U8KARY 
 
 OF 
 
 MA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, AND 
 ITS DEVELOPMENT: 
 
 FIVE SERMONS 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE THE 
 
 SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL SOCIETY, BOSTON, 
 
 IN JANUARY, FEBRUARY, AND MARCH, 1860, 
 
 $rtnteB at its Eeqtust. 
 
 " He tilth onto them. But whom say ye that I an ? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
 living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed an thou, Simon Bar-jona : . . . . upon this rock I will build my 
 church." MATT. !. 10-18. 
 
 n. 
 
 " Other foundation can no man laj than that it laid, which Is Jesus Christ." 1 COB. iii. 11. 
 
 ra. 
 
 "Now, if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every man's work shall be made 
 manifest : for the day shall declare it, because It shall be revealed by are ; and the Are shall try every man's work, of what sort 
 lti." ICoR. lii. 12,18. 
 
 rv. 
 
 "Ye believe in God : believe also In me." Joan xiv. 1. 
 
 V. 
 " And I will pray the Father, and be shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever." JOHJI liv. ID. 
 
 BY EDWARD E. HALE. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 WALKER, WISE, AND COMPANY, 
 
 245, WASHINGTON STREET. 
 
 1860.
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON, 
 22, SCHOOL STREET.
 
 FIVE SERMONS. 
 
 i. 
 
 " HE SAITH UNTO THEM, BUT WHOM SAY YE THAT I AM ? AND SlMON PETER 
 ANSWERED AND SAID, TlIOU ART THE CHRIST, THE SON OF THE LIVING 
 GOD. AND JESUS ANSWERED AND SAID UNTO HIM, BLESSED ART THOU, 
 SIMON BAR-JONA: . . . UPON THIS ROCK I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH." 
 Matt. xvi. 15-18. 
 
 OUR Saviour meant to build a church. The truth stated by 
 Peter is the foundation of it. It is built upon this rock, that 
 Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. The declara- 
 tion of Jesus bears this meaning only, unless we accept the 
 forced interpretation of the Roman Catholics, and suppose 
 that Simon Peter, the son of Jonas, is the corner-stone. 
 
 It is, indeed, a critical moment when Jesus speaks. The 
 moment is fitted, above all others, for a clear and full 
 declaration of the foundation of his church. The Galilean 
 multitude has tried to make him king. He has withdrawn 
 from their instances, and from the jealousy of Herod, out of 
 Galilee to Csesarea. The end of his ministry among his 
 countrymen has come. He is about to leave them and Gali- 
 lee to go to Jerusalem, and face his most bitter enemies. 
 " In every respect, this was the natural and fitting time for 
 the decisive, explicit communication of the one essential cha- 
 racteristic truth of his religion." At this moment, he asks 
 Peter (the head of the apostles) what his view of that truth 
 is. It proves that Peter understands it. He pronounces
 
 it in a sharp epigram, for which the church has always 
 thanked him. The church has really taken as its foundation 
 the truth which he laid down. Well may we listen with 
 reverent curiosity, well may we take to heart the words, when 
 the Master speaks of the truth they convey as the corner-stone 
 of his edifice. Peter's bold statement is, that Jesus of Naza- 
 reth, who was at that moment exiled from his country,* is the 
 Anointed, the Christ ; that he is, indeed, the Son of the 
 living God. 
 
 On that truth, Jesus meant to build his church, if, in his 
 own words, we are to find his own meaning. I believe that 
 we are. I believe we find his meaning there undisguised, 
 and that we find the whole of it. I believe that history has 
 made good his assertion, and has illustrated his meaning. 
 His church exists. It has spread over this world, subdued 
 this world, governed this world, re-created this world, as not 
 the most intense prophecy of that day declared it would in so 
 few centuries. It grows more powerful and more. It com- 
 pels government to obey it, and literature and science. It 
 heals the broken-hearted ; it opens the eyes of the blind ; 
 and slowly, but surely, frees the captive. His kingdom 
 comes, with the certainty of eternal power ; and his church 
 is the agent by which it comes. Or, to take the figure 
 of this text, the shelter of his church becomes wider and 
 wider ; her roofs and spires and domes welcome more wor- 
 shippers and more, are the homes of the devotion of more 
 hearts and more. Every land bears up her crosses where they 
 may flash in the sun; every breeze curls her incense as it 
 rises to the living God. And of this whole great fabric, 
 wide as the world as it extends, there is one foundation, and 
 one only ; which is, that Jesus is the Christ, and that he is 
 the Son of that living God. 
 
 * Caesarea Philippi was, at this time, in the province of Trachonitis, in the juris- 
 diction of the Philip whose wife Herod of Galilee had taken. Matt. xiv. 13, 34; xv. 
 21: and xvi. 13, all indicate, that, after the death of John, Jesus retired from 
 Herod's jurisdiction, or from public appearance iu it, until he was ready to go to 
 Jerusalem (Matt. xix. 1).
 
 History thus illustrates what he said ; and so illustrates it, 
 that it is no longer a prophecy, but already a majestic .truth 
 of the past as well as of the future. 
 
 I believe that it is not only the truth, but that it is the 
 whole truth. I believe, that is, that the church has no other 
 foundation. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God ; 
 and that is the complete statement of his being. His church 
 stands on that statement only ; and it is enough for it to stand 
 upon. 
 
 When, however, I say that Jesus here clearly expressed 
 the whole truth, you know that I differ from many theolo- 
 gians. There has gradually been wrought into form a con- 
 viction, which was not always bold enough to find statement, 
 that in Jesus' intercourse with men, even with his" apostles, 
 hie was obliged to maintain a certain " reserve ; " that his 
 statements to them, therefore, do not so much reveal the 
 whole truth, as contain it under a veil ; and that even some 
 centuries were needed before that veil could be wholly drawn 
 away. Thus the Roman- Catholic Church, at the present 
 time, has abandoned the effort to sustain its creed principally 
 by the authority of Scripture. Granting more frankly, that, in 
 Scripture, that creed exists, only so covered, that no man, even 
 with the help of the Holy Spirit, can deduce it from Scrip- 
 ture aione, the Romanist teaches that it was the business of 
 the church gradually to develop the creed, and, from time to 
 time, to give it statement which it had not before. With 
 reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, the 
 Roman Church acknowledges that the Fathers of the first 
 three hundred years seem to favor the Unitarian hypothesis. 
 " The early creeds," says Bishop Newman of that church, its 
 recent convert from the church of England, " make no men- 
 tion in their letter of the Catholic doctrine at all. They 
 make mention, indeed, of a Three : but that there is any 
 mystery in the doctrine that the Three are One ; that they are 
 co-equal, co-eternal, all increate, all omnipotent, all incom- 
 prehensible, is not stated, and never could be gathered from
 
 them."* " The definition of our Lord's proper divinity," he 
 says in another place, " was the work of the fourth century." f 
 
 * He continues : " Of course, we believe that they imply it, or rather intend it. 
 God forbid we should do otherwise ! But nothing in the mere letter of these docu- 
 ments leads to that belief. To give a deeper meaning to their letter, we must 
 interpret them by the times which came after. 
 
 " Again: there is one, and only one, great doctrinal council in ante-Nicene times. 
 It was held at Antioch, in the middle of the third century, on occasion of the inci- 
 pient innovations of the Syrian heretical school. Now, the Fathers then assembled, 
 for whatever reason, condemned, or at least withdrew, when it came into the 
 dispute, the word ' Homoousian,' which was received at Nicsea as the special sym- 
 bol of Catholicism against Arius. ' 
 
 " Again : the six great bishops and saints of the ante-Nicene Church were St. 
 Irenasus, St. Hippolytus, St. Cyprian, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, St. Dionysius 
 of Alexandria, and St. Methodius. Of these, St. Dionysius is accused by St. 
 Basil of having sown the first seeds of Arianism ; and St. Gregory is allowed, by 
 the same learned Father, to have used language concerning our Lord which he 
 only defends on the plea of an economical object in the writer. St. Hippolytus 
 speaks as if he were ignorant of our Lord's eternal Sonship; St. Methodius speaks 
 incorrectly at least upon the incarnation; and St. Cyprian does not treat of theology 
 at all. Such is the incompleteness of the extant teaching of these true saints, and, 
 in their day, faithful witnesses of the eternal Son. 
 
 " Again : Athenagoras, St. Clement, Tertullian, and the two saints Dionysii, would 
 appear to be the only writers whose language is at any time exact and systematic 
 enough to remind us of the Athanasian Creed. If we limit our views to the teach- 
 ing of the Fathers by what they expressly state, St. Ignatius may be considered as 
 a Patripassian, St. Justin Arianizes, and Hippolytus is a Photinian. 
 
 "Again: there are three -great doctrinal writers of the ante-Nicene centuries, 
 Tertullian, Origen, and, we may add, Eusebius, though he lived some way into the 
 fourth. Tertullian is heterodox on the doctrine of our Lord's divinity, and, indeed, 
 ultimately fell altogether into heresy or schism; Origen is, at the very least, sus- 
 pected, and must be defended and explained rather than cited as a witness of 
 orthodoxy; and Eusebius was an Arian. 
 
 " Moreover, it may be questioned whether any ante-Nicene Father distinctly 
 affirms either the numerical unity or the co-equality of the three persons; except, 
 perhaps, the heterodox Tertullian, and that chiefly in a work written after he had 
 become a Montanist: yet to satisfy the anti-Roman use of " Quod semper quod 
 ubique, quod ab omnibus " (" What has always been believed by everybody, every- 
 where;" the canon for testing belief, proposed by St. Vincentius of Liris), surely 
 ought not to be left for these great articles of doctrine to the testimony of a later age. 
 
 " Further: Bishop Bull allows that ' nearly all the ancient Catholics who preceded 
 Arius have the appearance of being ignorant of the invisible and incomprehensible 
 (immensam) nature of the Son, God; an article expressly contained in the Athana- 
 sian Creed, under the sanction of its anathema ' " (Newman's Essay on the Develop- 
 ment of Doctrine, pp. 14, 15, American edition). It must be remembered, that Dr. 
 Newman left an honorable position in the English Church, convinced by his own 
 argument. He is now a bishop in the Roman Church. Bishop Bull, whom he 
 quotes, was the English Bishop of Wells; and is one of the highest authorities in 
 the theology of the English Church. 
 
 t Ibid., p. 188.
 
 So it was not till the fifth century that the latent doctrine of 
 the worship of the Virgin Mary so far relieved itself from its 
 hiding-place as to get statement in words ; * that is, it cannot 
 be found earlier in Scripture, or other authoritative statements 
 of the church. In the same way, the doctrine, that Mary 
 mother was born free from original sin, did not get authori- 
 tative statement at the hands of that church till the 8th of 
 December, 1854, within your memory and mine. In like 
 manner, we may expect that church to go on, till it dies, 
 developing and defining other doctrines to which it has not 
 yet attained. 
 
 Protestantism began with such a protest against this claim 
 of Rome, as for a time threw Protestantism into a blind idola- 
 try of the letter of the Scripture. From that idolatry, how- 
 ever, Protestantism has now so far receded, that, especially 
 where the defence of a favorite creed requires, some of the 
 strictest Protestants now give in their adhesion to the same 
 theory, the necessity of a statement more perfect than that 
 of the Gospels. While they still claim that the Gospels con- 
 tain all truth, they hold that they so contain it that the men 
 of their time did not wholly understan'd^it. Thus are they 
 relieved wholly from the necessity of following the first 
 Fathers into any of their latitudinarianism, into any of their 
 Judaism, into any of their Platonism, or into ways which 
 might lead into Romanism. For instance : the most popular 
 Orthodox German critic of our day says of this same doctrine 
 of the Trinity, " In Christ's identical words, the dogma of the 
 Trinity is presented in an entirely undeveloped form, and 
 the unfolding of the mystery is committed to the" scientific 
 activity of the church"^ I understand this to be the view of 
 one who will interest you much more than even the leader 
 
 * " The recognition of the place which St. Mary holds in the economy of grace 
 was reserved for the fifth century " (Ibid., p. 188). It is worth notice, that it seems 
 to be Aihanasius who first suggested worship to her. The passage is in the essay De 
 Sanctissima Deiparsi, or " The Most Sacred Mother of God " (Athan., vol. i. 
 p. 1041). 
 
 t Olshausen, at Matt, xxviii. 19.
 
 8 
 
 of the English-Romanist party or of the German-Evangelical 
 party : I mean, of our esteemed friend, my predecessor in this 
 pulpit. I suppose, however, that he assigns a shorter period 
 for the development of doctrine. He says, that if the Mes- 
 siah, while " appearing in human form among the rude men 
 of that day, had been continually affirming, in the most 
 unqualified, sudden, peremptory manner, his divine supre- 
 macy, it could not fail to confuse and bewilder them, if not to 
 exasperate them, all unprepared for it as their ignorance was, 
 and while his visible shape appeared before them. Even the 
 comparatively few expressions which he did employ, made 
 more distinct and frequent as his ' hour ' approached, threat- 
 ened to put an end, and did finally help to put an end, to his 
 ministry in the body. The truth could not shine forth at 
 once, in its peerless glory, upon eyes so dull. He contented 
 himself, in his wise and tender condescension, with pronoun- 
 cing these comprehensive and weighty declarations of his com- 
 plete oneness with the Father ; and left the further doctrine of 
 his mysterious nature to unfold itself in the ripening wisdom 
 of his church, under the Holy Spirit which he promised." 
 
 And, in another place, the same writer says of Jesus' idea 
 in parting from the Eleven, " In a remoter and calmer period, 
 his worship would take its place spontaneously in their 
 hymns, ejaculations, and litanies. Meantime," that is, until 
 that remoter and calmer period comes, " he points them 
 to the Father, in whom they are already believing with a 
 more settled and definite faith." The worship of the Father 
 is to be their religion during the season of their parting from 
 him. The more mysterious doctrine of the Trinity will be 
 revealed to them in calmer and remoter days.* 
 
 * In the same strain, Alford the tender, truly Catholic, and learned critic of 
 the Greek text supposes, that, when Jesus died, even his apostles had never 
 heard of the miracles of his birth. "It was not till the faith of the apostolic 
 Christians was fully fixed on him as the Son of God, and the outline of his person 
 was firmly sketched out, that the Spirit brought out those historical records which 
 assure us of his supernatural conception " (Note at John vi. 43). Yet Mary mother 
 was living while they were all thus ignorant.
 
 I had proposed devoting one or two sermons, as I renew 
 my broken course of service here, to some examination of 
 the various statements which are made regarding the founda- 
 tion of the Christian Church. I shall try to show, in these 
 sermons, why I adhere to Peter's statement, as being as 
 complete as we can expect, as clear as we can ask. My 
 plan had been, indeed, to preach the first of these sermons 
 to-day; but, on reflection, I see we must examine a pre- 
 liminary question first. We must determine the authorities 
 to which we are to appeal. How far does the development 
 by the Holy Spirit, of the original doctrine of Christians, 
 affect the original doctrine as to the foundation of Christianity 
 itself ? that is, did our Lord himself clearly explain the foun- 
 dation to his disciples ? You see that the discussion of the 
 Trinity to-day is on a different footing from what it stood on 
 fifty years ago. Then, in our community, both parties held, 
 that, if they could get at the sense of Christ's own declara- 
 tions, they could get, not only at his doctrine undeveloped, 
 but at its developed, complete, and most scientific statement.* 
 Now we have to ask, whether our fathers were right in that 
 supposition. Are we to be satisfied with Christ's declara- 
 tions ? or are we to take them with the occasional comments 
 of St. Paul, or the fuller declarations of the councils of the 
 fourth century, as the more complete foundations of our 
 opinion ? 
 
 To this question, I ask, first, your attention. You see, of 
 course, the interest in which the Roman Church presses the 
 development theory. Let us grant, also, that a grand spiritual 
 truth rests behind its view. " We are the authority," says 
 that church. "A council of our bishops, summoned and 
 presided over by the popes, has an inspiration from the Holy 
 Spirit, which is superior in degree and in kind to the inspi- 
 ration which is given to any single man. No single man, 
 no, and no set of men, unless they be bishops consecrated 
 
 * See, for instance, Dr. Worcester's third letter to Dr. Channing, pp. 12, 13. 
 
 2
 
 10 
 
 by the apostolic succession, meeting at the call of St. Peter's 
 successor has a right to define a doctrine of religion. No 
 single man, no, and no set of men has a right to say 
 what the words of Scripture, though they were the simplest 
 words of Jesus, mean." In pressing this claim it is, that 
 the Roman- Catholic writers, addressing Episcopalian Protes- 
 tants, say, " You are obliged to come to us for your doctrine 
 of the Trinity; you are obliged to come to us for your 
 doctrine as to the sacraments. You take the authority of our 
 Fathers in both of these matters, where you agree with them. 
 You have no authority to sustain you in Scripture, unless you 
 take the comment the Fathers add to Scripture. Why, then, 
 do you reject the doctrine of purgatory ? Why do you reject 
 the doctrine of the Pope's supremacy ? to which those same 
 Fathers bear witness much more frequently than to the other 
 two. * You accept the lesser evidence ; you reject the 
 greater.' " * 
 
 I quote these words from Newman, the great leader of 
 the English " Puseyites." They are the appeal to which 
 so many of the English clergy have responded by going over 
 to the church of Rome, where Bishop Newman himself led 
 the way. I confess, I do not see how, logically, they could 
 have done otherwise. I know there are better laws than 
 logical laws sometimes, under which most of them have 
 found shelter : and I do see, therefore, how nine-tenths of 
 the clergy of the church of England were wholly indifferent 
 to Newman's pitiless appeal; because they held the doc- 
 trines of the Real Presence and of the Trinity, as most men 
 do, not as matters of argument, but of sentiment. They 
 were born to them, and they let them lie without proof and 
 without disproof. But when the appeal came to a logical, 
 an inquiring, perhaps rather sceptical mind, again and again 
 saying, " Why take one doctrine on the authority of the 
 Fathers, and reject another ? " I can see how, in the mere 
 
 * Bishop Newman, as above, p. 17.
 
 11 
 
 pride of consistency, such men went over ; and I believe we 
 shall see that they have many followers from that midway 
 position. For this I may say, that, in fifteen years since 
 Newman published that appeal, and, in going over to 
 Rome at the same time, announced his own answer to it, 
 the church of England has made no adequate reply to it. 
 With that singular policy, by which most great churches 
 ignore their most dangerous enemies, she has left this 
 question of questions, whose repetition so saps her living 
 strength, without reply. Or is it that she has none ? 
 
 What does the church of Rome say to us, who do not 
 hold to the Fathers' doctrine of the sacraments, nor to their 
 doctrine of the Trinity, who hold that there was an early 
 corruption of Christianity from external sources? 
 
 The same writer (Bishop Newman) dismisses us with these 
 words : " This view has no claims on our attention till it is 
 drawn out scientifically ; till we are distinctly informed what 
 the Christian or evangelical message is, or if there be any ; 
 from what sources it is drawn, how those sources are ascer- 
 tained to us, and what is a corruption." * He admits our 
 view of an early corruption of Christianity to be a plausible 
 hypothesis, certainly sufficient to account for the present 
 position of affairs ; but he dismisses it, even without exami- 
 nation, until its friends draw it out scientifically. Let us be 
 scientific, though we die ! 
 
 I am very sorry to detain you with these opinions of 
 different leaders of opinion ; but we must have some notion 
 of them, I think, if we are to come at any clear results 
 in our inquiry. 
 
 The Protestant Church, as I said, began by scouting the 
 whole theory of development of doctrine. " The letter of the 
 Bible," it cried, " and nothing more." Practically, however, 
 something more came in everywhere. Some churches kept 
 their old ritual. Every church took the view of the Bible 
 
 * Newman, as above, p. 18.
 
 12 
 
 of its own great men. Luther, Calvin, Knox, Robinson, 
 Edwards, Chalmers, and Channing could not fail to impress 
 on the Bibles which they interpreted the lessons which the 
 Holy Spirit taught them as they studied. As Protestantism 
 relaxed, therefore, from its first horror of Rome ; as it after- 
 wards passed through its first fit of extreme depression ; as, 
 a century ago or more, the true doctrine of the Holy Spirit 
 began to find place, and every man and woman got more 
 real converse with God, listened, and obeyed God in con- 
 science ; as He told of truth and duty, the idolatrous 
 worship of the letter of the Bible has given way, and the 
 Spirit which dictated it has had freer course and freer. The 
 superstition which would have opened the volume as an 
 oracle, and taken the first text which came as a guide for 
 immediate duty, exists no more. Scarcely more does the 
 kindred superstition linger, which, in any argument as to 
 duty now among the affairs of to-day, would take a single 
 disconnected text, whether from the Book of Chronicles or 
 the Gospel of John, and say, " Thus saith the Lord," in the 
 way which Cotton Mather would have done, or divines still 
 later. In proportion as men grant the centre of Christian 
 doctrine, that God is here, guiding, helping, and teaching 
 each reverent child, in the same proportion does the Bible 
 become a living revelation, rather than a dead one ; and the 
 child looks at the lesson which was given to fishermen in 
 Galilee, expecting to find the spirit of the divine life, but not 
 necessarily every literal injunction for the complicated duty 
 of London or of Boston. In this more extended view of 
 Scripture, we may note several different hypotheses. 
 
 1. There is the theory of those whom, for want of a bet- 
 ter name, I must call the extreme Rationalists. They look 
 on the Old Testament as what happens to be left of the 
 literature of Palestine and the neighborhood, mostly relating 
 to the Jews, a race especially devoted to worship and reli- 
 gious form. Jesus Christ was born of this race, they say; a 
 remarkable development of it. Far above what it had ever
 
 13 
 
 uttered before, his utterances were new instruction, and, so 
 far, new light, to the world. But he was still imbued with 
 some of the prejudice and some of the ignorance of his 
 nation. We must judge what he tells us, then, by the 
 light God gives to us ; and accept or reject, as we would in 
 listening to any other teacher. He taught the best he knew; 
 but he, too, was liable to error. 
 
 2. I may note the series of views, more or less distinctly 
 denned, of the leading Orthodox divines, which, in result, 
 do not so far vary from this Rationalistic hypothesis. Ex- 
 tremes are meeting always. In every religious body which 
 has a detailed creed to defend, which gives no freedom to 
 the individual inquirer, we shall find men who maintain 
 what the Roman Church calls the discipline of secrecy.* 
 " It is maintained, that doctrines which are associated with 
 the later days of the church were really in the church from 
 the first, but not publicly taught, and that for various rea- 
 sons ; as, for sake of reverence, that sacred subjects might 
 not be profaned by the heathen ; and, for the sake of cate- 
 chumens, that they might not be oppressed, or carried away, 
 by a sudden communication of the revealed truth." I 
 use the words of one of the advocates of this view. One 
 of the early Fathers f states it thus in one illustration: "To 
 the carnal, we teach the gospel in a literal way, preaching 
 Jesus Christ, and him crucified ; but to persons farther 
 advanced we communicate the Logos." This view of an 
 esoteric or concealed doctrine is not peculiar to the church 
 of Rome. All Protestants hold it virtually who find essen- 
 tial truth in the Epistles which they do not find in the 
 words of Christ. All Protestants hold it, I think, who say 
 that no man can grasp Christian doctrine until he is con- 
 verted, while no man can be converted unless he has 
 grasped Christian doctrine. The modern statement of the 
 commentators, that Jesus' words contained fundamental truth, 
 
 * Disciplina Arcani. t Tertullian.
 
 14 
 
 which he intentionally veiled, so that his apostles even did 
 not apprehend it, belongs to the same hypothesis. 
 
 It differs from the Rationalistic theory thus : That teaches 
 that Jesus taught all he knew, but was sometimes in error : 
 this teaches that he knew all truth, but, when he testified, 
 that he concealed a part intentionally ; so veiling it, that it 
 should only be developed by the scientific activity of after- 
 days. 
 
 3. To the same class of opinions, I might refer the view of 
 those writers who consider Christ's life as having an allegori- 
 cal meaning behind its apparent meaning. Dr. Bushnell is 
 the most successful representative among us of this school 
 of thought, in which the New Testament is a drama. But 
 different writers of this school use its latitude in different 
 ways ; and many of these are such as this philosopher would 
 condemn. Sometimes, for certain ultimate purposes, Jesus 
 assumes the position of a sufferer, and represents to the eyes 
 of men bitter and extreme agony. Sometimes God has pre- 
 pared " a form of art for the representation of Christ and his 
 work." The whole Passion Week is called a " tragedy," in 
 the sense that it represents something behind. The whole 
 gospel is spoken of as an aesthetic or artistic method of ex- 
 pression of God. Christ is not so much God or man ; but 
 he expresses God and he expresses man. Certain repre- 
 sentations appear in the gospel history ; and, to the gospel 
 times, they are realities : but, to the eye of more advanced 
 science, that is, of this holy, diligent, far-seeing, self- 
 satisfied nineteenth century, for instance, it is clear that 
 they are not in themselves real, but the exhibition of real 
 truth; which, to the ignorance of those who looked on, 
 assumed this pictured form. So, we are told, it is given to 
 us to interpret the drama which simpler ages believed was 
 real. 
 
 The first of these theories of development, which I have 
 called the Rationalistic, would say that our text expressed 
 more than the truth. " Jesus is the Son of God " would
 
 15 
 
 be the comments " as we are all God's children ; but when 
 he claimed that an eternal church was to be built on the 
 truth, that he was the Son of God, he let a Jewish notion 
 of a Messiah creep into his imaginations, and claimed more 
 than was true." 
 
 In the second of these theories, the Roman Catholic would 
 say that Jesus distinctly expressed less than the truth ; that 
 he just hinted at the truth, and left the church to develop 
 and expound it. That Peter was the corner-stone, was just 
 hinted ; and Peter's successors, and the successors to the 
 other apostles, were left to draw up, from that hint, the doc- 
 trine of a hierarchy which should have absolute authority 
 over the soul of man. 
 
 The Protestant-Orthodox scholar would listen to this ac- 
 count of development, only to say that another doctrine lay 
 hidden, and could be developed from what appeared. Jesus 
 said, undoubtedly, that the foundation of his church was in 
 the assertion, that he was the Christ, the Son of the living 
 God ; but, in this statement, there lay undeveloped the 
 deeper statement, that the Son of the living God is the living 
 God. Like the Romanist, the modern Orthodox critic holds, 
 that, in accommodating his language to the imperfections of 
 his hearers, Jesus distinctly expresses here less than the 
 whole truth ; leaving the rest, for remoter times, under a 
 veil. 
 
 In the third of these theories, the dramatic theory, 
 it would be said that the text was a part of a representation 
 which the eternal God had condescended to make for his 
 children. To make it, he had " abated his attributes," 
 had laid aside his omnipotence, his omnipresence, his omni- 
 science, as so many crowns of glory which might dazzle his 
 children. He walked among them representing man. In 
 that attitude he said, " My Father is greater than I ; " which, 
 at that moment, was true. In that attitude, he said he was 
 the Son of the living God ; but, so soon as he should take 
 again the jewels he had left aside, he would become the
 
 16 
 
 living God himself again. The language is the language of 
 eternal truth; but it is toned down to human accents, and 
 even to human ignorance, by infinite condescension. An 
 omnipotent God has condescended for the moment to "do 
 nothing of himself; " so he says, "The Son can do nothing 
 of himself: " which, at the moment the Son is in Jerusalem, 
 is true ; but, so soon as the Son ascends into heaven, it will 
 be true no longer. And this text, to him who speaks it, is 
 the truth as he speaks it ; but, to those who hear it, does not 
 express the truth. He knows it does not, and he does 
 not mean it shall. Only after-ages, from other sources, will 
 discover the truth which is just prefigured. 
 
 I am not satisfied by either of these developments of doc- 
 trine. I think the Rationalist statement does Jesus gross 
 injustice ; and I think the Romanist statement, and both the 
 Orthodox statements, more gross and more unjust, even in 
 their effort to exalt him. To say that he, knowing he was 
 very God, the living God, the Almighty, the Jehovah, who 
 had made, and was now sustaining, this world on which they 
 trod ; whom these apostles had been worshipping since they 
 were children ; that he should, with any motive, or in 
 whatever sense, have permitted them to say that he was 
 simply anointed by that God, and that he was his Son, know- 
 ing that, at that moment, they did not understand the words 
 as he did, to say this, appears to me injury as gross (though 
 I know it is not meant as insult) as ever was devised by 
 infidelity, or ever attained by the poor pride of reason. 
 
 And the other view that here is all an acted picture, 
 an external representation ; the theory which has to bor- 
 row even its language from the theatre, from what is false 
 and is meant to be false ; all this about the Son represent- 
 ing something which, in any distinct sense, he was not ; of 
 his appearing to be tempted, while, in any distinct sense, he 
 was not tempted ; of his living and moving in the character 
 of the Son of God, while really and truly he was God him- 
 self; all this language about the altar form, of which in late
 
 17 
 
 years we have heard much experiment is simply disgust- 
 ing to those not trained to it. I wish any protest might be 
 heard, in the right quarters, against the violence it does to 
 the sentiment of Christendom, if not to its convictions. I 
 wish those who use it had any idea of the quiver of sorrow, if 
 not of indignation, with which those, who have been frankly 
 making their Saviour a living example and a constant friend, 
 find him spoken of as personifying a character which did not 
 naturally belong to him, and keeping up reserve and con- 
 cealment, which only our keenness has been enough to pene- 
 trate. This view does not satisfy me : it pains me more than 
 any. 
 
 Thus do I set aside three of the theories of development. 
 And yet I also believe in the constant development of Chris- 
 tian doctrine ; and I acknowledge most gratefully, that the 
 church has made a great step indeed, if, with whatever 
 errors, all its leaders are agreed, that, from century to cen- 
 tury, the world will know more of Christianity, rather than 
 less. If only it can come to believe that that development is 
 intrusted to the Holy Spirit, wherever he acts, and not simply 
 to his whisper to early councils or modern popes,* all will yet 
 be well. It is a great advance on the letter-worship of old 
 years, if we see that the Holy Spirit is around us, and will 
 guide us into all truth. The books of the New Testament 
 are now the earliest monuments of the Divine Life, as the 
 Son of God gave it to mankind. In those books, we have all 
 our knowledge of what he did and what he said ; we see all 
 the picture of the work he wrought on Peter and John and 
 Caiaphas and Judas : but it does not follow that we are only 
 to try to reproduce those books, simply and literally, in the 
 life of to-day. We are not to try to make ourselves second 
 
 * It is to be observed, that no " council" was called in 1854 to decide the defini- 
 tion of the doctrine regarding Mary mother, but only an assembly of prelates known 
 to be favorable to it, what we should call a "packed convention." Roman- 
 Catholic writers of distinction insist that Pope Pius did not dare trust the " defini- 
 tion " to a " council," technically so called. 
 
 3
 
 18 
 
 Peters or second Andrews. We are not necessarily to go 
 about on foot, two and two, preaching the gospel, because 
 they did. We are not necessarily to perform vows in Jewish 
 temples because Paul did. We study in those books the 
 impress of Christ on his time, that, with God's present gui- 
 dance, we may fully receive his impress upon our time. We 
 do not ask to go back to " tread where he trod ; " we do not 
 ask to sit, and mend nets by the Jjake of Galilee : but, rather, 
 that in treading on these pavements, and in building this 
 machinery of to-day, the Life Divine which he brought into 
 the world may quicken our life-blood, and give us life more 
 abundantly. 
 
 Between that work of Jesus on the handful of fishermen 
 around him, and the work he carries on this day on the hun- 
 dreds of millions of people, in whose hearts, more or less, he 
 is reigning, the difference is wide indeed. His promise has 
 been fulfilled most graciously, that the church would do 
 greater things than the apostles did. The Holy Spirit, 
 speaking to who shall say how many hearts, has led them 
 into truth, wider, wider, and wider; and, chief among its 
 gracious influences, it has brought to their remembrance all 
 things that he did, and all things that he said : but it has 
 not proved, that, in what Christ said, he held back any thing ; 
 that what he said was insufficient for that time or this time. 
 
 The Holy Spirit has not convicted him either of a timid or 
 a reserved or of a half-way declaration. All doctrines of 
 development fail which hint that it has. The life of Christ, 
 which should sweep into our lives, proves to be fitted to the 
 most complicated conditions even of this " scientific activity," 
 of which our theologians boast, to those of enlarging disco- 
 very, of intricate society, of a world a million times larger 
 than the world of Galilee. Just so it will prove fitted to all 
 the relations of our lives in worlds on worlds beyond, when 
 we walk through infinity, and enter, in God's pleasure, into 
 the duties and the life of the archangels round his throne. 
 As we grow to see this, as we grow to feel it, our idea of
 
 19 
 
 its grandeur develops more and more : but when we come 
 back to see what he said of his life ; when we sit at his feet, 
 or listen to those sitting there, we find that the statement he 
 made then and there to the fishermen, as they sat upon the 
 beach, is the statement he will make to the host of heaven 
 when they are all gathered together in the courts of the 
 Almighty. In the triumph of his kingdom, as in the humi- 
 lity of his cross, he will never think of the robbery of equal- 
 ing God : but always there as here, in heaven as in Nazareth, 
 his word will be as it has been, that it pleased the Al- 
 mighty to anoint him ; that he is the Anointed of God. He 
 is the Christ, the Son of the living God, who discloses God 
 to all his children. 
 
 It is a victory, I confess, that the church has advanced 
 beyond that stupid literalism which made an idol of the Bible, 
 and which, if legitimately carried out, would make us rub our 
 corn between our hands for bread, because the apostles did ; 
 and look for a destruction, like Sodom's, of the kingdoms 
 of the world, because they so interpreted Jesus' prophecy. 
 Taking those records of what he said, let us, with the free- 
 dom which he gave us, under the guidance of this present 
 God, as near us as he was to them, work out the great 
 life-problems of our duty in our day. But we must suppose 
 that he gave us the foundation to build upon. We must 
 grant him the right of stating what that foundation is. We 
 must take the statement of the foundation from him alone. 
 
 It is true that we are open to every temptation. So some 
 demon of curiosity may tempt us to define what is inde- 
 finable. True, I cannot tell how God acts in my own heart, 
 though I know he acts here ; true, I cannot tell how my 
 soul rules my thinking powers, though I know it does rule 
 them : still some spirit of evil may tempt me to undertake 
 to tell how God acted in the heart of Jesus, and how in him 
 his divine soul was united with human intelligence. 
 
 " So fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
 
 20 
 
 It is human, I suppose, to make such inquiry. Well, then, if 
 I embark on it, let me do it with one proviso. What he said 
 about himself must be sufficient for me ; what he told, I must 
 receive as the whole ; what he explained, I must take as the 
 full explanation. To do else is to insult him. To let any 
 created man or any body of men sit in judgment on his nature 
 afterwards, to add to his words that which he did not choose 
 to add to them, is to do dishonor to his simplicity ; nay, even 
 to his truth. 
 
 In this inquiry as to what he was, if we are forced to it, we, 
 who do not know what we are, we will listen to him, and 
 to him alone. In that inquiry, we will, perhaps, some other 
 day, go farther. To-day, we will remember that this is his 
 central word at the crisis-moment. The foundation of his 
 church is this, that he is the Christ, the Anointed ; the Son 
 of the living God.
 
 II. 
 
 " OTHER FOUNDATION CAN NO MAN LAY THAN THAT is LAID, WHICH is JESUS 
 CHRIST." 1 Cor. iii. 11. 
 
 PAUL is speaking, in these words, of the building-up of the 
 Christian Church. He has been speaking of his own work 
 in it. He says he can do nothing but build upon the foun- 
 dation. Here he uses the same figure which Jesus used to 
 Peter, when, in reply to his cry, " Thou art the Christ, the 
 Son of the living God," he said, " On this rock I will build 
 my church." 
 
 I do not propose now to go any farther than this statement 
 of Jesus in inquiring what he considered himself or called 
 himself. He said this was the foundation of his church. 
 Let it be so. In the fact, however, that there is a founda- 
 tion, it is implied that something will be built upon the 
 foundation. Jesus himself seems, thus far, to grant that 
 his followers have some rights in " developing the doctrine " 
 which they receive from him. They are to build, undoubt- 
 edly, on him as a foundation. Paul, in this passage, speaks of 
 his work in such building. I propose, then, now to examine 
 what Jesus says, not in describing the foundation, but in 
 describing the work of his disciples upon it. We will come 
 to him to learn what was his idea of true discipleship He 
 did propose that the disciples should build. Did ho propose 
 that they should " develop " the foundation into any thing 
 more than he gave them ? After examining thus his defini- 
 tions of discipleship, we will in the same manner examine 
 those definitions of discipleship left us by his immediate fol- 
 lowers. We shall thus find out from the original sources
 
 22 
 
 what were the first definitions of Christian work in building 
 on the foundation of our faith. Thus we shall find out 
 what are our rights and powers as builders ; how much 
 can we do in building on the rock? in what direction can 
 we develop doctrine which has been hidden? and when 
 can we bring out views which Jesus thought " wisest to 
 reserve " ? 
 
 Now, it happens, that, just as we often have to sum up in 
 brief our religious position, as we want to now, just so Jesus 
 often had occasion to do. As we go on, we shall see, I 
 think, that, in such summings-up, we are to look for the 
 spirit, and not be tied by the letter. One man writes a 
 creed so that it tells how he himself comes to God ; but 
 life is lost, you see, when that creed is imposed on another 
 who did not come in precisely the same way. In such mat- 
 ters, if there be the least divergence, the creed does not fit 
 at all. In the mould in which a bust of Venus was cast, you 
 can no more shut up a bust of Clytie than you could a bust 
 of Hercules. Still we find, even in our own daily lives, that 
 there is constant need for condensed explanations of religion, 
 which can be used in familiar language, in answer to eager 
 or even captious inquiry. Such short abridgments do not 
 profess to exhaust religious teaching; but they do set forth 
 the essentials around which the rest shall cluster. Jesus, in 
 his life, found just that necessity. I propose, then, this 
 morning, in our examination of what constitutes Christian 
 discipleship, to examine all those condensed definitions of 
 it which Jesus himself gave. I propose, next Sunday, to 
 examine those given by his apostles. I do not call Jesus' 
 own definitions the creed which he proposed, because he 
 never proposed any ; but I do say, they are the forms, which, 
 if any creed is to be taken from his words, must be chosen. 
 They are Jesus Christ's definitions of discipleship. They 
 must be taken as the bases of any expressed creed, if my 
 position is correct, that what Christ explained as to his 
 own person is the full explanation.
 
 23 
 
 I shall first quote in order all these gospel definitions, and 
 at length. You must not say that they are tedious ; for I 
 am going to argue from them afterward. I do not, there- 
 fore, choose to abridge them, nor to ask you to take their 
 general sense on my authority ; and therefore I prefer to 
 bring all of them forward at length and together. I quote 
 them in order of time, and not in the order in which the 
 books happen to be found together. 
 
 Early in Jesus' ministry, he says to Nicodemus, " Except a 
 man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." He 
 repeats the same statement afterwards in Galilee : " Whoso- 
 ever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child 
 shall not enter therein." To Nicodemus, once more : " Ex- 
 cept a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter 
 the kingdom of God." And yet again : " God so loved the 
 world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever 
 belie veth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." 
 Here, in passing, we observe that John Baptist says, a few 
 days after, " He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting 
 life." As Jesus leaves Jerusalem and returns to Galilee, he 
 meets the woman of Samaria; to whom he says, "The true 
 worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth." 
 On his next visit to Jerusalem, " He that heareth my word, 
 and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life ; " and 
 on his third, " I am the light of the world : he that followeth 
 me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of 
 life." And again : " I am the door : by me if any man 
 enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find 
 pasture." Immediately after this, he returns to Galilee ; be- 
 gins his public preaching among his own countrymen ; where 
 the first " foundation text " is, " Love your enemies, bless them 
 that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for 
 them which despitefully use you and persecute you ; that you 
 may be the children of your Father who is in heaven." He 
 sends out his apostles soon after, and gives them this direc- 
 tion : " Preach, saying, The kingdom of Heaven is at hand."
 
 24 
 
 He sends out the Seventy, and directs them to say, "The 
 kingdom of God is come nigh unto you : " and immediately 
 after, to the lawyer who asked, " What shall I do to inherit 
 eternal life ? " he said, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
 strength ; and thy neighbor as thyself." To the Jews at the 
 Feast of Dedication : " My sheep hear my voice, and I know 
 them, and they follow me : and I give unto them eternal life ; 
 and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them 
 out of my hand." In the same tenor to Martha, about this 
 time : " I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that 
 believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." 
 In Galilee again : " Whosoever shall do the will of my 
 Father who is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister 
 and mother." To the Jews in Capernaum: " I am the Bread 
 of life : he that cometh to me shall never "hunger, and he 
 that believeth on me shall never thirst." And " This is the 
 will of Him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, 
 and believeth on him, may have everlasting life." And 
 " Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal 
 life, and I will raise him up at the last day." And " He 
 that eateth me, even he shall live by me." The end of his 
 life is now approaching, and he speaks of his church dis- 
 tinctly now for the first time : it is to be built on this rock ; 
 that he " is the Christ, the Son of the living God." Then 
 the " following him " is explained thus : " If any man will 
 come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross 
 daily, and follow me : whosoever will lose his life for my sake 
 shall find it." And in the same tone, to the young noble- 
 man : " If thou wilt be perfect," or " If thou wilt inherit eter- 
 nal life, sell all that thou hast, and come and follow me." 
 And in the same conversation : " Every one that hath forsaken 
 houses or brethren or sisters or father or mother or wife 
 or children or lands for my name's sake shall receive a 
 hundred-fold, and shall inherit everlasting life." This is 
 said when he is on his way, for the fifth and last time, to
 
 25 
 
 Jerusalem. He addresses at Jerusalem, in the last week of 
 his life, to the Twelve, the parable of the sheep and the goats ; 
 in which is this statement : " Then shall the King say unto 
 them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, in- 
 herit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of 
 the world. For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat ; I 
 was thirsty, and ye gave me drink ; I was a stranger, and ye 
 took me in ; naked, and ye clothed me ; I was sick, and 
 ye visited me ; I was in prison, and ye came unto me." In 
 parting from the Twelve the next night : " A new command- 
 ment I give unto you, that ye love one another ; as I have 
 loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all 
 men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to 
 another." "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life : 
 no man cometh unto the Father but by me." And in the 
 prayer of the Last Supper : " And this is life eternal, that 
 they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, 
 whom thou hast sent." Defending himself the next morning 
 before Pilate, he says, " Every one that is of the truth heareth 
 my voice." After his resurrection, he says to the Eleven, 
 " Peace be unto you : as my Father hath sent me, so have I 
 sent you." And at the very last : " Go ye into all nations, 
 baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, 
 and of the Holy Ghost ; teaching them to observe all things 
 whatsoever I have commanded you." 
 
 These are the texts and, I think, all the texts in which 
 Jesus gives his definitions of Christian discipleship. So far as 
 we take him as our authority in the definition of Christianity, 
 we are to include these words in our definitions. Of course, 
 the glad tidings he brought were vastly more extensive than 
 these texts, and comprise many more directions ; but so far 
 as he gives any description of what one of his followers is or 
 what he is not, any test of discipleship, he gives it in these 
 texts. If we may use the words, in these is his body of divi- 
 nity. So far as he helps us to condense, abridge, or digest 
 his gospel, to put it in statement brief enough to repeat and 
 
 4
 
 26 
 
 remember, he does it in the thirty texts which I have quoted. 
 I certainly do not say, that we have no right to digest or 
 develop his system from other texts ; but I do say, that, if 
 we look for his definition or his statement of his system, we 
 find it here. From other reading, we can make our statement 
 as to his church ; but it is in these words that we have his. 
 
 In about half of these texts, he defines discipleship. In 
 about as many (taking it for granted that it is understood 
 what a disciple of his is), he tells what his disciples will 
 gain. Of the first half, it is certain that these texts do not 
 help those writers who would construct the church by com- 
 pelling its members to assent to particular theories of human 
 nature or the divine nature. The majority of theologians do 
 this. In defining a Christian, they say that he is one who 
 has such or such intellectual convictions. You see, as I read 
 these texts, how little support that definition has in the letter 
 or in the spirit of Christ's definitions. Jesus does not mean 
 to create a new philosophical party, arriving at one set of 
 opinions on certain important subjects. He does not come to 
 give us opinions merely : he comes to give the Life which is 
 beneath all opinions, because it is beneath every thing with 
 which man has to do. He comes to give us new Life. It is 
 life which is to make us walk better, run better, sleep better, 
 eat better, and drink better; the life which is to make us 
 work better, rest better, play and enjoy better ; the life which 
 is to make us teach better, learn better, sail, row, cut, carve, 
 plough, plant, reap, and, in general, subdue the world, better ; 
 the life which is to make us hope better, believe better, and 
 love better; the life which is to make us look backward 
 better, and look forward better ; the life, best of all, which is 
 to make us endure better, possess our souls in patience better, 
 forgive better, and pray better ; the life in which we are to 
 see a living God better, and to come to him nearer. In this 
 enlarged life, this life on the plan of Heaven, this life which 
 begins an angel's life, of course we shall know better and 
 think better.
 
 27 
 
 But it is a very narrow statement of that life to say that it 
 consists only in thinking better and knowing better. Nar- 
 rower yet is the statement which puts it all in the knowledge 
 of God's nature and our own. Knowledge is something ; but 
 it is not every thing ; and human knowledge, the knowledge 
 man can grasp of God and his designs, is a very small part of 
 every thing. And so it happens, that when, as on all these 
 different occasions, the Lord of Life explains what he gives to 
 his followers, and what they are to try to gain, he does not 
 once allude to the knowledge which they are to acquire, to 
 the convictions which they are to form. He does not give, 
 in his own words, the first phrase of a scientific theology. 
 No : he came to enliven the world, to save it from sin, to 
 bring it to God. He left the world, expecting and demand- 
 ing that his followers should take up this work, and carry 
 it through. He gave them Life : he expected them to give 
 it to others. Demanding this, and nothing less, he looked 
 forward to his church ; but it was not to a company of men 
 and women at work with dictionaries and commonplace 
 books, finding out about "deific energies" and "instrumental 
 inequality," and " speculative cognition of infinite person- 
 ality," and the rest. He looked rather to a close-knit com- 
 pany of brethren and sisters, knit so close that he could call it 
 a family or a brotherhood, eager that God's kingdom should 
 come. He had revealed God as the Father of them all. He 
 himself loved them all, so that he was willing to die for them 
 all ; and he looked forward, nor vainly as it has proved, to 
 like love of him. Then he said, when he spoke of his 
 church, that this love of him would bind together the mem- 
 bers of that church in love ; and, in describing the united 
 family of the children of God thus united in a love which 
 sprang from a love of him, he gave the one sign of disciple- 
 ship which he ever did give, the only sign and the only test 
 of it : " By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, 
 if ye have love one to another." "As I have loved you, 
 that ye also love one another."
 
 28 
 
 As you observed, there are four or five other texts which 
 dwell on the love the disciples are to have for each other ; 
 and, as we saw, he speaks of this union between the disciples 
 as to be as close as the union between himself and God. 
 Whatever that union is, such is to be our union. We are to 
 be one, even as Christ and God are one. 
 
 He did not expect that this union would come merely be- 
 cause he asked for it. He knew it would never come unless 
 men followed him ; and they could not follow him unless they 
 believed in him. Of these thirty texts, therefore, at least ten 
 speak of the disciples as following him and believing in him. 
 It is clear enough what following him means, though the 
 church has not been very successful in doing it. But what is 
 it to believe in him ? I know the words are indistinct : so, 
 after all, are most words. Still, if we cannot accurately 
 define to others all his intent in them, I think we can really 
 get at it for ourselves if we really choose. To believe in 
 him completely implies that complete confidence in him, that 
 we are willing to follow him, or to make him our Leader. 
 " Ye call me Master and Lord : and ye say well : for so I 
 
 / *r 
 
 am : " and that is the test which he proposes. " Whoever 
 wishes to come after me must take up his cross, and follow 
 me." If I believe in him enough for that, there can be no 
 doubt that I believe as he asked me to. 
 
 But it is one thing to believe in him, and another to believe 
 or receive any special explanation of his nature. Look at 
 little things in illustration. I believe in the power of elec- 
 tricity so completely, that I implicitly trust my life on a 
 message sent over the wire ; but it does not follow that I can 
 say what electricity is, how it works, why or where it works. 
 On the other hand, while I believe in electricity, I may be- 
 lieve (as, in fact, I do believe) that every man's theory about 
 electricity is untrue. Or I may believe in the expansive 
 power of steam ; so that, when I mean to go to Worcester, I 
 simply try to connect myself with a steam-engine which is 
 going there. I have only to follow where it takes me. But I
 
 do not have to believe any theory of the steam-engine. It is 
 not necessary that I should have any, even the faintest, idea 
 how God gives to steam the marvellous qualities that it has. 
 Take these as the humblest parables like flour and leaven 
 parables of the way in which I am to follow Christ or be- 
 lieve in Christ, and in which he meant I should follow him. 
 I can follow him, sure that he is my divine Leader ; but I 
 need not say. how God gives him his Spirit. I can believe in 
 him without believing in any man's " scientific development " 
 of his nature. 
 
 Thus is it that Jesus, constantly calling on men to follow 
 him, speaks three times in these thirty texts of their believing 
 in him. The truth is, that, when the following him visibly and 
 constantly required that a man take his cross upon his shoul- 
 ders, it was very certain, that, if a man followed him, he did 
 believe in him. Through the Gospels, therefore, the test of 
 a belief in Christ is the following Christ. If we make him 
 our Leader really, if we follow our Leader as we live, then 
 we believe in him. If we fail to follow him, it is very certain 
 that we do not really believe. 
 
 Such is the drift of the fourteen or fifteen texts which I 
 spoke of as specially defining discipleship. The rest of the 
 thirty texts of definition speak as if there were no question as 
 to what a disciple is, but simply define specifically what a 
 disciple is to gain. We are now to look at them with the 
 others. Of all the thirty, we are now to see what are 
 the promises which Jesus makes for those who follow him. 
 Once his followers are said to be saved ; once, to be children 
 of his Father ; once, to love God ; once, to do the will of 
 God ; once, to worship the Father ; once, to " believe on Him 
 that sent me ; " twice they are said to be near God ; twice, to 
 come to the Father ; twice, to know Christ as the Son of the 
 living God ; twice, to be of the truth. Besides these separate 
 declarations, and, in their great declaration, including each of 
 these, half of these texts of definition (as I have called them)
 
 30 
 
 say that the followers of Christ shall receive life, shall re- 
 ceive eternal life, shall receive everlasting life, or shall receive 
 life more abundantly. Here, as we saw, was the central ob- 
 ject of his mission, that men who were dead might be alive 
 again ; that they might begin to live. His cures of the sick are 
 so many types of this great cure of a dying world. Its ears are 
 unstopped, and the scales fall from its eyes. The forward 
 march of the lame is another : the world puts its foot to the 
 ground, and from the halt of centuries it presses on. The son 
 of the widow of Nain opens his eyes ; the daughter of Jairus 
 looks up from her death-bed, and smiles upon her mother ; 
 Lazarus comes forth, and they unbind his graveclothes ; and 
 Jesus himself, at the break of day, pushes away the stone 
 from the mouth of the tomb. Little are even these miracles 
 compared with the constant miracle which they illustrate, in 
 which, for century after century, the young men and maidens 
 of the world, who have been dead, wake, and are alive again ; 
 the world's graveqlothes are flung by ; its old sepulchres are 
 thrown open : for, at his sovereign word, it follows and it 
 lives. 
 
 But, if it does not follow, it does not live. These texts 
 of definition give no cover to those who are ready to believe, 
 but are not ready to follow. These texts say nothing about 
 exalting Jesus ; they say nothing about honoring him, either 
 in definition of his nature or in worship of his person. The 
 church, alas ! has longed to make them do so. So easy a 
 thing would it be, were that enough for us, to exalt him in 
 our ritual. Oh ! yes : we could all do that. The church has 
 been willing to borrow every name for his exaltation, to seat 
 him even on the throne of heaven, if only it might buy off 
 the inexorable condition. But no : he says nothing about 
 sitting on the throne of heaven, nothing about our defining his 
 nature, nothing about our worshipping him ; but he. does insist 
 that we follow him. A luxurious church has hoped to escape 
 by painting him pictures and building him temples ; a philoso- 
 phical church has hoped to escape by analyzing his attributes,
 
 31 
 
 and explaining for him his genealogy ; a mystical church, 
 by veiling him in cloud, and making him suffer where we 
 ought to suffer ; and a commonplace church has coolly offered 
 to substitute intellectual adherence to a metaphysical creed 
 for the fulfilment of his inexorable demand. But neither 
 the indolent, the philosophical, the mystical, nor the intel- 
 lectual, have bought by their substitutes the Life which he 
 promised. He offered himself as our Master, and left us his 
 work to finish. He says to us, " If you obey me, you will 
 follow me." He proved his affection for us in his death ; 
 and he says, " If you believe in me, you will love me." 
 He meant that we should work at one in this service ; and 
 he says, " If you love me, you will love one another." 
 His true followers must listen to these demands. They 
 must not be tempted by any of the cheap substitutions. 
 They must not be diverted to any of the side-issues of the 
 dreamers. They must tread resolutely in his footsteps. 
 They must drink eagerly of his life. They must take 
 bravely hold of the work he gave them to do. If they mean 
 really to go after him, they must take up each his cross, and 
 follow.
 
 III. 
 
 " OTHER FOUNDATION CAN NO MAN LAY THAN THAT is LAID, WHICH is JESUS 
 CHRIST. Now, IF ANY MAN BUILD UPON THIS FOUNDATION GOLD, SILVER, 
 PRECIOUS STONES, WOOD, HAY, STUBBLE, EVERY MAN'S WORK SHALL BE 
 MADE MANIFEST: FOR THE DAY SHALL DECLARE IT, BECAUSE IT SHALL 
 BE REVEALED BY FIRE; AND THE FIRE SHALL TRY EVERY MAN'S WORK 
 
 OF WHAT SORT IT IS." 1 Cor. iii. 11-13. 
 
 THE work spoken of is the building-up of the Christian 
 Church. Paul has said, just before, that he claims no per- 
 sonal authority in building it up. He is nothing ; but he has 
 done what he could. What he has done, or what any man 
 has done, must be tested by time. 
 
 The passage, therefore, is a leading passage among those 
 which show what the apostles thought respecting their rights 
 in unfolding or developing the doctrine of Christ and the 
 external structure of his church. The one thing certain is 
 always the foundation ; viz., that Jesus of Nazareth is the 
 Christ. On that foundation, they are all building as they 
 can ; hoping to bring about that kingdom for which they are 
 sent. But, as they build, Paul and James and John never 
 claim to be themselves corner-stones, as the modern church 
 claims for them. They never claim to stand in the place of 
 Christ : still less do they claim what Romanists and Protes- 
 tants together claim for them, to unfold fundamental doc- 
 trine which Jesus did not unfold, or which he has reserved. 
 They take the tone, rather, of the most humble preachers of 
 our day. They say, " We teach Christ according to the grace 
 which is given us. If we teach him truly, our work will 
 stand ; for he does not change. Where we are wrong, the 
 harm is transient ; for, if our work is stubble, it will be de-
 
 33 
 
 stroyed. Only the foundation is sure. The foundation is, 
 that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God." 
 
 I am now to prove that this is the view these men took of 
 their position, and of the foundation on which they were 
 building. This is a necessary part of our inquiry into the 
 historical question, What were the foundations of the Christian 
 religion ? It is necessary also in our other inquiry, What are 
 the rights of the church in developing doctrine concealed or 
 reserved by our Master ? I have already repeated here the 
 texts in which Jesus himself distinctly defines discipleship, or 
 gives any tests of discipleship. With the same conditions 
 which I then laid down, I am now to repeat the definitions of 
 Christianity given by the apostles or first disciples. As I 
 repeat these texts, I ask you to observe all along the sensi- 
 tiveness with which they refrain from seeming to add any 
 thing of their own in the foundation. They all build upon the 
 foundation : " But other foundation can no man lay than that 
 is laid, which is Jesus Christ." 
 
 The apostles' definitions of Christianity that is our sub- 
 ject. In grouping them together, I acknowledge that the 
 apostles taught a great deal which is not included in these 
 definitions. So they taught a great deal which has not come 
 to us at all. I cannot, then, pretend to condense all they 
 taught ; but here are their specific definitions of discipleship : 
 and I claim that they must have laid down in such expres- 
 sions all they thought essential or fundamental ; and whoever 
 wants to make a creed or formula of the foundation of the 
 church must make it, unless he reject their authority, out of 
 these early definitions of theirs, unless he is satisfied with 
 those of Jesus which I read last Sunday. I quote from the 
 Acts and the Epistles, in the order of time, just as I did from 
 the Gospels. 
 
 Just after the ascension, at the day of the great Pentecost, 
 Peter says, " Whosoever shall call on the name of Jehovah 
 shall be saved ; " quoting the Prophet Joel, and saying that 
 that time had come : and then, when they were pricked in 
 
 5
 
 34 
 
 their hearts, and asked, " What shall we do ? " he says, 
 " Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of 
 Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive 
 the gift of the Holy Ghost." And, the same day, three thou- 
 sand were added to the disciples. The first description given 
 of the church is, " The multitude of them that believed were 
 of one heart and of one soul." The Samaritans were bap- 
 tized " when they believed Philip, preaching the things con- 
 cerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ." 
 Peter, preaching at Caisarea, sums up by saying that Jesus of 
 Nazareth was slain by the Jews. " God has raised him up,". . . 
 " and commanded us to testify that it is he who was ordained 
 of God to be the Judge of quick and dead. To him give all 
 the prophets witness, that, through his name, whosoever be- 
 lieveth in him shall receive remission of sins." The Holy 
 Ghost then fell on all who heard the word. Paul, preaching 
 in Antioch, sums up in these words, after saying that God 
 has raised Jesus from the dead : " Be it known unto you, 
 therefore, that through this man is preached unto you the 
 forgiveness of sins ; and, by him, all that believe are justified 
 from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the 
 law of Moses." After the dissension as to the Gentile con- 
 verts, Peter says of them, " God bare them witness, giving 
 them the Holy Ghost, even as he did to us ; " and his argu- 
 ment shows that he regards this as the test of discipleship. 
 On his second journey, Paul was in prison at Philippi ; and 
 when the jailer came running to him, and asked what he 
 must do to be saved, Paul said, " Believe on the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and thou shalt be saved." At Thessalonica, the Jews 
 who believed had been taught " that Christ must needs have 
 suffered, and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus is 
 Christ ; " and' the Athenian converts believed the same thing. 
 Paul writes from Corinth two letters to the little church at 
 Thessalonica ; but he does not so much as suggest in them 
 any test of discipleship, or any definition of what a Christian 
 is ; nor is any mentioned in the history of eighteen months
 
 35 
 
 which he spent at Corinth. But at Ephesus, meeting some 
 of John Baptist's followers, he explained to them that John 
 meant " they should believe on him who came after him ; " 
 that is, on Jesus. When they heard this, they were baptized 
 in the name of the Lord Jesus. In a letter written to Corinth 
 about this time, our text comes in : " Other foundation can no 
 man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ ; " and this : 
 " I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, 
 which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by 
 which also ye are saved, unless ye have believed in vain." 
 This gospel is, " That Christ died for our sins ; and that he 
 was buried, and that he rose again the third day ; " and that 
 he was seen of Cephas, of the twelve, of five hundred bre- 
 thren at once, of James, of all the apostles, and of Paul. 
 
 Writing to the Galatians, Paul thus describes their church : 
 ' ' Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus ; for 
 as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put 
 on Christ," a mystical phrase, explained immediately after- 
 ward as "Ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Again: "They 
 that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections 
 and lusts." " Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil 
 the law of Christ." 
 
 To the church at Rome, Paul wrote his most elaborate 
 letter, eager to remove their suspicions that he was a radical 
 disorganizer. To them he says, " God has set Christ Jesus 
 forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to 
 declare God's righteousness ; that God might be just, and the 
 justifier of him who believeth in Jesus." " Therefore, being 
 justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord 
 Jesus Christ." And " so many of us as were baptized into 
 Jesus Christ were baptized into his death ; that like as Christ 
 was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so 
 we should walk in newness of life." " If any man have not the 
 Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." In his speech to the Jews 
 at Jerusalem, Paul said he was baptized himself; "washing 
 away his sins, and calling on Jesus' name." And to Agrippa,
 
 36 
 
 summing up his own preaching : " I continue witnessing that 
 Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should 
 rise from the dead, and should show light unto the people 
 and to the Gentiles." Near the end of his life, writing from 
 Rome to the Ephesians, Paul says, " Ye are no more strangers 
 and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the 
 household of God ; and built upon the foundation of the apos- 
 tles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner- 
 stone." And he describes the object of the church and its 
 ministry to be, that " we all come in the unity of the faith, 
 and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect 
 man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
 Christ." 
 
 To the Colossians, there is this charge : " If ye be risen 
 with Christ, seek those things that are above, where Christ 
 sitteth on the right hand of God." 
 
 The Epistle to the Hebrews probably not written by 
 Paul contains no single passage, in its magnificent practical 
 appeals, which can properly be called a definition of Chris- 
 tianity. Indeed, the drift of the letter is, that while the old 
 covenant had ordinances of service, under the new, the dis- 
 ciple was left -to the greatest liberty, perhaps to absolute per- 
 sonal independence, in his allegiance to the Most High. 
 
 In the Epistle of James, there is this definition : " Pure 
 religion and undefiled, before God and the Father, is this : 
 To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to 
 keep himself unspotted from the world." 
 
 Peter, in his First Epistle, speaks of the elect, whom he 
 addresses thus : " Not having seen Jesus Christ, [yet] ye love 
 him ; believing in him, though now ye see him not, ye rejoice 
 with joy unspeakable and full of glory ; receiving the end of 
 your faith, even the salvation of your souls." In his Second 
 Epistle, he describes them as those who have obtained like 
 precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and 
 our Saviour Jesus Christ." Immediately after, he says, 
 " Giving all diligence, add to your faith, virtue ; and to vir-
 
 37 
 
 tue, knowledge ; and to knowledge, temperance ; and to tem- 
 perance, patience ; and to patience, brotherly kindness ; and 
 to brotherly kindness, charity. ... If ye do these things, ye 
 shall never fall. So an entrance shall be ministered unto you 
 abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and 
 Saviour Jesus Christ." 
 
 St. John says, in opening his First Epistle, " This is the 
 message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, 
 that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." He 
 afterwards gives us this definition : " Hereby we do know 
 that we know Jesus Christ, if we keep his commandments." 
 And " hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith 
 he abide th in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he 
 walked." Again : " In this the children of God are mani- 
 fest. . . . Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, 
 neither he that loveth not his brother." " Hereby we know 
 that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us ; " 
 and " every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in 
 the flesh is of God." " Whosoever shall confess that Jesus 
 is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God." 
 " Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of 
 God." " He that hath the Son hath life." In the Second 
 Epistle : " He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath 
 both the Father and the Son." And in the Third : " He that 
 doeth good is of God." " He that doeth evil hath not seen 
 God." 
 
 These are, I think, all the texts which can be spoken of as 
 being the apostles' definitions of Christianity. I have ex- 
 tended to the utmost, as in the last two, the range by which 
 I have admitted texts into their number. 
 
 You will observe in them, first, how much more discursive 
 is the language of the apostles, how much less pointed, than 
 those vivid, condensed words of Christ himself, which I 
 brought together last Sunday. You will observe, next, the 
 reason of the difficulty which the moderns find in constructing 
 from these writings what they call a " scientific theology."
 
 38 
 
 This reason appears, first, in the modesty with which the apos- 
 tles kept back their own notions. " Who, then, is Paul ? 
 who is Apollos?" they cried. "We are only the officers, 
 the servants through whom ye believed." They never 
 dreamed of using such inspiration as they had in " deve- 
 loping scientifically " doctrines which the Lord had reserved. 
 Their simple business was to apply in practice Christ's life 
 to the every-day work of Corinth or of Babylon or of Rome. 
 If they did this well, their work would stand ; if they did 
 it ill, it would not stand. It proved that they did it well. 
 The Foundation was sure. 
 
 Second, and chiefly, you see that modern theologians fail 
 to get " a scientific development " of doctrine from the words 
 of the apostles ; because what we call doctrine, in our modern 
 sense, was then so very small part of the Christian system. 
 It never occurred even to Paul, the most speculative of the 
 apostles, that intellectual doctrine and definition " scientific 
 development," as we call it would ever receive that atten- 
 tion which the church has given it. Paul even says some 
 very sharp things in ridicule of science falsely so called. In 
 fact, where the word " doctrine " comes in, it almost always 
 alludes to moral conduct; and the very idea of a church 
 resting on concurrence of opinion does not appear in the 
 Epistles more than it does in the words of Christ. Of 
 course, such a church is conceivable : it is, in a manner, 
 possible. You may found an association on agreement of 
 opinion, just as you may found it on similarity of occupation, 
 as an artist's club is founded ; or on the accident of birth, as 
 the St. Patrick's Society or St. Andrew's Society is founded : 
 but there is not a particle of evidence, either in Jesus' defi- 
 nitions of Christianity or in his apostles', that they were 
 founding Christianity on any such concurrence of opinion. 
 On the other hand, it is clear that they had a very different 
 organization, if I may call it so, in view. 
 
 " If I may call it so." But I am afraid that that name 
 organization veils the great idea. The idea is, that, by por-
 
 39 
 
 traying to all men and women in this world, Jesus our 
 Saviour; his love for us, his work for us, and his death; 
 by obeying his instructions, by receiving his spirit, and by 
 living his life, we shall touch heart after heart, and make 
 quicker their pulses ; so that, with a life completely new, 
 those hearts will beat, and those men and women live. 
 Then the idea is, that those who are thus alive will look 
 wildly round for blind eyes that they can open, for broken 
 hearts they can soothe, for dead lives they can awaken ; 
 that in the rapture and energy, the joy yet dissatisfaction, of 
 awakened life, they will look, on the one hand, on Him who 
 thus touched them ; and, on the other, at the world, for 
 whose life he died. It is supposed, then, that as one after 
 another thus look, both on him and on the world, in every 
 tribe, in every nation, as Jews and Elamites, Asiatics, Ro- 
 mans, and Africans, men and women who do not know 
 each other's names or language or opinions, begin to live 
 with this unselfish ardor, as they begin to go and come with 
 this spirit that is in him, a new bond will attract them 
 to each other. Only attract is too mean a word : bond is 
 only too hard a figure. Love is the only expression grand 
 enough, and enough tender ; and of that, alas ! the sound 
 has been so profaned, that it does not speak what Jesus 
 thought of or what John entreated. The great idea is, that 
 in this unity of spirit, this unity of hope, this unity of desire, 
 all these scattered individuals, who in Cappadocia, in Meso- 
 potamia, in the parts about Gyrene, or in imperial Rome, 
 love the Lord, will, of course, love each other; and that, 
 without tablets of stone, without articles of confederation, 
 without compromise or constitution, without a contract mu- 
 tually signed, without a covenant drawn up and attested, 
 most of all, without a creed defining shades of opinion, that 
 great unorganized company will be one ; one, without writ- 
 ten instrument or formal definition, even as Christ and God 
 are one ; one in spirit, one in object, one in motive, one in 
 hope, one in victory.
 
 40 
 
 Under this conception, when the apostles speak of the dis- 
 ciples, they speak of them as followers of Christ, just as he 
 did. The test-sign of that following was the taking the 
 cursed, detested, and despised name of Christ. Were they 
 willing to do that ? Yes ! if they believed in him as their 
 Saviour. No ! if they believed in themselves. Thus is it, 
 that following him, or taking his name, were the tests, and 
 the only tests, of belief in him. And belief in him is 
 belief in Him ! It is not the belief in any council of bishops, 
 who have developed scientifically the doctrine he reserved. 
 It is not the belief in any Athanasius, who has proposed a 
 definition of his nature. It is not the belief of any theory of 
 his person. It is not the belief of any genealogy about him. 
 It is the loyal acceptance of him as the Leader of life, as the 
 Anointed of his God and ours. 
 
 Certainly, then, I do not ask you to examine these texts of 
 definition, or those from Jesus' own lips, which I collected 
 last Sunday, with any view to distilling from them a doctrine 
 of his person, Unitarian or Trinitarian. True, they are, 
 in fact, Unitarian in every tittle, helplessly Unitarian, 
 pitilessly Unitarian, as we have seen Trinitarian critics, 
 Roman and Protestant, allow. But it is not for that that I 
 quote them : I quote them to show that the idea of Jesus 
 and the apostles was of something entirely beyond the acci- 
 dental concurrence of metaphysical or historical opinion. The 
 unity of the church which they contemplated was infinitely 
 more grand : so they describe it as one body, of one life, of 
 one soul, whose very strength consists in the utter unlikeness 
 of its members. Or now it is a great kingdom, with one 
 king, but with subjects so different from each other, the 
 parts wholly unlike ; green meadows here, blessed by the 
 sunshine ; bleak mountain- cliffs there, breasting the storm. 
 To describe the range of that kingdom, Jesus himself declares 
 human language powerless. Why, he takes his images from 
 the lightning blazing through the whole sky, from the deluge 
 whelming the whole earth, and then says those images are too
 
 41 
 
 narrow. Never does he, never do his, stoop from such 
 images to any wretched verbal formulas in the least resem- 
 bling our covenants or creeds. Everywhere, rather, there is 
 the idea, not of an enlisted army, measured by one fixed 
 standard, and known by one fixed confession ; but of a whole 
 land revealed in the darkness of midnight by one flash of 
 lightning ; or, as in the other figure, of this great rolling 
 ocean, which looks up to God, is ordered by God, and obeys 
 God, though each wave-crest offers its own homage, each 
 tide-surge worships in its own way. " How lawless ! " mut- 
 ters the scientific theologian, standing on the beach. " What 
 rebels ! " cries the petty prince from some sectarian heptar- 
 chy, as the disobedient tide drives him from his throne upon 
 the sand. But the great God looks on, and sees that there is 
 no rebellion, and that there is perfect law. This ocean never 
 rests. It pants, it heaves, or it throws up its blue waves till 
 they crest themselves with white, and faint away ; or they 
 pour on incessant, one infinite procession, to fling themselves 
 in order against the shore ; or they drop into a sleep, which 
 is not death, but breathes steadily and regularly as a sleeping 
 child, and so in their calm reflect the blue of heaven ; or 
 they fling themselves higher and higher toward the sky, drop- 
 ping down exhausted, only to start up again with one effort 
 more ; or, lying still beneath His sunshine, they deliver to 
 his demand the unseen vapors, which he transfuses into deli- 
 cious showers with which to bless the thirsty ground. And 
 in this rest or in that convulsion, tide-wave, wind-wave, 
 white crest, spray-dust, or unseen vapor-cloud, each, in its own 
 beautiful service, obeys one law of attraction, fulfils the 
 word of Him who sets it in order. That is the image Christ 
 chooses to describe his church. There is no precise similarity 
 between its combing waves ; nay, none between the separate 
 drops which make up its waves. But, because they all obey 
 one law of love, the church, the kingdom of the Lord, is one. 
 The believers are one in life ; or, if we analyze life into its 
 elements, they are one in faith, one in hope, one in love,
 
 42 
 
 the greatest of the three. Here are two words which the men 
 of science have never been able to pervert. Love and Hope, 
 they can do nothing with : they escape their crucibles. So 
 far as they have compelled the church to wear one uniform, it 
 has not been by quoting any of the texts which speak of Love, 
 or of Hope, her gracious sister. They have rather sought to 
 digest their systems by what is said of Faith ; and it has only 
 been by dwarfing the idea of Faith, by cramping her feet 
 with Chinese sandals, confining her chest as with iron corsets, 
 stopping her mouth as with the gag of the Inquisition, blind- 
 ing her eyes as with the bandage of the executioner, by 
 handcuffing her hands, by fettering her feet, and then clipping 
 the feathers of her angel- wings, that the Church has succeed- 
 ed at all in her interpretation of Faith to her children. Why, 
 Jesus spoke to a sect of literal verbalists. Paul spoke to 
 nations of mere sensual tastes. And all the apostles nay, 
 all preachers to this day are thus addressing a world which 
 asks for tangible signs ; which likes to go where it can see 
 or hear or taste ; which lives, as the brutes live, by the laws 
 of external matter. To such a world, Jesus speaks. To such 
 a world he brings life ; and that life is, that it shall not 
 seek longer for these signs without, but listen to God within. 
 It is to live, not by the evidence of the seen, but by the evi- 
 dence of things which are not seen. It is to listen, not to 
 thunders and earthquakes, not to tempests, not to trumpets, not 
 to explosions, but to a still small voice, to the present God. 
 You are all God's children : listen all to your Father. God 
 is not far from you : his kingdom is at hand. Here is God ; 
 now is God. Listen and obey. 
 
 Who listen, listen in faith ; who obey, obey in faith. And 
 we need not wonder, therefore, that Jesus and the Twelve, in 
 one unbroken appeal, beg for more faith, and more. We 
 need not wonder that faith, which is the evidence of things 
 not seen, should be allied with hope, because God is good, 
 and with love to all God's children ; that the three are dis- 
 played as the elements of the angels' life, of our li ves eternal.
 
 43 
 
 In seeking faith like that, what madness to return to Jewish 
 letter- worship ! What madness again to turn, like Greeks, 
 away from the voice of the present Spirit, when we seek it ! 
 This faith is the sense of law above. All written law we 
 will not try to write that down. This living God, in whom 
 we live, in whom we move, in whom we have our being, 
 we will not define him in words, which is to set limits to 
 him in words, more than we would define him or display 
 him in ivory, in silver, or in gold. This Holy Spirit is God 
 in our hearts, lives in us, and gives us life. Let us welcome 
 him, make him at home by our welcome, and obey him in 
 our lives. Thus, and thus only, shall we know that Scrip- 
 ture, that " by faith the just shall live."
 
 IV. 
 
 "YE BELIEVE IN GOD: BELIEVE ALSO IN ME." John xiv. 1. 
 
 I HAVE now examined the definitions of Christianity left 
 us by Jesus Christ and by his apostles. I have not done so 
 because we ought to take any one of them, and go about 
 measuring other people's Christianity by it ; and certainly I 
 have not done so because we ought to satisfy ourselves by 
 any limitation on our Christianity which any single definition 
 may imply. The Christian life knows no limitations. It must 
 be improving, or it is nothing. No : I have asked you to 
 study these definitions rather, because they are generally 
 overlooked in the popular discussion of the essentials of 
 Christianity. A habit has sprung up, of giving the name 
 evangelical) or gospel-born, to that system of theology of which 
 the earliest definition was made in the Athanasian Creed more 
 than four hundred years after Christ's death.* The word 
 " evangelical " is thus used by one of our sects in religion. 
 It is true, that, in the same way, the word " democratic " is 
 used as a name by one of three parties in our politics, though 
 all the three hold to democratic government ; and the word 
 " republican " by another, though they all hold to repub- 
 lican government ; and the word " American " by a third, 
 though all three hold to American government. And it is in 
 this way that the habit has grown up of calling those sects 
 " evangelical " who hold to the present modified forms of 
 Calvin's recension on Anselm's improvements upon Athana- 
 
 * For the Athanasian Creed is not the work of Athanasius, and cannot be 
 traced farther back than the end of the fifth century.
 
 sius and Augustine. I think there is some danger in the 
 constant use of such a phrase, without an occasional protest. 
 I have, therefore, thought best to renew that protest now. I 
 have quoted Christ's definitions of Christianity, and the defi- 
 nitions made by his apostles, to show that they did not restrict 
 Christianity within the dogmatic lines of our " scientific theo- 
 logies." 
 
 I have had another object, more important than this. In 
 the first of four sermons, I gave my authorities for saying 
 that the leading Trinitarian authorities of our time no longer 
 attempt the direct support of their theories from the Gos- 
 pels, but seek it rather in that " development " which the 
 church made from the doctrine of the Gospels. In especial, 
 they recur to the work of the Fathers of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries in that development. They grant, what I claim, 
 that in the New Testament, as it stands, their theories would 
 scarcely be discovered by one not previously informed ; but, 
 still, they claim that they are latent there. They are hidden 
 away, ready to come forth when one knocks at the door who 
 is rightly commissioned, well instructed, and inspired of the 
 Holy Spirit. Thus the church of Rome even now defines 
 new doctrines. Thus, in the English Church, we are told, 
 that, when Christ died, the apostles themselves had never 
 heard the story of his birth, not even from Mary mother. 
 It was not until after he died that the Holy Spirit prepared 
 their minds to receive it. And the very latest commentator in 
 this line tells us that Jesus left the apostles Unitarians ; only 
 he meant, that in a remoter and calmer period, by a sponta- 
 neous voice, they should address to him that homage, due to 
 an infinite God, which now he condescended not to claim. He 
 kept it in reserve. 
 
 Now, I say again, that I have no objection to the statement, 
 that there is much more in the Bible than he who runs can 
 read ; and I thank God with all my heart, that the Orthodox 
 schools are beginning to free themselves from the old slavery 
 of the letter. I thank God that they are working round to
 
 46 
 
 see that the Christianity of every generation ought to be on a 
 higher plane than that of the generation before. Is this 
 kingdom a tree ? it ought to grow from year to year. Is it 
 a fire ? it ought to be hotter with every new day. A great 
 point has been gained on the old critical hammering over 
 aorists and particles, the old battles about readings and 
 manuscripts, when the leaders of the creed-bound sects are 
 forced to say, that they hold to truth which the mere letter of 
 Scripture does not teach them. ' Or, let me say more simply, a 
 great point is gained, if now they give the Holy Spirit some 
 present share in the instruction of the world. 
 
 Certainly I welcome the theory of the development of 
 doctrine, especially when it comes from such lips as these. 
 The world has waited for it long enough ; and, in God's 
 mercy, it has come. It is only in a point of detail that we 
 have to take issue with those who proclaim it. 
 
 Who is to develop the doctrine ? They answer, " The Holy 
 Spirit." So do we. The Holy Spirit is to unfold it. We are 
 still in accord ; nay, in unison. Who shall the Holy Spirit 
 speak to ? Here comes the present point of difference. Who 
 shall the Holy Spirit speak to ? 
 
 1. The Roman Church says, he shall speak to a council of 
 bishops called by the Pope. 
 
 . All Protestant Orthodoxy says he spoke to certain coun- 
 cils of bishops held at Nice, at Constantinople, at Toledo, 
 and at other places, between thirteen and fifteen centuries 
 
 3. All Liberalism says yet again, the Holy Spirit must 
 speak to us, or we cannot hear. In us he must develop this 
 doctrine ; and we will not go for the development to any 
 council, nor to any Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Origen, 
 or Irenasus, of them all. 
 
 Between these three answers is Christendom divided. Of 
 the Roman answer, I now say nothing. Of the Orthodox 
 answer, I know that my statement seems hard. I know that 
 Protestant Orthodoxy does not like to admit its dependence
 
 47 
 
 on the great definitions of the fourth and fifth centuries. But 
 I cannot help that. So long as Orthodoxy drinks that cup, 
 it is nothing that she winces. She takes the advantages of 
 those definitions : she must take their disadvantages. She 
 holds up, I mean, what she calls the assent of the church, 
 from the time of Athanasius to the time of Luther, in the 
 doctrines of the Trinity, of total depravity, and of the suffer- 
 ing of God, for man's offences, in the place of man. She 
 paints you the grand picture of an undivided church placidly 
 marching on in these doctrines for those thousand years, a 
 blessed millennium. She shows you that modern dissent from 
 them is only three centuries old : that it was only when the 
 Bible was thrown open ; only when printing began ; only when 
 the Commons first gained their rights in the State, and free 
 inquiry first got its own ; only then that the separate mur- 
 murs got voice loud enough to be heard. She shows you, 
 that, for the blessed thousand years before, those definitions 
 had not been challenged : they had been held fixed and sure. 
 She claims all the immense advantage of the fact, that the 
 poetry of that thousand years, its other fine art, and its rich 
 stores of devotional expression, formed themselves around 
 the theological formulas drawn up for the church by the 
 councils which I have named, and the men who wrought for 
 them. " See how men did agree," she cries, "in the' darkest 
 ages of the church ! " Why should they not agree now ? 
 
 I say, that an Orthodoxy which takes these advantages 
 from the assent to one system of scientific theology through 
 the dark ages must take the disadvantages also. It is true, 
 that after Europe grew barbarous, and broke up into different 
 countries, without common ties, all the churches in those 
 countries held nominally to the standards of scientific theolo- 
 gy laid down before the division. It is true also, that during 
 a thousand years of sleep, in which no new principle in 
 science was established, none was established in scientific 
 theology. No improvement was made in government, none 
 in education, none in law, none in literature. As little was
 
 48 
 
 any made in the formulas of ecclesiastical opinion. It is true, 
 that, during those centuries in which no author rose to any 
 sort of lasting eminence in any walk of science or of letters, 
 no great change was attempted in the theological formulas 
 which had been laid down before the dissolution of the 
 Roman Empire. But it is true, on the other hand, that, 
 the moment the world was re-born, the men, from whom 
 its new birth is dated, protested, every one of them, against 
 some feature of those formulas. The dawn of the modern 
 world is to be hailed in the work of such men as Dante, 
 as Chaucer and Wiclif, as Tauler and Thomas a Kempis ; 
 heretics, every man of them ! men who began, with the first 
 struggles of their new life, the protest, which will never die, 
 against the -uniformity o'f the dead millennium. Granting, 
 however, that substantial uniformity which existed for a 
 thousand years before : I say, Orthodoxy must take the sour 
 with the sweet. She asks us to assent to that to which the 
 leaders of the universal church assented so long ; and we ask, 
 " What was the authority to which they assented ? " The 
 necessary answer is, " The Aihanasian Creed, and the Fathers 
 who cluster around that creed. They are to be our judges in 
 the scientific development of doctrine." 
 
 To persons fond of history, it is well worth while to study 
 the conflicting views of those Fathers and those councils. 
 They may, with profit, go back to the tangled web of 
 opinions out of which the creeds of those councils were 
 born. These councils all had equal rights. Yet, of some, 
 the decisions live a day ; of some, the creeds claim to be for 
 ever the scientific doctrine of Christendom. But we need 
 not here follow Orthodoxy into that line of study. 
 
 For Liberalism in religion makes the third answer I have 
 named. We claim that the Holy Spirit must help us to 
 the development of Christian doctrine. We cannot admit the 
 authority over us of any of those councils or any of those 
 men. Undoubtedly they had right to develop scientific 
 doctrine from the teaching of Jesus, and of the six apostles
 
 49 
 
 and two evangelists who left writings behind ; but the 
 church of to-day has the same right, and it has just as 
 much material to work upon. If the world to-day is 
 purer and better than it was in the days of the crash of 
 the Roman Empire ; if our civilization is more Christian, 
 if our science is more careful, if our learning is more pro- 
 found, than those of the Eastern and Western Empire, just 
 as their lights flickered out in thick darkness, we have 
 a better right to develop doctrine than had any of these 
 councils or any of these Fathers. To pretend that they 
 had any traditions as to doctrine, which had escaped every 
 pen for three centuries, is absurd. How much tradition 
 have you in your families, of what your ancestors knew 
 or what they suffered, of what was their opinion or what 
 their martyrdoms, when they were English men and women, 
 three centuries ago, living under the reigns of Henry the 
 Eighth and Bloody Mary? And to submit the doctrine of 
 the church to the arbitration of the bishops of that barbarous 
 age, when they were themselves at civil war regarding the 
 arbitration; to take for the agreed formula of doctrine a 
 statement drawn up in a time so benighted, that not one of 
 its statements in law, in morals, in poetry, or in philosophy, 
 is esteemed worth a straw, is only an indication of the 
 difficulty, amounting almost to impossibility, of agreeing 
 upon any formula. The truth is, that, after the Athanasian 
 formula had imposed itself upon Christendom, Christendom 
 sunk into a night so deep, that, for a thousand years, it 
 could not even protest any longer. To this death-like 
 torpor its millennium of uniformity is due. 
 
 I do not, then, pursue the history of the definitions of 
 doctrine any farther down. After we have left the apostolic 
 definitions of Christianity, there are none which have higher 
 claim to deference than our own. We stand, therefore, by 
 the Liberal answer, as to the development of doctrine. The 
 Holy Spirit shall unfold to our hearts the doctrine of the 
 
 7
 
 50 
 
 Lord. We reject, from end to end, any special authority 
 of the Fathers. 
 
 At this point it is that Liberal religion meets the anx- 
 iety constantly expressed, that, in our religious system, 
 we are nowhere. Liberalism, people say, is Latitudinarian- 
 ism. Religious freedom, they say, is the freedom to have 
 no religion. One man's religion is one thing, and another's 
 is another : therefore unity is impossible. This anxiety 
 expresses itself in a thousand ways. " You make religion 
 something all out-doors," says one ; and others ask us, and 
 very fairly, " What do you believe, if you are not bound to 
 formulas of scientific doctrine ? " " Unitarians have a name : 
 what does that name mean ? " " What is the starting- 
 point ? " " Grant that, in the Liberal body, there is wider 
 range than in the bodies of close communion : what are 
 their points of unity, of agreement, of accord ? " 
 
 This is a class of questions which we Liberal Christians 
 ought to answer. It is mere child's play for us to say that 
 we do what we think right, every man in his own eyes. 
 We stand before the world, and want to give our light 
 to the world. That light is real, and we have to show 
 that it is real. We claim to be Christians. We must, then, 
 show a vital tie to Jesus Christ. When, then, men say, 
 "You put Christianity all out-doors," I answer, "Yes, we do; 
 or, rather, the Lord did it for us." ' The new covenant is 
 disenthralled, unfettered; and those who accept it are free 
 in the range of heaven. When they say, again, " Who are 
 you ? what are you ? what do you believe ? " I answer, 
 " We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ ; " or, in the words 
 of Peter's confession, which Christ himself calls the cor- 
 ner-stone of his church, " That Jesus is the Christ, the 
 Son of the living God." 
 
 Of this statement, however, which seems to me ample 
 as to the foundation, and as much as any Christian man 
 
 * I owe this very happy epigram to the most modest of my friends.
 
 51 
 
 has a right to demand of a Christian brother, a " sci- 
 entific theology " complains that it is indefinite ; and a 
 storm of after-questions follows, as to how we test disciple- 
 ship : " How do we define it ? how do we explain it ? " To 
 which the logical answer is, That it is none of our business 
 to test it, to define it, or to explain it. We are expressly 
 warned not to judge, lest we be judged. We are ex- 
 pressly told that Jesus himself will not judge our opinions ; 
 that there is One that judgeth, his God and ours. I 
 conceive this to be a sufficient logical answer. But, be- 
 cause I grant that a logical answer never satisfies curiosity 
 with unlogical minds, I never rest upon this answer. I 
 am always willing to say that the tests of discipleship are 
 laid down by Jesus and by the apostles, and that I am 
 willing to abide by any of them. Thus : " By this shall 
 men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one 
 to another ; " or, " Whoso doeth the will of God, the 
 same is my mother or sister or brother ; " or, " Can any 
 man forbid water that these should be baptized, who have 
 received the Holy Ghost as well as we ? " Take these as 
 tests, or any other of the seventy definitions of discipleship 
 which you may find in the New Testament. 
 
 It is at this point that the two wings of the church really 
 part company. The sects with scientific creeds want us to go 
 on, and make scientific definition of the person of Christ, the 
 person of God, the person of the Holy Spirit, and the rest. 
 On our part, we decline that definition, except as matter 
 of curiosity : we declare that it has no concern whatever 
 with the essentials of discipleship. It is on that demand 
 for uniform definition on the one hand, and on that refusal 
 on the other, that the great issue joins. 
 
 I confess, the division does not seem to me the important 
 breach which they consider it on the other side. I am sorry 
 for them. I pity them from the bottom of my heart. I believe 
 all rangers, all light troops, always pity the men who are caged 
 up in garrisons. I believe all men who can go out-doors
 
 52 
 
 always pity those who are forced to stay at home. But, 
 while I pity them, I know, of course, that soldiers in gar- 
 rison also do good service ; and really it is so easy to desert, 
 that one need not shed tears for those who choose to stay. 
 And, on the other hand, for any one of us who gets tired 
 of freedom, who wants to rest himself in-doors, I am sure 
 there always seems to be a very cordial welcome. I cannot 
 conceive that the world is long to be deluded by the belief 
 that the Liberal schools are false or dangerous, so long 
 as we loyally build on the same foundation on which the 
 Orthodox schools affect to build. We build on the rock 
 which they build upon. From the essential, they develop 
 doctrine in their way : we develop it in ours. What then ? 
 Why, every man's work that he has builded will be tried 
 as by a fiery trial. The gold will stand; the stubble will 
 be burned. I am willing to leave the test of our develop- 
 ments there. 
 
 For, to conclude this review of the Foundations, there 
 are certain essential facts of Christianity about which the 
 church has never divided. It is perfectly easy to fix a 
 starting-point from which the different lines of development 
 begin. These essential facts may be stated in the words of 
 Scripture, or they may be condensed into shorter expression. 
 It was in the effort, doubtless, to state these facts briefly, that 
 creeds began. The earliest creeds are only short digests of 
 the facts of Christianity. It was only in later times, less 
 religious and more speculative, that creeds took the shape 
 of the resolutions which we pass at public meetings; when, 
 from statements of fact which could be proved or disproved, 
 they became statements of mere speculation or opinion. 
 Early in the history of the church, several of these simple 
 creeds were digested into the creed which the whole church 
 has used in its practice from that day to this day, the 
 creed which takes the name of the Apostles' Creed. This 
 creed contains the facts from which all Christians start in 
 their separate development of doctrines. This is the creed
 
 53 
 
 which the older churches taught to their children in their 
 infancy. Its substance had established itself, I think, within 
 three hundred years after Jesus died. It was, therefore, 
 substantially in wide use before the passion for scientific 
 theology began. After that fashion came in, it was still 
 the formula for all but the learned. And when we picture 
 to ourselves the great company of believers, pressing on with 
 one accord to the heavenly city ; when we look in fancy on 
 the deathbeds which have been cheered, on the martyrs who 
 have passed to glory, under the light of one Lord, one faith, 
 and one baptism, if we descend so low as to ask what were 
 the concurrent opinions of all this host, we have no right 
 to suppose that they held to the thunders of the Athanasian 
 Confession. The Church has never taught it to her babes, 
 never proclaimed it in her daily worship. She has held it 
 in reserve, as a choice symbol for those elect to her mysteries. 
 She has never put it in the forefront of her ritual, of her 
 catechizing, of her missions. When she taught the Lord's 
 Prayer to her little ones, she has taught them another creed 
 as the accepted digest of the facts of their religion. That 
 practical creed of Christendom has proved to be enough for 
 the Church's humbler martyrs, if it were not enough for her 
 philosophers ; and they, as they went to daily martyrdom or 
 to the martyrdom of the stake, have gone there, even igno- 
 rant of the existence of the unintelligible formula, as fol- 
 lowers of a Master whom they knew and loved. 
 
 That earliest creed describes the historical belief of every 
 Unitarian as well as of every Trinitarian. It describes ours 
 better than it describes theirs.* It is the creed which, Bishop 
 Newman says, favors the Unitarian rather than the Trini- 
 tarian hypothesis. That creed I shall teach to my children, 
 
 * Thus the Trinitarians of almost all schools are fond of maintaining that Christ, 
 the second person in the Trinity, "made the worlds." Thus Alford says, "The 
 Logos is identical with Jesus Christ: ... it is he who made the worlds." Yet the 
 Apostles' Creed distinctly says that God the Father, the first person in the Trinity, 
 is the Maker of heaven and earth.
 
 as an answer to this daily question, " What do Unitarians 
 believe ? " I advise you, my friends, to teach it to yours ; 
 not because it is so complete a statement as the statement of 
 Christ himself, but because it is a statement which, through 
 all history, the Church has held to, and which, though it 
 might contain much more indeed, is still a symbol of her 
 union. This creed and the Lord's Supper survive through 
 all the storms of discussion and of science, as two external 
 symbols, that, at heart, the Church is one. 
 
 " I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and 
 earth. 
 
 And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord ; 
 
 Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, 
 
 Born of the Virgin Mary ; 
 
 Suffered under Pontius Pilate ; 
 
 Was crucified, dead, and buried ; 
 
 The third day, he rose from the dead ; 
 
 He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, 
 the Father Almighty ; 
 
 From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. 
 
 I believe in the Holy Ghost, 
 
 The holy catholic church, 
 
 The communion of saints, 
 
 The forgiveness of sins, 
 
 The resurrection of the body, 
 
 And the life everlasting." 
 
 There is the condensed statement of the facts of religion, 
 which, for fifteen hundred years or more, the Church at large 
 has taught to her children. In later years, one phrase was 
 added to it, which I have not read, because it is unquestion- 
 ably modern. I confess, that a better statement might be 
 made from the very words of the apostles ; but, as it hap- 
 pened, this statement was made, a statement of the foun- 
 dation-facts of Christianity. It is a statement to which, fairly 
 interpreted, every Christian man may in good faith assent.
 
 55 
 
 It bears the mark, doubtless, of the time which created it. 
 It has not the simplicity of Jesus ; it has not the directness 
 of the apostles, whose name it bears : but it does not leave 
 the facts in the quest for speculation about the fact. In the 
 history of the church, therefore, it marks well enough the 
 dividing-point where one wing of the army marches off in 
 search of a scientific theology; where the other keeps on 
 in less scientific form. 
 
 Of the details of that symbol of belief, and, in general, 
 of the Unitarian efforts to unfold the doctrines of those 
 earlier days, I am to speak another Sunday.
 
 V. 
 
 " AND I WILL PRAY THE FATHER, AND HE SHALL GIVE TOU ANOTHER COM- 
 FORTER, THAT HE MAY ABIDE WITH YOU FOR EVER." John xiv. 16. 
 
 WHAT is called the Apostles' Creed was not written by any 
 of the apostles. It is not even a very early statement of the 
 historical facts of our religion. It is rather a compilation 
 made from parts of several early statements, with some addi- 
 tions intended to meet heresies of a later date. It is not, 
 again, a specially successful abridgment of the great facts of 
 Christian history. None the less, however, has it an interest 
 all its own ; for it does mark the union of the whole church. 
 It lays down the central facts to which all Christian specula- 
 tions gravitate, and around which, in their different orbits, 
 they revolve. Very different are those orbits, it is true ; and 
 those believers who move in one, lead lives strangely different 
 from those of others. As the inhabitants of the distant 
 Saturn must live in ways very strange to us who live upon 
 this world, so does the Romanist, in the orbit of his faith, 
 find very different light and heat in his religion from what 
 you gain, or I, from ours. Yet as the orbit of Saturn and 
 that of this earth alike are both governed by the binding 
 influence of the sun, so does every Christian believer's faith 
 gravitate to the central facts of Christian history. It must 
 be confessed, that some orbits are like those of comets, and 
 that the speculators rush off, like comets, into regions very 
 dark and very cold, very distant, indeed, from the centre. 
 None the less is the centre there. And so we find in history, 
 that while one speculation is popular at one time, and another 
 at another, so that one or another of the speculative creeds is 
 in fashion among the doctors, the real heart of the church is
 
 57 
 
 always true to home. The great central facts, about which 
 there is no critical dispute, are held to by that great body of 
 men who know but little of the doctors, and care less for 
 them. Because these central facts are well enough stated in 
 the Apostles' Creed, in a form which has been repeated 
 through Christendom for fourteen hundred years or more, 
 that symbol has an importance all its own. It becomes the 
 token of union; and so it takes the popular name of The 
 Creed, as if there were no other. It is, indeed, a statement 
 which can be understood, and can be remembered. It is a 
 statement of subjects of fact which admit of proof. So far, 
 again, it differs from those creeds of speculation which can 
 neither be understood, remembered, proved, nor disproved. 
 This constitutes its pre-eminence. 
 
 There is no Christian who would say that his religion was 
 summed up in it. Yet almost every Christian man might, in 
 good faith, give a general assent to it, without twisting it from 
 a legitimate meaning. I say this boldly : for I am sure the 
 Unitarian can give this assent ; and I know that Trinitarians 
 do give it, although I do not understand how. 
 
 Regarding God, the statement of the Apostles' Creed is, 
 " I believe in God, the Father Almighty, who made heaven 
 and earth." It thus opposes Christianity to the faith of the 
 Heathen in many gods. It states also the great essential of 
 Christian theology, that God is our Father. In face, also, 
 of those modern speculators, who declare that Christ, the Son, 
 is the Maker of the worlds, it proclaims that God, the Father, 
 made this earth and heaven. 
 
 It continues, " And I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, 
 our Lord," whose life and death are then briefly narrated. 
 In the severe condensation of this narration is, I think, the 
 greatest deficiency of this creed. I conceive that any man 
 can assent to its statements, who believes, in general, that 
 Jesus Christ was sent to be the Saviour of the world, and 
 believes the substantial truth of the narrative of the four 
 Gospels. As I said last Sunday, the clause, " He descended 
 
 8
 
 58 
 
 into hell," is admitted to be modern in comparison with the 
 remainder of the creed. There is no Scripture which, in 
 any sense, sustains it. It is not, therefore, always read in the 
 creed ; and is the one article which is not a point of union. 
 Those Protestant churches, therefore, which read it, generally 
 explain it away. Thus the Westminster Confession says, " He 
 descended into hell ; " that is, " continued in the state of the 
 dead." Now, in other places, the same confession says, 
 that, at death, the souls of the righteous ascend immediately 
 into the highest heaven ; and, as Jesus was certainly one of 
 the righteous, it appears that, in the use of this article by a 
 Presbyterian confessor, the words, " He descended into hell," 
 mean, " He ascended into the highest heaven." It is more 
 manly to omit a clause than thus to explain it away. 
 
 The statement of the creed, regarding the Holy Spirit, is 
 simply, " I believe in the Holy Ghost." The Christian does 
 not merely believe, as the Epicurean does, that God made 
 the world, and then let it alone. He believes that God is 
 in the world now ; that he governs its motions now. Law is 
 only the name of the methods of his action there. And God 
 comes to every heart now, to direct and inspirit now. Con- 
 science is only the name of the method of his action here. 
 To express this belief, the Christian says, " I believe in the 
 Holy Spirit." 
 
 These are the fundamentals of the creed. Thus does it 
 speak of man's relations to Christ, of Christ's to God, and of 
 man's to God. But the creed goes farther. For the Chris- 
 tian's love for Jesus Christ, and his resolve to follow him, are 
 not a lonely passion and determination : they make an enthu- 
 siasm which ties him to all other men who love Jesus and 
 follow him. That unseen union of them all is expressed by 
 the words, " I believe in the holy catholic church," and " the 
 communion of saints." 
 
 Again : the Christian's certainty that sin makes no impas- 
 sable barrier between him and God is expressed in the words, 
 " I believe in the forgiveness of sins."
 
 59 
 
 His certainty of immortality must be expressed also. And 
 so, in face of the old Pantheistic theory of the East, that, at 
 death, we are absorbed into God, and lose our own conscious- 
 ness ; that we are blocks of ice, floating in the ocean of eter- 
 nity, into which ocean we melt back again, the Christian 
 expresses the other certainty, that he shall possess a separate 
 conscious existence. He shall have, in heaven, some sort of 
 body of his own. Not, of course, that earthly body which he 
 has here : the great Christian scripture of Paul excludes 
 that notion ; so that it is strange that any section of the 
 church ever tried for it. But some body, such as Paul, in 
 paradox, calls a spiritual body, will belong to the soul in its 
 resurrection. 
 
 And, lastly, this resurrection is for eternal life. The 
 Father is eternal ; therefore the children are. And thus the 
 child, who, because he is child, and not creature, can begin 
 his confession by saying, " I believe in God, the Father Al- 
 mighty," can end it by saying, " I believe in the resurrection 
 of the body and in life everlasting." 
 
 Around a centre in which these facts are embodied, revolve, 
 in different orbits, the various systems of the Christian Church, 
 its different worlds and their satellites. In each system, 
 however small, the Christian life shows itself in two forms. 
 It exhibits itself thus in each congregation ; nay, in the two or 
 three gathered together, which is the smallest possible sepa- 
 rate church. In any two lives, it shows itself in two forms. 
 As, in a compass-needle, the northern electricity and the 
 southern take the two ends of the needle, however short; 
 nay, as the smallest atom of magnetized iron has its north 
 pole and its south : so the least organization of Christian 
 believers has its two poles of the divine life. They get dif- 
 ferent names in different bodies ; often they have no names : 
 but, wherever any congregation of Christians is alive, these 
 distinct methods of life appear. The names are not generally 
 successful ; the people to whom they are given seldom like
 
 60 
 
 them : but the distinction between the poles is always obser- 
 vable, even in the smallest meeting of those who most nearly 
 agree. They say, that the day after Sir Humphry Davy 
 had exhibited, for the first time, the magnetic spark as the 
 result of an immense battery, which, with that object, the Eng- 
 lish Government had built for him, Dr. Wollaston stopped 
 a friend in the street, and showed him there the same experi- 
 ment with a little battery, which he had made in a lady's 
 thimble. Just in that way, the great divisions of the church 
 of Christ, which history celebrates and at which theologians 
 are amazed, result from diversities of human character, which 
 you may see when only three persons are sitting together in 
 accidental intercourse, if the conversation turns, simply and 
 truly, upon religion. 
 
 When these diversities of the lives of separate Christians 
 exhibit themselves on the largest scale, we see the two great 
 opposed systems of doctrine which divide the world. We 
 close our survey of the developments of doctrine by contrast- 
 ing these two systems. 
 
 At one pole of opinion, they think that the original plan of 
 this world failed ; that, by the fall of the first man, the origi- 
 nal scheme was vitiated so far, that a new scheme was neces- 
 sary to recover from a wrecked world some fragments of the 
 human family.* 
 
 The opposite pole of opinion holds, that, in the general 
 design of the world, there has never been any failure ; that, 
 on the whole, the course of the world, under God's different 
 revelations of himself, has been steady improvement ; that, 
 indeed, God's system of government always shows advance 
 from lower grades of life to higher ; and that he sent his Son, 
 at last, not to rescue from a wreck a little company of his 
 children, but to communicate to the whole world, to all the 
 children, chance of higher life than they had before. 
 
 * I refer the careful student of this view to a sermon on this subject by my 
 friend Rev. David A. Wasson, " The Universe no Failure."
 
 61 
 
 The first pole of opinion, in consequence of its theory of 
 shipwreck, holds to very accurate descriptions of those who are 
 saved. It classifies them. It even writes down their name's. 
 It defines their opinions ; and, in the phrases of this set of 
 systems, those who are on the raft of safety, while the great 
 body of their brethren gasp vainly and go down, are the elect 
 of God.* 
 
 The opposite opinion, regarding Christ as the minister of 
 new life to a whole world, supposes that everybody gets some 
 of that life, even unconsciously. We know no limit to the 
 radiation of the Star of Bethlehem. Wherever any filament 
 of human life, even in commerce, in education, or in govern- 
 ment, connects any human being with the great manifestation 
 of God made in Galilee and Jerusalem, we believe that that 
 human being begins to get the advantage which, in Christ, God 
 offered to the world. From the savage, who first uses a tool 
 which is the invention of Christian civilization, up to the 
 Florence Nightingale, whom Christ sends to carry the life of 
 Christ to the wounded and dying, we believe the work of the 
 atonement may be traced in every life. In such infinite 
 variety of operations, we find it impossible .to classify or to 
 define. Blessed are they who are closest to him who brings 
 the life, blessed they ; for they gain most of it. But it is 
 not for us to say who gains just enough, or who gains none. 
 Christ came to every living man; and, whoever gains any 
 blessed influence from him, let him gain more. 
 
 True to the first theory, which I have called the theory of 
 shipwreck, the schools which hold to it suppose, at the- end 
 of mortal life, an examination of all who die. They closely 
 restrict those texts which speak of the inevitable judgment 
 passed upon all men ; and this judgment becomes simply a 
 judicial inquiry as to the way in which they conducted them- 
 selves here. Human life is, therefore, with those believers, 
 
 * Compare the tract, " The Life Preserver," No. 431, vol. xiii., in the Ameri- 
 can Tract Society's series.
 
 62 
 
 a scene of trial or probation ; at the end of which, some are 
 accepted as coming up to the standards, while all the rest 
 axe thrown by. 
 
 True, on the other hand, to the other theory, that God 
 lifted up the whole world when he revealed himself, we of 
 the Liberal schools conceive this world as a place of educa- 
 tion. It is not mere trial or probation : it is rather training 
 and elevation. Wherever we leave it, there we go on. 
 And the judgment is not an external decision, which cuts us 
 into two bodies, the lost and the saved : it is the immediate 
 and self- wrought consequence to every man of the powers he 
 has gained, or the sins by which he is enslaved. The world 
 is not a drill-yard, from which recruits are to be selected, if 
 they be tall enough and strong enough for the household 
 troops of the great Sovereign : it is rather the great family 
 school, in which he trains all his children in the accents, the 
 habits, and the duties of life beyond. Those who profit most 
 by its training will be able there to go on most rapidly, and 
 with the more advanced studies and offices of their new 
 career. 
 
 Both systems of opinion acknowledge the present work of 
 God, or the Holy Spirit. But the system which believes in 
 a historical fall, really disbelieving man's ability, gets forced 
 into statements which make the work of the Holy Spirit seem 
 external, arbitrary, and mechanical. It picks out the elect 
 as you might separate sound fruit from rotten, the fruit all 
 unconscious. 
 
 The other system, which does not believe in the fixed and 
 determinate evil of human nature, holding to its capacity for 
 improvement always, and to the identity of its essence with 
 the nature of God himself, expresses the work of the Holy 
 Spirit as an interfusion of the life of God with the life of 
 man. It is not an arbitrary lifting from without : it is a 
 swelling of the pulses of life within. The Spirit does not lift 
 up the soul, as you lift a child in your arms, that it may be as 
 tall as a man : it quickens the soul, that it may grow, and
 
 63 
 
 that, by this divine blessing, the child may become a man. 
 It does not single out one live wheat-grain from the rest, and, 
 without its effort, lay it away ; it does not lift such selected 
 wheat-grains by any ingenious machinery, as a man lifts 
 his corn at harvest-time, by an elevator, to the room in 
 his warehouse which it is fit for : it stimulates the life which 
 is latent in the grain, and feeds it with moisture, and feeds it 
 with air, that it may gain more life and more, and that it may 
 grow itself to bring forth thirty, sixty, and a hundred fold. 
 
 I say, there appears this difference in the language of the 
 two schools. But, on this point, I do not think they are, in 
 fact, so far apart as their zealous disputants make them appear. 
 
 But this habit of language necessarily drives the sterner 
 leaders of the shipwreck hypothesis into statements of the 
 work of redemption, which can be made wholly outside of 
 the place of man in it. Gradually, but certainly, man is 
 removed further away. At last, they begin to talk of the 
 redemption of man as a drama in which he is not even a near 
 spectator. As the statements become more philosophical, an 
 offended God satisfies the justice of a just God by uniting 
 himself with a human form. In this form he can suffer and 
 die, and does so. He sacrifices himself, that this just God 
 may show he is a merciful God, and that, without offence, he 
 may come as the Holy Spirit to save those souls which else 
 are lost. This great drama is performed to satisfy the host 
 of the angels, who else would charge a merciful God with 
 injustice ; and, as they look on, man also beholds the scene, 
 but it is all outside of him. 
 
 The other school of opinion holds neither views nor lan- 
 guage which keep God away from the soul of man. It 
 regards God as always watching and interpenetrating and 
 blessing every soul, even of the darkest savage, or, what is 
 worse, of the meanest child of civilization. It therefore 
 makes all its statements of atonement and redemption centre 
 in the work which is wrought on these several souls. A 
 Saviour who goes about doing good does it for these starving
 
 64 
 
 souls. A Saviour who weeps consecrates their sorrow. A 
 Saviour who dies, dies to bring them to God. A Saviour 
 rising from the dead lifts them to a new life. 
 
 And here, I suppose, is the centre of the distinction between 
 us and high Orthodoxy. We believe the work of the atone- 
 ment was wrought upon men. Calvin certainly regarded it as 
 wrought upon God. Of his admirers in our day, those who 
 partially dissent from him look on it as wrought for the satis- 
 faction of the angelic host. 
 
 At this point, both in the history of the church and in the 
 smaller history of each generation and each man, comes in 
 the separation between the two poles as to the person of 
 Christ. If the whole world is radically turned from God, 
 every heart hermetically sealed against him ; if the work of 
 man's redemption is to be wrought outside of man, and to be 
 the satisfaction of an infinite God, who is justly offended with 
 this defiant race, he who works that work must be, they 
 say, the equal of that God. Can we not, then, in some way, 
 make Christ this equal ? Can we not make him God, as well 
 as the Father he is to satisfy. Here is it, that, in history or 
 in any heart, Trinitarianism is born. 
 
 We, on the other hand, to whom the words, " I believe in 
 God, the Father," really mean, God is my Father, and I am 
 his child, in our belief that his Spirit ranges at will through 
 every heart, and that no sin is obstacle enough to keep him 
 out, we never feel this necessity of lifting Christ to be equal 
 with God. We, therefore, never develop that doctrine from 
 the Gospels. It is confessed on all sides, that, without 
 development, it is not found there. We believe that he is 
 the Son of God, and our Lord. True, in the same sense in 
 which we say the true church is one with God, we can say 
 that Christ is one with God ; but we do not say he is God, or 
 the equal of God. And, finding no necessity to describe his 
 nature, we, who cannot describe our own, we are satisfied to 
 call him, what the creed calls him, " Jesus Christ, his only 
 Son, our Lord."
 
 65 
 
 From a radical difference as to human nature, there thus 
 works its way into history and into separate belief a difference 
 as to the nature of the Saviour. It comes late into theology ; 
 four centuries, as we have seen, having passed before the 
 Orthodox view got " developed " from the Scripture so far 
 as to be denned. It is not the original difference between 
 the two schools, but is rather a subordinate difference which 
 comes in in the unfolding of the two. 
 
 It is not fair to say that either of these great systems is 
 merely the negation of the other. They are based on two 
 different principles : they differ, therefore, at the very start, 
 from each other ; but each has its positive elements, clear to 
 all but bigot eyes. Neither of them is a system of negations. 
 Our system is certainly the system of cheerfulness, energy, 
 action, courage, and positive progress. Let me sum up the 
 grand points around which it crystallizes, and I have done. 
 
 1. "We believe in God, the Father;" meaning God our 
 Father, not simply the Father of Jesus Christ. We believe 
 that every attribute of fatherly love exists in him, in its infi- 
 nite perfection ; and to us, therefore, every system is cer- 
 tainly wrong where any thing militates against his mercy 
 unlimited, his love unbound. 
 
 2. We equally believe, that, literally and completely, we 
 are all his children ; partakers of the divine nature, whenever 
 we choose ; and, whether we choose or no, made in his 
 image. We cannot help the divinity that makes us live. 
 We are immortal ; we are God-born ; and, so far, infinite 
 beings. There is no point in advance of us too high for our 
 aim. 
 
 3. We believe that this world was made by our Father as 
 a school for his children. We use it as he means, when we 
 train ourselves in the divine life as he has revealed it to us. 
 This world is the best school for this training, It is not a 
 bower of roses ; because that would not be the best school. 
 Nor is it a valley of horrors ; for a perfect Father made it 
 for his children. It is the best place he knew how to arrange
 
 66 
 
 for our training in faith, hope, and love ; which is to say, in 
 life eternal. 
 
 4. As that Father watched this school, as he led the world 
 along in its gradual development, he was preparing always 
 for the moment when its life might be enlarged. At that 
 moment, he sent the well-beloved Son into it, who brings to 
 it the divine life ; and all who come to him catch sparks from 
 him of that electric fire. 
 
 5. Whoever catches any thing of this life from the Lord 
 Jesus Christ will gain more of it from the living presence of 
 God, here and now, than he ever had before. This is what 
 one gains from the present Holy Spirit. So inspirited, he 
 will gain more again from the Lord Jesus ; and then, in turn, 
 yet more from the Spirit of truth. Thus the true child is 
 constantly gaining " life more abundantly." If he gets any of 
 the divine life, he may gain more, and he must gain more. 
 This is the test of the true life. An essential feature of it is 
 advance from faith to faith, from hope to hope ; yes, from 
 glory to glory. 
 
 Thus recognizing the constant affiliation of the immortal 
 children with their infinite Father, and his constant care of 
 them, it is impossible for us to regard death as the critical 
 central transaction which it is in the other theology. It is 
 the exchange of a material body for a spiritual body ; but it 
 is not the radical change of the child of God who passes 
 through it. He is God's child, as he was God's child. God 
 did take care of him : God does take care of him. The king- 
 dom of Heaven was at hand to him before this change of the 
 tool he uses. It is at hand in the new body which he uses in 
 the new world. It is impossible for us to look at the moment 
 of that change as the special moment for which we are to 
 direct our plans, or offer our prayers. We begin literally, 
 here, the life which is to be enlarging, and therefore chan- 
 ging, in one way and another, through all time, for ever. 
 
 To such practical guides of life does our theology enlarge 
 the symbols which say, " I believe in God, the Father ; and in
 
 67 
 
 his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord ; I believe in the Holy Ghost ; 
 and I believe in life everlasting." Charge them full with 
 meaning, and let this meaning show itself in life, and they 
 save the church from its only danger ; that is, the danger of 
 going to sleep or of standing still. 
 
 For the church is lost, when it deals with men as if they 
 were only creatures of this world. Leave that to the Epicu- 
 reans, to the sensualists, to the materialists. Let a Christian 
 church deal with men as immortal. It believes in life ever- 
 lasting. 
 
 The church fails again, when, in its philosophizing, it for- 
 gets either side of that threefold work of God from which it 
 is bom. It believes in God, the Father, who made heaven 
 and earth ; and in his only Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord : but 
 if it so believe in them as to shut out the present Holy Spirit, 
 informing us, uplifting us, and enlivening us, here and now, 
 it falls asleep, and almost dies. So sank the church of Eng- 
 land in the beginning of the last century. Or the church 
 may believe, as American Orthodoxy believes, in his Son, 
 Jesus Christ, our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit : but if it so 
 believe these as to suppose that God is not our Father, or that 
 he did not really make for us this world on which we tread ; 
 if it suppose that Jesus is so far God, that the Father becomes 
 a " distant, cold, impalpable effluence," it stumbles into the 
 pit where American Orthodoxy is now groping. From that 
 pit it will emerge only when it sees that a loving Father 
 made all things, and that, therefore, all are very good. Or 
 perhaps the church proclaims God, the Father, only ; and has 
 no great care for the new life sent by his Son, and no sense 
 of his present whisper in the Spirit. Then it stumbles where 
 the English Deists stumbled, and their friends the English 
 Unitarians of the last century. Then it needs to feel the 
 present God as well as the God who stretched out the heavens 
 and the seas ; and it needs to catch enlivenment from that 
 life of Christ, in which, in human effort, God had manifested 
 himself as he had before in the things that he had made.
 
 68 
 
 The church advances to its victory, only when it recogni/ccs, 
 severally, all three of the works of God, the work of crea- 
 tion, the work of redemption, and the present work of his 
 present Spirit. The church is weak, and it falls, when it 
 proclaims only one or two of these, or when it makes one out 
 of all three together. As its victory grows more imposing ; 
 as it ties sin with tighter cords, and holds it back more as- 
 suredly, the more certainly will it see the threefold sources 
 of the fountains of its life ; the more surely will it avoid the 
 robbery of balancing the one of these against the other, or 
 of trying to absorb the one by the other. Its statement of 
 creed will come back to the shortest : " I believe in God, the 
 Father ; and in Jesus Christ, his Son ; and in the Holy 
 Spirit." And, for its paean of triumph, it will not turn into 
 one shrine or another or another, as if God could be jealous 
 of his Son, or as if Jesus could be jealous of his Father; 
 but in the great open temple of his love, when that day of 
 victory comes, not sinking into any monotone of unison, it 
 will pour forth its praises in the triple chord of harmony, 
 
 " Glory be to the Father, 
 AND to the Son, 
 AND to the Holy Ghost, 
 
 As it icas in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. 
 
 Amen."
 
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