"^ 
 
 m 
 
 
 SMiMgMM 
 
 ^30J95?SP!^ 
 
 f|^ 
 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 University of California. 
 
 Gli^T OF" 
 
 Mrs. SARAH P. WALSWORTH. 
 
 Received October, i8g4. 
 Accessions No. S!^'^lJ~(o Class No. 
 

THE SILENCE 
 
 AND THE 
 
 VOICES OF GOD, 
 
 WITH OTHER SERMONS. 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S. 
 
 Late Fellow of Trinity Coll^re, Cambridge ; Master of Marlborough College, 
 and Chaplain in Ordinary to the Qaeen. 
 
 ;iriri7ERsiTT 
 
 #!?% 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY, . 
 
 713 BROADWAY, 
 
 1875. 
 
F'i 
 
 s"in>^L 
 
TO 
 
 THE EEV. CANON WESTCOTT, D.D., 
 
 REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 OP CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 I DEDICATE THESE SERMONS 
 
 WITH CORDIAL GRATITUDE 
 
 AND 
 
 WITH SINCERE ADMIRATION AND ESTEEM. 
 
;UFI7EIlSlT7l 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The three first sermons, which give their title to 
 this little volume, were preached before the Uni- 
 versity of Cambridge, and are published by the 
 request of the Vice-Chancellor. I have added to 
 them a few other sermons in deference to the wishes 
 of those who heard them delivered, and desired to 
 possess them in a permanent form. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 L 
 
 Silence and Voices. 
 
 Pagk. 
 
 1 Sam. iiL 10. Speak ; for ihj servant heareth 11 
 
 n. 
 
 The Voice of Conscience. 
 Bom. ii. 15. Their conscience also bearing witness 89 
 
 m. 
 
 The Voice of History. 
 
 Ps. xlvi. 6. The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms 
 are moved ; but God hath shewed His voice, and the earth 
 shall melt away 
 
 IV. 
 
 What Gk>D Requires. 
 
 MiCAH vi. 6-5. Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, 
 and bow myself before the high Grod ? shall I come before 
 Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old ? Will 
 
 (vii) 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 Faoe 
 the Lord be pleased With thousands of rams, or with ten 
 thousands of rivers of oil ? shall I give my firstborn for 
 my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my 
 soul ? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good ; and 
 what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and 
 to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? 93 
 
 V. 
 
 Avoidance of Temptation. 
 
 Matthew iv. 5-7. Then the devil taketh Him up into the 
 holy City, and setteth Him on a pinnacle of the temple, 
 and saith unto Him, If Thou be the Son of God, cast Thy- 
 self down : for it is written, He shall give His angels 
 charge concerning Thee : and in their hands they, shall 
 bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash Thy foot against 
 a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou 
 shalt not tempt the Lord thy God 107 
 
 VL 
 
 The Conquest over Temptation. 
 
 1 Cor. X. 13. There hath no temptation taken you but such 
 as is common to man : but God is faithful, who will not 
 suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able ; but will 
 with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye 
 may be able to bear it. 125 
 
 VH. 
 
 Wisdom and Knowledge. 
 
 Proverbs iv. 7. Wisdom is the principal thing ; therefore 
 get wisdom : and with all thy getting get understanding. 147 
 
CONTENTS. IX 
 
 vm. 
 
 "Working With our Might. 
 
 Paok. 
 2 Chron. xxxi. 21. And in every work that lie began in the 
 service of the House of God, and in the Law, and in tlie 
 Commandments, to seek his God, he did it with all his 
 heart, and prospered 165 
 
 IX. 
 
 Pharisees and FnBLiOAN& 
 
 Luke xviii. 9. And he spake this parable unto certain that 
 trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and de- 
 spised others 183 
 
 • 
 
 X. 
 
 Too Late. 
 
 Luke xix. 42. If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in 
 this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace 1 
 but now they are hid from thine eyes 207 
 
 XI. 
 
 Prayer, the antidote to Sorrow. 
 
 Luke xxiL 44. And being in an agony, He prayed 225 
 

 I. 
 
 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 " Muto non e, come altri credi, il cielo 
 Sordi siam noi, a cui 1' orecchio serra 
 Lo strepito insolente della terra." 
 
 Speak, for thy servant heareth. — 1 Sam. iii. 10.* 
 
 Man is a mystery to himself, and he is sur- 
 rounded by mysteries unnumbered. In the or- 
 dinary practical business of life, — in the common 
 task of everyday existence, — ^lie finds indeed no 
 difficulty ; and for millions of his race, for millions 
 who spend their days in servile toil, and whose 
 horizon is spanned by the little circle of ordinary 
 interests, — the * Enigmas of Life' would be a 
 meaningless expression. Absorbed in a sordid or a 
 sensual present, they have never wondered whence 
 they came, or whither they are going ; — they neither 
 question of the future, nor dream about the past. 
 It was the daily self-examination of one of the 
 most eminent of saints, Bernarde, ad quid venisti ? 
 " Bernard, for what purpose art thou here ? " but 
 
 * Preached before the University of Cambridge, April 27, 1873. 
 
 (11) 
 
12 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 there are whole races of mankind, to whom, shut in 
 by the narrowing walls of natural dulness or invol- 
 untary ignorance, such questions have never taken 
 shape. And yet these too, my brethren, are our 
 brothers; these too are heirs of our common im- 
 mortality: for these too. the great sun shines in 
 heaven, and the pure dew falls upon the sleeping 
 fields; over these, no less than over ourselves, 
 broods unseen, yet ever present, the atmosphere of 
 Eternity ; and it is as possible, we believe, for these, 
 as for earth's most gifted and most glorious chil- 
 dren, to stand redeemed before the Great White 
 Throne. And why ? — Because, under all diver- 
 sities, the essential condition of mankind is one ; 
 because, whatever we may fancy, God is oh TrpoauTro- 
 XijTZTrjg — no rcspccter of persons ; — because intelli- 
 gence or dulness, knowledge or ignorance, rank or 
 obscurity, wealth or indigence, these, and all other 
 evanescent or artificial distinctions between man 
 and man, are non-existent in the eyes of God, or 
 rather are only existent as conditions which in no 
 wise affect the innermost reality of his being ; — 
 which reality depends on this alone, — whether Man 
 is seeing the face, and holding the hand, and lis- 
 tening to the voice of God, or whether that face 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 13 
 
 has vanished from him, that hand been withdrawn, 
 that voice has first sunk into silence, then faded 
 from memory, then been banished from belief. 
 
 My brethren, in this matter let us not be de 
 ceived. We of this land, of this century, of this 
 University are, by God's grace, heirs of the treas- 
 uries of the world. Nothing profound has been 
 ever thought, nothing enchanting ever imagined, 
 nothing noble ever uttered, nothing saintly or 
 heroic ever done, which is not or may not be ours. 
 For us Plato and Shakespeare thought ; for us 
 Dante and Milton sang ; for us Bacon and Newton 
 toiled ; for us Angelo and Raphael painted ; for 
 us Benedict and Francis lived saintly lives ; for 
 the heritage of our liberty have myriads of heroes 
 perished on the battle-field, and for the purity of 
 our religion hundreds of martyrs sighed away their 
 souls amid the flames. But let us not pride our- 
 selves on this our glorious inheritance, or falsely 
 dream that this alone will avail us anything, or 
 that we are favorite children in the great family of 
 God. Certainly since to us much has been given, 
 from us much shall be required ; but, nevertheless, 
 the poorest and most squalid savage, the most op- 
 pressed and ignorant slave, shares with us a blessing 
 
14 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 and a mystery incomparably more transcendent than 
 any of these, — as much more transcendent as the 
 Bun is vaster and brighter than the earth, — ^in that, 
 to all of -us alike God speaks ; in that for all of us 
 alike, Christ died. To these, no less than to us, it 
 is possible so to live, in obedience to the law of 
 God, that Life, even amid its sin and suffering, may 
 still echo with the distant songs of a lost Paradise ; 
 and so to die, that death may be none other than 
 the house of God, and the gate of heaven. The 
 earthly gifts which make man pride himself above 
 his fellow-man are all perishable ; it is those things 
 only which cannot be shaken that shall remain. 
 " Know" (and, when we read such utterances, and 
 contrast them with the moaning, groping, dis- 
 believing, despairing faithlessness of an increasing 
 mass of modern literature, we seem to be breathing 
 the atmosphere of another and a better world !) 
 " Know that all are equal before the Lord, and that 
 men are born for holiness as the trees of the forest 
 for light." Yes, holiness is the one thing need- 
 ful ; whether there be prophecies, they shall fail ; 
 whether there be tongues, they shall cease ; whether 
 there be knowledge, it shall vanish away ; earthly 
 learning, and earthly endowments are but as the 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 15 
 
 grass, and as the flower : " the grass withereth, the 
 flower fadeth, because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth 
 upon it : the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, 
 but the Word of our God shall stand for ever." * 
 
 The Word of our God — that, and that alone; 
 and man, only as he listens to that Word, only as 
 he is in harmony with that God. The earth may 
 be shattered, and the heavens pass like a shrivelled 
 scroll ; but not the soul of man, which hath become 
 partaker of God's Eternity. The one thing then 
 of real and infinite importance to us, is, not the 
 fruit of our studies, not the success of our efibrts, 
 not the things for which men toil and weary them- 
 selves and sigh, not anything whereby we are dis- 
 tinguished from other men, but this only, which 
 afiects us in common with all other men, whether 
 our ears are quick to hear, and our hearts zealous to 
 obey the voice of God. To do this is safety : not 
 to do this is misery and failure : nay, to do this is 
 life, and to do it not is to make life itself an in- 
 itiation into death. And therefore, for these three 
 Sundays on which it is my high privilege to ad- 
 dress you, I would speak, feebly indeed and un- 
 worthily, but yet earnestly, on some fragment of 
 * Is. xl. 7, 8. 
 
16 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 this great subject — The Silence and the Voices of 
 God. 
 
 And surely the subject is not a needless one. 
 It may be a sad and startling fact, but it is a fact, 
 that, more and more among us, more and more 
 after eighteen Christian centuries, more and more, 
 though History has been full of lightnings and 
 thunderings and voices, yea, though the Word of 
 God has been made flesh and tabernacled among us, 
 there are men, men alas ! of learning and genius, 
 who not only refuse to listen to God's voice, but 
 even deny that God has ever spoken, deny even 
 that He is. Yes, in the dismal advance of atheism, 
 not content to repudiate the Lord that bought, and 
 the Spirit that striveth with them, men are begin- 
 ning openly to debate, in the blindness of their self- 
 sufficiency, whether there be so much as a God who 
 created them. And when we meet with such, what 
 shall we say ? My brethren, the proof of God's exist- 
 ence wholly transcends the region of argument, nor 
 is it any proposition which can be coldly reasoned 
 out by the finite understanding. If indeed a man of 
 base motives and guilty deeds, a blasphemer, a mur- 
 derer, an adulterer, one whose life is an organized 
 battle against the will and law of God, if such a man 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 17 
 
 denies God, of what use is it to say to him with the 
 fervid Father, Et tu tamen eum nosti, dum odtisi ?* 
 Nay rather, must we not say to him that he is too 
 deeply pledged and enlisted against the truth to be 
 convinced of it ? that as he has chosen to live having 
 no hope, and without God in the world, so for him 
 there is no God in the world ? He hath said it in 
 his heart, and who, in such a matter, shall neu- 
 tralize the deadly bias of his will ? what more can 
 we say to him, and what better can we hope for 
 him, than that, if the weak words of man fail to 
 pierce the hardened intellect, God's own power may, 
 through strange Providences, correct and convert 
 His erring child and lead him by the hand into the 
 Temple of a pure Faith through the open portals 
 of a holier and nobler life ? But when a man of 
 whom we know no evil, when a man of whose life 
 Charity is sure that it is honorable and innocent, 
 when such a man says with Diagoras, that there 
 is no God, or with Protagoras that he cannot tell 
 whether there be or not,f then if the invisible things 
 
 * Tert. de testim. Animae, iiL 
 
 t laaoL yap ovx iKdvreg kol Xiyovatv aKOvreg . . . k&v fxr) elvat 
 pfjq o)C Aiaydpa^ kclv ayvoelv tl tprj^ wf lipuraydpaQ. Max. Tyr. 
 Dissert, xvii. ep. 5. Cic. de Nat. Deorum. I. i. Diog. Laert. ix. 51. 
 Arist. Niib. 830, etc 
 
 2 
 
18 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 of Him from the creation of the world be not clearly 
 seen, being understood by the things that are made, 
 even His eternal power and Godhead, — ^if God's works 
 be disregarded, is -it likely that Man's logic will avail ? 
 Can we construct a syllogism, more overpowering for. 
 his conviction than " the starry heavens above ? " can 
 we write a book of evidences more potent to his con- 
 science than "the moral law within?'*' A society 
 for the defence of Christianity may have its own work 
 to do, but will it persuade the unbeliever, if the 
 voices of the sea and the mountains fail.? A man 
 may stand, if he will, amid the mirth and music 
 of a breathing summer day, when all the air is vocal 
 with whispering trees, and singing birds, and the 
 quivering of insect wings, and assert to us, con- 
 temptuously, that all is silent : what can we answer 
 him save that it is silent to the dull deaf ear ? A 
 man may close his eyes if he will till they are blind, 
 and then, standing in the burning noonday, may 
 defy us to prove that there is a sun in heaven : 
 what need we care to say to him in answer, but that 
 we see its splendor, but that we feel its warmth ? 
 What can we say to such, but that which even a 
 heathen said, " God is within thee, and is thy God ; 
 thou carriest God about with thee and knowest 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 19 
 
 Him not."* And may we not say, my brethren, 
 that as for ourselves we know God ; we hear His 
 voice ; we see His face ; His name is on our fore- 
 heads ? In joy He increases and purifies our joy ; 
 in sorrow He heals and sanctifies our sorrows ; in 
 sin He punishes and forgives our sins. And you, 
 self-honoring children of a cold and faithless gen- 
 eration, if such be here, you, who have invested so 
 much of modern thought with the clammy and 
 creeping mist of your uncertainties and your nega- 
 tions, if ye cannot yourselves believe in God, be 
 content at least in your own sad non-belief; and, 
 however much ye may be puffed up by the pride of 
 an imaginary emancipation, try not, in your cruel 
 kindness, in your condescending pity, try not to 
 rob us of Him. Try not to induce us to exchange for 
 your mean and flickering tapers our *^ offspring of 
 heaven first-born ; " or to enlighten our darkness by 
 putting out our sun. Or try your very utmost, but 
 it will be in vain. We too are biassed. We desire 
 not this strong delusion sent us that we should 
 believe a lie. For to lose God is not, as you say, 
 
 * 6 deoc evSov earl /cat 6 vfierepo^ 6ai/i(jv eori debx Tepi^ipeif 
 dhig Kai ayvoeZf. Epict. Dissert, i. 14, 16. 
 
20 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 to be robbed of some ^^ mentis gratissimus error ;*' 
 it is to lose our life. But we cannot lose it. Where 
 you argue, we feel. Where you doubt, we know, 
 Where you hesitate, we are certain. Where you 
 deny, we live. Hold yourselves, if ye will and must, 
 to be the sport and prey of every angry circumstance 
 and every pitiless law, but we will trust in the name 
 of the Lord our God. In the cold, in the storm, in 
 the darkness, prefer if ye will to wander and 
 stumble, without a comforter and without a friend, 
 but we will grope for our Father's hand. And 
 never have we, never hath any man groped for that 
 hand in vain. '^ Sanabiles fecit nationes terrae" 
 Man may have gone astray, but not hopelessly ; he 
 may have been smitten with a leprosy, but it is not 
 incurable. Oh, be it a little misfortune or a mighty 
 agony, be it a childish trouble or a boyish folly, be 
 it a transient disappointment or a lifelong difficulty, 
 be it a sudden dereliction or a besetting sin, ye who 
 have been sad, ye who have been weary, ye who 
 have been sick with discontent or self-disgust, I 
 challenge you to say whether you have ever sought 
 Him and found his promise fail ? whether you have 
 ever sought Him without His holding forth to you 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 21 
 
 in the very bitterness of death a green leaf from that 
 Tree of Life that grows for the healing of the nations 
 in the Paradise of God ? 
 
 So then although, more and more, the icy wind 
 of atheism, stealing through our literature with 
 almost inarticulate whisper, is chilling the hearts 
 of many, yet to counteract it, except by noble ex- 
 amples, except by Christian lives, appears to be but 
 a futile labor. But there are myriads more, who, 
 though they do not doubt the existence of God, yet 
 deny His Providence. An image is before them, 
 but there is Silence. For them He is inanimate 
 as an idol. Clouds indeed and darkness are round 
 about Him, but righteousness and judgment are 
 not the habitation of His seat. The voices of 
 man, — ^voices of blasphemy, voices of anguish, voices 
 of adoration, — ^may break the eternal stillness, but 
 they reach Him not, nor careth He, nor speaketh. 
 How should He care .? How should He speak ? 
 Hath he not abdicated in favor of His own works ? 
 What mean ye by your God, they say to us. What 
 is He but the Universe ? What is He but a vast 
 formless Fate ? What but a dread magnificence of 
 Nature ? What, but a fearful Uniformity of 
 Laws ? What, to take the latest of these philo- 
 
 
22 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 sophic utterances, what but "a stream of tendency 
 flowing through the ages ? " 
 
 And this, my brethren, if it be not unbelief, 
 is just as hopeless and just as comfortless. We 
 cannot trust in a blind destiny. We cannot love an 
 awful uniformity of laws. " A stream of tendency 
 flowing through the ages " may be a very philosoph- 
 ical conception of the God adopted by the insight or 
 the criticism of the nineteenth century, but, unlike 
 "our Father which is in heaven/' it has "no ear for 
 prayer, no heart for sympathy, no arm to save." 
 This God is not our God, nor can it be our guide for 
 ever and ever. And what follows ? If God be not, 
 or be as though He were not, then man is not or is 
 as though he were not. For what then is man ? 
 What but a phantom, a vapor, a nothing, — the 
 shadow of a dream moving amid dreams and shadows ; 
 at best one dying leaf in an illimitable forest ; one un- 
 regarded rain drop in some immeasurable sea ? And 
 so, if life be but a semblance and death but an ex- 
 tinction, and if, amid an infinitude of Time peopled 
 by myriads of existences, and an infinitude of Space 
 teeming with innumerable worlds, man be an atom 
 tossed out of nothingness, and destined to become 
 but dust "blown about the desert or sealed within 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 23 
 
 the iron hills;" — if this be so, — oh, dreary, dreary- 
 gospel of a darkness taking itself for exceptional 
 enlightenment! — if God be nothing, and Man be 
 nothing, what then is Virtue, and what is Truth? 
 Virtue forsooth — though the Prophets and the 
 Apostles and the Martyrs -knew it not — ^is prudence; 
 it is expedience ; it is utility ; it is enlightened self- 
 interest; it is, to use their favorite formula, the 
 "greatest happiness of the greatest number." And 
 Truth is a subjective impression ultimately resolva- 
 ble into particular conditions of the brain. My 
 brethren, who can be moved by these dim abstrac- 
 tions, by these coarse materialisms.? Who is the 
 Lord — if this be He — who is the Lord that I should 
 obey his voice ? All is vanity, delusion, emptiness. 
 All meaning is wiped out of life, as when a man 
 wipeth a dish, wiping and turning it upside down ; 
 "w^ solum certum sit nihil esse certi nee miserius 
 quiequam Jiomine nee superhius." * If we sin, what 
 does it matter to blind infinite Forces which may 
 crush us, but cannot love ? If we repent, what will 
 the iEons and the Spaces care for our repentance ? 
 Are we any better than what the Greek atheist said 
 we were, "dumb animals, driven through the mid- 
 
 * Pliny. 
 
24 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 night upon a rudderless vessel, over a stormy sea ? '^ 
 " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Yes, 
 ther. that bitter description is true, — "Seated be- 
 tween the tomb of his fathers whom he has dis- 
 owned, and the cradle of his children for whom he 
 feels only a bitter pity, man is no more than a mis- 
 erable puppet, condemned to play I know not what 
 lugubrious comedy before I know not what icy spec- 
 tators.'' ••' 
 
 And though these opinions, and such as these, 
 have for the young all the "fascination of corrup- 
 tion," — ^though they have all that destroying and 
 agonizing beauty which the great painter infused 
 into the horror of the Gorgon's countenance, on 
 which men must gaze though it turned them into 
 stone,f — yet God forbid that there should be many 
 of you, my younger hearers, who should have subtly 
 slidden into such treacherous unbeliefs. Yet they 
 spring alas ! from sources far beneath the soil ; and 
 many who have never said " There is no God," have 
 yet found a self-deceiving excuse for sin in " Tush, 
 God careth not for it. He hideth away his face, and 
 shall never see it." And alas ! the very best among 
 us all fails too often to realize, as a guiding thought 
 
 * Montalembert. f The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci. 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 25 
 
 in life, that God does speak, and speaks to us, and 
 speaks distinct messages in voices awfully articulate ; 
 or, even when we believe it with all our hearts, how 
 little are we ready always, in the midnight as in the 
 noonday, to say, with bowed head and folded hands, 
 " Si)eak Lord, for thy servant heareth." The Jews, 
 in a legend that is not meaningless, tell us how, on 
 the Mount, the great law-giver needed no human 
 sustenance, because the subtle harmonies of the uni- 
 verse so filled his soul as to satisfy and sustain his 
 whole being with their heavenly diapason ; but when 
 he came down out of the rolling clouds, the vesture 
 of decay closed his ears and he heard no longer, 
 and hungered for earthly food. Is it not so with 
 us ? Times there are when we hear the voice of 
 God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, 
 yea, when we hear it all the day long ; and there are 
 other times when we too listen with fainting hearts 
 to those who tell us that we have but mistaken the 
 pulse of our own beings for a sound above us ; and 
 that the universe wherein we live has long been 
 smitten with the curse of silence. Oh, they do not 
 lack for arguments ! Around every step of our ca- 
 reer on earth the mystery of the Infinite rises like a 
 wall of adamant, and the limitation of our faculties 
 
26 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 falls like a curtain of darkness. Look, they say, at all 
 this pain and misery and evil ; how is it reconcilable 
 with the Being of a God at once omnipotent and 
 all-loving ? Look at the myriads of mankind who 
 have lived only as the beasts live, and died as the 
 fool dieth. Look at all the evidences of "insane 
 religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, de- 
 testable pleasure and vain hope or vile, in which the 
 nations of the world have lived ; so that it seems as 
 if the race itself were still half-serpent, not yet ex- 
 tricated from the clay, a lacertine brood of bitter- 
 ness, the track of it on the leaf a glittering slime, 
 and in the sand a useless furrow;"* or in lan- 
 guage less full of scorn, "see," they say, "how gen- 
 eration after generation of the young rush sanguine 
 into the arena, generation after generation of the 
 old step weary into the grave ; how the beautiful 
 and the noble are cut off in youth, while the stained 
 and mean drag their ignominy through a long career. 
 Look at the chastisements that do not chasten ; the 
 trials that do not purify ; the sorrows that do not 
 olevate ; the pains and privations that harden the 
 tender heart, but do not soften the stubborn will; 
 the virtues that dig their own grave ; the light that 
 
 * Buskin. 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 27 
 
 leads astray." * Or need we look, they ask, beyond 
 our own little lives ? how often is the folly of a mo- 
 ment the anguish of a life ! In one instant a deed 
 is done, a choice is made. 
 
 And there cotneth a mist, and a weeping rain, 
 And life is never the same again : 
 
 yet no voice from heaven speaks, no angel flashes 
 from the blue. And if the light does not shine, why 
 at least does not the thunder roll ? men do wrong and 
 prosper ; men do right and die in defeat and dark- 
 ness. On the fields which the usurer has wrung 
 from the orphan, the sun shines and the harvest 
 waves; and no midnight dreams haunt the pillow 
 of the seducer, as he lies down to sleep as softly as 
 the innocent and the just. "Blaspheme God as 
 you will ; deny God, if you wish to do so," says one 
 in a recent work of fiction; "do all the evil that you 
 possibly can do, and this sweet moonlight which 
 seems to rise out of the waves, will shine no less 
 sweetly for you than for me, and will conduct us 
 both to our quiet homes." f 
 
 My brethren, I shall not attempt to answer all 
 these objections from the supposed silences of God. 
 
 » Enigmas of Life, "W. R. Grey, p. 210. 
 
 t Alphonse Karr, Le Chemin le plus court, p. 70. 
 
28- SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 God makes no ado: He does not defend himself: 
 He suffers men to blaspheme ; His enemies make a 
 murmuring but He refrains. And as for these, 
 many of them are false generalizations, many are 
 distorted facts, some are acknowledged mysteries, 
 some are wilful perversions of the truth : most of 
 them may be reduced to this — that God's ways are 
 in the sea, and His paths in the great waters, and 
 'His footsteps are not known. But further, much 
 of this, yea, and more than all this, may alas! to 
 those who utter it be awfully true. To men, to na- 
 tions, sometimes almost to a whole world, God is 
 silent : there is no God. Their eyes are blinded, so 
 that they cannot see; their ears closed that they 
 cannot hear. Aye, but it is a penal silence, a re- 
 tributive blindness. They who love the darkness, 
 have it. To those who will not listen, God does 
 
 not speak: Kadibg ovk kSoKifiaaav rbv Qebv Ix^iv h emyviSjaei 
 TrapidoKEV avrovg 6 Oebg elg a6oKifibv vovv.^ Like avCngCS. 
 
 like: there is a terrible resemblance between the 
 retribution and the crime: the choice that will 
 not discern is punished in kind, punished even here 
 by the mind that cannot. And then the whole uni- 
 verse becomes a gulf of silence, a void of blackness. 
 
 * Rom. i. 28. 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 29 
 
 They suffer, and there is no God ; they sin, and there 
 is no Eedeemer ; they despair, and there is no Com- 
 forter. The Jews, who with all their deadly per- 
 versity yet had many a flash of moral insight, knew 
 this truth too well. God had spoken to them, they 
 said, first, face to face as to Adam in Paradise ; then 
 only by the Urim ; then only by dreams ; then only 
 by prophets ; then only by the vague uncertainties 
 of the daughter of a voice, which was but to the few 
 an intelligible utterance, to the many but an articu- 
 late rolling of the distant thunder-peal. And as 
 His voices sounded fainter and fainter, so did He 
 withdraw farther and farther, as the sins of men 
 assumed a deeper and deeper dye, until now He is 
 but in the seventh and inmost heaven infinitely far, 
 and seemed awhile to have left them to their fate. 
 Yes, it is even so in the individual heart of man. 
 God forgotten is God ignored ; God ignored is God 
 doubted of; God doubted of is God denied; God 
 denied, sooner or later is God detested. 
 
 Aye, but on the other hand, to seek God is 
 to find ; and to listen is to hear ; and to hear is to 
 know and love ; so that, to His saints, day unto 
 day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth 
 Knowledge, and "God is a declaratory God, speak- 
 
30 silence' AND VOICES. 
 
 ing in ten thousand voices, and the whole year is one 
 Epiphany, one day of manifestation." 
 
 1. He speaks to us, for instance, in Nature ; 
 and even while I say it, I can imagine at once how 
 impatiently the cynic will sneer at what he will 
 regard as a poetic fancy which has been worn 
 threadbare into a deceptive platitude. It was so 
 in the days of the Preacher, "He hath made every- 
 thing beautiful in his time : also He hath set the 
 world in their hearts so that no man can find out 
 the work that God maketh." And so they cannot 
 even learn that one lesson which to us comes intui- 
 tively and at once, that Nature is but visible spirit : 
 that God is, and that He is a God of Love. Not 
 to the base, not to the sensual, not to the cold cynic, 
 not to the insolent scorner, but 
 
 " Every bird that sings, 
 And every flower that stars the elastic sod, 
 And every breath the radiant summer brings, 
 To the pure spirit is a "Word of God." 
 
 And that you may rather listen I will not state it 
 in my own words, but will quote here the language 
 of one who is dubious about many Christian truths, 
 and I will quote him to shew why it is that, stand- 
 ing with uncovered head and awful reverence in the 
 mighty Temple of the Universe, a believer holds 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. . 31 
 
 that God loves him, and wills his happiness. " The 
 earth," he says, "is sown with pleasures, as the 
 heaven is studded with stars; and when a man 
 has not been happy in life, we do not hesitate to 
 declare that he has missed one of the aims of his 
 existence. The path of the years is paved and 
 planted with enjoyments. Flowers the noblest and 
 the loveliest,— colors the most gorgeous and the 
 most delicate, — odors the sweetest and the subtlest, 
 — ^harmonies the most soothing and the most stir- 
 ring, — the sunny glories of the day, — the paje Ely- 
 sian graces of the moonlight, — 'silent pinnacles 
 of aged snow ' in one hemisphere, — the marvels of 
 tropical luxuriance in another, — the serenity of 
 sunsets, the sublimity of storms, — everything is 
 bestowed in boundless profusion : we can conceive 
 or desire nothing more exquisite or perfect than 
 that which is around us every hour." That then 
 is one revelation, but it is not all : for I add that 
 Nature, which is but the visible translucence of a 
 divine agency working upon material things, reveals 
 to us also that this happiness is attainable only in 
 the path of obedience, — that this "not-ourselves" 
 (if any feel happier by the use of sruch pantheistic 
 abstractions) is a not-ourselves which makes for 
 
32 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 righteousness. ^ Winds blow this lesson to us, and 
 waters roll it, and every leaf is inscribed with it, as 
 those on which the Sybil wrote out her prophecies 
 of old. "I dare to say it," writes a living author, 
 " that because through all my life I have desired 
 good, and not evil ; because I have been kind 
 to many, have wished to be kind to all, have wilfully 
 injured none, therefore the morning light is yet visi- 
 ble to me on yonder hills : " and, " This we may 
 discern assuredly ; this every true light of science, 
 every mercifully granted power, every wisely re- 
 stricted * thought, teach us more clearly day by day, 
 that, in the heavens above and in the earth beneath, 
 there is one continual and omnipotent presence of 
 help and peace, for all men who know that they 
 live, and remember that they die." 
 
 And oh, if any of you, even now, in your early 
 days, have lost this lofty faith, — ^if, amid the glories 
 of the world on which your lot is cast, you feel no 
 " presence which disturbs you with the sense of 
 elevated thoughts," or at least will not acknowledge 
 that that presence is the presence of our God — boast 
 not of this as though it were a sign of your unbi- 
 assed genius, or your intellectual superiority, but 
 rather blush for it, if it be, as it often is, the Neme- 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 33 
 
 sis of a faithless disobedience, — gr, if it be not, if 
 it have come to you in a holy, and a humble, and 
 a self-denying life, at the best weep for it as the 
 worst curse which could have smitten your life with 
 an irreparable blight ; weep for it, if God give you 
 the grace of tears, and pray, aye, even pray to the 
 merciful Father in whom you have ceased to have 
 a living faith, that He may save you from your- 
 selves, and save the life which He has given you, 
 with all its divine possibilities, and all its heavenly 
 aspirations, from being dwarfed and degraded into 
 " a tale 
 
 " Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing.^^ 
 
 2. And this God who thus reveals Himself to 
 
 us in Nature, reveals Himself also in the Moral 
 
 Law. It needed no voice from the rolling darkness, 
 
 it needed no articulate thunder leaping among the 
 
 fiery hills, to persuade mankind that " God spake 
 
 these words and said." For that law was written 
 
 on their hearts, their conscience also bearing them 
 
 witness. The Jews believe that the souls of all 
 
 Jews, for generations yet unborn, were summoned 
 
 from their antenatal home to hear the Deliverance 
 
 of the Fiery Law ; and, when a Jew is charged with 
 3 
 
34 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 wrong by another, he says, " My soul too has been 
 on Sinai." But it is not the souls of Jews only, 
 but of all mankind who have been there. It is 
 there that they learnt that avroSkaiov which is un- 
 changeable but by the Will of God. Nay, not 
 there, but long before the volcanic forces upheaved 
 from the bases of the world those granite crags, 
 whenever first the dead clay began to flush and 
 breathe with the unconsuming fire, then and there 
 were learnt these eternal distinctions of right and 
 wrong : 
 
 oh y&p Ti vvv ye Kg-xdeg, alV ael ttote 
 Cv ravra, Kovdelg oldev e^ brov '(pavrj* 
 
 "In highest heaven they had their birth, neither 
 did the mortal race of men beget them, nor shall 
 oblivion ever put them to sleep ; the power of God 
 is mighty in them, and groweth not old."f The 
 great philosopher of Germany might well doubt of 
 all things, till he had found that their certitude 
 rested on the indestructible basis of duty .J If all 
 else were shattered under our feet, that would still 
 remain. False miracles themselves could not rob us 
 of it. As in that grand legend of the Talmud, the 
 tree might at the words of the doubter be trans- 
 * Soph. Ant. 458. f Soph. Oed. Tyr. 866. seqq. % Kant. 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. " 35 
 
 planted from its roots ; the rivulet might flow back- 
 ward to its source ; the walls and pillars of the con- 
 clave might crack ; yea, a voice from heaven itself 
 might preach another Law, yet nerther rushing trees, 
 nor backward flowing waters, nor bending roofs, nor 
 miracles, nor mysterious voices should prevail against 
 our solid and indestructible conviction, and the 
 Eternal Himself should approve our constancy 
 and exclaim from the mid glory of His Throne, 
 " My sons have triumphed."* 
 
 3. And, once more, God speaks to us in Scrip- 
 ture ; which means that He speaks to us in that 
 revelation of Himself which He has vouchsafed to 
 the lives and hearts of other men. He hath sent us 
 prophets, rising up early and sending. Oh, my 
 brethren. He who hath lost his belief, as thousands 
 by their own impatience and to. their own sorrow 
 have lost it, has been robbed of a very blessed heri- 
 tage. It is true that the Holy Scriptures have 
 been wounded in the house of their friends; it is 
 true that priests and theologians, in their craving 
 for infallible authorities, have thrown up the mere 
 letter of them between the intellect and God, 
 making them an opaque barrier between us and 
 
 * Baba Metzia, 1 59. 
 
36 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 Him of whom they were meant to be the crystal 
 mirror. It is true that men, who were their pro- 
 fessed defenders, have deprived them of their glory 
 and their Universality, reading them under the 
 vail of bigoted misconception, or through the lurid 
 smoke of sectarian hate, making the Gospel of Life 
 and Love and Liberty httle better than "the re- 
 membrancer of damnation, and the messenger of 
 Hell." And yet there, in all its human tenderness, 
 in all its divine wisdom, like the lamp unquenched 
 by the vapors of the charnel-house, for all who 
 will use it rightly, that Holy and Blessed Book is 
 laid up on the inviolable altar of truth and honesty, 
 the eternal protest against the very sins which are 
 committed in its name. Kead it not with slavish 
 superstition, not with a blind and literal Fetish 
 worship, but in loving humility, in intelligent faith ; 
 and you, as myriads of your fathers have done, 
 will find it, if not the only, yet assuredly the best, 
 comfort in sorrow, the best warning in danger, the 
 best hope in death : when all else is bitter, it still 
 shall be sweeter than honey and the honey-comb, 
 and when all else is dross, it shall be as ten times 
 refined gold. 
 
 4 For lastly, let us never forget that it is there 
 
SILENCE AND VOICES. 37 
 
 chiefly — in the history that it records, in the sacra- 
 ments which it perpetuates, — that we hear most 
 clearly of all the Voice of God speaking to us by the 
 divine lips of the Son of Man. It was thus, my 
 brethren, that God revealed Himself, and if we re- 
 ject that revelation, can we hope for any other ? Is 
 not this the very lesson of the New Testament : — • 
 " God, who at sundry times and in divers manners 
 spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, 
 hath, in these last days, spoken unto us by His 
 Son ? " And in the light of that truth, when we 
 look at the ever- widening skepticism of this genera- 
 tion, do not the words of Christ, as recorded by the 
 beloved Apostle, acquire a fresh and terrible sig- 
 nificance : — " Ye have neither heard His voice at any 
 time, nor seen His shape ; and ye have not His word 
 abiding in you : for, whom He hath sent. Him ye 
 believe not ? " Oh ! let us hear that voice of the Son 
 of God, for if we hear it not, we may hear no other ; 
 and they who hear it live. And, when we pour out 
 the impassioned prayer of Luther, " Oh, my God, 
 punish far rather with pestilence, with all the terri- 
 ble sicknesses on earth, with war, with anything 
 rather than that Thou be silent to us," let us re- 
 member that such silence is never that God doth not 
 
38 SILENCE AND VOICES. 
 
 speak, but that we will not hear ; that whether we 
 hear or not, and the degree in which we hear, de- 
 pends upon ourselves ; that he who is of God hear- 
 eth the words of God, and that, if we hear them 
 not, it is because we are not of God. " The secret of 
 the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He shall 
 shew them His covenant;" but "the face of the 
 Lord is against them that do evil, to root out 
 the remembrance of them from the earth." 
 
II. 
 
 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 " Se non che conseionzia m' assicura, 
 La buona compiignia che 1' uom francheggia 
 Sotto r osbergo del sentirsi pura." 
 
 Dante, Inf. xxvin. 115. 
 
 Their conscience also bearing witness. — ^RoM. ii. 15.* 
 
 I SPOKE in my last Sermon, my brethren, of the 
 Silence and the Voices of God; I endeavored to 
 shew that He does indeed speak to us, and speak to 
 us continually, but that we may lose all sense of His 
 utterance, and be wholly uninfluenced by it, as he 
 who lives by the roar of a cataract is often unconscious 
 of its sound : and then I spoke of His voice in 
 Nature, His voice in Scripture, His voice in the 
 Moral Law — above all, the voice wherewith God 
 speaks to us by the lips of the Son of Man. To-day 
 I would speak of another of His voices, of one 
 which illustrates most clearly the methods whereby 
 He deals with us, of that voice which is at once the 
 most personal, the most peremptory, the most pene- 
 trating of all, — the voice of Conscience. 
 
 ♦ Preached before the University of Cambridge, May 4, 1873. 
 
 (39) 
 
 OF THSI 
 
40 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 And here I would say on the threshold that it is 
 no part of my present duty to enter into the battle- 
 field of modern materialism. If any rejoice to fling 
 aside the old and inspiring conviction — that Man, 
 " so noble in reason, so infinite in faculty, in form 
 and moving so express and admirable, in action so like 
 an angel, in apprehension so like a god,'' originated 
 because God made him out of the dust of the earth 
 and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life — 
 and to take in exchange for it the humiliating and 
 wholly undemonstrable hypothesis that he came 
 into being by some accident of development, I know 
 not how, from some film of protoplasm, I know not 
 where — still Man is, and the facts of his inner being 
 remain unchanged. Such beliefs, if they can be 
 called beliefs, have indeed spread with a rapidity out 
 of all proportion to the cogency of the arguments by 
 which they are supposed to have been established. 
 The great thinker who originated the theory, and 
 whose name it is impossible to mention without 
 admiration and respect, has distinctly declared him- 
 self against an atheistic materialism ; and it has 
 been left for his violent and reckless followers to 
 maintain, to the outrage of all sense and of all relig- 
 ion, that Man sprang from a single primordial 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 41 
 
 moneres which was self-generated and self-evolved, 
 and that therefore the belief in a Creator is unscien- 
 tific and exploded. Enough of such : but even in 
 England it has been thought a necessary sequel of 
 this belief in Evolution to argue that Man, thus 
 developed, proceeded to develop a moral sense out 
 of social instincts fortified by hereditary trans- 
 mission, and it is probable that very many even 
 of my younger hearers have read that celebrated 
 book on the Descent of Man, which professes — to 
 quote the author's own words — to "approach the 
 conscience exclusively from the side of natural his- 
 tory." 
 
 Well, if any man be content so to think, let him 
 so think, and be fully persuaded in his own mind. 
 The day has not yet arrived when it must be neces- 
 sary for a Christian minister to preface his simplest 
 teaching by a fresh proof of those grand truths which 
 for well-nigh two millenniums have been the common 
 heritage of advanced humanity. But since it is 
 common in these times to try and represent the 
 clergy as wilfully shutting their eyes to all recent 
 investigation, I only allude to these forms of scien- 
 tific assertion and negation, to shew that what 
 is called the silence of ignorance may sometimes be 
 
42 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 the silence of repudiation, sometimes even the reti- 
 cence of scorn. 
 
 In point of fact, however, no such theories will 
 affect my main ohject. It is enough for me that 
 even the most advanced materialist admits that 
 whether, " approached exclusively from the side of 
 natural history/' or not, there is such a thing as 
 Conscience and that its voice is heard in the soul of 
 man ; and I shall appeal to-day to nothing abstruser 
 than these admitted facts of common experience. 
 
 Nor, again, is it my purpose to enter on any of 
 the subtler questions of Moral Philosophy, or to 
 reargue the ten-times-argued question whether or no 
 Morality mean anything more than a system founded 
 on social utility. In the Christian Church at least 
 of a Christian University, it may, I suppose, even in 
 this 19th century of illumination, have some weight 
 that the word "usefulness does not once occur in the 
 New Testament," nor was " Measure all things by a 
 nice calculation of advantages," the language of Sinai, 
 nor did our Lord and Master Jesus Christ ever place 
 self-interest, however enlightened, on the throne of 
 conscience, when He taught us the will of His Father 
 in Heaven. Nor will any of the ordinary defini- 
 tions of conscience here serve me. To call it 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 43 
 
 "reflex approbation, or disapprobation," — to de- 
 scribe it as "an imitation within ourselves of the 
 government without us," — to define it as "man, 
 present to himself in his ethical conduct, and the 
 object of his own approval or disapproval,"— may 
 admirably illustrate the truth that when the wisest 
 of the ancients defined virtue to be " a following of 
 Nature," they were well aware that Man is a being 
 of a mixt world, related to two worlds, the heav- 
 enly and the earthly,* and that though there be 
 within us higher and lower principles of action, our 
 nature is in reality represented by the higher and 
 spiritual, not by the lower or animal, so that strong 
 passions mean nothing more than weak reason. 
 But alas! how little do such considerations touch 
 the heart ! how fully may they be admitted by 
 the intellect, while they are ignored by the life ! 
 how few of the philosophers who held them were 
 unaware of their practical impotence ; or, as they 
 themselves so sadly and so frankly confessed, were 
 enabled, by the intellectual strength of these con- 
 victions, to approach, even distantly, to the glori- 
 ous ideal of a holy or a noble life. No, this pale 
 
 * Anastas. Sinait. De Tiominis creatione (quoted by Harless, 
 Christian Mhics, p. 49). 
 
44 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 moonliglit of an utilitarian or rational morality is 
 not sufficient to guide the stumbling footsteps of 
 man up the flinty or uphillward road : no misty 
 meteors of a calculating philosophy, no feeble glim- 
 merings of a developed instinct, no imaginary light 
 of a fictitious faculty, will guide him there : nothing 
 will save him from the precipices and pitfalls there, 
 but that spirit of man which is the Lamp of God 
 within him ; nothing less than the full sunlight of 
 religion, yea, the Sun of Eighteousness risen on the 
 dark soul with healing in His wings. 
 
 An eminent and good man who lived to do 
 much courageous work in the world, which to this 
 day is bearing good fruit on the Western Continent, 
 tells us a reminiscence of his childhood which will 
 exactly illustrate my point of view. " When I was 
 a little boy," he says, "in my fourth year, one fine 
 day in spring my father led me by the hand to a 
 distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home 
 alone. On the way I had to pass a little pond, then 
 spreading its waters wide ; a rhodora in full bloom, 
 a rare flower which grew only in that locality, at- 
 tracted my attention, and drew me to the spot. I 
 saw a little tortoise sunning himself in the shallow 
 water at the roots of the flaming shrub. I lifted 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 45 
 
 the stick I had in my hand, to strike the harmless 
 reptile.; for though I had never killed any creature, 
 yet I had seen other boys do so, and I felt a disposi- 
 tion to follow their wicked examples. But all at 
 once something checked my little arm, and a voice 
 within me said clear and loud * It is wrong ! ' I 
 held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emo- 
 tion, the consciousness of an involuntary but inward 
 check upon my actions, till the tortoise and the 
 rhodora both vanished from my sight. I hastened 
 home, and told the tale to my mother, and asked 
 what it was that told me ' it was wrong.' She 
 wiped a tear from her eye, and taking me in her 
 arms said, ' Some men call it conscience, but I pre- 
 fer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. 
 If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer 
 and clearer, and always guide you right ; but if you 
 turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out, 
 little by little, and leave you in the dark and with- 
 out a guide. Your life depends on heeding that 
 little voice.' She went her way,'' he continues, 
 "careful and troubled about many things, and 
 doubtless pondered them in her motherly heart: 
 while I went off to wonder and think it over in my 
 poor childish way; but I am sure no event in my 
 
46 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 life has made so deep and lasting an impression on 
 me." Wise mother ! Happy son ! It is from, such 
 mothers that heroes spring; it is thus that are 
 trained the saints of God. When the greatest of 
 modern philosophers * exclaims, " Duty, won- 
 drous power, that workest neither by insinuation, 
 flattery, or threat, but merely by holding up the 
 naked law in the soul, extortest for thyself reverence 
 if not always obedience, — thou before whom all 
 appetites are dumb however secretly they rebel, 
 whence is thine origin?" — to such a question the 
 Christian at least will answer without a moment's 
 hesitation, and with all his heart, " Thine origin is 
 God." The power of the conscience is simply para- 
 lyzed apart from the belief in God. If it be not, as 
 St. Bernard calls it the candor lucis aeternae et 
 speculum Dei majestatis, — if it be not man's con- 
 sciousness of his relation to a Higher Being, whose 
 Law conditions the tendencies of his will, — it is 
 nothing. Apart from God that moral law loses its 
 meaning. It may be true, that the Ten Command- 
 ments, written on our hearts, obeyed in our lives, 
 are sufficient to drive from us every assault of evil, 
 but then they must he commandments ; they must 
 
 * Kant 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 47 
 
 not be a nice balance of advantages, but the living 
 utterance of a Father and a God. 
 
 " Hear these three things," said a Jewish Kabbi, 
 " and thou shalt eschew transgression ; remember 
 what is above thee, the All-seeing Eye, and the All- 
 hearing Ear, and that all thy actions are written in 
 a book." * But, separated from the thought of 
 God, the conscience becomes an idle enigma. If it 
 do not spring from Him, if it may not appeal to 
 Him, if it cannot testify of Him, it has nothing to 
 say and nothing to command. But herein lies its 
 true supremacy, that it is the voice of that which 
 even the heathen called " the God within us." It 
 is in this sense that St. Paul used conscience ; it is 
 in this sense alone that I can understand or speak 
 of it. 
 
 2. We have seen then already that the first 
 function of the conscience is to warn. And herein 
 is much of its mystery, for it seems to be ourselves, 
 yet not ourselves ; inseparable from us, yet no part 
 of us; speaking to us with gentle and divine ap- 
 proval, or with terrible and imperious authority, 
 yet with no inherent power to determine our actions. 
 Wholly beyond our .mastery, it stands towards 
 * Firke Aboth, ii L 
 
48 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 •moral evil in the same relation that pain holds 
 towards disease. When anything is wrong with 
 our bodies, when any function is disturbed, when 
 any mischief is latent, pain comes, whether we will 
 or no, to warn us beneficently of our danger. Nor 
 is it otherwise with the soul. All evil springs from 
 evil thoughts, "out of the heart proceed evil 
 thoughts," — evil thoughts, and then all the long 
 black catalogue of sins you know. And since an 
 evil thought is, to the soul, a disordered function, 
 an undeveloped disease, a latent leprosy, — when it 
 is lurking there, the pang of an alarmed conscience 
 gives us timely warning. Vain is it to plead that 
 this is but a thought; "Guard well," it says, "thy 
 thoughts : for thoughts are heard in heaven." It 
 was a recognized principle of Koman law that 
 cogitationis poenam nemo patitur ; but this is not 
 the principle of that sole legislation which had an 
 origin immediately divine. In every other code 
 that the world has ever seen or known, you will find 
 no prohibition of evil thoughts, but you will find 
 that prohibition, alike in the first and in the last of 
 those Ten Commandments which are the code of 
 Him, who alone searcheth and knoweth the heart 
 of man. Yea, in the code of heaven, a bad thought 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 49 
 
 indulged is a bad deed committed. Oh if we listen 
 to this warning from the first, if we thus ohstamus 
 prmctpiis, how strong, how noble, how impregnable 
 to the assaults of evil, may the soul become ! For 
 there are but two ways by which men grievously 
 fall, the one is by some sudden access of tempta- 
 tion, the other by the subtle corrosion of some 
 besetting sin. But into the latter, if we be true to 
 that voice within us, we cannot fall, because inno- 
 cence is nature's wisdom, and conscience faithfully 
 cherished makes it more terrible, more difficult to 
 yield than to resist : and if, on the other hand, evil, 
 unable thus to surprise us by the noiseless and sinu- 
 ous gliding of the serpent, bounds suddenly upon us 
 with a wild beast's roar and leap, even then it will 
 not master us, because then our habits and our 
 impulses, being pure and true, shield themselves 
 instantly under the strong breastplate of righteous- 
 ness, and the reiterated choice of what was good has 
 prepared the whole instinct of our nature, the whole 
 bias of our character, for resistance to the sudden 
 sin. 
 
 Whatever be the shape that the vile allure- 
 ment takes, the spirit within us thrills its glad 
 response to the noble utterance of the stainless 
 4 
 
50 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 Hebrew boy, " How can I do this great wickedness, 
 and sin against God ? " 
 
 Yes, my brethren, this is the state at which we 
 all should aim : 
 
 " This is the happy -warrior, — this is he 
 Whom, every man at arms should wish to he." 
 
 For when we have attained this state, or are 
 attaining to • it, then we are happy. Then the 
 eye being single, the whole body is full of light. 
 We reverence ourselves ; films fall away from our 
 eyes; we know that righteousness tendeth to life; 
 we cherish in our consciences the eternal protest 
 against everything that can degrade and ruin us, 
 the eternal witness that everything sweetest and 
 noblest is within our reach. It is one of the 
 very finest and deepest sayings of the great sage 
 of China that " Heaven means Principle." With 
 him, with all good men who have ever lived, 
 this was the solid result and outcome of expe- 
 rience. Other sources of happiness are but as 
 transient gleams of sunlight, but this is life eternal ; 
 other blessings fade as the flowers fade, but 
 this is an everlasting foundation. How full is 
 all Scripture of this one lesson! With what a 
 glow of belief, with what a force of conviction, 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 61 
 
 do those divine utterances crowd upon us, 
 *' Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord: 
 oh well is he, and happy shall he be." " The 
 Lord ordereth a good man's going, and maketh 
 his way acceptable to himself." " Thou wilt shew 
 me the path of life; in Thy presence is the ful- 
 ness of joy ; at Thy right hand there are pleasures 
 for evermore." ,^ 
 
 3. And why, my brethren, do we not all 
 live to inherit this blessedness of which we are 
 all the rightful heirs ? Because, alas ! we have 
 not all, and not always, listened to that voice 
 of conscience, and not to listen to it is misery; 
 for when it ceases to warn, it begins to accuse. 
 The angel who went forth so gently and tenderly 
 at first, to stop us on the path of ruin because 
 our way was perverse, assumes the drawn sword 
 and gleaming robe of the Avenger. And if, in 
 spite of this, we drive with furious passion over 
 the opposing power, as the wicked queen of 
 legend, urging her chariot over the murdered 
 Dody of her sire, agitated by all the furies, 
 drove through the city with her chariot-wheels 
 all dyed in blood, — then, shamed for a time, and 
 defeated, and defied, conscience, when it speaks 
 
52 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 again, speaks in an altered tone; no longer in 
 tones of calm and love, but of sadness and re- 
 proach, of scorn and menace, of wrath and fear 
 And then begins that misery of a concordia dis- 
 cors, that displicentia sui,^ that jangled dissonance 
 in what should be the sweet music of men's 
 lives. " The good that I would I do not, but 
 ,the evil that I would not that I do." We 
 know the story of how the great king before 
 whom the preacher had been contrasting the 
 misery of these two lives in one, exclaimed, "/ 
 know those two men. " And indeed this loss of 
 all unity in our being, this miserable dishar- 
 mony in life, this changing of an inseparable 
 companion from a loving friend into a bitter 
 enemy, this disintegration and dissolution of an 
 existence dragged on in a weakness that still 
 yields while the moral sense would still resist, 
 — ^the fact that a man should know what he is, 
 and scorn what he is, and yet be what he is, 
 — the sense of an ideal missed, of an opportu- 
 nity wasted, of all life shrivelled into a miserable 
 "if" and an empty "might have been;" — this 
 is the very essence of human misery. It is man 
 * Sen. De Tranq. An. ii. 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 53 
 
 without God, and therefore man without joy, or 
 peace, or hope. All Scripture is full of it. The 
 sinner hides himself in vain amid the garden 
 trees, and the sounding footstep follows him, 
 and the awful voice asks, " Where art thou .^ " 
 He has murdered some mortal body, or worse 
 perhaps, some immortal soul, and it asks, "Where 
 is Abel thy brother.?" He has indulged in some 
 secret sneer, or unuttered blasphemy, and setting 
 aside his vain denials, it sternly says, " Nay, but 
 thou didst laugh." He has in his selfish greed 
 made excuses for disobeying some positive com- 
 mand, and it asks, " What meaneth this bleat- 
 ing of sheep in mine ears ? " He has stolen 
 what is not his own, and it convicts him with 
 the accusation, " Tell me now what thou hast 
 done." He has committed deadly and undis- 
 covered crimes, and it cries with uplifted voice 
 and threatening finger, "Thou art the man." 
 He has been profane and blasphemous, and while 
 his knees knock together, and his cheeks grow 
 pale, in letters of flame it writes, " Mene, Mene, 
 Tekel " upon his walls. Why proceed ? is not 
 all history, is not all experience, full of these 
 haunted men, men pursued by guilt unrepented 
 
54 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 of, men for whom the whole earth is of glass; 
 men who thought that when the crime was over 
 they had done with it, but who have found 
 that it has not done with them; men who fan- 
 cied that they had but written their sins on 
 sand, and find them engraved on their own sad 
 memory as with a pen of iron on tablets of 
 brass, and perpetuated in the eternal records 
 "like a crack in the living rock" for ever? No 
 power, no rank can screen them. On the very 
 judgment-seat they are judged. Pilate may wash 
 his guilty hands, but what river can wash his guilty 
 heart ? Felix sits on his pompous tribunal, with 
 the scowling lictors on either side, but as Paul 
 reasons of temperance and judgment, Felix trembles. 
 Henry of Germany cowers before the aged Pontiff, 
 who bids him appeal to God's judgment to clear him 
 of his crimes. Sigismund is on his royal seat before 
 all the princes and prelates of his empire, but when 
 the humble priest whom he is about to condemn to 
 the stake reminds him of his broken oath, there, in 
 the presence of them all, he cannot repress the 
 deep blush which dyes his cheek with guilty crim- 
 son. There is no peace, saith my God, to the 
 wicked. How can it be peace, . 
 
THE VOICE OP CONSCIENCE. 55 
 
 " Ncxjte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem ? ** * 
 
 How can it be peace, 
 
 " to ever bear about 
 A silent court of justice in himself, 
 Himself the judge and jury, and himself 
 The prisoner at the bar ever condemned, — 
 And that drags down his life ? " f 
 
 No ! conscience is her own avenger. " To groan 
 too late over a lost life," J oh what a misery is 
 there ! From every age, from every literature, from 
 every history, one might establish it. If the tes- 
 timony of Scripture be suspected or despised ; if 
 those magnificent chapters in the Wisdom of Sol- 
 omon be thought too akin to Scripture to be ac- 
 cepted, shall I summon the unsuspected, the natural 
 testimony of Pagan witnesses ? Shall it . be the , 
 great poet-philosopher, Lucretius .? § " The scourge, 
 the executioner, the dungeon, the pitchy tunic, — 
 even though these be absent, yet the guilty mind 
 with anticipating terror applies the goad, and 
 scorches with its blows." Shall it be the great 
 epic poet who places the Ultrices Curae in closest 
 proximity to the mala mentis gaudia ? Shall it 
 be the youthful satirist, who asks, " Is the moan- 
 ing of him who is tortured in the Bull of Phalaris ; 
 
 * Juv. Sat. xiii. 198. f Tennyson, Sea Dreams. 
 
 . t Lucr. iii. 1024 § Ibid. 
 
56 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 is the sword that glitters a-tremble over his flushed 
 neck from the gilded fretwork, half so terrible, as 
 
 *Imus, 
 Imus praecipites quam si sibi dicat, et intus 
 PaUeat infeUx ? ' " * 
 
 Or once more, shall it be his fellow-satirist, who 
 exclaims, "Why shouldst thou think that they 
 have escaped, whom the inward consciousness of 
 guilt agitates with amazement and scourges with 
 the soundless lash, occuUum quatiente animo 
 tortore flagellum ? " f 
 
 4. But bad as this is, there is something 
 worse than the warning, worse than the accusing, 
 worse than the gnawing, — it is the dead conscience. 
 "It is wonderful to observe," says a great bishop 
 of our church, "what a great inundation of 
 mischief will in a very short time overflow all 
 the banks of reason and religion. Vice first 
 is pleasing, then it groweth easy, then fre- 
 quent, then habitual, then confirmed: then the 
 man is impenitent, then he is obstinate; then he 
 resolves never to repent, and then" — I pause 
 at language which the 17th century was less 
 afraid than the 19th is to use — then comes what 
 comes hereafter. Yes the timid becomes first 
 
 * Pers. 8ai. iii. 39. f J^v. Sat. xiii. 195. 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 57 
 
 the wilful, then the willing sin : novepdc, aTCka 
 TovTo niv Kot jSoilETac.^* For what was first tampered 
 with, then yielded to, then persisted in, is next jus- 
 tified; and last, oh horrible, boasted of: aye in 
 whole philosophies, in whole literatures, shame- 
 lessly glorified. And this is the stage worse 
 than the gnawing, for this is the murdered con- 
 science. When there is any hope for a wound 
 it continues to give pain: but when it has mor- 
 tified the pain ceases. Even so ceases the throb 
 of a conscience which is sleeping, which is defiled, 
 which is dead, which, in the powerful image of 
 St. Paul, is "seared with a hot iron." For 
 either its voice grows fainter and fainter, as the 
 voice of temptation grows louder and louder, or 
 becoming hateful by its reiterated condemnations, 
 it so inflames the sinner's anger, that he de- 
 liberately silences, chokes, murders it. And then 
 he is let alone. His conscience will cease to 
 torment him. And then he may go on undis- 
 turbed for years and years, filling to the brim 
 the cup of his iniquity : for years and years he 
 may be dishonest, a drunkard, an adulterer, a 
 
 * Aristoph. Eq. 1281. 
 
58 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 blasphemer : and never once hear again the voice 
 that he has stifled. Nay more, he may, such is 
 the mystery of iniquity, and because it is God's 
 decree that "the more we know of sin, the less 
 shall we feel its real nature," * he may actually 
 substitute for conscience another voice ; a voice 
 not true but lying, not faithful but traitorous ; 
 a voice which, answering him according to his 
 idols, dissimulates the taunting mockery with 
 which it cries, " Go up to Eamoth Gilead and 
 prosper;" a voice that palliates, that excuses, 
 that encourages, that whispers continually, " Peace, 
 peace," when there is no peace. And this is 
 the naost perilous of all. It comes to all in 
 proportion to their guiltiness, in proportion to 
 their insincerity. I have known it alas, come 
 even in early years. And it is wellnigh be- 
 yond man's cure. Woe to the traveller who 
 turns . his back upon the guiding star, that 
 
 * This is a profound remark of Mr. J. Martineau. This con- 
 iition of the soul is called cnToViduaig by Epictetus, i. e. " moral 
 petrifaction." 
 
 It is the aSSKtfiog vovg (Kom. i. 28), the Tzupucig r^g KapSlag, hest 
 described by St. Paul in Eph. iv. 17-19. See Harless, Christian 
 Ethics, E. Tr. p. 92. 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 59 
 
 he may plunge after the delusive meteor which 
 flickers hither and thither over the marsh of 
 death. Woe to the ship whose pilot, disregard- 
 ing the friendly beacon, chooses rather to steer 
 by the wrecker's deadly fire. And woe, woe, 
 double woe to that unhappy soul, which wilfully 
 accepts the suggestions of sin and Satan, as 
 though they were the pure, the unerring, the 
 awful voice of God ! * 
 
 5. For in this state, with a dead conscience, 
 the man himself may die, and perhaps often 
 does die, his soul as stupefied as the senses of 
 the traveller who lies down to sleep his last 
 sleep on the fields of snow. But sometimes the 
 task of the conscience is even yet not over, and 
 even the murdered starts up once more as the 
 terrified, the awakened conscience. Yes, some- 
 times for a man's punishment only, but some- 
 times also by Grod's infinite mercy, that a man 
 may be saved by that fiery agony, the dead 
 conscience leaps up into angry and terrible life 
 once more, casts off the cerements which years 
 
 * ao<l>ia kiriyeiog, ifwxtn^, iaifiovi66?jC' Jam. iii. 15. aapKLKij. 2 
 Cor. i. 12. 
 
60 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 of sin have bound around it, and starts, as tlie 
 ghost of some murdered victim might start from 
 the tomb, to upbraid its murderer.* Some ter- 
 rific calamity, some overwhehning bereavement, 
 loss, failure; some arrow of God winged with 
 conviction ; some lightning flash, shattering to 
 pieces the smooth path of life, cleaving its way 
 irresistibly into the stony heart, hurling to the 
 ground with a great crash the idols within it; 
 worst of all, some sin becoming the natural pun- 
 ishment, the inalienable possession of sin, some 
 "tempting opportunity" meeting the "susceptible 
 disposition," and leading to some great crime 
 which, though it be but the legitimate issue of a 
 long train of lesser sins, yet startles a man into 
 a recognition of his own awful wickedness, and 
 filling the dark chambers of the heart with a 
 glare of unnatural illumination, reveals the moral 
 law once more in all its insupportable majesty, 
 — something of this kind wakens even the dead 
 conscience as with the trump of the Archangel 
 and the Yoice of God. " Perfecto demum scelere, 
 
 * " It may be obscured," says TertuUian, " because it is not 
 God : extiaguished it cannot be, because it is from God." {Be 
 Anim. xlL) 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 61 
 
 magnitudo ejus intellecta est.'' * By that great 
 visitation conscience is awakened. She lights the 
 torch of memory at that lurid glare, and waves it 
 round the painted imagery of the desecrated soul 
 She is no longer the gentle friend, the soft-voiced 
 monitress, the kind reprover ; but she is the ex- 
 ecutioner with uplifted voice and outstretched 
 arm ; the Erinnys with snaky tresses and shaken 
 torch. The man's name is no more Pashur, hut 
 Magor Missabib, " terror on every side." And 
 then the maddened soul, tormented in this flame, 
 rushes forth into the night; too often, alas, like 
 Judas into the midnight of remorse and of de- 
 spair, — into the cell of the madman and the 
 grave of the suicide ; but sometimes also, blessed 
 be God, into the night indeed like Peter, but it 
 is to meet the morning dawn.f Then though the 
 Angel of Innocence have long vanished, the Angel 
 of Repentance takes him gently by the hand. 
 Gently it leads the brokenhearted penitent before 
 the tribunal of his better self, and there his 
 
 * Tac. Ann. xiv. 10. Cf. 
 
 Quid fas 
 
 Atque nefas tandem incipiunt sentire, peractis 
 
 Criminibus. Juv. Sat. xiii 238. 
 f Lange, Leben Jem,. 
 
62 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 oli sin, his old weakness, his old pride, his 
 old will is doomed to that death of godly sor- 
 row which even at the eleventh hour may issue 
 in a new and nohler life, and may once more 
 change conscience from a source of terror into a 
 source of perfect and inalienable peace. 
 
 6. But how if the conscience never does awake ? 
 How if the sinner die rich and increased with goods, 
 and there be no bonds in his death, but only at the 
 evening-tide when there is no light, there peals 
 from heaven, too late, the dread and sudden voice, 
 " Thou fool, this night," and so his dream be 
 broken ? What is a dream, my brethren ? Is it 
 not to take the substance for the shadow, and the 
 shadow for the substance ? the transient for the 
 real, and the real for the transient ? time for eternity, 
 and eterjiity for time.^ Such a dream is the life 
 of sin. And how if it be broken — ^not by calamity, 
 not by repentance, not even by remorse — ^but by the 
 cold clear light of eternity flashed suddenly upon the 
 closed and dreaming eyes ; revealing all things in their 
 true proportions, revealing all things in their absolute 
 reality ; revealing all things " in the slow sure his- 
 tory of their ripening ; " revealing all things as they 
 are, not under the glamour of sensual illusion, not 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 63 
 
 under the colorings of a treaclierous philosophy, not 
 through the distorting mists of a self-deceiving skep- 
 ticism : but as they are under the pure Eternal Eyes 
 of the Living God ? A man has been known in his 
 dreams to walk in perfect safety on the edge of 
 a giddy precipice: but let something disturb that 
 unwholesome slumber, — some light unknown to -the 
 sunless cavern of his own dreaming phantasy, some 
 voice which is not a mere dull echo of the impres- 
 sions from within, — there is a sudden start, a wild 
 scream, a white robe whirling through the air, and 
 he is killed. The dream ends, but it ends in death : 
 the waking certainty begins, but it begins in the 
 Eternal World. Ah me, so may it be when the 
 chill dayspring of eternity falls first in all the clear- 
 ness of its agonizing reality upon the glaring night of 
 man's illusions ! " Like a dream when one avaketh !" 
 were it not better to awake to reality, to be sen- 
 sible of peril and folly, before the dream and the life 
 are o'er ? 
 
 I have been speaking, my brethren, before a 
 great University, and some may think that I have 
 spoken on too simple and plain a theme. But in 
 an age when so many deny that God is, and so 
 many more that He is the rewarder of them that 
 
64 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 diligently seek Him, is it indeed too simple and 
 too plain a theme, to call attention to one of His 
 Voices, to appeal for its reality to the facts of man's 
 experience ? If, as a recent writer has truly said, 
 conduct he two-thirds of life, — if respecting so much 
 that occupies even a good man's thoughts we should 
 rather pray, " Oh turn away mine eyes lest they he- 
 hold vanity, hut quicken Thou me in Thy law," — 
 if the audience of a great University he, after all, 
 composed mainly of youthful souls engaged, as I 
 believe that all of you are engaged, in the hard 
 struggle of life, and the hard endeavor to do that 
 which is right in the sight of the Lord, — and if, 
 again, the helping of one immortal soul to gain the 
 victory over an evil self, and fulfil the true law of 
 its being, be a better and a greater thing than to 
 construct ten thousand ingenious Theodicaeas, or 
 subtle systems of moral Philosophy, — then are 
 these thoughts too simple ? Are they simpler than 
 Christ preached to the multitude on the green hill- 
 slopes, or John on the scorching strand ? The lan- 
 guage of apology sounds ill on the lips of a minister 
 of Christ. Better say frankly and at once that you 
 must look for no feats of intellect or sophism here. 
 The religion we preach was the religion, not of the 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 65 
 
 disdainful or the cynical, but of the poor and the 
 simple-hearted. It was proclaimed in the loneli- 
 ness of the desert and nursed in the squalor of the 
 catacomb : the sunrise of its first day flushed over 
 the manger, and the sunset of its last will fall red 
 upon the cross. To you therefore I speak not as wise, 
 or learned, or subtle, or profound, but as a human 
 soul to human souls, as a dying man to dying men. 
 The wind of heaven blows through the frail and 
 feeble reeds, and the voice of the preacher may to 
 some ear be the voice of God to-day. And if but 
 one here feel that on his soul is the burden of in- 
 iquity or the stain of guilt, if he be suffering the 
 conscience-stricken misery of a disintegrated and 
 self-despising life, then let me point him to the foot 
 of that cross where alone the burden can be re- 
 moved, and the stain be washed away. While you 
 are impenitent I know well that you cannot be 
 happy, but rather like the troubled sea that cannot 
 rest : but I point you thither where there is comfort 
 for the wretched, rest for the anxious, peace for 
 the troubled, purity for the defiled. You can find 
 it in Christ ; you can find it in the religion which 
 Christ came to teach ; you can find it nowhere else. 
 Lose your faith in this, and sin has no known sa- 
 
66 THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 viour, nor guilt any possible expiation. Oceans of 
 lustral water will not cleanse, nor the burning of 
 hecatombs of sacrifice atone for it, though kindled 
 with the blazing forests of a thousand hills. Lose 
 your faith in this, and then for the troubled con- 
 science there is no peace ; not in poppy or mandra- 
 gora or all the drowsy syrups in the world. Since 
 time was, suffering humanity has been saying to 
 each Prophet in turn, — 
 
 " Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased 
 And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
 Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff 
 Which weighs upon the heart ? " 
 
 And the answer of all others must be " No ; " but 
 the answer of your Kedeemer is " Come unto me 
 and I will give you rest." This is the sum of all, 
 that I have striven to say to you. The voice of 
 your conscience is the voice of your God. Obey it, 
 and you will find peace and holiness : disobey it, 
 and you will lose the light of God's countenance, 
 until you repent and learn to obey once more. But 
 to repent heartily is to be forgiven wholly. Yes, I 
 preach to you once more the forgiveness of sins, 
 that forgiveness purchased by the precious blood of 
 Christ. He alone can give peace to the accusing. 
 
THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE. 67 
 
 to the gnawing, to the terrified ; He alone can wake 
 the sleeping conscience, and call it into life again 
 when it is dead. " Neither is there salvation in 
 any other: for there is none other name under 
 heaven given among men, whereby we must be 
 saved." "I have lived," said the wise and gentle 
 Hooker on his deathbed, " I have lived to see this 
 world is made up of perturbations, and have long 
 been preparing to leave it, and gathering comfort for 
 the dreadful hour of making my account with God. 
 And though I have, by His grace, loved Him in 
 my youth, and feared Him in my age, and labored 
 to have a conscience void of offence towards God 
 and towards man : yet if thou, Lord, be extreme 
 to mark what is done amiss, who can abide it? 
 And therefore, when I have failed. Lord, shew mercy 
 to me ; for I plead not any righteousness, but the for- 
 giveness of my unrighteousness, for His merits who 
 died to purchase pardon for penitent sinners."* 
 
 * Walton's lAfe of Hooker, ad fin. 
 
III. 
 
 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are moved ; but 
 Grod hath shewed his voice, and the earth shall melt away. — Ps. 
 xlvi. 6.* 
 
 So far, my brethren, I have endeavored to en- 
 grave yet more deeply upon our hearts the all-per- 
 vading and unalterable conviction that God, our 
 God, our Father, our Creator, is a living God ; that 
 He is not far from every one of us; that His will is 
 the sole intelligible law of our lives ; that, if at any 
 time He seems to be silent, that silence is not in 
 Him, but in our own deafness and self-will ; that, if 
 our life be true life at all, in Him we live, and move, 
 and have our being. It is a truth of infinite impor- 
 tance, because with it I know of nothing so glorious, 
 without it of nothing so despicable and insignificant 
 as man. " What is man ? " asks David in the 8th 
 Psalm, after he had been gazing on the heavens 
 which broke over his head into their immeasurable 
 
 * Preached before the University of Cambridge, May 11, 1873. 
 
 (69) 
 
 ^^ Off THB^'^ 
 TTW TTTWTJCJT'P'rT 
 
70 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 depth of stars ; — and because he feels that He who 
 made those heavens is his Father and his friend, he 
 answers in a burst of exultation, " Thou madest him 
 a little lower than Grod, thou crownedst him with 
 glory and honor : " but when, in some flushed mo- 
 ment of victory, David again asks in the 144th 
 Psalm "What is man?" then, in the midst of hu- 
 man malignity and human meanness, thinking only 
 of man witliout God, he sorrowfully answers, " Man 
 is like a thing of nought ; " — and immediately after- 
 wards, as though in a burst of incontroUable dis- 
 gust at the crew of liars and blasphemers by whom 
 he is surrounded, he cries, "Cast out Thy lightnings 
 and tear them ; shoot forth Thine arrows and con- 
 sume them : " — feeling as all the best men have ever 
 felt, that when God is with us we may rejoice in 
 " the glories of our birth and state," but that man 
 when he forgets, man when he loses, much more 
 man when he abnegates his God, is a creature so 
 petty, so foolish, so ephemeral, so infinitely to be 
 pitied, that, unless his whole race can be purified by 
 baptisms of fire, it were almost better that it should 
 cease to be. 
 
 If then we would rise to the full grandeur of 
 our being, if we would live worthy of our immortal- 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 71 
 
 ity, let us bend our sternest efforts, let us strain our 
 noblest faculties, let us absorb our entire beings in 
 this one aim, to see God's face, to hear His voice, 
 to do His will. And since we have considered how 
 He speaks to us in Nature, which is the translucence 
 of His energy ; in the Moral Law, which is the epit- 
 ome of His will; in Conscience, which is the voice 
 of His Spirit ; in Scripture, which is the revelation 
 of His Son; — let us try to-day to mark how He 
 speaks to us also in History, which is " the con- 
 science of the human race," and which has never 
 been more adequately described than as "the pro- 
 phetical interpreter of that most sacred epic of 
 which God is the poet, and Humanity the theme." 
 
 If, my brethren, man were the abject thing to 
 which modern materialism would degrade him, His- 
 tory would have no significance. It would be bujt 
 like a lamp hung at a ship's stern as she is driven 
 by chance winds over a shoreless sea, — ^warning of 
 no peril, lighting to no anchorage, only flinging its 
 ghastly lustre over a white wake of wandering foam. 
 But, when we believe, as we do believe, that man is 
 a member of Christ, a child of God, an inheritor of 
 the Kingdom of heaven; then indeed the history of 
 man becomes a noble study ; it becomes a chapter 
 
72 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 in that book of Kevelation which enables us to rec- 
 ognize in the ways of God an order at once im- 
 mutable and divine. He who can believe that the 
 story of nations is but a confusion of whirling ma- 
 chinery which no spirit permeates or guides must 
 indeed despise it as an old almanac, or an agreed- on 
 fable ; but in this respect the ancient histories were 
 more religious than many of the modern, — from the 
 Aibg <r ereTieieTo ^ovlrj of the mighty Iliad, dowu to the 
 fine remark of Polybius that " History offers the 
 highest of education, and that it alone, without in- 
 jury, teaches us from every season and circumstance 
 to be true judges of what is best." One great histori- 
 an indeed of antiquity is doubtful and gloomy. ^^I 
 can come," he says, "to no certain conclusion as to 
 whether the affairs of men are guided by the im- 
 mutable law of destiny, or by the whirling wheel of 
 chance."* And yet it is evident that the whole 
 leaning of Tacitus was towards the nobler faith, and 
 if he seems to waver, it is only because he confined 
 his view to too limited a range. Fallen on very 
 evil times, encircled like our own great poet with 
 the barbarous dissonance of an abominable age, 
 gazing only on the sunset of Koman liberty as its 
 
 * Tac. Ann. vi. 22. Cf. iii. 18, H. i. 18, etc. 
 
THE VOICE OF IIISTOllY. 73 
 
 orb sank slowly into seas of blood, he judged of 
 man's destiny rather as a biographer than as an 
 historian. 
 
 But a biographer may easily mistake the middle 
 for the end, and fail to see that the apparent discord 
 in the organ music is not, and cannot be, its close. 
 We read the lives of the saints of God, and we are 
 perplexed at first and saddened to observe how one 
 after another may seem to have perished broken- 
 hearted and despised. One may be slowly torn to 
 pieces like Fra Dolcino, and another may be tortured 
 and strangled like Savonarola, and another burnt 
 like Huss, and another driven to say with the un- 
 daunted Hildebrand, "I have loved righteousness 
 and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile," 
 and another may faint to death in chilling anguish 
 like Xavier upon the lonely shore : but let us not 
 also fail to notice, that one and all, amid defeat and 
 dishonor, and desertion, they never lose the beatific 
 vision and the transcendant hope : one and all they 
 «tretch forth their hands in glorious anticipation of 
 the farther shore. Let us neither be deceived nor 
 saddened by such books as that great recent work 
 of fiction, which shews to us the hopeless failure of 
 so many human ideals, and the chilling sadness of 
 
74 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 SO many human lives.* True, that the loftier the 
 ideal, the more complete may seem to be the failure ; 
 and the more unselfish the purpose, the more sad 
 the life. In seeming^ not in reality. Each high 
 ideal is a prophecy which, later if not sooner, brings 
 about its own fulfilment. No good deed dies : be it 
 a rejoicing river, be it but a tiny rill of human noble- 
 ness, yet, so it be pure and clean, never has it been 
 lost in the poisonous marshes or choked in the mud- 
 dy sands. It flows inevitably into that great river 
 of the water of life which is not lost, save — if that 
 be to be lost — in the infinite ocean of God's Eternal 
 Love. And it is their intuition of this truth which 
 makes the Idylls of our great poet truer than the 
 fictions of our great novelist. The blameless king 
 murmurs indeed, amid the broken soliloquies of his 
 last troubled night, 
 
 " I found Him in the shining of the stars, 
 I saw Him in the flowering of His fields, 
 But in His ways with man I found Him not : '*■ 
 
 yet he never doubts of his mission, or wavers in his 
 purpose. The harp that has been prostituted and 
 jangled on earth shines still among the stars, and to 
 the greatly innocent, and to the sincerely penitent, 
 
 * Middlemarch. 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 75 
 
 and to the angels up in heaven, its music is still un- 
 disturbed.* And so, as the king dies deeply wounded 
 on the misty shore, yet the bark which carried him 
 vanishes away into the light, "and the new sun rose 
 bringing the new year."f Yes, this is the true and 
 eternal lesson. Ask all good men who have ever 
 died even in bitterest failure whether they would 
 not scorn either to fear or change, and would they 
 not answer with godlike unanimity, " Is not the life 
 more than meat, and the body than raiment?" 
 We sought the struggle not the victory, the service 
 not the reward. Though He slay us yet will we trust 
 in Him ; but we have no fear ; He will not slay us ; 
 He, the faithful God, who keepeth covenant, will 
 not fling us aside like broken implements, or mock 
 us with delusive hopes ; 
 
 " "WTioso has felt the Spirit of the Highest 
 
 Cannot confound, or doubt Him, or deny : 
 Tea, with one voice, oh world, though thou deniest, 
 Stand thou on that side ; for on this am L" 
 
 If then we fail at times to see this truth in the 
 little facts of our own lives, let us look beyond them, 
 and see it writ large upon the history of nations. 
 What would a man know of the sea by standing but 
 
 * Tristram. f Morte d! Arthur. 
 
76 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 an hour or two beside its waters in some small bay ? 
 could he suppose that there was anything but idle 
 chance in its little eddies or sweeping currents amid 
 the windings of the shore, as it is fretted by chance 
 puffs of wind, or sways over great beds of seaweed, 
 or is torn by protruding rocks ? But let him study 
 the phenomena of the whole great deep itself, and 
 then he will learn with what magnificent and uner- 
 ring regularity the moon sways the tidal march of 
 those mighty waters which, as they roll onwards, 
 majestic and irresistible whether in ebb or flow, re- 
 fresh and purify the world. Nor is it otherwise 
 with History. A physical accident, a criminal am- 
 bition, a misinterpreted despatch, nay, even the 
 changing of a wind, the stumbling of a horse, the 
 depression of an omen, may seem to have influenced 
 the fortune of nations : but these are, in reality, but 
 eddies and bubbles on the surface of the advancing 
 or receding tide ; and, if not in our threescore years 
 and ten, yet in the long millenniums of history, we 
 see the great tidal waves of retribution overwhelm- 
 ing every nation which forgets the eternal distinction 
 of Eight and Wrong, — we hear that voice of seven 
 thunders which every true historian has always 
 heard, proclaiming aloud that " for every false word 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 77 
 
 and unrighteous deed, for insult and oppression, for 
 lust and vanity, the price has to be paid at last. 
 Truth and justice alone endure and live. Falsehood 
 and injustice may be long-lived, but doomsday 
 comes to thorn in the end." 
 
 Yes, eveiy great historian should be no dull 
 registrar of events, but a prophet, standing, like 
 him of old, amid the careless riot and luxurious 
 banqueting of life, and teaching men to decipher 
 that gleaming message of God, written, as with the 
 fingers of a man's hand, on the parliament of na- 
 tions and the palaces of kings, that what is morally 
 just must be politically expedient, that "what is 
 morally wrong cannot be politically right." And 
 in doing this the Hebrew prophets have been our 
 truest teachers, nor have any teachers ever enforced 
 that great lesson with such divine insight, with 
 such unalterable certitude, with such passionate in- 
 tensity as they. Around their little insignificant 
 strip of plain, and hill, and valley, towered the co- 
 lossal kingdoms of a cruel and splendid heathen- 
 dom ; but to their enlightened eyes these, in their 
 guiltiness, were but phantoms on their way to ruin, 
 casting a weird and sombre shadow athwart the 
 sunlit horizons of a certain hope. What matter 
 
78 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 their force, their splendor, their multitude, if they 
 stand before the slow-moving chariot of the Eternal 
 God ? Is it the Kenite ? " Strong-is thy dwelling- 
 place, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock ; never- 
 theless the Kenite shall be wasted." Is it Assyria ? 
 " The Lord, the Lord of Hosts, shall send among 
 his fat ones leanness, and kindle under his glory a 
 burning fire." Is it Egypt ? Her wise magicians 
 shall be smitten with fatuity, and the papyrus of 
 her rivers fade. Is it golden Babylon, the city of 
 the oppressor ? The dead, moved at his coming, 
 ask her king with gibbering taunts, " Art thou also 
 become weak as we ? art thou become like unto us ? " 
 Is it purple Tyrus with her priceless merchandise ? 
 " Take a harp, go about the city, thou harlot, that 
 hast been forgotten." And so with all. " The na- 
 tions shall rush like the rushing of many waters, 
 but God shall rebuke them ; and they shall flee far 
 off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the moun- 
 tains before the wind, and like a rolling thing 
 before the whirlwind. And behold at evening- 
 tide trouble ; and before the morning he is not." 
 " This," exclaims the prophet in a flame of trium- 
 phant zeal, " this is the portion of them that spoil 
 us, and the lot of them that rob us." 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 79 
 
 Thus over the heads of the enemies of Israel did 
 her prophets roll, like a Pyriphlegethon of living 
 fire, the denunciation of God's wrath on sin. Never 
 had any nation been taught that lesson as Israel 
 had been taught it, from the fearful eloquence of 
 the maledictions upon Ebal, down to the days when 
 Isaiah wailed his dirge over " Ariel, the Lion of 
 God, the city where David dwelt." Nor had they 
 been taught by words alone. When Israel was yet 
 a child God loved him, and out of Egypt He called 
 His son. In the Old Testament we see that son 
 grow up to life. Many were the sins, the follies, 
 the apostasies of his youth. Can you point me to 
 one folly which was not visited with its natural 
 consequences ? to one pleasant vice which did not 
 become its own punishment ? to one sin which was 
 not lashed with its own appropriate scourge.^ 
 Then came the ruinous and crushing humiliation of 
 the Babylonish Captivity. A remnant, which they 
 themselves compared but to the chaff of the wheat, 
 returned ; and of the old temptation, the tempta- 
 tion to a sensual idolatry, they were cured for ever. 
 But they were not saved from other sins. Keeping 
 the form of their religion they lost its spirit ; from 
 a living truth they suffered it to degenerate into a 
 
80 
 
 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 meaningless ritual, into a dead formula, into a hyp- 
 ocritical sham. They had for centuries been hoping, 
 dreaming, talking of a Messiah, and their Messiah 
 came ; and how did they receive Him ? they received 
 Him with yells of " Crucify." And there, in Scrip- 
 ture, at the Cross which consummated their in- 
 iquity, the story of their nation ends. But History, 
 which proves the responsibility of nations. History 
 adds its chapter to the Sacred book. It shews how 
 soon the wings of every vulture flapped heavily over 
 the corpse of a nation that had fallen into moral 
 death. Some of those who had shared in that 
 scene, and myriads of their children, shared also in 
 the long horror of that siege which, for its unutter- 
 able fearfulness, stands unparalleled in the story of 
 mankind. They had shouted, " We have no king 
 but Caesar," and they had no king but Csesar, and 
 leaving only for a time the grotesque phantom of a 
 local royalty, Caesar after Caesar outraged and pil- 
 laged them, till at last their Caesar slaked, in tlae 
 blood of his best defenders, the red ashes of their 
 desecrated Temple. They had forced the Komans 
 to crucify their Christ; and they were themselves 
 crucified in myriads by the Komans outside their 
 walls, till room failed for the crosses, and wood to 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 81 
 
 make them with. They had preferred a murderer 
 to their Messiah, and for them there was no Messiah 
 more, while a murderer's dagger swayed the last 
 counsels of their dying race. They had accepted 
 the guilt of blood, and the last pages of their his- 
 tory were glued together with that crimson stain; 
 and, to this day, he who will walk round about Je- 
 rusalem sees in its ever-extending miles of grave- 
 stones and ever-lengthening pavements of tombs 
 and sepulchres, a vivid emblem of that field which 
 Judas bought with the price of his iniquity, — a 
 potter's field to bury strangers in, an Akeldama, a 
 Field of blood. 
 
 2. I turn from Judaea to the short but splendid 
 tragedy of Athenian history ; how short, how bril- 
 liant, how terrible, you all know well. Yes, we owe 
 to Greece an infinite debt of intellectual gratitude. 
 The exquisite ideal of beauty of her race, the grace, 
 the subtlety, the activity of her intellect, the per- 
 fection and supremacy of her art, the power and splen- 
 dor of her literature, conferred upon her a wreath 
 of unfading admiration. had she but learned 
 righteousness ; had she but won the grace to obey, 
 as she had received the insight to read that law 
 written upon the fleshy tablets of her heart ! But 
 
82 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 she cliose otherwise ; and now the world may learn 
 as memorable a lesson from the rapidity of her fall, 
 and the utterness of her extinction, as from all be- 
 sides ; for the ever-needed moral of that little hour 
 in which she played her part upon the lighted stage 
 is this, that intellect without holiness, beauty with- 
 out purity, eloquence without conscience, art with- 
 out religion, insight without love, are but blossoms 
 whose root and life are in the corruption of the 
 grave. All these gifts combined saved her not from 
 being eaten away by that fretting leprosy of her fa- 
 vorite sins, which degraded the Mapaduvo/idxv^ of her 
 youthful glory into the Graeculus esuriens of her 
 consuming degradation. With what fearful stern- 
 ness was the career of Athens cut short! It was 
 but ninety years after her handful of heroes had 
 clashed into the countless hosts of Persia and rout- 
 ed them, that her walls were razed among the songs 
 and shouts of her insulting enemies.. Some who 
 had seen the one might have seen the other. And 
 when the hour of her ruin came, when, on that 
 sleepless September night of terror and agony, down 
 the long walls from the Peiraeus to the Acropolis 
 rang that bitter unbroken wail which told that the 
 fleet of Athens had been destroyed at Aegospotami; 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 83 
 
 it is one of her own sons who tells us that it was 
 the shameful consciousness of her former tyrannies; 
 it was the avenging memory of Melos, and Torone, 
 and Scione, that made that bitter hour more bitter 
 still, by bidding her remember that even-handed 
 Justice was but commending to her own lips the in- 
 gredients of that poisoned chalice which in the plen- 
 itude of her pride and selfishness she had forced 
 the weak, and the defeated, and the unfortunate to 
 drink.* A great lesson doubtless, but the real 
 lesson of Grecian history is deeper, more universal, 
 more permanent than this ; and surely in days 
 when some men, in the worst spirit of the tainted 
 and godless renaissance of the fifteenth century, are 
 beginning shamelessly to preach a corrupt Hellen- 
 ism, which regards sin forsooth with aesthetic tolera- 
 tion, — ^in days when we have read the thoughts of 
 one calmly arguing an ideal so wretched and so base 
 as that it is best to crowd life with the greatest 
 number of pleasurable sensations, — in days when 
 hearing has been found for theories of an artistic 
 effeminacy, which, one hopes, would have made even 
 Antisthenes and Epicurus blush, — it is time, I say, 
 to read again that stigma of infamy which the 
 * Xen. Hell. iL 1, 2. 
 
84 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 Apostle branded for ever on the unblushful forehead 
 of the paganism which he saw, that its sons "be- 
 came vain in their imaginations, and their foolish 
 heart was darkened ; " that it was God Himself who 
 gave them over to vile affections, and to a reprobate 
 mind, because, "knowing the judgment of God, 
 that they which do such things are worthy of death, 
 they not only did the same, but had pleasure in 
 them that did them." 
 
 3. Take but one more prominent example from 
 ancient days to shew that there is no distinction 
 between the sacred and the secular, and that pro- 
 fane history is sacred too. From the palsied hands 
 of Greece, Kome rudely snatched the sceptre. And 
 you know that so long as the character of Rome 
 was simple and self-respecting; so long as her 
 family life was pure and sweet ; so long as she was 
 the Rome of the Camilli, the Cincinnati, the Fabii, 
 the elder Scipios ; so long as her dictators came 
 from the honest labor of the ploughshare, and her 
 consuls from the hardy self-denial of the farm, so 
 long she prospered till none could withstand her, 
 and impressed the world with lessons of law and 
 order and discipline manlier and better, than any 
 which Greece had taught. But, when the dregs of 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 85 
 
 every foreign iniquity poured their noisome stream 
 into the Tiber ; when the old iron discipline had 
 yielded to an effeminate luxury and a gilded pollu- 
 tion ; when her youth had grown debased, and 
 enervated, and false ; when all regard had been 
 lost in her for man's honor and woman's purity ; 
 when her trade had become a flagrant imposture 
 and her religion a dishonest sham ; when, lastly, her 
 literature became a seething scum of cynicism and 
 abomination such as degrades the very conception 
 of humanity, — then you know how justly, in long 
 slow agony, the charnel-house of her dominion crum- 
 bled away under the assaults of all her enemies, and 
 
 " Rome, whom mightiest kingdoms curtsied to, 
 Like a forlorn and desperate castaway. 
 Did shameful execution on herself." 
 
 And why did that giant power fall into frag- 
 ments before the weak hands which held a despised 
 and hated cross? Why? because, and only be- 
 cause, God is King ; because in the long run there 
 is nothing fruitful but sacrifice ; because it is self 
 denial not luxury, humility not insolence, love no 
 violence, justice not ambition, which overthrow the 
 world. 
 
 4. And that Christian Church, why was it that 
 
86 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 it too fell from that splendid eminence to which by 
 the immense ascendancy of justice, and the faith in 
 Eternal Laws, it had attained in the days of a 
 Hildebrand, and an Innocent ? What was it but 
 crime after crime that dashed the Papacy into dis- 
 honored ruin? The boundless ambition of Boni- 
 face YIII., the greedy avarice of John XXII., the 
 shameful violences of Urban VI., the unblushing 
 nepotism of Sixtus IV., the execrable crimes of 
 Alexander VI., the aggrandizing wars of Julius II., 
 it was not till the disgusted nations had long been 
 alienated by such spectacles as these that a humble 
 monk of Erfurdt, rising in the irresistible might of 
 moral indignation, shattered the supremacy of the 
 Vatican for ever. I might go on with history j I 
 might ask why Spain, once the Lady of Kingdoms, 
 is now the most despised and impotent of European 
 powers ; I might ask what changed the strong and 
 righteous England of the Commonwealth, to the 
 nation which suffered a perjured trifler to sell Dun- 
 kirk, and live in infamy on the subsidies of France ; 
 I might ask how comes it that at this very day our 
 beloved English Church, working as she is now begin- 
 ning so heartily to do, amid the hatred of her oppo- 
 nents and the disunion of her sons, may, even yet 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY.- 87 
 
 be unable to escape, by her late repentance, the 
 Nemesis of falling axe and kindled flame due to the 
 sluggish impotence and truckling worldliness of her 
 18th century. But though time forbids this, I 
 ought not to take all our instances from the past 
 when one flagrant illustration of this great truth 
 has happened in the present, and under the very 
 eyes of the youngest here. Is there, I ask, no plain, 
 no unmistakable lesson in the collapse and catas- 
 trophe of modern France ? Warnings enough she 
 had received; warnings of splendor overwhelmed 
 with darkness, warnings of strength smitten into 
 decrepitude, warnings of defeat, warnings of mas- 
 sacre, warnings of revolution, from the day when 
 her great monarch so sadly confessed to the little 
 child " I have loved war too much " to the day 
 when, in the living tomb of St. Helena, her imperial 
 conqueror had time to meditate on his audacious 
 blasphemy — "men of my stamp do not commit 
 crimes." But as fast as she had received such les- 
 sons, she had, alas ! forgotten them. Her religion 
 had become a godless materialism ; her practice a 
 calculated sensuality ; her literature a cynical jour- 
 nalism which sneered at every belief, and a leprous 
 fiction which poisoned every virtue. She trusted 
 
88 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 in her armies, in her numbers, in her prestige, in 
 the elan of her soldiers, in the persiflage of her 
 journalists, in the vaporing patriotism of her boule- 
 vards, — ^in anything and everything save in God 
 and right. And what came of it ? Her magnifi- 
 cence melted away like a vision of the Apocalypae ; 
 her unfortunate Emperor became a despised, broken 
 idol; like the corpse of some exhumed king, her 
 strength slipped into ashes at a touch. And the 
 causes of this were too obvious to miss. They lay 
 in her puerile vanity, her administrative corruption, 
 her universal effeminacy ; they lay in the bourgeois 
 materialism which desired nothing but vulgar lux- 
 ury; in the absence of all dignity and seriousness 
 in the old, and of all discipline and subordination 
 in the youug.* These sorrowful accusations are 
 taken not from the indictment of her enemies, but 
 from the confession of her sons : they are from a 
 book of a member of her Institute. " Tainted all 
 of us," says another, " in the depth of our hearts, 
 we must disengage ourselves from our habits, from 
 our morals, from our facilities, from our conventions 
 of yesterday, to reascend to the primitive sources of 
 humanity and ask ourselves simply but resolutely 
 * Renan, La BSforme intellect, et morale, passim. 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 89 
 
 the question — Is it right, distinctly Yes or No, 
 that there should be a God, a morality, a society, a 
 family ? ought woman to be respected ? ought man 
 to toil ? Is truth the end ; is justice the support ; 
 is the good absolute ? Yes, yes, a thousand times 
 Yes ! And societies, governments, families, indi- 
 viduals, can they, if they would be noble, durable, 
 fruitful, do without these conditions ? No, no, a 
 thousand times No." * Such was the lesson of the 
 late prostration and calamity of France, read not by 
 me but by one of themselves, even a prophet of 
 their own ; by one who has done his best to help 
 the corruption he deplores, and whose very name I 
 can hardly mention here. And yet, so little has it 
 been learnt, that I read how but a few days ago 
 one of her most prominent statesmen asserted, amid 
 the applause and laughter of his audience, that God 
 permits the existence of so many iniquities that He 
 cannot be regarded as of much account in estimating 
 the progress of the world ! f 
 
 * Alex. Dumas, fils, Une Lettre mr lea Ghoses du Jour, p. 30. 
 
 f " These gentlemen declared that they acknowledged no con- 
 trolling power but God and their conscience. As for the former 
 of these powers, it has permitted so many iniquities to be perpe- 
 trated that its invocation cannot be said to have much influence 
 in human aifairs " (applause and laughter). From a Times re- 
 port of one of M. Gambetta's speeches. 
 
90 THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 
 
 This then is the law, this the philosophy of 
 History. And it not only is but must be so, be- 
 cause the will of Grod governs the universe, and 
 God's will is the moral law. 
 
 And therefore all unrighteousness is sin, and all 
 sin is, necessarily, weakness. You will not, I am 
 sure, ask me what you have to do with all this ? 
 what the history of nations has to do with you ? It 
 has everything to do with every one of you. For 
 each biography is but a fragment of history ; each 
 soul but an epitome of the world. Nations are but 
 aggregates of such as you ; and Universities are no 
 small part of a nation's life ; and if this University 
 send forth, year by year, men who are brave, because 
 their consciences are clear and their hearts are 
 pure ; if, year by year, Cambridge add to the life of 
 England her stream of youthful students who are 
 manly, and soberminded, and fearless, and faithful, 
 then she will be adding no small momentum to the 
 forces which keep England great. But, on the 
 other hand, 
 
 " Vain miglitiest fleets of iron framed, 
 , Vain those all-conquering gtma, 
 Unless proud England keep untamed 
 The true heart of her sons." 
 
 Your lot is cast in stirring and not untroubled 
 
THE VOICE OF HISTORY. 91 
 
 times. Before you die there will hav^ been many a 
 vast change in the constitution of society, and many 
 a battle of God will have been lost or won. Oh 
 may you fight on God's side ! Fight against greed, 
 fight against falsity, fight against faithlessness, fight 
 against uncleanness in your own hearts, and so shall 
 you be ready for all God's work both now and any 
 time hereafter, until your Master gives you the sig- 
 nal that you may fall out of the ranks, or it is time 
 for you, not as men might say in their despair, to 
 give up their broken swords to Fate the Conqueror, 
 but to yield your pure souls to your Captain Christ. 
 Then, whatever happens, your life will not have 
 been in vain; then having heard His voice here you 
 shall be with Him hereafter, and you shall say, as 
 you stand, with bowed head indeed and awful rev- 
 erence, but yet a forgiven and an accepted child 
 before that unutterable glory, — ^you shall say, with 
 such joy as here the heart of man cannot conceive, 
 " I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, 
 but now^ mine eye seeth Thee." 
 
IV. 
 
 WHAT GOD REQUmES. 
 
 Wliere-with shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before 
 the high God ? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, 
 with calves of a year old ? "Will the Lord be pleased with 
 thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil ? 
 shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my 
 body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed -thee, O man, 
 what is good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to 
 do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
 God?— MiCAHvi.6-8. * 
 
 Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and 
 bow myself before the Most High God ? It is in- 
 deed a momentous .question, the most momentous 
 that can be framed in mortal words. For as we 
 enter deeper into the valley of life, and its rocks 
 begin more and more to overshadow us, to what do 
 all the other questions of life reduce themselves ? 
 To any man who has the slightest sense of Keligion, 
 — to any man, who, with all his imperfections, yet 
 solemnly feels that if life is to be life at all, every 
 year must bring him nearer and nearer to the great 
 
 * A Lent Sermon, preached at the Chapel Royal, St. James's, 
 February 16, 1872. 
 
 (93) 
 
94 WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 
 
 Light, — to all whom the sorrows and disappoint- 
 ments of life have for ever disenchanted, — no hope, 
 no thought, no question remains hut this, Is God's 
 love with me ? Am I at peace with Him ? In one 
 word, am I His ? Oh ! if not, how shall I, the low 
 liest of His creatures — how shall I approach Him ? 
 What else can I care for but this ? Kemove the 
 fear of Grod's displeasure, and I have no other fear. 
 Give me the joy of His countenance, and I ask no 
 other joy. Whatever may have been the illusions 
 of youth, they have vanished from the eyes of man- 
 hood. The winds have carried those bubbles beyond 
 the river, or, as we seemed to touch them, they 
 have burst ; but one thing have I" desired of the 
 Lord, that will I seek after, even to behold the fair 
 beauty of the Lord, and to visit His Temple. 
 Wherewith then shall I come before the Lord, and 
 bow myself before the Most High God ? 
 
 Many and various, in all ages, have been the 
 answers to that question, but in spirit and principle 
 they reduce themselves to the three, which in these 
 verses are tacitly rejected, that the fourth may be 
 established for all time. And, therefore, this is one 
 of those palmary passages of Holy Writ, which 
 should be engraved on every instructed conscience as 
 
WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 95 
 
 indelibly as by a pen of iron upon the living rock. 
 It formulates the best teaching of religion ; it cor- 
 rects the worst errors of superstition. Every book 
 of Scripture, every voice of Nature, every judgment 
 of Conscience re-echoes and confirms it. Happy 
 will it be for us, if we will use it as a lamp to guide 
 our footsteps, a law to direct our life. 
 
 (1) The first answer is, Will Levitical sacrifices 
 suffice.^ "Shall I come before Him with burnt- 
 ofierings, with calves of a year old ? " that is, " Shall 
 I do some outward act, or acts, to please God.?*" 
 Men are ever tempted to believe in this virtue of 
 doing something; to ask, as they often asked our 
 Lord, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life .5^" 
 And there are times when such external systems 
 may, for ignorant and stiff-necked nations, be a wise 
 safeguard. It was so for the Israelites at the Exo- 
 dus, depressed and imbruted as they were by long 
 slavery, and saturated with heathen traditions of 
 cruelty and vice. The Levitical institutes, — so mul- 
 tiplex, so trivial, so intricate, so material, so bur- 
 densome, — statutes which were not good, and judg- 
 ments whereby they could not live, — were best suited, 
 intolerable as was their yoke, to a people which in 
 honor of their brute idol, could sit down to eat, and 
 
96 WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 
 
 to drink, and rise up to play, while the body of heaven 
 in its clearness had scarcely vanished from their eyes, 
 and the majesty of darkness still rolled around 
 the burning hill. There have been attempts in all 
 ages to revive such ceremonials, or others like them, 
 because they are easier than true holiness, and tend 
 to pacify and appease the perverted conscience. 
 But God's own Word about them is plain; they 
 perish in the using ; they cannot sanctify to the 
 purifying of the flesh ; nay, in so far as they are 
 substituted for a heart religion, — ^in so far as they 
 are used to compound for the weightier matters 
 of the law, — in so far as they furnish an excuse 
 for selfishness, for censoriousness, for party spirit, — 
 they are eminently displeasing to God. External 
 observances, without inward holiness, are but the 
 odious whiteness of the sepulchre. "Bring no more 
 vain oblations, incense is an abomination unto Me," 
 saith God to such; "your sabbaths and calling of 
 assemblies I cannot away with." Thousands, I sup- 
 pose, have been asking themselves this Lent, Need 
 we fast ? Yes, my brethren, if you think that you 
 ought ; and if you know and find that by doing so 
 you increase your religious earnestness, and strength- 
 en your moral life. But not if you think that fast- 
 
WHAT GOD REQUIRE3. 97 
 
 ing is an end instead of a means ; not if it renders 
 you more self-satisfied ; not if it makes you less ac- 
 tive in works of good ; not if it renders you less len- 
 ient to your own failings. " Eat an ox, and be a 
 Christian," said the Jesuit Fathers to a penitent 
 who could not abstain from meat. What is the 
 passionate, indignant language of the Prophet Isaiah 
 on this subject ? ".Behold, ye fast for strife and 
 debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness : is 
 it such a fast that I have chosen.? to bow down his 
 head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes 
 under him ? wilt thou call this a fast, and an ac- 
 ceptable day to the Lord ? " No : fasting may be 
 necessary, only do not take it for religion ; — but, on 
 the other hand, look at home ; loose the bands of 
 wickedness, your own and others ; undo the heavy 
 burdens, your own and others ; take the beam out of 
 your own eyes; wash you, make you clean; put 
 away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes ; 
 cease to do evil ; learn to do well. That is dearer 
 in God's eyes than perpetual sacrifice, holier and 
 'purer than days of unbroken fast. 
 
 (2) If then we cannot please God by merely 
 doing, can we by giving 1 "Will the Lord be 
 pleased with thousands of rams, and ten thousands 
 
98 WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 
 
 of rivers of oil ? " Shall we like the Pagans try to 
 bribe God ? Shall we make His altars swim with 
 the blood of hecatombs, and fill his sanctuaries with 
 votive gold ? Or shall we, like terrified sinners in 
 the Middle Ages, think to buy ofi" his anger by 
 bequeathing our possessions to charity or to the 
 Church ? Ah ! my brethren, I suppose that while 
 not one of us is so ignorant as not to know the duty 
 of charity, none of us is so exquisitely foolish as to 
 imagine that he can by gifts win his way one step 
 nearer to the great White Throne. Sacrifices, to 
 bribe Him whose are all the beasts of the forest, and 
 the cattle upon a thousand hills ? Gold or gems to 
 Him, before whom the whole earth, were it one en- 
 tire and perfect chrysolite, would be but as an atom 
 in the sunbeam ? Ah, no ! 
 
 "Vainly we offer each, ample qblation; 
 
 Vainly with gifts would His favor implore ; 
 Better by far is the heart's adoration, 
 
 Dearer to Grod are the prayers of the poor.** 
 
 " Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it 
 Thee, but Thou delightest not in burnt-ofierings. 
 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit ; a broken 
 and a contrite heart, God, Thou wilt not despise." 
 
 (3) If then neither by doing, nor by giving, 
 
WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 99 
 
 can we please God, what third experiment shall we 
 try ? shall it be by suffering 1 Shall I, lacerating 
 my heart in its tenderest affections, give my first- 
 born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for 
 the sin of my soul ? This, too, has been frequently 
 and fearfully attempted; frequently, and fearfully, 
 and more persistently than any other, because in all 
 ages, and in all nations, men have invested God 
 with the attributes of terror and of wrath. Could 
 we, my brethren, judge rightly of the glorious sun 
 in heaven, if we only saw it glaring luridly through 
 the' whirled sands of the desert, or dimmed and dis- 
 torted by the hideous ice-fogs of the North ? And 
 can we, my brethren, judge of God — the Sun of our 
 souls — when He looms dark and terrible through 
 the crimson mist of haunted consciences and guilty 
 hearts ? No ; when men have been able only to thus 
 regard Him, then all the day long His terrors have 
 they suffered with a troubled mind. He, the All- 
 loving, the All-merciful, has seemed to them cruel, 
 wrathful, irresistible, delighting in smoking victims 
 and streaming blood. And thus alike in sunny 
 Greece, and stately Kome, and apostatizing Israel, 
 and scorching Africa, and in the far sweet islands 
 of the sea, to hideous emblems of some savage Deity, 
 
100 WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 
 
 — a Moloch, an Odin, an Atua, a Sheeva, — in the 
 rushing stream, or the molten furnace, or on the 
 blade of the consecrated sword, has the blood of man 
 been shed in abominable sacrifice, or his life robbed 
 of all health and joy in horrible self-torture. Noth- 
 ing seemed too sanguinary or revolting to appease 
 the sense of sin, or dim the glare of awakened wrath. 
 
 " Our sires knew well 
 The fitting course for such ; dark cells, dim lamps, 
 A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm, 
 No mossy pillow blue with violets." 
 
 They fled from the society of their fellows to 
 vast wildernesses, or desolate hills, or wave-washed 
 caverns. Knowing their sin, not knowing their 
 Saviour, — ^gazing in remorse and tears at the splen- 
 dors of Sinai, not coming in humble penitence to 
 the Cross of Calvary, — life became to them an in- 
 tolerable fear. When a man feels that the eye of 
 God is fixed upon him in anger, and knows not 
 how to escape, then no mountain seems too heavy, 
 no sea too deep, no solitude too undisturbed. He 
 says with the poet, 
 
 " Place me alone in some frail boat 
 Mid th' horrors of an angry sea, 
 Where I, while time may move, shall float 
 Despairing either land or day. 
 
' WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 101 
 
 Or under earth my youth confine 
 
 To the night and silence of a cell, 
 Where scorpions round my limbs may twine, — 
 
 Oh Grod I so thus forgive me Hell." 
 
 But has any man ever found these sufferings 
 sufficient ? Has any man. ever testified that he 
 found forgiveness through voluntary torture ? Or is 
 not that true which is said of the prophets of Baal, 
 " They leaped upon the altar, and cried aloud, and 
 cut themselves after their manner. And it came to 
 pass that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, 
 nor any that regarded ? " 
 
 (4) Not then by doing, not by giving, not by 
 Buffering may we come before the Lord, or bow our- 
 selves before the most high God. Oh ! if we could 
 thus be at peace with Him, who would not be doing 
 incessantly, who would not give all that he has, who 
 would not cheerfully suffer, as never martyr suffered 
 yet ? Yet let us not imagine that if men have 
 acted thus in sincerity, it will all have been in vain. 
 No, let us take comfort, knowing that God is love. 
 Though not by any number of formal actions can 
 we enter into eternal life, yet no work done from a 
 right motive, however erroneous, can be the fruit of 
 an utterly corrupted tree. Though no self-inflicted 
 anguish can be acceptable to God, yet "agonies 
 
 »>^. 
 
 /^^ 01 THH ^^ 
 
 fiririVBRSITT 
 
102 WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 
 
 of pain and blood shed in rivers are better than 
 the soul spotted and bewildered with mortal sin." 
 Though no giving shall purchase interest in heaven, 
 yet the poorest and slightest act which has sprung 
 from a true charity, — the kindly word spoken in 
 Christ's name, the cup of cold water given for His 
 sake, — shall not miss its reward. You may remem- 
 ber how, in the old legend, St. Brendan, in his 
 northward voyage, saw a man sitting upon an ice- 
 berg, and with horror recognized him to be the 
 traitor Judas Iscariot ; and the traitor told him how, 
 at Christmas time, amid the drench of the burning 
 lake, an angel had touched his arm, and bidden him 
 for one hour to cool his agony on an iceberg in the 
 Arctic sea; and when he asked the cause of this 
 mercy, bade him recognize in him a leper to whom 
 in Joppa streets he had given a cloak to shelter him 
 from the wind, and how for that one kind deed this 
 respite was allotted him. Let us reject the ghastly 
 side of the legend, and accept its truth. Yes, char- 
 ity — love to God as shewn in love to man — ^is better 
 than all burnt-offering and sacrifice. Yet if we 
 condemn the errors of other ages in their mode of 
 approaching God, let us at the same time humbly 
 remember that, better had we be at ceremonials all 
 
WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 103 
 
 day long, — better be giving in the most mercenary 
 spirit of self-interest, — ^better even be a Moloch wor- 
 shipper, drowning with drums the cries of his little 
 infant as he passes it through the fire, — than to be 
 a Christian living, as alas! so many live, without 
 God in the world ; living in pride, fulness of bread, 
 abundance of idleness ; living, while they are unjust, 
 unmerciful, uncharitable, unholy, in self-satisfied 
 Pharisaism, in gluttonous indifference, in sensual 
 ease. 
 
 Yet if all these be at the best but unacceptable 
 ways, what is the true way of pleasing God ? If not 
 by doing, not by giving, not by sufiering, then how ? 
 What is the Prophet's answer ? My brethren, by 
 being, " He hath shewed thee, man, what is 
 good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but 
 to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly 
 with thy God ? " Not once or twice only in Scripture 
 are we taught the same great lesson. "Behold," 
 said Samuel to the presumptuous king, " behold, to 
 obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the 
 fat of rams." " I spake not to your fathers concern- 
 ing burnt-ofierings," said Jeremiah, " but this thing 
 commanded I them. Obey my voice." Four times 
 over, — thrice to the murmuring Pharisees, once to 
 
104 WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 
 
 the inquiring Scribe who was not far from the king- 
 dom of heaven— did our Lord expressly sanction the 
 same high principle. By being then shall we please 
 God ; but by being what ? By being correct in the 
 pronunciation of half-a-dozen shibboleths ? By 
 being diligent in a few observances ? By fasting ? 
 By attending Church services ? By saying " Lord, 
 Lord," when, all the while, the heart is unsanctified, 
 the lips uncharitable, the passions unsubdued ? No, 
 my brethren, no a thousand times ; but by being 
 just, and merciful, and humble before our God. It 
 is the answer of all the Prophets, it is the answer of 
 all the Apostles, it is the answer of Christ Himself 
 Justice that shall hate the wicked balances, — -justice 
 that shall recoil from oppression and violence, — jus- 
 tice that shall loathe the small vices of gossip, scan- 
 dal, and spite : — ^mercy that shall make us careful 
 
 " Never to mix our pleasures or our pride 
 With, anguish of the meanest thing that feels ; " 
 
 mercy that shall cherish for every sorrow which can 
 be alleviated, and every pang that can be assuaged, 
 a divine, trembling, self-sacrificing love ; mercy 
 which, looking neither to be admired, nor honored, 
 nor loved, shall live for the good of others, not its 
 own ; — and lastly, a humble reverence towards God, 
 
WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 105 
 
 which shall be the source alike of that high justice, 
 and that heavenly mercy, — oh this is what G.od 
 requires, and thus alone can we live acceptably to 
 Him. Yea, acceptably ; for this is to live in Christ. 
 In Him was justice fulfilled; in Him was mercy 
 consummated ; in Him was such humility of rever- 
 ence towards His heavenly Father that, alike on the 
 hills of Galilee, and in the garden of Gethsemane, 
 we see Him absorbed in constant prayer. Oh ! my 
 brethren, God needs not our services ; He needs not 
 our formulae ; He needs not our gifts ; least of all 
 does He need our anguish ; but He needs as, our 
 hearts, our lives, our love ; He needs it, and even 
 this He gives us ; shedding abroad the spirit of 
 adoption in our hearts. If we resist not that Spirit 
 we need no longer be what we are ; no longer what 
 we have been. All meanness and malice, all deceit- 
 fulness and fraud, all injustice and insolence, all 
 Pharisaism and uncharity, all worldliness and lust 
 will fall away from us, and we shall be clothed, as 
 with a wedding garment which Christ shall give, 
 with justice, and humanity, and purity, and love. 
 Oh ! if we would indeed know how to serve Him 
 aright, let us put away all idle follies and fancies of 
 Dur own ; and seating ourselves humbly at his feet, 
 
106 WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 
 
 amid those poor and ignorant multitudes who sat 
 listening to Him among the mountain lilies, let us 
 learn the spirit of his own beatitudes — Blessed are 
 the meek for they shall inherit the earth; blessed are 
 the merciful for they shall obtain mercy; blessed are 
 they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for 
 they shall be filled. 
 
V. 
 
 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 Then the devil taketh Him up into the holy City, and setteth 
 Him on a pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto Him, If Thou 
 be the Son of God, cast thyself down : for it is written, He 
 shall give His angels charge concerning Thee : and in their 
 hands they shall bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash 
 Thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him. It is written 
 again. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. — Matthew 
 iv. 5-7. * 
 
 This which is the second temptation in St. 
 Matthew is, as you are aware, the third in St. Luke. 
 It may be that the younger Evangelist, looking 
 upon it as a temptation subtler and more perilous 
 than any which could come from earthly splendor, 
 regarded it as the last because it was the deadliest 
 assault. But the fact that St. Matthew alone gives 
 us definite notes of sequence, — the fact that, as an 
 actual Apostle, he is more likely to have heard the 
 narrative from the lips of Christ Himself, — the fact 
 that the recorded words, "Get thee behind Me, 
 
 * A Lent Sermon, preached in Hereford Cathedral, March 7, 1873. 
 
 (107) 
 
108 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 Satan/' seem to be the natural conclusion of the 
 entire temptation, render it all but certain that the 
 order of the actual temptation was that which the 
 first Evangelist adopts. 
 
 Nor is this all ; for there is also in this order an 
 inherent fitness, a divine probability. It represents, 
 on the part of the tempter, a Satanic subtlety- of 
 insight, which the acutest human intellect could 
 hardly have invented. For our Saviour had foiled 
 the first temptation by an expression of absolute 
 trust in God. Not even the pangs of famine in the 
 howling wilderness would tempt Him one step aside 
 from the perfect confidence that His heavenly 
 Father could, and, in His own time, would prepare 
 for Him a table in the wilderness. Adapting him- 
 self therefore with serpent cunning to this discov- 
 ered mood of the Saviour's mind, — breathing a sug- 
 gestion which must seem but the natural sequel of 
 that triumphant faith, — the tempter challenges this 
 perfect trust, not to gratify an immediate need, but 
 apparently to avert an immediate peril. There is 
 no stain of egotism, no impatience of sufiering, in 
 the present temptation. Transformed therein into 
 an angel of light, the tempter breathed his insidious 
 suggestion as a sublime victory of Messianic power, 
 
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 109 
 
 a striking illustration of sovereign faith. Transport* 
 ing the Saviour to the Holy City, where 
 
 " The glorious temple reared 
 His pile far off, — appearing like a mount 
 Of alabaster, tipped with golden spires," 
 
 the tempter set Him not on a — ^but as it should be 
 more accurately rendered— on the — on the topmost 
 pinnacle. Probably it was the summit of that Stoa 
 Basilik^, or Royal Porch, which towered over the 
 southern extremity of the magnificent mass. At 
 this point the walls of Jerusalem surmount a rocky 
 and elevated platform ; and as the porch itself was 
 of stupendous height, we are told by the Jewish 
 historian, no one could gaze down from it into the 
 sheer descent of the ravine below without his brain 
 growing giddy at the yawning depth of the abyss. 
 
 "If thou be the Son of God;" — again that 
 whispered doubt as though to challenge Him through 
 spiritual pride into an indignant exercise of His 
 miraculous power, — " If Thou be the Son of God, 
 cast Thyself down." Is not this Thy Temple, this 
 Thy Father's house.? Here the prophets prophe 
 sied about Thee ; here Anna and Simeon took Thee 
 in their arms ; here, while yet a boy. Thou didst 
 amaze by Thy wisdom the teachers of Thy people. 
 
110 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 And here, save Thyself, or, if not save, at least 
 assert Thyself by the splendor of miracle, in the 
 majesty of faith. Give to every passer in the valley 
 a sign from Heaven. Flash down, like a star from 
 the zenith, amid the astonished populace. Art 
 Thou afraid ? Nay, for — (and here mark how well 
 the devil can quote Scripture for his purpose, and 
 set the fatal example so greedily followed, of isola- 
 ting, perverting, distorting Holy Writ) — for "He 
 shall give His angels charge concerning Thee : and 
 in their hands they shall bear Thee up, lest at any 
 time Thou dash Thy foot against a stone." 
 
 So deadly subtle, so speciously plausible, was 
 this second temptation. There was nothing vulgar 
 in it, nothing selfish, nothing sensuous. It seemed 
 all spiritual ; and oh ! to how many a Pharisee, and 
 Keformer, and Saint, have such and similar tempta- 
 tions proved a fatal snare ! But calm, spontaneous, 
 deep with warning, came the simple answer, " It is 
 written again. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy 
 God ! " The word in the original is yet stronger, — 
 it is, ovK EKTreipdaeig, thou shalt uot tempt to the full, 
 thou shalt not challenge to the extreme — ^the Lord 
 thy God ; thou shalt not wantonly experiment upon 
 the depth of His pity, or the infinitude of His 
 
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. Ill 
 
 power. When thou art doing thy duty, then, trust 
 Him to the uttermost with a perfect confidence; 
 but let no seductive whisper thrust thee into sui- 
 cidal irreverence in thy demand for aid. Thus, to 
 add the words omitted by the tempter, shalt thou 
 be safe in all thy ways : 
 
 " Also, it is written 
 Tempt not the Lord thy God : He said and stood ; 
 But Satan — smitten by amazement — fell." 
 
 Now no one, I suppose, can ever have meditated 
 even superficially on the Temptation in the Wilder- 
 ness, without feeling its many-sided and searching 
 applicability; and though, at the first glance, this 
 second temptation may seem merely to involve a 
 spiritual pride, which, if not uncommon, is yet far 
 from universal, I think that if we look at it a little 
 more closely in humble simplicity, we shall, on the 
 contrary, find it full of warning to the youngest, no 
 less than to the oldest, to the worst sinner no less 
 than to the loftiest saint. 
 
 The key to its meaning lies surely in the answer 
 of our Lord. It is an allusion to the Book of Deu- 
 teronomy, " Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, 
 as ye tempted Him at Massah.'' And how had the 
 children of Israel tempted God at Massah? They 
 
112 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 were in the wilderness, and in lack of water ; but 
 hitherto God had guided, had fed, had loved them ; 
 for them He had smitten the parted sea ; for them 
 empearled with manna the barren waste ; for them 
 
 " By day along the astonished lands 
 
 The clouded pillar glided slow, ' 
 
 By night Arabia's crimsoned sands 
 Returned the fiery column's glow." 
 
 And could they then, indeed, suppose that God 
 would desert them there to die of thirst ? What 
 did they need but a little calm faith, a little patient 
 trustfulness, a little obedient hope, and then assur- 
 edly for them should the wilderness have rippled 
 with living waves ? But what did they do ? They 
 broke into angry murmurs; they clamored with 
 self-willed indignation ; they demanded as a right 
 the smiting of the stony rock. This was emphatic- 
 ally to tempt the Lord. It was at once presump- 
 tion and distrust, distrust of God's ordinary Provi- 
 dence, presumption of His miraculous aid. It was 
 neither faith, nor submission, nor hope ; it was 
 rebellion — it was sin. 
 
 1. Are we, then, never liable to tempt the Lord 
 our God, as Israel tempted Him in the wilderness, 
 as Christ refused to tempt Him on the Temple pin- 
 
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 113 
 
 nacle ? Yes, in many ways. Christ would not cast 
 Himself down, because He respected, as the laws of 
 His Father, the laws of nature ; and to cast Him- 
 self down would have been to brave and to violate 
 them. Now, we too, by our knowledge of those 
 laws, by study of them, by obedience to them, are 
 placed as it were upon a pinnacle of the Temple, — 
 on a pinnacle of that vast Cathedral of the Omnipo- 
 tent, whose azure dome is the vault of heaven, and 
 the stars its cresset lamps. Consider the supremacy 
 of man in nature. For us are fire and hail, snow 
 and vapor, wind and storm ; for us are the glorious 
 voices of the mountain and t*he sea ; for us the shell 
 upon the sand has its rosy beauty, and the moon in 
 heaven her silvery light. And look what man has 
 done ! How he has made the very elements minister 
 to his happiness, and decrease his toil,— how he has, 
 as it were, seized the very lightning by its wing of 
 fire, and bidden it flash his messages through the 
 heart of mighty mountains, and the bosom of raging 
 seas. But how.? By exact obedience to the laivs 
 of nature, never by insolent violation of them. 
 " The water drowns ship and sailor like a grain of 
 dust; but trim your bark, and the wave which 
 drowned it will be cloven by it, and carry it like its 
 8 
 
114 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 own foam, a plume and a power." '■* But is there 
 no moral lesson for us here ? Aye, and a deep one : 
 for the Book of Nature is also the Book of God, and 
 the Voice of Nature the Voice of God ; and the 
 history of. man, and the life of man, would have 
 been very different, if — instead of neglecting that 
 Book, being deaf to that Voice, violating those 
 Laws, and so flinging himself down from that Tem- 
 ple pinnacle, whereon his feet are set — he had in all 
 respects and in all ages humbly and faithfully 
 striven to understand and to obey. Half of the 
 peace and prosperity of nations, half of the health 
 and happiness of man, half even of the serenity and 
 security of moral life, depend on this. For pain, 
 mutilation, disease, death — these are the stem, 
 instant, inexorable penalties affixed by nature to 
 every violation of every law. Drop a spark near a 
 magazine, and a city may be shattered ; let hot 
 ashes fall in a prairie, and a province may be devas- 
 tated. The germs of diseases the most virulent, 
 which spread dismay and disaster through nations 
 and continents, lurk in the neglected cottage, and 
 the stagnant pool. And, as you all know, these laws 
 have a direct bearing on the individual life of man. 
 
 * Emerson, The Conduct of Life. 
 
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 115 
 
 By obedience to their beneficent indication can we 
 alone preserve a sound mind in a sound body. He 
 who would live to a green old age in purity and 
 honor, — he who would " account himself both a fit 
 person to do the noblest and most glorious deeds, 
 and far better worth than to deject and to defile 
 with such a pollution as sin is, himself so highly 
 ransomed and ennobled to a filial relationship with 
 God," — ^he who would not lay waste the inner sanc- 
 tities of his own immortal nature, or lie down in the 
 dust with his bones full of the sin of his youth, — he 
 must regard the laws of nature as a voice behind 
 him, saying, " This is the way, walk ye in it," when 
 he would turn aside to the right hand or to the left. 
 And then, indeed, he may feel that God's angels 
 shall guard him in all his ways. Never will he 
 
 " With unbashful forehead woo 
 The means of sickness and debility." 
 
 The sudden terror, the pestilence of darkness, the 
 arrow of noonday shall have no dread for him. Or 
 if he sufier, he will calmly and cheerfully accept 
 such suffering as a part of God's providence for his 
 mortal life, knowing that any suffering encountered 
 for the sake of duty with unflinching courage, en- 
 dured for the sake of duty with perfect trust, is only 
 
116 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 less noble than martyrdom itself. It is related of one 
 of the bravest of our kings — a king who, in many a 
 hard fight, when horses were shot under him and 
 bullets tore his clothes, exulted with a serene and 
 imperturbable courage, — that he had yet a deep con- 
 tempt for foolhardiness and neglect. "What do 
 you do here ? " he once asked sternly and angrily, 
 of a gentleman who had come to witness a battle. 
 " Do you not see the danger you are in ?" " Not 
 in greater danger than your Majesty," was the reply. 
 " Yes," answered the king, " but I am here in the 
 path of duty, and therefore may trust my life in 
 God's care; but you — " . . . before the sentence 
 could be finished a cannon-ball laid the rash intruder 
 dead at the unharmed monarch's feet. 
 
 2. Again, hy our spiritual and moral privileges, 
 no less than by the laws of nature, we stand as it 
 were upon the pinnacle of the Temple. Consider 
 our lofty privileges. We are, every one of us, mem- 
 bers of Christ, children of God, inheritors of the 
 kingdom of heaven. In infancy the Cross was signed 
 upon our foreheads;, in youth we were taught at 
 Christ's school ; in manhood the deepest and richest 
 ordinances of a free and unpersecuted religion wei'e 
 placed wholly within our reach. How many by such 
 
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 117 
 
 privileges as these have been tempted to their own 
 destruction ! " Admitted into the holier sanctuary 
 they have but been guilty of the deeper sacrilege ; 
 standing in the brighter radiance they have but 
 flung the deeper shadow." How many, even in the 
 early Church, cast themselves down at the tempter's 
 bidding into the gulf of Antinomianism ; how many 
 in all ages have imagined that they in particular 
 need not be guided by the strict letter of the moral 
 law. How is all such pride rebuked, how is the eter- 
 nal majesty and grandeur of the moral law asserted, 
 by Christ's calm answer, " Thou shalt not tempt the 
 Lord thy God." As long, indeed, as we stand firm 
 where His Providence hath set our feet we are secure. 
 " He shall defend thee under His wings, and thou 
 shalt be safe under His feathers ; His righteousness 
 and truth shall be thy shield and buckler." Daniel 
 when he prayed thrice a day looking towards Jeru- 
 salem was but doing what he had ever done, and 
 therefore for him the lions' mouths were sealed. 
 The three children were but resisting unsought 
 temptation, when they were dragged before the gold- 
 en image, and flung into the burning flame, and 
 therefore for them the Spirit of God breathed like 
 " a moist whistling: wind " amid the fire. But, op 
 
118 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 ihe other hand, when the early Christians thrust 
 themselves presumptuously and insolently into the 
 peril of martyrdom, how often did "the flaniinoj 
 inspirations of idealist valor " sink shamefully undei 
 the rude shock of reality. And the fall of many of 
 them was more terribly shameful, when they put 
 themselves with reckless self-confidence in the way 
 of moral temptations. As long as men watch and 
 pray, and use the ordinary means of safety furnished 
 by God's grace, so long they are safe ; but when they 
 despise those ordinances, how utter may be their 
 ruin ! When Lot, in his greed for gold, was willing 
 to exchange his nomad tent for the foul city's wicked 
 streets, how in the shipwreck of all he had and all 
 he loved, — ^how in the earthquake-shattered city, and 
 the lightning-riven plain, — ^how in the putrescent 
 scum and glistening slime of that salt and bitter 
 sea, which rolled its bituminous horror where his 
 garden-pastures had smiled before, — ^how, I say, did 
 he learn that God means even the most innocent- 
 hearted to keep far away from sin ! When Dinah 
 walked forth to see the daughters of the land, and 
 returned to bitterness and bloodshed, with rent veil 
 and dishevelled hair ; — when Peter followed into the 
 High Priest's palace, and was startled by sneering 
 
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 119 
 
 questions to deny with shameless curses the Lord he 
 loved, — how in their moral feebleness, how in their 
 sudden retribution, do they illustrate the great sin 
 and folly of rushing into danger's way ! Yes ! the 
 devil tempts us when he thrusts sin before us, but, 
 when we approach it of our own selves, it is then we 
 who tempt the devil; and " Lead us not into temp- 
 tation " is a prayer which will not be heard from the 
 lips of him who makes no effort to avoid it. He 
 who walks humbly, prayerfully, watchfully, on the 
 path of quiet duty, may indeed meet with danger ; 
 but if so, firmly holding the hand of God, — un- 
 shaken, unseduced, unterrified, — he shall tread upon 
 the lion and adder, the young lion and the dragon shall 
 he trample under feet. But he who dallies with 
 temptation, he who tampers with evil, is never safe. 
 People say that such and such a man had a sudden 
 fall ; but no fall is sudden. In every instance the 
 crisis of th^ moment is decided only by the tenor of 
 the life ; nor, since this world began, has any man 
 been dragged ever into the domain of evil, who had 
 not strayed carelessly, or gazed curiously, or lingered 
 guiltily, beside its verge. 
 
 3. Once more and lastly, and this is a point 
 which nearly affects us all, independently of all 
 
120 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 spiritual privileges, independently of God's inesti- 
 mable love in the redemption of the world by our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, we are set as it were upon a 
 pinnacle of the Temple, by the mere grandeur and 
 loftiness of our being, by the freedom of our wills, 
 by the immortality of our souls, by the glory and 
 honor, a little lover than the angels, wherewith 
 God has crowned our race. And how often, alas 1 
 and how fearfully, do men fling themselves down 
 from this glory and grandeur, into the abyss I 
 
 " Ah deeper dole I 
 That so august a spirit, shrined so fair, 
 Should, from the starry session of his peers, 
 Decline to quench so bright a brilliance 
 In Hell's sick spume ; — ah me the deeper dole ! " 
 
 For, indeed, by every sin, — above all by every wil- 
 ful, by every deliberate, by every habitual sin, — we 
 do fling ourselves from our high station down into 
 shame and degradation, into guilt and fear, into 
 fiery retribution and, it may be, final loss. And 
 yet, how many talk in these days as though to sin 
 were no great harm ; as though the sins of youth, 
 for instance, were all venial, and it were rather a 
 better thing than otherwise for a young man to 
 sow, as they call it, his wild oats ! But yet, though 
 man deceive himself and be deceived — though the 
 
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 121 
 
 tables of the Moral Law, even ere they were pro- 
 mulgated, were shattered to pieces on the mountain 
 granite — the Moral Law remains in its eternal maj- 
 esty, and in the heart and conscience of every living 
 man, louder than amid the thunder-echoing crags 
 of Sinai, " God spake these words and said" So 
 that every violation of God's law is to fling our- 
 selves down from the Temple pinnacle into the foul 
 and dark ravine ; — ^it is to see whether man's inso- 
 lent rebellion shall not triumph over God's immuta- 
 ble designs. 
 
 And to what do men trust, to what alas ! do 
 we trust when we act thus ? Is it not to the lying 
 whisper that God will give His angels charge over 
 us, and that, whatever we do, we shall still be saved ? 
 But oh, we cannot learn too early that stern lesson 
 of St. Augustine's that though God hath indeed 
 promised forgiveness to those who repent, He hath not 
 promised repentance to those who sin. We cannot 
 convince ourselves too absolutely, that, if we sin, 
 God will work no miracle for our deliverance. Peo- 
 ple talk of time producing a change in them ; but 
 time is no agent, and can lend no aid. And thus, 
 more men destroy themselves by hope than by de- 
 spair ; by the hope that is — the vague, vain, idle 
 
122 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 hope, — that they will some day be saved, than by 
 the despairing conviction that they never can be 
 saved. It has been often said that " hell is paved 
 with good intentions ; " it would be far more true 
 to say that hell is paved with idle hopes. Century 
 after century has the tempter been whispering to 
 myriads and myriads of human souls, " Cast thyself 
 boldly down. Yea, hath God said ? — ^Fear not ! 
 Thou shalt not surely die. Thou shalt enjoy the 
 sweetness Oi the sin, and shalt escape — for God is 
 merciful — the bitterness of the punishment." And 
 yes, my brethren, God is merciful; but shall we 
 make His mercy an excuse for our own wickedness, 
 or pervert His love into an engine for our own de- 
 struction.? Did our first parents, did any of all 
 their millions of descendants in all ages, ever find 
 that whisper true ? In the lost Paradise, in the 
 crushing shame, in the horror at God's presence, 
 in the waving barrier of fire about the Tree of Life, 
 in the son who was murdered, in the son who was a 
 murderer, in the ruin, and angi^ish, and degradation 
 that burst in like a flood upon their race, — did they 
 find that God thinks nothing of His word, and does 
 not mean what He has said.? And if indeed He 
 ioes not, what mean in history the battles and the 
 
AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 123 
 
 massacres, and in nature the earthquake and the 
 pestilence, and in daily experience the cell of the 
 lunatic and the grave of the suicide ? Do these 
 look like " a reckless infinitude of mercy, and bound- 
 less obliteration of the work of sin ? " Might we 
 not, it has been said, seeing a river, hope that it is 
 not a river, and so walk into it and be drowned, as 
 seeing, in all Scripture, and in all nature, judgment 
 and not mercy written down as the penalty of im- 
 penitent transgression, " hope that it is mercy and 
 not judgment, and so rush against the bosses of the 
 Eternal buckler as the wild horse rushes into the 
 battle?" 
 
 Thus then, my brethren, if Satan tempt us to 
 cast ourselves down from that high pinnacle, where- 
 on we are now standing, — ^whether it be by neglect- 
 ing the law of Nature, or by presuming on the law 
 of Grace, or by defying the law of Retribution, — 
 we shall, if we yield to that temptation, be yielding 
 to our own destruction. But to each of such temp- 
 tations we have the true answer, " Thou shalt not 
 tempt the Lord thy God." Trust Him, but tempt 
 Him not. Trust Him, for thou art His child ; and 
 if thou wilt love and fear Him, the very hairs of thy 
 head are all numbered. In the accidents of life, in 
 
124 AVOIDANCE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 its dangers, in its difficulties, in its moral crises, yea, 
 in the very valley of the shadow of death, trust 
 Him ; but in obedience, not in rebellion ; in faith, 
 not in audacity ; in humble patience, not in insolent 
 self-will. So, but so only, shall He give His angels 
 charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall 
 bear thee up lest at any time thou dash thy foot 
 against a stone. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to 
 man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted 
 above that ye are able ; but will with the temptation also 
 make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. — 1 CoB. 
 X. 13 * 
 
 You have just heard these words, my brethren, 
 in the second lesson of this evening's service. They 
 form the climax of a long and memorable digression 
 of which the leading thought is distrust of self, trust 
 in God, — distrust of self as a cause of watchfulness, 
 trust in God as a ground of hope. Like most of St. 
 Paul's words, real and burning words as they always 
 are, they acquire a yet intenser significance from the 
 sequence of thought with which they are connected. 
 He has been speaking of his position as an Apostle, 
 and claiming his right to be supported by his evan- 
 gelizing work. But he reminds his Corinthian 
 converts that he had deliberately waived that right. 
 
 * Preached as a Farewell Sermon in the Chapel of Harrow 
 School on the evening of Jan. 29, 1871. 
 
 (125) 
 
126 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 He had followed that rarer and nobler course which 
 is so hard to learn, and which he urges so often on 
 all Christians, of calmly and habitually being content 
 if need be, with less than is our due. And therefore, 
 instead of accepting the maintenance to which he 
 was so clearly entitled from the hands of his con- 
 verts, he had labored with his own hands to meet 
 the modest wants of a disciplined and simple life. 
 Yet he did not boast of this great self-denial ; he 
 had not done it for glory, or for gratitude, but for 
 God. What he had done he could not help doing. 
 The sacred hunger for souls had absorbed his ener- 
 gies ; the burning impulse of love had swayed his 
 soul; his labor had been its own reward, because 
 it had been done for the Gospel's sake, that he and 
 they might alike be partakers of its benefits. 
 
 And there for a moment he pauses. The thought 
 arrests his attention. You may have sometimes 
 watched a great tide advancing irresistibly towards 
 the destined shore, yet broken and rippled over 
 every wave of its sunlit fretwork, and liable at 
 any momeilt to mighty refluences as it foams and 
 swells about opposing sandbank or rocky cape. 
 Such, as the elder of you will recognize, is the style 
 of St. Paul. The word " Gospel,"— the thought of 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 127 
 
 sharing with them its awful privileges, — arrests him ; 
 he is suddenly startled at the grandeur of his own mis- 
 sion, and stops to warn them that even he, their 
 teacher, — even he called to be an Apostle, — even he 
 with all his perils and labors and sacrifices, needed, 
 no less than they did, unsparing, constant, anxious 
 self-discipline, lest he should become a castaway. 
 He reminds them that the mortification, the conflict, 
 the self-mastery which were necessary for him who 
 would wear heaven's wreath of amaranth,* were far 
 more intense and continuous than the severe train- 
 ing which the young athletes of their city must 
 undergo before they could win those coveted and 
 fading garlands of Isthmian pine. He reminds them 
 too of the awful lesson involved in the history of 
 their fathers. They, by glorious privilege, had been 
 guided by the fiery pillar, had been baptized in the 
 parted sea, had quenched their thirst from the 
 cloven rock, — yet all had been in vain. In spite of 
 all, their hearts had lusted after evil things. Some 
 had committed fornication and fallen in one day 
 three and twenty thousand ; some had tempted 
 Christ and been destroyed of serpents ; some had 
 murmured and been destroyed of the destroyer. Oh 
 
 • 1 Cor. ix. 25. 1 Peter v. 4. tov afiapdvTcvov rrj^ i^^fJ-Q ori^avov. 
 
< 
 
 128 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 let them beware, for all this dark and splendid his- 
 tory was written for their example. It was no dim 
 revelation of God's will, no uncertain utterance of 
 His voice. And its lesson was "Let him that 
 thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall." But 
 then, at once, after those stern and solemn messages, 
 
 4 
 
 the heart of the great apostle breaks with tears. 
 fle yearns to comfort his children. " Why should 
 they — why need they fall ? " The thought flashes 
 across his mind too rapidly for utterance, and leav- 
 ing it unexpressed, he continues, " There hath no 
 temptation taken you but such as is common to 
 man ; but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to 
 be tempted above that ye are able ; but will with 
 the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye 
 may be able to bear it." 
 
 At those blessed words, my brethren, we too will 
 pause. They are words of mercy, of strength, of con- 
 fidence, of comfort. Yery gladly for a few moments 
 would I dwell on them as my last words amongst 
 you. Very earnestly would I pray to Almighty 
 God, that, as a savor of life unto life, their meaning 
 may linger in our souls ; and that thereby we may 
 be helped forward by God's grace on the path of a 
 Christian life, feeling more peace amidst its troubles. 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 129 
 
 more courage under its difficulties, more hope amid 
 its failures, more joy as the quiet scene of its many- 
 blessings gleams forth under the sunlight of God's 
 approving smile. 
 
 1. Mark first, my brethren, that St. Paul as- 
 sumes the certainty of our encountering temptation. 
 No life, not even the life of our Lord and Master, 
 was ever yet without it. That journey of the Israel- 
 ites in the desert to which St. Paul alludes, fur- 
 nishes a close emblem of our own. Before each one 
 of us — a pillar of a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by 
 night, — glides visibly the protecting providence of 
 God. Wonderful deliverances are vouchsafed to us. 
 Enemies pursue us, and we must fly from them. 
 Enemies confront us, and we must fight with them. 
 Vividly and distinctly, loudly and intelligibly, — as 
 among the burning summits and thunder-beaten 
 crags of Sinai, — blaze for us the revealing splen- 
 dors, reverberate for us the majestic utterances of 
 the moral law. Simple and sweet as virgin honey, 
 — if we will only live thereon, — ^lies round us the 
 angels' food ; clear and crystalline, — if we will but 
 drink thereof, — murmurs and shines about us the 
 river of God's love. Yet, alas ! we fall as Israel fell. 
 
 Idolaters like them, we inflame ourselves with idols. 
 9 
 
130 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATIOIT. 
 
 Sensualists like them, we sigh for the fleshpots of 
 Egypt among the manna-dews of heaven. Thank- 
 less as they, we have heen discontented an(^ rebel- 
 lious in the midst of mercies. The language is 
 allegorical, the fact is bitterly real. All of us have 
 been tempted ; many of us have fallen ; some have 
 been overthrown in the wilderness. 
 
 And these temptations — these impulses from 
 without, these tendencies from within, to love our 
 bodies more than our souls, our pleasures more than 
 our duties, ourselves more than our God, — ^begin, 
 alas, almost with our earliest years. The very 
 youngest boy who hears me, knows what it is to be 
 tempted to do wrong, — tempted to neglect known 
 duties, to utter wicked language, — tempted to be 
 idle, or self-indulgent, or unholy, or unkind. Ah 
 my brethren, let us not conceal it, — let us frankly 
 acknowledge the plain fact, — ^an English Public 
 School, — nay, any school, public or private, is, and 
 must be a scene of temptation. That temptation 
 may vary in extent, in intensity, in deadliness ; at 
 one time, in one house, under one set of circum- 
 stances it may be fearfully virulent ; — under happier 
 influences it may be comparatively faint ; — but it 
 will be always there. It must needs be that offences 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 131 
 
 come. To one who feels the sacredness of life, to 
 one who cares for the souls of others, to one who 
 can thrill with an emotion of assent to that crush- 
 ing indignation which "flung the desecrator of 
 youthful innocence with a millstone round his neck 
 into the sea," the advent of a new boy to a Public 
 School must always cause anxiety ; he must be care- 
 fully shielded, gently watched over, wisely, and, if 
 need be, even solemnly forewarned. And even then, 
 though many a prayer be poured forth for him at 
 the throne of grace, though hands firm and tender 
 be outstretched to upbear his stumbling feet, nay, 
 even though, in the silent watches of the night, 
 hours of sleepless thought may have been given to 
 his welfare, as they have been given by many here 
 for many here, — ^he may cause bitter disappoint- 
 ment, he may go terribly astray. My brethren, it 
 is not my purpose to awaken the memories of the 
 past ; yet, as I look back over a space of more than 
 fifteen years, it is sadly,-* solemnly true, that I have 
 known some with whom God was not well pleased, 
 some who, listening to the subtle whispers of temp- 
 tation, forsook the guide of their youth to perish in 
 the wilderness. I mean not, God forbid! those 
 over whose young graves the grass is green ; those 
 
132 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 whom in the midst of us the voice of God has call- 
 ed, the finger of death has touched. I knew indeed 
 each and all of those whose names, from these mute 
 tablets, make to you their touching and eloquent 
 appeal ; I knew many others, whose names are unre- 
 corded here, but whom, — some by the sharp stroke of 
 accident, some down the lingering declivities of dis- 
 ease — God, perhaps only because they were so fit to 
 die, called away to their long home, nearer to their 
 heavenly Father, nearer to their brother Christ. 
 On their vacant places we could always gaze with- 
 out a tear; but from time to time there have been 
 other vacant places among you, not due to death ; 
 the vacant places of those who once were innocent, 
 who once were simple-minded, who once were up- 
 right, but from whom, partly for their own good, 
 partly for yours, it was best that you should sepa- 
 rate. And others there have been who have not left 
 us in sorrow ; but yet, if you could call them here, 
 — if they could show you how their feet have been 
 lacerated by the thorns which their own careless 
 hands sowed broadcast on their youthful path, — if 
 they could reveal to you what it is to bleed inwardly 
 and well nigh unto death with self-inflicted wounds, 
 — if, saved so as by fire, they could make you feel 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 133 
 
 beforehand that (it may be in years long after) a 
 man must possess and inherit the sins, aye and even 
 the mere follies of his youth, — then with what em- 
 phasis of warningy then with what solemnity of 
 dready would you hear St. Paul's admonition to dis- 
 trust of self, — ^would you learn that your life here is 
 to all but the careful and the prayerful a time of 
 danger, — that it is a wilderness of temptation in 
 which many fall. 
 
 2. Yes, so much I was forced to say; but I 
 add eagerly and joyfully that you need not fall, — 
 not one of you need fall, — every one of you may be- 
 come pure, and sweet, and noble ; every one of you 
 may die a holy man. My subject is not warning, 
 but comfort ; and St. Paul's comfort to those whom 
 he loved was this, " There hath no temptation taken 
 you but such as is common to man." Perhaps you 
 will say that this is no comfort. 
 
 " That loss is common would not make 
 My own less bitter ; rather more ; 
 Too common, — never evening wore 
 To morning, but some heart did break." 
 
 When a ship is going down in the angry sea, is it 
 any comfort to the drowning struggling mariner to 
 think that all his comrades also, — all whom he has 
 
134 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 honored, all whom he has loved, — are buffeting 
 hopelessly with those overwhelming waves? No, 
 my brethren, the consolations of Scripture are not 
 like this ; but how if we could tell him that .though 
 some will perish, all might escape ? How if we 
 pointed him to the life-buoy floating near him on 
 the billows, — to the life-boat straining towards him 
 through the storm ? How if, without concealing 
 his peril, yet cheering, aiding, inspiriting the bold 
 
 Courage, we cried, and pointed toward the land ; 
 This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon ? 
 
 Aye this is St. Paul's comfort — not that our 
 temptations are common to man, but they are hu- 
 man;'--' that there is nothing strange, abnormal, in- 
 superable about them ; that they are well within the 
 scope of our power to struggle with. If you would 
 kindle a soldier into daring would you point out to 
 him his spiritless, defeated comrades, — the victorious 
 insulting foe.^ Would some French general — a 
 Chanzy or a Bourbaki, — cheer on the despairing 
 armies of France in the hour of battle by telling 
 vthem of the retreat from Moscow or the rout at 
 
 * Greek avdptjiripog A. V. marg. "Moderate." 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 135 
 
 Waterloo ? Would he not rather fire their memo- 
 ries with the heroisms of Valmy and of Marengo, 
 with the glories of Jena and of Austerlitz ? Would 
 he not tell them how, exhausted by drought and 
 weariness, their glorious fathers had shattered the 
 magnificent chivalry of the Mamelukes at the Pyra- 
 mids, and how, ragged and shoeless, yet irresistible, 
 they had swept through the storm of fire to hurl the 
 German artillery from the Bridge of Lodi ? Even 
 so, in a world of sin and sorrow, in a moral world 
 which has its own disgraces and defeats, St. Paul 
 would point us not to those sad pale multitudes of 
 wasted and ruined lives, — not to the retributive dis- 
 eases of desecrated bodies, or the gnawing Nemesis 
 of guilty souls, — not to the chain of the felon, or the 
 cell of the lunatic, or the grave of the suicide, — ah 
 no ! these with an infinite pity, these with a faith 
 that transcends and tramples on the petty Phari- 
 saisms of dogma, these, sorrowing but not scorning, 
 compassionating but not condemning, we leave with 
 infinite tenderness in the tender hands of God, — 
 but no ! he points us, and we point you now, to the 
 glorious company of the high and noble, of the 
 pure and holy ; to. the white-robed, palm-bearing 
 procession of happy human souls; to those who 
 
136 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 have fought and conquered, to those who have 
 wrestled and overcome ! 
 
 3. But these perhaps you will say to me are 
 the strong great souls, the ScaBvolas of Christian 
 daring, the Manlii of Christian faith. Temptations 
 insignificant to them might well be insuperable to 
 us. Nay, my brethren, God is faithful, and will 
 not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are 
 able. In an age of cold faith and dead enthusiasm 
 no splendid heroisms, no agonizing martyrdoms are 
 required of you. Ye have not yet resisted unto 
 blood, striving against sin. Not yet, like the boy 
 Origen, have you seen a father torn from you by 
 violence ; or like the girl Blandina, been called upon 
 to face the cruel gaze of the bloody amphitheatre. 
 He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, tem- 
 pers also the temptation to the weak soul. He 
 knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are 
 but dust. Oh in that hero-multitude who follow 
 the Lamb whithersoever he goeth, think not that 
 there are only the dauntless and the powerful, the 
 great in heart and the strong in faith : no, there are 
 many of the weak and the timid, many of the 
 obscure and the ignorant, many of the shrinking 
 and the suffering there. We saw not, till they 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 137 
 
 were unfolded for the flight of death, their angel 
 wings. Yes ! Jacob, once a mean trickster, and 
 Aaron, once a weak apostate, is there ; and Rahab 
 the harlot, and David the adulterer; and Mary 
 the weeping Magdalene, and Matthew the con- 
 verted publican, and Dysmas the repentant thief; 
 many as frail, many as fallen, many as sinful as 
 the weakest and the worst of you; but there are 
 no stains on their white robes now ; there is no 
 weakness or meanness in their regenerated spirits 
 now, and the solemn agony has faded from their 
 brows. You think that you could never have been a 
 martyr, yet women more timid, and children more 
 delicate, have won and worn that crown ; nearer to 
 the flame they were nearer to Christ, and as the balmy 
 winds of Paradise beat upon their foreheads while 
 the fii'e roared about their feet, so believe me will it 
 be with you. I have known martyrs • here — ^boys 
 ungifted and unattractive, boys neglected and de- 
 spised, — yet so firm in their innocence, so steadfast 
 in their faith, that no evil thing had power to hurt 
 them. Every day their struggle was easier; every 
 day their path more happy. Weak, unloved, and 
 singlehanded, they overcame the world. And why ? 
 Oh, if any passing interest attaches to the accident 
 
138 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 of these last words, would that I could leave you 
 this thought as an indelible impression ; — Why ? 
 because God is faithful. To us in our blindness, 
 ignorance, waywardness, He does not always seem 
 so. To the strong man when he sits, despairing and 
 stricken, amid the ruins of his life, — to the father 
 whose erring son causes him agony and shame, — to 
 the mother who kneels broken-hearted beside the 
 cradle where her pretty little one lies dead, — to these 
 the sun shines not, and the stars give no light, — 
 the heavens above their heads are iron, and the 
 earth beneath their feet is brass. Yet, oh how gen- 
 tly He heals even for these the wounds which His 
 own loving hand has made ; how do the clouds break 
 over them and the pale silver gleam of resignation 
 brighten into the burning ray of faith and love. 
 Why art thou so cast down, oh my soul, and why 
 art thou so disquieted within me ? Trust thou in 
 God. Is there one of you, is there one in this 
 chapel whom he has not richly blessed ? I am sure 
 that there is not one of you. For our path in 
 life, my brethren, is like that of the traveller who 
 lands at the famous port of the Holy Land. He 
 rides at first under the shade of palms, under 
 the golden orange-groves, beside the crowded 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 139 
 
 fountains, with almonds and pomegranateif break- 
 ing around him into blossom : soon he leaves be- 
 hind him these lovely groves ; he enters on the 
 bare and open plain ; the sun burns over him, the 
 dust-clouds whirl around him ; but even there the 
 path is broidered by the quiet wayside flowers, and 
 when at last the bleak bare hills succeed, his 
 heart bounds within him, for he knows that 
 he shall catch his first glimpse of the Holy City, as 
 he stands weary on their brow. Oh how often, my 
 brethren, must the Christian, in this the Holy 
 Land of his short pilgrimage on earth, from the 
 golden morning to the blaze of noon, from the burn- 
 ing noon to the beautiful twilight, again and again 
 recall that tender verse of the Prophet, " I know 
 the thoughts that I think towards you," saith the 
 Lord, " thoughts of peace and not of evil" 
 
 4. Yes, Grod is faithful ; and most of all, be- 
 cause He will lay no heavier burden on any one of 
 us than we can carry well. Whether in the way of 
 trial, or in the way of temptation, remember, my 
 brethren, in the words of the poet, 
 
 " 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalos, 
 Another thing to fall.** 
 
 We shall all be tempted, but the effects of the 
 
 fuKIVBRSITT, 
 
140 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 temptation depend upon ourselves. Fling into the 
 same flame a lump of clay and a piece of gold, — 
 the clay will be hardened, the gold will melt; 
 the heart of Pharaoh hardened into perfidious in- 
 solence, the soul of David melted into pathetic 
 song. Bear temptation faithfully, and it will leave 
 you not only unscathed, but nobler. With each 
 temptation God will also provide not — as the En- 
 glish version has it — a way, but the wa,j of es- 
 cape ; * the one separate escape for each separate 
 temptation. Because God loves us, because Christ 
 died, because having risen again He shed forth 
 the Spirit in our hearts, therefore under the fiercest 
 assaults of Satan the soul may be always safe. 
 It may be like a beleaguered city, the powers of 
 evil may marshal all their devilish enginery, and 
 make the air hiss with their fiery darts, but every 
 sortie of the besieged shall be inevitably success- 
 ful; never shall there be capitulation; and by 
 true resistance the assaults of the tempter shall 
 at last be driven back in irretrievable, disgraceful 
 rout. 
 
 It would take me too long, my brethren, were I 
 to dwell on the way of escape from each temptation. 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 141 
 
 But without dwelling on them, I would gladly men- 
 tion — and merely mention — ^fbur, with the power 
 and efficacy of which I have been often struck. 
 i. The first is watchfulness over the thoughts. As 
 is the fountain, so will be the stream. Quench the 
 spark, and you are safe from the conflagration. 
 Crush the serpent's Qg^, and you need not dread 
 the cockatrice. Conquer evil thoughts, and you 
 will have little danger of evil words and evil ways. 
 The victory over every temptation is easiest, is 
 safest, is most blessed there, ii. The second way 
 is avoidance of danger. The best courage, believe 
 me, is sometimes shown by flight. Consider which 
 is your weakest point, who are your most dangerous 
 companions, which is your guiltiest hour. Avoid 
 those companions, defend that weak point, put the 
 strongest guard upon those hours, iii. Then, third- 
 ly, overcome evil with good. Kill wicked passion 
 by religious passion. Expel evil affections by no- 
 ble yearnings. Banish mean cravings by holy en- 
 thusiasms. " Give me a great thought" said the 
 German poet, " that I may live on it." Read great 
 books ; enrich your minds with noble sentiments ; 
 above all, read your Bibles ; fill your whole souls 
 with the thought of Christ ; make of him not only 
 
142 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 a Kedeemer, but a brother, — not only a Saviour, 
 but a friend, iv. And fourthly, I will mention 
 prayer. That, my brethren, is the truest amulet 
 against the siren songs, the holiest enchantment 
 against each Circaean spell. Suffer me to quote the 
 words of that great poet, whom I have wished 
 many of you to love : 
 
 " Amongst the rest a small unsightly root, 
 But of divine eflfect, he culled me out ; 
 * * * * ♦ 
 
 He called it Hoemony, and gave it me : 
 
 And bade me keep it as of sov'ran use 
 
 'Grainst all enchantments, mildew, blast, or damp. 
 
 Or ghastly furies' apparition." 
 
 I have said nothing, my brethren, of happy Sabbath 
 days; nothing of the strength that comes from 
 mutual communion; nothing of these delightful 
 services ; nothing of kindly admonitions ; nothing 
 of confirmation ; nothing of the memories of bap- 
 tism; nothing of that divine viaticum on life's 
 journey, the Supper of the Lord. My brethren, I 
 cannot say all I would, or a tithe of all. Would to 
 God that this little might be enough; enough to 
 convince you that because God is faithful you never 
 need do wrong ; enough to point to the drawn 
 sword in the path of wilful sinners ; enough to show 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 143 
 
 to those who are struggling timidly that around 
 them are angel champions, and over them are in- 
 vincible shields. To those who are new boys among 
 you, I would say. Resist the devil, and he will flee 
 from you. Ohsta principiis — avoid the beginnings 
 of evil — this is the way of escape for you. And 
 you who have learnt here some lessons of sin and 
 sorrow, believe me that no less to you ako lies open 
 the way of escape. Oh rouse yourselves, and play 
 the men. Indolence and selfishness would terrify 
 you by the sight of lions in the path, but press 
 onward and you will find them chained. God does 
 not mean you to perish. Your Lord came to seek 
 the sinful ; He died to save the lost. Make but 
 one effort, and yours too shall be the blessed- 
 ness of Him " whose iniquity is forgiven, whose sin 
 is covered." 
 
 My subject is ended. I thank God from my 
 heart that it has been a subject^ of comfort, of en- 
 couragement, of hope. And here I would gladly 
 close, but the last word must be spoken however 
 painful. After more than fifteen years among you, 
 it would not be natural, you would not wish me, to 
 make no allusion to a parting which to me at least 
 
144 THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 
 
 is very full of pain. Yet what shall I say .? To 
 those Colleagues who for so many years have treated 
 me with such generous sympathy and indulgent 
 kindness, I would offer from a full heart my sincere 
 and earnest and grateful thanks. To all those — 
 not a few of your number — whom at one period or 
 other it has been my high privilege to teach, I 
 would say, if God has ever enabled me to speak to 
 you any true and righteous words, continue thou in 
 the things that thou hast learned. To those who 
 have been placed towards me in the yet nearer 
 and dearer connection of Friends and Pupils, I 
 would say, Think kindly of me still, and for my 
 sake think and speak kindly of the new home to 
 which God's providence is calling me. And on ail 
 the Masters and Scholars and Benefactors of this 
 great and famous school I would invoke God's 
 richest and choicest blessings. You are entering 
 on a year of intense interest. I pray to God that 
 the tercentenary of Harrow may be right royally 
 prospered ; and when its celebrations are over, when 
 its benefits are achieved, may it witness the yet 
 deeper blessing of ever holier traditions ; may it 
 hand on from year to year the ever-brightening 
 torch of knowledge and of truth. But one word 
 
THE CONQUEST OVER TEMPTATION. 145 
 
 more. When the last echo of my voice shall have 
 died away, we shall all kneel upon our knees to 
 utter in silence one last petition ere the Sabbath 
 services are over and we leave the House of God. 
 Oh suffer me to beg of you, as my last request, that 
 each one of you. Masters and Boys and Friends, 
 would, as you kneel before our common Father, 
 utter one brief prayer for God's blessing upon him 
 whose place here will know him no more. It will 
 cheer me more than I can tell you in the midst of 
 new and difficult reponsibilities, to think that, as 
 I was leaving my Harrow home, the hearts of all in 
 this School Chapel which we love so well, were for 
 one moment united as the heart of one, in the sweet 
 and peaceful petition " For my brethren and com- 
 panions' sake I will wish thee prosperity ; yea, be- 
 cause of th« house of the Lord our God I will seek 
 to do thee good." 
 
 T <Je^ Oeip x^P^C T^ StSSvTi 
 ^filv rb viKoa 6ia rov Kvpiov ^av 
 ^Iriaov Xpiarov. 
 
 10 
 
VII. 
 
 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Wisdom is the principal thing : therefore get wisdom : and with 
 all thy getting get understanding.— Provekbs iv. 7.* 
 
 Bead in the light which falls upon it from the 
 teaching of Christ and His Apostles, there is, per- 
 haps, no Book of holy Scripture which illustrates more 
 clearly than the Book of Proverbs the objects and 
 th« privileges, the duties and the dangers, of this 
 seat of learning. Into the wonderful structure of 
 that book, into the TroltmolKiUc (Axpia of its noble teach- 
 ing, it is not my purpose to enter ; but there are 
 two features of it which will immediately -strike the 
 most careless reader; one is the allusive contrast 
 which runs through its earlier chapters, the other is 
 the constant connection of Wisdom with Knowl- 
 edge. Two voices are heard in it, — the voice of 
 Prudence and the voice of Folly ; the voice of "Virtue 
 and the voice of Pleasure ; the pleading of the vir- 
 
 * Preached in the chapel of King's College, London, at the 
 Annual Commemoration, July 16, 1871. 
 
 (147) 
 
148 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 gin Innocence and the pleading of the harlot Sense ; 
 the enticements of a Passion earthly, sensual, devil- 
 ish, and the lofty invitations of a Wisdom which is 
 pure, peaceable, gentle, full of mercy and good 
 fruits. 
 
 Subtle, and sweet, and perilous, and evanescent, 
 — ^powerful only to the soul that forgets its God, — 
 heard only in the twilight, in the evening, in the 
 black dark night, an unhallowed song is suffered to 
 break in upon those solemn utterances; a song, 
 drowned almost from the very beginning by the 
 groans of the deluded and the stern epitaph pro- 
 nounced over the living dead : and ever, overmas- 
 tering that strain, shaming it into terrified silence, 
 chilling it into penitent despair — is heard that other 
 Voice, pure as the voices of the Seraphim, offering 
 peace and pleasantness in life, and hope and safety 
 beyond the grave, — an ornament of grace for the 
 living, a crown of everlasting remembrance and 
 unfading glory for the dead. 
 
 And while the praises of this heavenly Wisdom are 
 painted in such fair colors, — while its worth is set 
 far above rubies and crystal, the gold of Ophir, and 
 the topaz of Ethiopia, — it is, both in the Book 
 of Proverbs and in other parts of Scripture, united 
 
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 149 
 
 constantly with Knowledge. "In the night that 
 God did appear unto Solomon, He said unto him, 
 Ask what I shall give thee. And Solomon said unto 
 God, Give me now wisdom and knowledge. And 
 God said unto Solomon, Wisdom and knowledge is 
 granted unto thee." They are not mere synonyms. 
 Knowledge may come when wisdom lingers ; and, on 
 the other haftd, wisdom may exist in rich and divine 
 ahundance where knowledge is scanty and superfi- 
 cial. And it is clear that, in Scripture, wisdom is 
 the loftier and the more sacred of the two. Take 
 knowledge to mean the sum total of every magnifi- 
 cent endowment and every extensive acquisition; 
 — ^let it involve not only erudition, but insight'; 
 not only information, but intellect ; not only the- 
 oretical acquaintance, but practical ability ; make 
 it include, if you will, the power to think as Plato 
 thought, and to write as Shakespeare wrote; be- 
 stow it on one single mind with such brightness 
 as never yet illuminated the world, and reward it 
 with a splendor of reputation such as no man 
 ever yet enjoyed, — ^yet even then knowledge falls 
 far, far below wisdom, — ^below wisdom merged in 
 obscurity ; below wisdom accompanied by igno- 
 rance ; below wisdom burdened with every earthly 
 
150 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 calamity, and insulted by every human scorn. Does 
 not all history justify herein the estimate of Scrip- 
 ture ? Have we not read of men whose heads 
 towered high above their contemporaries, who by 
 eloquence, or song, or intellect, have elevated and 
 charmed mankind, and yet of whom the humblest 
 child, the most ignorant pauper in the kingdom 
 of heaven, is greater than these ? Any age will 
 furnish us with examples. Seneca uttered words 
 of lofty morality and almost Apostolic force, yet 
 his inconsistent sycophancy and grasping avarice 
 awoke the scorn of even a dissolute and greedy age. 
 Ab6lard was endowed with an intellect keener than 
 is granted in a century to any of our race ; yet so 
 flagrant was his folly, so fatal his vanity, so gross 
 his crime, that the miserablest could afford to look 
 on him with pity, and almost the meanest with con- 
 tempt. Bacon has won for his glorious intellect the 
 reverence and admiration of every succeeding age, 
 yet there is, alas ! many an ignoble passage of his 
 life which can only claim to be forgotten by the 
 generous, and forgiven by the just. Has not God 
 over and over again scattered penal blindness over 
 vaunted acquisitions, and smiting a godless in- 
 tellect with a moral imbecility, has He not frus- 
 
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 151 
 
 trated the tokens of the liars, and made diviners 
 mad ? But why need we dwell on the fact that in- 
 tellectual eminence is no preservative against moral 
 infatuation, when God has written the same truth 
 so large over the history of nations ? Have we not 
 known mighty peoples who, professing themselves 
 to be wise, became fools ; who, because when they 
 knew God they glorified him not as God, became 
 vain in their imagination, and their foolish heart was 
 darkened ? Did the lustre of her genius, did the 
 liberality of her institutions, did the glorious roll of 
 her eloquence, did the lyric sweetness of her song, 
 save Greece from the infamy of her obliteration, when 
 she perished under the eating cancer of her favorite 
 sins ? Did the iron sceptre or the invincible sword, 
 did the dignity of her government or the strength 
 of her determination, deliver Rome from the long 
 agony of her vile corruption and pitiable decay ? 
 The fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, for all 
 their reviving knowledge and glittering refinement, 
 were they not full of wickedness, covetousness, 
 maliciousness ; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, 
 malignity? Did not the one honor Aretino as a 
 ])oct, and Poggio as a wit ; and the other accept 
 Chesterfield as a moralist, and elevate Voltaire into 
 
152 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 a sage ? Yes, — ^and it is a lesson of which this cen- 
 tury too has need, — ^knowledge without wisdom is, 
 as even a corrupt and worldly poet has expressed it, 
 
 " Dim as the borrowed beams of moon or stars 
 To lonely, weary, wandering travellers ; 
 And as their twinkling tapers disappear 
 When day's bright lord ascends the hemisphere, 
 So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight, 
 So dies and so dissolves in supernatural light." 
 
 Wisdom then is the principal thing, therefore get 
 wisdom. But what is wisdom 7 The world gives 
 the name to many higher and lower manifesta- 
 tions of intellectual foresight and practical sense, 
 but Scripture sees in it nothing save one single 
 law of life. In that most magnificent outburst 
 of life. In that most magnificent outburst of 
 Semitic poetry, tne 28th chapter of the book of 
 Job, — after pointing out that there is such a thing 
 as a high and noble natural knowledge, that there 
 is a vein for the silver, and ore of gold, and a place 
 of sapphires, and reservoirs of subterranean fire, — 
 the Patriarch asks, " But where shall wisdom be 
 found, and where is the place of understanding .? " — 
 and after showing with marvellous power that it is 
 beyond man's unaided search, — that the Depths and 
 the Sea say " It is not in me," and Destruction and 
 
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 153 
 
 Death have but heard the fame thereof with their 
 ears, — then he adds, as with one great thunder- 
 crash of concluding music, " God understandeth the 
 way thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof 
 
 And unto man He said, Behold, the fear of 
 
 the Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil 
 is understanding." And again, " The fear of the 
 Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And again, he 
 who, in the book of Ecclesiastes, rises step by step 
 out of the dreary cynicism of the sated worldling 
 into the calm confidence of a godly hope, states as 
 the conclusion no less than as the commencement 
 of the whole matter, " Fear God and keep His com- 
 mandments, for this is the whole duty of man : " 
 and in the Epistle of St. James, after the question, 
 " Who is a wise man, and endued with knowledge 
 among you ? " the answer is, not he who under- 
 standeth all mysteries, not he who can speak with 
 the tongue of men or of angels, but " Let him show 
 out of a good conversation his works with meekness 
 of wisdom." 
 
 But, if this be so, perhaps some one may say, 
 Is any knowledge worth the attainment, save the one 
 knowledge which is wisdom ? If knowledge be full 
 of difficulties, — ^if, without charity, it puffeth up, — 
 
154 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 if he who increaseth it increaseth sorrow, why then 
 do we labor for it with such sore travail? We 
 toil and toil, and perhaps in a moment we fall ill, 
 and in one day the flames of a fever calcine for ever 
 the tablets of the earthly memory, or in one moment 
 death comes upon us, and under its cold ^^hicjacet" 
 buries all that we have won. Or death comes to 
 another who has not labored, and, as that impene- 
 trable curtain is drawn aside, there is revealed to 
 him as by a single lightning-flash, secrets deeper 
 ten thousand-fold than those which we have wearied 
 ourselves in the very fire to win. Why strive then 
 after that which death may in a moment obliterate, 
 or disease destroy ? Were it not better done as 
 others use — ^not indeed to waste life* in indolent 
 frivolity or shameful sloth, but to give it all to 
 prayer and penitence, to religious musings or char- 
 itable works ? " Oh happy school of Christ," wrote 
 Peter of the Cells to a young disciple who had com- 
 plained of the weary seductions and splendid vices 
 of the mediaBval Paris, — " Oh happy school of 
 Christ, where He teaches our heart with the word 
 of power ; where the book is not purchased nor the 
 master paid. There, life availeth more than learn- 
 ing, and simplicity than science. There, none are 
 
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 155 
 
 refuted, save those who are for ever rejected, and one 
 word of final judgment, 'lie' or 'Venite,' decides all 
 questions and all cavils for ever." It was a natural 
 exclamation, but the answer to it is, that to the 
 true Christian every school will be a school of 
 Christ. On the ample leaf of knowledge, whether 
 it be rich with the secrets of nature or with the 
 spoils of time, he will read no name save the name 
 of God. The great stone pages of the world will 
 have it carved upon them legibly, as on the granite 
 tables of Sinai, and stars will sing of it in their 
 courses, and winds blow and waters roll. Each 
 Science, each History, each Literature, will be to 
 him but a fresh volume of divine revelation. We 
 were not meant to leave those volumes clasped, or 
 to suffer the book of life to drop out of our idle 
 hands unread. Kather would we exclaim to each 
 young student, as did the wise and holy St. Ed- 
 mund of Canterbury, "Work as though you would 
 live for ever ; live as though you would die to day." 
 To seek for knowledge where it is possible is the 
 ilear duty of man ; to win it is the gift of God. 
 Knowledge apart from wisdom is like a vestibule 
 dissevered from its temple ; but it may on the other 
 hand be the worthy vestibule of that sacred shrine. 
 
156 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 ^^ Felix ille" says St. Augustine, ^^qui hcec omnia 
 nesciat, te autem sciat ; " aye, but happier he in 
 whom knowledge is but a spark kindled from the 
 fountain of all heat, a sunbeam whereby he may 
 climb to the Father of Lights. If in any soul there 
 be, by the grace of God, health and happiness, truth 
 and justice, purity and peace, then for that soul 
 undoubtedly will industry be a fresh virtue, and 
 knowledge an added grace. Knowledge is a vain 
 thing only when it is sought out of unworthy mo- 
 tives and applied to selfish ends ; but it becomes 
 noble and glorious when it is desired solely for 
 man's benefit, and consecrated wholly to God's 
 praise. " There are some," writes St. Bernard, 
 "who desire to know with the sole purpose that 
 they may know, and it is base curiosity ; and some 
 who desire to know that they may be known, and 
 it is base ambition ; and some who desire to know 
 that they may sell their knowledge for wealth and 
 honor, and it is base avarice: but there are some 
 also who desire to know, that they may be edified, 
 and it is prudence ; and some who desire to know 
 that they may edify others, and it is charity." 
 " My child," said St. Columban to Luanus, when he 
 saw how ardently he devoted himself to learning, 
 
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 157 
 
 " thou hast asked a perilous gift of God. Many out 
 of undue love of knowledge have made shipwreck of 
 their souls." " My father," replied the boy with 
 deep humility, "if I learn to know Grod, I shall 
 never offend Him, for they only offend Him who 
 know Him not." " Go my son," replied the Abbot, 
 charmed with his reply ; "remain firm in that faith, 
 and the true science shall conduct thee on the road 
 to heaven." 
 
 And therefore we earnestly ask your support to- 
 day, a support, which as you may know, is urgently 
 required, for this seat of sound learning as well as 
 of religious education, — for a place where the youth 
 of England may be trained, as have been the noblest 
 of their fathers before them, to be not only " profit- 
 able members of the Church and Commonwealth," 
 but also to be " hereafter partakers of the immortal 
 glories of the Kesurrection." It was, as you are 
 aware, the avowed design of King's College that its 
 alumni should be taught holily as well as wisely, 
 and should be definitely brought up not only as 
 scholars but as Christians. Well we know how 
 heavy are the assaults which in these days the relig- 
 ion of Christ must undergo; and amid those as- 
 saults we need all the knowledge that we can. If, 
 
158 ' WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 as men say, that religion is doomed to perish, we 
 smile indeed in the certainty of faith, knowing that 
 Christ has built His Church upon a rock, and that 
 never shall the gates of Hell prevail against it; but 
 we are ready to exclaim with the ancient hero when 
 his battle-brunt was checked in the darkness, 
 •ev de <j>det Kai dXeaaovl Our enemies charge us with 
 timidity and obscurantism; let us in answer, as 
 children of the light, advance fearlessly into the 
 battle. As far as the farthest have pressed into 
 science, we would press; as high as the highest 
 have soared into speculation, we would soar ; as deep 
 as the deepest have dug in search for truth, we too 
 would dig. We are false descendants of the Crusa- 
 ders if we yield to cowardice ; false heirs of the 
 Martyrs if we shrink from pain ; false children and 
 false successors of the Fathers and the Schoolmen 
 and the Keformers if we scowl on intellect or sneer 
 at knowledge ; false to every tradition of our faith 
 and of our history, of our vocation and of our name, 
 if, being partakers of the divine nature, and having 
 escaped the corruption that is in the world through 
 lust, we do not "give all diligence to add to our 
 faith Virtue, and to our virtue Knowledge." 
 
 And it seems to me, my brethren, that in every 
 
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 159 
 
 word which I have spoken, I have been but feebly 
 endeavoring to interpret and illustrate the reasons 
 for which this college exists, namely, so far as may 
 be, to make knowledge the handmaid of Religion, 
 and each step in its acquisition a step also in holi- 
 ness of living and certitude of faith. And therefore, 
 in one of its departments, where its students learn 
 to apply for the service of man the Laws of Nature, 
 it would impress upon them that those majestic 
 agencies, which it is given to man only to control 
 and modify but not to change, are no mere blind 
 passionless elemental Forces, but the creation and 
 expression of a loving and a living Will. — And in 
 another of its great departments, devoted to the 
 Arts of Healing, it would teach them not only to 
 deal tenderly with this "harp of a thousand strings," 
 because of its delicate and beautiful organization, 
 but, far rather, to regard each sufferer who may rely 
 upon their skill as one for whom Christ died, and 
 each human body as a temple — ay, even in its worst 
 ruins, still as a temple of the living God. Who 
 shall overrate the value of such teachings ? There 
 have been those 
 
 " Who, in the dark dissolving human heart 
 And hallowed secrets of this microcosm, 
 
160 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Dabbling, with shameless jest, a shameful hand 
 Encamalized their spirits;" 
 
 There have been those who have marred a scientific 
 eminence by a godless materialism ; there have been 
 those who have desecrated a noble study by a brutal 
 irreverence: — ^but here the young student may be 
 taught to hallow the healing art by making it yet 
 more and more of a resemblance to the life of Him 
 who went about doing good, and healing those who 
 were sick of divers diseases ; and here he may learn, 
 an' if he will, to make his high profession a blessing 
 alike to the souls and to the bodies of those with 
 whom he deals, — a profession eminently pure and 
 tender and unselfish — pre-eminently Christian, and 
 therefore in exact proportion as it is so, pre-emi- 
 nently great. — How invaluable again may be a teach- 
 ing avowedly religious in supplementing the deficien- 
 cies, in counteracting the dangers, of a training in 
 Ancient Literature! how may it show that the 
 saints, and the great men, and the civilization of 
 Christianity, transcend the loftiest achievements of 
 heathendom ; that the truest progress of humanity 
 has been its progress under the banner of the Cross, 
 and that with all the natural virtues and splendid 
 heroisms of those memorable days, they yet cannot 
 
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 161 
 
 sway the soul with one thousandth part of that 
 thrilling and tender power which lies in that invita- 
 tion, so sweet and so divine, " Come unto me, all ye 
 that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
 rest!" 
 
 Once more and lastly, there is one department 
 of this College which is devoted to the direct and 
 immediate study of sacred things. If it be the ob- 
 ject of every literary training which is truly Chris- 
 tian to "baptize as it were the logic and literature of 
 Greece and Rome," and to read many books that 
 we and all others may the better read the one, it is 
 also deeply desirable, and desirable more than ever 
 in an age of difficulty and doubt, that the studies of 
 those who are to be its ministers should be immedi- 
 ately devoted to the doctrines, the history, and the 
 evidences of our faith. He who has been called the 
 last of the Romans,* saw, in his famous vision, a 
 woman full of years but of unexhausted strength, 
 and brilliant countenance, and glowing eyes, on the 
 lower skirt of whose garments of exquisite work- 
 manship was inwoven the letter $, and on the upper 
 the letter e, with letters which seemed to rise be- 
 tween them like the steps of a ladder. But those 
 
 * Boethius, De ConsoUUione ; ad init. 
 11 
 
162 WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 garments were aged and neglected, and a part of 
 them seemed to have been torn away as if by vio- 
 lence. To mend those rent robes, to restore them 
 from neglect, to re-supply the torn fragments, to 
 brighten the dimmed letters which are woven upon 
 them, to make clear once more the connection be- 
 tween Philosophy and Theology, to show that The- 
 ology may be indeed the '^scientia scientiarum" if 
 it be animated by enthusiasm and inspired by truth, 
 — this is the task of those who labor in the Depart- 
 ment of Theology. And surely all these tasks are 
 worthy of your hearty sympathy and worthy of 
 your generous aid ! Should it blunt that sympathy 
 or diminish that aid to be informed that this In- 
 stitution, so lofty in its purposes, is expressly devot- 
 ed to the support and service of the English 
 Church ? If it be Patriotism to aid our country, 
 is it mere Sectarianism to support our Church ? If 
 it was held glorious in a Spartan of old to love the 
 civil institutions of Sparta, is it a mere narrowness 
 in us to love the ecclesiastical polity of England 7 
 The poet says " dear city of Cecrops ; " shall we 
 not say " dear city of God ? " It is probable that 
 days of struggle and anxiety are before us. And 
 what in those days shall support the Church of 
 
WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE. 163 
 
 England ? Not her pride of station — that may be 
 humiliated; not her connection with the State — 
 that may be abruptly severed ; not her magnificent 
 endowments — they may be rudely torn away ; but 
 this — if men shall be able to say of her, as the Spirit 
 said unto the Angel of the Church in Thyatira, " I 
 know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, 
 and thy patience, and thy works ; and the last to be 
 more than the first." One of those works, and one 
 for which she hath mighty witnesses, has surely been 
 the high work of a Christian education. Oh, here- 
 in may her last works be ever more than her first I 
 And though, in these days of struggling selfishness, 
 the virtue of Public Spirit seems in most men to 
 be well-nigh dead, may God kindle the desire, as 
 He has granted the ability, among some of those 
 who hear me, to help — to help cheerfully and to 
 help munificently — in this great work to-day. 
 
 TQ eEi2 AOSA. 
 
YIII. 
 
 WORKma WITH OUR MIGHT. 
 
 And in every work that lie began in the service of the House of 
 God, and in the Law, and in the Commandments, to seek his 
 God, he did it with all his heart, and prospered. — 2 Chron. 
 xxxi. 21 * 
 
 Work, Energy, Success — those are the prom- 
 inent conceptions brought before us by this text, 
 and those are the main topics of the plain and 
 familiar thoughts I must address to you this morn- 
 ing. The duty of work, the necessity of energy, 
 the certainty of success, — such are the impressions 
 which, imperfect as must be our consideration of 
 this subject, I would yet desire, by God's grace, 
 to leave upon your minds. You are gathered at 
 an English public school, that you may prepare for 
 the work of your lives, and begin it here. Now, 
 the work of a good man in the world is mainly 
 threefold : — Work in the ordinary business of life ; 
 work for the good of others ; work to make his own 
 
 * Preached in the Chapel of Clifton College at the Annual 
 Commemoration, June 11, 1872. 
 
 (165) 
 
166 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 
 
 soul worthy of its eternal inheritance ; and in each 
 of these three tasks — which are - in reality blended 
 into one — toil and energy are the appointed condi- 
 tions ; with them, by God's blessing, success is the 
 certain reward. 
 
 And here, on the threshold, I hope that not one 
 of you — not even the youngest boy here — is in any 
 way repelled or disheartened by the thought that 
 work — aye, and hard work — ^is, in some form or 
 other, the law of life. There is, believe me, noth- 
 ing whatever stern, or repellant, or wearisome in 
 the thought. On the contrary, if God said "In 
 the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread," He said 
 it in mercy to a race fallen from innocence. If He 
 cursed the ground, He cursed it for man's sake. 
 Even the Heathen poet could say 
 
 Pater ipse colendi 
 Hand facilem. esse viam yoluit. 
 
 Yes, work is the best birthright which man still re- 
 tains. It is the strongest of moral tonics, the most 
 vigorous of mental medicines. All nature shows us 
 something analogous to this. The standing pool 
 stagnates into pestilence ; the running stream is 
 pure. The very earth we tread on, the very air we 
 
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 167 
 
 breathe, would be unwholesome but for the agita- 
 ting forces of wind and sea. In balmy and ener- 
 vating regions, where the summer of the broad 
 belt of the world furnishes man in prodigal luxuri- 
 ance with the means of life, he sinks into a des- 
 picable and nerveless lassitude; but he is at his 
 noblest and his best in those regions where he has 
 to wrestle with the great forces of nature for his 
 daily bread. I trust that every one of you, I 
 trust that every rightly trained and manly English 
 boy of this generation, feels a right scorn for a 
 slothful, which is always a miserable life. I trust 
 that not one is so ignorant as to fancy that a life 
 of toil is also necessarily a life without enjoyment. 
 Your school-life here gives you many a golden op- 
 portunity of innocent happiness ; many a spring and 
 summer day in which the world is " wrapped round 
 with sweet air and bathed in sunshine," and " it 
 is a luxury to breathe the breath of life." God as 
 little grudges you these as he grudges to the weary 
 traveller his draught of the desert spring ; and he 
 who will work but faithfully will assuredly receive 
 of God many a free and happy day spent under the 
 blue sky, in which he may, as it were, draw large 
 draughts of sunshine into his bosom, and rise for 
 
168 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 
 
 happy hours with thoughts fragrant as roses, and 
 pure as the dew upon their leaves. The man or 
 boy who has first thoroughly done his duty, — not 
 with eye-service, as a man-pleaser, but with single- 
 ness of heart serving God — ^may afterwards enjoy to 
 the very utmost his innocent delight ; — 
 
 The hour so spent shall live 
 Not tmapplauded in the book of Heaven. 
 
 / Yes, my brethren, only put duty always before 
 'pleasure. Never invert tliis order ; never let pleas- 
 ure interfere with the times of duty ; never let 
 pleasure usurp the place of duty ; never let pleasure 
 infringe on the domain of duty. To do this is to 
 imitate those ancient Egyptians who worshipped a 
 fly and offered an ox in sacrifice to it. And when 
 the higher purposes of life are thus subordinated 
 to the lower, it is but fit and natural that the 
 higher should wither away. When the trees of the 
 forest deliberately chose the worthless and trailing 
 bramble for their king, it was but a just nemesis 
 that fire should break forth from the bramble, and 
 devour the cedars of Lebanon. But if you take 
 work — not amusement, not indolence, not folly — as 
 the holy and noble law of life, it shall save you 
 from a thousand petty annoyances, a thousand 
 
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 169 
 
 precocious egotisms, a thousand sickly day-dreams 
 and morbid discontents. I hope that all of you 
 will admire the spirit of that eloquent and noble 
 knight who rode into the streets of Orleans with 
 these words enwoven in gold upon the purple 
 housings of his saddle, Qui non lahorat, neque man- 
 ducahit, " If any will not work, neither shall he 
 eat." I hope that all of you will feel the grandeur 
 of that last word, spoken at York, after a life of 
 splendid energy, by the dying Emperor Septimiu» 
 Severus to his sons — Laboremus, "Let us toil/' 
 Oh, let each one of you learn now, learn indelibly, 
 learn even in your boyhood, that " to pass out of 
 the world in the world's debt, to consume much and 
 produce nothing, to sit down at the feast of life and 
 to go away without paying the reckoning," to have 
 struck no blow for Grod, to have done no service to 
 the cause of righteousness, is discreditable indeed 
 even to a man ordinarily high-minded, but is to a 
 Christian guilty and shameful ; nay, is to a true 
 Christian even impossible. The only motto for him 
 is, " Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with 
 thy might." The only true description of his life 
 is, " Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serv- 
 ing the Lord." 
 
170 WORKING WITH. OUR MIGHT. 
 
 1. Now, let US take this text first, and test it 
 by your most ordinary life — your work here. You 
 know that your main external work here is to profit 
 by the studies of the place : to train yourselves by 
 patience, attention, thought, knowledge, for any 
 position to which in future life God may call you. 
 Well, I am not in the least afraid to say that in 
 this, as in all else, not only is work a duty, and 
 energy a necessity, but also that, with these, success 
 is a certainty. Of work being a duty I will say no 
 more, because, short as is the history of your school, 
 it proves how well you have learnt that noble lesson. 
 I know that idleness is not a besetting temptation 
 of this school, and that manly diligence is common 
 among you, and, therefore, as a school you have bril- 
 liantly succeeded. And yet, perhaps, there may be 
 some boys among you who think, with a sense of dis- 
 couragement, that they, individually, have failed. 
 Now, remember that by success in the highest sense, 
 we do not mean gaining brilliant honors, or reach- 
 ing distinguished attainments. They can be but 
 for the few. But God is " no respecter of persons ;" 
 He loves all of us. His children, and wills that in 
 the best sense we should all succeed ; nor are the 
 petty differences between intellect and intellect any- 
 
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 171 
 
 thing at all to His infinitude. He who has but re- 
 ceived the two, aye, or even the one talent, may do 
 as good service to God, may Ke infinitely dearer and 
 nobler in His sight than he who has received the 
 ten, and may hear, no less surely than* the other, 
 that high sentence of glorious approval, " Servant 
 of God, well done ! " And when a boy who has, or 
 thinks he has, always done his duty, — who has, or 
 thinks he has been always diligent, — does not get 
 on, lingers at the bottom of his form, wins no prize, 
 makes no appreciable progress, gets superannuated, 
 and so on, — where does the failure lie ? If not in 
 a want of diligence, then mainly, I think, in a 
 want of energy. To get on in this sense, a boy — 
 and especially a boy not naturally gifted — ^needs 
 energy ; he needs resolve ; he needs purpose ; he 
 needs heart ; he needs hope ; he needs enthusiasm ; 
 he needs courage ; he needs undaunted perseverance ; 
 he needs the power to say, — aye, and to mean it — 
 I will. In the regions of that which is at all pos- 
 sible there are hardly any known limits to that 
 which the human will can do. If a boy succeeds 
 in nothing, is poor in work and poor in games, lets 
 slip all his opportunities one after another, — de- 
 pend upon it this is because his resolutions have 
 
172 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 
 
 been feeble, and his purposes flaccid, and his habits 
 listless, and his will infirm ; because, in a word, 
 there has been no iron in him, but only wood and 
 straw. Let him pray and labor, let him believe 
 and hope and then he cannot fail. The great con- 
 temporary statesman gave the secret of Sir Walter 
 Kaleigh's marvellous achievements, when he said, 
 "I know that he can toil terribly." — That is one 
 side of the matter : humble and faithful dependence 
 on the help of God is another ; and, therefore, 
 when St. Bonaventura, the Seraphic doctor, was 
 asked the secret of his amazing knowledge, he 
 pointed in silence to the crucifix, which was the 
 only object that adorned his cell. Or a et labor a, 
 said grand old Martin Luther. " Prayer and pains- 
 taking," said Elliot, the lion-hearted missionary, 
 " will accomplish everything ; " nor, if he have 
 really made trial of this, will I ever believe that 
 any boy, in this or in any school, has cause to say 
 that he has failed. 
 
 So nigli is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to Man, 
 When Duty whispers, low, " TTwu muBt^ 
 
 The youth replies " / can.^'* 
 
 2. But, secondly, while you work, you must 
 
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 173 
 
 remember that you are not, or ought not, to be 
 working for yourselves, or your own selfish interests 
 alone, but also, and mainly, for the good of others. 
 If all the law be summed up in those two command- 
 ments, " Thou shalt love the Lord God with all thy 
 tieart," and " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
 self," then, assuredly, that work for others should 
 Degin here and now. We are not alone in this 
 world. In communities like these it is emphatically 
 true that no man liveth, no man dieth to himself. 
 The lowest, dullest, youngest boy here, does, and 
 must, and cannot help, in some way, and to some 
 degree, influencing others. Not more surely does 
 every word you speak make a tremulous ripple on 
 the surrounding air, than it makes a ripple in the 
 hearts of those around : but with this difference, 
 that, whereas the pulse of articulated air seems 
 soon to die away, on the other hand — 
 
 Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 
 And live for ever and for ever. 
 
 How vast is the power of a good boy for good, how 
 rapid is the influence of a bad boy for evil, is a daily 
 and deepening as well as a very solemn experience. 
 Often in a school, or in a house, have I seen a good 
 boy make virtue fearless and confident, and vice 
 
174 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 
 
 timid and ashamed. Often have I known boys by 
 whose mere presence, by whose countenance, as was 
 said of the Koman Cato, the good were inspired and 
 the wicked checked. Often, too, have I noticed the 
 reverse. Just as you may have seen a river bright 
 and " pure as the tears of morning," and pellucid 
 to its very depths, until it reaches some one spot, 
 and there, receiving some dark admixture, its waters 
 are stained, and the herbage withers on its banks, 
 and, as wave after wave catches the local taint, the 
 whole flowing river is thenceforth polluted and per- 
 turbed, and any beauty it has left is but the irides- 
 cent film over the corruption underneath, — even so 
 it often is in the house or school. And yet in this 
 case also — in the endeavor to raise the tone of 
 those around you, in the aim to make your school, 
 your house, your form, your dormitory, your chosen 
 friends better than you found them, — I say again 
 that as work is a duty, and energy -a necessity, so 
 success is a certainty. Let me show you that it is 
 so, not by an argument, but by an instance — one 
 instance where history might furnish hundreds — of 
 whole communities, even in their worst condition, 
 cleansed and ennobled by one man's influence for 
 good. At a time when society was corrupt and 
 
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 175 
 
 hollow to its heart's core, there was one — his name 
 was Armand de Kance — ^who lived in that glittering 
 world with immense applause. Kich, noble, eloquent, 
 handsome, he drank the cup of pleasure to the 
 dregs, and by God's grace, while yet young, found 
 it unutterably bitter. For a time he fell into de- 
 spair ; everything seemed to fall to dust in his hand, 
 to slip into ashes at his touch. But he was not one 
 who, as it were, longed only to purchase a cheap for- 
 giveness, and then still to clutch at every not abso- 
 lutely forbidden comfort. No; having sinned and 
 suffered, and been forgiven, he felt that henceforth 
 his life was consecrated, not to easy pietisms, but 
 to heroic endeavors. He shook off everything — 
 wealth, love, home, fame — and retired to a monas- 
 tery deep among the gloomy mountain-woods, 
 where, as you approach, you pass by three pillars 
 of iron, and on the first of these is engraved the 
 word Charity y and on the second Brotherly Union, 
 and on the third Silence. To this monastery he 
 retired, and found it in a condition truly frightful. 
 The few monks left in it were corrupt, degraded, 
 and ignorant to the last degree. Among these he 
 went alone, but with the avowed hope, the avowed 
 purpose, of reforming them ; — unarmed, save by the 
 
176 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 
 
 force of God, and that strong-sided champion, Con- 
 science. Many attempts were made to waylay and 
 mm'der him ; one monk tried to shoot him in open 
 day. But De Ranee never flinched. He worked 
 with his might, and, God helping him, he prosper- 
 ed. His most violent persecutors became his most 
 steadfast friends. The monk who shot at him be- 
 came a most humble and holy penitent. And thus, 
 in the irresistible might of a firm purpose and a 
 holy courkge, did one man triumph over his own en- 
 emies and the enemies of God. He came to a den 
 of robbers and left it a house of prayer. You are 
 not in a corrupt and dangerous place like that, but 
 in a Christian and an English school, where thou- 
 sands of good influences are at work around you ; 
 and yet, is there nothing that you can do ? Are 
 there no evils to check ? No sins to conquer ? 
 No characters to be amended ? No wrong-doings 
 to be repressed.? — Oh, assuredly, there is not one 
 of you who might not make those about him better ; 
 not one of you who will not succeed in doing so 
 if only he will faithfully try; not one who, in trying, 
 would not win God's richest blessing on his own 
 heart and his own life. 
 
 3. But how, my brethren, is this work possible, 
 
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 177 
 
 how is any other work worth doing, until the initial 
 work, the work of self-conquest, the work of setting 
 our own hearts right with God has been performed ? 
 He who would help others to be better, must first be 
 good himself; he who would point others to the 
 path which leads to their Saviour's feet, must first 
 nave found it for himself. But how find it ? Can 
 it come to him in a dream ? Can he stumble on it 
 by an accident ? Can he yawn it into being by a 
 wish ? Or, does it not lie rather through a strait 
 gate ? and must not he struggle and agonize who 
 would pass there- through .? (l think that we are 
 all liable to the danger of viewing with a fatal and 
 paralyzing indifierence our relation to God's majestic 
 law. For though it is not difficult for any one to 
 walk in God's ways, who, from childhood upwards, 
 has lived in the light of his earliest prayers, — with 
 how few, alas, is this the case ! How few of us are 
 unwounded.? How many of us must sadly say 
 ." The crown is fallen from our heads, for we have 
 sinned ? " Innocence of heart, my brethren, blame- 
 lessness of life, a conscience void of offence towards 
 God and towards man, — these are easier not to lose 
 than when once lost to recover ; and it is a fatal 
 thing, a fatally perilous arrogance and disbelid^to be 
 
 ^^^^ 
 
 U!ri7ERSIT7) 
 
178 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 
 
 living in sin yet not in sorrow ; in rebellion against 
 God's law, yet without either penitence or fear. In 
 this respect, therefore, pre-eminently,; work is a 
 duty ; the work of conscious, steady, self-improve- 
 nent : the will, nay, the resolve ; nay, the solemn 
 vow ; nay, the inflexible absorbing purpose, that 
 each year shall see us better, holier, wiser than 
 the last. And this work, too, must be with our 
 might ; it must be in penitence, and watchfulness, 
 and self-denial. But then it must and will succeed ; 
 aye, succeed with that highest of all successes, — 
 that success which includes and exceeds all others, 
 and beside which all others shrink into insigni- 
 ficance, — the prosperity of a heart at peace with 
 God. Other prosperity may or may not follow : it 
 generally does, but it is no great matter whether it 
 does or not, and when it does not, that loss is more 
 than compensated by a peace of mind which does not 
 even desire it. No true work since the world began 
 was ever wasted ; no true life since the world began 
 has ever failed. Oh, understand, my brethren, 
 those two perverted words, failure and success, and 
 measure them by the eternal not by the earthly 
 standard. What the world has regarded as the 
 bitterest failure has often been in the sight of 
 
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 179 
 
 Heaven the most magnificent <Buccess. When the 
 cap, painted with devils, was placed on the brows of 
 John Huss, and he sank dying amid the embers of 
 the flame, — was that a failure ? When St. Francis 
 Xavier died cold and lonely on the bleak and desolate 
 shore of a heathen land, — was that a failure ? 
 When the frail worn body of the Apostle of the 
 Gentiles was dragged by a hook from the arena, 
 and the white sand scattered over the crimson life- 
 blood of the victim whom the dense amphitheatre 
 despised as some obscure and nameless Jew, — was 
 that a failure ? And when, after thirty obscure, 
 toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village 
 carpenter. One came forth to be pre-eminently the 
 Man of Sorrows, to wander from city to city in 
 homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon 
 the shameful cross, — was that a failure.^ Nay, 
 my brethren, it was the life, it was the death, of 
 Him who lived that we might follow in his steps — 
 it was the life, it was the death, of 'the Son of 
 God. 
 
 Oh, may you learn this lesson here and now, in 
 this Christian chapel, the Holy of Holies of a Chris- 
 tian school, which, like every Christian school, is and 
 must be a Temple of the living God ! You may 
 
180 WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 
 
 learn here many and valuable lessons ; but the day- 
 may come when all others shall be as dust, and the 
 lessons learnt in this chapel be as pearls and gold. 
 " Believe me," said an eminent man, speaking to a 
 school like this, "believe one who tells you, from 
 his own recollection, that if there be any time or 
 place in which he may seem to have met the angels 
 of God on his pilgrimage through life, it was in 
 the midst of a congregation and in the walls of a 
 chapel such as this. Years have rolled away, yet 
 that chapel, with its joyful and mournful recollec- 
 tion, still remains a distinct and blessed spot in the 
 memory of the past. The words which were there 
 heard return again and again with the freshness and 
 vividness of yesterday, to cheer and enliven, to con- 
 sole and solemnize, the labor and the leisure, the 
 joys and the sorrows, not of one only who listened to 
 them, but of many far and near, who will remember 
 those hours and that scene as long as life and mem- 
 ory last. What has once been may, in its measure, 
 be yet again."* May God grant it, and so may this 
 School, which He has already so richly blessed, train 
 up many and many a youthful son who shall be a 
 
 * " Tliis is God's Host ! " — A Sermon preached in Marlborough 
 C5ollege Chapel, by the Very Kev. the Dean of "Westminster. 
 
WORKING WITH OUR MIGHT. 181 
 
 profitable member of the Church and Common- 
 wealth; and not this only, but — which shall be a 
 yet more blessed and enduring crown, — many and 
 many who, working with their might, shall, whethei 
 they prosper on earth or not, be partakers hereaftei 
 of the immortal glory of the Resurrection. 
 
IX. 
 
 PHABISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 And he spake this parable unto certain that trusted in themselves 
 that they were righteous, and despised others. — Luke xvii. 9.* 
 
 The parable which our Lord spoke on this occa- 
 sion told how two men went up to the Temple to 
 pray, a Pharisee and a Publican, and while the one 
 made his prayer a self-complacent catalogue of his 
 own virtues, the other would not so much as lift 
 up his eyes to heaven, but smote upon his breast, 
 saying, God be merciful to me a sinner; and this 
 man went down to his house justified rather than 
 the other. You will see therefore at once that the 
 lesson thus addressed to the proud and the self- 
 righteous is a pointed rebuke to self-righteousness 
 and pride ; and that, strange and terrible as such a 
 lesson might appear, those who despised others were 
 taught that their own position must be more dan- 
 gerous, more alien, less pleasing to God, than that 
 
 * Preached in Westminster Abbey (Special Eyening Service, 
 May 10, 1868). 
 
 (183) 
 
184 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 of those whom they despised. We always find this 
 fearless directness, this immediate pertinence, in the 
 teaching of our Lord. Straight and swift as the ar- 
 row to the mark, his words struck full into the hearts 
 and consciences of His hearers, and if they wounded, 
 it was not the rankling wound of an enemy, but the 
 faithful and blessed wound of a friend who stood at 
 hand to heal. Were there hypocrites among his hear- 
 ers ? He tore the mask from their faces, and held up 
 their true semblance to themselves and to the world. 
 Were there penitents ? He flung the white robe 
 of his mercy over their offences, and told them how 
 they might be justified and cleansed. Were there 
 the indifferent and the insolent ? the thunders 
 whose echo rolled upon the desert winds, were less 
 terrible than the awful warnings of His voice. They 
 who would rightly deliver Christ's message, must 
 herein study His example ; they must address them- 
 selves to the spiritual needs of their hearers ; and 
 if into the souls of the humble and the sorrowful 
 their words should descend as the dew of God upon 
 the tender grass, on the other hand to the hardened, 
 and the scornful, and the dead in heart, that word 
 must be a sword to pierce, a fire to calcine into dust, 
 a hammer to dash in pieces the flinty heart. Woe 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 185 
 
 to the Church which answers her worshippers accord- 
 ing to their idols ; which sinks her voice into the 
 dull conventional murmurs of " peace, peace, when 
 there is no peace ; " which reflects too faithfully the 
 easy and polished optimism of the world to utter 
 aloud in all their dread significance the plain stern 
 messages of God. If we would learn what and how 
 to speak, we must go back to read, with no filmed 
 vision, with no biassed perception, with no glozing 
 heart, the clear, unmistakable words of Christ; — 
 remembering only that He spake out of His divine 
 and spotless innocence, and we speak but as sinful 
 among the sinful, as weak and dying among weak 
 and dying men. 
 
 There were, as you know, two classes to which 
 our Lord's teachings were constantly addressed ; 
 on the one hand to Scribes and Pharisees, on the 
 other hand to Publicans and sinners. Now mark 
 what a rift of difference separated these two classes. 
 The Pharisees were the well-to-do, the instructed, 
 the religious classes, they were called Rabbi ; they 
 were honored in the synagogues; their profession 
 of sanctity was open and ostentatious ; it was worn 
 like the phylactery upon their foreheads, and like 
 the riband of legal blue which they made so broad 
 
186 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 upon the fringes of their robes. On the other hand 
 the Publicans and sinners were the dregs of man- 
 kind, — the offscouring and outcasts of the people, 
 the fallen, the friendless, the dangerous, and the de- 
 spised. Their very livelihood was guilt, their name 
 was infamy. A Pharisee regarded their mere pres- 
 ence as contamination, and would have shaken his 
 robe had it but touched them in his walk. Yet 
 how does our Lord deal with these two classes. J* 
 For the latter we find no single word of bitter irony 
 or crushing denunciation; awakement to the sense 
 of guilt and the need of repentance was easier for 
 them in whom self-deceit was impossible, nor did 
 they need warning who were so burdened already 
 with the world's agony and shame. But Christ 
 alone spake to them of hope, and therefore His 
 teaching dawned upon them like the dayspring 
 upon the darkness. They came to him as aWakened 
 penitents, and He treated them as the lost sheep 
 whom He came to save, the bruised reed which He 
 would not break, the smoking flax He would not 
 quench; and washed, and cleansed, and justified, 
 they repaid with passionate devotion the pity which 
 had touched their neglected and trembling souls. 
 But for the others, for them whose dead hearts mis- 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 187 
 
 took their own hypocrisy for holiness, and their own 
 ignorance for wisdom, — against them only that 
 divine and loving voice seems to ring with scorn 
 and indignation, and the lips that breathed the 
 Beatitudes to the poor crowds who sat listening 
 among the mountain-lilies, run over with scathing, 
 withering, almost pitiless rebuke at their smooth 
 hypocrisy, their ceremonial pedantry, their censori- 
 ous orthodoxy, their intolerable pride. For them 
 the crystal river of his tenderness becomes a stormy 
 torrent of living fire. To the Publicans and harlots 
 He gently said with that tone which broke into 
 sobs over lost Jerusalem, "Come unto me, all ye 
 that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give 
 you rest;" but to the Scribes and Pharisees He 
 cried in tones of doom and wrathfulness, " Ye fools 
 and blind ; blind guides, blind Pharisees ; ye ser- 
 pents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape 
 the damnation of hell ? " 
 
 Burning words, my brethren, and such as may 
 well astonish us ; men who have borrowed their 
 morality from Christianity, and used that very 
 morality to criticise its divine source, have ventured 
 to condemn them. That men have so ventured 
 to condemn, — that even to us, who believe in the 
 
188 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 Lord Jesus Christ, they come with a shock of sur- 
 prise as though at first sight they were inconsistent 
 with loving and sacred tenderness — ^is a proof that 
 they need our most serious attention : it is a proof 
 surely that they belong to some aspect of his charac- 
 ter which hitherto we have not rightly understood. 
 And such is pre-eminently the case. Christian art, 
 Christian eloquence, Christian song have long made 
 us familiar with Christ's meekness and lowliness of 
 heart ; they have portrayed him most often as the 
 Man of Sorrows ; they have lost themselves in the 
 infinitude of his suffering and his love. But it is 
 ever our danger to realize but half the truth ; and 
 there is one side of our Lord's character which, be- 
 cause it has not sufficiently been dwelt upon, has 
 scarcely exercised its due influence upon our minds. 
 It is his just indignation. The ideal of the Chris- 
 tian life, — ^not the true ideal, but the common one, 
 — ^has been too tame, too timid, too effeminate ; 
 strange as it may seem, it has wanted not only 
 that brightness and joyance, that high victorious 
 faith, that royalty of happiness, which of due right 
 belong to it, but it has been lacking also in that 
 fire and force, that iron in the blood, that dauntless 
 courage, that glorious battle-brunt in the heart of 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 180 
 
 man, which are yet necessary to soldiers of the 
 Cross. Yes, amid the perplexed hypocrisies of 
 civilization, amid the hollow insincerities which 
 permeate our very forms of speech, — it seems as 
 though we never dared that intensity of purpose, 
 that burning moral indignation, that splendid pas- 
 sion of scorn and hatred against all that is corrupt 
 and base, which lends to the words of Psalmist and 
 Prophet their eternal significance. The old mighty, 
 unswerving, heart of Christendom seems dead. We 
 dare not face our thoughts ; we dare not act up to 
 our convictions ; we are full of conventional phrases, 
 and polite reticence, and soft compromise, under 
 which is smothered that fire which of old burnt in 
 men's hearts till at the last they spake with their 
 tongue. There is indeed a wrath, as you read in 
 Scripture, an ignoble wrath, which worketh not the 
 righteousness of God ; but there is also a wrath of 
 righteous indignation, which is not permissible 
 only, but also pre-eminently noble. Such was the 
 wrath which nerved the strong right arm of Phine- 
 has, when he stayed the shameful apostacy of Israel 
 with one thrust of his avenging spear ; such was 
 the wrath wherewith Elijah bearded and smote at 
 their own altar the priests of Baalim, — such the 
 
190 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 wrath which flames in every unenervated heart 
 under intense love of right and intense hate of 
 wrong. We see it in the great forerunner, when 
 he braved in their tyranny the bloodstained tyrant 
 and the adulterous queen ; we see it in our blessed 
 Lord when he overthrew the tables of the money- 
 changers and drove them from the Temple with his 
 knotted scourge ; we see it in him whose whole 
 nature seems to have caught the lightnings which 
 flashed in his face as he journeyed to Damascus ; — 
 we see it in those great martyrs who with " the 
 unresistible might of weakness shook the world : " — 
 we see it in Origen, and Athanasius, and Augustine, 
 and Bernard, and Luther, and Knox, and Milton, 
 and Whitfield, and Wilberforce. .There was no 
 half-heart^dness of judgment, no timidity of com- 
 promise, in the thoughts and words of men like 
 these. They spoke as their Master spoke, and if 
 ever a worldly age is to be startled from its torpor, 
 it must be by voices like to theirs. Such men may 
 be stigmatized, as hot and rude, and violent, but 
 oh ! better is the clearing hurricane than the brood- 
 ing pestilence ; better their sacred fury than the 
 sleepy selfishness of a smooth prosperity : better, as 
 has been truly and boldly said, better are agonies 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 191 
 
 of pain and blood shed in rivers than souls spotted 
 and bewildered with mortal sin. 
 
 But, if from Christ's example we must learn the 
 duty of fervency, and the necessity for righteous in- 
 dignation, I know nothing which it more solemnly 
 imports us to realize than the conditions which J^in- 
 dled that lofty passion. Is there anything in us, or 
 in our circumstances, like that which moved the 
 wrath of the Lamb, and made the messages of de- 
 nunciation iall with such fearful emphasis from the 
 lips of perfect love ? Were the steps of our Master 
 in this city now, are there any like those Publicans 
 whom He so deeply pitied, — any like those Pharisees 
 against whom he uttered so terrible an anger, though 
 He well knew that He was thus awakening the re- 
 sentment which would nail Him at last to the bitter 
 cross ? 
 
 Ah, my brethren, the first at any rate of these, 
 classes is never far to seek. . Will you find them in 
 this fair Cathedral .? No ! they are not here. In 
 God's sight indeed, — to those eyes infinitely brighter 
 than the sun, which pierce into the naked human 
 heart, — there may have " been some whose prayers 
 this evening haVe been but "a noise of men and 
 women between dead walls," and there may be some 
 
192 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 criminal among those here present, whose crime 
 were it known would even make him amenable to 
 the broken laws of man. But if there be any such, 
 — and we know that ere now such have knelt in the 
 anctuary among God's Saints, — yet it is not of 
 such criminals that congregations are composed. 
 Happy might it be for us if we could gather more 
 of them into our Churches ; — ^happy if we could 
 make them feel that they, even they, in their sinful- 
 ness and shame, belong indeed to the Church's fold; 
 — ^happy if we could seek them as the shepherd 
 seeks his lost and wandering sheep ; — happy if we 
 could teach them to believe that the joy of the 
 Church on earth over one sinner that repenteth, is 
 the same in kind as that which causes a fresh strain 
 of exultation to ring from the harps of heaven. 
 So far as we can do this, are we doing the work that 
 Christ loves best. For His soul yearned towards 
 them, — ^nor was there any lesson that He better 
 loved to teach than the lesson that they too might 
 still repent and return and be received with love in 
 the home from which they had wandered ; — that in 
 spite of all their errors and all their crimes they 
 were still dear to that heavenly Father who is full 
 of tenderness to all His children, — who maketh His 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 193 
 
 sun to shine upon the evil and on the good, and His 
 rain to fall on the just and on the unjust. 
 
 But if the criminal classes — the Publican and 
 the sinner — exist no less in modern England than in 
 ancient Palestine, and if we, here assembled, assur- 
 edly do not belong to the number of open, flagrant, 
 and defiant sinners, is there on the other hand no 
 resemblance in us, inwardly no less than outwardly, 
 to those well-to-do, respectable, religious classes, 
 who stood so fair in the world's eye, but whom He 
 who was the Truth, and who came to reveal God 
 to man, compared to whited sepulchres full of dead 
 men's bones, — to graves which appear not, so that 
 they who walk over them are not aware of them ? 
 Are there among us no full-fed Sadducees, who be- 
 lieve neither in ^ngel nor spirit ; — no temporizing 
 Herodians anxiotie only for quiet and success ; — no 
 orthodox Scribes fiercely eager about the letter of 
 the law, profoundly ignorant of its spirit ; — none 
 like those worldly Priests and violent Pharisees, 
 who, in the desperate blindness of the human heart, 
 persuaded themselves doubtless that they were the 
 friends of God, while they were arraying every en- 
 gine of popular ignorance, and established power, 
 
 against His image in His Son ? The form indeed is 
 13 
 
194 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 changed, but must we not ask ourselves with deep 
 humility whether the spirit may not still remain ? 
 We too are not extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or 
 even as these publicans : yet can it be that some of 
 us also may be the children of wrath, even as others, 
 — can it be that of us also there are some whose 
 dull and selfish lives are so displeasing to God, that 
 they shall stand hereafter in the full front of His 
 displeasure, and hear from a Father most loving, 
 from a Judge most merciful, that chilling, crushing, 
 heart-appalling sentence, " I never knew you ; de- 
 part from me, ye workers of iniquity." 
 
 I for one, my brethren, cannot approach this 
 question with the easy confidence of our smooth 
 popular theology; I cannot profess to approach it 
 without deep and anxious misgiving; I cannot 
 clearly see in what respect we are exempt from dan- 
 ger lest our religion should not exceed the religion 
 of the Scribes and Pharisees. Certainly when we 
 look round us on the world of ordinary respectability 
 it looks fair enough. Yet it takes no very keen ob- 
 servation^ to note many and unlovely stains on the 
 white surface of our conventionality. Strip the iri- 
 descence from the surface of the standing pool, and 
 the stagnant waters putrefy below. Under that 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 195 
 
 glittering film of surface-respectability lie evils 
 which, as has been well said, "vex less, but mortify 
 more, which suck the blood though they do not 
 shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not tor* 
 ture it." That the age in which we live is full of 
 restlessness and discontent, — that it is an age but 
 half sincere in its beliefs, — that it is sinking more 
 and more deeply into luxury and self-indulgence, — 
 that it is agitated with an emulous and feverish de- 
 sire for wealth, — that it is afflicted with a deep un- 
 christian sadness and anxiety, — we learn not so 
 much from our preachers as from our daily moral- 
 ists. It is an age not of great crime, but of little 
 meannesses ; there are few murders, but plenty of 
 malice ; little blasphemy, but universal cynicism ; 
 rare epen thefts, but widespread secret dishonesty. 
 And the worst sign is that the Church has well-nigh 
 ceased to be fruitful of pre-eminent saintliness ; few 
 lights shine out distinctly from the general darkness. 
 Good and evil seem to be at truce, " lying together 
 flat upon the world's surface. Our very conception 
 of goodness seems to be dwarfed and impoverished ; 
 and so little do we attain the high and heroic ideal 
 of the Gospel, that men have begun to argue openly 
 that it is an ideal which is in these days obsolett and 
 
/ 
 
 196 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 impossible. Little, alas ! do we act up to our liigh 
 profession, and we know to our deep shame that the 
 world has some ground for its bitter taunt, that 
 often men who call themselves children of the king- 
 dom are as ready to take offence, and as prompt to 
 repeat calumny, and as hard to drive a bargain, and 
 as eager for gain, and as anxious for power, and as 
 bitter and as contemptuous to those who differ from 
 them in matters of opinion, as though they wero 
 not professed disciples of Him who was a village 
 carpenter, — of Him who prayed for His murderers, 
 —of Him who shrank not from the white leper's 
 loathly touch, and felt no horror when the tears of 
 the forgiven harlot flowed fast on His unsandalled 
 feet. 
 
 But since it is fatally easy to see the faults of 
 others, let us look rather at our own hearts. And, 
 though most of us may be wholly free from open 
 and notorious sins, our conception of our high call- 
 ing in Christ Jesus must be mean indeed, if that 
 suffice. So were the Pharisees who crucified their 
 Lord. Fear, happy circumstances, the absence of 
 temptation, — nay, even prudential calculation, — may 
 save a man from sinning thus ; and yet the 
 publicans and harlots may go into the kingdom of 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 197 
 
 God before him. Our lives may be correct before 
 men ; but God seeth the heart ; and our hearts, are 
 they right with God .? Is the glory of the Spirit 
 indeed bright within those spiritual temples, or is 
 there many an unhallowed idol in their inmost 
 chambers ? The real danger and ruin of guilt rests 
 not so much in the poison which it infuses into so- 
 ciety, not so much in its deadly and fatal conse- 
 quences to the well-being of nations, not so much 
 in any outward circumstances of punishment and 
 retribution, as in that alienation of the soul from 
 God, that gradual, slow-creeping mysteiy of spiritual 
 death of which men are often themselves unconscious, 
 until God suffers them, — as he suffered David, — to 
 fall into some great sin, which lights up the theatre 
 of the soul with a glare of unnatural illumination, 
 and reveals to them the true horror of themselves. 
 Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts; — evil 
 thoughts, and then, as though thereby the flood- 
 gates of iniquity were opened, — murders, adulteries, 
 and all the black and terrible sins whose catalogue 
 you know. When the Scribes and Pharisees 
 dragged into Christ's sacred presence a sinful and 
 fallen woman, and He said, " Let him that is without 
 sin among you cast the first stone at her," — ^is there 
 
198 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 not a solemn warning to us in the fact that those 
 words pierced the thick self-deception of dead con- 
 sciences, and one by one, — without even His eye 
 upon them to make the blush burn upon the guilty 
 cheek, — one by one, self-convicted, self-condemned, 
 —one by one, white-robed priest, and scrupulous 
 Pharisee, and self-complacent scribe, — one by one, 
 boy, and maiden, and old man, beginning from the 
 eldest unto the last, — abased by the sudden recogni- 
 tion of their own inward guilt, they rose and stole 
 from the Temple precincts, and left none there save 
 the Kedeemer and the redeemed ? Oh ! would it 
 not be so with us if Christ were here ? and He is 
 here ; and though now we see Him not, one day we 
 shall stand before his Holy eye ; and the moral sen- 
 sibility must be very dead in that man, who, in the 
 , filthy rags of his own righteousness, could meet that 
 • gaze before which the very heavens are not clean. 
 Oh, let us not deceive ourselves : this contented ac- 
 quiescence in ignoble efforts, this lukewarm subser- 
 vience to a low and unworthy standard, is the pecu- 
 liar disease of this century, and the peculiar danger 
 of a soft, luxurious, unvexed .career. Alas ! the 
 primrose path may lead only to the edge of the pre- 
 cipice ; and even if our lives be externally free from 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 199 
 
 every grave offence against the law of God, can we 
 afford to obliterate wholly from our memories those 
 two parables of Christ about the two men, — wealthy, 
 successful, respected, free from crime, — yet for one 
 of whom there was only that thundercrash of judg- 
 ment, " Thou fool, this night," and the silence which 
 followed it ; — and for the other only that lurid pic- 
 ture — ^aye, it may well appal us, yet Christ drew it 
 — that lurid picture of one carried from purple, and 
 fine linen, and sumptuous feast, to the burning 
 thirst and the tormenting flame ? 
 
 And when I think of these things, my brethren, 
 I feel, as I said before, a deep misgiving, — a mis- 
 giving which I cannot gloss over or disguise, — lest 
 some of us be guiltier even than the openly guilty, 
 and lest with more than the blessings of Chorazin 
 and Bethsaida we suffer more than the condemna- 
 tion of Sidon and of Tyre. Without life in the 
 spirit, — without the fire of God's love burning bright 
 on the altar of the regenerated heart, — how can we 
 enter into the kingdom of God ? And the dull 
 comforts of the world, — the blind, groping, illiberal 
 absorption in some mechanical routine, — the earth- 
 liness of a life toiling for riches, clogged with cares, 
 surfeited with indulgence, — these are the things 
 
200 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 which, if we he not very humhle and very careful, 
 more than all others quench the spiritual perception, 
 and, in the scornful concentration of the Psalmist's 
 language, make the heart grow/a^ as brawn. It is 
 not a Christian minister, it is a secular historian 
 who says that of all unsuccessful men, in every 
 shape, "whether divine or human, there is none 
 equal to Bunyan's Facing-both-ways, — the fellow 
 with one eye on heaven and one on earth, — who sin- 
 cerely preaches one thing and sincerely does another, 
 and from the intensity of his unreality is unable 
 even to see or feel the contradiction. He is sub- 
 stantially trying to cheat both God and the devil, 
 and is in reality only cheating himself and his 
 neighbor. This of all characters upon the earth 
 appears to me to be the one of which there is ' no 
 hope at all, — a, character becoming in these days 
 alarmingly abundant." Do we not find a significant 
 commentary on these words in the blank surprise 
 of John the Baptist, when Scribes and Pharisees 
 came to his ministry — " generation of vipers, who 
 hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come ? " 
 The robber and the Publican, the ignorant peasant 
 and the brutal soldier — it is natural that these 
 should come : but what has the wild rude prophet 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 201 
 
 of the desert and his doctrine of repentance to do 
 with you, and your dead sanctities, and your des- 
 picable orthodoxies, and your " Stand aside, for I 
 am holier than thou ? " Aye, it might well seem 
 impossible that anything should arouse respectable 
 men whose consciences have fallen into a death-like 
 slumber, as they slave at their farm and their mer- 
 chandise, and think that they have successfully 
 solved the problem of serving alike their Mammon 
 and their God. There are some men whose sins are 
 open, going before to judgment, marshalling them 
 with pointed finger and tumultuous condemnation, 
 haling them with open violence and public shame 
 before the bar : but, when our sins are only following 
 after us unseen, with stealthy footsteps and invisible 
 array, when the long accumulations of malice and 
 meanness, and avarice, and impurity — when the 
 false and settled habits of a worldly and selfish re- 
 ligionism gather in our rear in ever-increasing 
 multitudes, ready to crowd upon the stricken mem- 
 ory when death lets in upon the self-deceiving soul 
 the chill light of eternity, — then our condition, 
 though less molested and less notorious, may be 
 more full of peril. Oh, better by far that God 
 should break us with His indignation, and vex us 
 
202 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 with all His storms, — ^better that He should make us 
 suffer in every fibre of our being the ignoble mar- 
 tyrdom of sin, — ^better that His lightnings should 
 shatter the lowest bases of our earth-born happi- 
 ness, and let the nether fires glare in our very faces, 
 than that He should thus suffer our souls, under 
 this terrible danger of His wrath, to slumber on, 
 in this trance of despairing insensibility, in this un- 
 consciousness of commencing death. 
 
 For, believing that God's wrath against sin is 
 established in inexorable laws, — ^believing that He 
 has revealed that wrath as plainly as if He had en- 
 graved it upon the sun, or written it in stars upon 
 the midnight sky, — then casting my thoughts be- 
 yond death, and fixing them seriously there, my 
 heart shivers like a leaf in some cold wind ; and an 
 earnest, hearty, entire repentance, a searching, honest, 
 unshrinking self-examination, appear to be the 
 very work of life. Oh, we have all need of that 
 prayer of the Breton mariner, " Save us, God, 
 thine ocean is so large, and our little boats so small.'* 
 Smoothly indeed now, — ^like some frail vessel, with 
 white sail and streaming pennon, we may be gliding 
 over the calm and sunlit waves, yet without God's 
 love we may find at last that this dead sea of life 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 203 
 
 was but a sea of glass mingled with fire, — a sea in 
 which no haven opens, nor any light-house shines, 
 — a sea whose depths are unfathomable and whose 
 rolling waters have no shore. Ah, if our ship foun- 
 der in that sea, it will be too late to know things 
 in their true light, too late to be alarmed. Like 
 those of whom our Saviour so sadly spoke, — and oh ! 
 my brethren, consider for ourselves if the picture be 
 not as terrible as it is true, — we too may pass away 
 from our weeping families, from our mourning 
 friends ; we may leave the white marble to record 
 our blameless lives ; we may have got the money 
 or the success for the sake of which we forgot God, 
 and, passing into His presence, we may expect to be 
 received at His marriage-feast. And coming then 
 before His great white Throne with the familiar 
 words "Lord, Lord" upon our lips, we shall plead 
 our diligence and our usefulness, our amiable char- 
 acters, our decent professions, our moral lives, but, 
 even while our tongues falter with fear and misgiv- 
 ing, the numberless phantoms of forgotten but re- 
 corded and unrepented sins, from childhood to 
 youth, from youth to manhood, from manhood to 
 old age, shall be thronging like thick clouds between 
 us and our Judge ; — ^and, like the tolling of some 
 
204 PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 
 
 bell of death, shall fall, stroke after stroke, upon our 
 ears the judgments of Scripture, " Ye cannot serve 
 God and Mammon ; " "Ye did it not unto these little 
 ones ;" "He that offendeth in one point is guilty of 
 all ; " " He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool ; " 
 — and then, at last, in a voice which mingles . the 
 awfulness of death, judgment, and eternity, " Cast 
 out the unprofitable servant." 
 
 Oh, to no one of us may this ever be ! I have not 
 spoken, God forbid ! to make those hearts sad which 
 God has not made sad, but I have spoken these 
 words of warning, my brethren, because in this life 
 we have all need of frequent warning — ^because I 
 have supposed them to be needed by others, know- 
 ing them to be needed by myself And let us re- 
 member that the lessons of God's wrath against sin 
 are in reality the lessons of His love for a sinful 
 race. God shews His love by destroying that in us 
 which would keep us from Him. He would save 
 us, even by fire, from that spiritual death which, 
 unawikened, ends in eternal death. And he will 
 save us if we seek Him. While life lasts there is 
 possible for every one of us an eternal and glorious 
 hope. The purple thunderclouds which gather 
 around a sinful path, may dim, indeed, but they 
 
PHARISEES AND PUBLICANS. 205 
 
 cannot wholly obliterate the rainbow which spans 
 their gloom. I look on this great congregation, and 
 I say, in God's name, that there is not one immor- 
 tal being among you all for whose soul the great 
 Father who made it does not yearn ; not one whom 
 He does not long to reckon in the days that He 
 maketh up His jewels; not one, however soiled 
 with sinful stains, for whom Christ did not die. 
 And therefore the grace of God still calleth you to 
 repentance. If we perish, we perish wilfully ; but 
 no living soul, not one of all those millions of human 
 beings who are now breathing on the surface of the 
 globe, need be cut off from the mercy and peace of 
 God. Oh, let us then beware of hard, dead, pre- 
 sumptuous, worldly hearts — the insidious leaven of 
 the Pharisees and of Herod. Let us, with God's 
 help, work out our own salvation with fear and 
 trembling ; and that we may soon attain to that 
 perfect love which casteth out fear, and is a nobler 
 and better thing, let us all breathe this very night, 
 not with the lips only, but in the deep sincerity of 
 penitent and trembling hearts, that heaven-blessed 
 prayer of the broken and contrite publican, 
 
 ** God be merciful to me a sinner.** 
 
X. 
 
 TOO LATE. 
 
 If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things 
 which belong unto thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine 
 eyes. — Luke xix. 42. 
 
 On Friday eveniDg, a week before the Cruci- 
 fixion, our Lord arrived at Bethany, the sweet and 
 quiet home of Martha and Mary and Lazarus whom 
 He loved. On the evening of the next day, — the 
 Jewish Sabbath, — the little family made in His 
 honor that memorable feast, in which the love of 
 Mary, glowing into sudden rapture, led her to break 
 the vase of alabaster, and anele with precious 
 spikenard her Saviour's feet. The presence of the 
 risen Lazarus added to the scene a touch of awe. 
 Many Jews from Jerusalem, who had strolled to the 
 little village when the setting sun removed the Sab- 
 bath restriction of distance, mingled among the 
 guests ; and as they returned to the city, through 
 the tents and booths of the thronging pilgrims, they 
 
 * Preached at Hereford Cathedral on Palm Sunday, 1871. 
 
 (207) 
 
208 TOO LATE. 
 
 were able to answer the eagerly-debated question, 
 whether Jesus, — in spite of the violence with which 
 He had been treated in His last visit to Jerusalem, — 
 would still venture to be present at the Paschal feast. 
 Yes ! the great Prophet would indeed be there ! 
 
 The rumor spread more and more widely as the 
 morning dawned; and it was apparently towards 
 the busy noon, that, accompanied by a vast throng 
 of Galilean pilgrims, our Lord started on foot from 
 the friendly home under the palms of Bethany. 
 The main road from the village to Jerusalem wound 
 round the southern shoulder of the Mount of Olives, 
 and when it brought Him near the fig-gardens of 
 Bethphage, Jesus dispatched two of His disciples, 
 to fetch for His use an ass's colt, which had never 
 before been ridden. St. Mark, reflecting the vivid 
 memories of St. Peter, tells us how they found it tied 
 up to a door in the street ; and when the owners 
 willingly resigned it, the disciples, thrilling with in- 
 tense excitement, — ^for surely now, at last, the great 
 Messianic kingdom of their hopes was to be revealed 
 — ^flung their garments over it to do regal honor to 
 their Lord. Then they lifted Him upon it, and the 
 'triumphal procession started on its way. They had 
 advanced but a short distance when there cani(% 
 
TOO LATE. 209 
 
 round the shoulder of the hill, another festal throng 
 which had streamed forth to meet Him from Jeru- 
 salem, waving in the sunny air the green branches 
 which they had torn from the neighboring palms. 
 All were full of awful expectation. The tale of 
 the recent raising of Lazarus was on every lip. At 
 last, swept away by uncontrollable emotion, the 
 disciples began to raise those passionate cries of 
 " Hosanna to the Son of David," which formed part 
 of the great Hallel of their festal services. A scene 
 of intense enthusiasm ensued. Breaking into in- 
 voluntary acclamations, the whole multitude, — as 
 they pealed forth the burden of the strain, — ^began 
 to fling off their talliths, and spread them on the 
 dusty road to tapestry His path ; while others kept 
 plucking, from the roadside trees, the boughs of 
 fig and olive to strew them on His way. And so, 
 with ringing Hosannas and waving palms — one 
 multitude preceding, another following, the disciples 
 grouped around — the Saviour approached the Holy 
 City. It was no seditious movement of politic<al in- 
 dignation ; — it was no insulting vanity of self-as- 
 serting pre-eminence. It was but the triumph of 
 the poor : it was but the lowly pomp of one who 
 
 rode to die. The haughty Gentiles ridiculed the 
 14 
 
210 TOO LATE. 
 
 very record of it ; and yet, besides the tragic gran- 
 deur of its real majesty, what king's or consuFs 
 triumph has had one tithe of such power to move 
 the heart ? 
 
 At the time, however, even the disciples did not 
 understand it, nor did they recall till afterwards the 
 prophecy of Zechariah about "the king meek and 
 bringing salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass." 
 They expected something Avholly different from 
 what occurred ; they still hankered for some material 
 victory. Would He not, even now, restore the 
 kingdom to Israel.? Had not the demons dis- 
 cerned Him, and fled His gaze ? Had not heaven 
 recognized Him, and lit her stars ? Had not earth 
 known Him, and hushed her winds ? Had not the 
 rough sea heard Him, and stilled his waves ? Why 
 should not the humble Prophet of the poor now 
 burst forth as the irresistible avenger of the mighty ? 
 Why should He not, even now, change the ass's colt 
 for the chariots of God which are twenty thousand, 
 and, amid the rushing of congregated wings, drive 
 down in thunder upon insulting Koman and apos- 
 tate priest ? Had not the supreme moment come ? 
 did not the hand point to the hour on the dial-plate 
 of heaven ? 
 
TOO LATE. 211 
 
 Yes ! the moment had come : yes ! the hand 
 pointed to the horn', — but not as they hoped. — The 
 road from Bethany slopes up the Mount of Olives, 
 through green fields and shady trees, till, as it sud- 
 denly sweeps round towards the north, Jerusalem, 
 which has hitherto been hidden, bursts full upon 
 the view. Many a traveller has reined his horse at 
 that memorable spot with feelings too deep for 
 speech. But the Jerusalem of that day, — as Jesus 
 saw it under the burning flood of vernal sunshine, 
 wrapped in its imperial mantle of proud towers, — 
 the Jerusalem whose massive ramparts and lordly 
 palaces made it a wonder of the world, — was a 
 spectacle incomparably more magnificent than the 
 decayed and crumbling city of to-day. And as 
 there, — through the transparent atmosphere, — tow- 
 ering above the deep umbrageous valleys which sur- 
 rounded it, — the city reared into the morning sun- 
 light its multitudinous splendors of marble pinnacle 
 and golden roofs, — was there no pride, no gladness, 
 in the heart of its true King ? Far otherwise ! An 
 indescribable sorrow seized Him. He paused. The 
 procession halted. All the tumult of acclaim was 
 hushed. The glad cries sank into silence. And, as 
 Jesus gazed, a rush of divine sorrow and compassion 
 
 luFIVBRSlfyl 
 
212 TOO LATE. 
 
 welled up from His inmost heart. He had dropped 
 silent tears at the grave of Lazarus ; here, over fallen 
 Jerusalem, He wept aloud. Five days afterwards, 
 all the shame of His mockery, all the anguish of His 
 torture, were unable to extort from Him one single 
 sob, or to wet his eyelids with one trickling tear ; 
 but now an infinitude of yearning pity and trem- 
 bling love overmastered His whole spirit, and He 
 not only wept, but burst into a passion of lamen- 
 tation in which the choked voice seemed to struggle 
 for utterance. — Strange Messianic triumph ! Mourn- 
 ful inteiTuption of those exultant Hosannas ! As 
 He gazed on David's Sion, — as He stood before the 
 Jerusalem of the prophets and the kings, — the King, 
 the Deliverer, the son of David, wept ! 
 
 And why ? — At His feet the olives were flinging 
 their broad shadows over green Gethsemane, the 
 scene of His coming agony, — but it was not that. 
 Opposite Him, on the rocky plateau beyond the 
 Kidron, Calvary was waiting for His cross of torture, 
 — but it was not that. Nay, but it was something 
 which no eye saw but His. For He was gazing, 
 with the eagle glance of prophecy, on a scene far 
 different from that which met his actual gaze. 
 What He saw was, not a fair and holy city, sitting. 
 
TOO LATE. 213 
 
 like a lady of kingdoms, upon her virgin heights, — 
 but a city cowering, abject, degraded, desolate. To 
 Him the faithful city has become a harlot. Her 
 gold has become dross ; her wine mixed with water; 
 and now her hour had come. In the Jerusalem that 
 was — the glittering Jerusalem of the days of Herod 
 and Tiberius — He saw, down the dim vista of fifty 
 years, the Jerusalem that was to be, — the desecrated 
 Jerusalem of the days of Titus. He saw those 
 lordly towers shattered, — those umbrageous trees 
 hewn down, — that golden sanctuary polluted, — 
 Judaea Capta a desolate woman, weeping under her 
 palm-tree amid her tangled hair. In the flush of 
 the existing prosperity He foresaw the horrors of 
 the coming retribution. The eye of His troubled 
 imagination beheld the 600,000 corpses carried out 
 of those city-gates ; — the wretched fugitives cruci- 
 fied by myriads around those walls ; — the priests, 
 swollen with hunger, leaping madly into the de- 
 vouring flames, until those flames had done their 
 purging, scathing, avenging work, and what had 
 been Jerusalem, the holy, the noble, was but a 
 heap of ghastly ruins where the smouldering em- 
 bers were half-slaked in the rivers of a guilty na- 
 tion's blood. 
 
214 TOO LATE. 
 
 And as He saw it, — as this vision of the future 
 rushed red upon His gaze, — as He recalled the 
 promise of peace which the very name of the city- 
 breathed, and knew that she would see peace again 
 no more, — this Saviour whom they rejected, whom 
 they hated, whom they crucified, cried aloud in a 
 broken voice, and with eyes that streamed with 
 tears, " If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in 
 this thy day, the things that belong unto thy 
 peace," — " If thou hadst known," — and indeed those 
 words seemed to summon up yet another picture, — 
 not of Jerusalem as she was, — not of J,erusalem as 
 she Wds to he, — ^but of Jerusalem as she might have 
 been, — yes ! of a Jerusalem little less glorious than 
 her of the prophet's vision, descending out of 
 heaven with her walls of jasper and gates of pearl, — 
 of that Jerusalem about whom so many glowing 
 hearts have sung, — 
 
 Oh. happy harbor of the saints, 
 
 Oh sweet and pleasant soil, 
 In thee no sorrows may be seen, 
 
 No pain, no grief, no toil. 
 
 Thy houses are of ivory, 
 
 Thy windows crystal clear, 
 Thy tiles they are of beaten gold, 
 
 O would that I were there ! 
 
TOO LATE. 215 
 
 Right through the streets, with silver sound, 
 
 The flood of life doth flow, 
 Upon whose banks, on either hand, 
 
 The trees of life do grow. 
 
 Alas! it was all a glorious "if" — a heartrending 
 " might have been." It was as when a traveller 
 stands on some great misty mountain-top, — longing 
 to gaze on the magnificent expanse of city, and 
 plain, and river, and the rippling sea, — and for one 
 moment, through one great rent of the enshrouding 
 mist, he looks on a fairy vision, bathed in sunlight 
 and overarched with iris, — ^but, almost before he has 
 seen it, the rent in the mist is closed once more, and 
 ragged and grey the clouds roll up, and he is alone, 
 and miserable, and chill, and disenchanted. Even 
 so was it with that momentary glimpse of the possi- 
 ble Jerusalem; it was, alas ! but a vanishing "might 
 have been/' and 
 
 Of all sad words of tongue and pen 
 
 The saddest are those " It might have been.** 
 
 It might have been — ^but it was not : it never would 
 be now ; and love, after doing all in vain, could only 
 weep. " If thou hadst known — even thou — at least 
 in this thy day — the things that belong unto thy 
 peace;"— if — and there sorrow suppressed the 
 
216 TOO LATE. 
 
 apodosis ; and when the sob, which broke His voice, 
 was over, He could only add " but now they are hid 
 from thine eyes." 
 
 And herein, my brethren, lies the meaning of 
 this scene for us; this is the lesson on which I 
 would desire to fix our hearts this evening. May I 
 not hope, that, even now, in part at least, your 
 hearts and consciences have been interpreting it into 
 words ? It is an awful, but it is also, for that very 
 reason, a blessed lesson : and oh may Grod give me 
 wisdom to speak, and give you hearts to realize, 
 alike its awful and its blessed side ! 
 
 1. The awful side is this. There, before the 
 Saviour's gaze of tears, lay a city, splendid appar- 
 ently and in peace, and destined to enjoy another 
 half century of existence. And the day was a com- 
 mon day ; the hour a common hour : no thunder 
 was throbbing in the blue unclouded sky ; no deep 
 voices of departing deities were rolling through the 
 golden doors : and yet, — soundless to mortal ears in 
 the unrippled air of Eternity, — the knell of her des- 
 tiny had begun to toll : and, in the voiceless dialect 
 of heaven, the fiat of her doom had been pro- 
 nounced ; and in that realm which knoweth and 
 needeth not any light save the light of God, the sun 
 
TOO LATE. 217 
 
 of her moral existence had gone down while it yet 
 was day. — Were her means of grace over ? No, not 
 yet. Was her Temple closed ? No, not yet. Were 
 her services impossible ? No, not yet. The white- 
 robed Levites still thronged her courts ; the singers 
 still made the heavens ring with their passionate 
 litanies and silver Psalms ; the High Priest yet 
 sprinkled, year by year, the gold of the holiest altar 
 with the blood of unavailing sacrifice. No change 
 was visible in her to mortal eyes. And yet, for her, 
 from this moment even until the end, the accepted 
 time was over, the appointed crisis past, — the day 
 of salvation had set into irrevocable night. It was 
 with her as with the barren fig-tree, on which, next 
 day, the Lord pronounced His doom. The leaf of 
 her national life was still glossy-green ; the sun still 
 shone on her; the rain fell; the dew stole down; 
 but the fruit would grow on her no more, and there- 
 fore the fire was kindled for the burning, the axe 
 uplifted, which would crash on the encumbering 
 trunk. She was not spared for her beauty ; she was 
 not forgiven for her fame. And if it were so with 
 the favored city, may it not be so with thee, and 
 thee, and me ? What shall the reed of the desert 
 do, if even the cedar be shattered at a blow ? — Yes : 
 
218 TOO LATE. 
 
 the lesson of the tears of Jesus over Jerusalem, as 
 she gleamed before Him in the vernal sunshine, a 
 gem upon her crown of hills, is this : and oh may 
 we all have grace to learn it now — ^learn it even in 
 this solemn week : that, as for her, so for us, there 
 may be a too-late ; the door may be shut without a 
 sound ; the doom sealed without a sigh ; life may 
 be over before death comes. It is not — (oh mark 
 this !) — ^it is not that Grod loses His mercy, but that 
 we lose our capacity for accepting it : it is not that 
 God hath turned away from us, but that we have 
 utterly paralyzed our own power of turning back to 
 Him. And then the voice sighs forth with unutter- 
 able sadness, "Ephraim is turned unto idols, let 
 him alone." Let him alone, preacher, for he 
 hates the words of truth ! let him alone, Word of 
 God, for he hath set his face as a flint against thee ; 
 let him alone, Conscience, for he is bent on mur- 
 dering thee ; his sins have become not wilful only 
 but willing; he has chosen them, — let him have? 
 them. He has loved death more than life, and lies 
 rather than righteousness, and vice more than 
 virtue, and the world more than heaven, and the 
 lusts of the flesh rather than the law of God. And 
 the Spirit of God hath striven with him, and striven 
 
TOO LATE. 219 
 
 in vain : all, all hath been in vain : let him alone : 
 let him eat of the fruit of his own works, and be 
 filled with his own devices. 
 
 fearful voice of most just judgment I and yet 
 observe further, as a still more solemn source of 
 warning, that, at the very instant when this dread 
 fiat is sounding forth, we may be all unconscious of 
 it. Jerusalem knew not — she was wholly unaware — 
 that this was the last day of her visitation. She 
 had quenched the light of life, — ^but dreamed not of 
 the hastening midnight : she had silenced the voice 
 of warning, and suspected not that the hush which 
 followed was but the hush before the hurricane, — 
 the silence before the trumpet's sound. Sick — she 
 knew it not : dying — she knew it not. " Ephraim 
 hath gray hairs upon him, and he knoweth it not." 
 It is, alas ! ever thus. This is the very method of 
 God's dealings with us, — not by stupendous mira- 
 cles but by quiet warnings ; not by shocks of catas- 
 trophe, but by processes of law. The Holy Light is 
 but a beam shining quietly in the darkness, easily 
 strangled in the wilful midnight : the pleading voice 
 is but a low whisper amid the silence, easily drowned 
 in the tempest of the passions. And so, though the 
 day of grace has its fixed limits, and these may bo 
 
220 TOO LATE. 
 
 often narrower than the day of life, we neither know 
 what those limits are, nor when they are transcend- 
 ed. And if ours be a guilty ignorance, a penal blind- 
 ness, we cannot know. So that then the presump- 
 tuous sinner may be in this awful condition : — A 
 temptation may come to him, — perhaps a temptation 
 to some besetting sin to which he has often and often 
 yielded, and stifling the last faint whisper of con- 
 science he may sin once more ; and after that con- 
 science speaks no more ; and for the sake of that 
 one last miserable sin, he has lost his soul. Or per- 
 haps it is one last call to repentance ; and because 
 he has rejected it so often, he carelessly and wilfully 
 once more rejects it ; and after that, the call comes 
 again no more for ever, and the things that belong 
 unto his peace are hid for ever from his eyes. Life 
 continues, but it is really death ; and on the dead 
 soul in the living body the gates of the eternal 
 tomb have closed. 
 
 2. Can there be a blessed side to truths so true, 
 and yet so full of solemnity and judgment as these ? 
 Yes, if we will it, a most blessed side. Seeing that 
 there is good in the world, and there is evil in the 
 world, and that the evil is ruin, and misery, and 
 death, and that the good is blessing, and hope, and 
 
TOO LATE. 221 
 
 peace, — and that we can, if we will, choose the evil 
 and reject the good and so destroy ourselves for time 
 and for eternity, — what can God in his mercy do 
 more merciful than to make evil terrible to us, if so 
 be we may be averted from it ? And the more 
 terrible evil becomes to our inmost nature, — the 
 more, out of very hatred and horror, we turn away 
 from it as from our utmost bane, the happier are we. 
 And therefore everything is blessed which is meant 
 to make us tremble at sin,, every doctrine, however 
 awful, is blessed if it helps to startle us from that 
 fatal drunkenness, to wean us from that fatal fascina- 
 tion. The object of all terror is persuasion : of all 
 warning prevention : of all danger repentance. The 
 object of all that I have said is this, " Judge there- 
 fore yourselves, brethren, that ye be not judged of 
 the Lord." All our lives are in some sense a " might 
 have been ; " the very best of us must feel, I suppose, 
 in sad and thoughtful moments, that he might have 
 been transcendantly nobler, and greater, and loftier 
 than he is : but, while life lasts, every " might have 
 been " should lead, not to vain regrets, but to manly 
 resolutions ; it should be but the dark background 
 to a "may be" and a "will be" yet. "Arise then, 
 and flee to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope." 
 
222 TOO LATE. 
 
 Every one of us may be saved : every one of us 
 may be forgiven ; every one of us may be sanc- 
 tified: every one of us may break even the iron 
 fetters of besetting sins ; every one of us may be 
 brought to love so well everything that is good, 
 and true, and pure, that we shall loathe, even in 
 thought, the thing that is evil. As we love our 
 souls let us strive after this end with every energy 
 of our lives. If we are striving, — not loving our 
 sins, but hating them, — not yielding to them, but, 
 heart and soul, fighting against them, then Grod is 
 with us and we are safe : but if, on the other hand, 
 we have for months and years been growing colder, 
 deader, more indifferent to God and Chri-st, — if we 
 can listen now unmoved to what would once have 
 impressed and affected us, — if we can dally now 
 with temptations which we should once have shun- 
 ned, — ^if we can now commit sins from which we 
 would once have shrunk, — ^by these marks we may 
 be sure that our day of grace has been declining, — 
 that the shadows of its evening are lengthening out, 
 — and that, if no change occur, then, " ere the sun 
 of our natural existence has gone down, the sun of 
 our spiritual day may have set, never to rise again." 
 Oh, my brethren, who knows whether these very 
 
TOO LATE. 223 
 
 days of Passion Week may not be for us the day of 
 our visitation ? Let us all pray that they do not 
 pass in vain ? Now the door of repentance stands 
 open, and Heaven's light streams through it ; — ^now 
 in all love and gentleness the voice of our Saviour 
 calls : — now the Holy Spirit of God still strives with 
 us in our wanderings, still pleads for us in our fail- 
 ures ; — ^now, but who shall say how long ? not for 
 ever: not, it may be, even all our lives : not even it 
 may be, for many days. Oh, to-day if ye will hear 
 his voice, harden not your hearts. 
 
XI. 
 
 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 
 
 And being in an agony, He prayed. — Luke xxii. 44.* 
 
 When the last supper was over, and the last 
 hymn had been sung, our Lord and His Apostles — 
 with the one traitor fatally absent from their 
 number — ^went out of the city gate, and down the 
 steep valley of the Kidron to the green slope of 
 Olivet beyond it. Solemn and sad was that last 
 walk together; and a weight of mysterious awe 
 sank like lead upon the hearts of those few poor 
 Galileans as in almost unbroken silence, — through 
 the deep hush of the Oriental night, — ^through the 
 dark shadows of the ancient olive-trees, — ^through the 
 broken gleams of the Paschal moonlight, — they fol- 
 lowed Him, their Lord and Master, who, with bowed 
 head and sorrowing heart, walked before them to 
 His willing doom. 
 
 * Preached before Her Majesty the Queen, in the private 
 Chapel, "Windsor ; and, subsequently, at Marlborough College. 
 15 (225) 
 
226 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 
 
 That night they did not return as usual to 
 Bethany, but stopped at the little familiar garden 
 of Gethsemane, or " the oilpress." Jesus knew that 
 the hour of His uttermost humiliation was near, — 
 that from this moment till the utterance of that 
 great cry which broke His heart, nothing remained 
 for Him on earth, save all that the human frame can 
 tolerate of torturing pain, and all that the human 
 soul can bear of poignant anguish ; — till in that tor- 
 ment of body and desolation of soul, even the high 
 and radiant serenity of His divine spirit should suf- 
 fer a short but terrible eclipse. One thing alone 
 remained before that short hour began ; a short space 
 was left Him, and in that space He had to brace His 
 body, to nerve his soul, to calm His spirit by prayer 
 and solitude, until all that is evil in the power of 
 evil should wreak its worst upon His innocent and 
 holy head. And He had to face that hour, — to win 
 that victory — as all the darkest hours must be faced, 
 as all the hardest victories must be won — alone. It 
 was not that He was above the need of sympathy, — 
 no noble soul is ; — and perhaps the noblest need it 
 most. Though His friends did but sleep, while the 
 traitor toiled, yet it helped Him in His hour of 
 darkness to feel at least that they were near, and 
 
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 227 
 
 that those were nearest who loved Him most. 
 " Stay here/' He said to the little group, " while I 
 go yonder and pray." Leaving them to sleep, each 
 wrapped in his outer garment on the grass. He took 
 Peter and James and John, the chosen of the cho- 
 sen, and went about a stone's throw off. But soon 
 even iheir presence was more than He could endure. 
 A grief beyond utterance, a struggle beyond endur- 
 ance, a horror of great darkness, overmastered Him, 
 as with the sinking swoon of an anticipated death. 
 He must be yet more alone, and alone with God. 
 Keluctantly He tore Himself away from th^ir sus- 
 taining tenderness, and amid the dark-brown trunks 
 of those gnarled trees withdrew from the moonlight 
 into the deeper shade, where solitude might be for 
 Him the audience-chamber of His Heavenly Father. 
 And there, till slumber overpowered them. His 
 three beloved Apostles were conscious how dreadful 
 was the paroxysm through which He passed. They 
 saw Him sometimes with head bowed upon His 
 knees, sometimes lying on his face in prostrate suf- 
 fering upon the ground. And though amazement 
 and sore distress fell on them, — though the whole 
 place seemed to be haunted by Presences of good 
 and evil struggling in mighty but silent contest for 
 
228 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 
 
 the eternal victory, — yet, before thej sank under the 
 oppression of troubled slumber, they knew that they 
 had been the dim witnesses of an unutterable 
 agony, in which the drops of anguish which dropped 
 from His brow in that deathful struggle looked to 
 them like gouts of blood, and yet the burden of 
 those broken murmurs in which He pleaded with 
 His Heavenly Father had been ever this, "If it be 
 possible, — yet not what I will, but what Thou 
 wilt." 
 
 What is the meaning, my brethren, of this scene 
 for us ? What was the cause of this midnight hour ? 
 Do you think that it was the fear of death, and that 
 that was sufficient to shake to its utmost centre the 
 pure and innocent soul of the Son of Man ? Could 
 not even a child see how inconsistent such a fear 
 would be with all that followed ; — with that heroic 
 fortitude which fifteen consecutive hours of sleepless 
 agony could not disturb; — ^with that majestic 
 silence which overawed even the hard Roman into 
 respect and fear; — with that sovereign ascendency 
 of soul which flung open the gate of Paradise to 
 the repentant malefactor, and breathed its compas- 
 sionate forgiveness on the apostate priest ? Could He 
 have been afraid of death, in whose name, and in 
 
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 229 
 
 whose strength, and for whose sake alone, trembling 
 old men, and feeble maidens, and timid boys have 
 faced it in its worst form without a shudder or a 
 sigh ? My brethren, the dread of the mere act of 
 dying is a cowardice so abject that the meanest pas- 
 sions of the mind can master it, and many a coarse 
 criminal has advanced to meet his end with unflinch- 
 ing confidence and steady step. And Jesus knew, 
 if any have ever known, that it is as natural to die 
 as to be bom ; — that it is the great birthright of all 
 who love God ; — that it is God who giveth His be- 
 loved sleep. The sting of death — ^and its only sting 
 — ^is sin ; the victory of the grave — and its only vic- 
 tory — is corruption. And Jesus knew no sin, saw 
 no corruption. No, that which stained His fore- 
 head with crimson drops was something far deadlier 
 than death. Though sinless He was suffering for 
 sin. The burden and the mystery of man's strange 
 and revolting wickedness lay heavy on His soul; 
 and with holy lips He was draining the bitter cup 
 into which sin had infused its deadliest poison.* 
 
 * Is. liii. 4-6; Rom. iv. 25; 1 Cor. xv. 3. "Non mortem 
 homiit simpliciter, quatenus transitus est e mundo... ; peccata 
 vero nostra, quorum onus illi erat impositum, sua ingenti molo 
 eum premebant." Calvin ad Matt. xxvi. 37. 
 
230 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 
 
 Could perfect innocence endure without a shudder 
 all that is detestable in human ingratitude and hu- 
 man rage? should there be no recoil of horror in 
 the bosom of perfect love to see His own, — for whom 
 He came, — absorbed in one insane repulsion against 
 infinite purity and tenderness and peace ? It was a 
 willing agony, but it was agony ; it was endured for 
 our sakes ; the Son of God suffered that He might 
 through suffering become perfect in infinite sympa- 
 thy as a Saviour strong to save. 
 
 And on all the full mysterious meaning of that 
 agony and bloody sweat it would be impossible now 
 to dwell, but may we not for a short time dwell with 
 profit — may not every one whose heart — ^being free 
 from the fever of passion, and anfretted by the pet- 
 tiness of pride — is calm and meek and reverent 
 enough to listen to the messages of God, even be 
 they spoken by the feeblest of human lips, — may 
 we not all, I say, learn something from this frag- 
 ment of that thrilling story, that — "being in an 
 agony. He prayed." One or two lessons however 
 slight— if any have ears to hear — ^let me draw from 
 this. 
 
 For oh how much it may mean for us ; not it 
 may be to you as yet in the spring of life, though 
 
PKAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 231 
 
 even you have had solemn warnings how death may 
 stand unseen and silent even at the right hand of 
 youth. But however bright the brightest of your 
 lives may hitherto have been, — and may God your 
 Heavenly Father make your boyhood very bright 
 for all of you, that the memories of an innocent 
 and happy dawn may refresh you in life's burning 
 noonday and life's grey decline ! yet for every one of 
 you, I suppose, sooner or later the Gethsemane of 
 life must come. It may be the Gethsemane of 
 struggle, and poverty and care; — it may be the 
 Gethsemane of long and weary sickness ; — ^it may be 
 the Gethsemane of farewells that wring the heart 
 by the deathbeds of those we love ; — it may be the 
 Gethsemane of remorse, and of well-nigh despair, 
 for sins that we will not — but which we say we can- 
 not overcome. Well, my brethren, in that Gethse- 
 mane — aye, even in that Gethsemane of sin — no an- 
 gel merely, — ^but Christ Himself who bore the bur- 
 den of our sins, — ^will, if, we seek Him, come to com- 
 fort us. He will, if being in agony, we pray. He 
 can be touched. He is touched, with the feeling of 
 our infirmities. He too has trodden the winepress 
 of agony alone ; He too has lain face downwards in 
 the night upon the ground ; and the comfort which 
 
232 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 
 
 then came to Him He has bequeathed to us — even 
 the comfort, the help, the peace, the recovery, the 
 light, the hope, the faith, the sustaining arm, the 
 healing anodyne of prayer. It is indeed a natural 
 comfort — and one to which the Christian at least 
 flies instinctively. When the waterfloods drown us, 
 — when all God's waves and storms seem to be beat- 
 ing over our souls, — when " Calamity 
 
 Comes like a deluge, and o'erfloods our orimes 
 
 Till sin is hidden in sorro-w — " \ 
 
 oh then, if we have not wholly quenched all spiritual 
 life within us, what can we do but fling ourselves at 
 the foot of those great altar stairs that slope through 
 darkness up to God ? Yes, being in an agony, we 
 pray ; and the talisman against every agony is there. 
 And herein lies the great mercy and love of God, 
 that we may go to Him in our agony even if we have 
 never gone before. Oh, if prayer were possible only 
 for the always good and always true, possible only 
 for those who have never forsaken or forgotten God, 
 — if it were not possible for sinners and penitents 
 and those who have gone astray, — then of how in- 
 finitely less significance would it be for sinful and 
 fallen man ! But our God is a God of Love, a God 
 
233 
 
 of mercy. He is very good to us. The soul may 
 come bitter and disappointed, with nothing left to 
 offer him but the dregs of a misspent life ; — the 
 soul may come, like that sad Prodigal, weary and 
 broken, and shivering, and in rags; but if it only 
 come — the merciful door is open still and while yet 
 we are a great way off our Father will meet, and 
 forgive, and comfort us. And then what a change 
 is there in our lives ! They are weak no longer ; 
 they are discontented no longer ; they are the slaves 
 of sin no longer. You have seen the heavens grey 
 with dull and leaden-colored clouds, you have seen the 
 earth chilly and comfortless under its drifts of im- 
 melting snow : but let the sun shine, and then how 
 rapidly does the sky resume its radiant blue, and 
 the fields laugh with green grass and vernal flower I 
 So will it be with even a withered and a wasted life 
 when we return to God and suffer Him to send His 
 bright beams of light upon our heart. I do not 
 mean that the pain or misery under which we are 
 suffering will necessarily be removed, — even for 
 Christ it was not so; but peace will come and 
 strength will come and resignation will come and 
 hope will come, — and we shall feel able to bear any- 
 thing which God shall send, and though He slay us 
 
234 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 
 
 we still shall seek Him, and even if the blackest 
 cloud of anguish seem to shroud His face from us, 
 even on that cloud shall the rainbow shine. 
 
 Yet do not think, my brethren, that, because 
 God never rejects the prayer of sinner or sufferer, 
 that therefore we may go on sinning, trusting to re- 
 pent when we suffer. That would be a shameful abuse 
 of God's mercy and tenderness ; it would be a frame 
 of mind which would need this solemn warning, that 
 agony by no means always leads to prayer ; that it 
 may come when prayer is possible no longer to the 
 long hardened and long prayerless soul. I know no 
 hope so senseless^ so utterly frustrated by all experi- 
 ence, as the hope of what is called a deathbed re- 
 pentance. Those who are familiar with many death- 
 beds will tell you why. But prayer, my brethren, 
 — God's blessed permission to us, to see Him and 
 to know Him, and to trust in Him — that is granted 
 us not for the hours of death or agony alone, but for 
 all life, almost from the very cradle quite to the 
 very grave. And it is a gift no less priceless for 
 its alleviation of sorrow than for its intensification of 
 all innocent joy. For him who would live a true 
 life it is as necessary in prosperity as in adversity, 
 — in peace as in trouble — ^in youth as in old age. 
 
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 235 
 
 Here too Christ is our example. He lived, as we may 
 live, in the light of His Father's face. It was not 
 only as the Man of Sorrows, it was not only in the 
 moonlit garden of His agony, or on the darkening 
 hills of His incessant toil, that prayer had refreshed 
 His soul ; but often and often, every day during 
 those long unknown years in the little Galilean 
 village, — daily and from childhood upwards in sweet 
 hours of peace, kneeling amid the mountain lilies or 
 on the cottage floor. Those prayers are to the soul 
 what the dew of God is to the flowers of the field ; 
 the burning wind of the day may pass over them, and 
 the stems droop and the colors fade, but when the 
 dew steals down at evening, they will revive. Why 
 should not that gracious dew fall even now and 
 always for all of us upon the fields of life ? A life 
 which has been from the first a life of prayer, — a 
 life which has thus fi-om its earliest days looked up 
 consciously to its Father and its God, — ^will always 
 be a happy life. Time may fleet, and youth may 
 fade, — as fleet and fade they will ; and there may be 
 storm as well as sunshine in the earthly career ; yet 
 it will inevitably be a happy career, and with a hap- 
 piness that cannot die. Yes. this is the lesson 
 which I would that we all might learn from the 
 
236 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 
 
 thought of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane ; — 
 the lesson that Prayer may recall the sunshine even 
 to the dark and the frozen heart ; but that there is 
 no long winter, there is no unbroken night, to that 
 soul on which the Sun of Kighteousness has risen 
 with healing in His wings. 
 
 And that, my brethren, because . true prayer is 
 always heard. We read in the glorious old G-reek 
 poet of prayers which, before they reached the por- 
 tals of heaven, were scattered by the winds; and 
 indeed there are some prayers so deeply opposed to 
 the wiU of God, so utterly alien to the true interests 
 of men, that nothing could happen better for us 
 than that God should refuse, nothing more terrible 
 than that He should grant them in anger. So that 
 if we pray for any earthly blessing we must pray for 
 it solely " if it be God's will," " if it be for our highest 
 good ; " but, for all the best things we may pray 
 without misgiving, without reservation, certain that 
 if we ask God will grant them. Nay even in asking 
 for them we may know that we have them, — for 
 what we desire we ask, and what we ask we aim at, 
 and what we aim at we shall attain. No man 
 ever yet asked to be, as the days pass by, more and 
 more noble, and sweet, and pure, and heavenly- 
 
PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 237 
 
 minded, — no man ever yet prayed that the evil 
 spirits of hatred, and pride, and passion, and world- 
 liness, might be cast out of his soul, — without his 
 petition being granted and granted to the letter. 
 And with all other gifts God then gives us His own 
 self besides, — He makes us know Him, and love 
 Him, and live in Him. " Thou hast written well of 
 me," said the Vision to the great teacher of Aquin- 
 um, " what reward dost thou desire ? '* — " Non aliam, 
 nisi te Domine " — " no other than Thyself Lord,'' 
 was the meek and rapt reply. And when all our 
 restless, fretful, discontented longings are reduced 
 to this alone, the desire to see God's face ; — when 
 we have none in Heaven but Him, and none upon 
 earth whom we desire in comparison of Him ; — 
 then we are indeed happy beyond the reach of any 
 evil thing, for then we have but one absorbing wish, 
 and that wish cannot be refused. Least of all can 
 it be refused when it has pleased God to afflict us. 
 " Ye now have sorrow," said Christ, " but I will see 
 you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your 
 joy no man taketh from you." Yes, when God's 
 children pass under the shadow of the Cross of 
 Calvary, they know that through that shadow lies 
 their passage to the Great White Throne. For 
 
238 PRAYER, THE ANTIDOTE TO SORROW. 
 
 them Gethsemane is as Paradise. Grod fills it with 
 sacred presences ; its solemn silence is broken by 
 the music of tender promises ; its awful darkness 
 softened and brightened by the sunlight of heavenly 
 faces, and the music of angel wings. 
 
 74^ O? THB 
 
 THE END. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Due two weeks after date. 
 
 >• i- rs 
 
 30m-7,'12 
 
YB 27878 
 
 W^^V^io