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 3 1924 031 261 807 
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16 CHMIST. 
 
 efforts of mankind to find the hidden One. In 
 Clirist, tlierefore, the idea of an incarnate God first 
 touched history and passed over from legend to 
 evidence. Even the Jews, the race most hostile to 
 the claims of this Messiah, did not deny His exist- 
 ence, but in the ^.rly centuries said that He 
 performed his wonders by possessing himself of the 
 ineffable name stolen from the holy place of the 
 temple. Many as are the opinions as to the nature 
 of Christ, there is no denial anywhere, from the 
 earliest Christian to the last, that Jesus Clirist lived 
 and did almost such as recorded in the Gospel. 
 
 Exhausting no more of your time and, perhaps, 
 of your patience, too, upon a question which no one 
 denies, let us reflect upon our second theme, namely, 
 the quality of the fact. Here is the enigma of the 
 religious world. Confessing the reality of Christ, 
 the multitude of thinkers and toilers out of theolog}^ 
 and in it, out of the Church and in it, wonder and 
 wonder just what quality to attach to the Christ- 
 idea. Here we can not come with any perfect peace 
 for the intellect. Not only was there a great search 
 before Christ, a search in which Plato, and Cato, and 
 Cicero, and Epictetus, and Aurelius, and all the 
 great ones engaged, feeling after God if haply 
 they might find Him, but there is a search going 
 
OSBIST. 17 
 
 forward still, as absolute in our day as in the days of 
 the doubting Socrates or praying Aurelius. Christ's 
 advent into the domain of evidence has greatly 
 modified this pursuit after the unknown God, and 
 in the hearts of millions of human beings has put 
 the deep inquiry to rest. For eighteen centuries 
 thousands upon thousands have found in Him a 
 peace that knows no storm. But nothing but death 
 can solve, to all, all the enigmas of earth, and hence 
 to-day the immense seeking for light goes on, and a 
 large multitude asks, " What shall we believe about 
 this Saviour?" I can not speak peace to this troubled 
 sea, I only confess the presence of the storm, and 
 feel that many noble souls are out in the rufSed 
 water. Each one must calmly measure for himself 
 the value of the Christ, and do this " with charity 
 toward all and malice toward none." 
 
 Let me to-day ask you to think of the less 
 questionable elements in this historic fact. 
 
 1. It was a great gain to our race that at last 
 the search for an Incarnation came up to a real, 
 visible being. Man had gone about as far as he 
 could upon a theology of legend and absurdity. 
 There was no valuable religious faith in the world 
 at the time of the Advent. The great Roman Empire 
 could confer upon its scattered states arts and lan- 
 2 
 
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/cu31 924031 261 807 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 BEYOND THE SHADOW; or, The Resur- 
 rection of Life. 12mo, pp. 284. Cloth, $1.25. 
 A revised and enlarged edition of the work p\ib- 
 llshed in 1881 under the title of " The Gospel of the, 
 Resurrection." 
 " The most gignificant book concerning ' the last things * that 
 
 has been published in this country." — Prof. G. N. Webbbb, B.D. 
 " The substance of a conception which, in the course of thirty 
 
 years, is likejy to transform Christian thinking upon the subject." — 
 
 &. W. Dili!, D.D. 
 
 THE DIVINE SATISFACTION. A Review 
 
 of What Should, and Should Not, be 
 
 Thought About the Atonement. 12mo, 
 
 pp. 94. Paper, 40 cents. 
 
 " A much more valuable contribution to the subject than some 
 much more pretentious treatises." — The Christian union (N. Y.) 
 
 EARLY PUPILS OF THE SPIRIT; or, The 
 Ethical Development of the Prophets 
 of Israel. An inquiry Into the Inspiration of 
 the Old Testament. 12mo, pp. 46. Paper, 30 cents. 
 
 " Very strikingly interesting and instructive." — The Christian 
 World (London). 
 
TURNING POINTS 
 
 THOUGHT AND CONDUCT 
 
 JAMES MORRIS WHITON, Ph.D. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 2 AND 3 Bible House 
 
 1888 
 
(J. Cfif. 
 
 President White 
 ^ Library 
 
AUTHOR'S NOTE. 
 
 In July and August, 1887, it was my privilege 
 
 to occupy the pulpit of Carrs Lane Chapel in 
 
 the absence of Dr. R. W. Dale on a journey to 
 
 Australia. Ten of the Sermons then preached 
 
 in the course of six weeks' service are included 
 
 in this volume. Two others have been omitted, 
 
 and two preached during a similar visit to 
 
 Birmingham in 1886 have been substituted. At 
 
 the request of many who heard them the 
 
 series is published in grateful remembrance 
 
 both of hospitable friends and of responsive 
 
 congregations. 
 
 J. M. W. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. PAGE. 
 
 I. The Preparation i 
 
 II. The Reaction of Sin 17 
 
 III. Questions about Heaven 33 
 
 IV. The Eleventh Commandment 51 
 
 V. What is it to Receive Christ? ... 69 
 
 VI. The Poor Soul 87 
 
 VII. The Presence of the Lord 103 
 
 VIII. The Eighth Commandment 119 
 
 IX. The Omniscience of God 141 
 
 X. The Judgment Seat of Christ ... 159 
 
 XI. Our Partnership, with God 175 
 
 XII. The Elect of God 191 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 THE PREPARATION. 
 
THE PREPARATION.* 
 
 "And that day was the preparation." — Luke xxiii. 54. 
 
 IN order to get upon the track of thought 
 given us by these words, we must first 
 intelHgently connect ourselves with the fact 
 which they state. 
 
 It was the day on which our Lord was 
 crucified, and it was the day before the Jewish 
 sabbath. The scrupulosity of the Jews in 
 sabbath keeping was such that they were wont 
 to make preparation for the sabbath, putting 
 out of the way whatever might desecrate the 
 day, or hinder its holy keeping. When they 
 had murdered Jesus, they were not forgetful of 
 their punctilio. The dead body, if unburied, 
 ^\ould defile the sabbath. Therefore they had it 
 removed before hand. " The Jews, therefore, 
 because it was the preparation, that the bodies 
 
 * Preached Sunday Morning, July 24TH, iS 
 
 A 
 
4 THE PREPARATION. 
 
 should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath 
 day (for that sabbath day was a high day), 
 besought Pilate that their legs might be broken^ 
 and that they might be taken away." 
 
 The Jews' idea of a preparation for the 
 sabbath, however inconsistently and irrationally 
 applied, is a sound and an instructive one. 
 Many people now-a-days, whose sabbath hardly 
 begins until they find themselves seated in 
 church, would do well to secure themselves a 
 whole sabbath, instead of a fractional one, by 
 some forethought for getting the full benefit of 
 the day. This practical application, however, I 
 must ask each one to make for himself What 
 I now wish is to bring out that fundamental 
 truth of which the sabbath preparation affords 
 but one among many illustrations, a truth than 
 which there is none more consequential to us. 
 
 As we survey the universe, and study human 
 life and history, we see a certain law of change 
 governing all transitions from old to new. This 
 law of change is that nothing comes by a jump, 
 but everything by growth. The new was latent 
 in the old ; the old is patent in the new. Revo- 
 lution itself is nothing but the finishing of 
 evolution, the bursting of bud into flower. 
 Nothing springs up on a sudden ; everything 
 comes gradually by preparation. He lives 
 wisely in the present, and only he, who respects 
 this law by which God brings forth the births of 
 the future. 
 
THE PREPARATION. 5 
 
 I. Let US call before us from different fields a 
 few of the facts which illustrate this Divine law 
 of preparation. From the universality of this 
 law, thus illustrated, we shall draw practical 
 lessons of the highest moment. 
 
 I. Beginning with the simplest and most 
 familiar things, have you ever thought how 
 agreeably the daily change from full light to 
 total darkness is facilitated by the preparation 
 hour of twilight ? We are hardly aware what a 
 shock we are spared, what convenience and 
 pleasure we owe to the gradual overspreading of 
 the wings of night, in that soft variegated hour 
 which wraps one by one the shadows round the 
 world. The moralist, looking on this, and think- 
 ing of that " outer darkness " which envelopes 
 the lost soul that forsakes the light of God, 
 reflects that even so that darkness falls suddenly 
 on none, but grows by the gradual shutting out 
 of ray after ray of saving grace and truth, till 
 the last ray is quenched in total night. 
 
 2. Or have you ever marked the law which 
 governs the changes of the seasons between heat 
 and cold ? Suppose there were no gradual melt- 
 ing of spring, no gradual stiffening of autumn, — 
 suppose the snow-clad hillsides transformed by 
 sudden summer into rushing waters ; — suppose 
 the forest in full leaf suddenly winter-stricken 
 by snow and ice, the earth all at once sealed up 
 by frosts so that no rain water for winter could be 
 stored, and the summer droughts following at 
 
6 THE PREPARATION. 
 
 once upon the furious melting of the snows. 
 The temperate zone, where all the great harvests 
 of the world are produced,, the belt of the earth's 
 surface most favorable to the highest vigor and 
 best development of man, owes both its pro- 
 ductiveness and its healthfulness to that 
 benevolent arrangement of the Creator, by 
 which a period of preparation enables both 
 the earth and its inhabitants to alternate 
 between the extremes of heat and cold without 
 shock or injury. 
 
 3. The more familiar illustrations of seed-time 
 and harvest, of childhood and manhood, of lay- 
 ing foundations and building thereon, which 
 readily occur to every mind, suggest grander 
 parallels in God's long preparation of this globe 
 to be the dwelling-place of man. As soon as 
 the earth had formed her solid crust of dry land, 
 the primeval plants and forests sprang up, to 
 extract the deadly gas from the atmosphere, and 
 to condense it into beds of coal for our firesides, 
 our foundries and our engines. Then the great 
 laboratory of nature secreted the metals and the 
 gems for man's tools and weapons and orna- 
 ments. Then the slow shrinkage of the cooling 
 earth-crust wrinkled the surface with mountain 
 ridges, to draw the clouds and condense the 
 showers and form river-systems for the irrigation 
 and the commerce of creatures yet to be ; and 
 the same forces so diversified the surface of the 
 continents and indented the sea-coasts with 
 
THE PREPARATION. J 
 
 harbors, as to distribute their homes to the 
 nations, and fix seats for imperial cities. Such 
 the infinitely varied preparation, dating almost 
 from bygone eternity, for the fulfilling of human 
 destiny, as it now develops before our eyes in 
 that mere span of time which history includes. 
 
 4. The preparation of the planet for the race 
 is followed by the preparation of the race for 
 their future inheritance as the sons of God. The 
 Old Testament is not a record of favor to the 
 few with proscription of the many, but of the 
 preparation of the few to bless the many. So 
 are we to understand the doctrine of the Divine 
 election. For this were the Jews God's chosen 
 people, not to be favorites, but missionaries. 
 And he who sprang from them, our Saviour, 
 could have sprung only from a cultivated stock. 
 Here is the key to the wonderful history of the 
 Jews, through those slow centuries of steady 
 though often dubious development. What was 
 it all for? To produce a small nucleus for a 
 world-wide movement, one woman fit to be the 
 mother of the Son of God, twelve men fit to be 
 his Apostles to the nations. Other chapters of 
 the preparation had meanwhile been and still are 
 being written in divers parts of the world. The 
 slow and, to our eyes, often dubious advance of 
 Christianity is to the skeptic a stumbling-block, 
 but it is manifestly accordant with God's slow 
 preparation of the planet for the race, — a fact 
 which becomes to intelligence the index finger 
 
8 THE PREPARATION. 
 
 of hope in future openings of grace and glory, 
 the sign of a Divine development that even now 
 is nearer its beginning than its consummation. 
 
 5. What we have now found illustrated in the 
 succession of the days and the seasons, in the 
 preparation of the earth for man and of man for 
 Christ, we find exemplified likewise in the 
 progress of law and liberty, of civilization and 
 reform. No worthy reform sweeps an evil or an 
 error away, but the movement has a long history 
 of hidden preparation. First a germ of con- 
 viction has rooted in some single and obscure 
 heart ; has spread thence through some narrow 
 private circle ; has dared by and by to lift its 
 head, a tender sprout, into the world's notice ," 
 there has met and weathered the frosts and 
 blasts of adverse public opinion. Growing 
 steadily, silently, it has slowly won recognition, 
 gained converts and advocates one by one, filled 
 wider and wider circles with its new gospel ; 
 spread its leaven by degrees throughout the 
 public mind ; and then, at length, a great army 
 of believers being prepared, the signal sounds, 
 the people shout, the hoary ramparts of iniquity 
 and falsehood fall down. Thus Jericho's walls 
 began to be undermined, when Moses, forty 
 years before, started out alone from the Midianite 
 deserts to demand of Pharaoh liberation for his 
 people. Thus many a Gibraltar of wrong and 
 tyranny, that seems to outward view as likely to 
 stand for ever as the pyramids, is now being 
 
THE PREPARATION. 9 
 
 invisibly underrun by miners' galleries and 
 underlaid with patient elements of destruction, 
 like that reef in the river at New York, which, after 
 the slow sapping of years, the pressure of a 
 child's finger on an electric button shattered by 
 acres in an instant, while the earth quaked for 
 miles around. 
 
 6. In like manner, the liberty, whose series of 
 centennial anniversaries America this year con- 
 cludes, was not created in a year by a battle or 
 a declaration. These events merely asserted an 
 existing fitness for liberty, and that fitness was 
 the result of centuries of preparation, through 
 what grinding of tyrannies, what heroism of 
 revolutions ! The rising of the English barons 
 against King John, in the thirteenth century, 
 when the Great Charter was sealed at Runny- 
 mede, the reformed doctrines of Wiclif in the 
 fourteenth century, the Bible translations of 
 Tyndale in the sixteenth, the sufferings and 
 then the emigration of the Puritans in the 
 seventeenth, their laborious discipline of sub- 
 duing the wilderness, and defending their cabins 
 against the Frenchman and the Indian, all went 
 to prepare that slowly perfected fitness for self- 
 government, which, at length, th? embattled 
 farmers of Lexington and the Congress at Phila- 
 delphia simply asserted to exist. 
 
 7. The great law of transition by preparation, 
 which we have now looked at in its wider appli- 
 cations, applies, full well we know, in individual 
 
lb THE PREPARATION. 
 
 life. Grown people, at least, recognize the im- 
 portance of childhood and youth as a seed-time. 
 What sums are spent, and what lives, too, on 
 the education of children ! How often does 
 the man, bemoaning his wasted youth, exclaim 
 with the heathen poet : 
 
 " Oh that God would give me back my bygone years ! " 
 When Dr. Lyman Beecher was asked how long 
 it had taken him to write a certain great sermon, 
 he answered, " Forty years." The truth in this 
 remark is now more than ever recognized, — the 
 insufficiency of mere nature, or natural gifts, 
 uncultivated, the necessity of careful preparation, 
 whether one wishes to become a writer, a teacher, 
 a musician, a nurse, a specialist in any line. We 
 listen to a master on the violin. How ravishingly 
 he plays ! But that ease and freedom, that 
 strength and harmony of the thoroughly trained 
 action which seems like play, is a flower which 
 only the roots of sober work elaborate. Thus 
 have bloomed the grand discoveries that have 
 inspired and enriched the world. Many men 
 had seen apples fall from trees. But study had 
 prepared Newton to see in the fall of that 
 historic apple, the fall, as Emerson says, of a 
 greater apple to a grander globe. The flashing 
 upon his mind of the law that holds the stars in 
 their course was but the sudden blooming of his 
 patient preparatory study. 
 
 In every field of human effort and human 
 hope this truth is thrust upon the thoughtless, 
 
THE PREPARATION. 1 1 
 
 the slow development of high triumphs and 
 supreme joys through laborious preparatory pro- 
 cesses. 
 
 " Learn to do well" says Holy Writ. Such, 
 learning is all that we are here for in this 
 wearisome earthly school. Let our life be 
 checkered by disappointment and darkened by 
 sorrow, swept by storms and stripped by losses, 
 tantalized by baffled hope, and led along through 
 ruins and through deserts ; yet, if the outcome 
 be, that, in all the hardness of such a lot, we 
 have learned to do tvell, we have gained the 
 Divine goal, our life is not a waste, but a well 
 sown field ripe for the reaper. And what well 
 doing is there that does not come of learning, 
 by self-correction and self-denial, by patient 
 working and patient waiting, by the culture of 
 faith, and courage, contentment, and hope, would 
 one become either the wealthy trader, or the 
 skilful artist, or the influential statesman, or the 
 learned scholar, or, what is the most god-like 
 fruit of human endeavour, the good and Christian 
 man? 
 
 II. From these omnipresent illustrations of 
 the Divine law of the Preparation come two 
 thoughts of the highest practical moment. 
 
 I. The certainty of a future life. It is not a 
 wreck but a change, not an extinction but an 
 evolution that we reach at the outermost verge 
 of earth. What is all this preparation for, — the 
 preparations of history for progress, of youth for 
 
12 THE PREPARATION. 
 
 manhood, of experience for character, of dis- 
 cipline for power, of all learning for all life ? 
 Certainly, not for an end-all at the grave, unless 
 our very life itself be a cheat. We see all 
 creatures on the earth, save man, attaining all 
 that they are capable of But man knows that 
 he is capable of more than he can realize on 
 earth. He is conscious of power for unlimited 
 progress, if unlimited time be granted. For such 
 progress all life seems to be a preparation. Can 
 it be only in seeming? Unless man is the only 
 being whose constitution is not adjusted to the 
 reality of things, he must find the field, to which 
 his aspirations point for higher and better 
 achievements, beyond the narrow limits of his 
 training place. Our instinct of immortality is 
 not a mockery. The hope that girds our pre- 
 paration is not a fraud. The death which stops 
 the heart-beat when we have barely learned to 
 live, is not only the limit of the life that has 
 been. It must be the threshold of the life that 
 is to be. Yea, said our Lord, " / am the 
 resurrectiofi and the life ; he that believeth in me, 
 though he were dead, yet shall he live." 
 
 2. The necessity of intelligent preparation for 
 that life which is to be. This the whole order and 
 course of nature, the whole analogy of this world, 
 affirms. Is it foolish to drift thoughtlessly 
 through youth- without study to meet the duties 
 and opportunities of adult years ? Is it reckless 
 for the youth to say. Time enough to think of 
 
THE PREPARATION. 1 3 
 
 earning a livelihood, when necessity bids me 
 cease depending on my father ? Then what is it 
 to say, Time enough to provide for another 
 world when I reach it ? What that preparation 
 must be, no hearer of Jesus Christ, no thinking 
 man, can question. Each of us shall be 
 confronted, sooner or later, with the demand 
 whether he has adjusted himself to his Creator's 
 laws in faith and love and righteousness, as 
 patterned in Christ ; — whether he has builded his 
 life according to the model of redeemed humanity 
 in Jesus Christ our Saviour. Are we doing that ? 
 It is the question of our destiny. Ask the artist, 
 whether the misshapen statue can be transformed 
 by regrets into anything that shall not bring 
 shame to the workman. Ask the farmer, whether 
 the weed-tangled field in August can by regrets 
 be overspread with anything that shall not bring 
 emptiness to the barn. Ask the new comer to the 
 world unseen, whether the heart full of self with- 
 out God, of self without Christ, of self untrained 
 to self-denial in the service of the Divine goodness, 
 can by any regrets for the unreturning past fill 
 up the great gulf between the Christian and the 
 anti-christian character, the prepared and the 
 unprepared for heaven. The Judge has answered 
 for the dead who answer not : " Come, ye blessed 
 of my Father :— Depart from me, ye cursed!' Let 
 the facts of nature, of history, of life, which we 
 have seen, all teaching us the Divine law of the 
 preparation, convincingly corroborate our Lord's 
 
14 THE PREPARATION. 
 
 assurance, that the earthly life which fails to 
 prepare the Christlike fitness and powers of the 
 heavenly life, is in conflict with the Divine order 
 of things, and runs counter to universal law to a 
 future revelation of disappointment, shame and 
 loss, as certain as the unfolding of the leaves of 
 the coming spring. 
 
 For when we see the trees responding to the 
 caress of vernal sunbeams, and clothing them 
 selves with fresh leaf-mantles, we see no hasty 
 creation of a genial week, but simply the 
 unfolding of preparations made months before. 
 It was during the previous summer, in anticipa- 
 tion of the autumnal death of plant life, and of 
 its final resurrection after the winter's sleep, that 
 the leaf-buds were made ready to welcome the 
 return of the quickening spring. And where 
 that preparation was not made, no suns and 
 showers are able to reclothe that tree. 
 
 Thus nothing shall be unfolded hereafter but 
 that which was infolded here. The fragrant 
 beauty of the flowers of paradise is only the 
 opening of the buds of Christly character that 
 were formed on earth. Can you imagine a 
 laborer suddenly taken from a street-gang 
 capable of entering happily at once into a high 
 and honorable office of trust in the community ? 
 No more can we reasonably think of a place of 
 heavenly blessedness as prepared for us, any 
 further than we ourselves are prepared for it in 
 such capacities for blessedness, as we see in 
 
THE PREPARATION. 15 
 
 their perfect bloom in the Divine Man, our Lord 
 and Saviour. 
 
 And now what quickening have we found in 
 our study of God's universal law of the Prepara- 
 tion ? What lack we yet of fitness, of power for 
 the heaven to which Christ has led the way ? 
 
 On every side the world resounds with notes 
 of preparation for the things of earthly hope. 
 What notes of preparation for the things of 
 Christ's heavenly hope are audible within us ? 
 What intentness on a stricter righteousness and 
 a purer charity than we have yet attained ? I 
 see my neighbors in middle lifp absorbed in 
 laying up for their children, and in gathering 
 resources for their latter years. I must ask 
 them, Are you equally active in gathering the 
 treasure in heaven, the resources of Christian 
 character for the ages beyond ? I see my 
 younger friends preparing by study and training 
 for the duties and honors of this world. Them 
 also I must ask. Are you getting ready withal for 
 the Divine service of the coming world, for which 
 the decisive hour of examination may strike, per- 
 haps, to-morrow ? Say, friends and fellow pil- 
 grims to the undiscovered country, must our 
 resources, successes, honors, in every other case be 
 won by diligent preparation in applying means to 
 ends, and can it be, under the law which propor- 
 tions blessedness to character in the ages to come, 
 that we can shut our eyes, and drift, and dream, 
 and wake in heaven ? Absurd ! Impossible ! 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
 " / say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, 
 they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." 
 
 Matthew xii. 36. 
 
 IT is a law in physics, that action and reaction 
 are equal and in opposite directions. The 
 child illustrates it with his bouncing ball. It is 
 also a law in ethics, that there is no action, 
 however trivial, but has its appropriate and 
 equal reaction. It is no figure of speech, no 
 hyperbole, but a strict and sober enunciation of 
 this ethical law, which we find in Christ's declara- 
 tion of our accountability for even an act so 
 insignificant as we deem the idle word. 
 
 By " the day of judgment" which enforces this 
 accountability, we must, however, understand 
 something different from the notion popularly 
 attached to that phrase. Pictorial representa- 
 tions of future judgment fade before clearer 
 
 * Preached Sunday Morning, August 8th, 18 
 
 B 
 
1 8 THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
 conceptions of the spiritual reality. But that 
 reality, the thorough and inevitable searching- 
 ness of that judgment, involving an experience 
 of the consequences even of the most trivial 
 acts, grows more clear and certain in the light of 
 intelligent reflection. And when we discover 
 this Divine judgment to be immediate and con- 
 tinuous, ever present as well as ever future, the 
 life of to-day seems more profoundly momen- 
 tous. Conscience is quickened by a keener 
 sense of responsibitity for those petty details of 
 life, that often seem as devoid of consequence as 
 the breath itself, which evaporates in the idle 
 word. 
 
 The subject now before us is both general and 
 special. It gives us, first, a general view of the 
 Christian truth of retribution, as distinct from 
 the Jewish and Pagan notions of punishment,, 
 which are widely current in Christendom. It 
 gives us, next, a special illustration of this in the 
 certainty of judgment, even for the idle word. 
 
 I. As to the Christian truth of I'etribution, our 
 hymn-books have been purged of some terrific 
 stanzas once appointed to be sung concerning 
 the world of woe, like this of Dr. Watts : 
 
 " Eternal plagues and heavy chains 
 Tormenting racks and fiery coals, 
 And darts to give immortal pains, 
 
 Dipped in the blood of damnfed souls." 
 
 Such is the change which in the last fifty years 
 has affected Christian thought in this respect,. 
 
THE REACTION OF SIN. 1 9 
 
 that no one would now be willing to sing about 
 hell as our grandfathers sang. But many good 
 people are afraid that the fading of the old ideas 
 about hell may weaken the motives which deter 
 from sin. There is, indeed, some cause for such 
 solicitude. There is a deplorable decay of moral 
 convictions concerning law and penalty. We 
 shall, however, not be able to repair this decay 
 by merely insisting more strenuously on the 
 certainty of the future. The whole habit of our 
 daily life is trained upon the general maxim, 
 that the future is doubtful. Doubt will therefore 
 always cling to every conception of retribution 
 as chiefly future, because this will be imagined 
 as in some way capable of avoidance or mitigation 
 before the time arrives. The toning up of moral 
 convictions on this subject, of which so urgent 
 need exists, must be in another way. What has 
 faded in the future must be rediscovered in the 
 present. The realities of retribution must be 
 demonstrated as existing now and here, at least 
 in their beginning, in evil germs of immeasurable 
 potency. In the day of sin there must be shown 
 the dawning of a day of judgment, in the evil 
 reaction which is inseparable from the evil act. 
 
 A pastor told me that a boy in his Sunday- 
 school came to his mother and said : " My 
 teacher says there is no lake of fire and brim- 
 stone to put liars in, and I don't think there is. 
 What's the need, then, of a fellow being so 
 careful to tell the truth ?" Probably there are 
 
20 THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
 many men who think, with that boy, that if there 
 is no fire and brimstone to be feared, there's no 
 reason why they shouldn't be scamps. If they 
 think so, they are scamps already. " Virtue 
 founded on fear," says Dr. Parker, " is only vice 
 in a fit of dejection." I should hope to save that 
 boy, not by persuading him, in the first place, 
 that, though fire and brimstone may be a sort of 
 fiction, there is something in the future quite as 
 dreadful. Rather, I would lead him to see, first, 
 the present actual harm of lying, the ruin of 
 character, the disgrace, the shame, the inward 
 rottenness it causes. Then, I would ask him if 
 it isn't equal to fire and brimstone now, to carry 
 the stench of that foulness in him as long as he 
 lives, with both man and God against him, and 
 no getting the misery out of him till he gets the 
 lying out. I would thus make him see, that the 
 real fire and brimstone is in the present sin, so 
 quick to catch fire, so hard to quench, and, while 
 it burns, suffocating both conscience and happi- 
 ness with its poisonous exhalations. 
 
 The school-boy studying Latin finds in his 
 Vergil the same ideas of hell which the Christian 
 world has derived from Dante and Milton. 
 These, however they affect the imagination, fail 
 of power among the practical motives of the 
 world, not only for other reasons, but, in general, 
 because they transfer men's fear of retribution 
 from the living and actual present to a remote 
 and shadowy future, with room for many a hope 
 
THE REACTION OF SIN. 21 
 
 of escape between. Just here the Christian 
 truth of retribution far transcends that Pagan 
 conception, which Christian thought has in- 
 herited, and too long preserved, from the old 
 religions. 
 
 In the Pagan view, both heaven and hell lie 
 beyond the limits of the world and of time. 
 The keys of each are in the hand of Almighty 
 Power. The acme, both of hope and fear, is to 
 obtain admission to the one, and escape from the 
 other, when the gate of Eternity opens. The 
 judgment of acceptance or exclusion is not to 
 be passed till then, and much may meanwhile 
 happen to bend it to our hope. 
 
 But, in the Christian view, accordingto the word 
 of Christ, " The kingdom of God is within joii,'^ 
 heaven, and therefore hell, are here and now, 
 essentially if not completely, in actual reality if 
 not in full revelation, in beginning if not in 
 consummation. The eternal life, the eternal 
 punishment, are both here in leaf and bud, if 
 not in flower and fruit. The hope, the peril, are 
 not afar, above or below ; they are present in the 
 soul that is opening toward or closing against 
 the light of God. The future is not only in the 
 hereafter ; the present is the future in the 
 making, as conduct crystallizes into character. 
 The key of Paradise or of Gehenna is in the 
 hand of a gate-keeper who is no other than our 
 present self The light of the one, the darkness 
 of the other, exist for us not elsewhere than 
 
22 THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
 in the soul which the glory or the shadow fills. 
 Here, rather than beyond, is the opening of the 
 celestial or of the infernal door. The " Come, 
 ye blessed" or " Depart ye cursed" is not reserved 
 for another world than this ; it is the Divine 
 ultimatum of to-day, declaring to the good and 
 to the evil their character and their portion as it 
 is in the present hour. The Judgment of God is 
 indeed to come, but it is always coming, always 
 here, always more and more, grayer, deeper, 
 more thorough, till it is consummated in the 
 ultimate elimination of sin from the moral 
 universe. " The last judgment " is not when 
 the end of time arrives, but when, through the 
 judgment fires, the end of sin arrives. 
 
 Such, then, is the wide contrast between the 
 Pagan and the Christian view of retribution. 
 A remote consequence, says the Pagan ; an 
 immediate consequence, says, the Christian. The 
 Pagan thinks of consequences as detached from 
 conduct, and carried over into futurity, not to 
 affect us till after an interval, during which there 
 may be escape from them. This leaves a man 
 tolerably at ease, as if liable for a debt that is not 
 to mature for a long time, during which he trusts 
 by good fortune to provide for it. The Christian 
 teaching, on the other hand, is, that the con- 
 sequence of conduct is immediate. If a man 
 drinks brandy or drinks laudanum every day, 
 the stimulant or the narcotic does not lie dormant 
 in his system a moment. There is no waiting 
 
THE REACTION OF SIN. 23 
 
 till a distant day, when all at once the accumulated 
 effects appear in a frenzied excitement or a 
 ■comatose slumber. Equally impossible is it, in 
 the Christian view, to conceive of a moral or 
 an immoral act as not taking retributive effect 
 till a remote judgment day, when all at once a 
 bill that has been accumulating for years must be 
 summarily liquidated. All that may be thus 
 postponed is the mere discovery of consequences. 
 This, indeed, may long be evaded, till it come in 
 some sudden overwhelming burst of light. Not 
 so the real consequences themselves. The loss 
 of every bad act, the gain of every good act, go 
 with the act inseparably. There is no escape 
 from consequences, because there is no separation 
 ■of consequences from actions, no gap between 
 cause and effect, no interval between action and 
 reaction. There is in everything right eternal life, 
 there is in everything wrong eternal punishment, 
 just as there is life in every particle of food, and 
 death in every particle of poison. The antidote, if 
 timely taken, may work off the poison, yet never 
 without more or less of disturbance and pain. 
 Repentance and amendment may cut short the 
 ■eternal punishment, yet never without more or less 
 •of suffering : they begin to cut it short as often as 
 any sinner now or hereafter forsakes his evil way. 
 Yet it is none the less eternal, that is, inherent in 
 the eternal nature of things, so long as the baneful 
 wrong remains in the moral system, corrupting or 
 palsying the moral nature of the man. 
 
24 THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
 Now the Pagan notions of Divine judgment 
 and punishment, which color the common thought 
 of to-day, by putting off to the future the con- 
 sequences of sin, with opportunities of escape 
 before they ensue, have this pernicious effect 
 upon the moral tone of society. They relax that 
 moral safeguard which is in a conviction of our 
 inevitable accountability to the law of God. We 
 see their effect in the notions which so many 
 young people entertain, that they may enjoy the 
 pleasures of sin for a season, sow their wild oats,, 
 drink of Circe's cup, follow the lure of the sirens' 
 song ; and then, when the appetite for forbidden 
 joys is sated, obtain God's grace in its fulness 
 of hope, and by repentance avoid the bitter 
 aftertaste of sin. This moral skepticism, so 
 prevalent, so baleful beyond all other skepticism, 
 cannot be confuted by any rhetorical magnifying 
 of what is future. Rather and only by a rational 
 enlargement to its just proportions of the 
 neglected Christian truth concerning what is 
 present, — the instant recoil of the Divine retribu- 
 tio/is in the evil reaction which is inseparable 
 even from the slightest evil act. The Pagan 
 notion of a distant and avoidable consequence is 
 essentially immoral. Only the Christian thought 
 is ethically true, that the present is the supremely 
 consequential part of our existence. What we 
 call momentary is of eternal moment. We 
 dispose of our whole future in our disposal of 
 to-day. 
 
THE REACTION OF SIN. 2$. 
 
 To-day, therefore, is " t/ze day of salvation." 
 Our eternal judgment is in progress now. The 
 Judge is much nearer than at the door. His 
 sentence is wrought into character in the loom 
 of time that weaves the moral tissue of the soul 
 by every step we take in the way of loyalty or 
 disloyalty to the moral law of Christ. Short 
 may be the steps, but each step counts, not by 
 arithmetical but by geometrical progression, not 
 by addition, but by multiplication, by involution 
 from power to power. The idle word, that 
 is, the really good-for-nothing, wasteful word, 
 inevitably reacts in a moral hurt, in the neglect 
 of which is generated, as it were, a blood-poison 
 within the soul. 
 
 2. As to the special illustration of the truth of 
 retribution, for which Christ has selected the idle 
 word, only in the ethical and essentially Christian 
 conception of retribution as the reaction of sin 
 have we the proper point of view for a just and 
 adequate understanding of our Lord's saying: 
 " Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall 
 give account thereof in the day of judgment" — that 
 is, of each word in its day of consequences. 
 Every word as well as every deed, is judged by 
 its consequences, and every day of account to 
 consequences is in reality a judgment-day. 
 Evidently we must think of a time far nearer 
 and more recurrent than " the last day," to which 
 all such accounts have been supposed to be 
 deferred for final auditing and settlement. 
 
26 THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
 We are now prepared to see that our Lord's 
 saying must be, what many have thought it 
 could not be, literally true. The idle word (by 
 which I think our Master means all words that 
 hinder or stand in the way of good), often for- 
 gotten as soon as spoken, mere words as they 
 seem, empty breath, how unlikely men have 
 deemed it that such airy nothings are to count 
 for anything at such a time as they think " the 
 day of judgment " to be. Before the august 
 tribunal and in the vast concourse of such a day, 
 will not the grand facts of our life, the signal 
 merits or demerits, turn the scale decisively, 
 while the idle words count for the mere dust in 
 the pan? Will not the saint or the villain 
 stand or fall on grounds of greater moment than 
 the trifles of conduct ? Will not the idle word 
 then either be lost in the reckoning, or have no 
 weight in the result ? 
 
 On the contrary, Christ assures us that the 
 idle word will count, — every word that is in the 
 smallest degree harmful, — for idleness may be 
 regarded as the beginning of badness. But he 
 thinks also of the better as well as of the worse. 
 The least and lightest good word shall also have 
 its recompense. " For by thy words thou shalt be 
 justified, and by thy words thou shalt be con- 
 demned." The reason of this is not obscure. A 
 man talks as he is. When judged by your talk 
 you are judged by your character ; for talk is 
 character in expression. 
 
THE REACTION OF SIN. 27 
 
 But words not only express, but impress ; not 
 only show character, but make it. We have 
 seen the gossips at some loafers' exchange, 
 where idlers congregate. Their idle talk not 
 only shows what they are, but makes and keeps 
 them such. The flippant, worthless word not 
 onl^ utters but forms a like mind. It comes 
 from a mind set the wrong way, and it sets the 
 same way. Conversation is education. Men 
 are self-made by what they say, as well as by 
 what they do. To communicate an idea in 
 speech is to fix it more firmly in the mind of the 
 speaker. Our spoken word is like the nail that 
 fixes a lath or a shingle on a house. It fixes a 
 thought in the structure of our mental house. 
 The thoughts in whose circle we live, which 
 mould our affections, our conduct, our destiny, 
 are crystallized and set by our conversation, as 
 really as the shell of an oyster is formed by 
 secretion from the juices of its body. 
 
 Beside this thought we must range another. 
 In this matter of liability for the idle word, the 
 speaker of it is not to be thought of as a man in 
 court with a trivial complaint against him, but as 
 a man who is not well, whose ailment is by no 
 means insignificant because it seems but trivial. 
 The tongue shows the state of the system. Till 
 there is a clean tongue, there is not a clean man. 
 Till there is soundness there must be suffering. 
 Not only so, but, besides this, the evil of the 
 tongue reacts upon the moral system, as it does 
 
28 THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
 not upon the physical. " For every idle word 
 men shall give account in a day of judgment" 
 because the idle word is not only symptomatic 
 of evil before it, but prolific of evil after it. It 
 is doubly significant, as both an effect of evil 
 and also a cause of evil. A trifle, is it ? So is 
 a cotton seed. But every seed, and every frag- 
 ment of the seed-husk, must be ginned out of the 
 fibre, before the thread or cloth can be spun or 
 woven fitly. Small, indeed, it is, and so is a 
 grain of sand ; but every such grain must be 
 sifted out of the flour, or there will be pain when 
 the teeth bite it. Far less trivial in comparison 
 the evil of the idle word. Not great, it is grow- 
 ing greater. Not passively waiting to be acted 
 on by future punishment, it is already reacting 
 in immediate retribution, both inflicting present 
 evil and fomenting future evil. It not only crowds 
 out the benefit of a helpful word, as a wasted day 
 crowds out the gain of a productive day, and 
 leaves us losers. It also forms, as a physiologist 
 might say, one more cell of morbid tissue, a small 
 but a living cell, reproductively contributing to 
 the general unhealth of the system. All that 
 appears is one more tiny yellow particle on the 
 tongue ; but this registers one more germ of 
 disease to be eliminated, and from now on, until 
 eliminated, retributively reacting in judgment- 
 evils — a dimmer eye for truth, a feebler sympathy 
 with goodness, a more fateful proclivity to worse 
 transgressions and worsening consequences. 
 
THE REACTION OF SIN. 29 
 
 But not even thus have we measured the full 
 evil of the idle word. To this now we have to 
 add what ensues through the recoil upon our- 
 selves, in many an instance, of the evil done by 
 it to the neighbor, whose injury or loss by our 
 fault an awakened conscience can never con- 
 template except with pain, a pain the greater as 
 the evil which our idle word may have set on 
 foot runs on to lengths beyond repair by our 
 repentance. 
 
 By such a view of the retributive reaction of 
 sin, even in what is deemed its most insignificant 
 form, our Lord's teaching binds us to conclude 
 how pernicious is all sin, how certainly, how 
 immediately it is ever pursued by judgment- 
 wrath. In such a view there is no scaring 
 fiction, as in the ancient pictures of an infernal 
 dungeon occupied by fiendish tormentors. Nor 
 is there aught here from which a cool reason 
 might free a distressed imagination. But rather 
 there is all the permanent pungency of indubi- 
 table facts, sobering to thought, justified in 
 reason, stimulating to moral earnestness, re- 
 enforcing and reenforced by conscience, when 
 the beginning of the future judgment is found 
 present in the very beginning of sin. The idle 
 word is, beyond doubt, a deteriorating force. 
 But force, whether in ethics or in physics, though 
 it may be converted, can never be annihilated. 
 Its day of judgment includes to-day with all the 
 future, through which its indefinitely prolific 
 
30 THE REACTION OF SIN. 
 
 power for evil is to run and grow and reproduce 
 successive harvests of tares for the fire. Its 
 consequence is immediate in the setting of a 
 bud. What is distant is only the discovery of 
 the ripened consequence in light there is no 
 retreat from, and pains there is no escape from, 
 till the evil is purged out. Well, if here and 
 betimes. But if not here, there. Brighter and 
 brighter is to grow the light, that searches out 
 all secret wrong ; finer and finer the sifting 
 meshes, that catch and show all unfitness for the 
 joy of the pure in heart. Ultimately no evil, 
 however trivial can escape. The specks of sin 
 unseen in the darker world show black in the 
 brighter. On and on must go the discovery of 
 evil, and the pain of that discovery, in the in- 
 creasing " revelation of the righteous judgment of 
 God." What we have most to fear is not that 
 revelation, which is yonder, but the evil to be 
 revealed, which is here ; not the light of the 
 future, but the deformity and damage of the 
 present, upon which that light must fall as fire. 
 In this view of the spiritual realities of our 
 situation, as subject to the Divine judgment, how 
 manifest it is, that the land of our hopes and 
 fears is here and within ourselves, rather than 
 afar in some place beyond the bounds of mortal 
 life. We have in truth, no cause of reasonable 
 hope or fear in all the future, except that cause 
 which exists in what we are and do to-day, in 
 tending towards or away from the Christian ideal 
 
THE REACTION OF SIN. 3 1 
 
 of life. In this actual condition, and its present 
 and potent reaction for evil or good, are both 
 the judgment to be dreaded and the salvation to 
 be sought. " This is the judgment" said Jesus, 
 " that light is come and men loved the darkness 
 rather!' Our present and our only salvation is 
 so to love Christ's holy, kindly light, that it shall 
 show us what sort of growth, what growing forces, 
 are unfolding and gathering strength within us 
 to-day, till we learn wisely to fear even the idle 
 word, and the inevitable judgment-evil of its 
 deforming power. 
 
 Note. — " The d^y of judgment,'' and what should be under- 
 stood by that phrase, will be found fully discussed in my book,. 
 " Beyond the Shaduw '' (James Clarke and Co., London). 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN, 
 
QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN.* 
 
 ■" The kingdom of God is within yon.'" — (Luke xvii. 21.) 
 
 mHERE are some fallacious notions, which 
 are current about heaven. These are 
 ancient, as well as fallacious. In Christ's time, 
 there was a popular expectation of the advent of 
 "" the kingdom of God," which placed men's hope 
 in a bettering of their external situation, rather 
 than of their internal and moral condition. In 
 their anticipation that Divine power was to create 
 happy circumstances for them by putting all 
 foes under their feet, they gave small heed to the 
 prior interest of subjugating the foes " that war 
 against the soul" and to the creation within 
 themselves of the character in which only is real 
 felicity. To this, as the supreme interest, Christ 
 directed them, and said, " The kingdom of God is 
 within you.'' 
 
 * Preached Sunday Morning, July 31ST, 1887. 
 
36 QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 
 
 This saying must guide us in a Christian way 
 of thinking about heaven. When questions rise 
 as to its locality, and social organization, and 
 individual occupations, we are lost in mere con- 
 jectures. But when questions about the character 
 and spirit of the heavenly life come up, we 
 exchange conjectures for positive convictions. 
 What the Scriptures tell us of heaven is largely 
 negative or figurative, so far as regards the situa- 
 tion and its circumstances. Negatively, we are 
 told that there is no sea, no night, no sorrow, no 
 death. Figuratively, we are told of the resplen- 
 dent gems and gold of the celestial city, its river 
 of life, and tree of life, and throne of God. But 
 plain and literal terms are used to describe 
 heaven as a condition of moral and spiritual 
 health and peace and power, in likeness to Christ, 
 in fellowship with the good, in the service of God, 
 in an unfailing joy. 
 
 These descriptions of heaven as a spiritual con- 
 dition, rather than a local situation, are familiar 
 to us. They accord with our Lord's saying, 
 " The kingdom of God is ivithin you." They 
 make it evident that spirit is everything for the 
 realization of heaven. Wherever the spirit of 
 heaven is, in its moral power for purity and love 
 and communion with God, there heaven is, and 
 in this world as in another. Buffeted even, and 
 beset with trials a life on earth may seem to be, 
 as was the life of Christ. And yet even in the 
 midst of such a situation, the spirit may dwell 
 
QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 37 
 
 above the clouds, in an atmosphere of peace and 
 Hght and joy that is essentially heaven. And so 
 Christ, whom we speak of as '' a man of sorrows,'' 
 spoke of himself as constantly in heaven, 'Hlie 
 Son of Man who is in heaven." 
 
 I. This fact opens to us a series of useful 
 questions. The use of these questions is to help 
 us to think further in the direction in which our 
 Lord points us by saying, " the kingdom of God 
 is within you." These questions we may not be 
 able to answer positively. But it is not on that 
 account useless to ask such questions. It has 
 been well said, that " wise questioning is the half 
 of knowledge." The questions we have now to 
 ask will be of use by bringing out more clearly 
 Christ's essential principle, that a personal con- 
 dition, rather than external circumstances, is what 
 constitutes heaven. Of use, also, in stimulating 
 us to that personal culture, upon which any 
 realization of heaven must depend. 
 
 The world is full of people who place their 
 ideal of eEurthly happiness too much in the hope 
 of getting into better circumstances, better 
 houses, better dress, better society, better fortune. 
 But it is a common experience which George 
 Eliot has put on record, in her saying, that " no 
 list of circumstances will ever make a paradise." 
 And the disappointment which people regularly 
 ■experience, so far as they do not seek for inward 
 betterment, in temper and character, their disen- 
 chantment in possession of their prize, when they 
 
38 QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 
 
 find that something more than outward gain is 
 necessary to their contentment, starts a grave 
 question about the expectations of the future 
 life. Is it not altogether likely that many are 
 mistakenly placing their ideal of the heavenly 
 satisfactions too much in the hope of heavenly 
 surroundings, and too little in the acquisition of 
 the heavenly fitnesses, through which alone can 
 the heavenly satisfactions come ? 
 
 I. Our first question, therefore, in the line of 
 our Lord's saying, is this : Does the blessing of 
 heaven depend on the absence of all possible 
 causes of discontentment, or on our power to quell 
 all possible discontentment, and rise above it? 
 How is it in this world ? Our sunniest moments 
 in this world are bright, not because there are 
 absolutely no clouds anywhere in sight, if we 
 choose to look at them, but because we choose 
 not to look at the clouds. In the joyous social 
 circle, we refuse to think of coming farewells. 
 The possible misfortunes of the new year we put 
 out of mind, and give its first day to joyous 
 greetings. In our supreme moments of content 
 we can discover drawbacks and limitations, if we 
 will, but we rather turn from them, fix our minds 
 on the real and present good, and let the wings 
 of cheerfulness bear light hearts aloft. Is there,, 
 then, nothing like this in the heavenly life, a con- 
 tentment that depends on the disposition to look 
 thankfully on the bright side of things, rather 
 than on the utter absence of a side that either is 
 
QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 39 
 
 not bright, or, to a less sunny temper might not 
 seem bright ? If the question is at all startling 
 to our prepossessions, let us lay it up to reflect 
 upon after we have inquired further. 
 
 2. Another question in the same line is this : 
 May not the happiness of heaven depend on our 
 power to make things enjoyable, quite as much 
 as on the power of things themselves to give 
 enjoyment ? How is it in this world ? It is 
 in the most trying climates in the world that we 
 find the greatest measure of physical comfort. 
 And how so, but by cultivating the power to 
 obviate and remove the causes of discomfort ? 
 It is not where nature is most genial, but where 
 she is capricious and severe, that people in this 
 world live most comfortably, because, if it freezes,, 
 they have provided furnaces in doors and furs 
 out of doors ; if it rains they have waterproofs ;. 
 if days are "dark and short, they light the gas; 
 and know how to make their houses wind-tight 
 and mosquito-tight, if they choose. Art and 
 work convert an unsightly waste of rocks and 
 bushes into the pleasure-ground of a delightful 
 park. Thus we see some, by their power to 
 make the best of things, converting the hardest 
 situations into scenes of comfort, while others 
 find only discomfort, because they lack the 
 power to transform the situation. Will there be 
 no such tests of power hereafter in arduous 
 situations, which will be to us just what we are 
 able to make of them, and no more ? It is 
 
40 QUESTIONS- ABOUT HEAVEN. 
 
 certain, at least, that the supposition is not 
 negatived by anything that has been revealed. 
 
 3. A third question : . In what does any man 
 of high character find highest satisfaction ? Is it 
 not inthe triumphant workingof his powers,rather 
 than in the absence of a field for their working ? 
 An ideal humanity includes strength and heroism, 
 as well as sweetness and gentleness. The strong 
 and heroic side of our nature has a field before 
 it in the future, no less than the sweet and gentle 
 side. There is rest for the weary, doubtless, but 
 rest that refreshes for action ; peace, but not 
 sloth ; adoration, but no idle ecstasy. If an 
 Alexander could weep at the climax of victory, 
 because nothing was left him to conquer, not- 
 withstanding all the struggle that conquering 
 costs, what might we not imagine a Paul to feel, 
 if there were no arduous ministries to call his 
 robust powers into play, no field for the energy 
 of his Christian heroism ; no problems of diffi- 
 culty to engage all his sagacity and courage in 
 winning still further triumphs in the service of 
 his Lord ? What says the Scrfpture ? " Him 
 that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple 
 of my God." Much rests upon him there. The 
 faithful servant in the parable is promoted from 
 the charge of ten pounds to the charge of ten 
 cities. 
 
 4. Another question carries the same thought 
 a little further. Who are the men that taste 
 the keenest satisfactions of the present life, but 
 
QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 4 1 
 
 'the men who 'taste the noble joy of mastery ? 
 Not those at whose feet drop fruits full ripe from 
 trees they never planted, but those who see the 
 corn grow in fields which they have won out of 
 the heart of the forest ; men whose friendships 
 are dearer for the sacrifices that glued those 
 friends to their hearts ; men whose reputation 
 is dearer for the struggle that made way for their 
 friendless youth to the summit of honors. Is 
 heaven to know nothing of that triumphing 
 over obstacles and succeeding through difficul- 
 ties, in which some of the noblest joys of the 
 present world are tasted ? 
 
 5. A fifth and a more decisive question is, 
 whether there is any reason to expect a radically 
 different way of God with us hereafter than his 
 way here. One God, one law, is our axiom in 
 reasoning from the seen to the unseen. We see 
 a Divine law, that we have to wrestle, tug and 
 strive for every good we get. In this is the 
 Divine education, which draws out and discip- 
 lines our powers. But is the result of this 
 education so perfectly attained here, that we 
 may think it ceases, and changes to a radically 
 different way hereafter ? As to faith and 
 patience, courage, love, righteousness, is there 
 nothing more to attain of these than what we 
 have when we leave this world ? We . certainly 
 cannot believe in any arrest of development in 
 these after death. Neither can we see how the 
 ^development can go on, except under the same 
 
42 QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 
 
 law as here,' amid conditions that exercise faith,_ 
 
 and discipline patience, and call forth courage 
 
 in the way of righteousness. There is a hymn 
 
 which says : 
 
 " Hope shall change to glad fruition, 
 Faith to sight, and prayer to praise.'' 
 
 In some respects doubtless so. But the Scripture 
 says : " Now abideth faith, hope, charity!' Faith 
 and hope are as abiding as love, and the 
 objects of faith and hope can only be realized 
 by effort. 
 
 Now we need not in the least doubt that 
 heaven is free from sin and selfishness, from 
 distrust and disloyalty to God. Yet it was not 
 sin which caused the venomous reptiles, and 
 ferocious beasts, and wintry rigors of this world,, 
 that have to be guarded against and overcome. 
 We certainly cannot, with Milton, refer to the 
 fall of Adam and say : 
 
 " Then first began outrage from lifeless things." 
 
 Nor was it because of sin that coal and iron 
 were put where only hard labor can get them,., 
 nor because of disloyalty to God that many 
 parts of the globe were made with such stubborn 
 soil and trying climate, that comfortable living 
 depends on acquiring power to live comfortably. 
 And so, in a world of sinless virtue, may we 
 not find the same law as here — the development 
 of power by situations that call out power > 
 The law here is, that eating depends on working: 
 
QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 43. 
 
 for something to eat. Every object of desire is 
 marked with its price of effort. Is it sup- 
 posable that this law changes hereafter, when we 
 go forth from this preparatory school confessedly 
 unfinished, imperfect, — and that we find there a 
 contrary law, that everything is done for us with- 
 out further struggle of our own ? Living purely,, 
 contentedly, happily here, depends on our 
 acquiring power so to live. It cannot be 
 radically otherwise hereafter. One God, one 
 law. Death does not make up what the good 
 man lacks in himself, or do for him what he 
 should have done himself The man unfinished 
 here must be finished in a higher school. As to- 
 the situation we know little, but the law which 
 rules the situation cannot be contrary to the law 
 that rules the present, developing faith through 
 difficulties, and love through sacrifices, and 
 courage by hope of victory in well fought fields. 
 Let no one throw aside these questions as 
 merely speculative and unpractical. They are 
 thoroughly practical applications of the funda- 
 mental principle by which our Lord directs all 
 our thinking on this subject in saying, " Tlie 
 kingdom of God is within you!' They are 
 thoroughly practical, as incentives to that en- 
 deavor for the development of character which 
 the Gospel insists on, " unto a fidlgrown man, 
 imto the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
 Christr Heaven depends on personal condition 
 rather than external situation. Only a hint, no- 
 
44 QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 
 
 doubt, is this, but a pregnant hint, a hint to be 
 thought on and acted on. The really speculative 
 and unpractical man is he who is dreaming of a 
 heaven to be set up around him by Divine power, 
 a soft situation where one has nothing to do but 
 to take his ease, instead of striving for heaven to 
 be set up within him by the cultivation of his 
 spiritual powers, through Divine grace, and 
 Gospel truth, and obedience to the helping spirit 
 of God. 
 
 II. There are now a few facts before us, which 
 add emphasis to the questions we have asked, 
 and lend some probability to their indications. 
 
 I. One half of the human race pass from the 
 cradle to the grave. But still they live, and life 
 means growth ; growth means education. This, 
 no doubt, under happier influences and better 
 shepherding than here, according to the word of 
 the Lord, that " in heaven their angels do always 
 behold the face of my Father.'' But education is 
 not in knowledge merely, but in power more, not 
 so much in the acquisition of facts as in the 
 development of faculties. Under what law, then, 
 can the education of our babes in the unseen 
 world go on, that is radically different from the 
 law of education in the seen,- as an education of 
 power by circumstances that develop power, that 
 call faith and patience and courage into exercise, 
 that demand sacrifices of love, under the same 
 law which here sweetens our bread by the sweat 
 that earns it, and gives the noblest enjoyments 
 
QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 45 
 
 in the experiences of mastery " to him that over- 
 conieth " in the ways of God ? 
 
 2. Closely connected with this is the familiar 
 fact already alluded to, that, so far as we see God's 
 way, it is, that he does not do for us outright 
 that which we can do for ourselves. Though he be 
 ready to call dead Lazarus forth to life, yet he 
 first requires us to " take away the stone" that 
 Lazarus may come forth. The world has had 
 to work its way up to everything that has been 
 attained in goodness and truth, in comfort and 
 power. Not without God, but not without work. 
 " Work out your salvation, for it is God that 
 tvorkcth in you." Now what reason is there to 
 suppose that this Divine method ends, while 
 anything which can be realized under it is not yet 
 attained? Look, then, at the set of graduates 
 that go up from such schooling in this world. Is 
 their education apparently finished? Do they not 
 seem to have more to acquire in the same way of 
 struggle that gains all good acquisitions here ? 
 If so, how manifestly their realizations of heaven 
 depend on the acquired power they carry thither 
 to work with God toward the uttermost develop- 
 ment of whatever they have it in them to be and 
 to do. 
 
 3. Another fact, by no means to be over- 
 looked, is this : God's discipline in this earthly 
 school seems bent on the cultivation of patience 
 in self-contained power. What fires and floods 
 he carries us through, in teaching us to labor 
 
46 QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 
 
 and to wait, to endure and to be strong. How 
 he throws us off from outward supports upon 
 ourselves and our faith in him. How he darkens 
 our sun to teach us to create the cheer that does 
 not come from without, and to hght " the lamp 
 of God" within the heart. Are all these hardly- 
 learned lessons to be of no use hereafter ? Sup- 
 pose one has poorly learned them ; is he to be 
 excused from learning them better, because he 
 has got to heaven ? There is rest in heaven, 
 but rest from what ? Not from activity, so long 
 as it is the very nature of spirit to be active. 
 Christ tells u.s that God works ever. Of the 
 blessed dead the voice from heaven saith, " They 
 rest from their labours" — from all fatiguing, 
 wearing toil, but " their works do follow them" 
 the blessed work in which is the bliss of life. 
 There is rest, but no stop. There is peace, but 
 it is the peace of the strong, and peaceful so far 
 as it is strong. 
 
 4. The last fact requiring notice here, is the 
 testimony of Holy Scripture. The gift of our 
 Saviour is not a place, but a character of holy 
 power. " To as many as received him, to them 
 _gave he power to become the sons of God" And 
 what is this ? Power to forgive injuries, power 
 to make self-denials for righteousness' sake, 
 power to offer the sacrifices of benevolence, 
 power to endure hardship in a good cause, power 
 to overcome whatever tests our patience, faith 
 and love. This is the power, born within us of 
 
QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN., 47 
 
 "the Spirit of our crucified Lord, that makes the 
 heaven of the children of God. Death cannot 
 -confer this power on any lack of it. What is 
 lacked, that must be learned. Dwell thought- 
 fully on the word, " power to become the sons of 
 ■God." When will cease the growth of that 
 power to become ? When will cease the exercise 
 without which that power cannot grow ? 
 
 I have already said it, but I must repeat it, 
 that it is not necessary that we should be able to 
 give positive answer to the questions we have 
 raised to-day. It is enough that they light up 
 the probabilities ; enough that they teach us to 
 think helpfully upon the fundamental principle : 
 ■" The kingdom of God is tvithin you!' If the 
 idea of heaven toward which our questioning 
 points is distasteful to an indolent, self-indulgent, 
 luxurious inclination, in that very distastefulness 
 is a fresh confirmation of the probability of that 
 idea. 
 
 III. It remains to make some brief applica- 
 tion of our present study. 
 
 The ancient notion of hell, as pictured in 
 Dante's Inferno, has been cast into a more 
 spiritual form of thought, as a moral condition 
 rather than a local situation. The ancient 
 notion of heaven must likewise be transformed. 
 It is one of our chief spiritual needs to-day, to 
 revise our ideas of heaven. Beyond doubt, most 
 people are dreaming of what they will find there, 
 rather than providing what they must carry 
 
48 QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 
 
 there. It appears to them as a Divine pleasure- 
 ground, open to all who have lived on the whole - 
 a correct life, open even to the careless on con- 
 dition of a dying penitent prayer. Once in,, 
 everything is done for the inmates, and nothing' 
 remains for them to do to make the situation 
 perfect. But this is the Mohammedan, rather- 
 than the Christian idea of heaven. Nevertheless, 
 even the creeds of Christian churches convey the 
 false idea, that botched work and half-done 
 work is perfected by dying, so as not to need to 
 be done over, and completely done. Says the- 
 Westminster Catechism : — " The souls of be- 
 lievers are at their death made perfect in 
 holiness." This is true, if it means that they are 
 perfectly established in steadfastness to a godly 
 purpose. It is not true, if it means that all- 
 degrees of goodness are equalized by dying, as- 
 many think. To correct this luxurious illusion, 
 our Lord's word shows us that what we carry 
 determines what we shall find. " The kingdom 
 of God is within you!' What we are, not where 
 we are, is its criterion of blessedness. We enter 
 heaven only so far as heaven enters us. The 
 heavenly satisfactions depend on power to live 
 the heavenly life. And what that power is, our- 
 earthly discipline reveals ; — the power of con- 
 tentedness with whatever God allots, the power 
 of transforming bitter into sweet, the power to- 
 yield our preferences without murmuring, the 
 power to stand and wait without discourage- 
 
.QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 49 
 
 ment, the power to spend and be spent in the 
 work of love without exhaustion of a good 
 resolve, the power to overcome whatever hinders 
 our progress or threatens our peace, the power 
 to persevere joyously over rough roads and 
 through large costs to glorious ends, the power 
 to " to give thanks always for all things" the 
 power to " rejoice in God" when all things seem 
 untoward. Such is the power which all Christian 
 discipline aims to cultivate for heaven. Joyous 
 the holy fellowship, blessed the Divine peace, 
 transcendent the eternal satisfactions, for which 
 such powers are disciplined on earth in the 
 school of Christ. But why the discipline, except 
 the real heaven be somewhat different from the 
 heaven of fond and soft fancy, meeting our 
 desires by pressing its demands on us, for a 
 moral power that is able to appropriate its 
 fruitions of Divine content, precisely that power 
 which we have here to cultivate as followers of 
 Christ ? For such power there must be some 
 future field of exercise, and joy in its exercise. 
 In such power to live the life of the children of 
 God is all the promise of the heaven which the 
 Gospel calls us to. 
 
 Giving these thoughts due place, there is but 
 one answer, and that most positive, to be given 
 to the practical question they put to every one 
 of us. Must not each day tell against us in 
 terms of future weakness, unfitness and loss, 
 that fails to cultivate the moral power of the 
 
50 QUESTIONS ABOUT HEAVEN. 
 
 heavenly life by endeavoring to realize the 
 kingdom of God within us, according to the law 
 of Christ, by endeavoring to realize within 
 ourselves the aspiration of the Lord's prayer : 
 " Thy will be done in earth as it is done in 
 heaven" In all worlds, in all ages, no heaven 
 can be found anywhere, that is not found first 
 within us. Well does the poet remind us : 
 
 " The mind is its own place, and in ilself 
 
 Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." 
 
 Well does the Apostle exhort us : " Be not 
 deceived ; God is not mocked ; whatsoever a man 
 soweth, that shall he also reap." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT* 
 
 '■'■ If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a 
 liar." — I John iv. 20. 
 
 fTIHUS speaks the bosom disciple of Jesus, 
 J-^-l the man likest to his Lord. A ringing 
 speech it is. Right through all cant and all 
 self-esteem it goes, as with the whiz of a bullet 
 straight to the heart of the fact, that under- 
 neath some professions there is a lie. "I/a man 
 say, T love God, and hateth his brother, he is a 
 liar" This sharply questions us, and we must 
 question it to know what it means. 
 
 In the introduction to his History of the 
 Church of Scotland, Dean Stanley relates how 
 Archbishop Usher visited, without disclosing his 
 
 *Pre.4CHED Sunday Evening, July 31ST, 1887. 
 
54 THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 name, the great pastor of the Scotch Covenanters, 
 Samuel Rutherford. Being asked to take part 
 in the catechism which was included in the even- 
 ing devotions, the stranger's turn came at the 
 question, " How many commandments are 
 there ? " " Eleven," was the answer. " Eleven," 
 echoed Rutherford, " I am surprised that a man 
 of your age should not know better." The 
 answer came : " A new commandment give I 
 unto you, that ye love 07ie another ; as I have 
 loved you, that ye also love one another. By this 
 shall all men know that ye are tny disciples, if ye 
 have love one' to another!' The next morning 
 the Archbishop preached in Rutherford's pulpit 
 on this Eleventh Commandment, which their 
 respective churches had so lost sight of in their 
 fierce conflict with each other. 
 
 Of this commandment Paul has said : " The 
 whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this : 
 Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself 
 
 But who is the " brother " whom John speaks 
 of? Is he every one who joins, or ought to join 
 with us in saying, " Our Father, who art in 
 heaven ? " Or is only he our brother who 
 has a certain affinity of thought and feeling 
 with us ? Is Emerson right or wrong when he 
 says, in his essay on " Self- Reliance " : " Do 
 not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my 
 obligation to put all men in good situations. 
 Are they my poor ? I tell thee, thou foolish 
 philanthropist, I grudge the dollar, the dime, the 
 
THE KLEVKNTH COMMANDMENT. 55 
 
 cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me, 
 and to whom I do not belong. There is a class 
 of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am 
 bought and sold. For them I will go to prison, 
 if need be, but your miscellaneous popular 
 charities . . though I confess with shame 
 
 I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a 
 wicked dollar, which by and by I .shall have the 
 manhood to withhold." 
 
 Well, if the good Samaritan had thought with 
 Emerson, the Gospel would never have given 
 us that touching parable. He would have said, 
 That wounded Jew over there is really in a bad 
 fix, but let his own people look after him. He 
 does not belong to me, nor have I any obligation 
 to him. But this is the worldly spirit of sect, 
 caste, clique, party. The Christian spirit is 
 catholic, inclusive, brotherly to all, simply because 
 One is Father of all. The sect spirit, the caste 
 spirit takes us back to a time when man was 
 parted from man by the worship of separate and 
 exclusive gods. One God makes the worshippers 
 who are at one with him at one with each other, 
 regarding each other as before him " whose tender 
 mercies are over all his works." 
 
 '■'■ Doth the fountain send forth from the same 
 opening sweet water and bitter? " Can a man be 
 false toward his neighbor and true toward God ? 
 No more can a man love God who fails to love 
 his neighbor. This is the Apostle's thought. Our 
 Lord taught his disciples to recognize a brother- 
 
56 THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 hood of mankind as wide as the outermost circles 
 of human life in its remotest, darkest removes 
 from the centre of light and love and truth ; a 
 brotherhood over-leaping all partitions of nation 
 and family, of sect and character ; a brotherhood 
 excluding not even the ignorant, the boorish, the 
 mean or the vicious, from a privileged demand 
 upon the learned, the polite, the generous and 
 virtuous, for love. To break with this brother- 
 hood is to break with the Father of it. To 
 deny it, in any member of it, is to deny the 
 Father. " Verily I say imto you, inasmuch as 
 ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did 
 it not to me!' " If a man say, I love God, 
 and hateth his brother, he is a liar." 
 
 But how far does this stringent demand go ? 
 
 It does not run all brotherly regard down to 
 the level of an indiscriminate affection. Jesus 
 himself had his bosom friend, the nearest of all. 
 Some pious people fancy that, when they get to 
 heaven, all the bosom friendships of earth will 
 be swallowed up in a heart-glow toward all, in 
 which the life-long marriage partner or the child 
 is no more than any stranger. Pious nonsense 
 that. If there were truth in it, there would be 
 some approach to it, some growing toward it 
 here, as there is not. As we grow in love to our 
 neighbor, our love to those of our own home 
 grows only more pure, more profound. Relation- 
 ship is of permanent account. So also is 
 character. Jesus' love made account of character 
 
THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. S/ 
 
 when he looked upon the Jews " with anger" 
 because of their hard-heartedness, yet with a 
 heart which distinguished between the sin to be 
 hated and the sinner to be loved and saved. 
 With all due regard for relationship and for 
 character, the Divine law of love demands, first, 
 not a negative and neutral, but a positive dis- 
 position toward every man, no less positive than 
 the love with which " God so loved the ivorld 
 that he gave his only begotten Son" no less 
 positive than the love which prayed on the 
 cross, " Father forgive them ; they knotv not what 
 they do!' 
 
 Is then, the mere absence of ill will love'? No. 
 Is mere indifference, caring nothing one way or 
 the other, love ? No. There is no such thing in 
 nature, no such thing producible by the skill of 
 science, as a perfect vacuum, a space in which 
 there is absolutely nothing at all. Neither is 
 there any such thing in moral nature as a vacuum, 
 in which there is no sentiment whatever toward 
 any man or thing we know. As the absence, of 
 light is the presence of darkness, the absence 
 of a brotherly feeling is the presence of an 
 unbrotherly. The Gospel law recognizes no 
 vacant space, no middle ground, between love 
 and hate. The absence of that positive brotherli- 
 ness which embraces every man with hearty 
 good will, ready on occasion to do good even to 
 evil doers, is the spirit which cannot with truth 
 profess that it loves God. 
 
58 THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 There is sometimes a latent hate in us, which 
 we are unconscious of, which is as quiet as canned 
 gunpowder, till a spark betrays its nature and 
 reveals its power. When your dog meets 
 another with which he has had a quarrel, 
 how his back bristles, how his eyes glower, 
 what surly growls as he struts stiffly by. 
 Sometimes the dog-spirit comes out in us, 
 when we pass one who has done tis a shrewd 
 turn or an ill turn ; our thought bristles and 
 our heart mutters wrath as he walks by. 
 We hear his name mentioned with praise, and 
 say, " You don't know him as well as I." Then 
 the old story is told, roughening the back of 
 anger as it comes out. That is the animal man, 
 not the spiritual, in the charity that " Jiopeth all 
 things"; hopes the wrong doer has a conscience; 
 hopes he thinks better than he did ; hopes there 
 is no remembrance of the sin before the 
 Judge. 
 
 Said a great statesman : — " How many 
 estrangements, misunderstandings, mortal en- 
 mities, would be cleared up and dispelled, if the 
 adversaries would only for a few moments meet 
 eye to eye and face to face." It is true in 
 church and society as in politics. But the 
 difficulty is often in the hard and hateful un- 
 willingness even to meet. It is related of a 
 strong opponent of Henry Clay, that a mutual 
 friend once asked permission to introduce him 
 to Mr. Clay. " No sir," said he, " Mr. Clay has 
 
THE ELKVENTH COMMANDMENT. 59 
 
 •such a way with him that he would make me 
 like him in spite of myself." 
 
 Beyond question there is too much of this 
 feeling, even among the disciples of Christ 
 toward fellow disciples. They "just want to 
 have nothing to do with them," even at the 
 communion table, either in this world or the 
 next. There will be room enough hereafter for 
 these repugnances, but it can be found only out- 
 side of the family whose law is the spirit of 
 Christ. 
 
 It is told of a hard-tempered old farmer, that 
 he was so impressed with this necessity of 
 reconciliation to his neighbor in order to 
 reconciliation to God, that, being on his death- 
 bed, as he thought, he sent for a neighbor with 
 whom he had had an obstinate quarrel. " I'm 
 to die, Donald," said he, " and I maun die friends 
 wi' ye." " Aye," said Donald, " gie me your 
 hand." The hands were joined. " All settled, 
 Donald?" "Aye, all settled." " Weel, weel, 
 I'm glad ye're willing to hae it so, if I die. But 
 mind, Donald, if I dinna die, it's no settled 
 yet." 
 
 So, alas, many live. We mean on the dying 
 bed to bequeath a legacy of forgetting and 
 forgiving. But we have no mind to be in this 
 business our own executors. We imagine, like 
 that old farmer, that one can live outside and die 
 inside of the law of love. But, " // a man say 
 I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar." 
 
6o THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Yet, what would you have me do, one says, 
 with a person who is the thorough contradiction 
 of myself ? Can I keep his company ? Can I 
 make him at home with me. Is it not better to 
 part, than to meet and jar ? Yes, if the parting 
 be brotherly parting, as it ought and may, like 
 that of Abraham and Lot. The first thing is a 
 right spirit, in which candor and common sense 
 bear sway, and make even parting a thing of 
 good will, not ill will. 
 
 There are some who remember that when 
 feeling ran high in America on the slavery 
 question, those who urged that the negro was a 
 man, and should be treated as a brother, and not 
 a beast, were met by the silly rejoinder, " Do 
 you want your daughter to marry a negro?" 
 As if that were the natural result of obedience to 
 the Golden Rule in breaking the fetters, and 
 burning the auction-blocks, on which men^ 
 women and children were sold as cattle. 
 Equally unreasonable to pretend, that the 
 burying of hatchets and the cultivation of good 
 will requires the swamping of all the natural 
 diversities, in which men dwell in a closeness or 
 remoteness that is determined by their fitness to 
 each other. " Religion," said the Chinese sage, 
 " what is it but reciprocity ?" But there may be 
 reciprocity, whether it is an ocean or only a table 
 that lies between. There is reason in the saying 
 that " high fences make good neighbors." The 
 natural unlikenesses of temperament, the diver- 
 
THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 6l 
 
 •sities of occupation and education, which fence 
 men off from intimacy with each other, are no 
 more incompatible with a neighborly spirit, than 
 the high walls behind which in England a family 
 loves to shut itself in from all the world outside 
 its bounds. 
 
 But suppose that some offence has estranged 
 neighbor from neighbor ; there should, of course, 
 be an effort for reconciliation. Such an effort 
 may be wisely or unwisely made. Sores must 
 be dressed with a tender hand. There is a fit 
 time and an unfit. A premature effort may end 
 in worse embitterment. Here we are to watch 
 with a loving disposition for the auspicious 
 moment, saying to ourselves meanwhile, " Time 
 and I are a match for any man." 
 
 We must remember that a right spirit — the 
 main thing — is, first, reasonable and just. These 
 people who are so sure of their own opinion, their 
 own case, their own uprightness, as against 
 others, — I wonder if they ever paused to think 
 upon the advice that Oliver Cromwell gave to 
 the Scotch Presbyterian Assembly : — " My 
 brethren, I beseech you in the bowels of Jesus 
 Christ, believe it possible that you may be mis- 
 taken." We must make some allowance for the 
 imperfections of our own minds in our estimate 
 of our brother. We may be color-blind without 
 knowing it. Justice, while she holds a sword, 
 holds even scales. It is not just to load down 
 one scale, and not care for what should go into 
 
62 THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 the other. We are bound to look for the points 
 of sympathy, the lovable traits, the common 
 ground where we can agree with another. Well 
 says the old proverb : 
 
 " He that will live in peace and rest, 
 Must see, and hear, and say, the best.'' 
 
 And this meeting-point on what is best I affirm 
 is to be found in every case by whoever seeks 
 for it. But if one would rather not find it, he 
 hateth his brother. If we say we love him, or 
 would like to love him, but prefer to dwell on 
 his oddities, errors, weaknesses, sins, and what- 
 ever is unlovely, the truth is not in us. " Charity 
 rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth" 
 Is this our spirit ? Then we shall seek for some 
 truth to rejoice in, something in every man that 
 is of good report. So the legend of the middle 
 ages had its account of Judas Iscariot, that even 
 in him was found one good deed, for the sake 
 of which he had one day's release in each year 
 from the fire. 
 
 Perhaps I dislike this man's haughty and 
 distant manner. But let me not forget that he 
 is a most public-spirited and exemplary citizen, 
 the soul of honor. Nor do I like that man's 
 touchiness and self-conceit. But be it remem- 
 bered that he is a generous giver and helper to 
 many. This man is uncomfortably stiff and set 
 in his way, and rather too much of a fossil. * 
 Hut we are bound to admit that he is tender- 
 
THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 63 
 
 hearted to the poor, and a grand hater of all 
 rascality. That man is too close and penurious 
 for me. But I knew him to walk twenty miles 
 on the worst day of winter to carry fresh apples 
 to a sick bed. Why, there was Stephen Girard, 
 of Philadelphia, whom a great many despised as 
 a mean and stingy money-rake. But when 
 yellow-fever smote that city, and most men ran 
 away, Stephen Girard volunteered to be a nurse, 
 and for months did nothing but bear the victims 
 of the pestilence from their homes to the 
 hospital, watch there by their infected beds, 
 receive the last message from their dying lips, 
 wind the plague-smitten corpses in their noisome 
 sheets, and carry them forth with his own hands 
 for burial. There is good metal of the right 
 ring in many a nature where we do not look 
 for it. And if we really wish to love our 
 brother, we shall look for it, and be glad to find 
 it, and rejoice in the victory of love, overcoming 
 evil with good. Let there be first this brotherly 
 spirit, and no one will need to tell it what it 
 ought to do. 
 
 Now by what considerations shall we cultivate 
 this spirit, as a spirit to be cultivated in this 
 world in order to enjoy its ripened fruit in the 
 world to come ? 
 
 Probably there were never two persons who 
 found less cause to love one another than the 
 sister queens, Mary and Elizabeth of England, 
 rivals by birth, rivals by creed, and each the 
 
64 THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 heir to the hatreds of their respective mothers, 
 Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, — Mary 
 urged by her counsellors to put Elizabeth to 
 death, and Elizabeth escaping it only by her 
 consummate prudence. The traveller sees in 
 Westminster Abbey the tomb which com- 
 memorates in its touching inscription the grand 
 reconciliation effected by the grave. " We the 
 sisters Mary and Elizabeth partners in the 
 kingdom and in the sepulchre sleep here in hope 
 of the resurrection." 
 
 As I read that inscription, from which the 
 thought of Death as the great reconciler had 
 eliminated all trace of earthly discord, I said to 
 myself — Why should we cling to any feeling 
 toward another that we dare not carry into the 
 world of judgment ? Not death, but we our- 
 selves must be our own reconcilers, ere we 
 approach the Father. We must write our agree- 
 ments with the living hand. On the heavenly 
 altar as on the earthly is it written, " First be 
 reconciled to thy brother, then come and offer thy 
 gift." " Let not the sun therefore go down upoti 
 your wrath" for " ye know not what shall be on 
 the morrow!' 
 
 To reinforce our cultivation of the brotherly 
 spirit, there must come in still another con- 
 sideration. When Dr. Chalmers was offered on 
 one occasion a glass of wine, he declined it with 
 this excuse, " Sir, I am by nature a glutton and 
 a drunkard." This illustrates the charity which 
 
THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 65 
 
 IS saved from hating a brother by remembering, 
 ^' I too am of the same clay as he." In him we 
 may see ourself; in his faults, if not the 
 duplicates, the counter-parts of faults chargeable 
 to ourselves. If we thank God, as did the 
 Pharisee, that we are " not as other men" it 
 must be in the spirit of the publican in praying, 
 ^' God be merciful to me the sinner." Judging 
 ourselves fairly is prerequisite to fair judging of 
 our brother. Sentencing our own faults justly 
 is prerequisite to any just sentence of his. 
 Together go pride and hate, together go love 
 and humility. If we have the spirit of Christ, 
 the spirit of constant aspiration toward God for 
 ourselves and others, then criticism, as well as 
 charity, will begin at home. Only from such a 
 temper comes the love which cordially embraces 
 whatever is lovable in its brother, while at the 
 same time it as cordially detests whatever is 
 detestable. 
 
 One other consideration completes our theme. 
 ^' For this purpose" says John, " the Son of God 
 was manifested, that he m,ight destroy the works 
 of the devil" — destroy the works that embitter 
 and divide men by the works that unite them 
 with the loving Father. Are we for or against 
 this reconciling work of Christ ? If he makes 
 anything of us, it must be peace-makers, be- 
 ginning with our own tempers. In whatever 
 else we follow Christ, we have to begin by 
 making the best of one another, like the 
 
66 THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Redeemer who attached himself to whatever 
 was good and hopeful even in publicans and 
 sinners. 
 
 Tradition tells us that the Apostle John, in his 
 extreme old age, used to be carried to the 
 market-place of Ephesus, where he sat and 
 repeated to his disciples the words he had 
 treasured from the lips of Jesus. Over and over 
 again he reiterated, " Little children, love one 
 another." By and by they asked him to tell 
 them something more definite, more precise. 
 To which he answered : " This is the sum and 
 substance of the Gospel. If you do this, I have 
 nothing else to tell you." 
 
 " What is Christianity ? " asked Thomas 
 Erskine of Scotland, and answered his question 
 himself : " It is belief in the inexhaustible love 
 of God to man." There is no true belief in this 
 love of God, which does not sympathize with it, 
 and seek to share and imitate it. And if in this 
 view we exclaim, How little real Christianity 
 there is ! let us not forget that, whether there be 
 few saved or many saved, there is no saving 
 spirit but the loving spirit. Be heaven thinly or 
 fully peopled, we ourselves shall not be there, 
 except in the spirit of the great Lover of lost 
 men. By his great sacrifice for all, he has 
 obligated each to a like sacrifice for the other. 
 "If I, your Lord and Master, have washed 
 your feet, ye also ought to wash otie another's 
 feet" Through this crucifixion of pride comes 
 
THE ELEVENTH CO^T^r AN' DMENT. 6j 
 
 the resurrection of love. In these sacrifices 
 of brotherly love is the brotherhood of the 
 
 saved. 
 
 " . . . Therefore, Jew, 
 
 Though justice be thy plea, consider this — 
 That in the course of justice none of us 
 Should see salvation : we do pray for mercy ; 
 And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
 The deeds of mercy." 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST? 
 
WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST?* 
 
 "He that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me.'' 
 
 John xiii. 20. 
 
 IT is constantly reiterated from the Christian 
 pulpit and from the Christian press, that 
 accepting Christ is the salvation, and rejecting 
 him is the loss of the soul. That so it is, I do 
 not in the least doubt, and I wish to affirm it 
 with all the emphasis of complete conviction. 
 But I think that many, both preachers and 
 hearers, fail to clearly understand what is meant 
 by these all-important terms. 
 
 The real situation seems to be this. We have 
 come in the advance of Christian thought to a 
 point where a scholastic and theological concep- 
 tion of what the Gospel means by accepting or 
 rejecting Christ is giving way to a practical and 
 evangelical one. In theory the theological still 
 holds ; in practice the evangelical is superseding 
 it. The intellectual form of thought upon this 
 
 * Preached Sunday Morning, August 7th, 1887. 
 
72 WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST? 
 
 subject is still presented from pulpit and press in 
 accord with the traditions of the creed-makers. 
 But out of this the moral convictions of Christian 
 feeling are emerging into a clearer light, and are 
 shaping into a form more consistent with the 
 Gospel as interpreted by a larger Christian reason. 
 In this state of the case — the old house crumb- 
 ling, and the new house not well roofed in, — 
 many are able to find content in neither, and 
 seem to be for a season camping out. 
 
 Were you to ask me to assign a good reason 
 for saying that some Christian pastors and peo- 
 ple seem to have confused and inconsistent ideas 
 upon the subject of accepting or rejecting Christ, 
 I need only name a patent fact, familiar to all 
 who hear addresses from the pulpit, where a 
 theological intellect is dominant, and addresses 
 at funerals, where Christian feeling prevails. In 
 the pulpit it appears to be the theological Christ, 
 the acceptance of whom is salvation. At the 
 funeral it is the moral and practical Christ. In 
 the church the doctrinal impression is made, that 
 the man who does not accept the theological 
 Christ is lost. At the grave the conviction of 
 Christian feeling asserts, that the man who 
 has accepted the moral and practical Christ is 
 saved. 
 
 What I mean by this constrast between the 
 rejection of the theological Christ, and accept- 
 ance of the moral and practical Christ, will be 
 made plain by reference to specific cases. 
 
WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST ? 73 
 
 When some conspicuous unbeliever in the 
 theological Christ, like Charles Darwin, or 
 Theodore Parker, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
 leaves the world, here and there an orthodox 
 theologian may be found, who does not hesitate 
 to say unflinchingly in post-mortem remarks the 
 same that he says in sermons which theorize 
 about salvation in an abstract and intellectual 
 way. Said a preacher in Georgia : " Thedore 
 Parker is now in hell." Said a preacher in 
 Boston : " Emerson was a sweet sinner, but his 
 future place is outside of the Christian's heaven." 
 In most Christian minds, however, the logical 
 instinct is mastered at the grave's mouth by the 
 moral instinct. Our moral instincts, there at 
 least, recognize Christian principles even outside 
 of Christian forms. Men who have honestly 
 struggled, as Parker and Emerson did, even 
 outside of churches and in contradiction to 
 creeds, to realize on earth that truth in spirit, 
 that righteousness in life, that ministry of 
 benevolence, of which Christ is the Divine 
 Ideal, our moral instincts class among good 
 men and not bad. In such we recognize not 
 the spirit of the devil, but the spirit of him who 
 came ''to destroy the ivorks of the devil." They 
 rejected the theological Christ, as presented from 
 pulpits, — they accepted the moral, the practical 
 Christ of the evangelists. Such, at any rate, is 
 the conviction of all with whom moral realities 
 weigh more than theological formulas ; all with 
 
74 WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST ? 
 
 whom life and spirit count for more than the 
 acceptance of a creed. Such a conviction finds 
 its completest warrant in the testimony of 
 Christ himself " Whosoever shall do the will of 
 God, the same is my brother, and sister, and 
 mother." " Whosoever shall do and teach these 
 commandments shall be called great in the 
 kingdom of heaven!' 
 
 But let us try for still clearer ideas upon this 
 subject, where clear ideas are so widely want- 
 ing ; let us see what it is that such men reject 
 in rejecting the theological Christ. It is clear 
 that they do not reject the personal and living 
 Christ, but rather a theory about him. This 
 theory is the staple of the preaching from which 
 they turn away. Sometimes it appears to them 
 as a scapegoat theory, in which two Divine 
 Persons are represented as bargaining with each 
 other, the one to spare in mercy, and the other 
 to pay in suffering for those who are spared ; a 
 theory in which the liabilities to law of all who 
 consent to the arrangement are lifted from 
 them, and put upon a Divine substitute, who 
 answers the law for them, instead of helping 
 them, as their partner, to answer the law them- 
 selves. The current preaching gives them the 
 impression that accepting such an arrangement 
 is accepting Christ. But in some sincerely 
 upright minds such preaching raises a protest ; 
 and the point for us to notice is, that the protest 
 comes not from the worse side of nature, in 
 
WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST ? 75 
 
 their case, but from the better. Such a theory 
 about the way of salvation as through Christ 
 bearing our punishment contradicts their moral 
 conviction, that the Divine law puts on every 
 man an untransferable responsibility, and that 
 righteousness and guilt are untransferable things. 
 Such seems to them to be the Apostolic teach- 
 ing, that " Every man shall bear his own burden',' 
 and Christ's teaching, that every one shall be 
 judged " according to his works" It is not an 
 easy conscience, but a rigid conscience, in which 
 such men have rejected the scapegoat theory 
 about Christ. They are not to be set down by 
 theologians on that account as rejecting Christ, 
 when they have not rejected him. On the con- 
 trary, they have accepted his commandments, 
 and have taught them both by precept and 
 example, striving to make righteousness more 
 of a reality in private and public life. They 
 may have been 
 
 " Vague of creed and barren of rite, 
 Yet holding, as in the Master's sight, 
 Act and thought to the inner light." 
 
 It is a great confusion of thought to reckon 
 such men as rejecters of Christ, and unsaved, 
 and bidden to depart from him to " the devil and 
 his angels" when they have accepted Christ's 
 ideas of God, and of life, and of duty, and have 
 embodied Christ's teachings in their own princi- 
 ples and conduct. That in so doing they have 
 accepted the moral and practical Christ, our 
 
76 WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST ? 
 
 moral instincts attest, at least when we stand 
 beside their graves. 
 
 Sometimes again, the current preaching seems 
 to present the theological Christ in a sort of life- 
 boat theory. The world of mankind is described 
 as a wreck, wrecked before it had fairly entered 
 on its great voyage, at the mouth of the Eden 
 harbor where it was launched. Some, however, 
 are to be taken off the wreck and saved ; the 
 rest to be abandoned. The preacher pictures 
 Christ as coming to the wreck with a life- 
 boat. All who will have only to get into 
 the boat and be rowed ashore. To refuse 
 this is represented as rejecting Christ. Such 
 men are sometimes said to reject Christ, because 
 they reject this theory, and refuse to get 
 into the boat, or join the church, which is pre- 
 sented to them as the only ark of safety. But 
 this is by no means the same as rejecting the 
 personal Christ, nor do such men in fact reject 
 him. They have accepted a different idea, both 
 of Christ and of the world of mankind. The 
 world, in their view, is not a hopeless wreck, but 
 a ship faring on a hopeful voyage, that needs 
 only a captain, and Christ is to them that 
 Captain. So, as they judge, Jesus himself 
 thought, when " he saw the multitudes and was 
 moved with compassion, because they were as sheep 
 without a shepherd." Leadership, not a life-boat, 
 seems to them the world's need ; doing good, 
 rather than getting good done for you, the true 
 
WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST ? -JJ 
 
 way of salvation. It is as the great Leader in 
 doing good that Christ appears to them, — " the 
 Captain of salvation" as the New Testament 
 calls him ; and as such he is accepted by them, 
 in a faith which Emerson describes as " the 
 doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering 
 of all evil." This is the moral and practical 
 Christ, of whom the Quaker poet says : 
 
 " Thy litanies, sweet ofifices 
 Of love and gratitude ; 
 Thy sacramental liturgies, 
 The joy of doing good." 
 
 Though a man refuse to pronounce any 
 Christian creed that was ever framed, and 
 reject every portrait of Christ that theology 
 ever painted, it is a monstrous mistake to count 
 him as rejecting Christ, when he has evidently 
 received the essential gift of Christ to the 
 world, — the Christian spirit which consecrates 
 life not to getting but to giving good to the 
 world, in unselfish labors for clearer truth, purer 
 charity, more earnest righteousness, for the 
 helpless and oppressed, for the victims of vice, 
 or neglect, or tyranny. This is a real accept- 
 ance of Christ, in contrast with which any other 
 kind of acceptance is but nominal. 
 
 If now we interrogate the history of the 
 church, — from the days when the first great 
 councils settled the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 and defined the mysteries of the Person of 
 Christ, amid acrimonious debates and rancorous 
 
78 WHAT IS IT TO RKCEI^"E CHRIST ? 
 
 denunciations (which earned for one of those 
 " Christian " assembhes the name of " the 
 Robber Council"), down through the days 
 when Catholics fell upon Protestants with the 
 crucifix in one hand and the sword in the 
 other, and Lutherans and Calvinists rivalled 
 their common enemy, the Pope, in their mutual 
 animosity, even down to comparatively recent 
 times, when saintly men like Wesley and 
 \Miitefield were bitterly persecuted in the 
 bosom of the church, and still now, when 
 Christian men refuse Christian fellowship to 
 brethren who doubt their notions of hell and 
 the devil, and other Christians refuse even the 
 crumbs of their table for the aid of those 
 Christian missions which our Lord imperatively 
 enjoined, — one fact is sadly clear to a candid 
 mind. Multitudes in every age have accepted 
 the theological Christ, who have either partially 
 or not at all accepted the moral and practical 
 Christ. They have accepted a scapegoat 
 theory, or a life-boat theory of Christ, which 
 does not seem to have made them any less 
 selfish than before, but not Jiim, himself, in his 
 moral and practical reality as the ruling spirit 
 of an unselfish life, — which is the only really 
 saved life. Nominally and theologically they 
 are Christians, but Christ is not in them 
 practically, as the self-denying spirit which 
 follows the Apostolic rule : " Bear ye one 
 another's burdens, and so fulfil the laiv of 
 
WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST ? 79 
 
 Christ" Their spirit seems to be self-indulgent, 
 unforgiving, proud, devoid of aspiration for a 
 purer, kindlier, closer fellowship with the 
 Redeemer of men. They do not seem to be in 
 pursuit of the Divine Ideal of a morally saved 
 life, as represented in the life and death of the 
 self-sacrificing Christ. And yet such Christians 
 in every age, intellectually orthodox according 
 to the current theory, but practically unchrist- 
 like, claim that a man must receive Christ in 
 their way, or he cannot be saved. Such a 
 fact before the eyes of the world's common 
 sense has certain natural consequences. Among 
 these I may specify : 
 
 1. A popular impression of unreality and 
 unreason in the current preaching that a man 
 must accept the theological Christ in order to be 
 saved. Men doubt whether that can be the 
 saving thing for the life to come, when they see 
 it evidently not the saving thing for the life that 
 now is ; when they see some who reject the 
 theological Christ surpassing some who pro- 
 fessedly accept him, in their loyalty to the 
 Christian ideal of humanity, the essential Christ, 
 as the ruling Spirit of goodness, and righteous- 
 ness, and peace, and philanthropy. 
 
 2. A wide-spread confusion of thought, both 
 inside and outside of our churches. Tried by 
 the creeds, judged by the sermons we have 
 heard, — -so men say, — Parker and Emerson and 
 Darwin have certainly not accepted the 
 
8o WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST? 
 
 necessary conditions of salvation. Yet when 
 their hearts stopped beating, the preacher's logic 
 seemed to balk ; few dare the conclusion that 
 such men have gone to have part with the 
 enemies of man and God — " the devil and his 
 angels" — the majority, even of Christian 
 believers, so far as they know the facts about 
 such men, think of them with hope, as having 
 somehow through God's mercy entered into 
 congenial society among truth-loving, pure, and 
 earnest lovers of their fellow men. Tell us 
 then, O preacher, is the cry, what it really is 
 that we shall understand by accepting Christ 
 for salvation ? 
 
 3. A growing mass of Christian sentiment 
 outside of the churches, and refusing to come in 
 while this confusion of thought prevails, some 
 doubting about the theological Christ, none 
 doubting about the moral and practical Christ, 
 but convinced that this is really the saving 
 thing, though the church insists so strongly 
 upon the other. And so they stay in growing 
 numbers outside of church lines, with some 
 chill to Christian feeling and some darkening of 
 Christian joy in consequence, in a silent protest 
 for that supreme recognition of the moral and 
 practical Christ, which the creeds and pulpits 
 lay upon the theological. 
 
 4. An increasing disposition, even in the 
 church, to hope for the future of departed souls 
 on moral and practical, rather than theological 
 
WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST? 8 1 
 
 and theoretical grounds. Whether a man Hved 
 
 inside or outside the circle of professed believers 
 
 in Christ, yet when he has passed through the 
 
 gate of the grave, when .we stand bereaved and 
 
 thoughtful at the line between the worlds in 
 
 presence of 
 
 " The Shadow cloaked from head to foot, 
 Who holds the keys of all the creeds," 
 
 « e find our moral instincts trying to fathom the 
 unseen award of Divine Judgment by con- 
 sidering not what he professed, but what he was 
 and did. Theodore Parker, being called on to 
 pray at the funeral of an atheist, who was a man 
 of pure and exemplary character, began thus : 
 " O God, our departed brother did not recognize 
 thy existence, but he obeyed thy law." At such 
 a time we do not ask whether a man was 
 orthodox, unitarian, or radical in his theology, 
 so much as whether he was a good man or a 
 bad. We call to mind Christ's saying : " He 
 that is not against us' is on our part" and we 
 ask. Was he practically with or against the 
 work of Christ,— w'as he practically against or 
 for the works of the devil ? Was he conscien- 
 tious and upright ? Was he earnest and 
 sincere ? Was he humane and kind ? Was he 
 unselfish and faithful ? Was he a good son, a 
 good father, a good citizen, a good neighbor ? 
 His creed may have been grievously distorted 
 by education, or by a revolt from the caricatures 
 that he mistook for samples of Christianity. 
 
82 WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST? 
 
 Nevertheless, was his character righteous ? His 
 religious emotions may have been sadly chilled 
 or suppressed by skeptical doubts of the under- 
 standing. But, after all, was his moral principle 
 parallel or crosswise to those lines of benevolence 
 and righteousness which Christ drew as the lines 
 of the Eternal Law ? He may have opposed the 
 idea of Christ which he got from creeds. But 
 did he oppose or promote the real righteousness 
 which Christ inculcated in the Gospel ? Here 
 our moral instincts fall back on the word of the 
 Apostle : " He that doeth righteousness is 
 righteous :" " He that doeth good is of God" and 
 so we say with the poet : 
 
 " Not he that repeateth the name, 
 But he that doeth the will." 
 
 Many such we are constrained by the realities 
 of moral character to count as unconscious 
 followers — perhaps followers afar off, but still 
 followers, — not enemies, of the world's Re- 
 deemer. We are constrained, by the evident 
 bent of their action to the better side in the 
 world's struggle with the evil, to think of them 
 as those who, when the world's misleading 
 shadows shall have melted into the light 
 beyond, will devoutly recognize the Redeemer, 
 whose law their conscience instinctively obeyed. 
 
 We need now to sum up our thoughts on this 
 subject in a conclusion practically instructive 
 and helpful. What is it really to receive Christ? 
 The answer is twofold, but plain and brief 
 
WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST? 83 
 
 I. It is adopting his purpose practically, in a 
 loyal conscience, as our purpose. His purpose 
 is to realize God's righteousness on earth, 
 instead of man's righteousness of hollow forms 
 and defective morals ; — in place of a fictitious 
 righteousness in externals only, a real righteous- 
 ness in spirit and principle, as set forth in 
 program in his Sermon on the Mount. To be 
 righteous inwardly, in deed, in truth, in heart, — 
 that is the one essential point in which we are 
 called to close with Christ, in purpose to live a 
 purer, kinder, Christlier life. And if at this 
 point one should ask, Where, then, and what is 
 the faith in Christ which the Gospel requires ? I 
 reply : To adopt Christ's purpose as our own, in 
 moral sympathy with him, is the most practical 
 exercise of faith in him. 
 
 Here let us not omit to notice, that while a 
 proper sense of sin is one of the fruits, rather 
 than antecedents, of discipleship to Christ, for all, 
 at least, who have not led openly vicious 
 lives, — still, the conscious adoption of Christ's 
 purpose as our purpose, to be righteous in- 
 wardly, certainly includes the acknowledgment 
 that we are not yet what we ought to be, and 
 that penitent self-abasement before God which 
 is inseparable from any clear sense of our 
 imperfect fulfilment of his demands. In this 
 respect, as well as others, far better would it be 
 for some who, I hope, are in fact on Christ's 
 side, though unconsciously, if they could realize 
 
84 WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST? 
 
 the fact that they are with him, not against him, 
 in their moral purpose and aim, which are 
 essentially his. 
 
 But let us not fail here to mark that the 
 progress we make in realizing this purpose of 
 Christ for us depends on something further. 
 Christ's purpose is a loving purpose. He is our 
 sympathizing partner in a sore struggle, as the 
 Good Shepherd who gives his life for his sheep. 
 The full realization of his purpose depends, 
 therefore, on a bond of personal affection with 
 him. 
 
 2. Consequently to receive Christ in full for 
 progress and attainment, as well as for introduc- 
 tion into the way of God, is to embrace him 
 personally with a loving heart. Here his 
 Apostles testify : " With the heart man believeth 
 unto righteousness" and "faith worketh by love!' 
 Failing in this personal affection to Christ, what 
 can we be but feeble imitators of a far off Ideal — 
 bunglers trying to copy a beautiful statue, 
 instead of close partners with a loving friend, 
 whose spirit inspires our conscience, our under- 
 standing, our endeavor ? For lack of this 
 personal sympathy of human hearts with the 
 heart of Christ, theologians are narrow, divisive 
 and quarrelsome, excommunicating brethren 
 whom Christ receives. For this same lack of 
 personal affection to the great Friend of sinful 
 and sad humanity, the upright man, consenting 
 to Christ's supreme purpose of an inward right- 
 
WHAT IS IT TO RECEIVE CHRIST ? 85 
 
 eousness, lacks the inspiration to press upward on 
 the heavenly road, which is born of love to him 
 who leads the way, and he sticks for years in a 
 rudimentary knowledge of Christ that is poor 
 in power. Even in his church is Christ still but 
 partially received, because but feebly loved. 
 
 And still the real Christ, as the Divine Ideal 
 of goodness, the Divine law of life personified in 
 the living Spirit of love, waits outside men's 
 hearts for the full acceptance of affection, as the 
 condition of our progress in the realization of 
 his purpose in God's righteousness. For this 
 only we wait for the mists of skepticism to 
 dissolve, for the contentions of Christian brethren 
 to cease, for the confusion of tongues and of 
 thought between the theoretical and the practical 
 Christ to clarify into that unity of clear under- 
 standing and earnest endeavor, which dawns on 
 the clear intelligence of a loving heart. 
 
 " Blow, winds of God, awake and blow 
 The mists of earth away ; 
 Shine out, O Light Divine, and show 
 How wide and far we stray. 
 
 Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord, 
 
 What may thy service be ? 
 Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word. 
 
 But simply following thee. 
 
 Alone, O Love, ineffable. 
 
 Thy saving name is given ; 
 To turn aside from thee is hell, 
 
 To walk with thee is heaven." 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 THE POOR SOUL. 
 
THE POOR SOUL.* 
 
 " Ami he said unto them. Take heed and keep yourselves 
 from all covetotisness : for a man's life consisteth not 
 in, the abundance of the things -which he possesseth. And 
 he spake a parable unto them, saying. The ground of 
 a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: and he 
 reasoned within himself, saying. What shall I do, because 
 I have not where to bestow my fruits ? And he said. 
 This zuill I do : I will pull down my barns, and build 
 greater ; and there 'Mill I bestow all my corn and my 
 goods. And I will say to my soul. Soul, thou hast mttch 
 goods laid up for many years ; take thine ease, eat, 
 drink, be merry. But God said tmto him. Thou foolish 
 one, this night is thy soul required of thee ; and the things 
 which thou hast prepared, whose shall they be ? So is he 
 that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich 
 iozvard God." — Luke xii. 15 — 21. 
 
 Y I' FEATURE of moral character that 
 (*/«-'-» is frequently touched in the New 
 Testament, needs to be better understood. 
 Coveiousness receives constant warning and 
 rebuke from our Lord and his Apostles, and yet 
 few understand all that is meant by covetous- 
 ness. Covetousness excludes a man from heaven, 
 says Paul : " No covetous man, who is an idolater, 
 liatJt any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and 
 of God." He repeatedly mentions covetousness 
 
 * Preached Sunday Evening, August 7th, 1887. 
 
90 THE POOR SOUL. 
 
 among the most serious sins, such as adultery, 
 robbery, drunkenness. And yet a great many 
 suppose that covetousness is only the desire after 
 another man's possessions, and that one who 
 does not covet anything that is his neighbor's, is 
 free from a fault which Christ deems grave 
 enough to specify in a list along with theft and 
 murder. 
 
 The parable of the " Poor Soul " draws the 
 portrait of a covetous man. " Keep yourselves 
 from all covetousness" said Jesus, " and spake a 
 parable',' to show what covetousness was. He 
 describes a man who doesn't seem to hanker at 
 all after his neighbor's things. His farm yields 
 more than his barns will hold, and he devotes 
 himself to building bigger barns to store his pro- 
 duce, and congratulates himself on his barnsful 
 as a satisfactory investment. This is all. Yet 
 Christ points to this as the deadly sin of covet- 
 ousness. God, says Jesus, looks upon this man 
 as a fool. 
 
 Does not this seem quite contrary to some 
 highly respected opinions ? What has this man 
 done but what any prudent man should do? 
 His income grows faster than he can spend it, 
 and he simply invests the surplus ; he increases 
 his barn-room for storage of the abounding 
 increase of his farm. And what does he do 
 next, but indulge in a very natural satisfaction 
 at his condition ? I am now secure from want, 
 says he — " much goods laid up for many years." 
 
THE POOR SOUL. 9 1 
 
 I have worked hard. Now, " Soul, take thine 
 ease, — eat, drink, and be merry!' What wrong 
 here ? Does not the Bible say : " It is good and 
 comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the 
 good of all his labor that he taketh under the sun, 
 all the days of his life, which God giveth him, for 
 it is his portio7i ? " Yet Christ tells us that this is 
 the covetous man. Underneath the portrait of 
 all this worldly thrift and prudence, enjoying the 
 fruits of labor, Christ writes the name of fool. 
 
 But let us hear the Master to the end. The 
 enigma is solved by his closing words : " So is he 
 that layeth up treasure for himself and is not rich 
 toward God" The fault was in what he was 
 not. He was as industrious as a beaver ; that 
 was right. He was as saving as a squirrel ; 
 that was right. But working for self and saving 
 for self, like the beaver and squirrel, are not the 
 whole of a man's part. Christ calls the man a 
 fool because he takes less than a man's part. 
 He lays up treasure y»r himself, as he ought, so 
 as not to become a burden upon others ; but 
 no treasure in himself He is not rich in that 
 Divine intelligence which knows the right use of 
 wealth, and that Divine sympathy which applies 
 wealth to its right use. He is rich only as the 
 cock, that scratched up a diamond, and carried 
 it to the jeweller for a little corn, was rich. He 
 has accumulated the means of the most Divine 
 satisfaction, and knows not -how to get Divine 
 satisfaction out of it. Animal satisfaction, " Eat, 
 
92 THE POOR SOUL. 
 
 drink, and be merry',' is the limit of his desire. 
 For that, Christ calls him fool. 
 
 From this portrait of the covetous man we 
 get a clear idea of the nature of the sin of 
 covetousness, which to Christ and his Apostles 
 seems so deadly. The danger of it lies in 
 what it is not. It is, in this respect, like the 
 carbonic acid gas, which kills because it is not 
 capable of sustaining life. It fills the place 
 which vital air ought to fill, but it is not vital 
 air. It has no positive quality, which excites 
 attention and secures caution, like sulphurous 
 gas, or nitric gas, and it is all the more dan- 
 gerous for that. Breathing it, the man supposes 
 he is breathing vital air, until his head swims, 
 and, before he knows his danger, he falls sense- 
 less and knows nothing. So is covetousness. 
 The covetous man does not know he is covetous. 
 He would be indignant to be told that he is 
 covetous. He seems to himself only prudent, 
 economical, thrifty. No church member was 
 ever, disciplined for covetousness, although the 
 church has been tainted with it ever since Judas 
 fell a victim to it. It is a sin of defect, rather 
 than a sin of excess. Sins of excess expose 
 themselves. Sins of defect hide from the con- 
 sciousness even of the sinner. And so a sin of 
 defect may be even more dangerous than a sin 
 of excess, because less likely to be corrected. 
 Just as a man whose physical nature is paralyzed 
 by carbonic acid gas may be nearer death, more 
 
THE POOR SOUL. 93 
 
 incapable of resuscitation, than one who is 
 paralyzed by strong drink — so a man whose 
 moral nature is stupefied by the respectable sin 
 of covetousness may be nearer spiritual death, 
 more incapable of restoration to the life of a 
 child of God, than one who has been overcome 
 by those sins of passion, for which society 
 reserves the name of crimes. 
 
 Covetousness, then, is a broader defect than 
 it appears in the letter of the Tenth Command- 
 ment, " Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy 
 neighbor's!' The Commandment specifies only 
 one particular of it, just as the precepts, " Thou 
 shalt not kill" " Thou shalt not commit adultery',' 
 name only the " big brothers,'' so to speak, in 
 large families of sin. The Tenth Command- 
 ment forbids all inordinate and unbalanced 
 desire of things that in themselves are good. 
 To desire our neighbor's portion is a flagrant 
 case of covetousness, but it is not all of covetous- 
 ness. " Keep yotirselves from all covetousness',' 
 said Jesus, as he began this parable. If we 
 would know what " all covetousness " includes, we 
 learn from this parable that the desire merely 
 and only of this world's perishable goods, is 
 covetousness. Plainly enough. The rich man 
 had no desire to be " rich toward God" ; his 
 desires were bounded by his property and his 
 enjoyment of it. And this, said Christ, is the 
 covetous man. His sin is not in feeding the 
 lower side of his nature, but in not feeding the 
 
94 THE POOR SOUL. 
 
 higher. He is doing only a part of what he 
 ought to do, desiring only a part of what he 
 ought to desire. A farm well tilled, barns well 
 filled, a table well spread, are what he desires, 
 and there is nothing sinful in desiring them. It 
 is right to desire them. Desire for such things 
 is the nurse of industry and thrift. But the sin 
 is in the desire ending there, unbalanced by 
 the higher desires that man as a son of God 
 should cherish. It is the desire of the animal 
 man, unbalanced by the desire of the spiritual 
 man, that Christ brands as covetousness. It is 
 so natural, so admirable, in its proper care for 
 farm and barn and table, and other perishable 
 things, that its ruinous neglect of the imperish- 
 able things, " the true riches" as Christ calls 
 them, goes unnoticed, unrebuked, while the 
 body prospers, and the soul starves. 
 
 Study now, with a little closer notice of its 
 details, the character which Christ has painted 
 as the Poor Soul. 
 
 I. Observe the covetous man's idea of /mz^^j^- 
 menis. " I will pull down my barns and build 
 greater, and there will I bestow all my corn and 
 my goods." Bigger barns, that was all. If he 
 had had the modern opportunities, he would 
 have invested in bonds, or set up a bank, or 
 built a railway or a street of houses. But all 
 that he thinks of is what he calls " my barns," 
 my securities. It never enters his head that 
 God has other barns, as St. Augustine says. 
 
THE POOR SOUL. 95 
 
 " the bosoms of the needy, the houses of widows, 
 the mouths of orphans." He is going to put 
 everything into what one fire may turn to ashes, 
 or one raid of plunderers may turn into 
 emptiness. God's barns — -the investments of 
 benevolence that grow toward the world's 
 golden age — are nothing to his barns ; the books 
 of heaven which record what he is worth, are 
 nothing to his ledger, that figures what his 
 estate is worth. A rich getter, but a poor 
 giver, his way of investment makes him worth 
 just nothing on the spiritual side of his nature — 
 " toward God." 
 
 Concerning investments, Amos Lawrence, of 
 Boston, Massachusetts, who multiplied his 
 charities as his resources grew, till they ab- 
 sorbed five-sixths of his total income, wrote 
 thus : — " The good there is in riches lieth 
 altogether in their use, like the woman's box 
 of ointment ; if it be not broken and the 
 contents poured out for the refreshment of 
 Jesus Christ in his distressed members, they 
 lose their worth. The covetous man may there- 
 fore truly write upon his rusting heaps : These 
 are good for nothing. He is not rich who lays 
 up much, but he who lays out much. For it is 
 all one not to have, as not to use. I will there: 
 fore be the richer by charitable laying out, while 
 the worldling will be the poorer by his covetous 
 hoarding up." So, when one who had been 
 reduced from wealth to poverty was looking at 
 
96 THE POOR SOUL. 
 
 a college to which of his affluence he had given 
 liberally, he exclaimed, " Thank God, so much 
 is saved." 
 
 2. Observe this man's idea of life. " A maris 
 life" said Christ, as he began his parable, " con- 
 sisteth not in the abundance of the things that Jte 
 possesseth." The covetous man thinks just the 
 contrary. Good things, rather than good uses, 
 is his idea. But it is not only the rich pro- 
 prietor who has this covetous antichristian idea 
 of life. The poor have it all the same. The 
 barefoot boy eyes some grand house and thinks, 
 " How I'd like to live like that." Little knows 
 he of the skeleton in the house, the ill-health, 
 the family sorrow, the unsated cravings, the 
 heart-misery, which the magnificence veils. 
 The poor man, trudging home from work, passes 
 a luxurious carriage, and thinks, " How nice to 
 live like that." Ah ! if he knew what a drudge 
 to an overgrown property, what a slave to 
 servants or to misgoverned children, what a 
 nervous dyspeptic, sick of "nothing to do," is 
 sitting on those soft cushions. 
 
 " Oh, if they knew how pressed those splendid chains, 
 How little would they lAourn their humbler pains." 
 
 But is it life to have all that wishes crave of 
 this world's good ? When do such wishes get 
 their fill? What anxieties, envies, vexations, 
 soul-weariness, embitter many a cup that is 
 imagined to be nectar ! Said Dr. William 
 
THE POOR SOUL. gj 
 
 Adams, for forty years pastor of the Madison 
 Square church in New York, to a class in the 
 Union Theological Seminary in that city : — 
 " Young gentlemen, I have known intimately 
 the leading families of wealth and position in 
 this city for more than a generation, and with 
 this consequence, that I do not envy any one of 
 them." 
 
 Now, covetousness springs from an anti- 
 christian idea of life as having, rather than as 
 being, getting service rather than giving service, 
 and it is the sin of the poor quite as much as it 
 is the sin of the rich. The poor man, intent 
 only on getting, that he may have what the rich 
 have, and not intent on giving also, that he may 
 be what God is, " rich ifi good works" rich in 
 benevolent uses, — he is the Poor Soul — the man 
 whom Christ calls covetous. God put us in our 
 places, as he put Christ in his, not to be 
 possessors for ourselves, but distributors for 
 him. Not our acquisitions but our com- 
 munications of good realize for us the Divine 
 ideal of life. Not abundance of goods, but 
 abundance of good uses, that is life, the only 
 life worth living, the life of a willing steward of 
 God. Thus testify those who have made trial 
 of God's way. Said Samuel Budget, the 
 merchant of Bristol, England : — " Riches I have 
 had as much as my heart could desire, but I 
 never felt any pleasure in them for their own 
 sake ; — only so far as they enabled me to give 
 
98 THE POOR SOUL. 
 
 pleasure to others." Said Matthias Baldwin, 
 the. locomotive builder of Philadelphia: — "I feel 
 more thankful for the disposition to give largely 
 than for the ability. My money, without a new 
 heart, would have been a curse to me." It is 
 not to the rich only, but to the poor also that 
 such men testify. They thought so when they 
 were rich, because they thought so before they 
 became rich. The poor man in the struggle of 
 life must know what is life. The poor man who 
 does not make get and give go hand in hand 
 may get a rich living, but will never know what 
 is a rich life. 
 
 " It is not life upon thy gifts to live, 
 
 But to grow fixed with deeper roots in thee ; 
 And when the sun and showers their bounties give, 
 
 To send out thick-leaved limbs, a fruitful tree, 
 Whose green head meets the eye for many a mile, 
 
 Whose moss-grown arms their rigid branches rear. 
 And full faced fruits their blushing welcome smile, 
 
 As to its goodly shade our feet draw near." 
 
 3. Observe the covetous man's idea of his 
 soul. " / will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast 
 much goods laid up for many years ; take thine 
 ease, eat, drink, and be merry" What a mean 
 idea of his soul ! Was that all his soul could 
 do. Poor soul ! Was that all he desired his 
 soul to do? No wonder that God said unto 
 him, " Thou foolish one" All that he thought 
 his soul capable of was enjoyment. If that is 
 all we promise our souls, we are in the list of 
 fools along with him. It doesn't signify, as to 
 
THE POOR SOUL. 99 
 
 the matter of enjoyment, what the kind is, 
 whether one is on the go, like the butterfly, or 
 on the stay, hke the oyster ; — whether of the 
 gay or the sober kind, noisy or quiet, it may 
 matter to neighbors, not to us. If a man's 
 idea of what his soul wants is merely to find the 
 soft side of the world and enjoy it, it's no 
 wonder that he should doubt, as many such 
 men doubt, whether such a soul can be im- 
 mortal, for he treats it as no higher than the 
 soul of the dog, whose heaven is a soft rug in 
 front of a warm fire. " God said unto him, Thou 
 foolish one, this night shall thy soul be required 
 of thee!' If he had hope in death, it must have 
 been a fool's hope. If he went to paradise, it 
 must have been a fool's paradise. Whoever 
 thinks on such a soul's future, must keep to 
 these words with which God opened the gate of 
 the future to it : " Thou fool" 
 
 By why a fool? Christ answers by saying, 
 " Not rich toward God " ; poor for God ; poor 
 for the Divine uses. The great question, both 
 here and hereafter, is not what God can do for 
 us, but what God can do with us, for that settles 
 what he can do for us. The use God makes of 
 us, — that is, the use we choose and seek to have 
 him make of us, — determines the enjoyment God 
 can give, for in his kingdom, happiness is pro- 
 portioned to use and service, and comes through 
 use and service. And when the covetous man's 
 estate, more or less, goes to his executors, he 
 
lOO THE POOR SOUL. 
 
 himself goes to probate in the court of God with 
 the inventory of a character. And what does it 
 show? He is poor in disposition for serving 
 God, poor in capacity as a steward of God. 
 Living to do good, to distribute benevolently, to 
 sacrifice for others, are not in his line. He is 
 utterly uninitiated into the mystery of God's 
 fundamental law of love and self-surrender. 
 What use can God make of him under that 
 law? What happiness give him through such 
 use ? He finds that he has been living merely 
 like the bee, which stores the hive for others to 
 despoil and eat ; — doing only what the sheep 
 does, which thickens a warm fleece for others to 
 shear and wear ; — what the bird does, which lays 
 eggs for others to carry away and cook ; — what 
 the ox does, which sweats in the field that others 
 may feast ; — what the oyster does, which makes 
 the pearl for others to display. He Jias had a 
 living ; that is all. What he has is simply what 
 he is. And as he sees his accumulations, so 
 laboriously gathered, divided among his heirs, 
 and sees himself left simply a poor soul, poor 
 toward God, wanting in the spirit, the sym- 
 pathies, the capacities of God's kingdom of love, 
 must he not feel his conscience echo the judg- 
 ment of Heaven — Thoti fool ? 
 
 Let us hang up this picture of the Poor Soul 
 where we can look at it often ; — the man of the 
 world, the animal, intelligent, but unspiritual 
 man ; — the man who lives all in the basement of 
 
THE POOR SOUL. lOI 
 
 his nature, and not on the upper floors also ; — 
 active and thrifty in laying up treasure /iir him- 
 self, to be his for a few days, idle and thoughtless 
 as to laying up treasure in himself, to be his for 
 ever ; — -well able to live on the earth level, ill 
 able to breathe the air of heaven ; — the wasted 
 life of the covetous man ; — covetous, not because 
 he loves worldly good, but because he loves only 
 worldly good ; — covetous, not because he loves its 
 lower uses, but because he loves the lower uses 
 only, and cares nothing for its higher uses to 
 make him "rich toward God" His portrait, 
 drawn by the hand of Christ, is before us, as the 
 Poor Soul, who in cheating God of thankful 
 service, has only cheated himself of the imperish- 
 able riches. Surely not without grave reason 
 has Christ said to us, " Keep yourselves from all 
 €ovelousness." As we look upon this portrait, its 
 moral comes to mind in Shakespeare's sonnet : 
 
 " Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth. 
 
 Foiled by those rebel powers that thee array, 
 
 Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, 
 
 Painting thy outward walls so costly gay ? 
 
 Why so large cost, having so short a lease, 
 
 Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend ? 
 
 Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, 
 
 Eat up thy charge ? Is this thy body's end ? 
 
 Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, 
 
 And let that pine to aggravate thy store ; 
 
 Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross ; 
 
 Within be fed, without be rich no more : 
 
 So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, 
 And Death once dead, there's no more dying then." 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 
 
THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD.* 
 
 ^' Z(7, / avt with you alway^ even unto the end of the 
 world." — Matthew xxviii. 20. 
 
 /T^ATTHEW does not, like Mark and 
 «* * ^ Luke, record the Ascension of the 
 glorified Christ. But these words of Christ, with 
 which his record ends, are evidently parting 
 words, suggestive of the Ascension which 
 followed presently. They teach us how to 
 think of the Ascension, as a parting in form 
 rather than in fact, an impressive sign that the 
 days of sight were ended, and the days of faith 
 pure and simple were come instead. 
 
 In these words is breathed upon us the spirit 
 of the Gospel, as no mere historical record, but a 
 revelation of the Presence and Power of a 
 Divine Life evermore indwelling in humanity. 
 We pronounce them as our confession of unity 
 with all the generations of the godly, whom the 
 one Light quickens and the one Voice guides. 
 As we take them up into our lips, with what 
 fragrant associations do they enter our thoughts. 
 What patient apostles and reformers, despised 
 on earth but glorified on high, have refreshed 
 
 Preached Sunday Morning, August 14TH, 1887. 
 
Io6 THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 
 
 their hearts under the cross by cheerily repeating^ 
 their Lord's pledge, " Lo, I am with you alway." 
 How often has this sentence filled prison cells 
 with a heavenly presence. How often has it 
 opened the eyes of the martyr to the chariot 
 and horses of fire in waiting to bear him aloft 
 from within the circle of blazing fagots. We 
 repeat these words to-day as the chant to whose 
 triumphal cadence each step of the march of the 
 missionary and the martyr hosts has echoed. 
 We seem to hear them as the ecstatic refrain 
 of the anthem of the blessed, who are "for ever 
 ivith the Lord!' 
 
 Our first thought is that of the human 
 longing to which this promise of our Lord 
 ministers, — a longing which human affection 
 has often expressed, which human ingenuity, 
 as if conscious of its inability, has tried in 
 singular ways to satisfy. Not seldom do the 
 dying strive to console some dear one left 
 behind by saying, " I will be with you ; I will 
 come to you in dreams ; I will watch over you 
 to comfort you ;" but the realization falls far 
 behind the desire. And history tells us of 
 strange devices to perpetuate the presence of 
 the departed among the living, like that of the 
 great Robert Bruce, who willed that his com- 
 panions, on their crusading pilgrimage to the 
 Holy Land, should carry with them in a casket 
 his heart, that they might not go without him. 
 The portraits in every family sitting-room of 
 
THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. lO/ 
 
 the loved ones gone before attest at once our 
 desire to have them ever with us, and their 
 desire to be ever with us. This tender human 
 sentiment was recognized by the Divine Son of 
 Man in his parting promise to be ever with his 
 disciples. But how much of Divine power goes 
 with the promise to give it effect, appears in the 
 length to which the promise goes — " even to the 
 end of tJie world.'' Remote generations, dis- 
 ciples who were utter strangers to their Master's 
 face, and aided in bringing him to mind by no 
 recollections of endearing intimacy, are included 
 with Peter and John in the promise of their 
 Master's continual personal presence. No man 
 ever dreamed of promising- so much as that. 
 And so this saying of our Lord, like so many 
 others of his sayings, reveals him to us in his 
 twofold glory, as both most human and most 
 Divine. " / will be with you ;" — here speaks the 
 Son of Man to the longing of human hearts : — 
 " alway, even to the end of the world ;" — here 
 speaks the Son of God out of his Divine 
 efficiency to give full realization to his trans- 
 cendent promise. 
 
 For how far this goes beyond all human power 
 of realization we perceive at once. 
 
 What is the presence of a departed friend that 
 abides with us when he is gone to another land, 
 or another world ? So far as we know, it is an 
 ideal presence only. It exists only in our 
 thought. It depends upon our imagination to 
 
I08 THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 
 
 make him present, and cannot exist for us apart 
 from our reflecting or imagining power. The 
 ■absent one is present with us only when we form 
 a mental image, or idea, of him as with us, but 
 this ideal presence ceases the moment that the 
 idea passes. Suppose for a moment that this 
 ideal presence was all that our Lord meant to 
 promise. How inadequate is this. The old 
 photographs of our friends fade in their exposure 
 to the light of many years. Even the dear 
 •children that we bury, how the ceaseless rub of 
 work and care blurs the imprint of their faces 
 and voices upon our hearts after our tears have 
 dried, till at last we have to depend upon the 
 portrait on the wall for most that we can 
 summon back of the vanished look. Hardly 
 could the first disciples, however their memories 
 glowed at first with impressions of their Lord's 
 looks and tones, have preserved even his ideal 
 presence unobscured. And even though those 
 three short years had left on their minds an 
 indelible photograph of him, what of the multi- 
 tude who had never known him in the flesh? 
 Strangers to his face and form, foreigners to his 
 language and habits, how little in the way of a 
 merely ideal presence of Christ is signified to 
 most of them. By contemplating the Gospel 
 picture, a few succeed in the effort of devout 
 imagination to make the historical Christ a 
 present reality to them. But what of those 
 whose power of imagination is deficient ? What 
 
THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 109. 
 
 of the mass of unspiritual minds among the 
 disciples of the Lord ? How many there are 
 who say : 
 
 " Dim tracts of time divide 
 
 Those golden days from me ; 
 Tiiy voice comes strange o'er years of charge ; 
 How can I follow thee ? 
 
 Comes faint and far thy voice 
 
 From vales of Galilee ; 
 Thy vision fades in ancient shades ; 
 
 How should we follow thee ? " 
 
 Now it is this very defect of power to create an 
 ideal presence of our Lord, which guides us to- 
 the conviction that the presence he promised was 
 not ideal, but real ; not that which is in our 
 power, but that which is in his power. Surely 
 he meant much more than that he would be 
 present only so far as we can make him present. 
 
 Reasonable this conviction certainly is. But 
 is there aught to give it confirmation, to lift it 
 from a probability to an assurance ? 
 
 Here history comes in to testify to the fact of 
 a Divine Life abiding with a changeless presence 
 in the world. In history the changing world is 
 confronted with the unchanging Christ. 
 
 Compare the Europe of to-day with the 
 vastly different Europe of that Caesar to whom 
 Paul appealed. Mark the vast changes in 
 religion, law, civilization, governments, languages 
 and manners. Where savage hunters camped, 
 now stand the greatest universities ; grand 
 capitals, where forests then towered in solitude 
 
no THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 
 
 and waves lapped lonely shores. Compare the 
 cathedrals with the pagan temples. Compare 
 the ironclads with the oared galleys ; the docks 
 where the world's commerce centres with the 
 primitive boat-landing. Compare the naturalist 
 of to-day with his electric battery, his crucible 
 and his microscope, with the guessing Aristotle 
 or Pliny ; compare the star-gazing astrologer, 
 trying to read men's destiny in the sky, with his 
 descendant, the astronomer, interpreting the 
 laws which the worlds obey. Compare, then, 
 the circle that gathered round the martyr's 
 grave in the catacombs of the imperial city, 
 to receive the sacramental bread and wine, with 
 the gathering around this communion table, and 
 others which dusky forms surround with the 
 strange tongues of far off lands. Here at the 
 end of our search is " testis Christ, the same 
 yesterday, and to-day, and for ever!' The marvel 
 is, that with every door left open to change he 
 only is found unchanged. He left not one 
 written word as a fixed standard of teaching. 
 For the whole of one generation, at least, his 
 permanent record was mainly that which was 
 graven in loving hearts. His disciples coming 
 forth out of provincial narrowness and prejudice 
 came into conflict with the ideas of many lands, 
 with the philosophy and the superstition of all 
 the thinkers and dreamers of the world. But 
 do we find them, like all other disciples of all 
 other teachers, abating or modifying, in their 
 
THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. Ill 
 
 ■encounter with other thought, the thought he 
 charged them with as the thought of God ? 
 Far from it. Into that ancient world of the 
 Mediterranean nations they plunged, as if a 
 new river from the hills of Galilee had burst 
 into the western sea. But what a river ! Not 
 like the lordly Amazon or Mississippi, whose 
 flood freshens the sea for leagues, but yields ere 
 long to the saltness and strength of the tides. 
 Rather like the Gulf Stream, whose warmth and 
 force, dividing the ocean for thousands of miles^ 
 proclaim the incomparable energy of its mighty 
 source, sending warmth and fertility to lands 
 otherwise rendered waste and uninhabitable 
 beneath the northern sky. The wonder is, that 
 the ocean does not straightway swallow the 
 stream. The wonder is, that the world did not 
 change the disciples, but they it ; that the 
 warmth and force with which they were poured 
 into the world flows through the nineteenth 
 century the same as through the first. Does 
 not this proclaim an incomparable energy at the 
 source of power? All else belonging to that 
 first century has been swept away or recon- 
 structed. The teaching of Jesus only stands 
 unmodified, and sways the world. Misunder- 
 standings and abuses of it have dropped away, 
 but Christ's Gospel abides in its original lustre 
 as fully vindicated in this age as in that. The 
 elevation of mankind that has been going on 
 has not reduced the elevation at which Christ 
 
112 THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 
 
 Still stands above all, now more than ever appi'e- 
 ciated in his majesty as the world's spiritual 
 King. But how is it, that, with the sinking of 
 the old world and the upheaval of the new, 
 the throne and voice of Christ alone remain 
 unchanged, save in an ampler recognition and 
 a more diffused glory ? How is it, that, in all 
 our advancement, he, the countryman and 
 teacher of those ignorant Galileans, still takes 
 the lead ? Here we simply reason back from 
 the effect to the cause, as the energizing of a 
 Divine Spirit, the real presence of a Divine 
 Life, the glorious fulfilment of that glorious 
 word from the Galilean mount, " Lo, I am with 
 you alway, even to the end of the world" 
 
 The moral struggle of our life is to realize 
 effectually the invisible realities, amid which, 
 veiled as they are, we live. Is there, then, any 
 thought which may help us to apprehend that 
 present Divine Personality of whosp abiding 
 with us our ascending Redeemer spoke ? 
 
 The abiding presence of God with men 
 was an idea long familiar to the minds 
 trained under the old covenant, It was repre- 
 sented in the time of Moses by the sacred tent 
 of Jehovah in the midst of the encampment. It 
 sank into the thought of the Hebrew psalmist : 
 " Thou art ever with me!' " When I awake, I 
 am still with thee!' "/ have set the Lord always 
 before me ; because he is at my right hand, I shall 
 
THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. II5 
 
 not be moved." What more was needed than 
 this hallowing and strengthening thought ? 
 Certainly, no second divinity, no other pre- 
 sence, but a clearer presentation of the One 
 Eternal Presence. This was the object of our 
 Lord's assurance, " Lo,I am wiikyou alway," — 
 a more definite and concrete presentation of the 
 ancient truth of the Omnipresence of God. 
 
 How shall we think of God ? What sort of a 
 being is he ? What and how is he toward us ? 
 To answer these questions, and thus to meet the 
 fundamental want of spiritual life, was the 
 essential work of Christ, — to save the world by 
 revealing to us, in deed and in truth, our God. 
 Whatever Christ accomplished, whether by 
 action or by suffering, was for this end, to 
 declare God as our Father, that we might be 
 reconciled to him. He does it by his perfect 
 embodiment of Love, begirt with Power, and 
 interpreted by saying, " He that hath seen me 
 hath seen the Father!' He must go away ; but, 
 in going, his last word recalls us to his prime 
 object of teaching us how to think of God. 
 He does not utter that last word of comfort,, 
 which merely human guides have breathed from 
 dying lips : " God will be with you, and will be 
 your God." He does not thus leave the world 
 to sink back into that dim and undefined 
 thought of the Divine Omnipresence which he 
 found it cherishing. "Z^, I am tvith you alway." 
 This is no new personal presence to think of. 
 
114 THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 
 
 for that would be only a distracting of our 
 thought between the two unseen personalities. 
 It is rather a helpful shaping of our thought of 
 the One Eternal Presence, for all time to come, 
 into the familiar and gracious lineaments of the 
 Son of Man. What our Lord means to say is 
 this : The same bounty in providing for you 
 that fed the hungry in the desert ; the same 
 power in delivering you that quelled the tempest 
 on the lake ; the same patience with your 
 infirmities that restored Peter from his fall ; the 
 same wisdom that has taught you, the same love 
 that has embraced you until now, is with you 
 alway. '^ I will not leave you comfortless: I zvill 
 come to you" The form you have . seen and 
 touched departs. The Divine Reality abides. 
 Think of the Eternal Omnipresence as you think 
 of me. For, what it is, that I am. "Lo,Iain 
 with you alway.'' 
 
 Thus would our Lord, by his Ascension 
 Promise, perpetuate the work which he came to 
 perform. Thus would he leave for ever unveiled 
 in the heart-temple that idea of God which he 
 came to enshrine there. Thus would he aid our 
 effort for that distincter realization of the 
 presence of the Eternal Spirit, which we need 
 for our suri and our shield, for life's purity and 
 life's peace. He would not have us think of the 
 Father except as in him, nor of him except as in 
 the Father. Therefore he does not say, God 
 and I are with you ; for that would confuse the 
 
THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. I15 
 
 mind between two unseen presences. Nor does 
 lie say merely what men had been told before, 
 God is with you ; for that would leave them still 
 ■doubting how to think of God. He says rather, 
 / am with yon; for I am the gracious Revela- 
 tion, the full Image of the Omnipresent Life 
 indwelling ever in the world. 
 
 That sacred form, that holy look, that strong 
 and gentle voice, have gone away, long gone ; 
 eighteen centuries, and no return. A world of 
 other forms and voices has come in between, a 
 tossing, noisy sea. The sacred record is old. 
 A veil seems to lie upon the face of the Christ 
 of history. We gaze back through the long 
 vista of witnesses, and the vision grows dim. 
 Are we not looking too far for that which is 
 nearer than we think ? 
 
 There are moments in every life when God 
 seems more nigh. A mystic impression of the 
 Infinite Power steals over us under the temple- 
 arch of the star-lit sky. The thought of the 
 Eternal Architect descends upon us in the 
 presence of the mountain heads which millions 
 of years have furrowed. The eyes of an Infinite 
 Righteousness shame our misdeeds in the 
 solemn court of conscience. The ear of a 
 Divine Compassion is felt bending over our 
 dying bed for the whisper of our last confession. 
 Then how shall we represent to our thought 
 this mystic Presence, so hidden, so perceptible ? 
 Under what form commune with it ? How 
 
Il6 THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 
 
 interpret its inarticulate speech ? How know it 
 as a real Presence, not a shadow cast we know 
 not by what? How recognize any higher 
 personality hearkening with grace and respond- 
 ing with help to our own ? 
 
 In such moments,— let us make them more 
 frequent than they are — our Lord's Ascension 
 word is fulfilled, " Lo, I am with you alway," for 
 " r and my Father are one" In Christ the 
 Eternal Life has taken form, and voice, and 
 visible character, for evermore. From the home 
 circles of Cana and Bethany, from the temple 
 courts of Mount Zion, from the lakeside and the 
 hillside, where thousands hung entranced upon 
 his teaching, his Ascension farewell bids us exalt 
 our thought of him from the form of the flesh 
 to the power of the Spirit in a boundless range. 
 Since his Ascension the spiritual Christ is for 
 evermore unlocalized, a real and abiding Presence 
 everywhere. And here we find fulfilled his 
 promise of his coming ; for the word, which in 
 our English Testament we read coming, means, 
 in the orignal, simply presence. Thus, in very 
 deed, far otherwise and far more truly than in 
 the millennial fancies that have long befooled the 
 church, is Christ, who once came in the flesh, 
 ever coming again in the Spirit, as the promised 
 Divine " Comforter',' ever coming to interpret to 
 us with fresh clearness and helpfulness the 
 ancient mystery of the Divine Omnipresence. 
 In the ascended Christ that before unimaginable 
 
THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 11/ 
 
 Omnipresence of God is henceforth and ever 
 imaged to Christian thought. The Divine Life 
 which history finds abiding in the world with 
 changeless power, while all things else are 
 changed, is the same Life which the Gospel 
 records as having come to bless the wedding, 
 and to turn the funeral into joy. Henceforth the 
 dim and awful shadow of an Infinite Mystery of 
 Deity clothes itself in the benign glory of the 
 Son of Man, that it may win and return our 
 embrace. The Gospel is the Gospel of a Divine 
 Presence, the Word of the God who is ever with 
 us, filling earth and heaven with the grace that 
 once blessed the pehitents of Galilee with the 
 forgiveness of sins. And so it is as the Apostle 
 wrote of Christ : " He ascended up on high, that 
 he might fill all things!' 
 
 " No fable old, nor mythic lore. 
 Nor dream of bards and seers. 
 No dead fact, stranded on the shore 
 Of the oblivious years ; — 
 
 " But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
 A present help is he ; 
 And faith has still its Olivet, 
 And love its Galilee. 
 
 " The healing of his seamless dress 
 Is by our beds of pain ; 
 We touch him in life's throng and press, 
 And we are whole again." 
 
 Friends, it must be our endeavor to think 
 truly of Christ. Did we think more truly of 
 
Il8 THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD. 
 
 him, how would the points on which Christians 
 needlessly break with each other melt away in 
 his all healing light, and their schisms disappear 
 in the unity of his Spirit. How would those 
 good people, who stay outside of his visible 
 flock and fold in endeavors to be independent 
 Christians, discover that the way of Christ is 
 a way of mutual association, and that com- 
 munion with him is inseparable from fellowship 
 with his friends. We err and fail if we set him 
 afar off on green Hermon or gory Calvary. 
 Let us learn to-day to recognize him as with us- 
 in the daily providence that guides our life, with 
 us in the daily call of duty, with us in the daily 
 cup, whether of blessing or of trial, with us in 
 the daily admonitions and consolations of the 
 Divine whisper within the breast. Let us only 
 act upon his word as a fact, " Z^, / am with you 
 alway" and we shall realize it as a truth, our 
 sun and our shield, for grace and for glory, 
 '^ even to the end of the world!' Let not our 
 hearts be poor in the comfort, strength, and 
 peace of his indwelling Life. 
 
 " If not as once thou cam'st 
 In true humanity, 
 Come yet as guest within the breast 
 That burns to follow thee. 
 
 " Within our heart of hearts 
 In nearest nearness be : 
 Set up thy throne within thine own : — 
 Go, Lord-: we follow thee." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT.* 
 
 " Thou shalt not steal." — Exodus xx. 15. 
 
 '■'■ TVyHOU shalt not steal" Amen, say 
 J-*-l all of us. Ever since the primeval 
 savage defended the carcass of the animal slain 
 in hunting against the depredations of fellow 
 savages, a ban has lain upon stealing. Even 
 the low-lived who live by stealing are ashamed to 
 be caught at it. The appropriation of another 
 man's property against his will runs counter to a 
 social law inbred in our nature by many centuries 
 of heredity. 
 
 The question, therefore, is not so much about 
 the wickedness of stealing, but rather this : What 
 is it to steal ? Is it merely the activity of the 
 pickpocket or the burglar, of the shoplifter or of 
 the highwayman ? Do the laws which forbid it 
 sufficiently define it ? Do we, who abhor some 
 well-defined forms of stealing, recognize it and 
 abhor it in all its forms ? Are there any disguised 
 forms of it which we condone ? Do practices go 
 
 Preached Sunday Evening, August 14TH, 1887. 
 
122 THE EIGHT?I COMMANDMENT. 
 
 unchallenged under other and fairer names, 
 which, when looked into, prove to be in reality 
 stealing — the unjust taking of that which is 
 rightly another man's. In raising and solving 
 such questions is an important and at present a 
 much neglected part of moral education. 
 
 We may begin such inquiries with a strong 
 presumption that we shall find stealing to 
 comprehend much more than many suppose. 
 We find Christ, in his Sermon on the Mount, 
 expanding the commandment, " Thou shall not 
 kill" to include prohibition of the feeling of 
 hatred, and making the commandment against 
 adultery to include condemnation of the un- 
 chaste thought. It is at first sight a surprise 
 that he does not in like manner explain " Thou 
 shall nol steal" considering how prevalent was 
 extortion then both among Pharisees and 
 publicans. But, on looking further, we find that 
 he has not omitted to deal with this sin. To 
 the very root of it he has gone, and the Apostles 
 after him. Covetousness, by which is plainly meant 
 not only the hankering after what is another's, 
 but much more than this, all inordinate desire 
 for property, the desire for mere things of this 
 world unbalanced by stronger desire for the 
 treasures of the spirit, the desire of the animal 
 man unbridled by the desire of the spiritual man, 
 is the theme of repeated and solemn warnings. 
 Evidently in Christ's view the root of stealing 
 is covetousness, as the root of murder is hate. 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 1 23 
 
 and the root of adultery is unchastity of 
 thought. The covetous thought, scheming to 
 get out of another the utmost it can, regardless 
 of his advantage, regardful only of its own, — the 
 mercantile principle whose limit of price is set 
 at whatever another can be worked into 
 paying, — the predatory instinct, which regards 
 customers or employees as sponges to be 
 squeezed, or sheep to be shorn, — the passion for 
 acquisition, whose only bound is the hedge of 
 social sentiment or of the civil law, are as 
 manifest violations of the commandment, " Thou 
 shalt not steal"- as are the operations of the 
 professional cracksman. 
 
 The cartman who, when Chicago is burning,, 
 demands fifty dollars per load for the removal 
 of goods to a place of safety, is justl}^ 
 denounced as an extortioner. He happens 
 merely to have got a successful " corner " in 
 carting. No doubt, he is stealing to the amount 
 of his extortionate price above an equitable 
 price. Yet, somehow, the men who get up 
 " corners " in wheat, or oil, or anything market- 
 able, would feel indignant at being classed 
 among thieves. 
 
 A syndicate — the polite term for a ring — of 
 highly respectable gentlemen in New York 
 closed operations last April with a reported 
 profit of five million dollars from a corner in 
 coffee in consequence of a short crop ; their 
 neighbors' necessity having been worked as their 
 
124 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 opportunity. These New York operators, it 
 should be said, were understood to be in league 
 with some European parties, who, I think, must 
 have been French or Dutch. I have no right to 
 charge either the cartman or the coffee operators 
 with intentional wrong. But if the rich syndi- 
 cate is to be deemed any better than the poor 
 cartman, whom all condemn, it can only be on 
 that doubtful principle by which a person who 
 kills one man figures on the scaffold as a 
 murderer, while he who kills a million men 
 figures on the stage of history as a glorious 
 conqueror. 
 
 But here we must lay down the ethical 
 principles which justify such a judgment. This 
 done, we shall come to specific applications of 
 them. 
 
 Society begins in exchange of speech with 
 one another, and is developed by exchange of 
 services. Because no man can do everything 
 for himself, each man is by necessity an 
 ■exchanger, that is, a giver and a receiver of 
 services. Each is entitled to a fair exchange, 
 in which the service given and the service 
 received are equivalent to each other in a just 
 balance. 
 
 If exchanges were carried on by the primitive 
 
 mode of barter, so much wheat given in exchange 
 
 . by the farmer for so much coal received from the 
 
 miner, so much bread by the baker for so much 
 
 meat from the butcher, the principle of the just 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 1 25. 
 
 balance would be more clearly recognized and 
 more closely insisted on. The use of money as a 
 contrivance for facilitating exchange veils the 
 real fact, that labor of every kind, whether of the 
 judge or of the mill-operative, is an exchange of 
 service for service. The laborer is compensated 
 not by a direct but by an indirect service, when 
 the money is given him as a sort of negotiable 
 draft for whatever service he may wish to procure 
 with it. Money payment, says Ruskin, "'consists 
 radically in a promise to some person working for 
 us, that, for the time and labor he spends in our 
 service to-day we will give, or procure, equivalent 
 time and labor in his service, at any future time 
 when he may demand it." This convenient, but 
 round-about method of exchange of services by 
 the use of money naturally tends to an incon- 
 siderate and inadequate estimate of the services 
 given and received, as to their fair equivalency 
 with each other. Extravagant demand and 
 scrimped supply are far more likely than if every 
 service were exchanged directly for another 
 service. And so it has become one of our 
 important moral duties to form a right estimate 
 of money as the reckoning of the worth of service 
 given or service due. Were such an estimate 
 habitually made and equitably applied, the 
 enormity of demanding a year's maintenance in 
 exchange for a day's service would be more 
 clearly perceived in certain cases of professional 
 fees. 
 
126 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Society being thus in fact a mutual-benefit 
 association for the exchange of services between 
 its mutually dependent members, the exchange 
 -of those services in buying and selling is in its 
 nature benevolent. So far as the maxims and 
 practices of trade contradict this, they are lying 
 maxims and unjust practices. So far as business 
 dealings with a stranger are conducted with less 
 •concern for the equities of a fair exchange than 
 would be regarded proper between friends, those 
 principles are immoral. Society being organized 
 •on the benevolent principle of reciprocal service, 
 reciprocity in service is the essential principle of 
 all legitimate business. All business theories 
 -and business practices which ignore this prin- 
 ciple of reciprocity are in their nature unsocial, 
 immoral, and tend to fraud and spoliation. The 
 notion now widely acted on, that business is to 
 be worked for all it can be made worth to one's 
 self, without regard to the equivalent of service 
 rendered by it to others, is in direct violation of 
 the commandment, " Thou shall not steal!' No 
 wonder that men imbued with this false and 
 predatory idea of business tell us that business 
 •cannot be carried on upon Christ's Golden Rule. 
 The devil's golden rule is their motto : 
 " That he should get who has the power, 
 And he should keep who can." 
 
 Under this morally degrading view of business 
 many men have simply exchanged the scalping 
 knife and tomahawk of the savage for the 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 127 
 
 less gory but equally sharp and unscrupulous 
 weapons of wit, and masquerade in the market 
 as business men, when they are merely on a 
 raid for the spoils of war. A firm of railway 
 financiers failed in New York last week with 
 reported liabilities of twenty million dollars. 
 The cable tells us that the announcement of 
 their failure was hailed in the Stock Exchange 
 with cheers. The incident demonstrates how 
 business, which in theory is such reciprocity of 
 service that the interest of each is the interest of 
 all, has in practice been debased into an unscru- 
 pulous warfare with its alternating cries of 
 victory and of defeat. We may set it down as 
 certain, when a man tells us that business cannot 
 be conducted on Christian principles, that his 
 business is conducted on heathen principles, and 
 low heathen, at that. 
 
 We come now to applications of the funda- 
 mental principle of legitimate business. The 
 general statement is, that where the principle of 
 reciprocity is violated, where the just balance is 
 wanting between a service received and a service 
 rendered, there is the commandment violated : 
 " Thou shall not steal" Under this statement 
 we may specify : 
 
 I. Cases where a real service, reckoned at so 
 much money's worth, is taken in exchange for 
 an injurious or degrading service, that is, for no 
 real service at all. To sell a man a drink which 
 we know will do him harm, is to steal from him, 
 
128 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 as well as to poison him. To take a man's 
 money in exchange for what one has no right to 
 sell him, one's manhood or honor, is to steal 
 from him as well as to prostitute one's self The 
 taker of a bribe in any shape is a thief, as well 
 as a moral prostitute. The man who sells his 
 vote at the polls or in the legislature is in the 
 same category. What is known as " tipping," 
 though not in all cases unjustifiable, is very 
 often of doubtful morality. The servant, 
 whether in a public house or a public office, 
 who requires a tip before he will do his duty,, 
 must be classed with other bribe-takers. And 
 the people who give tips to servants or em- 
 ployees, with the intent to secure more than 
 their equal share of the service for which 
 all pay alike, arc in effect stealing from those 
 who do not stoop to the demoralizing practice. 
 If the taker of a bribe is in all cases a thief 
 directly, in many cases the giver is a thief by 
 indirection. Of this the records of profligate 
 legislation afford abundant proof. He who 
 secures a franchise by bribed legislation steals 
 from the community the difference between the 
 actual and the equitable consideration. 
 
 2. Cases where a real service, reckoned at so 
 much money's worth, is received in exchange for 
 what is only a fictitious and unreal service. He 
 who pockets the stakes of a bet as winner, how- 
 ever unconscious he be of the real moral nature 
 of the act, does what it is morally impossible to 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 1 29 
 
 call by any other name than stealing. For he 
 has taken a real service, as reckoned in the 
 purchasing power of the money ; he has rendered 
 the unreal service of a brief and illusive dream. 
 That the excitement of the bet is a substantial 
 equivalent to the loser, may be believed by 
 those who hold cloud-castles as good as solid 
 earth, and short hope equal to permanent 
 possession. That the loser agreed beforehand 
 to lose, and puts up with his bad bargain like a 
 man of honor, will justify the bet when it 
 justifies the prize-fight or the duel. Exchange 
 that is all loss to the one party, all gain to the 
 other, is no just balance of services ; it is mere 
 stealing. All that has been exchanged in 
 perhaps equal amounts is risk and risk. All 
 that has been given and received equally is mere 
 excitement. But property, the means of real 
 service, has been taken without real equivalent. 
 I would by all means avoid pronouncing a hasty 
 or a- harsh judgment. But I must deliberately 
 say, that such an act, judged by all well estab- 
 lished moral principles, is simply and only a 
 theft. 
 
 3. Of similar kind are the spurious exchanges 
 of the market, which consist in the buying and 
 selling of risks rather than of property, in what 
 is miscalled " speculation." 
 
 Here we must make a distinction. Legitimate 
 speculation is a far different thing. Speculation 
 strictly signifies the exercise of foresight. It is 
 
 I 
 
I30 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 legitimately and most usefully employed in fore- 
 casting the probable, supply of commodities,, 
 and in adjusting consumption to production by 
 prices that rise or fall with the prospect of a 
 diminished or increased supply. Thus the com- 
 munity is saved from the sudden strains of having 
 supplies cut off, or the market glutted, without 
 warning. This speculation does for society 
 what the contrivance called the " governor " 
 does for the steam engine. It is the foresighted, 
 economical regulator of expenditures by resources. 
 Of the same character is the rule of buying cheap 
 and selling dear, which is in effect, when legiti- 
 mately applied, the carrying of service from 
 where it is abundant to where it is deficient, as 
 when a man buys calico in England and sells it 
 in Africa, and then buys ivory in Africa and sells 
 it in England. The effect of such speculation is- 
 to increase the distribution of useful services 
 between man and man. Totally different is the 
 thing that is miscalled by the same name, which 
 is not carried on by the buying of commodities 
 but by the buying of mere risks, the same as 
 gambling. 
 
 I was until lately inclined to regard this as 
 an American vice. But I find by reading the 
 financial columns of your papers that it is 
 getting to be an English vice also, , though 
 perhaps imported from over the sea. In this 
 gambling speculation men simply bet on the 
 future price, and settle the bet by paying the 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 131 
 
 difference between the price bet on and the 
 actual price when the time of settlement comes. 
 A contract to take or dehver stocks, grain, pork, 
 or what not, on a given day at a set price, 
 without any intent to take or dehver the 
 property, but simply to receive or pay the 
 difference between the contract price and the 
 price current on the day named, is no exchange 
 of services, but a mere matching of risks, or 
 gambling. It is not business, it is stealing, 
 where the winner pockets the loser's money with 
 no equivalent rendered. In the same slough of 
 iniquity are the common business methods of 
 the tribe, to " bull " or " bear '' the market so as 
 to lure or scare the game into their net, as by 
 rumors that enable them to play with men's 
 hopes and fears, and rake the stakes into their 
 own pockets. Such men live at others' cost 
 without the least chance of any real service to 
 society, or intent to benefit any but themselves, 
 and with serious loss to bona-fide holders, by 
 the artificial depreciation of their property in 
 the speculators' football game. The whole 
 thing is rotten, rascally, damnably demoralizing. 
 4. Cases of unjust monopoly. Here also we 
 must make distinctions. Monopoly is the 
 exclusive, right of sale. It is not necessarily 
 unjust. To hold a patent-right an a new 
 invention, as telephones, or a copy-right on a 
 new book, or the only line of rails that can be 
 laid between two cities, is not unjust. Nor is it 
 
132 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 unjust for the owner to fix his price, if he does 
 so with equitable proportion between the 
 services given and received in exchange. There 
 is nothing odious in such monopoly. How then 
 has monopoly acquired its prevailing odious 
 signification of injustice ? Simply because price 
 has commonly been fixed not by equity but by 
 power. The monopolist — in the reproachful 
 sense of that word which utters the social 
 feeling of injustice, — is disliked because he 
 avails himself of his arbitrary power to fix and 
 collect a tax, in the shape of an extra price, on 
 every exchange of his services. He commonly 
 draws the line just short of the point at which 
 buyers would rebel, calculates what the market 
 will bear without breaking, and takes that 
 because of power to take it. This is not the 
 just balance of a fair exchange of services ; it 
 is extortion ; it is stealing. If it deserves this 
 name in the case of articles that could be 
 dispensed with, as nutmegs, what name of 
 adequate reproach when the necessaries of life 
 are thus dealt with ? In Bible times the 
 Prophets, speaking by Divine inspiration, used 
 some very plain and sharp speech about the 
 business men who made the measure small 
 and the price great when they had the power 
 to do it. It is time for the church of Christ 
 to follow their example, and to sharpen some 
 faded distinctions between righteousness and 
 robbery. 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 1 33 
 
 5. In connection with this are certain cases of 
 what is called " cut-throat competition." Not 
 all cases, however. If the market is glutted, 
 two sellers after one buyer, there will have to be 
 ruinous underselling ; a misfortune more than a 
 wrong. But where a man with the advantage 
 of a long purse, wishing to break a rival, and 
 gain a monoply in which he can fix prices by 
 power, begins the operation by introducing cut- 
 throat prices, it is nothing but a war for spoils, 
 in which his first victim is his rival, and his next 
 victim the whole community. 
 
 But more common and petty violations of the 
 commandment must be noticed. We mark 
 therefore, especially for the boys and girls who 
 are present, 
 
 6. Stealing by taking advantage of another's 
 mistake. Too much change is returned to you 
 at a shop counter. If we see the mistake, but 
 take the excess, and pocket our neighbor's 
 money knowingly, we simply act like the sneak 
 who picks pockets in the crowd. If we do not 
 notice it till afterwards, it may then be trouble- 
 some to restore to our neighbor what is his. 
 Can we keep it, then, on the ground that we are 
 not responsible for his mistake ? No, for we are 
 responsible for our own mistake. When the 
 money was tendered, the burden of examina- 
 tion was ours as much as his, and we were 
 equally negligent with him. Through our 
 negligence our neighbor's money has got into 
 
134 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 our pocket That is no justification for keeping 
 it there. We are bound to restitution quite as 
 much as if we had accidentally exchanged pocket 
 books. 
 
 Chief among the characteristics of President 
 Lincoln was the scrupulous integrity which 
 gained for him in the rough western country the 
 sobriquet of " Honest Abe." He wrought it 
 into his character in his youth. When he was 
 a country shop-keeper, he noticed, in looking 
 over a bill of goods which he had sold a poor 
 woman, that she had given him six-and-a- 
 quarter cents too much. The money that was 
 not his burned in his hands. That very night, 
 after locking his shop, he took a walk of several 
 miles to replace it in her hands. Such was the 
 character which, long afterwards, when the 
 dangers of a great war environed the nation, 
 was safely trusted with larger powers than any 
 other American has ever exercised. 
 
 7. Another common case of petty stealing 
 is in delay of payment for service rendered 
 beyond the mutually understood and expected 
 time of settlement. This is explicitly for- 
 bidden in Holy Writ. " Thou shalt not defraud 
 thy neighbor, neither rob him : the wages of 
 him that is hired shall not abide ivith thee 
 all night until the morning!' But it may be 
 inconvenient to pay at the expected time. 
 It may be still more inconvenient to wait 
 for payment. One procrastinator may keep 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 135 
 
 twenty people waiting, by keeping back the sum 
 of money which would pass from hand to hand 
 to settle twenty accounts. If there is incon- 
 venience, it belongs to him who has received the 
 service, not to those who are waiting for its just 
 •equivalent. The poor often suffer grievously in 
 this way from the neglect of those that live in 
 style. It is simply knavish, thievish, to keep a 
 man out of his dues, who is afraid to press for 
 them lest he should lose a customer or an em- 
 ployer. This oftenest comes of the fraudulent 
 habit of living beyond one's means. The man 
 who lives beyond his means to p^y promptly and 
 fairly for service rendered is to that extent living 
 upon the means of others, like a leech. He is 
 living on forced loans as really and as unjustifi- 
 ably as the highwayman who persuades his 
 victim with a cocked pistol. 
 
 8. In the same class of petty thefts is the 
 screwing out of a weak seller a lower price than 
 •one would have paid a firmer seller, by working 
 on his fears, or taking advantage of his necessities, 
 •or making feigned objections to his wares, or 
 falsely pretending they can be bought lower 
 elsewhere. Such frauds are noticed in Scripture. 
 ■" It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer ; 
 but when he is gone his zvay then he boasteth." 
 Such boasting, however, is the boasting of the 
 thief over ill-gotten spoil. 
 
 9. Stealing is also widely practiced by the 
 adulteration of commodities, thereby taking out 
 
136 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 of the buyer's pocket the difference of value 
 between what he gets, and what he thinks he 
 gets. An unscrupulous trader often forces his 
 rivals into such practices by the pressure of com- 
 petition. "We must do it to live," they say. 
 The brothel keeper says the same. The excuse 
 is worth no more in their business than in his. 
 
 But I do not intend, nor indeed would it be 
 possible, to enumerate the multitudinous infrac- 
 tions of the Eighth Commandment, which the 
 barbarism still latent in our boastful civilization 
 permits or condones. A man who tries to get 
 laws made, or to prevent laws from being changed,, 
 which he sees will benefit his pocket at the 
 expense of his neighbor's pocket, commits the 
 sin of stealing in its most odious form, by making 
 the natural guardians of his neighbor's rights 
 unnatural accomplices in his machinations for 
 his neighbor's wrong. He who evades any part 
 of his just share of public burdens steals from 
 his neighbors the amount which his practices add 
 to their share of those burdens. He, who in a 
 place of public trust is more generous with the 
 public money than he would be with his own, as 
 in undeserved pensions, sinecure appointments, 
 and party jobs, is thieving from the public to the 
 extent of his unjust generosity. The rack-rent- 
 ing landlord is no more innocent than any other 
 monopolist who fixes his price by the power of 
 taxation rather than by equity of exchange. To 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 1 37 
 
 collect all that the law permits, or to pay only 
 what the law compels, — of which so many hard 
 cases occur — without regard to the just balance 
 of actual service given and received, is of the very 
 essence of stealing and robbery. Though the 
 letter of the law permit it, it is condemned by 
 the equitable spirit of the law, which frons 
 generation to generation is ever struggling 
 towards more equitable enactments. 
 
 In fine, and at the root of the matter, the man 
 who goes into business with the mere purpose of 
 making money thereby is in great danger of 
 making it in inequitable ways. " 2'hey that make 
 haste to be rich',' says Holy Writ, " shall not be 
 innocent!' If nothing but selfishness goes into 
 business, nothing but selfishness can come out. 
 If covetousness, — the mere desire of this world's 
 goods, — is the single root of our worldly enter- 
 prise, then, beyond a doubt, stealing will grow 
 from it, somewhere, somehow, perhaps uncon- 
 sciously, but no less actually. But in real fact, 
 business life is essentially a ministry of supply to 
 want in the reciprocity of needed services. Why, 
 then, should it not be adopted intelligently, con- 
 scientiously, with a benevolent purpose to follow 
 it as such ? An industrial or commercial career 
 demands of every man to be conducted with as 
 sincere a purpose of doing good therein as the 
 calling of a preacher of the Gospel. " Either',' 
 then, as Jesus said, "make the tree good and its 
 
138 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 fruit good, or else make the tree corrupt and its 
 fruit corrupt" 
 
 But while one unscrupulous and soulless man 
 may often debauch the morals of an entire line 
 of business by forcing his competitors to imitate 
 his predatory practices against the protest of 
 their consciences, it is still, thank God, possible 
 to conduct business equitably and honorably, 
 as many do, upon the principle of a just balance 
 of reciprocal services, rather than with the 
 predatory instinct of the pickpocket. But 
 painful experience reveals the fact, that there is 
 a spirit rampant in the market, to enrich itself 
 at loss to others in every way not forbidden by 
 the letter of the law. It is also plain, that 
 through the imperfection of statute law many 
 practices are not legally branded as stealing 
 which are morally so. But whoever does not 
 ■care for the moral limit as he cares for the legal, 
 is already in spirit a thief and a robber. It is 
 high time for the Church to insist more on the 
 moral distinctions df which the civil statutes 
 take no cognizance. Religious life has been too 
 often divorced from business life, one conscience 
 kept for the church, another for the shop, and 
 some men by turns pray to God and prey on 
 their neighbors. The church ^cannot too soon 
 endeavor to purify the ethics of business, and 
 purge the temple which the mammon spirit has 
 defiled. Especially for our young men must 
 this be done, lest they be tempted to those 
 
THE EIGHTH COM^rANDMENT. 1 39 
 
 legally available but morally pernicious practices 
 which blight and sear the conscience. Probably 
 there never was a time when the Eighth Com- 
 mandment was more enormously violated than 
 now. A new and sinister significance has been 
 given to the pacific declaration that " the pen is 
 mightier than the sword," when the robber 
 makes his mark in ink instead of blood, and the 
 bigger the robber the more he inclines to pen 
 and ink. Expert authority declares that two 
 billions of dollars, one-third of the railway 
 capital of America, was, in 1884, mere " water" — 
 fictitious capital created by a stroke of the pen, 
 representing no service rendered to the com- 
 munity, and yet taxing the community for 
 •dividends the same as real capital expended in 
 service. It is only the methods of spoliation 
 that have been changed. The violent and 
 bloody ways in which barbarism robs have 
 given place to the pacific ways of civilization. 
 The club and the sword have been laid by for 
 the smooth tongue and the noiseless pen. But 
 the spoliation goes on, the stain of the primeval 
 cave-dwellers clings to the splendor of the 
 modern mart, and the hearer of the Gospel of 
 the grace of God still needs to be warned by the 
 thunders of Mount Sinai, " Thou shalt not 
 steal!' The warning may be unhedeed. But 
 sooner or later the judgment lightning will 
 inevitably strike. For "a false balance is 
 abomination to the Lord" 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 
 
THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD.* 
 
 " Atiii there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight r 
 but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of 
 him with whom we have to do." — Hebrews iv. 13. 
 
 TTTW E enter into this somewhat difficult 
 ^^^-^ subject in reflecting that the Infinite 
 Power which displays itself throughout the 
 universe is the power of Infinite Mind. Power 
 without a source of power is as inconceivable by 
 us as a stream without a spring. We infer that 
 the source of the power exerted in Nature is 
 Mind, because the source of the power we exert 
 ourselves is mind. Whatever we accomplish by 
 our own power, is effected by the willing and 
 working mind within. Hence our radical idea 
 of cause is that of intelligent will, effecting its 
 chosen ends. If we see an orderly row of trees 
 along the highway, we can account for their 
 
 * Preached Sunday Morning, August 2ist, 18 
 
144 THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 
 
 order only by thinking of a mind that willed it. 
 But the same rational necessity, which obliges us, 
 thus to account for the order of the trees, con- 
 strains us likewise to account for their existence 
 as proceeding from an intelligent Will. Thus 
 the ultimate demand of our reason for the inter- 
 pretation of the phenomena of Nature is a Mind 
 which energizes throughout the universe. And 
 so, as Dr. Martineau has said, " we decipher the 
 universe as the autobiography of an Infinite 
 Spirit, repeating itself in miniature within our 
 finite spirit." 
 
 Not only is it natural, and therefore rational, 
 thus to think, but the most refined scientific 
 studies of our day lead in the same direction by 
 the discovery of the so-called '' convertibility of 
 forces," showing that light and heat, magnetism, 
 electricity and chemical affinity are not mere 
 different forces, but distinct forms of One Force 
 working everywhere. Here we are probably as 
 near the seat of the Invisible Power that works 
 through Nature as scientific research can conduct 
 us. But when the torch of Science has lighted 
 up the depths, so far that we can see the various 
 forces which animate our bodies, and pervade all 
 worlds, converging toward one central nerve of 
 Power, which still runs back from us into the 
 inscrutable darkness, our most rational conclu- 
 sion is, that the Almighty Power which issues 
 from the abyss to create the stupendous har- 
 moriies and wondrous changes of Nature is, like 
 
THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. I45 
 
 our own power, the activity of a free Mind, that 
 works all things " after the counsel of his oivn 
 will!' Thus Science and Reason unite to con- 
 firm the words of Revelation : — " The Lord by 
 wisdom hath founded the earth ; by understanding 
 hath he established the heavens. By his knowledge 
 the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down 
 the dew" 
 
 Thus we approach the sublime truth of the 
 Omniscience of God, the all-penetrating Intelli- 
 gence which the first clause of our text affirms in 
 the broadest terms : — " There is no creature that 
 is liot manifest in his sight." Here, first, we have 
 to ask whether this is literally, or only figura- 
 tively true ? It is a most important question, 
 what is the unit of the Divine knowledge ? 
 Does that knowledge extend to individuals, or 
 stop at classes of things ? Does God know 
 every bird, or only the classes of birds, or, at 
 most, the winged kind of creature in general ? — 
 every fish, or only the finny tribe as a whole ? — 
 every human being, or only the several races or 
 communities of mankind, or simply the human 
 species ? — every atom of matter, or only the 
 material forces that organize atoms into masses, 
 and these masses themselves, as the air, the 
 water, the rocks, the worlds ? When we observe 
 Nature with attention, and mark the numberless 
 dewdrops freshly gemming the fields every 
 morning, the innumerable wild flowers that 
 spangle the earth, the countless leaves that 
 
 J 
 
146 THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 
 
 clothe the forests anew with vernal verdure and 
 autumnal splendor from year to year, and then 
 reflect that this great world, so infinitely varie- 
 gated, is but a speck in the Maker's universal 
 domain, this question strikes us keenly : — Does 
 God's Omniscience recognize each one of these 
 ephemeral dewdrops and leaves, or has he only 
 provided for their appearance in a general way, 
 with knowledge of forces and classes and quan- 
 tities, but taking no note of the infinitesimal 
 individuals? Christ affirms that Omniscience 
 notes the individual. " A re not jive sparrows 
 sold for two farthings f and not one of thetii is 
 forgotten before God. Bnt even the very hairs of 
 yonr head arc all numbered!' 
 
 Now if one should ask if this is not merely 
 figurative language, bold and striking indeed, 
 but only meant to give a vivid impression of 
 the vastness of the Divine knowledge, we should 
 have to point to scientific facts which shut us 
 up to a literal understanding of our Master's 
 words. I am aware that it is a difficult subject, 
 but it is of vital consequence to us to be 
 absolutely certain that we in our immeasurable 
 littleness are personally known to God our 
 Maker, and are dealt with individually by his 
 infinite wisdom. We shall get no clear certainty 
 of this momentous truth without an effort of 
 thinking. 
 
 Let me, then, ask you to reflect, first, that our 
 thoughts do not move in the same order as 
 
THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 1 47 
 
 God's thought. Our mental processes begin 
 with things of some magnitude, our body, our 
 house, the sun. It is notably the reverse in 
 the processes of the Creative Mind. We shall 
 see that God's thought, as the Creator, begins 
 with things that have for us no recognizable 
 magnitude at all, and proceeds not from large 
 to small, like our thought, but from small to 
 large. Moreover, our thought always begins at 
 the outside of things, and often goes no further. 
 God's thought, on the contrary, is in the reverse 
 order, working from the inside out, and know- 
 ing things from the centre forth. We might 
 roughly illustrate it by any complicated 
 machine, as known on the outside to the spec- 
 tator, and as known from within by the inventor, 
 whose niind conceived it as a thought before 
 his hand created it as a mechanism. 
 
 Now I was saying that the Power which we 
 see everywhere working in the universe seems 
 to be of the same kind as the power we see 
 working in ourselves, an intelligent power, the 
 power of an organizing mind. Here, then, is 
 the decisive principle. So far as this Power 
 extends, the intelligence of tlie organizing Mind 
 from zvhich it issues must necessarily extend. It 
 extends to the stupendous globes of light whose 
 rhythmical cycles mark off the hours of eternity. 
 To them, I say, it extends, but not originally 
 from them ; not in these is it originally lodged. 
 We discover its seat and starting point in the 
 
148 THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 
 
 individual atoms themselves. From these it 
 proceeds according to the Divine law of pro- 
 gress, "■front the least to the greatest" To these 
 we must track it in our search for its original 
 abode in the creation. 
 
 The minutest particle of gunpowder you can 
 produce by sub-division possesses the same 
 explosive property as a ton. But if each particle 
 had not this peculiar force, the ton would not. 
 The silver spoon used in eating an egg becomes 
 blackened by the minute quantity of sulphur 
 which the egg contains. The invisible atoms of 
 sulphur combine with the invisible atoms of 
 silver by the force of chemical affinity, and make 
 a new thing, which we call sulphuret of silver, 
 that plague of housekeepers. The black film 
 upon the tarnished spoon shows where the 
 intelligent Power we discover in nature begins in 
 its creative work. It reveals the primal presence 
 of organizing Mind in the very atoms of which 
 the universe is built. The perfect control of 
 every individual atom by this intelligent Power 
 demonstrates the residence in each of them of 
 that Power, and each of them as an object of 
 knowledge because an object of intelligent con- 
 trol by the Omniscient Maker. 
 
 Most instructive are the proofs of this which 
 may be drawn from the curious facts of chemistry. 
 It wholly depends on the proportions in which 
 the atoms of oxygen and nitrogen are put 
 together, whether the compound be the pure 
 
THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. I49 
 
 vital air, or the harmless anesthetic called 
 " laughing gas," or the violent poison, nitric acid. 
 Tea and strychnia are composed of precisely the 
 same elementary atoms, only in different propor- 
 tions. Contemplating this accurate adjustment 
 of atoms to each other, which makes the product 
 either a grateful beverage, or, by a slight change 
 of proportions, a terrible drug, carrying spasm 
 and agony to every living fibre, well may we say, 
 with the Duke of Argyll : — " What havoc in this 
 world, so full of life, would be made by blind 
 chance, gambling with such powers as these ! " 
 It is not chance which controls such combinations, 
 but Intelligence, and the intelligent Power which 
 controls each atom is the power of an organizing 
 Mind, working through atom to atom, and, of 
 course, knowing each atom with which it works. 
 The careful student of these mysteries of nature 
 cannot fail to read therein the lesson of Holy 
 Writ : " Neither is there any creature that is not 
 manifest, in his sight." 
 
 "As the heaven is high above the earth, so are 
 my thoughts higher than your thoughts" saith the 
 Omniscient Spirit. However transcendent to 
 our minds this thought of Omniscience extending 
 to the ultimate atoms of the universe, it does not 
 lack confirmatory illustrations. We have heard 
 of the famous general of antiquity, who knew 
 every man in his army by name. History 
 records many a master mind directing the affairs 
 of empire with an intelligence extending to the 
 
I50 THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 
 
 most trivial details. Such intelligence, raised to 
 the highest power, and working not upon the 
 outside of things, as human minds work, but 
 within and from the inside of things, is the 
 Omniscience by which the hairs of our heads, as 
 Jesus said, are numbered. And when we go on 
 to note the decisive efficiency which the all-con- 
 trolling Intelligence has given to the smallest 
 factors in many a problem of cause and effect, — 
 for instance, the cackling of geese which awoke 
 the garrison and saved the citadel of Rome ; the 
 persevering spider, fastening his web at the 
 seventh trial, which encouraged the dispirited 
 fugitive Bruce to make his last and successful 
 attempt for the liberation of Scotland ; the 
 perching of the shyest and wildest of birds over 
 the thicket in which the future conqueror of 
 India, Timour, was hiding from his enemies, 
 seeing which the pursuers turned away, and the 
 destiny of empire was decided ; a similar 
 incident in the crisis of the career of Mohammed, 
 the spiritual leader of so large a portion of man- 
 kind ; the glass of water thrown by one of Queen 
 Anne's women at another, which determined the 
 interests of Europe in the close of an exhausting 
 war ; the one foolish word of an obscure partizan, 
 which tipped the balance of an American 
 presidential election in which ten million ballots 
 were cast, — Christ's saying about the sparrows 
 and the hairs of our head is borne out by the 
 occurrences of ordinary experience. 
 
THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 151 
 
 But, furthermore: We are certain that God 
 knows the human world quite as minutely as he 
 knows the material universe. If no atom of 
 matter with its peculiar properties eludes the 
 cognizance of the Maker and the control of the 
 Combiner, much less can we suppose that any 
 spirit, however humble, narrow, or obscure, 
 escapes the notice and the control of the 
 Omniscient Mind, or that any human thought or 
 act, however veiled, however feeble, evades the 
 thought and providence of God. " A II things 
 are naked and laid open before the eyes of him 
 with whom we have to do!' 
 
 Like clouds that cross the sky, so many light 
 and seemingly aimless thoughts rise and vanish 
 hourly on the surface of the mind. Like rain 
 drops pattering on the glass so many trivial 
 words and deeds dot every day. The baby's 
 prattle and play, the mother's cradle-song, the 
 domestic chit-chat, the routine of the humblest 
 life, are these unnoticed by Omniscience ? How 
 explicit is the answer of that Revelation in 
 which the testimony of Omniscience utters 
 itself in the cry of the spirit that is awakened to 
 consciousness of its God. " O Lord, thon hast 
 searched me, and known me. Thou knoivest my 
 downsitting and mine uprising, thou understaiid- 
 est my thought afar off. Thou- winjwivest my 
 path and my lying down, and art acquainted 
 with all my -ways. For there is not a word in 
 my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knozvest it 
 
152 THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 
 
 altogether'' For there can be no doubt, that he 
 who controls, and therefore knows, the atoms as 
 well as the worlds, and whose Power controls 
 the worlds because of its control of their atoms, 
 must hold within his all-transcending thought 
 not only the empires, and the historic person- 
 ages, and the grand actions of human progress, 
 but also all the individual contributions to the 
 general movement, even to the most trivial act 
 or word or thought of the very feeblest con- 
 tributor. 
 
 In a chain composed of larger and smaller 
 links the smaller are equally important with the 
 larger. Such is the connection of cause and 
 effect, that stretches from the beginning of all 
 things onward. The rain-drop, that wet the 
 powder with which a felon meant to take a noble 
 life away, was beheld in its merciful errand as 
 much as the angel's mission to Jesus praying in 
 Gethsemane. The flying cinder, which lodged 
 in the traveller's 6ye, and kept him back from 
 sailing on the ship that foundered with all her 
 company, was sped by Divine Intelligence no 
 less than the blazing comet Even so, the 
 baby's prattle, or the mother's cradle-song, that 
 sends a gleam of penitential thought and holy 
 resolution into the darkened soul of a casual 
 listener, no less than the song of the angels to 
 the shepherds at the Saviour's birth ; so, too, 
 as once actually happened, even the profane 
 imprecation that shocked a sinner into trembling 
 
THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 153 
 
 at his own sins, and earnest effort to be saved 
 from their curse and woe, no less than the 
 sermon of the Apostle converting the thousands 
 of Pentecost, was foreknown in the Divine 
 Omniscience, as the occasion of the several 
 changes that came to pass in consequence. 
 Nothing is more certain than that God, in 
 introducing the great principle of individual 
 freedom into his spiritual creation, knew every- 
 thing contained by way of consequence, to the 
 minutest and remotest. Evidently, by as much 
 as you limit his knowledge, you limit his 
 control ; for it is not to be supposed that he 
 controls anything which he does not know. 
 And there is no more childish error, than to 
 parcel things out as important and unimportant, 
 and say that what we call unimportant is not 
 worthy of his thought. Says Dr. Martineau : — 
 " The whole Past must rain on the uplands, and 
 the clouds hang on the invisible peaks of 
 History, to make the smallest rill of thought 
 that winds through our own day." 
 
 Consider now those very lives to which we 
 sparingly accord the name of great, — Aristotle, 
 Caesar, Augustine, Luther, Lincoln. How many 
 humble and forgotten forerunners obscurely pre- 
 pared their triumphal way ! How many scattered 
 experiences of inferior minds contributed to the 
 full tide of their success ! How many grand 
 thoughts and deeds of theirs were rendered 
 possible only by that wide range of the wisdom 
 
154 THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 
 
 or folly of mankind which their sagacious 
 reflection surveyed ! How many circumstances, 
 so trivial in appearance that we call them 
 accidents, shaped their career, as the breeze 
 deflects the rushing rifle-ball ! In such great 
 historic souls it is no more possible for us to 
 distinguish the individual streams and drops 
 that have swollen the mighty current of their 
 power, than to recognize in the Mississippi's 
 flood the contributions of the mill-brook, or 
 the mountain spring, or the summer shower. 
 But all these are there. And there is One who 
 sees, as he has ever seen, and in seeing controls 
 each drop and rill of influence that has trickled 
 down, above ground or under ground, even from 
 the beginning. " Great in counsel and mighty in 
 work" and "his understanding is infinite." "For 
 his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth 
 all his goings" " Doth not he see my ways, and 
 count all my steps ?" 
 
 In a practical point of view the Omniscience 
 of God profoundly enforces the duty of humility 
 and of faith. 
 
 In the presence of human wisdom superior to 
 our own we stand silent, listening, deferential. 
 How, then, should murmuring hush before the 
 inscrutable and often painful mysteries of God's 
 Providence. With what tolerance should we 
 hesitate to condemn our neighbor for what he 
 thinks of that which is alike to him and us 
 
THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 155 
 
 unfathomable in the Being and Government of 
 the Omniscient. With what caution should we 
 scruple to dogmatize upon the unknown secrets 
 of the Infinite Mind, and that which he has 
 reserved for disclosure in the hereafter. Especi- 
 ally, with what humble consciousness of our own 
 ignorance should we check the doubts that dim 
 our convictions of his goodness, or make us 
 distrust the wisdom which supremely guides the 
 struggle of the world. Surely, " God resistcth 
 the proud, but he giveth grace to the hiunble." 
 
 Toward wisdom the natural attitude of the 
 less wise is trust. Toward Omniscience, the 
 perfect faith, which says : — 
 
 " Thy way, not mine, O Lord, 
 However dark it be ; 
 Lead me by thine own hand, 
 Choose out the path for me." 
 
 Surely, " without faith," as says the Apostle, " it 
 is impossible to please him!' In all dark 
 days, as well as all bright ones, in desertion, 
 bereavement, sickness, poverty, as well as in 
 comfort, health, and affluence, shall not the 
 thought of the Omniscient Guide, to whom we 
 have submitted our will and committed our 
 way, be sufficient for all peace and courage, 
 through faith in the wisdom that sees the 
 end from the beginning, with every step of 
 the hidden path. What cheer, then, for the 
 obscurest and feeblest soul that longs to con- 
 tribute toward God's good ends, in believing 
 
156" THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 
 
 that he beholds the widow casting in her mites, 
 the child contributing its cup of cold water, and 
 twines even these slender threads into his fore- 
 known place of power in those strong and many- 
 stranded cords of love, with which- he draws the 
 world unto himself 
 
 Finally, the Omniscient Mind, who energizes 
 thus through all individual atoms and through 
 all individual agents, must ultimately make his 
 energy recognized in the progress of all created 
 intelligence as Omniscience working for righte- 
 ousness. If it were not so, there would be an 
 obvious limit set to the energy and control of 
 the Infinite Mind, but limit there can be none. 
 To state the same truth in the language of Holy 
 Scripture : — " God shall bring every ivork into 
 jtidgment, with every secret thing, whether it be 
 good or whether it be evil." Men may not care 
 to see, and may not choose to know, whether 
 they are pleasing or displeasing to " hi7n with 
 whom we have to do!' But they cannot ulti- 
 mately avoid knowing it, and avoid feeling to 
 the uttermost the consequences of knowing it, 
 in a self-judgment, whose gladness or whose 
 groaning reveals the smile or the frown of their 
 Omniscient Judge. So surely as God now 
 judges us in the all-detecting Intelligence which 
 penetrates all our privacies, discerning the hidden 
 essence of our every thought and wish as con- 
 formed or contrary to his love and truth and 
 I'ighteousness, so surely shall we sometime, if 
 
THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD. 1 57 
 
 not now, be necessitated to judge ourselves as 
 consciously " naked and laid open " to his sight, 
 and to feel the glance of an Omniscient Eye as 
 a consuming fire to all of evil it beholds. Oh, 
 then, dear friends, that this might be now ! Oh 
 that we now might choose that Omniscient Eye 
 to be the " kindly light " of our life, our welcome 
 and trusted guide to the heritage of the holy and 
 the pure ! For our moral health and vigor, for 
 our personal purity, for the vitality of conscience, 
 for our growth away from evil into goodness, for 
 our eternal hope as children of God, let us more 
 carefully cherish the conviction of that Omni- 
 scient individualizing Glance to which our most 
 guarded thought and most secret wish are ever 
 naked and open. Above all the guardianship 
 that is put upon us by the presence of the 
 onlooking world, let us learn to look up oftener 
 to the Divine guardianship by which the angels' 
 robes are kept in their unspotted whiteness. 
 With the whole holy family in heaven and on 
 earth, let us continually repeat the confession of 
 the pure in heart : — " Thou God seest me." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 THE JUDGMENT SEAT OF CHRIST. 
 
THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST.* 
 
 ' Every one luho shall confess me before men, him shall the Son 
 of Man also confess before the angels of God : but he that 
 denieth me in the presence of men shall be denied in the 
 presence of the angels of God. " — Luke xii. 8, 9. 
 
 ' 1^ ERE is one of our Lord's greatest sayings. 
 i-^b It is also one that has been both greatly 
 and grossly misunderstood. In consequence, 
 skepticism is provoked to needless denials, and 
 Christian life fails of needful admonition. It is 
 a saying which has been worked up by the 
 imagination more than it has been worked into 
 by the moral reason. Of the more consequence 
 is it, therefore, to get out of it by thoughtful 
 study, if we can, the spiritual truth which our 
 Lord utters from the earthly fancies under which 
 men have covered it. 
 
 * Preached Sunday Morning, August 15TH, 1886, 
 
 AND SUBSEQUENTLY PUBLISHED IN The Christian 
 World Pulpit. 
 K 
 
1 62 THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 
 
 There were in Jesus' time princes, whose title 
 to royal power was disputed. Such often 
 endeavored to secure the throne by visiting 
 Rome, backed by a retinue of influential country- 
 men, to obtain the favour of the world's master. 
 Such an one might say, Whosoever shall stand 
 by me in my hour of need, him will I honor in 
 my hour of triumph : but whosoever shall desert 
 me in my struggle, him will I disgrace when I 
 shall have gained my crown. 
 
 It was in a somewhat similar situation that 
 Jesus uttered the great saying in our text. He 
 was contending for a disputed crown. Most 
 rejected him as a pretender. A few declared, 
 " Thmc art the King of Israeli In the hour of 
 deepest outward depression, but with complete 
 assurance of the future, he sought to brace the 
 hesitation of the wavering with a declaration 
 such as the lips of man Jiad never uttered. How 
 strangely must such words have fallen upon the 
 ears of his neighbors from one whom they spoke 
 of as " the carpenter's son ;" " Every one who 
 shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of 
 Man also confess before the angels of God : but 
 he that denieth me in the presence of men shall 
 be denied in the presence of the angels of God'' 
 
 And even now Christian thought about this 
 has not yet risen above the earthly figure of the 
 prince who has won his disputed throne, and in 
 a grand assembly of the powers of his realm 
 proceeds to honor his adherents and banish his 
 
THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 163 
 
 adversaries. Thus our hymns upon the subject 
 of " The Last Day " represent our Lord as 
 confessing his friends and rejecting his enemies 
 in a universal assembly of all men and angels, 
 amid the throes of the final dissolution of the 
 heavens and earth. What the hymns have 
 figured in words, artists have figured in stone 
 and in color, and it has ever been a favorite 
 attempt of ecclesiastical art to represent in 
 sculpture and in painting the judgment-seat of 
 Christ. But whether in the oldest or in the 
 newest of such representations, as in the Chapel 
 of Keble College at Oxford, a thoughtful mind 
 sees that the spiritual truth transcends, not only 
 the powers, but even the conceptions of the 
 artist. Such delineations, if viewed otherwise 
 than as the fossil thoughts of a past age, a record 
 of outgrown ideas, inflame the just resentment 
 of skepticism, as naturally as though the marble 
 gods of Greece in our museums were presented 
 as suitable objects for the worship of Christian 
 men. 
 
 Of great moral and spiritual consequence is it, 
 therefore, that we should try to disengage the 
 spiritual reality of the judgment-seat of Christ 
 from the imaginative forms which have overlaid 
 it in poetry and art. Reasonably we cannot 
 think of him who bore the cross of our sins and 
 sorrows upon his sympathizing spirit, as saying 
 from any seat of justice : — " Yoit turned your 
 back upon me once, so now be gone ; You 
 
1 64 THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 
 
 owned yourself my friend long since, so now be 
 welcome here." In the superstitions which early 
 beclouded the morning of Christianity, men did 
 entertain such notions of Christ. In consequence, 
 they elevated his mother to his throne to embody 
 the grace which they failed to recognize in him, 
 and to-day, in a large part of Christendom, still 
 dread his wrath, and turn to the Virgin to 
 propitiate her terrible Son. The worship of 
 Mary is a natural fruit of the gross fancy, which 
 likens the judgment-seat that Christ, sooner or 
 later, erects in every conscience, to that on which 
 an earthly potentate sits in the midst of an awe- 
 struck assembly. 
 
 And yet, however exaggerated the lines and 
 colors of the conventional image, it was, in its 
 original simplicity, used by our Lord himself 
 It was for those whose earthly forms of thought 
 he had to use, as their first stepping-stone to 
 higher things. In presence of the images of 
 awe in which Christian poetry and art have tried 
 to body forth Christ's warning of our future 
 acceptance or rejection by him as the Judge of 
 men, sober thought will not protest. This is all 
 unreal. Nay, said he, " the words that I have 
 spoken unto you are spirit and are life! If the 
 images are confessedly but shadows, still they 
 are images of something. What can the sub- 
 stance be, but that which is as much more 
 impressive than the image as the spiritual Christ 
 transcends his fleshly hearer ? The image which 
 
THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. l6S 
 
 fills the fleshly man with awe declares there is 
 that in the spiritual reality which profoundly 
 touches a spiritual mind. 
 
 I. For finger-posts that may guide our 
 endeavor to come at the spiritual reality here 
 symbolized, such thoughts as these may serve. 
 
 1. Evidently Christ here contrasts the seen 
 and the unseen world as respectively small and 
 great ; here a petty vicinage, there a grand 
 environment ; here ignorant men, there high 
 intelligences, the angels of Go^ ; here ourselves 
 as affected by the examples and opinions of 
 sinners, there ourselves as feeling the presence 
 and the criticism of the pure ; in dim light here, 
 in dazzling light there. 
 
 2. Again, Christ evidently contrasts the seen 
 and the unseen world in their respective objects 
 of honor and dishonor. Here he, the Perfect 
 One, is rejected to glut some passion, to court 
 some infidel Pilate or unscrupulous Caiaphas, 
 who has influence with Caesar or with the mob, 
 to hear some teacher, who sets no hard lesson 
 of struggle with evil, to trust some quack, who 
 vaunts a quicker cure for the troubles of the 
 time. But there, the type and form and pattern 
 of all glory and honor amid the pure intelli- 
 gences who inhabit the light of God, is he, the 
 eternal standard of goodness, before which all 
 that claims worth must approve its worthiness, 
 or show its worthlessness, by its harmony or 
 discordance with him. 
 
l66 THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 
 
 3. The next truth of which Christ here makes 
 us certain is, that in the future is simply the 
 continuance of present relations to him under 
 changed conditions. He does not say, for it 
 goes without saying, that now, as well as here- 
 after, those who confess him he confesses, and 
 those who deny him he denies. Hereafter, it is 
 just the same, but, as he warns us, in a most 
 consequential change of conditions, from dim 
 light to searching light, from the presence of the 
 foolish to the presence of the wise, from the 
 world of flesh to the world of spirit, from the 
 society in which Pilate and Caiaphas are highest 
 to the society in which Christ is highest In 
 such a transition to a world where the highest 
 honor crowns the highest worth, all moral 
 antagonism to Christ must become manifest 
 shame, all moral accord with Christ must 
 become manifest glory, in the presence of the 
 celestial witnesses. All conformity and all 
 contradictoriness to the Divine Ideal of moral 
 excellence in Christ continue there to be what 
 they were here, but in a new environment, 
 from which must result new experiences, 
 in a conscious honor or dishonor, whose cause 
 is in what we are, as compared with what 
 Christ is. 
 
 Thus we approach a true and clear conception 
 of what our Lord meant by confessing him and 
 being confessed by him, denying him and being 
 denied. It is certainly something more than a 
 
THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 1 6/ 
 
 public declaration, more than our saying, " My 
 Lord," and his saying " My friend." " Not every 
 one that saith unto me. Lord, Lord, shall enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven!' Not by what we 
 say, but by what we are, is our present confession 
 or denial of Christ most tellingly uttered before 
 men. Likewise, by what he is, as compared with 
 what we are, will his future confession or denial 
 of us be most conclusively made known, to our 
 glory or our shame before the heavenly witnesses 
 — " the angels of God" 
 
 We are now upon the ground of familiar 
 experiences in domestic and social relationships. 
 How does a son of a wise and virtuous father 
 confess or deny him most expressively? Certainly 
 not by the word which declares the external 
 relationship, not by saying " father," though he 
 ought to say it. Rather by conduct and character ; 
 either by the wise and virtuous following of 
 parental example, which bespeaks him as his 
 father's own son, heir of his spirit as of his name, 
 or else by the course of folly and vice, which 
 denies all moral affinity with him. So on the 
 father's part ; let father and son be in the same 
 society, how does the wise and virtuous father 
 most effectively own or disown the son before 
 intelligent observers ? Certainly not by saying, 
 or omitting to say, " my son " ; rather by being 
 in the same circle with him as an object of 
 comparison before observant witnesses, by the 
 light which the father's character reflects upon 
 
l68 THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 
 
 the son, to the son's honor or dishonor, as the 
 imitator or neglecter of a noble model. 
 
 The bearing of such facts upon the sequel of 
 our present attitude of confession or denial to 
 Christ must be patent to all who reflect upon the 
 unspoken but deeply felt realities of life. How 
 do pupils confess their teacher so expressively 
 and truly as by showing in their performances 
 the impress of his mind, his peculiarities of 
 method, style, and thought? How do great 
 masters in art most clearly confess or deny those 
 who profess to have sought instruction from 
 them ? In that strong light which the model 
 casts on the professed copy, whenever the two 
 are compared, the excellence of the master finds 
 a voice, which needs no tongue to speak, or ear 
 to hear its effective praise or condemnation of the 
 pupil's work, to the understanding of every 
 intelligent beholder. What reason have we, 
 then, to imagine that anything essentially different 
 from this familiar experience awaits our arrival 
 among the higher intelligences which dwell in 
 heaven, and the hour when " we must all be 
 ■made manifest before the judgment-seat of 
 Christ?" 
 
 If our Divine Master were indeed to utter any 
 word, I could not believe that he who wept over 
 scornful Jerusalem, and prayed for those who 
 nailed him to the cross, could utter any word but 
 of Divine pity to the soul that is in discord with 
 him. But, whether of pity or of power, no word 
 
THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 1 69 
 
 can annihilate a fact, or can reverse the judg- 
 ment effect of a consciously experienced reality. 
 In that world of light and truth where Christ is 
 the adored type of moral glory, the supreme 
 standard of moral worth, in the clear and 
 thorough self-expression of our character in its 
 innermost reality, as Christlike or un-Christlike, 
 the manifest fact of what we are as compared 
 with him, penetrating conscience to its centre 
 with a sense of honor or of dishonor, will need 
 no lips to convey to ears the conviction that we 
 are confessed by Christ or denied by him. 
 
 Such a judgment before Christ awaits every 
 one of us in that solemn court of conscience, in 
 which, sooner or later, every spirit must recognize 
 its present condition as the fruit of its past 
 action, its existing character as the net product 
 of " the deeds done in the body," and must with 
 joy or grief pronounce on itself the judgment of 
 God, as in the presence of its Creator. For such 
 a judgment we need not anticipate that God will 
 undertake any grand spectacular exhibition 
 according to human imagination, or gather all 
 men and angels in universal concourse, in order 
 to proclaim to ears what will have been ade- 
 quately realized by consciences. 
 
 II. From this look into the spiritual reality of 
 our subject we draw some obvious and practical 
 conclusions. 
 
 I. Confessing or denying Christ is certainly no 
 mere affair of words. Yet words, though weak^ 
 
I/O THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 
 
 are not worthless. Whatever worthy witness 
 words can bear, they will not fail to utter in any 
 loving and thorough-going confession of our 
 loving Lord. It is, indeed, the life, through the 
 •eloquence of character, which effectively and 
 completely confesses or denies him. But the 
 words we can speak for Christ as our Master are 
 part of life and its work. They can and do 
 make their mark on character — our own and 
 •others' character, and must make the best mark 
 they can. It is, indeed, the inner life of the spirit 
 where confession of Christ begins, and whence it 
 comes out in conduct. But if it fail to come out 
 in that part of conduct to which an openly-pro- 
 nounced confession of discipleship belongs, must 
 it not be owned that the spring which fails to find 
 so natural an outlet as the lips of a loyal friend, 
 is not full fed by the rain of heaven or by the 
 earnest spirit which is of God ? 
 
 2. Confessing Christ and being confessed by 
 Christ are not to be separated in our thought, 
 like workday and payday, as if the confessing 
 were all here and the being confessed all there. 
 What comes out there is simply the flash of an 
 awakened consciousness of a judgment of Christ 
 which has been going on here every day under 
 the eyes of the invisible witnesses of many a 
 negligent life. Oh, brother, complacent in a 
 mere honorary sort of membership in Christian 
 ranks, which begs the Master : — " I pray thee 
 have me excused from thy cross-bearing ; let 
 
THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 171 
 
 me off from thy burdens here and there," — have 
 you ever reflected that your lack of moral 
 earnestness in following Christ, your self-indul- 
 gence, covetousness, cowardice, sloth, your 
 preference of easier ways than his, pronounces 
 his present denial of you as no disciple of his ? — 
 a denial as real, though unsuspected, to-day, as 
 when it shall be faced in light there is no escape 
 from, and in presence of the angels of God. 
 
 3. Confessing or denying Christ here is 
 not a question solely as to the totality or 
 average of character, but quite as much a 
 question as to the particulars of character. 
 Point by point, the world compares the pro- 
 fessed copy with its model, and recognizes 
 agreements or contradictions in detail. No 
 otherwise can it be in presence of the angels 
 of God. There the being confessed or denied 
 by Christ can not be solely a question whether, 
 on the whole, we arc more Christian or anti- 
 Christian, or whether a general average shows a 
 balance of Christian traits in our possession. 
 On the one hand, we can expect nothing like an 
 act of grace to cancel, for the sake of Christ, any 
 particular of the judgment which, as Christ 
 declares, shall be according to our deeds. Nor, 
 on the other hand, can we anticipate that any 
 line is to be drawn between persons, with a 
 complete confession of those on one side and a 
 complete denial of those on the other. The 
 Divine judgment-line is not drawn first between 
 
172 THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 
 
 persons, but first between traits of character in 
 the same person. It is thoughtless to disregard 
 the fact that characters often mix incongruously 
 in the same person — that Christian graces are in 
 many a person very unequally developed ; that 
 Christian charity often hopes that one has found 
 a welcome in heaven who made his neighbors 
 very uncomfortable on earth. What, then, must 
 we anticipate for any spirit, however hopeful, 
 which enters the presence of the angels of God 
 with spots and taints which conscience has riot 
 detected, and fidelity to the Divine pattern 
 removed? So far it must undoubtedly be 
 sensible of contradiction to Christ, and cor- 
 respondingly also of denial by Christ. 
 
 When we take the measure of such a fact, we 
 begin to appreciate some things in Holy 
 Scripture which a self-indulgent style of 
 Christianity has ignored. Here we find the 
 reason for Paul's anxiety that his Galatian 
 converts should not merely get inside the church 
 door, but up into the circle nearest to Christ — 
 the feeling which vented itself in his impassioned 
 exclamation : — " My little children, I travail in 
 birth for you, until Christ be formed in you!' 
 
 We may entertain no doubt about this. 
 Whatever envy or deceit or harshness has not 
 been shaken off by earnest struggle here, will 
 not be brushed off by any passage through the 
 gate of the world to come. The judgment 
 according to the deeds done in the body will be 
 
THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 173 
 
 visited upon the character which is found to 
 exist as the net product of those deeds. The 
 love, the devotion to duty, the power of self- 
 sacrifice, which we have failed to cultivate here, 
 will not be infused by any mysterious regenera- 
 tive power in the waters of death. If we read 
 in a widely accepted formulary of doctrine, that 
 " the souls of believers are at their death made 
 perfect in holiness," we may accept it in the 
 sense that they will be perfectly established in 
 steadfastness to a godly purpose. We may not 
 accept it, as many do, to mean that all the 
 degrees of likeness to Christ in which men 
 depart this life will be equalized by dying. 
 Whatever we understand any creed to teach to 
 the contrary, we must utterly banish the deluding 
 dream, that we shall in any way escape reaping 
 exactly what we have sowed, until even " the idle 
 zvord" shall come to judgment. We must face 
 the certainty, that the honor or dishonor of the 
 coming judgment-experience, when what we are 
 in character and spirit is compared or contrasted 
 with what Christ is, and we are made manifest 
 as conformed or contrarious to him, will come 
 from the particulars of character, one by one, 
 and not from general averages, in which one 
 thing may be imagined to off-set another. Go 
 we hence with mixed and incongruous characters? 
 The line of honor and dishonor before Christ 
 must cut through those characters. Point by 
 point our conformity or contrariety to the 
 
174 THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF CHRIST. 
 
 Divine Master must exalt us or abase us in 
 respect of every quality in which we shall be 
 made to feel that the model confesses or denies 
 the copy. 
 
 In view of this certainty, so soon to be 
 realized in the searching light, before the 
 Supreme Standard, in the presence of celestial 
 witnesses of our glory or our shame, how trans- 
 cendently momentous is the present, as the time 
 which no other time can serve instead of ! How 
 illusory and wasteful is the postponement to 
 any later day, or last day, of that which to-day 
 demands, — the true confession of Christ, in 
 which a wakeful conscience works day by day 
 in studious fidelity of endeavor to conform to 
 the Master's pattern, until the Divine result is 
 worked out in a full salvation, and Christ is 
 formed within us, the pledge of our future peace 
 and joy in the society of the holy, and " in the 
 presence of the aitgels of God" 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
 Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for 
 it is God who worketh in you, both to ivill and to do, of 
 his good pleasure." — Philippians ii. 12, 13. 
 
 m 0-DAY I wish to set an old truth in a new 
 h'ght for the sake of a new impression 
 and fresh instruction. The theme is Salvation 
 and how to attain it. The usual way of opening 
 this subject is by first defining what Salvation is, 
 and next setting forth the Scriptural statements 
 of what God does and what we must do for it. 
 But let us follow a path not so thoroughly 
 beaten, to come out on a side of the truth that 
 we have not so often looked at. 
 
 I. Our first point is to find the natural con- 
 nections of the subject. 
 
 * Preached Sunday Morni.ng, August 28th, 1887. 
 
 L 
 
1/8 OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
 We may notice that the Apostle lays down a 
 sort of bridge, which connects this high theme 
 of Salvation with others that are more familiar 
 to the daily thoughts of most men. He tells us 
 that God is a co-operator in our efforts. God's 
 working with us he regards as a reason why we 
 should work with God. He says : — " Work out 
 your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in 
 you." Here now we are on ground that no one 
 of us is a stranger to. Salvation is only one of 
 many particulars in which God is a co-worker 
 with man. 
 
 The moment we look round intelligently 
 on the world, diversified as it is with pro- 
 ducts of human industry, we perceive that 
 every product of human labour is really a com- 
 pound thing. There is a Divine factor as well 
 as a human factor in the product. The wheat 
 we grind, the coal we burn, the brick we build 
 \\ith, and so, also, our most highly wrought pro- 
 ducts of art, engines, telegraphs, photographs, 
 chemical re-agents, and the like, are not our pro- 
 ducts only. God has helped us produce them ; 
 has furnished the matter to work upon, and the 
 natural forces to work through, and the intelli- 
 gence to work with. If we have produced 
 anything, it is because we have worked together 
 M-ith God. 
 
 Now Salvation is merely one case under this 
 universal law of human efficiency. Salvation is 
 to a certain extent a product of human endeavor ; 
 
OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 1 79 
 
 no one doubts that. It is, therefore, under 
 the general law of human endeavor ; which is, 
 that we, to be efficient and attain our ends, must 
 work with God ; must use the material God 
 gives, and the forces God supplies, according to 
 the methods God prescribes by what we call the 
 laws of nature. 
 
 II. Our next point is to observe precisely 
 what it is that man does, and what it is that 
 God does, in bringing forth whatever is produced 
 by human endeavors. We shall see, in general, 
 that man's part is confined to this : — He simply, , 
 places things, brings them into the proper rela- 
 tions, gets the different elements into the neces- 
 sary position or adjustment, and then God, by 
 means of natural forces does all the effective work, 
 as distinct from what is merely preparatory. 
 
 Suppose a farmer wants a crop. His part is 
 only to get the seed into proper relations with 
 the soil and the season, with warmth and 
 moisture, and in freedom from weeds, insects 
 and other enemies. He puts it under the soil, 
 and not too deep ; in warm and fertile soil, not 
 cold or barren ; where there is neither too much 
 moisture nor too little ; neither before the time 
 nor after ; he fences out the cattle, and he keeps 
 down the weeds. All this he does merely to 
 give his seed " a fair chance," as he would say ; 
 merely to open every door for the unobstructed 
 access of the Divine energies that are in the soil 
 and the sun and the showers and in the seed 
 
l8o OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
 itself. And when he has done this, when he has 
 simply placed things right for God to work with 
 him, then God does all the effective work. The 
 forces which God put into the nature of things 
 work right through to the end. The seed 
 germinates of itself ; the showers water it ; the 
 sunbeam with its wonderful chemistry assists the 
 growth of the living organism ; the soil sends 
 up its strength into stalk and fruit ; and the 
 farmer only looks on, till he sees the work of 
 God in nature is complete. What is the record 
 of each season in the cornfield ? The pre- 
 paratory labor is man's ; the productive work 
 is God's. The farmer has merely prepared the 
 way of the Lord of Nature to come and bless 
 him with the free gift of the Divine energies 
 that produce the harvest. 
 
 Christ has pictured this in one of his parables, 
 and compares to this the work of salvation. 
 The man casts seed into the ground ; he sleeps 
 and rises night and day ; the seed springs up 
 and grows, " he kiiowetli not how ; for the earth 
 bringeth forth fruit of herself" " So," says 
 Jesus, " is the Kingdom of God." 
 
 Now we shall see that this exactly illustrates 
 the combination of the Divine and human 
 factors in that special product of our endeavor 
 which we call our Salvation. Our part is merely 
 the opening of the communications, the pre- 
 paring of the way of the Lord by giving to his 
 saving power the open door of unhindered 
 
OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. l8l 
 
 access to the soul that is to be saved. This 
 door being open, the Lord's power enters and 
 does the saving work. Our part of the work 
 is to keep that door open, to remove obstruc- 
 tions, to make all hindrances and impediments 
 give way, to sacrifice whatever stands athwart 
 God's power so as to hinder its working. Salva- 
 tion is, therefore, subject to the same conditions 
 as every other product of our endeavor. 
 
 Look through the world and you will find 
 this fact everywhere evidenced, that the really 
 productive and efficient powers of the world 
 are the Divine energies that the world-Maker 
 has given us in his magazines of matter and 
 force. The world is thus daily living and 
 working on the gifts, that is, on the grace, of 
 God. All that the world has to do is simply to 
 keep the doors open, through which the gracious 
 powers must come. We reap, we mine, we 
 manufacture, we travel with a freedom that is 
 conditioned simply on our putting things, our- 
 selves included, into proper relations to the 
 grand working powers, which are all of God and 
 of his grace, or, as the text says, " of his good 
 pleasure." 
 
 No one can say that in this respect Salvation 
 is unlike other results of our endeavor. No 
 clear thinker can object to the doctrine that 
 Salvation is of the grace of God. If it were 
 not, then Salvation would be a surprisingly 
 exceptional thing, for it would be the one 
 
1 82 OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
 solitary good pi'oduct of human endeavor in 
 ■which God had no effective gracious agency. 
 
 Let us take one other illustration, in which 
 the human part of the product is more elabo- 
 rate ; but the effective energy is still of God, 
 and of his free gift. 
 
 Look at a locomotive engine. What a history 
 of labor and art and patient thought it em- 
 bodies ! What mining of coal and of iron ; 
 what furnaces, hammers and rollers ; what 
 mathematical calculation, and what fertile in- 
 vention in finding out the conditions that God's 
 laws prescribe ! For all that, what is it, fresh 
 from the shop, but a motionless curiosity, until 
 the power enters into it that alone can push 
 back the ground from under it ? Here is an 
 iron cage in which to store up and hold the 
 power, cunning doors to let it out, as needed, 
 upofi a sliding disk, which its mighty push for 
 freedom will drive before it, rods and wheels to 
 communicate this push to the rail, where friction 
 blocks it and turns it into forward motion. All 
 this result of a hundred years of study is only 
 an elaborate contrivance for bringing the weight 
 that mjist be moved into proper relation to the 
 power that can move it. All this is mere pre- 
 paration for the God-given power, and yet 
 nothing is produced but a mere motionless mass, 
 until that God-given power comes in to do the 
 work of movement. Now fill the boiler and 
 kindle the coal — that product of the sun-power 
 
OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 1 83 
 
 which God stored for man ages before man 
 breathed. The subtle energy of heat at once 
 enters its waiting cage, there drives asunder 
 with repulsive force the particles of water, then 
 gathers this force to a full head, then hisses out 
 its impatient call. Now the engineer lifts his 
 hand, as if invoking the power to work. The 
 lifted hand simply opens the door for the waiting 
 power to give its push in the prepared place, and 
 lo ! there is a " spirit in the wheels." The train 
 rushes by ; no man stirs a muscle to make it go. 
 On and on, through city and forest, till another 
 move of the hand shuts the power off— the 
 destination is reached ; the end is achieved by 
 man, but the work has been done by God. And 
 so, wherever we look at what seem to be the 
 works of man, whether in a mill where a water- 
 fall starts a hundred looms, or the ship driven 
 by the wind, or the daily news flashed round the 
 world on electric wires, or the trip-hammers 
 whose gigantic blows are delivered by that same 
 mighty force of gravitation which holds the 
 earth to its centre in the sun, what we see in 
 actual fact is Divine energies working without 
 price, and of God's free grace, as freely and as 
 mightily as men will only open doors for them 
 to work. 
 
 Two facts are now made perfectly clear. 
 
 (i) This gratuitous work of the Divine energies 
 depends on our placing the thing to be moved in 
 right relations to the moving power, so that the 
 
1 84 OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
 power can do its work, and produce its appropri- 
 ate result. 
 
 (2) Every such joint result of human endeavor 
 and Divine efficiency is the result of a right 
 relation established between the world-Maker 
 and the world-user, the result of the world- 
 user's faith in the world-Maker, in things 
 physical and mechanical. 
 
 And now, upon this showing, how clear and 
 certain it is, that this right relation between God 
 and man, this faith of man in God, realized so 
 far as mechanical action is concerned, needs to- 
 be realized also, so far as moral and spiritual 
 action is concerned. Then only is the right 
 relation between God and man completed 
 through the faith that brings u« into it. This is 
 Salvation, for Salvation is moral wholeness, the 
 whole man working under God and with God, in 
 morals as well as in mechanics, and God working 
 in man, the whole man, "to will and to do!' And 
 here we see the Scripture doctrine certified to 
 reason, that Salvation is through faith and by the 
 grace of God. 
 
 III. In the light in which we have set the 
 subject we are now able to see it cleared from 
 misconceptions. Salvation has often been blindly 
 thought of merely- as release from a place of 
 future punishment, or as admission to a place of 
 future happiness. There are two falsehoods that 
 have been mixed into men's ideas of Salvation, 
 and we cannot too clearly mark them, or toa 
 
OUR PARTNERSHII' WITH GOD. 1 85 
 
 earnestly reject them : (i) That Salvation is a 
 thing of the future, rather than of the present 
 and future, including our whole life. (2) That it 
 relates to our place and our circumstances, rather 
 than to our spirit and character. On the contrary,, 
 not speaking now in theological terms, but in the 
 equivalent language of common life, the essential 
 thing in Salvation is this : Right relations with 
 God now ; an open door and free way between 
 God and us, in all matters, now and henceforth,, 
 producing a combination of our endeavor with 
 his saving grace and power in every department 
 of our life. 
 
 This is demonstrated beyond question by the 
 analogy of all experience. The world seeks an 
 external sort of salvation from various evils, — 
 barbarism, poverty, disease, bondage to hard con- 
 ditions of one kind and another, and it has learned 
 how to work this lower kind of salvation out ; it 
 simply sets out its tubs, and the rain of .God's 
 grace fills them ; it simply spreads its sails, and 
 the wind of God's grace swells them in a pros- 
 perous course ; it puts things in right places and 
 opens doors, and then Divine energies come in 
 and move all its machinery, and make all its food 
 and clothing. Civilization is the result, and 
 civilization is merely an external and partial form 
 of Salvation. 
 
 Now, simply because there is one God whose 
 working is everywhere consistent, it follows 
 inevitably that Salvation, in that full and complete 
 
1 86 OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
 sense which is peculiar to the Gospel, is nothing 
 but the same concurrence with God which 
 a. scientifically working world has found to 
 be the secret of material power and progress, 
 ■carried up higher into a moral concord — a 
 spiritual union. For certainly, when man has 
 joined himself to God in ethics as well as in 
 physics, in spiritual endeavor as well as 
 mechanical effort, he is saved completely ; there 
 is nothing in the universe for him to fear. Until 
 this is done no man is saved at the core and 
 centre of his life. 
 
 Now, my friends, it is possible that some of 
 you, if asked half an hour ago. Are you in the 
 way of Salvation ? might have replied, " I do not 
 know ; tell me what Salvation is." Some of you 
 may have had the idea enveloped in a haze of 
 ■questions about the side-beliefs touching creeds 
 and churches, sacraments and faiths. I do not 
 care to go into that theological mist with you. 
 I ask you to stand in the clear light of facts, and 
 note these points in review, and close the review 
 with a single question. 
 
 1. Every product of human endeavor contains 
 a Divine factor, the power of God working for 
 -man. Salvation, therefore, as the highest pro- 
 duct of our endeavor, involves the working for 
 us of Divine power. 
 
 2. Man's part in every product of his endeavor 
 is simply the opening of doors, the right placing 
 ■of things, himself included, so that the Divine 
 
OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 1 87 
 
 power may come in and work for him. In 
 Salvation, therefore, our part is the right placing 
 of things, ourselves included, for the Divine 
 power to work. 
 
 3. Salvation which affects the body requires 
 the right placing of things mechanically. Salva- 
 tion which affects the soul requires the right 
 placing of things spiritually, so that God may 
 freely work his saving work of grace. 
 
 The question now is this. Have you placed 
 yourself aright, morally, spiritually, before God ? 
 Whether you look at the subject scientifically or 
 religiously, this question goes to the one vital 
 point. Salvation lies in concurrence with God, 
 in right relations toward him, or to use the Bible 
 phrase, in " reconciliation " to God. Are you in 
 heart at one with God, reconciled to him, in 
 obedience to the Gospel, placed right in a dutiful 
 spirit for the power of his grace to enter in and 
 work Salvation in you ? Is there a sin you have 
 not repented of and heartily forsaken ? Is there 
 a duty, however small, you are neglecting ? Do 
 you own Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Master, 
 and sincerely treat him as such ? If not, so long 
 you are not placed right toward the Saving Power ; 
 and this is the turning-point of your character 
 and destiny, as a being capable of Salvation. 
 
 IV. It now remains only to mark the point at 
 which, in our moral and spiritual salvation, the 
 human endeavor and the Divine power effect 
 their union. 
 
1 88 OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
 All the evidence before us goes to show that 
 whatever man achieves through his endeavors,, 
 his personal agency is limited, physically, to a 
 mere lifting of bis hand. He lifts his hand, and 
 the Power he invokes responds. Here we find 
 the old saying justified, that " to labor is to 
 pray," for that mechanical lifting of the hand 
 which moves the steam-lever is practically a 
 prayer for the power to come in and work. The 
 hand is, of course, lifted in an active belief that 
 the power invoked will enter through the door 
 which the hand opens, and will do the desired 
 work. Now what is this active belief which 
 opens the door to the working power ? It is the 
 simple yet saving thing which in the Gospel is 
 called "faith." 
 
 " Behold" says - our Saviour, " T stand at the 
 door and knock. If any man hear iny voice and 
 open the door, I will come in to him and zuill sup- 
 ivith him, and he with me!' Thus have the 
 Divine Powers, that ever stand outside our 
 thought ready to bless the ignorant world, often 
 made their quiet knocking heard in the secluded 
 study or laboratory, and roused the faith of 
 hopeful inventors to undo and open the door of 
 discovery, that they might bring in their bles- 
 sings to mankind. Thus let the Saviour's knock 
 be heard in the conscience ; our part is simply 
 the heart and hand of faith to open the door. 
 The Power that comes in is his. But the heart of 
 faith may cease to beat ; the hand of faith may 
 
OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH- GOD. 1 89 
 
 stiffen ; therefore the urgent call of the Apostle 
 to " work out salvation ivithfear and trembling" ; 
 no time is to be lost : there is much at stake ; 
 make trembling haste, for fear of loss. Is the 
 door ever to open ? Open it now. 
 
 For the waiting power is the Power which no 
 man can afford to wait for. And yet when it is 
 named to them, men will wait. Thus I have 
 seen a nervous invalid wait, in northside rooms 
 on the ground floor, shaded with dark, tall ever- 
 greens, suffering for the light ; and I have said 
 to such an one. Move upstairs out of this shade 
 into the sun, and you will feel new power coming 
 into you from his unobstructed beams. But 
 how hard to move a sick will ! 
 
 Yet, have you not divined what this yet un 
 named power is ? It is the love of God, taken 
 into our hearts in the living consciousness that 
 God loves lis, individually. Not the languid 
 and hazy notion that God loves being in 
 general, and is good to the universe, in which 
 vague belief so many lives seem to recognize 
 nothing in the heavens but a starlight, scattered, 
 dim and cold. Rather that vivid faith which 
 lifts the sunrise upon a world of chilly shadows — 
 the certainty that God loves me, sends his Son 
 to redeem me, calls me to be his child, opens his 
 heaven to me, with all the glorious possibilities 
 of a blessed immortality for me. Will not this 
 be God's power working in the heart to will, 
 and working in the life to do, " of his good 
 
igo OUR. PARTNERSHIP WITH GOD. 
 
 pleasure',' for the. soul that simply lets it in by 
 the hand of faith ? Nothing can seem more 
 certain. 
 
 Therefore, let me remind you finally, that the 
 real proof of power can only be in experiment. 
 No power can demonstrate itself unless it is 
 given the only thing it asks — a trial. The 
 theory is demonstrated. Salvation is a moral 
 and spiritual effect. The love of God is a 
 moral and spiritual cause, the first and chief of 
 causes. Only make this plain theoretical rela- 
 tion between the two practical. Use the cause, 
 and the effect will follow. Try it. Why not ? 
 Our part of God's salvation-work is simply to 
 use the cause, in an active belief of the Father's 
 loving words. God's part is to make the effect 
 follow through the willing and the doing that 
 spring out of our realization of his love to us. 
 Prove it. Why not ? If reason's persuasion is 
 feeble, if conscience slumbers under duty's sober 
 call, there is yet one potent word. That word 
 is Christ. Christ, living, dying, rising, reigning 
 now as the Moral King of the living world, is 
 God's grandest, tenderest argument with the 
 hesitating sinner. " God commendeth Ids love to 
 us, in that zvhile ivc were yet sinners, Christ died 
 for us." If this fails, if you fail to place yourself 
 aright toward the power of the love of God in 
 Christ, how can that power work within you ? 
 And how, then, can you be saved ? 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 " the elect of God." — Colossians iii. I2. 
 
 "/• i" FIT prelude to this subject is offered 
 fjr^ US in the parable of the Rich Man and 
 the Beggar, in the sixteenth chapter of the 
 Gospel according to Luke. Some people have 
 thought Dives, the rich man, rather severely 
 treated : — "he hadn't done anything.'' That is 
 just it : he hadn't done anything. He had left 
 Lazarus to the dogs. He was elect to be God's 
 steward, but imagined himself God's favorite, 
 and by negligence abused his trust. 
 
 In connection with this I am reminded of the 
 .saying of a recent English writer, which a 
 \'icar of the Church of England has emphati- 
 cally affirmed to me as true, that the idea of 
 any responsibility for the welfare of the laborers, 
 by whose toil the wealth of England is pro- 
 duced, has not dawned upon the mind of the 
 
 * Preached Sunday Evening, August 28th, 1887. 
 M 
 
194 THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 superior class. I am afraid that the like 
 might be said with truth concerning my own 
 country. And I think that in our times the 
 parable I have referred to is destined to be 
 studied more thoughtfully for the lesson which 
 Jesus conveyed in it concerning the elect of 
 God. It has been misused, as I think, for a sort 
 of spy-glass to see whether the punishments of 
 the future will ever come to an end. In a very 
 different line are we to look for its true teaching, 
 that in the future life we shall suffer not only 
 for the things done which we ought not to have 
 ■done, but also for the things undone which we 
 ought to have done. Our omissions are in truth 
 to be reckoned among our transgressions. The 
 keenest pains will chastise our neglect of the 
 Divine calling and our failure to fulfil the 
 service for which God gave us a trust of power. 
 
 I saw two little girls pass each other on the 
 street, about equal in stature and age, but in all 
 other respects unlike. The one was comely in 
 dress and looks, the other uncomely ; the one 
 with a school-book in hand, the other with a 
 basket for the fragments of food she begged 
 from door to door. The two children passed 
 each other as Plenty and Want are constantly 
 meeting and passing, without apparent notice of 
 each other, but as their paths crossed I saw the 
 apparition of one of the darkest mysteries of life. 
 Far more dark than the contrast between the two 
 homes to which these children belonged, seemed 
 
THE ELECT OF GOD. 195 
 
 the two lives to which they were apparently 
 destined, the one, the nursling of wise care 
 ■entering a pathway of brightest hope, the other, 
 a drudge to poverty, an apprentice to beggary, 
 an heiress to a cold crust and a hard bed. And 
 what reason could I give that it should be so ? 
 What had these children done that one of them 
 should have so much and the other so little ? — 
 that life should be bright and the world kind 
 to the one, but dark and rough to the other ? — 
 that privilege and opportunity should open a 
 garden to the one, but leave the other shut out 
 into a desert ? 
 
 The ancients had their solution of this 
 mystery. Some men were the chosen favorites of 
 heaven, and some its chosen outcasts and 
 reprobates. Paul refers to this in the case of 
 Jacob and Esau. " The children being not yet 
 born, neither having done anything good or bad, 
 that the purpose of God according to election might 
 stand, not of works, but of him that calleth, it was 
 said unto her. The elder shall serve the yotmger. 
 Even as it is written, Jacob T loved, but Esau 
 T hated!' 
 
 These words, quoted from the Old Testament, 
 have seemed to many to convey the notion of a 
 partial God, a Divine favoritism to a few. This 
 idea of Jehovah the Jews had, in common with 
 the ideas which the heathen had of their deities, 
 as restricting the Divine benevolence to the 
 elect. 
 
196 THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 Against this notion, however, the Old Testa- 
 ment itself, as well as the New, makes the 
 strongest protests. The psalmist asserts the 
 impartial benevolence of God. " The Lord is 
 good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his 
 works'' Paul asks with great warmth, " Is God 
 the God of Jews only ? Is he not the God of 
 Gentiles (heathen) also?" In alluding to the Old 
 Testament saying, " Jacob I loved, bnt Esau I 
 hated',' he exclaims, " Is there unrighteousness 
 zvith God? God forbid." It is true, that it is 
 upon a few words which occur in the writings of 
 Paul, that the dreadful dogma of the West- 
 minster Confession has been placed, somewhat 
 like a pyramid poised upon its apex : — "By the 
 decree of God and for the manifestation of his 
 glory, some men and angels are predestinated to 
 e\erlasting life, and others foreordained unto 
 everlasting death." Well does Calvin, himself a 
 chief champion of this doctrine, do justice to 
 human feeling respecting it, in terming it a 
 " dreadful decree." But if the whole spirit and 
 driff of Paul's teaching on the subject are to 
 guide us, rather than single phrases taken here 
 and there, we shall not have to follow Calvin as 
 Paul's interpreter. Paul insists, wherever he 
 touches this subject, that mercy and compassion 
 are supreme in the purpose of God. 
 
 The doctrine of " the elect of God " has 
 generally been treated in the Calvinistic way. 
 The recoil of the human heart from it has at 
 
THE ELECT OF GOD. 1 97 
 
 length prevailed to banish it from the pulpit. 
 The stern teaching of the Puritans took it for 
 granted that the more obnoxious to human 
 sentiment the doctrine was, the more likely was 
 its truth. But we prefer to say of God, with the 
 Quaker poet : — 
 
 " That nothing can be good in him 
 Which evil is in me." 
 
 We have still to formulate in Christian teaching 
 a humane conception of the truth on which the 
 New Testament lays great emphasis— though 
 the Calvinistic perversion of it has driven it for 
 the time into an undeserved and for us un- 
 fortunate obscurity — that the sovereign grace of 
 God has among men its elect souls. The 
 question must be settled, elect to what? to 
 special favor, or to special service ? On our 
 answer to this depend our conceptions both of 
 the character of God, and of our obligation in 
 the place we occupy in God's world. 
 
 I. Now the facts of life are often very sad 
 and hard. Very obvious are the distressing 
 inequalities of life. Even a child may ask, Why 
 is it so ? And this, even to the philosopher, is 
 often a puzzling question. Nevertheless, the 
 question presses, and we must answer as best wc 
 can, when we are asked. Whence is it that one 
 child is born into the lap of virtue and culture, 
 and another into the lap of vice and neglect? 
 Why does one babe open its eyes in a Christian 
 
198 THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 home, and another in a savage hut ? Why- 
 should one soul be launched into existence as a 
 prince, and another as a beggar ? 
 
 The ancients said, By the decree of God. 
 That was not wrong in fact, but only in the way 
 they thought about it. They thought of God 
 as picking out this one and that one for this or 
 that destiny, precisely as a potter picks out this 
 and that lump of clay to make a vessel for the 
 table or a vessel for the sink, of his own arbitrary 
 choice, and for nothing that is in the clay itself 
 The power of the potter over the clay was just 
 the figure by which they explained the Divine 
 action in making one man into a prince and 
 another into a beggar, one an elect Christian 
 and another an outcast heathen. Paul himself 
 on one occasion uses this figure of the potter to 
 stop the mouth of an objector, telling him he is 
 nothing but clay in the hands of a potter. This 
 is hardly satisfactory. It makes me think of a 
 criticism of St. Jerome upon a certain argument 
 of Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians, — -that it 
 was " a poor argument, but good enough for the 
 foolish Galatians." God deals with everything 
 according to its own nature. Clay is of mineral 
 nature, but man is of moral nature. Therefore 
 God cannot deal with men in that arbitrary way 
 of power in which the potter deals with clay. 
 
 But since science has revealed God's method 
 of creation, the potter-theory of the Divine 
 election must go the way that the carpenter- 
 
THE ELECT OE GOD. 1 99 
 
 theory of creation has gone, which supposed 
 God to have built the world, and all that is 
 therein, as a carpenter would build a house and 
 its furniture. Creation by growth out of the 
 elements of growth by the powers of growth is 
 the Divine method. And so is election by 
 growth out of the elements and by the powers 
 that produce the different situations and capaci- 
 ties of life. Observe a tree full of sap. Why 
 is this particle deposited in the bark where the 
 cattle gnaw it off, and this in the topmost twig 
 where the bird perches and sings ? Why is this 
 particle deposited in a leaf or a bud in the heart 
 of the tree's green crown, where it gets no light 
 no size and ripeness, and this where the sun can 
 kiss it into perfectness ? Just so men of equal 
 powers are distributed into .very unequal places, 
 where one has large and another small oppor- 
 tunities. So mused the poet in the country 
 churchyard : — 
 
 " Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 
 Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire, 
 Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, 
 Or walced to ecstasy the living lyre. 
 
 " But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page. 
 Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll ; 
 Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, 
 And froze the genial current of their soul. 
 
 " Full many a gem of purest ray serene 
 The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear ; 
 Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 
 And waste its fragrance on the desert air." 
 
200 THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 The rational account of it is not that God 
 picked out one for favor and another for disfavor, 
 but rather in the working of the law of growth, 
 in ways too complicated for us to trace. Just as 
 the particles that make the tree are assimilated 
 and chosen to different functions, so are the 
 human particles, or individuals, of the social 
 organism. To-day grows ever out of yesterda\% 
 and yesterday is entrusted with the making of 
 to-day. Men grow out of their ancestors, 
 intellectually and morally as well as physically, 
 The Jew to-day shows the tenacity and persever- 
 ance as well as the shrewdness of his patriarch 
 Jacob. The Bedouin Arab shows" the wild and 
 untamable strain of his patriarch Ishmael. We 
 say of the latest variety of a strawberry or a 
 pigeon, God made it ; but it is a creation by the 
 growth of natural elements throughforces directed 
 by the cultivator's or the breeder's choice. So of 
 human varieties, superior and inferior. What- 
 ever Divine election has made them to differ from 
 each other is not that respect of persons which 
 says to a favorite, "Sit thou here in a good place" 
 and says to an outcast, " Stand thou there, or sit 
 here under my footstool!' It is the operation of 
 that law of growth, which determines the condi- 
 tion of the present by the condition of the past, 
 while, as we are never to forget, it gives to that one 
 potent element which we call free will, the power 
 of ever forming new and better combinations 
 out of old elements and varying circumstances. 
 
THE ELECT OF GOD. 20r 
 
 The biologist tells us that heredity and 
 environment jointly acting produce the variation 
 of species. Only we must think of heredity and 
 ■environment not as blindly acting, but as per- 
 vaded by the Supreme Intelligence which freely 
 determines means to ends. The drunkenness of 
 savage ancestors a thousand years ago has sent 
 down its taint of feverish blood into the veins of 
 the babe of to-day. But the free choice of 
 ancestors less remote has introduced a strain 
 of blood tempered by Christian intelligence, and 
 •each element is present to-day for the free choice 
 of the parents who are to mould the character of 
 a coming generation. The particular results 
 of this grand method of election by growth are of 
 ■course foreknown eternally to the Infinite 
 Wisdom, the same as if they had been decided 
 day after day by successive fiats. But the 
 particular results express no favoritism to one 
 man above another on the part of the Author of 
 the system. The system is the best possible, 
 ■else God were not God. The system is as 
 benevolent to one man as to another, else God 
 were not as worthy of love by one man as by 
 another. The ultimate results of the system, 
 whatever they be, are not left to chance, but are 
 present from the beginning in the all-compre- 
 hending, Infinite Thought. And these ultimate 
 results, we may be sure, are not such as involve 
 an absolute and hopeless misery to any creature 
 of God. 
 
202 THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 IL Having seen how it is that a Divine 
 election by growth determines the inequalities 
 of life, we ought to look next at the Divine 
 equalization of all this inequality. We look too 
 much at externals, at mere circumstances and 
 situations. We seldom see the hidden man. A 
 great poet has said : 
 
 " Such as the condition of his lot, 
 By the appointment of the Sire of All, 
 Such the complexion of the mind of man,'' 
 
 The bird is not more happy because it is not a 
 fish, nor the fish less happy because it is not a 
 bird. The roving Indian is not wretched 
 because he does not own a palace, nor the 
 European prince happy because he has better 
 housing than a wigwam. If we wonder how the 
 beggar finds any sweetness in life, we may 
 equally wonder how the Mexican cactus gets its 
 pulpy texture out of the rock. Nothing is more 
 delusive than to imagine another man unhappy 
 in his situation, because we should be unhappy 
 to exchange places with him. All men, of 
 course, are not equally happy. Nor do all men 
 make equally good use of their opportunities to- 
 be as happy as they may be. But happiness 
 belongs to nature more than to place, and it has 
 been well observed, that " the limit of nature is 
 the limit of enjoyment." The sunlight and the 
 dew are for the nettle as much as for the tulip. 
 The grape vine will push its roots in the 
 direction where water lies. The plant in the 
 
THE ELECT OF GOD. 203 
 
 dark will bend its head toward the glass where 
 rays of light are beckoning it. And the heart, 
 more ingenious still, if it finds neither the water 
 of life nor the light of life at hand, will seek them 
 from afar with roots of faith and eye of hope, 
 and if this world seem to refuse them utterly, 
 will draw them by a Divine instinct from the 
 world to come. " There's love in a cottage." 
 " Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." 
 " Health is the best wealth." How full is 
 proverbial philosophy of such testimonies to the 
 Divine compensations that are ever equalizing 
 the world's apparent inequalities of happiness. 
 
 So, too, in regard to the apparent inequalities 
 of moral character and moral worth, as affected 
 by the inequalities of position in the world, there 
 is far more equalization than a hasty glance 
 concludes. There is an external morality, 
 fostered by prosperous circumstances, that is 
 highly respectable, but no better essentially than 
 the external depravity fostered by adverse 
 circumstances, and punished by society. The 
 native of the city slums, with all his indecencies, 
 oaths and drunkenness, may be on a moral level 
 with the regular church-goer who sins against a 
 well instructed conscience. The heathen praying 
 to his idol for the scalps of his enemies may be 
 the moral equal of the communicant at Christ's 
 table, who suffers himself to gratify his covetous- 
 ness or his resentments at the expense of 
 Christian charity. Christ said to the church- 
 
204 THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 leaders of his day : — " Behold the publicans and 
 the harlots go into the kingdom of God before 
 you." " Many stripes',' said he, " to the servant 
 zvho knew his Lord's will and did it not : few to 
 him zvho knew not." Not only an equal but an 
 equalizing love presides over the inequalities. 
 Frivolous Esau has a portion in the Divine 
 Benevolence no less than deceitful Jacob. The 
 equalizations of happiness are established in the 
 proportion which varying natures bear to varying 
 situations. The equalizations of moral character 
 in its responsibility to the Divine Judgment are 
 established in the proportion which varying 
 means of moral culture bear to the varying lives 
 that result. 
 
 III. The last direction which our thought 
 upon this subject may now take is given by the 
 the obvious question with which we began, but 
 which now we are better prepared to answer : 
 Wherefore the inequalities ? Why should the 
 subjects of an impartial and almighty Benevo- 
 lence be so differently endowed with Divine 
 gifts ? If it be said, that hard situations develop 
 strong qualities — patience, faith, fortitude, enter- 
 prise, — why should not all men, therefore, have 
 the benefit of equally hard situations ? If we 
 were keener sighted, perhaps we should see that 
 they do have it in different sorts of hard things ? 
 Some time in its history must every soul be 
 tried in the fire. But a better answer is, that a 
 system organized by Benevolence must have for 
 
THE ELECT OF GOD. 205 
 
 its supreme object the satisfaction of Benevo- 
 lence. God's Benevolence must be dispensed to 
 men through men. There must be a demand in 
 order to a supply. The inequalities of life 
 create the demand, present the opportunity,, 
 constitute the field for that exercise of benevo- 
 lence in which alone can man attain to a blessed 
 fellowship with the heavenly Father. 
 
 When, however, I speak of the inequalities 
 of life, I do not refer so much to the existing 
 as to the natural inequalities. The existing 
 inequalities in the extremes of wealth and 
 poverty, of power and of helplessness, are 
 unnatural, the exaggerated product of man's 
 greed and tyranny, of unjust laws and social 
 wrongs. But still there are natural inequalities 
 of native capacity and power ; only man's 
 selfishness has taken foul advantage of these, 
 designed as they were to furnish occasion for 
 the reciprocity of sympathy and good will. In 
 an ideal and perfect society, no man would be 
 so completely endowed in all particulars as to 
 be independent of his fellows. Each is com- 
 plete only as associated with others, in whom 
 he finds the supply of his individual lack_ 
 Through this supply of each to each we may 
 believe that even in the heavenly society is 
 realized the unity of all in mutual love. 
 
 Every illustration of the process of the 
 Infinite Thought, from which our life in all its- 
 varieties proceeds, is of course utterly inadequate. 
 
2o6 THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 Yet we may reverently, and without essential 
 misrepresentation, imagine God, in his adapta- 
 tion of means to ends, as contemplating the 
 matter thus : How can I best educate my 
 human family into that benevolence wherein I 
 am supremely blessed ? How knit them into 
 one in bonds of reciprocated affection ? I will 
 diversify the living world with inequalities as I 
 have diversified the face of the globe. There 
 are hills that lift their tops toward heaven to 
 gather the abundance of the clouds. There are 
 valleys below to be made fruitful by streams of 
 blessing from the hills. So shall there be men 
 with high powers to gather my goodly things 
 and distribute them for me. And there shall be 
 men in low place to drink in power from streams 
 of goodness, and to bless goodness with grati- 
 tude. There shall be mighty ones to embrace 
 the humble with protecting care, and humble 
 ones to be glad in their mighty protectors ; — 
 sound ones to compassionate the crippled, and 
 crippled ones to be glad in the love that makes 
 burdens light*: — wise ones to give guidance to 
 the ignorant, and ignorant ones to call out the 
 wisdom of the wise, and requite guidance with 
 confidence. There shall be abundance to 
 succor want) and want to requite succor with 
 affection. I will choose me out elect nations, 
 I will choose me out elect men, to be the 
 
 * Compare John ix. 3. 
 
THE ELECT OF GOD. 20/ 
 
 stewards and distributors of my impartial 
 grace. I will pour my brightest light into 
 elect lands, elect souls, to be my radiators and 
 reflectors to the world. I will choose me One 
 above all others. I will give myself to him in 
 unmeasured fulness, and send him forth as my 
 Only Begotten, supremely elect to save the 
 world by giving to the world whatsoever I have 
 given him. And by him will I show to all my 
 elect among mankind to what they are elect, 
 not to the privilege of calling aught their own, 
 but to the diviner blessedness of giving as I 
 have given to them, elect carriers, messengers, 
 and ministers of God to the world. Thus shall 
 men learn from one another the impartial father- 
 hood of God. Thus shall they come into 
 brotherhood to know the secret of the glory of 
 God. 
 
 Oh, if men had now learned it, had now come 
 into sympathy with this design of Eternal 
 Benevolence, it cannot be that the world's inequa- 
 lities would to-day present to many so dark an 
 enigma. But men will learn it ultimately. The 
 enigma is destined to a solution, in which the 
 Eternal Benevolence shall be justified. 
 
 Brethren, set in contrast with this the ancient 
 notion of a few favorites of heaven elected by 
 an arbitrary sovereignty to a paradise of light, 
 while an encircling outer darkness resounds with 
 the wail of an outcast multitude created for a 
 destiny of endless torment. Which is the 
 
208 THE ELECT OF GOD 
 
 Christian, and which the heathen idea of the 
 Divine election ? It is no wonder that those 
 Christian churches which still do homage to the 
 heathen idea in their idolatry of a crumbling- 
 creed, are now withholden by the Christian 
 instinct from teaching in their pulpits that God 
 has for his own glory predestined some to ever- 
 lasting death. 
 
 And yet it is not very far from that, when the 
 existing unnatural inequalities of this life are 
 treated in the supposed interest of social order 
 as God's work, and those who through social 
 -wrongs and the inhumanity of man to man are 
 left without provision for ordinary human wants, 
 are exhorted to acquiesce in it as an arrangement 
 of Providence, and unmurmuringly to respect 
 their betters. 
 
 IV. The practical lessons of our study to-day 
 are short and simple. It is for the sake of them 
 that we have made this study. 
 
 I The worshipper in a Christian church, who 
 thanks God to-day for what he has that others 
 have not, is yet in heathen darkness of soul, 
 if he is disposed to congratulate himself as God's 
 pensioner rather than God's servant, or as a 
 favorite elected to the luxurious possession rather 
 than a steward to the active distribution of God's 
 gifts. The true Christmas light has never 
 dawned in his heart, who thinks of God's 
 Son as having come to pick him out to be a 
 privileged feaster in a select society, rather than 
 
THE ELECT OF GOD. 209 
 
 a privileged cup-bearer of God's water of life to 
 thirsty souls. 
 
 There is a well known nursery hymn of 
 Hannah More's, which has suggested to innumer- 
 able children this ancient and unchristian fallacy 
 of favoritism in the Divine election. 
 
 " I thank the goodness and the grace, 
 That on my birth have smiled, 
 And made me in these Christian days, 
 A happy English child. 
 
 " I was not born, as thousands are. 
 Where God is never known, 
 And taught to say a useless prayer 
 To gods of wood and stone. 
 
 " I was not born without a home 
 
 In some poor broken shed, 
 
 A gypsy baby, taught to roam, 
 
 And steal my daily bread. 
 
 " I was not born a little slave, 
 To labor in the sun. 
 And wish that I were in my grave, 
 And all my labor done. 
 
 " My God, I thank thee, who hast planned 
 A better lot for me, 
 And placed me in this Christian land, 
 Where I may hear of thee." 
 
 But we shall hardly find it a better lot for us in 
 the end, if we stop where the hymn stops. There 
 should be a new edition of this hymn, with 
 several additional verses, to teach the children 
 
2IO THE ELECT OF GOD. 
 
 that the better lot is not found by resting in our 
 privileges, but only by communicating our 
 privileges to the unprivileged. Thus only can 
 we appropriate " the good part, which shall never 
 be taken away!' 
 
 2. Our being here to-day, instructed by 
 Christ, furnished with the knowledge and the 
 means of doing as Christ did, is proof that we, 
 in the only sense which either reason or the 
 Gospel tolerate, are " the elect of God" elect to 
 put God's best things to God's best uses, elect 
 to carry out his eternal design by using our 
 privileges for the foundation of other men's 
 hopes, and by employing our advantages as our 
 opportunities to lift all whom we can reach 
 into the advantage in which we stand. This, 
 brethren, is our heavenly calling. Better had 
 we been born savages, and died unenlightened 
 heathen, than to have refused it or abused it. 
 " Give diligence" says the Apostle, " to make 
 your calling and election sure!' To this the 
 words of God's elect Redeemer bear testimony, 
 " Ye did not choose me, but I chose you, and 
 appointed you, that ye should go and bear fruit!' 
 
 Note. — In addition to the two Sermons of August, 1886, 
 included in this volume, two others, The Forgiveness of Sins, 
 and Justification by Faith, are to be found in a pamphlet 
 published that year by James Clarke and Company, London : 
 The Divine Satisfaction ; A Review of what should, and 
 should not, be thought about the Atonement. 
 
Birmingham ; 
 
 Printed by Hudson and Son, 
 
 Edmund Street.