EX LIBRIS 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 FROM THE FUND 
 
 ESTABLISHED AT YALE 
 
 IN 1927 BY 
 
 WILLIAM H. CROCKER 
 
 OF THE CLASS OF 1882 
 
 SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL 
 
 YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
i 
 
UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
Other Books by the Same Author 
 
 THE creed of JESUS and OTHER SERMONS 
 
 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CROSS 
 
 HYMNS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 Edited by H. S. Coffin and A. W. Vernon 
 
 The Same for Use in Baptist Churches 
 Rev. Charles W. Gilkey, Co-editor 
 
 SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS 
 
 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WITH A CHRIS- 
 TIAN APPLICATION TO PRESENT 
 CONDITIONS 
 
UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 By 
 HENRY SLOANE COFFIN 
 
 Minister in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church 
 and Associate Professor in the Union Theologi- 
 cal Seminary, New York City 
 
 New Haven: Yale Univeksity Press 
 
 London: Humphrey Milford 
 
 Oxford University Press 
 
 MDCCCCXIV 
 

 coftright, 1914 
 By Yale University Press 
 
 First published, April, 1914 
 Second printing, March, 1918 
 
To My Father 
 EDMUND COFFIN 
 
 Yale *66 
 
 646532 
 
1 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These sermons have been preached in 
 the chapels of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, 
 Columbia, Brown, New York and Chicago 
 Universities, and of Williams, Dartmouth, 
 Wellesley, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke and Bryn 
 Mawr Colleges. Some of them have been 
 dehvered at the Conferences of the Young 
 Men's and Young Women's Christian 
 Associations at Northfield and Silver Bay. 
 They are published as they were spoken; 
 and they are necessarily colloquial. They 
 were preached to congregations of students 
 having similar needs; and the same ideas 
 recur in them frequently. The only reason 
 for their publication is the desire that has 
 been expressed to possess them in printed 
 form, and to be able to pass them on to 
 others, whose religious wants they may 
 possibly help to bring to the only Source 
 of supply. 
 
 December, 1913. 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. 
 
 Three Stages in Religious Experience 
 
 1 
 
 II. 
 
 Religious Prepossessions 
 
 19 
 
 III. 
 
 The Finality of Jesus 
 
 36 
 
 IV. 
 
 Abilities Suicidally Used . 
 
 57 
 
 V. 
 
 The Claims of the Church upon 
 
 
 
 Christians 
 
 76 
 
 VI. 
 
 Fools for a Purpose 
 
 90 
 
 VII. 
 
 Revelation by Concealment 
 
 108 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Religious Faculty 
 
 126 
 
 IX. 
 
 Unexpected Sympathy 
 
 142 
 
 X. 
 
 The Christian Thought of God . 
 
 160 
 
 XI. 
 
 Faith and Growing Knowledge . 
 
 176 
 
 XII. 
 
 The Fallacy of Origins . 
 
 192 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Reality of God . 
 
 211 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Religion— a Load or a Lift? 
 
 227 
 
 XV. 
 
 The Old, Old Story . 
 
 243 
 
THREE STAGES IN RELIGIOUS 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 Ezekiel 1 : 6, 28. The likeness of four living 
 creatures. The likeness of a man. The likeness of 
 the glory of Jehovah. 
 
 In Ezekiel's somewhat fantastic vision 
 there seems to be a mingling of three ele- 
 ments which successively attract attention. 
 We see first the subhmnan element; the 
 stormy wind, great cloud, flashing flame, 
 the living creatures with their strange 
 forms, wings and wheels, and with move- 
 ments comparable to a streak of lightning. 
 Next, intermixed with all this and becoming 
 more and more prominent, we see a human 
 element; the living creatures have the like- 
 ness of a man, the hands of a man under 
 their wings, the face of a man. Then, 
 mingling with all and at length occupying 
 our entire thought, is a divine element. 
 "The Spirit of life" controls the movements 
 of the wheels, the noise of the wings of the 
 
2 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 creatures is like the voice of the Almighty, 
 and, as we scan the human figure, there is 
 "brightness round about him." "As the 
 appearance of the bow that is in the cloud 
 in the day of rain, so was the appearance of 
 the brightness round about. This was the 
 appearance of the likeness of the glory of 
 Jehovah. And when I saw it, I fell upon 
 my face." 
 
 The successive elements in Ezekiel's 
 vision suggest stages through which many 
 of us pass in our religious experiences. 
 God, as we conceive of Him in childhood, 
 and perhaps in later life if our rehgious 
 ideas remain childish, is a mysterious and 
 magical creature not unlike Ezekiel's com- 
 pound of wind, cloud, flame, wings, wheels, 
 lightning. His face is the face of a man, 
 but His movements and methods are like 
 those of a benevolent but capricious fairy; 
 and it is the unmanlike in Him, that in which 
 He is utterly different from us, which 
 attracts our notice and commands our 
 admiration. 
 
 We were told that the Bible was God's 
 Book. That meant to us its unlikeness to 
 all other books, its freedom from any imper- 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 3 
 
 f ection or mistake, its accounts of wonderful 
 happenings such as never take place now- 
 adays — angels talking with men, dreams 
 like Jacob's or Joseph's or King Pharaoh's, 
 the parting waters of the Red Sea before 
 Moses and of the Jordan before Joshua, 
 Elijah carried to heaven in a chariot of fire, 
 the three brave Israelites unharmed in the 
 burning furnace and Daniel untouched in 
 the lions' den, animals entering into the 
 affairs of men like Balaam's ass and Jonah's 
 whale. Its miraculous stories offered no 
 difficulty to us ; they were what we expected 
 in God's Book; without them the Book 
 would not have had its fascination for us, 
 nor would it have impressed us as sufficiently 
 wonderful to be divine. 
 
 We were told that Jesus was God's Son. 
 Our minds naturally dwelt on His bright 
 home in heaven, unlike anything in the 
 world. His great love in coming down to 
 our earth and sharing human life, and on the 
 extraordinary events in the Gospel story — 
 the carolling angels at His birth, the Voice 
 that spoke to Him out of heaven, the 
 attacks of the tempter instantly repelled, 
 the water changed to wine, the winds and 
 
4 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 waves stilled by a word, the thousands fed 
 with one little boy's supper, the walking on 
 the sea, the raising of the dead, His own 
 rising from the grave and ascent into the 
 sky. These incidents not only did not 
 trouble us, they were the most interesting 
 and helpful parts of the narrative. They 
 fitted in exactly with our thought of what 
 God's Son would be and do. God was a 
 big fairy and naturally His Son would be 
 fairylike. It was far less entertaining for 
 us to hear and much harder to believe pas- 
 sages where Jesus appears to be tired out, 
 or unable to perform a mighty work, or 
 ignorant of some future event. 
 
 We were told to pray, and we asked God 
 for anything it came into our heads to think 
 we wanted. The notion of a law-abiding 
 universe, the idea that we must cooperate 
 with God to answer prayer, never occurred 
 to us. Augustine speaks of himself in 
 childhood as praying "though small^ yet 
 with no small earnestness that I might not 
 be beaten at school," but it never entered his 
 mind that the avoiding of the beating was 
 a matter in which he could materially assist 
 the Almighty. 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 5 
 
 Our religious life was on the creature 
 level in that it was predominantly selfish. 
 The world exists for children, not they for 
 the world. 
 
 All the world I saw or knew 
 Seemed a complex Chinese toy. 
 Fashioned for a barefoot boy. 
 
 It was frankly more blessed for us to receive 
 than to give, and our petitions were personal 
 pleas like the little Augustine's, or if our 
 
 Now I lay me down to sleep, 
 
 I pray the Lord my soul to keep, 
 
 concluded with pleas for blessings on others, 
 they were those whose lives meant much to 
 us — parents, brother, sister, nurse, friends. 
 When Dr. Thomas Arnold went to Rugby 
 he wrote: "My object will be if possible 
 to form Christian men, for Christian boys 
 I can scarcely hope to make; I mean that 
 from the natural imperfect state of boy- 
 hood, they are not susceptible of Christian 
 principles in their full development, and I 
 suspect that a low standard of morals in 
 many respects must be tolerated amongst 
 
6 UNIVERSITY SERMONS ^ 
 
 them." He lived to modify this opinion; 
 but he was correct in recognizing that much 
 of Jesus' teaching finds nothing to take hold 
 on in children. They can revere and adore 
 the winged creature, they cannot appreciate 
 the man. 
 
 Inasmuch as our imaginations were keen, 
 God seemed very real to us. Many children 
 have shared the experience Faber describes 
 in "The God of My Childhood": 
 
 God, who wert my childhood's love. 
 My boyhood's pure delight, 
 
 A presence felt the livelong day, 
 A welcome fear at night, — 
 
 At school Thou wert a kindly Face 
 
 Which I could almost see; 
 But home and holyday appeared 
 
 Somehow more full of Thee. 
 
 1 could not sleep unless Thy Hand 
 Were underneath my head, 
 
 That I might kiss it, if I lay 
 Wakeful upon my bed. 
 
 And quite alone I never felt — 
 
 I knew that Thou wert near, 
 A silence tingling in the room, 
 
 A strangely pleasant fear. 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 7 
 
 But the years which immediately follow 
 childhood are a disillusionizing period. We 
 discover beneath the wings of all our fairy 
 creatures the hands of a man. Santa Claus 
 gives place to affectionate people, and 
 Christmas loses its mysterious delight. 
 Prayer proves to be but the preliminary 
 to effort, a program we must carry out with 
 God, and almost inevitably we pray less. 
 Our studies as we advance give us a world 
 of law, and we are likely to lose the sense 
 of personal touch with the Lawgiver. 
 
 The Bible becomes a book of human 
 experience. Its science, history, morals, 
 religious ideas impress us often as very 
 crude. We are struck with the resemblance 
 of Israel's religion at many points to the 
 religions of other peoples. And as for the 
 miraculous stories, we class them with the 
 legends we have learned to expect in all 
 early literature. Instead of being unlike 
 all other books, the Bible seems to us 
 so entirely like many others, that we lose 
 sight altogether of its uniqueness. 
 
 Jesus becomes for us frankly a man. We 
 admire His heroism. His broad-mindedness. 
 His loyalty to truth. His glorious self- 
 
8 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 sacrifice; but we also recognize what we 
 consider His limitations, the extent to which 
 He shared the world-view of His contem- 
 poraries, believing in to us such unbeliev- 
 able beings as demons, and attributing 
 diseases and insanity to their sinister 
 activity. The miraculous tales about Him 
 we either explain as instances of the power 
 of a superior mind over others, or regard 
 as poetic expressions of spiritual truths. 
 
 Contact with fact has sobered and perhaps 
 dulled our imagination, so that we have 
 lost the sense we once possessed of God's 
 nearness. 
 
 I remember, I remember 
 
 The fir trees, dark and high; 
 
 I used to think their slender tops 
 Were close against the sky 
 
 is followed by the regretful 
 
 Now 'tis little joy 
 To know I'm farther off from heaven 
 Than when I was a boy. 
 
 Thomas Hood was really sighing for a 
 passed fancy, not a passed faith; but since 
 faith must picture Him in whom it believes. 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 9 
 
 the change in the picture may seriously 
 shake the faith. 
 
 There are some manifest gains in this 
 complete humanizing of our religion. We 
 appreciate and try to practice much of the 
 teaching of the Bible, particularly the 
 words of Jesus, that meant nothing to us 
 before. We enter with enthusiasm into 
 Jesus' hope of the Kingdom of Heaven on 
 earth, the social order in which men deal 
 justly, kindly and faithfully with one 
 another, and love is supreme. We discover 
 for ourselves that it is more blessed to give 
 than to receive, and all the earnestness we 
 used to put into our prayers to God goes 
 into our service of men. We form strong 
 friendships that were quite impossible to 
 childhood, and begin to explore the height, 
 breadth, depth and length of love. Devo- 
 tion to duty, honesty in dealing with truth, 
 consecration to humanity make up our 
 religion. We are content to accept the 
 statement of ^ir Edward Burne- Jones: 
 "There is only one religion ; *Make the most 
 of your best for the sake of others' is the 
 Catholic Faith, which except a man believe 
 faithfully he cannot be saved." 
 
10 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 In a very real sense Jesus means more to 
 us than He ever did. We have exchanged 
 a good fairy for a human brother, tempted 
 in all points like as we are. We draw from 
 the biography of this limited Man, as we 
 now consider Him, a sympathy and an 
 inspiration we never found there before. 
 We prefer to think that He was born as all 
 men have been, had to acquire His force of 
 will by struggle, had to hold His hopes in 
 the face of discouragement and apparent 
 defeat, had to battle to keep His faith in 
 God. 
 
 But just there, perhaps, we part company 
 with Him; we are not sure that we have 
 faith in God. At all events, we have lost 
 that feeling of God's actual comradeship. 
 His personal interest in and presence with 
 us, which was so strong in childhood. If 
 there is something we think should be done, 
 we rely on planning and not on praying. If 
 we are tempted, we do not think of Him 
 who can send a guardian angel to defend 
 us, or stand Himself at our side with flaming 
 sword, but smnmon up our self-reliance and 
 resolve to keep our self-respect. If we are 
 saddened and disappointed, if life goes 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 11 
 
 against us and our heart aches, we do not 
 run to a mother-like Deity to be soothed 
 and comforted, but rather say, with Henley: 
 
 Out of the night that covers me, 
 Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
 
 I thank whatever gods may be 
 For my unconquerable soul. 
 
 In the fell clutch of circumstance 
 I have not winced nor cried aloud; 
 
 Under the bludgeonings of chance 
 My head is bloody, but unbowed. 
 
 But have we lost nothing? We used to 
 be genuinely frightened as children when 
 we were naughty: "Thou, God, seest me." 
 Now, provided nobody finds out, we are 
 not much troubled by secret iniquities. If 
 we had something difficult to do, it was 
 strengthening to feel that an Almighty 
 Partner helped us do it. There was infinite 
 comfort in thinking that a great, kind Heart 
 was touched by aU our pains, that a Hand 
 reached down and held us up when we 
 stumbled, that an Ear was always open to 
 receive the confidences we were too shy to 
 give anyone else, and a Father up yonder 
 
12 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 understood us as nobody else could. When 
 we walked through a dark place it took the 
 lump out of our throat to hear a Voice 
 whispering, "Fear not ; I am with thee." 
 
 Perhaps we find ourselves in circum- 
 stances where we cannot help praying; and 
 when we actually pray, it does not seem so 
 utterly unreasonable. It is not that we get 
 the things we pray for without effort, but 
 we have a sense of getting Someone who 
 shares the effort with us. And if we keep 
 reading this Book which we regard as a 
 collection of human literature, we discover 
 that there is something in it that inspires us 
 as no other literature. It seems to appeal 
 to us at more points of our complex beings, 
 to fit into every conceivable situation in 
 which we happen to be, to meet us at deeper 
 levels and to raise us to greater heights. 
 Whatever our theory of its inspiration, we 
 feel that this collection of writings inspires 
 us with stronger, wiser, better impulses, 
 principles, purposes than any other book. 
 
 If we think often enough of the entirely 
 human Jesus, our admiration grows to 
 adoration. We find ourselves not applaud- 
 ing Him; we bow our heads in reverence. 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 13 
 
 If we do more than think of Him, if we 
 honestly try to follow Him merely as a 
 man, using His methods in our dealings 
 with men, facing perplexities, suffering, 
 defeat, with His courage and hope, we find 
 ourselves receiving from Him quite ines- 
 timable inspiration. We are amazed at the 
 fullness of love, of patience, of bravery, 
 there is in Him. We wonder if His expla- 
 nation of its source may not after all be 
 correct. Was there really a God, the Father 
 whom He trusted so implicitly as Lord of 
 heaven and earth, in fellowship with Him? 
 If there was, is there such a God still? Is 
 not this the most reasonable explanation of 
 the sense of companionship which we find 
 when we are driven to pray? 
 
 And if there be such a Father, must He 
 not have wished to speak with His chil- 
 dren — must He not have spoken? And are 
 not these inspirations which come to us from 
 the Bible His word through those who best 
 understood Him? To be sure, that word 
 came through entirely human experiences, 
 through men who were often imperfect and 
 mistaken, but however it came it does inspire 
 us now. "As the appearance of the bow 
 
14 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 that is in the cloud in the day of rain," so 
 is the appearance round about the Bible. 
 Light streams from it — a completely human 
 book with all the defects inevitable in what 
 men do, but through the human the divine, 
 the word of God. 
 
 And if there be such a Father, must He 
 not have wished to give His children a cor- 
 rect likeness of Himself? When we feel 
 constrained to adore Jesus, are we idolaters, 
 or is He the expression of God in a human 
 life? When we draw on His fullness and 
 discover unsearchable riches, is it not because 
 in Him we find the embodiment of God's 
 character? Is it not because He, like God, 
 is love? We are not looking for divinity 
 now in the extraordinary and unhuman 
 things about Him, we are finding His 
 humanity divine. His complete manhood, in 
 which He is bone of our bone and flesh of 
 our flesh. His very Godhood. Taking Him 
 as a man, and nothing more than a man, 
 we are constrained to place Him upon the 
 throne of our lives as our ideal, the Master 
 we cannot but obey. And as we obey the 
 Man, there is "a brightness round about 
 Him." We say: "If I ever worship a God, 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 15 
 
 He must be the duplicate of this Man. A 
 God unlike Him I refuse to worship, 
 because I know a diviner than He." If we 
 accept Jesus' own thought of His Father 
 we find that Father's character reproduced 
 in Jesus. This man is "the appearance of 
 the likeness of the glory of Jehovah"; and 
 when we see Him we fall upon our faces. 
 
 In humanizing our religion we have not 
 lost our God. We exchanged a good fairy 
 for a brother, and in the brother we have 
 discovered our Lord. 
 
 So I beheld my God, in childhood's morn, 
 A mist, a darkness, great and far apart. 
 Moveless and dim — I scarce could say. Thou art. 
 My manhood came, of joy and sadness born — 
 Full soon the misty dark, asunder torn, 
 Revealed man's glory, God's great human heart. 
 
 There is a childhood to be outgrown and 
 a childhood to be grown up to. When once 
 we have become not orphans, however self- 
 reliant, but trusting children, seeing God 
 in the human, in Jesus, and in aU that is 
 Jesus-like in any man, we are not quite so 
 eager to label childish all the extraordinary 
 elements in the Bible and about Jesus that 
 
16 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 fascinated our childhood's imagination. We 
 lay no emphasis on them. We do not say- 
 to any man, "You must believe them"; we 
 say, "You may." We resent the literalist 
 on the one hand, and the rationalist on the 
 other, who would reduce all the poetry of 
 religion to bald prose. The heart of a little 
 child demands that his faith shall have scope 
 for fancy. Of course we do not see in 
 unusual occurrences past or present any- 
 thing peculiarly Godhke, for the regular 
 and ordinary are equally divine ; nor can the 
 unhuman be diviner than the human, for our 
 God has been most fully disclosed in a Man. 
 But we discover that "human" is a much 
 more expansive adjective than we had 
 thought. We come to know men and women 
 who do more and better things than the best 
 fairy we ever heard of. We live with human 
 beings who are as angels of light. We are 
 not troubled with the marvellous in the past ; 
 our present is too full of startling surprises ; 
 even if these events of long ago are not all 
 to be taken as literal history, they may con- 
 tain elements of prophecy; they are symbols 
 of faith and hope. We are working and 
 waiting for a day when even Jesus shall be 
 
I 
 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 17 
 
 no longer unique, but when "God shall be 
 aU in aU." 
 
 Meantime we see our God in Jesus. We 
 cannot prove His deity to anybody who does 
 not make Him God by giving Him his 
 entire devotion. And whoever does, needs 
 no proofs. We accord this human Brother 
 all our reverence, all our trust, all our ser- 
 vice, and we do not rob His and our Father; 
 for He and the Father are one in purpose. 
 We draw upon Him for what God only 
 can supply, and we are not disappointed. 
 He does all for us God can do, for the 
 Father touches us personally through Him 
 and opens up His unsearchable riches in 
 Him. We live to make Him Lord over all, 
 assured that the loyalty yielded to Him is 
 yielded to the Father to whom He gives 
 back the Kingdom, and that in Him all 
 men, as we, will find the fullness of the God- 
 head bodily. We do not dehumanize Him; 
 He is first of all and entirely Man ; but that 
 does not mean that He is not also the com- 
 plete revelation of God. When we survey 
 the wondrous cross we see Man at his 
 highest ; and that for us is God at His best. 
 "This is the appearance of the likeness of 
 
18 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 the glory of Jehovah. And when I saw it, 
 I fell upon my face." 
 
 Love so amazing, so divine, 
 Demands my soul, my life, my all. 
 
II 
 
 RELIGIOUS PREPOSSESSIONS 
 
 Hebrews 11:6. He that cometh to God must 
 believe that He is. 
 
 This remark seems on the one hand a 
 truism. How can a man approach a God 
 who has no real existence for him? Would 
 anyone think of coining to God unless he 
 thought there were such a Being? What a 
 platitude to tell us that he that cometh to 
 God must believe that He is! And on the 
 other hand it sounds harsh and forbidding. 
 The most earnest believers have their 
 moments of uncertainty. Ours is an odd 
 world, and there are some ugly facts that 
 make God, or at all events the Christian 
 God, appear highly incredible. Even so 
 staunch a man of faith as Luther confessed, 
 "At times I believe and at times I doubt"; 
 and there is a letter of Hugh Latimer to 
 his fellow-martyr Ridley, in which he pleads : 
 "Pardon me and pray for me; pray for me, 
 I say. For I am sometimes so fearful, that 
 
20 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 I would creep into a mouse-hole; sometimes 
 God doth visit me again with His comfort. 
 So He Cometh and goeth." And in the 
 hour when God is gone, when the mind 
 oscillates between believing that He still 
 exists somewhere and believing that He has 
 never come at all, is there no chance for the 
 heart to go in search of Him through clouds 
 and darkness, if haply there be a God to feel 
 after and find? Is there no place in religion 
 for the prayer, "O God, if there be a God, 
 save my soul, if I have a soul" ? There is a 
 rigid exclusiveness in the sentence, "He that 
 cometh to God must believe that He is." 
 Has not our author been too dogmatic? 
 
 Let us see what he means. 
 
 He does not say, "He that cometh to God 
 must feel that He is a real Being." We 
 know what it is to feel the presence of some- 
 one in the room. We know the sensation 
 of loneliness when we are by ourselves; we 
 have a different feeling when we are aware 
 of the other's presence, even if the room be 
 so dark that we cannot see him and he never 
 utters a syllable to us. Many, perhaps all, 
 religious people have times when they sense 
 God's presence exactly as they sense the 
 
RELIGIOUS PREPOSSESSIONS 21 
 
 presence of a man of flesh and blood. But 
 this vivid realization of the Unseen requires 
 the use of the imagination. Imaginative- 
 ness varies in different temperaments, and 
 in the same person at different ages. Santa 
 Claus and fairies are entirely real to some 
 children; they can hear the former up the 
 chimney and fancy the latter in a park on 
 a spring day. If in coming to God we must 
 feel His reality and fancy Him actually 
 present, it is much harder for an adult to 
 come to Him than for a child, and as we 
 grow up we grow away from God. 
 
 Further, such feelings, like all feelings, 
 fluctuate. They seldom move on a level 
 plain; their course is over mountains and 
 valleys. The weather, our health, circum- 
 stances take them up or down, and lift us 
 to heights where God seems entirely clear 
 and near, or drop us to abysmal depths 
 whence He appears to be utterly excluded. 
 
 And even when we feel ourselves in touch 
 with God may it not be merely an imagi- 
 nation? And without consciousness of His 
 existence, may we not be firmly in His hand, 
 living and moving and having our being in 
 Him? Smugly self-righteous people fancy 
 
22 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 themselves God's intimates and speak of 
 blessed interviews with Him which are 
 entirely real to them; while their acquaint- 
 ances are certain that, if there be a God, He 
 has singularly little influence for good upon 
 His chosen, if these be His chosen. And 
 on the other hand, there are some into whose 
 thoughts God never comes, who impress us 
 as the sort of people to whom a good God, 
 if He exists, must be most close. 
 
 Faith and feeling, faith and fancy, are 
 not the same thing. Imagination is a vast 
 help to faith. Ruskin said that "an unim- 
 aginative person can neither be reverent 
 nor kind." He cannot be kind because it 
 requires imagination to place oneself in 
 another's place and feel what he feels. He 
 cannot be reverent because only he to whom 
 God is vividly actual walks humbly before 
 Him. Let faith fancy, but let us not 
 confuse the two. 
 
 Again our author does not say, "He that 
 Cometh to God must understand what He 
 is." There are a few exceptional people 
 who reach God headfirst. A leading 
 American theologian of the last generation, 
 Henry B. Smith, said: "My determination 
 
RELIGIOUS PREPOSSESSIONS 23 
 
 to seek religion was formed solely in conse- 
 quence of my complete persuasion of its 
 reasonableness. I did not feel any need of 
 it." But there are far more who "stand at 
 the temple door heart in, head out." They 
 may have moods when the sense of an 
 Eternal Beauty, of which all lovely sights 
 are passing gleams, entrances them; or when 
 the consciousness of a mighty and inscru- 
 table Force, back of all the energies active 
 in the universe, awes them; or when a 
 wisdom that baffles their search, an Ultimate 
 Truth behind all the broken fragments of 
 our unrelated notions, tantalizes their minds 
 to go out and explore the unknown for it; 
 ir when a Love, controlling all things for 
 good and holding their lives in its gentle 
 embrace, comes upon them as a thought so 
 good they cannot help wishing it true; but 
 as soon as they begin to use their intellects, 
 and explain their mood to themselves, and 
 
 I try to form some image of this Somewhat 
 |Dr Someone Beautiful, Mighty, Wise, 
 Loving, they can gain no clear conception; 
 the mood itself passes, and they find them- 
 selves in a world alone with things and 
 people. 
 
24 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 It is certainly important that believing 
 people should use their brains, and the 
 clearer the conception we form of the God 
 to whom we are coming the closer will we 
 get to Him, and the more intelligent will 
 be our fellowship. It was a true saying of 
 George Eliot's that "the few may find them- 
 selves in the religious life simply by an 
 elevation of feeling; but for us who have 
 to struggle for our wisdom, the higher life 
 must be a region in which the affections are 
 clad with knowledge." It is not enough for 
 us to have a feeling of trust in a Somebody 
 altogether good, so that at times a mood 
 steals over us in which we are uplifted and 
 soothed and inspired; we have to connect 
 that Somebody with the great universe, 
 with human history, with all that is happen- 
 ing about us and with what goes on in our 
 own hearts. And it is in thinking out, or in 
 failing to think out, these connections that 
 God becomes unreal to us. 
 
 But let us not make the mistake of trying 
 first to understand what God is and only 
 afterwards coming to Him. We must first 
 touch the shore and land, before we can 
 explore the continent and chart out the 
 
RELIGIOUS PREPOSSESSIONS 26 
 
 mountains and rivers and plains. We must 
 believe that He is, before we can understand 
 what He is. Faith is the John Baptist that 
 prepares the way for knowledge. We shall 
 always have to be satisfied with a knowledge 
 of God that allows for a huge ignorance 
 about Him. The interior of that Continent 
 it will take us all eternity to chart. But it 
 is quite possible for Him to be inescapably 
 actual to us, an abiding Reality, while we 
 confess, "Verily, Thou art a God that hidest 
 Thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour." 
 
 What then does our author mean by faith 
 when he tells us so dogmatically, "He that 
 Cometh to God must beheve that He is"? 
 He begins this chapter with a definition: 
 "Now faith is the giving substance to things 
 hoped for, a conviction of things not seen." 
 Herbert Spencer was right when he said 
 that "prepossession is nine points of belief." 
 Religion starts in us as a hope, a wish. 
 Many men are not infidels who ought to be ; 
 they do not really wish for a Christian God. 
 If this were actually His world; if success 
 be attainable only by doing His will, and 
 if the only success attainable be the kind 
 He Himself seeks, they would be very dis- 
 
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28 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 such as that "a part of anything is less than 
 the whole," while "the other is when the 
 heart doth cleave and stick unto that which 
 it doth believe. This certainty is greater 
 than the other. The reason is this : the faith 
 of a Christian doth apprehend the words of 
 the law, the promises of God, not only as 
 true but also as good; and therefore even 
 when the evidence which he hath of the truth 
 is so small that it grieveth him to feel his 
 weakness in assenting thereto, yet is there 
 in him such a sure adherence unto that which 
 he doth but faintly and fearfully believe, 
 that his spirit having once truly tasted the 
 heavenly sweetness thereof, all the world is 
 not able quite and clean to remove him from 
 it; but he striveth with himself to hope 
 against all reason of believing. For why? 
 this lesson remaineth forever imprinted in 
 him, *It is good for me to cleave unto God.' " 
 When a man comes to know Jesus Christ, 
 he is so mastered by Him, that he is forced 
 to declare that it would be the best imagin- 
 able thing for himself and for all men, if 
 the faith of Jesus were justified, if His 
 purpose for the world were achievable, if 
 the God in whom He trusted to bring His 
 
RELIGIOUS PREPOSSESSIONS 29 
 
 purpose to pass be actual. His hope is so 
 compelling that despite all arguments 
 against its possibility he cannot but try to 
 "give substance" to it. He, like Jesus, 
 places himself in trustful sonship with the 
 mysterious Someone who is Lord of all; 
 consecrates his whole heart, soul, mind, 
 strength, to advance the kingdom for which 
 Jesus hved and died; bears, believes, hopes, 
 endures all in the spirit of Jesus; and so 
 tests whether the unseen contains what 
 Jesus beheved it contained — a God the 
 duplicate of Jesus Himself in character. 
 
 Tests — for so far we have been treating 
 faith as man's wish and God as a man-made 
 picture to which its creators hope there is a 
 corresponding actuality. But many people 
 today think that our Idea of God is the only 
 God there is. Men have imagined a Being 
 perfectly good, according to their highest 
 standards of goodness; and, finding their 
 conception so comforting and exhilarating, 
 have forced themselves to believe it a picture 
 of a reality, while as a matter of fact there 
 is no proof that such a reality exists. But 
 this is to destroy religion. How long would 
 we keep on worshipping an idea of God? 
 
30 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 With how much fervor would we serve the 
 projection of our sublimest ideal? Dr. 
 Martineau has well said, "Amid all the 
 sickly talk about ^ideals' which has become 
 the commonplace of our age, it is well to 
 remember that, so long as they are dreams 
 of future possibility and not faiths in 
 present reahties, so long as they are a mere 
 self -painting of the yearning spirit, and not 
 its personal surrender to immediate com- 
 munion with an Infinite Perfection, they 
 have no more solidity or steadiness than 
 floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine, and 
 broken in the passing wind. You do not 
 so much as touch the threshold of rehgion, 
 so long as you are detained by the phantoms 
 of your thought: the very gate of entrance 
 to it, the moment of its new birth, is the 
 discovery that your gleaming ideal is the 
 everlasting Real, no transient brush of a 
 fancied angel wing, but the abiding pres- 
 ence and persuasion of the Soul of souls." 
 They who give substance to their hope 
 and so test it, do they come telling us that 
 their hope is unsubstantial, such stuff as 
 dreams are made on? Do they find no 
 actuality in the unseen meeting and answer- 
 
RELIGIOUS PREPOSSESSIONS 31 
 
 ing their trust? Does the hand that reaches 
 up for comradeship iii the purpose of work- 
 ing righteousness feel about in an empty 
 void, or is it laid hold of and held fast? 
 "Faith is the giving substance to things 
 hoped for, a test, a conviction of things not 
 seen." This Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews 
 is a roster of those who gave substance to 
 their hope and drew from the Invisible such 
 substantial force and wisdom and patience 
 and courage, that through faith they "sub- 
 dued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, 
 obtained promises, stopped the mouths of 
 lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped 
 the edge of the sword, from weakness were 
 made strong, waxed mighty in war, turned 
 to flight armies of aliens." The reality of 
 God is for them an inescapable fact of 
 experience. 
 
 Finding, following, keeping, struggling. 
 
 Is He sure to bless? 
 Saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs 
 
 Answer, "Yes!" 
 
 He that cometh to God must believe that 
 He is to the extent of hoping that He is and 
 being willing to give substance to his hope. 
 
32 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 You may recall George Eliot's description 
 of the religion of the unfortunate Hetty in 
 Adam Bede: "Religious doctrines had 
 taken no hold on Hetty's mind : she was one 
 of those numerous people who have had 
 godfathers and godmothers, learned their 
 catechism, been confirmed, and gone to 
 church every Sunday and yet for any 
 practical result of strength in life, or trust 
 in death, have never appropriated a single 
 Christian idea, or Christian feeling." The 
 unreality of God to many of us nominal 
 Christians is due to our failure to appro- 
 priate that which we say we think we 
 possess in Him. We never give substance 
 to our hopes. We never venture out for 
 righteousness' sake regardless of conse- 
 quences in the assurance that God is our 
 Shield, our High Tower, our Deliverer. 
 We never take our most real faults and 
 weaknesses to Him in the confident expec- 
 tation that He will rid us of our iniquities 
 and make His strength perfect in our weak- 
 ness. We do not turn to Him in our 
 perplexities and, spreading out our tangled 
 and bewildered thoughts before Him, let 
 the light of His face shine full on them to 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
 r 
 
 RELIGIOUS PREPOSSESSIONS 33 
 
 show us the way out. We do not let God 
 be God to us; and then we bemoan His 
 unreality! "0 taste and see that the Lord 
 is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in 
 Him." 
 
 And yet this is not quite all. There have 
 been men who were willing to give sub- 
 stance to their hope, to whom there seemed 
 to come nothing when they reached up for 
 God. Augustine confesses: "In my 
 thoughts of Thee, Thou wert not any solid 
 or substantial thing to me. For Thou 
 wert not Thyself, but a phantasm. If I 
 attempted to discharge my burden thereon, 
 that it might find rest, it sank into empti- 
 ness, and came rushing down again upon 
 me, and I remained to myself an unhappy 
 spot, where I could neither stay nor depart 
 from." Many others to whom God has 
 been at times an undeniable reahty go 
 through seasons when all sense of His 
 existence leaves them, when He seems 
 totally intangible. Have we not all passed 
 over considerable stretches of life in which 
 we were haunted by this feeling of the 
 unreality of that which before had been our 
 dominant conviction? If to come to God 
 
34 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 we must believe that He is, it seems to 
 require of us an heroic act of make-beheve. 
 Happily at this lowest level we are met 
 by One who assures us of His entire 
 familiarity with our experience and has 
 Himself been in our phght. "My God, 
 My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" 
 the cry goes up from Him to whom usually 
 God was most actual. And in the very 
 words He utters He shows us not only His 
 complete understanding of our case but the 
 way out from this sense of the unreality of 
 God. Even in His abandonment Jesus 
 still hopes for God, and hopes enough to 
 go directly to God as though He were and 
 plead, "My God." So many of us think to 
 ourselves or talk to others about God's 
 unreality without going straight to God 
 Himself and asking Him why He fails us. 
 Real rehgion consists not in thinking about 
 God but in dealing personally with Him. 
 Fenelon, the great French preacher, dared 
 to write a correspondent, "If God bores you, 
 tell Him that He bores you." Jesus has 
 that certainty of adherence that makes it 
 impossible for Him to give God up, even 
 when He feels that God has given Him up. 
 
RELIGIOUS PREPOSSESSIONS 35 
 
 He cannot but cleave to a God who is too 
 good a hope to Him to be considered an 
 illusion. "My God, My God!" — and as 
 Jesus gave substance to His unconquerable 
 hope, He tested and obtained a conviction 
 of things not seen. He endured as seeing 
 Him who is invisible. From the seemingly 
 empty space there came to Him that which 
 transformed this defeated and dying Man 
 into the world's most living Personality, 
 which rendered this God-forsaken but God- 
 seeking Believer the Author and Perfecter 
 of the faith of ten thousand times ten thou- 
 sand out of every kindred and tribe and 
 tongue and nation who through Him are 
 believers in God and are more and more 
 subduing the world into His Kingdom. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE FINALITY OF JESUS 
 
 Revelation 22: 13. I am the Omega. 
 
 The book in which these words are 
 ascribed to Jesus was written by a Jew of 
 the Jews, whose mind was saturated with 
 the thought and literature of his people, to 
 whom the religion of his race, belief in one 
 righteous God, was a passion, and the 
 ascription of divinity to any other than the 
 one God abhorrent blasphemy; but such is 
 the impression Jesus of Nazareth had made 
 upon him, that he places Him side by side 
 with God on the throne, and puts upon His 
 lips the identical words (taken from an Old 
 Testament Scripture), which he puts upon 
 the lips of God: "I am the Omega, the 
 Last, the End." This Jew voiced the 
 conviction of primitive Christendom, the 
 conviction of those who stood closest to 
 Jesus Himself, and became His most intelli- 
 gent and sympathetic interpreters. And he 
 expresses the faith of all of us who, since 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 37 
 
 his time, and today, have come under the 
 redeeming control of the personaHty of 
 Jesus. The Jesus we obey, love and wor- 
 ship is for us final. Our consciences, our 
 spiritual experiences, hear Him asserting, 
 "I am the Omega." 
 
 On what does our conviction rest? 
 
 1. Jesus is for us* the complete revelation 
 of the character of God. He reveals God 
 in two ways, through what God was to Him, 
 and through what He Himself was. 
 
 (1) Through what God was to Him. 
 No one can come near the Jesus of history 
 without feeling that He is in closest touch 
 with the God of His race, whom He habit- 
 ually thinks of as "Father, Lord of heaven 
 and earth"; with whom He is on terms of 
 affectionate intimacy, and to whom He 
 speaks with adoring reverence, "Hallowed 
 be Thy name!" We constantly catch from 
 His lips expressions which show that He 
 is thinking of this unseen Companion's 
 attitude towards people, and letting that 
 attitude determine His own. "He is kind 
 to the unthankful and the evil"; the peace- 
 makers are the children who most resemble 
 their divine Father ; He cares for the incom- 
 
38 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 petent, "the little ones," "the lost," "the 
 least"; He forgives every son who returns 
 to Him, but only sons who as freely forgive 
 their brothers can receive His forgiveness. 
 Jesus abides in His Father's love, does what 
 He sees His Father doing, works as His 
 Father has been and still is working, feels 
 that the Father in closest partnership with 
 Him doeth His works. 
 
 There have been, and there are today, 
 other men to whom God is a most real and 
 a most dear Being. They look to Him for 
 guidance, count on His assistance in every 
 right endeavor, bring their sins to Him for 
 forgiveness, rest in Him for comfort and 
 hope, enhst in His purpose, and feel them- 
 selves strong in His strength. But we know 
 of no other in all history to whom God has 
 been exactly what He was to this Son. We 
 speak of the God of Abraham, and see in 
 that patriarch a noteworthy pioneer in the 
 religious life of mankind; of the God of 
 Moses, and feel that this revered lawgiver 
 and his successors saw deeply into the will 
 of the Most High for the national life of 
 their people; of the God of the prophets, 
 and acknowledge that these inspired preach- 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 39 
 
 ers of righteousness penetrated far into the 
 secrets of the Spirit, and brought from their 
 explorations priceless discoveries of the 
 justice, kindness- and faithfulness of Jeho- 
 vah; of the God of the psalmists, and 
 ascribe to the sweet singers of Israel a 
 conmiunion with the King of glory, the 
 Lord of hosts, the Shepherd of Israel, their 
 refuge and strength, their light and exceed- 
 ing joy, their high tower and fortress, their 
 dwelling-place in all generations, which 
 enables them to voice the thirst of our souls 
 for the living God, and, to a large extent, 
 to express the satisfaction of that thirst in 
 language we shall never wholly outgrow. 
 And outside the boundaries of Israel we 
 recognize that there have been many elect 
 spirits who have been guides and inspira- 
 tions to their fellows in their quest for the 
 Lord and Deliverer and Comrade of their 
 souls. We would not disparage a Buddha, 
 a Confucius, a Socrates, a Mohammed, or 
 any other to whose conscience righteousness 
 was precious, and to whose soul the unseen 
 was not void. But the God and Father of 
 Jesus is for us a distinctive conception, 
 which eclipses them all, which satisfies our 
 
40 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 religious aspirations as no one of the others, 
 and which appears to include all that is of 
 worth in them. When we wish to find God 
 and enter into friendship with Him, we go 
 not to a number of teachers, getting what- 
 ever we can from each and combining it all 
 into a universal religion of our own com- 
 pilation; but we go to One, feeling that He 
 sums up all that we need in our thought of 
 God, saying, "Lord, Thou . knowest the 
 Father, and we would learn of Thee." It 
 may seem ungracious in us to say to repre- 
 sentatives of other faiths, "We have really 
 nothing to learn of you." It is well for us 
 to study every sincere conviction of any 
 man, weU for us to listen respectfully while 
 he tells us what his faith means for him and 
 his fellow believers; but we cannot admit 
 that he has anything needed to supplement 
 the religion of Jesus. "No man knoweth the 
 Father save the Son." "I am the Omega." 
 (2) NTor is this all. We Christians, 
 starting with the God of Jesus, the God to 
 whom He prayed, and whom He trusted, 
 obeyed, loved, adored, find that God dis- 
 closed in Jesus Himself. To quote the 
 words of a cultured woman, a Jewess by 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 41 
 
 birth, spoken with great earnestness a few 
 weeks ago : "I have become convinced that 
 there is nothing I can think of in the charac- 
 ter of God, which I do not find in Jesus; 
 and nothing that I want a God for, which 
 Jesus does not do for me." 
 
 It is easy to spin with our thought a 
 philosophical conception of God as the 
 absolute, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, 
 omnipresent, and so on, and, failing to see 
 the fulfillment of these speculative concep- 
 tions in the historic Jesus, deny His deity. 
 No one claims that Jesus was the complete 
 revelation of the intellect of God, or of His 
 aesthetic nature, or of His multitudinous 
 relations with the universe. But when we 
 come to character, to what God really is, 
 if we agree with Jesus that God is long- 
 suffering, forgiving, redeeming, self -giving 
 love, there is nothing we can think of in God 
 that we do not possess in Jesus. We say to 
 Him, as the psalmist to Jehovah: "Thou art 
 my Lord, I have no good beyond Thee." 
 We look at Jesus in all His relations with 
 men, and supremely when He hangs on 
 the cross, and we are compelled to confess, 
 "Behold our God! That is what we mean 
 
42 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 by the word, 'God.' " In Jesus dwelleth all 
 the fullness of the Godhead bodily. What 
 more can there be? 
 
 Thou, O Christ, art all I want; 
 More than all in Thee I find. 
 
 In the unveiling of the character, the 
 purpose, the heart, the will of Him, whom 
 we adore as God over all, Jesus is the 
 Omega. 
 
 2. He is the complete revelation of man's 
 life with God and with his fellow men, which 
 are not two things, but one, for, according 
 to Jesus, no man is rightly adjusted to God 
 who is not rightly adjusted to his brother. 
 
 Jesus is not for us a heavenly Being 
 masquerading on earth in human disguise. 
 If He is absolutely one with God in purpose, 
 heart of His heart and life of His life. He is 
 as entirely one with us, bone of our bone and 
 flesh of our flesh, "made in all points like 
 unto His brethren." He is limited in 
 knowledge and limited in power. There are 
 many things which He does not know, many 
 things which He cannot do. He is a man 
 of His age, the first century, with the world- 
 view and science, and even much of the 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 43 
 
 theology, of His contemporaries, believing, 
 for instance, that certain types of disease 
 were due to demons, as was commonly 
 believed in that day. He is a man of His 
 race, a Jew, with the inheritance and lan- 
 guage and forms of thought and intense 
 patriotism of His people. He is a Galilean 
 village carpenter, and His culture and train- 
 ing and connections are those of His class 
 and position. Spiritually He is akin to us, 
 with no immunities from pain and evil which 
 we do not possess, "tempted in all points 
 like as we are," now elated, now depressed, 
 now conscious of God's presence, now feel- 
 ing Himself utterly forsaken. He is our 
 Brother. 
 
 But this human, limited, uncultured, 
 tempted Man has been looked up to for 
 these nineteen centuries as the ideal which 
 forever baffles approximation, as the embod- 
 iment of the spirit which every right-minded 
 man covets for himself and seems never able 
 altogether to attain. Mr. Higginson reports 
 an interesting conversation between Emer- 
 son and Whittier. The former had re- 
 marked that the world had not yet seen the 
 highest development of manhood. 
 
44 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 "Does thee think so?" said Whittier. "I 
 suppose thee would admit that Jesus Christ 
 is the highest development our world has 
 seen?" 
 
 "Yes, yes, but not the highest it will see." 
 
 "Does thee think the world has yet 
 reached the ideals the Christ has set for 
 mankind?" 
 
 "No, no, I think not." 
 
 "Then is it not the part of wisdom to be 
 content with what has been given us, till we 
 have lived up to that ideal? And when we 
 need something higher, Infinite Wisdom 
 will supply our needs." That is a cautious 
 statement that in manhood Jesus is the 
 Omega so far. 
 
 And in a world which we have come to 
 think of as in process of evolution morally, 
 each age surpassing its predecessor in its 
 standards of duty, its conceptions of man's 
 obligations to man in home and industry and 
 commerce and government, its charities and 
 sympathies, is it not a marvel that for all 
 these growing centuries one Figure should 
 tower aloft like a giant Alp, in comparison 
 with whom the loftiest seem but foothills? 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 45 
 
 You remember Sidney Lanier's exquisite 
 lines to the race's prophetic poets : 
 
 Ye companies of governor-spirits grave. 
 Bards, and old bringers-down of flaming news 
 From steep-wall'd heavens, holy malcontents, 
 Sweet seers, and stellar visionaries, all 
 That brood about the skies of poesy. 
 Full bright ye shine, insuperable stars; 
 Yet, if a man look hard upon you, none 
 With total lustre blazeth, no, not one 
 But hath some heinous freckle of the flesh 
 Upon his shining cheek, not one but winks 
 His ray, opaqued with intermittent mist 
 Of defect; yea, you masters all must ask 
 Some sweet forgiveness, which we leap to give. 
 
 And then he runs over a list of earth's 
 famous teachers, pointing out some imper- 
 fection in each, and at length turns from 
 them all and concludes: 
 
 But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, 
 But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, 
 But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, 
 O perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
 O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, — 
 What "if" or "yet," what mole, what flaw, what 
 
 lapse, 
 What least defect or shadow of defect, 
 What rumor tattled by an enemy 
 
46 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Of inference loose, what lack of grace 
 Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's, — 
 Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, 
 Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ. 
 
 We have no hesitancy in going to Jesus 
 for the final solution of any problem which 
 may arise in connection with man's relations 
 to the Unseen, or with his most practical 
 relations with his fellows. We do not think 
 of Jesus as tentative and temporary, as 
 affording us the best guidance up to date, 
 but ultimately to be surpassed or super- 
 seded. We take the most complicated 
 questions of our age — race problems, the 
 attitude of the white man to the yellow and 
 the brown, of the black to the white, of 
 Gentile to Jew and of Jew to Gentile; 
 industrial perplexities, the legitimacy of 
 competition as a motive in business, the 
 relations of employer and employee, the 
 proportion of profits due to capital and 
 labor respectively, the rights of the property 
 owner and the rights of workers to employ- 
 ment; political questions, free trade or 
 protection, more or no battleships, the 
 obligations of society to the criminal; social 
 questions, race-track gambling — Is a horse 
 
 I 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 47 
 
 of more value than a man? — ^the drink 
 traffic, its regulation or prohibition; the 
 social evil in the narrower sense, with its 
 hideous roll of victims in every so-called 
 Christian city, a moral plague far more 
 loathsome and unnecessary than the pesti- 
 lences of the Middle Ages which our medical 
 men look back on as completely eradicable 
 evils; — we take them all to Jesus, certain 
 that His spirit, if seriously and conscien- 
 tiously apphed to them, will infalHbly lead 
 to an ultimate solution. We do not expect 
 to find our questions answered in so many 
 words in the teaching of Jesus. Obviously 
 many of these problems were not within His 
 horizon. And were the answer thus given 
 us, we should be dealt with as babies, not as 
 sons and daughters with minds of our own, 
 who, once given a principle, can be trusted 
 to think out its application for themselves. 
 But the principle, the controlling spirit has 
 been given in Him, and we are confident 
 that the spirit of Jesus is adequate to guide 
 us to such a solution that, if we obey, we 
 shall find the Kingdom of God coming, and 
 at length see His will done in earth as it is 
 in heaven. Jesus is the Omega. 
 
48 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 3. But even this is not all. Jesus is 
 more than the complete revelation of the 
 character of God, and of the Hfe of man 
 with God and his fellows. Those who 
 attempt to sum up Christianity by quoting 
 Jesus' summary of the Jewish Law, "Thou 
 shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy 
 heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," need 
 to be reminded that He was merely answer- 
 ing the question, "What is the essence of 
 Judaism?" not "What is the sxmi of all 
 religion?" Jesus claimed to be an inno- 
 vator as well as a fulfiller. "A new com- 
 mandment give I unto you," an early 
 follower interprets Him as saying. "This 
 is My commandment that ye love one 
 another even as I have loved you." ''Even 
 as Z" — the most important contribution 
 Jesus made to the world was just Himself. 
 Judaism had said, "Ye shall be holy, for I 
 Jehovah, your God, am holy"; and Jesus 
 had repeated and interpreted it, "Be ye 
 merciful, even as your Father is merciful.'* 
 But how is God holy, how is He merciful? 
 The Christians hear Jesus answering, "Even 
 as I." There is His own divinity, and 
 further we are at once led to Calvary. 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 49 
 
 "Hereby know we love," say the primitive 
 Christians, "because He laid down His life 
 for us." 
 
 And the important thing is that they are 
 compelled at once to complete the sentence 
 by adding: "And we ought to lay down our 
 lives for the brethren." Had Jesus come, 
 like the Old Testament prophets or like 
 John the Baptist, merely to reform Judaism, 
 to distinguish the important from the unim- 
 portant elements in the Law, Christianity 
 would have been nothing distinctive. Jesus 
 would have been a repetition and interpre- 
 tation of Moses, and His movement a sect 
 of reformed Jews. But why is it that a 
 religion which, up till Jesus, had been a 
 tribal, a national, a racial affair with a few 
 proselytes, and has remained such ever since, 
 only with far fewer proselytes today than 
 in the first century, suddenly, after Jesus, 
 becomes a world-conquering power? The 
 only explanation is that the personality of 
 Jesus, and that personality as disclosed 
 supremely on the cross, had brought a new 
 and well-nigh irresistible force. "I am not 
 ashamed of the Gospel," wrote a Hebrew 
 of Hebrews, who had known the highest 
 
50 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 inspiration which the most vigorous and 
 earnest form of the faith of his fathers could 
 furnish, and had found it inadequate, "I 
 am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the 
 power of God unto salvation, to everyone 
 that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to 
 the Greek." So soon as a man comes under 
 the control of the spirit of Jesus he is pos- 
 sessed by an overmastering impulse: "The 
 love of Christ coritraineth me." He is con- 
 scious of a supply of energy adequate for 
 anything: "I can do all things in Him that 
 strengtheneth me." Ask the men and 
 women, who in every Christian century have 
 been ready to hazard their lives on mission 
 fields, to give themselves to the care of the 
 sick, the leper, the victims of disease or of 
 social wrong — yes, ask any one of us Chris- 
 tians here, what is the most forceful inspira- 
 tion we know of, and we point with Paul to 
 a scene in the past, where outside a city wall 
 a dearly loving and now dearly loved Man 
 is nailed to a cross. We say that in Him 
 we see unveiled the very heart of Him, of 
 whom and through whom and unto whom 
 are all things, and are moved to live no 
 longer unto ourselves, but unto Him who 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 61 
 
 for our sakes died, and has risen again, and 
 is the present controlling power in us. A 
 well-known British journalist watched the 
 Passion Play at Oberammergau and came 
 away saying to himself: "This is the story 
 that has transformed the world," and he 
 seemed to hear an echo, "Yes, and will 
 transform it." 
 
 Jesus is not merely Revealer to us, but 
 Redeemer; not only the unveiling of the 
 ideal for ourselves and for all men, but the 
 inspiration to achieve it. It is because we 
 have discovered in Him the mightiest force 
 of which we are aware, a force whose 
 potencies we never seem to exhaust, that 
 we are driven to confess that He is the 
 Omega. 
 
 Were Jesus any less to us than final He 
 could not enlist all our loyalty and command 
 our entire consecration. But we feel that 
 there is no possible limit to the devotion we 
 owe Him. 
 
 Had I a thousand hearts to give. 
 Lord, they should all be Thine. 
 
 He draws from us all the reverence, all 
 the confidence, all the adoration, all the self- 
 
52 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 dedication of which we are capable. We 
 have no more for God Himself, and there- 
 fore Jesus is for us God, the embodiment 
 of God's character and the transmitter of 
 God's life. In harmony with Jesus we feel 
 that there remains no further attainment; 
 we are at one with the purpose of Him, 
 whose are sun and moon and stars of light. 
 If it be idolatry to worship any but God 
 alone, we are either idolaters or Jesus is for 
 us as God. Because He claims and gains 
 our utmost, we cannot but call Him "The 
 Omega." 
 
 Feeling thus towards Jesus, is it possible 
 for us to imagine for a moment that we are 
 acting as brothers towards any man, how- 
 ever good, who lacks this experience of the 
 power of Christ, if we do not seek to impart 
 it to him? In a recent controversy over the 
 use of Christian hymns in the public schools, 
 a prominent Jewish paper said in an 
 editorial, "Scratch a Christian anywhere 
 and you find a missionary." That is inevi- 
 table. Scratch a man without finding in 
 him a missionary, and you can be certain 
 that you have not found a Christian. If the 
 best of men who does not share our faith in 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 53 
 
 Jesus points to a noble religious creed and 
 a high standard of conduct, and asks, "What 
 would you convert me to?" we answer with- 
 out hesitation, "To Jesus Christ: to the 
 authority of His religious experience, to 
 God as revealed in Him, to the transform- 
 ing power of obedience to His spirit, to 
 unreserved consecration to His purpose." 
 If a man pleads that his religion is bound 
 up with his very being, that to forsake it 
 wiU upset his entire life, tear him up from 
 the roots, as the Brahman does in India, 
 as the Jew with us, we can only answer: 
 "There cannot be Greek and Jew, cir- 
 cumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, 
 Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is 
 all and in all." "He that loveth caste or 
 race, father or mother, son or daughter, yea, 
 his own life, more than Me is not worthy of 
 Me. I am the Omega." 
 
 Let us not be unjust or ungenerous to any 
 man. Let us gladly acknowledge that the 
 Spirit of God, which is for us the Spirit 
 of Jesus, controls many who have no con- 
 viction of Jesus' finality, and no sense of 
 personal loyalty to Him. Let us rejoice 
 in all that makes for righteousness and see 
 
54 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 in its workers allies for the Kingdom of 
 God. Jesus had no sympathy with the dis- 
 ciples who saw one casting out a demon and 
 forbade him because he was not a fellow 
 follower with them. "Forbid him not: for 
 he that is not against us, is for us." 
 
 At the same time let us not minimize what 
 the best and most useful of men without 
 personal attachment to Jesus lacks. There 
 is a world of difference between Saul of 
 Tarsus as a disciple of one of the broadest 
 and most spiritual of non-Christian teachers, 
 and Paul the servant of Jesus Christ. He 
 has a new light — "the light of the knowl- 
 edge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
 Christ"; a new power — "I labor, striving 
 according to His working, which worketh in 
 me mightily"; a new peace — "the peace of 
 God, which passeth all understanding," 
 guards his "heart and thoughts in Christ 
 Jesus"; a new joy — "Most gladly will I 
 rather glory in my infirmities, that the power 
 of Christ may rest upon me. I take pleasure 
 in weaknesses, in injuries, in necessities, in 
 persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: 
 for when I am weak then am I strong"; 
 a new inextinguishable and triumphant 
 
THE FINALITY OF JESUS 55 
 
 hope — "Who shall separate us from the 
 love of Christ? shall tribulation, or anguish, 
 or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or 
 peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we 
 are more than conquerors through Him that 
 loved us." Saul of Tarsus was one of the 
 most conscientious and earnest of men, while 
 he lived by the highest standards the faith 
 of his fathers had to offer; and it is difficult 
 to see how the forces latent in that faith 
 alone could have transformed him, impos- 
 sible to see how they could have made him 
 the man he became. "But if any man is 
 in Christ," no matter how excellent before, 
 "there is a new creation"; and the new 
 creation justifies his and our faith in the 
 finality of the new Creator. "I am the 
 Omega." 
 
 Gentlemen, is Jesus actually final for 
 you and me? Do we bring our questions of 
 right and wrong, expedient and inexpedient, 
 thoughtfully to Him, and let His Spirit 
 control our decisions? Do we turn to Him 
 as the all-sufficient source of strength with 
 which to confront life's ordeals, shoulder its 
 responsibilities, triumph in its sorrows, and 
 fight through its battle? Do we place at 
 
56 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 His disposal all that in us is, even to 
 the very last particle of our ability, our 
 resources, our energy, our love? Are we 
 prepared to do our utmost to make Him 
 Lord of all, even of the last man in the 
 ultimate spot on God's earth? 
 '^ "Why call ye Me, Lord, Lord, and do 
 not the things which I say?" 
 
IV 
 
 ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 
 
 1 Samuel 81:4. Saul took his sword, and feU 
 upon it. 
 
 This act was typical of Saul's entire 
 career. He was constantly taking the 
 weapons placed in his hand for service and 
 using them to destroy himself. 
 
 He is Samuel's choice for the kingship, 
 and from that eventful night when the old 
 prophet talked to him on the housetop, 
 Samuel was prepared to stand by him as his 
 trusted counsellor and vigorous supporter. 
 Saul had the chance to disabuse the old man 
 tactfully of any prejudices he had against 
 the new regime, and through him to gain 
 the hearty adherence of the more religious 
 element among the people who reverenced 
 their old leader; but in a very little while he 
 alienates Samuel's sympathy and forces 
 him to denounce him. A son is given him 
 whose prowess in battle and popularity 
 with the people render him a great source 
 of strength to the supremacy of his royal 
 
58 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 house. What more desirable heir apparent 
 could a king ask than Jonathan? But when 
 he unintentionally breaks a command of his 
 father's at Beth-aven, Saul would have put 
 him to death, had not public sentiment 
 compelled him to revoke his sentence. 
 David is brought to his court and attaches 
 himself to the king with warm affection and 
 loyalty. With his abilities as a warrior and 
 leader, and his growing reputation, what an 
 addition he is to Saul's strength. But the 
 king jealously quarrels with him and drives 
 him into exile ; and, despite David's repeated 
 attempts at reconciliation, he refuses to 
 take him back. The kingship itself was his 
 glorious opportunity to become the first 
 monarch of a mighty line and leave a per- 
 manent impress upon the life of the nation; 
 but he could not stand power, and his 
 exalted station proves his undoing, and sets 
 him in the list of the world's conspicuous 
 failures. It seems as though God had again 
 and again placed in his grasp a sword with 
 which to win a victory and each time he had 
 turned its point against himself and fallen 
 on it. It is a true description of his career 
 to say that he killed himself. 
 
ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 59 
 
 And Saul's experience is unhappily so 
 common. Education is one of the most 
 effective equipments for service. A trained 
 mind is a sword worth years of patient 
 grinding to acquire and constant sharpening 
 to keep in readiness for instant use. When 
 one reads the heroic struggles of poor boys 
 to get any sort of schooling and their enor- 
 mous sacrifices to purchase books, one won- 
 ders why many of us hold so lightly the 
 advantages offered us and do such pitiably 
 little reading that adds anything to our 
 mental enrichment. But education some- 
 times seems to give people something which 
 they not only do not use, but which actually 
 is in the way of their usefulness, like a 
 great unwieldy sword over which they 
 constantly trip and fall. We have present- 
 day analogies to Pope's 
 
 Bookful blockhead, ignorantly read 
 With loads of learned lumber in his head. 
 
 Education ought to render its possessors 
 eager to place their skilled intellects at the 
 service of their less endowed brothers, but 
 too often college graduates use their train- 
 ing solely to help them to selfish successes 
 
60 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 in profession or business, or for their own 
 amusement as dilettantes. Public spirit is 
 by no means the invariable characteristic of 
 college men and women. Their acquisitions 
 are implements to gratify personal ambi- 
 tion or to minister to self-indulgence, for it 
 is quite as possible to indulge and pamper 
 the mind as the body. And education often 
 estranges men from their less fortunate 
 fellows. Their own cleverness makes them 
 intolerant and scornful of stupidity and 
 dullness. Their bookish point of view puts 
 them out of sympathy with plain people 
 whose entire library is the book of common 
 life. Seldom do we find an educated man, 
 however much he may wish to, who can 
 see things with the eyes and thoughts of 
 the uncultivated, speak out his mind and 
 heart in language they understand, and get 
 so close to them that they do not feel that 
 his superior mind is a barrier between them. 
 The weapon placed in our hand for service 
 actually proves the destruction of our 
 usefulness. 
 
 Or take culture, the development of good 
 taste in music, art, literature, the refinement 
 of manners, good breeding, delicacy of feel- 
 
ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 61 
 
 ing. We recognize that this is something 
 much to be prized and hard to acquire for 
 any not to the manner born. Instinctively 
 we detect the difference between those who 
 possess and those who lack it. It is a ticket 
 of admission which enables its fortunate 
 holder to enter the best society of the past 
 and the present, to appreciate nature, books, 
 pictures, architecture, people. And besides 
 the incalculable enrichment which it confers 
 to the man's own life, it ought to fit him 
 to be the interpreter of things true and 
 honorable and gentle and lovely to his less 
 fortunate fellows. But how frequently it 
 has the opposite effect ! A finely cultivated 
 taste offers so many chances for exquisite 
 enjojonent that it is perilously easy to live 
 entirely for self-gratification. A sensitive 
 appreciation of beauty spontaneously recoils 
 from all that is unlovely. Coleridge said of 
 Dorothy Wordsworth: "Her taste is a 
 perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes 
 and draws in at subtlest beauties and most 
 recondite faults." And with such a delicate 
 organ it is all too easy to seek to banish from 
 one's thoughts the unpleasant, the coarse, 
 the sickening; to surround oneself with 
 
62 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 agreeable people; to give oneself to eon- 
 genial occupations; and to live a somewhat 
 tame and artificial and useless life within 
 a high-walled, formal garden. Culture 
 ought to broaden its happy possessors; but 
 how many pitifully narrow cultured people 
 we all know! Their much- vaunted good 
 taste often degenerates into that which 
 Dickens caricatured in Mrs. General, whose 
 refined mind would dwell on nothing that 
 was not perfectly proper, placid and pleas- 
 ant. And as for religion, one would expect 
 that a mind cultivated to see and respond to 
 beauty and goodness would leap up the 
 instant it caught sight of God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ. But conversions are exceed- 
 ingly rare among cultivated people. It may 
 be that too few ministers and teachers know 
 how to present the King in His beauty, so 
 that He appears as the altogether Lovely; 
 but people of culture are usually sophisti- 
 cated, and from the beginning babes have 
 seen things hidden from the wise and pru- 
 dent. And again it is not good form to 
 become wildly enthusiastic about anything, 
 and men arrive at God with a blazing pas- 
 sion for His Kingdom and His righteous- 
 
ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 63 
 
 ness, or they do not arrive at all. And, 
 above all, that which appreciates God is 
 love — not admiration, not good taste, but 
 the love that goes out in selfless service ; and 
 culture makes so many of its devotees 
 self-centred. You remember Tennyson's 
 "Palace of Art," to which he prefixed the 
 lines: 
 
 I send you here a sort of allegory — of a soul, 
 A sinful soul, possessed of many gifts, 
 A spacious garden full of flowering weeds, 
 A glorious devil, large in heart and brain. 
 That did love beauty only — ^beauty seen 
 In all varieties of mould and mind. 
 
 And then he draws the picture of the life 
 that banishes the disagreeable, the disgust- 
 ing, the terrible elements of human exist- 
 ence, and lives in its exclusive palace with 
 all things fair; and its self-culture becomes 
 a sword that pierces it. 
 
 And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be 
 Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie 
 Howling in outer darkness. 
 
 Or take wealth. It is nonsense to talk 
 slightingly of means and to cry up poverty. 
 It may be that we shall have the poor with 
 
64 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 us always; but that does not mean that 
 poverty is ever anything but an evil, and an 
 evil we are bound to battle to destroy. A 
 fair share for everyone in God's bountiful 
 heritage is a Christian ideal. And wealth 
 is a tool with which one can accomplish vast 
 things for the Kingdom of God. Paul tells 
 us that we are to labor to have to give. But 
 with a great many people their wealth is 
 the most serious impediment to their use- 
 fulness. Because they possess a certain 
 income, they feel constrained to live up to 
 it. They really must have this and that, 
 and do thus and so. If without this and 
 that, and ceasing to do thus and so, they 
 could invest their lives more profitably, it 
 is a great shame that the conventions of 
 wealth should be allowed to stand in their 
 way. Leaders in churches and philanthropic 
 organizations know very well that one can 
 seldom count upon a person of means 
 for reliable, continuous personal service. 
 Because they can afford to go here and 
 there, to gratify this and that desire, to 
 enjoy the country, or experience the delight 
 of travel, or go in for some time-consuming 
 sport, they are apt to do it, and to feel that 
 
ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 65 
 
 a subscription which enables others to do 
 good works excuses them from self-giving. 
 Their means which should be a sword with 
 which they personally take the field becomes 
 the destroyer of their self-sacrifice. 
 
 And (to mention swords that we seldom 
 think of as instruments of suicide) take 
 goodness, integrity of character. To be 
 known as entirely trustworthy, to be 
 respected as honorable, just and faithful, 
 is to be capable of the largest service of God 
 and man. But some of the least attractive 
 people you and I know are thoroughly 
 trustworthy. The men who crucified Jesus 
 were, for the most part, good men, honor- 
 able and faithful to a degree. People who 
 are not altogether honorable and not at all 
 reliable are sometimes more sympathetic 
 than the righteous. It is hard to be just 
 without becoming somewhat harsh, to be 
 uncompromisingly honest without ceasing 
 to be tender, to be straight without growing 
 narrow. The effort to be good renders 
 many men austere and hard. It is a ques- 
 tion whether the greater evil is wrought in 
 the world by the scamps and rascals or by 
 the good people, whose goodness is of a 
 
66 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 rigid and disagreeable variety. Many a 
 man's righteousness has spoiled his sympa- 
 thy and shut him off from helping those who 
 most needed him. And it is not without 
 significance that Jesus said, "I came not to 
 call the righteous but sinners." Self- 
 respect takes the place in many persons 
 which a craving for God should occupy. 
 So long as they are conscious of living up 
 to their lights and doing the best they can, 
 they feel no need of God. Their very good- 
 ness, which is not spurious but genuine so 
 far as it goes, makes them impervious to the 
 appeals of the Gospel. That which stands 
 in the way of their becoming better is not 
 their badness, but their goodness. They are 
 falling on their own swords. 
 
 Or take religion. A vigorous faith in 
 God is unquestionably the mightiest weapon 
 which a human hand can grasp. By faith 
 obstacles are vanquished, wildernesses 
 turned into springs of water, waste lives 
 redeemed. And surely, we think, religion 
 can never hurt anybody. But unfortunately 
 it can. The unseen becomes very absorb- 
 ing to those who love God, and they easily 
 grow careless of their small obligations to 
 
ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 67 
 
 the seen. Religious people are often incon- 
 siderate and thoughtless. They are deeply 
 impressed with the gracious forgiveness of 
 God and rejoice that He washes them 
 whiter than snow, but this may weaken their 
 consciences, and their assurance of free 
 forgiveness allow them to sin with greater 
 impunity. Companionship with God ought 
 to make conscience more sensitive, but 
 devout people are not conspicuous for the 
 fineness of their sense of honor or their 
 scrupulous regard for truth. The fact that 
 a man prays does not guarantee the amia- 
 bility of his disposition, the control of his 
 temper, or the gentleness of his tongue. 
 Religious people look at hfe in the light of 
 eternity, and unfortunately this may have 
 the effect of dulling their sense of the 
 importance of what they are and do today. 
 Genuine faith in God has been associated 
 at some time or other with almost every 
 diabolical characteristic in human nature 
 one can mention. In Saul's own case there 
 was no lack of rehgion. The difficulty was 
 that he thought that by being devout he 
 could compound for disregarding the diffi- 
 cult policy of the rigorously righteous 
 
68 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Samuel. He would offer a sacrifice, and 
 that would excuse him for keeping a good 
 share of the booty of his raid on Agag; and 
 he had to learn the bitter lesson that "to 
 obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken 
 than the fat of rams." His thought of 
 God, his feeling that he could make things 
 right with Him, proved a sword upon which 
 he fell and slew himself. 
 
 One contrasts with the tragic death of 
 Saul another Old Testament suicide. Blind 
 Samson grasps the pillars of the temple of 
 Dagon and crying, "Let me die with the 
 Philistines!" pulls the building upon him- 
 self and the oppressors of his people. It 
 forms a heroic ending which redeems the 
 man's misspent life; while Saul's is the 
 ignoble climax of his well-nigh unbroken 
 failure. Had he but shouted, "Let me sell 
 my life as dearly as I can!" and rushed upon 
 the Philistines, we should have felt him a 
 true king even in his defeat and disaster. 
 But there is a difference between the two 
 men. Samson did not care what happened 
 to him so long as he slew the foes of his 
 people. Saul could not get his mind off 
 himself. "Draw thy sword," he said to his 
 
ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 69 
 
 armor-bearer, "and thrust me through 
 therewith, lest these uncircumcised come 
 and thrust me through and abuse me." 
 One is reminded of the death of a far baser 
 man. Nero exclaims, "Qualis artifex 
 pereo," posing at least to himself even in 
 death. Saul cannot help thinking of what 
 is due to his own dignity. If he had cared 
 only for the kingdom over which God had 
 set him and for the people whose battle he 
 was fighting, it would have made no differ- 
 ence to him whether a Philistine javelin or 
 an Israelite's sword smote him. But his 
 pride, his self-importance, rose up and 
 obscured his consecration. It had been his 
 self-will which led to the rupture with 
 Samuel, his offended feeling that brought 
 him to sentence Jonathan, his pique that 
 induced him to banish the popular David. 
 Self had been Saul's lifelong foe. It was 
 the evil spirit that troubled him. He could 
 not forget himself, lose himself, and he ends 
 self-slain. 
 
 Education, culture, wealth, righteousness, 
 religion — and we might have lengthened 
 the list indefinitely — influence, friendliness, 
 love, popularity, what not? — are all swords 
 
70 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 of service, but swords which self-interest will 
 turn into weapons of suicide. Very few 
 men think of the knowledge of which Paul 
 speaks when he writes, "I know how to 
 abound." We spend a great deal of time 
 in learning how to get, but never think of 
 the need of learning how to have. Paul had 
 learned his lesson in the school of Him, who 
 having all things, being in the form of God, 
 emptied Himself. It is only the man who 
 is possessed by an engrossing interest, by 
 devotion to some Israel for whom God 
 makes him responsible, who can have 
 weapons of service and wield them to the 
 destruction of the enemies of the Kingdom 
 of love. We, within the walls of Battell 
 Chapel this morning, represent a splendid 
 equipment in brains, in refinement, in means, 
 in character, in faith, but it is all too pos- 
 sible that the points of our God-given 
 swords are turned towards our own breasts 
 and that we are falling on the very weapons 
 given us for divinest use. 
 
 You remember that Samuel had tried to 
 fire Saul's imagination, that night years 
 before on the housetop, with the vision of 
 what he might mean to the tribes of Israel, 
 
ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 71 
 
 and that the spirit of patriotic fervor, the 
 public spirit, came on him when he met the 
 band of leaping enthusiasts, and people 
 said, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" 
 But their questioning way of saying it tells 
 the story. He was, but not wholly. What 
 of ourselves? Is there any hesitancy in 
 people's thoughts where to classify us? 
 
 Never mind people; their judgments are 
 after all too inaccurate to waste our thought 
 on. Where do we classify ourselves? We 
 want to be useful in God's service, to be 
 warriors of the Kingdom of righteousness. 
 The prophetic fire burns here; we feel its 
 heat every now and again. But how 
 entirely does it consume us? Are we 
 flinging all our heart, soul, mind, strength, 
 into the Kingdom, or have we side- 
 interests — things which we feel we have a 
 right to get out of our education, our cul- 
 ture, our wealth, our reputation, our faith, 
 whether they bear directly on the cause of 
 God or not? That way lies suicide. For 
 whosoever would save his life — save his 
 intellectual enjoyment or save his clever 
 power to mould men to his will, save his own 
 sensitive refinement from contact with the 
 
72 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 unpleasant, save the comfort and indul- 
 gence that his wealth affords irrespective of 
 its hindrance of his personal service — he 
 who would save anything for himself shall 
 lose it. Saul saved the doubtful glory of 
 killing himself, instead of letting his last 
 strength go out in attempting to fell 
 another Philistine; and his foes cut off his 
 head, stripped his corpse and hung his body 
 in public shame on the wall of Beth-shan, 
 and his memory is displayed as a pathetic 
 failure before the eyes of all the ages. 
 
 But how is a man to lose himself? No one 
 can do it by trying to. The harder we try, 
 the more self-conscious we become. Saul 
 came nearest to forgetting himself when 
 he was with Samuel and his fellow enthu- 
 siasts. They nearly succeeded in getting 
 him wrapped up in the cause of his people. 
 And we have One whose consecration is far 
 more compelling than theirs. When a man 
 catches sight of Jesus Christ, if there is any- 
 thing inflammable in his make-up, it takes 
 fire. That for which Jesus lived and died 
 masters him. He cannot explain the fasci- 
 nation; he does not stop to try to explain 
 it; he goes headlong. For him to live is 
 
ABILITIES SUICIDALLY USED 73 
 
 Christ. What Jesus wished to accomplish, 
 what He believed we with God can accom- 
 plish, becomes an obsession. "The love of 
 Christ constraineth us." The cross lifts us 
 clean out of ourselves. Love so amazing, 
 so divine, not only demands, but has power 
 to enforce its demand for soul, life, all. 
 Whenever self with its persistent pleas for 
 recognition troubles us, our safety lies in 
 running to Calvary. We lose self in the 
 presence of the Crucified. We cannot help 
 it. There is in Him, as He pours out His 
 soul unto death, an irresistible persuasion. 
 "Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; 
 and whether we die, we die unto the Lord; 
 whether we live therefore, or die, we are the 
 Lord's," and the swords in our hands 
 become the swords of our God and of His 
 Christ, weapons through which we bring all 
 things into subjection to Him. 
 
 Some here today are like Saul on the 
 housetop with their whole careers still ahead 
 of them. God grant that Jesus Christ may 
 lay His spell on them and rid them of self 
 from the start. Others of us are more like 
 Saul at Gilboa with a long list of occasions 
 behind us when self-regard or self-pity or 
 
74 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 self-concern or self-conceit has made us use 
 our swords of service to our own hurt. 
 But He who is able to save unto the utter- 
 most can on the final battlefield, when the 
 cause seems wholly lost, make us sharers 
 of His wish. His enthusiasm. His sacrifice, 
 and as we raise the sword resolved to hit 
 at least one blow for God regardless of what 
 happens to us. He will make us more than 
 conquerors over self and the world. 
 
THE CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 
 UPON CHRISTIANS 
 
 John .20:21; 22. Jesus said to them, As the 
 Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when 
 He had said this. He breathed on them, and saith 
 unto them. Receive ye the Holy Spirit. 
 
 In Jesus' commission to His first disciples 
 we get a clear definition of the Christian 
 Church. It is the company of those who 
 share the purpose of Jesus and possess His 
 Father's Spirit for its accomplishment. 
 
 Protestantism has so emphasized the 
 individual's personal fellowship with God, 
 that it has often lost sight of his necessary 
 fellowship with the Church, the communion 
 of those of like purpose organized for col- 
 lective service. We need to remind our- 
 selves that, unique as was Jesus' relation to 
 God, He was a loyal churchman. 
 
 He was born into the Jewish Church, and 
 the first recorded incidents of His child- 
 hood — His circumcision and presentation 
 in the Temple — were His public recognition 
 
76 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 as a church member. The earliest expres- 
 sion of His own religious experience was 
 His saying to His parents that He must be 
 in His Father's house. That Church was 
 the heir of patriarchs, prophets, lawgivers, 
 psalmists, sages, and of generations of lowly 
 and earnest believing men and women. 
 Two of the evangelists give us genealogies, 
 which interest us today not so much as lines 
 of physical descent but as the ancestry of 
 Jesus' faith. The heritage of the Jewish 
 Church was Jesus' birthright. He expressed 
 His respect for the official leaders of the 
 body which had preserved the choicest reli- 
 gious experiences of the past in its Scrip- 
 tures, kept alive devotion to the God of 
 Israel in the world, and was holding up, 
 however imperfectly, the ideal of His King- 
 dom, when He said, "The scribes and Phari- 
 sees sit on Moses' seat : all things, therefore, 
 whatsoever they bid you, these observe and 
 do." In that Church's trust His faith was 
 born; in its worship and teaching His soul 
 was shaped and nourished; in its consecra- 
 tion the flame of His own sacrifice was 
 kindled. To it He owed a debt which He 
 never repudiated. 
 
 1 
 
CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 77 
 
 A Christian today is under no less obliga- 
 tion to the Church. Those who stand aloof 
 from it and coolly criticise it, as though they 
 sustained no personal relation to it, are as 
 unfilial as the man who would "peep and 
 botanize upon his mother's grave." There 
 are doubtless some things about the Church 
 with which we cannot sympathize. Its 
 beliefs may appear to us crude at a number 
 of points, and its official creeds phrased in 
 obsolete forms; its standards of conduct 
 may seem deficient in social obligation; its 
 outlook may be narrow, prejudiced and 
 exclusive of much that is not alien to the 
 purpose of the Son of man; its methods may 
 impress us as pathetically ineffective with 
 large sections of our population. The 
 Jewish Church in Jesus' day was lacking in 
 His eyes in all these respects; but the fact 
 remained that it had been His spiritual 
 mother, and this kinship gave Him a 
 responsibility He could not disown. 
 
 Again, its fellowship seemed to Him 
 indispensable for His own religious inspira- 
 tion. The life in which all succeeding 
 generations have seen the fullness of the 
 Godhead was not self-sufficient. Jesus* 
 
78 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 originality consisted in His discriminating 
 appropriation of the best He found in 
 existing institutions, ideals, beliefs, and 
 transforming it for His own purpose. He 
 went regularly to the services of the syna- 
 gogue and kept the appointed festivals at 
 Jerusalem. There must have been many 
 phrases in the prayers of the liturgy which 
 He found imperfect and even objection- 
 able. There were portions of the Church's 
 recognized Scriptures which He considered 
 outworn and inadequate representations of 
 God. He must often have been bored by 
 dull and unenlightened sermons. Some of 
 the Church's leaders did not command 
 His respect, and many of his fellow wor- 
 shippers must have seemed insincere and 
 uninspiring. But He did not depend upon 
 His own Bible reading and private com- 
 munion with God for the development of 
 His spirit. The fellowship of kindred souls 
 and the stimulus of social worship were to 
 Him essential for His religious vitahty. 
 
 Many high-principled Christians do not 
 attend church services and have no formal 
 connection with the organization today. It 
 is undeniable that there are many religious 
 
CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 79 
 
 stimuli besides those that come from public 
 worship and fellowship with the Church — 
 stimuli in literature, in education, in social 
 service; but if the Son of God could not 
 do without inspirations which came to Him 
 from the Jewish Church, it is surely not 
 likely that a modern Christian can maintain 
 his spiritual life at its utmost vigor without 
 constant contact with the Christian Church, 
 which, however faulty, is certainly no 
 faultier than the Church Jesus knew. 
 
 And again, Jesus found in the Church 
 the largest opportunity for the investment 
 of His personal religious life. According 
 to Luke's narrative, as soon as He became 
 aware of His special spiritual endowment 
 and had gone through the testing in the 
 wilderness, He returned to the synagogue 
 in which He had been reared, and announced 
 that the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him. 
 It is in a religious society that a man can 
 find his largest usefulness for the Kingdom. 
 In an organization others will supplement 
 him, catch his zeal, receive his new ideas, 
 spread his influence where he cannot per- 
 sonally go, and carry on the impetus of his 
 life long after he has ceased to be. The 
 
80 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Jewish Church offered Jesus pulpits from 
 which to speak His message, a theology in 
 which to clothe His thoughts, a heritage of 
 spiritual force with which He could ally 
 Himself, a membership of believing people 
 from which He drew His first adherents. 
 He seemed to feel that if He could capture 
 this organization, and get it to adopt His 
 purpose, He would have an incalculable 
 reinforcement. He was disappointed; but 
 whatever success He attained, He won 
 through it. 
 
 Where can a man with the purpose of 
 Christ today find a larger opportunity than 
 in the Christian Church? Here is the 
 impetus of the past to forward him; here 
 are lives with kindred faith and devotion to 
 be his partners ; here is a wealth of sentiment 
 to which he can appeal ; here is conveniently 
 arranged machinery to multiply his effect- 
 iveness; here is a body into which he can 
 infuse his spirit, and which will conserve 
 the results of his work long after he has 
 passed away. If he disagrees with its 
 official creeds, let him seek to revise and 
 improve them, as Jesus sought to teach the 
 Church of His age. If he thinks that it is 
 
CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 81 
 
 wasting its energies on trifles, let him recall 
 it to its divine commission, as Jesus set 
 forth to the congregation at Nazareth the 
 purpose of God. If he considers its methods 
 ineffective, let him show it a more excellent 
 way; and the Church, with all its tradition- 
 alism, is sincerely eager to be made more 
 efficient. Let him inspire it, by his thought 
 and consecration and sacrifice, with a new 
 spirit, with more of its own spirit — ^the 
 Eternal Spirit of the God and Father of 
 Jesus Christ. A Christian can do most, not 
 in isolation, but in fellowship with the 
 company of like-purposing believers. 
 
 We sometimes wonder that Jesus founded 
 no organization. This was not due, as has 
 been alleged, to His hostility to organiza- 
 tion, but to the fact that in the Jewish 
 Church He found such an organization 
 already in existence. He was not primarily 
 interested in polity, or creed, or worship, 
 or methods, but in the spirit and purpose 
 of the Church. If once He could fill it with 
 His Spirit and commit it to His purpose, 
 its government, theology, ritual, methods, 
 would adjust themselves. When it became 
 evident that the Jewish Church, as a whole, 
 
82 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 could not be won, He gave Himself to the 
 task of inspiring a small group within it 
 with His mind. The Spirit could be trusted 
 to find a Body of its own in which to gain 
 expression. The sole condition of member- 
 ship in the New Testament Church was 
 possession of the Spirit of Jesus; and 
 with large local differences in its forms of 
 administration, many varieties of theological 
 opinion and much diversity in worship, it 
 was an effective organization for its divine 
 purpose, compacted by loyalty to Jesus and 
 consecration to His aims. 
 
 The Christian Church is the chief agency 
 in our day for the setting up of the Kingdom 
 of God. As such, it has a claim on all who 
 share the purpose of Jesus. A man cannot 
 consistently follow Him, without following 
 Him into the fellowship of the Church. 
 
 In its present outwardly disunited condi- 
 tion. Christians do not always recognize the 
 obligation of church membership. Denomi- 
 nationalism may be offensive to them; and 
 they cannot unite with the Church save as 
 they belong to one of the churches. But 
 to serve in one regiment in an army is not 
 to disparage the equal loyalty and useful- 
 
CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 83 
 
 ness of all the other troops, and there is no 
 way of enlisting in an army save by enlist- 
 ing in some particular branch of the service. 
 
 Or a man may feel that no existing com- 
 munion fulfills his ideal. Let him remain 
 in that in which he was born, to which his 
 obligation is certainly strongest; or, if that 
 seems impossible, let him enter that in which 
 he can work with least friction. If a man 
 is entirely satisfied with any existing church, 
 it is to be hoped that he will not enter it, 
 and if he is in such already, that he will 
 hasten to leave. He will hinder and hamper 
 its advance, and be in matters ecclesiastical 
 that hopeless factor whom in political life 
 we label a "stand-patter." 
 
 Nor is there any inconsistency in worship- 
 ping and working, or even in occupying a 
 position of leadership, in a communion with 
 whose creed, or ritual, or methods one is not 
 in full sympathy. That was Jesus' condi- 
 tion in the Jewish Church, and a Christian 
 can well be as inconsistent as his Lord. The 
 point is that church membership is not an 
 optional responsibility which a follower of 
 Jesus may or may not assume; he cannot 
 follow his Lord and refuse to contribute the 
 
84 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 inspiration of his personality to the social 
 group which is functioning collectively for 
 the Kingdom. 
 
 For those of us who are already in the 
 memhership of one of the churches this 
 conception of the Church carries a duty to 
 stand for a distinctive type of churchman- 
 ship. We must seek to render our com- 
 munion as inclusive as the Church of Christ, 
 with a welcome and a scope for every 
 follower of Jesus. We must protest against 
 doctrinal tests, or the insistence on a par- 
 ticular type of religious experience, or the 
 emphasis upon conformity to some hallowed 
 rite, that would bar its fellowship to any 
 sincere Christian. We must wage incessant 
 warfare against denominational snobbery, 
 which, while admitting that other churches 
 are Christian, considers one's own a more 
 select company of the spiritually elite. We 
 must stand for Church unity, not by dis- 
 sociating ourselves from our communion, 
 but by working heartily for the Kingdom 
 of God through it, striving all the while to 
 increase its efficiency by doing away with 
 whatever in its standards, worship or 
 administration prevents any man who is 
 
CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 85 
 
 fit to minister in any church from entering 
 its ministry, or which debars any genuine 
 follower of Jesus from finding a congenial 
 home in its membership. We do not wish 
 to reduce the Church's thought to an 
 impossible agreement, nor its government 
 to a mechanical uniformity, nor its worship 
 to monotonous sameness; this would render 
 it of no value to many temperaments and 
 minds; but to make it include the widest 
 possible differences within a unity of spirit 
 that shall make it function harmoniously 
 and unitedly for its one divine purpose. 
 
 There are times when the Church of 
 Christ, as represented in the existing 
 churches, is a heavy cross to faith. In 
 the majority of local churches financial 
 support is an ever-pressing problem, and 
 the organization devotes the largest part of 
 its energies to the often sordid struggle for 
 subsistence. Like all great institutions, the 
 Church is naturally conservative, and gives 
 but a cold welcome to its ablest scholars and 
 keenest thinkers, who offer it new and fuller 
 glimpses of truth; and it has often perse- 
 cuted its prophets and garnished their 
 sepulchres in a succeeding generation. It 
 
86 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 is constantly exposed to the tendency to 
 consider the prejudices of those already 
 within its fellowship, and to adapt its work 
 to suit their tastes, rather than to think 
 primarily of those who are outside and to 
 shape its methods to reach them. As it is 
 composed of average people, it will usually 
 offend the cultured by its crudities and the 
 aesthetic by its lack of taste. Above all, its 
 work, which requires the most spiritually 
 gifted to do it well, has to be entrusted 
 to persons of ordinary, and sometimes con- 
 siderably less than ordinary, ability; and 
 their lack of inspiration, or intelligence, or 
 tact, or fidelity, pitifully cripples the work- 
 ing Body of Christ. Under such circum- 
 stances it is not astonishing that even those 
 who are predisposed to think well of all who 
 work in Christ's name are tempted to ask: 
 "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of 
 Damascus, better than all the waters of 
 Israel?" 
 
 But the stream of spiritual vitality in the 
 Church is, nevertheless, the river which 
 makes glad the city of God. What one of 
 our great rivers, a Hudson or a Connecticut, 
 for instance, is to the country through which 
 
 I 
 
CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 87 
 
 it flows, the Church is to human society. 
 The river's more rapid upper reaches turn 
 millwheels and supply power to run fac- 
 tories and to light towns. Its pools are 
 the swimming places of small boys in 
 summer and their skating ponds in winter. 
 In its shallows the cattle stand and cool 
 themselves on torrid days. At intervals its 
 banks are cut and its water deflected to fill 
 canals. Its broader waters bear vessels 
 freighted with merchandise. It sweeps past 
 cities, carrying the filth from their sewers 
 out into the ocean. And all along its course 
 meadows are richer, trees more luxuriant, 
 the whole countryside fairer and more 
 fruitful for its beneficent presence. Such 
 is the Church of God in the world of men. 
 It supplies busy lives with inspiration to do 
 the world's work in the Spirit of Christ. It 
 affords little children their happiest ideals 
 and develops them for their highest service. 
 It rests the tired with its ministry of comfort 
 and renewal. It furnishes devoted workers 
 to innumerable organizations whose work is 
 parallel with its own aims. It supports and 
 carries along lives laden with responsibilities 
 and burdened with oppressive weights. It 
 
88 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 cleanses the sinning and purifies the social 
 life, to which it brings the constant flow of 
 its purer standards and more generous 
 spirit. And wherever the Church is, lives 
 that are »0* in direct touch with it are richer 
 in ideals, fairer in character, and more 
 fruitful in service for its inspiring presence 
 in their neighborhood. There are, doubt- 
 less, showers of divine blessing that refresh 
 God's earth everywhere, and dews of mercy 
 that form nightly over the most parched and 
 barren soil; but the Church is the channel 
 through which the central stream of divine 
 life is flowing to fructify the earth with 
 fruits of righteousness akin to those of 
 Jesus. 
 
 In every age the Church has felt that the 
 flow of divine life and power in it was a 
 mere trickle; and this is true today. We 
 recognize the Church's mission — ^to cleanse 
 every sphere of our social life and permeate 
 a whole world with the Spirit of God in 
 Christ. And how titanic the task is! The 
 Church looks expectantly and trustfully to 
 its sons and daughters in the schools and 
 colleges of the land, pleading with them to 
 acknowledge their spiritual debt, to avail 
 
CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 89 
 
 themselves of its stores of garnered and 
 living inspiration, and to bring the wealth 
 of their endowment and energy to augment 
 its forces and fulfill its world-wide mission. 
 And shall it look in vain? 
 
VI 
 FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 
 
 1 Samuel 21:10-16. And David arose, and fled 
 that day for fear of Saul, and went to Achish, the 
 king of Gath. And the servants of Achish said unto 
 him. Is not this David, the king of the land? did they 
 not sing one to another of him in dances, saying, 
 
 Saul hath slain his thousands_, 
 And David his ten thousands? 
 
 And David laid up these words in his heart, and was 
 sore afraid of Achish, the king of Gath. And he 
 changed his behaviour before them, and feigned him- 
 self mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the doors 
 of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his 
 beard. Then said Achish unto his servants, Lo, ye 
 see the man is mad: wherefore then have ye brought 
 him to me ? Do I lack madmen, that ye have brought 
 this fellow to play the madman in my presence ? shall 
 this fellow come into my house ? 
 
 This is a curious tale to hand down 
 through the centuries associated with the 
 name of David, the revered founder of 
 Israel's sacred dynasty. It represents the 
 national hero rescuing himself from a 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 91 
 
 situation where he was under suspicion, not 
 by some devout appeal to God, nor by some 
 act of prowess, but by making a most 
 indecorous fool of himself, and behaving like 
 a raving maniac. One wonders why any 
 historian compihng an edifying account of 
 this great man's career should have included 
 this incident. No pubhc man today would 
 retain a press agent who did not show more 
 discrimination. And when one recalls that 
 Israel's historians are always preachers, 
 recording events not merely or mainly in 
 order to present a complete picture, but to 
 hold up an inspiring ideal, what possible 
 religious message could the editor of these 
 tales have found in this strange occurrence 
 in the life of Israel's greatest and most 
 honored monarch? 
 
 It is plain that our editor was thinking 
 of David as already a sovereign, for he 
 makes the Philistines call him "the king of 
 the land," although in fact he was as yet 
 merely a runaway from the court of King 
 Saul, suspected and hated because of his 
 too great popularity, and apparently unat- 
 tended by any followers. Now that a king 
 of whom popular fame was singing, 
 
92 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Saul hath slain his thousands, 
 And David his ten thousands, 
 
 should deliberately act the lunatic is, to say 
 the least, surprisingly undignified. Evi- 
 dently this discerning editor wished us to 
 notice that David did not let his dignity 
 stand in his way. And it was a point worth 
 emphasizing, for dignity has been a most 
 serious impediment to many men with king- 
 like roles to play in the world's life. They 
 have been willing to do almost anything for 
 a great cause provided it did not make them 
 appear ridiculous. People dare be anything 
 but fools. Now David's life was in peril: 
 he had to choose between his dignity and 
 his neck; and he chose the latter. It may 
 have been a mortifying memory that stayed 
 with him all his days, that once before the 
 traditional foes of his people, the detested 
 Philistines, he had been forced to appear 
 an idiot; but it was necessary to keep him- 
 self for the larger work God had in store 
 for him. 
 
 There are strange items in the program 
 God assigns to every man. Few of us fail 
 to find ourselves led into situations where 
 we feel like fools. This odd event in King 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 93 
 
 David's assorted experience recalls a similar 
 happening that remained fixed in the 
 memory of the Apostle Paul. Have you 
 ever noticed how he concludes that striking 
 Odyssey of woes in the Eleventh Chapter 
 of Second Corinthians? He runs over the 
 list of his toils and pains — prisons, stripes, 
 deaths, stonings, perils of robbers, of rivers, 
 in the wilderness, in the sea, among false 
 brethren, labor and travail, hunger and 
 thirst, cold and nakedness, shipwreck ("a 
 night and a day have I been in the deep") — 
 and then as the climax of all: "In Damascus 
 the governor under Aretas the king guarded 
 the city of the Damascenes in order to take 
 me: and through a window was I let down 
 in a basket by the wall, and escaped his 
 hands." Why does he place that adventure 
 in a basket above stonings and shipwrecks 
 and what not? John Henry Newman called 
 Paul a proud man; whether he was or not, 
 he had a certain position in the world, and 
 to think of the brilliant pupil of Gamaliel, 
 the man who had been commissioned by the 
 chief priests to stamp out the troublesome 
 sect of the Nazarenes, the man who had 
 become the leading figure in that growing 
 
94 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 sect, the man who could not have been 
 unaware of his own superbly equipped and 
 keen-cutting intellect, the citizen of the 
 Roman Empire who knew well how to 
 assert his rights and make the magistrates 
 of so considerable a place as Philippi come 
 and apologize for having beaten him — to 
 think of that man being bundled, as Shakes- 
 peare's Merry Wives of Windsor bundle the 
 absurd Sir John Falstaff, into a clothes- 
 basket, and lowered over the wall all doubled 
 up inside, was surely the extreme humilia- 
 tion. The apostle looked back on that as 
 the culmination of the things he had endured 
 for the sake of the exacting Master he 
 served. When he asked, "Lord, what 
 wilt Thou have me to do?" it had never 
 occurred to him that he would be told to 
 pocket his pride and be packed away in a 
 hamper. 
 
 You and I, as Christians, are summoned 
 to be kings unto God. We are to be the 
 lordly children of the Lord of heaven and 
 earth; but we must expect some queer items 
 in the kingly existence. Conscientious 
 followers of Christ repeatedly discover 
 themselves in comic situations. We pass 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 95 
 
 SO quickly in our most earnest efforts from 
 the sublime to the ridiculous. Recall the 
 efforts you have made to talk to some 
 indifferent man about personal religion, 
 your experiences as a Sunday school teacher, 
 your work for some great public cause, and 
 how grotesquely the droll and the serious 
 were blended! There were times when you 
 did not know whether to laugh or cry. 
 There were certainly moments when others 
 thought you a fool, and when you were 
 entirely ready to agree with them. But the 
 point is that the ridiculous seems to be as 
 truly part of God's will as the sublime. 
 David playing the madman is no less the 
 man after God's own heart than David the 
 sweet singer of Israel, or David the slayer 
 of Goliath of Gath. 
 
 A moment ago we were contrasting 
 David's escape from his perilous position by 
 making a fool of himself with a possible 
 escape by some act of bravery. Perhaps 
 there is no such contrast; it often requires 
 considerable courage to be willing to be 
 scorned as an idiot. Many of us can stand 
 almost anjiihing but that. Hawthorne has 
 written: "The greatest obstacle to being 
 
96 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 heroic is the doubt whether one may not be 
 going to prove one's self a fool; the truest 
 heroism is to resist the doubt; and the pro- 
 foundest wisdom to know when it ought to 
 be resisted, and when to be obeyed." AU 
 Christian service contains that risk; we are 
 constantly doing things that men of a 
 certain reputation for shrewdness consider 
 silly. Paul said once sarcastically: "We are 
 fools for Christ's sake"; but he might 
 have said it as truly in sober seriousness. 
 There was not a man who graduated from 
 Gamaliel's classroom with him who would 
 not have told you that Saul of Tarsus had 
 a splendid record at Jerusalem and showed 
 marvellous promise, but the poor fellow 
 became the victim of a fantastic delusion 
 and was as mad as a March hare. And 
 there must have been times when it was 
 difficult for Paul not to share their opinion. 
 When everybody looks at you with a pitying 
 glance as "a little off," it is not easy to 
 maintain one's assurance of sobriety. When 
 he saw the incredulous looks of his ques- 
 tioners on Mars' Hill, when he preached and 
 noticed distinguished hearers nodding know- 
 ingly at one another and remarking that 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 97 
 
 the fellow was beside himself, it required 
 unusual courage to persevere. Nobody can 
 be genuinely in earnest without appearing 
 eccentric in a world where intensity is con- 
 sidered bad form. All devoted Christians 
 seem a little, perhaps very, queer to men 
 and women whose hearts have never been 
 kindled with their fire. We must certainly 
 not cultivate singularity; the sanest of us 
 have enough eccentricities without seeking 
 to add to them ; but we need the daring that 
 keeps us faithful to our highest Christian 
 impulses and persistent in our most exact- 
 ing Christian tasks, when our comfortable 
 and unenthusiastic acquaintances let us 
 know that they consider us odd. "We are 
 fools for Christ's sake." 
 
 This incident discloses a certain sense of 
 humor in King David. One can imagine 
 him smiling inwardly as he drummed on the 
 door, assumed an utterly idiotic expression, 
 and saw the indignant and insulted Achish 
 berate his officious servants for having ven- 
 tured to inflict a lunatic on him. The 
 whole affair was a joke; and one is glad to 
 think that poor David, whose existence at 
 that time was an uninterrupted chapter of 
 
98 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 perils and hardships, had the soHd satisfac- 
 tion of at least one good, hearty laugh, 
 although he was forced to muffle it and keep 
 it to himself. 
 
 Possibly we may be attributing to our 
 discerning historian a purpose that was 
 foreign to his mind when we think of his 
 including this droll incident in order to 
 teach his readers the value of humor as a 
 tool in God's service. David conquered one 
 Philistine with a sling, and another by a 
 practical joke; and who will say that the 
 second was not as divine a method as the 
 first? Much might be said for the sustain- 
 ing power of a sense of the comic. There 
 are exceedingly difficult and trying circum- 
 stances to be endured, when a man's eye for 
 the absurd side of a vexation is the secret 
 of his patience. If one did not smile to 
 one's self at certain types of people, one 
 might lose temper, and tongue, and every 
 Christian grace, in dealing with them. 
 David's quiet laugh at Achish and his men 
 must have been a refreshing brook by the 
 way, of which he drank and lifted up his 
 head. 
 
 And it was his sense of humor that saved 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 99 
 
 his life. If he had not been able to make 
 a buffoon of himself he would have been 
 speedily put out of the way as a dangerous 
 Hebrew warrior; but Achish could not 
 bring himself to kill a fool. What was the 
 use? Humor is an effective weapon for 
 disarming hostility. The sharpness of con- 
 troversy can be sheathed if a man will only 
 exercise his appreciation of the comic and 
 introduce the playful element. One can 
 say well-nigh anjrthing inoffensively if it is 
 mixed with a sufficient quantity of foolish- 
 ness. This is not to commend flippancy; 
 far from it. Poor David was never more 
 dead in earnest than when he was screwing 
 up his face into the most outlandish grim- 
 aces and scrabbling on the door: his life 
 depended on the idiocy of his appearance. 
 "Humor," Miss Thackeray has well phrased 
 it, "Humor is thinking in fun, while we feel 
 in earnest." 
 
 And again we were contrasting this 
 fantastic way of meeting a crisis with that 
 of appealing devoutly to God. There seems 
 to be a difference between David's method 
 when the people were on the point of 
 stoning him, and it is written, "But David 
 
100 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 strengthened himself in Jehovah, his God," 
 and this narrative where he pretends to be 
 mad. But why should we insist on a con- 
 trast? Is it not as likely that David 
 strengthened himself in God, and that the 
 waking of his sense of humor to the possible 
 comic escape from his predicament was 
 God's answer to his appeal? Shall we not 
 reckon humor among the offspring of the 
 Father of mercies? It requires strength to 
 think in fun, while we feel in earnest — the 
 strength of perfect poise and self-possession. 
 A man cannot be frightened to death and 
 keep his wits about him and carry off his 
 part. David's life hung in the balance ; but 
 he was in no panic; he had hold of himself, 
 and could act this absurd role with complete 
 success. It is a striking instance of the 
 perfect peace of a mind stayed on God. 
 
 And how immensely desirable is this 
 strength to think in fun while we feel in 
 earnest! It saves one from a vast amount 
 of nervous wear and tear. David had a 
 most racking experience at the court of 
 Achish; after such an ordeal most of us 
 would have been entirely used up mentally; 
 but we can fancy the comedy of the situation 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOS^; I fiOi 
 
 in which he had so delightfully outwitted the 
 Philistines proving an exhilarating tonic to 
 him. As he chuckled to himself, his nerves 
 were soothed. And today in the heat of a 
 discussion when fiery minds are clashing and 
 opinions tenaciously espoused are crashing 
 against each other, the speaker who, while 
 feeling intensely his conviction, has the 
 strength to phrase his thought playfully, 
 not only makes his cause stronger, but 
 changes the atmosphere in which the entire 
 argument rages. Or when a fondly cher- 
 ished enterprise falls into desperate straits, 
 and its adherents are crushed and bowed, it 
 is not the weak man but the strong, who 
 can put the situation with a light touch that 
 not only relieves the strain, but in the 
 darkest moment will break a small crack 
 through which a ray of brightness finds its 
 way. There is no surer test of the posses- 
 sion of divine power than self-control; and 
 there is no more searching test of self- 
 control than the ability to let one's thoughts 
 play. When they are crowded and cramped, 
 like a wedged mob in a panic, they cannot 
 play. Staying them on God restores order, 
 and order brings calm and buoyancy. 
 
1G2 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Strange how the deepest things, like our 
 touch with God, and the lightest things, like 
 the surface ripple of humor, are inseparably 
 connected! 
 
 And already we are passing from what 
 may seem a rather trivial topic to life's pro- 
 foundest theme. Classifications into sane 
 and lunatic have sometimes been the division 
 into human and divine. When David was 
 classed as a madman he was put in distin- 
 guished company. We have already men- 
 tioned St. Paul, to whom Festus said, "Paul, 
 thou art mad"; and there is David's own 
 greater Son, of whom His puzzled and 
 annoyed kinsmen said, "He is beside Him- 
 self." Had our Lord Jesus, a week before 
 Palm Sunday, as He was approaching 
 Jerusalem, sent for some eminently wise 
 man of affairs, who was sympathetic with 
 Him, a man like Nicodemus for example, 
 and had He unfolded to him His plan of 
 offering Himself publicly to the nation as 
 its Messiah, letting them take Him, con- 
 demn Him, hand Him over to the Romans 
 who would crucify Him, and then from that 
 cross rule the world, it is quite certain that 
 level-headed Nicodemus would have looked 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 103 
 
 at Him in blank amazement, asked Him, 
 "Are 3'ou serious?" and gone away shaking 
 his head, confident that the Teacher who had 
 once made so deep an impression on him, 
 and whose personality he still found so 
 charming, had gone entirely out of His 
 senses. Saul of Tarsus recalled how the 
 crucifixion had appeared to him when he 
 first learned of it in Jerusalem. The clever 
 pupil of Gamaliel had been told that a cer- 
 tain Jesus from Galilee had given Himself 
 out as the Messiah; had attracted a few 
 followers; had come up to the capital and 
 made an open issue with the leaders of the 
 nation, so that they had concluded that He 
 must be silenced and discredited; that they 
 had succeeded in getting Him executed; 
 but that several hundred or even thousand 
 persons were going about saying that He 
 was alive, alive with power; that the cross 
 was His supreme act as God's Son ; and the 
 brilliant young student had laughed out 
 loud, "What foolishness!" But the years 
 often reverse a good many of our opinions ; 
 and the years together with some marvellous 
 divine experience had completely changed 
 Paul's mind. That foolishness was God's 
 
104 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 doing, and the foolishness of God is wiser 
 than men. Paul was spending his life being 
 called a fool, preaching the message of 
 the cross as the clearest expression of 
 God's mind and strength, His wisdom and 
 power — a preaching that almost everybody 
 pronounced foolishness. 
 
 Take the spirit of Calvary out of the past 
 and show what it implies today; point out 
 what it demands in a nation's foreign rela- 
 tions, in industrial arrangements, in legal 
 procedure, in business methods, in racial 
 relations, in family ideals, in personal 
 principles; and are there a great many 
 people, are there many of us, college men, 
 who are entirely convinced that this is good 
 business, practical politics, savoir faire, 
 expedient conduct? What is wisdom and 
 what is folly in this half-sane, half-mad 
 world of ours? Is there anywhere a stand- 
 ard, an expression in intelligible form, of 
 the ultimate wisdom on which the entire 
 universe is based? 
 
 There are many times when our world's 
 life strikes us as calculated to be comedy to 
 Somebody wiser than man. There are 
 countless things we take with the utmost 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 105 
 
 seriousness which, in some more reflective 
 mood, impress us as constituting a gigantic 
 farce to some big Gulliver looking down on 
 us LiUiputians. "It is He that sitteth above 
 the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants 
 thereof are as grasshoppers"; and there are 
 times, according to Jesus, when He who 
 sitteth above says to certain grasshoppers, 
 "Thou fool." Yes, it might be comedy, if 
 it were not something else. Look at the 
 distinguished members of the Jewish San- 
 hedrin worrying their wives and imperilling 
 their health with night sessions of their 
 august body — all serious to a degree about 
 this dangerous Pretender from Galilee, who 
 is so out of harmony with their idea of the 
 fitness of things. Look at Pilate "drest in 
 a little brief authority," who, while taking 
 himself quite seriously and being taken 
 seriously by everybody else, blunders 
 through his official duties. Look at the 
 crowds of practical, moderately intelligent 
 people flocking back from the place of 
 execution telling one another that this new 
 movement that was making such a stir has 
 certainly received its eflPective quietus. 
 "The kings of the earth set themselves, and 
 
106 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 the rulers take counsel together, against the 
 
 Lord and against His anointed He 
 
 that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh." 
 Yes, there's comedy in it : but it is too grim 
 for comedy. These sane, sagacious humans 
 have driven nails in the hands and feet of 
 the Son of God, and wet the cross with His 
 flowing blood! It is tragedy, not comedy; 
 there are tears above, not laughter. 
 
 But in that act deep-seeing men have 
 found the disclosure of sane and insane, 
 wisdom and folly. It is there they have 
 seen most clearly the rationale of the 
 universe: "Christ crucified, the wisdom of 
 God." 
 
 Does the spirit of that cross appeal to us 
 as so good that it ought to be true, so 
 glorious that we wish with all our hearts 
 that it would work? Are we prepared to 
 experiment with it? Have we experimented 
 enough already to have an experience that 
 convinces us that it does work, that it is both 
 the wisdom and the power of God? Are we 
 deliberately taking our tangled social prob- 
 lems and our intricate personal questions up 
 to the summit of Calvary, and letting its 
 light make plain our solutions? 
 
FOOLS FOR A PURPOSE 107 
 
 Those solutions will not commend them- 
 selves to everybody. The world's great 
 accomplishments have all been wrought by 
 those whom men thought unpractical before- 
 hand, and then agreed with, when the results 
 were all in. And for us it is simply a ques- 
 tion whether we dare be "fools for Christ's 
 sake." 
 
VII 
 
 REVELATION BY CONCEAL- 
 MENT 
 
 Mark 4 : 22. For there is nothing hid, save that 
 it should be manifested; neither was anything made 
 secret, but that it should come to light. 
 
 We do not know whether this is an 
 original saying of our Lord's, or a common 
 proverb which He picked up in the speech 
 of His day. It is the sort of truth that the 
 experience of the race discovers and coins 
 into a maxim. The more one tries to conceal 
 something the likelier it is to be found out. 
 What is told confidentially itches to be 
 repeated.' But if Jesus did not Himself 
 mint this saying but found it in circulation, 
 it is not the same common coin since He used 
 it. He left nothing as He got it. He 
 took the familiar words of men's religious 
 speech — God, kingdom, peace, joy, love — 
 and transmuted them into new words by 
 touching them vidth His personality: "My 
 God, My kingdom. My peace. My joy, as 
 I have loved you." His own experience is 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 109 
 
 an alembic that turns to gold all that it 
 receives. He fills His sentences with some- 
 thing from within Himself, so His words 
 become spirit and life. He never says any- 
 thing just because He has heard others say 
 it. If He uses their identical language, it 
 is to express a truth which has come to Him 
 as a personal discovery. All His sayings 
 are fragments of autobiography. He has 
 personally observed that this is a world 
 in which things are hidden, but hidden 
 not to stay concealed, but by their very 
 concealment to come to clearer light. 
 
 It does not take long to discover that 
 ours is a world of secrets. Our curiosity is 
 forever tantalized by happenings we cannot 
 explain and by hints which leave us still 
 inquiring. Mr. Bagehot, in his essay on 
 Clough, writes: "Undeniably this is an odd 
 world, whether it should have been so or no ; 
 and all our speculations upon it should begin 
 with some admission of its strangeness and 
 singularity." But we instinctively rebel at 
 mystery. We want to know, and we feel 
 that we have a right to know. Generation 
 after generation of men have tried to tear 
 aside the veils, pry into the unlighted nooks 
 
110 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 and crannies of existence, and make all 
 things plain. They have met with some 
 splendid successes. Knowledge has grown 
 from more to more. But the more men 
 know the more they see remains unknown. 
 Some have grown desperate in the presence 
 of the Sphinx-like secretiveness of the uni- 
 verse. Heine protested that the world was 
 "an age-long riddle which only fools expect 
 to solve." George Gissing makes Henry 
 Ryecroft write in his Private Papers: "It 
 may well be that what we call the unknow- 
 able will be for ever the unknown. In that 
 thought is there not a pathos beyond words? 
 It may be that the human race will live and 
 pass away; all mankind, from him who in 
 the world's dawn first shaped to his fearful 
 mind an image of the Lord of life, to him 
 who, in the dusking twilight of the last age, 
 shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood ; 
 and never one of that long lineage have 
 learned the wherefore of his being. The 
 prophets, the martyrs, their noble anguish 
 vain and meaningless; the wise whose 
 thought strove to eternity, and was but 
 an idle dream; the pure in heart whose life 
 was a vision of the living God, the suffering 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 111 
 
 and the mourners whose solace was in a 
 world to come, the victims of injustice who 
 cried to the Judge Supreme — all gone down 
 into silence, and the globe that bare them 
 circling dead and cold through soundless 
 space." 
 
 But this is the direct opposite of the faith 
 of Jesus. He assents to the statement that 
 our world is secretive; but He feels the 
 mystery no burden. Life's imintelligible 
 aspects are no weary and heavy weight to 
 Him. "It is what we should expect," He 
 assures us. "It is My Father's way of tell- 
 ing things by making secrets of them; to 
 show them to us more plainly by hiding 
 them away." He would have liked Walter 
 Pater's fine phrase, "the hiddenness of 
 perfect things," and He would have gone 
 further and asserted that they were hidden 
 not to prevent us from getting at them but 
 (strange as it may seem) in order to help 
 us to reach them. 
 
 Take nature, for instance, and what a 
 vast hiding-place it has proved I "There is 
 no new thing under the sun," in the sense 
 of being formed for the first time today. 
 Our latest novelty has existed from the 
 
112 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 beginning, and was latent in the frame of 
 things. It has been lying in the dark wait- 
 ing for our hands to lift it to the light. As 
 parents, who on Christmas Eve have filled 
 their children's stockings, grow almost 
 impatient if the child next morning spends 
 too much time over the first thing he pulls 
 out, and long to see him go further in and 
 get at the better things they have stowed 
 away in the toe, so one can fancy God 
 eagerly waiting through the ages to see His 
 children bring out one and another good 
 gift He has af oreprepared for them. How 
 delighted He must be when investigators 
 happen on some device that will lessen the 
 sufferings of the sick, or discover a principle 
 that will enable men to distribute more 
 justly earth's riches and make joy in wider 
 commonalty shared, or arrange some con- 
 trivance to relieve laborious drudgery, or 
 apply His spirit to some relations in life in 
 which they had been acting selfishly before ! 
 Ah, but why, if He is so anxious to have 
 them find all these things out, has He been 
 at such pains to conceal them that it has 
 taken centuries, yes, untold aeons, to uncover 
 them? Had they all been perfectly plain. 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 113 
 
 what would men have done with them? We 
 let a child make pothooks with a pencil or 
 a bit of chalk before we give him a fountain 
 pen or a typewriter. He must find out and 
 appreciate what letters are, and what he can 
 do with them, before we facilitate his making 
 them. Give him a typewriter to start with, 
 and he will break it in attempting to play 
 with it, and perhaps hurt himself with some 
 of the broken pieces. When he has a worthy 
 idea of what to do with it, then it can be 
 safely put in his hands. Had all the 
 devices of modern surgery been known to 
 the American Indians or to the Spanish 
 Inquisitors, how many times more hellish 
 might they have made their tortures! The 
 wonder is that God allowed His children 
 to know so much, when they used their 
 knowledge for such deviltry. But the point 
 is that by hiding things in nature He has 
 not permanently kept them from us, but 
 put them at our disposal. If they had been 
 easier to get at, we should not have mastered 
 them nearly so well. All the experiments 
 which failed went to equip the experimenter 
 who succeeded with skill to make the most 
 of his discovery. 
 
114 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 There are no locked closets in our Father's 
 house into which we are forbidden to go. 
 Every door has a key; and we find the key 
 as soon as we can profitably use the contents 
 of the closets. A Prometheus who discovers 
 some boon for his fellow mortals is not 
 punished for his boldness by an angry deity. 
 He may not be well treated by his neighbors 
 whom he is seeking to bless ; we have a way 
 of crucifying innovators on crosses of criti- 
 cism or worse; but God is never offended. 
 He takes care that no light is ever eclipsed 
 by darkness, no love holden permanently of 
 prejudice. There are no rooms in the house 
 of many mansions He is not glad to have 
 us explore. Our Father wants us to know. 
 We dishonor Him by supposing that He is 
 ever pleased when we take ignorance for 
 piety and fold our hands before a mystery, 
 saying, "I accept it, but do not presume to 
 try to understand it." "Prove all things." 
 He has hidden them only to pique our 
 curiosity. "There is nothing hid, save that 
 it should be manifested; neither was any- 
 thing made secret, but that it should come 
 to light." 
 
 So too in Jesus' own parables (and Mark 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 115 
 
 connects this saying in his Gospel with 
 Jesus' parables), as in nature, from which 
 Jesus has drawn them, the purpose of the 
 story is not to conceal truth but to make it 
 plainer. Tell a man something outright 
 and he says, "I understand; that's clear as 
 day," and excuses himself from further 
 thought upon it. Put it in a tale that sug- 
 gests more than it actually says, and his 
 interest is awakened. Christians, who take 
 their Master seriously and try to think out 
 what His teachings mean for them today, 
 are often disappointed. "Why did not 
 Jesus take up this question that puzzles me? 
 Why did not He make what He expected 
 of us entirely clear? How am I to know 
 what as a Christian I am to do under these 
 circumstances? How unsatisfactory to 
 have a handful of picturesque stories, and 
 a few sayings, like turning the other cheek, 
 and letting your coat go with your cloak, 
 and walking the second mile, and being salt, 
 and light, and leaven, and sheep, and 
 friends, and brethrerx, and little children, 
 as our sole guide to the intricate conditions 
 in which we are placed I" Yes, but the 
 Light of life, the solution of every per- 
 
116 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 plexity is hid in these few words; and the 
 answer to each question comes out when we 
 need it and can employ it. The very fact 
 that it requires hard thinking on our part 
 to reason out exactly what it means to be 
 salt, and light, and leaven, to be a friend of 
 Christ and a child of God, in this position 
 and in that relation, enables us when we 
 arrive at our conclusions to act with an 
 independence and an assurance we could 
 never otherwise have possessed. "I have 
 conscientiously thought this thing through, 
 and my mind is made up." It is not an 
 inviting prospect for the intellectually 
 indolent. Jesus never says, "Come unto 
 Me, all ye who are too lazy to think for 
 yourselves." He tells us frankly that He 
 is hiding His meaning in His words and 
 that we will have to stir up our minds to 
 search it out. But that will help us master 
 the answer. "There is nothing hid, save 
 that it should be manifested; neither was 
 anything made secret, but that it should 
 come to light." 
 
 Or take Jesus Himself. We are about 
 to celebrate again His birth as the child of 
 Galilean peasants who were lodged in a 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 117 
 
 barn. It would seem as though God had put 
 the light of the world under a bushel and not 
 on a lampstand. One can look in through 
 our text to a long chapter in the thought 
 of Jesus. As He grew to manhood and 
 gradually became aware of His life-purpose 
 must He not often have asked Himself, 
 "Why was I so humbly born? Why had I 
 no greater advantages in education? Why 
 have I been set for these thirty years in this 
 out-of-the-way town of Nazareth?" And 
 when the kingdoms of the world and the 
 glory of them swam within His ken, and 
 He realized that He had a meaning and a 
 message for them, that He was a Light to 
 lighten the Gentiles, His Kingdom leaven 
 to transform the whole mass of humanity, 
 how hard it must have been for Him to hide 
 Himself in the little villages of Galilee! 
 On what assurance did He rest His expec- 
 tation of achieving His purpose and becom- 
 ing the Messiah through whom God's 
 world-kingdom is set up? The text gives 
 us His conviction, the conviction by which 
 He deliberately confined Himself to a small 
 world and hid Himself in a few dozen 
 people, into whom He succeeded in breath- 
 
118 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 ing His Spirit. "There is nothing hid, save 
 that it should come to light." If a thing 
 was perfect, let it be hidden, it would not 
 be obscured. Let Him do one thing thor- 
 oughly, and the excellence of what He had 
 done would ensure its own notoriety. Let 
 Him hide Himself in Matthew and John 
 and Peter, and He would come to the blaze 
 of noonday in renewed lives, in Gospel 
 pages, in sheep for whom undershepherds 
 gave their lives, in the regeneration of all 
 things into love like His own. 
 
 Or take Jesus as He appears to us. If 
 we attempt to get back to Him and see the 
 Figure that moved among men, what do 
 we find? A Man at many points the product 
 of His age, with the world-view of His 
 contemporaries, ascribing certain forms of 
 disease and insanity to demons, as we would 
 not ascribe them with our scientific knowl- 
 edge today ; a Jew, with the intense feelings 
 of His race for Jerusalem and the national 
 destiny; a GaHlean carpenter, with the out- 
 look of His class and with no apparent 
 interest in culture, in art, in music, in states- 
 manship, in countless areas of man's high 
 development. As we look closer we are 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 119 
 
 astonished to find in this Mind, so largely 
 filled with the thoughts common to the men 
 of His day, a wisdom that we never seem 
 to overpass ; in this Jew, a world Soul with 
 limitless sympathies and unbounded pur- 
 poses; in this Peasant and Mechanic, a 
 Spirit which seems native to every sphere 
 of culture and human activity, so that we 
 feel no violence in associating Him with art, 
 with music, with science, and with every 
 thing true, lovely and honorable, whether it 
 came within His range of vision in His life- 
 time or not. But the Mind, the Soul, the 
 Spirit, seem hidden in the first-century 
 Jewish artisan. But why hidden? If the 
 Word, the Light, the Life, the Love of God, 
 were to be conmiunicated to men, how could 
 God accomplish it more effectively than by 
 compressing all into a human life? And 
 if this life be really human, not simply 
 masquerading here as human, it must be the 
 life of a Man of a particular age, nation and 
 class. When the Word was made flesh, 
 there was a hiding of God's power. We 
 can be so occupied with the flesh that we see 
 nothing through it. But the hiding is really 
 not to conceal but to reveal, to manifest the 
 
120 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 eternal life, which is God's own life and 
 which His children can share with Him, the 
 life of trust, of hope, of devotion to the 
 great purpose of the Kingdom of love. 
 
 Or, to take but one other instance, God 
 Himself seems very elusive, reticent, secre- 
 tive. If He wants the company of like- 
 minded children, why is it so easy for us to 
 live without having His presence obtruded 
 upon us, without even suspecting that He 
 exists at all? If we look for Him, is He 
 not always concealed? We say we know 
 Him as the Creator of the universe, but 
 how He hides His shaping hands under- 
 neath processes of evolution, chains of 
 causes, one thing leading to another, so that 
 it is hard to disentangle Him from that 
 which is not He! We say we see Him in 
 providence, in His ordering of the events 
 of our lives; but, when we look for Him, 
 here are coincidences, chance happenings, 
 our own skill, someone's loving thought of 
 us — a whole network of occurrences in 
 which we cannot distinguish His part from 
 ours and our neighbors' and say, "There, 
 that's God's doing; see Him through that; 
 that shows what He is." We say that He 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 121 
 
 reveals Himself in the Bible; but the Bible 
 contains a great mixture of things tem- 
 porary, like the Jewish Law, and things 
 eternal, like the spirit of Jesus, of things 
 very undivine to us, like the slaughters of 
 the Canaanites and the cursing prayers of 
 some of the psalmists, and things as divine 
 as the cross of Christ; what is man's and 
 what is God's in the inspired Scriptures? 
 God's word is here, but hidden beneath a 
 mass of obsolete science, faulty history, out- 
 worn ethics, crude theology. We say that 
 God is in people round about us, but what 
 in them is His, and what not? 
 
 He hides Himself within the love 
 Of those whom we love best. 
 
 We say that He is in ourselves, a present 
 guiding, strengthening, sanctifying Spirit, 
 but in our thought what is His wisdom and 
 what our own? In our impulses what comes 
 from Him, and what from ourselves? In 
 our characters what is of His creating and 
 what is due to our own striving towards 
 righteousness? 
 
 Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line 
 Severing rightly His from thine. 
 Which is human, which divine. 
 
122 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 "Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thy- 
 self, O God of Israel, the Saviour." 
 
 Strange that if He should wish to make 
 Himself known, to give us His friendship 
 and admit us to His intimacy, He should 
 go about it in this roundabout way, which 
 apparently leads as often in the opposite 
 direction! What is the meaning of it? 
 
 You may remember the character of 
 Nydia, the blind Thessalian flower girl, in 
 Bulwer-Lytton's "Last Days of Pompeii." 
 She is introduced to us singing the pathetic 
 song: 
 
 Ye have a world of light 
 
 Where love in the loved rej oices ; 
 But the blind girl's home is the House of Night, 
 
 And its beings are empty voices. 
 As one in the realm below, 
 I stand by the streams of woe ! 
 I hear the vain shadows glide, 
 I feel their soft breath at my side. 
 
 And I thirst the loved forms to see. 
 And I stretch my fond arms around. 
 And I catch but a shapeless sound. 
 
 For the living are ghosts to me. 
 
 Through the events of the story she passes 
 in sadness, cut off by her blindness from all 
 
 I 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 123 
 
 her heart desires. Then at the conclusion 
 of the narrative comes that fateful day 
 when Vesuvius breaks forth, and the doomed 
 city is dark as midnight beneath the thick 
 pall of smoke and falling ashes, and the 
 terror-stricken inhabitants rush blindly and 
 stumble and lose themselves in the awful 
 blackness; but Nydia, from whose sightless 
 eyes the light has always been hidden, 
 threads her way unerringly through the 
 streets and squares of the town, and rescues 
 her beloved. 
 
 God's hiding of Himself develops our 
 instinct for Him, the sense of touch with 
 which we become aware of His presence, the 
 sensitive hearing which enables us to dis- 
 tinguish His voice amid the confusion of 
 sounds, the inward sight which sees Him, 
 however many the other objects in the same 
 field of vision. God's self-concealment is 
 not to keep away from us, but to teach us 
 more surely to detect and find Him. For 
 the moment He seems to wrap Himself in 
 clouds and darkness, only that our sight may 
 be sharpened to pierce clouds and see Him, 
 who dwelleth in light unapproachable save 
 by eyes lit with trustful love. 
 
124 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Jesus never said anything without telling 
 us something about God. His Father was 
 the one topic of His conversation, and this 
 saying is no exception. Jesus, as we, walked 
 by faith, and not by sight. There were 
 times when God was hidden from Him; but 
 He knew that the hiding was solely for pur- 
 poses of discovery. "Thy Father who is in 
 secret," He called Him. Take the supreme 
 instance when on the cross darkness is over 
 all the land, and darkness actually shrouds 
 the soul of the sinless Son of God, so that 
 His Father is veiled from Him, and He 
 cries, "Forsaken." But God is never hid, 
 save that He should be manifested; neither 
 is He ever Himself secret, but that He 
 should come to light. Jesus' faith faced the 
 darkness as an obscuring of God only to 
 make Him plainer, and prayed, "My God, 
 My God," in the very breath that He had 
 to confess His sense of desertion. And that 
 exercise of faith still further sharpens His 
 sense for the divine; purifies (if we dare 
 say it) even His stainless heart; so that with 
 keener eyesight He sees God. "Father, into 
 Thy hands I commend My spirit." Jesus' 
 lifelong conviction is justified. God has 
 
REVELATION BY CONCEALMENT 125 
 
 withdrawn Himself only to be more surely- 
 found, concealed Himself only to be more 
 clearly seen as One who is light, and in 
 whom is no darkness at all. 
 
VIII 
 THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 
 
 Acts 9: 7. The men that journeyed with him stood 
 speechless, hearing the sound, but beholding no man. 
 
 Acts 22: 9. They that were with me beheld indeed 
 the light, but they heard not the voice of Him that 
 spake to me. 
 
 From Christianity's earliest days it has 
 been the custom to point to Jesus' resurrec- 
 tion as a convincing proof of His Messiah- 
 ship, a compelling argument for believing 
 in Him. But today probably no one 
 becomes a follower of Jesus on account 
 of His resurrection. Nobody believes in 
 the fact of the resurrection unless he has 
 for some other reason come to beheve in 
 Jesus. And this seems exactly what Jesus 
 Himself expected. In His parable when 
 Dives in torments pleads that Abraham 
 will send the beggar Lazarus to warn his 
 brothers, urging, "If one go to them from 
 the dead, they will surely repent"; Jesus 
 makes Abraham reply, "If they hear not 
 Moses and the prophets, neither will they 
 
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 127 
 
 be persuaded, if one rise from the dead." 
 Jesus did not think that any who had not 
 been convinced by His teaching, which was 
 the fulfillment and completion of all that 
 was true in Moses and the prophets, would 
 be persuaded by His rising. This accounts 
 for one puzzling feature of His recorded 
 appearances: He does not seem to have 
 manifested Himself to any man, with the 
 possible exception of Paul, who was not 
 already His follower. We must often have 
 wondered why He did not show Himself to 
 the Sanhedrin who condemned Him, to 
 Pilate and Herod and the soldiers. What 
 better start could He have given His cause 
 in the world than by gaining over the very 
 men who were responsible for His cruci- 
 fixion? What a force in founding the 
 Christian Church in Jerusalem Caiaphas, 
 the converted high priest, would have been, 
 and how effective Pilate would have proved 
 as an apostle to Rome! But it is to His 
 disciples only that He returns. Even the 
 five hundred whom Paul mentions are called 
 "brethren," indicating that they were 
 already adherents of His cause. The only 
 man who belonged to the ranks of His 
 
128 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 opponents to whom He manifested Himself 
 is Saul of Tarsus, the pupil of Gamaliel and 
 agent of the Sanhedrin in persecuting the 
 devotees of this new Way; so that his con- 
 version has a special interest. But did Jesus 
 really alter His method and hy a marvellous 
 occurrence convince an otherwise wholly 
 hostile man? 
 
 Something startling happened on the road 
 to Damascus. It was seen and heard hy 
 Saul and his companions; all saw a light 
 and heard a sound; but to Saul of Tarsus 
 it was an entirely different experience than 
 to his fellow travellers. They saw the light ; 
 he saw the Figure of Jesus. They heard a 
 confused noise; he heard a voice speaking 
 personally to him. How much of that 
 experience took place within his own mind, 
 and how much was seen and heard by his 
 senses, he could probably never have told. 
 When he wrote of it to the Galatians, he 
 said, "It was the good pleasure of God to 
 reveal His Son in me" The noise they 
 heard and the light they saw appear to have 
 made no religious impression on Saul's 
 escort; in spite of the transformation in 
 their leader they do not seem to have become 
 
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 129 
 
 Christians; but Saul of Tarsus underwent 
 a change that completely altered his career, 
 and has left an indelible impress upon the 
 history of mankind. The same light and 
 the same noise — what different results! 
 
 ^Vhen Paul looked back on his experience, 
 he did not emphasize its suddenness. He 
 writes that "it was the good pleasure of God 
 who separated me from my mother's womb, 
 and called me by His grace." This seemed 
 
 a day to which all days 
 Were footsteps in God's secret ways. 
 
 His mind had already been appealed to by 
 something in the message of this Jesus, for 
 he was kicking against the goad in rejecting 
 Him. So that Paul's case is not really 
 different from that of the others. His 
 conscience had already been laid hold of, and 
 the assurance that Jesus was alive in power 
 simply completed the conversion of his 
 reason. 
 
 All this is most interesting as shedding 
 light on the question of religious belief and 
 unbelief. Our world is the same for every- 
 body, with the same day and night, work 
 and play, sickness and health, joy and 
 
130 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 sorrow, life and death. The differences 
 between the lots of individuals are insignifi- 
 cant as compared with the sameness of that 
 which is everybody's. But there are two 
 very different interpretations of it. To one 
 set of people the world is just the world; 
 they take it as they find it, enjoy what is 
 pleasant and grumble at what is otherwise, 
 use according to their capacity the stock of 
 wisdom they inherit from the experiences 
 of their predecessors, and go through life 
 and into death without any sense of the 
 existence of an Invisible Companion. To 
 others the world is not just the world, but 
 the world and its invisible but most real 
 Lord, from whom they accept its arrange- 
 ments, to whom they ascribe the inspiration 
 of the wisest and best thoughts they find in 
 their own or other men's minds, and in whose 
 personal friendship they pass through life 
 and into death with a vivid anticipation of 
 something beyond. How is it that the 
 same set of facts conveys such different 
 impressions ? 
 
 You may recall the scene in the tavern 
 in "Silas Marner" where the village worthies 
 discuss the credibility of ghosts. 
 
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 131 
 
 "There's folks, i' my opinion," says the 
 landlord, "they can't see ghos'es, not if they 
 stood as plain as a pike-staff before 'em. 
 And there's reason i' that. For there's my 
 wife, now, can't smell, not if she'd the 
 strongest o' cheese under her nose. I never 
 see'd a ghost myself; but then I says to 
 myself, *Very like I haven't got the smell 
 for 'em.' " 
 
 "Tut, tut," answers the farrier, "what's 
 the smell got to do with it? If ghos'es want 
 me to believe in 'em, let 'em leave off skulk- 
 ing i' the dark and i' lone places: let 'em 
 come where there's company and candles." 
 
 There are similar attitudes towards God. 
 Some people with a taste for Him stoutly 
 declare His reality; while others insist that, 
 if God wants them to believe in Him, He 
 ought to disclose Himself so plainly that 
 there could be no mistaking Him. They 
 resent this uncertainty. "Facts are facts," 
 they remind us. "There is no difference of 
 opinion about the warmth of sunlight or the 
 wetness of rain. The sun shines on the evil 
 and the good, and the rain falls on just and 
 unjust. Why should not God, if He exists, 
 make Himself equally indisputable? If 
 
132 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Jesus rose from the dead and is alive with 
 power, why should not all see His form and 
 hear His voice?" 
 
 Apples have tumbled from trees ever 
 since Eve in Eden was tempted by one of 
 them ; but none seems to have suggested any- 
 thing momentous until in the garden at 
 Woolsthorpe one fell into a mind teeming 
 with thought and brought to Newton the 
 discovery of the law of gravitation. A 
 square yellow book, a hundred and sixty- 
 seven years old, small quarto size, with 
 crumpled vellum covers, part print, part 
 manuscript, containing the record of the 
 sordid murder of a young wife and her two 
 reputed parents by a vicious husband and 
 four desperadoes, must have been fingered 
 by many hands and scanned by many undis- 
 cerning pairs of eyes as it lay with a lot of 
 old and new trash on a stall on a step of the 
 Ricardi Palace in the Square of San 
 Lorenzo in Florence, until one fiercely hot 
 June day in 1865 an English poet picked 
 it up and got it for sixteen cents, and in his 
 heart and mind full of insight and sympathy, 
 learning and genuis, its tale became "The 
 Ring and the Book" — perhaps the greatest 
 
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 133 
 
 creation of our literature in the century. 
 Insignificant falling apples and insignificant 
 second-hand books suddenly assume mar- 
 vellous meaning when they catch a seeing 
 eye. The law of gravitation ought to have 
 been patent to everybody; but it was not, 
 until a prepared mind saw it in a flash of 
 insight. The fact that every individual in 
 a story has a distinctive point of view of his 
 own ought to have been plain to everyone; 
 but it never received its due expression until 
 the genius for sympathy of Robert Brown- 
 ing embodied it in his incomparable dozen 
 cycles. The fact that the cause of Jesus 
 could not be beaten, that Jesus Himself 
 could not be killed and banished from God's 
 earth, ought to have been clear to everyone ; 
 but it was only the faith of the disciples and 
 the mastered conscience of Saul of Tarsus 
 that made the discovery. The reality of 
 God should have been obvious to everybody ; 
 but, as a matter of history, there have 
 always been believers and sceptics. 
 
 There was a close friendship between 
 Thomas Huxley and Professor Haughton, 
 although they stood far apart in religious 
 conviction. Haughton, before his death. 
 
134 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 told of a conversation with Huxley in which 
 the latter said to him : "There are those who 
 profess to believe what I consider false ; but 
 I do not regard their opinions, because I 
 doubt the sincerity of some and the intel- 
 lectual capacity of others ; but I respect you, 
 and I know how sincerely you believe what 
 you hold so strongly, and should like very 
 much to know how it is that you believe what 
 I can't believe." "May I speak frankly?" 
 asked Haughton. "Certainly." "Then," he 
 said, "I don't know how it is, except that 
 you are color-blind." Huxley was much 
 struck. "Well, it may be so. Of course, if 
 I were color-blind, I should not know it 
 myself." "The men that were with him 
 stood speechless, hearing the sound, but 
 beholding no man." "They that were with 
 me beheld indeed the light, but they heard 
 not the voice of him that spake to me." 
 
 This may be very depressing. If faith 
 is a peculiar faculty which some possess and 
 others lack, then a man either has or hasn't 
 it, and if he hasn't it, he must content him- 
 self with seeing a blurring light where 
 others have a vision of God in Christ, and 
 with hearing a confused noise in what to 
 
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 136 
 
 others is the personal call of God. But our 
 religious sense like our taste in literature, 
 or our conscience, or our appreciation of 
 music, is a developable instinct. Goethe told 
 Eckermann, "I show you only the best 
 works, and when you are grounded in these 
 you will have a standard for the rest"; and 
 Matthew Arnold recommended us all to 
 carry about in our heads scraps of Homer 
 and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Milton 
 and Keats, and whenever we are required 
 to admire the worthless and extol the 
 commonplace, to murmur these passages 
 under our breath as a kind of taste tonic. 
 A correct conscience is not something that 
 is born in us. A small boy is as likely to 
 arrive in the world with a silk hat on his 
 head as with a proper sense of obligation. 
 Father and mother, teachers and pastor, 
 must set themselves to educate him in 
 responsibility, and produce in him a con- 
 science that shall function properly under 
 all life's complex circumstances. Many 
 people prefer the latest popular melody to 
 Beethoven or Wagner, but we do not con- 
 sider their musical standards final. We 
 believe that education, contact with some- 
 
136 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 thing better suggesting inevitable contrasts, 
 an ear gradually becoming more sensitive 
 will enable them to hear in the masters of 
 sound what no cheap and vulgar hack who 
 tosses off songs by the ream can possibly 
 furnish. Religious faith — the appreciation 
 of God, the sense of His presence, the eye 
 for His goodness and the ear for His 
 summons to duty — can be cultivated. 
 Saul's companions need not remain seers 
 only of a light and hearers of a noise. 
 
 Edmund Burke, in his treatise on "The 
 Sublime and Beautiful," remarks that "it is 
 known that the taste is improved exactly 
 as we improve our judgment by extending 
 our knowledge, by a steady attention to our 
 object, and by frequent exercise." 
 
 "By extending our knowledge." No man 
 can appreciate poetry unless he is fairly 
 well read in the poets. No man can hope 
 for a rich experience of God unless he is 
 conversant with those great souls who in 
 the past have walked closely with Him. 
 And no man is justified in saying that he 
 sees nothing in religion until he has famil- 
 iarized himself with the God of Jesus, 
 asked open-mindedly what Jesus actually 
 
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 137 
 
 believed He got out of the Unseen. To 
 extend our knowledge of the God of Moses 
 and Elijah, of Amos and Hosea, of Isaiah 
 and Jeremiah, of the psalmists, the histo- 
 rians, the wise men of Israel, of God seen 
 through Jesus by the evangelists and letter 
 writers of the New Testament, is to go a 
 long way towards awakening and strength- 
 ening in ourselves that instinct which sees 
 Him who is invisible. And as Rosalind 
 says, "The sight of lovers feedeth those in 
 love"; so familiarity with believers feedeth 
 those in faith. 
 
 "By a steady attention to our object." 
 Does the Christian God appeal to us as 
 desirable? Would we prefer His existence 
 to His non-existence? Would we care to 
 live in a world with Him? If we really 
 believed in Him, it would certainly make 
 vast differences in our modes of life, in our 
 plans for our careers, in our attitude towards 
 all sorts of questions, in the risks we were 
 prepared to take, in the things we would 
 absolutely refuse to do. Would the God 
 of Jesus be convenient or inconvenient to 
 us? Do we honestly want to believe in 
 Him, provided we sincerely can? No one 
 
138 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 will give "a steady attention" to the search 
 for God unless he is desperately eager to 
 be sure of Him; and it has been the expe- 
 rience of many centuries that nobody ever 
 sought God with his whole heart and failed 
 to find Him. It requires a venture. Faith 
 is a matter of daring. One must be prepared 
 to risk trying love as the ultimate wisdom 
 and the final force in the universe, precisely 
 as Jesus took the supreme risk of Calvary. 
 And without this "steady attention to our 
 object" there is no reason for imagining that 
 God will become palpably evident to us. 
 
 "And by frequent exercise." Paul told 
 King Agrippa that he had not been dis- 
 obedient unto his heavenly vision. If he 
 had, it is likely that he would have some day 
 come to the conclusion that his companions, 
 and not he, were right. There had been a 
 blinding light and a bewildering noise, but 
 it might have been any one of half a dozen 
 occurrences that are liable to take place any 
 time on the road to Damascus. What con- 
 vinced Paul was the life into which his 
 vision led him. People might tell him that 
 he had had a sunstroke; but he knew that, 
 sunstroke or something else, he had been 
 
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 139 
 
 led into a career of usefulness ; that life had 
 assumed a new meaning and fascination for 
 him; that depths of joy and peace and 
 strength and hope had been opened up ; that 
 he had passed into a friendship he could 
 only adequately describe by saying that he 
 knew the God and Father of Jesus Christ. 
 As he obeyed the impulses that came upon 
 him with mastering force in that hour of 
 his prostration, life disclosed its unsearch- 
 able riches for him. He saw and kept 
 seeing what he had been blind to until now. 
 He felt and kept feeling a vitality and an 
 energy and a kindling passion which sent 
 him over land and sea with power. He 
 heard and kept hearing the assuring voice 
 within saying, "Abba, Father," and giving 
 him that sonship with the Lord of heaven 
 and earth, which had been the distinguishing 
 characteristic of the Jesus whose followers 
 he had hunted down to death. However the 
 light and the noise of the Damascus road 
 might be explained physically, they had an 
 indubitable moral significance. Christ had 
 been formed in him, and it was no longer 
 Saul of Tarsus that lived, but a new man 
 in Christ Jesus. "By frequent exercise," by 
 
140 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 unremitting toil for the Kingdom, that 
 instinct for the living Christ, that faith in 
 His God and Father, flourished and grew 
 in vigor. Years after the startling day on 
 the Damascus road, when life's experience 
 had turned in its accumulated evidence, he 
 wrote confidently, "I know whom I have 
 believed." 
 
 The varied experiences of life may be 
 divinely significant or baldly meaningless. 
 They may be progressive disclosures of the 
 face of God in Jesus Christ, opening up for 
 us a more and more intimate fellowship with 
 Him, or they may be just a series of happen- 
 ings, pleasant or the reverse, but revealing 
 nothing. They may be clear and distinct 
 utterances of God to us, guiding, correcting, 
 inspiring — the articulate word of the Most 
 High, speaking as directly and personally 
 to us and letting us as intimately into His 
 friendship as the men of faith of the bygone 
 generations; or they may be the usual 
 rumble of the world's life, saying nothing. 
 The seeing eye and the hearing ear are for 
 us to develop. Whatever of God we see in 
 any flash of insight, use, or it will fade into 
 the light of common day. Visions obeyed 
 
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY 141 
 
 remain visions, the master lights of all our 
 seeing, but disobeyed they turn into illusions. 
 It is a sombre reflection that, after these 
 centuries of His vital activity in the world, 
 Jesus is still dead to so many; that the 
 living God does not exist for everybody. 
 It lies within our power to let Christ be a 
 living factor in our careers, their controlling 
 force; to give God the chance to be really 
 God to us. The same light and the same 
 sound can be so differently understood: 
 
 Where one heard thunder, and one saw flame, 
 I only know He named my name. 
 
IX 
 
 UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 
 
 2 Kings 6 : 30. And the people looked, and, behold, 
 he had sackcloth within upon his flesh. 
 
 It was a great surprise to the people of 
 Samaria to discover underneath the royal 
 robes of their king this secret garb of mourn- 
 ing. As they endured the frightful horrors 
 of famine during the siege, it had not 
 occurred to them that he was suffering. So 
 long as there was any food in the city, he 
 would surely have it. He was keenly 
 interested in the game of war, and they were 
 mere pawns on the board. What did he 
 know or care of their distress? The two 
 women, who in their starvation had entered 
 into this revolting compaxjt to boil and eat 
 each other's little boys, had thought to them- 
 selves that their dire condition was the 
 wretched plight of the poor. As they 
 watched the king attended by his guards 
 going his rounds upon the walls, they may 
 have said to themselves, "Little he thinks 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 143 
 
 of what we suffer!" But when one mother's 
 love proved too strong to let her keep her 
 awful bargain, and her neighbor's appeal 
 for justice brought before the king this piti- 
 ful and sickening story, overwhelmed with 
 horror, he rent his garments, and uncon- 
 sciously disclosed a heart, a heart that 
 entitles him to be remembered among the 
 true kings of history, a heart wrung with 
 the woes of his people: "Behold, he had 
 sackcloth within upon his flesh." 
 
 All suffering is self-centring. Pain or 
 sorrow sets us apart, gives us a sense of 
 uniqueness, concentrates our attention upon 
 ourselves, and makes us appear quite in a 
 class of our own. Every patient thinks his 
 a special case. Every sufferer feels there is 
 an unusual element in his condition. Every 
 lamentation runs : "Behold, and see if there 
 be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which 
 is brought upon me!" And our world is 
 so ordered in the providence of God that 
 our first discovery under such circumstances 
 is, that so far from being singular, we are 
 members of a great fraternity of fellow 
 sufferers. We never have a disease without 
 being astonished to find out how many of 
 
144 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 our acquaintances are familiar with it. We 
 never meet with an accident without reading 
 in the papers of similar misfortunes happen- 
 ing to people all over the country. We 
 never walk in the valley of the shadow of 
 some loved one's death without hearing of 
 friends with as sore a sorrow. We never 
 confront some terrible ordeal without 
 learning of others undergoing a similar 
 strain. Face an operation, and it seems 
 that everyone you know is in the hands of 
 a surgeon; have your house robbed, and 
 there have been burglaries on every block; 
 suffer a nervous breakdown, and the whole 
 world is or has been in a sanatorium. Every 
 experience which appears to us uncommon 
 and unprecedented proves an introduction 
 to a community who greet us with an under- 
 standing we had not in the least anticipated. 
 If misery likes company it seldom lacks it. 
 And there are many who tell us that they 
 have been almost compensated for their 
 sickness or loss by the fellowship into which 
 it has led them, and above all by the rending 
 of conventional garments which concealed 
 men and the uncovering of what lay beneath. 
 It was nearly worth the misery of a famine 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 146 
 
 for the inhabitants of Samaria to learn what 
 manner of man their king was. 
 
 It was his sudden emotion of horror that 
 betrayed the king into this self-revelation. 
 He had no idea of letting his people know 
 that he wore sackcloth next his skin. Per- 
 sons who feel keenly are usually uncommu- 
 nicative about themselves. Someone has 
 said rather cynically that the sympathy of 
 most people consists of a mixture of good 
 humor, curiosity and self-importance. And 
 that sort of sympathy is ready enough to 
 advertise and invite people to give it a 
 chance to talk about itself. But men of 
 genuinely sensitive feeling shrink from 
 undressing their hearts in public. People 
 may watch them every day as they walk on 
 the walls of life attending to their duty. 
 They know that they can go to them in need 
 and depend on them to do justice to what- 
 ever they ask of them; but they know very 
 little of what is underneath the man's robe 
 of office. The deeper a man is, the less 
 apparent is the effect painful experiences 
 have upon him. A great rock thrown into 
 a mountain lake raises a momentary splash 
 and starts a series of surface ripples, but in 
 
146 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 a very short while the lake appears exactly 
 as it did before. The rock has effected a 
 displacement of all the water in the lake, 
 and it lies at the bottom with its jagged 
 edges sharp and hard, but one would never 
 suspect it. In a shallow pool the rock would 
 have remained protruding above the sur- 
 face ; it would be far more conspicuous than 
 the pool itself. We would think of the pool 
 as the pool with the big rock; it would be 
 the rock which gave it distinction. Some 
 men's grief or poverty or disease is the only 
 noticeable thing about them. Others are so 
 big that, while we are with them, we lose 
 sight of anything that has befallen them, 
 however huge. They have the pain still 
 with them, but it is out of sight. The robes 
 they don to pace their round of duty, their 
 working-clothes, cover up the sackcloth. 
 
 And this is especially true of people with 
 responsibilities. It was the king's business 
 to keep the famine-stricken people of that 
 beleaguered city of good heart and hope. 
 If he wore sackcloth, he must let nobody 
 see it. He might feel more keenly than any- 
 one else the tragic plight of his capital, but 
 he dared not show his feelings. After a 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 147 
 
 business reverse the breadwinner feels the 
 more need of keeping a brave front and 
 carrying an undiscouraged face home at 
 night, and his wife considers that she owes 
 it to him to make the best of ever5rthing and 
 seem passing rich on her curtailed resources. 
 Many a home made wretched by wedded 
 unhappiness sees the mother or father for 
 the children's sake trying to go about as 
 though nothing were wrong, wearing the 
 sackcloth under the gay clothes of sociability. 
 Death seldom leaves us without greater 
 obligations to the living; and, that their 
 lives be not shadowed and saddened, the 
 heart's lonely mourning must be kept so 
 hidden that they do not guess its existence. 
 Girls at college often have some family 
 anxiety pressing upon them, of which they 
 feel bound to say nothing to their classmates, 
 but they find it no easy thing to enter fully 
 into everything that is going on here, when 
 their thoughts and hearts are frequently 
 elsewhere. All people who fill public posi- 
 tions, doctors and nurses with their patients, 
 teachers with their pupils, ministers with 
 their people, friends with those who look to 
 them for inspiration and counsel, know what 
 
148 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 it is to put personal feelings out of sight, 
 and wear the garment of their own rejoic- 
 ing, or the sackcloth of their grief, under- 
 neath the robe of office, while they make 
 their rounds upon the wall. 
 
 And it is the covering of the sackcloth, 
 and the keeping it covered, that require no 
 small heroism. To come away from a 
 doctor's office where the sentence of death 
 has been as good as passed, or where one 
 has been told that cherished plans must 
 be abandoned and a very restricted life 
 accepted with as good grace as one can 
 muster, and to go home and readjust one's 
 entire life without bating a jot of heart or 
 hope, or at all events without allowing our 
 condition to cast a cloud over the home 
 circle ; to carry about an inescapable anxiety 
 for some loved one, for whose rectitude or 
 self-control we have good cause to fear, and 
 to move among our friends, trying to take 
 a normal part in life's work and play; to go 
 about life's business with the heart wrapped 
 in the sackcloth of shame for some family 
 disgrace, and disregard the occasional stares 
 of curious persons and the ill-advised sym- 
 pathy of the clumsily well-intentioned; to 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 149 
 
 have doubt gnawing one's cherished con- 
 victions or a heart broken by abused confi- 
 dence, or to feel helplessly lonely for the 
 sound of a voice that is still, and never allow 
 our private pain to interfere with our public 
 obligations; to wear the rough sackcloth 
 next our flesh and walk the walls so that 
 men never guess that we are not swathed in 
 softest silk — such is the heroism of that 
 unnamed king of Israel. 
 
 Perhaps the woman who called to him was 
 surprised that he stopped to listen to her 
 story. After all, who was she, desperate as 
 was her condition, that the king should 
 notice her? She understood why he was so 
 attentive when with the rest she saw that 
 sackcloth. We are often astonished at the 
 sjTnpathy some people give us. We did not 
 know they were so interested in us, and we 
 did not think that their experience had given 
 them any point of contact with our condi- 
 tion. Many poor people, like this woman, 
 feel that the well-to-do move in a totally 
 different world from theirs and neither think 
 nor care what is happening to them. And 
 unfortunately a king with sackcloth next his 
 flesh is rare enough to be noted even on Bible 
 
150 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 pages. There are enough people in com- 
 fortable circumstances, who spend enormous 
 sums on their own pleasure, or adornment, 
 or comfort, or amusement, utterly regard- 
 less of the squalor and misery within a few 
 blocks of their luxurious dwellings, and of 
 the appalling need, not for charity — al- 
 though relief is still necessary — ^but for 
 intelligent, self-sacrificing, time-consuming 
 personal service along a hundred lines of 
 social betterment — there are enough such 
 callous people to give the poor, whose chil- 
 dren, if not boiled and eaten, are all too 
 often needlessly sacrified to preventable dis- 
 ease, or morally ruined by exposure to 
 accursed temptations, cause to think that 
 under the garments of wealth is a heart of 
 stone. But there are still these kingly souls, 
 and we, rich and poor alike, meet them. 
 They amaze us by the hearing they give our 
 story, and sometimes by the insight with 
 which they detect what we would like to say 
 without making us say it. 
 
 Later we usually find out some reason for 
 their sympathy. Unconsciously they draw 
 aside their garments sufficiently to let us 
 catch sight of sackcloth. Thackeray writes. 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 151 
 
 "The Samaritan who rescued you most 
 likely has been robbed and has bled in his 
 day, and it is a wounded arm that bandages 
 yours when bleeding." You remember the 
 touching incident in the history of our 
 English literature when Coleridge, in his 
 most necessitous days, received through a 
 publisher the offer of five hundred pounds 
 from another man of letters much his junior, 
 DeQuincey; behind that unexpected gener- 
 osity was the tragic fact that both men were 
 bound together by a similar adversity — 
 both victims of a drug. The heart that goes 
 out to ours knoweth its own bitterness. The 
 man who proves a comfort to us has been 
 comforted in his own aflfliction with the 
 comfort which he offers. The person who 
 is able to put his finger with infallible 
 accuracy on all our sore spots, saying, 
 "Thou ailest, here and here," has had an 
 intimate acquaintance of which we were not 
 aware with our malady. We can live with 
 people a long time, as these Samaritans had 
 spent the tedious weeks and months of that 
 awful siege with their king, and not know 
 them. Life's business compels men to wear 
 the conventional robes of place and work; 
 
152 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 it requires some special happening to make 
 them rend their garments and let us see 
 what is next their flesh. The first attention 
 they give us may be gratifying; but how 
 close they draw us to them when we see the 
 sackcloth! 
 
 Have you guessed already where this line 
 of thought was taking us? We men, with 
 our incurable religious instinct, have always 
 believed in a God above, and in large 
 measure responsible for, His world. We 
 have pictured Him as best we could through 
 the highest words in our human vocabulary, 
 and found Him a reality corresponding 
 more or less to our thought of Him. We 
 have believed that He was at least as good 
 as ourselves, and usually we have insisted 
 that He was a great deal better. If any 
 man was thoughtful, God was more con- 
 siderate. If any man was kind-hearted, God 
 outwent him. If any man was touched with 
 a feeling of his brothers' infirmities, God 
 was more truly afflicted in all our affliction. 
 But it has not been an easy faith to hold in 
 famine times. When unspeakable horrors 
 were taking place on earth, and the heavens 
 smiled serenely ; when men have been racked 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 153 
 
 with pain, or tortured by cruel wrong, or 
 broken with bitter sorrow, and the sun has 
 gone on shining upon the evil and the good, 
 and silence has been the only reply to men's 
 agonizing voices, it has seemed a mockery 
 to go on trusting that a heart up yonder 
 really feels with us. It has been most diffi- 
 cult to "bear without resentment the divine 
 reserve." And after all the universe is so 
 vast, and if there be a God over all. He 
 must be so totally unlike us, so remote in 
 His infinite thoughts and world-embracing 
 plans, that it appears absurd to imagine 
 that He thinks of and cares about what is 
 most momentous to us ; it must be so trifling 
 to Him. 
 
 Is not God in the height of heaven? 
 And behold the height of the stars, how high they 
 are! 
 
 We have all of us shared the mood with 
 which Eliphaz charges Job: 
 
 And thou sayest. What doth God know? 
 
 It is the men in Job's circumstances, in 
 the piteous circumstances of these women 
 in Samaria, whose faith has been most 
 
154 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 severely strained. In an awful period of 
 hunger in the early days of the colonists 
 in Virginia, known afterwards as "The 
 Starving-Time," a man walked up to the 
 fire before his neighbors and flung his Bible 
 into the flames, declaring that it contained 
 nothing but lies. And you recall the inci- 
 dent in George Eliot's novel where Janet 
 Dempster, after a scene with her drink- 
 maddened husband, is pushed out of doors 
 and sits shivering on the cold step. 
 
 With the door shut upon her past life, and the 
 future black and unshapen before her as the night, 
 the scenes of her childhood, her youth and her painful 
 womanhood, rushed back upon her consciousness, and 
 made one picture with her present desolation. The 
 petted child taking her newest toy to bed with her — 
 the young girl, proud in strength and beauty, dream- 
 ing that life was an easy thing, and that it was pitiful 
 weakness to be unhappy — the bride, passing with 
 trembling joy from the outer court to the inner 
 sanctuary of woman's life — ^the wife, beginning her 
 initiation into sorrow, wounded, resenting, yet still 
 hoping and forgiving — ^the poor bruised woman, seek- 
 ing through weary years the one refuge of despair, 
 oblivion: — Janet seemed to herself all these in the 
 same moment that she was conscious of being seated 
 on the cold stone under the shock of a new misery. 
 Her mother had sometimes said that troubles were 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 155 
 
 sent to make us better and draw us nearer God. 
 What mockery that seemed to Janet! Her troubles 
 had been sinking her lower from year to year, press- 
 ing upon her like heavy, fever-laden vapors, and 
 perverting the very plenitude of her nature into a 
 deeper source of disease. And if there was any 
 Divine Pity she could not feel it; it kept aloof from 
 her, it poured no balm into her wounds, it stretched 
 out no hand to bear up her weak resolve, to fortify 
 her fainting courage. 
 
 You recall the sequel. Janet's wretched- 
 ness leads a clergyman, Mr. Tryan, to rend 
 his reserve and let her know the story of his 
 own soul's passage through a similar land of 
 great darkness. And in it you remember he 
 had been found by One, tempted in all points 
 like himself. 
 
 We may have been f amihar with the story 
 of Jesus all our days, but each time we look 
 to Him, we are amazed to find something we 
 had not known before. Each experience 
 through which we pass, each need that drives 
 us to Him, proves a key that opens up a new 
 treasure-room and admits us to more of His 
 unsearchable riches. There are portraits 
 which give the impression that the face is 
 turned straight towards you, and the eyes 
 follow you as you move, from whatever 
 
156 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 angle in a room you look at them. It is so 
 with Jesus Christ. From whatever point in 
 life's whole round of occurrences we face 
 Him, we seem to be met by eyes fastened 
 directly on us and with such a look of 
 recognition as may pass between friends who 
 have endured together some strange and 
 secret experience, and are through it enabled 
 to understand each other completely. 
 
 Milton, in his little-read poem on the 
 Passion, describes Jesus' death in the 
 striking line : 
 
 Then lies Him meekly down fast by His brethren's 
 side. 
 
 It seems to be a true account of what Christ 
 has done in every situation in which we find 
 ourselves, as well as in death. It is not that 
 He has been in precisely the same circum- 
 stances as ours, any more than the king had 
 gone through the identical starvation and 
 desperate devising of these two women ; but 
 His experiences seem always sufficiently 
 close to ours to give Him a fellow feeling. 
 "Himself took our infirmities and bare our 
 diseases." Origen records a saying of His 
 unmentioned in the Gospels, which sounds 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 157 
 
 genuine: "For them that were sick I was 
 sick." And when from the cross we hear 
 Him crying, "Forsaken!" there seems no 
 depth of doubt or wretchedness which He 
 has not sounded. Nobody turns to Christ 
 from any experience, however extraordi- 
 nary, and feels that there is no point of 
 contact between himself and Him. There 
 is a picture by Francia in the Louvre repre- 
 senting a man bent in pain at the foot of 
 the cross, but looking up to this inscription, 
 "Maiora sustinuit Ipse." "Greater things 
 Himself hath endured." 
 
 And every cross grows light beneath 
 The shadow. Lord, of Thine. 
 
 In answer to each need of ours. His gar- 
 ments are rent, and behold, there is sack- 
 cloth within upon His flesh. 
 
 But all this is only saying that by recalling 
 a most touching Figure from the past, 
 gazing at the loveliest portrait in history, 
 we find in the career of the Man of Sorrows 
 that which makes Him kin to us, bone of 
 our bone and flesh of our flesh, the trium- 
 phant Sharer of our doubts and pains and 
 defeats. It is no small thing to know that 
 
158 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 One like us has borne all and been undis- 
 mayed; but what has this Man's sympathy, 
 however touching, to do with the invisible 
 Lord of heaven and earth? Edgar Tryan 
 and Janet Dempster in George Eliot's story 
 did not stop with a Figure of the past. 
 Through His heart they looked in at the 
 divine, at the love of God. The understand- 
 ing of our case, the feeling for our difficul- 
 ties, the tears for our wretchedness, which 
 we discover in Jesus, are not His merely; 
 for every man who lets the sympathy of 
 Christ uphold him, they prove none other 
 than the understanding and fellow feeling 
 and pity of the Most Highest. In Jesus 
 the garments of this inscrutable universe 
 have been rent and we see what is under- 
 neath all — Love. "I am poor and needy, but 
 the Lord thinketh upon me." "He counteth 
 the number of the stars; He healeth the 
 broken in heart and bindeth up their 
 wounds." It may seem incredible. One 
 can heap up arguments against its proba- 
 bility. But however it seem, countless 
 others have tried and found that it is true. 
 And when we call to the King of the 
 universe, who appears so distant from our 
 
UNEXPECTED SYMPATHY 159 
 
 interests and unfamiliar with our circum- 
 stances, let us go to Calvary where hangs 
 One like ourselves and look at Him crucified. 
 There comes to us from Him a sympathy 
 that proves the strongest and wisest force 
 with which we are anywhere in touch, and 
 that which is strongest and wisest, is for us 
 divinest, is God. 
 
 It is not that God can do everything He 
 would like to for us. Even He must some- 
 times say, "Whence shall I help thee?" 
 Neither out of his threshing-floor nor wine- 
 press can He supply the impossible. He 
 can do no more for us than love can do. 
 But love can sympathize. In Jesus the veil 
 of the temple is rent in twain from the top 
 to the bottom, and as we look, behold, there 
 is sackcloth within upon the heart of God. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF 
 GOD 
 
 John 14:9, 28. He that hath seen Me hath seen 
 the Father. The Father is greater than I. 
 
 George Eliot describes Adam Bede as 
 possessing "that mental combination which 
 is at once humble in the region of mystery, 
 and keen in the region of knowledge," and 
 she mentions in the same breath the depth 
 of his reverence and his hard common sense. 
 It is a description of an ideally balanced 
 mind for religion, for it enables its pos- 
 sessor to appreciate the two aspects of the 
 Christian thought of God — His certainty 
 and His mystery. We know what He is in 
 Jesus, so that we trust and adore Him as 
 entirely Christlike; and we look off from 
 Jesus to God's vastness in which He is more 
 than, but not different from. Him. The 
 Christian God is like Jesus and greater. 
 
 He is like Jesus. Think a moment what 
 we mean by "God" — ^the Force back of and 
 
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF GOD 161 
 
 in the universe, the Mind that planned and 
 controls planets in their courses and the 
 more unruly minds of the millions of men, 
 the Beauty of whom the loveliest sights of 
 earth are but fragmentary glimpses. Then 
 think who Jesus was — a child, born to a 
 carpenter and his wife in a stable, reared 
 in a small Galilean village and laboring at 
 His father's trade, appearing for a few 
 months as an innovating religious teacher 
 with a handful of illiterate followers, 
 arrested as a charlatan and revolutionary 
 by the authorities in Church and State, and 
 executed as a criminal. God is like Jesus; 
 how startling the statement is when one 
 appreciates its implications! 
 
 Is it true? Can it be proved? 
 
 As men looked at the sea, it occurred to 
 one of them that the water could carry him, 
 and he formed a mental image of a boat; 
 perhaps at the start it was simply a log to 
 which he clung. Another had a better 
 image, and a dugout or a raft was con- 
 structed. A third evolved a canoe, and so 
 on down to the scientifically calculated lines 
 of the last huge Atlantic liner and the 
 swiftest modem yacht. The history of 
 
162 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 navigation calls up a strange medley of 
 images — the countless predecessors and suc- 
 cessors of Noah's ark — scows and junks, 
 triremes and galleys, schooners and steam- 
 ers, in which men have trusted themselves 
 on the face of the waters. There is a long 
 series of experiments and a large experience 
 behind a vessel in which you and I embark 
 today. 
 
 As men looked off over the infinite sea of 
 Being, they felt that there was Something 
 or Someone there who could carry them; 
 and they have formed mental images of that 
 Someone. The image which Jesus employed 
 when He thought of God, and employed 
 so effectively that He Himself became to 
 His followers the embodiment of the God 
 He trusted, and so their Image of the 
 invisible Father, had behind it the religious 
 experiments of all the race, and in particular 
 of Israel's patriarchs, prophets, psalmists, 
 sages, and has since His day been tested by 
 the experience of many thousand Christians. 
 He improved on all His predecessors, 
 exactly as a designer of ships avails himself 
 of the knowledge of all who have tried his 
 task before him and attempts to advance 
 
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF GOD 163 
 
 on them. Since Jesus' day Christians have 
 not been able to improve on Him, simply 
 because they have found no deficiencies in 
 His image of God. When we say that God 
 is Jesus-like, we leave nothing to be desired. 
 
 Men's images of boats have been success- 
 ful; they have sailed the seas. The image 
 that best conforms to the necessities of winds 
 and waves, that enables them most skilfully 
 to steer into the winding channel of the 
 harbor, and to outride most safely the 
 storm, has displaced the less satisfactory. 
 Its workableness has been the proof of its 
 correspondence to the eternal facts of the 
 universe in the mighty deep. 
 
 Men's images of God, from the crudest 
 fetish to the figure of the Son of man, have 
 worked. Through them men have drawn 
 from the Unseen inestimable inspiration, 
 wisdom, comfort, strength, love. The image 
 through which they have received most has 
 naturally supplanted less effective concep- 
 tions. The image that best conforms to the 
 facts of the Invisible, that most exactly cor- 
 responds to the character of God, demon- 
 strates its truth by its workableness, its 
 results. If by adoring, trusting, obeying 
 
164 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 God in Jesus we find ourselves most enrich- 
 ingly related to the Unseen, is not the Jesus- 
 likeness of God proven, as far as proof can 
 go? If any man replies, "I simply cannot 
 believe it ; the God of all cannot be pictured 
 in a Man," we can only ask him to try and 
 see. The effectiveness of designs for vessels 
 cannot be tested by sitting about a table and 
 discussing drawings on paper; the conclu- 
 sive demonstration is a trial trip in all sorts 
 of weather. The Christlikeness of God 
 cannot be argued; its conclusive evidence 
 awaits those who venture out on life's enter- 
 prise confiding in and devoted to God in 
 the face of Jesus Christ. 
 
 ^Vhen we assert, as we do at this Christ- 
 mas season, that whoever sees Jesus, sees 
 the Father, we mean the Man Christ Jesus, 
 not the Babe of Bethlehem. This Baby, 
 however infinite His promise, cannot reveal 
 God fully. Had Herod succeeded in 
 murdering the Child of Mary, or had the 
 Boy died at twelve, or had Jesus been taken 
 from us any time short of Calvary, we 
 should not have had the final disclosure of 
 God in a human life. The incarnation is not 
 complete in the manger-cradle. Jesus* 
 
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF GOD 165 
 
 embodiment of God was an achievement at 
 which both He and His Father wrought 
 together for the three and thirty stainless 
 years of His earthly life. Clement of 
 Alexandria says, "With the most perfect 
 ease He made God shine on us"; we may 
 not be conscious of the effort but there is a 
 completely engrossing effort both on Jesus' 
 and on His Father's part in His revealing 
 God to us and in God's reveahng Himself 
 to us through Him. 
 
 It cost Jesus constant effort. We do the 
 Son of God a gross injustice if we think He 
 simply had to let Himself be sent to earth, 
 and be here what He could not but be. 
 There was certainly something unique about 
 Him to begin with. There is an undeniable 
 truth in the stories of His coming down from 
 heaven or of His miraculous birth, however 
 you may put into prose sentences the 
 religious poetry of the Gospels. He was 
 unique to start with ; but we must be careful 
 in allowing for this singularity not to repre- 
 sent Him as without our handicaps and so 
 attaining goodness with an ease impossible 
 to us. That is to rob ourselves of One made 
 and tempted in all points like unto His 
 
166 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 brethren. Jesus with the inevitable hmita- 
 tions of all human beings, limitations of 
 ignorance and of weakness, fought for 
 Himself and for us the good fight of faith, 
 wrought in patience and self-control and 
 consecration at His Father's business, and 
 was "made perfect" (to use the pregnant 
 New Testament phrase), became the Image 
 of the Most High, the fullness of the 
 Godhead bodily. 
 
 And it cost the Father an effort. The 
 conventional representation of the disclosure 
 of God in Jesus does the Father a gross 
 injustice. His love is supposed to be shown 
 in letting His Son leave Him for a few years 
 and become a poor human being in the earth. 
 But Jesus would have stoutly refused assent 
 to the statement that He had left the Father. 
 He was no prodigal here, nor in a far 
 country. Everything about Him in our 
 world — sun and rain, grass of the field and 
 birds of the air — ^was God's; people were 
 children of the Most High. And as for His 
 abiding contact with the Father, how could 
 it be more strongly put than: "I am not 
 alone, because the Father is with Me" ; "The 
 Father abiding in Me"? The Father's part 
 
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF GOD 167 
 
 in the incarnation was not in allowing His 
 Son to leave Him, but rather in constantly 
 accompanying Him, in going in Him. We 
 speak of an author's writing himself into his 
 book, of a leader's throwing his life into a 
 movement, of a workman's putting his heart 
 into his work. Paul said of the rimaway 
 slave, Onesimus, on whom he had lavished 
 his thought and pains, when he sent him 
 back to his master, Philemon, "Whom I 
 have sent back to thee in his own person, 
 that is my very heart." God through all the 
 years of the growth and the work of the Son 
 of Mary put Himself into Him. Answer- 
 ing the continuous trust of the Son of man 
 was the constant self -giving of the Father 
 to Him. There was an Advent of the 
 Father at Christmas, as truly as an Advent 
 of the Son. 
 
 The result of Jesus' trustful obedience 
 and the Father's self-impartation was the 
 disclosure of God in a human life, God in 
 Christ. "He that hath seen Me hath seen 
 the Father." 
 
 It has been one of the tragedies of history, 
 perhaps the greatest of all tragedies, that 
 Christians have loudly proclaimed the deity 
 
168 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 of Jesus, and kept on picturing God as in 
 many respects unlike Him. But it has 
 always been and is orthodox Christianity to 
 insist that deity in the Father and in the 
 Son is the same deity; Jesus is like the 
 Father and the Father is like Jesus. No 
 statement about God that represents Him 
 as thinking or feeling or doing anything in 
 the least out of harmony with the thought 
 and heart and purpose of Jesus can be 
 accepted for one moment by Christians as 
 true. It makes no difference whether the 
 statement be made by a Bible writer, or 
 whether it has been accepted by the entire 
 Christian Church for centuries. Anything 
 attributed to God in past, present or future, 
 which a Christian is convinced is unlike 
 Jesus, he must refuse to believe, or he ceases 
 to be a Christian. We must 
 
 Correct the portrait by the living Face, 
 Man's God by God's God in the mind of man. 
 
 This is the Christian Gospel, the good 
 news of God. We look at the Life which 
 appeared in Bethlehem and reached its 
 climax on Calvary. He is the Best we can 
 imagine, the Loveliest we can conceive. He 
 
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF GOD 169 
 
 is everything we want of goodness, and 
 patience, and forgiveness, and courage. 
 "He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
 Father. My God and your God is all that 
 I am; My Father and your Father is trying 
 to give Himself to you, as He gave Himself 
 to Me. Will you follow Me, and let Him 
 put Himself in His Spirit more and more 
 into you, as I received Him in His fullness 
 bodily?" 
 
 God is like Jesus and more, "The Father 
 is greater than I." This is a saying that we 
 seldom speak of, largely because it is difficult 
 for us to make anything out of it. Jesus 
 means so infinitely much to us that we feel 
 no need of and cannot conceive a greater 
 than He. And it is puzzling to think out 
 in what this superior greatness consists. Is 
 it power? Can we fancy a force greater 
 than the love drawing us from the cross? 
 If there be such a force, why did not God 
 use it, instead of employing something 
 inferior to save the world? Is it wisdom? 
 Could anything be wiser than this same dis- 
 closure of love at Calvary? Is it goodness? 
 Can God be better than the Crucified? But 
 we must not forget that above even the 
 
170 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Crucified was One before whom He bowed 
 and to whom He looked up with boundless 
 reverence. We look up with Him, and we 
 feel ourselves in the presence of mystery 
 which renders our words futile. This 
 "greaterness" of the Father, which we 
 cannot precisely phrase, emphasizes that 
 illimitableness of God which we need to 
 keep in mind whenever we think of Him. 
 A French mystic has said that to define God 
 is to end Him — "Le Dieu defini est le Dieu 
 fini." When we have said everjiihing we 
 can about the Most High, we have to lower 
 our heads and add, "He is all this and much 
 more." This is Jesus' invariable attitude. 
 The young ruler addressed Him as Good 
 Master. "Why callest thou Me good? none 
 is good save One, even God." "Away from 
 all that you see to admire and revere in Me 
 to Him who is the same but greater." 
 
 The ocean sends up a bay into our coast. 
 We use it as a harbor; we moor our boats 
 in it ; we sail around it again and again, until 
 we are familiar with its shore line ; we build 
 a house beside it, and grow accustomed to 
 looking it over a dozen times a day. The 
 water in the bay is one with the water in 
 
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF GOD 171 
 
 the ocean; it rises and falls with the tides 
 of the great sea. The ocean is in the bay, 
 so far as the ocean can be contracted within 
 such dimensions. We bathe in it without 
 fear, and sail on it with safety; and after 
 we have lived beside it for years feel that 
 we understand it ; it is our own familiar bay. 
 
 That is a picture of God in Jesus. He 
 holds as much of God as a limited human 
 life can contain. The life, the heart, the 
 mind, the will of God in Him are identical 
 with the life, the heart, the mind, the will 
 of the infinite and eternal Father, Lord of 
 heaven and earth. We can come close to 
 Him as our Brother; we can enter into His 
 faith. His hope. His purpose, His sacrifice, 
 and become His friends. After years of 
 obedient and trusting companionship, we 
 say, "I understand and know Jesus Christ." 
 That means, "I understand and know God," 
 for he that hath seen Him hath seen the 
 Father. 
 
 There is a sense in which we never get to 
 know a bay. Every time we sail over its 
 expanse we catch some new glimpse of 
 beauty we had not noticed before, some 
 effect of sunlight or of cloud or of wind- 
 
172 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 tossed wave or of moon-silvered water. 
 There are wonders of life within its limited 
 area that would keep us exploring and 
 studying them all our days to classify them 
 and understand them scientifically, and 
 marvels in shell and fish and plant to afford 
 us some new interest seemingly endless. 
 
 It is so with the exhaustless beauty and 
 unsearchable riches of Jesus. One can 
 scarcely read an incident in the Gospels 
 without finding something he had not 
 noticed before. Paul, who understood 
 Jesus as well and better than any follower 
 Christ has ever had, constantly feels his 
 vocabulary beggared in trying to describe 
 Him, and is reduced to such expressions as, 
 "The love of Christ which passeth knowl- 
 edge," "the unsearchable riches of Christ," 
 "God's unspeakable gift." 
 
 But the bay is not the ocean. That is all 
 that the bay is and more. We look out 
 across the bay to the bar at its mouth, and 
 let our imagination sail away over the limit- 
 less stretch of waters beyond, fancy the 
 many diverse lands which the sea touches, 
 picture the commerce of the world crossing 
 its markless paths, puzzle our minds with 
 
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF GOD 173 
 
 the strange and marvellous contents of its 
 vast recesses, hear at times the roar of its 
 surf as its waves come pounding in at the 
 harbor's mouth, and let its incalculable 
 vastness awe us. 
 
 "My Father is greater than I." There is 
 a boundlessness to our thought of God, of 
 whom and through whom and unto whom 
 are all things, the Life and Lord of this 
 and all worlds. We fancy His personal 
 fellowship not with a few hundred people, 
 but with every life that has ever lived, each 
 born in His thought, watched and led by His 
 love, accompanied in the darkest experience 
 of sorrow and the lowest hell of sin — God, 
 the great uniting sea with His contact for 
 ever and ever and ever with every soul. We 
 picture the commerce of all minds and hearts 
 passing through Him, the thoughts of all 
 men known to Him, the loves of all men felt 
 by Him. We puzzle our minds with the 
 inestimable treasures in His deep places — 
 His patience, which has borne the ignorance, 
 the folly, the obstinacy, of all His children 
 through all their generations ; His resource- 
 fulness, which has never been defeated by 
 man's thwarting His designs; His love, 
 
174 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 which in every age has suffered with and for 
 every child of His to redeem him, even as 
 Jesus suffered once on Calvary. At times 
 we hear a voice, like the voice of many 
 waters, the voice of the greatness, the 
 majesty, the holiness of our God. "He that 
 hath seen Me, hath seen the Father; the 
 Father is greater than I." 
 
 Religion means little to many of us simply 
 because our idea of God is neither interest- 
 ing nor attractive. The Christian thought 
 of God convinces the mind and constrains 
 the heart. Think of Jesus — ^the Babe, the 
 Boy, the Man, the Teacher, the Friend, the 
 Saviour, the Warrior with evil, the Sufferer, 
 the Lord of life. Unto us this Child is born, 
 unto us this Son is given. And all that He 
 was, our Father has always been and is and 
 always will be. We get the Father in the 
 Son. We have the light of the knowledge 
 of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
 Christ. But even this is not all. Up and 
 away from the unspeakable Gift we look to 
 an even wealthier Giver. We can let our 
 thought stretch itself and come to no end, 
 our love fly out and find no resting place. 
 "There's a wideness in God's mercy like the 
 
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF GOD 175 
 
 wideness of the sea." The water of the sea 
 is never different from the water of life in 
 the bay, but oh, the infiniteness of its reaches, 
 its immeasurable expanse! We are lost in 
 wonder, love and praise. 
 
 And this God, like Jesus and greater, is 
 our God forever and ever ; the God in whom 
 we trust, for whom we sacrifice, with whom 
 we toil and whom we seek to embody in a 
 whole world's life, so that He is all in all. 
 
XI 
 
 FAITH AND GROWING 
 KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Genesis 32 : 26. And He said, Let Me go, for the 
 day breaketh. 
 
 Psalm 139: 18. When I awake, I am still with 
 Thee. 
 
 The presence of God and clear daylight 
 seemed incompatible to the Patriarch Jacob. 
 While the blackness of night wrapped him 
 in its mysteries God was vividly near, 
 wrestKng with him, laming him, within his 
 grasp as he clung to Him desperately; but 
 as the morning broke the divine Visitant 
 appeared to be trying to get away. When 
 the sun dispelled the shadows and exposed 
 the familiar sights of earth, he expected to 
 find nothing underneath his arms and to see 
 empty space, where in the darkness he had 
 felt the moving, breathing, struggling 
 Combatant. The first streaks of dawn 
 brought the voice, "Let Me go, for the day 
 breaketh." 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 177 
 
 This feeling that light banishes God, that 
 to see clearly is to lose sight of Him, often 
 recurs in the experience of religious people. 
 
 In the world of startling surprises into 
 which a child is born, he finds little difficulty 
 in imagining the unseen beings of whom he 
 is told, and living in their actual society. 
 The Santa Claus, to whom he posts a 
 Christmas letter in the chimney, is so real 
 that he can readily be induced to think that 
 the wind he hears blowing over the chimney- 
 top is the swift passing of an airy postman 
 carrying the mail to the kindly patron of 
 good children. The invisible God, to whom 
 he addresses his nightly "Now I lay me 
 down to sleep" and says, "Our Father, 
 which art in heaven," is as sensibly at hand. 
 The pictures children form of God vary 
 with what they are taught and the impres- 
 sions they receive, but the sense of His 
 actuality they themselves supply. Mrs. 
 Browning's lines, in which she describes a 
 child's thought of God, put this graphically : 
 
 They say that God lives very high ; 
 
 But if you look above the pines 
 You cannot see our God: and why? 
 
178 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 And if you dig down in the mines 
 
 You never see Him in the gold; 
 Though from Him all that glory shines. 
 
 God is so good, He wears a fold 
 
 Of heaven and earth across His face — 
 Like secrets kept, for love, untold. 
 
 But still I feel that His embrace 
 
 Slides down by thrills, through all things made^ 
 Through sight and sound of every place: 
 
 As if my tender mother laid 
 
 On my shut lips her kisses' pressure, 
 
 Half-waking me at night, and said 
 
 " Who kissed you through the dark, dear 
 guesser ?" 
 
 But it was through the dark and when the 
 child was but half awake that the kiss was 
 felt. As he goes to school and gets expla- 
 nations for things that were mysterious to 
 him before, God inevitably becomes less 
 present. If he has fancied a divine Hand 
 setting the moon and stars in the evening 
 sky, just as the lamplighter turns on the 
 street lights, God's share in the beauty of 
 night disappears when he confronts a globe 
 and is shown how the earth revolves about 
 the sun, and the stars become visible simply 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 179 
 
 because of the absence of sunlight. If he 
 has pictured the rain falling from opened 
 windows in the heavens, after the manner of 
 the early Bible stories, God's part in the 
 tumbling drops is taken away when he learns 
 of the sun's evaporation of water and the 
 formation of clouds. The more he learns, 
 the more everything seems to him to go on 
 without God's having anything to do with 
 it. Mystery gave him a region in which he 
 could easily imagine God as active ; but light 
 is breaking on all these shadowy spots, and 
 he does not see God in them any longer. 
 The world he is studying grows more fasci- 
 nating; the things he sees and does absorb 
 his interest and attention, and he ceases to 
 let his imagination play as he used to; the 
 unseen is forgotten. The Great Companion, 
 who once was as real to him as the people 
 in his own home, seems to be leaving him, 
 saying, "Let Me go, for the day breaketh." 
 He thinks that, when he knows as much as 
 his elders, he will find himself in a godless 
 world. He may be steadily improving in 
 character, overcoming and outgrowing child- 
 ish weaknesses and faults; but the chances 
 are that the growing boy or girl will pray 
 
180 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 less, care less for the Bible and its stories, 
 think less of God, than the child. The 
 world is more interesting, and life is far 
 fuller and richer; but he has lost an inde- 
 finable somewhat that gave childhood a 
 mysterious delight. 
 
 There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, 
 The earth and every common sight. 
 
 To me did seem 
 Apparelled in celestial light. 
 The glory and the freshness of a dream. 
 It is not now as it hath been of yore : — 
 Turn wheresoe'er I may, 
 By night or day, 
 The things which I have seen I now can see no 
 more. 
 
 And if this is true when the dawn steals 
 on us, it is truer still when the long shadows 
 of early day retreat before the glare of mid- 
 morning. Many a schoolboy, who at fifteen 
 has made a compact with a divine Friend 
 and lived with a keen sense of loyalty to 
 Him, even if his fancy no longer pictured 
 Him with the vividness of childhood, finds 
 himself at college with a world- view in which 
 such a personal relation with the Unseen 
 appears impossible. He has become more 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 181 
 
 knowing, more clever, more critical. A 
 brilliant, hard light shines on everything. 
 Even the shadows seem no longer obscure 
 to him. The subtle beauty of the universe 
 with its suggestion of the divine has faded 
 out, and life's physical and human facts and 
 problems stare him in the face. He has 
 been taught to think — to think rigorously, 
 coolly, steadily, and the first application 
 of such searching thought to religious con- 
 victions usually dissolves them altogether. 
 The daybreak of manhood's knowledge has 
 banished God. 
 
 And now a flower is just a flower: 
 
 Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man — 
 
 Simply themselves, uncinct by dower 
 Of dyes which, when life's day began. 
 Round each in glory ran. 
 
 Nor is it alone in transitional stages in 
 our growth that God disappears with the 
 coming of light. It often occurs when we 
 let light in on our own religious experiences. 
 Men are interested today in studying the 
 human soul in its relations to God. Prayer, 
 conversion, revivals, all the movements of 
 our spirits towards the divine, are explored 
 
182 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 and charted. This searchlight of investiga- 
 tion has often the effect of obhterating God 
 from the very transaction in which we were 
 most aware of Him. Sudden transforma- 
 tions of character are, perhaps, the most 
 starthng and convincing of the manifesta- 
 tions of divine power. A careless and 
 indifferent boy becomes within a month 
 devout and devoted. We are amazed at the 
 rapidity of his development and the com- 
 pleteness of the alteration. A man who 
 yesterday was a brutish sot is overnight 
 turned into a self-controlled, sensitive, 
 responsible husband, father, citizen. We 
 feel ourselves in the presence of superhuman 
 force, and are awed. "The wind bloweth 
 where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound 
 thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, 
 nor whither it goeth; so is every one that 
 is born of the Spirit." But men have not 
 been content to allow the wind to remain 
 an inscrutable secret; they have studied the 
 atmospheric changes which affect air cur- 
 rents, and can tell us with reasonable 
 accuracy whence a breeze has come and 
 whither it goes. Men have probed into the 
 wonders of a change of heart; they have 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 183 
 
 collected statistics and compiled charts 
 showing that it was natural to expect a 
 growing boy to undergo a transformation 
 in his soul, when body and mind were pass- 
 ing through equally striking changes. They 
 analyze the process which takes place in a 
 redeemed drunkard's brain and relate it to 
 other, somewhat similar, mental changes 
 which remake lives. And this exploration 
 of the subtle occurrences in a soul frequently 
 has the result of robbing the experiences of 
 their divineness. God, who was so keenly 
 felt when the experience was shrouded in 
 obscurity, seems to have vanished, when we 
 examine it in broad day. 
 
 Nor is it only the light of investigation 
 which tends to do away with God; the calm 
 light of reflection has a similar effect. That 
 is, perhaps, the explanation of Jacob's expe- 
 rience in our text. When night settled on 
 him at the Jabbok, and he was wondering 
 whether his wily scheme to pacify his less 
 astute brother would succeed, his conscience 
 suddenly gripped him. His sin had found 
 him out. In angry Esau coming to meet 
 him with his band of warriors, his own 
 trickery was returning to plague him. The 
 
184 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 divine Wrestler asked insistently, "What is 
 thy name?" compelling the helpless man to 
 look at himself, judge himself, condemn 
 himself. In his shame and fear, bewildered 
 and confused by the troubling and accusing 
 thoughts that rushed upon him, he was 
 vividly aware of God. It is He who 
 opposes him, struggles with him, lames him. 
 But such an emotional strain cannot be 
 indefinitely prolonged: and with the dawn 
 the sight of hills and plain and stream 
 steadied him: his thoughts became quieter: 
 and as he reflected on his experience, lo, 
 God, a few moments before so insistently 
 present, appeared to be going. Have we 
 not been in sufficiently similar circumstances 
 to appreciate the inescapable pressure of 
 God through conscience, and then, as our 
 mind grew calmer and we began to reflect, 
 have we not been surprised at the cool 
 fashion with which we almost smiled at our- 
 selves for having been so wrought up over 
 our iniquities, and finally were we not 
 impressed with the utter remoteness of God, 
 a while before so sensibly in contact with us? 
 Or the darkness in which men are aware 
 of God's touch upon them may be the valley 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 185 
 
 of the shadow of a great sorrow. People 
 often surprise us by their cahnness under 
 the first shock of grief. It may be that they 
 scarcely realize their loss. Time brings lone- 
 liness home. But it is also true that the 
 excitement of sorrow renders the soul 
 acutely sensitive, and God is felt with an 
 unusual intensity. "Yea, though I walk 
 through the valley of the shadow of death, 
 I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me/' 
 When the life has readjusted itself after the 
 blow, when it is emerging from the shadowed 
 ravine on to the plain of convention and 
 routine and normal living, there is often a 
 sense of God's disappearance. Arnold's 
 Stagirius prays: 
 
 When the soul, growing clearer. 
 
 Sees God no nearer ; 
 When the soul, mounting higher. 
 
 To God comes no nigher; 
 Save, Oh save! 
 
 It is not astonishing that devout people, 
 to whom the sense of God's nearness means 
 everything, are eager to avoid the daybreak 
 of searching knowledge or the light of steady 
 and penetrating thought. "What has the 
 
186 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Church to do with the Academy?" has been 
 a cry raised from TertuUian's day to our 
 own. John Henry Newman complains of 
 "the all corroding, all dissolving skepticism 
 of the intellect in religious inquiries." It has 
 only been a vigorous faith, like Paul's or 
 John's, which willingly proves all things, 
 assured that "God is light, and in Him is 
 no darkness at all." Eyes have to grow 
 accustomed to bright sunshine as truly as to 
 darkness before they can see, and the process 
 is much more painful. It requires courage 
 and strength of will to open them, and keep 
 them open, despite the tears that form. 
 Such resolute looking is not disappointed. 
 The seeming fading out of God from the 
 scene will prove to be but bhndness due to 
 excess of bright. He covers Himself with 
 light as with a garment and the dazzling 
 robe often conceals Him. It is only after 
 we have familiarized ourselves with the day- 
 light that we make the discovery, "When I 
 awake, I am still with Thee." 
 
 The boy passing out of childhood is quit- 
 ting the world of fancy for the world of fact. 
 He has lost the Deity of his early imagina- 
 tion and must gaze at the God of things 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 187 
 
 as they are. He disturbs parents and 
 teachers by questioning the Bible stories, 
 the prayers, the simple religious ideas, which 
 once delighted him. Well for him, if their 
 faith is robust enough to enable them to be 
 frank! The reaction from the romance of 
 childhood reduces him to a bald literalist, 
 but he must look steadily at facts until they 
 of themselves awaken his wonder and awe. 
 Through Jesus, no longer a fairylike Being 
 but a Man, facing problems and difficulties 
 like our own, and with a faith we can share, 
 he must become aware of the God and 
 Father of Jesus Christ, and feel Him as real 
 a force as the most indubitable actualities 
 of hf e. 
 
 The college student with his new world- 
 view, with his sense of all-pervasive law, 
 with his necessarily critical attitude towards 
 all things, has a further struggle for faith. 
 He must keep his eyes open on his world- 
 view until they see the fact of religion as 
 clearly as other facts. He must look at laws 
 long enough to see that they are not opaque 
 barriers, but can be looked through to 
 a Personality behind them. Testing all 
 things, he must honestly test Jesus Christ, 
 
188 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 using Him as the Image of the invisible 
 Most High, until he knows whether that 
 image be valid or not, whether through 
 Christ he finds fellowship with a God whose 
 reality is certified to him by the guidance, 
 the power, the inspiration, the companion- 
 ship he derives from Him. If he loses some 
 of his childhood's religion it is lost "in no 
 other way than light is lost in light." 
 Awake to all the knowledge the world can 
 offer, he is still with God. 
 
 The man who examines religious expe- 
 rience in prayer, conversion and the like, and 
 finds investigation dulling faith, because he 
 discovers laws where before was nothing but 
 mystery, is not yet really awake. He must 
 rub his eyes and look again until the marvels 
 of the result wrought through processes 
 which seem ordinary enough, impress him. 
 The clicking of a telegraph receiver sounds 
 to an uninitiated listener the same when it 
 is recording some commonplace or some 
 message of momentous import. It is only 
 by watching what happens when the news 
 is received that he finds out the significance 
 of the sounds which seemed so usual. All 
 the occurrences in the mind of a man under 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 189 
 
 religious influences may seem very like 
 occurrences under much less exalted stimuli. 
 What do these occurrences make out of 
 him? what does prayer accomplish in him? 
 what is he converted to? — ^these are the tests 
 which set us in the way of seeing results 
 sufficiently godlike to attest the work of 
 God. With our knowledge of the processes 
 we ought to be able to increase and intensify 
 the results, to cooperate intelligently with 
 God, and in the broad day of knowledge find 
 ourselves in closer harmony with Him. 
 
 The Jacob who leaves the Jabbok is less 
 aware of God's presence than the struggler 
 who feels himself at Peniel face to face with 
 God. But his subsequent history shows no 
 more trickery; and is the God who steadily 
 and quietly speaks through a regularly 
 functioning conscience any less actual than 
 the God who wrestled with him in his night 
 of self-accusation and fear? Ought he not 
 to say after every step he has been enabled 
 to take in frankness and sincerity, "I have 
 seen God face to face and my life is pre- 
 served"? Not less but more reflection will 
 make us feel that the conscience, which daily 
 keeps us from moral destruction, is as 
 
190 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 marvellous a disclosure of the sublimest 
 Force in the universe — of God — as the 
 occasional bewildering struggle when an 
 outraged conscience assails us with divine 
 compunctions. 
 
 The man resuming life's routine after 
 some great experience may feel God slip- 
 ping from him. The garish light of common 
 day discloses nothing but common things 
 and common people; there is no inkling of 
 the divine Presence on the whole horizon. 
 Let him "awake to soberness righteously, 
 and sin not." Let him consecrate himself 
 to work in the spirit of Jesus while it is day, 
 however commonplace his day seems, and 
 see whether there does not 
 
 shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder 
 Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross. 
 
 When we seem to lose God because the 
 day is breaking, we shall not find Him 
 again by attempting an impossible retreat 
 into the night, but by advancing into the 
 day with open eyes. The difficulty is that 
 so many have their eyes partially closed. 
 They are not wholly awake — awake to 
 responsibility, awake to the wonder of 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 191 
 
 common facts, awake to the shining good- 
 ness of a life devoted to the purpose of the 
 Son of man. "Wherefore He saith, Awake 
 thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, 
 and Christ shall shine upon thee." Yes, 
 awake to all life's realities, the realities of 
 obligation and of faith among them, and 
 see whether the figure of Jesus Christ which 
 perhaps has faded into obscurity does not 
 shine out again as the Light of life ; and, 
 loyally following Him, see if through His 
 face there does not stream the light of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God, who is with 
 us not intermittently but always, not in the 
 shadows only but in the broad day; see if 
 we do not possess "waking thoughts more 
 rich than happiest dreams." 
 
XII 
 
 THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 
 
 John 7 : 27. Howbeit we know this Man whence 
 He is: but when the Christ cometh, no man knoweth 
 whence He is. 
 
 John 9:29. We know that God hath spoken unto 
 Moses: but as for this Man, we know not whence 
 He is. 
 
 Here are two apparently opposite reasons 
 for rejecting the claims of Jesus. Some 
 refused to recognize Him as the Christ 
 because they knew where He came from: 
 "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose 
 father and mother we know? We know this 
 Man, whence He is: but when the Christ 
 Cometh, no one knoweth whence He is." 
 Others objected to Him because they knew 
 nothing of His antecedents. Had He come 
 from a distinguished family in Jerusalem, 
 and had He possessed an influential back- 
 ing, they might at least have listened to 
 Him; but who knew anything about this 
 young peasant from Galilee? "As for this 
 Man, we know not whence He is." 
 
 Their objections to Jesus represent two 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 193 
 
 very common tendencies in men's religious 
 feelings. On the one hand, that which 
 seems to us altogether inexplicable we are 
 wont to attribute to God. Legal contracts 
 often contain a list of all conceivable 
 catastrophes — fire, disease, accident, ship- 
 wreck, war — and conclude with the phrase 
 "or act of God," to cover a humanly unfore- 
 seeable and unpreventable occurrence, as 
 though in that, but not in these other events, 
 God's activity was to be recognized. If 
 some good fortune befalls us without our 
 planning or working for it, we call it "a 
 special providence," while that which we 
 bring about by our own forethought and toil 
 does not impress us as providential. The 
 Israelites spoke of the manna which they 
 collected in the desert and for which they 
 performed no labor as "corn of heaven," but 
 the bread which they made from the grain 
 they grew in Canaan, although far better 
 bread, was not called heavenly. When an 
 idea suddenly comes into our minds without 
 any apparent connection with our previous 
 train of thought, and comes with some force, 
 we say, "I don't know how I came to think 
 of it; it seems as though God put it into my 
 
194 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 mind"; while in courses of action which we 
 think out very carefully, we are not vividly 
 conscious of being led by God. "When the 
 Christ Cometh, no one knoweth whence He 
 is." 
 
 On the other hand, whatever comes from 
 a venerated source is apt to seem to us divine, 
 when the identical thing would not convey 
 that impression if it had another origin. If 
 we receive an idea from a Bible verse, we 
 feel that it is God's word to us, but the same 
 thought occurring on the pages of some 
 other book would not produce the same 
 effect. If a stimulus to unselfish service is 
 given us at the Communion table, we accept 
 it as Christ's direct inspiration; if it comes 
 from some story of need read in the daily 
 newspaper, we are not likely to think of 
 Christ as having had anything to do with it. 
 "We know that God hath spoken to Moses: 
 but as for this Man, we know not whence 
 He is." 
 
 In other words, origins, the whence of 
 things, have a determining effect upon our 
 attitude to the things themselves. 
 
 We are just emerging from a half -century 
 which has been characterized by marvellous 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 195 
 
 scientific discoveries. The scientific mind is 
 particularly interested in investigating the 
 whence of things. The most influential book 
 of the last century bears the significant title, 
 "The Origin of the Species." And these 
 inquiries into origins have come into conflict 
 with the religious feelings of which we have 
 been speaking. 
 
 It was a shock to man's self-esteem to have 
 his beginnings probed, and to be told that 
 his ancestry was so closely akin to that of 
 the beasts. William Watson puts the 
 scientific view and the impression which its 
 statement makes upon us in the lines : 
 
 In cave and bosky dene 
 
 Of old there crept and ran 
 The gibbering form obscene 
 
 That was and was not man. 
 The desert beasts went by 
 
 In fairer covering clad; 
 More speculative eye 
 
 The couchant lion had, 
 And goodlier speech the birds, than we when 
 we began. 
 
 A soul so long deferred 
 In his blind brain he bore. 
 
 It might have slept unstirred 
 Ten million noontides more. 
 
196 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Yea, round him darkness might 
 
 Till now her folds have drawn, 
 0*er that enormous night 
 So casual came the dawn, 
 Such hues of hap and hazard Man's Emergence 
 wore! 
 
 The same methods which some scientists 
 were employing upon human origins, others 
 used in the study of the beginnings of reli- 
 gious institutions. The Bible was examined, 
 and it came as a startling, and to many an 
 unwelcome, surprise to be told that the first 
 five books of the Old Testament were not 
 written by Moses, but are a compilation 
 by many hands of material from half a 
 dozen or more centuries; that the Psalms 
 are not the poems of David, but, like our 
 own hymnal, a collection of hymns from 
 a number of authors, mostly unknown, 
 gathered together at different times for 
 the worship of the Jewish Temple; that 
 many of the prophetic books — Isaiah, for 
 instance — contain not the messages of a 
 single preacher, but the sermons of several 
 who lived perhaps in different centuries. 
 On the one hand, people had got in the way 
 of thinking of the Bible as God's very Word 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 197 
 
 to such a degree that they disliked having 
 it analyzed by these rigorous methods, and 
 did not care to connect it ^vith human expe- 
 riences. When they were told how its books 
 were put together, edited, revised, like other 
 books, it seemed to detract from the Bible's 
 sanctity. On the other hand, the connection 
 of particular books with revered names — 
 Genesis and the 90th Psalm with Moses, 
 the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song 
 of Songs with Solomon, Lamentations with 
 Jeremiah, the Fourth Gospel with the 
 Apostle John — had appeared to add to their 
 prestige. To be told that these men were 
 not their writers was disconcerting. "We 
 know that God spake to Moses, and Solo- 
 mon, and Jeremiah, and the Apostle John, 
 but as for these anonymous authors and 
 editors, we know not whence they are." 
 
 Religious customs, like the Sabbath, were 
 investigated and found to have existed in 
 earlier and cruder faiths than Israel's. And 
 at once men asked "If the Sabbath was an 
 ancient Babylonian institution, how is it of 
 divine authority for us?" 
 
 Doctrines were put to a similar test. A 
 generation ago it was commonly thought 
 
198 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 that the theological ideas of nineteenth 
 century Christians, like the Trinity, the 
 Incarnation, the Atonement, were identical 
 with those of the first century, that the 
 Westminster Shorter Catechism and the 
 Thirty-Nine Articles were accurate repro- 
 ductions of the beliefs of Jesus and Paul. 
 Historical study convinced scholars that, 
 while through aU the centuries Christians 
 have had similar religious experiences, have 
 been one in their trust in God, their loyalty 
 to Jesus Christ, their sense of His forgiving 
 love and redeeming power and inspiring 
 Presence, each generation has set forth its 
 experience in forms of its own. The doc- 
 trine of the Trinity is not in the New 
 Testament; but the experiences of God as 
 Father, revealed in Christ, a present inspira- 
 tion, which afterwards were expressed in 
 the doctrine, are there. Paul's explanation 
 of the cross was couched in sjonbolic lan- 
 guage that meant something to the men of 
 his day, but which meant something different 
 to the Middle Ages and something different 
 still to the Reformers. But men have been 
 upset by this historical investigation. "If 
 Paul thought thus and so, I either want to 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 199 
 
 think it exactly as he did, or it has no 
 authority for me. We know that God has 
 spoken to Paul; but as for these modern 
 theologians, we know not whence they are." 
 
 Latterly, the origin of Jesus Himself has 
 been under discussion. How are we to think 
 of His Preexistence before Bethlehem? 
 Had He a personal, conscious life in heaven, 
 or did He exist simply in the thought of 
 God, the sort of existence spoken of in the 
 phrase in the Revelation where the Lamb is 
 said to have been "slain from the foundation 
 of the world"? Others took up the question 
 of the virgin birth. Is it literal, prose 
 history ; or a first-century way of expressing 
 that these Christians discovered unique 
 spirituality in Jesus? 
 
 These questions are all as to origins: 
 "Whence came this part of the Bible, this 
 religious custom, this doctrine? Whence 
 came Jesus Christ?" 
 
 In the Reformation period it was a 
 burning question how Christ was present in 
 the Lord's Supper, and one of the greatest 
 of English theologians, the judicious Rich- 
 ard Hooker, wrote: "I wish that men would 
 more give themselves to meditate what we 
 
200 UNBTERSITY SERMONS 
 
 have by the sacrament and less to dispute 
 of the manner how." And again, "What 
 these elements are in themselves it skilleth 
 not, it is enough that to me which take them 
 they are the body and blood of Christ, His 
 promise in witness hereof sufficeth, His 
 word He knoweth which way to accomplish ; 
 why should any cogitation possess the mind 
 of a faithful communicant but this, 'O my 
 God Thou art true, O my soul thou art 
 happy!'" 
 
 The "how" of anything never seemed 
 important to Jesus. The man in His 
 parable who planted the seed was altogether 
 ignorant of its process of growth. "The 
 seed sprang up and grew, he knew not how." 
 And like a sensible man while it was grow- 
 ing he slept and rose and went about his 
 business. He got the harvest without know- 
 ing how it had grown. Jesus was indifferent 
 to origins : by their fruits, not by their roots, 
 ye shall know them. 
 
 A few sunmiers ago as I walked into the 
 hall in the Vatican where the Apollo Belve- 
 dere stands, and was seating myself to feast 
 my eyes on that glorious piece of sculpture, 
 a fellow countrywoman who was being con- 
 
 I 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 201 
 
 ducted with a party of tourists through the 
 gallery by a garrulous guide, seeing me 
 engrossed in this statue, condescendingly 
 turned back and informed me, presumably 
 to save me from wasting my time, "He says 
 that it's not original." She was surprised 
 and no doubt thought me ungrateful when 
 I continued to look at it. "Beauty," as 
 Emerson said of the Rhodora, "is its own 
 excuse for being." Who cares whence the 
 Apollo came, whether it was copied, as the 
 guidebooks say, from a bronze original, 
 whether it was carved in the third or the 
 fourth or some other century B. C? These 
 are all interesting details for the scholar, 
 and matters which he can investigate unfet- 
 tered by anyone's preconceived notions. But 
 
 A thing of beauty is a joy forever: 
 Its loveliness increases ; it will never 
 Pass into nothingness. 
 
 It is 
 
 An endless fountain of immortal drink 
 Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink. 
 
 It is refreshing to hear among the con- 
 flicting voices in the chapters in John which 
 contain the disputes over Jesus' origin this 
 
202 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 clear, somewhat sarcastic, but most sane 
 speaker: "Why, herein is the marvel, that 
 ye know not whence He is, and yet He 
 opened mine eyes. If this Man were not 
 from God, He could do nothing." 
 
 It is right that scholars, consecrated to 
 truth, should with the utmost freedom and 
 thoroughness investigate everything con- 
 nected with our Christian faith. It is right 
 that the results of their scholarship should 
 be embodied to a far greater extent than at 
 present in the study of our Bible schools. 
 It is right that Christian fathers and mothers 
 should read books which present these results 
 in untechnical form so that they shall not 
 commit the crime of teaching their children 
 things which they must later unlearn, and 
 perhaps unlearn in a spiritual crisis which 
 may cost them a serious struggle. It is 
 every waj'- right that we all should strive 
 not merely to be earnest but to be intelli- 
 gent, to know everything that we can know 
 about our Bibles, our religious customs, our 
 doctrines, above all about our Lord. It is 
 right that the Church should honor, as it 
 has not and does not always do, those who 
 devote their lives to painstaking study. It 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 203 
 
 is right that we who believe that our God 
 is Light and in Him is no darkness at all, 
 that our Lord Jesus is the Truth, and in 
 Him are all treasures of wisdom and knowl- 
 edge, should hold our minds open, expect 
 to receive new ideas, be prepared constantly 
 to readjust our thought so that it grows 
 broader and deeper and higher with the 
 years. But we are not left to sit at the doors 
 of distinguished scholars and wait to hear 
 their results before we know what to believe. 
 The beggar, blind from his birth, was as 
 competent to judge of the worth of Jesus 
 as Nicodemus, or any savant in Jerusalem. 
 *'Herein is the marvel, He opened mine 
 eyes." 
 
 Take the Bible. It is most interesting 
 to learn the results of modern scholarship, 
 to know as one reads the Fortieth Chapter 
 of Isaiah, for instance, with its "Comfort 
 ye, comfort ye My people," that the words 
 were spoken to discouraged exiles in Baby- 
 lon by a great prophet who did his work 
 some one hundred and fifty years after 
 Isaiah, who spoke while Jerusalem was still 
 in its glory; that the Book of Daniel was 
 written to cheer and keep steadfast the 
 
204 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Jews under the persecution of Antiochus 
 Epiphanes in 167 B. C; that the Fourth 
 Gospel is not a history like the other three, 
 but a spiritual interpretation of Jesus seen 
 through a remarkable man's religious expe- 
 rience. But all this knowledge of back- 
 grounds and literary details is after all by 
 the way. Long before they were known 
 the Bible was a light to men's feet and their 
 inspiration to faith, hope and love. "Herein 
 is the marvel" that this Book opens eyes 
 to see God, to see ourselves as we are and 
 as we should be, to see God's purpose for 
 the world He made, rules and loves. How 
 much inspiration are we getting out of the 
 Bible? Is it our daily companion? Are we 
 letting it open our eyes to our duty, our 
 peace, our exceeding joy? Through how- 
 ever various ways these books have been put 
 together, whether we know or do not know 
 whence they are, they could not do what they 
 have done and what they are doing, were 
 they not from God. 
 
 Take the Sabbath. The word itself, 
 according to Babylonian scholars, and the 
 testimony of the tablets, seems to indicate 
 that it existed as a day of good or evil omen 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 205 
 
 long before Abraham, and that the Hebrews 
 took it, Hke many other customs, from 
 Babylonia and remodelled it to fit their 
 religious beliefs. Its lowly beginning in the 
 midst of primitive superstitions is nothing 
 against it. We are told that our practice 
 of shaking hands began in the fear of primi- 
 tive man. When he met an acquaintance he 
 took hold of his hand so that he could 
 not draw his weapon and kill him. That 
 humble, altogether unfriendly ancestry does 
 not hinder us from using the clasping of 
 hands as the s^Tnbol of friendship, and as 
 an act in the marriage service. Through it 
 we express to our friends our sympathy, our 
 encouragement, our love. The Sabbath has 
 a long history behind it, and our Christian 
 Sunday is no more the Babylonian or even 
 the Jewish Sabbath, than our handshake is 
 the handshake of two mutually suspicious 
 savages. Evolution is God's method of 
 developing His best creations. We who 
 take the day as a Sabbath made over and 
 glorified as the Lord's Day, the anniversary 
 of Jesus' resurrection, to be used in raising 
 our brethren and ourselves into harmony 
 with His life, find its value. Herein is the 
 
206 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 marvel that so used it opens our eyes. Life's 
 obligations, possibilities, glories in fellow- 
 ship with God through Jesus Christ have, 
 as a matter of personal history, been made 
 more clear to us by our keeping this day 
 holy. We covet its privileges for everyone 
 in the community. We are anxious to see 
 our complex social life so adjusted that 
 every man, whatever his trade, gets some 
 sort of Sabbath, some Lord's day in each 
 week, which shall be his high day. The 
 custom has its authority for us not from its 
 origin but from its practically discovered 
 value. When we read the first chapter of 
 Genesis, where it is said that He who 
 worketh hitherto Himself rested, we may 
 find the language a poetic and picturesque 
 way of stating a truth, but a truth none the 
 less, that a Sabbath is part of the ideal life 
 for our Father and His children. 
 
 Take any doctrine. There were plants 
 long before there was any botany. The 
 trees and shrubs were growing on this 
 campus before scientists put out labels to 
 let us know how we who rejoice in their 
 beauty are to classify them in our thought. 
 Theology is the attempt to form a clear 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 207 
 
 opinion of our religious experiences. As 
 Sidney Lanier says of the laws of poetry : 
 
 As the poet mad with heavenly fires 
 Flings men his song white-hot, then back retires, 
 Cools heart, broods o'er the song again, inquires. 
 Why did I this, why that ? and slowly draws 
 From Art's unconscious act Art's conscious laws, 
 
 SO, without knowing just what we are doing, 
 we trust in God, follow Jesus Christ, feel 
 the inspiration of His Spirit prompting us 
 to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly 
 with God, to spend and be spent for those 
 who need us. We pray, we hope, we sacri- 
 fice. Then we try to think it all out : Who 
 is this God whom we trust? What control 
 has He over the world, over us? Who is 
 this Christ we follow? What is His relation 
 to God, to us? What is this Spirit we feel 
 within us? Botany differs from century to 
 century as men learn more; but the plants 
 and trees remain the same. 
 
 No! not quite the same. The scientific 
 study of plants gives us skilled cultivators, 
 who actually make the plants different, more 
 fruitful, more lovely. Theology opens 
 our eyes. The thoughtful study of our 
 
208 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 experiences shows us how to improve those 
 experiences, to get closer to God, to grow 
 more like Christ, to be freer children of the 
 Spirit. All Christian doctrines have humble 
 beginnings, because the religious life began 
 long before the perfect experience of God in 
 Christ. One finds the Trinity, the Incarna- 
 tion, the Atonement, in some form in almost 
 every religion. The form must continually 
 change, in order to express the ever growing 
 experience; but the test of any doctrine is 
 entirely simple and within the reach of the 
 lowliest Christian. Does this thought of 
 God, of Christ, of His cross, of His com- 
 panionship with me, of the Church, of the 
 Kingdom, of the future life, open my eyes 
 so that I walk more intimately and clearly 
 with my Father in the spirit of my Master 
 Christ? Do not despise doctrines because 
 similar ideas are found in all the faiths of 
 the world, degraded and exalted. Try the 
 doctrine by using it. If it is of no service, 
 let it go. If it opens our eyes, thank God 
 for it. 
 
 Take Jesus Christ Himself, His origin is 
 shrouded in mystery. How we are to think 
 of Him before His appearance as a Babe 
 
THE FALLACY OF ORIGINS 209 
 
 in Mary's arms, how we are to conceive of 
 His entrance into the world, may be quite 
 insoluble. Some may take New Testament 
 phrases literally, others in some other way. 
 What matters? However He came here, 
 here He is. Look at Him. If there be a 
 God whom we could love with all our heart, 
 soul, mind and strength, is not this Man His 
 embodiment? If there be an Ideal to which 
 we would have our lives, and the lives of all 
 our brethren conform, can we think of a 
 higher than He? If we trust and follow 
 Him, do we find ourselves dissatisfied, long- 
 ing for some clearer Light, some warmer 
 Love, some loftier Inspiration, some richer, 
 usefuller, stronger Life? Or do we find 
 ourselves saying. 
 
 Thou, O Christ, art all I want. 
 More than all in Thee I find? 
 
 We cannot prove His miracles of long ago; 
 "herein is the marvel. He opened mine eyes." 
 It may possibly be that some of them did 
 not happen, but are parables of spiritual 
 experiences; "one thing I know, whereas I 
 was blind, now I see." Men may be dis- 
 puting as to whence He came, we rest secure 
 
210 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 in our personal knowledge of what He is. 
 We have done what He told us to do, done 
 it hesitatingly and haltingly and awkwardly 
 like blind men ; but in the doing of His will, 
 our eyes were opened. We have a new view 
 of life, live in a new world, see God as our 
 Father, see His Kingdom of justice, mercy 
 and faithfulness as the one purpose we 
 cannot but live and labor to accomplish. 
 And because our vision splendid came 
 through obedience to Jesus, we feel bound 
 to commend Him with all the force we can 
 to every man, to bring every man to a like 
 obedience. Our thoughts of Christ may 
 change ; they will surely grow with the expe- 
 riences of the years and of eternity; but our 
 personal loyalty to Him cannot alter. It 
 is based on one indubitable fact: "herein is 
 the marvel. He opened mine eyes." 
 
 If there be one pair of unseeing eyes here 
 this morning, why not let Him open them 
 now? How? Obey Him in the first 
 impulse by which He moves us to do any- 
 thing for His cause. 
 
XIII 
 THE REALITY OF GOD 
 
 "The living God" — an expression found frequently 
 in both Testaments. 
 
 At a class reunion recently two close 
 friends, who had not had a chance to talk 
 together frankly since graduation, were 
 sitting, exchanging their opinions on the 
 deeper things of hfe, and the conversation 
 gradually drifted around to the subject of 
 religious conviction. One said to the other 
 something as follows : 
 
 "When I was in college I used to be 
 bothered by doubts whether all the miracles 
 mentioned in the Bible actually happened; 
 I had trouble believing in the divinity of 
 Christ; some kinds of prayer that I used to 
 hear a certain type of fellow offering in 
 class prayer meetings annoyed me, for I 
 could not see how God needed their remind- 
 ers and suggestions. But none of these 
 things concern me much at present: it isn't 
 
212 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 that I have settled them satisfactorily one 
 way or another ; but that a great deal bigger 
 and more fundamental question keeps forc- 
 ing itself upon me. Is what I call *God' a 
 label for a real Being, or simply a label for 
 an idea that has come to me partly as an 
 inheritance from the aspirations and super- 
 stitions of the past, and partly as an expres- 
 sion for the highest ideal I can imagine? 
 
 "I enjoy reading the Bible a good deal 
 more than I used to. Its superb language, 
 its amazing literary skill, the fascination of 
 its stories, the beauty of its thoughts, capti- 
 vate me. I spend part of every Sunday 
 afternoon reading selections from it to my 
 children, although I usually have hard work 
 dodging some of the questions they put to 
 me. I do not disagree when anybody 
 applies the adjective 'divine' to Jesus; there 
 is no one else who so fully deserves it, and 
 there is no word in the dictionary in my 
 estimation too exalted for Him. The more 
 I study the accounts of His life, the more 
 I look at the results of His influence, 
 the more I think about Him, the more 
 wonderful He appears to me. 
 
 "But the trouble is that I cannot see that 
 
THE REALITY OF GOD 213 
 
 the adjective ^divine' belongs to any other 
 Being. I don't quarrel with the divinity of 
 Jesus, but what of the reality of that other 
 He called 'Father'? The truth is that when 
 I get down on my knees to pray, I seem to 
 be talking into empty air. I have an idea 
 in my head that I call *God' ; I suppose it's 
 about the best notion I own, the most beauti- 
 ful article in my mental furniture. It's a 
 notion that is very stimulating and comfort- 
 ing to lots of people. It's been in my own 
 head so long that I have difficulty in flinging 
 it out of doors, exactly as I hate to give the 
 ash man a bit of furniture that I have looked 
 at all my hfe. But I don't seem to be able 
 to get away from the feeling that it's just 
 a notion ; and this feeling robs it of all value. 
 You can't get up much affection for a mere 
 thought in your own brain. You can't rely 
 on it for anything. There isn't much 
 communion in a one-sided conversation, 
 which makes you feel about as idiotic as 
 when you are caught talking aloud to your- 
 self on the street." 
 
 One might well question whether, if 
 religion had no more substantial reality in 
 it than that, it could have survived so long, 
 
214 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 and been prized so highly by millions of 
 hard-headed and practically successful men 
 and women. It is a somewhat dubious 
 comphment to pay Jesus to give Him the 
 loftiest adjective in one's vocabulary, but 
 consider Him deluded in His fundamental 
 conviction of the Father, to whose business 
 He devoted His life, in whose personal 
 fellowship He thought He found His 
 strength and hope and peace, and into 
 whose hands He consigned His spirit. The 
 imaginations of little children often impute 
 life to dolls or to some invisible playmate, 
 with whom they carry on long conversations, 
 or go for a walk, or sit down to a meal. But 
 there comes a day when the child looks 
 shamefaced when one alludes to a remark 
 attributed to the doll or mentions the make- 
 believe playmate. A growing acquaintance 
 with life has banished these fancies and com- 
 pelled the imagination to adjust itself with 
 facts. A make-believe playmate may con- 
 tent a child of four, but at eight he will crave 
 the comradeship of flesh and blood com- 
 panions. Is it seriously credible that 
 humanity should have satisfied itself for 
 these centuries with a make-believe Deity? 
 
THE REALITY OF GOD 215 
 
 To be sure God is a notion in our heads. 
 He could not be there in any other form; 
 that is the only way in which we exist in 
 each other's heads. We say that we see each 
 other: as a matter of fact, we see a small 
 image, the fraction of an inch in dimensions, 
 on the retina of our eyes, which our nerves 
 take and mysteriously transmute into an 
 idea in our minds. We say that we ex- 
 change thoughts: we cram some idea into 
 a word, and let the sound waves carry it to 
 an ear fitted to receive and convey it to 
 another man's mind. Through images and 
 words translating themselves into notions 
 we hold intercourse with one another. And 
 an amazing intercourse it is! Think what 
 freight of influence, of friendship, of love, 
 sight and sound waves, images and words, 
 the mechanism of eyes and tongues and 
 ears and brains is continually dehveringi 
 How full of results interperson conmaerce 
 is! 
 
 But the same image and the same word 
 may mean such different things to different 
 people. When a class enters college, a 
 freshman has a confused impression of many 
 faces whom he sees in the recitation room 
 
216 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 or at a class meeting. Gradually the im- 
 pressions assort themselves, and by senior 
 year, while many images that catch his eye 
 are images of men who remain simply class- 
 mates, with no very rich personal meaning 
 for him, others are the images of the men 
 who have become his probably best friends 
 for life. Why is it that the same image 
 falling on the eyes of several hundred men 
 has such a different significance for some 
 than for others? All attempts to account 
 for our friendships are unsatisfactory. We 
 usually fall back on such expressions as, "I 
 took to him, and he to me"; "We seemed 
 to hit it off"; "We drew together naturally." 
 
 The same word falls upon two sets of ears 
 with such entirely different effects. To one 
 it is a sound in an unknown tongue; to 
 another it carries inestimable love. 
 
 Life's circumstances are pretty much the 
 same for everybody — the same changing 
 seasons, the same heat and cold, the same 
 happiness and pain, the same success and 
 failure, the same life and death. The differ- 
 ence in men's lots is inconsiderable compared 
 with the sameness. But how differently 
 people interpret their lives, and how vastly 
 
THE REALITY OF GOD 217 
 
 different is the value they set upon them! 
 It is perhaps natural for the man who, like 
 Macbeth, says. 
 
 Life is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. 
 Signifying nothing, 
 
 to hold that those who get more out of life 
 simply imagine the more in their own 
 brains ; but those who, like Jesus, find a kind 
 and thoughtful Providence even in the fall 
 of a poor, dead sparrow, will hardly be 
 persuaded that the other point of view is 
 correct. 
 
 Shall we say that he who gets least or 
 he who gets most out of anything under- 
 stands it more truly? Have we any more 
 convincing test of the possession of truth, 
 than that which a man can do with what he 
 thinks he possesses? One man understands 
 the truth about electricity sufficiently to 
 devise a lightning rod and protect his house; 
 another can make electricity light his house, 
 carry his voice a thousand miles, bear a mes- 
 sage over a continent and under an ocean 
 to the other side of the globe. The first man 
 was in possession of truth as far as he 
 
218 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 went, but the second has gone farther and 
 possesses more truth. 
 
 From the dawn of history some men have 
 succeeded in getting more out of the world's 
 life than others could see that it contained. 
 They got this "more" because they believed 
 that back of and through it there was an 
 Unseen with which they could establish 
 contact, an Unseen which they found not 
 empty but inhabited. Exactly as men have 
 fellowship with one another through images 
 or words that convey meanings, so through 
 symbols they have had communion with the 
 Invisible. One can recall a long line of such 
 symbols, from the crudest fetish to the 
 Figure of the Son of man, which have 
 spoken to men of the Divine. There has 
 been a struggle for existence and a survival 
 of the fittest among the conceptions of 
 Deity; and in this struggle Jesus has over- 
 come, and is more and more on missionary 
 fields overcoming, all competitors. From 
 His personality we gain more divine impres- 
 sions than from any other. He awakens in 
 us the most religious response; He calls out 
 our trust, our obedience, our adoration, our 
 love. His image, borne to us by the light 
 
THE REALITY OF GOD 219 
 
 waves in the experiences of His followers 
 through the centuries, brings more that is 
 of supreme worth — inspiration, hope, wis- 
 dom, power to change us into His own like- 
 ness. Through this image, transmitted by 
 the New Testament pages and the lives of 
 many generations of Christian men and 
 women, we find the Invisible opening up 
 to us, getting into touch with us, giving to 
 us certain most precious things which we 
 invariably associate with personal com- 
 panionship, giving us nothing less than a 
 sense of the friendship with us of a Christ- 
 like God. Jesus' image from the past 
 establishes for us a present connection with 
 the Unseen, which we are unable to explain 
 in any other way than by calling it "inter- 
 person commerce." 
 
 And what an incalculable amount such a 
 relation with a living divine Comrade adds 
 to life I Listen to a few familiar expressions 
 from men who wrote in the conviction that 
 they possessed it: "Ye are the sons of the 
 living God"; "to serve the living and true 
 God"; "the living God is among you"; "we 
 are a temple of the living God"; "to this 
 
220 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 end we labor and strive, because we have 
 our hope set on the living God." 
 
 Do those understand the facts of life most 
 correctly who get the most out of them? 
 Does he understand his classmate best to 
 whom his image is merely that of a man 
 with whom he happens to be thrown for 
 four years, or he to whom his image conveys 
 a wealth of friendship? Does he interpret 
 a word aright to whom it is a sound signify- 
 ing nothing, or he to whom it carries infor- 
 mation and affection? Would the friend, 
 whose words we reported a moment ago, 
 have been really more faithful to truth, had 
 he, doing violence to his sentiment, allowed 
 the most helpful notion in his mind to be 
 carried out? If through the image which 
 your classmate presents to your eye you 
 receive from him friendship, you do not 
 question the reahty of his existence; he is 
 your living friend. If the notion of God 
 in a man's head is the best notion there, the 
 notion from which he derives most solid and 
 substantial comfort, stimulus, power, does it 
 not carry its own proof of correspondence 
 to reality? Can a man expect to climb out- 
 side of himself, and from some external 
 
 I 
 
THE REALITY OF GOD 221 
 
 position see that his notion tallies with an 
 objective fact? Suppose when he prays he 
 feels himself talking into empty air, is he 
 to depend on his momentary feeling as the 
 final test of actuality, and could the air 
 transmit an image to him of the unseen God, 
 and prove itself not empty? A personal 
 God can image Himself only in a Person; 
 and it is what the image itself manages to 
 convey to us that establishes what is behind 
 it. 
 
 To be sure all our classmates do not 
 appeal to us alike, nor are we polyglots to 
 understand words from all tongues. It 
 requires a capacity in us to interpret and 
 answer the man we meet and the word we 
 hear. Keats has an interesting sentence in 
 one of his letters which runs: "Ethereal 
 things may at least be thus real, divided 
 imder three heads — things real, things semi- 
 real, and nothings"; and in the first class 
 he itemizes : "Things real, such as existences 
 of sun, moon and stars, and passages from 
 Shakespeare" It was the poet's soul in him 
 to whom the elder poet spoke. It is the 
 godlike heart to whom alone God can mani- 
 fest Himself. Deep calleth unto deep ; deep 
 
222 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 cannot call to shallow. The pure in heart 
 see God. The colloquial expression we used 
 a moment ago in explaining the origin of 
 friendship, is a not inapt description of the 
 commencement of the most vital religious 
 experiences: "He took to me, and I to 
 Him." 
 
 Here is the Figure of Jesus Christ; do 
 we take to Him? He manifestly takes to 
 us; we cannot get away from the feehng 
 that He is reaching out to us. Do we 
 answer that outreach? Does Jesus Christ 
 mean enough to us to command our 
 obedience and enlist our devotion in His 
 purpose? If so, something immeasurably 
 great is coming to us through Him, and we 
 are on the road to the living God; or rather, 
 the living God is coming to us. Our evi- 
 dence that our classmate is a real friend to 
 us does not consist in anything outside of 
 the friendly impression he makes upon us. 
 The proof of God's actuality is not outside 
 of the present friendship He gives us 
 through the image of Jesus. We may not 
 have a vivid feeling of His reality; feelings 
 vary with temperaments and moods ; but in 
 devotion to Jesus a wisdom and power and 
 
 I 
 
THE REALITY OF GOD 223 
 
 love are given us, that sooner or later force 
 us to feel that we are in conscious fellow- 
 ship with God. "If a man love Me, he will 
 keep My word, and My Father will love 
 him and We will come unto him, and make 
 Our abode with him." 
 
 The living God — ^is He alive to us? A 
 living God must be a thinking and a speak- 
 ing God. Does it occur to us that He is 
 thinking of us, has a specific purpose for 
 us, wishes most eagerly that we should grasp 
 and fulfill it? Do we listen for His thought 
 through some divine word — a Christlike 
 suggestion in a book, from a friend's lips, 
 in an experience, in our own thoughts? Do 
 we interpret every Christlike idea that 
 reaches our minds as a thought that has 
 been first in God's mind, and has been 
 spoken personally by Him to us and carried 
 through the media which transmit the 
 messages of Spirit to spirit? 
 
 A living God must be an experiencing 
 God. We measure life by capacity for 
 experience; that is the difference between 
 a stone and a man. The events in our 
 world's existence, in our own and our 
 friends' lives, have an effect on God; they 
 
224 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 enter into His life. That through which 
 Jesus passed centuries ago — His Mount 
 of Transfiguration, His Gethsemane, His 
 Calvary, His conquered grave — speaks to 
 us of something going on now in the expe- 
 rience of the living God. Our consecrations 
 to fulfill righteousness give us the sense of 
 a responding "Thou art My beloved son," 
 and our treacheries and selfishnesses erect 
 a cross in a Heart where love is pierced by 
 and for us. Do we consider how we are 
 affecting the living God? 
 
 A living God must be a doing God. 
 Maurice said that Thomas Carlyle believed 
 in a God who lived till the death of Oliver 
 Cromwell; but "My Father worketh even 
 until now." Are we in the habit of connect- 
 ing every Christlike occurrence with His 
 direct activity — every act of generosity, 
 every movement of men's thoughts towards 
 justice, every craving for truth, every over- 
 throw of oppression, every outgoing of 
 sympathy, every self-sacrifice? Oh, but 
 these are all men's doings. Yes, everything 
 that Jesus did long ago was His own doing, 
 but His discerning eye saw through it 
 another Factor: "The Father abiding in 
 
THE REALITY OF GOD 225 
 
 Me doeth His works." If we are finding 
 the Jesus of the past an image through 
 whom the living God conveys something 
 of Himself to us, in every Jesus-like move- 
 ment in the consciences, the purposes, the 
 lives of people today we must see God 
 present and active. Do we recognize Him, 
 enter into partnership with Him, feel confi- 
 dent of the success of all that is Jesus-like 
 because the living God is in and behind it, 
 and take our part with it hopefully as those 
 who know that their indomitable Ally is 
 with them on the field? 
 
 The living God! What a difference it 
 makes whether He is alive to us or not, 
 literally a world of difference, for we dwell 
 in a totally different universe when He is 
 alive in it with us. 
 
 How pathetic it will be when some 
 of us are unexpectedly made aware that 
 He is alive and has been near us all along, 
 although we never suspected His presence, 
 or answered His pleading, or had anything 
 to do with Him, the living God I 
 
 How tragic, if we never awake to that 
 recognition; if the image of Jesus never 
 succeeds in conveying anything to us ; if the 
 
226 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Word made flesh in Him continues to 
 signify nothing; and we go through life and 
 into death alone, while through the friend- 
 liest possible expression of Himself — 
 through the Face of Jesus Christ — God 
 has been trying to get our attention, arouse 
 our sympathy, win our friendship, and give 
 us Himself, the Christlike Father, Lord of 
 heaven and earth — ^the living God! 
 
XIV 
 RELIGION— A LOAD OR A LIFT? 
 
 Isaiah 46: 1, 8, 4. Bel boweth down, Nebo 
 stoopeth; their idols are upon the beasts, and upon 
 the cattle: the things that ye carried about are made 
 a load, a burden to the weary beast. Hearken unto 
 Me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the 
 house of Israel, that have been borne by Me from 
 their birth, that have been carried from the womb; 
 and even to old age I am He, and even to hoar hairs 
 will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; yea, 
 I will carry, and will deliver. 
 
 Here is a contrast between gods that men 
 carry and a God who carries men; between 
 religion as a load and religion as a lift. The 
 prophet draws a graphic picture of the huge 
 images of the gods of Babylon bobbing and 
 swaying in a most absurdly undignified 
 fashion on the backs of straining and sweat- 
 ing beasts, as their frightened devotees try- 
 to bear them off to a place of safety 
 before the invading Persians. "Things you 
 paraded about," he derisively labels the 
 
228 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 deities of these image-revering Babylonians, 
 referring to the processions in which these 
 gods were borne whom now their worship- 
 pers carry off in such unceremonious haste. 
 And he compares them with the living God 
 of Israel's experience, who had taken the 
 infant nation in His arms at its birth in 
 Egypt, and had been marching majestically 
 through the centuries bearing it securely. 
 "Even to old age I am He, and even to hoar 
 hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I 
 will bear ; yea, I will carry, and will deliver." 
 
 There are many men who view religion 
 as a burden. As they look at it, a Christian 
 has to accept certain ideas regarding God, 
 Jesus Christ, the Bible, prayer, the future 
 life, which are hard notions to make one's 
 self receive. The intelligence has to be 
 forced under them, much as an unwilling 
 mule is compelled to stand still and be 
 loaded with its pack. 
 
 A Christian has to adopt certain customs, 
 such as saying his prayers, attending public 
 worship regularly, observing a ceremony 
 like the Lord's Supper, reading his Bible 
 every day; and these customs impress them 
 as a bore. Life lays upon them inescapable 
 
 I 
 
RELIGION— A LOAD OR A LIFT? 229 
 
 duties; they cannot see why they should 
 cumber themselves with these additional 
 loads. The prayers they were taught in 
 childhood have become useless luggage 
 which they carry along with them for 
 sentiment's sake; they do not feel them of 
 any real power. Church services are frankly 
 an irksome burden beneath which they would 
 not place their backs unless they were con- 
 strained to. The Bible is heavy reading, 
 and with the idea of enlightening themselves 
 (which is a prevalent passion) they usually 
 let the Bible alone. They may have brought 
 a copy with them to college which was given 
 them by someone they love, or presented to 
 them publicly on a memorable occasion ; but 
 it lies unopened on their bureau or shelf. 
 It never enters their minds that daily 
 contact with its pages would refresh and 
 invigorate them. 
 
 A Christian has to take upon himself 
 depressing obligations. His conscience 
 keeps piling upon his shoulders a mass of 
 responsibilities. The moral tone of the col- 
 lege is in part his concern; the agencies at 
 work in it for righteousness have a claim 
 upon his interest and time and energy; the 
 
230 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 attitude his classmates take towards his 
 divine Friend touches his sense of honor and 
 loyalty, and he feels that it is laid upon him 
 to see to it that they do not misjudge and 
 misunderstand his God. Above all his con- 
 science forces him to judge himself by an 
 impossibly high standard, by the Spirit of 
 Jesus Christ, and to task himself with every 
 secret thought, every personal ambition, 
 every acquiescence in social conventions, 
 every expressed opinion that discords with 
 the heart of his Master. And to many this 
 Christian conscientiousness is an intolerable 
 burden. Their consciences, they think, are 
 sufficiently troublesome, constraining them 
 to assume this and that obligation, without 
 having religion break their backs by heaping 
 on a great many more. 
 
 Our prophet would tell them frankly that 
 a burdensome rehgion is a false rehgion; 
 that a god they think of in certain ideas 
 which they force themselves to believe, wor- 
 ship in forms they spur themselves to keep 
 up, and serve in duties their consciences 
 strap upon their unwilling backs, is a man- 
 made god, a mere idol, not the living and 
 true Creator. He would assure them that 
 
RELIGION— A LOAD OR A LIFT? 231 
 
 the religion which they feel they do not 
 want, they do well not to want; it is only a 
 revival of ancient paganism. Religion that 
 is a load is not rehgion, is not fellowship 
 with the Most High God. The test, he 
 suggests, by which a man can find out 
 whether he is dealing with an idol or with 
 the Lord of heaven and earth, is this: Do 
 you feel yourself carrying your religion, or 
 do you feel that it carries you : is it a weight 
 or is it wings? 
 
 A Christian's beliefs are not ideas which 
 he compels his mind to accept; they are 
 convictions which grip him. They appear 
 to come to him with hands and arms, 
 and to lay hold of his intelligence; he is 
 aware of being picked up and carried along 
 by them. The truth takes him off his feet, 
 and he is conscious of resting on it, rather 
 than on ground of his own choosing. At 
 first he may struggle, and attempt to get 
 free ; or, perhaps of tener, he lies quietly, held 
 fast from the start. After he has been 
 carried some while, it never occurs to him 
 to break loose from the grasp of these con- 
 victions ; he rests in them, and is borne along 
 by them with supremest satisfaction. 
 
232 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Take any of the fundamental Christian 
 convictions — the lordship of Jesus, and His 
 power to make strong, wise, good, the man 
 who obeys Him; the Christlikeness of God, 
 with whom as our Father we live and work 
 in Jesus ; the inspiration of the Bible, which, 
 read under the guidance of Christ's Spirit, 
 supplies us with stimulating, correcting, 
 comforting, transforming disclosures of our 
 God ; the cross as the measure of God's love 
 to us and of our duty to men, drawing us 
 irresistibly to His heart and making us 
 take every human being, even those we like 
 least and those we have never seen, to our 
 hearts ; the Kingdom of God, the social order 
 of justice, kindness and faithfulness which 
 our Father devotes Himself to bring to pass 
 and to which we. His sons, are committed; — 
 these beliefs are not loads imposed upon 
 Christian minds. 
 
 We may remember the day when one of 
 these convictions first came to us, like a 
 towering giant Truth, and caught us up in 
 its arms. We cannot forget the sensation 
 of being raised by it, the feeling of security 
 and satisfaction in its strong hold, the new 
 outlook we had from that unusual height. 
 
RELIGION— A LOAD OR A LIFT? 233 
 
 Perhaps we cannot recall a day when any 
 of these behefs first met us, for we have 
 been carried in their embrace from our 
 birth, as they carried our fathers before us. 
 But there came a time when with growing 
 knowledge we looked up critically into the 
 face of the famihar truth that had so long 
 held us. Our fathers spoke admiringly of 
 this and that feature of its face; and these 
 did not happen to be the features that 
 appealed to us; but none the less the face 
 into which we were looking with the sharp- 
 ness of trained and inquisitive eyes was to 
 us the face of truth. We had no desire to 
 break away; we could not fancy our intelli- 
 gence thinking otherwise. Or, if in a 
 moment of restiveness we attempted to 
 shake loose and get down and stand on our 
 own feet entirely independent of and apart 
 from this truth, we discovered that it had 
 so tenacious a grip on our intelligence that 
 we could not get away from it. It kept 
 convincing and reconvincing us; and there 
 was nothing for us but to lie easily and 
 confidently, saying, "I am held; I cannot 
 think in any other way." And if we are 
 really being carried along by the conviction, 
 
234 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 we would not be loosed from its grasp for 
 anjrthing in the wide world ; it is bearing us 
 into life. 
 
 If any man here is trying to make himself 
 believe anjrthing about God, or Christ, or 
 the Bible, or the Christian life, let him be 
 sure that he is looking at some man-made 
 view of the Divine, a mere idol. When 
 God's truth comes along, it does its own 
 convincing. There is no getting away from 
 it. Its inescapableness is the test of its 
 divineness. 
 
 If any man here has been held under 
 certain conceptions of religious truth which 
 he finds his education or his growing expe- 
 rience of life taking from him, let him not 
 grieve. Some old Bel or Nebo has been 
 unstrapped from his back — ^that is all. The 
 living Truth cannot be taken from us; or 
 rather, we cannot be snatched out of His 
 arms. 
 
 We are never to try to make ourselves 
 believe anything; we are to look up trust- 
 fully into the face of the truth from which 
 we cannot get away, and let it take us up, 
 and hold and carry us. We are never to 
 be sorry for any belief that is wrested from 
 
RELIGION— A LOAD OR A LIFT? 235 
 
 us; but to congratulate ourselves that Bel 
 and Nebo, however helpful they may have 
 seemed, have been pulled off, that the living 
 God may have a chance of laying hold of 
 our minds. 
 
 Or take the Christian habits of private 
 prayer, public worship, sacraments, Bible 
 study. If they seem weights to us, not 
 wings, we may be sure that we are not in 
 touch with God through them. The trouble 
 may be that we are not using them to gain 
 fellowship with Him. If we really want 
 God, it is not likely that we shall be bored 
 by these means of realizing His presence and 
 entering His companionship. They are not 
 arbitrarily laid out rounds of exercise, like 
 the prescribed circle in a prison courtyard 
 about which jailors walk convicts for their 
 health; they are the beaten tracks free pil- 
 grims after God have worn through the 
 ages, the paths every believer with a true 
 experience of Him bids us take to find and 
 be with the Most High. 
 
 Or the trouble may be in the form of the 
 prayer, the public worship, the Bible study 
 we employ. Others can open for us a great 
 highway to God, but no man can tell 
 
236 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 another on just what foot of ground his 
 steps must fall. Prayer, public worship, the 
 Bible — ^these are the highway ten thousand 
 times ten thousand have used, and without 
 which they assure us they would never have 
 arrived at their intimacy with God; but we 
 have to discover for ourselves how to pray, 
 how to worship helpfully with others, how 
 to get at God's message for us through the 
 Bible. We must learn to be our natural 
 and unique selves on our knees with God; 
 our natural and unique selves with others 
 in social worship, to which we bring our 
 faith and enthusiasm as sacraments to uplift 
 our fellow seekers after Him who is invis- 
 ible; our natural and unique selves with the 
 choice religious experiences of the past in 
 the Bible open before us, and speaking their 
 messages to our souls. If we have given up 
 forms that were weights to us, we have not 
 lost anything; we must find others that are 
 wings, and seriously set ourselves to find 
 them. The test of the reality of our contact 
 with God through any form is the lift it 
 gives us into higher and larger hfe. If, as 
 Browning says, there is "a stoop of the soul 
 which in bending upraises it too," the up- 
 
 ( 
 
RELIGION— A LOAD OR A LIFT? 237 
 
 raising is not in the mere stoop, but in the 
 lifting God to whom our reverent approach 
 directly brings us. 
 
 Or take the responsibilities with which a 
 Christian conscience saddles a man — ^the 
 sense of personal accountability for the 
 standards and morale of the life of the 
 University to which we belong, of indebted- 
 ness to all the producers of the wealth that 
 makes possible our enriching and delightful 
 life here; our consciousness that we must 
 answer for our influence over the men at our 
 side, and give a reckoning as stewards to 
 the wider community beyond these walls for 
 our use of whatever Yale gives us for mind 
 or character ; our feeling that we are charge- 
 able to God for our lives, and must plan 
 them from day to day here, and for the 
 years ahead of us, so that He may say, 
 "Well done I" — ^this conscientiousness is not 
 depressing, but elevating. True, we feel 
 ourselves under great pressure; "I must," 
 we say, "I must be about my Father's busi- 
 ness"; "I must work the works of Him that 
 sent me, while it is day, for the night 
 Cometh" ; but the pressure is a driving force. 
 It lifts us out of ourselves; it gets us over 
 
238 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 the obstacles of laziness and diffidence and 
 cowardice; it gives us buoyancy under fail- 
 ure and discouragement. The Christian 
 ideal conscience compels us to strive to reach 
 appears like a steep summit up which we 
 must climb with straining toil; but the 
 Christian who is trying to climb knows that 
 there is an almost resistless pull in the ideal, 
 drawing him and rendering it easier to keep 
 on clambering up, than to turn his back and 
 take his way down. The upward pulling 
 power of the Christian ideal is nothing else 
 than the downward reach and lift of the 
 living God in Christ, like whom we feel we 
 simply must become. 
 
 There are a good many people who 
 consider themselves Christians who never 
 convey the impression of being lifted and 
 carried along by a great upbearing Power. 
 They are burdened with something — ^with 
 fear perhaps, fear of the germs of disease 
 about to infect them, of overstrain about to 
 cripple their nerves, of social upheaval about 
 to whelm them and theirs in poverty; bur- 
 dened with sorrow, unable to raise them- 
 selves under the crushing loneliness that 
 death has let fall upon them; burdened with 
 
RELIGION— A LOAD OR A LIFT? 239 
 
 problems, the perplexities in their own 
 careers which cause their minds to stagger, 
 the perplexities of our age with its pressing 
 questions in industry, in theology, in politics, 
 in every phase of human thought ; burdened 
 with their possessions, which impede them 
 from devoting themselves to unselfish 
 careers and render it incumbent upon them 
 to occupy a fixed social position in the 
 world ; burdened with themselves, oppressed 
 with the sense of their own futility, their 
 boredness, the. hardness of their task of 
 trying to amuse themselves and forget them- 
 selves. A common phase of our day is this 
 consciousness of being restive under some 
 undefined weight that leads people to try to 
 throw off every responsibility as too heavy 
 to be borne — civic duties. Church responsi- 
 bilities, family obligations. Life in a city 
 with its problems and claims is too tiring, 
 and they flee to the supposedly more restful 
 country, where needs do not thrust them- 
 selves so obtrusively and insistently upon 
 them. It is all part of the lack of the sense 
 of being uphfted and upborne, which is the 
 essence of the religious experience. To pos- 
 sess a genuine contact with God is to be 
 
240 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 carried by Him so that fear and sorrow and 
 problems and possessions and ourselves 
 are not burdensome because His arms are 
 beneath us and all. 
 
 There are a good many people who would 
 like to know whether it is possible to have 
 such contact with the living God. They 
 do not deny His existence, but they seriously 
 doubt whether they have ever been in touch 
 with Him; and they wish they knew where 
 they could see any clear evidence that His 
 hands took hold of them. This prophet, to 
 whom God was the high and lofty One 
 inhabiting eternity, would tell them that in 
 every experience with anything or anybody 
 that lifted them, God was surely placing 
 His arms about them, and they could 
 recognize His divine touch, and, if they let 
 themselves go, they would be carried. 
 
 Here is a truth that takes us off our feet, 
 a conviction that binds us in its embrace — 
 that is God. In yielding to truth we are in 
 His arms. 
 
 Here is conscience — ^well, it often seems 
 to do anything but lift us ; it knocks us down 
 and belabors us, and leaves us humihated 
 and bruised all over in the dust. Is not that 
 
 I 
 
RELIGION— A LOAD OR A LIFT? 241 
 
 the sensation we have when conscience gets 
 through handling us? But as a matter of 
 fact, we know that it never leaves us there. 
 Every knock-down of conscience is a boost 
 up; it is the upward pull of a higher ideal; 
 and that is God, the righteous God. 
 
 Here is love — and how it holds a man up ! 
 Those who love us, lift us. There is no 
 genuine love in all the world that does not 
 seem to come to us from the heights, to be 
 the downward reach of someone who would 
 do anything to upraise us; and that is God, 
 God who is love. 
 
 Here is Jesus Christ — ^the embodiment of 
 truth, conscience, love. How He towers 
 above us, so that, whenever we look at Him, 
 we have to look up ! How He grasps us, so 
 that we cannot think save with His point 
 of view, cannot try to be anjiihing else but 
 like Him, cannot get away from His love , 
 which always manages, in our most unbe- 
 lieving moods and our most selfish states, to 
 keep fast some bit of our nature ! How He 
 exalts us every time we take His outlook, 
 or try to be at all like Him, or respond to 
 the pull of His love on our heartstrings I 
 That is God, God coming into direct contact 
 
242 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 with us through Jesus Christ ; God stooping 
 to us, laying hands upon us, raising us in 
 His arms, carrying us into His hfe. 
 
 Those who give themselves up to the Hft 
 of God through truth, through conscience, 
 through love, and supremely through Jesus 
 Christ, know what it is to feel themselves 
 upborne. They are aware of the hold the 
 divine has on them, and are persuaded that 
 neither death, nor hfe, nor things present, 
 nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, 
 shall be able to separate them from the love 
 of God which is in Christ Jesus, their Lord. 
 The eternal God is their dwelling-place, and 
 underneath are the everlasting arms. "Even 
 to old age I am He ; and even to hoar hairs 
 will I carry you: I have made, and I will 
 bear; yea, I will carry, and will deliver." 
 
 I 
 
XV 
 
 THE OLD, OLD STORY 
 
 John 9:27. Wherefore would ye hear it again? 
 would ye also become His disciples? 
 
 A preacher entering this pulpit, particu- 
 larly at this season of the year when for a 
 number of you the college course is almost 
 ended, may well ask, as he begins to speak 
 once more of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 
 "Wherefore would ye hear it again?" 
 
 Most of us have listened to the presenta- 
 tion of Christianity in home, Sunday school, 
 Church services, books and Christian char- 
 acters since our earliest childhood. By a 
 long-established custom in this College, 
 we, its students, hear some phase of the 
 Christian message told us from the Univer- 
 sity pulpit every Sunday throughout our 
 course. A preacher may try to whet his 
 hearers' interest by exploring some out-of- 
 the-way nook or corner of the Bible, or by 
 selecting an odd text which will rouse their 
 curiosity, or by emphasizing some theologi- 
 cal novelty brought into being by an advance 
 
244 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 in our world's thought; but the good news 
 that to obey Jesus Christ is, hke the man 
 in the familiar story read a moment ago, 
 to be made to see — ^to live in a world where 
 the light of God's face falls on and alters 
 and beautifies everything — that cannot be 
 news to any man here; it is something to 
 which we have listened a thousand times. 
 What possible good will it do us to hear it 
 repeated? Have we the slightest intention 
 of becoming different men because of it, of 
 allowing Christ to have the sole and supreme 
 control of our lives? Is this morning's 
 service to be just a conventional exercise 
 through which we must go, you and I? Or 
 granting that the purpose of the University 
 in bringing us here is sincere, that we are 
 dealing with something that is overwhelm- 
 ingly real, life's most momentous interest to 
 some of us, is it conceivable that its telling 
 is far more than a perfunctory usage? 
 "Wherefore would ye hear it again? would 
 ye also become His disciples?" 
 
 There are several reasons which hinder 
 men today from yielding to the persuasive 
 appeal of the personality of Jesus. One of 
 these is the mental bewilderment in which 
 
THE OLD, OLD STORY 245 
 
 they find themselves when they ask what is 
 involved in becoming a Christian. There 
 are intellectual problems: How am I to 
 think of God, of Christ, of the Bible, or 
 prayer, of suffering, of death, of the mystery 
 beyond? We appreciate that we live in a 
 world of changing opinions, that the ideas 
 taught us on these subjects and held by a 
 great many good people whom we know, 
 do not seem to us mentally convincing. 
 How are we to arrive at satisfactory con- 
 victions of our own? There are such minor, 
 but still practical, questions as, What does 
 loyalty to Christ demand of me in my use 
 of Sunday, and in my attitude to a lot of 
 personal problems of a similar sort? On 
 what basis am I to arrive at my decisions? 
 There are the much more fundamental and 
 more complicated social perplexities. In 
 view of Jesus' ideal of universal brother- 
 hood, His teaching regarding justice and 
 self-sacrifice, how should I order my 
 methods of earning and spending money, 
 what position must I take towards questions 
 of public policy on economic lines, how far 
 can I accept the ideals of my parents, con- 
 form to the customs of the particular set of 
 
246 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 people with whom I am thrown, be in 
 harmony with the ways of thinking and 
 hving that prevail, for instance, here at 
 Yale? Conscientious persons, who are not 
 in the habit of promising without perform- 
 ing, hesitate to commit themselves to Christ, 
 even by registering a secret vow, until they 
 are clear to what they will be committed. 
 We may feel the spell of Christ upon us, 
 we may let His Spirit shape our ideals at a 
 number of points, but we shrink from giving 
 Him full sway, because we do not know 
 where that will take us. 
 
 It is fair to say that there is no short cut 
 out of this mental bewilderment. Nobody 
 on earth can tell his neighbor what he ought 
 to think. To follow Christ is to be con- 
 tinually thinking with a mind ready to revise 
 all previous conclusions. But that is not to 
 say that we are left solely to our own intelli- 
 gences. Men who obey Christ find His 
 Spirit formed in them, and that Spirit is 
 an unerring Guide. Read under the direc- 
 tion of that Spirit, the Bible yields us a few 
 great convictions and determining prin- 
 ciples that serve for all practical purposes 
 to keep us right. We are not relieved of 
 
THE OLD, OLD STORY 247 
 
 thinking for ourselves. Xo one can hand 
 us some ready-made beliefs or some univer- 
 sally applicable rules of conduct. We have 
 got to ask ourselves constantly : What is the 
 most Christlike thought I can hold of God, 
 of life, of pain, of destiny? What is the 
 most Christlike use I can make of means, 
 education, friendship? What is the most 
 Christhke solution I can see for any social 
 problem or political question? There is no 
 guarantee against our making mistakes, no 
 assurance that what appears most Christ- 
 like today may not be superseded by some- 
 thing that seems more Christlike tomorrow; 
 but no man who conscientiously follows the 
 Spirit of Christ, as that Spirit is breathed 
 on him from the New Testament pages, can 
 be seriously in the wrong. And yet it is not 
 possible to see far when we commit ourselves 
 to Christ. We must regard Jesus as suffi- 
 ciently trustworthy to be willing to go any 
 lengths to which His Spirit may lead us, 
 relying on the promise, "He that foUoweth 
 Me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall 
 have the light of life." 
 
 Another deterrent is the circumstance 
 that the usual expressions of religion bore 
 
248 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 some men. They may find Christ gripping 
 their consciences, but they are frank to 
 admit that they have no relish for Bible 
 reading, prayer, a Church service, or for the 
 meetings and work of the Christian Asso- 
 ciation. They recognize that other men 
 seem to have a taste for these things, but 
 they find in themselves no enthusiasm for 
 them, and often a distinct repugnance. 
 
 It is easy to say that a man with such 
 feelings cannot have his heart in the right 
 place towards Christ Himself; and that is 
 partially true. Genuine allegiance to Christ 
 awakens an interest in the Bible, a zest for 
 prayer, a sense of the value of common 
 worship, and a desire to push the aggressive 
 Christian propaganda, here and in the ends 
 of the earth. But it is also true that a man 
 may be loyal to Jesus and be widely out of 
 sympathy with a great deal that other Chris- 
 tians eagerly do in His name. Tempera- 
 ments and tastes are so different that none of 
 us can prescribe to another the form in which 
 his religious zeal should express itself. A 
 man must be on his guard lest he miss some- 
 thing which the experience of the past or of 
 the great mass of living Christians may 
 
 I 
 
THE OLD, OLD STORY 249 
 
 be able to contribute. He must beware 
 of permitting his mood or prejudice or 
 thoughtlessness to determine him, instead 
 of conviction and judgment. If Christian- 
 ity is to be socially effective it must be 
 backed by men who are not free lances but 
 are willing to acconmiodate themselves to 
 the Christian Church; and that today ought, 
 in some of its many communions, to furnish 
 a place for every Christian. The point is 
 that, if not in the more common and usual 
 ways, then in some other, a Christian must 
 allow the Spirit of Christ to lead him so to 
 worship and work that his personality is 
 most spiritually enriched and most usefully 
 invested for the Kingdom of God. 
 
 But we have dwelt over long on these 
 first two deterrents from full commitment 
 to Christ. It is doubtful whether mental 
 perplexity or distaste for the usual religious 
 practices and institutions holds any sincere 
 man back. When his heart goes out to 
 Christ, he is ready to use his head and think 
 out enough to hve and work by, and to 
 adjust himself to be helped and used in some 
 of the fairly varied Church activities of our 
 day. But there are more serious hindrances. 
 
260 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 One is a lack of interest in that which 
 interests Jesus Christ. However difficult 
 it may be to interpret some of His sayings, 
 that on which His heart was set is suffi- 
 ciently plain. Do we share His wishes? 
 What are the things about which we really 
 care? What occupies our thought? On 
 what would we rather spend our money? 
 What item in the newspaper do we look for 
 most eagerly and why? What is the point 
 of view we find ourselves taking on pubhc 
 questions and what sort of reasons prompt 
 us to take it? What kind of conversation 
 do we prick up our ears to listen to and find 
 it easiest to join in? If we are compelled 
 to admit that we are self-centred, that our 
 personal convenience or comfort controls 
 our views, that we do not get up genuine 
 enthusiasm for that which does not seem to 
 promise us some immediate advantage or 
 pleasure, that we are very much afraid of 
 anything that might disturb our present 
 fairly easy manner of life and make us 
 do hard things, of what use is it to sit and 
 listen to One who has turned the world 
 upside down, whenever He has been taken 
 seriously, and who assured His followers 
 
THE OLD, OLD STORY 251 
 
 that their first obligation would be to deny 
 themselves and take up a cross? "Where- 
 fore would ye hear it again? would ye also 
 become His disciples?" 
 
 Another obstacle is conventionality. Most 
 of us do not wish to be thought odd. The 
 result is that we are led unthinking to fall 
 in with the ways and usages of the particular 
 group of men with whom we are thrown; 
 or, if we think for ourselves and conscien- 
 tiously question whether it is right to do as 
 the rest, we are very ingenious in inventing 
 compromises that enable us to appear a 
 httle less evil and yet avoid becoming 
 noticeably different. 
 
 Further, a man at college, particularly 
 by his senior year, has created a tradition 
 for himself, with which it is not easy for 
 him to break. If one who for nearly four 
 years has never shown any particular reli- 
 gious interest, has never identified himself 
 with the positive Christian forces of the 
 University, has never let his classmates feel 
 that he was throwing his influence, whatever 
 it may amount to, on the side of Christ, 
 should suddenly make himself felt and 
 known as a pronounced and earnest sharer 
 
252 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 of the faith and purpose of Jesus, it would 
 attract attention. Perhaps the dehghted 
 comment of some of the godly would be as 
 trying as the bantering remarks of the 
 undevout. But in any case it would make 
 a man slightly conspicuous and place him 
 in an unusual position. 
 
 Oddity has always been an essential mark 
 of Christianity. Salt, light, leaven, must be 
 different from the mass they season, illu- 
 minate, transform. The man who has not 
 the courage to be different, to break with his 
 own past reputation, and the independence 
 to take his own place in fidelity to Christ, 
 irrespective of what anybody or everybody 
 may think or say, need not listen to a mes- 
 sage from Jesus of Nazareth. "Wherefore 
 would ye hear it again? would ye also 
 become His disciples?" 
 
 But the most serious deterrent is unwill- 
 ingness to sacrifice. Some of us are per- 
 fectly aware of certain things we should 
 have to stop if we actually gave Christ the 
 rule of our lives, and we do not want to stop 
 them. There are changes, decided changes, 
 we should be compelled to make in our 
 manner of life and it would be inconvenient 
 
THE OLD, OLD STORY 253 
 
 to make them. There would have to be a 
 readjustment of our interests, sympathies, 
 expenditures, plans ; and we are not disposed 
 to consider a radical, because Christlike, 
 readjustment. We should have to take into 
 consideration a great many people, about 
 whom we do not now bother ourselves; to 
 carry around a much more sensitive and 
 insistent social conscience; to let our con- 
 victions find a tongue more frequently; to 
 shoulder responsibilities we have been 
 calmly leaving on other backs; to lift our 
 friendships to a different level; to put reli- 
 gious inspiration unostentatiously and very 
 naturally into our contacts with lives devoid 
 of that element; in short, thoughtfully and 
 thoroughly to go over everything we do, or 
 feel we might do, and allow the Spirit of 
 Christ to settle how we shall hve, work, play, 
 spend, worship. It will be a series of 
 Gethsemanes in which we bring ourselves 
 to say, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." 
 They will not necessarily be a series of sad 
 occurrences; there is a deep satisfaction in 
 genuine self-sacrifice for the best of all 
 causes under the Best of all masters to which 
 no other joy is comparable; but frankly, 
 
254 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 they will be hard. There is nothing under 
 the sun harder than to be an intelligent and 
 consistent follower of Jesus. How can it 
 be otherwise when we remember who Jesus 
 is, and recall that He went up to Calvary? 
 Unless we are ready to attempt and re- 
 attempt the difficult, why listen to the 
 Crucified and His message? "Wherefore 
 would ye hear it again? would ye also 
 become His disciples?" 
 
 There has not been a thought in this 
 sermon that can be labelled new. We can 
 recall something exceedingly like it in the 
 first sermon we remember hearing, and cer- 
 tainly the point of it is identical with that 
 of every Christian sermon from this or any 
 pulpit. What is there new that we need 
 to hear? What is there new that we do not 
 need to be and to do? 
 
 Another college year, for some here their 
 last in this place, is rapidly ending. Is it 
 going to leave many of us in the same non- 
 committal attitude towards that which is 
 most fundamental — religion? And that 
 means for us not our attitude towards the 
 faith of Mohammed or the practice of 
 Buddha, but towards the convictions and 
 
THE OLD, OLD STORY 255 
 
 purpose of Jesus Christ. He has made His 
 appeal to us over and over. There was 
 something mysteriously attractive in His 
 Figure as we saw it through the stories and 
 hymns and prayers of our earliest child- 
 hood. There was a fascination for us about 
 Him when we looked at Him in boyhood 
 and saw Him representing our ideals of 
 truth, honor, courage, devotion. Our years 
 here, both in the experiences of this place 
 and in the parallel experiences of our homes 
 and outside interests, have brought their 
 appeals. One cannot mention all the Chris- 
 tian persuasions that have come to us 
 through some telling book; through the ifirst 
 pressure of responsibility convincing us of 
 the need of an unseen Ally; in some enrich- 
 ing friendship that opened up stores within 
 ourselves we had not suspected, and took 
 life down to a deeper level than it had 
 touched before; in the face of some great 
 human need when we were forced to search 
 ourselves and admit our inability to meet 
 it ; in the hour when the shadow of death fell 
 on us and a life we prized went out beyond 
 the reach of anything but faith; in some 
 frank and appealing statement of who 
 
256 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Christ is, what He stands for, what He asks 
 of us; in some more convincing life where 
 His Spirit was plainly dominant. Is there 
 any necessity for Christ to bring additional 
 persuasions? What more can there be? 
 "What more can He say than to you He 
 hath said?" Or why must He repeat to us 
 what we have heard so often? "Wherefore 
 would ye hear it again? would ye also 
 become His disciples?" 
 
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