Cornell University Library 
 
 arV15513 
 
 Sermons preached before the University o 
 
 3 1924 031 320 249 
 olin.anx 
 
The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031320249 
 

 /I 
 
 
 l-^^^tr-Ci- Jh^-i^^-^t^ 
 
 !i.i,,C/ .fvt--^ jjO^^i^ y-L-t^ yA-^ £^^^ <Stn^ '^-r-i^ ^.,.aL.t-»^ 
 
SEEMONS. 
 
Works by the Rev. R. C. Teench, B.D. 
 
 IN UNIFORM STYLE WITH THIS VOLnME. 
 I. 
 
 ON THE STUDY O.P WORDS. 
 
 1 vol. 12ino. Price 75 ceuta. 
 
 II. 
 
 ON THE LESSONS IN PROVERBS. 
 
 1 vol. ISmo. Price 50 cents, 
 
 III. 
 
 SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 1 vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents. 
 
 IV. 
 
 ENGLISH, PAST AND PRESENT. 
 
 1 vol. 12mo.. Price 75 cents. 
 
 POEMS. 
 
 1 vol. 12nio. Price one dollar. 
 
 VI. 
 
 CALDERON, HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, 
 
 WITH SPECIMENS OP HIS PLAYS. 
 1 vol. 12mo Price 75 cents. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY J. S. REDFIELD, NEW YORK. 
 
SERMONS 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 EICHAED CHENEVIX TRENCH, D. D. 
 
 DEAN OF WESIMINSTEK 
 AUTHOR OF " SYNONYMS OP THE NEW TESTAMENT" — " THE STUDY OF WORDS"- 
 "ENGLISir, PAST AND PRESENT" — *' PROVERBS" — "POEMS" — "CALDERON," ETC 
 
 RED FIELD 
 
 34 BEEKMAN STREET, NEW YORK 
 1857 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SEKMON I. 
 Chbist the Only Begotten of the Father . . page 7 
 
 SEEMON II. 
 Chkist the Lamb of God 35 
 
 SERMON in. 
 Chkist the Light of the World . 63 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 Christ the True Vine , . . 87 
 
 SEKMON V. 
 Christ THE Judge OF ALL Men 113 
 
SERMON I. 
 
 CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN OF THE FATHER. 
 
SEEMON I. 
 
 CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN OE THE FATHER. 
 
 John i. 1, 14. 
 
 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
 
 God, and the Word was God And the Word was 
 
 made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the 
 gloiy as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and 
 truth. « 
 
 All the controversies of our time, -whatever 
 questions are stirring at any depth the minds 
 and spirits of men, concentrate themselves more 
 and more around the person of Christ. " What 
 think ye of Christ ?" is more and more the ques- 
 tion, which according, as we answer, we shall 
 answer every other question; for it rules and 
 determines the answers to all. This fact, which 
 
 few, I imagine, would dispute, must not be re- 
 1* 
 
10 SERMON I. 
 
 garded as one auguring ill for the present con- 
 dition of that long conflict of faith with unbelief, 
 which in one shape or another runs throughout 
 all ages, and lies at the root of so many subor- 
 dinate conflicts which at first sight appear to be 
 remote from it. It is not as though, after all 
 the outworks had fallen, after these had one by- 
 one been assailed and taken, the defenders of 
 some beleaguered town were yet defending the 
 citadel to the last, knowing that its loss would 
 be the loss of all, that after it, nothing more re- 
 mained to defend. It is rather as when, after 
 the tide of battle has long been swaying uncer- 
 tainly hither and thither, the insight of the cap- 
 tains on either side, or the very instincts of the 
 combatants themselves, have led them to per- 
 ceive the point where victory is to be seized, or 
 defeat to be averted ; the true key of the posi- 
 tion contended for ; that which, as it is won, 
 everything will be won, no petty losses else- 
 where afiecting this result ; that which, as it is 
 lost, everything will be lost, no slight successes 
 in any other quarter at all availing to redress 
 
CHRIST THE ONLT BEGOTTEN. 11 
 
 the balance, or give back the victory which has 
 been lost. 
 
 I have, then — not indeed in any presumptuous 
 hope to add aught here to what others have 
 already spoken, yet still under the influence of 
 these convictions — chosen for my argument 
 during the month that I shall address you from 
 this place, subjects which all directly treat of 
 the person and dignities of our Lord ; which 
 treat of what he claims, or what Scripture 
 claims for him, to be. Without pretending to 
 any very strict order of sequence or coherence, 
 they yet will not be wholly without this. They 
 will all grow out of that central dignity. Word 
 of God, Only begotten of the Father, which is 
 about to occupy us this day ; and, with the ex- 
 ception of this day's discourse, they will all be 
 suggested by the services of the Sundays on 
 which they are delivered. As to-day we have to 
 do with the witness of John the Evangelist to his 
 Lord, so, next Sunday, I propose, God willing, 
 to deal with the witness of the other John to 
 Jesus, " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh 
 
12 SEHMON I. 
 
 away the sin of the. world ;" and then, in my 
 remaining discourses, with the Lord's witness, 
 under three aspects, to himself: as the Light 
 of the world, as the True Vine, and, lastly, on 
 Advent Sunday, as the Judge of all men, to 
 whom all judgment is committed, because he is 
 the Son of Man. May he of his own grace, give 
 a mouth and wisdom to speak only right things 
 of him. 
 
 By a course not altogether unusual, I have, 
 omitting the intermediate verses, connected the 
 first verse of the Gospel of St. John with the 
 fourteenth, making these to serve for my text; 
 and I have done this not without special reason. 
 For how often the G-ospel of St. John practically 
 begins for us at this fourteenth verse, " The 
 Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full 
 of grace and truth," or a verse or two earlier, 
 at the very earliest. All that goes before, as we 
 freely admit, must have its purpose and value, 
 since God has been pleased to reveal it; but 
 still for us we feel its chief value to be that 
 with it we can stop the mouths of Unitarians, 
 
CHKIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 13 
 
 or of those, rather, who call themselves such ; 
 that it proves one of the most available ■weapons 
 of controversy for the refutation of their errors, 
 and all those other errors, Arian and the like, 
 which in the end inevitably flow into theirs. 
 These are the chief purposes which that sublime 
 prologue to the fourth Gospel, that fitting vesti- 
 bule to this augustest temple, that portion of 
 Scripture which more than any other stirred the 
 marvel and admiration of the philosophical 
 heathen, and drew one and another within the 
 charmed circle of Christian truth, very often 
 seems to us as though it were intended to serve. 
 It invites us to no earnest meditation ; we do 
 not seek to lose ourselves in its wondrous depths, 
 that we may find ourselves again at heights of 
 which we dreamed not before ; we make little or 
 no attempt to place the loftier speculation of our 
 own day in relation and subordination to it. 
 The Incarnation is for us the beginning of the 
 history of Christ — his Sonship itself practically, 
 I do not say theoretically, beginning for us from 
 that date. We should reject, perhaps with some- 
 
14 SERMON I. 
 
 thing of indignation, any such statement, if it 
 were put boldly before us. And yet how often 
 Christ is regarded as the Word of God, because 
 he then, in the days of his flesh, uttered his 
 Father's word to the children of men ; the Wis- 
 dom of God, because of the wisdom manifested 
 in the carrying out of our redemption ; the 
 Image of God, because he that hath seen him 
 hath seen the Father. 
 
 We haye not, indeed, in the least denied that 
 he was Son, and Word, and Wisdom, and Image, 
 by an earlier right, by one which is out of, and 
 removed from, all conditions of time. The fact, 
 as revealed, we dutifully accept. But still we 
 do not perceive how this glory of Christ which 
 he had with the Father before all worlds, very 
 closely concerns us or our salvation. It gradu- 
 ally falls farther and farther back in our minds ; 
 our lively interest in theology only commencing 
 with the Word made flesh, as though then first 
 man's close connection with God began ; where- 
 as, indeed, it dates from the creation, or rather 
 from the divine purpose of the creation — the 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 15 
 
 Incarnatioii being not the cause and root out of 
 which that connection springs, but rather itself 
 the result and consequence thereof, the crowning 
 flower into which in due time that relation un- 
 folded itself. Nay, sometimes even the Incarna- 
 tion itself is felt as a step too early, and it is 
 the Atonement which first greatly occupies our 
 thoughts, or deeply stirs our affections. 
 
 Let us beware, brethren, lest we allow selfish- 
 ness to intrude into a region where least of all it 
 should find place, but which yet too easily may 
 become its especial haunt and home ; so that we 
 shall measure the value of truths, not by the 
 utterance which they contain of God's attributes, 
 his wisdom, his love, his righteousness, his truth, 
 not by the glory which they bring to him, but 
 solely by the bearing which they seem to have 
 on ourselves, and on our own individual spiritual 
 life. Something of this kind may perhaps be 
 traced among us now ; when the truths for which 
 Augustine struggled, the doctrines of grace, are 
 still precious and dear to us, because they seem 
 to bear, and do bear, on our every-day life, on 
 
16 SERMON I. 
 
 our daily conflict with sin and temptation ; while 
 those other truths of the eternal relation of the 
 Son to the Father, for which Athanasius strove, 
 for which he was contented to be an exile and a 
 fugitive, a dweller in caves and in wildernesses, 
 to brave the extremest wrath of the world's 
 mightiest potentate — these, with others which 
 like them seem to lie remote from our own im- 
 mediate need, awaken no lively sympathy in our 
 hearts. We confess their importance ; we should 
 strive, it may be most earnestly, against those 
 who should deliberately seek to rob us of them ; 
 we should probably then understand that they 
 were the strong substructures which, however 
 out of sight, did yet support the fabric of our 
 faith, that would be weak and tottering without 
 them ; but they are not now in any sense dear 
 and near to us, like those doctrines of grace, for 
 which Augustine witnessed, or of justification, 
 from which Luther shook the dust of ages three 
 centuries ago. Yet surely it was not for noth- 
 ing that in the early Church the word "the- 
 ology," with more special reference to its deri- 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 17 
 
 vation, was restricted to that portiou of what we 
 should call theology, which had to do with God 
 himself, with the ever-blessed Trinity, or with 
 the Son in his divine nature ; while by other 
 words, as for instance the " economy," men were 
 used to designate the appearance of the Son of 
 God in time, his life and walk in the flesh, his 
 directly redenfptive work. Those who employed 
 this language did feel, and rightly, that in God 
 the root of all theology lay ; that he was the 
 subject-matter of it, and consciously or uncon- 
 sciously they expressed this conviction by the 
 limitation which they assigned to the word. 
 
 And the dangers which beset us when we at 
 all forget this, are indeed neither few nor insig- 
 nificant. Theology, when it limits itself to the 
 immediately practical and useful, dismissing 
 everything which it does not esteem such, will 
 not long retain even that practical and useful to 
 which it has been willing to sacrifice everything 
 besides. Its pastures will lose their greenness 
 soon, its lower levels will become dry and 
 parched and barren, if they be not fed and re- 
 
18 SERMON I. 
 
 freshed from the upper springs. Its conversation 
 must be habitually in heaven, if it shall really 
 have anything which is worth the telling upon 
 earth. It is a Jacob's ladder, but angels must 
 (descend upon it, no less than ascend. If there 
 be none descending, there will in a little while 
 be none to ascend. In it we must have the 
 story, not merely of man's upward striving to 
 God ; indeed, not of this at all, except as the 
 result of God's downward looking upon men. 
 It is not the record of a religious sentiment in 
 man, a pathology of the human soul under cer- 
 tain of its higher aspects, but a record of a 
 divine revelation from God, of what he has an- 
 nounced to men •of his own being. In the fact 
 that we are sometimes forgetting this, that there 
 is so much about man, and so little about God in 
 our modem theology, lies in great part the secret 
 of its weakness ; of the feeble hold which it has 
 upon numbers who would gladly learn what God 
 has declared of himself; but who care much less 
 for any secondary notices as to the exact manner 
 in which this message has affected others ; and 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 19 
 
 least of all for what others have thought and 
 speculated about him. 
 
 If we would be delivered from these dangers, 
 and re-assert for that which is the queen-science 
 of all, her rightful dominion over the hearts and 
 spirits of men, we must learn to fall back more 
 on those transcendent truths of which the pro- 
 logue of St. John is full — to meditate on them 
 more fully and more frequently — to bring them 
 into greater prominence for ourselves and for 
 others — to believe that it was not for nothing 
 that this Scripture, or the first chapter of Colossi- 
 ans, was written. We must learn to connect our 
 Lord's manifestation in the flesh, not indeed less 
 with all which followed it, his death, his resur- 
 rection, his ascension, his glorified sitting at the 
 right hand of the Majesty on high ; but to con- 
 nect it more with that which preceded, his eter- 
 nal generation, the glory which he had with the 
 Father before the world was, the creation of all 
 worlds by him, and above all, of man, not mere- 
 ly by him, but in him, and for him, and to him ; 
 and this so really, that even had there been no 
 
18 SEEMON I. 
 
 freshed from the upper springs. Its conversatioa 
 must be habitually in heaven, if it shall really 
 have anything which is worth the telling upon 
 earth. It is a Jacob's ladder, but angels must 
 descend upon it, no less than ascend. If there 
 be none descending, there will in a little while 
 be none to ascend. In it we must have the 
 story, not merely of man's upward striving to 
 God ; indeed, not of this at all, except as the 
 result of God's downward looking upon men. 
 It is not the record of a religious sentiment in 
 man, a pathology of the human soul under cer- 
 tain of its higher aspects, but a record of a 
 divine revelation from God, of what he has an- 
 nounced to inenidf his own being. In the fact 
 that we are sometimes forgetting this, that there 
 is so much about man, and so little about God in 
 our modem theology, lies in great part the secret 
 of its weakness ; of the feeble hold which it has 
 upon numbers who would gladly learn what God 
 has declared of himself; but who care much less 
 for any secondary notices as to the exact mannep, 
 in which this message has affected others; and 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 19 
 
 least of all for what others have thought and 
 speculated about him. 
 
 If we would be delivered from these dangers, 
 and re-assert for that which is the queen-science 
 of all, her rightful dominion over the hearts and 
 spirits of men, we must learn to fall back more 
 on those transcendent truths of which the pro- 
 logue of St. John is full — to meditate on them 
 more fully and more frequently — to bring them 
 into greater prominence for ourselves and for 
 others — to believe that it was not for nothing 
 that this Scripture, or the first chapter of Colossi- 
 ans, was written. We must learn to connect our 
 Lord's manifestation in the flesh, not indeed less 
 with all which followed it, his death, his resur- 
 rection, his ascension, his glorified sitting at the 
 right hand of the Majesty on high ; but to con- 
 iject it more with that which preceded, his eter- 
 nal generation, the glory which he had with the 
 Father before the world was, the creation of all 
 worlds by him, and above all, of man, not mere- 
 ly by him, but in him, and for him, and to him ; 
 and this so really, that even had there been no 
 
20 SEEMON I. 
 
 Pall, an Incarnation, a coming forth on his part, 
 as at once the root and perfect flower of our 
 nature, would probably not the less have been. 
 
 It behooves us, indeed, to speak with hesitation 
 and modesty on a matter like this. Had there 
 been no Fall, the conditions under which that 
 transcendent manifestation of love and of honor 
 done to man must have taken place, would of 
 course have been infinitely different from those 
 under which the Eternal Son did actually ex- 
 change the form of God for the form of a ser- 
 vant, and become obedient unto death, even the 
 death of the cross. Those conditions, more glo- 
 rious seemingly, would have been less glorious 
 in reality, for they would have lacked the glory 
 of suffering, the unfathomable wonder of that in- 
 finite self-denial which stooped to the fallen and 
 the guilty, and shared the miseries of the one 
 and the penalties of the other. But the thing 
 itself, we may reverently believe, would not the 
 less have been. They only re-af&rm what has 
 been the conviction of many theologians in all 
 times, who are persuaded that the headship of 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 21 
 
 the race of man would have pertained to him not 
 the less, to whom all headship of men or of an- 
 gels rightly appertains ; all things in heaven and 
 in earth being recapitulated in him ; since only 
 in this recapitulation could the race of Adam 
 have attained the end of its creation, the place 
 among the families of God, for which from the 
 first it was designed. 
 
 In this view, the taking on Himself of our 
 flesh by the Eternal "Word was no makeshift, to 
 meet a mighty, yet still a particular emergent, 
 need ; a need which, conceding the liberty of 
 man's will and that it was possible for him to 
 have continued in his first state of obedience, 
 might never have occurred. It was not a mere 
 result and reparation of the Pall, such an act as, 
 except for that, would never have been ; but lay 
 bedded at a far deeper depth in the counsels of 
 God for the glory of his Son, and the exaltation 
 of that race formed in his image and his likeness. 
 For against those who regard the Incarnation as 
 an arbitrary, or as merely an historic event, and 
 not an ideal one as well, we may well urge this 
 
22 SERMON I. 
 
 weighty consideration, that the Son of God did 
 not in and after his ascension strip off this human 
 nature again; he did not regard his humanity 
 as a robe, to be worn for awhile, and then laid 
 aside ; the convenient form of his manifestation, 
 so long as he was conversing with men upon 
 earth, but the fitness of which had with that con- 
 versation passed away. So far from this, we 
 know on the contrary that he assumed our nature 
 for ever, married it to himself, glorified it with 
 his own glory, carried it as the form of his eter- 
 nal subsistence into the world of angels, before 
 the presence of his Father. Had there been any- 
 thing accidental here, had the assumption of our 
 nature been an afterthought (I speak as a man), 
 this marriage of the Son of God with that na- 
 ture could scarcely be conceived. He could 
 hardly have so taken it — taken it, that is, for 
 ever — unless it had possessed an ideal as well as 
 an historic fitness ; unless pre-established har- 
 monies had existed, such harmonies as only a 
 divine intention could have brought about be- 
 tween the one and the other. 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 23 
 
 What those pre-established harmonies were 
 the words of the heathen poet, but words 
 adopted and made his own by the Christian 
 Apostle, declare — " For we are all his offspring ;" 
 words, be it remembered, not addressed to the 
 regenerate, and* on the gromid of their regenera- 
 tion, but addressed by St. Paul to his heathen 
 listeners at Athens. Children of this world, 
 children of wrath, as all or nearly all of those 
 listeners may well have been when he addressed 
 them, he yet did not fear to bring them back to 
 their divine original, to remind them of the ideal 
 heights and primeval destinies of man — all for- 
 feited in Adam, and now won back and recov- 
 ered in Christ ; but which yet had been only re- 
 coverable, because they were a portion of man's 
 original inheritance ; because in the fact that 
 man was God's offspring, or God's race, the pos- 
 sibility lay that One should come forth from God, 
 he too God's Son from eternity, fulfilling this 
 name to the uttermost ; who should place his 
 shoulders under the mighty ruin of our race, 
 should arrest its fall, and so vindicate his right 
 
24 SERMON I. 
 
 to exclaim, " The earth and its inhabiters are 
 dissolved. I bear up the pillars thereof." 
 
 It seems to me, therefore, that in discoursing 
 of the Word made flesh, we may fitly, as regards 
 the redeemed, carry back our thoughts to that 
 creation of man in God's image and likeness, 
 which alone rendered an Incarnation possible. 
 We may fitly also, as respects the Redeemer, 
 declare that we regard that but as one step, the 
 last indeed, and most glorious one, of his mani- 
 festation, that he who so manifested himself then, 
 had been manifesting himself from the beginning 
 of the world ; and not of our world only ; for the 
 Apostle speaks of another and a higher world in 
 these words, " When he bringeth in the First 
 Begotten into the world he saith. And let all the 
 angels of God worship him." But yet in our 
 world also we may affirm that he had been mani- 
 festing himself long before, patriarch and prophet 
 walking in his light, encountering him, as he, the 
 Angel of the Covenant, the Captain of the Lord's 
 Host,- preluded his Incarnation by transient as- 
 sumptions of a human form. Yea, every spark 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 25 
 
 of higher life which was not trodden out in 
 heathendom, we have a right, resting on this 
 Scripture, to declare that it was he who kept it 
 alive, that this light shining in men's darkness 
 was his light, his unextinguished and inextin- 
 guishable witness in the hearts and consciences 
 of men. 
 
 When, however, the light shining in the dark- 
 ness proved ever more unable to scatter it, for 
 " the darkness comprehended it not," then there 
 followed another step in the manifestation of the 
 Eternal Word. He who was the divine ground 
 of man's being, himself became man : " the Word 
 was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we be- 
 held his glory, the glory as of the only begotten 
 of the Father), full of grace and truth." — " We 
 beheld," exclaims the Apostle, " his glory." 
 And what was the glory which he beheld ? The 
 fullness of his grace and truth. Not in the full- 
 ness of his power, not in the mighty works which 
 he wrought, or which were wrought on him, not 
 in signs and miracles and wonders, not in any of 
 these did the Apostle detect " the glory as of the 
 
26 SERMON I. 
 
 only begotten of the Father ;" but in this, that 
 he went up and down the world with words of 
 truth, and- gracious deeds of healing ; that he 
 preached the Gospel to the poor, that he stooped 
 to every need, had a heart for every wo. In 
 these things shone out the glory which the be- 
 loved disciple saw. 
 
 Oh, brethren, what potent medicine is here 
 for the pride and swellings of our souls ! We 
 have in his life of whom St. John is speaking 
 the human when it is most godlike ; nay, rather, 
 we have here man in his actual identity with 
 God. Surely this must be man, as he most 
 ought to be ; and oh ! how unlike he proves to 
 that dream of human greatness which we some- 
 times would fain realize for ourselves,- which we 
 are ready to wonder after when realized in 
 others. What a witness is here borne against 
 that worship of force — moral or immoral, it 
 matters little — to which some would so earnest- 
 ly invite us, which is only too welcome to our- 
 selves ; as though strength, if only it be strong 
 enough, contained ever an apology for itself. 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 27 ' 
 
 justified and redeemed its own excesses, became 
 a law to itself, and might own no other law; 
 the ten commandments, with their "Xiove God," 
 and " Love your neighbor," having been never 
 meant for the leading spirits of the world — so 
 that, to hear some speak, we might suppose that 
 holiness and righteousness are only one of the 
 many ways in which men are free to develop 
 themselves and their own inward life ; while if ' 
 their taste and impulses are in another direc- 
 tion, they are equally free to choose that other. 
 But here at length is the divine idea of humani- 
 ty ; the one man, about whom, if we believe any- 
 thing, we must believe that his life is normal 
 and regulative for the lives of all other men ; 
 and that life how different from, and how far 
 rebuking, those lives of " the men of the earth," 
 the proud and strong, for whom our admiration 
 is demanded. 
 
 And then, as another fruit of the Incarnation, 
 it not merely delivers us from false standards 
 of glory and of greatness, giving us for these 
 the true, but, much more than this, supplies us 
 
28 SERMON I. 
 
 with a deliverance from the same disease of our 
 spirits, when it has reached a far higher inten- 
 sity. We have thus a man whom men may wor- 
 ship, and yet not be guilty of idolatry ; whom 
 they are bound to worship, for he is also the Son 
 of God, if they would not be guilty of impiety. 
 Herein is deliverance from the last and subtlest 
 form of all idolatry, the deification and worship 
 of man, and, worst of all, of him in all which 
 constitutes his shame no less than his glory. 
 The race of mankind, growing intellectually to 
 man's estate, may outlive and leave far behind 
 every other form of false worship. It may no 
 longer fill a profaned pantheon with birds and 
 beasts and creeping things. The beneficent 
 powers of nature may no longer attract, nor the 
 blind forces of nature extort, its homage ; hero' 
 and demigod may pertain to creeds outworn and 
 a long-vanished past ; but there is an idol-wor- 
 ship which remains still behind, anid from which 
 there is no deliverance, except in him in whom 
 alone is deliverance from all idolatry, and who 
 alone satisfies the yearnings out of which it 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 29 
 
 springs. "God is man," or "Man is God" — 
 we must choose between these two statements, 
 and accept the tremendous consequences of our 
 choice. A time in the development of the his- 
 tory of our race arrives, when these are the only 
 altei-natives for every man. And if we are wil- 
 ling to believe St. Paul and St. John, be sure, 
 brethren, that the question in the end will pre- 
 sent itself to every man in a very palpable form, 
 and one from which there shall be no escape, 
 but that he must answer it one way or the other. 
 Will he accept the God-man, him who was God 
 from everlasting before he was made man ; or in 
 lieu of him, a man-god, a man that has lifted up 
 himself, and been lifted up by the consent of his 
 fellows, to this blasphemous height ? 
 
 Nor is it Scripture alone which declares this : 
 he must be blind indeed to the moral signs of 
 the times, who can not perceive this mystery of 
 iniquity, the last and the crowning one, already 
 working; this world-wide conspiracy, the same 
 of which David spake in the second Psalm, 
 spreading through an apostate Christendom 
 
32 SERMON I. 
 
 ing accepted and worshipped as such by all save 
 the little company (and they will be a little one 
 then), who shall recognise in Jesus of Nazareth 
 the only begotten of the Father, and who in the 
 strength of this confession, " I believe in Jesus 
 Christ, the Son of God," shall overcome at last 
 by the blood of the Lamb, issuing triumphantly 
 from those fires in which they shall have been 
 purified and made white and tried. To this de- 
 cision, to this solemn consummation, the world's 
 moral history, " the times of the Gentiles," are 
 travelling, and by ever faster strides. 
 
 But we must conclude, and we will do it with 
 one observation more. The Apostle who said, 
 " We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only 
 begotten of the Father," and who seemed to lay, 
 and no doubt did lay, such stress on this be- 
 holding, is the same who alone among the Evan- 
 gelists reports those words of his Lord, " Be- 
 cause thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast 
 believed ; blessed are they that have not seen, 
 and yet have believed." This is the abiding 
 blessedness, the blessedness which is equally for 
 
CHRIST THE ONLY BEGOTTEN. 33 
 
 all. With spiritual eyes (and after all it was 
 only with these that the beloved Apostle himself 
 beheld the glory of his Lord ; without these he 
 might have seen him, as so many others did, yet 
 never seen his glory) — with spiritual eyes we 
 too may " behold the glory as of the only begot- 
 ten, full of grace and truth." Beholding him, 
 we may be transformed into his image and like- 
 ness ; worshipping him, we may be delivered 
 from every false worship ; believing on him, we 
 may receive power to become all which " sons 
 of God," that name which we have borne from 
 our baptisms, involves. 
 
SERMON II. 
 
 CHRIST THE LAMB OF GOB. 
 
SBEMON II. 
 
 CHEIST THE LAMB OF GOD. 
 
 John i. 29. 
 
 The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, 
 Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the 
 world. 
 
 It has been sometimes asked and debated, to 
 which of the lambs of sacrifice, ordained in the 
 Old Testament, did the Baptist here refer ; with 
 which did he liken that immaculate Lamb, who, 
 being without spot and stain, should take away 
 our spots and stains, and bear the coUectiye sin 
 of the world. Did St. John allude to the daily- 
 lamb of the morning and evening sacrifice? — or 
 was it to the lamb of the passover, commemora- 
 ting the old deliverance from Egypt? — or was 
 
38 SERMON 11. 
 
 it to some other of the many lambs which were 
 prescribed in the law of Moses, as a portion of 
 the ritual of sacrifice appointed there? The 
 question is surely a superfluous one. The refer- 
 ence is not special, but comprehensive. It is to 
 none of these in particular, being indeed to them 
 all. They severally set forth in type and in fig- 
 ure some part of that which He fulfilled in sub- 
 stance and in full ; in him, not now a lamb of 
 men, but the Lamb of God, being at length ful- 
 filled to the uttermost the significant word of 
 Abraham, " God will provide himself a lamb." 
 
 The disciples of John understand the intention 
 with which he thus designated Jesus unto them ; 
 they understand it, if not at the first designa- 
 tion, yet at the second ; and as the Evangelist 
 tells us (he probably was himself one of the two 
 disciples, Andrew being the other), they "heard 
 him speak, and they followed Jesus." They 
 quitted one master, and joined themselves to an- 
 other. There was a drawing, attractive power 
 in that word about the Lamb, the taker a,way 
 of the world's sin, which no other word pos- 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OF GOD. 39 
 
 sessed or could possess. At a later day, Christ 
 himself declared, " I, if I be lifted up, will draw- 
 all men unto me." Already this potent draw- 
 ing had begun. Set between two magnets, the 
 disciples showed at once which was the mightier 
 of the two. John indeed had met many needs 
 of men's spirits — their need of repentance, of 
 confession of sin, of amendment of life ; but 
 there were other needs which he could not meet. 
 The spirit of man cries out for something deeper 
 even than these, something which shall reach 
 farther back ; which shall not be clogged with 
 sinful infirmities, as his own repentance even at 
 the veiy best must be. Men cry for some work 
 to rest upon, which shall not be their work, and 
 thus underlying the weaknesses of everything 
 human, but which shall be God's ; perfect, com- 
 plete, to which nothing need be added, from 
 which nothing can be taken away. They feel 
 that behind and beyond their repentance, even 
 though that repentance be wrought by the Spirit 
 of God, there must be something which God has 
 not so much wrought in them, as for them ; and 
 
40 SERMON II. 
 
 that on this they must rest, if they are to find 
 abiding peace for the soul; a rock to flee to, 
 which is higher than they ; higher than their re- 
 pentance, than their faith, than their obedience, 
 even than their new life in the Spirit. Now this 
 Rock is Christ ; and John pointed to this Rock, 
 and the two at once understood him. They had 
 longed after amendment of life, and John had 
 helped them thus far ; but they yearned for more 
 than this, for atonement, propitiation, ransom, a 
 conscience purged from dead works by the blood 
 of sprinkling, and John could not help them 
 here ; except indeed by directing them to Jesus, 
 as in these memorable words he did, " Behold 
 the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of 
 the world." 
 
 It is impossible to estimate too highly the sig- 
 nificance of these words, or the place which, in 
 a true scheme of Christian doctrine, they must 
 assume. As the Church understands them, they 
 set forth our Lord in his central' function ajid 
 of&ce, as the one perfect sacrifice, " the Lamb of 
 God ;" they set forth the effectual operation of 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OP GOD. 41 
 
 his sacrifice of himself, as a bearing, and a bear- 
 ing away, of the world's sin. They may there- 
 fore fitly constitute our starting-point from which 
 to consider what the Church's doctrine of the 
 atonement, or of the sacrifice of the death of 
 Christ, and of the consequences which follow 
 thereupon, may be ; and this, with especial refer- 
 ence to objections brought against this doctrine, 
 as failing to commend itself to the conscience, as 
 indeed outraging that sense of right, that revela- 
 tion anterior to all other revelations, which God 
 has planted in the heart ; as a doctrine there- 
 fore, which, however it may seem to be in Scrip- 
 ture, however a superficial interpretation of cer- 
 tain passages may favor this impression, it is 
 impossible can be truly there. 
 
 The gravity of the matter thus brought to 
 issue none can deny, nor yet the very serious 
 and far-reaching consequences which must fol- 
 low, if, while the word " sacrifice" should in- 
 deed be left us, all wherein the essence of 
 sacrifice consisted, as mainly its vicarious and 
 satisfactory character, were to be exploded from 
 
42 SERMON II. 
 
 the New Testament. One of the first of, these 
 consequences would be a loosening, that I say 
 not a dissolution, of the bonds between the Old 
 Testament and the New. There can be no ques- 
 tion that in the Old, the doctrine of sacrifice, of 
 the vicarious suffering of one for another, of sat- 
 isfaction resulting thereupon, everywhere pre- 
 vails. If there is nothing of this in the New, if 
 this is Jewish only and not Christian as well, if 
 Christ, for instance, is only the Lamb of God 
 because of his innocence and purity, and not be- 
 cause of his sacrificial death, if he takes away 
 the sin of the world only in the way of summon- 
 ing and enabling men to leave off their sins, all 
 bonds between the New Testament and at least 
 the Levitical sacrifices of the Old are broken. 
 These last point to nothing. They are a huge 
 husk without a kernel ; types without their ante- 
 type ; shadows, but not " shadows of the true," 
 and thus with no substance following ; a promise 
 without performance ; an elaborate and enor- 
 mous machinery for the effecting of nothing. 
 That which hitherto has ennobled those sacri- 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OP GOD. 43 
 
 fices in our eyes, was the truth which they fore- 
 showed. Let them have foreshowed nothing of 
 the kind, and they sink down at once to a level 
 with the heathen sacrifices ; nay, not merely to 
 a level with those, as those have hitherto been 
 regarded by us, but they drag down to a far 
 lower depth the heathen and themselves to- 
 gether. Hitherto the heathen sacrifices, hideous 
 distortions of the true as they so often were, yet 
 were not without a certain terrible grandeur of 
 their own. A ray of the glory of Calvary fell 
 upon them, and, dark as they remained, yet did 
 not leave them all dark. They were blind feel- 
 ings after the cross of Christ, passionate outcries 
 for it; they were lies indeed, yet lies which 
 cried after the truth. But take from Christ's 
 cross its character of an altar, and from his 
 death its character of a sacrifice, and at once the 
 Levitical sacrifices no longer remain as shadows 
 of the true, and the heathen cease to be remote 
 resemblances of the same. Let the doctrine of 
 Christ's death as being a vicarious atonement 
 and satisfaction be dismissed from the New Tcs- 
 
44 SERMON II. 
 
 tament, on the ground of its contradiction to the 
 righteous moral instincts of humanity, and it is 
 impossible consistently to maintain the divine 
 character of large portions of the Old. 
 
 But let us a little consider what the objections 
 are, which are now being made to the Church's 
 doctrine of the atonement, and what the answers 
 which they seem to demand. And first in regard 
 to this discussion it may be generally observed, 
 that it is not sufficient to reply to these objec- 
 tions out of Scripture ; the very argument of the 
 objectors being, that the meaning we attach to 
 our Scripture proofs can not be the right one, re- 
 volting, as it does, that sense of righteousness 
 and justice which is God's gift to men anterior 
 to all other gifts, that earliest revelation of him- 
 self which no later one can ever gainsay or set 
 aside, but into harmony with which each later 
 must be brought. We must seek our arguments 
 elsewhere. We must endeavor first to show, 
 and, confined within the narrow bounds of a sin- 
 gle discourse, I shall limit myself to this — how 
 that truth which we affirm, does not ofl'end, but 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OF GOD. 45 
 
 indeed commends itself to, the moral sense ; by 
 manifestation of the truth commending ourselves 
 and it to the consciences of men. 
 
 The objection, then, as I take it, to Christ's 
 vicarious offering — for I wiU first deal with this 
 — to the assertion that he died not merely for 
 the good of, but in the room and in the stead of, 
 others, tasted death for them, commonly assumes 
 this form. Must not righteousness, it is said, be 
 the law of all God's dealings ? Most of all, must 
 we not expect to find consistent with highest 
 righteousness that which is the most solemn and 
 awful dealing of G-od with his creatures ? But 
 how is it agreeable with this, how can it be 
 called just, nay, how can it be acquitted of ex- 
 tremest injustice, to lay on one man the penalties 
 of others, so that he pays the things which he 
 never took, so thai they sin and he is punished, 
 on him being laid the iniquities of them all ? 
 What have we here, an adversary will insist, 
 but in the awfuUest sphere of all, and in matters 
 the most tremendous, the same injustice which, 
 even in least things, provokes our indignation ; 
 
4b SERMON II. 
 
 as, for instance, when some playfellow of a 
 young prince is constituted, as we may some- 
 times have read of,, to suffer the consequences 
 of his idleness ; so that one neglects his tasks, 
 and another is chastised ; one plays the truant, 
 and another bears the smart ? 
 
 But the case is not in point ; and, since it has 
 been started, it might be worth our while to 
 make it in point, and then to consider whether 
 it presents itself in any aspect so monstrous and 
 absurd. To make it in point, the parts which 
 the several persons sustain must, in the first 
 place, be reversed. It must be that the young 
 prince suffers for his humbler truant companions, 
 not one of them for him ; it must be that he does 
 it, not of compulsion or constraint, but of his own 
 free will ; it must be that only such an act as 
 this would overcome their perversity and idle- 
 ness ; that he offers himself to this correction, 
 knowing that nothing else would overcome it, 
 and that this would be effectual to do so. A 
 submission with this knowledge to the punish- 
 ment of their faults and negligences and short- 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OP GOD. 47 
 
 comings might be strange, even as all acts of 
 condescending self-offering love are str.ange in a 
 world of selfishness and pride ; but surely there 
 would be nothing in it either monstrous or ridic- 
 ulous. 
 
 And exactly in the same way, when we hear 
 it urged, How can it be righteous io lay on 
 one man the penalties of others ? surely we 
 must feel that the question, to be effectually 
 answered, needs only to be more accurately 
 put ; that the form which it ought to assume is 
 this, How can it be righteous for one man to 
 take upon himself the penalties of others ? and 
 none who remember the " Lo ! I come" of the 
 Saviour, the willing sacrifice of our Issac, pre- 
 figured by his who climbed so meekly in his 
 father's company the hill of Moriah — none, I 
 say, who remember this, will deny our right to 
 make this change ; while surely the whole aspect 
 of the question is now by this little change al- 
 tered altogether. For how many an act of 
 heroic self-sacrifice, which it would be most un- 
 righteous for others to demand from, or to force 
 
48 SERMON II. 
 
 on, one reluctant, ■which indeed would cease to 
 be heroism or sacrifice at all, unless wholly self- 
 imposed, is yet most glorious when one has free- 
 ly ofiered himself thereunto ; is only not right- 
 eous, because it is so much better than righteous, 
 because it moves in that higher region where law 
 is no more known, but only known no more be- 
 cause it has been transfigured into love. Where- 
 in else is the chief glory of history but in those 
 deeds of self-devotion, of heroic self-offering, 
 which, like trumpet-tones sounding from \ the 
 depths of the past, rouse us, at least for a while, 
 from the selfish dream of life to a nobler exist- 
 ence ; and of which if the mention has become 
 trite and common now, it has only become so 
 because the grandeur of them has caused them 
 to be evermore in the hearts and on the lips of 
 'men. Vicarious suffering, it is strange to hear 
 the mighty uproar which is made about it ; when 
 indeed in lower forms — not low in themselves, 
 though low as compared with the highest — it is 
 everywhere, where love is at all. For indeed is 
 not this, one freely taking on himself the conse- 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OP GOD. 49 
 
 quences of other's faults, and thus averting from 
 those others at least in part the penalties of the 
 same, building, what others have thrown down, 
 gathering what others have scattered, bearing 
 the burdens which others have wrapped to- 
 gether, healing the wounds which others have 
 inflicted, paying the things which he never took, 
 smarting for sins which he never committed ; is 
 not this, I say, the law and the condition of all 
 highest nobleness in the world? — is it not that 
 which God is continually demanding of his elect, 
 they approving themselves his elect, as they do 
 not shrink from this demand, as they freely own 
 themselves the debtors of love to the last penny 
 of the requirements which it makes ? And_ if 
 these things are so, shall we question the right 
 of Grod himself to display this nobleness which 
 he demands of his creatures ? Shall we wish to 
 rob him of tjie opportunity, or think to honor 
 him who is highest love, by denying him the 
 right, to display it ? 
 
 But the sufferings and death of Christ were 
 not merely vicarious ; they were also satis- 
 
60 SERMON II. 
 
 factory ; and thus atoning or setting M one, 
 'bringing together the Holy and the unholy, 
 who could not have been reconciled in any other 
 way. When we speak thus, we are sometimes 
 taunted at the outset with the fact that the word 
 " satisfaction," as applied to the death of Christ 
 and its results, nowhere occurs in Scripture ; so 
 belongs to the later Latin theology (Anselm 
 being the first to employ it), that the Greek 
 theology does not so much as possess the. word 
 — I mean of course any Greek equivalent for it. 
 This is true ; but though the word " satisfac- 
 tion" is not in Scripture, the thing is everywhere 
 there, and we are contending not about words, 
 but things ; the idea of it is inherent in ransom, 
 in redemption, in propitiation, in scriptural 
 words and phrases and images out of number; 
 and just as in the Arian controversy, the Church 
 had a perfect right to the " homo-ousionj" care- 
 less whether the word were in Scripture or no, 
 so here to " satisfaction," seeing that this best 
 expresses and sums . up the truth which in this 
 matter she holds. 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OF GOD. 51 
 
 But, not to tarry longer with this objection at 
 the threshold, how, it is further urged, could 
 G-od be well pleased with the sufferings of the 
 innocent and the holy ? What " satisfaction," 
 since we will have this word, could he find, in 
 these ? Here, as so often, the faith of the 
 Church is first caricatured, that so it 'may be 
 more easily brought into question. Could God 
 have pleasure in the sufferings of the innocent 
 and the holy, and that innocent and holy his 
 own Son ? Assuredly not ; but he could have 
 pleasure, nay, according to the moral necessities 
 of his own being, he must have pleasure, yea, 
 the highest joy, satisfaction, and delight, in the 
 love, the patience, the obedience, which those 
 sufferings gave him the opportunity of display- 
 ing, which but for those he could never have dis- 
 played ; above all he must have rejoiced in these 
 as manifested in his own Son. For even we our- 
 selves, when we read in story of those who for 
 the love of their fellows have made their lives 
 one long patient martyrdom, or who, witnessing 
 for the truth, have been borne from earth in the 
 
52 SERMON II. 
 
 fire-chariot of some shorter but sharper agony, 
 do we not feel that we have a right to rejoice in 
 these martyrs of truth and love, yea, in the very- 
 pains and sufferings which they endured ? that 
 only as the nerves of our own moral being are 
 weak and unstrung, only as we have become in- 
 capable not merely of doing, but even of appre- 
 ciating, what is noble and great, do we grudge 
 them those pains, do we wish for them one of 
 these to have been less ; seeing that these were 
 the conditions of their greatness, that without 
 which it could never have been shown, without 
 whic]i it might never have existed ? 
 
 Even the heathen moralist could say of God 
 in his dealings with good men, '^fortiter amat ;" 
 there is no weakness in his love ; it is love ac- 
 cording to which he does not spare his own, but 
 thrusts them forth to labor and difficulty and 
 pains, in which alone they can be perfected ; 
 even as the, same heathen could affirm that G-od 
 had joy in nobly suffering men ; not, of course, 
 for the sufferings' sake, but for the virtues which 
 were manifested therein. And should not the 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OP GOD. 53 
 
 God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ have 
 pleasure in the faith, the love, the obedience of 
 his Son ? Yea, it was a joy such as only the 
 mind and heart of God c^uld contain, that in 
 his Son this perfect pattern of self-forgetting, 
 self-offering love was displayed. We do not 
 shrink from accepting in the simplest sense the 
 assertion of the Apostle, that Christ, giving him- 
 self for us on the Cross, became therein and 
 thereby " a sacrifice of a sweet-smelling savor" 
 unto God ; that he was well pleased therewith, 
 and said at length what he would never else 
 have said, " I have found a ransom." 
 
 Christ satisfied herein — not the divine anger 
 — but the divine craving and yearning after a 
 perfect holiness, righteousness, and obedience in 
 man, God's chosen creature, the first-fruits of his 
 creatures ; which craving no man had satisfied, 
 but all had disappointed, before. There had 
 been a flaw in every other man's escutcheon ; 
 every other, instead of repairing the breach 
 which Adam had made, had himself left that 
 breach wider than he found it. But here at 
 
54 SERMON II. 
 
 length was one, a son of man, yet fairer than 
 all the children of men, one on whom the Par 
 ther's love could rest with a perfect compla- 
 cency, in regard of whom he could declare, 
 " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
 pleased," in whom he had pleasure without stint 
 and without drawback. And that life of his, 
 the long self-offering of that life of love was 
 crowned, consummated, and perfected, by the 
 sacrifice of his death, wherein he satisiied to the 
 uttermost every demand which God could make 
 on him, and satisfied for all the demands which 
 God had made upon all the other children of 
 men, and which t|iey had not satisfied for them- 
 selves. 
 
 But if the question is here asked. How could 
 one man satisfy for many ? how by one man's 
 obedience could many be made righteous ? the 
 answer is not far to seek. The transcendent 
 worth of that obedience which Christ rendered, 
 of that oblation which he offered, the power 
 which it possessed of countervailing and coun- 
 terbalancing a world's sin, lay in this, that he 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OF GOD. 55 
 
 who offered these, while he bore a human nature, 
 and wrought human acts, was a Divine person ; 
 not indeed God alone, for as such he would never 
 have been in the condition to offer ; nor man 
 alone, for then the worth of his offering could 
 never have reached so far ; but that he was God 
 and man in one person indissolubly united, and 
 in this person performing all those acts, man that 
 he might obey and suffer and die, God that he 
 might add to every act of his obedience, his suf- 
 fering, his death, an immeasurable worth, steep- 
 ing in the glory of his divine personality all of 
 human that he wrought. Christ was able so 
 summarily to pay our debt, because he had an- 
 other and a higher coin in which to pay it than 
 that in which it was contracted. It was con- 
 tracted in the currency of earth ; he paid it in 
 the currency of heaven. Nor was it, as some 
 among the schoolmen of the Middle Ages taught, 
 that God arbitrarily ascribed and imputed to 
 Christ's obedience unto death a value which 
 made it equal to the needs and sins of the world, 
 such a value as it would not have had but for 
 
56 SERMON 71. 
 
 this imputation. We afBrm rather with the 
 deeper theologians of those and of all times, who 
 crave to deal with realities, not with ascriptions 
 and imputations, that his offering had in itself 
 this intrinsic value, that there was no ascription 
 to it, as of God's mere pleasure, of a value which 
 it did not in Itself possess ; for then the same 
 might have been imputed to the work of an angel 
 or of a saint; the whole exclusive fitness of the 
 Son of God undertaking tlie work would then 
 pass away ; and another might have made up the 
 breach as well as he. We af&rm rather that 
 what the Son of God claimed in behalf of that 
 race whereof he had become the representative 
 and the Head, he claimed as of right — although, 
 indeed, that right was one which the Father as 
 joyfully conceded as the Son demanded. With- 
 out a satisfaction such as this the eternal inter- 
 ests of that righteousness whereof God is the up- 
 holder in his own moral universe would not have 
 permitted him to be, as he now is, the passer-by 
 of transgression, the justiiier and accepter of the 
 ungodly-. 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OP GOD. 67 
 
 Such, my brethren, is the Church's faith in re- 
 spect of the atonement. That atonement is not, 
 as some would persuade us, a one-sided act ; it 
 looks not one way only, but two ; having a face 
 with which it looks toward God, as well as one 
 with which it looks toward man. It is no mere 
 reconciling of man to God, as though its object 
 were to remove the distrust, to kill the enmity 
 in man's heart, to persuade him to throw down 
 Tiis arms, and yield himself the vanquished of 
 eternal love. It is most truly this, but it is 
 much more than this. It is a reconciling not 
 merely of man to God, but of God to man; 
 whose love could not have gone forth upon the 
 children of men in its highest forms, in those of 
 forgiveness, acceptance, renewal, if this had not 
 found place. Think not then, my brethren, of 
 Christ the peace maker, as though he came only 
 to announce peace ; to say to the doubting and 
 distrustful children of men, " Why will ye re- 
 main at such a miserable and guilty distance 
 from your heavenly Father, when his arms are 
 stretched out to receive you, when he is only 
 
58 SERMON II. 
 
 waiting to enfold you within them ?" No doubt 
 Christ did come bringing this message, did pro- 
 claim that those arms were open, that heavenly 
 Father' waiting to be gracious, but he only 
 brought this inasmuch as he made the peace 
 which he announced. " Having made peace 
 (si^rjvo'^roijjfl'aff) by the blood of his Cross," " he 
 entered into the holiest of all, having obtained 
 (or, having }amB&\i found, eu^a^usvos) eternal re- 
 demption for us." In him and through him,' 
 through the sacrifice of death, the disturbed, and 
 in part suspended relations between God and 
 his sinful creatures, were reconstituted anew; 
 his blood being shed to cleanse men from their 
 sins, and not to teach them that those sins need- 
 ed no cleansing, and could be forgiven without 
 one. 
 
 And will any faith which is short of this faith 
 satisfy the deepest needs and cravings of your 
 souls ? You may struggle against it with your 
 understandings ; though, I think, very needless- 
 ly ; for it seems to me to approve itself to the 
 reason and the conscience, quite as much as to 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OP GOD. 59 
 
 demand acceptance of our faith ; but you will 
 crave it with your inmost spirits. There are 
 times whee, perhaps, nothing short of this will 
 save you from a hopeless despair. Let me im- 
 agine, for example, one, who with many capaci- 
 ties for a nobler and purer life, and many calls 
 thereunto, has yet suffered himself to be entan- 
 gled in youthful lusts, has stained himself with 
 these ; and then after a while awakens, or rather 
 is awakened by the good Spirit of God, to ask 
 himself. What have I done ? How fares it with 
 him at the retrospect, then, when he, not wholly 
 laid waste in spirit, is made to possess (oh, fear- 
 ful possession !) the sins of his youth ? Like a 
 stricken deer, though none but himself may be 
 conscious of his wound,* he wanders away from 
 his fellows ; or if with them, he is alone among 
 them, for he is brooding still and ever on the 
 awful mystery of evil which he now too nearly 
 knows. And now too all purity, the fearful in- 
 nocence of children, the holy love of sister and 
 of mother, and the love which he had once 
 dreamed of as better even than these, .with all 
 
60 SERMON II. 
 
 which is supremely fair in nature or in art, 
 comes to him with a shock of pain, is fraught 
 with an infinite sadness ; for it wakens up in him 
 by contrast a livelier sense of what he is, and 
 what, as it seems, he must for ever be ; it re- 
 minds him of a Paradise for ever lost, the angel 
 of God's anger guarding with a fiery sword its 
 entrance against him. He tries by a thousand 
 devices to still, or at least to deaden, the undy- 
 ing pain of his spirit. What is this word sin, 
 that it should torment him so ? He will tear 
 away the conscience of it, this poisonous shirt of 
 Nessus, eating into' his soul, which in a heedless 
 moment he has put on. But no ; he can tear 
 away his own flesh, but he can not tear away 
 that. Go where he may, he still carries with 
 him the barbed shaft which has pierced him ; 
 
 " haeret lateri letalis arundo." The arrow which 
 
 I 
 
 drinks up his spirit, there is no sovereign dittany 
 which will cause it to drop from his side — none, 
 that is, which grows on earth; but there is, 
 which grows in heaven, and in the Church of 
 Christ, the heavenly enclosure here. And you 
 
CHRIST THE LAMB OP GOD. 61 
 
 too, if such a one be among us, may find ^our 
 peace, you will find it, when you learn to look 
 by faith on him, " the Lamb of God, that taketh 
 away the sin of the world." You will carry, it 
 may be, the scars of those wounds which you 
 have inflicted upon yourself to your grave ; but 
 the wounds themselves he can heal them, and 
 heal them altogether. He can give you back 
 the years which the cankerworm has eaten, the 
 peace which your sin had chased away, and, as 
 it seemed to you, for ever. He can do so and 
 will. " Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be 
 clean, wash me, and I shall be whiter than 
 snow" — this will be then your prayer, and this 
 your prayer will be fulfilled. The blood of 
 sprinkling will purge, and you will feel yourself 
 clean; Your sin will no longer be yourself^ 
 you will be able to look at it as separated from 
 you, as laid upon another, upon One so strong 
 that he did but for a moment stagger under the 
 weight of a world's sin, and then so bore, that 
 bearing he has borne it away for ever. 
 
SERMON III 
 
 CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 
 
SERMON III. 
 
 CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE "WORLD. 
 
 JoHK viii. 12. 
 
 Then spake Jesus unto them again, saying, I am the Light 
 of the world ; lie that fblloweth me .shall not walk in darkness, 
 but shall have the light of life. 
 
 An attentive and thoughtful student of the 
 Gospel of St. John will scarcely have failed to 
 observe the manner in which almost everything 
 there seems to revolve round certain leading an- • 
 titheses — as few as they are comprehensive, as 
 simple as they are sublime. The spirit and the 
 flesh, truth and falsehood, life and death, or, as 
 here, light and darkness, these recur continual- 
 ly ; the burden of the highest and deepest things 
 of the kingdom of God, and of that other king- 
 
66 SERMON III. 
 
 dom opposed to his kingdom, is laid upon them ; 
 and they answer all purposes, and meet every 
 need. It is the very character of genius even in 
 things earthly and uninspired, that with simplest 
 implements and fewest materials it brings dbout 
 the mightiest and most marvellous results. Ex- 
 actly so is it here, in a yet higher sphere ; in 
 that not of human genius, but of divine inspira- 
 tion. The Lord himself, and the Evangelist who 
 has learned not merely to record, but to think 
 and speak his Lord's language, move among 
 these few, but at the same time vast and compre- 
 hensive contrasts, and by their aid set forth to 
 us the life in God, which is life, and the life out 
 of God, which is death ; all that is to be sought, 
 and all that is to be shunned ; they set forth this 
 as no accumulation of words and images, no pomp 
 of rhetoric could ever have availed to do it. 
 
 There are those to whom the diction of the 
 Evangelist in its extreme simplicity, the lan- 
 guage of the Lord himself, as he utters himself 
 in this fourth Gospel, will seem poor at a first 
 acquaintance with it; but just as St. Paul de- 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 67 
 
 clared " the foolishness of God is wiser than 
 men," so, with the example of his bold utterance 
 before us, we also may be bold to say, " the pov- 
 erty of God is richer than men," than all the 
 treasures of their eloquence, than all the wealth 
 of their words ; and never does a conviction of 
 this come home to us with greater force than 
 when we study as we ought the Gospel and Epis- 
 tles of St. John. How simple, for example, and 
 yet how far-reaching the words before us : "I 
 am the Light of the world ; he that foUoweth me 
 shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the 
 light of life." They move in a sphere of imagery 
 the most obvious, light and darkness being, so to 
 speak, primary moral symbols, symbols respect- 
 ively of knowledge and of ignorance in the intel- 
 lectual world, of good and evil in the ethical. I 
 suppose that no nation has ever existed on 'the 
 earth which has shifted and reversed the signifi- 
 cance of these symbols ; for whom light has rep- 
 resented ignorance and evil, or darkness knowl- 
 edge and good ; and it is quite inconceivable 
 that such a reversing of their significance should 
 
68 SERMON III. 
 
 ever suggest itself to any. The symbolism is an- 
 terior to, and independent of, all agreement ; it 
 admits of no discussion ; it is incapable of any 
 change ; being rooted in those mysterious corre- 
 spondencies between the natural and moral world, 
 which bear testimony at once to their own inhe- 
 rent and unchangeable fitness. Angels are and 
 ever will be regarded by us as clothed with light, 
 in shining robes ; yea, God himself will clothe 
 himself for all with light as with a garment, will 
 dwell in light inaccessible, will be the light as - 
 the life of men ; while the kingdom of evil will 
 be contemplated evermore as a kingdom of dark- 
 ness, and evil works as deeds of darkness ; even 
 as an element in the glory of the heavenly Jeru- 
 salem has been set forth to us under these words : 
 " There was no night there." 
 
 fiut to consider these words more nearly, I 
 would entreat you to observe, my brethren, how 
 the Lord assumes in them, as in so many other 
 of his words, as indeed more or less distinctly in 
 all his words, a central position in respect of the 
 whole family of mankind ; so that ail men stand 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WOULD. 69 
 
 in a relation to him in which they do not stand 
 to one other, or to any child of man except only 
 to himself. He presents himself, not as other 
 men are, a point, it may be an important one, but 
 still a point, in the vast circumference of humani- 
 ty. He is rather the centre to which the lines 
 from every other point converge ; from which 
 they diffuse themselves again. And in respect 
 of this, how different is Christ's self-assertion, 
 from the self-negation of every other good and 
 holy man. Every other, in proportion as he is a 
 good man and true, rejoices to make himself noth- 
 ing, to divest himself of every glory and of every 
 claim. The Baptist was great (we have an an- 
 gel's word for it), but when his countrymen 
 asked him, " Who art thou ? what sayest thou of 
 thyself?" the utmost he would claim was, to be 
 " a voice crying in the wilderness ;" he was, he 
 proclaimed, of the earth, and being earthly, spake 
 of the earth, and seemed to rejoice in words of 
 self-dispar agemen t . 
 
 But while he and every other godly man thus 
 abdicates every claim, puts back, at least before 
 
70 SERMON III. 
 
 God, the honor which others would thrust upon 
 him, while every other thus makes himself noth- 
 ing, Christ, on the contrary, makes himself every- 
 thing. He puts himself, 1 will not say into the 
 foremost rank, for that would ill express the fact, 
 but into a rank quite by himself. And yet' he 
 who did so, was, as we know, the meek and the 
 lowly one, was clothed with humility, came seek- 
 ing not his own glory, but the glory of his Par 
 ther ; while for all this no words are too large, 
 no statements too magnificent, for him to utter 
 in respect of himself. All the weary and heavy 
 laden in this vast wilderness of wo are to come 
 to him; he has rest and refreshment for them 
 ^11. He predominates over all human relations, 
 the nearest and the holiest ; to love father or 
 mother better than him, is not to be worthy of 
 him. He is the Bread of God, which men may 
 eat of and not die — the Resurrection and the 
 Life — the Way, the Truth, and the Life — the 
 True Vine — or^ as here, the Li^ht of the world. 
 Surely this fact, this contrast between Christ's 
 language about himself, and other good men's 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 71 
 
 language about themselves, may well give rise to 
 profound meditations ; the conclusions which we 
 may deduce from it are of infinite importance. 
 How many heresies which have torn the Church 
 it ought to have rendered for ever impossible. 
 For how impossible is it to reconcile these dec- 
 larations of the Lord about himself with any 
 other view of the dignity of his person save that 
 which the Catholic Church in all ages has held. 
 He is either that which the Church teaches him 
 to be — or that which we may well decline to 
 utter in an assembly of Christian men. There 
 is no other alternative. If these declarations 
 which Christ makes about himself are true, then 
 all temporizing middle positions, Arian, and 
 Unitarian, are such as it is impossible to main- 
 tain. Men can not rest in them for long; but 
 must either rise higher, that is, to the faith of ^ 
 the Church in respect of her Lord ; or else sink 
 lower, and renounce the Lord of glory as a de- 
 ceiver, or a deceived. For as many as accept 
 the Evangelists' record of our Lord's words as 
 perfectly representing what he did utter, unmod- 
 
TJ, SERMON III. 
 
 ified, uncolored by prejudices and prepossessions 
 of the relater,- every other position but one of 
 these, is one merely of transition, is one logically 
 untenable, and is sooner or later discovered to b 
 so, and forsaken. 
 
 A man might claim, for instance, to be a light, 
 as John " was a burning and a shining light ;" 
 but what man to be the light? Or he might 
 claim to be the light of some single age or some 
 single people, though in a very secondary and 
 subordinate sense ; but to be " the light of the 
 world," who but the Creator of the world could, 
 without intolerable presumption, such as would 
 convict him to be not light at all, but darkness, ' 
 claim to be this ? Others indeed, who had 
 caught some scattered rays of his brightness be- 
 fore he rose visibly above the horizon, had been 
 the light of this land or of that ; of this age or 
 the other. But, as was said, in how secondary 
 and subordinate a sense ! They brought trvths, 
 but they never brought the truth, to their fellow- 
 men ; for the truth is one, whole and complete, 
 and to bring it was reserved for him, who has 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OP THE WORLD. 73 
 
 the truth, because he is the Truth. And then, 
 the truths ■which they brought, those fragments 
 broken from the great body of the truth, how far 
 mingled with falsehoods they were, how much 
 weakened by contradictions, by contradictions in 
 the teaching, by contradictions in the lives, of 
 those that brought them. Extensively, over 
 what narrow regions the spiritual dominion 
 which they wielded, reached ; intensively, how 
 few the hearts which owned homage to them, 
 and oftentimes how slight the homage which they 
 owned. But he -is the light of the whole world. 
 It is of him as of the natural sun in the heavens, 
 whereof the Psalmist has said, " His going forth 
 is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit 
 unto the ends of the earth, and there is nothing 
 hid from the heat thereof." 
 
 Nay, some would make these words to reach 
 further still. A great teacher of the Greek 
 Church is very earnest that we should not limit 
 " the world" here to that world which we inhab- 
 it, but should give the word a wider, and, as he 
 
 believes, its proper extension. Christ is the 
 4 
 
74 SERMON III. 
 
 light, he urges, not of this world, but of all 
 worlds ; the unity of that creation of God, 
 whereof this world is only a province, demand- 
 ing that not man only, but all the hierarchy of 
 heaven, angels, principalities, and powers, should 
 behold the glory of the Father in the Son, that 
 in his light they should see light ; so that to re- 
 fuse or reject him is to put ourselves out of har- 
 mony with all creation, with the moral law not 
 of this world only, but of all worlds. I will not 
 at the present pause to inquire whether this ex- 
 tended meaning may be justly given to Christ's 
 language here ; whether he is claiming here to 
 be the light-bringer and light-giver to all crea- 
 tion, as indeed he is; and not to our world 
 alone. The words have a meaning sufficiently 
 august, when we limit them to our own world, 
 which he, the Sun of righteousness, illumines; 
 and this meaning will abundantly occupy us 
 to-day. 
 
 But in what senses, it may be asked, is Christ 
 the light of the world? In many. He is the 
 light, inasmuch as the Spirit which proceeds 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OP THE WORLD. 75 
 
 from him, which neVer would have reached men 
 except through him, that Spirit, being a holy 
 Spirit, preseryes them ih whom he dwells from 
 those sins which cloud the intellect and darken 
 the understanding, quite as surely and effectually 
 as they defile the heart and lay waste the affec- 
 tions. It is the mists of earth, the steam and 
 vapors rising up from beneath, which blot out 
 the heavenly constellations above. Now he pre- 
 vents these mists from gathering, or scatters 
 them when they are gathered ; and thus the en- 
 trance of his word giveth light — or, as the 
 Psalmist boldly declared, he had more under- 
 standing than the ancients ; — and why ? because 
 he kept the commandments. Christ is thus the 
 true educator of the intellect of man, inasmuch 
 as he is the only purifier of the heart of nian. 
 brethren, of how many men it is true that 
 they must be better men, holier men, before ever 
 they can be wiser men ; that they have been 
 bribed to perverse conclusions of their intellects 
 by the corrupt affections of their hearts, that 
 only through these they have arrived at those ; 
 
76 SERMON III. 
 
 for God, by an unchanging law of his moral uni- 
 verse, scatters his penal blindnesses as the pun- 
 ishment of our unlawful desires ; and that prom- 
 ise of Christ, " If any man will do his will, he 
 shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God" 
 — that promise has its darker side also, upon 
 which it is not a promise, but a threat : If any 
 man will not do his will, he shall not know of 
 the doctrine whether it be of God. 
 
 I do not, of course, pretend to say that there 
 are not kinds of knowledge as much within the 
 reach of the impure as the pure, of the proud 
 as the humble — in which men may make prog- 
 ress, yea, and win the garland, such as it will 
 be, quite irrespective of their moral condition. 
 But so soon as aver a moral element mingles with 
 any study — and how soon it does so, how well- 
 nigh impossible it is, except in the domain of 
 pure science, to keep it aloof — then at once they 
 are at a disadvantage ; and the larger this moral 
 element, the nearer the relation which any study 
 bears to God and the knowledge of him, by so 
 much the greater the hinderance they will find. 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OP THE WORLD. 7i 
 
 " Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall 
 see God;" and each approach to this purity, 
 each advance in it, is a cleansing and brightening 
 of that mirror in which alone the truth, which is 
 God's daughter upon earth, can be discerned; 
 each allowed impurity, be it of the flesh or of the 
 spirit, a tarnishing and darkening of the same, 
 so that it shall give no clear and undistorted im- 
 age back. 
 
 But Clirist is " the light of the world" in a yet 
 higher sense, for it is possible to conceive one 
 higher ; not merely as preserving clear and pure 
 and undistorted, the medium through which 
 knowledge can be attained ; not merely as keep- 
 ing healthy and single the eye by which it is dis- 
 cerned; — he not merely enables men thus to ac- 
 quire truth, but he is " the fountain light of all 
 our seeing" by a yet higher title, as he is the 
 truth ; for he that hath seen him hath seen the 
 Father ; and the Father we know is light, and in 
 him is no darkness at all. Such then as the 
 Father is, such is the Son, " light of light ;" the 
 light of the world, as bringing into it the true 
 
78 SERMON III. 
 
 knowledge of God, the light of the knowledge 
 of the glory of God shining in the face of Christ 
 Jesus, and from him reflected upon us. When 
 he came, the people that sat in darkness (and all 
 people sat in darkness, though some in thicker 
 than others), saw a great light; and wherever 
 men loved that light, and came to it, and did not 
 hide themselves from it, there all the foul and 
 hideous forms of superstition and error, which 
 the slime of the earth had gendered, perished at 
 his presence, as in heathen legend the brood of 
 the Python died beneath the glittering shafts of 
 the god of day. 
 
 Let me add, too, that Christ being the central 
 person of all time, in whom the history of the old 
 world ended, from whom the history of the new 
 world began, he has, or rather himself is, " the 
 key of knowledge," the key to the right under- 
 standing of all mythology, all history, all philos- 
 ophy, all art, with each other more serious and 
 earnest activity of the mind of man. And they 
 who, casting him aside, or leaving him out, who 
 saying of him, " What is this man more than an- 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OP THE WORLD. 79 
 
 other ?" seek to enter into the understanding of 
 any of these, are as men that having some hard 
 problem to solve, first deliberately exclude the 
 only right solution, and, this done, perplex 
 themselves endlessly with seeking an explana- 
 tion which they have themselves rendered it im- 
 possible that they can ever find. 
 
 In these ways then, brethren, is Christ " the 
 light of the world ;" and the promise which he, 
 as such, makes is this, that he who foUoweth him 
 " shall not walk in darkness, but have the light 
 of life." This walking in darkness, which is the 
 result of not following him, what is it? We 
 must not suppose, for the most part, that it is 
 anything which overtakes a man all of a sudden. 
 Little by little, by unmarked insidious approach- 
 es, the darkness which is in him (and there is 
 darkness in every man) encroaches on the light, 
 advances its own frontiers, narrows the domain 
 of the light ; and then if, as is too often the case, 
 what is once lost is never won back, no gains 
 compensating continual losses, the darkness in 
 the end covers all. To walk in darkness, it is 
 
80 SERMON III. 
 
 to see the lode-stars of our spiritual heaven, the 
 truths by which we live, going out one by one — 
 to watch them each day waxing fainter and dim- 
 mer and remote, with less of comfort, with less 
 of guidance in them, till at length they disappear, 
 and our eyes see them no more ; these disappear- 
 ing lights being not merely the special truths of 
 revelation and of the life in Christ, but all where- 
 by any moral jjeing is sustained in the soul — be- 
 lief in God, in goodness, in the freedom of the 
 will, in duty, in responsibility, in immortality, in 
 an answer beyond the grave for the things done 
 in the body. To relax our hold on all these, to 
 suffer them one by one to be taken from us, and 
 to feel, it may be, content, well pleased to let 
 them go, this is to walk in darkness. 
 
 This surely is the saddest of all, when men 
 thus accept their darkness, acquiesce in it, are 
 better pleased with the darkness in which all 
 may be huddled up, than with the light which 
 shows and searches out all. It is sad enough to 
 have the world, and our own place and meaning 
 in it, as an unsolved riddle to us, the burden of 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OP THE WORLD. 81 
 
 the mystery weighing on us with a weight which 
 sometimes threatens to crush out the life of our 
 spirits. But it is a far sadder thing yet, when 
 all this ceases to be a riddlS or mystery to us at 
 all, not because we have read it in the light of 
 faith, not because that has made all things plain, 
 but because we have reiwmiced all hope, all 
 care, all desire to have it solved at all, because 
 we have learned to smile as with superior scorn 
 on the past perplexities of our spirits, on the ob- 
 stinate questionings, the " What am I ?" and 
 " Where am I ?" and " Whither am I tending ?" 
 which visited us once ; and, dismissing all these 
 as the hypochondria of the spirit, have come to 
 regard the world as a convenient feeding- trough, 
 being resolved to make it yield what it can yield 
 after its kind in the shape of pleasures or honors 
 or riches or enjoyments, to shut in our spirits 
 within the limits of these earthly things, to mind 
 them, to acknowledge and trouble ourselves with 
 
 nothing beyond. This is a cure indeed of the 
 sickness of the spirit ; but it is the cure of death : 
 there may be calm now, if it deserve this name, 
 
82 SERMON III. 
 
 where there were restless agitations before ; but 
 it is the hopeless calm of the grave. 
 
 Nor may we suppose, my brethren, that dark- 
 ness, spiritual darkness at least, is a mere ab- 
 sence 'of light. It is itself an evil power and 
 presence in the soul. There is, and there can 
 be, no vacuum in th« heart of man. What the 
 truth does not fill, lies will fill. Who does not 
 obey the one, must obey the other. They are 
 Satan's slaves who will not be Christ's freemen, 
 and in one shape or another they must do his 
 work, and receive his wages. It was boldly 
 said by one of old, " All the way to heaven is 
 heaven" — perhaps over-boldly said, by one who 
 forgot for a moment what life has of burden and 
 of toil even for the faithful man. And yet these 
 words have their truth ; and being true, they are 
 true also in their converse ; and if all the way to 
 heaven is heaven, God blessing even now with 
 infinite blessings his servants that walk in that 
 way, so too, which is the same truth on its sadder 
 and its sterner side, all the way to hell is hell : 
 
 Vestibulum ante ipsnm, primisque in faucibus Orci 
 Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curse, 
 Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tiistisque Senectus. 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT (JP THK WORLD. 83 
 
 In that '■'■forlorn old age" how awfully does the 
 great religious poet of Rome put the last terri- 
 ble touch to his picture ; in that single epithet 
 summing up all — the life which is life no longer, 
 the vita non vitalis, in which all springs of joys 
 are dried up, in which the man has overlived 
 himself, his joys, and, which perhaps is sadder 
 still, even his sorrows — the life, it may be, 
 which in its outward desolation and abandon- 
 ment, without honor," without love, is only too 
 faithful an index of that which is within — the 
 life from which all the grace and ornament of 
 life have departed ; till he that bears is now 
 weary of it, and desires only to creep by obscure 
 and narrow passages to his grave. 
 
 Which of us, my brethren, would have this the 
 end? And yet our lives may only too easily 
 have such an issue as this. Such an issue lies 
 in wait for every one of us. Look around you, 
 and see, of how many who began well, with far 
 other auspices, is there presently occasion to 
 mourn for the defeated promise of their youth, 
 for the spring ■vy^ljich no snmmer followed, for the 
 
84 SERMON HT. 
 
 buds which never unfolded into flowers. You 
 have known some such, who for a time walked, 
 if not with a personal Saviour, yet with high 
 purposes, and no ignoble scheme for their life ; 
 but who now have quite gone back from these, 
 and are well-nigh ashamed that they ever enter- 
 tained them. Surely it is a matter of deepest 
 interest, one which concerns each of us most 
 nearly, to discover where the flaw was, what 
 hindered the orderly development of a spiritual 
 life in them ; how it befell that having come out, 
 at least in part, into the light, the darkness over- 
 took them again. The fault and the flaw was 
 here, in the leaving out of that all-important con- 
 dition which the Saviour puts — "He that fol- 
 loweth me. shall not walk in darkness." Com- 
 munion with a personal God and Saviour, a 
 patient following, of him, this is the one condi- 
 tion of indeed coming out of the darkness of 
 nature into the light of grace ; and, having come 
 out, the one condition of abiding in that light 
 and not being again swallowed up by that dark- 
 ness from which we seemed to have escape^. 
 
CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 85 
 
 They whom we deplore, forgot this ; they set 
 before them, it may be, some lofty ideal for their 
 lives to which they were determined to conform ; 
 but it was one of their own fashioning ; and they 
 relied for its carrying out on innate forces of 
 their own ; and thus the world was too strong 
 for them, and not they for the world. They had 
 not calculated on the strength, the subtlety, the 
 pertinacity of the opposing forces which it would 
 bring to bear against them. The impulses which 
 first bore them forward to do battle with it, 
 were presently spent and exhausted ; they had 
 no power to renew them, and no other to supply 
 their place. Had they leaned upon a higher 
 strength, had their eyes been toward the Lord, 
 had they followed him, then they too, like the 
 warriors of Gideon, might have been often 
 " faint," but, like them, they would still have 
 been " pursuing." The darkness might have 
 gathered round them for a while, but, children 
 of the light and of the day, they would presently 
 have emerged from it again. 
 
 " He that followeth me shall have the light 
 
86 SERMON III, 
 
 of life." Be it ours, brethren, to make this 
 glorious promise our own. For "to have the 
 light of Ught," what is it ? It is to be in fel- 
 lowship with him who is at once the light and 
 the life of men; and in this fellowship to be- 
 come more and more a child of light, for whom 
 the darkness is now past, the darkness of a self- 
 ish, the darkness of a prond, the darkness of an 
 miholy heart, and for whom the true light now 
 shineth. That light thoa mayest make, if thou 
 wilt, more and more thine own, mayest clothe 
 thyself with it, tiU it be to thee armor of light, 
 at once a sun and a shield, a glory and a de- 
 fence. Arrayed in this, thou mayest pass un- 
 harmed through aU the temptations of this 
 world; till thou, being brought at length into 
 a meetness for the inheritance of the saints in 
 light, shalt stand, all unawares it may be, with- 
 in the gates of that heavenly City, which need- 
 eth neither sun nor moon, " for the glory of the 
 Lord doth lighten it, and the Lamb is the light 
 thereof." 
 
SEEMON IV. 
 
 CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 
 
SERMON IV. 
 
 CHRIST THE TRUE VISfE. 
 
 John XV. 1, 2. 
 
 I am the true Vine, and my Father is the husbandman. 
 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away; 
 and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may 
 bring forth more fruit. 
 
 In this image of the Tine and the vine branch- 
 es, the mystical union which is between Christ 
 and his people, the closeness and the reciprocity 
 of it, he in them, and they in him, is set out 
 more distinctly than perhaps in any other figu- 
 rative language which holy Scripture employs. 
 This union does not lie at all in some of the 
 leading images which are there employed to set 
 forth this relation ; as, for instance, in Christ as 
 
90 SERMON IV. 
 
 the good Shepherd, the faithful as his sheep. It 
 is only brought in, as it were by a certain force, 
 into others ; as in Christ the living corner-stone, 
 his people the lively stones built upon him : al- 
 though it is a singular evidence of the manner in 
 which the sacred writers were full of this blessed 
 truth of Christ's innermost union with his peo- 
 ple, that in an image so little seeming to favor, 
 or even to tolerate, it as that of the dead stones 
 of the building, it does force its way, and Christ 
 becomes a living comer-stone, " in whom all the 
 building groiveth unto a holy temple in the 
 Lord." Here, however, there is no need of any 
 such forcing. This union lies naturally in the 
 words. It is indeed the truth, which above all 
 other truths the language that our Lord uses, 
 suggests; and which therefore, having these 
 words for our text, will most fitly occupy us to- 
 day. 
 
 It needs not curiously to inquire here what 
 was the immediate motive for the selection of 
 this image; whether, as some suppose, a vine 
 had entwined its tendrils round the guest-cham- 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 91 
 
 ber, where tke Lord and his disciples had par- 
 taken of their last and ever-memorable meal; 
 or, as others suggest, that, having left that cham- 
 ber, they were now passing through some vine- 
 yards on their way to the brook Cedron and the 
 garden beyond ; or that Christ alludes to that 
 famous vine, all of solid gold, with which, as a 
 symbol of the theocracy, Herod had adorned the 
 temple he rebuilt, and silently contrasts himself 
 with it. No one of these suppositions much com- 
 mends itself to us ; they are all, moreover, unne- 
 cessary. The Lord required no such suggestions 
 from without. The entire kingdoms of art and 
 of nature lay ever open before his eyes, with all 
 the most secret essences of things, for him to 
 select from their ample treasure-house what best 
 suited his present need, whatever would best em- 
 body that spiritual truth which he now was fain 
 to declare. 
 
 So far as Christ did receive a suggestion to 
 these words, it was one derived from those many 
 passages in the Old Testament in which Israel, 
 or the people of God, is spoken of under the 
 
92 SERMON IV. 
 
 type and image of a Vine ; and in this fact we 
 have the explanation of that " true" (" I am the 
 true Vine") which he claims for himself. For 
 whenever he uses this word " true" about him- 
 self, or whenever St. John uses it about him, he 
 claims, or it is claimed for him, not so much that 
 he is the true as contrasted with the false, but 
 rather the perfect as distinguished from the im- 
 perfect, as differenced from that which falls 
 short of, and only incompletely realizes, its own 
 ideal, only partially fulfils the promise which, 
 according to its name, it made. Thus when 
 elsewhere Christ announces of himself, " I am 
 the true bread that came down from heaven," he 
 does not deny that Moses gave to the people 
 bread from heaven, for " man did eat angels' 
 food ;" he only afi&rms that it was not such that 
 a man might eat thereof and not die ; that it 
 was not, as his flesh was, the food and medicine 
 of immortality. So again, when St. John says 
 of him, " that was the true light," he would by 
 no means imply that every other was a meteor 
 or an ignis-fatuus, misleading and betraying, but 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE TINE. 93 
 
 only that his relation to " the Father of Lights" 
 transcended that of every other, and was indeed 
 absolute and supreme ; so that no higher could 
 be conceived. 
 
 Exactly in the same way in this "I am the 
 true Vine," Christ does not deny, but rather al- 
 low, to Israel the title of God's vine, which is so 
 often given to it in Scripture, as in that 80th 
 Psalm, " Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt ; 
 thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it ;" 
 and again, in another place, " I planted thee a 
 noble vine, wholly a right seed." What he does 
 af&rm is, that Israel was not God's true vine ; 
 that it did not answer, but disappointed and de- 
 feated, the expectations and intentions of him 
 that planted it. Israel was an empty vine, 
 bringing forth fruit to itself, and not to him. 
 Elect though that people had been, the salvation 
 of the nations was not, as it might have been, in 
 it ; the nations did not, as fruitful suckers, at- 
 tach themselves to it. The goodly plant which 
 he had planted on the mountains of Israel was 
 turned into the degenerate plant of a strange 
 
94 SERMON IV. 
 
 vine unto him — " the vine of the earth," whose 
 clusters, after infinite long-suffering, were gath- 
 ered and cast into the great wine-press of the 
 wrath of Almighty God, and trodden there. 
 Still for all tMs there had been a time when 
 Israel was most really God's vine, just as it. was 
 God's son (" out of Egypt have I called my 
 son") ; while yet even then it was not his true 
 Son, any more than his true Vine, inasmuch as 
 it fell infinitely short of all which one name and 
 the other involved. 
 
 Christ, then, in that " true" not contrasting 
 himself with the natural vine, but, so to speak, 
 with the morale with that which only in part ful- 
 filled the promise of its name, claims for himself 
 to be the single one to whom this title by highest 
 title competed, in whom alone its promise was 
 completely fulfilled; who, trodden in the wine- 
 press should yield, as none other had yielded or 
 could yield, the wine that maketh glad the heart 
 of God and men. 
 
 I asked you last Sunday to observe the calm 
 yet deliberate self-assertion of our Lord ; and I 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 95 
 
 shall not urge this again. You will not, how- 
 ever, fail to note how it repeats itself here. 
 And in further following up of a not dissimilar 
 meditation you will note as well, how all things 
 fairest and loveliest in the natural world are vin- 
 dicated for himself by him, who is " fairer than 
 the children of men," and who claims all these 
 as weak types and faint reflections of his perfect 
 beauty." Thus the light is lovely, and the con- 
 dition of beholding all loveliness, and we have 
 heard him saying, "I am the Light of the 
 world." The starrj- host of heaven presents a 
 spectacle of unequalled magnificence; of this 
 host he singles out the best and brightest for his 
 own, and proclaims, " I am the bright and the 
 Morning Star." Thus, too, the vine being every- 
 where in Scripture by just right the type of all 
 things fair and gracious and fruitful, he who is 
 altogether lovely appropriates this name also as 
 his own ; — " I am the true Vine" — the kingdom 
 of nature being a prophecy of the kingdom of 
 grace ; even as the kingdom of grace is a fulfil- 
 ment of those prophecies of nature ; and he who 
 
96 SERMON IT. 
 
 SO spake, herein affirming that he is the kingdom 
 of grace realized to the full whatever was faintly 
 shadowed forth by the vine and the vine branch- 
 es in that of nature. 
 
 But what was it, we may reverently ask, which 
 enabled him to speak this language? How is 
 he this true Vine, the root and stock and stem 
 of a new humanity ? Is it in his human nature, 
 as the Man Christ Jesus ? or is it as he is the 
 Son of the Father, and himself God from ever- 
 lasting? Neither answer would be perfectly 
 complete. "We should answer rather, as he, be- 
 ing God and Man, was one Christ. There need- 
 ed indeed his Godhead, underlying his manhood, 
 and penetrating it through and through with its 
 own potency and power ; else he could not have 
 been life-giving, having life in himself, a divine 
 energy which he communicated to others. But 
 there needed also in him who should be the true 
 Vine, whereof men should be the branches, a 
 veritable humanity as well. Only by sinking 
 himself in our nature, by himself becoming the 
 very root out of which it grew, could he have 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 97 
 
 spread aiid_ diffused himself through a race of 
 regenerate renewed men, only by himself becom- 
 ing partaker of a human nature, could they have 
 become partakers of a divine. Being God, he 
 has his roots in heaven ; for the natural order 
 which places the roots below, and the branches 
 above, is here inverted ; and from these roots 
 our life is drawn. Being man, he has also what 
 without this manhood he could never have had, 
 his branches upon earth, or men for his brethren. 
 Neither then as God exclusively, nor as man ex- 
 clusively, is he the true Vine, but as, being God 
 and man, the divine and human are united and 
 married in one Christ. 
 
 He proceeds, " And my Father is the husband- 
 man." Here, as so often, Christ's greatness goes 
 hand in hand with his humility, and he himself 
 brings them into closest contact. He who de- 
 clares himself to be the true Vine, in the same 
 breath declares his Father to be the husbandman 
 — the husbandman, as the place of the words 
 plainly shows, of the whole Vine ; not of the 
 branches only, but of the stock and stem as well. 
 
98 SERMON IV. 
 
 Our Lord will by no means exclude himself from 
 his heavenly Father's husbandry; for he too 
 brought his own will into submission to his Fa- 
 ther's, drank of the cup which his Father had 
 mingled, was pruned to the quick by the knife 
 of affliction which his Father bore for him as 
 well as for others ; in all points learned obe- 
 dience by the things which he suffered ; and only 
 through this, his own obedience to death, became 
 the author of everlasting salvation to all them 
 that obeyed him. 
 
 But while Christ thus does not exclude him- 
 self from his heavenly Father's husbandry, it is 
 not of himself that he is chiefly speaking, when 
 he says, " My Father is the husbandman;" — of 
 us rather, of the branches, not of the stem ; as 
 they need this husbandry far more ; the best 
 needing to be pruned, the worst requiring to be 
 taken away. The best, that is the fruit-bearing, 
 need to be pruned. " Every branch in me that 
 beareth fruit, he purgeth [or pruneth] it, that it 
 may bring forth more fruit." There is some- 
 thing very noticeable here, a certain austerity, 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 99 
 
 which we may sometimes mark even in the very 
 promises of God. The fruit-bearing branches, 
 how shall it fare with them ? what reward shall 
 they have ? They shall be pruned ; their too 
 luxuriant shoots shall be checked, whicli often- 
 times can only be done by a far sharper disci- 
 pline, a far keener use of the pruning-hook, than 
 they ■ivould willingly have chosen for themselves. 
 Christ pledges the faithfulness of his Father, that 
 he, the great Vine-dresser, in that his very faith- 
 fulness will not leave his own without that chas- 
 tening which they shall need for their perfection ; 
 this chastening being itself a part of their re- 
 ward. It is one of those mysterious promises, 
 which sound so strangely except to the ears of 
 faith ; greatly resembling that other which the 
 Lord made to the two aspiring disciples — "Ye 
 shall drink of my cup ;" " Ye shall be baptized 
 with my baptism ;" drink of his cup of pain, be 
 baptized with his baptism of suffering ; which, 
 threat as it would have sounded in carnal ears, 
 was as a promise in theirs ; and did not repel, but 
 rather allured and drew them yet closer to him. 
 
"100 SERMON IV. 
 
 And not less significant the intention of this 
 their pruning — " that they may bring forth more 
 fruit," more fruit of faith, of patience, of love. 
 My brethren, of how many of God's dealings 
 with his elect have we here the explanation. 
 We sometimes wonder with regard to some of 
 these, that he should cast them again and again 
 into the crucible of trial; it seems, to us as 
 though they were already refined gold. But he 
 sees that in them which we do not see, a further 
 fineness which is possible ; and he will not give 
 over, till that be attained. It is just as in a por- 
 trait by some cunning artist, which is now draw- 
 ing near to its completion. Men look at it, and 
 count it perfect, and are well-nigh impatient that 
 the artist does not now withhold his hand, and 
 declare it finished ; while he, knowing better, 
 touches and retouches, returns again and again 
 to his work. And why? Because there floats 
 before him an ideal of possible excellence at 
 which he has not yet arrived ; but which he will 
 not rest nor be content till he has embodied in 
 his work. It is thus with God and some of his 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 10> 
 
 * 
 
 elect servants. Men, seeing their graces which 
 so far exceed those of common men, wonder 
 sometimes why they should suffer still ; why they 
 seem to be ever falling from one sorrow to an- 
 other. But he sees in them that which no other 
 eye can see — the grace which is capable of be- 
 coming more gracious still ; and in his very 
 faithfulness he will not deprive them, or suffer 
 them to come short, of this. They are fruit- 
 bearing branches, and because they are so, he 
 purges them, " that they may bring forth more 
 fruit." My brethren, how blessed must G-od's 
 service be, when he can give nothing better to 
 his servants in reward of their obedience, than 
 the ability to serve him more and better ; and, if 
 we may safely judge from the analogy of the pas- 
 sage before us, and other like ones, how different 
 must heaven itself be from the anticipation and 
 imagination of carnal men. They seem to think 
 that a certain amount of disagreeable, unwel- 
 come work for God must be here undergone, that 
 so they may be excused and exempted from all 
 work hereafter ; we gathering from these Scrip- 
 
102 SERMON IV. 
 
 tures rather, that heaven is aot a ceasing to 
 work for God, but is work in a wider sphere, 
 and in the spirit of a freer, more joyful obe- 
 dience ; according to those wonderful words of 
 the Apocalypse, " His servants shall serve him ;" 
 they shall rule over their ten cities in recognition 
 of their ten talents duly laid out : just as on the 
 other hand the penalty of not bearing fruit is the 
 not being able to bear, the very capacity of ser- 
 vice being withdrawn and taken away. 
 
 For we must not leave out of sight this side of 
 our Lord's words : " Every branch in me that 
 beareth not fruit, he taketh away." First, how- 
 ever, observe that "in me" — "every branch in 
 me;" for there is the stress of their guilt whom 
 these barren branches represent; inasmuch as 
 there lay the possibility of their fruitfulness. 
 The;' are branches in him/eLud yet for all this 
 barren and unfruitful ; joined to him, and yet 
 not receiving- life from him, the channels by 
 which his grace might have been received into 
 their souls being obstructed by sin and unbelief. 
 In their baptisms they were ingrafted upon him ; 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 103 
 
 they were made branches in him; and yet they 
 would not draw life from him ; but refusing him, 
 chose rather to draw death Yrom the stock of 
 that old corrupt nature, which they might have 
 now disowned and utterly renounced. There- 
 fore they are " taken away." But, putting the 
 whole of this passage, and not merely the two 
 verses which constitute my text, together, there 
 is a step before this in the progress of their 
 doom, " they are withered ;" and a step after 
 thisj "they are burned;" or putting all in their 
 order, they are first withered, then taken away, 
 and then burned. They are withered — the life 
 of their souls, the joy, the hope, the faith, the 
 love, all these dry up. How should they not, 
 when the fountains which should feed them are 
 stopped, or at least all connection with these 
 fountains broken off? What a mournful thing, 
 this withering of which the Lord speaks, and yet 
 how frequent ! Strange as it may sound, how 
 many a man has followed himself to his own 
 gr.ive. He is no mourner (would he were, for 
 then there might still be hope), but he is an 
 
104 SERMON IV. 
 
 assister at the grave of his own better hopes 
 and holier desires, of all in which the true life 
 of his soul consisted, which is all dead and 
 buried, though he, a sad survivor of himself, still 
 cumbers the world for a while. 
 
 And then the inward separation becomes an 
 outward as well ; the withered branch is taken 
 aw^y. It does not retain even in appearance its 
 connection with the vine. A slightest touch will 
 cause it to fall off, for there is no vital cohe- 
 rence, but only external contact, between it and 
 the living stem. The lightest occasion, the most 
 trivial temptation, will be sufficient to bring out 
 the fact that the man has already inwardly fallen 
 away from his Lord, that all vital union between 
 them has ceased. 
 
 And last of all, the withered branches are 
 gathered into bundles and burned. No wood so 
 unfit as the vine for any work but its own; as 
 the prophet Ezekiel significantly taught. If not 
 fit for its own work, it is fit for nothing. And 
 therefore " they are burned." Let us leave this 
 doom in the fearful mystery in which God's 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 105 
 
 word has shrouded it. Sufficient to remember, 
 and there may be a fearful analogy to this in the 
 spiritual world, that we do not make fuel of 
 wood than can be turned to any nobler uses and 
 ends ; but that we do so without remorse of that 
 from which all these better uses have for ever 
 passed away. 
 
 But, my brethren, how shall we gather up in 
 brief for ourselves the teaching which this Scrip- 
 ture contains. Leaving many secondary lessons, 
 we will endeavor to draw its central lesson from 
 it, to urge this, and to ask you to carry this 
 away with you. Christ is the Vine, ye are the 
 branches. It is not that you may le branches ; 
 but you are branches, in virtue of your Christian 
 profession, and that great sacramental act in 
 which you were sealed to Christ, and engrafted 
 upon him. You are branches ; but branches 
 dead, or branches alive — branches barren, or 
 branches fruit-bearing — branches which he will 
 prune, or branches which he will take away — 
 that is another question ; and it is a question 
 which you must decide. There are two roots 
 5* 
 
106 SEEMON IV. 
 
 out of which you may grow, from which you may 
 derive your life, the root of Adam, and the root 
 of Christ. The first, the root of Adam, is a bit- 
 ter root, a corrupt root, and can only impart to 
 you of its own bitterness and corruption. The 
 other, a new root, though indeed the oldest of 
 all, is a sweet root, and you may draw from it 
 of the sweetness it contains. It has indeed been 
 profoundly said, that the whole spiritual history 
 of the world, and of every man in the world, re- 
 volves round two men, Adam and Christ, fitly 
 therefore called the first Adam and the second ; 
 these being, so to speak, the two poles of hu- 
 manity, the one a fountain of death to all, and 
 the other a fountain of life, overcoming that 
 death, to as many as will receive life of him. 
 So indeed is it ; and the great question for every 
 one of us is this. To which of these will we be- 
 long? with which cast in our lot? from which 
 draw the life which we live in this world, the 
 words we speak, the thoughts we think, the 
 deeds we do? To the first, to the old Adam, 
 we must belong by natural birth and generation ; 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 107 
 
 to the second we can only belong by grace, by a 
 free act of God's will, by the divine regenera- 
 tion, by a birth from above, called in Scripture 
 by many and wonderful names — ra new creation, 
 a becoming as little children, a passing from 
 death to life, a being translated out of the king- 
 dom of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear 
 Son — and which, availing ourselves of the im- 
 agery supplied by the subject before us, we might 
 fitly call, a being broken off from tlie root of the 
 old Adam, and a being effectually grafted in 
 upon the new. I say effectually; for the first 
 initial act of this engrafting, though all-impor- 
 tant, though the germ, if duly unfolded, of every- 
 thing which follows, may yet come to nothing. 
 There are regenerate (I use the word in the 
 sense of the Prayer-Book and of the ancient 
 Church), who yet are never truly renewed; who 
 stop short at this first act, an act which might have 
 unfolded itself into the whole Christian life, but 
 which does not so in them. There are branches 
 in Christ which yet may cease to be such ; and 
 being dead, must be taken away, and gathered 
 
108 SERMON IV. 
 
 into bundles, and burnci-i See then, I would 
 say, that this regeneration which is once and for 
 all, unfold and complete itself in a renewal, 
 which must be day by day ; see that, being 
 branches in him, ye be also branches which he 
 will own, which draw their life from him, which 
 he may prune (for which is there that needs not 
 this ?) which he may prune to . the quick, but 
 which he shall not take away ; which shall bear 
 fruit, and whose fruit shall remain. 
 
 And if it be asked by any. How shall we be 
 such ? he himself gives the answer, " Abide in 
 me, and I will abide in you." Union with 
 Christ, this is the secret of all fruitfulness. 
 And if again it is asked. How shall we abide ? 
 it may be answered, first, by believing that we 
 have been made partakers of Christ; and then 
 by continual acts of faith on him ; falling back 
 evermore upon him ; hiding ourselves from the 
 stress of temptation, from the storm of trial in 
 the secret of his pavilion — the life we live in 
 the flesh living it by faith in the Son of God — 
 whatsoever we do, doing it in the name and in 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. 109 
 
 the spirit of the Lord Jesus. We abide in him 
 by acts of constant and earnest prayer, by the 
 study and devout meditation of his holy Word, 
 by meeting him often in the communion of his 
 Holy Sacrament ; even as, in respect of this last 
 means of abiding, it is very noticeable that these 
 words about the Vine and vine branches, this 
 " Abide in me, and I in you, follows immediate- 
 ly in time on the institution of the Sacrament 
 of union, the festival of Christ's blessed body 
 and blood. And so shall he abide in you ; and 
 you, who without him can do nothing, with him 
 shall be enable'd to do all things ; you shall bear 
 much fruit; and that, not such fruit as some 
 bear now, grapes of gall to set their own teeth 
 on edge in the end, apples of Sodom, which how- 
 ever fair to look on at the first, shall one day 
 fill their own mouths with ashes and with dust. 
 Oh, brethren, we have surely something better, 
 something wiser to do with our lives than that 
 which so many do with theirs, who spend the 
 first half of those lives in making the other half 
 miserable, in bringing to a baleful ripeness the 
 
110 SERMON IV. 
 
 bitter fruit, which they must themselves here- 
 after eat in sorrow and confusion, and perhaps 
 in despair. 
 
 And if when we invite you to this, the past 
 discourages you, past negligences, past sins, past 
 barrenness, so that you have now well nigh no 
 heart to undertake the work set before you, that 
 past, I would say, may indeed humble, but I do 
 not think it need discourage you. You remem- 
 ber, perhaps, the comfort with which the great 
 Athenian orator and patriot sought to strength- 
 en and encourage the spirits of his countrymen in 
 their final struggle with Philip. " If," he used to 
 say, " we had done all that we might, if we had 
 been watchful as we should have been, if we had 
 put forth our strength wisely and well, and yet 
 were in such evil condition as we are, we might 
 then with good reason despair. But seeing we 
 must own that we have not done so, that all this 
 has come upon us because we have been careless, 
 self-indulgent, wanting providence to foresee a 
 danger, and promptness- to meet it, there is a 
 good hope that if we take another course, our 
 
CHRIST THE TRUE VINE. Ill 
 
 affairs -will take another course as well." Exact- 
 ly so is it, brethren, with some of us. If we had 
 prayed earnestly, and yet no more had come of 
 it than has come ; if we had striven manfully 
 against sin, and yet sin had obtained so great a 
 dominion over us as it has ; if we had faithfully 
 fulfilled the conditions of our baptismal covenant, 
 and yetj notwithstanding, had so often and so 
 gi'ievously fallen ; if we had sought to abide in 
 Christ, and yet had remained barren and unfruit- 
 ful as, alas ! we are, we might then indeed justly 
 despair ; might let our hands hang down, and 
 the stream of our corruptions bear us whither it 
 would ; we might drift to our ruin without one 
 effort or one struggle more. 
 
 But it has not been so. Things have gone 
 backward with you, because you have been at 
 no pains that they should do anything else ; 
 because, without a miracle, such a miracle as 
 you have no right to expect, they could not have 
 done otherwise ; because there have been a thou- 
 sand wastes to your baptismal grace and no re- 
 plenishings ; much outgoing, and little or noth- 
 
112 SERMON IV. 
 
 ing incoming; because you have prayed little 
 and coldly and formally, or it may be, have not 
 prayed at all ; because you have nourished no 
 secret life with God in the reading and medita- 
 tion of his Word ; have forsaken his holy Table, 
 or, if you have drawn nigh to it, have so come 
 that you would far better have stayed away 
 than have thus presented yourselves there ; be- 
 cause, it may be, by open acts of sin, of unclean- 
 ness or other excess, you have inflicted deep 
 gashes upon your souls, and let out their spiritual 
 life-blood, not now in drops but in streams. I 
 say then that in looking back upon all this, if 
 this is the retrospect, there is matter for infinite 
 humiliation, but not for inert and inactive de- 
 spair. Such a life could have had no other 
 issues than it has had. But claim, which is 
 right, to live in God, to live in Christ, to draw 
 life from him; claim all which he freely gave 
 you when he said, " I am the Vine, ye are the 
 branches ;" and, whatever the past has been, 
 for the time to oome you may yet have " your 
 fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life." 
 
SERMON V. 
 
 CHRIST THE JUDGE OF ALL MEN. 
 
SERMON V. 
 
 Sdrbcnt SunBao. 
 
 CHRIST THE JUDGE OF ALL MEN. 
 
 John v. 26, 27. 
 
 For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to 
 the Son to have life in himself; and hath given him authority 
 to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of Man. 
 
 It is not surely by accident, it is not without 
 its meaning, that our Christian year begins at a 
 different moment from our natural. There is 
 still a full month to run, before another secular 
 ■year commences ; the new Christian year has 
 commenced already. We are thus impressively 
 taught that there are two orders in this world ; 
 an order of nature, and in the midst of this, and 
 owniug other laws than this does, an order of 
 
116 SERMON V. 
 
 grace. With Advent Sunday, as a glance at 
 our Prayer-Book is itself sufficient to indicate, 
 our Church year, as distinguished from our natu- 
 ral, begins. We enter this day upon a period 
 which the Church has specially dedicated to the 
 contemplation of the coming of our Lord and 
 Saviour — in which she would have us devoutly 
 carry back our thoughts to his first coming in 
 great humility, to the cradle of Bethlehem, with 
 a few poor shepherds round it ; in which She 
 would have us carry on our thoughts to his com- 
 ing again in his majesty, to the throne of his 
 glory, with thousands and ten thousands of an- 
 gels waiting to fulfil his commands. 
 
 Following then these plain leadings of our 
 Church, I propose a little to occupy your atten- 
 tion to-day with the second of these stupendous 
 events, with that yet in the womb of time, that 
 day as yet unborn, but ever hastening to its» 
 birth, which shall be, as Christ and his Apos- 
 tles ever taught, the great consummation of all 
 things, the winding up of the present age, the 
 clearing of all the ways of God, the complete re- 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 117 
 
 demption of his servants, the final destruction of 
 his foes. 
 
 And yet I can not conceal from myself the 
 dif&culty, I may say the danger, of my subject. 
 We have so often talked and heard talk about a 
 judgment-day, and this with so little of earnest 
 addressing ourselves to the tasks which such a 
 day, rightly believed, would impose upon us, that 
 in just punishment of these hollow unreal words 
 of ours we have come, I will not say to disbe- 
 lieve in such a day, but so to believe in it that it 
 exercises the very slightest influence on our lives. 
 The glorious retributions of that day do not rouse 
 us to a more active well-doing. The dreadful 
 terrors of that day do not drive us to that one 
 hope of sinners, the Cross of Christ. And this 
 most tremendous reality, when it moves us at all, 
 it is rather in the region of our imagination than 
 in that of our affections or our conscience. Thus, 
 who will not own that he has admired the mighty 
 creations of the painter's or poet's skill, as they 
 have sought to portray that judgment-scene, 
 Christ upon his throne, the elect and the repro- 
 
118 SEEMON V. 
 
 bate gathered before him — that he has too often 
 done this, without one thought passing through 
 his mind, "I shall be there, I shall be one of 
 that multitude whom these by their art have 
 summoned before that throne ; I shall be stand- 
 ing, not as a spectator, but myself to receive my 
 doom, to be acknowledged or rejected, to be set 
 on the right hand of that throne, or on the left ;" 
 — while the still more direct and authoritative 
 statements of Scripture have hardly a more 
 effectual working on our hearts or our lives. I 
 feel this danger, the danger that I may increase 
 this dullness and deadness of spirit in myself 
 and in you, even in the very act of warning and 
 protesting against it, and attempting to dispel 
 it. Yet still in the earnest trust that of God's 
 grace this may not be so, I will not decline the 
 subject ; but as I have in each preceding dis- 
 course taken for my argument some office or dig- 
 nity of our Lord, I shall not now depart from my 
 rule, but, as this day suggests, consider the glo- 
 rious Advent of our Lord and Saviour, or Christ 
 the Judge of all men — at the same time not 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 119 
 
 leaving out, as the Scripture never leaves out, 
 the Judge who is the Saviour as well, the King 
 who is also the Brother, and indeed because a 
 Brother therefore a King. 
 
 For you will not have failed, I think, my 
 Christian brethren, often to note the remarkable 
 language of my text. In it our Lord declares 
 that all judgment has been committed to him, 
 that he has received authority to execute judg- 
 ment, because he is the Son of Mem. At first 
 one might have expected something quite differ- 
 ent ; one might have expected him to say, that 
 all judgment was committed to him, because he 
 is the Son of God, for power belongeth unto 
 God. But it is not so ; judgment is his, because 
 he is the Son of Man. Therefore is it, because 
 he is himself man and the Son of Man that he 
 exercises this supreme authority among the chil- 
 dren of men. There is a memorable prevision 
 of this in the law of Moses, where God, antici- 
 pating the future historical development of his 
 people, and that a time would arrive when they 
 should ask a king, gives certain i-ules and con- 
 
120 SERMON V. 
 
 ditions under which they shall proceed to his 
 election, and this among others : " One from 
 among thy brethren shalt thou set a king over 
 thee : thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, 
 that is not thy brother." The law which God 
 thus imposed upon his people, he observed him- 
 self. He set no stranger over the children of 
 men, that was not their brother ; but one chosen 
 from among his brethren was judge and king, 
 and is so for evermore. 
 
 Most blessed, most comfortable thought for 
 those that in the midst of many weaknesses, 
 many infirmities, of temptations often but not al- 
 ways resisted, are seeking with sincerity of pur- 
 pose to do his will, to walk in his truth. He 
 was himself taken from among men ; he knoweth 
 whereof they are made ; he can have compassion 
 on their infirmities, having been himself in all 
 points tempted ' like unto them ; he will temper 
 judgment with mercy ; mercy shall rejoice against 
 judgment. But dreadful thought for the faith- 
 less and false-hearted, that God shall thus judge 
 the world by the Man whom he has ordained ; 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 121 
 
 infinite aggravation of their guilt, and therefore 
 of their doom. A divine love men might profess 
 themselves unable to understand, unable to meet 
 with a corresponding love of their own. They 
 might plead that it was something too remote, 
 something lifted too high above the range of 
 their sympathies and affections. But liow plead 
 this against a human love — against his love who 
 sought to draw men to himself, and so to his 
 Father, with cords of a man? Oh, what guilt 
 to have stood out against this ! It will be that 
 thorn-wounded brow, of which the frown will be 
 so terrible ; those nail-pierced hands that shall 
 fall with such a crashing weight upon the sinner. 
 It will be in looking at him who was pierced for 
 them, and whom they pierced, that the tribes of 
 the earth shall wail. 
 
 This then is a first consideration which may 
 well rouse us from a cold and heartless contem- 
 plation of that great day — this, namely, that 
 the Judge will be the Son of Man , who, because 
 he is such, will execute judgment among men. 
 But in respect of that judgment itself, let us 
 
122 SERMON V. 
 
 seek without losing ourselves in details, to seize 
 two or three of its grander features, and so, to 
 present them to our minds that they may serve 
 to quicken and strengthen the spiritual life of our 
 souls. 
 
 And, first, let us keep in mind that while 
 there are many judgment-days in the world's 
 story, that day is the complement and consum- 
 mation of them all. In one sense, there are 
 many judgment-days. "Every day is such ; for 
 Christ is a king now, a judge among the nations, 
 putting down one nation add setting up an- 
 other; removing the candlestick of some apos- 
 tate Church ; taking away the kingdom of God 
 from these, and giving it to others that shall 
 bring forth the fruits thereof. In one sense, 
 there are many judgment-days, however one may 
 crown and complete them all. It is not for 
 nothing that in the 24th of St. Matthew the de- 
 struction of Jerusalem and the end of the world 
 so run into one another that it is almost or quite 
 impossible to draw the line, and say what be- 
 longs to one, and what to the other. In all like- 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 123 
 
 lihood it never was intended that any such line 
 should be drawn ; for that day, while it was the 
 rehearsal of a day yet more terrible, was itself 
 a day of doom, even as there have been, and 
 probably will be many such, before the day of 
 doom shall arrive. We walk indeed in a world 
 of judgments, where in every page of story the 
 footprints of the divine righteousness may be 
 plainly traced. 
 
 And as it is with nations and Churches, so also 
 with men in particular. How often the life of a 
 man is the judgment of that man. "With his 
 own hands he has stricken the garlands of glad- 
 ness from his brow, and if he walks now dis- 
 crowned, it is because he has discrowned him- 
 self ; if threads of darkness and gloom are woven 
 into the inmost tissue of his life, from which for 
 this life at least they shall never be withdrawn, 
 it is he himself that has woven them there. 
 Oftentimes this is so plain that every eye can 
 read it; and often, when it is not plain to 
 others, it is plain to the man himself. He who 
 knows the secrets of his own heart and of his 
 
124 SERMON V. 
 
 own life, knows what the worm is that has 
 gnawed at the root of his earthly felicity, and 
 caused it to wither. Like an eagle pierced with 
 an arrow ■which its own wing had fledged, he too, 
 brought down from his pride of place, can only 
 too well perceive that the arrow of God's judg- 
 ments which found him out, was fledged and 
 speeded by his own sin. 
 
 Yet while thus there are as many judgment- 
 days in the world's story as there are days, God 
 showing even now that he is a God of judgment, 
 and that by him actions are weighed, still for all 
 this how imperfect, how incomplete are they all. 
 How much is left in the rough ; how much need- 
 ing to be adjusted and set on the square ; how 
 much is evidently postponed, waiting the redress 
 of a mightier day. The wicked prosper, the 
 righteous are trodden under foot. Dives feasts 
 to the end, and Lazarus pines to the end. The 
 present is oftentimes what St. Paul so significant- 
 ly calls it, "man's day" — man's, at least, in 
 part ; for God, in the language of the Psalmist, 
 "is strong and patient" -^patient because he is 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 125 
 
 strong, because he can afford to wait; because 
 none shall through the delay escape from his 
 hands. A day, however, is coming which shall 
 not be man's any more ; a day which shall be 
 God's day, God's altogether, which he shall vin- 
 dicate as wholly his own ; that which shall dif- 
 ference it from every other day consisting in this, 
 that it shall be the final and complete adjusting 
 of God's accounts with the world, and with every 
 man in the world ; the day which will not leave, 
 as every other day has left, its long arrears be- 
 hind it ; but that wherein every sin which has not 
 been freely forgiven through Christ the Saviour, 
 must be duly punished by Christ the Judge. 
 
 Let us not, my brethren, lose sight of this : as 
 little indeed of one as of the other side of this 
 solemn truth. Do not let us in thought of a 
 future judgment, lose sight of a present ; do not 
 let us in view of a present, explain away a great- 
 er which is in store. "We can not afford to let 
 either, or our faith in either, go. A day of judg- 
 ment far off, with nothing in hand, no present 
 pledges of God's zeal for righteousness, no first- 
 
126 SERMON V. 
 
 fruits of judgment, would soou be for men little 
 better than a shadow or a dream ; and that, 
 "Tush, doth God see?" "the Lord hath for- 
 saken the earth ;" " every one that doeth evil is 
 precious in his sight," would soon be the utter- 
 ance not merely of a few eminently ungodly, but 
 the shuddering apprehension of all. While on 
 the other hand to suppose that all was being 
 judged now, that there was no huge- catastrophe 
 in store, no divine crisis in the world's story, 
 larger, mightier, more searching, more satisfy- 
 ing than any that hitherto has been, redressing 
 all which is now unredressed, rewarding all that 
 is now unrewarded, punishing, where this shall 
 need, all that is unpunished now — this were 
 enough to drive a righteous man, as he looks out 
 on the present face of the earth, and the oppres- 
 sions done under the sun, to despair. Be it ours 
 to keep, by God's grace, a fast hold on both 
 these truths, and to believe in our God as one 
 who both now is judging, and hereafter will 
 judge, the world in righteousness by the Man 
 whom he has ordained. 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OF ALL MEN. 127 
 
 But, secoodly, it follows from the final char- 
 acter of that day, and constitutes another char- 
 acteristic feature of it, that it shall be one in 
 which God shall judge the secrets of men's 
 hearts by Jesus Christ. " We must all appear, ^^ 
 or, as now it is generally admitted, the words 
 with a slight variation should be rendered, " we 
 must all be manifested before the judgment-seat 
 of Christ" — a far more searching thought. If 
 we were to employ a homely expression and say, 
 " turned inside out," it would, I believe, exactly 
 express the intention of St. Paul ; all that is in- 
 ward now, and thus hidden, becoming outward 
 then ; all secret things searched out ; every 
 mask stripped off; every disguise torn away; 
 whatever any man's work has been, that day de- 
 claring it; and not according to 'its outward 
 varnish, but its inward substance ; for it shall be 
 eminently a day of revelation, of unveiling, that 
 is, or drawing back the veil which now covers 
 and conceals so much. It shall be a day of reve- 
 lation, and this in respect of the hidden things 
 both of glory and of shame. 
 
128 SERMON V. 
 
 It shall be a day of revelation for the hiddea 
 things of glory. We may bless God that there 
 shall be many such, which shall be first unveiled 
 upon that day, the deeds of light, which yet 
 shunned the light as carefully as ever the deeds 
 of darkness have done ; the alms which the right 
 hand did, and the left hand never knew ; the acts 
 of self-denial unguessed of by all save the doer ; 
 the painful victories over self, won in the unseen 
 battle-field of the heart ; the prayer of many a 
 Nathanael under the fig-tree ; the wrestling of 
 many a Jacob with God as with an adversary 
 through the long night of some strong tempta 
 tion ; all these shall come forth, that he who 
 saw in secret may reward them openly. Nor 
 will that be .only a day when God's hidden ones 
 shall first be revealed to others. Many a faith- 
 ful man shall then first be revealed to himself, 
 shall wonder to find that of the good whereof he 
 thought so little, God has thought so much ; and 
 shall hardly understand that for this very reason, 
 namely, that he esteemed of it so humbly, that he 
 forgot it, therefore God has written it in his book. 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 129 
 
 But seeing, brethren, ttat there is nothing 
 hidden which shall not be known, nor covered 
 which shall not be revealed, that day shall be 
 the day of a sadder revelation, that namely of 
 the unfruitful works of darkness, of the hidden 
 things of shame ; and all which the sinner would 
 hardly have borne should be known to one fel- 
 low-man and fellow-sinner, which he would have 
 counted no darkness nor shadow of death thick 
 enough to hide now, he must then avouch in the 
 face of an assembled world, before the holy an- 
 gels, and God the Judge of all. No wonder 
 that we read of some that on that day shall rise 
 " to shame and everlasting contempt ;" that 
 shall cry to the hills to cover them, and the 
 mountains to fall on them : who would welcome 
 even this destruction rather than the scorn and 
 confusion which shall then be their portion. No 
 wonder that the Psalmist, looking onward to 
 such a day, should have exclaimed, " Blessed is 
 the man whose sin is covered, whose unrighteous- 
 ness is forgiven." What man is there among us, 
 
 who would not fain make his own the blessed- 
 6* 
 
130 SERMON V. 
 
 ness of the man whose iniquity on that day shall 
 be sought and not be found; for he, tte same 
 who makes inquisition for it, shall himself have 
 already borne, and borne it away, and abolished 
 it for ever. And here too it shall not be only 
 what men have hitherto concealed from others 
 which shall then be laid bare. Many a sinner 
 shall then first be revealed to himself. The long 
 self-delusion of a life, the flattering of himself in 
 his own eyes, the counting all his ways pure, all 
 this shall only then have end. Surely if this is 
 possible, that a man may hide himself not merely 
 from others, but from his own self, our prayer tor 
 God should be, " Show me myself betimes ; let 
 me not first discover my sin, my guilt, my mis- 
 ery, when it is too late to part from them, when 
 there is no more sacrifice for sin, when these 
 must cling and cleave to me, and be a portion of 
 myself, for ever." 
 
 But then, when all are thus made manifest to 
 themselves and to others, then shall the King 
 divide between them ; and to use his own sim- 
 plest but sublimest words, " separate them one 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 131 
 
 from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep 
 from the goats;" — then, and not till then; for 
 every mouth must be stopped, and the righteous- 
 ness of his judgment must be apparent to all. 
 Consider a little what this separation of the pre- 
 cious from the vile must be. Here in the pres- 
 ent time light alternates with darkness, good 
 men are mingled with bad ; streaks of light par- 
 tially illumine even the darkness itself; evil men, 
 even though evil be the predominant law of their 
 lives, are not all evil. But there all good will 
 be gathered by a natural affinity to him from 
 whom its goodness first descended : all evil must 
 own what it is so slow to acknowledge now, an 
 Evil One as the father from whom originally it 
 came. There are manp companies now, grouped 
 according to the transient laws and necessities of 
 this present time ; there shall be only two com- 
 panies then. In one shall be all the excellent 
 of the earth, all that have kept the faith, that 
 have overcome the world, that have made their 
 garments white betimes in the blood of the 
 Lamb ; saints and martyrs that stand forth to us 
 
132 SERMON V. 
 
 as the pillar fires of that heavenly City toward 
 which we travel ; and with these thousands and 
 ten thousands of whom the world keeps no mem- 
 ory, whose names, not written here, shall yet be 
 found written in heaven in the Lamb's book of 
 life. Nor those only of other times, unknown to 
 us in the flesh, or heard of only by the hearing 
 of the ear ; but some also for whom we ourselves 
 have thanked God that such have been, and that 
 our lives were blended with theirs ; being, as 
 they are to us, the pledge of an eternal life be- 
 yond the grave worth all the arguments of the 
 schools, for we are sure that such love, such 
 goodness, could never have been kindled in hu- 
 man souls, again after a little moment to be ex- 
 tinguished for ever. To these the King shall 
 say, " Come ; you loved, weakly and imperfect- 
 ly, yet still you loved him who had first loved 
 you, and now the kingdom of love opens its arms 
 to receive you." 
 
 But that other company, the dregs and dross 
 of the world, the refuse and offscouring, all the 
 darkness, the pride, the falsehood, the selfish- 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 133 
 
 ness, the lust, the cruelty, the hate, all which, 
 isolated and scattered, shows so hideous now, 
 all this gathered into one, unchecked by the 
 presence of any good, fiercer and stronger be- 
 cause then finding no vent, but all turned in 
 upon itself, who can dare to dwell even in 
 thought upon this? They shall be judged al- 
 ready; the being what they are shall be itself 
 their judgment ; which judgment shall yet em- 
 body itself outwardly in that " Depart from Me" 
 of the King ; " Depart from me ; ye have chosen 
 to abide at a distance from me, and now take for 
 ever that which ye have chosen. My love to- 
 ward you awoke no answering love on yoiir 
 parts toward me, nor toward my brethren and 
 yours ; and now the kingdom of love rejects you, 
 as ye have rejected it. Be filled with your own 
 doings ; be gathered under your own head; un- 
 der the banner of him who is the prince of lust 
 and selfishness and pride ; as I am the Prince of 
 purity, of humility, and love, and would fain 
 have gathered you under mine." 
 Yet think not, brethren, when we thus speak, 
 
134 SERMON V. 
 
 when, as Scripture has done before us, we divide 
 these solemn and dread utterances of Christ into 
 a ''■ Come" and a " Depart," that these are there- 
 fore two different revelations of Ood. They are 
 at the root one and the same, working differently 
 according to the different quality of that on 
 which they work. When we say, " Our God is 
 Love," and when we say, " Our God is a con- 
 suming fire," we do but say the same thing over 
 again, looking at it from opposite sides. Tor 
 JQst as the same heat hardens the clay and 
 softens the wax, affects each, that is, according 
 to its own nature ; or as the same light gladdens 
 a sound eye, but torments a diseased; as the 
 same pillar of a cloud was a cloud and darkness 
 to the Egyptians, but gave light to the children 
 of Israel, guided these, and troubled those ; so 
 the same supreme moral energy of God which is 
 at once intensest love of good, and intensest ha- 
 tred of evil, drawing to itself whatever is akin, 
 repelling from itself whatever is alien, to it, shall 
 work the joy and blessedness of all that through 
 the regeneration have in the ground of their be- 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OF ALL MEN. 135 
 
 ing become like-minded witli him, being lovers 
 of good ; the tribulation and anguish of all that 
 are contrary-minded, and whom the dreadful 
 presence of that good, from which they shall 
 now be able to hide themselves no longer, shall 
 at once condemn and torment. The revelation 
 of the righteous God, of the incarnate Son of 
 God, contains in itself all which the ungodly can 
 fear, or the faithful can desire. 
 
 Let us, I beseech you, try ourselves each one, 
 and estimate our own standing and condition in 
 that kingdom which he shall set up, in the light 
 of this awful fact. Christ shall set up a kingdom 
 of truth : hast thou loved the truth, or hast thou 
 rather been loving and making a lie ? He shall 
 set up a kingdom of purity : hast thou been seek- 
 ing to cleanse thyself from all filth iness of flesh 
 and spirit ? or by sensual thought and sensual 
 act polluting both? — of love; but hast thou 
 been selfish and hard-hearted ? of humility ; but 
 hast thou been proud and high-minded ? There 
 shall no wise enter into it any thing that defileth.^ 
 Is this the sentence of thine exclusion ? 
 
136 SERMON V. 
 
 What question, my brethren, concern us at all 
 so nearly as these ? to be with Grod, or to be 
 without him for ever, it is this which that day 
 must determine ; or rather it is this which that 
 day must declare ; we are ourselves determining' 
 it now; that day will only declare it. There 
 are indeed who see a light breaking even for 
 them whom that day shall enfold in its dark- 
 ness; and far, far off, the faint glimmering of 
 another dawn for them beyond the blackness and 
 darkness which shall encompass them now. I 
 can not see it in God's Word, but, on the con- 
 trary, very much which excludes it ; which pro- 
 claims that for them who reject the Gospel of 
 his grace, there remaineth, when once their day 
 pf grace has ended, no other sacrifice for sin 
 than that which they have wilfully despised and 
 , rejected ; and to my mind our life would lose 
 much of its solemn earnestness, its awful mean- 
 ing, if I did not believe that within those brief 
 limits which shut it in on either side, the issues 
 of eternity were being decided, and we making 
 our choice, that choice which must be ours for 
 
CHRIST THE JUDGE OP ALL MEN. 137 
 
 ever; choosing for God, or choosing against 
 him ; to be ever with Christ, or to be ever sep- 
 arated from him ; if I did not feel, brethren, 
 that within these narrow lists, which yet are not 
 too narrow for this great decision, everything 
 must be gained, or everything be lost. 
 
 THE END.