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 ©LaJ^ (^Ax^aC^^ 
 
COLLEGE 
 SERMONS 
 
 CHARLES CARROLL ALBERTSON 
 
 MmiSTEE CENTRAL, PRESBYTERIAN CHTIKCH 
 BOCHESTEE, NEW TOKK 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 
 
 1909 
 

 ./y)/\jS 
 
 Published, December, 1909 
 
 Copyright, 1909, by 
 
 THE TRUSTEES OF THE PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION 
 AND SABBATH SCHOOL WORK 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. The Supremacy of the Unseen .... 9 
 
 II. The Call to the Heights . ... 21 
 
 III. The Gkeat Appeal . ... ... 33 
 
 IV. Man's Response to Christ's Appeal ... 45 
 V. A Doubter's Peateb ... ... 55 
 
 VI. The Intellectual Influence of Jesus . 65 
 
 VII. The Inspiration of the Prophet . . .75 
 
 VIII. Christian Certainties 89 
 
 IX. My Witnesses 101 
 
 X. Life's Great Meaning 113 
 
 XI. The Enlargement of Life . , , . . 123 
 
 XII. The Saving Few .... . 135 
 
 XIII. Success and Failure . ... 147 
 
 XIV. Not by Bread Alone . . .... 161 
 
 XV. The Practical Value of Sentiment . 173 
 
 XVI. The Athenian Altab 185 
 
AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 No part of the author's ministry has been more 
 pleasurable than the frequent opportunity to ad- 
 dress the students of various colleges and universi- 
 ties. The sermons included in this book have been 
 preached in recent years at Cornell University, the 
 University of Pennsylvania, the Woman's College 
 of Baltimore, Princeton University, Syracuse Uni- 
 versity, and Vassar College. Two of the briefer 
 sermons were delivered at the afternoon service at 
 Cornell, at which the speaker is limited to fifteen 
 minutes. Two of the sermons were preached on the 
 Day of Prayer for Colleges, and one on the evening 
 of Commencement Day, before the college Chris- 
 tian Association. ^ „ . 
 
 C. C. A. 
 
I 
 
 THE SUPREMACY OF THE UNSEEN 
 
"When in the secret place of our soul we build our God, 
 we form Him not out of cosmic forces, not out of gravitation 
 and chemical attraction, but out of holiness and love. And, 
 lo! as we look, the form is as of the Son of Man! The 
 Absolute as Absolute is not enough for the religious life. 
 Man must have some fixed, visible point, some crystalliza- 
 tion, as it were, of the All on which his love and reverence 
 may rest. That is where the New Testament story meets 
 him. Here he finds the humanizing and personalizing of the 
 Infinite Goodness. In the study of this Life he tastes eter- 
 nity. And as he believes, the power to be good flows into 
 him. Therefore knows he to-day the Christ, not only as 
 human, but also as Divine ; not only as a figure in history, 
 but as the eternal Now. 
 
 " 'God may have other Words for other worlds. 
 
 But for this world the Word of God is Christ." " 
 
 (.Ourselves and the Universe. J. Brierly. pp. 300, 301.) 
 
COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 THE SUPREMACY OP THE UNSEEN 
 
 "We look not at the things which are seen, but at the 
 things which are not seen." II. Cor. iv. 18. 
 
 It is difficult for us to determine the dominant 
 moral quality of our own age. We are too near it 
 — too much a part of it. We are like soldiers in 
 a battle. We know a little of the topography of 
 the ground over which we fight, advancing or re- 
 treating, but of the great plan of the battle, and 
 of the greater campaign, of which the battle is a 
 part, we know nothing until the campaign is ended, 
 and becomes a matter of history. 
 
 It takes time to read history aright. One says, 
 "This is an age of sin," and another, "An age of 
 doubt." Probably it is both. One of our most 
 brilliant essayists says, "Commercially it is an age 
 of advertisement; socially, it is an age of publico- 
 mania; physically, it is an age of nerves; politi- 
 cally, it is an age of democracy." Another says, 
 "It is an age of speed — its motto is 'Accelerate!' " 
 But do we not include it all when we say, "It is 
 an age of devotion to the material"? 
 9 
 
10 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 What are our favorite mottoes? "One world at 
 a time is enough." "We have to thank agnosticism 
 for that. "Seeing is believing." Whom have we 
 to thank for that ? Oh, we all say that. It has be- 
 come a proverb, that is, a proved truth ! And yet, 
 calling it so does not make it so. It may be a 
 sophism, a thing that appears true, but is not, a 
 falsehood masquerading as truth. 
 
 President Hadley of Yale said a year ago, 
 ' ' There are but three ideals of life for us to choose 
 from — the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Chris- 
 tian. ' ' Two of these, the Stoic and the Epicurean, 
 agree that one world at a time is enough, afiBrm 
 that seeing is believing. Christianity alone chal- 
 lenges these sayings. Christianity says, "One 
 world at a time is not enough — ^to say that it is, and 
 to act as if it were, is 'planetary provincialism.' " 
 Christianity says, "Seeing is not believing. Be- 
 lieving is seeing." And nowhere does it say so 
 more plainly than in this text — "We look . . . 
 at the things which are not seen." 
 
 It is a sad thing to be blind, never to see a flower 
 or star, never to see the liquid emerald of the ocean 
 or the gleaming sapphire of the setting sun; never 
 to see one's own sweet mother's face! The deaf 
 are unfortunate, never to hear the sound of wind 
 among the pines, or of mountain streams falling 
 over rocks, or the music of harp or viol or organ, 
 or the sweeter music of the human voice! Pity 
 those who are doomed to live in a world of total 
 darkness or of silence ! But more to be pitied are 
 those who, "have eyes to see, and see not," and who 
 
THE SUPBEMACY OF THE UNSEEN H 
 
 "have ears to hear, and hear not." Multitudes of 
 people, not at aU deficient in physical faculties, pass 
 through the world blind to its beauty and deaf to 
 its harmony. A woman once said to Mr. Turner, 
 who could put an almost infinite expanse of sky into 
 a square foot of canvas, "I never saw a sky like 
 that!" And he replied, "I suppose not, but don't 
 you wish you could?" 
 
 Much knowledge as we gain through our senses, 
 there is a vast universe of reality which no physi- 
 cal sense can comprehend. After we have seen 
 everything visible, heard everything audible, 
 touched everything tangible, weighed everything 
 ponderable, experienced everything possible by 
 means of nerves optic, auditory, olfactory, gusta- 
 tory, sensory, — that is not all. Knowledge is not so 
 limited as that. That would be a small world to 
 live in. By far the largest part of our universe is 
 beyond the range of sensuous apprehension. 
 
 Confronting the man whose creed is "Seeing 
 is believing" is a man whose creed is "Believing 
 is seeing." He is Paul. He believes in the in- 
 visible. He labors for invisible results. He prays 
 to an invisible God. He endures as seeing an 
 invisible Saviour. He feeds on invisible manna. 
 He has meat to eat that men know not of. And 
 by his side there stands an innumerable company 
 of others. Here is Tennyson, singing, in "In 
 Memoriam:" 
 
 Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
 Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, 
 By faith, and faith alone, embrace. 
 
12 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 Here is Browning, triumphant, in "Paracel- 
 sus:" 
 
 I see my way as birds their trackless way, — 
 I shall arrive ! 
 
 And here we stand this morning, repeating the 
 Christian creed, "We look not at the things which 
 are seen, but at the things which are not seen." 
 
 That we may be certain of the reality of the un- 
 seen, and that we may have wherewith to answer 
 those who boast of being sure of things material, 
 let us be reminded of some forces with which 
 we deal daily, not included in the catalogue of the 
 visible. 
 
 First, consider how many of the purely phys- 
 ical forces of the universe are invisible, — gravity, 
 electricity, chemical affinity, atmospheric pressure, 
 and the like. We talk of the attraction of gravita- 
 tion, and we know that it operates everywhere, but 
 the force itself is so elusive that it was only a little 
 while ago we discovered the law by which we meas- 
 ure it. We are familiar with the application of 
 electricity to commerce and industry, but we know 
 little of its nature. We have never seen it. We 
 have seen a fiery finger thrust through a storm 
 cloud, shattering an oak, or destroying a life as 
 with the touch of an avenging angel; we have seen 
 motion impelled by the force, but the force itself, 
 like the glory of God, no man can look upon it 
 and live. The most gifted electrical scientist of 
 our day, was asked at a dinner, "What is electric- 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF THE UNSEEN 13 
 
 ity?" And he replied, "It is a force about which 
 we know absolutely nothing. ' ' 
 
 You can take two harmless substances, an acid 
 and an oil, and produce a high explosive. What 
 invincible energy was at work combining those 
 atoms into a substance so different from either of 
 its constituents? We call it chemical afSnity. 
 
 The weight of the atmosphere upon this building 
 is far greater than the weight of the building 
 itself. But what is the atmosphere? What are 
 those ether waves on which we send our wireless 
 messages? The President of the British Society 
 for the Advancement of Science once said, "Ether 
 is the nominative case of the verb undulate." 
 How very plain that makes it! 
 
 Now what is it that discovers these cosmic forces 
 and employs them? It is evident there is some- 
 thing superior to gravity and electricity, for it 
 takes gravity and electricity and harnesses them. 
 We call it thought. But what is thought? It, 
 too, forbids analysis. We can analyze the brain, 
 but there is no trace of thought there. There are 
 cells of living tissue there, each cell composed of 
 three parts. The heart of the cell is composed of 
 nutrient matter; this turns to formed matter, and 
 formed matter changes to dead matter, and this is 
 the vital process. But tissue from the brain of a 
 frog reveals the same process. There is (to use the 
 figure of Joseph Cook) a little invisible weaver 
 at work in each cell, weaving the wonderful fabric 
 of life, but what it is in the human brain that 
 thinks — what it is in human life that writes poems, 
 
14 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 and carves statues, and paints pictures, and com- 
 poses orations, and strikes off constitutions, and 
 plans the conquest of the earth and air — ^what it 
 is that flashes intelligence under the sea, and over 
 the continent, that tames the winds and waves, 
 and nestles the lightning in its palm, — who knows ? 
 But that it is royal, creative, only a little short 
 of omnipotent, who does not know? 
 
 "We started with physical forces, impersonal, un- 
 conscious, blind, reasonless, but mighty. And we 
 found something superior to these. Is there any- 
 thing superior to thought? 
 
 There is. And we call it love. It is as much 
 above thought, as thought is above gravity. It 
 is to the soul what gravity is to the body. And 
 yet it is so mysterious that we know less about it 
 than we do of gravity. Sir Isaac Newton discov- 
 ered the law that any two objects in the universe 
 attract each other with a force that varies accord- 
 ing to the inverse square of the distance that sepa- 
 rates them. But it does not hold true that any 
 two souls in the universe attract each other with a 
 force that varies according to the inverse square 
 of the distance that separates them ! 
 
 But think of what love can do. Men live for it, 
 suffer for it, die for it. How absurd — ^to live and 
 suffer and die, inspired by an unseen power! 
 Thought conquers steam and electricity, but love 
 conquers thought. And thought becomes its hum- 
 ble slave! What boundless service, what uncalcu- 
 lating sacrifice, what absolute effacement of itself, 
 love can evoke ! 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF THE UNSEEN 15 
 
 Cool, calculating reason is no match for love. 
 Love laughs at reason as easily as at locksmiths ! 
 Who calls love unreal? A man crosses the conti- 
 nent to sit beside his gray-haired mother, and say, 
 "Talk to me as you used to do — I am tired and I 
 need your prayers." A mother exiles herself to 
 a leper island to be the companion of her afflicted 
 son. A family of Hungarian immigrants, a father 
 and mother and six children, apply for admission 
 to America at Ellis Island. A little farm in "Wis- 
 consin awaits them. The parents pass inspection, 
 and five of the children, but one daughter is men- 
 tally deficient. These can remain. She must re- 
 turn to the land from which she came. And she re- 
 turns — but not alone. They all go back. Love is 
 stronger than hope — stronger than desire for land 
 and liberty ! When we remember how strong love 
 is, we are not surprised that an Apostle declares, 
 "God is love." It is an advance force of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 But there is something stronger than love. It 
 is conscience. We say the brain is the organ of 
 thought. Sentimentally, the heart is the seat of 
 love. Where is the throne of conscience? And 
 what is conscience? AU we know is that it is 
 a tremendous reality, invisible, yet superior to love 
 because it directs love toward worthy objects. He 
 knew what conscience is who wrote: 
 
 "I hear a voice you cannot hear, 
 Which says I must not stay ; 
 I see a hand you cannot see, 
 Which beckons me away." 
 
16 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 An invisible hand, yet sceptering multitudes. 
 An inaudible voice, yet coming up from inner 
 depths with regal authority. Emerson wrote: 
 
 So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man. 
 When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
 The youth replies, I can. 
 
 The "I must" of duty and the "I ought" of 
 conscience are the same. It is what elevates life 
 from the moment it is recognized and given domin- 
 ion. It is the very ground of righteousness, the 
 basis of character. 
 
 Here are two men. One died peacefully in his 
 home, surrounded by an affectionate family, honor- 
 ing them, and honored by them. His loss is de- 
 plored by the community. The world is poorer 
 since he has gone, and heaven is surer and nearer. 
 The other, too, is dead, but how and where? On 
 the public highway, a bullet through his heart, a 
 rifle in his hand, curses on his lips — shot down like 
 a wild beast, in his flight from a plundered bank. 
 Shot down as he should have been. An outlaw 
 and a public enemy. 
 
 Now what is the difference between these men? 
 One cherished conscience, kept it void of offense 
 toward God and man, recognized in it his kinship 
 to the Divine. The other put away conscience, 
 heard but did not heed the voice of stillness, and 
 died as he lived, a bandit. Strange, is it not, that 
 such a difference is attributable to the presence in 
 one, and the absence from the other, of an entirely 
 invisible power? 
 
THE SUPEEMACY OF THE UNSEEN 17 
 
 We have ascended. We have seen the forces of 
 nature about us, and have found something in the 
 realm of mind called thought, that subdues them. 
 We have found something in the moral realm 
 called love, that controls thought, and something 
 in the same realm that governs love. At last we 
 come to the realm of the spirit and find a force as 
 much superior to conscience as conscience is supe- 
 rior to love, or love to thought, or thought to gravi- 
 tation. Thought masters physical energy. Love 
 commands thought. Conscience conquers love. 
 And faith enlightens and vitalizes conscience. We 
 have reached the summit of the pyramid. We are 
 not far from God. We are in the presence of 
 God. We work with God and God works with 
 us. For faith takes hold on God — touches the 
 healing hem of His garment. Nothing is holier, 
 nothing higher, nothing mightier, than this. 
 What is it? The Apostle tells us: "Faith is the 
 substance of things hoped for, the evidence of 
 things not seen." 
 
 Think of a cyclone plowing a furrow of death 
 through a populous city. Think of an earthquake, 
 laying low a province. But here in the realm of 
 the spirit is a force that seizes nations and perma- 
 nently affects the civilization of the world. Paul 
 invokes it and Rome turns Christian. Luther in- 
 vokes it, and Europe is lighted up with reforma- 
 tion fires. Wesley invokes it, and England is 
 saved from a reign of terror. 
 
 This force enters into human life and we have an 
 Augustine, a John Bunyan, a George Whitefield, a 
 
18 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 Dwight L. Moody, every one an apostle of the un- 
 seen. 
 
 But music is unreal to the deaf. Color is unreal 
 to the blind. Faith is unreal to the prayerless. 
 But to those who pray faith is a substantial verity. 
 And the whole end and aim of Christianity is to 
 lead us to live less in the realm of the visible and 
 more in the realm of the invisible. Religion is the 
 life of God in the soul of man. And this is wis- 
 dom, this is power, this is peace, — to see God as 
 Jesus Christ reveals Him — at once the most ex- 
 tensive and the most personal fact in the universe. 
 
II 
 
 THE CALL TO THE HEIGHTS 
 
"It may be that the world can get along without God but 
 / cannot. The universe-finity is to me like the chord of the 
 dominant seventh, always leading towards, always inviting 
 onwards, a chord of progress; God is the tonic triad, a 
 chord of repose." 
 
 {Poem Outlines. Sidney Lanier, p. 69.) 
 
 "Life, for every one of us, however small our place, is a 
 load too heavy to bear alone, too heavy, because for each of 
 us it is weighted with death and eternity. It is made so 
 that, by the compulsion of our weakness, we may be pressed 
 into alliance with a power that is not our own." 
 
 (^Sidelights on Religion. J. Brierly. p. 253.) 
 
II 
 
 THE CALL TO THE HEIGHTS 
 
 "O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up on 
 a high mountain; O thou that tellest good tidings to Jeru- 
 salem, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not 
 afraid ; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God !'^ 
 Isa. xl. 9. (R. V.) 
 
 The office of the Hebrew prophet was not merely 
 to foretell, but to forth-tell, to tell forth to men the 
 will of God. His voice was sometimes the voice of 
 destiny, telling what was to be in the fullness of 
 time. But it was oftener the voice of duty, tell- 
 ing what ought to be now. 
 
 Isaiah is first among Hebrew prophets in the 
 splendor of his poetic speech, and in the loftiness 
 of his spirit. Seven hundred years before the Star 
 of Bethlehem showered its silver on the Judean 
 night, he had caught the gleam of the day it her- 
 alded, and in his grasp of spiritual truth he is as 
 one who has already seen the Christ. He saw 
 from afar "the consolation of Israel" and his 
 heart was glad. That is the secret of his buoy- 
 ancy. He was not blind to the social and political 
 corruption of the age. No man. saw more clearly 
 than he, and he kept not silence. But he saw more. 
 He saw "the increasing purpose" of God, running 
 through the ages, and the thoughts of men growing 
 21 
 
22 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 wider and the world growing readier for the com- 
 ing of its King. There is your true optimist. He 
 is not, as one has said, "one who does not care 
 what happens, so it does not happen to him." He 
 is simply one who sees farther than his fellows. 
 He hears sounds to which other ears are deaf, like 
 the little Scotch girl, whose senses had grown keen 
 in long illness, who, at the siege of Lucknow, 
 heard the pipers miles away, as British troops 
 marched to the rescue of the city. 
 
 It is wonderful how far you can see from a 
 mountain. In the northern part of the Adiron- 
 dacks there is a peak, from the summit of which, on 
 a clear day, one can see not alone the neighboring 
 Adirondacks, but the Green Mountains of Vermont 
 and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Yon- 
 der narrow strip of green is Lake Champlain. To 
 the west is a silvery ribbon — that is the St. Law- 
 rence, dotted with a thousand islands, while yon- 
 der, — north and east — are the spires of Montreal. 
 On such a mountain stood the man of God who 
 looked across to Canaan ere he closed the long 
 heroic record of his life. To the watchman on 
 such a mountain, a dweller in the valley called out, 
 "What of the night?" and got the answer, "The 
 morning cometh, and also the night." To the 
 prophet, in the city or in the temple courts, God's 
 spirit calls, in the text, saying, "Get thee up to a 
 high mountain. ' ' This is ' ' the call to the heights. ' ' 
 And it is God's call to every human soul. 
 
 It is a call to clear vision. How easily the prob- 
 lems of the present blind us to the issues of the 
 
THE CALL TO THE HEIGHTS 23 
 
 future! When the Franco-Prussian war began, 
 a messenger awakened Von Moltke at midnight 
 with the news that the French army had taken the 
 field with the cry, " On to Berlin. ' ' He said, ' ' My 
 orders are in the desk, in the pigeonhole at the 
 right. Please see that they are issued." And he 
 slept on until morning. His plans were already 
 made. The war was ended before it began, and, 
 practically, the Germans were in Paris long be- 
 fore Sedan, just because they were rich in men of 
 vision. "Napoleon the Little" was also "Napol- 
 eon the Blind." 
 
 August 27, 1858, Lincoln and Douglas held their 
 second joint debate at Freeport. At a conference 
 of Republican leaders the night before, Lincoln an- 
 nounced his intention of forcing Douglas on the 
 morrow to declare himself on the question whether 
 a territorial legislature had or had not the power to 
 exclude slavery. He was counseled not to do so, 
 for it was foreseen that Douglas could make but 
 one answer, and that his position would make him 
 popular in Illinois, and win for him the senator- 
 ship. But Lincoln said, "I am after larger game. 
 The battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this." 
 He foresaw that the very declaration which would 
 win the senatorship for Douglas would lose him the 
 presidency, and it did, for it hopelessly divided the 
 Democratic party. It is not at all likely that Lin- 
 coln expected to be elected president in two years, 
 but he expected that some Republican would be 
 elected president on that issue. No man in mod- 
 ern times has possessed the prophetic spirit in 
 
24 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 larger measure than he. Some one said of him 
 during the war, "There was always a far-away 
 look in his eyes." His soul was far away. He 
 was a watchman on the mountain. 
 
 If we look for such a man beyond the sea, we 
 find him in Gladstone, of whom Bunsen said, "He 
 has heard higher tones than anyone else in the 
 land." By which he meant that Gladstone's mind 
 was habitually possessed by a higher consciousness 
 than that of others. 
 
 The best thing about this life of ours is that it 
 has the capacity for height. By one path or an- 
 other, by poverty or by pain, by discipline of the 
 mind or of the soul, by study of the works or the 
 Word of God, by the passion for service or the 
 power of prayer, or by all of these combined, we 
 may rise until the earth seems but a little thing, 
 and heaven not far away. Is not this the poet's 
 meaning ? 
 
 "I hold it truth, with him who sings 
 To one clear harp of divers tones, 
 That men may rise on stepping-stones 
 Of their dead selves to higher things." 
 
 The problem of life, then, above all else, is this; 
 how to regulate our habits of thought and action, 
 how to fulfill the duties and suffer the sorrows of 
 time, so that by these we may attain at length "the 
 firm resolve, the temperate wiU," the habit of see- 
 ing things from the highest possible view-point. 
 It is a great thing to stand where you may see 
 things from above. It is like standing on a sum- 
 mit, with the clouds below you, and the thunders 
 
THE CALL TO THE HEIGHTS 
 
 25 
 
 rolling at your feet. Below are unrest and terror, 
 but above is calm. How different death would 
 seem from the heavenly view-point! In what a 
 new light sorrow would shine forth ! 
 
 A man who had reached the heights of peace and 
 power said : "I was born in poverty, and I had a 
 withered arm from birth, but it never dawned 
 upon me imtil I was fourteen that narrow circum- 
 stances and a bodily disability were just what I 
 needed to make the most of my powers. It was 
 when I said to my father, 'I am poor and lame,' 
 and he said, quoting Scripture, 'The lame take 
 the prey.' Then I saw that what I had always 
 thought of as weights might turn out to be wings." 
 When that awakening comes to us, we have begun 
 to ascend. The office of religion is just this: to 
 point to the high mountain and .remind us that 
 there is our home. History says, "Look back." 
 Science says, "Look around." Philosophy says, 
 "Look in." Religion says, "Look up. Get thee 
 up on a high mountain." 
 
 A psalmist declares, "He maketh my feet like 
 hinds' feet." Have you ever seen a stag, outlined 
 against the sky, sure-footed on the far-off cliff? 
 The mountain is its home. So, what the psalmist 
 says is this, "By faith, I stand on high, serene and 
 strong." 
 
 "Thou that tellest good tidings." This is the 
 message of the prophet, and the prophet is the 
 teacher of religion. This is the character of his 
 message, it is good tidings. Is not this the very term 
 the New Testament applies to the Gospel, "Evan- 
 
26 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 gelion," good tidings? "We get our words "evan- 
 gel," "evangelist," "evangelical," from that word 
 which means good news. At first the word meant 
 a present given on account of good news. In At- 
 tic Greek, it meant a sacrifice offered on receipt of 
 good news, but in the New Testament, it means 
 the good news itself. Strange it is that the Gospel 
 of good tidings has ever been interpreted so as to 
 convey to men any other impression than that it is 
 good tidings. The Master Himself made it clear 
 that He came not to condemn the world, but to 
 save it from condemnation ; not to curse the world, 
 but to remove the curse; not to limit life, but to 
 enlarge it. Long ago it had become a proverb, 
 "As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news 
 from a far country." That is what Christianity 
 is. It is what the Son of Man came to tell us. 
 
 The two things that the world has most wished 
 for in moments of fancy are the philosopher's 
 stone, to turn base metal into gold, and the foun- 
 tain of perpetual youth in which the time-worn 
 pilgrim may wash away the scars of years. If 
 such things were real, who would not make any pil- 
 grimage, pay any price, to obtain the one and 
 reach the other? Men have grown gray and some 
 have even lost their reason trying to solve the prob- 
 lem of transmuting metals. The discoverer of 
 Florida was an aged soldier who thought to find 
 there the fabled waters. 0, sons of earth, what if 
 these dreams be but the shadows of things that are ? 
 What if in this Book there be the basis of a faith 
 that does turn the common things of life into the 
 
THE CAIiL TO THE HEIGHTS 27 
 
 gold of the soul ? And what if here we may learn 
 the secret of eternal life ? Then it is good tidings, 
 indeed. Well, many have found it so. Close beside 
 the bitter fountain in the wilderness grows the 
 sweetening branch. The smitten rock, from which 
 gushed forth the river, was but a symbol of Him 
 who said at Jacob's well; "The water that I shall 
 give him shall be in him a well of water springing 
 up into everlasting life." Good news! 
 
 The deepest hunger, the keenest thirst we know, 
 is for truth. Burdened with sin, we cry, "Is for- 
 giveness possible?" When woe fills to overflowing 
 the cup of life, when disaster follows disaster, and 
 the plans we have made come crashing down about 
 us, we say: "Is there a Father who knows and 
 cares ? Has He comfort and strength for us now ? " 
 Sitting in darkened chambers beside our dead, we 
 ask: "Is there another life where the broken 
 strands of this shall be re-knit?" If any man can 
 answer these questions to our rational satisfaction, 
 how glad and thankful we shall be ! Then glad and 
 thankful we should be, for One has answered them. 
 He speaks as one who knows. He has the accent of 
 authority and the tone of power. There is no halt 
 in His gait or haze in His eyes as He calmly speaks 
 of pardon, and inward reinforcement, and the 
 Father's many mansions. He is not afraid, and 
 His servants should not be. 
 
 "Lift up thy voice with strength. ... Be 
 not afraid." — Observe the positiveness of the mes- 
 sage, and the consequent boldness of the messen- 
 ger. But why should v/e be afraid? What have 
 
28 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 we to fear? You say, "There is so much to fear; 
 there is the paralyzing consciousness of the over- 
 mastering power of things present and visible; 
 there is the tyranny of flesh and sense ; there is the 
 bold denial of materialism; there is the supercil- 
 ious sneer of Epicureanism. There is the colossal 
 conceit of rationalism; and, worst of all, there is 
 the insidious strain of skepticism in us all which 
 meets the affirmatives of faith with the thought, 
 'It is too good to be true.' " What are we to do? 
 The text answers, "Lift up thy voice with strength. 
 . . . Be not afraid." Say to them that are of 
 a fearful heart, "Nothing is too good to be true if 
 God be its Author." And God is the Author of the 
 Gospel of His Son. 
 
 "Say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your 
 God. ' ' Has the city then a special need of this mes- 
 sage? Was there a city problem so long ago? 
 Kome was not yet built; it was just beginning. 
 There were a few shepherds' huts along the Tiber. 
 Where the great cities of the modern world now 
 stand was untraversed wilderness. But there was 
 Jerusalem. And Tyre and Sidon and Damascus 
 and Babylon were great. Then, as now, there 
 were wealth and poverty, virtue and vice, the 
 strong and the weak, the oppressor and the op- 
 pressed, side by side. Then, as now, the wicked 
 flourished, and corruption promised large divi- 
 dends; then, as now, the glutton feasted, and the 
 beggar waited at his gate; then, as now, the suc- 
 cessful man said to his soul, "Soul, . . . take 
 thine ease;" then, as now, the lust of the eye, the 
 
THE CALL TO THE HEIGHTS 29 
 
 lust of the flesh, and the pride of life all too easily 
 blotted out the vision of the Ideal ; then, as now, or- 
 ganized society needed a Saviour, and so, to the 
 cities of Judah, the prophet must cry ' ' Behold your 
 God!" 
 
 Can the thought of God cure the ills of the city, 
 our city, where commerce dominates everything, 
 and industry is personified by the man with a muck 
 rake, or the man with a hoe ? Can the thought of 
 God save New York and London, Paris and Chi- 
 cago, Peking and San Francisco? No; but the 
 thought of God can uplift the minds of men, and 
 clarify their vision until they see that only as the 
 grace of God enters into human life, only as the 
 presence of God becomes a restraining and con- 
 straining force, can there be any individual worth 
 or social safety. The vision of Paul saved many a 
 city of Asia Minor. The vision of Savonarola 
 saved Florence. The vision of Luther saved Eu- 
 rope. The vision of Wesley saved England. And 
 Christ was the center of that saving vision. 
 
 The city is to be saved only as the individuals 
 of which it is composed are saved. Each of us 
 can help to build the city in righteousness by prac- 
 ticing the Gospel of God incarnate. The history 
 of our race began in the country — in Eden. But 
 it is to end in the city — New Jerusalem. Midway 
 between Eden and New Jerusalem is Babylon. - 
 "We are in Babylon now. But every life hid with 
 Christ in God, every soul devoted to the will of 
 God, every "union of those who love in the service 
 of those who suffer," is helping to transform, 
 earth's Babylon into God's New Jerusalem. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GREAT APPEAL 
 
"I am moved more by my vision of the personality of 
 Jesus than I am by my thought of His doctrines. Spiritual 
 grovFth is brought about by the impact of nobler souls on 
 ours. Consequently, I cannot understand the Voltaire-like 
 petulance with vphich, in his Divinity School Address, Emer- 
 son banished 'the person of Jesus' from genuine religion. 
 He thinks that you cannot be a man if you 'must subordi- 
 nate your nature to Christ's nature.' It seems to me, 
 however, that you realize your capacities only by coming 
 into contact with their realization in others. The objectified 
 self reveals the subjective aptitude ; and with the thrill of dis- 
 covery begins the higher development. Spiritual growth is 
 the attainment of those who constantly look up to higher 
 personalities. Now if it is true of Jesus Christ (as Emerson 
 says in the address) that 'alone in all history He estimated 
 the greatness of man: one man was true to what is in you 
 and me,' then I should say that you and I are to find our 
 own highest life by opening our souls to the influence of this 
 perfect and absolute personality. Nay, as Jesus Christ was 
 perfect man, so also, and for that very reason, was He the 
 revelation and realization of the Divine Father. In the new 
 dispensation of spirit, as in the old of dogma, He must 
 therefore, in some sense, if not the orthodox sense, continue 
 to be our Mediator and Saviour." 
 
 (.Agnosticum and Religion, Jacob Gould Schurman. pp. 180, 
 181.) 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GREAT APPEAL- 
 "Never man spake like this man." John vii. 46. 
 
 This was the testimony of all who heard Him, — 
 priests, scribes, Pharisees, Saddueees, Komans, 
 Greeks, Samaritans, Syro-Phcenieians. With one 
 accord they all declared, "Never man spake like 
 this man." 
 
 He spoke with a certainty that others lacked. 
 The modern ministry that "ventures to assert" 
 that if we do not repent, "so to speak," and be con- 
 verted, "as it were," we shall be lost, "in a sense," 
 did not learn its lesson from Him. His word was 
 "Verily, verily." 
 
 He spoke with an authority that differenced Him 
 from others. Others quoted the opinions of the 
 ancients and the fathers. Others stood upon prec- 
 edents and were full of classic instances. But 
 Jesus was His own authority. He created prece- 
 dents. He prefaced His great sayings with, "I 
 say unto you." He spoke with a sanity, which 
 though it was not always apparent to His contem- 
 poraries, is clearly seen by us to have been a fea- 
 ture of His doctrine which elevates Him far above 
 every other teacher of His age and of subsequent 
 ages. Moreover, He spoke with absolute fearless- 
 33 
 
34 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 ness. Neither Jewish bigotry nor Roman power 
 nor Greek scorn could silence His faithful lips or 
 overcome His hero soul, or cause Him to dilute the 
 truth for tender ears. Hebrew religiosity was 
 shallow and hollow, and He knew and despised it. 
 Eoman power was a mere phantasm, and He so 
 characterized it. Greek wisdom was short-sighted 
 and He ignored it. The Roman procurator asked 
 Him "What is truth?" And He answered, with- 
 out apology, "I am the Truth." 
 
 Considered, too, as to the simplicity, the crystal 
 clearness, the perfect transparency, of His teach- 
 ing, "never man spake like this man." Words 
 may be made to conceal or reveal thought. Rous- 
 seau once remarked that definition would be so 
 much easier if it were not for the necessity of using 
 words! The best literature suffers, necessarily, 
 from translation into a foreign tongue, however 
 flexible or copious that tongue may be. But 
 turned into whatever mould of language, the truth 
 Jesus taught is so plain that wayfaring men need 
 not err therein. 
 
 In this respect English literature has few au- 
 thors to remind us of Jesus' words. One such, 
 however, is John Bunyan, whose mastery of terse, 
 tense speech was due to his intimate knowledge 
 of the Holy Scriptures. A Scotch preacher wrote 
 a commentary on "Pilgrim's Progress" and a 
 woman who read it told the author that she un- 
 derstood "Pilgrim's Progress" thoroughly, and 
 hoped some time to be able to comprehend his 
 notes ! 
 
THE GREAT APPEAL 35 
 
 Some writers are luminous; others are volumin- 
 ous. The recorded words of Jesus are few, but 
 they are like a gushing fountain in the heart of 
 the hills. Rivers have their sources in its pure and 
 unexhausted depths. So — as to certainty, au- 
 thority, sanity, courage, and clearness, "never 
 man spake like this man." This is why He ap- 
 peals to humanity so powerfully. This is why He 
 has taken deeper hold upon the race than any other, 
 — taken hold with a grasp that time does not di- 
 minish. 
 
 Spite of the fact that Christianity has never 
 numbered among its adherents more than a third 
 of the world's population, the influence of Jesus 
 on the intellectual and moral life of mankind has 
 produced radical and even revolutionary changes 
 in the thought and sympathies of nine-tenths of 
 the really constructive races of the world. 
 
 There have been times when the power of Chris- 
 tianity seemed to be spent, when its future seemed 
 uncertain, and its very existence in peril. In the 
 fifteenth century and again in the eighteenth, the 
 Star of Bethlehem shone but dimly through the 
 mists of shifting systems and theories. But every 
 such era of doubt has been succeeded by a renais- 
 sance of faith, and when men who had lost sight of 
 the Star looked again they saw a light above the 
 brightness of the sun. 
 
 Bishop "Warren, in his little book, "The Miracu- 
 lous Element in Christianity," points out that 
 there have been six distinct assaults on Chris- 
 tianity : , 
 
36 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 The first was in the lifetime of Jesus by those 
 who hated Him. 
 
 The heathen assault followed. 
 
 The third was pantheistic and was led by Spi- 
 noza. 
 
 The fourth was the skeptical philosophy of 
 Hume. 
 
 The fifth was the rationalistic theory of Paulus 
 and his followers. 
 
 The sixth is the historico-critical attack of 
 Strauss and Wellhausen and that school. 
 
 The first five failed, or there would have been no 
 necessity for a sixth. The sixth has already 
 reached its power and begun to decline, and still 
 is Christ exalted; still the world clings to Him, 
 because, whatever of human interpretation has 
 been revised, whatever that had been superim- 
 posed on Christianity has been removed, Jesus 
 Christ remains with His eternal appeal to man. 
 The great appeal, Jesus Christ's appeal to man, 
 remains. I do not mean His entreaty. His invita- 
 tion, His "Come unto Me" (0 word of words the 
 sweetest!), but that something in His person and 
 character, that august and winsome something 
 which evokes a wonderful response on the part of 
 the unprejudiced normal man. I use the word 
 "appeal" in the same sense in which we use it in 
 speaking of a picture, a poem, a statue, an argu- 
 ment, a proposition, or a cause, when we say "It 
 appeals" to us, or "It does not appeal" to us. 
 
 There are pictures that appeal to us. There is 
 music that appeals to us. There are lines of argu- 
 
THE GREAT APPEAL 37 
 
 ment that appeal to us, convince us, compel us to 
 give assent to them. You know what it is in Hof- 
 endon's picture, "Breaking Home Ties," that ap- 
 peals to us. It speaks to that almost universal ex- 
 perience in the memory of men who can never for- 
 get the day when the little bark of their lives glided 
 out from the love-loeked harbor of their childhood's 
 home. You know what it is in Millet's "Angelus" 
 that appeals to us. There is a concrete illustration 
 of the world's three greatest thoughts, work, love, 
 God. You know what it is in Raphael's Madonna 
 that appeals to us. It speaks to us. It tells more 
 eloquently than words could tell the dignity of 
 motherhood, the sanctity of childhood, the mystery 
 of the Incarnation. 
 
 There are poems that have the power of 
 personal appeal. Longfellow's "Psalm of Life," 
 Aldrich's "Ballad of Babie Bell," Burns 's 
 "Highland Mary" all have it. "The Ballad 
 of Reading Gaol" may take its place with the 
 great poems of appeal when we have forgotten who 
 wrote it. There are musical compositions that 
 exercise this spell over us. "The Pilgrims' Cho- 
 rus," from "Tannhauser" and Dvorak's "New 
 World Symphony" — made half of melody and 
 half of hope, — ^woo and win even the untrained 
 ear. 
 
 Now what is it in the very thought of Christ that 
 appeals to all who come face to face with Him? 
 We do not all honor the appeal — rise to meet it — 
 but even those who fail to respond to it recognize 
 in Him the power that says "Come," — says it so 
 
38 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 mightily, so winsomely, that they have to quench 
 their best impulses to resist it. 
 
 It is what He was, and what He eternally is. 
 Even if we knew of no miracle He ever wrought; 
 even if no direct word of His had floated to us 
 across the troubled waters of twice a thousand 
 years; if we had no other picture of Him than 
 that the evangelists give us, — ^the picture of a 
 soul more conscious of God than of Himself, more 
 conscious of eternity than of time; so spiritual, 
 yet so practical; so just, yet so compassionate; so 
 leonine, yet so in love with peace; so solitary, yet 
 so comradelike; — I say if we had only that por- 
 trait of Him, divested of all miracle and all para- 
 ble, we would still be sensible of an infinite appeal. 
 
 The world is greatly in error in supposing that 
 our faith in Jesus Christ rests upon what Pie did and 
 said. It rests, rather, upon what He was, and is. 
 We believe in His miracles because we believe in 
 Him. But He is greater than any miracle He ever 
 wrought, by so much as an artist is greater than 
 his work, by so much as the whole is greater than a 
 part. If you want miracles— miracles of ancient 
 and modern times — miracles no one can doubt or 
 deny, — study the appeal of Christ to men. 
 
 Imagine, if you can, a perfect man, a character 
 in whom all the elements of strength are so blended 
 as to produce no excess, leave no deficiency, and 
 you have the man of all men to whom Jesus Christ 
 would most powerfully appeal. If we were to 
 meet such a man we would say "There is a per- 
 fect type of the Christian!" And in so saying 
 
THE GEEAT APPEAL 39 
 
 we pay tribute to Christ. "We recognize in the per- 
 fect man the perfect image of Him. 
 
 The difficulty of defining what has been called 
 the appeal of Christ is in itself a testimony to the 
 extraordinary character of that appeal. An ax- 
 iom is a self-evident truth. It is useless to prove 
 that things that are equal to the same thing are 
 equal to each other. It proves itself. It is folly to 
 argue that a straight line is the shortest distance 
 between two points. It argues itself. 
 
 Color is self-evidencing to the eye. (If it is not, 
 the fault is not in the color, but in the eye. Con- 
 sult the oculist not the chemist.) Music is self- 
 evidencing to the ear. (If it is not, the ear needs 
 treating.) Beauty is self -evidencing to the taste. 
 The surgeon who spoke of a "beautiful surgical 
 operation" had confused technical skill with 
 beauty. The Pacific Ocean was self-evidencing to 
 the mind of the first European navigator who be- 
 held it. Balboa knew from the swell of the tides 
 that this was no inland sea. 
 
 The Christian world has a definite conception of 
 the person of Christ. It is not what one man 
 thinks of Him, but a composite photograph of what 
 all men see in Him — of what aU men always have 
 seen in Him. Each of us has in his mind's eye a 
 figure of Christ to the making of which all Chris- 
 tians and all creeds have contributed. And when 
 that conception of Christ occurs to any man — ^to 
 any man not already prejudiced against Him — the 
 effect is self-evidencing. By no process of logic, 
 but by an act of intuitive moral judgment, we hail 
 
40 COUiEGB SEEMONS 
 
 Him as one like tinto no other. Never man ap- 
 pealed to us as He appeals to us. 
 
 His appeal is to the whole man ; it is self -evidenc- 
 ing; and it reveals its masterfulness by its silence. 
 The great forces of the world are silent. Silent 
 the sunshine that brings the world to beauty and 
 bounty. Silent the light that repeats, in every 
 sunset sky, the miracle of Cana of Galilee — ^water 
 turned to wine. Silent the invisible weaver, life, 
 sitting at its little loom we call the cell, weaving a 
 manifold fabric of grass and tree and flower and 
 flesh. Silent the planets that wheel their stately 
 way around the sun. Silent the forces that lift 
 oceans into the sky. 
 
 Seven hundred years before the advent of Jesus, 
 a Hebrew prophet caught a glimpse of His coming, 
 and of His ministry, and said, ' ' He shall not strive, 
 nor cry." When He came there was no such 
 frenzy as sometimes attends the birth of a prince. 
 He grew to manhood through thirty years of ob- 
 scurity. He had no armies to attend Him, no 
 retinue of servants and retainers. He was al- 
 together unlike the great of earth. 
 
 Pierre Fritel has painted "The Conquerors." 
 There are Xerxes, and Alexander, and Caesar, and 
 Genghis Elan, and Attila, and Napoleon, on war- 
 horses, under banners, trumpets sounding, drums 
 beating, cymbals clashing. So the earthly great 
 have come. Not so the great of heaven. "The 
 Kingdom of God eometh not with observation." 
 Jesus Christ is King and Conqueror in a realm 
 where only the "still small voice" is heard. The 
 
THE GREAT APPEAL 41 
 
 light of the new life comes like dawn on the moun- 
 tains. 
 
 "Will the East unveil? The East is unveiled! 
 Have a care, sweet heaven, 'tis dawn!" 
 
 The life of God in the soul of the believer comes 
 like the springtime. Springtime beats no gong, 
 issues no prospectus, but one day there is a riot 
 of green in the trees, and a patch of purple on 
 south-lying hillsides where a week ago was snow. 
 A robin sounds a cheery note from the hedge and 
 spring is at the portal of the year ! 
 
 It is wonderful, when we yield to the appeal of 
 Christ, to feel, as time goes by, new impulses grow- 
 ing in us ; new pity for all pain ; new longing after 
 truth; new devotion to duty; new confidence in 
 prayer; new assurance of immortality. God is 
 working in us, and "now is our salvation nearer 
 than when we believed." 
 
IV 
 MAN'S RESPONSE TO CHRIST'S APPEAL 
 
"So much for the individual. But positive evidence does 
 not end here. Look at the effects of Christian belief as ex- 
 ercised on human society — 1st, by individual Christians on 
 the family, etc. ; and, 2d, by the Christian Church on the 
 world. 
 
 "All this may lead on to an argument from the adaptation 
 of Christianity to human higher needs. All men must feel 
 these needs more or less in proportion as their higher na- 
 tures, moral and spiritual, are developed. Now Christianity 
 is the only religion which is adapted to meet them, and, 
 according to those who are alone able to testify, does so 
 most abundantly. All these men, of every sect, nationality, 
 etc., agree in their account of their subjective experience ; so 
 as to this there can be no question. The only question is 
 as to whether they are all deceived." 
 
 {.Thoughts on Religion. George John Romanes, pp. 162, 163.) 
 
 "And now from all this we may come to a definition. If 
 one were asked to state in terms what a Christian is, I 
 should say something like this : a Christian is one who is 
 responding to whatever meanings of Christ are, through 
 God's Spirit, being brought home to his intellectual or moral 
 conscience. This is a definition at once exhaustive of the 
 profoundest Christianity and admissive of the simplest. The 
 meanings of Christ, either for thought or life, that one man 
 may be able to respond to with intellectual assent or prac- 
 tical obedience, will be many and advanced ; another man 
 may, with equal earnestness and effort, be able, from his 
 constitution, upbringing or circumstances, to respond to but 
 the most elementary. Yet both are Christians if both are 
 responding with a faithful conscience." 
 
 {The Fact of Christ. P. Carnegie Simpson, M.A pp. 195, 
 196.) 
 
IV 
 
 man's response to Christ's appeal 
 
 "To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternai 
 life." John vi. 68. 
 
 Mr. P. Carnegie Simpson has given us a brilliant 
 and remarkable little book, called "The Fact of 
 Christ." His argument is lucid and his statement 
 felicitous. He makes plain that whatever may be 
 our theories to account for the phenomena of 
 Christianity, and however we may differ in our 
 statement of principles involved, there is, underly- 
 ing them all, the indubitable fact that Jesus Christ 
 made an impression upon the world, and intro- 
 duced a force into the world, to account for which 
 demands both intellectual and moral candor. 
 
 No student of history doubts for a moment that 
 Jesus Christ appeals to man as does n,o other char- 
 acter in human history. His appeal is not alone 
 to the whole man, that is, to the entire range of 
 his faculties, but, in a remarkable way. He appeals 
 to the whole of humanity. Mohammed appeals to 
 the Arab, the Turk, the fierce and fatalistic nomad 
 of the East. Buddha appeals to the reflective mind 
 of the Orient. Jesus Christ's appeal is uniquely 
 cosmopolitan. He holds the scepter of the Western 
 world, and yet a learned Hindoo has said, "None 
 45 
 
46 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 but Jesus deserves, and none but He shall have the 
 diadem of India." 
 
 It is a fundamental principle of pedagogy, "No 
 impression without corresponding expression." 
 Let us inquire what impression the fact of Christ 
 has made on the mind of man, and if we can, let 
 us give expression to it. 
 
 Let us translate ourselves, so far as we are able, 
 to the first century of the era, to Jerusalem after 
 Pentecost, or to Ephesus, while John is still living 
 and teaching, or to Kome, when Paul is living in 
 his own hired house, preaching the Gospel to little 
 groups of freemen and slaves, who come to him for 
 instruction. What is our first thought as we ob- 
 serve what is going on? One Name is on the 
 lips of all the members of this little sect. They 
 whisper it in prayers and chant it in songs. They 
 greet each other and part, in that Name. 
 They break bread together and talk of Him. 
 They bury their dead in His Name and carve His 
 Name upon their tombs. The slave is no longer 
 servile, and the master no longer pitiless. The hum- 
 ble are bold, and the strong are tender. Persecu- 
 tions come, and the persecuted suffer the ruin of 
 their fortunes and the peril of their lives with 
 serenity and courage. All of which is not natural. 
 It is natural for the slave to hang his head, and 
 for the master to scorn his human chattels. It 
 is natural for the lowly to abase themselves, and 
 for the strong to lord it over the humble. It is 
 natural for a man to cling to his possessions, and 
 hold life above aU else. Selfishness is the oldest 
 
man's eesponse to Christ's appeal 47 
 
 custom of the race. Sin is the deadly drift of the 
 ages. But, somehow, the custom is broken, the 
 drift arrested. By what? By whom? By the 
 mere influence — we will call it that for lack of a 
 better name— of a crucified peasant! Was He a 
 scholar ? No. Did He write any books ? Not one. 
 Was He a poet ? No. Did He sing any songs and 
 so "call cowards up to duty in commanding 
 rhyme"? Never. Then He must have been a 
 soldier, a warrior, a great captain? Not that. A 
 political leader, inaugurating a new social order? 
 Nor that. What then? 
 
 I need not answer that question. That it is asked 
 proves what is the first impression Jesus Christ 
 has made on us and on the world. Wonder, 
 stupendous and unending wonder, is our first im- 
 pression. Immeasurable surprise is the first re- 
 sponse in man to Christ's appeal. 
 
 We ask, What did Jesus propose to do? We 
 see what He is doing among men, but the question 
 is. What did He purpose to do? Some men go all 
 through life without a purpose. But most of us 
 form a purpose before we have passed far into 
 the years of youth. With one, it is to make a 
 fortune, with another to win fame, with others, to 
 carve, or paint, or write, or fight, or build, or heal, 
 or plough. Now what did Jesus conceive His life 's 
 task to be? Our wonder increases when we learn 
 that He seriously proposed to found a kingdom, 
 to destroy the works of evil, to institute the reign 
 of love among men and among nations, to redeem 
 society by bringing back to goodness and to God 
 
48 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 all the individuals of which society is composed. 
 Did any other ever undertake a task like that? 
 Compared with it, the emancipation of a race of 
 slaves, or even the founding of a new nation, is a 
 small thing. 
 
 Go a little further into His life and you will 
 find He proposed and professed to solve the three 
 greatest and gravest problems of life — ^the prob- 
 lems of sin, and sorrow, and death. Now look at 
 His philosophy. His theology, His metaphysics. 
 His ethics. His system, whatever it may be called, 
 His Gospel, let us say, and you will see, potentially 
 if not actually, the materials out of which all this 
 is to be done. There is love, pure and sacrificial, 
 upon which to found a kingdom in the hearts of 
 men, love as the basis of a new brotherhood ; there 
 is grace abounding much more than ever sin 
 abounded; inward strength and comfort for the 
 heart with sorrow laden ; and there is immortality 
 with which to face the fearful phantasm of death. 
 All these elements are in His Gospel, and they must 
 impress us with their absolute adequacy. The 
 causes are fully equal to the effects desired. The 
 plaster is larger than the wound. 
 
 Surprise, at first, and afterwards, a sense of 
 adequacy, are awakened by a study of the fact of 
 Christ. Then follows in our minds the tribute we 
 instinctively pay to greatness, to simplicity, and 
 power. A good part of the admiration we have for 
 Abraham Lincoln is based upon our perception of 
 his native nobility, his elemental simplicity. He 
 was so free from anything like artificial greatness. 
 
man's eesponse to cheist's appeal 49 
 
 from the counterfeit semblance of dignity, and yet 
 so masterful, so completely captain of his soul, 
 and of the Ship of State he guided through the 
 seething sea of war. It is easy to admire a man of 
 our own flesh and blood, so near us that there are 
 those still living who have touched his hand. It 
 is not so easy to admire a personality separated 
 from us by sixty generations. Yet admiration is 
 a feeble word to measure the response in our hearts 
 when we hear the name of Mary's Son. He 
 seems not so far away, after all. We read the 
 Gospels and arise with a kind of feeling that if we 
 have not seen Him, we have at least heard His foot- 
 fall on the temple 's marble pavement, or the street, 
 that we have caught some accent of His voice, or 
 touched the hem of His passing garments. Whit- 
 tier puts it so : 
 
 But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
 
 A present help is He ; 
 And faith has still its Olivet, 
 
 And love its Galilee. 
 
 The healing of His seamless dress 
 
 Is by our beds of pain ; 
 We touch Him in life's throng and press. 
 
 And we are whole again. 
 
 No phenomenon within all the range of con- 
 sciousness is more inexplicable, and at the same 
 time more indubitable, than the nearness of Jesus 
 to His disciples, in all ages. . We speak of the 
 friendship of Jesus, fellowship with Him, com- 
 radeship. There is no name which quite satisfae- 
 
50 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 torily describes the experience. Poetry gives us 
 its best expression. 
 
 " 'He is my friend,' I said, — 
 'Be patient !' Overhead 
 The skies were drear and dim, 
 And lo ! the thought of Him 
 Smiled on my heart, — and then 
 The sun shone out again. 
 
 " 'He is my friend !' The words 
 Brought summer and the birds ; 
 And all my winter time 
 Thawed into running rhyme, 
 And rippled into song. 
 Warm, tender, brave, and strong." 
 
 When Elisha had succeeded Elijah, and with the 
 prophetic mantle on his shoulders, went his way, 
 the sons of the prophets saw him, and the story 
 reads that they saw that the spirit of Elijah rested 
 on him, and "they came to meet him, and bowed 
 themselves to the ground before him." That was 
 their tribute to his greatness. His greatness ap- 
 pealed to them and the loyal manhood in them rec- 
 ognized the masterly manhood in him. What shall 
 we call that sentiment which is awakened in us 
 by our recognition of the royalty, the majesty, 
 the divinity, and with it all, the brotherly advocacy, 
 the loverlike ministry of Jesus Christ? Admira- 
 tion is not the word. Reverence? Adoration? 
 Gratitude? Worship? Call it what we will, it is 
 the spirit of the disciple who said, ' ' To whom shall 
 we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life. ' ' 
 
 There is stiU another response in man to Christ 's 
 
man's response to Christ's appeal 51 
 
 appeal. It is suggested by a line in Longfellow's 
 story of "The Sifting of Peter": 
 
 'One sight of that pale, suffering face, 
 Will make us feel the deep disgrace 
 Of weakness. 
 
 A mere apprentice cannot set his crude canvas 
 beside the picture of a master without a sense of 
 shame. The contrast is too evident. "When we 
 think of what Christ was, — pure, and there is no 
 white day in all our lives; peaceable, and there 
 is something in us that delights in strife ; unselfish, 
 and our thoughts center in "I" and "me" and 
 "mine"; when we think of how dead He was 
 to all low aims, and how alive He was to all high 
 thoughts and affections; how can we help abhor- 
 ring ourselves? When we measure ourselves by 
 comparison with Him, unless our moral faculties 
 are utterly obtuse, we see the moral distance that 
 separates us from Him. 
 
 As a rule, the holier a heart grows, the more 
 deeply conscious it becomes of its own defilement. 
 In this respect Jesus is an anomaly. He never 
 confessed a sin because He never committed one. 
 Fine example of humility as Jesus' life affords us, 
 there is never a consciousness of need to be for- 
 given. On the tomb of Copernicus, are written 
 these words: "Not that grace which Paul received 
 crave I; not that favor with which Thou didst 
 pardon Peter ; but that which Thou didst grant the 
 malefactor, that alone crave I." There is the 
 heart of the true believer. The sight of Christ 
 
52 COLJiEGE SERMONS 
 
 has brought its sense of shame. But the shame 
 of the penitent never sinks to despair. It rises to 
 hope, and it dares to pray with the dying thief, 
 "Kemember me." 
 
 So, this is the manifold response in man to 
 Christ's manifold appeal: surprise, apprehension 
 of adequacy, recognition of His eternal Saviour- 
 hood, self -consciousness of need, and faith that God 
 is able to supply our need according to His riches 
 in glory by Christ Jesus. 
 
V 
 A DOUBTER'S PRATER 
 
"Constrained at the darkest hour to humbly confess that 
 without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the 
 forest solitude that I would confess His aid before men. A 
 silence as of death was round about me ; it was midnight ; 
 I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and worn . 
 with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate 
 was a mystery. 
 
 "In this physical and mental distress I besought God to 
 give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exult- 
 ing with rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson 
 flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the 
 long-lost rear column. 
 
 "As I mentally review the many grim episodes, and re- 
 flect on the marvelously narrow escapes from utter destruc- 
 tion to which we have been subjected during our various 
 journeys to and fro through the immense and gloomy extent 
 of primeval wood, I feel utterly unable to attribute our 
 salvation to any other cause than to a gracious Providence 
 who, for some purposes of His own, preserved us. 
 
 "Before turning in for the night I resumed my reading 
 of the Bible as usual. I had already read the book through 
 from beginning to end, once, and was now at Deuteronomy 
 for the second reading, and I came unto the verse where 
 Moses exhorts Joshua in these fine lines : 'Be strong and of 
 a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them : for the Lord 
 thy God, He it is that doth go with thee; He will not fail 
 thee, nor forsake thee.' " 
 
 (.In Darkest Africa. H. M. Stanley. Vol. 1, pp. 2, 4, Sll.) 
 
A doubter's prater 
 
 "And straightway the father of the child cried out, and 
 said with tears, Lord, I believe ; help Thou mine unbelief." 
 Mark ix. 24. 
 
 "We are all believers — at times. We are all 
 doubters — at times. There are moments of belief 
 and moments of unbelief in every life. The most 
 thoroughly confirmed skeptic has his hours of 
 faith, and the most confident believer has his hours 
 of doubt. Life is a curious combination of oppo- 
 sites. The hero of battles is afraid to speak a word 
 from a public platform; the frail woman rises to 
 heights of reckless daring; the prudent business 
 man, counsellor of nations, becomes the dupe of a 
 cheap swindler; the professional vagabond, the 
 drifter, the purposeless and passive apostle of 
 leisure, leaps, in one glorious, all-atoning moment 
 of self-abandon, to the death of one than whom 
 ' ' greater love hath no man, ' ' — only the tramp lays 
 down his life for a stranger! 
 
 A newly arrived visitor on our planet, a native 
 of Mars, reading certain pages of human history, 
 would be much confused, and possibly diverted, 
 by the apparent inconsistencies of certain pages of 
 earthly history: Benvenuto Cellini writes with- 
 55 
 
56 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 out hesitation of his pious thoughts and fervent 
 prayers at the very moment he is meditating the 
 assassination of his enemy; John Newton, master 
 of a slave ship, rejoices in the possession of a 
 peculiar spiritual peace; the Puritan comes to 
 America to escape religious persecution, and turns 
 persecutor when he gets into the saddle! These 
 are instances from comparatively modern history, 
 and it has been the same from the beginning. 
 Abraham could lie and pray; Elijah could with- 
 stand the king to his face, and flee from the wrath 
 of the queen ; Peter could betray his Lord, and die 
 for Him. "What does it aU mean? That we are 
 all, as Peter Cartwright confessed to his bishop, 
 "sanctified in spots"? That we fall within the 
 class represented by the person whose obituary in 
 a country newspaper contained the curious com- 
 ment, "He had been a Christian, off and on, for 
 fifty years"? 
 
 Are moral distinctions, after all, not clearly de- 
 fined? Is the line an invisible one — or a variable 
 one — which separates the true from the false, the 
 good from the evil? It is neither, but human 
 nature is variable, and God has not yet finished 
 maMng man. No good man is wholly good, and 
 no bad man is wholly bad. Character is not a 
 matter of isolated circumstances and events, but 
 of the general tendency of one's life. No one of 
 us is what he seems to be at any particular time, 
 but he is what he is with reference to what he 
 was, and to what he aspires to be. The evil that 
 exists in good lives is there to impel us to fight 
 
A dottbtee's pkayee S? 
 
 the good fight till life's last sun is set, and the 
 good that is in evil lives is there to bind us still 
 to God, and give us glimpses of possible redemp- 
 tion. The poet puts it simply when he says : 
 
 "I think, with a grief half glad, 
 That the bad are as good as the good are bad." 
 
 The casual hearer, the superficial reader, of the 
 poet's lines may say, "Does not the poet mean to 
 affirm that goodness and badness exist in us all 
 in about the same measure and proportion?" No, 
 he does not say that the good are as bad as the 
 bad, nor does he say that the bad are as good as 
 the good; he says that there is a little goodness in 
 the bad, and that there is a little badness in the 
 good. In the case of the good, the evil is ex- 
 ceptional; in the case of the bad the virtue is ex- 
 ceptional. 
 
 What constitutes the difference between the be- 
 liever and the iinbeliever, since they both doubt 
 and both believe? Are they not therefore in the 
 same spiritual order? Think not so. The great 
 fact, the determining fact, in the life of the be- 
 liever is his belief; in the life of the unbeliever it 
 is his doubt. The believer clings to his faith, and 
 suspects his doubt. The unbeliever clings to his 
 doubts and suspects his faith. Or, to use a more 
 familiar comparison, the believer believes his be- 
 lief, and doubts his doubt, while the unbeliever be- 
 lieves his doubt, and doubts his belief. 
 
 The poor man of the text, the man with a sick 
 child (and how we pity him, and pity the child!) — 
 
58 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 is he a believer or an unbeliever? Which does he 
 put first, his faith or his imfaith? "Lord, I be- 
 lieve." That is the first thiDg in his mind. That 
 counts most. The other thought is secondary. So, 
 he is a believer, but he is a doubting believer. His 
 prayer is the prayer of a doubter, but he is a 
 believing doubter. There is a world of difference 
 between honest doubt and stupid or stubborn un- 
 belief. Jesus dealt differently with the two, and 
 so should we. "Him that is weak in the faith, 
 receive ye, but not to doubtful disputation." And 
 again, "Tarry one for another." Some are able 
 to make more rapid progress in truth than others ; 
 let not such despise those who find it hard to take 
 their first few steps in faith. 
 
 You know how it is in school. There are always 
 some bright, precocious scholars who leave the 
 others far behind. You know the contempt with 
 which the prize scholar sometimes looks upon the 
 "trailer." You know the impatience of the 
 teacher sometimes when a whole class is held back 
 by one student who cannot get over a hard place or 
 see through an intricate problem. I do not know 
 that the best pedagogy would say to the teacher, 
 "Tarry for the slow scholar," but many a slow 
 scholar has caught up with his class because some 
 teacher, at vacation time, or after hours, or be- 
 cause some classmate, or fraternity friend, tarried 
 for him. You know what soldiers do on a long 
 march. They tarry for the weak and the lame, 
 except in the emergency of approaching battle. 
 The strong and vigorous will bear the arms of 
 
59 
 
 the weak, and if one sinks down by the roadside, 
 there is an ambulance for him, and in the absence 
 of an ambulance, ofScers have been known to dis- 
 mount, and repeat the beautiful self-denial of the 
 Samaritan who put a wounded man on his own 
 beast and brought him to the inn. 
 
 Look at the Master's treatment of this doubter. 
 The man confesses his faith is faltering. Some- 
 thing is in the way of his belief. I have wondered 
 if it may not have been that barrier to faith which 
 all of us have stumbled over at times when ap- 
 proaching some great promise of God, that com- 
 mon reflection, " It is too good to be true. ' ' What- 
 ever it was, it was no barrier to the love and power 
 of Jesus, for, without delay, he granted the father 's 
 request, and spoke the word that released and re- 
 lieved the aiHicted child. 
 
 Do we not see in this incident much that is of 
 permanent value to the believer, even the doubt- 
 ing believer, in our own age? Faltering faith 
 surely honors itself by frank confession. Doubts 
 do sometimes loom large in the dark, but assume 
 far less alarming proportions when brought to 
 the light. A great-minded and tender-hearted 
 bishop, whose name is cherished by us all, said to 
 a mother who was much distressed by the disposi- 
 tion of her son, a college student, to talk skeptically, 
 "Let him ventilate his notions. Let him air his 
 views. He is trying to find out what he believes, 
 and he will not find out until he exposes his ideas 
 to the full light of day." Another, equally wise, 
 said in a similar instance; "It is a plain case of 
 
'60 COLLEGE SEKMONS 
 
 intellectual measles. This kind of skepticism is the 
 rash. It is best to let it come out. Don't drive 
 it in." 
 
 Faltering faith is better confessed than con- 
 cealed. But mark the wisdom of this doubter, — 
 he goes straight to the Master with his confession. 
 How many knots would be untangled, how many 
 vexed and vexing problems would be solved by 
 going to the very central source of authority ! For, 
 meager as is the outline of our Saviour's teachings 
 in the Gospels, there is that in them which efiEect- 
 ively lifts much of the world's burden of doubt. 
 The rest He promises to the laboring and heavy- 
 laden is rest from perturbing thoughts, rest from 
 tormenting uncertainties, rest from harassing 
 doubts, as well as rest from weariness, and weak- 
 ness, and wickedness. Faltering faith, in the case 
 of this doubter, not only honors itself by candid 
 confession, but points out the way of peace by the 
 very nature of its expression. The confession is 
 a prayer. 
 
 The doubter who makes the confession of his 
 doubts an advertisement, a mere cheap appeal to 
 publicity, alienates himself, by that very act, from 
 the spirit of the truth-seeker. It is as indelicate 
 to expose one's doubts in the market place as to 
 display one's sorrows to the gaze of passers-by. 
 Here is the golden rule for all such souls as this 
 father, this half -believer : TeU your doubts to God ; 
 publish your faith to your feUow-man. There is 
 no place where doubt so quickly vanishes, where 
 weak faith so certainly grows strong, where lame 
 
A doubtee's pbayeb 61 
 
 faith leaps, and blind faith sees, as at the Master 's 
 feet, the throne of Grace. There is wisdom in the 
 prayer, "Help thou mine unbelief." 
 
 I am not saying there are no others to help our 
 unbelief. There are books and teachers and pas- 
 tors and friends that help our unbelief. A Cam- 
 bridge professor once declared that no student of 
 his ever left the university without being per- 
 manently influenced by the study of Butler's 
 "Analogy." Walker's "Philosophy of the Plan 
 of Salvation" has been useful in dissipating doubt 
 and stimulating faith in many a student's life. 
 When Phillips Brooks died, a great company of 
 men rose up to call him blessed, to testify that 
 when, in crises of their lives, they went to him, 
 they found light and leading. If anywhere within 
 your reach there be a man of firm faith, a man like 
 Tennyson's friend who "fought his doubts and 
 gathered strength," one who has faced the specters 
 of the mind and laid them, one whose faith is re- 
 freshing and contagious, and who knows how to 
 prove that "the soul has reasons that Reason cannot 
 know," go to that friend, that teacher, and say, 
 "Help thou mine unbelief." Not to the doubter 
 to compare your doubts, or to confirm them, lest 
 you be like a sick man who seeks advice of fellow- 
 patients in a hospital, but to the believer who has 
 a well-reasoned creed and the capacity to vindi- 
 cate it, to him go with the request, ' ' Help thou mine 
 unbelief." But the skill of all such men in help- 
 ing our unbelief is feeble compared with His to 
 Whom, at this or any moment we may appeal with 
 
62 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 the absolute certainty that He will speak the one 
 word to us we most need to hear. 
 
 He will speak the word of patience to the soul 
 whose doubt is but a passing phase of thought. He 
 will speak the word of grace to the soul whose 
 doubt is tangled in some mesh of trying circum- 
 stance. He will speak the word of peace to the 
 soul whose doubt is but an echo of the world's 
 periodic religious upheaval, or a reflection of his 
 own weariness. He will speak the word of trust 
 to' the soul whose doubt arises from an over- 
 anxiety to peer into the mechanism of the moral 
 universe. So shall His power be with us in the 
 night, and whatsoever doubt vexes our understand- 
 ing, our hearts shall answer it with the assurance, 
 "I know Whom I have believed." 
 
VI 
 
 THE INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 JESUS 
 
"But wherever there is a romantic movement in art there 
 somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of 
 Christ. He is in Romeo and JuUet, in the Winter's Tale, 
 in ProvenQal poetry, in the Ancient Mariner, in La Belle 
 Dame sans Merci, and in Chatterton's Ballad of Charity. 
 
 "We owe to Him the most diverse things and people. 
 Hugo's Les miseralles, Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai, the note 
 of pity in Russian novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, 
 the stained glass and tapestries and the quattrocento work 
 of Burne-Jones and Morris, belong to him no less than the 
 tower of Giotto, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tannhauser, the 
 troubled romantic marbles of Michelangelo, pointed archi- 
 tecture, and the love of children and flowers, — for both of 
 which, indeed, in classical art there was but little place, 
 hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from 
 the twelfth century down to our own day, have been con- 
 tinually making their appearances in art, under various 
 modes and at various times, coming fitfully and wilfully, as 
 children, as flowers, are apt to do : spring always seeming 
 to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and only came 
 out into the sun because they were afraid that grown-up 
 people would grow tired of looking for them and give up 
 the search ; and the life of a child being no more than an 
 April day on which there is both rain and sun for the 
 narcissus. 
 
 "Christianity is much else, I know, but, to the intellect 
 Christianity is the reasserting and reestablishing of faith as 
 the organ of knowledge and as the method of life. What 
 was the fall of man, but the unreasoning triumph of reason 
 in the soul of man? The serpent which tempted to sin was 
 rationalism, charming but stinging. Man persisted in eating 
 of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He would not 
 wait in trust upon God's knowledge. He must know for 
 himself. The heart was all loveless and the will was power- 
 less ; but the reason had won a triumph ; the intellect had its 
 false supremacy." 
 
 (£>e Profundis. Oscar Wilde, pp. 73, 73, 74.) 
 
VI 
 
 THE INTELLECTUAL INFLXTENCE OF JESUS 
 "The mind . . . which was in Christ Jesus." Phil. ii. 5. 
 
 The Christian world well knows the extent and 
 vitality of the moral and spiritual influence of 
 Jesus, — how by His words and life He has lifted 
 the world into a purer moral and loftier spiritual 
 atmosphere than it had ever Imown before; The 
 world was not without its moral teachers before 
 Jesus, but it remained for Him to vitalize the dead 
 morality of paganism at its best, to put into right- 
 eousness not only emotion, as Matthew Arnold 
 states it, but principle as well. The world had also 
 its spiritual leaders before Jesus. The Hebrew 
 prophets were spiritual geniuses. Jesus fulfilled 
 what they had dreamed, and completed what they 
 began. Buddha lived in the realm of the spiritual, 
 but Jesus taught the world the true relation be- 
 tween the spiritual and the material, the ideal and 
 the actual. 
 
 If Jesus had done no more than this, if He had 
 left His impress upon the moral and spiritual life 
 of the world, He would still be the world's greatest 
 Leader, and humanity's truest Benefactor. But 
 His intellectual influence has been as vital and as 
 extensive as His moral and spiritual influence, 
 65 
 
66 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 and of that we do not hear so much. Of the in- 
 fluence of Jesus on the mental life of mankind I 
 would have you think. ' ' The mind . . . which 
 was in Christ Jesus" means much more than His 
 intellect; it means His whole disposition, His emo- 
 tional and volitional nature, His mental attitude, 
 and moral altitude; but it includes His intellectual 
 habit, as well, and so, let us use it. 
 
 Employing the term, "the mind of Christ" in 
 this restricted sense, what were His intellectual 
 habits ? What were His modes of thinking ? What 
 characterized His processes of reasoning and judg- 
 ing? Three things supremely. He saw the world 
 as one. He recognized the inestimable value of 
 truth. He perceived the essential unity of mental 
 and moral truth. And for one Man, in that age, 
 to stand upon a platform of that kind; for one 
 Man to be loyal to such ideas, was to stand out 
 from all others, and above all others, like Saul of 
 Israel "from his shoulders and upward." 
 
 It is not easy to estimate the influence on man's 
 mental life of that one idea, the world as one, the 
 unity of world-processes. Zoroaster, who still 
 numbers his adherents by millions, taught a dual- 
 ism; there is an empire of light and an empire of 
 darkness. Paganism taught a pluralism ; there are 
 many empires of authority and power: one god of 
 the sea, another of the air, another of the earth, 
 and another of the winds ; one god of love (that is, 
 animal love) and another of war, and another of the 
 harvest, and another of the chase. Here and there 
 were men like Plato, who saw the unreason and the 
 
THE INTELLEOTUAIj INFLUENCE OF JESUS 67 
 
 mischief of sueh a conception of world-processes, 
 but none saw it so clearly, or proclaimed it so in- 
 dubitably as Jesus, so that from the beginning of 
 His Gospel until now. His conception of the unity 
 of God and the harmony of cosmic forces has 
 cleared the mental atmosphere, and made possible 
 sane thinking with reference to first causes and 
 natural phenomena and the universal reign of 
 law. 
 
 Aristotle is sometimes spoken of as the father 
 of the scientific method of observing facts and 
 drawing conclusions; but he was a pupil of Plato, 
 and Plato came nearest to Jesus in his idea of the 
 world's unity. Francis Bacon, more than any 
 other modern man, gave us the modern scientific 
 method, perfecting that which' Aristotle began. 
 But Francis Bacon looked to Jesus as his Master, 
 and was not forgetful of his debt, and of the 
 world's debt, to that Galilean Teacher who swept 
 all the pagan gods and notions of intermediary 
 deities off the field of man's mental vision. 
 
 The work of Jesus in this respect, was like the 
 work of a man who plants the powder blast in a 
 quarry. Others build out of material which he 
 dislodges. It was like the work of the pioneers, 
 who cleared the forests for generations that later 
 built palaces. He was a great Pathfinder for mul- 
 titudes of thinkers, not all of whom are well aware 
 of their intellectual indebtedness to Him. 
 
 It is more easily demonstrable that Jesus' em- 
 phasis on the superlative value of truth has had 
 unmeasured influence on the intellect of the world. 
 
68 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 No other teacher has ever made so much of truth. 
 Some have made more of facts. Jesus never dog- 
 matized about facts, just because He knew how 
 much more important truth is than mere facts. 
 The historian is anxious to collect and classify facts. 
 The philosopher cares little for facts save as they 
 point to truth. Truths explain facts. A thousand 
 people may be trusted to collect facts to one who 
 may be trusted to recognize truth when he sees it. 
 
 Jesus said, "I am the Truth." Here is an 
 affirmation of the revelatory power of personality, 
 which the psychologists of the world are just be- 
 ginning to recognize. Moreover, it is an affirma- 
 tion of a principle that theologians have not al- 
 ways appreciated, that Christianity is, in its be- 
 ginning, as in its finality, attachment to a Person. 
 
 Jesus said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the 
 truth shall make you free." It was as if Jesus 
 foresaw the age-long struggle of the world for free- 
 dom. Now all freedom is from one root, — political 
 freedom, social freedom, religious freedom, indus- 
 trial freedom, it is all the fruit of one plant, and 
 that plant has its root in the freedom of the spirit. 
 Herein Jesus proved Himself the world's farthest- 
 sighted Eeformer. He knew what revolutions, 
 what new adjustments, what new creations would 
 follow the freedom of the spirit. So He uttered a 
 single sentence, a simple pronouncement that all 
 freedom has its source in the inner life of man, and 
 lo! all things begin to be made new. It is not 
 strange that President Eliot of Harvard selected 
 these words to be inscribed upon the walls of the 
 
THE I2SrTELLECTXTAL INFLUENCE OF JESUS 69 
 
 Congressional Library at "Washington. They are 
 the magna eharta of the human mind. Where else 
 is such encouragement to the spirit of research and 
 discovery? Where else is such a commission to 
 read all the leaves of God's Book, His Book above 
 us, in the starry sky, His Book beneath us, in the 
 rock-ribbed earth. His Book within us, and His 
 Book before us, the Holy Scriptures of our faith? 
 Pastor Robinson told the Pilgrims, "New truths 
 are yet to burst upon us from this Book." Noble 
 words, but they are only an echo, — the voice comes 
 to us out of Galilee. 
 
 Hospitality to all truth, vast tolerance of the 
 mind, the catholic spirit of the man who said, "I 
 am willing to sit at the feet of anyone, however 
 humble he may be, if only he will teach me truth, ' ' 
 — all this is in the train of Jesus' high appraisal 
 of truth. 
 
 But these two mental traits of Jesus, His con- 
 ception of the world as one, and His knowledge of 
 the supreme worth of truth, are less exclusively 
 His, are more characteristic of some other great 
 teachers, such as Plato, than is the third. I refer 
 to His perception of the essential unity of mental 
 and moral truth. 
 
 The vice of ancient philosophy, and of much 
 modem thinking, is that it suffers a divorce of 
 mental and moral sincerity. An Apostle speaks of 
 those who are "ever learning and never able to 
 come to the knowledge of the truth. ' ' Such people 
 are like a hunter who kills game, and lets it lie 
 where it falls. He is out for the fun of shooting. 
 
70 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 The noblest game on our western plains was ex- 
 terminated by that method. Or, to use another 
 figure, there is a method of seeking truth not unlike 
 that of the coquette who captures hearts merely 
 for the sensation of conquest. The search for truth 
 is worth nothing if, when we arrive at truth, we 
 are unwilling to adopt it, even though it be of the 
 character of a moral imperative. As well kill game 
 for the mere sake of killing ; as well win hearts for 
 the mere sake of the sense of victory; as well cook 
 a meal and leave it uneaten; as well discover a 
 mine and never work it; as well paint a picture 
 and turn it to the wall; or build a mansion and 
 board it up, as to seek the truth and then turn from 
 it when we find it demands the heroism of sur- 
 render, the himiiliation of confession, or the sacri- 
 fice of service. 
 
 Multitudes have studied the personality of Jesus 
 Christ, and even when they have been satisfied that 
 He is the Saviour of souls, have been unwilling to 
 pay the price of discipleship. They lack moral 
 sincerity. And other multitudes have failed to see 
 in Jesus Christ all that He really is, simply because 
 they approached the study of His character with- 
 out that quality of moral candor, suggested by His 
 own words, "If any man will do . . . shall 
 know." No man can see in Jesus Christ all that 
 He is who does not bring to that study the willing- 
 ness to do His will, if it be clear that His will is 
 coincident with the will of God. 
 
 There is an impressive passage in one of Sidney 
 Lanier's lectures to the students at Johns Hopkins 
 
THE INTELLECTUAL INELUENCE OF JESUS 71 
 
 University, in which he says ; " He who has not yet 
 perceived how moral and artistic beauty are con- 
 vergent lines which run back into a common ideal 
 origin, he who has not come to that stage in 
 which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of 
 beauty burn as one fire, shine as one light within 
 him, he is not yet the great artist." Was it not 
 Aristotle who taught the doctrine that the per- 
 ception of truth is essentially a moral act ? Certain 
 it is that this is implied in Jesus' words, "If any 
 man will do His will, he shall know of the doc- 
 trine." Frederick "W. Robertson gives us a sig- 
 nificant phrase, "Obedience, the condition of 
 knowledge." Noah Porter, once President of Yale, 
 uses a similar expression in one of his baccalaureate 
 sermons. This is what I mean when I speak of the 
 unity of mental and moral truth. 
 
 I have a friend who sat down one day and 
 counted the words of Jesus recorded in the four 
 Gospels. He was amazed to find how few they 
 are. They could all be printed on one page of a 
 modem newspaper. Tet those words are the 
 classics of the religious world. "What volumes of 
 literature, what galleries of art, what wealth of 
 speech, what folios of song, have flowed out from 
 that little "lake of dreams"! More than all that, 
 what heroic endeavors to find the truth, to learn 
 the truth by living it, to mould the truth into the 
 body of life, to weave it into the fabric of character 
 His words have inspired ! 
 
 Hugh McMillan says that the two most signifi- 
 cant moments in the history of modern learning 
 
72 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 were, one, when Galileo first saw the greatness of 
 the universe, the other, when Buffon, examining a 
 pile of fossil bones, perceived that they were of ani- 
 mals hitherto unknown, and at once concluded that 
 the natural history of the world must be lengthened 
 by many ages. Those two moments marked im- 
 measurable growth for the human mind. There 
 have been many such moments, — ^moments of dis- 
 covery, which have enlarged the boundaries of 
 human knowledge. Men who make such discover- 
 ies, arrive at such conclusions, are stars in the sky 
 of learning. But there is a Sun in that sky. He 
 Who first saw the world as one. Who first taught 
 that truth is to be valued above all things else, 
 and Who made plain that the only way to possess 
 truth is to translate it into character, — shall we not 
 call Him "the sovereign Seer of time"? "The 
 mind . . . which was in Christ Jesus" was 
 creative in the highest sense, and His mind in us 
 lifts us to higher levels of thinking, as well as of 
 living and loving. 
 
VII 
 THE INSPIEATION OF THE PROPHET 
 
"Slowly but inevitably we are moving to this great 
 thought. It is summed up in one word : Redemption. The 
 watchword of a century ago was gravitation. It explained 
 the poise of the universe by a great and hitherto undis- 
 covered law. The watchword of yesterday was evolution. 
 It explains progressive change : the mounting-up of life 
 'through spires of form.' The forms of the universe are 
 seen in a series which is in the main ascendant, and in 
 which the survivor is supreme. The watchword of to-mor- 
 row is Redemption. The thinker will some day live, who 
 will make that great word Redemption stand out in all its 
 vast mystery and significance. This, I take it, is the work 
 of our new century. 
 
 "Redemption is the explanation of the existence of man, 
 of his present progress, and his future destiny. It is the 
 great mystery of joy in which the race partakes ; the spir- 
 itual culmination of all things earthly ; the forecast of 
 eternal things yet to be. 
 
 "Redemption is not a dogma ; it is a life. Redemption is 
 a perpetual and ascendant moral growth. It marks a 
 world-balm, a world-change. It is in the spirit of man that 
 it works, and not in his outer condition, or external striv- 
 ings. It is ultimately to root sin out of the world. 
 
 "Through stormy sorrows and perpetual desolations comes 
 the race to God. Zion is the whole of things — the encom- 
 passment of space, and time, and endless years, — an en- 
 vironment of immortality and peace." 
 
 (.The Warriors. Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay, pp. 163,164.) 
 
VII 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF THE PROPHET 
 
 "In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord 
 sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train 
 filled the temple. 
 
 "Above it stood the seraphim : each one had six wings ; 
 with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered 
 his feet, and with twain he did fly. 
 
 "And one cried unto another, and said. Holy, holy, holy, 
 is the Lord of hosts : the earth is full of his glory. 
 
 "And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that 
 cried, and the house was filled with smoke. 
 
 "Then said I, Woe is me ! for I am undone ; because I am 
 a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a 
 people of unclean lips : for mine eyes have seen the King, 
 the Lord of hosts. 
 
 "Then fiew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live 
 coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from 
 off the altar: 
 
 "And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath 
 touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and 
 thy sin purged. 
 
 "Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I 
 send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; 
 send me." Isa. vi. 1-8. 
 
 There were reformers before the Reformation. 
 Such were "WyelifEe, and Huss, and Savonarola. 
 
 There were Christians before Christ. Abraham, 
 
 Moses, David, and Isaiah must be numbered among 
 
 them. They looked forward toward Christ, in 
 
 hope, even as we look backward to Him, in faith. 
 
 75 
 
76 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 Of all the Christians before Christ, Isaiah seems 
 to have the most Christlike vision of the world as 
 the subject of redemption. He has much of the 
 spirituality of John, and much of the mental vigor 
 of Paul. He saw the New Jerusalem in the midst 
 of the old. He heard heavenly harmonies above 
 earthly discords. He sought to make a new earth 
 wherein dwelt righteousness. 
 
 The verses I have read tell us whence Isaiah de- 
 rived his inspiration. He saw God. No man can 
 be a prophet until he has that vision. We are not 
 prepared to see man, or sin, or duty, or death, or 
 destiny, until first we have seen God. What I 
 mean is this : a clear apprehension of God is neces- 
 sary to the understanding of any problem involv- 
 ing moral law. A right view of God is as the 
 base line to the builder, the ground tone to the art- 
 ist, the keynote to the musician. 
 
 Isaiah's hour of inspiration was the hour of his 
 vision of God. The supreme hour of any life, the 
 very pearl of hours, is when God is thought of as 
 He is. It may be we have imagined Him as a 
 great King, seated on His throne of power, hurl- 
 ing thtmderbolts at His foes; or we have pictured 
 Him a stern Judge, with an instrument of ven- 
 geance in His hands, ready to strike through 
 "with prongs of pain" the luckless sinner that 
 stands before Him; or, we have thought of Him 
 as an impersonal Power, an impenetrable Mys- 
 tery, a Stream of Tendency, or an Infinite Un- 
 known. Well, when one who has held such a view 
 of God sees Him as He is, — ^the God who is better 
 
THE INSPIBATION OP THE PBOPHET 77 
 
 than our best thoughts of Him can be, more pa- 
 tient than any teacher, more pitiful than any 
 father, more comforting than any mother, — ^that 
 is the day of his heavenly vision, the very birth- 
 day of his hope. 
 
 Isaiah says, "I saw." Is it, then, given to man 
 to be so sure of spiritual phenomena ? So it seems 
 from this Book. The basis of this confidence is in 
 the spiritual consciousness out of which Moses 
 spoke when he said, "I saw the passing pageant 
 of the goodness of the Lord;" out of which Paul 
 spoke when he said, "I saw a light above the 
 brightness of the sun, and heard a voice out of the 
 radiance calling me by name;" out of which John 
 spoke when he said, "In the midst of the golden 
 candlesticks I saw One like unto the Son of Man, 
 girt with a golden girdle, and holding the seven 
 stars in his hand." Not more real was the moun- 
 tain whereon Moses stood, or the splendid highway 
 over which Paul was traveling, or the rocks of 
 Patmos whereon the waves broke into spray, — ^not 
 more real were these than the visions unfolded to 
 human spirits there. 
 
 The definiteness of the prophet's memory is 
 startling, — in the death-year of King Uzziah. 
 Happy the man who keeps a journal and records 
 the date of this and that event. I know one who is 
 able to say: "It was on the 19th of March, 1886, 
 I began to be led by the Spirit. ' ' But others there 
 are who must say; "I do not know just when I en- 
 tered the new life. I think it was some time be- 
 tween sixteen and twenty years of age. The 
 
78 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 change came so gradually that I glided into the 
 consciousness of a definite relationship to God as 
 a ship glides out of a region of ice into a warmer 
 zone." God does not deal with us all alike. 
 There are flowers that burst into bloom, and there 
 are others that gradually unfold. Let not the 
 man with the calendar say to the man who develops 
 faith more slowly, "You are not a Christian." 
 And let not the man whose conversion was a pro- 
 cess rather than a single act, despise the testimony 
 of him who said, "I remember the day, the hour, 
 the spot where Love Divine first found me." 
 
 There are those who covet certain definite data 
 of religious life, who must content themselves with 
 general, rather than particular experiences. You 
 do not remember the day, or even the year, when 
 you first became conscious of self; you do not re- 
 member the day, or even the year, when you left 
 childhood behind you, and became a man. But, 
 if you are a man, if you are bearing burdens that 
 only men can bear, thinking a man's thoughts, doing 
 a man's work, the definite memory of manhood's 
 beginning may well be ignored. The fact that one 
 has reached the slope or summit of a mountain, is 
 proof that he began the ascent sometime, some- 
 where. Are you pure in heart, poor in spirit, 
 meek, mournful over sin, a lover of peace? Then 
 somewhere, along the path your feet have trod, 
 you caught a glimpse of the Eternal, you spoke to 
 the Infinite, and heard His voice, and the process 
 of your transfiguration began, which shall not end 
 
THE INSPIEATION OF THE PKOPHET 79 
 
 until you pass through the gates that open in- 
 wardly to the temple of all truth. 
 
 Manifold was the effect of Isaiah's vision. 
 First, he became keenly conscious of his own defi- 
 ciency: "I am a man of unclean lips." The in- 
 evitable effect of the vision of God, is a deeper 
 knowledge of our own need. It may be difficult to 
 determine whether a picture is a copy of a master- 
 piece, or the masterpiece itself, but put it beside 
 the original, and all the imperfections and im- 
 maturity of the copy are obvious. Here is a sheet 
 of paper called pure white. But when, by the aid 
 of scientific instruments, you produce a pure white 
 light, this paper appears an ashen gray, or a faded 
 yellow. It cannot stand the vision of pure white. 
 The humblest souls on earth, the most ready to con- 
 fess their faults, are those who have the clearest 
 vision of God. In His light we see not only light 
 but darkness. The very thought of God awakens 
 in us a sense of sin. 
 
 There are some who delay their first step in 
 Christian living because they have never felt the 
 weight of sin. They look for "conviction," long 
 for it, even pray for it. But how quickly it fol- 
 lows the sight of God! Let them pray for that; 
 let them pray for the vision of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Another result of the vision is quietness and as- 
 surance. There is nothing a prophet more needs 
 than a calm outlook into the future, the little fu- 
 ture of these years of our lives, and the greater fu- 
 ture of the centuries. No one of us is well quali- 
 
80 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 fied to be a soldier in the ranks of the army of re- 
 form until he sees that, whatever happens, God is 
 on the throne. There are many disquieting sights, 
 many disquieting thoughts. In vain the psalmist 
 admonishes us, "Fret not thyself because of evil 
 doers." "We do fret ourselves when wickedness 
 flourishes^ and vice runs riot and appears to be im- 
 mune from penalty. We do fret ourselves when 
 falsehood flaunts her banner in the face of truth. 
 "We are cast down when we see how full the world 
 is of frauds, and shams, and snares, and traps for 
 men, and wrecks of men. Superficially, the race 
 seems to be a failure, the world a sad experiment. 
 There are not wanting those who are ready to de- 
 clare modern civilization only a thin veneer, and 
 Christianity itself impotent to create a new order 
 of things. There are not wanting those who proph- 
 esy the ultimate and even speedily approaching 
 end of the present social and industrial systems, 
 in bloodshed and universal violence. But he who 
 sees what Isaiah saw has no such troubled dream. 
 God on the throne is the pledge that good shall be 
 the final goal of ill. God on the throne means that 
 He will make the vsrath of man to praise Him and 
 restrain the remainder. God on the throne means 
 that out of what seems remediless confusion per- 
 fect order and beauty are to come. God on the 
 throne means, not merely "moonlight on a 
 troubled sea," but the calming of the sea. God on 
 the throne means all things working together to 
 accomplish His good will. 
 We are like children in a machine shop, who see 
 
THE INSPIEATION OF THE PROPHET 81 
 
 this wheel revolving one way, and that wheel re- 
 volving another way, this wheel revolving rapidly, 
 and that wheel revolving slowly, and who conclude 
 that therefore there is no plan, no unifying force 
 about it all. Or, to use another figure, we stand 
 by a great loom, and see one side of the fabric, and 
 it seems to be a crazy patchwork of shapes and 
 colors. Isaiah caught a glimpse of the Engineer 
 and saw that He was master of all the wheels and 
 belts and pulleys. Isaiah caught a glimpse of the 
 Weaver at the loom and saw that the pattern was 
 before Him all the while. So, ever afterward, 
 whoever was on the throne of Judah, whoever ruled 
 Israel, there was one man absolutely calm and con- 
 fident, knowing that the King of kings was on the 
 Great Throne, and that all earthly monarchs are 
 but His puppets, with paper crowns and scepters 
 of straw. He was like Eobert Browning's man, 
 who "never dreamed though right were worsted, 
 wrong would triumph." "What is your carpen- 
 ter doing now?" said a Roman seofEer to an early 
 Christian. "He is making a coffin for your em- 
 peror," was the reply. And He was. Nero is but 
 a noxious memory. We name our dogs Nero. 
 The Carpenter of Nazareth is on the throne of 
 power, "Ancient of days yet ever new." 
 
 The vision of God revealed to Isaiah his need 
 of cleansing, made him long for holiness, and that 
 moment he was holy. In Maurice Hewlett's "For- 
 est Lovers," there is a girl who, though born of no- 
 ble blood, has been reared amidst squalor. When 
 Prosper, the clean-mouthed and summer-hearted 
 
82 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 knight takes her from her hut to save her from 
 death, he says, "Isoult, what is it you want?" 
 And she answers, "I want to be what I have never 
 been." "What then is that?" "To be clean." 
 The prodigal wanted a new robe before he sat 
 down at his father's table. The old robe was 
 soiled and worn. Jesus spoke a parable of a man 
 who made a feast, and required that those who sat 
 with him should have appropriate raiment. What 
 does that represent, — ^the white robe, the wedding 
 garment? Cleansing. All the ablutions of the 
 Old Testament ceremonials and all the baptisms of 
 the New, the baptism of water and the baptism of 
 fire, are designed to teach the Divine beauty and 
 the human necessity of holiness. If it took fire 
 to purify the lips of the young Hebrew prophet, 
 nothing less than fire will avail for us. To this 
 end came the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, His sym- 
 bol lambent tongues of flame. To this end God's 
 eternal Spirit is in the world to-day, ready to visit 
 us who say, 
 
 "Refining Fire, go through my heart, 
 Illuminate my soul." 
 
 Swiftly the angel was sent to touch the lips that 
 cried for cleansing, and always swiftly pardon 
 follows penitence, and peace accompanies pardon. 
 Do we know this — ^that the desire for purity is 
 itself purifying? He who desires God has God. 
 He who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is 
 fiUed. It is only the Divine within the heart that 
 can make us feel the need of Christ. "No man 
 
THE INSPIEATION OF THE PBOPHET 83 
 
 can call Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit." 
 When we understand this, innumerable barriers 
 fall, inniimerable obstacles disappear, innumer- 
 able objections vanish into thin air, — ^when it is 
 understood that the first faint desire for God is 
 itself a step toward God. 
 
 There is yet another sequel to the vision. This 
 was the end of it all,— "Who will go for us?" 
 The value of the vision was not to the prophet 
 alone, but to Judah and Jerusalem immediately, 
 and to all the race ultimately. He who sees God 
 hears Him also, and the voice that says, "Come 
 and see," says, "Go and tell." The fatal weak- 
 ness of much of our religion is that it is regarded 
 as an end in itself. No soul is saved for its own 
 sake. No soul is truly saved until it becomes, in 
 some sense, a saviour to other souls. Light is not 
 light until it impinges on some material substance. 
 The interstellar spaces are black because they con- 
 tain nothing for light to touch and transfigure. 
 The saving grace of God is not manifest until the 
 soul that was comforted comforts others with the 
 comfort wherewith it was comforted of God. 
 
 The sun does not shine for itself; stars do not 
 beam, nor flowers bloom, nor birds sing, for them- 
 selves. We do not light a candle for the candle's 
 sake, but that it may illumine the room. Our 
 spirits are the candles of the Almighty, and, to 
 carry the figure farther, we give light only as we 
 are consumed. A psalmist says, "The zeal of thine 
 house hath eaten me up," and such is the tes- 
 timony of many another life of faith. I have 
 
84 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 been thinking of such a life, a woman into whose 
 home there came, long years ago, a sorrow that was 
 absolutely appalling. Her youngest child, the 
 darling of her heart, was stolen away, kidnapped, 
 and the world well knows that little boy's name. 
 In the hour of her great grief, she saw the throne of 
 God spanning like a bridge of gold her gulf of woe, 
 and she was comforted. Then she heard the voice 
 of duty calling, "Who will go for us?" and she 
 said, "Here am I; send me." So, every Sunday 
 morning for twenty-five years, through summer 
 heat and winter storm, she has gone to the house 
 of God at half-past nine to teach a class of chil- 
 dren in the Master's name. Many another there 
 is, in whose life noble service followed the vision 
 of the Eternal. One is a missionary among the 
 Arabs on the border of the Great Desert. One is 
 a settlement worker in the slums of a great city. 
 One is a teacher of boys in a private school, and 
 he thinks more of doing well his work, of develop- 
 ing fine character in his scholars, than he does of 
 drawing his salary. One is a child who has never 
 spoken an unkind word since a certain day when, 
 after a storm of passion, he was led to see his weak- 
 ness and to pray for inward strength. The Lamb- 
 hood of God has made him gentle. 
 
 Another is a business man, the rule of whose life 
 is to mark every day, to make it memorable, by a 
 work of mercy and help. I have known him, late 
 at night, to go out upon the street, seeking an op- 
 portunity for humane service, because the day had 
 been too crowded to permit his fulfillment of a vow 
 
THE INSPIEATION OP THE PKOPHET 85 
 
 to close the record of no day without a message 
 given or a ministry performed in the spirit of 
 Jesus Christ. Still another is a woman who re- 
 veals almost incredible patience in dealing with 
 her family of riotous and fretful children. All 
 these, and others like them, are in the succession of 
 prophets and apostles, servants of the Most High, 
 — servants whom their Lord admits to friendship 
 with Himself. ' ' Ye are My friends, if you do what- 
 soever I command you." 
 
VIII 
 CHRISTIAN CERTAINTIES 
 
"A second way of ascertaining tlie nature of the Word 
 of God is to consult every variety of Christian experience. 
 Let testimony be sought from rich and poor, from the 
 densely ignorant as well as from the highly enlightened, 
 from men of affairs, from poets and philosophers and 
 scientists, from those who have been rescued out of gross 
 degradation and from those who have never known any other 
 than the Christian life; in all these persons alike, with or 
 without historical knowledge or a critical theory of the facts 
 of the New Testament, with or without a philosophy or a 
 theology, not seldom with irrational notions as to the great 
 outstanding features of Christian belief, there has been 
 created a new and higher, a supernatural, Divine con- 
 sciousness." 
 
 (.Realities of Christian Theology. Clarence Augustine Beckwith. 
 pp. 384, 325.) 
 
 "It would be incredible, if it were not true, that we still 
 have assailants and critics of Christianity in our midst for 
 whom the religious consciousness simply does not exist ; they 
 discuss what they think the claims of Christianity and pro- 
 nounce judgment against it, but the chief witness is never 
 called. Such grotesque travesties of justice ought in the 
 future to be laughed out of court. Happily there are signs 
 of the coming of a better day. It is good to be told by a 
 competent authority that 'the natural history of the re- 
 ligious consciousness as it manifests itself in the life of the 
 individual has now taken its place among the sciences.' " 
 
 (Ancient Faith and Modern Doubt. Professor W. R. Inge.) 
 
VIII 
 
 CHRISTIAN CERTAINTIES 
 
 "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I 
 see." John ix. 25. 
 
 Blindness is one of the commonest afflictions in 
 Egypt and Palestine. It has been so from time 
 immemorial. There are various reasons why it is 
 so. A distinguished oculist, impressed by the 
 multitude of people in those countries who suffer 
 from diseases of the eye, of one kind and another, 
 gives it as his opinion that a liberal use of soap 
 for a single generation would reduce the number 
 of blind by one half, and that the application of 
 very simple remedies would reduce the number of 
 the remainder by two thirds. 
 
 Blindness and leprosy are the two most fre- 
 quently mentioned ailments in the Scriptures. 
 Some of Jesus' most wonderful miracles were 
 wrought upon blind men and lepers. It must have 
 been so in the nature of things, for His miracles 
 were, almost without exception, benevolences, and 
 who needed help so much as these ? 
 
 The blind men of the New Testament form a 
 
 very interesting group of characters. Of them we 
 
 know the name of only one, Bartimeus, the son of 
 
 Timeus, of Jericho, who sat begging at the road- 
 
 89 
 
90 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 side. The blind man whose words I have quoted 
 is nameless, but of his personal history, of his 
 mental characteristics, and of the miracle which 
 restored him to sight, we know more than we do 
 about Bartimeus. This entire chapter — ^the ninth 
 of John — is given up to the story of his healing 
 and the circumstances which attended it. John is 
 the only one of the four evangelists who mentions 
 the circumstance, but that is not strange, for he is 
 the only one of the four who gives us an account 
 of the Judean ministry, a period of about two 
 months. 
 
 In the case of Bartimeus, it was the blind man 
 who heard the sound of tramping feet, and, learn- 
 ing that Jesus was passing, cried to Him out of 
 darkness for sight. In this case, Jesus sees the 
 blind man, and apparently without any request 
 on his part, heals and delivers him from hopeless 
 despair. Hopeless despair, for he was blind from 
 his birth. There is this difference between a man 
 born blind and one who has lost his sight by acci- 
 dent or disease, — ^the latter knows what sight is, 
 knows something of the manifold glory of earth 
 and sky, and has a little fringe of green around his 
 desert, a little world of beauty which memory re- 
 creates for him at his bidding. 
 
 I need not rehearse the story of the miracle; it 
 has no part in the purpose of this hour. Nor need 
 I engage in argument for miracles; that is foreign 
 to the idea in view. It is the mental attitude of 
 the man that most concerns us, his absolute assur- 
 ance of a fact, a great fact, the greatest fact in the 
 
CHRISTIAN CEETAINTIES 91 
 
 world to him. The enemies of Jesus were trying 
 to confuse this man. They were learned, adroit, 
 trained in the tricks of casuistry, and they at- 
 tempted, by critical examination, and cross-ex- 
 amination, to lead him to say something that 
 might compromise the claims or the character of 
 Jesus. "What did He say? What did He do? 
 How did He do it ? Did He claim to be a prophet ? 
 Did He call Himself the Son Of God? Are you 
 the blind man we saw at the gate this morning? 
 Were you blind from birth? Has He given sight 
 to others ? Where is He now ? Did He say where 
 He was going? Did He say He was Lord of the 
 Sabbath? Did He claim supernatural power?" 
 These, or such questions, came so numerously and 
 so rapidly that he declined to answer them, falling 
 back upon the one thing he was sure of, the one 
 fact that was indisputable. It was as if He said, 
 ' ' I know nothing about where He is or what He is, 
 or what He claims to be; one thing I know, one 
 thing only, but I do know that, — yesterday I was 
 blind and to-day I see. " In so saying, he was wise, 
 He had no gift of logic or disputation. He had no 
 scholarship or reputation to measure with theirs. 
 But he had a fact, a fact of experience, and he 
 stood squarely upon that, facing all comers and de- 
 fying all doubt with, "This one thing I know." 
 
 I have said he had no gift of logic. Neverthe- 
 less, there was logic in his fact. Logic does not 
 necessarily involve orderly processes of intellec- 
 tion. There is more logic in a simple demonstra- 
 tion than in a whole volume of reasoning. An 
 
92 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 old philosopher was contending that there is no 
 such thing as motion. His opponent in the singu- 
 lar debate simply arose and strode across the room. 
 He proved motion by moving. A man wrote a 
 book to prove that no vessel could cross the At- 
 lantic propelled by steam. A steamship carried 
 the first copies of his book across the sea. There 
 may have been logic in his argument, but there was 
 better logic in the steam. Great is the power of 
 a single fact. 
 
 The last half century has witnessed a marvelous 
 awakening of interest in the natural and applied 
 sciences. A passion for facts possesses the modern 
 world. A practical scientist would much rather 
 discover a fact in his field than a nugget of gold. 
 A naturalist has given us a book on "Ants." He 
 has been studying ants. He knows all about their 
 nature and their habits. He has discovered that 
 they have their systems of government, their armies, 
 and governors, and servants, and tramps. Think 
 of a great man spending years in cultivating the 
 intimate acquaintance of insects! Are insects so 
 important as all that? Can we put this knowl- 
 edge to any practical account? No — ^there is no 
 thought of that. But the world is eager for knowl- 
 edge, knowledge of things large and small, near 
 and far, and nothing that promises the reward of 
 knowledge is too remote or too inconsequential to 
 be studied. 
 
 To be sure, there are sciences which do not deal 
 with facts, which have nothing to do with con- 
 crete phenomena. They treat of relations, hy- 
 
CHBISTIAN CERTAINTIES 93 
 
 potheses, probabilities. Such a science is that of 
 pure mathematics in which the suppositions are en- 
 tirely arbitrary. But the sciences in which most 
 of us are interested rest upon observation and ex- 
 periment, and the bases of these are in facts. 
 So pervasive is the practical spirit in the world 
 that the impression prevails in some quarters that 
 science affords us the only certain ground, that re- 
 ligion is not a science because destitute of facts, 
 and hence can have no standing among scientific 
 thinkers. 
 
 Permit me to remind you that religion is a 
 science. It has its speculative side; we call that 
 dogmatic theology, which is a study of relations. 
 But it has also its practical side, on which we find 
 a firm foundation of facts. The Christian believer 
 has a ground of certainty in a wide range of pos- 
 itive phenomena. He is as fully justified in say- 
 ing, "I know" as any man who comes to us with 
 his volume of facts gathered by the help of micro- 
 scope, or scalpel, or crucible. Christianity has 
 its certainties. "We speak that we do know, and 
 testify that we have seen." 
 
 One of the first facts that confronts us in the 
 study of the Christian religion is that in the Holy 
 Scriptures we have a volume so rich and strong, 
 so noble and inspiring, that the world's libraries 
 do not contain its equal; a Book of sixty-six parts, 
 written by at least thirty-eight different authors, 
 in different countries, covering a period of sixteen 
 hundred years, yet the whole cohering by an in- 
 terior principle of unity so remarkable as to sug- 
 
94 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 gest that it must have had, from the begimiing, a 
 supervising Mind. Measured by the greatness of 
 its subjects, by the sublimity of its treatment of 
 them, by the perfection of its ideals, by its "verbal 
 felicities and intensities," by its relation to the 
 problems of human life and destiny — the questions 
 of to-day and to-morrow — ^by its historic influence 
 in the world, and by its effect upon the lives of 
 those who receive it, it is so different from other 
 books, from other so-caUed sacred books, that its 
 Divine origin is self-authenticated. 
 
 Treat the Book as we may, reject it as some have 
 done, neglect it as we all do, it is yet a fact to be 
 considered, to be accounted for, to be numbered 
 among the great certainties of our faith. If it be 
 not a fact to stand on, it is at least a fact to start 
 from, that our Book possesses such qualities as have 
 evoked incomparable tributes from the deepest 
 and keenest minds. Coleridge says, "It finds me 
 at greater depths of my being than any other 
 book." Sir Isaac Newton says, "I find more sure 
 marks of authenticity in it than in any profane 
 history whatever." Thomas Carlyle says, of a 
 single portion of it — ^the Book of Job, "A noble 
 book! All men's book!" Edmund Burke says, 
 "I have read the Bible morning, noon and night, 
 and I have been a happier and better man for 
 such reading." WiUiam H. Seward says, "The 
 hope of human progress is suspended on the ever- 
 growing influence of this Book." 
 
 I do not quote such tributes as arguments sup- 
 porting the supernatural character of the Bible. 
 
CHRISTIAN CEETAINTIES 95 
 
 I quote them in support of the proposition that the 
 text-book of Christianity is, itself, a great fact. 
 Our first fact is the Book, so full of God that "it 
 thrills us like the touch of a living hand;" so full 
 of truth and grace that it has a message for us 
 when we wreathe our brides and when we shroud 
 our dead. 
 
 There is a further fact, that in this Book we 
 have the historic basis of a Gospel which appeals 
 to the entire range of human faculties. It appeals 
 to the reason. It has never numbered among its 
 adherents more than a third of the population of 
 the globe, but it dominates the really constructive 
 races of men. It appeals to the imagination; the 
 art of the world is liberally devoted to the cause 
 of religion, whether in architecture, painting, mu- 
 sic, or poetry. It appeals to the emotions ; tears of 
 grief and songs of joy are mingled in the mani- 
 fold music of the Church; there is no story that 
 so melts the heart of the sons of men as that of 
 Jesus and the cross. It appeals to the conscience ; 
 the triumph of Christianity in the Fiji Islands 
 is significant. "When John Hiuit went there in 
 1838, children were sold to be killed and eaten, 
 but when he preached the Gospel to them, their 
 consciences were so stirred, they became so penitent, 
 that great numbers of them would cry aloud and 
 bewail their former depravity. You could not buy 
 a human being in those islands to-day at any price. 
 This Gospel appeals also to the will, — it commands 
 men's service. 
 
 What is the strongest human passion ? Is it the 
 
96 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 desire for property, or the lure of the unknown, 
 or the lust of power, or the passion known as love ? 
 What will not men do for gold? They wiU sail 
 stormy seas, traverse deathly deserts, or brave 
 Alaskan snows. The passion for discovery led the 
 Genoese sailor to trust his tiny caravels to an un- 
 charted ocean, led Balboa to plunge into the 
 thickets of an unknown wilderness, led Nansen 
 to isolate himself for three years in the vast wastes 
 of a region of eternal ice. And all that man can 
 do or suffer, men have done and suffered for the 
 sake of love. Is there any passion stronger than 
 these? There is. Look at Paul; look at Xavier; 
 look at WiUiam Carey, and Adoniram Judson, 
 and "William Taylor, and David Liviugstone, and 
 Dr. GrenfeU. This is the missionary motive, and 
 it is stronger than desire for gold, or the passion 
 for discovery, or the impulse of human love. It 
 is stronger than these because it is more persistent. 
 The Argonaut despairs at length, the discoverer 
 returns with well-earned fame, the lover's ardor is 
 quenched with age or altered ideals, but the cross- 
 bearer, the messenger of peace, toils on a lifetime, 
 content to do his Master's will, even though he see 
 no result of his labor. Even in his death a Chris- 
 tian passion for the winning of the souls of men 
 bums none the feebler, and his life goes out in 
 prayer for those his Master died to save. David 
 Livingstone was found dead in the attitude of 
 prayer in his rude hut in the forest. Horace Pit- 
 kin, who met his death in China during the Boxer 
 rebellion, sends back this message to America, 
 
CHRISTIAN CERTAINTIES 97 
 
 "Tell my wife to take care of our little son, and 
 when he is a man, let him come here, and take my 
 place." This Gospel commands the services of 
 men, it appeals to the heroic in man. And, in 
 truth, is there any faculty to which it does not 
 speak with power ? Not one. It sweeps the whole 
 horizon. It was made for man. It was made by 
 Him who made man. 
 
 And now another fact. He who said, "One 
 thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I 
 see," had hold of an interior fact, a fact of con- 
 sciousness, and these are the ultimate facts from 
 which there is no appeal. A man born blind, to 
 whom there comes the sudden revelation of the 
 visible universe, the splendid panorama of hills 
 and valleys, rivers and clouds, is conscious of a 
 change within him, which makes him something 
 he was not before, makes him more a man than he 
 has been. Ask him, "How old' are you?" and he 
 may say, "I did not begin to live until I began to 
 see." Such a miracle is a figure of what occurs 
 in a life which accepts Christ as personal Friend 
 and Saviour. It is only when our spiritual eyes 
 are opened we begin to live, begin to see things in 
 their true light. Thorwaldsen, who was born in 
 Copenhagen, when asked, ' ' When were you born ? ' ' 
 replied, "I do not know, but I arrived in Eome 
 at such and such a time." He dated his birth 
 from the beginning of his artistic education. 
 Many another has dated the real commencement of 
 his life from the beginning of his education, has 
 said, "I did not begin to live until I read that 
 
98 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 book, until I met that man." I have heard a fa- 
 mous scholar, a man of splendid endowment of heart 
 and brain, say of one of his teachers, an obscure 
 and humble person, who had given him his first 
 impulse towards the ideal, "He was the father of 
 the best part of me. ' ' 
 
 No one of us begins to live until he learns what 
 to live for, how to live aright, to live in the love 
 of God, in the joy of His strength, in dutiful 
 obedience to His will. If acquaintanceship with 
 Jesus Christ introduces us to that view of life, if 
 the study of His life inclines us to that view, then 
 is not His power to affect us vitally a fact to be 
 numbered among the impregnable data of con- 
 sciousness? Much has been said of friendship, of 
 culture by friendship, of friendship as the master 
 passion. One of the most constant experiences of 
 the Christian is a certain sense of the friendship of 
 Jesus Christ. The important question, in de- 
 termining the practical value of Christian experi- 
 ence, is not so much, What does Jesus do for us? 
 as it is, "What does His friendship do for us? If 
 it sets us right, and helps to keep us right, makes 
 us ashamed of all ignoble things, excites in us high 
 and honorable aspirations, the fact of that friend- 
 ship must be accounted of first importance in es- 
 timating the forces that make life great and strong 
 and true. 
 
IX 
 
 MY WITNESSES 
 
" The old conception that Jesus in the act and article of 
 His death paid for us a debt which we could not pay for 
 ourselves made a strong appeal for Christian activity. 
 Stronger, however, is the motive which the conception of 
 the progressive, age-long work of a suffering Redeemer calls 
 into life. JFaith in Christ, present in the world, bearing 
 our sins, and wounded in all our transgressions, cannot but 
 persuade us, as it did Paul, that it is a privilege to fill up 
 that which is lacking in the afflictions of Christ.1 We may 
 endure with Him the weight of the world's woe; we may be 
 laborers together with Him; we may share with Him the 
 work of redeeming the world. Our connection with Him is 
 real, not sentimental. We are genuine actors on the stage, 
 and upon us rests a heavy responsibility. By our wilful- 
 ness we quench His spirit, obstruct His work, lead Him anew 
 to Gethsemane. By our faithfulness we glorify Him. We 
 augment His efficiency in the world, and hasten the day of 
 His victory. The battle we are fighting is a real one. We 
 are not mimic soldiers, marching and countermarching on a 
 stage. Great issues are being decided by our conduct. If 
 the world battle is won, it will be won in and through hu- 
 manity. It will be by the Divine energy expressing itself 
 through obedient human wills. Man is an indispensable 
 agent in the vast work of healing the open wound of the 
 world. This complete identification of ourselves with Christ 
 in redemption makes a deeper call on our love and energy 
 than does gratitude for a finished work. To us, as to Simon, 
 is given the privilege of helping the Christ to bear His cross 
 up Calvary." 
 
 (.Atonement in Literature and Life. Charles Allen Dinsmore. 
 pp. 242, 213.) 
 
 >CoI. L 24. 
 
IX 
 
 MT WITNESSES 
 "Te shall be witnesses unto Me." Acts i. 8. 
 
 The last words of our friends are ever memor- 
 able. Even though we have not heard or heeded 
 their other sayings, we give ear to their speech as 
 they pass from us into the gathering mists of the 
 world unseen. 
 
 The text is a part of the last recorded message 
 of Jesus. "When He had spoken these things 
 . . . He was taken up. " He never spoke a use- 
 less word, much less a false one. So, whatever 
 value we attach to His other utterances — and all 
 He said was weighty and momentous — we must es- 
 teem His last words, His valedictory, of superlative 
 importance. 
 
 Three things mark the closing address of the 
 Master to His disciples: His confidence, — He 
 knows how great is the work the little company 
 of His friends are to undertake, yet He speaks as 
 though He were sure of the eventual triumph of 
 their cause; His consciousness of His own place 
 in the preaching of the Gospel, — they are to preach 
 His Gospel, do what He had commanded, be wit- 
 nesses unto Him; then there is His clear concep- 
 tion of the plan by which His Gospel is to be con- 
 101 
 
102 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 veyed throughout all the world. It is a simple plan, 
 — sublime in its simplicity. First, the disciples are 
 to be prepared by a spiritual empowerment; then 
 they are to testify everywhere. That is all, but it 
 is more than seems at first. Out of that plan are 
 to come churches, missionary societies, Yoimg 
 Men's Christian Associations, Societies of Chris- 
 tian Endeavor, Brotherhoods of Andrew and 
 Philip, Federations of Student Volunteers, and a 
 thousand other organized agencies designed to 
 carry the commission of Jesus Christ into effect. 
 
 On the whole, it is the very simplicity of the 
 method by which He proposes to evangelize the 
 world that impresses us most profoundly. It is 
 all summed up in two words, "My witnesses." 
 There is nothing here about churches and sacra- 
 ments, the Bible and the ministry, public worship 
 and sermons. There is nothing here that prohib- 
 its these. Presently they take their proper place 
 in the developments of the Apostolic age. But, at 
 first, all emphasis is laid on the personal testimony 
 of the personal witness concerning Jesus Christ. 
 
 Very much depends upon our correct understand- 
 ing of the office of a witness. The word ' ' witness ' ' 
 as used in the New Testament, may refer to one 
 who is a spectator; to one who tells what he has 
 seen; to one who testifies in court, or to one who 
 seals his testimony by suffering or by death. The 
 first three meanings are practically included in our 
 Lord's word, and the fourth has often been im- 
 posed upon the others by the hostility of the world 
 to the Christian faith. 
 
MY WITNESSES 103 
 
 The first call of those who would be disciples 
 of Jesus Christ, is to an actual experience. We 
 are expected to form our opinions concerning Him 
 from contact with Him, from knowledge of Him, 
 rather than from speculation about Him. His is 
 the call of that friend of Job who says, "Acquaint 
 now thyself with Him." His is the ideal of the 
 Apostle, who thus expresses the purpose of his life, 
 "That I may know Him, and the power of His 
 resurrection." 
 
 There is this difference between knowledge and 
 belief: knowledge is based upon experience; be- 
 lief is the result of a mental process. He whose 
 testimony is founded upon knowledge is sure. He 
 whose testimony is founded upon an intellectual 
 process may be shaken. The Spirit of Christ does 
 a twofold work in human salvation; He works for 
 us, and in us. What Jesus Christ has done for 
 men is important to men, but what He does in men 
 is more important to the world. All the world 
 knows that He lived an ideal life, and that He 
 died a hero's death. We believe He conquered 
 death, and ascended to be our eternal Intercessor. 
 This is what He does for us. But there is another 
 world, an interior, personal world, in which Christ 
 offers to prove His title as Saviour. What goes on 
 in this inner world each of us is best qualified to 
 say for himself: — whether He subdues the misrule 
 of passions here, whether He brings order out of 
 this inward anarchy, whether He gives us the 
 beauty of holiness for the ashes of penitence, 
 whether He strengthens the will to make the right 
 
104 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 choice between good and evil, whether He casts out 
 fear and causes us to rest in the midst of endless 
 agitation. All this falls within the sacred pre- 
 cincts of one 's own spiritual consciousness, and the 
 facts of this life, this world, are the subject mat- 
 ter of our testimony. 
 
 It is the duty of the witness to interpret his ex- 
 perience to those who are strangers to it in terms 
 that they can comprehend. The witness is to 
 know, and then to translate his knowledge into the 
 language of earth. Notwithstanding the very 
 natural impulse of one who has been fortunate 
 to desire to impart his joy to others ; in spite of the 
 strong social tendency to share our good news with 
 our fellows, there is in religion a counteracting 
 impulse away from publicity. The mystic is 
 prone to be content to muse upon the miracle of his 
 fellowship with God, but the Christian mystic may 
 not stop at musing. "While I was musing the 
 fire burned: then spake I with my tongue." 
 Speech — ^this is the great human element in the 
 program of the Kingdom of God. ' ' Go quickly, and 
 teU . . . that He is risen from the dead." 
 "Run, speak to that young man." "Pray for me 
 that utterance may be given me, that I may make 
 known the power and mystery of the Gospel." 
 "Let him that heareth say. Come." Is this mere 
 lip-service? It is lip-service, but not mere lip- 
 service. Consider the little less than omnipotent 
 power of speech. "Where the word of a king 
 is, there is power." It is the Word of God that is 
 a sword, " living and energetic." Words, spoken 
 
MY WITNESSES 105 
 
 or written, have created revolutions. Words, sup- 
 ported by mental and moral energy, have uplifted 
 nations. Never do we approach so nearly the dig- 
 nity of creation — I mean the dignity of being our- 
 selves creators, — as when we take the meaningless 
 elements of speech, and by combining them, give 
 shape to thought. 
 
 "I have known a word hang starlike 
 O'er a dreary waste of years, 
 And it only shone the brighter 
 Looked at through a mist of tears. 
 
 "I have seen a spirit, calmer 
 
 .Than the calmest lake, and clear 
 As the heavens that bent above it, — 
 Ne'er a wave of doubt or fear, 
 
 "But a storm has swept above it, 
 And its deepest depths were stirred. 
 Nevermore to slumber, — 
 Only by a word." 
 
 Sometimes the effect of a word is to calm a 
 storm rather than to storm a calm. It is written 
 in one of the Gospels that when Jesus was about 
 to confer the power of speech upon a dumb man, 
 He looked up to heaven and sighed, groaning in- 
 wardly. It has been remarked that possibly the 
 Master hesitated before He conferred such vast 
 power upon a human life. We are accustomed to 
 confess the power of a word for good; it may be 
 Jesus was thinking of the possible power of speech 
 for evil. 
 
 It is an amazing fact that the whole civilized 
 world was evangelized during the first few cen- 
 
106 COLLEGE SEKMONS 
 
 turies of the Cliristian era. That was before the 
 age of printing. Preaching was ahnost wholly 
 by the living voice. Hume observes that the rapid 
 propagation of the Gospel was in large part due 
 to the fact that every Christian felt it laid upon 
 him as a part of his profession of faith in Christ, 
 to bear verbal witness to his knowledge of Christ. 
 The author of the last book in the Bible speaks of 
 a vision iu which he sees the Church triumphant, 
 the spirits of the redeemed who had overcome "by 
 the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their tes- 
 timony. ' ' "What an honor it is, thus conferred upon 
 the ministry of human speech, — ^to be accounted 
 worthy of mention in the same moment with the 
 Divine Sacrifice! 
 
 That there has been a decline in the volume of 
 verbal testimony is doubtless due to the fact that 
 in recent ages the Church has multiplied its agen- 
 cies for disseminating the Gospel. The printed 
 Bible is the property of all men, and not alone 
 literature, but art, and philanthropy, and civiliza- 
 tion itself furnish a manifold witness for Christ. 
 Moreover, separate orders of pastors, evangelists, 
 missionaries, teachers, and other official witnesses 
 have in some degree diminished the sense of re- 
 sponsibility that once rested upon every Christian. 
 There can be no doubt, however, that the same obli- 
 gation rests upon us all who profess the faith to 
 make known to men the power of Christ's indwell- 
 ing grace. "Who doubts that Christianity would 
 take a long step forward if all its members were 
 
MY WITNESSES 107 
 
 to acknowledge and fulfill their ministry as faith- 
 ful witnesses of their Master? 
 
 Our first duty is to know. Our second duty is 
 to tell. The third duty is to recognize the fact 
 that the world is, and always will be, a court be- 
 fore which the Christian is expected to testify in 
 the case of Faith versus Unfaith. I mean to say, 
 the world expects him thus to testify. There was 
 a Christian business man who was greatly inter- 
 ested in the welfare of his employes. He provided 
 generously for their compensation, for their com- 
 fort while they were at work. He had the habit of 
 remembering the families of his laborers with gifts 
 at Christmas time. One day he spoke to a clerk on 
 the subject of religion, and as he did so, apologized 
 for intruding upon a realm which was foreign to 
 their business relations. The clerk said, "You 
 need not apologize; I have often wondered why 
 you never spoke of that matter before. I have 
 been disappointed that you did not mention the. 
 subject long ago." Then said the merchant, "In 
 that case I apologize to you for my neglect, and I 
 will ask my Master's forgiveness." That man 
 had the right idea of his duty. It was his business 
 as a confessing Christian, and it is ours, to let no 
 seasonable opportunity go unemployed to speak 
 a good word for the faith. Do you remember that 
 sweet and pathetic story in one of Ian MacLaren's 
 books, of the young minister who put aside his 
 academic discourse and preached a simple, per- 
 suasive sermon, because there came over him that 
 
108 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 Sunday morning his mother's memory, and her 
 words, "Speak a good word for Jesus Christ"? 
 That Scotch mother's advice appeals to laymen as 
 well as to ministers. 
 
 The brightest pages of Christian biography con- 
 tain the records of men and women, some igno- 
 rant and some learned, some humble and some 
 conspicuous, who made it the rule of their lives to 
 be witnesses to their faith, — ^men like WiUiam Tay- 
 lor, John Vassar, and Henry Clay Trumbull, and 
 women like Hannah Whitall Smith, Jennie Fow- 
 ler Willing, and Frances Willard. Wherever 
 these people went, and whomsoever they met, they 
 were good witnesses. They acted exactly as if they 
 were the authorized agents of the Gospel of Jesus 
 Christ. They were, and so are we, but we have for- 
 gotten our commission. Let us look at our creden- 
 tials. "Ye shaU be witnesses unto me." Where? 
 "In Jerusalem." Where is that? It is where 
 we live, where we are best known, where it takes 
 courage of a high degree to speak about religion. 
 Where else? "In Judea." Where is that? It 
 is the country round about home, familiar ground, 
 our neighborhood, the adjoining township, or near- 
 by cities. Where else? "In Samaria." Where 
 is that? Among people who are not friendly to 
 our faith. Where else? "Unto the uttermost 
 part of the earth." That is sufficiently inclusive. 
 So the whole earth is to be belted and girdled with 
 Christian testimony. So the witness of Christ is 
 to be like the British drumbeat, heard around the 
 world. 
 
MY WITNESSES 
 
 109 
 
 To what extent the Kingdom of God has been ex- 
 tended by the personal testimony of Christians 
 no statistics can tell, but it is certain that a very 
 much larger number of persons have been won to 
 the Christian view of life by personal and un- 
 official speech than by formal public discourse, by 
 debate, by learned argument, or even by song. 
 
 We have considered the duty of the Christian to 
 know, to tell, to recognize the world as the court 
 in which he is expected to testify. Now a word as 
 to the cross-examination, by which I mean that 
 part of the testimony in which the witness is com- 
 pelled to vindicate his story, to authenticate it. 
 It is the most difficult part of the examination, and 
 it is where a great many witnesses break down and 
 annul the force of their testimony. The cross-ex- 
 amination of the Christian is the inspection of his 
 life by those who say, "Prove your faith by your 
 works." A good life is not a complete testimony 
 for Christ, but a verbal witness without a good 
 life is worse than useless. The testimony of the 
 lips, unsustained by the witness of the life, is like 
 a coin which has the proper image and superscrip- 
 tion, but is spurious, counterfeit, made of base 
 metal. The testimony of the life without the wit- 
 ness of the lips is like a coin which rings true, is 
 made of the right metal, but has no image or super- 
 scription. (I have had such coins returned to me, 
 not exactly as worthless, but as of doubtful value.) 
 
 Napoleon said to his soldiers in Egypt, 
 "Twenty centuries look down upon you from yon- 
 der pyramids." Two worlds look down upon the 
 
110 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 soldiers of Jesus Christ. The spirits of the just 
 made perfect rejoice when we glorify God, and 
 the spirits of unjust men, and of just men not 
 yet made perfect in Christ, listen to what we say 
 in answer to the old, old, yet ever new question, 
 "What think ye of Christ?" There is an inter- 
 esting story of Dore, the artist, that once, crossing 
 the Italian frontier, he had mislaid his passport 
 and was called upon to prove his identity. This 
 he did by taking a sheet of common paper and a 
 piece of charcoal and tracing the homely, manly 
 features of Victor Emmanuel. The officers knew 
 that only Dore could draw like that. Challenged 
 by the world as we are, is it not for us to trace, 
 here and now, on the rough surface of our com- 
 mon lives, with only such instruments as our or- 
 dinary circumstances afford, the character of our 
 King? "By this shall all men know that ye are 
 My disciples." 
 
X 
 
 LIFE'S GKEAT MEANING 
 
"The preeminence of Jesus does not lie in the mere fact 
 that He did this or said that, but rather in the general im- 
 pression of His life as the sublime exhibition of a perfect 
 trust in God and a supreme love of man. He demonstrates 
 what human life ought to be and what it can be. He gives 
 men not only a precept to follow, but a life-motive suffi- 
 ciently powerful to enable them to put the precept into ac- 
 tion. He illustrates the victory of unselfish love, and He 
 creates in us the love that actually serves and sacrifices and 
 conquers. By His purity He shames us out of our wrong- 
 doing, and by His doctrine and practice of forgiveness He 
 encourages us to outgrow our sins. He makes knovyn the 
 heart of God by living wholly unto God, and He thereby 
 warms our hearts to a loving-kindness that creates the 
 kingdom of God. By His example He reveals the way of 
 life; by the winsome and forceful influence of His person- 
 ality He creates in us the earnest desire to enter and the 
 ability to walk securely in the way of eternal life." 
 
 (^The Church of To-day. Joseph Henry Crooker. - pp. 168, 169.) 
 
LIFE'S GREAT MEANING 
 
 "What is your life?" James iv. 14. 
 
 In some form this question appears in all serious 
 literature, ancient and modern. Who of us has 
 not followed the psalmist's thought, who says: 
 "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy 
 fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast 
 ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of 
 him?" In the chamber where the miracle of 
 birth is enacted, or by the couch where the mys- 
 tery of death occurs, we have asked the meaning 
 of life. On the bank of the majestic river that 
 rolls its volume to the sea, or by the shore of that 
 high-sounding sea, we have wondered, "So runs 
 my dream, but what am I?" Plucking a flower 
 out of the crannied wall, or beneath the bright 
 procession of the October stars, the query rises 
 in our minds as in the psalmist's, the Apostle's, 
 the poet's, "What is the nature and what the end 
 of this life of ours?" But the answer is far from 
 satisfying. If we look to nature for a solution 
 of the problem, we shall be disappointed. The 
 birth chamber and the couch of death are alike 
 dark with mystery, and the mystery is equally 
 great whether it be the birth of a child or a bird, 
 113 
 
114 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 whether the death be that of a man or of his dog. 
 The river and the sea seem sublimely superior to 
 the creature that questions them. The little 
 flower might say with truth, "I am as wonderfully 
 made as you are." The stars, if they were ani- 
 mate, might make reply, "And who are you, mere 
 pencil-points in distant space, that you should dare 
 to interrogate us?" 
 
 Nature is not particularly flattering to the pride 
 of the man who seeks to know his own place in 
 creation. The power of the natural forces crushes 
 him; the beauty of the flower shames him; the 
 bulk of the mountain overshadows him; the 
 rapidity of sound and light outdistances him; the 
 magnitude of the stellar space bewilders him. In- 
 numerable things in the world, — ^mere things, — 
 seem superior to human life. Yet man keeps on 
 forever asking, "What is my life? So runs my 
 dream, but what am I?" And man alone asks 
 such a question. The river, the sea, the flower, 
 the blazing star, — no one of these ever wrestled 
 with the mystery of the meaning of its own ex- 
 istence. So, human life is the self-imposed prob- 
 lem of the universe. 
 
 But human life is not the only problem man 
 sets himself to solve. He studies the natural 
 forces and elements that seem superior to him, 
 and lo! he conquers them. The river is navi- 
 gated, tunnelled, bridged, turned out of its chan- 
 nel. The sea is dotted with the fleets and navies 
 of nations. The wild flower is made to multiply 
 in variety and grow in beauty and fragrance. 
 
life's great meaning 115 
 
 The stars are measured, weighed, analyzed. The 
 mind of man more and more exercises dominion 
 over matter. It is in this man is superior, akin 
 to his Creator, exercising dominion. 
 
 A poet, among the giant trees of California, 
 said he seemed to hear the venerable "redwoods" 
 saying to him, "Your age is as nothing to ours." 
 It must be granted that a tree may outlast a human 
 body. But what if the body be to life only what 
 the shell is to the unhatehed bird? "What if, 
 within the body, there be a man that survives 
 the body? Then the tree, the mountain, or the 
 star, simply outlasts the shell which incases human 
 life for a season. The mountain and the star 
 last but do not live. "The thunderbolt may fall 
 on me and crush me; yet am I superior to it, for 
 I know and it does not. " It is the power to know, 
 to do, to choose, to will, to impress our will upon 
 the world of force, that makes this human life 
 something greater than it seems. 
 
 There are events in life, phases of life in the 
 sight of which man seems an inconsiderable being, 
 and human life a thing to be despised. Go to 
 those provinces in Japan where, during the last 
 winter, men and women and children were starv- 
 ing by thousands; where but a few years ago, 
 the bodies of the starved were piled in heaps and 
 burned. Go to that French coal mine, where 
 eleven hundred men perished but yesterday by 
 the explosion of fire damp. Have you ever seen 
 the "bone-pit" at Havana, filled with innumerable 
 scattered skeletons rudely dispossessed of their 
 
116 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 sepulcher at the expiration of a brief grave-lease? 
 Have you thought of the hundred thousand men 
 who lie in shallow trenches in Manchuria, — ^white 
 men and yellow men who fought in full sight of 
 the world a little while ago? Human life is a 
 small thing, it seems. Yes, it seems. But things 
 are not often what they seem. 
 
 Look at Japan again, and you will see the 
 Christian love of the world pouring its treasures 
 into the starving province to feed the hungry and 
 comfort the distressed. Some people believe in the 
 brotherhood of man. Look again at that French 
 coal mine; and you will see a collier struggling 
 through the darkness and suffocating vapor with 
 a comrade's dead body in his arms. "Greater 
 love hath no man than this." The valley of dry 
 bones at Havana is not so very different from 
 Pere le Chaise at Paris, only at Paris the remains 
 are underground. But both at Paris and Havana 
 you may see, in various forms, symbols of the 
 faith that smiles on death and says, "I shall not 
 wholly die." A new national life for Japan and 
 Eussia springs from the crimson dust of war. 
 Things are not what they seem. 
 
 Edwin Markham saw the picture of "The Man 
 With the Hoe, ' ' and in his poem laments the death 
 of manhood, the tyranny of labor, the crushed 
 spirit of the industrial slave. It is all in the 
 picture, — ^the retreating forehead, the deficient 
 chin, the lusterless eye, the hopeless heart. But 
 there is another picture we must see. It is the 
 "Angelus." The same peasant, in type, but by 
 
life's great meaning 117 
 
 his side is another, a girl. Love has entered the 
 life of "the man with the hoe." In the distance 
 rises a church spire, and it is the hour of prayer, 
 and the peasants bow their heads. God has en- 
 tered the life of "the man with the hoe." Life, 
 with labor as its only companion, is poor indeed. 
 But love transforms labor, and God sanctifies both, 
 and life grows great and beautiful. The two pic- 
 tures must be studied side by side. 
 
 And you must also study the artist. We have 
 not seen all there is in a picture until we have 
 seen the painter. He was right who said, "Man 
 is never so like God as when he produces a work 
 of art. He approaches the very power of God." 
 He does actually create a landscape, or a figure, 
 and as in Millet's case, or in Turner's, he puts a 
 measureless expanse of earth and sky into a few 
 square inches of canvas. What is life? Look at 
 the artist at his best and say what life is. Or 
 look at the sculptor. Buonarroti saw a block of 
 marble and said, "I will make an angel out of 
 it." And he did. Socrates, whose father was a 
 sculptor, reflected, "Is it not better to turn man 
 into the similitude of God than to turn marble 
 into the similitude of man?" So he became a 
 teacher. If you would know the power of human 
 life, look at the teacher. He deals not with in- 
 sensate marble, but with responsive human char- 
 acter. He says of his human material, "I will 
 make a student of him," and he may. Consider 
 the moral teacher who says of the student, "I will 
 make a saint of him," and he may. Arnold Win- 
 
118 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 kelried, gathering an armful of the enemy's 
 spears into his own breast and "making way for 
 liberty," is a fine type of soldierly service and 
 sacrifice. But what shall we say of one who, as he 
 fights his way over life's battlefield, — and life is 
 a battle to the most fortunate of men — gathers 
 into his heart of friendship one and another and 
 another of his comrades, and at the battle's close, 
 and life's, offers himself to the Great Commander, 
 saying, "Here am I and those whom Thou hast 
 given me." Now we begin to see the power and 
 dignity of manhood. "Thou madest him a little 
 lower than the angels; Thou crownedst him with 
 glory and honor." 
 
 The Holy Scriptures contain two or three sig- 
 nificant sentences touching the worth and mean- 
 ing of human life. "Thou madest him a little 
 lower than the angels" is a comfortable assur- 
 ance. But let us read it in another version: "a 
 little lower than God." Is there any confirmation 
 of such a view of the greatness of man? We have 
 it here: "The spirit of man is the candle of the 
 Lord." And what is a candle? A miniature sun. 
 The light that beams from the candle is the same 
 kind of light that streams from the sun. It is one 
 light, in morning star and twilight glowworm. 
 The spirit of man is the same kind of spirit that 
 dwells in God. God is a spirit; so is man, — a 
 spirit, having a body. And the spirit of man is 
 just as superior to matter, just as invulnerable to 
 death, as God. God has made it so. 
 
 There is a wonder in a drop of water. "Whistler 
 
life's gkeat meaning 119 
 
 tried for weeks to paint it. It is a little ocean 
 in itself. A trembling dewdrop on a spear of 
 grass images in its bosom the sky as perfectly as 
 does the sea itself. The sun's rays color it, and 
 the winds ripple it, just as they do the sea. 0, 
 soul of man, thou hast in finite scope the image 
 of thy God! Well art thou named "the being 
 with the upturned face." Each of us is born of 
 two worlds. "We get our bodies from the earth, 
 our spirits from above. Our lives are what our 
 spirits make them. Our bodies are mere con- 
 veniences. We shall get along without them pres- 
 ently. Emerson said, "We can get along very 
 well without the world." He knew that "the 
 things which are seen are temporal; but the things 
 which are not seen are eternal." 
 
 It is because our lives are greater than they 
 seem that we are social beings. Brutes, afflicted, 
 creep away to die alone. In our times of trial we 
 crave the clasp of a brother's hand. It is be- 
 cause we are the children of God we have moral 
 duties and obligations. A common mongrel cur is 
 under no obligation to become a thoroughbred, a 
 watchdog, a shepherd's assistant. A dwarfed bush 
 on an arid plain is under no obligation to grow 
 to towering height. But a human life, wherever 
 found, is under obligation to grow towards God. 
 It is because we are made in the likeness of God 
 we have heart-hunger for him. As said Augus- 
 tine: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and in 
 vain do we seek rest until we find it in Thee." 
 
 I stood on the seashore a while ago, and saw, 
 
120 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 rising from the pier a tall staff, like the mainmast 
 of a ship. From the top of the staff there ran to 
 the base a strand of copper wires, ending ia a 
 curious device where sat a man pressing a key 
 with dots and dashes. I heard no sound save the 
 metallic click of the instrument for several 
 minutes; then came a series of short, sharp ex- 
 plosions. The operator looked up and answered 
 my unspoken question by saying, "It is the 
 steamer Bermudian. I picked her up three hun- 
 dred miles out. She is reporting the weather." 
 On the shore of earth and time we stand and 
 send out into the "darkness that girds our life 
 aroimd" our voiced and voiceless prayers. And 
 not in vain do we sigh for God and cry to God. 
 In unnumbered ways He makes Himself known to 
 us. Our very longing for God is His Spirit work- 
 ing in us, whispering, "Seek, and ye shall find." 
 And in His unfailing Word He bids us call Him 
 the God of our lives. If, then. He be the God 
 of our lives, our lives are dear to Him; nor are 
 they bounded by the dates of birth and death. 
 From God we came; to God we shall return. 
 Whether we live or die, therefore; whether we 
 wake or sleep, we are in His good care. 
 
XI 
 
 THE ENLARGEMENT OF LIFE 
 
"This is why Christianity is so mnch stronger and 
 steadier than creeds and ecclesiastical institutions. Not sel- 
 dom the Christ takes hold of men, not through their thinking 
 and planning, but in spite of all that, and so we are often 
 surprised at the amount of unofficial Christianity in the 
 world. For the same reason — because the Christ is a fact 
 of experience — even when the historical or metaphysical fig- 
 ure fades away, leaving only the Ideal, men have still to 
 reckon with a power of the first magnitude. The Christ of 
 experience still abides. Under the name of The Anointed 
 One, something still calls to our dormant spiritual capacities 
 to awake. It makes us incorrigibly dissatisfied with evil in 
 spite of our love for it. It prescribes for Ufe a goal that 
 is self-evident and imperative, and it seems to offer just what 
 the soul desires of courage to work steadily for the highest 
 when postponements and apparent failures are soliciting us to 
 accept as our good something less than the best. In spite 
 of doubts, the Christ-figure calls aloud to the deeps of our 
 nature." 
 
 iThe Religion of a Mature Mind. George Albert Coe. pp. 
 418, 419.) 
 
XI 
 
 THE ENLARGEMENT OF LIFE 
 "He brought me forth also into a large place.'' Ps. xviii. 19. 
 
 Some one asked the chaplain of George IV if 
 he felt no fear when preaching to royalty, and the 
 good man replied, "I forget that there are prin- 
 ces before me and remember only that there are 
 souls to instruct in godliness." The author of 
 this psalm forgot that he was a, king when he 
 wrote these verses, and remembered only that he 
 was a soul, that he had been helped, and by Whom 
 he had been helped. 
 
 There are three singular facts about this psalm. 
 It occurs twice in the Holy Scriptures, once in II 
 Samuel and once in the Psalter. It contains two 
 verses quoted in the New Testament, one in 
 Romans and the other in Hebrews. These verses 
 are ascribed to Christ, as they appear in the New 
 Testament, so we may believe that it is something 
 more than a psalm of David, — that King David's 
 Lord speaks through it. 
 
 But here, at the nineteenth verse, it is a human 
 soul speaking. He is rehearsing the many mercies 
 of the Lord. He has just said, "He delivered me 
 from my strong enemy. He drew me out of many 
 waters. He was my stay." You know what a 
 123 
 
124 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 stay is in building. It is a prop. As applied to 
 persons, a stay is a stand-by, and the Greek for 
 stand-by is "Paraclete," and we translate it 
 "Comforter" or "Advocate." "If any man sin 
 we have an Advocate with the Father." So the 
 psalmist says, "The Lord was my Advocate." 
 Now follows the text, — ^"He brought me forth also 
 into a large place." And this is not the least 
 precious fact here adverted to, by any means. 
 
 David was bom in a small place, moved in a 
 small circle until the Lord led him out. Not at 
 once was he led into a large place. He mounted 
 to the throne by way of many a hardship and 
 many a battle. It was so with Joseph. He 
 reached the palace by way of the prison. But he 
 came to the larger place in time, as did Abraham 
 before him. Ur of the Chaldees was a small place. 
 Abraham had no outlook there, but he found a 
 large place in Canaan, a large place on earth, and 
 a large place in history. Even so was Moses led. 
 Egypt was a small place, — ^not small in extent of 
 dominion, nor in its power among the nations of 
 the world, — but its horizon was small. The palace 
 is a poor place for a prophet. Better the desert. 
 Better the meadows of Midian. Better the moun- 
 tains of Moab. Better the wandering through the 
 wilderness. Better the Sinai of law, the Nebo of 
 glory. 
 
 This has been the song of aU God's servants in 
 every age, — ' ' He brought me forth also into a large 
 place." Obedience to God never contracts our 
 powers. Christ does not lead men backward, but 
 
THE ENLAKGEMENT OP" LIFE 125 
 
 onward, upward. Matthew was led into a large 
 place when he left the toll-booth to follow Jesus. 
 Peter had never seen anything larger than the 
 Sea of Galilee until Jesus made him a fisher of 
 men. Paul at his best was only a theological 
 hair-splitter, a heresy-hunter, until Christ ap- 
 peared to him and filled his heart with a passion 
 for the preaching of the Gospel and the glory of 
 the cross. If the voice of patriarch and prophet 
 and apostle could be heard to-day it would cry, 
 "Never say 'No' to God. If He call thee, go. 
 He will lead thee into a large place." 
 
 No experience is more common to the most of 
 us than a certain contempt for the littleness of 
 the things by which we are compelled to live. 
 "We are crowded and hemmed in by our circum- 
 stances. We are painfully limited. The farm 
 boy who leaves the country goes to the city to 
 seek a more abundant life. He dreams the city 
 calls him to large enterprises. He does not 
 know how cramped are the lodgings of most dwell- 
 ers in the city, how small a part of it he will oc- 
 cupy, how easily the solitary individual is lost in 
 the crowd. James A. Garfield heard the call of 
 the sea when he was a lad, and only the love of a 
 widowed mother kept him from following a sea- 
 faring life. Why is the sea so attractive to many ? 
 Because of its bounty, its unmeasured space. It is 
 a touching fact that at the end of his life, at El- 
 beron, the eyes of the dying President rested lov- 
 ingly, longingly on the sea. Mr. Blaine suggests, in 
 his eulogy, that then his friend "heard the great 
 
126 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 waves breaking on the farther shore and felt upon 
 his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morn- 
 ing." 
 
 Thomas Marshall, of Kentucky, a man of genius 
 and power, expressed his desire to be buried in an 
 open field and not in a crowded cemetery. "I 
 have been crowded all my life," he said; "give me 
 room for my grave." If one who has led a life 
 of intense activity and great prominence feels this 
 sense of limitation, is it strange that others are 
 dissatisfied, whose ordinary lives are best symbol- 
 ized by "one raindrop falling on moor, or 
 meadow, or mountain, one flake of snow melting 
 into the immeasurable deep"? 
 
 I have heard a young lawyer say, "When I was 
 in college I had great ambitions. I planned to 
 make myself an authority on international law, 
 but now that I am out I am compelled to try 
 mean little eases before mean little juries." He 
 had not found the large place he sought. The 
 youth who would be a painter must be a clerk, 
 and the man with an artist's soul is selling tea 
 and coffee. Longfellow tells us of one "whom 
 nature made a poet but whom destiny made a 
 schoolmaster." We cannot map out our orbit as 
 we would. We crave largeness. Our faculties 
 seem fitted for a greater sphere than that in which 
 we, move. Literature is full of the expression of 
 this fact. "Songs of Unrest" would fill volumes. 
 Who of us busy daily with little vexatious prob- 
 lems would not prefer to deal with great ones? 
 Who of us fighting battles daily which only God can 
 
THE ENLAEGEMENT OF LIFE 127 
 
 see, would not prefer to fight an epoch-making bat- 
 tle? It is the insignificance of our lives that frets 
 us. So, whatever enlarges life in any right direc- 
 tion is a benefaction. 
 
 Blessed is imagination, which expands the walls 
 and lifts the low roof of life, and fills it with 
 dreams of what might have been and of what may 
 be. Blessed is travel, for it enlarges the horizon of 
 the traveler if he be a close observer. It is a 
 distinct step in one's mental development when he 
 first acquaints himself with the language and 
 customs of another country than his own. It is 
 an old saying, "A man is as many men as he 
 can speak languages." I know a German shoe- 
 maker who speaks nine languages, and he has ac- 
 quired them by traveling through foreign lands. 
 He goes abroad every year or two, tramps through 
 the country he visits, lives the life of the people, 
 and then comes back to his little shop to cobble 
 and to live over in memory the scenes of his now 
 numerous pilgrimages. Blessed is literature, for 
 it broadens life. To most of us time to travel is 
 denied. But books are not denied us, — books of 
 travel, of history, of science, of fiction. A late 
 writer advises us to read that fiction which por- 
 trays life as different as possible from our own. 
 We hardly need that counsel. A certain instinct 
 guides us in that direction. Dissatisfaction with 
 the limitations of our lives impels us to read 
 stories of soldiers and knights and heroes and 
 heroic deeds. Far-off ages and far-off civiliza- 
 tions attract us. We broaden our lives by chang- 
 
128 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 ing our view-point. Blessed is everything that 
 tends to widen our sympathies and give us the 
 consciousness of new relations. Blessed is the 
 religion that takes us out of ourselves, makes us 
 superior to our limitations, creates a new world 
 for us. Supremely blessed is the Gospel of Jesus 
 Christ, for of all religions that the world has seen, 
 it offers its disciples the most abundant life. 
 
 The distinctive glory of Christianity is its ex- 
 pansive spirit. The keynote of it is the greatest 
 possible development of the individual. It aims 
 to make every man a king, every heart the throne 
 of the Eternal, every life a consecrated temple. 
 "The humblest life that lives may be Divine." 
 It is a great undertaking, and it is imique in 
 Christianity. Confucius never taught it. There 
 is nothing in Confucianism to lead the individual 
 soul to greatness. Prudential maxims and con- 
 ventional morality may mean a better machine, 
 but they do not increase his spiritual resources. 
 Buddha taught the extinguishment of the indi- 
 vidual. Epietetus taught the suppression of emo- 
 tion, the denial of desire. Christ's doctrine is: 
 Diminish nothing that is right; repress nothing 
 that may be turned to good; do not diminish your 
 interests, but multiply them; live the largest pos- 
 sible life; conquer your sorrows by making the 
 sorrows of others your care; control your desires 
 by giving them a new direction; extend life on 
 every side. Is not this the Master's teaching? 
 Is it not the uniform testimony of experience that 
 Christian discipleship leads every faithful soul into 
 
THE ENLABGEMENT OF LIFE 
 
 129 
 
 a large place ? It is sin that narrows life, clips the 
 wings with which the spirit would soar to lofty 
 heights. Hence the conquest of sin by grace is 
 like the liberation of a slave. Fetters fall off. 
 Iron doors and brazen gates are torn asunder, and 
 the captive moves out into God's universe to learn 
 how life enlarges with each new step in grace. 
 There is a song which says, — 
 
 "Could we but stand where Moses stood 
 And view the landscape o'er," 
 
 "Why, we can stand there; we do stand there! 
 Our view-point is at the side of Jesus Christ. 
 "We have His perspective. "We see things as He 
 sees them. So things are not what they seem. 
 Life and death, time and duty, sorrow and pain 
 are transfigured, and history sweeps on towards 
 that "far-off Divine event" when "all things shall 
 be made new." Christ wants us to see, to hear, to 
 think, to feel, to act, in view of infinite relations. 
 He wants us to know that selfishness turns life 
 into a squirrel cage; that envy, greed, falsehood, 
 cruelty, base appetites, imprison men, make life 
 small, and that the spirit of holiness extends aU 
 the boundaries of the inner man. Remember this ; 
 — for the idea prevails among some that Chris- 
 tianity limits life, except in the direction of the 
 future. The fact is there is nothing else that so 
 expands it. Not imagination, not travel, not lit- 
 erature, not all other things combined. God never 
 calls us to impoverishment or isolation, but always 
 
130 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 to enrichment and fellowship with the spirits of 
 just men made perfect. 
 
 Christ was always calling men, — ^Philip, Nathan- 
 ael, the rich young ruler, Zaccheus, Bartimeus, 
 Lazarus, Nicodemus. Did any one of them follow 
 Him and fail to find the meaning of abundant life ? 
 Did any one of them turn back who did not turn 
 away from glory and honor and immortality? 
 Years ago I knew a life that was transformed and 
 led into a large place and made fruitful in abun- 
 dant measure, and the memory of it lingers in my 
 mind like a benediction. A common ploughboy 
 heard somewhere of the Great Teacher, who made 
 peasants and fishermen His disciples and let them 
 share His kingly thoughts. As he walked behind 
 the plough, he said to himself, "I would like 
 to live a larger life; I would like to feel the 
 uplift of great ideas. If the Teacher wiU take me 
 I will learn of Him." From that hour he was a 
 scholar in the school of Christ. He found the 
 Master meek and lowly of heart and not at 
 all like some teachers, who have no time to spend 
 with beginners. Almost before he knew it the 
 boy began to think differently of nature, of people, 
 of all God's creatures. He found himself grow- 
 ing more patient and humane, more studious and 
 reverent, richer in affection and keener in his in- 
 terest in everything that concerned the welfare of 
 the world. There was no sudden spasm of emo- 
 tion, but a gradual breaking away from old con- 
 ditions, a gradual ascension Godward. He 
 thought of that Young Man who suffered Himself 
 
THE ENLARGEMENT OF LIFE 
 
 131 
 
 to be baptized that He might leave nothing of 
 righteousness unfulfilled, and he was baptized. He 
 thought of another, who said, " I am debtor both to 
 the Greeks and to the Barbarians," and he said, "I, 
 too, am a debtor to the world. " So he began to con- 
 verse with people about the sweet reasonableness 
 of Christianity. He had a word for other plough- 
 boys, and a whole community began to feel the 
 impulse of his words and work. He never entered 
 the ministry, but his life was a continual ministry. 
 From the farm he went into the halls of the 
 legislature of his state, and from there to the 
 governorship, and from there the God "Who spoke 
 to him as he followed the plough, called him to 
 pass "through the gates into the city." Such 
 a life was that of the late Governor Mount, of In- 
 diana, upon whose tomb may well be written, — 
 "He led me forth also into a large place." 
 
 That is what God wants to do for all of us. We 
 cannot be so ambitious for ourselves as He is for 
 us. Not that He makes all His servants leaders 
 in the state, but He makes us princes of a royal 
 line, companions of apostles, comrades of the 
 saints, followers in the kingly train of the con- 
 quering Christ. 
 
XII 
 
 THE SAVING FEW 
 
"He who lives in the faith of Jesus Christ lives in the 
 freest action of his mental powers, and sees before him and 
 makes himself a part of the large world into which man 
 shall enter, in which he has perfect liberty, and can exercise 
 his powers as he could never have exercised them with- 
 out. . . . It is the truth that is to make us free, and 
 the entrance of a man into that freedom is the largest free- 
 dom of every region of man's life." 
 
 (.Thought and Action. Phillips Brooks.) 
 
 "Life is a mission. Every other definition is false, and 
 leads all who accept it astray. Religion, science, philosophy, 
 though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, 
 that every existence is an aim." 
 
 (.Life and Writings. Mazzini.) 
 
 "We live by Admiration, Hope and Love; 
 And, even as these are well and wisely fixed, 
 In dignity of being we ascend." 
 {The Excursion. Wordsworth.) 
 
XII 
 
 THE SAVING FEW 
 
 "And there went with him a band of men, whose hearts 
 God had touched." I Sam. x. 26. 
 
 The early history of Israel is full of peculiar 
 interest. It is the record of the evolution of a 
 people in the art of government. So long as a 
 race is in its childhood, it is capable of no gov- 
 ernment, the objects of government, — the protec- 
 tion of life and property, — being secured by the 
 action of the primal elements of force and fear. 
 But as the race rises in power, as its interests be- 
 come more complex, some form of organized gov- 
 ernment becomes necessary, and usually it is a 
 very simple form, government by tribes or clans. 
 Each tribe has its head, each clan its chief, and the 
 nation is simply an aggregation of little govern- 
 ments. 
 
 As time goes on, the people of a given terri- 
 tory suffer from the aggression of an alien race, 
 and then, for purposes of protection, the tribes 
 federate and some one man of superior ability 
 comes forward to lead them all. In the hour of 
 victory over the army of the enemy, some one cries 
 out, "Let us crown the man who led us to battle, 
 and make him chief over all." 
 135 
 
136 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 It is done, time goes by, the federation is 
 cemented more and more closely, until there is 
 something very like a kingdom, or an empire on a 
 small scale. So the first of the Ceesars rose to 
 prominence. So have almost all the great founders 
 of nations risen to power. 
 
 There was a time when Israel, for four hundred 
 years without a king, clamored for a different 
 form of government. For four hundred years 
 Israel had been peculiarly under the guidance of 
 the King of kings. In times of danger, deliverance 
 had come through some such providentially de- 
 veloped leader as Samson or Gideon or Deborah. 
 Doubtless God would have been still the Great 
 Defender, for God is never without some human 
 agent to accomplish His wiU among men. In one 
 age He chooses Cyrus, in another Charles Martel, 
 in another Gustavus Adolphus, in another WiUiam 
 of Orange, in another Oliver Cromwell, and in 
 another "Washington. God always has timber 
 growing in His forest wherewith to make a ves- 
 sel's keel or form a battering ram. 
 
 Now that Israel demands a king, God gives them 
 one, and his name is Saul. The method of his 
 choosing is here related. They are wise in trusting 
 to a man of vision and prayer the selection of their 
 monarch. They have great faith in Samuel's wis- 
 dom, for he has shown himself a faithful prophet 
 and a fearless judge. So, to Samuel they looked 
 for direction in matters of statecraft. The world 
 has changed in many ways since the day when 
 Israel committed the electorate to Samuel. In 
 
THE SAVING FEW 
 
 137 
 
 many ways the world has improved, but in this 
 respect we might make better progress by going 
 backward and making the choice of our rulers a 
 religious act. Do not understand me to advocate 
 a suffrage limited by ecclesiastical standards. I 
 would not commit to the priesthood the authority 
 to crown and uncrown kings, to appoint magis- 
 trates and dismiss them. But it has come to pass 
 in these days that the powers which select and 
 elect the agents of civil government have seldom 
 any conception of the sacredness of their ftmction 
 in public affairs. Too often caucuses and prima- 
 ries are in the hands of irresponsible men. There 
 are, indeed, exceptions; the scholar and the gen- 
 tleman, the man of culture and character are be- 
 ginning to see that the fault is theirs if incapable 
 and corrupt men are elevated to ofSee. 
 
 I fancy some critic is saying, "The choice of 
 Saul was an unfortunate one, even though it was 
 directed by a prophet." So it may seem. Saul 
 miserably failed, and his sun went down in dark- 
 ness. But remember, the Eye that sees all and 
 the Mind that knows all saw and knew Saul, and 
 He said, "Saul is the man." And he was an 
 unspoiled, valiant, and devout man, a bom leader, 
 the very man, and the only man who could hold 
 the forming nation in his hand. If Saul failed, if 
 he made shipwreck of his life, if, as has been sug- 
 gested, the cares of state weighed so heavily upon 
 him that he fell a prey to melancholia bordering 
 on madness, charge it not to Samuel, charge it not 
 to God. His was the failure of a strong but wilful 
 
138 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 man, who started right, but went astray. And if 
 Saul failed to do all he should have done, if he dis- 
 appointed Samuel, and disappointed God, sinking 
 at last into the grave of irresolute and vanquished 
 greatness, charge it not to the lack of good counsel, 
 for it is written, "There went with him a band of 
 men, whose hearts God had touched." 
 
 AU that these words mean, we cannot say, but 
 we may be sure of this, — ^they mean that Samuel's 
 companions and counsellors at that time were 
 patriots, sincere lovers of Israel, loyal friends, 
 capable of strong attachment to each other and to 
 their king; they were devout men who looked to 
 God for guidance and for grace; and they were 
 heroes. What a band of men they must have 
 been! Not great men, it may be, and not saints, 
 but good men, strong men, brave men, men of con- 
 viction and action. They were not many, only a 
 little band, but the future of Saul depended upon 
 his fidelity to them, and the hope of Israel was in 
 the increase of their influence and their kind. 
 
 Blessed is the man who, when dark days come, 
 has beside him a little band of men whose hearts 
 God has touched. David had such a band to sup- 
 port him, as had also Elijah. Blessed is the na- 
 tion which, in a crisis, in the presence of foes 
 without or within, when the mob, unthinking as the 
 swine of Gadara, is ready to rush down a steep 
 place into the sea, has a little band of men whose 
 hearts God has touched. Their common sense will 
 hold the rest in awe. Their courage will defeat 
 the conspiracies of the enemy. Their faith will 
 
THE SAVING FEW 139 
 
 pierce the dark veil of the future, and speak of 
 glorious things to come. A little band of God- 
 touched hearts has been the sweetening leaven of 
 society, the saving salt of the earth, the radiating 
 light of the world. 
 
 If we remember this, it will help us to read 
 history, — the human saviours of the race have al- 
 ways been a little band of men. How many were 
 there in Gideon's band when the Midianites 
 threatened the overthrow of Israel? Not half a 
 modern regiment! They were only a handful of 
 heroes who held the mountain pass against the 
 host of Persians. And this is true of moral move- 
 ments as well. The first disciples of Our Lord 
 were only twelve. The Church, on the morning 
 of the day of Pentecost, numbered but a hundred 
 and a score. "When the Dark Ages came, suc- 
 ceeded by the Middle Ages, in which the night 
 grew gray with dawn, the hope of the pure Gospel 
 was preserved in the breasts of a few whose knees 
 would honor and whose tongues would confess no 
 other name but Christ as the Church's head. 
 
 Count over the names of the reformers, Savon- 
 arola, Huss, Wyclif, Zwinglius, Sir Thomas More, 
 Erasmus, Melancthon, and Luther, — and who are 
 they ? A little band of men whose hearts God had 
 touched. God touched their hearts, and some 
 spoke, and some wrote, and some translated, and 
 all labored for the inalienable spiritual rights of 
 men and the glory of God. 
 
 In the early years of the eighteenth century, in 
 an English university there were a few students 
 
140 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 whose hearts God had touched to hunger for holi- 
 ness. They were from the humble walks of life, 
 not a prince or duke or lord among them. At first 
 they were but three. Presently the three grew to 
 five, and the five to seventeen. They were spoken of 
 contemptuously as the Holy Club, Bible Moths, the 
 Godly Club, Supererogation Men. Sometimes they 
 were dignified with the name Enthusiasts and Re- 
 formers, but the name by which they will be best 
 remembered is Methodists. 
 
 A hundred years ago, in Williams College, there 
 was a little band of men whose hearts God had 
 touched. They met in the friendly shelter of a hay- 
 stack, and held a prayer meeting, in which they 
 consecrated themselves to the work of evangelizing 
 the heathen world. There were five in that band, 
 but out of it grew a similar band at Andover, in 
 which was Adoniram Judson, the great apostle 
 to Burma. One of them died on the coast of Af- 
 rica. Two of them died of cholera, and their heroic 
 dust mingles with the soil of India. Another also 
 died near where the Pearl Mosque glistens in the 
 sunshine of Agra. Judson was buried at sea. 
 Great names are these, — Mills, Hall, Newell, Rich- 
 ards, Judson. 
 
 In 1854 there met in a dingy room in London a 
 little band of men whose hearts God had touched. 
 They were clerks and tradesmen, and they knew the 
 barren life of clerks in London stores. So they or- 
 ganized a society for moral and religious improve- 
 ment, which later developed into the Yoimg Men's 
 Christian Association. I happened to be present 
 
THE SAVING FEW 141 
 
 when Sir George "Williams, the leader of that little 
 band, was knighted, and no worthier life has thus 
 been honored within the memory of man. 
 
 About thirty years ago, in Kumamoto, Japan, in 
 a boy's high school, there was a lad whose heart 
 God had touched. He had found in Christ what he 
 had not found in Buddha, — a living Saviour. At 
 first he was afraid to confess his faith, but one day 
 he confided his secret to a fellow-student, and his 
 heart leaped for joy when he found a sympathetic 
 response. Their joy overflowed, and touched the 
 lives of others. Inquirers increased, and the num- 
 ber of Christians multiplied until there were forty 
 in that school ; when they made public their confes- 
 sion, it resulted in the breaking up of the school, 
 but the dispersion of the young disciples only dis- 
 seminated more widely the new faith, and some of 
 that little band are among the leaders of the Chris- 
 tian Church in Japan to-day. 
 
 Some such band of God-touched hearts is at the 
 genesis of every important moral and religious re- 
 form of the ages. The unit of power in every case 
 is a single life, a single heart touched to see the 
 world as the subject of redemption. The single life 
 at Oxford was Wesley, at Williams College was 
 Samuel Mills, at London was George Williams, at 
 Kumamoto a lad who had heard of the New Testa- 
 ment as containing the secret of the beautiful life. 
 The history of every significant movement having 
 for its purpose the uplift of the race must be re- 
 corded thus : "God touched the heart of one man; 
 he attracted to him a second, and they drew 
 
142 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 around them others, and so the holy fire burned and 
 the sacred influence spread from heart to heart." 
 A very suggestive saying is this, "whose hearts God 
 had touched." It means He had touched the key 
 of all motive, determination and conduct; touched 
 their lips to speak, their minds to think, their wills 
 to act ; touched their eyes, giving them new power 
 to see things in their right relations, new correlar 
 tions, and a new unity; touched their hands, 
 strengthening them to war a good warfare ; touched 
 their feet, armoring them to walk strange and hard 
 highways of duty. When God touches a man's 
 heart, He makes a new man of him; gives him no 
 new faculties, but turns all the old ones to new use. 
 He gives him new light on life's problems, new hope 
 for himself and for the race, new life moving in 
 larger circles around an eternal and immovable cen- 
 ter, that center the very personality of Jesus Christ. 
 I have a friend who sometimes tells, in speaking 
 of the missionary movement, in which our progress 
 sometimes seems so slow, of a conversation he once 
 had with an English gardener on a great estate. 
 My friend saw a strange, uncomely plant, upon 
 which the gardener seemed to bestow extraordinary 
 care. "What is it?" he inquired. The gardener 
 answered, "It is a century plant. My father eared 
 for it forty years ; I have cared for it almost as long, 
 and my son, who is my assistant, wiU care for it 
 after I am gone. My father never saw it bloom, 
 and I shall never see it bloom, but my 
 children and my children's children shall 
 see it bloom, and then they will think of my father 
 
THE SAVING PEW 
 
 143 
 
 and of me." Have you ever thought of the King- 
 dom of God as something like that? It is a great 
 plant having its root in the soil of ages, watered by 
 the tears of the saints, enriched by the blood of the 
 martyrs, fostered by the care of apostles, and still 
 putting forth strong stalks and green leaves. The 
 blossom is yet to come. But when Christianity 
 blossoms, not the perfume of the Eose of Sharon or 
 of the Lily of the Valley shall be so sweet, and the 
 glory of it shall be shared by all whose hearts God 
 ever touched to give their love and their labor to 
 its cultivation. 
 
XIII 
 SUCCESS AND FAILUEE 
 
"I cannot express it more nobly than in good old Pro- 
 fessor Simpson's words as a year ago he laid down his chair 
 in the medical school of the University of Edinburgh and 
 the deanship of the medical faculty, and presented the grad- 
 uating class of the year for their degrees. 'It may chance,' 
 said he, 'that some July day far down the century, when I 
 have long been in the ether, one or other of you will talk 
 with child or grandchild of the years when the century 
 was young. Along its unforgotten scenes there will arise 
 before your mind the memory of the day when at last you 
 burst the chrysalis shell of pupilage to lift free wings into 
 the azure. You will recall the unusual concurrence of the 
 simultaneous leave-taking of the university, by the graduates 
 and their promoter. "We came away," you will say to the 
 child, "a goodly company all together through the gateway 
 that leads to the rosy dawn. He passed out all alone 
 through the door that looks to the sunset and the evening 
 star. He was an old man like me," I forebear you say, "not 
 in himself a great man. He had been the friend of great 
 men and came out of a great time in the nineteenth century 
 when there was mid-sea and the mighty things, and it looked 
 to the men of his generation as if old things had passed 
 away and a new world begun. And he told us that the 
 great lesson he had learned on his way through life was the 
 same that the disciple who leaned on Jesus' breast at supper 
 taught to the fathers, the young men, and the little children 
 of his time, when he said, 'The world passeth away, and the 
 lust thereof : but he that doeth the will of God abideth for 
 ever.' " ' " 
 
 (.The Marks of a Man. Robert Elliott Speer. p. 118.) 
 
XIII 
 
 SUCCESS AND FAILURE 
 
 "This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth ; 
 but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou 
 mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein : 
 for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou 
 shalt have good success." Josh. i. 8. 
 
 The world needs a revised terminology. There 
 is such a thing as the immoral use of words. One 
 of the signs of a degenerate age is the degeneration 
 of its vocabulary. It is as great an offense to 
 truth to apply a good name to a bad thing as to 
 apply a bad name to a good thing. In one of the 
 visions of Isaiah, he sees the redeemed world, the 
 golden age, and marks as one of its great features, 
 a corrected nomenclature. "The vile person shall 
 be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be 
 bountiful." Is it not easy to see that to call one 
 liberal who is not liberal is to wrong all truly lib- 
 eral souls, and to call one bountiful who is not 
 bountiful, is unjust to all truly bountiful souls? 
 Is it not an offense to all brave men to call 
 a coward brave? Do we not ruinously discount 
 gentleness when we apply the term to one who 
 is not a gentleman? What an offense to friend- 
 ship to speak of one as a friend who is merely 
 an acquaiatanee ! Some one asked another, "Is 
 147 
 
148 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 not such and such a person beautiful?" and 
 the reply was, "No, not beautiful, but pretty." 
 A vast difference between those words. A strutting 
 little officer once said to Napoleon, "I am higher 
 than you," and he replied, "Taller, not higher." 
 
 Ruskin speaks of the discriminating use of words 
 as one of the tests of culture. Surely it should be 
 a quality of the religious mind to call things by 
 their right names, to avoid giving a good name to a 
 bad act or a bad name to a good act. The Scrip- 
 tures warn us : "Woe unto them that call evil good, 
 and good evil; that put darkness for light, and 
 light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and 
 sweet for bitter!" 
 
 There is a word which occurs with great fre- 
 quency in all our ordinary conversation and read- 
 ing, concerning which there is much confusion. 
 It is often applied to people and things that do not 
 deserve it, and as often denied to people and things 
 that do deserve it. It is the word "success," a 
 great word as to the place it occupies in modern 
 thought. It has been called "thei modem god. 
 Success," as if it were a thing adored by some, 
 idolized, deified; as indeed it is. There are those 
 who regard it as the highest good, the worthiest 
 aim in life. There are those to whom the inexcus- 
 able offense is to fail. And it is, if we rightly de- 
 fine the word. To succeed is the summum honiim, 
 if we do not misunderstand the word. Just here is 
 the trouble. There is confusion as to the real mean- 
 ing of success and failure. We overlook a fact inti- 
 mated in this text, in the apparent tautology of the 
 
STTCCESS AND FAILTTEE 149 
 
 phrase, "good success." It would appear that 
 success is not always successful, and that failure 
 does not always fail. "We have been deceived by 
 that popular sophism, "Nothing succeeds like suc- 
 cess." Who first uttered that fallacy we have 
 never taken the trouble to inquire. Certainly no 
 wise man ever said it. Certainly no good man ever 
 said it. And if he who invented the saying was 
 neither wise nor good, the sooner we forget it the 
 better, — the better for us, and the better for the 
 world. The plain truth is that nothing succeeds 
 like what the world sometimes brands a failure; 
 and nothing fails so miserably, so totally, so fatally, 
 as what the world sometimes calls success. The 
 confusion arises from a double standard of success. 
 According to human judgment, they succeed who 
 reach the end at which they aim. The rich mer- 
 chant, the popular politician, the promoted cap- 
 tain, the famous orator, the victorious athlete, — 
 these succeed, for they lay hold on the prize toward 
 which they strove. "Whether the prize is worth 
 striving for is quite another consideration. 
 "Whether the gold was hot and heavy ; whether the 
 crown was tarnished; whether the wreath faded on 
 the brow of the victor, — such questions we do not 
 ask. What if the merchant builds his palace at the 
 expense of his soul? What if the politician pur- 
 chases his power by judicious silence ? What if the 
 captain ascends the throne of power over the ruin 
 of hundreds of his peers? "What if the orator 
 lowers the tone of his gospel to tickle the itching 
 ears of the curbstone mob ? What if the runner or 
 
150 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 wrestler, in his development of the animal, ignores 
 the spiritual ? All this is nothing, — ^they have suc- 
 ceeded ! 
 
 But wait. There is the other standard, judged 
 by which they alone succeed who have a worthy 
 aim. In the one case the action is judged by refer- 
 ence to the end; in the other, by reference to the 
 purpose, the motive, the aspiration. Surely this is 
 a safe proposition: Anything succeeds in so far 
 as it does what it was designed by its maker to do. 
 An axe is a success if it cuts. A clock is a success 
 if it keeps time. If the axe is not well tempered, 
 if it loses its edge with the first stroke, it fails as 
 an axe. It may yet be a good hammer, or, sepa- 
 rated from its handle, it may serve as a paper 
 weight, but it is a poor axe. And if the clock 
 cannot be regulated; if it is unreliable; if we can- 
 not trust it to tell us the hour and the minute, 
 however beautiful it may be as an ornament, it has 
 failed as a clock. 
 
 Let us apply this proposition to human life. 
 "What is life for? What did God intend to make 
 when man walked out from His finished thought? 
 The question is not. Can we acquire wealth? We 
 can if we will to do it. The question is not, Can 
 we reach the summit of yonder hiU? We can if 
 we will to do it. The question is. What did the 
 Creative Power put us here to do ? That is for us 
 to discover, and that is for us to do. If He wants 
 us to be builders, we will build. If He wants us 
 to spin, we will spin. If God wants us to weave, 
 we will weave. The bee will teach us to build, the 
 
SUCCESS AND FAILtTBE 151 
 
 spider to spin, the worm to weave. If God wants 
 us to be mere machines, we will reduce our lives to 
 mechanical forces. But, if He wants us to make 
 the utmost of our highest faculties, to cultivate pa- 
 tience, and courage, and self-denial, and reverence, 
 and love, we must do that. And if we undertake 
 to do that, we shall find our teacher in a Man Who 
 lived a perfect life, and Whose life has been re- 
 corded for us that we might not fail to make our 
 lives Divine. 
 
 The Holy Scriptures make plain the purpose of 
 man's creation. We are not left in ignorance as 
 to our Maker's design. We are to do His will, to 
 incarnate His spirit, to follow Jesus Christ, to 
 have the mind that was in Christ, — that is, to get 
 His view of things. His view of time and eternity, 
 of pleasure and duty, of failure and success. If 
 we do this, if we faithfully try to do this, we suc- 
 ceed. If we do not try to do this, we fail. We 
 may succeed as builders, spinners, weavers, ma- 
 chines, and fail as souls, as sons of God. This is 
 the Biblical idea, this the Divine standard of judg- 
 ment : "That thou mayest observe to do according 
 to all that is written therein." But how difficult 
 to adopt this view ! How many standards of judg- 
 ment are set up in opposition to it! The popular 
 notion of success in China is scholarship ; in India, 
 voluntary suffering; in Korea, extreme old age; in 
 Egypt, it is honorable to be a beggar; in Turkey, 
 success means a well-filled harem; in Spain, he is 
 fortunate who has a name for valor. In America, 
 our idea of success is composite. Whatever else it 
 
152 COLLEGE SEEMOKS 
 
 excludes, it does not exclude money and the power 
 money is supposed to secure its possessor; it does 
 not exclude lavish expenditure, social prestige, the 
 ability to impress our neighbors with our superior- 
 ity by the maintenance of an elaborate establish- 
 ment. How largely money enters into our stand- 
 ard of success is evident from such stock phrases 
 as "poor but respectable," "poor but honest," "the 
 short and simple annals of the poor." Is it not 
 time to revise this part of our social creed? Is 
 there not some reason to accustom ourselves to 
 phrases of another kind, such as, "rich but respect- 
 able," "bom of rich but honest parents"? We 
 must not forget that the annals of the poor are 
 neither short nor simple, but contain both names 
 and deeds without which humanity would be poor 
 indeed. 
 
 Whatever standard of success we adopt, it were 
 well for us to remember this, that, measured by the 
 worldly standard, most men fall short of success. 
 Great wealth can be attained by comparatively few. 
 Only a small percentage of aU who engage in com- 
 merce achieve distinguished success. The average 
 is not high. In the nature of the case, very few 
 reach the highest honors in polities, and the exalta- 
 tion of one means the humiliation of another. In 
 war, one man is remembered, and a million are for- 
 gotten. He was a man of world-wide fame, who, 
 having reached the zenith of his ambition, wrote, 
 ' ' I am on the height, but it is cold and lonely here. " 
 He had been a President of this Republic — ^had re- 
 tired but two days before, who sat in the house of a 
 
SUCCESS AND FAILUEE 153 
 
 friend in "Washington, and said, "Two days ago I 
 had many friends ; to-day I have but few. I am no- 
 body. So fades the dream ! ' ' 
 
 Moreover, not only do few succeed, judged by 
 purely human standards, but some of those who 
 do succeed, fail in the highest sense. There are 
 vanquished victors, self-defeated conquerors. 
 There are poor rich men, weak strong men, foolish 
 wise men. Whatever else one may gain, there are 
 some things which, if he loses, render him unfortu- 
 nate indeed. Let a man gain all the world has for 
 him, — ^power, fame, money, what is it all worth to 
 him if he has lost brightness of honor, ease of eon- 
 science, treasures of love, dignity of self-respect, 
 the dominion of the spirit, and the approval of 
 God 1 I do not say that all who have gained those 
 things have lost these, but some have. 
 
 On the other hand, there are those who have been 
 accounted failures who, in the light of clearer judg- 
 ment, have succeeded. There is the possibility that 
 what looks like failure now may succeed in time. 
 Fifty years ago, the world looked at John Brown 
 and called him a failure. But he did all that he 
 started out to do, and more. It was no mere 
 caprice of circumstance, it was one of the vindica- 
 tions of history, that the song our soldiers sang, as 
 they entered Eichmond at the end of the war, was 
 
 "John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave, 
 But his soul goes marching on." 
 
 "William Tyndale's life looked like a failure, — ex- 
 iled from England, strangled to death at Vilvorden, 
 
154 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 praying with his last breath, "Lord, open the King 
 of England's eyes." But Tyndale's prayer was 
 answered. Only a little later Henry VIII defied 
 the Pope, and Tyndale 's version of the Bible passed 
 on its way to the throne of power. There was a 
 time when the life and ministry of Jesus of Naz- 
 areth looked like a failure. He had come to the 
 end, with the religious authorities against Him, and 
 with Imperial Rome against Him. Penniless as 
 any pauper, homeless as any outcast, friendless, 
 save for the faltering friendship of a group of men 
 as poor as himself, He died a malefactor's death be- 
 tween two thieves. So ends His ministry ! So van- 
 ishes His vision of a kingdom ! Ends? Vanishes? 
 "Wait. Wait until the third day. There is an open 
 tomb in Joseph's garden, and hope revives in the 
 hearts of the humble, and Jesus Christ begins His 
 age-long and world-wide victory. So, what ap- 
 pears failure may be success. 
 
 There is always the possibility that defeat may 
 be the stepping-stone to victory. If failure re- 
 veals to us our weakness, and leads to firm resolve ; 
 if defeat humiliates us, and gives us a better con- 
 ception of our proper place, cures us of conceit; if 
 the wreck of cherished hopes impels us to build 
 statelier mansions for our souls, then this may be 
 the way to ultimate strength and power. Phillips 
 Brooks failed as a teacher in the Boys' Latin School 
 in Boston, and retired from the profession of teach- 
 ing, tmder a shadow, his heart heavy, his future 
 dark. Then he was led into the ministry, and the 
 world has reason to rejoice that he failed as a 
 
SUCCESS AND FAILURE 155 
 
 schoolmaster. Dr. Lorenz, who, by a process of 
 bloodless surgery, reduces congenital dislocation of 
 the hip-joint, was a poor boy, but he had a good 
 mother and a great ambition. One day he found 
 a glove on the street. His mother said, "My boy, 
 you will have to work hard to get the other glove. ' ' 
 He did work hard, and before he was forty, he was 
 Assistant Professor of Surgery in the University of 
 Vienna. There was soon to be a vacancy in the 
 professorship, and he had reason to expect the ap- 
 pointment. Suddenly he developed a stubborn 
 skin disease. His hands became so sensitive he 
 could not put them into even the weakest aseptic so- 
 lution. His surgical career was at an end. "The 
 other glove" seemed unattainable. He left Vienna 
 temporarily, disconsolate, a failure. But in Italy 
 he met a friend who suggested that he specialize in 
 dry surgery. He had not seriously thought of that 
 before. It opened a new career before him, and 
 students of medicine who hear me well know what 
 a splendid career it has been. He had to fail before 
 he began to succeed. 
 
 There is a still more comforting phase of this sub- 
 ject. There are those out of whose failure there 
 issues no such happy sequel as that to which I have 
 just adverted. There are those who never get "the 
 other glove." There is this comfort for them. 
 Emerson says, ' ' The essence of greatness is the per- 
 ception that virtue is enough." If this be true, — 
 and it is true — ^then the essence of success is the per- 
 ception that to deserve to succeed is to succeed in 
 the eyes of the Great Taskmaster. Take the case of 
 
156 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 two students who compete for an honor in a college 
 class. One of them is brilliant and quick to learn. 
 He acquires knowledge without laborious effort. 
 The other is solid, slow in his mental processes, ac- 
 quires knowledge painfully. He must work hard 
 to do what the other does with ease. At the end of 
 the term, the brilliant student is awarded the prize. 
 Has the other failed? Par from it. The in- 
 structor knows that the prize-winner is not the close 
 student. If the prize represents application, in- 
 dustry, studious habits, then the loser deserves it. 
 But, after all, the reward of scholarship is not a 
 gold medal, or an honorable mention. Scholarship 
 is its own reward. 
 
 No earthly court or committee is competent to 
 say in any case whether the successful man de- 
 serves to succeed. There are so many factors of 
 which we have no knowledge. Doubtless, the real 
 victor is often the apparently defeated contestant. 
 Doubtless, there are those whom we call moral 
 failures who have struggled more heroically for 
 victory over self and sin than some others who 
 are called saints. The poet is right who inti- 
 mates that there may be more reverence in some 
 people's honest doubts than in some other peo- 
 ple's thoughtless prayers. "We fall back for- 
 ever upon this assurance, "The Lord knoweth 
 them that are His." He knows how fierce has been 
 the battle, and how faithful the spirit of the man 
 who fails. He knows the fidelity of His servants 
 who fight unseen battles, and perhaps never taste 
 the sweets of victory. He knows the struggle of the 
 
SUCCESS AKD FAILURE 157 
 
 conquered, and forever and forever He holds out 
 His hand to the soul in the midst of stress and 
 storm, saying, "Be thou faithful unto death, and I 
 will give thee a crown of life." 
 
 It is the faithful, not the clever; the faithful, 
 not the brilliant; the faithful, not the successful, 
 who succeed. We are not commanded to keep up 
 with the procession. We are commanded not to 
 depart from "this book of the law." We are 
 commanded to "meditate therein day and night." 
 We are coromanded to keep step with our Leader, 
 — and when the march is long and the load heavy 
 He tarries for us. There was one, long ago, 
 who said at the close of his long and burdened life, 
 the end of which, apparently, was an unrelieved 
 tragedy, "I have fought a good fight ... I 
 have kept the faith." That is what changes the 
 whole case. Paul's life was not a tragedy. It was 
 an epic, magnificent and beautiful. No man who 
 fights a good fight ever fails. No man who keeps 
 the faith throws his life away. Earth may take 
 that life and break it, but God takes up the frag- 
 ments, and lo! in His hands they are a perfect 
 whole. 
 
XIV 
 NOT BY BREAD ALONE 
 
"Surely this is a mystery. But just as surely it is a 
 reality. Inwardly, men and women are being renewed day 
 by day, while outwardly, men and women are perishing. 
 Souls are being bom again continually, not by the will of 
 the flesh nor by the will of man, but by the Word of the 
 Lord, which liveth and abideth for ever — which Word is 
 Christ. Men are living by bread, but not by bread alone. 
 Underneath the bounties which supply their temporal needs 
 they are touching the hand which feeds their spiritual long- 
 ings. In the wilderness they are finding heavenly manna. 
 Living waters flow from the riven rocks of time and sense. 
 Through the withering and fading leaves of mortality, as in 
 a secret and perpetual springtide, their souls are pierced 
 and quickened with 
 
 " 'Bright shoots of everlastingness.* 
 
 "Of this life Christ is the giver and the source. Christ is 
 the Bread of God Which cometh down from heaven and giv- 
 eth life unto the world. Christ is the living vine, and through 
 Him flows every drop of immortality that renews the human 
 branches and makes them glad with blossoms and fertile in 
 everlasting fruits." 
 
 (The Open Door. Henry Van Dyke. p. 154.) 
 
XIV 
 
 NOT BY BREAD ALONE 
 
 "It is written, Blan shall not live by bread alone." 
 Matt. iv. 4. 
 
 "We should never read the fourth chapter of 
 Matthew without reading, in connection with it, 
 the fourth chapter of Hebrews. Matthew records 
 the threefold temptation of Jesus. The author of 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews declares, "We have a 
 High Priest "Who is touched with the feeling of our 
 infirmities and was in all points tempted as we 
 are." I have heard a student say, "Jesus was 
 never tempted as I am." I have heard a business 
 man say, "Jesus was never tempted as I am." I 
 have heard an artist say, "Jesus was never tempted 
 as I am. ' ' But He was, He was tempted as all of us 
 are tempted, since He was tempted in all points. 
 His temptations were thoroughly representative. 
 His first temptation was to the appetite, the senses ; 
 his second was to the intellect, an appeal to the 
 pride ; His third, was to the will, an appeal to the 
 desire for power, ambition, that "last infirmity of 
 noble minds." So the three temptations covered 
 the whole scope of life, the entire compass of char- 
 acter. "In aU points." Where are the student's 
 temptations? In the realm of intellect? Jesus 
 161 
 
162 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 was tempted there. Where are the business man's 
 temptations? In the realm of will? He was 
 tempted there. "Where are the artist's tempta- 
 tions? In the realm of sensibility? He was 
 tempted there. In this, as in every other respect 
 essential to humanity, Jesus is the representative 
 Man, the second Adam of a new-bom, nobler race. 
 Abraham Lincoln is universally beloved in mem- 
 ory because he had within him, in larger measure 
 than any other man of modem times, the things 
 that are common to us all. This is a paradox, — 
 that the very commonness of the man is the thing 
 that makes him uncommon ! Can a man be so like 
 us all that he is above us aU? Yes. And that is 
 one feature of the unique distinctiveness of Jesus. 
 He lived a life so full of toil and trial, so full of 
 knowledge and experience, that though He is 
 bound to us all as our universal Brother, yet He is 
 "the Sovereign Seer of Time." A modem poet 
 sings: 
 
 "Although I know Thee as the Son of God 
 Anointed, 
 And hail Thee Prophet, Priest, and King 
 
 Appointed, 
 Still when I need Thee, Thou art nearest. 
 And when I trust Thee, Thou art dearest. 
 As Son of Man. 
 
 "And so I call Thee by the title 
 
 That I love. 
 And by the name that speaks most comfort 
 
 From above ; 
 Redeemer, Counsellor, Immanuel, — 
 As these I know Thee not so well 
 
 As Son of Man." 
 
NOT BY BREAD ALONE 163 
 
 But not the character of His temptation inter- 
 ests us as does the method of His conquest. " It is 
 written," He says. In the knowledge of what has 
 been written, He has wherewith to answer His ad- 
 versary. And ia the knowledge of what has been 
 written we have a source of strength the extent 
 and value of which is often unsuspected. 
 
 Matthew Arnold defines culture as the knowl- 
 edge of the best that has been thought and said in 
 the world. That knowledge is preserved in books : 
 the jurisprudence of Hammurabi and of Moses, of 
 Lycurgus and Justinian; the poetry of Isaiah and 
 Homer, of Virgil and Dante, of Burns and Brown- 
 ing; the dramas of Ji^schylus and Shakspere; the 
 meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Epietetus; 
 the intimate journals of Pascal and Amiel; the vis- 
 ions of "Piers Plowman" and John Bunyan; the 
 orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, of Burke and 
 Webster; the civic idealism of Plato and Sir 
 Thomas More, of John Locke and Adam Smith; 
 the gentle humor of Charles Lamb; the scholarly 
 sestheticism of Ruskin; the esthetic democracy of 
 "William Morris; the sermons of Robert Hall and 
 John Wesley. The greatest thoughts of the 
 world's greatest thinkers are on these library 
 shelves. To know what is written is culture, and 
 culture is a large part of what the old Greek 
 philosopher called "ampleness of soul." Better a 
 little house with an ample soul than an ample 
 house with no horizon. The Arab, it is said, 
 will not destroy the least floating fragment of 
 print lest it contain the Divine name or a sentence 
 
164 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 from one of the sacred books. What is written is 
 holy in his sight. 
 
 What is the Bible? It is the record of God's 
 revelation to His children. It is the laboratory 
 notebook of the greatest religious geniuses the hu- 
 man race has thus far produced. History, bi- 
 ography, philosophy, ethics, poetry, literature, these 
 are all here. For what? For whom? "These 
 are written, that tb might believe . . . and 
 that believing ye might have life through His 
 name." I stood beside a critic in an art gallery 
 recently, and heard him say of a canvas, "That 
 picture is not true to life." Similarly we charac- 
 terize certain novels, and condemn them, as not 
 true to life. Here are two pictures. One is a pho- 
 tograph, and the other a painting. Superficially, 
 the photograph is true to Life. It was made by 
 machinery. A lens, unconscious and insentient, 
 took in the view of things just as they were at the 
 moment the shutter snapped. But the painter sat 
 and waited till a cloud obscured the sun, or till a 
 mist hung over the valley, and he caught the sub- 
 dued glow in the sky, the color of the rocks, the 
 very atmosphere of the place, the peace that over- 
 spread it like the smile of God. He painted him- 
 self in it; he put his own mood into it, and so he 
 was true to the life within. This illustrates the 
 difference between the mechanical view of the uni- 
 verse and the spiritual view. "Man shall not live 
 by bread alone." 
 
 By what does man live if not by bread? "By 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of 
 
NOT BY BREAD ALONE 165 
 
 God." Jesus here quotes from the Book of Deu- 
 teronomy, in which God speaks to Moses, and Moses 
 to the people shortly before his death. How have 
 they lived these forty years in the wilderness? 
 Their hunger has been fed, and their thirst has 
 been assuaged, but they have had a life which has 
 been nourished by other things than by manna 
 from heaven and water from the smitten rock. Je- 
 hovah said to them, "Eemember all the way you 
 have been led." Then they remembered Egypt, 
 her slime pits and brick kilns; Egypt, and the 
 tombs of her tyrant kings and the temples of her 
 beast-worship; Egypt, and the Nile running red 
 like a bleeding vein laid open on the bare brown 
 breast of the desert; Egypt, and sudden darkness; 
 Egypt, and the death angel marking with his 
 shadow the threshold of every home from palace to 
 hut; Egypt, and the sprinkled blood of the pass- 
 over; Egypt, and the Exodus, the crossing of the 
 sea, the mountain and its law ; Marah and its sweet- 
 ening branch in the bitter pool; Meribah and the 
 gushing flood; Elim and its palms; the brazen 
 serpent; the death of Aaron on Mount Hor, — all 
 this they remembered and knew that their God had 
 trained, subdued, controlled, organized, and com- 
 pacted them into a nation. They had come out of 
 Egypt an ungoverned mob ; they are slowly taking 
 the shape of a self-governing people. In the coun- 
 cil of the elders there is the germ of future par- 
 liaments and senates. In their code of laws there 
 is the germ of future constitutions and statutes. 
 They are learning to live by memory. History is 
 
166 COLLEGE SEEMOjrS 
 
 only the recorded memory of past events. It is not 
 too much to say that we leam to live by history. 
 We shape our future by the lessons of experience. 
 The voice of the past is the voice of the Eternal, 
 warning, entreating, admonishing, encouraging, 
 summoning us to "the trimmed lamp and the 
 girded loin." Is not this the message of Isaiah, — 
 "Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, 
 This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the 
 right hand, and when ye turn to the left"? 
 
 If we live by memory, if we learn from history, 
 as we do, still more do we live and learn by our 
 own deepest experiences. Hezekiah puts it into 
 words of beauty and power, when, after his re- 
 covery from illness, and the merciful lengthening 
 of his life, he prays, * ' Lord, by these things men 
 live, and in all these things is the life of my spirit." 
 By what things? "What has secured the renewal 
 of his spiritual life? The lengthening of his years 
 was but a little thing. The deepening of his life 
 was everything. He had been face to face with 
 death, and he was not afraid, for he had walked be- 
 fore the Lord, "iu truth and with a perfect heart." 
 But he was ashamed to die. He had not finished 
 his work. Sennacherib's army had been snuffed 
 out like a candle, and Jerusalem had peace. But 
 after peace-bells ring there are perils more subtle 
 and more deadly than alien armies. After Ap- 
 pomattox came Keconstruction, and the shame is 
 on us yet. Hezekiah had yet a man's work to do, 
 and his sun was going down at noon. His prayer 
 
NOT BY BEEAD ALONE 167 
 
 was not the frenzied cry of an epicure, loath, to 
 leave his purple and his banquet table, but of a 
 hero who wants to be in the battle for God in the 
 thick of the fight. 
 
 I know a man who occupies a great pulpit in the 
 "West who, ten years ago, stood where Hezekiah 
 stood, at what seemed his journey's end. The 
 shadow on the dial moved back for this modern 
 prophet, and when he next stood before the people, 
 he said: "I have had my vision of Christ. Others 
 may have clearer vision of Him, but this is mine. 
 I will preach only what I know. I will preach 
 only what I know is supremely important. I will 
 preach only. what I have fallen down upon and 
 found safe and able to bear me up. I will preach 
 only what I found true when lately I went up to 
 the gate of Otherwhere." Ah, it is by such things 
 men live. It is by such things life takes on new 
 and Divine significance. 
 
 The greatest specialist in pulmonary tuberculo- 
 sis in America is himself a sufferer from the dis- 
 ease he has done so much to conquer in others. 
 Two of his children have died from it. I saw him 
 once after he had sat for hours in his consulting 
 room, examining patients. He was weary. He 
 said: "I have just seen a girl who was sure she 
 was incurably sick, and there is nothing the mat- 
 ter with her. I had to tell another who was sure 
 she had only 'a trifling cold' that she is doomed 
 to die." Then, shuddering, and with tears in his 
 eyes, he leaned his head on his desk, and cried, 
 
168 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 "0 God! God!" That man will come down 
 from the moimtains for a few days, to meet people 
 who cannot go to him, or to speak before medical 
 societies, and tuberculosis congresses, and then 
 hurry back with shortened breath, the unvanishing 
 shadow ever at his side. Unconquerable of will 
 and tender of heart, it is by such things he lives, 
 • — ^by sufEering, and courage, and sympathy. But 
 hear him speak of the world-wide campaign of ed- 
 ucation in the prevention of disease, and you wiU 
 see he lives also by hope. 
 
 It was in April, 1865. Grant was drawing his 
 lines about Lee to hold him in relentless grasp. 
 Grant was ill. He had eaten nothing for hours, 
 and little for days. His face was ashen, his fea- 
 tures pinched, and he looked like an old man. 
 Then there approached his headquarters a Con- 
 federate officer, on horseback, and under escort, and 
 handed him a note from Lee indicating willingness 
 to surrender. One of Grant's staff said, "I never 
 saw such a transformation. The general's eyes 
 took on brightness, and color came to his cheeks. 
 He sent Lee his answer, and walked away with the 
 buoyancy of a youth." Hope had given him new 
 life. An Apostle says, "We are saved by hope." 
 That is because hope is only another aspect of 
 faith. Hope is faith foreseeing the keeping of 
 God's "Word. It is faith leaning on God's "Word. 
 It is faith trusting in the dark. "We do not say 
 too much when we say that it is by faith we live. 
 "The just shall live by faith." Faiths may per- 
 ish, but faith does not. 
 
NOT BY BREAD ALONE 169 
 
 "There is no unbelief; 
 Wlioever plants a seed beneath the sod, 
 And waits to see it push away the clod, 
 He trusts in God. 
 
 "Whoever says, 'The clouds are in the sky, 
 Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by,' 
 Trusts the Most High. 
 
 "Whoever sees, 'neath winter's wealth of snow. 
 The silent harvest of the future grow, 
 God's power must know. 
 
 "Whoever says, 'To-morrow,' 'The Unknown,' 
 'The Future,' trusts the Power alone 
 He dares disown." 
 
 In Jesus' mind, life had a double meaning. In 
 His speech, bread had a double meaning. "My 
 meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me." "I 
 have meat to eat that ye know not of." It is not 
 difficult to judge where the Apostle John learned 
 the lesson of "hidden manna" which they must 
 feed upon who overcome. Material bread feeds 
 the material body, but there is another body, an- 
 other life. To awaken us to the reality of that 
 other life was the mission of the Master among 
 men. "It is not that which entereth into the body 
 that defileth it." Our lives are like temples slowly 
 building through the days. Our bodies are the 
 scaffolding. It matters little what composes the 
 scaffolding, just so it holds together till the temple 
 is built. "What goes into the construction of the 
 temple is of infinite importance. Its materials 
 must be abiding. It demands strength and beauty. 
 There are pillars and "lily work" at the top. "We 
 
170 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 live by the things that build us up invisibly, — by 
 memory and hope; by experience and aspiration; 
 by prayer and faith; by worship and service; by 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of 
 God ; thus and only thus are we ' ' builded together 
 for an habitation of God through the Spirit." 
 
 "Said the corn to the lilies, 
 'Come not near my feet, — 
 Tou are only lilies. 
 Neither corn nor wheat ; 
 Can one earn a living 
 Just by being sweet?' 
 
 "Answered the lilies 
 Neither Yea nor Nay, 
 But they looljed the fairer 
 All the livelong day, 
 And, at length, the Master 
 Chanced to come that way. 
 
 "While the tired disciples 
 Waited at His feet. 
 And the proud corn rustled, 
 Bidding them to eat, 
 'Children,' said the Master, 
 'The Life is more than meat.' " 
 
XV 
 THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF SENTIMENT 
 
"It is pleasant to feel nobly — that is to say, to live above 
 the lowlands of vulgarity. Manufacturing Americanism and 
 Caesarian Democracy tend equally to the multiplying of 
 crowds, governed by the appetite, applauding charlatanism, 
 bowing to the worship of Mammon and of pleasure, and 
 adoring no other God than force. What poor samples of 
 mankind they are who make up this growing majority ! Oh, 
 let us remain faithful to the altars of the ideal! . . . 
 Materialistic naturalism has the wind in its sails, and a gen- 
 eral moral deterioration is preparing. No matter, so long as 
 the salt does not lose its savor, and so long as the friends of 
 the higher life maintain the sacred fire. The wood itself may 
 choke the flame, but if the flame persists, the fire will only 
 be the more splendid in the end." 
 
 "The ideal, after all, is truer than the real: for the ideal 
 is the eternal element in perishable things : it is their type, 
 their sum, their raison d'etre, their formula in the Book of 
 the Creator, and therefore at once the most exact and the 
 most condensed expression of them." 
 
 (.Amiel's Journal. [Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Translation.] Vol. I. 
 pp. 227, 288, 234.) 
 
XV 
 
 THE PRACTICAL VALUE OP SENTIMENT 
 
 "And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh." 
 Gen. xxxvii. 19. 
 
 Hans Christian Andersen's story, "The Ugly 
 Duckling," is a classic. The Ugly Duckling was 
 no duckling at all, but a swan, and in the eyes of 
 the ducklings, an awkward, unlovely, unfriendly 
 bird. Not until the swans came did the ugly duck- 
 ling take its proper place and claim its heritage of 
 beauty and of grace. 
 
 Joseph was the ugly duckling of Jacob's brood. 
 He was not like his brothers. They were rude, 
 gross, savage. He was gentle, sentimental, poetic. 
 They were herdsmen, hunters, fighters, tillers of 
 the soil, men of affairs. He was a dreamer, a mys- 
 tic. It is not strange he was an alien and stranger 
 to them. It is not strange they were hostile to him. 
 It was the antipathy of opposites. 
 
 His fellow-citizens hated Aristides because he 
 was just and they were not. Joseph's brethren 
 hated him because he was their dissimilar, their 
 superior, and because, being what he was, he was 
 his father's favorite. Jealousy was at the root of 
 their hatred. He had committed the unpardon- 
 173 
 
174 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 able sin in their eyes, — the deadly and unpardon- 
 able sin of being unlike them. 
 
 Jealousy is at the root of a great many kinds of 
 hatred, — ^race hatred, and class hatred. The poor 
 unbalanced brain that accomplished the assassina- 
 tion of President McKinley was conscious only of 
 an unreasoning class jealousy. He said, "I did 
 not think it was right that one man should have 
 so much service," meaning honor, I presume. Jo- 
 seph's brethren did not think it right that he 
 should have the preeminence. The coat of bril- 
 liant colors was nothing in itself, but whenever 
 they saw it, it seemed to speak of all the favorit- 
 ism with which their superior brother had been 
 treated. "Superior?" Had they not equally 
 good claims to honor ? Were they not also Jacob 's 
 sons? Did they not labor for the common welfare 
 of the family and clan? So, doubtless, they 
 thought, and so, doubtless, they talked, and the 
 poison of jealousy rankled in their hearts until 
 they were ready for any crime in the calendar. 
 Do we not know how many a life has been blasted, 
 and how many a household has been ruined, by 
 that unlovely thing, jealousy? Given jealousy, 
 and many things may foUow, — self-love, cruelty, 
 violence, death. But, though the end may not 
 be violence, the end is always misery and tears. 
 
 In the case of Joseph's brethren, there was not 
 only contempt for the dissimilar, but contempt for 
 the familiar. Many a genius, many a sage, many 
 a saint, hag been despised by those who were 
 nearest to him. It is the old story of the un- 
 
THE PKACTICAL VALUE OP SENTIMENT 175 
 
 honored prophet in his own land. We have all 
 heard of "the illusion of the near." Are we not 
 prone to the undervaluation of the near? At the 
 unveiling of a monument to a great literary man, 
 some one remarked to his widow, who was present, 
 "You must feel very proud to have been the wife 
 of such a man." She replied, "Yes, I am, but 
 there were times when he was a dreadful nuisance 
 about the house!" That is nothing less than the 
 tragedy of the familiar. 
 
 The words of the brothers as the lad Joseph 
 approaches^ "Behold, here comes this dreamer," 
 suggest to me a far more general thought than 
 personal hatred or jealousy. They suggest the 
 scorn of a practical world for the merely senti- 
 mental. It may not amount to scorn. It may be 
 mere neglect, but the mental attitude is that which 
 says of the artist, the nature-lover, the poet, the 
 mystic, "Here comes that dreamer." Popular in- 
 difference to art is one of the outward signs of a 
 lack of inward grace. There are not wanting 
 some signs that we, in America, are awakening to 
 a sense of our needs in this direction, but the 
 lamentable ignorance of the average man as to the 
 standards of value in art condemns us for our de- 
 ficiency in the recognition of the value of senti- 
 ment. It does make a difference whether a church 
 looks like a temple or a warehouse. It does make 
 a difference whether our homes are beautiful or 
 hideous. It does make a difference whether we 
 cover our walls with gaudy chromos and showy 
 crayons, or with artistic engravings, photographs 
 
176 COLLEGE SEKMONS 
 
 of the masters, (which, by the way are no more 
 expensive than the colors that shriek at us). It 
 does make a difference whether the streets of a 
 city are disfigured by glaring advertisements and 
 indecent theatrical posters. Blessed are the civic 
 improvement agitators. "Here comes that 
 dreamer," but the life of the city is sweeter and 
 saner and finer because he has lived in it, and gen- 
 erations yet to come will rise up to honor his 
 name. 
 
 Disregard of the ideal phases of nature is a 
 part of this contempt for the sentimental. The 
 modern world owes a great debt to John Ruskin 
 for calling our attention not alone to the genuine 
 in art, but to the sublime in nature. Read his 
 prose poem on "Clouds," and then go out under 
 the sunset skies and see the handiwork of the In- 
 finite Artist on the immeasurable canvas of the 
 heavens. 
 
 The Christian Church observes the Sacrament of 
 the Lord's Supper with this ia view, — to make 
 God real to us, to give us a sense of His intimate 
 nearness. Any symbol, any experience that gives 
 us a sense of the Divine Presence, is sacramental. 
 The study of Nature in some of her phases has 
 that effect on some souls. There is a beautiful 
 suggestion of this in Shakspere's "Merchant of 
 Venice." Lorenzo says to Jessica: 
 
 "Look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of pure gold : 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
 But in his motion like an angel sings 
 Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubim." 
 
THE PEACTICAL VALUE OF SENTIMENT 177 
 
 The patine is the cover of the sacramental cup. Is 
 there nothing sacramental to us in a starry night, 
 in a rare landscape, in a virgin forest ?- If not, we 
 have not learned to read. What says the psalm- 
 ist? "The heavens declare the glory of God; and 
 the firmament showeth His handywork." What 
 John Ruskin has done. Dr. Van Dyke and Mr. 
 Eoberts are doing, and all such men to whom the 
 world is imder obligation for the vision of many 
 a "little river," and the heart of many an 
 "ancient wood." We have never seen Jesus as 
 He was until we see what a nature-lover He was, 
 how at home among the mountains and on the 
 sea, what eyes He had to behold the heavenly 
 meaning of every earthly scene. 
 
 Not only in popular indifference to art, and 
 common disregard of the ideal phases of nature, 
 does this contempt for the sentimental appear. 
 At the worst, it expresses itself in the failure of 
 many an otherwise sane and shrewd man to esti- 
 mate, the proper place of religion in the economy 
 and government of life. Ask your busy, bustling, 
 energetic man of affairs what the bank stands for, 
 what the factory stands for, and he will tell you. 
 He gives these their proper place in life. Neither 
 does he imderestimate the importance of educa- 
 tional and benevolent institutions. But if you 
 ask him what the Church represents, he may reply, 
 "Nothing but sentiment." It is the same old 
 materialism, — "Here comes that dreamer." 
 
 Yet, if we inquire whence have come the in- 
 fluences which have made man's life and woman's 
 
178 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 honor safe; whence the forces which have set a 
 new value on manhood, protected the sanctity of 
 the home, endowed us with the sovereign rights 
 of citizenship; if we inquire the fertile source of 
 the movement that makes for universal brother- 
 hood and peace, there is but one answer. The 
 most potent agent in the education and elevation 
 of society, and in the amelioration of human con- 
 ditions, has been "the faith of our fathers." By 
 all the dreams of aU the dreamers, by all the 
 visions of all the prophets, by all the prayers of 
 all the saints, and by all the tears of aU the 
 martyrs, the world has been purified and uplifted 
 towards God. Jacob's vision of Shiloh; Daniel's 
 vision of the world governed in righteousness; 
 Ezekiel's vision of the river flowing from the altar 
 of the House of God throughout the earth; Paul's 
 vision of the man in Europe asking for help; 
 Peter's vision of eliminated racial barriers, and 
 John's vision of a heavenly city descending upon 
 earth, are but parts of the perfect vision of the 
 plan of God who made the world to be the dwell- 
 ing place of a ransomed race. 
 
 No vision of David, or Isaiah, or Langland, or 
 Bunyan ever gave the man who had it and de- 
 clared it the title that belongs to Jesus as the 
 Supreme Idealist of the race. A skeptical social- 
 ist inquires, "But what did Jesus ever do?" 
 He wrote no constitutions, issued no Emancipa- 
 tion Proclamations, signed no Magna Charta, but 
 He made it possible for other men to work out 
 the freedom of mankind. He began it aU by 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF SENTIMENT 179 
 
 emancipating the spirit, by making us conscious of 
 world-citizenship, by laying upon us the dignity 
 of God's children. So doing. He became the 
 Supreme Idealist and as such rules the world. 
 But He chooses to rule the world through us. 
 Standing at His side, we have visions of world-con- 
 quest, not for ourselves but for the Kingdom He 
 foimded in the hearts of men. 
 
 It is no small thing to follow Jesus Christ. It 
 is to inherit a world of sentiment, and a world of 
 enterprise. It is ours not alone to dream, but to 
 dream and do. Joseph was a dreamer, but he 
 rose to the premiership 'of Egypt. Daniel was a 
 dreamer, but he became president of the princes 
 of Babylon. History is full of instances of men 
 who have inhabited the great world of the ideal, 
 and yet were not unfitted for contact with earthly 
 problems. Michelangelo was not a mere dreamer. 
 Gladstone was not a mere dreamer. Some one says 
 of him, ' ' He possessed two realms, one sentimental, 
 the other practical, and from either he could with- 
 draw himself into the other, and from each he 
 emerged, stronger for the other." General "Chi- 
 nese" Gordon was not a mere dreamer. He had 
 time to cultivate sentiment, the noblest of all senti- 
 ments — friendship with God — and yet he was a 
 warrior and the ruler of a great African empire. 
 
 We must, as workers together with God, as 
 scholars in the school of Christ, cultivate the sen- 
 timental in the midst of the practical. The senti- 
 mental is practical. "We must build our castles in 
 the air before we know where to build them on the 
 
180 COLLEGE SEKMONS 
 
 earth. George "Washington wrought out with his 
 sword what Samuel Adams had already wrought 
 out with his pen. Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel 
 were not the only liberators of Italy; there was 
 Mazzini, who had dreamed of a free and unified 
 Italy before them, and had started a hundred thou- 
 sand young Italians to dreaming his dream until 
 they were ready to respond to Garibaldi's call, 
 when he said, "You that are in love with hardship 
 and death, follow me." 
 
 The function of the dreamer is to hold up be- 
 fore us the ideal, to show us things as they should 
 be. The scheme may appear impracticable, and 
 it may be so now; but to-morrow the conditions 
 may have changed, and that which to-day is im- 
 possible may become the common order. Let us 
 read with new eyes the Sermon on the Mount, 
 Paul's hymn of love in the thirteenth chapter of 
 his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Peter's con- 
 ception of the Christian life as a chorus, in which 
 faith, courage, knowledge, self-control, endurance, 
 godliness, brotherly kindness and love make melody 
 unto the Lord, and see how Christianity creates 
 high ideals for us, gives us glimpses of the beauti- 
 ful in conduct and the sublime in character. 
 
 Herbert Spencer, in the preface to his "Data 
 of Ethics," speaks of the Christian ideal as so 
 difficult as to be unattainable. That is the old 
 Pagan spirit which charges us that our faith is 
 only a beautiful dream. Shall we therefore give 
 up our dreams? No; the glory of our faith is in 
 the perfectness of its Adsions. All hope of indi- 
 
THE PEACTICAL VALUE OF SENTIMENT 181 
 
 vidual worth and social greatness is in our honest 
 effort to make the ideal real. The saddest fact 
 about our lives is that we become too easily dis- 
 couraged, and, seeing the difference between what 
 we are and what Jesus Christ commands us to be, 
 we abandon effort, and treat our vision as a com- 
 mon thing. There is no tragedy comparable with 
 this, — the human heart a deserted sanctuary; the 
 inner light aflame no longer; amidst all the music 
 of the spheres, no voice from heaven; amidst all 
 the glories of earth and sea and sky, no Divine 
 vision. The universe is empty then, and life is 
 vain. "He who hath lost God hath nothing more 
 to lose, — he hath lost all. He who hath gained 
 God hath nothing more to gain, — he hath gained 
 aU." 
 
XVI 
 
 THE ATHENIAN ALTAR 
 
"Within the walls of the southern city — and Peking con- 
 sists of three — is a parklike inclosure, three miles in cir- 
 cumference. Its interior is occupied by avenues of forest 
 trees, tangled woodlands, and open stretches of coarse grass. 
 Within several walls, at the gate of each of which a small 
 fee is demanded, in a silent, lonely space, where neither the 
 din of the city nor the cries of children penetrate, arises 
 the famous Altar of Heaven, unrivaled by all altars beside. 
 It rests massively on the broad bosom of the earth ; bare 
 to heaven ; solitary, majestic, unattended ; a solid pile of 
 white marble, which reminded me of nothing so much, for 
 absolute impressiveness, as Stonehenge. Imagine a com- 
 plete circle of pure white marble, ninety feet across, as 
 though concentric with the horizon, and elevated in its solid 
 mass some sixty feet above the earth. On the south and 
 north its level surface is reached by flights of stately steps, 
 each broken into three terraces of nine, representing man, 
 earth, and heaven. On the occasion of his annual visit, the 
 emperor approaches from a distant door, alights from his 
 chair, walks slowly through long lines of state oflBcials, 
 ascends the southern stairway, and makes his way as a 
 suppliant to the central stone, a perfect circle. He kneels 
 there reverently before four pillars of bronze, on which 
 sundry small offerings of incense and silk are placed, whilst 
 a whole bullock is being burnt in a great furnace faced 
 with green porcelain, which stands on the grass below. 
 Thus he intercedes for his land, with 'the Almighty Ruler 
 of Heaven,' as though he were another Melchizedek. 
 
 "We stood on that stone with profound reverence. It is 
 recorded of Dr. Legge, that, on reaching this spot, he was 
 overcome with emotion, took off his boots, because it seemed 
 holy ground, and said, 'If ever God has been worshiped in 
 China, He has been worshiped here.' 
 
 "Very few Europeans have seen that tablet; but we had 
 the pleasure of being accompanied by Rev. Mr. Rhys, of 
 L.M.S., who is one of that fortunate number. Accompanied 
 by Gilmour of Mongolia, on one occasion he scaled the in- 
 closing walls at an unfrequented part, and saw that elo- 
 quent witness of the unappeasable demand of the human 
 heart for the Living God." 
 
 (F. B. Meyer. Letter from Peking, British Weekly, September 
 80, 1909.) 
 
XVI 
 
 THE ATHENIAN ALTAE 
 
 "For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found 
 an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. 
 Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto 
 you." Acts xvii. 23. 
 
 There is hardly a man in the world, however 
 little he may value culture, however highly he may 
 value time, who would not give the best year of 
 his life to see Athens, — ^Athens restored, Athens 
 as she was in the days when she was "the eye of 
 Greece, the mother of arts and eloquence." The 
 nearest modern approach to that Athens was the 
 White City on the banks of Lake Michigan in 
 1893. A Greek archbishop saw that splendid 
 creation of architecture and exclaimed, "This is 
 like the Athens of my ancestors." Yet it was not 
 Athens; it lacked Athenians. What were Athens 
 without her poets and orators, her artists and 
 philosophers? At the Nashville Exposition a 
 dozen years ago, they reproduced the Parthenon in 
 miniature, but it was not the Parthenon, — it 
 lacked the atmosphere and spirit of Hellenism. 
 Thueydides said of Attica, "Her place in history 
 will be measured by her capacity to produce men." 
 What makes a city great and famous with a 
 185 
 
186 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 worthy fame? The people that inhabit it, the 
 great minds that think, the great hearts that beat, 
 in it, — they give it immortality. 
 
 Charles Lamb once said he would have counted 
 it high honor to have been Shakspere's bootblack. 
 Consider the great men that flourished in the lat- 
 ter half of the first century of our era : Pliny, Sen- 
 eca, Quintilian, Juvenal, — who of us would not 
 rather see these than to see Rome in all her glory ? 
 Indeed these were Eome. It was at this time there 
 flourished another man, not a Greek, though ac- 
 quainted with Greek thought ; not a Eoman, though 
 a Eoman citizen ; a Jew, but not a Jew in exclusive- 
 ness. He was not a philosopher, as was Seneca ; not 
 a historian, as was Pliny ; not a critic, as was Quin- 
 tilian; not a poet, as was Juvenal. There is no 
 term which better describes him than that by 
 which he calls himself, an Apostle of Christ, 
 "Paul, called to be an Apostle." If we might be 
 permitted to see the face, clasp the hand, hear the 
 voice of but one of the great men of that age, 
 few of us would hesitate to choose Paul. In him 
 centers all that is worthiest, all that most con- 
 cerns the future of the race. He stands for a new 
 philosophy of life, a new revelation of truth, a 
 new order of things. 
 
 The text presents a picture of Paul in Athens. 
 He had just come from Berea, where many had 
 "received the word with all readiness of mind." 
 Awaiting the coming of Silas and Timothy, he oc- 
 cupied his time looking about the city. He could 
 not have been indifferent to its classic interest. The 
 
THE ATHENIAN ALTAR 
 
 187 
 
 golden age of Athens had passed, yet there was 
 much to remind him of the days of Pericles and 
 Phidias. Yet he was not here as a sight-seer, a 
 relie-hunter, an antiquarian. He was here as the 
 representative of a new religion. ' ' His spirit was 
 stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to 
 idolatry." He entered into conversation with 
 students and citizens. He found them curious to 
 know, eager to hear, about "this new doctrine." A 
 multitude of them conducted him to Mars Hill, 
 and requested a full statement of his faith. He 
 complied with their wish and in sentences of truly 
 noble eloquence, proclaimed the great truths of 
 Christianity, concerning God and man. He be- 
 gan: "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in aU 
 things ye are very religious." He did not say, 
 "Ye are too superstitious." He was too great an 
 orator, too skillful a controversialist, too wise a 
 tactician, to begin with an offensive charge. "With 
 prudence taught him in the schools of rhetoric, 
 with discretion exampled by his Divine Master, 
 he not only avoided a danger into which an un- 
 trained mind might have fallen, but he employed 
 that very danger to draw them to him. "Too 
 superstitious?" Far from it, rather, "Ye are 
 unusually reverent." There were altars all about 
 him, altars to Jupiter, Diana, Apollo, Venus, 
 Ceres, Athena, Juno; altars to graces and furies; 
 alters to Fame, to Energy, to Eloquence. Athens 
 was full of altars. An old traveler tells us there 
 were more altars in Athens than in all the rest 
 of the world. A Eoman satirist said, "It is 
 
188 COLLEGE SERMONS 
 
 easier to find a god in Athens than to find a 
 man." But with all their altars and their gods, 
 they felt the need of something higher and truer. 
 They were groping after something better than the 
 best they had. So they erected an altar and wrote 
 upon it, "TO THE UNKNOWN GOD." It was 
 a confession of the failure of their faith to satisfy 
 the deepest longings of the soul. So Paul used 
 their confession, saying, — "Whom therefore ye 
 ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you." 
 It was the act of a consummate orator, "wise as a 
 serpent, yet harmless as a dove." 
 
 There are men who, standing where Paul stood, 
 would have charged the Athenians boldly with 
 folly and unreasonableness. The sight of aU 
 those altars would have awakened their indigna- 
 tion. But, to Paul, the whole Pagan world was 
 as a blind man groping in a world of night, lean- 
 ing on a frail reed. He would not strike from 
 their hands their only staff. He would offer them 
 a better. He sought for some faint footstep of 
 the living God, and found it at that altar to the 
 UnlcQown God. To the Greeks he became a Greek 
 that he might win some. His theme that day was 
 "The Unknown God." His propositions were, 
 Though God may be unknown. He is not un- 
 knowable; and. He has revealed Himself in Jesus 
 Christ. Indeed, in some form or other, this was 
 always Paul's thesis, — ^that it is possible to know 
 God through Jesus Christ. This is the message 
 of the Gospel to the world to-day, — that we may 
 know Him, know that He is, know how near He 
 
THE AXHENIAN ALTAS 189 
 
 is, know that we are in harmony with Him, know 
 the moral impulse of His spirit and the inward 
 uplift of His everlasting arms. 
 
 The battle of Christianity to-day is not so much 
 with atheism, which denies the existence of God, 
 as with agnosticism, which affirms the imknow- 
 ability of God. The modern Athenian has built 
 him an altar, and inscribed upon it, "To the Un- 
 knowable God." The agnostic is perfectly will- 
 ing to admit that there may be a God, and that 
 He may be, metaphysically, all that we say He is ; 
 but if He is, we have no means of knowing it; 
 if there is a spiritual world and a future life, we 
 have no means of verifying them; we may hope 
 and wish and dream, but this is not knowledge. 
 So speaks the modem Athenian, and he seems so 
 modest and humble, so candid and truth-seeking, 
 he attracts multitudes of disciples. 
 
 Consider for a moment what kind of a God ag- 
 nosticism is willing to admit there may be, — a 
 God with metaphysical properties only. Why not 
 ascribe to Him moral qualities as well? Grant 
 the existence of such a God, One Who is not only 
 eternal but merciful, not only wise but compas- 
 sionate, and, by so much as He is compassionate. 
 He must reveal Himself to men who need a 
 knowledge of Him more than they need anything 
 else in the world. If God could be without moral 
 qualities, we might never know Him, but, being 
 good. He is under the necessity of His own nature 
 to reveal Himself to men. And, we believe He does 
 reveal Himself in Nature, in the Moral Law, in 
 
190 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 History, in the Holy Scriptures, and in His In- 
 carnate Son. 
 
 ' ' The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the 
 firmament showeth His handywork." Infinite 
 Wisdom, Infinite Power, Infinite Beauty, — ^these 
 are the revealing of God in creation. "A Power 
 not ourselves which makes for righteousness," — 
 so God speaks to us from depths of our own 
 being. An Invisible Force, moulding nations, 
 lifting up one and casting down another, operat- 
 ing now through Cyrus of Persia, and now through 
 Alexander of Macedon, to do the will of the King 
 of kings, — so God speaks to us in history. Then 
 there is this Book. No man can read it long and 
 seriously without discovering in it a Spirit re- 
 buking sin, teaching noble reverence for things 
 above us, sincere respect for things about us, 
 wholesome fear of things below us; a Spirit foster- 
 ing hope, whispering peace, silencing the lips of 
 pain, discovering to us our own best gifts and life's 
 consummate crown. No man can read this Book 
 carefully and candidly without discovering in it 
 intimations of a final revelation, a revelation of 
 God to men, by which those who are blind to 
 nature's message, deaf to the call of conscience, 
 and dead to the lessons of history, may see, must 
 see, that God is a Father and that we are His 
 children. 
 
 The highest revelation of life to life is vital, 
 not mechanical, not philosophical, not epistolary. 
 How does a friend reveal himself to you? By his 
 workmanship, by his gifts, by correspondence, it 
 
THE ATHENIAN ALTAR 
 
 191 
 
 may be. Then, last and best, the friend, the 
 lover, presents himself, knocks for admission at 
 your heart's door. That is the revelation of life 
 and love. How does a mother reveal herself to 
 her child? As nurse, as protector, as teacher, as 
 everything a mother can be, until some day it 
 dawns upon the unfolding soul that motherhood, 
 brooding, sacrificial motherhood, is more than a 
 mere force; it is a life. 
 
 So God reveals Himself to us, first as Cause, as 
 Designer, as Intelligence, as Beauty, and Order, 
 and Eighteousness. But, in the fullness of time, a 
 star glides out of the East to guide us to a 
 Cradle. What is there? The beginning of the 
 revelation of Immortal Life, of Deathless Love, of 
 God no longer unknown, no longer dimly per- 
 ceived, but the unveiled light of His glory in the 
 face of Jesus Christ. Hail, Babe of Bethlehem! 
 Hail, Man of Galilee! On this altar we will write 
 Thy name, and it shall be called, "Wonderful, 
 Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting 
 Father, and the Prince of Peace." 
 
 There are three distinct types of men, classified 
 as to their knowledge of God. There are those 
 to whom there is no God. They have shut Him 
 out of their lives. No spiritual message comes to 
 them out of all the tiniverse. For them "the 
 Great Companion is dead." And the explanation 
 is in Bushnell's well known phrase, "Eeligious 
 capacity extirpated by disuse." A peculiar mean- 
 ing attaches to the word "fool" in the psalmist's 
 characterization of one who said in his heart, 
 
192 COLLEGE SEEMONS 
 
 "There is no God." It signifies, "empty, faded, 
 withered." So the person referred to is not a 
 fool in the common sense of the term, a thought- 
 less, shallow, unreasoning mind. Much less is he 
 an imbecile, incapable of thought. The world may 
 caU him wise; he may be a scholar, a philosopher. 
 But, bright as his mind may be, something has oc- 
 curred to wither up the faculties by which God is 
 apprehended. 
 
 Then there are those to whom God is unknow- 
 able. Denying the human possibility of knowl- 
 edge of the Divine, they have closed and barred the 
 doors of their minds to evidences of His revela- 
 tion. Somewhere in their lives there may be an 
 altar to the Unknown God. When they feel the 
 need of Divine fellowship, they are at the altar 
 of the Unknown God. When the longing for im- 
 mortality, "leaps like an angel from the temple of 
 their hearts" it is the soul's cry to the Unknown 
 God. When sorrows come, as sorrows must come 
 in a world where death swings his scythe in every 
 summer breeze and every winter blast, and when 
 they crave comfort such as no earthly power can 
 give, they are reaching out their hands toward the 
 Unknown God. 
 
 But there are others to whom God is, to whom 
 He is knowable, and to whom He is known. It fell 
 to the lot of Helen Keller to hear from the lips 
 of Phillips Brooks her first clear message as to 
 God. He made very plain his doctrine of God's 
 personality and of His care for us. She under- 
 stood what he said, and replied, "I knew all that, 
 
THE ATHENIAN ALTAB 193 
 
 but I did not know His name." She had known 
 Something as the sum of all goodness, the object 
 of all devotion, the sky out of which and the sea 
 into which the stream of her life was flowing. 
 Her thoughts had gone out to Him, and returned 
 in ways she did not understand, but in ways that 
 brought a strange sense of peace and joy. Whom, 
 ignorantly she had worshipped, she came to know 
 as God. 
 
 There is a realm in which God comes near to 
 us, and becomes at once the most intimate and the 
 most extensive fact in all our experience. Out on 
 the desert of Arabia, far from the nation that 
 knew God best, we hear the voice of Eliphaz, in 
 the Book of Job, urging us, "Acquaint now thyself 
 with Him, and be at peace. ' ' Again, on the plains 
 of Judea, a Man is speaking to His disciples about 
 God. He does not argue that God is; He takes 
 that for granted. He seems to be very sure of 
 God. His voice has the accent of earnestness 
 and authority. God is more real to Him than any 
 other fact or force. And strange to say. His 
 conviction of things unseen is so contagious that 
 when He speaks those who hear Him have no 
 doubt. He says, ' ' This is life eternal to know God 
 and Jesus Christ "Whom He hath sent." A new 
 note in the music of the world is sounded, and its 
 melody lifts us in spirit to fellowship with Him. 
 Strangest of all phenomena in the realm of re- 
 ligion is this, that fellowship with Him pro- 
 duces upon us exactly the effect of fellowship with 
 God. Things that are equal to the same thing 
 
194 COLLEGE SEBMONS 
 
 are equal to each other. Once He said, "No man 
 knoweth . . . the Father, save the Son," and 
 then He added, "and he to whomsoever the Son 
 shall reveal Him." So, since Jesus Christ has 
 come, and has not withdrawn His presence from 
 the world, the Infinite is not unknown, the Eternal 
 is not silent, and Faith is something more than a 
 bridge of sighs across the gulf of Time and Death. 
 
 "In Christ I touch the hand of God, 
 
 From His pure heights reached down, 
 
 By blessed ways before untrod, 
 To lift us to our crown ; 
 
 Victory that only perfect is 
 Through loving sacrifice like His. 
 
 "Holding His hand my steadied feet 
 
 May walk the air, the seas ; 
 On life and death His smile falls sweet, 
 
 Lights up all mysteries ; 
 Stranger nor exile can I be 
 
 In new worlds where Hte leadeth me." 
 
 THE END