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THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 
 
 SItja? ^tt^mt Claim anti 3Cttraction 
 
 AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 THEODOEE C. PEASE 
 
 BABTLET FBOFESSOB OP SACBED BHETOBIC IN AHDOVBB THEOLOGICAL BEMINABT 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 PROFESSOR EGBERT C. SMYTH, D. D. 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 "THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUB" 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1894 
 
Copyright, 1894, 
 Bv HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
 Printed by H. 0. Houghton and Company. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTKODUCTION. 
 
 By Professor Egbert C. Smyth, D. D. . . v 
 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH rii 
 
 INAUGUEAL ADDRESS. 
 
 The Christian Ministry : Its Present Claim and 
 
 Attraction ....... 1 
 
 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 I. Primitive and Fundamental Elements in Preaching 46 
 II. Relation of Homiletics to Logic, Rhetoric, and 
 
 Eloquence ....... 79 
 
 SERMONS. 
 
 I. "Called to be Saints" 110 
 
 II. The Enigma of Life 125 
 
 ESSAY ON DANTE. 
 
 Dante's Vision of Sin and Judgment : A Study of 
 
 the Inferno 141 
 
 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 Era Angelico 173 
 
 Sunrise on Mount Moosilauke . . . .174 
 Memories from Over Sea .... 175-181 
 
 "Peace, be Still" 182 
 
 "Feed My Lambs" 182 
 
 The Return from the Mountain .... 184 
 For the Communion Season .... 186 
 The Last Easter 189 
 
IN MEMORIAM. 
 
 Shies were not yet red with sunset, far off still the evening hell, 
 Only sights and sounds of midday eye and ear could seem to tell. 
 And we knew not that our greeting was the greeting of farewell, 
 
 Did not Tcnow, in our rejoicing, that the hour had waxed so late. 
 That the tides were sobbing seaward which can neither turn nor wait, 
 And already in our presence stood the Opener of the Gate. 
 
 Thin the veil that hides the future we have never seen nor can ; 
 But that future somehow mingles strangely in the life of man. 
 While we see in part, and only see in part, the Father' s plan. 
 
 Every life hath its completeness — Are there not twelve hours still 
 In the day ? — And whosoever makes his own the Master's will, 
 Living, dying, staying, going, doth the circle all fulfill. 
 
 Friend of ours, we did not tell thee all we might have told that day ; 
 Many another thing we cherished in our heart of hearts to say, 
 Sad we known it was expedient thou so soon shouldst go away. 
 
 We were looking for achievement, and the victory had been won ; 
 For the golden years of service — with the sands so nearly run ; 
 Yea, we thought it the beginning, when God said thy work was done. 
 
 We shall not forget thee — never, while the way before us towers; 
 Something from thy life inpassing touched the inner springs in ours ; 
 Thou henceforth art in alliance there with God's uplifting powers. 
 
 Thou art here ; lo, thou art yonder, where the heavenly seasons roll, 
 Where in light and life immortal ends the pathway, of the soul, — 
 One hand beckoning, and the other resting on the shining goal. 
 
 S. V. COLE. 
 
 " The FortnigUly," November 27, 1893. 
 
INTEODUCTION. 
 
 This little volume deserves attention apart from 
 its memorial character. Its level and range of 
 thought, and its literary quality, are of a high 
 order. Those especially who would cultivate the 
 power of apt and effective public speaking will 
 find in it much that is helpful. 
 
 It is capable of a yet higher service, and for a 
 wider circle. Whatever presents to "the mind a 
 true ideal, and quickens the energies necessary to 
 its pursuit, has a universal value and is fitted to 
 gain permanent influence. This ideal may spe- 
 cially concern a particular profession, yet its eleva- 
 tion and nobleness belong to all pure and lofty 
 aims and bring them to view, and the strenuous 
 purpose revealed in its pursuit in any direction of 
 effort is identical or accordant with the resolution 
 demanded for the cultivation of excellence in all 
 other spheres in which it may be attained. It is 
 in this way that the following pages, even those 
 most exclusively occupied with the objects and 
 methods of a single calling, will attract and influ- 
 ence, it is hoped, men of other vocations, and, in- 
 
VI INIRODUCTION. 
 
 deed, so far as they become known, every generous 
 and aspiring mind. This their wider adaptation 
 and import will doubtless appear at once to any 
 one who will carefully peruse them. Yet a brief 
 reference to some facts personal to the author of 
 the lectures, sermons, and other productions here 
 gathered together may not be superfluous. 
 
 Professor Pease was endowed with unusual gifts 
 for linguistic and literary pursuits. The Latin, 
 Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Italian 
 languages were easily at his command, and he was 
 unusually conversant with the best in their litera- 
 tures. He had a strong natural predilection for 
 aesthetic studies. The call came to him to take up 
 the work of a preacher of the gospel and of a 
 pastor. Fearing lest his love of helles lettres, if he 
 wrote his sermons, would hazard or mar their es- 
 sential quality as addresses, converting them more 
 or less into essays, he early determined to speak 
 to men directly and under the influence of their 
 immediate presence. Perfecting in every way his 
 conception of the possible power and highest ob- 
 jects of such address, he gave himself with remark- 
 able assiduity and strength of resolution to the 
 realization of his ideal. He was first and most of 
 all a diligent student of the Word of God, reading 
 it in the original languages with critical care, catch- 
 ing with ear attent the very " accent of the Holy 
 
INTRODUCTION. vu 
 
 Ghost." The cure of souls was to him an impor- 
 tant part of his ministry, and intimately connected 
 with the material and aim qf his preaching. He 
 endeavored to enter into the meaning and progress 
 of the lives, into the intimate needs, of his people 
 in his successive charges. He spoke from life to 
 life. The subjects of his sermons were thoughtfully 
 selected ; their materials carefully collected and ar- 
 ranged ; orderliness and lucidity reigned supreme. 
 Their diction was a triumph of an art which was 
 wholly concealed, and was gained by a severe dis- 
 cipline and the use of a definite and intelligent 
 method. As I have intimated, the forms of speech 
 which Mr. Pease used in preaching were not fixed 
 in advance by reducing them to writing. Neither 
 were they in general committed to memory. Free 
 room and play were left for the inspirations which 
 come to a prepared speaker when fully enlisted and 
 engaged in actual discourse. Apart from the special 
 and immediate preparation of the matter of his dis- 
 course, his method was to perfect himself in the 
 English tongue so that in the delivery of his ser- 
 mon, in the expression of his thought when face to 
 face with an audience, he would be in command of 
 this language as a musician is master of the Instru- 
 ment on which he plays. His vocabulary became 
 at once copious and select by a veritable conquest 
 of words, acquiring them by wresting from them 
 
viii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the secret of their individual weight and force, and 
 by familiarity with them in their choicest uses; 
 training his ear also - to their energy or delicacy, 
 and fixing them in memory, by often repeating 
 them aloud. One way in which he enlarged the 
 range of his vocabulary, and at the same time made 
 it more select and serviceable, was the daily, or at 
 least regular and persevering, oral translation into 
 English from foreign authors whose diction was 
 most marked by the note of distinction. This 
 practice aided memory by associating the sound of 
 the word with its characters, and also rendered 
 more flexible the organs of speech. The result in 
 his own preaching was marked. With but few 
 notes, he spoke with an easy command of language 
 which was so natural and perfect as to be almost 
 unnoticed save by those who reflected upon what 
 was occurring. The words were but the thought, 
 the theme, the motive which stirred to action. They 
 were a lucid atmosphere, the medium of vision. If 
 their force or beauty arrested attention, it was as the 
 form which the spiritual reality they embodied most 
 naturally assumed. Mere fluency may diminish 
 expression, and is not a rare nor difficult attain- 
 ment. The choice of the right word, the unfettered 
 use of language appropriate to thoughts that range 
 from earth to heaven, the spontaneous selection of 
 forms and sounds that vary to the changing note 
 
INTR OD UCTION. vs. 
 
 and onward movement of persuasive discourse ; o£ 
 words that with the Spirit's power bring conviction 
 of sin, righteousness, and judgment, that strengthen 
 for conflict and minister consolation, that point out 
 plainly the path the Saviour trod, and move men 
 to follow Him, is quite another art and far more 
 difficult to gain. 
 
 Yet it is not a particular method, or its success, 
 to which I desire most to call attention, or which 
 lends to this volume, as already noticed, its distinc- 
 tive worth. It stands for life in its highest mood 
 and consecration. What has any one better to do, 
 or for which stimulus and help are of more value 
 to him, than to strive after the best ? 
 
 I scarcely have known a more pathetic termi- 
 nation of a public career than the close of Mr. 
 Pease's life. He had been called to the chair of 
 Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology in Andover 
 Seminary with a delightful unanimity. His accept- 
 ance of the office had been deliberate and conscien- 
 tious, and marked by a conviction that his life had 
 led him up to this special work. He entered on di- 
 rect preparation for it with an enthusiasm, modest, 
 quiet, controlled, yet clear and strong, and from 
 unfailing fountains. Many gathered to listen to 
 his inaugural, to welcome him to the work he was 
 undertaking. How bright were the growing and 
 fruitful years that seemed to lie before him. He 
 
X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 mapped out his course of lectures, was about to 
 enter on their delivery, and his voice was stilled. 
 
 To our Christian faith there are no uncom- 
 pleted lives for those who are one with the Con- 
 queror of the grave. Yet, besides this deepest of 
 consolations, is the solace, that here, within our 
 earthly horizons, and in so brief a time, there had 
 been so genuine and noble an achievement. He 
 who had thus wrought and succeeded had seen the 
 heavenly vision, which in its own divine way 
 comes to all, and had been obedient to it. Choos- 
 ing a special form of service, he had made perfec- 
 tion in it his aim. All his life was smitten by 
 the love of the ideal. And there was in this life 
 something yet more important to be noticed, for it 
 is more rare and stimulating; the resolve, the 
 unalterable decision, to attain to what he saw, a 
 power and majesty ever commanding him and 
 beckoning him on. The inaugural address, and 
 the opening lectures he was to have delivered, have 
 from this point of view an imperishable charm. 
 They mean what one man saw as a worthy aim, 
 and what he had been willing to do for it, and this 
 not as a transient impulse or purpose, but as a daily 
 consecration and unintermitting and strenuous en- 
 deavor. The few other productions which accom- 
 pany those just referred to also serve, each in its 
 own way, to illustrate the same significance of his 
 
INTRODUCTION. xi 
 
 life. The clergymen, whose affectionate remem- 
 brance of their brother and desire to widen his 
 influence, and the parishioners who have assisted 
 them in executing this purpose, in offering this 
 volume to the public, know full well how little it 
 suggests of his ministerial work, and how inade- 
 quately it represents his preaching. A life which 
 had sacrificed literary aims in obedience to a call 
 for direct and active service in the Christian min- 
 istry, had cut itself off from the early preparation 
 of works for publication. 
 
 I knew and loved Mr. Pease as a pupil. His 
 scholarship was accurate, his fidelity constant, his 
 simplicity and sincerity of character marked and 
 attractive. With peculiar pleasure he was wel- 
 comed to his chair of instruction. If he had lived 
 to enter fully on its duties he would have been, be- 
 yond question, a fit and distinguished teacher of 
 preachers. 
 
 This volume, brief as it is, contains and reveals 
 the secret of all true power. It testifies to a life 
 which aimed, in deep sincerity, in humility, in full- 
 ness of consecration, with a constant and victori- 
 ous resoluteness, to achieve what is ideally best 
 and of all things the most real. We are impressed 
 anew with the power of such an ideal when taken 
 up into a human will. 
 
 E. C. S. 
 Andover Theological Seminaby, May 8, 1894. 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 Theodoke Claudius Pease was born in the 
 city of Poughkeepsie, New York, on the 14th of 
 October, 1853. The few available facts as to his 
 lineage and early years are thus given in his own 
 words in the records of his class at Harvard : — 
 
 "The origin of the name Pease is uncertain. 
 But as a coat of arms granted to the family by 
 Otho II. of Germany has a pea haulm in an eagle's 
 beak, the name is probably connected in some way 
 with the pea plant. Whether the family came first 
 from Germany or Italy is a disputed point. The 
 first individual of the name of whom we have any 
 record was John Pease, LL. D., who lived in Eng- 
 land A. D. 1472. One branch of the family traces 
 its descent to Robert Pease, who came from Ips- 
 wich, England, the last of April, 1634, and settled 
 in Salem. His second son, John, removed from 
 Salem to Fresh Water Brook, which was then a 
 part of Springfield, Massachusetts, but is now 
 Thompsonville, Connecticut. His second son, Rob- 
 ert, removed to the adjoining town of Enfield in 
 1681, and is said to have been one of the first con- 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xiii 
 
 stables of that town. His second son, Robert, 
 lived for a time in Andover, Massachusetts, but 
 afterwards settled in that part of Enfield, Connect- 
 icut, now called Somers. His fourth son was born 
 in Somers, June 28, 1739, and lived in his native 
 town as a farmer. He was a lieutenant in the 
 Revolution. His eldest son, Giles, was born in 
 Somers, April 13, 1763. He was a merchant, and 
 held the office of justice of the peace. 
 
 " His eldest son, born at Somers, January 30, 
 1789, was named Theodore. He settled in Hartford 
 as a merchant, but died at the age of thirty, July 
 26, 1819. His second son, my father, Claudius Bu- 
 chanan, was born in Somers, April 22, 1815. He 
 was a merchant for ten years in Georgia, and six 
 years in New Orleans, La. Then he engaged in 
 the lumber business in New York city, living in 
 Poughkeepsie, and afterwards was a paper manu- 
 facturer in Springfield, Mass. 
 
 "My mother, whose name before her marriage was 
 Elvira Ann Smith, was the daughter of Jonathan 
 and Elvira Parsons Smith." She was a woman of 
 noble character and of rare refinement and culture, 
 and her son inherited from her, as he believed, his 
 love for literature and his facility in language. 
 She died at Poughkeepsie, April 30, 1855, at the 
 age of thirty-four years, six months and six days. 
 
 " I was then, when two years and a half old. 
 
XIV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 taken to Somers, where I lived with my father's 
 mother and sister. When I was twelve and a half 
 years old this sister of my father's, my aunt Sarah, 
 died, and my father came to Somers, where he re- 
 mained till I was sixteen, at which time we removed 
 to Springfield. I fitted for college partly with Pro- 
 fessor Kipley, who established a home school in 
 Somers, and mostly at the Springfield High School, 
 under Mr. O. M. Fernald, since professor of Greek 
 in Williams College, then classical instructor in 
 this school, to whom its graduates owed largely the 
 excellent preparation for coUege which they re- 
 ceived." 
 
 This record shows the growth, on the stock of a 
 typical New England family rooted in the soil of 
 an ordinary New England village, of the beautiful 
 character and talent which this book commem- 
 orates. It has a further value as portraiture, for it 
 bears witness thus early to the writer's love of de- 
 tail, eagerness for all the facts that might cast 
 light on the subject in hand, and careful habit of 
 research and statement which led him to set down 
 with accuracy, and with even greater fullness than 
 our abridgment shows, all available particulars in 
 a record to be closed unread, and sealed in the 
 vaults of a safe deposit. 
 
 This trait is observed in the earliest recollections 
 we have of his childhood. Aji occasional inmate 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xv 
 
 of the home remembers him " at an age when he 
 was not too old to sit on her knee, and yet old 
 enough to love books and reading, and to talk of 
 them as he sat there." Into his studies he entered 
 with such zest that at school he had no rivals. 
 But his chief delight was in " a precious old an- 
 thology of prose and verse, which he searched for 
 treasures to read, talk of, repeat, or make the 
 model of his own expression. He was a happy 
 child, the light and sunshine of the home, loving 
 and lovable, full of breezy life and fun." Like all 
 boys in country homes, he had his share of the 
 tasks and "chores" about the place. These he 
 seems to have disliked, in the degree that they were 
 solitary ; but whether to his taste or not, " he al- 
 ways did them obediently, and with the same thor- 
 oughness that marked aU his work through life. 
 There were no more weeds left in the garden bed 
 when he had finished than there were inaccuracies 
 in his New Testament work in after life. The 
 child was father of the man." The proverb ap- 
 plies with even greater force to his love and gift 
 of reading mentioned above. This grew with his 
 growth, and became a great talent, so that whoever 
 knew him at all knew of this. The swiftness, the 
 persistence, the range and variety of his reading, 
 which made all literature both in ancient and mod- 
 ern tongues his domain, the power to possess and 
 
XVI BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 retain the substance, and if he pleased the verbal 
 form of what he read, and to estimate, digest, and 
 assimilate it, may fairly be compared with the like 
 gift of Macaulay, and, as in the case of Macaulay, 
 was the amazement of his friends, impressing most 
 those who knew him best. On the early beginnings 
 of this passion and practice we have his own testi- 
 mony. The only portion of the little autobio- 
 graphy from which we have quoted that leaves sim- 
 ple facts for anything like a personal " confession " 
 is the closing paragraph. 
 
 " My love for reading has always been greater 
 than for any kind of amusement. But a small 
 country town afforded little opportunity for its 
 gratification, and the taste was but poorly directed. 
 My present mother, formerly a principal of Mount 
 Holyoke Seminary, whose maiden name was Mary 
 W. Chapin, has assisted me largely ; and from our 
 removal to Springfield my eyes alone have set the 
 bounds to my unlimited enjoyment of books. I 
 well remember how much of school hours even I 
 spent in reading the songs in ' Chambers's Cyclo- 
 paedia of English Literature,' a copy of which was 
 kept in school for reference. In college the same 
 devotion to reading has continued, and the gratifi- 
 cation of this, and an equally boundless love of 
 writing, has proved the most delightful, if not the 
 most valuable, part of my college work. My plans 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xvii 
 
 for life are quite undeveloped as yet, but I trust 
 that opportunities to gratify these two tastes will 
 not be wanting." 
 
 The impression of his mental bent thus gained 
 is deepened by the witness of all who knew him in 
 college. His record of scholarship and social stand- 
 ing, as marked by rank, honors, and offices, is cred- 
 itable. He stood first of the second ten in his 
 class. In Freshman year he received one of the 
 Lee prizes for reading, and at the beginning of 
 the Sophomore year a " detur," — Walton's Lives. 
 He was a member of the society of Christian Bre- 
 thren, of the Everett Athenaeum, of the 11. H. 
 and the O. K., and the $. B. K. societies. From the 
 middle of his Sophomore to the middle of his Sen- 
 ior year, he was editor of the " Advocate." He was 
 Odist at the Sophomore Class Supper, and was 
 elected Class Poet at graduation. This latter part 
 was done with great distinction, and received 
 marked attention from Professor James Kussell 
 Lowell, who, during the last two years of his 
 course at least, favored him with his acquaintance 
 and society, and guided him in his reading, his 
 style, and especially his study and practice of the 
 forms of verse. It was in lines like these that he 
 was set apart from his classmates, and, at least in 
 poetical gift, from the men of his time in college. 
 
 His general fame at Harvard arose chiefly out 
 
xviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 of his work on the " Advocate," to which he con- 
 tributed an extraordinary number of articles, more 
 than sixty-five in all. Scarcely an issue appeared 
 without some verse above his initials. Many of 
 these were reprinted in periodicals of wider circu- 
 lation ; and in the volume of " Yerses from the 
 Harvard Advocate," which preserved in more per- 
 manent form the best poetry of the first twelve 
 years of its issue, only two competitors approached 
 him in the number of poems found worthy of in- 
 sertion, while his contributions exceed those of 
 both of them together. His literary and linguistic 
 aptitudes were thought phenomenal. " He ab- 
 sorbed a language, and tongues dead or living 
 were real vestibules whereby he entered into a 
 knowledge of the life and thought of ancient or 
 modern peoples." This judgment of a classmate 
 and lifelong friend, who has since won distinction 
 in the same profession, like all else that is said of 
 him in youth, casts a light forward over his whole 
 life, which, as the same writer says, "was a nat- 
 ural development of what he was in college." His 
 room, his hands, his pockets are remembered as 
 loaded with books. His head seemed full of their 
 contents, especially of poetry, which on occasion 
 would flow in streams from his lips. All this will 
 seem to those who knew him later as said of him 
 but yesterday. There were favorite authors, and 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xix 
 
 passages, or poems, to which he must introduce 
 every new friend. For how many has he been 
 a guide to Dante, or Plato, or Browning, or New- 
 man, or whatever author each man's specialty or 
 aptitude would respond to ? Yet neither then nor 
 later was there any touch of conceit, of pedantry 
 or patronage in this. He hated ostentation and dis- 
 play ; modesty and reserve were an unfailing ele- 
 ment in his charm. But he loved beauty, and he 
 loved his fellows, and whether his companion were 
 child or adult, man or woman, it was his nature to 
 share every treasure of his own which he felt would 
 be welcome. To this he was impelled in part by a 
 fine passion for expression, but even more by the 
 nobler delight in impartation. 
 
 As one said of him in later years, he had a gen- 
 ius for friendship and comradeship. This, we have 
 seen, was noted in his childhood. To many of his 
 classmates this seemed his most notable trait. His 
 work was done easily and naturally ; it seemed no 
 more to absorb him than breathing, and left him 
 undiminished spirits and leisure for companion- 
 ship. " His room was a social centre for a con- 
 genial set. His recreations and even his tasks he 
 preferred to do in company." " He was healthy, 
 cheerful, friendly, entertaining, full of wit and 
 merriment, and often in high states of mental and 
 emotional happiness." " Yet no degree of hilarity. 
 
XX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 no provocation of his sense of humor, ever betrayed 
 him into a vulgar word." " He was high-minded, 
 pure, guileless, sensitive, poetic." " A lover of 
 beauty, moral and intellectual, he was never heard 
 to say anything to mar the sweet purity of his 
 ideal." 
 
 Two years before he entered college, in October, 
 1869, when fifteen years old, he joined the Con- 
 gregational church in Somers, Conn. From his 
 Freshman year he was a member of the Christian 
 Brethren, and "in class-meetings. Christian Bre- 
 thren meetings, and in personal intercourse, he ex- 
 hibited a high standard of Christian life." " He 
 was also among the first members of a little society 
 founded in his Freshman year, under the name of 
 'YTrrjpeTai XpuTTov, and which consisted of men from 
 different classes looking forward to the Christian 
 ministry." 
 
 The influences and inclinations leading him into 
 his life's calling reach further back, and lie deeper 
 than our scanty light enables us to follow. The 
 tone of uncertainty in the closing sentence of his 
 class record, and perhaps the interval of two years 
 which he let pass between Harvard and Andover, 
 given in part to teaching literature in Annapolis 
 Naval Academy, seem to show that his purpose 
 was not settled when he left college. For aspi- 
 rants to the ministry those were times of great 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxi 
 
 mental perplexity. There was a breach between 
 the church, its faith and ideal, and the world in 
 the light of modern learning and activity, which 
 the teaching and example of ministers like himself 
 have helped to remove. But though he took time 
 to know his mind and his duty, he always sought 
 the determining impulses to his calling as far back 
 as the confines of his earliest remembrance, and 
 felt his vocation to be coeval with his life. " I 
 have long known," he said when he received his 
 license to preach, " that I could never be anything 
 else than a Christian minister." 
 
 He received his special training for the minis- 
 try in Andover Theological Seminary, where after 
 three years of study he was graduated in 1880. 
 In August of the same year he was married to 
 Abby Frances Cutter, who, with her oldest and 
 only surviving child, Arthur Stanley Pease, is now 
 living in Andover, Massachusetts. 
 
 In June of his Senior year in the Seminary he 
 received and accepted a call to the Congregational 
 Church in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, a town 
 lying on the Connecticut River opposite to White 
 River Junction, and four miles south of Dart- 
 mouth College, in a region beautifully mingling 
 the charms of hill and river scenery. The parish 
 includes a quiet, thrifty, little village with outlying 
 farms. A young ladies' seminary in the place 
 
xxu BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 then made part of the congregation. The church 
 numbered something under two hundred members. 
 Here he was ordained in September, 1880, and 
 here he passed four busy, useful, fruitful, happy, 
 and above all growing years. 
 
 On his part he became fond of the place and 
 people, and never ceased to love them, and look 
 back with satisfaction and pleasure on his life 
 among them. On their side, " his life and his 
 words made a deep and lasting impression for good 
 on the community. As a man and a citizen he 
 was highly honored and esteemed. Courtesy and 
 cheerfulness were habitual in his bearing. The 
 laborer and the college professor alike were charmed 
 by his honest simplicity and profound erudition. 
 As a scholar he won a steadily widening fame. 
 His culture and learning were all the time a ben- 
 efit to the community and the Seminary, and were 
 recognized at the college. As a pastor he was 
 beloved by his flock. Earnestness, spirituality, and 
 sympathy were his marked characteristics. As a 
 preacher he was without a peer in this region of 
 the State. He was an eloquent and ready speaker, 
 and drew many to his congregation." 
 
 This pastorate stands out in his life as an epoch 
 of growth. He made rapid progress in the studies 
 and art of his calling. He settled his habits and 
 lines of reading and research ; he formed definite 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxiii 
 
 ideals of the functions of pastor and preacher; 
 he discovered his gift, and perfected his style of 
 extempore delivery. In the mastery of his profes- 
 sion, and the expansion and enrichment of his 
 mental and even more his spiritual nature, he made 
 an advance which did not fail to be remarked by 
 those who watched him during these four years, 
 and which overtook with surprise friends who had 
 not seen him during the interval. 
 
 There is a curiously interesting account of his 
 appearance as a man and a preacher at this time, 
 which is good even for later years. A chance trav- 
 eller, who had been caught over Sunday in the 
 vicinity, found such unexpected compensation in 
 the sermon he heard in the little church at West 
 Lebanon that he was moved to write of it to the 
 " Boston Journal " in a letter which appeared in 
 the issue of February 3, 1884. He describes the 
 preacher as " a young man, neither tall nor slight, 
 with a broad face and scholarly brow; posture 
 erect, except when speaking he lifts the head back 
 and to one side a little ; the sermon, extempore, — a 
 minute study of words, a search for the essentials 
 of the thing, careful analysis and discussion, a prac- 
 tical application to every-day life. Unity, progress, 
 force, and point in the discourse. Words care- 
 fully not laboriously chosen, elocution pleasant, 
 not lofty or ornate, but familiar and yet impressive. 
 
XXIV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 suggesting conscientious sincerity and consecration. 
 A thoughtful, powerful, practical sermon, grace- 
 fully and feelingly delivered, — an inspiration to a 
 better life." 
 
 This singular communication to a daily paper, and 
 evidently unbiased tribute of a passing stranger, 
 precipitated an inevitable crisis in the career of 
 the preacher thus signalized. It naturally arrested 
 the attention of churches seeking a minister, and 
 led to his being heard, and in the end called by the 
 First Congregational Church in Maiden, Mass. 
 
 This church is one of the three or four oldest in 
 New England, having its beginnings as far back as 
 1648. The traditions of its long and honored line 
 of pastors set an exacting ideal. It was the only 
 church of its faith and order in the heart of the 
 town, which grew rapidly, doubling its population 
 in the nine years of this pastorate, during which 
 the church added as many new names to its roU as 
 it had resident members when Mr. Pease came to 
 it. It served its large and outspread constituency 
 not only in the various services of the central meet- 
 ing house, but through several branches, some of 
 which were started under him, and one developed 
 into an independent church. 
 
 To supply the needs of this busy, growing church, 
 this broad parish, these hundreds of families, the 
 new pastor labored, fulfilling every function with 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxv 
 
 unwearied faithfulness. This pastorate, no less 
 than the former one, was a period of growth, en- 
 largement, ripening. But it bears the special mark 
 of work and service. 
 
 He maintained his habits of study and culture, 
 still following lines, some of which had engaged 
 him in youth. Each day saw its canto of Dante 
 read in the original, until, ere he closed it for the 
 last time, he had been through the " Commedia " 
 nearly seventy times. His critical, textual study 
 of the Hebrew and Greek, and rapid reading of 
 the English version of the Bible kept on, with 
 growing concentration of interest. More or less 
 directly everything became tributary to this, and 
 to his study of the theory and art of preaching, to 
 which more and more definitely he gave himself, as 
 if drawn intuitively and by the compulsion of a 
 divine call to the work which in the end was to 
 claim him, and to which he was fitted and dedi- 
 cated. 
 
 Yet all this was secondary and incidental to his 
 service of his people. He was a busy, working, 
 careful pastor, giving the best and most of his time 
 and strength, and heart as well, to the burden of 
 service, responsibility, sympathy, instruction, min- 
 istry ; various, incessant, accumulating, no atom of 
 which he would shirk, which he loved to bear. He 
 never suffered a personal interest to interfere, never 
 
XXVI BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 spared himself, if any light, comfort, or power from 
 the gospel could come through him to any single 
 soul. Only his rare facility, versatility, and healthy 
 vitality of mind and body enabled him to bear this 
 steady and increasing strain without disaster. Too 
 ready, we cannot but fear, he was to spend and be 
 spent, too willing to make one of those slow, silent, 
 often unnoticed offerings, of ministers who joy and 
 rejoice to be poured out upon the sacrifice and ser- 
 vice of the faith of their churches. 
 
 There is an eloquent monument of this patient, 
 fruitful service in the pastor's record, which shows 
 the number, variety, and scope of his instructions 
 as teacher and preacher ; and contains the roll of 
 the large number whom by his voice and hand he 
 welcomed into the church of Christ, every name 
 written in that always beautiful handwriting, which 
 here embodies each syllable and letter with a lov- 
 ing care, and nicety, that seems almost to speak of 
 the minute knowledge and personal regard which 
 each shared; fit symbol of that inward register 
 which preserved indelibly the names, faces, per- 
 sonality, and heart's secrets of joy or sorrow, of all 
 these and many more. He knew, not by effort, but 
 because of his individual interest the register of 
 his church literally by heart. 
 
 There is no end to the testimonies of those who 
 only learn the more as the lapse of time parts them 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxvii 
 
 from him, how much they are indebted to him 
 for the blessing of sorrows comforted, or of faith 
 found, recovered, or deepened and enlarged. " To 
 those in trouble of any kind he was tenderly sym- 
 pathetic and thoughtful, and was always more than 
 glad to have inquiring, even doubting ones come to 
 him for advice and assistance, and with such he 
 had a happy faculty of clearing away the doubts, 
 not so much by opposing arguments as by quietly 
 and tactfully leading the thought to truths to 
 which they could consent. In this way many a 
 young man just on the verge of slipping away into 
 the darkness of doubt or skepticism itself, or into 
 indifference, was saved to a life of useful, earnest 
 service of God." 
 
 In a wider way, " by his simple personal charac- 
 ter, and the unconscious lifting of others by a pure, 
 gracious, unselfish life, he was a constant inspira- 
 tion in the community. Charming in conversation, 
 a good listener as well as talker, quick in catching 
 the humorous side of conversation, full of fun as 
 well as scholarly and instructive, wholly above re- 
 proach in motive and in act, he won all hearts to 
 him by his tender, loving charity, and his quick 
 appreciation of the best to be found in all he met." 
 
 After all, his pulpit was the focus to which all 
 his labors converged, from which his influence 
 radiated. "Always earnest and impressive, he 
 
xxviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 was at times most eloquent, expressing largest, 
 deepest truths in choicest language. He never 
 failed to be instructive and inspiring, so honest 
 and true to his own ideals ; so spiritual and with 
 such a sweet loving spirit, absolutely sinking all 
 thought of self in his treatment of any sacred 
 theme. His first aim — his constant aim in all his 
 public efforts — was to be real in all he said from 
 the pulpit, and so he was never betrayed into say- 
 ing anything under the excitement of the occasion, 
 or for the sake of effect, or which had not pre- 
 viously become a very part of his own honest 
 thought and belief. This won him the lasting re- 
 spect and esteem of his people, and gave all that 
 he said great weight and power. The growth in 
 Christian life under his preaching was, as he would 
 have had it, largely unconscious of its source, even 
 with those most affected by it. Yet it was none 
 the less real, steady, and abiding. Many were 
 gradually led to a larger conception of Christian 
 truth and life, and more close, living, personal re- 
 lations to Christ himself, through his ministry, who 
 could not perhaps recall the particular sermons 
 from which influences for good had come to them." 
 The prime defect of this memorial, bitterly re- 
 gretted by its editors, as it wiU be by former hearers 
 of Mr. Pease, is that it contains not even one fair 
 example of what more than all else together was 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxix 
 
 the work and. achievement of his life, — his sermons. 
 They live in delightful memories, better still in the 
 substance of the character and faith of many listen- 
 ers, but to eye and ear they are lost beyond recall. 
 The two herein printed are but waifs, broken and 
 battered, that have drifted by chance currents to 
 hand. They are reconstructed from incomplete 
 shorthand notes, and the second of them lacks even 
 the benefit of the author's revision. The poems 
 too, it must be remembered, were as a rule not 
 prepared by the writer for publication. The Essay 
 on Dante needs, indeed, no apology. It should not, 
 however, be understood to represent the author's 
 powers of thought or expression at their best, for, 
 though it bears a recent date, it was the slow de- 
 velopment and late revision of a theme the lines 
 of which were fixed by an effort of his immature 
 powers. 
 
 This volume as a whole is a memorial of the 
 mind and art of one who was resolutely withhold- 
 ing himself from work for publication until the 
 full time of harvest should come. He had no 
 sooner put in the sickle than it dropped from his 
 hand. The small handful of precious first-fruits, 
 in the opening address and lectures, best tell us 
 what the harvest would have been. 
 
 In May, 1893, he received, and in June accepted, 
 a call to become Bartlet Professor of Sacred Khe- 
 
XXX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 toric and Lecturer on Pastoral Theology In An- 
 dover Theological Seminary. He formally closed 
 his pastorate in Maiden, with a farewell sermon, 
 September 3. He had already moved to Andover, 
 and begun, without any interval of rest, the prep- 
 aration of his Inaugural Address. This was de- 
 livered September 20, in the presence of an as- 
 sembly, which filled to its utmost capacity the 
 Seminary chapel, and was made significant by the 
 presence of representatives from near and far of 
 his brethren in the ministry, with whose general 
 approval and acclaim he had been called to his 
 chair. This done, he turned at once with ardor 
 and growing zest to the duties of his professorship, 
 giving his time mostly to the preparation of his 
 course in Homiletics, of which he had drawn out 
 a complete scheme, and fully prepared five intro- 
 ductory lectures. As he speedily came to the deci- 
 sion to adopt the same free method in their deliv- 
 ery that he used in preaching, he wrote out only 
 the first two, and hence these alone, though not 
 surpassing the rest in interest and value, are avail- 
 able for publication. 
 
 Over these closing weeks, full of enthusiasm and 
 activity, slowly crept the deepening shadow of a 
 strange physical lassitude, which his friends ac- 
 counted for by the loss of his wonted summer's 
 rest, and the excessive mental and emotional sti'ains 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxxi 
 
 lie had been under; but its insidious cause duly 
 appeared in a fever, which proved to be typhoid, 
 and after three weary weeks, happily free from 
 severe pain, terminated his life. 
 
 His mind was quite clear at the last, and he 
 knew well that he was near his "passing." He 
 looked back with humble, earnest gratitude, be- 
 cause "he had been permitted for thirteen years 
 to be a minister of the Lord Jesus ; " onward, with 
 confident hope that he should soon meet this same 
 dear Lord, and friends gone before, among them 
 his own mother, of whom he had no memory, only 
 all his life a longing for, and the one who had so 
 truly taken a mother's place to him, and of whom 
 we have seen dutiful mention in his class record. 
 To friends he was leaving on earth, he sent his 
 love, mentioning them singly and in groups, and in 
 particular to " every member of the church in 
 West Lebanon, and of the church in Maiden." 
 To all, in whatever degree of nearness they stood 
 to him, to wife, to son, to father, and sisters, to his 
 students, fellow-professors, fellow-ministers, to the 
 churches he had served, he left in some form the 
 same message : " Tell them, when one comes here, 
 where I am there seems only one thing worth liv 
 ing f or, — to love and to serve the Lord Jesus." 
 With such words were filled the last hours of a 
 beautiful Lord's day afternoon, and towards the 
 
xxxii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 dawn of the next morning, November 20, 1893, he 
 was given the answer of his prayer, audibly ut- 
 tered, " Let me go, for the day breaketh." 
 
 To friends in a wider circle, all unforewarned, 
 the news of this sudden departure brought a pain- 
 ful revulsion of their feelings of pleasure in his 
 promotion, joy in his first triumph, and boundless 
 hopes of his career, and left them bewildered by 
 the startling and mysterious stroke. One group of 
 these, which had gradually clustered about the per- 
 sonality of Mr. Pease, with whom he had been, the 
 guest and hero of their gathering, only the day 
 before his prostration by illness, when they met 
 after his death found a voice for their emotions in 
 the few verses read by one of their number. They 
 stand at the front of this volume, in some measure, 
 perchance, to speak the thoughts of many hearts. 
 
 It was wonderful how soon the gloom above the 
 enigma of this heavy grief and loss broke and 
 lifted before the shining of a holy life, and the 
 light of the truths in which it had been lived, of 
 which it still spoke. The Seminary chapel, where 
 he had so lately given his inaugural, was filled 
 with the sound of hymns of cheer and hope that 
 he loved, and a simple ritual of Scripture and 
 prayer. About him were gathered, as before, a 
 great assembly, returning to share the joy of a 
 loftier triumph with one who had again been called 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH xxxiii 
 
 to " come up higher," and " wear a truer crown 
 than any wreath that man can weave him." 
 
 Only a few steps back of this chapel and the line 
 of Seminary buildings lies the burial ground which 
 has received to its bosom already a worthy succes- 
 sion of godly and scholarly men. It is merely a 
 small and plain square of land, untouched by any 
 futile efforts of man's art to adorn it, but beauti- 
 fied alone by encircling hills and woods, by the 
 glories of a noble prospect, and by the consecra- 
 tion of much precious dust. It was our friend's 
 wish that he might finish his work on this hill, and 
 here on its slope might lie when it was done. Here 
 his four little children, who had lived but a few 
 weeks in the home in Maiden, were brought to lie 
 at his feet. Hither the students of his class, who 
 had begun already to love him as a friend, and 
 were counting on him as their master, bore his 
 body, and here in such sweet and honorable com- 
 panionship we laid him down, while his own life, 
 and his last message to us each, seemed to blend 
 in our hearts with the prayer we heard over the 
 grave. 
 
 ..." We bless and praise Thy holy name for 
 all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and 
 fear, and especially for those most dear to us, of 
 whom we have good hope that they have fallen 
 asleep in Jesus. And we beseech Thee to give us 
 
xxxiv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 grace to follow their good examples, that even here 
 we may be united to them in fellowship of spirit, 
 and that finally we may be gathered together with 
 them into the bosom of Thy love : through Jesus 
 Christ our Lord." 
 
 C. L. N. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 ITS PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION, 
 AND OTHER WRITINGS. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 ITS PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION.^ 
 
 It is quietly assumed in many quarters that the 
 special charm of the Christian ministry is broken ; 
 that the distinctive attraction of this field of labor 
 is in large measure irretrievably lost. Robbed of 
 the position and prestige it once held in the intel- 
 lectual no less than in the moral and spiritual 
 sphere, the ministry, it is said, can no longer urge 
 the claims or present the opportunities of other 
 days, — not merely of the ages past, but even of 
 forty or fifty years ago. In the changes that have 
 passed over modern life, older rivals have gained 
 a precedence before denied, and new rivals have 
 arisen to dispute the prize. To these changes, it 
 is added, the ministry must resign itself, with such 
 grace as it may, begin to take a lower room, and, 
 as a consequence, be content with the service of 
 inferior men. In a word, though the ministry will 
 doubtless long survive, — for our generation has 
 learned that nothing dies at once, — it will survive 
 in a state of mild decadence, a lingering autumn 
 which delays but cannot turn aside the killing 
 
 1 An Inaugural Address delivered at Andover Theological 
 Seminary, 20 September, 1893. 
 
2 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 frost; while the higher, spiritual uses it once 
 served will be gradually taken up and absorbed by 
 other callings, which in turn will draw away the 
 energies of active, earnest, and thoughtful minds. 
 
 All this, it is true, is seldom put in words : it 
 is assumed, far oftener than asserted. Hence, to 
 many of my hearers, so plain and blunt a state- 
 ment as this may seem improbable and overdrawn. 
 And, in the close and sheltered circles in which 
 some minds still move, even the suggestion here 
 clothed in words may sound unnatural, almost 
 blasphemous, indeed. Yet it needs but little ac- 
 quaintance with the world of to-day, whether we 
 touch in person its busy, widening life, or catch 
 its manifold reflection as mirrored in literature, to 
 discover how common this quiet assumption has 
 grown to be. It meets us in the novel, the ro- 
 mance, the lighter essay. It colors the graver dis- 
 cussion of scientific, ethical, and social problems. 
 It gives a tone, a hue, an air, to magazines and 
 reviews ; the daily prints are tinctured with it. It 
 lurks below the language of men of science, of 
 business, of society, of the world: it affects their 
 bearing toward the minister with easy tolerance 
 or light disdain : it shades and shapes their advice 
 to young men who pause before they choose their 
 calling. 
 
 Sometimes, however, this assumption comes to 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 3 
 
 the surface, and finds direct expression, — is laid 
 down, indeed, as a maxim beyond dispute. Ten 
 years ago, an Englisli scholar, himself a preacher, 
 published an essay on "The Decay of Modern 
 Preaching," ^ in which the fact of such decay was 
 plainly accepted, remedies were hardly suggested, 
 and the causes alone were considered a subject for 
 discussion. "Within the last few weeks, however, 
 the assertion has been made in still clearer terms 
 by a newspaper of exceptional intelligence and 
 independence. With an air of easy omniscience 
 tempered by condescension, the editor writes as 
 follows: "This socialistic preaching is to be de- 
 plored, because it weakens the already relaxed hold 
 of the clergy upon educated men. The church, of 
 course, no longer attracts the ablest of our college 
 graduates as of old, but it is quite possible for 
 men of moderate intellectual gifts to influence 
 their hearers, if they will follow the methods and 
 precepts of their Leader." And again, in the 
 same article: "The proportion of educated men 
 who refuse altogether to listen to sermons is con- 
 siderable, and the average attendance of such men 
 at church seems to be diminishing. Many stiU 
 attend the established services from motives of de- 
 corum : but if their pastors could look through the 
 grave and respectful expressions that mask their 
 1 J. H. Maha%, The Decay of Modern Preaching. 1882. 
 
4 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 thoughts, and see the emotions of pity for intel- 
 lectual feebleness and contempt for ignorance 
 which are held in restraint, they might learn that 
 their only strength lies in the possession and the 
 proclamation of humility and charity." ^ Humility 
 and charity are an edifying lesson indeed, and a 
 lesson it is always timely to learn, whether the 
 example of the teacher confirms his precept or not. 
 But the chief burden of this concio ad clerum is 
 precisely this assumption before us. Within the 
 narrowed province which bounds its present influ- 
 ence, the writer more than hints, the ministry can 
 no longer claim the service of minds of the first 
 order, but must expect to see them drawn into 
 wider and more promising fields, thus leaving at 
 best only second-rate men to become the preachers 
 and pastors of to-morrow. 
 
 Now, minds of the first order are not common 
 in any age or in any calling in life, and it is 
 by " men of moderate intellectual gifts " that the 
 world's work is mainly done. I have no desire, 
 however, to discuss the personnel of the difEer- 
 ent professions, and comparisons are proverbially 
 odious. Still less have I any fear with regard to 
 the permanent place and work of the Christian 
 ministry, established as it is on the same divine 
 
 1 The Nation, May 25, 1893. Editorial on "Christian 
 Socialism." 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 5 
 
 foundations with the Christian church, and with 
 Christianity itself. But it seems to me not unfit- 
 ting, on the threshold 6f the new work to which 
 I have been called, and in contrast to the quiet 
 assumption already noticed, to dwell upon the dis- 
 tinctive claims and attractions of the ministry to- 
 day. New emphasis certainly should be laid, not 
 indeed upon what remains of earlier interest and 
 influence after all deductions have been made, but 
 rather upon the special claim and charm which 
 grow out of the present, which have accrued to 
 preacher and pastor alike from the very changes 
 through which we have passed. For when once 
 the needs, the demands, and the difficulties of our 
 age are fairly understood, the Christian ministry, 
 I am convinced, offers a richer opportunity and 
 makes a stronger appeal than ever before to the 
 largest and best disciplined intelligence, no less 
 than to the heart that seeks the highest service of 
 mankind. 
 
 With the duties of the pastorate fresh in 
 memory, and more familiar than the duties of this 
 chair, I shall speak now as a preacher, not as a 
 teacher. But those who are preparing to become 
 ministers of the Word, beside the special know- 
 ledge and training amply provided here, need also 
 the inspiration that comes from a broad view of 
 their great charge, if the man of God is to be com- 
 
6 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 plete, furnished completely unto every good work. 
 And if the duties and demands of their calling 
 enlarge upon the view, let them remember that 
 the charm of the vision widens with the horizon, 
 and the promise and presence of the Master are 
 broad and near to cover every need. 
 
 What, then, is the distinctive attraction, the 
 peculiar charm, of the ministry to-day? What 
 features does this calling now present which make 
 up for any apparent advantages it has lost, and by 
 which, even more than in other days, it appeals to 
 the highest powers, as it calls forth and rewards 
 the largest effort and devotion ? And how are this 
 claim and charm related to the charm and claim of 
 other departments of thought and interest ? These 
 questions will mark the direction to which our at- 
 tention must now be turned. 
 
 If there is one outstanding peculiarity in the in- 
 tellectual effort of to-day, one feature upon which 
 the finger may safely be put as distinctive, it is 
 this: an intense feeling for movement, progress, 
 growth, life. It is this which within one crowded 
 century has revolutionized the sciences of the past 
 and called new sciences into being. This is the 
 new spirit of which men speak. It is this pro- 
 found sense of the subtle, unbroken relations that 
 bind all forms of life together, individual and 
 social, past, present, and future, which has made 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 7 
 
 men Impatient of all partial, narrow, isolated in- 
 terpretations of facts and phenomena, and distrust- 
 ful of all theories that claim completeness, where 
 ignorance is veiled under specious assumptions of 
 omniscience. Method, no less than matter, has 
 been transformed by this spirit. The ambitious 
 systems of the past, with the dogmatism of be- 
 liever and skeptic alike, of Eousseau and Voltaire 
 no less than of Aquinas and Calvin, have given 
 place to more modest hypotheses, held below the 
 fact, not above it, with conscious and confessed 
 limitations of ignorance and partial view, ready to 
 be revised or superseded whenever some larger 
 truth or some plainer fact shall come to light. 
 This sense, this method, and this spirit we find 
 at work everywhere. Although most apparent at 
 first among the interpreters of life in nature and 
 life in man, even the sciences of inert matter and 
 mechanical movement have shared their influence. 
 Under this impulse, indeed, matter is no longer 
 inert, and movement no more mechanical. As- 
 tronomy, geology, and physics have felt the change. 
 " Within the last quarter of a century," writes 
 Camille Flammarion, " bur sublime science has 
 been whoUy transformed. Instead of watching 
 inert masses in motion through the void of space, 
 the study of the universe as related to the physical 
 constitution of the different worlds, the evolution 
 
8 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 of the stars and of life, has taken its place." ^ 
 Forces once supposed to be latent or lost, geology 
 discovers still at work, and allows no break to 
 separate the present from the past. It is hardly- 
 necessary to dwell on the new conception of or- 
 ganic life from its humblest origin to its highest 
 reach. Evolution is the keynote to all our thought ; 
 and, however the word may be limited or defined, 
 three great truths are firmly established : first, a 
 close, continuous, mutual relation exists between 
 all forms and parts of the visible universe ; second, 
 no unpeopled void is found between woi-m and 
 man, between star and soul ; and, third, as a con- 
 sequence, no object can be too remote, and no form 
 of life too lowly, to claim our interest. The years 
 of patient observation which Darwin gave to the 
 earth-worm and Sir John Lubbock to the ant teach 
 us that no creature that has shared the Creator's 
 thought and touch is unworthy of our prolonged 
 and reverent study. The higher the forms and the 
 more varied the phases life affords, the more in- 
 tense our human interest becomes. Man is not 
 forgotten in this all-embracing passion and re- 
 search. His individual life and thought, from the 
 lowest savage to the sage and saint, have been 
 traced with unwearied pains. His societies, his 
 civilizations, have been patiently studied in their 
 ^ North American Review, January, 1890. 
 
PEESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 9 
 
 crudest as well as their highest forms, in rock and 
 monument and in surviving fault and strata; at 
 cost of sacrifice worthy of the martyrs of the faith. 
 The inscriptions of Assyria, dumb for long cen- 
 turies, speak again to the ear and through the lips 
 of a Eawlinson, and the mummied monarchs of 
 Egypt leave their sepulchred pomp and silence to 
 become the familiars, almost the household friends, 
 of a Mariette. Thus history is clothed with life, 
 and the prehistoric past is made to breathe and 
 move once more. The same great change trans- 
 forms the world in which we live. The peoples of 
 the present, remote and hostile before, begin by 
 closer contact and better mutual understanding to 
 realize their kinship. The curse of Babel is re- 
 versed, and the miracle of Pentecost renewed, 
 when long isolated languages are brought together 
 and recognized as hardly more than dialects of a 
 common speech. Literature, refusing the narrow 
 bounds of the classic, becomes cosmopolite, and 
 welcomes all genuine treasure, whatever be its 
 source. A hundred myths and legends melt in 
 one, and under the most grotesque exterior we feel 
 through all religions the need, the aspiration, and 
 the soul of man. 
 
 How much the material progress of our age, its 
 marvelous inventions, its multiplied facilities, must 
 count as factors in this result, we cannot fail to 
 
10 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 own. But it is the intellectual movement with 
 which we have to deal, and through all of this the 
 sense of life with its progress and continuity is 
 evident and distinctive. 
 
 It is not claimed, of course, that this sense of 
 life has been born out of nothing, or absolutely 
 created, in a single age. This spirit has always 
 been present in the world, disputing its place with 
 a coarser, mechanical conception. Within narrow 
 limits, and in separate realms of thought, it has 
 made the glory of every creative age, as in letters 
 at the Renaissance, or in religion at the Reforma- 
 tion. But in all these ages, barriers were inter- 
 posed, the spirit at work in one sphere did not 
 extend to another, inert matter and lifeless mech- 
 anism maintained their ground. To-day, for the 
 first time, the feeling is for life everywhere, for 
 life with its unbroken continuity and progress, for 
 life infinitely varied and manifold, yet forever 
 one. It is one universal, living force, which, we 
 have discovered in a truer sense than the poet 
 dreamed, 
 
 " Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees ; 
 Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 
 Spreads undivided, operates unspent." ^ 
 
 What, then, is the relation of the Christian 
 1 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 11 
 
 ministry to this mighty and far-reaching change ? 
 How far has it been caught up and borne on by 
 this current of new life ? Has it felt a stronger 
 impulse, found a larger mission, brought a new 
 message for to-day ? On the answer to these ques- 
 tions our whole discussion turns. No isolation of 
 interest and influence is possible. If the ministry 
 enters into this universal movement, if it is sen- 
 sitive to this far-reaching change, it will share in 
 the results, and find in these a fresh attraction 
 for thoughtful minds. If the ministry stands un- 
 changed, while all else moves onward, its former 
 charm may well be broken, for it has lost the 
 prophetic spirit. Like the prophets of old, the 
 preacher must speak from life, through life, and 
 unto life, if his message is to be heard and heeded. 
 Considered in its ideal, no calling touches hu- 
 man life at so many points as the Christian min- 
 istry. None, therefore, should feel the change on 
 which we have dwelt so widely, none should profit 
 more by its results. And none should find the 
 present time a more inspiring field for service. 
 The spirit of the age both quickens the preacher's 
 pulse and appeals to him for his message. To 
 bear witness to the presence of an unseen life, 
 above, below, around our finite lives, has always 
 been his office, to make men feel that life has been 
 his triumph ; when this witness has grown cold. 
 
12 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 formal, and mechanical, his state has suffered 
 decadence and eclipse. To-day, like St. Paul on 
 Mars' Hill, lie finds his teaching attuned to the 
 deepest thought of his age. Our poetry, in accents 
 now pensive, now profound, cries through the lips 
 of Egypt's king : — 
 
 " If thou be He that made the earth and skies, 
 To thine own creature come without disguise. 
 Long have I blindly groped around thy throne, 
 But the sense sees not what the heart has known. 
 I strain for thee, I gaze with eager nerves, 
 But my glance backward to my eyeballs curves ; 
 To meet thine arms my arms I fling abroad ; 
 My arms fold on me, vacant of the God. 
 Upon the dark I paint thy secret face, 
 But night holds nothing in her hollow space. 
 Dost thou not see my tears, not hear my cry ? 
 I cannot see nor hear, yet know thee nigh. 
 I feel thee in the dust-wreaths of the plain, 
 And in the rare, quick drops of sacred rain : 
 I seek thee round the corners of the rocks, 
 Or on the riverain pasture of the flocks ; 
 And thou art there, but art not there for me : — 
 Take all the world, all else I yield to thee : 
 But I must see the God before I die." ^ 
 
 Our philosophy still worships an Unknown God, 
 but dares to think over his thoughts, and even di- 
 vine his attributes of intelligence and power. Our 
 science begins to look through pbenomena and 
 1 Francis Turner Palgrave, Amenophis. 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 13 
 
 ask for mind, and utters these significant words, 
 first spoken two years ago within these very walls 
 by a master of unquestioned authority : " In the 
 study of the successions exhibited by animals 
 and plants, it has been perceived that the march 
 of events from the primitive simplicity towards 
 greater and greater complication, culminating in 
 man, requires us to assume the existence of some- 
 thing like permanent guiding influences operating 
 in the world of matter." ^ 
 
 In France, always sensitive as a barometer to 
 anticipate changes in the atmosphere of thought, 
 the need of "permanent guiding influences" in 
 the moral universe is also felt, and the direction 
 toward which men must look to find them is 
 plainly hinted. Saul also is found among the 
 prophets, when Renan foresees the possible return 
 of the world, wearied with the successive bank- 
 ruptcies of liberalism, to the Jehovah of the He- 
 brews. And Darmesteter, a savant of the younger 
 school, finds in the teaching of the prophets the 
 only hope for his own generation, borrowing the 
 prophecy of Amos, " Behold the days come, saith 
 the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the 
 land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, 
 but of hearing the words of the Lord," ^ and 
 
 1 N. S. Shaler, The Interpretation of Nature, p. 46. 
 
 2 Amos 7iii. 11-13. 
 
14 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 pointing to his own land for its fulfillment : " And 
 to-day also the fair virgins and young men look in 
 vain from one sea to the other ; from no rock 
 bursts the spring which shall quench the thirst of 
 the soul ; the divine word is not in Ibsen, and it 
 is not in Tolstoi even, and neither from the North 
 nor from the East cometh the light." ^ These 
 three voices, of poet, man of science, and critic, 
 are not isolated and unique ; typical are they 
 rather, and representative ; they speak the temper 
 of the time; they breathe the feeling of multi- 
 tudes of men and women all around us, unfamil- 
 iar with discovery or research, yet touched and 
 troubled by this atmosphere of unrest, with no 
 firm hold on the certainties of the unseen, but 
 conscious that the things which can be seen and 
 weighed and measured can never feed the hunger 
 of the heart. In such an age, the need for min- 
 istry has surely not been outgrown : was It ever 
 greater than now ? " From my earliest childhood," 
 a physician once said to me, " I can never remem- 
 ber a time when the sight of physical pain did not 
 
 1 J. Darmesteter, Les Prophetes d'Israel, iv. " Et au- 
 jonrd'hui auasi les belles flUes et les jeunes gens regardent 
 en vain d'une mer k I'autre ; de nul locher ne jaillit la 
 source oh. dtancher la soif de I'ame : la parole divine n'est 
 point dans Ibsen et elle n'est point dans Tolstoi meme, et ni 
 du Nord ni du Levant ne vient la lumifere." 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION 15 
 
 call out in me the instant impulse and effort to 
 relieve it." No diploma from the schools could 
 have conferred on him a better title to practice 
 medicine ; no emolument of fame or money could 
 equal the charm he found in his profession. In 
 the presence of spiritual suffering, the minister of 
 Christ must feel a kindred impulse : with this im- 
 pulse in his heart, he may hear his Master's call 
 in the half unconscious need and longing of his 
 fellow-men, and, never more truly than to-day, 
 may enter through the service and relief of his 
 brethren into the very joy of his Lord. " My 
 idea of heaven," said Tennyson, " is to be engaged 
 in perpetual ministry to souls in this and other 
 worlds." ^ And the saintly hero of whom Whittier 
 sings, served troubled souls around him, and found 
 in that service the highest blessing : — 
 
 " He forgot his own soul for others, 
 Himself to his neighbor lending : 
 He found his Lord in his suffering brothers, 
 And not in the clouds descending." ^ 
 
 But impulse alone, however unselfish, is not 
 enough for service. Effort must be trained and di- 
 rected, to become effective ; sympathy must be broad- 
 ened and made intelligent, before it can give relief. 
 
 1 Quoted from conversation, by Agnes Grace Weld, in the 
 Contemporary Review, March, 1893. 
 
 2 John G. Whittier, G. L. S. 
 
16 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 The preacher must know the truth he brings and 
 the times he serves. The pastor must study 
 closely society around him, as well as the individual 
 hearts to whom he is called to minister. The 
 changes of our age have been felt in all these 
 directions : in them all, the new conditions and the 
 new spirit must be recognized and understood. 
 The problems to be met are more varied and com- 
 plex than those of old. But the higher life rises 
 in its level, the more complex it grows of neces- 
 sity, and the more varied it becomes, the greater 
 the charm of study and service. The play of 
 changeful circumstance across a background calm 
 and unchanging delights the eye and the mind. It 
 is the charm of the mountain in its eternal pa- 
 tience, touched to new meanings by moving masses 
 of shadow ; of the sea, forever tranquil below the 
 restless tossing of the waves ; of the sky in its 
 pure untroubled depths of blue, far above the pass- 
 ing clouds of gold and amber. It is the charm of 
 the highest poetry from ^schylus to Shakespeare, 
 of the unshaken mind of Prometheus in contrast 
 with the turbid wrath of Zeus and the trembling 
 terror of his creatures ; of the calm constancy of 
 Cordelia and the white purity of Desdemona amid 
 the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of passion 
 all around them. Realized in its deeper meaning, 
 it has been the strength of prophets and martyrs 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 17 
 
 and apostles, who, through the things that could be 
 seen and shaken, held fast to the things unseen and 
 unchanging. And through all the changes of to- 
 day, the charm and strength alike are his who, 
 while others cling to broken spars of scattered 
 truths, rests firmly on that Providence which 
 shapes and guides the course of men and ages by 
 ways unsearchable but sure, — 
 
 " That God, which ever lives and loves, 
 One God, one law, one element. 
 And one far-ofE divine event, 
 To which the whole creation moves." ^ 
 
 With this spirit and confidence, we turn to study 
 more closely the effects produced by the changed 
 conceptions and conditions of to-day in the several 
 directions already indicated : first, in the meaning 
 and interpretation of the minister's message ; 
 second, upon the society to which he speaks ; and 
 third, in the individual lives entrusted to his 
 special care. In each direction, if his task has 
 become more difficult and complex, the attraction 
 is also doubled, while the sense of life with its con- 
 tinuity and its progress, ever varied yet forever 
 one, has grown larger, deeper, and more absorb- 
 ing. 
 
 I. The source of his message claims our first 
 
 ^ Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, last stanza. 
 2 
 
18 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 attention. The preacher is always the minister 
 of the Word, and the Scriptures remain the chan- 
 nel of the divine message. But there is a wide 
 difference between the ways in which men have 
 iregarded and used the Scriptures. The humble 
 soul indeed has always found here the hidden 
 manna. The great preachers, preachers who have 
 moved men's hearts as the trees of the wood are 
 moved with the wind, have never failed to draw 
 their fire and energy from this source. These 
 results have been possible under interpretations, 
 crude and literal on the one hand, wild and vi- 
 sionary on the other. They prove the power of 
 the Spirit through all the hindrance of the flesh. 
 Patristic allegory, mediaeval myth and legend, the 
 mystic's glowing imagination, the hard prosaic 
 system of the literalist, — not one, nor all, of these 
 could always dim the heavenly light. But while 
 we recognize the Providence that overruled human 
 folly, we find therein no sanction for these false 
 and forced interpretations of the Word. 
 
 The great, creative ages in the Church rose to 
 larger views of the Scriptures, and caught glimpses 
 of the richly varied wisdom they reveal. But the 
 mechanism of dogma, or the fanciful search for 
 symbols, soon closed in and hindered the influence 
 of the freer conception. To-day the revolution 
 throughout all realms of thought has transformed 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 19 
 
 the study of the Bible also. Mechanical concep- 
 tions, the absurdities of symbolism, have gone, to 
 return no more. The new method affects even 
 those who least accept the critical result. That 
 method of thinking you cannot escape, if you think 
 at all. And the distinctive feature of this new 
 conception of Scripture is the same which was 
 pointed out before, the sense of life, in all its 
 wonderful variety and movement, throughout the 
 whole. Luther discovered that Paul's words were 
 living things, with hands and feet. We have 
 found that every Scripture, — 
 
 " If out deep down the middle, 
 Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." ^ 
 
 The special questions of criticism it does not fall 
 within my province to discuss. They must be left 
 to competent hands. They do not belong to the 
 preacher's sphere. They demand a combination of 
 time, talents, and patient training which he cannot 
 give. Hasty verdicts in this department by men 
 of good intentions, but deficient in modesty and 
 judgment, are as unfortunate as verdicts of kin- 
 dred character and origin upon strictly scientific 
 questions. A common training in theology, and a 
 reader's familiarity with the languages In which 
 the Bible was written, enable the preacher to fol- 
 1 Mrs. Browning, Lady Geraldine's Courtship. 
 
20 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 low the general trend of criticism with intelligence 
 and advantage, but no more entitle him to pro- 
 nounce upon difficult and disputed points than the 
 physician's license and practice make him a com- 
 petent judge in the special questions of biology. 
 But the preacher's great message will not grow less 
 clear, strong, and imperative as he faces new inter- 
 pretations of the Scriptures. And if he follows 
 carefully the advance of enlightened and reverent 
 scholarship, he will welcome the largest, freest 
 investigation, waiting with patience the slow re- 
 sults of years, very confident that the treasure is 
 not less heavenly because the vessels are earthen, 
 and that here also the Lord hath more truth and 
 light yet to break forth out of his holy Word. 
 
 But there are special ways in which this changed 
 conception of the Scriptures and their organic life 
 must widen and vitalize the preacher's use of the 
 Word, and enlarge the interest and power of his 
 ministry. Of these effects, some are negative, 
 some positive. 
 
 A higher regard for the original meaning and 
 relation of each separate Scripture is a first evident 
 advantage to the preacher. The fantastic treat- 
 ment of the Bible by the pulpit of other days, 
 sometimes, alas ! in our own, is familiar to all. 
 Like the Master's raiment in the hands of the 
 Roman soldiery, the sacred vesture of Scripture 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 21 
 
 has been rent asunder and the division made by 
 lot. If these irreverent extremes have been rare, 
 how often passages have been used with little care 
 for their first sense and connection ! Texts, torn 
 from the woven fabric, have been held up in 
 shreds and patches : words, robbed of their right- 
 ful meaning, forced to yield strange, unnatural 
 senses, by trick of translation or outward resem- 
 blance. I need hardly allude to further distortion 
 by which the plainest passages were turned to 
 mysticism or metaphysics. AU this is possible, 
 while Scripture is regarded as mechanism or dead 
 anatomy. All this becomes impossible, when Scrip- 
 ture is felt to be informed with full, pervading, 
 breathing life. 
 
 The preacher who feels this life informing all 
 the Scriptures will shrink from the plain irrever- 
 ence of all careless vivisection. His texts will not 
 be isolated, nor their natural meaning strained. 
 Neither indolence nor timidity will tempt him to 
 take up current mistranslations or renderings mis- 
 applied. His Bible will never become an armory 
 of weapons for controversy, nor a quarry whence 
 stones may be cut to buttress mediaeval or modern 
 theories. He will not overlook the broad sweep 
 of Revelation, on the one hand ; he will not force 
 one doubtful passage on the other, — not even to 
 save the consistency of the whole. Open and 
 
22 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 sensitive to changing light, his errors may be 
 outgrown, and his truths will never become stereo- 
 typed in lifeless formulas. 
 
 Each several Scripture will thus have an indi- 
 vidual teaching, and, as a second advantage, the 
 preacher's message will gain in variety, in point, 
 in force. The dullness of mere repetition is a 
 besetting temptation of the pulpit. When the 
 Bible is only a book of texts, all equally available 
 at every turn, the narrowness of the preacher's 
 mind and experience becomes the measure and 
 limit of his teaching. The same meagre round of 
 truth and duty, viewed in the same familiar light, 
 cast in the same monotonous forms, will make up 
 his weekly burden. Each mind is only a pool, 
 stagnant and unwholesome, unless its life is con- 
 stantly renewed by currents from without. How 
 changed, then, the preacher's message becomes, 
 when at every point he touches the varied life of 
 Scripture ! Each scene, each character, each ut- 
 terance, has a meaning of its ovsti, the common 
 truths take individual color and force, and the 
 whole range of his teaching is widened. It was 
 his faithful study of rock and brook, with the 
 humblest wild flower on the edge of each, that lent 
 varied grace to Sir Walter Scott's descriptions. 
 He who follows Nature closely makes her lavish 
 wealth in some measure his own. And he who 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 23 
 
 draws from each Scripture its individual lesson 
 will never become the slave of dullness and repe- 
 tition. 
 
 Beyond the enrichment of each several inter- 
 pretation, the new sense of life and power flowing 
 through all Revelation counts as a blessing to the 
 preacher. Inspiration itself he cannot conceive 
 as confined within an artificial reservoir, motionless 
 through all time, unchanged in form, in depth, in 
 level ; he views it as a river, rather, with widening, 
 deepening course from source to sea ; he feels its 
 presence as a divine life, mingling with the currents 
 of human life, revealed through individual and 
 national history, with ever growing depth and 
 clearness. With such a vision, dogmatic losses, if 
 losses they be, are transmuted into higher gain. 
 The power of Eevelation the preacher finds not 
 static but dynamic, not mechanical but vital. It 
 comes from life, it flows through life ; the life of 
 a chosen race under the old dispensation, the life 
 of a widening church under the new ; the individ- 
 ual life of prophet and apostle under both. And 
 in the blending of divine and human at every 
 stage, neither element is lost or lessened: both 
 become broader and deeper with each further un- 
 folding, until the heart turns to the Spirit through 
 all Scripture as the most devout of our poets turns 
 to the Word Incarnate : — 
 
24 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 " Deep strike thy roots, O heavenly Vine, 
 Within our earthly sod. 
 Most human and yet most divine, 
 The flower of man and God." ^ 
 
 Both the larger life of race and church aud the 
 individual life of prophet and apostle have become 
 more human, more real, and thus are brought into 
 closer relation to other life, to our own lives. The 
 sacred story, no longer isolated, but subject like 
 other history to change and growth, becomes more 
 truly a lesson for the world. Around the name of 
 the great Lawgiver, the Law of Israel grows by 
 successive layers and accretions, like the codes of 
 Rome or England. Beneath the shadow of Solo- 
 mon, the proverbs which a nation's wisdom has 
 coined through generations from many dies are 
 gathered in one golden treasury. Through the 
 Psalter, set first in tune to David's harp, but richer 
 and more varied in tone than any individual life, 
 the Jewish Church pours forth her strains of 
 changing experience through ages of sorrow, exUe, 
 exultation, sweeps the wide gamut of religious feel- 
 ing, and blends in her eternal song the sigh of each 
 burdened heart with the aspiration of the whole 
 church of God. 
 
 The revelation through individual life, also, has 
 become richer and more distinct. Each prophet 
 ^ John G. Whittier, Our Master. 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 25 
 
 stands in his own place and bears his own message : 
 he is not a moutlipiece but a voice, not a pen but 
 a person, a preacher of righteousness first to his 
 age, and then to later ages. Even if his name is 
 lost, we feel his heart and life : the second Isaiah 
 is not less real a presence than the first. And 
 from the broken sobs of Hosea and the scathing 
 philippic of Amos to the richer personality of Jere- 
 miah, sensitive, tender, passionate, each prophet's 
 power is doubled when we feel the man below the 
 message. Restored to their local setting, the Epis- 
 tles of the New Testament are filled with life again : 
 the needs of the readers become as real as the 
 writer's heart. Through the Gospels even, uncon- 
 scious touches betray the Evangelist, his personal 
 feeling and his point of view. 
 
 The Scriptures plainly grow more human under 
 this changed conception ; but, further, they become 
 thereby not less but more divine. As the human 
 life in prophet and apostle, in race and church, 
 grows more real to the preacher's thought, and 
 comes closer to his heart and life to-day, so the 
 divine life through all is felt as richer and more 
 real. Revelation through life is, of necessity, 
 larger than Revelation through mechanism ; and 
 the higher and more varied the life through which 
 it flows, the deeper and richer Revelation itself be- 
 comes. At every stage of the sacred story the 
 
26 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 Spirit, we feel, breathes upon the Word ; while in 
 the movement, progress, life, m'aking the whole 
 organic, we find a larger revelation of divine, cre- 
 ative thought. Whatever similarities are discov- 
 ered between the earlier Scriptures and the records 
 of other races, there can be no question of a higher 
 purpose, a purer motive, moulding the common 
 material. No prophetic message fails to disclose 
 some clearer insight than before was given ; no 
 psalm but mingles inspiration with aspiration. 
 And from the first faint dawn of the Protevange- 
 lium to the broad noonday of the Gospel, from the 
 earliest strivings of the Spirit with man to the 
 perfect man in Christ, is discerned, now dimly, 
 now more clearly, that " one far-o£E divine event, 
 to which " Kevelation like " the whole creation 
 moves." 
 
 Above all else, however, the distinct and abso- 
 lute supremacy of the Master, in his Person and in 
 his claim, is the largest gain the preacher finds in 
 the changed conception of the Scriptures. Always 
 recognized in theory of course, this supremacy has 
 been sadly forgotten in fact. The Roman Church 
 has put the Person of Peter in his Master's place : 
 Protestanism has too often put the teaching of Paul 
 before, if not above, his Master's word. Peter's 
 language to Cornelius, " Stand up ; I myself also 
 am a man," and Paul's indignant disclaimer at 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 27 
 
 Lystra, " Sirs, why do ye these things ? We also 
 are men of like passions with you," may teach us 
 how both apostles would have refused this bor- 
 rowed worship. But a higher voice has spoken : 
 " One is your Master : and all ye," — Paul and 
 Peter among the rest, — " all ye are brethren." 
 From these temptations of the past, the preacher 
 of to-day is free. He cannot longer bring the New 
 Testament down to the level of the Old ; he cannot 
 make Christ the Interpreter of Paul. The very 
 limitation and finiteness of the human servant set 
 off the higher glory of the divine, the only begotten 
 Son. Reflected through different hearts and lives, 
 the Person of the Master shines forth the more 
 transcendent : contrasted with all broken lights 
 before Him and after Him, with the divers por- 
 tions and divers manners of prophetic revelation, 
 TToXv/iepuis Koi TrohjTpoirois, or with the partial vision 
 to which even Paul confessed, apn yivuxTKoi Ik fuepovg. 
 His teaching regains its rightful place and its 
 unique authority. His supreme Revelation be- 
 comes the crown and centre of the preacher's mes- 
 sage. " Back to Christ " is the watchword for all 
 interpretation of the past : " Onward to Christ," 
 the call of the Spirit for to-day. With this result 
 secure, the changing cloud of criticism that over- 
 shadows us may be dark or bright, we need not 
 fear to enter it ; other voices may grow silent, other 
 
28 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 forms may fade, one Form will still remain, — One 
 Voice will still speak from tlie cloud : " This is my 
 beloved Son ; hear him." 
 
 Such, then, is the source of the preacher's mes- 
 sage to-day. Such is the living "Word he is sent 
 to interpret to his age. The largest, profoundest 
 learning he can command, he may well call to his 
 aid. From other literatures and histories and 
 faiths he may draw whatever lessons they can 
 teach. He may welcome all new light of scholar- 
 ship, discovery, research. But with a Scripture so 
 varied and vital in every part, informed and knit 
 together by one organic growing life, in the highest 
 sense both human and divine, a hundred broken 
 rays of one Eternal Light, he need not fear that 
 his study wiU lose its interest, or his source of in- 
 spiration be exhausted. 
 
 II. A second broad direction in which the min- 
 ister is affected by the changed conditions of to- 
 day is in the sphere and local setting of his work. 
 The community, society, the church, each of these 
 three concentric circles that surround his life, 
 shares the stir and restless movement of the age. 
 Throughout our country, in New England as in 
 the West, in village as in city, the changes the age 
 has wrought, and the contrast with thirty years 
 ago, are many and striking. These changes the 
 preacher must take into account if he would adapt 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 29 
 
 Ms message to present needs ; these new conditions 
 will absorb the pastor's closest study and task his 
 best intelligence. 
 
 An English country parson of to-day, less quaint 
 in flavor but more virile than his earlier name- 
 sake, speaking for his brethren, counts the " abso- 
 lute finality" of their position its most cheerless 
 and trying feature. " Dante's famous line," he 
 writes, " ought to be carved upon the lintel of 
 every country parsonage in England. When the 
 new rector on his induction takes the key of the 
 church, locks himself in, and tolls the bell, it is his 
 own passing bell that he is ringing." And again : 
 " This boasted fixity of tenure is the weak point, 
 not the strong one ; it is movement we want among 
 us, not stagnation." ^ This fixity, this finality 
 might have been found in many a New England 
 parish fifty years ago; how strange and remote 
 these conditions seem to us to-day ! The frequent 
 changes in modern pastorates are due in part no 
 doubt to the unhappy restlessness of people and 
 pastor ; in part, also, it must be admitted, they 
 grow out of the larger and more varied demands 
 now made upon the minister, exhausting his 
 strength and necessitating relief through change 
 of field. A pastorate of ten years brings more 
 
 1 Augustus Jessopp, The Trials of a Country Parson, 
 pp. 85, 94. 
 
30 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 of varied experience to the pastor now than a pas- 
 torate of twenty years once brought And even 
 the nearest parishes differ so widely from one 
 another to-day that every change involves the 
 awakening of new interests and the careful study 
 of new conditions and problems. 
 
 While the pastorate remains the same, more- 
 over, the parish undergoes a constant, all-pervad- 
 ing change. Ten years mean more in the parish 
 now than twenty years meant half a century ago. 
 The whole complexion, the very atmosphere, of our 
 social life a single generation has changed. In 
 cities and large towns the difference is recognized 
 at once : it is real, though less perceptible, in vil- 
 lages also. The sleepiest hamlet, stagnant and 
 duller to the stranger's eye 
 
 " than the fat weed 
 That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf," ' 
 
 has not escaped untouched; the patient observer 
 finds, the pastor feels, even there the pathos and 
 the tragedy of hidden change. 
 
 Twenty-five years ago, the typical New England 
 village was homogeneous in character and simple 
 in life. Hardly a foreigner could be found among 
 a population born and bred in the same commu- 
 nity, for the most part in the same houses. Di- 
 versities there were, for our New England stock 
 ' Shakespeare, Hamlet, i. 5. 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 31 
 
 has always been rich in original varieties, but the 
 common types of character, the broad currents of 
 habit, thought, and life remained unchanged al- 
 most for generations. Neighbors in place were 
 neighbors in fact, and the life of the village was 
 like the life of a large and overgrown family. The 
 church was easily the centre of social interest, and 
 the Sunday meeting drew families together from 
 scattered farms, the sole relief to the monotony 
 and unvarying routine of daily life. How differ- 
 ent the New England village of to-day! The 
 homogeneous life, broken up within, has grown 
 heterogeneous from without, almost cosmopolite 
 indeed. The great tides of immigration, setting 
 in for years from every part of Europe, and later 
 from Asia also, have turned aside from the broad 
 course of the West, overflowed the bounds of the 
 city, and reached the larger villages ; while the 
 less noticed influx from the provinces on our 
 Northern border has been felt in smaller ham- 
 lets and scattered farms. In outward aspect, in 
 population, affected in her turn and measure like 
 the other States, New England remains no more 
 the staid, conservative, unchanging community of 
 thirty years ago. 
 
 Under this outward aspect, deeper and more 
 vital differences are found. Industrial changes, 
 added to the change of population, have modified 
 
32 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 our social customs, individual habits, ways of 
 thought. The framework of society is subtly al- 
 tered. Interests are isolated, men have grown 
 apart: a common feeling is lost, mutual indiffer- 
 ence succeeds, classes are strongly marked and 
 separated. The simpler conditions of the past 
 have gone ; relations "grow strained, new social 
 problems arise, ethical questions become multi- 
 plied and complex. Differences in thought and 
 life, growing out of differences of inheritance, 
 birth, training, and association, are not lightly 
 overcome. Men misunderstand one another, and 
 a common standard is lost. 
 
 Nor can these difficulties be studied in their 
 local setting alone. The little world of the village 
 opens by a hundred avenues into the larger world 
 without. Intercourse is unbroken ; the daily paper 
 carries the common thought, opinion, prejudice, 
 to the farthest point, diffuses common intelligence 
 and common ignorance, and makes all problems, 
 all troubles, however local or distant in their be- 
 ginnings, a burden to be borne by all. The tide 
 of change reaches the remotest village with restless 
 ebb and flow, and the mighty pulses of the great 
 world's life are felt to-day in the lowliest hamlet. 
 
 Under such conditions, what new significance is 
 given to Wesley's motto, in whichever way the 
 words are turned ! " My parish is the world," 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 33 
 
 every pastor may say, as be reflects on all the di- 
 verse elements that meet in the smallest commu- 
 nity, and remembers from what distant quarters 
 these elements have been drawn ! " The world is 
 my parish," he may add, when he finds his peo- 
 ple's thoughts and feelings affected by events so 
 far away, and feels their lives drawn slowly but 
 surely into the current of the great world's move- 
 ment! Is stagnation necessary in such a pastor- 
 ate ? Is it even possible ? 
 
 But the pastor must be more than a passive ob- 
 server, a curious and interested witness, in the 
 midst of these shifting scenes ; he must be an 
 actor on the stage. Nor is it enough, if his in- 
 dividual part is taken well; he is called to give 
 motive and harmony to the movement of others. 
 Here is incentive to largest effort: here is room 
 for the exercise of patience, the discipline of 
 thought, sagacious and far-sighted. Has any age 
 made more demands than this? 
 
 The church cannot remain untouched by these 
 changes all around her ; she must hear and heed 
 the call of each new occasion. If her members 
 grow lethargic, it is the pastor's task to awaken 
 them, and set more clearly before their eyes the 
 duties of to-day. In each community, along all 
 lines of modern movement, in society, business, 
 politics, the highest Christian principle, as already 
 2 
 
34 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 understood, needs to be made effective and para- 
 mount by the influence of an aroused, united 
 church. Religious problems, also, more complex 
 than in other days, demand for their solution 
 larger intelligence and charity, sympathy and 
 patience. The diverse elements in every church, 
 all ages and all classes, must be not simply har- 
 monized, but lifted into some broader union, knit 
 together as members of one body by diverse yet 
 mutual service. Organization, so potent a factor 
 in all our work to-day, must be extended here and 
 informed with life, until the church has brought 
 her special blessing near the whole community and 
 home to every heart. Above all, the old, original 
 gospel, a common Father, a common Master, a 
 common brotherhood, a common life, pure, sweet, 
 and strong, as in the earliest Christian age, freed 
 from all subtleties of metaphysics, whether Greek 
 or Roman, whether mediaeval or modern, made 
 plain to meet each daily need, most human be- 
 cause most divine, must come with growing clear- 
 ness from the preacher's lips, and through the life 
 of preacher and of people too, until all men under- 
 stand and feel its power. How large, how diffi- 
 cult, this task must prove, how slowly its results 
 will come, no pastor need be told. But he who 
 in the hardest field holds this ideal steadfastly be- 
 fore his own eyes and before his church, finds 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 35 
 
 interest and courage as the years go on; and he 
 who believes the gospel still divine will never 
 doubt the large fulfillment yet to come. Mean- 
 while, the very discipline of every day develops 
 mind and heart, enlarges his experience, deepens 
 his love for all humanity around him, and gives 
 his ministry an ever varied and absorbing claim 
 and charm. 
 
 III. A third and last direction in which the 
 minister feels the changed conditions of to-day is 
 in the cure of souls. I like this good old phrase 
 which has too largely passed out of use. It lays 
 the emphasis on the pastor's special work; it 
 makes distinct and imperative the individual rela- 
 tion in which he stands to every member of his 
 church and parish, the claim of every heart on his 
 peculiar care. 
 
 This close and individual relation to every soul 
 has always been ideal, rather than actual, indeed ; 
 an object to be held in view, not an end at any 
 time attained. And the possibilities of fulfilling 
 this charge to-day would seem at first far less 
 than in other days. To the ordinary observer, in- 
 deed, there is no respect in which the function 
 of the ministry and the life of the parish have 
 changed more evidently and more completely than 
 this. We have read in religious histories and 
 memoirs, and our mothers and fathers have told 
 
86 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 us, how the minister of other days made his stated 
 round of the parish, gathering each family to- 
 gether in turn, the parents with their children, 
 and questioning each person in regard to his spir- 
 itual welfare and his knowledge of the Bible and 
 the catechism. This custom has wholly passed 
 away, and cannot be revived under present condi- 
 tions ; and this, it is said, was clearly faithful pas- 
 toral work, a true cure of souls, in place of which 
 no regular and systematic method has been de- 
 vised, and for which the desultory and often in- 
 judicious teaching of the modern Sunday-school is 
 at best a very imperfect substitute. Of the value 
 of this custom in its time and place, and as wisely 
 used, I have no doubt : of the decline in religious 
 knowledge among our people, whatever the cause 
 may be, I fear there can be no question ; and of 
 the insufficiency of the Sunday-school at its best 
 to take the place of definite personal teaching I 
 am also profoundly convinced. But, for all this, 
 the custom here described was never in a strict 
 sense the cure of souls, whatever opportunity it 
 may have opened for further acquaintance with 
 individual hearts ; it belonged to the preacher, to 
 the teacher at least, not distinctively to the pastor. 
 Catechizing, however useful and excellent, must 
 not be confounded with the cure of souls. And 
 the pastor never has fulfilled his charge until his 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 87 
 
 own soul meets the soul he would help, alone, un- 
 distracted, with all the freedom and confidence of 
 personal intimacy. This highest form of ministry- 
 was needed and was exercised in other days : it 
 cannot be outgrown ; the need, and the opportu- 
 nity, were never greater, I believe, than now. 
 
 The very absence of that religious training com- 
 mon in the past makes this need of personal min- 
 istry the greater. Fifty years ago, every man of 
 average intelligence in a New England parish had 
 his memory stored with accepted truths : they were 
 held in the head, it may be, not in the heart ; the 
 formulas in which they were cast were narrow and 
 rigid ; grave errors grew around the truths, crude 
 superstitions mingled with the teaching in the 
 hearer's mind ; but the truths were there, unques- 
 tioned, lodged firmly in the thought, a safeguard 
 against temptation, an anchor in trouble. To-day, 
 no such reserve force remains to the man of aver- 
 age intelligence. The old superstitions are gone, 
 but the truths, once solid, seem to him shaken too. 
 He has not thought beyond them, or away from 
 them ; he has only been caught up and carried 
 along, unthinking, by the current around him. 
 He has lost the partial, outward support of tradi- 
 tional, inherited, almost unconscious beliefs ; he 
 has not found the inward surety of personal faith ; 
 he feels himself unanchored, on the open sea. 
 
38 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 adrift. What he needs is the strength of a brave, 
 calm, Christian friendship, of a faith incarnate in 
 another's life, intelligent, broad, and open of 
 mind ; fearless, also, because sure of itself, and 
 far more sure of the Master; able thus in His 
 Name to reach out the hand of ready helpfulness, 
 revealing life through life. Through such faith 
 and friendship, the pastor must fulfill his charge 
 in common life to-day. 
 
 Others there are in every parish, fewer in num- 
 ber than the class just mentioned, for whom this 
 personal ministry is yet more needful. These are 
 the young and thoughtful minds, interested in all 
 living movements of our age, sensitive to the mod- 
 ern spirit, questioning all forms, all facts, all 
 faiths, to find a higher truth. Bound by no tra- 
 ditions of the past, unfettered by present conven- 
 tion, they seem to timid minds irreverent. Among 
 older and religious people, both deference and dis- 
 cretion may keep them silent ; but the silence only 
 hides the widening distance between their thoughts 
 and the beaten paths behind them. These spirits 
 also need a friend to win their slow and jealous 
 confidence, call out their full confession, enter into 
 their every doubt ; a friend of riper years, taught 
 from his own experience, trained in the Master's 
 school to understanding, sympathy, and patience : 
 skillful to lead, not force, their steps from the few 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 39 
 
 things they still find true to the higher truth not 
 found as yet ; able to reveal that higher truth 
 through life before the laggard thought has 
 learned the way. This task of faith and friend- 
 ship, this personal ministry, may fall indeed to 
 any brave, strong, tender Christian soul ; it needs 
 the inward grace alone, no laying on of hands im- 
 parts the heavenly gift ; but the pastor must 
 surely count this service a sacred, most impor- 
 tant part of his mission. 
 
 These spirits, and not the men of easier faith 
 and lighter thought, must shape and mould the 
 movement of the church that is to be; out of 
 their difficulties, their doubts, once overcome, their 
 usefulness and strength will grow ; their own ex- 
 perience will discipline them to broader, better ser- 
 vice. The pastor who wins them builds not for 
 the present only, but for the future; he serves 
 another generation beside his own ; he reaches 
 through these consecrated lives a wider circle than 
 his eyes can measure, or his faith can foresee. 
 
 How delicate, how difficult, under these condi- 
 tions the pastor's task has grown ! What fine rare 
 gifts of nature and of grace this personal minis- 
 try demands ! What heavenly wisdom must blend 
 with human tenderness in him who is called to dis- 
 charge this service ! Like the Great Angel of the 
 Gate, in Dante's Vision, the pastor of to-day must 
 
40 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 bear two keys, one of gold and one of silver. The 
 golden key is the symbol of his true authority 
 within the church, received from Christ himself. 
 The silver key, which always he first puts in use, 
 betokens that wisdom of spiritual adaptation, 
 taught through experience and lowly patience, by 
 which he learns to discern and deal with each 
 heart aright : — 
 
 " Pill cara 6 1' una ; ma 1' altra vuol troppa 
 D' arte e d' ingegno, avanti che disserri, 
 Perch' ell' k quella che il nodo disgroppa." ^ 
 
 " There was no Iron," says a quaint old Eng- 
 lish writer, — " There was no Iron in any of the 
 Stuff or Utensils of the Sanctuary. Hard and In- 
 flexible Spirits are not fit for the Service of the 
 Church." 2 The Hard Church, a modern essayist 
 styles men of this type and temper ; and their 
 unfitness for the delicate task before us, his own 
 words well point out. " The Hard Church," he 
 writes, " necessarily relies on what may be called 
 the inorganic laws of human thought and action, 
 and ignores the more delicate laws of growth and 
 change discoverable in social and individual char- 
 acter." ^ How fatal this omission ! Here lies the 
 
 1 Dante, Purgatorio, vol. ix. lines 124^126. 
 
 2 John Edwards, The Preacher, vol. i. p. 169. 
 ' R. H. Hutton, Theological Essays, p. 340. 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 41 
 
 key to the whole difficulty ; and here, by contrast, 
 we learn what type and temper the pastor's task 
 to-day demands. " The inorganic laws of human 
 thought and action," — how narrow their sphere 
 has grown ! " In social and individual charac- 
 ter," how much more clearly " the delicate laws of 
 growth and change" are now discerned! With 
 life, not mechanism, the pastor deals to-day ; and 
 life, subtle and elusive everywhere, above all in 
 the human spirit, cannot be rudely grasped ; it 
 yields alone to the finer touch of love. By under- 
 standing, sympathy, and patience, this delicate 
 charge must be fulfilled; and as these graces of 
 the spirit grow, the pastor's life will bring to 
 others, and to himself, the larger blessing. 
 
 In the duties of the pastorate, then, as in the 
 broader field of public service and in the inter- 
 pretation of the Scriptures to his age, the minister 
 of Jesus Christ is called to-day to a mission of 
 unmeasured possibilities and growing power. In 
 this direction, also, as in those already followed, 
 the claim of the ministry is as clear, its work as 
 large, and its attraction as strong as in other days. 
 
 Thus, in a manner of necessity discursive, but 
 not desultory, as I hope, I have followed the broad 
 lines along which my subject seemed to lead. 
 "With all the widening changes in thought and 
 life to-day, changes affecting our conditions and 
 
42 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 our conceptions also, the place and claim of the 
 Christian ministry, we find, remain. And if any 
 of its glories, as the world may count them, have 
 passed away, they were only outward : the glory 
 which abides is alone inward and excelleth. Non 
 m/inistrari, sed ministrare, was the Master's 
 motto ; in ministry, in personal service, not in 
 any honors of place or power, preacher and pastor 
 find their true distinction. Such service the world 
 still needs, needs more indeed for the very changes 
 of the present : a ministry, deep, earnest, spirit- 
 ual, that speaks from life, — through life, — to 
 life. And with a Scripture to interpret, no longer 
 a dead letter but a living Word, in a society so 
 rich in varied life and movement, to hearts on 
 every hand that yearn for light and help, no more 
 absorbing charge can claim the consecrated soul 
 than such a ministry. 
 
 The limitations * of my theme have made my 
 view but partial. The great, eternal features of 
 the preacher's and the pastor's work have been 
 lightly touched : the interests which are not changed 
 have not come within my purpose. My task has 
 been to seize distinctive features created or empha- 
 sized at least by the changed conditions of to-day. 
 The highest feature I have reserved until the last. 
 I count this an inestimable blessing to preacher 
 and pastor alike : that never more truly than now. 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 43 
 
 under no conditions more fully than under ours, 
 has the minister been called to personal following 
 of his Master, both in the method of his work and 
 in the source and spring of his power. The only- 
 authority that carries moral and spiritual weight 
 to-day is the authority of character. And the 
 character of Jesus Christ the world makes its only 
 standard for judging the motives and conduct of 
 his disciples. However impatient it may be with 
 creed and dogma and ritual, it recognizes under 
 all differences of name and communion kinship in 
 deed and character with Him ; and for such kinship 
 it shows profoundest reverence. To be like Him 
 must always be the minister's ideal ; but lower 
 standards and confusing tests of men how often 
 divert the mind from the higher purpose ! How 
 helpful it should prove, when the world's own 
 expectation seeks that supreme and single level! 
 Again, the methods of the Master's ministry, so 
 personal, so delicate, so carefully adapted to indi- 
 vidual need, were never more in keeping with the 
 pastor's work than now. And as he studies in 
 each detail the Master's tenderness and searching 
 insight, or strives and prays to catch the gracious 
 spirit that informs the living gospel as a whole, 
 his inward life must grow in likeness to his Lord 
 with each new measure that he gains of the three- 
 fold gift of ministry, — understanding, sympathy, 
 and patience. 
 
44 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 
 
 For thirteen years it has been my privilege to 
 share the work of preacher and of pastor. That 
 work I leave with sincere reluctance, and only at 
 the call of what seems a nearer, but I dare not 
 say a higher, duty. Through all these years, the 
 present opportunity and the great ideal of this 
 calling have grown upon me, until I feel that every 
 preacher, like St. Paul, should glorify his ministry; 
 Sofa^ci) is the Apostle's word. But when I remember 
 how far achievement lags behind ideal, how even 
 this imperfect picture I have drawn puts the reality 
 to shame, I am moved to borrow from St. Gregory, 
 the earliest and still the keenest analyst of the 
 pastor's charge, his closing words : — 
 
 " Dum monstrare qualis esse debeat pastor In- 
 vigilo, pulchrura depinxi hominem pictor f oedus : 
 aliosque ad perfectionis littus dirigo, qui adhuc in 
 delictorum fluctibus versor." ^ 
 
 It has been the honor of this seat of sacred 
 learning, it has been the honor of this special chair 
 into which I am now inducted, that it has stead- 
 fastly upheld a high ideal of the Christian minis- 
 try. My three more immediate predecessors had 
 each a distinct and important part in this great 
 work. One sketched in broad and masterly out- 
 line the ideal of a strong and Intellectual preacher. 
 
 ^ S. Gregorii Magni, Regulce Pastoralis Liber, sub fine. 
 
PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 45 
 
 Another filled in the picture with almost infinite 
 fineness of detail. The third inspired the preach- 
 er's heart with visions of wider fields of service and 
 of conquest. To keep these fair ideals fresh and 
 living still, as in the dear and memorable days 
 gone by, and to help my younger brethren to 
 realize and seize the growing opportunities, the 
 urgent claims, the distinctive attractions, of the 
 ministry to-day, is the task to which, with the 
 blessing of God, I would now devote my life. 
 
LECTUEES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 I. 
 
 Introduction. — Explanation of Terms. — Primitive and 
 Fnndamental Elements in Preaching. 
 
 HoMiLETics, it must be premised at the begin- 
 ning of our discussion, is at once a science and an 
 art : it covers both the theory and the practice of 
 preaching, " A science," says Whewell, himself 
 a passed master in both departments, " a science 
 teaches us to know ; an art, to do." The distinc- 
 tion is well drawn and concisely stated ; it has an 
 evident value in giving definiteness and precision 
 to our use of terms : but doing, we must not for- 
 get, can never be really divorced from knowing, 
 and in the higher arts and sciences, especially, 
 the relations between theory and practice are most 
 subtle and vital. The distinction of Whewell, 
 therefore, must be supplemented by the earlier 
 dictum of Dr. Campbell : " AU art is founded in 
 science, and the science is of little value which 
 does not serve as a foundation to some beneficial 
 art." In the study now before us, at least, both 
 statements must be held clearly in mind, and the 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 47 
 
 inferences which follow from each should be car- 
 ried to their just conclusion. 
 
 Preaching, then, is an art. And art, by its very- 
 name, implies adaptation : it implies training, also, 
 discipline, acquired skill, superadded to any and 
 to all native gifts. We need not long delay over 
 the old objection, so often brought forward and 
 refuted, which, from the peculiar sacredness of his 
 calling, declared the preacher free from all rules, 
 from all human art. This objection has passed 
 away, together with the kindred idea of genius as 
 something above all law, a law unto itself alone. 
 Genius, we have learned, is not emancipation 
 from law, unfettered lawlessness and caprice : it 
 is, rather, the finer, higher, more perfect fulfill- 
 ment of law, drawn from insight instead of reason- 
 ing, and wrought out in a freer, often an uncon- 
 scious spirit. Inspiration, also, in the preacher as 
 in the Word he is sent to interpret, is no irregu- 
 lar, spasmodic, uncertain impulse; it respects the 
 nature which it informs ; it works, not above nor 
 apart from, but through the laws of human intelli- 
 gence. Art, on the other hand, true art, is not 
 lifeless mechanism, a contradiction of nature ; 
 rather, it is the parallel, or better, the continuation 
 of nature, working through kindred and organic 
 laws toward a kindred end. There is no irrev- 
 erence, therefore, in the bold hyperbole of Sir 
 
48 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 Thomas Browne, Nature is the art of God. And 
 Montaigne but expresses the same thought in sub- 
 tler, more impersonal form, when he writes : "II 
 faut que la nature s'artialise." The sacredness of 
 the ministry, then, suffers no detraction when we 
 speak of preaching as an art, and insist upon the 
 need of discipline and intelligent practice in him 
 who would discharge aright this sacred function. 
 
 Beside the art of preaching, there is a science 
 of preaching, also. The word, science, sounds at 
 first unnatural and incongruous in this connection, 
 but there is no other word to express the idea. 
 Theory is sometimes used, the Theory of Preach- 
 ing ; but the term is too subjective : it lacks the 
 outward solidity, the firmness, of established fact. 
 Science is our only term to cover a broad, com- 
 plete, systematic setting forth of the body of laws, 
 and of principles below those laws, on which all 
 art must rest. If all art, to borrow the language 
 of Dr. Campbell again, is founded in science, then 
 the larger, the more difficult and complex a given 
 art may be, the deeper must these foundations be 
 laid.^ The reign of empiricism is always narrow as 
 
 1 In practical art, says Whewell, principles are unseen 
 glides, leading ns by invisible strings through paths where 
 the end alone is looked at. It is for science to direct and 
 purge our vision, so that these airy ties, these principles and 
 laws, generalizations and theories, become distinct objects of 
 vision. — Quoted by Kidder, Homiletics. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 49 
 
 well as short-lived. The preacher whose art rests 
 on no broader basis than his own practice and 
 personal experience will find although knowledge 
 comes, that wisdom, which is far more important 
 and useful, lingers still. The broader, on the 
 other hand, the preacher's survey of his chosen 
 science, and the closer his study both of the mas- 
 ters of his special calling and of the principles 
 upon which all preaching rests, the more effective 
 and permanent his own work will become. There 
 is generally little originality in error. The larger 
 part of our own mistakes have been made many 
 times before us : we might have avoided them 
 had our intelligence been greater ; and knowledge 
 bought by experience costs too dear, if it comes 
 too late to be used. If we would put the ripened 
 wisdom of others, then, in place of that tardy 
 knowledge we ourselves might gain, if we would 
 anticipate thus the slow results of experience, we 
 must add science to art, or, better, we must build 
 our art on the broad, deep foundations of science. 
 
 There is, then, an art of preaching; there is a 
 science of preaching also ; and the relations which 
 bind them together are close and vital. You can- 
 not separate them without serious loss to both. 
 This is true in a measure of any study of homi- 
 letics, however theoretical that study may be, even 
 although it be taken up merely as an object of 
 4 
 
50 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 curious interest, with no intent to carry the prin- 
 ciples discovered into practice. In nature and 
 essence, indeed, neither the art nor the science can 
 be understood apart from the other. But it is 
 true in still larger measure of the study as we now 
 approach it, with a practical purpose, and within 
 definite limits of time. Throughout the discussion 
 on which we enter, then, at every step we must 
 keep the art and the science side by side ; we must 
 remember the twofold truth, as art has its begin- 
 ning in science, so science has its end in art. Each 
 theory must be tested by practice ; all practice 
 must be measured and judged under the broader, 
 clearer light of theory. Both science and art, both 
 theory and practice, however, have their chief in- 
 terest and value for us in their distinct relation to 
 the actual work of the preacher, as they deepen 
 and enlarge the power and permanent effectiveness 
 with which he fulfils his sacred charge. 
 
 At this point, in a line with the considerations 
 already offered, certain familiar terms must be 
 noted and explained. The list is not long ; it is 
 not meant to be exhaustive ; such words alone are 
 chosen as throw some light by their derivation 
 and usage upon our study as a whole, and thus de- 
 velop stiU further the general idea of preaching 
 in its nature and essence. Where this purpose 
 is served, minuteness of detail may well be par- 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 51 
 
 doned. " Homiletics " and "homily," "sermon" 
 and " preaching," call for special attention and 
 definition. 
 
 Homiletics, like certain names of other and 
 more familiar sciences, like ethics, mathematics, 
 physics, for instance, though plural in form, is 
 treated to-day as a noun in the singular. Usage 
 even now, however, is not entirely uniform, and 
 before the present century it inclined in the other 
 direction, all these words being made plural in 
 syntax as well as form. The form itself has been 
 explained as, in part, an imitation of Greek usage 
 in words from which these terms were taken, to. 
 yidiKo., TO. (jivo-iKo., and, in part, as due to the range 
 and complexity of the subjects covered by the 
 sciences in question. But neither explanation can 
 be counted complete or satisfactory : both are 
 found wanting in the particular case before us. 
 If the range of subject covered be considered, 
 there is no reason why rhetoric, the genus, should 
 be in the singular, and homiletics, generally con- 
 sidered as a species, in the plural. And if Grreek 
 usage were to determine, homiletics, like mathe- 
 matics, should be singular in form. For the later 
 Greek of Plutarch, at least, recognized homiletic 
 as the art of conversation. 
 
 Homiletics and homily, to pass from the form 
 to the meaning, belong to a group of words, the 
 
52 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 origin and relations of which it is not a piece of 
 pedantry, but a useful study to trace. The mean- 
 ing of this group in the New Testament, and in 
 the early church, must be noticed. "O/ttXos, the 
 original of the little group, has not been trans- 
 ferred to other and modern tongues : it occurs but 
 once in the New Testament, and there is omitted 
 by the best texts (Rev. xviii. 17), to describe the 
 crowd that throng the ships and witness the over- 
 throw of Babylon: a mingled multitude, united 
 by common fear and wonderment. '0/ttA.ta, the 
 original form of " homily," occurs but once also in 
 the New Testament, but in an unquestioned pas- 
 sage (1 Cor. XV. 33), in the verse borrowed by St. 
 Paul from the Thais of Menander, and restored 
 by the Revisers to its rightful meaning. " Evil 
 company," not communications, " doth corrupt 
 good manners," (ftOtipova-tv ^Orj xt"!"'^' ofiiXiai KaKaL 
 The verb, o/u,t\eiv, is found four times in the New 
 Testament. Twice it is used of the two disciples 
 on the way to Emmaus, " they communed with 
 each other, . . . while they communed together " 
 (Luke xxiv. 14, 15) ; once of St. Paul at Troas, 
 " and talked a long while " (Acts xx. 11) ; and 
 once of Felix, who, after the pointed preaching of 
 the apostle, " sent for him the oftener, and com- 
 muned with him " (Acts xxiv. 26). 
 
 These few instances show us how this group of 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 53 
 
 words passed from their first use, of a casual 
 crowd gathered by a slight and momentary inter- 
 est in common, through a regular and formal fel- 
 lowship, to the familiar converse, the friendly talk, 
 that made the delight of such association. In 
 classic Greek, these words had been used of the 
 communion and intercourse, and especially of the 
 enlightening conversation of philosophers with 
 their pupils. Xenophon applies them to Socrates 
 in the Memorabilia, I. ii. 6, 15. This further 
 meaning of instruction, some would find in the 
 o/itX^o-as of St. Paul at Troas. His conversation 
 there is supposed to have taken the form of expo- 
 sition, like the nt£7"T^, which formed part of the reg- 
 ular service in the synagogue, and which might be 
 delivered by priest, or elder, or any other compe- 
 tent person. Traces of this custom can be seen 
 both in the Acts and in the Gospels. The address 
 of the Master in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 
 iv. 16-21) was such a ntl^Tl ; such also was the 
 word of exhortation which the rulers of the syna- 
 gogue asked of St. Paul and Barnabas at Anti- 
 oeh in Pisidia (Acts xiii. 15). From the syna- 
 gogue the custom was carried over to the church, 
 and the name of homily was early given to such 
 a discourse, in which, as Justin Martyr tells us 
 (Apol. c. 67), the minister admonishes the people, 
 stirring them up to an imitation of the good works 
 
54 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 which have been brought before their notice. At 
 a later date, a more formal address was introduced 
 under the name of Xoyo's, but the simpler exposition 
 still held its place and was known as a homily. 
 Through the Latin Church, under the influence of 
 the Old French form, the word passed into our 
 language, together with its cognate and derivative 
 terms. Less common to-day than in older usage, 
 the homily preserves with us its special sense, and 
 is applied to a simple, homely, often informal ex- 
 position of scriptural teaching. Of such a char- 
 acter were the Books of Homilies set forth in the 
 reigns of Edward VI. and of Queen Elizabeth, 
 which were so long and so widely used in the Eng- 
 lish Church. 
 
 A gathered multitude ; a united and permanent 
 fellowship ; a common thought and language grow- 
 ing out of great interests held in common ; an ele- 
 ment of instruction, or, in broader and more spir- 
 itual terms, of ediflcation ; — these are the succes- 
 sive ideas which the history of this group of words 
 suggests. The suggestion goes far beyond the 
 narrow limits of the homily as now defined : it 
 marks the shape and color of the early conception 
 of all preaching ; it reaches in its effects the whole 
 science and art of homiletics. We pause, then, 
 to gather from this special study a further idea of 
 the character of Christian preaching at the begin- 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 55 
 
 ning, and to find therein certain fundamental ele- 
 ments which remain through all changes to mould 
 and direct our general conception of discourse in 
 the pulpit. 
 
 1. Christian preaching begins in the Christian 
 society : it has its roots in the Christian Church. 
 The 6;utXta proceeds from the ojxikoi. The college 
 of the apostles was the centre of the apostolic 
 ministry. The multitude of the disciples in the 
 upper room were the united and permanent fellow- 
 ship that antedated St. Peter's first sermon, and 
 from which the first preaching of the Word went 
 forth. And, however far the early missionaries 
 may have gone from the church at home, they 
 never forgot the bonds that united them with her 
 fellowship, nor suffered the strength and meaning 
 of their spiritual relation to her to be lost. They 
 were still, in St. Paul's significant phrase, apostles 
 of Christ, and apostles of the churches also, and the 
 glory of Christ, a,Tr6(rTo\oi iKKXyjcnav, Sofa Xpto'ToC. 
 
 This truth in the early conception of preaching 
 is not, and cannot be outgrown ; but, in churches 
 of freer form especially, it is far too often over- 
 looked. Where the emphasis is laid, as with our 
 churches, on no formal, outward union, but upon 
 unity of spirit within, there is the greater need 
 that the united, continuous, divine life through the 
 1 2 Cor. viii. 23. 
 
56 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 individual church should be deeply realized by her 
 members. For the sake of others, then, and for 
 his own sake, on the very threshold of his minis- 
 try every preacher should feel his close relation 
 as a preacher to the organic life of the church he 
 serves. To feel and share this life before his work 
 begins will help him toward a true ideal of his 
 calling : to make his people also realize this com- 
 mon life with growing power is essential to the 
 fulfilment of his own great charge. As a preacher, 
 he must speak both to the church and from the 
 church unto the world. In each direction, his 
 words will gather force and impulse from the 
 united life he feels behind his utterance. In both 
 appeals he should speak, not as an individual 
 alone, but as the voice of a living community, 
 an eternal fellowship. Beside him, as the elders 
 stood by Ezra on his pulpit of wood, on the right 
 hand and the left, in spirit if not in form, stands 
 the church he represents, with which his life is 
 united : through his lips, wherever he carries the 
 message of the Gospel, both the Spirit and the 
 Bride say, Come ! And when he is called to teach 
 a deeper, larger truth within the church, through 
 this living fellowship he gains a clearer insight, a 
 broader sympathy, a more persuasive accent. The 
 experience of the church, when this common life is 
 touched, answers to his appeal and rises to better 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 57 
 
 understanding and service. No brilliant play of 
 individual, but isolated, genius, no personal, un- 
 shared experience even, however profound, can 
 equal in deep and permanent effect that preach- 
 ing which strikes its roots in Christian fellowship, 
 which speaks from the church to the church, and 
 through the church to men. From the o/iiXos comes 
 the ofiiXia still. 
 
 2. Christian preaching moves in the circle of 
 Christian truths. As preaching began within the 
 church, so it drew its theme from the common 
 source of Christian life. It dwelt with largest 
 emphasis, with strongest insistence, on the com- 
 mon truths on which the church was built. Its 
 spirit was exposition from the first : it sought to 
 sound more deeply, and bring forth more clearly, 
 the divine, revealed, indwelling Word. Even the 
 later, more formal address, no less than the sim- 
 pler homily, dwelt upon these central, distinctive. 
 Christian truths ; all else was incidental to the 
 development of these. 
 
 This feature of the primitive conception, also, 
 is fundamental and abiding. Christian preaching 
 has not exhausted, it cannot exhaust, the power 
 and meaning of the Gospel : it still moves, there- 
 fore, within the circle of Christian truths. JV^on 
 nova, sed nove, has ever been its motto. It seeks 
 to make the old, familiar truth felt with new force 
 
58 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 rather than to discover some new message. It 
 finds the Word that came of old, when interpreted 
 by the living Spirit, made new to meet the chan- 
 ging needs of each generation, and proved thereby 
 both living and divine. The streams of life, which 
 always are flowing forth, reveal the living source 
 from which they are derived. 
 
 All this implies no narrowing of the preacher's 
 sympathies or of his research. It puts no check 
 upon the freedom of his movement, or the breadth 
 and keenness of his interest in any realm of hu- 
 man thought. It involves, indeed, a close and con- 
 stant study of whatever gives him a better under- 
 standing of his age, and of the Scriptures in their 
 largest, deepest meaning. It leaves his mind both 
 open and sensitive to every change in growth and 
 light, and his heart both hospitable and sympa- 
 thetic toward every form of genuine faith and 
 aspiration among men. But it implies, on the 
 other hand, his clear, profound conviction that the 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ alone contains enough of 
 truth and power, of light and heat, to redeem man- 
 kind, and create a new, divine type of character. 
 Such a conviction his study of the world with all 
 its forms and faiths may well confirm, as it makes 
 plain the universal need, while his personal know- 
 ledge of the unfailing power of the Gospel in its 
 present effects within him and around him will 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 59 
 
 give his message positiveuess, and point, and 
 fervor. 
 
 The great, distinctive Christian truths made the 
 strength of the earliest preachers ; they make the 
 strength of all vital preaching to-day. Not the 
 truths which the Gospel shares with earlier faiths, 
 not the interpretations which metaphysics puts 
 upon the plainest teaching, not the lesser, although 
 distinctive. Christian truths. The circle of great 
 truths, rather, Christ's revelation of the Father 
 and the Spirit, of man in the divine purpose, the 
 present failure and the largest possibility, of men 
 in their relation to one another and to Him, — these 
 are the dynamics of the preacher, here is his lever 
 with which to move the world. In this circle his 
 preaching will turn. 
 
 3. Christian preaching takes its rise in conver- 
 sation ; it is set in the conversational key. When 
 o/iiXia gained the special sense of speech, it carried 
 still the old associations, drawn from a broader, 
 but friendly, familiar intercourse. The warmth of 
 Christian fellowship was felt through the earliest 
 preaching, and inspired the name first applied to 
 such discourse. And when the statelier sermon 
 and the larger gathering of disciples seemed re- 
 mote from these humble beginnings, the greatest 
 of early preachers retained the glow, the homely 
 nearness, of the primitive form. Of Chrysostom's 
 
60 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 addresses, a later writer says : " They are called 
 speeches [or sermons, Xdyoi], but they are more 
 like homilies, for this reason, above others, that he 
 again and again addresses his hearers as actually 
 present before his eyes." ^ The language, whether 
 compliment or censure, is striking. 
 
 It may be questioned whether oratory of any 
 kind is rightly set in any other key; whether at 
 least our present age admits a different style from 
 this. The speeches of John Bright and of Wendell 
 Phillips, and our generation has seen no orators 
 who take precedence of these two, have proved 
 that the conversational style leaves room for the 
 highest flights of eloquence, while it preserves 
 throughout the strength, the sanity, the absolute 
 reality of common speech. But whatever may be 
 said of other forms of public speaking, in preach- 
 ing, at least, this quality is indispensable. The 
 poet, as Wordsworth has taught us, no less than 
 the man of science, must compose with his eye 
 upon the object, if his verse is to share the reality, 
 the inevitableness, of nature. And the preacher 
 must think, and speak, and write, if write he must, 
 with his eye upon his hearers, or, better, St. Paul 
 would say, w^ith his hearers always in his heart; 
 otherwise he may produce a faultless essay, but 
 he will miss the true effect of preaching. In the 
 ^ Photius, quoted by Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, p. 110. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 61 
 
 process of writing sermons, especially, this maxim 
 needs to be remembered. The absent hearers must 
 be pictured, felt, addressed, as present, actually- 
 present before the eyes, as the early critic said of 
 Chrysostom. This power of realizing the presence 
 of others in the solitude of thought, and, hence, of 
 speaking or writing as if conscious of the listening 
 ear and the interested, responsive eye ; this power 
 varies widely in the measure of native endowment. 
 You feel it in a marked degree in the best of letter 
 writers, like William Cowper. But the poorest 
 native gift may be cultivated almost beyond belief, 
 and, like other kinds of imagination, this should be 
 developed and trained for the preacher's special 
 purpose. Such training comes more readily, of 
 course, when the preacher has a congregation of 
 his own, and when the faces he sees from week to 
 week before him become familiar by social inter- 
 course and expressive by reason of personal ac- 
 quaintance. But even from the irregular and scat- 
 tered opportunities which the student finds, he may 
 by patient effort call up and construct a congrega- 
 tion to people his study, and give life and reality 
 to his solitary thought. And from the very be- 
 ginning of. his ministry, the preacher should not 
 forget that his art began in friendly. Christian 
 conversation, and that the point, directness, and 
 personal interest of the early preachers are needed 
 still to clothe his words with power. 
 
62 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 4. Christian preaching from the beginning 
 sought to instruct and edify the hearer. The 
 ofjuXia of Socrates was meant to teach and to en- 
 lighten his pupils. The exposition of the syna- 
 gogue unfolded and made more clear the truth of 
 Scripture. And from the first great sermon of St. 
 Peter in the Acts, to reach the conscience through 
 the mind and the heart has been the aim of Chris- 
 tian preaching. While the Christian Church and 
 fellowship gave motive and occasion for the preach- 
 er's words, while the common truth below their 
 united life made the basis of his witness, while the 
 tone in which he spoke was familiar and conver- 
 sational, there was always a higher point from 
 which the preacher addressed his hearers, and to- 
 ward which he strove to lift their thoughts and 
 their lives. Not a sermon in the Acts, not an 
 Epistle in the New Testament, forgets this twofold 
 purpose, or fails to find therein a basis for direct 
 appeal. 
 
 This twofold purpose, to instruct and to edify, 
 the preacher needs to bear in mind to-day. In 
 every sermon, whatever its special aim and end 
 may be, both elements should find their place. 
 Whether the church or the world be directly ad- 
 dressed, respect for the hearers demands them 
 both. Without them, all fervor of appeal is like 
 the crackling of thorns, a moment's blaze, but no 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 63 
 
 lasting heat. A just appeal, and no other has an 
 abiding force, must bear examination at the bar of 
 the hearer's mind, after the sound of the preacher's 
 voice has ceased. The earnest, honest effort to 
 instruct and edify, to make some truth more plain 
 and real, will alone endure that test. 
 
 But the preacher, it may be said, cannot always 
 speak from a higher point than his hearers have 
 gained. Their acquaintance both with the world 
 and with the Word of God may be wider than his ; 
 their experience may be larger and deeper. The 
 objection is specious, but not valid. Whatever the 
 preacher's limitation in years and personal expe- 
 rience, his training and preparation have given 
 him a certain advantage over his hearers : that ad- 
 vantage should be increased by every opportunity 
 for leisure and special study, for meditation and 
 prayer, and by constant practice in public teaching 
 and exposition. 
 
 For the mind, to borrow Lowell's favorite illus- 
 tration, like the dyer's hand, becomes subdued to 
 that in which it works. Let no man despise thy 
 youth, writes St. Paul to his younger brother in 
 the ministry, and that his teaching and conduct 
 might command the just respect of men, he adds 
 these counsels : " Be diligent in these things," Tama 
 fieXera; "give thyself wholly to them," ev tou'tois icr6i; 
 
64 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 " that thy progress may be manifest unto all," iva 
 
 (Tov fj TrpoKOTrr) cjiavepa y Tracrti/. 
 
 These four primitive and fundamental elements 
 in preaching have been suggested by the history 
 and usage of the Greek words, homily and homi- 
 letics. Two Latin terms now claim attention, " ser- 
 mon " and " preaching." From these also, when 
 compared with their Greek equivalents, we may 
 gather other features in the primitive conception 
 of the preacher's mission and purpose. 
 
 Sermon, in the English and the French forms 
 alike, is an abbreviated accusative of the Latin 
 sermo. Sermo is of uncertain origin, although 
 generally derived more or less directly from sero, 
 to join, or bind together. The Roman derivation 
 Varro gives in these words : Sermo est a serie : 
 sermo enim non potest in uno homine solo, sed ubi 
 oratio cum altero conjuncta. Others would con- 
 nect the word rather with serta or conserta oratio, 
 laying the emphasis, not on the succession of 
 speakers, but upon the succession of ideas inter- 
 woven in the same speech. I mention these de- 
 tails, because, although the word was first used of 
 conversation, even in Boman usage, and still more 
 under Christian interpretation, sermo carried the 
 idea of consecutiveness, and hence of plan and 
 formal discourse. It was the Latin equivalent of 
 1 1 Timothy iv. 15. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 65 
 
 the Greek \6yo<s, which we have seen was used in 
 contrast to biiLXia, and which emphasized the idea 
 of reason, the logic of speech. The sermon is thus, 
 as Dr. Hatch suggests, the creation of rhetoric, of 
 Greek rhetoric : it implies synthesis as well as 
 analysis : it points to the time in which Christian 
 preaching had taken a studied form, and had be- 
 come already in the highest sense a science and an 
 art. 
 
 "Preaching" and "preach" have come to us 
 from the Latin through the medium of early 
 French, the nearer Saxon derivative predieian be- 
 ing thus supplanted. Praedicare, the Latin orig- 
 inal, means to cry out, to make public, to proclaim 
 before men. It suggests the herald's function, and 
 is of kindred meaning with the Greek Kripva-a-m.^ 
 The latter is the most common word to describe 
 the preacher's work in the New Testament. Of the 
 other Greek words used of the same great office, 
 SiaXeyofwj. Suggests a reasoning or discussion, while 
 
 the common KaxayycWtu, the rare StayyeXXw, eiayyeXC^m 
 
 emphasize the relation of the messenger to the sen- 
 der, the latter revealing also the joyous character of 
 the message he bears. Through all these terms, the 
 Greek and the Latin, the command of the Master 
 to the first disciples finds an echo, " What I tell you 
 in the darkness, speak ye in the light : and what 
 
 1 St. Matthew x. 27. 
 5 
 
66 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 ye hear in the ear, proclaim upon the housetops," 
 KH/pv^aTe £7rt tZv So)iJia,T(ov. 
 
 From these words, then, from sermon and preach- 
 ing, we follow the primitive conception in further 
 detail, and remark again — 
 
 5. Christian preaching was early and naturally 
 developed into the systematic and logical discourse. 
 The simple story of the Master's life, told as we 
 find it in the Gospels, did not suffice even for the 
 age of the Apostles. Further development of the 
 fundamental truth was asked, the meaning of the 
 Master's words and mission, his living relation to 
 the earlier Kevelation and to the disciples who 
 should follow after Him. To meet such question- 
 ing and such needs the great Epistles were written, 
 the Ephesians and Colossians with their lofty vision 
 and majestic sweep, the Romans and the Hebrews 
 with their marshalling of prophetic evidence and 
 array of argument. And what the great Epistles 
 did for their readers the preacher must have done, 
 in his measure, for the same class of hearers also. 
 Nor is this all. These very Epistles were designed 
 in the first instance to be read in the gatherings of 
 
 ' Preaching, ic^puj, was he that called the People together 
 on Publiok Business, in the Cities of Greece, and made Proc- 
 lamations in the Markets and all Publiok Places, with a loud 
 voice. Saxons called Bishops God's Bedels. Edwards, 
 Preacher, I. 182. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 67 
 
 the brethren, — they were written, that is, with the 
 eye upon the hearers, not the readers. With such 
 a purpose in view, the writers, who were also 
 preachers of the Word, neither would nor could 
 have adopted a distinctively written style : their 
 choice and their natural instinct alike would lead 
 them to keep closely to the manner of their public 
 address, to write as they spoke. Such a conclusion, 
 I think, borne out by the evidence of the writings 
 before us. The Epistle to the Hebrews, especially, 
 is oratory, and oratory of the highest type : it 
 speaks to the ear, not to the eye : it gains full 
 force only when it is delivered, like the Oration on 
 the Crown. Read aloud its varied and vigorous 
 Greek, and you may catch even now through bold 
 figure and striking imagery the sweep and move- 
 ment of sound as well as thought, and feel the 
 power and freedom of the practised speaker. The 
 Epistles of St. Paul, also, less stately and sustained, 
 are spoken words. With his eye upon his hearers, 
 the rude Galatian, the subtle Greek, the Roman 
 schooled to thoughts of power and law, he utters 
 his message, abrupt and broken, it may be, or in 
 firm set logic of his own, or in breathless flight ris- 
 ing through circle after circle of lofty thought. In 
 the other Epistles of the New Testament no less, 
 we may find echoes of the apostolic preaching. In 
 each Epistle, an individual element, the speech of 
 
68 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 the writer, like St. Peter's Galilean accent, bewrays 
 him. St. John, with the few words so often re- 
 peated, clear, simple, yet profound, intense with 
 love that burns as well as brightens; St. James, 
 concise in utterance, weighty in meaning, strong, 
 severe, now rhythmic and sonorous, now like the 
 lightning swift and sudden, a master who unites 
 the pregnant, pointed brevity of Demosthenes with 
 the SetvoTijs of the Hebrew prophets ; St. Peter, dis- 
 tinctively the preacher among the Apostles, quick, 
 sensitive, and sympathetic, coining his words to 
 make an image striking in effect, a speaker by 
 native temperament and gift ; — we may see and 
 hear them all, while we study these few but pre- 
 cious pages, as they spoke among their brethren, or 
 to the wider circles of Jews and of Greeks around 
 the little Church. Nor can the preacher find a 
 better manual than these gathered writings afford, 
 to broaden his idea of the power and possibilities 
 of public speech. 
 
 The Epistles, then, disclose to us the methods to 
 which the writers were accustomed in their preach- 
 ing and public address. But, further, they teach 
 us, and the lesson is hardly less interesting or less 
 important, what the capacity and understanding of 
 their hearers must have been. These Epistles were 
 written, of course, with the expectation that they 
 would be understood as well as heard ; not by 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 69 
 
 every hearer, perhaps ; not by any one hearer, it 
 may be, thoroughly, at once, and in all parts ; but 
 in the general tenor of their teaching, and by the 
 gathered disciples as a whole. What trained intel- 
 ligence, such an understanding must have presup- 
 posed ! what ability both to follow lines of close- 
 knit argument, and to grasp at once great truths, 
 however profound or sublime ! Imagine the Ephe- 
 sians or the Colossians as just written, and read for 
 the first time in any Christian congregation in New 
 England to-day : how many hearers would gather 
 their meaning, or feel their impulse? how many 
 would grow restless, and wander in mind? how 
 few would ask that the same words be read again 
 in their hearing, that they might add to the truth 
 already discerned the truth that still lay beyond 
 their understanding ? 
 
 It is not, it is true, the mind alone that must 
 have been trained for such intelligent hearing ; it 
 is the heart that needed most and first especial cul- 
 ture ; and the interest once awakened, intelligence 
 is rapidly and by that very fact developed. The 
 early Christians came chiefly from the humbler 
 walks of life ; few of them, if any, had shared the 
 training of schools and philosophies. But the faith 
 they now embraced was itself an educative force, a 
 discipline of thought as well as of feeling. It grew 
 out of the older Scriptures, and for its justification 
 
70 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 those Scriptures must be searched and compared ; 
 it was built upon a revealed, creative Word, and 
 that Word must be examined and understood. The 
 believer was exhorted to be ready always to give 
 answer to every man that asked him a reason con- 
 cerning the hope that was in him. All this would 
 stimulate and quicken thought, and make the newly 
 awakened spirit eager to seek and ready to take 
 the teaching of apostles and preachers. The intel- 
 lectual movement among the people, despised by 
 rabbis and philosophers alike, must be taken into 
 account if we would appreciate the spiritual move- 
 ment. The training and discipline of disciples 
 were not forgotten in the effort to win converts ; 
 the kingdom was not extended widely alone, it was 
 built upon deep foundations of intelligent under- 
 standing. 
 
 We do not need, then, to go beyond the first 
 century, to find the beginnings of systematic and 
 logical discourse in the Christian communities. 
 The development of the third and fourth centu- 
 ries, the glorious outburst of eloquence which is 
 linked with the names of Chrysostom and of the 
 clover-leaf of Cappadocia, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, 
 and Gregory Nazianzen, was the result of Greek 
 rhetoric fused by Christian fervor. But the first 
 century marks the beginning of the highest type of 
 preaching; the Alexandrine ApoUos, avrjp Xoytos,^ 
 1 Acts xviii. 24. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 71 
 
 is linked with its first tradition, and the great 
 Epistles are living witnesses to its early develop- 
 ment. The sermon of to-day is not more unlike 
 the primitive homily than the great Epistles, the 
 Romans and the Hebrews, are unlike the simple 
 story of the Gospels on the one hand, and the 
 preaching of the prophets on the other. The ser- 
 mon, then, whatever its abuses may have been, is 
 the natural and just outgrowth of a faith which 
 builds upon the Word ; it is not a proof of deca- 
 dence, but of normal and necessary development. 
 
 6. The Christian preacher was from the begin- 
 ning, and is still, the personal messenger of Jesus 
 Christ ; his message was then, and still is, a Gospel 
 of joy and hope. I have put these two thoughts 
 together, because they cannot rightly be separated ; 
 the second follows the first, the first explains the 
 second. Out of his relation to his Master the 
 preacher's authority must come ; out of the nature 
 of his message the joy and hope of his work must 
 spring. Only as he holds both features firmly in 
 mind and heart, can he find power and grace to 
 win men and hold them in the service of his Mas- 
 ter. " We are ambassadors on behalf of Christ," 
 writes St. Paul, and no apostle felt more deeply 
 either the dignity or the devotion demanded by his 
 task, 'Yirlp Xpia-Tov ovv jrpea/Sevo/xev ; mark the loftiness 
 of his tone, " as though God were entreating by us," 
 
72 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 0)5 Tov 6eov TrapaKa\ovvTO% 8l' rjfjuav ; " we beseech you 
 
 on behalf of Christ," Seo/xe^a virlp Xpia-Tov,^ how ten- 
 der the words ! " As the Father hath sent me, even 
 so send I you," runs the charter of the Twelve. 
 And as Christ sent before His face the seventy dis- 
 ciples into every place whither He Himself would 
 come, so now He sends each messenger, each min- 
 ister, in His place and on His own divine errand. 
 No higher authority than this can be asked ; no 
 lower authority would be sufficient for the preach- 
 er's special work. 
 
 The pulpit is not a platform ; the preacher is not 
 a lecturer then. The truth he brings must approve 
 itself to reason, but it does not begin with reason. 
 He speaks for another, who speaks through him. 
 He presses on to apprehend that for which he was 
 apprehended by Christ Jesus, el koI KaraXd^o) e^' <S 
 Ktti KaTe\-i^<l>6r]v vtto XptcrroS 'IiycroC His whole per- 
 sonality is taken into the possession of a higher, a 
 divine Person, and sent forth thence with a clear, 
 divine message. The conviction of such a posses- 
 sion and message is his power. 
 
 The preacher's task, then, is prophetic; he is 
 linked in no merely fanciful way with the prophets 
 who went before him. His circumstances differ 
 widely from theirs, but his spirit has a kindred 
 quality, for he too is sent to speak for God to men. 
 1 2 Cor. V. 20. 2 Philip, iii. 12. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 73 
 
 The rough garment and leathern girdle are the 
 accidents of the prophet's calling, not its essentials. 
 And among the prophets what diversity in incident 
 and circumstance! If the remoter figures seem 
 very far away, the nearer prophets have points of 
 contact and kinship. If even Elijah was a man 
 of like passions with us, of like nature, that is, 
 bfioLoiradrj's rifuv, Jeremiah is a man of like per- 
 plexities with us also. And it is significant that 
 the life most fully drawn of all in the Old Testa- 
 ment is precisely his who comes nearest to our- 
 selves, both in the common daylight of his outward 
 career, unmixed with miracle, with no strange su- 
 pernatural glamour, and also in the varied trials 
 and sensitive temper of the life within. For Jere- 
 miah shared with us, — 
 
 " those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings, 
 Blank misgivings of a Creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realized; " ^ 
 
 and yet Jeremiah too was a prophet, and a prince 
 of prophets. And to his age, as to ours, Jeremiah 
 could speak with more strength and effectiveness 
 than Elijah. To-day also the Word of the Lord 
 comes home with 'nearest helpfulness, not through 
 the positiveness of universal because unthinking 
 * Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality. 
 
74 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 dogmatism, untouched by life around us, but 
 through hearts, sensitive to the doubt and ques- 
 tion of our age, that yet have found a divine Pres- 
 ence and leading clear and sufficient for their own 
 and hence for others' needs. Such a heart alone 
 has the authority Epictetus felt in the Stoic sage : 
 " He used to talk in such a way that each individual 
 one of us who sat there thought some one had been 
 telling Ruf us about him ; he so put his finger upon 
 what we had done, he so set the individual faults 
 of each one of us clearly before our eyes." ^ Such a 
 heart, above all, commands confidence by the higher 
 Power that speaks through his own lips and expe- 
 rience, as through Tennyson's teacher and friend : 
 
 " He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
 He would not make his judgment blind, 
 He faced the spectres of the mind 
 And laid them : thus he came at length 
 
 " To find a stronger faith his own : 
 
 And Power was with him in the night. 
 Which makes the darkness and the light, 
 And dwells not in the light alone, 
 
 " But in the darkness and the cloud." ^ 
 
 On the other hand, the preacher's message is 
 always one of joy and hope. It was such from the 
 beginning ; it is such to-day. No book reveals the 
 1 Epictetus, p. 269. ^ In Memoriam, xcvi. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 75 
 
 dark and serious side of human life with the abso- 
 lute clearness, the faithful, undisguised reality, of 
 the New Testament ; the opening chapters of the 
 Eomans are lurid with pictures of sin, and guilt, 
 and misery; the fifth and eighth chapters of St. 
 John's Gospel probe the human conscience to its 
 depths. Yet no book is so filled with courage and 
 hope as the New Testament. The Master, through 
 all disheartening circumstance, has His own eyes, 
 and those of His disciples, fixed on Satan fallen as 
 lightning from heaven ; he sees, and teaches them 
 to see, in every phase of sin and suffering a call to 
 work the works of God; the very cross is exulta- 
 tion unto Him. In the sombre chapters of the 
 Romans even, St. Paul burns with desire to carry 
 his Gospel to Rome, assured that there also it will 
 prove the power of God unto salvation. And the 
 necessity, di/ayK?;, laid upon him in the Corinthians,-' 
 " woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel," draws 
 its force from the gladness of his message; it is 
 like the feeling of the lepers in the deserted camp 
 of the Syrians : ^ " this day is a day of good tidings, 
 and we hold our peace ; we do not well." The glo- 
 rious Gospel in his charge he must give to all the 
 world. 
 
 No other spirit befits the preacher to-day ; and 
 at this point his task is brighter and more blessed 
 1 1 Cor. ix. 16. 2 2 Kings vii. 9. 
 
76 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 than that of Jeremiah and of his fellow prophets. 
 Their burden was often of judgment alone, of judg- 
 ment unrelieved by hope ; a dark, foreboding 
 cloud hangs above their ministry: it is, as St. 
 Paul said of the Mosaic law, a ministration of 
 death. But the Christian preacher's message is 
 always of life : all else in his preaching is subordi- 
 nate, incidental, to this ; the darkest circumstances 
 he views, and sets, in this relief. What a differ- 
 ence this involves in the whole color and impres- 
 sion of his message may be illustrated from an- 
 other field of thought. A few years ago, there ap- 
 peared two novels dealing with kindred subjects, 
 and with a kindred purpose to be served : " The 
 Nether World," by George Gissing, "All Sorts 
 and Conditions of Men," by Walter Besant. Both 
 moved in the lower strata of London ; both were 
 the result of long and faithful observation, and 
 both were pronounced by competent judges trust- 
 worthy in detail. But the effect produced upon 
 the reader was most diverse : one left him in de- 
 spondent mood, by the very hopelessness of the 
 state of things portrayed ; the other, although 
 no less sombre in its picture of the present, 
 left the heart still buoyant with the possibilities- 
 already disclosed, and inspired with desire to help 
 towards the realization of a better future. The 
 difference lay in the point of view, the dominant, 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 77 
 
 controlling thought. One dwelt on the darker, 
 discouraging aspects of the present, the present 
 death ; the other looked through these, and empha- 
 sized the cheer, the hope, the creative power, of 
 life. There are preachers, it must be admitted, 
 with whom the emphasis lies on the darker side, 
 whose thought and teaching, not by incidence but 
 by direction, savor most of death and unto death. 
 Their choice of themes, their treatment of every 
 theme indeed, the hearer feels depressing, dis- 
 heartening ; but such is not the preaching of the 
 Gospel, as the Apostles conceived it, as the Master 
 designed it, as the very word, evayyeXi^w, implies. 
 No sermon is really successful, no sermon fulfils 
 the purpose of preaching, if it leaves any hearer 
 either satisfied with himself, or discouraged and 
 hopeless for the future. Each sermon should make 
 every hearer feel : I ought to be better than I am ; 
 I may be better than I am ; and, by the grace of 
 God, I will be better than I am. Every preacher 
 may well ask himself, before and after each ser- 
 mon: Will my words produce, have my words 
 produced, to-day this twofold effect, on all, on 
 each, of my hearers ? If not, where does my fail- 
 ure lie ? Too little truth on the one hand, too little 
 love on the other, will explain the defect. aX-qOeveiv 
 iv oydTrrj must be his motto. 
 
 St. Francis de Sales, we are told, used to make 
 
78 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 a long pause before beginning bis sermon, moving 
 bis eyes slowly over all his congregation. A canon 
 noticed this one day, and asked St. Francis the 
 reason. The great preacher answered : " I salute 
 the guardian angels of all my hearers, and I ask 
 each one of them to prepare for my words the 
 heart he has in charge. I have gained the great- 
 est blessings by this practice." ^ Such prayer 
 and vision might well prove inspiring ; but what 
 deeper earnestness and power should clothe his 
 words who feels behind each hearer the loving 
 presence of his Master, and who speaks his mes- 
 sage as Christ's ambassador in the very hearing of 
 his Lord ! In Florence, there is a fresco by Andrea 
 del Sarto, which represents the Baptist preach- 
 ing by the Jordan. You see the crowds that sit 
 and stand before him, hanging upon his word, and 
 drinking in his message : you almost feel the truth 
 that falls from his impassioned lips. But the secret 
 of his power lies beyond the hearers' vision. In the 
 far background your eyes and the preacher's also 
 behold a kneeling figure, pleading for preacher 
 and for his hearers also. In the consciousness of 
 that greater Presence the Baptist found his power ; 
 in the same consciousness the preacher of to-day 
 must speak, if he would realize the true end of 
 preaching. 
 
 1 St. Francois de Sales, Modele, 225. , 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 II. 
 
 Relation of Homiletics to Logic, Rhetoric, and Eloquence. 
 
 HoMiLETics, we have seen, is both an art and a 
 science. Christian preaching, which forms its sub- 
 ject, has its roots in the Church, the Christian so- 
 ciety ; moves in the broad circle of distinctive 
 Christian truths ; is set in a conversational key ; 
 seeks to instruct and to edify; is early devel- 
 oped into systematic and logical discourse. The 
 Christian preacher is the personal messenger of 
 Jesus Christ; his message is therefore in its es- 
 sence a Gospel of hope and joy. 
 
 Now the higher an art is in its nature and its 
 product, the more does its perfection depend upon 
 the skill and training gained from other allied and 
 subordinate arts. The nobler and more complex a 
 science is, the more does its mastery demand a 
 thorough knowledge of other allied or subordinate 
 sciences. Before the painter can work out his own 
 conceptions with the large freedom of genius, be- 
 fore he can achieve distinction in his chosen field. 
 
80 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 he must gain both the knowledge of detail and 
 practical skill, the training of eye and of hand, to 
 follow and obey the motions of imagination and of 
 will. And if he turn to landscape, or still life, or 
 the human face and form, how much of minuter 
 knowledge in his special sphere must be added to 
 general truths of color and of tone ! Before the 
 astronomer can devote himself undisturbed to his 
 sublime science, what large and varied knowledge 
 he must lay under tribute, and from how many 
 special sources must that knowledge be drawn ! 
 Mathematics, chemistry, physics, with their mani- 
 fold divisions, each in turn, must be mastered be- 
 fore he can measure the movement, determine the 
 substance, weight, and mutual relations, and ana- 
 lyze the spectra of sun and of star. 
 
 Both as a science, then, and as an art, how sub- 
 tle and how complex is the preacher's task, how 
 high in its aim, how broad in its scope ! He has 
 the most delicate and difficult of problems to meet, 
 and of products to create. He must work convic- 
 tion of necessary but often unwelcome truths : he 
 must overcome the twofold resistance of native in- 
 ertia and sinful habit : he must make the unseen 
 stand out clearer and more powerful than the seen ; 
 the eternal outweigh the dominant and absorbing 
 interest of the temporal : he must sway the feel- 
 ings, convince the reason, quicken the conscience. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 81 
 
 and move the will. And all this he must do with 
 all men and with each man. For such a task what 
 large and varied knowledge is needed ; how wide 
 and deep an acquaintance with human life, in its 
 outward circumstance, and in its inward motives ; 
 what close and faithful study of 
 
 " All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame ! " ^ 
 
 As an art, then, homiletics is related to other 
 arts ; as a science, it is built upon other sciences ; 
 and these relations, these broader, deeper bases, 
 must be first considered, if we would understand 
 both the scope and the method of the preacher's 
 work. These special studies, kindred and fun- 
 damental, may be arranged in two groups, the 
 formal and the material: those studies, on the 
 one hand, which cover the general laws of human 
 speech, the science of thought, the arts of expres- 
 sion and persuasion ; and those studies, on the other 
 hand, which develop the subjects with which the 
 preacher deals, the whole range of theological re- 
 search, and, especially, the science of Biblical in- 
 terpretation. The relation of homiletics to each of 
 these groups must now claim our attention ; and 
 with the first group, the arts of form and expres- 
 sion, it is natural to begin. 
 
 1 Coleridge, Love. 
 6 
 
82 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 A concise and masterly volume on forensic ora- 
 tory was published a few months ago by a profes- 
 sor of law in Yale University. It is designed to be 
 a manual for advocates, as the title-page affirms ; ' 
 but the whole of the first part, and the second, 
 third, and fourth books of the second part, are 
 as applicable to the pulpit as to the bar ; and the 
 whole volume will amply repay the preacher's clos- 
 est study. Two sentences from Professor Robin- 
 son's preface I quote as bearing upon the point we 
 have now reached. " Seeking for the method in 
 which a legal contest ought to be conducted," he 
 writes, " I was led to compare the mode of opera- 
 tion adopted by advocates who had become noted 
 for the celerity and certainty with which they won 
 their cases, with the method and the rules pre- 
 scribed by writers on the Art of Forensic Oratory, 
 especially by Cicero and Quintilian, and became 
 satisfied that, whether consciously to themselves 
 or not, these advocates pursued that method and 
 obeyed those rules." And, again, after defining 
 the purpose of his treatise, he adds : " The study 
 of Logic, Rhetoric, and Elocution, on a far more 
 extensive scale than the limits of this volume per- 
 mit, I must strenuously recommend. Nor is there 
 a work on Advocacy or on any one of its subordi- 
 nate topics, nor any book of Trials, nor any able 
 novel, in which the operations of skillful advocates 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 83 
 
 and detectives are described, that he {i. e., the 
 student) may not profitably read as illustrating 
 and applying the rules and methods which this 
 manual inculcates and explains." Not less broad 
 and comprehensive is the survey which the preach- 
 er's art demands along the kindred lines of logic 
 and rhetoric, of oratory and literature. Not less 
 varied and manifold are the sources from which he 
 may draw his power to kindle, to convince, and to 
 persuade. And not less certain and rigorous are 
 the rules which, whether consciously to himself or 
 not, the preacher must observe, if he would reach 
 the highest results. We must examine, therefore, 
 the relation of the preacher's art to the different 
 members of this first group of studies. 
 
 1. The preacher should be familiar with the 
 broad principles of logic, both deductive and in- 
 ductive; the latter, indeed, however its claim to 
 a coordinate place with the former may be disputed, 
 is not less important to the thinker and speaker to- 
 day. The broad principles, I said : for the minute 
 details and mechanism of the art it is of course 
 unnecessary to keep in mind. The multitude of 
 moods and figures in the syllogism, together with 
 the barbarous jargon devised to distinguish valid 
 forms, he may forget with little loss ; the list of 
 formal and material fallacies may not remain fresh 
 and by name in his recollection ; but the practical 
 
84 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 discipline he gathers from the study, and the ex- 
 amination he learns to make of specious and seduc- 
 tive statements will never lose their usefulness. 
 Occasional reference to such books as the Elemen- 
 tary Lessons of Jevons and the recent volume of 
 the late Professor Minto will not be without ser- 
 vice, as a gymnastic for the mind, imparting facil- 
 ity and keenness to the powers of discrimination. 
 The latter volume may be commended also for its 
 constant application of the principles of logic to 
 the discovery of current fallacies in popular speech 
 and observation. 
 
 The art of logic grew out of dialectic : it was 
 devised and developed by Aristotle to meet the 
 needs and dangers of conversation as a means of 
 instruction and discipline. As homiletics has an 
 origin akin to dialectic, logic has here also a kin- 
 dred use. The danger in dialectic was that a skil- 
 ful questioner would take the conversation entirely 
 into his own hands, and carry the other parties 
 wherever he would, misled by their answers of yes 
 and no, into positions inconsistent or untenable. 
 Where all interlocutors are silent, as is the case 
 during discourse from the pulpit, there is the 
 . strongest reason for the speaker to examine care- 
 fully his statements and arguments. The preacher 
 has no one to answer him, it is often said, hence he 
 falls into habits of loose and inconsequent reason- 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 85 
 
 ing, such as the lawyer would find impossible, with 
 the insight and trained intelligence of the judge 
 above him, and the keen eye of the opposing coun- 
 sel to detect and uncover his fallacies. But if he 
 has no opponent to speak in his turn and correct 
 his errors, the preacher's hearers are a jury in per- 
 petual session, each member of which can examine 
 his arguments at leisure, and test and weigh their 
 worth. Such a jury is more to be respected and 
 more to be feared than a jury that sits for the oc- 
 casion only, decides the case at once, and straight- 
 way dismisses the pleader and his cause from mind. 
 Hence, the preacher's interests, no less than his 
 honesty and his honor, demand the patient search- 
 ing of each hidden premise and conclusion. 
 Warmth of feeling, brilliant imagination, and the 
 glow of speech are a poor excuse for statement 
 and reasoning that compromise the candor or the 
 intelligence of the preacher in the minds of his 
 wiser hearers. The evil such preachers do lives 
 after them ; and the distrust they create has un- 
 happily a wider reach than appears upon the sur- 
 face: they discredit the Gospel they preach, and 
 loosen its hold on thoughtful men. It is a part of 
 a pastor's painful experience to find in his parish 
 men of clear and candid minds who have been re- 
 pelled from Christian fellowship and thinking by 
 preachers of this character. 
 
86 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 These evils, it is true, are seldom the result of 
 deliberate purpose. Ministers are not mounte- 
 banks, or sophists, dishonest jugglers with words 
 or thoughts. The difficulty grows out of a habit 
 of speaking without patience and study, through 
 indolence or lack of training or self-deceit. The 
 inner sophist, it has been well said, is our most 
 dangerous enemy. Men generally deceive them- 
 selves before they deceive others. But it is the 
 function of logic to set free from inward errors, 
 as well as from misleading voices without ; to an- 
 swer and expose the sophist in our hearts, as well 
 as the false teachers who disguise the wolf beneath 
 the sheep's clothing. The illusions to which we 
 are all subject, preachers as well as other men, are 
 fourfold in nature and origin, as Francis Bacon 
 has taught us. There are illusions of the tribe or 
 the race, which we share with all mankind, which 
 belong to our common humanity ; illusions of the 
 cave, which belong to our individual tempera- 
 ment and point of view ; illusions of the market- 
 place, which come from conversation and the vul- 
 gar prejudice around us ; and illusions of the stage, 
 which dazzle our eyes by the splendor of great 
 names and the fair show of authority. From all 
 these four we need to be delivered. And the idols 
 of the cave and the tribe, no less than the idols of 
 the market and the stage, inexorable logic, the 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 87 
 
 iconoclast, labors to break in pieces and destroy. 
 To clear his own mind of illusion and self-deceit, 
 and to make his teaching commend itself to his 
 hearers as candid, intelligent, and just, the preacher 
 should seek the aid of logic. In the conflict with 
 error and ignorance, homiletics has need of this 
 strong, trustworthy, and mail-clad ally. 
 
 2. The preacher should be a master of the prin- 
 ciples and of the methods of rhetoric. The origin 
 of this art is highly suggestive. It grew up at Syr- 
 acuse after the overthrow of Thrasybulus, b. c. 466, 
 and the establishment of popular government in Si- 
 cily. Democratic exiles, who had been dispossessed 
 by the tyrants, put forward their earlier claims 
 to lands and other property. In the nature of the 
 case, little direct and documentary evidence could 
 be adduced, argument proceeded chiefly by infer- 
 ence, and a multitude of details had to be set in a 
 natural and effective order. To meet these needs, 
 the new art took its rise, " primarily intended to 
 help the plain citizen who had to speak before a 
 court of law." ^ The founder, Corax, laid down 
 rules for arrangement and divided the speech into 
 four parts : the proem, or introduction ; the narra- 
 tive, or statement ; the arguments, aySves ; the 
 subsidiary remarks, TrapeK^aa-K ; and the peroration. 
 He further brought forward and illustrated the 
 1 Cf. Encyd. Brit. Rhet. K. C. Jebb. 
 
88 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 place and use of probability, cko's, and pointed out 
 the fallacy of confounding its abstract and particu- 
 lar forms. Persuasion, then, was the purpose of 
 rhetoric from its very beginning ; and such is its 
 function still. Through all its diverse methods, 
 this common purpose runs and reigns. To this 
 end all faculties of the mind are addressed in 
 turn. 
 
 Rhetoric may be defined, then, as Dr. Campbell 
 defines eloquence, as " that art or talent (jixv-^ or 
 Svva/ui) by which the discourse is adapted to its 
 end." Quintilian's definition is to the same effect : 
 Dicere secundum virtutem orationis, scientia bene 
 dicendi. But the dictum of Francis Bacon, al- 
 though weighty, is too narrow. "The duty and 
 office of Rhetoric," he writes, " is to apply Reason 
 to Imagination for the better moving of the will ; " 
 the relation of rhetoric to the feelings, you notice, 
 is here passed over, — a serious omission. What, 
 then, is the end of discourse, to which rhetoric is 
 directed? The ends of speaking. Dr. Campbell 
 tells us, are four : " every speech being intended to 
 enlighten the understanding, to please the imagina- 
 tion, to move the passions, or to influence the will." 
 But with speech of the more serious kind, with 
 speech as it falls within our province especially, 
 there is but one real end, the last of the four, 
 " to influence the will ; " the other three are not 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 89 
 
 coordinate, but subordinate and subsidiary to this. 
 Cicero combines these three under two heads and 
 makes both lead up to the great end : Optimus est 
 orator qui dicendo animos audientium et docet et 
 delectat et permovet. 
 
 But the finest distinction between Logic and 
 Ehetoric, and by far the most striking definition 
 of Rhetoric also, is ascribed by Cicero and by Sex- 
 tus Empiricus to Zeno the Stoic. Logic he likens 
 to the clenched fist; rhetoric to the open hand. 
 Each writer adds the explanation which Zeno gave 
 to his own figure, and I therefore transcribe the 
 language of both. Zenonis est, inquam, hoc Stoici, 
 — writes Cicero, — omnem vim loquendi, ut jam 
 ante Aristoteles, in duas tributam esse partes : RTie- 
 toricam, palmce ; Dialecticam, pugni similem esse 
 dicebat, quod latius loquerentur rhetores, dialectici 
 autum compressius.^ The figure was a favorite with 
 Zeno, and he used it also to describe the successive 
 degrees or modes of apprehending truth, visus as- 
 sensus, comprehensio, scientia, being denoted by 
 the compression of the hand in different degrees. 
 ^t hoc quidem Zeno gestu conficiebat. Nam quum 
 extensis digitis adversam, manum ostenderat, visum 
 inquiebat hvQusmodi est. Deinde quum paullum 
 digitos constrinxerat, assensus hujusmodi. Turn 
 quum plane compresserat pugmimque fecerat, com- 
 1 Cie. De Fin. ii. 6, 17. 
 
90 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 prehensionem illam esse dicebat. Qua ex similitvr 
 dine etiam nomen ei rei, quod ante non fuerat, 
 KardXrjij/iv imposuit. Quum antem Icevam manum 
 admoverat, et ilium pugnum arete vehementerque 
 compresserat, scientiam talem esse dicebat?- The 
 explanation is given by Sextus in flowing Greek : 
 
 ZrjVOiV o KiTTCvs Ipuyr-qBw OTO) Bia<j>epei SiaXeKTiKrj prp-op- 
 tKiJs, av(rTpi\j/ai t7]v X^P"' "'"' ToA.ir i^airXoMras £<^'7) 
 TOVTo>, Kara. p.kv t^v (rvarrpocfjrjv to (rrpoyyvXav Kai jBpaxv 
 T^S StaXcKTlK-^S Ta-TTOiV tScoD/Att, Stct Sc T^s l^airXuKTcuK Koi 
 iKTacrecas tSiv haKTvXiav to irXaTv ttJs prjTopiKTJi Suya/ACMS 
 alviTToiieyo^. The clcnched fist and the open hand ! 
 The difference, it will be seen, goes deeper than the 
 style, the language alone : it affects the whole man- 
 ner of address, and the very spirit of the speaker 
 as he approaches his hearers. The clenched fist 
 means compulsion, and compulsion, whether physi- 
 cal or intellectual, always creates repugnance to- 
 ward opinions, and antagonism toward persons. 
 Such a speaker, even when he carries conviction, 
 loses the fairest fruit of victory : he leaves resent- 
 ment rankling in the breast of the vanquished. In 
 Butler's often misquoted lines, — 
 
 " He that complies against his will 
 Is of his own opinion still ; 
 Which he may adhere to, yet disown, 
 For reasons to himself best known." 
 
 1 Cic. Acad. Pr. ii. 47, 146. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 91 
 
 Logic alone, at its best, can only smite down, and 
 overpower ; it cannot win. But the open, friendly 
 hand of rhetoric means persuasion : it invites, al- 
 lures, and welcomes ; it makes a smoother, easier 
 path toward conviction, and when conviction is 
 gained adds the interest of pleasure and delight 
 to the movement of the will. The old fable of the 
 sun and the wind, each striving in turn to make 
 the traveller open or lay aside his cloak, points to 
 the same difference in method. In our day at 
 least, and especially among preachers, this differ- 
 ence should be carefully borne in mind ; the meas- 
 ure of usefulness will depend in large degree upon 
 clear discernment of the signs of the times at this 
 point. No age, perhaps, has been so impatient of 
 all dictation as our own, none more sensitive to 
 the slightest outward assertion or assumption of 
 authority : it cannot be driven, it must be drawn ; 
 but none surely has been so open to persuasion, so 
 ready to lend a respectful hearing to words that 
 are both reasonable and courteous. By such words 
 alone can real conviction, deep and lasting, be won. 
 He who adopts the oracular, authoritative, dictato- 
 rial air, when he rises before an audience, fails to 
 move intelligent men ; he may flog his hearers with 
 words, if they are schoolboys in mind, but after 
 they have outgrown the rod, and put away childish 
 thoughts and things, his method wiU no longer 
 serve. 
 
92 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 Homiletics, then, is not a mere branch, or spe- 
 cies, of rhetoric, as it has sometimes been called ; 
 such a definition is too narrow. But rhetoric is a 
 fundamental and important element in the preach- 
 er's work. Homiletics, upon one side at least, is 
 rhetoric with a special purpose to govern its appli- 
 cation, and direct its use. A wide and thorough 
 knowledge of the elements and properties of style, 
 of purity in diction, of clearness, force, and ele- 
 gance in the choice of words, of just arrangement 
 in marshalling and massing ideas, of the power of 
 apt and striking figures to illumine and enliven 
 thought, with whatever else adds charm and color, 
 effect and impressiveness, to human speech, — all 
 this, it is the function of rhetoric to impart. All 
 the subtle but legitimate methods men may take to 
 enlighten the understanding, to quicken the im- 
 agination, to stir the feelings, and thus to move 
 the will, of their fellow-men, should be covered by 
 the preacher's training. The means that others 
 all around him use for narrow, selfish, worldly ends, 
 he must learn to use, with no less diligence and 
 patience surely, for the larger, holier, unworldly 
 ends of his ministry. In this respect at least, the 
 children of this world must not be wiser in their 
 generation than the children of light. 
 
 3. The preacher must study the masters of pub- 
 lic speech, both the living and the dead, in other 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 93 
 
 tongues and in other callings, and in his own. Elo- 
 quence is rhetoric applied, illustrated, informed 
 with life. Brevissima via per exempla, example 
 is better than precept, as the Latin adage teaches 
 us, because it is at once clearer, easier, and more 
 persuasive. Its effects are gained In large meas- 
 ure, not through actual and deliberate copying, 
 but through unconscious and continual imitation. 
 Habits of speech and the formation of style, espe- 
 cially, are subject to these subtle and unconscious 
 influences. In these directions we are all affected, 
 slowly and insensibly, but deeply, permanently, 
 and from our earliest intelligence, by the strength 
 of our associations. The child takes his language, 
 his words and his idiom alike, from the servants in 
 the house, and later from the children on the play- 
 ground and in the streets, far more than from the 
 teaching in the schools. There are few public 
 speakers who do not at times, by word or phrase, in 
 meaning or in pronunciation, betray the effect of 
 these early surroundings. It is significant from 
 the intellectual no less than from the spiritual 
 point of view that the great preachers of the early 
 Church, Basil and the Gregories, Chrysostom and 
 Augustine, were all trained from infancy by careful 
 and gifted mothers. 
 
 In later and more reflective years also, these sub- 
 tle, unconscious influences have an importance not 
 
94 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 to be overlooked. We are all subject to the daily 
 and demoralizing effect of popular usage. The 
 newspaper is the channel through which whatever 
 is low and coarse, meaningless and indiscriminate, 
 barren and brutal, in the language of the streets, 
 finds its way into our homes and into our minds. 
 But the newspaper cannot be escaped; we must 
 read it in part at least. With all its defects, in 
 manners and in morals, and despite its evident and 
 growing deterioration, it has become a necessity to 
 him who would follow the course of events and 
 know what thoughts are in the minds of his fellow- 
 men to-day. Like the physician, the preacher can- 
 not flee from contagion, and his only safety lies 
 in recognizing his danger, and taking precautions 
 against the insidiousness o£ disease. 
 
 On the other hand, the preacher is beset as a 
 student by an opposite danger. Other languages 
 besides his own, especially the German, he must 
 use for purposes of study and research. And this 
 necessity, where matter counts for everything and 
 manner for nothing, tends to make him oblivious 
 to differences of idiom and usage, and insensible 
 to the finer qualities of his native tongue, and pro- 
 duces that careless or pedantic, but always awk- 
 ward and hybrid style, which disfigures so many 
 of our books and magazines of the higher class. 
 This subtle influence, also, the speaker must not 
 overlook. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 95 
 
 Neither of these dangers can be met by direct 
 attack. Both must be approached and turned 
 aside by indirection. Another set of influences, 
 as subtle, as gradual, as pervasive, must be brought 
 in play, if evil is to be overcome with good. And 
 for this purpose, the direct and diligent study of 
 form and expression needs to be supplemented by 
 that unconscious influence which comes from inti- 
 mate and daily familiarity with the acknowledged 
 masterpieces of thought and language. To walk 
 with the wise, the proverb tells us, is to gather 
 something of their wisdom. And to find and feel 
 for ourselves the charm of fitting and eloquent 
 speech is to cultivate a wholesome distaste for all 
 that is coarse and commonplace, crude and unfin- 
 ished in expression ; it is to imitate, almost uncon- 
 sciously, the manner of those with whom we thus 
 associate, to take delight ourselves in what Lowell 
 calls " the habitual full dress of the well - bred 
 mind." , Or, to change the figure and carry out the 
 comparison already used, great thoughts expressed 
 in choice and memorable words, familiar by fre- 
 quent repetition, will penetrate and fill the mind, 
 and serve as a prophylactic against the contagion 
 of popular and of pedantic speech, against hybrid 
 English and the English of the newspapers. 
 
 But these results, it may be said, will follow 
 from familiarity with any pure and classic English, 
 
96 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 with speech or essay, with poetry or prose. There 
 are other advantages, however, which the speaker 
 can gain only from the study of speech in its varied 
 forms. Every one has noticed and felt the differ- 
 ence between the spoken and the written style, 
 although few, it may be, could define the differ- 
 ence, or tell in what it consists. For the public 
 speaker, it is most important that this difference be 
 carefully analyzed and thoroughly understood. 
 
 The written style, then, addresses the mind 
 through the eye alone: the impression which it 
 seeks to produce, and upon which it relies, may be 
 formed slowly and at leisure, and renewed, cor- 
 rected, repeated, and enlarged whenever the reader 
 desires. There is room, therefore, for delicate and 
 subtle thought, — for thought that requires time 
 and patient effort before it can be grasped in fuU. 
 Such qualities, indeed, if only a fair meaning be 
 apparent at the outset, allure the reader, and lead 
 him back to frequent study and to ever new de- 
 light : they give to prose a part of the depth and 
 charm of poetry. The construction, also, may be 
 complex and intricate: the eye takes in all the 
 clauses of a sentence at a single glance, and readily 
 discerns the relation of one to another, of each 
 to the whole. Abrupt and sudden changes are 
 avoided, softened down, or smoothed away ; con- 
 nectives are frequent and varied, imbedded often 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 97 
 
 within the clause, not standing at its beginning ; 
 transitions are uniformly made as gentle and grad- 
 ual as possible. Such is written style at its high- 
 est and its best, as the masters of literature, from 
 Plato downward, have used it. 
 
 The spoken style, on the other hand, reaches the 
 mind through the ear, and, so far as words are 
 concerned, through the ear alone. The play of 
 thought and feeling across the speaker's face, the 
 light and glow and life that pass from his eyes to 
 the eyes and hearts of his hearers, all these give 
 expression and emphasis, but they cannot give dis- 
 tinctness, definiteness, to his utterance ; his thought 
 can only become intelligible through his words, his 
 words through the ear alone. The impression 
 which he seeks to produce, and upon which alone 
 he can rely, must be made d'un seul jet, as a 
 whole and in all its parts at once. It cannot be 
 retouched, corrected, enlarged ; it can be repeated 
 and renewed only by the imperfect and uncertain 
 aid of memory. The thought to be expressed, 
 then, must be given forth with strength and mass : 
 it must stand out in firm lines and bold relief. It 
 may be profound, suggestive, far reaching : it must 
 not be too delicate, over subtle, fine drawn. Con- 
 structions, also, must be simple, straightforward, 
 easy to grasp. Long sentences may take their 
 turn with the short, but the longest must not be 
 7 
 
98 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 complex or involved, but composed of parts dis- 
 tinctly articulated and connected in natural order ; 
 each sentence so plain, in fact, that wayfaring 
 men, though fools, shall not err therein. Transi- 
 tions should be obvious ; successive points must be 
 made sharp and striking : truths that are meant 
 to be held in memory must be enforced by repeti- 
 tion, or recapitulated in other words. Such is the 
 spoken style, at its highest and its best, as the 
 masters of assemblies have used it from Demos- 
 thenes downward. It differs from the written 
 style at every turn, but all these differences fall 
 under three particulars, — directness, point, and 
 force. 
 
 Now the preacher is a public speaker, and as 
 such his style should be the spoken style. Differ- 
 ent methods of delivery are not under our present 
 consideration : the emphasis lies here upon the 
 effect which the sermon should produce ; whether 
 it be read, or recited, or uttered without notes, the 
 style should be the same. He who writes his ser- 
 mons has greater need to cultivate this spoken 
 quality than he who speaks. But the preacher's 
 studies make him familiar chiefly with the written 
 style : the books he reads both in his special de- 
 partment and in general literature are all of this 
 class : his own style is from day to day insensibly 
 framed after these models. To counteract, then. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 99 
 
 or better, to supplement, this influence, he should 
 study the masters of public speech. If he is famil- 
 iar with other languages, whether classic or mod- 
 ern tongues, he will find it an advantage to read 
 the best of orators aloud to train his ear, and then 
 to put their thought in English words, gaining 
 thereby facility and fitness in speech. In Greek, 
 let him dwell upon Demosthenes, until he feels the 
 orator's variety and fineness and force, in the lim- 
 pid clearness of narration, in point and brevity of 
 reasoning, in close persuasiveness of appeal. Then 
 let him try to reproduce the same effects in terse 
 and vigorous and varied English. The Oration on 
 the Crown he read at college, at sundry times and 
 in divers manners, cut up in daily portions : now let 
 him master the great oration as a whole, that he 
 may f oUow its movement, feel its passion, and catch 
 its tone. The time it takes, the labor it costs, are 
 both well spent ; no written words make clearer the 
 secret of the spoken style. 
 
 Among the masters of modern speech, France 
 offers her orators of the Revolution, each charac- 
 terized by Castelar in striking figure:^ "Mira- 
 beau, la tempestad de ideas ; Vergniaud, la melo- 
 dia de la palabra ; Danton, el fuego, la ardiente 
 lava del espiritu; Camilo, el inmortal Camilo, 
 eterno, sublime nino escapado de Atenas, con cin- 
 1 JDiscursos Parliamentairos, iii. 127. 
 
100 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 eel en vez de pluma, especie de bajo relieve del 
 Partenon, viviente, animado." Spain points to 
 Castelar himself, somewhat florid to our northern 
 taste, but rich in historic allusion and political 
 insight, and eloquent with the mingled majesty 
 and music of the Castilian tongue. " I never lack 
 for a word, — Pitt never lacks for the word," is 
 the discriminating tribute ascribed to Pitt's older 
 rival. Fox. The secret of Pitt's happier choice of 
 words, as ready but more exact, lies in large meas- 
 ure in his early habit of translation from the clas- 
 sics. There was scarcely a Greek or Latin classi- 
 cal writer of any eminence, his tutor tells us, the 
 whole of whose works Pitt had not read before 
 the age of twenty. " His mode of translating the 
 classics to his tutor," writes a biographer, "was a 
 peculiar one. He did not construe an author in 
 the ordinary way, but after reading a passage of 
 some length in the original, he turned it at once 
 into regular English sentences, aiming to give the 
 ideas with great exactness, and to express himself 
 at the same time with idiomatic accuracy and ease. 
 Such a course was admirably adapted to the for- 
 mation of an English style, distinguished at once 
 for copiousness, force, and elegance. To this early 
 training Mr. Pitt always ascribed his extraordinary 
 command of language, which enabled him to give 
 every idea its most felicitous expression, and to 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 101 
 
 pour out an unbroken stream of thought, hour 
 after hour, without once hesitating for a word, or 
 recalling a phrase, or sinking for a moment into 
 looseness or inaccuracy in the structure of his sen- 
 tences." ^ This single instance, this long but per- 
 tinent quotation, must suffice upon this point. But 
 it would be easy to multiply instances to show how 
 large a place the practice of translation has had in 
 the training of skilful speakers, from Cicero, who 
 followed the Grreek orators with close and constant 
 study, to Lord Mansfield, who confesses that while 
 a student at Oxford he rendered all the orations of 
 Cicero into written English, and then, after an in- 
 terval, retranslated his English into Latin. Some 
 other language than his own, either classic or mod- 
 ern, almost every student of to-day has learned ; 
 there is no reason then why he should not tnake 
 this knowledge tributary to his training as a 
 speaker, with the light of example before him. 
 
 If the English language, however, confines the 
 preacher's choice, how wide a field still opens be- 
 fore him from which he may select ! No modern 
 tongue contains so rich and varied stores of elo- 
 quence as our own. The platform and the bar the 
 student may lay under tribute, no less than the 
 pulpit. Orators of other generations he may com- 
 pare with profit with orators of his own. Differ- 
 1 British, Eloquence, 552. 
 
102 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 ences in style will teach Mm much by very contrast. 
 His own defects of temperament and gift he may 
 remedy by careful choice of models. If he lacks 
 imagination, warmth, fire, let him learn to kindle 
 at Chatham's flame. If, on the other hand, his 
 feelings are sensitive and easily stirred, but his 
 language loose, his logic defective, and his thought 
 incoherent, let him turn to Erskine, the earliest 
 master of the modern style in speaking, whom a 
 competent authority recently pronounced the most 
 important of English orators for students of Eng- 
 lish law. Whatever his own native gifts or defects 
 may be, no speaker can afford to neglect Edmund 
 Burke, who alone among orators, by the power and 
 scope of his mind, and by the wealth of his wisdom 
 and suggestiveness, reminds one of Shakespeare. 
 " He is the only man," said Johnson, " whose com- 
 mon conversation corresponds with the general 
 fame which he has in the world. No man of sense 
 could meet Burke by accident under a gateway to 
 avoid a shower without being convinced that he 
 was the first man in England." The speech on 
 Conciliation with America, especially, less exuber- 
 ant and " Asiatic " than others of his speeches, 
 which Sir James Mackintosh regards as " the most 
 faultless of Mr. Burke's productions," by the logi- 
 cal order of its thought and the masterly grouping 
 of historic detail, deserves hardly less attentive 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 103 
 
 study than the Oration on the Crown. Modern 
 speakers must not be forgotten for the old, and in 
 the England of our own age Cobden will teach 
 the student to use his mother tongue in a man- 
 ner simple, straightforward, matter-of-fact : " You 
 know I never give any peroration to my speeches," 
 he said, " when I have finished, I sit down : " ^ while 
 John Bright affords illustration of all varieties of 
 modern speech, the imaginative, the passionate, the 
 distinct appeal to reason, all built up on the plain- 
 est, homeliest idiom which the language makes 
 possible, and which a Quaker training could im- 
 part. In our own country, it is enough to mention 
 Webster for weight and majesty, and Wendell 
 Phillips for a matchless blending of simplicity and 
 variety, of force and grace. 
 
 Least of all can the great preachers be neglected 
 by any preacher who rightly values his lofty call- 
 ing. "I never read sermons," is the confession 
 that comes too often from the lips of ministers to- 
 day, a confession put forward with something of 
 conscious pride, as if the statement were enough to 
 prove the speaker's personal genius and original- 
 ity. A similar confession would hardly be made 
 in other callings. Great arguments at the bar, 
 judicial decisions of the bench, are carefully and 
 minutely studied by lawyers and by judges of dis- 
 1 Cobden, Speeches, p. 478. 
 
104 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 tinction ; and studied, not for their substance 
 alone, but for manner, for the language in which 
 the thought is clothed. The masters of public 
 speech in every department have followed the ut- 
 terances of their predecessors and their contempo- 
 raries with the minutest and most patient care. 
 Read the lives of those preachers whose words 
 have sunk the deepest, who have left lasting effects 
 in the minds and hearts of men, and you will find 
 they never despised a kindred training. In preach- 
 ing, as in every creative art, analysis must be mas- 
 tered before synthesis : you must be able to take 
 sermon or speech apart, before you can put the 
 parts together with justice and effect. And this 
 power to analyze finds its best development and 
 discipline, not in our own imperfect work, but in 
 the finished work of the masters of speech. To 
 follow the processes by which great preachers 
 achieve their results, with close attention to each 
 detail, to order, form, and phrase, is to gain facil- 
 ity and freedom in the working of our own minds, 
 is to develop our own creative power. 
 
 Nor can the unconscious influence of this famil- 
 iarity with the great preachers be overestimated. 
 In the sermons of some men the note of provin- 
 cialism is always painfully prominent : whatever 
 they touch, their tone, their language, their thought, 
 are all of narrowest type: they remind you, it 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 105 
 
 is well said, of the conversation of those people 
 who have never been out of their native village : 
 they need to be broadened by contact with the 
 larger world. Now, to know the great preachers 
 of every age and communion is to lift the mind to 
 a broader as well as higher level ; it is to break 
 down provincial barriers, and give the vision and 
 freedom of the whole truth. Even the truths we 
 already know and love, also, gain new effect, as 
 these studies teach us new methods of approach, 
 illustration, and appeal. The very association of 
 the untrained, undeveloped mind, with minds of 
 larger grasp and poise, and perfect discipline, is it- 
 self an education : it makes our own thought more 
 vigorous and sustained in movement : it gives a 
 tone, a pace unto our minds : it cultivates in lan- 
 guage even a finer choice, a subtler sense of differ- 
 ence and of proportion, a delicate precision on the 
 one hand, and on the other a wider range. 
 
 The preacher cannot make his choice too wide 
 in this direction. The wealth of imagery and color 
 in Jeremy Taylor, " the Shakespeare of divines," 
 as Emerson calls him ; the simple but majestic 
 rhythm of Hooker ; the point and vigor of South ; 
 the logic and learning of Barrow ; the naturalness 
 and ease of Tillotson, — all have their lessons to 
 teach, their unconscious infl.uence to impart. The 
 masters of the French pulpit will cultivate his 
 
106 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 sense of form and order, of progress and precision 
 in his movement : not simply the preachers of the 
 court of Louis XIV., Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bos- 
 suet : but those of later times and of our own, La- 
 cordaire, Kavignan, Monsabr^, and the present 
 preacher of Notre Dame, D'Hulst : among Protest- 
 ants, from the earlier days, Saurin ; from our own 
 times, Colani, Babut, Decoppet, and Bersier, the 
 last of whom by virtue of his training in our own 
 country awakens larger interest, and stands nearer 
 us in his mode of thought. 
 
 The English pulpit of to-day by its very wealth 
 embarrasses the choice. No century compares with 
 this in the quality of English preaching at its best. 
 There is certainly no sign of decadence here. Each 
 communion has its men of light and leading, its 
 voices not echoes, its masters of thought and form. 
 The Unitarians point to the calm and philosophic 
 power of Martineau, the deep, spiritual insight of 
 Thom, the practical religious teaching of Beard. 
 The Independents are well represented by Princi- 
 pal Fairbairn, who needs no introduction here, and 
 by Dale, whom it would be hardly too much to call 
 the greatest of living preachers. Maclaren, among 
 the Baptists, has created a special type of exposi- 
 tion. The Church of England counts Liddon her 
 preacher to intelligence and the reason, and Knox 
 Little her type of fervid evangelism ; while the 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 107 
 
 Bishop of Eipoii, Carpenter, and the late Arch- 
 bishop of York, Magee, take highest rank as 
 preachers without notes, the last, perhaps the finest 
 type of that method of delivery which our age and 
 our language afford. Yet an eagle's flight above 
 all the rest must be placed the three great names 
 of Newman, Manning, and Church: Newman, so 
 rich in color and imagery and varied power ; Man- 
 ning, the keenest analyst of sin, the most direct of 
 preachers to the conscience ; and Church, whose 
 calm and thoughtful treatment of lofty themes lifts 
 the hearer into a purer atmosphere, 
 
 " Where, beyond these voices, there is peace." 
 The words in which Principal Shairp sets forth 
 the qualities of Newman's Parochial Sermons 
 might better be applied to the blended power of 
 these three names : " so simple and transparent," 
 he writes, "yet so subtle withal; so strong, yet so 
 tender; the grasp of a strong man's hand, com- 
 bined with the trembling tenderness of a woman's 
 heart, expressing in a few monosyllables truth 
 which would have cost other men a page of philo- 
 sophic verbiage, laying the most gentle yet persua- 
 sive finger on the very core of things, reading to 
 men their own most secret thoughts better than they 
 knew them themselves." ^ If other preachers profit 
 us by individual qualities of outline and form, these 
 1 Aspects of Poetry, 381, 382. 
 
108 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
 
 surely will bring their best fruit into our lives, 
 when we have caught their tone and spirit through 
 long and close association and daily familiarity. 
 They must be studied as the poets are studied, 
 with patient care and meditation. But the effect 
 is worthy of the cost. For no preacher who walks 
 each day in such companionship, who breathes this 
 air indeed, can let his own style sink to the coarse 
 and vulgar level of the streets, or become the slave 
 of sensationalism or pedantry in the pulpit. 
 
 With the preachers of our own country you are 
 more or less familiar. They have their lessons to 
 teach, some of them nearer to our special work 
 than we can learn from preachers more remote in 
 time and place. But none of them, with all fair- 
 ness it must be added, disclose those finer qualities 
 which the English pulpit at its best reveals. The 
 sturdy manhood and spiritual suggestiveness of 
 Bushnell, the rush and force and rhythmic flow of 
 Brooks, the many-sided practical insight of Beecher, 
 all are worth our study. The latter, I must con- 
 fess, little as he can teach in form, for variety and 
 for homely truth to common life surpasses all. No 
 single sermon fails to have its special portion, re- 
 mark, or anecdote, or keen Interpretation, for each 
 special class the preacher sees before him. To 
 each he gives some morsel of the bread of life, and 
 to this adaptation in his teaching, rather than to 
 any brilliant gift, his power is due. 
 
LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 109 
 
 To study each preacher, then, for his special gift, 
 and at his best ; to supplement the defects of one 
 by the excellences of another ; to gather from all a 
 clearer idea of effective form and presentation in 
 the preacher's message, and frame a larger ideal of 
 what the man behind the words should be, — these 
 are the objects which the student of homiletics sets 
 before him, as he turns to study the masters of the 
 pulpit. No slavish imitation, no copying of a con- 
 scious model, is possible to him whose mind is open 
 to many types of excellence. And the higher the 
 masters whom he follows most, the more will he be 
 lifted above formal imitation to the sharing of a 
 kindred spirit. 
 
 The list of preachers I have named is long ; but 
 it is not exhaustive. I have mentioned only those, 
 and but a part of those even, to whom I owe a per- 
 sonal debt for power and inspiration, who have 
 been of help to me in a preacher's life. A few 
 hints of this character I should have prized when 
 my pastorate began : I make these hints to-day, in 
 the hope they may prove helpful to others as they 
 begin to preach. There is material for a lifetime's 
 study here : but half an hour a day given to special 
 work like this will soon give any man a feeling, an 
 instinct, for spoken style, free him from the undue 
 influence of written forms, and enlarge his use of 
 his mother tongue. 
 
SERMONS.- 
 
 "CALLED TO BE SAINTS. 
 
 " Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the 
 will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, 
 
 " Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them 
 that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints." — 
 1 Corinthians i. 1, 2. 
 
 "Paul, called to be an apostle;" 'them that 
 are at Corinth called to be saints.' These are the 
 two clauses which I wish to separate from those we 
 have read, in order to fix your attention on them 
 this morning. I fear the first impression on our 
 minds as we put these clauses together is of con- 
 trast. " Called to be an apostle " ! We have a 
 very large idea of what that means. " Called to 
 be a saint " ! We have a very poor and small idea 
 of that, as shown in our conduct. Yet I am very 
 sure that the thought of the Apostle here is not of 
 contrast, but of closest parallelism. He sets the 
 two side by side as if they were on the same level. 
 Paul was not the man to parade, uncalled for, his 
 points of superiority over others. Sometimes, in 
 1 Reproduced from imperfect stenographer's notes. 
 
SERMONS. Ill 
 
 this epistle notably, he is driven to recall the dis- 
 tinguishing marks of his apostleship, not for him- 
 self alone, but for the sake of the churches he has 
 founded, to set them on a level with the early Jew- 
 ish churches. This is never his choice. He loved 
 rather, with aU great souls, to dwell on what was 
 common to him and those whom he addressed. It 
 is a mark of littleness — shows a mind essentially 
 small, and a temper contemptible — to put self on 
 a pedestal before our fellows, and challenge their 
 admiration for what we have and they cannot gain, 
 and forget our vast distance from the divine ideal. 
 The highest genius is here at one with the highest 
 goodness. It loves to emphasize what it holds in 
 common with all men, — what all men may have, 
 and ought to have. " Called to be an apostle," 
 " called to be saints " ! This is the common thought 
 which rings and reechoes through the epistle. Its 
 refrain, " We are called," blends the clauses of the 
 text, and binds together the hearts of the Apostle 
 and his hearers, and with theirs our own, bringing 
 to each of us, if we will realize it, the same hope, 
 and duty, and divine warning. 
 
 I. " Called to be saints." This is the clause on 
 which we wiU chiefly dwell, because we do not need 
 to dwell on the earlier clause. No one of us has 
 any question as to Paul's claim that he was " called 
 to be an apostle." But it seemed then, even to 
 
112 SERMONS. 
 
 some of his own converts, to be extravagant, while 
 the Jewish Christians all over the world were dis- 
 posed to set him lower than the Twelve. This very 
 epistle was written largely to maintain his equal 
 right and dignity with his fellow apostles. But all 
 dispute on this point is past. The world has heard 
 him, and he has so far moulded the Christianity of 
 the Western World, — Christianity as we know it, 
 and as the last ten centuries have known it, — that 
 it is difficult for us to lift the other apostles, even 
 Peter, James, and John, up to the level of Paul. 
 
 So we do not need to emphasize the fact that he 
 was called to be an apostle, but we do need to em- 
 phasize the fact that everybody is called to be a 
 saint, and that everybody is called to be a saint. 
 We do not very often think of ourselves as called 
 to be anything, still less saints, yet this is what 
 Paul insists upon. Hence we must study closely 
 what the Apostle means, how he uses the title, and 
 so what force it should have for us. 
 
 1. Let us see how widely he uses the phrase. It 
 is not the Corinthians alone who are so addressed. 
 Turn to the opening of the Epistle to the liomans, 
 " Paul called to be an apostle, ... to all that be in 
 Rome . . . called to be saints." As these epistles 
 were written near the same time, we do not wonder 
 at the kindred thought. Take, then, the later epis- 
 tles, the three great epistles of " The Prison House 
 
SERMONS. 113 
 
 at Rome," — Epheslans, Philippians, Colossians, — 
 and you find the same phrase, — "the saints which 
 are at Ephesus," Philippi, or Colosse. There is 
 indeed a noteworthy change in the form of this 
 address from that in the earlier epistles. There he 
 addresses the church, or the churches of a locality, 
 but here the saints : as if the more he has grown 
 in mind, the more he has come to see three things ; 
 first, that the holiness of the church is nothing more 
 than the holiness of the members who make it up ; 
 secondly, that a " saint " is what every individual 
 is called and meant by God to be ; and lastly, that 
 the highest help, the first service, he can render 
 any little gathering of Christians, is to keep this 
 truth before their minds, first, last, and all the time. 
 So, again and again, as he writes to different 
 churches, he begins with the same supreme ideal 
 of their lives. We hardly need say that through 
 each epistle runs the same line of argument. He 
 presses home the truth on all occasions, in all cir- 
 cumstances, relates it to all duties. Whenever he 
 writes to any company of Christians, he writes to 
 them as if they were saints, and calls them such. 
 
 2. Now when we turn to the character of the 
 people who made up these early churches, we do 
 not find them to be saints in the sense we give to 
 the word. The use of the phrase is not accounted 
 for by their native qualities or present attainments. 
 8 
 
114 SERMONS. 
 
 Many of them had been drawn from the class of 
 slaves, the most corrupt in the Koman State, steeped 
 in vice, tainted with all manner of sins. How often 
 we notice, after a catalogue of crimes prevalent in 
 that day, that the Apostle adds, " and such were 
 some of you" ! This he does only to mark the con- 
 trast between the past and the present. Yet even 
 now they do not show as ideal saints. We see 
 them quarrelsome, divided into factions, with little 
 unity of spirit : their meetings were sometimes 
 boisterous, their sacred feasts stained with pride, 
 jealousy, selfishness. The Apostle is here writing 
 expressly to condemn a flagrant case of crime in 
 the very church, whose members he addresses as 
 " saints." We feel, as we rise from reading his 
 epistle, that the term would have to be taken with 
 a great latitude of meaning, before we could apply 
 it to people who make up such a gathering as this. 
 
 3. Yet, notice, in the third place, that there is 
 no lowering of the ideal of what a saint should be 
 or of what a calling is. Both words have for Paul 
 a profound meaning. 
 
 a. A " saint " with him is the highest possible 
 ideal of humanity. There are few sadder things in 
 the history of Christianity than the way in which 
 this great word, which shines out in the pages of 
 the New Testament, has been dwarfed and dimmed. 
 I turn to mediaeval history, to the language of the 
 
SERMONS. 115 
 
 great writer who has died within two years, and 
 find a saint, a man who is ascetic, sour-visaged, 
 fasting, who goes through the world fighting, and 
 for himself alone. I turn to Puritanism, and read 
 it in the letters of Oliver Cromwell and the men 
 who made his staff and officers, and here is another 
 type of saint just as narrow-minded, with an added 
 touch of cant, from which the mediaeval saint was 
 free ; and then I open the New Testament and say. 
 Does the word mean such a pitiful being, instead 
 of the kind of man Paul conceives ? Under these 
 two classes of saints noble lives have been lived. 
 It is a fact of Christianity that multitudes of men 
 are better than their belief, and higher than their 
 professed ideal. But these later associations with 
 the word, mediaeval narrowness and asceticism on 
 the one side, Puritan eensoriousness and hardness 
 on the other, have sadly dwarfed and belittled its 
 meaning until it has become alas ! to many ears 
 and minds, only a cant term. Brush these aside, 
 put off all colored spectacles, and look into the 
 New Testament. There you see meet and blend, 
 the gentle grace, winsomeness, and charity of a 
 Francis Assisi, the personal purity in thought and 
 feeling of a Milton, the heroic manhood of a Philip 
 Sidney, the large-souled philanthropy, devotion, and 
 self-sacrifice that burned and blazed in Xavier. 
 That is the hind of saint that the New Testament 
 
116 SERMONS. 
 
 holds before you, and I challenge you to find in all 
 the wide world of lofty thought, action, and feeling, 
 a broader, higher, nobler, type of man or woman 
 than this, Paul's " Saint." 
 
 h. "Called," again, is a great word on the lips 
 or from the pen of Paul. How he dwelt upon its 
 meaning in his own case, when forced to contend 
 for the sacred name of Apostle ! How exalted as a 
 privilege, it seemed to him, raising him to the level 
 of others, even though they had known Christ after 
 the flesh as he had not ! " Called " ! it meant that 
 road to Damascus, and the dazzling light which 
 smote him down ; it meant that before his birth 
 God had fashioned him and sent him into the 
 world for a divine purpose. And now remember, 
 when he says " called to be saints " of his fellow 
 disciples, he does not lower that thought. He be- 
 lieves as he utters these words and impresses them 
 on his hearers that every disciple in Colosse or 
 Corinth is just as truly called of God to be a saint 
 as he himself is called to be an Apostle. The call- 
 ings rest on the same level and basis, have the same 
 great object in view, and when complete they reach 
 the same divine end. He is no more called to be 
 an Apostle than the humblest Christian of his day 
 is called to be a saint. 
 
 4. Now, as we think of the greatness of this 
 ideal, as we see how much it means, I think we 
 
SERMONS. 117 
 
 see why he has put the two clauses together here, 
 and why at the beginning of his epistles he delights 
 to insist on this great thought, that every disciple 
 is called to be a saint. 
 
 a. It explains to him the meaning of the sacri- 
 fice of Christ. That had never taken place for any 
 lower purpose than this : not to snatch a sinful 
 man away from the punishment he deserves, leav- 
 ing him stained with the same sin as before, not 
 to snatch him from hell, but to lift the soul out of 
 that sin and selfishness which is hell, out of those 
 temptations which blind his eyes and deafen his 
 ears to every divine call, out of the bondage and 
 slavery of sin into the glorious liberty of the sons 
 of God, — that is the purpose of the Incarnation ! 
 Christ came, suffered,, died, rose, ascended, that 
 you, my brother, might be a saint, and nothing less 
 than that was worthy of His coming. 
 
 6. Then, again, the same thought explains the 
 Apostle's own call. Why was he sent out into the 
 world with this great message ? Why was he for- 
 bidden to go to his own people and sent to the ut- 
 termost parts of the known world to bear the mes- 
 sage of the cross ? Because, he now sees, they — 
 these despised pagans, these races lying in dark- 
 ness beneath the contempt of the Jew and the 
 Greek — are called to be saints ; because God pur- 
 poses to create in these distant races a new type 
 of man. 
 
118 SERMONS. 
 
 c. Lastly, in this truth Paul was finding the se- 
 cret of the new and strange moral force which 
 Christianity had brought into the world. He had 
 seen in hundreds of his converts the power of this 
 truth to reform the life and build up the character. 
 If you would make a man something out of no- 
 thing, you must do more than menace him with 
 whips. Loftier than law is it to put within his 
 heart a divine spirit, and set before his eyes a 
 higher purpose, and make him feel that he is called 
 of God to be and to do something in this world. 
 Look at the early history of Christianity. I have 
 pointed out the class of people with whom it had 
 to deal, the dregs of the Eoman State ; but not 
 more wonderful was that power which centuries 
 before stooped in Egypt to an enslaved people, led 
 them through the wilderness, and lifted them into 
 a nation, than this moral force of the Christian 
 faith, which built up the base, material under its 
 hand into a new manhood and a new civilization. 
 Aye, and within two centuries compelled the admi- 
 ration of the haughtiest of Koman philosophers and 
 the most hostile of sceptics. Marcus Antoninus 
 writes that if it were possible for those of the Stoic 
 sect, to which he belonged, to reach the level of the 
 despised Christians, there would be hope for the 
 future of Stoicism. Julian the apostate, who 
 thought that he could sweep from the earth the 
 
SERMONS. 119 
 
 Christianity in which he had been cradled, was 
 first to confess that not until paganism could reach 
 the moral level of Christianity was there any hope 
 for paganism. That early church is an eternal 
 comment on the power of this call, the " call to be 
 saints." 
 
 II. Has the power of such a call passed away 
 for us to-day ? Has it no message to bring to our 
 ears and our lives ? Do we not need to be re- 
 minded often of what God expects of us, of what 
 Christ means us to become, of the purpose of the 
 New Testament and the Gospel as it is sent into 
 our lives and into our hearts ? We, too, are 
 " called to be saints." The lesson needs now, as 
 of old, to be repeated, kept daily before us, and 
 enforced upon our hearts. The words are not 
 common enough with us. We must rescue them 
 from cant and disgrace, lift them above contro- 
 versy, release them from all fetters of narrow in- 
 terpretation, and take them home to our hearts. 
 
 1. In the first place, let us remember that the 
 call is to every Christian disciple, not to the min- 
 ister alone, but to laymen as well. Their call is 
 on the same level, from the same source, with the 
 same divine certainty and purpose. It used to be 
 the fashion to speak of the ministry as " a sacred 
 calling." This way of speaking has gone out of 
 
120 SERMONS. 
 
 fashion : if because the ministry has lost its sacred- 
 ness, then this is a sad thing for the church and 
 for the race ; but if we mean that all other callings 
 have been brought up to something of the same 
 sacredness, then it is a blessing to the world. But 
 there still lingers in the hearts of many Christian 
 people the idea that the minister is called to some 
 level of character which it would be absurd to ex- 
 pect of the layman. Did you never see a Christian 
 who, in the case of his own character and conduct, 
 would allow a thousand things which he would be 
 ashamed to have his minister do? Do you find 
 any excuse for it in the light of this verse ? If I 
 were speaking to a congregation of ministers I 
 would say, With your contact with the truth of 
 God, you ought to have an ideal character far 
 above that of your neighbors, and whatever criti- 
 cism they pass upon you, ought only to give you a 
 higher idea of what Christ wants you to be. But 
 I should fail of my duty as a Christian preacher if I 
 did not say to you, that no Christian has any right 
 to expect from his minister a higher level of con- 
 duct than his own. Your moral vision sees no 
 ends too high for you to seek, sets no standards for 
 another, even for a minister, that you should not, 
 need not, reach. "What you feel the minister has 
 no right to do, that you have no right to do. 
 What you feel unworthy of his calling, that is un- 
 
SERMONS. 121 
 
 worthy of yours. You are called to be a saint, he 
 is called to help you to be a saint. The end of 
 his calling is found in yours, to which his is but 
 the means. He is the tool to help make you a 
 saint, and the tool is less than the work produced. 
 When God gives you a vision of something bet- 
 ter than yourself, or something larger and more 
 unselfish than you are to-day, that vision is from 
 heaven, and is meant for your guidance. Be not 
 disobedient to it. The voice of your conscience 
 will never sound too loudly for your own life, nor 
 present a higher ideal than God has meant for 
 you. 
 
 2. So again the call is for all men, not alone 
 for the professing Christian. There are a great 
 many people in every congregation who feel and 
 see the ideal which a church member should reach, 
 and are very severe when Christians fall short of 
 their ideal. I make no apology for any Chris- 
 tian's defects, but I say to the man who sees what 
 the Christian should be. How did you come to see 
 it, my brother ? The New Testament taught you, 
 the Apostle's language shows you, he has painted 
 for you the vision of what a saint should be, and 
 your own heart says, that is right, and every 
 Christian ought to be that. But has God flooded 
 your heart with light merely to make you a judge 
 of your brother ? Is that the purpose of the 
 
122 SERMONS. 
 
 New Testament and of the Incarnation ? No, my 
 brother, you are called to be a saint, np to the 
 highest measure you can see. God never gave 
 you any light which he did not mean you to use in 
 your own life. He has put no conscience in your 
 breast to make you a circuit judge over some one 
 else. You, all of you, are called to be saints. In 
 this call Father, Son, and Spirit unite. " The 
 Spirit and the Bride say come." The church, 
 the preacher, the open word, join in the appeal. 
 Would that I might set it ringing forever in your 
 hearts, to haunt your life, till it should re-make 
 and transform it all — " you are called to be 
 saints." 
 
 Remember, then, three final lessons. 
 
 1. We have all a divine purpose behind our 
 lives. God calls us, not we ourselves, to be saints. 
 He calls us by sending His Son to die for us, and 
 His Spirit to breathe within us. He has put us 
 here. He has given us this life and light, for this 
 end. The utmost that God can do for us, I say it 
 reverently, the highest thing he can do for us, is to 
 make us in His likeness, and that can only be done 
 by the fulfillment of this purpose, the developing 
 within our lives of the noblest saintship and the 
 largest likeness to His Son. 
 
 2. We have here a divine promise. How much 
 this means ! He who has begun a good work in 
 
SERMONS. 123 
 
 you will not leave it unfinished. Wherever moral 
 failure is recorded, God is not the cause. Your 
 life is not straitened in Him, but in yourself. 
 " Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it." Reach 
 out to your whole heritage. You cannot ask too 
 much. Remember the word of the Apostle : if 
 He gave His Son for us, " how shall He not with 
 Him also freely give us all things ? " The greater 
 includes the less. His purpose implies the promise 
 of the grace you need to-day, to-morrow, and the 
 next day, until you trample on every sin, and ful- 
 fill at last your calling to salntship. 
 
 3. In the last place, the divine warning in the 
 verse must be noticed. If there is any failure to 
 attain that ideal, it is not God's but yours ; and be 
 assured that He can never be content with less and 
 that you can never be satisfied with less. You 
 were made to be a son of God, and though you 
 fill yourself with husks you can never be content 
 to be a swine. You were made to be saints, and 
 with that light flooding your life, and that ideal 
 filling your vision, and that call in your ears, any- 
 thing less than that done and realized becomes its 
 own condemnation, and when the soul has narrowed 
 itself, and forever shut out all divine life and pos- 
 sibility, I think no remorse can ring within our 
 ears more terrible than these simple words, " Called 
 to be saints." 
 
124 SERMONS. 
 
 You remember the language of one of our own 
 poets, as he describes the soul of the malefactor 
 just on the borders of eternity, looking back over 
 his life : — 
 
 " Men think it is an awful sight 
 
 To see a soul just set adrift 
 On that drear voyage from whose night 
 
 The ominous shadows never lift; 
 But 't is more awful to behold 
 
 A helpless infant, newly born, 
 Whose little hands unconscious hold 
 
 The keys of darkness and of morn. 
 
 " Mine held them once ; I flung away 
 
 Those keys, that might have open set 
 The golden sluices of the day. 
 
 But clutch the keys of darkness yet ; 
 I hear the reapers singing go 
 
 Into God's harvest ; I that might 
 With them have chosen, here below 
 
 Grope shuddering at the gates of night. 
 
 " O glorious youth that once wast mine ! 
 Oh high ideal ! all in vain 
 Ye enter at this ruined shrine 
 
 Whence worship ne'er shall rise again; 
 The bat and owl inhabit here. 
 
 The snake nests in the altar-stone, 
 The sacred vessels moulder near, 
 The image of the God is gone." 
 
 J. B,. Lowell, Extreme Unction. 
 
SERMONS. 
 II. 
 THE ENIGMA OF LIFE. 
 " For now we see in a mirror darkly." — 1 COR. xiii. 12. 
 
 Not " darkly," but " in a riddle," as the margin 
 of the Kevision reads. " In an enigma " is the 
 exact translation. The phrase describes, not the 
 manner in which we look, but the thing which we 
 see. The darkness belongs, not to our vision alone, 
 but to the object at which we gaze. Thus the 
 clause harmonizes with the rest of the verse, with 
 the whole, chapter which teaches the relation in 
 which we stand to the great world of human life, 
 to our own present life, with all the problems 
 therein disclosed and forced upon our thought and 
 view. 
 
 That our vision here is imperfect and unsatisfy- 
 ing, all men confess : in this verse we learn the 
 reason for its imperfection. That reason is two- 
 fold:— 
 
 1. We see only the reflection, not the reality. 
 "In a mirror," says the Apostle, not "face to 
 face "; " in part," not as a whole. The object we 
 see in a mirror is not the object itself ; it is only 
 
126 SERMONS. 
 
 a reflection. No object can be seen thus in its 
 completeness. A face or a form presents but a 
 single side to the mirror, and that side alone is re- 
 flected therein ; of the other side the mirror can- 
 not tell us. So in the glass of life, one side, one 
 part, alone is seen : the other sides, the other parts, 
 which together make the whole, our eyes cannot 
 discern. 
 
 2. Again, the figure thus partially reflected is 
 dim, obscure, uncertain. " In a mirror, in an 
 enigma." The mirrors of the old world were made 
 of polished metal. The art of coating glass with 
 quicksilver, to produce a perfect reflecting surface, 
 was then unknown. In any mirror the reflection 
 may be dimmed by mist or moisture, by the very 
 breath of the beholder. In the ancient mirror it 
 was often distorted also by inequality and refrac- 
 tion. So in the glass of life the objects which we 
 see, the very side and face which we behold, are re- 
 flected in broken and unequal lights. Not only do 
 we see in part : the very part does not correspond 
 wholly with the reality. 
 
 It is no wonder, then, that a vision so imperfect, 
 a knowledge so poor and partial, should be destined 
 to pass away, when once the perfect state has 
 come, when we see " face to face," and know as 
 fully as we are known. Hence the Apostle turns 
 from our sight and knowledge, which are but tran- 
 
SERMONS. 127 
 
 sitory, to insist on the supremacy of that which can 
 never pass, — of faith and hope and love which 
 abide forever ; of love above all, which remains for- 
 ever the same, unchanged in character, though en- 
 larged and deepened in power as we pass from the 
 realm of the imperfect and shadowy into the realm 
 of clear and everlasting light. Thus is this verse 
 linked with the earlier verses of the chapter in this 
 noble hymn and eulogy of love. 
 
 But to-day we take this single verse, this single 
 phrase, as the subject of our thought. The enigma 
 of life I How familiar the words sound ! How 
 full they seem of deep pathos and suggestion ! 
 We have all felt — who has not felt ? — the fine 
 fitness of the phrase. It applies to our own life 
 and experience, to what we know of the life of 
 others around us, to the life of all men, to the his- 
 tory of the world, with its manifold and perplex- 
 ing problems. He feels its meaning most who has 
 lived most himself and seen most of human life. 
 The figure is as pathetic as it is true. The enigma 
 of life ! We see the child puzzling over the prob- 
 lem or riddle he is set to solve, using all his pow- 
 ers to draw some meaning from the seeming confu- 
 sion before him. Again and again he tries, but 
 finds no answer. Perplexed, discouraged, in de- 
 spair, he may be, but he cannot give up the ques- 
 tion. He is sure there must be an answer : he can 
 
128 SERMONS. 
 
 never rest content with ignorance and contradic- 
 tion. So, as the figure implies, we turn again and 
 again to the enigma of life, assured, however baf- 
 fled, that some answer there must be. How pa- 
 thetic the picture ! What truth to life it conveys ! 
 What a testimony to the greatness of man's nature, 
 — ay, and to the greatness of God's revelation of 
 himself therein. 
 
 For notice the exactness of the Apostle's figure. 
 It is chosen with deliberate care. It describes just 
 the light in which Christianity, the grace of God 
 as revealed in the gospel, compels us to look at the 
 present life. The more closely we study the figure, 
 the more clearly will its fitness appear. 
 
 I. Revelation has made life an enigma, and the 
 gospel has deepened the enigma. The statement 
 at first seems startling ; but if we consider it, we 
 shall find it is not only a fact, but a most signifi- 
 cant fact, — a part of that tribute to our faith 
 which comes from the unconscious lips and hearts 
 of all who have known the gospel, or have come 
 within the reach and range of even its partial in- 
 fluence. 
 
 Look at the figure again. What is a riddle, an 
 enigma ? It is not a mere mystery, but a mystery 
 which some one has set before us by design, — a 
 mystery with a meaning behind it, with an answer 
 somewhere. It implies intention and purpose: it 
 
SERMONS. 129 
 
 makes a disclosure necessary. It is and must be 
 the product of mind. It is neither fate nor chance. 
 It is not mere unintelligent coincidence. The child 
 would soon give over his effort to solve the puzzle 
 if he were not sure there was meaning to be found 
 there. He would not seek to unravel mere confu- 
 sion or expect to find a clue to chaos. What is 
 true of the child is equally true of the man. He 
 will not try to read the riddle of nature or of his- 
 tory unless he believes there is a meaning behind 
 it. Hence, outside of revelation and its assurance 
 of order and purpose, inductive science knows lit- 
 tle progress, and history is never studied as a com- 
 plete and ordered whole. I know, of course, what 
 Mohammedan Spain accomplished, but this is not 
 an exception ; for Mahomet drew from the Jewish 
 revelation the secret of progress, and science, in 
 Mohammedan Spain, however close its observation, 
 reached no broad and fruitful generalization. Not 
 science or history, however, is our direct theme 
 now, but rather life, of which these are a part. 
 
 Christianity compels men, then, to regard life as 
 an enigma. The mystery of the world was there 
 before : Christianity makes it a mystery with a 
 meaning. When the light of the gospel has dawned 
 on us, we are sure there must be a meaning, and 
 we cannot choose but seek it. This is true, not of 
 the believer alone, but of all who are born beneath 
 9 
 
130 SERMONS. 
 
 its light. Take a community like ours: let any 
 calamity befall a good man, such as his care and 
 foresight could not have prevented, let evil follow 
 upon some good action, and we are all perplexed 
 and troubled at the result. When death invades 
 a home, sudden death, and takes away the young 
 man, the husband, the father, in the very prime of 
 life and usefulness, the minister knows what the 
 mourners will say. They cannot understand how 
 God, who is good and who is our Father, should 
 deal thus with them. They cannot understand, 
 and their language implies that they expect to un- 
 derstand, they ought to understand ; and hence 
 they complain as if justly disappointed because 
 they do not understand. Now, Christianity, the 
 gospel, has created this expectation. The disap- 
 pointment comes from the fact that life is not a 
 mystery simply : it is an enigma. 
 
 The significance of this fact is only realized 
 when we reflect that no other religion, no religion 
 outside of revelation, has created such a demand or 
 awakened and called out such an expectation. We 
 find it in the Old Testament, upon the lips of prophet 
 and psalmist and patriarch. " Thou art of purer 
 eyes than to behold evil," cries Habakkuk, " and 
 canst not look on iniquity : wherefore lookest thou 
 upon them that deal treacherously, and boldest thy 
 tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is 
 
SERMONS. 131 
 
 more righteous than he ? and makest men as the 
 fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have 
 no ruler over them ? " ^ " Behold, these are the 
 ungodly, who prosper in the world," complains 
 Asaph ; " they increase in riches. Verily I have 
 cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands 
 in innocency." ^ " The earth is given into the 
 hands of the wicked," sighs Job: "he covereth 
 the faces of the judges thereof; if not, where 
 and who is he?"^ "That be far from thee," 
 pleads Abraham, " to do after this manner, to slay 
 the righteous with the wicked : and that the right- 
 eous should be as the wicked, that be far from 
 thee : shall not the judge of all the earth do right ? " * 
 These are questionings of a kindred tone with ours : 
 it is the enigma still that presses sorely upon these 
 hearts. 
 
 But when we turn to the pagan world, we find 
 a different tone and view. The mystery is still 
 there, but the enigma is gone : there is not even 
 the hope of a clue. Neither expectation nor dis- 
 appointment remains. The pagan looked in Greece 
 and Eome, the pagan still looks in India and Ja- 
 pan, upon the great mystery of life, but with a 
 blank and unexpectant gaze, not even asking for re- 
 lief. No thin veil that half reveals what it hides, 
 
 1 Hab. i. 13, 14. " Psalm Ixxiii. 12, 13. 
 
 ° Job ix. 24. * Genesis xviii. 25. 
 
132 SERMONS. 
 
 no curtain whose folds are for a moment drawn 
 aside, invites the sad but eager eye and heart. It 
 is a blank wall that confronts him, with no break 
 and no promise of relief. 
 
 I have been reading of late a selection of epi- 
 grams from the Greek anthology, — brief poems 
 arranged according to their subjects from the wide 
 circle of the world's most perfect literature. The 
 poems upon Fate and Change, Death and Life, 
 are most significant. Here are all the pathos, ten- 
 derness, and sorrow with which our human lot and 
 sympathy invest such themes. We feel the fresh 
 grief, as we read, over the loss of friends and kin- 
 dred, and even of the household pets, in those 
 homes so far away. Here are inscriptions and epi- 
 taphs upon the betrothed girl, the bride, the mother 
 with her babe, the boy of five or seven or twelve 
 years old, the faithful nurse, the faithful slave, the 
 favorite dog, the tame partridge, the nightingale. 
 We feel how close akin we are to these aching 
 hearts, how the brotherhood of sorrow bridges all 
 distance of time and space and knits together the 
 present and the past. But one thing we miss in 
 all this record : one point of difference there is be- 
 tween these mourners and ourselves. We find no 
 hint here of those " obstinate questionings," those 
 vain attempts, forever renewed, to find some mean- 
 ing in the tangled maze. Disappointment is here. 
 
SERMONS. 133 
 
 but seldom surprise; never, we may almost say, 
 that bitter sense of wrong whicli troubles our 
 hearts. They do not even blame the gods, these 
 sufferers of old : they view all as the play of chance 
 or the blind movement of unthinking fate. Life 
 is to them a mystery, not an enigma. They ex- 
 pected little of their gods, and hence they com- 
 plained not, and asked no reason for their broken 
 hopes. 
 
 It is hard for us to realize a state of mind and 
 heart like this : the very atmosphere is so unlike 
 the air we breathe. This difference Christianity 
 has created ; and in the very complaints, the quer- 
 ulous unrest, with whicli our hearts are filled, be- 
 liever and unbeliever alike, beneath, the stroke 
 of change and death, I find a noble, if uncon- 
 scious, tribute to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It 
 means much that we should expect and demand of 
 this the key to every problem, the answer to the 
 enigma of life. No other faith has ever created 
 such a demand or awakened such an expectation. 
 
 II. Again, Christianity alone explains the enigma 
 of life. Christianity alone can answer the ques- 
 tions it has raised. 
 
 These questionings, as we have seen, we all must 
 know. They haunt us and follow us despite our- 
 selves. They sit, like the fabled sphinx of old, 
 confronting every life, demanding to be met and 
 
134 SERMONS. 
 
 answered. "We turn to philosophy, to the religion 
 nature teaches, to the best guesses man can make, 
 but find no voice and no reply. We are driven 
 back to Christ for the only answer and explana- 
 tion. With Simon Peter we still must say, after all 
 wanderings and vain attempts to find some other 
 clue, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast 
 the words of eternal life." ^ The answer of the 
 gospel, then, is the only answer to the enigma. 
 That answer is twofold. It tells us why the enigma 
 exists : it points to the future with the promise of 
 explanation yet to come. We cannot find relief 
 unless we listen to both these voices. 
 
 1. The gospel tells us why life is an enigma. It 
 is because this world is not a whole, complete in 
 itself, but only a part of a greater whole. The 
 part does not, it cannot, take the place of the 
 whole. It is not meant to satisfy in itself. It is 
 intended to awaken thought, desire, and expecta- 
 tion, that look beyond and make the future a 
 necessity. The broken hopes, the expectations 
 unfulfilled, whatever makes this life felt as in- 
 complete and unsatisfying, — these all are part of 
 God's design. 
 
 You do not expect to find the answer to a prob- 
 lem when only half the problem is before you. 
 You do not open some romance or novel, some 
 1 St. John vi. 68. 
 
SERMONS. 135 
 
 story of the outer or the inner life, and think to 
 find the first chapter complete in itself. The first 
 scene, the first act, of a great drama, does not dis- 
 close the entire plot. The interest awakened there 
 must be sustained and deepened to the very end. 
 If it falls or fails before this point, the drama is 
 itself a failure. Life, it is said, is a drama, of 
 which the fifth act lies in another world. Life, 
 says the apostle, is an enigma, an unanswered rid- 
 dle, because we know in part alone, and not the 
 whole. 
 
 "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing," ^ 
 runs the Hebrew proverb. You remember what a 
 change has passed over all your thought and life 
 as you have passed from childhood into man's 
 estate. What different standards, estimates, ideas, 
 you have to-day from those you had at eight, at 
 ten, at twelve years of age ! And what a dwarfing 
 of your life it would have been, had the childish 
 thought and fancy never grown larger and deeper ! 
 The prattling words, the half -formed thought, the 
 imperfect reasoning, all had their place ; but when 
 manhood came, you put away and left behind these 
 childish things. The problem which it cost the 
 little brains such pains to answer, you understand 
 to-day at a single glance. You have a wider range 
 of knowledge on which to draw, experience and a 
 ^ Prov. XXV. 2. 
 
136 SERMONS. 
 
 trained intelligence for your help. What wonder, 
 then, since we are all children, undeveloped chil- 
 dren, here, with this narrow range, this limited ex- 
 perience, — what wonder life, itself a part, should 
 be to us an enigma? 
 
 2. The gospel points us toward an answer yet to 
 come. If it does not bring the full solution of the 
 problem here, it shows us where that full solution 
 lies. If it makes the future a necessity to our con- 
 science and our thought, it adds the highest as- 
 surance of the reality and satisfaction beyond. 
 " Now," says the apostle, " at this moment," more 
 literally, " we see through a mirror in an enigma ; 
 but then," with emphasis, "face to face." "Now 
 I know in part; but then shall I know," know 
 fully, as the margin adds, " even as also I was fully 
 known." It is not omniscience which the words 
 guarantee to us : that, like every other divine at- 
 tribute, is God's, and God's alone. But we shall 
 see enough to make the mystery plain. So from 
 some height you look down upon the winding roads 
 that lead through forests and valleys toward a sin- 
 gle centre, some populous city, it may be. The 
 wayfarer sees but a few rods before him ; his eye 
 cannot pass the nearest curve, but from your height 
 you see the whole. 
 
 " Thy truth gives promise of a dawn 
 Beneath whose light I am to see, 
 
SERMONS. 137 
 
 When all these blinding veils are drawn, 
 This was the wisest path for me." ^ 
 
 The Apostle is thinking also of a more direct 
 suggestion in the clauses before us. In place of 
 the reflection in the mirror, we shall then see the 
 reality. In place of the part, that face or side 
 which is turned toward the glass and so alone dis- 
 closed to view, we shall know the whole. Faith, 
 hope, and love will still be needed, and remain so 
 long as the creature is finite and the Creator infi- 
 nite ; but the vision of God and the clear sight of 
 all things in his light will fill the soul with un- 
 troubled trust, unfailing expectation, unquestion- 
 ing love. Such is the solution to which the gospel 
 points. Such the promise which the future holds. 
 To all our questionings this is the reply. 
 
 " O life as futile, then, as frail ! 
 
 O for thy voice to soothe and bless ! 
 What hope of answer or redress ? 
 Behind the veil, behind the veil." ^ 
 
 Eevelation, then, creates the enigma of life. It 
 changes life from a confused maze, an unmeaning 
 mystery, into an enigma, a mystery with a mean- 
 ing. Christianity both deepens and enlarges the 
 enigma, and explains it, giving a present reason 
 
 ^ S. Johnson. 
 
 ^ Tennyson, In Memoriam, 56 [old editions 55], 7. 
 
138 SERMONS. 
 
 for its existence and a promise of its solution in 
 the future. No other religion has accomplished or 
 even attempted either of these tasks. Let us learn 
 to prize more highly that faith which proves itseK 
 to us all by its unconscious influence over us, and 
 to those who follow its leading reveals an ever- 
 growing light and promise. Let us learn, then, to 
 use this light, and walk with greater confidence 
 and wait with calmer trust. 
 
 1. Let us learn to meet aright, in manly and 
 Christian spirit, the questions and problems of life. 
 We may be sure they will arise in our own expe- 
 rience over and over again. We cannot wholly 
 put them aside. When the mind only is touched 
 by them, we may divert our attention and seek to 
 rest content in simple ignorance. But the heart is 
 more importunate. " My heart, I cannot still it," 
 sings the poet ; and, when the change and sorrow 
 come most closely home, the content that comes 
 from ignorance, from agnosticism, is scattered to 
 the winds. The words of eternal life alone can 
 satisfy then. 
 
 2. Let us beware of expecting the full solution 
 here. An}^ philosophy, any theory of life, which 
 claims to have answered all the problems of the 
 world, proves thereby its incompleteness, its failure 
 to grasp all the facts. To cut the knot is not to 
 loosen it, to deny or ignore the enigma is not to 
 
SERMONS. 139 
 
 answer it. Remember the whole message of the 
 gospel. Look forward to its promise as well as 
 accept its present comfort. 
 
 3. Let us remember that the promise and an- 
 swer of the gospel belong to the faithful heart, and 
 not to the clear head alone. 
 
 " For meek Obedience, too, is Light, 
 
 And following that is finding Him." i 
 
 The closer we walk with Christ, the more we 
 obey him, the more his truth grows clear and all- 
 compelling. " Verily, verily, I say unto thee," he 
 said to Nicodemus, " we speak that we do know, 
 and testify that we have seen. ... If I have told 
 you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall 
 ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things ? " ^ We 
 may also reverse the inference. If we have be- 
 lieved and proved His testimony in earthly things 
 and found it true, we cannot but believe the wit- 
 ness that outruns our sight, of heavenly things. 
 He never has misled us, never has been proved to 
 be mistaken, in the path of present duty : shall we 
 not believe Him, then, when He speaks with the 
 same calmness and assurance of perfect knowledge 
 of the things unseen, of the world beyond, of the 
 Father's house? So shall we find grace to wait 
 
 1 J. K. Lowell, Above and Below. 
 
 2 St. John iii. 11, 12. 
 
140 SERMONS. 
 
 with patience for the clearer light on our present 
 mystery, and say, with the Apostle's confidence, 
 " Now we see in a mirror, in an enigma, but then 
 face to face : now I know in part, but then shall I 
 know fully, even as also I was fully known." 
 
 " Between the mysteries of death and life 
 
 Thou standest, loving, guiding, — not explaining ; 
 We ask, and thou art silent, — yet we gaze, 
 
 And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining ! 
 No crushing fate, no stony destiny ! 
 Thou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in thee ! 
 
 " Thy piercfed hand guides the mysterious wheels ; 
 
 Thy thorn-crowned brow now wears the crown of power ; 
 And, when the dark enigma presseth sore, 
 
 Thy patient voice saith, ' Watch with me one hour ! ' 
 As sinks the moaning river in the sea 
 In silver peace, so sinks my soul in Thee ! " i 
 
 1 Mrs. H. B. Stowe. 
 
DANTE'S VISION OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 
 
 A STUDY OF THE INFEKNO. 
 
 The face of the great poet of Florence must 
 have fitly revealed his character. The death-mask 
 of Dante, the best known — perhaps, as late re- 
 searches lead us to believe, the only genuine — like- 
 ness of the poet, at first sight repels the beholder. 
 There seems a mysterious kinship between this face 
 and the Fates of Michael Angelo. It might serve 
 as a representation of Nemesis even, for every line 
 from brow to chin looks cold and unyielding. But 
 closer study of the features softens this first repul- 
 sion, and leaves an impression much gentler and 
 truer. What first seemed hardness and severity be- 
 comes a righteous indignation against wrong, and 
 beneath apparent scorn there lies a tenderness un- 
 utterable, a love that has learned to be most kind 
 because it has learned to be most just. 
 
 A kindred change comes over the man who stud- 
 ies faithfully the poet's masterpiece and largest 
 legacy to the world, the " Divina Commedia." The 
 hasty reader, especially if his reading is confined 
 to the " Inferno," is repelled by much that is gro- 
 
142 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 tesque, unseemly, and even cruel. He sees only 
 partiality and caprice in the allotments of eternity, 
 and the poem strikes him as a sorry travesty on 
 justice, a miserable nightmare of vengeance, in- 
 spired by personal spite, by private prejudice or 
 partisan hate and fierceness. " The whole place of 
 punishment," writes Leigh Hunt, content with his 
 first impression, "is a reductio ad absurdum, as 
 ridiculous as it is melancholy ; so that one is aston- 
 ished how a man who thought himself so far ad- 
 vanced beyond his age, and who possessed such 
 powers of discerning the good and beautiful, could 
 endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a 
 region for any length of time, and there wreak and 
 harden the unworthiest of his passions." Such 
 wonder is not strange after a single reading, in a 
 mind like that of the essayist, sensitive rather 
 than profound. That the denunciation, however, 
 is as partial and superficial as sweeping verdicts 
 are wont to be, may be inferred from the life of 
 the poem, and its widening and deepening influ- 
 ence over the higher thought of men. Even among 
 English-speaking people, the admiration of Dante, 
 although slow in its growth, has almost passed into 
 a cultus, and men of widest difference in taste and 
 pursuits unite to do him homage. What is yet 
 more remarkable, intelligent appreciation of his 
 work not infrequently grows in inverse proportion 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 143 
 
 to the distance at which men stand from his own 
 modes and forms of faith. All this would have 
 been impossible, but for the intrinsic and abiding 
 worth of the work. Had the poem been only a 
 partisan pamphlet, or a personal satire, it would 
 have shared the fate of these, it would have been 
 as short-lived as they. Dante is not a Dean Swift 
 or a Defoe, and the " Divina Commedia " cannot 
 be brought down to the level of Hudibras. Dante's 
 feeling for righteousness, his keen sense of the 
 eternal distinction between right and wrong, his 
 belief in the inflexible certainty of justice, — these 
 have held fast the homage of men who have lost 
 sight of God and given up all faith in the world 
 to come. My present purpose is to emphasize 
 these features of the poem, and, beneath what 
 seems repulsive and discordant, to seek the founda- 
 tions of essential wisdom, justice, and love. A full 
 view cannot be given in the compass of this essay, 
 and our attention will therefore centre in the first 
 Cantica, the " Inferno." Dante's doctrine of sin 
 and judgment, as developed in the " Divina Com- 
 media," is our subject. 
 
 An intelligent interpretation of the poem must 
 begin with Dante's own words. " The subject of 
 this work," he writes to Can Grande, " must be 
 considered according to the letter first, and then ac- 
 cording to the allegorical meaning. . . . The sub- 
 
144 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 ject of the whole work, then, taken literally, is the 
 state of souls after death, regarded as a matter of 
 fact. For from this and around this the action of 
 the whole work moves. But according to the alle- 
 gorical meaning, the subject is man, in so far as 
 by merit or demerit, in the exercise of free will, he 
 is exposed to the rewards or punishments of justice. 
 . . . The object of the whole work, as of each part, 
 is to bring those who live in this life out of their 
 state of misery, and to guide them to the state of 
 blessedness." Restricting his words, then, to the 
 " Inferno," his purpose is to reveal, beneath the 
 vivid lines and colors of actual facts, that inevita- 
 ble sequence between sin and suffering, which runs 
 through all worlds because it is built upon unchan- 
 ging righteousness. His appeal here is to the rea- 
 son and conscience of mankind : it needs no reve- 
 lation to give to it either force or clearness. Hence, 
 the name of God is unheard in these deeps of 
 gloom : hence, also, Vergil, who proves so poor a 
 guide along the ascent of Purgatory, and who fades 
 from sight as we enter even the earthly Paradise, 
 leads with sure steps down the dizzy steeps and 
 along the winding corridors of Hell. With sin as 
 a terrible and universal fact in human life, reason 
 can foresee, conscience can foretell, both the cer- 
 tainty and the very form of doom : but the assur- 
 ance and power of renewal, and the first faint out- 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 145 
 
 lines of the heavenly vision, eye hath not seen, nor 
 ear heard, nor heart conceived, but God who has 
 created can alone reveal them by His Spirit. By 
 reason and conscience, the poet would have us 
 judge his work, as we pass from circle to circle of 
 the world below : the faith that is born of divine 
 grace must lead us through both the worlds above. 
 Let us pause with Dante, and read again the in- 
 scription over the sombre gates of Hell. To us as 
 to the poet, the meaning may be hard at first, but 
 the words will strike the keynote to all that fol- 
 lows. I give the first three lines for their solemn 
 cadence, and that we may not mar the symmetry 
 of the whole: the last six contain the important 
 truths we are studying : — 
 
 " Per me si va nella citta dolente ; 
 
 Per me si va nell' eterno dolore ; 
 
 Per me si va tra la perduta gente. 
 
 Ginstizia mosse '1 mio alto Fattore: 
 
 Feoemi la divina Potestate, 
 
 La somma Sapienza, e '1 primo Amore. 
 
 Dinanzi a me non far cose create, 
 
 Se non eterue, ed io eterno dnro: 
 
 Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate." ^ 
 
 ^ Inferno, iii. 1-9. 
 
 " Through me you pass into the city of woe ; 
 Through me you pass into eternal pain ; 
 Through me among the people lost for aye. 
 Justice the founder of my fabric moved : 
 To rear me was the task of power divine, 
 Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. 
 Before me things create were none, save things 
 Eternal, and eternal I endure : 
 All hope abandon, ye who enter here." — Cast. 
 10 
 
146 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 Righteousness is the moral cause of the world of 
 despair ; for giustizia is the full heir as well as the 
 lineal descendant of the Latin justitia. Neither 
 language has any other word for righteousness, 
 and the meaning is far broader than our " justice." 
 Over the great code of Eoman law runs the in- 
 scription, " Justice is the fixed and everlasting wiU 
 to give each man his due." So over the eternal 
 world of Dante we read, " Justice moved my lofty 
 Maker." Even-handed justice, as Shakespeare puts 
 it, righteousness that marks the eternal distinction 
 of right and wrong, demands that the distinction 
 be forever recognized in the broad world of fact, 
 and in the experience of every conscious child of 
 choice. By that moral necessity which men call a 
 divine decree, a possible sin, and therefore a possi- 
 ble hell, was involved in the very creation of finite 
 will : as soon as that possibility turned to terrible 
 fact, chain and sequence stood complete, and suf- 
 fering followed sin. But this first tragedy ante- 
 dated the fall, the creation of man, the whole 
 world of time : sin entered the world invisible, and 
 hell began with the fall of Lucifer. So long, too, 
 as sin endures, suffering must follow as the shadow 
 follows the dark substance ; but reason and con- 
 science by themselves discern no limit to trans- 
 gression, and hence see no end of pain. Revela- 
 tion may bring her hint or her assurance, but here 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 147 
 
 there is no appeal to revelation. Henoe, whether 
 we look before or after, the dark gate looms up 
 before us, casting its shadow of despair far beyond 
 the limits of time, across the two eternities, and 
 the inscription proves sadly true : — 
 
 "Before me things create were none, save things 
 Eternal, and eternal I endure : 
 All hope abandon, ye who enter here." 
 
 But righteousness, as we have said, is more than 
 simple justice. It includes all attributes of deity, 
 it belongs alike to every revelation of God. The 
 divine Power, the supreme Wisdom, and the primal 
 Love, are aU associated with Justice in this dark 
 inscription. The Trinity is clearly indicated in 
 Dante's words, and the teaching, therefore, is that 
 Father, Son, and Spirit, — Power, Wisdom, Love, 
 are one in their eternal righteousness, and in this 
 its full expression. The recognition of man's ill 
 desert as a universal fact, and of retribution as the 
 inevitable law of the moral universe, is the founda- 
 tion of Dante's " Purgatory " and " Paradise," no 
 less than of the "Inferno." His doctrine of re- 
 demption rests on the perfect fulfillment of the law 
 by Christ, which both manifested the divine grace 
 and condescension, and met, as man could not have 
 met, the demands of righteousness. But the de- 
 velopment of this doctrine is apart from our pres- 
 
148 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 ent purpose, and I mention it to show the harmony 
 of this legend over the "Inferno," with Dante's 
 higher teaching. 
 
 The sternness of these majestic lines softens into 
 tenderness as the poet passes through the throng 
 of shadowy forms, and the doctrine grows concrete 
 in human lives. An unutterable pathos breathes 
 through the sighs and groans of this opening canto, 
 and finds its climax in the beautiful figure, bor- 
 rowed from Vergil, but improved by borrowing : — 
 
 " Come d' autunno si levan le foglie 
 L' una appresso dell' altra, infln che '1 ramo 
 Kende alia terra tutte le sue spoglie; 
 Siluileniente il mal seme d' Adamo, 
 Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una, 
 Per cenni com' augel per suo richiamo." ^ 
 
 I cannot forget the many moving pictures of our 
 human frailty which the poets give, and espe- 
 cially the long procession of our human life, as it 
 meets us in the " Kubaiyat " of Omar Khayyam, 
 touched to new meaning by Vedder's wonder-work- 
 ing pencil : — 
 
 1 Inferno, iii. 112-117. 
 
 " Ab fall off the light autumnal leaves, 
 One still another following, till the bough 
 Strews all its honors on the earth beneath ; 
 E'en in like manner Adam's evil brood 
 Cast themselves, one by one, down from the shore 
 Each at a beck, as falcon at his call." 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 149 
 
 " A Moment's Halt — a momentary taste 
 Of Being from the Well amid the "Waste — 
 
 And Lo ! — the phantom Caravan has reached 
 The Nothing it set out from — oh, make haste ! " 
 
 But I can recall no other verses that equal these of 
 Dante in the portrayal of our sad, sinful, wander- 
 ing race, moving steadily onward toward the com- 
 mon doom of sin. 
 
 The common doom, I said : but my subject re- 
 minds me that the phrase is singularly inexact. 
 That all sin brings sorrow, and is infinitely re- 
 moved from the light of God, he has already taught 
 us. But Dante never confounded sins in the com- 
 mon sin. Even-handed Justice is always his guide, 
 and never have grades in guilt and grades in pun- 
 ishment received a more careful distinction than in 
 the " Inferno." And thus we pass to consider the 
 broad outline and grouping of this nether world, as 
 it illustrates the righteousness of God. 
 
 In the outermost circle, called Limbo, or the 
 border-land, are found the shades of unbaptized in- 
 fants and those non-believers of every age, who, 
 without the three theological or Christian virtues, 
 faith, hope, and charity, have led worthy and use- 
 ful lives in their generation. The whole region is 
 free from torment ; sorrow rather than pain is the 
 rule. And those who have shown peculiar excel- 
 lence in the world above are crowned with special 
 
150 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 privilege by heaven. Here is the noble castle 
 reared by wisdom and worth, defended by the 
 seven virtues, as walls and bulwarks, surrounded 
 by the stream of eloquence, and entered by the 
 seven gates of knowledge. Here sorrow reaches 
 its lowest measure, and in their semblance these 
 heroes are neither grieved nor glad. Their place 
 and state are nobler than were known to the hap- 
 piest shades in the Elysian fields of Homer or of 
 Vergil. As Wordsworth sings in "Laodomia," — 
 
 " Calm pleasures there abide — majestic pains." 
 
 This is a world — 
 
 " whose course is equable and pure, 
 No fears to beat away, — no strife to heal, — 
 The past unsighed for, and the future sure." 
 
 Here are 
 
 " heroic arts in graver mood 
 Revived, with finer harmony pursued." 
 
 Pensiveness and melancholy are here, such as the 
 soul must feel, shut out from the highest spiritual 
 life ; but the delights of reason remain, and the 
 sages and bards are absorbed in lofty meditation 
 and communion. The conception of such a state 
 and place as Limbo bears witness to a spirit more 
 generous and just than we have been wont to as- 
 cribe to mediaeval theology. 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 151 
 
 But Limbo is not included witMn the confines 
 of Hell, and at the entrance of this darker realm 
 we feel the change in atmosphere and tone. On 
 the very threshold each sinful soul stands in open 
 confession, while Minos, the heathen judge, admin- 
 isters the sentence, a symbol of the heathen con- 
 science which thus approves the decisions of the 
 eternal world. Each sinner is self-condemned. 
 Divine justice acts upon the guilty soul in no me- 
 chanical and outward fashion, but from within is 
 the impulse that drives each onward to his merited 
 punishment. Nor is there one complaint from 
 these tortured souls that the penalty is beyond the 
 sin. The tragedy of Prometheus, as iEschylus has 
 portrayed it, conscience on the side of the sufferer 
 and against the judge, is impossible in Dante's 
 thought and vision. When Vergil speaks of him- 
 self, he is careful that he may not be confounded 
 with actual transgressors punished in deeper cir- 
 cles, but he breathes no murmur against the Power 
 that has shut him out of Paradise. Curses we 
 hear, loud and deep, in diverse parts of hell, curses 
 against self, against kindred, and against God, but 
 not one voice denies its ill desert, and " every mouth 
 is stopped," in the solemn language of the Apostle, 
 while the whole wretched world is proven guilty 
 before Grod. 
 
 This execution of justice from within outward, is 
 
152 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 a constant feature in the teaching of Dante. In 
 the " Purgatorio," no outward bounds hedge in the 
 soul within one sphere of torment. Like Geron- 
 tius, in Newman's marvelous dream, the soul in 
 Purgatory finds solace in her suffering, until she 
 feels herself purged and ready to mount to another 
 circle. Then, as she rises of her own volition, the 
 mountain trembles in sympathy and exultation. 
 Purification, first accomplished within the soul, is 
 recognized and welcomed by all the universe as 
 soon as manifest without. Even the delay before 
 the process of purgation begins, the soul accepts 
 as just, and patiently awaits the appointed hour. 
 Casella, on the threshold of Purgatory, kept back 
 from beginning his journey upward, says : — 
 
 " No outrage has been done me. 
 If lie who takes both when and whom he pleases, 
 Has many times denied to me this passage, 
 For of a righteous will his own is made." 
 
 Following Aristotle, whom he reverences as il 
 maestro di color che sanno, Dante divides all sins 
 into three broad classes, — Incontinence, Bestiality, 
 and Malice. These sins, with all their varied shades 
 and forms, fall into successive and ever-deepening 
 circles of infamy. Some critics discover in their 
 order a single principle alone, the proportion of 
 injury which each specific sin brings upon the sin- 
 ner's fellow-men. As I read the poet, however, 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 153 
 
 this principle is subordinate to one far more pro- 
 found, the depth of moral baseness which the spe- 
 cific sin betrays and involves. In the subdivision 
 of the broad classes, this latter principle is cer- 
 tainly followed, for suicides and spendthrifts are 
 ranged below robbers and homicides. This princi- 
 ple also best accords with Dante's view of sin, as 
 something horrible and worthy of damnation in 
 itself, quite apart from the consequences it brings 
 to others. And with Dante, measure as well as 
 kind, of punishment are strictly proportioned to 
 the sin. 
 
 Incontinence, the first broad class, covers all 
 inordinate indulgence of passion, appetite, and 
 desire, whether the form be lust or gluttony, ava- 
 rice or prodigality, anger or sullen gloom. These 
 all are sins of surprise, which bring a speedy al- 
 though it may be only a superficial feeling of re- 
 vulsion, and hence do not imply of necessity a 
 resolute perversity of will. But Incontinence tends 
 downward, toward sins of darker dye. Lust dwells 
 hard by hate. Sensual pleasure, of whatever kind, 
 like the Medusa's head, which Dante makes its 
 symbol, blinds the eye of the intellect and hardens 
 the heart. Men who live in vice do not like to re- 
 tain God in their knowledge : they think of the 
 present alone, till at last they deny the spiritual 
 life, disbelieve in the world to come, and, like the 
 
154 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 fool, say in the heart, There is no God. This is 
 the sphere of Bestialism, or besottedness, so called 
 by the poet, because men, by denying their Maker, 
 unmake His image in which they were created, and 
 sink to the level of the brutes, who perceive no 
 spiritual existence, and no life beyond the senses. 
 Infidels and heretics fill this circle, the latter be- 
 cause, by representing God as other than He has 
 revealed Himself, they really deny Him. But Bes- 
 tiality is not a final stage : it leads to still deeper 
 sin, to Malice. Men may forget God and deny all 
 immortality, and yet retain the warmest feeling for 
 humanity, — individuals in our own time are in- 
 stances in point, — but Dante felt that the natural 
 tendency of atheism is to the loss of human feeling. 
 Can we deny, on the broad scale, that this is the 
 result in society with its larger reading of life? 
 History, at least, shows no instance where a com- 
 munity has lost all sense of the divine Fatherhood 
 and yet has retained the feeling of human brother- 
 hood. Malice makes our neighbor's injury its end, 
 and is therefore a sin of deliberate purpose. This 
 must explain the difference in punishment between 
 certain sins in this category, and some that seem 
 like these, but are punished under incontinence. 
 But injury may be wrought in either of two ways, 
 by force or by fraud. Violence, or force, may be 
 used against our neighbor, ourselves, or God : and 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 155 
 
 in each of these cases its exercise may be direct, 
 against the person, or indirect, against some pos- 
 session, of the being wronged. Men who lay vio- 
 lent hands upon their neighbors, in person by 
 death or wounds, or in property by rapine, are 
 tyrants, murderers, and robbers. The suicide lays 
 violent hands upon himself, the spendthrift upon 
 his own property. Finally, the divine Majesty 
 may be violated, in His blessed Person, in Nature, 
 which is His child; in Art, which is His grand- 
 child. Hence, within this class are found impious 
 blasphemers, and also those who, ignoring the great 
 law of Genesis, " In the sweat of thy brow shalt 
 thou eat bread," seek to live by the gains of usury. 
 The second subdivision of Malice, Fraud, is the 
 basest of sins. It may break the simple bond of 
 natural confidence, or it may break beside this some 
 special tie of trust. Hence, in ten pits are punished 
 deceivers, flatterers, simoniacs, sorcerers, barterers 
 of justice, hypocrites, thieves, evil counselors, schis- 
 matics, sowers of discord, and falsifiers. Last come 
 the lowest sinners of all, traitors, divided into four 
 classes, according as they have betrayed their kin- 
 dred, their country, their guests, or their lords. 
 These lowest circles of the pit, let it be said for 
 the honor of humanity, are also the narrowest, and 
 take their names from most infamous examples of 
 these several crimes — Caina, Antenora, Ptolemsea, 
 
156 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 and Judecca. Cain represents, of course, the be- 
 trayers of their kindred, the Trojan Antenor, be- 
 trayers of their country; Ptolemy the Younger 
 who betrayed Pompey, betrayers of friends and 
 guests ; while Judas is fitly singled out as the be- 
 trayer of his Lord. In the lowest deep of all lies 
 Lucifer, basest of ingrates, who, with unequalled 
 gifts, turned against his Creator: in each of his 
 three mouths hangs one of the three vilest traitors, 
 as Dante held them, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. 
 The punishment of Brutus, and even of Cassius, 
 may seem to us unjustly severe, but we must re- 
 member that to Dante the Roman Empire was 
 established by the direct will of God, and whoever 
 undermined its power was fighting against God. 
 If we think of the thousand petty strifes that de- 
 stroyed the divided cities of Italy, or contrast the 
 turbulence and confusion that filled the world of 
 that day, we shall not wonder that so large-minded 
 a statesman as Dante longed for the restoration of 
 a single government, built upon divine authority, 
 to punish vaulting ambition, and maintain peace 
 throughout the world. 
 
 Such, in rude outline, is the world of the lost, as 
 Dante conceived it. The consistency and power of 
 his conception become more impressive, the closer 
 we study it, and it can bear comparison with any 
 attempt to develop a system of sins and judgments 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 157 
 
 with which I am acquainted. M. Ortolan, profes- 
 sor of penal law in the faculty of Paris, has fol- 
 lowed the development of his special science in 
 literature as well as in law : he has studied with 
 this purpose Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Shake- 
 speare : " But the master of them all," he writes, 
 "is Dante : their master in time, for he is earlier 
 than they by nearly three centuries ; their master 
 in originality, no less, for in his conceptions vigor- 
 ous unity is maintained through inexhaustible va- 
 riety ; his poem presents itself to our study as a 
 complete system of punishments." 
 
 We turn now to consider the principle of adapta- 
 tion, of analogy, in Dante's system. A favorite 
 maxim of the eighteenth century declares those 
 punishments the best which are most analogous to 
 the crime. Anak)gy is the delight of the child, of 
 primitive races, of the multitude : its simplicity and 
 directness speak home to the heart : it needs no 
 subtle and elaborate explanations. But, on the 
 other hand, its charm lies in the variety of applica- 
 tion which it makes possible. The analogy touches 
 but a single point : that point may be found in the 
 person of the criminal, the parts of the body brought 
 into action, the means by which the deed was done, 
 the person injured, the nature of the loss inflicted, 
 or any of the manifold and multiform elements in 
 the great drama of evil. Lift these elements, al- 
 
158 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 ready so diverse, into the realm of imagination, let 
 the ideal mingle with and mould the material, and 
 the shades and forms of reprisal become a bound- 
 less field for the poet, with his gifts of symbolism 
 and allegory and metaphor. Never was poet more 
 keenly alive to the breadth of his opportunity than 
 Dante. Never were simplicity and diversity, power 
 and variety, combined more skilfully than in the 
 " Divina Commedia." 
 
 " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
 reap." The whole " Inferno " is a comment and 
 illustration, drawn from this single text. What 
 fine sarcasm, at the beginning, separates the caitiff 
 choir of neutral souls alike from heaven and from 
 hell, despised by both ! How fitly their colorless 
 life on earth finds reward in the absolute ignominy 
 and chaos of the outer darkness ! We, too, would 
 choose any lot rather than this : — 
 
 " Misericordia e Giustizia gli sdegna ; 
 Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa." * 
 
 " He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap 
 
 corruption." In the sphere of Incontinence, those 
 
 who have sown the wind reap the whirlwind. The 
 
 incessant storm which sweeps the victims of lust 
 
 before its blast is type of the ungovernable tem- 
 
 1 In/emo, iii. 50, 51. 
 
 " Mercy and justice scorn them both ; 
 Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by." 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 159 
 
 pest of passion within the soul. Cerberus, with 
 three throats, emblem of unbridled appetite, a per- 
 sonified -belly, as Miss Rossetti aptly calls him, 
 bays in the ears of those who made the belly their 
 god. The avaricious and the prodigals, antipodes 
 in method, but one in the senseless waste of goods, 
 imprisoned ini a single circle, from opposite direc- 
 tions dash madly against each other with mutual 
 revilings. Wrathful souls, true to their nature 
 and their habit, smite one another not only with 
 hands, but also with head, and breast, and feet. 
 Gloomy sinners, who turned the daylight here to 
 darkness, for others as well as for themselves, are 
 plunged forever beneath the black waters of 
 Styx : — 
 
 " Fitti nel limo dieon : ' Tristi f ummo 
 Nell' aer dolce ohe dal sol s' allegra, 
 Portando dentro accidioso fummo; 
 Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra.' 
 Quest' inno si gorgoglian nella strozza, 
 Che dir nol possou con parola Integra." ^ 
 
 Two centuries later than Dante, the author of 
 
 the " Imitation of Christ " sums up in stately Latin 
 
 » Inferno, vii. 121-126. 
 
 " Fixed in the slime, they say : ' Sad once were we, 
 In the sweet air made gladsome by the sun, 
 Carrying a foul and lazy mist within : 
 Now in these murky settlings are we sad.' 
 Such dolorous strain they gurgle in their throats. 
 But word distinct can utter none." 
 
160 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 these vivid analogies of Dante: In quihus homo 
 pecca/vit, in illis gravius punietur. Ibi accediosi 
 ardentihus stimuUs pungentur, et gulosi ingenti 
 Jame ac siti cruciabuntur. Ibi luxuriosi et volup- 
 tatum amatores ardenti pice et fmtido sulphure 
 perfundentur, et sicut furiosi canes prm dolore 
 invidiosi ululabunt?- 
 
 Nor is the law of analogy forgotten as we pass 
 to graver and deeper sins, sins of the spirit as well 
 as of the outer life. Within the city of Dis with 
 its flaming walls, those who have insulted the Al- 
 mighty by defiance or denial feel the vengeance of 
 that God who is a consuming fire. Suicides, since 
 they have thrown their manhood away, sink from 
 sentient to vegetive existence, and alone of mor- 
 tals after the resurrection wiU. remain unclothed, 
 their bodies which they despised hanging to the 
 branches within which they are forever imprisoned. 
 From the region of fire we descend to the fields of 
 ice, where Malice finds punishment, — ice, the fit 
 symbol of the hardening, chilling effect upon the 
 heart when human affections lose their warmth, and 
 the soul stiffens into selfishness. Sowers of discord, 
 separaters of friends and kindred, pass and repass 
 before a demon armed with the sword, who wounds, 
 and rends, and cuts asunder their persons, with re- 
 peated strokes. Islam Dante views as a schism ; 
 
 ^ De Imitatione Christi, I. xxiv. 3. 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 161 
 
 and Mahomet, as a divider, bears Hs face cleft 
 from chin to brow. Such are striking examples 
 of the varied analogies with which the poet suits 
 the penalty to the sin. 
 
 This even-handed justice never falters. There is 
 nothing to dazzle the eye, or divert the mind from 
 the enormity, the loathsomeness, and the folly of 
 the sin. Dante would have despised that respect 
 of persons which excuses wickedness on the ground 
 of friendship, kinship, or partisan and religious as- 
 sociation. He never let the genius of the sinner 
 cast a glamour over the baseness of the sin. His 
 comrades in political life, his friends and kindred 
 are measured by the same standard as the rest of 
 the world. His countryman, Ciacco, he puts among 
 the gluttons : ^ Cavalcante, father of his dear friend, 
 Guido, rises in the fiery vault beside his enemy, 
 Farinata : ^ his father's cousin, Geri del Bello, for 
 whom he has no word but of sympathy, is found in 
 the river of blood, where tyrants and their humbler 
 imitators take their fill of gore.^ Nor can all the 
 genius of his revered teacher, Brunetto Latini, save 
 him from the race-course of burning sand.* What 
 place would he have found for the heartless selfish- 
 ness of Goethe, or the narrow cynicism of Carlyle ? 
 Oh for an hour of his scourge of small cords in the 
 
 1 Inferno, vi. 52. ^ j. 52. 
 
 8 xix. 27. * XV. 30. 
 
 11 
 
162 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 temple of our modern life, where princes are wel- 
 come however dissolute, and titled insolence claims 
 the homage of society ! His scathing words still 
 ring in our ears, — 
 
 " Quanti si tengon or lassu gran regi, 
 Che qui staranno come porci in brago, 
 Di se lasciando orribUi dispregi ! " ^ 
 
 At the same time the excellences of those who 
 are punished receive their meed of fair praise. 
 Dante was susceptible to admiration for high at- 
 tainment in any sphere. He stood abashed before 
 heroes and sages in Limbo. The great Saladin 
 and even Mahomet fill his mind with awe. And 
 to have conversed with the worthies of the lower 
 world exalts him far above himself. He felt, too, 
 the sense of human frailty, and owned that sympa- 
 thy which must temper judgment in every gener- 
 ous soul. He does not forget that 
 
 " tears to human suffering are due; 
 And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown 
 Are mourned by man, and not by man alone, 
 As fondly he believes." ^ 
 
 The familiar story of Francesca, and the sadder 
 
 1 Inferno, viii. 49-51. 
 
 " There above 
 How many now hold themselves mighty kings, 
 Who here like swine shall wallow in the mire, 
 Leaving behind them horrible dispraise ! *' 
 
 * Laodomia, 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 163 
 
 tale of Ugolino, are suffused with tenderness and 
 pathos : of the latter, you remember, so cold a critic 
 as Landor could say, " The thirty lines from ^d 
 io senti' are unequalled by any other continuous 
 thirty in the whole dominions of poetry." But no 
 partiality could turn aside the wheel of Justice, 
 and human feeling, far deeper than many of his 
 critics are capable of sharing, cannot make him 
 false for a moment to his great principle. We 
 may call him severe and stern, but it is the sever- 
 ity and sternness of law, of nature, and, with all 
 reverence Dante would have added, of God. 
 Again and again he rebukes the easy-going senti- 
 mentalism which forgets the eternal distinction of 
 right and wrong, and dares to criticise with nar- 
 row vision the verdicts of the Omniscient. " Now 
 who art thou," cries the eagle of Paradise, 
 
 " that on the hench would sit 
 In judgment at a thousand miles away, 
 With the short vision of a single span ? " ^ 
 
 Traces of bitterness, of personal temper, I do 
 not deny. The treatment of Filippo Argenti,^ of 
 Bocca degli Abati,^ and, above all, of Frate Al- 
 berigo,* are simply unpardonable. But these are 
 the only instances of cruelty I recall, and the tenor 
 of the poem is far higher and sweeter than these. 
 
 ^ Paradiso, xix. 71-81, Longfellow. 
 
 = viii. 52-63. » xxxii. 97-106. * xxxiii. 148-150. 
 
164 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 To appreciate Dante, however, we must not for- 
 get the age in which he lived, and his own relation 
 to the church and her schools at that time. The 
 " Divina Commedia " is not his work alone, nor the 
 work of his century alone ; it is the culmination of 
 ten Christian centuries of intense thought and feel- 
 ing regarding the other life and its relations to 
 the present. " In philosophy," says Labitte, " he 
 (Dante) completes St. Thomas : in history, he is 
 a living commentary upon Villani. Wherever you 
 go through the thankless valleys of the Middle 
 Ages, this figure, at once sombre and luminous, 
 appears at your side as an inevitable guide." So 
 Ozanam, the prince of ultramontane commenta- 
 tors, pronounces the " Commedia " a " Summa " of 
 all the philosophy of the age, and calls Dante the 
 St. Thomas of poetry. Whatever may be said of 
 Dante's orthodoxy in other particulars, and into 
 this moot question I will not enter, in his escha- 
 tology, at least, he does not depart widely from 
 the teaching of his church. His aim was not to 
 invent or amend, but to give what was already be- 
 lieved a larger reality and a stronger hold upon 
 the hearts of men, by unfolding the eternal justice 
 that lay beneath the subtle distinctions of the 
 schools. The broad outline of established doctrine 
 he fully accepted. The divisions and general ar- 
 rangement of the " Inferno," the very idea of the 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 165 
 
 " Purgatorio," the angelic hierarchies of the "Para- 
 dise," all are the work of a faithful Catholic. 
 
 These subjects were only too familiar to men of 
 his age. They delighted to dwell in imagination 
 upon the after life, with Its baffling but ever-stimu- 
 lating mysteries. Legend after legend recounted 
 descents to the under-world, and art vied with ro- 
 mance in giving color and body to eternal scenes. 
 Even the details of Dante's vision in many cases 
 have been anticipated by artists of earlier days. 
 In the crypt of the Cathedral at Auxerre is a 
 fragment that paints the triumph of Christ as mi- 
 nutely as Dante describes it In the " Purgatorio." 
 Paintings of Hell and Paradise abound in cathe- 
 drals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and 
 all forms of torture are exhausted In the sculpture 
 of that time. When Dante studied in Paris, he 
 cannot have failed to wonder at the western gate 
 of NStre Dame, with its varied scenes of punish- 
 ment and blessedness. A single French archaeolo- 
 gist has gathered over fifty Illustrations of the 
 poem from earlier art. The same coarse and ma- 
 terialistic forms of torture are found in painting 
 and In poem. It was not an age of fine sensibili- 
 ties. To appeal effectively to hearers and readers, 
 the imagery had to be made vivid and powerful. 
 The preachers of the age used kindred illustrations. 
 Eome felt her religious empire already shaken by 
 
166 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 the profane hand of doubt, and to check this dan- 
 gerous foe, her clergy invoked more boldly the 
 fears of eternal torment. With all these materials 
 at hand, with the very form in some measure pre- 
 scribed, the world waited a poet to combine in a 
 symmetrical whole the scattered fragments of myth, 
 and legend, and allegory, cast the glow of imagi- 
 nation over the dullness of dogma, and call crea- 
 tion out of chaos. 
 
 This Dante did, and his work stands, like the 
 Gothic cathedral, an eternal symbol of the faith of 
 builder and worshippers alike. Much of what is 
 grotesque and hard in the poem belongs to the 
 times and not to the man. The vividness of de- 
 scription, the blaze of the very flames in the read- 
 er's eyes, the rivers of blood, the solid floor of ice, 
 those hideous nightmares of devils and fabled mon- 
 sters, Dante did not invent, but used with higher 
 purpose than his contemporaries. The consum- 
 mate genius must rise above his age, indeed ; he 
 must rise above what is unworthy and coarse in 
 the thought of his fellows. But even inspiration 
 must lower itself to the understanding of the crea- 
 ture, and we must not make too great demands of 
 the foremost souls. Shakespeare has written much 
 that a better era forgets, and Jonathan Edwards, 
 with a heart like St. John, shows how hard is the 
 bondage of an inhuman theology. Let Dante be 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 167 
 
 judged by the same rule, and we shall forget his 
 harshness, and remember the fearless boldness 
 which doomed popes to the same punishment with 
 people, the firm trust in the great truths of the 
 Gospel, and the faith in a divine Love large 
 enough to welcome every repentant sinner, what- 
 ever the church or the clergy might declare. 
 
 Once more, we must remember the author's in- 
 tense personality. In narrow minds this 'power 
 becomes a prejudice to warp and degrade its every 
 expression : in noble minds, it only deepens convic- 
 tion, and gives each utterance the force of reality. 
 What others gain by reasoning, such minds attain 
 by insight. Here is the difference between Dante 
 and Milton. Milton's paradise lay quite without 
 his own experience : Dante's poem is the record of 
 his inner history. Where Milton imagined, Dante 
 saw. He had passed through all these gloomy 
 scenes himself ; he needed no effort of imagination 
 to summon them before himself and then before 
 his readers. He spoke, like the Bedford tinker, 
 with the authority of the eye-witness. " He no 
 more doubted of that Malebolge Pool," says Car- 
 lyle, " that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, 
 its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than 
 we doubt that we should see Constantinople, if we 
 went thither." 
 
 Each of the three Cantiche of the poem has been 
 
168 DANTE'S VISION 
 
 linked with the period of his life to which it be- 
 longs, and whose character it reflects. The " In- 
 ferno" belongs to the years which immediately fol- 
 low his banishment. His heart smarted beneath 
 the wrong, his thoughts were full of the civic 
 strife. In each verse is the bloody wound, and 
 throughout the thunders of conflict reecho. The 
 "Purgatorio" was written far from home, when the 
 first bitterness of exile was over, while new hope 
 rose in his breast, as the approach of Henry VII. 
 quickened Ghibelline expectation. The "Para- 
 diso " belongs to the last years of his life, when 
 earthly hates were forgotten, and earthly hopes 
 had all withered, when heaven alone could charm 
 the weary soul. Then it was, 
 
 " da martiro 
 E da esiglio venne a questa pace." 
 
 Such is the personal element in his vision. His 
 life was full of hardship and thankless toil. He 
 knew the sorrow for ingratitude, he had proved 
 
 " come sa di sale 
 Lo pane altrui, e com' e dure calle 
 Lo seendere e '1 salirper 1' altrui scale." ^ 
 
 Do we wonder that from this world he turned 
 to the other for relief? that, homeless here, he 
 1 Paradiso, xvii. 58-60. 
 
 "How BBlt the savor is of other's bread ; 
 How hard the passage to descend and climb 
 By other's stairs I " 
 
OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 169 
 
 sought a resting place there? or that the chief 
 charm of the after-life, to him, lay in the even- 
 handed justice which was to set right the troubled 
 present? There he could flee from the tyranny of 
 fact to the righteous rule of truth. There he 
 could fashion for himself a realm of perfect justice, 
 where every wrong should find redress, and every 
 right be crowned. And as he dwelt upon the 
 righteousness of God, these dreams he knew must 
 some fair day come true. Out of his dreams and 
 longings rose before his eyes the city of God, that 
 Eome where Christ is a Koman, the one eternal 
 city, of which every soul that loves and chooses 
 righteousness, however exiled here, is already a cit- 
 izen, although he must pass now through the pur- 
 gatorial flames. On the other side, lurid against 
 the utter darkness, loomed up the city of Dis, 
 walled round with fire, and peopled by souls so 
 deeply sunk in sin that repentance, and therefore 
 pardon, were no longer possible. Between these 
 two lay the sphere where goodness, still entangled 
 with evil, must struggle on the upward* path. 
 These realms of reality lifted his mind above the 
 world of sense, and in the calm contemplation of 
 his majestic vision he learned the lesson of patience 
 and self-mastery. 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 FRA ANGELICO. 
 
 I LIKE the story of that monk who knelt 
 
 In prayer devout, and, lest some thought of sin 
 Should mar its grace, dared not his work begin 
 
 Till in the silence of his heart he felt 
 
 Thought grow divine and earthly longings melt 
 Beneath God's touch, and o'er the Babel din 
 Heard the clear whisper of the Christ within. 
 
 What wonder, when such inspiration dwelt 
 In his calm bosom, that he dared not rise. 
 
 But day by day, with meek and lowly heart, 
 Painted upon his bended knees, and wise 
 
 Deemed not the work his own, but his the part 
 To seize what God revealed unto his eyes, 
 
 And bid the panel glow with holy art. 
 
 Cambridge, 29 May, 1874. 
 
174 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 SUNRISE ON MOUNT MOOSILAUKE. 
 
 Long lines of light against the trembling gray 
 
 Slow flushed with red : above, more faint and 
 few, 
 
 The billowy clouds : beneath, in waves of blue 
 That rose and fell, dark ranges stretched away 
 Where in broad mists the lakes and rivers lay. 
 
 Dim thro' the dawn. Outlined to clearer view, 
 
 As mount from mount his lofty head withdrew, 
 A hundred peaks turned patient toward the day. 
 O'er the steep height of Carrigain at last 
 
 Rose the red disc, and touched the mists to gold. 
 Kinsman's smooth slope and rifted Lafayette 
 Still lay in purple bathed, till higher yet 
 
 Thro' golden clouds the glorious sun uprolled. 
 And o'er the world the glow of daylight cast. 
 
 2 September, 1887. 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 175 
 
 SUNDAY AT SEA. 
 
 Father, whose hands first framed and still uphold 
 Both skies and seas with all their depths con- 
 ceal, 
 In this thy temple on thy day I kneel 
 In lowly love and worship. Fold on fold, 
 Gray curtains shot with light — even as of old 
 In rapt Isaiah's vision fell the train 
 Of heavenly splendor — skirt the solemn main : 
 Above the blue vault hangs, with lamp of gold 
 Lighted each day anew. No voice I hear, 
 No sail the distance whitens. Silent, swift. 
 Our good ship forges on, the only shrine 
 
 Man's hands have reared. Yet ever, far and 
 near, 
 The murmuring waves in lowly worship lift 
 White hands of prayer, and mingle praise with 
 mine. 
 S. S. Alaska, 8 July, 1888. 
 
176 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 STRATFOED-ON-AVON. 
 
 Here Shakespeare's eyes first opened to the sun. 
 
 These vine-wreathed elms, green fields, and skies 
 of blue 
 
 Cradled his infancy. Here first he drew 
 Love's breath of life, and here his first songs won 
 Love's praise. What wonder when his course had 
 run 
 
 In wider circles, tried of heart but true, 
 
 Hither he came the old life to renew. 
 And sleep by Avon when his life was done ! 
 
 So should the favored life begin and end : 
 
 Child unto man and birth with death close 
 bound. 
 An even stream through all the channel flows : 
 The friend of youth should be old age's friend. 
 The natal bells the passing knell should sound. 
 
 And on familiar scenes the eyelids close ! 
 15 August, 1888. 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 177 
 
 IN GRASMERE CHURCHYARD. 
 
 " Nature never did betray 
 The heart that loved her." 
 
 Lines near Tintern Abbey. 
 
 Full twoseore years the poet's form has slept 
 
 In Grasmere churchyard. Friends have long 
 ago 
 
 Followed him, one by one. The places know 
 Him still that knew him once, nor stone has kept 
 His name alone. The vepy turf he stept 
 
 Upon seems to remember. Murmuring low, 
 
 Fair JRothay's waters with a gentler flow 
 Bend round his grave. The faithful dews have 
 
 wept 
 Him morn and eve anew, and year by year 
 
 Have spread a richer verdure o'er the sod. 
 No human hands have scattered blossoms here, 
 
 And all is fresh as from the hands of God ; 
 Yet — mark how Nature holds her lover dear — 
 
 Twin buttercups above the grasses nod ! 
 
 13 July, 1888. 
 
178 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 STAFFA AND lONA. 
 
 Behold the temple wrought in living rock 
 For Nature's worship ! When together sung 
 For joy the morning-stars, their voices rung 
 
 Through these dark aisles. This pavement, block 
 by block, 
 
 Was laid deep in the sunless seas to mock 
 
 The angry waves. When yonder vault was 
 
 hung. 
 On either side a thousand pillars sprung 
 
 To lift its arch above the tempest's shock. 
 
 Temple not made with hands ! Man, taught by 
 thee, 
 Might well have learned his lofty fanes to rear. 
 
 Touching to purpose new the lifeless stone : 
 Yet ages passed ere man's foot ventured near 
 Thy shore, while in thy maker's ear alone 
 Thundered the deep bass of the restless sea ! 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 179 
 
 STAFFA AND lONA. 
 
 Fae o'er the sea, mile after barren mile, 
 
 What green hills slope toward the northern 
 
 strand ? 
 One square gray tower I see : on either hand 
 Are broken walls. It is Columba's isle, 
 i-girt lona. Yonder massive pile. 
 Chat chapel small, those ruined cloisters, stand 
 i/V^here the brave saint gathered his little band, 
 And sent forth light to Britain. Slow defile 
 Before mine eyes long lines of chiefs and kings. 
 Brought hither by his dust to lie at rest 
 With abbots who of old his crozier bore. 
 Thus, though no more his living presence flings 
 Its light and splendor o'er the island blest. 
 His name still breathes from rock and hill 
 and shore. 
 Oban, Scotland, 22 July, 1888. 
 
180 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 FOUNTAINS ABBEY. 
 
 Soft falls the sunlight o'er the minster gray ; 
 The stately tower, the cloisters dim and lone, 
 The graves where abbots of the ages gone 
 
 Are laid. No rude hand here hath swept away 
 
 Mullion or shaft. The fingers of decay 
 With slow and gentle touches, one by one. 
 Have loosened arch and wall and crumbling 
 stone, 
 
 And left the ruins of an elder day ! 
 
 Man's worship ceases : Nature's doth not so. 
 Both priest and choir are gone. But over all 
 Ivy and greensward live, the thrushes sing 
 Their matins in the yew-trees, waters flow 
 
 Beneath the cloisters, and the wild pinks swing 
 Their censers rich with incense from the wall ! 
 1 August, 1888. 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 181 
 
 STONEHENGE. 
 
 Where leaden skies the low horizon meet, 
 Thy gray stones tower above the rolling plain 
 In lonely grandeur. Half thy pillared fane 
 
 In ruin lies. Yet is thine altar-seat 
 
 To yonder sun-stone true, as when complete 
 Thy sacred circles stood, when bloody stain 
 Ran down thy slaughter-block, and mad amain, 
 
 The druids danced beneath thy cruel feet ! 
 
 Mysterious shrine ! Thy lichened stones have kept 
 Their secret well ! Dane, Saxon, Koman, knew 
 
 Little as we thy meaning dark and dread ! 
 And none shall know, till those awaken, who 
 Beneath thy grassy barrows long have slept. 
 
 And at the judgment earth gives up her dead ! 
 Saxisbuky Plain, 21 August, 1888. 
 
182 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 "PEACE, BE STILL." 
 
 Dear Lord, who once upon the lake 
 
 Of stormy Galilee, 
 Didst from Thy weary pillow wake 
 
 To hush the wind and sea, — 
 
 Come at our prayer, and speak Thy peace 
 Within each troubled breast ; 
 
 Bid the loud winds of passion cease. 
 And waves of wild unrest. 
 
 Let that deep calm our bosoms fill. 
 That dwells for aye with those 
 
 Who lose their wishes in Thy will, 
 And in Thy love repose ! 
 
 "FEED MY LAMBS." 
 
 TO A TBAOHEK OF LITTLE CHILDKEN. 
 
 When the Master long ago 
 Walked this weary world below. 
 Mothers in the throng and press 
 Brought their babes for Him to bless, 
 And from lane and dusty street 
 Children gathered at His feet. 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 183 13 
 
 As of old the Master stands : 
 Still with blessings in His hands, 
 From green lane and dusty street 
 Calls the children to His feet, 
 Saying, as in Galilee, 
 " Bring the little ones to Me ! " 
 
 StiU He puts His parting test 
 To the hearts that love Him best : 
 " Simon, as thou lovest Me, 
 " Let these lambs thy burden be : 
 " Other work the world may ask, — 
 " Here is love's divinest task ! " 
 
 Brother, thou hast clearly heard 
 Through the years the Master's word ! 
 In thine heart His voice has said. 
 While His hand lay on thy head, 
 " Unto thee this task is given, 
 " Lead these little feet to heaven ! " 
 
 Weary is the world and wide : 
 
 Many calls on every side 
 
 Claim our hearts and fill our hands : 
 
 Yet, methinks, the Master stands 
 
 With the old, familiar test : 
 
 " This is his who loves Me best ! " 
 
184 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 When thy day of toil is past, 
 And the Master comes at last, 
 Be it thine before His Face 
 Now to hear His word of gi-ace : 
 " In each child entrusted thee 
 " Thou hast loved and honored Me ! 
 Malden, 22 October, 1891. 
 
 THE RETURN FROM THE MOUNTAIN. 
 
 Not long on Hermon's holy height 
 The heavenly vision fills our sight ; 
 We may not breathe that purer air. 
 Nor build our tabernacles there ! 
 
 One moment, like the favored Three, 
 We share that blessed company, 
 Where Moses and Elijah shine. 
 Transfigured in the light divine ! 
 
 The vision fades ; the splendor dies : 
 The saints have sought again the skies : 
 The homely garb the Master wore 
 Is bright with sudden glow no more. 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 185 
 
 If with the Master we would go, 
 Our feet must thread the vale below, 
 Where dark the lonely pathways wind. 
 The golden glory left behind. 
 
 Where hungry souls ask One to feed, 
 Where wanderers cry for One to lead, 
 Where helpless hearts in chains are bound, — 
 There shall the Master stiU be found ! 
 
 Nor Moses nor Elijah then 
 
 We long to see appear again : 
 
 No tabernacles by the way 
 
 We build the Master's steps to stay ! 
 
 There, bending patient o'er His task. 
 No raiment white our eyes shall ask. 
 Content, while through each cloud we trace 
 The glory of the Master's Face ! 
 Maldbn, 13 September, 1891. 
 
186 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 FOE THE COMMUNION SEASON. 
 I. 
 
 How blest Thy first disciples, Lord, 
 Whom Thou didst choose to walk with Thee ; 
 Who daily met around Thy board. 
 And made Thy home and family ! 
 
 How blest, when throng and press were gone. 
 And weary day herself had fled, 
 From all the noisy world withdrawn. 
 Alone with Thee to break the bread ! 
 
 Has the long day its burden brought ? 
 Are heavy hearts in sorrow bound ? 
 What sweet relief in kindly thought ! 
 What sympathy with Thee is found ! 
 
 For every care Thou hast an ear ; 
 Thou knowest all their changing moods : 
 What stirs the timid Philip's fear, — 
 Why thoughtful Thomas sadly broods. 
 
 Ah ! who would such a meeting miss ! 
 What strength is here to nerve the will ! 
 How fair a home for hearts is this ! 
 Who would not long to find it still ! 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 187 
 
 And is the vision vain as sweet? 
 Nay, Lord ! Thy table here is spread ! 
 And ever, where disciples meet, 
 Thy blessed hands still break the bread ! 
 
 We see Thee not : yet when we turn, 
 These moments melt in memory, 
 And aU Our hearts within us burn. 
 For we have met and talked with Thee ! 
 Mauxes, 7 January, 1890. 
 
 n. 
 
 Bbfobe us. Lord, Thy board is spread, 
 Thy love's unchanging token : 
 We share the cup, we take the bread. 
 Thy body bruised and broken : 
 And at Thy table, met with Thee, 
 Thy word, " In memory of Me," 
 Once more to us is spoken ! 
 
 No lengthening years of mist and gloom 
 Have power to change or bound Thee : 
 To-day, as in the upper room 
 Thy first disciples found Thee, 
 O let Thy Presence still our fears, 
 Eemove our doubts, and dry our tears, 
 While here we gather round Thee ! 
 
188 POEMS AND HYMNS. 
 
 We come, our hearts anew to yield 
 
 To Thee for Thy possessing : 
 
 We come, with lips but now unsealed, 
 
 A new-found love confessing : 
 
 Grant us, O Lord, Thy promised grace, 
 
 Reveal to each Thy loving Face, 
 
 And breathe on all Thy blessing ! 
 
 Thou knowest all our varied need, 
 Our gladness and our grieving : 
 What joys allure, what hopes mislead, 
 With false lights still deceiving : 
 With Thee we leave our troubled past. 
 With Thee our future, dim and vast, — 
 All things from Thee receiving ! 
 
 While here we hold communion sweet, 
 The dear, remembered faces 
 Of friends unseen, again we meet 
 In their familiar places : 
 For one with Thee is one with all 
 Who hear Thy voice and own Thy call. 
 Throughout the starry spaces ! 
 Malden, 6 July, 1890. 
 
POEMS AND HYMNS. 189 
 
 THE LAST EASTEE. 
 
 O Lord of Life, once laid in Joseph's tomb, 
 Around Thy grave the garden bursts in bloom, — 
 Thy glory breaks the world's long night of gloom ! 
 
 Alleluia I Alleluia ! 
 
 Thou for us all didst hang upon the tree ; 
 The burden of our sins was borne by Thee ; 
 Thy stripes have healed, Thy sorrows set us free ! 
 
 Alleluia ! Alleluia ! 
 
 Now all is o'er, — Thy toil. Thy grief, Thy pain ; 
 The vail of death by Thee is rent in twain ; 
 Thine earthly loss is our eternal gain ! 
 
 Alleluia ! Alleluia ! 
 
 Henceforth, through hours of ease and days of 
 
 care. 
 Help us with Thee our daily cross to bear. 
 Strong in Thy strength, and brave Thy cup to share ! 
 
 Alleluia ! Alleluia ! 
 
 When through dark vales our lonely pathway lies, 
 Though hearts may faint, and tears may dim our 
 
 eyes. 
 Thy light shall guide our footsteps to the skies ! 
 
 Alleluia ! Alleluia ! 
 
190 POEMS AND HYMNS 
 
 And when, at last, our work on earth is o'er, 
 Lead us, where Thou hast trod the path before, 
 Through death to life with Thee f orevermore ! 
 
 Alleluia ! Alleluia ! 
 Malden, 2 April, 1893.