"V
 
 . 

 
 NATURE AND LIFE: 
 
 SERMONS 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT COLLYER, 
 
 PASTOR OF UNIT! CHURCH, CHICAGO. 
 
 KIGHTH KPITION. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 HORACE B. FULLER. 
 
 SUCCESSOR TO WALKER. FULLER, & Co., WASHINGTON STREET. 
 CHICAGO : JOHN R. WALSH. 
 
 J868.
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 
 
 HORACE B. FULLER, 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: 
 
 STEREOTYPED AND PRIKTED BY 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON.
 
 TO 
 
 NAHOR AUGUSTUS STAPLES, 
 
 NOW IN HEAVEN, 
 tlfjtg 3300ft 
 
 IS DEDICATED AS A TOKEN OF 
 UNDYING LOVB.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 
 
 I LET this little book go out into the world, 
 feeling almost as if it were one of my children. 
 I cannot be indifferent to its reception, because I 
 love it. So I trust it will be welcome wherever 
 it goes, that friends will be glad to see it for 
 my sake, and strangers for its own. If it should 
 be blessed with a long life, I shall rejoice greatly ; 
 but, if it die early, f l shall still be glad it was 
 born. 
 
 R. C. 
 
 MAT 20,1867.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 I. ROOT AND FLOWER 1 
 
 II. WHAT A LEAF SAID 23 
 
 III. THE TREASURES OF THE SNOW 43 
 
 IV. LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY 61 
 
 V. THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON 83 
 
 VI. FAITH 102 
 
 VII. HOPE 119 
 
 VIII. LOVE 139 
 
 IX. ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS 161 
 
 X. THE FEAR OF GOD 178 
 
 XI. A TALK TO MOTHERS 198 
 
 XII. HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS 216 
 
 XIII. THE HITHER SIDE 236 
 
 XIV. THE BOOK OF PSALMS 256 
 
 XV. THE BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON 274 
 
 XVI. OMEGA , . 296
 
 SERMONS. 
 
 I. 
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 JOHN xii. 20-25 : " And there were certain Greeks among them that 
 came up to worship at the feast. The same came therefore to 
 Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, say- 
 ing, Sir, we would see Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: 
 and again, Andrew and Philip tell Jesus. And Jesus answered 
 them, saying, The hour is come that the Son of man should be 
 glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat 
 fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but, if it die, it 
 bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it, 
 and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life 
 eternal." 
 
 I WENT once, in the last days of June, to see an 
 old friend in the country, who has consecrated 
 his life to trees and flowers. When I came away, 
 he gave me something wrapped in a piece of 
 paper, bidding me select the best spot in my gar- 
 den, when I got home, and plant it. " For," he 
 added, " that is a very choice flower, sir, one 
 of the most beautiful things you ever saw in your 
 1
 
 2 EOOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 life." I left my friend, and started home ; and, 
 when I had got well out of his sight, )f course 
 I undid the paper, that I might look at my trea- 
 sure. It was as queer, unpromising a thing to 
 look at, as I ever saw. At the first glance, you 
 would take it for a poor, haggard old onion. 
 There was not a speck of beauty about it, that 
 I should desire it. Then I put my flower back 
 into the paper, brought it home, and planted it 
 just as I was directed ; and when I had done this, 
 I began to ponder and wonder over this great 
 mystery of planting and growing and flowering. 
 I said to myself, "What are my conceptions 
 of what is to come out of my dark, forbidding 
 bulb ? I never saw the flower, I suppose, in my 
 life. I have no certain idea what it is like. It 
 may resemble a sunflower or a peony or a daisy 
 or a bluebell. If I carry a single tooth pried out 
 of the limestone to Professor Owen, he will sketch 
 me an outline of the animal that used it, though 
 this be the first fragment ever seen of a thing 
 that died out ten thousand years before the first 
 man. But I may carry a fragment of this root 
 to the Owen of plants, if there be one, and 
 ask him to search in it for the flower; and I
 
 BOOT AND FLOWER. 3 
 
 suppose he must fail to tell me what it will be, 
 because there seems to be no possible link be- 
 tween the bare grain and the body as it pleases 
 God. And then this choicest spot in the garden. 
 what did my friend mean by that ? If I under- 
 stand him, he meant a place of the strongest pos- 
 sible contrasts, a place bare to the sun and 
 the night and the wind and the rain ; where I 
 had gathered the heaviest proportion of shard, 
 refuse, and decay ; a place where life has to do 
 battle with darkness and death, and to draw from 
 them its richest elements of beauty and perfume. 
 And then what have I done ? My friend gave me 
 this flower, as he called it, folded carefully as if it 
 were a jewel of price ; and, carefully as he gave 
 it, I brought it home. But, when I got home, I 
 put it down into this grim earth, this fragment of 
 the measureless waste of land, and left it there. 
 Had 1 not better keep it in some safe casket, or 
 fold it to my heart, until I see the beauty that 
 my friend has promised ? Is it possible, is it 
 ind.spensable in that will of God which I have 
 been taught to call the order of nature, that the 
 only way to come at the beauty and glory is that 
 it shall be put away and buried out of my sight ?
 
 4 ROOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 Can it be true, that the way to find what I want 
 is to lose it ; that the transcendent form and color 
 and perfume of August must depend upon the 
 decay of June ? " 
 
 Well, friends, these are some of the hinted 
 questionings that whispered themselves out of 
 my poor dry root, and I could give them but 
 one answer ; namely, " These seeming contra- 
 dictions are only so because I do not know 
 enough. And I can only know as I walk by 
 faith ; for faith, above all things, makes the dis- 
 cords of the present the harmonies of the future." 
 
 It is one of the many curious things that look 
 out at us from almost every page of the Gospels, 
 to assure us that the Gospels themselves are sub- 
 stantially fragments out of the real life and times 
 of Jesus Christ, that these men, who had come 
 to the feast at Jerusalem and requested to see 
 Jesus, should be Greeks, at that time probably 
 the most inquisitive and newsy race on the earth. 
 They had come, I presume, from Corinth or Eph- 
 esus ; and, when they went back home, the first 
 question would be, " What's the news ? " Now, 
 the news was Jesus ; his name and fame had gone 
 out into all Jewry. He was just then the com-
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 5 
 
 moil subject of discussion in the city gates and 
 synagogues ; and it would be a great thing for 
 them, when they got back home, to say, " We 
 have seen Jesus, and talked with him." And the 
 answer of Christ to their request, though it seems 
 at the first glance to be no answer at all, touches 
 the very heart of all such question and answer, 
 and is, beside that, a beautiful instance of the 
 rich, transcendental nature of this Son of God : 
 " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and 
 die, it abideth alone ; but, if it die, it bringeth 
 forth much fruit." As if he would say, " These 
 men want to see me. What can they gain by 
 that? There is nothing to see in me. If they 
 want to see me, they must wait until I go away, 
 and the world sees me no more. What they will 
 see is not me. The root is not the flower. This 
 common, foot-sore man, with this poor, brown 
 face, so thin and worn that men think I may 
 be nearly fifty, while I am still but thirty, what 
 can I be to men whose ideal is Apollo ? I can- 
 not sing with Homer ; I cannot speculate with 
 Plato ; I cannot unloose the seals with Euclid, or 
 bear men on the mighty tides of eloquence with 
 Demosthenes. Phidias made the marble speak ;
 
 6 ROOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 Apelles made the canvas glow ; I made ploughs 
 and carts and ox-yokes and stools. They cannot 
 see me. My simple words about God and man, 
 and duty and destiny, would be foolishness to 
 them. Let them wait until the world burns with 
 the lustre of what is sprung out of me. When I 
 have risen and stand with the martyr in the fire ; 
 when I shine in the catacombs until there is no 
 need of the sun; when I have whispered my 
 comfort and confidence to millions of desolate 
 souls, who are now, and will be looking at what 
 seems to them the fearful vacancy of the here- 
 after ; when I have created new homes for purity 
 and peace to dwell in, and brought men and 
 women and children back to the Divine will ; 
 when the love and truth and self-sacrifice of which 
 God has made me, though I seem but a poor 
 peasant, shall have done what all the genius of all 
 the ages has failed to do ; when I have hushed 
 the fevered heart of the world to rest, and quick- 
 ened it into a new life, then they can see me. 
 But I must die to live. The burial comes, then 
 the resurrection. I must be absent as a root, 
 or I can never be present as a flower." 
 
 Such, as I understand it, is the meaning folded,
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 7 
 
 not only in my text, but also in the richest life of 
 the world. Just as this most celestial soul was 
 folded in a life about which there is a very early 
 application of those old prophecies of some chosen 
 one who should be as a root out of a dry ground, 
 whose face should be marred more than that Of 
 any man, who should have no form nor comeli- 
 ness in him, so that, when men saw him, there 
 should be no beauty that they should desire him ; 
 and as God cast him, so folded, into the place 
 which, of all others at that time, held the heavi- 
 est proportion of shard and refuse hastening to 
 decay, cast him into that place as the choicest 
 spot in the garden of the world, and then, by 
 sunlight and darkness and dryness and ram 
 and life and death, wrought out his purpose, 
 until the flower came up, in the full time, to fill 
 the world with wonder and blessing, so it will 
 be with God's best blossom and fruit for ever and 
 ever. 
 
 The world bends with infinite tenderness over 
 the story of that woman who had no beauty and 
 no blessing, out on the Yorkshire moors. We 
 pity her for the dismal, scranny school of her 
 childhood, where food for the outer and the inner
 
 8 BOOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 life was alike hard and crusty and mouldy. We 
 pity her for the lonely drudgery, so hapless and 
 so hopeless, out in Brussels, as we see her sit 
 down to it, while her wings bleed beating the 
 bars of her cage, and the music soars within 
 her, 
 
 " And the life still drags her downward 
 
 To its level, day by day, 
 
 What is fine within her growing 
 
 Coarse to sympathetic clay." 
 
 Our lips tremble as we see that striving after 
 *ome touch of grace and beauty to deck the hard, 
 gray home, though it embody itself in no better 
 thing than a bright little frock and a pair of tiny 
 red shoes ; yet to see the poor blossom of grace 
 and beauty shrivelling in the fire, put there and 
 held there by a father harder than the home. 
 We watch her, a woman while yet a child, 
 a woman, because other little children, still 
 more helpless, are motherless, and can find no 
 other nature large enough to take them in and 
 .inderstand and adopt them ; a sister in all sweet, 
 ingenuous, simple ways ; a mother in all wise, 
 overbending care and love ; and then, at last, a 
 woman grown, walking over great stretches of 
 wild country, that she might be alone with that
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 9 
 
 other Father and Mother, the Father and Mother 
 of us all, and gather strength and courage from 
 the communion, to go back and bear her burden 
 of a stern, half-mad father, and a reckless, lost 
 brother, and a bare, rugged life; then we say, 
 " Oh ! why was not such a soul clothed in the 
 beauty of Juno, and born in the vale of Tempe, 
 in the golden days, the first-born and nurs- 
 ling of a queen ? " But we say this no longer 
 when the flower unfolds to the sun, when her 
 books and her life, in all their variant strength 
 and fulness, reveal the mystery of the homely 
 enfolding, the rank, sharp contrasts of the 
 garden-plat and the hot days and dark nights ; 
 for we see in the flower brimming with refresh- 
 ment and blessing to thousands, how not to the 
 beauty of the goddess, not to the flowery mead- 
 ows and bosky dells of Arcadia, not to the first- 
 born and nursling of a queen, could this power 
 come ; but to such a soul, set in such a place, to 
 battle through and gather all the influences of 
 such a life. 
 
 And so, again, dear, quaint, loving Charles 
 Lamb flowered out of the sharp contrasts of Fleet 
 Street and the South-sea House, and that other 
 l*
 
 10 ROOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 influence and element of bitterness almost too 
 terrible to mention. No man who has been 
 touched by the sweet beauty and merry twinkling 
 humor of Elia and the Letters, can realize readily 
 how it is that this airy, sprightly, and most wise, 
 genial soul, could ever gather such nurture in the 
 shadows of Christ's Hospital, and the eternal 
 dust and din of London. One imagines that the 
 endless drudgery of the desk, and the shadow 
 of a home where no face of wife or child ever 
 lighted at the sound of his footstep, ought to 
 have withered him up; and so it ought, but 
 for one thing that flashes down into the mystery, 
 and, besides the fact of his endowment, solves 
 the problem. When Charles Lamb was a young 
 man, standing at the portals of life, with that 
 rich nature beating in his heart, his sister Mary, 
 in a sudden passion of insanity, did the most 
 awful deed that daughter can do to mother. 
 Then, when the dust was given to the dust, this 
 young man said, " If I remain as I am, and make 
 my sister a home, there may be months or years 
 at a time when she can live with me in freedom 
 and comfort; but, if I put her away, there can 
 be no future for her but the asylum all the
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 11 
 
 days of her life." Then the young man buried 
 his rich nature in the soil of that home. And, in 
 all his life, he never told the world what he had 
 done ; revealing himself so frankly in all beside, 
 there is no hint of that prime revelation which 
 might open all the rest. He buried his life. And, 
 were we ignorant of this great law of what is rich 
 soil to a noble root, we would say, Now he will 
 wither away and die. But, lo ! God brings out 
 of that burial a flower, whose perfume and beauty 
 charm the world. Had he saved his life, it may 
 be he had lost it ; but, because he gave it, he 
 saved it ; because he went into the darkness, he 
 sprang into the light; he rose because he was 
 buried, and his uttermost loss became his most 
 transcendent gain. 
 
 There is nothing more touching to me in 
 all literature, than those poems and letters of 
 Burns that reveal to us this great fact of ad- 
 verse influences perfecting the Divine purpose. 
 We hear eminent critics deplore the fact that 
 Burns wasted his powers. They say he ought 
 to have written an epic. Friends, Burns did 
 write an epic ; and the subject was the battle 
 of a soul with its physical, social, and spiritual
 
 12 BOOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 adveraaries, an epic perhaps the most signifi- 
 cant that ever was written. And his whole life, 
 and every line in his poems, blend together to 
 make it ; and it trembles all over with this truth 
 of a life found in the losing, and lost in the find- 
 ing. Born in the worst period and place of 
 a fossilized Calvinism, he drew from that very 
 fossil the richest nurture for a broad and catholic 
 trust in the Infinite Love. Placed where a free 
 expression of opinion in religious speculation was 
 counted atheism, and in politics treason, the very 
 bonds that were laid on his soul to keep him down, 
 quickened him into some of the deepest and grand- 
 est utterances for freedom that ever rang through 
 the world. Taught from his cradle that our human 
 mature is utterly abhorrent and bad, the angels 
 trust not each other with a more perfect trust 
 than that which filled his soul toward humanity. 
 Loving as few men ever loved, fewer ever told, 
 as he did, what love can do to lift a man near to 
 heaven, or to sink him into a great deep. No man 
 ever painted such an interior as the u Cotter's 
 Saturday Night," or by implication called such 
 solemn penalties upon his own soul for causing 
 the mother to weep, and the father to haiig his
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 13 
 
 head in such a place. And out of that bitter 
 time and place, with that passionate, sinful, Sor- 
 rowful nature, the result of the life, in the whole 
 breadth of it, remains one of the richest flowers 
 that ever blossomed on the- world. A Scot- 
 tish peasant, deplorably poor, he left the world 
 richer beyond all price. Born into the lap of 
 a grim and forbidding time, the time was glo- 
 rified in his birth. More selfish than most sin- 
 ners, he was more unselfish than almost any 
 saint. And well he might have cried out, " Let 
 no man look at me who wants to see me, or 
 try to find the result of my life by the measure 
 of what he sees. I shall die, broken down by 
 poverty and sorrow and sin ; but I shall rise 
 again, and lead captivity captive, and receive gifts 
 for men. Old sectarian antagonisms will forget 
 to be hard and unmerciful, as they hear me plead- 
 ing ; and the fires of a nobler political faith 
 glow for ever in the words I have uttered of the 
 rights of man. Men shall look more frankly 
 into each other's faces, when they hear me cry. 
 * A man's a man for a' that ; ' and the atheist 
 gulp down his sneer, as he ponders over my 
 rebuke. My better nature shall make good men
 
 14 EOOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 better ; my wild cries for pardon teach the sin 
 ner afresh the curse of sin. My life was lost, 
 that it might be found; I died that I might bear 
 much fruit." 
 
 Now, I have mentioned these representative 
 lives, bearing on different sides of the thought 
 before us, in order that you may see, by these 
 examples, how I want to urge upon you the fact, 
 that this clear and steady insight into the corre- 
 spondence between nature in the plant and nature 
 in the man, which comes out so constantly in 
 the teachings of Christ, is weighted with a deep 
 meaning, and is for ever open to suggest rich 
 lessons for the soul. 
 
 And this first of all, that this present, per- 
 sonal-bounded life is but faintly understood, it is 
 so poor in comparison with what shall come out 
 of it, if we are steady to its great central purpose. 
 
 My shrivelled bulb, darkling there under the 
 soil ; this homely, near-sighted woman, sneering 
 at the " Methodies ; " this poor, stuttering London 
 clerk, watching his sometimes insane sister ; this 
 Ayrshire peasant, whose highest preferment was 
 to be a gauger, and whose heart exulted because 
 he had "dinnered wi' a lord," a lord whose
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 15 
 
 only hope of being remembered now on this earth 
 lies in that single dinner ; this peasant man of 
 Galilee, whose brothers did not believe in him, 
 all these instances strike the truth home, that we 
 see but a poor hint now of the glory resting on 
 our life, to be discovered when that life shall be 
 made perfect. 
 
 That man walking over the hills of Jewry in 
 the^ old time was no more like our worshipful 
 Christ and Son of God, if you had seen him, than 
 the May root is like the August flower. That 
 quiet woman, before she wrote " Jane Eyre," was 
 no more to the world than the woman hidden 
 to-day in our prairies or backwoods, who shall 
 yet reveal herself and be central to the world. 
 Charles Lamb and Robert Burns, could they 
 come back, would find nations waiting to do 
 them homage, on the very spot where they felt 
 most deeply the bitterness of neglect. And 
 this, not so much because the world was blind 
 to their beauty, as that this beauty had not yet 
 flowered out. They died, " not having received 
 the promise, but seeing it afar off; God having 
 reserved some better thing for us, that they with- 
 out us should not be made perfect."
 
 16 ROOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 Then there is this lesson, that those very 
 elements of decay and death we fear will hin- 
 der, to the true soul will not hinder, but help ; 
 nay, be vital and essential to the great pur- 
 pose for which that soul came, and to which it 
 tends. 
 
 I know of nothing more fatal, in all outward 
 seeming, than Jewry to Christ, and Ayrshire to 
 Burns, and Fleet Street to Lamb, and Haworth to 
 Charlotte Bronte". If God, in every one of these 
 instances, had revealed to me the conditional as 
 the root of the resulting life, I think I should 
 have besought him every time to alter the decis- 
 ion, and not plant such holy and noble natures in 
 such a dismal soil ; while the place I should have 
 chosen, had it been left to me, would probably be 
 as if I had kept the root my friend gave me safely 
 locked in my desk, never thinking how it is out 
 of the very contest with these antagonisms, that 
 the choicest power and grace must spring: as 
 the farce of saying mass by the scented priests 
 in Rome made Luther say it with a deeper 
 reverence, and more anxious searching for its 
 grace. But, above all, may we not see this 
 greatest lesson, that more profit comes to the
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 17 
 
 soul, and all related to it, out of separation and 
 darkness and death, in God's good time, than can 
 ever come out of union and light and life ? " Ex- 
 cept a corn of wheat fair into the ground and die, 
 it abideth alone ; but, if it die, it will bring forth 
 much fruit." 
 
 I suppose no men that ever lived would be 
 more ready than these apostles to say, " We grant 
 this, if you mean a grain of wheat ; but we can- 
 not see it, if you mean the life of a man." Yet 
 they themselves were to furnish one of the most 
 striking applications of the fact ever found in 
 human history. While the Messiah was with 
 them, they blundered over his sayings, hesitated 
 whether they could go with him, held a divided 
 love, and saw through a glass darkly, as I saw 
 the August flower in the root of June. But 
 when he died and was gone, then he came back 
 to them in all his glory and power. When they 
 had lost him, and darkness and death had taken 
 him seemingly into their heart, then came the 
 resurrection. Every word he had said became 
 radiant with tenderness and truth and love. 
 His deeds caught a new meaning. His life filled 
 -before them into an ever-growing wonder ; and
 
 18 ROOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 he was transfigured for ever, not to three men, 
 but to the universe. Then, as the great mem- 
 ories filled them, their sense grew ever clearer of 
 what their Friend had been ; but even that, at last, 
 was lost in the sense of what he was. So they 
 loved him, and labored and lived and died for 
 him ; and, when their time came, went singing, 
 with a most glorious and transcendent exultation, 
 into the shadow of death, because his light, shin- 
 ing through the shadow, goldened all the way. 
 
 Now, this is where the truth under discussion 
 comes most urgently home to every one of us. 
 The time comes again and again, when we must 
 bury the best we have, and leave it in the soil, 
 sever some precious belonging of life for duty 
 with Lamb ; or find sin or circumstance, sever it 
 with Burns. The prime condition of a life ever 
 found, is a life ever lost. But there are times 
 when we all feel poor and bare and sad for 
 our losses, and wonder whether it was not all 
 wrong when the treasure was taken away. I 
 tell you, if we are poor because we stand truo 
 to life and duty, we are poor only as the sowei 
 is poor, because he has to cast his wheat into 
 the furrow, and then wait for the sheaves of
 
 BOOT AND FLOWER. 19 
 
 harvest, poor as I was poor, because my flower- 
 root was not treasured where it would remain 
 as it was, but was cast where a life was wait- 
 ing to receive and re-create it, as true in its 
 way and mighty as the life of the first arch- 
 angel. 
 
 Our poverty, then, is our wealth, and our loss 
 our gain. If our life is as God will, yet is bare, 
 it is only as the granary is bare in June. That 
 very bareness is the prophecy of plenty ; and 
 fulness alone in June might bring grave reason 
 to fear, that there might be sparseness and hun- 
 ger in January. When I sow my good treasure 
 broadcast, as Christ did ; when I give myself with 
 what I am giving, then, as the earth never fails 
 of her harvest, but, in the Old World or the New, 
 will surely bring us our daily bread, so the soul 
 can never fail of her divine returns. Here or 
 yonder, in the full time, comes the full blessing ; 
 the flower flashing out glory, the fields laugh- 
 ing with plenty. 
 
 " Then who can murmur and misdoubt, 
 When God's great bounty finds him out? " 
 
 Arid just as I can gather and deepen this faith ; 
 as I can realize, though I have never seen, the
 
 20 BOOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 beauty of my August, I shall be ready to plant 
 my root, to let my wheat fall into the ground 
 and die, to give my life. Our great temptation is 
 to hold on to the seed-corn. We are in agony 
 because of the sowing. "When the angel comes 
 and takes our treasure, we say we will go too, 
 that we may die also. But the hand so masterful 
 and yet so gentle takes our treasure, and casts it 
 into its grave ; and then the hope and love and 
 life of our life is dead. 
 
 Dead, did I say ? What means this story of 
 the summer? Is not every day proclaiming 
 through all the land, that what was seeming 
 death is unconquerable life? Death has no 
 dominion; death is lost in victory. The resur- 
 rection comes while I am going to look at the 
 grave, and weep there, and count my losses and 
 recount my poverty. And then the shining ones 
 tell me the great secret, and send me on my way, 
 lost in wonder and solemn joy. 
 
 So it has been with our nation. Our root was 
 buried in the rank soil of decay and death ; and 
 many cried out that the noble thing perfected out 
 of a former summer, and watered by the tears and 
 enriched with the blood of the fathers, was clean
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 21 
 
 lost. It was because God had taken it out of 
 its dead coverings, and cast it into the heart of 
 elements that throb with life, as the earth throbs 
 with the summer sun. It was buried that it 
 might rise. The flowering of the former sum- 
 mer was over and done ; the blossoms of our 
 national holiness had withered away; the root 
 alone was left. "We held on to that through the 
 winter, thank God ; but then we wanted to hold 
 on to it through the summer also : we feared to 
 trust it to the new spring. The root, withered as 
 it was, was what we wanted. But our Father is 
 the husbandman ; and he buried the root out of 
 our sight. It was because there was as sure a 
 hope for the nation as there is for June roses. 
 "We had to watch painfully for it, to wrestle 
 with awful oppositions through a dark night. 
 But so does the farmer watch and wrestle for his 
 harvest. Canker-worm and caterpillar take their 
 toll; wind and storm do their work. Anxiety 
 and care can never be quite absent. They are 
 hardly more absent to-day than ever they were ; 
 only the day is sure to come in the nation as in 
 our life, in our life as in the nation, when the 
 flower unfolds to the sun in its perfect glory.
 
 22 BOOT AND FLOWER. 
 
 When the battle of Shiloh was fought, I went 
 from Chicago to the battle-field, with a corps of 
 nurses, to take care of the wounded men. Our 
 city, when I left it, was sheeted in 'grim black 
 weather : not a leaf was open on the trees, not 
 a flower in the gardens. But, when we got into 
 the South, the orchards were rejoicing in great 
 rosy clouds of apple-blossom, and the woods were 
 full of song. When I came back to Chicago, 
 however, the trees were still bare. Here and 
 there, a leaf had ventured out, and was shivering 
 in the bitter wind : but there was no spring yet ; 
 and men were reaping up all their old grudges 
 against the Lakes and their weather, and were 
 sure the spring would never come. 
 
 Now, I have one tree just by my study win- 
 dow, with which I have managed to become very 
 intimate. We nod to each other every morning. 
 In those long black days, I could see my friend 
 was looking disheartened enough. It had great 
 treasure of buds ; but it seemed to fold them as 
 a child folds a treasure in its clasped fingers, and 
 all the while to be,saying, " Well, I do think this 
 spring will never come." But I said, " Hold on, 
 good tree: spring is coming. I saw her down
 
 ROOT AND FLOWER. 23 
 
 there on the Alabama line. Here where you are 
 is the winter, fierce, persistent, determined to 
 stay. Yonder, where I have been, is the spring, 
 soft, sunny, filling the woods with her white 
 splendor ; and I can see the blossoms pouring up 
 this way, faster than I could run on my feet to 
 tell you." And it was so. The warm days came 
 at last ; the summer was victor ; and my tree 
 stood, tremulous in her beautiful green robes, like 
 a bride adorned for her wedding. 
 
 Now, why will men not take these things into 
 their hearts, and be as full of faith in the mean- 
 ing and purpose of their lives as of their flowers ? 
 Is the man alone the neglected step-child ? are his 
 fortunes alone misfortunes ? are we much worse 
 than the lilies ? Or is it not of all things true, 
 that as man rises nearest of all on this earth 
 to the image of the Infinite, so he is nearest of 
 all on this earth to the Providence that enfolds 
 and blesses all?
 
 n. 
 
 WHAT A LEAF SAID. 
 ISA. Ixiv. 8: " We all do fade as a leaf." 
 
 MY text is a sermon in itself. It was whis- 
 pered from the trees,' as you came to church : it 
 will rustle under your feet, as you go home. It 
 is the sermon of these autumn days, proclaiming 
 the dissolution, as the spring proclaimed the res- 
 urrection and the life. I heard this sermon, 
 when I was seventeen, in the plane-trees that 
 covered the foss of an old Roman camp : I shall 
 hear it, if I live, when I am seventy, in the elms 
 and maples by this lake shore ; and it has always 
 been the one thing, that the fading and falling 
 leaf is the mute monitor of the fading and failing 
 life. 
 
 And I can well believe how my experience 
 must answer to yours, how, in pensive mo- 
 ments all your life long, when the crimson ban- 
 ners unfold on the trees, and the leaves begin to 
 [241
 
 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 25 
 
 fall about your path, you have thought more pain- 
 fully of the fading life than at any other time 
 in the year. This seems to be not only the com- 
 mon feeling, but the habit also of the prophet 
 and seer, ^ew psalms were ever sung about tho 
 fading leaf, that had for their burden a great cry 
 of accomplishment and victory. All rejoice over 
 the purple grape and ripened grain. The fruit, 
 ruddy and golden, seems to laugh at us |0n the 
 tree ; but the leaf, rustling under our feet or 
 shivering in the sharp frost, seems to tell only 
 of dissolution and death. We thank God in 
 our great Thanksgiving for the kindly fruits of 
 the earth : we never thank him for the kindly 
 leaves. Every thing on the farm and in the 
 garden is considered, except the" leaf. " How 
 strange and awful the gusty wind and whirling 
 leaves of the autumnal day ! " Coleridge cries ; 
 and he does but express what all men feel. We 
 tack it into a distich for our children's copy- 
 books ; we set it to music, and sing it in our 
 parlors, and churches ; and we engrave it on 
 the memorial stones of our dead, that we all 
 do fade as a leaf. 
 
 And yet I do not intend to re-echo this cry 
 2
 
 26 WHAT A LEAF SAID. 
 
 to you this morning. At the best, it is not the 
 cry of the gospel, but of the law. It is not of 
 salvation by grace, but of dissolution by nature, 
 that we are thinking, when the leaves flutter 
 down from the trees, and the hollow^wiiids sigh 
 through the woodlands. He is no gospel minis- 
 ter who will wilfully discourse of discouragement. 
 I know of no voice that ought to be held so sa- 
 credly for inspiration as the voice of the preacher, 
 except, indeed, that of the husband or wife. We 
 do not come to church to be told that we are 
 withered leaves and crawling worms, but to be 
 assured that we are men made only a little lower 
 than the angels, and heirs of the everlasting life. 
 We come to the preacher to hear what will help 
 us sing, to realize what there is beside and bet- 
 ter than fading and falling. There is not a man 
 of us that does not encounter quite enough on 
 week-days to dishearten and discourage him, in 
 being compelled to listen to " Thus saith the 
 world," without being discouraged on a Sunday 
 by " Thus saith the Lord." 
 
 So, while I will frankly say my text is true, and 
 the sermon it preaches is true, and the whisper 
 we hear in the autumn wind is true, this question
 
 WHAT A LEAF SAID. 27 
 
 still waits to be answered, " How is it true ? " la 
 the fading of the leaf the only true thing about 
 it, the only matter worth our painful, earnest 
 thought ; or is there something more and better ? 
 What can the leaf crimsoning on the tree, and 
 the wind wailing through the branches, whisper 
 to our hearts beside this one sad strain, " We all 
 do fade as a leaf" ? 
 
 Well, this, I think, first of all. It can say, 
 " Take care you do not go wrong, in the first 
 step, by misunderstanding entirely what it is for 
 a leaf to fade ; that you do not exalt that into the 
 greatest, which may be of the smallest possible 
 consequence ; and that your steady gaze at this 
 point in its being does not shut out at once 
 reflection and anticipation, what the leaf has 
 been, and what it may be, in the providence of 
 God." 
 
 I do not say this to apologize for the leaf. I 
 have no idea that prospect and retrospect shall 
 clasp hands over it, and hide it from our sight. 
 I want the leaf to testify for itself, and say, " Yes, 
 indeed, your text is true. I am a fading leaf 
 certainly, and all leaves fade. But then you 
 must remember, that this is the true time to fade,
 
 S& \VHAT A LEAF SAID. 
 
 as the May-days were to spring; and, I cannot 
 doubt this, that any true time must be a good 
 time. Beside, I want you to tell me, whether I 
 am not, in my degree, a ripe and perfect fruit, as 
 certainly as your grape or apple ; and so whether 
 my falling is not like the fall of all ripe fruit, the 
 proof that I have done God's will through storm 
 and shine, and hear him whispering, ' "Well done ' 
 in the first frost ; so that when I am turning to 
 fall, am I not also turning to rise ; to be again, 
 in my degree, a servant and minister of the grace 
 of God? 
 
 " The truth is," my leaf may continue, " you 
 look at a leaf as you look at life, along the sur- 
 face, instead of into the deep : your estimate is 
 by superfice v not cube measure. I seem to fall: 
 I do fall. But, if it were possible for you to 
 see what I am doing beside, you would wonder, 
 as you noted, how the spirit that has animated 
 me, and been the life of my life, through all 
 the days and nights since I came into being, is 
 quietly freeing itself from its old familiar frame ; 
 and rising, not in fable but in fact, in deed and in 
 truth, to wait the bidding of the Master; while the 
 frame itself, this thing shivering over your head
 
 WHAT A LEAF SAID. 29 
 
 or rustling under your feet, will be guarded and 
 kept until the morning of its resurrection. Did 
 you rejoice this summer over your strawberries 
 and roses, and not remember, how, for a thousand 
 ages, my race, faded leaves as you call us, have 
 lain treasured, waiting to be their ministers and 
 yours whenever you should come to need us ? 
 You preach from your text, 'We all do fade as a 
 leaf:' why do you not sometimes preach from 
 that other text, ' The leaves of the tree are for 
 the healing of the nations ? ' What nation is not 
 healed through our ministry ? What great thing 
 was ever done where we cast no shadow ? You 
 cry ' Nothing but leaves,' and think you have 
 touched the dusty heart of all barrenness. When 
 you know what it is to be even a, faded and 
 fallen leaf, there will be a better music in your 
 cry. It is true, we are nothing but leaves ; yet, 
 in the order of the creation, you had been noth- 
 ing but for us. Here, as everywhere, there is no 
 broken link in the chain that binds all things 
 God has made, fast to his throne, no step lost 
 out of the ladder stretching from earth to heaven, 
 no dry place in the river of life. From the atom 
 to the angel, in Him we live and move, and have
 
 30 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 
 
 our being; and he is not far from every one 
 of us." 
 
 Then, when we come to understand this, we 
 are aware how this leaf falls honorably, after 
 doing what one leaf may do for its own and the 
 common blessing. A mere leaf, one in countless 
 myriads, it did not come out of chance, and does 
 not go into chance. It cannot fall to the ground, 
 as it could not bloom on the tree, without the 
 will of our Father ; and so, for leaves at least, 
 whatever we may believe of lives, this fading and 
 falling is not defeat and death, but victory and 
 life. 
 
 For, again, if my leaf may testify, it will say, 
 " I am a fading leaf certainly ; watching for the 
 sun and frost to give the signal for my dissolu- 
 tion. I have had to bear heavy rains, to wrestle 
 with great storms, to shudder in electric fires, to 
 fight my way and hold my own as well as I could 
 in the teeth of foes and parasites, ever since 
 I began to spring. But this I can say, as I fall, 
 that there has been no day since I first began to 
 grow, when I have not tried to be true to the law 
 of my life, as the mediator, bridging the gulf 
 between senseless matter and the sentient soul.
 
 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 31 
 
 You rejoice in your fruit ; if there had been no 
 leaf, there could have been no fruit, and there 
 would be no tree. The servant of all, I am, in 
 my way, the greatest of all, by the infallible 
 ordination and law of all service. I give you 
 walnut for your gun-stock, and ash for the 
 handle of your plough. I work through all 
 weathers to build your ships, factories, homes, 
 and churches. I am indispensable to the match 
 for your fire, and the mast for your merchantman. 
 I brace myself, and stand shoulder to shoulder 
 with my fellows on great pines, keeping watch 
 and ward in the long winter, on every coigne of 
 vantage, to keep you from the driving northern 
 storms, and spread myself as a shield over valley 
 and champaign, to shelter you from the burning 
 summer heats. I cast my mantle over the rain- 
 drop, until it can find a runlet ; and the runlet 
 I shelter to the rivulet, the rivulet to the river, 
 and the river to the- sea. I cover the springs 
 among the moss, and weave my tapestry to adorn 
 the bara desolation of the mountains. I hold 
 myself, simple and separate, always to my one 
 purpose. And now, in my falling, I shall fall for 
 blessing, and cease to be a leaf because, as a leaf,
 
 32 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 
 
 I am no longer needed. But, in ceasing to be 
 what I am, I may well remind you of what one 
 has said who loves us, and takes us into his 
 heart beyond all men living : ' We compare 
 ourselves to leaves : the leaves may well scorn 
 the comparison, if we live only for ourselves. 
 If ever in the autumn a pensiveness steals over 
 us, as the leaves flutter by in their fading, may 
 we not wisely look up to their mighty monu- 
 ments ; and as we see how fair they are, how 
 far prolonged in arch and aisle the avenues of the 
 valleys, the fringes of the hills, so stately, so 
 eternal ; the joy of man, the comfort of all living 
 creatures, the glory of the earth remember that 
 these are but the monuments of fading leaves, 
 that faintly flit past us to die ? Let them not die 
 before we read and understand their holy revela- 
 tion ; so that we also, careless of a monument 
 for the grave, may build one in the world, by 
 which men may be taught to remember, not 
 where we died, but where we lived.' ' ; 
 
 Then, keeping still to my parable, I can see how 
 my leaf will say further : " You can think as you 
 like, therefore, about man, as he fades and falls, 
 make the end of your life here as mournful
 
 WHAT A LEAF SAID. 33 
 
 as you please, dishonor death by evil names 
 and images, as its shadow falls upon your 
 race ; but I ask you, once for all, to leave 
 me out of your sad analogies. I protest 
 against being counted as one that shudders at 
 dissolution. I might have done that in June, 
 when my life was all to live ; but in September , 
 when it has had its day, as I begin to loosen 
 from the spray where God caused me to spring, 
 the loosening seems, as good as ever did the 
 springing. 
 
 " Then, there is another thing. I cannot tell 
 much about it ; it is just a sweet, misty mystery, 
 to be made clear, no doubt, in due time. But 
 near my heart, through all my summer, faint at 
 first, but growing stronger with the growing 
 days, I have felt and nursed and shielded the 
 intimation of another springing in a spring-time 
 to come, to which my present dissolution seems 
 to be e-ntirely indispensable. So, then, I shall die 
 as I have lived, with my face to the sun and the 
 great loving heavens, and welcome the autumn 
 frost as I welcomed the spring sunshine. It is 
 true that I have no hope like that your race 
 holds of living again, 
 
 2*
 
 34 WHAT A LEAF SAID. 
 
 ' Wrapped from the fickle and the frail, 
 With gathered powers yet the same, 
 Piercing the keen seraphic flame 
 From orb to orb, from vail to vail.' 
 
 My spirit must go whence it came, and my frame 
 must be trodden into the dust ; yet I fear noth- 
 ing that can happen to either, because I know 
 that both will be held in the hollow of His hand 
 who counts a faded leaf. I am sure of all the 
 life I shall ever need. I know that my Eedeemer 
 liveth. God will not leave me in the grave. 
 Though I am only a leaf, ' All the days of my 
 appointed time will I wait till my change come, 
 and trust the wisdom that has done so well for 
 me this time, what that change shall be.' And 
 so, if men are crying, ' We all do fade as a leaf,' 
 in any spirit of down-looking sadness and fear, 
 let them speak for their race, not for ours ; be- 
 cause, being true to life, we find out how to be 
 true to death, and secure an entrance into the life 
 to come." 
 
 Now, need I say, that, in lingering so over the 
 leaf, I am seeking the lesson for the life, how 
 sure is the assurance, that, if we will be so faith- 
 ful even as a leaf on a tree, when we fade and 
 fall there can be no room for regret; because
 
 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 35 
 
 aspect, prospect, and retrospect will be all alike 
 good, as we look down into the deeps of life, 
 and up through its altitudes, instead of watch- 
 ing, as we do, merely along its surfaces. In 
 this spirit, I want to trace, then, the lesson of 
 my parable, pointed alike at the cry in the text 
 and the echo in our hearts. And, in doing this, 
 to keep as close as I can to the lines I have 
 drawn, and, running them along their natural 
 parallels of the leaf and the life, say agreed that 
 we all do fade as a leaf : what then ? 
 
 For there is no alternative but to face the 
 fact. We all do fade and fall. We know that 
 dear faces and presences do fade out from every 
 life. I walked one summer under the green 
 leaves, on Staten Island, with as dear a friend 
 as ever man had on the earth; and we said, 
 " We will meet here, and walk and talk so, 
 every summer ; " but, when we met again, some- 
 thing had changed. When the summer came 
 again, my friend was fighting for his life ; and, 
 before another summer,.! went down from the 
 West into the quiet New-England valley where 
 he was brought up, to say a prayer by his grave. 
 Indeed, indeed, it is true we all do fade as a leaf.
 
 36 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 
 
 Yet I say, what then ? Am I sure that I fully real- 
 ize what it is to. fade as a leaf? Do I touch, iu 
 my estimate, the cube or the superfice ? Is it not 
 true that, in my painful and steady gaze at this 
 thing, I shut out both reflection and anticipa- 
 tion, and forget, that, with an assurance as much 
 deeper as I am more than the leaf, I may be sure, 
 that what I call fading and falling in is also 
 ripening and gathering; and the time for the 
 true life to be gathered, whenever it may be, is 
 that life's October, and as divine in its way as 
 the May was for its spring? 
 
 Because this truth is one with a vaster ; namely, 
 that not one aspect in life ought to fill my sight 
 to the exclusion of another, but life altogether 
 must be seen as we watch men fade and fall. 
 " All leaves are builders," says Ruskin ; " but 
 they are to be divided into two orders, those 
 that build oy the sword, and those that build by 
 the shield." I would see every life as that most 
 perfect of all seers into leaf-life sees every leaf. 
 It may be that our lives are the most obscure and 
 powerless for good this earth ever bore on her 
 breast: I tell you, if we are trying to be what 
 we can be, then the life of every one of us casts
 
 WHAT A LEAF SAID. 37 
 
 its speck of grateful shadow somewhere, holds 
 itself somehow up to the sun and rain, fights its 
 way with some poor success against storm and 
 fire and foe and parasite ; or it stands sternly, in 
 these great days, shoulder to shoulder with its 
 comrades, a strong tower of defence, to guard 
 what we have won in our war for humanity, 
 resolute not to fall into that trap the devil always 
 sets for a generous people, of giving up in the 
 treaty what they won in the fight. For it is true, 
 and truest of all, that not the things which satisfy 
 the world's heart easily; not purple grape, and 
 golden apple, and ripe grain, and brown seed, 
 and roses and asters ; not the noble and beauti- 
 ful, over which men rejoice and are glad, are 
 alone the fruit on the tree of life ; but the leaf, 
 faded, ragged and unnoticed, is fruit too ; falling, 
 when its day is done, it falls honorably ; dying, it 
 dies well; its work well done, and the world is 
 better by the measure of what one poor leaf may 
 do for its life. 
 
 All honor to the great men who so patiently 
 and steadily broke through the triple armor that 
 guarded the heart of the rebellion ; sprang over 
 the fastnesses of Georgia to paralyze its right
 
 38 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 
 
 hand, and swept bareheaded through the broken 
 ranks of our men, shouting our battle-cry so 
 grandly, that they went storming back like a 
 whirlwind when they heard it, and wrenched 
 a victory out of the very jaws of defeat ! And 
 honor to the man whose heart was quiet in 
 the dreadful days of the Wilderness, when only 
 a quiet heart and a mighty, with God's great 
 blessing, could avail us ! Above all, honor to 
 the great, steady soul, whose counsel guided, 
 whose truth moulded, whose devotion sanctified, 
 and whose life and death made glorious, the land 
 that had given him birth, and honored him, and 
 elected him to the greatest place a man can fill ! 
 These men, and all like them, are fruit. Let 
 their names be said and sung in every loyal heart 
 and home, and written in letters of living light 
 for men to read in the ages to come. 
 
 Ay, but I know of others as good and true. 
 Leaves, nothing but leaves. They were swept 
 down in the storms of battle, they withered in 
 the swamps and the sun, they faded out of our 
 homes and are dead ; or they live and strive, 
 casting their shield, standing close, working the 
 work of Him that sent them. All honor to
 
 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 39 
 
 the common soldier, the common laborer, the 
 poor teacher, the man and woman everywhere, 
 unknown and yet well known, with no name to 
 Jive, but bearing, in all they are and all they 
 do, the assurance of the life everlasting ! For as 
 every leaf on every tree is, by the tenure of its 
 life, a mediator and saviour, standing between 
 the hard rock and living man, the bridge between 
 life arid death, so this unknown man or woman, 
 this common soldier or common worker, is fruit, 
 in being leaf and falling, scorched by battle-fires 
 or chilled by night damps ; or, dying, worn out 
 by toiling in the field of the world. Not one such 
 man or woman has lived and striven and died in 
 vain. There may be no monument to tell how 
 they died or where they rest ; but what they have 
 done is their monument. The leaves of their 
 tree are for the healing of the nations. 
 
 Mother, you think the little one that was taken 
 from you could be nothing to the world ; it faded 
 o soon. Be sure, the leaf that lives only for a 
 day is something to the tree ; it has not lived in 
 vain. This had been a poorer world, had any 
 leaf of a day never bloomed ; and so your little 
 child has not only made you a richer woman than
 
 40 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 
 
 you possibly could have been had it never been 
 born, but its touch of bloom has helped the 
 world to bloom. It did not fall, as it could not 
 spring, without the will of our Father ; and, if 
 you did but know it, its autumn was as true as 
 its spring, and both were included in its few brief 
 moments of life. 
 
 And this is the way the lesson of the leaf 
 comes home to us all. We see about us other 
 lives, noble and fruitful ; and say, " If I could 
 only do as that man or woman is doing; if I 
 could accomplish some great thing that would be 
 a world's wonder and blessing, then, I think, 
 I could die gladly. But the Master comes, seek- 
 ing fruit and finding none. I plod on at my 
 desk ; I work in my home ; I weary at my task, 
 unknown, unnoticed, unprofitable, and no- 
 body." Well, my friend, I think discontent is 
 as good a thing in its place as life has in its treas- 
 ury. If you are young, there is probably hope 
 for you in something like the measure .of your 
 discontent ; and, if you are not young, that dis- 
 content is always good which can bring you into 
 a larger activity. I know not but it is good to be 
 always a little discontented. It is a sign, as
 
 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 41 
 
 when the dove fluttered to the window of the ark, 
 that there are olive leaves outside for the pluck- 
 ing. Still, I tell you, the question for most of us 
 to solve is not, Ain I fruit ? but Am I a leaf? I 
 take it, if we are to be fruit, we shall be by some 
 deep predestination ; and what we shall have to 
 do in that case will be to keep as sound as we 
 can to the core. But, if I am not fruit, then 
 I am leaf; and leaf is fruit in its own order. 
 Do I cast a mite of shadow ; do I beautify ever 
 so small a piece of blank barrenness ; do I help 
 along, in the measure of my one-leaf power, 
 in forming, if not fruit, then timber? because, 
 this question answered right, I have answered 
 every other. 
 
 Let me make this sure ; and then I may be 
 sure of this also, that the nipping frosts of the 
 autumn, when they come, will be as divine to me 
 as the dewy splendors of June. A falling leaf, I 
 shall fall honorably ; and the spirit, returning 
 to the God who gave it, will again be set to do the 
 greatest, and by consequence the most blessed, 
 thing it can do ; while this frame, the faded leaf, 
 will wait for the morning of its resurrection. For 
 this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and
 
 42 WHAT A LEAP SAID. 
 
 this mortal immortality. And when a man 
 reaches this faith, he will not fear death any 
 more than he fears life: 
 
 " Fear death ! to feel the fog at my throat, 
 
 The mist on my face, 
 When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 
 
 I am nearing the place ; 
 The power of the night, the press of the storm, 
 
 The post of the foe, 
 Where he stands, the arch fear, in a visible form, 
 
 And the strong man must go ! 
 No ; let me feel all of it ; fare like my peers 
 
 Who have met him of old ; 
 Bear the brunt; in a moment pay life's whole arrears 
 
 Of pain, darkness, and cold: 
 For sadden the worst turns the best to the brave. 
 
 The dark minutes at end, 
 Then the elements rage ; and the voices that rave 
 
 Shall soften and blend, 
 Shall change, and become, 
 
 First a peace, then a joy, then thy breast 
 O thou soul of my soul, I shall meet thee again, 
 
 And with God be the rest!
 
 m. 
 
 THE TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 
 
 MEDITATING through the week what I should 
 say to you to-day, my mind at last began to turn 
 steadily toward the snow that was falling all day 
 long between the window where I sat and my 
 church, covering the city with its white robe to 
 be instantly soiled and torn, and casting an 
 unspotted radiance over hundreds of miles of the 
 land through which also it was my lot to travel. 
 So I gradually became aware, that to-day I 
 must speak to you about the snow, and its place 
 in the world and life in which we are now wit- 
 nessing its presence, see what hint of the Di- 
 vine blessing is revealed to us in this fair ves- 
 ture of the winter, the delight of our youth, 
 the touching image of the white age before the 
 opening of a new spring, and the fair shroud, 
 that, in the black winter days, covers all the 
 graves 
 
 1431
 
 44 TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 
 
 I read a story once of what had happened just 
 before in one of the new English colonies. It 
 was a land where the snow fell but seldom. The 
 children had grown up to a good age, without 
 once seeing it. One day, the thick flakes began 
 to fall ; the children were terrified ; they shrank 
 back from it, did not know what to make of 
 it: but the parents ran out to welcome what it 
 was the first impulse of the children to fear. 
 The unknown wonder of the one was the wel- 
 come visitor of the other, bringing hosts of 
 kindly memories. It melted as it fell, was 
 what we now watch with disgust on sloppy days, 
 and call neither one thing nor the other. But, 
 as these men and women saw the feathery fleece 
 falling for the first time in their new home on 
 the other side of the world, it seemed to bring the 
 blessing of the old home on its wings, to make 
 their past and present more intimately one. It 
 was a means of grace to them : it came down cold 
 out of the heavens ; but their hearts became all 
 aglow, as it touched them. 
 
 I had written as far as this, when a lady came 
 to my study, and I read the incident to her. 
 " I know something as good as that," she said. " I
 
 TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 45 
 
 had a friend who went south, out of the reach of 
 the snow, lived there many years, and then came 
 north again. When the first snow fell after her 
 return, she ran out to meet it with all the delight 
 of a child, caught a flake in her hand, and kissed 
 it." A flake in her hand to kiss, she could 
 not resist the impulse. It was an old friend she 
 had nearly forgotten, as welcome as the flowers 
 in May. The philosopher could tell her, to be 
 sure, that this was not the snow that used to fall 
 about the old homestead. She knew better: it 
 was the same snow, because she was the same 
 woman: the identity was in her own nature. 
 It was a hint of that better life to come, in 
 which we are not to reckon by then and now, 
 by past and present, what was, and is not, 
 and never can be again ; but by an eternal 
 now, fresh and full as the heart of a great 
 ocean. 
 
 It is notable that there is but one instance of 
 an actual snow-fall in the Bible ; and even that is 
 rather a recollection than a record. It is in the 
 Second Book of Samuel, where, speaking of a 
 mighty man, the chronicler says he slew a lion in 
 the midst of a pit, in the time of s,now. If the
 
 46 TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 
 
 man and the lion were in the pit together, it was 
 a fine piece of valor ; but if it was done as the 
 same thing is done now in Africa, where a pit is 
 dug into which the lion falls and then is killed 
 from above, one cannot but think, that the lion 
 might have had more to say about it, had the 
 thing been done on the open plain and in 
 warm weather. In the poetry of the elder Scrip- 
 tures, the references to the snow are far more 
 thick-strewn than in the histories, showing how 
 the presence of the white glory melted into 
 the souls of those most open to all the influ- 
 ences of heaven, summer and winter alike. 
 "Hast thou entered into the treasures of the 
 snow ? " the Almighty is made to ask impatient 
 Job. And Job himself uses the term three 
 times, always, however, in the sense of melting 
 or melted snow, as if the man had not come into 
 actual contact with it, but had seen it, as I 
 saw it, melting and pouring from the mountains 
 in Switzerland under the August sun. In the 
 Psalms there is an exquisite hint of a snow-fall 
 through the perfect stillness, and a magnificent 
 storm piece into which the snow comes with 
 other elements. In the Proverbs, again, there is
 
 TRBASUEES OF THE SNOW. 47 
 
 a passage, how that there is nothing new under 
 the sun, in the matter of ice-cold drinks in sum- 
 mer, where the writer says, " As the cold of snow 
 in the time of harvest, so a faithful servant re- 
 freshes the soul of his master ; " from which wo 
 may also infer, that even Solomon, in all his glory, 
 had trouble with his servants. Isaiah has a noble 
 image of the truth falling softly and fruitening 
 the heart, as the snow falls and fruitens the 
 earth. There is not a word about the snow from 
 the lips of the Saviour ; and it is only noticed at 
 all in the New Testament in a secondary sense, 
 used as a comparison, never as an experience. 
 But to men that dwell, as we do, where the 
 snow is our constant companion through a long 
 winter, there is both opportunity and necessity 
 to enter more deeply into its meaning, than any 
 men have ever done who have only seen it at 
 second-hand, crowning Hermon with its radiance, 
 and lying white in the ravines of Lebanon. We 
 can see, if we will, how there is that in it which 
 at once illustrates the law, supplements the gos- 
 pel, and reveals the Almighty as intimately and 
 wonderfully present in the snows of winter as 
 in the blossoms of spring, or the greenery of
 
 48 TREASUEES OF THE SNOW. 
 
 summer, or the gold of the autumn of the year. 
 When John Foster learned that snow had been 
 detected on the poles of Mars, the white light of 
 it growing large in what must be the planet's 
 winter, and then small again in his summer, it 
 made him very sad. He argued, that the pres- 
 ence of the snow meant cold ; cold, suffering ; 
 suffering, sin ; and sin, on another planet, 
 a frightful extension of the curse and fall. It 
 made him sad, because, great man as he was, 
 he lived in the belief that this fair world was 
 wrecked and ruined in the biting of an apple ; 
 that a man and woman, as inexperienced as two 
 babies, were placed in a position to do a mischief 
 for which I am at a loss to find a comparison. I 
 thought of myself as placing my five-year-old 
 boy on the locomotive of a great train, and giv- 
 ing him the lever, with a strong temptation to 
 turn it, and a strict command to let it alone ; 
 then leaving him to his own devices, and the pas- 
 sengers to their doom. But the illustration is 
 too feeble to convey the idea of the common 
 doctrine of the Fall. It was the man's misfor- 
 tune, that, otherwise so great and good, he could 
 permit his soul to be bolted fast in a prison so
 
 TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 49 
 
 dark, that the very stars in heaven were no bet- 
 ter to him than a great penitentiary and grave- 
 yard. 
 
 " There is no such thing in nature as bad 
 weather," James Hogg used to say ; and cer- 
 tainly he got his share of all the weathers 
 possible to the bleak moorlands of Scotland: 
 and Coleridge said, " In nature there is nothing 
 melancholy." And both philosopher and shep- 
 herd, in saying such things, touched the brighter 
 and better belief, dawning now on the world in 
 the liberal faith. That the snow was on Hermon 
 when Adam was in Eden before the Fall, did 
 not come for a curse there or anywhere, but a 
 blessing ; not to work ruin on the snow-line of 
 Ararat, any more than on the wheat-fields of 
 Wisconsin ; and is as innocent of our sins, this 
 way or that, as the white robe of an angel. And 
 so the whole drift of our discovery of the nature 
 of the snow, is at the same time a revelation of 
 its grace and goodness. 
 
 I look out of my window at the whirling tem- 
 pest, or set my face against it grimly on the street, 
 or see it descending and covering a hundred 
 leagues of wintry land ; and shudder, if I am in 
 3
 
 50 TREASURES OP THE SNOW. 
 
 a shuddering mood, and say, " God help the 
 poor ! " and am, perhaps, content enough to let 
 God help them, as I creep back into my own snug 
 nest. But, while I am sheltering there, let me 
 take Scoresby's book on the Arctic Regions, or 
 Glaisher's book on the Snow, and watch, to my 
 endless wonder, what beauty is in a snow-flake. 
 
 That is not a rack of whirling wintry chaos 
 I see! the churning of wind and water and 
 frost into a white fury ; the desolation of a world 
 in which God is not. There is not an atom of 
 snow in this whole wide belt of the storm that is 
 not in itself a gem of exquisite outline and inline, 
 not any two of those innumerable myriads of 
 flakes alike, and yet they all dart out into the same 
 wonderful six-rayed glory. I may grind them, if I 
 can, into a more impalpable powder than this into 
 which they are crushed in these roaring mills of 
 God ; then put the smallest atom under my micro- 
 scope ; and, if I can get one fair glance at it, I 
 will still see the perfect unlike sixfold likeness, 
 no more, no less, as inexhaustible in its loveli- 
 ness as the power that made it. So the flakes 
 call to us for ever through the moan and shriek 
 of the storm, or whisper as they fall in silence.
 
 TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 51 
 
 and rest on the land like wool, " Hast thou en- 
 tered into the treasures of the snow ? " And tell 
 
 t 
 
 us how the revelation of the microscope chords 
 with the words of the Master, about the robing 
 of a lily, that, down to the minutest and most 
 common thing, the hand of their Maker and our 
 Father reaches, as perfectly as up to the most 
 celestial and divine. It is disorder to us ; it is 
 order to him. He directs the storm. Snow and 
 hail, fire and vapor, and stormy wind, fulfil his 
 word. Not a sparrow or a snow-flake falleth to 
 the ground without the will of your Father. I 
 ask the star, as it melts on my hand, " What 
 proof can you give me that you are not born of 
 the mere spume of the tempest ? " It looks at me 
 from beneath its six-rayed crown, and answers, 
 " I am no more that than the Atlantic. I come 
 out of order and light, a child of the day. I am 
 on the Lord's side. I come from heaven, as the 
 good angels come, to assure you afresh of its 
 immanence, and help you to enter in and be 
 saved." 
 
 Then this beauty chords again with the blessing 
 of the snow. In great cities we think little of 
 snow, except as it brings good sleighing or
 
 52 TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 
 
 evil walking, or the threat of the policeman if we 
 do not clean our sidewalks, or thin congregations, 
 or discomfort to our feet, or irregular mails and 
 trains. Indeed I doubt whether the snow was 
 ever meant for the city. It is as thoroughly out 
 of contrast in it as a stray lamb, and has no more 
 power to hold its white fleece whole, and live 
 on our streets. But, in the country, we instantly 
 find what this means : " He giveth snow like 
 wool." Between the surface of the earth and 
 the surface of the snow, the measured difference 
 in temperature is sometimes forty degrees. It is 
 always welcome in these latitudes, when it comes 
 early and in plenty, and stays well on the land ; 
 for then the farmer knows that the things will be 
 happed away snug and warm, that must survive 
 the winter. In the Lake-Superior region, much 
 colder than our own, where the snow falls with 
 the first frosts, and stays to the edge of summer, 
 many of the plants we dig up, and put into 
 our cellars, are left in the ground with perfect 
 safety, because " He giveth snow like wool " 
 to preserve them under its warm fleece. In my 
 readings, I have found many curious records of 
 persons buried under the snow, surviving through
 
 TREASURES OP THE SNOW. 53 
 
 long spans of time ; but, if a hand or a foot was 
 exposed, that was lost. 
 
 When I was at Fort Donelson, and there heard 
 that grand story, how the Iowa Second went 
 over the ramparts, and stayed, sleeping all night 
 in the snow, my informant said, " I looked along 
 the line where I knew they must be next morn- 
 ing; but all I could see was a row of white 
 mounds, out of which they rose presently, shak- 
 ing the snow from their blankets, and resuming 
 order of battle." " And was it not a fearful thing 
 to lie under that covering ? " I said to one of the 
 men afterward. " Well," he replied, " it wasn't 
 quite so warm as some places I have slept in: 
 still it was not at all so bad as you imagine." 
 
 The snow is, in its measure, the power of 
 God unto salvation. It is not an aggravation 
 of winter, but a defence against it. Philoso- 
 phy blends with science to tell of its grace and 
 goodness. We talk to our children of the good 
 fairies, in which, alas for them ! they believe no 
 more than we do. We might do better, if we 
 told them the truth about such a thing as the 
 snow, how God sends, in the snow-flakes, a 
 guardian angel for every grass-blade and flower-
 
 54 TREASURES OP THE SNOW. 
 
 seed he will keep from the frost, to protect them 
 first, and then to sink into their hearts, and rise 
 with them in the morning of their resurrection. 
 And then I would try to see what I taught, the 
 goodness of God in a snow-storm. It is some- 
 thing to see, for one hour, a snow-driven city, 
 to admire how all the vileness is hidden for a few 
 minutes out of sight, though there were no use 
 except that in it. But, in the country, the snow 
 casting its white robe of protection over the land, 
 gathering it as a hen gathereth her chickens 
 under her wings, that is a sight which leads us 
 again toward the heaven out of which the wonder 
 comes. And so I would touch these snow-flakes 
 less for what they prove than for what they 
 are, the testimony of a snow-drift to the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount; the extension of Christ's 
 great argument out of summer into winter. If 
 God so shape the snow-star, can he fail finally 
 to shape the soul? and if he giveth snow like 
 wool, to hap the shivering seed ; if he so clothe 
 the land as well as the lily, will he leave me 
 naked ? 
 
 But then I can see how the blessing of the 
 snow comes home still more nearly and directly.
 
 TREASURES OP THE SNOW. 55 
 
 It is good to watch the snow, as I have tried to 
 do ; to note 
 
 " The tiny spherule traced with lines 
 Of nature's geometric signs; " 
 
 and what an exact order and harmony is at the 
 heart of the endless agitation of a snow-storm ; 
 and to realize something of the blessing that 
 comes when " He giveth snow like wool." But 
 there is a better blessing in the snow, that can 
 come to us all, though we never saw a microscope 
 or snow book, and know of the thing only as 
 something thoroughly identified with winter. 
 
 "I think better of snow-storms," Prescott 
 says, " since I find, that, though they keep a 
 man's body indoors, they bring his mind out." 
 It has been said by another, that, while the land 
 is more fruitful as you approach the tropics, what 
 is taken out of the land is put into the man as 
 you touch the snow. In Iceland, where they are 
 shut out from the rest of the world through the 
 greater part of the year, and 
 
 " The housemates sit 
 Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed 
 In a tumultuous privacy of storm," 
 
 there has been a separate, and in its way quite a 
 noble, scholarship, to which we owe the preserva-
 
 56 TREASURES OP THE SNOW. 
 
 tion of some of the most precious Sagas, frag- 
 ments of the earliest history of our own race. If 
 you will draw a line from Edinburgh southward 
 until it touches just half-way in the measured 
 distance of England and Scotland together, and 
 then count the greatest names in each half for a 
 long time back now, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, 
 Watt, Arkwright, and the Stephensons, with 
 others more than I can mention, you will see, 
 that, though London and the Universities are to 
 the south of the line, the preponderance of genius 
 and power is to the north ; especially in those 
 priceless instances of men who had to cleave 
 their way upward out of the forge, coal-pit, and 
 hungry farm-lands, to fame. 
 
 In our own country, this fact is still more 
 striking and clear. Whatever line can live in 
 our literature, so far has been written in the 
 North. The most precious fruits in all the higher 
 departments of life and learning have ripened 
 within the snow-line. Nay, it is remarkable, that 
 in the thin edge of land between Cincinnati or St. 
 Louis and our own city, there is this difference, 
 that, in the gravest times this nation has ever 
 known, the great ballads, whose influence for
 
 TEEASUEES OF THE SNOW. 57 
 
 good was incalculable, ballads like the " Battle- 
 cry of Freedom," came from the city that is 
 set farthest in the snow. I mention these in- 
 stances as hints of what I mean by that better 
 blessing in the snow than the contemplation of 
 its starry order and noble uses as it lies on the 
 land. What every healthy man and woman feels, 
 when, after the disheartening rains of the last 
 weeks in the autumn, the first powder of the 
 white blessing falls ; and then, as winter deepens, 
 the snow comes in good earnest, and 
 
 " The whited air 
 Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven," 
 
 that is the intimation of the difference between 
 the snow present in, and absent from, our life. 
 
 So when I hear letters read from friends in 
 the South, that tell how, while we are battling 
 with the snow, they are enjoying the roses, I 
 say, " Well, the rose had to come out of the 
 snow. It is not a native and natural denizen of 
 the southern, but of the northern, hemisphere." 
 That is true for one thing. And then we shall 
 have the roses, and we have the snow. Those 
 dwellers in summer lands have the one blessing ; 
 we have both. What can they do when the ques 
 8*
 
 58 TREASURES OF THE SNOW. 
 
 tion is asked of them, " Hast thou entered into 
 the treasures of the snow ? " but stand silent 
 and conscious of their poverty, if they will but 
 have the grace ? For, not to dwell on that hearty 
 and healthful recreation, only possible to a few 
 of the dwellers in cities, the pleasantness of 
 sweeping through the snow in sleighs and good 
 company, a means of grace by no means to be 
 despised, providing always that the termination 
 of your ride be not a tavern, not to dwell on 
 this, I say, the man whose lot is cast where the 
 roses bloom outdoors in January might well ex- 
 change his roses for the final blessing that comes 
 hidden hi the snow. 
 
 When, on the edge of a wild winter night, the 
 snow begins to come down thick and fast, dark- 
 ening the heavens, covering the earth, muffling 
 all sounds, foiling all sights ; when the children 
 rush home from school, and the father from busi- 
 ness, and the shutters are fastened, and the cur- 
 tains are drawn, and the supper is done, and the 
 clear, open, wood or soft-coal fire is made up, 
 for one or the other of these I consider entirely 
 indispensable to a right study of the treasures 
 of the snow, and all sit in the sweet light
 
 TEEASUEES OF THE SNOW. 59 
 
 together, and try to remember one sick or poor 
 for whom they have not done what they could, 
 but are utterly unable ; and the books are brought 
 out, and the work, which, to be seasonable at 
 such a time, should be just as good as play; 
 and there is cheerful chat among the elders of 
 far-away times, and prophecy among the youth 
 of what shall be, to be fulfilled as God will and 
 as they will ; while still the snow falls and beats 
 about the home, and hisses down into the fire ; 
 and the heart grows tender in its thankfulness, 
 reaching out into the very wilderness, and cry- 
 ing with Burns, 
 
 " Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing, 
 That, in the merry months o' spring, 
 Delighted us to hear thee sing, 
 
 What comes o' thee ? 
 Whaur wilt thou cower thy cluttering wing, 
 
 And close thy ee? " 
 
 these, friends, are some of the treasures of the 
 snow, as they lie most obviously open to our rev- 
 erent study, inestimable, in their way, as the 
 blossoms of the spring, the flowers of_the sum- 
 mer, and the fruit of the autumn of the year. 
 
 It might be expected that I should now make 
 an application : I have none to make. One thing
 
 60 TBEASUEES OP THE SNOW. 
 
 only I can touch of the deeper spirit, beside what 
 I have touched as I have gone along. We speak 
 of the snow as of an image of death. It may be 
 that; but it hides the everlasting life always 
 under its robe, the life to be revealed in due 
 time, when all cold shadows shall melt away 
 before the ascending sun, and we shall be, not 
 unclothed, but clothed upon, and mortality shall 
 be swallowed up of life. 
 
 JAN. 26, 1867.
 
 IV. 
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 JOB iii. 23 : " Why is light given to a man whose way is hid ? " 
 
 " THE Book of Job," says Thomas Carlyle, " is 
 one of the grandest things ever written with a 
 pen ; our first statement, in books, of the problem 
 of the destiny of man, and the way God takes 
 with him on this earth ; grand in its simplicity 
 and epic melody, sublime in its sorrow and rec- 
 onciliation ; a choral melody, old as the heart of 
 man, soft as the summer midnight, wonderful as 
 the world with its seas and stars ; and there is 
 no other thing in the Bible, or out of it, of equal 
 literary merit." It is not possible now to tell 
 whether the book is a real history, or a sort of 
 oriental drama. The question is one that will 
 always keep the critics hard at work, so long as 
 there are rational, and what ought in all fairness 
 to be called not rational, schools in theology. My 
 own idea is, that the rude outline of the history 
 
 [fill
 
 62 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 was floating about the desert, as the history of 
 Lear or Macbeth floated about in later times 
 among our own fore-elders ; that, like those great 
 dramas, it was taken into the heart of some man 
 now forgotten, and came out again endowed with 
 this wondrous quality of inspiration and life, that 
 will bear it onward through all time. But, what- 
 ever the truth may be in this direction, this is 
 clear, that, when Job put the question I have 
 taken for a text, he was as far down in the world 
 as a man can be who is not abased by sin. He 
 had been the richest man in the country, hon- 
 ored by all that knew him, for his wisdom, his 
 goodness, or his money. He was now so poor, 
 that he says, men derided him whose fathers he 
 would not have set with the dogs of his flock. 
 He had been a sound, healthy man, fall of 
 human impulses and activities ; had been sight 
 to the blind, feet to the lame, a father to the poor, 
 a defender of the oppressed. He was now a 
 diseased and broken man, sitting on the ashes of 
 a ruined home ; his fires all gone out ; his house- 
 hold gods all shattered; his children all dead; 
 and his wife, the mother of his ten children, lost 
 to the mighty love which will take ever so deli-
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 63 
 
 cate but true-hearted woman at such a time, and 
 make her a tower of strength to the man. His 
 wife who should have stood, as the angels 
 stand, at once by his side and above him turned 
 on him in his uttermost sorrow, and said, " Curse 
 God, and die." 
 
 Two things, in this sad time, seem to have 
 smitten Job with most unconquerable pain. First, 
 he could not make his condition chord with his 
 conviction of what ought to have happened. He 
 had been trained to believe in the axiom we put 
 up in our Sunday schools, that to be good is to be 
 happy. Now he had been good, and yet here he 
 was as miserable as it was possible for a man 
 to be. And the worst of all was, he could not 
 deaden down to the level of his misery. The 
 light given him on the divine justice would 
 not let him rest. His subtle spirit, piercing, 
 restless, dissatisfied, tried him every moment. 
 Questions like these came up in his mind : " Why 
 have I lost my money ? I made it honestly, and 
 made good use of it. Why is my home ruined ? 
 1 never brought upon it one shadow of disgrace. 
 Why am I bereaven of my children, and worse 
 than bereaven of my wife ? If this is the re-
 
 64 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 suit of goodness, where is cause and effect? 
 What is there to hold on by, if all this misery 
 and mildew can come of upright, downright 
 truth and purity ? " Questions like these forced 
 themselves upon him, and would not be silenced. 
 There was but one way in which they could have 
 been silenced. If this spirit that troubled him 
 could have whispered, " Now, Job, what is the 
 use of your whining ? You know that you have 
 got just what you deserve ; that you are a poor, 
 old pewter Pecksniff, with not one grain of real 
 silver about you. Your whole life has been a 
 sham. You have said, 
 
 ' No graven images may be worshipped, 
 Save in the currency ; 
 Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive 
 Officiously to keep alive ; 
 Thou shalt not covet, but tradition 
 Approves all forms of competition.' " 
 
 If the spirit could have spoken so to the man, he 
 must have been dumb under a sense of the justice 
 of his punishment ; but there was no such sense 
 for him : his entire life had been a good life, and 
 the very light on his life in the past made his 
 present way only all the darker. 
 
 Then the second element in Job's misery seems 
 to lie in the fact, that there appeared to be light
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAT. 65 
 
 everywhere, except on his own life. If life would 
 strike a fair average; if other good men had 
 suffered too, or even bad men, then he could 
 bear it better. But the world went on just the 
 same. The sun shone with as much splendor 
 as on his wedding-day. The moon poured out 
 her tides of molten gold, night fretted the blue 
 vault with fires, trees blossomed, birds sang, 
 young men and maidens danced under the palms. 
 Other homes were full of gladness. This man 
 had sold his clip for a great price : the light- 
 ning had slain Job's sheep. That man had done 
 well in dates : the tornado had twisted Job's trees 
 down. Nay, worst of all, here were wicked men, 
 mighty in wealth ; their houses in peace, without 
 fear ; their children established in their sight, 
 sending forth little ones like a flock, spending 
 their days in prosperity, and yet saying, " Who 
 is the Almighty that we should fear him ? " while 
 here he was, a poor wreck, stranded on a deso- 
 late shore ; a broken man, crying, " Oh that it 
 were with me as in days gone by, when the can- 
 dle of the Lord shone round about me ; when I 
 took my seat in the market-place, and justice was 
 my robe and diadem ! When I think of it, I am
 
 66 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 confounded. One dieth in the fulness of hia 
 prosperity, wholly at ease and quiet : another 
 dieth in the bitterness of his soul, not having 
 tasted pleasure. How is it ? What does it mean ? 
 Why is light given to a man whose way is hid ? " 
 Now I suppose that not many men ever fall into 
 such supreme desolation as this, that is made to 
 centre in the life of this most sorrowful man. " It 
 is the possible of that which in itself is only posi- 
 tive." But then it is true that one may reach out 
 in all directions, and find men and women who are 
 conscious of the light shining, but who cannot find 
 the way; whose condition will not chord with 
 their conception of life ; who, in a certain sense, 
 would be better if they were not so good. The 
 very perfection of their nature is the way by 
 which they are most easily bruised. Keen, ear- 
 nest, onward, not satisfied to be below their own 
 ideal, they are yet turned so wofully this way 
 and that by adverse circumstances, that, at the 
 last, they either come to accept their life as a 
 doom, and bear it in grim silence ; or they cut the 
 masts when the storm comes, and drift a helpless 
 hull broadside to the breakers, to go down finally 
 like a stone.
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 67 
 
 Here is a young man newly come to your city, 
 fresh from his good country home. He is re- 
 solved to make a mark, to be the best sort of 
 a man. He is full of budding energies and capa- 
 bilities. Let him once get hold fairly, and he is 
 sure to succeed. But he finds it difficult to start : 
 places are not plenty. It is very hard, uphill 
 work : he strives, and stays poor. He does not 
 find the way. At last he is hungry and faint in 
 the wilderness, alone ; and the Devil comes, 
 tempting him. He is a very nice person proba- 
 bly, wears a good coat, lives in good style : it may 
 be he has a pew in church. He says, " Here is 
 something I want done : if you will do it, you 
 will get what you want, the kingdom of the 
 world. It is not what puritanic people call right, 
 to be sure ; but there is no harm in it. Every- 
 body does it ; and, if you do it, you are sure to 
 succeed." That young man is in danger, just as 
 his life rises in strong, fierce jets, and is full of 
 latent power. If he take counsel of his impa- 
 tience, he will kneel down there and then, and do 
 as he is bid. And it is possible that he will get 
 what he bargained for, but with this difference, 
 that, while he stands fast in his integrity, though
 
 68 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 there is no way, the light shines ; when he 
 has once gone down, the way may be open, but 
 the light is gone. Or he succeeds in all manly 
 integrity, makes his fortune, and then gradually 
 slides into a belief in a Providence like that Job 
 believed in before his trouble came, a Provi- 
 dence that will keep him prosperous, because 
 he is a good man: a great crash comes, and 
 he loses all, including his belief in God. Or he 
 makes a fortune, and holds it, but then forgets 
 that money to a man is like water to a plant, 
 only useful so long as it promotes growth. Like 
 water in the fountain or water in the tank, keep 
 it flowing, and it blesses ; keep it stagnant, and it 
 
 The maiden comes out of her home, with the 
 bloom of youth on her soul, a wonder of love 
 and trust. She walks wistfully down the world, 
 and gradually is aware, that she will never meet 
 the man she can wed. Yet her heart is full of 
 love, and there are moments when she feels very 
 very sad, trying to reconcile her nature to her 
 condition ; and she cries, " Why is light given, 
 when the way is hid ? " Or she weds, believing 
 that she has found a man sent from God for
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 69 
 
 her, to find afterward, perhaps, that she is mis- 
 taken by half a diameter. Yet she will strive 
 hard and long to see in him the man God has put 
 into her heart, but will give it up at the last, and 
 say, " Why is light given, when the way is hid ? " 
 
 Or the man and woman are set each to each, 
 like perfect music, unto noble words ; but one is 
 taken, and the other left. John Wilson, walking 
 down the world with such a wife by his side, said, 
 " I shall die in my nest : I shall see no sorrow." 
 But, one morning, he stood before his class, and 
 said, " Gentlemen, I have not examined your 
 essays : I could not see to read them in the valley 
 of the shadow of death where I have been ; " and 
 then the strong man bowed himself, and wept 
 sore, and went to his darkened home. 
 
 Or the man and woman live in sweet accord ; 
 but their home is too quiet, or it ripples over 
 with sweet laughter, and then passes again into 
 silence. 
 
 Or here, in the larger life, is a prince and 
 leader of men. The roots of his power begin to 
 ramify through all the land. He seems to be the 
 one indispensable man of the time. In the sorest 
 need of all, he is smitten down, and dies.
 
 70 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 Or here is a great cause, reaching back into a 
 great principle. The light of the divine justice 
 shines on the principle, and so wins men to it 
 that they cannot rest. Year after year, they will 
 stand suffering, toiling, dying for their cause ; 
 but the way does not open. Yet they cannot 
 choose but follow the light. If the light had not 
 shone so in our own land, we might have ground 
 along in some sort of affinity to slavery. It was 
 light poured on the conscience of the nation, that 
 brought on the war ; it was light shining through 
 the darkness, that kept the nation steady. Had 
 no such light shone, we should have constructed 
 a new Union, with the shackle of the slave for a 
 wedding-ring. But the light stood like a wall 
 of fire : yet how long it was only a light shining 
 on a hidden way ! our homes black with deso- 
 lation ; fathers, mothers, wives, only putting on 
 a cheerful look, because they would not by 
 their sadness dishearten the great heart of the 
 nation. 
 
 And so, I say, in men and nations you will 
 find everywhere this discord between the longing 
 that is in the soul, and what the man can do. 
 Our life, as some one has said of the Cathedral
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAT. 71 
 
 of Cologne, seems to be a broken promise made 
 to God ; and 
 
 "How blest we should be, 
 We have always believed, 
 Had we really achieved 
 What we nearly achieved ! 
 The thought that most thrilled 
 Our existence is one 
 That before we could frame it 
 In language is gone. 
 The more we gaze up into heaven, 
 The more do we feel our gaze fail. 
 All attempts to explore, 
 With earth's finite insight, 
 Heaven's infinite gladness, 
 Is baffled by something 
 Like infinite sadness." 
 
 Now trying, secondly, to find some solution of 
 this question, I want to say frankly, that I cannot 
 pretend to make the mystery all clear, so that it 
 will give you no more trouble ; because I cannot 
 put a girdle round the world in forty minutes, 
 and because a full solution must depend greatly 
 on our own dissolution. " Let the light enter," 
 said the great German, and then died. I 
 believe, also, that the man who thinks he has left 
 nothing unexplained, in the mystery of provi- 
 dence and life, has rather explained nothing. I 
 listen to him, if I am in trouble ; and then I go 
 home, and break my heart all the same ; because
 
 72 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 I see that he has not only not cleared up the mys- 
 tery, but that he does not know enough about it 
 to trouble him. The " Principia " and the Single 
 Rule of Three are alike simple and easy to him, 
 because he does not know the Rule of Three. 
 And so I cannot be satisfied with the last words 
 which some later hand has added to the book that 
 holds this sad history. They tell us how Job has 
 all his property doubled, to the last ass and 
 camel, has seven sons again and three daugh- 
 ters, has entire satisfaction of all his accusers, 
 lives a hundred and forty years, sees four gene- 
 rations of his line, and then dies satisfied. 
 Need I say that this solution will not stand the 
 test of life ; that if life, on the average, came 
 out so from its most trying ordeal, there would 
 be little need for sermons like this? For then 
 every life would be an open, self-contained provi- 
 dence, and the last page in time would vindicate 
 the first. Men do not so live and die ; and such 
 cannot have been the primitive conclusion of the 
 history. It has deeper meaning and a sublimer 
 justification, or it had never been inspired by the 
 Holy Ghost. 
 
 And this is sure to suggest itself to you,
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 73 
 
 as you read the history, that Job, in his trouble, 
 i would have lost nothing and gained very much, 
 if he had not been so hasty in coming to the 
 conclusion, that God had left him, that life was 
 a mere apple of Sodom, that he had backed up 
 to great walls of fate, and that he had not a 
 friend left on earth. His soul, looking through 
 her darkened windows, concluded the heavens 
 were dark. The nerve, quivering at the gentlest 
 touch, mistook the ministration of mercy for a 
 blow. He might have found some cool shelter 
 for his agony : he preferred to sit on the ashes 
 in the burning sun. He knew not where the 
 next robe was to come from : this did ; not de- 
 ter him from tearing to shreds the robe that 
 was to shelter him from the keen winds. It 
 was a dreadful trial at the best ; it was worse for 
 his way of meeting it ; and, when 'he was at once 
 in the worst health and temper possible, he said, 
 "Why is light given to a man whose way is 
 hid ? " Is not this now, as it was . then, one of 
 the most serious mistakes that can ' be made ? 
 I try to solve great problems of providence, per- 
 haps, when I am so unstrung as to be entirely 
 unfitted to touch their more subtle, delicate, and
 
 74 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 far-reaching harmonies. As well might you de- 
 cide on some exquisite anthem when your organ 
 is broken, and conclude there is no music in it 
 because you can make no music of it, as, in such 
 a condition of the life and such a temper of the 
 spirit, try to find these great harmonies of God. 
 When I am in trouble, then, and darkness comes 
 down on me like a pall, the first question ought 
 to be, " How much of this unbelief about provi- 
 dence and life, like Cowper's sense of the unpar- 
 donable sin, comes from the most material dis- 
 organization ? Is the darkness I feel in the soul, 
 or is it on the windows through which the soul 
 must see ? " Then, clear on this matter, the man 
 trred so will endeavor to stand at the first, where 
 this sad-hearted man stood at the last, in the 
 shadow of the Almighty, if he must stand in a 
 shadow, and hold on to the confidence that some- 
 where within all this trial is the eternal, the 
 shadow of a great rock in a weary land. 
 
 It is a wonderful story. Job and his friends 
 speculate all about the mystery, and their conclu- 
 sions from their premises are entirely correct ; 
 but they have forgotten to take in the separate 
 sovereign will of God. as working out a great
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 75 
 
 purpose in the man's life, by which he is to be 
 lifted into a grander reach of insight and experi- 
 ence than ever he had before. Job said, " I 
 suffer, I am in darkness and disappointment and 
 pain, because it is fate." Job's friends said, 
 " No : you suffer because you have sinned. 
 Rushes never grow without mire." They were 
 both wrong, and all wrong. He suffered because 
 that was the divine way of bringing him out of his 
 sleek, self-satisfied content; and when, through 
 suffering, that was done, he said, " I have heard 
 of Thee with mine ears, but now mine eye seeth 
 thee." There is a bird, it is said, that will never 
 learn the song his master will have him sing, 
 while his cage is full of light. He listens, and 
 learns a snatch of this, a trill of that, a polyglott 
 of all the songs in the grove, but never a separate 
 and entire melody of his own. But the master 
 covers his cage, makes the way all dark 
 about him : then he will listen, and listen to the 
 one song he has to sing ; and try and try, and 
 try again, until at the last his heart is full of it : 
 then, when he has caught the melody, the cage is 
 uncovered. When there is light on the song, 
 there is no need for darkness on the way.
 
 76 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 Friends, if I had never gone into darkened rooms, 
 where the soul stands at the parting of the 
 worlds; or sat down beside widows and little 
 children, when the desire of their eyes was taken 
 away with a stroke; or grasped the hands of 
 strong men, when all they had toiled for was 
 gone, nothing left but honor ; or ministered to 
 men mangled on the battle-field, beyond all tell- 
 ing ; and heard, in all these places where dark- 
 ness was on the way, melodies, melodies that I 
 never heard among the common-places of pros- 
 perity, I could not be so sure as I am, that God 
 often darkens the way that the melody may grow 
 clear and entire in the soul. 
 
 Then, if this man could have known, as he 
 sat there in the ashes, bruising his heart on this 
 problem of providence, that, in the trouble 
 that had come upon him, he was doing what one 
 man may do to work out the problem for the 
 world, he might again have taken courage. No 
 man lives to himself. Job's life is but your life 
 and mine, written in larger text. What we are 
 all doing, as we stand in our lot, steady to our 
 manliness or womanliness in our black days, is to 
 tell, in its measure, on the life and faith of every
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 77 
 
 good man coming after us, though our name may 
 be forgotten. There is a story in the annals of 
 science touching this principle, that we cannot 
 struggle faithfully with these things, and leave 
 them as we found them. Plato, piercing here 
 and there with his wonderful Greek eyes, 
 
 " Searching, through all he felt and saw, 
 The springs of life, the depths of awe, 
 To reach the law within the law," 
 
 was impressed by the suggestive beauty of the 
 elliptic figure. He tried to search out its full 
 meaning, but died without the sight. A century 
 and a half after Plato, Apollonius came, was 
 arrested in the same way, took up the question 
 where Plato left it, tried to find out its full mean- 
 ings, and died without the sight. " And so," 
 says a fine writer recently, " for eighteen cen- 
 turies, some of the best minds were fascinated by 
 this problem, drew from it strength and disci- 
 pline ; and yet, in all this time, the problem was 
 an abstract form, a beautiful or painful specula- 
 tion." It did not open out into any harmonious 
 principle. There was light on the thing, but no 
 light on the way. In the full time, Kepler came ; 
 sat down to the study ; and by what we call the 
 suggestion of genius, but ought to call the inspi-
 
 78 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 ration of the Almighty, found that the orbits 
 of the planets were elliptical. He died. Then 
 Newton was born, took up the problem where 
 Kepler had laid it down, made all the established 
 facts the base of his mightier labors ; and, when 
 he had done, he had shown that this figure, this 
 problem, that had held men spellbound through 
 the ages, is a prime element in the law of uni- 
 versal gravitation, at once the most beautiful 
 theory and the most absolute conclusion of sci- 
 ence. Then men could see how it was, because 
 God had made the light shine on the thing, that 
 the way was found. From Newton back to Plato, 
 in true apostolic order, every man, bending over 
 this mystery of a light where there was no way, 
 wrestling faithfully with it, had not only grown 
 more noble in his own soul in the struggle, but 
 had done his share toward the solution found 
 by this greatest and last who was also "born 
 under the law, that they might receive the adop- 
 tion of sons." 
 
 So, I tell you, is this restless search for a con- 
 dition that shall answer to our conception ; this 
 fascination, that compels us to search out the 
 elliptic of providence, the geometric certainty
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 79 
 
 underlying the apparent eccentricity. And every 
 struggle to find this certainty ; every endeavor to 
 plumb the deepest causes of the discord between 
 what the nature bears and what the soul believes ; 
 every striving to find the God of our loftiest faith 
 in our darkest day, will, in some way, aid the de- 
 monstration, until, in the full time, some Newton 
 of the soul will come, and, gathering the result 
 of all these struggles between our conception of 
 life and our condition in life, will make it the base 
 of some vast generalization, that will bring the ri- 
 pest conclusions of the science of providence into 
 perfect accord with the old, grand apostolic reve- 
 lation, " We know that all things work together 
 for good to them that love God." We wrong the 
 deepest revelations of life, when we are not con- 
 tent tD let this one little segment in the arc of 
 our existence stand in its own simple, separate 
 intention, whether it be gladness or gloom ; and 
 trust surely, if we are faithful, that the full and 
 perfect intention must come out in the full range 
 of our being. 
 
 God seldom, perhaps never, works out his 
 visible purpose in one life : how, then, shall he in 
 one life work out his perfect will ? The dumb
 
 80 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 poetry in William Burns the father had to 
 wait for Robert Burns the son. Bernardo waited 
 to be perfected in his son Torquato Tasso; 
 William Herschel left many a problem in the 
 heavens for John Herschel to make clear ; Leopold 
 Mozart wrestled with melodies that Ghrysostom 
 Mozart found afterward singing of themselves in 
 every chamber of his brain ; and Raymond Bon- 
 heur needed his daughter Rosa to come, and paint 
 out his pictures for him. 
 
 Dr. Reid has said, that, when the bee makes 
 its cell so geometrically, the geometry is not in 
 the bee, but in the geometrician that made the 
 bee. Alas, if in the Maker there is no such 
 order for us as there is for the bee ! If God so 
 instruct the bee; if God so feed the bird; if 
 even the lions, roaring after their prey, seek 
 their meat from God ; if he not only holds the 
 linnet on the spray, but the lion on the spring, 
 how shall we dare lose heart and hope ? 
 
 So, then, while we may not know what trials 
 wait on any of us, we can believe, that as the 
 days in which this man wrestled with his dark 
 maladies are the only days that make him worth 
 remembrance, and but for which his name had
 
 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 81 
 
 never been written in the book of life ; so the 
 days through which we struggle, finding no way, 
 but never losing the light, will be the most sig- 
 nificant we are called to live. Indeed men in all 
 ages have wrestled with this problem of the dif- 
 ference between the conception and the condition. 
 Literature is full of these appeals, from the doom 
 that is on us to the love that is over us, from 
 the God we fear to the God we worship. The 
 very Christ cries once, " My God ! why hast thou 
 forsaken me ? " Yet never did our noblest and 
 best, our apostles, martyrs, and confessors, flinch 
 finally from their trust, that God is light ; that 
 life is divine ; that there is a way, though we 
 may not see it ; and have gone singing of their 
 deep confidence, by fire and cross, into the 
 shadow of death. It is true, nay, it is truest 
 of all, that " men who suffered countless ills, 
 in battles for the true and just," have had the 
 strongest conviction, like old Latimer, that a 
 way would open in those moments when it 
 seemed most impossible. Their light on the 
 thing brought a commanding assurance, that 
 there must somewhere, sometime, be light on the 
 way. 
 
 4*
 
 82 LIGHT ON A HIDDEN WAY. 
 
 " I say to thee, do thou repeat 
 To the first man that thou shalt meet 
 In lane, highway, or open street, 
 
 That he and we, and all men, move 
 
 Under a canopy of love 
 
 As broad as the blue sky above; 
 
 That doubt and trouble, fear and pain, 
 And anguish, these are shadows vain, 
 That death itself shall not remain ; 
 
 That weary deserts we may tread, 
 Dreary perplexities may thread, 
 Through dark ways underground be led; 
 
 Yet we, on divers shores now cast, 
 Shall meet, when this dark storm is past, 
 Safe in our Father's home at last. 
 
 And, ere thou leave him, say thou this, 
 Yet one thing more: they only miss 
 The speedy winning of that bliss, 
 
 Who will not count it true, that love, 
 Blessing, not cursing, rules above; 
 And that in this we live and move. 
 
 And one thing further: let him know, 
 That, to believe these things are so, 
 This firm faith never to forego 
 
 In spite of all that seems at strife 
 With blessing all with cursing rife 
 That this is blessing, this is life."
 
 V. 
 
 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 
 ECCLES. i. 2 : " All is vanity." 
 
 ALMOST three thousand years ago, a little child 
 was born to David, King of Israel, whose advent 
 was felt to be such a blessing, that he was called 
 Solomon, or ' ; Peace." He was carefully reared, 
 as befitted the future ruler of the nation; had 
 natural gifts of surpassing excellence ; was dili- 
 gent in their improvement ; and, so far as we can 
 now ascertain, was the foremost scholar in the 
 land at that time. The nation of which he was 
 destined to be the ruler was then touching the 
 summit of its greatness ; and this prince became 
 to Jewry what Alexander, at a later day, was to 
 Greece, and Augustus to Rome. He came to 
 the throne in due time, and the people shouted, 
 *' God save the king ! " His public life opened 
 beautifully and well. He made wise treaties as a 
 king, and wonderful decisions as a judge. He
 
 84 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 
 
 developed commerce, manufactures, literature, and 
 art; edited, and partly wrote, one book which, 
 in those early days got unquestioned canoniza- 
 tion, and, in a measure deserved it. 
 
 He was also the founder and finisher of 
 the first temple on Zion, and offered the first 
 prayer at its consecration. That prayer has come 
 down to us: it reveals a sincere and religious 
 nature. Then he was a great student, philoso- 
 pher, musician, and landscape gardener ; created 
 a beautiful home, and married a- wife more of his 
 free choice than commonly falls to the lot of 
 kings. In a word, one thinks he was about all a 
 man can be, and gathered all a man can get, in 
 this world, to make him content and happy. 
 Then, when he had done, he wrote a sermon, 
 in which he tried to tell what it was all worth. 
 That sermon is the Book of Ecclesiastes, and 
 its burden is the text I have read you. And 
 I want to give you the kernel of the discourse, in 
 a few representative sentences, selected from the 
 whole book. 
 
 The preacher begins by declaring, that all 
 the things that happen are an endless repeti- 
 tion. The sun rises and sets ; the wind veers
 
 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 85 
 
 round and round; the waters are lifted out of 
 the sea, and poured in again. Man is a part 
 of this endless round ; race after race sweeps on, 
 all alike and all alike forgotten ; so that which 
 has been shall be, and there is no new thing 
 under the sun. " I have tried it," cries the 
 preacher. " I was a king, and what can any man 
 do more than a king? I tell you it is vanity; 
 and you cannot make the crooked straight, or 
 number what is wanting. Things are set fast 
 as they are, and so they will stay ; and he that 
 increases knowledge increases sorrow. I tried 
 pleasure, planted gardens, opened fountains, in- 
 dulged in wine and mirth and music. I know 
 exactly what these can do for a man ; and there 
 is no profit in them. I found them vanity ; so I 
 hated all my labor that I had done under the 
 sun. Then I dipped into fatalism. I said, * What 
 is to be will be ; there is a time for every thing 
 under the sun, a time to be born, and a time 
 to die ; a time to weep, and a time to laugh ; a 
 time to love, and a time to hate ; a time to get, 
 and a time to lose ; a time to pull down, and a 
 time to build up.' And, when the time comes, 
 the man must do his work ; but then this is van
 
 86 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 
 
 ity : for, if a man act so blindly, what is he more 
 than a beast ? There is no pre-eminence ; fate is 
 master of both ; all spring from the dust, all go 
 to the dust; all is vanity. Then I tried man. 
 But I saw the oppressed, and they had no 
 comforter; and the oppressor, and he had no 
 comfort. So I praised the dead more than the 
 living, and that which never knew life more than 
 they both. For I saw that every man was for 
 himself; and, though he had neither child nor 
 brother, he never said, ' Why do I starve my life 
 for gain ? ' All is vanity. What is a wise man 
 more than a fool ? Who can tell a man what is 
 good, when all his days are as a shadow ? Sor- 
 row is better than laughter; the end is better 
 than the beginning. A just man perishes by his 
 own justice, while a wicked man prolongs his life 
 in his wickedness. Nay, come to that, there is 
 no just man on this earth. I have studied the 
 thing out : there is not one man in a thousand 
 upright, and not one woman in the world. Don't 
 be righteous overmuch or wicked overmuch. I 
 see the wicked get the reward of the good, and 
 the good the reward of the wicked. A man has 
 no better thing under the sun than to eat and
 
 THE POLLY OF SOLOMON. 87 
 
 drink and be merry ; for there is no certainty. 
 The dead know not any thing. There is no wis- 
 dom or knowledge or device in the grave whither 
 we all hasten. And the race is not to the swift, 
 or the battle to the strong ; or bread to the wise, 
 or fame to the skilful. Servants ride on horses ; 
 princes trudge on foot. You cannot alter the 
 thing : it is so, and so it will be. If you dig a pit, 
 you will fall into it ; if you move a hedge, a ser- 
 pent will bite you ; if you take down a wall, the 
 stones will bruise you ; if you listen, you will 
 hear your servant curse you. Money will buy 
 any thing. All is vanity. Childhood and youth 
 is vanity ; old age is vanity. Vanity of vanities, 
 all is vanity." 
 
 This, my friends, is the substance of this great 
 man's last estimate of life. You read it, and, as 
 you read, you watch the writer trying to fight 
 down the black shadows as they rise. Here and 
 there, too, all through his sermon, he will say a 
 noble thing on the right side ; as if the old power 
 of piety was strong enough yet to burn through, 
 and force its way to the parchment. But, 
 when the best is said and done, the result is a 
 belief in a God who exacts more than he gives,
 
 88 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 
 
 and punishes more readily than he blesses. He 
 seems sometimes to think, if a man will take 
 good care, there may be some small chance of 
 content for him. Still he is all the while afraid 
 he may say too much on that side, and is ready 
 at every turn to let you see the death's head 
 within the folds of his vesture. Here and there 
 a pleasant note is just sounded, and you say, 
 " Now we are to have a bit of gospel, or a song 
 of thanksgiving." But the gospel is never heard ; 
 the song is never sung. The heavy, solemn chord 
 beats along steadily to the last ; and the burden 
 is always, " All is vanity." 
 
 And so it is that this woful estimate of life has 
 made this book by far the most difficult to under- 
 stand in the whole range of the Scriptures. 
 Down to the time of Jerome, there were pious 
 Jews not a few who held that it had better be 
 destroyed. It has taxed the ingenuity of com- 
 mentators, who have differed over it as only 
 commentators can. For the book has that about 
 it that will be heard. The writer was, in such 
 wisdom as it was, the wisest man of his era. He 
 had matchless opportunities of knowing what the 
 life really is he condemns so sternly. He speaks
 
 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 89 
 
 to you with a most evident, sad, painful good 
 faith, that makes you feel sure he means every 
 word he says. And then the book is set fast 
 among our Sacred Scriptures. The statements 
 in it are as positive as any other. Solomon is as 
 clear when he says, " Man has no pre-eminence 
 over a beast," as John is when he says, " Beloved, 
 now are we the sons of God." So it comes to 
 pass, that, if you take this book as it stands, and 
 undertake to believe it, the result is very sad. It 
 chills all piety, paralyzes all effort, hushes all 
 prayer. If there is grief in wisdom, had I not 
 better be a fool ? If all labor is vanity, and a 
 man is no better than a beast, and rewards and 
 punishments are a dire confusion, and child- 
 hood and youth and old age is vanity, and to die 
 is better than to live, because there is nothing 
 worth living or dying for, then this is 
 
 " A life of nothings, nothing worth, 
 From that first nothing ere our birth 
 To the last nothing under earth." 
 
 It cannot be denied, again, that the book is but 
 the vocal utterance of many a silent sermon in 
 many a lonely heart. It was this, no doubt, that 
 made it the text-book of Voltaire and the bosom- 
 friend of Frederick the Great. Its monotones of
 
 90 THE FOLLY OP SOLOMON. 
 
 despair are echoed out of a thousand experiences. 
 When a friend wished a great English statesman 
 a happy new year, " Happy ! " he said ; " it had 
 need be happier than the last, for in that I never 
 knew one happy day." When an English law- 
 yer, whose life had seemed to be one long range 
 of success, mounted the last step in his profes- 
 sion, he wrote, " In a few weeks I shall retire to 
 dear Encombe, as a short resting-place between 
 vexation and the grave." When one said to the 
 great Rothschild, " You must be a happy man," 
 he replied, " I sleep with pistols under my pil- 
 low." The most brilliant man of the world in 
 the last century said, " I have enjoyed all the 
 pleasures of life, and I do not regret their loss ; 
 I have been behind the scenes, and seen the coarse 
 pulleys and ropes and tallow-candles." And 
 the most brilliant poet of the last generation said, 
 " The lapse of ages changes all but man, who 
 ever has been, and will be, an unlucky rascal. 
 And one of the finest promise, dying in hi* first 
 prime, left us this estimate, that 
 
 " All this passing scene 
 
 Is a peevish April day ; 
 A little sun, a little rain, 
 And then death sweeps along the plain. 
 And all things fade awav."
 
 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 91 
 
 Nay, may I not leave these dead, and come to 
 the living to find a legion of men in Europe 
 and America, ready to indorse this as their 
 own estimate of life, men who feel that life 
 is weary, and fear that death is but a dead, blank 
 wall; who have come to consider the forces 
 of life and nature things that grind on so im- 
 mutably as to leave them no heart to pray ; who 
 see those whose life is a shame before heaven 
 rosy and happy, and threescore and ten; while 
 others, whose life had begun to be a very foun- 
 tain of inspiration and blessing, are cut off in 
 their prime ? And so they cry, " How can there 
 be a Divine Providence ? " and ponder over life, 
 and pare down faith to their contracting and con- 
 tracted hope, until a living faith in God dies out 
 of their heart ; and then they lose a real faith in 
 any thing, as Solomon did. For I tell you, that, 
 as the outer life takes its deepest meaning from 
 the soul, the inner life takes its deepest meaning 
 from God ; and, when that goes, all goes. When 
 a man ceases to believe in God, he is in instant 
 danger of ceasing to believe in any thing worth 
 the name of belief. In open-eyed loyalty and 
 trust, and trustful men and things, all these van- 
 ish, and he can see only
 
 92 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 
 
 44 Good statesmen, who bring ruin on a state; 
 Good patriots, who for a theory risk a cause ; 
 Good priests, who bring all good to jeopardy; 
 Good Christians, who sit still in easy-chairs, 
 And damn the general world for standing up." 
 
 Now, then, for all this, I have but one answer. 
 / cannot believe it. In the deepest meaning of the 
 truth and the life, this assertion that all is vanity 
 is utterly untrue. It is no matter to me that 
 the man who wrote it is sometimes called " the 
 wisest man;" that he was in deadly earnest 
 about it ; that it was his own woful experience ; 
 and, if you could add to this, that an angel had 
 come from heaven to re-affirm it. All this is gos- 
 samer before the conviction of every wholesome 
 and healthy mind, that in this universe there is 
 an infinitely different meaning. God never meant 
 life to be vanity ; and life is not vanity. I care 
 not that Solomon look at me out of his great sad 
 eyes, and say so, while his heart breaks; and 
 that Dundas and Eldon and Byron and Kirke 
 White range with him. I will not, you will not, 
 and millions beside in the world and out of it will 
 not, testify that all is vanity. 
 
 And that we are right and all such men wrong 
 can be proven, I think, outside our own experi-
 
 THE POLLY OP SOLOMON. 93 
 
 ence, on several different counts. For, first of 
 all, this Solomon is not the right man to testify. 
 When he said this of life, he was in no condition 
 to tell the truth about it, and he did not tell 
 the truth. Universal testimony makes this ser- 
 mon the fruit of his old age. There is a dim 
 tradition, that the book was found in fragments 
 after his death, edited, and the last six verses 
 added, and they are the best in the book, 
 by another hand. If this book was the work 
 of Solomon's old age, the fact of itself supplies 
 the first reason why we have such a sermon ; 
 for the man who wrote this sermon, and the 
 youth who offered that noble prayer at the dedi- 
 cation of the temple, are not the same men. 
 The young king knelt down in the bloom 
 of his youth, when the fountains of life were 
 pure and clean ; when through and through his 
 soul great floods of power and grace rose to 
 springtide every day; when the processions of 
 nature and providence, the numbers of the poet, 
 the wisdom of the sage, the labors of the re- 
 former, and the sacrifices of the patriot, were 
 steeped for him in their rarest beauty, endowed 
 with their loftiest meaning, and filled with their
 
 94 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 
 
 uttermost power. But that old king in the 
 palace, writing his sermon, is weary and worn ; 
 and, worst of all, the clear fountains of his 
 nature are changed to puddles ; the fresh, strong 
 life has been squandered away ; the delicate, 
 divine perception blunted, clogged, and at last 
 smothered to death. You know how, in his 
 later life, this man fell from his great estate ; and, 
 to gratify his passion and pride, outraged the 
 most sacred ordinances, and neglected the most 
 sacred duties, that can cluster round any life. 
 His biographer compresses the whole sad story 
 into one chapter ; but, if you will read that, you 
 can see how fearfully he had fallen, how 
 haggard vices had supplanted fair virtues, and 
 successful rebellion taken the place of " God 
 save the king." It is when he sits in that splen- 
 did, cheerless home ; when the sceptre totters in 
 his palsied hand, and the bloom of purity and grace 
 has gone out of him ; when his sin has made him 
 blind to the blessing of books and nature and 
 home and God, and his bad life has magnetized 
 bad men toward him, and driven good men away ; 
 and his relation to woman is of such a nature as 
 to drive him from the presence of such pure and
 
 THE FOLLY OP SOLOMON. 95 
 
 noble women as, thank God, never fail out of the 
 world, and never will ; satirists and Solomons to 
 the contrary, notwithstanding ; it is when he has 
 spent" all this substance in riotous living, and re- 
 duced himself to an utter destitution of the heart 
 and soul, that he will write his final estimate 
 of God, nature, life, death, books, and men and 
 women. Can we wonder that such a man should 
 write " all is vanity," when he had come to be the 
 vanity he wrote ? 
 
 But, then, I ask you, was this the time to make 
 the estimate, when the man was all dissonant 
 to the touch of the divine finger; or was that 
 the time when every faculty was chorded and 
 attuned, and he stood in harmony with life, and 
 the experience on which his estimate was founded 
 was the sweet music that came out of the com- 
 munion of his soul with God ? Believe me, we 
 cannot form the true estimate when the life is 
 ruined. What he said when he was his best self, 
 before his ruin, was true ; and the estimate he 
 made, when he was a lower man, was as much 
 out of true as the man was. 
 
 Then there was an error in this man's method 
 of testing life, that I suspect to be at the root of
 
 96 THE FOLLY OP SOLOMON. 
 
 much of the weariness that is still felt ; and that 
 is, the man does not seem to have tried to be 
 happy, in making others happy, in bringing one 
 gleam more of gladness, or one pulse mOre of 
 life, into any soul save his own. In the sad days 
 recorded here, nature, books, men, women, were 
 worth to him just what they could do for him. 
 When he gave up being good, and took to being 
 wise, he never more drank at that fountain which 
 is the source of all true blessedness, but made 
 his wisdom a cistern; and, lo! it was cracked 
 and fissured in every direction. He gave up 
 the present sense of God in the soul ; the high 
 uses of worship ; the inspiration hidden in great 
 books ; the deep blessedness of being father, hus- 
 band, friend, teacher, patriot, and reformer ; buried 
 himself in his harem ; turned a deaf ear to all the 
 pleadings of his better angel ; and, when he had 
 come to this, who can wonder that all was vanity ? 
 But now I must state the reason, that to me 
 is greatest of all, why I know all is not vanity. 
 A thousand years after this sad sermon was 
 written, there was born of the same great line 
 another little child. He had no royal training, 
 no waiting sceptre, no kingly palace, but the ten
 
 THE FOLLY OP SOLOMON. 97 
 
 der nurture of a noble mother, and, from the first, 
 a wonderful nearness to God, and that was all. 
 He grew up in a country town that had become a 
 proverb of worthlessuess. The neighbors, when 
 he is a man, cannot remember that he ever 
 learned his letters. He stood at the carpenter's 
 bench, working for his bread, until he was per- 
 haps thirty years old ; and then it was given to 
 him to preach another sermon, and make another 
 estimate. He was endowed with a power to see 
 into the nature of this world and its life, such as 
 never fell to the lot of another on the earth. The 
 good he knew, and the bad he knew, as I suppose 
 it was never known before. The human heart 
 was laid bare before him down to its deepest 
 recesses. None ever felt, as he did, the curse of 
 sin, or had such a perfect loyalty and love for 
 holiness. Nature, Providence, Heaven, and Hell 
 were actual presences, solid certainties to his 
 deep, true sight. He came out of the carpenter's 
 shop ; and when he had pondered over this solemn 
 question of life in the solitudes beyond Jordan, 
 it was laid, I say, upon him, as it had been laid 
 on his fore-elder long before, to preach on the 
 mighty theme. That sermon also has come 
 5
 
 98 THE POLLY OF SOLOMON. 
 
 down to us. It was as sure to do that, as the 
 sun was that shone when he was preaching it; 
 and to me the difference between the two sermons 
 bridges the whole distance between the two great 
 estimates of life, taught on this side by the 
 Saviour, and on that by Solomon. 
 
 Listen while I try the ring of a few sentences 
 from each of them. " Vanity of vanities, all is 
 vanity," cries the first preacher. " Blessed are 
 the poor, blessed are the mourners, blessed are 
 the quiet, blessed are the hungry for the right, 
 blessed are the giving and forgiving, blessed are 
 the pure-hearted, blessed are the peace-makers, 
 and blessed are the sufferers for the right," cries 
 the second. " Be not righteous overmuch," 
 cries the first. " Be ye perfect, even as your 
 Father in heaven is perfect," cries the second. 
 " That which befalleth a beast, befalleth a man," 
 cries the first. " The very hairs of your head are 
 numbered," cries the second. "There is no 
 knowledge nor wisdom nor device in the grave," 
 cries the first. " I go to prepare a place for you ; 
 and I will come again, and take you to myself, 
 that where I am, there ye may be also," cries the 
 second.
 
 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 99 
 
 This last preacher tested life also. Whatever 
 can be done to prove all is vanity, was done to 
 him. Giving out blessing, getting back cursing. 
 Surely, if ever man would write " Yanity of 
 vanities " over life, this was the man to do it ; 
 if ever one has made life unspeakably noble 
 and good through a perfect belief in it, it was this 
 man. The madman crouching among the tombs, 
 the lost woman on the street, the seaman on the 
 wharf, and the beggar full of sores, all stood in 
 the first glory of a celestial life, as he saw them, 
 the lily on the green sward, the bird on the spray, 
 and the child in the gutter, claimed in his heart 
 kinship with the cherubim and seraphim up in 
 heaven. God was to him the Father. The future 
 life was more of a reality than the present. He 
 saw resurgam written over every grave, and could 
 see past sorrow and pain, the perfect end, and 
 say, " Of all that my Father has given me, I have 
 lost nothing: he will raise it up at the last 
 day." 
 
 Now, I look out at life with you. and we can 
 no more solve some of its problems than could this 
 sa.d-hearted king, because we have in our own lives 
 some darkness or trouble like that which he felt.
 
 100 THE POLLY OP SOLOMON. 
 
 There are moments in our experience when fate 
 seems to block out prayer, when the awful stead- 
 fastness of nature comes in like a dead wall 
 against providence, and the vision is clouded, 
 and the heart is faint. It is because we hav 
 the black drop in our veins that we may ponder 
 the great problems of life, sometimes until our 
 hearts break, and yet be no nearer their solution, 
 what is either microscope or telescope to a 
 blind man. But as I grieve over these things, 
 and come no nearer, I hear this strong voice of a 
 greater than Solomon, crying, " Come unto me, 
 all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
 give you rest." Then, if I cannot see heaven of 
 myself, let me look at it through his eyes. If 
 earth grows empty and worthless to me, let me 
 believe in what it was to him, and be sure that 
 he is the Way the Truth and the Life ; so, hold- 
 ing fast by faith in him, I may come at last to a 
 faith in earth and heaven and life and the life to 
 come, and all that is most indispensable to the 
 soul. For so it is, that he is the Mediator be- 
 tween God and man; helps my unbelief; ever 
 liveth to make intercession for me ; that he is still 
 eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame ; that he
 
 THE FOLLY OF SOLOMON. 101 
 
 preaches deliverance to the captives, and the open- 
 ing of prison doors to them that are bound. If I 
 cannot pray because I see no reason, then that 
 bended figure on Olivet is my reason. If I can- 
 not distinguish between fate and providence, let 
 me rejoice that he can, and that my blindness 
 can make no difference to his blessing. So, un- 
 der this Captain of my salvation, I shall be more 
 than conqueror ; and, while the mournful outcry 
 is rising about me, "Vanity of vanities, all is 
 vanity," in my heart shall be the confidence that 
 all things work together for good. 
 
 " And nothing walks with aimless feet, 
 And not one life shall be destroyed, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God has made the pile complete."
 
 VI. 
 
 FAITH. 
 
 HEB. xi. 1 : " Faith ... the evidence of things not seen." 
 
 WHEN the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 has made this masterly definition of a true faith, 
 he instantly proceeds to make the thing clear by 
 illustration. He says, among other things, a 
 man once started out from the old home, to set- 
 tle in a new country. He did not know his des- 
 tination, only his direction. Somewnere west by 
 south lay the land he was to own ; and so west 
 by south he went. He was possessed by two 
 great ideas : one was to make a new home ; the 
 other, to fill that home with children, and so 
 become the founder of a family. He came to the 
 land at last, and was sure about its being the 
 right place, because the same thing occurred to 
 assure him of it thajt had first led him to seek it. 
 The voice in his soul, he had learned to know as 
 the voice of God, told him so. 
 11021
 
 FAITH. 103 
 
 But time went on. He lived to be an old man 
 before he had one legitimate son ; and died before 
 that sou then getting into years, and very shift- 
 less had children born to him. And all the 
 laud he could call his own, when the end came, 
 was a field he had bought years before, as a cem- 
 etery for his dead. This was what his life-long 
 faith had brought him as a pledge that it was a 
 faith and not a fancy, a shiftless, childless son, 
 and a graveyard. This man, says the writer, was 
 your ancestor; and he lived and died as fully 
 satisfied that every thing would come out right, 
 as if he had seen the land in your possession these 
 fifteen centuries, and seen you swarming as the 
 stars in the sky for multitude. 
 
 Then he tells of another, a man educated, 
 refined, intellectual, and directly in the way of 
 becoming almost any thing he could wish to be, 
 in. one of the foremost nations on the earth. In 
 the country, at that time, there was an alien race, 
 ignorant, oppressed, and so hateful to those 
 who oppressed them, that they never sat down 
 together at the same table. In the outset of his 
 career, that young man turned his back on all 
 his bright prospects, took sides with the despised
 
 104 FAITH. 
 
 and hated brickmakers, for that was what they 
 had come to ; gave up the society of cultivated 
 men, the occupations of the scholar and gentle- 
 man, and the use that must have become a second 
 nature ; went over and stood beside the pool 
 multitude ; identified himself with them ; went to 
 work as a shepherd, until the time should come 
 to emancipate them from their thraldom ; pon- 
 dered the thing over in the grassy solitudes of 
 Midian ; and then, when he had got so full of it 
 that he could be quiet no longer, went up to 
 court, bearded the king in his palace, and de- 
 manded their freedom. That man, says this 
 writer, was your lawgiver ; and he did this be- 
 cause he had the faith in the future which your 
 ancestor had. Here, he said, is the making of 
 a nation, and I am to make it. Across the 
 desert is the land they are to occupy; and I 
 ,am to lead them to it. Forty years after, he 
 was at the end of his career. All that time he 
 had striven for the fulfilment of his purpose, had 
 endured every thing and done every thing, with 
 this faith in his heart, that there was sure to be 
 success at the end. 
 Then, when they were quite ready to go in and
 
 FAITH. 105 
 
 take the land, the man knew that for him all was 
 over ; that the deep longing of eighty years was 
 not to be given him ; he could never stand on the 
 laud he had made every sacrifice to reach. But 
 there was a mountain-top that commanded the 
 country : he would go there, and take one great 
 look at it. He went up ; it lay glancing in 
 the sun, as Switzerland lies about the feet of 
 the Rhigi ; and, with the light of it in his eyes, 
 he died. God's angel kissed him, and he slept. 
 But, as he looked his last, he no more doubted 
 that the nation for which, fourscore years before, 
 he had pawned his position, prospects, likings, 
 and life, would live on that land, and be in 
 some way what he had wrought for, than if he 
 had seen it already dotted with their towers and 
 towns. And this was his motive-power, " Faith 
 . . . the evidence of things not seen." 
 
 What a mighty thing as a motive-power, then, 
 this faith must be! If a man is possessed by 
 it, that something can be done; in some sure 
 sense, it is done already, and only waits its time 
 to come into visible existence in the best way it 
 can. Just as one of those noble groups John 
 Rogers fashions for us is done the moment the 
 5*
 
 106 FAITH. 
 
 conception of it has struck his heart with a pang 
 of delight, though he may not have so much as 
 the lump of clay for his beginning ; while I might 
 stand with the clay in my hand to doomsday, and 
 not make what he does, because I could not have 
 the " Faith . . . the evidence of things not seen." 
 
 Indeed this is the sense I would put on that 
 strange saying of Jesus, " If ye have faith to 
 say to that mountain, * Be thou removed and cast 
 into the sea,' it shall be done," that what he 
 wants to impress on us is not so much the moun- 
 tain riven out of its deep fastnesses on the earth, 
 as the faith abiding in its deeper fastnesses in the 
 heart. " If ye have faith, it shall be done," I 
 conceive to be the true reading, as the true teach- 
 ing is, What cannot be done, cannot be of faith. 
 There can be no real faith in the soul toward 
 the impossible ; but make sure that faith is there, 
 and then you can form no conception of the sur- 
 prises of power hidden in the heart of it. 
 
 And, trying to make this thing clear to you, I 
 know of no better way to begin, than by saying, 
 that faith is never that airy nothing which often 
 usurps its place, and for which I can find no bet- 
 ter name than fancy, a feeling without fitness,
 
 FAITH. 107 
 
 an anticipation without an antecedent, an effect 
 without a cause, a cipher without a unit. 
 
 In the dawn of his life, a lad will say, " I am 
 going to be a merchant prince, or a metropolitan 
 preacher." It is a noble purpose, if it can sink 
 into his soul, deepen and enrich his nature, 
 and so become the ladder by which he will rise 
 into the heaven of his hope. But if to be what 
 he dreams lie merely dreams, cribs his lessons, 
 shirks his duties, and conducts himself generally 
 like a loafer, what he may call a faith is merely 
 a very foolish fancy, founded on nothing, and sure 
 to end in nothing but disappointment. 
 
 Or he may prepare a plan of his life at thirty, 
 on the theory that this world, with all its treas- 
 ures, is a sort of big sweet orange he can suck 
 with an endless gusto, and then give Lazarus the 
 skin ; and, whether he has money already or has 
 to make it, is determined to have a good time, 
 because he believes that was what orange and 
 appetite are made for. Now, is that a faith in the 
 world and life ? No : it is a fancy that will leave 
 liis orange at last as savorless as a potato-rind, 
 or as bitter as soot ; and set him some day longing 
 to get the cup of cold water out of the hand of the
 
 108 FAITH. 
 
 meanest man he ever left to rot, if he could only 
 hope to get with it the power that man has to 
 quench his thirst. Or he will make ready for the 
 life to come, by saying prayers, going through 
 motions, making professions, shirking responsibil- 
 ities, worrying down doubts, and pampering a 
 minister. And he will call that faith. Is it faith ? 
 It is the merest fancy, the play of the imagina- 
 tion, to the hurt of the man, hurtful every time, 
 and leading to tragical ends, whether in the day- 
 dream of the idle boy or the awful soliloquies of 
 Hamlet. 
 
 Fancies are never, at our peril, to be mistaken 
 for faith. They may feel just as good, and in 
 some wild way they are as good, to the maniac 
 strutting in his crown of straw, as to the king 
 on his throne. It is because they have no inti- 
 mate and inevitable relation to the set and 
 nature and law and life of things. And so they 
 can never be the evidence of things not seen. A 
 mere fancy, to a pure faith, is as the " Arabian 
 Nights " to the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 Then faith is not something standing clean at 
 the other extreme from fancy, for which there 
 is no better name than fatalism, a condition
 
 FAITH. 109 
 
 numbers are continually drifting into, who, from 
 their very earnestness, are in no danger of being 
 sucked into the whirlpools of fancy ; men who 
 glance at the world and life through the night- 
 glass of Mr. Buckle ; who look backward and 
 there is eternity, and forward and there is 
 eternity ; and feel all about them, and conclude 
 that they are in the grasp of a power beside 
 which what they can do to help themselves is 
 about what a chip can do on the curve at 
 Niagara. 
 
 And yet their nature may be far too bright 
 and wholesome to permit them to feel, that the 
 drift of things is not on the whole for good. 
 They will be ready even to admit that " our souls 
 are organ-pipes of diverse stop and various pitch, 
 each with its proper note thrilling beneath the 
 self-same touch of God." But, when a hard 
 pinch comes, they smoke their pipe, and refer 
 it to Allah, or cover their face and refer it to 
 A llah ; but never fight it out, inch by inch, with 
 all their heart and soul, in the sure faith that 
 things will be very much after all what they make 
 them, that the Father worketh hitherto, and 
 they work. And these two things the fancy
 
 110 FAITH. 
 
 that things will come to pass because we dream 
 them, and the fatalism that they will come to 
 pass because we cannot avoid them are never 
 to be mistaken for faith. 
 
 It is true that there is both a fancy and a fatal- 
 ism that is perfectly sound and good, the 
 fancy that clothes the future to an earnest lad 
 with a sure hope ; that keeps the world fresh 
 and fair, as in natures like that of Leigh Hunt, 
 when to most men it has become arid as desert 
 dust ; the bloom and poetry, thank God, by 
 which men are converted, and become as little 
 children. And there is a fatalism that touches 
 the very centre of the circle of faith, which Paul 
 always had in his soul. When sounding out 
 some mighty affirmation of the sovereignty of 
 God, he would go right on, with a more perfect 
 and trusting devotion to work in the line of 
 it. Fancy and fatalism, are the strong hand- 
 maidens of faith : happy is the man whose faith 
 they serve. 
 
 But what, then, is faith ? Can that be made 
 clear ? I think it can ; and, to do it, I will 
 go back to the illustrations I cited at the start ; 
 very noble and good, as I doubt not you are
 
 FAITH. Ill 
 
 aware, when they are divested of the unreal won- 
 ders the worship of the ages has gathered about 
 them. 
 
 A young man feels in his heart the conviction, 
 that there in the future is waiting for him a 
 great destiny. Yet that destiny depends on his 
 courage, and that courage on his constancy ; and 
 it is only when each has opened into the other, 
 that the three become that evidence of things not 
 seen, on which he can die with his soul sat- 
 isfied, though all the land he had to show for 
 the one promise was a graveyard ; and all the 
 line for the other, a childless son. Another 
 feels a conviction, that here at his hand is a 
 great work to do, a nation to create out of 
 a degraded mob, and to settle in a land 
 where it can carry out his ideas and its own 
 destiny. But the conviction can be nothing 
 without courage ; and courage, a mere rushing 
 into the jaws of destruction, without constancy. 
 Only when forty years had gone, and the 
 steady soul had fought its fight, did conviction, 
 courage, and constancy ripen into the full 
 certainty which shone in the eyes of the dying 
 statesman, as he stood on Nebo, and death was
 
 112 FAITH. 
 
 swallowed up in victory. And yet it is clear, 
 that, while courage and constancy in these men 
 was essential to their faith, faith again was es- 
 sential to their courage and constancy. These 
 were the meat and drink on which the faith de- 
 pended ; but the faith was the life for which the 
 meat and drink were made. A dim, indefinable 
 consciousness at first it was, that something was 
 waiting in that direction, a treasure hid in that 
 field somewhere, to be their own if they durst 
 but sell all they had, and buy the field. Then, 
 as bit by bit they paid the price in the pure gold 
 of some new responsibility or sacrifice, the 
 clear certainty took the place of the dim inti- 
 mation, and faith became the evidence of things 
 not seen. 
 
 This is the way a true faith always comes. Con- 
 versing once with a most faithful woman, I found 
 that the way she came to be what she is lay at 
 first along a dark path, in which she had to take 
 one little timid step at a time. But, as she went 
 on, she found all the more reason to take another 
 and another, until God led her by a way she 
 knew not, and brought her into a large ' place. 
 Yet it was a long while before any step did not
 
 FAITH. 113 
 
 make the most painful drafts on both her courage 
 and constancy. And so the whole drift of what 
 man has done for man and God is the story of 
 such a leading, first a consciousness that the 
 thing must be done, then a spark of courage to 
 try and do it ; then a constancy that endures to 
 the end; and then, whatever the end may be, 
 the prison or the palace, it is all the same, the 
 soul has the evidence of things not seen, and goes 
 singing into her rest. 
 
 Now, then, a faith like this must be a prime 
 thing in your life and mine, or we shall make a 
 dead failure of it ; and it must be rooted in us, 
 as it was in these old-time men, in a sure con- 
 viction of some divine intention to be wrought 
 out by our living. 
 
 There is a trick of humility, in some men, I 
 cannot believe to be good. It is that which 
 makes them so very humble, that they cannot try 
 to do a thing worth the notice of earth or heaven. 
 Believe me, that is not a possession, but a desti- 
 tution. It is not because I have humility when 
 I feel like that, but because I want faith. I can 
 see nothing noble in myself, because I have not 
 the evidence of things not seen. Well may any
 
 114 FAITH. 
 
 man be humble, in a fair, manly, and manful 
 humility ; but, I tell you, the humility that will 
 lead me to believe myself a nobody, a cipher, a 
 stick, in this great destiny-laden world and time, 
 is no better than a delusion and a snare. What 
 I can do with my single arm may be mean 
 enough ; but that is not the question. The thing 
 to consider is, What can I do with God to help 
 me ? And the difference of the one and the other 
 way is just the difference between a man trying 
 to push a train of cars up grade by his single, 
 puny strength, and the same man on a locomo- 
 tive, with the steam up, moving the whole mass 
 by a turn of the wrist. The man at the rear of 
 the train can do nothing : how should he ? But 
 give him the lever, and the faith which is the evi- 
 dence of things not seen, and all things are pos- 
 sible ; because then, in what his hand finds to do, 
 there is hidden a treasure of power unspeakably 
 greater than his own. The fire of an old world 
 before Adam, the life-long energy and inspiration 
 of Watt and Stephenson, the ponderous strokes 
 of the Nasmyth hammer, and the labors of a thou- 
 sand men, all lock into his hand the moment it 
 touches that lever
 
 FAITH. 115 
 
 Now, then, we want to make sure of three 
 things, then we shall know that this faith is our 
 own: 1. That God is at work without me, 
 that is, the divine energy, as fresh and full 
 before I came, as the sea is before the minnow 
 comes ; 2. That he is at work through me, 
 that is, the divine intention, as certainly pres- 
 ent in my life as it was in the life of Moses ; and, 
 3. That what we do together is as sure to be a 
 success as that we are striving to make it one. 
 There may be more in the graveyard than there 
 is in the home. In the moment toward which I 
 have striven forty years with a tireless, passion- 
 ate, hungry energy, my expectation may be cut 
 off, while my eye is as bright and my step as firm 
 as ever. It is no matter. The energy is as full, 
 the intention as direct, and the accomplishment 
 as sure, as though God had already made the pile 
 complete. And when, with the conviction that I 
 can do a worthy thing, and the courage to try 
 and the constancy to keep on, I can cast myself, 
 as Paul did, and Moses and Abraham, into the 
 arms of a perfect assurance of this energy, in- 
 tention, and accomplishment of the Eternal, 
 feel, in every fibre of my nature, that in Him
 
 116 FAITH. 
 
 I live and move and have my being, I shall 
 not fear, though the earth be removed, because 
 
 " A faith like this for ever doth impart 
 Authentic tidings of invisible thjpgs; 
 Of ebb and flow,' and ever-during power, 
 And central peace, subsisting at the heart 
 Of endless agitation." 
 
 Let the lad, in this spirit, dream of his great 
 place, then, and strike for it with all his might ; 
 and the man, in the thick of this world's work, 
 take heart as these old Hebrews did, and be 
 sure that to do what honest thing he has to do, 
 with courage and constancy as long as he lives, 
 is not only the way to heaven hereafter, but the 
 way to make heaven a solid and shining reality 
 now. Hume said the teaching of ethics in Eng- 
 land improved the manufacture of broadcloth. 
 I doubt not that the broadcloth re-acted again on 
 the ethics, because all things work together for 
 good to them that love God. 
 
 But one word waits now to be said. There, on 
 the summit of all great doing, stands one whose 
 life is the light of men ; because, beyond all men, 
 there came into his heart this conviction, that he 
 had a great destiny, and the courage to live for 
 it, and the constancy to hold on to it, together
 
 FAITH. 117 
 
 with an assurance of the divine energy and in- 
 tention and accomplishment, that carried him 
 clean through. 
 
 He was despised and rejected of men, a man 
 of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; but it bore 
 him through that. He esteemed himself stricken, 
 smitten of God, and afflicted ; but it bore him 
 through that. The great destiny he had believed 
 in never seemed such an utter failure as when he 
 was dying for it, and the men that had clung to 
 him and believed in him one with curses, and 
 the rest with cowardice forsook him, and fled ; 
 but it carried him through that. He died in the 
 very rose-bloom of his life ; but it carried him 
 through that, and so he became the power of 
 God unto salvation to every one that believe th. 
 
 O men, working for God's truth in this time ! 
 it is almost natural, when you see what appalling 
 forces of evil you have to encounter, that you 
 should say, " What can we do better than meet 
 in this corner, keep a spark of fire burning in our 
 own hearts, and let the rest go?" If that is 
 all we can do, we cannot do that. There is no 
 greater mistake than to suppose, that this divine 
 fire, of faith in the heart, is to be kindled Indian-
 
 118 FAITH. 
 
 fashion by rubbing two dry sticks together in a 
 meeting-house. I must have faith in my faith, 
 believe that, if my convictions in religion, in civil 
 policy, in morals, and in life altogether, could go 
 wide and deep, they would make new heavens 
 and a new earth ; and then go to work, and make 
 them go wide and deep. 
 
 " Thou must be true thyself, 
 If thou the truth wouldst teach; 
 Thy soul must overflow, if thou 
 Another soul wouldst reach, 
 It needs the overflowing heart 
 To give the lips full speech. 
 Think truly, and thy thought 
 Shall the world's famine feed; 
 Speak truly, and thy word 
 Shall be a fruitful seed ; 
 Live truly, and thy life shall be 
 A great and noble creed."
 
 VII. 
 
 HOPE. 
 
 I WANT to say a word about Hope, "the real 
 riches," David Hume said, " as fear is the real 
 poverty ; " what Jeremy Collier calls " that vigor- 
 ous principle, which sets the head and heart to 
 work, animates the man to do his very utmost, 
 puts difficulty out of countenance, and makes 
 even impossibility give way ; " " the highest 
 recognition of the pure intellect," says another 
 famous old author, " and the earnest of its im- 
 mortality ; " " at the bottom of the vase," the 
 ancients said, " when every other thing had gone 
 out of it," by which, no doubt, they meant the 
 human heart. 
 
 And I can think of no better way of getting 
 at the root of the matter, than to begin with the 
 primitive root of the word itself, in the Anglo- 
 Saxon. It is something that means to open the 
 eyes wide, and watch for what is to come ; as we 
 
 11101
 
 120 HOPE. 
 
 have all noticed children do, when they expect to 
 see some wonder or receive some gift. Indeed, 
 there is another word, closely akin to this, from 
 which we get our hope, the word expect, watch- 
 ing for what is to come, the obverse of inspect, 
 looking at what has come. Another closely- 
 related word, much more frequently used in 
 human senses in England than in America, is 
 gape; especially descriptive of the way in which 
 a young bird in the nest will get ready for food, 
 at the slightest intimation that it may be coming. 
 These roots, away back in the nursery of our 
 tongue, perhaps all belong to the one tangle, 
 though they are now growing as separate plants ; 
 and they certify, clearly enough, how the seed out 
 of .which they first sprang is the instinct by 
 which we are prompted, both for this life and 
 that which is to come, to look out eagerly toward 
 the infinite ; in the expectation, that there is in 
 God and his good providence that which will be 
 to us what the mother bird, poised on the spray 
 or shooting like a flash to her place, is to the 
 helpless fledgling in the nest. 
 
 And I want to ask, before I go further, what 
 can be more beautiful than these kindred etymol-
 
 HOPE. 121 
 
 jogies ? A child on tiptoe with its eyes wide open, 
 expecting, because an intimation has come, that 
 presently there will be something to see or re- 
 ceive ; the nestling in its cradle, waiting for its 
 sure morsel. That was the way in which our 
 first fathers tried to express their idea of what 
 hope is, and what it can do. They said, " As a 
 child opens its eyes, and a young bird its mouth, 
 so is true hope in the soul of a man," expec- 
 tation and intimation together, certainty reaching 
 through change, the flutter of a fledgling's heart, 
 welded fast to immutable law. 
 
 These meanings to me, again, are the delicate 
 dividing line between Faith and Hope. They are 
 twin sisters, and hardly to be known apart ; both 
 as beautiful as they can be, and alike beautiful, 
 and very often indeed mistaken each for the 
 other. Yet this need never be ; because between 
 them there is this clear difference, that while 
 Hope expects, Faith inspects ; while Hope is like 
 Mary, looking wp-ward, Faith is like Martha, look- 
 ing at-ward ; while the light in the eyes of Hope is 
 high, the light in the eyes of Faith is strong ; while 
 Hope trembles in expectation, Faith is quiet in 
 possession. Hope leaps out toward what will be ; 
 6
 
 122 HOPE. 
 
 Faith holds on to what is ; Hope idealizes, Faith 
 realizes ; Faith sees, Hope foresees. 
 
 And so it comes, that, in what we call religion, 
 faith is conservative, while hope is progressive. 
 And the most hopeful men are always drawn into 
 the new movements of their age, and are faithful 
 to them, so long as they can remember Goethe's 
 exhortation, to be true to the dream of their 
 youth. For progression is up stream, while con- 
 servatism is on stream. And so, if _a man gets 
 afraid, as Luther did, or tired with Erasmus, 
 there is no need that he should get out of the 
 boat, or pull back : all he need do is just leave 
 go of the stroke-oar, and the thing will go back 
 of itself fast enough. It is so J;hat not a few who 
 were progressive men at twenty-five are conser- 
 vative men at fifty-five ; yet are not aware that 
 they have done a thing to make themselves con- 
 servative. It is so that some Unitarians are 
 far less liberal than some Orthodox, who were 
 once a long way behind them ; not that they ever 
 pulled back, but they did not pull forward, while 
 the Orthodox did. Now they are away down 
 below ; and only do not go lower, because they 
 have drifted into the still waters in which it
 
 HOPE. 123 
 
 is a matter of the most absolute indifference 
 which way they may be heading. In their youth, 
 their watchword was, " Be sure you are right, 
 and then, go ahead ; " in their age it is, " Be 
 sure you are right, and then, hold on." The 
 trouble with such men is, that, while they hold on 
 to the faith, they have let go of the hope of their 
 religion. And so they inspect, but they do not 
 expect ; they believe in what has come, but not 
 in what is coming. So they expire after they 
 have ceased to inspire ; they die, but they do not 
 make many live. 
 
 You get a grand lesson on this matter, as 
 you go from the mouth to the springs of the 
 Rhine. Passing through the fog and mist of 
 Holland, as through a stagnant, grassy sea, you 
 stretch upward, league after league ; and, as 
 you go, the country gradually changes. The air 
 grows clearer, the prospect finer; every thing 
 that can stir the soul begins to reach down to- 
 ward you, and touch you with its glory. But 
 the higher you go, the harder is your going; 
 only the deepening beauty never fails you. So 
 at last you come into Switzerland, where the 
 blue heavens bend over you with their infinite,
 
 124 HOPE. 
 
 tender light ; and the mountains stand about 
 you, in their white robes, glorious as the gates 
 of heaven, with green valleys nestling between, 
 that, but for sorrow and sin, are beautiful as 
 Paradise. And all about you is a vaster vision 
 and within you an intenser inspiration than can 
 ever be felt on the foggy flats below. 
 
 It is the difference between faith alone, and 
 faith and hope together. A man may be afloat on 
 this river of the water of life, down on the stag- 
 nant flats of Romanism ; or he may pull up to the 
 outposts of the mountains, and, looking up and 
 down, may say, " That is enough for me ; now I 
 will go no further." Or he may look up, and see 
 still, blue, misty distances, hinting of a glory his 
 eye has not seen or his heart conceived ; and then 
 go on again, full of hope, until the uttermost 
 glory receives him into its heart. I do not claim 
 this great place, for my ism or any other. 
 When the thing is done, it is generally done 
 by a man who has broken away from the isms ; 
 some uplooking, steady, hopeful soul, that, 
 
 " Rowing hard against the stream, 
 Sees distant gates of Eden gleam, 
 And doth not dream it is a dream." 
 
 For it must be true, as God is true, that the ut-
 
 HOPE. 125 
 
 termost is the holiest truth ; and, not until a 
 man shall win his way to the very steps of the 
 great white throne, can he at his peril inspect 
 and cease to expect, be content with posses- 
 sion, and not discontent with desire, have such 
 an absolute faith in any revelation, as to have no 
 hope of a higher and better. 
 
 This brings me, then, to the consideration of 
 hope itself as a positive matter. And, in dis- 
 cussing this, I cannot do better than begin with 
 the figure the apostle has caught, and ask you to 
 notice the striking contrast it presents to many 
 of our common ideas of what hope is, and what 
 it can do. 
 
 Hope, you say. Why, that is the most intan- 
 gible thing a man can entertain. It is the mere 
 poetry of life, the play of summer lightning on 
 the night, the meteor shower across heaven, the 
 sheen of the aurora in winter. " Hope," says 
 Owen Feltham, " is the bladder a man will take 
 wherewith to learn to swim ; then he goes beyond 
 return, and is lost." And Lee, 
 
 " Hope is the fawning traitor of the mind, 
 Which, while it cozens with a colored friendship, 
 Robs us of our best virtue, resolution." 
 
 Now, what says Paul ? He has a picture in his
 
 126 HOPE. 
 
 eye of a Roman soldier, with bronze shoes, bra- 
 zen greaves, breastplate, sword, shield; a quick 
 eye, strong hand, steady foot, and a legion shoul- 
 der to shoulder, as cool in the thick of the battle 
 as if it was on dress-parade. But that is because 
 there is one thing more, wanting, which the man's 
 hand and foot and eye and sword and shield 
 would all come short of his need, when he has to 
 hold his own against the battle-axe of the barba- 
 rian, and that is the solid, shining helmet. So 
 the apostle makes our life a battle, and every 
 man a soldier, and it is not enough that the 
 heart be protected by the shield of faith, 
 the head must be guarded also by the helmet of 
 hope : the one is as indispensable as the other. 
 
 And a brief glance at the life about us will 
 soon convince you that the man is right. 
 Whether we dip into our own experience, or 
 watch that of other men, we shall still conclude, 
 with wise old Samuel Johnson, that our powers 
 owe very much of their energy to our hope ; 
 and whatever enlarges hope exalts courage ; and, 
 where there is no hope, there is no endeavor. 
 
 Here is Cyrus Field conceiving the idea of 
 binding the Atlantic with a cord, of making
 
 HOPE. 127 
 
 that awful crystal dome a whispering gallery be- 
 tween two worlds, of fulfilling afresh, in these 
 last times, the old prophecy, that " as the light- 
 ning cometh out of the east, and shineth even 
 unto the west, so shall also the coming of the 
 Son of man be." In carrying out his idea, the 
 man has two servants to help him, the faith 
 that it can be done, and the hope that he shall 
 do it. With these aids he goes to work. Faith 
 steadies him ; hope inspires him. Faith works ; 
 hope flies. Faith deliberates ; hope anticipates. 
 Faith lets the cable go, and it breaks, and is 
 lost. " Nay, not lost," cries hope, and fishes 
 it up again. If hope had struck work in Cyrus 
 Field, and faith alone had remained, we should 
 not this day have had this nexus formed of his 
 manhood, by which the world will be born 
 again to a new life. But there, through the long 
 day, the noble sisters stood, faith in Ireland, 
 hope in Newfoundland ; fakh in the Old World, 
 ' hope in the New. Faith threw the cord, hope 
 caught it. And " I saw a great angel stand with 
 one foot on the sea, and another on the land ; 
 and he sware by Him that liveth, that time shall 
 be no more"
 
 128 HOPE. 
 
 Here is Garibaldi conceiving the idea of a new 
 Italy. He has faith and hope. Austria, Naples, 
 and Rome are against him. But no man knows, 
 or can know, what faith and hope together can 
 do in a man of the pattern of Garibaldi. What 
 they have done for Italy will go ringing down the 
 ages. They have " subdued kingdoms, wrought 
 righteousness, escaped the edge of the sword, 
 turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women 
 have received their dead to life again ; others 
 were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that 
 they might obtain the better resurrection." And 
 iiV these very days they are singing a song, as we 
 sang " John Brown's body " and the " Battle-cry 
 of Freedom ; " and its burden is their hope that 
 Italy will be free. And if that man shall still keep 
 his hands clasped in the hands of these sisters, 
 this good work will never cease, until Italy shall 
 
 rise clean out of the dust, and the old mistress of 
 t 
 
 the world begin a jjew career ; in which her 
 greatness will be counted, as all true greatness is 
 counted, by the worth and weight of the service 
 she can render to the race. 
 
 Very curiously, if you will again, you can see 
 the power of faith without hope illustrated in
 
 HOPE. 129 
 
 China. There you see a nation, beside which in 
 numbers we are only a handful, that has had for 
 ages as much faith and as little hope as ever 
 entered into any civilization. When our ances- 
 tors were savages, they had advanced about 
 where they are now. Things we consider the 
 morning stars of our new life were known to 
 them centuries before we invented them! And 
 who shall say what China might not have been 
 to-day, had she marched on under the banner of 
 a boundless hope ? But she had faith without 
 hope. She said, " My learning, literature, sci- 
 ence, art, religion are all as good as they can 
 be. If any man shall add unto these things, I 
 will add unto him plagues ; and, if any man shall 
 take away from these things, I will take away his 
 part out of the book of life." It is in vain that 
 Raphael has painted, and Angelo builded ; and 
 that holy men, from of old, have written as they 
 were inspired by the Holy Ghost. What is St. 
 Peter's to the great Pagoda, or the Immaculate 
 Conception to the gilded Joss, or the Evangels to 
 Confucius, or the Monitor to the royal junk, or 
 any other thing we can show, to the glory of the 
 children of the Sun? So the vast empire sits 
 6*
 
 130 HOPE. 
 
 still on the stagnant waters of conservatism, 
 with faith, without hope ; inspecting for ever, 
 expecting no more, and with Russia creeping 
 stealthily toward a point where she can get a 
 fair sight at her heart. Then some day, there 
 will be a shot, and a great dead carcass, to 
 which the Lion of England will gather with the 
 Northern *Bear ; and on which the Eagle of 
 America will swoop down swiftly, screaming 
 defiance as she flies at the Eagle of France. But 
 who shall say, that China, with the noble quali- 
 ties no doubt she has, might not have had a 
 peerless place in the world, had she held herself 
 hopeful and expectant, continually, toward every 
 new idea and discovery, had she taken for a 
 helmet the hope of salvation ? 
 
 And, altogether, this fact of hope and its influ- 
 ence has some important applications. First, in 
 the application of hope to religion, to the deepest 
 and highest things of which we have any knowl- 
 edge, it is entirely essential to remember, that, 
 when this man tells his friends to take for a 
 helmet the hope of salvation, he meant the hope 
 he himself was rushing through the world to pro- 
 claim, with such an abandon of enthusiasm, as
 
 HOPE. 131 
 
 to make a cool, dispassionate Roman call him a 
 lunatic. 
 
 So that the first thing really in the exhortation 
 is the hopefulness of the exhorter. The man had, 
 for that old time, just what Cyrus Field had on 
 the Stock Exchange in London, the splendid 
 contagion of a great hope, as reasonable to him 
 as the coldest mathematical demonstration, while 
 yet it might seem to the mathematician a mere 
 wild dream. And this is always the first thing, 
 the greater thing than faith, the power that 
 sings what faith can only say, the perfect music 
 to the noble word. 
 
 In the England of John Wesley, numbers of 
 men were his peers in faith. Butler, Toplady, 
 Romaine, John Newton, and a whole host beside, 
 got as firm a grip on what faith can reach, and 
 said words as noble for it as he did. But Wesley 
 had more hopefulness in his little finger than any 
 other man of them had in his whole body, not 
 excepting even Whitefield, who was always ham- 
 j>ered by the chills and fever of Calvinism. 
 Wesley was the liberal Christian apostle of his 
 day, and his Methodism the liberal Christianity. 
 His successors, however, have long since ceased
 
 132 HOPE. 
 
 to pull up stream. But so it was, that, wherever 
 Wesley went, men caught the contagion of his 
 great hope, and then ran tirelessly as long as 
 they lived, kindling over all the world And so 
 Macaulay' does well to say, that no man can write 
 
 history of England in the last century, who 
 shall fail to take into account Wesley's vast in- 
 fluence in the common English life. 
 
 This was what Paul had to begin with. How 
 did he get it ? 
 
 We are watching, just now in this country, the 
 solution of a very weighty problem. It is this : 
 How nearly can the tree of knowledge over- 
 shadow and overgrow the tree of life in our chil- 
 dren, and we still endure to see it, without a 
 revolution ? We take them in their tender age, 
 make them do an amount of head-work before 
 they are through the high school, to say nothing 
 of college, most of us revolt from in our prime. 
 They grow thin and pale in the process, lose 
 vitality and what there is no better word for 
 than vim every year; and so, at last, they 
 graduate, with a fine stock of knowledge, and an 
 utter loathing of it in many cases ; that is, half 
 inanition and half intellectual dyspepsia.
 
 HOPE. 133 
 
 In a deep, spiritual sense, this was what the 
 world had come to in religion in Paul's time, and 
 what Paul had come to when the great hope 
 struck him on his way to Damascus. As a Jew, 
 he had run after all the signs, miracles, and 
 dogmas of his church ; as a scholar, had dipped 
 away down into what was known then of the 
 nature and philosophy of things ; and, alike as 
 Pharisee and philosopher, he had been in awful 
 and appalling earnest, only to find that somehow 
 his heart was dead to all the good of it. It was 
 then that the new hope had caught him, given 
 him a new life, and made him seem like a crazy 
 man to the Roman, as he went telling of the 
 wonder. But as the chemist can keep you a 
 piece of ice in a white-hot crucible, so in Paul's 
 nature there was a place cooler than any thing 
 the Roman suspected, where the worth of the 
 new hope was calmly proven right along, and 
 always with the same result, that, wherever 
 it took full possession, it opened the soul afresh 
 to earth and heaven, started all sorts of new 
 energies and activities, and, being a new life, 
 made a new man. 
 
 Then, in life generally, as in religion particu-
 
 134 HOPE. . 
 
 larly, this hope is essential. " Those sciences are 
 always studied with the keenest interest," says 
 Sir William Hamilton, " that are in a state of 
 progress and uncertainty. Absolute certainty 
 and completion would be the paralysis of any 
 study ; and the last and worst calamity that could 
 befall man, as he is now constituted, would be the 
 full and final possession of speculative truth he 
 now vainly anticipates as the consummation of 
 his happiness." And so it is always true, that 
 the restless radicals in speculative theology, in 
 any age, instead of being infidels, are saviours, 
 because they bring in a new hope, and break in 
 on the appalling dogma of a finality, with the 
 news that yonder, away in the distance, is the 
 intimation of a new world better and more beau- 
 tiful than this the time lives in ; and then, while 
 a timid conservatism is crying* out it is impos- 
 sible, as did the conservatism of old Spain, they 
 put out up stream, like Columbus, and find it. 
 
 I take no credit to the liberal faith we have no 
 right to claim, when I say what I believe, that 
 posterity will do us justice for endeavoring to 
 save even the Bible from contempt in the mind 
 of this age, first, by showing a better truth in
 
 MOPE. 135 
 
 it than was allowed to exist in the dogmas of the 
 churches ; and, second, by affirming that there is 
 an infinite truth over and above the Bible, into 
 which all men are welcome to penetrate who will 
 or can, so opening the vista of a blessed and 
 boundless hope to the always unsatisfied mind 
 and soul. 
 
 Then I must make this general hope my own 
 particular possession. Our time, and all time, 
 abounds in those who have a great faith, but not 
 a great hope ; the solid certainty about the heart, 
 but not the shining assurance about the intellect. 
 God will make all right somehow, they feel ; but 
 tell them that he will do far more exceeding 
 abundantly above all that they can ask or think, 
 and that will strike* them as something they 
 never adequately realized, always providing they 
 believe you. Yet it is this alone that lifts us out 
 of the world of inspection into that of expecta- 
 tion ; that flashes into the soul the vision of that 
 shy, trembling, blue, misty distance, on the far 
 horizon of the world of grace and truth ; hinting 
 rather than revealing its beauty, but bringing 
 untold treasure of rich experiences by the way, 
 as we pull up stream to seek it, experiences we
 
 136 HOPE. 
 
 had never suspected, staying down among the 
 flats. 
 
 Friends, I would not like to think of heaven as 
 in any sense a finality. If, when old Bunyan's 
 Christian went in at those golden gates, he gave 
 up a great hope for a great possession, then, 
 knowing what I do, and only what I do, I pity 
 him. 
 
 Young men and women, with this life mainly 
 before you, get this hope. I have had twenty 
 years more of life than you have ; and, if I could 
 tell you some of it that can only be known 
 where no secrets are hid, you would acknowledge 
 it was as hard for me as it ever can be for 
 you. I call back to you from my vantage-ground 
 of twenty years, and beseech you to bring, with 
 a great faith, a great hope ; to make sure, that 
 there is not a day you can live, bending over your 
 work, with a sad sense perhaps that the life is 
 going out of you in the merest necessity of 
 living, but brings you nearer to some divine sur- 
 prise of blessing, some great unfolding of God's 
 very glory. 
 
 Men and women in middle life, as I am ; with 
 the bloom gone from some things that seemed
 
 HOPE. 137 
 
 very beautiful, as they lay glistening in the dew 
 of the morning ; with ashes for beauty, yonder in 
 the cemetery ; and with a dumb, daily care about 
 things that must be cared for; with children 
 growing up, for whose future you plan and pray ; 
 with a faith still in the things from which the 
 bloom has gone, and that God, who has given you 
 ashes for beauty, will some time give you beauty 
 for ashes ; that things will come right generally 
 at last, and that the children will some time 
 scramble into the right place as you did, I 
 charge you, as one to whom God has entrusted 
 the keys, the sense and faculty of realizing 
 that his dark ways open, to take for your hel- 
 met the hope of salvation. Whatever you do, 
 never let a painful inspection rob you of a great 
 expectation. If, as you live, you try to live faith- 
 fully, then, as the Lord liveth, try to live hope- 
 fully, or you will miss the better half of your 
 living. Do you go to your graves these winter 
 days, and observe how the flowers you tended 
 there last summer are dead, and think of other 
 and fairer dead, of which those were but the poor 
 intimation. For the sake of all that can fill you 
 with the everlasting life, open your heart to the
 
 138 HOPE. 
 
 sense of that spring-tide, sure to rise, when the 
 sun comes back ; and tell your soul, that is but 
 
 4 
 
 the intimation also of the spring-tide poor David 
 Gray sang about, as he lay a-dying, in the first 
 bloom of his life, 
 
 " There is life with God 
 In other kingdoms of a sweeter air: 
 In Eden every flower is blown. Amen." 
 
 So may all sing, if to an inreachmg faith they 
 will add an outlooking hope, will know that 
 this flutter of the heart, that causes them to open 
 their eyes wide, reaches for its fruition into cer- 
 tainties immutable as heaven.
 
 vm. 
 
 LOVE. 
 
 1 COR. xiii. 13: "Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but 
 the greatest of these is charity." 
 
 IT was my lot lately to speak to you about two 
 prime things in our life, Faith and Hope. One 
 other thing still remains to be considered, 
 Love ; in Paul's estimation, the essence of all 
 professions and possessions in religion whatever. 
 I want to speak to you of this greatest thing now ; 
 to try and tell you what it is, what it can do, and 
 so what we are, if we possess it ; and, by conse- 
 quence, what we are not if we do not possess it, 
 though we may have every thing beside that earth 
 and heaven can give. In the text, the word is 
 translated charity. It is a term that touches, at 
 the best, only one little corner of love. In "Wick- 
 liffe's time, however, from whose Bible this trans- 
 lation was adopted into our version, love and 
 charity were as nearly related as charity and 
 benevolence are now. This can be understood, 
 
 [139]
 
 140 LOVE. 
 
 if we will remember that charity and dear, in the 
 sense of precious, belong to the one root. They 
 spring from what was common enough when 
 they were born, dearth or scarcity. Food was 
 then precious, much esteemed, much loved. The 
 generation to which my grandfather belonged 
 had some such idea as this. They lived through 
 a time when a succession of bad seasons, and a 
 wasteful war, had reduced the whole working 
 population of England to miserable black bread. 
 Then good bread, sound and white, was dear ; 
 not as it is now to us in money value merely, but 
 in this primitive value of something to love, a 
 small piece being given to the children sometimes 
 on a Sunday, as a very precious thing. 
 
 In that way, we get at the old meaning of this 
 word charity. Five hundred years ago, it was so 
 understood generally, as to warrant its adoption 
 by Wickliffe "in preference to love. In that sense, 
 Milton still uses it, three hundred years after, in 
 " Paradise Lost," in the lines, 
 
 " Which of ye will be mortal, to redeem 
 Man's mortal crime ? 
 Dwells in all heaven a charity so dear ? " 
 
 And Dr. Samuel Clarke still later says, " Charity
 
 LOVE. 141 
 
 doth not merely signify, as we use it now, alms- 
 giving to the poor ; but universal love and good- 
 will to all men." The word must have gone out 
 of use as expressing love, however, at a very 
 early day, perhaps about the time when people 
 ceased to put any love into their charity, making 
 it merely a duty ; for, a century only after Wick- 
 liffe, Coverdale renders the word as we have it, 
 Cranmer follows Coverdale, and the Geneva Bible 
 both. And I have dwelt this moment on the 
 matter, first, that you might see how it stands ; 
 and, second, that you may see something else that 
 is not without importance, so long as we prefer 
 the Bible in our worship before all other books. 
 
 A few Sundays ago, I read the lesson for the 
 morning, a part of the Sermon on the Mount, 
 from the translation of Andrews Norton, no doubt 
 one of the best in existence; and, wherever it 
 differs from the one we use, generally, the nearest 
 right. I heard a number of comments afterward 
 on the change. I did not hear one say it was for 
 the better : everybody, on the whole, preferred the 
 old version. So in my heart I do. I have read 
 it ever since I read any thing, and my fathers 
 before me for many generations. Our mothers
 
 142 LOVE. 
 
 read it as the sleeping babes nestled beside them ; 
 and, when the babes were old men of fourscore, 
 and dying, the minister read it to the departing 
 soul, and over the dust by the grave. And so no 
 wonder it is in our hearts. But what about the 
 head ? We owe something to that. When the 
 German peasant said to the priest, " I cannot 
 repeat the Lord's Prayer, but I can give you the 
 tune," he did precisely what we (who would have 
 laughed at him) do every time that we prefer the 
 sound to the sense, the old familiar words, now 
 only partly true, to the truth and life of Norton 
 and Noyes. I think, if the term " villain" had 
 been so fortunate as to be the best translation, 
 at the time our version was made, of the word 
 " servant," as it was in the elder English, and 
 then the old sense had left it as it has, there 
 would be great numbers of worshippers of the 
 common version, quite ready to show what a 
 sound, well-flavored word it is, especially if they 
 were not servants. The truth is, the best equiv- 
 alent for either Greek or Hebrew is always the 
 English that can give me the keenest edge or the 
 finest aroma of the original for which it stands ; 
 and, that word being the truest, is therefore the
 
 LOVE. 143 
 
 most sacred. So that not this, because it is old, 
 or that, because it is new, but that which, with 
 the letter, can transfer to me the spirit of the 
 original, is the most sacred book. 
 
 This said, the question comes up for our con- 
 sideration, What is this love, of which Paul makes 
 such marvellous account? In the chapter in 
 which my text occurs, he conducts one of the 
 most striking arguments, by affirmation, ever 
 made, to show what a supreme thing it is. He 
 supposes himself possessing the finest qualities, 
 excepting this one, that can be imagined. An 
 eloquence so noble as to combine manly breadth 
 with angelic insight, I may have that, he says. 
 Then he takes a brazen instrument and blows 
 through it one of those discordances we have all 
 heard from the thing, and says, If I have not love, 
 my eloquence is that. Or I may be able to dive, 
 by my intuitions, into the very heart of things 
 (with Shakspeare, he would have said, if he were 
 writing the Epistle now), or may hold in my brain 
 the whole encyclopedia of human knowledge, and 
 the result may be a power that can lift mountains 
 out of their sockets ; but, if I have not love, what 
 I have and what I am is nothing. Nay, with 
 7
 
 144 LOVE. 
 
 all this I may combine a charity so boundless, as 
 to leave me at last as poor as the poverty I have 
 stripped myself to relieve; and a devotion so 
 absolute, that I will be burnt at the stake. But 
 eloquence, intuition, knowledge, faith, benevo- 
 lence, and devotion, altogether, are merely so 
 many ciphers, if I have not love. 
 
 Now, is this wonderful governing quality capa- 
 ble of being made simple and clear, like faith and 
 hope, so that I may know inevitably whether I 
 possess it ? must be a great question, if Paul is 
 right, as no doubt he is. What, then, is this 
 love ? It is a word traceable altogether to many 
 different roots. That could not be otherwise; 
 because, in every rivulet that now makes this 
 river of the English tongue, it must have been 
 present in one form or other. Love would natu- 
 rally be one of the very first things the most 
 abject savages must find a name for, after getting 
 a word to express each of the bare needs of life. 
 The first time the man of the forest tried to win 
 a maiden in some higher way than by the ancient 
 contrivance of carrying her off by force, he would 
 need the word. The first time the mother had to 
 tell of the mysterious glow in her heart toward
 
 LOVE. . 145 
 
 her babe in its helplessness, she would need the 
 word. And so love, in one root, is longing ; in 
 another, goodness ; in another, preference : but, to 
 me, the right rests at last with Adam Clarke's 
 idea, that it is the Teutonic word leben, life. 
 " This is life," these children of nature said, when 
 they first began to be conscious of this glowing 
 wonder in their hearts. " You are my life," the 
 man said when he went to win the maiden ; and 
 the mother, when she caught her nursling to her 
 heart. Love is to live ; and not to love is not to 
 live. And it was exactly the definition that John 
 hit on away off across the world, when he wanted 
 to tell of the nearest and dearest of all the rela- 
 tions the soul can hold to God. 
 
 And so, if you will recall what was said about 
 faith, that it is inreaching; and hope, that 
 it is outlooking, we come then to what we 
 are to understand of love, that it is in being. 
 By faith I stand; by hope I soar; by love 
 I am. Faith assures me, hope inspires me; 
 love is me, at my best. " Love," says an 
 old French lexicon, " is the sameness of souls." 
 " Love," says Luther, " is that by which I de- 
 sire to be in perpetual union with that I love." 
 
 7
 
 146 LOVE. 
 
 " Love," says Dr. South, " is the spirit and spring 
 of the universe." "Love," says Emerson, "is 
 our highest word and synonym of God." -" And 
 love," says Solomon, " is strong as death." But, 
 the instant we read that, we say Solomon does 
 not reach the mark in his definition, any more 
 than he did in his life ; for, in the history of hu- 
 manity, millions of proofs have been given that 
 love is stronger than death, and is, as Erasmus 
 says, " as immortal, when it is rooted in virtue, as 
 virtue herself." 
 
 And it is only as we keep close to this idea 
 and fact, of love as life, that we can prevent 
 its being confounded with other and baser things, 
 that, getting mixed up with it in our language, 
 act like the baser metals mixed up in the coinage 
 of a country, giving the real gold and silver* a 
 lower relative value, and debasing the whole fair 
 standard of the commonwealth. Love, for exam- 
 ple, is not lust. Because love, for whatever may 
 in itself be good, adds just so much as there is in 
 what I love to life ; while lust for that very thing 
 exhausts life. Here are two men devoted to 
 money-making. In the one, money is a love ; in 
 the other, a lust. In the heart in which it is a
 
 LOVE. 147 
 
 love, it acts like a fire, expanding and softening ; 
 in the heart in which it is a lust, it acts like 
 a frost, hardening and contracting. In Peabody 
 and Peter Cooper, and I wish to heaven I 
 could put some noble Chicago man into the cata- 
 logue, in men like these it is a love. Their 
 hearts grow with their growing fortunes. They 
 are solid men ; they do solid things, found 
 great libraries and institutes, inaugurate noble 
 movements for model dwellings for the poor, 
 while, at the same time, they are sustaining vast 
 commercial interests, that make the difference 
 between Glasgow and Cork. 
 
 But, in numbers we have all known or heard 
 of, the love of money is a lust, and acts like a 
 frost, hardening, contracting, and finally killing 
 very large idea and generous impulse in their 
 souls. They will say the money is my own, to do 
 as I like. It is only their own, as if they owned 
 a glacier that was for ever accumulating over 
 them, and lived at the bottom of one of its chasms. 
 Their money is their own, as that ice would be 
 their own, it is their shroud and coffin and 
 grave. When we say money is the root of all 
 evil, we mean lust of money. So long as you
 
 148 LOVE. 
 
 can be sure that the fortune you are making is 
 " expanding with the expanding soul," you may 
 be sure that it is only good, and that continually ; 
 because it is so much added to your life, now 
 and for ever. The love of money to the lust of 
 money is as the preparation for heaven and hell. 
 
 This is still more clearly true, when we touch 
 another thing, about which we never think of 
 speaking as the love of this or that, even though 
 we put such an affix to the love of God ; but con- 
 sider it enough just to say the word, and it tells 
 the whole tale. The most primitive idea of the 
 relation of the man and woman in our Bible is 
 not at all what we make it now, that the man 
 is the volume and the woman the supplement. It 
 is rather that the man is the first volume, good 
 enough as far as it goes ; but, if there is to be no 
 second, more aggravating than if there wasn't 
 any, a story half told and then broken off just 
 as we began to get interested, demanding not a 
 supplement but a complement, to make it com- 
 plete. So the thing stands in the first Hebrew 
 dawn of time. The man is as good as the Lord 
 can make him ; but then there is nothing for even 
 the divine Worker to do but put him to sleep
 
 LOVE. 149 
 
 until he makes a woman. And the first thing he 
 tells him about her, as he bids them join their 
 hands, is, that she shall stand to him in the line 
 of that love which is life, shall not be some- 
 body else, but his own intimate self, as he hers ; 
 soul blending with soul, and becoming one, as two 
 drops of dew become one in the heart of a flower- 
 cup. It is so for ever with all true love. 
 
 When the young man, living in a room, eating 
 in a restaurant, and troubled about more things 
 than ever Martha was, feels at last how contracted 
 and poor such a life is at the best, and says in 
 his heart, " This is not living : I must get me a 
 wife," whatever may be his idea of the wife he 
 wants, the word he uses to describe his condi- 
 tion reaches away into the truth. It is not living : 
 it is just half living, and probably not that. His 
 heart is crying out for the rest of his- life. 
 
 Or when the maiden teaching school, working 
 in the store, helping to keep house at home, 
 doing whatever a maiden may do, thinks of a 
 question that might be asked and an answer that 
 might be given, if all was right that seems most 
 wrong, she is dreaming of another life, in 
 which a double care and sorrow and pain is only
 
 150 LOVE. 
 
 another name for a deeper color, a more exqui- 
 site texture, and a double warp and woof running 
 through the whole web of her future existence. 
 That is the love which is life, the love whereby 
 the two becoming one doubles the intrinsic value 
 of each for ever. 
 
 But there is that calling itself love which is 
 lust, something that seeks not a life, but an 
 appanage to life, and reaps for its sowing a 
 harvest of gray ashes. Love informs life ; lust 
 exhausts it. Love is the shining sun, lust is 
 the wandering star. When I remember some 
 sights I have seen, how men and women have 
 mistaken lust for love, and then, when they had 
 found out their mistake, have gone on dragging 
 their chain, biting it, and growing ever more 
 bitter the longer they live, I have wanted to 
 lift up my voice like a trumpet, to show men and 
 women this distinction, so that it shall be for 
 ever unmistakable ; and to cry to young men and 
 maidens, especially, that hear me, " How can ye 
 escape, if ye neglect so great salvation ? " 
 
 But, beside such special applications, there is 
 no direction in which we can turn but this spirit 
 meets us with its sweet, solemn face,, demanding
 
 LOVE. 151 
 
 to be put in the van of our endeavor, or there 
 can be no wonder and glory of success. Con- 
 sider the lesson we have learned in our war. 
 When we plunged into that red sea, the gentle- 
 men of England were looking on. They stated 
 frankly their opinions, a few on one side ; a 
 multitude on the other. The few said we should 
 hold our own : they were sure of it, John 
 Bright, Thomas Hughes, John Forster, of Brad- 
 ford, and all the men after their heart. The 
 great multitude which no man can number said 
 we had gone under. The " Times " thundered 
 the " Saturday Review " sneered, and M.P.'s 
 made conclusive addresses to the Honorable 
 House on the failure of democratic institutions. 
 What made this- diiference among men of about 
 equal opportunity? I will tell you. John 
 Bright, Thomas Hughes, John Forster, and 
 all that stood in their company, loved us with 
 a love that made their hearts throb and their 
 souls sing; so that Faith stood square, and 
 Hope plumed her wings, and they became the 
 glad ministers of their leader and guide. And 
 what made other men, whose names I will not 
 celebrate by this momentary mention, sure it 
 7*
 
 152 LOVE. 
 
 was all over ? It is the weakest word I can find, 
 when I say they did not love us. They had no 
 faith in us and no hope for us, because they had 
 no love ; " for now remaineth faith, hope, love, 
 these three ; but the greatest of these is love." 
 It is entirely possible, that, in the beginning, they 
 might not differ very much in their conclusions ; 
 but as somewhere on this continent the water 
 parts on the two sides of a barn, this way to 
 sunshine and freedom ; that to the fetters of 
 frost, so the two orders of men were positive 
 and negative. And as the days went on the love 
 was life, but the want of it death. 
 
 When a man really loves a land and a cause, 
 it piles great stores of life into his heart; so 
 that he may even come to some dreadful pass 
 where faith and hope fail him, and yet love shall 
 carry him through. One morning, when I was 
 in Europe, I had two things present themselves 
 to be done. It was in Lucerne. Louis Napoleon 
 had come the night before with the empress. 
 They could be seen ; or there was an old bridge 
 to be seen, on which the good city had painted 
 some of the most notable things in her history. 
 I neglected the emperor, but I saw the bridge :
 
 LOVE. 153 
 
 and here is one of the stories it had to tell 
 Hundreds of years ago, that Austria, now shorr 
 of the strength she so prostituted, went into 
 Switzerland to devour her bit of freedom, 
 burnt the harvests, besieged the cities, and 
 prepared to crush out the band that armed to 
 oppose her. There was little room for faith or 
 hope in such a contest ; but then all the more 
 room for an utterly limitless love. You know 
 the story. The enemy advanced, a solid wall 
 of steel, and began to creep round the little 
 band. Switzer after Switzer fell trying to break 
 in and turn the tide of battle. There might be 
 hope only if the wall was broken, and the peas- 
 ants could come within the line. Then, in the 
 last dreadful moment, one went rushing, for love 
 of Switzerland, on the solid ranks of the spears, 
 broke the close array, by gathering them into 
 his own breast, that is what they show you 
 painted on the panels of the old bridge at Lu- 
 cerne, and I have never regretted going to fill 
 my heart afresh with it, instead of going to see 
 the Emperor: it was the chance of getting a 
 look at a mortal or an immortal. I went to see 
 the immortal, to see the shrine of the man
 
 154 LOVE. 
 
 who had the love which is life so strong in his 
 heart, that his life itself is still in its prime, after 
 almost five hundred years. 
 
 And this is the truth about our life, in what- 
 ever way we test it. The love which is life alone 
 can make life all it must be, whatever we may 
 be and do beside. ' When the father wants to 
 put his son on the way to success, if he is a 
 wise man, he most anxiously tries to find out 
 where the lad's love lies ; for there, he knows, he 
 will have faith and hope, because the love will be 
 a perpetual inspiration and motive, a perpetual 
 life, to duty and accomplishment : while, to put 
 him at what he can never love, will only exhaust 
 and disgust him, until at last it is given up in 
 despair. Not that the boy and man is not faith- 
 ful and dutiful, but just because he could not 
 make up his mind to die out by a constant drain 
 on all the power and vitality there was in him, 
 when there is still a hope that he can do that 
 which will be like a well of water springing up 
 into everlasting life. Nay, so true this is, that 
 if one lad with love in his heart fails to do 
 the thing he loves, while another with what he 
 thinks is love, but which is only lust, of fame or
 
 LOVE. 155 
 
 fortune, shall in a measure succeed, the loving 
 heart shall still be fullest of the life of the en- 
 deavor. Hazlitt, as a painter, had this love: 
 Haydon had lust. Hazlitt never succeeded in 
 painting a picture, after all his endeavors ; but 
 he did succeed in loving his art so, that its power 
 and life lifted his soul into the finest insight and 
 appreciation of pictures possessed by any man in 
 his time : while poor Haydon, perpetually lusting 
 for applause, and to be the founder of a great 
 school, and to be honored and worshipped, went 
 on in an ever more desperate and deadly exhaus- 
 tion, down to his death. 
 
 So I would love to linger in these regions of 
 the common life, if there was time, and open 
 more fully to you this almost endless application 
 of love as life. But there is one great applica- 
 tion remaining, this that Paul makes, which is 
 but another way of saying this that the Almighty 
 makes ; for the words of men that speak as they 
 are moved by the Spirit do not create the thing : 
 they simply reveal it. 
 
 And the task is the more easy, because these 
 things, I have tried to make clear are most inti- 
 mately one with this that remains ; so that you
 
 156 LOVE. 
 
 do not turn away from these to come to this, but 
 just work on, facing in the one direction, getting 
 nearer and nearer to your study, to find in the 
 very centre of it this that the apostle fills so full of 
 all that is greatest and best. For, no doubt, when 
 the distinction is drawn in which a man is made 
 as eloquent as men and angels together, and 
 wise as all the seers, and accomplished as all 
 the scholars, and benevolent to the last mite in 
 his possession, and devoted as the martyr at the 
 stake, yet is deemed to be nothing if he have 
 not love, it is the line between love and lust that 
 is drawn ; between doing a thing in order to get 
 to heaven, and doing a thing because we are 
 already heavenly ; between being religious for 
 what may come of it, and expressing what has 
 come, as naturally as a child expresses its joy by 
 laughter. 
 
 It is charged to our faith, sometimes, that it is 
 indifferent about a change of heart. Let a man 
 do the works, it is said (we say), and then he is 
 sure to be right. It may be sometimes true: 
 it is as possible for us to fall into a cold mo- 
 rality as any other order of religious believers. 
 It is a very great mistake, however, to suppose
 
 LOVE. 157 
 
 that, because we are not eternally opening the 
 doors and poking the fire, we are therefore in- 
 different as to whether it is burning. We can 
 no more believe that a man can live this life, 
 which is love, and do its work for God and man, 
 and make a grand success of it, by doing good or 
 handsome or charitable or religious things, ex- 
 pecting that they will somehow at last work their 
 way into the heart, and make all right, than we 
 can believe that a locomotive can be started right, 
 filled full of power, and sent on its way, rejoicing 
 as a strong man to run a race, by kindling a fire 
 about it instead of in the firebox. It is for ever 
 indispensable, and for every body, that they have 
 a change of heart, if they need one. If in the 
 soul there is no glow and expansion, no such 
 feeling in the heart as that which you may under- 
 stand easily, any time, you will watch a mother in 
 the midst of her little brood of children, then 
 there must be such a glow and expansion, or all 
 there is beside is sounding brass and a tinkling 
 cymbal. " He that loveth not, knoweth not God." 
 It is the old, sweet, single word, without the 
 affix, as when we speak of the love of the man 
 and maiden. " He that loveth not, knoweth not
 
 158 LOVE. 
 
 God." The very love of God is only one of the 
 loves in our loving. It is not the object but the 
 lifo of which I am to make sure; and then, as 
 Richter says, " the heart in this heaven, like 
 the wandering sun, sees nothing, from a dew-drop 
 to an ocean, but a mirror it warms and fills." 
 " So loving was St. Francis," says Ruskin, 
 " that he claimed a brotherhood with the wolf." 
 " So loving was St. Francis," says another, 
 " that he remembered those that God had seem- 
 ingly forgotten." It is this love, and this alone, 
 that " beareth all things, believeth all things, 
 hopeth all things, endureth all things, and never 
 faileth." 
 
 But do you say, " Oh ! tell me how to get this 
 love ? " I tell you, you have the first white 
 spark of it. If you really love at all, if you love 
 a dog, you have that in your heart which may 
 grow to be as mighty as the love of the first arch- 
 angel. If I can love that I do love with the love 
 which is life, with a true heart, fervently, 
 as 1 open my heart to this grace and goodness 
 of loving, the breath of heaven will draw through 
 and fan the flame, kindling this way and that, 
 until the whole soul is on fire with a love that
 
 LOVE. 159 
 
 warms and energizes whatever it touches, like 
 the pure sun. It is a divine life, but its kin- 
 dling is in a human love. Who has not pon- 
 dered that wonderful history ? One goes to a 
 wedding. Only his mother knows much about 
 him: it is possible he knows but little about 
 himself. He sits apart from the merry-making: 
 there is not much there that he cares for ; but at 
 last there is one thing, the bridegroom, an old 
 friend probably, is about to be ashamed and 
 humiliated to the whole country-side. He saves 
 him from that shame and humiliation. I care 
 not a pin about whether it was water or wine they 
 had ; but here, at the opening of a gospel, is the 
 story of one who, for " auld lang syne," will not 
 let his friend hang his head ashamed. It is the 
 first spark to be detected of the greatest fire that 
 ever burned in a soul. Once started it caught, 
 here a cripple, there a blind man ; here a widow, 
 weeping by the bier of her only son ; there a 
 madman wandering among the graves: leaping 
 from one to another, growing white and full, deep 
 and intense, with what it fed on, until it burnt 
 through the very asbestos of the grave, and made 
 uncounted millions of hearts burn with the power
 
 160 LOVE. 
 
 of an endless life. It was a love which is life 
 that kindled the flame ; and it was what we may 
 all realize in some good measure, if we will. Then 
 ffG may be able to say no word to which the 
 tforld will listen ; may have no faculty, possess 
 no knowledge ; be as poor as the widow with her 
 two mites, which made one farthing ; and believe 
 that we do not believe any thing. But, because 
 we love with the love which is life, we shall have 
 the eloquence which surpasses speech, and the 
 intuition that dives below the faculty of the 
 seers; the knowledge before which the lamp of 
 knowledge pales, as a taper before the sun ; the 
 gold which is good, and the devotion that is 
 better than burning, the devotion of loving. 
 Heaven will then be in the soul : we shall 
 not seek it : we shall carry it. For as " now we 
 see through a glass darkly, but then face to 
 face ; and as now we know in part, but then we 
 shall know as we are known," so " now abideth 
 faith, hope, love, these three ; but the greatest of 
 these is Love"
 
 IX. 
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 JOHN i. 51 : " The angels of God ascending and descending upon the 
 Son of man." 
 
 THAT is, the angels come from below the Son of 
 man, as well as from above him ; yet they are the 
 angels of God, from whatever quarter they come. 
 And as in space the heavens are all about us, 
 not above only, but below ; so in the soul the 
 heavens enfold the son of man every way, and 
 below him, as above him, open to his angels. 
 
 The term " son of man," in the broad sense, 
 has no mystical meaning. It reaches clean 
 through the scale of life, from the son of man a 
 reptile in the Book of Job, and the son of man as 
 grass in the Book of Isaiah, to the Son of man 
 Lord of the sabbath, the Son of man, with power 
 on earth to forgive sins, and the Son of man glo- 
 rified of the Gospels. So it is at once the general 
 title for any child of humanity, and the one name 
 Jesus Christ always claims for himself. " The 
 
 [161]
 
 162 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 Son of man," therefore, is not only the loftiest, 
 but the lowest man. From the reptile to the 
 Kedeemer, it embraces every one. 
 
 But, broad as this term is, it is not broader 
 than this of the angels that come from the open 
 heavens everywhere into his life ; meaning, in the 
 simplest sense, that which is actively at work; 
 and, in the sacred sense, that which is doing 
 God's will. For there is no trace anywhere of an 
 indolent angel. You follow the term carefully as 
 it is used by these Bible men, and find that it 
 is by no means confined to what we understand 
 by "angels" commonly; but they seem to be- 
 lieve, with one of their own rabbins, that " all 
 divine operations, whether natural or spiritual, 
 are done by angels. Jacob's ladder is every- 
 where stretching from earth to heaven, and every 
 grass-blade has its own angel to attend it." 
 
 And so you will find, that, excepting the angel 
 is never feminine, there is almost infinite diver- 
 sity of angelhood. They are gods, and sons of 
 God, and men; the spirit of the thunder and 
 wind and fire ; the spirit of nations, kings, states- 
 men, and pastors. Time would fail me to tell of 
 their almost endless diversity, from the angel
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 163 
 
 standing at the gate of Eden, whose sword flamed 
 every way before the paradise lost, to the angel 
 with the golden reed, who measures the city in 
 the paradise regained. The Bible conception of 
 the angel touches, on one side, the spirits that 
 stand nearest the immanent glory ; and, on the 
 other, that mystery of life in which 
 
 " Every clod feels a stir of might, 
 An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 
 And, feeling blindly toward the light, 
 Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers." 
 
 And I have made this brief study of the Bible 
 senses of the " son of man " and the " angels," 
 because I suppose you have hardly imagined what 
 a breadth and scope these terms take ; and also 
 because, in this inclusiveness, we can find appli 
 cations of my text it is hopeless to seek in the 
 common conception of what it means. Read it 
 in the light of the commentaries usually written 
 about angels, and you say at once, " Here is some- 
 thing that relates entirely to the Messiah. It is 
 a part of that whole system of things that makes 
 him rather the exception than the instance of 
 humanity. These angels were to minister, and 
 did minister, to him, because he was Messiah, not 
 -because he was man ; and so we have no part or
 
 164 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 lot in the matter, except to study the curious 
 records of their nature and agency, contained in 
 the far-away hints of Gospel and Epistle. We 
 live now in a prosy railroad world, in which the 
 telegraph can outstrip in swiftness the swiftest 
 flying angel of the old ages ; and angels, for 
 many a century now, have fled from the earth." 
 This is all easily said, and men are saying it 
 on all sides of us. But it is not true that the 
 angels never come : the trouble is, we do not 
 look for them where they are. We look for 
 them to sweep down through the opening heav- 
 ens when they have come down already, and are 
 hidden in the bluebells at our feet. We want 
 them to appear like the great angels of Angelo : 
 they are looking at us out of the dreamy wander- 
 ing eyes of the babe born yesterday. We read of 
 the angel that came and fought for Israel in the 
 old days. He came and fought for us in these 
 new days, not on wings, but on strong tramping 
 feet; black, but comely; standing side by side 
 with our brothers and sons. He strikes the rock 
 in the wilderness now with a drill, and bores 
 Artesian wells, and ministers to hunger and 
 agony through a woman's hands and heart, and a
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 165 
 
 surgeon's skill, and all common human agencies. 
 Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to 
 minister ? But 
 
 " I think we do as little children do, 
 Who lean their faces on the window pane, 
 To sigh the glass dim with their own breath-stain, 
 And shut the sky and landscape from their view." 
 
 This indicates, then, the direction of my 
 thought. It is not to teach you some strange 
 doctrine, but to insist that you stand true to an old 
 doctrine. I want not to bar out of any life the 
 loftiest ministry of angelhood, but to insist also 
 on your recognition of the lowest ; and that these 
 come to us also. Do you say that Moses and 
 Elias came and talked with Jesus? Admitted. 
 But the children he took in his arms were angels 
 too, whose ministry was as indispensable to his 
 tried and lonely life as that of the ascended 
 prophets. And Martha troubled about his din- 
 ner, and Mary washing his feet with her tears, 
 these were angels as truly as those that found 
 him wandering in the wilderness, and fainting in 
 the garden. 
 
 Small matters, you say, to that high soul, a 
 batch of children, a woman in a tiff, and a wo- 
 man in tears ; surely you are lowering the stand-
 
 166 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 ard under which the angels muster, when you 
 make these angels. We can think how these 
 others might sweep down through the blue to 
 his side, to minister unto him. But women 
 and children, so far below him, how can they 
 be angels ? These ascended, as those descended 
 upon the Son of man. Indeed, it is wonderful 
 to notice what a great part these angels that 
 ascend play in the development of the life and 
 truth as it is in Jesus; or it would be won- 
 derful, if we did not see all about us now, how 
 clear it is, that, when a life has trued itself 
 to divine standards fairly, then whatever comes 
 to it is somehow transmuted into fine gold for 
 its service. To me, the shadow in the life of 
 Jesus is only less inestimable than the light ; the 
 most adverse things seem to be as indispensable 
 as the most felicitous. His homelessness, his 
 loneliness, his hindrances, his sufferings, all 
 come trooping from below, hard, black, forbid- 
 ding in the distance ; but, when they light on 
 him, they are angels. "We love him more because 
 he had not where to lay his head, than if he had 
 been lodged in the palace of the Herods. We 
 could never have had some of the most priceless
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 167 
 
 things in the Gospels, but for the fierce bigotry 
 of Scribe and Pharisee, vexing his righteous 
 soul. The very Prodigal is made a minister to 
 the most pregnant illustration in the Gospels 
 of God's great mercy ; while the lost woman 
 stands for the most touching instance of his 
 own great humanity. Nay, the heartless priest 
 and Levite cannot escape the mighty trans- 
 mutation ; and the darkest, saddest, most de- 
 plorable event in time, his agony and cruel 
 death, is the most significant, the very cen- 
 tral circumstance, in the history of man. Now, 
 these things, and all things like them, as they 
 come up about the Son of man, are compelled 
 into a divine service. Whatever the thing may 
 be, it is no matter: when once it touches him, 
 it becomes an angel. From the lowest to the 
 highest, from above and from below, their na- 
 ture always waits to be revealed in the nature 
 of the man to whom they come. 
 
 Right here, however, the question meets us, 
 What son of man now has any right to expect 
 such a ministry of angels in his life, as this that 
 was identified with the life of the Saviour ? We 
 cannot hope for it, because we can bear no such
 
 168 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 responsibility on the one hand, and can claim no 
 such worthiness on the other. There is but one 
 answer to this objection. It is, that not what we 
 may be worth to ourselves or the world, but 
 what we are worth to God, being the prime 
 reason why the angels come at all, we cannot be 
 sure that there is no such ministry except we 
 were sure there is no such worth. It would 
 seem clear enough, that the wretched man 
 who gets drunk, beats his wife and starves his 
 children, would have no hope of an angel ; but 
 he has perhaps a houseful pleading with him 
 and ministering to him every day, because, bad 
 as he is, he is not the son of perdition, but a son 
 of man. When your son has grown to be a man, 
 and you can order his steps no longer, it may 
 then be his destiny to go to some place a mile 
 south of his home ; but, in his wild wilfulness, 
 he turns his face north, and then it is seven and 
 twenty thousand miles of weary travelling to get 
 there. Will the angel of your love ever leave 
 him ; or will his weariness and pain and sorrow 
 be only a curse to him ? It is a horrible thing to 
 teach that the Almighty made even the fiends 
 only to torment us, to lead us wrong and lure us
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 169 
 
 down ; and then, at last, to listen while they 
 send up yells of fierce laughter over our hapless 
 misery. What I do I must stand by ; no doubt 
 of that, if I will not take refuge in the infinite 
 pity and pardon. The wages of sin is death, 
 death when the sin is done, death right along; 
 the deadening and darkening of all I might 
 have been, had I done right right on. But, 
 when the angels above me are powerless ; when 
 my mother's love, and my father's faith, and 
 wife and children and friends, all fail ; when 
 all the great influences from heaven fail, and 
 I will rush on and down, then the angels 
 come from below, in terrible shapes perhaps, 
 and armed with dire torments: but they come 
 to save me, and mean to save me. 
 
 Still the other is the nobler application. 
 When a man is on the right way, his heart 
 open to heaven, his life a prayer to be right ; is 
 longing right, striving right, and fighting, like Bun- 
 yan's Christian, up and down ; and who, though 
 he may plunge into fits of despond, and wander 
 in shadows of death, and get locked up in dun- 
 geons of despair, will never, if he know it, turn 
 his back on the one right way, on this son of
 
 170 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 man the angels descend in constant grace ; and 
 even the things that come from below and appal 
 him, when once the knight has well fought his 
 battle, are turned into forms of beauty, the 
 daughters of the king. 
 
 And be sure I do not mean by all this, merely 
 that elemental properties, and providential occur- 
 rences, and men good and bad, and nature in her 
 glory and grandeur and terror, are the only 
 angels that attend such a life, coming from below 
 and above to be its ministers. I do mean all 
 these. I can see how tribulation, and persecu- 
 tion, and famine, and nakedness, and peril, and 
 sword, and life, and death, and principalities, 
 and powers, and things present, and things to 
 come, may all be ministering angels ; but I can- 
 not strip life of loftier influences than these, that 
 are yet lower than the incoming of the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 I have a friend, for instance, who is so sure 
 that the child gone out of her arms comes back 
 to her as a ministering angel, that the belief wins 
 her out of her mourning, and fills her, I know, 
 with a perfect peace. Now, who am I that I 
 shall say, " My friend, you are mistaken" ? I
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 171 
 
 watch the eyes of this son of man, and see them 
 fill with the light of heaven, as he recognizes the 
 presence of spiritual things I can only see dis- 
 tantly and dimly or not at all. Who am I that 
 I should say, " What you see as a person, I see 
 as a principle; and I am right, and you are 
 wrong " ? I know, as well as Newton did, that 
 two and two make four ; that is a principle, it is 
 plain to both of us. But I stumble and stand 
 stricken at the portals of a world in the line of 
 that principle, that opens to him into an infinite 
 beauty and goodness. Yet, because I cannot see 
 what he can see, shall I say, " You are the vic- 
 tim of geometrical imaginations ; there is noth- 
 ing beyond simple addition ? " As I show most 
 wisdom when I sit at the feet of the master 
 in geometry, and accept his revelation, inasmuch 
 as it is deeper and better than my own; so I 
 show most wisdom when I sit at the feet of 
 this Master, who has most insight into spiritual 
 things, listening reverently to what he can tell 
 me; whose powers so far surpass my own. 
 
 So, in this loftiest sense, I cannot strip the 
 world of angels, and send them back into dim 
 and distant ages.
 
 172 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 " I think the sudden joyance, that illumes 
 A child's mouth sleeping, unaware may run 
 From some soul newly loosened from earth's tombs ; 
 I think the passionate sigh, which, half begun, 
 I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes 
 Of some tall angel standing in the sun." 
 
 But this insisted on, that wonderful spiritua 
 powers, of the loftiest order, are all about my life, 
 only hidden because that is best. There waits 
 that vaster order of ministers which includes 
 whatever beside can be an angel. And, in nam- 
 ing these finally, I cannot do better than follow 
 the track of illustration I have already made, and 
 say, that to us, as to our great forerunner, what- 
 ever influences in the world and in life touch us 
 to the quick, whether they come from below or 
 from above, if we are in the line of divine laws 
 and leadings, are all ascending or descending 
 angels. 
 
 The little child comes, with its crumb of ut- 
 terly helpless humanity. And, if it were possible 
 to be purely impersonal spectators, I suppose 
 there would be no greater wonder on the earth 
 than the almost infinite patience of the mother 
 with its habits, ailments, and, if it were not just 
 what it is, its endless annoyances. Yet in that 
 one small thing is hidden both angels. It is not
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 173 
 
 the smile she gets ; not the wealth of beauty she 
 sees, thank God, whether the world can see it or 
 no; not the freshness of its opening life, not 
 these only, these angels from above ; but its very 
 waywardness and greediness, its fractiousness 
 and sleeplessness, develop in her nature deep 
 springs of love, that could never come out of its 
 absolute perfection. From below as well as from 
 above, the angel comes to all true mothers from 
 all children ; and no mother can afford to lose 
 one of these ministries. 
 
 And as the life grows in us, the angels still 
 come from either hand. Our home is holy ; good 
 angels are always lighting on it out of heaven : 
 but we leave it, as Jacob did, before we find out 
 all about its angelhood. When the lad gets into 
 the wilderness, with a stone for his pillow, then 
 only he is for the first time aware of both the 
 angels. And, in the full tide of the life of a son 
 of man, sturdily bent on fighting the good fight 
 clean through, the angels are everywhere. Let 
 the young man keep himself pure, be the man 
 he ought to be and can be, and then the woful 
 painted shams on our streets, instead of being a 
 danger and a snare, will even come to be a means
 
 174 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 of grace ; for they will fill him with a great, sor- 
 rowful, manly pity, that ever one, who was some 
 mother's child and is some man's sister, should 
 lose so dismally her glory and her crown. Nay, 
 he will be more human at the thought of the in- 
 humanity that has made her what she is ; and, 
 instead of sneering at all women because she is 
 so fallen, as if a fool should sneer at the con- 
 stellations because of the falling stars, when 
 God shall wake him out of his sleep, and say, 
 " Behold the woman that I have made for thee ! " 
 he will reverence her with a more sacred rever- 
 ence, and love her with a holier love. 
 
 Indeed, I know of no way in which a man or 
 woman, determined toward whatsoever things are 
 true, will not find the angels climbing up as well 
 as coming down to him. What, I pray you, had 
 Luther been, had all Christendom come over to 
 his side the moment he launched his thesis ; or 
 Cromwell, had there been no Naseby or Marston 
 Moor ? What had Wesley been as Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, or Washington as the bosom-friend 
 of George the Third ? What had Howard been 
 but for the prisons that were a disgrace to the 
 worst ages, or Lady Russell but for the martyr-
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 175 
 
 dom of her husband, or Florence Nightingale but 
 for the Circumlocution Office? Not that these 
 things are there, that the man or woman may 
 reap renown ; but being there, and they right in 
 their track and true to the duty they present, 
 they find, in some way, that what was in the 
 doing the hardest and saddest thing in their life 
 was still so transmuted iii the process as to be- 
 come an angel. So a shaking bog in Lancashire 
 ministered to Stephenson, and the water flowed 
 for Fulton, and the lightning flashed for Frank- 
 lin, and the steam hissed for Watt, and the elec- 
 tric fluid pulsed for Morse. So mere pigments 
 and chemicals come up and meet in Hunt and 
 Church, the angels of inspiration that come 
 down ; then, from the sons of God and the 
 daughters of men, again other angels are born, 
 that stand on the canvas, a glory and a praise. 
 
 It will be very pleasant and good that every 
 man in this church succeed in his calling. It is 
 indispensable that the very hardnesses and hin- 
 drances that rise up to appal* him shall, by his 
 right determination, turn to ministering angels. 
 And I can hardly trust myself to say what angels 
 couch in the saddest places of our life, in the
 
 176 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 
 
 sick-room, by the deathbed, in the shadows of a 
 sore disappointment, in the hope deferred that 
 maketh the heart sick, in the very dungeons of 
 despair. We shrink and shudder, and say, " I 
 shall go down to my grave mourning." But 
 some morning, all at once, we bethink us of the 
 little key called promise; and it opens the dun- 
 geon door, and we creep out, blinking sadly into 
 the sun. But there is the sun, sure enough, and 
 we had thought he would never shine again ; and 
 here are the green pastures, and there the shin- 
 ing river. And men and women look at us with 
 a new tenderness, because our lot has been so 
 sad. Then the song sings itself somehow again ; 
 and, while we would shrink and shudder just as 
 much next time, we cannot but discover how, in 
 our very griefs, there were hidden angels reach- 
 ing up to hide, within the dark experience, some 
 treasure of patience or trust we could never have 
 possessed, had the angels only descended on us, 
 and our life been one long joy. 
 
 And I know, when I say all this, that I speak 
 to common experience through the whole range 
 of this angelhood. I think we do not begin to 
 realize as we ought what ministries cluster round
 
 ASCENDING AND DESCENDING ANGELS. 177 
 
 our life, to aid us in being what we may be, 
 angels, angels, every one, thick about us every 
 day, bearing us in their hands, and lifting us 
 up when we are fallen. Their faces gladden 
 us when we do well, and grow very sad at us wheu 
 we sin. Ay, and in some way those that we 
 speak of and think of as in heaven love us still 
 with all the old love of earth, and all the new 
 love of heaven together. So, because they love 
 us still, we are still one, our souls are in theirs, 
 and they in ours. We touch hands in the spirit, 
 and the light that is not the light of the sun 
 covers and enfolds us all.
 
 X. 
 
 THE FEAR OF GOD. 
 
 1 PETKK ii. 17 : " Fear God." 
 
 I WANT to say, as an introduction to this ser- 
 mon, that no writer or speaker in the Bible begins 
 his revelation by trying, first of all, to prove that 
 there is a God. In no part of the Bible is such 
 proof ever attempted. These men appear to 
 believe that the question is settled in some other 
 way than by reasoning ; or they feel that trying 
 to prove the being of God is a lower thing than 
 that which they are sent to do ; or they are so 
 filled with a great sense of his presence, that 
 they do not believe it possible for a sensible man 
 to doubt about his being, any more than to doubt 
 about the sunlight on a summer's day, living 
 in a focus of belief, like that man who, brought 
 before the Parliament of Toulouse on the charge 
 of atheism, lifted a straw from the ground, and, 
 holding it up before his accusers, said, " This 
 
 [178]
 
 THE FEAR OP GOD. 179 
 
 straw compels me to believe that there is a 
 God." But, while these men all believe that 
 there is a God, they disagree very widely about 
 his nature and character, and how he is related 
 to man. To one he is a terror and perplexity, 
 to another a supreme love ; to one a power 
 beyond all power, to another a limited, strug- 
 gling principle ; to one a grim Eastern despot, 
 to another a forgiving Father, his face beaming 
 with love to "this man, but to that man black 
 with vindictive vengeance. A great deal of the 
 trouble that men come to in trying to reconcile 
 these things as they are found in the Bible, lies 
 in their utter antagonism, and they can never 
 be reconciled for that reason: therefore we can 
 only take them as we find them, and test them 
 by the truth itself. I intend to do this, as far as 
 1 am able, in the discussion of that character 
 of God by which we are bidden to fear him. I 
 think there are some thoughts of the fear of God 
 that we may well ponder. I propose to name 
 some hurtful and some useful fears of God com* 
 mon among men to-day, and to point out their 
 value in the human life. 
 I. There is, first of all, a fear of God which
 
 180 THE PEAR OP GOD. 
 
 to me appears to be a reproduction, measure, or 
 color of the national life, different as the nations 
 differ. I believe it is impossible to bring a 
 Frenchman and a German, or a Scotchman and 
 an Irishman, or any two men that reach back 
 into a radical difference of race, to regard God in 
 the same way. Indeed we see this difference in 
 two children of the same family. One child will 
 rebel and take the penalty, snap his fingers and 
 do it again; while another will tremble and 
 shrink and fear. One will say prayers, and brood 
 over those mysterious promptings of the soul 
 that seem like the audible whispers of angels to 
 some children ; while another will appear to be 
 shut altogether out of this heaven, revelling in 
 the fresh new life of the present with a wealth 
 of enjoyment past all telling, " of the earth, 
 earthy." So there are nations that are light- 
 some, careless, earthy, objective; and nations 
 that are deep, stern, solemn, subjective ; and the 
 national nature colors the great central idea of 
 God. 
 
 Where the father in the home is a fear, the 
 God above is a fear. Where the father is care- 
 less, light-hearted, easily bought off, blending
 
 THE FEAR OP GOD. 181 
 
 laughter and tears, smiles and frowns, a kiss and 
 a blow, there the Holy Mother can turn the tides 
 of fate, and the Friar make a good thing out of 
 what, to a deeper-hearted people, is the dreadful, 
 steady, immaculate justice. The Frenchman who 
 could not stay to morning mass, but left his card 
 upon the altar, flashed a light across the world 
 that revealed the real texture of the French soul 
 as vividly as you shall see it, if you watch for a 
 year in the church of the Madeline, in Paris. 
 And when the Scotchman went away from the 
 kirk, for the first time in his life, to hear an 
 Episcopal service, in which a fine organ played a 
 prominent part, and said, as he came away, " Oh ! 
 it's verra bonnie ; but it's an awfu' way of spend- 
 ing the Sabbath, " he touched the deep, stern 
 Scottish character that, as some one has said, 
 " delights to praise the Lord by singing infinitely 
 out of tune " better than it could be touched in 
 a volume of disquisition. 
 
 So, friends, in a broad, national way, we take 
 the thing that is nearest us to touch the infinite. 
 
 The glass through which we see God is dark- 
 ened by our own breath. Some shadow of the 
 dark or bright we cast of our own free will. But
 
 182 THE FEAR OP GOD. 
 
 more than all that is this primitive, mysterious 
 shadow of the race, the shadow cast by blood 
 and climate and circumstance, determining for 
 all men save, it may be, one in a thousand 
 whether their Supreme shall be revealed in the 
 thunders of Sinai, or the sorrows of Olivet, or the 
 glories of Zion, a power that waits on our birth 
 to take us up and mould us, and which smiles to 
 hear us say, " What I will be I will." For as 
 you may find the Soldanella Alpina, piercing 
 through the snows upon the lower Alps, leaning 
 its frail purple blossom over the fearful icy clefts, 
 and the Victoria Regia in the hot lagoons of the 
 South, opening her vast, shining petals to glisten 
 in the sun, but never the great lily on the moun- 
 tain, or the blue bell in the lake ; so the idea of 
 God is moulded, more or less, by the great 
 ranges of the race, the intimate life-blood of the 
 country and the providence. 
 
 " The Ethiop's god has Ethiop's lips, 
 Black cheek and woolly hair, 
 And the Grecian god a Grecian face, 
 As keen-eyed, cold, and fair." 
 
 II. But, in our own nation, where so many 
 nativities centre, the idea of God and the conse- 
 quent fear of God differ very greatly. And I
 
 THE FEAR OF GOD. 183 
 
 have thought that it might be of use to you, that 
 I should note some forms of that fear as it exists 
 all about us, and tell you what I think is a false 
 and degrading, then what is a true and elevating, 
 fear of God, for us here, and to-day. 
 
 The first and lowest form is a fear of God as 
 a jailer and executioner, who stands and waits 
 until that sure detective, Death, shall hunt 
 the criminal down, and bring him into court 
 (where, by the way, there is no jury, a thing 
 that certainly would not be omitted if these West- 
 ern nations had written the Bible), and where, 
 really without trial, for his condemnation is a 
 foregone conclusion, he is turned into the de- 
 spair and torment of the lost. This is the low, 
 coarse, hell-fire fear, the fear described in a 
 quotation that every preacher of this school can 
 repeat to you as readily as he can repeat the 
 beatitudes, and that is sure to find a place in 
 the revival season, which indeed would be in- 
 complete without it. The writer is describing a 
 death-bed, and tells you, 
 
 " In that dread moment, how the frantic soul 
 Raves round the walls of her clay tenement; 
 Runs to each avenue, and shrieks for help, 
 But shrieks in vain ! How wishfully she looks
 
 184 THE FEAR OF GOD. 
 
 On all she's leaving, now no longer hers! 
 
 A little longer, yet a little longer, 
 
 Oh might she stay to wash away her stains, 
 
 And fit her for her passage ! 
 
 Her very eyes weep blood, and every groan 
 
 She heaves is big with horror ; but the foe, 
 
 Like a stanch murderer steady to his purpose, 
 
 Pursues her close through every lane of life, 
 
 Nor misses once the track, but presses on ; 
 
 Till, forced at last to the tremendous verge, 
 
 At once she sinks to everlasting ruin." 
 
 Now, if you can bring a man to believe this, 
 and to believe that God is to this dreadful 
 penalty what the soul is to the body, what the 
 burning is to the fire, the very life of the eternal 
 torture, replying " Never, never, never " to every 
 cry out of the pit of " Oh, when will this agony be 
 over ? " then you have a fear of God in that man 
 beside which the fear of a slave toward a cruel 
 driver is a pleasant, frisky thing ; and such a fear, 
 when it strikes root in a man, can have but one 
 of two results: it places him in a bitter, hope- 
 less, blasphemous atheism, such as you often find 
 in isolated communities that have heard only 
 these dreadful teachers ; or it forces him into 
 a slavish, crouching, abject submission, where 
 every free and noble aspiration is lost in the one 
 great hunger to be on good terms with such a 
 dreadful master. The Pagan, on this plane of
 
 THE FEAR OF GOD. 185 
 
 belief, is wiser than the Christian. He says 
 boldly, that the doer of this is the evil spirit, and 
 so he tries to be on good terms with him. But 
 wherever such a fear has a real place in the soul 
 of man or woman, African, Indian, or Saxon, in 
 that soul the love of God, or even a true fear of 
 God, is utterly out of the question. It destroys 
 every fair blossom of the soul ; it leaves nothing 
 , to ripen, nothing beautiful, even to live. 
 
 III. Then, to the eye of the resolute Christian 
 thinker, who dares not, as Coleridge has said, 
 " love even Christianity better than the truth, 
 lest he shall come to love his own sect better 
 than Christianity, and at last himself better than 
 all," there is another form of the fear of God, 
 not the best by far, but far better than this 
 utterly slavish fear. I mean that in which God 
 becomes the embodiment of pure bargain, exact- 
 ing from us, to the uttermost penny or the ut- 
 termost quivering nerve, whatever is due, 
 no more, no less. Here God appears with the 
 guards and sanctities of the law about him, self- 
 imposed and self-respected. The man need not 
 contract the debt if it does not please him ; but, 
 if he does contract it, he must pay, or another
 
 186 THE FEAR OF GOD. 
 
 must pay for him. Then the son of the great 
 creditor gives his own body to the knife, and 
 bears the intolerable agony instead of the debtor. 
 Now there is a touch of sublimity in this con- 
 ception. I do not wonder that Paul, standing 
 where he did, should be so filled with enthusiasm 
 by it, and should run all over the world to tell it, 
 with strong crying and tears. To Paul, educated 
 in the belief that a sacrifice was imperative, this 
 was a wonderful revelation, the awful debt 
 paid, paid by the Son in the gift of his life. 
 And to-day this form of the fear of God even 
 where it makes the man into a wretched, shiftless 
 debtor, and God into a stern creditor, yet with 
 such infinite deeps of tenderness in his heart, that 
 he will give his own Son for us all creates a 
 far nobler issue than that in which Antonio must 
 quiver in agony for ever, if for no debt of his 
 own, then for a debt contracted by his remotest 
 ancestor. There is that in this idea, which has 
 carried a wonderful weight with it, such a fear 
 has its own touch of tender reverence. Convince 
 a man that this is true, and he will be awe- 
 stricken and inspired to some fearful love. The 
 life and death that hangs on such conditions
 
 THE FEAR OF GOD. 187 
 
 must be of vast importance, and a God at once 
 so relentless and so merciful cannot be slighted. 
 
 Yet when we come to question the system, it 
 will not stand. The moment you open the idea 
 with the master-key of the Fatherhood of God, 
 you begin to see that it cannot be true. It is the 
 father punishing the brother who is innocent for 
 the brother who is guilty. And you cannot help 
 seeing, that, however willing the brother may be 
 to bear, it is against the nature of true greatness 
 in the father to inflict the penalty. It is no more 
 right to do so, than it was right to punish the 
 French page for the fault of the French prince. 
 If you admit the principle, you do so at the 
 expense of the clearest ideas of justice that are 
 found in your own soul, and that guide you in 
 every other decision. Either the doctrine must 
 be wrong in some radical way, or the ideas that 
 are right in every thing beside are wrong in this. 
 If it was right that Christ should bear your sins 
 in his own body on the tree, according to the 
 common interpretation of that doctrine, it will be 
 right for you to punish the elder child in your 
 home the next time the younger breaks into 
 some mad freak of temper. Besides, this doing
 
 188 THE PEAR OF GOD. 
 
 wrong with the sure conviction that some one 
 must suffer for it, and then crouching down 
 behind another while he bears the blow ; this 
 running into a debt that you are sure another 
 will have to pay; this lying on the shady side 
 of the barn all through the summer, because 
 you know you can beg enough corn to put you 
 through the winter, from the man who toils all 
 day .in the hot sun, and who loves you so well, 
 good, merciful man that he is, that you are sure 
 he will not let you starve, does not appear to 
 me to be the best way to promote a stout, deep, 
 steady, personal manliness. If you take the prin- 
 ciple out of the realm of religious ideas, and 
 bring it into common life, as a rule, it makes a 
 man small, tricky, and vicious. Then this unlim- 
 ited promise to pay creates all sorts of unfair and 
 unsound debts. When the common run of men 
 believe that they can have all they ask for, they 
 are not likely to be particular about pennies. 
 Our government is cheated every day in the exact 
 ratio of the confidence of depraved rogues, that 
 they can get their claims pulled through, and the 
 better the man to indorse the claim, the more 
 they will put down. If a good man will say this
 
 THE FEAR OP GOD. 189 
 
 is all right when it is all wrong, they will slide 
 in another cipher with perfect assurance. Now 
 meet this doctrine of vicarious payment fairly, 
 consider it as if you heard it for the first time. 
 If you will not be afraid of polarized words and 
 ideas, you will see that this must be the result tc 
 most men of even the advanced doctrine, that 
 God is an embodiment of justice or bargain, de- 
 manding strict payment, but willing to accept 
 any gold, if it be gold. It breaks up the inner 
 fastnesses of the man's soul, by pushing his ulti- 
 mate responsibility upon another. It makes God 
 fearful, not because I owe him, but because he 
 will be sure to make his claim good somewhere. 
 It makes a man false in the precise measure of 
 his own essential meanness. So that it was per- 
 fectly natural for that wretched man in Phila- 
 delphia to plot all the week how to cheat his 
 bank out of unlimited thousands, and then on the 
 Sunday go to Girard College and snuffle to the 
 boys, " Now, my young friends, I have come here 
 to-day to try if I can save one soul;" because 
 saving a soul and standing square in absolute 
 personal righteousness is by such doctrine not 
 essentially the same thing. In a word, it un cen- 
 tres a man. It lowers lofty standards so that
 
 190 THE FEAR OP GOD. 
 
 you need not climb up painfully to reach them ; 
 but just slide along on the dead level, and you 
 are there. It fills the world with churches, but 
 the Church with worldliness. The result is, 
 
 " God and the world we worship both together; 
 Draw not our laws to him, but his to ours: 
 Untrue to both, so prosperous in neither, - 
 A chilling summer bringing barren flowers." 
 
 So then we must 
 
 " Unwise in our distracted interests be ; 
 Strangers to God and true humanity." 
 Too good for great things, and too great for good. 
 Letting I dare not wait upon I would." 
 
 TV. But a far higher fear of God is to fear 
 him as we fear the surgeon, who must cut out 
 some dreadful gangrene in order to save the life. 
 Such a fear as this really touches the outskirts 
 of love, it is love and fear blended. When I 
 went to Fort Donelson to nurse our wounded 
 men, it was my good fortune to be the personal 
 attendant of a gentleman whose skill as a sur- 
 geon was only equalled by the wonderfully deep, 
 loving tenderness of his heart, as it thrilled in 
 every tone of his voice and every touch of his 
 hand.* And it all comes up before me now, how 
 
 * My position as nurse for this gentleman, Dr. R. L. Rea, of this 
 city, gave me such insight as inspired this poor tribute to his worth
 
 THE FEAR OF GOD. 191 
 
 he would come to the men, fearfully mangled as 
 they were, and how the nerve would shrink and 
 creep ; and how, with a wise, hard, steady skill, 
 he would cut to save life, forcing back tears of 
 pity only that he might keep his eye clear for the 
 delicate duty, speaking low words of cheer in 
 tones heavy with tenderness ; then, when all was 
 over, and the poor fellows, fainting with pain 
 knew that all was done that could be done, and 
 done only with a severity whose touch was love, 
 how they would look after the man as he went 
 away, sending unspoken benedictions to attend 
 him. Now, a fear like this is almost the loftiest 
 fear of God that has come to the human soul. 
 Here we find ourselves among all sorts of deprav- 
 ities. Sins that are as certainly shattering even 
 to the body as the splint of a shell or a rifle- 
 bullet, hit thousands of our fellows on every side. 
 They hit us. We can all count some friend or 
 kinsman who has bee,n killed by sin as surely as 
 if he had been shot down ; and it may be not one 
 of us can look back from the standpoint of forty 
 
 and goodness. He was one of a noble band, all full of the same 
 spirit. I am glad to say such words of them, and all the more that I 
 am sure they never expected to hear them.
 
 192 THE FEAR OP GOD. 
 
 years, and say, " I am willing to take the unal- 
 terable and eternal consequence of all my deeds 
 done to man and woman, ever since I was a man." 
 And this consciousness of something wrong in 
 us, this sight of something wrong about us, 
 makes havoc of the peace of the soul ; we feel 
 in our own life a thread of the common cancer. 
 
 Again, not sin only, but death, is fearful to 
 many of us ; we shrink from the touch of God, 
 as the man shrinks from the surgeon's knife. It 
 is doubtless some pain to enter into any life, and 
 that is why we shrink from it. It must be some 
 pain to the worm in the water to strip away the 
 dear old shell in which it has lived for seventy 
 years (the seventy years of a worm), to pierce 
 out into the air and spread its wings, though the 
 next moment it shall exult and sing as it floats 
 in the wonderful new world, with the rich color, 
 and the sunshine, and the unbounded gladness. 
 Now there is this intuition of our ultimate de- 
 pendence on God in every soul. Are we in sin ? 
 God must help us out of it finally, in some quick, 
 painful way, as the surgeon helps the sufferer. 
 Our suffering appeals at once to his pity, his 
 mercy, and his love. Are we in life ? Through
 
 THE FEAR OF GOD. 193 
 
 him we must brave the great change of our being, 
 i and begin to live again in some wonderful new 
 way. So corned this fear of God, at once a 
 shrinking and a clinging, inevitable and fearful. 
 And this is about as far as most liberal Chris- 
 tians go : they accept this life as a mystery of 
 trouble, and expect that God, who has certainly 
 brought them into it, will certainly help them 
 through it. So, with a touch of terror, as a 
 woman would trust herself in a frail boat on our 
 lake because she believed in the captain, though 
 the waters were turbulent and the sky dark, we 
 trust ourselves to God, and bear the peril as 
 bravely as we can, not always quite sure that 
 we shall win through, yet as the life deepens, 
 watching, with ever-fresh trust, the pilot at the 
 helm, sure, as the days wear on, that the master 
 knows best what to do, and that we have only to 
 bear the burden, meet the inevitable lot, and trust 
 to the end. 
 
 V. Then, finally, there is a fear of God which 
 is more of love than fear, a fear that has no tor- 
 ment. There is an inspiration by which our duties 
 rise up before us, vested in a nobleness like that 
 which touches the landscape for a great painter. 
 9
 
 194 THE FEAR OF GOD. 
 
 The true artist works ever with a touch of fear 
 He stands at his task, his heart trembling with 
 the great pulses of his conception. Carefully, 
 fearfully, as if his soul were to be saved by it 
 (as indeed in some measure it will be), he trios 
 to bring out the mystery of truth and beauty. 
 There is a deep gladness and a deep fear as, line 
 by line, touching and retouching with infinite 
 care, he perfects at last to the visible sight the 
 vision of beauty that was in him. And he is 
 fearful exactly as he sees the perfection of the 
 thing he is trying to embody. A dauber has fai 
 less fear than Church when he paints Niagara. 
 Now, believe me, God hides some ideal in every 
 human soul. At some time in our life we feel a 
 trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. 
 Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this 
 hidden impulse to do our best. There is a time 
 when we are not content to be such merchants 
 or doctors or lawyers as we see on the dead 
 level or below it. The woman longs to glorify 
 her womanhood as sister, wife, or mother. I say, 
 in the heart of us all, there is this higher thought 
 of life struggling for a realization. All at some 
 time cry, " Not that I have already attained, or
 
 THE FEAR OF GOD. 195 
 
 am already perfect," and then the fierce conflict of 
 life begins. The tempter tells me that if I try to 
 be an ideal merchant or lawyer or doctor I shall 
 go under. If it is a rule to mix inferior wheat, 
 and call it No. 1; to pull a rogue through in 
 spite of justice, when all the world knows he is 
 a rogue ; to keep a patient lingering a little for 
 an extra fee, then I must do it, or I am not fit 
 for this world. I must go where the wheat is all 
 pure and plump, and the judge has a clean calen- 
 dar, and the inhabitants never say, " I am sick." 
 If the woman will not dress, and dance over 
 ground enough to kill her if she had to walk it 
 doing good, in order to secure some darling 
 match for herself or daughter, then she must go 
 where there is neither marrying nor giving in 
 marriage. The young man must see life, or be a 
 spoon. Friends, that is the devil, the tempt- 
 tation in the wilderness, that every soul must 
 meet and faint and stagger under, in some form 
 or other. But here, on the other side, is God, 
 God standing silently at the door all day long, 
 God whispering to the soul, that to be pure 
 and true is to succeed in life, and whatever we 
 get short of that will burn up like stubble,
 
 196 THE PEAR OF GOD. 
 
 though the whole world try to save it. Now 
 here is the fear of God that is loftiest of all. It 
 comes to youth and maiden at the portals of life, 
 to make them beautiful in all sweet sunny hu- 
 manities, yet to keep them pure as the angels. 
 It comes to the wedded man and wife whose little 
 children are beginning to trouble the home, just 
 as the angel troubled the waters in the ancient 
 pool, that the home may be a fountain of healing 
 for the hurts and bruises of the world ; and it 
 helps them to look into that future when those 
 little pattering feet shall tramp strong and steady 
 in the ranks of life, those voices breathe out com- 
 fort and inspiration for fainting souls, and those 
 hands, now so restless with electric mischief, 
 grow skilful in the achievements of the age. It 
 whispers how it will lead you and help you, if 
 you will but keep your soul open to it ; how you 
 shall be able to bring those children into the 
 great ranks of God's holiest and best, as you take 
 heed to that monitor. It comes to the aged, and 
 brings sounds from over that golden sea beyond 
 which abides their home. It tells them to listen 
 to no tempter that would make the grave the end 
 of all, but to keep an open, tremulous ear for the
 
 THE FEAR OP GOD. 197 
 
 whispers that ever come from the upper world, 
 when the turmoil of life is over and the pilgrim 
 rests for a season. friends, it is to every man 
 and woman the still small voice, whispering 
 whatever at that moment we must hear if we 
 will live ! Not shouting, but whispering, so that 
 we must listen with a loving fear lest we miss 
 the accent ; not repeating louder for our heed- 
 lessness, but whispering, so that we must fear 
 lest we miss the word. God with us, not as an 
 Eastern despot, or a stern bargainer, or a painful 
 helper, but a pleading love. Not the thunder, 
 beating in terrific reverberations down the peaks 
 of Sinai , but that gentle voice on the mount of 
 the beatitudes, crying, " Blessed are the poor, 
 blessed are the meek, blessed are the merciful, 
 blessed are the mourners, blessed are the pure 
 in heart, for they shall see God."
 
 XI. 
 
 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 
 
 1 SAM. ii. 18, 19 : " Samuel ministered before the Lord, being a child. 
 Moreover, his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to 
 him from year to year." 
 
 THIS is part of a most touching story, how God 
 gave to a Hebrew mother a man-child, many 
 years after her wedding; and the gift was such 
 a gladness, that she dedicated him back to God, 
 and carried him back to the temple, there to 
 minister all his life. And once every year she 
 made him a little coat, and carried it up to 
 the temple herself, when she went to see her 
 child, whom she called Samuel, which, being in- 
 terpreted, is, " He who was asked of God." 
 
 We have three separate statements of the 
 nature of a little child. The first is, that, in 
 some way, it is utterly depraved and lost ; not 
 capable of conceiving one good thought, saying one 
 good word, or doing one good thing, being 
 
 " Sprung from the man whose guilty fall 
 
 Corrupts his race and taints us all." 
 [198]
 
 A TALK TO MOTHEES. 199 
 
 This statement, to my mind, is untrue, for two 
 reasons. The first is, that it clashes with the 
 loftiest revelation ever made to our race about 
 the child-nature. Jesus said, " Suffer the little 
 cl ildren to come unto me, and forbid them 
 not : for of such is the kingdom of heaven." 
 One cannot help seeing here the inevitable 
 logic. If the child is utterly depraved, and 
 of such is the kingdom of heaven, wherein 
 does the kingdom of heaven differ from the 
 kingdom of hell ? 
 
 I sat at my desk, trying to put my second 
 and most impregnable objection, as it springs 
 out of the nature of the little child itself, into 
 words. And one sat at my feet, rich in the 
 possession of a new toy; while another went 
 and came, singing through the fresh spring 
 morning. Then I said in my heart, " God, 
 my Father! when I can say that this morn- 
 ing sunshine, pouring into my room fresh from 
 the fountains of thy light, is a horror of great 
 darkness, and the voices of the singing birds 
 are intended to echo to us the cry of lost 
 souls ; and that the ever-changing glory of 
 spring, summer, autumn, and winter is but.
 
 200 A TALK TO MOTHEES. 
 
 the ever-shifting shadow of the frown of God 
 on a sin-stricken world, then I can say that 
 the light that comes out of the eyes of that lit- 
 tle child, who has not yet framed its tongue t) 
 call me father, is the bale-fire of a soul already 
 akin to the lost ; and the sweet confidences of the 
 other, the unlearned blasphemies of despair." 
 
 The second theory is one that I have heard 
 from some liberal Christians, that the heart 
 and nature of a little child are like a fresh 
 garden-mould in the spring-time. Nothing has 
 sprung out of it: but the seeds of vice are 
 already bedded down into it ; and we must 
 plant good seeds, and nurse them until there 
 is a strong growth of the better promise, 
 carefully, all the while, weeding out whatever 
 is bad as it comes to the surface. At the first 
 glance, this seems to be about the truth. Still, 
 I fear it has not come so much out of that 
 true philosophy which is founded on a close 
 observation of our nature, as it has come out 
 of a desire not to differ so very far from those 
 who denounce us heartily as unchristian. 
 
 Such an idea of the child-nature is, after all, 
 a moderate theory of infant depravity ; and as
 
 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 201 
 
 such I reject it, so far as it gives any pre- 
 occupation and predominance to sin, and ac- 
 cept the third theory, as the true and pure 
 gospel about the child-nature ; namely, that tho 
 kingdom of heaven, in a child, is like unto a 
 man that sowed good seed in his field; but af- 
 terward, while men slept, his enemy came and 
 sowed tares among the wheat, and went away; 
 and when the blade sprung up, and brought 
 forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. That 
 is the true statement of this fact, my friends, 
 as I understand it. The good seed is sown 
 first, good principles and powers are the first 
 to be set down in the fresh, young heart ; while 
 even the tares themselves are not utterly worth- 
 less weeds, but degenerate wheat, a poorer grain, 
 but never utterly useless or worthless ; for the 
 better kinds of it can be made into a rather 
 bitter bread, while even the worst can be burnt 
 up, and be made to enrich the ground for an- 
 other harvest of the nobler grain. The good 
 is primary, and purely good ; the bad is second- 
 ary, and not totally bad. And every little child 
 ministers before the Lord, and every mother 
 makes his garments from year to year 
 9*
 
 202 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 
 
 I propose to speak briefly on the nature and 
 possibilities of this mother influence, what it 
 is, and what it may be. And note, first of all, 
 that while in after-life the father may come to 
 an equal or even stronger influence over the 
 child, in the plastic morning of life, when 
 the infant soul puts on its first robes of joy 
 and love and faith and wonder, the hand of the 
 mother alone is permitted to give them their 
 rich quality and texture ; and, to her loving 
 and skilful eye only is left the decision of their 
 comfort and adaptation to the ever-varying na- 
 ture of every little one that comes into the 
 world. God has made it so in his infinite and 
 unfailing providence. 
 
 " Women know 
 
 The way to rear up children (to be just); 
 They know a simple, merry, tender knack 
 Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, 
 And stringing pretty words that make no sense, 
 And kissing full sense into empty words; 
 Which things are corals to cut life upon, 
 Although such trifles. Children learn, by such, 
 Love's holy earnest in a pretty play, - 
 And get not over-early solemnized. 
 
 Fathers love as well, 
 
 but still with heavier brains, 
 
 And wills more consciously responsible, 
 And not as wisely, since less foolishly." 
 
 To every little child, in the beginning, this
 
 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 203 
 
 earth is without form and void ; and the first 
 great light that God brings out of the darkness 
 is the face of its mother, and the first sound 
 that ever enters the silent sea of the infant soul 
 is the voice of the mother as she bends over it, 
 endeavoring to find some answering glance and 
 call of recognition. And God has made it so, 
 that the first sure sound the mother ever hears 
 breaking out of that silence, is more to her than 
 the great harmonies that were heard when the 
 morning stars sang together, and all the sons 
 of God shouted for joy. So, how can we wonder 
 that the tender nature of Christ gathered itself 
 into grave rebuke to those who would hinder 
 mothers from bringing little children to him, 
 that he might put his hands upon them and 
 bless them ? To me, the question is not whether 
 the children will or will not be benefited by 
 that benediction, and so whether it is worth 
 all that trouble and hindrance to the Master 
 to let them come; but whether that most noble 
 and tender of all souls shall acknowledge that 
 most noble and tender of all things, the long- 
 ing of the mother for a blessing upon the child. 
 Here, then, is the great fact set clearly
 
 204 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 
 
 before us. Mothers, your heart is the first 
 Paradise to every little child God gives you; 
 he finds rivers of water there, and the fruit 
 and flowers of his earliest human world. 
 While he can rest there, no wild beast can 
 make him afraid ; and when at last he eats of 
 the inevitable knowledge of good and evil, and 
 is fallen and naked and ashamed, your love may 
 so clothe him, as he passes out of his Eden, 
 that he will always live in hope of the Para- 
 dise regained. And so " we only never call 
 him fatherless who has God and his mother." 
 
 Then, secondly, while it is eminently true, 
 that the little child has such rich endowment, and 
 you have such a wonderful pre-eminence, it is 
 also true, that the possibilities open out two ways, 
 you may greatly blight his life, or you may 
 greatly bless it. The garments that mothers fit 
 on to the spirits of little children, like the gar- 
 ments that they fit to the outward form, only 
 more certainly, have a great deal to do with that 
 child's whole future life. Let me give you three 
 instances out of many that are kept in the archives 
 of the world. 
 
 What would you judge to be the foremost
 
 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 205 
 
 thing in Washington ? The obvious answer 
 is, his perfect, spotless, radiant integrity. The 
 man does not live in this world who believes that 
 any letter or despatch or state paper will ever 
 be found in any country, which, if well under- 
 stood, can call this great quality into question, 
 after he had come to the prime and power of his 
 manhood, as for that matter, at any time in 
 his whole life. Now it is ah instructive fact for 
 mothers, that of the few books that have come 
 down to us with which the mother of Washington 
 surrounded her boy in early life, the one most 
 worn and well used is a book on morals, by that 
 eminent pattern of the old English integrity, Sir 
 Matthew Hale; and the place where that book 
 opens easiest, where it is most dog-eared and 
 frail, is at a chapter on the great account which 
 we must all give of the deeds done in the body. 
 Before that boy went out of his home, his mother 
 took care to stamp the image and superscription 
 of integrity deeply on his soul. 
 
 What, after his great genius, would you men 
 tion as the most notable thing in William Ellery 
 Channing? We answer at once, his constant 
 loyalty to a broad, free, fearless examination of
 
 206 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 
 
 every question that could present itself to him; 
 a frank confession of what he believed to be true 
 about it, no matter what was said against it ; and 
 an active endeavor to make that truth a part of 
 his life. Channiug testified, with a proud affec- 
 tion, of his mother : " She had the firmness to 
 examine the truth, to speak it, and to act upon 
 it, beyond all women I ever knew." And so it 
 was, that, when her frail boy must go out 
 into the battle, she had armed him with the 
 breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of 
 salvation. 
 
 What, again, after his genius, stands foremost 
 in the life of Byron ? One answer only can be 
 given, his utter want of faith in woman. That 
 one thing did more to turn his life into wormwood 
 and gall, than all beside. He lost faith, first of 
 all, in his mother. In and through his childhood, 
 it was his mother that clothed him in the poisoned 
 garments that so wofully penetrated through all 
 his after-life, and made him the most miserable 
 man in his generation. 
 
 And so one might go on reciting instances 
 almost endlessly, if it were needful, to show how 
 true it is, that the mother makes the man. What
 
 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 207 
 
 then, positively, shall the mother do who will do 
 her best ? 
 
 I will answer this question first by noting what 
 she shall not do. And I cannot say one thing 
 before this, that the spiritual garment she fash- 
 ions for her little one from year to year shall 
 not be black. All mothers know how long before 
 their children can utter a word they can read 
 gladness or gloom in the mother's face. Let her 
 smile, and the child will laugh ; let her look sad, 
 and it will weep. Now, some mothers, if they 
 have had great troubles or are much tried in their 
 daily life, get into a habit of sadness that is like a 
 second nature. The tone of their voice and the 
 tenor of their talk is all in the pensive, minor 
 key. They even " sigh when they thank God." 
 They talk with unction of who is dead, and how 
 young they were, and how many are sick, and 
 what grief is abroad altogether on the earth. 
 And the child listens to all that is said. The 
 mother may think he does not care; but, if 
 my own earliest memories are at all true to the 
 common childhood, he does care. These things 
 chill him through and through. I remember 
 how I carried the terror of such a conversation in
 
 208 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 
 
 my heart once for days and days, long after the 
 good woman who had spoken had forgotten all 
 about it. Mothers, your children have no part or 
 lot in that matter ; death has no dominion over 
 them, and will not have for this many a day to 
 come : and it is foolish and wrong for you to lead 
 them with you into its dark valley and shadow. 
 If one of these little ones should be taken from 
 you, it will be to him only as if he lay down to 
 sleep. No sweet fruit of childhood can grow 
 amid those grim shadows ; he has his own little 
 griefs, too, already : he does not need yours. So, 
 as he stands before the Lord, and you fashion his 
 spiritual garments from year to year, put plenty 
 of gladness into them, let the first fear wait for 
 the first sin. In the kingdom of heaven, to which 
 he now belongs, there is no death ; his life is hid 
 with Christ in God. 
 
 Then I would ask that the garment of spiritual 
 influence, which you are ever fashioning, shall 
 not be of the nature of a straight-jacket. Has 
 your boy a heavy foot, a loud voice, a great appe- 
 tite, a defiant way, and a burly presence alto- 
 gether ? Then thank God for it, more than if 
 your husband had a farm where corn grows
 
 A TALK TO MOTHEES. 209 
 
 twelve feet high ; your child has in him the 
 making of a great and good man. The only fear 
 is, that you will fail to meet the demand of this 
 strong, grand nature, and try to break where you 
 ought to build. The question for you to solve, 
 mother, is not how to subdue him, but how to 
 direct him. Sometimes mothers are really selfish : 
 they refuse to pay the price for this noble growth 
 of childhood. It is a sad mistake to suppose, 
 that this sturdy daring must be bad; first the 
 wheat, then the tares. Dr. Kane was a wonder 
 of boisterous energy in childhood, climbing trees 
 and roofs, projecting himself against all obstacles, 
 until he got the name of being the worst boy in 
 Branchtown; but time revealed the divinity of 
 this rough life, when he bearded the ice-king 
 in his own domain, and made himself a name in 
 Arctic exploration second to none. The tumult, 
 again, when Sydney Smith was a boy, was a mar- 
 vel of boisterous clamor. But when that voice 
 set itself to be heard in the " Edinburgh Review," 
 it roused a whole kingdom ; and the abundant 
 vitality that set all distracted in childhood, so 
 penetrated and informed the whole after-life, as 
 to make its record one of the best biographies in
 
 210 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 
 
 the English tongue. Do not break your child's 
 passionate temper, but direct it. God knows, by 
 and by, he will need it all to batter down great 
 wrongs, and plead and work for the great right. 
 Do not fret and fear over the predominance of the 
 animal above the spiritual nature : it is all right 
 that it should be so at the start. The first man 
 is of the earth, earthy ; the second man is the 
 Lord from heaven. First comes that which is 
 natural, or, as the better translation has it, 
 first comes that which is animal ; afterward, that 
 which is spiritual. Do you know that the pure, 
 the almost ethereal Channing was so full of this 
 predominant animal nature in early childhood, 
 that the first idea of glory in heaven, as he him- 
 self tells us, that ever dawned upon his mind, was 
 in connection with an old colored cook. There 
 is a good, wholesome oversight that is beautiful in 
 all mothers ; but the true root of that ought to be 
 a great conviction, that our nature is loyal, and 
 needs no breaking. We never break a young 
 tree ; and, thank God, deformity is the rare ex- 
 ception in the spirit, as in the form. Blessed is 
 that mother who shall know this, and let every 
 good gift of God in the little child have its own 
 free clay.
 
 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 211 
 
 Then, positively, there is one most important 
 principle that no mother can ever forget. A good 
 and great man, whose children are remarkable 
 for nobility and beauty, said to me once in a let- 
 ter, " I count a great part of the grace in my 
 children from a new reading of the old command- 
 ment I read it always, ' Parents, obey your 
 children in the Lord : for this is right.' " That 
 I conceive to be especially the true reading for 
 you, mothers. When he is altogether with you, 
 his demands are especially sacred, and must be 
 obeyed. 
 
 I shall not speak in any material sense ; but, 
 when the child begins to think, he at once begins 
 to question. He is set here in a great universe 
 of wonder and mystery, and he wants to know its 
 meaning and the meaning of himself. But some 
 mothers, when their children come to them with 
 their questions in all good faith, either treat the 
 question with levity, or get afraid, and reprove 
 the little thing for asking. Mothers, this is all 
 wrong. This is one of your rarest opportunities 
 to clothe the spirit of your child in the fresh 
 garments that will make him all beautiful, as he 
 stands before the Lord. He can ask questions
 
 212 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 
 
 you cannot answer; but be sure that the ques- 
 tions that can be answered are best answered 
 simply and directly. The soul hungers and 
 thirsts to know: indeed, it must know. Those 
 moments are the seed-time ; and if you do not then 
 cast in the wheat, the enemy will sow the tares. 
 
 Then, as this primitive woman would be ever- 
 more careful to meet the enlarged form of her 
 child, as she went to see him stand before the Lord 
 from year to year, will you be careful to meet the 
 enlarged spirit of your child ? I do fear for the 
 mother who will not note how her child demands 
 and needs ever new and larger confidences. The 
 last thing mothers learn often is, that the child is 
 always becoming less a child. It is a great bless- 
 ing to that child whose mother can be well-timed, 
 and yet perfectly delicate, in her revelations ; who 
 can know when to reveal truth and falsehood, 
 nobility and meanness, purity and its opposite, 
 in thought and word, yet not have the child 
 look up in wonder to ask what she means ; who 
 can feel, in her prophetic and intuitive spirit, the 
 true time for every thing, that she is never too 
 late, and never too soon ; whose children will 
 bless her, because her words were always more of
 
 A TA.LK TO MOTHEE8. 213 
 
 a revelation than of a warning or a rebuke. Moth- 
 ers, as I speak to you so of your great trust, I 
 feel still more deeply your great reward ; for you 
 are greatly rewarded. As I have thought of what 
 I should say to you of what you should be, I have 
 seemed all the while only to be recalling what a 
 mother once was to a child. For my spirit went 
 back through many years to a little valley, 
 " among the rocks and winding scaurs," where 
 I saw a man and woman, in their early wedded 
 prime, sitting together. And as I sat with them, 
 watching their faces shine in the summer Sunday 
 sunlight, they seemed to me as the faces of 
 angels. Then the woman sang some words I 
 have never forgotten, out of a sweet old Metho- 
 dist hymn. These were the words : 
 
 " How happy is the pilgrim's lot ! 
 How free from every anxious thought, 
 From worldly hope and fear ! 
 Confined to neither court nor cell, 
 His soul disdains ^on earth to dwell; 
 He only sojourns here." 
 
 And from that time, somehow, I knew, in a new 
 way, that this was my mother. And now her 
 hair is white as snow, and she bends, in the ripe- 
 ness of her fruitful and graceful life, waiting for 
 the angels to come and carry her, after her long
 
 214 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 
 
 widowhood, to another of the many mansions, 
 where husband and sons are watching and wait- 
 ing for her coming. And is not this what a 
 million sons will tell of their mothers ? Blessed 
 is that man whose mother has made all mothers 
 worshipful ; blessed is that man who can make 
 such an entry in his diary as this of Washington 
 in his prime : " I got away, and spent the evening 
 with my mother." 
 
 Mothers, you have great sorrows ; but then 
 you have an exceeding joy. To you, more than 
 to fathers, belongs the responsibility ; but to you, 
 more than to them, comes the great reward. No 
 cares, no tears, no efforts you make are ever 
 really made in vain. When your child grows up 
 to his manhood, if that is noble and beautiful, he 
 will gladly say, " I owe it most of all to my 
 mother." And, if it is lost and stricken with sin, 
 he will fear above all the sorrow of his mother, 
 or to meet his mother, or'that she shall know of 
 his sin. And the first pulses of his penitence 
 will always come at the thought of his mother. 
 And then if, after all your love and care, the sil- 
 ver cord is loosed, and the golden bowl broken, 
 and your treasure is gathered into the safe keep-
 
 A TALK TO MOTHERS. 215 
 
 ing of the world to come, there may still come a 
 solemn gladness, even through your woe, as you 
 realize that he is not unclothed, but clothed upon. 
 And you shall see the travail of your soul and be 
 satisfied, because he is a nursling now of heaven. 
 
 ' For ever and for ever, 
 All in a happy home ; 
 And there to stay a little while 
 Till all the rest shall come. 
 To lie within the light of God, 
 Like a babe upon the breast, 
 And the wicked cease from troubling, 
 And the. weary are at rest."
 
 xn. 
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 ACTS v. 15 : " They brought the sick, and laid them that the shadow 
 of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them." 
 
 THE incident chronicled in the text transpired in 
 a time of strong excitement, when some fishermen 
 of Galilee had sprung into what was as yet a very 
 local prominence, and were melting and mould- 
 ing men's hearts in the fire of a conversion fresh 
 from heaven. They had done very great won- 
 ders under the pressure of that power for which 
 we use the word " miracle," though it is about as 
 indefinite as the Indian term, "big medicine." 
 And these wonders were connected especially 
 with the personal presence of one man, Peter. 
 They roused the entire country-side. The sick 
 and lame, it was rumored, had found a new life 
 and health when this man touched them : then 
 all who were sick, and all who had sick, began to 
 hope. Vast numbers were instantly brought in 
 to share the new blessing, far more than the mys- 
 
 [216]
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 217 
 
 terious power could cope with. There has almost 
 'always been a point at which the power to work 
 these wonders becomes exhausted ; but there is 
 no boundary, thank God, for human hope and 
 love. And so it was, that, for every one of these 
 nameless sufferers, God had put sympathy and 
 the longing to help them into some heart. 
 Kindly hands ministered to them in the daytime : 
 tireless watchers sat by them in the night. And 
 these, seizing the great opportunity, came troop- 
 ing in, bearing their sick with them, resolute to 
 leave nothing untried that had a spark of hope in 
 it. And, when there was no other hope that the 
 blessing of healing would fall upon them, they 
 brought their sick, and laid them where the 
 shadow of Peter might touch them as he passed 
 by. 
 
 And this, first of all, is a most touching thing, 
 this solejnn, silent trust in the shadow of a man. 
 The curtain is lifted for a single instant. You 
 see the fisherman pass in his homely garb. The 
 sick are laid there in the narrow street, along 
 which he is sure to come. You can observe the 
 anxious attendants scanning the faces of the suf- 
 ferers, to see if the tide of life rises ever so little. 
 10
 
 218 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 A moment more, and the curtain falls : it is never 
 lifted again. To us there is no result, not a 
 word that Peter's shadow did any good; that 
 Peter said it was right or wrong for them to try 
 so poor a chance ; or that the experiment was 
 ever tried again. And the incident has never 
 been attached, like a steam-tug, to any dogma or 
 doctrine, in order to drag it to the private wharf 
 of a sectarian conclusion. The thing alone, just 
 as it stands, is all that is left ; and it is enough 
 for my purpose, because it is the indication of a 
 belief that stirred 'some human souls in old times, 
 and ought to stir them still, a belief that there is 
 something in a shadow cast from one over another, 
 of a deep and potent power ; a deed done some 
 times the hand has no part in ; a word said the 
 tongue never utters ; a virtue going out of me, or 
 a vice, apart from my determination ; a shadow 
 of my spirit and life, cast for good or evil, as 
 certain and inseparable as my shadow on the 
 wall. 
 
 And the bare fact, of itself, seems to be hinted, 
 in many ways, to every man who will watch with 
 care for what is going on under the surface of 
 our life. For instance, there is some mysterious
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 219 
 
 force by which men often move us in attraction 
 or repulsion the first time we meet them, cast 
 a shadow of light or darkness we cannot account 
 for, and cannot overcome. What these subtle 
 influences are, no man has ever told us. We all 
 learn to reverence such impressions, or rue it if 
 we do not, because they are the shadow cast by a 
 substance we cannot see, that is to act on us for 
 bale or blessing. And 
 
 " I do not like thee, Doctor Fell ; 
 The reason why I cannot tell ; 
 But I do not like thee, Doctor Fell," 
 
 is the inner and instinctive verdict we pass on 
 some men ; probably, also, that some men pass 
 on us. Their shadows hurt us : our shadows 
 hurt them. 
 
 I have said, no man, so far, has been able to 
 tell what this shadow is, or the substance out of 
 which it springs. I presume it is as useless to 
 search for it, as it is to search for the spring of 
 the life itself. Perhaps it can never be made any 
 clearer than by the oldest faith we can find con- 
 cerning it, that it is the influence of the holy or 
 the infernal spirit, as it is cast for good or evil 
 out of the life of man.
 
 220 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 But in this sense I do not propose to dwell 
 on the question. I should love to speak to you 
 about some healing and hurting shadows far more 
 easily understood, shadows of a mighty mo- 
 ment, this way or that, we are casting every day, 
 know we are casting them, and ought to know 
 what they are coming to be and to do, shadows 
 cast out of a perverted or a purified life and pur- 
 pose ; and so, in every way, of unspeakably vaster 
 importance than the more occult, remote, and 
 mysterious shadow these men and women in 
 Jewry believed Peter cast, and we may believe we 
 cast, in some fashion, while we may have no will 
 at all in the thing we have done. 
 
 And, foremost of all shadows, of a greater bale 
 or blessing than perhaps any other we can cast y 
 is the shadow of the home ; the place where fa- 
 ther, mother, and children dwell together ; where, 
 four times in a century, God makes a new earth, 
 and out of which he peoples a new heaven ; the 
 most holy place on earth, the place no wise man 
 will ever enter with a profane or careless step. 
 
 I have sat bareheaded in the noblest Gothic 
 cathedral on the earth, listening to a choir and 
 organ that to me seemed as the voices of the sing-
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 221 
 
 ers, and the music that is heard, when the mar- 
 tyrs enter heaven. And for years I sat, in my 
 youth, in a simple country church, on every 
 Sunday morning, joining in the old liturgies, that, 
 in one form or another, had been said and sung 
 ever since the Saxon embraced the Christian 
 faith. Just beside where I sat was a figure car- 
 ven in stone, the memorial of a man who came 
 home, five hundred and fifty years ago, all broken 
 from fighting for the Holy Land in one of the 
 Crusades, and was laid there in the tomb to wait 
 for the resurrection. And out of the low, latticed 
 windows I could look on a green graveyard, 
 where the dust of Roman and Saxon, Dane and 
 Englishman, rested, after life's fitful fever, within 
 the shadow of the awful mystery. And once, I 
 remember, I rose in the gray light, and stood 
 alone by Niagara, while the sound of its mighty 
 thunder rose up fresh and pure, unbroken as 
 yet and undefiled by the clamor of those money- 
 changers who deserve a whip of not very small 
 cords for profaning that place, in which, of all 
 places, the soul longs to be alone with her God 
 And I feel no regret, that I did not realize ho^ 
 good the shadows are that were cast over me
 
 222 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 from those mighty waters, that noble temple, 
 and that rustic church in which men and women 
 have worshipped for a thousand years. I did feel 
 those influences. These were sacred places. But 
 the most sacred place, the holiest of all, the place 
 whose shadow stretches over forty-five hundred 
 miles of earth and sea, and forty years of time, 
 and is still a shadow of healing, is a little place 
 built of gray stone. It nestled under a hill that 
 sheltered it from the blasts that came sweeping 
 over the great moorlands out of the North. It 
 was a cottage with one door, and two windows 
 looking right into the eye of the South. A little 
 clump of rose-bushes and a plum-tree grew fast 
 by the door ; and one branch of that tree, reach- 
 ing up to the chamber-window, became, to a 
 little child I used to know, what the tree of the 
 knowledge of good and evil was to our first par- 
 ents in Eden. For the branch once bore only 
 one plum ; and the good mother said, " My child, 
 you must not eat that plum ; " and rather proud 
 the man is yet, that the boy obeyed his mother, 
 and never did eat the plum. And yet I am not 
 sure that there is much room to be proud. It 
 was as it is with some other fruits on that tree of
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 223 
 
 knowledge. The little hands did not pluck the 
 fruit ; but the little nails pecked it, until it was 
 not fit for anybody else to pluck. And so I am 
 led to wonder sometimes, whether it was not the 
 best thing after all for those first parents to 
 plunge in as they did, and get done with their 
 Paradise if they must, rather than " keep tho 
 word of promise to the ear, and break it to the 
 sense." But there, in that bright little home, 
 hung round with pictures of a marvellous execu- 
 tion, Moses with the tables, which were crim- 
 son ; and Peter with a long beard, which was 
 green. There, bending over the pictures in the 
 great Bible, or listening to psalm or song or story, 
 the child lived in the shadow of that home ; and 
 it became to him as the very gate of heaven, so 
 dear and good, that no great cathedral, no grand 
 scene in nature, no place for worship anywhere, 
 can be what that gray-stone cottage was, when 
 the world was young, when roses bloomed, and 
 fruit ripened, and snow fell, as if it were by 
 an understanding .-between the child and the 
 Maker, they were always so exactly what he 
 wanted ; and I doubt not there was such an 
 understanding.
 
 224 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 Friends, I wonder whether we have any deep 
 consciousness of the shadows we are weaving 
 about our children in the home ; whether we 
 ever ask ourselves, if, in the far future, when 
 we are dead and gone, the shadow our home 
 casts now will stretch over them for bane or 
 blessing. It is possible we are full of anxiety to 
 do our best, and to make our homes sacred to 
 the children. We want them to come up right, 
 to turn out good men and women, to be an 
 honor and praise to the home out of which they 
 sprang. But this is the pity and the danger, 
 that, while we may not come short in any real 
 duty of father and mother, we may yet cast no 
 healing and sacramental shadow over the child. 
 Believe me, friends, it was not in the words he 
 said, in the pressure of the hand, in the kiss, 
 that the blessing lay Jesus gave to the little 
 ones, when he took them in his arms. So it is 
 not in these, but in the shadow of my innermost, 
 holiest self ; in that which is to us what the per- 
 fume is to the flower, a soul within the soul, 
 it is that which, to the child, and in the home, 
 is more than the tongue of men or angels, or 
 prophecy or knowledge, or faith that will move
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 225 
 
 mountains, or devotion that will give the body 
 to be burned. I look back with wonder on that 
 old time, and ask myself how it is that most of 
 the things I suppose my father and mother built 
 on especially to mould me to a right manhood 
 are forgotten and lost out of my life. But the 
 thing they hardly ever thought of, the shadow 
 of blessing cast by the home ; the tender, un- 
 spoken love ; the sacrifices made, and never 
 thought of, it was so natural to make them ; ten 
 thousand little things, so simple as to attract 
 no notice, and yet so sublime as I look back at 
 them, they fill my heart still and always with 
 tenderness, when I remember them, and my eyes 
 with tears. All these things, and all that belong 
 to them, still come over me, and cast the shadow 
 that forty years, many of them lived in a new 
 world, cannot destroy. 
 
 I fear, few parents know what a supreme and 
 holy thing is this shadow cast by the home, over, 
 especially, the first seven years of this life of the 
 child. I think the influence that comes in this 
 way is the very breath and bread of life. I may 
 do other things for duty or principle or religious 
 training: they are all, by comparison, as when 
 10*
 
 226 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 I cut and trim and train a vine; and, when I 
 let the sun shine and the rain fall on it, the one 
 may aid the life ; the other is the life. Steel 
 and string are each good in their place; but 
 what are they to sunshine ? It is said, that a 
 child, hearing once of heaven, and that his father 
 would be there, replied, " Oh ! then, I dinna want 
 to gang." He did but express the holy instinct 
 of a child, to whom the father may be all that is 
 good, except just goodness, be all any child 
 can want, except what is indispensable, that 
 gracious atmosphere of blessing in the healing 
 shadow it casts, without which even heaven 
 would come to be intolerable. 
 
 But to make this question clear, if we can, let 
 me open to you a glimpse of some shadows that 
 are being cast in some homes every day, not over 
 children alone, but over men and women also. 
 
 Here is a man who has been down town all 
 day, in the full tide of care, that, from morning 
 to night, floods the markets, offices, and streets 
 of all our great cities. Tired, nervous, irritable, 
 possibly a little disheartened, he starts for his 
 home. If it is winter when he enters, there is 
 a bit of bright fire, that makes a bad temper
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 227 
 
 seem like a sin in the contrast ; a noise of chil- 
 dren, that is not dissonant ; and an evident care 
 for his comfort, telling, plainer than any words, 
 how constantly he has been in the mind of the 
 house -mother, while breasting the stress and 
 strife of the day ; while a low, sweet voice, that 
 excellent thing in woman, greets him with words 
 that ripple over the fevered spirit like cool water. 
 And the man who can nurse a bad temper, after 
 that, deserves to smart for it. There is no place 
 on the earth, into which a man can go with such 
 perfect assurance that he will feel the shadow 
 of healing, as into such a home as that. It is 
 the very gate of heaven. 
 
 But I will open another door. Here is a home 
 into which the man goes with the same burden 
 on him, heart-sick and weary in every nerve and 
 fibre of his nature, to find no forethought, no 
 comfort, no repose. When he enters the house, 
 querulous questions meet him as to whether he 
 lias forgotten what he ought never to have been 
 required to remember. Plaintive bewailings are 
 made to him of the sad seventy-seventh disobedi- 
 ence of the children, or the radical depravity of 
 the servants ; and a whole platoon-fire of little
 
 228 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 things is shot at him, so sharp and ill-timed, 
 that they touch the nerve like so many small 
 needles. It is in such things as these that the 
 shadows are cast, that hurt, but never heal ; 
 
 that drive thousands of men out of their homes 
 
 *.. 
 
 into any place that will offer a prospect of com- 
 fort and peace, even for an hour. 
 
 But let me not be unfair. The evil shadow 
 may just as certainly come from the man. Here 
 is another man in the mood I have tried to touch, 
 tired, irritable, probably savage. All day long, 
 he has fretted at the bit; but society has held 
 him in. He goes home too, but it is to spume 
 out his temper. He carries his dark face into 
 the parlor ; and one glance at it, nay, the very 
 sound of his foot, casts a shadow that can hurt, 
 but can never heal. If his wife is silent, he calls 
 her sulky : if she speaks, he snaps her. If his 
 children come to him with innocent teasings 
 he would give a year of his life some day to 
 bring back again, they are pushed aside, or sent 
 out of the room, or even God forgive him 
 are smitten. He eats a moody dinner ; takes a 
 cigar, bitter, I hope, and serves him right; 
 takes a book, too, not Charles Lamb or Charles
 
 HEALING AND HUETING SHADOWS. 229 
 
 Dickens, I warrant you; and, in one evening, 
 that man has cast a shadow he may pray, some 
 day, in a great agony, may be removed, and not 
 be heard. 
 
 But that this is not so everywhere, or generally, 
 how many happy homes can gladly testify ! Be- 
 lieve me, the shadows of healing are far more 
 and better than the shadows that hurt. I am 
 not here to cramp life and nature, and to tell 
 you it is harder to cast a shadow of blessing 
 than of bane. The nature of the shadow springs 
 from the nature of the tree ; and, in this world, 
 the upas and the poison vine are only here and 
 there, while the oak and the apple stand by 
 every cottage-door. And so it is, that into the 
 vast majority of homes, all over the earth, the 
 husband and father comes, when the day is done, 
 like the inpouring of a new life. He need only 
 bring himself to be the most welcome guest. 
 The wise men, who came only in the shadow of 
 a star, did well to bring gold and frankincense 
 and myrrh to insure their welcome, where the 
 child lay ; but the shepherds, who bore with 
 them the shadow and song of the angels, needed 
 no other gift.
 
 230 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 Then, again, what shadows of healing fall, in 
 their turn, from the children ! It has been my 
 lot to see a good deal of home-life. I have lived 
 in the old world and the new, very intimately for 
 thirty-five years, among the poor ; and in these 
 years, since I became your pastor, in your homes 
 and others like them, all over this city and coun- 
 try, I have been able from this experience to 
 draw only one conclusion. It is, that no afflic- 
 tion that can ever come through children ever 
 equals that which comes with their utter absence ; 
 while the heaviest affliction to most, the death of 
 the little one, often casts a shadow of healing 
 that could come in no other way. 
 
 I went one day to see a poor German woman, 
 whose children had all been down with scarlet 
 fever. Four were getting well again; one was 
 dead. And it was very touching to see how the 
 shadow of that dead child had come over the 
 mother, and sent its blessing of healing through 
 all the springs of her life. " These are beautiful 
 children," I said. " Oh, yes ! but I should have 
 seen the one that died." " Good ? " "Yes ; 
 but he was an angel. Patient had they been in 
 their illness, very patient ; but I should have
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 231 
 
 seen the lamb that was gone, he was so pa- 
 tient." So, then, I saw how it was the shadow 
 of healing had touched her from the babe in 
 heaven. While he was with her, he was like the 
 rest : she held them all alike in her heart, and 
 overshadowed them all alike with her love. But 
 now, when he was gone, he cast the shadow. 
 The little shroud was turned into a white robe, 
 that glistened and shone in the sun of Paradise, 
 so that she was blinded ; the broken prattle had 
 filled out into an angel-song ; the face shone as 
 the face of an angel ; and, all unknown to herself, 
 God had laid her where the shadow of the little 
 one up in heaven could touch her with its heal- 
 ing. And no shadow is so full of healing as that 
 shadow of the child that is always a child in 
 heaven. The most gentle and patient will some- 
 times feel a touch of irritation at the wayward- 
 ness of the one that is with us ; but no father or 
 mother in this world ever did bring back any 
 sense of such a feeling toward the one that is 
 gone. The shadow of healing destroys it for ever. 
 Nay, it may be, that, when some shadow that 
 hurts has settled down, they can hardly tell 
 how, between the father and mother, and holds
 
 232 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 hard on to the heart, so that 110 prattle and 
 laughter of the little ones in the home has power 
 to lift and disperse it, then one touch of that 
 shadow cast from beyond the grave in one instant 
 heals all the sickness. 
 
 " As through the land at eve we went, 
 And plucked the ripened ears, 
 We fell out, my wife and I, 
 Oh, we fell out, I know not why, 
 And kissed again with tears. 
 For when we came where lies the babe 
 We lost in former years, 
 There, above the little grave, 
 There, above the little grave, 
 We kissed again with tears." 
 
 So it is in some way true, that my shadow, the 
 shadow of my spirit and life, is a subtle and 
 wonderful substance too. I think that in some 
 deep, far-reaching way, if my word is true, but 
 my heart false, the heart casts a shadow that 
 robs the word of its finest essence, so that every 
 true man I speak to finds it difficult to believe 
 me. And if my word is gentle, but my heart is 
 savage, the gentle word will not win on true 
 hearts, because the shadow of what is not gentle 
 will destroy its essence. But just as in the fine 
 touch of nature, in one of the stories of Mr. Dick- 
 ens, where a man is made to say the most savage
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 233 
 
 and bitter things, while yet his heart is a well- 
 spring of love and gentleness, and a small bird 
 sits all the while on his shoulder, not in the least 
 alarmed ; so I may say hard things sometimes : 
 if my heart is gentle, then the heart will cast the 
 shadow, and will not even frighten a bird away. 
 
 Finally, within every healing shadow is God 
 himself ; and so, though it seem to be a shadow 
 of the sorest sorrow and pain, as it was to that 
 poor woman, yet will it lift me upward, and lead 
 me into the light. Indeed it cannot be a hurting 
 shadow, if God is in it. I care not how painful, 
 perplexing, and dark, the very darkness will be 
 light about me. If he is with me, I will fear no 
 evil. All the shadows of God are divine. 
 
 " Many shadows there be, but 
 
 Each points to the sun : 
 The shadows are many, 
 
 The sunlight is one. 
 Life's fortunes may fluctuate; 
 
 God's love does not; 
 And his love is unchanged, 
 
 While it changes our lot. 
 Let us look to the light 
 
 Which is common to all, 
 And down to the shadows 
 
 That ever do fall, 
 Ay, even the darkest, 
 
 In this faith alone, 
 That in tracing the shadows, 
 
 We find out the sun."
 
 234 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 
 
 I remember going once to our lake shore with 
 my children, who had carried me off with them 
 to play. And sitting down on a sand-bank, while 
 they strayed along the margin of the waters, I 
 gradually got into a waking, dream about the 
 mighty inland sea. I thought of the primitive 
 era, when, by some new balancing of the internal 
 fires, " God said, Let the waters be gathered 
 together, and it was so ; and God saw that it was 
 good." But the picture I made of the scene was 
 vast, dreary, and uncertain, as the waters of the 
 lake seem to be on the edge of a wild winter 
 night, with not a touch of beauty or blessing 
 about it. Just then, the children came running 
 to me with a treasure they had found in the sand. 
 It was a small shell of exquisite beauty, bedded in 
 a piece of limestone. It was a sermon in a stone. 
 For it said to me, " I was born in the time you 
 have just made so dreary. I was no more to that 
 for which I was made than the garment is for your 
 child. Yet you can see how beautiful I must have 
 been, and then guess what blessing past your 
 understanding was present in the world you have 
 made so dark. Look at me, and repent of your 
 incipient atheism, and believe that wherever there
 
 HEALING AND HURTING SHADOWS. 235 
 
 is life, let it be ever so mean and poor, there 
 also is God. The whole round world, with all 
 its life, is touched in some way by his shadow 
 and his light."
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 EXOD. xxxiii. 18, 20: "And Moses said, I beseech thee, show me thy 
 glory. . . . And the Lord said, There shall no man see me, and 
 live." 
 
 MY text contains two things, the desire of 
 the man, and the answer of God. The desire 
 of the man is for a full revelation of provi- 
 dence and grace from this side of his life, from 
 a starting-point : the answer of God is, that can- 
 not be, because, if such a revelation was made, it 
 would destroy the life itself. 
 
 Moses had been hidden away in the recesses of 
 Midian, forty years, quietly feeding his flock and 
 his family. He expected, doubtless, to die, as 
 he had long lived, a shepherd. But the Divine 
 Providence had marked out a very different path 
 for him ; and so he found himself compelled to 
 come out of his rest, and head the great exodus of 
 his kinsmen from Egypt. At the time when he 
 uttered this prayer, a part of his work was done ; 
 but the hardest task was before him. The mul- 
 f236]
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 237 
 
 titude was there ; but it was a vast, uncouth mass 
 of humanity, debased by the curse of slavery, 
 under which it had long groaned ; and de- 
 pended on him almost as a babe depends on its 
 mother, for the future. Moses feels what a deep 
 responsibility rests upon him, how fearfully 
 he must fail if this movement is a failure, and 
 what a glory will rest on his success if he suc- 
 ceeds. The solemn issue fills his heart with a 
 great longing to know what it will be. So, with 
 the simple trust of a man who believes that this 
 issue is already as good as settled in the counsels 
 of the Eternal, he cries, " I beseech thee, show 
 me thy glory." 
 
 And I have taken the text, because it seems 
 to me that this is always the longing of the 
 responsible human soul, conscious that this 
 life is welded into that which is to come. It 
 is true that there are men who contrive to live 
 on a semi-animal plane, who never feel this 
 hunger to know the secret of the glory of life 
 and God ; but that is because the soul is 
 dormant, curled in upon itself. And so, on the 
 other hand, there are a few who have come 
 to where this man stood forty years after, when
 
 238 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 he was on the mountain alone; the wilderness 
 behind him, the land of promise before ; and 
 he rested at last with God, men who sweep 
 such mighty spaces in the spiritual heavens, and 
 yet feel such a nearness to God on earth and in 
 life, that they are satisfied : they have seen the 
 Father, and it sufficeth them. But many of us, 
 I trust, are not down so low as the lowest of 
 those ; and I know that most of us are not yet 
 lifted into that great place with the highest. We 
 are simply where this man was when he uttered 
 his prayer, at the hither side of what we are to 
 do and to be. Life stretches out into the dim 
 distance before us ; and we feel that God is 
 with us, though we cannot see him; that our 
 life in the future is in his hand, while we cannot 
 know what it will bring. We know that the 
 cloud certainly has a silver lining ; but the dark 
 side is what turns most frequently toward us, and 
 we long so much to see the silver. We say in 
 our hearts, " If I could but grasp this idea of what 
 I am and what I may be, my real relation to this 
 life and to God, in all its fulness, then, I think, 
 there would be such an ever-present radiance with 
 me, that I could never doubt, or grow weary.
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 289 
 
 My life would rise and swell into such full confi- 
 dence as is only known to those that dwell where 
 the Lord God is the light. I beseech thee, show 
 me thy glory." 
 
 The young man in some way utters this cry 
 as he enters upon his separate and responsible 
 life, if he has any fair comprehension of what 
 it is to be a man. In New England, you shall 
 watch him, a child in his home, a tiny frag- 
 ment of mirth and mischief, no more con- 
 scious of or caring for the future than the bird 
 that pours out its song in the old apple-tree 
 fast by his chamber window. But the years 
 sweep on in their wonderful, silent certainty. 
 Childhood opens into youth. The school and col- 
 lege set their mark on his forehead, and he stands 
 at last on the verge of his manhood, in that first 
 prime, beautiful in the innocent as the first 
 bloom on the grape. Watch him then : he can 
 no more stay in the old home, than Noah could 
 stay in the old ark, when he knew the earth was 
 blossoming and waiting for him after the Flood. 
 But, as he longs to go, I speak from my own 
 experience, there are moments when this hun- 
 ger for some revelation of what his life will be
 
 240 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 grows almost into a pain ; when he feels, that one 
 flash, clear through, would be worth a year of 
 living. It is then that his soul wrestles with 
 God, cries out to him, " I beseech thee, show 
 me thy glory." Let me see whether I shall be 
 like a tree planted by the rivers of water, or 
 a mere stick left in the sand by the receding 
 tide. 
 
 The young man and maiden stand with their 
 hands clasped together, looking onward to that 
 time, when the revelation they have made each to 
 the other shall be made openly to the world, 
 and they shall be, for ever after, man and wife. 
 It is a wonder of happiness, as they stand there 
 and look through the golden gates, down the 
 long vista, from this first prime to that day when 
 they shall be old and gray-headed, and gather 
 up their feet and die. But then, after that, 
 comes the longing to know what this life they 
 are to live will be. It is with them as it was with 
 the man Moses : the very sacredness of this life to 
 come makes them anxious about its unfolding. 
 " What if I should fail to be what I now seem to 
 be? If poverty should come in at the door, 
 and love fly out at the window ? If one of
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 241 
 
 us should die, or if in any way this fair morning 
 'should bring a noon of black cloud-banks and 
 a night of storm and sorrow ? In doubling my 
 chances of blessedness, I am doubling my chances 
 of wretchedness. The divine balances never kick 
 the beam." It is when the man and woman feel 
 so deeply this meaning that these questionings 
 come ; and, as they rise and press on the soul, 
 they are this cry of the man to God, " I beseech 
 thee, show me thy glory." 
 
 Life sweeps on again, and the father and 
 mother bend over their first-born ; that wonderful 
 new testament from God out of heaven, the 
 holiest and most beautiful thing to them this 
 world ever held. They watch it as the lights and 
 shadows ripple over the face, and the smile 
 comes and goes that has so constantly suggested 
 the nearer presence of the angels ; and, as they 
 watch, they wonder what will be the fruitage of 
 this folded soul. Here is a life with them, and 
 theirs that can never end. 
 
 " The little lids now folded fast, 
 They must learn to drop at last 
 
 Our bitter, burning tears; 
 That small, frail being, singly stand 
 
 At God's right hand, 
 Lifting up those sleeping eyes, 
 Dilated with great destinies." 
 11
 
 242 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 They have the power, in their measure, to 
 mould this life into the image of God, or to 
 brand it with the mark of the beast ; and the 
 awfulness of their trust rises before them, as 
 the future of Israel rose before Moses in the 
 wilderness. Father, mother, child, they can 
 never be separate. First it was one life, then 
 two ; now three mingle together, never again 
 to be severed, father, mother, and child, now 
 and for ever. No wonder that they long to know 
 what will be the destiny of their trust, the 
 glory of God in this gift that he has sent them. 
 If they could see that, they could, live for ever 
 content ; and, with one heart and voice, they cry, 
 " We beseech thee, show us thy glory." 
 
 There are those, again, who feel after this rev- 
 elation upon their common life. There is a 
 school of writers and thinkers, at the head 
 of which, in his lifetime, stood Mr. Thackeray, 
 who, getting on into middle life, are led to 
 cry out mournfully, that life has lost its glow 
 and glory, has settled into a jog-trot joyless- 
 ness ; that their poetry sounds just like prose, 
 and commonplace is written over the portals of 
 every day.
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 243 
 
 Yet these men will never tire of telling you 
 what life used to be when they were young, 
 what it was to find the first bird's-nest and snow- 
 drop in the spring, to go on summer picnics, to 
 have the first sleigh-ride, to keep Thanksgiving 
 in the old home, to receive certain letters, and to 
 enter a certain parlor. Nay, in more tender 
 moods, they can tell you what it was to kneel 
 down before our Father, and have no more doubt 
 of his listening, than they had of the mother's 
 listening, on whose knees their hands were resting, 
 of a time when they believed heaven was only 
 a little ways out through the blue, and the 
 sister, who had gone, looked and talked pre- 
 cisely as she had done on earth. But now they 
 wear their rue with a difference. This bloom 
 has gone, and they hold on for sheer duty. 
 They find that their life has twisted itself into 
 others past all unloosing. They cannot choose 
 not to be what they are. " To be, or not to 
 be," is not the question. They must be, and 
 be steady and strong too, for the sake of others, 
 if for nothing else. But what a difference would 
 come to their living, if with that life in their 
 youth, that was fresh every morning and re
 
 244 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 newed every evening, they could mingle this 
 experience of their age, that seems to have driven 
 it out ! and that longing, when it comes, is this 
 cry, " I beseech thee, show me thy glory." 
 
 Finally, in these days the patriot watches for 
 a revelation of this glory on the nation. Inevi- 
 table, irresistible as the sweep of a planet, the 
 mighty storm of war has smitten us, routed us 
 out of our old resting-places ; and God has said 
 to us, as he said to Moses, " Get thee out, thou 
 and thy people." Surely this old Hebrew did not 
 strive harder than we have done to stay where he 
 was ; not to go out at the bidding of the Lord ; 
 to be quiet, and let an infernal institution alone ; 
 to hold on to our mutton, and milk, and wool. 
 But it is the everlasting alternative set before 
 every great people, the Red Sea and the wild- 
 erness, a baptism of fear and fire ; then absolute 
 obedience to God, and then at last victory, and 
 the rest that remains, or a peace purchased 
 at a price that would make us a by-word and 
 a hissing among the nations, and our future a 
 blackness of darkness for ever. Thank God 
 that we have known the day of our visitation, 
 have found that we can only be in the line of
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 245 
 
 providence through the Red Sea and the wilder- 
 ness. But then the tremendous interests at 
 stake touch us with this longing to know what is 
 finally to come of it. The cry comes up to God 
 from the nation, " I beseech thee, show me thy 
 glory." 
 
 And so it is everywhere with the deeper heart : 
 always we want to see the other from the 
 hither side. Wherever a young man has left 
 his home, to enter the battle of life ; or a young 
 man and maiden have said the most sacred 
 word we ever say to each other ; or a father and 
 mother look into the face of their first-born ; or 
 a weary man holds on steady and true, not so 
 much for himself, as for others ; or the patriot 
 looks wistfully at the great multitude heaving 
 and struggling, with the thunder of Sinai above, 
 the great desert before, and the promised land 
 only in the far distance, this to me is the inter- 
 pretation of that cry out of the soul, " I beseech 
 thee, show me thy glory." 
 
 Now to all this comes the answer of God: 
 " This cannot be, for that would be death. Such 
 a revelation as you are crying for, instead of
 
 246 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 being the inspiration, would be the destruction, 
 of the life I have given you." 
 
 And I conceive a possible answer in the na- 
 ture of the thing itself. Is it so universal, this 
 mist on the track ? Then it must be right. I 
 might make sure of that, without any appeal, 
 except to common human sense, and gra<:e. Thfe 
 old pious conclusion, that what is universal must 
 be best, is as good here as anywhere. It cannot 
 be, that corn and trees are, as a rule, all right ; 
 and men and women, all wrong. If it were bet- 
 ter that we should see clear through, from the 
 hither to the other side, then to see would be 
 the rule ; and only not to see, the exception. No 
 doctrine can be more divine, did we know it, 
 than this of the fitness of things, the essential 
 harmony of the world and life with some vast 
 purpose of the Maker. God is righteous (right 
 wise) in all his ways. I do not envy either the 
 philosophy or the faith, that can give evil such a 
 dreadful advantage over good, as to concede to it 
 any power beyond what pleases God. And no 
 dilemma in the doctrine that this is the best pos- 
 sible world, can ever be so cruel as that which 
 follows for ever, steady as its own shadow, the 
 doctrine that it is the worst.
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 247 
 
 Then really, this is the way in which I act 
 toward my own children. I never tell them all 
 the secrets of my intention toward them, be- 
 cause a certain instinct I can never overpass tells 
 me some reserve is better. If my son should 
 come to me, as he started out in life, and say, 
 " Father, I want to know the uttermost you mean 
 to do for me under any circumstances ; then, 
 when I know how good you are, I shall not only 
 be more content, but what I do will be done with 
 more inspiration. I shall love you more, and 
 serve you better, because you are so generous." 
 I should count it a great misfortune to have the 
 lad talk like that; and if I did so reveal all 
 my purposes, and he should be ever so dutiful, I 
 could never be sure that this was not dictated 
 quite as much by the greed of what was to come, 
 as by the love that springs out of our relation 
 as father and son, what I am now to him, 
 and what he is to me ; and so the whole tenor of 
 his life after that, in the shy springs and roots 
 of it, would seem to be touched with the chill of 
 death. 
 
 Then it is grander and holier not to know, yet 
 to be high and pure all the same, walking by 
 faith, and not by sight.
 
 248 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 What makes the difference in our estimate 
 of the first captain that ever sailed to these shores, 
 and the man who brings his ship into port this 
 morning ? To the one, the reverence of all men 
 will be given ; but, to the other, hardly a second 
 thought. The difference is this, of seeing and not 
 seeing. The one starts on his dim and perilous 
 way, breaking through league after league of 
 trackless waters, and through the doubt and fear 
 that is all about him in the ship. He has not 
 received the promise, has not really seen it 
 afar off ; but it is no matter : the man holds fast 
 to the hope set before him ; and that keeps him 
 steady, until at last his quest is found. But the 
 captain who enters the harbor this morning 
 knows what Columbus only believed. He has 
 seeri the end, as far as mortal can see that from 
 the hither side. At noon or night, whenever he 
 would look westward, here was the land standing 
 in the sun ; it was all plain sailing, well done 
 by a common man, without any deep emotion, 
 or struggle or victory, except over wind and 
 storm. 
 
 But, once more, there is stronger reason in 
 the fact, that what the man cries out for is
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 249 
 
 not so much something to see, as something to be ; 
 and, until he is one with the glory, he cannot see 
 it. There is a wonderful suggestiveness in this 
 story, when you get at the heart of it. From 
 the time the cry is uttered, forty years come and 
 go, bringing ever new labor, and mostly sorrow. 
 Now he seems to be going backward, now for- 
 ward ; from the sea to the Jordan, from the Jor- 
 dan to the sea. "Working, watching, weeping, 
 praying, but never utterly broken down, he be- 
 comes at last an intimate part of the glory 
 he longed for. Then he does not ask for the 
 revelation he cannot choose, but have it because 
 he is in it. 
 
 Now, friend, does life go hard with you, and 
 this longing come painfully over you, consider 
 whether this may not also be your experience. 
 What moment is the highest in the life of the 
 Master? Is it when the angels come, or when 
 the voice is heard out of the cloud ; or when 
 multitudes follow him, shouting " Hosanna ; " or 
 when great floods of life pour from him to refresh 
 the faint and sick and broken-hearted ? Believe 
 me, not one of these, but that moment when, in 
 all the universe, he felt he was alone ; that even
 
 250 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 God had forsaken him ; and yet was equal to the 
 dreadful demand, and led captivity captive. 
 
 The solution of the problem turns on one thing 
 only. As I stand here, looking wistfully onward, 
 longing for the light, crying for the glory, am 
 I able to step out in time with what is demanded 
 of me as a man ? When I have answered that 
 question, I have answered all. God will see to 
 the rest. There can be no fear but my life will 
 pass into the ever-nearing glory ; and, in the 
 fulness of time, I am sure to receive the full rev- 
 elation. 
 
 Here we are as the earth in the winter, and 
 we cry out for the summer. Did you ever 
 think how certainly the summer comes? The 
 earth wheels onward through the awful spaces. 
 We might imagine she would get adrift, or not 
 set herself to the time, and so we might lose 
 our summer. But steadily she turns to the sun 
 when her time comes, and the glory breaks upon 
 her, according to the promise. So at last she 
 comes down from God, out of heaven, like a 
 bride adorned for her wedding. 
 
 I get sick sometimes at my poor, halting faith, as 
 I see how constantly God will remind me of the
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 251 
 
 certainty of his presence; how even inanimate 
 nature, as I call it, thrills and pulses with this ever 
 present helpfulness, toward the glory that shall be 
 revealed. As I did some little matter among my 
 plants yesterday, I noticed, when one delicate 
 shoot seemed to suffer from the sun, a leaf on the 
 same stem came over, and covered it a little with 
 its shadow. I tried to turn it back ; but there 
 was no shadow of turning. I could break it or 
 fetter it, or inflict some other outrage on it ; but 
 I could not alter its will to succor that mite of 
 a bud, and defend it from the sun; because it 
 was as the wing of an angel, and its law and 
 order as deep and sure as the law that holds the 
 planets in their mighty harmony. Then, as I saw 
 this, I said in my heart, " my Father ! let me 
 learn from this leaf, if I will not be taught by 
 thy Spirit, how the whole creation witnesses to 
 the certainty of the coming glory. Surely if in 
 this blind, dumb thing, there can be such faithful- 
 ness to the flowering ; if this leaf can be as an 
 angel, to guard and shelter the one purpose, 
 how much more shall I find, that the man, the 
 most perfect flower of God, is guarded and 
 guided, through the dark night and the fierce
 
 252 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 noon, to the full time when he shall unfold to 
 the eternal beauty to which he was destined in 
 his creation. For 
 
 " There's not a flower can grow upon the earth, 
 Without a flower upon the spiritual side : 
 All that we see is pattern of what shall be in the mount, 
 Related royally, and built up to eterne significance. 
 
 There's nothing small : 
 No lily, muffled hum of summer bee, 
 But finds its coupling in the spinning stars ; 
 No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere ; 
 No chaffinch but implies a cherubim. 
 
 Earth is full of heaven, 
 And every common bush a fire with God." 
 
 Young man, standing on the hither side, ready 
 to start, and wondering what glory life will bring, 
 believe me, it will bring all you can possibly use 
 or deserve, in God's own good time. What is 
 most essential as you stand there is, that you put 
 heart and life into an honest and high endeavor. 
 Trust in God as Moses did, let the way be ever 
 so dark, and it shall come to pass that your 
 life at last shall surpass even your longing ; not, 
 it may be, in the line of that longing, that 
 shall be as it pleases God, but the glory is as 
 sure as the grace ; and the most ancient heavens 
 are not more sure than that. 
 
 Man and woman, standing in the presence
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 253 
 
 of your first true love, do not fear any thing 
 that love can bring. Passion might fly out of the 
 window when poverty comes in at the door ; but 
 love will stand by you while life holds on, and 
 then it will plume its wings, and go with you into 
 the eternal life. 
 
 Father and mother, longing to know what your 
 babe will be, it is most likely, if you did know, 
 the very knowledge would interfere fatally with 
 the divine intention. Only Mary seems to have 
 known any thing about the glory, that like a star 
 shone on the cradle of her son ; and she could 
 not understand it any more than the rest. You 
 would be so appalled at the way he must go, the 
 Sinai and the wilderness, the sorrow and pain ; 
 or so blinded by the glory that will come when 
 he has taken his own place, that, in either case, 
 you would be totally unfit for the simple duties 
 and cares, small and poor as they would then 
 seem, on which every thing under God depends. 
 
 Man in middle life, to whom life is hard and 
 dry. whose cry is sometimes, " that I had wings 
 like a dove! then would I flee away, and be at 
 rest," I doubt very seriously whether fleeing 
 would do it. When Bierstadt wanted to get the
 
 254 THE HITHER SIDE. 
 
 glory of the Yo Semite into his canvas, he did 
 not retire to his chamber and read about it, re- 
 clining on velvet and sipping nectar; but went 
 out, over the plains, through the wilderness, 
 through hardship and danger, into the heart of 
 the glory; and watched and waited, day after 
 day, if he might but see the skirts of the robe in 
 which it was clad. And lo ! he saw the glory ; 
 and it folded him in and was all about him, like 
 the breath of life. 
 
 It is so that we must come to the sense of the 
 deepness of the blessing of the life we live. Go 
 into the heart of it, at whatever labor and pain ; 
 enter mightily into its duties ; watch not for its 
 shadow alone, as these complainers do, but most 
 of all for its light, and it shall come to pass, that 
 you shall find at last in your hearts what the 
 painter found at last in his canvas, as much glory 
 as will fill them full of a radiance that will bless 
 \vherever it shines. 
 
 Patriot, watching for the redemption of the 
 nation from its fetters and sins, I bid you re- 
 member, that, in this old history, one thing is 
 exalted above all. It is not the power of David, 
 the glory of Solomon, the reformation of Samuel
 
 THE HITHER SIDE. 255 
 
 or Nehemiah: it is this forty years' struggle 
 through the wilderness, to which all look back 
 in the after-time as the period when God came 
 nearest, and his glory shone most gloriously ; of 
 which the very relics were kept most religiously, 
 and the most awful days became national holi- 
 days. We may well thank God, and take cour- 
 age, and march on, when we know that the pillars 
 of cloud by day and of fire by night are set fast 
 in the divine order, to guide us on the way. 
 Perfect peace will come at last, and order and 
 joy ; and the glory has come through the thick 
 darkness already when we rest in the promise 
 of God. Let us all be sure, that all is well what- 
 ever comes, while we trust, and stand fast, and 
 strive ; and only hopeless, and rightly hopeless, 
 when we want what we are in no wise willing 
 to earn. The glory and glow of life come by 
 right living ; for in that " we all, beholding as 
 in a glass the glory of the Lord, shall be changed 
 into the same image, from glory to glory, as by 
 the spirit of the Lord."
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 
 LUKE xx. 42 : " The Book of Psalms." 
 
 THE Book of Psalms, and not the Psalms of 
 David, is the most appropriate title. David is 
 the author of a good many of the pieces ; but he 
 is only one of ten or perhaps twelve authors, who 
 have a share in the entire collection. The par- 
 ticular process by which the book came to assume 
 its present form has passed out of all memory and 
 history. It is probable, that long ago there 
 were at least five collections of Psalms, and that 
 they were finally all brought together, and cast 
 into one, very much as our collections of Hymns 
 for the church service are made now. The 
 Masorah, school of criticism among the Jews, 
 one object of which was to keep a jealous eye on 
 the outward letter of their Bible, to count the 
 books, words, and even letters of which it is com- 
 
 f256]
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 257 
 
 posed, has preserved the division lines of those 
 minor books of Psalms. The same thing has 
 been done in the Syriac Version, a very old trans- 
 lation from the Hebrew. It is also probable, that 
 the editor had the trouble such men have now. 
 St. Athanasius has preserved the tradition, that 
 the present selection of one hundred and fifty 
 was made out of three thousand Psalms, that 
 were at that time getting themselves said and 
 sung on the hills and in the valleys of old Jewry ; 
 from which we may infer, that bad verse and 
 pretended inspiration is by no means the result of 
 modern degeneracy. Who this devoted man was, 
 is not at all certain : some say Hezekiah ; some, 
 Ezrah. Others say that it must have been an. 
 unknown man of a later time, as some of the 
 Psalms bear marks of having been written as late 
 as the age of the Maccabees, or about one hundred 
 and fifty years before Christ, and two hundred 
 and fifty after the last of the Prophets. The 
 Jews themselves assert that the 92d Psalm was 
 written by Adam; the 89th, by Abraham; the 
 110th by Melchizedek ; the 90th and ten follow- 
 ing, by Moses. Seventy-one are given to David, 
 (some manuscripts give him eighty-two) ; the
 
 258 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 
 
 72d and 127th, to Solomon; and the rest, to 
 writers whose names you will not care to know. 
 
 This classification, however, will not bear 
 criticism : the text itself, in some of the Psalms, 
 makes it impossible. For instance, the Psalm 
 attributed to Abraham makes frequent mention 
 of David. Other and better systems, in later 
 times, keep these elder men out of the book 
 entirely, and make Moses the oldest writer whose 
 poems are admitted. This is probably true, or as 
 near as we shall ever be to the truth on this 
 matter. Moses, David, Solomon, and seven 
 obscurer men, answer to our call, when we say 
 who are the authors of the Book of Psalms. 
 
 Then to come to the inner structure of 
 the book, we may perceive that this editor has 
 only been moderately careful in the performance 
 of his task. There is, to be sure, a rough sort 
 of harmony in which David has a section to 
 himself. Then David has a share of a section 
 with Asaph; then Asaph and others join at a 
 third ; and the fourth and fifth are by authors 
 whose names are not known. But, by some 
 strange oversight, the Psalms 14th and 53d are 
 almost exactly alike : with the exception of a few
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 259 
 
 words in one verse, they are the same Psalms. 
 The last five verses of Psalm 40th are precisely 
 the same as the five verses that compose Psalm 
 70th. Psalm 18th is the same as the 22d chapter 
 of the second book of Samuel ; while the 144th 
 Psalm is made up out of a mosaic of verses, 
 selected from the 8th, 18th, 39th, 102d, and some 
 other Psalms, the 8th and llth verses of this 
 Psalm being also the same verse repeated, and the 
 whole composition standing without any percepti- 
 ble harmony of verse to verse, or any relation of 
 ideas each to the other. 
 
 Then, again, a number of the Psalms are writ- 
 ten as you would write an acrostic : each verse 
 begins with a particular letter of the Hebrew 
 alphabet, from the first to the last. The long 
 Psalm 119th is one of those, except that, in the 
 the monkish division of the Bible, the alphabetic 
 section is subdivided into eight verses. The 
 145th Psalm is another in which the acrostic 
 form has been broken up by one verse being lost, 
 that is, the one set to the fifteenth letter, 
 but restored from some old manuscript since our 
 common version got to be canonized Finally, 
 one or two other Psalms are the substantial re-
 
 260 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 
 
 petition of the one thing, that any two versions 
 of a poem from the French or German would be, 
 when it was rendered into our own tongue. This 
 is the outward frame-work of the book, as it 
 stands, subjected to the honest eye-sight we give 
 to any other book, a selection of sacred poems, 
 from a great mass, written during a range of 
 years that would include the reign of Alfred the 
 Great and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, 
 containing marks of carelessness that would ruin 
 the reputation of any editor in our own time ; 
 with no particular certainty about the authorship, 
 or when the book was collected, or who did it, or 
 when men pronounced it of such divine authority, 
 or who authorized them to do so, and whether 
 some of the best among the two thousand eight 
 hundred and fifty rejected Psalms ought not to 
 have been retained, at any rate in preference to 
 those that are twice printed. 
 
 Now, then, here is a most interesting study : 
 all nations have grown into poetry as soon as they 
 began to grow into any thing above the common- 
 est life of" the moment. - But this book of poems 
 has taken its place easily and beautifully before 
 and over the home-poems of the foremost nations
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 281 
 
 on the globe. The Greek, by comparison, has 
 forgotten his Homer and Hesiod; the Roman, 
 (hose first poetic utterances out of which Livy 
 and those that followed him drew their material 
 for the beginnings of the history of that marvellous 
 commonwealth. The sagas of Scandinavia, and 
 the sacred hymns of the Druids, have all gone 
 into night. The psalms are lost that sounded 
 through the temple-services and palaces and cot- 
 tages of Egypt and Assyria. Even where the 
 sacred poem is left, the meaning is dead, or all 
 but dead, whether it be to the disciple of Buddha 
 or Mahomet ; while here is a book of poems, 
 some of which are probably as old as the oldest 
 of those that are dying or dead, as fresh and wel- 
 come as ever. If I could have stood here this 
 morning, and, instead of my sermon, could have 
 told you that I had come into the possession of a 
 wonderful and curious literary treasure, that 
 had been sent to me, say from China, a book 
 written from two to three thousand years ago, 
 a book of poems by different authors, ranging 
 through a period of a thousand years, in which 
 there are to be found the most vivid pictures of 
 life in that old time ; the writers, with the sim-
 
 262 THE BOOK OP PSALMS. 
 
 plicity of children, letting you look into their 
 hearts, so that by looking, you learn their inner- 
 most experiences of hope and fear, sorrow and 
 joy, struggle, defeat, and victory, their thoughts 
 of life and death in its almost infinite differences 
 to different men : and all this not as a description 
 of a life they stand and look at, but a life in 
 which they themselves are at once actors and 
 spokesmen, as much as if Tennyson had been in 
 the charge of the Light Brigade, or the foremost 
 actor in the French Revolution had written the 
 Marseillaise. That ever since those poems were 
 written, they had exerted the most wonderful 
 power over the human heart, great armies had 
 stood bare-headed to sing some of them before 
 great battles, and knelt down to repeat others after 
 great victories, some filling out the aspirations 
 of the loftiest and the holiest minds with words 
 as pure as their purest thought ; others express- 
 ing the deepest penitence of the most degraded, 
 alike welcome to the greatest king and the 
 poorest beggars, if I could tell you this, there 
 would be but one thought in this church. Not 
 one of you but would say, " Above all books, 
 I desire to see that, and to get at the heart 
 of it "
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 263 
 
 And if I should say to you, " Tell me what, in 
 your estimation, is the one word that will best 
 express the quality which has made this book 
 what it is to all those different men and times," 
 you would answer, " That word is inspiration : 
 the poems that can be what you describe are in- 
 spired, and so are fountains of inspiration for that 
 reason." And then, if I should say to you, 
 " How can you be sure of this ? We cannot tell 
 certainly who wrote them ; we cannot tell when 
 they were collected ; no man can put his finger 
 upon the time or place when the book was first 
 said to be inspired ; it is badly put together ; 
 some poems come in twice, and others bear marks 
 of the most mechanical verse-grinding." Your 
 answer would be, " This is all no matter. We 
 should love to know who were the authors ; but 
 they would gather lustre from the poems, not the 
 poems from them. It is no matter when they 
 were collected ; the fact that they were collected, 
 and staid so, is the most significant ; and, if two 
 thousand and five hundred years ago, the most 
 notable men in Jewry had written in letters of 
 gold that they were inspired, and the tablet were 
 still to be seen among the treasures of the Yati-
 
 264 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 
 
 can, that were nothing to this seal that has been 
 set to their inspiration by untold millions of the 
 race." Here, then, is the first principle in the 
 inspiration and worth of the Book of Psalms to 
 yon and me. Whatever value we may set upon 
 it, there is that property in it which I have illus- 
 trated in my ideal book from China, perennial 
 life and universal adaptation. Here are the very 
 words that have sounded over the wild tumult of 
 the battle, and dropped lovingly from the heart 
 of the mother bending over her first-born, hush- 
 ing it to rest, that are still unexhausted be- 
 fore the mightiest power of organ and choir, and 
 yet have easily folded themselves to the measure 
 of a broken voice on a death-bed, a blessing of 
 inspired utterance which Bacon and Milton and 
 Cowper and Burns loved to set to the measures 
 of our sweet English tongue, and at which no 
 sincere heart ever came to drink, and went away 
 weary and unrefreshed ; because they came right 
 out of the human soul, and go straight and fast 
 as light, and high as God. 
 
 I do not forget, of course, in this discussion, 
 that there are in this book the vindictive Psalms 
 that have so sorely puzzled those that want to
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 265 
 
 measure the Bible's inspiration by mechanical 
 rule, and stand appalled, therefore, before the 
 terrible fury of that sentence : " Happy shall he 
 be that taketh thy little ones, and dasheth them 
 against the stones " ; or this, "As for those 
 that compass me about, let burning coals fall 
 upon them ; let them be cast into the fire, into 
 deep pits, from which they cannot rise ; " or this, 
 " My enemy has rewarded me evil for good, and 
 given me hatred for my love ; therefore let his 
 prayer become sin ; let his children be fatherless 
 and beggars and vagabonds for ever ; let there be 
 none that will have mercy upon him, or upon his 
 fatherless children ; let the iniquity of his fathers 
 be remembered ; let not the sin of his mother be 
 blotted out." Now, there are some that say, 
 " These Psalms are a great mystery." And they 
 try to explain them by saying, " The writer was 
 a good man : therefore he could not, at the mo- 
 ment when he wrote these sentences, be person- 
 ally under the influence of those feelings ; else he 
 couli not, on the other hand, be inspired of God. 
 We judge, therefore, that he uttered these words 
 as a prophetic foresight of what these men would 
 come to, and not what he wished they might come 
 10
 
 266 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 
 
 to." I have searched through all sorts of books 
 to find what this class of minds have to offer in 
 explanation of these awful curses ; and this is the 
 best that I can find, the best, I believe, that 
 has ever been written. The reply to the whole 
 matter is very short. We say, friends, you have 
 a right to your own opinions ; but, on the face of 
 these Psalms, there is but one meaning to plain 
 men ; and that is, that they are stout, solid, com- 
 pact cursing ; a man cursing a man, and that 
 is the truth. You have every right to try to ex- 
 plain them away ; but it is like biting a file, at 
 once useless, and destructive of a precious gift 
 of God. Your trouble rises out of your claim of 
 entire inspiration of the divine, holy spirit through 
 the whole book. We have no such trouble, be- 
 cause we make no such claim. We claim the holy 
 spirit inspired what is holy and pure and tender 
 and true, beautiful and good, and manly and 
 womanly : but if there is a part of the book hard, 
 unmerciful, vindictive, or ungodly, on the plain, 
 wholesome interpretation of those terms as we 
 live by them, then the holy spirit did not inspire 
 that, but the unholy spirit; and, if you want 
 scripture, I repeat for you those words of the
 
 THE BOOK OP PSALMS. 267 
 
 disciple, " Beloved, believe not every spirit ; but 
 try the spirits whether they be of God." It is a 
 most painful instance of the sad result of consent- 
 ing to be fettered by the hard rules of a system, 
 in the interpretation of that book which, of 
 all others, asks for a clear eye and a free soul, 
 that the man who would laugh in your face 
 if you told him that the same spirit inspired 
 Burns to write his " Cotter's Saturday Night," 
 and another poem which I must not even men- 
 tion, dare not question whether the same spirit 
 inspired the 109th Psalm and the 12th chap- 
 ter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. To be 
 frank, however, it is but right to say, that there 
 are conceivable conditions in life, when these 
 imprecations become natural : when the poor hu- 
 manity, hunted and driven into a very insanity 
 of desperation, will take to this as the last effort 
 at self-defence or vengeance. I could think of 
 that slave-woman, in the old bad time, who mur- 
 dered her children to prevent them from being 
 carried back to their doom, using exactly such 
 words ; but what is the true inspiration of such 
 fearful moments, has been set in a fastness of 
 light for all to see. When one had been be
 
 268 THE BOOK OP PSALMS. 
 
 trayed, condemned in the face of all justice, 
 scourged, blinded, mocked, smitten, spit upon, 
 and crucified, he cried, " Father, forgive them : 
 they know not what they do." 
 
 But, again, I say it is not for the faults or de- 
 formities of this book, but for its intrinsic beauty 
 and truth, that the human heart is faithful to 
 it, and loves it with such an enduring love. One 
 great strain runs through almost every poem ; 
 namely, that this material universe, and this 
 world and life, is not the mere cunning perform- 
 ance of a great upholsterer, but the actual ex- 
 pression of God. Written before men knew 
 much about material laws, it is steady to the 
 grand idea that God himself is the Law ; so that 
 whatever of terror or sublimity or beauty could 
 be seen in nature, whatever of light and darkness 
 in life, was interlinked with the presence and 
 power of the divine spirit. Then, what is more, 
 and still another beauty in the book, is, these 
 ideas had been on fire in that human soul out 
 of which the Psalm sprang. They had made the 
 man sing ; and this is the result of his singing, 
 set to a music that is all aflame with the beauty 
 and salt of truth. Travellers tell us what a deep
 
 THE BOOK OP PSALMS. 269 
 
 meaning these poems gather, when you come to 
 stand in the very scenes where they were written. 
 The great multitude, for instance, on some day 
 of high worship, stand in the portico of the tem- 
 ple, and witness a thunder-storm come sweeping 
 up from the Mediterranean. It strikes Lebanon, 
 and the cedars bend and break in the tem- 
 pest. It drives down the sides of Hermon, roars 
 through the wilderness, and, at last, breaks 
 over Jerusalem in great torrents of rain. Then 
 the sun conies out again, and all is still. But 
 out of that thunder-storm there has come a 
 Psalm : the mantle of inspiration has fallen on 
 one in the multitude, and the 29th Psalm pours 
 from his heart, not as men sing of the storm 
 now; for to him God informs and fills the storm : 
 " The voice of the Lord is on the sea ; the God of 
 glory thundereth ; the voice of the Lord breaketh 
 the cedars ; the voice of the Lord divideth the 
 fire ; the Lord shaketh the wilderness ; the Lord 
 will give strength to his people, and bless them 
 with peace." The man quivers with this sense 
 of the presence of God, and the quiver is in the 
 poem too. The poet-shepherd follows his flock, 
 guides them, defends them, seeks out new pas-
 
 270 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 
 
 tures, takes them through the grim passes where 
 the wild beast lurks, the valley of the shadow 
 of death ; he never for a moment fails of his 
 care over them; and so, at last, on some high 
 day of the soul, perhaps after he has had a 
 hard time, defending and seeing to his charge, 
 he fills with a great sense of his own relation to 
 God, of dependence upon one above him, as he is 
 above the flock; and the one spark has lighted 
 up the whole beauty of the analogy : " The Lord 
 is my shepherd : I shall not want. He maketh 
 me to lie down in green pastures : he leadeth me 
 beside the still waters. Yea, though I walk 
 through the valley of the shadow of death, I will 
 fear no evil. I am defended : my Shepherd has 
 a rod and a staff. Surely, goodness and mercy 
 shall follow me all the days of my life." And I 
 wish I had room to notice a number more of 
 those word-paintings, where some piece of life is 
 at once made to shine out from the old, dim past, 
 and is filled with the presence of God. There is 
 the grand picture of a storm at sea; the touching 
 sketch of the captives sitting under the willows on 
 the banks of the Euphrates ; and the sad wail of 
 the poet, far from the temple and its services,
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 271 
 
 envying even the sparrow and swallow building 
 about the capitals, for the rest which he could 
 never find, until he should meet again with the 
 old familiar faces, and mingle in the services, 
 a sort of lamentation that I observe, poets seldom 
 fall into any more, and as seldom into the services 
 out of which it sprung. And so it comes to pass, 
 because these men possessed these two great gifts, 
 first, that intense sympathy and oneness with 
 what they describe, which makes their description 
 an immortal, spiritual photograph ; and, second, 
 that wonderful realization of the direct presence 
 and agency of God, by which they are able to say 
 " I and we," where even Milton can only say " he 
 and they." The best of those Psalms have for 
 ever been, and perhaps will for ever be, abreast 
 of every new man that comes into the world. 
 They are nature and divinity set to music, to a 
 perfect natural music, the key of which we 
 bring into the world when we come. They will 
 only die out, and be forgotten, when man ceases 
 to wrestle and stagger under his burden, or to 
 exult and clap his hands in his great moments of 
 victory. 
 
 We shall for ever gather new insight into the
 
 272 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 
 
 laws of nature ; but, if we are imbued with the 
 spirit of the Psalms, we shall never cease to hear 
 the voice of God in the clang of the sea booming 
 among the rocks ; to see him in the light of the 
 morning when the sun riseth, the fair morning 
 without clouds, with the tender grass springing 
 out of the earth by the clear shining after rain. 
 We shall measure the courses of the stars, and 
 discover their great secrets more and more clear- 
 ly in the ever-growing ages ; but no attainment 
 will ever carry us above that grand utterance, 
 " The heavens declare the glory of God, and the 
 firmament showeth his handiwork. There is no 
 speech or language where their voice is not 
 heard. The sun rejoices as a strong man to run 
 a race, and there is nothing hid from his power." 
 And men will for ever say, "I laid me down, 
 and slept; for the Lord sustained me." And 
 they will never forget to cry, " In the time when 
 I am old and gray-headed, God! do not for- 
 sake me." And, " As the hart panteth after the 
 water-brook, even so panteth my soul after God," 
 and, while there is danger, they will cry, " Keep 
 me as the apple of thine eye ; hide me under the 
 shadow of thy wing ; " while there is deliverance,
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 273 
 
 men will tell how God " bowed the heavens, and 
 came down," and " redeemed the souls of his 
 servants, so that none of them that trusted in 
 him were desolate." And, while ever there is 
 death, there will be men who will be sure to 
 sing, " My heart is glad, for thou wilt not leave 
 my soul in the grave, nor suffer thine holy one 
 to see corruption : therefore I will rest in hope. 
 Thou wilt show me the path of life. I shall be 
 satisfied when I awake in thy likeness." 
 
 And so I think it will be for ever with this 
 book, studded all over with living sentences set 
 to the music of living souls. The vindictive 
 Psalms will die out ; we shall put them aside. 
 They were the outpouring of hearts made savage 
 by oppression in a savage time. They are noth 
 ing to us, or we to them. We could do better 
 without them to-day. We can aiford to have two 
 psalms exactly alike, as we could afford to have 
 two copies of the song, " To Mary in Heaven," 
 in the same book. None of these things can 
 trouble us, when we come with a sweet, whole- 
 some frankness to this great book, and enter into 
 the spirit and power of its utterances, wherever 
 they chord with the longings and aspirations of 
 the soul.
 
 XV. 
 
 THE BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 
 
 NARRATIVE SERMON, DELIVERED MARCH 2, 1862. 
 
 I PROPOSE to speak to you this morning about the 
 battle-field at Fort Donelson, of those that are 
 alive and well there, those that are wounded and 
 sick, and those that are dead. I do this because 
 the subject fills my heart and mind above all 
 others at this time ; because you have a right to 
 expect your pastor to tell you what reason justi- 
 fied him in leaving your church vacant last Sun- 
 day, without asking your permission ; because 
 I know nothing can be of so much interest to 
 you as the story of my week's experience ; and, 
 finally, because the thing itself teaches the real 
 divinity and gospel of the time. 
 
 It was natural, when the news was flashed into 
 our city, that the great battle, as fierce, for the 
 number engaged in it, and as protracted as Wa- 
 terloo, was turned into a transcendent victory; 
 [274]
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OF FOET DONELSON. 275 
 
 and when bells were ringing, banners waving, 
 men shaking hands everywhere, and breaking 
 into a laughter that ended in tears, and into 
 tears that ended in laughter, that we should 
 all remember that this victory had been won at a 
 terrible price ; and that those bells, so jubilant to 
 us, would be remembered by many a wife as the 
 knell that told her she was a widow, by Rachels 
 weeping for their children, and by desolate Davids 
 uttering the old bitter cry, " Would to God I had 
 died for thee, my sou, my sou ! " 
 
 And it was natural, too, that we should remem- 
 ber, that there, on that battle-field, must be vast 
 numbers, friends and foes, alike suffering great 
 agonies, which we could do some small thing to 
 mitigate, if we could only get there with such 
 medicines and surgery, refreshment and sym- 
 pathy, as God had poured into the bosom of our 
 great city, pressed down, shaken together, and 
 running over. 
 
 Sydney Smith has said that there would be a 
 great many more good Samaritans in the world 
 than there are, if we could be good Samaritans 
 without the oil and the two pence. He might 
 have said that there are a great many who give
 
 276 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 
 
 tlic oil and the two pence as gladly and readily 
 as their great parabolic prototype ; and it was a 
 fine illustration of the sort of life we live almost 
 unconsciously in these distant centres of a new 
 civilization, that a great meeting should gather 
 itself together without effort, provide the oil and 
 the two pence in a wonderful plenty, find a great 
 company of surgeons and others ready to leave 
 every sort of indispensable work that they could 
 not possibly have left the day before, and see 
 them away on the very first train that started in 
 the direction of the battle-field after we got the 
 news of the victory. 
 
 Let me here point out the striking fact in our 
 human nature, that while we are constantly in- 
 venting excuses why we will not do this thing or 
 that, and putting the yoke of oxen or the piece of 
 land we have just bought, or the wife we have 
 just married or are about to marry, in the way of 
 all sorts of divine things, there comes some great 
 sweeping sorrow or joy, with its consequent duty, 
 once and again in our life, before which our ex- 
 cuse goes down like a wall of cards. We can 
 resist the marriage-supper; but a city afire, a 
 great victory that will tell on the fate of the
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 277 
 
 nation for all time to come, our own child in a 
 Fever, or a man buried in a well just as we are 
 going past, flames over all excuses to the sound- 
 hearted man or woman. God seems to deal with 
 us at such moments as we deal with our children 
 after a long perversity. He sets us down in some 
 place with a touch we know it is impossible to 
 resist ; and seems to say to us, " Now, sir, stand 
 just there, and do just so." 
 
 It seems a trifle to mention, and I would pass 
 it over, if I thought that reading about it would 
 give you the sense of it ; but it was not so with 
 me, and I suppose is not with the most of you. 
 You go down Lake Street over a deep, solid ice, 
 take your seat hi the cars, race over great, dreary 
 reaches of snow-clad " prairie " and ice-bound 
 waters, to step at last from the car into deep, soft 
 mud, at the end of this wonderful iron road, and 
 not a vestige of ice or snow is to be seen. It was 
 the first time in my life that I got a clear realiza- 
 tion of parallels of latitude. Our great desire, of 
 course, was to get to Fort Donelson and to our 
 work in the shortest possible time; and I am 
 sure you will not thank me for a full account of 
 Cairo, historical and descriptive. I will merely
 
 278 BATTLE-FIELD OP FORT DONELSON. 
 
 say, \vhen you want to solicit a quiet place of 
 retirement in the summer, do not even go to look 
 at Cairo. I assure you, it will not suit. It is 
 notable here only for being the first point where 
 we met with traces of the great conflict. The 
 first I saw were three or four of those long boxes, 
 that hold only and always the same treasure ; 
 these were shells nailed together by comrades in 
 the camp, I suppose, to send some brave man 
 home. As I went past one lying on the sidewalk 
 in the dreary rain and mud, I read on a card the 
 name of a gallant officer who had fallen in the 
 fight ; and, as I stood for a moment to look at it, 
 the soldier who had attended it came up, together 
 with the brother of the dead man, who had been 
 sent for to meet the body. It seemed there was 
 some doubt whether this might not be some other 
 of the half-dozen who had been labelled at once ; 
 and the coflin must be opened before it was taken 
 away. 
 
 I glanced at the face of the living brother as 
 he stood and gazed at the face of the dead ; but I 
 must not desecrate that sight by a description. 
 He was his brother beloved, and he was dead ; 
 but he had fallen in a great battle, where treason
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 279 
 
 bit the dust, and he was faithful unto death. He 
 must have died instantly ; for the wound was in 
 a mortal place, and there was not one line or fur- 
 row to tell of a long agony, but a look like a quiet 
 child, which told how the old confidence of He- 
 brew David, " I shall be satisfied when I wake in 
 Thy likeness," was verified in all the confusion 
 of the battle. God's finger touched him, and he 
 slept; and 
 
 " The great intelligences fair 
 That range above our mortal state, 
 In circle round the blessed gate, * 
 
 Received and gave him welcome there." 
 
 One incident I remember, as we were detained 
 at Cairo, that gave me a sense of how curi- 
 ously the laughter and the tears of our lives are 
 blended. I had hardly gone a square from that 
 touching sight, when I came across a group of 
 men gathered round a soldier wounded in the 
 head. Nothing would satisfy them but to see the 
 hurt; and the man, with perfect good nature, 
 removed the bandage. It was a bullet-wound, 
 very near the centre of the forehead ; and the 
 man declared the ball had flattened, and fallen 
 off. " But," said a simple man eagerly, " why 
 didn't the ball go into your head ?" " Sir, "
 
 280 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT UONELSON. 
 
 said the soldier proudly, " my head's too hard : a 
 ball can't get through it ! " 
 
 A journey of one hundred and sixty miles up 
 the Ohio and Cumberland Rivers brought us to 
 Fort Donelson ; and we got there at sunset. I 
 went at once into the camp, and found there dear 
 friends who used to sit in these pews, and had 
 stood fast through all the thickest battle. They 
 gave us coffee, which they drank as if it were 
 iiectar, and we as if it were senna. 
 
 A body of men drew up to see us, and de- 
 manded the inevitable " few remarks : " and we 
 told them through our tears how proud and 
 thankful they had made us, and what great 
 tides of gladness had risen for them in our city, 
 and wherever the tidings of victory had run ; and 
 how our hands gave but a feeble pressure, our 
 voices but a feeble echo, of the mighty spirit that 
 was everywhere reaching out to greet those 
 that were safe, to comfort the suffering, and to 
 sorrow for the dead. 
 
 The " own correspondents " of the newspapers 
 describe Fort Donelson just as if a man should 
 say that water is a fluid, or granite a solid. I 
 have seen no printed description of it that will
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OP FORT DONELSON. 281 
 
 make a picture in the mind. I think there is a 
 picture graven on some silent soul, that will get 
 itself printed some time. But it took years to 
 get a word-picture of Dunbar, and it may take as 
 long to get one of Donelson. If you take a bow, 
 and tighten the string until it is very much over 
 bent, and lay it down on a table, with the string 
 toward you, it will give a faint idea of the breast- 
 works ; the river being to them what the cord is 
 to the bow. At the right-hand corner, where the 
 bow and cord join, is the famous water-battery, 
 commanding a straight reach in the river of 
 about a mile, where the gunboats must come 
 up; and at the other end of the cord, up the 
 river, lies the town of Dover. 
 
 It was my good fortune to go over the entire 
 ground with a number of our friends, and to 
 wander here and there alone at rare moments 
 beside. The day I spent there was like one of 
 our sweetest May-days. As I stood in a bit of se- 
 cluded woodland, in the still morning, the spring 
 birds sang as sweetly, and flitted about as mer- 
 rily, as if no tempest of fire and smoke and 
 terror had ever driven them in mortal haste away. 
 In one place where the battle had raged, I found
 
 282 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 
 
 a little bunch of sweet bergamot, that had just 
 put out its brown-blue leaves, rejoicing in its first 
 resurrection ; and a bed of daffodils, ready to 
 unfold their golden robes to the sun: and the 
 green grass in sunny places was fair to see. But, 
 where great woods had cast their shadows, the 
 necessities of attack and defence had made one 
 haggard and almost universal ruin, trees cut 
 down into all sorts of wild confusion, torn and 
 splintered by cannon-ball, trampled by horses 
 and men, and crushed under the heavy wheels 
 of artillery. One sad wreck covered all. 
 
 Of course, it was not possible to cover all the 
 ground, or to cut down all the trees. But here 
 and there, where the defenders would sweep a 
 pass, where our brave men must come, all was 
 bared for the work of death; and, where the 
 battle had raged, the wreck was fearful. 
 
 Our ever-busy Mother Nature had already 
 brought down great rains to wash the crimson 
 stains from her bosom ; and it was only in some 
 blanket cast under the bushes, or some loose 
 garment taken from a wounded man, that these 
 most fearful sights were to be seen. But all over 
 the field were strewn the implements of death,
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OP FORT DONELSON. 283 
 
 with garments, harness, shot and shell, dead 
 horses, and the resting-places of dead men. 
 Almost a week had passed since the battle, and 
 most of the dead were buried. We heard of 
 twos and threes, and in one place of eleven, still 
 lying where they fell ; and, as we rode down a 
 lonely pass, we came to one waiting to be laid in 
 the dust, and stopped for a moment to note the 
 sad sight. Pray, look out from my eyes at him 
 as he lies where he fell. You see by his garb that 
 he is one of the rebel army ; and, by the pecu- 
 liar marks of that class, that he is a city rough. 
 There is little about him to soften the grim 
 picture that rises up before you, as he rests in 
 perfect stillness by that fallen tree ; but there is 
 a shawl, coarse and homely, that must have 
 belonged to some woman; and 
 
 "His hands are folded on his breast: 
 There is no other thing expressed, 
 But long disquiet merged hi rest." 
 
 Will you still let me guide you through that 
 scene as it comes up before me ? That long 
 mound, with pieces of board here and there, is a 
 grave ; and sixty-one of our brave fellows rest in 
 it, side by side. Those pieces of board are the
 
 284 BATTLE-FIELD OP FORT DONELSON. 
 
 gravestones, and the chisel is a black-lead pencil. 
 The queer, straggling letters tell you that the 
 common soldier has done this, to preserve, for a 
 few days at least, the memory of one who used 
 to go out with him on the dangerous picket- 
 guard, and sit with him by the camp-fire, and 
 whisper to him, as they lay side by side in the 
 tent through the still winter night, the hope he 
 had before him when the war was over, or the 
 trust in this comrade if he fell. There you see 
 one large board, and in a beautiful, flowing hand, 
 " John Olver, Thirty-first Illinois : " and you 
 wonder for a moment whether the man who has 
 BO tried to surpass the rest was nursed at the 
 same breast with John Olver ; or whether John 
 was a comrade, hearty and trusty beyond all 
 price. 
 
 And you will observe that the dead are buried 
 in companies, every man in his own company, 
 side by side ; that the prisoners are sent out after 
 the battle to bury their own dead ; but that our 
 own men will not permit them to bury a fellow- 
 soldier of the Union, but every man in this sa- 
 cred cause is held sacred even for the grave. 
 
 And thus, on the crest of a hill, is the place
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OP FOET DONELSON. 285 
 
 where the dwellers in that little town have 
 buried their dead since ever they came to live on 
 the bank of the river. White marble and gray 
 limestone and decayed wooden monuments tell 
 who rests beneath. There stands a gray stone, 
 cut with these home-made letters, that tell you 
 how William N. Ross died on the twenty-sixth 
 day of March, 1814, in the twenty-sixth year of 
 his age ; and right alongside are the graves, 
 newly made, of men who died last week in a 
 strife which no wild imagining of this native man 
 ever conceived possible in that quiet spot. Here, 
 in the midst of the cemetery, the rebel officers 
 have pitched their tents; for the place is pne 
 where a commander can see easily the greater 
 part of the camp. Here is a tent where some 
 woman has lived, for she has left a sewing- 
 machine and a small churn ; and not far away, 
 you see a hapless kitten shot dead; and every- 
 where things that make you shudder, and fill 
 you with sadness, over the wreck and ruin of 
 war. 
 
 Here you meet a man who has been in com- 
 mand, and stood fast ; and, when you say some 
 simple word of praise to him in the name of all
 
 286 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 
 
 who love their country, he blushes and stammers 
 like a woman, and tells you he tried to do his 
 best ; and, when we get to Mound City, we shall 
 find a man racked with pain, who will forget to 
 suffer in telling how this brave man you have 
 just spoken to not only stood by his own regi- 
 ment in a fierce storm of shot, but, when he saw 
 a regiment near his own giving back because 
 their officers showed the white feather, rode up 
 to the regiment, hurled a mighty curse at those 
 who were giving back, stood fast by the men in 
 the thickest fight, and saved them ; and, says 
 the sick man with tears in his eyes, " I would 
 rather be a private under him, than a captain 
 under any other man." 
 
 I notice one feature in this camp, that I never 
 saw before : the men do not swear and use pro- 
 fane words as they used to do. There is a little 
 touch of seriousness about them. They are 
 cheerful and hearty ; and, in a few days, they 
 will mostly fall back into the old bad habit so 
 painful to hear : but they have been too near to 
 the tremendous verities of hell and heaven on 
 that battle-field, to turn them into small change 
 for every-day use just yet. They have taken the
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OP FORT DONELSON. 287 
 
 Eternal Name for common purposes a thousand 
 times ; and we feel as if we could say with Paul, 
 " The times of this ignorance God passed by." 
 But on that fearful day, when judgment-fires 
 were all aflame, a voice said, " Be still, and know 
 that I am God ; " and they are still under the 
 shadow of that awful name. 
 
 Now, friends, I can give you these hints and 
 incidents, and many more if it were needful ; 
 hut you must still be left without a picture of 
 the battle-field, and I must hasten to the work 
 we want to do. The little town of Dover was 
 full of sick and wounded ; and they, first of all, 
 commanded our attention. I have seen too much 
 of the soldier's life to expect much comfort for 
 him ; but we found even less than I expected 
 among those who were huddled together there. 
 There was no adequate comfort of any kind : 
 many were laid on the floor, most were entirely 
 unprovided with a change of linen, and not one 
 had any proper nourishment. What we carried 
 with us was welcome beyond all price. The 
 policy of our commanders was to remove all the 
 wounded on steamboats to Paducah, Mound City, 
 and other places on the rivers ; and it was a part
 
 288 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 
 
 of my duty, with several other gentlemen acting 
 as surgeons and nurses, to attend one hundred 
 and fifty-eight wounded men from Fort Donelson 
 to Mound City. 
 
 I may not judge harshly of what should be 
 done in a time of war like this in the West : it 
 is very easy to be unfair. I will simply tell you, 
 that, had it not been for the things sent up by 
 the Sanitary Commission in the way of linen, 
 and things sent by our citizens in the way of 
 nourishment, I see no possibility by which those 
 wounded men could have been lifted out of their 
 bloodstained woollen garments saturated with wet 
 and mud ; or could have had any food and drink, 
 except corn-mush, hard bread, and the turbid 
 water of the river. 
 
 That long cabin of the steamboat is packed 
 with wounded men, laid on each side, side by 
 side, so close that you can hardly put one foot 
 between the men to give them a drink or to cool 
 their fearful hurts. Most of us have been hurt 
 badly at some time in our life, and remember 
 what tender and constant care we needed and 
 got. If you will substitute a rather careless and 
 clumsy man for the mother or wife who waited
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 289 
 
 on you, and divide his time and attention among 
 perhaps forty patients, you will be able to con- 
 ceive something of what had been the condition 
 of these poor travellers but for the Chicago Com- 
 mittee. 
 
 Here is one who has lost an arm, and there 
 one who has lost a leg. This old man of sixty 
 has been struck by a grape-shot, and that boy of 
 eighteen has been shot through the lung. Here 
 a noble-looking man has lived through a fearful 
 bullet-wound just over the eye ; and that poor 
 German, who could never talk English so as to 
 be readily understood, has been hit in the mouth, 
 and has lost all hope of talking, except by signs. 
 
 That man with a shattered foot talks in the 
 old dialect I spoke when I was a child ; and, 
 when I answer him in his own tongue, the words 
 touch him like a sovereign medicine. 
 
 The doctor comes to this young man, and says 
 quietly, " I think, my boy, I shall have to take 
 your arm off ; " and he cries out in a great 
 agony, " dear doctor ! do save my arm ! " and 
 the doctor tells him he will try a little longer ; 
 and, when he has gone, the poor fellow says to 
 me, " What shall I do if I lose my arm ! I have 
 
 13
 
 290 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 
 
 a poor old mother at home, and there is no one 
 to do any thing for her but me." 
 
 That man who has lost his arm is evidently 
 sinking. As I lay wet linen on the poor stump, 
 he tells me how " he has a wife and two children 
 at home, and he has always tried to do right and 
 to live a manly life." The good, simple heart is 
 clearly trying to balance its accounts before it 
 faces the great event which it feels to be not far 
 distant. As I go past him, I see the face grow- 
 ing quieter ; and at last good Mr. Williams, who 
 has watched him to the end, tells me he put up 
 his one hand, gently closed his own eyes, and 
 then laid the hand across his breast, and died. 
 
 That boy in the corner, alone, suffers agony 
 such as I may not tell. All day long, we hear 
 his cries of pain through half the length of the 
 boat ; far into the night, the tide of anguish 
 pours over him : but at last the pain is all gone ; 
 and he calls one of our number to him, and says, 
 " I am going. I want you to please write a letter 
 to my father: tell him I owe such a man two 
 dollars and a half, and such a man owes me four 
 dollars ; and he must draw my pay, and keep it 
 all for himself." Then he lay silently a little
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 291 
 
 while, and, as the nurse wet his lips, said, " Oh, 
 I should so like a drink out of my father's 
 well ! " and, in a moment, he had gone where 
 angek gather immortality, 
 
 " By Life's fair stream, fast by the throne of God." 
 
 And so all day long, with cooling water and soft 
 linen, with morsels of food and sips of wine, with 
 words of cheer and tender pity to every one, and 
 most of all to those that were in the sorest need, 
 we tried to do some small service for those that 
 had done and suffered so much for us. Some are 
 dead, and more will die ; and some will live, and 
 be strong men again : but I do not believe that 
 one will forget our poor service in that terrible 
 pain ; while to us there came such a reward in 
 the work as not one of us ever felt before, and 
 we all felt that it was but a small fragment of 
 the debt we owed to the brave men who had 
 given life itself for our sacred cause. 
 
 Two or three things came out of this journey 
 l/o the battle-field, that gave me some new 
 thoughts and realizations. And first, in all 
 honor, I realized more fully than you can do, 
 that, in those victories of which Fort Donelson is 
 the greatest, we have reached not only the turn-
 
 292 BATTLE-HELD OF FORT DONELSON. 
 
 ing-point, as we hope, of this dreadful war, but 
 we have plucked the first-fruits of our Western 
 civilization. I am not here to question for one 
 moment the spirit and courage of our brothers 
 in the East : the shade of Winthrop, noblest and 
 knightliest man, the peer of Arthur for truth, of 
 Richard for courage, and of Sidney for gentle- 
 ness, would rise up to rebuke me. Ball's Bluff 
 was worse than Balaklava as a criminal blunder, 
 and equal to it in every quality of steady, hope- 
 less courage. America will never breed a true 
 man who will not weep as he reads the story of 
 those hapless Harvard boys, whose clear eyes 
 looked out at death steadily to the last, and who 
 scorned to flinch. 
 
 But here, on our own Western prairies and in 
 our backwoods, we have been raising a new gen- 
 eration of men, whose name we never mentioned, 
 under new influences, whose bearing we did not 
 understand ; and, the first time they could get a 
 fair field and no favor, they sprang into the fore- 
 most soldiers in the land. 
 
 Good, elderly New-England ministers of our 
 own faith have made it a point to speak, in 
 Eastern conventions, of our hopeless struggle
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OP FOET DONELSON. 293 
 
 with the semi-savagery of these mighty wilder- 
 nesses. My dear doctor, that boy of eighteen 
 was born in the prairies, and went to meetings 
 where you would have gone crazy with the noise 
 of the mighty prayers and psalms ; and he got 
 the conversion which you do not believe in, and 
 was a sort of Methodist or Baptist : but he stood 
 like one of Napoleon's Old Guard through all the 
 battle ; and, when he was shot down and could 
 fight no longer, his mighty spirit dragged the 
 broken tabernacle into the bushes, and there he 
 prayed with all his might, not for himself, but 
 that the God of battles would give us the victory. 
 That rough-looking man was wounded twice with 
 ghastly hurts, and twice went from the surgeon 
 back to the fight; and only gave up when the 
 third shot crippled him beyond remedy. 
 
 " I saw those ' Iowa-Second ' boys come on to 
 charge the breastworks," said our friend Colonel 
 Webster to us. " More than one regiment had 
 been beaten back, and the fortunes of the day 
 began to look very uncertain. They came on 
 steadily, silently, through the storm of shot, 
 closing up as their comrades fell : and without 
 stopping to fire a single volley that might thin
 
 294 BATTLE-FIELD OF FORT DONELSON. 
 
 the ranks of the defenders, and make some gap 
 by which they might pour into the fortress, they 
 went down into the ditch, and clean over the 
 defences ; and there they stayed in spite of all." 
 
 One quiet-looking officer saw his company 
 sorely thinned in the beginning of the day ; and, 
 that the cause might have one more arm, he took 
 musket and ammunition from one who could use 
 them no more, and fought at the head of his 
 company, shot for shot, all day long : and, as a 
 wounded soldier told me this through his pain, 
 he added, " I tell you, sir, if that man ever runs 
 for an office, I'll vote for him, sure." 
 
 Secondly, From all these experiences, I have 
 got a fresh conviction of the great mystery of the 
 shedding of blood for salvation. We have been 
 accustomed, especially in Unitarian churches, to 
 consider Paul's ideas about blood-shedding as 
 the fruit of his education under a sacrificial Ju- 
 daism ; and that, again, as a twin-sister of bar- 
 barism : but as I went over this battle-field, and 
 thought on the dead heroes and of all they died 
 for, I kept repeating over each one, " He gave 
 his life a ransom for many ;" and I wondered, 
 when I thought of how we had all gone astray as
 
 BATTLE-FIELD OP FORT DONELSON. 295 
 
 a people, and how inevitable this war had become 
 in consequence, as the final test of the two great 
 antagonisms, whether it may not be true in our 
 national affairs as in a more universal sense, 
 " Without the shedding of blood, there is no re- 
 mission of sins. " And so, by consequence, every 
 true hero fallen in this struggle for the right is 
 also a saviour to the nation and the race. 
 
 Finally, I came to feel a more tender pity for 
 the deluded men on the other side, and a more 
 unutterable hatred of that vile thing that has 
 made them what they are. On all sides I found 
 young men, with faces as sweet and ingenuous 
 as the faces of our own children, as open to sym- 
 pathy, and, according to their light, as ready to 
 give all they had for their cause. 
 
 I felt like weeping to see children of our noble 
 mother so bare and poor and sad ; to see their 
 little villages, so different from those where the 
 community is not tainted by the curse and pro- 
 scription of human bondage ; and I felt, more 
 deeply than ever before, how for the sake of those 
 men, who in spite of all are our brothers, this 
 horrible curse and delusion of slavery ought to 
 be routed utterly out of the land.
 
 XVI. 
 
 OMEGA. 
 GEN. iii. 9: " Where art thou? " 
 
 THIS question was put first to the first man, as 
 it has been, and will be, to all his descendants. 
 It was put to Adam as he was closing one cycle 
 of his life, and opening another. The innocence 
 of ignorance had left him, and the insight which, 
 for good or evil, always follows, had taken its 
 place. The first man that ever did wrong, he 
 was just then through his first wrong-doing ; 
 and it was with him as it has been with his chil- 
 dren ever since : he was afraid to meet God with 
 the sin on his soul. 
 
 This fact, in itself, would be food for the most 
 pregnant meditation ; but there is another mat- 
 ter, I think, still better at this particular time. 
 The man is just completing one cycle of his life, 
 I said, and entering another. It was inevitable 
 it should be so, as the sunrise to-morrow. He 
 
 [296]
 
 OMEGA. 297 
 
 tried to avoid it; but God would not let him 
 avoid it. He never will. It would turn this 
 earth into hell, if he did, right where we stand. 
 " It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the 
 living God :" it would be unspeakably more fear- 
 ful not to fall into his hands, to come to an 
 end and a beginning with sin on the soul, and 
 without the Holy Spirit to press that sin home 
 painfully, and compel us to hide our faces for 
 shame. I have heard preachers often try to make 
 sin fearful by proclaiming a torture of fire for it ; 
 but the most fearful fire I ever heard of was one 
 in which there was no torture ; where a man 
 had lain down on a lime-kiln, and the vapor had 
 come up and destroyed all feeling, and then the 
 fire ; and, when morning came, what the fire had 
 touched was charred bone, and the man never 
 knew it, never knew it, or he would have 
 been saved. 
 
 And now, after these days of communion to- 
 gether, some sad, and some joyful, but all, I 
 trust, good, we have come to an end and a 
 beginning. When we meet again, it will be in 
 another year. You have been busy, in these 
 days, taking account of where you stand in your 
 
 18*
 
 298 OMEGA. 
 
 business. You will make very sure of that before 
 you are through : it is right you should. " He 
 that will not provide for his own household is 
 worse than an infidel." Let all religious men 
 remember, who let their affairs lie round loose, 
 while others they count infidel keep things snug 
 and true, that of the two, in Paul's estimation, 
 the careless Christian is farthest from God. But 
 those who are not careless in these matters, and 
 will know just what they are worth, face to-day 
 another question not less but more imperative, 
 " What am I worth in the treasure of the inner 
 life ? how does that account stand ? What I am 
 worth in the world I shall make sure about ; but 
 then what I am worth to the world, and the 
 world to me, demands still more close and care- 
 ful investigation." 
 
 And I can well imagine, how, in helping you 
 to answer this question, I might congratulate 
 you, first of all, on the fact that you are another 
 vear nearer death and eternity. This must be the 
 burden of all that is heard to-day from those who 
 eeem to believe it is the whole duty of man to 
 show 
 
 " How earth is foul, and heaven is gracious."
 
 OMEGA. 299 
 
 If they are right in their showing, there \s a great 
 outburst of congratulation through all Christen- 
 dom, because one year more has gone, and pres- 
 ently the time will come when we shall exchange 
 this life for another. 
 
 The lad, working at his tasks in the distant 
 school, may love the school ; but, on a tablet set 
 in a corner of his heart, you will find written, 
 " So many weeks since school began ; only so 
 many more, and then I go home." And the stout 
 little heart beats faster, and the eyes grow misty, 
 sometimes, with the happy anticipation. The 
 pilgrim grows always more glad as he nears his 
 Mecca or Jerusalem. The outer edge of the des- 
 ert is seen with rapture by the traveller who has 
 been jolting and rocking for days on the back 
 of a grunting camel. The sailor, over half-way 
 across the water, pledges the port he is bound 
 for. There is no one thing I can think of, akin 
 to our common comparisons between this world 
 and another, that ought not to make us glad we 
 are so much nearer done with this than ever we 
 were before. Is this earth a desert land, a 
 valley and shadow of death, an enemy's coun- 
 try ? Is it true, as the Hymn-book has it, that
 
 300 OMEGA. 
 
 " Prickly thorns through all the ground 
 
 And mortal poisons grow; 
 And all the rivers, that are found, 
 With dangerous waters flow" ? 
 
 Then well may we be thankful, that we are so 
 much nearer done with pains and poisons and 
 dangers for ever and ever more. 
 
 And yet I doubt sincerely whether one sermon 
 will be preached to-day, in which, from first to 
 last, this doctrine will be pushed to its inevitable 
 conclusion ; whether one man will say, " Breth- 
 ren, I congratulate you that soon you will die, 
 and insist on your accepting my congratulations 
 as the inevitable sequence of all I have said about 
 earth and heaven since the first of January last." 
 If the man would let his people alone, they 
 might let the thing pass as one of the absurdities 
 into which the best-regulated pulpits are liable to 
 fall ; but, if he insisted on a reply, it would prob- 
 ably be, " If that is the logic of your teaching 
 this year, next year you must change your logic, 
 or we will change our minister." 
 
 So this " Where art thou ? " urges the preacher, 
 first of all, to ascertain the worth of his own 
 lessons. It comes to the pulpit before it comes 
 to the pews ; and, if in his own honest heart the
 
 OMEGA. 301 
 
 preacher is aware that there is something wrong 
 in this summing-up, he is bound to see where it is. 
 He will see then that the result is wrong, because 
 the statement is wrong. I dare not tell a man I 
 am glad he is so much nearer his end, because 
 I have been saying what is not true about his life. 
 In the last test, God has seen to it, that nature 
 should be stronger than such grace as that. I 
 tell men this world is a valley of desolation, a 
 vain show ; and its life a cross, a burden, and a 
 disappointment : and that heaven is all that can 
 be imagined and more of blessedness. Yet I dare 
 not say then to my friend, " I am glad you are 
 soon to die." What makes me afraid ? Certainly, 
 not that the future is not what I say, and infinitely 
 more. The trouble is, I have got hold of a lop- 
 sided truth, when I make earth nought, and 
 heaven every thing. And the truth is, this earth 
 is my home now as certainly as heaven will be, 
 and the life that now is a blessing as surely as 
 that which is to come. This life is not a vapor, 
 the flash of a shuttle through the loom, a tale that 
 is told, a withered grass-blade ; and the truest 
 seer that ever looked into its heart, Jesus 
 Christ, never said it was. It is the most solid
 
 302 OMEGA. 
 
 and certain thing I know of in this universe, after 
 the life of God. Is it a cross ? it is also a crown. 
 Is it a burden? it is a blessing. Are there 
 thorns in it ? there are roses. Do mortal poisons 
 grow in ? let me find out their secret, and I can 
 make them divine medicines. The waters are 
 dangerous; but they make a province as the 
 garden of God, and power is given to breast them, 
 master them, and make them ministers. The 
 living swim : the dead only float. The leaf falls : 
 the young bud shoots. I am quoting Job sitting 
 in his ashes, when I say hard things about life ; 
 not Jesus sitting on the Mount, or by the shore. 
 Let me be true in my living ; then I shall rejoice 
 that I live, and shall not fear to die. A great 
 German has said, that "to the blessed eternity 
 itself there is no other handle than this instant." 
 Do I think of God as in heaven ? he is here too, 
 or he is not there: of angels? angels are all 
 about me : of golden streets ? I prefer green sward, 
 and so shall get it. Do I believe in heaven as 
 somewhere to go? it is first something to be. 
 Heaven is a temper, then a place. In a word, the 
 question, " Where art thou ? " can find only one 
 answer from any fair-living man. I am in this
 
 OMEGA. 303 
 
 world, and am glad of it. The more I find it out, 
 the more I believe in it, and thank God for it. 
 And I mean to hold on to it as long as I can, 
 just as a sound-hearted apple holds on to its 
 tree, that I may get every ray of its sunlight, 
 every moment of its darkness, every drop of its 
 dew, and every dash of its wind and rain. The 
 holy life is the life whole to this present world ; 
 keeping its laws, chording with its harmonies, 
 true to it every time, and to the life that is in it ; 
 discerning always between the world and its 
 wickedness, and holding on to the one with all 
 my might, that I may be able to master the other, 
 as a good swimmer holds on to the water, and 
 so destroys its power to hurt him. 
 
 On this ground I congratulate every earnest 
 man and woman on the close of another year, not 
 because it has lifted us out of life, but because it 
 has lifted us into life, not that we are older, 
 but that we are more, and not that the year has 
 been all any one of us would wish it, either for 
 ourselves, our friends, or our country ; but that, 
 in the great sweep of the eternal, it was the next 
 thing to be and to do. So, in the light of a 
 boundless life, of which this is but a small see-
 
 304 OMEGA. 
 
 tion, and in which a loving loyalty to this world, 
 as God has made it, is a prime element for the 
 blessedness of the life to come, I congratulate 
 myself and you, that we have had another year 
 of its influences, to abide with us for ever. 
 
 Then our question presents itself in another 
 way. The fact that I am not to be hustled 
 through my life, but to abide in it and love it, 
 makes it imperative that I shall know how it is to 
 be done. And I will say a word on that, first, in 
 its most material aspects ; after, as I may. When 
 this fearful and wonderful frame was created, and 
 became the visible sign of myself, there was hid- 
 den in its secret chambers so many years of life. 
 I could begin from the day I became accountable, 
 and use those years wisely ; could write " value 
 received" through my early manhood, my perfect 
 prime, and my ripening age, at the foot of every 
 one of them, and so use this world as not abusing 
 it; or I could overdraw my account, as Burns 
 did, and Byron, and many another, and close up 
 before forty. This is what is commonly called 
 fast living ; and it is fast living : but if I have 
 studied life to any purpose, that is by no means 
 confined to the drunkard, debauchee, and black-
 
 OMEGA. 305 
 
 leg. In the simple matter of using up two daya 
 in one, of exhausting the vital forces of life, of 
 wasting more energy in one day than I can 
 recover in one night, or in six days than I can 
 recover in seven nights and a Sunday, I can do 
 that at the desk, the bar, the anvil, or the plough. 
 And so, this day, if you are still young or in your 
 prime, yet feel that you are not what you were in 
 health and strength a year ago, my question, 
 "Where art thou?" touches you. You are 
 overdrawing your account, my friend; and, if 
 you don't take care, you will be a bankrupt. 
 There will come a day when you will find that 
 nature has shut down on you, and will not listen 
 to any plea of necessity. If you are predestined 
 to live the mere life, but exhaust the vital life, you 
 may drift on to seventy; but you have done at 
 forty, and the rest will be only one weary drag ; 
 and no man can judge for you how much you can 
 afford to spend. Every man must watch the 
 balance for himself, and answer the question to 
 God. 
 
 But let me not be misunderstood. There may 
 come a time in the life of a man, when no con- 
 sideration of how much life he is spending per
 
 306 OMEGA. 
 
 day ought to weigh with him for a moment ; any 
 more than, in imperative need, he shall hesitate 
 whether he will put himself in deadly peril, to 
 defend some sacred trust; which his refusal to 
 defend at any risk of life would render the rest 
 of the life he might have to live worse than 
 worthless. 
 
 But I am now speaking of that even responsi- 
 bility that comes to us all, of the every-day 
 life ; and the way a man may overdraw it, to 
 make money, or win some bauble ; or even, 
 to win some good prize in ten years, that ought 
 to take him twenty. You say I do not mean to 
 carry on in this way. I will turn over a new 
 leaf; but I must have so much money first, or 
 such a position, or have done such a thing. I 
 have only one answer. You will probably get 
 the money or the position: you may not; but 
 the chances are you will. Then you will not 
 turn over a new leaf; or, if you do, it may be 
 too late. " Behold ! now is the day of salva- 
 tion." There never was a time when the tempta- 
 tion to be reckless of this life was so heavy and 
 urgent as it is to-day ; or when we needed so to 
 hold on to the old steadfast idea, that a preacher
 
 OMEGA. 307 
 
 shall be shut out, by the very tenure of his of- 
 fice, from the ordinary traffic of the world, that 
 his eye may be clear, and his spirit unaffected 
 by what dangerously affects those that wait on 
 his ministry. It is a graver moral blunder for 
 a pastor to speculate in corner lots or oil stocks, 
 than if Gabriel came down from heaven to do 
 it; because he stands nearer his people than 
 Gabriel can hope to do ; and the moment he 
 casts himself into these great swirling currents 
 of temptation, he loses the quality for which, 
 above all things, they ought to value him, the 
 serene, unworldly heart. For it is impossible 
 that even prayer can keep the preacher's spirit 
 open, watchful, and tremulous to the ever-vary- 
 ing dangers of the times, if he is not in some 
 way separate from them too ; and he may be 
 sure, that no exhortation he can give about a 
 dangerous love of money can be more than sound- 
 ing brass, when once he has touched the edge of 
 the greed himself. 
 
 And be sure I do not say this that I may 
 merely urge the husbanding of our powers, and 
 the enjoyment of the fulness of our life, though 
 that is a right good thing ; but greatly because,
 
 308 OMEGA. 
 
 by this means, we rise into the better life while 
 we are still in this, and make a heaven about 
 us of common blessing. 
 
 Scott wrote " Guy Mannering " in a few weeks. 
 It is full of the aromatic sap of his genius. 
 When he did this, he was in his perfect prime ; 
 his poems were but the forerunners of his best 
 novels, and these novels are the crown of glory 
 on his life. But Scott had one fatal greed : he 
 
 wanted to create Abbotsford, as it were, in a 
 
 
 
 day. There was no glory in this, as there is no 
 glory in the million things a million other men 
 have done, who might have done better. But, to 
 make Abbotsford, he used up two days in one, 
 poured out book after book with a prodigality 
 that astonished the world. The result was, that 
 Scott, who had the frame and stamina of a giant, 
 began to break down. In this there were two 
 results : first, loss of health, that concerned Scott 
 rather than the world; second, loss of inspira- 
 tion, that concerned the world as much or even 
 more than the man. For, just as the man lost 
 his vitality, the new books lost their peculiar 
 and perfect power. They deteriorated from 
 genius to talent, and from talent to common
 
 OMEGA. 309 
 
 place; and then the spell that had held the 
 world, lifted men into better atmospheres, and 
 quickened and nurtured human souls, was gone. 
 Abbotsford was created, and then, after that, re- 
 deemed; but the world was the loser by all it 
 had a right to expect of its noble son. If, in- 
 stead of driving and draining his genius like a 
 slave, he had waited reverently for its welling, 
 then, when the sweet waters ran freely, had 
 turned them into the golden channels of great 
 books, for the blessing of the world, he ought 
 to have written his last books as he wrote his 
 first, as he was moved by the Holy Ghost. 
 He did write them as he was moved by his pub- 
 lishers. The consequence was, that the publish- 
 ers got the book ; but the world did not get that 
 without which it was as worthless as a book of 
 old sermons. 
 
 I mention this as an illustration of the deeper 
 meaning of my question. In such a life as that 
 of Channing, there seems to be an intimate rela- 
 tion between the frail and delicate organism and 
 the transcendent genius. We are at a loss to 
 guess whether such a soul could find a fitting 
 instrument in any other body, whether it
 
 310 OMEGA. 
 
 could pierce and soar so, imprisoned in the 
 mould of common men. But I conceive this to 
 be universally true : if a man begins life with a 
 powerful soul in a powerful frame, and then 
 wastes that frame in a reckless disregard of 
 those laws on which it depends, then the fail- 
 ing human power to eat and drink and run and 
 laugh and sleep and whistle and sing, is the 
 indication of a failing spiritual power, of which 
 these are but the signs. He is a full-orbed man 
 no longer : what he has lost is but a shadow of 
 what the world has lost in him. He may inten- 
 sify as he becomes unwell, and run morbidly to 
 some one thing, as a Strasburg goose runs to 
 liver, may become notable for that one thing 
 for a time, among men as morbid as himself. 
 But he has lost the most celestial thing, in try- 
 ing to create the more material; as Scott lost 
 the power to write books like " Old Mortality," 
 in the morbid desire to create Abbotsford. 
 
 I do not, therefore, ask so much what is to be 
 the result of any waste of power to you; that 
 is your own business: but what will it be to 
 your home and the world at large. Out of your 
 life there flows, every day, some spiritual influ-
 
 OMEGA. 311 
 
 ence, as true in its nature and degree as any 
 ever known. You may never write a book or 
 even a letter ; but then no more did Jesus Christ. 
 No mistake can be greater than to suppose, that 
 I have done my duty by my home, in filling it 
 with plenty; or my children, in securing for 
 them the best teachers; or that I have been 
 true to my marriage vow, because I have kept 
 myself pure, and never stinted my wife in her 
 expenses ; or to Church and State, because I 
 have voted right on election day, and been, in 
 my time, a deacon. friend ! I tell you, un- 
 speakably more than this is that mysterious and 
 most holy influence of a sound, elastic, cheerful 
 human soul in a body to match. I see, once in 
 a while, a home in which I am just as sure it is 
 impossible for the children to go radically wrong, 
 as it is for the planet to turn the other way on 
 her axis. The whole law of their life, of then* 
 spiritual gravitation, is fixed by the strong, sweet 
 father and mother; resolute, above all, to pre- 
 serve this perfect right attraction, though there 
 may be less, at last, in counted dollars. 
 
 I have seen men as full of chivalric and loving 
 attention to their wives, as tender and thought-
 
 312 OMEGA. 
 
 ful and delicate as in the old courting days, 
 when their fate still hung on the woman's will. 
 I see men sometimes in society, who will let no 
 pressure of business or care crowd them so that 
 they cannot afford time for sympathy, and to give 
 a helping hand in matters that are above the 
 price of money, giving what money cannot buy, 
 the light and life of an unworn nature. And 
 all this is what I would ask most urgently in my 
 question. Where art fhou ? 
 
 Is the tide of success in your profession flood- 
 ing out your home, and human sympathies, and 
 excellences ? Have you less time for a thought- 
 ful loving-kindness toward others than you once 
 had? less time for your children, to chat with 
 them, and play with them, and tell them stories ? 
 less time to give to your wife, who has, perhaps, 
 been waiting all day, with a budget of things to 
 tell you, of no interest to you, probably, in the 
 abstract, but the current coin of her little domes- 
 tic world and life. 
 
 You may be too much done over to care for 
 any of these things: then I will tell you what 
 will happen. After a while, your children will 
 cease to tease you, or your wife to tell you what
 
 OMEGA. 313 
 
 is in her heart ; and a cloud will settle on your 
 home and its life you cannot account for; the 
 old Eden look will leave it, thorns and thistles 
 will spring up about it ; every thing will change 
 to your altered nature. And then, instead of 
 looking right in the eyes of the trouble, and try- 
 ing to amend it, you will do what this first man 
 did in similar circumstances, turn round and 
 blame your wife. 
 
 Dear friend, whether man or woman, I ask 
 you, as we part, whether you have kept this old 
 wholesome faith in, and love for, the life that 
 now is ; because I really know of no way so sure 
 to the loftiest and holiest life of heaven, as that 
 which lies directly through a deep, quick sympa- 
 thy with the life on earth. When we lose that, 
 we lose what the sap is to the tree ; the mediator 
 between our being and the life about us and above 
 us ; the secret of all our growth and fruitfulness, 
 as of all our glory and joy. 
 
 And I have said not a word to the hearers of 
 my sermon I do not say to the readers of my 
 book. 
 
 THE END.
 
 JUST PUBLISHED. 
 
 A MAN IN EARNEST: 
 
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