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THE WORLD'S GREAT SERMONS

COMPILED BY

GRENVILLE KLEISER

Formerly of Yale Divinity School Faculty; Author of "How to Speak in
Public," Etc.

With Assistance from Many of the Foremost Living Preachers and Other
Theologians

INTRODUCTION BY LEWIS O. BRASTOW, D.D.

Professor Emeritus of Practical Theology in Yale University

IN TEN VOLUMES

VOLUME X DRUMMOND TO JOWETT

General Index

1908







CONTENTS


VOLUME X.


DRUMMOND (1851--1897).
The Greatest Thing in the World

WAGNER (Born in 1851).
I Am a Voice

GORDON (Born in 1853).
Man in the Image of God

DAWSON (Born in 1854).
Christ Among the Common Things of Life

SMITH (Born in 1856).
Assurance in God

GUNSAULUS (Born in 1856).
The Bible vs. Infidelity

HILLIS (Born in 1858).
God the Unwearied Guide

JEFFERSON (Born in 1860).
The Reconciliation

MORGAN (Born in 1863).
The Perfect Ideal of Life

CADMAN (Born in 1864).
A New Day for Missions

JOWETT (Born in 1864).
Apostolic Optimism


Index to Preachers and Sermons

Index to Texts




DRUMMOND

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


Henry Drummond, author and evangelist, was born at Stirling, Scotland,
in 1851. His book, "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," caused much
discussion and is still widely read. His "Ascent of Man" is regarded
by many as his greatest work. The address reprinted here has appeared
in hundreds of editions, and has been an inspiration to thousands
of peoples all over the world. There is an interesting biography
of Drummond by Professor George Adam Smith, his close friend and
colaborer. He died in 1897.




DRUMMOND

1851--1897

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD[1]

[Footnote 1: Reprinted by permission of James Pott & Co.]

_Tho I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love,
&c._--I Cor. xiii.


Everyone has asked himself the great question of antiquity as of the
modern world: What is the _summum bonum_--the supreme good? You have
life before you. Once only you can live it. What is the noblest object
of desire, the supreme gift to covet?

We have been accustomed to be told that the greatest thing in the
religious world is faith. That great word has been the key-note for
centuries of the popular religion; and we have easily learned to look
upon it as the greatest thing in the world. Well, we are wrong. If we
have been told that, we may miss the mark. I have taken you, in the
chapter which I have just read, to Christianity at its source; and
there we have seen, "The greatest of these is love." It is not an
oversight. Paul was speaking of faith just a moment before. He says,
"If I have all faith, so that I can remove mountains, and have not
love, I am nothing." So far from forgetting, he deliberately contrasts
them, "Now abideth faith, hope, love," and without a moment's
hesitation the decision falls, "The greatest of these is love."

And it is not prejudice. A man is apt to recommend to others his own
strong point. Love was not Paul's strong point. The observing student
can detect a beautiful tenderness growing and ripening all through his
character as Paul gets old; but the hand that wrote, "The greatest of
these is love," when we meet it first, is stained with blood.

Nor is this letter to the Corinthians peculiar in singling out love as
the _summum bonum_. The masterpieces of Christianity are agreed about
it. Peter says, "Above all things have fervent love among yourselves."
Above all things. And John goes further, "God is love." And you
remember the profound remark which Paul makes elsewhere, "Love is the
fulfilling of the law." Did you ever think what he meant by that? In
those days men were working their passage to heaven by keeping the ten
commandments, and the hundred and ten other commandments which they
had manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more
simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hundred and ten
things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, you will
unconsciously fulfil the whole law. And you can readily see for
yourselves how that must be so. Take any of the commandments. "Thou
shalt have no other gods before me." If a man love God, you will not
require to tell him that. Love is the fulfilling of that law. "Take
not his name in vain." Would he ever dream of taking His name in vain
if he loved Him? "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Would he
not be too glad to have one day in seven to dedicate more exclusively
to the object of his affection? Love would fulfil all these laws
regarding God. And so, if he loved man, you would never think of
telling him to honor his father and mother. He could not do anything
else. It would be preposterous to tell him not to kill. You could only
insult him if you suggested that he should not steal--how could he
steal from those he loved? It would be superfluous to beg him not to
bear false witness against his neighbor. If he loved him it would be
the last thing he would do. And you would never dream of urging him
not to covet what his neighbors had. He would rather that they possest
it than himself. In this way "Love is the fulfilling of the law." It
is the rule for fulfilling all rules, the new commandment for keeping
all the old commandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian life.

Now, Paul had learned that; and in this noble eulogy he has given us
the most wonderful and original account extant of the _summum bonum_.
We may divide it into three parts. In the beginning of the short
chapter, we have love contrasted; in the heart of it, we have love
analyzed; toward the end, we have love defended as the supreme gift.

Paul begins contrasting love with other things that men in those
days thought much of. I shall not attempt to go over those things in
detail. Their inferiority is already obvious.

He contrasts it with eloquence. And what a noble gift it is, the power
of playing upon the souls and wills of men, and rousing them to lofty
purposes and holy deeds. Paul says, "If I speak with the tongues of
men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass,
or a tinkling cymbal." And we all know why. We have all felt the
brazenness of words without emotion, the hollowness, the unaccountable
unpersuasiveness, of eloquence behind which lies no love.

He contrasts it with prophecy. He contrasts it with mysteries. He
contrasts it with faith. He contrasts it with charity. Why is love
greater than faith? Because the end is greater than the means. And
why is it greater than charity? Because the whole is greater than the
part. Love is greater than faith, because the end is greater than the
means. What is the use of having faith? It is to connect the soul with
God. And what is the object of connecting man with God? That he may
become like God. But God is love. Hence faith, the means, is in order
to love, the end. Love, therefore, obviously is greater than faith. It
is greater than charity, again, because the whole is greater than a
part. Charity is only a little bit of love, one of the innumerable
avenues of love, and there may even be, and there is, a great deal of
charity without love. It is a very easy thing to toss a copper to a
beggar on the street; it is generally an easier thing than not to do
it. Yet love is just as often in the withholding. We purchase relief
from the sympathetic feelings roused by the spectacle of misery, at
the copper's cost. It is too cheap--too cheap for us, and often too
dear for the beggar. If we really loved him we would either do more
for him, or less.

Then Paul contrasts it with sacrifice and martyrdom. And I beg the
little band of would-be missionaries--and I have the honor to call
some of you by this name for the first time--to remember that tho
you give your bodies to be burned, and have not love, it profits
nothing--nothing! You can take nothing greater to the heathen world
than the impress and reflection of the love of God upon your own
character. That is the universal language. It will take you years to
speak in Chinese; or in the dialects of India. From the day you land,
that language of love, understood by all, will be pouring forth its
unconscious eloquence. It is the man who is the missionary, it is not
his words. His character is his message. In the heart of Africa, among
the great lakes, I have come across black men and women who remembered
the only white man they ever saw before--David Livingstone; and as you
cross his footsteps in that dark continent, men's faces light up as
they speak of the kind doctor who passed there years ago. They could
not understand him; but they felt the love that beat in his heart.
Take into your new sphere of labor, where you also mean to lay down
your life, that simple charm, and your life-work must succeed. You
can take nothing greater, you need take nothing less. It is not
worth while going if you take anything less. You may take every
accomplishment; you may be braced for every sacrifice; but if you give
your body to be burned, and have not love, it will profit you and the
cause of Christ nothing.

After contrasting love with these things, Paul, in three verses, very
short, gives us an amazing analysis of what this supreme thing is. I
ask you to look at it. It is a compound thing, he tells us. It is like
light. As you have seen a man of science take a beam of light and pass
it through a crystal prism, as you have seen it come out on the other
side of the prism broken up into its component colors--red, and
blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange, and all the colors of the
rainbow--so Paul passes this thing, love, through the magnificent
prism of his inspired intellect, and it comes out on the other side
broken up into its elements. And in these few words we have what
one might call the spectrum of love, the analysis of love. Will you
observe what its elements are? Will you notice that they have common
names; that they are virtues which we hear about every day, that they
are things which can be practised by every man in every place in life;
and how, by a multitude of small things and ordinary virtues, the
supreme thing, the _summum bonum_, is made up?

The spectrum of love has nine ingredients:

  Patience--"Love suffereth long."
  Kindness--"And is kind."
  Generosity--"Love envieth not."
  Humility--"Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up."
  Courtesy--"Doth not behave itself unseemly."
  Unselfishness--"Seeketh not her own."
  Good temper--"Is not easily provoked."
  Guilelessness--"Thinketh no evil."
  Sincerity--"Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth."

Patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness,
good temper, guilelessness, sincerity--these make up the supreme gift,
the stature of the perfect man. You will observe that all are in
relation to men, in relation to life, in relation to the known to-day
and the near to-morrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much
of love to God; Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal
of peace with heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is
not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life,
the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The
supreme thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a
further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the
sum of every common day.

There is no time to do more than to make a passing note upon each of
these ingredients. Love is patience. This is the normal attitude of
love; love passive, love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm;
ready to do its work when the summons comes, but meantime wearing the
ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. Love suffers long; beareth all
things; believeth all things; hopeth all things. For love understands,
and therefore waits.

Kindness. Love active. Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's life
was spent in doing kind things--in merely doing kind things? Run
over it with that in view, and you will find that He spent a great
proportion of His time simply in making people happy, in doing good
turns to people. There is only one thing greater than happiness in the
world, and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping; but what
God has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that
is largely to be secured by our being kind to them.

"The greatest thing," says some one, "a man can do for his Heavenly
Father is to be kind to some of his other children." I wonder why it
is that we are not all kinder than we are? How much the world needs
it. How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. How infallibly
it is remembered. How superabundantly it pays itself back--for there
is no debtor in the world so honorable, so superbly honorable, as
love. "Love never faileth." Love is success, love is happiness, love
is life. "Love," I say, with Browning, "is energy of life."

  For life, with all it yields of joy or wo
  And hope and fear,
  Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love--
  How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.

Where love is, God is. He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God. God
is love. Therefore love. Without distinction, without calculation,
without procrastination, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is
very easy; especially upon the rich, who often need it most; most of
all upon our equals, where it is very difficult, and for whom perhaps
we each do least of all. There is a difference between trying to
please and giving pleasure. Give pleasure. Lose no chance of giving
pleasure. For that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly
loving spirit. "I shall pass through this world but once. Any good
thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any
human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for
I shall not pass this way again."

Generosity. "Love envieth not." This is love in competition with
others. Whenever you attempt a good work you will find other men doing
the same kind of work, and probably doing it better. Envy them not.
Envy is a feeling of ill-will to those who are in the same line
as ourselves, a spirit of covetousness and detraction. How little
Christian work even is a protection against unchristian feeling! That
most despicable of all the unworthy moods which cloud a Christian's
soul assuredly waits for us on the threshold of every work, unless we
are fortified with this grace of magnanimity. Only one thing truly
needs the Christian envy, the large, rich, generous soul which
"envieth not."

And then, after having learned all that, you have to learn this
further thing, humility--to put a seal upon your lips and forget what
you have done. After you have been kind, after love has stolen forth
into the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade
again and say nothing about it. Love hides even from itself. Love
waives even self-satisfaction. "Love vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed up."

The fifth ingredient is a somewhat strange one to find in this _summum
bonum_: Courtesy. This is love in society, love in relation to
etiquette. "Love doth not behave itself unseemly." Politeness has been
defined as love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be love in little
things. And the one secret of politeness is to love. Love can not
behave itself unseemly. You can put the most untutored persons into
the highest society, and if they have a reservoir of love in their
hearts, they will not behave themselves unseemly. They simply can not
do it. Carlyle said of Robert Burns that there was no truer
gentleman in Europe than the plowman-poet. It was because he loved
everything--the mouse, the daisy, and all the things, great and small,
that God had made. So with this simple passport he could mingle with
any society, and enter courts and palaces from his little cottage on
the banks of the Ayr. You know the meaning of the word "gentleman." It
means a gentle man--a man who does things gently with love. And that
is the whole art and mystery of it. The gentle man can not in the
nature of things do an ungentle and ungentlemanly thing. The ungentle
soul, the inconsiderate, unsympathetic nature can not do anything
else. "Love doth not behave itself unseemly."

Unselfishness. "Love seeketh not her own." Observe: Seeketh not even
that which is her own. In Britain the Englishman is devoted, and
rightly, to his rights. But there come times when a man may exercise
even the higher right of giving up his rights. Yet Paul does not
summon us to give up our rights. Love strikes much deeper. It would
have us not seek them at all, ignore them, eliminate the personal
element altogether from our calculations. It is not hard to give up
our rights. They are often external. The difficult thing is to give up
ourselves. The more difficult thing still is not to seek things for
ourselves at all. After we have sought them, bought them, won them,
deserved them, we have taken the cream off them for ourselves already.
Little cross then perhaps to give them up. But not to seek them, to
look every man not on his own things, but on the things of others--_id
opus est_. "Seekest thou great things for thyself?" said the prophet;
"seek them not." Why? Because there is no greatness in things.
Things can not be great. The only greatness is unselfish love. Even
self-denial in itself is nothing, is almost a mistake. Only a
great purpose or a mightier love can justify the waste. It is more
difficult, I have said, not to seek our own at all, than, having
sought it, to give it up. I must take that back. It is only true of a
partly selfish heart. Nothing is a hardship to love, and nothing is
hard. I believe that Christ's yoke is easy. Christ's "yoke" is just
His way of taking life. And I believe it is an easier way than any
other. I believe it is a happier way than any other. The most obvious
lesson in Christ's teaching is that there is no happiness in having
and getting anything, but only in giving. I repeat, there is no
happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. And half the
world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness. They think
it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. It
consists in giving and serving others. He that would be great among
you, said Christ, let him serve. He that would be happy, let him
remember that there is but one way--it is more blest, it is more
happy, to give than to receive.

The next ingredient is a very remarkable one: good temper. "Love is
not easily provoked." Nothing could be more striking than to find
this here. We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless
weakness. We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family
failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take into very
serious account in estimating a man's character. And yet here, right
in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place; and the Bible
again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive
elements in human nature.

The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous.
It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men
who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but
for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" disposition. This
compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the
strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is, there are two
great classes of sins--sins of the body, and sins of the disposition.
The Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first, the Elder
Brother of the second. Now society has no doubt whatever as to which
of these is the worse. Its brands fall without a challenge, upon the
Prodigal. But are we right? We have no balance to weigh one another's
sins, and coarser and finer are but human words; but faults in the
higher nature may be less venial than those in the lower, and to the
eye of Him who is love, a sin against love may seem a hundred times
more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not
drunkenness itself, does more to unchristianize society than evil
temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for
destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for
withering up men and women, for taking the bloom off childhood, in
short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence
stands alone. Look at the Elder Brother, moral, hard-working, patient,
dutiful--let him get all credit for his virtues--look at this man,
this baby, sulking outside his own father's door. "He was angry," we
read, "and would not go in." Look at the effect upon the father, upon
the servants, upon the happiness of the guests. Judge of the effect
upon the Prodigal--and how many prodigals are kept out of the kingdom
of God by the unlovely character of those who profess to be inside?
Analyze, as a study in temper, the thunder-cloud itself as it gathers
upon the Elder Brother's brow. What is it made of? Jealousy, anger,
pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness, touchiness, doggedness,
sullenness--these are the ingredients of this dark and loveless soul.
In varying proportions, also, these are the ingredients of all ill
temper. Judge if such sins of the disposition are not worse to live
in, and for others to live with, than sins of the body. Did Christ
indeed not answer the question Himself when He said, "I say unto you,
that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of heaven
before you." There is really no place in heaven for a disposition like
this. A man with such a mood could only make heaven miserable for all
the people in it. Except, therefore, such a man be born again, he
can not, he simply can not, enter the kingdom of heaven. For it is
perfectly certain--and you will not misunderstand me--that to enter
heaven a man must take it with him.

You will see then why temper is significant It is not in what it is
alone, but in what it reveals. This is why I take the liberty now of
speaking of it with such unusual plainness. It is a test for love,
a symptom, a revelation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the
intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within;
the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some
rottenness underneath; a sample of the most hidden products of
the soul dropt involuntarily when off one's guard; in a word, the
lightning form of a hundred hideous and unchristian sins. For a want
of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of
courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolized
in one flash of temper.

Hence it is not enough to deal with the temper. We must go to the
source, and change the inmost nature, and the angry humors will die
away of themselves. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids
out, but by putting something in--a great love, a new spirit, the
spirit of Christ. Christ, the spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours,
sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what
is wrong, work a chemical change, renovate and regenerate, and
rehabilitate the inner man. Will-power does not change men. Time does
not change men. Christ does. Therefore, "Let that mind be in you which
was also in Christ Jesus." Some of us have not much time to lose.
Remember, once more, that this is a matter of life or death. I can
not help speaking urgently, for myself, for yourselves. "Whoso shall
offend one of these little ones, which believe in me, it were better
for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were
drowned in the depth of the sea." That is to say, it is the deliberate
verdict of the Lord Jesus that it is better not to live than not to
love. _It is better not to live than not to love._

Guilelessness and sincerity may be dismissed almost without a word.
Guilelessness is the grace for suspicious people. And the possession
of it is the great secret of personal influence. You will find, if you
think for a moment, that the people who influence you are people who
believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up; but
in that other atmosphere they expand, and find encouragement and
educative fellowship. It is a wonderful thing that here and there in
this hard, uncharitable world there should still be left a few rare
souls who think no evil. This is the great unworldliness. Love
"thinketh no evil," imputes no bad motive, sees the bright side, puts
the best construction on every action. What a delightful state of mind
to live in! What stimulus and benediction even to meet with it for
a day! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence or
elevate others, we shall soon see that success is in proportion to
their belief of our belief in them. For the respect of another is the
first restoration of the self-respect a man has lost; our ideal of
what he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become.

"Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." I have
called this sincerity from the words rendered in the Authorized
Version by "rejoiceth in the truth." And, certainly, were this the
real translation, nothing could be more just. For he who loves will
love truth not less than men. He will rejoice in the truth--rejoice
not in what he has been taught to believe; not in this Church's
doctrine or in that; not in this ism or in that ism; but "in the
truth." He will accept only what is real; he will strive to get at
facts; he will search for truth with an humble and unbiased mind,
and cherish whatever he finds at any sacrifice. But the more literal
translation of the Revised Version calls for just such a sacrifice for
truth's sake here. For what Paul really meant is, as we there read,
"Rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth,"
a quality which probably no one English word--and certainly not
sincerity--adequately defines. It includes, perhaps more strictly, the
self-restraint which refuses to make capital out of others' faults;
the charity which delights not in exposing the weakness of others, but
"covereth all things"; the sincerity of purpose which endeavors to see
things as they are, and rejoices to find them better than suspicion
feared or calumny denounced.

So much for the analysis of love. Now the business of our lives is to
have these things in our characters. That is the supreme work to which
we need to address ourselves in this world to learn love. Is life not
full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every
day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a
schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one
eternal lesson for us all is how better we can love. What makes a man
a good cricketer? Practise. What makes a man a good artist, a good
sculptor, a good musician? Practise. What makes a man a good linguist,
a good stenographer? Practise. What makes a man a good man. Practise.
Nothing else. There is nothing capricious about religion. We do not
get the soul in different ways, under different laws, from those in
which we get the body and the mind. If a man does not exercise his arm
he develops no biceps muscle; and if he does not exercise his soul, he
acquires no muscle in his soul, no strength of character, no vigor of
moral fiber nor beauty of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of
enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression
of the whole round Christian character--the Christlike nature in its
fullest development. And the constituents of this great character are
only to be built up by ceaseless practise.

What was Christ doing in the carpenter's shop? Practising. Tho
perfect, we read that He learned obedience, and grew in wisdom and in
favor with God. Do not quarrel, therefore, with your lot in life. Do
not complain of its never-ceasing cares, its petty environment, the
vexations you have to stand, the small and sordid souls you have to
live and work with. Above all, do not resent temptation; do not be
perplexed because it seems to thicken round you more and more, and
ceases neither for effort nor for agony nor prayer. That is your
practise. That is the practise which God appoints you; and it is
having its work in making you patient, and humble, and generous, and
unselfish, and kind, and courteous. Do not grudge the hand that is
molding the still too shapeless image within you. It is growing more
beautiful, tho you see it not, and every touch of temptation may add
to its perfection. Therefore keep in the midst of life. Do not isolate
yourself. Be among men, and among things, and among troubles, and
difficulties, and obstacles. You remember Goethe's words: _Es bildet
ein Talent sich in der Stille, Doch ein Character in dem Strom der
Welt_. "Talent develops itself in solitude; character in the stream of
life." Talent develops itself in solitude--the talent of prayer, of
faith, of meditation, of seeing the unseen; character grows in the
stream of the world's life. That chiefly is where men are to learn
love.

How? Now how? To make it easier, I have named a few of the elements of
love. But these are only elements. Love itself can never be defined.
Light is a something more than the sum of its ingredients--a glowing,
dazzling, tremulous ether. And love is something more than all its
elements--a palpitating, quivering, sensitive, living thing. By
synthesis of all the colors, men can make whiteness, they can not make
light. By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they can
not make love. How then are we to have this transcendent living whole
conveyed into our souls? We brace our wills to secure it. We try to
copy those who have it. We lay down rules about it. We watch. We pray.
But these things alone will not bring love into our nature. Love is
an effect. And only as we fulfil the right condition can we have the
effect produced. Shall I tell you what the cause is?

If you turn to the Revised Version of the First Epistle of John you
will find these words: "We love because he first loved us." "We love,"
not "We love him." That is the way the old version has it, and it is
quite wrong. "We love--because he first loved us." Look at that word
"because." It is the cause of which I have spoken. "Because he first
loved us," the effect follows that we love, we love Him, we love
all men. We can not help it. Because He loved us, we love, we love
everybody. Our heart is slowly changed. Contemplate the love of
Christ, and you will love. Stand before that mirror, reflect Christ's
character, and you will be changed into the same image from tenderness
to tenderness. There is no other way. You can not love to order. You
can only look at the lovely object, and fall in love with it, and
grow into likeness to it. And so look at this perfect character, this
perfect life. Look at the great sacrifice as He laid down Himself, all
through life, and upon the cross of Calvary; and you must love Him.
And loving Him, you must become like Him. Love begets love. It is
a process of induction. Put a piece of iron in the presence of
an electrified body, and that piece of iron for a time becomes
electrified. It is changed into a temporary magnet in the mere
presence of a permanent magnet, and as long as you leave the two side
by side they are both magnets alike. Remain side by side with Him who
loved us, and gave Himself for us, and you too will become a permanent
magnet, a permanently attractive force; and like Him you will draw all
men unto you; like Him you will be drawn unto all men. That is the
inevitable effect of love. Any man who fulfils that cause must have
that effect produced in him. Try to give up the idea that religion
comes to us by chance, or by mystery, or by caprice. It comes to us by
natural law, or by spiritual law, for all law is divine. Edward Irving
went to see a dying boy once, and when he entered the room he just put
his hand on the sufferer's head, and said, "My boy, God loves you,"
and went away. And the boy started from his bed, and called out to the
people in the house, "God loves me! God loves me!" It changed that
boy. The sense that God loved him overpowered him, melted him down,
and began the creating of a new heart in him. And that is how the love
of God melts down the unlovely heart in man, and begets in him the
new creature, who is patient and humble and gentle and unselfish. And
there is no other way to get it. There is no mystery about it. We love
others, we love everybody, we love our enemies, because He first loved
us.

Now I have a closing sentence or two to add about Paul's reason for
singling out love as the supreme possession. It is a very remarkable
reason. In a single word it is this: it lasts. "Love," urges Paul,
"never faileth." Then he begins one of his marvelous lists of the
great things of the day, and exposes them one by one. He runs over the
things that men thought were going to last, and shows that they are
all fleeting, temporary, passing away.

"Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail." It was the mother's
ambition for her boy in those days that he should become a prophet.
For hundreds of years God had never spoken by means of any prophet,
and at that time the prophet was greater than the king. Men waited
wistfully for another messenger to come, and hung upon his lips when
he appeared as upon the very voice of God. Paul says, "Whether there
be prophecies, they shall fail." This book is full of prophecies. One
by one they have "failed"; that is, having been fulfilled their work
is finished; they have nothing more to do now in the world except to
feed a devout man's faith.

Then Paul talks about tongues. That was another thing that was greatly
coveted. "Whether there be tongues, they shall cease." As we all know,
many, many centuries have passed since tongues have been known in this
world. They have ceased. Take it in any sense you like. Take it, for
illustration merely, as languages in general--a sense which was not
in Paul's mind at all, and which tho it can not give us the specific
lesson will point the general truth. Consider the words in which these
chapters were written--Greek. It has gone. Take the Latin--the other
great tongue of those days. It ceased long ago. Look at the Indian
language. It is ceasing. The language of Wales, of Ireland, of the
Scottish Highlands is dying before our eyes. The most popular book in
the English tongue at the present time, except the Bible, is one of
Dickens' works, his "Pickwick Papers." It is largely written in the
language of London street-life, and experts assure us that in fifty
years it will be unintelligible to the average English reader.

Then Paul goes further, and with even greater boldness adds, "Whether
there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." The wisdom of the ancients,
where is it? It is wholly gone. A schoolboy today knows more than
Sir Isaac Newton knew. His knowledge has vanished away. You put
yesterday's newspaper in the fire. Its knowledge has vanished away.
You buy the old editions of the great encyclopedias for a few cents.
Their knowledge has vanished away. Look how the coach has been
superseded by the use of steam. Look how electricity has superseded
that, and swept a hundred almost new inventions into oblivion. One of
the greatest living authorities, Sir William Thompson, said the other
day, "The steam-engine is passing away." "Whether there be knowledge,
it shall vanish away." At every workshop you will see, in the back
yard, a heap of old iron, a few wheels, a few levers, a few cranks,
broken and eaten with rust. Twenty years ago that was the pride of the
city. Men flocked in from the country to see the great invention; now
it is superseded, its day is done. And all the boasted science and
philosophy of this day will soon be old. But yesterday, in the
University of Edinburgh, the greatest figure in the faculty was
Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of chloroform. The other day his
successor and nephew, Professor Simpson, was asked by the librarian
of the university to go to the library and pick out the books on his
subject that were no longer needed. And his reply to the librarian was
this: "Take every textbook that is more than ten years old, and put it
down in the cellar." Sir James Simpson was a great authority only a
few years ago; men came from all parts of the earth to consult him;
and almost the whole teaching of that time is consigned by the science
of today to oblivion. And in every branch of science it is the same.
"Now we know in part. We see through a glass darkly."

Can you tell me anything that is going to last? Many things Paul did
not condescend to name. He did not mention money, fortune, fame; but
he picked out the great things of his time, the things the best men
thought had something in them, and brushed them peremptorily aside.
Paul had no charge against these things in themselves. All he said
about them was that they would not last. They were great things,
but not supreme things. There were things beyond them. What we are
stretches past what we do, beyond what we possess. Many things that
men denounce as sins are not sins; but they are temporary. And that is
a favorite argument of the New Testament. John says of the world, not
that it is wrong, but simply that it "passeth away." There is a great
deal in the world that is delightful and beautiful; there is a great
deal in it that is great and engrossing; but it will not last. All
that is in the world, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and
the pride of life, are but for a little while. Love not the world
therefore. Nothing that it contains is worth the life and consecration
of an immortal soul. The immortal soul must give itself to something
that is immortal. And the immortal things are: "Now abideth faith,
hope, love, but the greatest of these is love."

Some think the time may come when two of these three things will also
pass away--faith into sight, hope into fruition. Paul does not say so.
We know but little now about the conditions of the life that is to
come. But what is certain is that love must last. God, the eternal
God, is love. Covet therefore that everlasting gift, that one thing
which it is certain is going to stand, that one coinage which will be
current in the universe when all the other coinages of all the nations
of the world shall be useless and unhonored. You will give yourselves
to many things, give yourselves first to love. Hold things in their
proportion. _Hold things in their proportion._ Let at least the first
great object of our lives be to achieve the character defended in
these words, the character--and it is the character of Christ--which
is built round love.

I have said this thing is eternal. Did you ever notice how continually
John associates love and faith with eternal life? I was not told
when I was a boy that "God so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should have everlasting
life." What I was told, I remember, was, that God so loved the world
that, if I trusted in Him, I was to have a thing called peace, or I
was to have rest, or I was to have joy, or I was to have safety. But
I had to find out for myself that whosoever trusteth in Him--that
is, whosoever loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to love--hath
everlasting life. The gospel offers a man life. Never offer men a
thimbleful of gospel. Do not offer them merely joy, or merely peace,
or merely rest, or merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give
men a more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love,
and therefore abundant in salvation for themselves, and large in
enterprise for the alleviation and redemption of the world. Then
only can the gospel take hold of the whole of a man, body, soul, and
spirit, and give to each part of his nature its exercise and reward.
Many of the current gospels are addrest only to a part of man's
nature. They offer peace, not life; faith, not love; justification,
not regeneration. And men slip back again from such religion because
it has never really held them. Their nature was not all in it. It
offered no deeper and gladder life-current than the life that was
lived before. Surely it stands to reason that only a fuller love can
compete with the love of the world.

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to
live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love.
We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live
tomorrow. Why do we want to live tomorrow? It is because there is some
one who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and
love back. There is no other reason why we should live on than that we
love and are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love him that he
commits suicide. So long as he has friends, those who love him and
whom he loves, he will live; because to live is to love. Be it but the
love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go and he has no
contact with life, no reason to live. He dies by his own hand. Eternal
life is to know God, and God is love. This is Christ's own definition.
Ponder it. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." Love must be eternal.
It is what God is. On the last analysis, then, love is life. Love
never faileth, and life never faileth, so long as there is love. That
is the philosophy of what Paul is showing us; the reason why in the
nature of things love should be the supreme thing--because it is going
to last; because in the nature of things it is an eternal life. It is
a thing that we are living now, not that we get when we die; that we
shall have a poor chance of getting when we die unless we are living
now. No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and
grow old all alone, unloving and unloved. To be lost is to live in an
unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to
love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God; for God is
love.

Now I have all but finished. How many of you will join me in reading
this chapter once a week for the next three months? A man did that
once and it changed his whole life. You might begin by reading it
every day, especially the verses which describe the perfect character.
"Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not
itself." Get these ingredients into your life. Then everything that
you do is eternal. It is worth doing. It is worth giving time to.
No man can become a saint in his sleep; and to fulfil the condition
required demands a certain amount of prayer and meditation and time,
just as improvement in any direction, bodily or mental, requires
preparation and care. Address yourselves to that one thing; at any
cost have this transcendent character exchanged for yours. You will
find as you look back upon your life that the moments that stand out,
the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have
done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, above and
beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those
supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to
those around about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which
you feel have entered into your eternal life. I have seen almost
all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed almost every
pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look back I see
standing out above all the life that has gone four or five short
experiences when the love of God reflected itself in some poor
imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the
things which alone of all one's life abide. Everything else in all our
lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of
love which no man knows about, or can ever know about, they never
fail.

In the Book of Matthew, where the judgment day is depicted for us in
the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from
the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but
"How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of religion,
is not religiousness, but love. I say the final test of religion at
that great day is not religiousness, but love; not what I have done,
not what I have believed; not what I have achieved, but how I have
discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that
awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done,
by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the
withholding of love is the negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof
that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means that He
suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in all
our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him to be seized with
the spell of His compassion for the world. It means that

  I lived for myself, I thought for myself,
    For myself, and none beside--
  Just as if Jesus had never lived,
    As if He had never died.

It is the Son of Man before whom the nations of the world shall be
gathered. It is in the presence of humanity that we shall be charged.
And the spectacle itself, the mere sight of it, will silently judge
each one. Those will be there whom we have met and helped; or there,
the unpitied multitude whom we neglected or despised. No other
witness need be summoned. No other charge than lovelessness shall be
preferred. Be not deceived. The words which all of us shall one day
hear sound not of theology but of life, not of churches and saints but
of the hungry and the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but of shelter
and clothing, not of Bibles and prayer-books but of cups of cold water
in the name of Christ. Thank God the Christianity of today is coming
nearer the world's need. Live to help that on. Thank God men know
better, by a hairbreadth, what religion is, what God is, who Christ
is, where Christ is. Who is Christ? He who fed the hungry, clothed
the naked, visited the sick. And where is Christ? Where?--Whoso shall
receive a little child in My name receiveth Me. And who are Christ's?
Every one that loveth is born of God.




WAGNER

I AM A VOICE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


Charles Wagner, French Protestant pastor and moral essayist, was born
in 1851 in Alsace. He is at present rector of the Reformed Church
in Fontenay-Lous-Bois, in the Department of Seine. He received a
comprehensive education at the universities of Paris, Strasburg and
Goettingen, and after undertaking many cures in the provinces he went
to Paris in 1882, where he occupied himself in a crusade against the
degrading tendency of life, art and literature in certain of their
Parisian phases. He has been a founder of several popular universities
under the auspices of the Society for the Promotion of Morality. He
has published many books, and "La Vie Simple" ("The Simple Life")
was crowned by the French Academy and has been translated into many
European languages, as well as into Japanese. Wagner has been styled
the French Tolstoy, but he is less visionary and much more popular and
practical in his views than the Russian mystic. The author of "The
Simple Life" was greeted with many expressions of warm appreciation on
his visit to the United States a few years ago. He was a guest at the
Presidential mansion by invitation of President Roosevelt, who has
highly commended "The Simple Life."




WAGNER

Born in 1851

I AM A VOICE[1]

[Footnote 1: From "The Gospel of Life," by Charles Wagner, by
permission of the McClure Company, publishers. Copyright, 1905, by
McClure, Phillips & Co.]

_I am the voice[2] of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the
way of the Lord_.--John i., 23.

[Footnote 2: In the French version of the Scriptures it is "_a_
voice," and it is necessary to retain this reading in order to render
precisely Pastor Wagner's thought.--_Translator_.]


Nothing is rarer than a personality. So many causes, both interior
and exterior, hinder the normal development of human beings, so many
hostile forces crush them, so many illusions lead them astray, that
there is required a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances to
render possible the existence of an independent character. But
when, God alone knows at the cost of what efforts and of what happy
accidents, a vigorous and original personality has been able to
unfold, nothing is rarer than not to see it degenerate into a mere
personage. History teaches us that men exceptional in will and energy
almost always become obstructive and mischievous. They commence by
serving a cause and end by taking possession of it so completely that,
from being its servants, they become its masters. Instead of being men
of a cause, they make the cause that of a man, and they degrade the
most sacred realities to the paltry level of their ambitious egoism.

Thus, when we meet with strong natures, endowed with the secret of
leadership and command, yet able to resist the subtle temptation to
which so many of the finer spirits have succumbed, it behooves us to
bow and to salute in them a greatness before which all that it is
customary to call by that name fades into nothingness.

If ever soul encompassed this greatness, it was that of John the
Baptist. John is little known. Of him there remain only a few traits
of physiognomy and a few snatches of discourse. But these snatches are
full of character, these traits possess a sculptural relief; just as
with broken trunks of columns, with fragments of stones, all that is
left of temples that were once the marvels of ancient art, they enable
us to conceive of the grandeur of the whole edifice to which they
once belonged. John was at once strong and humble, energetic and
self-detached. Never has an individuality so well-tempered been less
personal. Identifying himself completely with his rôle as precursor,
he found perfect happiness in effacing himself in the glory of Christ,
just as the dawn disappears in the splendors of the morning.

History is full of precursors who impede and withstand those whom they
had first announced. When the time comes to retire and to give way
to those for whom they have prepared the way, they do not have the
courage to sacrifice themselves. They go on forever, and often become
the worst enemies of the cause they have defended. John knew nothing
of these failings which are the perpetual scandal in the development
of the kingdom of God. Not only did he say, speaking of Jesus: "He
must increase, but I must decrease," but he made all his acts conform
to these words.

"This my joy is therefore fulfilled," he said, as he dwelt upon the
first advances of the gospel, and he exprest thus a sweetness of
sacrifice forever unknown to personal souls that remain vulgar in
spite of their genius.

Finally, John described himself metaphorically in that inimitable
prophetic speech which explains in full the idea that he formed for
himself of his ministry. Under the sway of a morbid curiosity, the
crowd, more perplexed by the appearance of the worker than attentive
to the work, prest him with questions. Who then art thou, mysterious
preacher? Art thou one of the old prophets of Israel, escaped from his
rocky tomb? Or art thou perchance He whom we await? No, answered John,
I am neither one of the prophets nor the Messiah himself, I am no one:
I am a voice!

I am a voice! This is not a formula that sums up the vocation of the
prophets solely, or of all those who, in the pulpit or in the tribune,
by the pen or by the public discourse, exert an influence upon their
contemporaries. These words are addrest to every one. They define for
every man, the humble yet great duty of truth that he is called to
fulfil in his sphere and according to the measure of his ability. At
the epoch in which we live, such a device is so applicable to the time
being, so pressing, so needful for us to hear, that it is wise to
engrave it in the very foreground of our consciousness.

To become a voice we must begin by keeping still. We must listen.
The whole world is a tongue of which the spirit is the meaning. God
engraved its fiery capitals in the immensity of the heavens, and
traced its delicate smaller letters on the flower, on the grass, on
the human soul, as rich, as incommensurable as the abysses of space.
Whosoever you are, brother, before letting yourself utter one word,
lend your ear to that voice that seeks you, I might almost add, that
implores you. Listen!--Listen to the confused murmur that arises from
the human depths, and that, comprising in it all tears, all torments,
as well as all joys, becomes the sigh of creation.

Listen in your heart to remorse, the sad and poignant echo that sin,
traversing life, leaves everywhere upon its passage. Shut your ear
to no sound, however unobtrusive, however sad, it may be. There are
voices that issue from the tombs, others that call to you from out the
abyss of past ages; repel them not, listen! One and all, they have
something to say to you.

But do not be content with listening to man. Pierce nature, and,
in visible creation as in the invisible sanctuary of souls, watch
attentively for the revelation of Him whose eternal thought every
living thing, humble or sublime, translates after its own fashion. He
speaks to you in the dark nights and in the bright light of dawn, in
the infinite radiance of the worlds beyond all reckoning, and in the
humble stalk that awaits, in the valley bottom, its ray of light and
its drop of dew. Listen!--If there is anguish in the voice of poor
humanity, there are in great nature profound words of soothing, of
hope. Look at the flower in the fields, listen to the birds in the
skies! After the distrest voices that perturb you, you shall know the
voices that relieve and console. There shall befall you that which
befell the nun whose memory is preserved for us in the old legends.
Listening to the forest voices she had gone, following them always, as
far as the thick solitudes where nothing any longer comes to trouble
the collected soul. There, in the shade of a tree where she had seated
herself, she heard a song till then unknown to her ears. It was the
song of the mystic bird. This song said, in marvelous modulations, all
that man thinks and feels, all that he suffers, all that he seeks, all
that falls short of fulfilment for him. It summed up in harmonies the
destinies of living beings and the immense pity that is at the root
of things. Softly, on light, strong wings, it lifted the soul to the
heights where it looks upon reality. And the nun, her hands clasped,
listened, listened without end, forgetting earth, sky, time,
forgetting herself. She listened for centuries without ever growing
tired, finding in the song that charmed her a sweetness forever new.
Dear and truthful image of what the soul experiences when, mute,
as respectful as a child and as ready of belief, it listens in the
universal silence to the voices that translate for it the things that
are eternal!

All those who have become voices have traveled this way. At Patmos or
in the desert, on Horeb or on Sinai, they have trembled with fright or
started with joy. But everything has its time. There comes a day when
all voices, soft or terrible, that man has heard, grow still, to let
henceforth only one be heard, which cries to him: "Go! go now and be
a witness of the things you have heard! Go! I send you forth as lambs
among wolves! Go! I send you toward men whose brow is harsh, whose
heart is wicked, but fear nothing, I shall embolden your face, I shall
give you a heart of brass and a forehead of diamond."

When that moment has come, one must, in order to remain faithful to
his mission, remember that after all he is only a voice. Truth
does not belong to us, it is we who belong to truth! Wo to him who
possesses it and treats it as something that belongs to himself. Happy
is he who is possest by it! No preference, no kinship, no sympathy
counts here. Alas! it is not thus that men understand it. It is for
this reason that they degrade truth and that it becomes without power
in their hands. Instead of winging its way heavenward in vigorous
flight, it crawls along the earth, like an eagle whose wings have been
broken. Nothing is sadder than to see how those who ought to lend
their voice to truth, turn it to their own uses and play with it. The
voice, human speech, that sacred organ, whose whole worth lies in
sincerity, has in all ages been the victim of odious profanations. But
in this age it is more than ever attainted. The evil from which it
suffers is defilement.

At certain epochs a word was as good as a man. It was an act total,
supreme, guaranteed by the whole of life. There was no need to sign,
to stamp, to legalize. Speech was held between friends and enemies
alike, more sacred than any sanctuary, and man maintained it, with the
obscure but just sentiment that it is at the base of society, and that
if words lose their value, there is no longer any society possible.
Later the written word was considered sacred. And coming nearer to
our own day, we have been able to see the masses, guided ever by
that quite legitimate sentiment of the holiness of speech, regard
everything printed as gospel truth. Those times are no more. We have
lied too much, by the living word, the pen, and the press. We have
said and printed too much that is light, false, wittingly disfigured.
Armed with an instrumentality that multiplies thought and spreads it
broadcast to the four corners of the earth with a rapidity unknown
to our fathers, we have made use of it, for the most part, to extend
slander more widely and to cause a greater amount of doubtful
intelligence to swarm upon the earth. So well have we spun speech out
in all our mouths, so thoroughly have we deprived it of its proper
nature and caused it to become sophisticated, that it is no longer of
the least value. The confidence of the masses in authority, which is
one of the slowest and most difficult conquests of humanity, we have
lost like a thing of no worth. They no longer say to any one who now
lifts up his voice: Who are you? But: What end have you in view? What
party do you serve? By what interest are you led? By whom have you
been bought? That there may be a sacred truth, loved, respected,
adored; a truth that is worth more than life, to which one may give
himself wholly and with happiness--this idea diverts the cynics
and makes those whom the cruel experiences of life have rendered
distrustful, shake their heads. If ever an epoch has needed to
rehabilitate human speech, it is our own. What good are we if it is
good for nothing, since it is at the root of all our institutions?

Who will give it back its potency?--They who will know how to resign
themselves to being but a voice!

Permit me to bring home to you, by means of a very modest example,
what man may gain in force by being but a voice. Look at that clock.
When the hour has come, it marks it. Whether it be the hour of birth
or of death, the hour of joy or of sorrow, the hour of longed-for
meetings, or of heart-breaking farewells, the clock strikes that hour.
It is only a mechanism, but it is scrupulously exact, it measures that
time which descends to us drop by drop from the bosom of eternity, and
when the hammer falls on the brazen bell, the entire universe confirms
what it announces. The suns and the worlds mark at this very moment,
in the immortal light, the same point of time that is indicated below
on earth, some starless night, by the humblest village clock. We must
imitate the clock. In full consciousness, through absolute submission,
man should make himself the humble instrument of truth, and go through
supreme servitude to supreme power. When he does not do this, he is
only an imperfect timepiece. But when, bound by his word, chained to
the truth that he serves, he has become its slave, and when, without
hate, without preference, without human fear, without other desire
than that of being faithful, he proclaims what is just, true, right,
good, the rocks are less firm on their base than this man: for he is a
voice!

A voice is, if you like, a slight thing. Stilled as soon as it
awakened, it is heard only by a few and for a little while. It is said
that singers are greatly to be pitied, since posterity can not hear
them. Nothing of them remains. And yet how many marvelous forces
underlie this apparent fragility! The thunder has its roar, the breeze
has its tenderness, but their power is transitory; they are sounds and
not voices. A voice is a living sound, it is the vibrant echo of a
soul. It is doubtless that most fragile thing, a breath, but joined to
that which is most durable, spirit. And it is for this reason that, if
the instant when it is born sees it die, centuries of centuries can
not destroy its effect. The truth which is in it confers immortality
upon it, and when this voice escapes from a human breast, he who
speaks, sings or weeps, feels indeed that eternity has concluded an
alliance with him. Peeling his fragile testimony confirmed by all that
endures and can not die, he says with Christ: "Heaven and earth shall
pass away, but my words shall not pass away!"

The holy labors entrusted to the voice can never be counted. Because
of the very fact that it lives and that it contains a soul, it is
the great awakener, the incomparable evoker. When, obscure still and
unknown, a thought distracts us and slumbers at the bottom of our
being, a voice is all that is needed to make it emerge into the light.
With maternal tenderness, the voice borrows all the energies of
incubation, to infuse with warmth, to fortify, the nascent germs of
spiritual life. In it lives and breaks forth what, in the evolving
soul, tends feebly and furtively toward the flowering. In short, the
voice, speech, the tongue, condenses in a single focus incalculable
quantities of rays.

Only think of the efforts that human thought must have made to reach
that clearness that enables it to become speech. Every word that you
utter without giving it a thought is a monument toward which centuries
and multitudes of minds have wrought. A world is contained in it. Poor
words! one man decks himself out in them, another wraps himself up in
them, but how few know of the warmth of life and love that has put
them into the world that they may be forever the witnesses of the past
for posterity! No matter, for when they have been made sufficiently to
resound like an inanimate cymbal, there comes an hour when they revive
under the breath of a true and living being, and they depart to spread
life. Then they fulfil their rôle as educators. To educate is to
explain a being to itself. And this is the benign service that
the voice performs. It tells us what we think better than we can
ourselves. It unbinds the chains of the captive soul and permits it to
take its flight. Happy the child, happy the young man who meets with
a voice to decipher him to himself! This is what Christ did in those
blest hours when He reunited the children of His people, as a bird
reunites its brood under its wings!

What the voice does in detail, it continues to accomplish on the
larger scale. At certain moments societies seem a prey to a sort of
chaos. A number of contrary forces clash and perturb them, as they
perturb and rend individual souls. Men seek, feeling their way, a road
that seems to elude them. A crowd of spirits, by the very fact of
their contemporaneity, feel themselves distracted and agitated all
in the same way. Confusedly and provoked by the same sufferings they
elaborate the same ideal and formulate the same desires. But they all
wander along twilit paths on the side of the night where the light
seems to be breaking through, without, however, being able to
pierce the darkness. These are the preliminary agonies of the great
historical epochs. Then let a being more powerful, more vital, an
elect soul that has passed through this phase and conquered these
shadows, become incarnate in a voice! That is enough. The personal
word which expresses the soul of that epoch and responds to its
needs, is found. It sounds through the world like a new _fiat lux_!
Everywhere, in those who listen to it and feel secret affinities with
it in themselves, it constitutes a magnificent revelation of light and
life. All these hearts vibrate in unison with one; and, gathering up
all these scattered notes into a single harmony, he who expresses the
sentiments of all, renders an account of the wonderful power of which
he is the instrument. No, it is no longer a man that speaks: what
sounds upon his lips, is the whole soul of a people, is a whole epoch,
is a new world.

A voice is also that inimitable sigh, that pure sob which tells
of grief because it issues from a suffering heart. It is pity and
compassion, it is the angel of God arriving among us on the caressing
breath, a messenger of mercy, and pouring into the tortured depths of
our poor heart its healing dew. It is Jesus saying to Mary, and, in
her, to all those whom grief afflicts: "Why weepest thou?" It is David
singing: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" It is Isaiah crying:
"Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people; speak ye comfortably to
Jerusalem!"

A voice is, on the solitary path where our will strays, the faithful
shepherd calling his sheep; it is every sign, even tho it be made
by the hand of a child, which in the days of forgetfulness and
unrestraint, suddenly wakes us and warns us that our feet skirt the
abysses.

Then, after the work of education, of creation, of pity, comes the
work of severity, of punishment, of destruction. The voice has been
compared to a sword. Like it, it flames and punishes. A voice is
Nathan rising up before the criminal king and calling down upon his
head the avenging lightning of this word: "Thou art the man!" The
sword attacks, destroys, but it defends, also, and this is its fairest
work. Never is the voice more touching than when it is lifted in favor
of the weak, and, when, suddenly, in the midst of the iniquities
of brute force that it denounces, marks with its stigma, it causes
justice to shine forth and the truth to be felt, in the holy
soul-traversing thrill, that God Himself is there and that His hour
has come!

A voice has its echo. When this echo is sympathetic, it is endowed
with the sweetest recompense and obliterates the memory of many
sorrows. But this echo is often hostile. It arises from wrath and is
increased by hatred. Then it is resistance, riot, that rumbles. It is
the passions and the scourged vices that twist and bellow like deer
under the lash of the trainer. How many times, O, faithful voices,
souls of peace and truth, has the spirit that animates you driven you
to these fearful encounters--you who have heard in the silence of your
hearts the holy verities and who know their worth, you are obliged to
go bearing them in the face of menace, of mockery, of trembling rage
where they seem to us like Daniel in the lion's den! A terrible
ordeal! but one before which the testifying voices have never
recoiled. Luther, who knew the emotions of the great battles of the
spirit where one man is alone in the face of a thousand, where tinder
the growing clamors and the cries of death ... a voice struggles like
a torch in a tempest, has given to the servants of truth a counsel
that is the alpha and omega of their austere mission. When they have
said all, done all, essayed all, put all their being and all their
love into the proclamation of what they have to announce, then, he
says, "let them be ready to be hooted at and spat upon!" And not only
should they be ready but they should accept this lot with happiness.
Christ says to them: "Happy are they that are outraged and persecuted
for the sake of justice!"

Alas, the rudest proof for him who speaks the truth is not to arouse
indignation. That, at least, is a result, and however sad it may be,
it bears witness to him who has spoken. Certain protests, despite
their fury, are a sort of involuntary homage. The supreme trial for
a voice is indifference. When John called himself a voice in the
wilderness, he alluded to that external solitude where his voice was
raised. But this solitude, on certain days was full of life and the
gospel cites for our benefit certain facts which prove that the words
with which it resounded were not lost in the empty spaces. They moved
and struck home from the humblest regions of society to the exalted
spheres, to the royal throne itself. John garnered love and hate,
blessing and curse, the desirable fruits of all energetic action.
Since that time and before, more than one voice has been able,
applying them to itself, to give to those prophetic words, "voices in
the wilderness," another very melancholy significance. The supreme
image of despair is a voice that is lost in the silence, as is lost,
in the bosom of dead solitudes, the call that no one hears, for succor
that will never come.

After having spoken of the different voices, of their power, of their
effects, let us bestow a compassionate remembrance upon the lost
voices, on those who were or who are still, in the most lamentable
sense of that word, voices in the wilderness.--To be a man, a soul, to
have felt the lighting of a holy flame within oneself; to love truth
and justice; to feel the pain of contact with a life ruled over by
falsehood and violence; at the heart of this poignant contrast between
a divine ideal and a heart-rending reality, to receive from his
conscience, from God himself, the command to speak; to put his life
into this work, to renounce everything to be only a voice ... and
after all this to see himself forsaken, neglected, despised! To wear
oneself out slowly in a strife obscure and without issue; to perish
without having aroused either sympathy or opposition, to disappear
into oblivion before disappearing in the tomb ... ah! all the furies,
all the bloody reprisals, the dungeons, the gibbets, the massacres,
all the martyrdoms by which human wickedness strove to stifle the
voice of the just, are less horrible than this extermination by
apathy.

And yet, not to press things to this cruel extremity, but remembering
the parable of the sower, where so many seeds are lost for the few
that take root and flourish, ought we not be willing to be, in the
greatest number of cases, voices in the wilderness, only too happy if
our thankless labors are recompensed elsewhere by an encouraging echo?
Have we not here, on the contrary, the image of human life? we are
always aspiring toward an ideal more elevated than that which we
realize. We are always precursors, and it becomes us to accept humbly
what that destiny holds both of pain and of beauty.

Besides, do we know whether voices that seem to be lost, are so in
reality? Are the stones that are hidden in the foundations of a
beautiful edifice, and thanks to which the whole fabric is supported,
lost because no one sees them? In the same way it must be that many
voices are forgotten apparently, until such time as, added together
and finding in each other mutual support, they end by emerging into
the full light of day.

To wait and to work; to do his duty, and leave the rest to God; to
journey through life, gathering truth into his heart, and then into
the family, the Church, the city; to be its faithful voice; this is
the best use a man can make of his mortal days. And should it be your
lot to be voices in the wilderness; among your children deaf to your
cries; among your compatriots insensible to your warnings, console
yourselves. Greater than you have suffered the same fate. Unite
yourself in spirit to their company and be happy to suffer with them.
At least as you come to understand more and more from day to day that
truth can not perish, and that it is potent even on feeble lips; you
will establish in your hearts faith in the world that endures, and you
will be less astonished and less disconcerted when you see the face of
this world pass away. You will live by the sacred fire cherished in
your souls. Let your furrow close, your hope will not perish! Like
Moses on Nebo, you will enter into the silence, having filled your
dying eyes with the spectacle of the promised land!




GORDON

MAN IN THE IMAGE OF GOD

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


George Angier Gordon, Congregational divine, was born in Scotland,
1853. He was educated at Harvard, and has been minister of Old South
Church, Boston, Massachusetts, since 1884. His pulpit style is
conspicuous for its directness and forcefulness, and he is considered
in a high sense the successor of Philip Brooks. He was lecturer in the
Lowell Institute Course, 1900; Lyman Beecher Lecturer, Yale, 1901;
university preacher to Harvard, 1886-1890; to Yale, 1888-1901; Harvard
overseer. He is the author of "The Witness to Immortality" (1897),
and many other works.




GORDON

Born in 1853

MAN IN THE IMAGE OF GOD[1]

[Footnote 1: Printed here by kind permission of Dr. Gordon.]

_And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him_.--Genesis i., 27.


It must never be forgotten that all truth lies in the order of life
itself. There is a natural environment, and in it have been, real and
mighty from the beginning, the laws and forces which science has but
recently discovered. Copernicus discovered the true order of the solar
system; but the order itself has been there from the morning of time.
Newton discovered the force of gravity, but that force has been in the
natural situation since creation. Chemists have been able to make out
sixty-five or sixty-six irreducible elements; but while chemistry is
young, the elements are everlasting. Electricity is the discovery of
yesterday, and yet it has been at play in man's environment from the
foundation of the world. The continuity of life, from the lowest forms
of it up to man, has been a fact from the first; but not until
this century has the fact meant anything. Few things impress the
imagination more powerfully than the sense of the forces that have
surrounded man from his first appearance on the earth, and that
have been noted and utilized only in recent times. There stands the
immemorial force, and men have had no eyes for it till yesterday.
Thoughtful men begin to look upon the environment in a new spirit.
They begin to walk within it in amazement and hope. All the forces of
the material universe are here, and only a few things about them
have been discovered. The natural environment is rich beyond all
calculation or dream; it is exhaustless. Here in the field of man's
life is the alluring object of science. Here in the natural situation
are the everlasting and benign energies that wait to be discovered and
prest into human service. There is a human environment, and all the
fundamental truth about man has been present in it from the start.
Moses gave his nomadic brethren the ten words; but they were written
in the human heart ages before they were inscribed upon stone. The
great Hebrew prophets gave to the world the vision of one God, His
righteous government of the world, and His election of a single race
for the service of all the races; but God and His government and His
method in the education of man were real and mighty before Amos, and
Hosea, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah beheld them. Christ revealed the
Father through His own divine Sonhood; but the Fatherhood of God is an
eternal truth. Nowhere is the divineness of Christ more obvious than
in the ease and adequacy with which He, and He alone, is able to read
the meaning of the human situation. Christ as Prophet, as Seer and
Discoverer, is most amazing to the most gifted. His eye for fact
is divine. He notes the falling sparrow, and at once reaches the
universal fatherly foresight and control of God. His consuming vision
goes everywhere, turning the hidden truth of life into light and joy
in His parables. His teaching is revelation, the unveiling of the
aboriginal divine order. He makes nothing; He reveals what God made.
And when He increases life it is by showing the path to that increase
ordained of God, insight and obedience. The will of God is the final
law for heaven and earth; the vision of it and surrender to it are the
path of life. Here we touch the depth of the old faith. God the Father
creates, and the Son reveals. The order of the Spirit is eternal; the
revelation of it is in time and for sense-bound men. Here we see in
a mirror and dimly; there they behold face to face. And Christ drew
forth into light the divine significance of man's life, as God
originally made it; and that divine meaning of existence thus drawn
out is the gospel of Christ.

In the text we are carried by a true seer back of all traditions,
behind all conventions, beyond all beliefs about life to life itself
as it lies in its own freshness and fulness. We are led to look upon
human life newly made, still warm with the touch of the creative hand,
and yet containing in it that very hour all that the Lord eventually
drew out of it. If the first man had understood himself he would have
been essentially a Christian. And therefore I propose to evolve from
the original human situation, as described in the text, the outline of
what I take to be a great faith.

I. If the first man had understood himself, he would have seen in
himself the interpreter of nature. From the first command, "Let there
be light," to the final, "Let us make man in our image," there are two
things to be noted. There is continuity in the creative process, and
there is an ascension from the lower to the higher. The first duty of
our self-comprehending Adam will be to look backward. He will look
across the wide field whose farther limit lies in cloud and whose
hither border touches his feet. He will survey the creative process
that has led up to and that has come to its climax in him. And as he
thinks of himself as the product of nature, must he not conclude that
as reason is the result, reason must have preceded the process and
governed it? Humanity is the issue; therefore humanity must have
planned the issue and secured it. Back of this march of life, behind
this developing and ascending order, out in the darkness, before the
light was created, there was the Mind that accounts for man. Thus the
last becomes the first, the man that ends the creative process sees
that a human God must have preceded the process.

This truth is one of the greater insights of the time. The continuity
of life, from the lowest forms to the highest, has received during the
last fifty years an unparalleled recognition. So, too, with the fact
of the steady ascent of life. Not indeed in a literal and yet in a
true way, the modern scientific conception is a wonderful parallel to
the sublime hymn with which the Bible opens. In the beginning was the
fire-mist. In that fire-mist began the process of development. It
became worlds, systems innumerable, a stellar universe, and within
this whole a solar order, an earth beating forward in preparation for
the advent of life. Life when it came flowed into countless forms.
From the shapeless mass it pushed on upward into successively higher
and finer structures, ever aspiring toward man. Ages preceded the
advent of man. There were upon the part of life ages of preparation,
ages of climbing. Before life rose the mountain of the Lord; it
must be scaled and its summit reached before man could put in
an appearance. But the hour for which the whole cosmos had been
travailing in pain could not be indefinitely delayed. In the fulness
of time, as the tree bursts into bloom, as the tide rolls to the
flood, as the light breaks in through the gates of morning, nature
came to her supreme expression in man. Man is not here on his own
strength. He is not in the bosom of things unaccounted for. He is the
child of nature; her last act, her highest product, the best that is
in her power to bring forth, the son in whose wondrous being her own
motherhood is to undergo total transformation.

That is the modern scientific conception; look for a moment at its
greatness. Man as final issue of nature must turn round and look
backward. He must look down the long line of life to the far-off first
beginning. He must pass beyond the earliest forms in which the vital
movement began to the mysterious, formless, eternal power behind all.
And it is here that nature is lifted into a new character by her human
product. In that eternal power there must be a reason to account
for man's reason, conscience to account for his conscience, love to
account for his love, spirit to explain his spirit. Nature as mother
must become spirit to account for the soul of her son. The flower
shows what was in the seed, the oak is the revelation of what was in
the heart of the acorn; and man as the last and best outcome of nature
is the authoritative expression of the power that is behind nature.
Thus the mind that is the final product of nature discovers the mind
that is the source of nature. Man seeking the origin of his being
finds it on the farther side of nature in One like unto a son of man.
He learns later to distinguish between the reality and the image,
between God and godlike man. And then a wireless telegraphy is
established between them across the vast untraveled distances of
nature. The life near to God can not send the tokens of His inmost
character upward to man; the brute life near to man can not carry
downward to God man's thoughts and hopes. The animal life that
stretches in an expanse so wide between the Creator and His best work
can not connect the human and the divine. But when the spirit to which
nature comes in man has once seen the Spirit in which nature must
begin, then the wireless telegraphy comes into play. The heart, that
is the last product of life, sends out its mysterious currents, its
aspirations, its gladness, its grief, and its hope; and these repeat
themselves in the great heart of God. And forth from the Spirit behind
nature issue the messages of recognition, of sympathy, of intimated
ideals and endless incentive, that register themselves in the soul of
man. Nature is a solid, sympathetic, and now and then glorified, and
yet dumb, highway between God and man. Her beauty belongs to the
Spirit that she does not know, and it speaks to the Spirit that is
older than her child. She is a mute, unconscious sacrament between the
infinite reason and the finite, a path for the lightning that plays
backward and forward between the soul of man and the soul of God.
The great primal fact in the human environment is that man is the
interpreter of nature. In this character of interpreter of nature he
receives his first message from God, and makes his first response.

II. The second fact in the human situation is that religion is the
interpreter of man. As man looks backward he beholds beyond nature
a face like his own, only diviner; and ever afterward the noblest
aspiration of his soul is to win the smile of that face and to escape
its frown. Our self-comprehending Adam would confess that he knew
himself only when he noted within him the lover of the infinite. And
here history leads the way. You look into "The Book of the Dead," and
you see what high and serious things religion meant for the early
Egyptian. The pyramids are monuments to religion. The art of the
ancient races was chiefly homage to the divine. The Athenian Parthenon
would never have been but for faith in the goddess that shielded the
city. Greek art, the greatest art in the world, is primarily a tribute
to faith. Those marvelous statues were likenesses of the gods; those
incomparable temples were dwelling-places for the gods. Religion is
in the warp and woof of the world's love and sorrow, its art and
literature, its patriotism and history. The life of man is the
cathedral window, and religion is the colored figure that stands in
it. The two are inseparable. You can not abolish the figure without
breaking the window; you can not banish religion without destroying
humanity. Try to explain Homer's world without Olympus; account for
Mohammedanism and make no reference to faith; write the history of
the Middle Ages and take no note of the "Divine Comedy"; sum up
the meaning of Persian and Indian civilization and pay no heed to
religion; show what Hebraism is and leave unnoticed its consciousness
of God, and you will create a parallel to the philosopher who should
endeavor to trace the significance of human life apart from man's
passion for the infinite.

Here then is the key to manhood. He is a being over whom the unseen
wields an endless fascination. There is in him a thirst that nothing
can quench save the living God. His chief attribute is an attribute
of wo, an incapacity for content within the limits of the visible
and temporal. His differentiation from the brute is at this point
absolute. Between man and the lower orders of life there is a line of
likeness; there is also from the beginning a line of unlikeness. In
physical structure man is both similar and dissimilar to the animal.
As bread-winner and economist he is kindred and he is in contrast to
the creatures below him. In the home, in society, and in the state
in which both home and society are set and protected, the line of
likeness grows less and less distinct, while the line of unlikeness
becomes bolder and plainer. It is impossible to deny observation to
the dog and impossible to grant to it science. The instinct for beauty
belongs to the bird, but art in the full sense of the word, as the
self-conscious expression of beautiful ideas, is no part of its life.
One can not decline to note method in the existence of the brute,
and one is compelled to withold from it philosophy. In these higher
activities the line of likeness between man and the animal is of the
faintest description; while the line of contrast becomes more and more
pronounced and significant. When we come to the summit of man the
likeness vanishes utterly. Among the lower life of the world there is
no _Magnificat_, there is no _Nunc Dimittis_; the beginning and the
end do not link themselves to the Eternal. The brute has no religion,
no temple, no priest, no Bible, no sacrament of love between itself
and the invisible. The tower of this church tells at once, and from
afar, that it is a church. Near at hand, much besides the tower tells
the same story. There is the cruciform foundation; there is the
structure of its walls. There is the outside with distinct note; there
is the inside with its joyous beauty. Look at the church closely and
you need no tower to proclaim what it is. And yet the tower is its
most conspicuous witness: at a distance it is the sole witness.
Religion is similarly the eminent token that man belongs to a divine
order. The basis of his being in sacrifice should repeat the same
tale. Civilization as a struggle after social righteousness should
announce the same fact. Man's thoughts and feelings, and their
manifold and marvelous expression in art, in institutions, and in
systems of opinion, utter the same testimony. And yet the tower of his
being, high soaring and far seen, is his feeling for the invisible.
You do not know man until you behold him worshiping.

III. The third fact in our human situation is that Christianity is the
interpretation of religion. You see the devout old Jew, Simeon, who
met Jesus as His mother brought Him for the first time into the
temple; and there you behold the old faith interpreted by the new. All
that was best in the Hebrew religion is conserved and carried higher
in the Christian religion. Everywhere the devoutest Jews were
conscious of wants which the national faith did not meet. They waited
for the consolation of Israel, and when Christ came he supplied
satisfactions which Hebraism could not supply. Christianity commended
itself to the disciples of Christ because it seemed to be their own
faith at its best. They were carried over into it by the logic
of their previous belief and their deep human need. Paul sought
righteousness as a Jew; when he became a Christian, righteousness
was still his great quest. And Christianity commended itself to him
because the national ideal of righteousness was set before him in
a sublimer form, and because a new inspiration came to him in his
pursuit of it. The old immemorial goal of human endeavor was exalted,
and the everlasting incentives were filled with the freshness of a
divine life. Thus the religious Jew, when Christ came, was like a
convalescent patient. The process of recovery was going on, but in
a way that was discouragingly slow. The longing was for the higher
altitudes of the spirit, for the pure and bracing atmosphere of some
exalted leader, for an environment richer in healing ministry and in
restoring power. That longing Christ met. He carried His believing
countrymen on to the heights. He surrounded them with the freshness of
His own spirit. He put over them a new sky. He took them into a new
environment, rich with His truth and grace, tender with infinite
sympathy, stored with the forces that work for spiritual vigor, filled
with the love of His Father. Ask Peter or James or John or Paul, ask
any believing Jew and he will tell you that Christianity is simply the
consummation of his faith as a Jew.

The gospel moves along the same line of self-verification with
reference to all the great religions. The Persian believes in eternal
light, and he hates the contending darkness. Christianity says that
God is light, and that in Him is no darkness at all; that Jesus is the
Light of the world, and that whosoever followeth Him shall not walk
in darkness, but shall have the light of life. The Greek was full of
humanity, and he could not help making his gods and goddesses simply
larger and more beautiful men and women. What is the soul of that
amazingly beautiful and seemingly fantastic mythology of the Greeks?
Why do they worship Apollo and Aphrodite, Hermes and Athene? Because
they can think of nothing higher than ideal humanity. And Christ
comes, the ideal man. The beauty of the Lord is upon Him. His thoughts
and feelings and purpose and character are the most perfect things in
the world. He identifies Himself with man, and He identifies Himself
with God. He is the Son of man, and as such He is the Son of God. And
thus a human. God, a human universe, a human religion is offered to
the Greek, and in place of the wonderful mythology the clear, warm,
divine fact. The Mohammedan believes in will; and the gospel puts
before him that ultimate irresistible Will as a Will to all good,
eternally burdened with love, and nothing but love, for man. The Hindu
is smitten with an endless craving after rest, and he thinks the path
to peace lies in the diminution and final extinction of being. Christ
goes to the Hindu and says: "Come unto me all ye that are weary and
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn
of me; for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto
your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

He sets before the Hindu an infinite social peace; he calls into play
the moral will that for ages has been allowed to slumber. The goal
is high social harmony; the path to it is the intelligent will in
faithful, inspired, victorious obedience. The need of the Hindu is
not less but more and better existence. The way out of his despair is
through fulness of life. His misery is but the dumb prayer for eternal
life, that is, for existence supreme in its character and in its
volume.

Thus Christianity is everywhere the interpreter of religion.
Everywhere it carries the world's faith to its best. It is the
consummation both of the human need and the divine answer. And to-day,
in our own world, it goes on the same high errand. The intuitions of
righteousness, the sympathies with goodness, the wish for the more
abundant life, the ideals and the struggles, the hope and the fear,
without which man would not be man, find their interpreter in
Christianity. It is the soul carried to the utmost depth of its need
and the loftiest height of its desire, and then made conscious that
below its profoundest weakness and above its highest dream is the
infinite Love that is educating its life. It is the best wisdom of
history speaking to the highest interests of man. As mothers brought
their children to Jesus that He might reveal the inmost meaning of
childhood, open its treasure to the hearts that loved it, and by His
consecrating touch assure it of perpetual increase; so are the nations
bringing their religions to Him, and the noble among men their
uncomprehended longing and hope. He walks among us still as the
Revealer, the Conserver, and the Consummator of life.

IV. Lastly, Christianity finds it own interpretation in God. We have
seen man looking backward and finding the origin of his soul in the
Soul that is behind nature. We have seen his religion telling him
that he can not live by bread alone, that he can rest only under
the shelter of the unseen, that he is infinitely more akin to the
invisible than to the visible, that he has a spirit and must therefore
hunger for the fellowship of the eternal Spirit. We see Christianity
lifting this religious capacity to its highest, and bringing in the
divine appeal in its sublimest form. We behold the earth transfigured
in this Christian dream, the ladder set that reaches from the dreamer
to heaven, and upon it, going up and coming down, the great prayers of
the soul and the tender responses of the Most High. To what shall we
refer this sublime, transfiguring dream? Is it the delusion of the
sleeper, or the whisper of God? Is the ladder set up from the earth,
or is it let down from above? Did man shape it out of his abysmal
desire, or did God make and establish it out of His love. What can
we say of that which is the highest wisdom, the widest sympathy, the
divinest love, and the mightiest power in human history? What can
we do with that which is the true life of man? Can the trees of the
field, as they clap their hands and sing in the freshening breeze, do
other than refer it to heaven? And man, as he sees the light of Christ
upon the Spirit behind nature, beholds in the gospel that which
interprets his highest dreams, feels in Christianity the power to
understand and to become his own best self--can he do other than say
that his Christian faith is the gift of God? The star in the brook
refers you for the explanation of its being to the star in the sky;
and the glory of the gospel living in the depths of man's soul has no
other origin than the love of God.

The hope of science lies in exploring the natural environment. All
material reality is here, and here science has found all her truth,
and every season reminds her that inexpressible wonders still wait her
search. In the heavens above, and in the earth beneath, and in the
waters under the earth are hidden the treasure for which she is to
toil. Earth and sea and sky; the waveless depths and the windless
heights, and the wide expanse between, now sunlit and again
stormswept, are the field of her enterprise and hope. And in the same
way the human environment is the region that the spirit must explore.
The meaning of humanity must be found in and through humanity. "Say
not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? that is, to bring
Christ down; or who shall descend into the abyss? that is, to bring
Christ up from the dead. The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in
thy heart." The divine reality offers itself to faith in and through
the scope and sweep of life. The order of God is in the life of
society. The ideal for man, the method by which it is realized, and
the power, are set in the spiritual tissues of the race. If you see no
God, no soul, no genuine religion, believe rather that you are blind
than that your human environment does not contain them. You are the
product of nature. It follows that nature must be great enough to
account for you and your race and the Christ who is your race at its
best. Back of the nature that gave birth to you, that bore your kind,
and brought forth Christ, there must be the sufficient Spirit. You
are sure that you can not live by bread alone. You have thoughts that
wander through eternity. You can not rest until you rest in God. You
are a being made for religion, and again here is the gospel that meets
your intelligence with its wisdom, your heart with its love, your will
with its moral authority. Nothing puts your being in tune, and nothing
rings out the best music that is in you, as the gospel does. It is
omnipresent in our civilization, working everywhere to crush the
beast and to free the man. It is in a mother's love, the soul of its
tenderness; it is in a father's heart as ideal and incentive. The
history and the experience and the hope of our homes are transfigured
in its light, as if the earth should repose in an everlasting evening
glow. Patriotism is alive with its fire, and the new and growing
passion for humanity is the great token of its quickening spirit.
It is the box of ointment, very precious, which has been broken in
society and all Christendom is filled with its perfume. Birth and
death, love and sorrow, achievement and failure, human life and its
immemorial content, the old room and the dear and dreary things in it,
take on new dignity and grace. To detect the new spirit in the old
dwelling is the best and most rewarding of all intuitions. To live in
the human homestead consecrated by the diffusion of Christ's gospel is
to undergo an unconscious conformation to exalted ideals. Because of
our Christian civilization, behind every morning is the Father, who
makes His sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and who sends His
rain upon the just and the unjust. Nature has been lifted into a
servant of the divine beneficence. And man's wild but imperishable
passion for the unseen has been brought to see its last and best self
in the love of Christ. Wherever we look, this gospel is the master
light of all our seeing; and once more, is it not light from heaven?
We know where to look for the belt of Orion, and clear and grand as
the stars that constitute it are the great saving truths which are set
in the human sky. There is nothing arbitrary in this sublime faith,
nothing that does not rise out of the human order, nothing that is a
mere import from the world of fancy or wild belief. The faith is the
translation of fact into thought and speech. The eyes of Christ pass
over and through the order of the universe, and His vision is our
faith. Man is the interpreter of nature; religion is the interpreter
of man; Christianity is the interpreter of religion; and God the
Father is the interpreter of Christianity.




DAWSON

CHRIST AMONG THE COMMON THINGS OF LIFE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


William James Dawson, Congregational preacher and evangelist, was born
in Towcester, Northamptonshire, in 1854. He was educated at Kingswood
School, Bath, and Didsbury College, Manchester. He has long been
known as an author of originality and pure literary style. In 1906 he
received the pastorate of Highbury Quadrant Congregational Church,
London, and accepted an invitation to do general evangelistic work
under the auspices of the National Council of the Congregational
churches of the United States. He now resides in this country.




DAWSON

Born in 1854:

CHRIST AMONG THE COMMON THINGS OF LIFE[1]

[Footnote 1: Reprinted by kind permission of Messrs. Fleming H. Revell
& Co., New York.]

_As soon then as they were come to land they saw a fire of coals
there, and fish laid thereon, and bread. Jesus saith unto them, Come
and dine_.--John xxi., 9, 12.


I can not read these words without indulging for a moment in a
reminiscence. Not long ago, in the early morning, while all the world
slept, I stood beside the Sea of Tiberias, just as the morning mist
lifted, and watched a single brown-sailed fishing-boat making for the
shore, and the tired fishermen dragging their net to land. In that
moment it seemed to me as if more than the morning mist lifted--twenty
centuries seemed to melt like mist, and the last chapter of St. John's
gospel seemed to enact itself before my eyes. For so vivid was the
sense of something familiar in the scene, so mystic was the hour, that
I should scarce have been surprized had I seen a fire of coals burning
on the shore, and heard the voice of Jesus inviting these tired
fishermen to come and dine.

Now if I felt that, if I was sensible of the haunting presence of
Christ by that Galilean shore, how much more these disciples, in
whose minds every aspect of the Galilean lake was connected with some
intimate and thrilling memory of the ministry of Jesus.

Christ once more stands among the common things of life; the fire,
the fish, the bread--all common things; a group of tired, hungry
fishers--all common men; and He is there to affirm that in His
resurrection He had not broken His bond with men, but strengthened
it--wherever common life goes on there is Jesus still.

I. Notice the words with which the story opens, and you will see at
once that this is the real clue to its interpretation. "When morning
had now come, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples knew not
that it was Jesus." A strange thing that! Why did they not know Him?
Because they were not looking for Him in such a scene. It had seemed a
natural thing, if Jesus should appear at all, that He should appear in
the garden, a vision of life at the very altar of death. It seemed yet
more probable and appropriate that He should appear in the upper room,
that room made sacred by holiest love and memory. If any words of
Christ yet lingered in the mind and had power to thrill them, they
were surely these words, "Ye shall see the Son of man coming in the
clouds of heaven," glorified, triumphant, lifted far above the earth
and its humble life. And so, if they were looking for Christ at all
that morning, I think they watched the morning clouds, expecting Him
to come down the resplendent staircase of the sunbeams to call the
nations together and vindicate Himself in acts of universal judgment.
And behold! Jesus comes as a fisherman standing on the lakeside, busy
over a little fire, where the morning meal is cooking; and behold!
Jesus speaks, and it is not of the eternal mysteries of God, not of
the solemn secrets of the grave, but of nets and fishing and how to
cast the nets--the simple concerns of simple men engaged in humble
tasks.

No wonder they did not recognize Him. Once more the Son of Man comes
eating and drinking, and even the eyes that knew Him best can not see
in this human figure by the lakeside the only begotten Son of the
Father, full of grace and truth. They looked and saw but a fellow
fisherman, cooking his meal upon the shore, and they knew not that it
was Jesus.

II. Think for a moment of the earthly life of Christ, and you will
see that it was designedly linked with all the common and even the
commonest things of life.

If you or I could have conceived the great thought of some human
creature that should be the very incarnation of God, what would have
been the shape of our imaginings? Surely we should have chosen for
this earthly temple of the Highest some human form perfected in grace
and beauty by the long refinements of exalted ancestry; the child of
kings or scholars; the delicate flower of life, in whom the elements
were so subtly mixed that we should recognize them as special and
miraculous--so we might think of God manifest in man. But God chooses
for the habitation of His Spirit a peasant woman of Nazareth, humble,
poor, unconsidered.

If we could have forecast the training of such a life, how should
we have pictured it? Surely as sheltered from the coarseness of the
world, delicately nourished, sedulously cultured; but God orders
that this life should manifest itself in the house of the village
carpenter, out of reach of schools, in a little wicked town, under the
commonest conditions of poverty, obscurity, and toil.

If you and I could have imagined the introduction of this life of
lives to the world, how should we picture that? Surely we should have
pictured it coming with pomp and display that would at once have
attracted all eyes; but God orders that it shall come without
observation, unfolding its quiet beauty like the wayside flower, which
there are few to see and very few to love. Commonness: that is the
great note of the incarnation and the purposed feature of Christ's
earthly life.

He reaffirms His fraternity in common life. The disciples could not
imagine that as possible; nor can we. And why not? For two reasons,
one of which is that we have forgotten the dignity of common life.

1. Dignity is for us almost synonymous with some kind of separation
from common life; it dwells in palaces, not in cottages; it inheres in
culture, but is inconceivable in narrow knowledge; and to the great
mass of men it is, alas! the attribute of wealth, of fine raiment,
of social isolation. But we have not learned even the alphabet
of Christ's gospel unless we have come to see that the only true
_in_dignity in human life is sin, meanness, malevolence, and
small-heartedness; and that all life is dignified where there are
love, purity, and piety in it, whatever be its social category.

I read the other day that it is probable that the very mire of the
London streets contains that mysterious substance known as radium, the
most tremendous agent of light and heat ever yet discovered by man; so
in man himself, however low his state, there is the spark of God, an
ember lit at the altar fires of the Eternal, and it is because we
forget this that we forget the dignity of common life. For we do
forget it. We may make our boast that a single human soul is of more
value than all the splendors and immensities of matter; but in our
actions we treat the boast as a mere rhetorical expression. There is
nothing so cheap as men and women--let the lords of commerce answer
if it be not so. But Christ acted as tho the boast were true. He
deliberately inwove His life into all that is commonest in life. He
has made it impossible for us, if indeed we have His spirit, to think
of any salient aspect of human life without thinking of Him.
Where childhood is, there is Bethlehem; where sorrow is, there is
Gethsemane; where death is, there is Calvary; where the toiler is,
there is the poor man of Nazareth; and where the beggar is, there is
He who had no place where to lay His head. There is not a drop of
blood of Christ, nor a throb of thought in our brains that is not
thrilling with the impact of this divine life of lives. And so the
true dignity of life is this, that Christ is in all men, faintly
outlined it may be, defaced, half-obliterated, but there, and the
Church that forgets this has neither impulse nor mandate for Christ's
work among men.

2. And then, again, there is a second reason: we have not learned to
look for Christ among the common things of life.

"Let us build three tabernacles," said the wondering disciples on
the Mount of Transfiguration, and the speech betrayed a tendency of
thought which was in time to prove fatal to the Church.

The Christ without a tabernacle, the free, familiar Christ of the lake
or the wayside was everybody's Christ; but the moment Christ is shut
up in a church or a tabernacle He becomes the priest's Christ, the
thinker's Christ, the devotee's Christ, but He ceases to be the
people's Christ.

I remember five years ago standing in the great church of Assisi,
which has been erected over and encloses the little humble chapel
where Francis first received his call. You will scarcely be surprized
if I confess that I turned with a sense of heart-sick indignation
from the pomp of that splendid service in the gorgeous church to
the thought of Francis, in his worn robe, going up and down these
neighboring roads, touching the lepers, calling them "God's patients,"
pouring out his life for the poor; and I knew Christ nearer to me
on the roads that Francis trod than in that church, which is his
mausoleum rather than his monument. And as I felt that day in far-off
Umbria, so I have felt to-day in England; my heart goes out to
Catherine Booth; to Father Dolling, to these Christs of the wayside,
and it turns more and more from the kind of Christ who lives in
churches and nowhere else. My brethren, you will let me say that we do
but make the church Christ's prison when we forget that all the realm
of life is His. Oh, you good people, you do love your church, but
often think and act as tho the presence of Christ can be found nowhere
else. Lift up your eyes and see this risen Christ, a fisherman upon
the shore, busy in no loftier task than to have a meal prepared for
hungry fishermen. Unlock your church doors, let Christ go out among
common people; nay, go yourselves, for it is here that He would have
you be. Remember that wherever there is toil, there is the Christ
who toiled; and there you should be, with the kind glance, the warm
hand-grasp, and the loving warmth of brotherhood.

Christ stands amid the common things of life; where the fire is lit,
there is He; where the bread is broken, there is He; where the net of
business gain is drawn, there is He; and only as we learn to see Him
everywhere shall we understand the dignity and the divinity of human
life.

III. "And Jesus said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the
ship, and ye shall find. They cast, and now they were not able to draw
it for the multitude of fishes."

Here is another strange thing. Christ knows more about the management
of their own business than they do. They had toiled all night and
caught nothing; is not that a significant description of many human
lives? "Children, have ye any meat?" asks that quiet Voice from
the shore, and they answer "No." Is not that yet more pathetically
significant? All the heartbreak and disappointment of the world cry
aloud in that confession. Oh, I could fill an hour with the mere
recital of the names of great and famous people who have toiled
through a long life, and as the last gray hour came over their dim sea
of life, "brackish with the salt of human tears," have acknowledged
with infinite bitterness that they have caught nothing. Listen to the
voice of Goethe, "In all my seventy-five years I have not had four
weeks of genuine well-being;" to the confession of our own famous
poet,

  My life is in the yellow leaf,
    The flowers, the fruits of love are gone;
  The worm, the canker, and the grief
    Are mine alone.

to the ambitious and successful statesman who says, "Youth is folly,
manhood is struggle, old age regret"; to one of our most brilliant
women of genius in our own generation, wife of a still more brilliant
husband, who cries, "I married for ambition, and I am miserable."
Surely there is some tragic mismanagement of the great business of
living here. Oh, brother, is it true of you, that after all the
painful years happiness is not yours? You have no meat, no food on
which the heart feeds, no green pasture in the soul, no table in the
wilderness, and the last gray day draws near and will find you still
hungering for what life Has never given you.

Learn, then, that Christ knows more about the proper management of
your life than you do. "Cast your net on the right side of the ship,"
speaks that quiet Voice from the shore. And you know what happened.
And it is so still. Just because Christ stands among the common things
of life, He knows most about life, and, above all, He knows where
the golden fruit of happiness is found and where the secret wells of
peace.

And to some of us whom God has called to be fishers of men the issue
is yet more solemn. We have the boat and the nets, all this elaborate
organization of the Church, but have we caught anything this year?
Where is the draft of fishes? Where are the men and women saved by
our triumphant effort? I will make my humble confession this morning,
that for five-and-twenty years I have cast the net, but only lately
have I found the right side of the ship; only lately have I discovered
how easy it is to get the great draft of fishes by simply going to
work in Christ's way. I do not believe in the indifference of the
masses in religion; the indifference is not in the masses, but in the
churches. You will never catch many fish if you stand upon the shore
of cold respectability and wait for them to come; launch out into the
deep and you will find them. Go for them--that is Christ's method.
Compel them to come in, for remember Christ's ideal was, as Bishop
Lightfoot so nobly put it, "the universal compulsion of the souls of
men." And if your experience is like mine, you will find that there is
strangely little compulsion needed to bring men and women to Christ.
I stood but lately in a house where fifty fallen women lived; I went
there to rescue three of its unhappy inmates. When the moment came to
take these three women from their life of sin, their comrades lined
the passage to shake my hand; there were tears and prayers, and
messages like these, "Be good. You'll be a good woman," "We wish we
had your chance"; and these poor souls in their inferno wished me
"a happy New-year." Compulsion! There was small need for compulsion
there! I believe I could have rescued all of these fifty women at one
stroke had I known where to take them. But to the shame of the Free
Churches in London I confess that, with the exception of the Wesleyans
and the Salvation Army, I do not know a single Free Church Rescue Home
in London. And I put it to you this morning whether you can any longer
tolerate that omission? I ask you whether you really want a great
draft of fishes, for you can have them if you want them. Christ knows
the business better than you do; and if you will come out of the
cloister of the church and seek the people in His spirit, I promise
you that very soon you will not be able to drag the net for the
multitude of fishes.

IV. "And Jesus said unto them, Come and dine."

Dine on what? Not the fish which they had caught. They had caught one
hundred and fifty-three great fishes; but notice Christ's fire was
kindled before they came. Christ's fish was already laid thereon, and
all they had to do was to come and dine. It is all you have to do, all
the churches have to do. Did not Christ so put it in the parable of
the Great Supper?--"Come, for all things are ready." Is not the last
word of Scripture the great invitation?--"The Spirit and the Bride
say, Come, and whosoever will, let him come, and take of the water of
life freely." Many a church can not say to a hungry world, "Come and
dine," because it will not let Christ prepare the meal. It will not
live in His spirit, it has no real faith in His gospel, it does not
understand that its true strength is not in elaborate organization
or worship, but in simple reliance on His grace. And so there is the
table covered with elaborate confections, which are not bread, and
when it says, "Come and dine," men will not come, for they know that
there is nothing there for them. Let Christ prepare the meal and all
is different then. When He says, "Come and dine," there is "enough
for each, enough for all, enough for evermore." And as Jesus spoke, I
think there flashed upon the memory of these men the scene when Jesus
fed the five thousand, and by that memory they knew their Jesus. No
one else ever spoke like that, with such certainty and such authority.
And the same Voice speaks even now to your hunger-bitten soul, to your
famished heart, "Come and dine."

V. "Then Jesus taketh bread and giveth them, and fish likewise."

There is no mistaking the act; it was a sacramental act. Here, upon
the lake shore, without a church, without an altar, the true feast of
the Lord was observed. For what does the Holy Supper, which is the
bond and seal of the Church's fellowship, stand for, if it is not
for this, the sanctification of the common life? Bread and wine, the
commonest of all foods to an Oriental, are elements indeed, because
they are necessary to the most elementary form of physical life,
things used daily in the humblest home. By linking Himself
imperishably with these commonest elements of life, Christ makes it
impossible to forget Him. Once more the thought shines clear, Jesus
among the common things of life.

And then there comes one last touch in the beautiful story. While
these things happened, the day was breaking. Is there one of us
long tossed on sunless seas of doubt, long conscious of failure and
disappointment in life? Are there those of us whose sorrow lies deeper
than that which is personal--sorrow over our failure in Christ's work,
pain over a life's ministry for Christ that has known no victorious
evangel? Turn your eyes from that barren sea to Him who stands upon
the shore; He shall yet make you a fisher of men. Turn your eyes from
that bleak, dark sea of wasted effort where you have fared so ill; it
is always dark till Jesus comes, it is always light when He has come.
There is a new day breaking for the churches--a day of widespread
evangelistic triumphs that shall eclipse all the greatest triumphs of
the past, if we will but go back to Christ's school and learn of Him
how to save the people. And to each of us He says to-day: "I am the
living bread; I am the bread of life come down from heaven. If any man
eat of this bread, he shall live forever." "Come and dine." Will you
come?




SMITH

ASSURANCE IN GOD

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


GEORGE ADAM SMITH, divine, educator and author, was born at Calcutta
in 1856, and educated at New College, Edinburgh, Scotland. He is at
present professor of Old Testament Language, Literature and Theology
in the United Free Church College, Glasgow. He is author of "The
Historical Geography of the Holy Land," "Jerusalem, the Topography,
Economics and History from the Earliest Time to A.D. 70" (1908). He is
generally regarded as one of the most gifted preachers of Scotland.



SMITH

Born in 1856

ASSURANCE IN GOD

_Preserve me, O God._--Psalm xvi., 16.


The psalmist lived in a period when belief in the reality of many gods
was still strong, and when a man who would follow the one true God
had to prefer to do so against the attractions of other deities and
against the convictions of a great number of his fellow countrymen
that these deities were living and powerful. That stage of religion is
so distant from ourselves that we may imagine the psalmist's example
to be of no practical value for our faith, yet in such an imagination
we should be very much mistaken indeed, for, to begin with, consider
how much you and I to-day owe to those believers who so many centuries
ago rejected all the gods that offered themselves to the hearts of men
except the true God, and who chose to cleave to Him alone with all
that passionate loyalty which breathes through these verses. But for
them you and I could not be standing where we are in religion to-day.
As the eleventh of Hebrews reminds us, we are the spiritual heir of
such believers. It is to their struggles and their faith and their
victories that we greatly owe it that we have been born into an
atmosphere in which no religious belief is possible to us save in one
God who is Spirit and Righteousness and all Truth.

That, then, was the great choice that the psalmist's faith was turning
to--a choice that was no mere assent to a creed that had been fought
for and established by previous generations of believers. It was the
man's own proving of things unseen and his own preference of those
against the crowd and a system of things seen, palpable, and very
powerful in their attraction for the senses of humanity. But we are
not to suppose that the rival deities, from which this man turned to
the unseen God, were to his mind or to the mind of his day the heap
of dead and ugly idols which we know them to be. They were not dead
things that he could kick away with his feet that these believers had
to reject when they sought the living God, but things which he and his
contemporaries felt to be alive and powerful; powerful alike in their
seduction and in their vengeance. They were believed to be identical,
as you know, with the forces of nature; they were supposed to be
indispensable to the welfare of the individual and of society, and
they were fanatically supported at the time by the mass of this man's
own countrymen; so that to break from them in those days meant to
abandon ancient opinions and habits, to resist many pleasant and
natural temptations and to incur the hostility, as was believed, of
the powers of nature, to break with customs and with rites that had
fortified and consoled the individual heart for generations and been
the support and sanction of society and of the state as well. Yet this
man did it. From all that living crowd and system, from all those
visible temptations and terrors he turned to the unseen, fully
conscious of his danger, for he opens his Psalm with a great cry,
"Preserve me, preserve me, O God!" but yet deliberately, and with all
his heart: "I have said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord." I have no
goodness, no happiness, that is outside Thee or outside the saints
that are in the land, "the excellent in whom is all my delight." Here
we touch another great characteristic of all true faith which is full
of example to ourselves. It is remarkable how, when a man really turns
to God, he turns to God's people as well, and how he includes them in
the loyalty and in the devotion which he feels toward his Redeemer.
His confidence and the sensitiveness of his faith in and toward God
become almost an equal confidence and an equal sensitiveness toward
his fellow believers. So it is throughout Scripture; you remember that
other psalmist who tells us how he had been tempted to doubt God's
providence and God's power to help the good man--"does God know and is
there knowledge in the Most High? Verily I have cleansed my heart in
vain and washed my hands in innocency." The psalmist immediately adds:
"If I had spoken thus, behold I had dealt treacherously with the
generation of God's children." If I had spoken thus, denying God,
I had dealt treacherously with the generation of God's children.
Unbelief toward God meant to him treason toward God's people; and the
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews affirms the same double character
of true faith when he emphasizes just these two points in the faith
of Moses: "choosing to suffer affliction with the people of God," and
"enduring as seeing Him who is invisible," and God Himself through
Jesus Christ has accepted this partnership of His people in our
loyalty--"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren ye have done it unto me." I do not believe in the full
faith of any man who does not extend the loyalty he professes to
God to God's people as well, who does not feel as sensitive to his
brethren on earth as he does to his Father in heaven, who does not
practise piety toward the Church as he does toward her Head, or find
in her fellowship and her service a joy and a gladness which is one
with his deep joy in God, his Redeemer. Nay, is it not just in loving
people who are still imperfect, often disappointing, and far from
their ideal it may be, that in our relations to them we are to find
the greater proof and test of our religious faith? In these days such
a duty is unfortunately more complicated than with the psalmist. The
lines between God's Church and the world is not so clear as it was to
him, and the Church is divided into many and often hostile factions.
All the more it becomes the test of our religion if our hearts feel
and rejoice in the fellowship of God's simpler and more needy and more
devoted believers, however unattractive they may otherwise be.

Consider the way in which the psalmist reached this pure faith in God
and in His people. A factor in the process was distaste for the ugly
rites of idolatry--"Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer."
Idolatry always develops a loathsome ritual. Sometimes it is cruel
and sometimes it is horribly unclean, but it always debases the
worshiper's mind, confuses his conscience, and hampers his freedom and
energy by the burdensome ceremonies it imposes upon them. Standing
afar off from them as we do, and knowing that there is no heathen
religion but has something good in it, we are apt to think that it
does not in the least matter how crude or how material a nation's
faith be if only it be faith in something more powerful than
themselves, if it satisfy their consciences and have some influence in
disciplining society and helping the individual to control himself.
But you have only to see idolatry at work, and at work with the
habits of ages upon it, to recognize how terrible it can be in its
identification of sheer filth and cruelty with the interests of
religion, and how it at once demoralizes and paralyzes its adherents.
To see it thus is to understand the passionate horror of these words:
"Their drink-offering of blood will I not offer."

It is, however, no mere recoil from the immoral which started the
spring of this psalmists's faith in God. That faith was formed on
personal experience of God Himself. In simple but pregnant phrases the
psalmist tells us how sure he has become, first, of God's providence
in his life; secondly, of God's intimate communion with his soul. God,
he says, had been everything in his life. One does not know whether
the psalmist was a prosperous man or a poor one; the inference that he
was prosperous and rich has sometimes been drawn, but wrongly drawn,
from one of the verses of the Psalm. His indifference to that is
clear, but what he did have he knew he had from God. God, he says, is
all his happiness and all his strength--"The Lord is the portion of
mine inheritance and of my cup; thou maintainest my lot." Whether poor
or prosperous he could say: "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant
places; yea, I have a goodly heritage." Now that assurance of divine
leading is not analyzable, but we know that it does grow up solid and
sure in the experience of simple men who have put their trust in God,
who have felt life to be a commission from Him and who have done their
duty obeying His call. With such men "all things work together for
good." Tho life about them shake and darken, they feel their own
solidity and have light enough to read the future. Tho stript
and stark, they feel the Lord Himself to be the portion of their
inheritance and of their cup. The portion of my inheritance the Lord
is, i.e., the little bit of land that fell to each Israelite as his
share in the promised inheritance of the nation. "The Lord is the
portion of mine inheritance," as we might say in our Scotch language,
"The Lord is my croft and my cup," so they find in Him all the
ground and the freedom they need to do their work, fulfil their
relationships, and develop their manhood.

It is, however, with the psalmist's second reason for his faith we
have most to do. "I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel:
my reins also instruct me in the night seasons." This man held close
communion with God. Is it not great to find the testimony of a brother
man coming down all through those ages, from that dim and distant
past, clear and sure as to this, that he had God's counsel and that
God kept communion with him? God had spoken to this man and shown
him His will. Yes, he had received what we call inspiration and
revelation, and had proved the truth of these in his life. They had
led and they had lifted him. Nor had they come to him as many men
falsely suppose revelation and inspiration exclusively have come to
mankind, by means, namely, that were extraordinary and miraculous. The
psalmist tells us of no vision of angels, of no voice from heaven. The
Lord had not appeared to him in dreams nor by any marvelous signs; on
the other hand, he tells us simply that the divine counsel of which
he was so sure, and which he passes on to us, came to him through the
workings of his inner spiritual life. That is what he means by the
emphatic statement "yea, my reins instruct me in the night seasons,"
which he adds parallel with the thought, "I will bless the Lord, who
hath given me counsel." According to the primitive physiology of
this man's nation and times, the reins of a man fulfil the same
intellectual function which we, with our larger knowledge, know are
discharged by the brain. This was how God's revelation came to this
brother of ours, through the working of his mind and conscience, but
it was in the night seasons that they worked, not in the day and in
the sunshine, but in the night when a man is left to himself with
only this advantage to his thought: that like the blind he is yet
undistracted by the influences which are seen. When he lies down he
thinks soberly and quietly about himself and about life and about God,
and about the great hidden future that is waiting for him. He
was communing with God, who had made his brain and used it as an
instrument of revelation. In these thoughts God was communing with man
through his reason and through his conscience. You and I are always
contrasting God's providence and His grace. We are always attempting
to oppose reason and revelation; to this man they were one. God's
great grace had come to him through God's own providence, and God's
revelation was ministered to him through the reason with which he had
endowed the creature He had made in His own image. This psalmist's
chief and practical help to us men and women today is that he became
sure of God not because of any miracle or supernatural sign, on his
report of which we might be content indolently to rest our faith, but
in God's own providence in his life and in God's quiet communion with
him through the organs God Himself has created in every one of us. For
all time, whether before or after Christ, these are the chief
grounds and foundations of faith in God. So it was in the Old
Testament--"stand in awe and sin not," "commune with your own heart
upon your bed and be still," "be still and know that I am God." So
with Christ, "for the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation,
but the kingdom of heaven is within you," and so with Paul, "the
Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the
children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and joint
heirs with Christ." "For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, ... that he would grant you according to the
riches of his glory to be strengthened with might by his spirit in the
inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, to the end
that ye being rooted and grounded in love may come to apprehend with
all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height and to
know the love of Christ."

God's guidance of his life, first of all, produces in a man a great
sense of stability. "I have set the Lord always before me: because he
is at my right hand I shall not be moved." He who has found God so
careful of him, he whom God hath regarded as worth speaking to and
counseling and disciplining, will be certain that he shall endure,
provided he is sure of his own loyalty. The life so loved of God, so
provided for, and in such close communion with the Eternal is not, can
not be the creature of the day, and this assurance stands firm in face
of even death and the horrible corruption of the body. The psalmist
refuses to believe that he is to dwell in the horrible under-world
forever--either himself or any of God's believers. "Thou must not,
thou wilt not leave my soul in sheol, thou must not, thou wilt not
suffer thy loved ones to see the pit." To this man it is incredible,
and our hearts bear witness to the truth if we have had any experience
of God's blessing and guidance. To this man it is incredible that the
life God has cared for and guided and spoken to and brought into such
intimate communion with himself can find its end in death. Those whom
God has loyally loved and who have loyally loved God--for this
word badly translated "holy" in the psalms really has that actual
significance--those whom God has loyally loved and who have loyally
loved God shall never die. As He lives so shall they; they shall never
be absent from His presence. Be the future unknown and unknowable,
be we ourselves incapable of conceiving the processes by which this
mortal shall put on immortality, or where heaven is, or what eternity
can possibly be to those who have never lived outside time, yet that
future is secure and its immortal character is indubitable--where God
is there shall His servants be, and because He is there their life
shall be peace and joy, and because He is eternal it shall last
forevermore. That thought is the whole of the hope and argument. We
are assured of the future life because we have known God, and as we
have found Him to be true to us and proved ourselves true to Him.




GUNSAULUS

THE BIBLE VS. INFIDELITY

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


Frank Wakely Gunsaulus was born at Chesterville, Ohio, in 1856. He
graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1875. For some years he was
pastor of Plymouth Church, Chicago, and since 1899 pastor of Central
Church, Chicago. He is also president of the Armour Institute of
Technology. He is a fascinating speaker, having a clear, resonant
voice, and a dignified presence. His mind is a storehouse of the best
literature, and his English style is noteworthy for its purity and
richness. He is the author of several books and is in popular demand
as a lecturer.




GUNSAULUS

Born in 1856

THE BIBLE VS. INFIDELITY[1]

[Footnote 1: Preached as an impromptu reply to R.G. Ingersoll. Printed
from an unrevised stenographic report.]

_There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none
of them is without signification_.--I Cor. xiv., 10.


Ours is a voiceful era. Perhaps, as the ages come and go and man's
life grows richer, its questions more restless for answer, its
moral supports called upon to bear heavier interests of faith, its
enterprises more often and searchingly compelled to defend themselves,
the voices of time will be increasingly potent and worthy of his
attention. A singularly suggestive collection of messages fills the
air today, and all of these voices speak of one theme--the Bible.

Anarchy, which is always atheistic, holds its converse in the places
of evil which this book's message would close forever; the foes of
that civilization builded on its laws and stimulated by its hopes asks
us to condemn it as worthy only of caricature, vituperation, and hate.
Let us find a path of duty today, not refusing to listen to any of
these voices, but asking that other voices also may help us to the
truth.

The preacher's message is a book called the Bible. That is only the
literary form of his message--telling its history. Even that form,
which is much less divine as paper and ink are less lofty in the
scale than humanity, has worked wonders. To-day, the Bible offers the
nineteenth-century infidel as testimony of the influence it has. It
has force enough to make infidelity preach tearfully and well about
man, woman, and child. Skepticism did not do so well until the Bible
came. The Bible has furnished the eloquence of infidelity with such
a man as Shakespeare to talk about; no student of literature could
imagine Shakespeare without the Bible and the Bible's influence upon
him as he created his dreams. It furnished an Abraham Lincoln for an
orator to compare favorably with incomplete ideas of Almighty God; but
it seems to have been unable to show the critic that Christian ideas
of Almighty God made Lincoln so love the Lord's Prayer that he wanted
a church builded with this as its creed. It would seem that any
general denunciation or humorous caricature of a book which has
worked such an amazing effect in literature as has the Bible would
be tempered by some recognition of the fact that these other
minds--poets, orators, sages, and scientists--have found illumination
and help in its pages. Liberal Christianity will be intellectually
broad. Certainly the greatest of modern pagans, Goethe, will not be
accused of favoritism toward the Bible, yet he said: "I esteem the
gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth from them the
reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the person of
Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have
manifested upon earth." The Earl of Rochester saw that the only
liberalism which objects to the Bible, in its true uses, is the
liberalism of licentiousness; and he left this saying: "A bad heart
is the great argument against this holy book." And Faraday, weeping,
said: "Why will people go astray when they have this blest book to
guide them?"

If we turn to literature we encounter many such liberal thinkers as
Theodore Parker, who calmly informs us: "This collection of books has
taken such a hold upon the world as has no other. The literature of
Greece, which goes up like incense from that land of temples and
heroic deeds, has not half the influence of this book. It goes equally
to the cottage of the plain man and the palace of the king. It is
woven into the literature of the scholar and colors the talk of the
street." That is the voice of the liberalism which includes rather
than excludes.

These were men not of the band of evangelical Christian preachers, who
are roughly classed as a set of persons unable to tell the truth about
the Bible, for fear they may lose their means of subsistence; these
are men who know the true mission of the Bible. It is not to furnish
a picture of life in the time of Moses such as life ought to be, a
portrait of a David for the imitation of men, a statue of a warrior
in a time of barbarism who shall command my obedience to his commands
now, an idea of God wrought out in ignorance and darkness, which has
no self-development within it. The mission of the Bible is to furnish
a humanly written account of a people, just as human as we, in whom,
by divine inspiration, the soul of truth so lived and worked as to
develop, in gradual course, by laws, by hopes, by loves, by life, a
living, and, at last, perfectly authoritative ideal of righteousness,
but more than all a gradual growth of such moral power as would be
commanding in the redeeming self-sacrifice and love of Jesus Christ.
Every page of the Old Testament was only preparatory, as the thorny
bush is preparatory for the rose. Christ is the end of the long, weary
human history that leads to Him. If the laws of Sinai had been enough,
there never would have been a Calvary. No one for a moment dreams that
the God of nature could have brought forth such a fruit as the life
and ideas of Jesus without a tree of such a history, a tree rooted in
the ground, storm-twisted, gnarled, and valuable only for its fruit.
We are not asked to eat the roots and bark and branches; only the
fruit has an appeal to us. Its appeal is to our hunger, its authority
lies in the fact that it satisfies our hunger.

It has satisfied the hunger of men whose liberalism came from their
being made liberally. Large and capacious souls of mighty yearnings
are they. They stand in contrast with the puny critics who assert
that the Bible fails to feed them, because they have never tasted its
nourishment.

Liberal Christianity, separating itself from the dogmatism which would
make Christianity a book religion, worshiping a literary idol rather
than loving a human revelation of the divine, knows it is not an
ignorant lot of men and women who have received most from the Bible
and spoken most gratefully of its message. When we think of sending
the Bible to barbarism, with the hope of creating in its stead
civilization, we can look into the face of John Selden, one of the
most illustrious of English lawyers, when he says: "I have surveyed
most of the learning that is among the sons of men, yet at this moment
I can recall nothing in them on which to rest my soul, save one from
the sacred Scriptures, which rises much on my mind. It is this: 'The
grace of God, which bringeth salvation, hath appeared unto all men,
teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live
soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for
that blest hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our
Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us that he might redeem
us unto himself, a peculiar people zealous of good works.'" Liberal
religion must include Selden. We will not be deterred from giving the
Bible to heathenism of any kind when we remember that Sir William
Jones has left these words: "The Scriptures contain more true
sublimity, more exquisite beauty, and finer strains of poetry and
eloquence than could be collected from all other books that were ever
composed in any age or in any idiom." Liberal religion must be as
broad as Sir William Jones.

This is a very needy world, and many are the institutions of evil that
need to be changed for institutions of goodness. If we are to believe
the eloquence of hopeless unbelief, we ourselves will only be the
slaves of a fatalism which says that man is but a result of forces;
that what we call crime is but a part of the necessary course of
things, and that there is no such thing as moral responsibility. This
makes all reform or efforts at staying the tide of evil useless.
Oftentimes the heart of the man who has ceased to read his Bible gets
the victory over this dreadful philosophy, and it is not remarkable
that the skeptic becomes the exponent of freedom, charging like a host
of war upon all institutions of slavery. Liberal theology puts its one
hand on the dogmatist who tells him to accept literal infallibility,
and its other on the sincere lover of men who has lost his Bible
entirely. And liberalism says: It is in just such moments that we
trust our Bible the most, and we remember that William Wilberforce,
who lifted the chains from the bondmen, has said: "I never knew
happiness until I found Christ as a Savior. Read the Bible! Bead the
Bible! Through all my perplexities and distresses I never read any
other book, I never knew the want of any other." We are certainly not
despising the science which is worthy of a name, nor are we forgetting
any proposition which has found a place in the world's thought, if we
look into the face of Sir John Herschel, who tells us that "all human
discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more
and more strongly the truths contained in the holy Scriptures." It is
truly no part of wisdom for us to conclude that for scientific reasons
we ought to forsake our Bible when Professor Dana avers: "The grand
old book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves
are turned and pondered, the more will it sustain and illustrate the
sacred Word."

Surely it is not the hour dogmatically to withdraw this book, which
has proved the basis of civilization. Professor Lyell, the great
English geologist, tells us: "In the year 1806 the French Institute
enumerated no less than eighty geological theories which were hostile
to the Scriptures, but not one of these theories is held today."
Bacon's remark is still true: "There never was found in any age of the
world either religion or law that did so highly exalt the public good
as the Bible." And John Marshall and Prince Bismarck agree with Daniel
Webster when he says: "If we abide by the principles taught in the
Bible our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and
our posterity neglect its instructions and authority no man can tell
how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in
profound obscurity." There is not an anarchist in America who does not
clap his hands when he hears a Bible with the Ten Commandments and the
Sermon on the Mount denounced. Indeed, the civilization in which we
stand, as compared with the barbarism out of which we have been led
by the Bible, would make William Henry Seward's assertion only a mild
statement of the truth when he says: "The whole hope of human progress
is suspended on the ever-growing influence of the Bible." I prefer
lawyers like these to lead American public opinion. Part of the
service of these men has been that they have shown theology that the
Bible is not a set of texts on a dead level of authority and equal
value, but the revealing, slow and sure, of an inspiration obeyed by a
certain people in the realm of morals like that inspiration obeyed by
another people in the realm of art, and its test is: Does the Bible's
ultimate message, its crowning commandment of Christ's life and love,
produce goodness in morals? just as the test of the long revelation
of beauty in his ancestors and the Greek is, does its ultimate
commandment produce goodness in art.

Christianity does not ask: "What think ye of the Bible?" It asks:
"What think ye of Christ?" There the throne is set, and so majestic is
His glory that the moment we come into His presence we are judged. The
Judge of the earth has taken His place in thought, history and hope.
He is not on trial, and He asks no question as to what man thinks of
the book which has enthroned Him in literature. The test is placed in
my conduct and yours; each may say with Michael Bruce, who left these
words on the fly-leaf of his Bible:

  'Tis very vain of me to boast
  How small a price this Bible cost;
  The day of judgment will make clear
  'Twas very cheap or very dear.

Shall we go forward with our Bible or backward without it? Infidelity
has always forgotten that, so far as it has an eye for liberty and
humanity, the Christianity not of sects but of the Bible has furnished
it and trained it. The liberalism which puts its Bible aside will
acknowledge that a Christless humanity culminated in Rome. Skepticism
is often eloquent when it tries to show how much "fragments of Roman
art" had to do with the making of modern civilization. Now, as Rome
marks the height to which humanity without a Bible ascended, it would
seem that this would be just the point where free and untrammeled
thought and the fullest intellectual liberty would be found. Right
there, where a Christless race was supreme, ought to be the place
where the liberty abounded which the religion of Christ is said to
destroy.

Whose program for the production of intellectual and spiritual liberty
can liberals accept? Hoarse is the cry: The Bible is to be cast out.
We look and behold men who have these opinions sitting on the throne
of the Caesars. Now, one would suppose the intellect of that whole
realm would have fair play. There was no Bible there to fetter or to
annoy. This ought to be the halcyon age for "the liberty of man, woman
and child." These rulers have the same dignified abhorrence for all
kinds of religion. The skeptic Lucretius says: "The fear of the lower
world must be sent headlong forth. It poisons life to its lowest
depths; it spreads over all things the blackness of death; it leaves
no pleasure unalloyed." I match the Roman with the phrase of a recent
orator of this school who spoke of the soldiers dead, as now "sleeping
beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of
storm, each in the windowless palace of rest." There was no window in
the grave when more illustrious and original skeptics talked about it.
Modern infidelity has many expressions on the future after death which
sound like the old Roman distich, "I was not, and became; I was, and
am no more."

Its orator, bending over the body of his dear brother, said nothing
more touching than did Tacitus over the grave of Agricola, as he
wrote: "If there is a place for the spirits of the pious; if, as the
wise suppose, great souls do not become extinct with their bodies;
if"--oh, that age of "if" ought to have been an age when every brain
was free and no thought or sentiment were a chain. The Bible of
Christianity was not powerful enough to throttle anybody. Its pages
were not all written; its authors were hunted and outcast. Morals,
too, ought to have been all right, for we are told that they are
independent of God and Christ.

But what is the fact? Strangely enough, in that age, when nearly every
monarch, or poet, or philosopher was a humorous skeptic and they had
no Christian religion to "bind their hands," in an age when nothing
but this sort of infidelity was supreme, Seneca, to whom connoisseurs
in ethics blandly turn when they grow weary of the strenuous Paul or
the pensive John, Seneca, while he wrote a book on poverty, has a
fortune of $15,000,000, with a house full of citrus tables made of
veined wood brought from Mount Atlas. While he framed moral precepts
which we are besought to substitute for the Sermon on the Mount, he
was openly accused of constant and shameless iniquity, and was leading
his distinguished and tender pupil, Nero, into those practises and
preparing him for those atrocities which Seneca himself had upon his
own soul while he wrote his book on clemency. At that hour the Bible
Christianity offered to the world's heart and aspiration, not a book,
not a theorist of morals, but a man for the leadership of humanity,
and, of that Man the literary and calm French skeptic says: "Jesus
will never be surpassed." In the age of Rome, when people were not
burdened by churches or Bibles, Lucian says: "If any one loves wealth
and is dazed by gold; if any one measures happiness by purple and
power; if any one brought up among flatterers and slaves has never had
a conception of liberty, frankness and truth; if any one has wholly
surrendered himself to pleasure, full tables, carousals, lewdness,
sorcery, and deceit, let him go to Rome." There was no Bible either
to preach against it or to interfere with it. These things were the
product then, as they are now, of infidelity. Whenever the world
wishes a civilization so barbarous as that, the reviler of the Bible
must create it, for they have the applause of evil and the good-will
of crime. In the age of Rome, when this skepticism was the creed of
the State, Nero got tired of the goddess Astarte, and murdered his own
brother, his wife, and his mother, and the senate was so affected with
the same opinion that they heard his justification and proceeded to
heap new honors upon him. He threw the preacher Paul into jail, but
there Paul wrought out the impulse of Europe. In the age when the
great Livy said that "neglect of gods" had come, Caligula let loose
his imperial frenzy, and every stream of blood that could be sent
toward the sea carried its red tide. In that age when, like later
eloquent critics, Ennius said that he did not believe that the gods
thought of human beings, "for if the gods concerned themselves about
the human race the good would prosper and the bad suffer," the
courtesan was kept for pleasure and the wife for domestic slavery. In
that happy age of unbelief, when Menander sung "the gods do not care
for men," "the homes were," according to Juvenal, "broken up before
the nuptial garland faded"; and according to Tertullian, "they married
only to be divorced." Friends exchanged wives; infanticide and other
hellish crimes were common. This is what that spirit, in its purity,
did for the home, when there was no Bible to read at its hearthstone
and no New Testament to put into the hands of young lovers departing
to make a new rooftree.

Labor will some day be too liberal to give up its Bible. In that age,
when "God was dead"; in that age, when "the gods had abdicated";
they said, "the mechanic's occupation is degrading. A workshop is
incompatible with anything noble." The curse of slavery had blotted
the name of labor, and they agreed that "a purchased laborer is better
than a hired one," and thousands of prison-like dwellings rose to
conceal the myriads of slaves. In that age Nero, who had the same
opinion about God which the vaunting spirit which calls itself liberal
has today, had a "golden house" as large as a city, with colonnades a
mile long, and within it a statue of Nero 120 feet high. That is what
the theory of infidelity did for labor and the working man when it
was on the throne. Do you wonder that from that day to this the
"carpenter's son" of the Bible has been scoffed at by this infidelity?

In that age, when the theories of infidelity ruled, the gladiators
made wet with their blood the great enclosure of the arena. The women
and timid girls of Rome gave lightly the sign of death. The crowd
shook the building with applause as the palpitating body was dragged
by a hook into the death-chamber, and slaves turned up the bloody soil
and covered the blood-dabbled earth with sand that the awful amusement
might go on. All this was allowed by infidelity in its purity, before
it had been influenced by the Christian's Bible into believing that
such things are atrocious.

Oh, when I hear infidelity prate of the horrors of slavery and defend
a Godless theory of the State, I remember that those who had it in its
purity did not regard the slave as a man. When I read the story of
slavery and hear an exponent of free thought say, "The doctrine that
woman is a slave or serf of man--whether it comes from hell or heaven,
from God or demon, from the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, or
the very Sodom of perdition--is savagery pure and simple," I say,
"That is so, but just that was the ruling idea when infidelity was on
the throne of Rome." And only where the Bible has gone and triumphed
has woman the privileges which are thus praised.

When I hear it said: "Slavery includes all other crimes. It is the
joint product of the kidnaper, pirate, thief, murderer, and hypocrite.
It degrades labor and corrupts leisure. To lacerate the naked back, to
sell wives, to steal babes, to debauch your soul--this is slavery," I
answer: "That is so," and I add that all these and a thousand other
damnable features of slavery were seen in Rome when the whole Roman
people felt and spoke about the message of the Bible just as your type
of liberalism does today.

To all this wretched state of man what offers came from Seneca, whom
skepticism quotes as a moralist? Why, he said: "Admire only thyself";
and when he saw that a man must get out of himself, he said: "Give
thyself to philosophy." Not philosophy, but the power of the Bible's
Christ has lifted man upward to his highest life.

If ever anti-Christianity had a chance to show its beauty, it was when
it was at its supreme strength, and when Christianity was a babe in
the manger; and these are only suggestions of the hell it dug for man
at Rome. You say that it was not what skepticism is at the present
day, and I acknowledge that it is so. Why? Because nineteen centuries
have rolled like waves of light between, and Christ has improved it
in spite of itself. Never had the world so good a chance to see what
almost absolute skepticism and unbelief could and would do for the
liberty of the human soul as then. But when the thrones of Rome were
occupied with men who held the same opinion of the Bible as he does
today, what was the freedom of the race?

The scene all comes back. Here is a little, obscure set of poor people
who follow the words and life of the son of a carpenter. They are
powerful in nothing that Rome calls power. But Rome says that they
shall not think that way. Celsus, from whom our less scholarly
skepticism is ready to borrow arguments, was not enough for the new
thought in the arena of debate, and they cried for another arena. Let
us remember that unbelief, in its purity at that date, was so offended
at nothing as at the fact that the Church said: "Christian justice
makes all equal who bear the name of man," and that Paul said: "There
is neither bond nor free, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Nothing
so offended the representative of free thought in that period as
the fact that a rich Roman, in the time of Trajan, having become a
Christian, presented freedom to his 1,250 slaves on an Easter day.
And, in all that time, when poor Christians with the funds of the
Church were privately buying the freedom of slaves, I do not find
that a base liberalism believed in liberty. Neither did it believe in
freedom of thought. It is the blossom of egotism; it has nothing to
which it bows; it beholds no majesty to which it can look up. It is
sublime self-conceit, and it has no hesitancy in telling the whole
human race that at its grandest moments it has been wrong. This
egotism dared to become active in Rome, and it asked the Christians,
in the person of the Emperor, to worship him, and to strew incense
about him. "I will honor the Emperor," said Theophilus, "not by
worshiping him, but by praying for him." Such men as that infidelity
kindly put to death. Around their quivering limbs the infidelity of
that day made the fagots to flame, and it taught the red tongues of
cruel death to creep about their smoking bodies.

Men who believed that the Bible's influence was what infidelity says
it is, made the funeral pyre for Polycarp, the populace bringing fuel
for the fire, and while the flames made a glory of their lambent
glare, he cried out: "Six and eighty years have I served him and he
has done me nothing but good, and how could I curse him, my Lord
and Savior. If you would know what I am, I tell you frankly, I am a
Christian." He did his own thinking, and was brave enough to avow his
opinion, for which hate of Christianity duly burned him. This was the
way infidelity treated free speech. In that way it unchained the soul
of Polycarp. Infidelity's idea of Christianity sent the martyrs of
Numidia and Paulus out of the world while they were praying for their
murderers. Who believed in freedom then? Infidelity's idea of the
message of the Bible followed the Christian like a wild beast, and
in the catacomb of Calixtus drew from the pursued soul the pathetic
exclamation: "Oh, sorrowful times, when we can not even in caves
escape our foes!" And all this was true, because they said,
"Recompense to no man evil for evil"; "Pray for them that despitefully
use you and persecute you."

This spirit of hate has had at least one holiday at the expense of
Christian faith. On the night of the 18th of July, 64, Rome was swept
with fire. Six days and nights it raged. Ruined was the world's
metropolis and excited were the wo-stricken people. Nero, whose
opinions of Christianity, by the way, were wonderfully like the
orator's, was king, and the people suspected that this royal monster
did it. Men told of how he exulted over the sea of flame as he watched
it from the tower of Maecenas; and whatever the truth of this may be,
it is certain that for the rage of the people Nero must have a victim,
and Tacitus tells us that he charged the Christians with the crime.
Then opened in Rome the awful carnival of bloodshed that the orator
never mentions, in which horrible modes of torture and excruciating
methods of producing pain vied with each other in satisfying the
demands of death. Women bound to raging bulls and dragged to death
were not without the companionship of others who, in the evening, in
Nero's garden, were coated with pitch, covered with tar, bound to
stakes of pine, lighted with fire, and sent to run aflame with the
hatred of Christianity. Through the crowd of sufferers a gentleman,
who was ultra-liberal as the orator, drove about, fantastically
attired as a charioteer, and the people were wild with delight.
Domitian had the same ideas, and severe were his persecutions of the
new heresy. This was the day on which infidelity was so full of the
love of freedom that it cried: "The Christians to the lions!"

And so I might recount to you how for hundreds of years the Church
found out how early and unchristianized infidelity loved freedom of
thought. To a type of liberals, it has for years seemed a joy to go
to the places in the old world and note how intolerant the Church has
been. Now I suggest to any one that he go and visit some of the places
where men who thought of Christianity as negativism thinks showed
their faith and its fruits. Let him go to the Colosseum and ask the
winds that moan over its ruins what they know of the history
of infidelity. The winds will hush in that wreck of stupendous
magnificence, and with an eloquence gathered from seventeen centuries
they will tell him a story that will cause a flow of tears, for much
of infidelity is of noble heart. They will tell him how the marble
seats were crowded with thousands; again will sweep upward the shout
of the excited throng; before him there will lie a half-dead Christian
martyr, and near that pool of blood will stand a lion who has satiated
his horrid thirst.

They will tell him how infidelity made that splendid place a temple
of the furies, how it laughed and yelled and applauded, as it amused
itself with that spectacle of horror. They will tell him how the
underground passages served to keep and cage wild beasts, and how
those who then hated Christianity starved the fierce lion until his
eyes rolled in hot hunger and his teeth were sharpened with its agony.
They will tell him how the infidelity of that day put balls of fire
on the backs of the lions, and how the madness of their passion was
increased by scattering hated colors about, tearing the beasts with
iron hooks and beating them with cruel whips. They will tell how the
Christian was made to fight these infuriated beasts without weapons,
while infidelity was frantic with applause. It said "no" to the torn
body yonder, that was mangled and supplicating in blood for life. I
would have him stand there until, in after years, in a nobler strain
than that of Byron, he could say:

  And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
  All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
  Which softened down the hoar austerity
  Of rugged desolation.

          *       *       *       *       *

  Till the place
  Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
  With silent worship of the great of old!
  The dead but sceptered sovereigns who still rule
  Our spirits from their urns.

So long as I know what this book has been and done, so long as man's
history will not allow me to risk the interests of society with the
infidelity which has so often demoralized it, so long will I yearn to
get the Bible and its message to all men. It has been our world's best
book. With this book as inspiration and resource, William Tyndale
and Miles Coverdale were so to continue and complete the task of The
Venerable Bede and John Wyclif as to make an epoch in the history of
that language to be used by Shakespeare and Burke--an era as distinct
as that which Luther's Bible so soon should mark in the history of a
language to be such a potent instrument in the hands of Goethe and
Hegel. For this very act of heresy, Tyndale was to be called "a
full-grown Wyclif," and Luther "the redeemer of his mother-tongue."
With the Bible, Calvin was to conceive republics at Geneva, and
Holbein to paint, in spite of the iconoclasm of the Reformation, the
faces of Holy Mother and Saint, and in spite of the cruelty of the
Church, scripturally conceived satires illustrating the sale of
indulgences. With that book Gustavus Vasa was to protect and nurture
the freedom of the land of flowing splendors, while Angelo was
transcribing sacred scenes upon the Sistine vault or fixing them in
stone. Reading this book, More was to die with a smile; Latimer,
Cranmer, and Ridley to perish while illuminating with living torches,
and the Anabaptist to arouse the sympathies of Christendom by his
agonies. With this book in hand, Shakespeare was to write his plays;
Raleigh was to die, knight, discoverer, thinker, statesman, martyr;
Bacon to lay the foundation of modern scientific research--three stars
in the majestic constellation about Henry's daughter. With this Bible
open before them the English nation would behold the Spanish Armada
dashed to pieces upon the rocks, while Edmund Spenser mingled his
delicious notes with the tumult of that awful wreck.

This book was to produce the edict of Nantes, while John of Barneveld
would give new life to the command of William the Silent--"Level
the dikes; give Holland back to the ocean, if need be," thus making
preparation for the visit of the Mayflower pilgrims to Leyden or
Delfthaven. Their eyes resting upon its pages, Selden and Pym were to
go to prison, while Grotius dreamed of the rights of man in peace and
war, and Guido and Rubens were painting the joys of the manger or the
sorrows of Calvary. His hand resting upon this book, Oliver Cromwell
would consolidate the hopes and convictions of Puritanism into a sword
which should conquer at Nasby, Marston Moor and Dunbar, leave to the
throne of Charles I, a headless corpse, and create, if only for an
hour's prophecy, a commonwealth of unbending righteousness. With that
volume in their homes, the Swede and the Huguenot, the Scotch-Irishman
and the Quaker, the Dutchman and the freedom-loving cavalier, were to
plan pilgrimages to the West, and establish new homes in America. With
that book in the cabin of the _Mayflower_, venerated and obeyed by
sea-tossed exiles, was to be born a compact from which should spring
a constitution and a government for the life of which all these
nationalities should willingly bleed and struggle, under a conqueror
who should rise from the soil of the cavaliers, and unsheath his sword
in the colony of the Puritans.

Out of that Bible were to come the "Petition of Right," the national
anthem of 1628, the "Grand Remonstrance," and "Paradise Lost." With
it, Blake and Pascal should voyage heroically in diverse seas. In its
influence Jeremy Taylor should write his "Liberty of Prophesying,"
Sir Matthew Hale his fearless replies, while Rembrandt was placing on
canvas little Dutch children, with wooden shoes, crowding to the feet
of a Jewish Messiah.

Its lines, breathing life, order, and freedom, would inspire
John Bunyan's dream, Algernon Sidney's fatal republicanism, and
Puffendorf's judicature. With them, William Penn would meet the
Indian of the forest, and Fénelon, the philosopher, in his meditative
solitude. Locke and Newton and Leibnitz would carry it with them in
pathless fields of speculation, while Peter the Great was smiting
an arrogant priest in Russia, and William was ascending the English
throne. From its poetry Cowper, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning
would catch the divine afflatus; from its statesmanship Burke,
Romilly, and Bright would learn how to create and redeem institutions;
from its melodies Handel, Bach, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven would write
oratorios, masses, and symphonies; from its declaration of divine
sympathy Wilberforce, Howard, and Florence Nightingale were to
emancipate slaves, reform prisons, and mitigate the cruelties of war;
from its prophecies Dante's hope of a united Italy was to be realized
by Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel. Looking upon the family
Bible as he was dying, Andrew Jackson said: "That book, sir, is the
rock on which the Republic rests"; and with her hand upon that book,
Victoria, England's queen, was to sum up her history as a power
amid the nations of the earth, when, replying to the question of an
ambassador: "What is the secret of England's superiority among the
nations?" she would say: "Go tell your prince that this is the secret
of England's political greatness,"

Beloved friends, when spurious liberalism, with all her literature,
produces such a roll-call as this; when out of her pages I may see
coming a nobler set of forces for the making of manhood, then, and
only then, will I give up my Bible; then, and only then, will I cease
to pray and labor that it may be given to all the world.




HILLIS

GOD THE UNWEARIED GUIDE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


Newell Dwight Hillis was born at Magnolia, Iowa, in 1858. He first
became known as a preacher of the first rank during his pastorate over
the large Presbyterian church in Evanston, Illinois. This reputation
led to his being called to the Central Church, Chicago, in which he
succeeded Dr. David Swing, and where from the first he attracted
audiences completely filling one of the largest auditoriums in
Chicago. In 1899 he was called to Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, to
succeed Dr. Lyman Abbott in the pulpit made famous by the ministry
of Henry Ward Beecher. By his strong personality and mental gifts he
draws to his church a large and eager following. His best known books
are "A Man's Value to Society," and "The Investment of Influence."




HILLIS

Born in 1858

GOD THE UNWEARIED GUIDE[1]

[Footnote 1: By permission of the _Brooklyn Daily Eagle_. Copyright,
1905.]

_Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God, &c._--Isaiah xl.,
1-31. _He shall not fail, nor be discouraged_.--xliv., 4.


This is an epic of the unwearied God, and the fainting strength of
man. For splendor of imagery, for majesty and elevation, it is one
of the supreme things in literature. Perhaps no other Scripture has
exerted so profound an influence upon the world's leaders. Luther read
it in the fortress of Salzburg, John Brown read it in the prison
at Harper's Ferry. Webster made it the model of his eloquence,
Wordsworth, Carlyle and a score of others refer to its influence upon
their literary style, their thought and life. Like all the supreme
things in eloquence, this chapter is a spark struck out of the fires
of war and persecution. Its author was not simply an exile--he was a
slave who had known the dungeon and the fetter. Bondage is hard, even
for savages, naked, ignorant, and newly drawn from the jungle, but
slavery is doubly hard for scholars and prophets, for Hebrew merchants
and rulers.

This outburst of eloquence took its rise in a war of invasion. When
the northern host swept southward, and overwhelmed Jerusalem, the
onrushing wave was fretted with fire; later, when the wave of war
retreated, it carried back the detritus of a ruined civilization. The
story of the siege of Jerusalem, the assault upon its gates, the fall
of the walls, all the horrors of famine and of pestilence, are given
in the earlier chapters of this wonderful book. The homeward march
of the Persian army was a kind of triumphal procession in which the
Hebrew princes and leaders walked as captives. The king marched in the
guise of a slave, with his eyes put out, followed by sullen princes,
with bound hands, and unsubdued hearts. As slaves the Hebrews crossed
the Euphrates at the very point where Xenophon crossed with his
immortal ten thousand. In the land of bondage the exiles were planted,
not in military prisons, but in gangs, working now in the fields, now
in the streets of the city, and always under the scourge of soldiers.
When thirty years had passed the forty thousand captives were
scattered among the people, one brother in the palace, and another a
slave in the fields. Soon their religion became only a memory, their
language was all but forgotten, their old customs and manner of life
were utterly gone. But God raised up two gifted souls for just such an
emergency as this. One youth, through sheer force of genius, climbed
to the position of prime minister, while a young girl through her
loveliness came to the king's palace. One day an emancipation
proclamation went forth, from a king who had come to believe in the
unseen God who loved justice, and would overwhelm oppression and
wrong. The good news went forth on wings of the wind. Making ready
for their return to their homeland, all the captives gathered on the
outskirts of the desert. It was a piteous spectacle. The people were
broken in health, their beauty marred, their weapon a staff, their
garments the leather coat, their provisions pieces of moldy bread, and
their path fifteen hundred miles of sands, across the desert. To such
an end had come a disobedient and sinful generation!

In that hour, beholding these exiles and captives, a flood of emotions
rushed over the poet; he saw those bound who should conquer; he saw
that men were slaves who should be kings. Then, with a rush, an
immeasurable longing shivers through him like a trumpet call. Oh, to
save them! To perish for their saving! To die for their life, to be
offered for them all! In an abandon of grief and sympathy, he began
to speak to them in words of comfort and hope. At first these exiles,
dumb with pain and grief, listened, but listened with no light
quivering in the eye, and no hope flitting like sunshine across the
face. Their yesterdays held bondage, blows and degradation; their
tomorrow held only the desert and the return to a ruined land. Then
the word of the Lord came upon the poet. What if the night winds did
go mourning through the deserted streets of their capital! What if
their language had decayed and their institutions had perished? What
if the farmer's field was only a waste of thorns and thickets, and the
towns become heaps and ruins! What if the king of Babylon and his
army has trampled them under foot, as slaves trample the shellfish,
crushing out the purple dye that lends rich color to a royal robe?
"Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people." Is the way long and through a
desert? "Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill shall
be made low." Has slavery worn man's strength to nothingness until he
is as weak as the broken reed and the withered grass? The spirit of
the Lord will revive the grass, trampled down by the hoofs of war
horses. Soon the bruised root shall redden into the rose and the
fluted stem climb into the tree. And think you if God's winds can
transform a spray and twig into a trunk fit for foundation of house or
mast of ship, that eternal arms can not equip with strength the hand
of patriot?

Is the Shepherd and Leader of His little flock unequal to their
guidance across the desert? "Behold the Lord will come with a strong
arm; he shall feed his flock like a shepherd and he shall gather the
lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom." What! Man's hand
unequal to the task of rebuilding Jerusalem? Hath not God pledged His
strength to the worker, that God whose arm strikes out worlds as the
smith strikes out sparks upon the anvil? Is not man's helper that God
who dippeth up the seas in the hollow of His hand? Who weighs the
mountains with scales and the hills in the balance? What! Thine
enemies too strong for thee? Why, God looketh upon all the nations and
enemies of the earth as but a drop in the bucket. He sendeth forth His
breath, and the tribes disappear as dust is blown from the balance.
Then the trumpet call shivered through these exiles. "Hast thou not
known? Have the sons of the fathers never heard of the everlasting
God, the Lord, Creator of the ends of the earth? Fainteth not, neither
is weary!" Heavy is the task, but the Eternal giveth power and
strength. Even tho young patriots and heroes faint and fall, they that
wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. While fulfilling their
task of rebuilding they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they
shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. Oh, what a
word is this! What page in literature is comparable to it for comfort!
Wonderful the strength of the warrior! Mighty the influence of the
statesman! All powerful seems the inventor, but greater still the poet
who dwells above the clang and dust of time, with the world's secret
trembling on his lips.

  He needs no converse nor companionship,
  In cold starlight, whence thou can not come,
  The undelivered tidings in his breast,
  Will not let him rest.
  He who looks down upon the immemorable throng,
  And binds the ages with a song.
  And through the accents of our time,
  There throbs the message of eternity.

And so the unwearied God comforted the fainting strength of man.

Primarily, this glorious outburst was addrest to the exiles as heads
of families. The father's strength was broken and his children had
been crusht and ground to earth. The ancient patrimony was gone; he
had gathered his little ones in from the huts where slaves dwelt. He
was leading his little band of pilgrims into a desert. But the prophet
spoke to the exiles as to men who believed that the family was the
great national institution. With us, the family is important, but with
these Hebrew exiles the family was everything. For them the home was
the spring from whence the mighty river rolled forth. The family was
the headwaters of national, industrial, social and religious life.
Every father was revered as the architect of the family fortune. The
first ambition of every young Hebrew was to found a family. Just as
abroad, a patrician gentleman builds a baronial mansion, fills it with
art treasures, hangs the shields and portraits of his ancestors upon
the walls, hoping to hand the mansion forward to generations yet
unborn, so every worthy Hebrew longed to found a noble family. How
keen the anguish, therefore, of this exile in the desert! What a scene
is that of the exiles upon the edge of the desert. Darkness is upon
the land and the fire burns low into coals. Worn and exhausted,
children are sleeping beside the mother. Here is an old man, lying
apart, broken and bitter in spirit--one son stands forth a dim
figure--looking down upon his aged parents, upon the wife of his
bosom and upon his little children. Standing under the stars, he
meditates his plans. How shall he care for these, when he returns to
his ruined estate? In the event of death, what arm shall lift a shield
above these little ones? What if sickness or death pounce upon a home
as an eagle upon a dove, as wolves upon lambs, or as brigands descend
from the mountains upon sleeping herdsmen!

Every founder of a family knows the agony of such an hour! We are in a
world where men are never more than a few weeks from, possible poverty
and want; little wonder then that all men seek to provide for the
future of the home and the children. But to the exile standing in the
darkness, with love that broods above his babes, there comes this
word of comfort: God's solicitude for you and yours will not let Him
slumber or sleep! God will lift up a highway for the feet of the
little band of pilgrims. The eternal God shall be thy guide in the
march through the desert. His pillar of cloud by day and of fire by
night shall stand in the sky; He shall lead the flock like a shepherd;
He shall gather the little ones in His arms, and carry the children
in His bosom. And if the father fall on the march, the wings of the
Eternal shall brood the babes that are left. His right arm shall be a
sword and His left arm a shield. The eternal God fainteth not, neither
is weary. Having time to care for the stars, and to lead them forth by
name, He hath time and thought also for His children. What a word is
this for the home! What comfort for all whose hearts turn toward their
children! What a pledge to fathers for generations yet unborn! This
truth arms every parent for any emergency. For God is round about
every home as the mountains are round about Jerusalem, for bounty and
protection.

But the sage was also thinking of men whose hopes were broken, and
whose lives were baffled and beaten. These exiles, crossing the
desert, might have claimed for themselves the poet's phrase, "Lo,
henceforth I am a prisoner of hope." Like Dante, they might have
cried, "For years my pillow by night has been wet with tears, and all
day long have I held heartbreak at bay." For these whose glorious
youth had been exhausted by bondage, life had run to its very dregs.
Gone the days of glorious strength! Gone all the opportunities that
belong to the era when the heart is young, the limitations of life had
become severe! Environment often is a cage against whose iron bars the
soul beats bloody wings in vain!

How many men are held back by one weak nerve, or organ! How many are
shut in, and limited, and just fall short of supreme success because
of an hereditary weakness, handed on by the fathers! How many made one
mistake in youth in choosing the occupation and discovered the error
when it was too late! How many erred in judgment in their youth,
through one critical blunder, that has been irretrievable, and whose
burden is henceforth lasht to the back! In such an hour of depression,
Isaiah assembles the exiles, and exclaims, "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my
people. Tho your young men faint and be weary, tho the strong utterly
fail, yet God is the unwearied one; with his help thou shalt take thy
burden, and mount up with wings as eagles; with his unwearied strength
thou shalt run with thy load and not be weary, and walk and not
faint." For this is the experience of persecution and the reward
of sorrow, bravely borne that the fainting strength of man is
supplemented by the sure help of the unwearied God.

Therefore, in retrospect, exiles, prisoners, martyrs, who have
believed in God seem fortunate. The endungeoned heroes often seem the
children of careful good fortune and happiness. The saints, walking
through the fire, stand forth as those who are dear unto God. How the
point of view changes events. Kitto was deaf, and in his youth his
deafness broke his heart, but because his ears were closed to the
din of life, he became the great scholar of his time, and swept the
treasures of the world into a single volume, an armory of intellectual
weapons. Fawcett was blind, but through that blindness became a great
analytic student, a master of organization, and served all England in
her commerce. John Bright was broken-hearted, standing above the bier,
but Richard Cobden called him from his sorrow to become a voice for
the poor, to plead the cause of the opprest, and bring about the Corn
Laws for the hungry workers in the factories and shops. Comfort ye,
comfort ye, my people.

Let the exile say unto himself: "Your warfare is accomplished; your
iniquity is pardoned; the Lord's hand will give unto thee double for
all thy sins that are forgiven." The great faiths and convictions of
the prophets and law-givers, your language and your laws and your
liberties, have not been destroyed by captivity; rather slavery
has saved them. At last you know their value; in contrast with the
idolatry of the Euphrates, the jargon of tongues, the inequality of
rights, the organization of justice and oppression, how wonderful the
equity of the laws of Moses! How beautiful the faith of the fathers!
How surely founded the laws of God. Henceforth idolatry, injustice and
sin became as monstrous in their ugliness as they were wicked in their
essence. Everything else might go, but not the faith of the fathers.
Persecution was like fire on the vase; it burned the colors in. Little
wonder that the tradition tells us that for the next hundred years,
at stated periods, all the people in the land came together, while a
reader repeated this chapter on the unwearied God and the fainting
strength of man that had recovered unto hope, men whose hopes had been
baffled and beaten.

The thought of an unwearied God is also the true antidote to
despondency. The ground of optimism is in God. When that great thinker
described certain people as without God and without hope, there was
sure logic in his phrase, for the Godless man is always the hopeless
man. Between no God anywhere and the one God who is everywhere, there
is no middle ground. Either we are children, buffeted about by fate
and circumstances, with events tossing souls about in an eternal game
of battledore and shuttlecock, or else the world is our Father's
house, and God standeth within the shadow, keeping watch above His
own. For the man who believes in God, who allies himself to nature,
who makes the universe his partner, there is no defeat, and no death,
and no interruption of his prosperity. Concede that there is a God,
and it follows as a logical necessity that He will not permit any
enemy to ruin your life and His plans. For a man who holds this faith
it follows that there can be no defeat, or failure. Indeed, the
essential difference between men is the difference in their relation
toward God. Here are the biographies of two great men. Both are men
of genius, both are marvelously equipped, but their end was, oh, how
different. One is Martin Luther, who stood forth alone, affirming his
religious freedom, in the face of enemies and devils thick as the
tiles on the roofs of the houses. The few friends Luther had shut him
up in a fortress to save his life, but Luther mightily believed in
God. With the full consent of his marvelous gifts, he surrendered his
life to the will of God. Knowing that his days were as brief as
the withering grass, he allied himself with the Eternal. In his
discouragement he read these words, "The Everlasting God fainteth not,
neither is weary." In that hour Martin Luther shouted for joy. The
beetling walls of the fortress were as tho they were not. Victorious
he went forth, in thought, ranging throughout all Germany. And going
out, he went up and down the land telling the people that God would
protect him, and soon Germany was free.

Goethe tells us that Luther was the architect of modern German
language and literature, and stamped himself into the whole national
life. The Germany of the Kaiser is simply Martin Luther written large
in fifty millions of men. But what made Luther? There was some hidden
energy and spirit within him! What was this spirit in him? The spirit
of beauty turned a lump of mud into that Grecian face about which
Keats wrote his poem. The spirit of truth changes a little ink into
a beautiful song. The spirit of strength and beauty in an architect
changes a pile of bricks into a house or cathedral or gallery. And the
thought of our unwearied God changed the collier's son into the
great German emancipator. But over against this man, who never knew
despondency, after his vision hour, stands another German. He,
too, was a philosopher, clothed with ample power, and blest with
opportunity. But he did evil in his life, and then the heart lost
its faith, and hope utterly perished. The more he loved pleasure and
pursued self, the more cynical and bitter he became. Pessimism set a
cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies
like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the
philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder
summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the
colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart. He became the most
miserable of men, and knew no freedom from sorrow and pain. And lo,
now the man's philosophy has perished like a bubble, his influence
has utterly disappeared, for his books are unread, while only an
occasional scholar chances upon his name, tho the great summer-making
sun still shines on and Luther's eternal God fainteth not, neither is
weary.

Are you weak, oh, patriot? Remember God is strong. Do your days of
service seem short, until your life is scarcely longer than the flower
that blooms to-day and is gone tomorrow? God is eternal, and He will
take care of your work. Are you sick with hope long deferred? Hope
thou in God; He shall yet send succor. Have troubles driven happiness
from thee, as the hawk drives the young lark or nightingale from its
nest? Return unto thy rest, troubled heart, for the Lord will deal
bountifully with thee. Are you anxious for your children? God will
bring the child back from the far country. For the child hath wandered
far, the golden thread spun in a mother's heart is an unbroken thread
that will draw him home! For things that distress you to-day, you
shall thank God to-morrow. Nothing shall break the golden chain that
binds you to God's throne. Are you hopeless and despondent because of
your fainting strength? Remember that the antidote for despondency is
the thought of the unwearied God who is doing the best He can for you,
and whose ceaseless care neither slumbers nor sleeps.

Little wonder therefore that God became all and in all to this feeble
band of captives, journeying across the desert back to their ruined
life and land. God had taken away earthly things from them, that He
might be their all and in all. When the earth is made poor for us,
sometimes the heavens become rich. God closed the eyes of Milton to
the beauty in land and sea and sky, that he might see the companies of
angels marching and countermarching on the hills of God. He closed the
ears of Beethoven, that he might hear the music of St. Cecilia falling
over heaven's battlements. He gave Isaiah a slave's hut, that he might
ponder the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. How is
it that this prophet and poet has become companion of the great ones
of the earth? At the time Isaiah rebelled against his bondage, but
when it was all over, and the fitful fever had passed, and the fleshly
fetters had fallen, he smiled at the things that once alarmed him, as
he recalled his fainting strength and the unwearied God.

Gone--that ancient capital. Babylon is a heap. Jerusalem a ruin! But
this epic of the unwearied Guide still lives! Isaiah, can never die!
Can a chapter die that has cheered the exile in his loneliness, that
has comforted the soldier upon his bivouac, that has braced the martyr
for his execution, that has given songs at midnight to the prisoners
in the dungeon? Out of suffering and captivity came this song of rest
and hope. At last the poet praised the eternal God for his bonds and
his imprisonment. Oh, it is darkness that makes the morning light so
welcome to the weary watcher. It is hunger that makes bread sweet.
It is pain and sickness that gives value to the physician and his
medicine. It is business trouble that makes you honor your lawyer and
counselor, and it is the sense of need that makes God near.

Are there any merchants here who are despondent? Remember the eternal
God and make your appeal to the future. Are there any parents whose
children have wandered far? When they are old, the children will
return to the path of faith and obedience. Are there any in whom the
immortal hope burns low? The smoking flax He will not quench, but will
fan the flame into victory. Look up to-day; be comforted once more.
Work henceforth in hope. Live like a prince. Scatter sunshine. Let
your atmosphere be happiness. If troubles come, let them be the dark
background that shall throw your hope and faith into bolder relief.
God hath set His heart upon you to deliver you. Tho your hand faint,
and the tool fall, the eternal God fainteth not, neither is weary. He
will bring thy judgment unto victory, immortalize thy good deeds, and
crown thy career with everlasting renown.




JEFFERSON

THE RECONCILIATION

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


Charles Edward Jefferson was born at Cambridge, Ohio, in 1860. He came
to public attention by the effectiveness of his preaching during a
most successful pastorate in Chelsea, Mass., from which he was called
to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, in 1897. During his New York
pastorate the Tabernacle at 34th Street has been sold and a unique
structure, including an apartment tower ten stories high, has been
built farther up-town. Dr. Jefferson has published several successful
books. He has a mellow, sympathetic voice, of considerable range and
flexibility, and he speaks in an easy, conversational style.




JEFFERSON

Born in 1860

THE RECONCILIATION[1]

[Footnote 1: Reprinted by permission from "Doctrine and Deed,"
Copyright, 1901, by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.]

_Christ died for our sins_.--1 Cor. xv., 3.


I want to think with you this morning about the doctrine of the
Atonement. Having used that word atonement once, I now wish to drop
it. It is not a New Testament word, and is apt to lead one into
confusion. You will not find it in your New Testament at all,
providing you use the Revised Version. It is found in the King James
Version only once, and that is in the fifth chapter of Paul's letter
to the Romans; but a few years ago, when the revisers went to work,
they rubbed out the word and would allow it no place whatever in
the entire New Testament. They substituted for it a better
word--reconciliation--and that is the word that will probably be used
in the future theology of the Church. It is my purpose, then, this
morning, to think with you about the doctrine of the reconciliation,
or, to put it in a way that will be intelligible to all the boys and
girls, I want to think with you about the "making up" between God and
man.

Christianity is distinctly a religion of redemption. Its fundamental
purpose is to recover men from the guilt and power of sin. All of
its history and its teachings must be studied in the light of that
dominating purpose. We are told sometimes that Jesus was a great
teacher, and so He was, but the apostles never gloried in that fact.
We are constantly reminded that He was a great reformer, and so He
was, but Peter and John and Paul seemed to be altogether unconscious
of that fact. It is asserted that He was a great philanthropist, a man
intensely interested in the bodies and the homes of men, and so of
course He was, but the New Testament does not seem to care for that.
It has often been declared that He was a great martyr, a man who laid
down His life in devotion to the truth, and so He was and so He did,
but the Bible never looks at Him from that standpoint or regards
Him in that light. It refuses to enroll Him among the teachers or
reformers or philanthropists or the martyrs of our race. According
to the apostolic writers, Jesus is the world's Redeemer, He was
manifested to take away sin. He is the Lamb of God that taketh away
the sin of the world. The vast and awful fact that broke the apostles'
hearts and sent them out into the world to baptize the nations into
His name, was the fact which Paul was all the time asserting, "He died
for our sins."

No one can read the New Testament without seeing that its central and
most conspicuous fact is the death of Jesus. Take, for instance, the
gospels, and you will find that over one-quarter of their pages are
devoted to the story of His death. Very strange is this indeed, if
Jesus was nothing but an illustrious teacher. A thousand interesting
events of His career are passed over, a thousand discourses are never
mentioned, in order that there may be abundant room for the telling of
His death. Or take the letters which make up the last half of the New
Testament; in these letters there is scarcely a quotation from the
lips of Jesus. Strange indeed is this if Jesus is only the world's
greatest teacher. The letters seem to ignore that He was a teacher or
reformer, but every letter is soaked in the pathos of His death. There
must be a deep and providential reason for all this. The character of
the gospels and the letters must have been due to something that Jesus
said or that the Holy Spirit inbreathed. A study of the New Testament
will convince us that Jesus had trained His disciples to see in His
sufferings and death the climax of God's crowning revelation to the
world. The key-note of the whole gospel story is struck by John the
Baptist in his bold declaration, "Behold the Lamb of God which taketh
away the sin of the world." In that declaration there was a reference
to His death, for the "lamb" in Palestine lived only to be slain. As
soon as Jesus began His public career He began to refer in enigmatic
phrases to His death. He did not declare His death openly, but the
thought of it was wrapt up inside of all He said. Nicodemus comes to
Him at night to have a talk with Him about His work, and among other
things, Jesus says, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness
so shall the Son of man be lifted up." Nicodemus did not know what He
meant--we know. He goes into the temple and drives out the men who
have made it a den of thieves, and when an angry mob surrounds Him He
calmly says, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it
up." They did not know what He meant--we know. He goes into the city
of Capernaum, and is surrounded by a great crowd who seem to be eager
to know the way of life. He begins to talk to them about the bread
that comes down from heaven, and among other things He says, "The
bread which I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life
of the world." They did not understand what He said--we understand it
now. One day in the city of Jerusalem He utters a great discourse
upon the good shepherd. "I am the good shepherd," He says; "the good
shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." They did not understand
Him--we do. In the last week of His earthly life it was reported that
a company of Greeks had come to see Him. He falls at once into a
thoughtful mood, and when at last He speaks it is to say that "I, if I
be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." The men standing by did not
understand what He said--we understand. All along His journey, from
the Jordan to the cross, He dropt such expressions as this: "I have
a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be
accomplished." Men did not know what He was saying--it is all clear
now.

But while He did not talk openly to the world about His death, He did
not hesitate to speak about it to His nearest friends. As soon as He
found a man willing to confess that He was indeed the world's Messiah,
the Son of the living God, He began to initiate His disciples into the
deeper mysteries of His mission. "From that time," Matthew says, "he
began to show, to unfold, to set forth the fact that he must suffer
many things and be killed." Peter tried to check Him in this
disclosure, but Jesus could not be checked. It is surprising how many
times it is stated in the gospels that Jesus told His disciples
He must be killed. Matthew says that while they were traveling in
Galilee, on a certain day when the disciples were much elated over the
marvelous things which He was doing, He took them aside and said
"Let these words sink into your ears: I am going to Jerusalem to be
killed." Later on, when they were going through Perea, Jesus took them
aside and said, "The Son of man must suffer many things, and at last
be put to death." On nearing Jerusalem His disciples became impatient
for a disclosure of His power and glory. He began to tell them about
the grace of humility. "The Son of man," He said, "is come, not to be
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom
for many." On the last Tuesday of His earthly life He sat with His
disciples on the slope of the Mount of Olives, and in the midst of His
high and solemn teaching He said, "It is only two days now until I
shall be crucified." And on the last Thursday of His life, on the
evening of His betrayal, He took His disciples into an upper room, and
taking the bread and blessing it, He gave it to these men, saying,
"This is my body which is given for you." Likewise after supper He
took the cup, and when He had blest it gave it to them, saying, "This
is my blood of the covenant which is shed for you and for many for the
remission of sins. Do this in remembrance of me." It would seem
from this that the one thing which Jesus was desirous that all His
followers should remember was the fact that He had laid down His life
for them. One can not read the gospels without feeling that he is
being borne steadily and irresistibly toward the cross.

When we get out of the gospels into the epistles we find ourselves
face to face with the same tragic and glorious fact. Peter's first
letter is not a theological treatise. He is not writing a dissertation
on the person of Christ, or attempting to give any interpretation of
the death of Jesus; he is dealing with very practical matters. He
exhorts the Christians who are discouraged and downhearted to hold up
their heads and to be brave. It is interesting to see how again
and again he puts the cross behind them in order to keep them from
slipping back. "Endure," he says, "because Christ suffered for us.
Who his own self bore our sins in his own body on the tree." The
Christians of that day had been overtaken by furious persecution.
They were suffering all sorts of hardships and disappointments. But
"suffer," he says, "because Christ has once suffered for sins, the
just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God." Certainly the
gospel, according to St. Peter, was: Christ died for our sins.

Read the first letter of St. John, and everywhere it breathes the
same spirit which we have found in the gospels and in St. Peter. John
punctuates almost every paragraph with some reference to the cross.
In the first chapter he is talking about sin. "The blood of Jesus
Christ," he says, "cleanses us from all sins." In the second chapter
he is talking about forgiveness, and this leads him to think at once
of Jesus Christ, the righteous, "who is the propitiation for our sins,
and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world." In the
third chapter he is talking about brotherly love. He is urging the
members of the Church to lay down their lives, one for another,
"Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for
us." In the fourth chapter he tells of the great mystery of Christ's
love: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us,
and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." To the beloved
disciple evidently the great fact of the Christian revelation is that
Christ died for our sins.

But it is in the letters of Paul that we find the fullest and most
emphatic assertion of this transcendent fact. It will not be possible
for me to quote to you even a half of what he said on the subject. If
you should cut out of his letters all the references to the cross, you
would leave his letters in tatters. Listen to him as he talks to his
converts in Corinth: "First of all I delivered unto you that which
I also received, how that Christ died for our sins." That was the
foremost fact, to be stated in every letter and to be unfolded in
every sermon. To Saul of Tarsus, Jesus is not an illustrious Rabbi
whose sentences are to be treasured up and repeated to listening
congregations; He is everywhere and always the world's Redeemer.
And throughout all of Paul's epistles one hears the same jubilant,
triumphant declaration, "I live by the faith of the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me."

Let us now turn to the last book of the New Testament, the Book of
the Revelation. What does this prophet on the Isle of Patmos see and
hear, as he looks out into future ages and coming worlds? The book
begins with a doxology: "Unto him that loved us, and washed us from
our sins in his own blood, to him be glory and dominion forever and
ever." John looks, and beholds a great company of the redeemed. He
asks who these are, and the reply comes back, "These are they who have
washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." He
listens, and the song that goes up from the throats of the redeemed
is, "Worthy art thou to take the book, and to open the seals thereof;
for thou wast slain and didst purchase us for God with thy blood."
At the center of the great vision which bursts upon the soul of the
exiled apostle, there is a Lamb that was slain. Whatever we may think
of Jesus of Nazareth, there is no question concerning what the men who
wrote the New Testament thought. To the men who wrote the book, Jesus
was not a Socrates or a Seneca, a Martin Luther or an Abraham Lincoln.
His life was not an incident in the process of evolution, His death
was not an episode in the dark and dreadful tragedy of human history.
His life is God's. greatest gift to men, His death is the climax and
the crowning revelation of the heart of the eternal. You can not open
the New Testament anywhere without the idea flying into your face,
"Christ died for our sins."

How different all this is from the atmosphere of the modern Church.
When you go into the average church to-day, what great idea meets you?
Do you find yourselves face to face with the fact that Christ died
for our sins? I do not think you will often hear that great truth
preached. In all probability you will hear a sermon dealing with the
domestic graces, or with business obligations, or with political
duties and complications. You may hear a sermon on city missions, or
on foreign missions; you may hear a man dealing with some great evil,
or pointing out some alarming danger, or discussing some interesting
social problem, or urging upon men's consciences the performance of
some duty. It is not often in these modern days that you will hear
a sermon dealing with the thought that set the apostles blazing and
turned the world upside down. And right there, I think, lies one of
the causes of the weaknesses of the modern Church. We have been so
busy attending to the things that ought to be done, we have had no
time to feed the springs that keep alive these mighty hopes which make
us Christian men. What is the secret of the strength of the Roman
Catholic Church? How is it that she pursues her conquering way, in
spite of stupidities and blunders that would have killed any other
institution? I know the explanations that are usually offered, but it
seems to me they are far from adequate. Somebody says, But the Roman
Catholic Church does not hold any but the ignorant. That is not true.
It may be true of certain localities in America, but it is not true of
the nations across the sea. In Europe she holds entire nations in the
hollow of her hand; not only the ignorant, but the learned; not only
the low, but the high; not only the rude, but the cultured, the noble,
and the mighty. It will not do to say that the Roman Catholic Church
holds nobody but the ignorant. But even if it were true, it would
still be interesting to ascertain how she exercises such an influence
over the minds and hearts of ignorant people--for ignorant people are
the hardest of all to hold. When you say that the Church can hold
ignorant men, you are giving her the very highest compliment, for
you are acknowledging that she is in the possession of a power which
demands an explanation. The very fact that she is able to bring out
such hosts of wage-earning men and women in the early hours of Sunday
morning, men and women who have worked hard through the week, and many
of them far into the night, but who are willing on the Lord's Day to
wend their way to the house of God and engage in religious worship,
is a phenomenon which is worth thinking about. How does the Roman
Catholic Church do it? Somebody says she does it all by appealing to
men's fears, she scares men into penitence and devotion. Do you think
that that is a fair explanation? I do not think so. I can conceive how
she might frighten people for one generation, or for two, but I can
not conceive how she could frighten a dozen generations. One would
suppose that the spell would wear off by and by. There is a deeper
explanation than that The explanation is to be found in the spiritual
nature of man. The Roman Catholic leaders, notwithstanding their
blunders and their awful sins, have always seen that the central fact
of the Christian revelation is the death of Jesus, and around that
fact they have organized all their worship. Roman Catholics go to
mass; what is the mass? It is the celebration of the Lord's Supper.
What is the Lord's Supper? It is the ceremony that proclaims our
Lord's death until He comes. The hosts of worshipers that fill our
streets in the early Sunday morning hours are not going to church to
hear some man discuss an interesting problem, nor are they going to
listen to a few singers sing; they are going to celebrate once
more the death of the Savior of the world. In all her cathedrals
Catholicism places the stations of the cross, that they may tell to
the eye the story of the stages of His dying. On all her altars she
keeps the crucifix. Before the eyes of every faithful Catholic that
crucifix is held until his eyes close in death. A Catholic goes out of
the world thinking of Jesus crucified. So long as a Church holds on to
that great fact, she will have a grip on human minds and hearts that
can not be broken. The cross, as St. Paul said, a stumbling-block
to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, is the power of God unto
salvation to every one that believes. The Catholic Church has picked
up the fact of Jesus' death and held it aloft like a burning torch.
Around the torch she has thrown all sorts of dark philosophies, but
through the philosophies the light has streamed into the hearts and
homes of millions of God's children.

Protestantism has prospered just in proportion as she has kept the
cross at the forefront of all her preaching. The missionaries bring
back the same report from every field, that it is the story of Jesus'
death that opens the hearts of the pagan world. Every now and then a
denomination has started, determined to get rid of the cross of Jesus,
or at least to pay scant attention to it, and in every case these
denominations have been at the end of the third or fourth generation
either decaying or dead. There is no interpretation of the Christian
religion that has in it redeeming power which ignores or belittles the
death of Christ.

If Protestantism to-day is not doing what it ought to do, and is
manifesting symptoms which are alarming to Christian leaders, it is
because she has in these recent years been engaged so largely in
practical duties as to forget to drink inspiration from the great
doctrines which must forever furnish life and strength and hope.
If you will allow me to prophesy this morning, I predict that the
preaching of the next fifty years will be far more doctrinal than the
preaching of the last fifty years has been. I imagine some of you will
shudder at that. You say you do not like doctrinal preaching, you want
preaching that is practical. Well, pray, what is practical preaching?
Practical preaching is preaching that accomplishes the object for
which preaching is done, and the primary object of all Christian
preaching is to reconcile men to God. The experience of 1900 years
proves that it is only doctrinal preaching that reconciles the heart
to God. If, then, you really want practical preaching, the only
preaching that is deserving the name is preaching that deals with the
great Christian doctrines. But somebody says, I do not like doctrinal
preaching. A great many people have said that within recent years. I
do not believe they mean what they say. They are not expressing with
accuracy what is in their mind. They do like doctrinal preaching if
they are intelligent, faithful Christians, for doctrinal preaching is
bread to hearts that have been born again. When people say they do
not like doctrinal preaching, they often mean that they do not like
preaching which belongs to the eighteenth or seventeenth or sixteenth
centuries. They are not to be blamed for this. There is nothing that
gets stale so soon as preaching. We can not live upon the preaching
of a bygone age. If preachers bring out the interpretations and
phraseology which were current a hundred years ago, people must of
necessity say, "Oh, please do not give us that, we do not like such
doctrinal preaching." But doctrinal preaching need not be antiquated
or belated, it may be fresh, it may be couched in the language in
which men were born, it may use for its illustrations the images and
figures and analogies which are uppermost in men's imagination. And
whenever it does this there is no preaching which is so thrilling
and uplifting and mighty as the preaching which deals with the great
fundamental doctrines.

In one sense, the Christian religion never changes, in another sense
it is changing all the time. The facts of Christianity never change,
the interpretations of those facts alter from age to age. It is with
religion as it is with, the stars, the stars never change. They move
in their orbits in our night sky as they moved in the night sky of
Abraham when he left his old Chaldean home. The constellations were
the same at the opening of our century as they were when David watched
his flocks on the old Judean hills. But the interpretations of the
stars have always changed, must always change. Pick up the old charts
which the astrologers made and compare them with the charts of
astronomers of our day. How vast the difference! Listen to our
astronomers talk about the magnitudes and disunites and composition of
the stars, and compare with their story that which was written in
the astronomy of a few centuries ago. The stellar universe has not
changed, but men's conceptions have changed amazingly. The facts of
the human body do not change. Our heart beats as the heart of Homer
beat, our blood flows as the blood of Julius Caesar flowed, our
muscles and nerves live and die as the nerves and muscles have lived
and died in the bodies of men in all the generations--and yet, how the
theories of medicine have been altered from time to time. A doctor
does not want to hear a medical lecturer speak who persists in using
the phraseology and conceptions which were accepted by the medical
science of fifty years ago. Conceptions become too narrow to fit the
growing mind of the world, and when once outgrown they must be thrown
aside. As it is in science, so it is in religion. The facts of
Christianity never change, they are fixt stars in the firmament of
moral truth. Forever and forever it will be true that Christ died for
our sins, but the interpretations of this fact must be determined by
the intelligence of the age. Men will never be content with simple
facts, they must go behind them to find out an explanation of them.
Man is a rational being, he must think, he will not sit down calmly in
front of a fact and be content with looking it in the face, he will
go behind it and ask how came it to be and what are its relations to
other facts. That is what man has always been doing with the facts of
the Christian revelation, he has been going behind them and bringing
out interpretations which will account for them. The interpretations
are good for a little while, and then they are outgrown and cast
aside.

A good illustration of the progressive nature of theology is found in
the doctrine of the atonement. All of the apostles taught distinctly
that Christ died for our sins. The early Christians did not attempt to
go behind that fact, but by and by men began to attempt explanations.
In the second century a man by the name of Irenaeus seized upon the
word "ransom" in the sentence, "The Son of man is come to give his
life a ransom for many," and found in that word "ransom" the key-word
of the whole problem. The explanation of Irenaeus was taken up in the
third century by a distinguished preacher, Origen. And in the fourth
century the teaching of Origen was elaborated by Gregory of Nyssa.

According to the interpretation of these men, Jesus was the price paid
for the redemption of men. Paul frequently used the word redemption,
and the word had definite meanings to people who lived in the first
four centuries of the Christian era. If Christ was indeed a ransom,
the question naturally arose, who paid the price? The answer was, God.
A ransom must be paid to somebody--to whom was this ransom paid? The
answer was, the devil. According to Origen and to Gregory, God paid
the devil the life of Jesus in order that the devil might let humanity
go free. The devil, by deceit, had tricked man, and man had become his
slave--God now plays a trick upon the devil, and by offering him the
life of Jesus, secures the release of man. That was the interpretation
held by many theologians for almost a thousand years, but in the
eleventh century there arose a man who was not satisfied with the
old interpretation. The world had outgrown it. To many it seemed
ridiculous, to some it seemed blasphemous. There was an Italian by the
name of Anselm who was an earnest student of the Scriptures, and he
seized upon the word "debt" as the key-word of the problem. He wrote
a book, one of the epoch-making books of Christendom, which he called
"_Cur Deus Homo_." In this book Anselm elaborated his interpretation
of the reconciliation. "Sin," he said, "is debt, and sin against an
infinite being is an infinite debt. A finite being can not pay an
infinite debt, hence an infinite being must become man in order that
the debt may be paid. The Son of God, therefore, assumes the form of
man, and by his sufferings on the cross pays the debt which allows
humanity to go free." The interpretation was an advance upon that of
Origen and Gregory, but it was not final. It was repudiated by men of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and finally, in the day of the
Reformation, it was either modified or cast away altogether.

Martin Luther, Calvin, and the other reformers seized upon the
word "propitiation," and made that the starting-point of their
interpretation. According to these men, God is a great governor and
man has broken the divine law--transgressors must be punished--if the
man who breaks the law is not punished, somebody else must be punished
in his stead. The Son of God, therefore, comes to earth to suffer in
His person the punishment that rightly belongs to sinners. He is not
guilty, but the sins of humanity are imputed to Him, and God wreaks
upon Him the penalty which rightfully should have fallen on the heads
of sinners. That is known as "the penal substitution theory."

It was not altogether satisfactory, many men revolted from it, and in
the seventeenth century a Dutchman, Hugo Grotius, a lawyer, brought
forth another interpretation, which is known in theology as "the
governmental theory." He would not admit that Christ was punished.
His sufferings were not penal, but illustrative. "God is the moral
governor," said Grotius, "his government must be maintained, law can
not be broken with impunity. Unless sin is punished the dignity of
God's government would be destroyed. Therefore, that man may see how
hot is God's displeasure against sin, Christ comes into the world and
suffers the consequences of the transgressions of the race. The cross
is an exhibition of what God thinks of sin." That governmental theory
was carried into England and became the established doctrine of the
English Church for almost three hundred years. It was carried across
the ocean and became the dominant theory in the New Haven school of
theologians, as represented by Jonathan Edwards, Dwight, and Taylor.
The Princeton school of theology still clung to the penal substitution
theory, and it was the clashing of the New Haven school and the
Princeton school which caused such a commotion in the Presbyterian
Church of sixty years ago. They are antiquated. They are too little.
They seem mechanical, artificial, trivial. We can say of the
governmental theory what Dr. Hodge said, "It degrades the work of
Christ to the level of a governmental contrivance." If I should
attempt to preach to you the governmental theory as it was preached by
theologians fifty years ago, you would not be interested in it There
is nothing in you that would respond to it. You would simply say, "I
do not like doctrinal preaching." Or if I should go back and take up
the penal substitution theory in all its nakedness and hideousness,
and attempt to give it to you as the correct interpretation of the
gospel, you would rise up in open rebellion and say, "We will not
listen to such preaching." If I should go back and take up the
Anselmic theory and attempt to show how an infinite debt must be paid
by infinite suffering, you would say: "Stop, you are converting God
into a Shylock, who is demanding His pound of flesh. We prefer to
think of Him as our heavenly Father." If I should go further back and
take up the old ransom theory of Origen and Gregory, I suspect
that some of you would want to laugh. You could not accept an
interpretation which represents God as playing a trick upon Satan in
order to get humanity out of his grasp. No, those theories have all
been outgrown. We have come out into larger and grander times. We have
higher conceptions of the Almighty than the ancients ever had. We see
far deeper into the Christian revelation than Martin Luther or John
Calvin ever saw. These old interpretations are simply husks, and men
and women will not listen to the preaching of them. If, now and then,
a belated preacher attempts to preach them, the people say, "If that
is doctrinal preaching, please give us something practical."

And so the Church is to-day slowly working out a new interpretation of
the great fact that Christ died for our sins. The interpretation has
not yet been completed, and will not be for many years. I should like
this morning simply to outline in a general way some of the more
prominent features of the new interpretation. The Holy Ghost is at
work. He is taking the things of Christ and showing them unto us. The
interpretation of the reconciliation of the future will be superior in
every point to any of the interpretations of the past.

The new interpretation is going to be simple, straightforward, and
natural. The death of Christ is not going to be made something
artificial, mechanical, or theatrical. It is going to be the natural
conception of the outflowing life of God.

The new interpretation is going to start from the Fatherhood of
God. The old theories were all born in the counting-room, or the
court-house. Jesus went into the house to find His illustrations
for the conduct of the heavenly Father. He never went into the
court-house, nor can we go there for analogies with which to image
forth His dealings with our race. It was His custom to say, "If you,
being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much
more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them
that ask him."

The new interpretation is going to be comprehensive. It is going to be
built, not on a single metaphor, but on everything that Jesus and
the apostles said. Right there is where the old interpretations went
astray. They seized upon one figure of speech and made that the
determining factor in the entire interpretation. Jesus said many
things, and so did His apostles, and all of them must contribute to
the final interpretation.

Two things are to be hereafter made very clear: The first is that God
reveals Himself in Jesus Christ. The old views were always losing
sight of that great fact. There was always a dualism between God and
Christ. I remember what my conception was when I was a boy. I thought
that God was a strict and solemn and awful king, who was very angry
because men had broken His law. He was just, and His justice had
no mercy in it. Christ, His Son, was much better-natured and more
compassionate, and He came forth into our world to suffer upon the
cross that God's justice might relax a little, and His heart be opened
to forgive our race. I supposed that that was the teaching of the
New Testament, it certainly was the teaching of the hymns in the
hymn-book, if not of the preachers. And when I became a young man,
I supposed that that was the teaching of the Christian religion. My
heart rebelled against it. I would not accept it. I became an infidel.
A man can not accept an interpretation of God that does not appeal to
the best that is in him. No man can accept a doctrine that darkens his
moral sense, or that confuses the distinction between right and wrong.
I would not accept the old interpretation because my soul rose in
revolt against it. I shall never forget how, one evening in his study,
a minister, who had outgrown the old traditions, explained to me
the meaning of the reconciliation. He assured me that God is love,
invisible, eternal. Christ, His Son, is also love. In becoming at
one with the Son we become at one with the Father. This is the
at-one-ment. And when that truth broke upon me my heart began to sing:

  Just as I am--Thy love unknown
  Hath broken every barrier down;
  Now, to be Thine, yea, Thine alone,
    O Lamb of God, I come!


I wonder in telling this if I have not spoken the experience of many
of you this morning. It is impossible to love God if we feel that He
is stern and despotic, and must be appeased by the sufferings of an
innocent man. The New Testament nowhere lends any support to that
idea. Everywhere the New Testament assures us that God is the lover
of men, that He initiates the movement for man's redemption. "God so
loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son...." "Herein is
love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us." "God commendeth
his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us." "The Father spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for
us all." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." "I and my Father
are one." These are only a few of the passages in which we are told
that God is our Savior. When an old Scotchman once heard the text
announced, "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten
Son," he exclaimed, "Oh, that was love indeed! I could have given
myself, but I never could have given my boy." This, then, is the very
highest love of which it is possible for the human mind to think: the
love of a father that surrenders his son to sufferings and death.

And this brings us to the second great truth which is outgrowing
increasingly clear in the consciousness of the Church. The death of
Jesus is the revelation of an experience in the heart of God. God is
the sin-bearer of the world. He bears our sins on His mind and heart.
There are three conceptions of God: the savage, the pagan, and the
Christian. God, according to the savage conception, is vengeful, and
capricious, and vindictive. He is a great savage hidden in the sky. We
have all outgrown that. According to the pagan idea, He is indifferent
to the wants and woes of men. He does not care for men. He is not
interested in them. He does not sympathize with them. He does not
suffer over their griefs. He does not feel pain or sorrow. I am afraid
that many of us have never gotten beyond the pagan conception of the
Almighty. But according to the Christian conception, God suffers.
He feels, and because He feels, He sympathizes, and because He
sympathizes, He suffers. He feels both pain and grief. He carries a
wound in His heart. We men and women sometimes feel burdened because
of the sin we see around us; shall not the heavenly Father be as
sensitive and responsive as we men? But somebody says that God can
not be happy then. Of course he can not be happy. Happiness is not an
adjective to apply to God. Happy is a word that belongs to children.
Children are happy, grown people never are. One can be happy when the
birds are singing and the dew is on the grass, and there is no cloud
in all the sky, and the crape has not yet hung at the door. But after
we have passed over the days of childhood, there is happiness no
longer. Some of us have lived too long and borne too much ever to be
happy any more. But it is possible for us to be blest. We may pass
into the very blessedness of God. The highest form of blessedness is
suffering for those we love, and shall not the Father of all men have
in His own eternal heart that experience which we confess to be the
highest form of blessedness? This is the truth which is dawning like a
new revelation on the Church: the humanity of God. It is revealed in
the New Testament, but as yet we have only begun to take it in. God
is like us men. We are like Him. We are made in His image. We are His
children, and He is our Father. If we are His children, then we are
His heirs, and joint heirs with Christ. Not only our joys, but our
sorrows also, are intimations and suggestions of experiences in the
infinite heart of the Eternal.




MORGAN

THE PERFECT IDEAL OF LIFE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


George Campbell Morgan, Congregational divine and preacher, was born
in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England, in 1863, and was educated at the
Douglas School, Cheltenham. He worked as a lay-mission preacher for
the two years ending 1888, and was ordained to the ministry in the
following year, when he took charge of the Congregational Church
at Stones, Staffordshire. After occupying the pulpit in several
pastorates, in 1904 he became pastor of the Westminster Congregational
Chapel, Buckingham Gate, London, a position which he still occupies.
Besides being highly successful as a pulpit orator, Dr. Morgan has
published many works of a religious character, among which may be
enumerated: "Discipleship"; "The Hidden Years of Nazareth"; "Life's
Problems"; "The Ten Commandments." His last work, "The Christ of
To-day," has passed through several editions.




MORGAN

Born in 1863

THE PERFECT IDEAL OF LIFE

_Jesus therefore said, When ye have lifted up the son of man, then
shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as
the Father taught me, I speak these things. And he that sent me is
with me; he hath not left me alone; for I do always the things that
are pleasing to him. As he spake these things, many believed on
him_.--John viii., 28-30.


The Master, you will see, in this verse lays before us three things.
First of all, He gives us the perfect ideal of human life in a short
phrase, and that comes at the end, "the things that please him." Those
are the things that create perfect human life, living in the realm of
which man realizes perfectly all the possibilities of his wondrous
being--"the things that please him." So I say, in this phrase, the
Master reveals to us the perfect ideal of our lives. Then, in the
second place, the Master lays claim--one of the most stupendous claims
that He ever made--that He utterly, absolutely, realizes that ideal.
He says, "I do always the things that please him." And then, thirdly,
we have the revelation of the secret by which He has been able to
realize the ideal, to make the abstract concrete, to bring down the
fair vision of divine purpose to the level of actual human life and
experience, and the secret is declared in the opening words: "He that
sent me is with me; my Father hath not left me alone."

The perfect ideal for my life, then, is that I live always in the
realm of the things that please God; and the secret by which I may do
so is here unfolded--by living in perpetual, unbroken communion with
God: communion with which I do not permit anything to interfere. Then
it shall be possible for me to pass into this high realm of actual
realization.

It is important that we should remind ourselves in a few sentences
that the Lord has indeed stated the highest possible ideal for human
life in these words: "The things that please him." Oh, the godlessness
of men! The godlessness that is to be found on every hand! The
godlessness of the men and women that are called by the name of God!
How tragic, how sad, how awful it is! because godlessness is always
not merely an act of rebellion against God, but a falling-short in our
own lives of their highest and most glorious possibilities.

Here is my life. Now, the highest realm for me is the realm where all
my thoughts, and all my deeds, and all my methods, and everything in
my life please God. That is the highest realm, because God only knows
what I am; only perfectly understands the possibilities of my nature,
and all the great reaches of my being. You remember those lines that
Tennyson sang--very beautifully, I always think:

  Flower in the crannied wall,
    I pluck you out of the crannies;--
    Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
    Little Flower--but if I could understand
  What you art, root and all, and all in all,
    I should know what God and man is.


Beautiful confession! Absolutely true. I hold that flower in my hand,
and I look at it, flower and leaves and stem and root. I can botanize
it, and then I tear it to pieces--that is what the botanist mostly
does--and you put some part of it there, and some part of it there,
and some part of it there. There is the root, there the stem, and
there are the leaves, and there is everything; but where is the
flower? Gone. How did it go? When did it go? Why, when you ruthlessly
tore it to bits. But how did you destroy it? You interfered with the
principle that made it what it was--you interfered with the principle
of life. What is life? No man can tell you. "If I could but know what
you are, little flower, root and all, and all in all," I would know
what life is, what God is, what man is. I can not.

Now, if you lift that little parable of the flower into the highest
realm of animal life, and speak of yourself--we don't know ourselves;
down in my nature there are reaches that I have not fathomed yet. They
are coming up every day. What a blest thing it is to have the Master
at hand, to hand them over to Him as they come up, and say, "Lord,
here is another piece of Thy territory; govern it; I don't know
anything about it." But there is the business. I don't know myself,
but God knows me, understands all the complex relationships of my
life, knows how matter affects mind, and physical and mental and
spiritual are blended in one in the high ideal of humanity. Oh,
remember, man is the crowning and most glorious work of God of which
we know anything as yet. And God only knows man.

But here is a Man that stands amid His enemies, and He looks out upon
His enemies, and He says, "I do the things that please him"--not "I
teach them," not "I dream them," not "I have seen them in a fair
vision," but "I do them." There never was a bigger claim from the lips
of the Master than that: "I do always the things that please him."

You would not thank me to insult your Christian experience, upon
whatever level you live it, by attempting to define that statement
of Christ. History has vindicated it. We believe it with all our
hearts--that He always did the things that pleased God. But I have got
on to a level that I can touch now. The great ideal has come from the
air to the earth. The fair vision has become concrete in a Man. Now,
I want to see that Man; and if I see that Man I shall see in Him
a revelation of what God's purpose is for men, and I shall see,
therefore, a revelation of what the highest possibility of life is.
Now this is a tempting theme. It is a temptation to begin to contrast
Him with popular ideals of life. I want to see Him; I want, if I can,
to catch the notes of the music that make up the perfect harmony which
was the dropping of a song out of God's heaven upon man's earth, that
man might catch the key-note of it and make music in his own life.
What are the things in this Man's life? He says: "I have realized the
ideal--I do." There are four things that I want to say about Him, four
notes in the music of His life.

First, spirituality. That is one of the words that needs redeeming
from abuse. He was the embodiment of the spiritual ideal in life. He
was spiritual in the high, true, full, broad, blest sense of that
word.

It may be well for a moment to note what spirituality did not mean in
the life of Jesus Christ. It did not mean asceticism. During all the
years of His ministry, during all the years of His teaching, you never
find a single instance in which Jesus Christ made a whip of cords
to scourge Himself. And all that business of scourging oneself--an
attempt to elevate the spirit by the ruin of the actual flesh--is
absolutely opposed to His view of life. Jesus Christ did not deny
Himself. The fact of His life was this--that He touched everything
familiarly. He went into all the relationship of life. He went to the
widow. He took up the children and held them in His arms, and looked
into their eyes till heaven was poured in as He looked. He didn't go
and get behind walls somewhere. He didn't get away and say: "Now, if I
am going to get pure I shall do it by shutting men out." You remember
what the Pharisees said of Him once. They said: "This man receiveth
sinners." You know how they said it. They meant to say: "We did hope
that we should make something out of this new man, but we are quite
disappointed. He receives sinners."

And what did they mean? They meant what you have so often said: "You
can't touch pitch without being defiled." But this Man sat down with
the publican and He didn't take on any defilement from the publican.
On the other hand, He gave the publican His purity in the life of
Jesus Christ. Things worked the other way. He was the great negative
of God to the very law of evil that you have--evil contaminates good.
If you will put on a plate one apple that is getting bad among twelve
others that are pure, the bad one will influence the others. Christ
came to drive back every force of disease and every force of evil by
this strong purity of His own person, and He said: "I will go among
the bad and make them good." That is what He was doing the whole way
through. So His spirituality was not asceticism. And if you are going
to be so spiritual that you see no beauty in the flowers and hear no
music in the song of the birds; if the life which you pass into when
you consent to the crucifixion of self does not open to you the very
gates of God, and make the singing of the birds and the blossoming of
the flowers infinitely more beautiful, you have never seen Jesus yet.

What was His spirituality? The spirituality of Jesus Christ was a
concrete realization of a great truth which He laid down in His own
beatitudes. What was that? "Blest are the pure in heart, for they
shall see God." Now, the trouble is we have been lifting all the good
things of God and putting them in heaven. And I don't wonder that you
sing:

  My willing soul would stay
    In such a frame as this,
  And sit and sing itself away
    To everlasting bliss.

No wonder you want to sing yourself away to everlasting bliss, because
everything that is worth having you have put up there. But Jesus said:
"Blest are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." If you are pure
you will see Him everywhere--in the flower that blooms, in the march
of history, in the sorrows of men, above the darkness of the darkest
cloud; and you will know that God is in the field when He is most
invisible.

Second, subjection. The next note in the music of His life is His
absolute subjection to God. You can very often tell the great
philosophies which are governing human lives by the little catchwords
that slip off men's tongues: "Well, I thank God I am my own master."
That is your trouble, man. It is because you are your own master that
you are in danger of hell. A man says: "Can't I do as I like with my
own?" You have got no "own" to do what you like with. It is because
men have forgotten the covenant of God, the kingship of God, that we
have all the wreckage and ruin that blights this poor earth of ours.
Here is the Man who never forgot it.

Did you notice those wonderful words: "I do nothing of myself, but as
my Father taught me, I speak." He neither did nor spoke anything of
Himself. It was a wonderful life. He stood forevermore between the
next moment and heaven. And the Father's voice said, "Do this," and He
said "Amen, I came to do thy will," and did it. And the Father's voice
said, "Speak these words to men," and He, "Amen," and He spoke.

You say: "That is just what I do not want to do." I know that. We want
to be independent; have our own way. "The things that please God--this
Man was subject to the divine will." You know the two words--if you
can learn to say them, not like a parrot, not glibly, but out of your
heart--the two words that will help you "Halleluiah" and "Amen." You
can say them in Welsh or any language you like; they are always the
same. When the next dispensation of God's dealings faces you look at
it and say: "Halleluiah! Praise God! Amen!" That means, "I agree."

Third, sympathy. Now, you have this Man turned toward other men. We
have seen something of Him as He faced God: Spirituality, a sense of
God; subjection, a perpetual amen to the divine volition. Now, He
faces the crowd. Sympathy! Why? Because He is right with God, He is
right with men; because He feels God near, and knows Him, and responds
to the divine will; therefore, when He faces men He is right toward
men. The settlement of every social problem you have in this country
and in my own land, the settlement of the whole business, will be
found in the return of man to God. When man gets back to God he gets
back to men. What is behind it? Sympathy is the power of putting my
spirit outside my personality, into the circumstances of another man,
and feeling as that man feels.

I take one picture as an illustration of this. I see the Master
approaching the city of Nain, and around Him His disciples. He is
coming up. And I see outside the city of Nain, coming toward the gate
a man carried by others, dead, and walking by that bier a mother. Now,
all I want you to look at is that woman's face, and, looking into her
face, see all the anguish of those circumstances. She is a widow, and
that is her boy, her only boy, and he is dead. Man can not talk about
this. You have got to be in the house to know what that means. But
look at her face--there it is. All the sorrow is on her face. You can
see it.

Now, turn from her quickly and look into the face of Christ. Why,
I look into His face--there is her face. He is feeling all she is
feeling; He is down in her sorrow with her; He has got underneath the
burden, and He is feeling all the agony that that woman feels because
her boy is dead. He is moved with compassion whenever human sorrow
crosses His vision and human need approaches Him. And now I see Him
moving toward the bier. I see Him as He touches it. And He takes the
boy back and gives him to his mother. Do you see in yon mountain a
cloud, so somber and sad, and suddenly the sun comes from behind the
cloud, and all the mountain-side laughs with gladness? That is that
woman's face. The agony is gone. The tear that remains there is gilded
with a smile, and joy is on her face. Look at Him. There it is. He
is in her joy now. He is having as good a time as the woman. He has
carried her grief and her sorrow. He has given her joy. And it is His
joy that He has given to her. He is with her in her joy.

Wonderful sympathy! He went about gathering human sorrow into His
own heart, scattering His joy, and having fellowship in agony and in
deliverance, in tears and in their wiping away. Great, sympathetic
soul! Why? Because He always lived with God, and, living with God, the
divine love moved Him with compassion. Ah, believe me, our sorrows are
more felt in heaven than on earth. And we had that glimpse of that
eternal love in this Man, who did the things that pleased God, and
manifested such wondrous sympathy.

Fourth, strength. The last note is that of strength. You talk about
the weakness of Jesus, the frailty of Jesus. I tell you, there never
was any one so strong as He. And if you will take the pains of reading
His life with that in mind you will find it was one tremendous march
of triumph against all opposing forces. About His dying--how did He
die? "At last, at last," says the man in his study that does not know
anything about Jesus; "At last His enemies became too much for Him,
and they killed Him." Nothing of the sort. That is a very superficial
reading. What is the truth? Hear it from His own lips: "No man taketh
my life from me. I lay it down of myself. And if I lay it down I have
authority to take it again." What do you think of that? How does that
touch you as a revelation of magnificence in strength? And then, look
at Him, when He comes back from the tomb, having fulfilled that which
was either an empty boast or a great fact--thank God, we believe it
was a great fact! Now He stands upon the mountain, with this handful
of men around Him, His disciples, and He is going away from them. "All
authority," He says, "is given unto me. I am king not merely by an
office conferred, but by a triumph won. I am king, for I have faced
the enemies of the race--sin and sorrow and ignorance and death--and
my foot is upon the neck of every one. All authority is given to me."

Oh, the strength of this Man! Where did He get it? "My Father hath not
left me alone. I have lived with God. I have walked with God. I always
knew him near. I always responded to his will. And my heart went out
in sympathy to others, and I mastered the enemies of those with whom I
sympathized. And I come to the end and I say, All authority is given
to me." Oh, my brother, that is the pattern for you and for me! Ah,
that is life! That is the ideal! Oh, how can I fulfil it? I am not
going to talk about that. Let me only give you this sentence to finish
with, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." If Christ be in me by the
power of the Spirit, He will keep me conscious of God's nearness to
me. If Christ be in me by the consciousness of the spirit reigning and
governing, He will take my will from day to day, blend it with His,
and take away all that makes it hard to say, "God's will be done."




CADMAN

A NEW DAY FOR MISSIONS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


S. Parkes Cadman is one of the many immigrant clergymen who have
attained to fame in American pulpits. He was born in Shropshire,
England, December 18, 1864, and graduated from Richmond College,
London University, in 1889. Coming to this country about 1895 he was
appointed pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Metropolitan Tabernacle,
New York. From this post he was called to Central Congregational
Church, Brooklyn, with but one exception the largest Congregational
Church in the United States. He has received the degree of D.D. from
Wesleyan University and the University of Syracuse. The sermon here
given, somewhat abridged, was delivered before the National Council of
Congregational Churches, in Cleveland, Ohio, and is from Dr. Cadman's
manuscript.




CADMAN

Born in 1864

A NEW DAY FOR MISSIONS

_God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ: by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the
world_.--Gal. vi., 14.


The pivotal conception of missionary enterprise is the conception of
Christ as the eternal priest of humanity. If any need of the world's
heart is before us now, it is the need of the Cross. There is a
deep and anxious desire in men for the saving forces of sacrificial
Christianity. The ideals of the New Testament concerning Gethsemane
and Calvary are being thrust upon our attention by the upward
strugglings of the people. They, at any rate, have not forgotten the
forsaken Man in the night of awful silence in the garden, nor His
exceeding bitter agony, nor the perfect ending that made His death His
victory. The wastes of eccentricity, whether orthodox or heterodox,
and the over curious speculations of theologies remote from the
habitations of men, have had little influence upon the multitudes
we seek to serve. And if I had to choose a sphere where one could
rediscover the central forces of Christian life and of Christian
practise, I would lean toward the enlightened democracies which to-day
are vibrant with the plea that the shepherdless multitudes shall have
social ameliorations and new incentives and selfless leaders.

We are all very jealous for the honor and success of the propagandism
we sustain at home and abroad, and I hold that its honor and success
alike depend upon the priesthood and redemptive efficacies of Jesus.
These sovereign forces are correlated with His victories for the
twenty past centuries, and they constitute the distinctive genius of
the faith.

We shall gain nothing for the rule or for the ethics of Jesus by
derogating that peculiar office of the divine Victim which is, to
me, at any rate, the most sublime reason for the Incarnation and the
ineffable height and depth and mystery of all love and all strength
blessedly operative in every ruined condition by means of sacrifice.
The missionary fields confessedly can not be conquered by the unaided
teacher; he must have more than a system of truth, more than a
program, more than a reasoned discourse. Their vast inert mass demands
vitalization; and the life which is given for the life of men, the
divinest gift of all, is alone sufficient for this regeneration.

Moreover, can we rest the absolutism and finality of Jesus upon
anything less than the last complete outpouring of His soul unto
voluntary death for men's salvation? I do not think we can, and it is
a requisite that we place larger emphasis upon this holy mystery of
our life through Christ's death, the substantial soul and secret of
all missionary progress in all ages of the Church.

Before we can see the miracle of nations entering the kingdom of God,
before we can dismiss the black death of apathy which rests on so many
professedly Christian communities, before we can dominate the social
structure in righteousness and justice, the Church must be raised
nearer to the standards of New Testament efficiency. And New Testament
efficiency rested upon the perfect divinity and all-persuasive
mediatorship of "Christ and him crucified." The personality of Christ
involves for many of us the entire relation of God to His universe; He
is "the central figure in all history," and Pie is "the central
figure of our personal experience," creative in us, by His inaugural
experience, of all we are in Him and for our fellows. Thus we make
great claims for the Lord of the harvest, and we make them soberly,
and we know them true for our spiritual consciousness, and we are
prepared to defend them.

Yet I, for one, do not hesitate to admit that the theological
necessities of missionary work are many, and that they must be
recognized and met before it can fully accomplish its infinite
design. Indeed, the rule of Jesus in all these aspects of His mission
clarifies and simplifies the gospel. It is plain that such a gospel,
wherein the living personality of the Christ deals with the living
man to whom we minister, is not to be beset by complications and
abstractions. Its spiritual topography embraces the height of
good, the depth of love, the breadth of sympathy, and the width of
catholicity. It was meant for the race and for the far-reaching
reciprocities and inexpressible necessities of the race. It is attuned
to the cry of the common heart. Its interpretations have the sanctions
of an authoritative human experience which has never failed in its
witness. Sometimes I have challenged these honored servants of the
evangel who have come back to us from quarters where they were busy
on the errands of the cross. Almost pathetically, with the painful
interest of one inquiring for a long absent friend of whom no news has
been received, I have solicited the missionaries. They came from the
south of our own dear land, where they administered to the negro; from
the arctic zone, from the farther East. Their wider vision, their more
imperial instinct, were plain to me, and my usual question was, "What
do you teach the impulsive colored man and the stolid Eskimo and the
pensive Hindu and the inscrutable Asiatic?" And they replied, "We
teach them, that God is a personal spirit and Father, whose character
is holiness and whose heart is love; that Jesus Christ is the designed
and supreme Son of God, who lived in sinlessness and died in perfect
willing sacrifice for the eternal life of all men, that by the will of
God and in the power of His spirit men may have everlasting life and,
better still, everlasting goodness, if they will accept and trust in
Jesus Christ for all."

And this gospel obtains the day of overcoming for which we plead and
pray. For tho an angel from heaven had any other, men do not respond;
the charisma rests on no other message. Possest of it, and possessing
it, under the covenant of heaven and led by the Shepherd and Bishop of
souls, we shall go forth determined to give it place in us and in our
presentations as never before. May nothing mar the solemn splendor
of such a message from God unto men. Let us subordinate our undue
intellectualism and place our boasted freedom under restraints, so
that the evangel may be preached without reserve and with abandon.
"For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, himself
man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all."

Such in one grand passage is the creed that breathes the very life and
spirit of the most significant and overwhelming missionary period in
the history of the Christian Church.

There is a new day due in missions because of the immense superiority
in missionary methods. The _personnel_ of our administrations has been
superb, and of nearly all the honored servants of God who have labored
in domestic and foreign departments it could be said, "Thou hast
loved righteousness and hated iniquity." But I presume these seasoned
veterans would be the first to show us how the whole conception of
propagandism has been readapted, and its vehicles of communication
multiplied in various directions. The onfall and sally of the earler
evangelistic campaigns are now aided by the investment and siege of
educational and medical work.

The trackways of a policy embedded in the wider interpretation of the
gospel are laid and the new era takes shape before our comprehension.
Travel, exploration, and commerce have demanded and obtained the
_Lusitania_ on the sea; the railroad from the Cape to Cairo on the
land, and they have left no spot of earth untrodden, no map obscure,
no mart unvisited. Keeping step with this stately and unprecedented
development, and often anticipating it, the widening frontiers of our
missionary kingdom have demonstrated again and again how the Church
can make a bridal of the earth and sky, linking the lowliest needs
to the loftiest truths. And best of all in respect of methods is the
dispersal of our native egotism. We have come to see that the types of
Christianity in Europe and America are perhaps aboriginal for us,
but can not be transplanted to other shores. "Manifest destiny" is a
phrase that sits down when Japan and China wake up. Not thus can Jesus
be robbed of the fruits of His passion in any branch of the human
family. We are to plant and water, labor in faith, and die in hope,
scattering the seed of the gospel in the hearts of these brothers of
regions outside. But God will ordain their harvests as it pleaseth
Him. What will be the joy of that harvest? Throw your imagination
across this new century, and as it dies and gives place to its
successor, review the race whose devotion has then fastened on the
divine ruler and the federal Man, Christ Jesus. For nearly a hundred
years the barriers that segregated us will have been a memory. The
Church will have discovered not only fields of labor, but forces for
her replenishing. Then will our posterity rejoice in the larger
Christ who is to be. The virtuous elements of all other faiths will
be placed under the purification and control of the priesthood and
authority of Jesus. And tho in these ancient religions that await the
Bridegroom, the mortal stains the immortal and the human mars the
beauty of the divine, in the light of His appearing they will assume
new attitudes and receive His quickening and thrill with His pulse.
When I conceive of this reward for our Daysman I protest that all
other triumphs seem as tinsel and sham. The Desire of all nations
shall then see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied. The
subtle patience of China, the fierce resistance of Japan, the brooding
soul that haunts the Ganges valley, the tumult of emotion of the
Ethiopian breast, all are for His appearing; they must be saved unto
noble ends by His sanctification. For that time there will be a Church
whose canonization of the infinite is beyond our dreams, enriched on
every side, with common allegiance and diversity of gifts, and every
gift the boon of all, and Christ's dower in His bride increased beyond
compare.

This is the ideal of the new day; may it become our personal ideal.
Then shall we fight with new courage for the right, and abhor the
imperfect, the unjust, and the mean. Our leaders will care nothing for
flattery and praise or odium and abuse. Enthusiasm can not be soured,
nor courage diminished. The Almighty has placed our hand on the
greatest of His plows, in whose furrow the nations I have named are
germinating religiously. And to drive forward the blade if but a
little, and to plant any seed of justice and of joy, any sense of
manliness or moral worth, to aid in any way the gospel which is the
friend of liberty, the companion of the conscience and the parent
of the intellectual enlightenment--is not that enough? Is it not a
complete justification of our plea?

We shall do well to remember that no evangel can prosper without the
evangelical temper. The parsing of grammarians is of little avail
here, and to have all critical knowledge of the prophets and apostles
of the faith without their fervor and consecration is profitable
merely for study, and useless mainly for the larger life. Our culture
must be the passion-flower of Christ Jesus. To be more anxious about
intellectual pre-eminence or ecclesiastical origins than about "the
trial of the immigrant" and the condition of the colored races is not
helpful. "There is a sort of orthodoxy that revels in the visions of
apocalypses and refuses to fight the beast," says Dr. Nurgan.
Such barren indulgence is excluded from any glory to follow.
Technicalities, niceties, knowledge remote and knowledge general must
be appropriated and made dynamic in this life-and-death conflict;
any that can not be thus used can be sent to the rear for a further
debate.

Diplomacies in church government and adjustments in church creeds can
wait on this consecration, this baptism of unction. I never heard that
the statesman who formulated the peace at Paris in 1815 got in the
way of the Household Brigades and the Highlanders at Waterloo and
Hougomont. They played their commendable game, but they could not
have swept that awful slope of flame in which Ney and the Old Guard
staggered on at Mont St. Jean.

Let us redeem our creeds at the front, and prove the welding of our
weapons and their tempered blades upon every evil way and darkness and
superstition that afflict humankind.

And have you not seen with moistened eyes and beating hearts the
pathetic surgings of harassed and broken sons and daughters of
God toward His son Jesus Christ? I have watched them until I felt
constrained to cry aloud and spare not; and while viewing them here
and yonder, and refusing to be localized in our love toward them, have
not our spirits been rebuked, have they not known fear for ourselves,
have they not pensively echoed the charge of some that we have no real
roots in democracy, but are as plants in pots, and not as oaks in the
soil of earth? If independency is a barrier to the essence of which it
is supposedly a form, if superiority shuts us off from assimilation
with popular movements and delivers us over to cliques, then these
churches of ours[1] will end in a record of shame and confusion.
While we are busy in trivial things, our energy and our might will be
deflected, and the living God will hand over the crusade to those who
have proven worthier and who knew the day when it did come, even the
day of their visitation.

[Footnote 1: The special reference is to the Congregational churches.]

We must arise with courage undismayed, and join in the cry of the
ages:

  When wilt thou save the people,
    O God of mercy, when?
  The people! Lord, the people!
    Not crowns, nor thrones, but men.

  Flower of thy heart, O Lord, are they,
  Their heritage a sunless day.
  Let them like weeds not fade away;
    Lord, save the people.

If our hearts are thus enlarged, we shall run in the way of His
commandments; fatherhood and brotherhood and sonship will not be
symbols, shibboleths of pious intercourse, but ways of God's reaching
out through us for the total brotherhood. We shall silence the caviler
against missions; we shall raise the negro in the face of those who
say he can not be raised; we shall see the latter-day miracles, and
the lame man healed and rejoicing at the Temple gate. Thus may the
breath of God sweep across our pastorates and dismiss timidity,
provincialism, ease, and narrowness of outlook. And thus may the power
be demonstrated as of heaven because it is the power unto salvation.
Let us fear not men who shall die, nor be content to fill our peaceful
lot and occupy a respectable grave. The new world needs the renewed
baptism, and the "modernism" of which medievalists complain is the
robe of honor for the Christ of this epoch. So that there shall come
unto the Church the flame of sacred love, and, kindling on every heart
and altar, there shall it burn for the glory of Christ, the High
Priest, with inextinguishable blaze. We can rest content, for, behold!
the day cometh and in its light. Let us go hence.




JOWETT

APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


John Henry Jowett, Congregational divine, was born at Barnard Castle,
Durham, in 1864, and educated at Edinburgh and Oxford universities.
In 1889 he was ordained to St. James's Congregational Church,
Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in 1895 was called to his present pastorate of
Carr's Lane Congregational Church, Birmingham, where he has taken rank
among the leading preachers of Great Britain. He is the author of
several important books.




JOWETT

Born in 1864

APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM[1]

[Footnote 1: Reprinted by permission of A.C. Armstrong & Son.]

_Rejoicing in hope_.--Romans xii., 12.


That is a characteristic expression of the fine, genial optimism of
the Apostle Paul. His eyes are always illumined. The cheery tone is
never absent from his speech. The buoyant and springy movement of his
life is never changed. The light never dies out of his sky. Even the
gray firmament reveals more hopeful tints, and becomes significant of
evolving glory. The apostle is an optimist, "rejoicing in hope," a
child of light wearing the "armor of light," "walking in the light"
even as Christ is in the light.

This apostolic optimism was not a thin and fleeting sentiment begotten
of a cloudless summer day. It was not the creation of a season; it was
the permanent pose of the spirit. Even when beset with circumstances
which to the world would spell defeat, the apostle moved with the mien
of a conqueror. He never lost the kingly posture. He was disturbed by
no timidity about ultimate issues. He fought and labored in the spirit
of certain triumph. "We are always confident." "We are more than
conquerors through Him that loved us." "Thanks be unto God who giveth
us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

This apostolic optimism was not born of sluggish thinking, or of idle
and shallow observation. I am very grateful that the counsel of my
text lifts its chaste and cheery flame in the twelfth chapter of an
epistle of which the first chapter contains as dark and searching an
indictment of our nature as the mind of man has ever drawn. Let me
rehearse the appalling catalog that the radiance of the apostle's
optimism may appear the more abounding: "Senseless hearts," "fools,"
"uncleanness," "vile passions," "reprobate minds," "unrighteousness,
wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife,
deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent,
haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, without understanding,
covenant breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful." With
fearless severity the apostle leads us through the black realms of
midnight and eclipse. And yet in the subsequent reaches of the great
argument, of which these dark regions form the preface, there emerges
the clear, calm, steady light of my optimistic text. I say it is not
the buoyancy of ignorance. It is not the flippant, light-hearted
expectancy of a man who knows nothing about the secret places of the
night. The counselor is a man who has steadily gazed at light at
its worst, who has digged through the outer walls of convention and
respectability, who has pushed his way into the secret chambers and
closets of life, who has dragged out the slimy sins which were lurking
in their holes, and named them after their kind--it is this man who
when he has surveyed the dimensions of evil and misery and contempt,
merges his dark indictment in a cheery and expansive dawn, in an
optimistic evangel, in which he counsels his fellow-disciples to
maintain the confident attitude of a rejoicing hope.

Now, what are the secrets of this courageous and energetic optimism?
Perhaps, if we explore the life of this great apostle, and seek to
discover its springs, we may find the clue to his abounding hope.
Roaming then through the entire records of his life and teachings,
do we discover any significant emphasis? Preeminent above all other
suggestions, I am imprest with his vivid sense of the reality of the
redemptive work of Christ. Turn where I will, the redemptive work of
the Christ evidences itself as the base and groundwork of his life.
It is not only that here and there are solid statements of doctrine,
wherein some massive argument is constructed for the partial unveiling
of redemptive glory. Even in those parts of his epistles where formal
argument has ceased, and where solid doctrine is absent, the doctrine
flows as a fluid element into the practical convictions of life, and
determines the shape and quality of the judgments. Nay, one might
legitimately use the figure of a finer medium still, and say that in
all the spacious reaches of the apostle's life the redemptive work of
his Master is present as an atmosphere in which all his thoughts and
purposes and labors find their sustaining and enriching breath. Take
this epistle to the Romans in which my text is found. The earlier
stages of the great epistle are devoted to a massive and stately
presentation of the doctrines of redemption. But when I turn over the
pages where the majestic argument is concluded, I find the doctrine
persisting in a diffused and rarefied form, and appearing as the
determining factor in the solution of practical problems. If he is
dealing with the question of the "eating of meats," the great doctrine
reappears and interposes its solemn and yet elevating principle:
"destroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died." If he is called
upon to administer rebuke to the passionate and unclean, the shadow of
the cross rests upon his judgment. "Ye are not your own; ye are bought
with a price." If he is portraying the ideal relationship of husband
and wife, he sets it in the light of redemptive glory: "Husbands, love
your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up
for it." If he is seeking to cultivate the grace of liberality, he
brings the heavenly air around about the spirit. "Ye know the grace
of our Lord Jesus Christ, that tho he was rich, yet for your sakes
he became poor." It interweaves itself with all his salutations. It
exhales in all his benedictions like a hallowing fragrance. You can
not get away from it. In the light of the glory of redemption all
relationships are assorted and arranged. Redemption was not degraded
into a fine abstract argument, to which the apostle had appended his
own approval, and then, with sober satisfaction, had laid it aside, as
a practical irrelevancy, in the stout chests of orthodoxy. It became
the very spirit of his life. It was, if I may be allowed the violent
figure, the warm blood in all his judgment. It filled the veins of all
his thinking. It beat like a pulse in all his purposes. It determined
and vitalized his decisions in the crisis, as well as in the lesser
trifles of the common day. His conception of redemption was regulative
of all his thought.

But it is not only the immediacy of redemption in the apostle's
thought by which I am imprest. I stand in awed amazement before its
vast, far-stretching reaches into the eternities. Said an old villager
to me concerning the air of his elevated hamlet, "Ay, sir, it's a fine
air is this westerly breeze; I like to think of it as having traveled
from the distant fields of the Atlantic!" And here is the Apostle
Paul, with the quickening wind of redemption blowing about him in
loosening, vitalizing, strengthening influence, and to him, in all his
thinking, it had its birth in the distant fields of eternity! To
the apostle redemption was not a small device, an afterthought, a
patched-up expedient to meet an unforseen emergency. The redemptive
purpose lay back in the abyss of the eternities, and in a spirit of
reverent questioning the apostle sent his trembling thoughts into
those lone and silent fields. He emerged with, whispered secrets such
as these: "fore-knew," "fore-ordained," "chosen in him before the
foundation of the world," "eternal life promised before times
eternal," "the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our
Lord."

Brethren, does our common thought of redemptive glory reach back
into this august and awful presence? Does the thought of the modern
disciple journey in this distant pilgrimage? Or do we now regard it as
unpractical and irrelevant? There is no more insidious peril in modern
religious life than the debasement of our conception of the practical.
If we divorce the practical from the sublime, the practical will
become the superficial, and will degenerate into a very lean and
forceless thing. When Paul went on this lonely pilgrimage his spirit
acquired the posture of a finely sensitive reverence. People who
live and move beneath great domes acquire a certain calm and stately
dignity. It is in companionship with the sublimities that awkwardness
and coarseness are destroyed. We lose our reverence when we desert the
august. But has reverence no relationship to the practical? Shall we
discard it as an irrelevant factor in the purposes of common life?
Why, reverence is the very clue to fruitful, practical living.
Reverence is creative of hope; nay, a more definite emphasis can be
given to the assertion; reverence is a constituent of hope.
Annihilate reverence, and life loses its fine sensitiveness, and when
sensitiveness goes out of a life the hope that remains is only a
flippant rashness, a thoughtless impetuosity, the careless onrush of
the kine, and not a firm, assured perception of a triumph that is only
delayed. A reverent homage before the sublimities of yesterday is the
condition of a fine perception of the hidden triumphs of the morrow.
And, therefore, I do not regard it as an accidental conjunction that
the psalmist puts them together and proclaims the evangel that "the
Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in them that hope in his
mercy." To feel the days before me I must revere the purpose which
throbs behind me. I must bow in reverence if I would anticipate in
hope.

Here, then, is the Apostle Paul, with the redemptive purpose
interweaving itself with all the entanglements of his common life, a
purpose reaching back into the awful depths of the eternities, and
issuing from those depths in amazing fulness of grace and glory. No
one can be five minutes in the companionship of the Apostle Paul
without discovering how wealthy is his sense of the wealthy, redeeming
ministry of God. What a wonderful consciousness he has of the sweep
and fulness of the divine grace! You know the variations of the
glorious air: "the unsearchable riches of Christ"; "riches in glory
in Christ Jesus"; "all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places
in Christ"; "the riches of his goodness and forbearance and
long-suffering." The redemptive purpose of God bears upon the life of
the apostle and upon the race whose privileges he shares, not in an
uncertain and reluctant shower, but in a great and marvelous flood.
And what to him is the resultant enfranchisement? What are the
spacious issues of the glorious work? Do you recall those wonderful
sentences, scattered here and there about the apostle's writings, and
beginning with the words "but now"? Each sentence proclaims the end
of the dominion of night, and unveils some glimpse of the new created
day. "But now!" It is a phrase that heralds a great deliverance!
"But now, apart from the law the righteousness of God hath been
manifested," "But now, being made free from sin and become servants to
God." "But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh
in the blood of Christ." "But now are ye light in the Lord." "Now, no
condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." These represent no
thin abstractions. To Paul the realities of which they speak were more
real than the firm and solid earth. And is it any wonder that a man
with such a magnificent sense of the reality of the redemptive
works of Christ, who felt the eternal purpose throbbing in the dark
background and abyss of time, who conceived it operating upon our race
in floods of grace and glory, and who realized in his own immediate
consciousness the varied wealth of the resultant emancipation--is it
any wonder that for this man a new day had dawned, and the birds had
begun to sing and the flowers to bloom, and a sunny optimism had taken
possession of his heart, which found expression in an assured and
rejoicing hope?

I look abroad again over the record of this man's life and teachings,
if perchance I may discover the secrets of his abiding optimism, and I
am profoundly imprest by his living sense of the reality and greatness
of his present resources. "By Christ redeemed!" That is not a grand
finale; it is only a glorious inauguration. "By Christ redeemed; in
Christ restored"; it is with these dynamics of restoration that his
epistles are so wondrously abounding. In almost every other sentence
he suggests a dynamic which he can count upon as his friend. Paul's
mental and spiritual outlook comprehended a great army of positive
forces laboring in the interests of the kingdom of God. His conception
of life was amazingly rich in friendly dynamics! I do not wonder that
such a wealthy consciousness was creative of a triumphant optimism.
Just glance at some of the apostle's auxiliaries: "Christ liveth in
me!" "Christ liveth in me! He breathes through all my aspirations. He
thinks through all my thinking. He wills through all my willing. He
loves through all my loving. He travails in all my labors. He works
within me 'to will and to do of his good pleasure.'" That is the
primary faith of the hopeful life. But see what follows in swift and
immediate succession. "If Christ is in you, the spirit is life." "The
spirit is life!" And therefore you find that in the apostle's thought
dispositions are powers. They are not passive entities. They are
positive forces vitalizing and energizing the common life of men.
My brethren, I am persuaded there is a perilous leakage in this
department of our thought. We are not bold enough in our thinking
concerning spiritual realities. We do not associate with every mode
of the consecrated spirit the mighty energy of God. We too often
oust from our practical calculations some of the strongest and most
aggressive allies of the saintly life. Meekness is more than the
absence of self-assertion; it is the manifestation of the mighty power
of God. To the Apostle Paul love exprest more than a relationship. It
was an energy productive of abundant labors. Faith was more than an
attitude. It was an energy creative of mighty endeavor, Hope was
more than a posture. It was an energy generative of a most enduring
patience. All these are dynamics, to be counted as active allies,
cooperating in the ministry of the kingdom. And so the epistles abound
in the recital of mystic ministries at work. The Holy Spirit worketh!
Grace worketh! Faith worketh! Love worketh! Hope worketh! Prayer
worketh! And there are other allies robed in less attractive garb.
"Tribulation worketh!" "This light affliction worketh." "Godly sorrow
worketh!" On every side of him the apostle conceives cooperative and
friendly powers. "The mountain is full of horses and chariots of
fire round about him." He exults in the consciousness of abounding
resources. He discovers the friends of God in things which find no
place among the scheduled powers of the world. He finds God's raw
material in the world's discarded waste. "Weak things," "base things,"
"things that are despised," "things that are not," mere nothings;
among these he discovers the operating agents of the mighty God. Is it
any wonder that in this man, possessed of such a wealthy consciousness
of multiplied resources, the spirit of a cheery optimism should be
enthroned? With what stout confidence he goes into the fight! He
never mentions the enemy timidly. He never seeks to underestimate his
strength. Nay, again and again he catalogs all possible antagonisms in
a spirit of buoyant and exuberant triumph. However numerous the enemy,
however subtle and aggressive his devices, however towering and
well-established the iniquity, however black the gathering clouds, so
sensitive is the apostle to the wealthy resources of God that amid it
all he remains a sunny optimist, "rejoicing in hope," laboring in the
spirit of a conqueror even when the world was exulting in his supposed
discomfiture and defeat.

And, finally, in searching for the springs of this man's optimism, I
place alongside his sense of the reality of redemption and his wealthy
consciousness of present resources his impressive sense of the reality
of future glory. Paul gave himself time to think of heaven, of the
home of God, of his own home when time should be no more. He loved to
contemplate "the glory that shall be revealed." He mused in wistful
expectancy of the day "when Christ who is our life shall be
manifested," and when we also "shall be manifested with him in glory."
He pondered the thought of death as "gain," as transferring him to
conditions in which he would be "at home with the Lord," "with Christ,
which is far better." He looked for "the blest hope and appearing
of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ," and he
contemplated "that great day" as the "henceforth," which would reveal
to him the crown of righteousness and glory. Is any one prepared to
dissociate this contemplation from the apostle's cheery optimism? Is
not rather the thought of coming glory one of its abiding springs? Can
we safely exile it from our moral and spiritual culture? I know that
this particular contemplation is largely absent from modern religious
life, and I know the nature of the recoil in which our present
impoverishment began. "Let us hear less about the mansions of the
blest and more about the housing of the poor!" Men revolted against an
effeminate contemplation, which had run to seed, in favor of an active
philanthropy which sought the enrichment of the common life. But, my
brethren, pulling a plant up is not the only way of saving it from
running to seed. You can accomplish by a wise restriction what
is wastefully done by severe destruction. I think we have lost
immeasurably by the uprooting, in so many lives, of this plant of
heavenly contemplation. We have built on the erroneous assumption that
the contemplation of future glory inevitably unfits us for the service
of man. It is an egregious and destructive mistake. I do not think
that Richard Baxter's labors were thinned or impoverished by his
contemplation of "The Saint's Everlasting Rest." When I consider his
mental output, his abundant labors as father-confessor to a countless
host, his pains and persecutions and imprisonments, I can not but
think he received some of the powers of his optimistic endurance from
contemplations such as he counsels in his incomparable book. "Run
familiarly through the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem; visit the
patriarchs and prophets, salute the apostles, and admire the armies of
martyrs; lead on the heart from street to street, bring it into
the palace of the great king; lead it, as it were, from chamber to
chamber. Say to it, 'Here must I lodge, here must I die, here must I
praise, here must I love and be loved. My tears will then be wiped
away, my groans be turned to another tune, my cottage of clay be
changed to this palace, my prison rags to these splendid robes'; 'for
the former things are passed away.'" I can not think that Samuel
Rutherford impoverished his spirit or deadened his affections, or
diminished his labors by mental pilgrimages such as he counsels to
Lady Cardoness: "Go up beforehand and see your lodging. Look through
all your Father's rooms in heaven. Men take a sight of the lands ere
they buy them. I know that Christ hath made the bargain already; but
be kind to the house ye are going to, and see it often." I can not
think that this would imperil the fruitful optimisms of the Christian
life. I often examine, with peculiar interest, the hymn-book we use at
Carr's Lane. It was compiled by Dr. Dale. Nowhere else can I find the
broad perspective of his theology and his primary helpmeets in
the devotional life as I find them there. And is it altogether
unsuggestive that under the heading of "Heaven" is to be found one of
the largest sections of the book. A greater space is given to "Heaven"
than is given to "Christian duty." Is it not significant of what a
great man of affairs found needful for the enkindling and sustenance
of a courageous hope? And among the hymns are many which have helped
to nourish the sunny endeavors of a countless host.

      There is a land of pure delight
        Where saints immortal reign;
      Infinite day excludes the night,
        And pleasures banish pain.

      What are these, arrayed in white,
        Brighter than the noonday sun?
      Foremost of the suns of light,
        Nearest the eternal throne.

  Hark! hark, my soul! Angelic songs are swelling
    O'er earth's green fields and ocean's wave-beat shore.
  Angelic songs to sinful men are telling
    Of that new life when sin shall be no more.

My brethren, depend upon it, we are not impoverished by contemplations
such as these. They take no strength out of the hand, and they
put much strength and buoyancy into the heart. I proclaim the
contemplation of coming glory as one of the secrets of the apostle's
optimism which enabled him to labor and endure in the confident spirit
of rejoicing hope. These, then, are some of the springs of Christian
optimism; some of the sources in which we may nourish our hope in the
newer labors of a larger day: a sense of the glory of the past in
a perfected redemption, a sense of the glory of the present in our
multiplied resources, a sense of the glory of tomorrow in the fruitful
rest of our eternal home.

  O blest hope! with this elate
  Let not our hearts be desolate;
  But, strong in faith and patience, wait
    Until He come!




GENERAL INDEX




INDEX TO PREACHERS AND SERMONS

Abbott, Lyman, The Divinity in Humanity
Abraham's Imitators; or The Activity of Faith. By Thomas Hooker
Affection, The Expulsive Power of a New. By   Thomas Chalmers
Argument, The, from Experience. By Robert William Dale
Arnold, Thomas, Alive in God
Ascension, The, of Christ. By Girolamo Savonarola
Assurance in God. By George Adam Smith
Atonement, Eternal. By Roswell Dwight Hitchcock
Atonement, The Prominence of the. By Edwards Amasa Park
Augustine, St., The Recovery of Sight by the Blind

Bacon, Leonard Woolsey, God Indwelling
Basil "The Great," The Creation of the World
Baxter, Richard, Making Light of Christ and Salvation
Beecher, H.W., Immortality
Beecher, Lyman, The Government of God Desirable
Bible, The, vs. Infidelity. By Frank Wakely Gunsaulus
Blair, Hugh, The Hour and the Event of All Time
Blind, The Recovery of Sight by the. By St. Augustine
Bones, The Valley of Dry. By Frederick Denison Maurice
Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, The Death of the Grande Condé
Bounty, The Royal. By Alexander McKenzie
Bourdaloue, Louis, The Passion of Christ
Broadus, John A., Let us Have Peace with God
Brooks, Memorial Discourse on Phillips. By Henry Codman Potter
Brooks, Phillips, The Pride of Life
Bunyan, John, The Heavenly Footman
Burrell, David James, How to Become a Christian
Bushnell, Horace, Unconscious Influence

Cadman, S. Parkes, A New Day for Missions
Caird, John, Religion in Common Life
Calvin, John, Enduring Persecution for Christ
Campbell, Alexander, The Missionary Cause
Carlyle, Thomas,--In Memoriam. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
Carpenter, William Boyd, The Age of Progress
Chalmers, Thomas, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection
Charming, William Ellery, The Character of Christ
Chapin, Edwin Hubbell Nicodemus: The Seeker after Religion
Character, The, of Christ. By William Ellery Charming
Christ and Salvation, Making Light of. By Richard Baxter
Christ Among the Common Things of Life. By William James Dawson
Christ Before Pilate--Pilate Before Christ. By William Mackergo Taylor
Christ, Enduring Persecution for. By John Calvin
Christ, The Ascension of. By Girolamo Savonarola
Christ, The Character of. By William Ellery Channing
Christ, The First Temptation of. By John Knox
Christ, The Loneliness of. By Frederick William Robertson
Christ, The Passion of. By Louis Bourdaloue
Christ--_The_ Question of the Centuries. By Robert Stuart
  MacArthur
Christ, The Spirit of. By Charles H. Fowler
Christ, What Think ye of. By Dwight Lyman Moody
Christ, Zeal in the Cause of. By William Morley Punshon
Christ's Advent to Judgment. By Jeremy Taylor
Christ's Real Body not in the Eucharist. By John Wyclif
Christ's Resurrection an Image of our New Life. By Frederich Ernst
  Schleiermacher
Christian, How to Become a. By David James Burrell
Christian Victory. By Christopher Newman Hall
Christianity, The Mysteries of. By Alexander Vinet
Christianity, The Transient and Permanent in. By Theodore Parker
Chrysostom, Excessive Grief at the Death of Friends
Church, The Mother. By Ernest Roland Wilberforce
Church, The Triumph of the. By Henry Edward Manning
Clifford, John, The Forgiveness of Sins
Colonization, The, of the Desert. By Edward Everett Hale
Common Life, Religion in. By John Caird
Common Things of Life, Christ Among the. By William James Dawson
Condé, The Funeral Sermon on the Death of the Grande. By Jacques
  Benigne Bossuet
Creation, The, of the World. By Basil
Creation, Work in the Groaning. By Frederick William Farrar
Crosby, Howard, The Prepared Worm
Cuyler, Theodore Ledyard, The Value of Life

Dale, Robert William, The Argument from Experience
Day, A, in the Life of Jesus of Nazareth, By Francis Wayland
Dawson, William James, Christ Among the Common Things of Life
Death, Glorification Through. By Francis Landey Patton
Desert, The Colonization of the. By Edward Everett Hale
Divinity, The, in Humanity. By Lyman Abbott
Drummond, Henry, The Greatest Thing in the World
Dwight, Timothy, The Sovereignty of God

Earth, The Shaking of the Heavens and the. By Charles Kingsley
Education and the Future of Religion. By John Lancaster Spalding
Edwards, Jonathan, Spiritual light
Elect, The Small Number of the. By Jean Baptiste Massillon
Eternal Atonement. By Roswell Dwight Hitchcock
Eucharist, Christ's Real Body not in the. By John Wyclif
Evans, Christmas, The Fall and Recovery of Man
Event, The Hour and the, of all Time. By Hugh Blair
Experience. By Alexander Whyte
Experience, The Argument from. By Robert William Dale
Expulsive Power, The, of a New Affection. By Thomas Chalmers

Faith, Constructive. By Charles Henry Parkhurst
Faith, The Activity of; or, Abraham's Imitators. By Thomas Hooker
Faith, The Story of a Disciple's. By Henry Scott Holland
Fall, The, and Recovery of Man. By Christmas Evans
Farrar, Frederick William, Work in the Groaning Creation
Fénelon, Francois de Salignac de la Mothe, The Saints Converse with God
Footman, The Heavenly. By John Bunyan
Forgiveness, The, of Sins. By John Clifford.
Fowler, Charles H., The Spirit of Christ
Funeral Sermon, The, on the Death of the Grande Condé, by Jacques
  Benigne Bossuet

Gethsemane, The Rose Garden of God. By William Robertson Nicoll
Gladden, Washington, The Prince of Life
Glorification Through Death. By Francis Landey Patton
God, Alive in. By Thomas Arnold
God Calling to Man. By Charles John Vaughan
God Indwelling. By Leonard Woolsey Bacon.
God, Marks of Love to. By Robert Hall
God, Preparation for Consulting the Oracles of. By Edward Irving
God, The Government of, Desirable. By Lyman Beecher
God, The Image of, in Man. By Robert South
God, The Saints Converse with. By Francois Fénelon
God, The Sovereignty of. By Timothy Dwight
God the Unwearied Guide. By Newell Dwight Hillis
God's Love to Fallen Man. By John Wesley
God's Will the End of Life. By John Henry Newman
Gordon, George Angier, Man in the Image of God
Government, The, of God Desirable. By Lyman Beecher
Grace, The Method of. By George Whitefield
Greatest Thing, The, in the World. By Henry Drummond
Grief, Excessive, at the Death of Friends. By Chrysostom
Guide, God the Unwearied. By Newell Dwight Hillis
Gunsaulus, Frank Wakely, The Bible vs. Infidelity
Guthrie, Thomas, The New Heart

Hale, Edward Everett, The Colonization of the Desert
Hall, Christopher Newman, Christian Victory
Hall, John, Liberty only in Truth
Hall, Robert, Marks of Love to God
Heart, The New. By Thomas Guthrie
Heavens, The Shaking of the, and the Earth. By Charles Kingsley
Hillis, Newell Dwight, God the Unwearied Guide
Hitchcock, Roswell Dwight, The Eternal Atonement
Holland, Henry Scott, The Story of a Disciple's Faith
Holy Spirit, Influence of the. By Henry Parry Liddon
Hooker, Thomas, The Activity of Faith; or Abraham's Imitators
Hour, The, and the Event of all Time. By Hugh Blair
Howe, John, The Redeemer's Tears over Lost Souls
Humanity, The Divinity in. By Lyman Abbott

Ideal of Life, The Perfect. By George Campbell Morgan
Immortality. By H.W. Beecher
Infidelity, The Bible vs. By Frank Wakely Gunsaulus
Influence, Unconscious. By Horace Bushnell
Influences of the Holy Spirit. By Henry Parry Liddon
Inheritance, The Heavenly. By John Summerfield
Irving, Edward, Preparation for Consulting the Oracles of God

Jefferson, Charles Edward, The Reconciliation
Jesus of Nazareth, A Day in the Life of. By Francis Wayland
Jowett, John Henry, Apostolic Optimism
Judgment, Christ's Advent to. By Jeremy Taylor
Judgment, The Reversal of Human. By James B. Mozley
Justification, The Method and Fruits of. By Martin Luther

Kingsley, Charles, The Shaking of the Heavens and the Earth
Knox, John, The First Temptation of Christ
Knox-Little, William John, Thirst Satisfied
Latimer, Hugh, Christian Love
Life, Christ's Resurrection an Image of our New By Frederich Ernst
  Schleiermacher
Life, God's Will the End of. By John Henry Newman
Life, The Perfect Ideal of. By George Campbell Morgan
Life, The Pride of. By Phillips Brooks
Life, The Prince of. By Washington Gladden
Life, The Value of. By Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
Liberty only in Truth. By John Hall
Liddon, Henry Parry, Influences of the Holy Spirit
Light, Spiritual. By Jonathan Edwards
Loneliness, The, of Christ. By Frederick William Robertson
Lord, The Resurrection of Our. By Matthew Simpson
Lorimer, George C. The Fall of Satan
Love, Christian. By Hugh Latimer
Love, Marks of, to God. By Robert Hall
Luther, Martin, The Method and Fruits of Justification
MacArthur, Robert Stuart, Christ--The Question of the Centuries
McKenzie, Alexander, The Royal Bounty
Maclaren, Alexander, The Pattern of Service
Macleod, Norman, The True Christian Ministry
Magee, William Connor, The Miraculous Stilling of the Storm
Man, God Calling to. By Charles John Vaughan
Man, God's Love to Fallen. By John Wesley
Man in the Image of God. By George Angier Gordon
Man, The Fall and Recovery of. By Christmas Evans
Man, The Image of God in. By Robert South
Manhood, The Meaning of. By Henry Van Dyke
Manning, Henry Edward, The Triumph of the Church
Martineau, James, Parting Words
Mason, John Mitchell, Messiah's Throne
Massillon, Jean Baptiste, The Small Number of the Elect
Maurice, Frederick Denison, The Valley of Dry Bones
Melanchthon, Philip, The Safety of the Virtuous
Memorial Discourse on Phillips Brooks. By Henry Codman Potter
Messiah's Throne. By John Mitchell Mason
Ministry, The True Christian. By Norman Macleod
Missions, A New Day for. By. S. Parkes Cadman
Missionary Cause, The. By Alexander Campbell
Missionary Work, The Permanent Motive in. By Richard S. Storrs
Monster, A Bloody. By Thomas DeWitt Talmage
Moody, Dwight Lyman, What Think ye of Christ?
Morgan, George Campbell, The Perfect Ideal of Life
Motive, The Permanent, in Missionary Work. By Richard S. Storrs
Mozley, James B., The Reversal of Human Judgment
Mysteries. The, of Christianity. By Alexander Vinet

Newman, John Henry, God's Will the End of Life
Nicodemus: The Seeker after Religion. By Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Nicoll, William Robertson, Gethsemane, The Rose Garden of God

Optimism, Apostolic. By John Henry Jowett
Optimism. By John Watson
Oracles, Preparation for Consulting the, of God. By Edward Irving

Park, Edwards Amasa, The Prominence of the Atonement
Parker, Joseph, A Word to the Weary
Parker, Theodore, The Transient and Permanent in Christianity
Parkhurst, Charles Henry, Constructive Faith
Passion, The, of Christ. By Louis Bourdaloue
Patton, Francis Landey, Glorification Through Death
Paul Before Felix and Drusilla. By Jacques Saurin
Peace with God, Let us Have. By John A. Broadus
Permanent, The Transient and the, in Christianity. By Theodore Parker
Persecution for Christ, Enduring, John Calvin
Pilate Before Christ--Christ Before Pilate. By William Mackergo
  Taylor
Potter, Henry Codman, Memorial Discourse on Phillips Brooks
Pride, The, of Life. By Phillips Brooks
Prince, The, of Life. By Washington Gladden
Progress, The Age of. By William Boyd Carpenter
Punshon, William Morley, Zeal in the Cause of Christ

Reconciliation, The. By Charles E. Jefferson
Recovery, The Fall and, of Man. By Christmas Evans
Redeemer's Tears, The, over Lost Souls. By John Howe
Religion, Education and the Future of. By John Lancaster Spaldin
Religion in Common Life. By John Caird
Religion, Nicodemus: The Seeker after. By Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Resurrection, Christ's, an Image of our New-Life. By Frederick Ernst
  Schleiermacher
Resurrection, The, of Our Lord. By Matthew Simpson
Resurrection, The Reasonableness of a. By John Tillotson
Reversal, The, of Human Judgment. By James B. Mozley
Robertson, Frederick William, The Loneliness of Christ
Royal Bounty, the. By Alexander McKenzie

Sackcloth, The Transfigured. By William L. Watkinson
Saints Converse with God, The. By Francis Fénelon
Salvation, Making Light of Christ and. By Richard Baxter
Satan, The Fall of. By George C. Lorimer
Saurin, Jacques, Paul Before Felix and Drusilla
Savonarola, Girolamo, The Ascension of Christ
Schleiermacher, Frederick Ernst, Christ's Resurrection an Image of our
  New Life
Seiss, Joseph A., The Wonderful Testimonies
Service, The Pattern of. By Alexander Maclaren
Shaking, The, of the Heavens and the Earth. By Charles Kingsley
Sight, The Recovery of, by the Blind By St Augustine
Simpson, Matthew, The Resurrection of Our Lord.
Sins, The Forgiveness of By John Clifford
Smith, George Adam Assurance in God
Songs in the Night By Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Souls, The Redeemer's Tears Over Lost By John Howe
South, Robert, The Image of God in Man
Sovereignty, The of God By Timothy Dwight
Spalding, John Lancaster, Education and the Future of Religion
Spiritual Light By Jonathan Edwards
Spurgeon, Charles Haddon Songs in the Night
Stalker, James Temptation
Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, In Memoriam--Thomas Carlyle
Stilling of the Storm, The Miraculous By William Connor Magee
Storm, The Miraculous Stilling of the By William Connor Magee
Storrs, Richard S. The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work
Summerfield, John The Heavenly Inheritance

Talmage, Thomas DeWitt A Bloody Monster
Taylor, Jeremy Christ's Advent to Judgment
Taylor, William Mackergo Christ Before Pilate--Pilate Before Christ
Temptation By James Stalker
Temptation, The First, of Christ By John Knox
Testimonies The Wonderful By Joseph A Seiss
Thirst Satisfied By William John Knox Little
Time, The Hour and the Event of all By Hugh Blair
Tillotson, John, The Reasonableness of a Resurrection
Transfigured Sackcloth, The By William L. Watkinson
Transient, The, and Permanent in Christianity. By Theodore Parker
Triumph, The, of the Church. By Henry Edward Manning
Truth, Liberty Only in. By John Hall
Valley, The, of Dry Bones By Frederick Derrison Maurice
Van Dyke, Henry, The Meaning of Manhood
Vaughan, Charles John, God Calling to Man
Victory, Christian By Christopher Newman Hall
Vinet, Alexander, The Mysteries of Christianity
Virtuous, The Safety of the. By Philip Melanchthon
Voice, I am a. By Charles Wagner

Wagner, Charles, I am a Voice
Watkinson, William L, The Transfigured Sackcloth
Watson, John, Optimism
Wayland, Francis, A Day in the Life of Jesus of Nazareth
Weary, A Word to the. By Joseph Parker
Wesley, John, God's Love to Fallen Man.
Whitefield, George, The Method of Grace
Whyte, Alexander, Experience
Wilberforce, Ernest Roland, The Mother Church
Words, Parting By James Martineau
Work in the Groaning Creation. By Frederick William Farrar
World, The Greatest Thing in the. By Henry Drummond
Worm, The Prepared. By Howard Crosby




INDEX TO TEXTS


                      VOLUME

Genesis i., 2              I
  i., 27                  II
  i., 31                 VII
  i., 31                 VII
  iii., 9                 VI
  xxxvii., 33           VIII

I Kings x., 13           VII
  x., 36                  IX

II Kings vi., 1,2         IX

Esther iv., 2           VIII

Job xxxiii., 4            IX
  xxxv., 10             VIII

Psalms xvi., 16            X
  xlii., 2              VIII
  cxix., 45              VII
  cxix., 129             VII

Proverbs xi., 30          IV

Isaiah xl., 1-31           X
  l, 4                   VII
  lvii., 15              VII

Jeremiah vi., 14         III
  x., 23                 III

Ezekiel xxxvi., 26         V
  xxxvii., 1-3             V

Jonah iv., 7             VII

Matthew iv., 1             I
  vi., 10                 IV
  viii., 25, 26          VII
  xii., 12                IX
  xiii., 24               VI
  xvi., 17               III
  xvii., 5                IV
  xix., 30                 V
  xx., 30                  I
  xxii., 5                II
  xxii., 32               IV
  xxii., 42             VIII
  xxii., 42               IX
  xxvi., 26                I
  xxvii., 22             VII
  xxviii., 19             IX

Mark vii., 33            VII
  xvi., 15                VI

Luke iv. 27              III
  ix., 10-17              IV
  x., 18                VIII
  xix., 41, 42            II
  xxi., 33                 V
  xxiii., 27, 28          II
  xxiv., 51                I

John i., 23                X
  iii. 1, 2               VI
  iii., 8                VII
  v., 39                  IV
  v., 42                 III
  vi., 38                 IV
  vi., 63               VIII
  vi., 64                 IX
  viii., 28-30             X
  x., 28                   I
  x., 34-36             VIII
  xii., 24                IX
  xiv. 27                  V
  xv., 12                  I
  xvi., 31, 32            VI
  xvii., 1               III
  xvii., 20, 21            V
  xx., 8                  IV
  xx., 8                  IX
  xxi., 9, 12              X

Acts iii., 15           VIII
  xix., 23                IX
  xxiv., 24, 25          III
  xxvi., 8                II
  xxvi., 8                IX

Romans iv., 12            II
        v., 1             IX
        v., 4           VIII
        v., 15           III
        v., 15           III
       vi., 4            III
     viii., 9           VIII
     viii., 22           VII
      xii., 11            VI
      xii., 12             X

I Corinthians ii., 2       V
              ii., 9      IV
              ix., 24     II
              xiii.,       X
             xiv., 10      X
              xv., 3       X
              xv., 19     VI
              xv., 20      V
              xx., 13     IX

II Corinthians ii., 14-16  V
                v., 10    II
                v., 13-15 VI

Galatians iv., 1-7         I
          vi., 14          X

I Thessalonians iv., 13    I
                 v., 17   II

Hebrews i., 18           III
      xii., 26-29         VI
     xiii., 13             I

II Peter i., 11           IV

I John, ii., 16         VIII
         v., 15           IV

Revelations ii., 17       VI
          xiii., 8        VI
          xxii., 3       VII

Apostles' Creed         VIII