Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL 
 THINGS
 
 THE 
 
 EYE FOR SPIRITUAL 
 THINGS 
 
 HENRY MELVILL GWATKIN, M.A. 
 
 DIXIE PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 
 AND FELLOW OF EMMANUEL COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE 
 D.D., AND LATE GIFFORD LECTURER, EDINBURGH 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET 
 1906
 
 Printed by 
 MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, 
 
 FOR 
 
 T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. 
 
 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND co. LIMITED. 
 NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
 
 BV 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 rilHESE are scattered words on many subjects ; but 
 -- their central thought is this. 
 
 Christ our Saviour came to destroy nothing at all, 
 save the works of the devil. The knowledge of God 
 is not to be earned by sacrificing reason to feeling, or 
 feeling to reason, by ascetic observance or by orthodox 
 belief : it is given freely to all that purify themselves 
 with all the force of heart, and soul, and mind. 
 Further, the only power that can bring feeling, thought, 
 and will into harmonious action is the personal 
 influence of Christ which St. Paul sums up in faith. 
 From that personal influence all holy desires, all 
 good counsels, and all just works do proceed, though 
 the doers be those who never heard His name; and 
 to its transfiguring power, if it be rightly received, 
 
 no limit can be set even in this life. 
 
 t 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, February 8, 1906.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS. Ps. xix. 1 . 1 
 II. THE BREAD OF GOD. John vi. 33, R.V. . 15 
 
 III. THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA. Isa. vi. 1 . 29 
 
 IV. NEITHER WILL THEY BE PERSUADED. Luke 
 
 xvi. 31 . . . * . 39 
 
 V. THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY. 2 Cor. v. 17, 
 
 R.V 47 
 
 VI. PATIENCE. Rev. xxii. 20 . . . .61 
 
 VII. CHRIST " GAVE NO PROOFS." John xv. 24 . 71 
 VIII. HOPE. 1 Cor. xiii. 13 . . .81 
 
 IX. IDOLS. 1 John v. 21 . . .89 
 
 X. JESUS COULD NOT. Mark vi. 5 . . .97 
 
 XI. CHRIST'S KINGDOM. John xviii. 36 . . 105 ;, 
 
 XII. THIS MORTAL MUST PUT ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 1 Cor. xv. 53 113 
 
 XIII. THE HOPE OF ZACHARIAS. Luke i. 68 . . 121 
 
 XIV. THOMAS. John xiv. 5 . . .129 
 XV. THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER. Luke 
 
 vii. 47 137 
 
 XVI. ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. Matt. xxv. 46 . . 145 
 
 XVII. BE NOT YE CALLED RABBI. Matt, xxiii. 10, 11, 
 
 R.V 153" 
 
 XVIII. PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 1 Tim. iv. 12 . . 161 
 
 vii
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 sj CHAP. PAGE 
 
 . XIX. LOVE DIVINE. Gal. ii. 20 ... 169 
 XX. SALVATION. Matt. i. 21 . . .177 
 
 9t*~X XXI. JOB'S PROBLEM. Luke xiii. 4 . 187 
 
 o 
 
 ' XXII. THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS. John xi. 49, 50 197 
 
 XXIII. THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. Luke 
 
 xx. 38 . . . .207 
 
 XXIV. BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH. 2 Cor. 
 
 iv. 2 . . . . . .215 
 
 XXV. CHRIST AS GOD. Matt. xvi. 15 . . 225 
 
 XXVI. FREE FORGIVENESS. Luke vii. 41 . . 235 
 
 . XXVII. SONS OF GOD. John i. 11, 12 . . .245 
 
 f+f o * 
 vjjvvn., XXVIII. FIRST THE BLADE. Mark iv. 28 . . 253 
 
 !r-\ 
 *"1
 
 I. 
 
 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL 
 THINGS.
 
 " The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament 
 sheweth his handywork." Ps. xix. 1.
 
 I. 
 
 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS. 1 
 
 IS there one among you who never looks up with 
 admiration to the silent splendour of the mid- 
 night sky? Its grandeur awed primseval nations, 
 and still fascinates the most cultured. One genera- 
 tion cometh, and another goeth ; and still those 
 glittering stars pursue their course from year to 
 year and century to century. With them seems 
 neither change nor shadow of turning. The stars 
 that looked on David look on us, and will look on 
 the earth when thousands of ages shall be past. 
 And their sound is gone out into all lands, for there 
 is neither speech nor language where their voices 
 are not heard. Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades 
 light one country ; to another are revealed the 
 chambers of the south. They are splendid even in 
 this murky North of ours ; but to the mountains 
 and the desert they shew their fullest glory blazing 
 from a crystal sky. Small wonder if men of old 
 time were " driven to worship " stars that glowed 
 like lamps in heaven. 
 
 And if we are ourselves in no danger of falling 
 
 1 University of Cambridge, December 8, 1895.
 
 into star-worship, the reason is not that the old 
 heavens have lost their grandeur in these latter 
 days. We know what our fathers never knew 
 that these twinkling points of light are suns like our 
 sun, and many of them hundreds of times brighter 
 than our own sun ; that the measured distance of 
 the very nearest of them utterly beggars imagination : 
 and that for every star we see with our eyes there 
 are thousands in the ethereal deeps of space around 
 them. Yet many a time our lines have measured 
 them, our balances have weighed them, our spectro- 
 scopes have shewn what they are made of, and our 
 analysis has laid its hand on stars that no man to 
 this day has seen. 
 
 But where is he that made them all ? Where 
 is he that created the heavens, and spreadeth them 
 out as a tent to dwell in ? He is the Lord our God, 
 the Lord of Hosts is his name. The heavens declare 
 his glory, and the firmament sheweth his handywork. 
 If there is any one thing which all nations in all 
 ages have thought manifest, it is the eternal power 
 and divinity revealed from the sky. And yet there 
 are men who tell us that they can see no God in 
 heaven. They say that they have asked, and had no 
 answer; sought, but never found. Fools we might 
 answer according to their folly ; but it is not always 
 the fool that hath said in his heart, There is no God. 
 Some of these men are no triflers, but acute and 
 earnest seekers after truth, and we shall be the 
 fools ourselves if we neglect their words. Yet they
 
 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS 5 
 
 have searched every corner of the sky, and never 
 seen our God in it. The heavens, they say, declare 
 the glory of Kepler and Newton, but not the glory 
 of God. 
 
 Why is this ? Why cannot they see what seems 
 so plain to others ? Their eyes are as good as ours, 
 and not a star that we can see escapes them. Is 
 the voice of the ages a delusion, or is the mistake 
 in the last word of science ? 
 
 In one sense the question is not for us an open 
 one. If we know God for ourselves, we can as 
 soon deny the sun that shines in the heavens as the 
 light that shines in our hearts ; so that if others 
 cannot see him, we are forced to conclude that 
 there is something wrong with them. But if we 
 say this, we are doubly bound to shew where the 
 mistake is. 
 
 Two things then are needed for seeing. We must 
 have not only something to see, but eyes to see it 
 with. We need training as much for spiritual as 
 for scientific truth. Just as the astronomer's trained 
 eye sees wreaths of cloud and glimmering points of 
 light where we see nothing but darkness, so the man 
 of God sees wreathing splendours round him, and 
 glimmerings of mystery to which the natural man is 
 blind. The keenest eye can only see what it has 
 the proper power to see. Some of us are blind to 
 one colour, some to another, and some to all colours ; 
 and there are vibrations which none of us can see 
 as light at all. So it is with spiritual things. One
 
 6 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS 
 
 of us catches one tint, another another, some none 
 at all; and there must be many a glorious colour 
 that is waiting for an eye which can see it. 
 
 Two things, said a great philosopher, fill me with 
 awe Conscience within me, and the starlit sky 
 without. These two things are not connected to- 
 gether by accident. If the inner sense is wanting, 
 the outward eyes and ears will see and hear in vain. 
 If a voice from heaven came to us, some would say 
 it thundered. If a spirit passed before our face, it 
 would but speak some truism that we knew before. 
 If we saw creation with our eyes, we should call it 
 spontaneous generation. You will not see God in 
 earth or heaven till you have seen him in your heart. 
 You may see him indeed with other men's eyes, and 
 hear of him with the hearing of the ear; but you 
 will never know him for yourself, however sound and 
 orthodox your parrot-cries may be. The knowledge 
 of God is not to the wise, nor yet to the men of 
 understanding, but to them that seek him with all 
 their heart and all their soul as well as all their 
 mind. Understanding and learning are good gifts, 
 though devils might have them, and human devils 
 often have had them. There was a good deal of both 
 in that earthly hell, the artistic age of Italy. But 
 they are gifts whose value depends on the use we 
 make of them. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall 
 he also reap. He that lays himself out heart and 
 soul and mind for selfish pleasure, selfish pleasure 
 shall he have, and the curse of emptiness that goes
 
 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS 7 
 
 with it. And he that lays himself out heart and soul 
 and mind to find truth, as some of these men do, 
 truth shall he find, and its blessing with it. Only 
 if scientific truth is all that he is looking for, he must 
 not expect to pick up spiritual truth by the wayside. 
 The knowledge of spiritual truth no more comes of 
 itself than his knowledge of scientific truth came of 
 itself. He can have them both if he pleases there 
 is nothing to hinder but not unless he lays himself 
 out for both. It is true that the two searches 
 have a great deal in common, for the one is far 
 more scientific, the other far more spiritual than 
 their narrower votaries imagine. Still they are 
 not the same, and the one will not do duty for the 
 other. 
 
 If serious men tell us that the heavens declare no 
 God to them, I am perfectly willing to believe them. 
 I make no charge of any sort against them ; only 
 I say that they are going to work the wrong way. 
 It is not the simpletons only that have seen a God in 
 heaven, but many of the brightest and best of the 
 children of men. Even science can shew us no such 
 mighty cloud of witnesses, of those who speak of that 
 they know. If our friends cannot see what these 
 have seen, let them seriously bethink themselves 
 whether they understand all the terms of the ques- 
 tion, before they take upon them to set aside our 
 answer. It may be they have not well considered 
 how serious a matter is the search for God. They 
 have acuteness and learning, diligence and candour:
 
 8 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS 
 
 what lack they yet ? The answer is that as spiritual 
 knowledge covers a wider range than scientific, the 
 search for it will call for wider powers. The man 
 of God is much the better for acuteness and learn- 
 ing, and can do nothing at all without diligence 
 and candour ; but these are not all that he 
 needs. 
 
 The broad difference of spiritual from scientific 
 knowledge is that it has to do with a living God, 
 and not with lifeless matter, and therefore appeals 
 to the whole man, not chiefly to the reason. This 
 is what we mean by saying that there is no spiritual 
 knowledge without faith. But let there be no 
 mistake here. It is not faith to receive truth itself 
 as a mere corpus of doctrine from others, much less 
 to profess our firm belief of what we think in our 
 hearts is most likely to turn out false. The unseen 
 is the realm of faith, not the unreasonable. Neither 
 is faith the mere assurance of salvation, which may 
 be no better than the assurance of Ignorance at the 
 gate of the celestial city. But neither again is faith 
 to be limited to things which science can discover. 
 If our knowledge of mere life is limited in every 
 direction, not only by scientific difficulties, but by 
 deeper psychological mysteries which there is no 
 reason to suppose that science will ever penetrate, 
 surely it is idle to fancy that reason alone can fully 
 explore the mystery of mysteries that underlies the 
 rest./^Faith is a manifold thing. It has a purely 
 natural side of mere belief, which is strictly_jcientific
 
 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS 9 
 
 in appealing to reason, and calling for proof suited to 
 the question in hand. And there is no faith unless 
 this side is satisfied.// The faith which scorns to pass 
 through the gate of reason is none of our faith. The 
 Lord himself never asked for blind belief, and the 
 disciple is not above his master. All that churches 
 or councils can do is to bear witness of their own 
 belief and experience. They have no peculiar com- 
 mission to discover truth, no peculiar inspiration to 
 declare its meaning. Their decisions are as fallible 
 as others, and it is not less unspiritual than un- 
 scientific and untruthful to accept them without 
 regard to evidence. 
 
 / So then, if reason bars the way, we can go no 
 further. Whatever is clearly contrary to reason, 
 like some common theories of the Lord's Supper, 
 is plainly self -condemned. //Only we must be sure 
 that reason does bar the way. Much that we cannot 
 fully explain, like the Incarnation, is not only 
 not contrary to reason, but absolutely true to the 
 deepest needs and instincts of human nature. It 
 belongs not to the unreasonable, but to the un- 
 foreseen. 
 
 If now we can pass on to the spiritual side of 
 faith, we find it complex. As reverence, trust, and 
 love are the answer of the whole man to the love of 
 men, so faith is the answer of the whole man to the 
 love of God. Of the whole man, not of the reason 
 only, or even chiefly. It is not the cold assent of 
 reason, as to some scientific fact which has nothing to
 
 io THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS 
 
 do with our inner life. It is not the pale radiance 
 of aesthetic admiration, playing idly round some human 
 Christ who never rose with power from the dead. It 
 is not the passing heat of spiritual excitement, which 
 is quickly raised and as quickly dies away. It is the 
 stedfast fire of love divine, which alone has power to 
 fuse together the whole complex of heart and soul 
 and mind in a glowing flame of love to him that 
 loveth us, and with his own blood loosed us from our 
 sins. 
 
 Faith is the beginning, and faith is the end of 
 spiritual knowledge. And faith is not a peculiar 
 mystery of Christian orthodoxy. By their fruits ye 
 shall know them ; and many a misbeliever brings 
 forth fruits of the Spirit in love and gentleness and 
 temperance, though joy and peace may never visit 
 him. There is true faith according to its kind in 
 every work that is done on the face of the wide earth 
 for the sake of love and duty, back to the Three 
 Hundred in the pass, and down to the child in the 
 slums who shares his last coppers with one who 
 needs them more than he. In every nation he has 
 faith who feareth God and worketh righteousness, 
 for he is accepted with him. And the man that 
 walketh in darkness and hath no light if only 
 he walks uprightly and judges righteous judgment, 
 he too shall see the mystery of the truth and 
 duty that he loved unfolded in the loving face of 
 him that liveth and was dead, and is alive for 
 evermore.
 
 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS n 
 
 " And judges righteous judgment," I said. This is 
 the question for the sceptic, and he must not evade it 
 merely because we may not ask him to his face. I 
 took him at his best, and meant it for no empty 
 compliment. He is acute and learned, diligent and 
 candid. So far as reason goes, his work is perfect. 
 But is he equally willing to see light that may first 
 reach him some other way ? Is there nothing in 
 childhood or fatherhood that speaks of a heavenly 
 Father ? Is there nothing in human love with all 
 its weaknesses that points up to a love that is stronger 
 than death ? Is there nothing in human forgive- 
 ness and self-devotion that may help him to believe 
 our story of a Son of God who gave himself for 
 men ? We are not dealing fairly with the Gospel 
 if we forget that it is presented to us not as 
 philosophy or science or law, nor even as history, 
 but as the revelation of God. And if such a 
 revelation there be, we may expect to recognize the 
 love of God as we recognize the love of men ; 
 by instinct and affinity rather than by conscious 
 reasoning. 
 
 So far I have treated the sceptic as a man of 
 candour, as indeed he often is. In that case he is 
 simply looking to reason only for what reason alone 
 cannot give. How far this may be sin I take not on 
 me to say ; but at all events it is an imperfection if 
 he leaves powers unused that might help him in the 
 search for truth. But let him not flatter himself 
 that he is candid as a matter of course still less
 
 12 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS 
 
 that he owes his candour to his scepticism. True 
 candour is not so common as society requires us to 
 assume. Most men are such creatures of custom or 
 passion that they can scarcely pretend to candour 
 at all. They just catch at the first thing that comes 
 in their way, and call it common sense. Even those 
 of us who really aim at truth are continually misled 
 by pride or hatred, by sloth or carelessness, by evil 
 thoughts of all kinds for every base or selfish 
 thought is so much cloud that hides the truth. The 
 sources of error are far more commonly moral than 
 purely intellectual. 
 
 This is the rule that error is commonly moral 
 and if the sceptic is no exception to it, neither are 
 we. It is not knowledge or orthodoxy that raises us 
 one step above the devils who believe and tremble. 
 We too who hope in God will need to purify ourselves, 
 even as he is pure who dwelt among us full of grace 
 and truth. There is no paradise of idleness even for 
 us who have seen our Saviour shining on us like the 
 sun in heaven, and felt the touch that endues both 
 heart and soul and mind with power from on high. 
 Though the clouds of doubt may never again over- 
 shadow us, the mists of sin that are always rising in 
 dense and stifling masses round us are even more 
 effective to hide the light from us. There is no 
 heroic way to heaven none but the old prosaic road 
 of faithful effort and unwearied vigilance. That is 
 the road our Leader trod before us ; and it is only 
 while we trace the narrow pathway where his feet
 
 THE EYE FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS 13 
 
 have been that we can see the splendour of the unseen 
 world through which our journey lies. Only so shall 
 the heavens declare his glory to us, and the earth his 
 righteousness, that we may live, and rejoice before 
 him for ever.
 
 II. 
 
 THE BREAD OF GOD.
 
 " The bread of God is that which cometh down out of heaven, 
 and giveth life unto the world." JOHN vi. 33, R.V.
 
 II. 
 
 THE BREAD OF GOD. 1 
 
 "DLESSED be the Lord our God, whose mercy has 
 -*-^ preserved us through the perils of the year to 
 welcome the returning light of Christmas Day. How 
 natural the old festival seems, with its tidings of joy 
 and gladness the old festival our fathers rejoiced in, 
 and their fathers before them, through all the genera- 
 tions of Christian Englishmen. True it is that last 
 year's festival is not come back unchanged. Names 
 that were great and mighty then are only memories 
 now, and voices that we loved shall speak no more in 
 this world, and new lives are unfolding of those whom 
 Christ is training to be teachers and evangelists 
 of children yet unborn. The years shall come and 
 go, the nations rise and fall ; but the witness of 
 Christmas Day remains the same ; and age after age 
 till he come shall hear its glorious message of a Son 
 of God who for us men and for our salvation came 
 down from heaven to take our nature on him and 
 be the Son of Man for evermore. 
 
 Yet Christmas Day was not always the landmark 
 of the year it is to us. We cannot trace it back like 
 
 1 University of Cambridge, Christmas Day, 1898.
 
 i8 THE BREAD OF GOD 
 
 Easter to the earliest times. Far into the Nicene 
 age the Epiphany was the great winter festival, 
 commemorating Christ's manifestation generally, and 
 his baptism in particular, with a secondary reference 
 to his earthly birth. Christmas Day was of Western 
 origin, closely related to the birthday of Mithras on 
 December 25, and possibly to some other heathen 
 festivals. It first appears at Eome in 360, and 
 thence spread eastward. In the West it became a 
 principal festival, and the Epiphany was limited 
 chiefly to the visit of the Magi. In the East it has 
 always been less prominent ; and in Eussia the chief 
 services of the day commemorate Napoleon's retreat 
 from Moscow. All honour too to Eussia, if she has 
 not forgotten the great salvation which God gave her 
 and us, when he made the remnant of the Grand 
 Army like the remnant of Sennacherib's host. 
 
 Now this Western preference of Christmas Day to 
 the Epiphany is intensely characteristic of the Latin 
 church. Eome has never had much liking for the 
 more abstract forms of thought. She borrowed her 
 philosophy in one age from the Greeks, in another 
 from Teutonic schoolmen ; and even her ecclesiastical 
 theory was made in Africa. In her long line of 
 popes we see statesmen, lawyers, and administrators 
 in abundance, but no such thinkers as Anselm or 
 Bradwardine. The great creative thoughts are not 
 of Eoman birth : even the Holy Empire was heralded 
 by Tatian's barbarian trumpet. The splendid work 
 she did in history was rather to maintain the old
 
 THE BREAD OF GOD 19 
 
 positions than to conquer new ones. She intrenched 
 herself behind some simple doctrines, and thought it 
 enough to throw up round them rampart after ram- 
 part of church traditions and observances. Not to 
 Eome was given " the eagle eye of Origen," the kingly 
 intellect of Athanasius, the mighty manliness of 
 Luther. She fell on evil days, when all her strength 
 seemed needed to save the simplest elements of the 
 Gospel from the world-wide overthrow in which the 
 everlasting Empire perished. It were ungrateful to~~ 
 refuse our full admiring homage to the noble work 
 she did in the dark times when tempest after tempest 
 of barbarism came up like a flood of mighty waters 
 overflowing. For centuries she stood between the 
 living and the dead, Christ's faithful witness and 
 evangelist : therefore also he gave her authority and 
 power to rule the world she was rescuing authority 
 only forfeited by ages of misrule, power not yet lost : 
 by centuries of ever-deepening falsehood. 
 
 Eome has never laid to heart the old Gospel of 
 Genesis, that man was made in the image of God. 
 She starts from a false dualism of God and man, in / 
 which divine and human stand apart, or are connected 
 by no natural affinity, but only by some definite act| 
 of the divine. That act we may make believe is just 
 or merciful : but we cannot certainly know that it is 
 more than inscrutable caprice, unless we fully recog- 
 nize that the divine is of a higher order than the 
 infinite of mere superhuman power and unbending 
 law. This is the witness of the Incarnation so
 
 20 THE BREAD OF GOD 
 
 God loved the world and Eome has never denied 
 that the Son of God became the Son of Man for our 
 salvation. Yet neither has she ventured to receive 
 him as the hope and joy and light and life of men. 
 St. Paul's in Christ is a doctrine she has left to the 
 mystics ; for in the gracious and gentle Saviour she 
 saw the stern and awful Judge to come. So she 
 feared, and made her gods to go before her, even the 
 saints her fellow-servants, and went and worshipped 
 them. This was only natural; for human nature 
 needs a human mediator with God, and if the one 
 true mediator's manhood is forgotten in the terrors 
 of his deity, other mediators more like man will have 
 to take his place. And if the freedom of God is 
 inscrutable, the service of man cannot be reasonable. 
 He may bow down like a slave before the Most High, 
 but he cannot walk humbly with his God. As soon 
 as Augustine's Calvinism had been set aside as 
 unpractical, man was free too, and stood apart in 
 godless independence, working out his own forgive- 
 ness, and laying up treasure in heaven by Pharisaic 
 obedience to church traditions and observances. 
 
 Under the influence of ideas which contrasted 
 divine and human things in the sharpest way as 
 mutually exclusive, it was natural that Latin thought 
 should tend to regard God's working as abrupt and 
 define as miraculous interventions breaking through 
 the order of a sinful and transitory world. They 
 shine out as points of brilliant light ; but the rest 
 is utter darkness, for there is no diffused light in the
 
 THE BREAD OF GOD 21 
 
 Latin sky. God acts every now and then with a -i 
 high hand and outstretched arm ; but the rest of the 
 world's history goes on almost as if there were no 
 God at all, for the dualism of God and man carries 
 with it a dualism of sacred and profane which runs 
 through history and life, so that even the continuous 
 working of the Holy Spirit is rather to guarantee 
 church authorities or sacred books or sacramental 
 rites than to help our personal infirmities and guide 
 us into truth in all its range. Thus the Incarnation" 
 is reduced to a single fact of history which took 
 place in such a year of Csesar Augustus a fact 
 which was indeed the culmination of a mighty series 
 of interventions and deliverances, and a fact which 
 had the most momentous consequences, but a fact 
 related rather to^thje.jisddent of sin than to the 
 essential nature of God and man. Some of the Urreeks 
 had more or less clearly aeen that, sin or no sin, the 
 Incarnation was needed fully to express in time the 
 latent humanity of the eternal Word in whose image 
 man was made. But though the schoolmen were 
 divided, the northerns rather leaning to the Greeks, 
 the Latin spirit is best given by the answer that an 
 Incarnation required not by sin but to declare a 
 natural affinity of God and man, would not be super- 
 natural at all. 
 
 The Latin church did well in holding firmly the 
 historic truth of the Incarnation, for a gospel which 
 explained it away would be no gospel at all. If 
 Christ is less than perfect God, we are yet in our sins ;
 
 22 
 
 THE BREAD OF GOD 
 
 for neither mau nor angel can restore the image of 
 God which sin has defaced : and if Christ is less 
 than perfect man, we are yet in our sins ; for none 
 but man can make atonement for the sins of men. 
 Our Saviour is indeed the living bread which came 
 down once for all from heaven ; and Eome herself 
 has shewn us many times that if a man eat of this 
 bread, he shall live for ever. But this is not the 
 whole truth ; and if we have received the love of 
 truth at all, we shall not refuse truth which is wider 
 than Latin thought. The bread of God is also that 
 which ever cometh down from heaven, and ever 
 giveth life unto the world. If Christ came down 
 from heaven once for all, he is no less ever coming, 
 ever calling, ever giving life, not only to his visible 
 church, but to the men that walk in darkness ; for 
 he is the true light, whose ever-present coming 
 lighteth every man. He is the light of the world, 
 and he worketh hitherto. 
 
 Hiatoric truth is in its nature infinite ; for if there 
 is but one God, the whole creation must form but one 
 organic whole, so that if we could fully trace out any 
 one fact of history or life in all its bearings, we should 
 unravel the entire mystery of earth and heaven. But 
 that which our ears have heard and our eyes have seen 
 is only partial truth, however true it be. The best of 
 our knowledge is only partial truth. We see truths 
 like scattered points of starry light, and are never more 
 than dimly conscious of the wreathing clouds of glory 
 which overspread the ethereal deeps around them.
 
 THE BREAD OF GOD 23 
 
 True it is, as has been finely said, that " The 
 temporal at once illuminates and enshrines the eternal ; 
 and without those sacred years lived under Syrian 
 skies, the eternal life of the High Priest of Humanity 
 would be for us an infinite void, sending forth no 
 light to our minds and no comfort to our hearts." 
 Yet neither can we rise to the full significance and 
 dignity of history till we see behind the things of 
 time the overspreading glory of the eternal. Even 
 as the forces battling in every drop of water are forces 
 that rule the stars of heaven, so the forces of light 
 and darkness contending on the narrow field of time 
 are forces of the world where time is not. History 
 must somehow mirror the eternal, however darkly 
 sinners may see the likeness ; and there can be X*^ 
 nothing without its meaning for the other world. / / 
 As the vacant air we breathe is full of germs of 
 this world's life, so what seem the empty things of 
 common life are full of potencies for life eternal. 
 Our passing spites and worries may be sordid enough ; 
 but the thankfulness and patience which overcome 
 them belong to a world which passeth not away. 
 So step by step we rise from the little tragedies of 
 daily life to the great and overawing catastrophes of 
 history ; and in the midst of all of them stands the 
 glorious form, divine and therefore human, of that 
 same Christ who through an eternal spirit offered 
 once for all the sacrifice which has won for us an 
 eternal redemption. 
 
 In saying that we in England are far too much
 
 24 THE BREAD OF GOD 
 
 enslaved to Latin glosses on the Gospel, I am not 
 thinking of surface matters, or of the foolish people 
 who are bewitched with every novelty, if only they 
 hear say it comes from Rome. Many of our truest 
 churchmen and not a few of our stoutest Protestants 
 have not got far beyond the Latin way of thinking. 
 If the reformers broke the yoke of bondage, they 
 could not cast out the spirit of slavery. We seem to 
 forget that the Latin church was not the first word 
 of God's Holy Spirit as neither shall it be the last. 
 Before the days of Koman power there flourished a 
 church of wider thoughtfulness and clearer sight of 
 Christ. The Greek world between the second and 
 fourth centuries is astonishingly modern in some 
 ways more modern than a world within the memory 
 of our fathers, for the course of centuries has once 
 more brought round England not our northern 
 island only to the old questions of our Saviour's 
 Person which occupied his faithful teachers at Alex- 
 andria. These are the questions that will stir the 
 coming age ; and the English people is plainly called 
 of God to fight the hardest of the battle. And will 
 he not sustain us in it ? Is it because there is not a 
 God in England that we inquire so timidly at Eome ? 
 The worst of the modern church of Rome is not 
 simply that she has added many falsehoods to the 
 truth, nor even that the falsehoods are the working 
 parts of her doctrine, but that such truth as she 
 retains is made of none effect by the practical 
 Agnosticism which condemns her children to hear
 
 THE BREAD OF GOD 25 
 
 the Saviour's voice at second-hand, and only through 
 a church which claims more than God requires for 
 himself to be believed without regard to reason// 
 Every word of his prophets calls us to judge right- 
 eous judgment, and every saying of the Lord himself 
 expects reason to recognize truth once presented to 
 it. Yet on the final question of all whether we 
 have a real knowledge, a direct and personal know- 
 ledge of God in Christ, Eome and the Agnostic are 
 in full agreement. 
 
 Here then we come back to the old battlefields of 
 Clement and Athanasius, for the self-same question 
 underlay both Gnosticism and Arianism. It under- 
 lay the Eeformation also, and underlies even the 
 reconstruction of society which is visibly the task 
 of our time, for the knowledge of Christ is the 
 revelation of man. Only in the light of his sinless 
 purity dare we look up the steep ascents to heights 
 of human nature towering as far above the angels as 
 the deeps of sin are sunk below the beasts that 
 perish. Christ or Agnosticism ? is the question, 
 old and ever new, round which the world must 
 finally divide : and we are in the thick of battle, 
 for much that passes for Christian is pure Agnosti- 
 cism. If we are to reconstruct society, we must 
 take up the old problems of Christ's Person ; yet 
 not quite on the old Eastern lines, for we may call 
 no man master upon earth. The Eastern church 
 was very far from faultless. It has suffered more 
 than Eome from oppression without and ignorance
 
 26 THE BREAD OF GOD 
 
 within, though it has never so deeply sinned against 
 light. It leaned too much to philosophy, and never 
 fully realized the working of the Spirit in man ; and 
 even its noble defence of Christ's deity tempted it to 
 forget like Eome his manhood, and like Rome to 
 worship idols. Its deathly stupor of a thousand 
 years and more is not without a cause. Meanwhile 
 God teaches daily ; and every great revolution of 
 history has brought its own great revelation with 
 it. The hard and narrow Latin schoolmaster taught 
 with power the unity of Christendom. The Reforma- 
 tion tore in sunder the unspiritual unity of Western 
 Europe, rediscovered our Lord's forgotten manhood, 
 and laid a firm foundation for the future by subjecting 
 all human teaching and authority to Scripture first, 
 and now to revelation howsoever known, for God 
 reveals himself in divers manners. Not for nothing 
 the stars of heaven and the dust of the earth are 
 given to our scrutiny, and forgotten generations yield 
 up to us their buried secrets, and human life is 
 developed for us with a richness and complexity our 
 fathers never dreamed of. The voice that comes up 
 from the earth, the voice that comes back from the 
 past, the voice that meets them from our own heart 
 these three agree in one ; and their witness is of Christ. 
 God calls us to know him for ourselves ; not to 
 hear about him from other men, and fancy that 
 enough. We live by the spiritual truth we make 
 our own by living it, not by the intellectual truth we 
 confess with our lips. The corporate confession which
 
 THE BREAD OF GOD 27 
 
 is our communion with each other is no better than 
 the belief of the devils, unless we join to it the 
 personal confession which is our communion with 
 Christ. Our faith is a poor thing if it never rises to 
 the heights where worlds and churches and griefs 
 and sins are all forgotten in full-hearted adoration 
 My Lord and my God. Whom have I in heaven but 
 thee ? Let this be the keynote of our Christmas 
 joy. It will not be the less pure and holy if we 
 refuse to recognize in the Virgin birth an isolated 
 marvel which puts reason to confusion. The Incarna- 
 tion stands alone in history, not for want of intimate 
 connexion with life in all its range, but just because 
 it is the one far-off divine event to which creation 
 pointed from the first, the full and final revelation 
 which sin has not called forth, and sin shall not 
 defeat. In it is not only God's own gracious answer 
 to the hopes and yearnings of his erring children here 
 in earth ; it is God's own eternal truth which far 
 excels the fairest dreams of goodness men have ever 
 dreamed, God's own transcendent gift of life eternal 
 far exceeding all that we could ever ask or think. 
 The incarnate Son of God is not like a meteor in 
 history, which flashes up from the darkness and is 
 gone in a moment : he is the historic point of ever- 
 growing light by which we see the overspreading 
 glory of the risen Son of Man who is our ever-present 
 and abiding life and joy. For the bread of God is 
 that which ever corneth down from heaven, and ever 
 giveth life unto the world.
 
 III. 
 
 THE DEATH OF QUEEN 
 VICTORIA. 
 
 29
 
 " In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord.''' ISA. vi. 1. 
 
 30
 
 III. 
 
 THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA. 1 
 
 YOU must notice that the last word is not the 
 sacred name Jehovah. It is the King of 
 kings and Lord of lords, who doth from his throne 
 behold all the dwellers upon earth. 
 
 If the scene of Isaiah's call is laid in the temple, 
 the vision is not of buildings made with hands. 
 The vails of the temple are fallen away ; yet neither 
 ark nor mercy-seat appears only a palace and a 
 throne. Solomon's tiny sanctuary much smaller 
 than this room is become a palace, and the skirts 
 of glory fill its courts. These things saw Isaiah, when 
 he saw Christ's glory, and spake of him. 
 
 " In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the 
 Lord." Uzziah was a great king, though his last 
 years were clouded, and his long reign of more than 
 half a century was the most magnificent period of 
 Jewish history since the time of Solomon. The 
 overshadowing northern kingdom of Jeroboam n was 
 in confusion, and the Assyrian war-cloud seemed to 
 have turned some other way. So Jerusalem flourished, 
 and trade and wealth increased. The temple service 
 
 1 Girton College, January 27, 1901. 
 31
 
 32 THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 was regular and its ritual splendid, for the priests 
 guided the monarchy they had saved from Athaliah's 
 murderous hands, and the people were devoted to the 
 stately ceremonial. Was it not the religion of the 
 state by law established ? The very swindler said, 
 Blessed be the Lord, for I am rich. Here surely was 
 a pious people, enjoying well-deserved prosperity. 
 
 " In the year that king TJzziah died I saw the 
 Lord." Here is a date if you please ; but we shall 
 see a deeper meaning in it if we note the contrast 
 of king Uzziah with the Lord of lords. It is the 
 passing of the earthly king which reveals the King 
 of kings who passeth not away. God speaks in 
 change and death and revolution, in tones men 
 cannot choose but hear. His way is in the whirl- 
 wind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust 
 of his feet. There is a solemn pause when the great 
 ones of the earth are taken ; and when we look again, 
 behold, all things are new. 
 
 The vision of God is the call of the prophet ; and 
 it gave him eyes to see the misery and sin which 
 underlay that proud prosperity. There was the sin 
 of the land-grabbers rampant. " Woe unto them that 
 join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be 
 no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst 
 of the earth." There was the sin of the drunkards 
 rampant. " Woe unto them that rise up early in 
 the morning, that they may follow strong drink ; that 
 continue until night, till wine inflame them." There 
 too was the prophet that teacheth lies; and there
 
 THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA 33 
 
 were rulers of Sodom, and people of Gomorrah. There 
 was wealth in abundance, religion in abundance, 
 national defence in abundance ; but the nation was 
 not sound. So it was crushed in a moment when 
 Damascus and Samaria joined against it. 
 
 God grant it be written in history, that in the 
 year that Queen Victoria died, we saw the Lord. 
 She is in all our hearts the queen who never 
 shamed us, the woman whose kindliness never failed, 
 for in more than courtly language, she was a gracious 
 queen. In her young days there was deep distress 
 and bitter discontent in England ; but in our time 
 every murmur round her throne had long since died 
 away. She gathered her people to her by the toil 
 of threescore years and more ; and by her sorrows 
 too, for she was not spared the heaviest of sorrows 
 and bereavements. Queen Elizabeth herself was 
 not loved more proudly in her last glorious years by 
 the England she had saved from destruction. And 
 now that our ancient queen is taken from us, the 
 strangers of all nations join our mourning for her 
 who was but now the most august of living 
 sovereigns. 
 
 Half the pathos of life is in its changes. First 
 we see our elders fall in front of us, and hear 
 ourselves called forward to the front of battle ; then 
 our equals fall around us, and younger men behind 
 us, till our own turn comes, for no man leaves that 
 battlefield alive. So God reveals himself, as one by 
 one he takes away the fathers we loved, the friends 
 3
 
 34 THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 we leaned on, perhaps even the children we delighted 
 in ; but only that he may himself be our portion in 
 the land where every work of love and mercy done 
 in the wide world is treasured up for evermore. 
 
 Like Uzziah, Queen Victoria was marvellously 
 helped. We are altogether too forgetful of the 
 thousand years and more of mercies culminating in 
 her splendid reign. We have no need to envy 
 Israel. Our God is a living God of living men, not 
 a dead one since the fathers fell asleep. The voice 
 that spoke on Sinai speaks in England still ; and the 
 arm of the Lord which divided the Eed Sea works 
 as mightily as ever in our midst. England is as 
 much God's people as ever Israel was, and London 
 just as much his dwelling as Jerusalem. Our land 
 is as holy as Judah ; our streets are as near him as 
 the mercy-seat of old. It was not for Israel's 
 righteousness, or because God loved Egypt and 
 Assyria less than Israel, for there is no respect of 
 persons with him ; neither is it for England's 
 righteousness, or because God loves France and 
 Ilussia less than England, for there is no respect of 
 persons with him. As he chose Israel to do one 
 great work for him, so has he chosen England now 
 to do another. He that brought up Israel from 
 Egypt also brought up the English out of Germany, 
 and many a time delivered our fathers from the 
 house of bondage. It is he who has made us as the 
 stars of heaven for number, and given us western 
 lands and southern seas for our inheritance. It is
 
 THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA 35 
 
 he who has made peace on our soil, hardly broken 
 by the tread of enemies for the best part of a thousand 
 years he, who gave the pride of the Spaniard to the 
 winds before us, and scattered the fleets of France 
 in the clash of Trafalgar. It was not our own right 
 hand our wooden walls and streak of silver sea 
 that wrought salvation for us, but the Lord himself 
 has been a wall of fire about us. Our fathers cried 
 to him, and he delivered them in many a day of 
 trouble and rebuke to set our rule in the sea, and 
 our dominion at the world's end. 
 
 So here we stand, at the parting of the ways. 
 The Victorian age is ended. However the new king 
 may strive to follow his mother's footsteps, he cannot 
 entirely do so. There must and will be change : 
 God grant it give us worthier thoughts of our high 
 calling. If greatness is to be measured by power 
 to do his work, ours is without question and by 
 far the greatest of the nations. God never gave 
 Israel a nobler task than he has laid on England to 
 witness of truth and peace and mercy to every nation 
 under heaven. So much the sorer will be our 
 punishment, if we turn aside to sordid selfishness 
 and filthy gain, to lies and idol-worships, and then 
 thank God that we are not as other men. As he 
 dealt with Israel, so will he deal with us, for there 
 is no respect of persons with him. Though England 
 were the signet on his right hand, yet will he pluck 
 us thence and give us into the hand of our enemies, 
 as he did that awful coronation morning when round
 
 36 THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 Westminster Abbey rose the noise of tumult and the 
 glare of flames, and even the Conqueror trembled 
 as our trembling forefathers laid on his head the 
 crown which the judgment of God on the battlefield 
 gave him. 
 
 In the year that Queen Victoria died, God is 
 speaking to us ; and if we refuse the still small voice, 
 he will speak again in the whirlwind and the earth- 
 quake. He will speak to us in righteousness, and 
 in judgment he will reckon with us. If we have 
 oppressed the stranger, and removed our neighbour's 
 landmark, and set our heart on covetousness ; shall 
 he not visit for this ? If we have walked in the 
 counsel of the ungodly, or consented to the shedding 
 of innocent blood ; shall he not require it of us ? 
 If we have allowed the land-grabbers and the 
 drunkards and the oppressors of the poor to corrupt 
 our statesmen ; shall he not judge us ? If our heart 
 has been lifted up to say, I sit in the seat of God, in 
 the midst of the seas, and my own power and the 
 might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth ; shall 
 he not abase our pride and slay us by the hand of 
 strangers ? His works are truth, his ways are judg- 
 ment. Are we doing truth before him, or walking in 
 selfish ways of our own ? 
 
 These are questions that ought to be put, for 
 these are the questions our conscience asks us. On 
 some of them we may be clear : on others I fear we 
 are far from innocent. If we have not done the 
 crimes ourselves, we may have done worse, for the
 
 THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA 37 
 
 deliberate excusing of sin is worse than the sin itself. 
 However, the sin of a nation is nothing else than the 
 sin of the men who form that nation. If we wish 
 to make our prayer heard on high, there is but one 
 way to do it. " Thyself keep pure." Do justice and 
 love mercy and walk humbly with thy God, for this 
 is all that God requires of us. The Lord incarnate 
 added nothing to those words of Micah. Keep 
 innocency, and take heed to the thing that is right ; 
 for that shall bring us peace at the last. So when 
 darkness comes, as come it will when the snows of 
 threescore years are whitening on us, and our early 
 guides are long since gone to rest, and the friends 
 of our life in whom we garnered up our love are 
 taken from us, we shall still have strength to do 
 God's work, in loneliness and sadness it may be, yet 
 in peaceful calm and overflowing thankfulness, for the 
 clouds and darkness are behind us ; forward shines 
 the golden dawning of the western sunrise. 
 
 May God of his mercy give us truth and wisdom 
 to serve our king and country, and to do his will 
 for he is King of kings and Lord of lords according 
 to the calling he shall give us in this his holy 
 commonwealth of England.
 
 IV. 
 
 NEITHER WILL THEY BE 
 PERSUADED.
 
 "And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the 
 prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose 
 from the dead." LUKE xvi. 31.
 
 IV. 
 NEITHER WILL THEY BE PERSUADED. 
 
 words are the ending of the parable of the 
 -*- rich man and Lazarus ; and I need not discuss 
 the whole of it. Let me only warn you that parable 
 is parable, and not literal fact. It is good for the 
 lesson our Lord means to teach : but we cannot take 
 for granted that he means to teach everything he 
 seems to say that there is fire in the other world, 
 for example, or that in paradise we shall sit on 
 Abraham's lap. He makes the ideas of his own time 
 the machinery of his parable ; but he does not neces- 
 sarily warrant them for true. They may be true, but 
 that is not what he wants to tells us. 
 
 To return to our parable. What is wrong with 
 the rich man, that he gets into a place of torment ? 
 He must be a bad man : yet our Lord does not tell us 
 what his badness is, or even that he is bad at all. In 
 fact, I take Dives (so we will call him in Latin) for a 
 very decent and respectable man of the world. Our 
 Lord cannot mean that it is wrong to be rich, for he 
 puts Abraham in paradise, who was very rich. Nor 
 does he hint that Dives got his wealth by bad means, 
 or made a specially bad use of it. If he makes him-
 
 42 NEITHER WILL THEY BE PERSUADED 
 
 self comfortable, he does not seem to get drunk. He 
 is not arrogant, for he does not drive Lazarus away ; 
 nor even uncharitable, for he seems to send a servant 
 out to him every day with some meat. There is no 
 reason to doubt that Lazarus did get the crumbs. 
 
 Well then, what is wrong ? Just this, I think, 
 that he made himself comfortable without thinking 
 more about Lazarus. He sends him his dinner every 
 day, and thinks his duty done ; and many of us will 
 say in our hearts that so it was. Yet if there is 
 any one lesson about charity which our Lord takes 
 pains to teach us, it is that if we do not send a 
 blessing with our gifts, no blessing will come back to us. 
 We may give money or money's worth as Dives did ; 
 but if we do not also give something of our very selves, 
 our giving is vain. God does not make up his ledger 
 in pounds, shillings and pence : he cares only for a 
 willing heart and loving service. 
 
 token of them, but it cannot supply their place. If 
 there is no spirit of love in your charity, it is worth 
 nothing before God. This is what was wrong with 
 Dives. He was too busy making himself comfortable 
 to consider why God sent Lazarus to his gate that 
 he might do him kindness himself, and not put off his 
 duty with some cheap charity through a servant. 
 True kindness is what a little child can give ; but the 
 greatest of kings cannot buy it. It is but another 
 name for the wisdom which cannot be gotten for gold ; 
 neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. 
 You will not be wrong if you say that the whole
 
 NEITHER WILL THEY BE PERSUADED 43 
 
 purpose of all religion is to teach you true kindness 
 to your fellow-men, for it is through the love of men 
 that we learn the love of God, and by the love of men 
 both sheep and goats will be judged in the last day. 
 God reveals himself to us in every one he sends in our 
 way, if we do him true kindness ; but Dives passed 
 every day without heeding. He took no pains to 
 learn the lesson God was teaching him : what wonder 
 if he came to a place of torment ? 
 
 Passing over the first request he makes, I come to 
 the one I want to speak of. If Lazarus cannot help 
 him, cannot he go and help others ? Dives has five 
 brethren ; and they seem to be living much the same 
 life as he did, for he fears lest they also come into 
 this place of torment. Now in what temper does 
 Dives ask this ? Some of the commentators think he 
 is beginning to learn unselfishness : others reply that 
 his anxiety for his brothers is only love of self, or a 
 covert hint that God never gave him a fair chance. 
 If I had to decide the question, I should say that 
 Dives is learning something: but upon the whole I 
 would rather not discuss it, for I do not think this is 
 what our Lord meant to teach us. " Abraham saith 
 unto him, They have Moses and the prophets ; let 
 them hear them." The Jew had no such Bible as 
 ours; but his Old Testament was enough to leave 
 him without excuse. " And he said, Nay, father 
 Abraham : but if one went unto them from the dead, 
 they will repent." 
 
 Here is the religion of the natural man for you.
 
 44 NEITHER WILL THEY BE PERSUADED 
 
 He knows he is a sinner, and therefore he fears God, 
 for only perfect love casteth out fear. God is a tyrant 
 who needs to be propitiated with sacrifices and out- 
 witted with cunningly devised ceremonials. So he 
 sees God in the great and strong wind and the earth- 
 quake and the fire of miracles and mighty works, but 
 not in the still small voice of common life. He will 
 allow that God speaks every now and then from the 
 whirlwind, but not that he reveals himself every day 
 in the appeal of our fellow-men for true kindness. Give 
 us a miracle, says he, that shall silence doubt and scare 
 us once for all from sin for evermore. He forgets that 
 it is not doubt but unwillingness that hides God from us, 
 and that no amount of terror can overcome unwilling- 
 ness. If a spirit passed before our face, it could tell 
 us nothing to the purpose but what we know already : 
 and if the angel of wrath were revealed in flaming fire, 
 the sinners would return to their sin the moment they 
 got over their fright. " And Abraham said, If they 
 hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be 
 persuaded, though one rose from the dead." And they 
 were not persuaded a few months later, when one did 
 rise from the dead. 
 
 God gave us the common relations of life as husbands 
 and wives, and fathers and mothers, and brothers and 
 sisters, and friends and neighbours and citizens, that 
 through them we might learn the law of love towards 
 our fellow-men by which we shall all be judged at the 
 last, from the most ignorant of heathens to the most 
 cultivated of Christians. He gave them even to the
 
 NEITHER WILL THEY BE PERSUADED 45 
 
 heathen ; but we know that the Son of Man came 
 down from heaven to destroy the sin that blinds us to 
 God's revelation in them. The striving to love our 
 fellow-men is itself that striving to know God 
 which Christ has told us is eternal life. Be your 
 religion what it may, your learning, your charity, your 
 churchgoing what you please : if you have not the 
 spirit of love, you have still to learn Christ's alphabet. 
 Some men have been enlightened, and tasted of the 
 heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy 
 Ghost, and tasted the good word of God, and the 
 powers of the world to come ; yet all this availed them 
 nothing, for without love their splendid gifts were cold 
 and dead. Whether there be prophecies, they shall 
 fail ; whether there be tongues, they shall cease ; 
 whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away: 
 but faith and hope and love only these three abide 
 for ever ; and the greatest of these is love.
 
 V. 
 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY.
 
 " The old things are passed away ; behold, they are become 
 new." 2 COR. v. 17, R.V.
 
 V. 
 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY. 1 
 
 "YTOT all things are become new. That is a false 
 -*~* reading; and the context shews that St. Paul 
 is not speaking of old things generally, but of our old 
 selves and the things we loved in past time. 
 
 If any man is in Christ, there is a new creation : 
 
 The old things are passed away ; behold, they are become new. 
 
 Neither have all things yet become new; only the 
 same old things that passed away like a dream of the 
 night. He is telling us of changes going on now, 
 not looking forward like St. John to the time when 
 he that sitteth on the throne shall say, Behold, I 
 make all things new. He speaks indeed of powers 
 of a future age, but only in their working here on 
 earth of the eTrvyeta, not the eirovpdvia. 2 
 
 " The old things are passed away." The grass 
 wi there th, the flower fadeth, and the trees of the 
 forest shall vanish away. We are ourselves in 
 constant flux and never-ceasing change; for only in 
 
 1 University of Cambridge, June 16, 1901 (Commencement 
 Sunday). 
 
 John iii. 12.
 
 50 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 
 
 romances do the living sleep for ages, whether Ephesus 
 or Boston be their place of waking. Truth itself 
 seems to change ; for many times a great leader's 
 teaching has lost its power in the hands of disciples 
 who turned a life into a scheme of orthodoxy. The 
 great and wide sea is ever changing, never changed ; 
 but the systems in which men of little faith try to fix 
 truth for ever pass before us like the long procession 
 of the icebergs breaking from their northern glaciers 
 and drifting away to their doom in the south. 
 
 " The old things are passed away," and quite 
 rightly we are slow to see it. He has little sense of 
 holiness who tramples on the past, or scorns the words 
 of those whom God has taken from us. Yet the old 
 things do pass away, and often silently. We seem to 
 wake of a sudden to find that the old hand has lost 
 its cunning, the old custom is turned to wrong, the 
 old teaching emptied of its living force. Then what 
 are we to do ? We have a carnal craving for some- 
 thing fixed in this world, some rock of adamant on 
 which the storms of time shall beat in vain. Meaner 
 men simply will not take the trouble to give up the 
 old things. The foolish mother would like her baby 
 to be always little ; the stupid politician shrinks from 
 needful reform ; the cowardly Christian looks out for 
 - a master upon earth, or hides himself amongst the 
 trees of dogma, that no fresh voice from heaven may 
 unsettle the thing he is pleased to call his faith. 
 
 Yet revelation always comes in change ; and change 
 itself is revelation, if we have eyes to see it. So it is
 
 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 51 
 
 in life. When we were children, we thought and 
 spoke as children ; but now we have put away 
 childish things. So in history. Only decaying 
 nations and decaying churches like the declining 
 Empire and the modern church of Some look back 
 to some canonized past, and strive to live by tradition. 
 We are simply unbelieving when we cling like drown- 
 ing men to truth of other days which cannot be God's 
 message to ourselves. All purely natural things 
 must pass away. The beauty of our childhood fades, 
 the proud powers of our manhood fail us, and words 
 that were spirit and life to our fathers are empty 
 sounds to us whom God has changed. Who cares 
 now for the battle-cry of the Crusaders? The old 
 things are passed away, and the glory seems departed 
 with them from the earth. We look wistfully to the 
 culture of Greece, the splendour of Rome, the fervour 
 of the early Christians, the simple faith of the Middle 
 Ages, the strong righteousness of Puritanism ; but we 
 can no more recall them than we can wake the dead. 
 They are passed away for ever, and we must face as 
 we best can the work of a world which without them 
 seems cheerless and commonplace. 
 
 The new century is hardly well begun ; yet we 
 have already seen impressive changes. As a student 
 of history I might speak of the great historians that 
 are gone from us, or of the lives that are trembling 
 with us whom God long preserve. As an old 
 student in the University I might tell of the gaps in 
 our ranks, from heads of houses to the last young
 
 52 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 
 
 explorer cut off in his prime. 1 As an Englishman 
 who counts the state as holy as the church, I might 
 speak of the great queen under whom we all grew 
 up for no man in the Senate House that winter 
 morning had heard before in Cambridge the cry, God 
 save the King. But now that the Victorian age and 
 the nineteenth century are ended, let me rather touch 
 some of the great changes they witnessed. 
 
 Those changes were not the offspring of the French 
 Revolution. The years of confusion were a clearance 
 of rubbish rather than a laying of new foundations. 
 The cannon of Austerlitz and Leipsic proclaimed the 
 end of an old age, not the birth of a new age. The 
 creative work was done more in America before them, 
 and during the stupid Metternich reaction after them. 
 Its guiding ideas I think were two both contained 
 in the Gospel, both made practical by the Reformation, 
 both prepared for by the clearances of the eighteenth 
 century, both full of promise for the twentieth. The 
 first was a deeper sense of the worth and dignity of 
 man as an individual, and in his natural grouping of 
 nations and tribes and tongues and peoples. Hence 
 on one side national upheavals first Greece and 
 Belgium, then Italy, then Germany ; and the Balkan 
 states are only kept down by selfish neighbours. In 
 another direction a wave of reform ran over Europe. 
 If it was not in form religious, neither was it a simple 
 return to the Rights of Man, but in the main a 
 serious endeavour to fit men for their duty to their 
 
 1 Anthony Wilkin, King's College : died at Cairo, May 13, 1901.
 
 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 53 
 
 country and to each other, and to raise the standard 
 of duty in all relations. On yet another side, the 
 higher value set on the individual gave a higher value 
 to the societies of nations and churches in which he 
 found himself. Some take this development of the 
 society for a reaction from the individualism of the 
 age ; but to myself it seems part of the same move- 
 ment, and only so far sound as it is such. After all, 
 even the church was made for man, not man for the 
 church. The other guiding idea of the nineteenth 
 century was that of evolution, which interpreted first 
 science, then history and theology : and if it has 
 thrown no light on the final mysteries of speculation 
 first principles cannot be demonstrated it has 
 marvellously illuminated for us the methods of God's 
 working in the world. 
 
 These two guiding thoughts are both intensely 
 Christian. The reddest of red republicans never claimed 
 for man such dignity as is given him in our old story 
 of a Son of God who gave himself a ransom for us 
 all. The boldest of levellers never went such lengths 
 as we go in the Supper of the Lord, where rank and 
 race are utterly ignored, and all come up alike to feed 
 by faith on Christ. The greatest enthusiast of nations 
 cannot outdo the love of country which lights the 
 pages of his Bible. It flashes up at the outset, when 
 Miriam sings her song of triumph over Pharaoh's 
 host ; and it shines out at the end on the gloom of 
 the gathering storm when the last of the Hebrew 
 prophets, James the Lord's brother, denounces wrath
 
 54 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 
 
 from the Lord of hosts on the oppressors of the poor. 
 The Lord himself was an Israelite indeed when he 
 refused to hurl a rotten Jewish nation on a rotten 
 Gentile world : and at the end of the Canon comes 
 the impressive protest of the Kevelation of St. John, 
 which remained for ages unechoed, that nations and 
 .tribes and tongues and peoples are God's permanent 
 groupings of mankind. As for evolution, what else 
 is the majestic development of the revelation from the 
 furthest past which the astronomer can discern to 
 the furthest future which the prophet can divine ? 
 Gradually the ages led up to the coming of their 
 Lord : gradually the centuries are unfolding something 
 of the fulness of his grace and truth. 
 
 But if the guiding ideas of the nineteenth century 
 were in the Gospel from the first, they would hardly 
 have been got out of it without the Eeformation. 
 The Latin church had left its work of witnessing and 
 ministering for Christ, and made itself a judge and a 
 divider among men. Its doctrines were all poisoned 
 by one colossal blasphemy. It required what God 
 has never asked even for himself to be believed 
 without regard to reason, and obeyed without regard 
 to conscience. So the yoke of Christiajn^Pharisaism 
 had to be broken, that men might be free to serve 
 God in spirit and truth. The unspiritual unity of 
 Western Europe had to be shattered in pieces, that 
 nations might escape the tyranny of an alien and 
 sectarian church. Above all, the idea of an infallible 
 church holding plenary powers from an absent king
 
 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 55 
 
 had to be rooted out before men could begin to see 
 the gradual development which is God's word to suc- 
 cessive generations. But an infallible church is also 
 incorrigible : therefore he cut her in sunder, and 
 appointed her portion with the hypocrites. 
 
 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the 
 afterswell of the storm ; and only the nineteenth was 
 free to take up the work which the Eeformation 
 made possible even in countries where it was rejected, 
 That work is hardly more than begun ; but we can 
 already see its character. Our losses are no doubt 
 immense. The old social order is gone, the old con- 
 ception of miracle and inspiration is overthrown, and 
 a growing tangle of practical questions represents the 
 growing complexity of life and thought. But is there 
 no gain in our wider knowledge of truth ? in a more 
 strenuous and earnest life ? in a quickened hatred of 
 social wrong ? in a higher tone of that national con- 
 science which under any form of government speaks 
 the final word ? Is it nothing to know Christ as he 
 never was known before ? to see the realms of grace 
 and nature joined in their incarnate Lord ? to be 
 made free from the horror of past ages, the in- 
 scrutable despot far off in heaven, who sought some 
 other glory than the highest welfare of his creatures ? 
 No heavier burden has been lifted from men since 
 the Gospel swept away the whole slavery of gods and 
 saints and demons, and left us face to face with th 
 risen Son of Man who hears the prayer of all fles 
 from his throne on high.
 
 56 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 
 
 True, we have dangers enough in hatreds of nations 
 and hatreds of classes, in rich who corrupt the poor 
 and poor who are reckless for want of hope, in armed 
 militarism, in blatant quackeries, in recrudescent 
 superstition. But we need not despair if the gospel 
 of commerce has gendered strife, or the gospel of 
 reform has left many evils uncured, or the gospel of 
 culture has turned out some cultured criminals. 
 Commerce, reform, culture are gospels good and true ; 
 but they are not the gospel of salvation. Our hope is 
 not in these, but in him who gave them. Our fathers 
 cried to him, and not one of their children is for- 
 gotten before him. If the old things are passed 
 away, are they therefore lost ? As the Lord of 
 goodness liveth, nothing that is good can perish. 
 Though like the corn of wheat it fall into the ground 
 and die, it dies only that it may bring forth much fruit. 
 Christ came to destroy nothing, save the works of the 
 devil, but to complete and realize in sunbright splendour 
 every vision of goodness which ever floated in the 
 twilight of our world of sin. 
 
 " The old things are passed away," and they cannot 
 return. This we hear is Nature's law of change. 
 Things tend downward, and only the touch of life 
 can lift them up again. Now look at history. If 
 Greece has perished, she remains a light to the world. 
 If Rome's eternal throne is cast down, her witness 
 to right and law is imperishable. If the old saints 
 are mouldered into dust, their spirit lives among us 
 in many a patient toiler of whom the world is not
 
 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 57 
 
 worthy more prosaic it may be, but no way less 
 heroic than that which dared the cross and the fire in 
 the olden time. If Puritanism has passed away, it 
 has left us many of the best features of English life 
 the sober earnestness, the civil freedom, the Sunday 
 rest, the quiet sense of duty which labours to unloose 
 the bands of wickedness, and to undo the heavy 
 burdens of all that suffer wrong. The more appal- 
 ling the world- wide scene of change, decay and ruin, 
 the more certainly a power of life is working upward 
 through it all. 
 
 " The old things are passed away ; behold, they are 
 become new." This is God's law of change. They 
 leave us only to return in other shapes, they vanish 
 only to come back in nobler forms. God never takes 
 away but that he may give us more abundantly. He 
 takes away the innocence of childhood, that he may 
 give us the old man's crown of glory. He takes away 
 the fathers we leaned on and the children in whom 
 we garnered up our love, that he may be himself the 
 father of the fatherless and the hope of them that are 
 desolate. He takes away the guides we trusted, the 
 friends who were our very life, that he may be him- 
 self our guide and everliving friend. He unsettles 
 the simple belief of ignorance, that he may give us 
 the nobler faith of them that know. He smites with 
 emptiness the burning words which stirred our fathers, 
 that he may give us other words of deeper meaning 
 and of yet more thrilling call. Nothing that is good 
 can perish. Though he sift it as corn is sifted in a
 
 58 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 
 
 sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. 
 The dross of our thoughts shall perish ; but the word 
 of our God which came to us will embody itself again 
 in worthier forms. Through all the changing scenes 
 of history his call remains the same Come upward 
 hither, and I will shew thee of my glory. 
 
 It is the same in life. In all time of our wealth 
 we are ready to ask, Is not this great Babylon, 
 which I have built ? Hath not my power and the 
 might of my hand gotten me this wealth ? But in 
 times of change and trouble we learn that God is 
 holy, and mercy is with him. When failure or 
 sickness or sorrow or shame has crushed our pride, 
 thoughts that are not our own are wafted- to us, and 
 words that are not our own are put in our mouth. 
 In the loneliness of affliction there is one that draws 
 near to us ; and then we feel the touch of life that 
 lifts us on our feet, and bids us go in peace, and sin 
 no more. 
 
 Yet is it real after all ? Can we know God for 
 ourselves, or no ? Here is the question of questions 
 for all the ages ; and never was it more keenly 
 fought than in our own. Year by year the battle 
 thickens, and louder grow the shouts of war, and 
 deadlier still the fiery darts of the wicked: and 
 therefore mightier than our fathers knew shall be 
 the works of God among their children. In the 
 whirlwind and in the storm he shall speak ; in 
 shakings of earth and heaven shall he plead with all 
 flesh. By the distress of nations and perplexity of
 
 THE OLD THINGS PASSED AWAY 59 
 
 statesmen, by the strange thoughts of a new genera- 
 tion, by the formless dreams of better things that 
 float around us by these signs we know that some 
 mystery of God is even now unfolding, as glorious as 
 the call of the Gentiles, and as hard for our Pharisees 
 and Sadducees to receive. But the old things that 
 passed away are never lost. In Christ they are 
 become new, and shine with a light we never saw 
 in them before. There is no loss, however great it 
 seem, which God will not abundantly recompense to 
 them that are faithful and patient ; no patient and 
 faithful service which he will not reward with the 
 honour and glory and immortality for which we seek, 
 and far above all these the crowning gift of everlasting 
 life in Jesus Christ our Lord.
 
 VI. 
 PATIENCE.
 
 " Surely I come quickly." KEY. xxii. 20. 

 
 VI. 
 PATIENCE. 1 
 
 "ORETHKEN you who are gathered here to-day 
 -*--* for the solemn service in which this church 
 and realm admit you to the high dignity and weighty 
 charge whereunto God hath called you Peace be; 
 with you, now and always. 
 
 You hear the risen Saviour's gracious promise, 
 Surely I come quickly : and let him that heareth say, 
 Even so, come, Lord Jesus. It is a hard saying. 
 Eighteen hundred winters have come and gone, and 
 the Lord is not come yet. Sixty generations of the 
 faithful have waited in vain for the lightning flash 
 of his appearance, and sixty generations of scoffers 
 have asked, Where is the promise of his coming ? 
 How long, Lord ? is the never-ceasing cry of the 
 saints : but no sign from heaven breaks the frozen 
 silence of the sky, no glorious apparition of a risen 
 Son of Man comes riding on the whirlwind and the 
 storm to deliver the souls of his elect from the 
 wrong and outrage of a world of sin. And so, says 
 the faithless hymn 
 
 " And so we wait and watcli in fear : 
 It may be that the Lord is near." 
 
 1 Hereford Cathedral, December 22, 1901 (Ordination Sermon). 
 63
 
 64 PATIENCE 
 
 " It may be." Nay, in sure and certain truth our 
 Lord is near and in our midst, nearer to us than we 
 are to one another, nearer to us than our very flesh. 
 He is not like a stranger who needs to come from a 
 far country, for he is with us already, pleading here 
 with every soul that hears these words of mine, and 
 pleading at the ends of the earth with every soul 
 that never heard his name, for he is the true light 
 whose ever-present coming lighteth every man. The 
 eyes of sense are blind, and he that loveth sin shall 
 not behold him ; but earth is just as full as heaven 
 of his glory, and even we by faith can see his comings 
 in the silence of the night and in the turmoil of the 
 day, on the sunlit hills and by the stormy sea, in the 
 rise and fall of kingdoms and in the petty worries of 
 our daily work. Whatever comes to pass, he comes 
 to us in it, and speaks to us in it ; and blessed is 
 he that answereth, Speak, Lord, for thy servant 
 heareth. 
 
 These are the comings of the Lord in our time, 
 the teaching and the training of our souls, not vaguely 
 for heaven, but for that particular state of life to 
 which he shall please to call us in the world to come. 
 Betide us what may, that is the word he speaks to 
 us ; and the pure in heart will know its meaning. 
 Cleanse your hearts till you see him in the common 
 work of life ; and then you need not fear the great 
 and dreadful day when every eye shall see him. 
 But of that day neither man nor angel knoweth, 
 nor did the Lord himself in the days of his flesh
 
 PATIENCE 65 
 
 He commands us to watch, to have our loins girded 
 and our lights burning, and to be like servants 
 waiting for their master when he cometh home. " In 
 whatsoever I find you, in that I will judge you," one 
 of the very few sayings of the Lord not recorded in 
 the Gospels. But he never told St. John that he 
 would come soon. That word quickly does not mean 
 that he will come without delay, but that he will 
 come quickly when he does come. As the lightning 
 shineth from one end of heaven to the other, so shall 
 his coming be. In fact, in many of his sayings he 
 plainly shews his knowledge that his last coming 
 would not be soon. 
 
 One great coming he did indeed expressly limit to 
 " this generation." " Verily I say unto you that 
 there be some standing here which shall not taste 
 of death till they see it." So the apostles understood 
 that he would come in their time : and they were 
 not mistaken. Did he not come with power ? did 
 he not judge the living and the dead ? when he sent 
 forth his living church on its long career of victory, 
 and gathered the eagles of destruction to the dead 
 church of Annas and Caiaphas. The destruction of 
 Jerusalem put an end to one great age of the world ; 
 but that coming of the Lord was no more future to 
 St. John in Patmos than it is to us. 
 
 Behold, I come quickly, is the message old and 
 
 ever new. He comes with the eagles of destruction 
 
 the Eoman eagles round Jerusalem, the northern 
 
 eagles round Eome, the Turkish eagles round Con- 
 
 5
 
 66 PATIENCE 
 
 stantinople, the German eagles round Paris God 
 forbid it be some other eagles round London or New 
 York. Yet he comes not always in storm and tempest 
 and distress of nations. He comes in the trials and 
 bereavements of life and in its joys and triumphs too, 
 in every word of truth and mercy that falls from human 
 lips, and seems nearest in the still small voice that 
 rises from unfathomable deeps of human consciousness. 
 Brethren, when you feel the tumult of evil passion 
 rising in your hearts, pause and listen. If a word 
 is wafted to you no matter whence which says, 
 Do right, abate your pride, give up that hatred, know 
 of a surety that this is the word of the Lord to you, 
 a coming of the Lord as real as the fiery dawning of 
 the day of doom. 
 
 Behold, I come quickly. His words are as a 
 trumpet blast across the ages, rousing one generation 
 after another from the deadly sleep of the backsliders. 
 His comings do seem sudden to sinners like us, for 
 his thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are our 
 ways his ways. Men are impatient, and he is the 
 God of patience. Most of our sins and most of our 
 mistakes come from impatience. Men were impatient, 
 and made them gods in the image of corruptible man, 
 and beasts, and creeping things. They were impatient, 
 and calculated the day of his coming in every genera- 
 tion afresh. They were impatient, and put their 
 trust in spiritual directors and church traditions, 
 that they might walk by sight and not by faith. 
 They were impatient, and slew their brethren with
 
 PATIENCE 67 
 
 sword and cross and fire for not following them, and 
 thought malice and hatred and lying and slander 
 for the good of the church a sacrifice well-pleasing 
 to God. 
 
 Brethren, you will find it the hardest part of your 
 work to wait with patience on the Lord, always 
 watching for his comings and hasting unto them, but 
 always leaving him in his own way and in his own 
 good time to clear away that difficulty, to remove 
 that hindrance, to right that wrong. Behold, all 
 souls are mine, saith the Lord ; and by the mystery 
 of his dealings with your own, I charge you to 
 reverence his dealing with another. Be sure that he 
 will try your patience to the uttermost. Time after 
 time ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Son 
 of Man, and ye shall not see it. It is not always an 
 evil servant who saith, My lord delayeth his coming ; 
 nor was it only the foolish virgins who slumbered and 
 slept before the bridegroom came. You will find it 
 only too easy to crowd out healthy doubts and 
 questionings, to stifle faith and even truth and 
 conscience in the ceaseless fidget of laborious im- 
 patience which is now in fashion. You will hear 
 presently the noble charge which is the charter of 
 your office. Study that charge again and again, and 
 make sure that all your work is done accordingly. 
 You will hear in it that you are not servers of tables 
 and providers of spiritual excitement, but messengers, 
 watchmen, and stewards of the Lord. Your work is 
 to feed the sheep of Christ, whom he bought with his
 
 68 PATIENCE 
 
 death, and for whom he shed his blood and to feed 
 them with the bread of life : and the bread of life is 
 Christ in all his comings, for he that once came down 
 from heaven for our salvation is always coming down 
 from heaven and always giving life to the whole 
 world. 
 
 Now consider what manner of man our Saviour 
 was, that you may learn to be like him. He never 
 spoils his work with hurry, never debases it to 
 spiritual excitement. There is no impatience even in 
 his burning words of sevenfold Woe on scribes and 
 Pharisees. He bids gather up the fragments, and 
 folds the napkin when he rises from the dead. 
 Above all, he has patience to limit his work. He 
 trains a few disciples carefully, and is content to be 
 an utter failure in the world's eyes. But he knew in 
 whom he trusted. He kept up his unfailing patience 
 by constant communion with God and study of the 
 words God spake to them of old : and you must 
 do the like. Whatever you leave undone, you must 
 make time for continual prayer and daily reading and 
 weighing of the Scriptures. Let no man deceive you, 
 for this is vital, and there are many deceivers. I 
 myself have heard an ordination address which openly 
 treated the study of Scripture as waste of time. Let 
 no man persuade you that your first duty is to 
 organize clubs and guilds, to multiply services and 
 approve your ministry by getting good subscriptions 
 and overflowing congregations. All this may be ex- ' 
 cellent: but if you let it crowd out the weightier
 
 PATIENCE 69 
 
 matters of personal communion with God and study 
 of his holy Word, your work is dead, your ministration 
 vain. 
 
 Patience, patience yet again. The Lord is good to 
 them that wait for him. He never left prayer un- 
 answered, or the cup of cold water without reward. 
 Bear your witness truly, for the Holy Ghost is witness 
 also, and will confirm you not with the miracles of 
 old time, but with greater works than these. Fear 
 not : and if he tarry, wait his time. Behold, I come 
 quickly, and my reward is with me, to give every 
 man according as his work the work of his life 
 shall be. Study his comings in the past with loving 
 reverence, and watch for his comings in the present 
 with loving patience : so shall you learn to look with 
 loving expectation to that last great and terrible 
 coming, for perfect love casteth out fear. There is 
 no condemnation for them that are in Christ. No 
 stranger shall be revealed in that day's flaming fire, 
 but our own good Lord, the Lord who loves us, and 
 in his own blood loosed us from our sins. And then 
 we shall see with our eyes the answer to Faith's 
 perpetual challenge Must not the love that beareth 
 all things also be the love that overcometh all things ?
 
 VII. 
 CHRIST "GAVE NO PROOFS." 
 
 71
 
 " If I had not done among them the works which none other 
 man did, they had not had sin." JOHN xv. 24.
 
 VII. 
 CHRIST "GAVE NO PROOFS." 1 
 
 IN 1742 there came out a remarkable book 
 Christianity not founded on Argument by 
 Henry Dodwell, the son of the learned non-juror. 
 Its purport is this. " Seasonable belief is a con- 
 tradiction in terms. We are commanded to believe, 
 not to reason ; and if we stop to reason things out, 
 we shall never get anything proved. The command 
 is to us all, and makes no allowance for children 
 or unlearned. Moreover, the man who reasons is a 
 doubter ; and doubt is not the faith which overcometh 
 the world. The Lord himself gave no proofs, but 
 required men to believe him without proof, so that 
 reasoning is rebellion pure and simple. Reason and 
 religion are inconsistent with each other, for reason 
 rests on doubt and suspicion, religion on submission 
 and faith. The safe motto is Tertullian's Credo quia 
 absurdum." 
 
 There can be little doubt that Dodwell wrote in 
 bitter irony : yet many mistook his satire for a 
 powerful defence of Christianity ; and to this day 
 there are many Christians who believe in sober- 
 ly Cathedral, February 21, 1904. 
 73
 
 74 CHRIST "GAVE NO PROOFS" 
 
 earnest more or less of what Dodwell wrote in irony. 
 He did but speak the avowed belief of some, the 
 secret thought of many more, that the Gospel is 
 contrary to reason and common sense. Some of these 
 men smother their conscience for themselves and 
 make very good conventional Christians. Others call 
 in some infallible church or other to smother their 
 conscience ; and these also pass for Christians. Those 
 only are called unbelievers who draw the logical 
 conclusion by rejecting the Gospel entirely ; yet they 
 are no way greater unbelievers than the others, and 
 every now and then they are better Christians, if we 
 judge them by their fruits, as the Lord commands us. 
 
 Now I do not want just now to prove that 
 Christianity is not contrary to reason ; but I do want 
 to shew you the absolute and utter falseness of 
 Dodwell's position, that our Lord gave no proofs, but 
 required men to believe him without proof. Many 
 people have a lurking idea that it is more or less 
 true ; and many more who see that it is false do not 
 understand how grossly and outrageously false it is. 
 Few indeed of us I fear distinctly see how steadily 
 our Lord appeals to reason in all his acts and words. 
 
 Yes, say some, He did give proofs, for he worked 
 miracles. I agree that he did signs, as St. John 
 prefers to call them ; and these signs I believe are 
 weighty proofs. There has been far too much re- 
 action from the eighteenth century doctrine which 
 saw nothing in them but proofs. It is absurd to say, 
 as some do, that even if miracles be true, they prove
 
 CHRIST "GAVE NO PROOFS" 75 
 
 nothing but themselves. If the story of Lazarus be 
 true, surely it proves that our Lord had not only 
 power to wake the dead, but shewed infinite delicacy 
 and tenderness in doing it. The mistake was in 
 forgetting that the signs were something more than 
 works done to prove his divinity. They were not 
 simply displays of power, but the natural outflow 
 and expression of his goodness and mercy. Read 
 for instance the story of Jairus' daughter, and see 
 how even the power that wakes the dead is over- 
 shadowed by the marvellous outflow of gentleness and 
 patience and tender care, not only for the child, but 
 even for the woman who delays his urgent errand. 
 
 But I am not thinking only or even chiefly of 
 miracles. Jesus of Nazareth spoke with authority 
 in the sense that he spoke for himself instead of 
 quoting tradition like the rabbis, and in the sense 
 that he never spoke a doubting word. He says, 
 Verily, verily; never a Peradventure. But he did 
 not speak with authority, if that means that he did 
 not submit to our reason every word he spoke. 
 Often he gives us direct and formal argument, as 
 that the disciples are guiltless in eating the ears of 
 corn, or that Satan is not casting out Satan ; and he 
 argues even where he does not seem to argue. He 
 does not throw down his teaching and say, There, 
 take it or leave it. Every sentence seems to say, 
 Judge for yourselves, and judge the righteous judg- 
 ment, for you see that my words are words of truth 
 and goodness. You know what they mean as well
 
 76 CHRIST "GAVE NO PROOFS" 
 
 as you know what the cloud on the western sea 
 means. " If I had not come and spoken to them, 
 they had not had sin." Everywhere he takes for 
 granted that whether or no men could have found 
 out the truth for themselves, they are very well able 
 to recognize it when it is put before them. Every- 
 where he appeals to reason, though I grant not to 
 mere logic ; and if reason is not able to answer his 
 call, his teaching is reduced at once to a mass of 
 nonsense. 
 
 It is the same in the Old Testament. It is always, 
 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord. 
 The first commandment reasons, how he brought them 
 out from the land of Egypt and the house of bondmen : 
 and to reason God commits his cause without reserve. 
 Judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. 
 Hear now, house of Israel ; is not my way equal ? 
 are not your ways unequal ? In the glorious judg- 
 ment scene of Ps. 1., Our God shall come, and shall 
 not keep silence : there shall go before him a con- 
 suming fire, and a mighty tempest shall be stirred up 
 round about him : yet even there he does not simply 
 lay down the law, but reasons with his people. 
 
 Now this continual appeal to reason is of the very 
 essence of the Gospel. The old Deists were not 
 entirely wrong when they spoke of Natural Keligion 
 as the necessary foundation and the proper test of a 
 revelation : only the real Natural Eeligion is not a 
 creed about a God and a future life, but a sense of 
 duty, and of right and wrong. Man is the image of
 
 CHRIST "GAVE NO PROOFS" 77 
 
 God ; and however that image is dimmed by sin, it is 
 not destroyed. Were man utterly depraved, it would 
 be useless for God to reason with him. He might 
 raise him by a stroke of power; but that stroke 
 would utterly shatter the freedom which makes him 
 better than the beasts. We must have God's truth 
 within us, if we are to recognize God's truth without 
 us. All experience confirms the assumption of the 
 Gospel, that if only we are willing to judge the righteous 
 judgment, we can very well judge of right and wrong 
 in spite of sin. Even the sinner knows goodness 
 when he sees it, however he may hate it. Even the 
 sinner can burn with righteous indignation against 
 the sins of other men. The drunkard scorns the 
 coward, and the selfish schemer can take up his 
 parable against the drunkard. 
 
 Here is the fundamental error of all the forms of 
 religion which try to rest on authority instead of 
 reason. They try to cut away all possibility of real 
 knowledge and belief. We cannot know a thing 
 unless reason compares it with ideas we have already. 
 We compare a new metal with our ideas of colour, of 
 hardness, of weight, and so on. We compare some- 
 body's conduct with our ideas of right and wrong. 
 So we must compare the revelation with all our ideas 
 which bear on it : and unless we do this, we cannot 
 know whether it is true or false, or have any real 
 belief or disbelief at all. So every form of religion 
 which forbids us to do this does its best to make faith 
 the assent to things not proved, the evidence of things
 
 78 CHRIST "GAVE NO PROOFS" 
 
 not true. We have no business to believe the Lord 
 himself without regard to reason. " If I had not 
 done among them the works which none other man 
 did, they had not had sin." 
 
 Now that I have claimed for reason that it is the 
 only test we have or can have of truth, I must ex- 
 plain two points I have already hinted. For one of 
 them, I do not believe that reason can be trusted to 
 discover God's truth only to recognize it when set 
 before us, and that only when we are willing to see 
 truth. My second point is even more important. 
 Though the appeal is always to reason, we must re- 
 member that there is always something behind logic. 
 And that something is not recondite learning. The 
 decisive question of the Gospel is, What think ye of 
 Christ ? And though learning may help, it is not 
 learning which answers, My Lord and my God. That 
 is the answer of reason, for the whole man speaks 
 through reason. Eeason is not one power amongst 
 others : it is rather the voice through which all the 
 powers of heart and soul and mind must speak. The 
 appeal is not to reasoning as if the Gospel were a 
 mere affair of logic; it is rather through reason to all 
 the powers of man which speak through reason. We 
 need them all. We need the soul that seeks for 
 goodness and the heart which feels it as well as the 
 mind which recognizes it. 
 
 Let me put this yet again, that there may be no 
 mistake. I am as far as possible from denying that 
 the light of love divine will commonly first dawn on
 
 CHRIST "GAVE NO PROOFS" 79 
 
 the loving heart. Certain it is that if the heart is 
 not touched sooner or later, there can be no confession 
 unto salvation. But the confession before men is 
 needed too, and only reason can make that confession. 
 It will not always be put into a formal creed, but it 
 must always be a confession of the love of truth ; and 
 for us Christians it must be full adoring love of him 
 who is the Truth not as abstract truth alone, but as 
 the supreme and final guide of life. That confession 
 will not always be a bold declaration in the face of 
 danger, though sometimes it must be. Often it may 
 be the quiet witness of a life that is given to Christ 
 in simple and adoring love. It is love, not logic, that 
 stirs this world ; and it is love, not logic, which has 
 the promise of the other world. It is as the Lord 
 has told us, " He that hath my commandments, and 
 keepeth them, he it is that loveth me : and he that 
 loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will 
 love him, and will manifest myself to him."
 
 VIII. 
 HOPE.
 
 " But now alndeth . . . hope." 1 COR. xiii. 13.
 
 VIII. 
 
 HOPE. 1 
 
 I HAVE torn these words out of a familiar context, 
 because it is of hope I wish to speak, though truly 
 faith, hope, and love are no more than aspects of the 
 one life in Christ which is life eternal here on earth. 
 
 Nobody can read his Bible to much purpose with- 
 out seeing that hope is a chief part of godliness. 
 Hope was the very life of Israel. " Our fathers hoped 
 in thee. The Lord will be the hope of his people, 
 the confidence of the ends of the earth." And if the 
 old fire of hope burned low in the ages of Pharisaic 
 formalism, it blazed out again more brightly than 
 ever when Christ our Lord brought life and im- 
 mortality to light. Christ in us is the hope of glory, 
 the one living power that could overcome the disgust 
 and loathing of that hard old pagan world where hope 
 was lost. And if its brightness was dimmed again 
 in the dark times of Christian Pharisaism, it was 
 never quite extinguished. Beyond the Dies irce rose 
 Jerusalem the golden. 
 
 The Gospel never looks on hope as an accident of 
 
 1 St. John's College, Cambridge, May 8, 1904 (Commemoration 
 Sermon). 
 
 83
 
 84 HOPE 
 
 health or temper, but as a primary duty. Want of 
 hope is not a natural weakness, but a deep estrange- 
 ment from Christ; for no man who has tasted the 
 good word of God and the powers of a world to come 
 can want for hope, unless he fall away. The victory 
 of faith which overcometh the world is no more than 
 the natural working of the triumphant hope and over- 
 flowing thankfulness without which Christian life is 
 not itself. The vilest sin is not more unbelieving 
 than the cultured cynicism which knows the world 
 too well forsooth to cherish hope, and shuts its eyes 
 to the powers not of this world working in it. 
 
 Yet even the devil of cynicism bears witness that 
 there is a false hope, as well as a false faith and a 
 false love. Hope sustains the sinner, that God has 
 forgotten, that he will never see it. Hope puffs up 
 the Pharisee, because he is not as other men, nor 
 even as this publican. Hope sends many a man to 
 gospels of reform, of commerce, of culture, of science, 
 for the salvation which none of them can give. But 
 false hope dreams a vain dream ; true hope takes 
 full account of truth. We ignore nothing, dissemble 
 nothing, excuse nothing; yet we have the full assur- 
 ance of hope. We know far better than the cynic 
 how sin has enslaved ourselves, our neighbours, and 
 the world : but we know that sin is conquered. The 
 love of Christ which towers far above the loftiest 
 heights of human goodness reaches also far below the 
 lowest deeps of human sin. If the noblest of saints 
 must always be the most abashed before the majestic
 
 HOPE 85 
 
 holiness of him that knew not sin, the greatest of 
 sinners is not beyond the pleading of the infinite and 
 boundless love and sympathy which for us men and 
 for our salvation came down from heaven to a cross 
 of shame. Paint your picture of the world as darkly 
 as you please, lay on thick the colours of misery and 
 want and vice and wrong, and add that Christendom 
 in something like two thousand years has failed to 
 cure it. Our hope is neither ignorant of these things 
 nor careless of them, but triumphant over them. If 
 the Incarnation is a fact, it must be a fact of the 
 eternal order which reveals the meaning of the world 
 of space and time, and gives us absolute and final 
 certainty that in God's own good time the tangle 
 shall be unravelled, and the wilderness of sin shall be 
 made like Eden and her desert like the garden of the 
 Lord. Before the one stupendous fact that the Son 
 of God was crucified for men all hopelessness vanishes, 
 all doubts are silenced, all murmurs die away : we can 
 but give our life in lowly adoration and full-hearted 
 thankfulness to him who died for us. 
 
 They know little of human nature who complain 
 that the Gospel is full of hope. So indeed it is. 
 There is no faith without hope, for faith is the 
 assurance of things hoped for ; no love without hope, 
 for love hopeth all things ; yet no true hope without 
 faith to endure the unseen as seen, no true hope 
 without love to inspire it, for only love can hope in a 
 world of sin. How could the Gospel be otherwise 
 than hopeful ? Is not the love that beareth all things
 
 86 HOPE 
 
 the love that overcoineth all things ? Be it soon or 
 be it late, the victory is surer than to-morrow's sun- 
 rise; and in that hope we can dare and do, and 
 what is harder we can watch and wait, and suffer 
 earthly failure like the Lord himself. What else 
 would you have ? A man cannot do common work 
 without hope, though it be of nothing better than his 
 daily wages ; and the Gospel would be self -convicted 
 if it called on a man for the noblest of work without 
 kindling in him the noblest of hope. Hope is neither 
 a natural gift nor an amiable weakness nor a selfish 
 calculation, but the very life by which we live, in this 
 world or another. What matters the lapse of ages to 
 spirits like ourselves, in Christ immortal spirits, that 
 we should greatly care to see the victory one of these 
 days rather than the day when we shall meet and 
 welcome our Lord returning ? 
 
 If we of all men were to give up hope, the very 
 stones would cry out. Are not these academic walls 
 around us monuments of hope ? Some of the noblest 
 of them come down from the dark fifteenth century 
 the night before the dawn when the old order was 
 ready to vanish away, and Christendom cowered not 
 for fear only, but for very shame before the Hussite 
 and the Turk. Then true piety turned silently away 
 from the houses of false holiness to build homes of 
 learning, in sure hope that truth would not fail men 
 like a lying church. There is no finer witness of this 
 better spirit than that college which joins the names 
 of the rival Queens. Our own foundress was in this
 
 HOPE 87 
 
 way only like the other Margaret, the mainstay and 
 the ruin of the house of Lancaster. She grew up 
 amid the clash of civil war, the horrors of Wakefield 
 and Towton, the demoralizing revolutions of Barnet 
 and Bosworth : yet two great foundations witness to 
 this day her unshaken hope for the ages that were to 
 follow her own outworn fifteenth century. 
 
 That ye may abound in hope, says St. Paul, hope 
 for ourselves, hope for our neighbour, hope for the 
 world. Be the sin of our heart what it may, and 
 seventy times seven the falls of the past, in Christ we 
 know that sin shall have no more dominion over us. 
 Be the sin of our neighbour what it may, love hopeth 
 all things, and without love we are nothing. Be the 
 sin of the world what it may, we know who came to 
 take it away. His hand is not shortened, that he 
 cannot save ; neither is his ear heavy, that he cannot 
 hear the great and bitter cry that cometh up from 
 earth to heaven. You may give up hope when the 
 Saviour of the world confesses himself defeated, and 
 all-ruling Love retires for ever baffled from the battle- 
 field of human wickedness : but until then Christ calls 
 you to set your hope on him, and to bear witness of 
 it to the world. 
 
 Hope shall never fail. Hope shares the prerogative 
 and dignity of love, to stand on the wreck of worlds 
 and gaze on the eternal Face which sinners may not 
 see and live. The works of God shall pass away. 
 The law of decay is not more plainly written on our 
 mortal bodies than on the mightiest star that walks
 
 88 HOPE 
 
 the frozen verge of heaven. Even spiritual gifts shall 
 perish, unless faith and hope and love throw over 
 them the asbestos robe of immortality. If prophecies 
 there be, they shall be needed no more ; if tongues 
 there be, they shall cease ; if knowledge there be, it 
 shall be needed no more : but hope along with faith 
 and love abideth evermore. There is room and work 
 for hope even in the world where we shall be like 
 him, for we shall see him as he is. If heaven is not 
 poorer than earth, there must be unmeasured room 
 for hope in revelations far beyond all that sinners can 
 ask or think revelations rising through the years of 
 eternity, but always revelations of our heavenly 
 Father's love in Christ.
 
 IX. 
 IDOLS.
 
 Little children, keep yourselves from idols." 1 JOHN v. 21.
 
 IX. 
 
 IDOLS. 1 
 
 rPHESE would seem to be the last words of Scripture 
 * that were written, the last charge of the last 
 apostle, the last solemn warning in which the Holy 
 Spirit sums up the Gospel for all generations. Yet 
 they sound strange. Surely we have no idols. What 
 need have we of such a charge as this ? 
 
 Not much, if wood and stone are needed to make 
 an idol : but if we are putting anything whatever in 
 God's place, we are not so clear. Some calling them- 
 selves Christians have worshipped saints on every 
 high hill and under every green tree ; some have 
 made the church an idol, and some the Bible ; some 
 have made money their god, others have worshipped 
 success, and others have sold themselves for pleasure. 
 All these and more are glanced at by St. John : but 
 his thought is deeper than this. 
 
 What account does the Gospel give of itself ? 
 What is it, on its own shewing ? It is a revelation, 
 and first a revelation of this world's true estate and 
 order. It is this world's truth which it reveals, this 
 world's life it fills with glory. Mean and prosaic as 
 
 1 Girton College, August 13, 1905 (Women's Summer Meeting). 
 91
 
 9 2 IDOLS 
 
 our lives may seem, eternal issues rest on them. As 
 every candle flashes out its light to the furthest stars 
 of heaven, so every thought of ours must echo through 
 the boundless deeps of the eternal world around us, 
 as day by day we spell out one more letter of the 
 decision for the day of doom. Ever if the lips that 
 speak it are divine, they can declare only that which 
 we ourselves have written. 
 
 Christ came, as he said, to bear witness to the 
 truth ; and his coming is the absolute and final proof 
 of that goodness of God without which all thought is 
 meaningless. This is the truth revealed in Christ ; 
 and he was not its witness only, but its living centre, 
 the living Truth in whom heaven and earth consist 
 and have their being. He was himself the revelation : 
 yet was he its witness also, the Faithful and True. 
 
 But if he was faithful and true, what manner of 
 persons ought we to be ? Each one of us bears some 
 word of God, has work for God no other living person 
 can do. We may not know what the message is ; 
 but we shall give it truly if we have received the 
 love of truth. Now truth is less in words and deeds 
 than in the thought behind them. A man of science 
 worthy of his calling is a good sample of truth in 
 thought. He spares no pains in searching out his 
 facts, takes them all into account, allows nothing to 
 bias him, and refuses to go a step beyond the evidence 
 before him. His one desire is to see the thing exactly 
 as it is. So far as it goes, the scientific spirit is the 
 Christian spirit. We have only to take in the moral
 
 IDOLS 93 
 
 facts, and go on with unninching truthfulness to the 
 moral questions. But the moral facts touch us closely, 
 and sorely tempt us to cloke our sins or find excuses 
 for unrighteous judgment. Even sincerity is not 
 enough. It is not enough to say and do nothing but 
 what you believe to be true and right. How did you 
 get that belief ? You must answer quite as much for 
 the way you got it as for the use you make of it. If 
 you have shut your eyes to things you ought to have 
 seen, you are guilty before the Lord of truth. If you 
 took up what you are pleased to call your creed at 
 random, like the suicides who go over to Eome to get 
 rid of the trouble of thinking, it is no belief at all. 
 It is pure scepticism, with a rag of self-will to cover 
 its nakedness. Truth is not what we choose to 
 believe, but what we win for ourselves in wrestling 
 with God. We may hear the witness of others, but 
 the truth will never be ours till we have won it for 
 ourselves. The idea that we can live on spiritual 
 truth taken on authority is the idlest of idle dreams. 
 The aim of all good teaching is that the learner should 
 be able to see the truth for himself. No zeal, no 
 good works, no pleading of authority, no professions 
 of humility, can absolve us from the duty of striving 
 with all our power to make sure that our beliefs are 
 true. 
 
 The love of truth is not inborn in the natural man. 
 He likes his own ways best, and has to learn from 
 the trials of life that God's ways are not our ways, 
 and need to be searched out with loving patience.
 
 94 IDOLS 
 
 Pride and partizanship, sloth, timidity, and all the 
 forms of worldly self-love are not to be overcome 
 without serious effort. We are all on the side of 
 truth at least we all say so but it does not follow 
 that we are lovers of truth. Here is the moral value 
 of our daily work. The easiest lesson in the school 
 of truth is to do that work in the spirit of truth. 
 Petty as it may seem, it is the earthward end of a 
 ladder that reaches up to heaven. It is a greater 
 work to give the cup of cold water than raise the 
 dead. Our single duty here on earth is to bend all 
 our heart and all our soul and all our mind to the 
 single task of learning the love of truth, for the love 
 of truth is the love of God. 
 
 But is that so ? you ask. If the love of truth is 
 everything, what room is left for purity and gentle- 
 ness, humility and unselfishness ? What has the love 
 of truth to do with these ? Much every way, I answer ; 
 for all sin is an untruth, a defiance of the true order 
 of earth and heaven. In one of Hort's great sayings, 
 Every thought which is base or vile or selfish is first 
 of all untrue. These are the idols from which we 
 have to keep ourselves. Whatever you think of God 
 in your inmost heart, you will live accordingly. 
 Whatever idol you make him into, that idol will 
 make you like itself. 
 
 It is not by learning nor by culture nor even by 
 worship that we come to the knowledge of God. The 
 utmost which even worship can do is to cleanse us 
 for our higher duties those duties of common life in
 
 IDOLS 95 
 
 which our God reveals himself, in joy and sorrow, in 
 sickness and in health alike. Even the Supper of the 
 Lord would be a mockery, if Christ were not as near 
 us in every other work of truth we do. Only be true, 
 true in every fibre of your being ; and truth of 
 thought shall cleanse your eyes to see the truth of 
 God which is the light of life. 
 
 Women as you are, you are priests of God, and 
 prophets charged with words of truth to all around 
 you. You need the vision of glory, and the coal of 
 fire to touch your lips, before you take the name of 
 truth upon them. He that sitteth on the high and 
 lofty throne is he that is true, the faithful witness 
 and the firstborn from the dead. Only be true ; and 
 he shall guide you safe till this world's twilight shall 
 have .passed away, and you shall see the truth you 
 loved in all its glory, shining out in clear and vivid 
 splendour in the light of life eternal. And the idols 
 he shall utterly abolish.
 
 X. 
 
 JESUS COULD NOT.
 
 " And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his 
 hands on a few sick folk, and healed them. And he marvelled 
 at their unbelief." MARK. vi. 5.
 
 X. 
 JESUS COULD NOT. 1 
 
 T WELL remember the shock of surprise with which 
 -*- these words first came upon me as a boy of 
 seven in a Leicestershire vicarage, at finding some- 
 thing which the Son of God was not able to do. 
 Indeed, his power had never failed him before this 
 in signs and wonders. He had but just rebuked the 
 storm and cast out demons, healed the sick and raised 
 the dead ; yet the moment he comes back to his own 
 country with all the glory of his wonders on him, he 
 can do scarcely anything. He is checked at once, 
 as if the powers of darkness had suddenly become 
 too strong for him. Something of the sort it must have 
 been, for Jesus marvelled. Once before he marvelled 
 at the Eoman centurion's faith ; and only once again 
 he marvels now at the unbelief of his own country- 
 men. We marvel too, but we often marvel wrongly, 
 knowing neither the meaning of the Incarnation nor 
 the power of God, nor even the mysterious freedom 
 he has given us of choosing evil rather than good. 
 
 In the first place, the power upon earth of 
 the incarnate Son of God was not unlimited. He 
 
 1 Brantham, April 12, 1896. 
 99
 
 ioo JESUS COULD NOT 
 
 came not hither with the glory which he had before 
 the world was, but in form as a man, in the likeness 
 of flesh of sin, and tempted in all things as we are, 
 yet without sin. As a Son of Man he overcame the 
 world, as a Son of Man he did his works, and as a 
 Son of Man he shall come to be our judge hereafter. 
 His mighty works are signs not so much of deity as 
 of the perfect sinless manhood which is the image 
 of God. It may be there is none of them we could 
 not do ourselves, if only sin had never touched us. 
 The transfiguration itself, and even the resurrection 
 from the dead which declared him the Son of God 
 were (so to say) only the natural victory of sinless 
 human nature over death. After all, the great sign 
 he gave was not his mighty power, but his perfect 
 love and patience. That power was only his for the 
 work of God, not for selfish or unworthy ends. He 
 could turn water into wine to help others, but not 
 stones into bread to feed himself. He might wither 
 a fig tree for a sign, but not cast himself down from 
 the pinnacle of the temple to confound the unbelievers 
 in the courts below. So it was here in his own 
 country. The few sick folk he healed are enough 
 to shew that his power was the same as ever. But 
 if he had done more, he would have driven the 
 unbelievers to choose between forced belief and fierce 
 resistance. And this is precisely what he could 
 not do. 
 
 Again, power is only a thing to be used, not one of 
 the essentially good things like faith and love, of which
 
 JESUS COULD NOT 101 
 
 we never can have too much. Power to do the right 
 thing is good, but all power beyond this is so much 
 weakness. This is what we forget when we think 
 to honour God by looking up to him as a being 
 of unbounded power, who can do all things without 
 let or hindrance. It is true that he governs all 
 things, and that his word shall not return unto him 
 void ; but it is not true that God can do all things, 
 for there are some things which we know that he 
 cannot do. He cannot deny his own holiness. He 
 is not a man that he should lie, or a son of man that 
 he should repent. Aye, there is a joy of men 
 unknown to God the joy of sin forgiven. The mere 
 physical power which holds the universe together 
 might be equal to any act we can imagine; but 
 something of his power God renounced when he 
 created the world, and something more when he 
 created man. He did not give him freedom with one 
 hand only to take it away with the other. As far 
 as man has any real power of choosing between good 
 and evil, so far must God have renounced the power 
 of compelling him to choose good rather than evil. 
 In this the Incarnation makes no difference. Suppose 
 for a moment that our Saviour's manhood was utterly 
 unreal the mere shape of a man and nothing more. 
 Whatever he might have done, there is one thing we 
 can say for certain he would not have done. He 
 would not and could not even then have used the 
 mighty hand and outstretched arm of deity to force 
 belief on impenitent and unwilling men.
 
 102 JESUS COULD NOT 
 
 And this brings us to the third point I mentioned 
 our own mysterious power to defeat the will of 
 God by doing evil. That power is inconceivable, 
 so long as we think of God as mere power. Yet it 
 is undeniable that we are doing every day the things 
 we know he hates. His wrath is as truly revealed 
 from heaven on all iniquity as if he rained brimstone 
 and fire on all who stifle truth in their unrighteous 
 doings. No, God is holiness indeed, but not mere 
 power. Even the God who spake on Sinai is a God 
 who sheweth mercy unto thousands of generations ; 
 and in Christ he has v shewn us of his real self as 
 light and love. Our freedom is real, and it is given 
 us in love. He might have made us machines 
 always doing the right thing ; but then we should 
 have been no more than machines. It was not 
 machines that he wanted, but men in his own image 
 who could see his glory and return his love, and 
 be with him for ever. No forced hallelujahs does he 
 ask of us, but a willing offering and a service which 
 is perfect freedom. And for us freedom to do right 
 means also freedom to do wrong. If man is to obey 
 freely, he must also be free to disobey. This is what 
 I glanced at when I said that all power beyond the 
 power to do the right thing is so much weakness. 
 The highest state we can imagine the state we hope 
 to reach in the other life is not a state of freedom. 
 It is not a state where we have to strive with 
 painful efforts and many a failure and worse than 
 failure after some distant goal of holiness. It is a
 
 JESUS COULD NOT 103 
 
 state where God has made our inmost nature holy 
 like his own, a state where we live in Christ and 
 Christ lives in us and keeps us, so that we can no 
 more sin than he. And this is not a state of freedom, 
 though we plainly cannot reach it but through 
 freedom, and God has told us that he will never 
 make us holy without an effort of our own. 
 
 Meanwhile sin is real. The freedom of the natural 
 man is only a freedom to choose evil, for evil the 
 natural man will always choose. He is as wholly 
 bent on evil as the Son of Man was bent on good- 
 Yet God has not left himself without witness in the 
 heart of every man. Conscience speaks from deeps 
 of your real self which sense has never fathomed ; and 
 the voice of conscience is the word of God within. 
 You may stifle it with your untruth or drown it in 
 the noisy clatter of your eager passions ; but when 
 it speaks again, you will hear no more its gentle 
 pleadings with your childhood. It will speak of wrath 
 that grows hotter and judgment that comes nearer 
 as you harden yourself in sin. God grant you may 
 not be able to silence his witness in you till the time 
 when Death's cold hand shall wake you from your 
 living death. 
 
 Of one thing be well assured. He that did no mighty 
 works for his own countrymen will do none for you. 
 What would be the use of them ? Let him come down 
 from the cross, said some, and we will believe ; and 
 perhaps they thought they meant it ; but they were 
 not persuaded when he rose from the dead. Forsooth
 
 io 4 JESUS COULD NOT 
 
 you might believe if you could choose a sign for your- 
 self ; and how much the better would you be for it, 
 if you were still in your sins ? Behold, I shew you 
 a more excellent way. God cares not to overwhelm 
 us with marvels, but commends to us his love, in that 
 Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. His 
 kingdom is not a kingdom of might, but one where 
 he that will be first must be the servant of all. Only 
 by love serve one another, and the cup of cold water 
 given in his name shall not be forgotten. In Christ 
 all enemies are overcome ; and he shall fill your daily 
 life with greater works than those he could not do 
 in his own country. Eemember, for Christ has told 
 us, that cup of cold water is a greater work than he 
 did himself when he gave sight to the blind or life 
 to the dead. Only watch, and be strong in faith, and 
 thou too shalt be a light to lighten the world, and a 
 giver of life to the dead.
 
 XI. 
 CHRIST'S KINGDOM. 
 
 105
 
 "Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world."- 
 JOHN xviii. 36. 
 
 106
 
 XL 
 CHRIST'S KINGDOM. 1 
 
 ~YTOU must notice carefully the difference between 
 -*- the two trials of our Lord. Before the high 
 priest he is accused of blasphemy, in making himself 
 the Son of God, and condemned on his own avowal of 
 the charge. Then they take him to Pilate, because 
 they cannot put him to death without the governor's 
 authority. But they drop the charge of blasphemy 
 Pilate was not likely to listen to it and bring a new 
 one of treason of making himself a king, a king of 
 the Jews. It was a simple charge enough ; yet 
 Pilate must have seen at a glance that there was 
 something behind it. What were those Pharisees 
 doing in the crowd ? Had they suddenly become 
 lovers of Csesar ? Pilate feels doubtful, and proceeds 
 to question the prisoner. " Art thou the king of the 
 Jews ? " The answer practically asks what he means : 
 " Is this your own question about treason, or is it a 
 form of words others have put into your mouth ? " 
 Plainly the latter. Then came the decisive words, 
 " My kingdom is not of this world." He is a king 
 then, but not a rival of Csesar ; and this he shews in 
 1 Brautham, April 16, 189/ (Good Friday). 
 
 107
 
 io8 CHRIST'S KINGDOM 
 
 a way Pilate would understand. " If my kingdom 
 were of this world, then would my servants fight." 
 In fact, they all offered to fight, and Peter did fight, 
 and would have made it impossible for our Lord to 
 say this, if he had not been stopped at once. But 
 the story of Malchus was not one the Jews could 
 bring to the governor's ears. 
 
 A few more words, and Pilate saw plainly that he 
 had no practical question of treason before him. It 
 was not indeed very clear what the prisoner meant by 
 still calling himself a king, and talking about truth, 
 as if truth had something or other to do with the 
 matter; but there was no doubt at all about the 
 question Pilate had to deal with. Whatever Jesus of 
 Nazareth might be, he was not making himself a king 
 in the sense that concerned Csesar. 
 
 If Pilate could see what Jesus was not doing, we 
 can see what he was doing. He was setting up a new 
 kind of kingdom on the face of the earth. The old 
 kingdoms of the East, the kingdoms of a Sennacherib 
 or a Nebuchadnezzar, were kingdoms of naked force, 
 which only kept their subjects in obedience by 
 wholesale slaughters and captivities. Even Home 
 began in this way, with very little thought of duty 
 to the world she had conquered : but now she was 
 beginning to rule the nations for their own good, 
 and not for selfish gain. She was beginning to lose 
 herself in the world, that the world might become 
 Koman. She gave it peace, and law, and order, and 
 the rest of the good gifts of civilization : yet surely
 
 CHRIST'S KINGDOM 109 
 
 something was lacking yet. All her power was weak 
 to lighten the miseries of life, and all her wisdom 
 failed her in the face of death. Even Rome's was not 
 a throne of righteousness. Neither she nor any other 
 kingdom ever could turn a world of selfish men into a 
 world of peace and holiness. 
 
 Neither could the Lord himself. It must cease to 
 be a world of selfish men before there could be peace 
 or holiness. The weak kings who ruled by the might 
 of armies must give place to the strong king who 
 ruled by the might of loving service. " Whosoever 
 will be great among you, let him be your servant ; and 
 whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your 
 bondman." This was the truth which Eome was 
 feeling after in her pagan darkness. She was be- 
 ginning to see that selfishness would not answer in 
 the state that she must lose her life in the world 
 before she could win a world-wide life. But the 
 boldest of Eoman statesmen never ventured further. 
 The wisdom of the world never ventured on the 
 daring thought which lay next, that self-sacrifice is 
 not the law of empire only, but the law of life itself. 
 " He that loveth his life is destroying it ; and he that 
 loseth his life in this world, to life eternal shall he 
 keep it." 
 
 This is the right by which Jesus of Nazareth so 
 calmly claimed to be not only king of the Jews, but 
 king of the world. Not by might, for he was no 
 Barabbas to make insurrection, nor by learning, for he 
 was no Gamaliel to bandy questions of mint and
 
 no CHRIST'S KINGDOM 
 
 anise and cumin, nor even as the Son of God, for that 
 is not in question here ; but as the Son of Man who 
 for us men and our salvation stooped lower than any 
 man, even from the throne of heaven to the male- 
 factor's cross of shame. As the Saviour of the world, 
 he is its rightful king, and the owner of the nations 
 he has purchased with his blood. 
 
 This then is a new sort of kingdom. It comes 
 not from this world but from heaven ; not with the 
 shouting of the crowd, but in the silence of our hearts. 
 It governs not by soldiers and police without, but by 
 conscience and love within. It rules not over deeds 
 and words only, but over the thoughts and intents of 
 the heart. Its laws are not the decrees of a mortal 
 king, but revelations of eternal truth. Its people are 
 of all nations, for there is none left out but he that 
 shuts himself out ; and of all generations, for there is 
 no death in it. Its citizenship is not to be won by 
 wealth or learning, but by purity and willing service. 
 Its nobility is not of rank and title, but of purer 
 heart and harder service ; and its rewards are not of 
 the gewgaws of orders and decorations, but of glory 
 and honour and immortality, and beyond all these the 
 crown of life that fadeth not away. 
 
 How did he win his kingdom ? Not by pride and 
 self-will, for even Christ pleased not himself, but by 
 obedience even to death and shame. For our sakes 
 he became poor, and made himself of no reputation, 
 and ministered to us, and laid down his life for us. 
 No man ever carried out like the Lord himself his
 
 CHRIST'S KINGDOM in 
 
 own command, Whoever will be chief among you, let 
 him be your bondman. Wherefore God also hath 
 highly exalted him, and made him both Lord and 
 Christ, and given him a kingdom that shall not pass 
 away, and a dominion that shall not be abolished. 
 
 For whom did he win it ? Not for himself only, 
 but for every one that is of the truth, and hears his 
 voice. He has brought us out of the darkness and 
 misery of sin to share his kingdom with him ; for he 
 has made us not citizens and subjects only, but kings 
 and priests. Through the shame of the cross we see 
 not forgiveness only, but a higher glory for us than 
 that of angels. 
 
 The kingdom is his gift ; and yet we must win it 
 for ourselves. It is freely given no price and no 
 condition only we must rouse ourselves and count 
 the cost before we can take it from his hand. We 
 must strive as he strove, and be obedient as he was 
 obedient, and call on him for grace to help in time of 
 need. 
 
 For Christ is not a mere example to us, or we 
 should still be in our sins. That scene on Golgotha 
 is not an antiquated story, but one that will touch our 
 inmost life. How, is more than we know. We are 
 plainly told indeed that it is a true atonement for 
 our sins and the sins of the whole world ; but how it 
 works is not revealed to us. Perhaps we could not 
 understand it; in any case it is something we do 
 not need to know. But the practical side is plain 
 enough to those who have felt the power of life which
 
 ii2 CHRIST'S KINGDOM 
 
 comes from the Lord who liveth and was dead, and is 
 alive for evermore. We know that the barrier of sin 
 is broken down, and that our Father's love flows 
 freely to us, and calls out our own to answer it. 
 True, the natural man will answer with a curse ; but 
 every one that is of the truth will welcome the 
 kingdom of truth which is not of this world. He will 
 not fight against the love of Christ, but give himself 
 up to it, and let it sink into him and cleanse his 
 heart that he may be able to see the kingdom of God, 
 and to enter into it, and to take the place in it that 
 shall be given him among the kings and priests whom 
 Christ has redeemed and made his own for ever.
 
 XII. 
 
 THIS MORTAL MUST PUT ON 
 IMMORTALITY.
 
 " This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal 
 must put on immortality." 1 COR. xv. 53. 
 
 114
 
 XII. 
 
 THIS MORTAL MUST PUT ON 
 IMMORTALITY. 1 
 
 rnHE centre of the world's long history is Christ our 
 -^- Saviour's resurrection from the dead. Through 
 the endless ages of the past, the old natural creation 
 was preparing for and pointing forward to the divine 
 ^Redeemer's coming ; and through the endless ages of 
 the future, the new spiritual creation will still draw 
 its life and power from the resurrection of the Son of 
 Man. 
 
 I say the resurrection of the Son of Man; for it 
 was not a simple conquest of Satan by the Son of God, 
 or a simple baffling of the powers of the grave which 
 might have held him captive. All this it was, but 
 more than this. It would be no concern of ours, if it 
 were not also the resurrection of the Son of Man. It 
 is the victory of love that beareth all things, the 
 victory of faith which overcometh all things ; yet it 
 is the victory of one who shared our human weakness, 
 and was in all things tempted like as we are, yet 
 without sin. For us men and for our salvation he 
 came down from heaven and lived among men, and 
 
 1 Biautham, April 18, 1897 (Easter Day). 
 116
 
 n6 THIS MORTAL MUST 
 
 bore their sorrows and their sin. For us men and 
 for our salvation he refused the glorious transfigura- 
 tion where Moses and Elijah waited on him, and chose 
 the cross of shame, to make atonement for the sin of 
 the world. Therefore also hath the Father raised him 
 up, to be the firstborn from the dead, and the first- 
 fruits of them that slept. 
 
 For mark : it is not simply the rising of a common 
 man like other men : it is the resurrection of the Son 
 of Man in whom are treasured all the powers of the 
 life that now is, and of the life that is to come. The 
 life of earth is his creation, and the life of heaven 
 flows from him. In our natural life, and yet more in 
 our spiritual life, we are members of Christ ; for he 
 is the head, and the beginning of the creation of 
 God. If it was not possible for the sinless Son of 
 Man to be holden of the pains of death, neither was 
 it possible for the risen Son of Man to win his victory 
 for himself alone. He is gone up on high like a king 
 in the day of his power, with a mighty train of 
 captives. The conquered powers of death and hell 
 are in his following; and with him go the living 
 thousands of the Lord's redeemed with songs and 
 everlasting joy upon their heads. 
 
 " For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and 
 this mortal must put on immortality." Mark well the 
 daring confidence of these tremendous words. There 
 is hope of a tree if it be cut down ; but man when he 
 dieth, where is he ? Yet against the fixed unbroken 
 law of Nature that in Adam all die, he sets his fixed
 
 PUT ON IMMORTALITY 117 
 
 unshaken certainty that in Christ shall all be made 
 alive. And this is not only a thing that shall be, 
 but a thing that must be, for in the light of Christ's 
 resurrection we can see its necessity. If Christ our 
 head is risen indeed, we his members cannot for ever 
 sleep in death. Christ will raise us up, both bad and 
 good ; and then will come the great separation the 
 wheat to the barn, the tares to the fire. 
 
 " For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and 
 this mortal must put on immortality." This robe of 
 mortal flesh was only lent us for awhile, as we pass 
 the narrow strait between God's world from which we 
 came, and God's world to which we go. Then shall 
 we be clothed upon with the robe of immortality. 
 The body which shall rise and live for ever is not 
 that body which thou sowest. It is not that body 
 that we lay in the earth, worn out with sin and sick- 
 ness. It is not the old seed which springs up from 
 the earth, but the fresh plant it bore within. So from 
 the womb of the grave shall come the immortal body 
 whose germ we cherish now. It will come at the 
 archangel's call ; but none the less it will be the 
 natural result which the laws of God are unfolding 
 from the life we live in this world. Whatever it be, 
 that is the body in which we shall have to face the 
 judgment of the world where there is no more time. 
 
 It is natural and right that we should desire to 
 know something of the processes and changes by 
 which this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and 
 this mortal immortality. If this is one of the many
 
 n8 THIS MORTAL MUST 
 
 things which are not revealed, because it was not good 
 that God should tell us them, we need not therefore 
 fear that we shall do wrong in trying to search it out 
 for ourselves. All things are ours if we are Christ's ; 
 and every mystery of earth and heaven is freely given 
 to us, to find out so much of it as we can. Peradven- 
 ture science will one day throw some glimmerings of 
 light on this: but meanwhile Scripture deals with 
 something that concerns us now, and in a far more 
 practical way. If Christ is the firstfruits of them 
 that slept, it follows that we who are his must pass 
 through some such change as he passed through. We 
 sinners dare not hope that our change will be quite 
 the same as his who knew no sin ; yet some such change 
 we know it must be. If the life of Christ that liveth in 
 us is a truth and no delusion, it must be life indeed ; 
 and the gates of the grave shall not prevail against it. 
 If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the 
 dead dwell in us, he that raised up his Christ from 
 the dead will also quicken our mortal bodies. Because 
 his Spirit dwelleth in us, he will not leave our soul 
 in the grave, nor suffer those who in Christ are holy 
 to dwell for ever with corruption. 
 
 Our Saviour's resurrection is not the solitary fact 
 it seems at present. It only stands alone because, out 
 of all the millions who have tasted death, none but he 
 has yet been raised from the dead to die no more. 
 Enoch and Elijah never saw death, and Lazarus only 
 returned to common life. And it shall not for ever 
 stand alone. Christ is the firstborn among many
 
 PUT ON IMMORTALITY 119 
 
 brethren ; and his resurrection is the assurance for 
 them all. In Christ the love that is stronger than 
 death for the first time put forth the fulness of its 
 power : and one day this power shall reach to all 
 that are his. How these things shall come to pass, it 
 doth not yet appear ; yet something of it we can see. 
 Christ learned obedience by the things which he 
 suffered, and the captain of our salvation was made 
 perfect by suffering. He was not glorified till his 
 human training was completed. So must it be with 
 us. We too must suffer a while and be made perfect, 
 before the God who hath called us to his eternal glory 
 shall raise us up together with him and make us to 
 sit in the heavenly places with him. We must be 
 like him here on earth, and walk as he walked, in 
 gentleness and truth, in patience and in love unfeigned, 
 and purify ourselves even as he is pure at the right, 
 hand of God : then when he shall appear, he will 
 draw us to him, and we shall be for ever like him, 
 for we shall see him as he is. 
 
 But the resurrection of him who is both Son of God 
 and Son of Man is a fact which cannot be for our 
 salvation only, but must affect the whole of earth and 
 heaven. These indeed are mysteries before which 
 reason is powerless, imagination fails, and thought is 
 lost in adoration ; yet some glimpses of them are 
 allowed us. In it we see the earnest and assurance 
 of God's purpose to gather together again in one all 
 things in Christ all things which are in heaven and 
 earth. Not the elect only, nor even all men, but all
 
 120 MORTAL MUST PUT ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 things, from the archangel to the stones we tread on. 
 From him they came, in him they are, and to him 
 they shall return. In him the old heavens and the 
 earth we see consist and have their being ; in him all 
 sickness is healed, all discord reconciled ; in him the 
 new heavens and the new earth we look for shall find 
 their eternal peace and harmony.
 
 XIII. 
 THE HOPE OF ZACHARIAS. 
 
 121
 
 " Blessed be the Lord God of Israel : for he hath visited and 
 redeemed his people." LUKE i. 68. 
 
 122
 
 XIII. 
 THE HOPE OF ZACHARIAS. 1 
 
 77ACHAKIAS the priest and his wife Elisabeth had 
 *-* grown up from their youth, walking in blameless 
 righteousness before the Lord, and waiting in their 
 childless home for the mercy he had promised to 
 their fathers. But the voice of prophecy had been 
 silent for many a long year since Malachi's last 
 words, that God would send them an Elijah before 
 the great and dreadful day, lest he come and smite 
 the earth with a curse. Many a Gentile conqueror 
 had swept over the mountains of Judah ; and now 
 the nation was far sunk in Pharisaic formalism, with 
 Caesar's yoke heavy on its neck. Five generations 
 before, another old priest, Mattathias of Modin, had 
 roused Israel to the noblest struggle in all its history : 
 but no such call as that was sent to Zacharias, to be 
 a nation's leader ; and he was not one of the zealots 
 who debased God's promised mercy into mere revenge 
 on Gentiles. Years passed on, and still no prophet 
 came. The old couple could only wait and ponder still. 
 A few more years of quiet walk with God, and they 
 would pass to the land where all things are forgotten. 
 1 Oulton, September 5, 1897. 
 
 123
 
 124 THE HOPE OF ZACHARIAS 
 
 As the lightning shineth from heaven, so came the 
 message to them that they were still to see the 
 goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. The 
 silence of ages was broken. From the midst of the 
 cloud of incense that filled the sanctuary God's angel 
 spake to Zacharias as he spake to them of old. His 
 prayer is heard, and a sign is given. The reproach 
 of Elisabeth shall be taken away, for a child of their 
 own is the Elijah that was for to come. Then for 
 long speechless months the old priest is left to ponder 
 yet again the ripening promise, confirmed by the still 
 more wonderful tidings that came with Mary from 
 Nazareth of Galilee. At last his mouth is opened 
 in the day of joy and gladness, and the thoughts of a 
 lifetime burst out in thanksgiving. " Blessed be the 
 Lord God of Israel : for he hath visited and redeemed 
 his people." The hope of Zacharias for God's people 
 is some such quiet life as his own, of holiness and 
 righteousness before the Lord ; but with no enemy to 
 make them afraid, and with the dayspring from on 
 high to give them light. No more fightings without 
 or fears within ; but the knowledge of salvation to 
 cover the land, the remission of sins to fill our hearts 
 with gladness, and the peace of God to rest on us all 
 the days of our life. 
 
 A lovely vision truly, though it does not reach 
 Simeon's lofty thought, of a light to lighten the 
 Gentiles also. But what was the reality, when 
 Zacharias was gone to his rest ? His Elijah was 
 killed as the prophets before him were killed ; and
 
 THE HOPE OF ZACHARIAS 125 
 
 the greater than Elijah that came after him came 
 like a disinherited king. The crown they gave him 
 was a crown of thorns, and for his throne he had a 
 cross of shame, in the day when Israel renounced his 
 king. So the wrath of the Lord arose against his 
 people, and he gave them into the hand of the 
 Komans, to destroy their city and to burn with fire 
 the house of their sanctuary, and to blot out Israel's 
 name from among the nations. All history can shew 
 no more appalling contrast to the peaceful grandeur 
 of the psalm of Zacharias. 
 
 But the vision is not therefore false. The very 
 sign of a prophet is faith to look through the blackness 
 of darkness around him to the flush of the dawn on 
 the far-away mountains. Prophecy is not a horoscope 
 by which they that are cunning can foretell the 
 destiny of nations. Its work is to set history and 
 common life in the light of eternity, and to shew the 
 tossings of their miry sea of wickedness all guided by 
 a providence that never faileth to the final summing 
 up in Christ. Therefore prophecy has no perspective. 
 Its light shines alike through past and future, through 
 near and far alike ; and to it the night is as clear as 
 the day. It is like a dissolving view. We gaze it 
 may be on Joshua's conquests, or the destruction of 
 Sennacherib's host, or the judgment of Jerusalem : 
 but the longer we look, the clearer looms out its 
 mighty background of the ages in their courses 
 gathering round the glorious form of him that liveth 
 and was dead, and is alive for evermore.
 
 126 THE HOPE OF ZACHARIAS 
 
 So here the prophet Zacharias lifts up his eyes 
 from the darkness and shadow of death around him 
 to the dawning light. Its noonday splendour might 
 be near, it might be far away : but as the Lord 
 liveth, his promise is surer than to-morrow's sunrise. 
 Be it soon or be it late, there remaineth a rest to 
 the people of God. When Joshua bore witness, Not 
 one thing hath failed of all the good things which 
 the Lord hath spoken, he must have felt that even 
 the land that flowed with milk and honey was no 
 more than a sign and a sacrament of some better 
 thing provided for them. The rest which Joshua 
 could not give them must be given by a greater 
 Joshua ; for it is he shall save his people from their sins. 
 But to Zacharias it is not given to know the times or 
 the seasons, or how these things shall come to pass. 
 The old man's words are all of holiness and peace, 
 for the cross on Golgotha is hidden from his eyes. 
 One thing he knows and is sure of : The zeal of the 
 Lord of Hosts shall perform this. 
 
 Now all these things are written for our instruc- 
 tion. Our good things, like Joshua's, are signs and 
 sacraments of a glory that shall be revealed. All 
 holy desires, all good counsels, all just works, are not 
 only gifts of God, but promises that he will one day 
 bring them to perfection far above all that we can 
 ask or think. Christ came to destroy nothing at all, 
 save the works of the devil, but to fulfil to the utter- 
 most every dream of goodness that has ever visited 
 the sons of men. If God is good, so must it be.
 
 THE HOPE OF ZACHARIAS 127 
 
 Sooner or later, his love must have its perfect victory. 
 Yet heaven would not be heaven if it threw back no 
 light on earth. What is told us of its glory was 
 never meant to feed our idle curiosity and puff us up 
 with carnal imaginations, but to strengthen us for the 
 common duties of life by shewing us that our labour 
 is not in vain in the Lord. Work that is done for 
 God is never lost. Every temptation overcome, every 
 wicked passion conquered, every little work of mercy 
 done for Christ's sake, is one more glimpse of the 
 eternal, one more tasting of the powers of the world 
 to come. If " heaven lies about us in our infancy," 
 it is also with us to old age, and in our very self, if 
 we are in Christ. 
 
 This is the practical value of prophecy, and in fact 
 of all Scripture not to send us into raptures about 
 heaven, but to make us good fathers and mothers, 
 good sons and daughters, good neighbours and good 
 citizens. We are told some of the secrets of another 
 life only that we may be able to do our work in this 
 life. When Zacharias took up his parable of peace 
 and holiness in a tune to come, was he not living in 
 that time already ? And cannot we live in it too ? 
 Heaven is not some far-off country which none of us 
 can reach but through the flaming gateway of the 
 day of doom. It lies around us here and now ; and 
 in this world of sin and misery its life is not refused 
 us. Heaven is the air our spirit breathes, for all 
 holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works are 
 something more than prophecies and promises of good
 
 128 THE HOPE OF ZACHARIAS 
 
 things to come. Our efforts after knowing God are 
 weak through sin ; but Christ has told us that these 
 efforts are themselves eternal life : and in the world 
 where sin has passed away, the effort after knowing 
 God shall still remain eternal life. Fightings without 
 and fears within shall have an end, for even now 
 their angry clamour is hushed before the still small 
 voice in which our Saviour speaks to us of patience 
 for a season. Then, when we have cast all our cares 
 on him that careth for us, the Lord of Peace shall 
 give us peace on earth, and the peace that passeth 
 understanding shall keep our hearts and minds as 
 well for this present life as for the life that endeth 
 nevermore.
 
 XIV. 
 THOMAS.
 
 " Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou 
 goest, and how can we know the way ? " JOHN xiv. 5. 
 
 130
 
 XIV. 
 THOMAS. 1 
 
 Q10ME common ideas about our Lord's disciples are 
 ^ strangely mistaken. We set them down as 
 arrant cowards because they all forsook him and fled, 
 though they had just offered to throw away their lives 
 for him by trying to fight five hundred Roman soldiers. 
 We read something about love in St. John, and 
 straightway transfer to him the gentleness which 
 more properly belongs to St. Paul, quite forgetting 
 the terrible sternness of his quiet words. So when 
 we read that Thomas doubted, we set him down as one 
 of our sceptics who will not believe till they have seen 
 a miracle with their own eyes. 
 
 Now Thomas was just what some of our triflers 
 would like to be thought a sober truthful man who 
 insists on facing the facts he sees before he goes a 
 step further. Such a man is slow to move : no 
 passing enthusiasm can stir him, only the gravest 
 sense of duty. And faith is none the worse for 
 counting the cost before it gives itself to Christ. 
 When Wellington saw a man turn pale as he marched 
 up to a battery, " That is a brave man. He knows 
 
 1 Brantham, April 17, 1898. 
 131
 
 i 3 2 THOMAS 
 
 his danger, and faces it notwithstanding." Such a 
 man is Thomas when we first hear him speak. When 
 the others try to hinder our Lord from going into 
 Judaea, where the Jews had sought to stone him, it is 
 Thomas who answers with quiet courage, Let us also 
 go, that we may die with him. So in the supper 
 chamber, when our Lord speaks of going away ; while 
 Peter breaks in impatiently, Lord, why cannot I 
 follow thee now ? Thomas reasons it out soberly, 
 Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how can 
 we know the way ? 
 
 Now what was such a man likely to be doing after 
 the crucifixion ? It is a striking touch of nature in 
 the Gospels, that while the chief priests understood 
 our Lord's words about rising again the third day, his 
 own disciples never realized them at all. That be far 
 from thee, was the thought of their heart when he 
 spoke of suffering to come. They clung to the earthly 
 presence, and were confounded when it was taken 
 away from them. Thomas must have felt even more 
 keenly than the others the awful reality that Jesus 
 whom they loved was dead. There was no glossing 
 over that fact. It had cost him more than it would 
 have cost a lighter nature to give up all for Christ ; 
 and here it had all ended in hopeless disappointment. 
 
 Then in the dawning of that first glorious Easter 
 morning comes the news that the great stone is rolled 
 away, and the sepulchre is empty. Away fly Peter 
 and John to see for themselves, with Mary of Magdala 
 following. The two disciples were convinced by what
 
 THOMAS 133 
 
 they saw, Mary by the well-known voice which spoke 
 to her; and when the Lord had been seen first of 
 Cephas, then of the Twelve that night, all doubting 
 was for ever silenced among them. They knew that 
 the thing was true, and that the Lord they loved was 
 risen indeed, and is alive for evermore. 
 
 Yet there was one heart still comfortless. Thomas 
 was not with them that night of gladness. Such a 
 man as he, who never cared to go a step further than 
 he could see clearly, would prefer to wrestle alone 
 with sorrow. In vain they told him, We have seen 
 the Lord. He was too true to pretend belief when 
 he was not convinced. The print of the nails and the 
 gash of the spear were hard facts which as it seemed 
 no hearsay stories could undo. Nothing but the touch 
 of his own hands could assure him that it was indeed 
 the Lord. 
 
 All this looks very like the Pharisees asking a sign 
 from heaven ; but it is not really so. Would those 
 Pharisees have believed, if they had got their sign ? 
 But Thomas means what he says. He is open to 
 conviction, but sees only one sign that seems con- 
 vincing. Facts needed facts to overcome them, and 
 this was the only test he could think of. He is not 
 really insisting on a sign of his own choice ; only 
 forgetting the chief part of the evidence before him. 
 He is too bewildered to look behind that single scene 
 on Golgotha. Signs of love, signs of power, signs of 
 prophecy, go for nothing before that single fact of 
 death. He never asks, Ought not the Christ to
 
 i 3 4 THOMAS 
 
 have suffered these things ? We must not take too 
 literally the words of such a man at such a time, as 
 if positively nothing but actual touch would convince 
 him. So he fancied : but there was one who knew 
 him better. Next Sunday the risen Lord took Thomas 
 at his word. " Reach hither thy finger and see my 
 hands, and reach hither thy hand and put it into my 
 side; and become not faithless, but believing." He 
 was not faithless yet ; but here was the test. 
 
 Can you imagine that he needed to do as he had 
 said ? Not he, when once he sees the well-known 
 form, and hears the well-known voice again. Up he 
 springs, his own words flung to the winds, and every 
 doubt dispelled for ever, with his adoring confession, 
 My Lord and my God. It is the climax of the Gospel 
 of St. John. He has led us from confession to confes- 
 sion, steadily upward from Nathanael to Peter, from 
 Peter to Martha, and now from Martha to these culmin- 
 ating words of Thomas. With these he stops, as though 
 his work was done when the loftiest confession of all 
 burst out from the soberest and most cautious of the 
 Twelve. 
 
 And to these words of Thomas all Christian life 
 must come. We know well enough what we ought 
 to do. What can be simpler than to do justly, and 
 to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? 
 But where in the wide world shall we find strength 
 to do it ? It is not enough to hear of Christ, or to 
 confess him along with others as our Lord and our 
 God. The belief of others will do you no good, for
 
 THOMAS 135 
 
 no truth is truly yours till you have made it yours by 
 labour and toil, and found its echo in your own heart. 
 You are not truly Christ's till you let the world drop 
 out of sight, and take him for your own with the 
 apostle's cry, My Lord and my God. Whom have I 
 in heaven but thee ? and on earth there is none that 
 I desire beside thee. This is the cry which the 
 Saviour delights to hear ; and in it you shall find for 
 yourself a never failing well of life, and a never failing 
 stream of blessing for those around you.
 
 XV. 
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A 
 SINNER. 
 
 137
 
 " Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are 
 forgiven ; for she loved much : but to whom little is forgiven, 
 the same loveth little." LUKE vii. 47. 
 
 138
 
 XV. 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER. 1 
 
 QIOME of the most exquisite stories in the Gospels 
 k-' are told us only by St. Luke, such as the 
 raising of the widow's son at Nain, or the parables 
 of the Eich Man and Lazarus, of the Prodigal, or of 
 the Good Samaritan. And among them all, the story 
 of the woman that was a sinner is unsurpassed in 
 tenderness and beauty. 
 
 There was a Pharisee named Simon, and one day 
 he asked Jesus to meat in his house. Now Simon was 
 not a scheming enemy, but a friend of a cold sort, and 
 none too civil. However, Jesus went in and sat, or 
 rather lay down, for they did not sit on chairs as we 
 do, but lay across broad couches, so that his feet were 
 clear on the side of the couch away, from the table. 
 Then came in a woman that was a sinner in the city. 
 People often do come in from the street without 
 offence in the East ; but it was a bold thing for a 
 woman and a well-known sinner to come into a 
 Pharisee's house. However, she brought a box of 
 ointment, and stood over his feet to anoint them ; 
 but instead of doing this, she bursts into tears of 
 
 1 Colwicb, September 3, 1899. 
 139
 
 140 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 passionate repentance. Then she does a thing which 
 some of Simon's friends would have thought as bad 
 as any of her sins. She let down her hair, though 
 it was thought disgraceful for a woman to be seen 
 with her hair down, and dried his feet with it. So 
 she remained, kissing them and anointing them with 
 ointment. 
 
 Simon says nothing he is not rude enough for 
 that but his thought is, This man does not know, 
 or perhaps does not care what sort of a woman is 
 clinging to him ; so he cannot be a prophet. Jesus, 
 however, soon shews him something that he does know. 
 " Simon, I have something to say to thee." " Say on, 
 rabbi." " A money-lender had two debtors, and one 
 owed him ten times as much as the other. As they 
 could not pay, he freely forgave them both. Which 
 then of them will love him more than the other ? " 
 Not a very interesting question for Simon : however, 
 " I suppose the one to whom he forgave more." 
 Quite right, answers the Lord ; for Simon has fairly 
 convicted himself. Jesus turns round to the woman, 
 as he says to Simon, Do you see this woman ? Then 
 he tells him how she has done for him all the duties 
 of common civility which Simon has neglected, and 
 something more than all of them. Simon gave him 
 no water to wash his feet this is needed in countries 
 where they wear no boots but she has washed them 
 with her tears, and even dried them with her hair. 
 Simon should have given him the kiss of peace, and 
 he might have done it on the hand if he had wanted
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 141 
 
 to be very civil indeed ; but she has never ceased 
 passionately kissing his feet. Simon had not anointed 
 his head even with common oil, as the custom was ; 
 but she has anointed his feet with costly ointment. 
 Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins have been 
 forgiven those many sins you are thinking of, for 
 she loved much ; but he to whom little is being 
 forgiven, the same loveth little. 
 
 But what does this mean ? Is it that her sins 
 have been forgiven as a reward for her great love ? 
 Some take it so ; but they are certainly wrong. The 
 point of the parable is not that the debtor was 
 forgiven because he loved his creditor, but that he 
 will love him after he is forgiven ; the point of the 
 next words is not that he who loves little will get 
 little forgiveness, but that he who is forgiven only a 
 little will not love much ; and the point of our Lord's 
 last words to the woman is that her faith has saved 
 her, not her love. In every case the forgiveness 
 comes first, and after it the love. Our Lord means 
 that love is not the cause of forgiveness, but the sign 
 by which we know it. He reasons thus you know 
 that her sins are many ; yet you see that her love is 
 great. How can this be, unless her sins have been 
 forgiven ? Forgiveness is needed to account for her 
 change from a state of sin to a state of love. 
 
 And so it is with all of us. We are told indeed to 
 work out our own salvation, but never to work for our 
 forgiveness. That is given once for all in Christ 
 already, forgiveness full and free ; so that it is too
 
 142 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 
 
 late to bargain about it with God, even if we sinners 
 had something to offer for it. Yet this is the inveter- 
 ate mistake of the natural man. He will not simply 
 take his forgiveness, but looks about for something 
 to buy it with. He is ashamed to appear before God 
 in the nakedness of sin, so he puts on some decent 
 rags of his own righteousness there are plenty of 
 them in the devil's wardrobe. When God calls him, 
 he answers that he is really not fit to come just now ; 
 but when he has done a reasonable part of the work 
 himself, he will come to God to get it finished. Now 
 the beauty of this is that he never does manage to do 
 any part of the work himself ; and it is the merest 
 delusion to fancy that he can. The Pharisees of all 
 ages have tried that plan, and it has never answered. 
 Even Saul of Tarsus could not work it. 
 
 No : God never laid on us this task of overcoming 
 sin by ourselves. He never sent us into the battle 
 with nothing but the timid virtues of the natural man 
 to fight withal against the passions of the flesh, 
 deceitfulness of the world, and the wiles of the devil. 
 The sword of our good intentions will be shivered in 
 the battle, and the fiery darts of unbelief will pierce 
 the armour of our pride. Yet strength, abundant 
 strength, is ready, if we will only ask for it. If God 
 calls us, let no man think himself unfit to come at 
 once. The weaker, the meaner, the viler he feels 
 himself before Christ's majestic holiness, so much the 
 fitter he is to pray the prayer of faith which no man 
 ever prayed in vain God be merciful to me a sinner.
 
 THE WOMAN THAT WAS A SINNER 143 
 
 The woman x was not forgiven because her sins were 
 many, as if the greatest sinner straightway made the 
 greatest saint, but because she truly felt herself a 
 sinner, and truly desired the forgiveness which God is 
 more ready to give than we to ask for. 
 
 Once for all get rid of the Pharisee's idea that 
 forgiveness is a thing to be won by toil. It is not 
 the far-away goal of the Christian life, but the gracious 
 gift with which we start a gift whose fulness unfolds 
 through love in righteousness and peace and joy, as 
 fast as we are able to bear the glory it reveals. In 
 our own strength we can do nothing ; but forgiveness 
 fills our souls with the love that overcometh all things. 
 
 Many a year has come and gone since Jesus was 
 at meat in the Pharisee's house ; but the memory of 
 the woman that was a sinner shall never perish. We 
 can think of no higher blessing than that which the 
 Lord pronounced on her Go, and enter into peace ; 
 thy faith hath saved thee and that is the blessing 
 he gives to every sinner of the sons of men who truly 
 turns to him.
 
 XVI. 
 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 
 
 10
 
 
 / 
 
 ) &^ *** " 
 
 "And these shall go into everlasting punishment: but the 
 righteous into life eternal." MATT. xxv. 46. 
 
 ^^- ^ 
 
 ' ^ ^ i^^ , 
 
 "^ 
 
 t/ ^,, A 
 
 
 HO
 
 XVI. 
 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 1 
 
 IT is not entirely of my own motion that I take up 
 the dread subject of eternal punishment, but at 
 the wish of some present here. Such a call Christ's 
 minister may not refuse, for he is bound to declare 
 the whole counsel of God to the utmost of his power. 
 May the Lord of all truth, before whom we meet this 
 day, direct our hearts on this tremendous question. 
 
 Let us begin with one general thought. " What- 
 soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." This 
 is an old truth of Scripture and Nature which our 
 fathers knew : yet Science in these latter days has 
 thrown on it a light our fathers never saw. If there 
 is another world at all, we need no message from 
 heaven to tell us that our lot in it must be the 
 natural consequence of our doings in this world. It 
 is no mere decree which joins good and bad in this 
 world with weal and woe in that. We cannot imagine 
 it otherwise, for the necessity lies in God's own 
 nature. Just as we leave this world, so must we 
 enter that, and take the place in it for which we have 
 made ourselves fit. If you are fit for the blessing of 
 
 1 Brantham, March 20, 1898. 
 147
 
 148 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 the righteous, you shall stand with them before the 
 throne ; and if you are fit to be with the devil and his 
 angels, with the devil and his angels must your portion 
 be. And if there is fitness in this, there is also mercy ; 
 for heaven itself would be the deepest hell of all 
 for the man that loves not God. But the sentence 
 that shall be pronounced is our own decision, though 
 the speaker is the Lord in glory. Whatever be the 
 punishment of the wicked, it must be the natural 
 consequence of his wickedness. 
 
 But what shall it be ? The words of Scripture 
 are full of terror ; and their terror is only heightened 
 by their studied vagueness. But once for all get 
 rid of the common ideas of hell. It is no more full 
 of fire than the streets of heaven are paved with 
 gold : and if it were, it could not harm our spiritual 
 bodies. Scripture points another way ; and so does 
 common sense. Many a sinner here would gladly 
 face a death of fire, if he were only sure that it 
 would burn up the torments of remorse. And what 
 will be our remorse when the drunkenness of sin is 
 past when the love of Christ we scorned is shining 
 out, but not for us, in its unclouded splendour, and 
 the wrath of God we set at nought is blazing down on 
 us in all its terror ? These are the fires of hell ; and 
 they are fires that cannot but burn as long as we sin, 
 and cannot but cease if ever we cease from sin. 
 
 But how can they ever cease ? Does not our Lord 
 tell us in so many words that the punishment is 
 everlasting ? Yes, he does ; and beyond all doubt his
 
 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 149 
 
 words are true. But are we sure what they mean ? 
 The meaning that first conies into our own heads is not 
 always right ; and " the plain meaning " is very often 
 wrong. What can be plainer than, If a man hate not 
 his father and mother, he cannot be my disciple ? 
 Neither will it do to take for granted that our English 
 Bible is always exactly right. Though the translators 
 did marvellously well in their day, on some points 
 every scholar now can see that they were mistaken. 
 
 Our text speaks of everlasting punishment, and of 
 life eternal ; but the Greek word is the same in both, 
 and it does not mean a thing which never ends. It 
 is the punishment of an age, which in this case is the 
 age to come ; and it is not a punishment which lasts 
 all through that age, but the punishment which 
 properly belongs to it, just as other punishment (fire 
 for example) properly belongs to this age. So too the 
 life is the proper life of the world to come, as the 
 Creed calls it : but our assurance that it has no end 
 is not in the word translated eternal, but in the 
 nature of the life itself ; for the life Christ gives of 
 his own life cannot have an end. / 
 
 But in the nature of punishment there is nothing 
 to shew that it cannot have an end. We cannot get 
 the doctrine out of passages which speak of it as 
 eternal or everlasting, for these always have the word 
 which we have just seen does not mean endless. 
 Other passages say that it is for ever, or to translate 
 exactly, for the age ; and one awful warning is of a 
 sin that hath no forgiveness, either in this age or in
 
 ISO ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 that to come : but we are told again of God's glory 
 through all the ages, and we cannot say what 
 splendours of it may light those further ages. Again, 
 we hear of fires that burn continually, like the fires in 
 the Valley of Hinnom which burned up the rubbish 
 of Jerusalem ; and these must have some tremendous 
 meaning : but if sinners burn like rubbish, they will 
 not burn for ever. It would be dangerous to take a 
 literal story from the visions of St. John, as that 
 heaven and earth fled away, and death and the grave 
 as well as the sinners were cast into the lake of fire. 
 Yet even here only the devil, the beast and the false 
 prophet are expressly said to be tormented to the 
 ages of the ages ; and these surely are not sinners 
 of mortal birth. 
 
 In fact, the word translated punishment positively 
 will not bear the meaning of endless punishment. It 
 it not punishment simply, but punishment that is 
 meant to cure men of their evil ways ; and this 
 cannot last longer than the sinful temper which has 
 to be cured, for we cannot suppose that the wrath of 
 God will rest on a sinner for a moment after he truly 
 turns to him, whether in this age or another. 
 
 As for the word damnation, there is no such word 
 in the Bible. It is always either judgment or con- 
 demnation. Thus he that resisteth the ordinance of 
 God shall receive to himself a judgment, and he 
 that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and 
 drinketh to himself a judgment. So he that believeth 
 and is baptized shall be saved ; but he that dis-
 
 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 151 
 
 believeth shall be condemned. The warning is 
 terrible enough, that he shall stand guilty before 
 the Lord whose love he scorned : but there is no 
 word here or anywhere else of anything in the least 
 like what is commonly meant by damnation. 
 
 We have still the question whether it is possible 
 at all for a sinner to turn to God in that age. 
 Scripture, I think, has no clear statement, but a good 
 deal on both sides. If it nowhere clearly forbids 
 hope, it nowhere clearly holds out hope, and certainly 
 nowhere hints that we shall ever again have the 
 opportunities we threw away in this life. But one 
 general consideration seems decisive. We know that 
 God's purpose is to have mercy on all men, that sin 
 bars the way, and that he will never bring us to 
 heaven while we are not fit for heaven. Consider 
 now some vile and hardened sinner, as like a devil 
 as he can make himself. That man goes (unless the 
 Lord of truth has lied) into suffering worse than the 
 worst of this life, where too great suffering soon breaks 
 down the body. Now we cannot see how suffering 
 can ever melt such a man on earth it only made 
 him blaspheme the more : yet if it be God's purpose 
 to have mercy on him, we cannot imagine that purpose 
 finally defeated by sin. Through whatever struggles 
 and defeats, love divine must sooner or later have its 
 perfect victory if not in this age, then in that ; 
 and if not in that, then in some other of God's endless 
 ages. Now I ask, is that a perfect victory which 
 leaves a host of men and devils in unending torment,
 
 152 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT 
 
 defiant, raging, unsubdued ? Even an earthly king 
 is not quite satisfied till he has turned his rebels into 
 loyal men. Or is it a perfect victory which simply 
 annihilates the wicked or turns them into automatons> 
 as if God could not manage them any longer ? Lame 
 and barren victories these, fit only for this world's 
 tyrants. Through the lurid clouds which overhang 
 the day of doom one fact shines out clear and certain. 
 The love which leaves the ninety and nine will never 
 rest while a single one of those for whom Christ's 
 blood was shed remains an outcast from the peace of 
 God in bliss. 
 
 Some there are who say that the fire must be 
 unending, because nothing else will frighten men from 
 sin. But does that frighten them ? Did any man 
 ever sin a sin the less for fear of hell ? Scripture 
 puts forward the love of Christ, not the fear of hell. 
 Dark as the shadow is, it was never meant to fill our 
 life with gloom. No, Christ came to fill our hearts 
 with joy with joy as natural as the joy of laughing 
 children, keener than the keenest joy of earthly love. 
 Mysterious and awful is the joy of joys, when our 
 God has prospered us to find the lost, and bring it 
 home to be for ever folded in the arms of Christ our 
 Saviour's love the love that beareth all things and 
 abideth evermore.
 
 XVII. 
 BE NOT YE CALLED RABBI. 
 
 153
 
 " Neither be ye called masters : for one is your master, even 
 the Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your 
 servant." MATT, xxiii. 10, 11, K.V. 
 
 164
 
 XVII. 
 BE NOT YE CALLED RABBI. 1 
 
 fTHHE word here translated masters is found nowhere 
 -*- else in Scripture. Its rough meaning is teachers, 
 so that the rough meaning of the passage is what he 
 has said a couple of verses before. Be not ye called 
 Rabbi, for one is your teacher, and all ye are brethren. 
 There he was warning the people against the scribes 
 and Pharisees, who through pride of learning quite 
 mistook the duty of teachers, and made themselves 
 lords in Israel. Now he goes further. He is not 
 now thinking of mere teaching, but of the whole 
 guidance of life ; and therefore he uses a word of 
 wider meaning. " Neither be ye called masters." He 
 is not speaking here of a master who commands a 
 servant, but a master who guides our lives. The 
 master of a school for instance is not a mere teacher 
 whose work is done when his boys know certain 
 lessons. He has to train them up for goodness, to 
 keep away bad influences, to bring out all their powers, 
 and as far as he can to make them true and unselfish 
 men. There is a great deal more than mere teaching 
 in this. 
 
 1 Seaming, August 28, 1898. 
 155
 
 156 BE NOT YE CALLED RABBI 
 
 Now the mere fact that our Lord is speaking to the 
 multitude as well as to his disciples is warning enough 
 that this is not the schoolmaster's work only, but a 
 duty that comes to all of us. And is it not so ? The 
 great and learned teacher does not stand alone in his 
 duty to be a guide of the blind and a light of them 
 that are in darkness, for the poorest mother in a 
 cottage is a teacher of babes who in her measure 
 shares his lofty calling in the sight of God. The cry 
 for light and guidance reaches all of us, for the very 
 children are guides of smaller children. We cannot 
 help being guides, for the cry is none the less real if 
 it is not put into words, and our answer is none 
 the less effective if we give it without thinking. 
 Example is better than precept, and what we are 
 ourselves is always the chief part of our teaching. 
 
 Now, says our Lord, take care how you answer 
 rather how you answer than what you answer, for 
 though it is important to do the right things, it is 
 very much more important to do things in the right 
 spirit. You seem to be guides, and in one sense you 
 are guides ; but the real guide, the teacher of teachers 
 and the guide of all guides, is the Christ of God. He 
 it is who guides alike both us who guide in this world 
 and those who seem to follow us ; and we are only 
 blind guides if we cannot see this. 
 
 What then is the right spirit ? Let us ask our 
 Lord again. There is another significant change here 
 in his language. As regards mere teaching, he thinks 
 it enough to say, Be not ye called Rabbi, for all ye
 
 BE NOT YE CALLED RABBI 157 
 
 are brethren. We are all of us learners, and the 
 only difference among us is that some are a little 
 further on with their lessons than others ; so we need 
 not be puffed up. But when he conies to the wider 
 duty of the guide, he says something more. Neither 
 be ye called masters ; but he that is greatest among 
 you shall be your servant. For the mere teacher it 
 is enough to remember that teacher and learner are 
 brethren ; but he that aspires to be a guide of life must 
 stoop to be a servant of those he guides. The work 
 is not of lordship, nor even of brotherly help, but of 
 service ; and in the spirit of service it must be done. 
 
 Of twofold service, on one side learning wisdom from 
 the Lord who guides ourselves, on the other teaching 
 wisdom as well as we can to those whom God is 
 guiding by our influence. Now what a glorious power 
 is our influence over others, if it is the guidance Christ 
 is giving them, and of what utter baseness are we 
 guilty if we use it for our own selfish ends. But the 
 devil of selfishness is the subtlest of his kind, and 
 comes to us many a time transformed into an angel of 
 light. Is it not the most natural thing in the world 
 that we should strive to make our pupils like ourselves, 
 giving them truth as we ourselves have seen it, and 
 bringing them along the same road our God has 
 brought ourselves ? 
 
 Yes, this is the plan of the natural man, and of the 
 spiritual man too, whenever he forgets that " one is 
 your Master, even the Christ." We were never given 
 this wondrous power of influence merely that we
 
 158 BE NOT YE CALLED RABBI 
 
 might shape our fellow-men in our own image, but 
 that we might help our Lord to shape them in his 
 own. We are not petty despots over them, but 
 fellow-workers with Christ ; and Christ's work is not 
 for the threescore years and ten of this life, but for 
 the life whose years shall not fail. Deep calleth unto 
 deep the deep of the Spirit of God without us to the 
 deep of the Spirit of God within us. God's truth is 
 like the great sea that never rests, yet never changes. 
 Sometimes the sunlight rests on calm deeps of dimpled 
 blue ; then again its rolling walls of solid green are 
 crashed on the cliffs in clouds of spray. Yet when 
 ages are past, and many an ancient coast is covered 
 fathoms deep, the sea is still the same, and shall be 
 till the day of doom. Neither are God's ways like 
 our ways, for he looketh unto the ends of the earth, 
 and seeth under the whole heaven. He maketh a 
 way in the sea, and a path in the great waters ; and 
 again, he maketh the clouds his chariot, and walketh 
 upon the wings of the wind. 
 
 Be not high-minded, but fear. He that has felt 
 the mystery of God's dealings with himself will 
 reverence the mystery of God's dealings with another. 
 The particular lights of truth which are so bright for 
 us may shine dimly for our neighbour, and his eyes 
 may see dazzling splendours to which our own are 
 blind. Neither is the way God has led us his way 
 for men of other thoughts and other tempers, whom he 
 is training for other work in this life and the life to 
 come. It may be natural impatience and vulgarity
 
 BE NOT YE CALLED RABBI 159 
 
 are natural that we should try to force them into 
 our own way ; but God will not hold us guiltless if 
 we lay rude hands on sacred things. The sin is near 
 akin to superstition, for the will-worship which insists 
 on serving God in our own way is very likely to insist 
 on forcing the same way on our neighbour, and the 
 vulgar pride which makes ourselves a law for others 
 will blind us to God's teaching of ourselves. There is 
 a worse thing than mere limitation and narrowness 
 there is unbelief somewhere if we preach ourselves 
 as the light of men, and forget the true light whose 
 coming into the world lighteth every man. 
 
 There is no nobler and diviner work in life than 
 this of being guides to other men, and therefore none 
 that makes a more searching call for gentleness and 
 reverence and deep humility. It is not learning that 
 is needed, though learning has its uses, but the 
 wisdom that comes of purity and truth and love 
 unfeigned. This is the wisdom from above, which 
 alone has power from on high to strike out sparks of 
 life divine from those around us. Not by might, nor 
 by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts ; 
 and the Spirit of God within us is the spirit of gentle- 
 ness and loving service. "Whosoever will be great 
 among you, let him be your minister ; and whosoever 
 will be chief among you, let him be your servant : even 
 as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but 
 to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."
 
 XVIII. 
 PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 
 
 ii
 
 " Be thou an example."! TIM. iv. 12. 
 
 162
 
 XVIII. 
 PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 1 
 
 PEBSONAL influence is a force that never ceases 
 working. Fathers and mothers, wives and 
 children, friends and acquaintances we influence 
 them, and they influence us ; and that unceasingly, 
 for even the memory of past influence is itself an 
 influence, and may be all the stronger if the memory 
 of death has made it sacred. We may not feel, or 
 we may forget ; but something remains on record for 
 the day of judgment. 
 
 Yet influence is a subtle force. It does not seem 
 to depend on the things we do, for two men may do 
 the same things or speak the same words, yet give 
 out very different influences. Or if they speak no 
 words at all, their silent presence is an influence. 
 The mere sight of some persons is an influence of 
 rest and peace, while others chill us before they speak 
 a word. The doctor does his best to keep them out 
 of a sickroom. Neither does personal influence depend 
 on the reputation a man bears, which indeed is 
 occasionally quite wide of his real character. Every 
 now and then you say in your heart it may not be 
 
 1 Emmanuel College, Cambridge, November 20, 1898. 
 163
 
 164 PERSONAL INFLUENCE 
 
 right to say it in words " He is supposed to be so 
 and so ; but somehow he gave me a different impres- 
 sion." Well, your impression may be wrong : but do 
 not part with it till you are satisfied that it is wrong, 
 for it is more likely to be true than common fame. 
 
 And for this reason. A man may put on manners, 
 but he cannot disguise his personal influence. An 
 effusive welcome somehow rather chills you than 
 otherwise ; and gradually you see that the man is 
 cold and heartless. Another man is correct enough ; 
 there is nothing you can say against him ; yet you 
 feel that his influence is not good. You may not say 
 it often you ought not to say it but can you help 
 drawing your conclusion ? But here comes a practical 
 question. Suppose you are not good yourself. Sup- 
 pose, for instance, you have a bad temper. Ought 
 you to put on manners like the hypocrite, or to 
 " be natural," and let it loose ? I answer without 
 hesitation, Do what the hypocrite does, but do not 
 stop where he stops. He is quite right in putting 
 on manners : the wrong he does is in not trying to 
 make them real. He puts on manners merely to 
 hide his bad temper; you must put them on that 
 they may help you to overcome it. If you firmly 
 keep down the wicked words and wicked looks, that 
 will help you greatly to overcome the wicked 
 thoughts; but only if you are doing your best to 
 overcome them, not if you are content like the 
 hypocrite with hiding them. 
 
 Personal influence comes from the real man, and
 
 PERSONAL INFLUENCE 165 
 
 his disguises do not help it at all. You see this well 
 in public men, from whom we learn what it is prudent 
 to do. One man is an excellent speaker : but his 
 best speech will somehow prove unconvincing if he 
 does not believe it himself. Another is a poor 
 speaker; but his words will carry weight if they 
 are carefully and earnestly thought out, and spoken 
 with evident sincerity. The world may take a little 
 time to judge between them, but in the end it seldom 
 judges wrong. The one may be admired ; the other 
 will be listened to. Any clever fellow may snatch an 
 occasional success ; but there is no lasting influence to 
 be won without sincerity and truth. 
 
 All this is even truer when we ask what it is 
 our duty to do. Men simply refuse to learn from 
 Pharisees who teach, and do not. Words that come j 
 from the heart may be poor words, but they are the / 
 words that go to the heart. It is useless to preach 
 if you are not yourself the sermon. Your best words 
 will ring hollow (the world has a good ear for false 
 money) unless you are doing your best to live accord- 
 ing to them. But poor words will find their way to 
 the heart if they come from the heart ; and then, 
 whether we hear or whether we forbear, yet shall we 
 know that they were God's word to us. 
 
 If then you want to have a good influence, you 
 must be good yourself; and if you want to have a 
 better influence, you must be a better man. There 
 is no other way, for it depends not on what we do, 
 but on what we are. Influence is unconscious, so
 
 166 PERSONAL INFLUENCE 
 
 that if you lay yourself out for it, you will lose your 
 pains. It comes of itself like true happiness if you 
 follow duty ; but if you make it your aim, it will for 
 ever escape you. A good influence is God's choicest 
 blessing for this life: and there is no blessing for 
 the man who wilfully turns aside from duty. Yet 
 let no man doubt that the blessing is within his 
 reach. The best of us are not good ; only striving to 
 be good. Yet a light that is set on a hill cannot be 
 hid ; and even if it seem hid in a cottage, there will 
 not be wanting some of God's children to rejoice in it 
 and bless him for it. Christ is the light of the 
 world; and as thou art his, thou too shalt be its 
 light. It is the very nature of light to shine in the 
 darkness; and he that is faithful, his light shall 
 never be put out, for it was lighted from the true 
 light. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but the 
 humblest of Christ's people shall shine for ever in his 
 presence. 
 
 Personal influence is the divinest of all gifts, 
 because it is not a living power only, by which we 
 live ourselves, but a life-giving power, by which we 
 raise up life in others. The first Adam became a 
 living soul ; the second is a life-giving spirit ; and 
 so is every one that is Christ's. The flesh profiteth 
 nothing ; it is the Spirit that giveth life ; and so is 
 every one that is born of the Spirit. It is the very 
 nature of life to generate new life ; and this is the 
 law of heavenly life as well as earthly. Just as it is 
 the highest function of the natural life to raise up the
 
 PERSONAL INFLUENCE 167 
 
 natural life of a new generation, so it is the highest 
 privilege of the spiritual life to raise up spiritual life 
 in them that are dead in trespasses and sins. Our 
 Saviour did a mighty work in raising Lazarus from 
 the dead ; but he calls each one of us to do a greater 
 work than this. Christ is the life of the world ; and 
 as thou art Christ's, thou too shalt be its life. Thou 
 too shalt heal the sick and raise the dead as he did : 
 but the sickness thou shalt heal is the palsy of the 
 spirit, the leprosy that leadeth unto death in sin ; and 
 the life which thou shalt give is not the fleeting life 
 of a risen Lazarus, but a life that is incorruptible, for 
 death hath no dominion over it. 
 
 Now therefore give glory to God, who has given 
 such power unto men. But take heed to yourselves, 
 for to you is this unearthly power given, and you 
 shall give account of it. Woe to the man who takes 
 this noblest gift of God, and turns it downward to 
 the devil's work. Wickedness indeed is not life, but 
 rather death in life; yet wickedness breeds wicked- 
 ness, as pestilence breeds pestilence. None of us 
 liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. We 
 cannot help influencing all around us. Our lightest 
 word may echo to the ends of the earth, and the look 
 of a moment may influence the life of children yet 
 unborn. Creatures of a day, we count things trifles 
 of a day, and forget that every trifle has its eternal 
 meaning, and we shall see it plainly in the great and 
 dreadful day, when the secrets of all hearts are 
 known.
 
 168 PERSONAL INFLUENCE 
 
 Light and life ? Pollution and infection ? Which 
 are you ? for one or the other you must be. Look 
 warily before you answer, and pray God for grace to 
 keep you right, or bring you right if need be. Whoso 
 is faithful, his reward shall be the awfullest and 
 holiest joy of life that power divine by which we 
 raise the dead, and bring them back to Christ our 
 Shepherd and our Saviour.
 
 XIX. 
 LOVE DIVINE. 
 
 169
 
 " The Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." 
 -GAL. ii. 20. 
 
 170
 
 XIX. 
 LOVE DIVINE. 1 
 
 TN the simple words before us lies the power of life 
 -- that is in Christ ; and the fact that such power 
 can lie in simple words is itself a gospel for the ^ world. 
 There is neither deep enchantment nor recondite 
 learning in the voice that wakes the dead ; only the 
 speaker is the Lord who loves us. There are secrets 
 in Christ inscrutable to sinners, and deeps of wisdom 
 fathomless to men ; but the deepest mystery of all, 
 the mystery of mysteries which angels desire to look 
 into, is the open mystery of love which every child 
 who loves can understand. To that child our Father 
 reveals the secret of life which is hidden from the 
 most learned of scholars who is too proud to receive 
 the kingdom of God as a little child. Learning is 
 a good gift, and one that we may covet earnestly ; 
 but it is not the best gift, for only love can bless it 
 to our use. No gifts of learning can make us like 
 God as love does, for love is the one true image, 
 frail and mortal though it seem, of the awful holiness 
 on high that glows with love as ever-burning fire. 
 Though we ourselves are frail and mortal beings, 
 
 1 Howick, July 24, 1904. 
 171
 
 172 LOVE DIVINE 
 
 our love is not in Christ the frail and mortal thing it 
 seems, for Christ has given it of his own the power 
 of an endless life. It is eternal just because it is not 
 our very own. It is the deepest and strongest thing 
 we know ; and it is not our own. " Herein is love, not 
 that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his 
 Son to be the propitiation for our sins." This is the 
 highest example of love, and this it is which calls out 
 our love ; for by this, says St. John, was manifested 
 the love of God in us not toward us, but in us. 
 He means not here the great manifestation of the love 
 of God as love toward men, but its further manifesta- 
 tion in ourselves, when we love our fellow-men. Our 
 love is not our own ; it is only God's love working 
 in us. 
 
 But the sending of the Son of God is more than the 
 highest example of love. It is the mighty tragedy 
 from which all human love derives its living power. 
 It is not a mere condescension of infinite greatness to 
 infinite littleness, but the costly sacrifice by which 
 our Father redeemed his perishing children. Kindness 
 and goodness are only one side of love ; and we debase 
 it into weakness and sin if we forget its other side 
 of stern self-sacrifice and awful holiness. He that 
 spared not his own Son, will he spare us ? If he that 
 knew not sin bore the consequences of sin that was 
 not his own, shall not we sinners bear the consequences 
 of our own sin ? The Lord of Love ordained them, 
 and perfect love is merciless in doing its work of 
 mercy.
 
 LOVE DIVINE 173 
 
 Hear Isaiah's picture of the Lord of hosts come 
 down to save his people 
 
 As when the lion growleth, 
 
 and the young lion over the prey ; 
 
 Though a multitude of shepherds be called out against him, 
 for their shouting he will not be afraid, 
 and for their noise he will not abase himself. 
 
 It is strange that the wild lion pictures the love 
 of God? Even the doctor must do his work with 
 merciless thoroughness. If he does not cut out the 
 whole of the diseased flesh, the cancer will return. 
 So much the more in perfect love is neither 
 variableness nor shadow of turning. The awful 
 unrelenting sternness of the laws of God in Nature 
 is no proof at all that he is not a God of perfect love ; 
 rather it is what we ought to expect from such a God. 
 
 If God is love indeed, one thing is certain. He 
 that spared not his own Son, but gave him up to 
 the uttermost consequences of the sin of the world ; 
 neither will he spare us the uttermost suffering that 
 is needed to cleanse us from sin. Be it what it may, 
 he will not spare us. Every one shall be salted with 
 fire, to make him a welcome offering in Christ. God 
 grant the fire of this world's trials may suffice ; for if 
 that fails, he will not spare us the fire of hell. What 
 that fire may be is more than I know ; yet if God is 
 love, that love must fill the lowest deep of hell. Even 
 the fire of hell cannot be anything else than the fire 
 of love divine that beareth all things, and ever seeks 
 at any cost of suffering to win us from our sin.
 
 i 7 4 LOVE DIVINE 
 
 God hates sin ; and he that loveth sin, the wrath 
 of God abideth on him. So God hated sin, that he 
 gave his only Son to die for the sin of the world. 
 What is it then that Christ has done for us by 
 his death and resurrection ? He is the propitiation 
 for our sins ; he has made atonement for us ; he has 
 reconciled us unto God ; he is our sacrifice ; he has 
 redeemed us from sin ; he has wrought salvation for 
 us ; he has given us life eternal. Now these are not 
 so many different things ; they are only different 
 ways of looking at one thing : and we are told to look 
 at it in many different ways, because no one way 
 of looking at it can give us all that it means. For 
 instance, Christ is our sacrifice because he really did 
 what the old sacrifices only represented ; but we need 
 other words to remind us that he also did for us things 
 which the old sacrifices could not represent at all. 
 
 One thing, however, Christ has not done. He has 
 not reconciled God to us, if we mean that God once 
 hated us, and only loves us now. God hates sin ; 
 but he never hated us, even while we were yet sinners. 
 His wrath is love after all, but love too strong and true 
 to spare us needful suffering. An atonement for sin 
 was not needed that he might be free to love us, but 
 that we might be able to love him. He is not an 
 offended God who cannot pardon the guilty till the 
 innocent has suffered in their place. He is more 
 ready to forgive than we to ask him; and there is 
 nothing to separate him from us but the wall of sin 
 we build ourselves.
 
 LOVE DIVINE 175 
 
 Why then, ask some, why cannot God forgive us 
 without any atonement at all ? If he really loves us, 
 why cannot he forgive us at once ? Well, there is 
 at least one plain reason why he cannot. Suppose 
 the Lord of Truth took back his word, The soul that 
 sinneth, it shall die. Suppose almighty Love were 
 weak enough to take the Serpent's word instead, Ye 
 shall not surely die. What then ? We should be 
 sinners still, repenting only to sin again, unless God 
 should also give us some new life that can strive with 
 sin and overcome it. Without this no forgiveness can 
 make us anything but immortal sinners, as unfit for 
 heaven as we were before. 
 
 For this then Christ our Saviour was contented to 
 suffer death on the cross not that the Father might 
 be made to love us, but that we might have life, and 
 have it in abundance. And those who have that life, 
 and feel it leaping up within them unto life eternal, 
 they tell us with one voice that it flows from the cross 
 of Christ. Search through the ages, search through 
 every land ; and wherever you can find one who verily 
 knows the powers of another world, he will tell you 
 with St. Paul, " I am crucified with Christ : nevertheless 
 I live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me : and the life 
 which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of 
 the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself 
 for me."
 
 XX. 
 
 SALVATION. 
 
 12
 
 " Thou shalt call his name Jesus : for he shall save his people 
 from their sins." MATT. i. 21. 
 
 178
 
 XX. 
 SALVATION. 1 
 
 T17"E are all agreed that the Gospel is a message 
 of salvation that whether Jesus of Nazareth 
 be God or man or both or neither, he is presented 
 to us as the Saviour of the world. This is his claim ; 
 and those who ridicule its falsehood and those who say 
 he never made it are nevertheless in full agreement 
 with us that on this claim the faith of Christendom 
 has rested since time out of mind. There may be 
 doubt whether Christianity be true ; but there is no 
 doubt at all that it is a gospel of salvation. 
 
 So far well : but some good people have strange 
 ideas of what salvation is. A common word like that 
 needs no explanation forsooth, so we never stop to 
 ask what it really means. We take something or 
 other for granted, and stumble into meanings for 
 words which would astonish St. Paul ; as when we 
 turn the charity that never faileth into giving a six- 
 pence to get rid of a beggar. Even the unbeliever 
 sometimes has grace to tell us that salvation is not 
 worth much, unless it means a great deal more than 
 some of us fancy. And what is that ? If we are 
 
 1 Bottisham, December 20, 1903. 
 179
 
 i8o SALVATION 
 
 saved, we shall not go to hell. We shall get our 
 sins plastered over somehow or other, and then we 
 shall steal into heaven and be happy ever after. 
 What more can we want ? What can be more 
 delightful than to cheat God's law, and escape the 
 punishment we deserve ? 
 
 This is a very old way of thinking. I could shew 
 you pages and pages written within three hundred 
 years after Christ, which seem to see nothing in 
 the Gospel but the one escape from hell fire. But 
 it is assuredly not Christ's way of thinking, nor that 
 of his apostles. It is doubtless true that if we are 
 saved, we shall not go to anything like what people 
 mean by hell : but it does not follow that this is a 
 good account of salvation. On the contrary, it is 
 utterly misleading. We never read that Christ came 
 to save us from hell fire, whatever that may mean. 
 We read indeed that we are saved from wrath 
 through him ; but wrath is not hell fire. Surely 
 in this life the wrath is revealed from heaven on 
 all ungodliness ; and he that believeth not the Son, 
 here and now the wrath of God abideth on him. 
 That wrath is as truly revealed in the torments of 
 conscience, and even in the false peace of the utterly 
 wicked who have almost forgotten that they ever 
 had a conscience, as it can possibly can be in any 
 future fires of hell. It is a faithful saying doubtless, 
 that Christ came to save sinners : but what was it 
 from which he came to save sinners ? Surely from 
 sin itself, not simply from some future punishment
 
 SALVATION 181 
 
 of sin. His word is, Go, and sin no more ; his promise, 
 Sin shall have no more dominion over you. The 
 message is of light and life and love, of righteousness 
 and peace and joy, here on earth as well as there 
 in heaven for evermore. It has its warnings for the 
 despisers and the wicked ; but the men who mistake 
 these for the message itself are simply mistaking the 
 shadows for the sunlight. 
 
 The mistake arose among the early Christians, who V 
 lived under the Koman Empire, and looked up to that \ 
 as the image upon earth of God's kingdom over the 
 earth. So indeed it was, but a more imperfect image 
 than they knew. The Empire was a great and mighty 
 state, and represented God's kingdom far more worthily 
 than Egypt or Babylon had done ; but it had its weak- 
 nesses, and one of these was misleading. The Empire 
 had no good police : but the amount of crime this 
 caused was not the whole of the mischief. In the 
 first place, so many offenders escaped that people got 
 familiar with the idea that if they broke Caesar's law, 
 they had a good chance of getting off unpunished ; and 
 people are tempted to blame the law itself when 
 one man is punished and perhaps a worse escapes. 
 Then again if the authorities could not catch all the 
 offenders, they were tempted to make tremendous ex- 
 amples of those they did catch, burning and crucifying 
 them wholesale. Now the early Christians, who lived 
 under the Empire, naturally looked up to God as a 
 sort of Koman emperor in heaven. So they were 
 tempted to think his laws like Csesar's, declaring not
 
 1 8a SALVATION 
 
 always eternal right and truth, but sometimes only 
 the passion of a moment his justice like Caesar's, 
 which sometimes punished offenders, and sometimes 
 could not get hold of them his punishments like 
 Caesar's, full of cruelty. They could hardly rise above 
 Caesar to the idea of a law that never fails, of justice 
 that is never deceived, of punishments that always 
 come in the way of natural consequence. So they 
 saw no difficulty in the story that God will some day 
 condemn the wicked and the heathen to the ever- 
 lasting fire of hell. 
 
 " Some day," you notice. The natural man likes 
 this gospel, not because it is full of horror, but because 
 it is really less terrible than it looks. There is a 
 good deal in that "some day." Many things may 
 happen first ; and at all events, we need not trouble 
 ourselves quite yet. Perhaps it is too bad to be true ', 
 and anyhow, it is a long way off, and we know that 
 God is merciful. So the devil tells us every day ; but 
 he only means his old lie, Ye shall not surely die. 
 
 But some will say, Where is the difference ? If we 
 are saved from sin, we shall be saved from hell, and 
 we cannot be saved from hell unless we are saved 
 from sin. If we cannot have one salvation without 
 the other, it does not matter which we make our aim. 
 I answer that this is very good theory, but that it does 
 not work out in practice, because the natural man 
 insists on forgetting that we cannot be saved from 
 hell unless we are saved from sin. Heavenly things 
 are like earthly. If we are good, we shall have true
 
 SALVATION 183 
 
 joy, and we cannot have true joy unless we are good. 
 We cannot have the one without the other: yet it 
 matters a great deal which we make our aim. If 
 we aim at being good, joy will come of itself ; but if we 
 aim at joy, we shall not be good, and true joy will 
 utterly escape us. So here with heavenly things. If 
 we want only to be saved from hell, we shall not 
 really feel that we need first to be saved from sin. 
 The natural man positively will not believe it. Some 
 say that Christ has made an arrangement which will 
 somehow save us from our punishment. Others are 
 of the elect, and all roads will bring them to heaven. 
 Others put their trust in holy sacraments and holy 
 ceremonies in general to save them from hell here- 
 after without saving them now from sin. God says, 
 The soul that sinneth, it shall die; and they will 
 renounce their sin fast enough when they are 
 frightened by any sort of danger, though they mostly 
 come back to it when the danger is over. The clever 
 thing, you know, is to time your repentance properly, 
 so as to get all the pleasures of sin as long as you can 
 enjoy them ; then at the last moment you say words 
 or go through ceremonies, and then sure enough the 
 pleasures of heaven lie straight before you. Both 
 saints and sinners mismanage the one by giving up 
 the pleasures of sin, the other by not getting those 
 of heaven; but you have cheated God's law, and 
 made the best of both worlds. 
 
 Granted that we must be saved from sin, men do 
 not see that we must first be saved from sin
 
 184 SALVATION 
 
 before we can be saved from hell : and in this 
 they make at least two great mistakes. For one 
 of them, they look on hell simply as a punishment 
 for sin, as if something else might have done as well. 
 They forget that hell is necessarily connected with 
 sin as its natural consequence. More than this ; it 
 is nothing else than our present state of sin continued 
 after death. Whatever death may be, we have no 
 reason to think it has any power to change our heart. 
 The difference it makes to the sinner is that he has to 
 leave behind him the body which protected him from 
 too much suffering, and the distractions which helped 
 him to turn his back on God. Now at last he is 
 forced to face the truth he despised, and to see the 
 love he hated blazing down in wrath upon him. If 
 that wrath be fire, then I for one believe that hell is 
 fire. But the coals of wrath are sin, and that fire 
 needs must burn as long as it can find in us any sin 
 to feed it. Whether it will ever fully burn away our 
 sin is more than I need now discuss : but if it have 
 an end at all, it can have no other end but this. If 
 hell is a state of sin, the one thing certain is that we 
 cannot possibly be saved from it, either now or here- 
 after, till we have been saved from sin. 
 
 The other great mistake is in fancying that a man 
 can be frightened into goodness by the fear of hell. 
 True, he will do a good deal if he is well scared ; but 
 he will not do the one thing needful. Salvation is 
 not easy to buy, and he will pay a high price for it in 
 good works and other mortifications ; but he will not
 
 SALVATION 185 
 
 part with sin. No man ever loved sin the less for 
 fear of hell, though fear of hell has kept some in 
 misery till a better thing got hold of them. Christ 
 alone can save us from our sin : and even he can only 
 save us by the power of love. The same love that 
 burns in wrath on sin shines as light on them that 
 turn away from sin. It is not sin itself that sinks us 
 to hell, but the love of sin ; and if we love Christ in- 
 stead, sin shall have no more dominion over us. The 
 question from the great white throne will not be 
 how many sins we did, but what we did with our sin. 
 Did we love it, or did we turn away from it ? Do not 
 trouble yourself to get assurance of your forgiveness. 
 You cannot turn away from sin but in the love of 
 Christ ; so that the turning away is itself forgiveness 
 and salvation here on earth, signed and sealed in 
 heaven, and attested among men by the death and 
 resurrection of the Son of Man, in whom we have 
 eternal life both now and evermore.
 
 XXI. 
 JOB'S PROBLEM. 
 
 187
 
 " Those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and 
 slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that 
 dwell in Jerusalem?" LUKE xiii. 4. 
 
 188
 
 XXI. 
 
 JOB'S PROBLEM. 1 
 
 is the problem of Job, that God's ways are 
 not equal. Evil does not always hunt the 
 wicked to overthrow him. Sometimes he flourishes 
 like a green bay tree, and becomes mighty in power, 
 while the righteous dieth in the bitterness of his 
 soul. God's ways are not equal, for if he causeth 
 his sun to rise on just and unjust, he also brings 
 calamity on just and unjust, as it would seem, with- 
 out respect of persons. 
 
 It was an old problem in Job's time this strangely 
 unequal distribution of this world's good and bad 
 things and it is a problem still. Job's friends and 
 Job himself could only grope in darkness, and even 
 the cross of Christ has not made it clear. We have 
 indeed a full assurance from the other world that 
 God is not unjust, but full of love : but we have no 
 vindication of his ways to men. He does not vindi- 
 cate himself when he answers Job, and he does not 
 vindicate himself in Christ. It may be that the 
 answer is beyond our reason, and we must learn it by 
 living it, so far as we can ever learn it in this world. 
 
 1 Girton College, February 25, 1900. 
 189
 
 IQO JOB'S PROBLEM 
 
 Meanwhile Job's friends found a short answer. 
 If Job had suffered above other men, he must have 
 sinned above other men. If he had seemed a good 
 man, he must have been so much the greater 
 hypocrite. Even Elihu does not get far beyond this ; 
 and the Lord himself only convicts Job of ignorance, 
 and clears him from the charges of hypocrisy and 
 gross sin. Yet the answer of Job's friends is the 
 instinct of sinful human nature, when calamity 
 overtakes our friends, to say, Their sin hath found 
 them out. On two occasions our Lord rebuked it. 
 When they told him of the Galileans whom Pilate 
 had killed at their sacrifices, he answered that sin 
 (I mean their sin) was not the reason why they or 
 the eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell had 
 suffered these things. Again he says, Neither hath 
 this man sinned, nor his parents, of the man that 
 was born blind. So clearly does he speak, that men 
 have ever since been more or less ashamed to ex- 
 plain the misfortunes of their neighbours that way. 
 Whatever evil thoughts they may cherish, they are 
 commonly shy of telling them to others. 
 
 Yet I fear the right thing is often done for the 
 wrong reason, as if the sin were a breach of charity 
 rather than a breach of truth : and it is never safe 
 to have bad reasons. In this case there may be 
 no visible harm when our neighbour's misfortune is 
 what lawyers might call the act of God : the mischief 
 arises when it plainly is the result of his own sin, 
 and we are forbidden in the name of charity to say
 
 JOB'S PROBLEM 191 
 
 so. I grant it is not always and everywhere proper 
 to say it : but if charity requires us to shut our eyes 
 on truth we see, the sooner we renounce that sort 
 of charity the better. 
 
 Now I am as far as possible from thinking that we 
 can fully make out the problem which our Saviour 
 left unsolved : but I think we can do the sort of 
 thing which men of science do. They have never 
 fully made out a single fact of nature not even 
 why we feel warm before the fire. Sooner or later, 
 they are always checked by a vail of mystery. 
 Sometimes they can push back the vail a little, by 
 shewing that one thing depends on another; but 
 they never can tear it down. If they can explain 
 one cause by another for a long way, sooner or later 
 they always come to a cause they cannot explain. 
 Why does a stone fall ? Because the earth pulls 
 it down ? Why does the earth pull it down ? They 
 cannot explain that ; and when they do explain it, 
 they will only explain it by some further cause they 
 cannot explain. Science never really does explain 
 things : but it gives us a practical view of lesser 
 mysteries by shewing that they are parts of greater 
 mysteries, as when we learn that our weather depends 
 on the balancings of the clouds for thousands of miles 
 around us. 
 
 So here, though we cannot explain Job's problem, 
 we can get a very practical view of it when we see 
 that it is part of a greater problem. That greater 
 problem is Predestination. And shall we look for
 
 i 9 2 JOB'S PROBLEM 
 
 light to what Gibbon might call the darkest corner 
 of the whole theological abyss ? Yes : just because 
 Predestination is a great mystery, it throws a flood 
 of light on the lesser mysteries around it. Job's 
 problem is a case of predestination, for misfortunes are 
 the refusing or the taking away of this world's good 
 things : and this is predestination, so far as it is not the 
 result of our sin. And predestination is no reward of 
 merit. If it was not for the man's sin that he was born 
 blind, neither was it for your righteousness that you 
 were born with eyes to see. Esau was a sinner if you 
 please ; but he was not rejected for his sin, because 
 he was rejected before he was born. So too, if 
 Pharaoh had a rival for the throne of Egypt, that 
 rival was no more rejected for his sin than Pharaoh 
 was exalted for his righteousness. Predestination 
 as we find it in the Bible refers to this world's good 
 and evil things, not to salvation and perdition ; and 
 misfortune is the loss of this world's good things, or 
 the gaining of this world's evil things. The loss of 
 spiritual good things is not called a misfortune ; and 
 at any rate it is no part of Job's problem. 
 
 Now the gifts we are born with are entirely matter 
 of predestination, for we have no voice in the matter. 
 They are in God's hands, at his sovereign disposal, 
 and he does not account for them to us. The 
 opportunities also which we meet in life are largely 
 matter of predestination, for they are largely beyond 
 our control. Nor is there any injustice in this. 
 God never promised to let all men share his gifts
 
 JOB'S PROBLEM 193 
 
 alike, or according to their merits ; and he will not 
 judge us by his gifts, but by the use we make of 
 them. Our gifts and opportunities are so to say 
 the zero line from which we start ; and the question 
 for us in the last day is how far we have got beyond 
 it. To whom much is given, of him shall much be 
 required. The zero for one man is ten talents, for 
 another five, for another one ; and even the man with 
 one talent will be commended if he gains with it one 
 more talent. God is not Pharaoh, to require bricks 
 without giving straw. 
 
 If you ask me Job's question, why the wicked 
 prospers in all his ways, while the righteous is 
 crushed by misfortunes, I can only answer that such 
 is God's will. Sometimes the wicked deserves all he 
 gets. He may be one of the children of this world 
 who for their own generation only are wiser than the 
 children of light : and then God gives him his reward 
 in his own generation only. He never promised that 
 world's peace to the wicked, or this world's happiness 
 to the righteous. If a man labour for the meat 
 which perisheth, he shall not labour in vain ; and if 
 he labour for the meat which endureth unto ever- 
 lasting life, he shall in no wise lose his reward. 
 
 But suppose all merit out of the question. Then 
 we can only say that God gives and refuses this 
 world's good things according to his sovereign will ; 
 and this is what we call predestination. God forbid 
 indeed that I should think the great masses of hope- 
 less and demoralizing poverty which disgrace our
 
 194 JOB'S PROBLEM 
 
 modern civilization anything else than an abomination 
 to him. It is not his will that men and women 
 should be born into a state which is worse than that 
 of beasts, but it is his will that the sin of our fathers 
 as well as our own sin should work out its evil results 
 to the third and fourth generation, though it is 
 equally his will that we should labour with all our 
 might to check them. It is as truly service to God 
 as anything we do in church, when we labour to 
 loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy 
 burdens, and to let the oppressed go free. We are 
 preaching a gospel to the poor in preaching the lesser 
 gospels of mercy which draw their power from the 
 glorious gospel of salvation. It matters little what 
 the work of mercy is, and even less who does it, for 
 every good work is of God. 
 
 In saying that God gives and refuses this world's 
 good things according to his sovereign will, I do not 
 mean that his counsel is always secret unto us. If we 
 cannot see it as we look forward, we can often see it 
 as we look backward, say on the apostle of the Gentiles 
 and the gifts which fitted him for his work. Only we 
 have no right to complain if we cannot see God's pur- 
 pose at all. Again, I do not mean that his sovereign will 
 works otherwise than according to law. The old proverb 
 that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's 
 teeth are set on edge, is true enough of natural conse- 
 quences, however false it was when it meant that the 
 children are not able to turn away from the sin of their 
 fathers. Yet again, and this is the most important
 
 JOB'S PROBLEM 195 
 
 point of all, I do not mean that sovereign will is 
 mere caprice, or utter mystery. The purpose for 
 which it works is known to us, the methods by which 
 it works are partly known, and the motive for its 
 working is revealed to us. Be the mystery of 
 predestination what it may, above and beyond it is 
 the mystery of love assured to us in the Incarnation. 
 Be the mystery of predestination what it may, it is 
 but a thing of this world's order, whereas the Incarna- 
 tion comes down to us from a higher order, and must 
 govern our understanding of this world's problems. 
 We must look at them in the light of that supreme 
 and final revelation of our Father's love, and rest in 
 patience and thankfulness that there is love beyond 
 them all. Lower the clouds as darkly as they may, 
 the sun is shining on their silver tops. 
 
 If we suffer, we shall also reign with him : 
 If we deny him, he also will deny us : 
 If we are faithless, he abideth faithful : 
 Himself he cannot deny.
 
 XXII. 
 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS. 
 
 197
 
 " And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that 
 same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor con- 
 sider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the 
 people, and that the whole nation perish not." JOHN xi. 49, 50. 
 
 108
 
 XXII. 
 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS. 1 
 
 Lord's ministry lasted as long as it did 
 and no longer, because Pharisees and Sadducees 
 could not agree to kill him till after the raising of 
 Lazarus. The Pharisees indeed took counsel against 
 him as early as the healing of the man with a 
 withered hand, and from that time forward were 
 constantly seeking to put him to death. But when 
 we read that they took counsel with the Herodians, 
 who were very much the same as the chief priests 
 and Sadducees, and that nothing came of it, the 
 natural conclusion is that the Herodians would 
 not help them, for when they did help them 
 later, their help was effective enough. They did 
 not refuse for any love of Christ, as they shewed by 
 their mockings under the cross, but simply because 
 they saw no reason why they should help. The 
 prophet of Nazareth was no doubt a very contemptible 
 fellow ; but if the Pharisees found him a thorn in 
 their side, this was reason enough why the Sadducees 
 should not help them to get rid of him. 
 
 So things went on till the Sadducees themselves 
 1 Girton College, October 28, 1900. 
 
 199
 
 200 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS 
 
 were alarmed by the raising of Lazarus and the stir 
 it made. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees 
 gathered a council, saying, What do we ? for this 
 man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, 
 all men will believe on him : and the Eomans shall 
 come and take away both our place and nation. 
 But there seems to have been much disputing. 
 Nicodemus and Joseph may not have been there ; 
 but others were not likely to abandon at once the old 
 Sadducee view, that they must not give up a man who 
 was a plague to the Pharisees. Presently one of them, 
 named Caiaphas, being high priest that year, that 
 memorable year, bursts in with the characteristic 
 rudeness of the Sadducees. He is a strong man who 
 knows his own mind, and is impatient of all this 
 talking. " Ye know nothing at all, nor even consider 
 that it is expedient for us, that one man should die 
 for the people, and that the whole nation perish not." 
 Caiaphas has gone over to the Pharisees, and that 
 is decisive. From that day forth they took counsel 
 together for to put him to death. 
 
 Caiaphas looks down on the council with the 
 contempt of a thoroughly bad man for people who 
 cannot make up their minds at once. If the Pharisees 
 had scrupled at shedding innocent blood, he would 
 have despised them the more. The matter was as 
 plain as it could be. If Jesus was a political danger, 
 the sooner he was put out of the way the better. 
 The question was not of right or justice, but simply 
 of " our expediency " ; and if anyone cannot see that,
 
 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS 201 
 
 he is a fool. It does not matter who or what Jesus of 
 Nazareth may be, or what he may have done or left 
 undone, for he must plainly be put to death as soon 
 as may be, if our expediency requires it : so there is 
 an end of the matter. 
 
 Clear and cogent reasoning this, no doubt; the 
 very language of the statesmen in all ages who 
 make a mock of truth and right. Yet with all his 
 common sense and clear logic, Caiaphas has made 
 one woeful blunder, which St. John follows down 
 with unrelenting sternness. Let us see. The real 
 objection to our Lord was not simply that he broke 
 the Sabbath, or even that he claimed to be the Son 
 of God. Down below these charges was the feeling, 
 none the less real that the Jews were not fully 
 conscious of it, that his teaching and personal claims 
 were destroying the privileges of Israel. It was all 
 very well for him to say that he was only sent to 
 the lost sheep of the house of Israel : but there 
 was nothing specially Jewish in his teaching; and if 
 he really was the Son of God, he must be Lord of 
 Gentiles as well as Jews, and he shewed no disposition 
 to pour out on them the vengeance for which Israel 
 was longing. It seemed rather that he would give 
 the Komans their chance for vengeance on Israel. 
 Therefore it was expedient for God's people that he 
 should be put out of the way. 
 
 God's people forsooth. That was not the word 
 they used. They said, " the Komans shall come and 
 take away our place and nation." By using that
 
 202 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS 
 
 other word nation they let out the fatal secret that 
 
 they were no longer God's people, but a mere nation 
 
 like the nations of the world, whom they likened 
 
 unto dogs. They spoke more truth than they knew. 
 
 It was their own place, for it was no longer God's, 
 
 and they themselves were a people of Israel no more, 
 
 but a mere Jewish nation which was renouncing the 
 
 privileges of which they were so proud. Then comes 
 
 Caiaphas, keen as a lynx for questions of expediency, 
 
 but with no eye for this huge moral blunder. He 
 
 just repeats it, " that the whole nation perish not." 
 
 Then St. John lays open the lofty irony of God 
 
 in history. Caiaphas was indeed a prophet. This 
 
 spake he not of himself : but being high priest that 
 
 year, that memorable year, he prophesied that Jesus 
 
 should die for that nation Israel was one of the 
 
 nations now, and nothing more and not for that 
 
 nation only, but that also he should gather together 
 
 in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. 
 
 This was the comment of the old evangelist, as he 
 
 looked back through sixty years to the days when he 
 
 had been with Jesus : and from the teaching of those 
 
 sixty years he learned the fulness of the meaning 
 
 which Caiaphas had not intended. He had seen the 
 
 shame of the cross, the glory of the resurrection. 
 
 He had seen Christ's churches guided by a wisdom 
 
 that was not of men to spread among the Gentile 
 
 nations, till now they were chiefly made up of the 
 
 scattered children of God whom the Jews despised. 
 
 Above all, he had seen the awful irony of the
 
 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS 203 
 
 destruction of Jersualem by the Komans, the burning 
 of the temple, and the scattering of Israel that it 
 should not even be a nation any more. In their 
 hatred of Gentiles they condemned and killed the 
 Just, lest the Eomans should come and take away 
 their place and nation : yet this very hatred it was 
 which actually brought the Eomans to take away 
 their place and nation. Meanwhile Christ died for 
 Israel, and not for Israel only, but that he might gather 
 into one the children of God which were scattered 
 abroad. In Christ there was neither Greek not 
 Jew, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, but for all 
 alike the power of everlasting life. There failed not 
 one thing of all that Caiaphas had said, however little 
 he may have meant it. 
 
 But is St. John quite right ? Is there not one 
 thing still unfulfilled ? Christ died that he might 
 gather into one the scattered children of God : and 
 where is that unity now ? The church of the first 
 days was all of one mind, and for several centuries 
 there was but one communion of Christians, and 
 indeed there could not be more than one, if we do 
 not count those outside it as Christians at all. But 
 where is unity now ? The Greeks curse the Latins, 
 the Latins curse us, and we ourselves have sects by 
 the score, all claiming to be Christ's true followers. 
 Yet Christ spoke of unity " that they may be 
 perfected into unity" and plainly meant unity to 
 be a mark of his church. On this pretence it is that 
 so many in our time desire unity at any cost of truth.
 
 204 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS 
 
 If only we were one communion, the authority of a 
 united church would seem to cover things which with- 
 out it would be falsehood and disobedience to Christ. 
 
 I deliberately call this a pretence, for a temper 
 which is careless of truth is none of Christ's. We 
 believe Christ because he is the truth ; and if we 
 sacrifice truth to anything whatever, we are none of 
 his. There is no profaner page in history than that 
 of the negotiations for the union of churches, down to 
 the very latest. If Rome is right in calling herself 
 infallible, the sooner we make our submission to her the 
 better. We cannot make conditions with a claim like 
 that. But if she speaks falsely, no man fit to be called 
 a Christian can think of union with her till she has 
 repented of the great lie which has caused more dis- 
 union in Christendom than any other. We cannot 
 make conditions with a lie like that. 
 
 But have we really no higher idea of unity than 
 this ? Is the unity Christ spoke of an outward and 
 material unity of rites and worship, of laws and 
 ordinances, such as might have satisfied Caiaphas ? 
 If this were all, we should be none the better for it, 
 and might be much the worse, for this kind of unity 
 could not but be utterly unspiritual. There is no 
 gain in Christian unity if it is gained by disregard 
 of truth, and is therefore unity in him who was a 
 liar from the beginning. No, Christ spoke not of a 
 satanic unity like this, but of a unity in himself which 
 far transcends all outward differences of race and 
 creed and rival churches. Differences there must be
 
 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS 205 
 
 of thought and expression, just as there are differences 
 of calling ; but the love of Christ covers them as the 
 waters cover the sea. Nay, there can be no unity 
 without them, for without differences there can be 
 no spirit working unity through differences and by 
 means of them. It is not difference of belief which i 
 separates men, but bad temper which makes it an J 
 excuse for a quarrel. And if the outward and visible 
 sign of communion fail us, it does not follow that 
 the inward and spiritual grace of unity is wanting. 
 Unity is not a far-off dream of the future, but a 
 present fact, and the mightiest fact of present life. 
 Be differences what they may, all those who are one 
 spirit with the Lord are already gathered into one 
 in him. 
 
 St. John was right. Unity is present like salvation : 
 yet like salvation it can grow. From faith to higher 
 faith is the rule of Christian life, revealed in the 
 successive trials which are to make us perfect like 
 our Lord by suffering. Where the Spirit is, there 
 is unity; and the Spirit is with us as we grow in 
 grace and knowledge. Salvation grows, from the first 
 motions of good we feel in childhood to the ripened 
 graces of the man of God who wears a nobler crown 
 of glory than the grey hairs of this world's life : and 
 beyond these again is the everlasting growth of 
 likeness to Christ in the world where there is no more 
 strife and hatred. So too unity grows, from the first 
 faint sympathies of human kindness to the ripest 
 charity that flesh of sin can reach on earth : and
 
 206 THE PROPHECY OF CAIAPHAS 
 
 beyond that again lies the everlasting growth of 
 unity in that eternal which we call the future. So 
 when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, 
 and this mortal shall have put on immortality, we shall 
 see that the apostle's hope and aspiration through years 
 of toil and suffering, to be found in Christ one with 
 Christ and one with all that are in Christ is not a 
 mystic's dream of some far-distant future, but an eternal 
 fact of the eternal world which flows unseen around 
 this world of gloom and sin like the all-embracing 
 and all-quickening air of heaven in which we live and 
 move and have our being.
 
 XXIII. 
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE 
 BODY. 
 
 207
 
 " He is not a God of the dead, but of the living." LUKE xx. 38. 
 
 208
 
 XXIII. 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 1 
 
 "VTOT Easter Day only, but every Sunday in the 
 -^-' year is the memorial of Christ our Saviour's 
 resurrection from the dead. Christ is risen ; he is 
 risen indeed. He that liveth and was dead is alive 
 for evermore, and has the keys of death and the grave. 
 An ever-new and living way is open to our Father's 
 presence through the blood of Christ. There are no 
 stairs of gold to climb, no gates of adamantine rock 
 to pass, no guards of cherubim or flaming sword 
 to stop us. The palace of the Great King lies 
 open, and the throne of mercy stands unguarded. 
 There is nothing but our sin to make us afraid ; and 
 our Easter Sunday's message is that the risen Son of 
 Man has conquered sin for all that will forsake it. 
 
 No such glorious news was ever told on earth as 
 on that first Easter Day which turned the unspeak- 
 able shame and horror of the crucifixion into ever- 
 lasting victory. As the great peaks of the Himalayas 
 stand out in peerless grandeur by themselves, looking 
 down ten thousand feet of snowy wastes on mountains 
 higher than any in Europe, so Christ our Saviour's 
 
 1 Brantham, April 7, 1901 (Easter Day). 
 14
 
 210 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 
 
 resurrection stands out by itself, looking down in 
 peerless grandeur on the noblest scenes of history. 
 Never before and never since has death been over- 
 come by man, and peradventure never shall be more 
 till the trumpet sounds for the coming of the Son of 
 Man, who conquered sin and death on Golgotha for 
 evermore. 
 
 Yet even as those highest peaks are made of the 
 same rocks which form the mountains far below them, 
 so the Saviour's resurrection is not so utterly unlike 
 the rest of history as it seems. No strange light 
 shone from the empty tomb, but the old light whose 
 ever-present coming lighteth every man. No unheard- 
 of power raised him from the dead, but the old power 
 of love divine which is the life of every sinner, 
 however unworthy of it he may be. Love is stronger 
 than death; but no man touched by sin can wield 
 the fulness of its quickening power. It is a true 
 instinct which tells us that our loved ones only pass 
 away from us because the love which struggles to 
 recall them is too weak with sin to do it. Could we 
 but look on them like the Lord himself, with eyes 
 that sin had never dimmed, and love that sin had 
 never stained with subtle selfishness, then surely as 
 our God is love, that love of ours, which is his love 
 working in us, would have power to raise the dead. 
 They sin who find a limit in heaven or earth or hell 
 to the power of the love of God which worketh in us, 
 ever striving to lift us up to heights of holiness above 
 the angels. That which can overcome the grim
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 211 
 
 reality of death in sin can surely conquer its shadow 
 of bodily death. 
 
 I think our text will help to shew us that our 
 Saviour's resurrection is only the perfect working of a 
 law that works in all of us, and but for sin would 
 have its perfect work in all of us. The question laid 
 before him by the Sadducees is not simply of a future 
 life, but of the resurrection of the body. I need not 
 analyse his answer closely ; nor will I dwell on the 
 mighty argument of his words, For all live unto him 
 that the living God cannot be supposed to rule a 
 world of death. God said to Abraham, I will be thy_ fbv^ C 
 
 God ; and after many days he still says to Moses, I 
 
 ' J J J ' 
 
 am the God of Abraham. What does this mean but 
 that a covenant of God is of necessity an everlast- 
 ing covenant ? And he that shares an everlasting 
 covenant must also share an everlasting life, Be- 
 cause I live, ye shall live also. To whom the Eternal 
 speaks, he cannot die for ever. The image of God in 
 man must share God's everlasting life. Nothing 
 that is good can perish ; for whatsoever God doeth, 
 he doeth it for ever. I cannot think that even 
 these lower gifts of prudence and wisdom will 
 perish in the grave. Though they go to the land 
 where all things are forgotten, they will not for ever 
 be forgotten. Unless heaven is poorer than earth, all 
 faithful work that is done in this world of death must 
 have its use and meaning for that particular state of 
 life eternal to which our God shall please to call us. 
 But if these lower gifts are indestructible by death,
 
 212 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 
 
 far more so the loftiest gift of all, the love which 
 makes us likest God, the love of Christ which is shed 
 abroad, even in the hearts of men who never heard 
 his name. If God is love, how can his love within 
 us perish ? The thoughts that " wander through 
 eternity," the conscience which thunders from another 
 world, the love that is lavished for others can a 
 being capable of these things sink into nothingness, 
 and vanish like foam on the water ? Let them believe 
 it who can : I am not so credulous. 
 
 But if this had been all that our Saviour meant, 
 the Sadducees would have been acute enough to 
 answer, Well, Master, this may prove a future life : 
 but how does it bear on our question of the resurrec- 
 tion of the body ? I think our Lord has not for- 
 gotten that. God's everlasting covenant was with 
 Abraham not Abraham's soul, but Abraham body 
 and soul, for the body was expressly brought into the 
 covenant by the seal of circumcision. If therefore 
 the body fell away at Abraham's death, it must 
 sooner or later be raised again to bear its part 
 in the covenant of life eternal. So must it be with 
 Abraham; and so must it be with us and all men, 
 for there is no man that is not in some sort of 
 covenant with God for life eternal. Our own 
 covenant is sealed in Baptism, and ratified in every 
 work we do by faith ; and most of all that body and 
 blood of our Lord Jesus Christ on which we feed by 
 faith shall preserve our body and soul to everlasting 
 life. These are the pledges of his love, the assurances
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 213 
 
 of life transcending space and time, a life that 
 cannot fail to quicken first our mortal body, and then 
 to repair the waste of sin and make this devastated 
 world rejoice with the beauty of our God which 
 fadeth not away, and with the glory of the Lord 
 which is for evermore. 
 
 Is this vision of St. Paul too dreamy, too en- 
 thusiastic in a word, too glorious to be true ? The 
 natural man may well despair as he looks round on a 
 world more than half heathen after nearly nineteen 
 hundred years of Christian preaching, and often very 
 doubtfully Christian even where it calls itself 
 Christian. But what would he have ? Was Christ 
 to bear down the wills of men and make himself a 
 king by force ? If not, two thousand years are as 
 nothing for the colossal task of winning through 
 sinful men the hearty and willing submission of a 
 world of sinners to a Gospel which crucifies the lust 
 of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. 
 You doubters do but play over the surface of human 
 nature, and know little more than children of the 
 tremendous forces working in its depths. Try them 
 for yourselves. Take seriously the struggle I will 
 not say with sin, but only with some habits you know 
 to be wrong. Strive and fight in all your carnal 
 strength. Eemind yourself of duty, call prudence 
 and worldly wisdom to your help, and bring in pride 
 and shame and the keenest darts of ridicule in vain. 
 Then when you have learned in your helplessness the 
 might and mystery of sin, you may think of measuring
 
 214 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 
 
 the mightier power of the love of Christ which over- 
 comes it. You can no more judge that power by the 
 men who resist it than you can judge of learning by 
 a man who cannot read. See what it has done for 
 those who have given themselves to it heart and soul 
 how it has awed and hallowed the most gifted 
 natures, and turned the weakness of common people 
 into strength, and lifted them to heights of loving 
 tenderness and patient courage far above the tales of 
 classic virtue. What must that power be, which 
 already shines so gloriously through the vail of sin ? 
 Far off the day may be, when the kingdoms of the 
 world shall become the kingdoms of our God, but 
 faith can see its coming from afar, and knows as 
 surely as to-morrow's sunrise that in God's own good 
 time we shall all of us come to the measure of the 
 stature of the fulness of Christ. And in that day 
 there shall be no more death, but honour and glory 
 and immortality, with the gift of life eternal crowning 
 all, and joining us for ever to the Lord who loves us.
 
 XXIV. 
 
 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE 
 TRUTH. 
 
 215
 
 " By manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every 
 man's conscience in the sight of God." 2 COR. iv. 2. 
 
 216
 
 XXIV. 
 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH. 1 
 
 . PAUL'S Second Epistle to the Corinthians tells 
 us more than any other of his own life and 
 trials. We get hints elsewhere ; but here he writes 
 with a weight lifted off his mind, and speaks more 
 freely to these repentant sinners than even to his 
 beloved Philippians, who had never gone seriously 
 wrong at all. The verse before us is his description 
 of the Christian ministry, or rather of Christian 
 teaching in the widest sense. So let us take it to 
 pieces clause by clause, and see exactly what he 
 means. 
 
 By manifestation of the truth. The way we come 
 to know spiritual things is sometimes called revelation, 
 sometimes manifestation. If we speak of revelation, 
 we mean that some vail of ignorance and sin is taken 
 away, so that we can see their glory. The glory is 
 there ; and now the thing that hindered us from see- 
 ing it is removed. It is as if the shutters were taken 
 down to let the light shine in : and it is always 
 a work of God, for we never read of man revealing 
 anything spiritual. But manifestation is the common 
 
 1 Emmanuel College, Cambridge, March 4, 1903. 
 217
 
 218 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH 
 
 word in St. Paul, and St. John uses no other in his 
 Gospel. Manifestation means not that the vail is 
 taken away, but that the light shines through it more 
 and more. If the sun rises in a mist, we see its light 
 and feel its warmth long before it melts away the mist. 
 So when Christ says, I will manifest myself to him, 
 he means not that he will do away our ignorance and 
 weakness at a stroke, but that if we love him, ignor- 
 ance and weakness shall not prevent his light from 
 shining on us more and more unto the perfect day. 
 
 When therefore St. Paul speaks of manifestation, 
 he means that none of us can presume to reveal truth. 
 It is no property of ours as the natural man thinks, 
 for it belongs to the eternal world and not to this, 
 so that we can only bear witness to it. Our Saviour 
 came to do no more, and we may do no less. Only if 
 we bear a faithful witness, the truth will shine out 
 of itself, and by its manifestation commend us, as he 
 says, to every man's conscience. There is the teacher's 
 reward on earth not the applause of the world, but 
 the answer of every man's conscience, whether he 
 hear or whether he forbear, Yea, that is truth. It is 
 a reward which may not reach him here ; but it is 
 recorded for the last day. Spiritual truth is not like 
 a statute law which might have been otherwise, and 
 which we must either learn by heart or refer to when 
 we want it. Spiritual truth is God's own thought, 
 and therefore has no variableness nor shadow of 
 turning. And because it is God's nature, it is also 
 man's nature, for man is the image of God. Truths of
 
 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH 219 
 
 history or science are often hard to find ; but spiritual 
 truth is easy, for it is already written in our hearts, 
 if only we are willing to read them. There may be 
 doubt whether this or that is evil-speaking ; but there 
 is no doubt at all that evil-speaking is wrong. If I 
 tell you with St. Paul to put away lying, you all know 
 well enough that this is God's word ; and if I assure 
 you with the Jesuits that you may tell lies almost as 
 often as you please, you all know that this is the devil's 
 word. Even the Jesuit will not deny that it is wrong 
 to tell lies : only he devotes himself to proving that 
 this or that is not telling a lie, and often proves it by 
 arguments which will hardly convince anyone who 
 wishes not to tell lies. 
 
 It is in the sight of God that by manifestation of 
 the truth we commend ourselves to every man's con- 
 science. He sees the listeners as well as the teachers. 
 If conscience is a judge of truth from whose decision 
 there is no appeal in this world, it does not follow 
 that we are free to believe just what we choose 
 to believe. Conscience is not caprice or fancy, and 
 truth is not whatever we choose to believe, but God's 
 thought revealed from heaven to us, and echoed in our 
 hearts, if we are willing to obey. Take an instance 
 from common life the dinners at Corinth, where 
 meats which had been offered to idols were set on the 
 table. Shall I do right in eating of them ? Well, 
 there is no doubt at all that idolatry is wrong : so if 
 I think it idolatry, it is sin for me, whatever it is for 
 somebody else who thinks otherwise. If I am sure
 
 220 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH 
 
 that is not idolatry, I am clear, if that be the only 
 doubt about it. But I am bound to make sure one 
 way or the other if I can : and if I cannot be sure 
 that it is right, conscience will tell me that it is sin 
 for me. 
 
 Conscience and religion are closely connected : but 
 they are not connected on equal terms, for conscience 
 is above religion, and must judge it for us. To con- 
 science our Lord himself appealed in every word he 
 spoke. Judge not according to appearance, but judge 
 the righteous judgment. Why even of yourselves judge 
 ye not what is right ? And St. Paul, " I speak as unto 
 wise men ; judge ye what I say." If ever a man tells 
 you to believe him or his church without by manifesta- 
 tion of the truth commending himself to every man's 
 conscience in the sight of God, you will know for 
 certain that his teaching is none of Christ's. To 
 speak generally, conscience tells us what we ought to 
 do, while religion gives us strength to do it. " He 
 hath shewed thee, man, what is good ; and what 
 doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and 
 to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? " 
 Is not this the voice of conscience ? Yet it still sums 
 up all Christian duty, for our Lord has added nothing 
 to these words of Micah. " Thou knowest the com- 
 mandments," he says to the rich young man. " That 
 ye love one another " is an old commandment, which 
 we had from the beginning : "as I loved you " is not 
 a new commandment, but strength to keep the old 
 which makes the whole a new commandment. We
 
 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH 221 
 
 are weak with sin, and cannot do what conscience 
 tells us we ought to do : therefore while we were yet 
 without strength, in due time Christ died for the un- 
 godly, that where sin abounded grace might much 
 more abound, and be our strength to do our heavenly 
 Father's will. 
 
 Get clear this difference between conscience and 
 religion. Conscience is the voice of God within us, 
 the word of truth and holiness which tells us what 
 we ought to do, and adds no more. Religion is the 
 voice of God without us, the word of grace and power 
 which takes up the work from which the conscience 
 of sinners recoils, and carries it through in Christ 
 to everlasting life. But the two are closely linked 
 together. Eeligion without conscience would not 
 know what to do; conscience without religion could 
 not do it. Yet there are some who try to separate 
 what God has joined together. The natural man does 
 not know the power of sin, and often openly denies 
 or practically forgets that we need any deliverance 
 from sin. Either it is a natural mistake, or it is 
 balanced by the good we do, or at any rate God is 
 merciful, and will not mind it much. But if we do 
 not need to be delivered from sin, we must either give 
 up religion as useless or couple it with conscience as 
 a second means of learning what we ought to do. 
 But then if conscience and religion both do the same 
 thing, do we really need them both ? And if one of 
 them is not wanted, which is it ? 
 
 Some of our unbelievers take their stand on con-
 
 222 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH 
 
 science only. They say truly enough that conscience 
 tells them what they ought to do ; and then they see 
 no need of religion. Well, religion at least the only 
 religion we need now consider tells us that Christ 
 died for us, to deliver us from sin : and if this be true, 
 conscience tells us that we owe some duties to him. 
 The only answer is that he died for nothing of the 
 sort : and this generally means I do not say it 
 always means that sin is only a natural mistake, 
 and that a natural mistake is not enough to call for 
 such a revelation as this from heaven. In this last 
 they may be right : but surely they have conscience 
 itself against them when they try to explain away 
 sin as nothing worse than a stupid mistake. They 
 knew the difference well enough when they were 
 children : how have they managed to forget it now ? 
 
 Extremes meet; so some of our Pharisees at the 
 other end of the scale take their stand on religion 
 only, as if there were no need of conscience. The 
 church says so and so; and there is an end of the 
 matter. But they are really preaching not Christ 
 nor even the church, but simply themselves, for they 
 will not let us question what they teach us. They 
 count it presumption to ask whether the church really 
 says what they tell us, unbelief to insist on knowing 
 precisely what church they mean or by what right it 
 commands us, unpardonable sin to try their teaching 
 by the Saviour's words. This is no caricature of a 
 very common sort of teaching, though I grant it does 
 not always go these outrageous lengths. Very many
 
 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH 223 
 
 of us make ourselves masters upon earth, and forget 
 that one is our master, even the Christ. 
 
 Teaching enforced in this kind of temper is not 
 likely to be true : but were it ever so true, it is put 
 altogether the wrong way. A command is emptied 
 of spiritual power if we are content to deliver it as 
 a mere command, and not as a manifestation of the 
 truth to every man's conscience. We cannot ignore 
 conscience without destroying religion too, for we 
 leave nothing for religion to work on. And what 
 becomes of sin, when the natural questions of con- 
 science which God welcomes in every word he speaks 
 are treated as disobedience ? The church of Eome, 
 for instance, hardly pretends to treat them otherwise. 
 The penalty of counting innocent things as sinful is 
 that really sinful things are hardly taken seriously. 
 We may use very serious language or fix a serious 
 penance ; but we simply cannot see how sinful they 
 are while we mix them up with things which are 
 essentially disobedience to an authority which does 
 not really speak to conscience. 
 
 Yet false doctrine is never wholly false ; and even 
 in this there is a grain of truth which we must confess. 
 Truth is real, and he that refuses it refuses at his 
 peril. If he refuses natural truth, he endangers his 
 natural life ; if he refuses spiritual truth, he risks his 
 spiritual life. So far our Pharisees are right. But 
 we must not pretend to be masters upon earth : 
 we are but humble witnesses of things that we have 
 seen and heard and spiritually known. We bear our
 
 224 BY MANIFESTATION OF THE TRUTH 
 
 witness ; and the answer of your conscience that we 
 are telling you the secrets of your own heart is the 
 manifestation of the truth by which you live. If 
 only you are truly faithful to it, the Spirit of Christ 
 which dwelleth in you shall guide you into all 
 the truth, and raise you up for the last day to life 
 everlasting.
 
 XXV. 
 CHRIST AS GOD.
 
 "But whom say ye that I am ?" MATT. xvi. 15. 
 
 226
 
 XXV. 
 
 CHRIST AS GOD. 1 
 
 OUR Lord has just asked Peter, Who do men say 
 that the Son of Man is ? and heard the various 
 accounts they give of him. " But who do ye say that 
 I am ? " Peter's answer is unhesitating : Thou art 
 the Christ, the Son of the living God. That, how- 
 ever, we need not follow any further. Christ speaks 
 as usual to us all. He asks every church and sect 
 all down the ages, But who do ye say that I am ? 
 and the answers he gets are as various as those 
 which Peter told him. Some say he is God, some 
 say he is man, and some say he is both. We 
 confess ourselves that he is both God and man : 
 God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before 
 the worlds; man, of the substance of his mother, 
 born in the world. Putting this in plain words, it 
 simply means that he is as divine as the Father, as 
 human as ourselves. This is as much as anyone 
 need believe, for the complications of the Athanasian 
 Creed add positively nothing to it but a warning 
 not to explain it away. This, however, is the message 
 of the Gospel ; and we cannot alter it without entirely 
 
 1 Girton College, October 29, 1907. 
 
 227
 
 228 CHRIST AS GOD 
 
 changing it. If he is not perfect God and perfect 
 man, we have borne false witness of him ; and you 
 had much better look out for a new gospel than try 
 to patch up the old one. 
 
 It is a hard saying, I grant. Even if men do 
 not feel their sin, there are plenty of philosophical 
 difficulties in the idea that a man who lived on 
 earth was very God : and if they do, there is a still 
 greater moral difficulty besides. If the heavens are 
 not clean in his sight, how can he be clean that is 
 born of a woman ? The difficulty affects both sides 
 of the question. The more we feel our unworthi- 
 ness, the harder we find it to believe that one who 
 is God has indeed stooped to the likeness of flesh of 
 sin : and the greater the guilt of sin, the more 
 incredible it seems that one who is flesh of our 
 flesh is indeed the high and lofty One that inhabiteth 
 eternity, whose name is Holy. No wonder it has 
 been in all ages a stone of stumbling and a rock 
 of offence. The Jews took up stones to stone him, 
 " because thou being a man makest thyself God " ; 
 the Gnostics of the next century murmured, as they 
 might have said, " because thou being God makest 
 thyself a man " ; and men have stumbled ever since 
 on one side or the other, confessing sometimes his 
 deity, sometimes his manhood, but seldom realizing 
 both at once. The so-called ages of faith confessed 
 indeed both; but their worship of saints is enough 
 to shew that his manhood was unreal to them. So 
 in our own day many a man who calls him the Son
 
 CHRIST AS GOD 229 
 
 of God practically thinks of him as a man ; and 
 many another who calls him a Son of Man will 
 rather explain away his manhood than face the 
 saying that he was in all things tempted like as we 
 are, but without sin. 
 
 Now which is the easier of the two mistakes 
 to worship him as God, and forget that he is man ? 
 or to admire him as a man, and forget that he is 
 God ? It is an impressive fact of early Church 
 History, that as soon as men could collect their 
 thoughts about him, they were much more inclined 
 to deny the manhood which had lived among them 
 than the deity they had spiritually known. The 
 false teaching of the second century doubted rather 
 that he was really man than that he was really 
 God : and as I look down the ages, I am inclined 
 to think this has always been the deeper and more 
 obstinate mistake of the two among serious men. 
 Anyone can see the difficulty of a man being God : 
 but one who knows his own heart is likely to feel 
 more acutely the difficulty of God becoming man. 
 The one is chiefly a question about infinity : the 
 other touches a difficulty we can hardly even see 
 without a deeper sense of sin than some of us possess. 
 
 Yet is the difficulty real after all ? Is it certain 
 that what is man cannot be God, and what is God 
 cannot be man ? If so, there is an end of the 
 Gospel certainly, and I think of all other religion 
 too. We could not imagine a god of any sort, 
 unless we were more or less like the idea we have
 
 2 3 o CHRIST AS GOD 
 
 of him. If there be gods, they must be like us, or 
 we could not know anything about them : and if there 
 be one God, our nature compels us to think of him 
 as at least the best of all that is best in men. And 
 here the sense of sin which makes the difficulty 
 comes in to solve it. The greater the misery, the 
 more it appeals to men for help; and the better 
 the man, the more he feels the appeal. The man 
 who is utterly merciless is utterly hateful : can we 
 throne that hateful thing in heaven ? A father 
 pitieth his children, and even a Samaritan can do 
 mercy: is God alone without pity for men so 
 cancered with sin ? Is not the very misery of sin 
 a witness that sin is tyrannizing over something in 
 us higher than itself ? And if God is the highest 
 we can think of, it follows that the love, the com- 
 passion, the self-sacrifice, which are the highest things 
 we know in men, must be the image of God. Ponder 
 the matter, and you will see that a God who dwells 
 in selfish blessedness is quite unthinkable. A life 
 which is not worthy of man cannot be worthy of 
 God. If ye being evil know how to give your 
 children good gifts, to bear with them, to cherish 
 them, to lay down life itself if need be for them, 
 surely God being good will not do less than sinners 
 do. The everlasting arms must be arms of mercy, 
 and the face behind Nature's merciless laws must 
 be a loving one. 
 
 Yet we say this with fear and trembling. No 
 heathen ever said it plainly in the olden time ; and
 
 CHRIST AS GOD 231 
 
 the unbeliever who says it now has learned it from 
 the Gospel. Dare we count on the love we do not 
 deserve ? What if our unthankfulness has for ever 
 turned God's face away from us ? Nature has no 
 forgiveness : how can we expect any ? We may 
 still hope, but without some sign from another world 
 to give us courage, we dare not more than faintly 
 hope that somehow sin may not be found beyond 
 the reach of mercy. Then like a burst of sunlight 
 comes the overwhelming revelation So God loved 
 the world. As an old writer says, " He hated us 
 not, nor cast us off, nor bare us malice, but had 
 patience with us and long-suffering. He took up 
 our sins himself, and sold his own Son to be a 
 ransom for us, the holy one for sinners, the immortal 
 one for mortal men." Stupendous indeed and far 
 beyond all that we sinners could dare to think is 
 the compassion and self-sacrifice which for us men 
 and for our salvation stooped from the throne of 
 heaven to a cross of shame. We cried for deliver- 
 ance, and Christ has given us victory; for mercy, 
 and he has crowned us with glory and honour ; for 
 life, and he has given us his very self, that we may 
 feed on him and live for ever. No poet's dream is 
 this, no delirium of heated fancy, but a sober fact 
 of life, which thousands of the best and brightest 
 of us have in living verified from age to age, and 
 in living witnessed of its absolute and final certainty. 
 Why should it be thought incredible that he is 
 the Son of God whose Person is a fact of a higher
 
 232 CHRIST AS GOD 
 
 order than the rise and fall of kingdoms ? Was he 
 no more than man, who spake as never man spake, 
 and did works which none other man did ? Why 
 should it be thought incredible that the Son of God 
 came down from heaven to deliver man, when the 
 story is in perfect harmony with the deepest fact 
 of human nature ? And that is not sin. Evil is 
 indeed a grim reality, coming down it may be from 
 a time, if time it be, before the dawn of life on 
 earth; and sin has sunk far deeper in us than we 
 know. But man is an unfathomed deep ; and sin 
 is not the bottom of his nature. Far down below 
 the deep of sin is spread the real deep, the deep 
 from which we cry to God. Our cry may be faint 
 and stifled ; but he will hear whose ears are open. 
 Our cry is unto God, our soul is thirsting for the 
 living God ; yet it is not to the red right hand of 
 power that we cry. Mere omnipotence could only 
 raise us from our death in sin by shattering the 
 moral freedom which makes us better than the 
 beasts. For human love we cry to God, for only 
 human love can touch our heart. The frail and 
 sin-stained thing we see on earth is enough to shew 
 us the power that conquers death and sin, but not 
 to realize the fulness of its might. 
 
 " Thou must save, and thou alone " : 
 
 yet only man can save, for only sinless man can 
 reveal to men that God's heart is full of human love, 
 too strong to waver like these changing moods of
 
 CHRIST AS GOD 233 
 
 ours, yet too tender and unselfish to shrink from 
 any sacrifice that may deliver man, and yet withal 
 no other love than that which he has shed abroad 
 in our hearts, however sin has dimmed its glory. 
 Our cry is answered, our aspirations are fulfilled, in 
 him who is both Son of God and Son of Man, in 
 Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour.
 
 XXVI. 
 FREE FORGIVENESS. 
 
 235
 
 " There was a certain creditor which had two debtors . . . and 
 when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both." 
 LUKE vii. 41.
 
 XXVI. 
 
 FREE FORGIVENESS. 1 
 
 TT7"E all know something of the difference between 
 our Lord's plain teaching and the complicated 
 systems of men ; but the student who knows it best 
 knows also that men are not always to blame for it. 
 There are parts of theology which cannot be made 
 simple, and parts of our Lord's teaching which are not 
 plain. I think you will find that while the revelation 
 of Christ is plain, and our duty plainer still, the 
 difficulties and there are often plenty of them are 
 in the philosophy behind it. For instance, Providence 
 is easy enough to one who comes to it as we all may, 
 in the spirit of a little child, and believes in a heavenly 
 Father who sees all that we do and guides all that 
 comes to pass for our good. The difficulties begin 
 when we ask, How shall this be ? for there are 
 mysteries in everything we know and everything 
 we do, so that a gospel without mystery would be 
 a plain lie. Yet we are perfectly free to ask the 
 question Mary is not rebuked for asking it but if a 
 plain answer cannot always be given to a plain question, 
 we must not grumble if we do not always get one. 
 1 Trinity Church, Leicester, February 2, 1902. 
 
 237
 
 238 FREE FORGIVENESS 
 
 On the Forgiveness of Sins the difference is very 
 striking. It is an easy doctrine, and also a hard one. 
 Many of the wise men cannot see how easy it is, 
 and many of the simple folk have no idea of its 
 hardness. We ask the theologians, and we get 
 learned discussions about prevenient grace and grace 
 of congruity : we ask the Lord himself, and he gives 
 us parables like the Two Debtors, the Unmerciful 
 Servant, and the Prodigal Son, which even a child can 
 understand. He tells us a simple tale of mercy shewn 
 by men ; and if God's mercy is like that, we know 
 what it means. The difficulty is not in understanding 
 him, but in believing him, for our bad conscience tells 
 us at once that the news of forgiveness is much too 
 good to be true. If we do not hate God, we try to 
 forget him, and more than half wish he would forget 
 us, and leave us alone. If he does remember us, we 
 know that we have not given him cause to remember 
 us for good. Yet the Gospel is the news that he 
 loves us in spite of the sin he hates, and is ready to 
 welcome us as the prodigal was welcomed, if only we 
 will arise and go to him. The difficulty is that we 
 do not believe him our bad conscience hinders us 
 and to overcome our unbelief he gave us the strongest 
 assurance of his love, in that Christ died for us 
 while we were yet enemies of God. This assurance 
 is the atonement, which means the reconciliation of 
 our heart to God : and there is no other atonement 
 for sin. 
 
 You will notice that our Lord looks at the matter
 
 FREE FORGIVENESS 239 
 
 in various ways. In two of these parables sin is 
 likened to debt, but in the third to the prodigal's 
 wilfulness, and elsewhere he likens it to a captivity 
 from which we needed to be set free. This is im- 
 portant, for it shews that while sin is like all of 
 them, it is not exactly like any of them, so that we 
 shall go wrong if we take for granted that it is. This 
 indeed is the way most of the mistakes have been 
 made. For example, sin is like a captivity, because 
 it is a miserable bondage ; and Christ has ransomed 
 us from it. But we get into difficulties when we ask 
 who received the ransom. Some said Satan, some said 
 the Father : and both answers are downright immoral. 
 One makes the devil a god ; the other makes God a 
 devil. Clearly the point of the matter is that the 
 ransom has delivered us, and that it cost Christ 
 unspeakable shame and suffering: and this is all. 
 Our Lord likens sin first to one thing, then to another, 
 not only because no one thing can teach us all that 
 we need to know, but because there is no one thing 
 which will not lead us wrong if we refuse to look at 
 other things also. 
 
 Take one famous theory of past ages. Our great 
 archbishop Anselm likened sin to debt. We owe God 
 perfect obedience, and plainly cannot pay it: and 
 even if we could pay it from this day onward, there 
 would still be a debt from the past. Yet it must 
 be paid somehow, said he, before God can justly 
 forgive us. It must be paid by man ; yet only God 
 is able to pay such a debt as that. The only
 
 2 4 o FREE FORGIVENESS 
 
 way out of the difficulty was for God to become 
 man. So the Son of God became man and paid per- 
 fect obedience, and paid it for us: so now we are 
 clear of our debt, and our Father is free to love us 
 again. 
 
 Anselm was a very great thinker: yet here he 
 would have done better if he had set aside his Koman 
 law, and read the parables like a little child. There 
 are many difficulties in his theory ; but there is one 
 clear mistake which I wish to set before you. He 
 takes for granted that the debt must somehow be paid 
 that God would do wrong if he forgave us before 
 somebody or other had paid it. But why so ? Is free 
 forgiveness positively wrong ? Yes, says he. It is 
 admirable no doubt for ourselves ; but God is a great 
 King whose glory we have despised, so that he must 
 have satisfaction before he can forgive. But is it 
 positively wrong for an earthly king to give a free 
 pardon to rebels ? On the contrary, they are not 
 punished simply because they have done wrong, but 
 to prevent them and others from rebelling again, 
 so that the wrong would be in refusing a free 
 pardon, if there were clearly no risk of a new 
 rebellion. Even if there were some risk, it might 
 still be wise to issue a free pardon which would win. 
 over some of the rebels and leave the rest without 
 excuse. Far more must the King of kings be a 
 gracious Lord whose only glory is the welfare of 
 his creatures, more willing to grant than we to ask 
 forgiveness.
 
 FREE FORGIVENESS 241 
 
 At all events, in all three parables the forgiveness 
 is free. The man is no doubt expected to behave well 
 in the future ; but no satisfaction is required for the 
 past. He asks forgiveness, and receives it. When 
 the two debtors had nothing to pay, the creditor freely 
 forgave them both : he did not take the satisfaction 
 of putting them in prison. The unmerciful servant 
 was forgiven his ten thousand talents, and would have 
 heard no more of them if he had not so abominably 
 misbehaved himself. The prodigal indeed does think 
 of satisfaction for the past when he proposes to say, 
 " Make me as one of thy hired servants." But this is 
 the one thing he does not say. He gets through his 
 confession. "Father, I have sinned against heaven 
 and before thee ; I am no more worthy to be called 
 thy son" but there he stops. He does not add, 
 " Make me as one of thy hired servants," because he 
 knows now that even if he is an unworthy son, he has 
 never lost a son's place in his father's heart. So here 
 again for the third time forgiveness is free. Had it 
 been so recorded only once, we might have thought 
 it one of the small things we must not make too 
 much of: but when our Lord makes all the three 
 great parables turn on free forgiveness, we cannot 
 go wrong in thinking it the chief thing he wants to 
 teach us. 
 
 So it is. The news from heaven which we call the 
 
 Gospel is the news of free forgiveness not that God 
 
 will some day forgive us if we do such and such good 
 
 works, but that he has forgiven us in Christ already, 
 
 16
 
 242 FREE FORGIVENESSS 
 
 and in that forgiveness given us power to do the good 
 works. From one end of the New Testament to the 
 other, you will find no hint that God requires any sort 
 of satisfaction for the past. Only confess your sin to 
 him and have done with it, and you shall hear no 
 more of it from him. 
 
 If Wesleyans or Salvation Army men or any others 
 have done a good work on the face of the earth, they 
 have done it only by preaching this gospel of forgive- 
 ness, that Christ has loosed us from our sins. The 
 guilt of the past is done away, and in thankfulness to 
 him is power for the future, that sin may have no 
 more dominion over us. This is the Gospel of Christ ; 
 and his mighty power is in it, whoever preaches it ; and 
 anything else is another gospel which is not another, 
 but no gospel at all. A gospel of terror is the devil's 
 gospel, whoever preaches it. The thunderings and 
 lightenings of almighty power may crush the sinner's 
 courage, and drive him to all sorts of superstition ; 
 but no man ever sinned a sin the less for fear of hell. 
 Out of the heart are the issues of life : and nothing 
 can reach the sinner's heart but the mighty power 
 of free forgiveness, which humbles him to the dust 
 with shame, but only to lift him on his feet again 
 and send him on his way rejoicing, with the heavy 
 burden loosed, the secret cancer cured. From 
 below the reach of terror, below the reach of shame 
 itself, springs the bounding joy of life restored, 
 the joy of sin forgiven, the joy of thankfulness in 
 Christ, the joy of life eternal here on earth. Let
 
 FREE FORGIVENESS 243 
 
 him that will make trial, and see that the Lord is 
 good, 
 
 Who forgiveth all thy sin : 
 
 and healeth all thine infirmities ; 
 Who saveth thy life from destruction : 
 
 and crowneth thee with mercy and loving-kindness.
 
 XXVII. 
 SONS OF GOD. 
 
 245
 
 " He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But 
 as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the 
 sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." JOHN i. 
 11, 12. 
 
 246
 
 XXVII. 
 SONS OF GOD. 
 
 TTTHEN is it that we become children of God? 
 Is it when we are born ? or when we are 
 baptized ? or when we come to Christ by faith ? 
 Here are three opinions which have all been widely 
 held in Christendom : and I believe that each of them 
 is perfectly true in its own sense, so that each of them 
 becomes false when it is used to deny the others. 
 
 First, however, let us make sure what we mean by 
 sons of God. Here we must be careful, for the Son of 
 God who is God as well as man, is a son of God as 
 well as we, for he is not ashamed to call us brethren. 
 Now one of the things I learned from Athanasius 
 is that sonship does not consist in coming after a 
 father, which in the case of the Son of God would be 
 absurd, but in likeness to a father that a son is the 
 image of his father, and not a being of a different 
 kind. A house or a table may be a man's handi- 
 work ; but only a child can be his living likeness. In 
 the same way, a son of God is like God, and he that 
 is like God is a son of God. 
 
 Now likeness is a question of more or less, for one 
 thing may be very like another, or only a little like 
 
 247
 
 248 SONS OF GOD 
 
 it. Christ alone is perfectly like God : we sinners are 
 very imperfectly like him, though some of us are more 
 like him than others, and no man is entirely unlike 
 him. If the ripest saint is likest God, however short 
 he comes of Christ's majestic sinlessness, yet some- 
 times the vilest of sinners will give us flashes of 
 glorious unselfishness which tell us that the Father 
 of Spirits has not disowned him. Again, a son may 
 confess his sonship and behave as a good son should ; 
 or he may throw away his birthright, and even treat 
 his father as an enemy. And though God will not 
 disown his fatherhood or slack his loving care, he may 
 please to give us formal assurance that he will always 
 welcome sinners as children when they come back to 
 him. 
 
 Thus we are children of God by birth, in the sense 
 that God made us in his own image, and that sin has 
 not entirely destroyed that image, though it has made 
 us disobedient children who throw away their birth- 
 right and belie their sonship. Again, we are made 
 children of God in Baptism, in the sense that we there 
 confess our sonship and promise to be what God's 
 children should be, while he owns us for his children 
 and gives us formal promise of a father's welcome 
 whenever we come to him. Yet again, we become 
 children of God when we come to Christ by faith, 
 in the sense that we then give up our disobedi- 
 ence and take up our place as children of God. But 
 we are not made children of God in Baptism or by 
 coming to Christ, in the sense that we were not
 
 SONS OF GOD 
 
 249 
 
 God's children before. Neither are we made children 
 of God by birth or by coming to Christ, in the 
 sense that Baptism is an empty ceremony. Nor 
 yet do we become children of God by birth or in 
 Baptism, in the sense that we can have life without 
 coming to Christ by faith. 
 
 Now which of these three mistakes is most danger- 
 ous in our time ? I think the first. Though there arc 
 plenty of Christians who will not come to Christ, few 
 of them will openly deny that they need to come ; and 
 though there are some who undervalue Baptism, the 
 present fashion leans more to a superstitious reliance 
 on the outward ceremony. But great parties are 
 agreed in denying that we are born sons of God. 
 One recognizes God's promises in Baptism, and makes 
 that the beginning of sonship; the other sees that 
 Baptism does not always make us like God, and 
 allows no sonship till we come to Christ by faith. 
 Scripture cries out against them both. 
 
 My thoughts were drawn this way by a sermon on 
 our text, which argued that those who have not re- 
 ceived power to become sons of God cannot be sons 
 already. This was plausible ; but I cannot think it 
 sound. " He came to his own, and his own received 
 him not." Who are his own ? The word is only 
 found again in the solemn words that " Jesus having 
 loved his own which were in the world, he loved 
 them unto the end." These were no strangers or 
 hired servants, but the men nearest his heart, the 
 friends who had continued with him in his tempta-
 
 250 SONS OF GOD 
 
 tions, who were as his mother and his brethren. So 
 " his own " in our text must be very near to God : and 
 as they are plainly no friends, I conclude that they 
 are disobedient children. But to as many as received 
 him he gave power not here strength or capacity 
 but lawful authority to become sons of God. He 
 rather openly declared them sons than actually made 
 them sons. 
 
 Some therefore were already sons of God before 
 they received that authority ; and nothing is said of 
 the rest. Our text does not compel us to deny that 
 we are all born sons of God; and other passages 
 seem to prove it beyond reasonable doubt. Take 
 some samples. Take our Lord's parable of the 
 Prodigal confessedly the most finished portrait of 
 the sinner he ever drew. The point of the story is 
 not that the prodigal was a stranger who became a 
 son on his return, but that he was always a son, 
 though a wilful and unworthy son : and the com- 
 parison on which the whole parable turns cannot be 
 misleading. Take St. Paul at Athens, speaking to 
 heathens, and frankly accepting the heathen poet's 
 words, For we are also his offspring. Take the 
 writer to the Hebrews, Who speaks of " many sons " 
 of God : and what makes them sons ? Not Baptism, 
 not faith in him who sanctifieth them, but the fact 
 that he and they are all of one Father. " Forasmuch 
 then as the children share in blood and flesh, he also 
 likewise partook of the same." That is, the Son of 
 God was not made man that he might make us
 
 SONS OF GOD 251 
 
 children of God, but because we were already children, 
 and needed to be freed from the slavery of fear which 
 sin had brought upon us before the eternal purpose 
 could be taken up again where sin had interrupted it. 
 And God's eternal purpose for us is something more 
 than innocence or paradise regained. Further and 
 further on the far horizon flits our goal of sinlessness, 
 to those who strive and fall, and strive again through 
 this life's weakness and humiliation : yet it is no 
 more than the starting-point of that life's evergrowing 
 fulness. Little thinks the sinner of the glory and 
 honour of the royal birthright he throws away by sin 
 of the mystery of the eternal counsel, that children 
 of men should be heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ, 
 and rulers of the world to come. 
 
 Through Christ our Saviour's death and resurrec- 
 tion we receive not sonship for the first time, but 
 assurance that we are sons, and power to turn from 
 disobedience to faith. That sonship is just as much 
 Christ's work as our salvation, for by him we were 
 made in the image of God. Sin has not annulled the 
 old Gospel of Genesis, and Christ has not repealed it. 
 God's first word concerning man remains the ground 
 of all Christian teaching. Our message is not that 
 the sinner is no child of his, and needs to become one, 
 but that he is an unworthy child, and needs to turn 
 away from his wickedness and save his life alive. Of 
 all this God gave us full assurance from heaven, in that 
 he gave his Son for the sin of the world to taste of 
 death for every man not for the baptized or for
 
 252 SONS OF GOD 
 
 the elect, but for every man from the saintliest of 
 saints to the vilest of the vile, for they are all children 
 of God on whom he sends the sunshine and the rain 
 of heaven. 
 
 God calls you not by words of mine or other words 
 alone, but by every thought of righteousness and peace 
 and joy that he has ever given you not to become 
 his children, as if he counted you strangers, but to 
 turn away from disobedience, to take up the forgive- 
 ness already bestowed in Christ, and in the strength 
 of thankfulness to walk worthy of your calling, and 
 to rejoice for ever in our Father's love. Is this too 
 hard ? Is it more than flesh and blood can do ? " Not 
 by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the 
 Lord." His grace is sufficient. If any of you lack 
 strength, let him ask help of Christ in time of need, 
 and he shall not ask in vain from him who is able to 
 save to the uttermost every one that cometh to God 
 through him.
 
 XXVIII. 
 FIRST THE BLADE. 
 
 253
 
 " First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the 
 ear." MARK iv. 28. 
 
 254
 
 XXVIII. 
 FIRST THE BLADE. 1 
 
 fTlHE parable of the seed growing silently is little 
 -*- noticed, because it is recorded only by St. Mark : 
 but it is as full of meaning as the more familiar 
 parables of the Sower or the Prodigal. 
 
 As our Lord compares the kingdom of heaven to a 
 corn of wheat which is cast into the ground, we will 
 see how that seed grows. In the first place, it does 
 grow. Its nature is to grow ; and though bad weather 
 may keep it back for awhile, it will grow if it gets 
 into the soil, and that silently and steadily. The 
 farmer sleeps, and does his day's work, and sleeps 
 again ; but the seed is growing all the while. How 
 it grows he cannot tell, for life is a mystery, and 
 Science has not found out the secret even of a grass 
 like that. In the next place, the order of growth is 
 fixed first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn 
 in the ear. Everything in its own time and order : 
 you never saw the fruit before the flower, or the 
 harvest in winter. Then again it grows by taking 
 into itself particles of matter. It feeds on the earth 
 below, and drinks the water of the rain of heaven 
 1 Ridley Hall, Cambridge, February 27, 1903. 
 
 255
 
 256 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 from above ; and without that water it could take up 
 nothing from the soil. Earth and heaven join to feed 
 it ; but the power of life which turns the soil and the 
 rain into leaves and stem and fruit baffles all our 
 efforts to discover it. 
 
 There is yet another point which our Lord does 
 not mention here, though he does elsewhere. Except 
 a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
 alone : but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. 
 And St. Paul, That which thou sowest is not quickened, 
 except it die : and then he reminds us that what rises 
 from the earth is not the seed we sow, but a plant 
 whose glory we could not have discovered from the 
 seed. Such a body God hath given it, according to 
 its kind. 
 
 To this growth our Lord likens the kingdom of 
 heaven. Now the kingdom of heaven is not a thing 
 that can be seen like the kingdom of England. It is 
 wider and older than any church, wider than all the 
 churches put together. It is as wide and as old 
 as the world, for his kingdom ruleth over all. The 
 ground was preparing through unmeasured ages, the 
 seed was sown when the first man became a living 
 soul, and the harvest shall not be fully gathered in 
 till there is no more death. The kingdom stands for 
 God's guiding of all men in all ages before and after 
 Christ : and nothing less can be the meaning of that 
 Catholic Church which we confess to be one. There 
 is no true unity except in Christ: yet every one 
 on the face of the earth who does a work of love
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 257 
 
 is so far one in Christ with us, even though he 
 never heard Christ's name ; for Christ's grace is with 
 him. 
 
 Now let us trace the growth of the kingdom of 
 heaven in the world. First, it does grow. It is like 
 the flowing tide : a wave or two may not tell you 
 much, but presently you will see it washing higher up 
 the rocks. So a generation or two may not tell you 
 much, but in history you will see the rising tide 
 beyond mistake. If the world is far enough yet from 
 being genuinely Christian, and some of its greatest 
 states even now are little better than robbers on the 
 watch, it has without question grown more Christian 
 from age to age. There is more good in it now, and 
 generally good of a higher tone and with a greater 
 influence. Nobody who knows any history can wish 
 to go back to the thirteenth century, or even to the 
 first. Then again it grows in order first the natural, 
 then the spiritual ; first the commands of a law, then 
 the freedom of a gospel ; first the crude ideas we 
 get from single texts, then the wider and worthier 
 thoughts we learn by comparing texts with each 
 other, with the general drift of Scripture, and with 
 God's other words in science and history, in life and 
 conscience. When once the wickedness of a thing, 
 say slavery, is clearly seen, it stands rebuked for ever. 
 Again, the kingdom grows silently, like the corn. It 
 comes not in the noise of war and strife, as if the 
 wrath of man could work the righteousness of God ; 
 nor in the debates of parliaments and church councils, 
 17
 
 258 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 in the drawing up of laws and creeds and ordering of 
 rites and ceremonies, as if it were a work of human 
 wisdom. It comes it is ever coming whenever 
 God gives us a loftier view of truth, a worthier idea 
 of duty, a nobler work of service to our fellow-men. 
 It comes, but no man knoweth how it comes, for life 
 is always a mystery. Yet again, it grows like the 
 corn, by feeding on things of the earth. It is the 
 kingdom, not the visible church, which takes into 
 itself the kingdoms of men, their laws and societies, 
 and grows by transforming them : yet it would have 
 no power to transform them if it were not also drink- 
 ing water of that rain of heaven which makes the 
 wilderness of sin to rejoice, and its desert places to 
 flourish like the garden of the Lord. 
 
 " The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou nearest 
 the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh 
 and whither it goeth : so is every one that is born of 
 the Spirit." The kingdom of God in our own hearts 
 is like the corn again. First, it grows. It may fall 
 by the wayside or on stony ground or be choked 
 among thorns ; but its nature is to grow, and grow it 
 will in every good and faithful heart. But all things 
 in order, like the corn. First that which is natural, 
 then that which is spiritual. The warfare of life 
 must come before the crown of victory, the bitterness 
 of repentance before the joys of love divine, the child- 
 like enthusiasms of the new believer before the 
 chastened graces of the ripened man of God. Our 
 leader learned obedience from the things he suffered,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 259 
 
 and we must let patience have her perfect work before 
 we can enter into the royal rest of God. Yet again, 
 the kingdom grows in silence, like the corn. It 
 comes not in the heroic moments of life, but in the 
 weary times of patient work and waiting ; not in the 
 rioting of spiritual excess, but in the quiet round of 
 common duties, for these are the sacrifices with which 
 God is well pleased. We sleep, and rise night and 
 day, and the seed grows up, we know not how. The 
 unbidden thoughts of good which stir our hearts come 
 to us like strangers from another world so bright 
 they seem, so far above our sordid selves. The life 
 within us is no conquest of our own, but the gift of 
 God in Jesus Christ our Lord. How it grows is 
 more than we know : all that we can do is to cherish 
 it with reverent and loving care. Yet again, the 
 kingdom grows by taking up the things of earth 
 our relations and friends, our business and amuse- 
 ments, and the hopes and fears, and cares and joys 
 that come from them. The richer our earthly life in 
 these things, the richer the material for our heavenly 
 life to feed upon. 
 
 "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 
 Whatever stirs our mortal frame ; 
 They are but ministers of Love, 
 And feed his sacred flame." 
 
 If this is true of the earthly love which springs from 
 the earth and looks up to heaven, still truer is it of 
 the love divine which comes down to us from heaven. 
 On the things of earth the life of heaven feeds ; and
 
 260 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 it can no more do without them than the seed can do 
 without the soil. Such an escape from them as the 
 monk dreams of would only be into a region where 
 goodness is impossible. Yet neither can we transform 
 the things of earth unless we drink the water of the 
 rain of heaven that rain which cometh down out of 
 heaven to become in us a spring of water leaping up 
 to life eternal. 
 
 Yet another likeness. Through death unto life 
 is the law of the spiritual world as well as of the 
 natural. Here again the kingdom of heaven is like 
 the corn of wheat which bears no fruit except it die. 
 Look first at nations. The Three Hundred in the 
 pass gave new life to Greece, and the rout of Cannse 
 lifted Eome to the throne of the world. As with 
 nations, so with churches. The blood of the martyrs 
 is the seed of the church, and the fires of Smithfield 
 are still the candle of the Lord in England. Them 
 that scorn them God will judge ; for that scorn bears 
 witness that they are the children of the men who 
 slew the Just. As with churches, so with men 
 through death unto life. The soul that sinneth, it 
 shall die. The old man in us which sinned must 
 surely die, if we are to put on the new man which 
 after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. 
 The old things are passed away ; behold, they are 
 become new : but they must pass through the gate 
 of death before they can return, still natural desires 
 and earthly things, but natural desires and earthly 
 things transfigured by the powers of the other world,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 261 
 
 and resplendent with the glory of the love of God. 
 This is the word of Christ our Lord his only word 
 repeated with fourfold emphasis by all the four 
 Evangelists He that loveth his life is destroying it ; 
 and he that hateth his life in this world, to life 
 eternal shall he keep it.
 
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 THE USE OF THE SCRIPTURES 
 IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 By Professor W. N. CLARKE, D.D. 
 
 The Bible continues to be the unspeakably precious treasure of Christendom, and 
 will retain its place and power as the manual of Christianity and the book of God for 
 men. But its place and power must be preserved through perfectly frank recognition 
 of the facts concerning it, and use of it for exactly what it is. Modern study shows it 
 to be in some important respects a different book from what it has been thought to be, 
 and it is necessary that we learn to use it in a manner that corresponds to its character 
 thus ascertained.
 
 T. and T, Clark's Publications. 
 
 By Rev. ALFRED PLUMMER, P.P. 
 
 THE SATURDAY REVIEW says: 'It is a real boon to have a series 
 of popular and interesting lectures on the Reformation by a loyal 
 churchman such as Dr. Plummer.' 
 
 NEW VOLUME NOW READY. 
 
 ENGLISH CHURCH HISTORY. 
 
 From the Death of King Henry VII. to the Death of 
 Archbishop Parker (1509-1575). 
 
 By the Rev. ALFRED PLUMMER, D.D., 
 Late Master of University College, Durham. 
 
 Crown 8vo, price 3s. net. 
 
 %* This is a companion Volume to the Author's recent work on the 
 period from the Death of Archbishop Parker to the Death of King 
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 admirable book,' adding, 'The characters are skilfully drawn, and 
 live and move before us. We cannot too highly commend these lectures, 
 which sustain interest and attention from beginning to end.' 
 
 'We have much pleasure in strongly recommending this book. It is 
 the work of a scholar who possesses all the qualifications to make history 
 readable.' Church Bells. 
 
 RECENTLY PUBLISHED. 
 
 ENGLISH CHURCH HISTORY. 
 
 From the Death of Archbishop Parker to the Death of 
 
 King Charles I. 
 FOUR LECTURES. 
 
 By the Rev. ALFRED PLUMMER, D.D., 
 
 Late Master of University College, Durham. 
 
 Crown 8vo, price 3s. ^^ net. 
 
 ' The treatment is succinct, dispassionate, and fair, the style is clear 
 and strong ; aud this volume will form a useful introduction to the study 
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 Cbe 
 
 Intentatimml 
 
 ffixfrrarg. 
 
 UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF 
 
 THE REV. CHAKLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., D.LiT., 
 
 Professor of Theological Encydopa'dia and Symbolics, 
 Union Theological Seminary, New York ; 
 
 THE LATE REV. STEWART D. F. SALMOND, D.D., 
 
 Principal, and Professor of Systematic Theology and New Testament Exegesis, 
 United Free Church College, Aberdeen. 
 
 Tills Library is designed to cover the whole field of Christian Theology. Each 
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 carefully planned wlwU. It is intended to form a Series of Text-Books for 
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 the several branches of study assigned to them. They will be associated with each 
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 adequately represent theprese.nl condition of investigation. 
 
 TWELVE VOLUMES OF THE SERIES ARE NOW READY, viz. : 
 
 An Introduction to the Literature of 
 the Old Testament. 
 
 Christian Ethics. 
 
 Apologetics. 
 
 History of Christian Doctrine. 
 
 A History of Christianity in the Apostolic 
 Age. 
 
 Christian Institutions. 
 The Christian Pastor. 
 The Theology of the New Testament. 
 
 By S. R. DRIVER, D.D., D.Litt., Regius 
 Professor of Hebrew, and Canon of Christ 
 Church, Oxford. [Seventh Edition. 125. 
 
 By NEWMAN SMYTH, D.D., Pastor of the 
 First Congregational Church, New Haven, 
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 By the late A. B. BRUCE, D.D., Professor of 
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 of Ecclesiastical History, Yale University, 
 New Haven, Conn. [Second Edition. 125. 
 
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 D.D., Professor of Church History, Union 
 Theological Seminary, New York. [izs. 
 
 By A. y. G. ALLEN, D.D. ; Professor of 
 Ecclesiastical History, Episcopal Theo- 
 logical School, Cambridge, Mass. [125. 
 
 By WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D., LL.D., 
 Pastor of Congregational Church, Colum- 
 bus, Ohio. [ios. 6d. 
 
 By GEORGE B. STEVENS, D.D., LL.D., Pro- 
 fessor of Systematic Theology in Yale 
 University, U.S.A. [125.
 
 <f nttritattonal 
 
 continued. 
 
 The Ancient Catholic Church. 
 
 Old Testament History. 
 
 The Theology of the Old Testament. 
 
 Doctrine of Salvation. 
 
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 New College, Edinburgh. [izs. 
 
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 History, Amherst College, U.S.A. [125. 
 
 By the late A. B. DAVIDSON, D.D., LL.D. 
 Edited by the late Principal SALMOND, 
 D.D. [i2s. 
 
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 Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale 
 University. [125. 
 
 VOLUMES IN PREPARATION : 
 
 The Reformation. (In Two Vols.) 
 
 The Literature of the New Testament. 
 
 Contemporary History of the Old Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 The Early Latin Church. 
 
 Canon and Text of the New Testament. 
 
 Contemporary History of the New Testa- 
 ment. 
 Philosophy of Eeligion. 
 
 Later Latin Church. 
 
 The Christian Preacher. 
 
 The Greek and Oriental Churches. 
 
 Biblical Archaeology. 
 
 The History of Religions. 
 
 Doctrine of God. 
 
 Doctrine of Christ. 
 
 Doctrine of Man. 
 
 Canon and Text of the Old Testament. 
 
 The Life of Christ. 
 Christian Symbolics. 
 Rabbinical Literature. 
 
 By T. M. LINDSAY, D.D., Principal of the 
 United Free College, Glasgow. 
 
 By JAMES MOFFATT, D.D., United Free 
 
 Church, Dundonald, Scotland. 
 
 By FRANCIS BROWN, D.D., D.Lit., Pro- 
 fessor oi Hebrew and Cognate Languages, 
 Union Theological Seminary, New York. 
 
 By CHARLES BIGG, D.D., Regius Professor 
 of Church History, and Canon of Christ 
 Church, Oxford. 
 
 By CASPAR RENE GREGORY, D.D., LL.D., 
 Professor in the University of Leipzig. 
 
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 versity, New Haven, Conn. 
 
 By ROBERT FLINT, D.D., LL.D., Emeritus 
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 burgh. 
 
 By E. W. WATSOV, M.A., Professor of 
 Church History, King's College, London. 
 
 By W. T. DAVISON, D.D., Tutor in System- 
 atic Theology, Richmond College, Surrey. 
 
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 By G. BUCHANAN GRAY, D.D., Professor 
 of Hebrew, Mansfield College, Oxford. 
 
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 fessor in Harvard University. 
 
 By WILLIAM N. CLARKE, D.D., Professor 
 of Systematic Theology, Hamilton Theo- 
 logical Seminary, N.Y. 
 
 By H. R. MACKINTOSH, Ph.D., Professor 
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 Edinburgh. 
 
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 fessor of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. 
 
 By F. C. BUKKITT, M.A., University Lec- 
 turer on Palaography, Trinity College, 
 Cambridge. 
 
 By WILLIAM SANDAY, D.D., LL.D., Lady 
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 of Christ Church, Oxford. 
 
 By C. A. BRIGGS, D.D., D.Lit., Professor of 
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 Union Theological Seminary, New York. 
 
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 that the selection of tlie subjects to be treated, and the proportion of space 
 assigned to each, must reflect to some extent the personality of the author, 
 obliging him to tell what connected impressions he has gained from the wide 
 survey. Otherwise the work would become a small dictionary of Christian 
 antiquities, or a series of brief, imperfect monographs. Hitherto no attempt 
 lias been made in a formal manner to study the institutions of Christianity 
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 requires to be defined. Its expansion to cover creeds and doctrines, as well as 
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 A HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN 
 
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 BY ARTHUR CUSHMAN McGIFFEET, PH.D., D.D., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, 
 NEW YORK. 
 
 ' Nowhere will the reader gain a clearer conception of the whole movement, 
 and of the significance of Paul's Epistles in relation to it, than in these pages. 
 . . . This book will be invaluable as a resume of the latest critical work upon 
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 which, as the production of a man still young, must be pronounced wonder- 
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 language.' Critical Review. 
 
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 an ancient and noble work of art buried beneath successive layers of plaster 
 in some old cathedral, and removes the plaster and brings back the ancient 
 and forgotten picture to the light. ... In promoting the better understanding 
 of this gospel, as understood by Paul, and in bringing about that revival of 
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 a large part.' Outlook. 
 
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