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BALDWIN LECTURES 
 
 for 
 1902-1903 
 
 Delivered at Ann Arbor, Michigan 
 under the direction of 
 
 THE HARRIS MKMORIAI, TRUST 
 
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 v*/"*' 
 
 4^ X-^" / ^v 
 
 Press of 
 
 Winn & Hammond 
 
 Detax>it 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Extract from the Deed of Trust 
 
 Monotheism and the I^ove of God . 13 
 
 Right Rbverend Frederick Burgess 
 Bishop of Long Island 
 
 The Personal Interpretation of Christianity 37 
 
 Reverend Chari,es E. Woodcock 
 St. John's Church, Detroit 
 
 The Gospel of God's Pardon ... 65 
 
 Reverend Wii,i,iam S. Rainsford 
 St. George's Church, New York 
 
 Christianity and Education ... 85 
 
 Right Reverend Thomas Frank Gaii,or 
 Bishop of Tennessee 
 
 The Realizing of God . . . . loi 
 
 Reverend William D. Maxon 
 Christ Church, Detroit 
 
 147817 
 
Extract From the Deed of Trust 
 
 In Accordance with the Provisions of 
 
 WHICH THE Baldwin I^ectures 
 
 WERE Instituted 
 
 "This Instrument, made and executed be- 
 tween Samuel Smith Harris, Bishop of the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of 
 Michigan, of the City of Detroit, Wayne 
 County, Michigan, as party of the first part, and 
 Henry P. Baldwin, Alonzo B. Palmer, Henry 
 A. Hayden, Sidney D. Miller, and Henry P. 
 Baldwin, 2d, of the State of Michigan, Trustees 
 under the trust created by this instrument, as 
 parties of the second part, witnesseth as follows : 
 
 "In the year of Our Lord one thousand eight 
 hundred and eighty-five, the said party of the 
 first part, moved by the importance of bringing 
 all practicable Christian influences to bear upon 
 the great body of students annually assembled 
 at the University of Michigan, undertook to 
 promote and set in operation a plan of Christian 
 work at said University, and collected contribu- 
 tions for that purpose, of which plan the follow- 
 ing outline is here given, that is to say : 
 
 "i. To erect a building or hall near the 
 University, in which there should be cheerful 
 parlors, a well-equipped reading-room, and a 
 
6 Extract from the Deed of Trust 
 
 lecture-room, where the lectures hereinafter 
 mentioned mi^ht be given; 
 
 '*2. To endow a lectureship similar to the 
 Bampton Lectureship in Eng^land, for the estab- 
 lishment and defence of Christian truth; the 
 lectures on such foundation to be delivered an- 
 nually at Ann Arbor by a learned clerg-yman or 
 other communicant of the Protestant Eipiscopal 
 Church, to be chosen as hereinafter provided, 
 such lectures to be not less than six nor more 
 than eight in number, and to be published in 
 book form before the income of the fund shall 
 be paid to the lecturer; 
 
 "3. To endow two other lectureships, one 
 on Biblical Literature and Learning, and the 
 other on Christian Evidences, the object of such 
 lectureships to be to provide for all the students 
 who may be willing to avail themselves of them 
 a complete course of instruction in sacred learn- 
 ing, and in the philosophy of right thinking 
 and right living, without which no education 
 can justly be considered complete ; 
 
 "4. To organize a society, to be composed 
 of the students in all classes and departments of 
 the University who may be members of or 
 attached to the Protestant Episcopal Church, of 
 which society the Bishoo of the Diocese, the 
 Rector, Wardens, and Vestrymen of St. An- 
 drew's Parish, and all the Professors of the 
 Universitv who are communicants of the Pro- 
 testant Episcopal Church should be members 
 ex-oiUcio, which society should have the care 
 
Extract from the Deed of Trust 7 
 
 and manao^ement of the reading-room and lec- 
 ture-room of the hall, and of all exercises or em- 
 ployments carried on therein, and should more- 
 over annually elect each of the lecturers herein- 
 before mentioned, upon the nomination of the 
 Bishop of the Diocese. 
 
 **In pursuance of the said plan, the said so- 
 ciety of students and others has been duly 
 organized under the name of the 'Hobart Guild 
 of the University of Michigan;' the hall above 
 mentioned has been builded and called 'Hobart 
 Hall;' and Mr. Henry P. Baldv^in of Detroit, 
 Michigan, and Sibyl A. Baldwin, his wife, have 
 given to the said party of the first part the sum 
 of ten thousand dollars for the endowment and 
 support of the lectureship first hereinbefore 
 mentioned. 
 
 ''Now, therefore, I, the said Samuel Smith 
 Harris, Bishop as aforesaid, do hereby give, 
 grant, and transfer to the said Henry P. Bald- 
 win, Alonzo B. Palmer, Henrv A. Hayden, 
 Sidney D. Miller, and Henry P. Baldwin, 2d, 
 Trustees as aforesaid, the said sum of ten thou- 
 sand dollars to be invested in good and safe 
 interest-bearing securities, the net income there- 
 of to be paid and applied from time to time as 
 hereinafter provided, the said sum and the in- 
 come thereof to be held in trust for the follow- 
 ing uses : 
 
 "i. The said fund shall be known as the En- 
 dowment Fund of the Baldwin Lectures. 
 
 "2. There shall be chosen annually by the 
 
8 Extract from the Deed of Trust 
 
 Hobart Guild of the University of Michigan, 
 upon the nomination of the Bishop of Michigan, 
 a learned clergyman or other communicant of 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church, to deliver at 
 Ann Arbor and under the auspices of the said 
 Hobart Guild, between the Feast of St. Michael 
 and All Angels and the Feast of St. Thomas, 
 m each year, not less than six nor more than 
 eig-ht lectures, for the Establishment and De- 
 fence of Christian Truth ; the said lectures to be 
 published in book form by Easter of the follow- 
 ing year, and to be entitled *The Baldwin Lec- 
 tures;' and there shall be paid to the said lec- 
 turer the income of the said endowment fund, 
 upon the delivery of fifty copies of said lectures 
 to the said Trustees or their successors ; the said 
 printed volumes to contain, as an extract from 
 this instrument, or in condensed form,.^a state- 
 ment of the object and conditions of this trust." 
 
 In the month of July, A. D. 1901, the 
 Trustees in whose hands the administration of 
 this trust reposed, received a communication 
 from the family of Governor Baldwin and the 
 Trustees of his estate, requesting that, instead 
 of the course of lectures as prescribed, some 
 other method should be adopted which in the 
 discretion of the Trustees would more faith- 
 fully carry into effect the intent and purpose of 
 the donors. This intent, as stated by the deed 
 of j^ift, is to brin^ to bear ''all practicable 
 Christian influences upon the g^reat body of stu- 
 
Extract from the Deed of Trust 9 
 
 dents annually assembled at the University." 
 
 In this communication it was sug-g-ested also 
 that courses of sermons by different preachers 
 should be tried as an experimental change. In 
 accordance with this suggestion, the present 
 course was arranged and delivered with marked 
 success. 
 
EXPLANATORY 
 
 As shown by the foregoing pages, 
 these lecture sermons are a departure 
 from the original plan. The publication 
 is made under our direction solely. 
 
 Trustees of Harris Memorial, 
 Trust 
 
Monotheism and The Love 
 of God. 
 
 The generous donor of this lectureship has 
 been equally generous in the range of thought 
 which he has given to the lecturers. Beginning, 
 as I do to-night, this year's course, I find myself 
 embarrassed by the very wealth of topics which 
 might be selected. In the belief, however, that 
 man's relation to God is the subject which is of 
 supreme interest to the human mind and heart, 
 I have determined to take one phase of it and 
 treat it under the title of ''Monotheism and the 
 Love of God." 
 
 Two things may be assumed in an educated 
 audience like this — the belief in God and the 
 belief in the personality of God. The man who 
 in these days would profess himself an atheist 
 would certainly be a bold champion of a lost 
 cause. Atheism is no longer fashionable, to 
 say the least. The man who adopts it keeps it 
 to himself along with his other secrets. This 
 secretiveness has always been associated with 
 the folly of the atheist. For even the fool, as 
 Lord Bacon reminds us, did not speak aloud, 
 but whispered to himself when he professed his 
 unbelief, ''The fool hath said in his heart, there 
 
14 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 is no God." The belief in the personality of 
 God shall be also assumed, although this faith 
 is by no means as common among- educated 
 people. In this respect pantheism is the opposite 
 of monotheism. Pantheism resolves the whole 
 universe, man and animal, tree and ground, 
 stars and planets, into the One Divine Reality, 
 the impersonal Substance but the infinite 
 Powder. This, it is asserted, is the theology of 
 Buddhism, that is, of a large section of man- 
 kind. But I doubt if the common people accept 
 any abstract idea like that, or can think of God 
 apart from personal being. And, in spite of 
 the influence of Spinoza, this idea has never 
 found a really permanent home in European 
 and American thought. A great deal w^hich is 
 called Pantheism is simply the reaction against 
 the heartless theology of the Deists and the 
 "Deus ex machina" idea of the i8th century 
 thinkers. But it is one thing to say v^ith the 
 Theist that God is immanent in all things and 
 that all things live in Him, and quite another 
 to deny with the Pantheist that God is also 
 transcendent to His universe, dwelling in the 
 Eternal Light of His own nature. The 
 theology of the Pantheist must in the last 
 analysis be fatalistic and unmoral, and Illing- 
 worth is right when he says ''Pantheism is 
 merely materialism grown sentimental, but no 
 more tenable for its change of name." 
 
 The Hebrew scriptures are one of the chief 
 sources of the conception of the unity of God. 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 1 5 
 
 But do they enjoin in the people monotheism 
 pure and simple, or do they only command 
 the people of Israel to give their allegiance 
 only to Jehovah as the one God who is holy 
 and strong and able to give them salvation? 
 What, for instance, is the meaning of the 
 words in Deuteronomy which are translated 
 thus by the revisers : "Hear, O' Israel, Jehovah 
 our God is one Jehovah, and thou shalt 
 love Jehovah thy God with all thy heart 
 and with all thy soul and with all thy might?" 
 Was it merely meant to inculcate fidelity to 
 the nation's God? The answer to this question 
 shows a transition period, as it were, in Hebrew 
 thought. Undoubtedly for centuries the com- 
 mon people continued to regard the gods of the 
 heathen around about them as real gods, but 
 felt that to Jehovah alone did they owe alle- 
 giance. Even in Miriam's song we can detect 
 this acknowledgment of the existence of other 
 gods: 
 
 "Jehovah is my strength and song, 
 And He is become my salvation; 
 This is my God and I will praise Him; 
 My father's God and I will exalt Him. 
 Jehovah is a man of war ; 
 Jehovah is His name 
 
 Who is like unto Thee, O Jehovah among the Gods? 
 Who is like Thee, glorious in holiness, 
 Fearful in praises, doing wonders?" 
 
 It is not that Miriam does not claim pre- 
 eminence for Jehovah, but she does not here 
 at any rate assert that He alone is God. This 
 
1 6 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 was a song of triumph, but whenever Israel 
 was defeated there was always the danger of 
 apostasy. To the majority of the people Baal 
 and Ashtaroth existed, but they were not to 
 be trusted or worshiped. But over and over 
 again the people fell back into the ignoble 
 servitude. Even Solomon, who built the Tem- 
 ple and uttered its most touching dedication 
 prayer, Solomon, the wise and the wealthy, 
 combined a discreet attention to the gods of 
 Moab and Egypt with his duties to Jehovah. 
 It does not seem possible to us, as we hear him 
 pray there for all his people and for the nations 
 round about, closing each petition with the re- 
 frain, "Hear Thou in Heaven thy dwelling 
 place, and when Thou hearest forgive," that he 
 could have been an idolator. But the chronicler 
 tells us plainly of the apostasy. "Solomon," he 
 says, "did what was right in the sight of the 
 Lord; only he worshiped upon high places," 
 which means, only he kept up the devotion to 
 the heathen gods. 
 
 But it is the glory of the Hebrew nation 
 that its greatest men and thinkers were be- 
 lievers in the One Only God, the maker of 
 heaven and earth. And in the end they brought 
 the whole nation to their faith. Moses, Elijah, 
 Isaiah—what other names do we need to impress 
 us with this truth? One passage in the life of 
 Elijah is only an illustration of how the great 
 men in Israel regarded the heathen deities. As 
 he listened to the false prophets leaping on their 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God ly 
 
 altars and crying, "O Baal hear us/' how he 
 turned on them with the biting irony, ''Cry 
 aloud, for he is a god, either he is musing, or 
 he is gone, or he is on a journey, or perad- 
 venture he sleepeth and must be awakened." 
 Could we have a better example of the con- 
 tempt of the true Hebrew mind for anything 
 like polytheism or idolatry? Sometimes, as 
 in Leviticus, the gods of the heathen are called, 
 with a play upon the word, Eleelim rather than 
 Elohim, that is nothings rather than God. St. 
 Paul, it would seem, must have referred to 
 this when in writing to the Corinthians he 
 stated what had become an axiom in Hebrew 
 and Christian theology. "We know that an 
 idol is nothing in the world and that there is 
 none other God but one.'' 
 
 It is an impressive thing to notice how every 
 advance in modern knowledge has tended to 
 confirm this faith of the Hebrews — that there 
 is One Only God, the Creator of heaven and 
 earth. Professor Drummond says that it is a 
 remarkable thing that "Atheism, after trailing 
 its black length for centuries across European 
 thought, has had its doom pronounced by 
 science." Atheism and polytheism are alike 
 impossible for one who has been brought up 
 in modern schools. The uniformity of nature 
 is one of the first articles of the scientific creed. 
 The heavens have been studied until men see 
 one increasing purpose. This world has been 
 analysed until men no longer for a moment 
 
i8 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 question that it exists on one uniform plan. 
 To the log-ical mind there is no escape from 
 the necessary step from the uniformity of na- 
 ture to the unity of God. Anything else, to 
 borrow the fig-ure of a modern writer,* would 
 be as absurd as to suppose that because you 
 threw up into the air a sufficient amount of type 
 it would therefore come down and arrange 
 itself on the floor in the order of Shakespeare's 
 Hamlet. Such a combination is, of course, one 
 of the chances. A sufficient number of letters 
 and you have the hope, if you choose to call it 
 so, that the play will form itself at random 
 from this sowing- of type. But what sane man 
 would believe it, or would not question the 
 fraud if the experiment were tried successfully? 
 This is what modern science has done for us. 
 It has shown us the Book of Nature. It is one 
 book, bound and arranged in order, and Science 
 would, I think, be ready to write down the 
 name of the author, God. *'The Lord our God 
 is one God." 
 
 But physical science while witnessing- to this 
 g-reat truth gives only a partial answer to the 
 soul's questionings. It is as if I hold in my 
 hand a copy of Tennyson's "In Memoriani" 
 and ask one of you how it came to exist. "I 
 know," he says, "all about it. It was published 
 by such and such a firm. I have worked with 
 them for years. I know their method of print- 
 ing- and lithography. I can take you to their 
 works and show you the process, point out 
 
 *See Ward's "Naturalism and Agnosticism," Vol. 2, page 59. 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 19 
 
 to you how deftly the men handle the type and 
 put the book tog-ether." That answer might be 
 satisfactory to some people, but perhaps it does 
 not satisfy you, and you turn to me with the 
 same question and ask me how the book came 
 to exist. ''Ah," I say, "I know. There were 
 two boys brought up together in England. 
 They had strong intellects, similar tastes, 
 natural refinement and pure hearts. Between 
 them there grew up a friendship of whose 
 intensity neither was ashamed. They had the 
 capacity for affection. After leaving the uni- 
 versity one of them went for a journey on the 
 Continent, and at Vienna almost without a 
 moment's warning died in that foreign land. 
 For a while upon the soul of the one who was 
 left there descended a profound gloom as he 
 waited in England for the "fair ship from the 
 Italian shore," which was bringing back his 
 friend's body, and envied 
 
 "The deep calm in that noble breast 
 Which heaves but with the heaving deep." 
 
 But through all his sorrow he kept his faith 
 in that future which Christianity stands for, 
 and this poem is the result of all his musings. 
 Sometimes in the music the note of faith seems 
 low, but always it is there ; and the whole 
 poem, disjointed though it seems at first, is 
 bound together with the golden cord of love. 
 
 These are the two explanations of the book, 
 and both are right. The one is the answer of 
 science, and the other of relig-ion. Science 
 
20 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 takes you into the workshop, shows you, or 
 tries to show you, how the world was made, 
 how it was evolved through the aeons of time 
 into the mysterious ^lobe of beauty which we 
 know. It is at best, however, only the printer's 
 knowledge of the book. But Christianity 
 studies the same book within and learns there 
 not only the unity of God, but His love for 
 mankind. The one is the answer of Science, 
 the other of the Bible. Charles Darwin shows 
 you man beings formed slowly through the ages 
 by the so-called natural selection and sexual 
 selection. The writer of the book of Genesis, 
 in a passage of the truest poetry, gives us man's 
 origin in God. "And God made man in His 
 image. And God breathed into him the breath 
 of life and man became a living soul." Both 
 these answers may be true; they are by no 
 means incompatible. I leave you to say which 
 is the more valuable. 
 
 One fact, however, will determine our an- 
 swer. The love of God has no place in modern 
 science. It is quite ready to put the illumined 
 golden text on the walls of its school house : 
 "The Lord thy God is one God," for the unity 
 of God is regarded as established. But the 
 words "God is love" or "Thou shalt love the 
 Lord thy God" would have no place in its lec- 
 ture rooms. Like the book fanciers who get the 
 first edition of the classics, and when they get 
 them put them on their shelves and ask their 
 friends to admire the outside, but on no account 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 21 
 
 to cut the leaves, so they acknowledge the unity 
 of the book and the authorship, but have no 
 knowledge of the author's heart. But religion 
 cuts the leaves and reads the glowing verses, 
 reads until it finds in the author's words the 
 reflection of His own nature. Science is always 
 tracing things from below. It wants us to 
 believe that conscience comes from the dog's 
 whine, or love from the tigress' snarl. But 
 religion traces man's love and faith from God. 
 "Do not err," it says, "every good gift and 
 every perfect gift is from above and cometh 
 down from the Father of Lights, in whom is 
 no variableness, neither shadow of turning." 
 
 Now these two principles have been strug- 
 gling against each other through all the 
 centuries. To tell their history would be to 
 relate the history of mankind. But one thing 
 monotheism establishes is the solidarity of the 
 human race. It follows as a corollary from 
 the unity of God. When Greek philosophy 
 had arrived at this great conviction of mono- 
 theism then the Roman Empire, with its great 
 conception of the nationalization of all races 
 of men, was capable of partial realization. And 
 when monotheism had become an axiom of 
 Hebrew thought, then the Christ came to 
 teach the world that all men stand in the same 
 relation to God- But this great truth has had 
 only a slow progress towards recognition. The 
 Church herself has oftentimes denied it in her 
 history. Heretics, for instance, have been re- 
 
22 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 jq^arded as inferior beings only worthy of death. 
 The o^reat St. Bernard, whose name has become 
 a synonym for true hospitality, nevertheless 
 preached a crusade when he promised to those 
 who should slay an unbeliever happiness in this 
 life and Paradise in the next. And when the 
 crusaders took Jerusalem, atrocities we are told 
 worse than anything that can be conceived took 
 place, and 70,000 were butchered, while the 
 pope's legate took part in the triumph. At the 
 massacre of Beziers the army of Montford was 
 guided by the Abbot of Citeaux. When the 
 town was taken the difficulty was to distinguish 
 the heretics from the orthodox. "Slay them 
 all," cried the Abbot, ''the Lord will know His 
 own." Twenty thousand were slain. 
 
 This same struggle is going on at the pre- 
 sent time. Lookmg at the human race as 
 created by the "survival of the fittest," men 
 are too apt tO' speak of inferior races and to 
 regard them as doomed for destruction. "The 
 only good Indian is a dead Indian" has passed 
 into a proverb. The white race is often unwill- 
 ing to do justice to the black race. "These 
 negroes must go down," is the unspoken creed 
 of many men. To the consciences of many in 
 our ow^n country there has sprung up a new 
 standard of morals. Right and wrong are 
 judged by something which we call Anglo- 
 American alliance, and many statesmen read 
 with equanimity of the slaughter of thousands 
 of natives in China or Africa, with Catling 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 23 
 
 ^uns and Mauser bullets, whereas anything like 
 an Indian mutiny or the cruel killing- of a white 
 man's representative, is looked at as murder. 
 It is perfectly possible for a nation's heart to 
 become as hard as a nether grindstone if the 
 prevalent scientific account of the origin of man 
 becomes the nation's creed. A great European 
 emperor can talk about carrying the gospel at 
 the point of the sword, and some men no doubt 
 secretly applaud such a sentiment as the best 
 and quickest way of evangelizing the world. 
 
 But another view is also present in our 
 country, and we can thank God for it. When 
 the Emperor William I. of Germany spoke at 
 his coronation at Versailles of "Unser Gott," 
 the keen French critic in bitter satire asked, 
 "When did God proclaim Himself to be the 
 exclusive property of the German nation?" 
 That question is in the hearts of many of us 
 at the present time, and we can see that the 
 American nation is strug"gling against this 
 lower selfish creed. She has delivered Cuba, 
 for instance, out of bondage, and now she is 
 trying to be fair in her trade. Her best and 
 wisest ministers will also seek to do justice to 
 the Philippines and to abolish the tortures and 
 cruelty which should belong to a past age. 
 
 It is here that a nation's faith becomes of 
 supreme importance. This higher ideal can 
 only be realized when we believe in the truth 
 which science can not reveal that mankind has 
 one origin and that God loves not one nation 
 
24 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 but the whole race. This great Epiphany truth 
 has never been shaken by science, but on the 
 other hand we must not look for its corrobora- 
 tion at scientific hands. It belongs to that 
 sphere of thought which we call the moral rea- 
 son. Without it a nation must become cold and 
 hard, incapable of the tenderer and higher 
 conceptions. Without it the higher missionary 
 spirit must vanish, which creates in us the 
 longing to carry our own blessings of free 
 government and universal education through 
 the world. Jowett tells of Geronimo, who, 
 having heard that the aborigines of Australia 
 were the lowest type of savages on the face of 
 the earth, went voluntarily and labored among 
 them for twenty years without making a con- 
 vert, and then added, "I should like to havt 
 been that man." That breathes the spirit of the 
 missionary. This lowest savage, who by the 
 way shows close relationship to the Caucasian, 
 is our brother by virtue of our common origin. 
 God's love extends to him in his hut in the 
 forest and ours must do the same. There is 
 nothing more marvellous than this missionary 
 spirit, and it depends for its fire on this relig- 
 ious faith, which comes not by the will of man, 
 but of God. 
 
 But not only will the intercourse of nations 
 be exalted by this highest conception of God, 
 but our own lives with one another will be 
 expanded in the same way. It is here that our 
 Christianity shows itself in the truest light. 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 25 
 
 Antiquity had little thought of duty to men 
 being- based on duty to God. "Jesus," says a 
 modern writer, "is the only Teacher who has 
 not only insisted on universal love, but has 
 based it on the conception of the love of God : 
 'That ye may be the children of your Father 
 which is in heaven.' " How long men have been 
 in grasping this truth! In Greece and Rome, 
 civilized as they were, a man might cheat 
 another any day, might plan murders, adul- 
 teries, crimes of every kind, and still, if he 
 kept the ritual law, if he made his sacrifices 
 regularly, he would be regarded as a religious 
 man. It was against such a view as this that 
 Christ was constantly contending in His con- 
 troversies with the Pharisees. They looked at 
 sin as outward. When the young man who 
 owed his duty to his aged parents came and pre- 
 sented the small percentage of such a debt, 
 which the priests called "Korban," to the Tem- 
 ple, then he was absolved from all obligations. 
 It was no matter to them that the father or the 
 mother would be listening with the pathos of 
 old age for the elastic tread of youth, and yearn- 
 ing for the comfort and strength he would im- 
 part. The Korban had been paid. Which is 
 the great commandment, a rabbi was asked 
 one day. "The commandment of tassels" was 
 his answer, and then he told how much he 
 esteemed this law, so that if ascending a ladder 
 or a stair he tread on a tassel and broke it, he 
 would not move until it had been mended. 
 
26 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 This same frivolous character was no doubt in 
 their question when they asked the Master 
 ''Which is the ^reat commandment of the 
 law?" and He replied, ''The Lord thy God is 
 one God. And thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God." Duty was to be founded on God. That 
 was the first and ^reat commandment. It lifts 
 all life into a higher plane, this glorious con- 
 ception of our relation to God. Prof. Royce 
 once asked a graduate who had been out of 
 college a few years, and was very successful in 
 his business, what was his view of a good and 
 successful life. He replied: "My notion of 
 a good life is that you ought to help your 
 friends and whack your enemies." Ah! how 
 far that answer is from the spirit of Jesus. 
 "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, 
 do good to them that hate you and pray for 
 them that despitefully use you and persecute 
 you, that ye may be the children of your 
 Father." The world's best rule is not to do for 
 others what they would not do for you; but 
 Jesus puts it "Whatsoever ye would that men 
 should do unto you, even so do unto them, for 
 this is the law and the prophets." 
 
 How great becomes Jesus' ideal as we read 
 it thus. It is in one sense a reversal of nature's 
 law. It is reading something into the world 
 besides physical evolution. There is little doubt 
 that progress in the world has been made by 
 the law of natural selection. The breed of the 
 tiger is improved by the struggle he carries on 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 27 
 
 for existence. The polar bear is white only 
 because white ones are fitted to escape the 
 enemy, and a long process of selection has 
 determined the color. Man can in many cases 
 improve the breed of his animals, his horse or 
 dog, by process of elimination and by assisting- 
 the fittest to survive. But when we reach man 
 something seems to arrest this law. The 
 Spartan mother, for instance, is not a great suc- 
 cess as a mother. We can not think that the 
 human race would be improved if any learned 
 committee of scientists went through the schools 
 of America, for instance, and chloroformed 
 those boys and girls who seemed least likely to 
 become good citizens. Now, why is this? Be- 
 cause man is a being with a conscience, i.e., with 
 the voice of God speaking to liim- There is 
 something more than the physical to take into 
 account. We have little idea what would 
 become of the human race if we should thus 
 carry out this wholesale law in our struggle 
 after perfection. Mr. Huxley, in one of those 
 great moments of his when he rose above his 
 theory in his craving for the truth, said, in his 
 Romanes lectures: ''The ethical process is in 
 oppositon to the cosmic process, and tends to 
 the suppression of the qualities best fitted for 
 success in the struggle for existence. In place 
 of ruthless self-assertion morality demands self- 
 restraint ; in place of thrusting aside or treading 
 down all competition it requires that the 
 individual shall not merely respect, but shall 
 
2S Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 help his fellows. Its influence is directed not 
 so much to the survival of the fittest as to the 
 fitting of as many as possible to survive. It 
 repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence." 
 That is true only because man is not only a 
 Beings formed through the ages by physical 
 laws, but because what the writer of the Book 
 of Genesis tells us is also true, that God breathed 
 into his nostrils the breath of life. If the evolu- 
 tionary theory could account in any reasonable 
 way for conscience, then my contention would 
 be at an end, for conscience is the living witness 
 to the great truth which Jesus proclaims, that 
 men came not from below but from above. 
 Conscience recognizes that fact and gives its 
 great tribute to the Bible History. Primitive 
 man is not to be sought for among the outcasts 
 of civilization; we must not go to the lowest 
 savages, to the aborigines of Australia, for our 
 knowledge of his life and habits or his marriage 
 customs. It was not thus that Jesus taught us 
 to begin the study of anthropology. When, for 
 instance, the Pharisees came and asked Him 
 about divorce and told Him that Moses per- 
 mitted a man to give his wife a bill of divorce- 
 ment and put her away, His answer took us 
 back to primitive society : "Moses suffered this 
 for the hardness of your heart, but from the 
 beginning God made them male and female." 
 Or, as it is repeated in St. Matthew, "but from 
 the beginning it was not so." Here is an appeal 
 to the original purity of mankind; that purity 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 29 
 
 which the conscience of man witnesses to in. 
 all the experiences of life. If we could peer 
 throuo^h the ^s^ates of history, which shut us out 
 of this primitive world, I think we should find 
 that the animal who was breathed into man- 
 hood by God was a noble and majestic creature. 
 Conscience gave to him his knowledge of God. 
 He walked with God at morning and eventide. 
 He felt the Divine Presence, and when at last 
 he broke the Divine law he felt the expulsion 
 from that Presence. Such is the picture the 
 Bible gives us, and we ought not to be hunting 
 among Esquimaux or Zulus or Hottentots, or 
 the cannibals of the Sandwich Islands, for our 
 idea of what man was in his primal age. 
 
 But the gospel of monotheism and the Love 
 of God teaches us not only the solidarity of 
 mankind, but it tells us of man's destiny. It 
 is a significant fact that the belief in man's 
 immortality comes strongly to the front only 
 under the influence of theism. When the Greek 
 thinkers had shaken themselves free from poly- 
 theism and mythology, then men like Socrates- 
 could arise in Athens. As we see him drink 
 the hemlock in his prison and turn to sleep like 
 a little child, we know that it is theistic faith 
 which has strengthened him. So long as men- 
 believe only in polytheism they grant immor- 
 tality of a certain kind to a few of their heroes 
 or their distinguished people, but anything like 
 a faith in the immortality of man as man does 
 not enter their minds. 
 
30 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 This is illustrated in Hebrew history. So 
 long- as theism had not taken possession of the 
 people's hearts and they believed only in the 
 tribal God, the intimations of immortality are 
 few. It is rarely that we can find passages 
 which teach it explicitly, although in many parts 
 of the Old Testament we find implicit intimation 
 of the writer's faith. Moses, for instance, can 
 be quoted by our Lord when confronting the 
 Sadducees: "For that the dead rise." He said 
 **even Moses showed at the bush when he called 
 the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of 
 Isaac and the God of Jacob. For He is not a 
 God of the dead but of the living-, for all live 
 unto Him." That this was a right inference 
 and that it put the teaching of the Pentateuch 
 on the subject of the future life in a way which 
 they had never seen before, is shown by what 
 is added. "And certain of the scribes answering 
 said, Master, Thou hast well said." These men 
 who had been studying those scriptures all their 
 lives saw a flash of light then, and they could 
 not restrain their admiration. 
 
 But the common people among the Hebrews 
 up to the time of the captivity had little concep- 
 tion of personal immortality ? Their one idea is 
 the continuance of the national existence. For 
 that they are willing to sacrifice themselves, for 
 that they will fight and suffer poverty or exile. 
 That Abraham might become a great people 
 was the patriarch's desire; that his progeny 
 should be as the stars of Heaven and as the 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 31 
 
 sands on the seashore innumetable, was his 
 prayer, and his descendants took that same ideal 
 as their own. The individual mi^ht perish, but 
 Jehovah, their God, Jehovah the man of war, 
 would protect and strengthen the national exist- 
 ence. This national aim took the place of any 
 personal aspiration for immortality. It made 
 a very hig-h g-rade of morality possible. Men 
 could sacrifice themselves and their families, 
 their money, their houses and their lands that 
 Jehovah might save the people. It is this which 
 accounts for the Israelite's peculiar attachment 
 to Jerusalem, as the city to which his nation's 
 destiny was mysteriously bound. His poets 
 cannot sing the songs of Zion in captivity, and, 
 when they go out of her gates, it is with the 
 sorrow of those who sow in tears, but, when 
 they return to her, it is the joy of the harvest. 
 "He that now goeth on his way weeping shall 
 doubtless come again with joy and bring his 
 sheaves with him." 
 
 But after the captivity, when monotheism 
 pure and simple had taken possession of the 
 popular mind, then we find the infinite value of 
 the individual has become an article in the 
 national creed. The people returned from 
 Babylon a new people. The national ideal is 
 still there, but the individual is responsible now 
 not only for the part he plays in protecting the 
 national honor and existence, but for his own 
 destiny here and hereafter. It seems as if this 
 new faith is somehow closely connected with 
 
32 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 the triumph of theism over every form of 
 idolatry. 
 
 And here, too, we find that natural science 
 has no insight into this faith. I should wish 
 to speak with all respect of the investigations 
 of scientific observers into psycholo,2^ical phe- 
 nomena, of their research in the domains of 
 spirit rapping^s and slate writing and all the 
 various superstitions and frauds of the past and 
 present time, but the best result of their under- 
 takings has little value from a relig^ious point 
 of view. Prof. Shaler says : "A number of men 
 of no mean authority as naturalists, some of 
 them well trained in experimental science, have 
 after long and apparently careful inquiry become 
 convinced that there is evidence of the survival 
 of some minds after death."! That is the best 
 we can get from science, and the general 
 impression, I believe, among even these investi- 
 gators is that these surviving minds are weak 
 and that their mental existence is not worth 
 having. It only shows to us that we have gone 
 to the wrong school to learn about immortality. 
 Physical science has no message Tt can not 
 corroborate the witness of faith, because it has 
 no power to read the inside of the book. Ac- 
 cording as science is either reverent or flippant 
 before this great problem of destiny, she will 
 have either the pathos of a blind Milton holding 
 a copy o-f Vergil which he cannot read, or the 
 grotesqueness of an ape grasping a book he 
 cannot understand. 
 
 t "The Individval" p. 305. 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 33 
 
 It is the same lesson once more. We must 
 look to the moral reason for our confirmation 
 of the deepest faith of our lives. It is in Jesus' 
 revelation of the love of God that we find the 
 solution. Thus theism becomes the basis of 
 our faith. The personal Creator has certain 
 moral obligations to His creatures. The uni- 
 verse shall be founded on the principles of 
 justice and of love. "It is He that hath made 
 us and not we ourselves." We have a right 
 to demand that this world shall not be a mockery 
 of justice or give the lie to our truest hopes. 
 We have a right to expect that God shall not 
 have made us in His image to dash us in pieces 
 at last. He shall not have created in us the 
 hunger and the thirst after righteousness and 
 not satisfy us. He shall not have planted in our 
 hearts a love which seems to be immortal in its 
 power and in its pain, and then blot us out for- 
 ever. This is the true theistic position in regard 
 to the expectation of death. Prof. Fraser, in 
 speaking of what he calls the final venture of 
 theistic faith, says : *'To those whose lives are 
 habitually directed in theistic trust towards the 
 realization of their true spiritual ideal, physical 
 death is not a leap in the dark, but rather in the 
 divine light which illuminates all present exper- 
 ience. In the divine universe of theistic faith, 
 man can make his exit from the body in the 
 assurance that it is well ; yet, like the patriarch, 
 "not knowing whither he is going." Equally 
 beautiful is the expression of a modern poet: 
 
34 Monotheism and the Love of God 
 
 "We know not whence is life, nor whither death, 
 Know not the power which circumscribes our breath ; 
 But yet we do not fear; What made us men, 
 What gave us love, shall we not trust again?" 
 
 This argument seems, perhaps, utterly value- 
 less to the one who will not look outside physical 
 science. But it is of overwhelming force to 
 those who have accepted Jesus' faith in the love 
 of God. There is no philosophy which can 
 prove, for instance, the truth of Jesus' parable 
 of the Lost Son, but the moment you have 
 become convinced that that picture of the Father 
 which it contains is the picture of the One Only 
 God, then this higher view of the world as 
 founded on truth and justice and love follows 
 as a necessary conclusion. 
 
 This is the message which I want to leave 
 in your minds. The best things in life are not 
 known to science. It has been no part of my 
 object to belittle scientific pursuits, but rather 
 to show the separate functions of science and 
 faith. The blessings which have come to man- 
 kind fiom studies in physics have been great 
 and lasting. All that is proved by physical 
 science the Church must gladly accept. Some- 
 times, as in the case of Galileo and the Coperni- 
 can astronomy, the discoveries of science will 
 require a certain readjustment of our Christian 
 philosophy. But in the end ever> discovery will 
 only lead to higher Christian concepts. In the 
 same way evolutionary ideas may seem revolu- 
 tionary to popular conceptions of the Book of 
 Genesis. But when we have recovered from 
 
Monotheism and the Love of God 35 
 
 our surprise we shall always find that science 
 has not really touched the religious question at 
 all. The truest thinkers will tell us that the 
 g"reat religious problems remain the same as 
 ever, and that for those whose faith in the 
 omnipotence and love of God is strong, the 
 Book of Genesis tells exactly the same marvel- 
 lous story, even when we have ceased to accept 
 its literal meaning. The loss of the old 
 Ptolomaic fancies about a flat earth and a blue 
 firmament, and the rejection of the thought of 
 God making a clay image out of the earth are 
 nothing to religious faith. They have no more 
 to do with faith than the binding of the book 
 has to do with the author's ideas. We must 
 readjust our Christian philosophies from time 
 to time, as more and more scientific research 
 shows us the facts of God's universe, but the 
 real heart and core of religious faith will remain 
 the same, and men will still believe in the Love 
 of God who has given His Son for the life of 
 the world and the infinite value of that im- 
 mortal being, man, for whom the Son of God 
 has died upon Calvary. 
 
 And to you, young men and women, I plead 
 for a larger attention to the things of faith. 
 However necessary it may seem for you to 
 advance in your profession by your own techni- 
 cal studies, yet I ask you to study with especial 
 fervor the things of the Spirit, the relation of 
 the human soul to God. "For the things which 
 are seen are temporal, but the things which are 
 not seen are eternal." 
 
The Personal Interpretation of 
 Christianity 
 
 One of the provisions of this lecture founda- 
 tion requires that something shall be said on 
 the subject of Christian evidences, and also on 
 the side of rig^ht living, "without which no 
 education can justly be considered complete." 
 In what follows the chief point to bear in mind 
 is this — the application of Christianity to the 
 individual life. The question discussed here is 
 not what is Christianity in itself, but this, 
 rather, what is Christianity in myself? In the 
 subject proposed, "The Personal Interpretation 
 of Christianity," will be found something which 
 touches our life at all points and, in its very 
 nature, is a subject worthy of most careful 
 consideration. The best christian evidence 
 after all is a worthy christian life. While it is 
 apparent that much that is necessary to an 
 exhaustive treatment of this subject will have 
 to be omitted, it is sufficient for the purpose in 
 hand to point out the claim of Christianity as 
 a revelation of God and the bearing of Christ- 
 ianity on the life of man. 
 
 Over the triple doorways of the cathedral of 
 Milan are three noteworthy inscriptions which 
 
3^ Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 ^race the noble arches. Above one of the side 
 doors is carved a beautiful wreath of roses, and 
 underneath are these words, *'A11 that pleases is 
 but for a moment." Over the other side door 
 is a sculptured cross, and beneath is written, 
 ''All that which troubles us is but for a 
 moment." While over the great main entrance 
 is inscribed, "Only that is important which is 
 eternal." What is the significance of these say- 
 ings? Is it not this, that somewhere between 
 our enjoyments and our anxieties lies the true 
 sphere of life, where we work out our destiny 
 in the light and by estimates which are eternal ? 
 Man is immortal, on the side of eternity, not "a 
 soulless body on a godless earth." 
 
 It is characteristic of man to become so occu- 
 pied and absorbed in that which enchants or 
 enslaves him as to postpone or minimize that 
 which is important. In a very deep sense, man 
 makes his own mind, he makes his own world; 
 and, as he goes through life, with his own 
 interests at heart, he meets and then makes or 
 misses his own heaven. He is confident that 
 he is moving somewhere. He is. But it is 
 significant, with a difference, whether this be 
 progress or whether it is only motion. It is a 
 matter of supreme importance that when we 
 cast off the moorings we do not forget to ship 
 the rudder. Afterwards it makes all the differ- 
 ence imaginable whether we are simply adrift or 
 whether we are on a voyage steering on some 
 definite course. The inquiry, "Where bound?" 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 39 
 
 should never find us unable to answer. There 
 must be a determined somewhere in every true 
 life. For to be indefinite is to become impos- 
 sible, and to be impossible is to lack the 
 "ambition of distinctiveness." This would be 
 nothino- less than a severe impeachment both of 
 purpose and character. "It appertains only to 
 weak minds," said Lacordaire, "to give them- 
 selves up to the stream of life without once 
 asking whither it is leading them." 
 
 Now, God has given us a definite way to 
 save us from all uncertainty, and this pathway 
 — to change the figure — is marked and echoes 
 with the footsteps of Jesus Christ. The 
 christian revelation is the gospel of right living. 
 The personal interpretation is to believe God, 
 accept His word, and give Him our life. God 
 has settled what Christianity is in itself; we 
 have to meet the question, "What is Christian- 
 ity in ourselves ?" 
 
 There is an urgent protest to enter against 
 treating the revelation of God as though it were 
 in open court. It is not something to be dis- 
 cussed and adjudicated — something whose 
 metes and bounds must be settled by argument, 
 agreement, or, may be, by compromise. What 
 is left after such a process is not worth discuss- 
 ing. Men have som.etimes rejected the things 
 of God when presented as an open question. 
 Christianity is not man's opinion — it is God's 
 ultimatum. 
 
 We shall do well, therefore, to bear in mind 
 
40 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 there are some thinje;-s which are closed ques- 
 tions. The revelation of God must be so 
 treated, inasmuch as we are absolutely power- 
 less to add to or to diminish from the original. 
 The divine revelation is not enriched by one 
 ray of human thought, includes no human sug- 
 gestion, nor does it bear any marks whatever 
 of having been submitted to man's criticism or 
 modification. It is a closed question as to its 
 contents, and is presented to man's acceptance 
 as the will and law of God. As the revelation 
 of God, it makes known to us what we know 
 of God; and what we know of God we know 
 are his own statements and self-unveiling. We 
 may have evidences and interpretations which 
 illustrate and enlarge God's self-declaration, but 
 they add nothing, as fact, to what God has been 
 pleased to make known of Himself. This reve- 
 lation, then, is the source of our knowledge of 
 divine things, and is open in one sense only, 
 namely, to all reverent investigation and accept- 
 ance. It is permanent as fact, but under the 
 office of the Holy Spirit it may be progressive 
 to apprehension. 
 
 Some men, however, have insisted on going 
 back of the revelation in the effort to investigate 
 God Himself. A little reflection should con- 
 vince them of the futility of such a course. For 
 God, surely, is incapable of analysis, of demon- 
 stration, or of comprehension. Men make their 
 own difficulties where they have refused to 
 consider anything regarding God as a closed 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 41 
 
 question. In their investigation they have 
 insisted on comprehending God, an attempt 
 which v^ould place God within defined bound- 
 aries, and then seek to ^o outside of the Being 
 of God to scrutinize, verify and estimate His 
 worth and claims and Person. In this procedure 
 they have eg-re^iously failed to appreciate that, 
 in order to be successful, man would have to 
 be eternal, infinite, omniscient — in other words, 
 man, himself, would have to be God. Some 
 men are making the mistake of pursuing the 
 inquiry, "What is God?" instead of asking the 
 question open to an answer, "Who is God?" 
 
 If we are to know God at all, we must take 
 Him at his own word. God's self-declaration 
 not only requires no indorsement, but is essen- 
 tially incapable of parity of judgment from any 
 source. God is not under the auspices of 
 humanity; therefore, only God can vouch for 
 God. If we do not take God on His own state- 
 ment, there is no other source to be used as a 
 substitute for knowing Him. In that statement, 
 Jesus Christ stands behind every word that He 
 ever uttered. "His words," says Harnack, 
 "speak to us across the centuries with the fresh- 
 ness of the present." They are new in every 
 age, supreme by every test, and stand absolutely 
 alone in this, that no word of Christ has ever 
 required restatement or re-enactment. 
 
 Acceptance of this revelation involves all that 
 flows out of it. Christianity, to be sure, has a 
 revelation, has a creed, has a theology, has a 
 
42 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 doctrine — but "it is a life." We find in the 
 things of God only what we employ the truth 
 in seeking. We cannot, in reason, employ an 
 untruth to find God. *'Be it unto thee according 
 to thy faith." What we find will depend upon 
 the spirit which we take with us into the search, 
 and the answer, mark it well, will always be 
 in kind. **The high priest entered the Holy of 
 Holies, and found God. A king entered and 
 came forth a leper. Pompey entered and found 
 it empty." Reverent, sacrilegious, sceptical, 
 inquiry have not now, as they had not then, 
 identical answers. How true in this connection 
 are the words of Anselm: "He who does not 
 believe will not experience, and he who has 
 not experienced will not understand." 
 
 As we face the promises and the privileges 
 held out to us in the revelation of Jesus Christ, 
 let us clearly understand that only to truthful- 
 ness of soul can truths of God be made known. 
 "Like cannot know like, unless there is a like 
 bent of soul." Knowledge will not save man, 
 for without truthfulness in our doing there is 
 no truth in our knowing. If we have mortal 
 sincerity, we shall have "not only certainty of 
 faith, but also certainty of discernment." 
 Christianity was given for adaptation to human 
 life. It was not given, however, through the 
 New Testament, until men had first made it, 
 not an experiment, but an experience. It was 
 revealed to men and demonstrated by men 
 before men were used by the Holy Ghost as the 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 43 
 
 agents or instruments to make known "the faith 
 once delivered to the saints." What, therefore, 
 was possible for them, as men, is, under the 
 Holy Spirit, possible for us men. 
 
 I. 
 
 If Christianity is to be true for us, it must 
 be true in us. To realize its meaning, we must 
 make it a personal interpretation. What do 
 we mean by this ? In the first place, Christianity 
 is a revelation to us. It demands that we shall 
 treat it as law. If we accept it, we discover 
 that Christianity deals with the individual, and 
 our personal interpretation is to make, through 
 faith and obedience, a new life and a new char- 
 acter. Our Lord gave not only a new law, but, 
 as we shall see, a new life and a new motive. 
 
 It would matter very little to us, indeed, 
 whether there were any law of God at all if it 
 were addressed to angels and not to humanity. 
 Such revelation or law would have no bearing 
 whatever upon man were he devoid of religious 
 capacity. Where he could have no knowledge, 
 and where he is denied admission, there he 
 would be free from all responsibility. But this 
 revelation, on God's express declaration, is 
 intended and was entrusted to man in a living 
 contact with a living God. There is within us 
 a seat of God consciousness, and we cannot 
 successfully deny God to our own soul. Beyond 
 all cavil we possess the mystery of consciousness 
 which whispers to us of an origin with a divine 
 
44 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 impress, of a destiny which outlasts the imper- 
 fectly realized aims of earth. Whatever in our 
 temporal career may succeed or disappoint, 
 whatever the attempt or falling short, above and 
 beyond these is the permanent hope — concrete 
 and explicit — that we shall ^ain those things to 
 which our faith has wedded our soul. This 
 hope is based upon our belief that the law which 
 binds us binds God also to His promises, and 
 that God to be God at all, must be true to Him- 
 self and to us. Thus we are attached to God, 
 not by laws and fetters which bind us and re- 
 strain our liberty, but by love and obedience 
 which hold us, and yet make us free. We have 
 but one liberty — a life under the law of truth. 
 Any other life is lawlessness. 
 
 Some men would make this attitude of God 
 toward man a mechanical rather than a vital 
 relationship — ^as though God rules without 
 instead of within us. Make God external, far 
 off and unrelated — an impersonal God, holding 
 sway through the medium of mechanical laws, 
 and you take away all that is so necessary to 
 human needs — ^the personal sympathy and 
 assistance toward which men open their hearts 
 and stretch forth their hands. Let no one 
 beguile us, and let us not deceive ourselves, into 
 making this a "superficial kinship." For a con- 
 ception of God as One so remote and aloof from 
 man that He hears not, cares not, aids not, is 
 clearly an unchristian conception, and denies 
 the attributes of an all-loving, personal God. If 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 45 
 
 God knows all that would condemn man, and 
 stretches forth no hand to save, then we must 
 re-write the gospels and readjust our faith. The 
 greatness of God and the imminence of God 
 are set forth in His unveiling of Himself, and 
 the one is as truly fact as the other. Dr. Rob- 
 bins, the author of "A Christian Apologetic," 
 states this clearly where he says: "It is the 
 function of faith to fuse the seeming^ contradic- 
 tion of God's transcendence and His imminence ; 
 it is doubtful if intellect alone is competent to 
 the task. But against the arbitrary divorce 
 between the divine and the human, this separ- 
 ateness of creation which tends to reduce God 
 to an abstraction, all the profounder thoug^ht of 
 the world raises a voice of protest. To yield 
 assent to it is not only to cast scorn upon the 
 deepest insight of philosopher and poet, but to 
 do despite to the imperative demands of the 
 relig"ious consciousness of mankind." 
 
 "God's greatness flaws round our incompleteness, 
 Round our restlessness His rest." 
 
 In the second place, this revelation to us is not 
 only that we should hear of the law, but in treat- 
 ing it as law we should know for what purpose 
 it is to be applied. As essential to his develop- 
 ment man is to receive it for a two-fold applica- 
 tion : (i) To .govern his life; and (2) to save 
 his soul. 
 
 The law of God makes demands upon the life 
 of man — demands which are intense in their 
 purpose and prospect. We are not asked to 
 
4^ Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 believe only that the laws of Gk)d are the true, 
 but we are commanded to be true by those laws ; 
 to give our allegiance to God and then both test 
 and attest our loyalty by our obedience. We 
 can acquire nothing- for which we have not given 
 something out of ourselves. The effort and the 
 sacrifice will be in proportion to the desired 
 object. Nothing, after all, is really our own 
 for which we have not rendered some equiva- 
 lent. God gives us no gifts without correspond- 
 ing obligations. If the things of God are true 
 in themselves, they are true for us only when 
 they are true in us, and are personally used as 
 the rule and guide of our life. "The spirit of 
 man is the candle of the Lord, lighted from God 
 and lighting us to God." 
 
 Having a rule and guide, and living up to the 
 light of our convictions, we shall derive from 
 our Christianity in proportion to the moral sin- 
 cerity and the personal courage which we put 
 into it. Holding a certain faith, a man keeps 
 his soul free from the perplexities and uncer- 
 tainties which arise in the lives of some men. 
 He may hold his beliefs and his doubts at the 
 same time, without fear or misgiving, and, 
 better still, without confusion. There is no dis- 
 honor in honest doubt, for doubt is the soul's 
 struggle and the soul's right to know. Ten 
 thousand doubts do not constitute one denial. 
 Our doubts, it may be, are only our faith which 
 has never reached and felt the sunshine. With 
 the law of God to guide us in unknown ways, 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 47 
 
 we shall be able to solve what is necessary to 
 satisfy. These words are timely: "Go on be- 
 lieving your beliefs and doubting your doubts, 
 but do not make the mistake of believing your 
 doubts and doubting your beliefs." 
 
 The doubts and temptations and struggles 
 which come to us are our opportunities for spir- 
 itual manhood. Some men will make difficul- 
 ties out of them. You cannot protect some men 
 from using every opportunity to make a mistake. 
 When we seek a spiritual career we are not shut 
 up to the painful uncertainty of making critical 
 guesses at life. The law which governs us is the 
 same law which guides us. It is not some intri- 
 cate way which we are to traverse wherein we 
 are easily confused and often bewildered ; for we 
 shall miss the way only so far as we miss the 
 truth. "The Christian religion," to quote Har- 
 nack once more, "is something simple and sub- 
 lime; it means one thing and one thing only: 
 Eternal life in the midst of time by the strength 
 and under the eyes of God." By its very nature, 
 then, the law of God will be our guide, or it will 
 be our judge. How far a man will follow his 
 spiritual intelligence is a personal problem — a 
 question of moral integrity and spiritual insight. 
 
 Not only is the revelation to us a law to 
 govern life — it goes further and deeper — it is to 
 save man's soul. "The spirit of man is always 
 praying for light and revelation is the answer." 
 If we take hold only of the natural elements of 
 life, we are simply clinging with both hands to 
 
4^ Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 death. Natural existence ends in death; it is 
 the spiritual which takes hold of life. Man has 
 no higher honor than this : God having created 
 him, and recreated him by redemption, gave 
 him a law and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, 
 and then, having done all, God trusted man 
 with himself. Man, therefore, has a very real 
 part in his own salvation. 
 
 So many people face this all-important ques- 
 tion with no definite course of action. They 
 meet it with theory and speculation, they weigh 
 and balance, propose and offset, postpone and 
 hesitate, until they come to moral and spiritual 
 stagnation. There is such a thing, a very real 
 thing, as losing initiative and energy in every 
 spiritual faculty. A man may stir up a roll of 
 difficulties without ever settling a fact or arriv- 
 ing at a conviction. Then there is another 
 danger of "mistaking obscurity for profundity 
 and muddiness for depth." There is profound 
 meaning for every man in this thought that part 
 of his salvation is to be saved from himself. 
 Saved, sometimes, from an intellectual dissipa- 
 tion which "feeds the intellect and starves the 
 soul." 
 
 The revelation which gives to man some- 
 thing for his salvation is that he may rediscover 
 himself, in the light of the image of God. Now, 
 no man seriously pretends that he has discovered 
 God through himself, but to have found his 
 genuine, godlike, destined self in the face of 
 Jesus Christ. This recovery of his true man- 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 49 
 
 hood leads him by way of atonement to work 
 out his salvation. 
 
 Let us ask in the next place, what is the 
 salvation? Is it salvation from punishment? 
 This is a very common answer. Is it sal- 
 vation from pain? This, again, is often 
 ,^iven as its meaning. But these are 
 secondary considerations, and are wholly 
 inadequate to satisfy the true meaning of our 
 inquiry. Pain and punishment are the conse- 
 quence of personal acts. There is something 
 which exists before pain and punishment — 
 something which brings a man face to face with 
 what he is, and with what he has done and is 
 doing; afterwards with the consequence. Reve- 
 lation shows us that sin is sin, as God sees it. 
 Salvation is salvation from sin itself, not from 
 pain and punishment. To be saved is to be 
 saved from the cause, and the curse which 
 produces these effects. If man Is saved, he is 
 saved from sin here and now, for life and for 
 eternity. 
 
 We do not have to go to revelation to find 
 what sin is. It is a fact and curse written in 
 the nature and experience of all men. Sin 
 is not an invention of the gospel; it made a 
 gospel necessary. It is no bugbear of the 
 church or figment of theology. Theology de- 
 fines what it is, and the church is our city of 
 refuge. Ah, no ! every man speaking out of his 
 own experience knows that sin is and what it 
 is in the bitterness of his own heart. Revelation 
 
50 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 shows us what it is, against whom it is com- 
 mitted, declares its penalty, offers a remedy and 
 opens the way of escape. It is serious enough 
 to mean a death struggle, either to conquer or 
 to be conquered. That man is neither safe nor 
 sane who dares to laugh at sin. It is so serio«$ 
 that, under the eyes of God, we are pledged to 
 a downright, outright, lifelong battle against 
 the desires and appetites which hold us in self- 
 surrender, against the weak self-love, the inert 
 will, the indolence or the cowardliness which 
 have allowed our soul to be misled by disloyalty 
 and to become shackled with dishonor. If this 
 battle is too heroic for some souls, then God 
 can do nothing for the man who will do nothing 
 for himself. But this God does offer to do 
 for all men : we are delivered from the power 
 of sin by the love of God in a life with God; 
 and we are delivered from the penalty by His 
 forgiveness. For no enlightened, true-hearted 
 man can thus ever be "a meaningless, pointless 
 struggle toward a meaningless, pointless end." 
 
 XL 
 
 Thus far we have considered Christianity as a 
 revelation to us. The personal interpretation of 
 the truths of God carry us forward in a develop- 
 ment which makes of His laws something which 
 is to be treated as a life. This is Christianity 
 revealed in us. There is very little that is true 
 for us as law which is untrue for us as life. If 
 there is any firm grasp of God's truth we shall. 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 5 1 
 
 by faith and obedience, realize the meaning of 
 a revelation in us. 
 
 Now, can we put any sharp, clear meaning 
 into our Christianity? Are we so keyed to the 
 truths that we dare to live them, able to stand 
 for them, willing, if need be, to sacrifice or even 
 to suffer for them? '*We suffer," it has been 
 said, "because we sin; we sometimes sin because 
 we decline to suffer." Our religion is no relax- 
 ation. It is no fugitive impulse and pious fancy. 
 If it is only that then it is only this : 
 
 "Like snow upon a river, 
 A moment white, then gone forever." 
 
 If it is only a little morality tinged with a 
 little emotion, it will tantalize because it is noi 
 true. This is the question, "Is it possible for 
 men to come into vital touch and connection 
 with Jesus Christ, to live his laws and answer 
 with their life?" 
 
 There are some people who seem to have no 
 power of decision because of a lack of discrim- 
 ination and of self-determination. "They feel 
 the things they ought to be beating beneath the 
 things they are," and this feeling brings them 
 near to a tendency to act, but deserts them in 
 the crucial moment of supreme test. The 
 tendency to act without acting inevitably results 
 not only in the loss of powerj but also in the 
 loss of opportunity. They put no clear intention 
 or emphatic purpose into life. What other 
 people make out of life by heroic self-determina- 
 tion, the indeterminate people regard as good 
 
52 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 luck or ^ood fortune. There is no genuine suc- 
 cess for any man which is not earned. Success, 
 by the way, is this: to be in the rig-ht place at 
 the ri^ht time with the power to make a decision. 
 Now the personal interpretation of Christianity 
 is to make it a life, a revelation in us. The 
 difficulty of the christian life is that we only 
 half live it. Where we only half live it, we are 
 to be classified with those *'Who have just 
 enoug-h religion to make them miserable and not 
 quite enouj2[h to make them happy." Man may 
 do much to "disenchant heaven and disillus- 
 ionize the ima^e of God," but somehow he has 
 always found it harder to disbelieve than to 
 believe. His main limitation is to fail in living 
 what he does believe. This is his weakness, and 
 his weakness may become his caricature. 
 Apropos of this there is a bitter epigram — bitter 
 because seemingly true — ''that more evil is done 
 in the world by weak men than by wicked 
 men." 
 
 Accepting, then, the truths of God as some- 
 thing to be translated into a life, we lay hold 
 of the profound fact that humanity is rooted in 
 the eternal. The underlying hope of all 
 spiritual attainment is this, our personal rela- 
 tionship to God. "To as many as received Him 
 to them gave He power to become the sons of 
 God, even to as many as believed on His name." 
 This brings out the reassuring truth of God's 
 nearness. Near as our pressing needs, near as 
 our hardy endeavors, near as our soul is open 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 53 
 
 to make room in our life for the temple of God. 
 There must be a Holy of Holies in every man's 
 soul, where he can meet God and pray to Him, 
 saying, "Speak to me that I may see Thee." 
 For man will never discover nor realize his true 
 nature unless he meets with and lives in touch 
 with the love and sympathy of God. ''This is 
 life eternal, that they mi^ht know Thee, the 
 only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou 
 hast sent." We shall have a strong-, clear soul- 
 ^rasp of this vital relationship with God when 
 ''our life is hid with Christ in God." Then will 
 follow a deeper apprehension that God com- 
 municates His truths through His son, through 
 His word, and through His church. We then 
 meet Him where, for and to us, He communi- 
 cates His grace and pardon and life through 
 His Sacraments. The indwelling of the Holy 
 Spirit in man is the informins: power, and by 
 this power we come to know God, the extension 
 of the Incarnation, the efficacy of the cross, in 
 a vital contact with Jesus Christ — the union of 
 the branches with the vine. It means, and it 
 should mean, nothing less than this : that we are 
 constitutionally related to Jesus Christ. The 
 ideal hidden in our hearts becomes visible in 
 our lives as we see in Jesus Christ what man 
 is like, and see in ourselves what Christ is like. 
 If this truth sinks deep into our souls, if only 
 we are sincere not to mar the truth by dealing 
 with the outside of it, then it will "disappear in 
 us as light and reappear in us as life." 
 
54 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 Relationship with God discloses the true 
 nobility of manhood. By ri^ht of origin we 
 call God our Father. Let no man, therefore, 
 take his life at too low an estimate, for in his 
 spiritual ancestry he inherits and is endowed 
 with an imperishable distinction. As a son of 
 God he stands in the nobility of his manhood, 
 only once removed from God in dignity, in 
 majesty, in honor. Created in the likeness of 
 God, infinite in scope, eternal in destiny, he is 
 the climax of God's handiwork, the child of 
 God's love. Not only is he eligible to God's 
 truth — his importance is further signalized in 
 this : he is chosen as a representative of God, an 
 ambassador and mouthpiece of Jesus Christ. 
 Conscious of this, he must be a higher, holier, 
 truer man for God's trust in him. Let him 
 ignore or fail to grasp this inspiration and 
 honor, and the form of his visage changes. His 
 infiniteness becomes indefiniteness, his scope a 
 weary chaos, his destiny the shameless neglect 
 of one who is foot-glued and flesh-bound to 
 some lesser plan, groping along some lower 
 level because his soul is sucked dry of all aspira- 
 tion until it becomes incapable of inspiration. 
 What loss could be greater than tliis, for a man's 
 heart to hold only the ashes of its sacred fire ! 
 
 With such a heritage, if Christianity is a reve- 
 lation in us, it must, perforce, demand response 
 and correspondence. These demands are im- 
 perial. First of all, every man stands as the 
 pledge for his own life. He must fill up the 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 55 
 
 measure of his possibility, and for this he can 
 have no sponsor and no surety. His possibili- 
 ties are only as practical as he makes them. 
 There may be difficulties and there may be 
 struggles, but man is free to meet the one and 
 make the other. Man must have something 
 v^hich calls him out into the open where he 
 stands up and is counted. No man may take 
 heroism in a poetic sense and fulfill himself. 
 He needs a vigorous faith in a stupendous task 
 to preserve for him a Christianity which is 
 neither mollusk nor invertebrate, as he stands 
 erect in the possibility and integrity of his man- 
 hood, looking Jesus Christ in the face. The 
 attempt at such a life is in no ''suggested feel- 
 ing or imitated conduct." It is attained, if it is 
 attained at all, by no process of emotional sensi- 
 bility, by no excited or exalted feeling, for 
 ''emotion is not conviction, and feeling is not 
 faith." Emotion is too often the effervescence 
 of courage. There is something in our religion 
 like that defined of art, where it is said, "Be- 
 tween the theory of art and the beginning of 
 art there is a fatal interval." Between know- 
 ing how to do a thing and doing that very thing 
 — that is the crux; but it is the boundary line 
 between success and failure. St. James stated 
 it in this form, "Therefore to him that knoweth 
 to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." 
 
 When a man is true to his convictions, he is 
 true to some conclusion. If he must fight with 
 body, mind and soul to transform possibilities 
 
56 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 into visible things, the man made manifest, it 
 is unheroic to ask that this be made easy. 
 Easy! — such is the ''fatal interval" — the seduc- 
 tive temptation, the mental sedative of the man 
 who has no moral aim. How far this has led 
 to disability each man can determine for himself, 
 as he accepts or avoids this self-revelation, that 
 there is no character as ''there is no virtue with- 
 out temptation and stru^^le and victory." 
 
 Let a man take up his manhood and show 
 what is in him. Let him look up, aim hio^h, and 
 attain; then he will take his life seriously and 
 reverently, and he will not be troubled with 
 anxieties which may be avoided nor confused 
 with a babel of queries which have no answer. 
 Then shall he know out of his own experience 
 that no wron^ can ever satisfy and no truth 
 ever disappoint. He has the witness in him- 
 self that "evil often conquers but it never 
 triumphs." 
 
 In the next place man, throu^^h his relation- 
 ship to God and the wealth of his possibilities, 
 faces another fact, namely, his responsibility. 
 This puts a man on record as to whether his 
 life squares with the truth. Responsibility is 
 something which cleaves to the individual. This 
 is a personal matter in which no one can share. 
 We may receive counsel from others, we may 
 be guided and informed of God, but we can 
 refer our responsibility neither to God nor to 
 man; it lies at our own door. Men may go 
 with us, in things that are mutual, but no man 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 57 
 
 can go for us in anything that is personal. We 
 may have equals, but we have no parallel. We 
 cannot live with another man's life; we cannot 
 think with another man's mind, nor aspire with 
 another man's soul. Man stands alone in the 
 sacredness of his own. individuality, unmistaken 
 in his identity and unconfused in his own 
 accountability. The message of God is not 
 addressed to the mass, but to the man, and man 
 answers for his life with his life. 
 
 Responsibility met man — it is his birth — 
 meets him at every point of contact with life 
 and then reveals him or exposes him in what 
 he is. It demands an answer to this question, 
 whether the truth in his knowing is the same 
 truth in his living? We may be content to be 
 just like other people, too easily satisfied with 
 a decent and average christian respectability. 
 But God never made us like other people. In 
 earth and heaven we have no counterpart and 
 no superior. It is therefore self-impeachment 
 and self-abdication to permit our life to sink and 
 become absorbed in that which stands for 
 humanity and not for man. Mankind is divided 
 into man, and man is the king who can, he who 
 ever rules at the head of his own empire. Rule 
 then, but do not ruin. 
 
 No man can have any gift of God without 
 a corresponding obligation. Know this, one 
 might as well seek to escape from himself as to 
 hope to escape from his responsibility. No man 
 is free to accept or reject responsibility. He 
 
58 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 would have to be mentally deficient and morally 
 incompetent — idiot or insane — to remain irre- 
 sponsible. For every man the summons is to 
 come forth and declare himself. It is a judg- 
 ment in the everlasting now. For him the bat- 
 tle is on, and henceforth it is career or it is. cari- 
 cature, but it is always the man made manifest, 
 either a revelation in him or a revelation of 
 him. 
 
 III. 
 
 In dwelling^ on the personal interpretation of 
 Christianity, we have seen, in the first place, that 
 it is a messag^e or revelation to us; in the next 
 place, that it is a life, or a revelation in us; in 
 the last place, the attempt will be to show that 
 it is a revelation through us. 
 
 It is one of the characteristic distinctions of 
 man that God associates him with Himself in 
 carrying out His truths in some objective way. 
 For such an exalted commission we should feel 
 the necessity of keeping our lives fit for God's 
 use by keeping in touch with some definite 
 personal service. Some men will dare to go 
 into life with no clear intention, with no sub- 
 lime motive. The truths of God seem to stop 
 when they arrive in the lives of these men. They 
 seem to have no clear intention in God's employ- 
 ment. This may be common to most men, and 
 it may explain why the average christian does 
 not count for as much in the church as the 
 average business man does in the market, or the 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 59 
 
 averag^e politician does in the caucus, or the 
 average athlete in the contest. So much Christ- 
 ianity is in a state of suspended animation. It 
 is abstract not concrete. We need something 
 which shall crystalize our motive, emphasize our 
 intention and save our purpose from reaching 
 the vanishing point. A definite christian is the 
 only possible christian. This v;^e have when 
 Christianity becomes a revelation through us. 
 If there is any blurring of the truth because we 
 are out of focus, we need to readjust ourselves. 
 If there is any lowering of the truth, it is 
 because it comes in contact with an unworthy 
 life. "There is no alchemy bv which you can 
 get golden deeds from leaden instincts." That 
 which hinders the revelation through men may 
 be what St. Augustine said of his own experi- 
 ence, "The evil to which I was so wonted held 
 me more than the better life which I had not 
 tried." If we have joined the ranks, let us face 
 the battle and so fight, "not as one who beateth 
 the air." 
 
 What is the nature of the Christianity to be 
 revealed through us? It is an appointment of 
 God to give something out of our life for our 
 love to Him and for the good of our fellowman. 
 If our Christianity has done anything for us, it 
 will make us want to do something for others. 
 This takes a man outside of himself and puts 
 him alongside the cares and needs of his brother 
 man. In all that we are and in all that we have, 
 we are trustees for others. God has appointed 
 
6o Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 us to a stewardship of service, and this is to 
 save us from christian vagueness, from social 
 and spiritual failure by settin,^^ us at work. 
 Under this appointment every man is account- 
 able to God for the use of his life. This is 
 truly a ministry that, by some means within 
 our own power, we make the things of God 
 helpful to some one else. Whatever this may 
 be, wherever the opportunity arises, our work, 
 our share, can be delegated to no man living. 
 
 Realize this and we cannot remain content 
 in the selfishness and exclusion of our own 
 salvation. We cannot stand as silent onlookers 
 in a world calling for a hopeful word and a 
 helping hand. "When God would save a man," 
 says St. Augustine, "he does it by way of a 
 man." By you, and the man to be saved may 
 be your friend, the one by your side whose 
 tendencies and temptations you know better 
 than anyone. You have had fears and misgiv- 
 ings for his safety, you have talked with others 
 about him, you have prayed for him again and 
 again, but have you ever spoken to him regard- 
 ing himself? There is so much in personal 
 Christianity that is weak and cowardly because 
 it is inarticulate. The chum and associate, what 
 has he lost through you? Burn these words 
 into your conscience, "Ye shall not see my face 
 except your brother be with you." "Is there 
 not a cause?" Is there no difficulty which 
 another meets which we could not help to solve? 
 Is there no temptation which another fights, 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 6i 
 
 where we could not cheer and encourage him 
 with our love and interest ? Is there a sin which 
 makes a "blight on every flower and a canker 
 in every fruit" from which we could not rescue 
 him? Is there no anguish, no remorse, no sor- 
 row, no burden which we could help to lighten 
 with our loving^ sympathy? Sympathy! What 
 is sympathy? This, surely this, ''two hearts 
 tu^^in^ at the same load." We are ready 
 enou,2:h with our criticism and our condemna- 
 tion, but who is strong enough for sympathy? 
 We have little rig^ht to rebuke where we do not 
 love. If we are strong- and able for these 
 things, then our religion will give us all we need 
 and cost us all it is worth to others. Our Christ- 
 ianity has no limit, but that of unfaithfulness. 
 
 Where do we stand in a service which costs 
 us something, if it is worthy of God, and if 
 it is worth anything at all to man? Let us 
 remember that "opportunity and ability make 
 responsibility." It is only out of courage and 
 love and sacrifice that a ministry to man is 
 formed. Let a man ask himself, is there one 
 soul on earth a step nearer God through any 
 personal effort of my own? We may well ask 
 ourselves, therefore, has anything that we have 
 said or done helped anyone else to do anything ? 
 Our example, influence and contact are potent 
 or else they are impotent powers. If we have 
 no example, we profane our trust; if we have 
 no influence, it is the hollow mockery of an 
 unworthy life; if we have no contact, we shall 
 
62 Personal Interpretation of Christianity 
 
 answer for it in the day we are asked "where 
 is thy brother?" Shall we fall back to the rear 
 in every call to service and join the ^reat nerve- 
 less host who take for their motto, ''They also 
 serve who only stand and wait?" There is but 
 one consistency in this, the consistency of 
 nothing-ness. Never ! we will fare the duty and 
 bear the brunts. "Let us break the drum, but 
 hold up the standard!" 
 
 After all, you can put no nerve into a man's 
 life, nothing higher or greater than the ideal to 
 which his soul responds. When we have an 
 ideal we have a prospect. There is no such 
 thing as an ideal without faith and love and 
 inspiration. Our ideal in life should commit 
 us to something^ tang^ible, hopeful and per- 
 manent. With an ideal, a little soul-stir would 
 save us from stag^nation. We are in the midst 
 of life, and we are making our own world, writ- 
 ing our own history, meeting our own heaven. 
 Now, what sort of workmanship are we putting 
 into life? There are only three primary colors 
 with which to paint the lily, to picture the glory 
 of the sunset, to portray the magnificence of 
 the landscape, or to describe the beauty and 
 the character of the human countenance. 
 Raphael and Rembrandt, Titian and Turner, 
 Ct)rot and Millet made these primary and 
 secondary colors almost articulate. There are 
 only seven notes by means of which to create 
 wondrous harmonies of cantata and oratorio, of 
 opera and symphony. Yet Beethoven, Haydn, 
 
Personal Interpretation of Christianity 63 
 
 Mozart, Liszt, Warner and Chopin have moved 
 the world to feeling, to passion, to rapture and 
 to tears. There are only a few letters of the 
 alphabet, but they are the only means of trans- 
 lating all thought, all science, all poetry and 
 prose into words, and transmitting them to man 
 and to generations. Moses and David, St. 
 John and St. Paul, Homer and Shakespeare, 
 Goethe and Hugo, and a host of others, have 
 made the world anew and resonant with mean- 
 i*^g. There are only five senses out of which 
 to create experience and character and express 
 a life by these and the soul behind them; 
 humanity may be made heavenly or incarnate 
 evil as it moves heavenward or hellward by the 
 very use of them. 
 
 We have only the powers of a man, body, 
 mind and soul, to serve and worship the all- 
 knowing, all-loving God. Angel or archangel 
 cannot take our place, live our life, nor complete 
 our task. For all and every need we have God 
 and law, and life, and stewardship. We may 
 be next to God and great as angels, if we stand 
 true to our appointment — the nobility of man- 
 hood in the responsibility of service. "God will 
 measure a man's life by the proportion that his 
 deed bears to his opportunity." 
 ^'Grow old along with me ! 
 
 The best is yet to be, 
 
 The last of life for which the first wa* made. 
 
 Our times are in His hand 
 
 Who saith, 'A whole I planned, 
 
 Youth shows but half ; trust God ; see all, nor be 
 afraid.' " 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 If we confess our sins. He is faithful and just to 
 forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all un- 
 righteousness, — I John, 9. 
 
 A few hours ago I had been speaking to 
 you about the gospel of God's love. I wish 
 now to try and speak about the gospel of His 
 pardon. But let me for a moment connect 
 what I said this morning, with what I shall try 
 to say this evening. 
 
 Every age must have its own gospel in a real 
 sense; must, in other words, have its own way 
 of looking at the gospel and stating it. So 
 must each individual. No man can preach the 
 gospel, or see the gospel, or live the gospel, in 
 quite the same way as his brother can; but yet 
 for all that, the time surely has come when 
 there ought to be more of an agreement among 
 us as to what the gospel of Jesus Christ in its 
 essence really is. There are three things that 
 are essential. I don't say that these three things 
 contain all that it is, but I do say that I believe 
 them to be the fullest statement given to us in 
 any one passage of inspired writ. 
 
 First, "God loved the world." 
 
 Not part of the world, but all the world ; not 
 
66 The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 one race in the world, but all races in the world ; 
 not the happily born and reared, but those un- 
 happily born and not reared; not only as the 
 maker of the world, the preserver of the world, 
 the ruler of the world, but as the lover of the 
 world. The world is not a law work, much less 
 a chance work, but it is a love work. 
 
 If any one thinks this old g^ospel is always 
 easy to believe, he knows very little about life. 
 Whatever may be the fault of our ag^e, as com- 
 pared with other a^es, lack of sympathy is not 
 that fault; and, sympathetically bound, not 
 merely to our friends, but to all men as we are 
 to-day, feeling the sorrows and pains of others, 
 not as shadows that fall across our pathway 
 merely, but as heavy burdens that sometimes 
 crush into our very souls. It is about the hard- 
 est thin^ I know to believe that the world is a 
 love work. But whether I can believe it or 
 not, that's the g"ospel. 
 
 Second, "God so loved the world that He 
 ^ave." 
 
 That means, in short, that His love is not a 
 making love, or a preserving- love, or a ruling 
 love, but that it is also a suffering love, and 
 radiant being though He be, in all the travail 
 and sorrow of His universe, He knows and ex- 
 periences its pang. **Let us shut out suffering," 
 cries the superficial man. "Yes, let us shut out 
 suffering," cries the pleasure-seeking man. "Let 
 us build a lordly pleasure house, and say to our 
 soul, *Dear soul, take thine ease.' " Some men 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 67 
 
 and a few women still do this, but what sort of 
 people are they? Are they the people we re- 
 spect? Are they the people we follow? No. 
 Man is bound so closely to man, that as the 
 plague strikes us all — it does strike us all — there 
 is no retiring to Bocaccio's villa outside 
 Florence, and there, tuning our harps and 
 wreathing ourselves with flowers, make merry 
 while the deadly plague stalks among our fel- 
 low-men. You can't do it to-day. And why? 
 Because we do profoundly feel, when we cannot 
 even believe, that if there is a God at all, he is 
 a God that suffers as well as loves. The old 
 Olympus idea of God is dead, dead. On the 
 cool, shady brow of the mountain God no longer 
 sits, the smoke of men's troubled lives almost 
 gratefully rising to His nostrils. No, he is 
 down among men in their toil and sorrow, in 
 their pain and crying; taking the little child on 
 his knee, and weeping by the graveside of His 
 friend. So, long ago, men ventured to believe 
 that God revealed Himself, and once God has 
 been so seen, men no longer care for, or believe 
 in, the Olympus God, let him be as thunderous 
 or beautiful as he may. 
 
 *'God so loved the world that he gave." 
 There are all sorts of painfulnesses on earth, 
 but there is no pain like the pain of giving. It 
 is by giving we can test our capacity for pain to 
 the highest. We will bear pain for ourselves, 
 when it is the pathway to further health, 
 usefulness, we can bear it bravely and 
 
68 The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 without murmur; but if it might be that 
 we bear it in order to save those we loved then 
 we could bear it more than dutifully — we could 
 bear it joyfully. What will I give for 
 the thing- I love? I will give my money 
 for my son, I will give my time; I will 
 give my best. But what are these? I will give 
 my right hand for his right hand. Nay, there 
 is not a father or mother listens to me to-day 
 who, if it came to be a question of life and death 
 itself, would not gladly say, "I would lay down 
 my half-worn life to-morrow that my child 
 might step forward better to accomplish, more 
 perfectly to finish, the tasks that I have failed 
 in. There is no penalty that I will not gladly 
 take, if I will thereby save my child." 
 
 '*God so loved that he gave — ^ave His only 
 begotten Son." 
 
 And yet once again, and third : God's love is 
 victorious. The thing worth loving, the thing 
 worth doing, that thing should be done; that 
 thing shall live; that thing shall not perish but 
 have everlasting life. If there is anything in me 
 that is worth keeping alive after this life is over, 
 alive it shall be kept. If there is not anything in 
 me worth keeping alive, let it die. Who wants 
 to keep it alive? I don't. But mark you, my 
 friends. The thing about love is just this : Love 
 doesn't create value, hut it discovers value. What 
 do I mean? I mean just this. If you really 
 care for any person, first when you meet them, 
 perhaps they are very ordinary folk to you. As 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 69 
 
 you meet a^ain, your interest is aroused, and you 
 see things you didn't see before. As friendship 
 g^rows, all sorts of things arise before your eye, 
 <And you gradually become assured of their value. 
 As intimacy follows, a strange thing has taken 
 place — the person you first passed on the street, 
 or scarcely cared to nod to, has become almost 
 essential to you. Why is all this? Is there 
 something there that never was there before? 
 Not at all. It is only that love has discovered 
 value, and in its discovery knows full well that 
 it lives in the assurance that to-morrow more 
 value will be discovered. We never exaggerate 
 the value of anyone. With our best seeing, best 
 loving, we only discover part of the value. 
 
 So Jesus, the man of love, comes to walk 
 among us, and to declare the value of the thing 
 he loves; the value of the commonplace thing, 
 the every-day man and woman, the plain little 
 street-child; the value of all these to God him- 
 self, the God who, in the last resort, is respon- 
 sible for it all. Yes, this is the third great prin- 
 ciple of the gospel. The gospel stamps life's 
 loveliness with God's assurance of permanence. 
 The old gospel whispers to us, sings to us, shouts 
 to us, that what was beautiful and worthy in life 
 cannot die; that which belongs to Jesus, appre- 
 ciates Him, falls towards Him, stumbles, stag- 
 gers after Him, cannot die, for everlasting life 
 is not based on the attainments of men, but on 
 the character of Almighty God Himself. That's 
 the gospel. 
 
70 The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 God's love made the world. God's love suf- 
 fers with the world. God's love is victorious in 
 the world. 
 
 What about the gospel of pardon, the removal 
 of sin? , 
 
 First, I want to say to you that it is quite im- 
 possible for me to-day more than to touch here 
 and there this great question of man's salvation 
 from sin. I do not claim to put before you any- 
 thing like a complete statement of the nature of 
 it, or the method of it. I can only, in the time 
 allotted to me, point out here and there things 
 about it that I think I can see somewhat clearly, 
 and that I hope may be helpful to you ; thoughts 
 that may perhaps suggest other thoughts of your 
 own that shall go much deeper and further than 
 mine. 
 
 Again, I would say quite frankly that I think 
 we have been accustomed to treat sin in too 
 academic a way. We have not been quite honest 
 about it. We have talked about sin more than 
 we meant. We protested too much, and said 
 things we didn't feel, or only felt when we were 
 smitten with some misfortune, or were sick in 
 body or depressed in mind. 
 
 I remember an incident of long ago in college. 
 It made a great impression on me. An excellent 
 man came down to Cambridge in the old land, to 
 preach to us undergraduates. He was a holy 
 man and courageous. He lived only to preach 
 the gospel, as he saw it, but his views of men 
 and things were sombre, and, as I look back on 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 7^ 
 
 it all now, I see that he was deeply tinned with 
 the Puritan spirit, that always tries to category 
 things in God's world as right and wrong. Well, 
 he preached to us lads about conversion, and 
 told us that conversion meant turning away for- 
 ever from a great many things that we dearly 
 liked. It was true, we had been told by our 
 parents that we oughtn't to like them, that they 
 were of the world, and that to be true Christians 
 we ought to give them up. But our instincts 
 never quite tallied with this teaching. Certainly 
 it didn't in the case of the boy I now speak of. 
 He was a first-rate fellow, lived soberly and tried 
 to do the best he could. He was much affected 
 by the appeals of the preacher, and remained 
 after many of the discourses for private conver- 
 sation, as indeed many of us did. At last, 
 towards the close of the services, the preacher 
 urged on this lad that he should then and there 
 renounce the world, and take his stand as a 
 Christian. "Will you," said the good man, '*0h, 
 will you be converted now?" "Oh, yes," said 
 the youth. "I would like to be converted, sir, 
 but I don't think I would like to be converted in 
 the May term." 
 
 Now, this was what I call unhealthy treatment 
 of sin. There are sins enough, God knows, in 
 the world, without our creating new ones by our 
 fancy. The path of life is narrow and steep 
 enough for the man who is going to do right, 
 without making it narrower and steeper and 
 more difificult than need be. 
 
72 The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 Now, what I really wanted to do for myself 
 is to try and see how Jesus looked at sin, what 
 it meant to Him, and He, surely, had more to 
 do with it than anybody else. The first thing I 
 notice is, that he took a totally different view of 
 sin from what the Jews of His time did. He 
 found a definite — a very definite— doctrine of 
 sin when he came. It was prevalent everywhere. 
 Both by His teaching and practice. He declared 
 that doctrine to be wrong, and substituted an- 
 other in its place. The Jews re^^arded disease as 
 a sin, and it awakened their wrath. Jesus re- 
 garded sin as a disease, and it inspired his pity. 
 
 Let me illustrate. Here was a blind man. 
 The natural question that arose to the minds of 
 the disciples, after they have been even years 
 with Jesus, when they see the blind man is, 
 ''Master, who did sin? This man or his parents, 
 that he was born blind?" Jesus answered: 
 ^'Neither this man sinned nor his parents." They 
 meet a leper. The leper's status is already set- 
 tled. He is not only physically unclean, he is 
 morally unclean. They meet a crazy man or an 
 epileptic. The question is past argument; all 
 believe he is inhabited by the devil. Lunacy is 
 a wickedness. For that matter, people believed 
 this but a short time ago. Witchcraft was traffic 
 with Satan, and was to be cured by the ducking- 
 stool or the bonfire. Our point of view was not 
 so very far from theirs. Now Jesus comes as 
 the great Physician for sinners. He will not be 
 a judge. He never used His power to punish 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 73 
 
 sin. His disciples want Him to call down the 
 fire from Heaven. He rebukes them. "You 
 don't know what your spirit is," He says. Up 
 to the very last they expect Him to use His 
 power against His enemies. They have learned 
 very little from following Him round, and lis- 
 tening to Him speak. He will not condemn His 
 enemies, not even His murderers, and He dies, 
 praying for their excuse. ''The Lord hath sent 
 Me to bind up the broken-hearted, declare liberty 
 to the captives, sig^ht to the blind, to set at lib- 
 erty those that are bound, to proclaim the accept- 
 able year of the Lord, not the day of vengeance 
 of our God." He never threatened. Often he 
 did warn, but that is a very different thing-. But 
 the trouble was that when Christianity fell on 
 the Roman world, the Roman spirit, iron-bound 
 and legal, could not yet yield to the gentleness 
 of the spirit of Jesus; the vast lump was too 
 heavy, too stolid, to be leavened quickly, and the 
 merciful teachings were thrust aside, and the old 
 spirit of legalism revived under the Roman 
 forms of government. God was a judge ; Jesus 
 was made what he protested he never was — a 
 judge; and the gentle Mary had to be invoked 
 and all the vast host of saints, to give some small 
 modicum of hope to men. I say he warned, he 
 did not threaten. There are laws of body and 
 mind, spiritual, physical, which cannot be dis- 
 regarded. Ignore these, and your bodies and 
 souls will become offal, fit only for the place 
 where offal is consumed. This he taught. 
 
74 The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 There is no final room in the universe under the 
 laws of God for the monstrous and for the ab- 
 normal, and the monstrous and the abnormal 
 must perish. This he taught. Men who grow 
 careless and unsympathetic, who care not for the 
 hungry, the naked and the suffering; women 
 who make pleasure the end, instead of a recrea- 
 tion — for all these life down here has failed. The 
 redemptive influence of ''this earthly" order has 
 been wasted on them. If they are to be saved 
 at all, they will go into future discipline. This 
 he taught. This is not threatening — ^this is 
 warning. 
 
 Now first I have said, Jesus is the physician 
 for sin and not the judge of sinners. 
 
 Next, he warns sinners, doesn't threaten 
 them. 
 
 Third, Jesus never demanded sacrifice for 
 sin. He never said He was a ransom paid to 
 God for sin. What He did say was that the 
 Father loved His children, and He came to tell 
 them of that love. He never said God was a 
 changeable God. He said that nothing we could 
 do could change Him toward us*. How could 
 He so change, and yet be God? He came to 
 commend God's love to us. He came to recon- 
 cile us to God. Of course, the old Jewish idea 
 of sacrifice was far from dead; that idea of 
 sacrifice was built up through a period of a 
 thousand years ; grew as all systems must grow, 
 more elaborate and less vital as they get older. 
 It began with the small, free-will offering of 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 75 
 
 Leviticus, 1-3, when each man brought his cow 
 or his goat, or his pigeon, or his handful of 
 grain, as the case might be, the best he had, 
 and it was acceptable because it was his free-will 
 offering. This was the simple beginning of 
 sacrifice, but it grew into an enormous elabora- 
 tion — a god-hiding, man-destroying ritual, until 
 against it the fiery appeal of the Great Prophet 
 had to be hurled. 
 
 "To what purpose is the multitude of your 
 sacrifices unto me ? saith the Lord : I am full 
 of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of 
 fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of 
 bullocks ; or of lambs, or of he goats. 
 
 "When ye come to appear before me, who 
 hath required this at your hand, to tread my 
 courts ? 
 
 "Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an 
 abomination to me; the new moons and sab- 
 baths, the callings of assemblies, I cannot away 
 with ; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. 
 
 "Your new moons and your appointed feasts 
 my soul hateth; they are a trouble unto me; I 
 am weary to bear them. 
 
 "And when ye spread forth your hands, I 
 will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye 
 make many prayers, I will not hear ; your hands 
 are full of blood. 
 
 "Wash ye, make you clean; put away the 
 evil of your doings from before mine eyes; 
 cease to do evil. 
 
 "Learn to do well ; seek judgment, relieve 
 
76 The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 the oppressed, jud^e the fatherless, plead for 
 the widow. 
 
 "Come, now, and let us reason together, saith 
 the Lord : though your sins be as scarlet, they 
 shall be white as snow; though they be red like 
 crimson, they shall be as wool. 
 
 "If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat 
 the good of the land." — Isaiah i : 11-19. 
 
 Sacrifices and offering thou wouldest not, but 
 a body hast thou prepared me. 
 
 Ah, the Church has forgotten all this too 
 often, and has fallen into the perpetual mistake 
 of making the Saviour's work the condition of 
 man's forgiveness, something interposing be- 
 tween God and man, some innocent and holy 
 thing stepping in and taking the blow aimed at 
 man ; and thus man is only converted at the cost 
 of the degradation of the idea of God. Jesus 
 offers the goodness and mercy of God to men 
 without conditions. He doesn't come to men 
 because repentant men call Him, but He comes 
 to them because He is goodness, mercy, love — 
 because He is God manifest in human flesh — 
 and when He has come, they repent. We have 
 reversed all this. We have said, "Repent, and 
 God will come to you." Jesus said, "God is 
 good; therefore repent." Jesus doesn't say to 
 Zaccheus, "Zaccheus, will you make restitution? 
 If you do, I will come to you." But He says : 
 "Zaccheus, I want to come to your house." And 
 when Zaccheus, all amazed with the beauty of 
 his condescension, is smitten to the heart, it is 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 77 
 
 easy for him to say, ''The half of my goods I 
 will give tO' the poor, and if I have taken any- 
 thing from men by false accusation, I will 
 restore it fourfold." Jesus came first, and then 
 came repentance. And so it runs along : "Love 
 your enemies, bless them that persecute you, 
 that you may be dear children of your Father 
 which is in Heaven, because He maketh His 
 sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and 
 sendeth His rain upon the just and the unjust.'* 
 By love God leads us to repentance. Christ 
 didn't wait for men to come to Him. He came 
 to them; didn't wait for them to love Him; He 
 first loved them. The gospel is the presentation 
 of God to us by Jesus, not that we loved Him, 
 but that He first loved us. He would not be 
 God, true tO' His own godhead, if He did not 
 forgive. Paul is quite plain about this. "God 
 who is rich in mercy, for His great love where- 
 with He loved us, even when we were dead in 
 sin." Or take, lastly, the greatest declaration of 
 all. It was the remembrance that He had a 
 Father, that He had a home, that the foulness 
 of the far country could not make these any less 
 real, that all the wrong he had done, and the 
 pain he had caused, and the waste of his life, 
 and the meanness of it all — that none of these, 
 or all of these together, could rob him of his 
 right to Sonship. It was this that made the 
 boy at last rise up, and, in the distant lands of 
 sin's exile, say, "I will, I will arise and go unto 
 my Father." Thus it was that Jesus came 
 
78 The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 among- men. Is there a blind man doomed to 
 darkness? He doesn't say to him, "Will you 
 be good if I give you sight?" He makes no 
 condition. Is there an impotent man that has 
 waited for weary years for what he believes to 
 be an angel visit ? He heals him first, and then 
 says, ''Sin no more, lest worse things come to 
 thee." Is it a poor, sick woman worn with long 
 weakness? She wants to touch him, she has 
 faith — maybe a low sort of faith only, the low 
 spirit of faith that leans on the wandering, 
 magical sort of man ; yet all the multitudes must 
 make way for that feeble finger touch. Is it a 
 little child that the mother wants to feel His 
 hand? He takes the little one on his knee and 
 says, "All may so come. Nay, all must so 
 come, if they are to come to me and to God at 
 all." 
 
 This is the attitude of Jesus. What is the 
 attitude of the Church ? We bring little children 
 to the Church to-day. Has this child been 
 baptized or no? No. Well, then, we receive 
 this child as Jesus said we should receive all 
 children. "Suffer them to come to me and 
 forbid them not," and yet before they come, I 
 want to ask three questions. Nay, before you 
 bring this child, you must promise three things 
 in its name: You must renounce the devil and 
 all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the 
 world, with all covetous desires of the same and 
 the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt 
 not follow, nor be led by them. 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 79 
 
 2. You must believe all the articles of the 
 Christian Faith, as contained in the Apostles' 
 Creed. 
 
 3. You must obediently keep God's holy will 
 and commandments, and walk in the same all 
 the days of your life. 
 
 Tremendous pledges, these. I don't want to 
 say anything to belittle them; but have we put 
 them in the rig-ht place? Are we right in 
 making them conditions to baptism? Can any 
 one in his senses conceive of Jesus saying, **I 
 cannot receive this little child until you have 
 promised and vowed these things in its name!" 
 Or can anyone conceive of Jesus receiving a 
 little child, and then saying he would not let 
 the disciples baptize it ? I don't believe in need- 
 lessly arguing with the great past, but I do say 
 that we must break even through the past, if 
 it is separating us from the essence of the mean- 
 ing of the life of Jesus. And furthermore, I 
 believe, in her better mood, the Church always 
 knew this, for she especially ordained that under 
 circumstances of stress and danger, all children 
 may be baptized without question or answer, and 
 that lay baptism itself, when in the name of the 
 Father, Son and Holy Ghost is as thoroughly 
 valid baptism as when performed by the highest 
 Bishop in the Church. 
 
 But I must not further digress from the main 
 point I have before me. I want in conclusion 
 to say this to you : that all thoughtful people to- 
 day ought to admit that a new light, a very 
 
8o The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 ^reat new li^ht, has been poured on this whole 
 question of sin by the new knowledge that has 
 come to men in the last fifty years. We know 
 now that human life is an emergence from the 
 order of the mere animal to the order of man, 
 and that Christians venture to believe what we 
 cannot yet prove — a further emergence from the 
 order of man to the order of the God-man. 
 
 Once upon a time in this world there was no 
 such thing as man. Life was unmoral. Morality 
 could not exist until the time of choice between 
 good and evil had arrived, and the beasts had 
 no choice. It is no sin for a monkey to try and 
 grab the biggest cocoanut and prevent any other 
 monkey taking it. The shark as he ravages 
 the sea sins not, nor does the peacock as he 
 spreads his tail, nor the tiger as he gluts his 
 craving for blood. Remnants of the fish and 
 the tiger and the peacock we have in us. What 
 is the use of ignoring or denying it? But 
 mounting up above these, and knowing he does 
 wrong if he doesn't mount above these, ever 
 rises the man. 
 
 The doctors say that in our bodies are hun- 
 dreds of vestigia. Vestigia are relics of organs 
 that once were useful and are useful no longer. 
 Very often they are dangers, positive threats, 
 to health, and the surgeon's knife removes them 
 when it can. Sins are vestigia — things that 
 hang to us from the old past, and are slowly 
 worked off and can be worked down. Sins are 
 like the old leaves that cling to the tree, and 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 8i 
 
 even the winter storms and the cruel frost won't 
 bear them away. They have to ^o, but nothing 
 will carry them off finally but the springing- life 
 within. Freedom from the peacock, the shark, 
 the tiger, the ape, we shall have. The struggle 
 from lower to higher we shall win. It is God's 
 method of making us strong. Only by long 
 persistence do we win soul vigor. He is with 
 us in the struggle from beginning to end. He 
 put us to the struggle ; He is responsible for the 
 stru^^le; He ordained the struggle^ — ordained 
 the very conditions of it. And thus, with a tre- 
 mendous assurance, those that understood Christ 
 could proclaim the reality of God's help and for- 
 giveness for men, forgiveness of the past, free- 
 dom from the animal ; more sail, less lead ; more 
 soul, less tiger ; more man, less ape. God made 
 the order of the past, and within that order God 
 put man's soul. He knew what he did. "He 
 knoweth what he doeth." Therefore, "I am 
 weary of my sickness; I would fain be where 
 they shall die no more, and with the company 
 that perpetually cry, 'Holy, Holy, Holy !' " No. 
 There is God's right to deliver me from all that 
 keeps me back from that great day. Socrates 
 long ago said, ''God might forgive sin, but He 
 could not see how it was possible." The best 
 poets and philosophers have taught as much as 
 that. But with Jesus, faith had won its assur- 
 ance that forgiveness was possible. But it was 
 more than possible, for God was bound to see 
 us through — not only merciful (reverently be it 
 
82 The Gospel of God's Pardon 
 
 spoken), but faithful and just "to forgive us our 
 sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." 
 
 Let us go forth, young men, into God's 
 world. Remember it is a love w^orld. Love 
 planned it, love is in it from beginning to end. 
 Love will see it through. Not an easy thing to 
 believe always, but you try to believe it. As you 
 go forth among men and gaze on misery and 
 wrong, sorrow and injustice, things that still 
 abound everywhere, remember as you look over 
 the sadness of it all, that these are the results of 
 evil will, the results of what man's sin can ac- 
 complish within a brief space of three-score 
 years and ten. If evil powers within and around 
 us can accomplish so much to blight and to blast, 
 oh, remember, these are but the brief possibilities 
 of an hour; what are they in comparison with 
 the everlasting powers of right, of love, of wis- 
 dom, of God. I look around, and I see what 
 one evil man can do. But I want to lift my 
 eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help, 
 and to remember that if the transient will of an 
 hour can do harm, what can eternal will, al- 
 mighty power, everlasting righteousness, un- 
 changing love, accomplish ? As Paul put it long 
 ago — no words of inspired men will ever state it 
 more gloriously — "Where sin abounds, the grace 
 of God shall much more abound." For we can 
 never dream of forgiveness and salvation as 
 complete as Jesus Christ has proclaimed. 
 
The Gospel of God's Pardon 83 
 
 There is grace enough for thousands of new worlds as 
 
 great as this, 
 There is joy for fresh creations in that upper home of 
 
 bliss ; 
 There is plentiful redemption in the blood that has been 
 
 shed. 
 There is joy for all the members m the sorrows of the 
 
 Head, 
 For the love of God is broader than the measure of 
 
 man's mind, 
 And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind. 
 
Christianity and Education. 
 
 "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
 which is Jesus Christ." — i Cor. III. :ii. 
 
 Paul, the Apostle, writing from Ephesus to 
 the Corinthian Christians, compares the growth 
 of the Soul to one of their own beautiful build- 
 ings, and says that the superstructures may vary 
 with the character, temperament, conditions and 
 circumstances of the individual builder; may be 
 wood, hay, stubble, gold, or silver ; but one thing 
 is certain, fixed, unalterable, ''Other foundation 
 can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus 
 Christ." This is true for the Soul of man, for 
 his active life here and hereafter, for his pro- 
 gress, his civilization, his government, laws, 
 institutions — for all that goes to make up the 
 larger hope or wider destiny of mankind now 
 and forever. 
 
 The process of creation culminates in man; 
 for with man begins the new spiritual order, 
 which interprets and fulfils all life. It is destined 
 to fill the Universe and outlive time. At the 
 basis of it, — its law, its motive, its inspiration, 
 — is a great act of sacrifice, an act of love, the 
 love of God the Father in his only Begotten 
 Son, — that all that is in man and that shall grow 
 out of man for the Universe and through 
 
86 Christianity and Education 
 
 Eternity, may be built up, may be perfected, 
 completed, saved. 
 
 We cannot improve to-day upon the wonder- 
 ful truth given to the Wise Master Builder. 
 The experience of the ages has only reinforced 
 his judgment. The progress of civilization, the 
 whole historic record of man's onward march 
 but strengthens, deepens, enlarges the conviction 
 that "Other foundation can no man lay than 
 that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." 
 
 I want to say something about Christianity 
 and Education. It is an old subject, a large 
 subject, a most important subject, naturally 
 suggested by such an Institution as the Baldwin 
 Foundation. It is a subject moreover very 
 directly and explicitly included in the text, 
 which I have chosen from St. Paul, involving, 
 when we examine it closely, the whole meaning, 
 value and significance of Christianity in the 
 world. 
 
 For, after all, what do we mean by education ? 
 Certainly not the weak, impoverished idea of 
 special training of men and women for the 
 duties of a trade or a profession; not the mere 
 cram of names and dates and facts. It is a com- 
 monplace nowadays to say that education is a 
 process, a development, an evolution of power 
 from within. And if there be no power within, 
 all the education in the world will not create 
 it. There is a learning that is useless, cumber- 
 some, undigested. So, in a real sense — 
 
Christianity and Education 87 
 
 "Truth is within ourselves. * * * 
 There is an inmost center in us all, 
 Where truth abides in fullness, and around, 
 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
 This perfect, clear perception, which is truth, 
 A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
 Blinds it and makes all error; and to know 
 Rather consists in opening out a way 
 Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape." 
 
 "And men have oft grown old among their books, 
 To die case-hardened in their ignorance." 
 
 On the other hand, we must not forget, that, 
 if the mere utilitarian and objective theory of 
 education has been discredited, the whole world 
 has condemned the crude guess-work of Rous- 
 seau : that man in a state of nature, without 
 science, without revelation, without civilization, 
 is at his best. 
 
 We say, then, that education is twofold, both 
 drawing something out and putting something 
 in. He is a simpleton, who thinks nothing, but 
 what he reads, and he is a greater simpleton, 
 who, in the solution of life's problems, refuses 
 to take advantage of the thought and experience 
 that past ages have to offer. 
 
 What is education? Why, it is the prepara- 
 tion of men and women to take their places in 
 the world. It is, as a great scholar has said, 
 the supervision, the direction of the change, the 
 great change that is taking place all around us, 
 whereby our boys and girls are getting ready 
 to take our places, to assume our responsibilities, 
 to discharge the duties that we discharge, in 
 
88 Christianity and Education 
 
 Society, Government and religion. And for the 
 manner and character of that change, its good- 
 ness or its evil, its success or failure, you and 
 I are responsible. Thus one generation may be 
 made or marred by that which precedes it; and 
 upon the truth, the wisdom, the carefulness of 
 the methods of education, which prevail in this 
 country to-day, the future of our institutions, 
 of our religion, of our American Government, 
 Society and Civilization will inevitably depend. 
 If there is anything precious to us in the political 
 heritage of our fathers; anything sacred in the 
 ideals of our social life; anything holy and true 
 in the blessings of our religion — then this sub- 
 ject is of vast importance to every one of us: 
 then to Christian men, the Church of God indif- 
 ferent to education is a contradiction in terms 
 — for the Church is nothing if it be not the 
 school of Christ, and the Gospel is unintelligible 
 except as being in its deepest, truest, widest 
 sense, a means and method of education. "Other 
 foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
 which is Jesus Christ." 
 
 There are, it seems to me, certain great and 
 pregnant facts that have to be taken into con- 
 sideration in any true theory of education; 
 certain facts without which education is deprived 
 of its only adequate justification and stripped of 
 half its meaning and value. 
 
 And the first of these is man's spiritual nature 
 and man's immortal life. If man is a brute, or a 
 brute adorned with discussive reason and only 
 
Christianity and Education 89 
 
 that, then he is a failure, his life is a burden, 
 his knowledge is guess work, his achievements 
 here are of little account or meaning. There 
 is no guarantee of the truth of his moral or 
 spiritual judgments; there is no proof of the 
 validity of his intellectual processes, and his 
 education is for the most part a waste of time. 
 But if man is a spiritual being, — if he is 
 immortal, — ^if the culture, the growth, the 
 development of soul accomplished here, have 
 value and significance forever ; if this life be the 
 opportunity for the exercise and the evolution 
 in us of capacities, powers, faculties which 
 eternity is to complete and satisfy — then every 
 school is sacred and every path of knowledge 
 is holy ground. I believe in education, in higher 
 education, because I believe in man's spiritual 
 and immortal life, and any theory, any scheme, 
 any method of education that ignores this fact 
 of human nature, is unscientific in the first place, 
 because it arbitrarily excludes a fact that is 
 practically admitted, in one form or another, by 
 the entire human race; and it is one-sided, 
 poverty-stricken, superficial, because it trys to 
 make a whole man by developing two-thirds of 
 him. Of all the extraordinary contradictions 
 in the world nothing could be more extra- 
 ordinary than this : the attempt to make a man 
 out of body and mind, with no provision for the 
 soul's growth, and thus to deny the religious 
 experience of mankind, and call this attempt 
 education. 
 
90 Christianity and Education 
 
 There is another fact that education must 
 recognize. Education must have its model, its 
 ideal. There must be some goal towards which 
 it shall be definitely directed. And as I believe 
 in man's spiritual nature and man's immortal 
 life, and just in proportion as I believe in man's 
 high destiny, in man's divine potentiality, so 
 must I believe that the end, the purpose, the 
 object of all his striving, his development is 
 God. My Brothers : We do not always realize, 
 we do not stop to think, that there is a profound 
 and eternal significance in the fact of man's 
 desire for progress. And yet what human 
 characteristic is there revealed in all the cen- 
 turies, so clearly defined, so inevitable, so 
 insatiable, as this hunger and thirst for growth, 
 for improvement, for change. Man stands to- 
 day, after one hundred generations of effort, on 
 the outskirts of the woodland, on the margin 
 of the Sea of knowledge, and yet he is not 
 weary, he is not tired. The great Scientist 
 assures us that two billion years would not be 
 sufficient to reach the conclusions which we 
 want to reach, and the results we would like to 
 find in some departments of Mathematics alone. 
 And yet we do not abandon hope — we are eager 
 to go on. The very instinct of life is the instinct 
 to keep on, to advance, to increase in knowledge 
 and in power. For man as man there is no 
 rest here. Education, Schools, Colleges, Uni- 
 versities — what are they but the signs and 
 symptoms of man's untiring, unending yearning 
 for progress and self-development? They have 
 
Christianity and Education 9 ^ 
 
 one purpose, one end and satisfaction, and that 
 is God. It is an Apostle who bids us to add 
 to Faith Virtue, and to Virtue Knowledge; 
 because through the knowledge of God we are 
 called to glory and Virtue, that we may become 
 partakers of the Divine nature. 
 
 But who, but what is God? Let us read the 
 Philosophers and analyze their arguments about 
 the absolute, the unknowable, the Infinite and 
 Eternal energy. Let us ask Nature with her 
 inexorable law, sparing none, forgiving none, 
 cold, and hard, and pitiless to all, who and what 
 is God? Is He the sum total of Virtues gen- 
 erally admired by men, raised algebraically to 
 the highest power ? Is he a great guess by some 
 Philosopher, looking for a First Cause? A 
 stern, inevitable, unconscious Energy from 
 which or whom all things proceed? A veiled 
 Tyrant, ready to slay, the remorseless Minister 
 of an iron law, that predestines and predeter- 
 mines and destroys and saves, without com- 
 passion and without regret, only to be solicited, 
 placated, propitiated, by an innocent Sufferer? 
 God be praised — He is none of these. There 
 is an answer, which reason never found and 
 Nature never gave. It has changed the world. 
 
 "Think Ahib, or dost thou think, 
 
 "The all great were the all loving, too. 
 
 "And through the thunder comes a human voice, 
 
 "Oh heart I made, a heart beats here, 
 
 "Oh Face I fashioned, see it in myself. 
 
 "Thou hast no power, nor canst conceive of mine, 
 
 "But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
 
 "And thou must love Me, who hast died for thee.* 
 
92 Christianity and Bdiication 
 
 And again: 
 
 "The acknowledgment of God in Christ accepted by thy 
 
 reason, 
 "Solves for thee all problems in the world and out of it 
 "And has so far advanced thee to be wise." 
 
 Brethren : I know who and what God is. You 
 know who and what God is. Man knows it, 
 feels it, understands it, responds to it, only in 
 Jesus Christ. "This is eternal life to know 
 Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom 
 Thou hast sent." 
 
 But when we know God, and not until then, 
 education becomes a real thing, a definite and 
 reasonable thing and therefore a scientific thing. 
 It touches the moral life. Because the highest, 
 noblest, manliest attribute of man is the sense 
 of duty. The testimony of education is unani- 
 mous in this, that the finest, supremest work of 
 education is the cultivation of the sense of duty. 
 And duty becomes real, intelligible, only in the 
 consciousness of God. For if the sense of duty 
 is the utilitarian regard for the most generally 
 received opinion, the being honest because it is 
 the best policy; or if duty is the obedience to 
 what the majority of men have come to regard 
 as the highest light within us — then it is a dim, 
 uncertain image, which soon will fade. But if 
 duty means the discharge of obligation, the 
 recognition of responsibility, to the one eternal 
 God and Father, by beings who themselves are 
 free, personal, moral, accountable, — then we 
 
Christianity and Bducation 93 
 
 stand on solid ground — we know who we are 
 and who He is, and the end, the purpose, the 
 meaning- of life and of education is clear. But 
 human nature is weak and stumbling; is erring, 
 sick and full of sin. Who does not know it? 
 The ideals are far off. These standards that 
 we dream of, these planes of high effort, these 
 wide and ample theories of education and pro- 
 gress, delight the mind, but we say they are 
 impracticable. We must fall back to the lower 
 level of average life and not hope in this genera- 
 tion, at least, to mount high. In fact, this is 
 the whole difficulty in talking about the soul and 
 its training. It is well enough, it is said, for 
 Poets and Preachers to write about it, and for 
 our hearts to respond to the pictures they repre- 
 sent ; but it is cold matter-of-fact experience that 
 human nature is not equal to it, not fit for it, and 
 is only tantalized by the suggestion of it. Ah. 
 my Brethren, do those who speak thus of educa- 
 tion, those who think so hopelessly — do they 
 know, or have they ever heard of the fact, the 
 great fact, the tremendous Christian fact, of the 
 Spirit of God — the power that is not ourselves, 
 to straighten out the tangled threads of human 
 doubt and faith, to kindle the smouldering 
 hopes, to brace and forge with hammer strokes 
 the moral sense, and make us men — men of 
 power, men of courage, men of confidence and 
 zeal for God and righteousness? 
 
 These then are my principles, my facts, upon 
 which I say the large, true view and theory of 
 
94 Christianity and Education 
 
 education rests: the fact of man's immortal 
 destiny, the fact of God in Christ, the fact of 
 the help and comfort of the Holy Spirit. "Other 
 foundation can no man lay than that is laid, 
 which is Jesus Christ." 
 
 I set out to show what was the highest, fairest 
 view of education, and I found that it was 
 Christian education. And so I do not believe in 
 Christian education, because it is Christian, or 
 because the Church has taught it, but because 
 I claim that after eighteen centuries of trial it 
 has been found, proved, demonstrated to be the 
 best, the largest, highest ideal of education the 
 world has ever seen. These three facts, which 
 are the foundations of our ideals of education, 
 apply to the least as to the greatest, to the mind 
 and even to the body as to the soul of man. 
 They apply to all the departments of human 
 development and knowledge; because they affect 
 man as man, whether he be a student, who is 
 impressed by the experiments of Chemistry, or 
 by the revelations of Geology, or by the wonders 
 of Astronomy, or by the laws of Language and 
 the masterpieces of literature. For man, as 
 man, independently of all that he does or 
 knows, or hopes to do and know, values and 
 appreciates what he is and is to be. And these 
 three facts that I have made and we have found 
 to be the very basis and vindication of the 
 higher view of education, what are they? 
 Why, they are the facts of the Church's Creed. 
 I believe in God the Father and the forgive- 
 
Christianity and Education 95 
 
 ness of sins. I believe in God the Son and 
 the Resurrection of the body. I beUeve in God 
 the Holy Ghost and the life everlasting. And 
 (applying these really and practically in human 
 life) I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. 
 That is the Apostles' Creed. What is this but 
 the illustration of the fact that Christianity has 
 survived the changes and chances of human his- 
 tory, not because it was handed down to us 
 by the fathers, but because it was true; and 
 that the Creed is held by the Church to-day 
 not because she received it and it is printed 
 in her Prayer Book, but because every gener- 
 ation of Christians have found by experience 
 and trial that it is the truth? "Other founda- 
 tion can no man lay than that is laid, which 
 is Jesus Christ." 
 
 As a matter of fact, the Christian ideal of 
 education has been accepted and endorsed by 
 the civilized world. The three facts that I 
 have claimed as Christian facts are to-day, in 
 one way or another, taken for granted in every 
 system of education that obtains among the 
 leading races of mankind. Even our Public 
 Schools, in which theoretically no religion is 
 permitted to be taught, are in the care of 
 teachers, who, as a class, have their minds per- 
 vaded by these principles, and who can never 
 touch a moral question in the school-room with- 
 out assuming, to some degree, the great facts 
 upon which our modern ideas of morality are 
 based. Literature and life are inseparable and 
 
96 Christianity and Education 
 
 imply each other; and literature in its greatest 
 form, is saturated with Christian truth. It is 
 too late then to argue the broad question of the 
 Christian character of all higher education. 
 Christian education is here; it has been tried 
 and has stood the test of time ; it was here when 
 you and I came into the world; it will be here 
 when we have turned to dust; and in it and 
 with it, as you and I know well, are bound up 
 the hopes for the generations that shall follow 
 us, the confidence that we feel in the perman- 
 ence of the institutions we have loved, and the 
 ideals we have cherished. 
 
 But what about the Church and education? 
 In a time when the fundamental Christian 
 thought has triumphed may we not do without 
 the Church, which in the public mind is asso- 
 ciated, not with these great broad principles 
 that we admit, but with technical dogmas, that 
 bristle, as it were, until we cannot see the wood 
 for the trees? In other words, may we not 
 say plainly that the Church has saved and 
 handed on, by toil and sacrifices, for eighteen 
 hundred years, these great and splendid truths, 
 and now, at last, has forfeited the right to call 
 them in any sense her own. 
 
 Well, I grant the misery and perversity of 
 that passion for doctrinal definition, which be- 
 gan with Rome in the year 12 15 and climaxed 
 in Calvin in the year 1560, which has split 
 Christendom into sects and diverted the atten- 
 tion of men from the essential truth and fixed 
 
Christianity and Education 97 
 
 it upon cant phrases and shibboleths. Yet I am 
 not here to fault or criticize my Christian 
 brethren of other names. As dear old Bram- 
 hall said, "It is charity to think well of our 
 neighbors and good divinity to look well to 
 ourselves." And we who still love and cherish 
 the traditions and institutions of the old Church 
 of the Elnglish-speaking- people have a past 
 history *'of Church and education," which 
 ought to be a promise and inspiration for the 
 future. From the day that Alcuin, a Saxon 
 Englishman, built up the Christian schools of 
 Charlemagne, and thereby founded the Uni- 
 versity system of Europe, to the day when 
 Arnold at Rugby declared that education meant 
 morality and morality meant religion; and by 
 his unequalled success as a teacher, created an 
 epoch in the history of modern education — 
 from first to last, from the middle ages to our 
 own time, the Church of the Anglo-Saxons 
 has been a teaching Church. The simplicity of 
 her baptismal creed, the sober dignity of her 
 worship, her quiet reverence and her free 
 spirit, have ever been friends of learning. 
 This was the inspiration of the noble-minded 
 man upon whose foundation this lecture is 
 delivered. This is the strong compulsion that 
 brings me here from Tennessee to speak on this 
 great theme. This, also, my brethren, is the 
 appeal and challenge to those of you, who are 
 Christian men, in this great University. Be 
 not afraid or ashamed of the history of the 
 
9^ Christianity and Bdncation 
 
 Church of Jesus Christ. Whatever the cynics 
 and enemies may allege of mistakes made and 
 wrongs done in times past by Christians who 
 were averse to progress, the fact, the tre- 
 mendous fact remains, that the faith, the 
 sacrifice, aye! the blood and suffering of the 
 Christian Church, were the price that was paid 
 for the breadth and freedom of modern schol- 
 arship. And you Christians have_your special 
 opportunity and obligation of service in a great 
 centre of learning like this. Pray God that 
 you may meet it, in thought and word and act, 
 with the courage and fidelity you owe to 
 Christ ; for it is in your power largely to see that 
 the tone and atmosphere of this place is the tone 
 and atmosphere of a Christian University; a 
 University where true liberty and true religion 
 may go hand in hand; where scholarship may 
 be broad and free, untrammelled by the denial 
 of man's high destiny in Christ; where 
 Christianity and Science may flourish to- 
 gether, unfettered by servile views of God and 
 human nature — and yet illuminated and 
 strengthened by the truth that justifies itself 
 through life; a University, finally, where virtue 
 shall enrich Faith, and knowledge shall learn 
 self-control; where refinement and gentleness 
 and courtesy — the appreciation of beauty in art 
 and literature and manners — shall be the ma- 
 ture fruit of patience and Charity and brotherly 
 kindness, in the atmosphere and rule of love 
 to God and man. 
 
Christianity and Education 99 
 
 My Brethren, this is an ideal worth living 
 for. To have it take hold of one man's mind, 
 to inspire and strengthen him, would com- 
 pensate for the labor and time involved in a 
 whole course of lectures like this. For any 
 of you to be able to feel, when Commencement 
 Day comes, that you have contributed some- 
 thing to the realization of such an ideal in this 
 University, will be your best reward then, and 
 the promise and prophecy of your joy and 
 peace forever. 
 
The Realizing of God. 
 
 "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit ? or whither shall 
 I flee from Thy presence?" — Psai^m cxxxix. :7. 
 
 "In Him we live and move and have our being." — 
 Acts xvii. :28. 
 
 Religion has had many definitions, but the 
 realization of religion is deeper and more per- 
 suasive than any of its definitions. The point 
 of view from which I would address you to- 
 night regards religion not as a philosophy but 
 as a relationship. Though the explanation of 
 religion may and commonly does take the form 
 of philosophy, yet the realization oi religion 
 is by a process more vital than any mode of 
 thought. Religion has to do with the relation- 
 ship between personal beings and a Supreme 
 Personal Being. If there is no God religion is 
 without legitimate paternity — it is but an un- 
 related thing of time — at best an utilitarian 
 morality. If God is not a personal Being, in- 
 telligent, just, loving, helpful, seeking and satis- 
 fying a relationship between Himself and men, 
 it is needless for us to take interest in religious 
 questions. If you and I were forms of matter 
 only, as the materialist would have us believe, we 
 should bear simply a necessary relationship to 
 Nature and its operations. But as living person- 
 
I02 The Realizing of God 
 
 alities, our real relationship is in and with that 
 Supreme Person of whom Nature is a manifes- 
 tation. The necessities of our personality keeps 
 demanding-, Is God my Creator? Is the Life 
 in me from His life? Is the limited intelli- 
 gence I have a true reflection, according to my 
 capacity, of His intelligence? Is the good I 
 would do of the same essential quality as His 
 goodness ? When I do wrong and cannot repair 
 it, may I rely yet on His sympathy? When I 
 strive to resist evil are there forces within and 
 around me girding my moral being for the 
 victory? When the world's seductions steal 
 away my senses may I yet recover the loss by 
 invoking against the movements of my flesh 
 an undercurrent of spiritual energy derived 
 from and reinforced by the divine Spirit? 
 When my body dies is there still for me a 
 recognition and a welcome from Him whom 
 I have sought to know and serve throughout 
 the course of my earthly existence? 
 
 Such questions concerning God and man's 
 relationship to Him, are as old and as new as 
 human experience; and never more vital or 
 hopeful than to-day. The answer to such ques- 
 tions is to be sought in the continually unfold- 
 ing experience of mankind, and for us to-day, 
 heirs of the thought and life of the ages, the 
 answer must still be made in the accumulated 
 light of the age in which we live. We are 
 living in a world of thought which has put on 
 the trim habit of science, in a world which tests 
 
The Realising of God ^^3 
 
 every theory, opinion, desire or hope of man 
 by the process of experiment. Philosophy has 
 come down from the clouds to build up in 
 human consciousness the consistent relation be- 
 tween Experience and Cause. In ethics men 
 are busy with what is in test of what ou^ht to 
 be. In psychology they begin the study of the 
 human soul by inspecting the movements of 
 the muscles of a frog's leg. Science is investi- 
 gating all things visible and invisible, material 
 and spiritual, by one and the same procedure. 
 It sweeps the heavens with its telescope to learn 
 the movements of the stars, and, if so be, tid- 
 ings of God; it dissects the human body in 
 search ior apt cures of disease, and it would 
 put itself in physical touch with spirits departed 
 from their bodies in order to demonstrate the 
 immortality of the soul. In religion, the centre 
 of authority, having passed from the Church to 
 the Bible, and again from the Bible to reason, 
 seems to-day triumphantly pressing reason to 
 submit itself to the primary power of faith and 
 the moral intuitions. We are then clearly in 
 an age of thought wherein religion, like every- 
 thing else that concerns human life, demands 
 scientific verification. I am speaking this 
 evening to some whose training in a great mod- 
 ern University forbids them from treating at 
 all with religion except in terms of life's ex- 
 perience. The thoughtful young man who 
 looks below the material surface of things to 
 discover the substance, the cohesion, the motive 
 
I04 The Realizing of God 
 
 and the purpose of his life, does not, cannot, 
 ought not to view religion or approach its 
 problems as his grandfather or even his father 
 did. For religion, as I said at the beginning, 
 is a relationship, and if it means anything at 
 all, it means everything to him as an individual 
 capable of being brought into such relationship. 
 It must grip his own thought, searching his 
 own nature through and through, set free his 
 own life's forces to claim his privileges and to 
 fulfill his duties as a living son of an ever- 
 living God. 
 
 In view of this modern demand upon re- 
 ligious thought, and in harmony, I trust, with 
 the present purpose of the Baldwin lectureship, 
 I ask you to consider afresh that primal idea 
 and fact of Religion, namely, God, and your 
 own realizable relationship to Him. And for 
 this I shall speak more as a preacher than a 
 philosophic lecturer. 
 
 You and I commonly take God too much as 
 a traditionally granted assumption, without put- 
 ting ourselves in living thought relations with 
 Him. In the background of consciousness we 
 let Him float vaguely while the more obvious 
 affairs of intellect or life claim our interest, un- 
 til suddenly from some sharp discipline we 
 awake to the fact that we have been living prac- 
 tically without God in our world. Seemingly 
 He has withdrawn from us or we have 
 dropped away from Him — which comes to the 
 same thing. We perhaps would justify our 
 
The Realizing of God 105 
 
 disregard of Him on the ground that the idea 
 of God, though the most sublime and the most 
 necessary, is intellectually the most elusive 
 conception with which the human mind can 
 have to do. But at once the answer comes 
 from history that men, whether with or against 
 their intellects, have ever clung to the idea of 
 God. Since the world began He has been the 
 fear and hope of the sinner, the aspiration and 
 joy of the saint, the confidence of the prophet, 
 the muse of the poet, the truth of the philoso- 
 pher. In all ages, human thought or fear or 
 hope has had some conception of His charac- 
 ter or power expressed in various symbols, 
 incantation and formulas, witnessing to the fact 
 that deep in the consciousness of humanity 
 there is one essential permanent idea, ever seek- 
 ing to make itself real — God, an idea so vast 
 as to comprehend all possible thought of Him, 
 yet so near and so adaptable to man's ex- 
 perience that every soul of whatever condition 
 has a necessary relation to Him, and under the 
 right conditions may become conscious of that 
 relationship. The child, looking up into the 
 overarching vault, sees the stars as "God's 
 eyes" smiling through the darkness at him ; the 
 savage marks the lightning as the flash of God's 
 anger, the pestilence as the blast of his hot dis- 
 pleasure, and the night wind through the pines 
 as his whisper of warning. To the philosopher 
 God is the Infinite Mind, or the Absolute; to 
 the Scientist, He is the Supreme Force, or the 
 
io6 The Realizing of God 
 
 Ultimate Reality; to the moralist, He is the 
 Power in man's conscience that makes for 
 righteousness; to the materialist God is eter- 
 nally Orphaned Nature; to the secularist He is 
 Collective Humanity, while g-enerally men can- 
 not experience a profound emotion without 
 seeming to realize the nearer Presence of the 
 Supreme Power to whom their joy may ren- 
 der praise and their pain fly for relief. 
 
 God is the universal Idea, the underlying 
 *•* and interpenetrating Reality; nevertheless man 
 
 has ever found Him indefinable and elusive. 
 "Canst thou by searching- find out God? 
 Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection ? 
 It is high as heaven. What canst thou do? 
 Deeper than the depth, what canst thou 
 know?" exclaims an early poet-philosopher, 
 blinded by human suffering which he cannot 
 but perceive comes with the knowledge and per- 
 mission of God. 
 
 "No man hath seen God at any time" is the 
 conviction even of the Christian evangelist, not- 
 withstanding he believed in and served God as 
 revealed by Jesus Christ. "O, the depth of the 
 riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of 
 God; how unsearchable are his judgments and 
 his ways past finding out," is the adoring ut- 
 terance of the Christian apostle while still 
 treading the way which Christ had opened to 
 him as leading to the Father. Clearly our 
 original Christianity, with all its wisdom and 
 power from God in the person of Jesus, left 
 
The Realizing of God io7 
 
 much hidden mystery within the Bein^ of God 
 and much of our conscious relations to Him to 
 be worked out through the developing ex- 
 perience of humanity. Later the doo:matic 
 scholars of the fourth and fifth ecclesiastical 
 Councils confidently claimed to encompass and 
 define God in their formulated Creeds, but He 
 would not be confined within them; for, break- 
 ing through He still submitted Himself to 
 manifold heresies and mysticisms by which 
 minds eag"er, curious, passionate, tried still to 
 elucidate or realize Him. In the Middle Ages 
 God was conspicuously elevated upon the 
 Throne of Majesty, the avenue to which was 
 lined by innumerable intermediaries, and from 
 which diverged two ways, one for the faithful 
 Churchmen into the golden fields of paradise, 
 the other for the impenitent sinner into the pit 
 of endless despair. In the eighteenth century 
 God was conceived to be the original Architect 
 of the universe, who, from the beginning hav- 
 ing completed His work, left it to its own 
 natural devices, save for His occasional inter- 
 positions by way of special providences. In the 
 nineteenth century men in pursuit of scientific 
 verification divested God of His personality 
 and devised for His name the algebraic symbol 
 X — -The Unknown ; while still among emotional 
 Christian revivalists He is vividly expressed in 
 terms which confuse His attributes with those 
 of an implacable devil. 
 
io8 The Realizing of God 
 
 Varyinj»- conceptions of God! What are 
 they but human si^ns of His indefinableness ? 
 Or manifold voices of men crying out in the 
 darkness after God, some faintly, others pas- 
 sionately, some with no constraint of reason or 
 humility, others with the pretentious pride of 
 intellect, each reflecting- some fragment or 
 fringe, yet all alike falling short, of the im- 
 mensity and manifoldness of the Eternal 
 Reality called God. 
 
 There is one conception of GKDd which dur- 
 ing the closing years of the nineteenth century 
 has been recovered, and illumiated by eminent 
 theologians, philosophers, scientists and poets, 
 which must be, I think, the greatest possible 
 help to those who would serve God with heart 
 and will as well as with the understanding. 
 You are undoubtedly familiar with what is 
 commonly called the Immanence of God, or 
 the universal indwelling of the Divine Presence 
 and Power in nature through its laws and in 
 man through all his experiences. If you were 
 disposed to study this recovered conception you 
 may do so at some length in Prof. A. V. Allen's 
 excellent history, "The Continuity of Christian 
 Thought," or more briefly in the admirable 
 menographs of John Fiske, "The Idea of God," 
 and "Through Nature to God," wherein the 
 contrasted and intermerging truths of God as 
 transcendent and God as immanent are brought 
 out with exceeding skill and graphicness. 
 Should you wish to trace it back to its source 
 
The Realizing of God ^^9 
 
 in philosophy, you will study the ^reat Jewish 
 thinker, Spinoza, out of whose profound but 
 questionable pantheism you may extract some 
 essential elements in the modern thought of 
 God. If Spinoza may prove too elaborate or 
 confusing, read Emerson's two essays, "Na- 
 ture" and "The Oversoul." If you would find 
 the subject gathered up, variously illustrated 
 and driven home, you cannot do better than 
 read a comparatively late book by Dr. Gordon 
 — "A New Epoch of Faith." If you would 
 turn to poetry, and you should cultivate the 
 best poetry if you would sound the deepest 
 depths and freest flight of man's touch with 
 God, you will find wisdom and beauty concern- 
 ing the divine immanence in Wordsworth, 
 Tennyson and Browning; also much along this 
 line suggestive and helpful in a lately published 
 book of Bishop Carpenter's, "The Religious 
 Spirit in the Poets." 
 
 What do these thinkers mean by the Im- 
 manence of God? They mean what the He- 
 brew patriarch meant when he said : 
 
 "Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall 
 I go from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven, 
 Thou art there. If I go down to Sheol, Thou art there 
 also. If I take the wings of the morning and remain in 
 the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy 
 hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me." 
 
 They mean what the Lord Christ meant when 
 He said : 
 
no The Realising of God 
 
 "God is Spirit;" "My Father worketh hitherto and I 
 work;" "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on 
 the good." 
 
 They mean what St. Paul meant, when he 
 wrote : 
 
 "In Him we live and move and have our being." 
 
 They mean what Wordsworth meant when 
 he spoke of what he inwardly felt — 
 
 "The sense sublime 
 "Of something far more deeply interfused." 
 
 They mean what Herbert Spencer had in mind 
 when tracing natural phenomena back to their 
 ultimate source he declared the "Presence of an 
 infinite and eternal energ-y from which all things 
 proceed." 
 
 They mean what Tennyson meant as he 
 sang: 
 
 "Speak to Him then, for He hears, and spirit with spirit 
 
 can meet, 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands 
 
 and feet." 
 
 And again : 
 
 *'Only that which made us meant us to be mightier by 
 
 and by, 
 Set the sphere of all the boundless heaven within the 
 
 human eye. 
 Set the shadow of Himself, the boundless, through the 
 
 human soul, 
 Boundless inward in the atom, boundless outward in 
 
 the whole." 
 
The Realizing^ of God 
 
 III 
 
 They mean what John Fiske meant as, draw- 
 ing from the teachings of the great Greek 
 Church Fathers, Clement, O'rigen and Athana- 
 sius, he wrote : "They regarded deity as imma- 
 nent in the universe, and eternally operating 
 through natural laws. In their view God is not 
 a localized personality, remote from the world 
 and acting upon it only by means of occasional 
 portent and prodigy ! Nor is the world a lifeless 
 machine, blindly working after some preordained 
 method and only feeling the presence of God in 
 so far as he now and then sees fit to interfere 
 with its normal course of procedure. O'n the 
 contrary, God is the ever present life of the 
 world; it is through Him that all things exist 
 from moment to moment, and the natural se- 
 quence of events is a perpetual revelation of the 
 divine wisdom and goodness."* 
 
 I have called this doctrine of the Immanence 
 of God a recovered doctrine. It is not new but 
 old, as we might know by the quotations from 
 the Hebrew psalmist and St. Paul, and from the 
 references to the early Fathers of the Greek 
 Church. It is the profound conception that all 
 men have had and must have who really feel God 
 in their inner life, and reflect up His necessary 
 relation to the universe and the onward course of 
 human society. Hebrews, Christians, ancient 
 and modern, have held this conception' of deity 
 more or less clearly, and it was fundamentally 
 involved in the Church's doctrine of the Holy 
 Spirit ; but it was largely lost or overcome under 
 
 "The Idea of God," pp. 82, 83. 
 
112 The Realizing^ of God 
 
 the formal teaching of the Latin Fathers, the 
 crass externaHsm of the middle ages, and the 
 mechanical rationalism of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. The philosophers, theistic scientists, 
 poets and theologians of the nineteenth century, 
 informed, as we may believe, by the Spirit of 
 Truth, have recovered the lost doctrine and pro- 
 foundly quickened our religious faith, hope and 
 service by this truly scientific conception of God 
 and of man's ethically realizable relation to 
 Him. 
 
 The doctrine is no device for defining the In- 
 finite being of God. It cannot pretend any more 
 than other doctrines to comprehend Him, as 
 though God, the infinite Life, could be encom- 
 passed by verbal formulas. But the doctrine 
 does serve to set free within our minds an ani- 
 mating view-point from which to overcome the 
 hard mechanical notions respecting Him and 
 His work in nature, in history and in the per- 
 sonal lives of men. It serves to take God out 
 of that enforced remoteness to which a formal- 
 ized theology had driven Him and even out of 
 that inaccessible nescience to which a material- 
 ized science would consign him. 
 
 It brings Him into our practical thought, it 
 connects Him with our common life and experi- 
 ence. It does away with the sharp distinction be- 
 tween nature and the supernatural, as it com- 
 prehends all things visible and invisible within 
 the underlving unity of His life and will. It 
 sweeps away all so-called miracles by giving us 
 to see Him working in every simplest movement 
 
The Realmn^ of God 1 13 
 
 of our common life, and explaining the seem- 
 ingly miraculous by referring us to a deeper un- 
 derstanding of His works. 
 
 Moreover, the idea of God's immanence deep- 
 ens and expands our view of divine inspiration 
 as something working with no less reality, power 
 and fruitfulness than in the olden times. God 
 spoke from Mt. Sinai, but He did not then cease 
 to speak. He spoke through Christ on the 
 Mount of Beatitude and on Calvary most pro- 
 foundly and winningly, but He did not then 
 cease to speak, for He speaks to-day in every dis- 
 covery of science, through every just and equal 
 law established in our courts, in every work of 
 art that educates a genuine love of the beautiful, 
 by all the deeds of brave men and patient women 
 and through the appeals of innocent, trustful 
 children or of any suffering cause of humanity. 
 
 God, we say, inspired the Bible in varying 
 degrees, as holy men of old, moved by the Holy 
 Spirit, spake in promise, in rebuke, in warning; 
 yet, not less really and sometimes now with 
 even greater practical effect God inspires truly 
 gifted writers of modern books which in the lan- 
 guage of our times and with regard to our 
 present-day experiences and needs help us to 
 serious thinking, pure feeling and heroic moral 
 action. 
 
 In a word, the doctrine of the divine imma- 
 nence deepens and quickens and enlarges within 
 us the convicting, consoling, uplifting sense of an 
 everliving God who is in the world now as ever, 
 
114 The Realizing of God 
 
 and more fully now than ever because of man's 
 larger knowledge and wider experience. All 
 times have been and are in His hand, and the 
 everlasting arms of His purpose have never been 
 withdrawn from the universe or the life of man. 
 He is ever with His world, because the world is 
 His, every part and parcel. Snow-clad moun- 
 tain and fertile valley, grassy plain and arid 
 desert, gentle brook and heaving ocean, 
 golden sunshine and dreadful thunderbolt, 
 peaceful village and bursting volcano, flower 
 and weed, blossom and mildew, plenty 
 and famine, medicine and poison, fine gold and 
 common clay — all are Thine, O Lord, for Thou 
 hast created all things ; for Thy pleasure and for 
 Thy purpose they existed and were created ; and 
 all lower things that in Thee and through Thee 
 they may become higher or reveal Thee in ever 
 higher or closer relationship. 
 
 And God is with us men of the twentieth cen- 
 tury, with us as He was ever of old, though 
 everywhere about our strangely developing civ- 
 ilization He makes deeper and finer marks of 
 His presence. He is with us in all things, 
 whether positive good or seeming evil, in sin 
 and in repentance, in the insight of the stimu- 
 lated conscience, in the sob of the contrite heart, 
 in the fear of the coward spirit, in the inter- 
 mingling pain and joy of the crucified flesh. He 
 is with us in the orderly worship of the glorious 
 cathedral, in the unassuming piety of the little 
 meeting-house, and in the revival of men's bodies 
 
The Realizing of God "5 
 
 and brains, amid the primal vitalities of the 
 meadows, the mountains and the ocean. He 
 dwells in the mansions of the rich and in the 
 cottages of the poor, and in the hovels of the 
 outcasts. He educates in our universities, in our 
 schools and in the experiences of daily life. He 
 legislates in our congress. He goes forth in our 
 wars, He visits our jails, our hospitals, and our 
 places of amusement. He weeps with us, laughs 
 with us, prays with us, dies with us and rises to 
 life with us. If in veiled presence He was in the 
 atrocities of the massacre at Kishineff. He is at 
 once unveiled in the moral indignation and 
 charity of Christendom which rebukes and re- 
 pairs that unspeakable outrage. 
 
 Whither shall you and I, then, go from His 
 Spirit or whither shall we go from his presence? 
 Nowhere. He is everywhere around and in us. 
 His life pulses in our veins. His thoughts are in 
 our thoughts; by His laws we are girt about 
 through every throb of our hearts, every stir of 
 conscience, every motion of will, every deed done 
 or left undone, in every death we lament, and 
 in every life we cherish. We are personal beings 
 because He is a personal being; we are ethical 
 beings because He is ethical. We are His chil- 
 dren because He is our Father who has mind, 
 desire, law and discipline for our highest good. 
 
 Since this is so what is our part to perform? 
 It is to make a permanent decision for God, the 
 personal Divine Life, as against the material 
 world which God alone can use and administer 
 
ii6 The Realizing of God 
 
 to our higher life ; it is, by the very power with 
 which He has endowed us, to decide for Him as 
 against a loveless universe and a disintegrating 
 nature. 
 
 What is the straight course for our feet? 
 There it lies, beginning at our inner moral sense 
 and stretching indefinitely on through light and 
 shade, through good and evil, to the recognition 
 and realization of Nature's God. Along every 
 step of this way, the God within us bids us to 
 reverence every revelation and to obey every law 
 which He has made and continues to make for 
 our growth in wisdom and the permanent secur- 
 ity of our life force. Along every step of the 
 way our evident duty is to refuse the evil and 
 choose the good, for God is in the evil to teach 
 us to shun and renounce it, as He is in the 
 good to make us delight in it more and more. 
 
 Yes, our part is ever more to cooperate with 
 God in adjusting His laws within us to what- 
 ever other laws of His, wherever and however 
 they operate, which tend to keep us in living re- 
 lations and in an unbroken unity of moral pur- 
 pose with Him. 
 
 Yet, after all this has been said of God's Im- 
 manence and of our relationship to Him, 
 wrought out into realization through experience, 
 there surely remains a definite word for a Chris- 
 tian to say to those who, like my hearers, are 
 heirs of the Christian faith and experience of 
 nineteen hundred years. Jesus Christ! He 
 lived. He still lives. His experience of God, 
 
The Realizing of God 1^7 
 
 His realization of God's personal character and 
 will was and remains an ineradicable fact in the 
 life of humanity. His religion of the Incarna- 
 tion and of the cross and of the riven tomb, 
 having met the conflicts of nineteen centuries, has 
 entered this twentieth century without loss of 
 vital substance and with unimpaired confidence. 
 By the test of the ages that religion in essential 
 definition has proved itself to be no transient 
 phenomenon, but a revelation of God's eternal 
 truth set within historically changing forms. 
 
 In the midst of the titanic material aggressive- 
 ness of our times, men still look with assurance 
 to the name of Jesus Christ for internal power 
 to free them from the restrictions of their ex- 
 ternal environment. To Him dwelling by faith 
 and service within their consciences men still 
 go for the quickening and security of their real- 
 ization of God's paternity and of their own 
 actual or possible relationship to an eternal life. 
 
 In their ethical relations and efforts, men still 
 justify the familiar admonition of John Stuart 
 Mill : "Live so that Jesus Christ would approve 
 your life." 
 
 Such a religion in the deepest sense of the term 
 is scientific. It was verified in His life. It veri- 
 fies itself still in those who know and serve Him. 
 Since He lived that religion the idea of God's 
 immanence has been no theory but a truth of 
 increasing assurance of demonstration. From 
 his life in God, as from no one other in human 
 flesh, the world has learned to think with rev- 
 
ii8 The Realizing, of God 
 
 erent familiarity of God as the Father. In his 
 character they have experienced the inspiring 
 vitality and affection of the Father's will. 
 
 Would you leave Jesus Christ out of your 
 confident approach to God ? Nay, to leave Him 
 out would be as though you should leave out the 
 physical sun of the material heaven in your ef- 
 fort to get light and heat for the common ac- 
 tivities of your bodily life. 
 
 Hear Him say : "I and The Father are one." 
 "He that hath seen me, hath seen The Father." 
 '* Whosoever willeth to do God's will shall know 
 the doctrine of God." 
 
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