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 SE EMON S 
 
 NEW AND OLD
 
 NEW AND OLD 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. 
 
 ARCHBISHOP 
 
 LONDON 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1880
 
 (TJic rights of translation and of reproduction arc reserved)
 
 Stac. 
 Annex 
 
 J31 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMOX PAGE 
 
 I. ELIJAH'S TRANSLATION AND CHRIST'S ASCENSION. 1 
 
 II. AGRIPPA 11 
 
 III. THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER . . .23 
 
 IV. JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 37 
 
 V. BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS ... 50 
 
 VI. THE LOVE OF MONEY 60 
 
 VII. THE ARMOUR OF GOD 71 
 
 VIII. THE THORN IN THE FLESH 86 
 
 IX. ISAIAH'S VISION 98 
 
 X. SELFISHNESS 112 
 
 XL ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS . . 123 
 
 XII. PONTIUS PILATE 134 
 
 XIII. THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES . . . l,~2 
 
 XIV. EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE . . . . 1C3 
 XV. ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER . . . .184 
 
 XVI. THE KINGDOM WHICH COMETH NOT WITH OB:-EB- 
 
 VATION 196 
 
 2O3S325
 
 iv CONTENTS 
 
 SKUMOtf PAGE 
 
 XVII. PliESSING TOWARD THE MARK . . . . 207 
 
 XVIII. THE VALLEY OP DRY COKES 219 
 
 XIX. ALL SAINTS 232 
 
 XX. THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE CROSS. . . . 241 
 
 XXI. CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH . . . 249 
 
 XXII. LOT'S CHOICE 258 
 
 XXIII. THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 2C7 
 
 XXIV. BAXTER AND THE SAINT'S REST , 279
 
 SERMON I. 1 
 ELIJAH'S TRANSLATION AND CHRIST'S ASCENSION. 
 
 2 KINGS ii. 11. 
 
 And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, 
 there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted 
 them both asunder ; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into 
 heaven. 
 
 THERE is almost nothing in the New Testament, al- 
 together abrupt, altogether unprepared, wholly unlike 
 to all that in the Old went before it. There are few 
 of the leading events of our Lord's life that have not 
 their nearer or remoter analogies, parallels, prefigurations 
 in the lives of some one or more of the Old-Testament 
 saints ; God in this fact testifying that He is the author 
 of both Covenants ; one purpose, one scheme, one in- 
 tention running through both, knitting them together, 
 so that it is impossible to detach them from one another, 
 to ascribe divine authority to tte one, and at the same 
 time to withhold it from the other. To give an instance 
 of what I mean : there is an anticipation, a feeble one 
 indeed, but still an anticipation, of the Transfiguration 
 
 1 Ascension Day. 
 
 B
 
 2 ELIJAH'S TRANSLATION 
 
 of Christ in the skin of Moses' face shining, as he also 
 came down from the mountain where he had been talking 
 with God. 1 The glory, indeed, of Moses' Transfigura- 
 tion, if we may call it by so august a name, was 
 infinitely less than the glory of Christ's ; but this only 
 agreed with the relative position of the two Moses a 
 servant in the house of another, Christ a Son in his 
 own. 
 
 Not otherwise the Ascension of the Lord is pre- 
 figured, foreshown, and, we may say, anticipated in part, 
 by the Translation of Elijah; and the Church has 
 marked her sense of the inner connexion in which the 
 two events stand to one another by appointing the 
 chapter from which my text is drawn, the chapter 
 which records the fact and the manner of Elijah's 
 taking up into heaven, as one of the lessons to be read 
 in the services appointed for Ascension Day. We may 
 expect to find, in comparing the two narratives, points 
 of likeness, and points of difference : points of likeness, 
 for the kingdom of God is one, one throughout all ages ; 
 its leading events, therefore, will repeat themselves again 
 and again : points of difference, because there is growth 
 in it, advance, development; the bud passes into the 
 flower, the shadow into the substance, the type into the 
 antitype, and God, who spake long and often by his 
 servants, speaks at last by his Son. Nor will such an 
 1 Exod. xxxiv. 29.
 
 AND CHRIST'S ASCENSION 3 
 
 expectation as this be disappointed. There is already 
 much of Christ's Ascension in Elijah's Translation ; 
 but at the same time there are features in the later and 
 more glorious event which exist not at all, or only in 
 their weak outlines, in the earlier : there are points of 
 unlikeness, even of absolute contrast between the one 
 and the other. Let us a little consider that earlier 
 event, Elijah's Translation, to-day, reading it as we go 
 along in the light thrown back upon it by the later, by 
 the Ascension namely of the Lord of glory. 
 
 Now at last Elijah's work is done ; his long con- 
 troversy with Israel, with an apostate king and a 
 rebellious people, is drawing to a close; he shall no 
 longer prophesy as in sackcloth, denouncing heavy 
 things to his people, shutting up heaven with a word, 
 withholding for long years the rain and the dew from 
 the earth, slaying the wicked prophets of Baal ; a 
 man of peace, yet by a stern necessity bringing a sword. 
 All this has ended now. It has been revealed to him 
 that his warfare is accomplished ; his rest and reward 
 are near. He shall be withdrawn in a wonderful way 
 from the earth. And his faithful servant Elisha, he too 
 knows what is at hand, cleaves to his lord with a 
 clinging affection : ' As the Lord liveth, and as thy 
 soul liveth, I will not leave thee.' He counts, and 
 rightly, that there will be some boon and blessing for 
 him, some legacy of love, if only he be with his master 
 
 B 2
 
 4 ELIJAH'S TRANSLATION 
 
 to the last, and behold him in the very moment of his 
 departure. The pertinacity of his faith at length meets 
 with its reward. Elijah no longer seeks to dismiss 
 him ; on the contrary, suggests to him that he should 
 put himself in the way of a blessing, ' Ask what I shall 
 do for thee before I be taken away from thee ; ' where- 
 upon the longing desire and expectation of Elisha's soul 
 clothe themselves in this petition : ' I pray thee, let a 
 double portion of thy spirit be upon me.' 
 
 These words, I would observe by the way, have 
 been often misunderstood, as though Elisha had claimed 
 twice as much of the spirit as that portion which Elijah 
 had for his own. Now none could impart more than he 
 actually possessed as much perhaps as he possessed, 
 or a part of what he possessed, but certainly not 
 more. Neither does Elisha ask more. All that he 
 asks is, to be recognized as Elijah's eldest-born ; that 
 to him, among the spiritual sons of the prophet, the 
 rights of primogeniture might pertain. It was a part 
 of these rights, of the privileges of an eldest son, that 
 the father might bequeath, or indeed was bound to 
 bequeath, to him a double portion of his inheritance, 
 twice as much as he bequeathed to any other ; * and it 
 is this, not a portion twice as much as Elijah himself 
 actually had, that Elisha sought. The whole course 
 of the after history would, indeed, sufficiently refute 
 1 Deut. xxi. 17.
 
 AND CHRIST'S ASCENSION 5 
 
 this latter interpretation ; for, even granting that the 
 miracles of Elisha are more in number than those of 
 Elijah, and appeal is sometimes made to this fact, yet 
 none who reads this history with any true insight can 
 deny that in Elijah we have the loftier figure, the more 
 heroic nature, the more predominant spirit ; that Elisha, 
 the scholar, might indeed carry on the work which 
 Elijah, the master, had auspicated and begun, might 
 complete, but could scarcely have commenced, that great, 
 and in many respects most successful, protest against 
 idolatry which his mightier precursor was first raised 
 up to bear. 
 
 But in all this story a higher meaning is ever 
 present with us as we read. We read of Elijah, but we 
 feel that a greater than Elijah is here. Our thoughts 
 carry us on to One who, like the prophet of the elder 
 dispensation, had finished the work upon earth which 
 his Father had given him to do ; who had borne the 
 burden and the heat of a yet fiercer day than the prophet 
 had ever borne, endured with a diviner patience, with 
 not even one passing movement of impatience, a worse 
 contradiction of sinners, had drunk the cup of a bitterer 
 agony, had been baptized with the baptism of a more 
 searching pain ; and who, now about to leave the earth, 
 announced to his faithful disciples that legacy of love, 
 that promise of the Father, that double portion of the 
 Spirit, which He would bequeath to them, and which
 
 6 ELIJAH'S TRANSLATION 
 
 should compensate them for his bodily absence in those 
 coming times when they should behold no more Him 
 whom the heavens had received out of their sight. 
 
 The actual translation of Elijah follows, being re- 
 corded in those words which I have put forward as cen- 
 tral to the work of this day : ' And it came to pass, that 
 as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there 
 appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted 
 them both asunder ; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind 
 into heaven.' Compare with this the Ascension of our 
 blessed Lord : ' And it came to pass, while he blessed 
 them, he was parted from them, and carried up into 
 heaven.' The placing of one account side by side with 
 the other is very instructive, and suggests many points 
 of comparison. Elijah is translated, a chariot of fire 
 and horses of fire are commissioned to snatch him away 
 from the earth, and carry him to heaven ; but our Lord 
 is borne upward by his innate power ; He is not trans- 
 lated, He ascends. He came from heaven, and He 
 returns to heaven, as to his natural home. The wonder 
 is, not that He should now at length go to heaven, 
 but that He should so long have tarried upon earth. 
 Calmly, majestically, He ascends, carrying with Him 
 that body which He had redeemed from the grave. No 
 fire-chariot is needed for Him; and why? there is 
 nothing of earthly dross requiring to be burnt out of 
 Him, no wondrous transformation, no last baptism of
 
 AND CHRIST'S ASCENSION 1 
 
 cleansing fire before He can endure to pass into the 
 presence of his Father ; but such as He was upon earth, 
 exactly such He passes into the heavens. No shock, 
 no whirlwind, no violent rapture in his case ; for in 
 his Ascension there is no breach of the laws of his 
 natural life, but all is in exactest conformity with them. 
 Surely in all this matter the comparison between the 
 servant and the Son brings out to us the greatness in- 
 deed of both ; but at the same time the transcendent 
 superiorities of the Son, who in all things hath the 
 pre-eminence. 
 
 In what follows after Elijah has been taken up, 
 we may have a dim foreshadowing of the history of the 
 Church, above all the apostolic Church after the Ascen- 
 sion of its Lord. Elisha, we are told, the faithful disciple, 
 'took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and 
 smote the waters, and said, Where is the Lord God of 
 Elijah ? and when he also had smitten the waters, they 
 parted hither and thither : and Elisha went over.' The 
 significance of this lies in the fact that it is exactly the 
 same miracle l which Elijah himself had a little while 
 before performed. Are we not here reminded of Him 
 who, being Himself anointed with the oil of gladness 
 above his fellows, did yet, when He left the earth, not 
 so leave it but that He left behind Him gifts and graces 
 and powers with his Church, endowing it with these 
 1 See ver. 8.
 
 8 ELIJAH'S TRANSLATION 
 
 from on high ; and so effectually endowing it, that the 
 works which He did, his Church was able to do the 
 same, fulfilling to the very letter that promise which 
 He had made : ' He that believeth on me, the works 
 that I do, he shall do also, because I go unto my Father.' 
 These powers, these gifts, these supernatural endow- 
 ments, were, so to speak, the mantle which fell from 
 our ascending Lord, the mantle which the Church took 
 up, with which it has arrayed itself; in right of 
 possessing which it claims to be the inheritor of its 
 Lord's commission; in the power which that mantle 
 imparts, seeks ever to carry on and to complete its 
 Lord's work, to repeat and multiply his works of grace 
 and mercy and power in the world. 
 
 And if we, brethren, we of the Church of the latter 
 days, have seen, like Elisha, our Master taken from our 
 head, if a cloud has received Him out of our sight, and 
 the day of second appearing not yet appeared, what 
 shall be our conduct, what remains for us to do ? Both 
 narratives are abundantly instructive. Elisha wasted 
 not his time in idle lamentations ; there was but that 
 one cry, ' My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, 
 and the horsemen thereof! ' and then he girt himself 
 to his own work, though a work to be performed in his 
 master's strength. And the Apostles, they stood not 
 for long idly gazing up into heaven, watching the track
 
 AND CHRIST'S ASCENSION 9 
 
 of their departing Lord and the path of light that He 
 had left ; but returning to Jerusalem, ' continued with 
 one accord in prayer and supplication,' waiting for the 
 promise of the Father ; which no sooner had they re- 
 ceived than they became witnesses to Christ ' in Jeru- 
 salem, and in all Judasa, and in Samaria, and unto the 
 uttermost part of the earth.' They felt, and they felt 
 rightly, that they were not weaker through his departure, 
 but stronger. Those words of his, ' It is expedient for 
 you that I go away,' had been a hard saying to them at 
 the first ; but it was not long before they understood 
 them, before they tasted of the sweet which lay con- 
 cealed in their seeming bitter, before they understood 
 that a Lord in heaven, sitting at the right hand of God, 
 receiving there gifts for men, and shedding abroad those 
 gifts upon men, this was better than a Saviour upon 
 earth, limited by conditions of time and space, with a 
 Holy Ghost not yet given, because the Son of God was 
 not yet glorified. They understood this ; and let us, 
 my brethren, ask of God that we may understand the 
 same, what this, our Lord's Ascension and sitting at 
 the right hand of God, is for us and for all believers ; 
 why Ascension Day, if it does not quite attain to the 
 dignity and honour of the first three among the Christian 
 festivals, Christmas Day, and Easter Day, and Whit- 
 Sunday, is yet only a little inferior to them, while it tran-
 
 10 ELIJAH'S TRANSLATION 
 
 scends in the dignity and importance of the event which 
 it commemorates every other day in our Christian 
 calendar. 
 
 Very briefly, then, Christ's Ascension is, in the first 
 place, the complement of his Resurrection. It was not. 
 enough that He should rise from the dead and walk this- 
 earth again. He must show that not earth, but heaven, 
 is his home, and the centre to which He is irresistibly 
 drawn. He must take his place as the Universal Bishop,, 
 the Bishop of all souls ; no longer the Shepherd of one 
 little flock in Judasa, but the Great Shepherd of the 
 sheep gathered in from many flocks into an universal 
 fold. Christ's Ascension enables you to regard Him 
 as the King of Glory, Head over all things in the Church, 
 and as such having received gifts for men. True, there 
 were gifts and blessings before, but not in such large- 
 ness ; they were restrained, the full fountains of grace 
 were not yet unsealed. A few drops of blessing had 
 sprinkled a single family, a single nation ; but now as a 
 great flood it overflowed the world. The dew was hitherto 
 upon Gideon's fleece only, and it was dry upon all the 
 world besides ; but now there should be dew on all the 
 ground. May it richly moisten and bedew the hearts of 
 you all. 

 
 AGEIPPA 1L 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 AGRIPPA. 
 
 ACTS xxvi. 28. 
 
 Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to 
 be a Christian. 
 
 ALMOST, and not quite! So near the prize, and yet 
 missing it after all ! With only one step between him 
 and life, and that one step not taken ! Surely this was a 
 tragic doom ; the whole range of Scripture does not offer 
 us a more tragic one ; for, oh ! the difference between 
 the ' almost ' and the ' altogether ' a difference not less 
 than between death and life, between all which we have 
 most to fear, and all which we have most to desire. 
 
 Who was it that uttered these memorable words, 
 which I take as they stand in our Version, and without 
 entering into the question whether or not they might be 
 capable of a somewhat different turn ? It was ' King 
 Agrippa,' as St. Luke calls him ; being known as Herod 
 Agrippa the Second in profane history. It was no good 
 stock of which he came. He was son of another Herod 
 Agrippa, who is branded in an earlier chapter of the 
 Acts as the murderer of James the Apostle; and who
 
 12 AGRIPPA 
 
 was only defeated by the interposition of an angel in 
 his purpose of killing Peter also ; of that Herod Agrippa 
 who perished so miserably, being smitten of God in the 
 hour of his blasphemous pride. 1 Nor was this all. He 
 was descended from a mightier criminal yet; he was 
 great-grandson of that first Herod who slew all the 
 young children at Bethlehem, trusting to include in 
 that slaughter the royal Child, to whom the throne 
 which he occupied as an intruder and usurper rightfully 
 belonged. There was blood enough of God's saints and 
 servants on that wicked Herodian race ; and, to do this 
 Herod justice, there is no desire upon his part to shed 
 more of this precious blood, or to curry favour with the 
 Jewish people, by delivering Paul, as his father would 
 fain have delivered Peter, to their will. Had he been 
 .such a cruel persecutor, breathing out rage and threaten- 
 ings against the followers of Christ, his story would not 
 have contained half, no, nor a hundredth part of the 
 warning for us which it does contain. It might hardly 
 have touched us at all. 
 
 This Agrippa was a king one of those little kings 
 who were permitted to maintain a shadow of royalty 
 within the limits of the Roman Empire. When Festus, 
 the newly appointed Roman governor of the neighbour- 
 ing province, arrived at Cassarea, the seat of his govern- 
 ment, it -was consistent with the subordinate position 
 1 Acts xii. 2-4, 23.
 
 AGEIPPA 13 
 
 of Agrippa, that he, though called a king, should do 
 homage to the superior majesty of Rome in the person 
 of the Roman deputy, and wait upon him on his first 
 arrival, and welcome him there. After many days, 
 spent no doubt in feasts and ceremonies and courtly 
 revels, and when now the interest in these began to 
 flag, and some new excitement was needed to stimulate- 
 the jaded appetite of these hunters after pleasure, 
 Festus chanced to mention to his royal guest that a 
 strange Jewish prisoner his name was Paul had been 
 left upon his hands by his predecessor Felix. What 
 offence this man had commited he was quite unable to 
 make out ; nor yet why the Jews were so fiercely set 
 against him that nothing would satisfy them but his 
 blood. And to confuse matters more, the man had 
 claimed to be sent to Rome, and to be tried before the 
 Emperor himself, a right which, being a Roman citizen, 
 could not be denied him; while yet he, Festus, was 
 sorely perplexed what account of Paul's matters, of the 
 crime wherewith he was charged, to send with him. In 
 fact, the whole quarrel between the other Jews and this 
 Paul was a mystery to him. It turned on some wretched 
 dispute of their own superstition, on one Jesus, who 
 certainly was dead, for a predecessor of his own, Pontius 
 Pilate, had crucified him some thirty years before ; but 
 whom Paul, who on other points seemed reasonable 
 enough, persisted in affirming to be alive.
 
 14 AGEIPPA 
 
 The curiosity, perhaps even the interest, of Agrippa 
 is excited. Though not a Jew by birth, he was such 
 by education ; familiar with the law and the prophets, 
 ' expert in all customs and questions which were among 
 the Jews.' l He would gladly hear the man himself. 
 Festus readily consents. It was this probably which he 
 had been aiming at all the while. The next day they 
 are all assembled : Agrippa and Bernice ' with much 
 pomp,' and Paul with his chain. But being permitted 
 to speak for himself, he so speaks, so convincingly, 
 with such demonstration of the truth, so pressing home 
 upon the king the claims of Jesus of Nazareth to be 
 the Christ, the promised king of Israel, that from 
 Agrippa at length are wrung those memorable words, 
 * Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.' 
 
 But wherefore 'almost,' and why not altogether? 
 How came it that he stopped short where he did, and 
 never advanced any further ? Alas ! brethren, it is 
 only too easy to answer this question. Our own hearts 
 supply, and only too well, the answer, when they whisper 
 to us that, under like temptations, we might only too 
 probably have stopped short where Agrippa stopped. 
 For suppose he had been ' altogether ' persuaded. What 
 a change in all his outward conditions of existence must 
 have followed ! what a coming-down from his pride of 
 place ! To be a Christian was not so easy a thing then 
 1 Acts xxvi. 3-27.
 
 AGEIPPA 15 
 
 ns it is now. No more of that great pomp, no more of 
 those obsequious crowds, no more of that royal purple, 
 no more of those flatteries and favours which the world 
 reserves for its own, for the great and prosperous among 
 its own children. Then too, if the king was bound, as 
 there is too much reason to believe, in the cords of 
 an unholiest attachment, those cords must have been 
 snapt asunder at once, that secret wickedness utterly- 
 put away. And other thoughts, as we can little doubt, 
 rose up before him, even the thoughts of all the scorn 
 and all the bitter mockery which that same world has 
 in store for those that desert its allegiance. What would 
 they say at Rome ? What would they say at Jerusalem ? 
 What would they say in Cassar's palace ; what in the 
 Great Sanhedrim ; when it was told, as the latest and 
 most piquant news of the day, that he, that King Agrippa, 
 had thrown in his lot with the despised Nazarene, the 
 crucified Galilaean ? All this, we may well believe, 
 passed swiftly through his mind ; he counted the cost, 
 and that cost seemed too much for him to pay. 
 
 Truly, dear friends, it was much ; the only question 
 is, whether it was too much. Perhaps not. Perhaps 
 he counted amiss, and another could have counted better 
 for him than he counted for himself. Let us make the 
 experiment. Let us, for we can do it deliberately and dis- 
 passionately, cast up his gains first, and then his losses, ' 
 and set those against these. His gains, what were they ?
 
 16 AGEIPPA 
 
 For a few years more he kept the glories to which he 
 clung, he played his part of king on the world's stage, 
 and men bowed to him the crooked hinges of the knee, 
 and paid him lip-homage, and he sat in the chief place 
 of honour at wearisome feasts, and was the principal 
 figure in hollow court-ceremonials and empty pageants 
 of state ; and then the play was over, and his little day 
 was done, and darkness and night swallowed up all y 
 and he carried nothing away with him when he died 
 (except indeed his sins), neither did his pomp follow 
 him. His gains then, they were not after all so very 
 large, and, such as they were, they did not tarry with 
 him long. 
 
 But his losses, or rather his loss ? It may not seem 
 so much, seeing that it can be summed up in a single 
 word, and yet that word a word of awful significance. 
 What did he lose ? He lost himself. Christ has de- 
 manded, ' What shall a man profit, if he gain the whole 
 world, and lose his own soul ? ' Agrippa had not gained 
 the whole world only a miserable little fragment of it j 
 and this but for a moment, for a little inch of time ; but 
 in the grasping and gaining of this he had made that 
 terrible loss and shipwreck of which Christ speaks, had 
 lost himself; in other words, had lost all. 
 
 But now let us contemplate the matter from another 
 point of view. Suppose, dear brethren, he had found 
 strength actually to do that thing which he was almost
 
 AGRIPPA 17 
 
 persuaded to do ; suppose lie had made room for the truth 
 in his heart, had been wholly persuaded to become a 
 Christian, had followed on where the Spirit would have 
 led him, how would it have been with him then ? Here, 
 again, let us count the cost for him; let us put the 
 sufferings of this present time over against the eternal 
 weight of glory. The sufferings of this present time 
 a few years of self-denial and of toil ; a few hard words 
 and contemptuous looks from the world which he had 
 forsaken, a few buffetings from evil men; it might 
 have been a sharp and painful passage into life; but 
 sweetened all by the sense of God's love, by the 
 .assurance of his favour, by the knowledge of sin for- 
 * given, of a conscience cleansed from its guilty stains 
 through the blood of the atonement, by the fellowship 
 of all the best and noblest upon earth, by the hope of a 
 glory to be revealed; and then, this brief life ended, 
 then when the expectation of the worldling perishes, 
 when there is nothing more for him but a fearful 
 looking for of judgment to come, Agrippa's hope would 
 have begun to find its fulfilment, and the gates of 
 Paradise have been thrown open to him, and the great 
 ' Well done ' have sounded in his ears. For the purple- 
 which here he renounced, he should have been clothed 
 for ever in the white and shining garments of im- 
 mortality ; for the crown which here he laid down, he 
 should have worn a crown of life for evermore. Joy 
 
 c
 
 18 AGRIPPA 
 
 beyond joy, to see the face of God, and in and through 
 that beatific vision to be changed from glory to glory 
 even into his likeness, to leave behind and for ever 
 every soil and spot and stain, all impurity and defile- 
 ment ; and this should have been his portion for ever. 
 Certainly it was a mistake which he made, a miscal- 
 culation, as we all must own. It ivas a rich treasure 
 hid in the field, on which he had stumbled unawares. 
 It was a pearl of great price, which had come within 
 his reach, and he would have been no foolish merchant- 
 man had he sold all that he had, and bought this 
 pearl. It would have proved no sorry bargain after all. 
 We own, we confess as much. Standing, in regard of 
 him, upon an eminence, where the hillocks of time do 
 not conceal from us the mountains of eternity, nor the 
 trivialities of this life the realities of the life eternal, as 
 for him they did, we are all ready to admit that he left 
 the better part, and chose the worse ; even while we do 
 not conceal from ourselves the mighty difficulties which 
 hindered him from embracing that better. But shall 
 we stop here, with this acknowledgment? Are not 
 all things, and these among the rest, written for our 
 learning? What about ourselves? Are there no 
 Agrippas now ? Thou that art hesitating in thy mind, 
 thou also convinced of sin by the power of the Spirit, 
 but not yet converted from sin by the same Spirit, 
 thou that tremblest on the brink of the mighty river of
 
 AGRIPPA 19 
 
 God's love, and yet darest not commit thyself boldly to 
 its waves, art not thou exactly such another as this 
 was? Change the name, and this tale might be told 
 of thee. Thou art this King Agrippa; thou art the 
 man. Thou too hast said after some searching sermon, 
 or the earnest converse of some godly friend, or after 
 reading some holy book which has found thee out in the 
 deeper depths of thy soul, or after some manifest 
 dealings of God with thee by sorrow or by joy, by 
 mercy or by judgment, thou too hast said to this 
 book, to this sermon, to this friend, to this joy, to this 
 sorrow, or rather to Him who was speaking to thee 
 through all these * Almost thou persuadest me to be 
 a Christian, a Christian in deed and not only in name, 
 to accept Christ for what He is, the true Lord of my 
 life ; ' and yet this ' almost ' of thine, like that of the 
 unhappy king long ago, has never ripened into a 
 * quite.' 
 
 And why not? It rises clear before thee, the 
 blessedness of a life in Christ, of having the deep 
 wound of thy spirit healed, as He only can heal it, 
 of throwing in thy lot with saints and apostles and 
 martyrs, and all the holy and humble men of heart that 
 have ever lived, of working for God, and not against Him, 
 for the truth and not against it, the blessedness of 
 such a life as this rises up plainly before thee ; and 
 the emptiness, the vanity, the disappointment, the 
 
 c 2
 
 20 AGEIPPA 
 
 defeat, the misery, the despair which must attend any 
 other life than this ; and thou too hast almost chosen 
 thy part, even that better part which should never be 
 taken from thee. And why not? what has hindered? 
 what has stood hitherto in the way of so blessed a con- 
 summation ? will perhaps stand in the way unto the end ? 
 Alas! exactly that which stood in the way of King 
 Agrippa. The bands that bound him, and bound him so 
 closely, that he dallied indeed with life and with heaven, 
 but made a covenant with death and with hell, they are 
 the same that bind thee. 
 
 Perhaps, like him, thou art holden by the cords of 
 some sinful passion. Thou canst not bring thyself to 
 forego the sweetness of it. It seems to thee that if that 
 were taken out of thy life, the life which remained 
 would not be worth the living, that all the wine would be 
 drawn, and nothing but the lees remain. Or the sin 
 may not be sweet, the sweetness of it, if it ever had any, 
 may have departed long ago ; but though not sweet, 
 it may be strong, binding thee with bands which thou 
 hast no courage to break, which thou knowest thou 
 couldst not break without a far mightier effort than 
 any which thou art prepared to make. 
 
 Or there may be no such single well-defined hin- 
 drance to thy yielding thyself without reserve to that 
 God, who would have thee altogether, that He might 
 bless thee altogether ; no bosom sin, dear as a right eye,
 
 AGR1PPA 21 
 
 almost as much a part of thyself as a right hand, which 
 would need to be plucked out or cut off; but rather 
 a more vague and general reluctance to yield thy will 
 to God's, to mortify the corrupt affections of the heart, 
 and to come under the rules and discipline and obliga- 
 tions of the life in Christ, the indolence of a worldly 
 and self-indulgent spirit, than which perhaps there is 
 nothing more effectual to keep men from Him. Or it may 
 be, at least in part, the fear of man which oppresses 
 thee. What will they say, the old ungodly companions 
 with whom thou hast walked at liberty in times past, 
 when thou announcest to these thy intention of or- 
 dering thy life henceforward by another rule, of living 
 the rest of thy time not to the lusts of men but to the 
 will of God ? 
 
 But be these bonds what they may, oh ! believe 
 that it is worth the while to break them, as in the 
 strength of Christ they can be broken. These moun- 
 tains of opposition, it is worth while to cry to Him, 
 that He would make them a plain. It is well worth the 
 while. A few years hence, and it will be with every 
 one of us, as it was with King Agrippa not very long after 
 these memorable words were uttered; and then how 
 utterly insignificant, not merely to others but to our- 
 selves it will be, whether we were here in high place or 
 in low, rich or poor, talked about or obscure, whether 
 we trod lonely paths, or were grouped in joyful house-
 
 22 AGEIPPA 
 
 holds of love; whether our faces were oftener soiled 
 with tears or drest in smiles. But for us, gathered as 
 we then shall be within the veil, and waiting for the 
 judgment of the great day, one thing shall have 
 attained an awful significance, shall stand out alone, as 
 the final question, the only surviving question of our 
 lives, Were we almost Christ's or altogether, in other 
 words, were we Christ's, or were we not ? 
 
 Oh ! sadness of all sadnesses that ' almost,' which 
 never ripened into ' quite ' ; to have stood on the brink 
 of the great river of salvation, and yet never to have 
 committed ourselves to its waves, to have seen the King 
 afar off, some faint glimpses of his beauty, and yet never 
 to have followed on to know Him more, and thus never 
 to see Him near. Oh ! sadness of all sadnesses, and guilt 
 of all guilts ! And that this may be never ours, let us 
 pray earnestly and with something such a prayer as this : 
 ' Fix, Lord, our wavering hearts on Thee. Strengthen 
 our weak desires for Thee. Suffer us not to fall back 
 from Thee, even though we would. Hedge up our way 
 behind us, though this be with thorns. Draw us to 
 Thyself, and having drawn, bind us by any cords to the 
 horns of thy altar. Compel us by any discipline of love, 
 that we be not almost, but altogether, Thine.'
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 23 
 
 SERMON III. 1 
 
 THE WOMAX THAT WAS A SINNER. 
 
 LUKE vii. 39. 
 
 Now when the Pharisee which had bidden him saw it, he spake 
 within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would 
 have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth 
 him : for she is a sinner. 
 
 Ix that well-known passage of Scripture, of which I 
 have just cited a single verse, we have, so to speak, 
 the title-deeds of all such Refuges and Homes as 
 that for which I am pleading to-day; we have the 
 special charter by which, more than by any other, 
 they exist. In saying this, I do not imply that if no 
 such incident as that which is recorded here, had been 
 related in the life of our Blessed Lord, we should be 
 without our warrant for such efforts to rescue and 
 redeem, for such institutions as this Home, whereby 
 there is given to these efforts persistence and per- 
 manence. I do not say this. In every page of the 
 Gospels we might read the assurance that such en- 
 deavours are according to the mind of Christ, that 
 1 Preached on behalf of a Penitentiary.
 
 24 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 there could be no work which would better express 
 that mind, very few that would express it at all so 
 well. And yet, granting all this, we may be pro- 
 foundly thankful that we have the special warrant for 
 it which this Scripture affords, that we have Christ 
 here brought face to face with a fallen but penitent 
 woman, and that there is written at large in this 
 Gospel the story of the infinite pity, tenderness, and 
 compassion with which He welcomed her back, of 
 the strong and earnest displeasure with which He 
 regarded those who would have built up a wall of 
 separation between Him the Holy and her the 
 unholy. 
 
 You are familial- with all the details of this story, 
 for none has imprinted itself more deeply on the 
 whole heart of Christendom; how in the days of his 
 flesh Christ sat one day at meat in the house of a 
 Pharisee, and how, as He sat there, there came this 
 woman ' which was a sinner ' behind Him. Of much 
 concerning her we are ignorant ; in what rank of life 
 she had once moved, among the high places of this 
 world or the low; whether she had fallen, tempted 
 by another, or herself the temptress ; what the exact 
 measures of her guilt had been ; only one thing about 
 her we do know, namely, that the crown of woman's 
 honour was no longer hers, that she was a moral outcast 
 among her people, that in the judgment of those who
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 25 
 
 were regarded as the world's most righteous members, 
 her very touch was defilement. What would there have 
 been for her, so esteemed by others, so esteemed by her- 
 self, but an ever deeper fall, an ever more hopeless en- 
 tanglement in the miry clay ; a departure ever wider and 
 wider from all things holy and pure and good ; self-scorn 
 and self-contempt, echoes of the scorn and contempt 
 which she everywhere met in the world ; these driving 
 her ever from bad to worse what else but this, if the 
 righteousness of Simon the Pharisee had indeed been 
 the righteousness of God, if a far higher righteousness, if 
 a love, of which he knew nothing, had not been revealed 
 from heaven, if that righteousness and this love had not 
 met, blended, united with one another in an indissoluble 
 union in the person of Him, who as Jesus of Nazareth 
 now sat at that inhospitable board ? 
 
 And there were dim yearnings in that fallen one, 
 who had drunk deeply of the world's scorn, which told 
 her this, which told her that here was One who could 
 and would judge her sin with all severity and what 
 would his forgiveness have been worth, if He had not 
 done this ; if that forgiveness had rested on a shallow 
 estimate of her guilt ? who would hate her sin with a 
 perfect hatred, such as none other could feel about it; 
 but who, bating no single jot of this, could regard her, 
 the sinner, with an infinite compassion ; and, if only 
 she desired to leave her sin behind, could give her peace
 
 2G THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 for the miserable past, and the power of a holy living- 
 for the time which remained. It was for this that with, 
 an unutterable longing she longed, not for escape from 
 future punishment ; her punishment was already present, 
 to be what she was, separate from God, an outcast from 
 the kingdom of holiness ; and Christ was the mysterious 
 lodestar which so mightily drew her now, because there 
 was something which whispered to her that in Him she 
 might find again all which she had lost, and till now 
 must have counted that she had lost for ever. 
 
 And so, bearing down in the earnestness and in- 
 tensity of her desire obstacles which at another time 
 she might have been quite impotent to overcome, she 
 found herself in the house of the Pharisee, at the feet 
 of Jesus, at his feet who must be her helper, her healer, 
 her deliverer, if such there were any for her in heaven 
 or on earth. And now those eyes, which had once shot 
 poisonous lightnings, shed tears enough to have quenched 
 the unholy fires which they had kindled once; while 
 with those tears she washed the blessed feet which had 
 deigned to tread this guilty earth of ours ; and then 
 dried them with the hairs of her head these once the 
 nets with which she had sought to snare unwary souls ; 
 and the precious ointment, laid up for purposes of luxury 
 and excess, this turning to holier uses and in the pro- 
 digalities of a new affection she poured on those same 
 feet, beautiful to her as bringing not merely the glad
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 27 
 
 tidings of good things to come, but as having thither 
 borne Him who was Himself the glad tidings which He 
 announced. 
 
 I need not remind you how ill the proud and cold- 
 hearted Pharisee, in whose house this gracious scene was 
 enacted, a scene into which angels must have delighted 
 to look, could endure it ; how impossible it was for him 
 morally to find himself in it. Salvation was indeed come 
 to that house, but, alas ! not to him that was the master 
 of it, as it can come to none who are the sharers in his 
 spirit. He, a loveless keeper of the law, if indeed a 
 keeper, had looked at that law as it was graven on 
 stones; and, as he looked, that law, like a Medusa's 
 head, had frozen his very heart to the utter hardness of 
 stone. She had looked at the same law, or indeed at a 
 law higher and holier, as it was embodied in Him who 
 was also Love ; she had seen her sin there, and the 
 condemnation of it, the pitiless condemnation of her 
 sin she would not have asked anything else but at 
 the same time had beheld there an infinite pity, a pity 
 at once human and divine, for her the sinner ; and, as 
 she looked, hope which had been dead revived, fountains 
 which had been stopped flowed freely forth again, the 
 heart of stone in her was turned into a heart of flesh, 
 and she greatly loved (we have Christ's own word for 
 the fact) that Lord who had first loved her ; and having 
 heard and made her own the absolving words, she went
 
 28 TEE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 forth from that presence into peace, into the heavenly 
 peace, as the element in which henceforth her life should 
 
 move. 
 
 This little history, of which I have thus sought 
 briefly to gather up the sum, is, as I have ventured 
 already to call it, the charter of such an Institution 
 as this of ours, help for which I am claiming this day. 
 Would that my voice could reach some on whom, 
 as it appears to me, it has especial claims. Thus, in 
 our Christian land, and growing up under favour- 
 able influences of Christ's Church, there are not a 
 few among us, young men and old, who in their 
 perilous youthful years were preserved, or whom 
 the grace and providence of God is preserving now, 
 from the corruption which is in the world through 
 lust, who have grown up as from their baptismal 
 root, so that amid all the faults and follies of child- 
 hood and youth they have kept that good thing 
 which was committed to them, and have not needed 
 painfully to win it back with toil and tears, if 
 indeed won back at all, in an after time. Whom 
 shall they thank for this, that they thus walked 
 among fires which did not kindle upon them, that 
 their feet were preserved from snares in which so 
 many others were miserably entangled ? Shall it 
 be themselves ? Shall they say that they kept them- 
 selves from their iniquity ? Woe to them, self-
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 29 
 
 righteous Pharisees, and not humble saints, if they 
 count it so ! Better, perhaps, to have fallen than so 
 to stand ! Was it not God, even He who keeps the 
 feet of his saints, who strengthens them in the hour 
 of temptation, making for them a way of escape, 
 was it not He who upheld them ? And do they not 
 owe Him a large and abundant thank-offering for a 
 boon so inestimable as this, one which others would 
 give worlds, if they had them, could they now make 
 it their own ? 
 
 But, alas ! there are others, and what if some such 
 should be here to-day, who look back with shame and 
 inward confusion at so many blurred and blotted pages 
 of their lives ; whose wounds, wounds inflicted by 
 themselves, have been indeed healed, healed by the 
 mighty Healer, by the effectual operation of his grace ; 
 but who will bear the scars of these wounds even to 
 their graves. I speak not of these scars ; I inquire not 
 with what sackcloth those who must plead guilty to this 
 accusation have clothed themselves inwardly because of 
 these sins ; but, as far as this world reaches, I would 
 ask them to compare their lot with the lot of those 
 whose cause I am pleading now. Those have sinned, 
 and you have sinned the same sin, but the penalty how 
 different ! They eat the bitter fruit of their doings to 
 the last morsel ; they drink the bitter cup of their own 
 shame to the uttermost drop. The crown is stricken
 
 30 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 from their brows ; and even at the best, and whatever 
 good may be in store for them still, the glory has 
 vanished from their lives, and, so far as this life is 
 concerned, it can never come back again. But how 
 fares it with you ? Perhaps you will extenuate (I trust 
 you will not) your faults, will urge that they were faults 
 of youth, and have been followed and made good by the 
 unbroken respectabilities of later age. But these un- 
 happy ones, are they not also for the most part young ? 
 few but those who have a little experience in the matter 
 know how young when they fall, having oftentimes lost 
 all almost before they know that they have anything to 
 lose. And if they fall ever deeper and deeper, from one 
 degradation to another, remember that, as far as this 
 world and the opinion of this world reaches, there is no 
 recovery for them. The way of return, which is at every 
 moment so easy for the man, is from the first impossible 
 for the woman. The man, he has but to assume the 
 decent proprieties of living, and all the past is at once 
 condoned and forgotten. Some will say perhaps that 
 you were once rather wild, that you sowed your wild 
 oats ; but they will hardly esteem the worse of you ; 
 and presently, perhaps, good things cluster round you, 
 blessings of home, of family, of domestic life, wife and 
 children ; and the sin which the world forgave you so 
 easily, which entailed so little of shame or loss here, 
 you often learn only too easily to forgive it to yourselves.
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNEB 31 
 
 Let me say here, and lest I should be misunderstood 
 on this matter, that in some sense I do not complain 
 that the penalties imposed by the world on sins of un- 
 chastity should be heavier in the case of the woman than 
 of the man, unequal dealing though this may seem, un- 
 equal dealing though, when driven to excess, it is. In 
 this making of her penalty the heaviest there is an in- 
 stinct of justice, though of a justice pushed by the harsh- 
 ness of the world so far that it reaches an injustice. 
 There are sanctities whereof the woman has, in the moral 
 constitution of things, been appointed the special, though 
 not indeed the exclusive, guardian. A glorious privilege 
 and prerogative ; but one which, being despised, must 
 entail its own corresponding punishment. If, so far 
 from guarding, she betrays the citadel which she was 
 set to keep, how can the penalties be other than great ? 
 
 But freely granting this, I would not the less 
 demand of every man who hears me, and whose 
 conscience tells him that he has at all sinned after 
 the similitude of these sinners whom it is thus sought 
 to save, that he too has in any degree helped 
 forward this enormous evil which defies the bene- 
 volence of the world, and has thus far defied even 
 the charity of the Church, let it have been in years 
 long past, in a time divided from this present time 
 by large spaces of decent, yea of holy living, that 
 still he be not content without making such large and
 
 82 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 visible reparation as the case requires. The partners 
 of his guilt, those whom he solicited, or who soli- 
 cited him to sin, they may have long since passed 
 away, may have gone down into the grave by those 
 steep stairs of infamy and scorn and shame which 
 lead for these unhappy ones so swiftly and so in- 
 evitably there ; and he shall never meet them again 
 until that terrible day of recognitions, when the de- 
 ceiver and the deceived, the tempter and the tempted, 
 the betrayer and the betrayed, shall stand face to 
 face before the throne and before the Judge. But 
 others have succeeded in their room ; one miserable 
 generation following another ; and here and there 
 one of these cries faintly for help ; stretches out a 
 feeble hand, if any will grasp it, ere she sink 
 beneath the waves, looks round, too often in vain, if 
 there be any who will care for her soul. Surely what 
 he owes to the other he may pay to these ; and not 
 with such an offering as costs him nothing, which 
 he does not so much as feel; but as one who hag 
 here to do with a God who is not mocked. 
 
 On other grounds I would make my appeal to 
 you, wives, sisters, mothers, and through you to 
 many more in the same relationships of life, who are 
 not gathered with us to-day. What pinnacle of 
 dignity and honour is like to that of a matron of 
 our land, whose children rise up and call her
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 33 
 
 blessed ; and the heart of whose husband safely 
 trusts in her ? Surely her estate is queenly. But 
 He who has given to her much, who has given her 
 that dignity, crowned her with that honour, He 
 makes corresponding claims at her hands. You 
 that sit the centres of a circle of happiness in your 
 sheltered homes, your daughters, it may be, as 
 polished corners of the temple, growing up in fear- 
 less innocence, yea, some of them growing up in the 
 very beauty of holiness, as far removed from the 
 slightest contamination of this sin as the sparkling 
 drifts of the new fallen snow from any the faintest 
 stain or soil of the earth, do not thoughts sometimes 
 arise in your hearts ? Knowing what you must know 
 of the corruption of our fallen nature, its mournful 
 proclivity to evil, have you never asked yourselves 
 how it might have fared with them, if all those 
 jealous protections with which you have fenced them 
 round had been wanting ; if, instead of moving in an 
 atmosphere of purity, they had breathed evermore 
 au atmosphere of corruption ; if ugly examples had 
 been ever before their eyes, foul words often in 
 their ears ; if instead of prayers, they had been fami- 
 liar with curses ; if home and the sanctities of home 
 they had never known, huddled up in crowded rooms, 
 the very conditions of which were enough to break 
 down all womanly self-respect, if God's word and 
 
 D
 
 34 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 sanctifying Spirit had never been brought to bear on 
 their spirits ; nor any of those mysterious influences of 
 'pure religion breathing household laws,' which have 
 encircled your beloved from the first? Are they, 
 think you, of such different clay from others, so far 
 exempt from that birth-sin, which, if we believe 
 anything the Church teaches and experience sets its 
 seal to, is the miserable heritage of us all, that 
 because they stand before you now, the light of 
 your eyes, the joy of your hearts, the ornament of 
 your lives, not merely untouched by, but in the main 
 unconscious of, all this hideous evil, think you that, 
 therefore, they would have done the same, if all the 
 shaping forces, the moulding influences of their 
 lives had been such as, alas ! these are for too 
 many ? It is God, and God's grace alone, which has 
 made them to differ, which has kept them to be, as 
 you fondly hope, honoured wives and happy mothers, 
 only exchanging one form of purity for another, the 
 purity of a maidenly for that of a matronly estate. 
 
 Surely you will not dare to enjoy all these benefits, 
 to move in this rich circle of love and joy in which God 
 has planted you, careless of all the sin and wretchedness 
 without it and beyond; never bethinking you, when 
 some winter-night has gathered you and your loved 
 oues round the cheerful hearth, of that pale form, flit- 
 ting beneath the dreary lamplight, wearing the cruel
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 35 
 
 stones, but not harder or more cruel than the brutal 
 men to whose brutal lusts she is a minister a child 
 perhaps still in years, but with everything childlike for 
 ver departed from her ; never, I say, bethinking you of 
 her, and how there are moments when she, this child 
 without the innocency of childhood, this exile from all 
 earthly love, this bird without a nest, this flower up- 
 rooted, withered, and trampled on in the mire, calls to 
 mind that she too has a Father still, and says, like the 
 Prodigal, that she will arise and go to Him, but knows 
 not where to turn, or how to break the fetters which 
 bind her so fast to that sin, which she has learned to 
 loathe, though she has not learned how to repent it. 
 If you have done and will do nothing here, surely an 
 ingratitude like this were enough to make God in his 
 anger to curse your blessings, to cause evil to rise up 
 against you perhaps shame and dishonour in quarters 
 from which you looked for them the least. 
 
 I ask then help from all. The Jews will not tread 
 on any piece of paper lying by chance on the ground, 
 because perhaps the name of God may be written upon 
 it. It is only a perhaps for them ; but it is a certainty 
 for us that the name of God is written on every one 
 of these souls now lying in the mire. They bear the 
 image and superscription, however defaced, however well 
 nigh effaced, of the great King. Lift them from this 
 mire. Help to retrace that image on their souls, to 
 
 D2
 
 36 TEE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 restore them to the treasury of God. There may be 
 little joy on earth when one of these outcasts is gathered 
 in ; no jubilant acclamations here when the lost is found, 
 and one that had long lain among the pots is covered 
 with silver wings and her feathers like gold. But there 
 is joy in heaven, joy before the angels of God, for the 
 tears of sinners are the wine of angels, and joy in his 
 heart, who now sits on the throne of glory, and who 
 once, sitting in the house of Simon the Pharisee, said 
 to a woman who had greatly sinned, and now greatly 
 repented and greatly loved, ' Thy sins are forgiven. 
 Go in peace.'
 
 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 37 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN. 
 
 GEN. xlv. 3. 
 And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph. 
 
 DURING two whole Sundays in our Christian Year the 
 First Lessons of the day have been drawn exclusively 
 from the history of Joseph and his brethren. This 
 circumstance, added to the fact that there is no por- 
 tion of Holy Scripture more profoundly attractive, 
 none which takes a stronger hold on the affections of 
 young and old, has caused that, notwithstanding the 
 lamentable ignorance of Scripture which prevails at the 
 present day, and the few who find time to bestow 
 upon it any patient study, this history is, in a certain 
 measure, familiar to us all. Yet, this notwithstanding, 
 I am sometimes disposed to doubt whether we at 
 all enter into and admire as we ought the wonderful 
 wisdom and love displayed in all those dealings of 
 Joseph with his brethren which are crowned at 
 length by this declaration of himself to them as the 
 brother whom they had sold into Egypt. If I do not
 
 38 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 
 
 mistake, all which has gone before, his speaking roughly 
 to them, his accusing them as spies, his casting them 
 into prison, his retaining one of them in harsh durance 
 there, his refusal to see them again unless their younger 
 brother is with them, his causing his own cup to be 
 found hidden in Benjamin's sack, his bringing of his 
 brothers back under heaviest accusation, his threat to 
 detain Benjamin as his bond-slave ; all this, if I do not 
 err, presents itself to many among us as a playing with 
 their fears, a putting of them to unnecessary pain, a 
 certain mitigated form of revenge in which he permits 
 himself; or if they admit not so much as this, at 
 any rate as a dealing with no fixed purpose and 
 moral aim. They are unable to see why Joseph did 
 not make himself known to his brethren from the 
 first; and, seeing that he must all the while have 
 intended to forgive them, declare this forgiveness 
 from the beginning. With what another interest 
 would they study these chapters, if they recognized 
 the profound counsel of love which dictates all these 
 dealings of his ; and this counsel I will now endeavour, 
 to the best of my power, to trace. 
 
 I have a right, as I said just now, to assume the 
 main outlines of Joseph's history to be familiar to 
 you all. He, the Hebrew slave, by wonderful deal- 
 ings of God's providence, had been called to be a 
 Prince and a Saviour in the mightiest and most
 
 39 
 
 civilized kingdom which then existed upon earth. 
 Thanks to his wise foresight there is corn in Egypt, 
 while a famine is raging in all the neighbouring lands : 
 and thither, by the same leading hand of God, his 
 brethren are brought, that they may buy corn for their 
 households. And now they stand before him who in a 
 manner has life and death in his hands ; and yet not 
 all of them, for Benjamin, the one unguilty, is not with 
 that guilty company ; nor is his absence difficult to 
 explain. He is now the beloved of his father Jacob, 
 as Joseph formerly had been. The father's preference 
 for him may awake the same envy and jealousy and 
 ranklings of despite in his brethren's hearts which his 
 preference for Joseph had aroused of old. This the 
 aged patriarch feels, and perhaps with some vague mis- 
 givings that the fate of Joseph had not been altogether 
 as reported to him, that there was some dark secret 
 there, and the brothers could hardly have kept their 
 counsel so well but that he must have surmised this, 
 he will not expose the sole surviving son of his beloved 
 Rachel to this long journey and to all the hazards of 
 one kind and another which during that journey may 
 befall them. 
 
 Joseph recognized his brethren at once, though they 
 failed, as they bowed before the mighty vicegerent of 
 Egypt, to recognize in him the child by them so piti- 
 lessly sold into bondage : and Joseph, we are told,
 
 40 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 
 
 'remembered the dreams which he had dreamed of 
 them ; ' how their sheaves should stand round about 
 and make obeisance to his sheaf 5 how sun and moon 
 and eleven stars should all do homage to him. 1 All at 
 length was coming true. 
 
 Now of course it would have been very easy for 
 him at once to have made himself known to his brethren, 
 to have fallen on their necks, and assured them amid 
 floods of tears of his forgiveness. But he does nothing 
 of the kind. He has counsels of love at once deeper 
 and wiser than would have lain in such ready and off- 
 hand declaration of forgiveness. He has counsels of 
 love toward them such as God has towards the children 
 of men. His purpose in all which follows is to prove 
 whether they are different men, or if not, to make 
 that they should be different men, from what they were 
 when they practised that deed of unnatural cruelty 
 against himself. He must know whether they at all 
 repent that old wickedness of theirs. If there is no 
 such repentance, he must prove whether he cannot 
 bring such about ; if there is, must seek to strengthen 
 and deepen it ; seeing that the law of God's kingdom 
 is, that only the truly penitent are capable of being 
 truly forgiven. At once he forms his plan ; which 
 having formed, he carries out with unshrinking hand 
 unto the end ; enduring to give some present pain 
 1 Gen. xxxvii. 7-9.
 
 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 41 
 
 even to that beloved father, if only those blessed issues 
 to which he looks may be reached at last. He feels 
 that he is carrying out not his own purpose, but 
 God's; and this gives him confidence in hazarding 
 all, as he does hazard it, in bringing this matter 
 to a close. 
 
 Two things were necessary here ; the first, that he 
 should have the opportunity of observing his brethren 
 in their conduct toward their younger brother, who had 
 now stepped into his place, and was the same favourite 
 with his father as Joseph once had been ; whether they 
 were jealous, evil-minded toward Benjamin, as they once 
 had been toward himself: the second, that by some 
 severe treatment which should bear, if this might be, 
 a more or less remote resemblance to their treatment 
 of himself, he should prove whether he could call out 
 from them a lively remembrance and a penitent con- 
 fession of their past guilt. Out of the first purpose, 
 although partly also to satisfy the yearnings of his own 
 heart, he affects to misunderstand their errand, charges 
 them with being spies, guilty therefore of death ; and 
 thus draws out from them in their own defence the 
 information which he most desired, namely, that their 
 father was yet alive, and that their younger brother, 
 whose absence may have suggested the worst suspicions 
 to Joseph's mind, was with him. Still affecting harsh- 
 ness, and as giving no credit to their words, he requires
 
 42 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 
 
 that the younger brother of whom they spake shall 
 appear before him, and so make good their assertion, 
 else he will not believe that there is any truth in them. 
 
 Meanwhile they shall all remain in confinement as 
 men under heaviest charges. They must taste some- 
 thing, though it be but the smallest portion, of that 
 anguish which they made him to taste to the full. We 
 can very well imagine that the prison in which they 
 were shut up, and in which for three days they were 
 left, was not altogether unlike that dismal pit into 
 which they had cast him. It was the same scene, 
 although with infinite mitigations, acted over again ; 
 only with this significant change, that the parts were 
 shifted in it ; they suffering now what they had inflicted 
 before. And thus all the past must have risen up in 
 their memories; for indeed sins are often written as 
 with sympathetic ink upon the tablets of the soul ; they 
 need to be held to the fire of tribulation before even 
 the chief actor in the sin shall himself read them there. 
 So was it now. They began to read their past sin in 
 the light of their present anguish ; and this, although 
 Joseph, going back in part from the severity of his first, 
 announcement, has declared now that instead of nine 
 remaining, and only one being permitted to depart, nine 
 may go, and only one remain in ward as a pledge for 
 the return of the others. 
 
 Already the salutary chastening is effectually work-
 
 JOSEPH AND HIS BEETHREN 43 
 
 ing. They cannot mistake in all this the finger of God, 
 nor fail to see that it is their own sin which is finding 
 them out. 'They said one to another, We are verily 
 guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the 
 anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would 
 not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us/ 
 What music must these words, which they spoke little 
 guessing they were understood, have made in his ears. 
 With what a welcome must he have welcomed this sign 
 which showed that the twenty years' ice of their souls was 
 breaking up at last, and that the waters of repentance 
 were beginning to flow freely forth. No wonder that ' he 
 turned himself about from them and wept.' But there 
 was no weakness in those tears of his ; they did not hinder 
 him from carrying through the work which he had begun. 
 ' He took from them Simeon, and bound him before their 
 eyes.' If Simeon had been, as there are many reasons 
 to conclude, the ringleader in that foul conspiracy 
 against a brother's life, how must their sense of being 
 in the hands of God, and entangled in his net, have 
 been deepened when the ruler of Egypt selected him 
 and no other for bonds, and, should they fail to return, 
 for death. This done, he lets the others go; but as, 
 where there is no interference with his higher pur- 
 pose of good, he must fain do them good, as he cannot 
 bear even now to withhold from them the marks of his 
 love, he gives them provision for the way; and, not
 
 44 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 
 
 enduring to merchandise with father and brethren for 
 bread, he causes the money which they have paid for the 
 corn they are carrying home to be placed in their sacks. 
 
 When they come back, and report to the aged 
 patriarch, their father, the resolution of the lord of 
 the country, and the only condition under which they 
 may traffic in the land, or recover their brother there 
 left in bonds, he breaks out into passionate lamenta- 
 tions, exclaiming with words truer than he knows, 
 but the literal truth of which must have cut them 
 to the heart : ' Me have ye bereaved of my children ; ' 
 nor will he hear of an imperilling of his youngest 
 and best beloved for the doubtful advantages held 
 out to him in return. Thus for a while ; but in the 
 end the stern necessities of the case overcome his 
 resolution. They shall go, and they shall carry Ben- 
 jamin with them. 
 
 I will not repeat in detail incidents which are 
 familiar to us all. This time their reception is at first 
 more gracious than it was before. Simeon is brought 
 forth to them. They eat and drink in the house, and 
 in the very presence of the mighty ruler of Egypt. 
 Strange, mysterious it must have seemed to them when 
 he set them each and all in the order of their birth- 
 right. How could he have known this ? what higher 
 hand is working here ? And then, when sending to 
 each his portion he sends to Benjamin a portion five
 
 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 45- 
 
 times larger than to any other, there is a purpose even 
 in this. Will they be jealous of him, as they were 
 jealous of Joseph once, of the favour which his father 
 showed him, and of the coat of many colours which he 
 made for him ? Happily no signs of such a jealousy 
 appear. And now they have taken their leave, and 
 have departed homeward; yet not so, but that they 
 carry with them, although they little guess it, that 
 which shall presently bring them within his danger 
 once more, and enable him, in the last and sharpest 
 trial of all, to make proof whether their spirit now is- 
 another than that which it once had been. 
 
 Their bearing when Joseph's divining cup is at length 
 found in Benjamin's sack is decisive of this. They rend 
 their clothes, and prepare at once to return to the city. 
 Had they been the same men which they had been two- 
 and-twenty years before, this discovery would have filled 
 them with no such anguish and despair ; nay, they might 
 rather have been well pleased without crime of theirs to 
 be rid of that younger brother who had stepped into 
 Joseph's place in their father's love ; nor would they 
 have taken more seriously to heart that aged father's 
 agony at the loss of this son, than they took the same 
 to heart on that other occasion, when they spake with 
 icy indifference words which must have stabbed him to 
 the very soul. 1 Had they been the men they once had 
 1 Gen. zxxvii. 32.
 
 46 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 
 
 been they would have separated, as was so easy to do, 
 their own lot from their brother's; disengaged their 
 fortunes from his ; left him behind them to the doom 
 which, by a mean act of ingratitude and theft (for so it 
 must have seemed to them), he had so justly deserved. 
 Joseph's steward, who is in his master's confidence, 
 suggests this to them ; it is afterwards suggested by 
 Joseph himself. 1 How easily they might have satisfied 
 their consciences, adopting such a course ! They had 
 promised, indeed, to bring Benjamin safely back ; but 
 they had never undertaken to defend him, as it was 
 plain they could not defend him, from the consequences 
 of his own sin. 
 
 But there is no disposition on their part to dis- 
 connect their fortunes from his, to make selfish con- 
 ditions of safety for themselves. Nay, they accept his 
 offence as their own, his iniquity as the iniquity of 
 them all. One fate, one lot for all; or, if a better 
 doom for any, let that be for him. Great as his fault 
 has been, deep as the danger and disgrace into which 
 Benjamin has brought them, they will not desert him, 
 and by this desertion obtain, as is plain they may do, 
 a selfish deliverance for themselves. 
 
 Their trial reaches its crisis when Joseph announces 
 to them that Benjamin shall remain his bondsman, but 
 that they all are free to return home. Judah is the 
 1 Gen. xliv. 10-17.
 
 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 47 
 
 spokesman in reply, and by just right ; for while the 
 matter concerns them all, it concerns him the most. 
 He has become surety to their father for the safe return 
 of the lad, 1 and he does not shrink from the uttermost 
 which that suretyship may involve. Rejecting Joseph's 
 suggestion, he makes, in the nobleness of self-offering 
 love, another proposition. Stepping nearer in the pas- 
 sionate earnestness of the moment, he speaks boldly 
 out, yet not at the same time forgetting for an instant 
 with whom he speaks, that it is with Egypt's lord. 
 This speech of Judah's has hardly obtained the admira- 
 tion which it deserves. It is a noble model of the 
 eloquence which sometimes visits men not eloquent by 
 nature, when a great occasion has loosed their tongues. 
 Briefly recapitulating what had passed since first he 
 and his brethren came to Egypt, he puts back the 
 temptation with which Joseph has tempted him and 
 his brethren. Without Benjamin he will not return 
 home. The life of his father is bound up with the life 
 of the lad ; only let the lad return with his brethren, 
 and Judah will remain, a bondsman in his stead. 
 
 This was enough for Joseph; this was all he wanted. 
 Brethren that could thus speak and act were not the 
 same that had sat down in Dothan to eat bread, while 
 he, their brother, was lying in the pit ; they were not 
 the same that had brought his raiment dipped in blood 
 
 1 Gen. xliii. 9.
 
 48 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 
 
 to their father, saying, 'This have we found: know 
 now if it be thy son's coat or no.' There was nothing 
 to hinder him now from revealing himself to them ; 
 from exclaiming, 'I am Joseph;' from falling and 
 weeping upon their necks, in token that all the past 
 was forgotten and forgiven, blotted out of his remem- 
 brance for ever. 
 
 I have thought good to dwell in some detail on 
 these dealings of Joseph with his brethren, both on 
 their own account, and also because they are, to so 
 great an extent, the very pattern of God's dealings 
 with men. Joseph was to his brethren in God's place, 
 acted throughout under a divine guidance ; and as he 
 with them, so God oftentimes with us. He sees us 
 careless, too lightly forgiving ourselves our old sins ; 
 and then, by trial and adversity and pain, brings those 
 sins to our remembrance, causes them to find us out, 
 and at length extracts from us a confession, ' We are 
 verily guilty.' And then, when tribulation has done 
 its blessed work, He is as ready to confirm his love to 
 us as ever was Joseph to confirm his love to his brethren ; 
 nay, many times readier ; for He with whom we have to 
 do is God, and not man ; He is One of whom Joseph 
 was but a weak type and figure ; every man's brother, 
 greatly sinned against by all, rejected of his brethren, 
 but exalted by God to the right hand of power ; yet in 
 this, his high estate, not forgetting his brethren, having
 
 JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN 49 
 
 compassion upon them, being merciful to their sins; 
 pleading with them, but pleading in love ; wounding, 
 but wounding that He may heal ; punishing, but only 
 that He may bring them to confess their guilt, their 
 offences against Him ; and, this done, making Himself 
 strange to them no more, but revealing to them the 
 depths of that love which all the while He felt, but 
 which only when this end was attained He was able to 
 declare,
 
 50 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 
 
 GAL. vi. 2. 
 Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. 
 
 IN one sense, and that the highest sense of all, Christ 
 is Himself the only bearer of our burdens, or of the bur- 
 dens of our brethren. He is the only bearer of the 
 burden of our sins. He took that burden upon Him at his 
 Incarnation ; He bore it, and so bore it through a life of 
 perfect obedience to the will of his heavenly Father, that 
 He for ever bore it away when He finished his sacrifice 
 of expiation and propitiation on the Cross. The bear- 
 ing of this burden none other shared with Him, and, 
 it is evident, none other could share; for even He, 
 mighty as He was, upheld in his human nature by a 
 divine personality, seemed in the garden of Gethsemane 
 to stagger for an instant under that tremendous burden. 
 He trod the winepress alone, and of the ' people there 
 was none with Him.' 
 
 So too when we contemplate, not the world's sin, 
 but the world's woe, the burden of its sorrow and
 
 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 51 
 
 anguish, there is a sense in which He bare this, as no 
 other has borne, nor could have borne it, fulfilling the 
 words of the prophet, ' Surely He hath borne our griefs, 
 and carried our sorrows.' The remains of selfishness 
 which are in every other man, which the regeneration 
 itself does not in this life wholly abolish, cause that all 
 others escape in great part the burdens of sorrow and 
 anguish which He continually bore. In no other man 
 has there existed a perfect love, and thus in no other 
 a perfect sympathy with all the joys, and so too no less 
 with all the sorrows of our race ; not to say that the 
 limited horizon of every other man's vision prevents 
 him from taking in more than a very smallest portion 
 of these joys and these sorrows ; even as he is able most 
 faintly and most inadequately to realize even that little 
 portion which he does take in. Of all men that ever 
 lived, Christ, and Christ alone, stood, so to speak, at 
 the central point of humanity. Around Him stretched 
 the huge circumference of human woe ; while from every 
 point of that dread circumference, along all the lines 
 which converged and met in Him, the voices of human 
 pain and suffering travelled and found sympathetic echoes 
 in his heart; along all the lines the throbs of human 
 anguish passed, and wrung that heart, as though each 
 several grief had been his own. That heart was large 
 enough to take them all in, to embrace in itself all the 
 sorrowful that was not also the sinful, which any child of 
 
 2
 
 52 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 
 
 Adam has at any time felt. The loneliness, the abandon- 
 ment, the defeated hope, the despised love, the unfulfilled 
 yearning, the torture of suspense, the suffering of the 
 body, the aching of the spirit, He knew and under- 
 stood them all. No cup of pain which had been lifted 
 to any mortal lip, but that He tasted the bitterness 
 of it ; no depth of agony into which any human spirit 
 had gone down, but that the plummet line of his love 
 sounded it as well. This it was to be every man's 
 brother, and as incarnate Love to have assumed the 
 nature of every man. 
 
 But I can imagine some who listen to these words 
 of mine here saying in their hearts, ' If it be indeed 
 thus, if love opens the door to so many sorrows which 
 else might have been shut out, if the more we have the 
 mind of Christ, the more we shall feel the sorrows of 
 other people, surely it is rashly and unwisely done to 
 seek any large measure of that likeness to Him, of that 
 love which brings these results in its train. Is not a 
 prudent isolation of ourselves, a shutting up of bur- 
 selves within ourselves, rather to be chosen, by which 
 we may hope to escape all this ? ' 
 
 Brethren, no. The way of self-isolation, in other 
 words, of selfishness, may present itself as the more 
 excellent way; and yet we act not less blindly than 
 guiltily when we choose it, and this for many reasons. 
 Let me mention some.
 
 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 53 
 
 In the first place then, this same selfishness, this 
 same isolation of ourselves which shuts us up against 
 the sorrows of others, shuts us up also against their joys. 
 If the one fountain is sealed, so will also be the other. 
 He who will not weep with them that weep, neither 
 shall he rejoice with them that rejoice ; and thus there 
 are sealed to him the sources of some of the purest and 
 truest delights which the heart of man can entertain, 
 namely, the pleasure which we derive from the happi- 
 ness of others. 
 
 But then, further, it is a course as blind as it is 
 sinful, because all experience proves that the man who 
 lays his account to live an easy, pleasurable life by know- 
 ing nothing, by refusing to know anything, of the cares, 
 troubles, and distresses of others, is never able to carry 
 out this scheme of his to a successful end. In strange 
 ways, strange, that is, as they appear to us, he is sure 
 to be baffled and defeated in this his guilty dream of a 
 life lived like that of the Epicurean gods, the life of one 
 looking down as from a superior height on a vast welter- 
 ing world of labour and sorrow and pain beneath him. 
 In the profound words of the Christian poet, ' Care 
 find the careless out ; ' and the man who has built up, 
 at the cost of every duty, a citadel of selfish ease for 
 himself, and made the defences strong, and set watches 
 at every gate by which it seemed possible that any foe 
 to his peace, any troubler of his enjoyment, might enter,
 
 64 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 
 
 that man sooner or later is doomed to discover what 
 feeble and ineffectual barriers are all these. In an 
 instant, at a single bound, the enemy whom he thought 
 to exclude overleaps and stands within the defences 
 which he had reared at such cost and pains, or enters 
 at some unguarded postern gate; and he who would 
 not have so much as a crumpled sere leaf beneath 
 him, finds himself tossing on a bed of pain, sharp 
 set with piercing thorns; he who would not stretch 
 out a little finger to lighten the burden of another, 
 groans under the intolerable weight of his own. 
 
 And why is this sure to be the issue of all such 
 selfish schemes ? Because God reigneth ; because He 
 will have it so; because He sets Himself against the 
 man who sets himself against the law of Christ, the law 
 of love. l Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil 
 the law of Christ : ' these are the words of the Holy 
 Ghost by the mouth of the Apostle Paul ; and he who 
 resolves not to bear any part of the burdens of his fel- 
 lows, resolves not to fulfil the law of Christ ; and if God 
 is Judge, if his face is against them that do evil, what 
 can come of any such walking counter to his will, but 
 a curse, and not a blessing, for him who has resolved so 
 to order his life ? 
 
 But, further, bear ye the burden of one another's sins. 
 In one sense, as we have seen already, Christ only can 
 do this. And yet, while this in the highest sense of all
 
 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 55 
 
 is supremely true, there is a secondary and inferior 
 sense in which we may bear this burden for one another. 
 Did not St. Paul, for example, bear the burden of the 
 sins of these same Galatians, when, because they had 
 suffered themselves to be seduced by false teachers into 
 ways of self-righteousness and spiritual pride, he needed 
 to begin again from the beginning the whole work of 
 their conversion, and to bring them back by painful steps 
 to Christ and his Cross once more ? 1 And we, brethren, 
 what must we do, if we would bear this burden for one 
 another ? We must not soon be provoked ; we must be 
 patient toward all men; seeking, if they be overtaken 
 with a fault, to restore them in the spirit of meekness ; 
 not hugely angry at any discomfort or loss or annoyance 
 which their faults may entail, while we remember how 
 often and in how far greater things we have provoked 
 the patience of God ; accepting therefore this which 
 their sin may lay upon us as part of that burden which 
 sinners dwelling among sinners must expect to bear. 
 So too we bear the burden of other men's sins when we 
 take trouble, endure toil and pain and loss in seeking 
 their restoration ; when, at however remote a distance 
 from our Lord, we too follow them into the wilderness, 
 that so, it may be, we may find, and having found may 
 bring them home again. 
 
 And as it is a duty to bear the burden of one 
 1 Gal. iv. 19.
 
 56 SEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 
 
 another's sin, so is it also to bear that of one another's 
 weakness, of those infirmities which are not sin, although 
 only sinful creatures would be subject to them. ' Sup- 
 port the weak,' this was the solemn exhortation which 
 this same Apostle uttered on a very solemn occasion. 1 
 You, for example, may be strong in faith ; you may be 
 able to lay firm hold on the promises of God in Christ, 
 to cast the anchor of your faith sure and steadfast within 
 the veil ; yet do not therefore despise, be not impatient 
 with him who at every step is ready to halt, who is full 
 of doubts and fears, who cleaves to his Saviour with a 
 weak trembling faith, which hardly knows itself to be 
 faith at all. You may think another full of needless 
 scruples ; and perhaps he is so, and God may have given 
 to you the gift of discerning things that differ, which 
 He has withholden from him ; or you may count him 
 narrow-minded, and wanting in any large views of the 
 truth ; yet bear with him, bear the burden which these 
 scruples, this narrow-mindedness of his may impose 
 upon you, as possibly a most useful discipline, which 
 God through this same brother has provided for you. 
 
 But, lastly, bear the burden of one another's sorrows. 
 What simple, and yet what sublime, words are those, 
 which in the Gospel story we so often read concerning 
 the Lord, ' He had compassion on them.' Let the same 
 mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. How 
 1 Acts xx. 35.
 
 SEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 57 
 
 often quite another mind is ours ! There are too many 
 who might be likened, one of our old divines, in his 
 quaint way, has likened them, to the hedgehog, which, 
 wrapping itself up in a ball, keeps all its soft warm wool 
 within and for itself ; has nothing but sharp prickly 
 spines which it presents to them that are without. And 
 indeed is not this, my brethren, the exact image of the 
 selfish man ? And when I speak of him, think not that 
 I mean some monster of cruelty and hardness of heart, 
 against whom the very world cries shame. Oh, no ! the 
 selfish man whom the word of God denounces is simply 
 the man who will bear no burden which he can evade, 
 who will enter into no sorrow from which he can decently 
 escape. He may be polite, he may be courteous, he may 
 be good-humoured ; he may be even good-natured, where 
 good-nature will entail on him no serious trouble ; he 
 may shed tears over fancied sorrows, yes and over real 
 ones, where they are specially adapted to move the ima- 
 gination and the feelings ; but for all this, self is the 
 centre round which his whole life and being revolves. 
 To keep things painful at a distance from himself, to 
 draw round himself a charmed circle, into which these 
 shall be unable to intrude, this is the aim and object, 
 I may say the ambition, of his life. 
 
 Brethren, if this be our ambition, if, so far as means 
 and opportunities will admit, it is our study to effect 
 this for ourselves, I do not say but that we may partially
 
 5S BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 
 
 and for a time succeed ; we may be cursed with that 
 which is the greatest curse of all, namely, success in evil 
 doing. But of this be sure, that our gain here will be 
 indeed our loss ; so to save our life will be to lose it ; 
 and a day will arrive when we shall discover this. Oh, 
 miserable retrospect for him who himself lies at length 
 on a bed of languishing ; to whose own lips is put at 
 last that cup of anguish which, with careless eye, he- 
 has seen go round to a thousand others ; who is sub- 
 mitted now to those stern realities of pain and all the 
 terrible teaching which they bring with them ; oh, mi- 
 serable retrospect for him who, looking back through a 
 long vista of years, cannot now but remember that, living 
 in a kingdom of love, he has yet shut his heart to all 
 love ; a sinner, whose only hope was in the mercy of 
 God, he has yet failed to shew that mercy to men which 
 he so greatly needed that God should shew to him. 
 With wealth perhaps and leisure and talents, and 
 golden opportunities (now, alas ! for ever fled), he has 
 yet smoothed no pillows, wiped away no tears, sustained 
 no weak, bound up no broken, borne no burdens, 
 poured the oil and wine of consolation into no wounded 
 hearts; and now the mercy which he has not shew^ 
 how can he hope that it will be shewn to him ? 
 
 Wouldst thou escape such a miserable looking back, 
 such a miserable looking forward ? There is only one 
 way to do this. Cast thyself boldly forth into the
 
 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS 59 
 
 kingdom of love. See what burdens of thy brethren 
 thou canst there come under. Fear not these burdens, 
 that they shall crush thee to earth; so strange is 
 their operation that, rather, they shall be wings lifting 
 thee to heaven. Fear not that they shall take all joy 
 out of thy life ; so far from this, thou shalt enjoy thy 
 life, as never thou enjoyedst it before. They who have 
 tried declare no less, declare too that this bearing of the 
 burdens of others makes our own burden far lighter 
 when it comes. And if at any time thou faintest, or 
 growest weary, or shrinkest from this, there is one sure 
 secret of strength, and it is this : Consider Christ ; 
 consider Him who, in the days of his flesh, bore the 
 burden of the world's woe ; who on his cross bore the 
 burden of the world's sin ; who is the bearer of thy 
 burden now, else thou wouldst not be in the kingdom 
 of grace ; who must be the bearer of thy burden at the 
 last, else thou wilt never be in the kingdom of glory ; 
 and who will only so bear it upon one condition, that 
 thou doest the things which He has said, that thou ful- 
 fillest his law, even the royal law of love. This if thou 
 wilt not do, as thou wilt have rejected love, the kingdom 
 of love, and He who is the Prince in that kingdom, 
 will reject thee. Thou must bear thy burden for thyself ; 
 and thou who knowest the secrets of thine own heart 
 and thine own life, wilt best be able to judge whether 
 that burden will or will not be too heavy for thee to bear.
 
 60 THE LOVE OF MONEY 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 
 THE LOVE OF MONEY. 
 
 1 TIM. vi. 10. 
 The love of money is the root of all evil. 
 
 IF we in our sermons speak seldom, and it must be 
 owned that we do speak seldom, of the sin of covet- 
 ousness ; if only at rare intervals and in mincing terms 
 we bid you, and in you ourselves, to take heed of it, there 
 is assuredly no warrant for any such reticence in Scrip- 
 ture. There, as in these words of St. Paul, ' The love of 
 money is the root of all evil,' or in those other of Christ 
 our Lord, ' Take heed and beware of covetousness,' we 
 are warned with all plainness of speech against it ; even 
 as we are again and again reminded there of other sins 
 and further dangers which this sin draws after it ; as, 
 for instance, how ' they that will be rich fall into tempta- 
 tion and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, 
 which drown men in destruction and perdition.' l Nor 
 is the warning of Scripture by earnest words only, but 
 by terrible examples no less. What a dread procession 
 ' 1 Tim. vi. 9.
 
 THE LOVE OF MONEY 61 
 
 of souls, which losing heaven, very often did not win 
 that earth for which they were content to lose it, is 
 made there to pass before us : Achan, who thought to 
 enrich himself with that wedge of gold and that Baby- 
 lonian garment ; and for whom that wedge of gold 
 served but as it were to cleave his soul asunder, while 
 that Babylonian garment proved to him no better than 
 a winding sheet : l and Gehazi, with the two talents of 
 silver and the five changes of raiment, which he obtained 
 by a lie from Naaman, but did not make account of the 
 garment which he should never change, of that robe of 
 leprosy which should cling to him and to his children 
 for ever : 2 and Balaam, who loved the wages of un- 
 righteousness, but who took no gain of money, though 
 he had made shipwreck of all that he might take it : a 
 and there, too, is the betrayer, who purchased ' the field 
 of blood' with the reward of iniquity, being himself 
 the first to handsell that field with his own. 4 
 
 These, as you well know, are but a few of the beacon 
 lights which in Scripture have been kindled to warn us 
 from the rocks and quicksands on which so many have 
 perished ; while yet with so many of these warnings 
 there, the like are not, as I urged just now, very often 
 heard in our pulpits. How shall we account for this ? 
 Is it that our people are assumed not to be so much 
 
 1 Josh. vii. 21-25. 2 2 Kings v. 22-27. 
 
 3 Num. xxiv. 11. Acts i. 18.
 
 62 
 
 exposed to temptations from this quarter as were others in 
 the days of old ? or do we take for granted that, however 
 exposed to these temptations, you have all in the main 
 victoriously overcome them ? Or do we hold our peace 
 from quite an opposite cause ? Is it that we despair of 
 making head against a sin which has grown so mighty, 
 and thus count it our safest course not to display our 
 helplessness by making impotent war against it ? or, 
 saddest of all, can it be that we, who should denounce 
 this sin, are tongue-tied, as knowing that if any could 
 read our hearts, and all which is working there, it would 
 be only too easy to retort on us, { Physician, heal thy- 
 self; thou, who denouncest this sin, art thou not thyself 
 holden as fast as any other in the cords of it ? ' I pre- 
 sume not to offer the explanation; but the fact can 
 scarcely be disputed, that, taking into account the im- 
 mense prominence which in so many of the affairs of 
 life questions about money assume, the infinite tempta- 
 tions to which men are exposed through their eagerness 
 to get, their unwillingness to part with this, they are 
 very inadequately guarded against these temptations by 
 any monitions which from our lips they receive. Let 
 me for once at least break through this habit of silence, 
 and address to you some words on this matter. 
 
 ' The love of money,' says the Apostle, ' is the root 
 of all evil ; ' not that all evils have, but that all may 
 have, their root therein. To say that all evils do actually
 
 THE LOVE OF MONEY 63 
 
 spring from this root would be an exaggeration, and 
 more than the truth. Pride and lust, the world and 
 the flesh, are both roots of evil quite as really as the 
 love of money ; and have their own evil offshoots as well. 
 But there is no evil, St. Paul would say, which may not 
 spring from this root. Take a rapid glance of a few of 
 these, to which it certainly gives birth. 
 
 And first, what a root it is of idolatry ; or rather it 
 is not so much a root of this, as itself this idolatry 
 * covetousness, which is idolatry.' 1 This sounds a hard 
 saying, but it is one which can justify itself. For what 
 is the essence of idolatry ? Is it not a serving and 
 loving of the creature more than the Creator ; a giving 
 to the lower what was due only to the higher, what was 
 due only to Him who is the highest of all ? Men are 
 idolaters when, instead of saying, c The Lord is my 
 Shepherd, I shall not want,' they say, ' I have much 
 goods laid up for many years ; ' or, to translate this into 
 modern language, ' I have an ample rent-roll,' or ' I 
 have a large balance with my banker, and therefore I 
 shall not want.' Will any, looking at his own heart, 
 deny that worldly goods in possession or in imagination 
 do mightily tempt men to lean on them ; and, if an 
 earnest watch be not kept, are very powerful to draw 
 away the heart from a simple and childlike trust in Him 
 who clothes the lily, and feeds the young ravens which 
 1 Col. iii. 5.
 
 64 THE LOVE OF MONEY 
 
 call upon Him ; and who will much more clothe and 
 feed his own children that are better than these ? 
 
 And as this love of money disturbs the relations of 
 men to God, drawing off to some meaner object affections 
 due to Him, so it mingles continually an element of 
 strife and division in the relations of men with one 
 another. How often it has caused brethren in the faith, 
 yea, and brethren in blood, to fall out ; been, as it were, 
 an apple of discord among those most bound to love 
 one another. Such it would inevitably have proved for 
 Abraham and Lot, if the nobleness of the character of 
 the royal-hearted patriarch had not made this impossible. 
 But all are not followers of Abraham here. 1 Which of 
 us has not known families that dwelt once in love and 
 peace together, and might have done so to the end if it 
 had not been for the dividing of the inheritance ? But 
 out of this what of secret rancours, of open quarrels, has 
 sprung ; of strangeness, and often of much more than 
 strangeness, put between brethren ; of enmities which 
 seem as though they would never cease, which are 
 transmitted from one generation to another, a miserable 
 heirloom of strife and debate. 
 
 Again, what a root of unrighteousness, of untruthful 
 dealing between man and man, of unfair advantage taken 
 of the simple and the ignorant, of falsehood, fraud, and 
 chicane, does the love of money continually show itself 
 
 1 Gen. xiii. 7-9.
 
 THE LOVE OF MONEY 65 
 
 to be ! How fruitful a root of these only that last day 
 will declare, when all ' the hidden things of dishonesty ' 
 shall not be hidden any more. But even now, when so 
 much is covered and concealed which shall then be laid 
 bare, we can see enough and too much of the rank 
 harvest of robbery and wrong which grows from this 
 single bitter root; I mean of robbery and wrong as 
 in God's sight ; for very much in these things, stopping 
 short of that whereof the laws of men take cognizance, 
 and bringing men under no pains and penalties of human 
 tribunals, is not the less hateful in the eyes of Him who 
 is a God of righteousness and truth ; and, though the 
 laws of man may have no power to touch it, is not the 
 less contrary to their profession, who, as children of light, 
 are bound to walk in the light, and to have no fellowship 
 with ought which will not endure to be made manifest 
 by the light. 
 
 And then for time would fail me if I dwelt at large 
 on all the mischiefs that spring from this, which even 
 the heathen poet could style 'the accursed hunger of 
 gold ' what treading on the poor ; what thrusting of 
 them on unwholesome and dangerous occupations, with 
 no due precautions taken for their health and safety ; 
 what shutting up of the bowels of compassion from the 
 Lazarus lying at the gate ; what wicked thoughts find- 
 ing room in men's hearts, secret wishes for the death 
 of those who stand between them and some coveted 
 
 F
 
 GO THE LOVE OF MONEY 
 
 possession, have all their origin here ; that I speak not 
 of other and worse sins than these, when the wicked 
 thought embodies itself in the wicked act, ' the treason of 
 the murdering in the bed,' with all other those monstrous 
 deeds written in the annals of crime, whereof certainly 
 our age has been as fruitful as any which went before it. 
 
 But such outbreaks of strange wickedness, you say, 
 lie out of the range of the temptations to which you are 
 exposed ; there is no need to warn you against such. Be 
 it so ; though indeed there is no sin which another has 
 ever committed, but that we, under like temptations and 
 provocations, might commit the same. Let this however 
 pass, and let us concern ourselves only with those other 
 less enormous outcomings of the evil springing from this 
 root ; and bear with me a little longer, while I suggest 
 some considerations which may help us to take up arms 
 against a sin which, like some pernicious ivy, is ever 
 seeking to twine itself round our hearts, till it strangle 
 all the nobler life of our spirits. 
 
 Consider then, first, how powerless riches are against 
 some of the worst calamities of our present life ; how 
 many of the sorrows which search men out the closest, 
 which most drink up the spirit, these are utterly im- 
 potent to avert or to cure. Men think of them as of 
 a strong tower, to which they can always resort, and 
 whither no enemy can follow ; and therefore they are so 
 ager to heap them up ; or, if this is out of hope, count
 
 THE LOVE OF MONEY 67 
 
 those happy who are able to do so. But take an instance 
 of their impotence ; the case (not so uncommon) of one 
 suffering intense and persistent bodily pain. Ask a man 
 in a fit of the stone, or a victim of cancer, what his 
 riches are worth to him ; why, if he had the wealth of 
 the Indies ten times told, he would exchange it all for 
 ease of body, and a little remission of anguish. 
 
 But why speak of bodily anguish ? There is an 
 anguish yet harder to bear, the anguish of the man 
 whom the arrows of the Almighty, for they are his 
 arrows, have pierced ; who has learned what sin is, but 
 has stopped short with the experience of the Psalmist, 
 'Day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my 
 moisture is turned into the drought of summer,' l and 
 never learned that there is also an atonement. What 
 profits it such a one that all the world is for him, so 
 long as he feels and knows that God is against him ? 
 He may cover and conceal his spirit's hurt with purple 
 and gold ; but it does not the less gnaw inwardly, and 
 take all joy and gladness from his life. 
 
 Then, too, how often we see a man comparatively 
 desolate in the midst of the largest worldly abundance. 
 He has loved, and the beloved, the desire of his eyes, 
 has been early taken from him, and he runs his long- 
 widowed course, and paces his empty halls alone, nour- 
 ishing a secret grief, which all that this world gives is 
 1 Ps. xxxii. 4.
 
 68 TEE LOVE OF MONEY 
 
 quite unavailing to assuage. Or with large possessions 
 he goes childless, and, like another Abraham, sees some 
 stranger, some ' Eliezer of Damascus,' l on whom shall 
 devolve the inheritance of many generations, or the 
 newer wealth for which he himself has toiled and carked 
 and cared. Or, sadder still, he has children, but riotous, 
 unruly, disobedient, who plainly are only waiting for 
 the moment when he shall be in his grave to scatter 
 with usurers, with jockeys, with gamblers, with harlots, 
 all which he has so carefully watched over, or so pain- 
 fully gotten together. Surely, as the wise king said 
 long ago, ' this also is vanity.' 
 
 These considerations may do something; but take 
 now another and a more effectual remedy against this 
 sin. Let a greater love expel a less, a nobler affection 
 supersede a meaner. Consider often the great things 
 for which you were made, the unsearchable riches of 
 which you have been made partakers in Christ; for 
 covetousness, the desire of having, and of having ever 
 more and more, sin as it is, is yet the degeneration of 
 something which is not a sin. Man was made for the 
 infinite ; with infinite longings, infinite cravings and 
 desires. He was intended to find the satisfaction of all 
 these longings, all these desires in God ; ordained by 
 the primal law of his creation to hunger and thirst for 
 God, and to be satisfied only with Him. But averting 
 1 Gen. xv. 2.
 
 THE LOVE OF 310 XEY 69 
 
 himself from God, the hunger and the thirst still remain, 
 the sense of emptiness, the yearning after something 
 which he has not got, the desire of having, of filling 
 that immense void within him; and now, because he 
 has refused to fill it with the fulness of God, he seeks to 
 fill it with the fulness of the creature, with ever more 
 and more of this ; which however, do what he will, 
 leaves him dissatisfied and yearning still ; for none are 
 truly filled save those whom God satisfies, and satisfies 
 with Himself. 
 
 But finally, the habit of largely and liberally setting 
 apart from our income to the service of God and the 
 necessities of our poorer brethren is a great remedy 
 against covetousness. I do not mean lazy and promis- 
 cuous almsgiving, with no pains taken to know whether 
 our gifts are well bestowed emptying our seed-corn out 
 of the sack's mouth, instead of carefully scattering it 
 with the hand ; for this can do nothing except harm. 
 But I mean a wise and deliberate dedication of a portion 
 to God, of that which all came from God. Nor need I 
 urge that this portion, if it is really to help us in mor- 
 tifying the corrupt affection of covetousness, must not 
 be a very small and niggard one. It must not be that 
 paltry residue which, in most cases, is all that is likely 
 to remain, if indeed anything at all will remain, after 
 every taste, every fancy, every desire of our hearts has 
 been gratified. I say not how much it should be. That
 
 70 THE LOVE OF MONEY 
 
 tithe of our income which some have laid down as an 
 absolute rule, supplies at all events a most useful test, 
 suggests a proportion to which an approximation might 
 be most fitly made. But whether more than this, as it 
 might very well be with many, or less than this, as it 
 might be with others, or this exact amount, of one thing 
 I feel sadly sure, namely, that any dedication of a portion 
 of our income which at all approached to this, would be 
 ten times, twenty times more than that amount which a 
 large number of those calling themselves Christian, and 
 believing that they are fulfilling their duties as such, 
 actually dedicate at the present. Our charities, the 
 offerings which we offer to God, too often cost us nothing, 
 and therefore, as a consequence, they profit us nothing ; 
 they help us little or not at all in the way to heaven ; 
 nay, rather, in their littleness serve only as an acknow- 
 ledgment that we recognize a duty which yet we are 
 refusing to fulfil. Some perhaps will say, Better then, 
 to withhold this little, if it shall thus prove a witness 
 against us. They may say this ; but they cannot in their 
 hearts believe that any true help is here. That help 
 can only lie in so multiplying this little that it may 
 witness not against us but for us ; that, like the alms 
 of Cornelius, which, as you will remember, were ' much 
 alms/ it may come up for a memorial before God. 1 
 1 Acts x. 2, 4.
 
 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 1L 
 
 SERMON VII. 1 
 
 THE ARMOUR OF GOD. 
 
 EPHESIANS vi. 13. 
 
 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be 
 able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. 
 
 THERE is but one kind of armour, brethren, which, 
 after all is done, proves of any value, and that is the 
 ' armour of God.' It is only through putting on of this 
 that a man, or a nation, is able to do that which the 
 Apostle desires here that the Ephesians may be enabled 
 to do namely, l to withstand in the evil day, and having 
 done all, to stand.' It greatly behoves, therefore, all 
 those who believe that such an evil day may come, that 
 in one shape or another it must come, earnestly to 
 inquire what this ' armour of God ' is, and whether they 
 have indeed put it on ; seeing that without this pre- 
 paration all other preparations will avail nothing. ' A 
 horse is counted but a vain thing to save a man ; ' we 
 may make up our breaches, and fortify our strongholds ; 
 we may enlist in the service of war the latest discoveries 
 1 Preached to the Queen's Westminster Rifle Volunteers.
 
 72 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 
 
 of science ; we may build navies which shall sweep the 
 seas ; the tramp of armed battalions may wake unwonted 
 echoes in the streets of our cities ; and yet for all this, 
 in one way or another, there will be found a fatal weak- 
 ness in all our preparations ; there will be flaws and rifts 
 in our armour ; our battlements will be taken away, for 
 they are not the Lord's ; wisdom and counsel will perish 
 from the wise and prudent ; yes, too, and courage from 
 the brave ; and this at the very moment when such are 
 needed the most ; and God will plainly shew that all 
 those who put their trust in an arm of flesh, and, if 
 only that arm seem sufficiently strong, care little for 
 any other support, are trusting in a vain thing, which 
 cannot profit nor deliver. 
 
 But some may perhaps ask here, What is this 
 * armour of God,' of which you speak ? We can under- 
 stand this man or that being bidden, in his own single 
 and personal conflict with sin and Satan and with evil 
 men who are his instruments, to take such armour, and 
 array himself with it. It is a figure, yet one sufficiently 
 intelligible. We can understand also why it should be 
 promised to him who obeys this bidding, to this soldier 
 of God, to him and to him only, that he shall stand in 
 the evil day of temptation and trial. But a people or 
 nation, how can they put this armour on ? What does 
 this language mean in respect of them ? The conflicts 
 which they wage, they are with outward, not inward
 
 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 73 
 
 foes with flesli and blood, not with spiritual wicked- 
 nesses. With what ' armour of God ' can they be 
 clothed ? And granting that such is in their reach, 
 how can this affect the issue of conflicts which are not 
 spiritual but carnal ; which are fought not with spiritual 
 adversaries, but with flesh and blood, with men of like 
 passions with themselves ? 
 
 Questions such as these might easily rise up, not in 
 the hearts of some, but of many. Let me endeavour 
 to answer them. And first, I am bold to affirm there 
 is ' armour of God ' for a nation as well as for an indi- 
 vidual. Travel in your thoughts to the verse next fol- 
 lowing my text, and you will find the several pieces of 
 this armour enumerated, the breastplate of righteousness, 
 or, as it is elsewhere, of faith and love, the girdle of 
 truth, and so on with the rest. But these, righteous- 
 ness, faith, love, and truth, these are not matters which 
 pertain to us merely in our single separate relation to 
 God ; but also most closely in our relation with our 
 brethren. They affect all the conduct of man to man, 
 all the relations of class with class, of high with low, 
 and poor with rich ; of the husband with the wife, of 
 the child with the parent, of the master with the ser- 
 vant, of the buyer with the seller ; of the wise with the 
 simple ; of the ruler with the ruled; of the Queen with 
 her subjects ; of the subjects with their Queen. There 
 is not one of these relations, in which, and in the fulfil-
 
 74 THE AB1IOUR OF GOD 
 
 ment of the duties flowing out of that relation, we may 
 not put on this ' armour of God,' if we will that is r 
 there is not one of them in which we may not act 
 lovingly, truthfully, faithfully, righteously with our 
 brethren ; battling against and overcoming the ever- 
 recurring temptations to act otherwise; shewing our 
 faith by our works ; shewing that we fear and honour 
 God by just and true and affectionate dealing with 
 our neighbour. 
 
 But this being so, what I would say is, that when 
 such a dealing is the predominant rule and law of a 
 nation's life, when, despite the multitude of exceptions 
 which may be found, still in the main class deals justly 
 with class, when the rich do not tread upon the poor r 
 nor the poor grudge against the rich ; when children do> 
 not rise up against their parents, but reverence, fear, and 
 obey them ; when, with fewest exceptions, husbands and 
 wives keep faithfully the vow and promise between them 
 made ; when uprightness and honesty is the general law 
 in the dealings between buyer and seller ; when truth 
 is spoken between man and man ; when God's law and 
 God's word is acknowledged as the ultimate test and 
 touchstone by which everything is to be judged, and to^ 
 which everything is to be brought ; I say, when it is 
 thus with a nation, we may venture to affirm of it,, 
 despite of all the sins, all the evils which it may harbour 
 in its bosom, that it has put on the armour of God ; and
 
 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 75 
 
 judging of the future by the past, we augur that it will 
 stand in whatever evil days may arrive. 
 
 And if it be further asked, ivhy a nation may be 
 therefore expected to stand ; the answer is not merely 
 that God will be with it, that God will bless it, may 
 correct, but, in the midst of his loving corrections, will 
 not give it over to death. This is indeed true ; but 
 over and above this we may see and trace very plainly 
 how and in what several ways the elements of goodness 
 in it will be also in themselves elements of strength and 
 power and endurance. The absence of class jealousies, 
 of envies, emulations, heart-burnings, and with this the 
 knitting of the heart of the whole nation as the heart 
 of one man, what an element of strength is this in the 
 day of trial. Again, mutual confidence between man 
 and man, what another source of strength is here ; while 
 the want of this confidence, mutual distrust, the un- 
 certainty whether the man you lean on the most may 
 not prove a traitor or a coward, is as rottenness in 
 the bones. Then, too, where the home is holy, where 
 the sacred fire burns purely on the domestic hearth, 
 there is a beauty, a sanctity, a blessedness about the 
 life of the family, which is felt by thousands and tens 
 of thousands to be worth living for, and worth dying 
 f or which arms the patriot heart of the father, the 
 husband, and the brother, to do and dare all in the 
 defence of homes which are so precious ; yet only so
 
 76 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 
 
 precious because they are so pure. In these and in 
 a thousand ways moi*e, which time will not permit me 
 to recount, this ' armour of God,' being, as it is, armour 
 of righteousness and truth, of purity and love, approves 
 itself as that which makes a nation strong, which nerves 
 its arm, and establishes its heart, which enables it < to 
 withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.' 
 
 If then it should appear likely that such an evil day 
 is now approaching for us, if perilous times are perhaps 
 at hand, times that will try to the uttermost men and 
 nations, how momentous a question is this which presents 
 itself to us ? Have we, as a people, taken to ourselves 
 the armour of God ? Are we as a nation clothed with 
 it, with that armour of light, that panoply of God, which 
 is at once a light and a defence, a sun and a shield ? I 
 look round me, and, blessed be God, I see many tokens 
 for good, that it is even so ; much to give us assurance 
 that, notwithstanding the overflowings of ungodliness 
 which sometimes make us afraid, the heart of this 
 people is sound; much for which to thank God and 
 take courage ; though mingled, as I am bound to say, 
 with very much which might most justly fill us with 
 misgiving and alarm. 
 
 Bear with me, suffer me while I touch very rapidly 
 on one or two of these tokens and auguries that are 
 not for good, but for evil. Thus I spoke just now of the 
 sanctity of the family life, the strength which there is
 
 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 77 
 
 in a people who are under the influence of ' pure reli- 
 gion breathing household laws.' But the sense of this 
 sanctity, reverence for that most sacred bond of all, 
 the bond of marriage, from which all family life proceeds, 
 must have waxed feeble, must have well-nigh disappeared 
 among large numbers of our people, before ever the 
 nation could have been startled from its dream of self- 
 righteousness by such miserable revelations as those 
 which our Divorce Courts within the last few years have 
 afforded. Or look at our streets by night, yea, and 
 oftentimes by day, full of the unhappy and fallen mem- 
 bers of one sex, who minister to the coarsest lusts and 
 most sensual appetites of the other. What a yawning 
 gulf of perdition opens here before our eyes, and one into 
 which many a young man has cast all that was best and 
 noblest and purest, yes, and I am bold to affirm, all 
 that was bravest in his heart therein to be swallowed 
 up for ever. 
 
 Again, are we, one is sometimes tempted to ask, as 
 just and upright a people as once we were ? We are 
 richer, more prosperous, more flourishing now than our 
 fathers were. We conduct business on a grander scale ; 
 we smile at the petty returns which satisfied them. 
 But are we a more righteous or as righteous a people as 
 they in their narrower line of things were of old ? Is 
 there the same truth, the same fairness, the same mer- 
 cantile honour which once existed among us ? Are
 
 78 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 
 
 there not some tokens which seem to say no? How 
 shall we explain those laws which it has been found 
 necessary to pass, hindering one manufacturer from 
 assuming, that is, from forging, the name and trade- 
 mark of another? how shall we explain the almost 
 recognized rule, so that scarcely any shame attends the 
 avowal of it, that lying measures, which proclaim them- 
 selves one thing, and are quite another, lengths which 
 are not nearly so long, and breadths which are not at 
 all so broad, as they proclaim themselves to be, may be 
 passed off and palmed on the unsuspecting buyer, and 
 that with no brand of fraud on the seller ? 
 
 Other questions, alas! like these, I might ask. I 
 might count up our sins ; sins of the clergy, quite as 
 easily as sins of the laity ; or sins of the higher, rather 
 than sins of the middle, class; but let these suffice. 
 In these, and in such as these, are the rifts of our armour. 
 Here are the true perils of the nation ; here, in these 
 sins of ours, is that which justifies any misgivings about 
 the future which we may entertain. For if righteous- 
 ness exalteth a nation, so also sin is not merely, in the 
 words of the Wise King, a reproach to any people, but 
 undermining, as it does, the moral strength, eating out 
 the moral heart, of a people, leaves it in the end naked 
 and defenceless a Samson with all the outward shows, 
 it may be, of his strength remaining, but with his 
 locks shorn, and that strength indeed gone from him ;
 
 THE AEMOUR OF GOD 79 
 
 though perhaps he will not discover this till the Philis- 
 tine is upon him, and he goes forth thinking to rid him- 
 self of his adversary as in the days of old. 
 
 My brethren, whom we have rejoiced to welcome 
 within these walls to-day, you will not, I am sure, 
 account one word which has been spoken as intended 
 to depreciate the importance of that mighty national 
 movement in which you have borne and are bearing 
 your part. So far from slighting or underrating it, I 
 accept it as itself one of our most hopeful tokens for 
 good ; while the absence of any such national muster 
 in perilous times like these would be indeed one of 
 the worst among those tokens of ill which I spoke 
 of just now, a most disastrous augury for the future, 
 a fatal evidence that indolence, and effeminacy, and the 
 love of ease, and the unwillingness to endure hardness, 
 or to affront danger, had gone far to take away the man's 
 heart from us, and left us poor and contemptible in our 
 own eyes and in the eyes of the world, a people without 
 valour, or, in other words, without worth a carcase 
 around which, according to the immutable laws of God's 
 government in this world, the eagles would presently 
 be gathered together, as round their appointed prey. 
 
 But in this national gathering you and your fellows 
 throughout the land have declared that it is not thus, 
 that there are things dearer to Englishmen than their 
 ease and their safety, their comforts and their luxuries,
 
 80 TEE ARMOUR OF GOD 
 
 their buying and selling and getting gain that this 
 land of ours, which has known how to reconcile the pre- 
 rogatives of an ancient line of kings with the liberties of 
 an advancing people, this land so full of the monuments 
 of past greatness, and the pledges of greatness to come, 
 this citadel of freedom, this bulwark of the pure and 
 reformed faith of Christ throughout the world, is a land 
 dear to them, dearer, if need be, than the life itself. 
 They have avouched their conviction, that of all this 
 glory and this greatness, these blessings of pure religion 
 and temperate freedom, this marvellous heirloom of the 
 past, we, this living generation of Englishmen, account 
 ourselves in God's sight the guardians and the trustees. 
 For indeed these treasures are not ours not ours, that 
 is, in fee, that we may do with them what we will 
 lose, squander, dissipate them, if we are so minded ; but 
 as we received them from our fathers, so we are bound, by 
 moral obligations the most binding, to hand them down 
 unimpaired, undiminished, to our children ; nay, more 
 than this, to bequeath them if possible a richer, more 
 glorious inheritance than we received them. 
 
 For this is the true law of a noble nation's life. To 
 each generation which in succession at once 'is, and re- 
 presents it, there is granted the use and enjoyment of 
 priceless blessings blessings of law, of liberty, of order, 
 of national dignity and glory blessings which that 
 generation did not win, but which others in ages past
 
 81 
 
 won for them obtained for them oftentimes at the price 
 of costliest sacrifices, by patience and endurance, by 
 toil and tears, not seldom upon battle-fields, in dungeons, 
 and on scaffolds. But with the use and enjoyment of 
 these blessings is also committed to each generation in 
 turn the guardianship of them ; that this which they 
 have inherited suffer no loss, no diminution, while pass- 
 ing through their hands. Nay, this does not satisfy the 
 just claims which may be made upon them. They are 
 bound, as others before them were, to improve what they 
 have received, to perfect what may be still lacking there- 
 in, to repair the injuries and decays which the lapse of 
 years may have wrought, to redress the wrongs and 
 supply the shortcomings which the course of time may 
 reveal ; to make their special contributions, as others 
 before them have made theirs, to the glory, the honour, 
 the well-being, the moral no less than material pro- 
 sperity of that dear land which has given them birth, 
 and to which they owe a mightier debt than they can 
 hope ever perfectly to repay. 
 
 And indeed, brethren, I know not what shame, 
 what ignominy, what scorn, would not rightly be their 
 portion, what curses of an indignant posterity would 
 ntt justly light upon their heads, who should betray a 
 trust so solemn and so awful as this is the generation 
 which should not merely fail in leaving better what 
 they found good, in leaving greater what they found 
 
 G 
 
 fou
 
 82 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 
 
 already great but of whom in the records of all after 
 time it should be written, that they found England 
 great, and that they left her small ; that they found 
 her crowned and sceptred, a royal land, and that they 
 left her servile and sitting in the dust ; that they found 
 her the inviolate island of the free, and left her polluted 
 and profaned with the hostile foot of the stranger ; that 
 they found her the chiefest and the first, and that they 
 left her among the lowest and the last. 
 
 Friends and fellow-countrymen, it is because you 
 are resolved to do your part to avert even the remote 
 possibility of such a dishonour, such a reproach from 
 yourselves, that you are in arms this day. Men of 
 peace, addicted to the arts of peace, habituated to the 
 pursuits of peace, it is your dearest wish to live peace- 
 able lives, and, as I would fain trust, to lead those lives 
 in all godly quietness. You know something of the 
 hateful guilt of war; that every needless unrighteous 
 war, undertaken out of greed, or pride, or ambition, or 
 love of glory, or lust of dominion, or desire of revenge, 
 is a crime huger, darker, deeper, entailing a more fright- 
 ful guilt upon its authors, than any other in the dread 
 catalogue of human crimes ; being as it is a crime on a 
 far more gigantic scale than any other can possibly be. 
 But in this guilt, at any rate, you feel that you can 
 never be entangled. You, by your very constitution, 
 are rooted to your native soil. No ambitious warrior or
 
 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 83 
 
 statesman, even if lie should desire it, could ever use 
 you as instruments of wrong-doing towards others, of 
 aggression upon the rights of your neighbours. It is 
 with your feet planted upon this English land, amid 
 the graves of your fathers, among your own hearths and 
 homes, that you, if ever the occasion should arise, will 
 give proof of your manhood ; not as men inflicting wrong 
 upon others, but only as those who would avert intoler- 
 able wrong from us and from yourselves. 
 
 But knowing this guilt of theirs, the wasters and 
 destroyers of the earth, first-born of Cain with the mark 
 of the arch-murderer on their foreheads, their guilt, 
 who to the Moloch of their ambition or their pride offer 
 hecatombs of the lives of men, you know also that there 
 is another guilt, which we dare not affirm to be less ; 
 even the guilt of those who might have guarded, who 
 might have defended against the mightiest and worst 
 of these, the blessings which God had given them; 
 but who, out of sloth, or cowardice, or vain confidence, 
 or slight esteem which they set upon his gifts, cared not 
 to do so, suffered these to be wrested out of their hands, 
 made shameful shipwreck, not of their own blessings 
 alone, but of the blessings of countless generations to 
 come. He who will have his gifts esteemed at a just 
 price from time to time puts a nation to the proof. He 
 says to it, not in so many words, but in a language 
 which cannot be mistaken, At what rate do you prize 
 
 o 2
 
 84 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 
 
 these blessings of mine, whereof you make your boast ? 
 What sacrifices will you undergo to keep them ? Do 
 you count them worth contending for ? Do you count 
 them, if need be, worth dying for ? By your presence 
 here, clad not in the garments of peace, but in the 
 livery of war, you have avouched that you do. Your 
 answer to this question is, Yes ; being the same answer 
 which you are prepared to give, as now in this house of 
 peace and prayer, with no danger in sight, so also amid 
 sterner scenes, and mingling this Yes of yours, not as 
 now with the rolling peals of the organ, but with the 
 dreadful voices, the thunder-music of war. 
 
 But words of boasting, words which might seem 
 however remotely to savour of boasting, become not us, 
 nor this house of God, nor yet the occasion which has 
 brought us together. Bather let us devoutly seek of Him 
 the consecration of those arms which we have not will- 
 ingly, but only by the strong constraint of duty, as- 
 sumed. Let us humble ourselves every one in his sight, 
 confessing our own sins and our people's ; wherein con- 
 sists the true danger which threatens us, the danger 
 which draws all other dangers in its train, and which 
 makes them dangers indeed ; seeking pardon for those 
 sins through the precious blood of Christ. And when we 
 have thus cleansed our bosoms from the miserable burden 
 of unconfessed, unrepented, unforsaken, and therefore, 
 unforgiven sin, let us seek to put on the whole armour
 
 THE ARMOUR OF GOD 85 
 
 of God ; to put it on ourselves, to help others to put it 
 on ; armour of righteousness, armour of purity, armour 
 of truth and love ; and then, God being our helper, 
 whatever evil day may come, whatever foes may assail, 
 be they spiritual wickednesses alone, or enemies of flesh 
 and blood as well, we may humbly yet confidently 
 hope that we shall be able to withstand in that evil 
 day, and having done all, to stand.
 
 86 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 
 
 SERMON VIII. 
 
 THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 
 
 2 COR. xii. 7-9. 
 
 And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance 
 of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the 
 messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above 
 measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might 
 depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient 
 for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most 
 gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the 
 power of Christ may rest upon me. 
 
 AN eminent father of the Western Church has loved to 
 remark, and has indeed remarked several times over, 
 on the exceeding preciousness which the grace of 
 humility must possess in the sight of God, and on the 
 evidence of this which we have in the fact that St. 
 Paul was submitted to such a discipline as is here 
 recorded, that he might the more surely retain it. The 
 same illustrious teacher has not failed further to remind 
 us, and to remind us often, of the fatal ease with which 
 this excellent grace may be lost, when a Paul himself 
 could be in peril of losing it ; and, seizing that which 
 above all is the distinctive warning in this passage
 
 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 87 
 
 conveyed, he earnestly bids us to note the strange and 
 unexpected quarters from which this grace is assailed, 
 so that the very gifts and favours bestowed by God 
 upon his own may minister food and fuel to their 
 pride, may exalt them in their own conceit, and cause 
 them to let go a grace, which in this resembles charity, 
 that if a man have it not, then having everything else, 
 but not having this, he is nothing and worse than 
 nothing in the sight of God. Lessons of such vast 
 importance to us all being wrapt up in this Scripture, 
 it may be worth our while to examine it a little closer. 
 St. Paul has just told the Corinthians of favours 
 strange, rare, wonderful, which had been vouchsafed to 
 him, of ' a man in Christ,' by all acknowledged to be 
 himself, who was ' caught up to the third heaven,' ' into 
 Paradise,' who had there heard words more wonderful 
 than could find utterance again in any dialect of earth, 
 as indeed must be the case with any words of heaven ; 
 who had there glimpses of glory vouchsafed him such 
 as have been seldom permitted to any child of man 
 while yet abiding in this tenement of clay. But, he 
 goes on to say, 'Lest I should be exalted above 
 measure,' lifted up too high 'through the abundance 
 of the revelations,' lest he should grow dizzy even at 
 the recollection of those heavenly heights on which he 
 walked for a while, and losing his head should stumble 
 and fall, 'there was given to me,' God of his grace
 
 88 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 
 
 provided for him, < a thorn in the flesh, the messenger 
 of Satan to buffet me,' lest, as he twice repeats it, ' I 
 should be exalted above measure,' and that which was 
 meant to be his wealth should turn out not wealth, but 
 poverty, not a lifting up, but the most terrible casting 
 down of all. 
 
 Now what exactly this ' thorn in the flesh,' of which 
 the Apostle speaks, was, the Corinthians knew very 
 well; but we do not know, and we never shall know 
 with any certainty ; nor does it greatly concern us that 
 we should know. Only of this we may be quite sure, 
 from the purpose with which it was sent, and the 
 language in which it is spoken of, that it was something 
 to vex and annoy him, to humble and keep him low, 
 some effectual antidote to spiritual pride. Various 
 conjectures have been hazarded about it. Among these 
 perhaps the following commend themselves the most. 
 First, it has been suggested by some that this ' thorn 
 in the flesh ' was some temptation a ' messenger of 
 Satan ' in this sense. There is perhaps nothing which 
 more effectually humbles a man who has been walking 
 upon spiritual heights, who has been brought into near 
 and high communion with God, drunk deeply of the 
 river of his pleasures, than afterwards to find that, 
 despite of all this, he is still obvious to the meanest and 
 lowest temptations of the flesh or of the spirit ; that 
 Satan can still suggest to him envious thoughts, or
 
 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 89 
 
 impure thoughts, or proud thoughts ; and that, however 
 he may have fancied that he had left all these very far 
 behind, there is that in him which is only too ready 
 to respond to these suggestions of the enemy. Some 
 temptation in one of these kinds or another that ' thorn 
 in the flesh ' may very possibly have been. 
 
 Others, again, have proposed quite a different 
 explanation : that by this we are to understand some 
 man, such a one, for example, as Alexander the copper- 
 smith, of whom St. Paul himself bears witness that he 
 greatly withstood his words ; l some man who, even in 
 the matter of human gifts, was immeasurably St. Paul's 
 inferior, and who yet was permitted to resist him, to 
 sow tares where he had sown good seed, and in various 
 ways to hinder and traverse and undo his work. This, 
 too, has something to recommend it. Doubtless it 
 would have been an infinite humiliation that he, with 
 his lofty and noble purposes, his wondrous endowments, 
 natural and supernatural, should yet have been effectually 
 withstood by so mean and vulgar an adversary as this. 
 
 Once more : there have been others who have seen 
 in this ' thorn in the flesh ' some bodily ailment, cramp- 
 ing the Apostle's energies, crippling his powers, entail- 
 ing the necessity of painful remedies, and never suffering 
 him to forget that body of humiliation which he carried 
 about. An infirmity such as this, feelingly reminding 
 ' 2 Tim. iv. 14, 15.
 
 90 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 
 
 him what he was, would have been a school excellently 
 fitted for the learning of humility and the unlearning 
 of pride. It has been the school in which many of 
 God's saints have learned their lesson of humility, and 
 may have been that in which St. Paul was learning his. 
 There is a passage in his Epistle to the Galatians (I 
 refer to iv. 13, 14) where he speaks of an 'infirmity of 
 the flesh,' called by him presently after his temptation 
 in his flesh, which may very well have been something 
 of the kind. 
 
 But whatever this ' thorn ' may have been, it was a 
 thing so painful, so unwelcome to flesh and blood, so 
 hard to be borne, it seemed, in the Apostle's mind, so 
 serious a hindrance to his apostolic labours, perhaps also 
 to his own growth and progress in the spiritual life, 
 that he thrice besought the Lord that it might be taken 
 from him. By this ' thrice ' we may understand that he 
 set forth three several seasons, these at some interval 
 from one another, and made it at each of these the 
 special purport and object of his prayer that this which 
 so vexed, harassed, and annoyed him might depart from 
 him, might not be permitted to buffet him any more. 
 
 What was the Lord's answer to his servant ? Did 
 He allow his petition ? In one sense He did ; in an- 
 other He did not. In a higher and more real sense He 
 did ; in a lower and apparent sense He did not. His 
 request in the letter of it He did not grant, but in the
 
 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 91 
 
 spirit of it He did. He did not grant it in the letter. 
 The precise boon which St. Paul asked, namely, that 
 this ' thorn, in the flesh ' might be taken from him, this 
 was withheld. But why had he asked this ? That his 
 work for Christ might not be hindered ; that the higher 
 life of his own soul and spirit might not endure any 
 wrong. And the Lord's answer is to this effect, that 
 these objects will be best attained by suffering this to 
 continue which he so longed to see removed. So will 
 he learn evermore to walk humbly with his God ; so 
 will he be saved from that worm of pride which is ever 
 threatening, like a canker, to eat into and to destroy the 
 fairest fruits of the Spirit. In the sense of his own 
 weakness he will learn the secret of God's strength; 
 empty of self, he will be filled with the fulness of God. 
 ' Thou askest that this should depart, but I have a better 
 boon for thee. This shall remain, but strength and grace 
 shall be added to thee sufficient to bear it; and thus 
 thou shalt learn lessons of humility, of faith, of patience, 
 of hope, which thou wouldst have never learned if I had 
 too lightly answered thy prayer.' But was not this to 
 answer it indeed ? and does not the Apostle feel that it 
 was so when he goes on to declare, ' Most gladly there- 
 fore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power 
 of Christ may rest upon me ' ? 
 
 Having given this rapid oversight of the Scripture
 
 92 THE THOEN IN THE FLESH 
 
 before us, have I not a right, O my friends, to affirm 
 that it is full of comfort and instruction for all ? Say 
 not in your hearts that this case of St. Paul's was an 
 exceptional case ; that we cannot be caught up into the 
 third heaven ; that there is no danger lest we should be 
 exalted by an abundance of revelations ; that the record, 
 therefore, of these passages in the inner life of St. Paul 
 may be curious and interesting, but can have no close 
 or near application to ourselves. I am sure that in our 
 humbler spheres they have a very real application ; and 
 this I will endeavour to show. 
 
 If, then, we look round us, and examine closely the 
 lot and condition of men, even of those who seem the 
 most signally favoured of fortune, if, I say, we nearly 
 regard this, we may in almost every case perceive that 
 their happiness is not complete and full-orbed ; or, if it 
 appear so for an instant, like the moon at the full, pre- 
 sently the shadows begin to encroach, rnd there is a rim 
 of dark, larger or smaller, on the orb of every man's 
 joy. Something is wanting to every man, even to him 
 whom the world counts the most favoured of all. He 
 is rich, but a stranger, it may be, shall inherit all that 
 he has. He is famous in the world, but has no joy at 
 his domestic hearth. A noble career opens to him, but 
 health fails, and he must renounce it. Fortune seems 
 to give everything, but yet in a strange irony withholds 
 the one thing, which would make all the rest to have
 
 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 93 
 
 any true value. There is the whole row of cyphers, 
 but the one figure before them, which would make them 
 express anything, is wanting. 
 
 Thus fares it even with the favoured few ; but this, 
 of course, is still more observable with the many who 
 have no such rare and exceptional gifts; everywhere 
 something absent whose presence would have been 
 desired something present which would have been 
 wished away; some good thing withheld, or some sad 
 thing added to every man's condition ; in other words, 
 some ' thorn in the flesh/ It is sometimes evident to 
 all the world ; in other cases the world knows nothing 
 about it, and none except the sufferer himself knows ; 
 but he knows only too well the irritation, the annoyance, 
 the disquietude, ' the fever and the fret ' of which it is 
 a constant source to him. How easy it is to grow im- 
 patient, angry, under a discipline such as this perhaps 
 at first to ask that it might be removed, that it might 
 depart ; to ask this once and again ; and then if, as it 
 seems, we are not heard, to fret and murmur against the 
 Lord. Very often a man is the more irritated and pro- 
 voked by it because there is nothing grand, or romantic, 
 or heroic about it. It is some very commonplace, very 
 ordinary annoyance, with no striking features about it, 
 nothing to present the sufferer as a martyr in the eyes 
 of a pitying and admiring world. Had there been such, 
 then we might have borne it with some sort of patience ;
 
 94 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 
 
 but such ordinary, ignoble trials, rather humbling than 
 exalting us in the sight of men, these are hardly to be 
 endured with any meekness of patience. 
 
 Alas! brethren, we do not know that such mes- 
 sengers as these to humble us are a part, and a most 
 important part, of the discipline of our lives. It takes 
 very little to puff up these vain hearts of ours. Let 
 only a little success, a little prosperity, attend us, and 
 we are ready to burn incense to our own drag, to count 
 that our own wisdom and our own prudence have pro- 
 cured it ; little as we have in which to exalt ourselves, 
 still to exalt ourselves above measure in that little. Let 
 the world bestow on us a few of its flatteries and its 
 smiles, and we are ready to throw in our lot with it ; to 
 say in our hearts, ' This is our rest,' and not so much as 
 to desire any better rest than it can give. How would 
 it fare with us if the poison of this pride and this world- 
 liness wrought in us without an antidote ? The ' thorn 
 in the flesh,' that is the appointed means to keep us 
 low, to prevent us from yielding ourselves to the world 
 altogether, its votaries and its victims, to remind us that 
 we are sinners, living among sinners, and can only look 
 in this present time for a sinner's doom. That is it which 
 shall bring us in right earnest to a throne of grace, 
 and make us to desire a better country and a heavenly. 
 Or apply this which has been just said to the more 
 directly spiritual life of men. There is perhaps nothing
 
 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 95 
 
 which so much disappoints the young and earnest 
 Christian as the slow progress which he makes in holi- 
 ness. There is nothing which surprises, which often- 
 times casts him down, so much as this, after he has tasted 
 that the Lord is gracious, and known something in his 
 heart of hearts of the power and sweetness of God's word, 
 to discover that he is still exposed to temptations of the 
 lowest, the meanest, the most grovelling kind tempta- 
 tions to little exhibitions of vanity, to little untruthful- 
 nesses in word or deed, to petty acts of selfishness, to 
 impure thoughts and unholy imaginations. He had 
 hoped that he was to travel on from strength to strength, 
 from one height of Christian attainment to another and 
 a higher height, without let or hindrance. He, too, 
 having been in his third heaven, counts that he shall 
 never come down from it, that he shall walk ever as 
 on the battlements of heaven ; or at any rate does not 
 expect that henceforth he shall be liable to the every-day 
 vulgar temptations which he sees to be besetting so 
 many round him. Soon, however, he learns his mistake. 
 The way 'of holiness is a much more tedious way than 
 he had supposed. He is much farther off from the goal 
 than he had imagined. Many humiliations, many pain- 
 ful discoveries of indwelling corruption are still before 
 him. The Canaanite will dwell in the land, and does 
 not give place for one, no, nor yet for many defeats. 
 You remember what the Lord said concerning the
 
 96 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 
 
 literal Canaanites, when the children of Israel were 
 about to take possession of the land : ' I will not drive 
 them out from before thee in one year, lest the beasts of 
 the field multiply against thee. By little and little I 
 will drive them out from before thee, until thou be in- 
 creased and inherit the land.' Is there not a profound 
 teaching for us here, whether it was directly intended 
 or no ? If the Lord had driven out the Canaanite at 
 once, and before Israel was strong enough and many 
 enough to occupy the whole country, the beasts of the 
 field would have multiplied upon them. What are these 
 ' beasts ' but the pride, the elation, the lifting up of the 
 heart, the vain confidence in self, the forgetfulness of 
 God, which would grow upon the Christian, if, in the 
 days of his novitiate, and at the first onset, he were 
 allowed to carry all before him, to take the whole land 
 of his future inheritance in possession at once? His 
 very victories would be more disastrous than defeat, 
 would themselves be his ruin. Therefore to him also is 
 given, given of a gracious God, ' the thorn in the flesh,' 
 one, or it may be many temptations constantly recurring ; 
 and, even while of God's grace he is able to overcome 
 them, humbling him not the less by the mere fact that 
 he has to take up arms and earnestly contend with foes 
 so mean and so unworthy. Oftentimes he passes through 
 the whole experience of St. Paul; he prays that this 
 messenger of Satan may depart from him ; but learns 
 that God has provided some better thing for him ; that
 
 THE THORN IN THE FLESH 97 
 
 better thing being, not release from temptation, but 
 victory in and over temptation. We in our sloth and 
 indolence may not esteem it better ; but we have God's 
 assurance that it is. 
 
 Therefore, brethren beloved, if there be any among 
 you vexed, hindered, hampered by obstacles, annoyances, 
 infirmities, temptations, besetting your outward or your 
 inward life, murmur not for these, neither say how much 
 better it would be for you if only these would depart ; 
 on the contrary, they are very probably an essential part 
 of that appointed training for heaven under which your 
 God sees it good that you should pass. And if you have 
 besought Him to free you from the vexation of these, 
 and He has not done so, do not therefore conclude that 
 He has not heard. He has heard, though He may not 
 have granted, and this in very faithfulness and love ; for 
 to his enemies He often grants their petitions in anger, 
 while to his friends He refuses them in love. So fared 
 it with his servant Paul, when he besought Him thrice 
 that the thorn in the flesh might depart from him. To 
 him the Lord made answer, ' My grace is sufficient for 
 thee : for my strength is made perfect in weakness.' 
 Shall not the answer which satisfied an Apostle also 
 satisfy thee ? Wilt not thou also accept it for what 
 it is, an answer of grace, and learn to say with him 
 ' Most gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, 
 that the power of Christ may rest upon me ' ?
 
 98 ISAIAH'S VISION 
 
 SERMON IX. 
 
 ISAIAH'S VISION. ! 
 
 ISAIAH vi. 1-3. 
 
 la the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon 
 a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. 
 Above it stood the seraphims : each one had six wings ; with 
 twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, 
 and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, 
 Holy, holy, holy, is the LOED of hosts : the whole earth is full of 
 his glcry. 
 
 WE have here in this wondrous vision the proper in- 
 auguration of the great Evangelical prophet to his future 
 work ; and one which, in its essential features, resembles 
 very closely the inauguration which other eminent ser- 
 vants of God, alike under the Old Covenant and under 
 the New, obtained ; which Moses obtained, when God 
 spake to him out of the burning bush, 2 and he at the 
 first ' hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God ; ' 
 which Jeremiah obtained, when God put forth his hand, 
 and touched his mouth, making him a meet ambassador 
 of his, who had said just before, ' Ah, Lord God ! behold, 
 I cannot speak : for I am a child ; ' 3 the same inaugura- 
 
 1 Preached on Trinity Sunday. 2 Exod. iii. 6. a Jer. i. 6-9
 
 ISAIAH'S VISION 99 
 
 tion which Paul obtained, when suddenly on the way to 
 Damascus a light shone round him, blinding him out- 
 wardly, that it might illumine him inwardly; casting 
 him down once, that it might lift him up for ever ; the 
 same inauguration which many more, need I mention 
 Joshua, 1 and Gideon, 2 and Ezekiel, 3 and Peter, 4 obtained ; 
 for God's messengers go not until they are sent, and 
 presume not to deliver a message which they have not 
 received directly from the Sender. We have here then, 
 I say, the prophet's legitimation to the solemn work of 
 his life ; and we shall miss the meaning of this sublime 
 Scripture, its significance for him, its significance for 
 ourselves, unless we contemplate it as such. 
 
 And first, he gives the date of the vision. What 
 meaning may there sometimes be in a thing which seems 
 so simple as a date ! What significance, what solemnity 
 may it sometimes have, as surely it has here : ' In the 
 year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord.' What 
 would he say here but this, 'In the year when the 
 crowned monarch of the earth went down into the dust 
 and darkness of the tomb, and all the pomp and pa- 
 geantry which had surrounded him for a little while 
 dissolved and disappeared, I saw another King, even 
 the King immortal, sitting upon his throne, which is for 
 ever and ever ' ? How simply and yet how grandly are 
 
 1 Josh. i. 1. 2 Judg. vi. 12-24. 
 
 * Ezek. i. 2. 4 Luke v. 4-10. 
 
 * H 2
 
 100 ISAIAH'S VISION 
 
 earth and heaven here brought together, and the fleeting 
 phantoms of one set over against the abiding realities 
 of the other. 
 
 But if his throne is in heaven, the skirts of his glory 
 reach even to the earth : ' his train filled the temple ; ' 
 and around and above that throne stood for they were 
 in the presence of their King the seraphims in burning 
 row, themselves a living circle of light ; while yet be- 
 fore the more awful brightness of Him who sat upon 
 the throne they veiled their faces and veiled their feet ; 
 for ' He charges his angels with folly, and the heavens 
 are not pure in his sight.' And of these, ' one cried unto 
 another' in the great antiphon of heaven, 'and said, 
 Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts : the whole earth 
 is full of his glory.' 
 
 I should call you to note at any time, above all I 
 must call you to note at this, the glimpse afforded here 
 to the Church of the elder dispensation of that great 
 crowning mystery which the Church of the newer dis- 
 pensation throughout all the world is celebrating to-day. 
 In this trisagion, in this thrice repeated Holy, we have, 
 it is true, no more than a glimpse of the mystery ; even 
 as in the Old Testament more is nowhere vouchsafed. 
 More, in all likelihood, the Church could not then, nor 
 until it had been thoroughly educated into a confession 
 of the unity of the Godhead, with safety have received ; 
 while yet it was a precious confirmation of the faith,
 
 ISAIAH'S VISION 101 
 
 when, in a later day, this mystery was fully made known, 
 to discover that the rudiments of it had been laid long 
 before in Scripture, that first and last were there bound 
 together, the full unfolded flower of the New Testament 
 shut up in the bud and blossom of the Old, that known 
 to God were all his works from the beginning. 
 
 Such were the sights and such the sounds which 
 were vouchsafed in the visions of God to the prophet's 
 eye and ear. It needed but a touch of the divine hand 
 to transport him out of himself, and to show him these. 
 And the same sights and sounds of another, of a higher 
 and a purer, world, they are round about us still. We 
 cannot see them, we cannot hear them, clothed as we 
 are in this c muddy vesture of decay ' ; but not the less 
 they are very nigh to us, everywhere round us; we 
 moving up and down with only a thin veil separating 
 us from them and this a veil, which when the hand of 
 God shall draw aside, we too shall see the King upon 
 his throne ; and shall see Him, either to rejoice in the 
 light of his countenance for ever, or to perish utterly 
 in the intolerable brightness of his presence. 
 
 But the prophet what is the first impression which 
 this glorious vision makes upon him ? Is it joy ? Is 
 it rapturous delight ? Is he bathed as in the bliss of 
 Deity ? In the presence of God, in nearness to Him, 
 does he find the fulness of joy ? Strange to say, it is 
 altogether otherwise with him. His first cry is not of
 
 102 ISAIAH'S VISION 
 
 exultation and delight, but rather of consternation and 
 dismay, ' Woe is me ! for I am undone.' Strange, I 
 said, and yet, if we meditate a little, not strange at all. 
 For how can the near revelation of the Holy God be 
 aught else but terrible to unholy man ; revealing, as 
 it does, the dread antagonism between them ; the war, 
 which must be a war to the death, unless some way of 
 reconciliation shall be found ? And when I say unholy 
 man, think not that I mean this man or that, who 
 may have wrought more evil, drunk up iniquity with 
 a greater greediness, than his fellows; but I include 
 every man, the relatively holiest no less than the re- 
 latively unholiest man that is born of woman, every child 
 of this fallen race. For all alike, this nearness to God, 
 this standing in his immediate presence, seeing, as it 
 were, his face, this, except under conditions of which 
 presently we shall speak, breeds the extremity of an- 
 guish and of fear ; and though God is life and the one 
 fountain of life, it is, as it were, a very message of death. 
 Even the heathen, as more than one legend in their 
 mythology declares, could apprehend something of this 
 truth. If Jupiter comes to Semele arrayed in the 
 glories of deity, she perishes, consumed to ashes in a 
 brightness which is more than mortality can bear. So, 
 too, it must have fared with Moses, if to him, still clothed 
 in flesh and blood, that over-bold request of his, ' Shew 
 me thy glory,' had been conceded ; if it had not been
 
 ISAIAH'S VISION 103 
 
 answered to him, 'Thou canst not see my face; for 
 there shall no man see me, and live.' ! ' We shall 
 perish, for we have seen the Lord of Hosts,' was the 
 ever-recurring cry of those saints of old ; and even such 
 is the voice of the prophet here, ' Woe is me ! for I am 
 undone ; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I 
 dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips : for mine 
 eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.' He who 
 uttered this cry was one, as none can doubt, who had 
 kept himself from his iniquity, holding the mystery of 
 the faith in a pure conscience ; and yet in that terrible 
 light he saw and avouched himself as a man undone, 
 saw stains in himself which he had not imagined before, 
 discovered impurities which he had not dreamt of be- 
 fore, saw his own sin and his people's sin, for he did 
 not feel that he could separate himself from this, acting 
 and reacting as these had done upon one another, till 
 that mighty cry of anguish was wrung from him. Those 
 lips of his, with which he should have taken part in that 
 heavenly hymn, they were ' unclean lips ' ; and if those 
 were unclean, then that truth in the inward parts, that 
 absolute cleanness of heart which God requires, he must 
 have felt to be wanting too. 
 
 Ah, dear brethren, we who are bearers to you of 
 the word of Christ are often sadly perplexed that we 
 find it so hard, so well-nigh impossible, to bring down 
 
 1 Exod. xxxiii. 18-20.
 
 104 ISAIAH'S VISION 
 
 some whom we address from the high places of their 
 self-conceit ; to lead them to take that first step in the 
 Christian life which consists in giving glory to God 
 and taking shame to ourselves. But have we not the 
 explanation here? They have never even remotely 
 known that which Isaiah knew when he stood in that 
 awful presence ; never seen themselves in that terrible 
 light which laid open and manifest to him all of himself 
 which hitherto had been hidden even to himself. Re- 
 maining wilfully at a guilty distance, it has been never 
 given to them to behold even the remotest skirts of the 
 glory of Him on whom the Seraphim wait, to catch the 
 faintest echoes of that angelic song, that ' Holy, holy, 
 holy,' which fills the temple of heaven and of earth ; 
 and so they live on, their hearts unconsecrated to Him, 
 their lips uncircumcised by Him ; perfectly satisfied with 
 themselves, and never dreaming that one thing, that one 
 thing which is everything, is lacking to them still. 
 
 But yet, it may be asked, how should we wish it other- 
 wise ; how should we wish that light, which makes all 
 things manifest, to make manifest to them these hidden 
 things of themselves, seeing that such manifestations, 
 such revelations of God's holiness, call out in them whose 
 unholiness is thus laid bare, voices of dismay and fear, 
 like that of the prophet, ' Woe is me ! I am undone ' ? 
 It may be asked, Do we wish to call out such a voice of 
 anguish in any among you ? Yes, dear friends, even so.
 
 ISAIAH'S VISION 105 
 
 It is exactly this cry which we would call forth from 
 every one among you who has not uttered it already; 
 for indeed so to be undone is not to be undone, but 
 rather to be made for ever ; and what we fear for some is, 
 not that they may utter this l undone/ but that they 
 may never utter it never, that is, until it be too late. 
 Awful moment (I will not deny it), dreadful moment 
 (who will affirm otherwise?), is that for any human 
 .soul, when God first reveals Himself to it as the all-holy; 
 reveals his law, which has been broken a thousand 
 times, as the righteous and eternal law of the moral 
 universe ; when we know that the evil which we have 
 done never can be undone ; when we do not as yet know 
 that it can be done away ; forgiven, and forgiven on the 
 ground which alone satisfies the deepest cravings of the 
 conscience namely, because the penalty of it has been 
 already paid. A moment that in the spiritual history 
 of a man, when death seems rather to be chosen than 
 life, the burden of discovered sin as one greater than 
 the soul can bear ; and yet that moment with all its 
 dreadfulness is a passage, in some sense the only 
 passage, into a true life. 
 
 And such the prophet found it; for hear what 
 follows ; hear God's answer to this cry of his, and then 
 judge whether this does not justify me in saying that so 
 to be undone as he was, is not to be undone, but rather 
 to be made for ever. ' Then flew one of the seraphims
 
 106 ISAIAH'S VISION 
 
 unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had 
 taken with the tongs from off the altar : and he laid it 
 upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy 
 lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin 
 purged.' 
 
 Observe, I beseech you, the manner in which sin, I 
 mean the guilt of sin, is here, as evermore in Holy 
 Scripture, spoken of as taken away by a free act of God, 
 an act of His in which man is passive ; in which he 
 has, so to speak, to stand still and see the salvation of 
 the Lord ; an act to which he can contribute nothing, 
 save indeed only that divinely awakened hunger of the 
 soul after the benefit which we call faith. It is quite 
 another thing with the power of sin. In the subduing 
 of the power of sin we must be fellow-workers with 
 God ; all the faculties of our renewed nature will need 
 to be strained to the uttermost. So, too, it is quite 
 another thing with the stain of sin : this, to be effaced, 
 will demand the fuller's soap and the refiner's fire ; the 
 patient toil, it may be the many tears, of him who would 
 indeed have this stain effaced from his soul. But, in 
 the matter of getting rid of the guilt of sin, we have 
 nothing to do but to stand still and see the work of our 
 God. This is the universal language of Scripture, and 
 with nothing less than this will the heart of men be 
 content. When Joshua the high-priest (the passage,, 
 let me say, constitutes a most instructive real parallel
 
 ISAIAH'S VISION 107 
 
 to the present) stands before the Lord 'clothed with 
 filthy garments,' the word of grace which goes forth 
 concerning him, ' Take away the filthy garments from 
 him,' is in its essence identical with this; the inter- 
 pretation of that symbolic act following close upon the- 
 act itself ' Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass 
 from thee.' l It is this which in Scripture the saints of 
 God, who feel themselves sinners too, crave after; such 
 an act of taking away as shall be wholly God's, and 
 which, as being such, shall be perfect ' Purge me with 
 hyssop, and I shall be clean : wash me, and I shall be 
 whiter than snow.' 2 It is this which the soul, rejoicing 
 in its deliverance from the condemnation of sin, avouches 
 that it has received : ' As far as the east is from the 
 west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from 
 us ; ' or again, ' Thou wilt cast all their sins into the 
 depths of the sea.' 3 
 
 Still and evermore this forgiveness is represented to 
 us in Scripture as purely the work of God ; of God 
 through Christ, as we have learned in that clearer dis- 
 pensation under which we live ; though it was not a whit 
 less truly through Christ in the times of that elder cove- 
 nant. Indeed He that sat on the throne, whose train 
 filled the temple, before whom the Seraphim veiled their 
 faces, whom they hymned with alternate song, He at 
 whose bidding one of tl ese flaming fires touched the 
 1 Zech. iii. 1-5. 2 Ps. li. 7. Mic. vii. 19.
 
 108 ISAIAH'S VISION 
 
 prophet's lips with the coal from the altar, He was Him- 
 self no other than the Son in his pre-existent glory, in 
 the form of God, in that form of God which was from 
 eternity his own. This we might safely have concluded 
 from the analogy of other Scripture ; for all the appear- 
 ances of God in the Old Testament are appearances of 
 the Son, anticipations of his Incarnation ; but we do 
 not need to argue it. We gave St. John's distinct de- 
 claration that the glory which Esaias at this time saw 
 was the glory, not of the Father, for no man hath seen 
 Him at any time, but that of the only begotten Son of 
 the Father, and that Esaias, speaking these things, 
 * spake of him.' J 
 
 Let us keep, then, that distinct which the Scripture 
 keeps distinct deliverance from the guilt of sin, which 
 is God's act and his only, and deliverance from the power 
 and dominion of sin, in which we must bear our part, 
 in which we must be fellow-workers with Him. Dis- 
 tinguish them, if you would have any true peace, a 
 conscience which shall be indeed at peace with Him ; 
 distinguish, but since God has joined, see that you do 
 not so much as attempt to divide them. Think not 
 (it will be a vain thought) to keep the peace and the 
 joy, while you are not following after the holiness, 
 while you are not yielding yourselves to God, and 
 offering yourselves to do his work and to run in the 
 1 John xii., 40, 41.
 
 ISAIAH'S VISION 109 
 
 way of his commandments, now that He has set you at 
 liberty. 
 
 If you do, will not the prophet who has been leading 
 our thoughts this day himself condemn you ? Behold 
 in him the fruit of iniquity taken away, and of sin 
 purged. Behold the joyful readiness with which he now 
 offers himself for the service of his God. A moment 
 before he had cried, ' Woe is me ! I am undone ; ' but 
 now when the voice reaches him from the throne, ' Whom 
 shall I send, and who will go for us ? ' at once he offers 
 himself, * Here am I ; send me.' joyful liberty of those 
 whom Christ has made free! He stops not here to 
 enquire whereunto the Lord would send him, to under- 
 take what painful labour, to drink what cup of suffering, 
 to be baptized with what baptism of blood. Be the task 
 what it may, he is ready for it. 
 
 And you, dear friends, who have known the grace 
 which he knew, will you not offer yourselves, if you have 
 not offered yourselves already, for that work, whatso- 
 ever it may be, to which your Healer and your Purifier 
 would send you ? Shall there be no ' Here am I ; send 
 me,' from that lightened heart, from those cleansed lips 
 of yours ? Your mission, it may be humble, or it may 
 be high; the adorning the doctrine of Christ in some 
 lowliest estate, or the adorning of it in some highest, 
 and before kings ; the teaching of some little child, or 
 the helping to cast down some huge iniquity which
 
 110 ISAIAH'S VISION 
 
 darkens half a world. Isaiah's mission, wo know what 
 that was ; cast your eyes but to the close of the chapter, 
 and you will see that it was from that day forth to bear 
 to his people the saddest message and burden of woo 
 \\ hirli it could bo committed to a loving heart to bear; 
 even as there is all reason to believe, that in the end it 
 was appointed to him to resist to the death a bloody and 
 idolatrous king ; and, if Jewish tradition may be trusted, 
 only in the fire-chariot of an agonizing martyrdom to 
 pass into the presence and to see for ever the face of 
 lh:il Kinjr immortal, of whom now this passing glimpse 
 was vouchsafed him. 
 
 It is to humbler trials, to easier tasks, that in all 
 likelihood He invites you ; but He does invite, He does 
 expect you to offer yourselves to these: 'Lord, what 
 wilt thou have me to do ? ' And say not that this 
 question has been nsked already, and that you have 
 received no answer to it. What, is not everything 
 within and without you an answer to it? Within you 
 is there not abundance there to be done, and that 
 Ho would lain see done ; a work of gra. < k'.'im indeed, 
 but which needs in every direction to bo doopened, 
 strengthened, purified; a work of grace which has 
 strangely lagged and loitered since that day when 
 in baptism you were made a child of God, and made 
 five of all the powers and privileges of the heavenly 
 kingdom ? And without you, in a world like ours, in
 
 ISAIAH'S VISION 111 
 
 such a world of woe, is there no work for Christ's 
 volunteers, for any and for all who have a willing mind 
 to the work ? Look around you, and will you then dare 
 to say this ? What, are there no burdens that you can 
 bear, no tears that you can staunch, no ignorance that 
 you can scatter, no hearts which have utterly lost faith 
 in the goodness and love of God, which you may bring 
 back to faith in Him and in his love, by shewing what 
 love there is in the children of God? See to it, I 
 beseech you, that your faith be no barren acquiescence 
 in what God has wrought for you, with an indolent 
 resting thereupon ; that your joy go forth for the glad- 
 dening of others ; else, be sure, it will presently be no 
 joy at all for yourselves ; the very springs of it will soon 
 be dried up. If God has given to you any of his peace 
 and joy, then when He says, as presently He will say in 
 your hearing, and meaning that you shall hear, ' Whom 
 shall I send, and who will go for us?' see to it that 
 Isaiah's answer be also yours, ' Here am I ; send me.'
 
 112 SELFISHNESS 
 
 SERMON X. 
 
 SELFISHNESS. 
 
 PHIL. ii. 4, 5. 
 
 Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the- 
 things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
 THESE words contain a warning against selfishness. It 
 is a singular fact that the words ' selfish ' and ' selfishness ' 
 should be of comparatively recent introduction into the 
 English language. They are little more than two 
 hundred years old, and were quite unknown to Shake- 
 speare and the writers of his time. They first make 
 their appearance in the writings of some of the Puritan 
 divines towards the middle of the seventeenth century, 
 and were remarked on, sometimes condemned as novel- 
 ties, at the time of their first employment. I say it is 
 a singular fact that the words should be so new, seeing 
 that the thing is so old. Selfishness, or the undue love 
 of self, is as old as sin, is as old as the Fall, or indeed 
 as old as the Devil. I called it just now the undue love 
 of self. Perhaps I should have called it rather, the love
 
 SELFISHNESS 113 
 
 of our wrong self. There is a self belonging to us, and 
 that our true self, which it is our duty to love, as is 
 plain from that precept of Christ, ' Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself seeing that in this precept the 
 love of self is made the rule, measure, and law of our 
 love to our brethren ; which it could not be, if it were 
 itself a condenmable thing. 
 
 But perhaps some may ask, What do I mean by the 
 true self in every man, which he not merely may, but 
 ought to love, seeing that by this he is to learn his love to 
 his neighbour, and measure what that ought to be ? I 
 answer, that in every redeemed man there is not one self 
 only but two, a true and a false, a nobler and a baser, a 
 life which he is to love and to cherish, and a life, one 
 indeed which is not so much a life as a death, which he 
 is to mortify and to kill ; and selfishness is a man's love 
 of the wrong self in him, a pampering and cherishing 
 of this, with a corresponding slight, neglect, and injury 
 done to the right self, to that higher nature in him 
 which came from God, and should return to God ; and 
 which it is the bounden duty of every faithful man to 
 nourish, sustain, and develop in himself as in others to 
 the uttermost. 
 
 If therefore the question were put to any one of us, 
 Is it right to love oneself ? it would be desirable before 
 answering, to put a question to the questioner, and to 
 ask him, What self do you mean ? Do you mean that 
 
 I
 
 114 SELFISHNESS 
 
 nobler life which God planted at the first in me and in 
 every man, which, when sin had nearly extinguished, 
 Christ revived in me again, extricated from all which 
 was crushing it, and from which it never could have 
 extricated itself? Do you mean that life which shall 
 endure for ever and ever, which shall survive when this 
 world and the fashion of this world shall all have past 
 away ? If you mean this, I answer, It is right to love 
 this, to provide for it whatsoever will most help its 
 growth and progress, to remove far off from it whatso- 
 ever would be its injury and bane ; in all ways to cherish 
 and make much of it. But if, on the contrary, you 
 mean by self that meaner, baser self, which, alas ! I 
 bear about with me still, and which craves present grati- 
 fication, and which in every thing makes its own interest, 
 its own honour, its own ease, its own pleasure the fore- 
 most consideration, postponing and subordinating every 
 other consideration to these, I answer, It is not right to 
 love this self; for this self, the miserable result of Adam's 
 fall, the legacy which he has bequeathed to his children, 
 and which not one of them has repudiated as he ought, 
 was suffered to remain in us, redeemed, regenerate men, 
 for our exercise, that we might, in the power of the 
 Holy Ghost, mortify, subdue, and in the end abolish it 
 utterly ; not that we might feed, pamper, and nourish 
 it up to a fiercer activity. And when we speak of selfish- 
 ness, we mean this love of our wrong self the loving
 
 SELFISHNESS 115 
 
 that in us which we ought to hate, our disease and not 
 our health ; and, as will necessarily follow, though we 
 may not intend it so, a hating that in us which we 
 ought to love ; inasmuch as these are contraiy one to 
 the other, and all that is added to the one is taken 
 from the other. 
 
 But selfishness, thus explained, may seem to include 
 all sin ; and so, no doubt, it does. The two words are 
 properly, and in their ultimate grounds, exactly coex- 
 tensive with one another. But while in absolute strict- 
 ness of speech this is so, selfishness in our common 
 acceptation of the word occupies a somewhat narrower 
 domain. It expresses all those undue preferences of 
 self, of that meaner self whereof I just spoke, which 
 display a manifest indifference for the feelings, the in- 
 terests, or the safety of others ; and to the end that my 
 subject may not lose itself in infinite space, it is of 
 selfishness in this its common and narrower acceptation 
 that I desire to say something before we part. Let me 
 show, by one or two instances from Scripture, exactly 
 what I call outcomings of selfishness, as distinguished 
 from, though not opposed to, outbreaks of sin in the 
 general. For example, when St. Paul and his company 
 on their way to Rome were overtaken by that terrible 
 tempest in the Adrian Sea, and would have perished, if 
 the lives of all them that sailed with him had not been 
 given to Paul, we read that the shipmen or sailors let 
 
 i 2
 
 116 SELFISHNESS 
 
 down the boat, and were about to abandon the ship and 
 all who were in it. 1 Here was a glaring piece of selfish- 
 ness ; not merely did these sailors consult only for their 
 own safety, but they so consulted for it, as, humanly 
 speaking, to ensure the destruction of all who sailed 
 with them ; for what faintest glimpse of hope would 
 have remained, when all who understood the manage- 
 ment of the ship had forsaken it ? Strangely enough, 
 that same story of St. Paul's shipwreck supplies another 
 example of the same thing. Yet I ought not to say, 
 strangely ; for great perils are the touchstone of every 
 man ; and as they call out in nobler natures all that is 
 noblest in them, so in meaner natures all that is mean- 
 est. When it was evident that the ship would go to 
 pieces on the shore, ' the soldiers' counsel was to kill the 
 prisoners,' Paul included, ' lest any of them should swim 
 out, and escape.' 2 They thought, that is, that there 
 might be some remote possibility of danger to them- 
 selves, that they might be held answerable, if any of the 
 prisoners should escape (an almost impossible thing), 
 and therefore proposed to make short work of it, to 
 release themselves from this slightest shadow of a 
 danger by taking the lives of these helpless prisoners 
 committed to their charge. The pages of Scripture 
 would afford other examples in like kind ; but let these 
 suffice. 
 
 1 Acts xxvii. 30. * Acts xxvii. 42.
 
 SELFISHNESS 117 
 
 We need only to look around us upon that actual 
 world in the midst of which we live, or indeed to look 
 within us upon that interior world, in the main known 
 to ourselves alone, and in either of these we may find 
 illustrations and examples of this sin of selfishness only 
 too many. What selfishness in high places and in low 
 among the rich, and among the poor ! I have seen 
 it asserted of our artisans, that, earning such large wages 
 as they do, on an average one-third of their weekly 
 earnings is spent on selfish gratifications in which it is 
 impossible that their wives and children can share. Nor 
 have those in higher places a right to cast a stone at 
 these, while so much of their superfluity, of that which 
 God lent them, but did not give, ministers to their own 
 luxury, their own pride of life, so little of it to the urgent 
 needs of Christ's suffering poor ; while of their energies, 
 their time, their thoughts, so much is devoted to their 
 own interests and amusements, so little, if indeed any 
 part at all, to bettering the condition, or alleviating the 
 sorrows of others. 
 
 We all, my brethren, hate selfishness in the abstract ; 
 we count it an ugly sin, when we see it plainly stamped 
 on the lives and actions of others. The Oriental despot, 
 who appropriates a hundred wives to himself, and thus 
 compels a hundred of his subjects to have no wife at all, 
 seeing that there are not more women born into the 
 world than men ; the slaveowner, who robs his fellow-
 
 118 SELFISHNESS 
 
 men of their dearest rights, and compels them to a life- 
 long servitude and toil, not for their own profit but for 
 his ; the seducer of innocence who, for a moment's vile 
 gratification, poisons the springs of a life, turns all its 
 sweet into bitter, its glory into shame ; these and such 
 as these are hateful spectacles, and more or less we all 
 feel them to be such. But it would be ill done, if in 
 our abhorrence of more glaring and ugly selfishnesses 
 such as these, to some of which we are not tempted, 
 others of which are quite out of our reach, we lost sight 
 of the thousand subtler, and therefore more dangerous, 
 forms in which this same sin seeks to penetrate and 
 insinuate itself into the life of every one among us. 
 For, indeed, such thousand subtler, more insinuating 
 forms it has; and much, very much in the arrange- 
 ments of society, in the recognized maxims of the world, 
 in the corruptions of our own hearts, is ever disposing 
 us to give it allowance and acceptance, when it suggests, 
 as it is ever doing, that we should take the ease, and 
 give another the toil ; we should take the safety, and 
 give another the danger; we should take the honour, 
 and give another the dishonour ; we should take the 
 pleasure, and give another the pain ; we should take the 
 profit, and give another the loss. 
 
 But if it be indeed true, as the Apostle so mourn- 
 fully asserts namely, that, except in so far as they are 
 under the leading of the Spirit, ' all men seek their own ; *
 
 SELFISHNESS 119 
 
 if selfishness be this familiar evil, this domestic foe, 
 lurking so close to every one of us, ever endeavouring to 
 lead us away from the path of self-denial and self-sacri- 
 fice to that of self-seeking and self-pleasing, how shall 
 we resist it, how shall we overcome it ? St. Paul gives 
 us a clear hint how this may be done, when having said, 
 'Look not every man on his own things, but every man 
 also on the things of others,' he goes on to say, ' Let 
 this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus ; ' 
 and then sets before us, in those wonderful words which 
 follow my text, the great pattern and example of his 
 life and of his death. He was rich, yet for our sakes 
 He made Himself poor ; He was in the form of God, yet 
 He took on Him the form of a servant. All might, 
 majesty, glory, and dominion were his ; He was in the 
 bosom of the Father; He shared with the Father and 
 the Holy Ghost in the incommunicable bliss of Deity ; 
 yet all this He laid aside ; all this He renounced, and 
 became a man that had been much, that had been an 
 infinite condescension ; but more than this of men the 
 least and the last, a worm and no man ; for three and 
 thirty years He trod this painful earth of ours, despised, 
 rejected, an outcast of his people, crowning at length 
 that painful life with a death as full of indignity as of 
 anguish. And for what ? for whom ? For nothing that 
 should accrue to Himself, but for us men and for our 
 salvation, that we by his poverty might be rich, by his
 
 120 SELFISHNESS 
 
 stripes might be healed, that his shame might be our 
 glory, his cross our crown, his death our life. I say, 
 brethren, that the contemplation of Christ, not a cold, 
 formal reception of certain doctrines, but a contemplation 
 of Him, an habitual realizing of Him to our spiritual 
 eye, first in the glory which He had with the Father before 
 the foundation of the world, all which He laid down for our 
 sakes ; and then in his earthly life of poverty, of labour, 
 of humiliation, of scorn, of suffering, of death, all which 
 He undertook for our sakes ; it is this, brought home to 
 us by that Spirit who can take of the things of Christ 
 and show them unto us, which must cure us (for nothing 
 else will) of our selfish preference of. ourselves to others, 
 of that seeking of our own things and not the things 
 also of others, which now clings and cleaves, like an 
 inner garment, so closely to us all. 
 
 And if, dear friends, we are resolved to walk in that 
 more excellent way in which we have Him for our 
 pattern and our guide, do not let us wait for great and 
 signal opportunities of shewing that we can prefer the 
 good of others to our own. Such occur very seldom ; 
 while small occasions occur every day, in the bosom of 
 our family, in our daily intercourse with the world ; and 
 moreover, strange as this may sound, the great occasions 
 are not nearly so good a test of our sincerity as the 
 small. Great acts of self-sacrifice attract observation,
 
 SELFISHNESS 121 
 
 are talked about, often bring honour, credit, glory to the 
 doer. A thousand mixed motives may impel us to 
 these ; but the smaller acts in which we yield our will 
 to the will of others, postpone our convenience, our 
 pleasure, our ease, to theirs, these, unobserved by the 
 world, often unobserved even by the person on whose 
 behalf they are done, these are a far truer test. Let us 
 then, every one, ask ourselves at once such questions as 
 these, Am I shifting off upon some other a burden which 
 I ought to bear ? Do I habitually inflict large incon- 
 venience and toil upon others for the sake of some 
 trifling convenience or pleasure which may accrue to 
 myself ? What is the distribution of my time, what of 
 my money ? Is it a selfish one ? Is self the centre, 
 round which I seek to make that little world in which 
 I move, so far as in me lies, to revolve ? Do I live in 
 habitual disregard of the Apostle's precept, ' Look not 
 very man on his own things, but also on the things of 
 others ' ? And oh ! remember the danger which lies so 
 near us in such a self-examination as this, lest while we 
 are sharpsighted as eagles to see the motes in the eyes 
 of our brethren, we should be blind as moles to see the 
 beams in our own. Unless our eyes are anointed with 
 syesalve, with the eyesalve to be bought of Christ, we 
 shall see nothing here. The selfishness, most visible to 
 -all the rest of the world, will escape ourselves, unless
 
 122 SELFISHNESS 
 
 He shews it to us. But He will shew it, if we honestly 
 seek this at his hands ; and not this only, but will go 
 on to teach us the blessed art of so losing our lives 
 in *this world, that we may save them unto life 
 eternal.
 
 ON THE DUTY OF EATING VAIN THOUGHTS 
 
 SERMON XI. 
 
 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS. 
 
 PSALM cxix. 113. 
 I hate vain thoughts. 
 
 How many are there among us who could confidently 
 take up the Psalmist's words, and make them our own ; 
 and in his sight, and speaking as in the immediate 
 presence of Him to whom all hearts, and all the ima- 
 ginations of all hearts, are open and manifest, could 
 say, ' I hate vain thoughts ' ? I fear not all ; perhaps 
 very few indeed. For indeed how many, while they 
 acknowledge a certain rule on their outward conduct, 
 and that their actions must be conformed to a law imposed 
 on them from above, seem to take for granted that 
 thoughts are free, that these may move in that inner 
 region and province which is peculiarly their own, un- 
 questioned and unchallenged; that they will have to 
 give little or no account of these. 
 
 And yet Scripture does not encourage us in any such 
 notion as this. The wickedness of the old world, that 
 wickedness which only a Flood could wash away, how
 
 124 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 
 
 is that set forth to us there ? Not so much by the evil 
 which was done, as by the evil which was thought. 
 1 God saw,' we are told, ' that every imagination of the 
 thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually.' * 
 What does St. Peter say to Simon Magus ? ' Pray God, 
 if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven 
 thee.' 2 And does not another Apostle remind us that 
 the Word of God is c a discerner of the thoughts and 
 intents of the heart ' ; 3 that the Lord at his coming 
 ' both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, 
 and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts : and 
 then shall every man have praise of God ' ? 4 
 
 But what need I to accumulate proofs that, as God 
 is a knower of the thoughts of men's hearts, so also 
 is He a punisher of those which are evil ? Often, 
 it is true, thoughts present themselves to us as such 
 slight, shadowy, evanescent things, coming and going, 
 and, as we fancy, leaving no trace behind them, that we 
 fail altogether to attach to them the importance which 
 they deserve. And yet, dear brethren, what is a word 
 or deed but an embodied thought ? the incarnation, if I 
 may so speak, of a thought ? And must not the thought 
 of a man, as the primary and immediate birth of his 
 heart, be more truly indicative, tell more clearly what 
 is in him, than his words or works, which are only 
 
 1 Gen. vi. 5. * Acts viii. 22. 
 
 8 Heb. iv. 12. < 1 Cor. iv. 5.
 
 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 125 
 
 secondary outcomings of the man, can ever do ? Reason, 
 then, there is enough that we should set a watch not 
 merely at the door of our lips, and over the works of 
 our hands, but that we keep a watch closer still, one 
 which will demand a yet stricter vigilance ; ever striving- 
 and ever praying that the meditation of our hearts may 
 be acceptable in God's sight ; and, as a needful condition 
 of this, hating ' vain thoughts,' which cannot be accept- 
 able to Him. 
 
 But what, it may be asked, is included in this 
 phrase, ' vain thoughts ' ? This question, I propose to 
 answer first ; and then, this answered, to consider, very 
 briefly, what are some of the helps which we may use, 
 and where we may find such helps, for the fighting 
 against, overcoming, and in the end getting rid of 
 these. 
 
 And first, what are 'vain thoughts'? To this it 
 may be answered in the general, that as there are three 
 forms of temptation by which we are assailed in other 
 regions of our spiritual life, as there is no sin which 
 does not range itself under one or other of these three 
 heads, which is not a yielding to the world, or to the 
 flesh, or to the devil, so fares it also in that region with 
 which we have now particularly to do, the region of the 
 thoughts. 
 
 And, first, there are the vain worldly thoughts,
 
 126 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 
 
 which we must hate. And here, let me observe by the 
 way, that thoughts, which in themselves are perfectly 
 harmless and innocent, may become vain through being 
 welcomed and entertained at the wrong season. 
 Thoughts, for example, of the shop, of the market, of 
 the exchange no one would affirm that these in them- 
 selves are vain ; they belong to the necessary business 
 of many men ; allowable, and more than allowable, in 
 their place and in their time ; but yet they may become 
 ' vain,' if suffered to intrude, without rebuke, on our 
 prayers, to follow us to the house of God, it may be to 
 the very table of the Lord, and in other ways to disturb 
 the holy seventh-day rest of our spirits ; if we do not 
 resolutely shut the door of the inner chamber of our 
 hearts against them when we would pray to our Father 
 in heaven. 
 
 So, too, these same thoughts may become sinful 
 and vain through mere excess, through occupying our 
 minds overmuch ; as when we dwell on them exclu- 
 sively ; at our uprising and downsitting ; when they 
 are with us at all times of the day ; when we do not 
 care to dismiss them, and indeed could hardly now 
 dismiss them if we tried. The world must be very near 
 us, when the worldly thought is ever with us. Our 
 treasure, our best treasure, must assuredly be there, 
 else our heart and the thought of our heart would not 
 be always there also. I suppose that every one who
 
 ON THE DUTY OF EATING VAIN THOUGHTS 127 
 
 wishes to deepen and strengthen his own spiritual life, 
 proposes to himself some sort of meditation on things 
 heavenly at some set time of every day; but what 
 chance has this meditation of holding its place, what 
 likelihood is there that it will not presently be wholly 
 thrust out of the day, when worldly thoughts, grown 
 strong by too much allowance, are ever ready to dispute 
 with it even that brief interval which it would fain 
 claim for itself? Or even if they should not wholly ex- 
 pel it, they will leave it a dead heartless thing, with all 
 power, grace, and strength departed from it. See then, 
 I would beseech you, that that which in itself may be 
 perfectly right do not, through excess and overmuch 
 allowance, become wrong to you. You are in the world, 
 and have your work to do in the world ; and that work 
 should be done vigorously and well, and this it cannot 
 be without due thought bestowed upon it ; moreover, 
 as interesting and concerning you nearly, it must often 
 recur to your mind. Yet for all this have a care that it 
 do not swallow you up, that it do not take possession of 
 you altogether. Thoughts that are always running on 
 this world, on its hopes and fears, its gains and losses, 
 its victories and defeats, that can never get out of 
 this track, are vain thoughts; and he that is wise 
 will see betimes the peril and the danger with which 
 they threaten the whole life of his soul, and will 
 watch against them, as knowing that we may perish
 
 128 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 
 
 through things lawful as surely as through things 
 unlawful. 
 
 But if a wise man will watch against these thoughts 
 about this world, which are only sinful when indulged 
 and allowed at a wrong time or in excess, how much 
 more will he hate those that in their nature and essence 
 are sinful ; as, for example, impure thoughts ; being such 
 as more than any other sully and defile the mirror of the 
 soul, and render it incapable of giving back the pure 
 image of God. What a call there is not to eschew only 
 but to hate such on the part of those who profess to be 
 followers of the immaculate Lamb, of the Prince of all 
 purities, of Him who has said, ' Be ye holy, for I am. 
 holy ; ' and who, when He demands holiness on the 
 part of his people, does not contemplate a mere blame- 
 lessness in outward conversation, so that men shall see 
 nothing amiss in them, but that holiness of heart which 
 shall endure his searching glance, before whom all 
 things are naked and manifest. Hate, then, these 
 ' vain thoughts ' ; hate them with a perfect hatred. 
 They are in themselves a whole world of iniquity, and 
 do more perhaps than evil thoughts of any other kind 
 to taint, corrupt, and poison the whole inner life of 
 the soul, until nothing there is pure, but everything 
 defiled. 
 
 The transition to other thoughts, to such as we more 
 immediately ascribe to the devil, is easy. The connexion
 
 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 129 
 
 between those at which I have just been glancing 
 and these is closer than we might at first imagine. 
 Shakespeare knew this when he made lago, being as he 
 is the most devilish character which has issued from the 
 wondrous workshop of his brain, also in imagination 
 the uncleanest. Neither is it only in the land of the 
 Gadarenes that devils and swine are found in closest 
 relation with one another. But into this mysterious 
 connexion I will not seek to enter further. 1 It will 
 be enough to indicate proud thoughts in general, as the 
 third division of those which I have undertaken to con- 
 sider. It is only little which I can speak of these. 
 
 Few persons in this world obtain as much homage, 
 respect, observance from others as they fain would ob- 
 tain ; few occupy places in this world as high as it seems 
 to themselves their merits and services might justly 
 challenge and deserve. But of these, thus disappointed 
 and defeated of their proper rights, how many make it 
 up to themselves, or at least seek some compensation, in 
 imagining to themselves the course of this world as they 
 would like it to be, or as they hope it may yet one day 
 prove ; and the Tempter in fantastic vision is ever at 
 hand to feed these high thoughts of ours, to set us on 
 the high mountain of our pride, to bring half the world 
 to our feet, as ready to do homage to us ; for he well 
 knows that there is nothing which more unfits us for 
 
 1 Matt. viii. 30, 31. 
 
 K
 
 130 02V THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 
 
 humble e very-day duties, for prayer, for communion 
 with God, than the indulgence in these vain conceits, 
 and walking in imagination on these high places of our 
 pride. Young men, young women, beware of allowing 
 yourselves in idle daydreams such as these. There may 
 seem to you no harm in them ; but there is great and 
 serious harm. Examine them a little closer. Are they 
 not always for the exaltation of self? Is not self the 
 centre of them in every case ? It is you, not anybody 
 else, but always you, who in that imaginary scene which 
 you depict to yourself, are the central figure ; you, who 
 do something clever, or grand, or heroic, or self-denying, 
 and obtain the applause and admiration of the world. 
 Can anything be worse, can anything be more injurious 
 to the spiritual life of the soul, to its simplicity and 
 purity, than these secret glorifyings of self? Can any- 
 thing do greater wrong to the soul than this substitution 
 of magnificent feats of imaginary heroism or self-denial 
 for the commonplace, every-day tasks and humbler 
 duties of the Christian life, which are really within our 
 power, and which claim fulfilment at our hands ? Hate, 
 then, these vain thoughts. They will fill you with con- 
 ceit of the worst kind, and leave you empty of every 
 good thing. 
 
 But, still more evidently devilish, there are ' vain 
 thoughts ' of malice and evil-will ; these too growing 
 out of a root of pride, as it would not be difficult to
 
 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 131 
 
 show. It is strange that persons should ever wish ill 
 to others gratuitously, and without having received any 
 slight or wrong at their hands. Yet so it is, nothing 
 perhaps revealing so strongly the depth of man's fall, 
 and the way in which the poison of the Old Serpent has 
 penetrated into the veins, as the fact that there is such 
 a thing as ' being glad at calamities ' (the Greek language 
 has a word for this gladness), and this even though the 
 calamity of others bring no profit to us, and though 
 they whom the calamity has overtaken have never in 
 anything harmed or wronged us in the least. There is 
 such a thing as looking abroad on the world, and grudg- 
 ing to see others more prosperous, more esteemed, hap- 
 pier in their family circle, in higher estate, more at 
 ease in their outward circumstances ; and desiring that 
 this prosperity should be less, and having pleasure in 
 any event which should make it less, which should justify 
 words like those of the Prophet, ' Art thou also become 
 weak as we ? art thou become like unto us ? ' l Hate, I 
 beseech you, these vain thoughts. Let none say in his 
 heart, c Oh, I could never be tempted to such gratuitous 
 malignity as this.' What any other has ever been tempted 
 to, be sure that you may be tempted to the same ; and 
 perhaps, if you had watched yourself a little closer, you 
 would be ready to acknowledge that you had been tempted 
 to it already ; and not this only, but had yielded to the 
 
 temptation. 
 
 1 Isa. xiv. 10. 
 
 K 2
 
 132 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 
 
 But a few words must still be spoken on the remedies 
 for ' vain thoughts ' ; how to resist them, how so effectu- 
 ally to hate them that they shall find no room nor enter- 
 tainment with us. It is plain that before we undertake 
 this in earnest, we must be fully aware of their guilt. 
 I have attempted to say something of this already, and 
 cannot now say more. Let it be sufficient once again, 
 to remind you, that in that day which may be so near, 
 which cannot be very remote, God shall judge not the 
 open things only of men's lives, but the secrets of men's 
 hearts, by Jesus Christ. 
 
 Then, too, let us fully realize to ourselves the ever- 
 present danger which there is, that the evil thought will 
 breed something even worse than itself. ' Lust, when 
 it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin.' The evil thought 
 is mother of the evil deed. It is the cockatrice's egg, 
 from which the fiery flying serpent may at any moment 
 be born. No man can say, with confidence, ' Thus far 
 will I advance in sin, but no farther. I will taste, in 
 imagination, the sweetness of the sin ; but there I will 
 stop.' God evermore defeats these wicked calculations 
 of ours ; and the sin which we have deliberately resolved 
 to commit in part, He compels us (for I will not shrink 
 from using the word) to commit in the whole. 
 
 But this the guilt and the danger of allowing such 
 thoughts as these freely admitted, how shall we rid our- 
 selves of them ? how shall we chase them away ? Chase
 
 ON THE DUTY OF HATING VAIN THOUGHTS 133 
 
 them wholly away, we never shall ; but, as an old divine 
 said well, ' I cannot hinder a bird from flying over my 
 head, but I can hinder it from building its nest in my 
 hair.' Let them find no entertainment from us. As 
 often as they visit us, let them drive us to Him, by 
 whose holy inspiration alone we are able either to think 
 those things which be good, or to refuse to think those 
 things which be evil ; let them, I say, drive us to Him 
 in a real, though it may be a voiceless prayer, in a brief 
 meditation on the glories of heaven, or on the pains of 
 hell, or on Christ hanging upon his cross and bearing 
 there the penalty of our sins, or on Christ coming to 
 judgment and bringing to light all hidden things of 
 darkness and this wicked thought of ours among the rest. 
 In devices such as these we must find our help. Nor 
 may we doubt that the issue and reward of all manful 
 resistance to him from whom all evil things do come, and 
 these fiery flying darts among the rest, will be that he 
 will flee from us ; and that to us too it will be granted 
 to enter into and a little to understand the blessedness 
 of those words which had their first and most glorious 
 fulfilment in the wilderness and for the Lord, ' Then 
 the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and 
 ministered unto him.' ' 
 
 Matt. iv. 11.
 
 134 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 SERMON XII. 
 
 PONTIUS PILATE. 
 
 MATT, xxvii. 11. 
 And Jesus stood before the governor. 
 
 OF the many evil men who were immediate sharers in 
 the guilt of our Lord's death, there is none who affords 
 such a study of character as Pontius Pilate ; none, the 
 inner workings of whose heart and mind we are allowed 
 so closely to inspect. As this study of character he is 
 the more profitable to us, because, among many guilty, 
 he is by no means the guiltiest ; his sin, which we may 
 sum up in the words, 'moral cowardice,' much more 
 closely resembling the sin into which any one of us at 
 any moment may fall, into which every one of us has 
 fallen, than the sin of Judas Iscariot or of Caiaphas. 
 
 The three earlier Evangelists deal in a rapid and 
 summary manner with this portion of the Evangelical 
 story. It is for this reason that St. John treats it at 
 full. Profoundly interesting is it to note, as traced by 
 him, the mortal duel which is fought out between the 
 Roman Governor and the Jewish hierarchs; a duel
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 135 
 
 which is not the less real, nor waged the less fiercely, 
 because carried on under forms which partially veil it 
 from our eyes, so that only at certain moments the in- 
 tense hostility which animates both him and them is per- 
 mitted to appear. This conflict is undecided long, but 
 the Jewish hierarchs are victorious in the end. And no 
 wonder. They know their own minds, while he only half 
 knows his. They are consistent, thorough-going in evil ; 
 he is weak and less than half-hearted in good. No sooner 
 do they stand face to face than the mutual antipathy 
 breaks forth, and the struggle at once begins. They 
 have brought their prisoner to him, with the demand 
 which, if not openly made, it is impossible for Pilate to 
 miss, that without more ado he should confirm the sen- 
 tence which they have already passed upon Him. But 
 Pilate is not wholly without that sense of law and of the 
 dignity of law which had given to the Romans the do- 
 minion of the world ; which speaks out so proudly in the 
 words of another Roman Governor, ' It is not the manner 
 of the Romans to deliver any man to die, before that he 
 which is accused have licence to answer for himself con- 
 cerning the crime laid against him ; ' l and therefore 
 going out to them he demands, ' What accusation bring 
 ye against this man ? ' This question, revealing as it 
 does his resolution not to be made a blind instrument of 
 their malice, offends them greatly. They would fain 
 
 1 Acts xxv. 16.
 
 136 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 enter into no discussion. What they want is that the 
 Governor, accepting the justice of their sentence, should 
 proceed to execute it, or give them authority to do so. 
 They reply in displeasure, ' If he were not a malefactor, 
 we would not have delivered him up unto thee.' It was 
 enough that they of the Great Sanhedrim had con- 
 demned Him; let the Roman Governor ratify their 
 sentence and carry it out ; that is his business. 'If this 
 be so ; if He be indeed a malefactor, as you say,' Pilate 
 replies, ' carry out yourselves the sentence which ye have 
 pronounced against Him. Take Him, and judge Him 
 after your law.' There would have been nothing more 
 welcome to them than this permission, but for one fact, 
 which he knew and which they knew ; and which no doubt 
 was present in his mind when he so spake namely, that 
 the right of capital punishment, the power of the sword, 
 had been withdrawn from them by the Romans, and it 
 was the life of the Lord they desired. And now they are 
 brought to the humiliating confession of this ; a confes- 
 sion which must have cost them much, and to which, for 
 this very reason, Pilate is the better pleased to bring 
 them, l It is not lawful for us to put any man to death.' 
 Neither can they any longer hope that he will be con- 
 tent to be the mere passive executor of their will ; they 
 proceed therefore at once to bring forth their charges 
 against the Lord. 
 
 To St. Luke we owe an exact account of the shape
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 137 
 
 which these charges took : ' We found this fellow per- 
 verting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to 
 Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King.' l 
 They knew very well, cunning and malignant as they 
 were, that they would very hardly indeed persuade Pilate 
 to put Jesus to death on the ground that He had claimed 
 to be the Son of God ; that his first impulse would be 
 to drive them, bringing this accusation, from his judg- 
 ment-seat with something of the same contempt with 
 which Gallio drove the accusers of St. Paul. 2 They 
 can scarcely hope to effect their end without giving a 
 political colouring to his offence. It must not be one 
 .so much against their theocracy as against the civil 
 .government of Rome. And this colouring with infinite 
 dexterity they give to their charge. Christ did claim 
 to be a King ; and they took for granted that, if He 
 .should be questioned whether He were such or not, He 
 would not deny it. Their hope was (nor were they 
 .altogether disappointed in this hope), that Pilate, with 
 the quick ear of suspicion, would catch at that word 
 ' king,' and, not perceiving how profoundly different 
 his kingdom was from any of the kingdoms of the world, 
 and in how different a sense He claimed to be a King, 
 would at once see in Jesus a competitor for the throne 
 of Judaea, a troublesome and, it might be, a dangerous 
 pretender, whom it would be well with the least delay 
 1 xxiii. 2. 2 Acts xviii. 15.
 
 138 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 or noise to get out of the way. There is an infinite- 
 baseness in the manner in which they thus offer up 
 their own expectations of a Messiah, prostituting these- 
 to their more urgent purpose of hate and revenge, in 
 their charging against the Lord the very thing which 
 they were waiting and hoping that the Messiah, such 
 as they expected Him, would do namely, that He would 
 rally the whole nation against the hated domination of 
 the Gentile. The same cunning malignity, the same 
 making of the charge a political one, reappears more 
 than once in the Acts. 1 
 
 They have succeeded so far that, as all the four 
 Evangelists tell us, Pilate begins his judicial inquiry 
 with the question, ' Art thou the King of the Jews ? *" 
 But while the three earlier Evangelists report only th& 
 Lord's simple affirmation that such He was, St. John 
 records a most important conversation between Him 
 and Pilate. The Governor, having again withdrawn 
 into the judgment-hall, whither the Jews did not 
 follow, and having called the Lord unto him, addressed 
 this question about his kingship to Him. Instead of 
 answering at once, He replies to question with question r 
 ' Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it 
 thee of me ? ' as much as to say, ' In what spirit dost 
 thou ask this question ? for when I know this, I shall 
 better know what reply I shall make to it. Is it the- 
 1 See xvi. 21 ; xvii. G, 7.
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 139 
 
 true Messiah-hope which thou art asking after ? or art 
 thou merely retailing the accusations made against Me 
 by my enemies ? ' Not, alas ! ' of himself/ The proud 
 Roman indignantly puts back the suggestion that he 
 could take any interest in the Jewish hope of a Messiah 
 and Saviour. ' Am I a Jew,' is his displeased rejoinder 
 to the supposition that he should have spoken this of 
 himself, ' that I should care for such dreams and ex- 
 pectations as these which thy people cherish? Thine 
 own nation and the Chief Priests have delivered Thee 
 unto me ; and therefore I have put this question to 
 Thee.' And then, as one offended at the freedom of 
 that question, he resumes the judge ; but at the same 
 time with something of good-will he asks, ' What hast 
 thou done?' The Lord shall thus have his opportu- 
 nity of explaining the bitter enmity which the chiefs 
 of his own nation thus manifested against Him. He 
 must have done something to provoke this enmity. 
 What was it ? 
 
 The answer of the Lord is not direct, but indirectly 
 He does reply. * You ask Me what I have done ? 
 Nothing punishable by the laws of any state ; nothing 
 of which the state can take cognizance, seeing that my 
 kingdom, for I am a King, is not a kingdom of this 
 world ; is not from hence, grows out of no earthly root.' 
 He does not, as all who are capable of judging will at once 
 acknowledge, deny that his kingdom is here, but only
 
 140 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 that it is hence, that it is from beneath; being, as it 
 indeed is, from above ; a kingdom coming down from 
 heaven, however the seat of it may be for a while upon 
 earth ; in the words of Augustine, ' Non negat hie esse, 
 sed hinc.' Observe, I beseech you by the way, the 
 majestic confidence with which, even at that hour, when 
 abandoned by all, in the hands of foes, He who, in the 
 words of St. Paul, ' witnessed a good confession before 
 Pontius Pilate,' not once only, but thrice, claims a 
 kingdom as properly his own. 
 
 His words, ' If my kingdom were of this world, then 
 would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered 
 to the Jews,' have been often misunderstood. They are 
 often taken to explain the passive tameness with which 
 the disciples allowed their Lord to be laid hold of in 
 the garden of Gethsemane, not offering more than the 
 faintest shadow of resistance; indeed, for the greater 
 part, offering none. But the words cannot bear this 
 meaning. They refer not to the past, but to the present. 
 ' Were my kingdom of this world, then would my 
 servants now interfere, that thou shouldst not give Me 
 back to the power of the Jews.' And by these ' servants ' 
 He means, not that feeble, terrified little band of 
 Apostles, with their ' two swords,' l nor yet the unwar- 
 like train of his followers ; but He has in his mind's eye 
 those ' twelve legions ' of angels of whom He spake a 
 
 1 Luke xxii. 38.
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 141 
 
 little while before, whom and more than whom his 
 Father at a word of his would give Him. 1 He saw, 
 though Pilate could not see, the mountain full of horses 
 and chariots of fire, compassing round about the greater 
 than Elisha who was here, 2 which all He might even, 
 now at a beck summon to his aid. 
 
 You will have observed that Christ has not yet 
 in as many words called Himself a King ; but in that 
 three times repeated mention of his kingdom his king- 
 ship was virtually implied. Pilate recognizes this, and 
 repeats his question, ' Art thou a king then ? ' He 
 repeats it; but, if I do not mistake, in another spirit 
 from that in which he put it at the first. The question 
 as now put is rather an evidence of the deep though 
 momentary impression which Christ's last words have 
 made upon the questioner. It is not a judicial interro- 
 gation; not a going back on the accusation of the 
 Jews ; not as much as to say, ' Then Thou allowest the 
 truth of this charge which they make against Thee/ 
 The inquiry springs from a deeper root, as evidenced by 
 the Lord's reply, ' Thou sayest ; for I am a King. To 
 this end was I born ' this had reference to his birth 
 of a woman ; ' and for this cause came I into the 
 world ' descended from his Father's throne, laid aside 
 for a while the glory which He had with Him from 
 the beginning, ' that I should bear witness unto the 
 
 1 Matt. xxvi. 53. * 2 Kings vi. 17.
 
 142 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my 
 voice.' 
 
 Note, I beseech you here, how graciously the Lord, 
 speaking to a heathen, so modifies his language as to 
 be intelligible to him. He speaks of ' the truth,' 
 that being a middle term between Jewish theology and 
 heathen philosophy, common to both, and forming a 
 connecting link between them. He does not speak of 
 the Messias hope, which would have been a wholly 
 unintelligible language to Pilate, but of 'the truth.' 
 All the better and nobler heathen professed themselves 
 lovers and seekers of the truth. If there had been any 
 longing after it in Pilate, that word would have found 
 an echo in his heart. If he had been in any sense ' of 
 the truth,' with any predisposition for it, he would, as 
 Christ says, have heard his voice, even his who was 
 Himself the Incarnate Truth. But he has none ; and 
 having now rid himself of those momentary impressions, 
 and desiring to break off the discourse, he exclaims 
 with something of impatience and contempt, and as a 
 sceptical child of this present world, ' What is truth ? ' 
 and then, without waiting for an answer, he returned 
 to the Jewish crowd who were impatiently waiting 
 without, and declared the conviction at which he had 
 arrived, 'I find in him no fault at all.' They renew 
 their charges more fiercely than ever, for they are afraid 
 that their victim will escape them : ' He stirreth up the
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 143 
 
 people, teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from 
 Galilee to this place.' Pilate eagerly catches at the 
 word Galilee ; he would fain disengage himself from 
 the whole affair, in which, as he now plainly sees, he 
 must either act directly against his conscience, condemn- 
 ing an innocent man, or else embitter still more against 
 himself all the chiefs of the Jewish nation. That men- 
 tion of Galilee seems to open to him an unlooked-for 
 way of escape. Is the man a Galilasan ? He will send 
 Him to be judged by Herod, the tetrarch of Galilee, 
 * who himself also was at Jerusalem at that time.' 
 Here will be a double gain, a compliment paid to 
 Herod, in this acknowledgment of his jurisdiction, in 
 this unwillingness to encroach upon it ; and, still better 
 than this, he will so deliver himself from that terrible 
 dilemma in which he is placed. Unhappy man ! with 
 what dismay he must presently have seen the prisoner, 
 whom he had hoped to be rid of for ever, returned upon 
 his hands. He was not so to escape. 
 
 Weak and without all moral supports, Pilate cannot 
 bring himself, at all costs, to do justice. But there is 
 one way remaining still, by which it may be possible 
 to avoid committing the flagrant injustice which the 
 Jews require at his hands. They had a custom that 
 the Governor should release to them a prisoner at the 
 Passover. He would himself propose that Jesus should 
 be the prisoner. The release of one so remarkable as
 
 144 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 He was, one accused of the highest crime against the 
 state, would prove a most solemn recognition on his 
 part of their right to such a privilege would probably 
 be eagerly grasped at by the people. He knew too 
 that there were many sympathies among the multitude 
 in favour of the Lord, as his triumphal entry into 
 Jerusalem some few days before had sufficiently attested. 
 But there was a competitor for the popular favour, 
 with far stronger claims on that favour than were his ; 
 one who had actually done what they had only hoped 
 that Jesus would do namely, made insurrection against 
 the Roman power, and shed the blood of Roman oppres- 
 sors; and him the populace are easily moved to ask, 
 instead of the Holy and the Just. 
 
 This feeble effort of Pilate to save the Lord, or 
 rather to save himself from that miserable guilt which 
 he sees so close before him, has failed. He has still 
 one device behind : he will chastise, and having chas- 
 tised, will release Him. Assuredly some movements of 
 compassion will stir in their hearts when they behold 
 Him torn and bleeding under the cruel Roman rods; 
 or if not movements of compassion, yet of contempt, 
 which shall do the work of pity ; and he hopes to take 
 .advantage of these, so to effect his release. Such is his 
 scheme for befriending the Lord. Truly, the tender 
 mercies of the wicked are cruel. Pilate withdraws ; 
 and now begins the scene of insult and wrong and
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 145 
 
 cruel mocking which has imprinted itself so deeply 
 on the heart and imagination of Christendom, but to 
 dwell on which would be foreign to the purpose of 
 to-day. All this was transacted within the praetorium, 
 or inner court of Pilate's house, out of sight therefore 
 of the Jewish multitude, who were eagerly waiting 
 without. 
 
 And now Pilate, in pursuance of his scheme, will 
 make his final effort to stir some feeling of commisera- 
 tion in their hearts. Is it not enough? he would 
 imply ; the man is innocent ; the inquisition by scourg- 
 ing has wrung out from him no confession of guilt, of 
 any plots against the Roman sovereignty, or against 
 his own countrymen. And ' then came Jesus forth ' in 
 his forlorn masquerade of royalty, ' wearing the crown 
 of thorns and the purple robe.' Pilate himself leads 
 Him forth, and shows Him to the people, uttering at 
 the same time that wondrous word which the Church 
 has so eagerly caught up ; for just as Caiaphas, the 
 representative of the Jewish Church, spake deeper 
 things than he knew when he exclaimed, ' It is expe- 
 dient for us that one man should die for the people,' * 
 even so Pilate, the representative of the heathen world, 
 spake a far deeper word than he was aware of, when, 
 pointing to the Prince of Martyrs, he exclaimed, ( Ecce 
 homo!' ' Behold the man!' What Pilate himself 
 
 1 John xi. 50. 
 
 L
 
 146 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 meant, what emphasis he laid on the words, it is 
 not easy to determine; yet no doubt for the moment 
 he was touched and moved, however there may have 
 mingled contempt with the pity. We may supplement, 
 I think, his ' Behold the man ' with some such words 
 as these, * whom you dread so much ; whom you 
 would fain have me to dread so much.' 
 
 But the rude Roman, nursed among conflicts and 
 blood, familiar with the horrid butcheries of the Roman 
 amphitheatre, seeks in vain to touch the hearts of Jewish 
 Priests. Their only answer is, 'Crucify him, crucify 
 him ! ' Pilate replies, ' Take ye him, and crucify him : 
 for I find no fault in him.' With a bitter irony the 
 Governor again affects to forget that this power had 
 passed from them. They are humiliating him, and he 
 in return will humiliate them, obliging them to confess 
 that they must wait upon a heathen tribunal for the 
 carrying out of their decrees, even those which most 
 nearly concern the highest matters of their faith. And 
 he does bring them to this. He has so plainly declared 
 that on political grounds he can find no guilt in their 
 prisoner, that the Roman State was in nothing 
 aggrieved or threatened by Him, as to leave them no 
 alternative ; they must drop this accusation altogether, 
 and come back from this, the pretended charge, to the 
 real one ; and this now they do : ' He may have done 
 nothing against your law, but He has against ours. By
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 147 
 
 our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the 
 Son of God.' 
 
 How significant are the words which follow. ' When 
 Pilate therefore heard that saying, he was the more 
 afraid.' So that there had already woke up in him some 
 mysterious awe, awe which had deepened into fear, in 
 respect of this prisoner before him ; but now he was ' the 
 more afraid.' That word, ' Son of God,' alarmed him. 
 All the unbelief of the time, all the scepticism of his 
 own heart, had not so entirely destroyed in him every 
 vestige of faith in a higher world, and one in closest 
 connexion with this lower, but that this sounded as a 
 word of fear in his ears. What if he should be drawing 
 down some special vengeance of heaven upon himself, 
 outraging One who had both the power and the will to 
 avenge himself? And then there may have come again 
 to his mind the message of his wife, not so much heeded 
 at the moment, ' Have thou nothing to do with that 
 just man : for I have suffered many things this day in a 
 dream because of him.' * Again he pauses ; withdraws 
 once more with the Lord into the judgment-hall, and 
 with direct reference to those words, ' Son of God,' 
 demands of Him, ( Whence art thon ? ' ' Dost Thou,' 
 that is, ' claim to belong to another and higher world 
 than this ? ' To this question Jesus gives him no 
 answer. He knows too surely what the end will be, 
 
 ' Matt, xxvii. 19. 
 
 L 2
 
 148 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 and will not increase Pilate's guilt by increasing his 
 knowledge. The Roman Governor is offended at this 
 silence. ' Speakest thou not unto me ? knowest thou 
 not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power 
 to release thee ? ' In one sense this was true, but in 
 another most false. A righteous judge has no power 
 I mean morally he has none to condemn the innocent, 
 or to absolve the guilty. He is set to execute judgment 
 and righteousness upon earth. And our Lord, in his 
 reply, would fain bring Pilate back to this, the rightful 
 view of his office : ' Thou couldest have no power at all 
 against me, except it were given thee from above ; 
 therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater 
 sin.' Difficult words, but which I think may thus be 
 explained : ' Thou speakest as though I were delivered 
 into thy hands, for thee to do with Me as thou wilt. 
 But it is not so. Thou hast just that amount of power 
 which is granted thee from above ; that much, and no 
 more. Thou knowest not, or only dimly and obscurely 
 knowest this, as compared with him, the Jewish High 
 Priest,' representative here of the whole body of 
 Christ's Jewish enemies, ' who, with clearer light and 
 ampler knowledge, have risen up against Me, and 
 delivered Me into thine hands ; whose sin, therefore, is 
 greater than thine.' Wonderful indeed is the manner 
 in which the Lord at such a moment measures out the 
 comparative guilt of one and another, of Jewish High
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 149 
 
 Priest and Roman Governor; and graciously places in 
 the mildest possible light his guilt, who was just about 
 to send him to a cruel and unrighteous death. 
 
 This word of Christ has found out Pilate in such 
 inmost depths of his heart, that ' from thenceforth he 
 sought to release him ; ' but as he had done this already, 
 we can only understand that now he did it more ear- 
 nestly than ever ; in St. Peter's words ' he was determined 
 to let him go.' l And perhaps he might have ventured 
 something in the cause of righteousness and truth ; but 
 an accusation at Rome, and to Tiberius, the most sus- 
 picious of all tyrants, this he could not brave ; and it is 
 with this that the Jewish chief priests threaten him now. 
 They have kept this weapon in their armoury to the 
 last, only to bring it forth in case of uttermost need, 
 and when every other has failed. But this need has 
 arrived, and they do not scruple to employ it : 'If thou 
 let this man go, thou art not Csesar's friend : whoso- 
 ever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.' 
 They will charge him at Rome with this his unseason- 
 able lenity to a rebel and a pretender to Ceesar's throne. 
 So much they make Pilate clearly to understand, and 
 this is enough. They have thrown a weight into the 
 scale of unrighteousness and wrong, which causes that 
 of righteousness and truth at once to kick the beam. 
 His guilty conscience tells him that, even if in this 
 1 Acts iii. 13.
 
 150 PONTIUS PILATE 
 
 matter lie could clear himself, there were charges enough 
 of malversation, of violence, of cruelty, which they could 
 bring against him, and from which it would be impossible 
 to clear himself. He was prepared to drive matters far, 
 but he dared not drive them so far as this. ' When 
 Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus 
 forth,' and with one more bitter word to the Jewish 
 priests, ' Shall I crucify your king ? ' which drew from 
 them one shameful disavowal more of all their hopes of 
 a Messiah, ' We have no king but Caesar,' he delivered 
 Jesus unto them to be crucified. At the same time he 
 takes care to embody his mockery, not of the Lord, but 
 of the persecutors of the Lord, in the title which he 
 wrote and fixed upon the cross, ' Jesus of Nazareth the 
 King of the Jews ; ' being only the better pleased, and 
 the more determined not to alter it, when he found that, 
 as he had intended, they took it as an insult to them- 
 selves. 1 
 
 And so ends the tragedy of Pontius Pilate, a bad 
 man, but by no means the worst of that wonderful 
 group which are gathered round the cross of Christ, 
 and on whom that cross has poured such a flood of light ; 
 who, as actors, abettors, or approvers, share the primary 
 guilt of that crime, the secondary guilt of which is 
 shared by us all. A bad man, but very far from the 
 worst ; with a guilt which reaches not at all to the guilt of 
 1 John xix. 21, 22.
 
 PONTIUS PILATE 151 
 
 high priests ; which stands far below that of Judas ; and 
 therefore the more awful example of the crimes in 
 which men may be entangled merely through a lack of 
 moral stamina; for who can attest to us with such a 
 dreadful clearness as he does, how little feeble motions 
 towards good will profit, nay, how they will serve only 
 to deepen the damnation of those who refuse to yield 
 obedience to them ; who, seeing what is the better part, 
 do yet for by-ends of worldly policy and convenience, 
 and to make things safe and pleasant to themselves, 
 shrink from the painfulness of duty, and leaving that 
 better part, choose the worse ?
 
 152 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 
 
 SERMON XTIL 
 
 TOE DEATH AND BUEIAL OF MOSES. 
 
 DEUT. iv. 21, 22. 
 
 Furthermore the Lord was angry with me for your sakes, and sware 
 that I should not go over Jordan, and that I should not go in 
 unto that good land, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an 
 inheritance : But I must die in this land, I must not go over 
 Jordan : but ye shall go over, and possess that good land. 
 
 WHO is there that does not feel, as he reads or hears 
 these words, the deep pathos of them ? There is no 
 faintest murmur, no lightest note of complaint, in the 
 language with which the aged servant of God records 
 his own sentence of exclusion from the Promised Land ; 
 yet there pierces an infinite sadness through that lan- 
 guage. It is evident that he deeply felt, even while he 
 meekly accepted, the just but severe sentence of his doom. 
 Severe indeed ! the entrance into that Promised Land, 
 the bringing in to it of that people for whom he had so 
 long laboured, and wept, and prayed, that should have 
 been the crown of his life, the rich reward of all his toils. 
 Forty years a fugitive and exile in the land of Midian, 
 this long exile the penalty of a too hasty attempt to do
 
 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 153 
 
 in the flesh what he should hereafter accomplish in the 
 spirit ; } forty years the painful leader of a discontented, 
 murmuring, rebellious people, through a weary and 
 dreadful wilderness ; he had borne all their burden, 
 all the contradiction of sinners, all their waywardness, 
 ingratitude, revolt. It was due, under God, to his 
 patience, to his wisdom, to his courage, that one by one 
 the obstacles in his path and theirs had been all cleared 
 away ; that the mountains had become plains ; and now, 
 when the glorious goal was in sight, nay, close at hand, 
 as within his grasp, he was not to reach it after all. 
 He had sown, and another should reap ; he had laboured, 
 and another should enter into his labours. There was 
 surely, brethren, something deeply tragic in such a de- 
 feat of such a life, even though that defeat reached but 
 to this present world, and left untouched the inheritance, 
 incorruptible and undefiled, which was reserved in 
 heaven for him to whom the earthly inheritance was 
 denied. 
 
 We know that this with which the Lord had threat- 
 ened him on the day when he offended by the waters of 
 Meribah, 2 that this which Moses speaks of as the sentence 
 impending over him, was all fulfilled. It is all recorded 
 in the closing chapter of this book. And yet, though 
 the sentence stood fast, it had its gracious mitigations, 
 as the Lord is ever gracious to discover such, when it is 
 1 Exod. ii. 11-15. * Num. xx. 12.
 
 134 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 
 
 his own whom He is chastening. ' Get thee up,' it i& 
 said to him, ' unto Mount Nebo, which is over against 
 Jericho, and behold the land of Canaan, which I give to- 
 the children of Israel for a possession.' And then we 
 are told that ' Moses went up from the plains of Moab 
 unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, and 
 the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, and all 
 Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and 
 all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the 
 south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of 
 palm trees, unto Zoar.' A glorious spectacle, a mag- 
 nificent prospect for any eyes, as the very few, travellers 
 and pilgrims, who have had the opportunity of beholding 
 it, with one consent have declared. But what a spec- 
 tacle for him ! He saw the land, not merely in its 
 natural beauty, a land flowing with milk and honey, 
 a land of mountains and brooks, a land which was the 
 glory of all lands ; but he saw it as the land which the 
 Lord had given to Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and 
 to their seed, to the end that, despite of all the sin and 
 opposition of men, even of those who were the bearers 
 of his promises, He might there work out the eternal 
 purposes of his love ; that He might found there a 
 fortress of true religion, where his worship should be 
 maintained during the long and weary ages in which 
 all the rest of the world should be wholly given to? 
 idolatry ; and from whence, in due time, should go forth-
 
 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF HOSES 155 
 
 the ambassadors of his grace, who should everywhere 
 declare his name, and plant the banners of the faith in 
 every land. 
 
 And as he saw it, and understood, if not all, yet 
 much of the significance of that land for all the after- 
 history of mankind, how it should be indeed a Holy 
 Land, for it should be once trodden by the feet of One, 
 a prophet like unto him, and greater than him, for He 
 should be Moses and Joshua in one, and far more than 
 either, far more than both ; as he saw this good land, 
 may we not believe that he was comforted for all, felt 
 that it was glory enough for a sinful man to have been 
 used by God to bring his people thus far, even to the 
 verge and border of this land of inheritance ? May we 
 not be sure that with him was not merely a perfect 
 acquiescence in the will of God ; so that he accepted 
 that will without murmuring or repining ; but that he 
 felt goodness and mercy to have followed him from the 
 first to the last, and that no good thing had been with- 
 holden from him ? and that so, looking in that supreme 
 hour before and after, looking back to all the way by 
 which the Lord had led him, to those three mysterious 
 forties into which his life had been divided, the forty 
 years at the court of Pharaoh, the forty years in the 
 land of Midian, and now the forty years in the wilder- 
 ness ; and looking forward to a land of inheritance, 
 fairer, richer, brighter even than that which he now
 
 15G THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 
 
 saw, but must never tread, the weary, much -enduring 
 man yielded his spirit to his God ; God, as the Jewish 
 rabbis assure us, drawing out that spirit with a 
 kiss ; they meaning by this to express their sense 
 of the serene composure, the painless peace of his 
 departure. 
 
 And, then, one final honour was in store for him 
 still. No human hands bore the dead Lawgiver and 
 Prophet to his grave, or composed him there. ' He,' 
 that is God, as we are told, ' buried him in a valley in 
 the land of Moab, but no man knoweth of his sepulchre 
 unto this day ; ' he whom God buried, according to all 
 likelihood not seeing corruption, and his grave unknown, 
 because probably he was raised from it as soon as laid 
 there ; only just tasting the penalty of death, and then 
 that penalty removed ; as would all seem indicated and 
 implied by the apparition of Moses, with Elijah, in a 
 glorified body upon the Mount of Transfiguration. 1 The 
 same also seems pointed at in an obscure passage in 
 the Epistle of St. Jude, where mention is made of the 
 Archangel Michael, that is, of Christ the Prince of 
 Angels, on the one side, and of Satan 011 the other, dis- 
 puting about the body of Moses; 2 Satan contending 
 that he, as a sinner, should pay to the uttermost all the 
 penalties of sin, death, and the return to dust which 
 goes along with death ; the Archangel Michael, the 
 1 M;itt. xvii. 3. 2 Jude 9.
 
 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 157 
 
 great Prince which standeth for the children of his 
 people, 1 declaring that for him one part of the penalty, 
 not indeed the essence of it, but this adjunct to it, was 
 remitted. 
 
 Let this, however, be as it may, we cannot, I think, 
 read and at all consider this solemn and mysterious 
 close of the great Prophet's life without many thoughts 
 rising in our hearts ; without feeling that there are 
 lessons of instruction the most manifold which are pre- 
 sented by it. I shall endeavour very briefly to draw 
 out from it two or three of these. 
 
 And first, a life may appear in some leading point 
 of it to have been a failure, to have been defeated of 
 that crowning success which in our shortsighted vision 
 it had almost a right to claim ; and may for all this 
 have been a life most acceptable to God, and consum- 
 mated with a death very precious in his sight. Moses, 
 the saint of the Lord, may lead his people through the 
 wilderness ; all the labour, all the toil, may be his ; but 
 not, so far as this life is concerned, the recompense and 
 the reward. It is often so. The lives of few men are 
 rounded and complete ; there is something wanting, 
 something fragmentary in almost all ; and this quite as 
 much in the lives of God's saints as in the lives of other 
 men. They as little realize all in higher things which 
 they propose to themselves, as the children of this world 
 1 Dan. xii. 1.
 
 158 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 
 
 realize all in the meaner objects of ambition which they 
 have proposed to themselves. They carry out precious 
 seed, and sow in tears ; but, as regards any harvest in 
 this present time, they often do not come again with joy, 
 bringing their sheaves with them. And why ? Because 
 God will write his sentence of vanity upon all things 
 here. There is no labour of men's hands which shall 
 altogether escape this sentence ; for sin is an all-per- 
 vading element which mingles with every work of man's ; 
 nothing can altogether escape it ; and if it should hap- 
 pen that in these judgments of God any seeming wrong 
 is done to any, if the just expectations of any servant of 
 his may thus seem to have been baffled, He who is the 
 King of ages can redress in eternity the wrongs of time ; 
 and all their disappointments and losses here He can 
 there make good for them a thousand fold. 
 
 But once more. See in this which the Lord spake 
 unto Moses, ' Thou shalt die in this land ; thou shalt not 
 bring this congregation into the land that I have given 
 them,' an example of the strictness with which God will 
 call even his own to account ; and, while his judgments 
 are in all the world, will cause them to begin at his own 
 house. Moses' sin seems to us, as we read of it, to have 
 been comparatively a small one, a momentary outbreak 
 of impatience or unbelief, so that he spake unadvisedly 
 with his lips ; and yet it entailed this penalty upon him, 
 this baffling of the dearest hopes of his life. Ah,
 
 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 159 
 
 brethren, if these things are done in the green tree, 
 what shall be done in the dry ? If judgment thus 
 begin at the house of God, where shall the ungodly and 
 the sinner appear ? If God could so punish an act of 
 disobedience, and that so far from a flagrant one, as we 
 measure sin, that it has been often disputed wherein 
 exactly the offence of Moses consisted, how shall He deal 
 with those whose whole life is one long disobedience and 
 defiance of Him ? Let us take good heed betimes, and 
 separate ourselves not merely from such a doom as theirs, 
 but watch against sins which, falling very far short of 
 their sin, may yet abridge us of our joy, cause us to for- 
 feit some blessed privilege which, except for this, should 
 assuredly have been ours. Moses was dear to God, and 
 this one matter excepted, ' faithful in all his house ; ' 
 and yet he may not escape ; his sin is visited upon him. 
 Surely the service of our God is a very awful thing, 
 much more solemn and awful than we are wont to regard 
 it; not to be done deceitfully; this of course; but 
 neither to be done carelessly, heedlessly, at random. 
 Take we heed to ourselves how we do it. We may not 
 make shipwreck of all, but yet how much we may 
 lose by careless walking, by the allowance of some 
 unmortified corruption. The heavenly inheritance, of 
 God's infinite mercy in Christ, may still be ours, reserved 
 in heaven for us ; and yet, while that is saved, how 
 easily may we empty our life of some excellent boon,
 
 160 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 
 
 some crowning and completing good, which it else- 
 would have known. 
 
 But then, once more. We are wont, and not un- 
 naturally, to regard this death of Moses as something 
 altogether unlike the deaths of other men. And so in a 
 sense it was. The summons to that solitary mountain, 
 every friend and companion left behind, alone with God 
 in that awful solitude, all this is his and no other's. 
 There was indeed something unique in the manner of 
 his departure. And yet, look at it in another point of 
 view, and what was it but the solitude of every death- 
 bed? On mourra seul, l we shall die alone ; ' these were 
 the words of the great Pascal ; and they are true of 
 every man. We may live with others, but we must die 
 by ourselves. Millions may have gone before us, and 
 millions may follow after ; but each one of us must gird 
 himself for that tremendous journey alone ; not Moses 
 more lonely on the peak of Nebo ; nor of all those 
 weeping ones that stand around our couch, can one, 
 even if he \vould, take a single step of that journey with 
 us ; alone, unless One be with us, a conqueror of Hades, 
 a Prince of Life, who with his rod and staff can comfort 
 those who pass even through the darkest valley of the 
 shadow of death. 
 
 Another word, and we will conclude. Observe, I 
 beseech you, and admire the way in which God so often 
 overrules the lives of the saints of the elder covenant,
 
 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 161 
 
 that by them He may, as in type and shadow, set forth 
 to us the eternal verities of the Gospel. So was it here. 
 Moses may lead the people to the borders of the pro- 
 mised land; but he cannot introduce them there, nor 
 give to them that land in possession. Another must 
 do this ; and that other, who ? Joshua must do this ; 
 Joshua or Jesus, for these, as I need not remind you, 
 are forms of the same name. .Moses, who gave the law, 
 who received the two tables of stone written with the 
 finger of God, and who declared these to the people, he 
 is the type and embodiment, the visible representative 
 of that law which he gave. ' The law came by Moses ; ' 
 but yet that law, holy and perfect as it was, could not 
 give life ; it could not bring any man into the land of 
 everlasting life, nay, rather, it wrought death. It was 
 1 a fiery law,' terrifying, threatening, scorching, con- 
 suming. It could show men what they ought to be ; 
 could thus bring them, as it were, to the very borders of 
 the land which they would possess ; but it could not of 
 itself make them ' meet for the inheritance of the saints 
 in light.' The law made nothing perfect ; but only 
 served as a preface and a prelude for the bringing in of 
 a better hope. Take heed, then, that you hear Moses ; 
 that whatever he commands in liis moral law you observe 
 and do ; yet think not to live thereby, lest it be said to 
 you, as to the Jews of old, ' There is one that accuseth 
 
 M
 
 162 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES 
 
 you, even Moses, in whom ye trust.' l Thou wilt have 
 come infinitely short of that law which thou hast striven 
 to keep. It will have as infinite condemnation for thee. 
 Think not of Moses that he can ever be more than a 
 schoolmaster to Christ ; that he can bring thee a foot 
 further than to the borders of the land of thine inherit- 
 ance. Another must lead thee in, if ever that good 
 land shall be thine. Jesus, our Joshua, our Saviour, 
 He must do this. He, the Giver of the Spirit ; He, the 
 Forgiver of sins, the Deliverer from the curse of the 
 broken law ; He, and He only, is the Captain of the 
 Host of the Lord, 2 who can lead through Jordan, who 
 can cast down the walls of Jericho, who can enable his 
 people to take the good land in possession, and to enter 
 upon that everlasting rest which remaineth for the 
 people of God. 
 
 1 Johnv. 45. 2 Josh. v. 14.
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 163 
 
 SERMON XIV. 1 
 
 EVEKY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE. 
 
 JAMES i. 17. 
 
 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh 
 down from the Father of lights. 
 
 SURELY it has been devised wisely and well that the 
 services of to-day should stand, if possible, in some 
 connexion with the celebrations which will fill up the 
 remainder of the week. You, who have sought that 
 such a connexion should stand plainly forth, have thus 
 declared many things. You have declared first, that 
 you have no intention nor desire to separate the gift 
 from the Giver, to glorify the one, and to forget or leave 
 out of sight the other, to make much of man at the 
 expense of Him who is the God of man, and from whom 
 all the wit, wisdom, intelligence, or goodness that any 
 man has ever possessed, originally came ; being, as these 
 are and must be, little fragments, so to speak, of the 
 divine heart or mind. You have declared that for you, 
 
 1 Preached at Stratford-upon-Avon, April 24, 1864, being the 
 Tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth. 
 
 M 2
 
 164 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 in the words so opportunely occurring in the service of 
 this morning, ' every good gift is from above, and cometh 
 down from the Father of lights ; ' so truly the Father 
 of all Lights, that each other lesser light can only have 
 been derived from his, and must have been kindled first 
 at his authentic fires. 
 
 Nor less do you declare that, as all things come of 
 Him, so we are bound to render unto Him thanks for 
 all ; and if for the magnificence of that earth which He 
 has framed for man's dwelling-place, for the hills which 
 He has set so fast with his power, for ' this brave over- 
 hanging firmament fretted with golden fires,' so it behoves 
 us first and chiefly to praise Him for his most excellent 
 creature man, ' the beauty of the world,' the crown of 
 things, the first-fruits of his creatures ; and if for man, 
 then most of all for those men who marvellously trans- 
 cend their fellows, who, ' framed in the prodigality of 
 nature ' or of grace, reveal to us the possibilities of great- 
 ness or of goodness which are in man. Yes, apart from 
 all the pleasure or profit which we may have by these, 
 we are bound to praise Him that He has given such 
 gifts unto men, shown them capable of receiving the 
 same ; for such is the fellowship of our race, so inti- 
 mately are we bound up with one another, that what is 
 given to one may in some sort be considered as given 
 to all, and from that one, glory and honour to redound 
 to all.
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 165 
 
 It has then, doubtless, been well imagined that the 
 sacred services of to-day, in nothing abating their 
 spiritual character, should yet blend themselves, as har- 
 moniously they may, with the other more festal solemni- 
 ties of the time. One thing only I could willingly 
 have desired, namely, that on some other, less unequal 
 to the occasion, had devolved the task of tracing the 
 connexion between them, and of weaving the one into 
 the other. But it is often our true humility to do what 
 we are bidden, even while we know how imperfectly 
 we shall do it ; this rather than to withdraw from the 
 proffered task in that pride which will not endure to 
 attempt anything that it cannot hope to crown with a 
 perfect success. One fitness, indeed, I possess, namely, 
 that I am not wholly unaware of the difficulties of my 
 undertaking. To this I shall address myself now ; only 
 first on one or two points challenging your considerate 
 forbearance. 
 
 Thus, if I preach about Shakespeare, and that 
 method of treatment sounds somewhat novel and unusual 
 in your ears, you will still remember that this is the 
 very thing which I am set to do ; which thus in my 
 office as a minister of Christ, and in his holy house, I 
 could alone consent to do. And then if in so doing I 
 pass over innumerable aspects on which he presents 
 himself to us, and contemplate him only upon one ; 
 though one, indeed, the most important of all, namely,
 
 166 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 the directly moral ; it is not because other aspects are 
 indifferent to me, or as supposing them indifferent to 
 you ; but because here I have no right, as certainly I 
 have no desire, to contemplate him in any other aspect 
 than this. 
 
 What reason have we then to celebrate with a jubilee 
 the fact that exactly on this day, three hundred years 
 since, Shakespeare was born ? or, to put the question 
 in the form and fashion which this hour and this house 
 will naturally suggest, Why do we thank God, wherein 
 have we just ground to praise Him, that such a man 
 has been among us ? What is there in his writings to 
 render them an enduring benefit to us, a possession for 
 ever ; such as we feel makes us richer, wiser, and, using 
 it aright, better than we should have been without it ? 
 This is the question which I propose a little to consider 
 this morning. 
 
 If indeed the literature of a nation were merely an 
 amusement of the cultivated few, the ornament of their 
 idler hours, then what the fashion of it might be, or 
 what manner of men they were who formed it for us, 
 would be of very slight importance indeed ; could 
 scarcely at the best afford matter of serious thanksgiving. 
 We might desire that it should be graceful, as we should 
 desire that the garniture of our houses or of our persons 
 should be graceful ; that it should entertain without
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 167 
 
 corrupting : our desires could scarcely extend further. 
 But a nation's literature is very much more than this. 
 The work of its noblest and most gifted sons, the utter- 
 ance of all which has been deepest and nearest to their 
 hearts, it evokes and interprets the unuttered greatness 
 which is latent in others, but which, except for them, 
 would never have come to the birth. By it the mighty 
 heart of a people may be animated and quickened to 
 heroic enterprise and worthiest endeavour. With the 
 breath of strong and purifying emotions, it can stir to 
 a healthy activity the waters of a nation's life, which 
 would else have stagnated and putrefied and corrupted. 
 Having such offices, being capable of such effects as 
 these, of what vast concern it is, that it should deal with 
 the loftiest problems which man's existence presents; 
 solve them, so far as they are capable of solution here ; 
 point to a solution beyond the veil, where this only 
 is possible ; that, whatever it handles, things high or 
 things low, things eternal or things temporal, spiritual 
 or natural, it should be sound, should be healthy ; clear, 
 so far as possible, of offence ; enlisting our sympathies 
 on the side of the just and generous, the pure and the 
 true. Of what supreme concern it is that those who so 
 contribute to frame and fashion a nation's life, should be 
 men reconciled with God's scheme of the universe, 
 cheerfully working in their own appointed sphere the 
 work which has been assigned them there, accepting
 
 168 
 
 God's world, because it is his, with all its strange 
 riddles and infinite perplexities, with all the burdens 
 which it lays upon each one of us ; not fiercely dashing 
 and shattering themselves, like imprisoned birds, against 
 the bars of their prison-house, or moodily nourishing in 
 their own hearts, and in the hearts of others, thoughts 
 of discontent, revolt, and despair. 
 
 Such a poet, I am bold to affirm, we possess in 
 Shakespeare. For must we not, first of all, thankfully 
 acknowledge a healthiness, a moral soundness in all, or 
 nearly all, which he has written ? that on his part there 
 is no paltering with the everlasting ordinances on which 
 the moral estate of man's life reposes, no challenging of 
 the fitness of these, no summoning of God to answer 
 for Himself at the bar of man for the world which He 
 has created ? Then, too, if he deals with enormous 
 crimes (and he could not do otherwise, for these, alike 
 in fiction and in reality, constitute the tragedy of life) ; 
 yet the crimes which he deals with travel the common 
 road of human guilt, with no attempt upon his part to 
 extend and enlarge the domain of possible sin, and 
 certainly with no desire to paint it in any other colours 
 than its own. He dallies not with forbidden things. All 
 which the Latin language, with so just a moral instinct, 
 styled infanda and nefanda, things as little to be spoken 
 of as done, these, which thus declare themselves unutter- 
 able, remain with rarest exception unuttered by him.
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 169 
 
 And in his dialogue, if we set him beside others of 
 his age and time, how little, by comparison with them, 
 is there which we wish away from him, would fain that 
 he had never written. There are some of his contem- 
 poraries whose jewels, when they offer any such, must be 
 plucked out of the very mire; who seem to revel in 
 loathsome and disgusting images, in all which, for poor 
 human nature's sake, we would willingly put out of 
 sight altogether. What an immeasurable gulf in this 
 matter divides him from them ! while of that which we 
 must regret even in him, a part we have a right to as- 
 cribe to an age, I will not say of less purity, but of less 
 refinement and coarser than our own ; and of that which 
 cannot be thus explained, let us at all events remark 
 how separable almost always it is from the context, 
 leaving, when thus separated, all which remains perfectly 
 wholesome and pure. 
 
 There are writers, but Shakespeare is not one of them, 
 whose evil is inwoven with the texture of their writings, 
 with the very web and woof of these ; writers who defile 
 everything which they touch ; for whom, and ere long 
 for whose readers, nothing is pure, one foul exhalation 
 and miasma of corruption presently enveloping them 
 both. But Shakespeare, if he has wrought any passing 
 wrong, or given any just occasion of offence in the 
 matters of which we speak, let us not forget the com- 
 pensations which he has made ; that we owe to him
 
 170 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 those ideals of perfect womanhood, which are the love- 
 liest, perhaps the most transcendent, creations of his 
 art. Shakespeare's women, we have but to mention, 
 them, and what a procession of female figures, whose 
 very names make music in our ears, move at once before 
 the eyes of our mind. Surely if the woman be in God's 
 intention the appointed guardian of the sanctities of 
 home, the purities of domestic life, we owe him much, 
 who has peopled the world of our imagination with 
 shapes ' so perfect and so peerless ' as are these. True 
 it is that we want far more than art, far more than the 
 highest which art can yield, to keep us holy, to preserve 
 us from the sin of our own hearts, from the sin of the 
 world around us ; and there is no more fatal mistake 
 than to forget this. Neither dare we affirm of Shake- 
 speare himself that he was always true to those ideals 
 of female loveliness which he had created, that he never 
 broke faith with them. We have evidence, he himself 
 supplies it, evidence, as I think, not to be gainsaid, that 
 there was a period of his life when he laid up much 
 matter of after-sorrow and self-reproach for himself; 
 in his own wonderful words, ' gored his own thoughts, 
 sold cheap what is most dear ; ' for what so dear as in- 
 nocency and self-respect ? he, too, a diamond only to be 
 polished in its own dust ; and, like so many a meaner 
 man, making in one part of his life work too large of 
 repentance for another. But with all this we dare affirm
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 171 
 
 an habitual delight in the purest, the noblest, and the 
 fairest on the part of one who, in the workshop of his 
 imagination, forged a Miranda and an Imogen. ' Filth 
 savours but itself,' feeds, and would fain lead others to 
 feed, on the garbage in which alone it finds pleasure. 
 Of Shakespeare be it said, that he who has painted his 
 long gallery of women, holy, and pure, and good, walk- 
 ing in fearless chastity through the world, has painted, 
 in anything like full length, only one wanton woman, a 
 Cressida, throughout all the ample range of his art, and 
 her only for scorn and contempt. 
 
 There is another matter in which, as it seems to me r 
 we owe a large debt of gratitude to Shakespeare, namely, 
 in the fairness, the justice which he displays to all sorts 
 of men, and this even when he was under the strongest 
 temptation to withhold it. He may thus have helped 
 us to something of the same fairness too. Take an 
 example of what I mean. Shakespeare was a true 
 child of the England of the Keformation. He was 
 born of its spirit ; he could never have been what he 
 was, if he had not lived and moved in the atmosphere, 
 intellectual and moral, which it had created. Nor was 
 he merely its unconscious product. One who so loved 
 England, 'this demi-paradise,' who dwelt with such 
 affection on the annals of her past glory, who allows 
 the beatings of his own patriot heart to be so clearly felt 
 and seen as he tells the story of Agincourt, could not
 
 172 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 have been indifferent to the assertion of national inde- 
 pendence which the Reformation involved. Indeed, all 
 of us must have felt that we heard not another, but 
 Shakespeare himself, speaking in those grand words 
 with which he makes King John put back the preten- 
 sions of a foreign priest to 'tithe and toll' in the 
 dominions of an English king. And yet, born as he 
 was of the spirit of the Reformation, with the after- 
 agitations of that mighty struggle not yet subsided, 
 welcome as would have been to multitudes of his hearers 
 a holding up to hatred or ridicule or contempt of the 
 proud prelate, the scandalous friar, the incontinent nun, 
 there is a noble absence in his writings of everything 
 of the kind. As often as he does introduce members 
 of any religious order, they are full of kindly help for 
 others, and themselves grave, serious, devout. Indeed, 
 we number among these the stately and severe Isabella, 
 who, if she exaggerates aught, does it upon virtue's 
 side. A grand self-respect on the part of the poet will 
 not allow him to fall in with the popular cries, to howl 
 with the wolves, to trample on the weak or the prostrate ; 
 and he has helped in this to teach the English people a 
 lesson which they have not altogether failed to learn. 
 That we have here the explanation of what has just been 
 noted, and not in any lingering affection upon his part 
 to Romish doctrines and practices, is clear from the fact 
 that he bears himself exactly in the same fashion
 
 EVERT GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 173 
 
 towards the Puritans. Here, too, there can be no man- 
 ner of doubt that any amount of ridicule or abuse of 
 these sectaries, just beginning to make themselves felt 
 and feared, would have been welcome to large numbers 
 of the playgoers of the time, that excellent sport might 
 have been made of all which was peculiar and extra- 
 vagant in them. Others, indeed, have not scrupled to 
 make it ; but, bating a few passing jests with no malice 
 in them, the shafts of his ridicule are never directed 
 against them ; nor, indeed, we may take this occasion 
 to add, against any earnest form of religious life what- 
 soever. He knew too well the danger of confounding 
 the false and the true of religion in a common reproach ; 
 and how easily the scorn, meant for the one, might be 
 diverted and made to light upon the other. 
 
 But once more : Shakespeare has been found fault 
 with by the critics of the last century, that, as they com- 
 plain, ' he seems to write without any moral purpose,' 
 that he 'makes no just distribution of good or evil.' 
 It is a shallow view of art, as of life, which could 
 alone have given birth to this accusation. It is true that 
 the moral intention of Shakespeare's poetry does not lie 
 on the surface, is not obtruded ; it may and will often 
 escape the careless reader. But it is there, lying deep, 
 as do nearly all the lessons which God teaches us 
 through our own lives, or through the lives of others. 
 To no one of the uninspired writers of the world has
 
 171 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 it been granted, I believe, so strongly to apprehend, 
 so distinctly to make visible, that men reap as they 
 have sown, that the end lies in the beginning, that 
 sooner or later 'the wheel will come full circle,' and 
 'the whirligig of time bring round his revenges.' 
 "Who else makes us so and with such a solemn awe 
 to feel that justice walks the world ' delaying,' it may 
 be, but ' not forgetting,' as is so often the manner with 
 the divine avengers ? Even faults comparatively trivial, 
 like that of Cordelia, he does not fear to shew us what 
 a train of sorrows, for this life at least, they may entail. 
 Certainly we shall look in vain in him, as we look in 
 vain through the moral universe, for that vulgar dis- 
 tribution of rewards and punishments in which some 
 delight; neither is death, but dishonoured life, in his 
 estimate, the worst of ills ; for death may be, and often 
 is, an euthanasia, the divine cutting of some tangled 
 Tmot which no human skill could ever have untied. 
 So, too, if we would recognize these footsteps of God in 
 the world, this Nemesis of life, which he is so careful 
 to trace, we must watch his slightest hints, for in them 
 lies oftentimes the key to, and the explanation of, all. 
 In this, if I may say it with reverence, he often reminds 
 us of Scripture, and will indeed repay almost any 
 amount of patient and accurate study which we may 
 bestow upon him. Let me illustrate what I say. 
 They are but a few idle words dropt at random, which,
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 175 
 
 in the opening scene of King Lear, make only too evi- 
 dent that Gloster had never looked back with serious 
 displeasure at the sin of his youth, standing embodied 
 as it does before him in the person of his bastard 
 son ; that he still regarded it with complacency, rolled 
 it as a sweet morsel under his tongue. This son, his 
 whole being corroded, poisoned, turned to gall and 
 bitterness, by the ever-present consciousness of the 
 cleaving stain of his birth, is made the instrument to 
 undo him, or rather to bring him through bitterest 
 agonies, through the wreck and ruin of his whole 
 worldly felicity, to a final repentance. Indeed for once 
 Shakespeare himself points the moral in those words, so 
 often quoted, but not oftener than they deserve : 
 
 ' The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
 Make instruments to plague us.' 
 
 But for this once that he points the moral of a life, a 
 hundred times he leaves us to point it; as indeed is 
 almost always the manner in that Book of books, which, 
 like Joseph's kingly sheaf, stands up in the midst of 
 the field, that so even the chief among the others may 
 do homage to it. 
 
 Let me note, in connexion with what has just been 
 spoken, that the ideal characters of his art, just as the 
 real characters of actual life, never stand still. They are 
 rising or falling, growing better or growing worse, and 
 ripening thus for their several dooms. Some we behold
 
 176 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 working out their lives into greater clearness and noble- 
 ness, making steps of their dead selves by which they 
 are mounting to higher and better things. Summoned 
 to the more stern and serious business of life, or brought 
 into the school of adversity, we see them taking shame 
 to themselves that they have played the truant hitherto, 
 learning to look at life as something more than a jest, 
 girding themselves in earnest to its tasks and toil, and 
 leaving for ever behind them the frivolity and the vanity, 
 it may be the folly and the sin, in which hitherto their 
 years were spent. There is no dearer argument with 
 Shakespeare than this, nor one to which he oftener 
 returns. And then, on the other side, he shows us them 
 who will not use aright the discipline of life, who wel- 
 come and allow those downward-dragging temptations 
 which beset us all ; these waxing worse and worse, for- 
 feiting what good they once possessed, strengthening in 
 their evil, and falling from one wickedness to another. 
 He shows us a Macbeth, met in that most dangerous 
 hour, the hour of his success, giving place to the Devil, 
 allowing the wicked suggestion of the Evil One room 
 in his heart. Then follows the dread concatenation of 
 crime, one ever drawing on, and in a manner rendering 
 necessary, another, till the end is desolation and despair, 
 the blackness of daikness for ever. Where, I sometimes 
 ask myself as I read, where is there a sermon on the 
 need of resisting temptations at the outset, of treading
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 177 
 
 out these sparks of hell before they have set on fire the 
 whole course of nature, like that ? 
 
 And then, once more : to speak not of what Shake- 
 speare has written, but what Shakespeare was : assuredly 
 we owe him much for the connexion which he has shewn 
 may exist between the loftiest genius and the most per- 
 fect sober-mindedness. He had for ever rendered absurd 
 the notion that genius is of necessity irregular, unable 
 to acquiesce in the ordinary conditions of human exist- 
 ence, or cheerfully to adapt itself to these. Doubtless 
 it has often failed in this. There are too many to whom, 
 whether by their own fault, or by some mysterious des- 
 finy, the very gifts of heaven have been fatal. The shore 
 of human life is strewn with no sadder wrecks than some 
 which these have made ; and not without abundant war- 
 rant did a poet of our own age sum up the lives of many 
 who had gone before him, ' the mighty poets in their 
 misery dead.' Yes, mighty, but not the mightiest of 
 all. He who towers above every other is memorable in 
 all which we know about him for the even balance of 
 all his faculties; for the equable and harmonious de- 
 velopment of his whole being ; for the unpretending 
 simplicity which would not allow him to claim any 
 exemptions, any immunities on the score of genius for 
 himself. In nothing eccentric, in nothing differing to 
 the common eye from any other burgher of your town, 
 he bought and sold in your streets; portioned his 
 
 F
 
 178 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 daughters ; invested in prudent purchases the fruits of 
 honourable toil ; what he had thus fairly earned he was 
 prepared, if occasion required, to defend by such just 
 help as the law afforded; shrank from no humblest duty 
 of every-day life ; and yet all the while knew himself, 
 for he must have known it, the dear heir of a memory 
 which the world should never let die. 
 
 You will be asked, before you leave this church 
 to-day, to contribute to the restoring and beautifying 
 of its chancel, in which the dust of Shakespeare, for it 
 is even so near to us, mingles with the common clay. 
 I will only ask you each to imagine to himself this 
 England of ours without her Shakespeare ; an England 
 in which he had never lived nor sung. What a crown 
 would be stricken from her brow! How would she 
 come down from the pre-eminence of her place as 
 nursing mother of the foremost poet whom the world 
 has seen, whom, we are almost bold to prophesy, it ever 
 will see ! Think how much poorer intellectually, yea, 
 and morally, every one of us would be ; what would 
 have to be withdrawn from circulation, of wisest 
 sayings, of profoundest maxims of life-wisdom, which 
 have now been absorbed into the very tissue of our 
 hearts and minds ! what regions of our fancy, peopled 
 now with marvellous shapes of strength, of grace, of 
 beauty, of dignity, with beings which have far more 
 reality for us than most of those whom we meet in our
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 179 
 
 daily walk, would be empty and depopulated! And 
 remember that this which we speak of would not be our 
 loss alone, nor the loss of those who have lived already, 
 but the disappearance as well of all that delight, of all 
 that instruction, which, so long as the world endures, he 
 will diffuse in circles ever larger, as the recognition of 
 him in his unapproachable greatness becomes every day 
 more unquestioned, as he moves in the ages which are 
 yet to come ' through ever wider avenues of fame.' 
 
 But of this enough. Cease we from man. Let no 
 word be uttered here, which shall even seem to imply 
 that the praise and honour, the admiration and homage, 
 which a man may receive from his fellows are, or can 
 be, the best, the crowning glory of life. Good they 
 are; but they are not the best. Few, in the very 
 nature of things, can be those illustrious sons of memory, 
 dwelling apart from their fellows on the mountain peaks 
 of their solitary grandeur, and dominating from these 
 their own age, and the ages to come. To very few it 
 can be granted, that their names should resound through 
 the centuries, that men shall make long pilgrimages to 
 the place of their birth, gather up the smallest notices 
 of them as infinitely precious, chide an incurious age 
 which suffered so much about them, that would have 
 been priceless to us, to perish for ever, or celebrate with 
 secular solemnities the returning period of their birth- 
 
 N 2
 
 180 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 All this must be the heritage of the fewest ; but because 
 such, it cannot be the best of all ; for a righteous God 
 would never have put his best and fairest beyond the 
 reach of well-nigh all among his children. This is not 
 the best. That is the best, which all may make their 
 own, those with the smallest gifts as certainly as those 
 with the greatest; faithfully to fulfil humble duties; 
 to follow Christ, it may be by lowliest paths, unseen of 
 men, though seen of angels and approved of God ; and 
 so to have names written not on earth, but in heaven, 
 not on the rolls of earthly fame, but in the Lamb's book of 
 life. For, brethren beloved, I should be untrue to that 
 solemn trust which I bear, untrue to those responsibilities 
 from which I can never divest myself, if I did not remind 
 you, above all if I did not remind you on such a day as 
 this, that goodness is more than greatness, and grace 
 than gifts ; that men attain to heaven not soaring on 
 the wings of genius, but patiently climbing by steep 
 stairs of faith and love and obedience ; that the brightest 
 crowns, if all their brightness is of earth and none 
 from heaven, are doomed to wither ; that there is but one 
 amaranthine crown, even that which Christ gives to 
 them, be they high or low, wise or simple, emperors or 
 clowns, who have loved, and served, and obeyed Him. 
 
 This crown they have obtained, the serious and sage 
 poets who have consecrated their divine faculty to the 
 service of Him who lent it. For myself, I am strong to
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 181 
 
 believe that from one so gentle, so tender, so just, so 
 true, as was Shakespeare, the grace to make this highest 
 consecration was not withholden ; that we have a right 
 to number him with Dante, with Spenser, with Milton, 
 and with all that august company of poets 
 
 ' Who sing, and singing in their glory move." 
 
 His intimate, in some sense his profound, acquaintance 
 with Scripture, no one can deny, or the strong grasp 
 which he had of its central truths. He knew the deep 
 corruption of our fallen nature, the desperate wickedness 
 of the heart of man ; else he would never have put into 
 the mouth of a prince of stainless life such a confession 
 as this : ' I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I 
 could accuse me of such things that it were better 
 my mother had not borne me, . . . with more offences 
 at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, ima- 
 gination to give them shape, or time to act them in.' 
 He has set forth the scheme of our redemption in words 
 as lovely and as exquisite as have ever flowed from the 
 lips of uninspired man : 
 
 ' Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once ; 
 And He that might the vantage best have took, 
 Found out the remedy.' 
 
 He has put home to the holiest here their need of an 
 infinite forgiveness from Him who requires truth in 
 the inward parts :
 
 182 EVERY GOOD GIFT FROM ABOVE 
 
 ' How would you be, 
 
 If He, which is the top of judgment, should 
 But judge you as you are 1 ' 
 
 He was one who was well aware what a stewardship 
 was his own in those marvellous gifts which had been 
 entrusted to him, for he has himself told us, 
 
 ' Heaven does with us as we with torches do, 
 Not light them for themselves ; for if our virtues 
 Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
 AB if we had them not.' 
 
 And again he has told us that 
 
 ' spirits are not finely touched 
 But to fine issues ; ' 
 
 assuredly not ignorant how finely his own had been 
 touched, and what would be demanded from him in 
 return. He was one who certainly knew that there is 
 none so wise that he can ' circumvent God ' ; and that 
 for a man, whether he be called early or late, 
 ' Kipeness is all.' 
 
 Who shall persuade us that he abode outside of that holy 
 temple of our faith, whereof he has uttered such glorious 
 things, admiring its beauty, but not himself entering to 
 worship there ? One so real, so truthful, as all which 
 we learn about Shakespeare declares him to have been, 
 assuredly fell in with no idle form of words, when in 
 that last testament which he dictated so shortly before 
 his death, he first of all, and before all, commended his
 
 EVERY GOOD GIFT FEOM ABOVE 183 
 
 soul to God his Creator ; and this (I quote his express 
 words), 'hoping and assuredly believing through the 
 only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour to be made 
 partaker of life everlasting.' May God grant this to 
 us all.
 
 184 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 
 
 SERMON XV. 
 
 ON THE HEAKING OF PKAYEB. 
 
 JOHN xvi. 23, 24. 
 
 Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in 
 my name, he will give it you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing 
 in my name : ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be 
 full. 
 
 THE Church, on this Rogation Sunday, is still in an 
 attitude of waiting, still seeking and asking, as that 
 name implies, the promise of the Father, the Pente- 
 costal gift of the Holy Ghost, who should abide with 
 her for evermore. This Sunday then, which we have 
 reached in our Christian Year, and the Gospel which is ^ 
 appointed for it, from which my text is drawn, will 
 naturally lead us to the subject of prayer, as that which 
 will best befit the day. The subject is eminently in 
 season now, even as it can never be out of season at 
 any time. He who knew what was in man, knew the 
 backwardness to prayer which is in the heart of every 
 one of us ; and this, notwithstanding all the present 
 rewards, all the present delights, which it often brings
 
 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 185 
 
 with it ; He knew that we needed every motive, every 
 argument to be brought to bear upon us, which might 
 prompt us to a due and diligent performance of this 
 excellent duty. It is for this reason that his Word is 
 so full of goads and incentives to prayer. Now we 
 have Christ, our great exemplar, set before us as Him- 
 self praying, rising up a great while before day, and 
 retiring into a solitary place for prayer; and this his 
 prayer no make-believe, but with strong crying and 
 tears. Now He speaks a parable to us that men ought 
 always to pray, and not to faint ; l now He shews us a 
 Peter delivered from Herod's sword by the prayer made 
 without ceasing of the Church for him ; 2 or again, as 
 in the verses before us, He pledges his faithfulness and 
 truth to us that our prayers shall be answered, that 
 whatsoever we ask the Father in his name, He will 
 give it ; and then, mingling in his own gracious manner 
 command and promise together, He goes on to say, 
 * Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.' 
 
 Let us then, my brethren, a little consider, 
 
 1st, What it is to ask in the name of Christ. 
 
 2ndly, With what necessary limitations, which, 
 though unuttered, must yet be understood, the promise 
 is to be taken, that what we ask we shall receive. 
 
 And 3rdly, What the blessed fruit of asking and 
 receiving will be ; namely, that our joy will be full. 
 1 Luke xviii. 1. 2 Acts xii. 5-7.
 
 186 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 
 
 And first, 'Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father 
 in my name, He will give it you.' What is it to 
 ask in the name of Christ ? Plainly it must mean a 
 great deal more than merely the closing of each of our 
 prayers and petitions with a certain form of words, as 
 that we ask all for Christ's sake. To ask in the name 
 of Christ is to ask as those who know themselves to 
 have been set by God's grace in the kingdom of the 
 reconciled and the redeemed ; as those who have been 
 brought near to the Father by the Son, and who could 
 not, and who continually confess that they could not, 
 have been brought near in any other way. To ask in 
 the name of Christ is to plead his merits, to make 
 mention of his righteousness ; to shelter ourselves and all 
 our own sin and guilt and shame behind this righteous- 
 ness of his ; to acknowledge with our lips, to confess 
 with our hearts, that by a sinful nature and by an evil 
 practice we are heirs of shame, children of wrath, less 
 than the least of God's mercies ; that we could make no 
 claim to the very smallest of these, but only to indig- 
 nation and wrath, and to God's extreme malediction 
 which is against all sin, if Christ had not died, if Christ 
 had not risen again, died for our sins, risen again for 
 our justification ; if Christ had not ascended to the 
 right hand of the Father ; if He were not there even 
 now, our Mediator, our Intercessor, our Advocate, our 
 High Priest. This it is to ask in the Son's name ; no
 
 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 187 
 
 cold and heartless formality of the lips, but a deep 
 conviction, modifying, moulding, pervading, colouring 
 all our prayers, that in Christ, and only in Christ, God 
 is perfectly well pleased ; and in us only so far as we 
 are found in Him; that all our acceptance with God, 
 all our right to be heard by God, rests solely and 
 exclusively on the work for sinners which Christ once 
 accomplished on Calvary, and is evermore pleading in 
 heaven. 
 
 But secondly, we have the promise, ' Whatsoever ye 
 shall ask the Father in my name, He will give it you.' 
 But is this the fact? Does this come true in our 
 actual life ? Is not the promise here bigger than the 
 actual fulfilment of the promise in our own experience, 
 or in the experience of others? Questions such as 
 these, not unmixed with misgivings, have probably, at 
 one time or another, passed through and perplexed the 
 minds of us all. But take the words with such limita- 
 tions as, though not expressed, must plainly be supplied, 
 and there will be found no exaggeration in the promise ; 
 nothing to which the experience of God's saints cannot 
 set its seal. Some limitation these words, in the very 
 necessity of things, must receive. Plainly Christ does 
 not pledge Himself here that his Father will give things 
 harmful to his children, even though they in their 
 blindness and shortsightedness should ask such at his 
 hands. To his enemies He may grant their desires, and
 
 188 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 
 
 in the very granting plague them more than if they had 
 been disappointed of their lust. They may seek, like 
 murmuring Israelites, their quails, and may obtain them, 
 may eat and be well filled, and perish while the meat is 
 yet in their mouths. 1 They may ask to be permitted, 
 like Balaam, to go on some errand of covetousness and 
 wrong, and they may be permitted in God's very anger 
 to go, so rushing headlong on their doom. Like the 
 people of Gadara, they may beseech the Lord to depart 
 out of their coasts ; and He may take them at their 
 word and leave them, and they may see his face again 
 no more. 2 But with other counsels and by other 
 methods He deals with his own. They too may ask 
 amiss ; for there is much of dark, much of carnal in them 
 still. They too may ask that which, if He were to 
 grant, they could not bear ; that which would puff them 
 up, which would lead them far away from the paths of 
 their true blessedness, which in one shape or another 
 would be their harm, perhaps their ruin ; and this He 
 no more grants them, however eagerly, however passion- 
 ately they may demand it, than a loving mother would 
 give the red berries of the poisonous nightshade to a 
 wayward and fretful child, even though it should 
 stretch out its eager hands with crying and tears for 
 the deadly boon. There is no pledge then here that 
 God will give any but good things to his children. 
 1 Ps. Ixxviii. 29-31. * Mark v. 17.
 
 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 189 
 
 Other things in very faithfulness and love He must 
 withhold, however they may be almost tempted to accuse 
 Him for this that his promise has failed. 
 
 But, again, there is no pledge in these words, that 
 God will give to his children what they ask exactly in 
 the form, shape, and manner in which they ask it, even 
 though the thing itself be according to his will. Here, 
 too, they must trust in Him, trust in a Father's love ; 
 be sure that He will grant them their desires either in 
 the shape in which they present these to Him, or in a 
 better shape, with some higher and completer fulfilment 
 than it has entered into their thoughts to conceive. 
 Strange, wonderful, mysterious, are the ways in which 
 God answers the prayers of his people. Well for us 
 that we do not always know how He will answer them ; 
 else, I believe, many a prayer would die upon our lips, 
 and we should not venture to offer it. We ask one 
 thing, and He appears to give us quite another ; leads 
 none in the path by which they fain would go ; seems to 
 baffle, defeat, disappoint those whom He loves the best ; 
 and yet all the while He is the Faithful and the True, 
 is fulfilling the desires of them that fear Him, For what 
 is the desire in which for them all other desires are 
 summed up ? Is it not first and chiefly that they may be 
 holy, that they may be among those who shall see his 
 face with joy, and stand without fault before his throne 
 for ever ? If such be their prayer oi prayers, can any
 
 190 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 
 
 dealing, any discipline of God's, which helps, furthers, 
 sets forward this, be other than an answer to prayer ? 
 Like the sons of Zebedee they sue for places in his king- 
 dom, places near to Him, for they love Him ; but, short- 
 sighted as they are, anticipating that, in some brief and 
 compendious manner, that kingdom shall be theirs ; and 
 little guessing of the cup which they must drink, and 
 the baptism with which they must be baptized, before 
 ever that kingdom can be indeed their own. 1 But, asking 
 the end, He counts that they have also asked the means. 
 Asking holiness, He counts that they have asked all with- 
 out which that holiness would never have been attained. 
 Asking to be near Him, He counts that they asked each 
 one of the painful and toilsome steps by which the 
 heavenly heights can be scaled, and that nearness 
 won. 
 
 They would not have dared explicitly to seek this 
 discipline for themselves. Flesh and blood would have 
 shrunk back from such a prayer ; but implicitly they 
 did ask it, even the cup of purifying sorrow, the baptism 
 of cleansing pain; and He, in whose love there is no 
 weakness, who means that his own shall praise Him, not 
 for an hour here, but for an eternity in heaven, listens to 
 the central desire of their hearts, the deepest voice of 
 their souls, which is for holiness ; gives them what they 
 asked, though He does not give it to them as they asked 
 1 Matt. xx. 20.
 
 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 191 
 
 it. Their beloved, the desire of their eyes, go forth to 
 distant lands, and they pray that they may yet see their 
 faces again in the flesh. They see them not here again ; 
 but He gives them blessed assurances that they shall yet 
 behold them once more in heaven. Or they would fain 
 have walked by smooth paths, and in company with one 
 beloved partner of their life, to the City of the heavenly 
 rest ; and they have asked that such paths, and in such 
 companionship, might be appointed for their treading. 
 Little by little He makes them to understand that it is 
 by other roads, in loneliness, perhaps, and solitude, and 
 walking, it may be, in the shadow of some life-long 
 grief, that the rest of the heavenly City shall be won. 
 But still, as that was the central and cardinal longing 
 of their hearts, to stand within those diamond walls, to 
 see there the King in his beauty, He is faithful to every 
 jot and tittle of his promise, so long as He makes all 
 things for them work together to this their highest 
 blessedness, and consummation, and joy. 
 
 So much, dear friends, to vindicate the faithfulness 
 of God, when He answers prayer in other ways than 
 those which beforehand we have laid down to ourselves, 
 and would fain lay down to Him. Yet it is not meant 
 by this that there is not many a prayer which receives 
 its direct and simple answer; and this in the very 
 form in which it was laid out before his throne ; and 
 many more which would do the same, if only they
 
 192 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 
 
 fulfilled the one condition which Christ has imposed 
 on our prayers : ' Whatsoever things ye desire, when 
 ye pray believe that ye receive them, and ye shall 
 have them.' But how hard it is thus to believe. It 
 is comparatively easy to pray to regard prayer as 
 a healthy, elevating, purifying exercise of the soul; 
 which must have a reactive influence for good on our 
 hearts and our affections ; but to regard it as indeed 
 a speaking with God, such a speaking with God as 
 must be followed by a speaking of his to us in return, 
 to follow our prayers with the eye of faith, nothing 
 doubting that they will come back to us in the shape of 
 the strength, the grace, the blessing we have sought for> 
 this we find most hard ; sometimes we do not so much 
 as attempt to do it. Take an evidence of the slowness 
 to this which the Church, while yet in the warmth of 
 its first love and earnestness of its first faith, supplied. 
 Peter was in prison, in the dungeon of Herod, appointed 
 to death. 'Prayer/ we are told, 'was made of the 
 Church without ceasing unto God for him ; ' to wit, 
 that he might be delivered from the sword of Herod 
 and from all the expectation of the Jews. But when 
 this prayer of the Church had been duly heard, and an 
 angel had stricken off the chains from the Apostle's 
 hands, and the doors of his prison had opened of their 
 own accord, and he came, a free man, to those who 
 were in the very act of praying that he might be
 
 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 193 
 
 delivered, that he might be set free, they would not 
 believe it, said it was his angel, affirmed that the 
 maid was mad who brought them the assurance that 
 their prayers had been heard, and that what they 
 sought had been granted indeed. 1 And we, my 
 brethren, are just as slow, or slower, to believe than 
 they were; slow above all to believe in this mystery 
 of prayer, a mystery hidden very often from the wise 
 and prudent, but revealed unto babes. For what is it 
 we need, to enter into this mystery ? Surely it is that 
 of which we have so little; it is the child's heart, 
 the belief of the child in its Father's love, and that He 
 will withhold from it no manner of thing which is 
 good. 
 
 If, then, you would obtain, ask, expecting to obtain. 
 Launch forth the arrows of your prayer, not as into 
 vacant air and empty space ; but let the very throne of 
 God be the mark and scope which you aim at ; follow 
 them, these wondrous arrows which, winged by faith, 
 can pierce even heaven ; follow them with the eye of 
 faith till they have alighted there ; and then expect in 
 one shape or another to hear of them again. He that 
 made the ear, shall He not hear ? He into whose own 
 ear there ascend from this earth of ours so many vain, 
 so many proud, so many wanton, so many cruel, so 
 many blasphemous words, the harsh grating discords of 
 
 1 Acts xii. 16. 
 
 O
 
 194 ON THE HEARING OF PEAYER 
 
 sinful earth, shall He not hear the sighing of contrite 
 hearts, the voices of faithful supplication, the appeals 
 of children to their Father's love ; these which are the 
 harmonies no less of heaven than of earth, as sweet 
 or sweeter than the hallelujahs of angels to Him that 
 sitteth upon the throne ? 
 
 Having, then, such promises as these, see, I beseech 
 you, to this matter of prayer, to which such precious 
 promises are linked. Other arguments I might use. I 
 might remind you, and your own experience would set 
 a seal to my words, that it is the very breath of your 
 spiritual life, that without which this life will pine, 
 wither, and die. And if there be any here to-day who 
 have yet to learn this, I cannot refrain from saying, and 
 that with all the plainness of speech which our office 
 as ambassadors of Christ imposes, which the vital im- 
 portance of the subject demands, whatever decencies 
 of a religious life you may be maintaining before the 
 world, whatever fair show of a religious profession you 
 may be making before the Church, yet if you be living 
 without earnest constant prayer, prayer which is prayer 
 indeed, a pressing out of your own darkness into God's 
 marvellous light, a laying hold of his strength in your 
 own utter weakness, you are living without God in 
 the world; and therefore knowing nothing of those 
 mighty transforming powers, powers of the world to 
 come, which are evermore at work in his Church,
 
 ON THE HEARING OF PRAYER 195 
 
 changing those who submit themselves to them, from 
 carnal to spiritual, from earthly to heavenly, from 
 children of this world to children of the living God. 
 Ask, then, I beseech you, one and all, that so you 
 may receive, and that your joy may be full ; not scanty, 
 as now even for the best of us it too often is, but 
 abundant ; not intermittent, but continuous and un- 
 failing ; that, so receiving, you may not be poor, when 
 such riches, riches of grace and strength, may be yours 
 for the asking ; that you may not be sick, with all the 
 means of health within your reach ; but may by your 
 own experience make proof that, when God gave to 
 his children prayer, He gave them the golden key 
 which unlocks the treasure-house of heaven, bade them, 
 so to speak, to help themselves ; said to them, and said 
 not in vain, that all things were theirs. 
 
 02
 
 19G THE KINGDOM WHICH COMETH 
 
 SERMON XVI. 1 
 
 THE KINGDOM WHICH COMETH NOT WITH OBSERVATION. 
 
 LUKE xvii. 20. 
 The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. 
 
 WE have here the proclamation of a law which holds 
 good, not merely in the kingdom of heaven, that 
 kingdom of divine operations, but one which, with 
 only few and partial exceptions, holds good no less in 
 every region of human activity; for it is not merely 
 this Church of the living God, the mightiest and most 
 marvellous birth which the world has ever seen, that 
 ' cometh not with observation ' ; but of every great 
 movement, great event, great institution, of all in short, 
 or of well nigh all, which has exercised a deep and 
 lasting influence on the after- history of the world, it 
 may be noted that it has had small and unobserved 
 beginnings, has grown up like the mustard seed^ 
 without observation ; while loud and grand commence- 
 ments, summoning as with the sound of a trumpet the 
 whole world to behold what a mighty birth is at hand, 
 
 1 Preached on Whitsunday.
 
 NOT WITH OBSERVATION 197 
 
 or what a glorious thing has just been born ; these are 
 almost sure to come to nothing, to end in shameful 
 discomfiture and defeat. Thus, who has ever traced the 
 obscure rudiments, the first foundations of that won- 
 drous city on the banks of the Tiber, which was for so 
 many centuries queen and mistress of the world ; and 
 which, when the sceptre of temporal sovereignty dropped 
 irom her aged hand, presently grew young again, and 
 wielded, as with a new lease of life and of power, a 
 spiritual dominion more wide and wonderful than ever 
 her temporal had been ? Who knows the secrets of the 
 birth of Rome ? But who does not know with how loud 
 a promise, with how vainglorious an announcement, an 
 older city was proposed to be built, the city and the 
 tower whose top should reach unto heaven; what a 
 name and a fame its builders designed beforehand for 
 themselves, organizing, as they were purposed to do, 
 into one grand society all the tribes and families of 
 the earth ; l and how, in a little while, nothing but a 
 deformed and shapeless mass of bricks remained to 
 tell of the city which should have been at once the 
 symbol and the centre of their world -wide sovereignty 
 and dominion ? 
 
 And this silent coming of whatever shall prove great 
 indeed, true in many regions of human activity, is 
 truest of all in that highest region of all, where human 
 1 Gen. xi. 4.
 
 198 THE KINGDOM WHICH COMETH 
 
 and divine most work together. ' It is the glory of 
 God to conceal a matter.' If other momentous births 
 ' come not with observation,' with pomp and circum- 
 stance and pride, challenging notice, noised abroad by 
 the thousand tongues of rumour and report, least of all 
 does the kingdom of God come with these. And for 
 the confirming of this assertion, what history so won- 
 derful as that of this kingdom's first coming ; of the 
 exaltation, within three centuries after its first planting, 
 of the Church of Christ upon the high places of the earth? 
 By what silent courses, by what unmarked degrees, by 
 what invisible agencies did that new life, whereof the 
 Son of God was the Author and Giver, impart of itself 
 to an old and dying world ; working its way from within 
 to without, from below to above, from the centre to the 
 circumference ; gradually transmuting, transforming, 
 and transfiguring whatever was brought into contact 
 with it ? How little did that proud heathen world, how 
 little did imperial Rome, throned in her golden palaces, 
 amusing herself in her bloody amphitheatres, dream 
 that she nourished within her bosom a mightier than 
 herself, a weakness which would be stronger than all 
 her strength, a foolishness which should be wiser than 
 all her wisdom, a patience which should weary out all 
 her cruelty, a love which should vanquish all her hate. 
 To one seeing but as man sees, where was there ever a 
 strength, a splendour, a glory like hers, the fourth beast
 
 NOT WITH OBSERVATION 199 
 
 which Daniel saw, 'dreadful and terrible, and strong 
 exceedingly,' whose iron teeth had broken in pieces all 
 the kingdoms of the earth, and was stamping the residue 
 of them beneath its feet ? l And where, on the other 
 hand, was a weakness like theirs, the votaries, in the 
 judgment of one of the wisest and most tolerant among 
 the heathen, of ' an exaggerated and detestable super- 
 stition ; ' followers c of one Jesus, which was dead,' 
 whom somewhere in Syria a Roman governor had once 
 put to death, but whom these obstinate and perverse 
 enthusiasts ' affirmed to be still alive ' ? 
 
 What could be the issue of a conflict between op- 
 posing forces so unequally matched as these? What 
 credit would he have found, who in the second, yes, and 
 far on into the third century, had announced to the 
 princes of this world, the leaders of its thought, the 
 wielders of its power, to Roman senator or Greek phi- 
 losopher, that the future was not with them; that it 
 had passed out of their hands ; that it belonged to the 
 adherents of this despised Oriental superstition ? Would 
 they have believed him, if he had told them that the 
 palace of their Csesars itself, not to speak of their 
 own households, was already filled with the votaries of 
 it ; that the very ground beneath their feet was honey- 
 combed with the long galleries wherein were laid thou- 
 sands and tens of thousands who had already lived and 
 1 Dan. vii. 7,
 
 200 THE KINGDOM WHICH COMETH 
 
 died in the faith of this crucified Man ; nay, that the 
 hour was coming, was even at the door, when Rome 
 herself, in the person of the highest representative of her 
 majesty and her power, should worship before Him, and 
 should confess to Him as Lord of lords and King of 
 kings ? 
 
 Strange, incredible announcement ! and yet, as we 
 know, true notwithstanding. The leaven wrought. The 
 mustard seed grew. The stone cut out without hands 
 became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. 1 
 The waters which issued from the sanctuary, reaching to 
 the ankles at first, were anon to the knees, and then 
 presently to the loins, and ere long waters to swim in, 
 a river that could not be passed over; 2 while yet all 
 this, attracting slightest notice, coming unobserved, 
 unawares overtook a world which little knew what and 
 how great blessings were about to break forth upon it ; 
 the kingdom only revealing itself for what it was, when 
 all the preparations for it were consummated and com- 
 pleted. 
 
 But this, my brethren, which is thus true of the 
 kingdom as a whole, shows itself also true continually 
 of that same kingdom as it severally comes to one and 
 another who receives it. I do not deny that it comes 
 sometimes and to some souls as in the storm and in the 
 earthquake, in mighty shakings for them as of the earth 
 1 Dan. ii. 34, 35. 2 Ezek. xlvii. 1-5.
 
 NOT WITH OBSERVATION 201 
 
 and of the heaven ; but more often far in the still small 
 voice, finding its way by secret invisible channels, such 
 as it fashions for itself, into the hearts of men ; chang- 
 ing everything, and in the end glorifying everything ; 
 and yet all the while working unseen, its operations 
 withdrawn from the world's eyes, nay, sometimes, and 
 for a while almost withdrawn from the knowledge of 
 them over whom this mighty change is passing. 
 
 And if you ask the reason of this, that reason is not 
 far to seek. These are its actings, because it is the 
 kingdom of the Spirit ; of that Spirit which was, as upon 
 this day, poured out on all flesh ; on all, that is, who do 
 not resist and close their hearts against it, on as many 
 as the Lord God shall call ; this kingdom therefore being 
 round us and about us, as truly round and about our spirits 
 as the air is round and about our bodies, sustaining them 
 by that equable pressure which it exerts on every side ; 
 being, as it is, the element by which those bodies live, 
 inhaled and again exhaled at every breath which we 
 draw. Even so fares it with this kingdom of the Spirit, 
 encompassing every one of us like a spiritual atmo- 
 sphere; where it has not entered, seeking to enter; 
 fashioning ways of entrance for itself; standing at the 
 door and knocking ; and never content till it constitutes 
 itself a kingdom of God within us, and not merely one 
 round about us. For, indeed, this is the meaning of 
 all the discipline of our lives, of the joy and the sorrow,
 
 202 THE KINGDOM WHICH COMETH 
 
 of the honour and the dishonour, of the health and the 
 sickness, of those days when God has seemed to make 
 a hedge about us and ours, so that no evil has come 
 nigh our dwelling; and of those other days when, it 
 may be, He has broken forth upon us, breach upon, 
 breach, and the grave has said ' Give, give,' and take 
 our choicest and our best. What, I say, is the meaning 
 of all this, of the height and the depth, the joy and the 
 sorrow, the chances and changes innumerable of our 
 mortal life ; nor to speak of more intimate and mys- 
 terious dealings of God with our spirits ; what but that 
 by one admonishment or another, in answer to this 
 knocking or to that, we might open to Him the door, 
 and, He entering in, the knigdom might be indeed 
 within us, and we, in the highest and most blessed sense 
 of all, in the kingdom ? 
 
 No more is needed for this than the act of our faith, 
 that we believe and receive that, as on this day, the last, 
 highest, and most abiding gift of God to his creatures, 
 a gift implied in the creation and constitution of man, 
 but one which could not be actually conferred in its- 
 fulness and universality, until Christ had glorified the 
 nature of man at the right hand of the Father ; that, 
 as on this day, this gift was imparted, this kingdom of 
 the Spirit founded. For so it is ; and thenceforward 
 that poor mean weary world which our natural eyes 
 behold, and in which our natural lives are spent, is not
 
 NOT WITH OBSERVATION 203 
 
 all ; that world of getting and spending, of rising up 
 to toil and lying down for weariness, of pushing and 
 striving, of one losing and another winning, with all its 
 innumerable meannesses and falsehoods is not all. Be- 
 side it and behind it, too often hidden for us by it, there 
 is another world ; I do not mean a world very far off, 
 such as we may hope to reach by and bye, in another 
 state of existence, but one in which we may be living and 
 moving even now, in which tens of thousands are living 
 and moving at this moment, a world, or call it rather a 
 kingdom, of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
 Ghost. It is one which can take all the meanness, the 
 weariness, and the dreariness, and the vanity out of that 
 other world ; or if it leave ought of these, leaving only 
 enough to make us yearn and cry for a still more perfect 
 deliverance ; while in this taking, incomplete though it 
 may be, a pledge is given us, that these shall one day 
 disappear altogether, and the shadows give place to- 
 substance, and the emptiness to fulness, and the false- 
 hoods to realities, and the weariness to perfect rest, and 
 the meanness and mutability to the glory, dignity, and 
 honour of that kingdom, which knows no change, even, 
 as it knows no sin. 
 
 Yes, dear friends, such a kingdom not merely will be, 
 but is. Our eyes may be holden, and we may not see 
 it ; God may be in this place, and we may not know it. 
 Our waking dreams may be of far other things than
 
 204 THE KINGDOM WHICH COMETH 
 
 those shining stairs which connect heaven and earth, 
 with angels ascending and descending by them on the 
 Son of Man ; but as our faith does not first create these 
 blessed and transcendent facts, so as little does our un- 
 belief do away with them or destroy them. That king- 
 dom cannot deny itself ; though, alas ! we may only too 
 easily deny our part and portion in it. 
 
 I have spoken of it mainly, and to this I have been 
 naturally led by the festival of this day, as the king- 
 dom of the Spirit ; and yet when I remind you of that 
 share in this kingdom which every one among us may 
 claim, I am myself reminded that I should not omit fur- 
 ther to remind you that the Spirit who was as upon this 
 day given is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son ; 
 and the kingdom which was as upon this day founded, 
 the kingdom of the Father and of the Son. There can 
 be nothing more dangerous, as past experience has 
 abundantly shown, than to separate, even in thought, 
 the gift of to-day from the work of Good Friday, of the 
 Easter morning, of the Ascension Day. It is because 
 the Son of God has died for our sins, and risen again 
 for our justification, and having ascended, has sat down 
 on the right hand of the Majesty on high, it is there- 
 fore that this Spirit is given, even as a pure river of 
 water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the 
 throne of God and of the Lamb ; in other words, as the 
 Spirit of the Father and the Son. Know Him as such ;
 
 NOT WITH OBSERVATION 205 
 
 no mere vague floating influence, but a personal Spirit, 
 as truly a Person as the other Persons of the ever-blessed 
 Trinity ; so manifold and so mighty in his operations, 
 that the seven lamps of fire burning before the throne 
 are declared to be the seven spirits of this one Spirit, 
 the sevenfold mighty workings of the same ; even as 
 you heard this morning, that it was in tongues of divided 
 flame He first descended on the Church. As light, that 
 is, and as fire ; as light to illumine, light to make mani- 
 fest all the hidden things of our darkness ; as fire to 
 warm, and also to consume ; yes, blessed be God, as fire 
 to consume, to burn up the chaff with unquenchable 
 fire ; for when we think, dear friends, of all the chaff, 
 the straw, the stubble, the dross in ourselves, shall we 
 not thank God that this Spirit is fire, and, whatever 
 else He may consume or spare, and on that awful ques- 
 tion I enter not now, pledged to burn up all this with 
 unquenchable fire ? 
 
 For the rest, let Him come in this way or in that, 
 with observation or without it ; only see that in what- 
 ever shape He comes and his kingdom comes, you 
 welcome and receive Him. The wind bloweth where it 
 listeth. If only it be filling the sails of thy soul, it 
 matters not so much to thee whence it cometh ; nor, if 
 only it be bearing thee heavenward, whither it goeth. 
 If only thou findest thyself in the kingdom of the Spirit, 
 that Spirit teaching, that Spirit guiding, that Spirit
 
 206 NOT WITH OBSERVATION 
 
 enlightening, that Spirit sanctifying, ask not too curi- 
 ously by what steps thou earnest thither. 
 
 It is blessedness enough, and more than enough, 
 to be there ; for that kingdom to which thou belongest 
 may be a hidden one now, grudgingly acknowledged, 
 or not acknowledged at all, by the wise and prudent 
 of this world, and thou a hidden one in that kingdom ; 
 yet of this be sure, that, however without observation 
 now, it will in the end be the observed of all observers, 
 the admired of all admirers, the cynosure of every eye, 
 the one glory when every other glory shall have paled ; 
 the one name and fame which shall survive when every 
 other shall have passed away as a noise ; the one king- 
 dom which, itself immovable, shall behold the wreck 
 and the ruin of every kingdom besides ; and then, in 
 that kingdom of the Spirit, that kingdom of the truth, 
 wherein goodness shall be the only measure of greatness, 
 and each and all shall wear an outward beauty exactly 
 corresponding to the inward beauty of the Christ which 
 shall be formed in them ; or, alas ! shall put on an 
 outward deformity corresponding to the inner unloveli- 
 ness of their hearts and lives ; then, I say, in that 
 kingdom of the truth, all that are of the truth, and thou, 
 if thou art of this, shall shine out as the sun in the king- 
 dom of their Father, for Christ, who is their life, shall 
 have appeared, and they too shall appear with Him in 
 glory.
 
 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARE 207 
 
 SERMON XVII. 
 
 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK. 
 
 PHIL. iii. 12. 
 Not as though I had already attained. 
 
 How wonderful is this language on the lips of St. Paul, 
 that he, after so many years of discipleship, after so 
 many years of apostleship, should still be striving, still 
 pressing forward, should still feel how far short of the 
 goal he was ; and forgetting the things which were 
 behind, should reach forward still to those which were 
 before ; with all his knowledge of Christ, counting that 
 there was a knowledge of Him, higher, deeper, larger, 
 fuller than any to which he had yet attained, that there 
 was a power of Christ and of his resurrection which 
 as yet he had not known, but which it was possible 
 for him to know. And if this language is wonderful 
 on the lips of the Apostle, there must in Christ be a 
 wonder corresponding. What, we may fitly ask, must 
 be the glory, beauty, and excellency of that Lord whom 
 St. Paul for so many years had served; when he, the 
 great Apostle himself, had only caught some glimpses
 
 208 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK 
 
 of these ? What must be the power of Christ in them 
 that believe, when he had hitherto known this power 
 only in part ? You remember, perhaps, how the 
 mightiest discoverer in natural science of modern times, 
 I mean Sir Isaac Newton, said toward the close of his 
 life, that he was but as a child, who had gathered a 
 few shells on the shores of an illimitable sea. He saw 
 stretching before him a vast ocean of knowledge, which 
 his life had been too short, which even Ms powers 
 had been too weak, to explore. What lie felt in things 
 natural, St. Paul felt in things spiritual, that there 
 were heights above him which he had never scaled, 
 depths beneath him which he had never fathomed; 
 that, rich as he was in Christ, there were yet hidden 
 in that Lord treasures of wisdom and knowledge which 
 would make him far richer still; that God was un- 
 searchable, unfathomable, a shoreless sea, an ocean of 
 perfections ; of which he understood a little, of which 
 he was understanding ever something more ; but which 
 man could no more take in than he could hold the sea 
 and all its multitudinous waves in the hollow of his 
 hand. Skirts of his glory St. Paul had seen, but not 
 his train which filled the temple of the universe. 
 Secrets of Christ's power he had known, who in this 
 very Epistle declared, 'I can do all things through 
 Christ which strengtheneth me ; ' and yet he felt that 
 there was a power of Christ, transcending all which
 
 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK 209 
 
 even he had known; and like some great earthly 
 conqueror, who should esteem nothing won while any- 
 thing remained to win, nothing accomplished while 
 anything was yet possible to accomplish ; who slighted, 
 despised, trampled under foot all his old successes in 
 the eager pursuit of new ; even so this mighty spiritual 
 athlete, this captain, commander, conqueror, leader of 
 the hosts of the Lord, could not stay his steps, could 
 not arrest his course. For himself, and for those whom 
 he had hitherto led from victory to victory, he was 
 still covetous of more; more victory over sin, more 
 triumphs over the world, more casting down of the 
 strongholds of Satan, more spoiling of principalities and 
 powers; to be more clothed with humility, to follow 
 after a more perfect holiness, to know more of that 
 love of Christ which passes knowledge. 
 
 I have thought, dear friends, that we might all be 
 fitly reminded what on these matters was the mind of 
 Paul ; how little he, this eminent servant of God, was 
 content with any attainments which he had already 
 made ; because it is not to be denied that there is much 
 continually tempting every one of us to stand still, to 
 acquiesce and rest satisfied in that whereunto we have 
 attained, instead of pressing forward to the things which 
 are before. How often do we see those in the Church 
 of Christ, who appear to take for granted that there is 
 to be one, and one only, serious struggle for them in the 
 
 f
 
 210 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK 
 
 whole course of their spiritual existence, the passage, 
 so to speak, from darkness to light, from death to life. 
 But this conflict over, this passage successfully accom- 
 plished, being thus ' converted,' they appear also V> 
 take for granted that no other conflict deserving the 
 name remains for them. This struggle is for them like 
 the difficult passage over the breakers at the bar of a 
 river ; which if once prosperously accomplished, the 
 ship is henceforward in smooth water, in a safe harbour, 
 and may lay its account so to continue to the end. 
 But is it so ? Can it be truly affirmed that all the 
 serious difficulties and dangers of the Christian life are 
 at the outset ? Doubtless, that is a tremendous crisis in 
 every man's spiritual life, when he first wakes up to the 
 knowledge of sin ; and despite of all its agonies and its 
 terrors a blessed crisis, if only hand in hand with this 
 knowledge of sin goes the knowledge of Christ the 
 forgiver of sin, whose blood cleanses from its stain, 
 whose spirit delivers from its dominion. But serious, 
 solemn, awful, yea terrible as this sometimes is, blessed 
 as the victory is of him who by faith beholds his sin put 
 away, and himself reconciled with God, causing as it 
 does angels to sing their Te Deums in heaven, still this 
 is not all ; and it is a mistake most dangerous to our- 
 selves, most dishonouring to our God, if we count it all ; 
 if we be content to remain victors in this first battle- 
 field, to hold what we have then and there won, to make
 
 211 
 
 that the goal which was only the starting-place, that 
 the Omega which was only the Alpha of the life which 
 we should have lived in Christ. So acting, we should 
 only too much resemble the children of Israel ; we should 
 act over again their sin, who were content if only they 
 could just make room for themselves in the land which 
 the Lord had given them to possess it wholly ; who were 
 at no pains to drive out the Canaanites ; but came to 
 terms of dishonourable accommodation with those whom 
 they should have thoroughly rooted out from the land. 1 
 This course, as I said just now, is at once most 
 dangerous to ourselves, and most dishonouring to our 
 God. I will dwell on both these points a little. It is 
 most dangerous to ourselves. I urge this the first, being 
 as it is the poorer and lower motive, and preferring to 
 reserve the higher and nobler to the last. He who re- 
 solves that he will stand still, is making sure for himself, 
 though he may not think it or intend it, that he will go 
 back. Not to grow is to decay. It is only by a series 
 of new efforts, new starts, as it were, new beginnings, 
 revivings of the work within us, that we so much as 
 keep our place, and manage not to lose the ground 
 which we have already made our own. We find the 
 motive to these new starts now in some searching dis- 
 course, now in some holy book, now in the word, now 
 in the example, of some more advanced Christian friend ; 
 
 ' Judg. i. 27-34 ; ii. 1, 2. 
 
 v 2
 
 212 PEES SING TOWARD THE MARK 
 
 now Christ meets us at his table, making us perhaps to 
 feel that we can only just claim to have the marriage 
 garment of the welcome guests ; now it is sickness, now 
 it is sorrow, which does the work appointed for it to 
 accomplish ; delivers the message which it was charged 
 to bring ; for all these things and a thousand more God 
 works with his children, submitting them to chance and 
 change, emptying them from vessel to vessel, lest they 
 should settle down upon their lees. But if we will not 
 accept the admonishment which all these dealings of 
 his contain, if we will not answer to the call which they 
 make upon us, shall we keep even what we have gotten,, 
 shall we remain even where we are ? Does the boat 
 which was making difficult headway against a strong 
 current remain where it was, when the rowers idly rest 
 upon their oars? And is the Christian life anything 
 else than such a toilsome struggle against the stress 
 and stream of our own corrupt inclinations ? I do not 
 speak now, brethren, of higher rewards, a brighter crown, 
 a more glorious inheritance, a place nearer to the throne^ 
 which we may so miss ; but I say that our being saved 
 at all is seriously compromised, is brought into immi- 
 nent danger, unless the motto of St. Paul's life, Plus 
 ultra, 'I reach forth unto those things which are before,' 
 is the motto also of ours. Where all is loss, with no 
 compensating gain, where the world is ever at work to< 
 abate the edge of our spirits, and no new edge is given.
 
 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK 213 
 
 to them again, what is likely to be the end it is only too 
 easy to imagine. 
 
 But I am unwilling to appeal to you solely on such 
 grounds as these, when there are so much higher on 
 which I can rest my appeal. The Gospel of Christ 
 was not given to us only or chiefly that we might be 
 safe. He who reads the question, ' What must I do to 
 be saved ? ' as though it were asked, ' What shall I do 
 to be safe, to provide for my own personal security ? ' 
 is bringing selfishness into that scheme, the whole plan 
 and purpose of which was to expel selfishness, and to 
 substitute higher principles of action in its room. I 
 will therefore remind you further that such a course is 
 one most dishonouring to our God. For why was it that 
 He called us out of darkness into his marvellous light ? 
 Was it for our sakes merely ? or was it not also for the 
 praise and glory of his own name, that we might show 
 forth his praise, that we might be his witnesses, that 
 in us might be seen the exceeding greatness of his 
 power; how of clods of earth He could make stars 
 of heaven, hewing from the rough quarries of earth 
 polished stones for glory and for beauty that should 
 adorn the walls of that spiritual temple which He is 
 building, and shall one day fill with his presence ? But 
 if this be the end of our calling, to show forth his praise, 
 to do valiantly in his name, to tread under foot at once 
 his enemies and our own, namely, all the power of the
 
 214 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK 
 
 Evil One, it is clear that this only we shall do as we are 
 growing in grace, as we are passing from the condition of 
 little children, who just know that their sins are for- 
 given for Christ's name's sake, unto that of young men, 
 who are strong and in whom the word of God abideth, 
 and who have overcome the Wicked One ; in due time 
 to be enrolled among those whom St. John addresses as 
 fathers for their ripe experience, and for the fulness of 
 their knowledge of the mystery of Christ. 1 
 
 Brethren beloved, if you ask me how shall we 
 escape a danger which lies so near to every one of us, 
 overcome a temptation which so flatters our indolence, 
 bat yet at the same time so entirely defeats the high- 
 est purposes for which we were called, which may cause 
 us to make entire shipwreck of our souls, I have no 
 advice to give but the most obvious, no counsels which 
 have not been given ten thousand times before. I can 
 only put you in remembrance of things which you 
 already perfectly know. And yet even this may be 
 profitable ; much of our preaching in the very necessity 
 of things must consist of such a putting in remembrance 
 as this. 2 
 
 First, then, let me remind you, how in spiritual 
 things it is just as true as in worldly, that 'the hand of 
 the diligent maketh rich,' while he that dealeth with a 
 1 1 John ii. 12-14. * Jude 5 ; 2 Pet. i. 13.
 
 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK 215 
 
 slack hand is hastening to poverty. Of two who began 
 their Christian life together why does one grow in 
 grace, and the other stand still, or, it may be, rather go 
 backward than forward ? We intrude not here into the 
 secrets of God's grace. He may give of his mere free- 
 dom larger, freer, more abundant supplies of grace to 
 one than to another ; or, even if grace is equal, the soil 
 of one heart may be kindlier for the ripening the fruits 
 of the Spirit than that of another ; but yet it stands 
 true in the main and in the long run that this hand of 
 the diligent maketh rich. Devout diligence in prayer, 
 devout diligence in the study of God's Word, devout 
 diligence in waiting on Him at his Holy Table, and in 
 all other means of grace ; and last but not least, devout 
 diligence in the outward work of the Lord, these are 
 the helps appointed for you, by aid of which you are to 
 grow in grace and in the love and knowledge of Christ 
 the Lord. 
 
 Devout diligence in prayer ; here indeed is the 
 mainspring of the whole Christian life. In this we 
 speak with God, and God with us. Of Christ, our 
 pattern and example, we are told that, while He prayed, 
 the fashion of his countenance was altered. 1 All 
 prayer, which truly deserves the name, has in its degree, 
 and exerts on the worshipper, such a transforming, 
 transfiguring power. While he is praying the fashion 
 1 Luke ix. 29.
 
 216 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK 
 
 of the countenance of his soul, yes and oftentimes 
 the fashion of his bodily countenance, is altered. In 
 medieval legends of saints we are continually told of 
 holy men that while they prayed they were lifted up 
 from the earth and nearer to heaven. Now this, which 
 of course is not true in the letter, is yet a sort of clumsy, 
 confused expression of the blessed truth, that prayer 
 does in a higher sense lift man from earth toward 
 heaven, infinitely nearer to God than he could other- 
 wise have been. Oh, how careful will you be, as many 
 as mean to press forward, about your times of prayer ; 
 outwardly, that they should not be encroached on, that 
 they should not be abridged ; inwardly, that they may 
 be times of a real laying hold of God and of his strength. 
 You will lay to heart this solemn truth, that almost all 
 apostasies, all fallings away from God, have begun in 
 the secret chamber. The Demases who have forsaken 
 Paul and Paul's Lord, having loved this present world, 
 there was probably nothing outwardly to distinguish 
 them from the Lukes who were faithful to the end. 
 One tree stood as fair to look at as the other. The 
 only difference was that one had roots and the other 
 had none. When therefore the tempest came, one 
 stood, and the other fell. See that ye be rooted and 
 grounded in Christ. Be very jealous of your times of 
 prayer. Enlarge them, if and when you can. Let
 
 PRESSING TOWARD THE MARK 217 
 
 nothing but the most absolute necessity persuade you to 
 diminish them. 
 
 But once more, he that has that noblest of all ambi- 
 tions, the ambition which St. Paul expressed in my text, 
 will nourish himself daily and largely on the words of 
 eternal life. Magazines, newspapers, novels, histories, 
 what a thousand competitors there are, seeking to absorb 
 the little leisure which is all that most of us have at our 
 own disposal, to drive the Scriptures into some obscure 
 corner of the day, or to drive them out of the day al- 
 together. How resolute many of us must be if we are 
 to find any time for the study of the word of God. And 
 yet it is the study of it which we need. It is when we 
 sit under the shadow of this tree of life, and gently 
 shake the branches, then it drops its golden fruit into 
 our lap, not when we hastily pass it by, or gaze on it 
 from afar. Brethren, as many as would grow in grace, 
 by this self-denial or by that win to yourselves some 
 time for this study, not starving your souls of this their 
 necessary food. 
 
 Nor less will the Table of the Lord be precious to 
 you, and you frequent guests thereat. Some who have 
 made much progress in the spiritual life have told us that 
 they found signal advantage in bringing each time that 
 they drew nigh to that Holy Table, some special re- 
 quest which they then laid before their Lord. On one
 
 218 
 
 occasion it would be, perhaps, that they might obtain 
 perfect victory over some temptation which was griev- 
 ously harassing them ; another time that the Lord would 
 impart to them some grace in which they felt themselves 
 greatly deficient ; at another time the special request 
 might be for the conversion of a child, or some other 
 dearly beloved. These are devices in which one will find 
 profit, and another not ; yet many, I think, might find 
 their advantage in thus at the Holy Communion gather- 
 ing the longings and desires of their hearts to a single 
 head, and seeking to carry away some special boon at 
 each of these times of refreshing. 
 
 But all this being said, it would be a grievous omis- 
 sion if I did not further and lastly remind you that as 
 many as love the Lord, and would fain love Him more, 
 they labour for the Lord, and would fain labour for Him 
 more. St. Paul pressing toward the mark was no selfish, 
 solitary runner ; he sought to draw many with him. The 
 prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus would 
 have been no prize to him, if others had not shared it 
 with him. The increase which he desired, which he 
 sought with all his might to set forward, was the 
 increase not of a single limb, but of the whole body 
 to the edifying of itself in love. Let his mind be 
 also ours.
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
 
 SERMON XVIII. 1 
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES. 
 
 EZEK. xxxvii. 9, 10. 
 
 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of 
 . man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God ; Come from 
 the four winds, breath, and breathe upon these slain, that 
 they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the 
 breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their 
 feet, an exceeding great army. 
 
 PERHAPS there is no prophet of the Old Covenant, whose 
 writings offer to us such sublime, original, and some- 
 times terrible imagery as those of the prophet Ezekiel. 
 What a picture has he drawn and spread out before our 
 eyes in those ten verses, of which you have just heard 
 the concluding. ' The hand of the Lord was upon me, 
 and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set 
 me down in the midst of the valley which was full of 
 bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, 
 behold, there were very many in the open valley ; and,, 
 lo, they were very dry.' The prophet, we gather from 
 
 1 Preached on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the 
 Gospel
 
 220 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
 
 these words, had been carried in the spirit to some 
 ancient battle-plain ; some vast fields of blood, of which 
 the world owns now so many; where, in ages long 
 before, two mighty armies had met, and fought, and 
 parted, leaving the earth encumbered with their un- 
 buried dead. The flesh of these slain had long since 
 wasted away. The jackal, the wolf, the vulture, the 
 worm, had fed sweetly on it. But bones innumerable, 
 ghastly trophies of death, bleached by the sun and rain 
 and wind, still strewed the ground, and attested the 
 dreadful work which had here been wrought, of the 
 children of Cain who had here met to slaughter and 
 destroy one another. 
 
 As the prophet is gazing on this ghastly spectacle, 
 on these bones ' very many and very dry,' the Lord asks 
 him, ' Son of man, can these bones live ? ' He answers 
 in language not unlike to that of the seer in the 
 Apocalypse, 1 ' Lord God, thou knowest.' Thou, he 
 would say, canst breathe life into any death; but 
 whether this Thou wilt, is a secret which Thou hast 
 reserved for Thyself. Again the Lord said unto him : 
 , Prophesy unto these dry bones, and say unto them, O 
 ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.' Marvellous 
 and stupendous were the results which followed. Listen 
 to them in the prophet's own words : ' So I prophesied 
 as I was commanded : and as I prophesied, there was a 
 1 Kev. vii. 14.
 
 TEE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 221 
 
 noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came 
 together, bone to his bone. The sinews and the flesh 
 came up upon them, and the skin covered them above : 
 but there was no breath in them ' all the forms of life, 
 but as yet no actual life itself, each bone knit to his 
 bone, the integuments of flesh clothing again the naked 
 skeleton ; but thus far no breath, no animating principle 
 of life. 'Then he said unto me, Prophesy unto the 
 wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus 
 saith the Lord God ; Come from the four winds, breath, 
 and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So 
 I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath 
 came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their 
 feet, an exceeding great army.' 
 
 Needs it, friends, any words of ours to enhance 
 the grandeur, the terror, the magnificence of the picture 
 here presented to your spiritual eye? Needs it any 
 words of ours to explain the inner meaning of this 
 famous vision of the prophet-priest of the Captivity? 
 If we have at all apprehended that meaning, we shall 
 own that this vision of the dry bones, coming first 
 together at the word of the prophet, and then breathed 
 on by the breath of life, and by that quickening breath 
 made to stand upon their feet, and transformed into an 
 army of living men, wonderfully represents to us that 
 work of the Lord which began at Pentecost, when the- 
 word of the Lord went forth, and the Spirit of the Lord
 
 222 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
 
 with that word breathed mercifully and mightily on a 
 dead world, renewed the moral face of the earth, and 
 commenced that wondrous transformation, that regenera- 
 tion, which having its beginning in the hearts of men, 
 shall not cease till all things shall have been made new, 
 a new heaven and a new earth, in which righteousness 
 shall dwell. 
 
 For, even while we freely recognise to the full what 
 of glorious and good the heathen world had to show, 
 we still confidently ask, What in its grand sum total 
 was the moral condition of the world till Christ lived 
 and died and rose again, and ascending up on high from 
 thence gave gifts unto men ? Have we not a right to 
 say, nay, should we not be compelled to say, that it was 
 in the main even as this valley of dry bones, peopled 
 with men who one to the other seemed alive, went about 
 the tasks, fulfilled the functions, pursued the pleasures 
 of this lower life ; but in the eye of God were dead, 
 dead in their trespasses and their sins ; that in every 
 part of the world, sin reigned, and death, death moral 
 and spiritual, with sin ? Contemplate that world, not 
 as clothed in that false glamour and deceitful splendour 
 with which Art and Poetry invested it, but as it must 
 have presented itself to eyes purer than to behold 
 iniquity ; contemplate it, I say, exactly on that Pente- 
 costal day, which we may justly call the birth-day of the 
 Church ; only one small people upon the whole earth
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 223 
 
 preserving the knowledge, the faith, the worship of the 
 true God ; and they only using this knowledge to sin 
 more guiltily, because against clearer light and know- 
 ledge, than the other nations of the world ; their hands 
 still red with the blood of Him whom they should have 
 welcomed as their King and their God ; the rest of the 
 world ' wholly given to idolatry ' ; and with idolatry to 
 what strange and hideous forms of evil ! Contemplate 
 for an instant the gladiatorial shows of Rome, men 
 killing one another to make sport for lookers on ; by 
 tens and by hundreds 'butchered to make a Roman 
 holiday.' Contemplate, but with hasty and averted eye, 
 the strange lusts of Greece, men glorying in their 
 shame, and boasting of wickednesses which one would 
 suppose no darkness would have seemed to them thick 
 enough to hide ; the world having cast up its Tiberius, as 
 a little later it did its Caligula, its Nero, its Domitian ; 
 setting him in the highest place which it had to offer ; 
 saying to him, a wretch a thousand times unworthy to 
 live, ' Thou art our Imperator, our emperor, our com- 
 mander ; thou art the man whom we delight to honour ; 
 to set at the crown of things ; in thee we behold the 
 truest image of what we ourselves would fain be, if only 
 we possessed the power.' 
 
 Then, when all things were thus at the worst, the 
 Son of God was manifested in the flesh, lived a life of 
 perfect obedience, made on His cross a perfect offering
 
 224 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
 
 for all the sins, past, present, and to come, of all man- 
 kind ; rose again, in manifest sign and token that this 
 offering had been accepted, went up on high, and, being 
 exalted at the right hand of God, shed abroad his gifts 
 upon men, even the rebellious. And when they that 
 were ambassadors of his grace, at his bidding began to 
 prophesy, immediately there was a great shaking among 
 the dry bones in the valley of death, everywhere a 
 mighty agitation ; life once more was in conflict with 
 death and overcoming death ! and as the breath of God 
 passed first over the Jewish Church and then over the 
 Gentile world, and breathed upon those slain, multitudes 
 came up out of their graves, the graves which sin had 
 dug for them, three thousand souls, we know, on the 
 day of Pentecost, were the first-fruits of a far mightier 
 harvest, and all stood upon their feet, an exceeding 
 great army of living men, made now by that quickening 
 breath of the Holy Ghost alive unto God. And ever as 
 these messengers of Christ, and such as in succession 
 took up the message from their lips, proclaimed the 
 words of that life, and said in the name and in the power 
 of God, ' Come from the four winds, breath, and 
 breathe upon these slain,' the same effects followed ; 
 the Holy Ghost was given; and multitudes, alienated 
 hitherto from the life of God, dead in their sins, 
 lived to holiness and to God. 
 
 Sad, brethren, it is to think that there should have
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 225 
 
 been ever pause or remission in such a blessed work 
 of re-animation as this. But that such pause or re- 
 mission has been we cannot deny. Looking out upon 
 the world, as at this present moment it offers itself to 
 our eyes, is not the spectacle which it presents only too 
 like that seen in the visions of God by the prophet of 
 the older Covenant with indeed this blessed difference, 
 that the valley of the dry bones has never since that 
 day of Pentecostal gifts been wholly a valley of death, 
 wrapt in the utter silence of the grave ? The pro- 
 mise has still been made good for those who would 
 believe it, ' Behold, I will cause breath to enter into 
 you, and ye shall live ? ' the prophesying of the word 
 of the Lord has never ceased ; nor yet, as the result 
 of that prophesying, the noise and the shaking, the 
 coming together of the dry bones, and then the ani- 
 mating and quickening of these by the breath of the 
 living God. Death reigns not now everywhere, as 
 once ; but yet, oh ! how much death, how much that 
 has refused and is still refusing to live. Not to speak 
 of those whom the false religions of the world, Hindoo 
 and Buddhist and Mahommedan, have slain, who go 
 down to the grave with a lie in their right hand, nor 
 yet of the votaries and victims of a thousand meaner 
 superstitions and idolatries, is not Christendom itself a 
 spectacle at this day which well might make angels 
 weep ? which would make our heads a fountain of 
 
 Q
 
 226 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
 
 tears if we had that earnest zeal for the glory of God, 
 that true compassion for the perishing souls of men 
 which we ought. For surely the slain in it are many 
 those whom superstition has slain, and those whom 
 infidelity has slain the slain by intemperance, and the 
 slain by covetousness, and the slain by uncleanness, 
 and the slain by pride, and by a thousand other 
 weapons of the enemy ; who could number up their 
 multitudes ? Pray, brethren, ye who have any feel- 
 ing sense of what the Church of the living God ought 
 to be, terrible in its ranks as an army with banners, 
 and what it is, resembling as it does only too nearly 
 a valley of dry bones pray, as did the prophet of old, 
 'Come from the four winds, breath of God, and 
 breathe upon these slain, that they may live.' And 
 as prayer is a mockery, unless work is added to it, 
 add in one shape or another your work to your 
 prayers. 
 
 But how, if there be among us any to-day whose 
 own condition is only too like that of the dry bones of 
 the valley, any saying in his heart, as said the children of 
 Israel of old, ' Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost ; 
 no breath of God shall ever again renew the face of our 
 souls, no life of God shall ever again quicken our dead 
 spirits ' ? I know how easily such a despair of our- 
 selves may creep over us, and what a covenant with
 
 227 
 
 death we seal when we give place to such despair. 
 But have any, I ask, a right to do this, to seal such a 
 covenant as that is above all, have they a right to do 
 this, when God has given to us such a Scripture as 
 that on which we have been dwelling to-day, or when 
 He permits us in our Christian Year to keep such a 
 festival as Pentecost? For these, why were they dry 
 bones, why were they not simply men just dead, the 
 fresh corpses of those newly slain in some battle of 
 yesterday, with the echoes of a life that had hardly 
 departed yet ringing in them, which were thus seen by 
 the prophet in the visions of God to stand up on their 
 feet ? Why were they the dry bones of ages past and 
 of battles long ago, which he thus describes as again 
 penetrated by the quickening Spirit from on high? 
 Why but to teach us this, that there are no sinners 
 who have lain so long festering in sin as in the 
 corruption of the tomb, none with habits of evil so 
 ingrained and inveterate, as to be incapable of renewal 
 and revival. He who is the Prince of Life, who has 
 the seven spirits of God, calls, and at his potent voice 
 not merely a daughter of Jairus, who had just expired, 
 or a widow's son as yet unburied, or a Lazarus just 
 four days dead, not merely the sinners of yesterday or 
 the day before, may rise up and walk, alive among the 
 living ; but at that almighty bidding those whom sin 
 had slain long ago, so long that now they are out of all 
 
 Q 2
 
 228 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
 
 hope ever to be otherwise than they are, those also may 
 live again, pierced and penetrated through and through 
 in their dry marrowless bones, until they also stand on 
 their feet once more, part of the army of living men,, 
 the soldiers and servants of the living God. Beloved, 
 doubt it not. We perish, because we will not believe 
 in the love, and because we will not believe in the 
 power, of God, in that mighty power of God, able of 
 stones to raise up children to Abraham, mighty to 
 change sinners into saints, clods of earth into stars of 
 heaven, haters of God into lovers of God, persecutors of 
 the faith into preachers of the faith, Sauls into Pauls j 
 to whom no marvels of mercy and of might are im- 
 possible. 
 
 Is it not even so ? You have heard the words of 
 one Seer of the Old Covenant, listen to those of another 
 in the New : ' And he shewed me a pure river of water 
 of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of 
 God and of the Lamb.' l What is the ( pure river of 
 water of life ' but the Holy Ghost given to men, who> 
 proceedeth from the Father and from the Son ? Turn 
 back again to our prophet of the Old Covenant, and hear 
 concerning these same mystical waters, this river of 
 life, how well it deserves its name. ' These waters ' 
 he too describes them as issuing from under the thres- 
 hold of the temple ' go down into the desert ' (a desert 
 1 Eev. xxii. 1.
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 229 
 
 before, but by these waters changed into a Paradise, 
 the very garden of the Lord), ' and it shall come to 
 pass, that every thing that liveth, whithersoever the 
 river shall come, shall live. Every thing shall live 
 whither the river cometh.' 1 Let that river come to 
 thee to thy parched lips, to thy thirsty heart. Many 
 waters thou hast drunken of hitherto, waters, it may 
 be, of this world's best delights, and some waters, it 
 may be feared, drawn from this world's muddiest pools. 
 But none of them have slaked the thirst of thy soul, 
 least of all have any of these waters which the world 
 affords proved for thee a well of water springing up 
 within thee unto everlasting life. Perhaps thou sayest, 
 4 There are no such waters to slake the immortal thirst 
 of the children of men.' But if God and his word be 
 true, there is a river, fed from the upper springs, making 
 glad the City of God ; and every one that chooses, thou 
 therefore if thou wilt, may take of its waters of life 
 freely. 
 
 But, my brethren all, I must not let you go, with- 
 out reminding you, as in duty bound to that Society 
 whose cause I am pleading, of a charge which lies 
 upon us; and I link that charge very closely with 
 those great truths which have to-day been proclaimed 
 in your ears. There is a river of life, proceeding out 
 of the throne of God and the Lamb, which can heal all 
 1 Ezek. xlvii. 1-9.
 
 230 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
 
 that it touches. There is a breath of God which can 
 quicken and revive the dead. Oftentimes, as we look 
 at some heathen tribe, with all its foul superstitions 
 and wicked works, we are tempted to exclaim, ' Can 
 these bones live ? ' We have received our answer. 
 They can live ; they can come together ; they can 
 stand upon their feet, armies of living men. One thing 
 however is needful, that there should be those who 
 should prophesy to the slain, who should bid the breath 
 from the four winds to breathe on them that they may 
 live. You will observe that in our vision God speaks 
 not directly, but uses the prophet's voice, and quickens 
 the dead through his word. It is ever so. By men 
 God blesses men. He has constituted his Church as 
 the instrument by which He will bless the world. 
 Help then this Society to send forth faithful men, who 
 shall not prophesy in vain, but at whose bidding the 
 breath of heaven shall re-animate the slain of the 
 earth. Show at what rate you prize your own blessings, 
 pardon of your sins, peace with God, renewal in the 
 spirit of your minds, the hope of heaven, by your 
 eagerness to impart the same to others. Withhold not 
 more than is meet. Believe the word of the wise king, 
 who has said that such a withholding ' tendeth to 
 poverty ' ' to poverty of spirit, to poverty of grace, 
 yes, and not seldom to poverty of estate too : for how 
 1 Prov. xi. 24
 
 TEE VALLEY OF DRY BONES 231 
 
 often, because men will not give, God takes, takes and 
 leaves no blessing behind Him; while to them who 
 render to Him cheerfully and freely, first themselves, 
 for that is the condition of all acceptable offering, and 
 then of their substance, He can and will in his own 
 way and in his own measure cause all good things 
 to abound.
 
 232 ALL SAINTS 
 
 SEEMON XIX. 
 
 ALL SAINTS. 
 
 KEV. vii. 9, 10. 
 
 After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could 
 number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, 
 stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with 
 white robes, and palms in their hands ; And cried with a loud 
 voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, 
 and unto the Lamb. 
 
 ALL the services of to-day have helped to remind us 
 this sublime Scripture reminds us above all that this 
 is the festival of All Saints. We commemorate, that 
 is, upon this day, not one or another pre-eminent ser- 
 vant of God, but all those who have lived and died in 
 the true faith and fear of his holy name. We ask that 
 we may be followers of them, as they were followers of 
 Christ. We seek to derive for ourselves such help in 
 cur Christian pilgrimage as the contemplation of their 
 lives and deaths is capable of abundantly yielding ; for 
 the language of the poet is hardly in excess, when of 
 them he exclaims :
 
 ALL SAINTS 233 
 
 4 They are, indeed, our pillar fires, 
 
 Seen as we go ; 
 
 They are that City's shining spires, 
 We travel to.' 
 
 But it is not their lives and their deaths only which 
 we are this day invited to contemplate. What a scene 
 of glory unimaginable does the Seer of Patmos unfold 
 before our eyes in the Scripture which you have just 
 heard. Let us dwell on it a little. ' I beheld, and, lo, 
 a great multitude, which no man could number.' Even 
 so ; it will have come to this a great multitude which 
 no man can number ; and yet it is written too : ' Strait 
 is the gate, and narrow is the way, and few there be 
 that find it ; ' and again : ' Many are called, but few 
 chosen ; ' and again : ' The faithful are minished from 
 among the children of men ; ' and this may be, and no 
 doubt is, true of any one age or one country; but bring 
 them all together, of all times and of all tongues, and 
 they will be many, a great cloud of witnesses, a vast 
 ocean of blessedness, fed and filled as it will have been 
 by innumerable rills. 
 
 And is not this a strengthening, elevating thought 
 this of that countless multitude which will one day 
 stand before the throne ? How often we are tempted 
 to be out of all heart. The world seems so strong, and 
 the Church seems so weak Christianity itself almost 
 a failure, unable to enlist the affections of men, at least
 
 234- ALL SAINTS 
 
 of the men of this generation, impotent to contest the 
 battle-field of the earth with the powers which are 
 arrayed against it. Put away from you thoughts like 
 these. They are the pleas of our indolence, the out- 
 comings of our unbelief. The Son of God did not take 
 our flesh, and live our life, and die our death, in vain. 
 He has everywhere his hidden ones in the worst times 
 his seven thousand in Israel that have not bowed the 
 knee to Baal J precious golden grains of wheat, which 
 shall fill the garners of heaven, and fill them even to 
 overflowing, though they be now concealed, one here, 
 one there, by the mountains of chaff, which shall then 
 have been for ever winnowed away from the barn-floor 
 of the Lord. 
 
 Is not this, I say, a cheering, sustaining thought ? 
 They may be few here or few there ; but let them all 
 be gathered into one, all that have departed in the 
 true faith of his holy name from the first that fell 
 asleep in Jesus almost as soon as He quitted the earth, 
 or rather from righteous Abel, to him, the last that 
 shall have hardly breathed out his latest sigh before 
 the trump of the archangel shall recall him to that life 
 which he had scarcely forsaken, and they will constitute 
 this innumerable company ; for indeed God would not 
 be satisfied with less ; He will have no solitudes, no 
 empty places, no vacant thrones in heaven, but infinite 
 1 Bom. xi. 4.
 
 ALL SAINTS 235 
 
 multitudes to be sharers in his blessedness, to declare 
 to all creation and through all eternity the wondrous 
 counsels of his love. 
 
 And then, dear friends, what thoughts arise in the 
 heart as we contemplate not the numbers only, but the 
 quarters from which all these will have been gathered 
 from 'all nations, and kindreds, and people, and 
 tongues.' Those who were divided here by all which 
 could divide, who were separated from one another 
 by immense distances of time, of space, of culture 
 barbarians to one another here yea, those who were 
 kept asunder by far sadder barriers than these, those 
 who misunderstood, perhaps mutually anathematised 
 one another, until heaven would have almost seemed no 
 heaven to them, if they had been told that they should 
 meet each the other there, shall yet, being one in 
 Christ, one in their faith and love to Him, stand to- 
 gether before the throne, and exchange the long aliena- 
 tions and miserable discords of earth for the blessed 
 concords of heaven. 
 
 Think, too, from other points of view, what a 
 marvellous company will that be ! Think of all that 
 will be there, and awful thought ! of all that will 
 not be there. Not there many who have walked in the 
 full blaze of Gospel light ; who have had all the advan- 
 tages in the possession of the truth which we have; 
 but who, knowing much, have loved not at all ; whose
 
 236 ALL SAINTS 
 
 places therefore, for there were places for them if they 
 had shown themselves worthy of them, shall know 
 them not ; whose crowns others shall have taken ; while 
 there will be found in that wondrous company not a 
 few who, amid much darkness, superstition, and error, 
 have been true to the central truth of all, have clung 
 to Jesus with full affiance of heart ; and when it shall 
 be enquired with something of wonder why this one or 
 the other is so near to the throne, ' He loved much,' or 
 ' She loved much/ will be the key and explanation of 
 all. Let us not lose sight of this, for indeed it is 
 good for us that we should always remember that 
 while faith is the condition of salvation, there is 
 every reason to believe that love will be the measure 
 of blessedness. 
 
 And all these the beloved disciple saw in the visions 
 of God standing before the throne, occupying no remote 
 province or obscure corner of heaven, but as a kind 
 of first-fruits of God's creatures, in whom that promise 
 of Christ was being fulfilled, that where He was, there 
 they should be also He on the throne, and they around 
 it. And he saw them ' clothed with white robes ' 
 even as white is evermore the colour of heaven. But 
 these white robes, white, as we may be well assured, 
 not merely as we count whiteness, but with the daz- 
 zling whiteness of heaven, where had they gotten them ? 
 For that company, the excellent of the earth though
 
 ALL SAINTS 237 
 
 they were, had yet travelled through a naughty world, 
 they too gathering their spots and their stains, some 
 deeper and darker than others ; but all having gathered 
 spots and stains out of number in this passage. How 
 then so white now ? The seer does not wait long to tell 
 us. They had washed these robes of theirs and made 
 them white in the blood of the Lamb. 1 
 
 And this is not all. There are ' palms in their 
 hands.' Now we shall lose much of the riches and 
 beauty of this Scripture if we take, as so many inter- 
 preters have done, these palms merely as the signs 
 and tokens of victory. Doubtless if we met words like 
 these in some Greek or Latin poet, such an interpreta- 
 tion would be a just one. But the Apocalypse moves 
 altogether in the circle of sacred imagery ; all its 
 symbols and images are derived from the Old Testa- 
 ment ; none are borrowed from the heathen and profane 
 world ; and it is to the Old Testament that we must 
 look for the explanation of these palms. The key of 
 knowledge which shall unlock to us their true sig- 
 nificance must be looked for at Lev. xxiii. 40, where 
 Moses, instituting by divine command the Feast of 
 Tabernacles, gives this instruction, c And ye shall take 
 you the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, 
 and the boughs of thick trees, and ye shall rejoice 
 before the Lord seven days ; ' and this we read at a later 
 
 1 Ver. 14.
 
 238 ALL SAINTS 
 
 day of their doing : ' Therefore they bare branches, and 
 fair boughs, and palms also, and sang praises unto 
 him.' l Now keep in mind the significance of that 
 Feast of Tabernacles, and why it was that the people 
 were to dwell in those booths for eight days. There 
 was here a commemoration of the weary wanderings 
 through the desert, and of the blessed entrance into the 
 promised land : ' that your generations may know that 
 I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when 
 I brought them out of the land of Egypt.' 2 The palms, 
 then, are the tokens of a sorrow that has been turned 
 into joy, of weary wanderings that have been succeeded 
 by a blessed rest ; and when these are thus placed in 
 the hands of the redeemed, we learn by this token that 
 they are keeping at last that true Feast of Tabernacles, 
 whereof the other was but the feeble antitype, that their 
 pilgrimage through the great and terrible wilderness of 
 the world is for ever ended ; and that now ' they shall 
 hunger no more, neither thirst any more ; neither shall 
 the sun light on them, nor any heat.' 
 
 Will not that be much ? Will not that be a blessed 
 consummation ? When we call to mind what a forlorn 
 and desert journey for multitudes of God's saints this 
 earthly life has been, or now is ; all the bitterness 
 which they have known to themselves, and with which 
 no stranger has intermeddled ; the unappeased hunger 
 
 1 Mace. x. 7. z Lev. xxiii. 43.
 
 ALL SAINTS 239 
 
 of so many souls after a love which they here have 
 never found; when we picture to ourselves all the youth- 
 ful brows from which the fresh garlands, a springing 
 hope and joy, have been early and for ever stricken; 
 when we think of the tragedy to which multitudes 
 of lives, showing so fairly at the outset, have presently 
 turned; of the great tribulation through which so 
 many pass to their rest, the fire-chariots of pain by 
 which God's saints are so often rapt into his presence ; 
 when we contemplate a little the marvel and the 
 mystery of all that unutterable anguish which He often 
 suffers here to be the portion of his beloved, is it not 
 well to be reminded that however this may endure for 
 the night, yet joy cometh in the morning ; that there 
 are festal palms for the weariest pilgrim of this world, 
 and an innumerable multitude of happy palmers stand- 
 ing before the throne ? And some of these perhaps 
 we have known ; some of them, it may be, were once 
 bound up here in the same bundle of life with our- 
 selves ; and these so beautiful in their lives, so beautiful 
 in their deaths, that only to remember that such have 
 been, that we have walked for a season with them, 
 is a chastening, a purifying, yea, and however much 
 we may miss and mourn them, a gladdening thought. 
 And we who are struggling and contending still, shall 
 we not, on this day above all, praise our God for them : 
 that He is holding them in safest keeping, in the
 
 240 ALL SAINTS 
 
 hollow of his hand, in the repose of his Paradise, in 
 the secret of his pavilion ? Shall we not find in the 
 very remembrance of them, a remembrance which is a 
 communion as well, a new motive to holiness, lest in the 
 end there should be set a great gulf between ourselves 
 and them ? 
 
 Oh that to us it may be granted to have a place 
 with them, were it only in the outermost circle of those 
 concentric rings of light and life and glory, which, each 
 one nearer than the other, surround the throne, and 
 draw joy unutterable from the beatific vision of Him 
 who sits upon the throne ! And there is but one way 
 for this, and that way the Gospel of this morning, the 
 eight Beatitudes of the Sermon upon the Mount, has 
 taught us brought as that portion of Scripture is in 
 our Prayer Book into wonderful juxtaposition with this. 
 It is the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the 
 hungering and thirsting after righteousness, the merci- 
 ful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted 
 for righteousness' sake ; it is these, and only these, who 
 make up that great multitude which stand before the 
 throne, and before the Lamb.
 
 THE HOLT WOMEN AT THE CROSS 241 
 
 SERMON XX. 
 
 THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE CROSS. 
 
 JOHN xix. 25. 
 
 Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's 
 sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. 
 
 THEY understood not the meaning, certainly not all the 
 meaning, of that spectacle which was before them, that 
 weeping company who on that world-memorable day 
 stood by the Cross of Jesus neither she, the mother, 
 who now at length found the word of the aged Simeon 
 true ' yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own 
 soul also' nor that other Mary, the greatly sinning, 
 and the greatly loving and greatly forgiven. No, nor 
 yet the Apostle who testified of these things, and who, 
 as we gather from the verse which follows my text, 
 having recovered from his brief fear, was also standing 
 there, that he might receive the last legacy of love at 
 the hands of his dying Lord. They understood it not 
 all as yet the mighty mystery of that atoning sacrifice 
 had only obscurely revealed itself to their eyes ; they 
 saw but darkly through the. thick cloud of a present 
 
 B
 
 242 THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE CROSS 
 
 agony how that Cross was indeed an altar, the altar, 
 the true altar, to which every other altar that had been 
 ever reared pointed from which alone they derived 
 any meaning at all. 
 
 And when all this became plain to them, as pre- 
 sently it did become plain, what new and further 
 mysteries must they presently have found in that Cross 
 what an even deeper significance must that which 
 they had witnessed have acquired in their eyes. And 
 how indeed should it have been otherwise? For the 
 things of Christ, and especially the things of the Cross 
 of Christ, are things which angels desire to look into, 
 which angels themselves do not hope to fathom. 
 
 And yet, while all this is so, while the mystery of 
 that Cross is unsearchable, while we can never know all 
 that it meant, yet at the same time there is much that 
 we can know. If it has hidden things which only 
 eternity can make clear, it has also most plain things 
 for the present time. Indeed there never was before, 
 there can never be again, so plain a speaking to the 
 world. That Cross has a voice clearer than every other 
 voice; it speaks a language more impossible to be 
 mistaken. Let us only in spirit be gathered near it, 
 let us only be found in company with the faithful ones 
 that are there, with the holy mother blessed and now 
 afflicted above women, with the Magdalen and with 
 John, and there will come out to us voices from that
 
 THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE CROSS 243 
 
 Cross, which will speak to us in deeper depths of our 
 being than any other voices that have ever reached us 
 from elsewhere. All that is needed on our part is 
 earnestly to ask that we may learn the lesson which it 
 is set to teach us ; that we may read the meaning of our 
 lives, and the meaning of the world around us, in the 
 light which is shed upon them from it. 
 
 And first, brethren, how shall we dare with that 
 Cross in our view, with that Cross lifted up before us, 
 to lay out our lives for self-pleasing and self-indulging ? 
 I am not speaking here of those grosser forms of self- 
 indulgence, which are evidently and plainly sinful, and 
 still less of open and manifest sins, which go before 
 men to judgment, which they who do declare plainly 
 that they have no part nor lot with Him who came to 
 deliver men from their unrighteousness and their sins. 
 But how shall we venture to lay out our lives for 
 ourselves how shall we make the possessing of this 
 world's honours, or its wealth, or its favour, or its high 
 places, the main end and scope of our lives ? how shall 
 we dare with that thorn crown in view and all the 
 concentrated agony of that hour, to live lives, as far as 
 we can make them so, of unbroken luxury and ease, 
 taking no part in the sufferings of Christ which we 
 can avoid, choosing ever the feast and never the fast ; 
 choosing to sleep with them that slept in the garden, 
 rather than to pray with Him, who being in an agony, 
 
 R 2
 
 244 THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE CROSS 
 
 prayed the more earnestly; so that when a Lent is 
 passed and all its blessed assistances for setting forward 
 our soul's health have escaped us unimproved, our 
 Lord's words of a mournful reproach, 'What, could 
 ye not watch one hour ? ' or the sadder and more re- 
 proachful yet, ' Sleep on now,' sound only too mourn- 
 fully and appropriately in our ears. 
 
 I say, brethren, with Christ's Cross before us, shall 
 we attempt to shrink from and evade our own? In 
 truth, a hopeless endeavour ! for he who will not take 
 his share in the world's burden, who draws his shoulder 
 from under it, does not really escape it. His share of 
 that burden is laid upon him still. All that he has 
 effected by his attempt to shun, is that he misses the 
 blessing of it. He has sought to save his life, and so 
 perhaps has lost it. For thus it is ever. ' Care finds 
 the careless out.' In a moment it leaps within the 
 defences which a man may ever so carefully have 
 reared; in a moment the enemy is within those de- 
 fences ; and all the thought and labour of a life to 
 exclude him has proved vain : and he whose labour it 
 was that he might not have a crumpled rose-leaf under 
 him, finds himself tossing suddenly upon a bed of 
 thorns : he, who would not touch with his little finger 
 his brethren's burdens, now groans under his own. 
 For even so does a righteous God evermore defeat 
 men's plans of self-pleasing, and Himself lays upon
 
 THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE CROSS 245 
 
 them that, and often in far larger measure, which they 
 would not take upon themselves. We have but this 
 choice, to meet the toil and the task of life as manful 
 combatants, or to be overtaken by them as cowardly 
 fugitives. In one way or other these will inevitably be 
 ours. 
 
 Therefore for these, and for all other reasons, looking 
 at the Cross of Christ, let us dare to say to ourselves, 
 In the power of that Cross I will die to myself, to my 
 own will, to my own desires, in so far as they are mine, 
 and not God's. It is an awful word, when we say it 
 in earnest when we say it, really meaning to carry it 
 out really meaning that it shall be the death-knell of 
 our own self-will and self-pleasing which has sounded, 
 and all in us of the old man will plead and remonstrate 
 against it, will urge that life is not worth living on 
 such conditions as these. Yet if thou dare to say it 
 and to act upon it, thou shalt find that out of this 
 death of the old man, shall presently come life, even 
 the true life which was utterly cramped and confined 
 before this seeming bondage shall be thy truest 
 liberty ; this which seems utter straitness for thy spirit, 
 shall anon translate thy feet into a large room. At 
 the same time let us not suppose, dear friends, that 
 it will be enough to say once that we will die to self, 
 and that this once resolutely said, the struggle will 
 be over, the victory will have been gained. We shall
 
 246 THE HOLY WOMEN AT TEE CROSS 
 
 need to say it again and again ; for on every side we 
 shall find the love of luxury, of ease, of pleasure, in 
 short, of the world, encroaching upon us, which ever 
 and again will need to be arrested and thrust back. 
 Hardly, and only with earnest prayer and after many 
 a struggle, do we win a foot of ground here, and still 
 more hardly do we keep that we have won. To stamp 
 the Cross upon our lives and on all parts of them, this 
 is no slight undertaking. What continual danger we 
 are in, of slipping out of this, of finding some excuse 
 for not attempting this. How ready is each one of us 
 to smooth away all the rough corners and sharp edges 
 of Christian obedience, all which brings us in unwel- 
 come collision with the world, or with our own desires 
 or to let the world by its constant yet almost imper- 
 ceptible friction smooth away for us these rough corners 
 and edges. And yet if that Cross means anything (if 
 Christ hanging there was in any sense a pattern and 
 example to us), all this in the power of his Spirit must 
 be attempted, and in a measure must be done. Here 
 then is our first lesson. That Cross witnesses against 
 lives which, stained it may be with no great sins, are 
 yet marked by no great self-devotion ; which, perhaps 
 without excess, are yet also without self-denial lives 
 which in the world's sight and world's estimate are 
 decent and comely, and would have indeed been so, 
 if no Saviour had suffered, and in suffering shown us
 
 THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE CROSS 247 
 
 a more excellent "way, and commanded us to walk 
 in it. 
 
 But secondly, in what light does that Cross show to 
 us a life, not such as I have spoken of, of ordinary 
 decent worldliness, but of positive sin and open trans- 
 gression of the divine law that Cross of Christ, upon 
 which He condemned sin in the flesh ? Oh, brethren, 
 it is just this Cross which throws so fearful a light upon 
 sin now, which will make it in the world to come so 
 impossible to be forgiven. It will be the thorn-crowned 
 brow, whose gaze it will be so dreadful hereafter to 
 meet. On his head who shall be our Judge, there will 
 be many crowns, but the crown of thorns, as it is 
 the most glorious, so will it be the most awful of 
 all. It will be the nailed and the pierced hand 
 which it will be so crushing to have laid on us in 
 anger. It will be his cup of gall, which will have 
 made our cup of sinful pleasure so guilty a thing. To 
 have resisted the mighty attractions of the Cross, 
 this will be the great condemnation of sinners 
 to have made, as far as in them lay, that word of 
 the Saviour vain, 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all 
 men unto me.' It had been comparatively little to 
 have stood out against the threatenings of right- 
 eousness ; but that when God Himself laid bare to 
 us his beating heart, and bade us to cast ourselves 
 there, his wounded side that we might hide ourselves
 
 243 
 
 in it. then to have sullenly stood aloof, to have gone 
 npon our own ways, and to have stopped our ears and 
 made them adder deaf to the mighty charmings of love, 
 this will be the sin of sin, the sin which will defy 
 forgiveness.
 
 CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH 249 
 
 SERMON XXI. 
 
 CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH. 
 
 2 COR. viii. 9. 
 
 Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was 
 rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his 
 poverty might be rich. 
 
 IT was bat recently that these Corinthians had known 
 this grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, for it was he 
 himself, the writer of these words, who had first brought 
 to them the knowledge of that grace ; who had found 
 them, some the servants of vain idols, and some of a 
 vain philosophy or some, it might be, the servants of 
 both at the same time and, delivering them from these 
 sinful and beggarly elements of this world, had im- 
 parted to them the knowledge of those unsearchable 
 riches of Christ, whereof he here reminds them. And 
 if you will observe the occasion on which, and the 
 motive with which he utters these words, you will 
 find them to be as follows: The Church at Corinth 
 was comparatively a wealthy one above all, wealthy 
 if set beside the mother Church at Jerusalem. From 
 some cause or another, various causes have been as-
 
 250 CHEIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH 
 
 signed, the poor saints at Jerusalem continually needed 
 the assistance of their richer brethren throughout the 
 world ; and St. Paul is here urging the Christians at 
 Corinth to a liberal contribution on their behalf. And 
 now the apostle, who loves ever to appeal to the highest 
 motives, sets before the Corinthians, in these words of 
 my text, why it was their duty to open their hands and 
 their hearts freely, to respond cheerfully and largely to 
 the appeal which he made to them. Ye profess to be 
 followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, to be desirous to 
 walk in his footsteps, to take Him for a pattern and 
 example. And you know what that pattern and example 
 was what his grace towards us was rich He became 
 poor for our sakes, that we, through his poverty, might 
 be rich. Shall we refuse to follow, though it be at an 
 infinite distance, in his footsteps? How infinite this 
 distance is, and must always continue, and at the same 
 time how constraining the motive which we may here- 
 find for acts of self-sacrifice and self-denial, be they 
 small or be they great, will appear most plainly, when 
 we have a little more closely studied the memorable 
 words : ' Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 who being rich, he, etc.' Being rich, or though He was 
 rich; to what do these words refer ? What were the 
 riches which He had, and which for our sakes He re- 
 nounced ? No doubt the riches of his glory and pre- 
 eminence in heaven in his pras-existent subsistence
 
 CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH 251 
 
 the glory which He had with the Father, before the 
 foundations of the world were laid. All attempts to 
 explain away these words, as though they expressed less 
 than this, as though anything short of this would ex- 
 haust and satisfy their meaning, must at once be rejected 
 and set aside as idle and futile. He was rich what 
 words of ours can express, for indeed what thoughts of 
 ours can conceive, the riches which were his ? He was 
 in the form of God, the firstborn or the born before every 
 creature in the bosom of the Father sharing with the 
 Father and the Holy Ghost the incommunicable bliss 
 of Deity, for He thought it not robbery to be equal with 
 God, and taking all, did not account that He was snatch- 
 ing anything which was not rightfully his own. And 
 Him the angels, a living circle of light around the 
 throne, worshipped for evermore ; and when the four 
 living creatures gave glory and honour and thanks to 
 Him that sat upon the throne, who liveth for ever and 
 ever, it was to Him, to the Son, the Image of the In- 
 visible God, that this glory and honour and these 
 thanks were rendered. 
 
 But being rich He made himself poor. Here again 
 what comparison drawn from things earthly would 
 make even a remote approximation to this making of 
 Himself poor on the part of the Son of God ? Truly 
 it immeasurably transcends them all. It .is a real foil 
 when a king, by the turn of fortune's wheel, comes
 
 252 CHRIST POOR TEAT WE MIGHT BE RICH 
 
 down to a private man's estate; but we have a far 
 greater fall than this to deal with. Let him exchange 
 his royal robes for a beggar's weeds, his sceptre for a 
 staff, wander an outcast and an exile over the earth, 
 that too were nothing that would but feebly help to 
 shew forth what we are contemplating here. 
 
 For such a change, great as no doubt it would be, 
 would yet find place altogether within fixed and in some 
 respects very narrow limits that is, within the limits 
 and conditions of our humanity. That king who left 
 his throne he was but a man at the highest, subject 
 therefore to all the infirmities of our nature, to sorrow, 
 to sickness, to accidents, to death, dwelling in a house 
 of clay which the moth crushes he continues a man at 
 his lowest. He has but changed his outward garb and 
 trappings, not the essentials of his existence. 
 
 A rich man to become a poor man, or a great man 
 a small, or a king a beggar what is it after all, wherein 
 does it even remotely approach the change which St. 
 Paul speaks of here : God to become man, not to cease 
 from being God, for that it was impossible for Him to 
 do. God could never cease to be God ; but to abdicate 
 and renounce for the time all the actings of Deity, to 
 empty Himself of all these, to take upon Him man's 
 nature with all its inherent weaknesses and infirmities, 
 with all the conditions which cling to it, except, indeed, 
 its sin which is only its miserable accidents and not its
 
 CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE EICH 253 
 
 essence to take upon Him the form of a servant, and as 
 lowest and last and least to walk this painful earth of 
 ours, hungering and thirsting, having not where to lay 
 his head, enduring the contradictions of sinners, and 
 at length paying the things which He never took, 
 stripped of all, bare of all, undergoing the extreme 
 penalty of our sin, tasting death and the bitterness of 
 death for every man. Truly He made Himself poor for 
 our sakes a worm and no man. There was no poverty 
 like his. 
 
 But his purpose in all this. That we through his 
 poverty should be rich. How strangely these words 
 sound ! that the poverty of one should be the riches of 
 many ! And yet it is indeed only another putting of the 
 same wonderful paradox which runs through the whole 
 Gospel, and through the whole of Christ's dealings with 
 the children of men. Those dealings were throughout 
 a giving and a taking, a wondrous exchange, such as it 
 could only have entered into the heart of God to con- 
 ceive. He everywhere taking from us whatever was 
 poorest, meanest, saddest, most painful, most igno- 
 minious, and giving to us what was highest, noblest, 
 choicest, best, and most glorious; taking earth and 
 giving heaven, taking our poverty and giving to us his 
 riches. But this is not all; taking our shame and 
 giving to us his glory, taking our cross and giving 
 to us his crown, taking our sin and giving to us
 
 254 CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH 
 
 his righteousness, taking our curse and giving to us 
 his blessing, taking our death and giving to us his life. 
 
 Truly He did make Himself poor that we through his 
 poverty might be rich. But of what riches speaks the 
 Apostle here? Not of silver and gold, corruptible 
 things, of which if one have more another must have 
 less, which oftentimes corrupt those that have them, 
 which at best perish in the using ; which leave us, or 
 which at the best we must leave. Not to make us rich 
 in these ; for He knew that man's true life was not in 
 them, that a man abounding in these, rich in all which 
 the world calls riches, might yet still be poor, poor in 
 all the elements of true happiness, poor in time and 
 poor for eternity ; poor in time, having no joy in his 
 life here, for the fountains of joy even here are within 
 a man and not without, from above and not from 
 beneath. How poor too may a rich man of this world 
 be, how poor for eternity, how bare, how naked, how 
 miserable, when that world which was his only world 
 shall have passed away from him and the glory of it ; 
 this too He knew as none of us can know, as it is to 
 be hoped we shall never know, as only that last and 
 terrible day shall declare. 
 
 To make us rich, then, in what ? Rich in peace, rich 
 in joy, rich in the grace, favour, presence, and benedic- 
 tion of our God. And oh ! brethren, how poor is man's 
 life, how mean, how wretched, if it have not these ; if it
 
 CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH 255 
 
 "be lived without Christ and without God. Men may array 
 that life outwardly with what gorgeous trappings they 
 can; cover over and conceal the inner squalor and 
 meanness of it as they will ; they may hide its loath- 
 some sores under purple and gold ; yet the inner mean- 
 ness and poverty of it cannot effectually be hid, will 
 make themselves felt ; its sores refuse to be hidden, will 
 break forth so that all may see them. There is hollow- 
 ness at the heart of a worldly life, be it outwardly as 
 rich and prosperous as it may ; a want of sincerity in its 
 joys ; its mirth is madness, and its loudest laughter ever 
 followed by a sigh. What good shall my life do me ? 
 is sooner or later the cry of the jaded votary of pleasure. 
 He who thought to enjoy everything in a little while 
 enjoys nothing. The prodigal of yesterday is the bank- 
 rupt of to-day. ' I enjoy nothing,' those were the very 
 words of one, gifted with all the external helps to 
 happiness a poet, one of the noble of the earth, gifted 
 with genius, with all that wealth could command, who, 
 having loosed himself from all the painful tasks which 
 duty would impose, sought only to please himself. 
 Having laid himself out to enjoy everything, but with- 
 out God, against God, this was the sad and forlorn con- 
 fession which was wrung from his lips ere he had 
 reached half the allotted years of man. 
 
 But that Saviour with whom we have to do makes 
 the life of his people rich, brings them back to God,
 
 256 CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH 
 
 the one fountain and spring of all joy, reconciles them 
 to Him in the blood of his cross, and in that same act 
 reconciles them to themselves, healing the deep hurt of 
 their spirits and changing the deep discords of their 
 lives into harmonies. The world in which they live, 
 they behold it now as God's world. The work appointed 
 to them to do is God's work, and this adds dignity and 
 honour to the humblest task which may be allotted to 
 them here. 
 
 Toil and labour, sorrow and suffering, all have 
 transformed and transfigured from the moment that the 
 light of heaven, the light of Christ's cross has rested 
 upon them. They are no longer mere heavy crushing 
 burdens, under which our suffering humanity groans 
 as it staggers wearily to its grave ; but these very 
 things, seeming to be burdens, are indeed lightsome 
 wings, lifting us heavenward ; a divine training and 
 discipline appointed for the children of God ; a ladder 
 let down from heaven, by which they may mount, 
 painfully, it may be, and with bleeding feet to the 
 throne of God. Surely the Apostle had good right to 
 affirm that Jesus Christ became poor that we through 
 his poverty might be rich. 
 
 But whom did St. Paul mean by we ? Was it only 
 those who were already partakers of these riches that 
 were in Christ ; and who should henceforward glorify 
 themselves in the exclusive possession of these riches ?
 
 CHRIST POOR THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH 257 
 
 or was it not rather all men that all whom sin had 
 impoverished might through the grace of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ be made rich ? It was not a favoured few, 
 but all whose poverty Christ would fain change into 
 riches, their sin into righteousness, their shame into 
 glory, their despair into hope, their death in life into a 
 life even in death ; his purposes of love as wide as the 
 world.
 
 258 LOT'S CHOICE 
 
 SERMON XXII. 
 LOT'S CHOICE. 
 
 GEN. xiii. 12, 13. 
 
 Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled in the cities 
 of the plain, and pitched his tent toward Sodom. But the men 
 of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly. 
 
 LOT, I need not remind you, was a nephew of Abraham, 
 his brother's son ; and when Abraham at the bidding of 
 God made his great venture of faith, quitted his father's 
 house and father's gods, and began his long pilgrimage 
 in the land of promise, he took, we are told, Lot as 
 the companion of his pilgrimage. You will observe the 
 entirely subordinate position as is slightly but suffi- 
 ciently indicated by the words of the sacred historian : 
 Abraham took Lot no slight or trivial honour to be 
 thus brought into closest fellowship with such a man 
 as Abraham, one of the noblest that ever trod this 
 earth of ours, the friend of God ; in some sort the 
 founder of the glorious family of the children of God, 
 for indeed to live in near familiarity with one nobler 
 than ourselves, with higher ideals of life, is a talent for
 
 .LOT'S CHOICE 259 
 
 which we shall have to give an account. How far Lot 
 was ennobled by such companionship with one of the 
 born kings of the earth, what spiritual uses he made of 
 such an opportunity, we shall presently see. The first 
 occasion on which there was room for a display on his 
 part was that of the strife which sprang up between 
 the herdsmen of the greater and the lesser man. Both 
 had numerous herds of cattle till the land was not 
 large enough to find room for both. They must part. 
 And now each shows himself in his true light ; money, 
 goods of this present world, dividing of the inheritance, 
 these and such like do more perhaps than aught else 
 in the world to lay bare what men really are, touch- 
 stones to distinguish truly between the false and the 
 true. So it proved here. Abraham the royal hearted 
 bears himself nobly, he is the uncle, Lot but the 
 nephew, he already the recipient of the glorious 
 promises of God, in whom all the kindreds of the 
 earth should be blest. Lot the nephew, one who in 
 his insignificance would never have been so much as 
 heard of in after years. 
 
 But Abraham claims nothing for himself on the 
 score of all this ; gives his nephew the pick and choice 
 of the whole land which is before him. If thou wilt 
 take the right hand, then I will take the left. And 
 Lot is content to profit by the offer of his uncle. 
 Without remonstrance, without real reluctance, without 
 
 s 2
 
 260 LOT'S CHOICE 
 
 so much as the show and semblance of reluctance, he at 
 once selects for himself what appears the best. Then 
 'Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of 
 Jordan, that it was well watered every where, then Lot 
 chose him all the plain of Jordan,' not a share or portion 
 of what was best, but all of it for himself, and pitched 
 his tent toward Sodom. Surely, if there had been any 
 true greatness in him, it would have been impossible 
 for him to have availed himself in this fashion of the 
 large-heartedness of Abraham and without more ado 
 have appropriated all which seemed best to himself. 
 Even in selfishness, even among the children of this 
 world, in greedy graspings there are measures, propor- 
 tions, and degrees. 
 
 But there were other moral blemishes which cleaved 
 to the choice which Lot had made, only too suggestive 
 of what was the true spirit of the man about whom we 
 are now concerned. The sacred historian, having re- 
 corded that Lot pitched his tent towards Sodom, 
 adds these significant words : ' but the men of Sodom 
 were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly.' 
 Observe here how the sacred historian leaves us to put 
 these two things together to form our own judgment 
 of him who for such poor and paltry gains was willing 
 to plant himself, his wife, his children in the midst 
 of a people so deeply sunken in impure lusts, and yet 
 wherefore should we wonder at the silence of our God,
 
 LOT'S CHOICE 261 
 
 and if there are many things which we must read into 
 Scripture, there are also many which we must read out 
 of it. The silences of Scripture are also as instructive 
 as its speech ; what it does not say will often convey 
 lessons as real, as effective, as what it does say. Thus 
 we are not told in as many words how miserable a 
 falling away it was for a member of the elect family 
 to mingle with the heathen and to learn their works. 
 We are left to gather all this from the after issues of 
 the story. Lot's life is a sermon, it was meant to be a 
 sermon to himself, let it in any event be a sermon for 
 us. Lot makes haste to be rich, but the riches escape 
 him. The good which he had chosen is no good, the 
 people of Sodom with whom he has cast his lot, were de- 
 feated in battle, the city in which he has chosen to live 
 is taken, Lot and all that he has is swept away in what 
 would have been hopeless captivity if Abraham had not 
 played the man indeed, pursued the enemies who were 
 retiring, laden with their spoils, overtaken them with 
 his little company of faithful retainers, and rescued his 
 nephew and all from the terrible doom that was his. 
 
 One would have thought that this was enough, that 
 Lot would have shaken off the dust of the guilty city ; 
 that, however fair, however well watered the plain of 
 Sodom might be, he would not have put himself in 
 the way of being again partaker of her plagues. But 
 there are some on whom all the dealings of God are
 
 262 LOT'S CHOICE 
 
 thrown away, whom his gentleness does not make 
 great, whose severity does not warn. And Lot was 
 one of these. When we next hear of him, we find him 
 comfortably established at Sodom again, sitting at the 
 door of his house, improved and repaired as I do not 
 doubt, and all this as zealously as though nothing had 
 happened, as though nothing would happen ; as though 
 there were no such things as warnings in the world, 
 and where these are neglected and despised, judgments 
 that follow behind them. That fierce tempest of war in 
 which all was so nearly perishing together for him and 
 his has past over. 
 
 All shows fair and prosperous again, though in- 
 deed a judgment far more terrible than that which 
 they had just overlived was at hand, even at the door. 
 As concerns the sinful cities, the cup of their iniquity 
 was full, they were just about to be set forth, suffer- 
 ing the vengeance of eternal fire. Neither can Lot 
 do anything to avert this doom. There are righteous 
 men whose prayers can save a soul, a city, a kingdom, 
 that is, if there be anything savable about them. 
 There are righteous men whose mere presence imposes 
 a restraint upon the wicked, so that these, whether 
 they will or not, stand in awe and abashed before 
 goodness which rises to such immeasurable heights above 
 them. But Lot was evidently not one of these, when 
 he protests against and would fain prevent a hideous
 
 LOT'S CHOICE 263 
 
 crime, all the reply which he gets from those among 
 whom he has been living is this : ' This one fellow 
 came in to sojourn, and he will needs be a judge.' 
 Nobody, it is evident, makes much account of him or 
 of anything which he says or does. When having been 
 warned of the approaching overthrow of the city, the 
 winding sheet of fire in which it was about to be 
 wrapped, he goes to his sons-in-law with words like 
 these : c Get you out of this place, for the Lord will 
 destroy this city,' his words carry no weight, obtain 
 no belief from them. He seemed to his sons-in-law as 
 one that mocked. Nay, his wife herself, who must 
 have known him best, does not believe him, but 
 looking back in the very agony of her flight courts the 
 dreadful doom which overtook her. Indeed, one may 
 affirm, that he himself hardly credited the message 
 he brought to others; we are expressly told that he 
 lingered, could hardly be torn away from the precious 
 things of earth to which his soul so clung, was only 
 delivered from perishing with the perishing city by 
 the gracious violence of an angel, which saved him 
 as in his own despite. But it is life, and life only, 
 which he has saved ; all else is gone, all which he has 
 gotten by preferring himself in honour and profit to 
 others on that memorable day when they two, uncle 
 and nephew, separated and went their several ways to 
 issues so different ; all which he has gotten by taking
 
 264 LOT'S CHOICE 
 
 up his abode with the wicked, that is gone too. It is 
 not much that we hear of him more ; and certainly 
 nothing that alters for the better our estimate of his 
 character. A little more we are told about him, but 
 that may be passed over here. And then, with the 
 brand of dishonour on his brow, he disappears from 
 sacred story. 
 
 My brethren, is a life in its moral features at all 
 resembling this the life which we should wish to have 
 lived ? To him who lived that life, who lived a life set 
 at so low a key, there were not wanting, even in that 
 poor spiritual condition, many tokens of the faithfulness 
 of God for indeed what faithfulness it is in Him when 
 He deals with us as He dealt with Lot in blended 
 judgment and mercy when He empties us from vessel 
 to vessel, when He breaks our idols, defeats our schemes 
 of wealth, disappoints our ambitions, strips us, it may 
 be, of everything which we clung to the most when, I 
 say, He does this instead of leaving us to wrap our- 
 selves in the robe of an unhallowed prosperity, with no 
 sorrows in our life, and no bonds in our death, with all 
 things going well with us except the one thing which 
 in the end will be all. 
 
 But, my brethren, this faithfulness of our God 
 which will not leave us alone in our sins, which will 
 not leave us to the saddest and dreadfullest of all dooms, 
 namely, the unpunished prosperity of wicked, or say
 
 LOT'S CHOICE 265 
 
 worldly men, we cannot say that it always accomplishes 
 its work. I had almost said that it failed in his case 
 with whom we have mainly now to do but, leaving 
 this in the obscurity in which Scripture has left it, this 
 certainly we may affirm that, if saved, Lot was saved as 
 by fire. Would we wish such a scarcely saved as this 
 to be ours, graces so poor and so stunted as his were, 
 little service or none done by us to others, little or 
 no glory done by us to God and then, after many 
 warnings which yet had failed to warn us, a close to 
 our day of grace with as little of honour about it as 
 waited on the close of this man's day ; no abundant 
 entrance into the kingdom ours, but we cast naked and 
 shivering, as shipwrecked mariners, on the shores of 
 everlasting life ? 
 
 Assuredly we would not have it so and blessed 
 be God, He can appoint for us quite another course for 
 our Christian life, and quite other issues for it, issues 
 happy and honourable, if only, in quite another sense 
 than Lot's, we will choose the better part for ourselves ; 
 if only we seek to be gilded with touches, however 
 faint, of brightness, such as are to be gotten by habitual 
 fellowship with the excellent of the earth ; above all, 
 by communion with Him who is fairer than the children 
 of men, and who makes fair, in a manner transfiguring 
 and transforming all who steadfastly look at Him and 
 behold, in however slight a measure, his glory all this,
 
 266 LOT'S CHOICE 
 
 I say, may be ours, if, laying God's judgments to heart, 
 we turn our backs betimes on the doomed and guilty 
 city of this world, we blessed fugitives to that heavenly 
 city which hath foundation, a city of refuge now, and 
 of glory for evermore.
 
 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 267 
 
 SERMON XXIII. 
 
 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE. 
 
 ROM. xv. 4. 
 
 Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our 
 learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures 
 might have hope. 
 
 IT is much to be feared that the acquaintance which 
 too many among us possess with those many sacred 
 books which together constitute for us the Bible is very 
 slight and very superficial, that it is sadly wanting in 
 thoroughness, accuracy, extent, and depth. There are 
 certain portions of Scripture with which almost all of 
 us can scarcely help having more or less familiarity 
 the Gospels for example, and those chapters in the Old 
 Testament which we have heard from year to year 
 read in the Sunday service of the Church. But for too 
 many among us there is just reason to suspect all be- 
 yond this is, I will not say an unknown, a terra incognito, 
 but one which has been very carelessly explored, if indeed 
 explored at all. The hold which they have on the great 
 facts, features, and outlines of the rest of the Bible is
 
 268 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 of the loosest and slightest kind, while even those who 
 possess a livelier interest in spiritual things could only 
 too easily be carried beyond the lines to which their 
 knowledge extends. Familiar, it may be, with the 
 highways of Scripture, they are yet comparative 
 strangers to its byways have rarely or never trodden 
 these, though much, if not as much, of profit and 
 instruction is to be gathered in these which I have 
 ventured to call its byways, as in its more frequented 
 highways. 
 
 What is the explanation of this prevailing unac- 
 quaintance with Scripture, this lack of a close familiarity 
 which I fear we must charge home upon so many, not 
 merely with its lesser details, but with its broader 
 features and outlines ? The explanation, alas ! is only 
 too easy. The Bible is little read, and is studied still 
 less. We rejoice as members of a Reformed Church in 
 an open Bible, that no tyrannous priesthood keeps the 
 Word of God under lock and key, dispensing just such 
 little petty doles and portions of it as it pleases to the 
 lay people. We glory in our societies which circulate 
 copies of the Scriptures by thousands and by millions ; 
 that it is not now as in those ages before the invention 
 of printing, when a copy of the Bible would cost some 
 forty pounds of our present money, while it now costs 
 fewer pence ; but ah ! brethren, what profits an open 
 Bible, a Bible so cheap that it has been or may be
 
 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 209 
 
 brought into nearly every cottage of the land, if at the 
 same time it remains an unread Bible ? What profits 
 the commonness of the blessing if this very common- 
 ness has taken away in great part from the price and 
 value of it? What is our gain if it should appear that 
 the Word of the Lord was precious in those days, and is 
 not precious in ours ? 
 
 Brethren, I appeal to the consciences of some among 
 us, and they shall answer whether I express too un- 
 favourable a judgment of our present religious condition, 
 when I affirm that at this day the Bible is very little 
 read among us little read, I mean, as compared to the 
 claims which it has upon every one among us. There 
 is one person with whose ways, doings, habits, thoughts, 
 duties, manner of distributing his time, each of us 
 here present is thoroughly acquainted. How is it 
 with that one person namely, with ourselves? I 
 speak not here of those who are altogether negligent 
 of this duty, such as in habit and practice never read 
 the Bible. They may perhaps take it down from its 
 shelf in an hour of sickness or pain, to be quickly re- 
 placed there so soon as that sickness has been exchanged 
 for health and the pain for ease; or, it may be, in Mi.' 
 season of great sorrow and bereavement they turn to 
 its unfamiliar pages, hoping to find some comfort there ; 
 but the stress of the sorrow passes away, and the volume 
 is gladly closed and set aside in some unknown corner
 
 270 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 again. But there are others who, though they would 
 not admit this entire neglect of the Word of God, 
 must yet own that their only reading of the Bible 
 is on Sunday. A chapter, or a chapter or two, 
 read on the Sunday evening is all the searching 
 of the Scriptures for which they fancy they can find 
 time is, at any rate, all for which they have heart 
 or desire. 
 
 And you, dear friends, who are more habitual 
 students of God's Word, who daily seek to nourish your 
 souls with some portions of it, must not you, or at least 
 some of you, acknowledge that these portions are often 
 small, the amount of time allotted to this study only 
 too brief, often encroached on from divers sides, so that 
 while the Scripture may be read indeed, yet it is not 
 also marked, learned, and inwardly digested, and that 
 thus the profit is small as compared to what it should 
 have been. There is not on your part all that growing 
 familiarity and increasing acquaintance with the oracles 
 of God which there should be. 
 
 For, indeed, brethren, there is no book which re- 
 quires such constant, such daily study, if we are to 
 become familiar with it, if we are at all to make the 
 riches which it contains our own. Eegard it first 
 merely on what one might call its human side, and 
 quite apart from the fact that it is the wisdom not of 
 man but of God. Consider first the mere size of the
 
 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 271 
 
 book. The Bible contains some twelve hundred 
 chapters. Is it a light matter to become familiar with 
 a volume of such extent as this ? And then consider 
 the infinite variety of the matter which it contains : books 
 so unlike one another books of history, books of poetry, 
 books of prophecy, books of doctrine. Consider also, 
 that while there is in this book the highest method (for 
 method is of God), there is no system in it (for systems 
 are of men). Scripture is not a hortus siccus, where 
 you can at once find each thing which you want to find, 
 labelled and ticketed, and put away in its own drawer ; 
 it is not a hortits siccus, with everything under your 
 hand at once, but a garden ; and that not an artificial 
 garden, in which can be everywhere traced the hand 
 and art and device of man, but a glorious wilderness 
 of sweets, in which under higher guidance guidance of 
 the Spirit of God, guidance of the Church of God you 
 must gradually learn to find your way, and discover 
 one by one the beauties which it contains, but which it 
 is very far from obtruding upon every careless observer. 
 Assume for an instant that Scripture differs in no 
 essential thing from the highest works of human intel- 
 lect and genius and then, as other books demand 
 patience and study before they give up their secrets, can 
 it be expected that this book, or rather this multitude 
 of books, should not demand the same ? 
 
 But regard the Scriptures in its proper dignity,
 
 272 THE STUDY OF SCBIPTUEE 
 
 with those higher claims which it has upon us, as the 
 message of God to sinful man, and then it will be 
 still more manifest that only the constant and diligent 
 student can hope to possess himself of any considerable 
 portion of the treasures which it contains. For what, 
 indeed, is Scripture ? Men uttered it, but men who 
 were moved thereto by the Holy Ghost. It is the 
 wisdom of God. Think you that the plummet line of man, 
 even of man enlightened by a light from on high, can 
 soon sound the depths of the wisdom of God ? Are 
 not the depths of that wisdom unsearchable, such as we 
 should always search into, but which we can never hope 
 to search out. If all Scripture is by inspiration of God, 
 and all Scripture profitable for instruction in right- 
 eousness, must not all Scripture, putting aside a very 
 few chapters indeed, be the object of our most diligent 
 heed? 
 
 True it is that, with all our studies, we shall never 
 have mastered, or nearly mastered it all. We may see 
 an end of all other perfection ; but of the perfection 
 of God, or of ought which bears a direct impress and 
 stamp of God, we cannot see an end. Did we live a 
 thousand years, and were we to devote the most patient 
 industry and the rarest gifts of intellect during all this 
 time to the study of God's Word, there would still 
 remain in it heights which we had not scaled, depths
 
 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 273 
 
 which we had not fathomed. We should feel at the 
 last something as Sir Isaac Newton felt when, contem- 
 plating the discoveries in natural science which he had 
 made, and the much which remained undiscovered still 
 at the end of his life, he exclaimed, he had been but as 
 a child gathering up a few shells upon the shore of an 
 illimitable ocean. 
 
 But because Scripture cannot all be known, this is 
 no reason why we should not seek to know of it all 
 that we can ; and if there are in it veins of precious 
 ore, which lie so far below the surface that no skill of 
 ours can ever penetrate there, remember that there are 
 on the surface waving harvests of golden grain these 
 within the reach of all ; there is no reaper who goes 
 forth into the fields of Scripture, but may presently 
 return rejoicing, and bring his sheaves with him. 
 Or look at it under another image, and it is the tree 
 of life, planted by the waters of life, whose leaves are 
 for medicine, and whose fruit for food and bearing its 
 twelve manner of fruit. Some of this fruit may grow 
 on the topmost branches, beyond our reach ; but the 
 lowest in stature among us may gather enough to satisfy 
 the hunger of his soul, to nourish it up unto everlasting 
 life. 
 
 I beseech you, brethren, esteem at its due rate this 
 inestimable gift of God to the world, even his own 
 
 T
 
 274 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 Word, only inferior in value to the gift of his dear 
 Son and the necessary complement of that other gift 
 for how without a written Scripture should we have 
 had any faithful and authentic record of the words and 
 works of Christ ? Suppose these had been entrusted to 
 oral tradition, had been so handed down from generation 
 to generation, how little confidence should we have that 
 we now possessed the very words which Christ spake, 
 a record of his works exactly as He wrought them nay, 
 how certain it is that we should not possess this, that 
 many fables would by this time have mingled with the 
 truth, and that it would be often impossible to distin- 
 guish one from the other. Without a Bible, the work 
 of redemption which Christ wrought could only have 
 reached after ages as a dim uncertain rumour, a tradi- 
 tion in which the elements of truth and falsehood would 
 long before this time have been so inextricably mingled 
 together that it would be impossible to separate them 
 the one from the other. The one gift of a Saviour 
 drew after it, and made necessary, a Scripture to testify 
 of that Saviour ; and a Church to be the guardian of 
 that Scripture. 
 
 Eeview, I beseech you brethren every one, the 
 relation in which you stand to the Word of God. 
 The Church, by her collect which I have just used, 
 specially invites you to this. If you have hitherto been 
 content with such desultory acquaintance with it as you
 
 TEE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 275 
 
 might pick up at church, or as you derived from the 
 not wholly effaced recollections of childish years, resolve 
 that this shall be so no more ; that you will not wrong 
 your soul as you have done, stinting or depriving it 
 altogether of its necessary food. 
 
 Eesolve, then, I would say first, that every day you 
 will read some portion of Scripture, consider which the 
 Church suggests ; find, or if you cannot find, make a 
 time for this. At any cost, at any sacrifice, rescue and 
 redeem the time necessary for this. Remember what 
 the Psalmist could say : ' Mine eyes prevent the night 
 watches, that I might meditate in thy word.' Might 
 it not sometimes so fare with you? And what you 
 read, strive to read it devoutly with reverence ; here, 
 too, in the spirit of the Psalmist when he exclaimed, 
 < Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous 
 things out of thy law.' Remember that it is only in 
 God's light that we can see light that we can only 
 see in Scripture what He shows us. The fountain from 
 which Hagar should have quenched her thirst was close 
 to her, and yet she could not see it. She, with he* child, 
 would have perished for thirst in the wilderness, if the 
 angel of God had not opened her eyes, and shewed 
 to her the fountain there (Gen. xxi. 16, 19). Christ, 
 and Christ only, has the key of knowledge that when 
 He opens none can shut ; that if He should shut them 
 
 T 2
 
 276 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 against our presumption and pride, not all the wise, 
 nor all the wisdom of this world could open them 
 to us. 
 
 Then once more let us read, looking for Christ 
 Christ in the Old Testament quite as much as in the 
 New though Christ under types and shadows in the 
 one, and openly declared in the other. He said Him- 
 self of us : ' They testify of me, that is their glory.' 
 
 Then, too, let us read with personal application ; for 
 Scripture is like a good portrait, which, wherever we 
 move, appears to have its eyes on us still ; and many 
 times the sacred archer may seem to have drawn his 
 bow at a venture, but has arrows which shall pierce 
 and penetrate through the rifts of our armour, putting 
 us to wholesome pain, and wounding, but only wounding 
 that they might heal. 
 
 Finally, brethren, whatever we learn out of God's 
 Holy Word, let us seek in our lives to fulfil the same 
 not forgetful hearers or readers, not like a man be- 
 holding his natural face in a glass, and going his way, 
 and straightway forgetting what manner of man he was. 
 If that faithful mirror shews us blemishes and de- 
 formities on the face of our soul, let us seek to remove 
 them ; evil passions and tempers allowed, let us seek of 
 God's grace to subdue them ; duties undone, let us seek 
 henceforth to fulfil them, ever striving to bring both 
 the outward course and inward spirit of our lives into
 
 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTURE 277 
 
 closer and more perfect agreement with what there we 
 read. 
 
 In all these ways let us give diligence to bring out 
 for ourselves the riches and glory of the Word of God ; 
 and then, if some gainsayer should rise up in our time 
 and such in all times there will be, for the Scripture, 
 like the Scripture's Lord, shall be a sign spoken against 
 the objections and cavils of such objector will trouble 
 us very little. We may not be able to answer them ; it 
 may need more learning, more ability, than we possess, 
 but we shall have this answer : ' I Icnoiv that Scripture is 
 a book of God's, for I have found it so. It has answered 
 my deepest needs. It has told me things about myself, 
 things about God, which I could have never discovered 
 of myself, but which, being discovered, I must at once 
 set my seal to, as true communion with this book makes 
 me wiser, better, purer, exerts an influence upon me for 
 good immeasurably higher than that which is exercised by 
 any other book other books exercising the same only 
 in the measure that they share the spirit of this Book. 
 The Bible is thus to me its own attestation ; I see it 
 in its own light.' Be able to say this, let it have thus 
 commended itself to your conscience, and your faith 
 in Scripture, as the very Word of God, will not be 
 shaken by any captious cavils of men; and then, 
 though the cry be raised by some : ' What is this book 
 more than another?' you will be able to reply that
 
 278 THE STUDY OF SCRIPTUBE 
 
 in this it is more than any other; that it exercises 
 an influence, purifying, ennobling, strengthening, on the 
 hearts and lives of those who study it and love it, which 
 no other book can lay claim to in the least ; and that 
 you yourselves have found this so.
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 279 
 
 SERMON XXIV. 
 
 BAXTER AND ' THE SAINT'S REST.' 
 
 HEBREWS iv. 9. 
 There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. 
 
 I HAVE undertaken to speak to you this day of one, and 
 of the most famous work of one, who at the time of his 
 death stood outside of, and to a certain point in anta- 
 gonism to, that Church, whereof most, if not all, of us 
 here present have the privilege of being members. I 
 am about to express my own sympathy, and to claim 
 yours, for labours of his, as wrought for the common 
 good, the spiritual profit of us all. For myself I need 
 hardly say that there does not seem to me any incon- 
 sistency in this. I feel no embarrassment in the con- 
 templation of the position which I occupy ; nor am I 
 conscious that any explanation, still less that any apo- 
 logy, is needful from me. When brought into contact 
 with those who stand outside of our own communion, 
 be they the living or the dead, I make no pretence of 
 believing that there are not differences, it may be im- 
 portant differences, between us; 1 do not hesitate to
 
 280 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S BEST' 
 
 profess that I regard my own as the best; else how 
 should I justify my cleaving to it? And further, I am 
 persuaded that we do not hasten, but rather put further 
 off, that blessed day when all who are Christ's shall be 
 outwardly as well as inwardly one in Him, by prema- 
 ture anticipations and snatchings at the same. To heal 
 our divisions, so to heal them, I mean, that they shall 
 not presently break out anew and prove more inveterate 
 than ever, is almost a Pentecostal work. Whenever 
 things are ripe for such a consummation, it will come 
 as of itself; there will be no mistake about it; the 
 dividing walls and separating barriers will fall away as 
 of their own accord. Meanwhile, and having ever in 
 view the hastening of the coming of such a day, there 
 is a duty which is plainly ours, a duty at once negative 
 and positive ; a negative duty, that we do not accen- 
 tuate, emphasize, exaggerate points of difference; a 
 positive duty, that we heartily thank God for all which 
 He has wrought in any of his Saints and servants, for 
 the likeness to Christ which He has formed in them ; 
 and not less for all which He has accomplished by 
 them ; that we recognize this with no grudging recog- 
 nition as a contribution thrown into the common stock 
 of the Church, an addition to the wealth not of a 
 section of it, but of the whole. It is this last duty, 
 which it is my privilege and pleasure to be called to 
 fulfil to-day. With Richard Baxter's Nonconformity,
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 281 
 
 whether it was his fault, or the Church's fault, or 
 nobody's fault, or everybody's fault, with this I have 
 happily nothing this day to do. With these preliminary 
 words I pass to my proper theme. 
 
 There are books which seem rather to write them- 
 selves, than to be written ; which are as the medicinal 
 gum that oozes from the tree, without constraint and 
 almost without solicitation; books, of which the authors, 
 if it were demanded of them why they wrote them, 
 might with perfect truth reply, because they could 
 not help it. Such I take very much "The Pilgrim's 
 Progress' to have been; and such 'The Imitation of 
 Christ ' ; the literary purpose, the intention of composing 
 a book, having altogether fallen into the background. 
 Many passages make plain that Baxter's ' Saint's Kest ' 
 is a book of the same spontaneous birth ; and I much 
 regret that in the shorter form, which is the only one 
 for the most part in which we possess or read it, these 
 passages have mainly or altogether been allowed to 
 disappear. For indeed, as is needful for many reasons 
 here to observe, the veritable work, as it came from Bax- 
 ter's hands, has important points of un likeness as com- 
 pared with the little volume, which we give as a prize in 
 our Sunday schools, and in other ways seek to disperse ; 
 and which in the case of many among us is probably all 
 with which we ourselves are familiar. In mere bulk, the 
 book as he wrote and published it is four or five times
 
 282 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S BEST' 
 
 bigger than the little volume which we know ; so that 
 when this announces itself as ' abridged,' this announce- 
 ment fails to convey, or conveys very inadequately, the 
 fact of the extent to which it has been cut short ; nay, 
 I am obliged to add, cut short not always with under- 
 standing. Thus, to go no further than the title-page, 
 we miss there the affecting and very instructive words 
 as to the true meaning and primary purpose with which 
 it was written, 'Written by the Author for his own 
 use, in the time of his languishing, when God took 
 him off from all public employment.' And we miss 
 not less many allusions to the troublous times in which 
 he lived and wrote, to Worcester, and Edgehill, and 
 Naseby, to the pall of mourning which our Civil War 
 had spread over the face of England ; all of which had 
 their use, served to give an historic basis to the book, 
 and hindered it from floating as it were in the air. 
 I would not here be misunderstood. The process of 
 abridgement has been somewhat mercilessly, and at 
 times somewhat clumsily executed ; and yet under no 
 other conditions could the book have made itself the 
 home which it has made in the hearts of so many 
 thousands in our land. Half is sometimes more than 
 the whole ; and this may be true of the fourth part as 
 well. The book, as Baxter wrote it, is long ; sometimes, 
 if we were to venture to speak out all that is in our 
 hearts, we should acknowledge it is tedious ; above all
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 283 
 
 in the earlier parts. It is only after a while that he 
 extricates himself from straits and narrows, in which 
 he has needlessly entangled himself there. 
 
 But now having ventured on this word of fault- 
 finding, let me finish with the same ; and note certain 
 defects and drawbacks, mostly formal, which, if I am 
 not mistaken, cleave to it; that so, this done, I may 
 dismiss the subject, and proceed to trace, as I best 
 may, what of excellent worth it offers to us. Baxter 
 then, a master in the art of the distribution of his 
 materials, with many of the merits of the Schoolmen 
 whom he studied so closely, and with some of their 
 faults, sometimes abuses this mastery ; pushes distinc- 
 tions and divisions so far, multiplies them so wantonly, 
 that not clearness, but confusion, is the result. His 
 method is not his servant, but he the servant of his 
 method. And as with the distribution of his materials, 
 so also with his materials themselves. They accumulate 
 beyond all reason under his hands. He is so full, with 
 so vast a range of theological interests, so well versed 
 in the controversies of his own time and of the times 
 past, that it is only too easy for him to go off upon 
 some side quest, if such offers itself to him, and to 
 follow it up much further than is consistent with the 
 main purpose or general symmetry of the work which 
 he has actually in hand. Take a notable example of 
 this from the book immediately before us. He has
 
 284 BAXTER AND ' THE SAINT'S REST' 
 
 not advanced very far in his praise of the heavenly 
 rest before it conies strongly home to him that the 
 certainty of our inheriting this rest depends on the 
 credibility of the Scriptures which promise it, on the 
 fact that they are no other than the infallible word of 
 God ; and hereupon he addresses himself to the whole 
 question of the divine authority of Scripture, and 
 generally of the Evidences of the Christian Religion, 
 devoting more than one hundred and thirty closely 
 printed pages to the subject. I need hardly say that 
 with occasional good points this treatise on Christian 
 Evidences, for it is nothing less, is of comparatively 
 little value now; although this by no fault of the 
 writer. The battle which is of all the ages, that, I 
 mean, of faith with unbelief, has within the last two 
 hundred years, above all during the last twenty, so 
 shifted its ground, that ' the high places of the field,' 
 those which, being won or lost, do in fact determine 
 the issues of the conflict, have ceased to be the same 
 which in his time they were; nay the very foes are 
 different, and different too is that for which we are 
 contending. The Deist of the seventeenth century 
 denied the fact of our having received a revelation from 
 God ; he never, so far as I know, denied the possibility 
 of our receiving such a revelation. Then, and up to a 
 recent date, we had not staked all upon the issue. 
 Even if the battle had gone against us, something
 
 BAXTER AND ' THE SAINT'S BEST ' 285 
 
 would have still remained ; or at least we might have 
 believed that something remained ; a living personal 
 extramundane God, governing the world in righteous- 
 ness; a voice of conscience, his voice within us, 
 attesting the everlasting distinctions between good 
 and evil ; the hope of immortality. These, with other 
 things precious, men might still have counted their 
 own. Now there is no room for any such belief; the 
 conflict is for all which we have; for all which is 
 human and all which is divine in man ; and it is well 
 that we should look this fact in the face. 
 
 And other avenues stretching away to the right 
 hand and to the left, Baxter cannot always resist the 
 temptation to explore ; and this, though they may lead 
 him far away from that which is his more immediate 
 concern. Above all, let him only find himself in the 
 neighbourhood of some perplexed question of the 
 Schools, such a one as has tasked and divided the 
 subtlest intellects of Christendom for centuries, which 
 has set Thomist against Scotist, Realist against Nomi- 
 nalist, and is likely to do the same to the end of time ; 
 for these controversies are not dead, they have only 
 a little shifted their ground; and at once, like the 
 war-horse of Job, he smells the battle afar off, 'the 
 thunder of the captains and the shouting,' and no- 
 thing will content him till he finds himself in their 
 midst.
 
 286 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S BEST' 
 
 I have thus delivered myself freely in regard of 
 certain drawbacks and faults from which this book 
 cannot be affirmed to be free; and dealing, as I am 
 thus far, mainly with things formal and external, let me 
 mention here, before entering into deeper matters, one 
 formal merit which it eminently possesses. I refer to 
 that without which, I suppose, no book ever won a 
 permanent place in the literature of a nation, and which 
 I have no scruple in ascribing to it I mean its style. A 
 great admirer of Baxter has recently suggested a doubt 
 whether he ever recast a sentence, or bestowed a thought 
 on its rhythm, and the balance of its several parts; 
 statements of his own make it tolerably certain that he 
 did not. As a consequence he has none of those bravura 
 passages which must have cost Jeremy Taylor, in his 
 ' Holy Living and Dying ' and elsewhere, so much of 
 thought and pains, for such do not come of themselves, 
 and unbidden, to the most accomplished masters of 
 language. But for all this there reigns in Baxter's 
 writings, and not least in ' The Saint's Rest,' a robust 
 and masculine eloquence ; nor do these want from time 
 to time rare and unsought felicities of language, which, 
 once heard, can scarcely be forgotten. In regard indeed 
 of the choice of words the book might have been written 
 yesterday. There is hardly one which has become 
 obsolete ; hardly one which has drifted away from the 
 meaning which it has in his writings. This may not be
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 287 
 
 a great matter ; but it argues a rare insight, conscious 
 or unconscious, into all which was truest, into all which 
 was furthest removed from affectation and untruthfulness 
 in the language, that after more than two hundred years 
 so it should be ; and we may recognize here an element, 
 not to be overlooked, of the abiding popularity of the 
 book. 
 
 Having tarried thus long as in the outer court of 
 the temple, let me now draw nearer to the heart of 
 things. And first I will attempt to realize to myself 
 and to you the conditions, outward and inward, under 
 which this book was produced, the forces which con- 
 tributed to its production ; for these will have gone far 
 to make it what it is. I remarked at the outset that 
 the book was one of those which seem rather to write 
 themselves than to be written. Let this, however, be 
 as it may, so much at least stands fast, that it was 
 originally composed for his own use surely an invalu- 
 able condition for a book of practical divinity, that it 
 should have been written to instruct, to comfort, to 
 strengthen him from whom it came, and then, if it 
 might be, others. We have his own account of the 
 genesis of the book, the pearl and crown, as I take 
 it, of all his books. Removed by sickness from all 
 active exercise of his ministry, left solitary in a country- 
 house, sentenced to death by the physicians, I began,' 
 he says, 'to contemplate more seriously the everlasting
 
 288 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 
 
 rest which I apprehended myself to be just on the 
 borders of. That my thoughts might not too much 
 scatter in my meditation, I began to write something 
 on the subject ; but being continued long in weakness, 
 where I had no books and no better employment, I 
 followed on till it was enlarged to the bulk in 
 which it is published.' 
 
 This then we note first about the book, and as helping 
 to explain and account for its existence, namely, that 
 it was the writing of one whose own life was a long 
 familiarity with pain ; not seldom a strong agony ; who 
 could take up with most literal truth the words of the 
 great apostle, 'In this tabernacle we groan.' No one 
 would willingly read the catalogue which more than 
 once he has given of all the diseases which laid siege in 
 his body to the citadel of life; but certainly no one 
 can read it without marvel that one with twenty mortal 
 sicknesses on his head should have seen that suffering 
 life prolonged for threescore and sixteen years. As 
 little can any one read it without admiration for that 
 continual triumph of the spirit over the flesh and over 
 fleshly ills, which could alone have enabled him to crowd 
 into years so preoccupied with pain such a vast amount 
 of work for God. He makes no parade of these suffer- 
 ings ; in this book only slightly alludes to them ; but 
 the yearning of the sick after health, of the weary after 
 rest, the sense of unease, of a vast weariness enfolding
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 
 
 289 
 
 all things here, makes itself very distinctly felt in such 
 passages as the following : 
 
 'Surely, a man would think, who looks upon the 
 face of the world, that rest should to all men seem 
 seasonable. Some of us are languishing under conti- 
 nual weakness, and groaning under most grievous pains, 
 crying in the morning, would God it were evening, 
 and in the evening would God it were morning, weary 
 of going, weary of sitting, weary of standing, weary of 
 lying, weary of eating, of speaking, of walking, weary 
 of our very friends, weary of ourselves ; oh how oft hath 
 this been mine own case, and is not rest yet seasonable ? 
 Whither can you go ; or into what company can you 
 come, where the voice of complaining doth not show 
 that men live in a continual weariness ? But especially 
 the saints, who are most weary of that which the world 
 cannot feel. What godly society almost can you fall 
 into, but you shall hear by their moans that somewhat 
 aileth them ? Some weary of a blind mind, doubting 
 concerning the way they walk in, unsettled in almost 
 all their thoughts ; some weary of a hard heart, some 
 of a proud, some of a passionate, and some of all these 
 and much more. Some weary of their daily doubtings 
 and fears concerning their spiritual estate, and some of 
 the want of spiritual joys, and some of the sense of 
 God's wrath, and is not rest then seasonable ? ' 
 
 But, again, Baxter felt profoundly the rrliLri"i;- 
 
 U
 
 290 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S BEST' 
 
 divisions, if not of Christendom, yet certainly of Eng- 
 land ; and moreover, as he himself often confesses, there 
 was a deep disappointment which mingled with his 
 sense of these. That the openly profane should make 
 war with all who would live godly, for this he was pre- 
 pared ; nothing else was to be expected. But it went 
 to his heart, and he recurs to this with a sad iteration, 
 that those professing godliness should scorn and defame, 
 should bite and devour one another as they did. Some 
 of us may have heard tell of a dying saint, who being 
 reminded by his friends that he was passing into a world 
 where the wicked cease from troubling, took up and 
 completed the patriarch's words, adding, 'Yes, and 
 where the good cease from troubling too.' Few have 
 felt this troubling on the part of the good, or of those 
 whom he esteemed good, more acutely than Baxter did. 
 I am confident that I do not err in esteeming it one 
 of the main burdens which made him yearn for that 
 heavenly rest, where the wicked cannot, and where the 
 good have no desire, to trouble any more. 
 
 Some will be surprised when I thus implicitly claim 
 Baxter as a son of peace ; some will be tempted to dis- 
 allow this claim ; remembering, as no doubt they will, 
 that he certainly took no inconsiderable share in the 
 theological fighting of his time. And no doubt, at a 
 first glance, and as long as we dwell on the mere surface 
 of things, it is not unnatural to regard him as a man of
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 291 
 
 war, of strife and contention all his life long ; fighting 
 against everybody; fighting, as I need not tell you, 
 against Papists, though counted by many Protestants 
 as only half-hearted in this battle, and this because he 
 would not teach that the further from Rome the nearer 
 to God ; fighting against the Prelatists or Bishops ; and 
 then, when these had disappeared for a while from the 
 scene, misliking many things in the Presbyterian rule 
 which had succeeded ; at open war with the Indepen- 
 dents, with the Fifth Monarchy Men, with the Anabap- 
 tists ; with the Libertines or Antinomians ; with the 
 Quakers, not the sober quietists then that they are now ; 
 with the Seekers, who counted that the kingdom of 
 God was still to seek; and with various minor sects, 
 ' some tolerable, some intolerable,' so he describes them, 
 which distracted the land ; his hand against all these ; 
 and yet I am bound to say, with all this, never in my 
 judgment fighting for mere fighting's sake ; but always 
 fighting for peace. When he said, and they are words 
 well worth remembering, ' He that is not a son of peace 
 is not a son of God,' this was not merely a pointed 
 epigrammatic saying which he was uttering, but a voice 
 which came from the deep of his heart. And it is no 
 more than due to him to add that as he yearned, 
 so he laboured, for peace. There is something affecting, 
 almost pathetic, in his entire confidence, a confidence 
 which no experience seemed able to shake, that all men, 
 
 v 2
 
 292 BAXTER AND TH E SAINT'S REST' 
 
 if once shown they were in the wrong, would at once 
 own that they were so, and without more ado would 
 confess and forsake the errors of which they were con- 
 vinced. In this conviction he was never weary of 
 writing books with titles such as these: 'A Friendly 
 Accommodation,' or again, ' Pacifying Principles,' or once 
 more, 'Against Contentious and Church distracting 
 Controversies,' or yet once again, ' An End of Doctrinal 
 Controversies by reconciling Explication.' 
 
 Whether his schemes of at-one-meiit were in deed 
 always reconciling and pacifying may be fairly a ques- 
 tion ; but in this indomitable faith of his that peace was 
 attainable, and that for the attaining of this it only 
 needed that men should be clearly made to see on which 
 side the right lay, and that it was possible to make them 
 see this, I recognize a certain simplicity if you will ; but 
 the grand simplicity of a man who ascribed to others the 
 same intellectual and moral honesty, the same allegiance 
 to the truth, or to what they believed to be the truth, 
 which he found in himself. 
 
 I have said that it might very fairly be a question 
 whether his schemes of pacification were such as were 
 always likely either in manner or matter to be crowned 
 with very signal success. And indeed, when we come 
 to acquaint ourselves a little closer with them, it is 
 not very wonderful if they failed. Here is one of 
 his summonses to the 'word-warriors' this excellent
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 293 
 
 phrase is of his own coining to lay down their arms 
 and to come to some understanding. It constitutes the 
 title-page of his ' Catholic Theology,' and little as he 
 may have intended this, it must be owned that every 
 word of it is a provocation and a challenge. It is worth 
 quoting, and with very slight omissions I quote it : 
 
 * Catholic Theology, plain, pure, peaceable ; for 
 pacifying of the dogmatical word-warriors, who by con- 
 tending about things unrevealed. or not understood, and 
 by putting verbal differences for real, and their arbitrary 
 notions for necessary sacred truths, deceived and deceiv- 
 ing, have long been the shame of the Christian religion, 
 a scandal and hardening to unbelievers, the incendiaries, 
 dividers and distracters of the Church, the subverters 
 of their own souls, and those of their followers, calling 
 them to a blind zeal and wrathful warfare against true 
 piety, love and peace, and teaching them to censure, 
 backbite, slander and prate against each other for things 
 which they never understood.' 
 
 Certainly it is not strange if these words exercised 
 no eminently pacifying influence on those to whom they 
 were addressed ; if he who wrote them had often to take 
 up the words of the Psalmist : I labour for peace, but 
 when I speak to them thereof, they make them ready to 
 battle.' As I have said already, this dwelling in the 
 tents of Kedar, this labouring for peace, but, whether 
 by his own fault or the faults of others, labouring iu
 
 294 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 
 
 vain, was another burden of his spirit, and one I am 
 persuaded which mightily helped his longing for the 
 true City of the Vision of Peace. 
 
 But if life had its disappointments, it had its dangers 
 too ; was full of these, of temptations innumerable. How 
 should he not yearn to leave them for ever behind. 
 Hear some words of his, and you will own that he took 
 these temptations in earnest, that for him the conflict 
 with them was not a mere beating of the air, or fighting 
 with shadows : 
 
 ' the hourly dangers that we poor sinners walk 
 in ! Every sense is a snare, every member a snare, 
 every mercy a snare, and every duty a snare to us. We 
 can scarce open our eyes but we are in danger. If we 
 behold them above us, we are in danger of envy. If we 
 see sumptuous buildings, pleasant habitations, honour 
 and riches, we are in danger to be drawn away with 
 covetous desires ; if the rags and beggary of others, we 
 are in danger of self-applauding thoughts and unmerci- 
 fulness. If we see beauty, it is a bait to lust ; if defor- 
 mity, to loathing and disdain. We can scarcely hear a 
 word spoken, but contains to us matter of temptation. 
 Have we comeliness and beauty, what fuel for pride ! are 
 we deformed, what an occasion of repining ! Have we 
 strength of reason and gifts of learning, oh how hard it 
 is not to be puffed up, to seek ourselves, to hunt after 
 applause, to mislike the simplicity of Christ. Are we
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 295 
 
 unlearned, and of shallow heads and slender parts, how 
 apt then to despise what we have not, and if conceited- 
 ness and pride do but strike in, to become a leading 
 troubler of the Church's peace under pretence of truth 
 and holiness. Are we men of eminence, how hard to 
 devote our power to his glory from whom we have re- 
 ceived it. Are we inferior and subjects, how prone to 
 grudge at others' pre-eminence, to bring all their actions 
 to the bar of our incompetent judgment. Are we rich 
 and not too much exalted ; are we poor and not discon- 
 tented. If we be sick, oh how impatient ; if in health, 
 how few and stupid our thoughts of eternity ! ' 
 
 But the author of ' The Saint's Rest ' aims at some- 
 thing more than the disenchanting us from the love of 
 this world, and from the minding of earthly things. This 
 is but half, and the easiest half, of the task which he has 
 set before him. ' To despise earth,' he has somewhere 
 said, 'is easy to me, but not so easy to be acquainted 
 and conversant in heaven.' This, as its name sufficiently 
 declares, is the motive and final cause of the book to 
 assist and set forward, in himself first and then in others, 
 this acquaintance with heaven, this conversation in 
 heaven ; to kindle, by meditation on heavenly things, 
 above all of the heavenly rest, the cold affection towj.nls 
 these which he mourned in himself, which he saw too 
 plainly in others ; which who is there among us that does 
 not feel in himself?
 
 296 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 
 
 And here is indeed an explanation of the immense 
 importance which he attached to meditation, of the 
 prominence which he gave to it as a help, nay, almost 
 as an exercise absolutely necessary for the strengthening 
 and deepening of the spiritual life of the soul, with the 
 most careful directions when and where and how this 
 may be most profitably exercised, which he gives. Many, 
 if I mistake not, are wont to regard this exercise of 
 meditation with coldness and distrust, as a device for 
 the promotion of a certain artificial piety and a tran- 
 sient excitement of the religious affections ; much 
 extolled and much practised in the Roman Catholic 
 Church ; and recently, with other questionable helps to 
 devotion, borrowed from it by a few among ourselves. 
 There cannot, however, be a greater mistake than this. 
 It needs but a very slight acquaintance with the best 
 Puritan divinity of the seventeenth century, with such 
 books as Gurnall's ' Christian Armour,' with Bates' 
 treatise on this very matter, above all with the writings 
 of Baxter, and this one first of all, to dissipate any 
 such notion. 
 
 The fourth and concluding portion of ' The Saint's 
 Rest,' nearly three hundred pages, and constituting 
 almost an independent work for it has its own title- 
 page, its own preface, its own dedication is devoted 
 exclusively to the urging of this duty, which he de- 
 scribes as ' the delightfullest task to the spirit, and the
 
 BAXTER AND ' THE SAINT'S REST' 297 
 
 most tedious to the flesh, that ever men on earth were 
 employed in.' I must needs consider it the most 
 precious portion of the whole book, indeed he himself 
 announces that all which went before was but as a leading 
 up to this. But he shall himself describe this section 
 of his work : ' a Directory,' he calls it, ' for the getting 
 and keeping of the heart in heaven by the diligent 
 practice of that excellent unknown duty of Heavenly 
 Meditation ; being the main thing intended by the 
 author in the writing of this book, and to which all the 
 rest is but subservient.' And on meditation, not merely 
 as a help to the heavenly life, but as one which none 
 may lawfully forego, he often expresses himself very 
 strongly, as thus : ' That meditation is a duty of God's 
 ordering I never met with a man that would deny. It 
 is in word confessed to be a duty by all, but by the 
 constant neglect denied by most.' 
 
 I have thus sought to trace very briefly the moral 
 and spiritual factors, as they present themselves to me, 
 which wrought together for the producing of -this book ; 
 the leading objects and aims which the writer of it set 
 before him. But what, some may say, to whom it is 
 still an unknown land, or who to-day for the first time 
 are skirting with me its outermost borders, what of 
 special spiritual good may we hope to obtain by nearer 
 acquaintance with it ? First, then, let me say, If there 
 should be any in this great assembly who, notwithstand-
 
 298 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 
 
 ing their presence among us here to-day, do yet in 
 their heart of hearts think scorn of that pleasant land, 
 are despisers of that heavenly rest to which he invites 
 them, they, if they can be persuaded to a closer fami- 
 liarity with it, will come into contact with one whom in 
 other points they may judge of as they may ; but this I 
 dare affirm they will not be able to deny, that to him 
 heaven was no sentimental dream, and hell no painted 
 flame ; with one who will plead with them as probably 
 they never have been pleaded with before, lest a promise 
 being left them of entering into that rest, they should 
 fall short of it. For indeed I have sometimes thought 
 that this pathos, this passionate earnestness, is the 
 quality in Baxter wherein he is almost, if not altogether, 
 without a peer. There have been others in other points 
 his equals and his superiors. But I ask myself where 
 I should find any other such pleading with souls, any 
 other, ' Why will ye die ? ' which does not fall short 
 of his. 
 
 I could not leave this unsaid, without leaving unsaid 
 that which is most characteristic of the man and of the 
 book. But I do not dwell on it any further. It is of 
 the book as a help to the setting foward of the higher 
 life in them who have already begun well, that it is 
 my task to speak. If you ask me what help to this 
 you may expect to find in it, I will say in the first place, 
 counsels of excellent good sense, as serviceable to-day as
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST* 299 
 
 on the day upon which they were first uttered ; protests 
 against mischievous exaggerations, whether on the right 
 hand or on the left, you will meet with in abundance. 
 Thus what can be better than this against those who 
 taught (there are some who teach so nowadays), that 
 men not merely may know, but must know the exact 
 moment of their conversion, or have not been converted 
 at all : 
 
 ' I will not enquire whether thou remember the 
 time or the order of these workings of the Spirit. There 
 may be much uncertainty and mistake in that. But 
 I desire thee to look into thy soul, and to see whether 
 thou find such works [of the Spirit] wrought within 
 thee. And then, if thou be sure they are there, the 
 matter is not so great though thou know not when or 
 how thou earnest by them.' 
 
 Or here again on what I will venture to call the 
 very small religious value of tears : 
 
 ' Some soft and passionate natures may have tears 
 at command, when one that is truly gracious hath none ; 
 yet is this Christian with dry eyes more solidly appre- 
 hensive and deeply affected than the other is in the 
 midst of his tears ; and the weeping hypocrite will be 
 drawn to his sin again with a trifle, which the groaning 
 Christian would not be lured to commit with crowns 
 and kingdoms.' 
 
 Or once more, on the infinite and dangerous self-
 
 300 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 
 
 confidence so often to be seen in those who after long 
 Aval king in darkness have suddenly caught a partial 
 glimpse of the true light : 
 
 ' The first new strange apparition of light doth so 
 amaze them, they think they are in the third heavens, 
 when they are but newly passed from the suburbs of hell ; 
 and are presently as confident as if they knew all things, 
 when they have not half light enough to acquaint them 
 with their own ignorance.' 
 
 Certainly these are good ; and it would be easy to 
 multiply them a hundredfold; but there is more and 
 better and higher behind. That pathos which I ascribed 
 to Baxter just now does not manifest itself merely in 
 those calls to the unconverted, full as those are of an 
 inward bleeding compassion. There are passages not a 
 few toward the end of the book, strains of the most pas- 
 sionate devotion, in which he seeks to initiate such as 
 have yielded themselves to his guidance into the deeper 
 mysteries of divine meditation, to furnish them with 
 some of the materials on which the soul may work, to lead 
 them upward and onward, step by step, from strength 
 to strength, from glory to glory, to the contemplation 
 of the glory of God. Take, for example, this. He has 
 spoken of some motives to love, and proceeds : 
 
 ' But if yet thou feelest not thy love to work, lead 
 thy heart further, and shew it yet more. Shew it the 
 King of saints on the throne of his glory, who is the
 
 BAXTER AND ' THE SAINT'S REST 1 301 
 
 first and the last ; who liveth and was dead. Draw near 
 and behold Him. Dost thou not hear his voice ? He 
 that called Thomas to come near and to see the print of 
 the nails, and to put his fingers into his wounds, He it 
 is that calls to thee, Come near, and be not faithless but 
 believing. Look well upon Him. Dost thou not know 
 Him ? Why, it is He that brought thee up from the 
 pit of hell, and purchased the advancement which thou 
 must inherit for ever. And yet dost thou not know 
 Him? Why, his hands were pierced, his head was 
 pierced, his side was pierced, his heart was pierced with 
 the sting of thy sins, that by these marks thou mightest 
 always know Him. Hast thou forgotten since He 
 wounded Himself to cure thy wounds ; and let out his 
 own blood to stop thy bleeding ? If thou know Him not 
 by the face, the voice, the hands, if thou know Him not 
 by the tears and bloody sweat, yet look nearer thou 
 mayest know Him by the heart. 
 
 ' Hast thou forgotten the time when thou wast weep- 
 ing, and He wiped the tears from thine eyes? when 
 thou wast bleeding, and He wiped the blood from thy 
 soul ? when pricking cares and fears did grieve thee, and 
 He did refresh thee and draw out the thorns ? Hast 
 thou forgotten when thy folly did wound thy soul, ami 
 the venomous guilt did seize upon thy heart ; when He 
 sucked forth the mortal poison from thy soul, though 
 therewith He drew it into his own? Oh how often
 
 302 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S BEST 1 
 
 hath He found thee sitting weeping like Hagar, while 
 thou gavest up thy state, thy friends, thy life, yea, thy 
 soul for lost ; and He opened to thee a well of consola- 
 tion, and opened thine eyes also, that thou mightest see 
 it. How oft hath He found thee in the posture of Elias, 
 sitting down under the tree forlorn and solitary, and 
 desiring rather to die than to live ; and He hath spread 
 thee a table of relief from heaven, and sent thee away 
 refreshed, and encouraged to his work. How oft hath 
 He found thee in such a passion as Jonas, in thy peevish 
 frenzy aweary of thy life ; and He hath not answered 
 passion with passion, though He might indeed have 
 done well to be angry, but hath mildly reasoned thee 
 out of thy madness, and said, Dost thou well to be 
 angry, and to repine against Me ? How often He hath 
 set thee on watching and praying and repenting and 
 believing, and when He hath returned, hath found thee 
 fast asleep, and yet He hath not taken thee at the worst, 
 but instead of an angry aggravation of thy fault, He 
 hath covered it over with the mantle of love, and pre- 
 vented thy overmuch sorrow with a gentle excuse, The 
 spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. How oft hath He 
 been traduced in his cause or name, and thou hast (like 
 Peter) denied Him, at least by thy silence, while He 
 hath stood in sight ; yet all the revenge He hath taken 
 hath been a heartmelting look, and a silent remember- 
 ing thee of thy fault by his countenance.'
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S BEST' 
 
 303 
 
 And hear him once and only once more; as he 
 rebukes with the same passionate earnestness those who, 
 loving God, do not love Him better ; who professing to 
 seek, and in a sense seeking, a heavenly country, are yet 
 unwilling to reach it, and to find themselves (all life's 
 
 tempests past) in the Fair Havens of the eternal rest : 
 
 'Ah foolish, wretched soul, doth every prisoner 
 groan for freedom ? and every slave desire his jubilee ? 
 and every sick man long for health ? and every hungry 
 man for food, and dost thou alone abhor deliverance ? 
 Doth the seaman long to see the land? Doth the 
 husbandman desire the harvest ? and the traveller lon 
 to be at home ? and the soldier long to win the field ? 
 And art thou loth to see thy labours finished ? -and 
 to receive the end of thy faith ? and to obtain the 
 things for which thou livest? Are all thy sufferings 
 only seeming ? have thy griefs and groans been only 
 dreams ? If they were, yet methinks we should not 
 be afraid of waking ; fearful dreams are not delightful. 
 Or is it not rather the world's delights that are all mere 
 dreams and shadows ? Is not all its glory as the 
 light of a glow-worm, a wandering fire ; yielding but 
 small directing light and as little comforting heat in 
 all our doubtful and sorrowful darkness ? Or hath the 
 world in these its latter days laid aside its ancient 
 enmity ? Is it become of late more kind ? Who hat h 
 wrought this great change, and who hath made this
 
 304 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S BEST' 
 
 reconciliation? Surely not the great Reconciler. He 
 hath told us in the world we shall have trouble, and 
 in Him only we shall have peace. We may reconcile 
 ourselves to the world (at our peril), but it will never 
 reconcile itself to us. Oh foolish unworthy soul, who 
 hadst rather dwell in this land of darkness than be 
 at rest with Christ ; who hadst rather stay among the 
 wolves, and daily suffer the scorpion's stings, than to 
 praise the Lord with the Host of heaven! If thou 
 didst well know what heaven is, and what earth is, it 
 would not be so.' 
 
 And the same yearning which uttered itself in this 
 book, the firstfruits of his pen, written before half his 
 earthly pilgrimage was finished, abode with him in 
 strength to the last. Richard Baxter is not generally 
 known as a poet ; but a small volume of ' Poetical 
 Fragments,' so he calls them, is one of the hundred and 
 forty books, great and small, which acknowledge him 
 for their author. One of these poems he calls his 
 ' Valediction,' that also written at a time when he 
 esteemed himself on the very borders of the heavenly 
 country, though in fact some ten years more should 
 elapse before that country was reached. 
 
 Let me cite as my valediction a few verses from this, 
 as showing that age had not dvVed his longing desire 
 for the Heavenly rest ; being snoh also as may fitly 
 quicken our own desire after the s^.ne :
 
 BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S REST' 305 
 
 What is the time that 's gone, 
 And what is that to come ? 
 Is it not now as none 7 
 
 The present stays not. 
 Time posteth, oh how fast, 
 Unwelcome death makes haste, 
 None can call back the past, 
 
 Judgement delays not. 
 Though God brings in the light, 
 
 Sinners awake not ; 
 Because hell 's out of sight, 
 
 They sin forsake not. 
 
 Man walks in a vain shew ; 
 They know, yet will not know, 
 Sit still, when they should go, 
 
 But run for shadows ; 
 While they might taste and know 
 The living streams that flow, 
 And crop the flowers that grow 
 
 In Christ's sweet meadows. 
 Life 's better slept away 
 
 Than as they use it ; 
 In sin and drunken play 
 ' Vain men abuse it. 
 
 Is this the world men choose. 
 For which they heaven refuse 
 And Christ and grace abuse, 
 
 And not receive it 1 
 Shall I not guilty be 
 Of this in some degree, 
 If hence God would me free, 
 
 And I 'd not leave it ? 
 My soul, from Sodom fly, 
 
 Lest wrath there find thee; 
 Thy refuge rest is nigh, 
 
 Look not behind tlice.
 
 30G BAXTER AND 'THE SAINT'S 'REST 1 
 
 There 's none of this ado ; 
 None of the hellish crew, 
 God's promise is most true, 
 
 Boldly believe it. 
 My friends are gone before, 
 And I am near the shore, 
 My soul stands at the door ; 
 
 O Lord, receive it. 
 It trusts Christ and his merits ; 
 
 The dead He raises. 
 Join it with blessed Spirits, 
 
 Who sing thy praises. 
 
 PBISTBD BY 
 
 SrOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUAUE 
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