pi pi H^ffi'<»(s ^ ,-}: 1' l'^*'" — "^ (J THE NEW CRUSADE SijooHs liu ©r. Jeffn'Son QUIET TALKS WITH EARNEST PEOPLE. 16mo. $1.00. QUIET HINTS TO GROWING PREACHERS. I6mo. $1.00. DOCTRINE AND DEED. 12mo. $1.50. THINGS FUNDAMENTAL. 12mo. By mail, $1.65. THE NEW CRUSADE. 12mo. By mail, $1.65. THE MINISTER AS PROPHET. I6mo. By mail, $1.00. THE OLD YEAR AND THE NEW. 12m.o. By mail, 83 cents. FAITH AND LIFE. 12mo. By mail, 35 cents. THE WORLD'S CHRISTMAS TREE. 12mo. By mail, 83 cents. THOMAS Y. CROV/ELL & CO. NEW YORK 0SH 8F f ■.?>^ THE NEW CRUSADE^qiM OCCASIONAL SERMONS AND ADDRESSES BY CHARLES EDWARD JEFFERSON PASTOR OF THE BROADWAY TABERNACLE NEW YORK NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1907, By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. Published, September, 1907. 2ro THE YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN OF AMERICA WHOSE HEARTS AND HANDS IF TOUCHED BY CHRIST WILL MAKE OUR NATION STRONG AND TRUE THESE DISCOURSES ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2009 witii funding from Princeton Tlieological Seminary Library littp://www.arcliive.org/details/newcrusadeoccasiOOjeff CONTENTS I PAGE The New Crusade i II Religion as a Form of Power 21 III The Person of Christ 5^ IV Liberty, its Dangers and Duties 73 V *^The Unrecognized God 99 VI The Man of the Sea 121 VII The Man at Bethesda 143 viii CONTENTS VIII PAGE The Puritan Vision of God 167 IX Consecrated Personality 187 X An Angel in the Sun 207 XI Young People of the Church 229 XII Christian Unity 247 XIII International Peace 269 THE NEW CRUSADE Delivered at the Anniversary of the Congregational Home Missionary Society, Des Moines, Iowa, October 17, 1904. THE NEW CRUSADE I WONDER if the time has not come for the preaching of a new crusade. Does not this age demand a Peter the Hermit or a St. Bernard rather than a Gamaliel or a Thomas Aquinas ? I know there is something quixotic and disconcerting in the name " Crusade," for the mention of it carries the mind back to those mighty movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in which masses of men flung themselves upon the Holy Land in des- perate and futile effort to wrest from the grip of the Saracen the tomb of our Lord. And when one thinks of the madness and superstition, the cruel- ties and barbarities, the disillusionment and vast catastrophes of those immortal campaigns, he feels like offering up the prayer, " From all crusades of every sort may the good Lord deliver us!" But the madness and superstition, the cruelties and barbarities, were only accidents and excres- cences, creations of the Zeitgeist never to be re- produced in like combinations or similar forms. They did not constitute a part of the crusade idea. In every crusade there are only three permanent 3 4 THE NEW CRUSADE and distinguishing elements. First, a definite and clear-cut goal, rising lustrous and alluring before the eye of the mind, bewitching men in their wak- ing hours and disturbing them even in their slum- bers. Second, a passionate enthusiasm which burns up in its white flames all lesser ambitions and mean desires, and which counts no cost too great and no sacrifice too awful if only the desired goal can be attained. Third, a loyalty to one supreme commander so intense as to melt all the soldiers into a solid phalanx and send them with irresistible momentum against the foe. Those were the three fundamental features of the dazzling and unparalleled phenomena of eight centuries ago. There was a goal, the rescue of the Holy Land; there was an enthusiasm which burned up the lethargy and indifference of nations and which, eating into men's vitals, scorched even reason itself; there was loyalty to Jesus as the supreme commander, every crusader being bap- tized into the name which is above every name, and marching under the banner of the cross. Why should there not be a twentieth-century crusade } If you ask what shall be the goal, my reply is, the rescue of America. America, the Republic of the West, the mightiest experiment in free gov- ernment known to history, land of the Pilgrims' pride, land where our fathers died, Washington's land and Lincoln's land, our Holy Land, to res- cue it from the hands of the Saracen, that is the THE NEW CRUSADE 5 ambition of the new crusade. The Saracen of the twelfth century has gone, the Saracen of the twentieth century is here. Who is he ? He is the rumseller and the whoremonger, the gambler and the scurvy politician ; he is the dishonest mer- chant and the mischief-making artisan ; he is the greedy and unscrupulous capitalist and the anar- chistic wage-earner ; he is the bribe-giver and the bribe-taker, the law-breaker and the law-hater, the home-destroyer and the foe and enemy of Christ ; he is the man who works iniquity and makes a lie. To break the power of his mailed fist, — that is the object of the new crusade. America is in danger: the man is blind who doubts it. America may yet be lost : he who denies it does not keep his eyes on the swirl and trend of things. He has never put his ear to the ground and heard the roar of the subterranean fires which seethe and hiss under the thin crust of our civilization. He has never stood at the center of our great cities where Vice has built her most splendid palaces, and Wickedness has thrown up his long hues of forts, and where the rulers of the darkness of this world have massed their cohorts behind ramparts well-nigh impregnable, and felt upon his cheek the breath of worlds infernal, and been awed and subdued by the glitter and scarlet, the majesty and power, the horns and the crowns of the beast against which the Lamb must wage war. As James Russell Lowell used to say, 6 THE NEW CRUSADE " Democracy is only an experiment," and the ex- periment is not yet completed. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not yet demonstrated its power to solve the problems which it itself creates and to come off victorious over all its foes. The star- spangled banner may yet be torn to tatters by the fierce winds which blow from the deep caves of the human heart. To beat back the Saracen, to repair the desolations which he has made, to rescue America, the land dedicated to liberty and God, and best fitted by tradition and training and environment to be the organ through which the Eternal shall proclaim his will to all the sons of men, that is the luminous and glorious goal of the crusade of our new century. Where shall we get the fire ? Let us get it where God puts it, in the hearts of the young. The hottest fires which burn upon our earth are kindled in the veins of the youth, because there are objects in the world-plan of God which can be secured only by the energy of fire. Young men for action, old men for counsel, so it has been from the beginning and so it will be to the end. To set the youth of America, boys and girls, young men and maidens, marching against the Saracen, that is the supreme and crowning work of the American pulpit. How can the work be done ? By striking the militant note. A distinguished scholar and pro- THE NEW CRUSADE 7 fessor of Harvard University has recently declared that what our modern world most needs is a moral equivalent to war, something that will appeal to men as universally as war does, and which in- stead of destroying their souls will save them. Open your New Testament, O Professor, and you will find the moral equivalent of war expounded and illustrated. The Christian life is warfare. Following Christ keeps men on the battlefield. It is endlessly significant that the New Testament loves the imagery of war. Have you noticed that the men whose feet were shod with the prepara- tion of the gospel of peace went to the barracks and camp for some of their most graphic and effective metaphors ? It was not because Paul happened to be chained for a season to a soldier of the Praetorian guard that he loved the language of soldiers, but because military phraseology finely fits the forms of great spiritual truths and expresses with adequacy and picturesqueness the processes of victorious life. The characteristic virtues of a soldier are the crowning virtues of a Christian. Listen to Paul calling to the Roman Church : " Let us put on the armor of Hght." He does not ask the old city who has pushed her conquests to every horizon to lay down her armor, but simply to change it. He does not beseech her to cease to be conqueror, but only to change the weapons of her warfare. What he says to the Romans he says to all. In the first 8 THE NEW CRUSADE of all his letters he writes to the Thessalonians : " Let us be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love ; and for a helmet the hope of sal- vation." The figure was so pat and so illuminat- ing that he kept it and used it again and again in his sermons and in his letters, expanding it and developing it until it reached its complete form in the great chapter of his letter to the Ephesians beginning: "Put on the whole armor of God." When he talks to Timothy he speaks after the manner of a warrior. " Timothy, fight the good fight of faith." " Endure hardness as a good sol- dier of Jesus Christ." " No soldier on service entangleth himself with the affairs of this life ; that he may please him who enrolleth him as a soldier." And at last when the old hero was pushed to the wall, and the Roman executioner stood ready to do his work, he exclaimed as though it were the proudest thing a Christian can say : " I have fought the good fight." He was not ashamed of the gospel. In Ephesus and Corinth, in Antioch and Rome, at the center of a world which reverberated with the tread of armed men he held up his head and was not ashamed, knowing that he was a conqueror and was in possession of a weapon which was mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. The military manner of his speech flashes in the Greek where our English translation conceals it. To his beloved Philippians he writes : THE NEW CRUSADE 9 " The peace of God which passeth all understand- ing shall garrison your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." Where did he get this conception of Christian life as warfare ? From Jesus of Nazareth. The Prince of Peace did not shrink from the imagery of war. As soon as a man was found who saw in him the eternal Son, Christ said : " Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it." The idea of conflict was in his mind, and though the conflict would be terrific, victory at last was sure. When men thronged him, desiring the privilege of being num- bered among his followers, this is what he said to them : " What king going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first and consult- eth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thou- sand } " A man at the beginning of his Christian Hfe becomes a soldier, and the virtues which will make him successful in the Christian life are those which are indispensable to a successful mili- tary commander. To his apostles on the great day of their going forth he said : " Think not that I am come to send peace on earth : I came not to send peace, but a sword." And then in order that he might not be misunderstood he hastened on to explain that he meant that he had come to draw the line plain and straight, to array good to THE NEW CRUSADE men against bad men and stir up bad men against good men so that a man's worst enemy might be living with him under the same roof. He held back nothing, but told the apostles clearly what they might expect. " Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves." We do not under- stand the word wolf. It does not belong to our vocabulary. What do we know of wolves ? We have never heard the howl of one at midnight nor seen the blood dripping from his jaws. But every man to whom he spoke knew the meaning of the word. The wolf was the most voracious, cruel, pitiless of all the animals of Palestine. Jesus said " wolves," knowing precisely what it meant. Translated, his declaration ran : " The world will be hostile to you. Men will resist you, snap at you, put their teeth into you, tear you, if possible kill you and devour you, but do not be afraid to die on the field." He dipped his brush in " hues of midnight and ecHpse" and painted a picture dark enough to curdle the blood. Why ? Because he knew what is in man. He knew that down in the human soul is that which goes promptly out to face danger, suffering, death. The heart is by birth heroic and responds to the sound of trumpets. Place before the unspoiled man two roads, one strewn with roses and running out across fragrant meadows to lands abounding in comfort, ease, and pleasure, the other road steep and flinty, running THE NEW CRUSADE n up over naked crags toward a cross surmounting the place of a skull, and that which is deepest and strongest in him will choose the road which leads to the cross. If that is not true, then there is no hope of the world's redemption. This, then, is the New Testament way of appeal- ing to young men. We have not often enough made use of it. We have talked too much of* happiness and made the Christian life a tame and prosaic and easy thing. We have not girdled it with perils or filled it with adventure, or made it so grand and stirring as to appeal to the heroic in man. There is in the wide heart of youth a whole world of appetite and instinct and passion upon which the church must lay her hand and make use of on God's battlefields, instincts which crave excitement and adventure, forces which are mighty in the pulling down of strongholds and the trampling of foes. Sometimes there has been too much introspection, too much emphasis upon the feelings, as though the supreme question in human life is. How do you feel } What can you tell from the feelings of youth .-' They are multi- tudinous as the sands and as changing as the waves. O the ecstasies and raptures, the elations and depressions, the agonies and despairs of youth ! To attempt to find God's smile or frown in the feelings or to determine one's destiny from the ebb and flow of the emotional life, that way madness lies, and weakness, and possible moral disintegra- 12 THE NEW CRUSADE tion. We have had too much of the introspective, and not enough of the bugle and the marshal- Hng of cohorts and the onward dash against the Saracen. Sometimes we have dwelt too much on defini- tions. No man cares anything for definitions un- til after forty. In the last half of life it is interest- ing to define the things that we have experienced and learned in the first half. But nothing great can be satisfactorily defined. All great things sweep beyond the narrow boundaries of our de- fining processes. Who can define life, love, God .-' No one has ever yet succeeded in defining faith. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews tried it, but after he had gotten down his definition, he said: "Now let me illustrate what I mean." He knew that he had not succeeded, and so he goes on to tell of Abraham and how he turned his back upon his native land, and snapped all the tender ties which bound him to his home, and went out into the world which was wide and wild, not know- ing where he was going, but certain only that he was doing the will of God. He tells of Moses leaving the pomp and glory of the Egyptian court and suffering affliction with the people of God, never flinching and never surrendering, but endur- ing as seeing Him who is invisible. The examples come trooping through his mind, and suddenly he pauses, saying. Let me put the whole case in a nutshell : Faith is that spirit which " subdues king- THE NEW CRUSADE 13 doms, works righteousness, obtains promises, stops the mouths of Hons, quenches the violence of fire, escapes the edge of the sword, out of weakness is made strong, waxes valiant in fight, and turns to flight the armies of the aliens." Any man who subdues kingdoms, works righteousness, and puts to flight the armies of the aliens, no matter what his definitions are, is entitled to a place among the heroes of faith. At other times there has been too much so-called testimony, testimony which has come to nothing, too much reading of reports of things contemplated rather than of things achieved, too much recon- noitering as scouts and spies, too much speculation as to the stature of the giants, and too much tast- ing of the varieties of grapes. In a large part of all our praying and preaching, the soothing and consolatory note has driven out the martial music, and there has been calm-eyed reflection instead of the vision and exultation of soldiers eager for battle. Why is it that war is endlessly fascinating ? Why do the nerves tingle and thrill at the sound of fife and drum .'' Why do boys love best the "fightingest" parts of the Scriptures, and why do young men devour with relish the latest book on the last miUtary campaign ? Why do men and women who know what war is and who confess that it is savagery, barbarism, and hell, feel their souls expanding when they see the battle-flags 14 THE NEW CRUSADE wave and the battered veterans march ? Why do aged men with their trembling hand on the latch of the door of the home eternal and their hearts hungry for the vision of the King in his beauty, become young again and mount up with wings as eagles, under the flash of the bayonets and the thunder of the guns ? One explanation is, that man is naturally a savage, that he is by nature cruel and bloodthirsty, and that his boasted Christian civili- zation is only the thinnest varnish conceahng the barbaric soul within. Others would say that man is silly and super- ficial, a sort of human peacock endowed with the gift of strutting, and that he loves war for its pomp and circumstance, because they appeal to his vanity and love of display. Gold braid and spangles tickle him, he is captivated by the flash of gilt buttons and the glitter of burnished steel. But the deepest explanation is, I think, the truest. Man is fasci- nated by war because he is the son of God, and has in him immeasurable capacity for heroism. War gives him opportunity to face danger and overcome death. To scorn suffering and endure hardship and trample under his feet the utmost the enemy can do, this is all possible in battle, and for such forthputting of the soul's energies war furnishes the invitation and arena. Courage is beautiful even when seen against a background of blood. Endurance is sublime even when clad in hell-fire. THE NEW CRUSADE 15 " * Forward the light brigade ! ' No man was there dismayed — Not though each soldier knew Some one had blundered. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die! Into the valley of death Rode the six hundred. " Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them, Volleyed and thundered. Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well ; Into the jaws of death, Into the mouth of hell. Rode the six hundred. "When can their glory fade? Oh, the wild charge they made ! All the world wondered. Honor the charge they made! Honor the light brigade. Noble six hundred! " And to the end of time the world will echo the poet's words, " Noble six hundred." " The Son of God goes forth to war A kingly crown to gain ; His blood-red banner streams afar : Who follows in his train 1 " The work is stupendous, and we err when we make it small. We have a fashion of cutting it into strips. l6 THE NEW CRUSADE scissoring it into ribbons, and losing the uplift which comes from the vision of proportions majestic. We cut the world in two and speak of Foreign Missions and Home Missions. We cut up Home Missions into little bits and lose out of it the inspiration which belongs to an enterprise colossal. To many, Home Missions suggest a lumber camp, a mining camp, a rude and rugged hamlet in the wilderness, a straggling settlement on some far-off frontier. The fact is, we are all on the frontier, and wherever we may live the problems of the lumber camp and the mining camp and the pioneer settlement are at our door. We are always in sight of the Saracen. It will be a long campaign. We blunder when we prophesy that it will be brief. No sixty or one- hundred day men are wanted. Every man must enlist for Hfe and in every heart the spirit must burn. " I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In America's green and pleasant land." It will be a costly campaign, it will demand mill- ions and hundreds of milHons of dollars. All the money contributed up to date is only a trifle com- pared with the money needed for so gigantic a task. Indeed, we may say we have thus far gotten no money at all : we are hoping to secure some by and by. What do we Americans care for money THE NEW CRUSADE 17 when by it we can accomplish our wishes ? When did Americans ever draw back from an enterprise deemed deserving on account of the cost or the price ? They told New York City it would cost tens of millions to run a tunnel through the granite foundation of Manhattan Island, and the city cried, " Let the great work be done." They told the Empire State it would cost a hundred miUions to cut a ship canal from Buffalo to Albany, and the people with a mighty voice shouted, " That is the kind of canal we want ! " They told the United States government that it would cost a fabulous pile of gold to join the Atlantic and the Pacific, and Con- gress, nothing daunted, ordered the work to be begun. Shame on us if from the rescue of the Republic we are drawn back by expenditures which seem gigantic. What is gold for, but to be used in extending the kingdom of our Lord ? It will cost money and it will cost men. But to what better purpose can the lives of men be spent than in breaking the power of the Saracen } Nations when engaged in war do not falter because the war demands men. Japan sends a hundred thousand soldiers into Manchuria, and because they are not sufficient she sends another hundred thousand, and when they are found to be not enough she sends a hundred thousand more. What matters it how great the sac- rifice, and how many thousand men give up their lives, if only the Japanese empire can beat back its enemy and save itself from being blotted off the map of the 1 8 THE NEW CRUSADE world ? And what matters it how many of us go down into premature graves if America can only be wrested from the grip of the Saracen ? The work is as difficult as it is costly. When Christ sent forth his apostles he commanded them to do four things, all of them impossible : " Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and cast out demons." So the great commission ran, and so it runs for us. We too must do the impos- sible, for with God all things are possible. We must heal the sick. They are lying by the tens of thousands in the bottoms of our great cities, and the groan of their sufferings comes to our ears. They lie within sight of the gleam of our fine linen and like Lazarus they are fed upon crumbs. At the last great day they will rise up against us with the awful accusation : " I was sick and in prison and ye visited me not." There is a leper out in Utah. That leper must be cleansed. There is a race which is dead, dead to the higher ideals and visions of the soul, and that dead negro race must be raised. Society is tormented with many demons : gambling, commercial greed, race hatred, political corruption, militarism, industrial tyranny, and drink, and all these demons must be exorcised by the twentieth-century crusader. The liquor traffic slays every year, under the protection of the stars and stripes, more men and women than are annually butchered by Abdul the Damned. To cast out these demons, this is our work, and in THE NEW CRUSADE 19 the name and by the power of God we must do it. It will take as much courage as the men had who fought at Bunker Hill. The battle will be fiercer than that of Gettysburg. There will be wider scope for the lofty courage of an intrepid spirit than was furnished at Santiago or San Juan Hill. One day there passed into the temple at Jeru- salem a young man whose spirit was dejected. Uzziah the Magnificent was dead. The hand which had ruled with majesty and power was lifeless and cold. Fearful problems faced the kingdom, alarm- ing perils loomed on every hand, and the young man, Isaiah, sad of heart and perplexed in mind, sought refuge in the temple. And standing there he lifted up his eyes, and lo ! God appeared. Out of the ineffable glory there came a voice : " Who will go .'"' and, humble and yet courageous, the youth replied : " Send me ! " There is much in Amer- ica just now which is depressing. Problems are multitudinous and compHcated, and dangers hang ominous in every horizon. Uzziah the Magnificent is dead. Washington is dead, and all the immor- tal company of those who with him laid the deep foundations of the Republic. Lincoln is dead, and Garfield is dead, and McKinley is dead, Grant is dead, and Sheridan, and Sherman, and nearly all the immortal commanders who in the great war carried our flag to victory. The grand army of the RepubHc is dwindhng with the years, and it will soon have vanished from the earth. 20 THE NEW CRUSADE The teachers who taught us and the preachers who thrilled and lifted us in our boyhood have nearly all passed into the city whose gates are pearl. And instead of this great company of heroes and martyrs and saints, we see a flood of immigrants flowing through our eastern gateways in tidal waves across the land, men of foreign speech and alien look, of curious custom and strange belief, to whom Washington is a name and Lincoln altogether unknown : and these men are taking possession of the hills and valleys of New England and of the great farms of the West ; they are climbing to power in all our cities, sitting down with scant reverence to our traditions and customs in the seats of the mighty, and on this great tide of foreign life American institutions and ideals roll hke ships on a sea tossed by storm ! What we need is a fresh vision of God. There is still ground for hope. In the temple of our American Christianity a young man is standing. He is look- ing into the light which is inaccessible. Out of the glory there comes to him a voice : " Who will go ? " And down deep at the center of the reply which shall fall from the young man's lips lies concealed the destiny of the Republic. " O beautiful my country, ours once more. What were our lives without thee ? What all our lives to save thee? We reck not what we give thee ! We will not dare to doubt thee ; But ask whatever else, and we will dare." II RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, March II, 1906. II RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER " The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power." — I Cor. iv. 20. This is a common saying of Paul. We might count it one of his maxims. He is always ex- pressing this thought, now in one form and now in another. He is determined to make it clear that Christianity is not a thing of words, but a thing of power. He seems at times to have a contempt for words. It is so easy to use them, so many people take delight in using them. The church in Corinth was filled with such peo- ple. They were adepts in the use of language. Paul writes to them and says : " Yes, a lot of you can beat me out in the use of words, I do not pre- tend to be a match for many of you, but I am willing to subject myself to this test : When I come we shall see who it is that has the power." That is the test by which he wished to be meas- ured. And that is the test which we insist upon to-day. No man is estimated by what he says, every man is ranked by what he does. Christianity, Paul says, is to be measured in the 23 24 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER same way. If it were not a religion of power, if it did not accomplish things, if it did not work trans- formations in the lives of men, it would be good for nothing but to be trampled under the feet. To the Romans he says : " I am not ashamed of the gos- pel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that beHeves." Paul knew that the word power would strike a responsive chord in the hearts of the Roman Christians. Men in the city on the Tiber could appreciate strength, effectiveness, might. Paul is not ashamed to be a preacher of Christianity in a city in which power is the one thing deemed worth admiring, because the religion of Jesus is able to attack and overcome. Paul always considered himself a soldier; he was engaged in a mighty warfare. To the Corinthians he wrote : " The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but they are mighty to the pulling down of strongholds." He loved to think of the power of Christ. It was from Christ that the apostle drew all his strength. " I can do all things through him who strengtheneth me," was the exultant shout which came from his lips as he passed from city to city and from country to country. In his great letter to the Colossians, which is preeminently his letter on Christ, he pictures him as the head of all principality and power. In his letter to the Ephesians he tells his readers that he is constantly praying that they may know the exceeding great- ness of God's power to usward who believe, accord- RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 25 ing to the working of his mighty power which he wrought in Christ. It is because he sees Christ far above all princi- pality and power and might and dominion that he passes through the storm of persecution with a song on his Hps. It is the omnipotence of God which causes him again and again to burst into exclamations of praise in the midst of his argu- ment. "Unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think accord- ing to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen." When he writes to Timothy it is to exhort him to remember that he has not received the spirit of fear, but the spirit of power and of love. He warns the young preacher to beware of all people who retain the form of godliness and deny the power thereof. Let us think this morning about religion moving in the realm of power. Religion always has a tendency to degenerate. This is because religion deals with things that are above, and men are of the earth earthy. There has never been a religion in the world which has not had its seasons of declension and deteriora- tion. There is a constant temptation to make re- ligion simply a form of words. Men are incurably religious, instinctively they hunger for God. They will not forsake him utterly even though they refuse to live his life. Instead of renouncing him 26 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER altogether, they will cling to the words which ex- press his praise, they will go on repeating sen- tences suggestive of adoration and devotion even when their hearts are far from him. That has been the tendency of every religion in every time. And Christianity has again and again suffered this common catastrophe. From the age of Constantine onward the Christian religion under- went a steady declension, becoming increasingly formal and mechanical, losing out of it the ele- ments of spiritual power. In many parts of the Christian world the religion of Jesus degenerated into a form of words. Men and women still said their paternosters, but the spirit of the Lord had departed from their hearts. Priests at the altar kept repeating the old Latin words. Hoc est corpus, while their own hearts were sordid and worldly and the people to whom they ministered had little conception of the great truth which the words had once symbolized. In a thousand churches the priests kept on droning the old threadbare words, and to the ears of the ignorant and degraded wor- shippers the words were only unintelligible gibber- ish. It is from this Latin phrase. Hoc est corpus, that we have gotten our word Hocuspocus. To such depths Christianity descended in the ages which history calls dark. This tendency, illustrated on a large scale in human history, is a tendency against which every Christian man must constantly contend. To all of us the temptation RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 27 comes to reduce Christianity to a form of words. We will not renounce it, we will not forsake it, we will not leave it, and we will keep on repeating the dear and sacred words. How easy it is to repeat the Lord's Prayer, saying the words while the heart does not pray. How readily we repeat the Apostles' Creed, holding tightly to the form of sound words while the mind is wandering to the ends of the earth. How common it is to sing : "All hail the power of Jesus' name!" with no answering thrill in the heart to the thought. Or "Nearer, my God, to Thee," without making the slightest effort to have the prayer fulfilled. Christianity may also degenerate into a form of knowledge. It may be conceived as a philosophy, or poetry, or a science, a body of knowledge to be possessed, a group of doctrines to be accepted, a bundle of affirmations to be agreed to. From the very beginning there has been in wide circles a tendency to reduce Christianity to a matter of the intellect and to make subscription to a creed the test of one's spiritual condition in the eyes of God. The Christian religion is rich in the problems which it suggests to the intellect. The Hfe of Jesus bristles with questions which the thoughtful mind takes delight in striving to answer. The death of Jesus is a phenomenon which has always provoked men to thought, and the whole body of Christian scriptures awakens intellectual activity and gives the mind delight by stimulating it to 28 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER attempt a formulation of the great ideas embedded in these scriptures. To dig out these ideas and relate them one to another and build them into a system, all this has endless fascination for certain types of mind, and in many a century the definition of a Christian has been a man who accepts the ideas which the New Testament presents. Gnosticism in the third century, and Hegelianism in our own time have conceived rehgion to be simply a form of knowl- edge, and many a man has imagined himself to be religious when he was simply interested in religious notions. These are the two tendencies, then, against which every professing follower of the Lord must be on his guard. The tendency to reduce Christianity to a form of words is the besetting temptation of Roman Catholicism. By its tremendous emphasis on ceremonies and by its constant repetition of paternosters, Romanism has always shown a ten- dency to degenerate into a ceremony, a ritual, a form of language, while the power of the Son of God to mold and lift men's lives has too fre- quently been lost sight of. When a Protestant attends a Roman Catholic church he is likely to come away hungry. There are so few ideas, ) there are so many apparently formal words. Against this tendency to formahsm every devout Roman Catholic priest must make everlasting war- fare. In the Protestant church the tendency is to RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 29 reduce Christianity to a form of knowledge. We Protestants boast ourselves upon our intellec- tuality, we take delight in playing with ideas. We are experts in the formulation of high doctrines, we philosophize and speculate and compare our notions one with the other, and suppose that by working with ideas we become really faithful fol- lowers of the Lord. The average Roman Catholic feels that he is not a good Catholic unless he attends the mass. The average Protestant feels that he is not a good Protestant unless he accepts the creed. " I go to mass every Sunday," says the Catholic in a tone of exultation, as though that were the supreme thing which Almighty God ex- pects of man. ** I accept everything in the creed," says the Protestant in a tone of great complacency, as though the acceptation of a creed would make a man a Christian ! With these two tendencies always working in the heart we need to come back again and again to the New Testament and hear Paul saying : " The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power." According to the New Testament Christianity is a form of power, it is a religion that works mira- cles. It produces mighty transformations, and turns the world upside down. The history of early Christianity is a history of opening prisons, opening graves, and unprecedented happenings. Jesus showed a remarkable indifference to words. He never wrote a sentence, nor did he ask any- 30 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER body else to write. He expressly said that men might speak words which were derogatory to him, but that this would not be fatal unless they quenched the divine spirit in their heart. The men who wrote the New Testament were seemingly reckless in the loose way in which they handled the scriptures. When they quote the Old Testament scripture they are not at all careful to quote it accurately : they paraphrase it, they give the gist of the passage. They do not care for precise syllables or exact phrases. It is a fact the significance of which should not be overlooked, that Jesus before his ascension told his apostles they must stay in Jerusalem until they had received power from on high. They had already received his words, but with his words they were able to do nothing ; they had learned the Lord's Prayer and had memorized his parables, and had drunk in the great discourses spoken in the upper chamber, but even the words of God himself are of no avail in opening human hearts and changing the spiritual climate of this earth unless the words are used by men who have been baptized with power. The apostles had been instructed in the ideas of the Master, they knew all the truths which he had taught them on the street corners and in the fields, but even in possession of these ideas they were absolutely impotent, and were commanded to tarry in Jerusalem until they had received something better than ideas — the power of the Holy Spirit. RELIGION- AS A FORM OF POWER 31 Even the ideas of God himself are useless in the great work of overcoming evil unless the ideas are used by men who have received the heavenly- baptism. That is the vital distinction which the New Testament never loses sight of, the distinc- tion between words and ideas on the one side and the power of God on the other. Words are de- preciated, philosophy or systematized ideas are also scorned and made light of. Christianity is noth- ing, according to the writers of the New Testa- ment, unless it moves in the realm of power. We are now ready to interpret, I think, certain phenomena of our own day. What is the matter with the Christian church } men are everywhere asking. Has not the Christian church Christ's words .'' Yes. Do not all Christian preachers possess Christ's ideas ? Yes. What then is the matter with the church ? The church in many a quarter lacks the one thing essential — power from on high. In many congregations religion has degenerated into a thing of words, in many other circles it is nothing but a matter of opinions. Only in those regions in which Jesus of Nazareth still does mighty deeds is the church really alive. On a certain occasion Jesus chided the leaders of his day because they did not know how to inter- pret the signs of the times. They were skilled in putting two things together in the lower realms of experience and thought. They could put a cer- tain color of the sky and a storm together, they 32 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER could put another color of the sky and fair weather together ; but when they saw the spiritual climate of Palestine changing, they could not put that change and God together. We are equally blind ofttimes in our efforts to interpret the signs of our times. How we blunder when it comes to accounting for the really great things which are taking place under our eyes. How many of you, for instance, are acquainted with the work of the Salvation Army.? You know that such an institution exists, you have heard the drum — and that is about all that some of you have heard. A few of you, it may be, have stopped at the street corner and heard a Salvation Army leader talk. The talk did not much edify you, and you passed on thinking that Salvation Army sermons are like the drum, sound chiefly, signifying nothing. Others of you have gone a little further. You have attended Salvation Army meetings, you know something of the work, but how few of us realize the extent of the work which the Army is really doing. It reads like a glowing page added to the Book of the Acts. In 49 different countries the Army is working, in 3 1 different languages it preaches the gospel. It holds a million and a half meetings every year. It has 18 land colonies, with 30,000 acres of land under cultivation. It has 116 Rescue Homes, and 17 Prison Gate Homes, and 180 Shelter Stations, and 644 social institutions, and 7200 corps and outposts, RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 33 with nearly 17,000 officers and cadets. In our own country the Army has 50,000 soldiers, and the converts which they make aggregate 6600 every month. They spend ^900,000 a year on the poor, and are doing an amount of social and philanthropic work which cannot be here described. And all this growth in a single generation ! How will you account for it } This is my expla- nation : The Salvation Army conceives of Chris- tianity as a form of power. That this is true, is indicated in its name, in the titles of its officers, in the whole vocabulary of its sermons and hymns. When you attend the Salvation Army meetings you are sure to hear something about the power of Jesus. He is the Almighty Saviour. He saves sinners from their sins. He saves to the uttermost all who put their trust in him. No man is too tightly bound by his habits to be delivered by this Mighty Conqueror. One of their favorite hymns is, " All hail the power of Jesus' name ! " You never hear that hymn sung anywhere else as it is sung in the Salvation Army. They sing : " Jesus Saves ! Jesus Saves ! " There is a tone of triumph in the refrain which makes the heart beat. You cannot account for the Salvation Army suc- cesses by its words. It is poor in words. Many of its preachers are uneducated. The Army is poor in ideas. You could not live upon its preaching, there is not enough thought in its sermons. Its triumphs are not won by its words or by its ideas, but by the 34 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER power of the Eternal. General Booth is a man of power, made mighty by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. He will take his rank among the greatest leaders in Christian history. Recently he was given audience by the highest of earth's kings, Ed- ward Vn. Not long ago he made an automobile tour from one end of England to the other, and from the time he started until his journey's end the road was banked on both sides with continuous crowds of people, cheering him and praying God's bless- ing on him as he passed. No Roman conqueror of the olden time ever received such an ovation as that granted to General Booth in his triumphal tour through England. The Salvation Army has many things to teach us; let this one be sufficient for to-day : " The kingdom of God is power." Along with this movement at the bottom of society there is another movement working at the top, whose successes many of you have no doubt found it difficult to account for. I refer to that movement known as Christian Science. Thousands of people nowadays are bewildered by what seems to them the phenomenal growth of Christian Science. They do not understand why such an in- terpretation of Christianity should have spread so rapidly into all the leading nations of the earth. Nor can they understand how Christian Scientists can build such splendid temples of worship, and dedicate them without a dollar of debt. They can- not understand the enthusiam of the Christian Scien- RELIGION- AS A FORM OF POWER 35 tists, and why they are so indefatigable in their efforts to make converts everywhere. They also find it difficult to account for the abounding joy of these people, the large attendance at their prayer meet- ings, to say nothing of the numerous cures which are declared by trustworthy witnesses to have been wrought. How are we to explain all these things .-' The first and easiest explanation is to say that the founder of Christian Science is a charlatan, and that the majority of Christian Scientists are dupes and dunces. This is the easiest of all explana- tions, but it is not one which is worthy or convinc- ing. That is the explanation which has invariably been offered by superficial people to account for every forward movement in the Christian world. The Reformers were counted by their contemporaries wicked men and their followers as dupes and cranks. The apostles were all put down as deceivers, and Jesus himself was said to have a devil. Thomas Carlyle in his " Heroes and Hero Wor- ship " contends that no great movement in hu- man history can be ascribed entirely to fraud. Whenever large numbers of intelligent men and women are moved to act together in an effort to better the race, there is something deeper in their hearts than trickery and deceit. No doubt many true things can be said by way of disparagement of many persons who profess the Christian Science 36 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER faith. Some have gone into the Christian Science movement because they have itching ears and are always seeking for some new thing. They once were Spiritualists and later on they were Esoteric Buddhists, they have trained in a score of different camps of so-called " advanced thought," and now for the present they have pitched their tent with the Christian Scientists. Such people, no doubt, there are, but they will not account for the Chris- tian Science movement. There are Christian Scientists who are erratic and visionary, and there are others who have no doubt become Christian Scientists for the material benefits which their profession brings them. But you cannot account for the Christian Science movement by pointing out the crack-brained fanat- ics and money makers. When the spring rains fall and the brook comes rushing down its bed, it carries in its swollen waters sticks and dead leaves and many a sort of rubbish, but you cannot account for the current by pointing to the leaves and sticks. Sticks do not flow, nor do dead leaves flow. The problem to be accounted for is not the sticks and leaves, but the momentum of the flood which carries sticks and leaves along. And so it is with the Christian Science current. Many a stick and dead leaf is floating on its rushing waters, but the problem still remains : What has given the Christian Science current its tremendous momentum .-' RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 37 How can we account for the success of this new interpretation of the Bible? Certainly not by pointing to its words. In the realm of language it is pathetically weak and meagre. The volume written by its founder is a specimen of cheap and tawdry English. One cannot read a chapter of it without having conclusive evidence that its author is an ignorant woman, absolutely innocent of all literary skill. Her language has the pretentious- ness, the floridness, and the stilted, high-flown splendor of the essay of a High School girl. There are Christian Science writers who have a better command of English than Mrs. Eddy, but none of their literature has in it any marks of dis- tinction. Certainly we cannot account for Chris- tian Science victories by referring to its words. And yet it must be admitted that even the words of Christian Science have an appreciable influence on the minds of a certain class of people. Many of the expressions of Christian Science are novel, and because of their novelty they arrest attention. Not a little of the attraction of Ralph Waldo Emerson is due to his vocabulary. He was descended from a line of Christian ministers, and the word God had been worn threadbare in the Emersonian home. Emerson was tired of the word. It had become to his ears commonplace, and so for the most part he avoids it in his writings. He believes in God, but he does not call him God. He substitutes other names for the traditional 38 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER name. One of his favorite names is " Over Soul." By " Over Soul " he means God. The novelty of the name appeals to the imagination of young people, and many a young man will talk with en- thusiasm about the "Over Soul," that would be ashamed to show any special interest in God. St. Paul says : " Set your affections on things above." That exhortation has been dinned into people's ears for 1900 years. Emerson was sick of it. He expressed the same idea in an Emersonian way: " Hitch your wagon to a star." In this phrase he says what St. Paul says, but the very freshness of the phraseology reaches the heart, and all sorts of people have been helped by the Emersonian lan- guage who would have passed by the language of St. Paul as simply a pious platitude. Christian Science has a curious nomenclature. All sorts of new phrases are used in curious ways, but when they are closely scrutinized one discovers that they simply express the old facts and the old truths. But, admitting the influence of its new phrases, we cannot account for the success of Chris- tian Science by its words. Nor can we account for its victories by its ideas. Christian Science is poor in ideas. All of its ideas are old, and many of them are antiquated. Its philosophy is exceedingly crude, and its use of the Scriptures is belated and fantastic. It has adopted a method of using the Bible which has been dis- carded by all people who know what the Scriptures RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 39 really arc. It is singular that a body of people professing to be advanced should take up with the old proof-text method of using the Bible which was in vogue in the days of our fathers. By proof-text method I mean the method of dipping into the Bible at any point whatsoever, lifting up one sen- tence, and proving your proposition by that sen- tence- That is what men did in the seventeenth century. They reached down into the Old Testament and picked up this sentence : " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and accepting that sentence as the unchangeable will of God they proceeded to put women to death who were accused of witch- craft. There is no absurdity and there is no mon- strosity which cannot be proved by that method of using the Scriptures. The Christian Scientists have a way of picking up isolated sentences, and using them as though they were detached oracles of God from which there could be no dissent. Every in- formed person knows that every text must be inter- preted through its context. We must know what goes before and what comes after. Moreover, no one book of the Bible can be allowed to settle car- dinal matters alone. When we speak of the teach- ing of the Scriptures, it must be their teaching from beginning to end, the teaching conveyed by the general trend of their thought. And not only this, but the Bible must be interpreted in the light of history, and the words which Jesus and the apos- 40 REUGION AS A FORM OF POWER ties spoke must be unfolded by that Holy Spirit which has been granted to the saints of nineteen Christian centuries. Strange to say, Christian Science has also gone back and taken up the mystical method of inter- pretation, a method which wrought incalculable mischief in the middle ages, but which has been discarded by every school of thought which has the slightest claim upon the respect of intelligent peo- ple. Under the sway of the mystical method every conceivable sort of nonsense was read into the Scriptures, and that is precisely what Christian Sci- ence is doing in our day. Some of the interpreta- tions given to well-known passages of Scriptures by the founder of Christian Science are so grotesque and so ludicrous that it is surprising they should be accepted by any one of sane mind. The whole method of using the Scriptures as taught by Christian Scientists is belated and demor- alizing. The Christian Science leaders are men and women who are not learned in the history of philosophy, or the history of theology, or the history of interpretation, and their pretentious use of the Bible could make no impression upon any one who is not more ignorant than they themselves. We cannot account for the hold which Christian Science has upon large numbers of people by taking into consideration its ideas. How are we to account, then, for its progress ? In my judgment the only adequate explanation is RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 41 that Christian Science from first to last conceives religion as a form of power. It believes in mighty- deeds. It believes that the Eternal mind is still capable of doing wondrous things. It believes that Jesus of Nazareth was a worker of miracles, and that miracles are possible in our day. It leads men to expect large things from God, it stirs in their hearts the spirit of expectation. It aims to create at the very start absolute trust in infinite Love. In a Christian Science church you are always hearing of what God is doing. In every Christian Science prayer meeting you constantly hear of what God has really done. The words amount to nothing, the ideas amount to little, but through the whole Christian Science world there runs the great conception of Christianity as a form of power. Because of this conception wonderful things have happened. Men and women are converted in Chris- tian Science churches just as truly as they are converted in the Bowery Mission or in the Salvation Army. In all parts of the country there have been the most marvelous transformations of temper and disposition. Men and women have been really born again. Those who have been made wretched by their fears — who have been afraid of a draught, and of the night air, and of the sun, and of the damp, and of their own shadow, and of everything — 'have passed under the influence of Christian Science teachers and have found deliverance from 42 RELIGION- AS A FORM OF POWER all their fears, so that they have gone forth exulting in the liberty that belongs to the sons of God. Others have been worn out by worry, one of the most destructive of all sins. They have worried about themselves, about their health, their fortune, their property, their children, their friends, their neighbors, their city, their nation, the world. They have worried about everything. And then at last they have come under the influence of Christian Science teachers and have learned that it is not necessary for a human soul to worry at all, that all worries can be once and forever cast off, and cast- ing their care on One who is able to bear it, they have faced life again with a heart courageous and songful. Others have been delivered from the demon of hate. For years they have been critical and captious. They have nursed their enmities and grudges, they have been envious and jealous and suspicious, not knowing that there was any deliverance for their souls. By and by they came under the influence of some Christian Science teacher, and learned the better way. To their amazement the old hateful disposition was removed and their heart overflowed with love. Diseases not a few have also been completely cured. There is no reason whatsoever for doubt- ing the genuineness of thousands of cures which Christian Science claims. Undoubtedly many men and women have, under the influence of the new life which has come to them through the RELIGION- AS A FORM OF POWER 43 teaching of Christian Science, thrown off physical infirmities and bodily weaknesses by which they had been afflicted for many years. Many diseases can be shaken off by simply lifting up the tone of the interior life. Elizabeth Barrett was a sick woman, confined to her bed, and Robert Browning called upon her. She fell in love with him, and her love for him lifted her out of bed and gave her health again. A great love will in some cases restore one to health. And so will a great ambition, and so, sometimes, will a great work, and so, sometimes, will a great burden, and so, sometimes, will a great hope. Any- thing that quickens the emotions and fills the heart with thoughts of God must have its influence upon every organ of the body, and make it more difficult for disease to work its ravages there. Christian Science does not deceive us when it points to the long Une of happy people who have been brought back to health again by its minis- trations. At this point we are ready to account for certain things which possibly have perplexed you. Why is it that you cannot shake the faith of a Christian Scientist in his beUef } If you have ever tried it, you know that you have tried in vain. They are as immovable as Gibraltar. No sort of logic or argument has the slightest effect upon them. This is because their faith is founded on experience. Experience is the firmest rock there is. A man is 44 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER always ready to stand upon a thing that he knows because the thing has happened in himself. There was a blind man in Jerusalem whose eyes Jesus opened. The enemies of Jesus at once surrounded him, trying to make him out a har, declaring to his face that he had never been blind at all. When indubitable proof was brought that the man had really been blind, his accusers then turned upon Jesus, claiming that he was a blasphemer, and a fraud. To all their arguments and accusations the man had but one reply: "Whether he is a sinner or not I do not know, but this one thing I know, that whereas I was blind now I see." With that simple affirmation on his lips he stood and faced all the learned people of Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin could not make him budge an inch. So it is with the man or woman who has really been blest through Christian Science. You may make fun of Mrs. Eddy, you may expatiate upon her money-making instincts, you may ridicule her rhetoric and pour scorn upon her ideas, but all that you may say has not the shghtest influence, for the person will calmly say : " Whereas I was once what I was, now I am what I am." The reason Christian Scientists cannot be moved either by our arguments or our ridicule is because they are conscious of having received blessings which never came to them before they embraced the new faith. And here also we find the explanation of why RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 45 Christian Science money flows in such surprising streams. It is proverbial that churches find it difficult to raise money, but now there is in our midst a church which knows no such thing as a deficit. It builds its churches of the finest and costliest materials, erecting at the present time a church in Boston costing two million dollars, and the money is forthcoming without any conscious effort. How will you account for that .-' The usual interpretation is that Christian Science works simply among the rich, that she turns her back upon the poor, that she keeps far away from the slums, and spends all her energies upon the people who live in the best sections of the city and who are abundantly able to pay largely for the blessings which they receive. Now it is true that Christian Science confines itself to the better classes of society. Its special province is the wives and daughters of rich men. It does not have that missionary spirit which sent the apostles among the poor and which keeps the Salvation Army working in our slums. But when all this is said you have not yet ac- counted for the fact that Christian Science churches have money in abundance. They get money from the rich, but the question is, how do they get it .'' It is easier to get money from poor people than it is from rich people. Rich women ordinarily take no delight in building churches; rich men are not in the habit of throwing their money into 46 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER religious causes. If Christian Scientists get such enormous sums of money from the pockets of the rich, we are face to face with this question : How are they able to work this wonder ? There is but one adequate explanation, and that is the money is given out of gratitude. It is because these men and women have been genuinely helped that they give their money without stint. There is no feeling in this world so generous as gratitude. Gratitude is love flowing toward a benefactor. In the presence of my benefactor, filled with memories of what he has done for me, I will count my purse but trash and will give him everything it holds. Christian Science churches would never get the money, were it not that genuine blessings have come to those from whose pockets the money comes. Some one at this point may say, then why should we not all become Christian Scientists if Christian Science is able to do these mighty deeds .'' The answer is that Christian Science does some mighty deeds, and also other deeds which are horrible. Whenever I pick up a book recounting the beauti- ful things which Christian Science has performed, I think of another book that will never be fully known until the Judgment Day — a book of tragedy and horror, of torture, agony and death. Wherever Christian Science goes it lifts some people out of despondency and sickness, and sends them on their way rejoicing, and wherever it goes it also shortens RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 47 lives and sends men and women to premature graves. O, the needless pain that innocent women and children have suffered, the indescribable tor- ture that has come to some of the noblest of God's children, all because of the erroneous teaching of this new religion, which claims to teach in Jesus' name. Only recently I was called to see a sick woman at one of our hotels. She had been confined to her bed for several days suffering excruciating pain. Among her friends there was a Christian Scientist, who came to her with bold promises of giving immediate relief. She assured the sick woman that there was nothing the matter with her, and that it was possible for her to leave her bed and walk. Taking upon her lips the words of Simon Peter, she said to the woman on the bed : " In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, I command you to get up and walk." The poor invalid, not knowing what to think and trusting that somehow she might possibly be healed, acted upon the word, and all the while suffering the greatest torture, she endeavored to make her way across the room, only to fall at last in an agony which brought on a hem- orrhage from which she a few days later died. That is Christian Science on its horrible side. It makes its progress because it carries in its mes- sage a mighty truth, but it has wrapped round and round the truth the most egregious and fearful errors, which bring ruin, desolation, death. I am sometimes asked the question, how long will it 48 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER last ? The answer is, until it has registered its protest and done the work which has been given it to do. Christian Science is a protest against the awful materiahsm of our age. When it started, forty years ago, a little band of English writers had made it difficult to believe that Christ worked miracles. John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, by their inimitable style, caught and held the attention of the world and breathed into the minds of men on both sides of the sea a distrust of all stories of the miraculous. Even ministers of the gospel were affected by the atmosphere in which they lived, and in many a pulpit there preached a man who did not empha- size the mighty power of God. It was at this crisis that the founder of Christian Science arose and, in defiance of the opinion of her day, not only claimed all the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth as genuine, but asserted that just such mighty things can be done to-day. Her teaching was a protest against the entire materialistic con- ception of man. Man was desperately sick, and the world was trying to cure him with drugs. The root cause of his sickness was studiously ignored. His ailments had multiplied, and so also had the remedies. Men were being dosed with opiates and narcotics and all sorts of poisonous drugs. Charlatans by the thousand were pretending to cure, when they could bring only superficial and temporary relief. RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 49 Would you know to what dimensions the patent- medicine fraud of this country has reached, it is necessary only to read the articles of Samuel Hop- kins Adams which have appeared in recent num- bers of Collier's Weekly. Even to-day the people of this country swill down seventy-five mil- lions of dollars' worth of drugs every year. No greater fraud is known in the entire history of the world than the patent-medicine fraud of the United States. When the night was at its darkest the founder of Christian Science arose and declared with the fervor of a prophet of the Lord that the root cause of disease is in the spirit. Man is a spiritual being, and he is to be cured after all by taking that fact into account. He must be told that he is a son of the Eternal, and not an animal that can be soaked indefinitely in drugs. Remove lust, and intemperance, and gluttony, and sloth, and vanity, and hate, and fear, and worry and the large proportion of all the diseases in the world will have completely vanished in the third generation. In protesting against the materialistic conception of the world, and the materialistic con- ception of man. Christian Science has done a large service. How long will the movement last.? Until its protest is registered and the right emphasis has been placed again on the omnipotence of God. Every religious movement that awakens the en- thusiasm and affection of large numbers of people 50 RELIGION- AS A FORM OF POWER makes a contribution to the spiritual development of the world. No matter with what errors it may come, or in what vagaries and delusions it may be immeshed, God will make use of it in the education of men. It is for us, then, who are not Christian Scientists and who never expect to become such, to follow the advice which St. Paul gave to his converts in Thessalonica : " Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." This is good : Belief in the power of God. He is the Almighty One. He alone does marvelous things. We are his children. In us he is able to work great transformations. Through his power and grace our life may be transfigured. Op- pose Christian Science as a church with all your strength. Discard it as a philosophy, for it is mis- taken. Reject it as a science, for it is mischiev- ous. Recoil from it as an interpretation of Chris- tianity, for it is defective and deceptive. Resist it with all your might and keep your friends, if you can, from coming under the sway of its pernicious doctrines. But do not attempt to vanquish it by making fun of it, or by ascribing evil motives to the leaders of it. Conquer it by the power of God in your own heart and life. Overcome the evil which it carries with it by the goodness which abounds in your own soul because the great God has redeemed you and because his Son lives in you and works through you. Ill THE PERSON OF CHRIST Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, Febru- ary 19, 1899. Ill THE PERSON OF CHRIST " What manner of man is this ? " — Matt. viii. 27. So cried the men upon the boat when the storm fell dead at the command of Jesus. Jesus had been asleep. Worn with labor, he was physically exhausted. Like all tired men, he restored himself in sleep. But while he slept a storm came down on GaHlee. It grew until it seemed the fragile boat must certainly succumb. In consternation the disciples rushed to him, exclaiming, "Master, save us or we perish." Opening his eyes and looking calmly into the face of the storm, he re- buked it and there was a great calm. Here again in the life of Jesus the human and the divine have flashed out in startling contrast. A man asleep has aroused himself to do what God alone is able to perform. No wonder the disciples were be- wildered and that their wonder broke into speech. "What maimer of man is this .^ " was all their astonished lips could utter. The world has been asking the same question ever since. On a recent Sunday morning we studied the 53 54 THE PERSON OF CHRIST humanity of Jesus, and on a subsequent Sunday- morning the deity of Jesus was our topic. The question which I wish to discuss with you this morning is, How were the humanity and the di- vinity combined ? What manner of man is this ? The problem is a perennial one. Each generation of Christians is obliged to grapple with it and work out an answer more or less acceptable to the reason and satisfactory to the heart. According to the expHcit declaration of the gospels Jesus was a man. He was made in all things like unto his brethren. He was tempted at all points even as we are. He was subject to the limitations of our humanity. He was under the law of development. He was in every part of his nature intensely and genuinely human. But according to the explicit statements of the gospels Jesus was more than man. His knov/ledge and power and goodness all transcended those of ordinary men, and he stood out before the men who knew him, unique, unparalleled, unapproached and unapproachable. Time is a great leveler, and many great men are by the ages stripped of their crowns. Not so with Jesus. He grows with the progress of the centuries. And the disciples' question is increas- ingly urgent : " What manner of man is this } " The New Testament says that Jesus was human. The New Testament also says that Jesus was divine. He had the powers of man and of God. How to combine these two sets of attributes in THE PERSON OF CHRIST 55 such a way as to leave for us a person whom we can understand and love is a question by which all the generations have been perplexed. Every thinking Christian is obliged to meet this mystery. The moment we begin to think about what the gospels say of Christ, we find ourselves bewildered by statements apparently contradictory, and baffled by the spectacle of a person who eludes analysis and defies classification. Boys and girls feel the pressure of the problem, and ask all sorts of puzzling questions. Aged saints at the end of life still look with anxious eyes into a mystery they cannot solve. The only way to escape the problem is not to think about it. But that is more than escaping the problem, it is abdicating our man- hood. To refuse to think, is to cast away our chief glory as rational beings. God has created us to think. We are commanded to love the Lord our God with all our mind as well as with all our heart. And he who makes no serious effort to apprehend the person of Christ is turning his back upon the most precious privilege offered to the mind of man. No other problem in the entire realm of human thought is so fascinating as is this. In the history of religion the person of Jesus is the crowning wonder. Personality in every man is a mystery. Its mysteriousness increases as we rise in the scale of intellectual power and spiritual insight. It is easier to understand a Hottentot 56 THE PERSON OF CHRIST than a Gladstone, and to account for a Red Indian than a Shakespeare. But when we come to the person of Jesus we are confronted by a person- ality more complex than all others. In him are mysteries which both bewilder and inspire. What manner of man is this } If he were man as Gautama, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Mohammed were men, he still would be a mystery, but the gospels make him more than these. If he were simply God — knowing all, all powerful, free from temptation, limitation, ignorance, development, and death — some explanation of his person might seem to lie within our reach ; but he combines the attributes of both man and God. It is in the union of these two sets of capacities and powers that the heart of the mystery lies. This, then, is the problem upon which fifty generations of thinking men have been engaged, and upon which men are working still. Let us glance at some of the solutions which have been offered. The simplest of all solutions is to deny that Jesus was more than man. If he says he was, he was mistaken. If John says he was, John errs. If Paul says he was, Paul blunders. If the church thinks he was, it thinks so because it is super- stitious. That was the solution offered by the Ebionites in the first century, and that in substance is the solution offered by the humanitarians of to- day. Do the gospels say that Jesus was miracu- THE PERSON OF CHRIST 57 lously conceived — cut that out, it is a myth. Do they say he arose from the dead — cut it out, it is a legend. Do they say he worked miracles — cut that out, it is an idle tale. Do they say he claimed to have existed before his birth — cut it out, he probably never said it, or if he did he meant he preexisted only in the mind of God. Do they say he claimed to be judge of men and the arbiter of destiny — cut it out, he was beside him- self. Hallucinations in great men are common. That is one solution. It is the easiest of all. Some who adopt this solution call themselves " advanced." But why a man should be called advanced because he goes back and picks up a theory propounded eighteen hundred years ago, is not at all clear. This theory is held by persons who are some- times called " advanced thinkers," although it may be questioned whether "thinkers" is a proper word to use in this connection. It requires no extra brain power to use a pair of scissors ; and to reach the conclusion that Jesus was only man all one needs is scissors. The substitution of a pair of shears for vigorous thought has often been made with great eclat and with such consummate art as to blind ordinary mortals to the nature of the transaction. But the knack of using scissors ought not to be counted as conclusive evidence of an extraordinary endowment of brain power. We ought not to be hoodwinked by the sleek insinua- 58 THE PERSON OF CHRIST tion that those who deny the divinity of Jesus are thinkers above all others, far in advance of this superstitious and ignorant age. The simple fact is that the humanitarian solution is no solution at all. It is a sly evasion of the problem. When asked, what manner of man is this .'' the humani- tarians blot out more than half the New Testa- ment, and build their answer on the flimsy fragment which remains. But only a few professing Christians have ever been willing to cut the New Testament into shreds. If there is a book of authentic history in the world, it is the New Testament. In every century the majority of Bible students have frankly recog- nized that the gospels picture Jesus as more than man and have honestly endeavored to give him his proper place in the universe of God. At the beginning of the fourth century there was in the church at Alexandria a presbyter by the name of Arius, a devout and noble man, a forceful thinker and a skillful writer. According to Arius, Christ is a created being, the perfect image of his father, higher than all angels, existing before his incar- nation, a middle being between God and man, God's agent by whom the world was created. Arianism was an earnest and honest effort to explain the person of Christ. But it did not do justice to all which the New Testament says. For more than half a century the church grappled with this heresy, and it was two hundred years THE PERSON OF CHRIST 59 before it was finally uprooted. After its extinc- tion as a power in Christian theology and life it reappeared again and again, having isolated and brainy defenders. It had adherents in England through the seventeenth century ; among whom John Milton and Isaac Newton were the most re- nowned. Some of the early New England Uni- tarians were Arians. But Arianism has now practically vanished from the earth. As a solu- tion of the problem of Christ's person, it has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. The Christ of the gospels is not a sort of archangel, higher than man and lower than God. It was not until the sixteenth century that an- other solution of the mystery was offered. This time it came from an Italian by the name of Socinus. According to Socinus, Christ was not divine, but he was more than man, his attributes were beyond the human. He was conceived of a virgin, was perfectly holy, and after death was exalted to ab- solute power, all things being subject unto him. Socinus was reverent and refused to mangle the New Testament. He believed it was inspired by God, and instead of discarding the declarations which seemed to go contrary to his theory, he en- deavored to give them a consistent interpretation. According to Arianism, Christ was a supernatural being, coming down to earth. According to So- cinianism, Christ was a human being rising by the holiness of his life and the grandeur of his vie- 60 THE PERSON OF CHRIST tories to the dignity and glory of God. Through the last three hundred years Socinianism has had numerous and talented defenders, but its sway has been only local and its triumphs have been few and transitory. Socianism, like Arianism, has practi- cally vanished from the earth. It, too, has been weighed in the balances of human reason and found wanting. The Christ of the gospels is not a man who climbs from the level of humanity to the throne of God. While one school of thinkers has ignored or obscured the divinity of Christ, another type of mind has just as persistently ignored his human- ity. In the first century a class of men arose who denied the reality of Christ's flesh. His body was a phantom, they said, his sufferings and death were visions. The heresy spread in all directions, becoming known as Gnosticism. It penetrated the church, and even Clement of Alexandria did not hesitate to say that Christ was free from all bodily necessities. He ate not for the sake of the body, but in order that it might not enter into the mind of those who were with him to entertain a different opinion of him. For over three hundred years the church was obliged to fight these various forms of Gnosticism, in order that it might estab- lish in the thought of the world the reality of Christ's humanity and safeguard the union of the divine and the human in his person. But while the leaders of the church were a unit THE PERSON OF CHRIST 6 1 in asserting both the divinity and the humanity of our Lord, how to think the union of the two was a problem which perplexed them all. How can God and man be united ? That was the question. In endeavoring to solve the mystery, some schol- ars subordinated the humanity, giving the divinity such sole dominating power that the humanity practically ceased to exist. Thus Gregory of Nyssa said, "As a drop of vinegar when cast into the sea is transformed and becomes a part of the sea-water, so the flesh of Christ was trans- formed and lost all its natural properties by union with the divine infinitude." Sometimes, on the other hand, the divine was lost sight of and the humanity was exalted until the deity of Jesus be- came an illusion or a fiction. Sometimes, as in the case of Nestorius, both natures were recog- nized, but the two natures were kept side by side in such a way as to make Christ two persons instead of one. From the council of Nicaea in 325 to the coun- cil of Chalcedon one hundred and twenty-six years later, the controversy over the person of Christ was incessant and fervent. It was at the council of Chal- cedon, in the middle of the fifth century, that the church placed on record the completest scientific statement of her conception of the person of the Redeemer. These are the words : " We unani- mously teach one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ; Complete as to his godhead and com- 62 THE PERSON OF CHRIST plete as to his manhood ; Truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, con- substantial with the Father as to His Godhead, and consubstantial also with us as to his manhood ; like unto us in all things, yet without sin ; As to His Godhead begotten of the Father before all worlds, but as to his manhood in these last days born, for us men and for our salvation, of the Vir- gin Mary, the mother of God ; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only Begotten, known in two natures, without confusion, without conversion, without severance and without division ; the dis- tinction of the natures being in nowise abolished by their union, but the pecuharity of each nature being maintained and both concurring in one per- son and hypostasis. We confess not a Son di- vided and sundered into two persons, but one and the same Son, and Only Begotten and God-logos, our Lord Jesus Christ." This has stood for over fourteen hundred years as the completest statement ever offered by the church of her conception of the person of our Lord. But since the Reformation, thinking men in increas- ing numbers have felt that this creed of Chalcedon is defective. It sets forth the two natures of Christ, but it does not bring them into suitable reconcilia- tion with each other. It discards a double Christ, it denies the conversion of God into man or of man into God, but it gives no satisfactory explana- tion of that greatest of all mysteries — the union THE PERSON OF CHRIST 63 of God and man. How can ignorance and omni- science, omnipotence and weakness, perfect holi- ness and the experience of temptation, be combined in one person ? This is the problem which will not down. We who have puzzled our minds and hearts over it, have simply passed through the experiences through which all thinking Christians have passed. As early as the third century one of the great- est thinkers the church has ever produced, Origen, wrote thus : " Since we see in him some things so human that they appear to differ in no respect from the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine that they can apparently belong to nothing less than to the primal and ineffable nature of deity ; the narrowness of human under- standing can find no outlet, but, overcome with the amazement of a mighty admiration, knows not whither to withdraw, or what to take hold of, or whither to turn. If it think of a God, it sees a mortal ; if it think of a man, it beholds him return- ing from the grave after overthrowing the empire of death, laden with its spoils. " To utter these things in human ears, and to explain them in words, far surpasses the powers either of our rank or of our intellect and language. I think that it surpasses the power even of the holy apostles ; nay, the explanation of that mys- tery may be beyond the grasp of the entire crea- tion of celestial powers." But no matter how 64 THE PERSON OF CHRIST great the mystery may be, the human mind cannot let it alone. Many of the deepest thinkers of our century have devoted their lives to the problem of the person of Christ. Up to the middle of the last century the common explanation has been that of the creed of Chalcedon. The two natures have been asserted, placed side by side and left standing there. But in the think- ing of the average Christian the Christ of the creed of Chalcedon becomes a double-headed Christ. He has two consciences, two consciousnesses, two knowledges, two wills, — he is practically two persons. When Luke says he grew in wisdom, the ordinary explanation is : He increased in wisdom as a man. When he said he did not know, he was speaking as a man — as God he of course knew everything. Now people who think deeply are not going to submit forever to any such jugglery as that. A Christ who increases in wis- dom and yet is no wiser when a man than he was when a baby, a Christ who knows and who does not know in the same instant, a Christ who cries out from one side of him, " My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " while on the other side of him he is in possession of perfect felicity and peace, is as much of a phantom as the delusive Christ of the Docetists and the Gnostics. The whole gospel thus interpreted becomes a sham and a delusion. What manner of man is this ? Modern scholar- THE PERSON OF CHRIST 65 ship is seeking for light in Paul's letter to the Phi- lippians: " Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus : Who, being in the form of God, counts it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men." The suggestive expression is " emptied himself." What does that mean ? How much is implied ? The Greek word for emptied is "ekenosen." Out of that word has come an interpretation of the person of Jesus which is now known as the doctrine of the Kenosis. Christians who adopt this view of Christ's person are known as Kenoticists. Within the last fifty years the leaders of Chris- tian thought on both sides of the sea have, in in- creasing numbers, become adherents of the Kenotic doctrine : such men as Delitzsch, Lange, Miiller in Germany, Godet in Switzerland, De Pressense in France, Martensen in Denmark, Canon Gore in England, and Henry M, Goodwin and Howard Crosby in our own country — these are representa- tives of a great host of Bible students, who have found relief in the doctrine of the Kenosis. What is this doctrine ? According to the Kenotic inter- pretation the Christ of the gospels is one person, with one consciousness and one knowledge and one will. This Christ has the limitations of our humanity. He grows in wisdom. He is tempted. He learns obedience. He is perfected through suffering. 66 THE PERSON OF CHRIST He is ignorant of the day of judgment, and hence is not omniscient. He moves from place to place, and hence is not omnipresent. He is destitute of his divine glory which he had before the world was. He feels himself deserted on the cross. It would seem, therefore, that from his birth to the resurrection he laid aside his divine attributes of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. These were his and he surrendered them. After the resurrection he assumed them all again. All authority in heaven and on earth was once more given to him, even as he said. In other words, the Son of God reduced himself to the limitations of humanity. He emptied himself of his divine glory and his divine mode of existence, and assumed the human mode of existence, subject to the limits of space and time and the laws of development and growth. He was ignorant and helpless as a child, Hmited in all human ways as a man. He was made in all things like unto us. We have thus thrust the mystery back another notch, and it now takes this form : How could the Son of God limit himself .-' How can divine at- tributes be laid aside ? The answer is, by an act of will. The self -limitation was voluntary. Christ had power to lay down his life and he had power to take it again. We have no such power of will, but men, in proportion to their greatness here on earth, can subject themselves to self-limitations. The greater the man, the more completely can he THE PERSON OF CHRIST 67 go out of himself and enter into a life which is not his own. A mother can so pass into the life of her child that its sufferings hurt her more than they pain the child. She for the time ceases to feel like a woman and becomes a child. A father can become a boy among his children, forgetful for the time of all he knows and who he is. He empties himself and is found in the fashion of a boy. These outgoings of love are not parallels of the incarnation, but they are faint suggestions of it. Will power in the greatest men is amazing. The scholar can read or write surrounded by a crowd of talking people, and not hear a syllable of what is said. By an act of will he can limit his con- sciousness to a contracted area, and not know anything which lies outside. If man can so limit himself, what may God's Son do} Who dares say what self-limitations are possible to infinite love } God is omnipotent. He is omnipotent, therefore, in his ability to hmit himself. Self-abnegation — we know what it means on earth, what may it mean in heaven .-' Self-efface- ment — we have caught glimpses of it in man, what may we see of it in the being of God ? Jesus took upon him the form of a servant, and was found in the fashion of man. He acted through human faculties. He looked out of hu- man eyes ; heard through human ears ; walked with human feet ; suffered with a human heart ; thought through a human brain. The brain is 68 THE PERSON OF CHRIST the instrument of the mind. The cells in its gray matter are the key-board on which the spirit plays. By the destruction of any portion of the thought area of the brain, a man's power of thinking is impaired. His soul is not made less, but the con- sciousness of the soul is contracted. Only the other day a boy in the West, who lost his mind twelve years ago from a blow on the head, was cured by a surgical operation. Ra- tional Hfe had been suspended for twelve long years because of the thickening of the skull bone, and the moment the pressure was relieved the soul of the boy uttered itself again. "Why did you strike me .-' " was his first question on coming back to life again. His mind had not been lost ; it was only the key-board of the brain which had refused to respond to the stroke of the mind. So long as we live on earth, our spirit is dependent for its consciousness on the brain. Jesus had a human brain. Through that brain he was obliged to do all his thinking. On its Hmited key-board he played all the music of his life. The keys on which he played were like the keys on which we play, although his were made of finer stuff, but he could not, because of his brain limitations, know more than a perfect man can know ; or more than God chooses to reveal to a man who carries out his will. There was more in the depths of his personality than ever came to consciousness in the days of his incarnation. THE PERSON OF CHRIST 69 There is more in us than has ever yet been unfolded. Our brain will not let out all the music of our spirit In our highest moments we are conscious that we have that within us which cannot be expressed, and which only eternity will unfold. When we cast off these bodies, the ener- gies of the soul will find scope for activity and enjoyment impossible so long as " this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close us in." All through his earthly life, Jesus was the eter- nal Son of God, but he could express only so much of himself as can be expressed through the faculties and powers of our humanity. His power on earth was given him by his heavenly Father. His power on earth was extraordinary, but it was not the power of the unshackled and omnipotent God. His knowledge on earth was extraordinary, but it was not the knowledge of the omniscient God. He had insight and fore- sight. He read heart secrets and foretold events yet to come, but Moses and Elijah and Isaiah and many other prophets had manifested surprising power in this direction. Spiritual illumination was given him by God Almighty as that illumi- nation was needed, but in every case it came through the human brain. He knew only what his Father told him, and whatever his Father told him, that he told to his disciples. Listen: "All things that I heard from my Father I have made known unto you." His faith, there- 70 THE PERSON OF CHRIST fore, was human, like yours and mine, but stronger. His prayers were human, like yours and mine, but truer. His heartache was human, like yours and mine, but more intense. His knowledge was hu- man, like yours and mine, but vaster. His expe- rience was human, like yours and mine, but richer. For he never sinned, and did always those things which were pleasing unto God, He was made in all things like unto us. From the cradle to the cross he lived under the limitations of our earthly life. Always was he the son of God, but in the days of his humiliation he for our sakes became poor; he beggared himself that we through his poverty might be rich. This conception of the person of Christ does not remove all mystery, but it removes all contra- dictions and gives us a Redeemer who does not offend the reason or mock the heart. With Paul we still exclaim : " Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness : God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out ! Of him, and through him, and to him, are all things : to whom be glory forever." What manner of man is this .-' He is God's ideal man. He is our elder brother. He is our THE PERSON- OF CHRIST 71 Master and our example. We see him before his resurrection, and we cry out, " Behold the man ! " After his resurrection we see him and with Thomas we exclaim, " My Lord and my God!" IV LIBERTY— ITS DANGERS AND DUTIES Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, Septem- ber 27, 1903. 74 IV LIBERTY — ITS DANGERS AND DUTIES " Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty ; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another." — Gal. v. 13. The Epistle to the Galatians is of all Paul's letters preeminently the letter of freedom. It is one of the mightiest cries ever uttered on behalf of liberty. It has done more to melt the shackles from the human mind than any dozen books ever written. It is a hot, fierce, uncompromising protest against all the legalisms and pedantries and tyrannies and despotisms of man. We might call it the declara- tion of independence of the human soul. The gist of the entire letter is summed up in the words with which the fifth chapter opens: "Stand fast in the Hberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." To this letter as to a beacon fire the champions of liberty have come to light their torches before setting out upon some new campaign ; to this letter as to a fountain warriors of freedom, tired and dust covered, defeated and discouraged, have come 75 ^6 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES back to drink, and found here refreshment for their souls ; to this letter Martin Luther came for weap- ons with which to batter down the pretensions and tyrannies of the mediaeval church ; to this letter two hundred years later John Wesley came for fire with which to warm the heart of a Christian world grown cold. In every land and time since Paul penned this letter, men chafing under the restraints of slavery have lifted up their heads and taken heart again whenever they have heard this glad announcement : " Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty." But the letter to the Galatians is not easy reading. It is difficult because the thought is so condensed. Paul's ideas are packed close together in sentences so short that they become enigmatic. It is one of the most concentrated of all Paul's writings. It is not to be read in a hurry, or with a desultory mind. Moreover, the problem with which Paul here is deal- ing has lost something of the urgency which it had in apostoHc times. It is not easy for men of one age to throw themselves into the situation of men of an age two thousand years away. Paul writes in the phraseology not of our century but of the first. And even our EngHsh translation of his Greek must be translated into the vernacular of our ordinary life before his meaning becomes clear to our mind. Let us try this morning to go down into the central meaning of this epistle. The supreme question of the human race has LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES jy ever been : How can man win the favor of the Eternal ? Professor James of Harvard in his latest book, entitled, "Varieties of Religious Experience," has sifted the phenomena of the religious con- sciousness of the race and come to the conclusion that the one experience which has been constant from the beginning is the feeling that man is not right, and that it is well with his soul only when he has allied himself to the higher powers. How is a man to win the favor of heaven ? That is the age-long question, and to that question various answers have been given. One of the earhest an- swers was, man must humiliate himself, render him- self uncomfortable and bring himself down in abject misery to the dust ; only thus can he show his con- trition, and only thus can he win the smile of the Eternal. Under the influence of this idea men in every age and in almost every land have starved themselves and beaten themselves and slept on stones and lacerated their flesh and mutilated their bodies and subjected themselves to all sorts of torture, thinking that by the degradation of their body they were doing something which would make their entrance into heaven certain. That has been the idea of barbarians everywhere, and the idea survives long after men have won the right to be counted civiHzed. But sooner or later this idea of physical suffering is inevitably left behind. Men come to see that God is not to be appeased by the shedding of 78 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES human blood. To the question : What must man do to win the favor of the Most High, the answer is : He must worship ; he must offer sacrifices, he must put upon the altar that which is of value to him; he must observe certain feasts and fasts, he must go through the elaborate forms of a prescribed ritual. Only as he observes the ceremonies laid down by the ordained officials of religion is it possi- ble for the soul to be at peace with God. But even this idea does not long satisfy the grow- ing human heart. Worship becomes monotonous and sacrifices lose the significance which they once possessed. The time at last arrives when the mind sees that it is not by religious forms and ceremonies but by the actions of the obedient will that God's heart can be touched and his favor won. It is not by praying or singing, bowing or offering sacrifices, that God's protection is secured, but by the per- formance of noble deeds, and the multiplication of good works. If a man, then, is to win the favor of the Eternal, let him go to work and fill the days with gracious deeds. These are the three answers which the world has always given to the question, What must a man do to win the favor of God t All these three an- swers were given among the population of Galatia. There were men living there who believed that the eternal powers are never satisfied save by the humil- iation of the body. The leading goddess of the country was Cybele, and her devotees won her favor LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 79 by mutilation of the flesh. There were others to whom all such physical crucifixion was abhorrent, who found relief in offering sacrifices. They gave to the gods presents, they had their holy times and seasons, their appointed fasts and feasts. To be punctilious in the observance of every ceremony and in the keeping of every holy day, this was supposed to win for men abundant entrance into heaven. There were others to whom no word was great but the word obedience. All formalities of every sort were hollow and worthless in their eyes. Submission to God's law, this and this alone was the price of the favor of the Eternal. A man, these men said, must earn God's favor, and he must earn it by a Ufe filled with obedient deeds. But into this world ruled by these three different conceptions the Apostle steps, boldly declaring that all three conceptions are wrong. A man, Paul says, does not win God's favor by physical degrada- tion or ecclesiastical ceremony, or by obeying the Decalogue. There is nothing, he asserts, which a man can do which will win him the favor of God. It is not possible for him to crawl into it, or to climb up to it, or to earn it, or to buy it. A man has God's favor at the start before he has done a single thing. God's favor belongs to him because man is God's child. God has manifested his favor in the gift of Jesus Christ his Son. The favor of the Eternal Father, therefore, is not to be earned even by obe- dience to the law, but is simply to be accepted with 8o LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES thanksgiving and joy. The just, Paul says, shall live by faith. He must believe that God is indeed his Father and that he has manifested his love in the heart of Jesus. This for Paul is the starting point. Unless you start there you miss the secret of Christianity altogether. Believe that God's favor is something to be earned either by sacrifices or by noble deeds and you have missed the glory of the message which the Son of God came to bring. Be- lieve that you have been redeemed by what God has done in Christ, and then go on, and live as a redeemed man ought to live. But is not this dangerous doctrine } Indeed it is. There is nothing so dangerous in this world as liberty, except the lack of it. Wherever this doc- trine of salvation by faith has been preached boldly and with passion, it has been wrested by men to their own destruction. There were men in the first century who Hstening to Paul's preaching said, Very well, if we are dead to the law and the law has passed away, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for whatsoever we do is right. If the greater the sin the more abundant the grace, then let us sin more, that grace may still more abound. In the sixteenth century, under the preaching of Luther, crowds of men and women seized upon this idea of liberty and used it for an occasion to the flesh. Law, they said, has passed completely away. For the redeemed soul there is no law at all. What- ever a Christian wants to do and does, is right. LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 8 1 Church historians call these creatures Antinomi- ans because they were opposed to law. And what took place in the sixteenth century under Luther took place in the eighteenth under Wesley, and what took place under Wesley takes place under the preaching of every man who preaches boldly the great doctrine of liberty in Christ. Is the doctrine false, then, because some men wrest it to their own destruction } Nay ! Truth can never be proclaimed in a world like this without the possibility of somebody abusing it. Nobody will ever be hurt by St. Paul's doctrine if he will take the trouble to find out what St. Paul's doctrine really is. When Paul says that Christians are no longer under law, he means that they are no longer under law as external restraint. When he says that the law has passed away, he means that it has passed away as a measure of coercion, but he does not mean that the life of man can ever safely depart from the principles ordained of God. While in one sense law passes away, in another sense it comes back with new significance and authority. In one sense it dies, in another sense it lives with a rekindled life. It is no longer exter- nal restraint but internal constraint, no longer external compulsion but internal impulsion, no longer external coercion but internal aspiration. The law is no longer written upon stone, it is now written upon the tables of the heart. It no longer 82 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES hangs over a man's head, it is incorporated as a ruHng principle of his life. It is no longer shackles by which he is bound, it is within him a new nature. His soul is the home of the spirit of law, and he looks up to God and calls him Father. A simple illustration will make all this clear. Every boy in the years of his boyhood is under law. His mother lays down the law that he must comb his hair and wash his face every morning before he comes to the breakfast table. That law is fixed and the boy is under it. Sometimes he chafes and wriggles under it. He wishes he could get out from under it. To wash one's face every morning, that seems the climax of bondage. If one could only escape, now and then, life would have new zest and value. Probably the boy never lived who did not at some time during his boyhood stand appalled at the idea that it would be necessary for him to wash his face and comb his hair every morn- ing of every week of eve^y month of every year of his life. The boy is indeed under law, but little by little the law loses its force. Little by little it vanishes from sight, until the young man is no longer under this law at all. But does he wash his face and comb his hair ? He does. Not because he is under law, but because the law is now in him. The external rule has become a guiding principle, the tyrannical command has now become a second nature. He no longer washes his face because he is compelled to do it, but because he wants to do it. LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES ^^ It is his nature to do it. He would be uncomfort- able if the washing were not done. He is dead unto the law because the spirit of the law has found its home in his soul. Now the ideal Christian life is the life in which all law has passed away. There is no longer any feehng of restraint from without. All life is ordered and directed from within. And just as a man rises in the art of living he finds that laws of all sorts lose their sovereignty over his mind. How many laws on the statute books are dead laws to us. We never think of them. We care nothing for them. So far as we are concerned, they have completely passed away. You and I are not under the law against murder. We never on waking in the morning sigh at the thought that it will not be possible for us to kill some one before night. We do not want to murder. It is not our nature to do such things. The law is not over us, it is incorporated in our heart, and we are not conscious of its presence. And as with murder, so with drunkenness. There are men in our community for whom all laws against drunkenness are irksome and tyranni- cal, they interfere with freedom. "What business is it of the city," these men say, "whether we are drunk or not .? " Life to such men would be far more pleasant if every man were permitted to get drunk when and where he pleases. They are yet under the law. For us the law has died and we 84 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES are free. And so with thieving. There are men who feel that their personal liberty is curtailed because the legislature has declared that a man must not steal. They are under the law. You and I are unconscious of the law. It has no ex- istence for us. We are never tempted to break open a man's house and steal his silver spoons. We are no longer coerced, we are free. I once knew a man in New England who had a record. How many crimes he had committed I do not know, but he was a man known to the police in many cities. One day he came to my study here in New York. He was in a fever of excitement. He looked like a wild animal pursued by dogs. The first thing he said to me was : " They have recognized me. I have got to get out of here. It will not be safe to stay another hour." I asked him who it was that had recognized him. He said it was the policemen. He no longer dared to walk down Broadway. The eyes of all the policemen were on him. And to be arrested meant imprisonment for some offense long since committed. Walking the streets of this free city was misery to him. He was under the law, and the law was to him a curse. But you and I are not under the law. We do not look at the police- men nor do they look at us. We go where we please, in any part of the city, and no officer of the law molests us or makes us afraid. We are not under the law because the law is in us. LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 85 When, therefore, Paul tells men that they are no longer under the law, he takes care to guard him- self against misconception. He will not close this letter without sounding a solemn word of warning. Brethren, he says, you have been called unto lib- erty, only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh. Of all St. Paul's warnings, this is the one most needed by our times. The trouble with America is not too much liberty, but liberty used in mischievous ways. The Christian church is not too free, but there are too many people in the church who do not know how to use their freedom. Many men have been obliged to buy their freedom at a great cost, but you and I were born to free- dom ; we breathed the atmosphere of liberty when we were rocked in the cradle, and all our Hfe has been lived under a flag every star of which is sug- gestive of liberty. There is no need of any man urging us to stand fast in the liberty wherewith we have been made free. But, alas, thousands of Americans need to Hsten to the warning which Paul gave to the Gala- tians : " Brethren, you have been called unto liberty ; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." The duties and responsibilities of liberty, these are things concerning which all.of us should think. The abuses and dangers of freedom, against these every thoughtful man should be on his guard. See what havoc is wrought in the Christian church because men use their liberty for an occasion to the flesh. 86 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES It was once supposed that a man could win God's favor by attending public worship. You and I believe that no longer. It belittles God to make him a Being capable of opening his heart only on condition of our willingness to go to church. Churchgoing is not essential to win his favor. We have his good-will already. We are therefore free, and, believing this, many a man uses his freedom for an occasion to the flesh. He does not go to church. He sits at home and lolls in an easy chair and skims the Sunday newspaper. The law of public worship has passed away as ex- ternal compulsion, and the law has not appeared in that man's soul as reverent desire to know God. It has been taught and believed that unless a man took the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper he would forfeit his place in heaven. You and I have never accepted that. We do not believe that the heart of the Eternal God can be opened by a man's willingness to eat a crumb of bread or take a sip of wine even though he may do this inside the place of prayer. We have been called unto liberty and none of these things are binding on us, and, puffed up with the knowledge of this, many a man never comes to the Lord's table at all. Be- cause he is at liberty to stay away, he uses his liberty for an occasion to the flesh. One would suppose that a man, although a free man, if he had in him the spirit of Jesus would be glad to comply with his dying request. LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 8/ You and I do not believe that by the giving of our money we can ever earn the love of our Heav- enly Father. The little contributions which we lay upon the plate are poor and paltry things, and what are we but stewards intrusted with what God has first given unto us ? It is not necessary to give, then, in order that God may smile upon us. Misled by this, many a man spends his dollars in the store and the club and saves his pennies for the church. Realizing that he has been called to liberty, he uses his liberty for an occasion to the flesh, and consents to do an unmanly thing. In many parts of Christendom it has long been cus- tomary for the Lord's followers to confess their sins to church officials. The confessional was swept away by the Reformation, and you and I would not endure it, no, not for an hour. But because Protestants are not obliged to con- fess their sins to their pastor, too many professing church members never confess their sins at all. They use their liberty for an occasion to the flesh. Many Christian congregations have done away entirely with all books of prayer. It was once supposed essential to order and decency, that all members of the congregation when they came together should pray the same prayer. We have thrown prayer books away, but many of us, exult- ing in our liberty, use our liberty for an occasion to the flesh, and when we come into the Lord's house we do not pray at all. O, Saul of Tarsus, if 88 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES thou wert here upon the earth thou surely wouldst say to us what thou didst say to the Galatians : " Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty : only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." And is not this warning needed by our poor Republic, all torn by many dissensions and heavy laden with many burdens ! We Americans are not too free, but we are great abusers of our free- dom. Ours is a free press, and we would not have it anything else than free. We could not endure a press doctored by the Sultan, nor could we be content with papers scissored by a censor ap- pointed by some Czar. One of the crowning glories of America is its free press. A press muzzled or gagged is a press of which to be ashamed. But how has this free- dom been abused ! In every American city un- scrupulous and greedy men, eager to swell their circulation in order to increase the size of their fortune, have made their papers minister to the flesh. They have gone through the sewers and the cesspools for material with which to fill their columns. They have uncovered the ulcers and the leprosies of society and spread them out before the eyes of growing boys and girls. They have ex- ploited the doings of rich fools and harlots and sui- cides and murderers. They have hounded men in the secrecy of their homes and shouted from the housetops things that should never have been told. They have been vultures plunging their accursed LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 89 beaks into the putrescent carcasses of vice and crime, harpies that have defiled our breakfast and our dinner tables. What shall we do ? Take away the freedom of the press ? Never. All we can say- is : Brethren of the press, you have been called unto liberty, only use not your liberty for an occa- sion to the flesh. We have a free government. Ours is a country for the people, of the people, and by the people. In many a land no such liberty as ours is known. In parts of Europe the safety of the country is supposed to depend upon the existence of a large standing army. Every young man on reaching a certain age is compelled to give himself up to army discipline. He is taught to stand erect and to keep step with his fellows, and in his heart there is built up a steadfast devotion to his father- land. Whether men believe in the army or not, whether they care for military discipline or not, to the army they must go and to military discipline they must submit. In this country we have a standing army, but our soldiers are armed, not with bayonets but with ballots, little pieces of paper. These are placed in every hand, and by the use of these bits of paper the glory of the country is augmented or tarnished. But no one is compelled to use his bit of paper ; he is free. And because we Americans are not compelled to vote, thousands of us have been negligent in the performance of one of the most sacred duties which the Lord God go LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES has placed upon us. The doctor has too fre- quently on election day attended to his patients and forgotten to vote, the lawyer has gone on pleading his cases, the merchant has gone on sell- ing his goods, the bookkeeper has gone on count- ing up his figures, the mechanic has gone on with his work of building — while the interests of the city were left neglected and the destiny of the nation placed in peril. Brethren, you have been called unto liberty, only use not your liberty for an occasion to the flesh. We have a free church. In many European countries religious life is bound. The life of society is gathered up into the hands of religious teachers and shepherds. Men are told what they may read and what they must think. Days are established on which they must fast. In the con- fessional they are obliged to pour into the ears of their pastors the inmost secrets of their hearts. Thousands of men and women thus brought up have crossed the sea and landed on our shores. On arriving here they heard it said that under our flag every man is as good as every other man. They read it in the papers that every man must do his own thinking and stand on his own feet and answer to God and to God only for his thoughts and his deeds. They heard church authority de- rided and religious leaders pooh-poohed. And tak- ing all things into their own hands they began to do as they pleased. LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 91 In every American city there are thousands and tens of thousands of men and women brought up under the church discipHne of other lands, who have drifted completely away from their church and are living without God and without hope in the world. The superficial observer looking on this great crowd of the godless says, " Ah, there is Roman Catholicism for you ! " You are mistaken, my friend, that is not Roman Catholicism, that is the first effect of liberty upon people not prepared for it. In the fullness of time they were called to liberty, but when the external framework by which they had been bound was taken away, they had not sufficient strength of character within to sus- tain them, and so their liberty became an occasion for the flesh. Unprotected by the safeguards to which they had been accustomed, they were swept into divers kinds of folly and madness by the hurricanes which sweep across this land of the free. The Roman Catholic church has no more serious problem on its hands than to catch the ear once more of the men and women who were reared within its fold, and who under the influence of our American atmosphere have drifted away from church influences altogether. Let me say a word to those who have recently come into our city. A city is the home of liberty. New York City is the freest place in all the land. You have greater liberty on this little island of Man- hattan, where every square mile has its eighty-seven 92 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES thousand people, than you could possibly have in the middle of the Sahara Desert, for you can do a thousand things in this city which are impossible in the sand. And what a delightful thing liberty is, especially after one has felt for years the bond- age of a little city or a narrow rural town. In a little town one cannot dress as he pleases. It is unsafe to think, there, outside the routine chan- nels. There are always spies looking out for every false step and for every one who dares to go contrary to established customs. The espionage of a town is galling and exasperating beyond ex- pression. But in the city people are too busy to look into one another's affairs. One can dress as he pleases, think what he likes, go where he will, and the big city is neither alarmed nor amused. In the city man is free. But how difficult it is to use this freedom ! Only a few are strong enough to do it. In a little town a man is held up largely by his neighbors. He votes because the voting list is short, he becomes a member of the church because the church is needy, he works in the Sun- day school because teachers are few. He dares not be anything else than what he ought to be, or do anything else than what he ought to do, because held in the grip of hundreds of pairs of eyes in the heads of those who know him. But when that man or woman comes into the city, there are no eyes upon him save the eyes of God alone. Men can LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 93 save us in the country ; only God can save us in the city. Every Christian who comes to New York City to make this his home comes to judgment. Not until he arrives here does he really know what he actually is. Here his life will be determined, not by restraint from without but by constraint from within. And if there be no internal constraint, New York is a dangerous place to be. The number of professing Christians who make shipwreck of their religious life in this great city is something appall- ing. In the town they joined the church. Some- body asked them to do it and so they did it. They supposed they did it because they wished to be the true disciples of the Lord. But now they are in New York City, and they do not identify themselves with the church. They neglect it. They turn their back upon it. They shun its services. They refuse to help bear its burdens. No love of Christ constrains them to do what he would have them do. It is evident that their Christian life in their former home was only a hollow sham. In the old home church they were teachers in the Sunday school or workers in the missionary soci- ety. They heard the call : Go into my vineyard — and with alacrity obeyed it. In their ignorance they supposed that they were led by the Spirit of God and were working in order to please him ; and now they are in New York City, but they are doing no church work whatever. They teach in no Sunday 94 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES school, their names are to be found on the book of no religious organization, they are constrained to do no Christian service, because the love of Christ is not in their heart. In the old church home they were led to work for divers reasons and from vari- ous motives, but their working was not Christian, it was not offered as a sacrifice to God. In the life of this great city the hollowness and mockery of much that has passed for rehgion in smaller places is made evident to the eyes of men. But I imagine I hear some one saying : " Oh, I am not needed. I worked in the old home church because I was needed there. But certainly New York churches need no assistance from such a humble Christian as I am." Who told you that you were not needed.? If you have heard such an assertion, you must have heard it from the devil, for it sounds like one of his lies. Not needed in New York ! You do not mean it ! You have said it without thinking ! Not needed in a city which is a vast Pool of Bethesda, where the porches are full of sick and impotent folk, men and women who have come here in search of health and have not found it, who have come seeking fortune and have missed it, who have come dreaming of fame and have failed to obtain it ! On every hand there are the discouraged, the disappointed, the lonely and the forlorn — and you dare hold up your head and say that in such a place, at such a time, you are not needed ? You are in the midst of LIBERTY -DANGERS AND DUTIES 95 a great mass of human beings created in God's im- age, hungry for the consolation of the gospel, and you, a professing Christian, won't help ! You forget what New York is. It is the me- tropolis of the new world, where fashions are molded which will dominate the lives of millions of our fellow-countrymen, a city in which standards are fixed by which thought and conduct shall be bound in many a section of the land, a city in which every year fifteen thousand students are educated to go out to become leaders of society from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the arbiters of the destiny of communities and commonwealths, and it may be nations. And in a city where it is so important that the atmosphere should be warm with the breath of Christ, and where it is so necessary that standards should be high, and that tone should be true, you hold up your head and say that you, a Christian man, a Christian woman, are not needed in New York ! Brethren, you have been called unto liberty, only do not abuse your liberty. You wrong yourself when you do it. You injure your own soul. For your own salva- tion I urge you to throw yourself into the life of the church and to abound in the works of the Lord. We say that Manhattan is an island, and so it is, as geographers count islands, but in another sense Manhattan is a river, a great, swift river on whose bosom there float two million barks, in God's eyes 96 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES immortal souls. The river is filled with eddies, and here and there are dangerous currents, and in whatever direction we turn our eyes we see men and women going down. Young men who came to this city bright eyed and lofty minded, with the perfume of their mother's prayers still hanging round them, are going down. Young women who came to the city to earn a living, with hearts as pure as the heart of the Madonna, are going down. Men in middle life who suc- ceeded in withstanding the temptations of youth are unable to stand the strain which the city puts upon them, and in the maturity of their powers they are going down. Aged men almost within sight of the eternal harbor, they too are going down. All around you, men and women, God's children, your brothers and sisters, are going to destruction, and you, a professing Christian, won't help them, and say that you are not needed ! My friend, Manhattan is more than a river ; it is a whirlpool. The current sweeps round and round with an ever accelerating swirl, and human beings, unless their lives are hid with Christ in God, are sucked in and down and lost forever. Manhattan is a sea across which the winds are always blowing, and the waves are always rough. If you in the exercise of your freedom have not fallen into the habit of despising the counsel of all religious teachers, please hsten to me when I tell you that on this sea it is impossible for a LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 97 Christian to walk unless he holds the Master's hand ! Let us now complete St. Paul's sentence. "Brethren, you have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but through love be servants one to another." Does he say servant .-' That is the word. Do ser- vants and liberty go together ? Most assuredly they do. There is no liberty in this world aside from servantship. Only those who are bound are free. This is one of the paradoxes of the gospel. If you would be free you must take the yoke. Stand fast in the liberty, brethren, wherewith Christ has set us free. Revere it. Fight for it. Keep it. Only do not use it for an occasion to the flesh. Look constantly unto Jesus, who was the freest man who ever walked our earth, and yet who walked it always as a slave. When only a boy he learned to pronounce that hard word " must." " I must be about my Father's business." Later on, a young man, he said : " I must work the works of him that sent me." Still later he de- clared : " I must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things, I must be crucified, I must rise again." And so he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusa- lem, and as he went he said : " I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened until it be accomplished." Always free he was, but yet always bound, bound by the life of God within him. " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God." Unto 98 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES his disciples he could say : " I do always those things that are pleasing unto him." Would you be free ? Then listen to his exhortation : " Take my yoke upon you and learn of me." " If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." V THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, April 17, 1904. THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD " I girded thee, though thou hast not known me." — Isa. xlv. 5. " I girded thee, though hast not known me." God is the speaker, and Cyrus, king of Persia, is the person spoken to. Cyrus is the greatest man in the sixth century before the Christian era, one of the greatest of all the men who have figured in human history. Xenophon makes him the ideal prince of the ancient world. His career of con- quest has been unbroken and glorious. He has conquered Media and added it to his kingdom. He has taken Lydia with all her wealth and made her his own. Great Babylon has fallen before his irresistible arms, and now God is calling him to a service greater still, the liberation of the Hebrews. They are to be sent back to Jerusalem. The tem- ple is to be rebuilt. The fire is to be rekindled on the altar. The sacred utensils which Nebuchad- nezzar stole are to be restored to their former uses. For this work of emancipation Cyrus is raised up. He is God's anointed ; he is God's shepherd. To him God gives assurance of support and victory, 102 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD saying: "I have wooed thee, though thou hast not known me : I have girded thee, though thou dost not know me." Strange language this for a Hebrew prophet to put into the mouth of God ! Cyrus is not a Jew. He is a Gentile. He has no part in the covenant made by God with the chosen people. He is not a monotheist. He is a polytheist and reverences Merodach and all the other Babylonian gods. And yet to this heathen polytheist God is repre- sented as saying : " Thy right hand I have holden. I have even called thee by thy name. I girded thee, though thou hast not known me. " Surely this is a great prophet. He has grasped the truth that God endows men with wisdom and grace and power though the men themselves may be igno- rant of the source whence come their gifts, and that he uses men for the carrying out of his vast plans, though these men do not know the end for which they were born, or for what purpose they came into the world. The unknown God in spir- itual life — that is our theme this morning. The physiologists tell us that in the body there are two forms of life, the conscious and the uncon- scious. There are two nervous systems, the cere- brospinal and the sympathetic. A large part of our hfe is carried forward without any volition on our part and even without our knowledge. The heart beats day and night without waiting for our orders. The lungs expand and contract on their THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 103 own initiative and impulse. The processes of di- gestion are carried forward from stage to stage without our attention or direction. The founda- tion movements of our life are conducted below the level of our conscious thought, and on this un- conscious Hfe are built the activities of the life we know. The activities which lie beyond the reach of will and even outside the realm of conscious life are more essential to our welfare than the activities which have been placed within our knowledge and control. The psychologists are telling us that the soul, like the body, has its unconscious life. A large part of personality is as yet submerged. The greater part of us never comes into the field of consciousness. What personality is we shall never know until death has let Hfe out to its com- pletion. There are subliminal regions, dark and mysterious, filled with forces which weave tjie tex- ture of our life. Out of these abysmal depths come our intuitions, convictions not born of the reason and yet able to sway and to mold our lives. Up from these depths feelings now and again surge, feelings for which reason can find no satisfactory explanation, and yet which con- stitute a " heat of inward evidence " which com- pels us to doubt against the sense. There are forces outside our conscious self that bring re- demption. The heart has reasons which the Rea- son cannot understand. The sources of our spir- 104 ^-^^ UNRECOGNIZED GOD itual life lie in a region which cannot be explored. It would seem that down below the level of con- scious thought God feeds the springs of feeling and carries on the processes of spiritual recon- struction. In him we live and move and have our being, and he does for us constantly more than we ask or think. He girds us, though we do not know him. This throws light upon experiences which often perplex us. Life is filled with surprises. We find ourselves doing things we never imagined we could do, enduring things which we were sure would completely crush us, overcoming difficulties which we had no strength to meet. We are surprised at ourself. People say, " I don't know how I did it! " "I can't see how I lived through it." "That I am alive to-day is to me a mystery ! " We meas- ure our resources and then in imagination call up some awful calamity whose coming would blot the sun from heaven and make life unendurable, and then on some terrible day the dreaded calamity arrives, and, strange to say, we do not die ; we are borne up by forces of whose existence we were not aware, and in spite of our unspeakable mis- fortune we are by and by able to laugh, and even sing. We are perplexed, but not in despair ; cast down, but not destroyed. No visible hand from heaven is outstretched to hold us ; no angel comes in the hour of bloody sweat to sustain us, and yet we are sustained. He helps us, though we do not THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 105 see him ; he guides us, though we do not know him. Light is also thrown upon a phenomenon which has caused perplexity to many thoughtful minds, the appearance in heathen countries of truths and graces which were once supposed to be the exclu- sive possession of Christianity. There was a time when Christian men, in painting the pagan world, painted it black. There was not one sunbeam in all the terrible picture. The darkness was total. The degradation was complete. The religions of the people were a mass of error, fraud, and false- hood. But within fifty years the heathen world has been opened up to the eyes of Christendom. The sacred books of the East have been trans- lated into EngHsh. The study of comparative religion has gone forward until scholars know the contents and spirit of all the world's great faiths. Much that we formerly thought of heathendom has been found to be untrue. The darkness is great, but it is not total ; the degradation is ter- rible, but it is not complete. Outside of Christen- dom all is not midnight. The Christian rehgion is not the only religion which contains truth. There are in other literatures passages of poetry like unto the Hebrew psalms. There are in every country ethical maxims similar to some of those contained in the Sermon on the Mount. In every religion there are lofty sentiments, sublime con- ceptions, sound and wholesome moral precepts, I06 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD and among the followers of every great religious teacher there are saints who manifest many of the graces of the disciple whom Jesus loved. Frag- ments of Christianity are found everywhere. How are we to account for this } Some men have satisfied themselves by saying that these out- croppings of Christianity in pagan lands are acci- dental. Ethical coincidences have come about by chance. These beautiful sayings of pagan poets are happy hits, fortunate guesses, a play of heat lightning in a sullen sky. Others have claimed that every good thing in pagan lands is borrowed from the Jews. The truths in non-Christian reli- gions all had their home in Palestine. The truth flowing from the mouth of Prophet and Apostle fell upon the earth, made its way eastward through mysterious subterranean channels, and bubbled up in life-giving springs in the midst of heathendom. Or else it was carried from country to country by faithful missionaries whose names have been lost to history. But why contrive an explanation so cumbersome and difficult, when an easier one is far more reasonable } Why not go for an expla- nation to the first chapter of the fourth gospel.? "All things were made by him; without him was not anything made that was made. In him was Hfe ; and the life was the light of men. He was the true light which lighteth every man that Cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world THE VMRECOGmZED GOD 107 knew him not. He came unto his own and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." Put a great God over the world and in it, over man and in him, and you will be prepared to find truth everywhere, and Christian graces blooming in all the lands. It is because God is everywhere that there are pearls in all the seas, and stars in all the skies. Men had spiritual life before Jesus of Nazareth taught in Galilee. He taught that men might have life more abundantly. There was wine in all the goblets : he simply filled them to the brim. There were dreams of immortality in many a sensitive heart : he brought them to the light. Men tell us that part of our Bible came from Egypt, a part from Babylon, a part from Persia, and that much of it was not original with the Jews. What of it } If God girds men with wisdom and with strength, even though they misconceive his nature and his will, why should we not expect great empires hke Egypt and Babylon and Persia to make contributions to the religious text-book of the world } If there is a wideness in God's mercy like the wideness of the sea, we should expect it to wash the shores of all the world. When Confucius brings his common-sense, and Buddha his doctrine of self-abnegation, and Zo- roaster his conception of the conflict between good and evil, and Epictetus his teaching of humble sub- t08 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD mission, we need not say that these men have borrowed from the wise men of Palestine, but can easily believe that they have all sat at the feet of the invisible and omnipresent Christ; and if our ears be sensitive we can hear Christ saying : " I girded them although they did not know me." Since God is wise and also sovereign over all his works, we may feel assured that not one nation has ever walked with aimless feet, and that the moral achievements of no tribe or people will ever be destroyed or cast as rubbish to the void when God hath made his pile complete. There is another problem which perplexes many : How are we to account for so many good people outside the Christian church ? Each one of us has acquaintances and friends of whose moral integrity we are certain and whose Christian graces and virtues are many, and yet who are not pro- fessedly religious people. They do not read the Bible, so far as we know they do not pray, they do not partake of the Lord's Supper, and some of them do not even attend public worship. Some of them do not believe in Christ in any such sense as the church desires that men should believe in him ; and yet, strange to say, many of these persons are undoubtedly good, honest, kind, generous, and self- sacrificing, and a few of them are far superior in moral worth and spiritual attainment to many of the members of the church. How can we account for this } The easiest thing THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 109 to do is to deny that such persons are good. We may say that their virtues are only so much dead morality, that their graces are nothing more than the product of training in pohteness, and that how- ever decorous in deportment, they lack the Spirit of God in their hearts and are therefore dead in sin, even when they seem to be alive. This was once the favorite method of deahng with the outside saints, but it is a method which has long since been discarded. Christians are no longer willing to deny indisputable and conspicuous facts. A flower is still a flower even though it blossoms all alone in the depths of the vast forest or grows amidst the weeds beside the dusty road. It will not do to say that a flower is not a flower because it is not grow- ing in our garden. God delights in producing lovely things in the most unexpected and surpris- ing places, and when we get our eyes upon them it is not for us to deny that they exist. Honesty is honesty, and kindness is kindness, and purity is purity, and generosity is generosity, and self-sacrifice is self-sacrifice, no matter where you find them ; and instead of weaving arguments by which to prove that apparent virtue must be something else, let us thank God for every evi- dence of his presence, no matter when or where the evidence is presented. Moreover, it is a haz- ardous thing to say that a man is not good because he does not fit into our program. That was the fearful blunder made by the Pharisees in dealing no THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD with Christ. They had a narrow inclosure all finely hedged in with rules and regulations inside of which every man acceptable to God was sure to be found. They had a schedule of pious actions which every genuine saint was expected to follow. Jesus came, and the first thing He did was to step over the hedge. He would not stay inside. He refused to follow the schedule. The Pharisees were shocked, alarmed, enraged. Jesus seemed to be a good man, at least He spoke gracious words and performed gentle deeds, but He would not stay inside the inclosure ! He had a beautiful spirit and lived a beautiful life, but He would not follow the program ! And so the Pharisees began to suspect Him. They doubted His goodness. They tried to get Him back inside the hedge. When He refused to go they were sure He was bad. His beautiful hfe counted for noth- ing. They began to jeer at Him. He went about doing good, but they hated Him. " He is a glut- ton and a wine-bibber," they sneered, "a friend of publicans and sinners," which, being interpreted, meant " Birds of a feather flock together." Later on some one ventured to suggest that He had a devil in Him, and the final conclusion was, after He had lived for years a life without a flaw and without a stain, that He was in league with the monarch of the infernal world. Think of that! Absolute goodness, perfect wisdom, supreme kind- ness, immeasurable self-sacrifice, all ascribed to THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD ill the devil, and for no other reason than that Jesus did not fit into the church program, and refused to stay inside of the ecclesiastical inclosure. May God save us from committing so heinous a sin ! What shall we say then ? Shall we say that re- ligion is unnecessary and that the church can be dispensed with and that it makes slight difference whether a man believes in Christ or not ? Some have said just that, but in this they have greatly erred. It is not difficult to account for all the goodness which exists outside the Christian church if we bear in mind certain facts. First of all, let us remember that there is such a thing as heredity. Every man is in part the product of the past. What he is depends in a measure on what his an- cestors have been. Now, wherever in a Christian country you find a person with a beautiful face, and by a beautiful face I mean a face in which there are spiritual lines, and with a life which is fra- grant with Christian graces, if you will take up the history of that man or woman and trace it back to the earlier chapters, you will come sooner or later upon a Christian — a Christian father or mother, or grandfather or grandmother, or great grandfather or mother, some true saint of God who loved the place of prayer and who spoke the name of Jesus with reverence and love. This saint held in check his impulses, subdued his lawless inclinations, bridled his appetites and passions, brought his life into beautiful submission to the law of heaven, and 112 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD just as the iniquities of the fathers are visited on the children down to the third and fourth genera- tions, so also are the virtues and graces, and many a man has on him to-day the mark of Christ, al- though he takes no interest in the Bible and is never seen in the house of God. Of such a man God says, " I girded him, although he does not know me." Moreover, environment is a factor in every hu- man life. No man can live isolated or in a vacu- um. We are all modified by our surroundings. The fiber of our being is in part determined by the atmosphere we breathe. It is not necessary for a man to read the Bible, to get the Bible, nor to pray in order to get some of the effects of prayer, nor to go to church in order to receive the aroma of the gospel. The church floods the world with light. This hght falls on the reflecting surfaces of Chris- tian institutions, and is thrown into the eyes and lives of men who imagine themselves independent of Christianity ; it falls on the pages of magazine and book and is reflected into the hearts of thou- sands who never hear a preacher preach ; it falls on every side of our complex civilization as on the myriad facets of a gem, and the whole atmosphere is so saturated with the glory of the Eternal Son of God that every eye is a partaker of that glory and every heart illuminated by a light which can- not be escaped. Suppose that a rose in a foolish moment should THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 113 say: " I will have nothing to do with the sun. I do not like him. I will not reverence him. I will not even turn my face his way." And so all in a pet the Httle flower turns its face toward the dull and unresponsive earth to escape the influences of the sun which it is determined to despise. But the great sun, sorry that a flower should be so foolish, carries on his ministries of love. The air, with the warm kisses of the sun upon it, steals down under the petals of the rose, wooing them to fuller form and brighter color ; the sunlight, f aUing now on this object and now on that, is reflected into the downcast countenance of the drooping flower; and the industrious sun, the steadfast friend of all flowers, both wise and foolish, keeps right on pumping water from the sea and sends it in gentle showers upon the land, the rain- drops trickling down through the sullen earth until they find the rootlets of the rosebush, and then mount upward through stalk and stem, until in the tips of the petals the water becomes the red blood of the rose ! And over the rose the great good- natured sun keeps saying, " I girded you, although you did not know me." When a man turns his back upon the Sun of Righteousness and says, I will not look at Him nor beheve in Him, nor pray to Him, nor praise Him, will the great Sun cease His shining, will He cut off the foolish man and allow him to fade and perish .? Not so have we learned of Christ. Our 114 IHE UNRECOGNIZED GOD God is a God who causes His sun to shine on the evil as well as on the good ; He sends the rain on the just and the unjust also. No matter how deter- minedly a man endeavors to escape the power and love of Christ, he fails completely in the end. For the compassionate Son of God floods the world with light, pours all round the man a sea of glory, steals into his heart through the love of wife, of child, of friend, glides into his soul through picture, song, and printed page, and as the man grows in the elements of manhood, if he could only hear what Christ is saying, he would catch these words : " I am girding you, although you do not know me ! " Let no man think that because he has cast off God therefore God has let him go. He works with us and deals with us most wondrously even when we are least conscious of His pres- " Whither shall I go from Thy spirit Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there : If I make my bed in hell, behold Thou are there. If I take the wings of the morning And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there shall Thy hand lead me, And Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say surely the darkness shall cover me ; Even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee ; But the night shineth as the day ; The darkness and the light are both alike to Thee. THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD II5 We do injustice to the ways of God unless we remember that He is our Father, and not only our Father, but the Father of all. He is working in Christendom and outside of Christendom, in the church and outside of it, in Christians and in those who are not Christians, in those who pray and in those who never pray. We sometimes speak of the means of grace, meaning prayer and Bible study, the Lord's Supper and church attendance. Rather a meager list of means of grace for a God so great and a world so needy ! Why not go on and name other means of grace: fatherhood, motherhood, friendship, literature, art, music, business, work, suffering, — all these are channels through which the good God comes to men. God does not confine His work with human souls to Sunday. He works with us straight through every day of every week. In every experience He is present, endeavoring to enlarge our heart. And what He does with us He is doing, so far as human wills will let Him, with all men every- where. He is a Saviour, and He goes forth to seek and to save those who are lost. He does not con- fine Himself to church members. He mingles with the publicans and sinners. If He were working only inside the church, then well might we despair; but because He is working everywhere, sovereign of all the forces which are or are to be, we can hold up our heads in hope, knowing that at last every knee shall bow. He goes everywhere. Il6 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD convincing men of their sins. When a girl takes her first step downward her cheeks burn with shame. Why ? Because the eyes of Christ are on her. It is His gaze which causes the burning in the cheek. The cheek would never burn if there were no God. The young man who surrenders to his lower self feels an awful sense of degradation. This is because Christ has condemned him. There would be no remorse if there were no God. The business man who stoops to do a mean or dishonest thing has planted a thorn in his mem- ory which pricks him and causes him to bleed. This, too, is nothing but the condemnation of the Lord. And if God is present in every soul to chide and warn and rebuke, so He is present in every soul to soothe and cheer and bless. Before every man, high and low, rich and poor, saint and sinner, Christ is standing, saying : " Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and will open the door, I will come in." No one makes a right choice without receiving the blessing of heaven ; no one takes a step upward without a " well done " from the lips of the King. Along the avenues and the alleys, in the garrets and cellars, in the mansions and slums, the un- sleeping God is at work ministering to men and relieving them in the midst of their distresses. Poor tired women, who do all their work and all their sewing, and bear the burdens and anxieties which children bring, and who, because of house- THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 117 hold cares, never go to church and never hear an anthem and never sing a hymn, are not forsaken by Him. They grow in grace, learning patience and tenderness and self-sacrifice all the time. They may not be familiar with pious phrases, they may know little of Isaiah or even of St. John, but God is with them, and at the last great day many of them will be found at His right hand. A poor woman in a miserable tenement, who makes a bed in a corner of her shabby room for some poor wretched creature poorer than herself, has a strange glow in her wearied heart which is nothing less than the voice of Christ saying, " My peace be unto thee." Such a woman may with surprise say in the other world, " When saw I thee } " There is nothing more interesting, I think, in the New Testament than its account of people who were surprised. The woman at Jacob's well talked with Jesus and did not know that she talked with the Messiah. He helped her, and her heart burned within her before she knew Him. On the morn- ing of the resurrection Jesus met Mary, but she did not know Him. In the afternoon two sad-hearted men walked with Jesus from Jerusalem to Em- maus, and though their hearts kindled and glowed as He talked, they did not know Him. The blind man, blind from his birth, whose eyes Jesus opened, did not know Him even when he looked into His face. To the question of Jesus, " Dost thou be- lieve on the Son of God.^"' the pathetic answer Il8 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD came, " Who is He, Lord, that I might believe on Him ? " Many a sad-hearted man on his way to Emmaus feels his heart burn within him and finds life becoming tolerable again who does not realize that he is in the presence of the Son of God, and many a man whose eyes have been opened to spiritual values, and who sees that only the things which are invisible and eternal are of worth and beauty, does not know the name of Him by whom his blindness has been changed to sight. Christ girds men constantly who do not know Him, Ages ago the sun built up mighty forests on our earth, which forests, moldering down, became buried deep and were transformed gradually into beds of coal. We dig it out and cut it up and throw it into the grate, all black and cheerless ; it does not look like sunshine. But once kindled, its ancient memories are revived, and it burns and glows and lights up all the room, exerting a witchery over the heart, which causes it to dream of sunny days of yore or golden ages yet to come. While seated before the blazing grate we do not think of the sun ; but the coal fire is nothing but sunbeams let out of prison, and if we had ears to hear we should hear the old sun saying, " I am girding you, although you do not know me." Mrs. Browning, in her greatest poem, says that earth is crammed with heaven, and that every common bush is aflame with God. If that be true of bushes, much truer is it of men. Souls are THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 119 crammed with heaven, and every loving heart is afire with God. God has deposited His love in human beings, in lover, maiden, wife, mother, friend, and their love warms us, thrills us, cheers and charms us, lights up with glory this old drab world until it ghstens Hke a palace, and Hf e becomes so supremely blessed we wish we might live here forever. We call it human love, forgetting that all love comes out of the sky. Had we ears to hear, we should hear Christ saying, " I am loving you, although you do not know me." " We may not climb the heavenly steeps To bring the Lord Christ down ; In vain we search the lowest deeps, For Him no depths can drown. " But warm, sweet, tender, even yet A present help is He ; And faith has yet its Olivet, And love its Galilee. " The healing of the seamless dress Is by our beds of pain ; We touch Him in life's throng and press, And we are whole again. " O Lord and Master of us all, Whate'er our name or sign, We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, We test our lives by Thine." VI THE MAN OF THE SEA Delivered at the Seventy-third Anniversary of the American Seamen's Friend Society, Broadway Tabernacle, New York, May 5, 1901. VI THE MAN OF THE SEA ''Lord, save me." — Matt. xiv. 30. It was the cry of a man upon the water. It was night. The wind was boisterous and the sea was rough. The man was about to be over- whelmed. There was deliverance from one quar- ter only. It was a cry of mingled hope and despair which rose above the moaning of the wind, " Lord, save me ! " This episode in the life of Peter, described so graphically by St. Matthew, is the picture of a continuous experience which unfolds itself in the spiritual life of the race. The storm described by Matthew has long since died away, the voice of the man who uttered the cry has long been still, all who were then alive have passed into the eternal silence, but the experience of that night is not an- cient history never to be lived again ; it is a story repeated over and over again even unto this pres- ent hour. Names and forms are changing always, but the spiritual experiences of our humanity run on unchanged down the widening generations. And so this morning there is still a storm upon the 123 124 THE MAN OF THE SEA sea. A man is walking there. The man is in danger of being overwhelmed. If we have ears to hear, we can hear a cry coming across the water, " Lord, save me ! " The sea is no longer the little lake of Galilee. It is the ocean. The man is not Simon Peter. He is the modern sailor. A sailor is a man who walks upon the water. When I say walk, I use the word in the ordinary Bibhcal sense. In the Scriptures to walk usually means to live. That is the sense in which the prophets always used it, and our Lord fell into the habit of their speech. " I must walk to-day and to-morrow and the day following," " He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life." The apostles all spoke as Jesus did. Listen to Paul : " Let us walk honestly as in the day," " We walk by faith, not sight," " Let us walk in the Spirit," " I beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation where- with ye are called," " See that ye walk circum- spectly." And the beloved disciple reminds us that we ought to walk even as Jesus walked. " I have no greater joy," he said to his converts, " than to hear that my children walk in truth." If to walk, then, means to live, a sailor walks upon the sea. He walks there by the command of God. An ever increasing number of men are living on the sea. Already the ocean population numbers three million souls, a nation as large as the American Republic when it first unfurled its flag. And what THE MAN OF THE SEA 125 a curious nation this oceanic nation is. It is a nation of men. It is made up of men gathered from almost every country under heaven. They pass from land to land, from port to port, and have no fixed abiding place. Thousands of them have no regard for the Supreme Ruler of the world, but they are nevertheless servants of His will. They are on the ocean by God's commandment. It is God's desire that all the nations should come close together, that the various races should be depend- ent one upon another, that communication be- tween the continents should be swift and constant, that all good things should be interchanged, and all men everywhere should be woven together into a vast brotherhood working out in divers forms the manifold purposes of heaven. These men upon the sea are the servants of the Most High. Without them humanity cannot real- ize its highest ends. It is they who are draw- ing the continents together, and reducing the planet to a city in whose markets the products of the world are bought and sold. That man upon the water is one of the chief characters in modern history. Blot him out, let him sink, and you change not only the map of the world, but you change the texture of its civilization. He is an Atlas on whose shoulders Empires and Repub- lics are carried. He is the minister of humanity, the servant of God. When you build your pedes- tals on which to place the statues of the men who 126 THE MAN OF THE SEA have created the modern world, you must not for- get to build one for the statue of the man of the sea. That man is in danger. It is night upon the sea. There are no churches there, no school- houses, no art galleries, no splendid bodies of scholars or of saints to shine like beacon lights making clear the path to heaven. It is midnight upon the ocean. The winds are blowing — wild, furious, dangerous winds from the caves of de- mons, winds that can wreck a soul. The sea is rough, and seems to have no pity in it. Teased into fury by the storm, it rages like a beast that is mad. And this man has only the treacherous sea under him and the blast of the wind in his face. What is he to do ? God has commanded him to walk upon the water. But he cannot do it success- fully alone. " Lord, save me! " that is the cry that comes up from the man on the sea. I do not say that that is the cry which he utters. There is a difference between the cry of a man's lips and the cry of a man's soul. With his lips he cries for what he wants, with his soul he cries for what he needs. When Saul of Tarsus reached the western edge of Asia he lay down to sleep one night with the murmur of the yEgean Sea in his ears. In his sleep he dreamed, and in his dream he saw a man, a European, with great hungry eyes looking at him. All through the night Paul heard the man calling. His constant cry was, " Come over, come over, and help us." THE MAN OF THE SEA 127 When the morning dawned, Paul and his com- panions crossed to Europe, but they did not find the man whom Paul had heard in his dream. They stopped at NeapoHs, but the man was not there. They went on to Philippi, and the man was not there. On the Sabbath day they went out of the city down to the place of prayer on the bank of the river, but the man was not there. Only a hand- ful of women heard the first Christian sermon ever preached on the continent of Europe. To the end of his life Paul never found that Macedonian whose cry had disturbed his slumbers. Who then was that man ? What was the cry which sounded in Paul's ears } It was not the articulate utterance of any particular individual. It was the deep unuttered cry of Europe. That man was the soul of the great Western world. Paul had brooded over the needs of the continent whose representatives had come to Jerusalem asking to see Jesus, and when he fell asleep the needy soul of that continent stood up in the form of a man, pleading as only a soul can plead, " Come over, come over, and help us." And so when I ask you this morning to listen for a cry coming in from the sea, " Lord, save me ! " I do not mean that any particular sailor is calling upon Christ for deliverance. If you should go to any particular man and begin to talk to him about Jesus he might turn his back on you, or pos- sibly curse you. He might snatch from your lips 128 THE MAN OF THE SEA the name of Christ and use it to fill out his blas- phemous utterances, but even while his lips kept repudiating the Son of God his soul would still cry, " Lord, save me ! " It is not the conscious want but the unconscious need which pleads trumpet- tongued with God and which ought to thunder in our ears with tones that will not let us sleep. Not what the sailor asks but what he needs; this is the cry which God listens to and which I would have you hear this morning. First, think of the need of the sailor. Think of the life he lives. Think of his privations and sacrifices. He must practically give up his home. The average sailor has no home. What would we be without our home ? It is the home atmosphere which sweetens us, the home influences which hold us, the home voices which call us to true and noble living. Lord, save me — that is the only possible salvation for a man deprived of his home. But the sailor is taken away from the church. For months and even for years he may not be able to enter the sanctuary. He hears no prayers, no spiritual songs, no Bible reading, no sermons. Put yourself in his place. Imagine yourself deprived of all the public means of grace, not a song or a prayer or a sermon, not a word of Christian cheer or inspiration for long months, what would you be } Many of us who bathe ourselves in the re- deeming atmosphere of God's house every Lord's day find it difficult to keep ourselves unspotted THE MAN OF THE SEA 129 from the world. With spiritual songs ringing in our ears, with the touch of prayer upon our spirit, with exhortations and appeals dropping constantly into our heart, we often find ourselves beginning to sink. On the land our cry is. Lord, save us! Do you wonder that sailors sink and that so many of them go down forever.? We can choose our companions. The land is broad and men are many and we can generally associate with whom we will. But a ship is a tiny world and men are huddled together in narrow quarters. A man, even if dis- posed to be true and pure, may be obliged to live close to those whose mouths are profane and whose hearts are unclean. We can hold one another up, by prayer and conversation, by co- operation in noble work ; but the sailor has none of our privileges and scarcely any of our helps. " Lord, save me ! " Out of the heavens must come the strong hand which delivers. Think of his hardships. No other man has more. Think of the bed he sleeps in. Think of the air he breathes, except when he is on deck. Think of the food he eats. Think of the absence of not only all the luxuries, but also all the com- forts of life. A popular novelist, for many years a sailor, has recently asserted that no mechanic in England would endure for even a week the priva- tion, the monotony, and the actual hardships to which men are subjected who live before the mast. No wonder the average seaman dies under 130 THE MAN OF THE SEA thirty, and that the average life of service on the sea is only twelve years. Dr. Johnson once de- scribed a sailor's life as perpetual imprisonment with a chance of being drowned. It has become a proverb that there is no hell for the sailor. He has his hell this side the grave. Think of his work ! It is monotonous drudgery. Much of it is done in the midst of great danger, most of it at great discomfort. Burned by the heat in summer, frozen by the blasts in winter, beaten and battered by the storms, poor man, he is often a complete wreck before he has lived even half the allotted threescore years and ten. For ten years of my life I preached to sailors once every month in a Marine Hospital in Massa- chusetts. My congregation was different every time, but it always presented the same dilapidated, wretched, pathetic appearance. My hearers looked as though they had escaped from a great battle. Some had broken arms, some broken legs, some great gashes in their head, some lacerated and mangled faces, some frozen hands and feet. Poor battered wretches with the life almost pounded out of them, they would hobble into the chapel with canes and on crutches, bandaged and tied up and plastered over, in order to hear me preach, and their rough weather-beaten faces appealed to me as no other faces ever have. My heart went out to them in their loneliness and distresses, and goes out to them still, and to all their fellows on the sea. THE MAN OF THE SEA 131 So great a liking for them grew up in my heart that nothing gives me greater pleasure than to be permitted to say a word to increase the interest of Christian people in what I believe to be almost the most neglected of all God's children. I do not mean to say they are neglected alto- gether. Thanks be unto God, Christian men and women in increasing numbers are giving thought and love to these men, but for centuries the neg- lect was well-nigh universal, and the attention they now receive is small compared with what it ought to be. It was not till 1812 that in Boston the first society ever organized in this world for the reHgious care of seamen was started. It was not till 1820 that there was erected on Roosevelt Street, in this city, the first Mariners' Church ever built. From that day to this the work for seamen has been expanding, but they are still among the most neglected of all the sons of men. What a slight figure they cut in the thought even of those of us who are most interested in the world's re- demption. How seldom we pray for them, how little we do for them. Outside of a little company of their faithful friends, who is interested in a sailor.!" The politician cares nothing for him. If a man has a vote, no matter how poor and de- graded he may be, he will be looked up in his cellar or attic, and at least once every year he will be made to feel that he is a man and counts one in the great host of American citizens. 132 THE MAN OF THE SEA But a sailor has no vote. The politician pays no attention to him. He is ignored in all cam- paign literature as though he did not exist. Even the philanthropists are too busy with other people to give but hasty thought to the men who do busi- ness on great waters. They are careful of the httle children, and of the aged, and of the bhnd, and of the deaf and the dumb, and of the insane, and of the imbeciles, and of the criminals and of the prisoners, and even of the horses and cats and dogs, but the sailor they usually pass by on the other side. Rehgious workers in great armies are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, and visiting the sick, and showing hospitahty to the stranger, but except in rare cases, their thought and affection seem to stop when they come to the edge of the sea. Indeed, the bulk of Christian work stops several blocks this side of the edge of the water. Our neglect of the sailor on land is more surprising and wicked than our neglect of him when he is on the deep. A sailor is the inhabitant of two worlds — the world of water and the world of land — and we neglect him in both worlds. Although he is our guest we pay scant attention to him when he arrives at our doorstep. He reaches the city in the most desolate and degraded sections of it. Cities have a strange way of deteriorating as they approach the sea. There is usually a congestion of poverty and vice in the neighborhood of the THE MAN OF THE SEA 133 wharves. Misery and dissipation build their homes near the docks. Hunger and rags, drunkenness and lust, profanity and filth, these as a rule seize upon the sea border of a city, and the sailor who has been, it may be, in a hell on the sea because of the cruelty of officers or the brutishness of com- panions finds himself at once in the midst of a hell on the land. What a dangerous company of men and women stand on the shore to greet him on his arrival. The saloon keeper, the harlot, the black- leg, the land shark, the gambler, the thief are all there to take advantage of his credulity and to fan into flame his worst passions. Look at him falling into the clutches of that band of harpies ! He has escaped from the storm of the sea into a more furious storm on the land. As you see him pur- sued from street to street by that gang of devils determined to prey upon him, cannot you hear the piercing cry, " Lord, save me ! " And the climax of the tragedy lies in the fact that all this takes place at our gate. We dress in fine linen and fare sumptuously every day, while there is a man at our gate, not licked like Lazarus, but bitten by dogs. We respectable people crowd together in the center of the island, leaving a terrible fringe along each river which most of us never look into and would not venture to touch. Sailors are obHged to land in streets through which we are almost afraid to walk. Do you know that last year 4343 vessels came into our harbor, and that on board these vessels there were almost 550,000 men of the sea? Over a half million sea- men are our guests every year, and what sort of hospitality do we extend them ? When Paul and his companions were shipwrecked on the coast of Malta, St. Luke says that the people of that island showed them no little kindness, for they kindled a fire and received them every one, be- cause of the rain and because of the cold. What the people of Malta did for Paul and his fellow-voyagers we, Manhattan islanders, ought to do for the seamen who are cast up from day to day on our shore. We ought to kindle a fire and throw round these half million men the warmth and cheer of gracious hospitality. For a sailor when he comes ashore is chilled by the damp of the sea and what he most of all wants is warmth. He comes drenched by the mists, and any man who kindles a fire for him, though it be a fire of hell, can easily get into his heart. All along the edges of our city men and women have kindled fires in which the bodies and souls of seamen are consumed. The Church of God must put out these fires and kindle others which will illumine the mind and cheer the heart. We must bound Manhattan Island with a belt of holy fire. One of the first uses to which St. Paul put the fire which had been kindled by the people of Malta was to shake into its flames a deadly viper which had seized upon his hand. If we had holy fires all along our shores, THE MAN OF THE SEA 135 our sailor guests could shake into them the viper- ous sins which fasten themselves upon their souls. We Christians surely ought to come up to the level of the heathen of Malta : we ought to kindle a fire. God holds us responsible for these men. They are sailors ; but they are men. They have minds and hearts, hopes, affections, aspirations, and dreams. Every one of them is created in the image of God, and it is Christ's wish that every one of them should be with Him where He is and behold His glory. They are our servants. They are working for us. They minister to our physi- cal and social and commercial life. Our dinner is better, our homes are more comfortable, our libraries are larger, our merchants are richer, our life is sweeter and more complete, because of the labors and sacrifices of these toilers of the sea. Take out of this city every comfort and luxury, every decoration and treasure brought to us by the hands of a sailor, and the city would be impover- ished and ruined. We are the masters of these men, and to us the command has come, " Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal ; knowing that ye also have a master in heaven." Do we give to the men of the sea that which is just and equal } Have we been interested in legislation looking to the safeguarding of their rights .'' Has it pained us to know what wretched accommodations are provided for seamen even in these days of floating palaces ? " Just and equal ; " 136 THE MA AT OF THE SEA that is the way the commandment runs. What will Christ say to the rich church members of our day who cross the ocean again and again in ele- gance and luxury, without so much as a thought for the poor slaves by whose ill-paid labor ocean voyages are made possible ? They are more than our servants ; they are our brethren. We are members of the same family, children of the same Father, redeemed by the same Elder Brother, created for the same high and vast eternity. We are our brother's keeper. We can- not shake off our responsibility if we would. We are condemned if we pass by a man in need. Every man whom we can reach is our neighbor, and God brings a half million men into New York harbor every year that we may do them good. We may say our prayers and sing our songs, here at the center of the island, but if we pass by the seamen whom God brings daily and lays at our gate, our punishment will be as awful as that of Dives in flames. It is for these reasons that the American Sea- men's Friend Society ought to have a large place in the hearts of all Christian people. How many of us, I wonder, know about it and are interested in its work } Do you all know it was organized in 1828, twelve years before the Tabernacle, and that in seventy-three years of its career it has belted the globe with its influence .!* Do you know that it aids in the support of chaplains to seamen in THE MAN THE SEA 137 thirty-seven ports at home and abroad, that it has assisted in the building of Sailors' Homes in various parts of the world, that it founds and fosters port societies for the social entertainment and religious instruction of seamen, that it looks after sick and destitute sailors, and assists in the difficult work of securing for them their legal rights ? Have you ever seen its Home down in Cherry Street in this city, where temperance and religious meetings are held straight through the year, and where hun- dreds of sailors have found Him whom to know is life eternal ? Have you heard of the loan libraries which are sent out on American vessels leaving this port ? If you have not, you will be surprised to know that eleven thousand new libraries have been already shipped, and that counting shipments and reshipments, an average of two libraries for every working day has been sent to sea for forty- three years. Such a library costs only twenty dol- lars, and it will last for many years. One of the purposes of this sermon is to induce at least a dozen of you to invest, each one, in a Hbrary, that the influence of the Tabernacle which is now felt in so many lands may also be made manifest on all the seas. I cannot conceive of a more profitable invest- ment for Christian money in all the wide world. The time has come when the whole world is paying new attention to the sea. We speak of the Old World, meaning Europe, but in reality the old world is the ocean. It was made before the 13^ THE MAN OF THE SEA land, but it is the last world to be discovered. Men have now entered in earnest upon its con- quest. They are even making a map of the floor of the oceans. Having measured the depth of the valleys and the height of the mountains of the continents, they are now measuring the mountains and valleys of the seas. Only recently a work on Oceanography was brought out in England, consist- ing of fifty royal octavo volumes, aggregating nearly thirty thousand pages. The plant life and the ani- mal life of the water is being studied by scores of enthusiastic students, and the greatest conquests of science in the twentieth century will possibly be conquests of the sea. Men are finding strange things in the water. The other day some divers brought up from the bottom of the Mediterranean the fragments of some statues. The world was thrilled by the discovery of a few hands of bronze and a few marble busts fashioned by Athenian sculptors centuries ago. We shall some day make another discovery ; we shall bring up not a marble man from the ooze of the ocean bottom, but out of the darkness of the forecastle we shall bring up a man of flesh fashioned by the hands of the Infi- nite Artist. If the scholars can afford to give time and thought to a bronze hand of a lost statue, we Christians can afford to become enthusiastic over a sailor's soul. John, the beloved disciple, says he saw a mighty angel setting his right foot upon the sea. That THE MAN OF THE SEA 139 is what the world just now is doing. It is taking possession of the sea. One of our distinguished citizens has written a book in which he sets forth the influence of sea power in history. It is safe to say that its influence in the future will out-match its influence in the past. Our Repubhc is prepar- ing to walk upon the sea. God has spread an ocean outside our eastern and western windows, and on these oceans as well as on the land, this nation is to work out its destiny. On the water as on the land it must do its duty, and on board our ships as well as in our shops and factories there must be men true to the laws of righteous- ness. What means the creation of our navy, if we are not to walk upon the sea } What means the constant effort to expand our merchant marine, if God is not leading us to walk in more influential ways upon the waters? In one sense there will be in the future no more sea. No more sea in the sense of mystery, danger, barrier, separation, for the ocean shall become more and more a continent on which men shall pursue their pleasures and carry on their business. An increasing number of Americans are destined to walk upon the water. It is a fact of vast significance that the civiliza- tion of the twentieth century, like the angel in the Apocalypse, is putting its right foot upon the sea. If we are wise, therefore, we shall look after our seamen without delay. Thus far to many of us the sailor has been only an outcast and a vaga- I40 THE MAN OF THE SEA bond. He has been the publican of the modern world, the man passed as hopeless, to be classed with unreclaimable sinners. We have excommu- nicated him. We have regarded him as a heathen. But the Son of God seized upon the publican of Palestine, to the utter consternation of the reli- gious leaders, and made him a member of the apostolic band. There was a publican in the little company upon whose shoulders Jesus rolled the work of bringing the world back to God. The Christian religion will not allow us to think of any class of men as hopelessly degraded or finally ex- cluded. Jesus found redemptive forces in the very classes which the Jewish church had foolishly cast aside. The Christian church must use the sailor. More hopeful material the world does not afford. The man of the sea is young, and he is schooled in the experience of self-sacrifice. Many of us do not make good Christians because we are too fas- tidious and squeamish. Our life has made us soft and fussy. We have had too many cushions, too many servants, too much coddling. We lack the tone and fiber of genuine Christian soldiers. We make a great ado about trifles, and shirk duties that are hard. But the man of the sea is used to rough knocks. Hardship has made him tough and courageous. He has the very elements which Christ demands in those who serve Him. What stuff these men of the sea are made of ! We have not yet forgot- THE MAN OF THE SEA 14 1 ten how the stokers on the Oregon, when brought up half dead from the awful heat of their burning prison, as soon as they had partially recovered from their fainting condition begged to go back to their post again that they might do their part in bringing the great battleship on time into Cu- ban waters. Nothing was too severe for them to bear if only they could serve their country. Give men like that a love for Christ and they will bring this world to God. Supreme humility, per- fect self-denial, unflinching courage, glorious endur- ance, reminding one almost of Golgotha — these are the very virtues which the church is in need of, and all these she will find in beautiful abun- dance in the rough, tough-fibered, stout-hearted men of the sea. Once let a sailor be baptized with the Holy Spirit and you have another Simon Peter, a man of rock, on whose rugged strength the Christian church can build her hopes with no fear of disap- pointment. This is the man whom God has ordained to be the most efficient of all foreign missionaries. His work carries him to many cities and countries and gives him the command of many languages, and when he has the good news in his heart he tells it wherever he goes. This is the very man that the church needs to carry on her work. He will be the cheapest as well as the most effective of all mission workers. He will get his salary from the merchants and his eternal reward from the 142 THE MAN OF THE SEA King. Commerce is the servant of the Almighty, and the Son of God will use her more and more in the upbuilding of the church universal. Com- merce by employing Christian seamen will become the mightiest of all societies organized for foreign missionary work. When every ship that sails the sea has on board men baptized into the name of Christ, "Jesus shall reign where'er the sun Does his successive journeys run ; His kingdom stretch from shore to shore, Till moons shall wax and wane no more." Do not forget, then, the men of the sea. Pray for them without ceasing. Strengthen the arms of those who labor to give them the gospel. Never let a year go by without a contribution to the treasury of some Seamen's Friend Society. Remember that if Christ has ordered you to walk upon the land, He has ordered others to walk upon the sea. The man upon the sea is your ser- vant, your neighbor, your brother. When you look down the harbor what do you see .-' First of all the statue of Liberty enlightening the world. But what do you see beyond that } Can you not see the figure of a man outhned against the sky — the man of the sea.'' Listen, and perhaps you may hear a cry rolling across the water — " Lord, save me ! " To help that man get hold of the hand of Christ — that is one of the great works which God has given us to do. VII THE MAN AT BETHESDA Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Mi sionary Association, New London, Conn., October 23, 1902. 144 VII THE MAN AT BETHESDA " A certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years." — John v. 5. Thirty-eight years is a long time. It is a long time to any man. It is a longer time to a man who is sick. And to a sick man who has no friends, it is longer still. To the man at the pool of Bethesda time had become interminable. All days to him were alike : chill and drab and hope- less. Strange to say, no one had ever seen this man. For years he had lain at one of the prominent centers of Jerusalem. Men constantly passed the spot where he was lying, but no one ever saw him. Merchants and traders, vinedressers and shepherds, scholars and church officials, the keen-eyed men of their day and generation, came and went, but not one of them ever saw this man. This was be- cause every man was thinking of himself. One had bought a piece of ground, another had bought five yoke of oxen, another had married a wife, and so none of them had time to come to this man's assistance. And that is why they could not see 145 146 THE MAN AT BETHESDA him. We do not readily see a man who is likely to stop us when we are in a hurry. He was in- visible even to the crowd of invalids in the midst of whom he lay. His fellow-sufferers, as they hobbled or shuffled by him, did not see him, for their eyes were fixed upon the bubbling water which was to bring them swift relief. Sickness does not always open the heart and refine the spirit ; it may close the one and dull the other. Invalidism is a soil in which the flowers of paradise sometimes grow with marvelous luxuriance and celestial bloom, but just as often it is the soil in which flourish brambles and briers and all the poison weeds of an abnormal selfishness. The sick men at Jerusalem had organized their life around the principle which lay at the foundation of the civiHzation of their day. Every man for himself: that was their motto. And the reason why no invalid saw this hopeless cripple was be- cause he was at the rear end of the procession. Year after year the blind and the halt and the withered, like so many priests and Levites, passed by on the other side, and no good Samaritan ever came. It is not a pleasant picture, and yet we ought to look at it, for it gives us a bird's-eye view of the world which Jesus came to save. To the Hebrews God had sent prophets in a long succession, teach- ing them the ways of mercy, but the servants, one after another, had been killed, and the husband- THE MAN AT BETHESDA 147 men of the vineyard had refused to bring forth fruit. The episode at the pool of Bethesda is an awful commentary on the moral degradation of the Hebrew people. A sick man lies for years within the sight of water which he believes will heal him, and in all the great and pious city there is not one hand reached out for his relief. Day after day, week after week, month after month, the sacrifices and anthems and prayers of an elaborate worship went on in the temple, but not a man in all the priesthood seemed to know that there was a brother man a few yards away who had something against him. While the fire was kept burning on the temple altar, the fire of hope in a human heart, the divinest fire on earth, was left to flicker feebly and at last go out. The man at the end of the procession lay in darkness and the shadow of death. But in the fullness of time on a never-to-be- forgotten day, a man comes down to the pool of Bethesda who has a genius for seeing men. Run- ning His swift glance over the faces of the crowd. His eyes rest at last on the wan face of the man at the end of the procession. He looks at him, He comes toward him. He speaks to him, He asks him a question. The man pours out the dismal story of his woe, but before the last dark syllable has died on the air the man is on his feet — so swiftly has infinite mercy come to his relief. The story is significant because illustrative of 148 THE MAN AT BETH BSD A the disposition and habit of the world's Redeemer. What He did at Bethesda He always did, and does, and will forever do. How large a part of all His public career can be covered by this picture of Bethesda ! " The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." " They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick." " I come to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance." So He said and says, and will say forever. He began his ministry by hold- ing up an ideal sketched by Isaiah's master pen, and said to the people who knew Him best: " This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. For the spirit of the Lord is upon Me because he has anointed Me to minister to the world's neglected." Strange to say, this announcement of His program stirred up opposition at the very start. But He never wavered or turned back. He said He would preach the gospel to the poor and He did it. The poor were the victims of the cruelty and scorn of the rich. He befriended them. There were men who were morally and spiritually poor who had lost treasure in comparison with which a purse is but trash. He was especially kind to these. The poorest people in all Palestine were the Samaritans. For four hundred years they had been ostracized and hated by the Jews. The capital of Samaria was called a city of fools. A Samaritan was not considered so good as a dog. For many generations the Samaritans had been steadily THE MAM AT BETHESDA 1 49 ignored. A Samaritan was at the end of the pro- cession; and so it was to a Samaritan that the first clear disclosure of His Messiahship was made. The Samaritan chosen to receive the revelation was not a man, but a woman, for a Samaritan woman was lower down in the scale than a Samari- tan man. She was nothing but a toy or a slave, in whose soul the Rabbis had no interest. And so Jesus preached His gospel first of all to a Samaritan woman. She was not a lady, but a jaded, ignorant woman, mentally unfurnished and morally bankrupt. She had neither education, nor character, nor reputation. Of all the human beings who were at that time upon the stage of action, this woman was as low as the lowest. To her first of all He announced the fact that He was the Mes- siah, and to her He explained what kind of worship is acceptable to the Eternal. A certain woman was there who had an infirmity for a long time, and when Jesus saw her He had compassion on her and said to her, "Wilt thou be made whole.?" His heart went out always to the Samaritans. The reUgious teachers of His day were experts in han- dling Scripture, but they were bHnd to the needs of men ; so one day he told a story in which a man naked and half dead is neglected by a priest and a Levite and rescued by a Samaritan who chances to pass that way. To the complacent and self-satis- fied scribe who listens to the story, Jesus says, point- ing to the figure of the Samaritan, " Go, do thou 150 THE MAN- AT BETHESDA likewise." His tenderness for the Samaritans was never forgiven by the Jews. When Jesus at- tempted to preach in the streets of Jerusalem men hooted at him and stabbed Him with the venomous taunt, " You are a Samaritan and have a devil ! " In Galilee and Judea the men lowest in the social scale were Pubhcans. They were the custom-house officers of Palestine. They col- lected Jewish money for Caesar's treasury, and hence were counted renegades and traitors. Like all reputed traitors they were treated with con- tumely and scorn. Jesus' heart went out to the Publicans. He ate with them in their homes. Men in consternation asked His disciples the rea- son why their Master ate with Publicans. So un- usual a phenomenon demanded instant explanation. By and by it became a remark tossed from mouth to mouth, " He is a friend of Publicans." But the frowns and criticisms of the good people of His day never swerved Jesus from His course. He was the steadfast friend of the unpopular and of all upon whom society refused to smile. One day when passing through the city of Jericho, the most unpopular man in all the town climbed into a tree to see him. He was rich, and he was a Publican. Jesus looked up into his face and said, "Come down, Zaccheus; I will dine with you to- day." He said it in the hearing of a great crowd. He said it, remember, in the priestly city of Jericho, THE MAN AT BETHESDA 151 where social lines were drawn more tightly than anywhere else in all Palestine, and where class hatred was most venomous, because sanctified by the sanction of the professed leaders of religion. There were two men in Palestine who were espe- cially conspicuous and noteworthy : at the one end of society stood the Pharisee, at the other end stood the Publican. Jesus pictures both men pray- ing in the Temple, and lo ! the Publican goes home justified rather than the Pharisee ! Oh, the divine audacity of this man ! He erects twelve thrones, and on each throne He places a man who shall judge one of the twelve tribes of Israel, and when the world looked to see who the men were, behold one of them was a PubHcan ! And there the Publi- can has sat for nineteen centuries, and there he will sit to the end of time, reminding us ever of the consoling fact that out of the world's neglected and outcast classes can come, and will forever come, regenerating forces for the redemption of the race. But why need I dwell on these things.? The time would fail me if I should tell you of the lepers whom He healed, of the blind men to whom He gave sight, of the insane men among the tombs to whom He gave a sound mind, of the miserable outcasts whom He loved back to life again. What is the New Testament but a description of Be- thesda, the house of mercy, with Jesus at the center of it, saying to the most helpless and hopeless of all the impotent folk that lie there, " Rise and 152 THE MAN- AT BETH BSD A walk " ? The French artist, Tissot, seized upon the core of the gospel when he painted the picture of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns, sitting on the steps of a ruined temple holding His bleeding brow, over the shoulders of two poor peasants, who, foot- sore and weary, have sat down there in the gloom of their great desolation. And what He did He told his followers to do : " Go to the lost sheep, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons; when you give a dinner, invite the people overlooked by others; if you want to be great, you must be the servant of all." When John the Baptist, shut up in prison, began to wonder why Jesus did not march straight onward and seize the reins of power, and sent a messenger, asking, "Art thou He that was to come, or shall we look for another.?" Jesus sent back in substance this luminous reply : " Tell John I have tarried behind at the pool of Bethesda with the man who has had an infirmity thirty and eight years. I am caring for the people who are impotent and discouraged at the end of the pro- cession." That was the proof that He came down from heaven. To take care of the man for whom nobody cares and to give strength to the man who has lost courage and hope, God Himself cannot do a diviner thing than that ! Some great deliverer standing at the pool of Bethesda saying to the man who is without a friend or a hope, " Rise and walk " is the world's ideal Messiah, the one for whom THE MAN AT BETHESDA 153 weary ages have looked long and waited. " Follow Me," "Follow Me," " Follow Me," so He said to all who were willing to listen, and when they looked up they saw Him going always toward Bethesda. The disciple must be Hke his Master, and the servant must obey his Lord. " Why call ye Me Lord if ye do not the things which I say } Ye are My friends if ye do whatsoever I command you. I have given you an example." Knowing that in a little while the world would see Him no more, He breathed the ruling ideas of His soul into a few simple words, which will shine like constellations with steady and saving light on the world's dark path forever. The "lost sheep," the " lost coin," the " lost son," the half -dead trav- eler between Jerusalem and Jericho, the neglected beggar at the gate, — are these not the fixed stars by which humanity must guide its course.^ All through His life our Lord could not look upon a crowd without being moved with compassion for them. He loved men from the beginning. He loved them to the end. The last day He spent in the temple he gave immortality to a poor lonely woman who had timidly dropped two bits of cop- per into the treasury. He noticed her because she was at the end of the procession of all who gave gifts. On the cross He threw around the poor benighted soldiers, neglected servants of Caesar's court, as they drove the nails through His hands, the healing folds of a loving prayer. And when 154 ^-^^ ^^^^ ^^ BETH BSD A at last He stepped from this world into paradise He carried a robber in His arms. " Therefore God has highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Why did Jesus show this vast concern for the neglected and the apparently worthless .■* He saw in every man the image of God. Every man to Him was a child of God. By birth man belongs to the Heavenly Father. In his heart are the pos- sibilities of the life eternal. In his soul are wrapped up powers which will unfold forever. BeHeving this there was in Jesus' eyes round every man the ro- mance of the infinite. There was in every heart the mystery of eternity. Every man in the innu- merable multitude which have moved across the earth from the cradle to the grave, from the age of ice to the present hour, no matter what his race, his nationality, his color, his rank or social condi- tion, has been and is the child of God, created in His image, fitted for communion with Him, in- trusted with vast responsibilities, the heir of an immeasurable destiny. That was the belief of Jesus, and if His belief is without foundation then the New Testament is robbed of its luster, and Golgotha loses its meaning. The foundation truth of Christianity is the infinite worth of man. This conviction of man's greatness is the key THE MAN AT BETH BSD A 155 which unlocks the mystery of the tragedy of Jesus' life. His great quarrel with His nation was that His countrymen were inhuman. The inhumanity of the so-called best people of His day stirred Him to pity and fiery-eyed indignation. The land was full of religion, but it lacked the milk of human kindness. The scribes and Pharisees had their eyes glued on institutions, books, ceremonies. They had lost interest in man. To them the Sabbath was more than a human being, the tem- ple was more than a human body, a sacrifice was more than the good-will of a brother man, a con- tribution to the temple was more than fihal devo- tion to one's parents. The good people of His day were punctilious in regard to ablutions and fastings and prayers, but they had lost the heart that pities. " Go learn what this means," He said to the crowd of quibblers. " I desire mercy and not sacrifice." " You pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith." This was His terri- ble and crushing arraignment. His entire life was spent in picking up men whom the world had knocked over and speaking kindly to men who had been shoved into a corner, and whispering words of hope into the ears of men whom the Jewish church had labeled " lost," and who had been cast out by public opinion into the outer darkness. His one supreme purpose was to induce the world to beheve first in the fatherhood of God, 156 THE MAN AT BETHESDA and secondly in the sonship of man. There is no more pathetic question in the Scriptures than : " Is not a man better than a sheep ? " It flashes light on the heartlessness of the Jewish church of the first century. But is not all this elementary } It most cer- tainly is. It is nothing more than the A B C's of Christianity. But there is nothing so imperatively needed to-day as the remastering of the Christian alphabet. We need of all things else a restate- ment of the Christian doctrine of man. For the materialistic interpretation of life has gone every- where, and in many quarters the Christian concep- tions are trampled under foot. Many forces have conspired to produce confusion, and many a fixed star of hope has been dissipated into mist. Within the last fifty years the world has gone through a revolution greater than any since the days of Luther. It is not surprising that men walk con- fused and need to reexamine the deep foundations on which humanity must forever build. Science, by lifting up the heavens and pushing out the horizons, has given a new pathos to the age-long question : What is man that Thou art mindful of him } Man is so Uttle compared with the bulk of the universe, the temptation is to reckon him insignificant. Because the worlds are so many and the ages are so vast, the incarnation has to some become incredible. But with the lowering of the dignity of Christ comes inevitably THE MAN AT BETHESDA 157 the lowering of the dignity of us all. If our Elder Brother is not what He says He is, then we, His younger brethren, are not certain where we stand. A humanitarianism that builds on a Christ less than the Son of the Living God is a humanitarianism as impotent as the man at Bethesda, and as eva- nescent as the morning cloud and the early dew which passeth away. The creation and expansion of machinery has brought about a reconstruction of the entire in- dustrial world. Populations gathered from vast areas have been massed in great centers, and in the roar of machinery the human voice has been drowned, and in the processes of production the human heart has been forgotten. Do we not talk of " hands " } We are in danger of forgetting we are a nation of " souls." The principle of competition, owing to the breaking down of national barriers, has gotten into a world-wide arena, and is working with an intensity and momentum unparalleled and as- tounding. Under the principle of competition the race is to the swift and the battle is to the strong. Men are piling up wealth in comparison with which the wealth of Croesus was a widow's mite, while other men, children of the same God, are crowded down into the slums, there to welter and rot at the bottom of great cities. It was the stars which caused David to ask : " What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" It is human eyes 158 THE MAN AT BETHESDA peering at us from the doors and windows of tall houses in crowded alleys and narrow streets which bring from our heart the same pathetic and puzzled cry. With the world thundering on at its present rate we are in danger of for- getting the man at Bethesda. We have forgotten him many times already. We forgot him a hun- dred years ago. If we had not forgotten him we should not now blush over " A Century of Dis- honor." We forgot him fifty years ago, and because we did forget him it was necessary that every drop of blood shed by the lash should be paid for by blood drawn by the sword. We for- got him only the other day. He was in a mine, and we could not see him, and so we hurried on and built our civilization on the product of that man's labor, never thinking of him or his wife, or of his children, even though every one of them is a child of God. The other day that man quit working, but we paid no attention to his action. He was only a Slav, and his bad humor, we thought, would quickly subside. But to our surprise he persisted in his refusal to work, and little by little the pillars of the republic began to tremble. The wheels in factories and mills ceased to turn. The hands of that Slav were on them. Schoolhouses began to close — that Slav had kept them open. Sick people in many a humble home began to feel the pinch of cold — the Slav had been ministering unto them. The poor in great cities began to THE MAM AT BETHESDA 159 moan, and the Chief Magistrate of the republic confessed, "The situation is intolerable." That unnoticed foreigner, hundreds of feet under ground, had by his labor made life comfortable and pleas- ant to millions who had never seen him. He had called for help repeatedly for many years, but no one went to his assistance. By refusing to work he compelled the world to look at him. Men to-day are computing the cost of the strike. They say it has cost the nation a hundred and eighty millions of dollars. How much additional it has cost in suffering no one knows, but this is certain, the strike was worth all it has cost if it fixes the eyes of the nation on the men who spend their lives in the mines. They are our brethren. Christ died for them. They toil for us. If they are foreigners and ignorant and depraved and dangerous, then their claim upon us is all the greater. If the miner is at the rear end of the procession, our Lord is by his side. It is His prayer that we may be with Him where He is and behold His glory. Paul could not have been mistaken when he said that if we have not the spirit of Christ we are none of His. The measure of a man's Christianity is not his attitude to the man above him, or to the man on his own level, but to the man who is below him. How do we feel toward the man who is at the rear end of the procession } That is the test of our devotion to Christ. l6o THE MAN AT BETHESDA We are living in a hurried age. There are still twelve hours in a day, but what are they among so many tasks and pleasures ? A hurried age is always in danger of becoming superficial. The temptation is to make much of the distinctions which lie altogether on the surface. Ours is pre- eminently an age of luxury and material splendor. Dives cut a large figure in the public eye. It is written that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth, but many people have never read that sentence, and many of us who have read it do not believe it. Men all around us are pulling down their barns and building larger ones, and saying to themselves and their wives and children : " Let us eat, drink and be merry through all the years." The tragic folly of all this does not impress us. We jingle our gold in our pockets and say with childish glee, "We are the richest nation on the earth," for- getting that it is required in stewards that they be found faithful. In this age when we are so busily engaged in weighing our gold and our silver and our copper, our grain and our merchan- dise and our fortunes, we need a fresh vision of the Man who threw a man into one pan of the scales and the world into the other pan, declaring that one man outweighs the world. We need a fresh vision of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. That is a great declaration which St. Paul makes in his second letter to the Corinthians, THE MAN AT BETHESDA l6l "Wherefore henceforth we know no man after the flesh." Is this the man who saw Stephen die, and who traveled all the way to Damascus to crush out the religion of the Nazarene? This is the man, and yet not the man, for Paul has become a new creature. Old things have passed away and all things have become new. He has entered upon a new era. He has seen the risen Christ and has grasped the significance of His death. Christ died for all. That is a great word, " all." It is a word which sweeps away distinctions and burns up limitations. It has in it something of the wideness of God's mercy. It is like the heavens, it bends soft and gracious over every head. Christ died for all — wherefore we know no man after the flesh. " There is neither Jew nor Greek." Race distinctions are all abolished. Who is saying this.? A Hebrew of the Hebrews in whose blood there run the inherited prejudices of a thousand years. Yes, he says there is neither Jew nor Greek. The chasm has been bridged by the death of Jesus. " There is neither bond nor free." Social distinc- tions are rendered insignificant. Who says this .? A Jew. Greece loved the beautiful, but she never saw that it was beautiful that all men should be brothers. Rome prided herself on her love of justice, but she was never fair to the slaves. Saul of Tarsus lays one hand on the shoulder of Philemon, and the other on the shoulder of Onesimus, and says to the master, "Receive your slave as a 1 62 THE MAN AT BETHESDA brother beloved." Christianity begins not by tak- ing the manacles from the wrist, but by removing the prejudices from the heart. Sooner or later the fetters are dissolved in the fervent heat of that great word brother. If it be true that God's only Son died for all, then all these distinctions with which the world is filled are of slight importance. Can we say as Christian men and women that we know no man after the flesh } Have we allowed the death of Jesus to blot out the distinct- tions which estrange ? Race hatred is to-day viru- lent and furious on both sides of the sea. Class distinctions and class alienations are everywhere in evidence, and everywhere they retard the coming of the golden age. There is a caste system in America almost as deeply intrenched, and proba- bly as difficult to annihilate, as the caste system of India. Even our churches ofttimes have a ten- dency to drive classes further apart, and to keep alive antagonisms which ought to die. If there is one truth above all others which needs to be ut- tered to-day with passionate and reiterated emphasis, it is the truth that one is our Master and that we are all brethren. To talk about " foreigners " with the accent of scorn is wholly unchristian ; to speak the word " American " in a tone which casts a shadow over the rest of the world is altogether pagan; to speak about the "ignorant masses," the " unwashed herd," with intonations of contempt is to fall into the ditch into which the Pharisees turn- THE MAN AT BETHESDA 163 bled. There is too much ado about badges and ranks and distinction, and not enough genuine good-will and brotherly love. And because we do not believe in the infinite worth of man we are harassed by fears and are subject to distressing panics. We hear much to-day of perils. Some men cry aloud because of the "yellow peril," and others shudder at the "black peril," while others are affrighted by the "white peril." Believe that man is the son of God no matter what his race or what the color of his skin, and there is no peril which cannot be safely met and surely conquered. Whence proceeds the note of discouragement which is sounded so frequently in these days } From our lack of faith in man. The work is long and arduous, there are many delays and many failures. What we do we know not now, but we shall know hereafter. But who can faint or falter, no matter what the discouragements may be, who believes that every man is a child of God, redeemed by the blood of God's only Son, and was created to walk in the ways of righteousness and peace .'' When men say, what are you going to do with the red man } what do you expect to do with the black man } what are you going to do with the yel- low man } our answer is, we propose to treat him like a man. By dealing with him as though he were a son of God it will be made clear in God's good time what place he is to fill in the processes of l64 THE MAN AT BETHESDA carrying the world onward toward "that far-off di- vine event toward which the whole creation moves." Christ's faith in man, I think, was more wondrous far than His faith in God. How he trusted man ! " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." He was certain that to the appeal of love the race of men will certainly respond. He threw His words into the air, and said they would never pass away, certain that man's hungry heart would catch them and treasure them up forever. He rolled the world upon the shoulders of twelve weak men, expecting them to carry the world to God. He said to the man at Bethesda, who was without strength and without hope, " Rise, and walk." " A certain man was there, which had an infirm- ity thirty and eight years." That is not all. If that were all, then were the future dark indeed. " And Jesus saw him." That is the revelation which Christianity has brought us. By the side of the man who is infirm there stands the strong Son of God. Our salvation lies in remembering that He is there. It is fitting to-night that we should take the bread and wine in remembrance of Him. We need to remember Him as the Good Samaritan, the Good Shepherd, the Great Physician, the Friend of Sinners, the Saviour, who gives His life a ran- som for many, and one who stands at Bethesda and says to men, " Rise, and walk." I suppose all historians would agree in saying that since the discovery of America, the five most THE MAN AT BETHESDA 165 neglected men on the American continent have been the red man, the black man, the yellow man, the white man among the mountains, and the white man amid the snows. These are the men under whom the American Missionary Association has placed its strong arms, and into whose heart it has breathed the spirit of Christ. Other organizations have done great things in His Name, but none has been truer to His spirit, or imitated more closely the method of His work. And if organizations are to be judged as men are judged, and if the tests applied to individuals can be applied to men when massed together, then the time is coming when to this society will be addressed the glorious greeting, " Come, ye blessed of My Father," For on the last great day the white man from the mountains will say, " I was an hungred and ye gave me meat" ; the man from the snows will say, " I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink "; the red man will say, " I was naked, and ye clothed me "; the yellow man will say, " I was a stranger, and ye took me in " ; the black man will say, "I was sick, and ye visited me ; I was in prison and ye came unto me "; and when these voices have died away there will fall upon the silence the music of a voice which is sovereign, saying, " Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these My brethren, ye did it unto Me." VIII THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD Sixth Annual Sermon before the New England Society, on Forefather's Day, Broadway Tabernacle, New York, Decem- ber 17, 1905. 168 VIII THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD " And I saw a great white throne." — Rev. xx. ii. The apostle is on Patmos, an island in the ^gean Sea. He is an exile, driven from his country and his work. He is a prisoner. His cell is ten miles long. The roof of it is God's great heaven and the walls of it are the waves of the encircling sea. And from his prison cell he looks out upon the world. There is darkness upon the lands, but in the dark- ness here and there he sees a hght like the flame of a candle which a group of the followers of Jesus have kindled. And a great wind is blowing. It is a terrible world upon which the apostle looks. Cruel despotisms and ancient tyrannies lift their frightful thrones and still go on writing a story which is tragedy. All sorts of evils in divers shapes and in many forms of aggression and devastation move across the scene, squirming Hke serpents, devour- ing like locusts, crunching and crushing like drag- ons, torturing like fiends. Above the level of the sea the spirit of rebellion lifts its hideous head like a great beast, huge, majestic, mighty, concentrating in itself the characteristic features of the brute crea- 169 170 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD tion. Sin with flashing crown and scarlet robe, bedizened and spangled, moves in the midst of the nations leading men captive to her will. It is worth noting that evil to the man on Patmos is no pallid or puny thing. It is not a petty and impotent an- tagonist, but majestic, persuasive, alluring, mighty, magnificent, with crown and scepter and royal robes, captivating the eye with the glamour of its magnificence, and swaying the imagination by the exhibition of its power. And against this vast and terrible hierarchy of evil another kingdom is making war. There is a tremendous struggle in the world, immeasurable forces are contending for the mastery, and the land trembles under the shock of the opposing armies. But the apostle is nothing daunted. His eye does not quail nor does his heart grow faint. Undis- turbed he looks upon the great thriUing picture with light upon his face, because over the arena in which the age-long war is carried on he sees the glory of the great white throne. With this throne burning in his eye he looks upon the world with a heart undismayed and a soul radiant with hope. This vision was not peculiar to the apostle John. It was one granted to all of the apostles. It was the secret of their overmastering power. We err when we suppose that the apostles turned the world upside down because they carried in their memory the parables and the Sermon on the Mount. The words which Jesus spoke were mighty words, but THE PURITAN- VISION OF GOD 171 not by means of them did the apostles lift empires off their hinges and turn the stream of centuries into a new channel. The New Testament explicitly tells us that after the disciples had listened to the teaching of Jesus for three years, drinking in his parables, his discourses and his prayers, they were still impotent in the face of a world which they were sent to conquer. They had seen Jesus as a teacher teaching on the hillside and by the sea and on the corner of many a street ; they had seen him as a great physician healing men in Capernaum and Bethsaida, and in the market-places of old Jerusa- lem ; they had seen him as a reformer upsetting the tables of the money-changers and driving the dese- crators of the temple in dismay into the streets ; but none of these things were sufficient to brace their hearts for the great work intrusted to their hands. In spite of all of Jesus' teaching and all of Jesus' mighty deeds, the disciples after the death of their Master were limp and impotent, helpless as children, timid as cowards, hiding behind doors that were locked and barred, incapable of sending up a shout of triumph or a song of praise. And then all at once a change came. They stood upon their feet hke so many giants of the Lord, and began to speak words and to sing songs at which the world wondered. What wrought this transformation ? A vision of Jesus on the throne ! Listen to Simon Peter in that great sermon by which he broke the hearts of three thousand men, 172 THE PURITAN- VISION OF GOD as he says to them, " He hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear ! " The teacher, the physician, the reformer has ascended to the throne, and from the throne he will henceforth as King rule the world. It was with this vision flashing before their eyes that the apostles went out to convert the nations. The wildest storm that ever swept across the lands broke in their faces, but nothing could bend or melt them. A deacon by the name of Stephen was stoned, but even while the stones were crashing into his flesh his face bore no marks of agony, but rather shone like the face of an angel because he caught glimpses of the glory of the throne. James, one of the sons of thunder, lays down his head upon the executioner's block without a tremor or complaint. It had been his supreme ambition to be near Jesus on His throne, and when death comes he does not fear it but meets it gladly, saying, " I shall through death come nearer to the throne ! " Saul of Tarsus travels from city to city and from country to country, everywhere hated and hounded and persecuted. He is imprisoned, he is whipped, he is stoned, he is threatened with death, he is made the offscouring of all things, a contemptible creature upon which men wiped their feet and spit their venom, but he never winces or falters, never groans or laments, but sings wherever he goes, " Now unto the King Eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 173 and ever." It was this vision of the throne that inspired Paul in the writing of his letters. He breaks into song in the midst of his very severest arguments. In his great letter to the Romans in which he climbs up one of the most splendid ladders of logic which human genius has ever framed, he pauses halfway up the ladder, shouting : " O, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God ! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out ! For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things : to whom be glory forever." The strength and peace and joy of all of the apostles came from their vision of the throne. This vision has been given to isolated indi- viduals in every land and time, and wherever the vision has been granted there has been one more name added to the roll of the heroes and the saints. Never has the vision come but that it has been lighter in the world. It came to a whole group of men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who, next to the apostles, are the mightiest men who have ever lived. They were the Burghers of the Netherlands, the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of England, the Covenanters of Scotland, and the founders of New England. These are the five tribes of the Israel of God who have molded the temper of modern civihzation and changed the structure of the world. Men may say what they will about these men, dwelling on their peculiarities 174 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD and scoffing at their limitations ; men may caricature them, disHke them, denounce them, despise them, but this one thing must in all fairness be admitted, that no mightier men have ever lived. They were mighty in the realm of thought, thinking out ideas which burn like fixed stars in the firmament of the mental world, by which stars men still direct their courses and nations build their institutions. Their words were mighty, having hands and feet, and as they have traveled down the highways of the cen- turies, they have taken hold of everything they have met, subduing them to their own lofty temper. They were mighty in deed. They laid their hands upon the Church, society and the State, and the prints of their fingers are on them all. We cannot understand the times in which we live, interpret the movements and problems of modern Christendom, nor appreciate the meaning of our flag until we make the acquaintance of this immor- tal company of intrepid souls by whose genius the world has been recreated. These men were differ- ent from the apostles in many points — in language and in customs, in race and natural temperament and disposition ; they differed from them in many an opinion and conviction, but the Puritans and the apostles were alike in this, they saw in heaven that a throne was set and that one sat upon the throne who was the sovereign of this world. What kind of God was it that the Puritans and the apostles saw } It is sometimes intimated that THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 175 the God revealed in the Scriptures is a rather bar- baric and degraded being, with savage propensities and limitations which make it impossible that he should be reverenced or loved by thinking men. I do not so read the Scriptures. To the men who wrote the Bible God was so glorious in his attributes and so exalted in his character that it was impossi- ble for human pen to describe him. Moses tried to do it, and his language quivered, gasped, and then broke down completely. Isaiah tried to do it, but his pen refused to write. He noticed that even the seraphim were hiding their faces, not daring to look upon the eternal glory, and the prophet falling on his face cried in distress, " Woe is me ! I am undone, for mine eyes have seen the King." Job tried to do it, but he also failed. He attempts to enumerate God's works, but scarcely has he begun when he ceases, saying, " These are but a part of His ways." We leave Job where we left Isaiah, prostrate on his face saying, " I abhor myself ! " The only man in the Scriptures who makes a sus- tained effort at describing the Eternal is the pris- oner on Patmos. And he also fails. He begins by comparing the King to the most precious stones that the earth affords, but feeling how inadequate this is, he says, I will not attempt to tell you what he looks like ; let me describe to you the surroundings in the midst of which he lives. The four-and-twenty elders, representatives of redeemed humanity, take their crowns of gold and cast them at his feet ; 1/6 777^ PURITAN- VISION OF GOD and the four great beasts, representatives of the ani- mal creation, they also fall down before him, render- ing to him their homage and their praise ; and out- side the beasts there rise rank above rank the angels, and all these, ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands break out in praiseful song ; and out of the great heart of the universe there comes up a voice saying, " Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever." The God of the Scriptures is so infinitely glorious that he cannot be described. John's effort to describe him is laudable and earnest, but his language is very difficult to read. We who try to read it are perplexed and baffled by it, not knowing exactly what he is trying to do. He makes havoc of gram- mar and rhetoric, hurling his words into magnificent chaos in his herculean effort to paint the face of the King. He takes every noun that has color in it, and every adjective that has luster, and every verb that has music, and every figure that has a wealth of suggestion, and every image that has in it the power to find the blood, and every verbal gem cre- ated by the genius of scholar and orator and poet, and all these he weaves into sentences which corus- cate and flash and blaze until we are dazzled and bewildered by the unparalleled splendor and turn away our eyes fatigued and overwhelmed. The genius of human speech in the Book of the Reve- lation simply falls down in a swoon completely THE PURITAN- VIS 10 AT OF GOD 177 exhausted by its" effort to hint at the indescribable glory of Him who sits on the throne. And that was the God whom the Puritans also saw. It is interesting to see how the great Puritan writers pile up their words in their efforts to picture their idea of the Eternal. " What is God ? " they used to say, and their answer was, " God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth." The Puritan, like Job, threw himself on the ground saying : " I abhor myself. I have seen him, therefore I abhor myself." Like Isaiah he cried : " Woe is me ! I am undone, for mine eyes have seen the King." Like John he fell at Christ's feet as one dead. But the King, although infinitely glorious, was a God who spoke to men. " Out of the throne there came a voice." God is a revealing God. He cares enough for man to speak to him. He speaks to him in a voice that is intelligible. Man can understand him if he will. This conception of the Eternal is never departed from from the first chapter of the Scriptures to the last. God is everywhere a speaking God. In the Garden of Eden he spoke to man. He spoke to Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, andall the prophets. Jesus Christ is the complete word that comes out of the infinite heart. It was this speaking God whom the Puritans also saw. "Thus saith the Lord," they cried as they went out to subdue the world. 178 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD God speaks, he speaks to you, he speaks to every one. You must therefore prepare yourself to listen. You must train your mind that you may interpret his message. His message is recorded in the Scrip- tures, and that message you must read and under- stand and profit by. No priest or king shall read it for you. You must read it for yourself. Therefore you must be educated. It was the conception of the speaking God that built Harvard College and Yale College and all the other Puritan colleges of the world. Every one of our Puritan schools is built on the Puritan vision of the Eternal. The God who sits upon the throne is the sover- eign of the world. His sway is absolute, his dominion has no end. He is the sovereign judge. He holds man accountable for his deeds. To him every soul must give account. " He will judge every one of you after his ways." "The soul that sinneth it shall die." "We must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and render an account of the deeds done in the body." " And I saw the dead, great and small, stand before God." That was the vision by which Hebrew thought was always haunted. And that was the vision which haunted the Puritan through all his days. " Draw the curtains and leave me alone," said old John Cotton on his death-bed, on the last day of his earthly Hfe. " Draw the curtains and leave me alone. I would speak for a while to the King ! " The outcome of this vision, it is not necessary for THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 179 US to-night to consider. You know what it was in apostolic history, and you know what it has been in the history of the Puritan world. From this vision there came a courage which has never been surpassed. The Puritans had in them the intrepid temper of Drake and Frobisher and the other sea kings of the sixteenth century, and did not hesitate to cut the cables and push their ships out upon seas whose bounds had not yet been determined. They were not afraid to trample down precedents when precedents were wrong, and burn up customs however ancient if those customs had proved de- structive to the soul. There was no enemy however terrible whom they hesitated to fight, there was no suffering however fearful from which they shrank. As the historian Froude says in one of his essays, " They were the only men who in that great age stood up and fought," the only men who dared to strike at the Duke of Alva and resist the tyranny of Philip. When men told William the Silent that his cause was hopeless and tried to induce him to give up, his reply was, " When I took in hand to defend these oppressed Christians I made an alli- ance with the mightiest of all potentates — the God of Hosts — who is able to save us if he choose." " It is not with us," said one of the founders of New England, "as it is with those whom small things can discourage." The Puritan was heroism incarnate. And along with this splendid courage there was a magnificent hatred of shams and lies. l80 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD The Puritans hated mendacity, despised all con- tradictions to duty and to truth. They saw that the throne was white. Because the throne of the Pope was black they hurled their thunderbolts against it. Rehgion in their day had become an elaborate and embroidered lie, and so they trampled it beneath their indignant feet. They took off the head of a king because he was a liar. And along with this hatred of hypocrisy and falsehood there was a fidelity to duty which never wavered and never failed. The Puritan conscience became a new factor in the progress of the world. The initial note of the new age was struck in Martin Luther's answer to the officials of the Roman church who demanded that he recant. " I can do naught else. Here stand I. God help me. Amen." A new age dawned when those words were spoken. That was the temper of the Puritan everywhere. Listen to John Knox on his trial for treason saying, " I am demanded of conscience to speak the truth ; and therefore the truth I speak, im- pugn it who so list." They have inscribed those words around the frieze of one of the rooms in the old house in Edinburgh in which the Scotch reformer lived. And along with this fidelity to duty there came a steadfast and unquenchable hope. Like the old Hebrew prophets the Puritans could never be beaten down. In the darkest night, amid the wildest discords, when the storm was at THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD i8l its highest they still kept saying to themselves, " Sometime, somewhere, somehow, His kingdom shall come, and His name shall be glorious through- out the world ! " Is not this the vision which we need ? We are living in confused and troubled times, when the winds are blowing a hurricane across the lands and the currents are sweeping us onward toward what we do not know. Sin still wears] her scarlet and lifts her scepter, and evil in a thousand forms devastates the peoples of the earth. Many a fixed star has been dissipated to mist, and many a hope in these recent days has gone out. In current literature and in the conversation of the aged I detect now and then a tone of weariness and despondency, sometimes sinking into a sigh of hopelessness and despair. Many men have lost hope in their city and in our republic and in the world. Would that we might have a fresh vision of the throne ! And if the prisoner on Patmos could speak to us to-night, he would say : " Look up ! Look up ! " But how difficult it is to look up. You remember John Bunyan's man with the rake. His eyes are fixed upon the ground, for he is raking up sticks and straws, while over his head hangs a golden crown which he never sees. It was hard for men in the sixteenth ^century to look up when they were raking sticks and straws; immeasurably more difficult is it now when men are. raking together diamond dust and bars of gold. 1 82 THE PURITAN- VISION OF GOD Furthermore, the prisoner on Patmos would say to us : " Listen, God is speaking to you. Hear what he says ! " Not a little of the mischief of our age has been caused by the growth of what is known as Agnosticism — a long and high-sounding word for unbelief. It may be doubted whether there have ever been any genuine atheists on the earth, men who have denied the existence of Deity altogether. Even Lucretius, the Roman poet, believed in a Deity who was far removed from all that goes on in the world, hidden somewhere in the inexhaustible depths of space. The human mind in every age has felt that there must be something, be it law or force or principle or energy or fate or destiny or mind, by which the universe came into being, and according to which it moves. But all men are practically atheists who deny that God can speak, and that he does speak to the human heart. To say that one does not know whether God speaks or not is to cut away the ground upon which the world's strongest characters have been built. " Out of the throne," says John, "there comes a voice. Listen to it." And if you listen you will hear it telling you to pray. There is divine wisdom in the poet's lines : — " Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet — Closer is He than breathing, and nearer Than hands and feet." " Look up, listen, work." Work while it is day, for the night is coming when no man can work. THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 183 Work, for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. Work, in order that at the end of the day you may hear the King saying, " Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord." What is the best gift which one can give to this world ? What was the gift which the ancient He- brew people gave to humanity ? It is surprising how many things there are which it did not give. It never carved a statue which the world cared to preserve, nor painted a picture which the world cared to look at, nor wrote a piece of music which the world cared to hear, nor constructed a philos- ophy which the world cared to investigate, nor worked out a scheme of metaphysics which the world cared to follow. Palestine never produced a Phidias or a Plato, or a Raphael or a Caesar ; all that she gave the world was an impulse Godward, and because she gave the world this, therefore God has given Palestine a name which is above every name, so that at the mention of this name human lips everywhere repeat with reverence and love — "the Holy Land." And what did the Puritans give to the world 1 Certainly not pictures, nor statues, nor philosophy, nor metaphysics. They were not artists or scientists or architects or sages ; they were nothing but heroes who gave the world a new impulse toward God. In many ways they are behind us, in delicacies, luxuries, skill, scientific knowledge ; and yet with 1 84 THE PURITAN- VISION OF GOD all our ocean liners and our palace cars we feel in our highest hours that these men are still ahead of us. They are ahead of us because they are nearer to the throne. In many points they are below us. We have climbed high since the days in which they lived. We can look down upon them in knowledge, in experience, in achievement. Even our High School girls could tell John Milton a thousand things which Milton never knew. And yet some- how in our better hours we feel that these men are above us and their voices come down to us from some Alpine height, musical and sweet, freighted with a message which makes us. think of the song of the angels that fell long ago upon the December air in old Judea. With all our knowledge and acumen and attainments and accumulations we stand abashed before these men, acknowledging that they are indeed above us, and all because the radiance of the throne is on their foreheads. This then is the greatest work which any man can do, which any set or society of men can do, which any state or any church can do ; it is to blow the dust off the ideal, to pick up the lowered standards and lift them higher, to unveil the face of virtue that men may see her in her loveliness, to adorn the doctrine of the blessed God, to sound a note of warning that men shall not take the downward path, but turn their faces toward the throne. If we should ask ourselves what our Puritan fore- fathers would say to us if they could speak to us THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 185 to-night, no doubt they would say very simple and elementary things like this: "Better die than live ignobly — better be poor through life than be dis- honest — better fail with honor than succeed by means that are unworthy of a man — better leave your boys nothing but an unspotted name than leave them a colossal fortune with a name that has been tarnished. " There is no tragedy on earth so ter- rible as the fading of the luster of an honored name. There is no spectacle so heart-breaking as the spectacle of laurel withered brows that have worn it nobly until their hair is gray. There lies upon this island one of the highest heaps of gold ever amassed by the genius and ingenuity and industry of man. That mass of gold can be an Aaron's rod by means of which miracles shall be wrought for humanity, it may if wrongly used be a mill- stone and drown us in the depths of the sea. Let us keep repeating to ourselves the words of Jesus, "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." Let us ponder the meaning of the sentence, " What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul } " And how in a world hke this shall a man keep from losing his soul .-' Simply by living always within sight of the great white throne ! IX CONSECRATED PERSONALITY Address before the National Council, Portland, Maine, October 17, 1901. IX CONSECRATED PERSONALITY When the Man of Galilee declared that the first and great commandment is, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength," He claimed the whole man for God. He left no outlying districts to become tributary to an inferior potentate, no powers to prostrate themselves before a rival master. The Bible everywhere and always, in its visions of the sons of men, sees them falling down before One whose right it is to reign, and casting their crowns before his throne. " Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name," — that is the utterance of every man who has found the secret of peace. If it be true, as the Scriptures say, that the church is Christ's body and his bride, the medium of revelation both to men and angels, the organ through which the Lord God Almighty speaks to His created universe, it follows that the church has a claim on us which cannot be denied except at our peril, and presents to us a sphere in which our energies may find amplest scope for their greatest 189 190 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY achievements. The doctrine most neglected in our churches to-day is Paul's doctrine of the Christian church. Paul could not think about the church without passion heat ; he could not write about it without bankrupting language in his effort to express what his soul saw. His heart bled whenever he thought of the time when he had made war on the church. Again and again he got down into the dust and said, " I am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church." There is the heat of a blast furnace in the question which he hurls at the obstreperous Corinthians, — " Despise you the church of God .'' " The church in his day was marred and stained and feeble, but over its diminished head he saw in vision the majestic beauty of a glorious church without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, holy and without blemish. To the preachers of his day he said, in a tone which even now thrills the blood : " Feed the church of God, which he has purchased with his own blood. It is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth." In the profoundest of all his letters, and the greatest of them all, his subject is the church. Soaring above the local and the transitory, leaving all complications, entanglements, and blunders far behind him, he beholds the mission of the church in the vast and unfolding plan of God. By this vision he is humbled, thrilled, exalted. " Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 191 grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ ; to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known tJiroiigh the cJinrch the manifold wisdom of God." It is only by approaching the church from above that we shall find ourselves in a mood attuned to the discussion of this hour. Approach the church from below, and without the light of revelation falling on it, what is it } Nothing more than what many a philosopher and Christian writer has made it out to be, — a religious club, a pious coterie, a school of ethics, a spiritual police force, a philan- thropic center, a benevolent society, one out of a hundred organizations, all of them necessary and all of them doing good. But the church is doomed the day she permits herself to be classed with other organizations. In this respect she is like her Lord. Make Jesus of Nazareth only one of the world's teachers and martyrs, and you have taken away the world's Redeemer. It is only when he is lifted up above the mightiest of the holy, and holiest of the mighty, that he draws all men unto him. It is only when the church stands out as the body and bride of God's only Son that men are wilHng to bring into her the glory and the honor of every province of our wide extended human life. It is the open scandal of Christendom that when the church gets a man to-day she gets only a fraction of him. The man who throws his entire 192 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY self into the church is one man picked out of ten thousand. Men speak of coming into the church. As a rule, they do not come in. They send in their names. But what is in a name in the task of redeeming society, in the work of revealing the manifold wisdom of God .? Others send in their money along with their names, but gold, unless accompanied with heart and mind and strength, can never unlock the doors of unbelief or usher in new Pentecosts. Some bring in their body, but set their mind to work in other fields. But there is nothing great in the world but man, and there is nothing great in man but mind, and if a man does not consecrate his mind to the service of the church his membership is a tree with nothing but leaves. What does the church of God need so much to-day as br^in } From the smallest church in the country hamlet to the largest city church, things are not being done as they ought to be done, because men do not give to church administra- tion the attention which it needs. Oh, for larger areas of consecrated gray matter — -.-jDf the brain ! Miracles are being wrought every- • where, in the world of industry, commerce, art, because a magician of wondrous powers — the human mind — is energetically at work. Why is it that the church stands paralyzed and embarrassed in the midst of a generation endowed with the power of doing mighty works .-' It is because the brain power of Christian men is largely drawn CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 193 away from church administration and used in hfting commercial empires off their hinges and turning the streams of industrial energy into new channels. Men do not, as a rule, come into the church bringing their heart with them. They put their treasure into the club, the lodge, the grange, the fraternity, the labor union ; and where their treasure is, there is their heart also. The most difficult hymn in the hymn-book for a modern con- gregation to sing is : " I love Thy Kingdom, Lord ! The house of Thine abode, The church our blest Redeemer saved With His own precious blood. " I love Thy church, O God ! Her walls before Thee stand, Dear as the apple of Thine eye, And graven on Thy hand. " For her my tears shall fall. For her my prayers ascend ; To her my cares and toils be given, Till toils and cares shall end." Men bring their conscience into the church, and some of them leave it there. They put it away with their hymn-book and Bible, and go without a conscience through the week. The dual Hfe which thousands of Christian men are living is one of the most curious and alarming phenomena of modern history. Church members are Christians at home and in the church, but in appalling num- 194 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY bers they are pagans and worse in politics and business. Their heart is like Palestine in the early days of the conquest. An isolated hill-top here and there has been captured for the Lord of Right- eousness, but the mountains are filled with uncon- quered tribes of thought and feeling which still dominate the life and action of the land. If you ask the cause of this slack allegiance to the church, may we not find it in the decadence of Calvinism as a ruling power in modern life t The philosophy of Calvin has long since been discarded by men who see the morning, and much of his theology is abhorrent to the modern mind. But in throwing away his errors, and shaking our- selves loose from his false conceptions, we have lost our grip on the one idea which gave Calvinism its vitality, and made it the power of God unto sal- vation to nations that had lost their way. Calvin- ism knew only two beings — God and the soul. With magnificent audacity it swept away the priests and the popes, the saints and the angels, and left the soul standing face to face with its Creator. The old interpretations and traditions, speculations and philosophies, which had accumu- lated around the faith once delivered to the saints until it became mysterious and complicated and unintelligible to the plain people, were burned up in the unquenchable fires of men who, like Isaiah, saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up. " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts ! " CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 195 That was the strain which Calvinism heard, and the response it gave to the heavenly anthem was, "Woe is me!" The sovereign holiness of God and the awful sinfulness of man, — these form the massive buttresses from which Calvin swung his mighty arch. In the sixteenth century, as in Isaiah's day, the lips which cried "Woe is me!" were touched by a live coal from off the altar, and the ears that had been thrilled by the heavenly anthem heard a voice saying, " Thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is purged." The universe in the grip of a holy God, the im- mortal soul directly accountable to him forever — that is the heart of Calvinism. In the power of that transfiguring faith men went forth to write new chapters in the history of progress. Calvinism placed a crown on the head of the individual man. The old Teutonic reverence for the individual came to its coronation in the theology of a French- man. Man owes everything to God. In fiction the idea worked itself out into the immortal alle- gory of John Bunyan. In poetry it embodied it- self in the epic of John Milton. In politics it became incarnate in Oliver Cromwell. Never till the breath of Calvinism was on men's faces did an Englishman of plebeian blood dare to take off the head of a tyrant king. In the realm of religion it led to commotions and revolutions. There were wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun was turned 196 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY into darkness and the moon into blood, and men calling on the name of the Lord were delivered from despotisms which had held them a thousand years. Englishmen, fired with the belief that every man of them was a son of God, answerable to God alone, picked up the Bible, and with it as with a battle-ax began to hack and hew the prerogatives of those who had lorded it over them in the church. The miters were torn from the bishops' heads, and when good Queen Bess and bad King James used their power to oppress Christ's freemen, these men resisted unto death. Like Moses, they endured as seeing Him who is invisible. They had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings ; yea, of bonds and imprisonment. They were destitute, afflicted, tor- mented. Some of them remained in England to become the leaven of the British empire; others crossed the sea to lay upon the Atlantic coast the deep foundations of a new republic. The men who made New England what she is stood each man alone in the presence of the Eternal. In traveling along New England roads one is struck by the fact that the old farm-houses are not located as they would be located by the men who build houses nowadays. The early settlers of New England do not seem to have cared for scen- ery. Not infrequently the big barn was placed in front of the house, across the road, cutting off a scene of surpassing loveliness. These men cared CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 197 little for the beauty of hill and vale, of grove and mountain. They looked out upon eternity. They saw the Lord high and lifted up, and in his pres- ence they kept on saying, " Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name." Even the faces of loved ones were not so beautiful to them as was the face of Him whom having not seen they loved. " Leave me alone," said John Cotton to his attendant, as he started down into the valley of the great shadow. The curtains were drawn about the bed, his wife and children retired from the room, and alone the greatest of New England's early preachers met his God. Whatever is excellent and permanent in the struc- ture of our national life came from the Puritan attitude and temper. But in our day we are in danger of losing sight of the individual. Years ago Tennyson said, ** The individual withers," and he has been withering more and more. Amiel was right when he wrote in his journal: "The two tendencies of our epoch are materiahsm and socialism, each of them ignor- ing the true value of the human personality — the one drawing it down into the totahty of nature ; the other drawing it down into the totality of society." In whatever direction we look we see the individual slipping out of sight. He is disap- pearing in journalism. There was a time when men like Horace Greeley and the elder Bennett stood out as leaders of public opinion, stamping 198 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY the impress of their personality on all who read their papers. From many papers the editorials have vanished altogether ; in others they are ab- breviated and impotent. Tabloid journalism, says London's leading newspaper man, is to be the journalism of the future. In other words, men are not to look to the press for guidance in thought and action, but simply for news rolled into pellets which may be swallowed quickly by men while on their way to business. The same forces are at work in the world of poHtics. In the olden times, men like Hamilton and Jefferson and Webster and Clay stood before the nation, and gave utterance to ideas which thrilled the hearts and shaped the legislation of a continent. Congress now does its most important work in committee rooms, and the measures at last decided on are the resultant of innumerable forces which it is difficult to analyze and impossible to trace. The industrial world makes war on the individual. It is not by chance that we speak of the masses. Our speech betrayeth us. It proves we are losing sight of the individual. The word "masses" is a product of our machinery, and machinery has a tendency to reduce immortal souls to bits of mechanism. Go through any large manufacturing establish- ment, and what do you see .'' Wheels, pistons, cylinders, beams, belts, with here and there a human being stationed, that by hand or foot he CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 199 may supplement the effort of the gigantic monster which thunders and roars in its eagerness to turn out a product which the world is waiting to use. We do not say, " What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! How infinite in faculty ! " for he is only a little cog in one of the wheels. We think of the machinery, of the miracles of pro- duction, of the way in which America is leading the world ! The world of commerce is also at war with the individual. Men dare not stand any- where isolated and independent. To accomplish their designs they go into corporations, and there the individual vanishes from public view. Corpo- rations do dishonest and cruel deeds, but who is responsible we cannot say. We cannot get our hand upon the culprit because he eludes our eye. These corporations have recently manifested a genius for combining. One corporation swallows up another, and then another and still another, until at last it meets a corporation as large as it- self, and the two combine to form a trust. Like huge monsters of prehistoric times these trusts move slowly across the modern world, exciting the consternation of many and the wonder of all. The same influences are at work in the church. The church can never shut her windows so tightly as to keep out the atmosphere of the age. No matter what she says or does she cannot escape the tug of forces which dominate the world around her. This is the day of organizations. We have 200 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY our leagues, unions, boards, societies of a hundred types and names. Individuals slip into these as into bottomless pits, and are never heard from again. When the world says, How many thou- sands of Christians have you ? we are ready with our answer. When it says, What have you done ,-' we are embarrassed. We have all the regularity and precision and everlasting movement of machinery, but we lack the one thing essential, the warmth and moving power of personal affection. There is a conspiracy on foot to wipe out the individual man. There is a tidal movement toward the city, and city life makes ceaseless war on personahty. Men are lost when they go into the city, as rivulets and rivers are lost when they reach the sea. What is a city but an ocean swept and tossed by the winds that blow from the caves of passion, pride, and greed ? Men who are strong and who stand erect in village Hfe disintegrate and disappear under the strain which city life lays on them. " What is man that thou art mindful of him.?" The question was first asked under the Syrian stars. The question has a new pathos when it is suggested by the massed and feverish population of a great city. How shall we save the individual } We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principal- ities and powers and against the forces which modern civilization has created. The world of industry by its machinery, the world of commerce CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 20 1 by its combinations, the world of politics by its enthronement of majorities, the world of society by its cities, the world of thought by its socialisms and materialisms, the world of organized Chris- tianity by its societies and mass movements, are all at work causing the individual to shrivel and the sense of personal responsibility to perish. Back to Christ. That is our only salvation. We must open our New Testament and read again of the one sheep, the one coin, and the one boy. We must refresh our souls by listening to Jesus talk to the one man in the upper room, and to the one woman by the well. We must come back to Peter's Pentecostal phrase, "every one of you," and learn how to speak with Pauline accent the names of in- dividual men. We must come back to the New Testament view point and see the human soul through his eyes. We have been thinking too much of what a man has, and not enough of what a man is. The newspapers have debauched us and demoral- ized us. They have told us about the millions, and the banquets, and the yachts, and the horses, and the summer homes, and we have come to think that these things are all-important. We need to go back to the record and read it again. " Unless a man forsake all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." " A man's life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses." " What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " 202 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY We need to relearn the arithmetic of the Bible. Our modern arithmetic is all wrong. We are duped and enslaved by our inordinate love of figures. We overestimate the importance of large congregations. Our work is not to build large con- gregations, butiaxgejnen. What does a large con- gregation amount to unless it is a nursery in which growing giants are being fed, who by and by will beat the PhiHstines and carry off the gates of Gaza .'' Jesus cared nothing for large congre- gations. He had one once, but soon got rid of it. He jabbed it with unpleasant truths until it left him, and then he gave himself to just twelve men. The weakest things our Lord ever did were the things he did with crowds: the greatest achieve- ment of his mighty life was the training of the twelve. We are too easily elated and too readily depressed by a simple fluctuation of figures. We gained ten thousand — Hurrah ! We lost ten thousand — Let us cry ! Who are we that we should reason thus } Have you not read, have you not heard, that one shall chase a thousand, and two shall put ten thousand to flight .-' Shame on the denomination that has produced a Horace Bushnell, a Henry Ward Beecher, and a Dwight L. Moody, if it ever measures its work by count- ing the crowds which march under its banner. One man can shape the mood and fix the standards of a community. One man can change the spiritual climate of a continent. One man can sweeten the CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 203 springs of theological thought in two hemispheres. Let us not be frightened by statistics, but master the arithmetic of God. We must come back to our work. Our first work is not the solution of the social problem. As Harnack says, " The gospel is not one of social improvement but spiritual redemption." The re- demption of the individual is the solution of all our problems. In him is the fountain in which the world will be washed clean ; from him will come the flames in which the world's iniquities shall be burned up like chaff. Our first work is feeling after the individual if haply we may find him. It is the finding of the one sinner which causes rejoicing among the angels of God, because only in this way does the Kingdom come and God's will get done throughout large areas of human Hfe. God gives us men. " The finest fruit earth holds \ up to its Maker is a man." Personality holds within itself the powers which build the new Jerusalem. We have been told of the reign of law. There is no such thing. Natural law is but the conduct of a person. Persons alone reign. We live under the sovereignty of a personal God. We have been told that ours is a government of law and not of men. In the deepest sense the state- ment is not true. Our Constitution is written, but it is not fixed. From the beginning till now it has been modified by the men who interpreted it. It will be changed many times by the supreme judges 204 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY of the future. A city has a charter, but a city is not ruled by its charter but by its men. What are laws if there are no men to enforce them ? The government of a community is determined not by the laws on the statute book, but by the disposition and character of its most influential citizens. Throughout the ages, humanity has been under the government of a man. An Englishman once tried to prove that humanity in its career and character has been chiefly con- trolled by its physical environment. Climate and soil, earthquakes and volcanoes, rainfall and wind, — these, he said, are the determining factors in racial development and national progress. It was a speculation which history shatters into a thousand pieces. God and men are the determining forces in human history. " On God and godlike men we build our trust," because from them have come all the blessings we have known. Confucius has had a mightier influence on the thought and customs of Asia than all the mornings that ever flushed with gold the snowy crowns of the Him- alayas. Luther and Calvin have left a deeper mark on Europe than Vesuvius with his torch of flame, or the Jungfrau with her diadem of snow. Shakespeare has done more to tinge the feelings and shape the imaginations of the English people than all the waves that ever broke in foam upon the coasts of their island home. Washington has done more to determine the character of American CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 205 manhood than all the suns of all the systems of the Milky Way. The mind of one man laid across a nation's heart will sink down deeper into it than the bar of light let fall from the heaven-wide arch constructed of God's stars. Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter, a teacher, without fortune, reputation, or human learning, has done more to form the disposi- tion and shape the ideals of the leading nations of the world than all the winds and ocean currents, and all the stars of all the heavens, and all the sea- sons which have traveled with their buds and birds and snows and storms across the lands. The foundation of our civilization is not an idea or a philosophy, not a principle or a system, but a man. " I am the way, the truth, and the life." The Redeemer of the world is a man. The ideal toward which we move is a man. The music to which we march is the music of the words which He spake and speaks ; " I am come that ye might have Hfe, and that ye might have it more abun- dantly." X AN ANGEL IN THE SUN Thanksgiving sermon, Broadway Tabernacle, New York, November 29, 1906. AN ANGEL IN THE SUN " I saw an angel standing in the sun." — Rev. xix. 17. We have no time to study the vision of the Apostle in its connection with his other visions, nor can we hope to fathom the depth of the idea which lay in the Apostle's mind when he uttered the words. We have time only to snatch the sur- face meaning of the sentence, the idea which is most obvious and compelling. I saw an angel standing in the sun. The word " sun " needs no explanation. There are a few words which we can master without a commentary or dictionary, and this is one of them. The sun is an old acquaintance. It shone on us in our cradle and it has accompanied us all the way. It is the friend of everybody. Everybody has seen it, knows it, loves it. It is a huge mass of matter, an enormous ball of stuff, an immense spectacle of fiery splendor. It is matter raised to its highest point of brilliancy, physical stuff hfted to its lofti- est magnificence. The fiery heart of the universe bursts into blossom in the sun. Because it is so vast and so glorious it becomes the fit symbol of 2IO AN ANGEL IN THE SUN the material creation. In that yellow disk at noon we have the consummate image of physical vast- ness, physical power, and physical glory. It is an image which cannot easily be hidden. It is raised aloft so that every eye can see it. Men of feeble vision are aware of its presence. Even blind men know that the sun is shining. The exile on Pat- mos saw what all of us have seen — he saw the sun. And he saw more. He saw an angel standing in the sun. What is an angel ? A being which transcends the world of matter, a representative of the celestial kingdom, a spiritual creature of im- measurable intelligence and power, a visitor from high heaven, a messenger from eternity, a servant of the most high God. The Apostle saw an angel standing in the sun. His keen and eager eyes caught a spiritual splendor that lay enshrined in the blaze of the material glory. He saw the wis- dom and power of the spiritual universe speaking from the center of the universe of matter. All this lies in the simple declaration — I saw an angel standing in the sun. These words have been chosen for my text be- cause they express in graphic phrase the thought which is my message to you for this day. On Thanksgiving Day every man sees the sun. If he does not, it is because he is incorrigibly stubborn or incurably blind. If he cannot see the sun where he happens to be standing, he ought to AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 211 make efforts to see it. If he has been walking on the shady side of the street, let him come over on the sunny side, at least for a day. If he has per- chance fallen into a pit of despondency or hole of despair, or if, baffled by outrageous fortune, he has crawled defeated and dejected into a cave, let him come out of his cavern or dungeon and look for a season at the sun. Every one is likely at times to get shoved into the shade, to be crowded into a mood from which the whole world looks drab. But Thanksgiving Day is a trumpet reminding all somber-hearted men and women that the time has arrived to gaze at the sun. We are living in days when the sun is often over- cast. Mists go up from the pestilential places of the earth filling the air with poison and darkness. Many souls, like many chimneys, do not consume their own smoke and the result is a darkening of the heavens. There are men now alive, and women too, who have a genius for dipping their brush into hues of midnight and eclipse. They have a mania for exploiting the unsavory and sor- did. They take delight in brooding over the brutal and dismal. They scold and moan and shriek so constantly over the world's woes and sins that we forget that the sun is shining. The whole heavens are blotted out by lachrymose tales and lugubrious prophecies, as by chilHng clouds driven inland from a murky storm-wild sea. There are men who live only to count up miseries 212 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN and wrongs. They earn their living by picturing the forms and processes of the world of darkness. They earn large salaries by painting out the sun. There are newspapers which fly like flakes of darkness through the air, shadowing every mind into which they fall. But on Thanksgiving Day we will have nothing to do with the mopers and growlers. This is no day for the professional shriekers. A famous Grecian philosopher once said to the dashing Alexander the Great, " Stand out of my light." Let us say to the whole tribe of men who have jaundiced eyes and waihng pens, Get out of our light ; we want to see the sun ! Our President and Governor have asked us to look at the sun. Let us do it. If a man does not believe there is any sunshine any more, let him crawl out from under the avalanche of morbid and pessimistic literature by which he has been over- whelmed, and let him clamber to the top of a hill from which he can see the world as one vast plain and one boundless reach of sky. If the clouds have gathered round him, let him remember that the clouds are always low, and let him, by sheer energy of spirit, rise above the clouds into those clear regions where he can behold the sun. We are never where we ought to be if we cannot see the sun. If we have lost it, it is because we are hemmed in by barriers of our own creation or of other men ; which barriers give us a contracted view. The narrow view is always the depressing AN- ANGEL IN THE SUN 213 view. One can easily prove that New York is hell by looking into one small corner of it, that America is a nation of barbarians by cutting out a small spot here and there, that the world is slipping back by clipping out a thin slice of current history. It is not difficult to prove that the stream is flowing backward if you take your place at a point where an obstruction in the channel causes an eddy and a backward swirl of the waters which are impatient to get on. " Oh, it is dark, fearfully dark." That may be true of your own life and home — but your life is not the only life and your home is only one of many homes. " Oh, it is dark — there is no sun at all." That may be true in your business, in your social set, in your favorite papers and books, but your little world is not the universe. Your favorite authors are only a handful, your social set is an in- finitesimal ripple on the great ocean of life. Lift up your eyes and look at the sun — something big, something really glorious, something magnifi- cently immense. Those companions of yours who darken the world by their skepticism or quench the light by their sneers are only sulphur matches which the devil is striking in your presence. There is a flash, a smell of brimstone, a flicker- ing and evanescent blaze, and then smoke and blackness of darkness. Why not look at the sun ? Those authors of yours who have gotten you into a despondent mood about yourself and everybody else are only candle dips flickering in the gale. 214 ^^ ANGEL IN THE SUN They cannot be depended upon for guidance. They have been burning only for a day, they will go out to-morrow. Why do you not look at some- thing that shines on and on through the centuries and ages and millenniums. Thanksgiving Day is a day whose message to all men is — Ho ye that sit in darkness, hold up your heads and look at the sun ! When men look up it is the material splen- dor which they see first. This is proper and to be expected. First that which is natural and afterward that which is spiritual. This is the invariable order. The blazing orb of na- tional prosperity — that is the sun which men most easily see, and we have a right to look at it and rejoice in it. Walk in imagination this morning across the land and let your eye run along that line of 303,267,000 bushel measures filled with potatoes dug this year out of our soil. Glance at that row of 36,000,000 barrels of ap- ples picked this year from our trees. Take in that pile of 12,500,000 bales of cotton grown this year in our fields. Fasten your eyes on those 30,000,000 bushels of rye, those 144,528,000 bushels of barley, those 739,883,000 bushels of wheat, those 863,352,000 bushels of oats, those 2,822,400,000 pounds of sugar, those 2,881,096,000 bushels of corn. Sit down before that mountain range of good things. Measure the dimensions of this pile of five billion bushels of grain. Look at AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 21 5 that sun. Warm yourself by it. No such sun has ever shone on America as the sun which has shone on it during the last eleven months. All past marvels have been eclipsed, all bygone mira- cles have been surpassed. Pass now from the kingdom of agriculture into the realm of commerce. See those long trains reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Count the cars. Some man tried to do it and when he reached 5,588,162 he stopped. Every one of these cars filled with treasures of field and mine, of factory and mill, earning for the great railroad corporations in three quarters of a year the gross sum of ^1,439,000,000. Look at the ships in the harbors along the Atlantic and along the Gulf and along the Pacific carry- ing merchandise to distant lands worth over $1,425,172,000 in ten months; these ships bring- ing home again over a billion dollars' worth of treasures from all the lands of the earth to make us a comfortable and happy people. Look at the sun. Never has it blazed with such efful- gence as now. See the streams of money. No such streams did Midas ever create or Croesus dream of or Caesar control. In the last ten months the bank clearings have gone beyond one hundred and thirty-one billions of dollars — a sum as inconceivable as is the distance from the earth to the north star. When the Census Bureau tells us that the national wealth now aggregates nearly 2l6 AN- ANGEL IN THE SUN $107,000,000,000 we stand bewildered and dazed. We are almost blinded by the light of the sun. But the question now is : Do you see an angel standing in the sun, a heavenly significance in this national prosperity, a divine meaning in those colossal triumphs? What do you see — just oats and rye and wheat, only cotton and sugar and pig iron ? Is your eye good only to take in freight cars and steamships and piles of gold coin, or can you see an angel in the sun, a token of divine mercy, a manifestation of heavenly generosity, a revelation of Infinite goodness, an assurance of a Father's benediction ? Is there any spiritual con- tent in this blazing orb of material aggrandize- ment, in the physical splendor is there a light above the brightness of the sun ? Or is this a physical phenomenon pure and simple, a material wonder unrelated to higher worlds, so much stuff massed together by so much muscle and so much gray matter in the brain ? Is that all you see ? If that is all, then you do not see so much as the man saw who said, " The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." " Every beast of the forest is his and the cattle upon a thousand hills." " He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herbs for the service of man ; that he may bring forth food out of the earth." The sun does not climb the heavens of its own volition and with its own inherent strength, nor does a nation rise to place and power without assistance from above. AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 21 7 Blessings such as ours do not come by acci- dent, or drop from the hand of unthinking fate. It was not by chance that this continent was hidden from the Eastern world till 1492, nor was it by chance that men of spiritual vision laid in tears and blood the deep foundation stones upon which later men have builded, nor was it by chance that George Washington was born in 1732 and that Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 and Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858, nor is it by chance that the American brain has be- come fertile above all others in devising instru- ments and tools for using the forces of nature in the development of physical resources, and that American hands have become cunning above all others in manipulating the machinery by which the world's wealth is multiplied and the forces of civilization made mightier. I see an angel in the sun — a message from high heaven, a revelation of a spiritual intelligence and power, guiding all and sustaining all, wooing our hearts if we are willing to a new devotion to the Creator of us all. Now let us take a broader view, leaving our own little farms and gardens, and take in the whole material creation — earth and sea and sky. This physical universe which is our home, what is it but a great mass of matter hung in space, a mate- rial globe rolling with other globes onward we know not whither .«' How like a coruscating, flam- 2l8 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN ing sun it hangs before the eyes, lustrous, mysteri- ous, gloriously and indescribably beautiful. It is a sun which every man can see, but some men see far more than others. One man looks out on Nature, but for him it is not appareled in celestial light. He watches the seasons in their pomp, but the pageant gives to him no hint of the working of the mind of an Infinite Artist. He experiences the witchery of dusk and dawn, feels the magic of the loveliness of flowers, comes under the spell of moonUght upon the water, tingles under the touch of the glory of sunrise and the splendor of sunset, but he does not have " A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and in the mind of man, — A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." In other words, he does not see the angel in the sun, the spiritual splendor enthroned in the physi- cal glory. What do you see in the sun.? Is the universe a vast machine, a stupendous mass of brute matter passing from one phase to another without purpose or benevolent intention, heedless of man and ignorant of God, baffling the human mind by its interminable processes and its inexpli- cable variations and ongoings } What do you see } AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 219 A great disk of shining stuff — if that is all, you do not see so well as the man saw long ago who said : " The heavens declare the glory of God And the firmament sheweth his handiwork, Day unto day uttereth speech, And night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language ; Their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, And their words to the end of the world." This man saw an angel standing in the sun. Let us take a still wider view, embracing in our survey not simply the physical creation, but also the vast world of man. Human nature is a part of the universe, the highest and most mysterious part which we know anything about. Let your eyes rest on this. What do you see in the human race } Roll all mortals into a huge mass, let that mass like a rolling sun hang before your eyes. What do you see } A huge lump of flesh and blood born of the ground returning to dust again .? A vast aggregation of animals, hungry, biting, snapping, ruled by animal instincts, swayed by animal impulses, ending at last as animals end } If that is all you see, you are no further advanced than the jaded Oriental skeptic who thousands of years ago declared in a fit of despondency : " That which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts ; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other ; yea they have all one breath ; 220 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast ; for all is vanity. All go into one place ; all are of dust and all turn to dust again." What do you see ? Man's limitations and shortcomings, his weakness and ignorance, the insignificance of his efforts and the transitoriness of his earthly exist- ence? Anybody can see those; they are spots on the sun. Long ago a thinker in the distant East was sad- dened by the thought of man's infirmities and dejected by the experience of human frailties, but when he asked the question, What is man .? he saw an angel standing in the sun, and under the inspi- ration of the glowing vision he wrote a song which has been caught up and chanted the wide world over. " Thou hast made him a little lower than God, Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet, All sheep and oxen, yea and the beasts of the field. The fowl of the air and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea." And to the song of the Hebrew poet we may add another stanza and say, Yea, the force of the wind and the power of the wave and the pressure of steam, and the strength of gravity and the might of magnetism and the potency of heat and the almightiness of light, and the plunge of the AN- ANGEL IN THE SUN 221 cataract, and the energy of electricity, and the virtues and efficacies of all the cosmic forces, thou hast put these under his feet. " O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth ! " This is the day to look at the sun — the sun of our humanity. There are astronomers who can look into the disk of the orb of day and see noth- ing but raging storms of flaming gases. They see no angel there proclaiming the wisdom and omnipotence of the Creator. There are men who can look at humanity in the twentieth century, and while nations are making new conquests and break- ing the bonds of ancient tyrannies and rising to new levels of thought and achievement, these men can find no better words with which to describe the magnificent drama than animal, brute, beast. Of course there are animal characteristics, and brutish actions, and beastly degradation, and inhu- man conduct. But is this all.'' The sun has in- deed its spot, but is there no angel standing in the sun ? Can you see nothing in humanity but what smacks of the earth — greed and lust, cruelty and hate, tears and death ? This wonderful race of men of which we all are members, dowered with capacities which are immeasurable, intrusted with powers which are incalculable, with a destiny which is beyond the reach of our dreams, this race of men laughing and crying, achieving and suffering, hoping and despairing, cursing and praying, loving and hating, buying and selling, marrying and giv- 222 AM ANGEL IN THE SUN ing in marriage, feasting and dancing and shrieking and singing, hungering and thirsting and everlast- ingly aspiring after the unattained and unattainable, driven by instincts which are ineradicable, swayed by impulses which are unconquerable, stirred and thrilled by visions and dreams which are inexpli- cable and unescapable, what a wonderful race it is ! What do you see in humanity ? this great shining orb of human flesh ? Look for the angel to-day. Think of the mothers who through this last year have sacrificed themselves for their chil- dren ; of the fathers who have bravely kept on at their work that hungry mouths might be fed and naked feet might be covered ; of the teachers who have poured their life-blood into the souls of those intrusted to their guidance ; of the physicians who have alleviated pain and ministered to the dying ; of the nurses in the hospitals and sick chambers of the world, who have cheerfully borne privations and drudgeries that it might be easier for those on whom the hand of affliction had fallen heavy; of the philanthropists who have looked after little children and homeless boys and girls, and widows and helpless women, and broken and disheartened men ; of the reformers who have, in the midst of disappointments and discouragements, held their hand to the plow refusing to look back; of the rich men who have poured out of their treasures to succor the poor and to give strength to noble causes which needed assistance ; of the poor men AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 223 and women who have shared their last crust with some one poorer than themselves, and made a bed in their humble lodging for some one who had no- where to lay his head ; of the servant girls who have denied themselves pleasures and oftentimes comforts that they might send their savings to a father or mother, or sick sister or brother in the old home across the sea ; of the men through whose hands a constant stream of gold has been flowing through six days of every week, and who have a right this day, according to the test im- posed by the psalmist, to ascend into the hill of the Lord, because they have kept their hands clean and have not lifted up their hearts unto vanity ; of the men who have faced death with- out flinching in the fire departments and police departments, at the life-saving stations and on the railroads, laying down their lives at the call of duty, saving lives by giving up their own ; of the missionaries who at home and abroad have worked in obscure and dangerous places far away from home and kindred, counting all things but dross for the sake of the Name which is above every name ; of all the workers, high and low, rich and poor, famous and unnoticed, in city, town, and hamlet, who this last year have done some- thing to lighten a burden, to dissipate a darkness, to heal a hurt heart, to smooth the road for feet which were bleeding, to wipe away tears, to soothe an ache, to banish a suspicion, or prejudice, or 224 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN error, to diminish the gloom, to kindle a light in minds which were bewildered, and create a glow in hearts which were troubled and chilled ! Look at the sun, the race of man, our race ! Do you not see an angel standing in the sun ? intelhgence more than animal, wisdom more than earthly, power more than human, loveliness more than physical ? Can you not see an angel — an inspi- ration from on high, a manifestation of heaven, a revelation of Deity ? Let us now come up still higher and fix our eyes on that one face which is above every face, and behold the man who, although a part of our hu- manity, is yet above it. It would be a strange Thanksgiving Day without a glance at the Sun of Righteousness. What do you see in this sun .-' Of course you see the light. No such light as this has ever been seen either before or since. " Never man spoke like this man." So said the wise men in the first century, so say the wise men of our day. " We never saw it after this fashion." So said the men who saw his miracles, and so say the men who see his miracles in the world of now. His name is above every name in every land where character is valued and high ideals are prized. Every tongue confesses that he is mightiest of the holy and holiest of the mighty. Like a full-orbed sun he shines upon the earth, and all other teachers are, compared with him, what the planets are to the 3un. AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 225 This is a day on which to look at the sun. What do you see ? A man — a Jewish patriot, a Pales- tinian philosopher, an Oriental martyr, a blazing prophet, a fiery-eyed reformer, a sweet and stain- less saint ? If that is all you see, you see no more than the Pharisees, for they thought he was a prophet, a man as tall-statured as John the Bap- tist. You see no more than the Sadducees, for they thought he was a patriot, a man of the same temper as Jeremiah. You see no more than the crowds in old Jerusalem, for every man was con- vinced that this Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet, a mighty teacher, a daring and revolutionary re- former. You see no more than the apostle Philip, for Philip saw only the glory of Christ's humanity, and was blind to the light eternal. " Show us the Father and it sufficeth us. Let us see God and we shall be satisfied." And the answer came, " Have I been so long time with you and hast thou not known me, Philip } He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me. You see my works, you hear my words, you know my career. You behold the full-orbed glory of a perfect Hfe, do you not see the angel in the sun — do you not recognize the divine intelligence, the heavenly power, the stamp of the eternal.-' Are you so absorbed in the contemplation of my physical fea- tures, that you have missed the revelation of the divine ? I have lived among you in the fashion of 226 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN a man, in the form of a servant, the bodily out- Hnes being altogether such as belong to the world of space and time, subject at every point to the physical conditions to which all men are subject, and is this earthly aspect of my Hfe all that your eye has caught, all that your mind has discerned, all that your heart has discovered ? Have I been so long with you and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?" This is the age-long tragedy of this world — the blindness of men to the angel in the sun. Material things we apprehend with alacrity and gladness. We can taste, touch, handle them. But the divine significance of things on earth continually eludes us, the spiritual interpreta- tion of what we see and hear perpetually es- capes us. Thanksgiving Day calls us out of our materiahstic mood and says, " Behold the angel in the sun ! " Alas, even the voice of Thanksgiving Day is not sufficient to arouse many a soul from its lethargy or remove the scales from the eyes. It is only by a strenuous effort that we can keep the angel visible in the Thanksgiving sun. The day, hke every other great day, has a tendency to degenerate, to lose its spiritual significance, and to become a day of boisterous recreation and unrestrained feasting. The Thanksgiving dinner is central in the thought of the day. The dinner becomes the symbol of the national prosperity, of physical AN ANGEL IN THE SON 227 enjoyment, of creature comfort. And who would say that the dinner shall not rightfully stand con- spicuous and beautiful in the day, that this glowing sun shall be hidden, and not be permittted to shed its rays upon our hearts and faces ? Let him say such a thing who can, not I. Rather will I say, Let men and women feast throughout the land, and let every home be filled with social cheer. Let broken family circles be reunited, the old acquaintances meet again. Let the Thanksgiving sun blaze in unveiled splendor and fill all the house with floods of glory, but at the feast let us look with eyes intent for the angel standing in the sun. Alas for us if we miss the spiritual significance of it all, the heavenly meaning of the banquet, the divine origin of our joys. At the center of every physical pleasure stands an angel proclaiming the goodness of the Creator. He is the giver of every gift which cheers the nerves or warms the heart or satisfies the spirit. Good things to eat and a good appetite to enjoy them and good friends to share our joy with us, all these things come straight from the heart of a God who loves us, and all these would be impossible in a universe created by a God who did not have a loving heart. A Thanksgiving dinner to the observing soul becomes sacramental. It is the supper of our Lord. It is the visible sign of spiritual grace, bodying forth the loving-kindness of the Eternal. Happy are we if in the full-orbed 228 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN glory of every pleasure which comes to body, mind, or spirit we behold the presence of the angel, God's supreme messenger to the race of men, the form and power and glory of Him who loved us and gave himself for us ! XI YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH Address before the International Council, Tremont Temple, Boston, September 26, 1899. 230 XI YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH The nineteenth century will shine in history as a century of discoveries. An English scientist has given us a list of them, but he has omitted the greatest of them all, the discovery of the child. Accurately speaking, we should say the " re-dis- covery of the child," for the child was first discovered nineteen hundred years ago by the Carpenter of Nazareth, In the first century of our era Jesus took a child and set him in the midst, and he has done it again in the century which is now drawing to a close. He has set him in the midst of the artists. Ever since the days of Joshua Reynolds artists in increasing numbers have been painting children. Not only do they paint little princes and princesses, but they paint ragamuffins and street urchins. The world would rather look at the faces of children than at the angels of the mediaeval masters. A child is more interesting than an angel. He has set him in the midst of the poets. It was not until the days of William Blake that poets 231 232 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH began to gather round a child. Nearly all the child poetry of the world's literature has been written since the days of Wordsworth. Now the poets are saying with our own Longfellow : — " Come to me, O ye children ! And whisper in my ear What the birds and the winds are singing In your sunny atmosphere. Ye are better than all the ballads \ That ever were sung or said, \For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead." He has set him in the midst of the psychologists, and they are studying him furiously. They are looking at his motions, they are listening to his language, they are peering into his little mind, and tabulating all they see there. The evolution of a solar system is not so fascinating to the philosopher of to-day as is the unfolding of a soul. He has set him in the midst of the church. We have our Children's Sundays and our Christmas concerts and our Sunday-school picnics, our cradle rolls and baby bands, and innumerable societies for the instruction and safeguarding of the children. The greatest work which the church has done in the nineteenth century has been done among the young. Three great reUgious movements have made the century forever glorious, all three of them born of a passion to save young people. First of all and greatest of all is the Sunday-school. Although it YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 233 was born near the close of the last century, it is distinctly a nineteenth-century movement, for this is the century in which it has been developed into an institution of world-wide usefulness and im- measurable and transfiguring power. On this single continent there are to-day nearly one hundred and fifty thousand Sunday-schools, with a million and a half of officers and teachers and almost twelve million scholars. Twelve million human beings ! the majority of them children, studying the Scrip- tures ! Look at that and you can behold with the eye of faith Satan falHng as lightning from heaven. The second great movement of the century is the Young Men's Christian Association. The century was nearly half over before the first asso- ciation was organized ; but already the movement has struck its roots down into the soil of more than forty countries, and enrolls an army of a quarter of a milHon of men. Out of this young men's move- ment has sprung a Young Women's Christian Association, which, although as yet only in the days of its infancy, has a membership of nearly forty thousand. And out of these combined asso- ciations has sprung in these recent days the Student Volunteer Movement, which has already circled the globe with its victories, and promises to do more for foreign missions than any other organiza- tion that has ever attempted to stir the hearts of men to obedience to the great marching order of the King: "Go ye, and disciple the nations." 234 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH Fourteen hundred volunteers are already in the foreign field, and four thousand others are in train- ing. Six thousand students are studying the problems of foreign missions, and increasing streams of money are flowing into our missionary treasuries from our halls of learning. The colleges of the world are being knit together into a compact brotherhood whose purpose is to claim humanity for God. The century was more than three-quarters gone before the third great movement of our age was born. It was in 1881 that the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor started upon its phenomenal career. At the end of eighteen years it has fifty-six thousand societies, with a member- ship of three million four hundred thousand. But these figures do not tell the full story of its con- quests. Like the river of God, it overflows its banks, and in all parts of Christendom new societies with new names spring into existence, begotten by the spirit which the Endeavor movement has created and strengthened and instructed by its example and its methods. A million and a half of young men and women, although marching under other banners, belong to the great Endeavor army. Five millions of the young people of the world organized into a training school for Christian service in less than two decades ! It is one of the miracles of Christian history. The future historian of the Christian church will say that Christendom YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 235 entered upon a new era that February night when in the city of Portland the first Endeavor society was formed. Where is that man who said that the church has lost its grip, and that Christianity is a decrepit and declining thing ? Let him read the history of the last fifty years, and if he has eyes to see he will see. But I am not asked to do the work of a historian to-night, recounting with hallelujahs the things already done. I am asked to be a prophet, bidden to gaze into the century that is upon us, and to report what I see. Not what have we done, but what shall we do, — that is the question." And my answer is. Pay more attention to the home. The home is the making place of Chris- tians, and it is because so many Christians are made otherwhere that we have so many Christians who are maimed and disappointing. All acute thinkers from the time of Aristotle have seen that the family is the unit of society. It is the founda- tion out of which all the streams of life proceed. The Christian church must lay its hand with redeem- ing pressure upon the family. For the family is in danger. The great conflict of the coming century is going to rage around the home. Multitudinous forces are gathering to disintegrate the foundation stone on which our civilization rests. Steam and electricity by teasing men to travel tear them in increasing numbers from the family hearth. Phi- losophies, specious and satanic, are undermining 116 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH the sanctity of marriage. Commercial life and club life and social life have all conspired to take parents from their children. The midtiplication of religious organizations has weakened the sense of parental responsibility, and fathers and mothers have too often turned over to others duties which God gave to parents. The result is that the church does not hold her children as she ought. Every minister knows that around his church there are three zones of people, all of them descended from Christian stock. In the inner zone are people who are in sympathy with the church, though not members of it. They attend its services and contribute to its support. In the middle zone are men and women who, though born into Christian homes, never go to church. They do not hate the church, but its forms to them are weariness, and they are deaf to its appeals. In the outer zone are the publicans and sinners ; men and women who were rocked in Christian cradles and kissed by Christian mothers and taught by Christian teachers, but who have given up both reli- gion and morality, and have nothing for the church but flippant scorn and bitter hatred. There is a leak somewhere. In spite of the long line of organiza- tions marshaled with such consummate skill for the protection of our children from the cradle to adult- hood, too many of them get away from us. The chain seems to be unbroken and unbreakable, but alas ! the first link is the weak link, and because YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 237 the first link so often snaps, we suffer humiliation and defeat. Every organization would do better service if supported better by the home. Has not the time come, therefore, for a new study of the family } The home is a divine insti- tution. It is God's way to set the solitary in famines. He educates the race through the dis- cipline of the family. Under the Jewish dispen- sation religion went by households ; so it did when Christianity was young. Baptism went by house- holds, as in the case of Stephanas and Lydia and the Phihppian jailer. The Lord's Supper went by households. The eucharist was celebrated in the house. The church was in the house before it worked its way out into society, and the church in society must inevitably Hmp and fall unless we keep ahve the church in the house. Instruction went by households. Apostles in writing to the saints had a message for the children. No child was to be called an alien, even though only one parent was a Christian, for even in that case a child was not unclean but holy. We ought to face, then, the question. Is a child born of Christian parents inside the church or out- side .? If it is outside, then the kingdom of God is one thing and the Christian church is another thing, for Christ has explicitly declared that chil- dren are in the kingdom of God. If the child is outside the church at birth, can it be carried into the church in its mother's arms } If not, then the 238 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH disposition of the church is not the disposition of the Master, for he said, "■ Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not." If the child is in the church, then it should be recognized pubHcly and continuously throughout all the years. The church should baptize it, if not in infancy at least as early as the child's mind is capable of grasping the significance of the ceremony. And if we baptize our children, why have they not a right to the Supper of the Lord ? On what ground do we make such wide distinction between the two sacraments of the church ? How can we in reason say that a child has a right to the symbol of God's cleansing power, and no right to the symbol of God's sustaining grace ? If the little Jewish boy was permitted to partake of the paschal lamb, certainly our children ought to partake of the symbol of the broken body of the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. If baptism goes by households, so also ought the eucharist. A new glory will come into our churches when parents and their children shall take bread and wine together. Many a boy would have been saved to the Christian church had he not been trained to feel himself a vagabond and outcast on every Communion Sunday. But there are other ways in which this recogni- tion can be made conspicuous and effective. At the age of seven children may be presented with Bibles in the presence of the congregation. YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 239 At the age of thirteen they may be examined pubHcly before the church on the fundamentals of our faith. Their names should be printed in the church directory from the date of baptism. Their needs should be recognized in the sermons of the preacher. If St. Paul in his loftiest letters did not forget the children, no Christian minister need feel it beneath his dignity to give a paragraph now and then in the midst of his most ponderous dis- courses to the boys and girls who have been bap- tized into the name of Christ, and whom the New Testament reckons among the faithful and the saints. But recognition is not enough. Children must be fed. The problem of the Christian church is at bottom a problem of feeding. The first line in the bill of instructions given to the chief of the apostles is divinely significant — " Feed my lambs." If the church fails to grasp the meaning of the first Hne, all its after life is bound in shallows and in mis- eries. Children must be fed. If they are fed, they will be " born again " in the nursery. It is no more necessary for a child to be conscious of the second birth than of the first birth. Conver- sion is a process that ought to be begun in the cradle. If children are fed, they grow. If they are fed on the life of God, they grow into the image of his Son. A child ought to be nourished by an atmosphere of Christian love. Atmosphere is the spiritual milk which little children drink, and build 240 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH up into character. When the mind unfolds, the Scriptures should be studied. Father and Mother should unfold the Word. The father is God's first priest in history and in all life. If the parent priest shirks or falters, all other priests are engaged in a well-nigh hopeless task. If Christian men in the few leisure moments of the morning feed them- selves on newspapers, and take no time to feed their children on the Bible, let no one wonder if the Christian church runs the race that is set before it like a hmping giant with a wounded heel. Parents must be assisted in this instructional work. O for a catechism in all our churches throughout the world ! The catechisms of the sixteenth century have been outgrown, but the need of catechetical instruction will never be outgrown so long as the human mind retains its present structure and is held in the grip of the laws which have governed it from the beginning. The church has never made lasting conquests, except where it has used the interlocutory method of instruction. The Jewish church built itself four-square and im- pregnable by this method of question and answer. It was by the same method that Christianity made its first great conquests. When Julian the Apostate wished to check the growth of Christianity, he stopped the mouths of Christian teachers. When Martin Luther wished to fortify Protestantism against the attacks of Rome, he wrote two cate- chisms. When John Calvin undertook to estab- YOUJVG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 24 1 • lish a system of church government that neither men nor devils could tear down, he wrote a cate- chism. When Rome determined to break the power of Protestantism, she betook herself with new fervor under the inspiration of Loyola to catechetical instruction. With all her follies and crimson sins Rome goes on her conquering way because she knows the value of a child. The voice of Xavier still rings through all her coun- cils, " Give me the children until they are seven years old and any one can take them after- wards." There is no more impressive spectacle to be seen in St. Peter's to-day than the sight of a priest on Sunday afternoon catechising the little Italian boys. There in earth's greatest temple, filled with immortal marble and matchless paint- ings, at the very center of the splendor sits a little child with a priest by his side. That is a picture worth looking at, for we are in danger of for- getting that any church, even though its his- tory runs back to Plymouth Rock and Scrooby, is crippled and doomed that does not catechise her children. Instruction — painstaking, continuous, system- atic instruction — this is the crying need of the Christian church of our day. We are living in an age of books, but in our day, as in the days of Hosea, God's lamentation is, " My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." Thousands of Christians are scared by higher criticism because 242 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH they do not know what higher criticism is. Thou- sands are confused and bewildered, fumbling at duties and stumbling over mysteries which are no mysteries at all. Thousands are cold and indifferent because they do not know the things which brace the will and set the blood on fire. Thousands are car- ried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and by the superficial speculations of deluded women. Any Simon Magus who gives out that he is some great one is certain of a following. And every sort of superstition and delusion and hal- lucination can count its converts by the thousands because God's people are not instructed. We have had Niagaras — yes, Noachian floods — of ex- hortation ; let us now have clear-cut, courageous, constructive teaching ! It is not unlikely that the greatest advance that the Christian church is going to make in the twen- tieth century will be in the expansion of the Bible school. The Bible school is only in its infancy, and of what it is capable of becoming we have scarcely dreamed. We are just beginning to real- ize the necessity for it. America started out with the Bible and the catechism in her public schools. The catechism long ago disappeared, and the Bible is departing, and they will never come back again. Our public schools are destined to be secular. But it is becoming increasingly clear that secular education is not enough. Men may know the three R's and not know Him whom to know aright YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 243 is life eternal. Men and women versed in science, art, and literature are not strong enough to build enduring nations or a victorious church. Without moral instruction and spiritual training humanity is lost. All around our schoolhouses we have been building penitentiaries and jails, and the jails are as crowded as the schools. We have dis- covered that educated men can get into the penitentiary, and that cultivated people can be hoodwinked and gulled by any high-sounding false- hood that comes along. Never have we had more education and never have we had more cranks and fanatics and dupes. Thinking men are asking, what shall we do .'' The Roman Catholic Church has given her answer in brick and stone from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Her answer is the parochial school. What shall our answer be .? The Bible school. Not the Bible school as we have it now, but the Bible school indefinitely expanded and perfected. Why should it not be made more flexible and all-embracing .? Why should not the time of its sessions be deter- mined by the demands of the parish t And when necessary, why should there not be a session of the school at every hour Sunday afternoon, and on every afternoon of every week, and on every even- ing of the week, so that all classes of people might find it possible to attend ? And why should not the curriculum of the Bible school be vastly ex- panded } Why should not our young people be 244 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH taught the history of the Bible, and the history of doctrine, and the history of the Christian church, and the scope and aim of Biblical criticism — yes, and the history of Congregationalism ? Our heroes and saints have written a book of Acts worthy of a place by the side of the book written by St. Luke. Why should not our young people know the rock whence we were hewn, and the hole of the pit whence we are digged .-' With this larger conception of the Bible school we are. going to give a new dignity to teachers. They are going to be recognized more and more as ministers of the Lord, ordained for a divine and difficult service, and trained and furnished by com- petent instructors. Some day Christian men and women gifted for the work of teaching will be ashamed to do what thousands of our best people are doing now — turning their back upon the greatest opportunity which God can give a human soul. Christians who teach in Bible schools are writing God's thoughts on minds which will live when the last of the stars has burnt out, and are hastening the coming of the city with the jasper walls and the gates of pearl. We are passing into a century which is going to be swept by tremendous intellectual storms. The winds of doctrine spoken of by the apostle were only zephyrs compared with the gales which are going to blow. For three hundred years we have been teaching men that every man has a right to YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 245 think for himself, and now we must take the con- sequences. Books are multiplying, libraries are growing, the air is filled with all sorts of philoso- phies and sciences, speculations and interpretations. Men everywhere are reading, men everywhere are thinking. They must be guided into the thoughts of God. Ours is preeminently a teaching church, and if we do not teach we are basely recreant to our trust. Attacks, furious and multitudinous, must be expected upon every doctrine of our faith. We must teach our young people how to meet these assaults. The young men of Europe in medieval times flung themselves in magnificent crusades upon the Holy Land, in frenzied efforts to tear Christ's sepulcher from the clutches of the Turk. Young men and women of the twentieth century must march in many an arduous crusade against an enemy more wily and determined than the followers of Mohammed. Never shall we fight again with carnal weapons for the defense or advance of our religion, but war must there always be. The sword for our warriors is the sword of the Spirit. The sword of the Spirit is the Word of God. What is that Word.? The church must seek for it as for treasure hidden in a field, and having found it, must teach it to the young. The world is increasingly preoccupied and con- ceited, and the church like a timid Timothy blushes and hesitates. Paul says to her, " Take heed to 246 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH thyself and the teaching." The world is increas- ingly inquisitive. It has written interrogation points over every book of Scripture, and across every form of spiritual experience. Peter says to the church, " Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you." The world is increasingly furious in its pursuit of pleasure and of fortune. The forces of materiaUsm are tremendous and aggres- sive. Only men of firmest fiber and instructed faith, men with convictions that have been forged and tempered in the heat of God's eternal love which burned its way into our world through the heart that broke on Golgotha, can carry the cross through the coming storms. Listen to what the Spirit of the risen and reigning Christ is saying to the churches. We have heard it from the begin- ning, let us hear it now again : " Feed my lambs. Shepherd my sheep. Feed my sheep." XII CHRISTIAN UNITY Preached on April 21. 1907, in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, the Sunday preceding the Wednesday evening on which the Church took action in regard to the Proposed Plan of Tri-Union. 248 XII CHRISTIAN UNITY " Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." — Eph. iv. 3. That is the way it stands in the version of the New Testament which was made in the seven- teenth century, but the revisers have changed the word endeavoring, substituting in its place giving diligence. They felt that the old expression was not strong enough, it does not express all that was in the apostle's mind. The word which he made use of suggests exertion, effort. This is not an easy thing that he is asking the Ephesians to do. It is something which can be done only by the forthputting of energy. It will require a deal of industry and a deal of strength. They must be busy about it, they must keep it, for there is dan- ger that it may disintegrate or evaporate, or be stolen. It is something immeasurably valuable, and therefore it is worth while to be diligent about the keeping of it. And what is this valuable thing.? Christian unity. " Giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit" — the unity which the spirit of God creates, strive earnestly to keep that in the bond of peace ! He has already told them how 249 250 CHRISTIAN UNITY this can be done. It is to be done by cultivating certain virtues and graces. Without these virtues and graces it is impossible to secure unity, much less to keep it. The first of the graces is lowli- ness. Paul begins where Christ always began, with humility. That is the first rung in the ladder. Unless we begin there, we can never ascend. It is the first step toward the attainment of Christian unity — lowliness of mind. And out of this lowli- ness of mind will come meekness or gentleness, and out of this meekness will come longsuffering, and the longsuffering will express itself in forbear- ance. Unless Christians are willing to forgive, to bear and forbear, it is impossible for peace to pre- vail. And then he tells the Ephesians what are the grounds of this unity. There are solid foun- dations on which it can rest. They lie in the very nature of God and in the universe which he has built. There is one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, and one faith, and one baptism, and, finally, there is but one God, who is over all, and through all, and in all. But notwithstanding the fact that God desires this unity and is willing to cooperate with men in creating it, it is not some- thing to be expected either to-day or to-morrow. It is a high attainment to be reached only as the goal of spiritual growth. In the earlier stages of development there must of necessity be clashing and conflict, discord and misunderstanding. But all these dissonances will gradually disappear, for CHRISTIAN- UNITY 25 1 God will give the church officers, teachers, evangel- ists, prophets, pastors, whose supreme business will be to develop in Christians the graces which the apostle has named, to awaken in them sympathies and affections which will make this unity possible. Under their ministration the church will pass from glory to glory until we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. My theme to-day is Chris- tian Unity. It is a significant fact that the theme of the pro- foundest chapter in Paul's greatest letter is the unity of the Christian church. Never does the apostle rise higher than he does in this fourth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, and never does he go deeper, never does his language burn with a more fervent heat, never is his thought more august and thrilling. It is likewise signifi- cant that the uppermost theme in the greatest prayer of our Lord which is recorded in the New Testament is Christian unity. On the night in which he was betrayed he offered a prayer in the upper chamber which is the greatest of all re- corded prayers since time began. He prays for various things in this prayer, but for nothing does he plead with such earnestness as for unity. " Holy Father," he says, "keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me that they may be one as we are." In these words he referred to the 252 CHRISTIAN- UNITY eleven men who were with him in the room, but by and by his thought takes a larger sweep, his mind runs down the ages, and he sees the countless mil- lions who shall come to God through him. " Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one as thou Father art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us." Nor does he even now leave the thought. He dwells upon it, hovers round it, goes back to it as though he could not let it go. It is his deepest, most fervent wish, his supreme and crowning desire, " that they may be one even as we are one: I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." And then he adds the reason why it is that he pleads so earnestly for this great blessing. It is " that the world may know that thou hast sent me." Here, then, we have come upon something which every professing Christian must often pon- der : it is the unity of Christians which is to dem- onstrate before the world the divinity of Christ. It is the harmony among his followers which is to prove to men that he came down from heaven. The truth of the Christian religion is not some- thing to be demonstrated by the eloquence of preachers or established by the wisdom of theolo- gians, or made certain by the learning of scholars. Spiritual unity is the one demonstration by which the world can be convinced, and to that demon- stration every Christian can make his contribu- CHRISTIAN UNITY 253 tion. The humblest man in the church, the weakest woman in the church, the youngest boy and girl in the church, can help supply the credentials by which Christianity shall gain a hearing, and every soul baptized into the name of Jesus can contribute something to the demonstration by which his divinity shall be established before the world. This is the only argument which the world will ever understand. All other arguments are too ab- struse, too abstract, too difficult to follow. Chris- tian unity is a demonstration which everybody can understand, and to contribute to this demonstra- tion is the supreme Christian duty. According to the New Testament there never can be but one Christian church. At a certain point in Paul's life he was greatly distressed because the rumor had gone abroad that he was teaching one thing and the other apostles were teaching something else. If this were true, he felt that the very hfe of the Christian church was at stake. He knew that if there are two Christian churches, both of them must inevitably go to the wall. By the very na- ture of things there can be but one church and one message. And this also was the conviction of Jesus. When he made the great promise to Simon Peter, he did not say, " Upon this rock I will build my churches," but " Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it." There is to be only one flock, as there is only one shepherd. 254 CHRISTIAN UNITY Probably there is no other subject receiving so much attention in the Christian world to-day as the subject of Christian unity. The subject is in the air. It is in the air everywhere. It has a place, not in one denomination, but in all denomi- nations; not in one country, but in all countries. It is a vital theme around the world. Steam and electricity within the last hundred years have done wondrous things. They have taken the villages and massed them into cities. They have taken the cities and bound them together so that every city knows what every other city thinks and does. They have taken the nations and bound them together into a great family, so that common thoughts and feel- ings flow around the world. The great problem to-day is how to live together, how to get rid of the discords and the conflicts, how to nourish co- operation and promote harmony. This feeling has taken possession of every one of the departments of life. It is mighty in the commercial world. The old order has broken down. For the sake of economy, men are combining. The old system was too extravagant ; it led to frightful squandering of money. And so we are Hving in an age of cor- porations, syndicates, trusts. We are living in a day of new perils, perils so gigantic and so for- midable that united action becomes imperative, individuahsm can do nothing with them ; only a concerted attack can make the slightest impres- sion. And so everywhere there are new dreams CHRISTIAN UmTY 255 of cooperation, federation, union. On every hand we have alliances, and leagues, and federations. It is not to be wondered at, then, that the Christian church should be seized by this spirit and that Christians everywhere should be asking them- selves, How can we reduce the friction ? How can we get closer together ? Edward Everett Hale was right when he said that the great word of the next hundred years will be " together." Christians of all communions are asking them- selves. How can we, as disciples of Christ, come closer together in our work t How can we in- crease our efficiency .'' How can we do the work with finer economy } How can we best glorify the name of our Leader? These are the questions which are stirring in Christian hearts everywhere, and so the air is filled with schemes and projects of church union. All sorts of plans and devices have been brought forth by means of which the divisions may be reduced in number and the army of Christ be made more formidable in its attack upon iniquity and wrong. In a time like this, there- fore, it behooves every Christian to study carefully the problems which Christian unity involves. We do not live here but once, and our age is the age through which God speaks to us. We are not to turn a deaf ear to it, or turn our back upon it; we are to study it, and hsten to it, and see what, through it, the Almighty is saying unto us. It is by the study of the signs of the times that we are 256 CHRISTIAN UNITY to read the disposition and intention of God. When men everywhere are thinking about Christian unity, it is indisputable proof that it is God's will that all Christians everywhere should think about the sub- ject soberly, reverently, and with his fear before their eyes. Not only are we to study the subject, but we are to keep asking ourselves. How will it be possible for us to reduce the discord and hasten the day of beautiful and triumphant peace .-' It is important in the discussion of so great a subject that we see clearly the end to be aimed at, and also the steps by which it may be attained. In the earlier stages of every discussion of a sub- ject of large dimensions, men become bewildered because they do not see clearly the goal toward which they ought to move. The air is filled with mists, and the best of men become blinded, so that they do not see distinctly what it is which is worth while striving for. This imperfect vision gives rise to numberless misapprehensions and misun- derstandings, and great reforms are often blocked and retarded simply because of the confusion that exists in the minds of those who are their ardent supporters. In our efforts to secure church unity, it is important that we should understand what unity is, and not allow it to become confounded with something which is not at all Hke it ; namely, uniformity. Uniformity is one thing and unity is quite another thing, but by many inteUigent Christians they are conceived to be the same. CHRISTIAN UNITY 257 When the average man thinks of a united church, he thinks of a uniform church, and this probably is not to be wondered at, because that has been the conception of Roman Catholicism for fifteen hun- dred years. When Roman Catholicism talks church unity, she always means church uniformity. Ac- cording to her conception, church unity lies in gov- ernment, and a united church is impossible unless all professing Christians render allegiance to one man. When Christianity found its way to the city of Rome, she was stamped with the genius of the Roman Caesars, and that impress she has borne to the present time. Rome had a genius for govern- ment. Her supreme ambition was to incorporate the nations and the races into her august and imperial system. To all surrounding people she gave laws, and the one thing upon which she in- sisted in every land was that the people should subject themselves to the Roman order. She wanted but one empire in the world, and there should be uniform laws from one end of it to the other. That idea was accepted by the leaders of the Roman Catholic church, and down to the present hour it is just as natural for the Roman priesthood to want to rule as it is for a bird to fly. The impulse runs in the blood. According to Roman Catholicism, there should be one vast hierarchy with officials rising rank above rank, culminating at last in one supreme head, the Vicar of Christ. Under this hierarchy, all the Lord's fol- 258 CHRISTIAN UNITY lowers should bow in reverent obedience. That is a conception which thrills the imagination of thou- sands. It awes and subdues the Roman Catholics, and it also has a tremendous fascination for Protes- tants. There are thousands of Protestants who cannot escape the spell of it, and when they think of church unity, they also think of a church that shall be uniform throughout the world, a church that shall everywhere have the same form of wor- ship, the same polity, the same form of govern- ment, all of its parts being finely knit together and held in subjection to one supreme head. But how- ever beautiful that may be as an ideal, it evidently is not God's ideal. Roman Catholicism endeavored to make Europe uniform, but she failed. She held in her hands the wealth and the power of the world, and if uniformity were anything that could be se- cured, she would have secured it. She went to work upon Italy, and Italy obeyed ; she worked upon Spain, and Spain obeyed ; she went to work upon Holland, and Holland rebelled. The men who had picked their country from the bottom of the sea were not willing to be dictated to by the Bishop of Rome. Then took place one of the most hor- rible butcheries that has ever soaked our earth with blood, and in the end Rome retired, defeated. Rome tried to keep Germany uniform, and she failed. She tried to make England uniform, and failed. After the Pope had failed, Enghsh kings and queens tried to do it. Elizabeth tried, and so CHRISTIAN UNITY 259 did James I, and so did Charles I, and Charles II, and James II, and they all failed. There was nothing but strife and confusion and hatred and suffering and imprisonment and blood and death, until finally with the coming of William and Mary the impracticable attempt was given up. There is something down deep in the blood of an Eng- lishman which renders it absolutely impossible for the scheme of uniformity to succeed. It would seem, then, that the unity which God wants is not the unity of uniformity. Uniformity is a thing of the skin ; unity is a thing of the heart. Uniformity is a thing that lies on the surface ; unity is a thing of the spirit. The unity for which the New Testa- ment pleads is a spiritual unity. It is not a unity of worship, or a unity of polity, or a unity of gov- ernment — all of which things are superficial and incidental. The unity for which the New Testa- ment pleads is a spiritual thing. " Giving dili- gence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace," cries the greatest of the apostles. And when Jesus in his great prayer prays for unity, it is always a unity that is spiritual. " I pray that they may be one in us." That is, in purpose, in desire, in aim, in disposition, in character, in love. We are then to get our idea of unity, not from the Church of Rome, but from the works of God. Science proclaims with a thousand tongues the unity of Nature. There is but one universe, and there is a divine harmony running through it. 26o CHRISTIAN- UNITY This is acknowledged by every one who is inter- ested in scientific studies, and yet how varied Nature is. You cannot sweep stars and blossoms, birds and pebbles, brooks and mountains, into a common category and compel them either to look alike or to act alike or to be alike — and yet Nature is profoundly, grandly one. It is the unity of di- versity which the Lord God Almighty tells us that he loves. And every time we lift up our eyes and look upon Nature, we are reminded that uniformity is not according to God's plan. Science tells us that the human race is one, and yet how different men are from one another. There are white men, black men, yellow men, red men, men of many sizes and many grades of culture, of many habits and many aspirations and ambitions, but never- theless, they are one. In human flesh, then, as well as in the world of Nature, God tells us that unity and uniformity are not the same. So far as we can see it will never come to pass that all the fol- lowers of the Lord will adopt the same form of worship and submit themselves to a common ecclesiastical head. Now if we grasp this larger idea of unity, we are better able to understand what is the sin of schism. According to the teaching of the Greek and Roman churches, and also of the Lutheran and AngHcan churches, there is no sin so heinous and so damnable as the sin of schism ; no other sin works such mischief, no other sin is to be so dreaded and so hated, no other sin CHRISTIAN UNITY 26 1 gives such pain to the head of the church as this. So Romanism and Lutheranism and Anglicanism have always taught. But what is schism } Ac- cording to these four great churches, schism is a breach of church unity, and the breach of unity is made whenever one separates himself from the church authorities. A Roman Catholic says that every man is a schismatic who does not acknowl- edge allegiance to the Pope. Lutheranism says that every German is a schismatic that does not commune with the national church. Anglicanism says that every Englishman is a schismatic who is not obedient to the Enghsh church. All the Wes- leyans and Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Baptists in England are to the authorities of the English church only so many schismatics and sectaries. But what is a schismatic } According to the New Testament, he is a man who has not the ChristHke disposition and separates himself from the church of God, the man who has not the loving heart. In all Roman CathoHc countries, Roman Catholic priests and bishops treat with su- percihous contempt all ministers of other churches. In doing this these priests and bishops are schis- matics ; sectarianism has robbed them of a Chris- tian heart. We in this country cannot realize the lordly disdain, the snobbish air of condescension, with which many bishops and rectors of the Eng- lish church have always treated, and treat to-day, their Christian brethren outside the Anglican com- 262 CHRISTIAN UNITY munion. But according to the New Testament, these bishops and rectors are the schismatics. One would not suppose they had ever seen the New Testament, so unbrotherly and so unchristian is their temper and their conduct. No man is a schismatic except a man who has cut himself off from Christ, and every man cuts himself off from Christ by fostering the disposition of an unloving heart. It is largely because of these misconceptions of what Christian unity really is that we have so many misdirected efforts aiming at church union. There is a feeling down deep in the hearts of many people that so long as there are different branches of the church. Christian unity is nothing but a dream, and that only by the reduction of the de- nominations can you ever fulfil the prayer of Christ. This feeling is especially strong in our day because of the confusion which fills Christen- dom. Thousands of men are frightened by the diversity of opinions. Men are thinking every- where, and thinking a thousand different things. You know how it is in regard to the Bible. Get together a hundred Christian people, and you can- not get them to think the same in regard to the Bible as a whole, or in regard to any one of the books, or in regard to any one sentence in any one of the books. And these divergences of opinion, already numerous, are going to become more and more in the immediate future. We are just at the CHRISTIAN UNITY 263 beginning of the age of thought. And in this babel of opinion it is not surprising that many- good men should feel that, after all, what we need is a strong government. We need somebody to restrain us, we need some external and august authority that shall tell us clearly what it is we are to believe. Then, again, the seamy side of denomi- nationalism has been much exploited, and the evils of the system have been set forth in such glowing language, that many Christians are almost ashamed to confess that they belong to any denomination at all. Men have told us a thousand times about the wicked extravagance of supporting three or four churches in a little village, and they have told us heartrending stories of the awful waste of precious money in all the towns and cities of the West, a half a dozen different denominations build- ing churches side by side, when a single church would have done the work. They have also re- minded us of the unseemly rivalries, of the enmities and jealousies which are created by these denomi- nations working side by side, and some of us after listening have leaped to the conclusion that after all it would be a great deal better if there were only a single church. But the New Testament says that we are to judge a tree by its fruits. You who think that a single communion would be so much superior to several communions ought to study Christian history and see how the single church theory has worked. They had but one church in 264 CHRISTIAN UNITY Italy, and Italy is largely a land of infidels. They have had but one church in Russia, and that church is dead. They have had but one church in Germany, and the great mass of the German people do not care enough for it to attend its worship. They had but one church in France, and more than half of the French people are unbelievers. They had but one church in Spain, and Spain is a skeleton among the nations. I do not deny that denominationalism has its seamy side, and that many of its by-products are far from pleasing, but that is the price M^e pay, and we ought to bear in mind that by our many churches we ward off dangers that have cursed and snapped the spiritual strength of other lands. For my part, give me the New England village with its three or four churches standing side by side, looking out upon the green, in preference to any Italian village with its single church, or any Russian village with its single church, or any German village with its single church. I do not say that we need as many as one hundred and forty different denominations. I have no doubt the num- ber will be considerably reduced. I do not say that many of the evils will not be lessened by schemes of federation and by a larger development of the principles of Christian comity ; I only protest against the assumption that denominationalism is an invention of the devil, when church history clearly demonstrates it to every man that is willing to face the facts that it is the most efficient, most CHRISTIAN UNITY 265 fruitful, most life-giving scheme of church govern- ment which has ever been tried. Let us then be care- ful when men come to us with their schemes of diplo- macy, urging us to weld two or three or more denominations together. Sometimes this can be done, and sometimes it should not be done. Let us beware of the plausible talk which makes external authority seem necessary and beautiful; for the suppression of differences either in doctrine or in worship is not the best or the quickest route to Christian unity. The history of the church proves that many an external union covers over dissensions that become all the fiercer because they are covered. When we are urged to give up this and that in order to unite with somebody else who is also willing to give up that and this, let us ponder before we take the step, asking ourselves if both sides may possibly not give up too much. The men, therefore, who shout the loudest and the longest for church unity are not always the men who are doing the most to promote it. How shall we advance the noble cause.? Obey the Pope — so says Romanism. Use the Prayer Book, says Anglicanism. Reduce the number of our denominations, shouts the modern enthusiastic reformer. But if we read the New Testament aright, he does the most to ad- vance the cause of Christian unity who works the hardest to build up in human hearts a Christian temper, to develop in men and women everywhere broader sympathies and a more generous apprecia- 266 CHRISTIAN- UNITY tion. He is working most effectively for Christian unity who places Christ the highest, and brings men nearest to him. I have said that there could be but one Christian church upon the earth, and I Hke to believe that there has never been in all the 1900 years more than one church. There have always been differences, but the differences are not deep or fatal. There are still great differences, but most of them do not hurt. Listen to a Grecian priest in St. Petersburg, and a Roman priest in Rome, and a Lutheran preacher in Berlin, and a French priest in Paris, and an Anglican bishop in London, and any Protestant minister in New York City, and after listening to their sermons you would know that all of them were Christian men. Differ they would in language and likewise in emphasis and accent, but there would be something about each and every sermon which would tell you that they had a common Master. There are no Christians on the earth that do not say : " Our Father who art in heaven." All Christians everywhere say that the Golden Rule is golden, and that the New Commandment is the highest commandment ever given unto men. Christians are divided into many folds, even as it is the divine will that they should be ; they are grouped into divers communions, but this cer- tainly is the Lord's will. It does an Episcopalian church good to have a Methodist church not far away, and it helps a Methodist church to have an CHRISTIAN UNITY 267 Episcopalian church in the same town. Every Catholic priest is helped if he has round him a circle of Protestant preachers, and every city is all the better if it has in it the great Roman Catho- lic church with its emphasis upon obedience and reverence and loyalty to the traditions of the past. Let us then cultivate kindly, generous, sympathetic feeUngs toward all the followers of the Lord. I know people who never refer to the Baptists except to bring in something concerning water, as though the great Baptist Communion had never done any- thing for the world but dip men and women under water. There are Christians who never refer to the Methodists without some sarcastic fling about their shouting, as though the great Methodist church had never done anything in this land of ours but shout. There are those who never speak of the Episcopahans without a sneer at their for- mality, as though formality were the only product that Episcopalianism has as yet brought forth. All the great communions of the church of God have labored and sacrificed and wrought victories and added to the imperishable spiritual wealth of the world. All honor to them all, and love for them all, and let us thank God that it is true to-day, as it has been true from the beginning, and as it will be true to the end, that there is but one body and one spirit, and one hope, one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. XIII INTERNATIONAL PEACE" Preached on April 14, 1907, in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, the Sunday preceding the National Peace Con- gress in New York. 270 XIII "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" " Blessed are the peacemakers : for they shall be called the sons of God." — Matt. v. 9. To us the words sound as sweet as the chime of silver bells, but to the people of 1900 years ago they were as wild and discordant as the blare of a horn blown by an idiot. They made mockery of the most sacred traditions of the past and contra- dicted the common sense of the world. " Blessed are the war makers, for they shall be called the sons of God." Assyria had written this with her sword, and Babylonia had written it, and Persia had written it, and long before these Egypt had written it, and in later times Greece had written it, and Rome was writing it in letters of blood over the lands and the seas. And who is this that dares stand up and say : " Blessed are the peacemakers : for they shall be called the sons of God".? Who is this young man from Galilee, with the smell of the carpenter shop on his garments, who dares to trample upon the traditions of the past and insult the common sense of the race .-" " Blessed are the peacemakers : for they shall be 271 272 ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' called the sons of God." The words traveled out from Palestine to the ends of the world, roUing down through lines of marble statues of the great military chieftains who had filled the world with their glory, every marble brow bearing a wreath placed there by a jubilant and adoring people. Before the marble images crowds stood awestruck as in the presence of the mightiest, but the words of the Gahlean carpenter have withered the wreaths and scattered the crowds. It has become the commonplace of our time : " Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God." We are always in danger of forgetting how radical Christianity is. It is the most radical reli- gion ever preached on this earth. Whenever it is rightly understood, it turns things upside down. Its great sentences are to us commonplaces — we can handle them without a thrill, listen to them and grow drowsy. That is because they have been worn smooth by the breath of sixty genera- tions. But if we could really understand them, if we paid attention to them, we should see down in the depths of them the red glare of volcanic fires. Whenever men truly grasp them, they work renais- sances, reforms, and revolutions. The followers of Jesus ought to be the most radical people on the earth. They always are when they are baptized with the spirit of the Lord. Take, for instance, such a commonplace idea as the Fatherhood of God. ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' 273 What a radical doctrine it is ! Can you conceive of anything so quixotic and visionary as setting a whole world to praying, " Our Father " ! There is only one doctrine more incredible than that, and that is the Brotherhood of Man. How preposterous it all is when one stops to think about it : that all the men on the face of the earth are members of one family, that they belong to one another, and owe fraternal obligations to one another ! Yet these are the two fundamental doctrines of Jesus. If men could only comprehend them, old things would pass away, and all things would become new. But it was not because the ideas of Jesus were radical that men were disturbed and exasperated by them ; it was because he carried his radicalism into action. He could have taught the brotherhood of man without molestation. It is a beautiful and poetic doctrine ; men would have applauded it if he had only taught it. But he lived it. He was brotherly with pub- licans, men that were not respectable. That en- raged the people. " He is the friend of publicans" — so they sneered all over Palestine. He might have said nice things about the pubHcans, thrown them beautiful gems of thought — but to sit down with them and eat with them in defiance of the traditions of polite society ! What man has a right to trample on the established beliefs of the best people of his day } Jesus was so radical that he dared to live the doctrine of the brotherhood of man. He was brotherly even with Samaritans. 274 '' INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' He reached his hand across a bottomless chasm and touched the foul flesh of a Samaritan who was a leper. It stung every respectable Jew to madness. The Pharisees belched forth their venom in the words : "You are a Samaritan and have a devil." In the estimation of every pious Jew, only a devil was capable of being brotherly to a Samaritan. Jesus was the preacher of righteousness — and righteous- ness is a thrilling doctrine, and men like to hear it preached. If eloquently spoken, they will applaud it. But Jesus wrought righteousness, established it here and now. For instance, he went into the temple, upset the tables of the money-changers with his own hands, and with his own strong right arm drove the beasts and the scoundrels out. It was not what he preached, but what he did, that made men wild to drink his blood. From the day on which he overturned the tables and sent the coins rolling across the marble floor, many a hand in Jerusalem itched to take him by the throat and crush out his Hfe. You cannot understand that Satanic chorus of voices : " Crucify him ! Crucify him ! " unless you understand that Jesus was the most radical man that ever lived. And the terrible thing about it all is that he in- sists upon it that his followers shall be like him. He never grew weary of emphasizing that one point. His followers are to do what he does, they are to drink the cup of which he drank, they are to be baptized with the baptism with which he '' INTERN ATIOIVAL PEACE'' 275 was baptized, they are to take up their cross and follow him — that, he says, is fundamental. He never allows them to get away from it. He that hears these sayings of mine and does them is like a man who builds on rock; he that hears my sayings and does not do them is like a great fool. That was his teaching at the beginning, and that was his teaching at the end. In the upper cham- ber on the night of his betrayal the exhortation runs after this same fashion. " If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them." " Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you." In other words, Christians are called to be brothers to all men everywhere, to manifest the fraternal spirit toward all men of every race. They are to go through the world overturning the tables, making clean the places that are foul, and driving wicked men to their hiding-places. They are to turn the world upside down and consent to crucifixion. That is the Christian rehgion in a nutshell. We are prepared, therefore, for just such a beatitude as this : " Blessed are the peacemakers." You will observe that he has nothing to say about the peace wishers, the peace hopers, the peace lovers, the peace eulogizers, the peace sentimentalists — the blessing is promised simply to those who make peace, who work for it, who promote it, who by sacrifice and effort establish it in human hearts and political institutions. Peace is not a gift, it is an achievement. It is not something to be sung about, 276 ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' but something to be wrought out by the sweat and the prowess and the indefatigable labor of man. It is possible to make mischief in this world. Some men like to make it ; they have made it ; they are making it now. It is possible to make hate and fan the flames of enmity, to increase the volume of the notes of discord. Many men like to do that — they are doing it to-day. In a world so full of passion, prejudice, and hate as this one is, it is not difficult to make strife and dissension and war. Christianity calls upon men to make peace, to an- tagonize the forces that make for discord, to say by their Hps and their lives that the ideals of Jesus can be wrought out in human civilization. Blessed are the peacemakers, the men who strug- gle and labor and suffer and sacrifice for peace, for they shall be called the sons of God. Not now are they so called, but they shall be. We are liv- ing in a world round which the clouds hang heavy. The mist is still in men's eyes, and most of us see but dimly. Through the mists we can see the glow of military pomp and catch the flash of mili- tary glory, feel the splendor of military achieve- ment, stand bewitched before the genius of mili- tary prowess — but the clouds will some day blow away, the mists will some time melt into air, and the red battle-fields covered with writhing men will not be counted fields of glory, and the military chieftains, instead of standing in the highest places, will be found in the lowest ranks of the servants ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' 277 of humanity, while far above them will sit in quiet dignity the broad-browed sons of God, who in their day and generation labored to extend the limits of the kingdom of good-will. Let us think, then, about the subject of inter- national peace. It is the greatest of all subjects upon which the human mind in our day can dwell. What other subject is so broad as this } It touches all the nations ; it involves all the races. There is not a being on the earth that is not covered by this vast theme. It is a problem of human interest ; it is a religious question, but it is also a political question. It is a question with which the state must deal; it is also a question with which the church must deal. It is an ethical question ; it is also a spiritual question. No matter who a man is, or what he believes, if he is human, he must be interested in this theme. It is a question which will not be settled to-day or to-morrow ; it is too vast and compHcated for that. Centuries have labored together to create it, and centuries must work together to solve it. A man who comes to the subject of international peace comes to a sub- ject which will not only enlarge his heart, but tax and discipline his mind. The world has gotten itself into a most curious dilemma. All the great nations to-day are lovers of peace, yet all of them are constantly preparing for war. No absurder spectacle is to be found in the history of the world. Europe, for instance, is 2/8 ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' staggering under the weight of thirty billion dollars of debt, most of it caused by wars or prepa- rations for wars ; and in addition to the enormous sums which must be raised to pay the interest on this debt, Europe is spending one and a half billions of dollars every year for the maintenance of her armies and navies. And, strange to say, the sum although colossal grows larger and larger year by year. The annual sum expended is four hundred million dollars larger now than it was eight years ago. All the leading nations are pushing onward in this direction, with the United States at the head of the column. Within the last ten years our population has increased about lo per cent and our military expenditures 300 per cent. In two respects we lead the world : in the number of murders and the pro- portionate increase of our military expenditures. The result of this is that great reformatory movements must suffer for lack of money. The civil- ization of the world is checked by this awful finan- cial drain. England spends over three hundred mil- lions a year on her army and navy, and only eighty milHons on education and science and art. After paying for her soldiers, and sailors, there is not much money left for anything else. Russia spends over two hundred millions a year for her army and navy, and only twenty two millions on public in- struction. After the god of war has gotten his share, there is very little left for better things. Even in the United States in a time of profound '' lATER.VAT/ONAL PEACE'' 279 peace, without an enemy in the world, we are spending over two hundred million dollars a year for our army and navy, and although we are one of the richest nations on earth, Congress finds it difficult to raise money to buy a lot for anew post- office, and is all the time haggling over the wages which shall be paid to the men who carry our letters. But this is not the only result : not only is the way of reform barred and the progress of civilization arrested, but the hearts of men are be- coming embittered everywhere. Men are becom- ing anarchists, nihilists, terrorists, revolutionists, socialists, and in every country there is the grim muttering of a coming storm. See the poverty in all the countries, Hsten to the cry of distress that goes up constantly to heaven, and then see the rulers of the world using ever increasing amounts of money for multiplying the instruments of slaughter, and you will cry out : " O judgment, thou hast fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason." It is at a crisis like this that the Christian church finds her opportunity. She is the church of the Prince of Peace. That is his proudest title. She is the promulgator of the doctrine of human brotherhood. The prayer which Christians must all repeat begins with, " Our Father " ! Other men may indulge in national animosities ; Chris- tians cannot. Other men may give way to race prejudice; Christians must not. Other men may 280 ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' foment strife and fan the flames of passion ; Chris- tians must always work for peace. To that end we were born, and for that purpose came we into the world. The baptismal water on our foreheads meant that we were to work for human brother- hood. To doubt that is disloyalty, and to evade it is a sin. Because the church stands for brother- hood, it is bound to consider the needs of the poor. The Christian church at the very beginning turned itself enthusiastically to the needs of the poor. The first cry that arrested its ears was the cry of poverty; the first money that was ever collected was money which was sent to the poor; the first officers elected in the church were chosen to look after the poor. When Paul came up to Jerusalem to confer with the three elders of the Palestinian church, they reminded him how essential it was that he should remember the poor, and he told them that that was the very thing he was zealous to do. What an opportunity, then, the church of Christ has in our day when the poverty of the world is crying trumpet-tongued for relief, to com- pel men to think about the wickedness of squan- dering treasure on the multiplication of instruments of destruction. But somebody asks : What can the church do } It can do much. Preachers can discuss the ques- tion ; they can bring the thought of men to bear upon it. A distinguished judge of the Supreme Court of the United States in an article in a recent ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' 28 1 magazine, in contrasting the professions, said in substance this : " The doctor deals with men's bodies, the lawyer deals with their material inter- ests, but the preacher deals with the life to come." The distinguished judge is a friend of ministers, and he was endeavoring to say something which would give the minister distinction — but, alas, what an antiquated sound his language has! That is the idea which men had a hundred years ago. I do not know of any preacher who has it now. Preachers to-day are not dealing with the life to come except indirectly ; they are dealing with the life that now is. The books which they read are books which deal with the life of to-day ; the prob- lems about which they think are the problems which vex society now. Every preacher who understands his business knows that he is not called to deal with the Hfe to come ; it is with the life of this world that he is to grapple. It is with the age in which he lives that he is to deal. He is as near to men as either the doctor or the law- yer. It is his business to turn human minds and hearts to the problems and evils at our door. It is only recently that we have come to understand the Lord's Prayer : " Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth even as it is done in heaven." No preacher nowadays is trying to get his people into some other world ; he is trying to get the better world established in this world. It is not to prepare men to do God's will somewhere else, 282 ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' but to train them to do God's will here and now, that every preacher lives and prays and labors, and therefore international peace is a question with which a preacher has to deal. He must bring it often to the minds of men and compel them to think about it. So long as we pray that the kingdom of God may come, we are bound to consider the wisdom of spending so much money on battleships and guns. But what can laymen do .'' First of all, they can inform themselves. It is surprising the lamentable lack of information among inteUigent people upon this all-important subject. There are thousands of Christians who have no conception of the enormous sums of money which are being squandered, and of the wicked and inexcusable folly into which Christendom has been led. If all the Christians of this country would read the last volume of Bloch's masterly work on War, and also a half-dozen other volumes which have appeared within the last five years, enthusi- asm would burn like a conflagration, and there would be protests which would be heard all over the world. If Christians were better informed than they are, they would speak with greater courage, and Hkewise with fuller wisdom. Ours is the land of public opinion, and every one of us has our part to do in forming it. It is not our congressman after all who form our laws ; it is that mysterious, intangible, mighty public opinion '' INTERN-ATIONAL PEACE'' 283 created by the minds and hearts of numberless people. Now the public opinion of any nation can be changed: it can be debased, it can be elevated; it can be paganized, it can be Chris- tianized. Many of you have, no doubt, been surprised at the changed attitude in the French republic, not only toward England, but also toward Germany, within the last few years. Who would have be- lieved that France and England could ever have come so close together as they are to-day } and who could have believed that within a generation after the Franco-Prussian War so many French- men could say such generous things about their German neighbors .-' What has wrought this change.? It has been brought about by the systematic and deliberate and persistent efforts of a noble band of Frenchmen who are working for the day of universal peace. By their speeches and by their writings these men have changed to an amazing degree the temper of the French republic. What has been done in France can be done anywhere. The thirty million Christians in the United States can make the sentiment of this country what they choose. There is need for just such an in- fluence as the Christian church can bring to bear. We are a prosperous and, to a large extent, a vain- glorious people. We have been deeply material- ized by our material successes. There is a coarse and brutal strain in us as a nation, and this strain 284 ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' manifests itself ever and anon. The worst manifes- tation of it in recent days is that which is displayed in the Program of the Jamestown Exposition. The promoters of that enterprise in making up their Program put down thirty attractive features, eighteen of which are military or naval. In read- ing down the list, with its high-flown adjectives and its constant repetition of "military glory " and "military splendor," one can hardly realize that such a thing could have come to pass in a land like ours. " Come, O people, come," these James- town Exposition managers shout; "come to see the uniforms of soldiers,^see the battleships, see the torpedo boats, see the military parades, see the military balloons, see the military relics, see all the pomp and glory of war." O that it should have come to this in the land of Washing- ton, who prayed constantly that God might remove the awful scourge of war from the earth ! That it should come to this in the land of Grant, whose greatest saying is chiseled in the granite of his tomb : " Let us have peace " ! That it should come to this in the land of Sherman, who said : " I am tired and sick of war. War is hell " ! That it should come to this in the land of benefactors and philanthropists, all of whom, from Benjamin Franklin down, have been advocates of peace and antagonists of war ! That it should come to this in the land whose greatest poets have sung their sweetest songs concerning peace, and whose people <' INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' 285 have ever delighted from the first day until now, not in the barracks or the parade ground, but in the church and in the school ! When we have still among us men capable of writing the James- town Program, there is a deal of work for the Christian church to do. If the Christian church does not do this work, then somebody else will do it. We are living in God's universe, and the stars in their courses are fighting against war. It is lamentable the way the Christian church has fumbled almost every impor- tant subject. It is amazing that at nearly every crisis she should have been weighed in the bal- ances and found wanting. Everybody nowadays sees that slavery was an iniquitous institution, that it is not right for one man to own another. Is it not amazing that all Christians could not see that fifty years ago ? Thousands could not. They were wise men and good men, and yet for some reason their eyes were blinded so they could not see, their hearts were hardened so they could not feel. Here and there there was a minister like Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn and Joseph P. Thompson in New York who saw the truth and spoke out bravely, but hundreds of ministers were dumb. Here and there were noble laymen, and noble women whose hearts went out in sympathy with the slave, and who worked and prayed for the great redemption, but the masses of Christians were indifferent. 286 '^ INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' In the year 1855 David Christie brought out his famous book, "Cotton is King." He had noth- ing but sneers for the abolitionist — abolition, he said, was a vagary, a sentimental dream. His ar- gument was incontrovertible. It ran thus : The North needs cotton, the South must produce it ; the South can produce it only by slave labor — therefore the negro will remain a slave. Millions of men assented to the argument of Christie. They did not know that long before Christie wrote his book, a young man by the name of Lincoln had been down in New Orleans where he had seen a mulatto young woman of pretty face and comely body put up for sale at auction. Lincoln had looked into the auctioneer's face and heard him say: "Come up, gentlemen, and examine her; I keep back no secrets from my customers," — and the heart of the young man from the North grew hot within him. He said : " By God, if I ever get the chance to hit that thing, I will hit it hard." God in his own good time gave him the chance — and he hit it hard. And whenever I pick up a paper and see that the United States government has spent ten million dollars for a new battleship — as much money as would buy all the land of Har- vard University and all its more than a hundred buildings ; and all the land of Hampton Institute and all its farms and buildings ; and all the land of Tuskegee and all of its buildings, too — when I read of that much money being put into a single <' mTERN-AT/ONAL PEACE'' 287 vessel weighted down with instruments of slaughter, I console myself by saying : There is a young man somewhere under our flag who will in God's good time hit that thing, and hit it hard. We cannot go on as we are going. Already we read that England has invested 670 millions of dollars in her navy and she is spending over 300 millions of dollars on army and navy each year ; and while she is doing this, thousands of men and women in London are pick- ing up apple-cores on the street and eating them because they are so hungry, picking up peach seeds and cracking them for the kernel in them to save them from starvation, and thousands of little boys and girls are eating crusts out of swill cans in order to keep themselves alive. Do you sup- pose that England can go on doing that forever ? I tell you, No. And do you suppose the United States can go on investing in battleships at ten million dollars apiece when over two millions of her people cannot read or write, and when nine millions of black men and women in the South, vicious and ignorant, many of them, are crying for relief } and when all of our American cities are filling up with a foreign population which, because of its character, is multiplying our dangers and making more complicated all of our problems ? Do you suppose our republic can go on building battleships when we need our treasure in so many other fields ? I tell you. No. Do you suppose 288 '' INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' that Russia can go on doing what she is doing to-day, voting new money for battleships, while millions of her people are on the verge of starva- tion ? Who can see the pictures of the haggard women and the pinched faces of the little chil- dren — who can see even the pictures of the poor starved horses without being kept awake at night by the awful spectacle ? And if the church of Jesus Christ on earth allows that outrage to go on with- out a protest, then the church will cease to be the church of Christ, and deserves the scorn and ridi- cule of men. There are times when, if the church does not speak, the very stones will cry out against her. But dark as the picture is, there is abundant room for hope. Things are bad, but they are not so bad as they have been, and they are certain to become better. The nations are coming closer together. Steam is at work and so is electricity, and they are strong-limbed servants of the Al- mighty. The scholars of the world have long since come together, and their international meet- ings are increasing year by year. The writers of the world have come together ; the same books are read around the world. We already have many international bodies, and we are destined to have many more. We have an International Postal Union ; an International Institute of Agriculture made up of forty-two of the leading nations of the earth ; we have an International Parliamentary ''INTERNATIONAL PEACE'' 289 Union made up of twenty-five hundred statesmen of the leading nations of the world ; we have a body of International Law made up of several hundred of the leading jurists of the world; and by and by we shall have an International Commer- cial Bureau ; and sometime we are going to have an International Congress which will give advisory legislation to all the empires and republics of the world. It may be that this is the next step which, under God, the world is destined to take. It has been a dream of the prophets and poets for centu- ries that there would sometime be a Parliament in which the nations should all be represented. It is not unlikely that it is through just such a Parlia- ment that the problem of disarmament will be solved. For many years the subject of arbitration had been discussed, and many an effort had been put forth to induce nations to adopt arbitration treaties, but for the most part these efforts were in vain. But at the close of the last century the Hague Court was established, and within these last seven years over two score arbitration treaties have been signed. The establishment of the court made it easy for the cause of arbitration to ad- vance. There has been a deal of talk against the consummate folly and wickedness of armaments, but the talk has thus far brought forth no tangible results. It may be that disarmament will never come until we have the International Congress — 290 '' mTER NATIONAL PEACE'' and for this Congress the leaders of the Peace movement are enthusiastically at work. The con- gress to be held this week in our city has a double purpose : First, the creation of a public sentiment in favor of international arbitration ; and secondly, the creation of influences which may be brought to bear upon our statesmen which shall lead them to favor the creation of an international legislative body composed of the representatives of the na- tions of the world. America should certainly take the lead in all this work for peace. We owe it to our past and to our present and to our future. Be- cause of our position we ought to do it, because of our size and also because of our wealth we ought to do it, because of our history and because of the great men whose names have made our nation illustrious we ought to do it, because we are a republic built on the principles of equality and fraternity and good-will ; because God has given unto us such a land, and because he has dowered us with so many gifts, and because he has filled full a wonderful century, we ought, through our chosen rulers, to work in season and out of season for the creation of the parliament of man, the federation of the world. Date Due tr-^^-^A 'f'^i. T^*l ^S*: V'xc'' T f-.