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Title: The World's Great Sermons, Volume 9: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Author: Various
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_The World's Great Sermons_
VOLUME IX
CUYLER TO VAN DYKE
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 IX--CUYLER TO VAN DYKE
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK and LONDON
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
VOLUME IX
CUYLER (Born in 1822). Page
The Value of Life 1
BROADUS (1827-1895).
Let us Have Peace With God 19
WILBERFORCE (Born in 1840).
The Mother Church 37
SPALDING (Born in 1840).
Education and the Future of Religion 49
MACARTHUR (Born in 1841).
Christ--The Question of the Centuries 73
CARPENTER (Born in 1841).
The Age of Progress 91
PARKHURST (Born in 1842).
Constructive Faith 111
PATTON (Born in 1843).
Glorification Through Death 129
SCOTT HOLLAND (Born in 1847).
The Story of a Disciple's Faith 145
STALKER (Born in 1848).
Temptation 165
BURRELL (Born in 1849).
How to Become a Christian 183
WATSON (1850-1907).
Optimism 199
NICOLL (Born in 1851).
Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of God 211
VAN DYKE (Born in 1852).
The Meaning of Manhood 231
CUYLER
THE VALUE OF LIFE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, Presbyterian divine, was born at Aurora,
New York, in 1822. He took his degree at Princeton in 1841, and
studied theology in Princeton Seminary. He was ordained to the
ministry in 1848, but after discharging the duties of three pastoral
positions, took up the prosecution of more general activities,
including temperance and philanthropic work. He has been a
voluminous writer, having contributed some four thousand articles to
leading religious organs. He died February 26, 1909.
CUYLER
1822-1909
THE VALUE OF LIFE
_The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty
hath given me life._--Job xxxiii., 4.
There are two conflicting theories, nowadays, as to the origin
of man. One theory brings him upward from the brute, the other,
downward from God; one gives him an ascent from the ape, the other
a descent from the Almighty. I shall waste no time in refuting the
first theory. The most profound physicist of Europe, Professor
Virchow, of Berlin, has lately asserted that this theory of man's
evolution from the brute has no solid scientific foundation. Why
need you and I seek to disprove what no man has ever yet proved or
will prove? The other theory of man's origin comes down to us in the
oldest book in existence, the Book of Job, and tallies exactly with
the narrative in the next oldest books, those compiled by Moses:
"The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath
given me life." That is the Bible account of your ancestry and mine.
We make a great deal of ancestry. The son of a duke may become a
duke; the child of a king has royal blood in his veins; and a vast
deal of honor is supposed to descend with an honorable descent.
Grant this true, it proves a great deal; it proves more than some
of us imagine. It proves that there is something grander than for
man to have for his sire a king or an emperor, a statesman or
a conqueror, a poet or a philosopher. It looks to the grandest
genealogy in the universe, the ancestry of a whole race; not a few
favored individuals, but all humanity. My brethren, fellow sharers
of immortality, open this family record. Trace your ancestry back to
the most august parentage in the universe: One is our Father, God;
One our elder brother, Jesus. We all draw lineage from the King of
kings and the Lord of lords. Herein consists the value and dignity
of human life. I go back to the origin of the globe. I find that
for five days the creative hand of the Almighty is busy in fitting
up an abode of palatial splendor. He adorns it; He hollows the seas
for man's highway, rears the mountains for his observatories, stores
the mines for his magazines, pours the streams to give him drink,
and fertilizes the fields to give him daily bread. The mansion is
carpeted with verdure, illuminated with the greater light by day,
lesser lights by night. Then God comes up to the grandest work of
all. When the earth is to be fashioned and the ocean to be poured
into its bed, God simply says, "Let them be," and they are. When man
is to be created, the Godhead seems to make a solemn pause, retires
into the recesses of His own tranquillity, looks for a model, and
finds it in Himself. "And God said, let us make man in our image,
after our likeness.... So God created man in his own image, in the
image of God created he him; male and female created he them.... So
God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life and he became a
living soul." No longer a beautiful model, no longer a speechless
statue, but vivified. Life, that subtle, mysterious thing that no
physicist can define, whose lurking place in the body no medical eye
hath yet found out--life came into the clay structure. He began to
breathe, to walk, to think, to feel in the body the "nephesh": the
word in the Hebrew means, in the first place, the breath of life,
then, finally, by that immortal essence called the soul.
Now, it is not my intention to enter into any analysis of this
expression, "the spirit," but talk to you on life, its reach and
its revenue, its preciousness and its power, its rewards and its
retributions, life for this world and the far-reaching world beyond.
Life is God's gift; your trust and mine. We are the trustees of the
Giver, unto whom at last we shall render account for every thought,
word and deed in the body.
I. In the first place, life, in its origin, is infinitely important.
The birth of a babe is a mighty event. From the frequency of births,
as well as the frequency of deaths, we are prone to set a very
low estimate on the ushering into existence of an animate child,
unless the child be born in a palace or a presidential mansion, or
some other lofty station. Unless there be something extraordinary
in the circumstances, we do not attach the importance we ought to
the event itself. It is only noble birth, distinguished birth,
that is chronicled in the journals or announced with salvos of
artillery. I admit that the relations of a prince, of a president
and statesman, are more important to their fellow men and touch them
at more points than those of an obscure pauper; but when the events
are weighed in the scales of eternity, the difference is scarcely
perceptible. In the darkest hovel in Brooklyn, in the dingiest attic
or cellar, or in any place in which a human being sees the first
glimpse of light, the eye of the Omniscient beholds an occurrence
of prodigious moment. A life is begun, a life that shall never end.
A heart begins to throb that shall beat to the keenest delight or
the acutest anguish. More than this--a soul commences a career
that shall outlast the earth on which it moves. The soul enters
upon an existence that shall be untouched by time, when the sun is
extinguished like a taper in the sky, the moon blotted out, and the
heavens have been rolled together as a vesture and changed forever.
The Scandinavians have a very impressive allegory of human life.
They represent it as a tree, the "Igdrasil" or the tree of
existence, whose roots grow deep down in the soil of mystery; the
trunk reaches above the clouds; its branches spread out over the
globe. At the foot of it sit the Past, the Present, and the Future,
watering the roots. Its boughs, with their unleafing, spread
out through all lands and all time; every leaf of the tree is a
biography, every fiber a word, a thought or a deed; its boughs are
the histories of nations; the rustle of it is the noise of human
existence onward from of old; it grows amid the howling of the
hurricane, it is the great tree of humanity. Now in that conception
of the half savage Norsemen, we learn how they estimated the
grandeur of human life. It is a transcendent, momentous thing, this
living, bare living, thinking, feeling, deciding. It comes from God;
He is its Author; it should rise toward God, its Giver, who is alone
worthy of being served; that with God it may live forever.
II. In the next place, human life is transcendently precious from
the services it may render to God in the advancement of His glory.
Man was not created as a piece of guesswork, flung into existence as
a waif. There is a purpose in the creation of every human being.
God did not breathe the breath of life into you, my friend, that you
might be a sensuous or a splendid animal. That soul was given you
for a purpose worthy of yourself, still more of the Creator.
What is the purpose of life? Is it advancement? Is it promotion? Is
it merely the pursuit of happiness? Man was created to be happy, but
to be more--to be holy. The wisdom of those Westminster fathers that
gathered in the Jerusalem chamber, wrought it into the well-known
phrase, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever."
That is the double aim of life: duty first, then happiness as the
consequence; to bring in revenues of honor to God, to build up His
kingdom, spread His truth; to bring this whole world of His and lay
it subject at the feet of the Son of God. That is the highest end
and aim of existence, and every one here that has risen up to that
purpose of life lives. He does not merely vegetate, he does not
exist as a higher type of animal: he lives a man's life on earth,
and when he dies he takes a man's life up to mingle with the loftier
life of paradise. The highest style of manhood and womanhood is to
be attained by consecration to the Son of God. That is the only
right way, my friends, to employ these powers which you have brought
back to your homes from your sanctuary. That is the only idea of
life which you are to take to-morrow into the toils and temptations
of the week. That is the only idea of life that you are to carry
unto God in your confessions and thanksgivings in the closet. That
is the only idea of life on which you are to let the transcendent
light of eternity fall. These powers, these gifts, the wealth
earned, the influence imparted, all are to be laid at the feet of
Him who gave His life for you. Life is real, momentous, clothed with
an awful and an overwhelming responsibility to its possessor. Nay, I
believe that life is the richest of boons, or the most intolerable
of curses.
Setting before you the power of a well-spent life, I might of course
point first to the radiant pathway that extended from Bethlehem's
manger to the cross of Calvary. All along that path I read the
single purpose of love, all embracing and undying: "My meat is to do
the will of him that sent me.... I have glorified thee on earth, I
have finished the work thou gavest me to do." Next to that life we
place the life begun on the road to Damascus. In him Christ lived
again, with wondrous power, present in the utterances and footsteps
of the servant. "For me to live is Christ:" that is the master
passion of Paul. Whether he ate or drank, gained or lost, wrought or
suffered, Christ filled the eye and animated every step. The chief
end of Paul was to glorify his Savior; and of the winding-up of
that many-sided term of existence he could exclaim, not boastfully,
but gladly: "I have fought the good fight; I have finished my
course; I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a
crown of righteousness."
I found myself lately studying with intense interest the biography
of Baxter. For half a century that man gave himself to the service
of Jesus with a perseverance and industry that shames such loiterers
as you and I. Just think of a man that twice on every Lord's day
proclaimed the gospel of his Master with most elaborate care and
unflinching diligence; on the first two days of the week spent
seven hours each day in instructing children of the parish, not
omitting a single one on account of poverty or obscurity; think of
him as devoting one whole day of each week to care for their bodily
welfare, devoting three days to study, during which he prepared one
hundred and sixty instructive volumes saturated with the spirit of
the word, among them that immortal "Saints' Everlasting Rest," that
has guided so many a believer up to glory. The influence of one such
life as that changed the whole aspect of the town of Kidderminster.
When he came to it, it swarmed with ignorance, profligacy,
Sabbath-breaking, vice; when he left it the whole community had
become sober and industrious, and a large portion converted and
godly. He says: "On the Lord's Day evening you may hear hundreds
of families, in their doors singing psalms or reading the Bible,
as you pass along the streets." Sixteen hundred sat down at one
time to his communion-table. Nearly every house became a house of
prayer. Such was one life, the life of a man much of the time an
invalid, crying out often unto God for deliverance from the most
excruciating bodily pains. Such was one life on which was a stamped
"Holiness to Jesus," and out of which flowed the continual efflux
of Christian power and beneficence. Such a man never dies. Good men
live forever. Old Augustine lives to-day in the rich discourses
inspired by his teachings. Lord Bacon lives in the ever-widening
circles of engines, telegraph and telephones which he taught men how
to invent. Elizabeth Fry lives in the prison reformers following
her radiant and beneficial footsteps. Bunyan lies in Bunhill
Fields, but his bright spirit walks on the earth in the "Pilgrim's
Progress." Calvin sleeps at Geneva, and no man knoweth his sepulcher
to this day, but his magnificent "Vindication of God's Sovereignty"
will live forever. We hail him as in one sense an ancestor of our
republic. Wesley slumbers beside the City Road Chapel; his dead hand
rings ten thousand Methodist church bells round the globe. Isaac
Watts is dead, but in the chariot of his hymns tens of thousands
of spirits ascend to-day in majestic devotion. Howard still keeps
prisons clean. Franklin protects our dwellings from lightnings. Dr.
Duncan guards the earnings of the poor in the savings-bank. For a
hundred years Robert Raikes has gathered his Sunday-schools all over
Christendom; and Abraham Lincoln's breath still breathes through
the life of the nation to which, under God, he gave a new birth of
freedom. The heart of a good man or a good woman never dies. Why, it
is infamy to die and not be missed. Live, immortal friend, live as
the brother of Jesus, live as a fellow workman with Christ in God's
work. Phillips Brooks once said to his people: "I exhort you to pray
for fulness of life--full red blood in the body, full and honest
truth in the mind, fulness of consecrated love to the dying Savior
in the heart."
III. In the next place, life is infinitely valuable, not only
from the dignity of its origin and the results and revenues it
may reach, but from the eternal consequences flowing from it. Ah,
this world, with its curtaining of light, its embroideries of the
heavens, and its carpeting of verdure, is a solemn vestibule to
eternity. My hearer, this world on which you exhibit your nature
this morning is the porch of heaven or the gateway of hell. Here
you may be laying up treasures through Christ and for Christ, to
make you a millionaire to all eternity. Here, by simply refusing
to hearken, by rejecting the cross, by grieving the Spirit, you
may kindle a flame that shall consume and give birth to a worm of
remorse that shall prey on your soul forever and ever. In this brief
twenty years, thirty, or forty, you must, without mistake, settle a
question, the decision of which shall lift you to the indescribable
heights of rapture or plunge you to the depths of darkness and
despair. I am a baby at the thought of the word "eternity"; I have
racked this brain of mine, in its poverty and its weakness, and
have not the faintest conception of it, any more than I have of the
omnipresence of Jehovah; yet one is as real as the other, and you
and I will go on in the continuation of an existence that outnumbers
the years as the Atlantic drops outnumber the drops of a brook; an
existence whose ages are more than the stars that twinkled last
night in the firmament--an existence interminable, yet all swinging
on the pivot of that life in that pew. It is overpowering.
How momentous, then, is life! How grand its possession! what
responsibility in its very breath! what a crime to waste it! what
a glory to consecrate it! what a magnificent outcome when it shall
shuffle off the coil, and break itself free from its entanglements,
and burst into the presence of its Giver, and rise into all the
transcendent glories of its life everlasting!
In view of that, what a solemn thing it is to preach God's word, and
to stand between the living and the dead! And in view of life, its
preciousness and power, its far-reaching rewards and punishments,
let me say here, in closing, that there are three or four practical
considerations that should be prest home upon us and carried out by
us:
1. The first practical thought is, how careful you and I ought to
be to husband it. The neglect of life is a sin; it is an insult to
God; it is tampering with the most precious trust He bestows. The
care of life is a religious duty. A great deal of your happiness
depends on it, and I can tell you, my Christian brother, a great
deal of your spiritual growth and capacity for usefulness depends
on the manner in which you treat this marvelous mechanism of the
body. Your religious life is affected by the condition of the body
in which the spirit tabernacles. It is not only lying lips, it is
"the wilful dyspeptic, that is an abomination to the Lord." Any one
that recklessly impairs, imperils and weakens bodily powers by bad
hours, unwholesome diet, poisonous stimulants or sensualities, is a
suicide; and there are some men, I am afraid, in this congregation
that yield themselves such unpitied bond-slaves to the claims of
business, that they are shortening life by years and impairing its
powers every day. Thousands of suicides are committed every year in
Brooklyn by a defiance of the simplest laws of self-preservation and
health. What shall we say of him who opens a haunt of temptation,
sets out his snares and deliberately deals out death by the dram? So
many pieces of silver for so many ounces of blood, and an immortal
soul tossed into the balance! If I could let one ray of eternity
shine into every dramshop, methinks I could frighten the poison
seller back from making his living at the mouth of the pit.
2. Again, in this view of the value of life, what a stupendous crime
wanton war becomes--offensive war, such war as multitudes have
dashed into from the lust of conquest or the greed of gold. When war
is to be welcomed, rather than a nation should commit suicide and
the hopes of men perish, then with prayers and self-consecration may
the patriot go out to the battle and the sacrifice; but offensive
war is a monster of hell. With all our admiration for Napoleon's
brilliant and unsurpassed genius, there are passages in his life
that make my blood sometimes tingle to the finger ends, and start
the involuntary hiss at the very thought of such a gigantic butcher
of his fellow creatures. If that man knew that a battery could be
carried only at the cost of a legion of men, he never hesitated to
order their sacrifice as lightly as he would the life of a gnat. I
read that, after what is called his splendid victory of Austerlitz
was over and the triumph was won and the iron crown of empire was
fixt on his brow, as he stood on the high ground he saw a portion
of the defeated Russians making a slow, painful retreat over a
frozen lake. They were in his power; he rode up to a battery, and
said, "Men you are losing time! fire on those masses; they must be
swallowed up! fire on that ice!" The order was executed. Shells
were thrown, and went crashing through the brittle bridge of ice,
and amid awful shrieks hundreds upon hundreds of poor wretches
were buried in the frozen waters of that lake. I believe the dying
shrieks of his fellow creatures will haunt the eternity of a man
who prostituted the most magnificent powers the Creator fashioned
in this our century of time to the awful work of shortening life,
tormenting his fellow creatures and sending a million unbidden
before God.
3. Once more I emphasize upon you, my beloved people, life, its
preciousness and power, its rewards and its retributions. And yet,
what a vapor, what a flight of an arrow, what a tale that is told!
Short, yet infinite in its reach and its retribution! When life is
represented as an arrow flight and a vapor, it is not that it may
be underrated in its infinite importance, but only that we may be
pushed up to the right sense of its brevity. Everything in God's
world ennobles humanity and exhibits life as earnest, solemn,
decisive, momentous. The highest ends are proposed to it while it
exists, the most magnificent rewards are held out at the termination
of its consecrated vitalities. At the end of it is the great white
throne, and the decisions of the judgment. Some of you, turning
from this discourse this morning, may say it was nothing but sacred
poetry because your life is only the steady, monotonous round of
a mill-horse--to-morrow across the ferry, home at night--through
its routine in the shop, in the counting-room, in the family, on
the Sabbath in church--and say, "I see nothing in my life that
thus sparkles or shines or has this sublime characteristic!" Ah,
my friend, grant that your life may be the mill-round of the
mill-horse; you turn a shaft that reaches through the wall into
eternity, and the humblest life in this house sets in motion
revolving wheels that shall at last grind out for God's garner the
precious grain, or else the worthless chaff of a wasted existence.
So again I say, life is the porch of eternity, the only one we
shall ever have; and you are to decide now whether it shall be the
uplift from strength to strength, from glory to glory, or the plunge
downward and still downward and deeper downward to darkness and
eternal death.
My friend, what sort of a life are you living? A really earnest,
humble consecration to God? Go on. Live, as I mean to do, as long as
God shall spare power and intellectual faculty to serve Him. Live
as long as you can, as largely as you can; and then carry all life's
accumulation and lay it down at the feet of Him whose heart broke
for you and me on the cross of Calvary, and say: "Master, here I am,
and the life Thou hast given me."
BROADUS
LET US HAVE PEACE WITH GOD
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John A. Broadus was born in Virginia in 1827. His preeminence
as a preacher was attained while he was chiefly occupied as
professor of New Testament Interpretation and Homiletics in the
Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville, Kentucky. (Originally
established at Greenville, South Carolina.) For many years Dr.
Broadus was regarded as the foremost preacher of the South, and
was in demand on many important public occasions for sermons and
addresses. It has been said that "the thought and the language
of his sermons lingered in the mind like strains of melodious
and inspiring music." The sermon here given is characteristic of
the earnest simplicity of his style, and of the theological and
philosophical bent of his homiletic methods. He died in 1895.
BROADUS
1827-1895
LET US HAVE PEACE WITH GOD[1]
[1] Reprinted by permission of A. C. Armstrong & Son, from "Sermons
and Addresses" by John A. Broadus. Copyright, 1886.
_Therefore being justified by faith, let us have peace with God,
through our Lord Jesus Christ._--Romans v., 1. (R. V.)
It is nearly four centuries ago now, that a young professor from
the north of Germany went to Rome. He was a man of considerable
learning and of versatile mind. Yet he did not go to Rome to survey
the remains of antiquity or the treasures of modern art. He went
to Rome because he was in trouble about his sins and could find no
peace. Having been educated to regard Rome as the center of the
Christian world, he thought he would go to the heart of things and
see what he could there find. He had reflected somewhat at home, and
had talked with other men more advanced than himself, on the thought
that the just shall live by faith; but still that thought had never
taken hold of him. We read--some of you remember the story quite
well--how one day, according to the strange ideas that prevailed and
still prevail at Rome, he went climbing up a stairway on his knees,
pausing to pray on every step, to see if that would not help him
about his sins. Then, as he climbed slowly up, he seemed to hear a
voice echoing down the stairway, "The just shall live by faith; the
just shall live by faith." And so he left alone his dead works, he
arose from his knees and went down the stairway to his home to think
about that great saying, "The just shall live by faith."
It is no wonder that with such an experience, and such a nature,
Martin Luther should have lived to shake the Christian world with
the thought that justification by faith is the great doctrine of
Christianity, "the article of a standing or a falling church." It
is no wonder that John Wesley, rising up with living earnestness
when England was covered with a pall of spiritual death, should have
revived the same thought--justification by faith.
Yet it is not true that the doctrine of justification by faith is
all of the gospel. It is true that the doctrine of justification
by faith is simply one of the several ways by which the gospel
takes hold of men. You do not hear anything of that doctrine in
the Epistles of John. He has another way of presenting the gospel
salvation, namely, that we must love Christ, and be like Him, and
obey Him. I think sometimes that Martin Luther made the world
somewhat one-sided by his doctrine of justification by faith; that
the great mass of the Protestant world are inclined to suppose there
is no other way of looking on the gospel. There are very likely some
here to-day who would be more imprest by John's way of presenting
the matter; but probably the majority would be more imprest by
Paul's way, and it is our business to present now this and now
that, to present first one side and then the other. So we have here
before us to-day Paul's great doctrine of justification by faith,
in perhaps one of his most striking statements. "Therefore, being
justified by faith, let us have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ."
My friends, we talk and hear about these gospel truths, and repeat
these Scripture words, and never stop to ask ourselves whether
we have a clear idea of what is meant. What does Paul mean when
he talks about being justified? There has been a great deal of
misapprehension as to his meaning. Martin Luther was all wrong in
his early life, because he had been reared up in the idea that a
justified man means simply a just man, a good man, and that he could
not account himself justified or hope for salvation until he was a
thoroughly good man. Now, the Latin word from which we borrow our
word "justified" does not mean to make just, and as the Romanists
use the Latin, their error is natural. But Paul's Greek word means
not to make just, but to regard as just, to treat as just. That is
a very important difference--not to make just, but to regard and
treat as just. How would God treat you, if you were a righteous
man; if you had, through all your life, faithfully performed all
your duties, conforming to all your relations to your fellow
beings--how would He regard and treat you? He would look upon you
with complacency. He would smile on you as one that was in His sight
pleasing. He would bless you as long as you lived in this world,
and, when you were done with this world, He would delight to take
you home to His bosom, in another world, because you would deserve
it.
And now as God would treat a man who was just because he deserved
it, so the gospel proposes to treat men who are not just and who
do not deserve it, if they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. He
will treat them as just, tho they are not just, if they believe in
Christ; that is to say, he will look upon them with His favor; He
will smile upon them in His love; He will bless them with every good
as long as they live, and when they die He will delight to take them
home to His own bosom, tho they never deserved it, through His Son,
Jesus Christ. That is what Paul means by justification. And when
Martin Luther found that out he found peace. This Epistle to the
Romans had always stopt his progress when reading the New Testament.
He would read, in the Latin version, "For therein is revealed the
justice of God," and he felt in his heart that God's justice must
condemn him. But now he came to see what was really meant by the
righteousness of God, the righteousness which God provides and
bestows on the believer in Jesus. A sinful man, an undeserving
man, may get God Almighty's forgiveness and favor and love, may be
regarded with complacency and delight, tho he does not deserve it,
if he believes in the Lord Jesus Christ. That is justification by
faith.
It is one thing to take hold of this matter in the way of doctrinal
conception and expression, and of course, God be thanked! it is
another thing to receive it in the heart. There are many people who
get hold of it all in the heart with trust and peace that never
have a correct conception of it as a doctrine. Yet I suppose it is
worth while that we should endeavor to see these things clearly.
Other things being equal, they will be the holiest and most useful
Christians who have the clearest perception of the great facts
and truths of the gospel. So I recommend to you that whenever any
one tries to explain to you one of these great doctrinal truths,
you shall listen with fixt attention and see if you can not get a
clearer view of the gospel teachings on that subject, for it will
do you good.
Now let us come to the second thought here, viz., being justified
by faith. A man might say, if God proposes to deal with those
who are not just, as if they were, why does He condition it upon
believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ? Why can not God proclaim
a universal amnesty at once, and be done with it, to all His
sinful, weak children, and treat them all as if they were just,
without their believing? I don't think this is hard to see. God
does not merely propose to deal with us for the time being as if
we were just, but He proposes in the end to make us actually just.
It would be an unsatisfactory salvation to a right-minded man if
God proposed merely to exempt us from the consequences of our sins
and not to deliver us from our sins. You do not want merely to
escape punishment for sin without ever becoming good; you want to
be righteous and holy, you want to be delivered from sin itself as
well as from the consequences of sin. And this gospel, which begins
by its proclamation that God is willing to treat men as just, altho
they are not just, does not stop there. It proposes to be the means
by which God will take hold of men's characters and make them just,
make them holy. You may, for the moment, conceive of such a thing as
that God should make a proclamation of universal amnesty, and treat
all men as if they were just; but that would not make them any
better. The gospel is not merely to deliver us from the consequence
of sin, but to deliver us from the power of sin. You can conceive
of an amnesty as to the consequence of sin, which should extend to
persons that will not even believe there is such an amnesty; but
you can not see how the gospel is to have any power in delivering
us from the dominion of sin, unless we believe the gospel. It can
do so only through belief. Therefore it is not possible that a man
should be justified without belief. I think it is useful that we
should thus try to see that this is not a matter of mere arbitrary
appointment on the part of the sovereign Power of the universe,
but that the condition is necessary--that it can not be otherwise.
"Being justified by faith," it reads; and we can not be justified
without faith, because the same gospel is also to take hold of us
and make us just.
And now, some one who feels a little freshened interest in this
subject, some man who has never got hold of the gospel faith, says
to himself: "I wonder if the preacher is going to explain to me
what believing is, what faith is. I never heard any one succeed in
explaining faith." Well, if you will pardon me, the best explanation
of faith I ever heard was given by a negro preacher in Virginia. As
the story was told me, one Sunday afternoon, a few years ago, some
negroes were lying on the ground together, and one of them spoke
and said, "Uncle Reuben, can you explain this: Faith in de Lord,
and faith in de debbil?" "To be sure I can. There is two things:
in de fust place, faith in de Lord, and then faith in de debbil.
Now, in the fust place, fustly, there is faith. What is faith? Why,
faith is jes faith. Faith ain't nothing less than faith. Faith ain't
nothing more than faith. Faith is jest faith--now I done splain it."
Really, that man was right, there is nothing to explain. Faith is
as simple a conception as the human mind can have. How, then, can
you explain faith? You are neither able to analyze it into parts,
nor can you find anything simpler with which to compare it. So also
as to some other things, that are perfectly easy and natural in
practical exercise, and can not be explained. What is love? Well,
I won't go into an elaborate metaphysical definition of love, but
if I wanted a child to love me, I should try to exhibit myself in
such a character to him and act in such ways that the little child
would see in me something to love, and would feel like loving.
There would then be no need of an explanation of what love is. Did
you ever hear a satisfactory definition of laughter? If you wanted
to make a man laugh, would you attempt to define laughter to him?
You might possibly succeed in making a laughable definition; but
otherwise definitions won't make a man laugh. You would simply say
or do something ludicrous, and he would laugh readily enough if he
was so disposed; and if the man be not in a mood for laughing, all
your explanations are utterly useless. And so what is faith? There
is nothing to explain. Everybody knows what faith is. If you want to
induce a man to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you must hold up
the Lord to him in His true character, and then, if he is in a mood
to believe, he will believe, and if he is disinclined to belief, all
your explanations will be fruitless. The practical result may even
be obstructed by attempts to explain. What is faith? You know what
faith is. Every one knows.
Well, then, a man might say, "If you mean by faith in the Lord the
simple idea of believing what the Scripture says concerning Him,
the idea of believing its teachings about the Lord Jesus Christ to
be true, if that is what faith means, then all of us are believers,
all have faith." I am afraid not. I am afraid there are some here
who have not faith. Has a man faith in the Lord Jesus Christ who
simply does not disbelieve in him? I may not deny that what the
gospel says is true, but is that believing? Yonder sits a gentleman;
suppose some one should come hastily up the aisle, calling his
name, and say, "Your house is afire." The gentleman sits perfectly
quiet and looks unconcerned, as people so often do when listening
to preaching. The man repeats it: "I say your house is afire."
But still he sits in his place. Some one near him says, "You hear
what that man says. Do you believe it?" "Yes, I believe it," he
carelessly replies, and does not stir. You would all say, "The man
is insane, or certainly he does not believe it; for if he did, he
would not sit perfectly still and remain perfectly unconcerned."
Even so when the preacher speaks of sin and guilt and ruin, of God's
wrath and the fire that is not quenched; or when he stands with
joyful face and proclaims to his hearers that for their sin and ruin
there is a Savior; and they say they believe, and yet look as if it
were of no concern to them at all; then I say they do not believe
it--the thing is not possible. They may not disbelieve it; they may
not care to make an attempt to overturn it; they may be in a sort of
negative mood; but they do not believe it.
With that statement I suppose there are a great many of us who
concur and who will at once say, "Often I fear that I do not really
believe it. If I did believe it, the gospel would have more power
over my heart and more power over my life than it does have. And
what, oh, what shall I do?" The preacher has to remind you of that
father to whom the Savior came when the disciples had tried in
vain to heal his suffering child. Jesus said to him: "All things
are possible to him that believeth;" and he replied: "I believe;
help thou my unbelief." That should be your cry: "I believe; help
thou my unbelief." The man would not deny that he believed, and yet
felt bound to add that he knew he did not believe as he ought to.
Now the comfort is, that He who sees all hearts accepted that man's
confessedly imperfect faith, and granted his request. That has often
been the preacher's comfort as he uttered the same cry, "I believe;
help thou my unbelief"; and God give it as a comfort to you! But
do not content yourself with such a state of things, with any such
feeble, half-way believing. Nay, let us cherish all that tends to
strengthen our faith in the gospel; let us read the Word of God,
praying that we may be able to believe; let us say from day to day,
as the disciples said: "Lord, increase our faith."
The text proceeds: "Therefore, being justified by faith, let us have
peace with God." Instead of the declaration, "We have peace with
God," the best authorities for the text make it an exhortation, "Let
us have peace with God"; and so the revised version reads. Some
critics admit that the documents require us so to read, but say that
they can see no propriety in an exhortation at this point--that it
seems much more appropriate to understand the apostle as asserting
a fact. Yet I think we can see meaning and fitness in the text as
corrected: "Being justified by faith, let us have peace with God."
Let us have peace with God, notwithstanding our unworthiness. My
friends, we can not have peace with God so long as we cling to
the notion that we are going to deserve it. Just there is the
difficulty with many of those who are trying to be at peace with
God. They have been clinging to the thought that they must first
become worthy, and then become reconciled to God; and they will have
to see more clearly that they must come to Christ in order that,
being reconciled, they may be made good, may become worthy. We may
say there are two conceivable ways to have peace with God. It is
conceivable to have peace with God through our worthiness, and it is
conceivable and also practicable to have peace with God through our
Lord Jesus Christ, tho we be unworthy. Then let us have peace with
Him, altho so unworthy, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Again, let us have peace with God, tho we are still sinful and
unholy, tho we know we come far short in character and in life of
what God's children ought to be. We must be, ought to be, intensely
dissatisfied with ourselves; but let us be satisfied with our
Savior, and have peace with God through Him; not content with the
idea of remaining such as we are, but, seeing that the same gospel
which offers us forgiveness and acceptance offers us also a genuine
renewal through our Lord Jesus Christ, and promises that finally we
shall be made holy, as God is holy, shall indeed be perfect, as our
Father in heaven is perfect. Let us rejoice in the gracious promise
of that perfect life, and, while seeking to be what we ought to
be, let us have peace with God. Our sanctification is still sadly
imperfect--the best of us well know that, and probably the best of
us feel it most deeply; but if we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,
our justification is perfect. We can never be more justified than
we are now justified, tho we shall be more and more made holy as
long as we live, and at last made perfectly holy as we pass into the
perfect world. My brethren, do think more and talk more of that. It
is an intensely practical matter, not only for your comfort but for
the strength of your life. If we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,
altho we are painfully conscious that we are far from being in
character and life what we ought to be, yet, through the perfect
justification which we have at once, we shall in the end by His
grace be made perfectly holy.
Let us have peace with God, tho we have perpetual conflict with
sin. What a singular idea! Peace with God, and yet conflict, yes,
perpetual conflict, with a thousand forms of temptation to sin,
temptations springing from spiritual tempters--perpetual conflict,
and yet peace with God. Is not that conceivable? Is not that
possible? In this conflict we are on the Lord's side; in this
conflict the Lord is on our side; and so, tho the battle must be
waged against every form of sin, we may have peace with God.
And finally, let us have peace with God tho He leaves us to suffer
a thousand forms of distress and trial. "Let us have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom also we have had access by
faith into this grace wherein we stand; and let us rejoice in hope
of the glory of God. And not only so, but let us also rejoice in
our tribulations; knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and
patience, proving; and proving, hope; and hope maketh not ashamed,
because the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts through
the Holy Ghost which was given unto us." Surely man may have peace
with God, tho he be left to suffer. For none of these things can
separate us from God's love. Who shall separate us from Christ's
love? "For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, neither
angels nor principalities nor powers, neither things present nor
things to come, neither height nor depth, nor any other creature,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord." When we are in trouble, let us take fast hold upon
that great thought, that trouble does not divide us from the love
of God. Yea, God's peace can conquer trouble, and guard us, as in
a fortress, against its assaults. "In nothing be anxious; but in
everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your
requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth
all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in
Christ Jesus."
WILBERFORCE
THE MOTHER CHURCH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Ernest Roland Wilberforce, son of Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of
Winchester, was born in 1840, and educated at Harrow and Oxford. He
was appointed bishop of Newcastle in 1882, and thence translated to
Chichester in 1895.
WILBERFORCE
Born in 1840
THE MOTHER CHURCH[2]
[2] From "The Anglican Pulpit." Reprinted by permission of the
publishers, Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton.
_Take up thy son._--2 Kings iv., 36.
There is a metallic sound about most missionary sermons which
seems, at least to some, instinctively to harden the hearts and to
invalidate the sympathies of the listeners. The jingle of the coming
collection appears to be inextricably mixed up with the solemn
truths and heartfelt appeals that flow so often from the preacher's
lips, and we feel that at least we would rather separate the two by
as wide a chasm of intervening time as may be possible consistently
with the well-known cooling tendencies of all human emotions. I have
no reason to think that this sermon will prove itself to be in any
real sense an exception to this general rule, and yet, my brethren,
I seek, as God may now enable me, to remind you very briefly of
some of the deeper principles that underlie all missionary success,
believing as I do that these are possest of a peculiar power of
eliciting enduring support, since they flow from the bosom of the
Godhead itself.
"Take up thy son." God alone, it has been said, who Himself created
it, can fully understand the infinite pathos of human nature.
Certain it is that beneath the inspired record the histories of
men and women of old begin to sparkle and to burn as, endowed with
life and personality, they act anew their histories before us as we
sympathize with their mistakes, wonder at their endurance, admire
them for the traits of humanity they display, and feel drawn toward
them by the attractive power of their love; we feel that we can be
no longer really solitary here below, that, however tiresome may be
our lot, we have friends who speak from those old records, friends
who link yet living hands the closer round our hearts as we see much
of our own life-history faithfully anticipated in theirs, and learn
to read the solution of many of the struggles of the present in the
difficulties of the past. "Take up thy son." From that old chamber,
built originally to form a sanctuary for the honored servant of his
God, where now the corpse of the only child of the household is
lying, there seems to me to speak a voice of prophecy with regard to
God's dealings with humanity at large.
It was a time of overshadowing and of darkness in that Eastern
household. The death of her son, marvelously given in her husband's
old age, had left the mother's heart a thousand times more aching,
crusht, and weary than before. Instinctively that heart reaches
out toward the man of God. The mother's feet are turned to Carmel.
She will accept no substitute; no wand of office, no symbol of
authority will satisfy the eager cravings of her love. Drawn by
the cords of that great, all-constraining power, at length the
prophet stands within the darkened room, and through the personal
contact of the prophet with the dead, the power of God revives
the corpse. So both in the distance and within the darkened room,
while anxious, expectant hearts keep watch below, do Elisha's
actions typify the deeds of One Who within a thousand years will
walk the streets and lanes of Eastern towns, and will be known by
loving hearts throughout the countryside. Humanity had died by sin
throughout all the bygone ages; the symbols of authority from the
Carmel of God's presence had been reached down to men upon the
Fall. On human nature, wrapt in the fell sleep of sin, the wand of
office had been used, but there had been no bringing back to life.
Messenger after messenger had come, men who had communed with their
God, as undoubtedly as Gehazi had left the presence of Elisha to
go that day to Shunem; but there was neither voice nor hearing,
and sorrowfully still each servant witnessed in succession to his
mission: "The child is not awaked." Ah, who, my brethren, should
venture to guess, still less to dogmatize, how prayer might be said
to quicken the accomplishment of the counsels of the triune God? Yet
had prayer no part in the plan of the Incarnation? If the love of
the Shunammite mother compelled the presence of the prophet, could
then one of the greatest moral forces known within the universe
be purposely excluded from the great work of man's redemption by
the God Who has caused it to be recorded of Himself, "Thou nearest
prayer?" Could fervent prayer and mighty intercession that rolled
upward from the breasts of so long a line of kings, and patriarchs,
and prophets, and so many a lonely and unnoticed spot amid the hills
and valleys of Judah, where Baal found seven thousand knees that
were recalcitrant to his false and bloody worship, even when the
great Elijah believed himself to be alone in the one worship of the
true God of Israel; could the longings of the hearts that desired
to behold the things that after-generations saw, could the cry of
the souls from under the altar, "Oh, Lord, how long?" could, I ask,
all these be fruitless and in vain? Or had each its own due place
at least in hastening the coming of the kingdom, and in determining
when the fulness of time had arrived?
This, at least, is sure. Constrained by the laws of an imperious
love, God gave Himself to bring what all His messengers had failed
to convey. Clothed in that very flesh which once by sin had died,
Christ stood in personal relations to mankind, His hand in theirs,
His eyes to their eyes, His mouth to their mouth; and lo! beneath
His personal contact there began to glow again the warmth of
pristine life which once had burned in Eden, when God and man held
free and undiverted commerce. And then Christ filled up full with
all its spiritual meaning that final action of the Syrian prophet
which had seemed to be so simple and so natural. For, ere He left
the arena where He had proved Himself to be the Conqueror of death,
Christ called forth the Church which He had formed, and He bade
it tend the life which He had reimplanted in the hearts of men,
accompanying the mighty commission with a plenary promise of abiding
power: "Shepherd my sheep; feed my lambs: lo, I am with you alway,
even unto the end of the world." Uniformity of action in every
position, mechanical exactness in every class of work, whether you
evangelize under frozen climes or torrid zones, whether you preach
to polished Eastern intellects or instruct the degraded savage, is
neither to be expected nor yet to be desired. The religion that
becomes mechanical always stops itself. But within the lines of her
commission the Church of God is bound to show in practise that she
can touch all hearts, enlist all sympathies, influence all lives,
gather up into her ample bosom all whom the Master loves; just
as a mother folds to her heart the entire members of her family,
irrespective of their diversity of tastes, habits, and mode of life,
nay, even in spite of their failings, and often of their sins,
and beneath the loving sympathy of that loving embrace all know
instinctively that they have each their own peculiar place within
the many mansions of the widely loving heart.
We are living in an age of development. Within old bottles it is
certain new wine is beginning to ferment, and elemental forces
gather for the strife. Life implies assimilation; assimilation means
union of powers, or new energies rising out of such combinations. In
early days the Church of Christ assimilated the life, the teachings,
the powers around her, casting out the false, ennobling the true;
and she became the living force to which the history of the world
bears testimony. And what does all this teach us? Even that as a
mother adapts herself to the varying characters displayed by her
children in her wise government of the family, so must the Church of
England in all her work take up her son into her bosom, teaching the
good and enforcing the true, yet adapting her methods to win wisely,
to win surely, to establish a lasting yet a spiritual dominion.
Here there is a real danger, one all the more real because
speciously veiled from our sight; philanthropy is busy around us--so
much so that now it is almost a reproach not to be the instigator of
half a dozen schemes for the elevation of this class or that people,
or of some other country. But is not this far too often accompanied
by a revolt from all dogmatic truth? Are not many of these schemes
simply social and not religious, and, therefore, at best, temporary
rather than eternal in their aims, since they are founded upon man,
and not upon God?
Religious feeling, I fear, is dying. The past acquirements of man
are ever laughed to scorn by the succeeding generation. These are
not to be the standard to which all is to be referred. Utilitarian
principles and emotional subjectivity seem now to go hand in hand;
and the old formula, "Thus saith the Lord," is to be a formula no
more amid the forces of the world; religious feeling, I say, I fear,
is ebbing away, and with it goes infallibly all real missionary
enterprise. These are inseparably linked. If it be true, as it is,
that the spiritual life of a nation, a parish, or an individual
be in danger of languishing unto death unless there be in it some
manifestation of missionary zeal, so also is it true that unless
there be some more powerful lever at work than mere desire for
social reformation, unless God be the end and the object of life,
then no one will continue to spread God's teaching, or to carry far
and wide the good news of the Son of man.
The first human mother came from out of the side of Adam at the
call of God; our great spiritual mother came from the side of
Christ our Lord. Oh, my brethren, we have so much to thank God for;
so much that bids us now take courage, so much that ennobles our
aims and helps to strengthen our objects. From all parts of the
world, wherever the energy of Englishmen has penetrated, there now
is coming the cry in gathering tones, "Take up thy son." Hearts
are asking for the priceless boon of the gospel to be preached
to them. Heathen tribes are looking wistfully across the waste
of intervening waters, and rich England, rich in her transmitted
treasure of dogmatic truth and revealed faith, rich in her dower of
sons as well as in her possession of silver and gold, is giving as
yet an insufficient answer, and has not as yet fully embraced her
son. How long shall there be this suspense, as that of early dawn
ere the sunshine fills the twilight? Let there be but more true
love and warmth in the mother's heart, let there be, that is, a
revival of spiritual life at home, and once more shall it be said,
"Great was the company of preachers," as in the iron-clad armor of
chastity, temperance, and righteousness, men go forth to work and
win for Christ. Have ye each made this yet sufficiently a matter
of prayer, of self-denial, of deep, faithful trusting all to God?
My brothers, in the kingdom and patience of our God already clarion
notes are sounding out around us, and signs are but repeating notes
of warning. Messages of deep importance seem to tremble in the air,
forces to be gathering for some greater conflict than has been ever
known before. Community of work is producing unity in thought; hands
are clasping now that have been kept asunder far too long. The earth
is being girdled gradually with spiritual fortresses, whence is
flashed on and ever on the golden light till Christ shall come again
and claim His bride. Can we then wonder at all forms of opposition
meeting us? But gathering gradually is the mighty family which in
the day of revelation shall call God their Father. Some time will
the fellow soldiers know one another; some day shall the long muster
roll be called. Then will the Captain of our salvation gather all
His children round Him. Is it long to wait, hard to fight, difficult
to keep up the spirit during the discouragements that beset all
missionary life? Do they wear too dark a hue at times? Lo, the words
of Revelation are now finding echo in the pages of science, and in
unison these voices blend. Beneath us even now this solid orb begins
to know fatigue and to slacken in its course. Remarkable words
lately written are these: "Even now as the earth circles on in her
appointed orbit, the northern ice-cap slowly thickens, and the time
gradually approaches when its glaciers will flow again, and austral
seas, sweeping northward, bury the seeds of present civilization
under ocean wastes, as it may be they now bury what once was as
high a civilization as our own. And beyond these periods science
discovers a dead earth, an exhausted sun, a time when, clashing
together, the solar system shall resolve itself into a gaseous form,
again to begin immeasurable mutations." What Revelation has loudly
declared, that science is now at length beginning to understand.
From both, I say, the voices call; they blend into a trumpet warning
mellowed with unutterable pathos: "Work while it is day; take up thy
son."
SPALDING
EDUCATION AND THE FUTURE OF RELIGION
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John Lancaster Spalding, Roman Catholic bishop and author, was
born in Lebanon, Kentucky, in 1840. He was educated at Mount St.
Mary's College, and at the University of Louvain, Belgium. Ordained
a priest in 1863, he was six years later chosen as secretary and
chancellor of the diocese of Louisville. In 1877 he was appointed
to similar offices in the diocese of Peoria. He is a typical modern
bishop, of the Cardinal Manning type, and the activity which he
displayed in recent social and educational movements was recognized
by his appointment to serve on the President's commission to
investigate strikes, in 1902. The trend of his literary work may
be seen in his volumes on "Education and the Higher Life" (1890);
"Socialism and Labor" (1902); "Religion, Agnosticism and Education"
(1902).
SPALDING
Born in 1840
EDUCATION AND THE FUTURE OF RELIGION[3]
[3] Reprinted by permission of Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Co., from
Bishop Spalding's "Religion, Agnosticism and Education."
_It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing;
the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit and are
life._--John vi., 63.
The greatest service we can do a human being is to give him a right
education, physical, intellectual, moral and religious. If it is
our duty to do good to all; as far as in us lies, it is our duty
to labor for the education of all, that no child of God may live
with an enfeebled body, or a darkened mind, or a callous heart,
or a perverted conscience. Since it is our duty to educate, it is
our duty to give the best education; and, first of all, to give
the best education to woman; for she, as mother, is the aboriginal
God-appointed educator. What hope is there of genuine progress, in
the religious life especially, if we leave her uneducated? Where
woman is ignorant, man is coarse and sensual; where her religion is
but a superstition, he is skeptical and irreverent.
If we are to have a race of enlightened, noble and brave men, we
must give to woman the best education it is possible for her to
receive. She has the same right as man to become all that she may
be, to know whatever may be known, to do whatever is fair and just
and good. In souls there is no sex. If we leave half the race in
ignorance, how shall we hope to lift the other half into the light
of truth and love? Let woman's mental power increase, let her
influence grow, and more and more she will stand by the side of man
as a helper in all his struggles to make the will of God prevail.
From the time the virgin mother held the infant Savior in her arms
to this hour, woman has been the great lover of Christ and the
unwearying helper of His little ones; and the more we strengthen
and illumine her, the more we add to her sublime faith and devotion
the power of knowledge and culture, the more efficaciously will she
work to purify life, to make justice, temperance, chastity, and
love prevail. She is more unselfish, more capable of enthusiasm for
spiritual ends, she has more sympathy with what is beautiful, noble
and godlike than man; and the more her knowledge increases, the more
shall she become a heavenly force to spread God's kingdom on earth.
Doubtless our failure to win the hearts of all men is due in no
slight degree to our indifference to the education of woman.
The Church, in virtue of its divine institution, has the supreme and
absolute right to teach Christian truth and thereby to influence
all education. To her alone Christ gave the commission to teach
whatsoever He had revealed and commanded; and none who believe that
He speaks the words of the eternal Father may refuse to hearken to
the voice of His historic Church uttering the things that appertain
to religion and salvation. Christ did not send His apostles to teach
all knowledge, but to teach His religion; to teach the worship of
God in spirit and in truth, in lowliness of mind and purity of
heart, as men who hunger and thirst for righteousness. In all that
concerns the religious life the Church has the office of Christ,
represents Him and speaks with His authority; and to enable her
to do this with infallible certainty, the Holy Ghost was sent and
abides with her. But Christ did not teach literature, philosophy,
history, or science; and consequently He did not establish His
Church to teach these things. He founded a Church, not an academy.
_Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum._
He left natural knowledge where he found it; left it to grow by
accretion and development, through the activity of special minds
and races, with the process of the ages. He bade His apostles teach
whatsoever things He had commanded them--the doctrines of salvation
and the principles of Christian living. These things He came to
reveal; these He lived and died to plant in the minds and hearts of
men as seeds of immortal life. God doubtless might have made known
from the beginning all the truths of science; but this was not part
of the divine economy. For thousands of years the race was left to
make its way amid the darkness of universal ignorance; and when
here and there a ray of light fell from some mind of genius, it
seemed quickly to be extinguished amid the general obscurity. The
philosophy and the science of Plato and Aristotle had been in the
world for three centuries when Christ came, but He made no allusion
whatever to them. He neither praised nor blamed these great masters
of all who know. Those whom He denounced were not the teachers of
wisdom, but the formalists, who, holding rigidly to the letter of
the law, and adding observance to observance and rule to rule, had
lost the spirit of religion, had apostatized from the infinite love,
which is God.
Christ came to bring immortal faith and hope and love to man. He
uttered no word which might lead us to suppose that He considered
literature or philosophy or history or science as an obstacle to the
worship of God in spirit and in truth. He denounces greed and lust
and indifference and heartlessness; but He does not warn against
the desire to know, the desire to upbuild one's being on every
side, to become more and more like unto God in power, in wisdom,
in goodness, and in beauty. He lays the stress of His example and
teaching upon religion, upon eternal things. He tells us that we can
not serve God and Mammon, but He does not say that faith and reason
conflict. We are human because God is present in the soul; we have
reason because the divine light shines within us--the light which
enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world. There can be no
real contradiction between God and His universe, between nature and
the supernatural, between faith and knowledge. On the contrary, the
universe is the manifestation of God's wisdom, goodness and power.
Nature and the supernatural both come from Him; and in wider and
deeper knowledge, we shall find a foundation for a mightier and more
spiritual faith in the eternal Father and His divine Son. Truth can
not contradict truth; for truth is true because it is enrooted in
God, who is absolute truth and at one with Himself. Things are what
they are, and God has given us reason, that we may see them as they
are. The false can never be proven to be true, and the Author of
truth can not teach error or give grace to believe error. All truth
is orthodox, whether it come to us through revelation, reaffirmed by
the voice of the Church, or whether it come in the form of certain
and scientific knowledge. Both the Church and the men of science
must accept the validity of reason, and must therefore hold that
reason can not contradict itself. Knowledge and faith both do God's
work, both help to build man's being into ever-increasing likeness
to Him. Let us not emphasize the opposition between the temporal and
the eternal. God is even here, and even now we are immortal; and
whatever helps us to do His will by serving more effectively our
fellow men, is sacred and of priceless worth. The giving of a cup of
water in the right spirit is divine service; and so is the patient
research which leads to a knowledge of the causes of suffering and
disease, and thereby enables us to shut out pestilence or to make
uninhabitable regions wholesome.
How infinitely difficult it is to preach the gospel effectively to
those who live in ignorance and poverty as in the shadow of the
darkness of death! All who have striven and who strive to educate
the whole people, to bring opportunity of a freer and more human
life to all, have been and are, whether intentionally or not,
workers in the cause of Christ for the salvation of men.
With what misgiving Catholics and Protestants regarded scientific
astronomy when it first began to gain acceptance! And yet what has
it done but make known to us a universe infinitely more wonderful
and sublime than men had ever dreamed of? So it is with all
advancing knowledge. In widening our view of God's work, it gives
us a more exalted conception of His absolute perfection; and at the
same time it puts into our hands more efficient means of working
for the good of man. A truly catholic spirit deems nothing that
may be of service to man foreign to the will of God, as revealed
in Christ. We hold fast to the principle of authority; and at the
same time we believe that man's mind is free, and that he has the
right to inquire into and learn whatever may be investigated and
known. If the Church is to live and prosper in the modern world,
Catholics must have not only freedom to learn, but also freedom to
teach. The spirit is not a mechanism, and when it is made subject to
mechanical rules and methods it loses self-activity, becomes dwarfed
and formal, and little by little sinks into impotence. A servile
mind can never know the truth which liberates. Christ did not found
His Church to solve philosophic, scientific, or historic problems.
These have been left to human research; but Catholics, if they hope
to present effectively their supernatural beliefs to an age of
civilization and culture, must not neglect the chief means by which
the mind is made strong, supple, and luminous. Our men of ability,
whether priests or laymen, must be encouraged to put to good use the
talents with which the Creator has entrusted them; and to prepare
them for this all-important work we must leave nothing undone to
provide them with schools equal to the best. If we isolate ourselves
and fall out of the highest intellectual and moral life of the world
around us, we shall fatally drift into a position of inferiority,
and lose the power to make ourselves heard and understood. If in
the early centuries of Christianity the Church was able to take to
itself what was true and good in pagan philosophy and culture; if
St. Augustine and St. Thomas of Aquino knew how to compel Plato
and Aristotle to become helpers in the cause of Christ, why should
we lose heart and imagine that the Church has lost the faculty of
assimilation? She is old, indeed, but she is also young, having
the promise of immortal life; and therefore she can never lack the
power to adapt herself to the requirements of an ever-revolving
environment.
Since Christ has made the success of His religion largely dependent
on human effort, not annuling nature by grace, but heightening
rather the play of free-will, we must know how to make use of our
best and strongest men; for an institution which can not make use of
its best and strongest men is decadent. What is there to fear? Is
it conceivable that human error shall prevail against God's truth?
Does the religion of Christ, the absolute and abiding faith, need
the defense of concealment, or of sophistical apology, or of lies?
Truth is the supreme good of the mind, as holiness is that of the
heart; and truthfulness is the foundation of righteousness. The most
certain result of the philosophic thought of the last hundred years
is that the primal cause and final end of all things is spiritual,
not mechanical or material. If only we go deep enough, we never fail
to find God and the soul. Shall we dread the results of historical
research? In the Church, as in the world, good has been mingled with
evil--the cockle with the wheat. What God has permitted to happen,
man may be permitted to know; and if we are wise, we may glean, even
from the least promising fields, fruits which shall nourish in us a
higher wisdom and a nobler courage. A righteous cause can never be
truly served either by the timid or the insincere. And what is true
of the history of the Church, is true also of the history of the
Bible. No facts connected with its composition can obscure the light
of God's word which shines forever in its pages, to illumine the
path that leads to a higher and more perfect life, and in the end to
everlasting life.
Opinion rules men, and opinion is nourished by beliefs, and beliefs
are created and sustained by ideas. If we permit ourselves to
fall out of the intellectual movement of the age, we shall lose
influence over the minds that create opinion and shape the future.
"One man of science," says von Hertling, "who works with success
in the fields of research, whose name is written on the page of
history in far-gleaming characters, and who at the same time leads
the life of a true son of the Church, outweighs whole volumes of
apologetics." The truths of salvation are doubtless infinitely more
important than the truths of science; but this natural knowledge
so attracts the attention and awakens the interest of the men of
to-day, it so transforms and improves the methods and processes
by which civilization is promoted, that it has created a new
world-view, not only in the minds of the few profound thinkers and
original investigators, but in the general public of intelligent
men and women; and if our words are to awaken a response, we must
be able to place ourselves at the standpoint of our hearers. The
theologian, the apologist, the orator must be able to say to the
children of this generation: "We see all that you see, and beyond we
see yet diviner truth." Arguments and syllogisms have little power
of persuasion. We win men by showing them the facts of life; and to
do this we must be able to look at things from many points. This
ability is precisely what the best education confers; for it renders
the mind open, luminous, fair, supple, and many sided.
To live in the mind, to strive ceaselessly to learn more of the
infinite truth, is not easy for any one. It requires a discipline,
a courage, a spirit of self-denial, which only the fewest ever
acquire; and when men of this strength and excellence devote
themselves to the elucidation and defense of the doctrines of
religion, we must honor and trust them, or they will lose heart
or turn to studies in which their labors will be appreciated. If
mistrust of our ablest minds be permitted to exist, the inevitable
result will be a lowering of the whole intellectual life of
Catholics, and as a consequence a lowering of their moral and
religious life. If we have no great masters, how shall we hope to
have eager and loving disciples? If we have no men who write vital
books--books of power, books which are literature and endure--how
shall we expect to enter along an inner line into the higher life
of the age, to quicken, purify, and exalt the hopes and thoughts
of men? Is the Bible itself written with the rigid exactness of
a mathematical treatise? Is it not rather a book of life, of
literature, full of symbols and metaphors and poetry? What book
has been so misunderstood, and misinterpreted, even by honest and
enlightened minds, even by theologians themselves?
Since the inspired writers may thus easily be misunderstood, may we
not conclude that it is our duty to treat with good will and loving
kindness authors who, not being supernaturally assisted, employ
the talents which God has given them, and which their own tireless
industry has cultivated to the highest point, to clothe the old
truths with the light of the wider and more real knowledge of the
universe and of human history, which the modern mind possesses? The
new times demand new men; the ancient faith, if it is to be held
vitally, must be commended with fresh vigor and defended with all
the arguments which the best philosophy, science, and literature
may suggest. Christ came to cast fire on earth, and what does He
desire but that it be kindled? _Currit verbum Dei_, says St. Paul;
and again: "Wo is me if I do not preach." He is debtor to all men.
On Mars Hill he speaks to the most enlightened minds of his day. He
is a reasoner as well as a preacher. He places the lines of a Greek
poet among his own inspired words. To this intellectual, moral,
and religious activity, heightened and intensified by supernatural
faith, we owe the spread of Christianity throughout the Gentile
world, more than to the zeal and labors of all the apostles. Is
it credible that if St. Thomas of Aquino were now alive he would
content himself with the philosophy and science of Aristotle,
who knows nothing either of creation or of providence, and whose
knowledge of nature, compared with our own, is as that of a child?
St. Ignatius of Loyola says that to occupy oneself with science, in
a pure and religious spirit, is more pleasing to God than practises
of penance, because it is more completely the work of the whole man.
Is not theology, like the other sciences, bound to accept facts? To
deny a fact is to stultify oneself. But how shall we know what is,
if we are ignorant of the world-wide efforts of men of learning and
intellectual power to get at the facts of the universe? The supreme
fact is life; and only that is true, in the best sense of the word,
which is favorable to life, to its growth, its joy, its strength,
its freedom, its permanence. Whatever dwarfs, whatever arrests,
whatever weakens life, is evil.
The great purpose of genuine education is not to store the memory
or to accustom to observances, but to strengthen man with his own
mind, to rouse him to higher self-activity, to vivify him, to give
him fresh faith, hope, and courage, to deepen the foundations of his
being, to cultivate his faculties, to give him a firmer grasp of
truth and a clearer view of things as they are. Whatever narrows,
whatever hardens, whatever enslaves is foreign to the purpose of
education. We should dread nothing so much as what undermines
spiritual energy; for unless man's highest powers are stimulated
and kept active, he falls into sensual indulgence, or becomes the
victim of a weak and skeptical temper, no longer able to believe
anything, or to hope for anything, or to love anything with all
his heart. This is the temper of decadent races, of perishing
civilizations, and of dying religions. Losing the power to believe
with vital faith in God and in the soul, men cling to the fantom
life of cheap and vulgar pleasures. They seek gold and position;
they trust to mechanical devices, to political schemes; they worship
the rising sun; their truth is what is popular, their good is what
makes for present success. Having no firm hold of the eternal and
infinite, they believe in human cunning, not in the might of divine
truth. They forget that all truth is orthodox, and that behind all
truth stand the veracity and the power of God, who makes Himself
known in the laws of science, as in the majesty of the everlasting
mountains and the starlit heavens. As a kind word spoken for the
love of God and man becomes religious, so a right spirit consecrates
human action in whatever sphere. "Whoever utters truth," says St.
Augustine, "utters it by the aid of him who is truth itself." A
devout and illumined spirit sees all things bound together in
harmony and beauty about the feet of the eternal Father. Knowledge
confirms faith, and faith impels to knowledge. Religion nourishes
morality, and morality strengthens and purifies religion. Art,
in reflecting some feeble rays of the infinite splendor, opens
vistas of the diviner life. Science in showing that order reigns
everywhere, even in the midst of seeming discord, that all things
are subject to law, gives us a clearer perception of God's infinite
wisdom and power. Material progress itself in making earthly things
subject to human knowledge and skill, fulfils the will of the
Creator who made all things for man.
Thus science and art and progress all conspire with religion to
upbuild man's being and to mold him into ever-increasing likeness
to God. It is in religion, however, that the conquering might of
the spirit is best revealed, and this of itself is sufficient to
give it supremacy. It is not merely a world-view, a creed, and a
worship; but an original and historic manifestation in human life
of the primal power, which transforms and liberates. It is the
breaking through of the inner source of being, of God, who reveals
Himself to the lowly minded and the pure of heart, as the beginning
and end of all that exists; as the one eternal Absolute, in whom
and by whom and for whom all things are. The soul that is conscious
that religion rests upon this everlasting foundation is not troubled
by misgivings as to its truth or usefulness. It is God present in
the innermost part of our being; it is Christ working with the
almighty Father to redeem man from subjection to the transitory and
apparent, from the lust of the flesh, from greed for what ministers
to the senses alone. Thus it is an independent world, a kingdom in
itself, able to endure and to remain the same in the midst of an
order of things that is forever changing and passing away. Whatever
alteration may occur in the views of the intellectual, whatever
decay or transformation of political and social institutions may
take place, religion, the Catholic religion of Christ, shall abide,
still endowed, after the lapse of however many ages, with its
original freshness and vigor.
There was never yet genuine thinker, or poet, or artist whose work
may not be brought, if we are strong and clear-sighted enough,
to contribute to the cause of pure religion. The theologian, the
preacher, and the apologist who are ignorant of the best that has
been thought and said by the makers of the world's literature, can
not have the culture, the intellectual vigor, the openness and
pliability of mind, without which, short of miracle, it is not
possible rightly to commend divine truth to an enlightened age.
They whose vocation it is to be public teachers, to mold opinion,
and to direct thought, must have more knowledge, a wider outlook,
a firmer grasp of spiritual realities than those whom they seek to
enlighten and guide. The deepest truth seems shallow when uttered by
the frivolous; the holiest things seem to lose half their sacredness
when they are entrusted to the coarse and ignorant. It is not
enough that the minister of religion have a pure and loving heart,
and strong and disciplined mind: he must also have the breeding
and culture of a gentleman. Manners are not idle; they spring from
inner worth; they are the flower of high thinking and plain living.
Christ, it has been said, was the world's first gentleman, and
they who live and act in His spirit must be gentlemen. If we build
majestic temples, if we construct our altars of costly marbles,
if our sacred vessels and priestly vestments are made of gold and
silk and studded with precious stones, why shall not they who offer
sacrifice and who preach the gospel be required to be clean and
decorous, fair and gracious? If it is vanity to speak with ease and
elegance, to pronounce with correctness and distinctness, to read
with right intonation and emphasis, then must we not say that it is
vanity also to erect gorgeous edifices wherein to worship God, who,
as St. Paul says, may not be shut in houses made by human hands?
If the priest is to be educated at all, he must receive the most
thorough and complete education. He must trust wholly to grace,
or he must spare no pains whereby endowment may be developed into
faculty.
The young, who are the hope of the future, can be won and held only
by the highest ideals, in the light of which they may thrill with
hope and feel that it is a blest thing to be alive and active, to
fight the good fight and, if need be, to perish in a worthy cause.
To speak to them with contempt of what the nineteenth century has
done, of its science and literature, of its truer knowledge of the
past, its keener critical sense, its amazing progress in carrying
out the divine command that all things be made subject to man, of
the success with which it has battled against ignorance, poverty,
and disease, would be to fill them with contempt for ourselves, as
being men without understanding and without heart. We must indeed
warn against pride and conceit and halfness and dilettanteism,
against irreverence and knowingness; but it were a fatal mistake to
imagine that we can do aught but harm by seeking to inspire them
with a distrust of science and culture, or with a dread of the
influence of such things on religious faith. We of all men should be
able to walk with confidence in the paths of knowledge. Since we are
glad to receive money and to have the favor of men in high places to
assist us in our spiritual work, how shall we be willing to lack the
help of thoroughly disciplined and enlightened minds, to lack the
power of thought which is the most irresistible force God has given
to man? If we look upon theology as merely a system of crystallized
formulas, as a science which need take no cognizance of the general
culture of the age, content with presenting the old truths in
the old way, as merely a larger catechism, with a more detailed
exposition of definitions and refutations, we deprive it of power
to influence men who are all alive with thoughts urgent as the
growth of wings; who in the midst of problems which the new sciences
raise and accentuate, have grown confused and begin to doubt whether
human life shall not be emptied of its spiritual content. All
knowledges are related, as all bodies attract and help to hold one
another in place; and if we hope to commend and enforce revealed
truth with efficacious power, we must be prepared to do so in the
full blaze of the light which research and discovery have poured
upon nature and the history of man. If, in consequence, we find it
necessary to abandon positions which are no longer defensible, to
assume new attitudes in the face of new conditions, we must remember
that tho the Church is a divine institution, it is none the less
subject to the law which makes human things mutable, that tho truth
must remain the same, it is capable of receiving fresh illustration,
and that if it is to be life-giving, it must be wrought anew into
the constitution of each individual and of each age.
Is it possible to look on the great, eager, yearning, doubting,
and suffering life of man, and not to feel infinite desire to be
of help? Can we believe in our inmost being that we have the words
of eternal life, and not be roused as by a voice from heaven from
our indifference and somnolence, from our easy contentment with
formal education and half knowledge? We do not need new devotions
and new shrines, but a new spirit, newness of life, a revivification
of faith, hope and love, fresh courage and will to lay hold on the
sources of power, that we may compel all knowledge and science to
do homage to Christ, and to serve in the noblest way all God's
children. We must be resolved to labor to see not only things as
they are, but ourselves, too, as we are. Where self-criticism is
lacking, whether in individuals or in social aggregates, decay
and degeneracy inevitably set in. If there are true and wholesome
developments of life and doctrine, there is also a false and morbid
evolution, against which we must be ever watchful. Ceaseless
vigilance is not the price of liberty alone, it is the price we must
pay for all spiritual good; and how shall we be ever vigilant if we
are forbidden to criticize ourselves and the environment by which
our life is nourished and protected. As walking is a continuous
falling and rising, so all progress is an upward movement through
error and failure toward truth and victory. As the decay of races,
the ruin of civilizations, the downfall of states are seen in the
end to be helpful to the progress of mankind, since they do not
perish, wholly, but contribute something of their vital substance
to those that follow; so the history of human thought shows that
while systems rise and pass away, even the errors of sincere and
original minds, associated as they are with truth, aid in some way
the general advancement of knowledge and culture. All things work
together for those who love God. Action may not be dissociated
from thought, nor thought from action. Doubt is overcome, not by
abstracting and arguing, but by doing the thing which is given us to
do. The intellect is not the center and soul of life; and knowing
is not the whole of being. Faith is not a conclusion from a line
of reasoning. We can not bind our destiny to the conquests of the
mind. We have power to think, but our chief business is to act; and
therefore we must forever and forever fall back on faith, hope, and
love, and on the conduct they inspire, or we shall be driven forth
into the regions of mere speculation, into a dreary world of empty
forms.
MACARTHUR
CHRIST--THE QUESTION OF THE CENTURIES
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Robert Stuart MacArthur was born at Dalesville, Quebec, in 1841,
and graduated from the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1870. He
has been pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, New York, continuously
since 1870. From the very first he began to attract attention as
pastor and preacher, and the success which has attended his ministry
has been phenomenal. During his ministry his church has given for
benevolent and missionary enterprises more than two million dollars.
MACARTHUR
Born in 1841
CHRIST--THE QUESTION OF THE CENTURIES
What think ye of Christ.--Matt. xxii., 42.
The ideal man has not yet been discovered. Humboldt, who traveled
far, saw much and felt more, recorded in his diary this sentence,
"The finest fruit earth holds up to its maker is a man." It is here
implied that this finest fruit is the ideal man. But Humboldt did
not affirm that he had ever found this man. The ideal man has not
yet been discovered among those who were mere men. No one of our
noblest men was a spotless sun; no one reached sinless perfection.
From all our loftiest specimens of manhood I turn dissatisfied to
Jesus Christ, and in Him I find the ideal becomes actual, the dream
real, and the hope fruition. What Mount Tabor is, rising abruptly
in its unique symmetry and beauty from the northeastern arm of
the plain of Esdraelon, that Jesus Christ is, rising in insulated
grandeur and spotless perfection above the plain reached by the
noblest men of all the centuries.
What Mount Blanc as the king of the Alps is, lifting its crystal
domes and towers 15,781 feet above the level of the Mediterranean
Sea, compared with the other snow-clad and cloud-kissed mountains
of the Alps, that Jesus Christ is compared with the loftiest men
who have risen as mountain heights above their fellows through all
the ages. What the Himalaya range, the most elevated and stupendous
mountain system on the globe, sweeping across historic lands as far
as from New York to Chicago and back to New York, and rising so high
that the superb Matterhorn, if lifted bodily and placed upon the
Jungfrau, would not reach the glittering Himalaya heights, that and
more Jesus Christ is to the long line of men who have risen highest
in mortal grandeur in the history of the human race. Jesus Christ
is the pearl and crown of humanity; He is the loftiest specimen
of manhood the race has produced; he is the fullest manifestation
of divinity God has given the world; He is the effulgence of
God's glory, and the very image of His substance. He rises in
unapproachable glory, not only above men, but also above saints
and seraphs, and above angels and archangels. Gazing upon Him, we
can exclaim with inexpressible enthusiasm and unutterable ecstasy,
"_Ecce Homo!_" and with the same breadth and with equal truth we can
also reverently exclaim, "_Ecce Deus!_"
The setting of this text is instructively suggestive. For some
time in His discussion with the Pharisees, our Lord had been acting
on the defensive. Both Sadducees and Pharisees had been asking Him
questions. His answers put the Sadducees to silence, and their
confusion greatly gratified the Pharisees. It is now their turn to
experience similar confusion from the celerity and dexterity of His
replies. Never was there so skilful a debater as Jesus Christ. He
was masterful in His clarity of thought, simplicity of speech, and
purity of motive.
In the case before us, He passes from the defensive to the
offensive, and he convicts Scribes and Pharisees of entertaining
false views of the Messiah. They had disputed His claims as a
spiritual Messiah, and He now shows the irreconcilable contradiction
between their views of Him as a mere worldly Messiah, and the
teaching of their own prophetic Scriptures. They were silenced and
even stunned by His rapid, aggressive, and unanswerable attack.
We are significantly told that "no man was able to answer him a
word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more
questions."
It must, doubtless, be admitted that there are men in every
community, who have no definite convictions regarding Jesus Christ.
It seems almost incredible that in a community of culture and
Christianity men and women should be found who have not reached
definite conclusions regarding the person and character of Christ.
I put then the question with the _utmost_ directness, "What think
ye of Christ?" This is the broadest, deepest, and loftiest question
ever put to the human race. This is the question of all the ages.
This question virtually engaged the thought of Abraham; it evoked
a response from Moses; and it stirred the deepest emotions and
loftiest praise of David, as he swept his lyre and sang his immortal
songs....
In this congregation there are no hearers unwilling to admit that
Jesus Christ is at least a great historic character. They frankly
admit that He was born at Bethlehem, brought up at Nazareth, and
crucified at Jerusalem. They are entirely correct in the outward
features of His earthly career, but they have comparatively little
conception of the spiritual significance of His wonderful life and
His vicarious death.
They think of the historical elements of His Wonderful life as
they would think of those of Buddha, Zoroaster, or Mohammed. Their
conception of His earthly life has no power over the development of
their own lives, except as a mere character of history. They fail to
see that His was a unique life, and that it was lived on earth by
Him, that it might be lived in some measure over again on earth by
us. They fail to see that He became the Son of man, that we might
become the sons of God. They do not learn that He revealed the
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man that we should sweetly
experience the one and constantly illustrate the other. The historic
Christ has no more power over the practical lives of some, than the
traditional heroes of classic legend. Virtually for them there is
no Christ or God. Practically for them there is no historic Christ.
Until the historic Christ is translated into a personal Savior and
Master, controlling our acts, our words, and our thoughts by His
matchless example, His unique personality, and His spiritual purity,
there is for us no historic Christ worthy the name.
There are those who think of the Christ as a dreamy, sentimental,
and poetic character. They are charmed by the commendable
characteristics of His remarkable life. They refer to Him in terms
of soothing speech and of dreamy affection. There is an element of
poesy in all their conceptions of the divine-human Christ. They
think of Him in language which the robust Chalmers called, in his
lofty scorn, "nursery endearments." They are ready to adopt the
language of the renowned French theologian, eminent Orientalist, and
brilliant rhetorician, Renan, when he speaks of the Christ of God
as the "sweet Galilean." Such epithets must be utterly unwelcome to
Christ. If He be not more than man, then He is less than man. If He
be not worthy of our loftiest devotion, He is certainly worthy of
our severest reprehension. In a word, if He be not God, He is not a
good man.
Carlyle described materialism as a "gospel of dirt"; we might
fittingly describe this sweet and silly sentimentalism as a "gospel
of gush." Only as we bow down at Christ's feet, and worship Him as
the divine-human Man, can we give Him the honor which He merits and
demands. Then we can employ and sanctify the loftiest poetry in
chanting His praise, the noblest art in limning His person, and the
profoundest logic in urging His claims upon men as the divine-human
Savior. There are many who are willing to admit and who earnestly
affirm that Jesus Christ is the ideal man of the human race. They
are ready to declare that it was a glorious thing that man was
originally made like God, and that it was a still more condescending
thing that God was made like man. The Christ was indeed the ideal
man of the human race. He was the great exemplar, the perfect model,
the sublime original to be imitated by all true men and women. In
Him, and in Him only, the plant of humanity blossomed and bloomed
into a perfect flower.
But how can we account for the perfection of His humanity, if
we deny the reality of His divinity? We ought, as students of
literature and life, to account for Jesus the Christ. We strive to
account for Socrates and Plato, for David and Isaiah, for Paul and
Luther, for Washington and Gladstone, for Lincoln and McKinley.
Are we not under the strongest possible obligations to account
for Jesus Christ? Men say that Jesus Christ was good, but that He
was not God. Out of their own mouths these men convict themselves
of inconsistency in their locutions and illogicality in their
reasonings. If Jesus Christ be not God, He is not good. He is either
an unpardonable egotist, or a hopeless lunatic, or he is the Christ
of God, and God over all, blest forever more. He claimed to be
God, and if His claim be not true, how can he be good? The stream
of His life flowed through the human race on a higher level, and
rose to a vastly higher point, than any other stream known to human
history or divine revelation. How shall we account for the height
to which that stream rose? Water can never rise higher than its
source. If that source were simply human, how can we account for the
superhuman height which it reached? If we admit the account given in
the gospels of His virgin birth and divine origin, all His life is
easily explicable.
But if we deny His unique origin, we can not logically account for
His unique life. A life began as was never another life, we might
expect to see continue as no other life continued. A naturally
skeptical man finds it easier to admit the account of Christ's
remarkable birth than to attempt to explain His remarkable life
if He deny the remarkable birth. The unicity of His birth we would
naturally expect to eventuate in the unicity of His life. His life
can not be explained on any principle of heredity. We readily admit
the royal element in His blood, altho the fortunes of His family had
fallen before His birth; but no law of heredity will account for
the physical attractiveness, the mental superiority, and the moral
purity of Jesus, the Christ. Neither will environment account for
His marvelous career and character. What was there in the peasant
conditions of His family life to produce the uniqueness of His
manhood? Neither will education account for the Christ. He was never
in school, in the technical sense of that term, altho He doubtless
studied in the village synagog; and yet He rose above all the
limitations, traditions, and bigotries by which He was surrounded.
It is doubtful if He ever sat at the feet of the greatest rabbis of
the time. It is certain that He never studied at the feet of the
philosophers of Greece and Rome, nor of the dreamy Orient. He never
traveled, except possibly barely across the confines of Palestine,
a country about the size of the State of New Hampshire. How came
He to emancipate Himself from the sectarianism and sectionalism of
His country and century? How came He to be the contemporary of all
the ages? How came He to utter in the Sermon on the Mount truths
which socially and religiously the foremost thinkers of to-day can
barely understand, and dare not fully apply to the solution of the
problems of the hour? No mere human thinker has ever approached the
Sermon on the Mount. But in pure spirituality of thought, our Lord
surpassed it in His last address to His disciples. This address
bears the ineffaceable marks of His supreme divinity and absolute
deity. O, ye critics, I ask you as a problem of literature and life
to account for Jesus the Christ. I ask no favors for Him. It is you
that need the favors, if you oppose the Christ. I demand for Him
simple justice. "What think ye of the Christ?"
Dr. Geikie, in his "Life of Christ," calls attention to the fact
that the Jews confess great admiration for the character and words
of Jesus; that the Mohammedan world gives Him the high title
of Messiah; that the myriad-minded Shakespeare paid Him lowly
reverence, and that men like Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, and
Milton set the name of Christ above every other name. He also
reminds us that Jean Paul Richter, whom his countrymen call "Der
Einzige," the unique, tells us that "the life of Christ concerns
him who, being the holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among
the holy, lifted with his pierced hands empires off their hinges,
and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still
governs the ages." Spinoza, the great philosopher, son of Portuguese
Jews, disciple of Aben-Ezra and Descartes, calls Christ the symbol
of divine wisdom. Schelling and Hegel speak of Him as the union of
the divine and human. The immortal Goethe, the acknowledged prince
of German poets, and one of the most superbly accomplished men of
the eighteenth century, says, "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."
What thinkest thou of the Christ, O Jean Jacques Rousseau, with all
the brilliancy of thy intellect, the singularity of thy character,
and the enthusiasm of thy writings? Give place to the witness
Rousseau; hear his testimony. Rousseau speaks: "How petty are the
books of the philosophers, compared with the gospels! Can it be that
writings at once so sublime and so simple are the work of men? Can
He whose life they tell be Himself no more than a mere man?... Yes,
if the death of Socrates be that of a sage, the life and death of
Jesus are those of a God." What thinkest thou of the Christ, burly,
brusk, brave, and heroic Thomas Carlyle, with all thy marvelous
reading, thy profound thinking, and thy contempt of cant and love
of truth? Carlyle steps forward and speaks: "Jesus of Nazareth, our
divinest symbol! Higher has the human thought not yet reached."
Let us summon Dr. Channing, the cultured and eloquent preacher and
writer, the foremost man among American Unitarians in his day.
What thinkest thou, O Channing, of Jesus Christ? He makes reply:
"The character of Jesus Christ is wholly inexplicable on human
principles."
What thinkest thou, O Herder, illustrious German thinker, broad
scholar, and exquisite genius, of Jesus, the Christ? Superb is his
reply: "Jesus Christ is in the noblest and most perfect sense the
realized ideal of humanity." What thinkest thou of the Christ, O
Napoleon, mighty son of Mars, striding through the world like a
Colossus, darkening the brightness of noonday with the smoke, and
lighting the darkness at midnight with the fires of battle? Hear
this man of gigantic intellect, whatever may be said of his moral
motives: "I think I understand somewhat of human nature, and I tell
you all these (the heroes of antiquity) were men, and I am a man,
but not one is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than man. Alexander,
Cæsar, Charlemagne, and myself founded great empires; but upon what
did the creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone
founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions would
die for him." Compared with such witnesses as these, the opponents
of Jesus Christ of to-day are pigmies so contemptible in mentality
and so questionable in morality as to be ruled out of every court of
testimony, where intellectual ability and moral worth have weight.
I summon thee, O execrable Judas. Behold him flinging down the
thirty pieces of silver before the chief priests and elders. Hear
him speak in his agony of soul: "I have sinned in that I have
betrayed the innocent blood." I summon thee, O Pontius Pilate,
with thy immortality of shame in the creeds of the ages. The Roman
Procurator washes his hands. Strange sight! He speaks: "I am
innocent of the blood of this just person." He speaks again: "I find
no fault in this man." I summon John, the heroic Baptist. Hear His
testimony: "Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the
world." O loving and divine John, the Evangelist, what thinkest thou
of the Christ? "He is the Vine, the Way, the Truth, the Light, and
the Word, and the Word was God." I summon thee, O matchless Paul.
What is thy testimony? "He is the image of the invisible God.... The
blest and only Potentate, the King of kings, the Lord of lords."
I summon thee, Apostle Peter, once confessor, then denier, but
afterward penitent witness and heroic martyr. What is thy testimony?
"He is the Christ, the Son of the living God." I summon thee, O
once doubting but always brave Thomas. Hear the testimony of this
witness as he falls at the Master's feet and exclaims, "My Lord and
my God!"
I summon thee, O John Bunyan, immortal tinker; thy glorious Pilgrim,
marching through the ages, telling the story of redeeming love, is
thy testimony to the character of thy Lord. I summon thee, O Charles
Spurgeon, and the testimony of all thy volumes, of thy glorious
life and of thy peerless ministry is that "Jesus Christ is the
chiefest among ten thousand and the One altogether lovely." I summon
thee, O De Wette, great Biblical critic of Germany: "This only I
know, that there is salvation in no other name than in the name of
Jesus Christ, the crucified." I summon thee, O scholarly, cultured
MacIntosh; the attendants are watching thy last moments, they
bend over thee to catch thy last whispers: "Jesus, love!--Jesus,
love!--The same thing." I might summon ten thousand more, who from
the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, and from a thousand racks and stakes
went up to glory and to God, and their testimony would be, "None but
Jesus, none but Jesus." I summon thee, Toplady, and hear thee sing
this great hymn, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me."
I summon thee, O Tennyson, immortal laureate, thou who hast fought
thy doubts and found divine help. Let us hear the result of thy
conflicts:
Strong Son of God, immortal love,
Whom we, that have not seen Thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we can not prove.
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest life in man and brute;
Thou madest death; and lo! Thy foot
Is on the skull which Thou hast made.
Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood Thou;
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours to make them Thine.
I summon thee, O Browning, poet of divine optimism and interpreter
of the deeper instincts of the human heart, let us hear the
conclusion of thy philosophic mind:
I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the world and out of it,
And hath so far advanced thee to be wise.
I summon thee, O Gladstone, noblest of statesmen, uncrowned king of
the world, thou who didst come in contact with the throbbing life
of the world, of politics, letters, and religions, what sayst thou
concerning humanity's greatest need? "I am asked what a man should
chiefly look to in his progress through life as to the power that
is to sustain him under trials and enable him manfully to confront
his afflictions. I must point to something which, in a well-known
hymn is called, 'The old, old story,' and taught with an old, old
teaching, which is the best gift ever given to mankind. The older I
grow, the more confirmed I am in the belief that Jesus Christ is the
only hope of humanity."
I summon Thyself, O Thou Christ of God, Thou holiest of the holy,
Thou who art God of very God. What sayst Thou of Thyself? "Before
Abraham was I am." "I and my Father are one." "He that hath seen me,
hath seen the Father."
CARPENTER
THE AGE OF PROGRESS
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William Boyd Carpenter, English divine, was born in 1841 in
Liverpool, educated at the Royal Institution and Cambridge
University, where he was appointed Hulsean lecturer in 1878. After
holding several curacies he was appointed vicar of Christ Church,
Lancaster Gate, in 1879. He held also a canoncy of Windsor Until
1884, when he was consecrated bishop of Ripon. In 1887 he delivered
the Bampton lectures. He has published a large number of works,
among which may be reckoned "Commentary on Revelation" (1879);
"Lectures on Preaching" (1895); and a "Popular History of the Church
of England" (1900).
CARPENTER
Born in 1841
THE AGE OF PROGRESS
_And the sons of the prophets said unto Elisha, Behold now, the
place where we dwell with thee is too strait for us. Let us go,
we pray thee, unto Jordan, and take thence every man a beam, and
let us make a place there where we may dwell. And he answered,
Go ye._--2 Kings vi., 1, 2.
There are two conditions of real personal power in the world. One
is that we should be able to look above this earth and see some
heavenly light surrounding everything we meet. We call this, in
ordinary language, asserting the power of insight, and it is that
which redeems life from being regarded as commonplace. Everything is
tinged with heavenliness for those who see heaven's light above all;
and the possession of this power gives that dignity of conception
to life which is one of the secrets of power. But there is another
condition also, and that is that there shall be the strength of
personal assertiveness. A man may be possest of never so much
insight, and yet he may lack that robustness of personal character
which can make itself felt among his fellows; he may, in fact, be
deficient in the powers of personal action.
Now these two gifts Elisha possest. He possest the loftiness of
insight. He had seen when his master was taken up the glimpse
of the fiery chariot which took him into the heavens, and from
that time forward his life was tinged with the consciousness of
heaven. Nothing could be mean or low to a man who had beheld that
first vision of God. This was, as it were, an enduring and abiding
background of all his after-conceptions. So in the hour when it
seemed as tho beleagured by armies and enemies, that there was no
power of release, his eyes, as it were, were still open to behold
the heavenly brightness about him. He possest also that power of
personal assertiveness. Standing in front of the Jordan, he smote
aside every difficulty which hindered him commencing his career.
But there is a third qualification still which is needed, in order
that these two powers may be brought, as it were, into practical
contact with life. Great men, it has been said by one of our own
great teachers, are men who live very largely in their own age; that
is to say, they are persons the drift and set of whose mind does not
belong to the generation before themselves exactly, altho they may
be possest of powers of insight, nor to the generation after their
own age, but have much power of sympathy and comprehensiveness
toward the interests and exigencies of their own time. They are
men to use the phrase, who are in touch with their own age. And
therefore it is, tho a man may be possest of so much insight that
heavenly light breathes upon all things, tho he may have a certain
robust assertiveness and energy of character, yet if he have
no power of adjusting his capacities, so to speak, in language
understood of the men among whom he moves, all that power will, for
the practical purpose of life, be thrown away.
Elisha possest the two. Does he possess the third? Is he a man, in
fact, who can make his influence felt among the men of his day?
Is he in touch with his time? Can he be a man capable, not only
of acting for himself, but capable, by that subtle and magical
influence, of arousing the activity of others? For a man may,
indeed, hold a position of isolated splendor, which may produce
the admiration of the men of his day; but to be a real prophet, I
take it, is to be able to merge largely our own individuality into
the individualities of others, and to be not so much the cause of
admiration as the cause of activity.
Now I think that the scene will explain to us that Elisha was
largely possest of that gift. If you watch it you will see that here
is a scene which has since then often been exhibited in the story
of all great movements. One of the great conditions of life is the
capacity to expand. Dead things may indeed crystallize into a sort
of cold uniformity, but that which has life in it is always possest
of expansive energy. Here are these sons of the prophets becoming
conscious that the place where they dwell is too strait for them.
It is a movement which, as it were, arises outside the prophet's
suggestion; he is not the one who tells them that the place is too
strait. They gather themselves together and say, "The place is too
strait for us; let us go and build a larger and ampler habitation
for ourselves." And immediately you watch him in the midst of these
men whose minds are alive to the spirit of progress. He identifies
himself with their aspirations; he is one with them in the movement;
he does not coldly frown upon their glorious aspirations, which
are from the extension of their own institutions, but rather makes
himself one with them. Not only so. See how he allies himself to
their individual life. He does not even dictate to them the whole
method of the movement; each man shall be free, he says, to choose
his beam. When they say, Let us go and select our own beam for our
own habitation, be it so. He is not to frown down their individual
efforts, but, at the same time, by going with them he preserves
the coherence, as it were, of their work. He allows the freest
scope of individual activity, but yet preserves them in the great
unification of their work. And when the episode happens which often
does happen in the story of great movements--when the hour comes
when one man's heart is smitten through with despondency, when the
work is still before him, but the power of carrying on the work has
dropt from his hand, slipping into the stream which is ever ready
to drown our best ambitions and endeavors--Elisha stands beside
a man in despondency, cheers his spirit, which is overwhelmed by
hopelessness, and restores to him hope, capacity, and power. I say
this is a man who is, in a great sense, a true prophet of his day,
not simply posing for personal admiration, not merely asserting
himself and destroying the capabilities of those about him, but with
that sweet flexibility and that wondrous firmness combined, which is
capable of giving movement to the young life about him and at the
same time drawing them into the one great purpose of existence.
And thus it seems to me that the scene spreads beyond its own age.
It is a type of all great movements, and it gives us a fitting
attitude of those who would direct and control such movements. Here
is the prophet in relation to the idea of the age of progress. The
place is too strait for us. It is not the cry of the Jewish Church
only; it is the cry of all ages. "The place is too strait." You
and I might say that is a vision of the growth of Christendom;
the place is too strait. The little upper chamber at Jerusalem did
not suffice for the three thousand converts. "The place is too
strait," they are forced to exclaim. The limits of Judea are too
small for the ever-extending energy of Christianity. Every land and
every nationality must be brought within its sway, and the workers
shall be as the workers in this scene, manifold. Here shall be men
like St. Paul, who shall go, with a strong forensic sense of what
the gospel is, to speak it to the hearts of men who need it, and
lift them high above commonplace things. Here shall be one like
St. John, reposing upon the bosom of his Lord, and able to unfold
to them heavenly visions and the anticipations of the outgrowth
and development of the world. Here is one who, like Origen shall
collate, like Jerome shall translate, like Augustine shall expound,
like the men of later ages shall preach the spirit of reformation.
The place is too strait, but given to each man his individual
freedom, the power and the expansion of the Church goes on.
But is it not true that while, on the one side, we might say that
this is a glorious picture, untouched and untinged by any dark
lines, the moment that we begin to look at it in its practical
form we begin to see the difficulties of its development? Let us
go unto Jordan, and let us take each man our own beam. As long as
the expansion of the Church is in the direction of the increase
of its numbers or accession of new territories, so long indeed the
men who have had the spirit of zeal have been willing to sanction
such extension. But there comes a time when the consciousness
of its expansion does not move according to the line of numbers
merely, but it moves according to the line of new institutions and
of new thoughts. How, then, will it be received by those into whose
hand is placed the responsibility of its guidance? "The place is
too strait for us;" so they cried in the early Church when they
found that Judaic institutions were too narrow for the spirit of
Christianity. The new wine could not be left in old bottles. "The
place is too strait for us;" so they cried when they found within
the bosom of the medieval Church that there was not the opportunity
for the expansion of their spiritual life and the development of
their missionary energy. But has it always been true that the
spirit of this religious zeal which longs for new developments and
new departures has been received with the spirit of wisdom? You
and I know full well that the history of the Church of Christ is
the history of a thousand regrets. Did the medieval Church never
regret the act by which it drove forth the Waldenses into schism?
Has our Church never regretted the day when it looked askance at
the work of John Wesley? You know full well, whatever might have
been the feeling of earlier times, there is growing up among us a
larger and wider spirit, catching--shall I say?--the true directing
spirit which shone thus in the life of Elisha; and believing that
it is possible after all that each man may have his function in
life, and each man, choosing his beam, may in bearing that beam
be building up the temple of God. But, alas! it is hard for men
to believe it. Still, even now, the spirit of prejudice surrounds
every aspect with which we regard life and Church movement. It is
difficult for a man bred in one communion, for example, to believe
in the types of saintship which have become the favorites of
another; harder, perhaps, for men bred in the very heart of Rome
to believe in the spirit of saintship which dwelt in the breast of
Molinos; hard for those dwelling in the heart of Protestantism to
understand Bonaventura or Xavier; hard for one who has been taught
in Presbyterian lines to believe in that sanctity which descends
to us as an heritage from Cosin and Ken; and difficult, perhaps,
for Episcopalians to recognize the sanctity which dwelt in Richard
Baxter and John Bunyan....
You may believe that there is the danger of the Church--shall I
say?--growing stereotyped in its forms, by checking the freedom of
individual life. There is the danger, on the other side, of the
Church, as it were, spreading itself in the aggregation of splendid
individualities; and because men believe intensely in their own
mission, because they can not but see that the beam which they
are hewing down is one of paramount importance to take some place
in supporting the temple of God, they are inclined to prefer the
attitude of isolation. Is this wise, and is it well? Pardon me if
I ask you to say that this spirit, if allowed to grow, is a spirit
which, from its various aspects, is one which, by all means in
our power, we ought to set our faces against. Our own beam is not
the temple of God. Each move and form of religious thought is not
comprehensive of the whole; but it is here where men, choosing
their own beam, begin to believe in their own, and their own alone,
and seek to impose that little thing of their own as tho it were
an absolute necessity of every portion of God's Church, that you
get the spirit of actual division. "The whole is greater than its
part." If we could only bring the aphorisms of ordinary life into
the bearings of the Church of God we should be happier. But, let me
assure you, when a man has his beam, and tells me that that beam
will be built into the temple of God, will support its roof, and
perhaps be the very thing which will add new dignity to the splendid
arch which will spring from it, I am content to accept it. Let him
believe anything that will beautify and extend. But when he tells
me that it is catholicity to believe in his beam being all, he
simply, as it were, sins against the very thing he is seeking to
maintain. It is a sign of intellectual mediocrity; it is the spirit
of sectarianism; it is the spirit ultimately of skepticism. When
a man believes that pious views, which have been found profitable
to his own soul, are to be made the rule for the whole catholic
Church; when he tells me that special hours for special services
are essential for the well-being of all Christian souls; when he
tells me that special attitudes in the house of God are essential to
catholicity, it is intellectual mediocrity, as the brilliant French
poet has written which can not comprehend anything beyond itself.
It is a spirit of sectarianism; for what, I pray, do you mean by
sectarianism, if it is not this spirit, that you exaggerate your own
particular doctrine into such proportions as to make men feel that
there is none other than that? You are of your own little Church,
and you are doubtful of the rest of the world. That is the spirit of
sectarianism, and that, if you understand it rightly, is the only
fault of skepticism; for to believe that God is to be narrowed down
to the conception of such a thing as that, to believe that God's
temple is to be brought down to the measure of your own little beam,
is to believe with such a stunted growth, such a stunted conception
of God, that it is practically denying Him altogether.
Sometimes I venture to think that we have lost faith in Christ
altogether. We believe in a Church which can be manipulated by
human wisdom, we believe in a Church which can be galvanized by
organization, but we can not believe in a Church whose development
is being overruled by the guiding spirit and eternal presence of
Christ Himself. If you take a large view of Christianity the danger
becomes yours. Some, indeed, hew down beams for the temple of God
not themselves knowing of that temple into which they are placed;
for I do believe that in the development of God's great world the
efforts of earnest and honest men who know not indeed in what
direction their efforts are tending will be found to have been real
efforts for the promotion of something, for the bringing out of some
truth, for the establishment of some truth by which the Church may
live, on which the Church may build, of whom the whole building,
fitly framed together and compacted by that which every joint
supplies, shall thus grow into the holy temple of the Lord.
But the scene is not the scene merely of these activities uncrossed
by a single reverse. Here is the accident, here is the time in which
men begin to feel that their power has left them. One, in hewing
down his beam, animated by a spirit of a little overeagerness,
perhaps gifted with that egotism of his work which made him develop
it more rapidly than that of his fellows, strikes too hard a blow,
and the loose ax-head slips off the haft and falls into the stream.
Immediately he is face to face with, and conscious of, that most
painful consciousness which can ever visit the heart of man--the
contradiction between the grandness of the work and the ideal of
the work which he has to achieve and his own impotence. There is
the beam, and all about me are the workers, and the house is to be
built for the sons of the prophets. But here, in my hand I hold this
simple haft, bereft of the power of doing my share in that great
work. It is a picture which has been repeated often and often. Does
there not come a time when we feel that the power, as it were, of
things has forsaken us? There was a time when our creeds afforded
us great delight. We believed in God; we believed in redemption; we
believed in the Spirit which could guide human affairs; we moved to
our work full of the exuberance of confidence in that faith. But
behold, there has come a time when we, perhaps almost unconsciously,
lose the very thing which has given us hope.
Now whenever a new doctrine or new truth has come up in the history
of the Church, it has been held, in the first instance, by men who
lived by it and tied their own lives to it. No power of that ax-head
slipt off into life's stream. They knew what they were doing. When
men brought out the doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible, they
knew what they were doing; they hewed down the trees about them, and
they really believed it. Their lives were created by this truth. So
when they believed in the real presence of Christ, they believed
that Christ was really present. It was no fiction. When they
believed in the doctrine of justification by faith, they believed
that God had taken them into His own hands, that God had grasped
their lives, and God Himself was behind their lives. Truth was to
them truth, and it was a consecrated thing; but remember that truth,
which is a flower, has its roots there, and it is only as you grasp
it by its roots it becomes true to you. Truth is not a thing of the
intellect only; it descends into our moral nature, it grafts upon
our affections and conscience; the moment I cut it away from it it
ceases to be truth; it becomes dogma--for the sake of distinction.
That is to say, the men of our age who do not live by that truth
wish, as it were, to attach that truth to them; they wish to make it
actually the cry of party. They stole the wand of the enchanter, but
they had not the power of the enchanter. They knew that they had the
flower, but the flower cut away from its moral root had no force and
no vitality, and therefore it crystallizes it. Hence, the natural
history of a doctrine is this: when men are taking it rightly, using
it as for God, rightly handling it, it is a power in their hands.
Taken up for their own purposes, for the purpose of satisfying an
indolent understanding, for the purpose of evading the claims of God
which other truths may be making upon their minds, it then becomes
evacuated of its power; it is impotent, it is buried underneath the
stream of constantly changing time.
And, then, how shall it be restored? By again, I say, being taken
up out of the stream by the true handle. If you wish to restore
the power of truth, you must see that it is the truth which has
a claim upon your moral being. For just as we are told that the
sun may pour down its beams eternally upon the face of the moon,
burning and blistering with its rays its surface, and that there
everything remains cold and frozen underneath those beams, because
no sweet atmosphere can hold the sunbeams in its fold, so it is
true that when you take truth and use it from its false side, it
shall pour its brightest rays into your intellect, not the dry light
which Bacon meant, but the false light which some substitute for
it. You receive a true light upon your understanding, and there is
no moral atmosphere upon your nature to embrace those sunbeams, to
keep them and make them your own, and make them your life blood by
their presence. If thus we take truth it becomes false to us, a
buried and useless thing. But if you take truth from its moral side,
and approach it from its moral and spiritual side, it shall again
become a power in your nature.
When men believed in the inspiration of God and the Bible it was a
power to them; but when this dropt down into a belief that every
jot and tittle was part and parcel of God's inspiration, then they
merely crystallized into a dogma what was a great and living truth.
When men ask us, Are the doctrines of Christianity dead; are they
played out? my answer is, They are dead to those who use them
wrongly, as all truth is dead to those who have no moral love of
truth--dead to those who will use them as charms and incantations,
sewing them, as the Pharisees sewed some texts, into the border of
their robes; dead, indeed, they are to those who are not making them
part of their own life, but not dead to those who, tho they may
not be able to formulate their view into any way that will satisfy
a partizan section of Christianity, yet feel that to them the old
inspiration is life. God's living voice will speak to them godlike
in every line, to them because they believe in a Christ behind
all these truths, and that these are but the endeavors of men to
express the power of the living thought and voice of God. Then to
them ordinances will live; a real presence will be about their path.
Sacraments and ordinances will live because something lives behind
them. They are not using them falsely but reverently, and truly God
has spoken to their souls; He has put back the truths into their
hearts by the handle of some new-found life.
It is the same with our own lives; often and often it happens that
you feel life has lost its power and charm; its vigor was once
great. I came up, for instance, into the midst of my fellows here,
with all the enthusiasms of university life, and I rejoiced in
them; but now, somehow or other, the novelty has gone away, and the
interest has palled, and I do not care. Life has lost its meaning to
me, and I do not feel that life is worth living at all. Yes, it is
a contradiction in your own mind between the conception of life as
in your nobler moments you form it and your own impotence. Has the
ax-head gone? Has it slipt into the water? How can it be restored?
The first thing a man discovers in his own impotence, is that the
power which was in his hands was not his own.
It is only when you and I see this that we can take it up again.
Take life, and make it the reason for indulgence; take amusements,
and make them the instruments for mere enjoyment; take study, and
make it the reason for mere pride; and you will find the ax-head
will slip off. All the knowledge you possess will be like blinded
knowledge, capable of being applied to nothing. But believe it to
be your own, given you of God--these hands, this brain, this heart,
God's, not your own; these ordinances of religion God's, not your
own; these teachings of the Church in all ages God's varied voice,
which, if heard aright, shall blend into one mold in your ears. Take
it up as His, and not your own; lift up your life right reverently;
bend as you receive it from His hand, who can alone give you the
restored fulness of His powers. You are surrounded by workers; your
mind is often disturbed among the many cries and many sounds; but
believe it, each of you has your own beam, and God can put into your
hand the weapon which you are to use in hewing it down. Go forward,
and be not afraid.
PARKHURST
CONSTRUCTIVE FAITH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHARLES HENRY PARKHURST was born at Framingham, Massachusetts, in
1842. Since 1880 he has been pastor of Madison Square Presbyterian
Church, New York. He reads his sermons from a carefully prepared
manuscript, from which he does not raise his eyes during the
delivery. His English style is much admired for its force and
compactness. His voice interests and impresses the hearer by its
unusual depth and resonance. Dr. Parkhurst has taken a conspicuous
part in the effort for civic purity and righteousness. He has
published a number of books.
PARKHURST
Born in 1842
CONSTRUCTIVE FAITH
_Why is it thought a thing incredible with you that God should
raise the dead?_--Acts xxvi., 8.
Paul stood before Agrippa to answer to him for the things whereof he
had been accused. And one of the charges of which he stood indicted
was his belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the publicity
with which he had proclaimed that belief.
Such resurrection was to Paul credible, to Agrippa apparently
incredible. Why? Why credible to the one, but incredible to the
other? Does the difficulty lie in the event or in the method of
approaching it? In the event, or, perhaps, in the mental or moral
constitution of the people who contemplate it?
The question is not one of mere academic interest. It is too deeply
involved in the whole Christian scheme to have the door slammed in
its face as a mere intellectual or scholastic intruder. The writer
of the first Corinthian letter rather bruskly settled that matter
when he wrote, "If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain
and your faith is also vain." As Paul understood it, that was one of
the fundamentals of the gospel, and he, if any one, was competent to
judge what its fundamentals were.
And while there is an element of formality, ceremony and parade,
in the way in which the Church, after nineteen hundred years,
celebrates the event, yet the Church has a great deal of heart
for the event, believes in it some and would like to believe in
it more. Its attitude toward it to-day is, "Lord, I believe; help
thou mine unbelief." It is too deeply linked in with our thoughts
of immortality for us to be able willingly to let go of it. One man
slipping through the grave in an immortal way creates a chance for
every other man. Even if Christ did not rise in the way predicated
of Him, we may still be immortal; but the soul likes one good
authenticated instance of a death that was not fatal as something
definite to anchor itself upon, and is not always so sure of its
anchorage grounds as to be able quite to rest in the hope it tries
so hard to cherish. Aside from the fact that even if He did rise it
was a great while ago--and the argumentative value of a fact tends
to weaken with the centuries--there are other considerations that
complicate the case, so that we always welcome whatever promises to
relieve a little the strain of an unsettled confidence.
It will be rather to our advantage then, I am sure, that we should
distinctly face the fact that the event which the day celebrates is
a somewhat severe tax upon that faculty of ours by means of which
we are able to become convinced of what is unproved and perhaps
unprovable. We can reason toward it a part of the way, but the
reasons are all exhausted before we have arrived at an affirmative
conclusion; and the gap that still remains we fill in with faith.
It is better to state the situation in that frank way, for then
we know exactly what we have to deal with. We can in part attest
the fact of Christ's resurrection, but in part we have to accept
it by the exercise of faith. That may be a discouraging condition
of things, and may not be--discouraging, perhaps, if we mean by it
only that we know it in part, and guess or imagine the rest. But we
ought to seek for faith a somewhat more dignified and constructive
function than that.
There is this, at any rate, to be said about faith--that there
is no faculty of which we make more constant use or that we use
with greater effect when used wisely; and no faculty in which
more of the richest contents of our personality admit of being
concentrated. This faculty is going to be quite largely exercised
by people to-day, and it is a favorable time to comment upon it. It
is of great use in religious matters and the season an opportune
one for encouraging its use and stimulating it to more complete
development. It may enable us in some measure to understand why what
was incredible to Agrippa was credible to Paul.
While there is a larger field in religion for the exercise of faith
than there is anywhere else, we ought to know that it is no more
indispensable there than elsewhere. You, of course, are aware that
there are very few things that can be absolutely proved--proved
in such a way that something over and above is not required in
order to insure a satisfactory conviction. Even if mathematical
demonstrations seem to be an exception to that rule, you should
remember that even there your demonstration has to start with
something that is unproved and that can not be proved. As matter
of fact, absolute demonstration is one of the rarities, whether in
the intellectual, moral or spiritual world, and a man who is not so
equipped as to be prepared to piece our logical proof with something
else of a different complexion is in no condition to be confident of
anything.
As a rule, our conclusions contain a good deal more than was
comprised in the premises. Logic is well enough in the text-books,
is, besides, of considerable practical account, and yet if we
never decided to do a thing until we were satisfied of its logical
accuracy, we should leave nearly everything undone.
In framing our convictions we make some use of reason, but either
because the reasoning faculty is weak in us, or still more because
the situation is such with us that our convictions do not have to
be altogether reasoned out, the conclusions at which we arrive are
usually a great deal sounder than can be logically accounted for.
There is some reason about us and a good deal of something else--has
to be. Otherwise, whether individually or collectively, we should
never get anywhere.
We trust people without being more than about half certain that it
is safe to trust them, and usually discover in the end that we made
no mistake in trusting them. We go aboard an express-train without
having one syllable of information about the engineer, the engine,
the track of the railroad, and nine hundred and ninety-nine times
out of a thousand, and a good deal more, a ticket to Chicago will
take us to Chicago. In the same way we talk confidently about the
sun, but should make awkward work trying to prove that there is
one--seeing that the little ethereal pulse-beat knocking just at the
window of our own eye is the only direct information that we have of
it.
The heroism that is in our conclusions is something tremendous, and
we talk about all these matters as tho we were perfectly at home
with and had intellectually penetrated to the heart of them. It is
interesting, and not only interesting but quite suggestive, the
very slight degree to which ordinarily our confidence is discouraged
by the small amount of distinct fact that we are able to adduce in
justification of our confidence; how brave the steps are that we
take upon ground that has never been accurately explored and of
which, therefore, only the roughest outline map has been prepared.
But at the same time how likely we are to find our way through and
arrive safely at the terminal.
Such illustrations are sufficient to indicate that this faculty
that we have of believing where we are not able perfectly to see
is a respectable faculty, a faculty that we are all showing our
respect for by the constancy with which we make use of it in all our
ordinary modes of thought and usual methods of action.
So that when we talk about religious faith--faith in religious
things, and in events of Christian history, we are dealing with an
inner impulse that we depend upon every day, the only difference
being a difference as to the field in which that impulse works; even
as celestial gravity is the same as terrestrial gravity, only in the
one case working among the stars, and in the other operating down
here on the ground.
Now this faculty that in common affairs we call belief and in
religious ones faith, is quite a distinct thing from a disposition
to walk in the dark when there is no light. Faith is not credulity.
A fool can be credulous and certainly will be, but faith requires
for its rooting and growth soil that is deep and strong. The men
large enough to be great thinkers and immense workers were they whom
the writer of the Hebrew letter describes as prophets of faith.
There is a dignity and authority about the faith faculty poorly
appreciated by people who give it a degraded position in the scale
of human powers: the faculty of finding light enough to walk by when
the light is only a twilight with no distinct sunbeams in reach to
make the path brilliant.
If faith were simply a process of assumption, a matter of easily
and perhaps shiftlessly taking things for granted, then the smaller
a man's soul the greater would be the likelihood of the abundance
of his faith. But that is not the case. The men of which Scripture
history especially predicates faith are the intellectual and moral
giants of history, the men who were virile and strongly chivalrous
enough to make long excursions into the region of truth and to
move out in a large and telling way upon the field of action.
Credulousness will grow and blossom with its roots hidden only
in dry sand, but it takes something quite different from a human
sand-lot to propagate the sort of quality and the modes of thought
and activity celebrated in the eleventh of Hebrews.
All men or women who have shown themselves able to be anything or
do anything in the world have owed this competence to the fact that
they have felt the presence of objects that were too remote from the
eye to be distinctly seen, too remote from the mind to be distinctly
known. Their field of clear vision has been invariably girt about
with an encompassing zone so dense as to be almost impenetrable,
but too obvious to remain invisible. It is with them a faltering
perception of what is almost altogether out of sight. It is what
St. Paul expresses when he says of faith that, "it is the evidence
of things not seen." It is that captivating apprehension of regions
lying beyond the scope of definite vision that creates a sense of
no end of great possibilities and so breaks down the obstinacy of
antecedent objection.
This mysterious discernment that constitutes the genius of faith
we see delicately illustrated even in the play of the bodily eye.
However transparent the material atmosphere immediately about us, as
the eye reaches forth into the distance the outlines become more and
more obscure until the vision loses itself in the immensity of the
prospect that it can only feel and scarcely distinguish. But even
that makes the universe grow great before us as the little world
we know is evidenced to be fringed with the bewitching margin of a
world that is hardly in view.
When, for instance, we look up into the sky on a starry night we are
delighted, of course, by the stellar spots of distinct brightness,
but after all, the charm unspeakable and almost crushing, of such
a sky, is not the stars that we can distinctly see, but those
whose edges are softened down into tantalizing obscurity, bits of
nebulous uncertainty that leave us almost undecided whether they
belong to the world of things visible or to the realm invisible; so
that our sense of them becomes nearly as much a sense of the unseen
as of the seen. And in the presence of celestial scenery in such
manner stimulating to the mind and heart, any declaration in regard
to the astronomic world, even fairly authenticated by competent
authorities, would secure from us not only willing but eager
acceptance.
There pertains thus to the eye a kind of advance-guard of discovery
that gives us a feeling of the unknown wonders that are away in
the corner of the sky, quite before the eye is able to take strong
visual hold upon them. And, as I say, it makes the universe larger
and richer, and not only that, it lays out for us a sort of shadowy
avenue along which the eye is encouraged to let its vision run out
on experimental and adventurous trips with at least some prospect of
being able to return from such excursions laden with more or less of
the products of discovery. To people who sometimes lift their eyes
above the level of the ground, such evasive hints as distant things
give of themselves are very provocative; they tend to make the eye
alert, to tax it to its utmost endeavor, to fill it with inquiry,
and an interrogation is always the outrider of discovery.
And that is the way always that things of whatever kind become known
to us, by standing as closely as ever we can to the edge of the
known and then feeling our way--not seeing our way, but feeling our
way--as far as we can over the edge of the known out into the vast
space where, in almost, not quite, utter indistinctness, hovers the
unknown. That was the process by which Columbus discovered America.
He discovered it by sailing along the line of his presentiment.
He reasoned toward it as far as he could and then supplemented
the insufficiency of reason by a generous contribution of faith;
possest, that is, of so long a reach of thought and so roomy a
conception of God's world that there seemed space in it for another
Europe, which ought somehow to be there in order to fill that space.
And the way in which the discoverer who sailed from Palos discovered
a new geographical world is the way in which we have to approach
the suspected contents of the religious world, suspected events
of Christian history. The sense, the mastering sense, of outlying
spiritual territory too obscure for us to say a great many definite
things about it, but too certainly there to be denied or ignored,
is a necessary prerequisite to all successful use or observance of
such a day as we are celebrating. A man whose thoughts stop short at
the point where those thoughts cease to move in perfect light can
celebrate Easter as a formality, but never as a reality.
The resurrection of Christ does not admit of absolute demonstration.
Undoubtedly the testimony in favor of the event is strong. It was
evidently unquestioned by a great number of intelligent people
living at the time of its reputed occurrence. So much force as
all such evidence has is to be estimated at its logical value. So
Columbus estimated at its logical value all the indications that
were afforded him of the existence of another continent. To most
people of that generation those evidences appeared insufficient
to warrant fitting out vessels of exploration, and it was long
before funds requisite for the purpose could be secured. And the
magnificent result and discovery was due to the fact that in
Columbus' mind there was room for America and in the minds of other
people there was not. His thought, or whatever you may call it, had
in it a vitality that enabled it to move beyond the point where it
could give a satisfactory account of itself. He could see beyond the
point where he could see distinctly. The scheme of things as it lay
drafted in his mind was drawn on a scale large enough to comprehend
everything that was already definitely known, everything that was
indefinitely surmised, and a good deal beside that neither he nor
any one else had ever conjectured.
Now what I want you to realize is that that is the kind of mind
that does the world's work, the kind of mind that arrives, that
kind of mind that is competent to come up close to the frontier, to
venture across the frontier, to do some outside exploring, to bring
back some of the products grown on ground newly explored, and thus
practically to push forward the frontier and to add another lot
of land to the world's geography, whether it be the geography of
country, of thought, or of religious experience. And nothing more is
asked for here than is demanded along every other line of life and
expansion. It is only the men and women whose minds are sufficiently
sensitive to the unknown to be able to take in more than has yet
been definitely found that are ever the means by which anything new
ever _is_ found. That is true in the departments of astronomy and
geology and in every other field of whatever sort in which thought
has ever done any work. A presentiment of the undiscovered is the
regular prelude to discovery, and to the extent that men, whether
from intellectual contractedness or from moral aversion, have not
that presentiment they will be unable to allow even the historic
proofs of Christian events the argumentative force that belongs to
such proofs.
The convincing power of an argument depends quite as much upon
the size, fiber, quality of the man addrest as upon the logical
compulsions or the argument used in addressing him, which is to say
that we are responsible for what we believe as well as for what we
know, and that the machinery of faith operates inside the domain of
ethics.
For example: standing on the basis of the harmonious testimony
rendered by the intelligent authors of the gospel narratives, no one
would dispute the truth of those narratives were there not in them
references to events which lie out of line with things the scheme
of which we happen to be familiar with, and which in the unblushing
conceit of our unsophisticated humanness we dare to presume to be
the whole of things; which means that people do not want the world
to be any larger or any different from what they have already
decided to have it; nor that any events should occur in it or occur
anywhere but what are slow-paced enough to keep step with any most
common thing that moves in our workaday life.
Thomas would not believe in the risen Christ because risen Christs
were not a part of the universe as he had plotted it. The other
disciples did believe in a risen Christ because they were large
enough to be able to think farther than they could think clearly,
and because they were able to push the chariot of their convictions
over a road that had not been logically paved. And undoubtedly when
Thomas did finally accept Christ it was not because he had reasoned
Him out in his mind nor fingered Him out by pressing his hands into
the print of the nails, but because of having had divinely wrought
in him a capacity for larger persuasions than his mental and moral
contractedness had been hitherto able to accommodate.
And that is still the way in which we have to acquire the art of
great believing, the art of immense assurance of faith and the
triumphant joy that is bound to go along with it. A world that is
only large enough to contain our petty employments, or to contain
our small pleasures and paltry lusts, is not a world big enough
to have room in it for a human Son of God or for His immortal
escape from the tomb. We might convert our Church into an Easter
conservatory and crowd floor, galleries and chancel with a chorus of
as many angels as heralded the advent, and all of this be a splendid
tribute to the Lord of the resurrection and a splendid memorial
of the great Easter event, but the prime point of all is for us
each inwardly to grow to the proportions of so august an event, to
be inwardly equal to the cordial and settled entertainment of so
thrilling a thought, to have created in us such a sense of vast
spiritual territory margining this small world of commonplace, as
will give abundant space for transactions conducted on so large a
scale as that of the marvelous birth, the death in whose presence
the sun was darkened, and the great rising from the grave that broke
down the walls between this world and the other, converted the
coffin into a cradle of life eternal, and swung wide the doors of
paradise.
It is our prayer that the wide view opened before us by this
memorial season may stimulate us to higher levels of thought;
create for us a world too large to be filled with the small and
passing interests and commonplace incidents of life; destroy for
us in that way the obstinacy of antecedent objection; mental
reluctance and moral antagonism be dissolved in the warm light of
the larger prospect, till we become able to recognize Jesus in the
gracious face and scarred figure; and in the cordiality of complete
conviction to echo the words of the persuaded Thomas, "My Lord and
my God."
PATTON
GLORIFICATION THROUGH DEATH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
FRANCIS LANDEY PATTON, Presbyterian minister and educator, was
born in Bermuda in 1843. He studied at Knox College, Toronto, and
Princeton Seminary, New Jersey. From 1865 to 1871 he held many
pastorates, but in the latter year his work as a controversialist
and educator began. He took a prominent part in the ecclesiastical
trials of Prof. David Swing and Dr. C. A. Briggs, and was elected
to succeed Dr. McCosh in the presidency of Princeton in 1888, but
resigned in 1902, after which he was elected president of the
Princeton Seminary. He is a deep thinker and dialectician, and
a vigorous speaker on the theological subjects in which he is
interested.
PATTON
Born in 1843
GLORIFICATION THROUGH DEATH[4]
[4] Copyright, 1905, by _The Homiletic Review, New York_.
_Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall
into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit._--John xii., 24.
We all know that it was necessary for Christ to die, and that his
path lay through the valley of the shadow of death. I do not take
this text to illustrate this idea, but to concern myself with a
line of illustration which has no reference to His death, and so
will avoid the suggestion. We have here, in the first place, the
enunciation of a principle which goes far toward unifying the moral
and spiritual history of our world. Glorification through death is
a principle that may be seen in various spheres of observation,
and in the relation of the individual to the race. For instance, a
man of ordinary education has a family of boys and girls. He has
reached that time of life, the sure sign of middle age, perhaps a
little beyond, when he ceased to raise the question that he has
been raising about himself, How shall I make the best of myself?
and he begins to raise the question-the only question he thinks of
after that--What shall I do for them? "Well," he says, "I had but
a limited education; they shall have the best the country can give
or they are willing to take. I had but few opportunities; there is
no lack of opportunity for them. I had many a rough encounter when
I first set out in the world; they shall have the advantage of my
accumulated earnings to set them up in life."
Sure enough, the boys grow up and fill positions that the father and
mother did not fill, and could not fill; and by and by they all come
home again, and as they look on the dead man's face they say, or
rather they seem to say, "Father did well by us," and they may very
well say it. His hand had wrought for them; his head had thought
for them; his heart had beat for them; this is the long result--the
father lies in his coffin, and the children go their several ways
in life, and repeat in their own experience the story; and so "the
individual withers, and the world is more and more."
And this principle of glorification through death is illustrated
further in the fact that, when the lower forms of life or
civilization disappear to make room for the higher, the one
dominating phase of the doctrine of evolution is the seeming unity
with which it invests everything; because, imagine it true, and
there at once you see how moving are the poet's words:
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
This is the story not of the potential, but of the actual. And
what is true of the material world is true of the spiritual world.
The history of the spiritual world is a history of displacement.
You may account for it by the love of glory or by the sentiment of
revenge, but we know that God's glory is the final cause, and it
is all explicable upon the great scale of divine providence. We
all understand that there is a definite relationship between our
present and the past, and that we to-day are the heirs of all that
civilization that has gone. Our acts are the result of all that has
gone before. They were the seed and we are the harvest: "Except a
corn of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone; but
if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The mass of this early
civilization survives in the civilization of to-day. Where do you go
to find the origin of the great principle of civil liberty? Where
do you go, but to that crowd of sturdy peoples who lived along the
banks of the Rhine, and whom Tacitus describes, or to those sturdy
barons at Runnymede who extorted the Magna Charta from King John? It
is just as true in the sphere of science or philosophy. It is a far
cry back to Thales of Miletus, and yet our own boasted century, the
nineteenth, and this which may have boasts of its own, has a close
relation to the civilization of the very far past. Our astronomy
is different from their astrology, and our chemistry is different
from their alchemy, but they are closely associated. We see further
than they did sometimes, just because we are as pigmies borne on the
shoulders of a giant.
This principle of glorification through death is illustrated once
more in that a new and expanded form of life is the fruit of death.
Take the railroad at the proper season of the year, and see the
corn standing as a dazzling glory in the fertile fields of the
golden West. Mark how towers herald the approach to the towns and
cities, and ask what they stand there for? These are the nation's
treasure-houses. These are the storehouses of the world. This is the
annual coronation of nature, and simply so many illustrations of
the text: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the earth and die, it
abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit."
Change the illustration and borrow one from the humbler phases of
the animal world, like the caterpillar, which eats up the floor
of the leaf on which it creeps, until, by and by, as it begins to
realize that its life is nearly done, it sets its house in order,
turns undertaker, weaves itself a silken shroud, and awaits the
dawning of its resurrection day, and soars away a bright-winged
butterfly--a beautiful illustration of the text: "Except a corn of
wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone; but if it die,
it bringeth forth much fruit." That is the story of our life. We are
born, and we grow; we go on our way, renew our infancy with impaired
faculties, and then we pass away. Life is a battle, and we win our
greatest victory when we lie down on that battle-field and die. Life
is a race, and the goal is at the grave. Life is a journey, and the
path that we take lies straight for the valley of the shadow of
death. The valley is dark, but beyond the darkness and across the
river I see the lights of the celestial city; I get an echo of the
angels' song, and the glimpse that I get tells me that it is worth
all it costs to die.
The principle of glorification through death is illustrated in the
death of Judaism. Judaism was a divinely founded institution--a
theological seminary. The purpose of it was to disseminate the
knowledge of the one living and true God. With the approach of the
pagan world and Christianity it gathered up its energies to give
birth to Jesus of Nazareth. That is what it existed for; and in
the throes of the birth-struggle Judaism died. Let us not speak
reproachfully of Judaism, for the glory of Christianity is the glory
of Judaism with an added glory: "Except a corn of wheat fall into
the earth and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth
forth fruit."
Once more (for this is our Lord's own illustration concerning
Himself), the principle of glorification through death is
illustrated in the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ
Himself. We see Jesus made a little lower than the angels and
crowned with glory and honor. He suffered that we might conquer.
He drank the bitter cup in order that we might taste something of
the sweetness of the joys of His Father's house. He has settled the
question of His own place, and of our place too, in the scale of
being. The question whether the finite and the infinite can ever
come together has been solved in the doctrine of the incarnation. We
do not want any more to sing the old song, which never amounted to
very much in the way of music or poetry:
I want to be an angel,
And with the angels stand,
A crown upon my forehead,
A harp within my hand.
We do not want anything of the sort. Angels never rise so high nor
stand so low as man. They know nothing about sin or repentance or
salvation through Jesus Christ, and are not worthy to sit with Him
who judges the ten tribes of Israel.
This text not only fastens on us this principle of glorification
through death, but, in the second place, it gives us a twofold
vindication of death, the first being the perils of survivorship,
and the second being the promise of grace. Death is one of the most
philosophical things in the world; and if you put yourselves in
the right attitude toward it, it is one of the kindest agencies in
nature. There is such a thing as a time to die; for two reasons at
least.
One is the solitude of old age--the peril of survivorship--"Except
a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone";
it abideth alone. You can imagine a person very old. His eyes have
grown dim. Generations have grown old and died, but he still lives
on. He is too old to take kindly to the new ideas, or to see much
reason for the changes taking place. He is too old to have an
interest in the present, too old to have any friends, and at last
he lives, and lives, and lives, until he seems like a monumental
intrusion into the present, an object that people stop to look at
when they are in a reflective mood and wish to mark the flight of
years. Who would not court a new-made grave rather than risk the
perils of survivorship?
Then there is the promise of grace. Our blest Lord hallowed the
grave by His presence, and left it upon the morning of the third
day. The promise of Christ gives us a connection with His own
glorious resurrection; and planted with Him in His death, we shall
be with Him in His glory. And so the message comes to you and to
me: Be not afraid. Do not hesitate to go down, even into the
grave. Our Lord has not made it unnecessary for us to die, but He
has robbed death of its terrors. He has made easy the approach; He
has festooned the entrance with flowers; and we ride through its
portals, singing as we go, "O grave, where is thy victory? O death,
where is thy sting?" and we turn to discover that the door of death
is the gate of heaven.
Again, this text teaches one other truth. As we read it, we can not
very well help being imprest with the idea that there is embodied
in it the thought that there are two contrasted modes of being: a
fruitless conservation and a prolific decay. The seed corn is very
tenacious of life, and there is a story that grains taken from an
Egyptian mummy have been planted and have germinated in English
gardens. I believe that this is not so, but the tenacity of wheat
in respect to life is true. It abideth; but it abideth alone.
Let it reproduce itself, and by and by there will be enough of
harvest to feed a nation. We must make a choice between a fruitless
conservation and prolific decay. And this choice comes to us in
so many ways. We see it in the sphere of prejudice. Prejudice is
often, but it is not always, right. It is very often misplaced or
perpetuated beyond a time when it does any good. (You never find
a man cherishing a prejudice, because he says he is "standing up
for a principle.") It was good enough when he started; it served
its purpose at first; but it has outlived its usefulness, and is
now just a prejudice. A good many years ago, at the foundation of
the London Missionary Society, a speaker said, "We stand to-day at
the funeral of bigotry." There is not a word of objection to that,
except that these obsequies have been so unduly protracted. God send
the day when men shall recognize the lineament of Jesus Christ in
one another's face, whether they be Presbyterians, Episcopalians,
or what! And this principle, this choice, whether there shall be a
conservation that is fruitless, or an expenditure that is generous,
meets us everywhere. It meets us in our relationship to the past.
There is a sort of medievalism cherished and fostered by some
people with an odor of sanctity--they love things which are old.
And there is a vandalism that destroys the old, and worships the
new, because it is new. My friends, they are both wrong. Let us look
at our inheritance of the past in proof of this. Hold fast to that
which is true, and do not hold anything that is not. Read the great
formularies of worship with the critical light of modern thought,
and hold on to that which is true. The Jerusalem Chamber is not holy
ground, the Westminster divines were not inspired. If they said what
was true, it is because of the truth of what they say that we hold
on to it, not because they said it. And what is true in regard
to these formulas holds true in reference to our own individual
life. But there are times, I suppose, when people who live in a
city as busy as this is, and where the engagements of the week run
over into two weeks, and where every hour has its own employment,
there are times, I suppose, even here that people have leisure to
sit still while the fire burns; and in these choice stolen hours,
I suppose, figures of long ago come out upon the canvas, and stand
there in bold relief; and we say that they were happy days. Imagine
that dear old room, and those pictures of long ago coming before
us, when our imagination was all aglow. I can imagine that the
door-bell might ring, and that one of those that we have not seen
for fifty years was announced. I can imagine the conversation that
would ensue. We would talk excitedly for twenty minutes, and then
the conversation would flag, and before the hour was up we would be
completely disillusioned, and would see that our paths had diverged.
All that sort of thing was good in its way and time, but it is not
the time for it now. Of course, we must have a foundation for the
house. Still we do not live in the cellar. We live upstairs in the
sunlight, and experience says we do well. These past incidents of
life are just the foundation, and it is the superstructure after
all that you build upon; and unless a man is willing to part with
the past, he is going to make a mistake. Unless we learn to do
better to-day the things that we did yesterday, and paint a better
picture to-day, and write a better poem than the last, and are
more proficient in our arts, we are just as good as dead. We are
eternally improving and moving on. There is a conservation, stedfast
and still; and there is a forgetfulness and a generous prodigality
of past attainments that is prolific of vast results. There is
your health. What are you going to do with it? You had better wear
out than rust out any day. You can see people who make themselves
obnoxious to you by their everlasting attitude of complaint. There
is something better for a man to do than to take care of his health,
and he will probably live longer if he does not. Is a man who has
an intellect expected to have nothing better to do than to play
nurse to his body that he has to summer in the North, and winter
in the South, and to clothe with purple and fine linen, and fare
sumptuously every day, and give it now and then a trip to Europe--a
body that is bound to die? There is your life. What are you going
to do with it? There is your money. What are you going to do with
it? Why, invest it, and be careful about your security, and don't be
careful about the interest, and keep on investing and reinvesting,
until it will take the figures of astronomy to count it. As fortunes
go now, astronomy is not in it. Invest it, and then what do you
do? There are so many things that some people might do and do do,
that so many more people might do. They might perpetuate their
names by doing something for the Church, for education, and for the
world, and its moral, spiritual, and intellectual advance. God be
praised for this! You, who have cast your bread of benevolence upon
the waters of Christian philanthropy hope that you will receive it
after many days. This world's history shows that our forests have
not been cleared by the brawn of men who lived in comfortable homes.
How have our liberties been secured? By the blood of men who counted
no service too great. Can we do that? William of Orange might have
lived a long life, but he stript himself of land and fortune, and
planted himself in deadly opposition to Alva, and died a monument
to the fall of Spanish tyranny. Yes, my friends, in humbler spheres
it is your privilege, and mine, in the house of this tabernacle, to
choose between the alternative of a conservation which is fruitless
and an expenditure that is substantial, generous, and prodigal. It
is a choice for us to make. Wrap yourselves in your mummy folds, and
live for yourself or, in generous forgetfulness, live for God and
country, and for fellow men while you live, and when the hour comes,
without fear, if need be, drop into the ground and die.
Help us, O Lord, to endure as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. Help
us to do our duty so completely that every day we do better and
become better and be with Christ. Help us that we may be ready for
death, and in that last encounter may be as brave as in all the
other encounters of our lives. Give us this faith to the end. For
Christ's sake. Amen.
SCOTT HOLLAND
THE STORY OF A DISCIPLE'S FAITH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, English clergyman and author, was born at
Wimbledon in 1847. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, at which
university he was distinguished for learning and character. In
1844 he was appointed Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, London. He
has published "Logic and Life"; "Creed and Character," and other
volumes.
SCOTT HOLLAND
Born in 1847
THE STORY OF A DISCIPLE'S FAITH
_Then went in also that other disciple which came first to the
sepulchre, and he saw and believed._--John xx., 8.
John, the beloved disciple, has given his witness, has made his
confession. What he once touched, and tasted, and handled, that he
has declared unto us. It was the shining, the epiphany of God the
Father which he and the twelve had discovered, tabernacled close
at their side in the body of Christ. "We saw his glory, the glory
as of God himself." So he pronounces. Yet still his listeners sit
on about his feet. They hear great words, but these words are the
end of a long and anxious meditation. The apostle is giving us, is
giving them his completed conclusions--yes, and they have accepted
the conclusions; they hold them fast. But it is not enough to know
what they ought to believe, tho that is much--they must also know
the process by which the conclusion is to be reached. They must
reproduce in themselves the living story of its formation. They
must be conscious of its stages, its degrees, and its growth. They
can not surely be as reapers entering into the labors of others
who went forth weeping with good seed. They must feel their own
faith grow, first the blade, then the ear, and so at last, in ample
richness, the full corn in the ear; and therefore they went on
wondering. "Let us hear it all," they say; "tell us of that day when
first it came to you that something wonderful was there. Tell us
how you slowly learned the great mystery; and then tell us when and
how it was that the full truth broke from your heart and from your
lips. Tell us this, that so we, too, may say with you and with ten
thousand times ten thousand: 'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.'"
This is the question that St. John sets himself to answer; and you
can see that it is so by this, that he begins his gospel, not with
our Lord's own beginning, the baptism by John, but with the day
on which the disciples began to believe on Him; and he ends it,
not with our Lord's own ending, His ascension, but with the first
completed confession of Jesus by an apostle--the confession of
Thomas. This achieved, his gospel is done; he has nothing to add but
one scene that to him was full of tender personal interest.
The Fourth Gospel tells us how the apostolic faith was built and
established. Let us carefully turn to it, for it is a revelation of
the apostle's own heart. The old man himself is bidding us draw
near and taste of his own experiences. He unlocks his soul to us
that he may help us to mount up into his assured peace, so calm, so
sure, so strong. He sits there murmuring always his: "Come, Lord
Jesus, even come"; and round about him, enthroned in the majesty
of age, is that mysterious silence in which the voices of the
Spirit and the Bride say: "Come." And yet he can turn from that
upward vision and bend his eyes back on us--on us, so perplexed,
and troubled, and hesitating, and fearful, and bewildered. He can
yearn to make us fellowship in his joy. "Little children, it is the
last hour. Even now are there many antichrists. And now, my little
children, abide in him. My little children, let no man lead you
astray, for this is the true God and eternal life; and therefore, O
my children, keep yourselves from idols." So tender, so beseeching,
the fatherly love! And in the name of that love he sets himself
to tell the story of his own conversion, how he had begun. He can
recall every tiny detail of that first critical hour. It began
on the day when John the Baptist cast off the hopes that were so
eagerly bent upon him; for he it was, the Baptist, and not the Lord
Jesus, who first woke in their hearts that spiritual movement which
became Christianity. He roused first the cry of the new faith, and
passionately they had given him their souls--they and all who,
seeing John, mused in their hearts what would be the Christ. Even
the Pharisees of Jerusalem felt the excitement and shared the hope;
and it was to their deputation that the Baptist made his great
repudiation: "No; I am not it, not the Christ; no, nor Elias, nor a
prophet. I am nought but a flying cry in the wilderness, a cry that
floats by on the wind and perishes. Not I, but another--another who
comes after me; yea, who is now standing among you, even tho you
know it not." So he confest. He denied not, but confest; so brave
a heart he had! All those hearts were at his service, a world of
devotion all lying there at his feet; but he would not be tempted.
He knew his own limits; he would have none of it. He confest, and
denied not: "I am not the Christ."
And then came the great moment. It was the very next day after
the great confession--so exact is the apostle's memory. The very
day after, John saw Jesus coming toward him, and a wonderful word
broke from him: "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the
sins of the world." Taketh away the sin! Oh, the peace of such a
promise to those who had been washed in Jordan, and had repented,
and had confest, and yet found their burden of sin as miserable,
as intolerable as ever! The words haunted them; and when, the day
following, John uttered them again, two of them at least could
not rest. Their hearts burned to know more. Who is this strange
visitant--so quiet, so silent, so unobserved? He makes no sign. He
says no word. He invites no attention. He does not even stop to
look. He just passes by; and, lo! He is already passed--in another
moment He will have gone. They must act for themselves then. They
will force Him to stop and tell them the secret. So two of them that
heard John speak followed Him--two of them, and John the beloved,
who now tells us the story, was one of the two. And now that they
followed, He, the Stranger, must turn and speak. For the first time,
then, He looked upon them with that look which again and again had
power to draw a soul, by one glance, out of the night of sin into
the life of eternal light. He turned and saw them following, and
it was then they heard His voice first speak--that voice which by
its cry could raise the dead. "Whom seek ye?" That was all. And
they--they hardly knew what to say--only they must see Him, must go
with Him; and they stammered out: "Rabbi, where dwellest thou?" And
He said: "Come and see."
Come and see! It was all as quiet and natural and easy as any
ordinary interview. No one could have seen anything unusual. Just a
few words of salutation--just three short sentences that could be
said in half a minute. And yet that sealed their lot for eternity.
That was the moment of decision. "Come and see." They went and saw.
So intense is the apostle's memory of that blest hour that he can
never forget the very hour of the day. It was just ten o'clock when
he got to the house. They stopt there with Him that night; and in
the morning they were sure of what they had found--so sure that
neither of them could rest until he had hurried off with the good
news to find and bring his brother. Andrew found his brother before
John could find James; or else it was that both went at once to
seek for Peter, and Andrew found him first. Anyhow, when Peter was
found, both were prepared to assert, "We have found the Christ."
And so they brought the great chief to his Master; and in a moment
the Master knew what He had won in that loyal, loving soul, and He
turned those deep eyes upon him, and named him by his new name.
"Thou art Simon, the son of Jonas; thou shalt be called Cephas."
So it all began. The very next day after that the Master Himself
added one other to the number--Philip a friend of Peter's and
Andrew's--and Philip brought Nathaniel; and these were the little
band whom the Master took with Him from Jordan to Cana--the seed of
that great Church which now reigns from Babylon to Rome.
"And what next"--so the listeners ask--"what was the next step
made?" Three days later, at Cana, for the first time, came that
strange secret of which the apostle had spoken. The glory shone out
with a sudden flash from the deeps within Him; a word of power leapt
out--very quietly. Very few saw or knew it. But as the few saw there
the white water redden into wine, they knew, and felt the wonder
of that change which had passed over their own being. That word of
power was at its work within them, transforming them from out of
sickly impotence into splendid energy. They saw now what it was that
had happened when the Lord spoke, that it would have the same power
whether He spoke to matter or spirit, to body or soul; whether He
said: "Thy sins be forgiven thee," or "Rise up and walk." As water
into wine, so the old into the new.
So the light flashed; so the secret made its first disclosure. It
had vanished again, for His hour had not yet come; but they had seen
it, and this is John's enduring record, remembered by us this day,
that there first at Cana Jesus manifested His glory, and there His
disciples first believed in Him.
And what next did they learn? It was at Jerusalem, the Passover
feast. The Master made His first entry and startled them, for He who
was so quiet and reserved burned with a sudden fury as He looked
upon the temple of Jehovah. Very, very rarely did He show Himself
excited or disturbed; but then He was terrible. He bound together
a scourge of small cords. He drove the cattle in front of Him; He
dashed over the money-changers' tables. And John can recall still
the look of the coins as they poured down upon the pavement. And
they, the disciples, wondered at the violence of the emotion, until
a word from an old Psalm came into their minds, and they remembered
how it was written that the zeal of the Lord's house should be in a
prophet's heart like a devouring fire.
At that time, too, the Lord Himself gave a sign and spoke a word,
which at the time the disciples could make nothing of, and forgot.
It was about the temple being destroyed and raised again in three
days. They forgot it; but long after, when He had risen from the
dead, the old words came back to them: "After three days I shall
raise it again"; and they remembered then how He had spoken them two
years before His death, and as they remembered, they believed....
And how can we stop to follow the apostle through all the wonderful
story? Yet just one thing we can not pass over--the awful hours of
crisis in Galilee. It came just when all looked brightest, when
the people were rushing round Him, and would have made Him a king.
They would have gone with Him to the death. But He--He threw it all
away to the winds. He hurried off the twelve in a body across the
lake, for they had caught the crowd's enthusiasm, and could not be
calmed. He scattered the crowd; He fled back Himself alone into the
dark hills, and on the morrow at Capernaum, He broke it all down by
a word which staggered the rising belief. It was a saying about His
body and His blood--a very hard saying. Not only were the Pharisees
furious, but His own followers were dumfounded. They could not bear
it, could not believe. They fell away, and walked no more with Jesus.
"And you, O disciple dearly loved, what of you and your brethren?"
"Most terrible, most bitter that hour, my children," the old man
answers. "We walked trembling, quaking, behind him. We were cowed
and disheartened, until he the Master felt himself the chill of our
dismay, and He turned to us and challenged our failing faith. 'Will
ye also go away?' Oh, the shame of being open to a charge of such
meanness! The very tenderness of the question and of the reproach
recalled and recovered us. We knew nothing. We could explain
nothing. Every clue was lost. The darkness was thickening over our
heads, our hearts were failing for fear, our souls were sinking in
the great water-floods, earth was falling from us; struggle, and
anguish, and doubt shook us with wild alarm; and yet, even so as
he turned his eyes upon us, the old unconquerable faith woke, and
stirred, and quickened; and with a rush, as of a mighty wind, it
lifted us; and out from Peter's lips broke the words which saved
us--the words which sealed us to Him forever: 'Will we go away? Nay,
Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life!' So
we spoke with burning hearts, and yet through and through us still
those strange eyes of His pierced. Deep below all our emotion He
penetrated. Quite calmly He weighed its worth; and in one of us even
then He detected a flaw which would widen and worsen. One of us,
He knew, hung back from echoing St. Peter's confession. One spirit
there was there that could not throw off its dismay, one dark spirit
in whom the hard saying was the seed of bitter and poisonous fruit.
'Have I not chosen you twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?' He
spoke of Judas Iscariot, who should betray him."
So they followed and clung, the trembling band; clung through all
the narrowing days in which the Jewish enmity hardened itself into
the hate of hates; clung even tho their souls fell away from the
rapture of St. Peter to the desperate wail of Thomas: "Let us go
with him that at least we may die with him"; clung even through
the terrors of that last evening, when they sat shaking with the
very shudder of death, and the soul of the Master Himself was
trouble-tossed, and there was the scent of treachery in the air, and
the end was very near, and He spake dim, dark words that they could
not follow--only they knew one thing, that He was to be taken from
them, and they sat shrouded in a mighty sorrow such as no assurances
even of His could lessen or lift. One moment there was indeed even
then in which they seemed suddenly to lay hold of His meaning. "Now
we believe," they cried. "Now we are sure that thou camest forth
from God." So they cried, and yet He met their professions with a
sorrowful hesitation. "Do ye now believe? Yea; the hour is all but
come when ye will all flee and leave me alone." How sad and cowed
they felt at the rebuff! Were they then never to rise into the joy
of clear and entire belief? Yes; it came at last. Blest assurance!
Let John tell how it was reached by him.
Two points he singles out for himself as marking epochs of his
own conviction, and in them both we are let inside the workings
of his innermost mind. And how curious, yet how natural is the
working! For in every hour of agony the mind becomes strangely and
fearfully alert to very little things. It is sensitive to sudden
and ineffaceable impressions. It is touched into the swiftest and
subtlest activity by the tiniest touches of detail. Often in the
supreme moment of a dark tragedy, the fibers of the imagination seem
to close round some minute incident, like the ticking of a clock in
the hush of a death-chamber; and never throughout the long years
that follow can it detach that tiny incident from its memory of the
black hour. And so with St. John. He stood below the bitter cross,
and he saw the nails beaten through the hands and feet, and he heard
the last loud cry, and yet still his despair hung heavy as death
upon his soul, until, just at the touch of the soldier's spear,
there broke from the dead side a little jet of blood and water.
What was it that he saw and felt? What was it that so startled him?
Why could that little jet of blood and water never pass out of his
sight? Why should it haunt him sixty years after, as still his heart
wonders over the mysterious witness of the water and the blood? We
can not tell. Perhaps he could never tell. Only his spirit woke with
a start. Only a strange tremor shook him, and somehow just then,
just at that little pivot moment, he must break off all his story,
to declare with abrupt and quivering emphasis: "This is the disciple
that wrote these things. He it is who saw the water and the blood,
and he knows that his record is true."
And once again, in the haste of the resurrection morning, what was
the moment and what was the scene which turned his despair into
belief? It was the moment at which he stooped down and saw within
the empty tomb the folded napkin and the linen clothes. What did he
notice? Why, that the napkin that had been round the Master's head
was not lying with the linen clothes, but was rolled up in a place
by itself. A tiny, tiny thing! Yet somehow it was that which he saw
and never forgot. It was that which he could never omit from his
story of the resurrection--the rolled-up napkin lying apart from the
linen clothes. Was it the sudden sense that struck him of order and
seemliness as of a thing premeditated, intended? Was it the reaction
of detecting the quiet tokens of deliberate purpose there, where
all had seemed to him a very chaos of confusion? Who can say? Only
just then a key was somewhat turned and a bolt shot back somewhere
within his breast, and a secret flashed in upon him, and a thrill of
insight rushed over him, and his blindness fell off as it had been
scales, and a quiver of hope shot up like a flame, and a new light
broke over him, and he passed at one bound out of death into life.
"Then entered in, therefore, that other disciple which came first to
the tomb, and he saw and believed."
My brethren, where do you stand? How far have you come in this
pathway of faith? Are you yet at the beginning, looking wistfully,
with hungry eyes, after a hundred gallant human heroes who point you
this way and that? Are you musing in your heart which of them may
be your guide and master, which is the Christ? Good, and fair, and
high they may be; but they must all confess it, they can not deny
it--they are not the Christ. And all of them who are honest will
earnestly assure you, "It is not I, but another." Oh, and that other
even now standeth among you, tho you know Him not yet; and there is
a voice gone out upon Him which has gone out upon none other ever
born of woman, with this witness, "Behold the Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world!"
Consider it. What an assurance! Who is there that has ever been
brave enough to accept such a salutation without a whisper of
protest, without a shadow of a scruple? Who is this that dares to
stand up before the entire mass of His fellows and say, "Come, all
who are weary and heavy-laden--come, all who are burdened sorely
with sin--come all to me--I will give you rest?" Who is He? Look
at Him. He is passing even now before you. Follow Him. He is very
quiet, and still, and silent; but follow Him. He will turn at last
and speak, and invite you--invite you a little further. "Master,
where dwellest thou?" "Come and see."
O Jesus, Lord and lover of souls, there are many of us laden with
sickness and sin, so many that are sad with doubt and fear, that
are asking: "Master, where dwellest thou?" Oh, let them even come
home with Thee and see. Go and see. Abide with Him, talk with Him.
Wait upon Him. Learn His words. Take up His gospels. Read them with
care, with silence to yourself, with thought and prayer. Abide with
Him one night at least, that you may in the morning be able to tell
your fellows: "I have found the Christ." And then suddenly, now and
again, a light flashes, and a glory is made manifest to you. Some
touch of Divine benediction will break out of the secret silence,
some sudden joy, some gift of power. It is as at Cana with you when
the water ran into wine.
Yet this when it comes, remember, is not the end. It is but a
pledge. You may not cling to the blessings and the gifts of faith.
They flash and disappear, and you will not be surprized to find that
you have yet a long road to travel--a road of disappointment, of
increasing failure, of gathering pain, of enlarging doubt--doubt!
why not? Doubt of the ways and the methods of God. Doubt of the
path as the darkness encompasses, doubt of Christ's meaning, of
His wisdom, of His readiness, of His care, of His guidance. The
obscurity may even deepen as you advance along the road of faith.
The storm may grow blacker and fiercer, for the higher your faith
in God, the darker will be your despair at His failure to make His
name good. And you will find Him fail. He will seem to come so
little way in the world; He will seem to miss opportunities. It is
very hard to believe in One in whom others believe less and less
every day. And then it is, when all are falling away and the hard
sayings of theology begin to harass and repel, then it is that you
must call with all your might upon the St. Peter within you that you
may have the heart of fire that will feel but one thing, will feel
that if the world fell into ruins, and if the power of God Himself
be hidden, yet there stands the Christ still facing you with the
question: "Will you go away? Will you fail as others failed me?"
Will you feel then but this, just that you must send out your faith
in the one passionate cry: "Lord, thou art there, and that is all.
Thou hast the words of eternal life. To whom can I go? Tho all men
forsake thee yet will not I; and in spite of all, I believe, and am
sure that thou art the Christ, the holy one of God?" That is the
faith which is felt indeed as a rock under the feet, and to such
faith the love of God will make itself more and more manifest. You
will so trust Him in the black night, you who can walk on knowing
nothing but that Christ goes before you, you who mutually cling
with the violence of an ineradicable love to Him Who has enthralled
you, you will find yourselves carried on day after day, you know
not how, until at last you find yourselves enclosed in some upper
chamber with the Master. Yes, and there the secrets of His love
are disclosed, and the mysteries of His counsels, and the hidden
wonder of His victory, and the strange glory of His consolation. You
will not know or understand all; you will feel yourselves held in
the grasp of a wisdom that reaches far and away beyond your little
day. You will inquire with stammering lips as Philip and Judas, not
Iscariot, and Thomas stammered in the upper chamber before you, and
the answer that He gives will be but dim; and yet you will know
enough to make you absolutely sure that the truth as you hold it in
Jesus is the truth that holds the world in one in God, and you will
be able to cry in glimpses of peculiar manifestation: "Lord, now
speakest thou plainly, and speakest no parable. Now I believe, and
have known, and am sure that thou camest forth from God." And yet
even that faith, the faith of roused feelings, may lapse again; even
that moment of blessing may lose its power over you. Yes, for only
when you become convinced not only of your possession of a Teacher
who once came on earth from God, but more, of a Lord living on the
far side of death, living in the might of a resurrection life, able
to stand by you in that life-giving might as you keep there with
the faithful in the upper chamber--able to feed you with His life
now from that home of His beyond the grave--only then, when you so
receive Him, and take of Him, and taste Him, and know yourselves
quickened in Him--only so will your last doubt pass away from you,
only so will the close of the crown of your faith be obtained,
and you will end--as the story of St. John ends--with the cry of
doubting Thomas, with his last doubt scattered--the cry in which the
perfected apostolic faith at last saluted its rising Master--"Jesus
Christ, my Lord and my God."
STALKER
TEMPTATION
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
JAMES STALKER, professor of Church History in the United Free Church
College, Aberdeen, was born at Crieff in 1848, and was educated at
the universities of Edinburgh, Halle, and Berlin. He has been an
incumbent of many pastorates in Scotland, and has published "Life of
Jesus Christ"; "Life of St. Paul"; "The Preacher and His Models,"
etc. In 1891 he delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching,
at Yale, and is examiner for the degree of B.D. in Aberdeen
University.
STALKER
Born in 1848
TEMPTATION
_There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to men;
but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above
that ye are able; but will with temptation also make a way to
escape, that ye may be able to bear it._--1 Cor. x., 13.
Once, when I was going to address a gathering of young men, I asked
a friend what I should speak to them about. His answer was: There
is only one subject worth speaking to young men about, and that is
temptation.
Of course, he did not mean this literally: he only meant to
emphasize the importance of this subject. Was he not right? You
remember, in the story of the Garden of Eden, where the tree
which represented temptation stood? It stood in the midst of the
garden--just at the point where all the walks converged, where Adam
and Eve had to pass it every day. This is a parable of human life.
We are out of paradise now; but the tree of temptation still stands
in our life where it stood then--in the midst; where all the roads
meet; where we must pass it every day--and every man's weal of wo
depends on the attitude to it which he takes up.
There are six attitudes in any of which we may stand to
temptation--first, we may be tempted; second, we may have fallen
before temptation; third, we may be tempting others; or, fourth,
we may be successfully resisting temptation; fifth, we may have
outlived temptation; sixth, we may be assisting others to overcome
their temptations.
As I should like these six attitudes to be remembered, let me
give them names; and these I will borrow from the politics of
the continent of Europe. Any of you who may glance at times into
the politics of France or Germany will be aware that in their
legislative assemblies there prevails a more minute division into
parties, or groups as they are called, than we are accustomed
to. In your politics you are content with two great historical
parties--Republicans and Democrats. But, as I have said, in
Continental parliaments the members are divided into groups. You
read of the group of the left center, the group of the left, and the
group of the extreme left; the group of the right center, the group
of the right, and the group of the extreme right. I do not pretend
that even these are all; but I will take these as the six names I
need for characterizing the six attitudes in which men may stand to
temptation.
On the left there are three--first, the group of the left center, by
which I mean those who are being tempted; second, the group of the
left, by which are meant those who have fallen before temptation;
third, the group of the extreme left, or those who are tempters of
others. And on the right there are three groups--the fourth group,
that of the right center, containing those who are successfully
resisting temptation; the fifth, the group of the right, or those
who have outlived their temptations; and the sixth and last, the
group of the extreme right, that is to say, those who are helping
others to resist their temptations.
Let me run rapidly over these six groups.
I. The group of the left center or those who are being tempted.
With this one I begin; because we have all been in it. Whether we
have been in the other groups or not, we have all been in this one:
we have all been tempted. One of the first things we were told when
we were quite young was that we should be tempted--that we should
have to beware of evil companions; and there is not one of us in
whose case this prediction has not come true.
There is, indeed, no greater mystery of providence than to
understand the unequal proportions in which temptation is
distributed. Some are comparatively little tempted; others are
thrown into a fiery furnace of it seven times heated. There are in
the world sheltered situations in which a man may be compared to a
ship in the harbor, where the waves may sometimes heave a little,
but a real storm never comes; there are other men like the vessel
which has to sail the high seas and face the full force of the
tempest. Many here must know well what this means. Perhaps you know
it so well that you feel inclined to say to me, Preacher, you know
nothing about it; if you had to live where we live--if you had to
associate with the companions whom we have to work with, and hear
the kind of language which we have to listen to every hour of the
day--you would know better the truth of what you are saying. Do not
be too sure of that. Perhaps I know as well about it as you do.
Perhaps my library is as dangerous a place for me as your workshop
is for you. Solitude has its temptations as well as society. St.
Anthony, before his conversion, was a gay and fast young man of
Alexandria; and, when he was converted, he found the temptations of
the city so intolerable that he fled into the Egyptian desert and
became a hermit; but he afterward confest that the temptations of a
cell in the wilderness were worse than those of the city. It would
not be safe to exchange our temptations for those of another man;
every one has his own.
I believe, further, that every man has his own tempter or temptress.
Every man on his journey through life meets with some one who
deliberately tries to ruin him. Have you met your tempter yet?
Perhaps he is sitting by your side at this moment. Perhaps it
is some one in whose society you delight to be, and of whose
acquaintance you are proud; but the day may come when you will
curse the hour in which you ever saw that face. Some of us, looking
back, can remember well who our tempter was; and we tremble yet,
sometimes, as we remember how nearly we were over the precipice.
One of the chief powers of temptation is the power of surprize. It
comes when you are not looking for it; it comes from the person and
from the quarter you least suspect. The day dawns which is to be the
decisive one in our life; but it looks like any other day. No bell
rings in the sky to give warning that the hour of destiny has come.
But the good angel that watches over us is waiting and trembling.
The fiery moment arrives; do we stand; do we fall? Oh, if we fall,
that good angel goes flying away to heaven, crying, fallen, fallen!
II. The group of the left or those who have fallen before temptation.
Tho I do not know this audience, I know human nature well enough to
be certain that there are some hearing me who are whispering sadly
in their hearts, This is the group I belong to: I have fallen before
temptation; it may not be known; it may not even be suspected; but
it is true.
To such I bear a message of hope to-day.
The great tempter of men has two lies with which he plies us at two
different stages. Before we have fallen, he tells us that one fall
does not matter; it is a trifle; we can easily recover ourselves
again. And, after we have fallen, he tells us that it is hopeless:
we are given over to sin, and need not attempt to rise.
Both are false.
It is a terrible falsehood to say that to fall once does not matter.
Even by one fall there is something lost that can never be recovered
again. It is like the breaking of an infinitely precious vessel,
which may be mended, but will never again be as if it had not been
broken. And, besides, one fall leads to others; it is like going
upon very slippery ice on the face of a hill; even in the attempt to
rise you are carried away again farther than ever. Moreover, we give
others a hold over us. If we have not sinned alone, to have sinned
once involves a tacit pledge that we will sin again; and it is often
almost impossible to get out of such a false position. God keep us
from believing the devil's lie, that to fall once does not matter.
But then, if we have fallen, he plies us with the other lie: It is
of no use to attempt to rise; you can not overcome your besetting
sin. But this is falser still. To those who feel themselves fallen
I come, in Christ's name, to say, Yes, you may rise. If we could
ascend to heaven to-day and scan the ranks of the blest, should we
not find multitudes among them who were once sunk low as man can
fall? But they are washed, they are justified, they are sanctified,
in the name of our Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. And so
may you be.
It is, I know, a doctrine which may be abused; but I will not
scruple to preach it to those who are fallen and sighing for
deliverance. St. Augustine says that we may out of our dead sins
make stepping-stones to rise to the heights of perfection. What did
he mean by that? He meant that the memory of our falls may breed
in us such a humility, such a distrust of self, such a constant
clinging to Christ as we never could have had if we had not fallen.
Does not the Scripture itself go even further? David fell--deep as
man can fall; but what does he say in that great fifty-first Psalm,
in which he confesses his sin? Anticipating forgiveness, he says:
Then will I teach Thy ways unto
Those that transgressors be,
And those that sinners are, shall then
Be turned unto Thee.
And what did our Lord Himself say to St. Peter about his fall?
"When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren." A man may
derive strength to give to others from having fallen. He may have a
sympathy with the erring; he may be able to describe the steps by
which to rise, as no other can. Thus, by God's marvelous grace, out
of the eater may come forth meat, and out of the strong may come
forth sweetness.
III. The group of the extreme left or those who are tempters of
others.
These three groups on the left form three stages of a natural
descent. First, tempted; secondly, fallen; then, if we have fallen,
we tempt others to fall.
This is quite natural. If we are down ourselves, we try to get
others down beside us. There is a satisfaction in it. To a soul
that has become black a soul that is still white is an offense. It
is said of some, "They rest not except they have done mischief,
and their sleep is taken away, except they cause some to fall."
There is nothing else, I think, in human nature so diabolical as
the delight which the wicked feel in making others like themselves.
Have you never seen it? Have you never seen a group of evil-doers
deliberately set themselves to ruin a newcomer, scoffing at
his innocence and enticing him to their orgies? And, when they
succeeded, they rejoiced over his fall as if they had won a great
triumph. So low can human nature sink.
Sometimes it may be self-interest that makes man a tempter. The
sin of another may be necessary to secure some end of his own.
The dishonest merchant, for his own gain, undermines the honesty
of his apprentice; the employer, making haste to be rich, tempts
his employees to break the Sabbath; the tyranical landlord forces
his tenants to vote against their conscience. Why, there are trades
which nourish on other people's sins.
But perhaps the commonest way to become a tempter is through
thoughtlessness. I protest, we have no pity for each other's souls.
We trample about among these most brittle and infinitely precious
things, as if they were common ware, and we tempt one another and
ruin one another without even being aware of it. Perhaps, indeed, no
one who goes to the place of wo goes there alone; perhaps every one
takes at least one with him. I hear it said nowadays that the fear
of hell no longer moves men's minds; and that preachers ought no
longer to make use of it as a motive in religion. Well, I confess,
I fear it myself; it is a motive still to me. But I will tell you
what I fear ten times more. What! is there anything which a man can
fear ten times more than the fire that never shall be quenched? Yes!
it is to meet there any one who will say, You have brought me here;
you were my tempter; and but for you I might never have come to this
place of torment. God forbid that this should ever be said to me by
any one. Will it be said to any of you?
But now let us turn away from this side of our subject and look at
the bright side--at the three groups on the right.
IV. The group of the right center, or those who are successfully
resisting temptation.
Not very long ago a letter chanced to come under my eye. It was by a
young man attending one of the great English universities. One day
two or three fellow students had come into his rooms and asked him
to join them in some amusement of a questionable kind, which they
were contemplating. On the spur of the moment he promised; but, when
they had gone, he thought what his parents would say if they knew.
It was a godly home he belonged to and a very happy one, in which
the children were bound to the parents in such a way that they kept
no secrets from them. He thought of his home, and he had doubts
whether what he had promised to do might not cause pain there. He
was afraid it would; and he promptly and frankly went and told his
companions that his engagement was off till he should inquire. The
letter I saw was the inquiry. It affected me deeply to read it; for
it was easy to understand how much manliness was required to do that
which might be interpreted as unmanly.
The memory of that man's home came to him in the hour of temptation
and made him strong to resist. I wonder this influence does not
prove a rescuing power oftener than it does. Young men, when
you are tempted, think of home. I have been a minister away in a
provincial town; and, I think, if you could realize the mother's
terror, and the father's stricken frame, and the silent tearful
circle, as I have seen them--it would make you fling the cup of
temptation from your lips, however persuasive was the hand that
proffered it.
Yet this will not always be a strong enough motive in the struggle
with temptation. There will come times when you are tempted to great
sin which will appear to you absolutely safe from discovery and not
likely to inflict the slightest injury on your fortunes. In such
circumstances nothing will sustain you if you do not respect your
own nature and stand in awe of your own conscience. Nay, even this
is not enough; the only effective defense is that of one who was
surely tempted in this very way, "How can I do this great wickedness
and sin against God?"
There are secret battles fought and victories won on this ground,
never heard of on earth, but essentially more glorious than many
victories which are trumpeted far and wide by the breath of fame.
There is more of courage and manhood needed for them than for
walking up to the cannon's mouth? Many a soldier could do that who
could not say "No" to two or three companions pressing him to enter
the canteen. Not long ago I was speaking to a soldier who told me
that many a time in the barracks he was the only man to go down on
his knees out of twenty or thirty; and he did it among showers of
oaths and derision. Do you think walking up to the cannon's mouth
would have been difficult to that man? Such victories have no record
on earth; but be sure of this, they are widely heard of in heaven,
and there is One there who will not forget them.
V. The group of the right or those who have outlived their
temptations.
On this point I do not mean to dwell; but I should like at least
to mention it, as there is contained in it a great encouragement
to some who may be enduring the very hottest fires of temptation.
Perhaps your situation is so intolerable that you often say, I can
not stand this much longer; if it lasts as it is, I must fall--"One
day I shall fall into the hands of Saul."
No, you will not. I bid you take courage; and as one encouragement I
say, you will yet outlive your temptation.
That which is a temptation at one period of life may be no
temptation at all at another. To a child there may be an
irresistible temptation in a sweetmeat which a man would take a
good deal to touch; and some of the temptations which are now the
most painful to you will in time be as completely outlived. God may
lift you, by some turn of providence, out of the position where
your temptation lies; or the person from whom you chiefly suffer
may be removed from your neighborhood. The unholy fire of passion,
which now you must struggle to keep out of your heart, may, through
the mercy of God who setteth men in families, be burnt away and
replaced by the holy fire of love burning on the altar of a virtuous
home. The laughter and scorn which you may now be bearing for your
Christian profession will, if you only have patience, be changed
into respect and veneration; for even the ungodly are forced at last
to do honor to a consistent Christian life.
In these and other ways, if you only have patience, you will outlive
temptation; tho I do not suppose we shall ever in this world be
entirely out of its reach, or be beyond the need of these two
admonitions: "Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation,"
and, "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall."
VI. The group of the extreme right, or those who are helping others
to overcome temptation.
You see, on the right there is an upward progress, as on the left
there was a downward one. The first step is to be successfully
resisting temptation; a higher one is to have outlived temptation;
the highest of all is to be helping others to resist it; tho I do
not say that this must be the chronological order. It is the order
of honor.
This group of the extreme right is the exact opposite of the group
of the extreme left. Those in the latter group are tempting others
to fall; those in this one are encouraging and aiding others to
stand fast. No man ought to be satisfied till he is in this noble
group.
There are many ways in which we may assist others with their
temptations. A big-hearted man will often be doing so without being
aware of it. His very presence, his attractive manhood, his massive
character act as an encouragement to younger men and hold them up. I
do not know anything so much to be coveted as in old age to have men
coming to say, Your example, your presence, your sympathy were like
a protecting arm put round my stumbling youth and helped me over the
perilous years. My brothers, if a few men can honestly say this to
us in the future, will it not be better than Greek and Roman fame?
Many are helping the young against their temptations by providing
them with means of spending their leisure innocently and profitably.
Our leisure time is the problem. While we are at work, there is not
so much fear of us; but it is in the hours of leisure--the hours
between work and sleep--that temptation finds men, and they are
lost; and therefore I say, there is no more Christian work than
providing men with opportunities of spending leisure profitably.
But by far the best way to help men with their temptations is to
bring them to Christ. It may be of some service to a man if, in the
time of trial, I put round him the sympathetic arm of a brother;
but it is infinitely better if I can get him to allow Christ to put
round him His strong arm. This is the effectual defense; and no
other can be really depended on....
BURRELL
HOW TO BECOME A CHRISTIAN
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
DAVID JAMES BURRELL was born at Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, in
1849. He graduated from Yale College in 1867. Since 1891 he has been
pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church, New York, which was founded
in 1628. Dr. Burrell is unusually popular as a pulpit preacher, and
attracts many young people to his evening services. His delivery is
clear-cut and vigorous, and often he rises to dramatic heights of
eloquence. His gesture is marked by grace and appropriateness, and
his illustrations are always chosen with felicity. His sermons are
stenographically reported and printed each week in pamphlets for
wide distribution.
BURRELL
Born in 1849
HOW TO BECOME A CHRISTIAN[5]
[5] Copyright, 1906, by the American Tract Society. Reprinted by
permission.
_And there arose no small stir about that way._--Acts xix., 23.
The name by which the early Christians were familiarly known was
"The people of that way." In the year 36 the Sanhedrin issued a
commission to Saul of Tarsus authorizing him to arrest any whom
he might find "of the way, whether they were men or women, and to
bring them bound unto Jerusalem." (Acts ix., 2.) In the year 58,
twenty-two years later, the same Saul, now an apostle of Christ,
made a defense from the steps of the Castle of Antonia, in which he
said, "I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering
into prison both men and women" (Acts xxii., 4).
The name thus given to the followers of Christ is significant for
many reasons. The question has been raised in some quarters as to
whether religion is dogma or life. In fact, our religion in the last
reduction is neither dogma nor life; it is a way from sin into the
Kingdom of God. Its bed-rock is truth, its pavement is character,
its destination is eternal life.
It is a plain way; as indicated in the prophecy, "A highway shall
be there and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness; the
wayfaring man tho a fool shall not err therein." Nevertheless, to
the unsaved no question is more bewildering than this: "What shall I
do that I may inherit eternal life?" In the Pocono Mountains, last
summer, I found it very difficult to keep in the old Indian trail;
tho it was easy enough for my comrade, who had been born and bred in
the vicinity. A letter lies before me, written by a man of affairs,
in which he says, "All my life I have been an attendant at church;
I would like to be a Christian, but I confess that I have never yet
learned how to set about it."
It is my present purpose to make this matter as clear as I can. Let
it be said at the outset that one thing only is needful in order
to become a follower of Christ--to wit, that one shall believe in
Him, but, before we come to that, we must touch upon a matter of
preliminary importance.
A man must repent before he believes in Christ (Mark i., 15). Now
repentance is not a saving grace, having value only as it leads to
something further on. The pain of a physical malady has no curative
virtue; but it is this pain that inclines the patient to ring the
doctor's bell. So John the Baptist goes before Christ with his cry,
"Repent ye!" Since without repentance there is no adequate sense of
need, nor disposition to accept Christ.
Let us get a clear understanding of repentance. It suggests at the
outset, an apprehension of sin as a fact; not a figment of the
imagination, not "a belief of mortal mind"; not an infection due to
environment, and therefore involving no personal accountability; but
a distinct, flagrant violation of holy law, by which the sinner is
brought into rebellion against God.
And sin must be apprehended, furthermore, as a calamitous fact, that
is, involving an adequate penalty: "The soul that sinneth, it shall
die." A true penitent recognizes the justice of the punishment which
is imposed upon him; as did the repentant thief, when he said to his
comrade, "We indeed are condemned justly." One who spends his time
in trying to explain away hell and "the unquenchable fire" and "the
worm that dieth not," is not a penitent man.
And sin must be furthermore recognized as a concrete or personal
fact. It is not enough to acknowledge the incontrovertible presence
of sin in the world around us. The important thing is, that this
sin inheres in me. So David prayed, "Have mercy upon me, O God,
according unto thy loving kindness; for I have sinned and done this
evil in thy sight." He had always known, in general terms, that
adultery was a fearful thing; but when it pointed its gaunt finger
at him in the watches of the night and hissed, "Bathsheba!" it
brought him to his knees.
And this conviction of sin must be followed by a resolution to
forsake it. The true penitent fears his sin, hates it, loathes it,
abhors it, and determines to quit it.
But observe, all this is merely preliminary to the one thing
needful. There is no virtue in repentance _per se_. The penitent is
not saved; he has only discovered his need of salvation. He knows
his malady; now how shall he be cured of it? To pause here is death.
One in a sinking boat must not be satisfied with stopping the leak;
the boat must be baled out. A man head over ears in debt can not
recover his credit by resolving to pay cash in the future; he must
somehow cancel his past obligations. If a penitent were never to
commit another sin, the "handwriting of ordinances" would still be
against him. The record of the past remains; and it will confront
him in the judgment unless it be disposed of. The past. The mislived
past! What shall be done about it?
This brings us to the matter in hand: What shall I do to be saved?
or How shall I become a Christian?
Our Lord at the beginning of His ministry said to Nicodemus, "God so
loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth on him, should not perish, but have everlasting life."
And to make the matter perfectly clear to this learned rabbi, He
resorted to the kindergarten method, using an object-lesson: "As
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son
of man be lifted up (that is, crucified), that whosoever believeth
in him should not perish, but have eternal life." So the one thing
needful is to believe in Christ.
The same truth was repeated over and over in the teachings of Jesus
and of His disciples as well. To the jailer of Philippi who, in
sudden conviction, was moved to cry, "What shall I do?" the answer
of Paul was, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be
saved."
But what is it to "believe in Christ?" It is easy to say, "Come to
Christ" and "Accept Christ" and "Believe in Him"; but just here
occurs the bewilderment. These are oftentimes mere shop-worn phrases
to the unsaved, however simple they may appear to those who have
entered on the Christian life.
To believe in Christ is, first, to credit the historic record of His
life. Once on a time He lived among men, preached, wrought miracles,
suffered and died on the accurst tree. So far all will agree; but
there is clearly no saving virtue in an intellectual acceptance of
an undisputed fact.
It means, second, to believe that Jesus was what He claimed to be.
And His claim is perfectly clear. To the woman of Samaria who sighed
for the coming of Messiah He said, "I that speak unto thee am he."
No reader of the Scripture could misunderstand His meaning, since
the prophecy of the Messiah runs like a golden thread through all
its pages from the protevangel, "The seed of the woman shall bruise
the serpent's head," to the prediction of Malachi, "The Sun of
righteousness shall arise with healing in his beams."
But, more than this, Jesus claimed that as Messiah He was the only
begotten and co-equal Son of God. He came forth from God and,
after finishing His work, was to return to God and reassume "the
glory which he had with the Father before the world was." It was
this oft repeated assertion which so mortally offended the Jews as
to occasion His arrest on the charge of blasphemy. He persisted
in His claim, and was put to death for "making himself equal to
God." It must be seen, therefore, that no man can be said to
believe in Christ who is not prepared to affirm, without demur or
qualification, that He was what He claimed to be.
It means, third, to believe that Jesus did what He said He came
into the world to do. And here again there can be no doubt or
peradventure. He said, "The Son of man came not to be ministered
unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many." His
death was to be the purchase price of redemption. In the wilderness
He was tempted to turn aside from His great purpose. The adversary
led Him to a high place, and with a wave of his hand, directed His
thought to the kingdoms of this world, saying, "All these are mine.
I know thy purpose: thou art come to win this world by dying for it.
Why pay so great a price? I know thy fear and trembling--for thou
art flesh--in view of the nails, the fever, and dreadful exposure,
the long agony. Why pay so great a price? I am the prince of this
world. One act of homage, and I will abdicate. Fall down and worship
me!" Never before or since has there been such a temptation, so
specious, so alluring. But Jesus had covenanted to die for sinners.
He knew there was no other way of accomplishing salvation for them.
He could not be turned aside from the work which He had volunteered
to do. Therefore He put away the suggestion with the words, "Get
thee behind me, Satan! I can not be moved! I know the necessity that
is laid upon me. I know that my way to the kingdom is only by the
cross. I am therefore resolved to suffer and die for the deliverance
of men."
On a later occasion, on His way to Jerusalem--that memorable journey
of which it is written. "He set his face stedfastly" to go toward
the cross--He spoke to His disciples of His death. He had been with
them now three years, but had not been able fully to reveal His
mission, because they were "not strong enough to bear it." A man
with friends, yet friendless, lonely in the possession of His great
secret, He had longed to give them His full confidence, but dared
not. Now, as they journeyed southward through Cæsarea Philippi,
He asked them, "Who do men say that I am?" And they answered,
"Some say John the Baptist; others, Elias; others, Jeremias, or
one of the prophets." And he saith, "But who say ye that I am?"
Then Peter--brave, impulsive, glorious Peter--witness his good
confession: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!" The
hour had come. His disciples were beginning to know Him. He would
give them His full confidence. So as they journeyed on toward
Jerusalem He told them all how He had come to redeem the world by
bearing its penalty of death; "He began to show them how he must
suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and
be killed." At that point Peter could hold his peace no longer, but
began to rebuke him, saying, "Be it far from thee, Lord! To suffer?
To die? Nay, to reign in Messianic splendor!" And Jesus turning,
said unto him, "Get thee behind me, Satan!"--the very words with
which He had repelled the same suggestion in the wilderness. As He
looked on His disciple, He saw not Peter, but Satan--perceived
how the adversary had for the moment taken possession, as it were,
of this man's brain and conscience and lips. "Get thee behind me,
Satan! I know thee! I recognize thy crafty suggestion; but I am not
to be turned aside from my purpose. Get thee behind me! Thou art an
offense unto me. Thy words are not of divine wisdom, but of human
policy. Thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that
be of men!"
From this we conclude that the vicarious death of Jesus is the
vital center of His gospel, and that any word which contravenes it
is in the nature of a Satanic suggestion. It follows that no man
can truly believe in Christ without assenting to the fact that the
saving power is in His death; as it is written, "The blood of Jesus
Christ cleanseth from all sin," and, "Without the shedding of blood
there is no remission." He came into the world to die for sinners,
that they by His death might enter into life; He came to take our
place before the bar of the offended law, to be "wounded for our
transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, that by his stripes
we might be healed"; He came to "bear our sins in his own body on
the tree"; and to believe in Christ is to believe that He did what
He came to do.
It means, fourth--and now we come to the very heart of the
matter--to believe that Christ means precisely what He says. He
says to the sinner, "The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive
sins." He says, "Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast
out." He says, "He that believeth in me hath everlasting life."
At this point belief means personal appropriation; acceptance,
immediate, here, now. It is to make an end of doubt and perplexity
and all questionings, by closing in with the overtures of divine
mercy. It is to lay down one's arms and make an unconditional
surrender. It is to take the proffered hand of the Savior in an
everlasting covenant of peace. It is to say, "My Lord, my life, my
sacrifice, my Savior and my all!"
But just here is where many hesitate and fail. They do not "screw
their courage to the sticking point." They come up to the line, but
do not take the step that crosses it. They put away the outstretched
hand, and so fall short of salvation.
The will must act. The prodigal in the far country will stay there
forever unless his resolution cries, "I will arise and go!" The
resolution is an appropriating act. It makes Christ mine; it links
my soul with His, as the coupler binds the locomotive to the loaded
train. It grasps His outstretched hand; it seals the compact and
inspires the song:
'Tis done, the great transaction's done,
I am my Lord's and He is mine!
He drew me, and I followed on,
Charmed to confess the voice divine.
High heaven that hears the solemn vow,
That vow renewed shall daily hear;
Till in life's latest hour I bow
And bless in death a bond so dear!
Now this is all. The man who really believes on Christ is saved by
that alone. He can never be lost. As Wesley sang, "Christ and I are
so joined, He can't go to heaven and leave me behind." But salvation
from the penalty of sin is not the whole of salvation; only the
beginning of it.
The sequel to "becoming a Christian" is following Christ.
"Salvation" is a large word, including growth in character and
usefulness and all the high attainments which are included in a
genuine Christian life. This is what Paul means when he says, "Work
out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God
that worketh in you." Work it out! Work your salvation out to its
uttermost possibilities! Be a maximum Christian; not content with
being saved "so as by fire," but craving "an abundant entrance" into
the kingdom. All this is accomplished in the close and faithful
following of Christ.
This "following" is the sure test and touchstone by which a man
determines whether he has really come to Christ and believes in
Him. Our "good works" are not meritorious as having any part in
our deliverance from condemnation; but they are the acid test of
our faith; and they also determine the quality of the heaven that
awaits us. And, in this sense, "they shall in no wise lose their
reward." To use a rude figure; a man going to an entertainment gets
a ticket of admission, but for his reserved seat he pays something
more. "The just shall live by faith;" but the abundance of their
life is determined by the product of their faith. Wherefore, he
loses much who, while believing in Christ, follows Him afar off.
To follow Christ at the best, means to regard Him as our Priest,
our only Priest, whose sacrifice is full and sufficient for us. We
forsake all other plans of salvation and trust simply and solely to
the merit of His atoning blood.
To follow Christ means to regard Him as our only Prophet or Teacher.
All preachers, ecclesiastical councils, historic creeds and symbols
are remanded to a subordinate place. His word is ultimate for us.
To follow Christ means to regard Him as our King. He reigns in
us and over us. His love constrains us. His wish is our law. His
authority is final. "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it."
And to follow Christ means to do all this in the open. It may be
that some who refuse to confess Christ are ultimately saved by Him;
but the presumption is immensely against the man who lives that way.
"Stand forth into the midst!" "Quit thyself like a man!"
In closing, we return to iterate and reiterate the proposition that
our salvation from sin and spiritual death is by faith in Christ and
by that only. Let no side issues enter here to confuse and bewilder
us. "He that believeth shall be saved."
That is final and conclusive. Our deliverance is wholly of grace: we
do not earn it. "The wages of sin is death: but the gift of God is
eternal life."
Long as I live, I'll still be crying
Mercy's free!
And therefore all the glory is unto God: "Of whom are we in
Christ Jesus, who is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and
sanctification and redemption; that, according as it is written, if
any man glory, let him glory in the Lord."
Nevertheless, the benefit of the gift is conditioned on our
acceptance of it. The manna lies about our feet "white and plenteous
as hoar frost," but it will not save us from famishing unless we
gather it up and eat it. The water gushes from the rock, but we
shall die of thirst unless we dip it up and drink it. Christ on the
cross saves no man; it is only when Christ is appropriated that He
saves us. We must make Him ours. We must grasp His extended hand.
Luther said, "The important thing is the possessive pronoun, first
person singular." One of the fathers said, "It is the grip on the
Blood that saves us." Christ stands waiting--he offers life for the
taking. Who will have it? The worst of sinners can make it his very
own by saying with all his heart, "I will! I do!"
WATSON
OPTIMISM
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
JOHN WATSON, widely known under his pen name of "Ian Maclaren,"
was born at Manningtree, Essex, England, in 1850. For many years
he was pastor of Free St. Matthew's Church, Glasgow. He died at
Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, in 1907. He enjoyed unusual popularity, both
as a preacher and as a lecturer. In 1896 he gave a course of
lectures to the students of Yale. "The Bonnie Brier Bush" is his
best-known book. Another volume of his, "The Cure of Souls," is full
of splendid practical suggestions for the minister and divinity
student. Here is a sample of his satire directed toward certain
speakers: "It is said that there are ingenious books which contain
extracts--very familiar as a rule--on every religious subject, so
that the minister, having finished his sermon on faith or hope,
has only to take down this pepper-caster and flavor his somewhat
bare sentences with literature. If this ignominious tale be founded
on fact, and be not a scandal of the enemy, then the Protestant
Church ought also to have an 'Index Expurgatorius,' and its central
authorities insert therein books which it is inexpedient for
ministers to possess. In this class should be included 'The Garland
of Quotations' and 'The Reservoir of Illustrations.'"
WATSON
1850-1907
OPTIMISM[6]
[6] Reprinted by permission of the publishers, A. C. Armstrong & Son.
_Go ye therefore and teach all nations._--Matthew xxviii., 19.
Among the characteristics of Jesus' teaching which have passed into
the higher consciousness of Christianity is an inextinguishable
optimism. When He was only a village prophet, Jesus declared that
the social Utopia of Isaiah was already being fulfilled; when
He gave the Sermon on the Mount He spoke as a greater Moses,
legislating not for a nation but for a race. If He called apostles,
they were to disciple every creature, and if He died it was for a
world. His generation might condemn Him, but they would see Him
again on the clouds of heaven. His death would be celebrated in a
sacrament unto every generation, and being lifted on a cross He
would draw all men to Him. The apostles who failed in His lifetime
would afterward do greater works than Himself, and He who departed
from their sight would return in the Holy Ghost and be with them
forever. He looks beyond His own land, and embraces a race in His
plans. He ignores the defeats of His own ministry, and discounts the
victory of His disciples. He teaches, commands, arranges, prophesies
with a universal and eternal accent. This was not because he made
light of His task or of His enemies; no one ever had such a sense
of the hideous tyranny of sin or passed through such a Gehenna, but
Jesus believed with all His heart and mind in the kingdom of God,
that it was coming and must come. He held that the age of gold was
not behind, but before humanity.
The high spirit has passed into the souls of Christ's chief
servants. The directors and pioneers, the martyrs and exemplars of
our faith have had no misgivings; the light of hope has ever been
shining on their faces. St. Paul boasted that he was a free-born
Roman, but he was prouder to be a member of Christ's commonwealth,
whose capital was in heaven and in which all nations were one. He
was loyal subject of Cæsar, but he owned a more magnificent emperor
at God's right hand. Above the forces of this present world he saw
the principalities and powers in the heavenly places fighting for
his faith. Scourged and imprisoned he burst into psalms, and he
looked beyond his martyrdom to the crown of righteousness. Shackled
to a soldier he wrote letters brimming over with joy, and confined
to a barrack room he caught through a narrow window the gleam of
the eternal city. Never did he flinch before a hostile world, never
was he browbeaten by numbers, never was he discouraged by failure
or reverse. He knew that he was on the winning side, and that he
was laying the foundation of an everlasting state. You catch the
same grand note in St. Augustine with all his horror of prevailing
iniquity; in the medieval hymn writers celebrating Jerusalem the
Golden, when clouds of judgment hung over their heads; and in the
missionaries of the faith who toiled their life through without a
convert, and yet died in faith. They might be losing, but their
commander was winning. The cross might be surrounded with the smoke
of battle, it was being carried forward to victory.
They were right in this conviction, but do not let us make any
mistake about the nature of this triumph, else we shall be
caught by delusions, and in the end be discouraged. It will not
be ecclesiastical, and by that one means that no single church,
either the Church of Rome, or the Church of England, or the Church
of Scotland will ever embrace the whole human race, or even its
English-speaking province. One can not study church history since
the Reformation, or examine the condition of the various religious
denominations to-day without being convinced that there will
always be diversity of organization, and any person who imagines
the Church of the East making her humble submission to Rome, or
the various Protestant bodies of the Anglo-Saxon race trooping in
their multitude to surrender their orders to the Anglican Church
has really lost touch with the possibilities of life. Nor will the
triumph be theological in the sense that all men will come to hold
the same dogma whether it be that of Rome or Geneva. There will
always be many schools of thought within the kingdom of God just
as there will be many nations. Neither one Church nor one creed
will swallow up the others and dominate the world. He who cherishes
that idea is the victim of an optimism which is unreasonable and
undesirable. The kingdom of God will come not through organization
but through inspiration. Its sign will not be the domination of a
Church, but the regeneration of humanity. When man shall be brother
to man the world over, and war shall no longer drench cornfields
with blood: when women are everywhere honored, and children are
protected: when cities are full of health and holiness, and when the
burden of misery has been lifted from the poor, then the world shall
know Christ has not died in vain, and His vision shall be fulfilled.
A fond imagination which only tantalizes and disheartens! It is
natural to say so, but magnificent dreams have come true. Suppose
you had been on the sorrowful way when Jesus was being led to His
doom, and women were pitying this innocent prophet whose hopes had
been so rudely dashed, and whose life had been so piteously wasted.
"Ah!" they cry, "His illusions have been scattered, and His brief
day is going down in darkness." It appeared so, but was it so?
Suppose while the kind-hearted people were talking, some one had
prophesied the career of Jesus. They would have laughed and called
him a visionary, yet which would have been right, the people who
judged by Jesus' figure beneath the cross, or the man who judged
Jesus' power through that cross? The people who looked at the mob of
Jerusalem, or the man who saw the coming generations? There are two
ideas of Christ's crucifixion in art, and each has its own place.
There is the realistic scene with the cross raised only a few feet
from the ground, a Jewish peasant hanging on it, a Roman guard
keeping order, and a rabble of fanatical priests as spectators. That
is a fact, if you please, down to the color of the people's garments
and the shape of the Roman spears. Very likely that is how it looked
and happened. There is also the idealistic scene with a cross high
and majestic on which Christ is hanging with His face hidden. Behind
there is an Italian landscape with a river running through a valley,
trees against the sky, and the campanile of a village church. At
the foot of the cross kneels St. Mary Magdalene, on the right at a
little distance are the Blest Virgin and St. Francis, on the left
St. John and St. Jerome. The Roman soldiers and the Jewish crowd and
that poor cross of Roman making have disappeared as a shadow. The
great cross of the divine Passion is planted in the heart of the
Church and of the race forever. Facts? Certainly, but which is the
fact, that or this? Which is nearer to the truth, the Christ of the
sorrowful way or the Christ at God's right hand?
Have there been no grounds for optimism? Has the splendid hope of
Christ been falsified? One may complain that the centuries have
gone slowly, and that the chariot of righteousness has dragged
upon the road. But Christ has been coming and conquering. There is
some difference between the statistics of the Upper Room, and the
Christian Church to-day; between slavery in the Roman Empire and
to-day; between the experience of women in the pre-Christian period
and to-day; between the reward of labor in Elizabeth's England and
to-day; between the use of riches in the eighteenth century, and the
beginning of the twentieth; between pity for animals in the Georgian
period and to-day. If we are not uplifted by this beneficent
progress, it is because we have grown accustomed to the reign of
Christianity, and are impatient for greater things. We are apt to
be pessimists, not because the kingdom of God is halting, but
because it has not raced; not because the gospel has failed to build
up native churches in the ends of the earth with their own forms,
literature, martyrs, but because all men have not yet believed the
joyful sound.
There are two grounds for the unbounded optimism of our faith, and
the first is God. How did such ideas come into the human mind? Where
did the imagination of the prophets and apostles catch fire? Where
is the spring of the prayers and aspirations of the saints? Whence
do all light and all love come? Surely from God. Can we imagine
better than God can do? Can we demand a fairer world than God will
make? Were not the Greek philosophers right in thinking that our
ideals are eternal, and are kept with God? It is not a question of
our imagining too much, but too little, of being too soon satisfied.
So soon made happy? Hadst thou learned
What God accounteth happiness
Thou wouldst not find it hard to guess
What hell may be his punishment
For those who doubt if God invent
Better than they.
The other ground for optimism is Jesus Christ. Does it seem that the
perfect life for the individual, and for the race, is too sublime,
that it is a distant and unattainable ideal? It is well enough to
give the Sermon on the Mount, and true enough that if it were lived
the world would be like heaven, but then has it ever been lived?
Yes, once at least, and beyond all question. Christ lived as He
taught. He bade men lose their lives and He lost His; He bade men
trample the world underfoot and He trampled it; He commanded men to
love, and He loved even unto death. This He did as the forerunner
of the race. Why not again with Christ as Captain? Why not always,
why not everywhere? Is not He the standard of humanity now, and is
not He its Redeemer? Has He not been working in the saints who have
reminded the world of God? Will He not continue to work till all men
come to the stature of perfection?
Only one institution in human society carries the dew of its
youth, and through the conflict of the centuries still chants
its morning song. It is the religion of Jesus. I do not mean the
Christianity which exhausts its energy in the criticism of documents
or the discussion of ritual--the Christianity of scholasticism or
ecclesiasticism, for there is no life in that pedantry. I do not
mean the Christianity which busies itself with questions of labor
and capital, meat and drink, votes and politics, for there is no
lift in that machinery. I mean the Christianity which centers in the
person of the Son of God, with His revelation of the Father, and His
gospel of salvation, with His hope of immortality and His victory
of soul. This Christianity endures while civilizations exhaust
themselves and pass away, and the face of the world changes. Its
hymns, its prayers, its heroism, its virtues, are ever fresh and
radiant. If a man desires to be young in his soul let him receive
the spirit of Jesus, and bathe his soul in the Christian hope. Ah,
pessimism is a heartless, helpless spirit. If one despairs of the
future for himself and for his fellows, then he had better die at
once. It is despair which cuts the sinews of a man's strength and
leaves him at the mercy of temptation. Do you say, What can I do,
because the light round me is like unto darkness? Climb the mast
till you are above the fog which lies on the surface of the water,
and you will see the sun shining on the spiritual world, and near
at hand the harbor of sweet content. True, we must descend again to
the travail of life, but we return assured that the sun is above the
mist. Do you say, What is the use of fighting, for where I stand
we have barely held our own? Courage! It was all you were expected
to do, and while you stood fast the center has been won, and the
issue of the battle has been decided. It was a poet who had his own
experience of adversity, and was cut down in the midst of his days,
who bade his comrades be of good cheer.
Say not, the struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.
It may be in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward look, the land is bright.
NICOLL
GETHSEMANE, THE ROSE GARDEN OF GOD
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William Robertson Nicoll, Presbyterian minister and author, was born
at Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, 1851. He was educated at the University
of Aberdeen, where he took his degree in 1870. He was Free Minister
of Dufftown, 1874-1877; of Kelso, 1877-1885. In 1886 he became
editor of _British Weekly_, _Bookman_, _Expositor_ and _Woman at
Home_, and is a prolific writer of books, mostly theological.
NICOLL
Born in 1851
GETHSEMANE, THE ROSE GARDEN OF GOD[7]
[7] Copyright, 1901, by _The Homiletic Review,_ New York.
_Without shedding of blood is no_--Heb. ix., 22.
I had a strange feeling, dear brethren, this morning, in busy
London, on a week-day, in the sunshine, reading these words from the
Epistle to the Hebrews; and it struck me that some few would think
they were strangely antique, that they contrasted violently with
your morning newspapers. And then it passed through my mind again
that there could not be anything so vitally modern, so close and
quick to the moment in London as just my text--"Without shedding
of blood there is no"--no anything; nothing; no mighty result, no
achievement, no triumph, no high thing accomplished without shedding
of blood. That is just on the lowest plane what we are getting to
know as a nation, and if we are taught it as Christians, then we
shall come to know at last what Christianity means.
Dear brethren, life is just our chance of making this great and
strange discovery, that without shedding of blood there is nothing,
nothing at all. How do young people begin, most of them? They begin
by doing little or nothing; they begin by trifling. And then they
begin to find that they are not making progress. And if so, they are
wise, gradually they put more strength into it; and then more, till
at last they have put all their strength into it. And then they say
they have not succeeded, have not gained their point. And they say,
What have we got to do now? You take off your coat to your work. A
man may disrobe; what more can be done? What more have I got left?
Left? You have got your blood left, and until you begin to part
with that you will never do any great work at all. I mean by that,
if you leave a mark in life; to fulfil a mission in life there is
wanted something more than the concentration of life. I appeal to
you, there is wanted, besides, the pruning of life, aye, and even
the maiming of life. There must be for success, even in the business
world, I say, in the world of commercial achievement, there must be
more and more an actual parting with the life before it is reached.
And we are being sternly taught this lesson as a nation. But I want
to teach it this morning to the Church as Christians.
Well, let me go back to the very beginning. I find that there is
in the primitive elemental religion a profound and solemn witness
to this truth; "Without shedding of blood there is no remission,"
no peace with God, no life in Christ. And I look upon these early
and crude and distorted ideas as God's deep preparation of the mind
and heart of man by the grand gospel of the substitution under the
law of Jesus Christ for guilty sinners. And we can not get those
thoughts out, they are embodied in our very language. Do you know
what the word "bless" means, what it was derived from? The word
"bless" comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for "blood." And the idea
dimly aimed at is this: that before you can really bless a fellow
creature you must part with your life, or part of your life, for
him; shed blood. We can do a great deal by little things; our Lord
said so--by smiles, by gifts, by kind words, by cups of cold water.
Christ will never forget these things. But at the same time, if you
are to bless a soul in the superlative sense, you can not do it in
that easy way; you have to sprinkle the soul with blood, and with
your own blood. You know what I mean. Oh, some of you know it who
have labored for another soul for weary years; you know it too well.
But part with your life and you will win a soul at last. It will
cover a multitude of sins.
I wish I had time to quote from the primitive religions; but I
would remind you of the old legend of the building of Copenhagen.
The builders could not make progress with their work; the sea came
in and took it away, until at last they took a human life, and by
the sacrifice of that human life they gave to the city stability.
And you know the old idea of primitive religion, that the corn will
not grow in the seed ground unless the body of a dead man is buried
there--life coming out of death. Now, I say all these things point
on to the supreme Author of the universe; Jesus died, the Just for
the unjust, that He might bring us to God. Now do you not think you
can see how it is that the eternal Son shed His blood in Gethsemane,
and offered Himself immaculate to God on Calvary?
But we shall never know quite--none of the ransomed ever know--how
deep were the waters crost, or how dark was the night that the Lord
passed through ere He found the sheep that was lost. But we read
with hearts bowed the prayer offered up with strong crying and
tears--the prayer, "If it be possible let this cup pass." There is
no prayer like that, when you feel that a life is hanging in the
balance, that the issues are not quite decided, that your prayer
might turn it. Then you understand what prayer can be. And we hear
those dim, overcome witnesses who heard afar the broken moaning, the
long-drawn sighs, who saw the hard-won victory which seemed defeat,
and we read--I love to read--about that all-pitying but undimmed
angel who appeared to strengthen at last. God made His minister
a flame of fire in the dark and cold, else could Christ have
conquered? His prayer was answered; the cup was not taken away, but
His lips were made brave to drink it, and He drank it and opened the
kingdom of heaven to all believers. Some of my friends think that
the real crowning-point in the suffering of Christ was Gethsemane,
that it was over there that the cross was more the public and open
manifestation which the world, passing by the wayside, could see. I
do not know. Christ quivered a lament upon the cross too.
And now I come to the two thoughts of my sermon.
In the first place, partly from etymology, we learn that the
shedding of our own blood is the condition of our blessing others.
And then my second point is, that since bloom and blossom, the
perfection of life, are also associated with the root, with the word
blood, then I say that the bloom and perfection of our own lives
depend upon our parting with the natural life and having it replaced
by the resurrection life. I hope it is simple enough. Without
shedding of blood there is no blessing to others; without shedding
of blood there is no blessing to ourselves. Take these two great
ruling missionary ideas.
I. Bloodshed for blessing others.
I spoke about Gethsemane because I wanted you to understand that
I was referring not merely to absolute physical death, but to
the death which leads a man to go on, and perhaps to live more
abundantly than before. But still, dear friends, we have been most
solemnly and impressively reminded in these times, that, whatever
has failed in the Church of Christ, the race of martyrs has not
failed. Great names have been written there, the names of those
who have been received in heaven. And, for my part, I love the way
in which the Church of Rome reverences the martyrs. You know that
that Church never prays for the martyrs, but makes requests for
their prayers; you know that that Church pictures in the assembly
of the redeemed before the throne the martyrs in their robes of
crimson and the saints in white. The blood of the martyrs is the
seed of the Church. We can not atone for others, but we can bless
others. We can not, dear friends, have any part in the one perfect
oblation and substitution in the sacrifice of the world, but we
fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ. We know
Him and the fellowship of His sufferings as well as the power
of His resurrection. And when Christ first laid His hand on His
well-beloved He said: "I will show him how great things he must
suffer for my name's sake." This is the chief work of the martyr,
to suffer; and it is the chief work of every Christian to suffer
for Christ's name's sake. And I sometimes think the whole of
Christianity, for the present generation, is summed up in this: fill
up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ, for until
that is filled up He can not have His triumph.
But, dear brethren, of course I do not confuse labor and suffering
in the Christian servant's life. The labor is effective in
proportion as there is suffering, and the suffering by itself is
nothing without the labor. But, oh, how Christ's great servants have
suffered! Have you ever thought how St. Paul was actually driven
to use the awful language of the passion when he described his own
life? He did not like to do it; he always drew the line sharp and
clear between himself and the Master. He said, "Was Paul crucified
for you?" Yes; but he was driven to say, "I am crucified with
Christ"--always bearing about the body and its death--"I die daily."
Oh, they have suffered by way of bloodshed. Yes; but, dear brethren,
I think that in the lives of the great servants of Christ, the elect
servants, there is always one Gethsemane above the rest, far above
the rest; one shedding of blood, one parting with life which makes
all the rest comparatively easy. We can not tell, I think, about
other people's Gethsemane; and we can not tell, will not tell,
nothing would make us tell, about our own.
How does the Gethsemane come? Often it is passed with very little
sign or show. You have read in "The Bonny Brier Bush" that when
George Howe came home to die, his mother hid herself beneath the
laburnum, and as the cat stood beneath the stile, it told the plain
fact, as she had feared. And Margaret passed through her Gethsemane
with the gold blossoms falling on her face. I believe there are
some of you who are passing through your Gethsemane in this chapel
while I am speaking to you now. There is little to show--some
absence of manner, some twitching of the lips, some unwonted pallor,
some strange abstraction, but no more. And you will never tell
anybody about it, and nobody will discover it when you are dead.
You sometimes suspect--do you not?--about another man what his
Gethsemane has been. You are almost sure to be wrong. That surrender
which you see was accomplished almost without murmur or reluctance.
Sometimes in biographies I think I can see where the Gethsemane is.
It may be, and often is, the rooting out of some cherished ambition
that has filled the heart and occupied every thought, every dream
for years and years. It may be the shattering of some song, the
breaking of some dream. It may be, and often is, a great rending
of the affections, the cutting the soul free from some detaining
human tenderness. Well, we do not know--the real Gethsemane never
lasts long. I think an hour is the longest that anybody could bear
it--"Could ye not watch with me one hour?" True, the heartache may
go on to the end, but the Gethsemane, that can not last a long time.
We have in biographies some instances of Gethsemanes, and sometimes
in very unexpected places. You would not imagine that a prosperous
suburban minister, with a rich congregation, and every earthly
ambition realized, would have his Gethsemane as a missionary
far among the heathen has. But in the "Life of Dr. Raleigh," of
Kensington, whom many of you remember, there is a significant
passage. When he was at the zenith of his fame he said that
ministers came and looked around at his crowded church and envied
his position. "They do not know," he said, "what it has cost me
to come to this." In the "Life" of the beloved James Hamilton, of
Regent Square, there is a passage which always touches me. It shows
how he parted, for Christ's sake, with the great ambition of his
life. He longed to write a life of Erasmus, but other things came
and he was balked of his desire. He says:
"So this day, with a certain touch of tenderness, I restored the
eleven tone folios to the shelf and tied up my memoranda, and took
leave of a project which has often cheered the hours of exhaustion,
the mere thought of which has always been enough to overcome my
natural indulgence. It is well. It is the only chance I ever had of
attaining a small measure of literary distinction, and where there
is so much pride and naughtiness of heart it is better to remain
unknown."
I think we may all easily see where the Gethsemane came in in Henry
Martyn's life, and--I say it with great diffidence--I think we may
see where the Gethsemane came in in John Wesley's life, tho I should
not care to indicate it. But the heart knoweth its own bitterness.
What we know is that the Gethsemanes in the Christian life are
in the course of duty, and in obedience to God's will, as it is
revealed from day to day.
Go back to John Wesley's Journal. On one occasion he had the claim
of a reputed saint, and he rejected it, and said--mark these words:
"No blood of the martyrs is here, no scandal of the cross, no
persecution of them that love God." No blood is here, no saint. When
Adam Clarke was speaking in the City-Road Chapel in 1816, at the
establishment of a missionary society in London, he told the people
about the Moravians. And I need not tell you how great the Moravian
influence was on early Methodism. He told his hearers at that
time that the Moravians, when all told, only numbered six hundred
members, but they had missionaries in every part of the globe to
which it was then possible to send them. Dr. Clarke told them of the
beginning, which was in the far-away place of St. Thomas. A negro
slave escaped from St. Thomas somehow, and he came into contact
with Zinzendorf, and found the way of salvation, and rejoiced in
Christ. Well, this negro came to the Moravians, and he told them
that among his fellow slaves in St. Thomas there were several--his
own sister was one, I think--who were feeling after God. "But," he
said, "nobody can go out to tell them the gospel unless they sell
themselves as slaves and go out as slaves." Whereupon two brethren
immediately offered themselves, and exprest their willingness to
be sold as slaves, that they might preach Christ. Yes, we may be
sure that no life will bring forth fruit to God if it is without
its Gethsemane, with the great drops of blood in it; and I believe
that just as the Savior's blood dropt in Gethsemane and the ground
blest it, so the blood of the surrendered soul makes its Gethsemane
a garden, if not now, then hereafter; but the time must be, whenever
a martyr's blood has been shed, upon that ground the fruits of
righteousness must spring.
II. Bloodshed for self-perfection.
I have just my other point. The second point is that there must be
bloodshedding for the bloom and perfection of our own lives before
they can come to their flower, to God's ideal beauty; there must be
the expenditure of the natural life.
Now, what is it that should follow when we have parted with our life
and lived our Gethsemane; what should be the effect upon our lives?
Well, what ought to follow is, that the resurrection life, which the
shedding of blood has made room for, should take the place of the
other. But what does follow? I think three things, often:
First, it often happens that a real Gethsemane of the soul means
a brief tarrying in this world. It seems as if too much life had
gone, as if the spirit could not recover its energies. There are a
few books which the heart of the Church has always loved. I call
them Gethsemane books. They are books about Gethsemane, about the
bloodshedding in the early days and what was gone through. They are
chiefly the lives of David Brainerd, Henry Martyn, and McCheyne. But
there are many others that I have no time to name. All of these died
young, not without signs of the divine blessing, but their rich,
fervent natures were prematurely exhausted and burned out. Have you
read the memoir of Brainerd? John Wesley published it, slightly
abridged, for his people, and I have a copy. Read it, mark its
reserved passion, its austere tenderness; read the story of young
Miss Edwards, who followed her betrothed so soon. You will then feel
that you have done business in great waters. The pages of this book
are all spotted with blood. Read Brainerd's aspirations:
"Oh, that I might be a flaming fire in the service of my God! Here I
am, Lord, send me; send me to the ends of the earth; send me to the
rough and savage pagan, to the wilderness; send me from all that is
called earthly comfort; send me even to death itself if it be but
in Thy service and to promote Thy Kingdom."
But sometimes the earthly life is parted with and not fully replaced
by the resurrection life, and the long-drawn melancholy ensues. You
really must not believe that I am speaking as an enemy of Methodism
when I say I venture to think there is something of that in the life
of that great saint and supreme Christian poet, Charles Wesley. I
think it will be granted by his most ardent admirers that the last
thirty years of his life will not compare with those of his mighty
brother. They were sad years in the main, spent in comparative
inaction, with many, many wearisome discontented days. Dear friends,
there is no such thing as melancholy in the New Testament--nothing.
And Charles Wesley's melancholy is the most attractive in the world--
Oh, when shall we sweetly move?
Oh, when shall our souls be at rest?
And there is this view of life: "Suffer out my threescore years till
the Deliverer come; and then this soul appeals to God to explain my
life of misery with all Thy love's designs in Thee." Those are awful
matters--"explain my life of misery with all Thy love's designs in
Thee." But, dear friends, am I right in saying that this frame is
a Christian frame? When Charles Wesley was in his last years his
favorite text was--and it is a text which will always go with his
name--"I will bring the third part through the fire." That is, he
thought that God would bring to glory one-third part of Methodists,
that one-third of them would endure to the end. Compare that with
"God is with us who seeth the end." Who is right? And he never
sought an abundant entrance into the kingdom. What he used to say
over and over again was: "Oh, that I might escape safe to land on a
broken piece of the ship. This is my daily, hourly prayer, that I
may escape safe to land." In his latter days he was always warning
those about him that a flood was coming out over the country which
would sweep much of this religion away. You know it was said on
another death-bed, "Clouds drop fatness."
It is always necessary that the bloom of life should come out of
death. What Christ means is that as the natural life goes, as the
veins are depleted, there is the resurrection life which should
fill them and pour into them to strengthen. There is no book in
the world, I think, like John Wesley's "Journal," because it is
the book of the resurrection life, and I do not know another in
all literature; the resurrection life lived in this world almost
as Christ might have gone on living it if the forty years had been
prolonged into fifty years. As a book it stands out solitary in
all literature, clear, detached, columnar. It is a tree that is
ever green before the Lord. It tells us of a heart that kept to the
last its innocent pleasures, but held them so lightly, while its
Christian renunciation and its passionate peace grew and grew to the
end, the old wistfulness, the old calm fiery and revealed eloquence.
John Wesley was indeed one of those who had attained the inward
stillness, who had entered the second rest, who, to use his own
fine words, was "of those who are at rest before they go hence,
possessors of that rest which remaineth even here"--even here--"for
the people of God." With what emotion one comes to his closing days,
and follows him to that last sermon at Leatherhead, on the word:
"Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he
is near!" And watch by his triumphant death-bed and hear him say,
"The clouds drop fatness." The only one I can compare him with in
all the history of the Church is the apostle Elliot, the missionary
to the Indians, whose life was written by Cotton Mather. You know
that in that day they had a tradition that the country was safe
as long as the apostle was there. Some of you will remember that
Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his great book, "The Scarlet Letter," tells
us of how the poor children of Arthur Dimsdale pleaded to see the
apostle Elliot, for the testimony is that there was an unearthly
light upon his face to the last of his long life. We read about that
great apostle, fit to be named with Wesley, that he had his bitter
sorrows. Two sons died before him, and Cotton Mather says they were
desirable preachers of the gospel. But the old man sacrificed them.
Now, note Cotton Mather's phrase, "sacrificed with such a sacred
indifference." And he was so nailed to the cross and the Lord Jesus
Christ that the grandeur of this world would seem to him just what
it would be to a dying man, when at a great age and nearing the end
he grew, with John Wesley, still more heavenly, more Saviorly, more
divine and scented more and more of that spicy country at which he
was ready to put ashore. His last words were, "Welcome, joy," and he
died. Such a life of sacrifice is the gateway of the eternal city.
2. It is likewise necessary that the conversion of the world should
come out of death. I for one believe in the ancient promise, "The
knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the
sea." Yes, but before the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the
earth, the earth must be covered with the blood falling upon it from
faithful souls. "Without shedding of blood there is no--." Some
young men whom I love have started societies for the evangelization
of the world in the present generation. I love that; let us try.
But what is evangelization? To send Bibles, to deliver the message
to everybody? No, not that, but the shedding of the servants' blood
on every field, with the world as one great Gethsemane. We shall see
over it the flowers that grew only in the garden where Christ's brow
dropt blood. At this meeting, in this chapel, there will be some
sweet mother who is going through her Gethsemane. She is resolving
to give up a son who has heard the call: "Depart, for I will send
them far hence to the heathen." One in widow's weeds was asked if
she had subscribed to the missionary society. She said: "Yes, I gave
my only son, and he died in the field." That is my text: "Without
shedding of blood there is no--."
Yes, and there is some young heart here that has a great deal to
give up, a great deal at home. And he is hearing me, and he has
made up his mind that he will make the sacrifice, too; that he will
go forth to Christ. And what are the rest of us doing? Well, dear
brethren, there is to be a collection, and we will put our hands in
our pockets in the old way, half thinking what we will spend, and
how we are to spend it before we go home; and select a coin and put
it in. And then we shall go home and see a missionary magazine on
the table, and express our regret that missionary magazines are not
better edited and not more interesting. Of course, there will be
something for the collector when the collector goes round. It will
not be much; and perhaps, owing to the war, you know, we can not
give quite so much as last year.
And do you really think that the world will ever be converted in
that way? Do you believe it? Have you any right to expect that it
should be converted in that way? No right at all. The world will
never be converted until the Church is in agony, and prays more
earnestly, and sweats, as it were, great drops of blood; never,
never! "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins."
VAN DYKE
THE MEANING OF MANHOOD
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Henry Van Dyke was born in Germantown, Pa., in 1852. He is a
graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and of Berlin University.
From 1882 to 1900 he was pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church,
New York, since which time he has been Professor of English
Literature in Princeton University. As a preacher he is generally
regarded as a model, and as the author of many books he enjoys
the highest literary reputation. Doctor Brastow calls him "the
pulpit artist of his school," and adds: "In skilful handling of
the manuscript, in clearness, force, chasteness, and felicity of
diction, and in a directness and cogency of moral appeal which
seemingly his later literary interests have not enhanced, he stands
in the front line of American preachers."
VAN DYKE
Born in 1852
THE MEANING OF MANHOOD[8]
[8] By permission of Dr. Van Dyke and the publishers. From "The
Culture of Christian Manhood." Edited by W. H. Sallmon. Copyright,
1897, by Fleming H. Revell Co.
_How much, then, is a man better than a sheep!_--Matt. xii., 12.
On the lips of Christ these noble words were an exclamation. He
knew, as no one else has ever known, "what was in man." But to us
who repeat them they often seem like a question. We are so ignorant
of the deepest meaning of manhood, that we find ourselves at the
point to ask in perplexity, how much, after all, is a man better
than a sheep?
It is evident that the answer to this question must depend upon our
general view of life. There are two very common ways of looking at
existence that settle our judgment of the comparative value of a man
and a sheep at once and inevitably.
Suppose, in the first place, that we take a materialistic view of
life. Looking at the world from this standpoint, we shall see in
it a great mass of matter, curiously regulated by laws which have
results, but no purposes, and agitated into various modes of motion
by a secret force whose origin is, and forever must be, unknown.
Life, in man as in other animals, is but one form of this force.
Rising through many subtle gradations, from the first tremor that
passes through the gastric nerve of a jellyfish to the most delicate
vibration of gray matter in the brain of a Plato or a Shakespeare,
it is really the same from the beginning to the end--physical in its
birth among the kindred forces of heat and electricity, physical in
its death in cold ashes and dust. The only difference between man
and other animals is a difference of degree. The ape takes his place
in our ancestral tree, and the sheep becomes our distant cousin.
It is true that we have somewhat the advantage of these poor
relations. We belong to the more fortunate branch of the family,
and have entered upon an inheritance considerably enlarged by the
extinction of collateral branches. But, after all, it is the same
inheritance, and there is nothing in humanity which is not derived
from and destined to our mother earth.
If, then, we accept this view of life, what answer can we give
to the question, how much is a man better than a sheep? We must
say: He is a little better, but not much. In some things he has
the advantage. He lives longer, and has more powers of action
and capacities of pleasure. He is more clever, and has succeeded
in making the sheep subject to his domination. But the balance is
not all on one side. The sheep has fewer pains as well as fewer
pleasures, less care as well as less power. If it does not know how
to make a coat, at least it succeeds in growing its own natural wool
clothing, and that without taxation. Above all, the sheep is not
troubled with any of those vain dreams of moral responsibility and
future life which are the cause of such great and needless trouble
to humanity. The flocks that fed in the pastures of Bethlehem got
just as much physical happiness out of existence as the shepherd,
David, who watched them, and, being natural agnostics, they were
free from David's delusions in regard to religion. They could give
all their attention to eating, drinking, and sleeping, which is the
chief end of life. From the materialistic standpoint, a man may be a
little better than a sheep, but not much.
Or suppose, in the second place, that we take the commercial view of
life. We shall then say that all things must be measured by their
money value, and that it is neither profitable nor necessary to
inquire into their real nature or their essential worth. Men and
sheep are worth what they will bring in the open market, and this
depends upon the supply and demand. Sheep of a very rare breed
have been sold for as much as five or six thousand dollars. But
men of common stock, in places where men are plenty and cheap (as,
for example, in Central Africa), may be purchased for the price
of a rusty musket or a piece of cotton cloth. According to this
principle, we must admit that the comparative value of a man and a
sheep fluctuates with the market, and that there are times when the
dumb animal is much the more valuable of the two.
This view, carried out to its logical conclusion, led to slavery,
and put up men and sheep at auction on the same block, to be
disposed of to the highest bidder. We have gotten rid of the logical
conclusion. But have we gotten rid entirely of the premise on which
it rested? Does not the commercial view of life still prevail in
civilized society?
There is a certain friend of mine who often entertains me with an
account of the banquets which he has attended. On one occasion he
told me that two great railroads and the major part of all the sugar
and oil in the United States sat down at the same table with three
gold-mines and a line of steamships.
"How much is that man worth?" asks the curious inquirer. "That
man," answers some walking business directory, "is worth a million
dollars; and the man sitting next to him is not worth a penny." What
other answer can be given by one who judges everything by a money
standard? If wealth is really the measure of value, if the end of
life is the production or the acquisition of riches, then humanity
must take its place in the sliding scale of commodities. Its value
is not fixt and certain. It depends upon accidents of trade. We
must learn to look upon ourselves and our fellow men purely from a
business point of view and to ask only: What can this man make? how
much has that man made? how much can I get out of this man's labor?
how much will that man pay for my services? Those little children
that play in the squalid city streets--they are nothing to me or to
the world; there are too many of them; they are worthless. Those
long-fleeced, high-bred sheep that feed upon my pastures--they are
among my most costly possessions; they will bring an enormous price;
they are immensely valuable. How much is a man better than a sheep?
What a foolish question! Sometimes the man is better; sometimes the
sheep is better. It all depends upon the supply and demand.
Now these two views of life, the materialistic and the commercial,
always have prevailed in the world. Men have held them consciously
and unconsciously. At this very day there are some who profess
them, and there are many who act upon them, altho they may not be
willing to acknowledge them. They have been the parents of countless
errors in philosophy and sociology; they have bred innumerable and
loathsome vices and shames and cruelties and oppressions in the
human race. It was to shatter and destroy these falsehoods, to sweep
them away from the mind and heart of humanity, that Jesus came into
the world. We can not receive His gospel in any sense, we can not
begin to understand its scope and purpose, unless we fully, freely,
and sincerely accept His great revelation of the true meaning and
value of man as man.
We say this was His revelation. Undoubtedly it is true that Christ
came to reveal God to man. But undoubtedly it is just as true that
He came to reveal man to himself. He called Himself the Son of God,
but He called Himself also the Son of man. His nature was truly
divine, but His nature was no less truly human. He became man. And
what is the meaning of that lowly birth, in the most helpless form
of infancy, if it be not to teach us that humanity is so related to
Deity that it is capable of receiving and embodying God Himself? He
died for man. And what is the meaning of that sacrifice, if it be
not to teach us that God counts no price too great to pay for the
redemption of the human soul? This gospel of our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ contains the highest, grandest, most ennobling doctrine
of humanity that ever has been proclaimed on earth. It is the only
certain cure for low and debasing views of life. It is the only
doctrine from which we can learn to think of ourselves and our
fellow men as we ought to think. I ask you to consider for a little
while the teachings of Jesus Christ in regard to what it means to be
a man.
Suppose, then, that we come to Him with this question: How much is
a man better than a sheep? He will tell us that a man is infinitely
better, because he is the child of God, because he is capable of
fellowship with God, and because he is made for an immortal life.
And this threefold answer will shine out for us not only in the
words, but also in the deeds, and above all in the death, of the Son
of God and the Son of man.
1. Think, first of all, of the meaning of manhood in the light of
the truth that man is the offspring and likeness of God. This was
not a new doctrine first proclaimed by Christ. It was clearly taught
in the magnificent imagery of the book of Genesis. The chief design
of that great picture of the beginnings is to show that a personal
Creator is the source and author of all things that are made. But
next to that, and of equal importance, is the design to show that
man is incalculably superior to all the other works of God--that the
distance between him and the lower animals is not a difference in
degree, but a difference in kind. Yes, the difference is so great
that we must use a new word to describe the origin of humanity, and
if we speak of the stars and the earth, the trees and the flowers,
the fishes, the birds, and the beasts, as "the works" of God, when
man appears we must find a nobler name and say, "This is more than
God's work; he is God's child."
Our human consciousness confirms this testimony and answers to it.
We know that there is something in us which raises us infinitely
above the things that we see and hear and touch, and the creatures
that appear to spend their brief life in the automatic workings
of sense and instinct. These powers of reason and affection and
conscience, and above all this wonderful power of free will, the
faculty of swift, sovereign, voluntary choice, belong to a higher
being. We say not to corruption, "Thou art my father," nor to the
worm, "Thou art my mother"; but to God, "Thou art my father," and to
the great Spirit, "In thee was my life born."
Not only cunning casts in clay:
Let science prove we are, and then
What matters science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.
Let him, the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape;
But I was born to other things.
Frail as our physical existence may be, in some respects the most
frail, the most defenseless among animals, we are yet conscious of
something that lifts us up and makes us supreme. "Man," says Pascal,
"is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature; but he is a reed that
thinks. It needs not that the universe arm itself to crush him. An
exhalation, a drop of water, suffice to destroy him. But were the
universe to crush him, man is yet nobler than the universe; for he
knows that he dies, and the universe, even in prevailing against
him, knows not its power."
Now the beauty and strength of Christ's doctrine of man lie, not
in the fact that He was at pains to explain and defend and justify
this view of human nature, but in the fact that He assumed it with
an unshaken conviction of its truth, and acted upon it always and
everywhere. He spoke to man, not as the product of nature, but as
the child of God. He took it for granted that we are different from
plants and animals, and that we are conscious of the difference.
"Consider the lilies," He says to us; "the lilies can not consider
themselves: they know not what they are, nor what their life means;
but you know, and you can draw the lesson of their lower beauty into
your higher life. Regard the birds of the air; they are dumb and
unconscious dependents upon the divine bounty, but you are conscious
objects of the divine care. Are you not of more value than many
sparrows?" Through all His words we feel the thrilling power of
this high doctrine of humanity. He is always appealing to reason,
to conscience, to the power of choice between good and evil, to the
noble and godlike faculties in man.
And now think for a moment of the fact that His life was
voluntarily, and of set purpose, spent among the poorest and
humblest of mankind. Remember that He spoke, not to philosophers
and scholars, but to peasants and fishermen and the little children
of the world. What did He mean by that? Surely it was to teach us
that this doctrine of the meaning of manhood applies to man as
man. It is not based upon considerations of wealth or learning or
culture or eloquence. Those are the things of which the world takes
account, and without which it refuses to pay any attention to us. A
mere man, in the eyes of the world, is a nobody. But Christ comes
to humanity in its poverty, in its ignorance, stript of all outward
signs of power, destitute of all save that which belongs in common
to mankind; to this lowly child, this very beggar-maid of human
nature, comes the king, and speaks to her as a princess in disguise,
and lifts her up and sets a crown upon her head. I ask you if this
simple fact ought not to teach us how much a man is better than a
sheep.
2. But Christ reveals to us another and a still higher element of
the meaning of manhood by speaking to us as beings who are capable
of holding communion with God and reflecting the divine holiness in
our hearts and lives. And here also His doctrine gains clearness
and force when we bring it into close connection with His conduct.
I suppose that there are few of us who would not be ready to admit
at once that there are some men and women who have high spiritual
capacities. For them, we say, religion is a possible thing. They can
attain to the knowledge of God and fellowship with Him. They can
pray, and sing praises, and do holy work. It is easy for them to be
good. They are born good. They are saints by nature. But for the
great mass of the human race this is out of the question, absurd,
impossible. They must dwell in ignorance, in wickedness, in impiety.
But to all this Christ says, "No!" No, to our theory of perfection
for the few. No, to our theory of hopeless degradation for the
many. He takes His way straight to the outcasts of the world, the
publicans and the harlots and sinners, and to them He speaks of
the mercy and the love of God and the beauty of the heavenly life;
not to cast them into black despair, not because it was impossible
for them to be good and to find God, but because it was divinely
possible. God was waiting for them, and something in them was
waiting for God. They were lost. But surely they never could have
been lost unless they had first of all belonged to God, and this
made it possible for them to be found again. They were prodigals.
But surely the prodigal is also a child, and there is a place for
him in the Father's house. He may dwell among the swine, but he is
not one of them. He is capable of remembering his Father's love.
He is capable of answering his Father's embrace. He is capable of
dwelling in his Father's house in filial love and obedience.
This is the doctrine of Christ in regard to fallen and disordered
and guilty human nature. It is fallen, it is disordered, it is
guilty; but the capacity of reconciliation, of holiness, of love
to God, still dwells in it, and may be quickened into a new life.
That is God's work, but God Himself could not do it if man were not
capable of it.
Do you remember the story of the portrait of Dante which is painted
upon the walls of Bargello, at Florence? For many years it was
supposed that the picture had utterly perished. Men had heard of it,
but no one living had seen it. But presently came an artist who was
determined to find it again. He went into the place where tradition
said that it had been painted. The room was used as a storehouse for
lumber and straw. The walls were covered with dirty whitewash. He
had the heaps of rubbish carried away. Patiently and carefully he
removed the whitewash from the wall. Lines and colors long hidden
began to appear; and at last the grave, lofty, noble face of the
poet looked out again upon the world of light.
"That was wonderful," you say, "that was beautiful!" Not half so
wonderful as the work which Christ came to do in the heart of
man--to restore the forgotten likeness of God and bring the divine
image to the light. He comes to us with the knowledge that God's
image is there, tho concealed; He touches us with the faith that the
likeness can be restored. To have upon our hearts the impress of the
divine nature, to know that there is no human being in whom that
treasure is not hidden and from whose stained and dusty soul Christ
can not bring out that reflection of God's face--that, indeed, is
to know the meaning of manhood, and to be sure that a man is better
than a sheep!
3. There is yet one more element in Christ's teaching in regard to
the meaning of manhood, and that is His doctrine of immortality.
This truth springs inevitably out of His teaching in regard to the
origin and capacity of human nature. A being formed in the divine
image, a being capable of reflecting the divine holiness, is a
being so lofty that he must have also the capacity of entering
into a life which is spiritual and eternal, and which leads onward
to perfection. All that Christ teaches about man, all that Christ
offers to do for man, opens before him a vast and boundless future.
The idea of immortality runs through everything that Jesus says and
does. Never for a moment does He speak to man as a creature who is
bound to this present world. Never for a moment does He forget, or
suffer us to forget, that our largest and most precious treasures
may be laid up in the world to come. He would arouse our souls to
perceive and contemplate the immense issues of life.
The perils that beset us here through sin are not brief and
momentary dangers, possibilities of disgrace in the eyes of men,
of suffering such limited pain as our bodies can endure in the
disintegrating process of disease, of dying a temporal death, which
at the worst can only cause us a few hours of anguish. A man might
bear these things, and take the risk of this world's shame and
sickness and death, for the sake of some darling sin. But the truth
that flashes on us like lightning from the word of Christ is that
the consequence of sin is the peril of losing our immortality. "Fear
not them which kill the body," said he, "but are not able to kill
the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and
body in hell."
On the other hand, the opportunities that come to us here through
the grace of God are not merely opportunities of temporal peace and
happiness. They are chances of securing endless and immeasurable
felicity, wealth that can never be counted or lost, peace that the
world can neither give nor take away. We must understand that now
the kingdom of God has come near unto us. It is a time when the
doors of heaven are open. We may gain an inheritance incorruptible,
and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. We may lay hold not only on
a present joy of holiness, but on an everlasting life with God.
It is thus that Christ looks upon the children of men: not as
herds of dumb, driven cattle, but as living souls moving onward to
eternity. It is thus that He dies for men: not to deliver them from
brief sorrows, but to save them from final loss and to bring them
into bliss that knows no end. It is thus that He speaks to us, in
solemn words before which our dreams of earthly pleasure and power
and fame and wealth are dissipated like unsubstantial vapors: "What
shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own
soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
There never was a time in which Christ's doctrine of the meaning of
manhood was more needed than it is to-day. There is no truth more
important and necessary for us to take into our hearts, and hold
fast, and carry out in our lives. For here we stand in an age when
the very throng and pressure and superfluity of human life lead us
to set a low estimate upon its value. The air we breathe is heavy
with materialism and commercialism. The lowest and most debasing
views of human nature are freely proclaimed and unconsciously
accepted. There is no escape, no safety for us, save in coming back
to Christ and learning from Him that man is the child of God, made
in the divine image, capable of the divine fellowship, and destined
to an immortal life. I want to tell you just three of the practical
reasons why we must learn this.
(1) We need to learn it in order to understand the real meaning, and
guilt, and danger, and hatefulness of sin.
Men are telling us nowadays that there is no such thing as sin. It
is a dream, a delusion. It must be left out of account. All the
evils in the world are natural and inevitable. They are simply
the secretions of human nature. There is no more shame or guilt
connected with them than with the malaria of the swamp or the poison
of the nightshade.
But Christ tells us that sin is real, and that it is the enemy, the
curse, the destroyer of mankind. It is not a part of man as God made
him; it is a part of man as he has unmade and degraded himself. It
is the marring of the divine image, the ruin of the glorious temple,
the self-mutilation and suicide of the immortal soul. It is sin
that casts man down into the mire. It is sin that drags him from
the fellowship of God into the company of beasts. It is sin that
leads him into the far country of famine, and leaves him among the
swine, and makes him fain to fill his belly with the husks that the
swine do eat. Therefore we must hate sin, and fear it, and abhor it,
always and everywhere. When we look into our own heart and find sin
there, we must humble ourselves before God and repent in sackcloth
and ashes. Every sin that whispers in our heart is an echo of the
world's despair and misery. Every selfish desire that lies in our
soul is a seed of that which has brought forth strife, and cruelty,
and murder, and horrible torture, and bloody war among the children
of men. Every lustful thought that defiles our imagination is an
image of that which has begotten loathsome vices and crawling shames
throughout the world. My brother-men, God hates sin because it ruins
man. And when we know what that means, when we feel that same poison
of evil within us, we must hate sin as He does, and bow in penitence
before Him, crying, "God, be merciful to me a sinner."
(2) We need to learn Christ's doctrine of the meaning of manhood in
order to help us to love our fellow men.
This is a thing that is easy to profess, but hard, bitterly hard,
to do. The faults and follies of human nature are apparent. The
unlovely and contemptible and offensive qualities of many people
thrust themselves sharply upon our notice and repel us. We are
tempted to shrink back, wounded and disappointed, and to relapse
into a life that is governed by disgusts. If we dwell in the
atmosphere of a Christless world, if we read only those newspapers
which chronicle the crimes and meannesses of men, or those realistic
novels which deal with the secret vices and corruptions of humanity,
and fill our souls with the unspoken conviction that virtue is an
old-fashioned dream, and that there is no man good, no woman pure, I
do not see how we can help despising and hating mankind. Who shall
deliver us from this spirit of bitterness? Who shall lead us out of
this heavy, fetid air of the lazar-house and the morgue?
None but Christ. If we will go with Him, He will teach us not to
hate our fellow men for what they are, but to love them for what
they may become. He will teach us to look, not for the evil which is
manifest, but for the good which is hidden. He will teach us not to
despair, but to hope, even for the most degraded of mankind. And so,
perchance, as we keep company with Him, we shall learn the secret
of that divine charity which fills the heart with peace and joy and
quiet strength. We shall learn to do good unto all men as we have
opportunity, not for the sake of gratitude or reward, but because
they are the children of our Father and the brethren of our Savior.
We shall learn the meaning of that blest death on Calvary, and be
willing to give ourselves as a sacrifice for others, knowing that
he that turneth a sinner from the error of his ways shall save a
soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.
(3) Finally, we need to accept and believe Christ's doctrine of the
meaning of manhood in order that it may lead us personally to God
and a higher life.
You are infinitely better and more precious than the dumb beasts.
You know it, you feel it; you are conscious that you belong to
another world. And yet it may be that there are times when you
forget it and live as if there was no God, no soul, no future life.
Your ambitions are fixt upon the wealth that corrodes, the fame that
fades. Your desires are toward the pleasures that pall upon the
senses. You are bartering immortal treasure for the things which
perish in the using. You are ignoring and despising the high meaning
of your manhood. Who shall remind you of it, who shall bring you
back to yourself, who shall lift you up to the level of your true
being, unless it be the Teacher who spake as never man spake, the
Master who brought life and immortality to light.
Come, then, to Christ, who can alone save you from the sin that
defiles and destroys your manhood. Come, then, to Christ, who alone
can make you good men and true, living in the power of an endless
life. Come, then, to Christ, that you may have fellowship with Him
and realize all it means to be a man.
END OF VOL. IX.
THE HOUR-GLASS STORIES
THE SANDALS
By REV. ZELOTES GRENELL. A beautiful little idyl of sacred story
dealing with the sandals of Christ.
THE COURTSHIP OF SWEET ANNE PAGE
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Merry Wives of Windsor," full of fun and frolic, and telling of the
Courtship of Sweet Anne Page by three rival lovers chosen by her
father, her mother, and herself.
THE TRANSFIGURATION OF MISS PHILURA
By FLORENCE MORSE KINGSLEY. This clever story is based on the theory
that every physical need and every desire of the human heart can be
claimed and received from the "Encircling Good" by the true believer.
THE HERR DOCTOR
By ROBERT MACDONALD. A novelette of artistic literary merit,
narrating the varied experiences of an American girl in her effort
toward capturing a titled husband.
ESARHADDON
By COUNT LEO TOLSTOY. Three allegorical stories illustrating
Tolstoy's theories of non-resistance, and the essential unity of all
forms of life.
_Small 12mo, Dainty Cloth Binding, Illustrated._
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THE HOUR-GLASS STORIES
THE CZAR'S GIFT
BY WILLIAM ORDWAY PARTRIDGE. How freedom was obtained for an exiled
brother.
THE EMANCIPATION OF MISS SUSANA
An entrancing love story that ends in a most romantic marriage.
THE OLD DARNMAN
By CHARLES L. GOODELL, D.D. A character known to many a New England
boy and girl, in which the "lost bride" is the occasion for a
lifelong search from door to door.
BALM IN GILEAD
By FLORENCE MORSE KINGSLEY. A very touching story of a mother's
grief over the loss of her child of tender years, and her search for
comfort, which she finds at last in her husband's loyal Christian
faith.
MISERERE
By MABEL WAGNALLS. The romantic story of a sweet voice that thrilled
great audiences in operatic Paris, Berlin, etc.
PARSIFAL
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"These Twelve Letters are all on 'Practical Matters' which enter
into the life of all our 'Girls.'... All is subordinated to
produce wise, practical, and much-needed instruction, in plain,
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TELLS ALL ABOUT
The Choice of a Wife
Choice of a Husband
Clandestine Marriages
Duties of Husbands to Wives
Duties of Wives to Husbands
Boarding-house and Hotel Life _vs._ The Home
Costume and Morals
Plain Talk
Easy Divorce
Motherhood
Heredity
Paradisaic Women
Influence of Sisters over Brothers
Martyrs of the Kitchen
The Old Folks' Visit.
"It is a wholesome book. It will carry a benediction into thousands
of domestic circles."--_Zion's Herald, Boston_.
"Thoroughly Christian and commonsense."--_Free Methodist_, Chicago.
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* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as
printed.
Missing page numbers are page numbers that were not shown in the
original text.
Mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where
the missing quote should be placed.
Page 125: "standing on the basis of the hormonious testimony" ...
The transcriber has replaced "hormonious" with "harmonious".
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Cuyler to Van Dyke, by Various
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