CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library arW38420 Sermons / 3 1924 031 765 328 olin,anx Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031765328 SERMOI^S, BY /^s/^). T H O M A S T?*^TONE, OF BOLTON. BOSTON: CROSBY, NICHOLS, AND COMPANY. NEW VOKK: CHARLES & FRANCIS & CO. 1854. UNIVERSITY ^, LIBRARY^ oaiibeisqe: meioaii ahd comtaht, pbioteb3 to the universiit. CONTENTS. FilSE I. Obedience to the Spieit .... 1 n. The Manifold Unity 16 m. The Psalm op Thanksgiving .... 27 IV. The Angelic Message 42 V. The Sbceet Attractions . . . . 58 VI. Palm Days 74 Vn. Influence and Eecepiion .... 87 Vni. The Coubsb os Cheistianity. 1. Mythology of the Chubch . . . 109 IX. 2. DOCTEINB OF THE ChUKOH . . . .126 X. 3. Ethics of the Chuech .... 142 XI. 4. Politics of the Church . . . .157 Xn. The Wobd of the Ebfokmation ... 171 Xm. The Middle of the Nineteenth Centuby . 185 XIV. The Want of the Age 204 XV. The Pbophetic Poet 219 XVI. Can ye not discern the Signs ? . . . 231 XVII. Kejection of Evil 247 XVni. Repentance 258 IV CONTENTS. XIX. Uneighteous Deckees 269 XX. The Etebnal Eeoiitude .... 284 XXI. Febfectiok in Lots ...... 301 XXn. The Patteen showed in the Mount . . 313 XXnr. The Woeship called Heeest .... 324 XXIV. The "Woeship called Hekbst ... 339 SERMON I. OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIEIT. Rev. ii. 7. HE THAT HATH AN EAB, LET HIM HEAR WHAT THE SPIEIT SAITH UNTO THE CHUECHES. Sounds are continually falling on the ear, wheth- er it heed them or not. Winds blow through the forests, or amidst the branches of lonely trees, or over grass or grain or flowers ; waters roll beneath their sweep, breaking in waves or dashing for ever along the beach ; thunders peal from the clouds ; the unceasing voices, unceasi'ng even amidst the stillness of nature, are joined, and the silence broken, by numberless and varied tones of animals by day and by night, by the words of men and the sounds of their industry. The ear becomes oftentimes heedless of them, as of the air whose undulations bear them to it; there is a sort of passive hearing, unsought, unobserved, scarcely remembered. We have, moreover, what may be called an active hearing. The man summons himself to listen ; he collects bis thoughts, he calms his feelings, he creates, so far as he can, a deep silence around him and within him ; that, all else still, he may 2 OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. give ear only to the chosen voice. This he invites into his inmost soul. This he loves to hear and feel penetrating through his whole being. This communicates to him of its ovsrn powers and in- fluence, making him glad with its joyous tones, and sad through the sorrows which it speaks. The trumpet summons men to war; the music of fit instruments quickens them to meet and go through the perils and the horrors of its battles. Gentler strains, as of the hymn and the prayer, draw the soul from its agitations to repose, and breathe a peace in which it is nourished for holier worship and loving deeds. Always, indeed, as the eye brings its objects before us for the sight, type of the mind in its conscious vision ; so the ear opens the entrance to impulses of sound, symbol of the soul in the vividness of its quicker emotions. Obedience itself, as the very word traced to its ori- gin indicates, is nothing else than a certain activity of hearing; the man hearkening to "some higher voice which moves him, listening that he may drink in its influences, and going forth into deed, stern or gentle, as the welcome power impels. Outward senses and their organs are creations of an interior and unseen Power, earthly expres- sions of a heavenly sphere, human receptacles and channels of a Divine Life, to which by conse- quence they for ever and necessarily correspond. Hence, as we pass from nature to spirit, or rather enter through the former as vestibule, into the latter as temple or shrine; as we rise above the world of sensations within which we have been OBBDIKNCE TO THE SPIRIT. d born, into the sphere of life which the Regenera- tion opens to the inner consciousness; there is no real break ; it is rather a series of ascensions, wherein the lower is ever prophecy of the higher, and an everlasting harmony surrounds, unites, and fills each and the whole. A single application of this universal law presents itself in figurative speech, such as the text, for instance, in which almost every word gives us some natural image to repre- sent a spiritual idea. He that hath an ear, through which he can take in sound, let him hear, if he will, what the Spirit breathed as air or wind brings and gives forth of its own and other voices ; thus Nature is always saying some word of hers to men. But there is which the ear heareth not, which neither outward sense reaches nor the heart of man — much less the head — comprehends. A deeper spirit there yet is which revealeth the unseen, un- heard, uncomprehended presence, as there is an everlasting sphere which that presence creates, opens, and illumines, even to the experience of the prepared soul. He that hath an ear, through which he can take in its celestial melodies, let him hear, listening, reverent, joyous, what the Spirit breathed as air of a new spring, gives out to gladden and bless us. The Word calls us to dwell where itself has birth, in the bosom of the Father. So does the Spirit speak. We have before us, in the Apocalypse, its words to those seven churches of Western Asia, commending their love, their faith, their virtue, where these existed ; condemning their apostacies, their unbelief and sin, when love 4 OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. had failed; admonishing them of the rain into which they should fall by disobedience, and utter- ing promise of the highest elevation to the faith- ful. And as these churches have their permanent parallels in societies and persons through the de- scending ages of Christendom, so to these also come, as equally permanent, the befitting words of the one Spirit. Think not, because we see no John or other to behold or record his vision of the Lord girded with emblems of his power and his glory, walking amidst churches represented by golden candlesticks, and sending to them messages as from his own lips ; think not, because these grand hieroglyphs have now faded into the obscurity of a deepening past, that therefore the spirit is re- mote and voiceless. Throughout the churches, into the souls, of this age also, amidst the loves and the hates, the beliefs and the distrusts, the obedience and the disobedience, the good works and the evil; the light and the darkness, now min- gling and surging among men, the Spirit is present still, unheeded it may be, yet here alike in the peace and. the commotions of mankind, coming forth evermore from its own deep to inspire and confirm whatever there is of bliss, and when the gloom and storm are about us, to go over the high- est wave, to soothe the swollen seas, to scatter the clouds and bring back the sun. Neither dead, nor even asleep, it is alone eternal amidst passing things, unchangeable in the very heart of mutability, while seeking to draw all things into concord with its own harmony. OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. Such the distance, however, to which our times have removed from the Unseen, and such the hold which they have given to natural powers and in- terests over the affections, the thoughts, and the pursuits, that before we proceed to interpret any special invitation, we need a persuasion in us that the whole thing is more than illusion. Some may deny, some even ridicule, the very notion, as if Christianity were not, in its very definition, God with us ; and others possibly do not deny, though they may ridicule it, simply because they have not thought enough to doubt, as if the greatest thing might be the least considered. Where neither de- spised nor denied, this spiritual experience may be so far from the heart that men accept it as the article of a creed ; they hear it as the faint echo of a far-off age, or the strange sound of a foreign language, rather than welcome it as the life of the soul, bringing with it celestial airs, and opening the heart to receive them as familiar words always spoken in the Father's house. I have somewhere heard it said, that the great work of modern preach- ing is to transfer into the "West the readier faith of the East. We want a faith which shall rise from opinion into trust and hope and love ; which shall quicken conviction into experience; which shall transfigure doctrine into Truth," and shall make that Truth alive through communion with God, and full of power to overcome evil, to enthrone right, and to do good to all ; gathering back the knowl- edge and strength and maturity of the West into the bosom of a childlike Oriental vision. Look 6 OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. not only to our Scriptures, themselves the greatest product of the East, but to those other books which have been held sacred among its nations, and observe how constant and how simple the recognitions everywhere met with of the Divine Presence and the universal laws ; their tone is orac- ular ; we seem, not to be questioning the philoso- pher, whose very name denotes the love and the pursuit of wisdom rather than the attainment or the communication, but listening to the prophet who, from being the seer of a Divine vision, has become speaker of its holy message. The absolute reason comes to us with its wealth and its beauty. A richer importation this were to us than all the treasures and the splendors which the East has yielded to our shores ! The truth, after all, in holiest Scriptures is en- shrined, not exposed ; it is suggested, rather than expressed ; it is reserved, not obtruded ; and as we find it in such hallowed secrecy, so do we feel our- selves drawn to guard it by silence. As there is sometimes a shallow religion, which flows smoothly from the tongue, or ripples noisily in its course when there is a freshet, then runs out and leaves a dry, barren bed, so when the devotion is deep and of the heavenly fountain, it rather turns itself away from glare and show, seeking silence and the shade, moving unseen, but deepening and widening always as it draws nearer to the great ocean within which it dwells for ever undistinguished. The cause is plain enough. The devout man bears in his soul a mystery of love and beauty ; he cannot open it, OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. 7 and he feels that it grows best in secret, such its nature, and he will not waste it by exposure. In this is found, moreover, the ground of what may have sometimes dwindled into reasonless custom or idle superstition. There is a name of the High- est which, it is said, the ancient Hebrews never re- peated ; there is a mystic word, they tell us, in the East, which the devotee never pronounces. The soul may seek in contemplation or prayer or deeds of charity to perceive the Being whom it reveals ; the lips must be silent. Accuse not the reverence, if it looks dim of sight; there is wisdom in it. The name infolds the nature ; let us not articulate the sounds idly or profanely, while the meaning, the soul, the great reality, fades away from them, the lips pronouncing a mighty word, the heart void of all which gives it life. There is in truth an un- speakable Name, the Being to whose ancient say- ing the universe for ever repeats the echo, I AM. His influence flows into us for ever, his attraction draws us, his blessing is upon us. Who shall pre- sume to draw the veil aside which covers Him? to speak the mystery which every hour is laying open ? There was a time when Jewish reverence would not let a piece of paper lying on the ground be trodden on : the Great Name might be written upon it. Be sure, in the immensity of this uni- verse there is nothing, great or small, but that Name is written over it and through it, within and without. There are now seen houses of worship whose form represents the cross, which are sur- mounted by the cross, and as we go within, we 8 OBEDIENCR TO THE SPIRIT. see the cross painted, and the cross borne on priestly robes, and human art seeking everywhere to set the cross before our eyes. But the figure can never be ingrained ; nothing can make it one with the building itself. Nature, on the contrary, silent and secret as the processes always are, is for ever re- vealing the vital and creative presence. Every- thing is full of life and meaning. The same, and yet other, one in soul, varied endlessly in form, the universe is always unfolding an everlasting order. As the principle of its growth pervades the whole flower, from its root through every fibre and tissue, every leaf and bud and petal, perfect in every part; so throughout the heavens and the earth, a secret Power, the unspeakable reality, lives and bodies itself forth, perfect alike in the whole and in the part, not carved or painted here and there as the hand works, but constituting the essential all in all. This Presence in Nature, its several realms, mineral, vegetative, animal, through forma- tion, growth, and life ; and in Man, his several or- gans, capacities, and powers, through sense, through thought, through affection ; in the reciprocal rela- tions of Man and Nature, and the perpetual courses of action passing between both, and from each into the whole, from the whole into each, up to the very limit of our knowledge ; this Presence, revealed in all which we see, then seeming to us to stretch away beyond our sight, and to live wherever life is, and to fill even if there be any void, through in- finitude and eternity, we confess to be, not some reasonless power, some soulless law, but Living OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. 9 Spirit, the very Being of Wisdom and Love, moving forth in endless creations, and seeking to make all one harmony. Thus the Infinite is un- veiled; thus the Invisible is seen; thus the Un- speakable is pronounced; thus the Spirit speaks, and the Word goes out evermore, a light and a blessing. The voice is always silent; but the silence is vocal. Now this is the first thing which our age needs,, the perception, at least the hearty belief, of this Di- vine Presence. The world seems near to us, sur- rounds us, presses upon us, holds possession of us. The kingdom of God, meantime, appears as if far off from us, and, if anything, but a dim shade in the evening. It is night, in which the wide, dark earth spreads out between her children and their sun. The rays shoot off into spaces farther than our sight reaches, and we stand as if shut up within the unillumined cone. Unlike the shadow which our earth casts in this, that, whereas the night has its hours pre-established by destiny, so that we can neither hasten nor stay them, the inner darkness is of ourselves, so that no sooner do we turn away from it, looking earnestly to the East, than it is already morning. A gray dawn it may seem at first; but the sun is there, and while we look is always rising. With its sweet breath, out of its holy light, a calm and soothing voice flows into the soul : " Trust thou for ever in me ; fear jiever that I shall fail thee ; doubt not the power which strengthens thee, nor the wisdom which enlightens. As the light shines into thine eye ; as the sound 10 OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. comes from every side into thine ear ; as the air enters with every breath thou drawest ; so come I to the waiting soul ; day-beam in which thou walk- est, immortal word to refresh and cheer thee, foun- tain of thy life and joy. I live ; in me thou livest. Through me thou hast all." Our ears, alas! are dull of hearing. They are dull to the higher calls, but open and quick to other solicitations. Before us rises the path to power, and all along its far heights we hear the invitation to try that proud way. Near it wealth throws out and promises its treasures. Somewhere else fame excites us to es- say the sterner task of winning its perennial monu- ments. Each appetite is assured of its pleasure. The passions are continually stirred by excitements and hopes. We yield, and dream that we are rising, while every step is sinking lower. We drink the Lethean stream, and forthwith oblivion comes over us. We forget the paternal love from which we live, and by which we are encirled in all our ways. Servile to the selfish and sensual impulses, we live for ourselves and the world ; and in pursuit of weal which turns to woe so soon as we have gained it, at least of possession which leaves us needy through the deeper avarice which it has brought into us, we give away whatever of holier good at once excites and fills the permanent aspirations. Sacredness of religious faith, domestic joy, health, everything, is put in peril, that these lower things may be won. Who surrenders himself with like steadfast energy to the invitations of the spirit? Our towns and our cities, our land and the seas, are full of their OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. 11 selfish industries and their sensual toils and gains. Forests fall, palaces spring up, manufactures ex- tend, mines open, ships sail, head, heart, hand toil night and day, for ambition, for a:varice, for appe- tite, for pride. How seldom see we souls of the mould we praise so much in ancient story ! Souls cheerfully letting all such things go, with life it- self, obedient to the voice which they heard, and others did not hear, led by the hand which they saw, but others pronounced a phantom or worse! These the souls we need now. They must live soon, or those hopes which gladdened once our own prospect of the future, must fade in the darkened sky. We want real obedience to the spirit; we have praise enough now for even obsolete virtue. There are enough to celebrate in high phrase heroes and saints of old ; we famish for the saintly heroes to-day. They have said many words, in this age, as in all time, to show how vain worldly pursuits are, and how cheap worldly gains ; it is time we believe ourselves, and exchange empty speech for living deed. They warn us still of the sirens sing- ing near us their melodious' trifles, and tell us to close up our ears that we may not hear ; but the music charms us away from severer service, we waste our time and our souls in the false joys. Echoes come to us everywhere of the ancient wis- dom, growing fainter as we go farther back from their heavenly source, but repeating the divinity there is in goodness, the nobleness there is in abandonment of selfishness and pleasure, and the beauty with which love shines like the morning- 12 OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. star. Might we go near, and drink the influence from the secret and primeval fountain ! The true bliss is to draw from these wells of salvation. How little do these times, or indeed any times, know it ! The life silently surrendering everything to the spirit of truth; rejecting the gain which comes at the cost of conscience ; crucifying every lust of evil, and even turning from friendship and dearest society when they seduce the soul from its simpli- city; exclaiming. Get thee behind me, Satan! to the promise of ease won by decline of the highest work ; accepting pain, welcoming sorrow and the daily cross, in worship of the Good and True ; this, this is the life for which the weary days, though they know it not, are famishing. When once man Cometh to live such a life, the heavens are open ; his ear hears the voice of the Spirit, his heart is full of love, his hand of kindly deeds ; either in silent waiting he standeth to be bidden on noble and holy errands, or in vigorous work he is gone out as minister of the Love in which he lives. Yet I would by no means speak as if there were none such now. Such, we may trust, there always are. The world, indeed, neither knows nor asks for them. Their lives flow, perhaps, all unseen, as if through depths of forests. Their obedience, which they shrink from confessing even to themselves, is only seen in the purer and gentler character graven into the common labors of the day. For neither out of the world, nor away from the world's busi- ness, does the Spirit call us. In the right order, in- deed, of the soul and the world, both move on in OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. 13 perfect concord ; the evils which enthral the soul, and make the world tyrannous, disappear ; the soul is redeemed to freedom, the world is reduced to subordination, the Divine Life is enthroned, and all feelings, thoughts, deeds, through the whole do- main of humanity, flow together in unresisting obe- dience. Meantime, and in the midst of a discord which may seem to us another chaos, the true man seeks to live after this higher pattern. He shakes off the despotism of custom, and leaves far away from him the vices of the world. The prayer of his heart renews itself in the deed of his hand ; the word which comes to him in secret embodies itself in the open day. So let him live, hearkening and obeying, heeding little as he may his outward state^ whether good or ill, high or low, conspicuous or ob- scure. In senate or in workshop, in the study, the office, or the counting-room, tilling the soil or toil- ing on the sea, laboring anywhere, or questioning in solitude the Eternal Truth, let him lift himself calmly up toward the region of the celestial melo- dies, and produce them anew in the music of a life which they quicken to harmonious movement. I cannot dismiss the course of thought which we have taken without adding one thing, involved indeed in the whole, but demanding a distinct an- nouncement. This Spirit, the secret presence and access of the Lord to all, is absolutely supreme. Milton represents his Satan, when he comes to bring evil into the world, as soothing his despair by the hope that thereby he should hold divided empire with the Heavenly King. Type of what 14 OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. has been always the course of men, doing evil while yet they felt the presence and restraint of inevit- able good ! The selfishness, whether of sensuality or of pride, has greeted itself with the promise, that, if it could reign neither alone nor supreme, it should at least invade and control some portion of the greater realm. The Divine Spirit has yet never ceased to discover its powers, and to affirm its su- premacy. Might the revelation be received! It must be received, else the heavens can never open to us. As in the universe we conceive to our- selves, in the outward nature, a process from its central sun through numberless orbs and systems, out to the last and lowest forms of the immense circumference, all obedient to the pervading influ- ence ; in the inward nature, a higher process from the Divine centre, through successive forms and cy- cles of spiritual existence, even to the darker verge and limit, and the order, moreover, which proceeds from the Highest, encircling all with its golden chain, filling all with its attractive influence ; so with each man is there present the same law of universal symmetry and obedience. The very heavens are, as it were, infolded within him, all their orbs and circles, waiting for the word to ar- range them and lead them on in their everlasting courses. His earthly nature, with all its elements to the lowest and most fragile, asks the same superior guidance. Everywhere the love of the Lord must be supreme. Else, as if the unbroken attraction of nature were dissolved, and the Divine influence it- self drawn back, all becomes scattered, discordant OBEDIENCE TO THE SPIRIT. 15 chaotic, the world of man, his very soul, rent, shat- tered, darkened. We have read of great cities, under w^hich an earthquake shook the foundations, or over which volcanic fires swept, and the melted masses covered and grew hard above them ; houses, palaces, temples, the fairest works of art, and the men who rejoiced in them, all buried in the ruin. Shadows of the soul receding from the Spirit, and letting the world and its lusts sweep over it or un- dermine ! The empire of the Lord divided ; centre mixed with circumference; heaven darkened and sunken by infernal blasts ; the sun and stars fallen ; the order and beauty of the soul shattered and lost in an ingulfing earth or a volcanic mass. It is as if the destroying god of the East had done his first wild work of boundless desolation. Let but the central life, the quickening spirit, come over and fill us ; then all is changed, and the universe of man reproduces the perfection and symmetry of mater- nal nature ; the destroyer disappears, or rather, as in the mythic tale, becomes the renewer, and as he goes out in his power. Heaven resumes its wonted serenity and brightness ; sun and stars shine; worlds stand forth in fresh beauty. The spiritual creation rests in its Sabbath. SEEMON II. THE MANIFOLD TINITT.* Psalm civ. 24. O LOED, HOW MANIFOLD AKE THT WOEKS ! IN WISDOM HAST THOU MADE THEM ALL: THE EAETH IS FULL OF THT EICHES. The last week has renewed our remembrance of the great truth. The powers latent in what seems but dead, the earth beneath our feet, have been shown. As we walk over it or take portions of it in our hands, it appears only as sand or clay. Rocks may have been beaten, or through other pro- cess have crumbled, into little and loose pieces ; fallen leaves have mingled with them, or decayed trees or autumnal grasses ; rains have come down upon them, or dews or vapors, and seas, lakes, . streams, from the grand river to the tiny brook, have watered them ; heat, light, air, have penetrated through them ; and as results of these, and if there be other influences, we have, for bare and dry wastes, green fields, flowers of every scent and hue, rich fruit, nourishing grain, all, in one word, which gives life and beauty to nature. Such the simple combinations of the elements ! * Delivered the Sunday succeeding an agricultural exhibition. THE MANIFOLD UNITY. 17 Their products as numberless. Out of fissures in the rocks, from the unbroken rock itself on which a little soil has gathered, plants spring and flowers bloom. All along the steep sides of mountains we see the pine, the oak, the maple, other loftiest trees growing out from between masses standing forth in everlasting grandeur ; and from the dark preci- pice vines stretch their tendrils, and flowers soften the wild savagery by their sweet, calm beauty. But who shall speak of the uncounted varieties, and of the equally uncounted numbers in each variety, by which fields and forests are thronged I And how wonderfully fitted, each to whatever may be the spot of its growth or other relations within which it is held ! Streams of manifold influence are flow- ing for ever, every one through its own channels to its own repositories. The flower-weed we pull up and fling away, how wonderful in itself! What powers and combinations have entered into it ! Look at some single leaf through a glass by which it shall be sufiiclently enlarged ; you might call its little particles compact piles of brilliant pearls. And into each glittering pearl of this vegetable mine nature has given forth of her amplest re- sources. A soil, fitted through nicest choice and numberless adaptations ; water gathered from height or depth, through meeting influences of sky and earth ; air, tempered to the very want of the hour and the growth ; fire, penetrating the whole through heat or light ; seed at once endowed with precisely the power of yielding such growth, and exacting for the effect precisely these conditions ; and from 18 THE MANIFOLD UNITY. the first outcoming of the soft shoot to the com- pletion of the plant, silent processes going forward every hour of night and of day to secure the end. Sun and earth, as well as air and clouds, are wait- ing, as servants, on the very weed. Nay, they are waiting in perpetual ministrations on each leaf, and in unexhausted care bringing their secret powers into and through every particle for its perfection and the perfection of the whole. Growth is not partial and fragmentary, but integral ; the uni- verse, we, might almost say, compresses itself into the atom ; the atom, expanded to its widest, is in- dex and mirror of the universe. Yet with infinite variety; that from the poles to the tropics, from east to west through every region, each product is, not symbol only of the whole great nature, but exponent of the peculiar qualities and modi- fications assumed within the sphere of its own growth. Nor is this the end : of all vegetation, similar as the seeds and influences may be through- out the entire period of development, there are still those hidden differences which mark all as wholly individual. The resources of nature are indeed in- exhaustible. From even the same stem, several fruits grow ; but as kind is distinct from kind, so ia individual from individual wholly and for ever. The remark applies equally to animal existence. From the lowest, which forms a sort of junction with the vegetable, to the highest, which appears almost as if prophetic of man, and thence in man through his ascending course to the very verge of pure spiritual existence, we see the same perpetual THE MANIFOLD UNITY. 19 V discrimination. Two opposite facts meet us here, as they meet us lower down in the many realms of existence; unlimited oneness, endless multiplicity. All is one, no twain are alike. But here again each contains the whole. If the mere weed seen in its amplitude, is comprehension of the infinite powers of nature ; so likewise is each animal, with the developed energies of a life revealing sensation and movement ; so likewise is man, with the higher qualities of spiritual consciousness, not only taking in the whole compass of inferior existence, but entering into that higher and broader cycle within which divine and celestial realities for ever revolve. Nothing is more common than the endeavor to illustrate or to prove God's existence and perfection from nature as it thus appears through each realm to the body and even the bodily sensations of man, with their relations also to those mental powers by which he reduces outward things to subjection. It is well. These all indicate, as they flow from, a cause evolving them as effects. But they fail of revealing the first and highest cause. To perceive that, we must seek to go into the holiest shrine, the -secret oracle, the Divine Presence itself in our souls. Before essaying this, however, we will proceed a while on our external path. As the mind of man is highest among such as we know of the manifold works of the Divine Wisdom, richer than all the fulness of the earth, so may we deem also the products of mind operating through the bodily organs, portions of the same in- exhaustible energy. From the spontaneous growth 20 THE MANIFOLD UNITY. of the soil, we turn to what it yields through tillage ; from water and fire, as they appear in their univer- sal forms, we turn to the mechanism by which they are converted to the daily use and brought under the control of man ; from the air, as it streams everywhere around us, we pass to the subserviency into which man is seen bringing it to his own wants ; we see the tree cut down and wrought into shapes more numerous than can be told, the staff, the seat, the table, the house, the ship, and who can tell the myriad uses ? Throughout the world, the mind is devising, the hand is doing, some work by which these or other materials furnished by nature are wrought into ministers of the imperial thought. And while the tiller of the soil or the skilful me- chanic is thus bringing out supplies to our outward and palpable wants, the artist comes forth, detect- ing the finer beauty which dwells in all, and repro- ducing it in the marble or on the canvas. The musician seizes and echoes it in sound ; the writer transfers it to the paper which mechanism has pro- duced ; the speaker gives it forth in those living tones which pierce to the heart. Everywhere the mind is using nature. But in reality the whole, even of these human processes, draws us to the Divine Source. As in those unnumbered gifts which autumn bestows, we see continual media- tions, so in the works of human strength around us. The Lord does not show himself apart from the Creation, a distinct and palpable presence. He stands not out as strong man, moving worlds as wheels by his hand. He is never seen, like the THE MANIFOLD UNITY. 21 mechanic, shaping his beautiful products, like the painter, spreading his intermingled lights and shades. He never appears but in the thing done, — the thing done through constant interpenetra- tions of all things into each, effects succeeding, evolved by and evolving effects, as the waves of water or of air rolling and following each other. Thus in the operations of man. They flow i directly and palpably from him, undulations of that great ocean-existence which he is. His will, his thought, his hand, his deed, these are the perpetual mediums through which the Unseen Presence cir- culates into cities and structures of men, as really as through air and water and earth, to plant or ani- mal. If through evaporations and clouds, the Lord shines out in the beauty of the evening or morning sky, neither is he removed farther from the fair colors and life-like forms of an Angelo or a Raphael. Man works in and from God. And as the Highest gives the material on which man tries his hand, so does he give also the mind which conceives, the soul which ' loves, the hand itself which shapes, and breathes the inspirations which quicken. Seen aright, God is indeed all in all. As the effect, so is the cause. As the work, so the worker, so the laws of working. Hence a universal correspondence exists. We might conceive a mind viewing this outward world at the point of its exist- ence when life was unknown in it : there is a sun, be it supposed ; there is a moon, there are stars ; the sky bends over it, the earth and the ocean are encircled by the atmosphere. But neither sea nor earth nor 22 THE MANIFOLD UNITY. air is yet touched by animal existence. Could this mind behold nature, so void of personal life, yet proceeding in its birth from the Supreme, it might also perceive a necessary connection of the one and the other. It is a divine cause : the effect must answer to it. Nature must be such as its soul. Thus of every man the deed is correspondent to himself; his movement, his tone, his speech, his style of utterance, everything, is as he is. The law holds of necessity through all things. Let the mind see next the process of growth, — this whole earth giving forth its secret sources of vegetation and fruitfulness. We have now the Divine cause and the co-operative elements ; this boundless vegetation must answer at once to both. Like the pre-exist- ing elements, it must correspond to the Highest ; and as gathering into itself those earlier elements, it must correspond to them. It is the law of effect answering to cause, developing itself in an ascend- ing scale ; the nearer to the Supreme Essence as it gives a heightened form of qualities themselves correspondent. Let the same mind see the next higher ranks evolved from the quickened mass ; from the water, fish, reptiles, and birds ; from the earth, quadrupeds and man. The same double correspondences till continues. The Creative Pow- er raises the lower elements into higher composi- tion ; the form which embodies, so answers to them, must also represent and answer to the First in per- fect accord with its own affections. So for ever. This fact of the One thus developing itself through universal correspondencies, is the centre of what we THE MANIFOLD UNITY. 23 usually denominate laws of nature. Those laws are indeed no other than the Divine Presence dis- posing its infinite harmonies. As in some grand symphony, the several instruments and voices sound out each its own ; the one, its soft tones, as of a dying wind ; another, its shrill, piercing notes, as it would startle the dullest ear ; a third, its deep and solemn organ peal ; all, their peculiar swells and cadences, yet in their widest divergences, and manifold as they may be, corresponding to the one master inspiration which they obey ; so through the greater symphony of the universe ; endless variety, no discord ; perpetual change, no dissonance ; voice with voice, heart answering to heart, for ever. It is not as we live, or rather die, within the limi- tations of the natural world, that we recognize this celestial order. As the eye sees vigible things, and the ear hears sounds, and each sense perceives its objects ; as next the sensuous thought apprehends sensuous things, and the scientific observation gathers and arranges its general facts, and the phil- osophic mind contemplates its great ideas ; so does the spiritual principle perceive the spiritual realities and laws. No man discerns so clearly the descent of the Infinite into the whole range of the Finite, as to pronounce the whole Divine, but through the Divine penetrating and enlightening the very cen- tre of his being. Raised to the realm of celestial truth, he sees its rays circulating through whatever of earth and of mind comes within the circle of his knowledge. And as he renders obedience to the heavenly vision, his perception of its everlasting 24 THE MANIFOLD UNITY. realities and its universal laws, grows continually quicker and more clear. Our observations, beginning thus in the manifold aspects of nature through its ascending gradations, and seeming, it may be, to lose themselves in the boundless multiplicity, come at length to the sight of unity. The unity dwells, however, in the spirit- ual sphere, not in the natural world, and reveals itself with a clearness proportioned, not to our sensuous or scientific or philosophical knowledge, so much as to our spiritual consciousness. Nature becomes now symbol of Spirit. Spirit, and its outflowing spheres of benignity and of power, encircle and penetrate the world, and make it transparent. Nothing perishes, all is quickened. From the highest centre of the inmost heaven, through the descending cycles of outer existence to the lowest point in the circumference of nature, the soul of God quickens all things and draws them into an ever-growing harmony. The mani- fold works of the Lord become one in the unity of the wisdom by which they are formed; the earth, filled with riches of God, gives back the whole to its source ; one order, one law, one life shines through the great transparency. As the whole, we have remarked, gathers itself into each thing ; so most truly does the universe compact itself in man. Going out into the con- templation of the immensity which surrounds us • looking to the sun and those earths which move as planets around their vast centre ; thence risinff to some greater orb with its planets sweeping TIJE MANIFOLD UNITY. 25 larger ckcles, eyid attracting systems of worlds, as our sun the single planets, all obedient to some higher attaction, whose centre who can tell? — we can never discern one element or law, but it dwells and operates in our own bodies. Rising thence into the regions of higher thought, seeing the sunny face of Truth, as it beams upon our souls and draws them to itself, moving itself onward and higher to yet greater and more glorious spheres, all flooded by celestial light,, we can never any more discover one element, one law, which is wholly wanting in the deep mysteries of our interior being. There, stars of heaven and planets of earth ; there, central attractions and circling orbe ; there, a sun going forth in its strength and a moon walking in brightness, and an earth full of divine riches, — heavens of love, descending through chan- nels of the several affections into the whole range of existence, of wisdom quickened by love, spread- ing like light throughout the compass of intellect and action, of power, effluence of love, energy of wisdom, revealed in every purpose and thought and deed. Thus is man the microcosm, according to ancient thought, a certain mingled world, kindred of the two worlds, uniting the celestial and terres- trial, enshrining the life and light of the eternal Word in a temple one with the immense structure of nature. Be it ours to build up the immortal fabric. Let faith invite knowledge ; let spirit welcome and bless nature ; so gather those living ideas which the heights of love nourish, then shape them to sym- 3 26 THE MANIFOLD UNITY. metrical beauty ; draw from their quarries precious and imperishable truths, and lay the strong foun- dations ; rear the walls to the lofty roof, furnish the secret chambers and the open courts ; build inward, holier to the Holiest ; overlay the whole with purest gold ; silently, that no sound disturb the sacred pro- cess, let the structure advance to the great hour when, all divine things brought in, the consecra- tion shall go forward amidst the glory of the Lord filling for ever this nobler house. Mine be it, let each soul repeat, to build up in silent purity the everlasting temple. SEEMON III. THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. Psalm cxlvi. 1, 2. PKAISE TE THE LOED. PEAISE THE LOKD, O MT SOUL ! WHILE I LIVE WILL I PKAISE THE LOED : I WILL SING PEAISES UNTO MT GOD WHILE I HAVE ANT BEING. Origjin, Nature, End, there are these three. To all existence is one, one only, primal Origin ; but secondary elements and qualities proceeding from the First Being, pass into numberless diversities of Nature. From the lowest atom or mass of dead earth to the highest sun ; from the vegetable, which scarcely distinguishes itself from the lifeless atom, to the noblest growth of forest or field ; from the life, we might almost literally call it, of the plant, to that of the lordliest animal ; from the meanest expression of mind to its grandest development of thought or prayer, of word or deed ; — the uni- verse is filling itself for ever with its forms, its classes, its races, in earth, in water, in air, through elements numberless themselves and nourishing these manifold diversities. Varied as the natures, so various are the ends. Each thing and the en- tire whole continually discover subordinate uses, corresponding with their qualities and powers ; but in proportion as they are seen more perfectly in 28 THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. their own completeness, they come the nearer to opening before us the higher and entire end, the final cause, as philosophy has often called it, of their existence. An end, let it be observed, this is, inherent in the thing itself, not found in its bare relations to other things with which it may be con- nected. I can hardly think that so little a thing as even the wild flower, springing up and blooming almost under the last snows of winter, was orig- inally planted and has been nourished so carefully either for me or for any other man. Rather, I am ready to believe, it exists for itself; created and nourished through cold and heat, in all stages of its growth, to be the flower it is, to fulfil in its Sphere the beautiful idea which it embodies. There may be that, perhaps, in the Divine Soul which must in this way give forth its sweet benignity. Still more, we may think it is so, throughout the ■Compass of living existence. There is joy enough in life itself to justify the Creative Wisdom. Lefl unrestrained in its own element, to gro'W, to unfold itself, to perfect its nature, every creature is blessed in very living. Beyond this, we see that, with the same freeness, particular things enter into number- less relations and subordinations to the whole. All things are continually coming in truth into one Web; and fast as the shuttle flies weaving them together, the connections and secret influences are multiplied and strengthened: at the same timej however, each thread, each filament, is a whole not only contributing to the great texture, but receiving of it strength and compactness. There THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. 29 is at once all in each, and each in all. These ends of existence, these hidden causes, continually- projecting themselves into multitudinous and beau- tiful effects, rise in ascending scale, as natures are higher ; in man, as highest, they show themselves at their greatest elevation. Him, the Divine Life inspires. It excites the deepest aspirations, the sweetest affections, thoughts pure and bright as light, deeds nobler than heroism, words true to the soul and true to God; these all, movements of his inner being, growths of his life, substantial and elemental portions of the spiritual fabric, Ivhose basis is on the earth amidst the fluctua- tions of time, but whose summit rises ever upward through the heavens amidst the calm Sabbath of the Eternal. So his end is no other than celestial and immortal. His, in one word, is the filial union with the Father, signified by prayer and praise, and preeminently by the hymn. " What else," Bpictetus is reported^ to have said, " what else can I, lame old man, if not sing the God ? Sure, if I had been a nightingale, I would have done the things of a nightingale ; if a swan, those of a sWan ; but now that I am partaker of reason, I ought to sing God in the hymri; this is my work, I am doing it ; nor will I leave this assigned order while it is given me : you, moreover, I invite to this same song." The first, indeed, and largest use of music and song this is, the celebration of God. Poetry, we used to be told, — we may rejoice that the notion is passing away, — consists of fiction, its source and 30 THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. power invention, its end and aim pleasure. Hence, it was inferred, there must be something of exag- geration ; and as infinitude does of itself and from necessity surpass all fiction and all exaggeration, religion, we have been assured, can furnish no topic for the poetical expression of the human mind. Letit pass, how contrary is such a theory to the laws of the soul and the nature of true song. Strange, at least, that history should have been so wholly overlooked! Those old Hebrew Psalms! Those prophetic strains of Isaiah, his lips touched with mysterious fire, and of earlier and later bards, from the age of Moses to the age which breathed forth last of all the great promise of the Lord coming to his temple, judging the past and intro- ducing a new order! Nor are Grecian hymns wanting; the poetry of the Greeks is indeed essen- tially religious : and in our own language,. Spenser has not only celebrated the toils and the struggles and the worth of Human Virtues, but sung also the Heavenly Beautie; Milton has echoed the morning Song of Paradise; and of all our poets, those words which sink deepest into our hearts, and are with us in the holiest hours, will be found the words of profoundest religious significance. A Divine Inspiration, men of the olden time be- lieved the power of song; wisely and truly, it seems to me. What if mimicries of the celestial gift have for a while driven away the fresh original vision, or clouded it to our view ? The reality may sometime come back. New melodies may de- scend into waiting and prepared spirits ; and freely THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. 31 as the night-bird sings in the dim forest, or as the swan moves over the smooth waters, looking up into the serene air, so freely, so from the quick heart of revived humanity, the hymn and the harp, — and why not the responsive dance ? — shall again, we may hope, celebrate the First Being ; nay, the more divinely, as he hath become a nearer Pres- ence. When amidst the shades of his dimmer faith I hear David uttering and calling forth the rapture, Praise ye the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul! when I listen to his irrepressible and jubilant promise. While I live will I praise the Lord; I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being ; when I see him invoking all instru- ments, and the joyous dance, all nature and life, the whole universe, to join the great hymn, I can scarce choose but wonder that we, gladdened by the higher faith and the brighter hope, we, greeted everywhere by the Spirit of love, and looking into the opened heaven, have become so joyless and dark in our worship. The very word has come to be associated with gloom and constraint. The glad tidings seem to have lost their gladness with the lapse of ages ; and the breath of sorrow has soiled and stained, if it , have not swept away, the holy mirth of a younger devotion. The old word, There is a Great Eye, let us tremble, stands even yet untranslated : when shall it read, The Great Eye beams with Love, let us rejoice? That solace of the sorrowing woman, banished and wanderirjg in the eastern desert, we have completely inverted ; scarce one ever thinks of it or repeats it but as 33 THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. language of terrific admonition: when shall we say for ever, not in fear, but in cheerful hope, not for mere warning, but for trust and love and prom- ise of new joy, Thou God seest me ? Go where we may, we still are encircled by pulsations of the one living Heart; still the great Eye looks down, a more benignant sun, upon our tears or our smiles ; still the angel comes to bring love and peace : let us be glad ! And yet there may be reason sometimes for de* pression. We cannot wonder at the gloom which covers the mind and story, and even the counte* nance, when a Dante comes forth out of the terri- ble visions of his Purgatory and his Hell. They must of necessity darken the soul. They must leave their sombre shades over him. From those infernal depths, we could not think to see him re- turn unscathed to the green earth and the blue sky. Emblems of the mediaeval Christendom! Not more have airs from heaven, than blasts and clouds from the lowest abyss, passed over it. Even the devoutest and most gentle of its saints seemed to walk between light and shade. Their very lustre was reflection of the western sun from thick and heavy clouds falling over their East. Thomas h. Kempis looks to us the very form of devotion ; but the same shade is on his brow ; his voice is the low, sweet wail, rather than the full outburst of thanks- giving. There is not so much the clear sun shining over fields and cities, over land and sea, children playing and shouting on the shore or the inland, as the moon, at one instant looking out all light, THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVINS. 33 the next hidden by passing clouds, over long reaches of forest or the dim aisles of Gothic cathe- drals, when every house or tree casts a dark shadow, the yety light glooming and awful. So Leighton ; his tender spirit shrinks from all harshness, and is a constant benediction; but there is a cast oif melancholy, from which he scarce emerges into clear, broad day ; heavenly tones have sounded to his solitude, they have touched and penetrated and quickened his soul, yet seeming as if broken or dis- turbed by northern wintry gusts, that with the hymn sadder sounds are inwoven. It is as we sometimes hear the winds sighing, dying away, into their solemn pauses, deeper than silence, appearing more fetill and hushed than very stillness. The moon- light is beautiful, and the wind, calm or tempestu- ous, has its melody ; but the bright morning and the sunshine of spring or of summer befit rather the fulness of our powers and our overflowing ac- tivities. We want a devotion full of cheer, as the monastic piety was full of awe. Wordsworth images it in part through his Young Herdsman. Nature has penetrated into his soul, awakening love and bliss. It has become joy to him, when from some headland he beholds the rising sun, and the world bathed in morning light. All things have passed, as it were, into elements of his being; de- voutness is his very life. Music and song are dis- missed ; words of prayer and of praise lie still, the feeling is too deep : — " His mind was a thanksgiving to the Fower That made him ; it was blessedness and love ! " 34 THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. But even this, as I have said, is partial. It is lonely, rather than social; contemplative, rather than active ; an Elysium of beautiful visions, rather than an Eden which the man is to dress and keep, and to dress and keep along with others, flesh of his flesh, one with his own soul. We want a greater psalm. This course of things appears inevitable. The joyousness even of those Hebrew Psalmists, if we look attentively to its occasions, cannot always be pronounced of the deepest and holiest character. Free them from invasions or oppressions of their enemies ; give them victory in war ; let them stand safe on the shore of the Red Sea, the waters then rolling back on the Egyptians ; let hosts of Midian perish ; let David obtain the throne, or deliver it to Solomon ; let the captive nation return from the Euphrates, rejoicing in promises of renewed free- dom and glory, of a golden age and a triumphant Monarch in the future ; then the heart burst out into exultations of a joy not greater than the sorrow, we might add, alas ! the very revenge, amidst the reverses and desolations of their country, and the triumphs and reproaches of hostile powers. This ancient Hebrew people, however, through its whole history, nor least in these lyric expressions of its several states and courses, represented a higher, deeper, holier worship, a devotion equally cheerful and joyous and triumphant, but of more spiritual origin and strain, its hymn going up from the re- born soul to the quickening spirit, its paan cele- brating the victory won from the power of sin its THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. 35 joy flowing from inspirations of Universal Love, blessed for ever with the secret consciousness of unselfish and unlimited good. The child, it has be- come a very trite saying, is father of the man ; but the character which the man shall hereafter reveal, opening the inmost life outward, is by no means the same with what is apparent in the external types of childhood. The child, let me repeat, all out- ward ; his first activity, of the body ; even his mind, directed naturally, spontaneously, continually to outward things ; his joys aiid griefs, proceeding from pleasures or pains to the senses ; nature itself awakening his rapture, not so much because he yet perceives its inward soul of beauty, as because he finds in it scope for all his powers. The man, sup- pose him truly such, fully grown within as without, is inward ; his chief activity, of the soul, of the mind, of the spirit ; his contemplation, celestial and divine ; his joys and griefs, chiefly from within, from the consciousness of the benignant Presence, or from temptations in the wilderness ; nature, dearer to him than ever, has become temple and shrine of God, at which he waits in reverent and joyful siknce, to see the glory, to hear the voice. So soon as this process is advanced far enough for the two spheres to meet, the inward and spiritual to fill the outward and the natural, both to move forward in the har- mony of the spirit penetrating and guiding obedi- ent nature, — we take up the old hymn with new in- sight ; the divine communion brings back a greater than the primasval cheer of thanksgiving. To my mind the Hebrew seems to be the child ; the Chris- 36 i;he psalm of thanksgiving. tjan, when the Christ is truly revealed as Divine Form and Life within him, is the man. The for- mer toiled, played, fought, was glad or sorrowful, prostrate in prayer or singing and dancing in praise, foreshadowing in natural expressions corresponding processes in the spiritual sphere wherein the latter should toil and rejoice, should strive and be victori- ous, and wrestle and win angelic blessing and promise, and enter a heavenly laijd, walking a new earth alive with inner beauty, bathed in the light falling on it for ever froin the new heavens which overarch it. But this Christian maturity has not been reached yet; the childlike manhood is still future. Nature and spirit have not flowed together ; their harmony stands puly as a promise and a hope. The Psalm of Nature is waitiijg ever to be trans- lated into Hymn of the Spirit. Those lonely, pen- sive, monastic tones, voices of later saints sound- ing so sweet to us even in their wail, are intermedi- ate ; they befall in the transition of man from the temple to the closet, from the priesthood of a class to the priesthood of the soul ; we may not spurn them or cast them off: let us seek to translate them also into new litanies and livelier anthems, to draw forth their secret melody and give it forth in voices of higher mood. They come down to us, holier frag- ments of the mediaeval culture, one with the cathe- drals and castles and towers, products and symbols of the ages as they emerged from the depths of God, his spirit still lingering over them, reproducing their life in the present, waiting in calm assurance the interpreter who shajl pronounce their interior THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. 37 meaning as prophecy of a holier future. Thus the past, even of what we call darker ages, shall unite with the perpetually recurring voices of nature, to fill up the choral hymn. History shall be no longer record or tradition of withered and fallen deeds, wasting with autumnal leaves, but the living humanity, its May-dew fresh on the green buds, de- veloping evermore its elements and qualities, its powers and its beauty, — no death, no decay, but perennial growth, — as the earth knows nothing of loss, but when the rock crumbles, or the tree falls, or the animal leaves its flesh and bones, these and whatever else there be which dissolve, all remain, ele- ments and conditions of future forms and enlarged growth. And out of all. Nature and Humanity, as the New Jerusalem is seen coming down to gather into it each and the whole, illumining all with its immortal sun, we shall collect the matter of that new song with which earth shall answer Heaven, and man shall respond to angelic voices, in ever- lasting hallelujahs. It shall be the psalm of life. The body of man is the true temple. As we make it fit by repent- ance and purity, by rejection of evil and acceptance of good, by consecrations of love and obedience, the Lord is seen entering and filling it. The vision kindles rapture. Then breaks forth the shout of unconfined joy. From the inmost shrine, through all courts of the Holy, the hymn sounds out. Down from the Supreme Spirit it is breathed into the secrecy and sanctuary of the heart. There it dwells as the Eternal Life. Thence it returns as 4 38 THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. aspiration to Heaven. Thence, as celestial air, it moves over and purifies the affections. In and through them it circulates into the whole com- pass of thought, and utters itself as voice of Truth. It renews itself in the living deed, and speaks through the harmony of speech. It is love and purity, gentleness and energy, simplicity and wis- dom, peace and power, communion of divine charity and human kindness. It is the bliss of solitude and the inspiration of society. It floats through the soul even in sleep, and wakes and sings with its waking. It pours its still and reviving influence through the hours and the deeds of the day, that they become instinct with its own life and power. Banishing discord from the heart, it unites severed man in perfect communion. Expelling despotic pride and servile meanness, it raises the lowly, hum- bles the high, making all free, no tyrant, no slave, all children of the Highest, brethren one of another. War, ceasing from the heart, ceases frorh the world ; Peace, breathing its sabbath into the heart, gives to the weary world the holy rest of the Father. The perfected individual is type of the perfected race ; the family, kindred on earth, as in heaven, is one complete man. We now have our liturgies and our hymns for the several hours of recognized wor- ship ; and through them, age after age, nation after nation, from east to west, in north and south, vast oceans severing them, many tongues dividing their utterance, give out their praises and their desires their sorrows, their hopes, their joys. It is well whenever it is sincere. But there is a holier ser- THE PSALM OF THANKSBIVING. 39 vice, shut up within no walls, limited to no time ; the liturgy of the soul living through nations and ages ; the hymn of mankind born into the everlast- ing kingdom of God ; a life consecrated by obedience and charity ; worship of the Infinite Spirit in its own essence and reality ; love for ever giving itself in service to all. Be this our psalm of thanksgiving. Looking abroad into the majestic universe, and entering into communion with its spirit, let us put aside whatever is discordant and jarring, all selfishness and pride, all envy and jealousy, all unkindness and impurity, everything evil and false, every prejudice and narrow- ness ; and opening our souls to selectest influences, flow they whence and through what channels they may, let us prepare ourselves to enter and dwell in the house of the Lord, raising to him the Psalm, con- secrating to him every power and service, through the whole of our existence. Not with our lips only, but with heart and hand and living deed, let the soul ascend. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity ! the ancient voluptuary might exclaim, such the disappointment, the weariness, the very disgust, coming with the pursuit and the completion of a shadowy life wasted in chase of shadows. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! the devout soul might repeat with other feeling in ages and conditions wherein the world seemed given over to hopeless evil, for this earth no better hope than its final dissolution, for man nothing but fruitless toil, and only when we see the gates of heaven shutting the world from us for ever, any promise of good ful- 40 THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. filled. No such thing as vanity ; reality of realities, all is reality ! this the burden of the new prophecy with which the heart of man is charged ; the soul revives, weariness has passed with the night, and the plaint swells out into the high strain of hope and holy deed. To love God and obey his voice, to love man and serve him by sweet and healing ministries, this is to body forth prayer in charity, to convert the workshop into temple or closet, to raise toil into duty, and to enliven duty into joy, to niake piety humane, and philanthropy godlike. We must often go to the mountain, that we may see the heavenly vision and pattern; but there we must not stay ; we must go down when the word has been spoken, the vision seen, and the pattern showed, though we may not think our faces have begun to shine ; that is no concern of ours ; we must go to fulfil the lowliest service, even if it be within the deepest shade of the valley. If from the sacred fountain we have taken any water into our little urns, we must not keep it shut up, but pour it out and let it flow where it will, through brake or grass, or into the dry sand, asking never that the stream show itself, only that along its course, if silent and unseen, the green may be deeper, and the flowers more fresh, the beauty growing, and the whole divine. I would it were given me to translate into fitting words this benignant life. I can but feebly strive for it. As I can, let me speak, and ask that each heart may raise the silent hymn : — Blessed be Thou, seen of no human eye, heard THE PSALM OF THANKSGIVING. 41 of no human ear, whom yet our souls confess and the mind beholds, whom our thoughts seek and our tongues praise. Blessed be Thou, with whose fulness nature overflows, and whose image man bears in his spirit and his higher love. Blessed be Thou, whom neither time nor space can measure. Infinite and Eternal Being! From Thee floweth the universe for ever new, fresh in the dew of its everlasting youth. Seasons and ages pass ; Thou remainest unchanged. Beauty shines through thy numberless works; its source and soul thou art. Love comes forth to redeem, to serve, and to bless thy children; Love itself thou alone art. From the abyss of sin, from the shade of sorrow, they look up to thee; thine it is to subdue sin, to soothe sorrow, to plant the celestial paradise, thine. Saviour, Father ! Thine, First, Midst, Last ! Blessed be Thou, only Thou, now and for ever ! Bless him, ye heavens ! Bless him, thou earth ! Bless him, sun, stars, and moon, in your perpetual courses ! Bless him. Nature, through thy manifold voices and thine unceasing movements and births and growths ! Bless him, Man, outflow and image of his Being! Truly may the promise go from us, — We will join the universal benediction; with heart and hand, through word and deed, we will raise the hymn of obedience, of service, and of love. Amen. SERMON IV. THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. Luke ii. 10. behold! I BBING TOU GOOD TIDINGS OF GREAT JOT. I WOULD it were in my power to reproclaim the good tidings, so that they might renew with us the great joy. They have grown old ; might they drink again the dew of their youth: they fall powerless on the ear ; might they flow fresh and full into the soul: they gain but half .our assent; might they win entire and living belief! When shall this once be? when the Christmas pass from the cold evening of the year to the warm dawn of the Christ, rising sunlike in the quickened heart ? The angelic word is really young this morn- ing as when it came long ago to the shepherds, only let us welcome it with the same sincerity, and go with them to see and to tell its promise. The soul imbathed in this morning light, beholding within the sphere of its silent vision the everlasting Christ, strong in the consciousness of the new heavens opened over it, making the earth around it new, needs only to declare what it sees, that declaration is a Gospel, — the spirit announcing a divine birth in humanity. There is an ancient legend wherein THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. 43 we read, that, when men die, they forthwith appear before a tribunal which, it has been appointed, shall know nothing of the person, nothing of his worldly relations and rank, nothing but the very and real self, both the judge and the judged meeting un- clothed, soul itself and alone face to face with soul itself equally alone. Could such meeting be an- ticipated! Nor yet for judgment and sentence only, but for secret vision and heavenly revelations. Might conscious presence of the living man with the Lord be once gained; might the man die to what is merely outward, to whatever hinders his per- ception of the Divine Reality, and soul itself dwell alone in open vision of Soul itself dwelling alone in the infinite universe ; then how good the tidings which it should bring us from the mysterious soli- tude! What great joy should burst forth from every heart, answering the voice of deep unto deep through heaven and earth ! Such in its kind is all true prayer. It is soul meeting soul, both unclothed, face to face ; and while the man thus stands waiting before the Lord, he sees the heavens open and angels descend. Let him in devoutness of spirit give utterance to the secret insight; let the soul, keeping itself, as in that mythic judgment, all unclothed, free from selfish and sensual adhe- sions, deliver as it can the heavenly vision, — noth- ing of itself, all of the Divine, like the air which shows itself never, but lets the light appear and reveal every form through the pure transparency ; — then we might come to acknowledge, that the Gospel is not old story,, but fresh opening of the 44 THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. Life; not the birth once in Bethlehem only, but the Saviour revealed through successive genera- tions, and to each prepared heart, the salvation still uncovering its wells that we may come to them from the deserts, and draw from them with unsated and deepening joy. . There had long, I need scarcely say, been cher- ished the hope of Israel. Ancient glories dimmed ; one proud temple fallen; the consecrated na- tion borne captive to the Euphrates, restored only by favor of a Gentile conqueror; successive dominions, Persian, Grecian, extended over the land promised to the fathers, over the chosen sons of Abraham ; Rome now governing it by that colossal power which bestrides the world; amidst such dark memories and such a depressed expe- rience, the people await in ambitious hope the coming of One greater than Moses, outshining the splendors of their earlier and triumphant Mori- archs. He shall redeem them from the humilia- tion of bondage ; he shall raise them up to perma- nent supremacy ! The common ambition of nations, distinguished only by the sanctity with which the whole was then invested by its reference to God, to his Messiah, to his People. Nor is it at all un- likely that these shepherds, obscure as their names and their position might be, having little to hope for themselves, but asking none the less for the aggrandizement of their nation and their national worship, understood the annunciation only thus : " Unto you bring I good tidings of great joy ; joy which shall be great to the whole people of Judea. THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. 45 To'day there is born the Savioiir of your natiolij the Messiah by holiest election and consecrationj the Lord destined to fulfil the prophetic hope, the King mightier in war, more glorious in victoryj than David, of more regal splendor, of wider sways than Solomon. On his lasting throne he shall sitj making Jerusalem imperial beyond Rome, sub- jecting more and greater nations than Csesar, ruling the world, and ruling it for ever." This old hope seems still to remain among the subdued and dispersed children of Judah. As con- nected, however, with the great history which Chris* tendom has written, the life of Jesus commencing with the day which called the shepherds to the manger, prolonged through descending ages, and only developing its earlier influences even now, we know that theoretically neither Jews nor Christians presume upon its fulfilment. The former are said to wait still for the Messiah destined to make the prophetic dream a grand reality ; the latter, seeing things pass otherwise than had been anticipated, have come to separate the whole promise of his dominion and destiny, from what are set aside from Christian reverence, as merely secular and political interests of the transitory world. Yet after all this religious contempt of a faith once so holy, we need but look more closely and intimately to the course of the ages, and we shall find it virtually going forward to its accomplishment. Judaism, With the powers which it gave to its Messiah, outlived thei. forms to which the name has. been confined. Judaism, that is, the substan- 46 THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. tial fact, passed from the Jews who rejected Jesus, and transferred itself to the nation gathered out of the nations, — to the empire silently rising to supremacy within the empire, — wherein he was received. Thus, again, Judaism, through the type of Christianity, which it cast and established, was really redeemed precisely when it seemed over- whelmed, and enthroned when its very existence seemed at an end. The primitive germ expanded into Christianity, and bearing henceforth this new name, spread itself far and wide over the nations, growing deeper, higher, broader, with the lapse of ages; the leaves of this tree promised for their healing. Nay, spiritual as it appeared, and eternal as it declared its hppe to be, it did in fact, how- ever unconsciously, achieve the triumph of Judea. Through what was at first patronage, which it gained of the Imperial Power ; through the suprem- acy to which it gradually rose over kings and na- tions, uniting Europe amidst all its discords in one sentiment transcending all ; and, when its splendor was obscured, its empire questioned and divided by rebellions, by schisms, by separations, even then, through the secret influence with which it ceased not to flow into the faith, the hope, the love of the human heart, this same Judaism, glorified by its resurrection in Christianity, has really gone far in fulfilling even the secular hope of Israel. What the later Esau sold, the new Jacob won. Actually, though men thought not so, the Messiah has sat for centuries on the throne of David, clothed with higher power, ruling and judging mankind. How- THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. 47 ever, even to this day, Christians disclaim the secu- lar aspects of their religion, and its saints have sev- ered themselves apparently from the world, still, as an existing element of life and society, Christi- anity has long been and yet is what nothing, either in its own nature or in human things, can hinder it from being, a secular and political power ; nor yet in the world only, but over the world, an inevitable and enduring dominion. There has been much dec- lamation spent upon the Jews, that their hope and thought were so low ; let us rise to higher thought, to more celestial hope, as we surely ought. But, to say nothing of our own low thought, — nothing of the thoroughly irreligious strifes and schemes of in- dividuals, of societies, of nations ; of their ambitions, setting mercy and justice aside in their grasp of power ; of their selfishness, making the strong ty- rants, the weak slaves ; of their atheistic lusts, in- viting the devils to the shrine from which they have banished the God ; to say nothing of these things and the like, which Christendom seems to think ex- empt from all responsibility to religion, so soon as those magic epithets, secular, political, are pro- nounced over them in some profane antibaptism ; — we may find other and infinitely more innocent correspondence between Christendom down to the nineteenth century, and Judaism in the first, and before even that. Unconsciously we have accepted our Messiah to the station which they, quite as unconscious what their words meant, assigned to theirs. If modern history were read aright, it would be learned that actually for more now than a thou- 48 THE ANGELIC MBSSAGBt sand years, the highest sovereignty among the na- tions 13 unseen; approaching, slowly indeed, but surely and with unbroken course, toward the ab- sorption of all earthly commonwealths in the King- dom of the Messiah. I cannot stop at this moment to inquire how far the Jewish hope, transformed into the Christian fact, has become involved and mixed up with error and sin. Let us proceed rather to a different view, The good tidings of great joy! we may dismiss the questions, how Jewish shepherds understood them, how far Christendom has, consciously or un- consciously, fulfilled their promise, especially in external and secular relations; and, taking them up in their interior largeness, we may try to trans- late them from a temporary word into the ever- lasting idea. Could the angel come to us as to the shepherds, could but some angelic soul, which, as in that old mythic tradition, had stood alone, face to face, with the Unseen, come and open its mysterious vision, what then should we hear? That it is which, if possible, I would speak. That it is which, unable to speak, let me try to suggest. Through such lowlier words may we take in some strains of the majestic voice ! — Man ! thy sleep has been long in the night gathered over thy pilgrim- age. Awake, and recall the dreams which have come to thee. Thy morning risen now, behold in the lights it brings the Presence which thou hast not known. There is which neither tongue can speak, nor thought reach, nor reason define; in- most of all things, life of lives, soul of souls, truest THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. 49 love, boundless being, source of power. Type of this secret Presence is in thee ; thine own soul and mind, which thou seest not, of which no word ex- hausts the mystery, no sensation makes it open and palpable; but thou art, thou Jivest through every member and organ and fibre. Such, though greater beyond thought, the Divine Omnipresence ; purest Essence surmounting thy highest conception, around thee, within thee, no form seen, no voice heard. Thou searchest through spheres and earth and abyss, all reveal it, but it hides itself still. Near thee for ever, it eludes thee for ever. Retired from thy sight, it never ceases to open itself. Essence passes into existence; Being shines out as Truth ; Life produces and fills its infinitude of Forms. Nor are these severed from each other; there is no schism, no break. All in the Highest rise into One. There are the Attributes, as Love, as Wisdom, as Power ; in thy manifold and chang- ing experiences, they seem to thee threefold or more numerous; couldst thou rise above thyself and fol- low them to their radiant height, they should ap- pear in unity; the One, centre, source, life, encir- cling Power of all. There is infinite Beauty in Nature, filling it and overflowing. Nature exists in Love ; its laws and harmonies reveal the Wis- dom, its grandeur and its movements reveal the Power, of that Love which is sole origin of all Wisdom, of all Power. So, man! thou canst never be left orphan and outcast, nor thy world be forsaken. Fear not, even in the depth of thy dark- ness. Let hope shine in upon thee from the whole 50 THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. boundless realm. Be of good cheer ; the One in- folds thee for ever, living through thy life and thy loves, opening realms of truth, and moving in the great and perpetual processes of the universe. Thou mournest over the infection and the prevalence of evil; but evil is nowhere nearer to thee than the healing Presence. The very weed contains in itself powers of cure. Always with thee, child of heaven and earth, are ministers from both of health or of solace. Distrust not the service. Be strong in the secret strength which they dispense ; and the evil which oppresses thee shall pass away, thou shalt rise above it, walking and dwelling in the serener sphere. I seem to hear the angelic voice speaking words, greater indeed, but of such import, and cannot hin- der the confession that the Lord is in this place also, in this time, however dim our sight of him has been. But earnestly still the heart gives forth another question : Is the Mystic Presence so really near to me, here and now, as to shepherds, patri- archs, saints of the Eastern world and the older times? Let me dare to translate the answer: Thou readest, O man ! in sacred books of the voice of the Lord heard walking in the garden, and mak- ing its articulations understood ; of the same voice, in other tones and for varied purposes, to Noah and to Abraham; of the bush burning unconsumed, and the Being seen and heard of Moses ; of the mountain, thunders and lightnings from its heights, and amidst them Divine Laws proclaimed to a wondering people ; of words coming from the Lord THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. 51 through prophets and apostles ; of manifold and marvellous forms in which the Unseen appeared to ancient men. This angelic appearance and annun- ciation, so full of splendor and of awe ! This, and all other visions and voices come, not to dishearten thee by fear that the hours of revelation are passed away, but to cheer thee with hope that thou shalt see the truth and beauty which they bring. Be thou sure the one Life shines now, as ever ; here, as everywhere ; to thee, as to other souls. Thine evening walk in garden or forest, or in full cities of men, may bring thee back a holier Eden ; and to thee wind or calm may bear the Eternal Word. On the solid earth or the heaving sea ; in thy glad home or thy sad wanderings ; amidst all the scenes which Nature opens, and all the successions of thy joys and thy sorrows ; the one Bye looks with in- finite benignity on thee, the same Voice sounds through the universe into the depths of thy being, the unchangeable Love encircles and flows into thee. Fear not, nor doubt; to thee, lonely soul, the Father lives. Considered thus, however, the great annuncia- tion may seem to drop altogether its historical as- pect, retaining only what in it is ideal and everlast- ing. Another question then suggests itself. If the Divine Presence be really eternal and universal, wherefore need we ■ more ? Is not this enough ? Why should there be great joy that this Son of Man is born ? We may try still to translate and expand the message addressing, not a few Jewish shepherds only, but the aspiration and the want of 52 THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. man : — Thy Father leaveth thee not in thine igno- rance and sin. Sunken art thou, sunken to depths out of which thine own power fails to raise thee up. Darkness is over thee, darkness within thee, the light of the true life all hidden by thy passions and thy misdeeds. Far from the path to heaven thou hast strayed into dark and downward ways, concealing thus from thyself the Presence and Love of the Father. Thou hast made it^to thy soul as if God were not. From the heavens thou hast fallen, son of the morning ; amidst infernal realms, night and fathomless depths girding thee round, thou hast wandered long, thou wanderest now, helpless, deathfnl, without God, without hope, in the world which holds thee for its thrall, to which thou hast surrendered thy heaven and thyself. The voice filling Nature sounds, but on deaf- ened ears. The omnipresent vision shines, but the eyes are closed. Therefore hath the Lord come, even into those cycles of thy nature which are yet open; into connections with those states and capacities which remain accessible. He hath come, that in Man thou mayst see God; that in the Messiah thou mayst perceive the Celestial Truth; that in the Son thou mayst behold and love the Father. The hidden is uncovered ; the mystery revealed ; the dark illumined. The Christ after the flesh promises, and prepares us to receive the Christ living, enthroned, within ; as he finally departs from the realm of sense, drawing near to the spirit, and from the interior heaven into which he rises, shedding light and life through the soul THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. 53 and the world. It is eternal life to know the only true God; in him whom he hath sent thou seest him, and the vision rises to consciousness of the Father. Brought thus near to the Holiest, reckon thyself no longer lost in the world, no longer dis- tant from heaven, but already dead unto sin, alive unto God, in Jesus Christ, the Lord. As thus the communion of the Divine Nature with the Human is established in the revelation of the Lord, so through correspondence and analogy, as well as vital influence, is it renewed in the re- generation, the entrance through all time of the celestial life into the Christian consciousness; all facts in the history of Jesus developing, and thence illustrating, those universal laws by which the Divine Love enters and pervades and perfects Humanity. The inward affections, existing at first, it may be, but as dim desire, grasping with uncer- tain thought a something unmeasured and un- bounded, embosom the immortal germ. The soul, unconscious of the promise which it bears within it from above, seems ever to shrink in fear and shame of the growing life ; natural thought strug- gling against spiritual instinct. Better angels tell how great the mystery yet unrevealed, the embryon life approaching to its birth ; in silence the hour is waited for. With it come gentler affections, as shepherds from nightly watching of their flocks, and holier thoughts, as from a richer East, to bring gifts andsreverent worship. As into some distant region, the Egypt of the soul, this childlike vision passes, as alone in a strange place, growing unseen 54 THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. toward the knowledge of itself. So progressively the season of higher consciousness advances. In baptismal consecration, heaven opens, the spirit comes down, the paternal love reveals its fulness and its peace. The victory is not yet, however ; for really the stern conflict has not passed. The de- scending Spirit leads evermore the son of man into separation and solitude and the wilderness. The scene of Temptation now comes forward. Amidst wide wastes and pathless deserts, in darkness and loneliness and untold sorrow; wild beasts raging, spirits of evil and of falsehood striving to deceive and destroy ; the Holy meets, alone and famishing, the unholy. XJnconquered, unseduced, unsoiled, the spirit advances to its triumph and to ministries of angels. The celestial order arises ; realities from the brighter sphere shine out ; new strength fills every limb. The word becomes power ; the blind eye sees, the deaf ear hears, the lame walk, the dead live, dark spirits go back into their own dark- ness. The miracle proceeds, until it is finished in the truth which accepts the cross, in the life which surmounts death, in the glory with which the resur- rection encircles the ascending spirit. Such the grand symbol of the Gospel ! Such the divine pro- cesses through which the saving life enters and grows up within the soul ; as real, as heavenly, as powerful, as those by which the Saviour was born of old and made perfect through his suffering. The good tidings end not here ; the angel utters wider promise. Not to a few chosen Jews, but to the whole people of Judea, the first hearers prob- THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. 55 ably thought it to reach ; and this, so narrow to us, might have seemed large to them. Not to the de- scendants of Israel only, but to the sons and daugh- ters of men over the whole earth and through all ages we have come to apply it, looking to the spirit rather than the letter, to the Divine meaning rather than the human word. As God hath taught us to call no man common or unclean, so he hath excited our trust that his great gift is universal, his salvation commensurate with the free reception of it by mankind. Whosoever will, let him take the water of life. Nor again does this promise limit itself at all to states of existence succeeding the present and earthly. The saving spirit is destined rather to quicken even the mortal body. The king- dom of God infolds, in its interior powers, the law which must finally draw nations and the world to obedience and rest. As the earth is visited, re- freshed, made fertile, by influences from the sky and overspreading clouds, and if left without the sun and its rays, without the air and the falling waters, must grow barren and dead ; so the lower ground of human existence, the earth and soil of our nature, lives and is fruitful only from the in- flowing heavens, nothing grows but through the beams of a higher sun and the streams welling forth of the divine fountains. These despending into the prepared soil, no± the soul only, but the very body, shares in the influence ; not the individ- ual alone, but the social order, is penetrated and reborn ; and the great joy which fills the one, free, glad heart of humanity reveals the consciousness 56 THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. that in his glory, the holy angels with him, the Saviour is come, and his people are redeemed. The Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let me revert to a familiar fact already sug- gested. The hope of the Jews, to a great extent, was secular. That hope, it has been added, Chris- tendom already has done, and is still doing, some- thing, even if unconsciously, to fulfil. Christianity, . that is, the Christ as understood and obeyed of his followers, is now raised to kingly power. This is as it should be. Mark, however, the limitation; not the Christ absolutely, perfectly, but the Christ as understood, as obeyed. More truly understood, more sincerely and entirely obeyed, he will reign not the less greatly, but the more greatly, power- fully, divinely. His laws, his spirit, his life, di- vested of human corruptions, filling the soul through its depths, its breadths, and its heights, flowing out into all relations, making all things new, shaU be confessed supreme ; and as in other ages his abso- lute and universal dominion over men and kings and nations was shadowed in the Papal Supremacy and the Catholic Church, so we may trust that in the Regeneration the same dominion will become a reality through the Christ throned in the soul, through the Divine Life insphered in the majestic temple of a reborn humanity. No pomp of out- ward royalty, no circumstance of splendid cere- monial, no grandeur of pontifical authority, not so much as even a visible presence, need we look for; nothing indeed, other than that which is most real and substantial, the unseen Spirit gathering THE ANGELIC MESSAGE. 57 quickening, perfecting, the great body which it is for ever raising and building up, its materials found and prepared, perhaps, as if in distant forests, the structure growing silently to beauty and life in the New Jerusalem, The Lord is himself archetype, as he is parent, of mankind ; and his celestial order archetype, as it is source, of the terrestrial order. So the infinite love flowing from the Father, becomes in our hearts filial and fraternal; piety, obedience, charity, body themselves in deed; the heavenly peace reproduces and images itself in all states and courses of earthly existence. SERMON V. THE SECEET ATTEACTIONS. Matt. ii. 1, 2. WHEN JESUS WAS BOEN IN BETHLEHEM OF JUBBA, IN THE DATS OF HEROD THE KIN&, BEHOLD, THEEB CAME WISE MEN FROM THE EAST TO JERUSALEM, SATING, WHERE IS HE THAT IS BORN KINS OF THE JEWS ? FOR WE HAVE SEEN HIS STAR IN THE EAST, AND ARE COMB TO WORSHIP HIM. It is so always. Let the Divine Love reveal itself; let it shine out through the mind instinct with celestial affections; then, amidst influences, however unlike and even contrary to itself, — then, be the falsehoods what they may, proceeding from evil lusts dominant as they will, by which the higher gift is surrounded, — prepared souls will discern its tokens, and seek it out. The morning rays of their own East lie upon the new vision. Into the sphere of a higher illumination they can- not choose but go up, that they may see, that see- ing they may worship, the great Presence. Dim at the first their perceptions may be ; but they cease not to ask for clearer and more perfect knowledge. " Guide us," such is their earnest prayer, " to the new-born Truth ; we have seen its starry light, we come, its servants, to devote ourselves to it in pure thought and loving obedience ! " The aspiration is THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. 59 answered. The thirsting spirit finds and drinks of the living fountain. The hungering soul finds, what it never loses more, the living bread. The majestic influence, which leaves untouched all un- genial things, gathers to it every receptive form. The elective attraction, which even repels discor- dant powers, draws surely as silently whatever is of the quality corresponding to itself. We perceive illustrations in the personal expe- rience. All states and elements of existence are collected, as seminal and germinant principles, in each man. Look to the grand forms and appear- ances of nature ; the heavens and the earth, and a deep, dark under-world, lie folded up within him ; an east, radiant with beams of a diviner sun ; a west, reaching far back into the lengthening shades ; a south, open to the lights of day ; a north, falling off into regions of night and winter. Look to the divisions of the earth as occupied by different tribes and families of mankind, so representing, as through hieroglyphs graven into the very soil, their several qualities; there the Egypt with its science, there the Persia with its Magian and mystic wisdom, the Palestine with its promises of inner rest, the Jeru- salem with its laws of life, its celestial truths, its purer worships ; and so, land after land, city after city, through the whole wide earth, preexist in the human being, that unconscious epitome of the uni- verse. Look in the same way to historical charac- ters; all of them embodying permanent principles; all, having a like inward preexistence ; now hidden, as in deep and dark recesses, now drawn out in 60 THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. open sight, now seeming like forms of sincere love, now darkened and fierce through their perversion, those which are evil and infernal; the tyrant Herods, and the false priests, and the heartless scribes, seeking only self-exaltation, bound together only by hopes of gain from combination, oppressing whatever puts their power in peril, and always ready to turn their tumultuous repugnancies against each other when pride and interest stir them up. The good, meantime, whose hearts are always open like day, whether dwelling amidst the dawn of their East, or surrounded by the shadows which presecution loves to cast, represent equally the higher princi- ples ; such, the wise men, loving and seeking the Truth ; such, Joseph and Mary, types of the holiest qualities and relations of the man and the woman ; such, he who is less type and representative than very substance and reality of whatever is enduring, the central form, as of this, so of all history, the Divine Child. Let it be next observed, that there are in every life, perhaps, certain hours of crisis, — hours when these different and opposite qualities and impulses appear, as it were, collected within the circle of open vision, as these their historical types were drawn together in Judea. A new star has risen in the East, inviting the soul to seek the Highest. Beneath this light of the Divine counte- nance sin looks dark and deformed, such as it really is, passion and pride and selfish pursuits seem as they are, worse than vain and ignoble. Evil is condemned, falsehood denied. Amidst shades and clouds, it may be, but really, the Beauty of the THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. 61 Lord shines from the heavens. The only great- ness now is Love; the only reality, Truth. All betokens the approach of a life quickening and exalting the whole manhood. States or processes like these may be called by different names, and may be attended by different forms of conscious feeling and thought, as men are trained in unlike theologies and under unlike methods of discipline, or as their own temperaments are varied. But name and describe them as we may, they can never be other than realities to sincere souls. They present the celestial, appearing amidst the terrestrial. Love rises,, even if darkened by hates. The Divine overlooks the clouded and tempestuous abyss. Mark now the secret movements of the roused spirit! All noble aspirations, all unselfish purposes, all kindlier affections, all lofty thoughts, move toward the birthplace of this immortal Prom- ise. I have seen, when one is reading of a martyr- deed or a transcendent word, or when he sees or hears either from another, how the eyes will fill, and the lips quiver, and the voice falter, over- mastered by the power which is yet tenderness rather and entrancing beauty, taking the man from himself as into a holier Eden. 'T is a dawning love, a rising wisdom, a very angel of the Lord coming down to stir the deep fountains, that we may bathe in them and live. Obedient to the heavenly vision, our better affections all come forth, as the star shines, and go toward the holy place of Truth, even onward to where the star rests over the infant life. 6 62 THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. Not unnatural, nay, profoundly significant, this other fact : the devout soul asks its questions, and receives counsel, even of alien thoughts. It has not learned yet to separate semblance of worth from substance. There is venerable and solemn usage; there is sacred tradition; there is divine doctrine ; there is a whole glorified and monu- mental past ; whither but to this, as it were, City of God, shall it go, that it may learn what its hope is, the source and the law of its life, the ground and the promise of its bliss? Nor wholly vain the quest. These mouldering relics, amidst the very death which is creeping over them, retain the word which the coming day shall reveal, alive, fresh with the dew and the radiance of heaven. Minds enthralled to old custom are indeed disturbed by the threatening question ; but the answer lies slum- bering in their -antique memories ; that very custom contains it, written and rolled up as in those an- cient volumes. Unfold the roll; they read the letter which leaves them dead, but 'in it is the spirit, which every truer soul breathes in, and is strengthened, and guided to the Lord. The soul, so taught and encouraged, goes on its way, and fulfils its worship. But the meaner thoughts stay behind, plotting mischief. The tyrant and the for- malist are troubled by the coming of reality and justice and mercy. There is agitation now, noth- ing can hinder it, there are tumults, there is dis- cord. In the cold and dark caverns of our north, reptiles and fierce beasts may lie down near each other in quietude, and sleep away the winter ; let THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. 63 a warmer spring-day come, its heat reaching into their recesses and their stiffened limbs, then do they begin to wake, then they creep or rush abroad with their native cunning and cruelty, that each gentler nature shrinks and would withdraw from their approach. The spring-time of the soul comes, as well to the dormant evils as to the revived good. A holier king is announced; the Herod in us is filled with jealousy and fear and rage. A greater epoch is foreshown, a higher order of existence awaits its birth, the traditional and secular Jerusa* lem is shaken with uncertain dread. Herein is what men familiarly call the spiritual warfare. There are a good and an evil, a true and a false, which, as the soul is religiously awak- ened, do struggle, and must of necessity struggle together. Selfishness and love can be never at one. Dead form and living spirit, dogmatic tra- dition and prophetic idea, cannot harmonize ; each for ever repels the other. Nor sooner, again, does the man begin in genuine simplicity to search for the Eternal Truth, to seek his life in the Infinite Goodness, than, like mailed legions, the bestial passions and low thoughts and superstitious fears and obsolete opinions spring up as in battle against him ; and if they cannot stay the heavenward prog- ress or slay the immortal life, they will yet spend their violence and murderous wrath in the fierce attempt. There is annoyance, even where life triumphs over death. Sorrow beclouds the heart, while peace and very joy well up from within. Maternal love weeps over its perished hopes, 64 THE SECEET ATTRACTIONS. though the celestial birth fulfils its destinies and its promises. Bring before you the uncounted warfares of the ages, their onsets and their re- sistances, their reverses and their successes, their raurmurings in defeat and their shouts of victory; these, so seeming great and of immense issue, we rather pronounce the smaller and narrower types, on an external ground, of those greater strifes in which the heavenly hope is won of infernal foes. Se- cret, unseen, these strifes must of course be ; not the less real and stern. Evils and falsehoods, sins and fallacies, pretending good, go forth, amidst darkness and weakness, sinking sometimes almost to despair, to destroy the infant life, and extinguish its growing aspirations. And he who knows nothing of this in- ward strife, the source and strength of the outward conflicts reproduced through all history, has yet the first passages to learn in the spiritual experience. Destructive as at first it seems, this is really the necessary preparation which heaven is making of the soul for itself, through dispersion of that outer darkness which rolls up incessantly from its owft abyss to cloud the interior skies and the renewed earth. Let the soul never shrink nor falter. If it haa found even enemies whom it sought and welcomed as wiser friends, and haters of the True whom it visited as teachers ; if in solitude, amidst violence and thickening gloom, it watches the very stars till they sink into the blackness of midnight, let it be still of good cheer. The stars are there, and will shine again ; the sun is above, and can neither fall THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. 65 nor grow dim. The conflict of demons shall give place to the peace of God. The dark solitude shall be lighted up by the assurance so calmly uttered once : I am not alone, because the Father is with me. Eise, lowly soul ! life comes to thee from thy worship of the childlike form. Eise, strong in thy vision of the Lord, cheered by the voice and the ministries of angels! Thou shalt find thy home and thy Sabbath. Be sure, all is well. The same law of elective attraction holds in every fresh manifestation of the Divine Presence. What exists in one soul exists in other souls throughout the world and the ages. The same in- ternal elements, moreover, always organize them- selves in similar forms. Whence, so far as selfish- ness prevails, shooting forth into its manifold branches of pride and envy, of wrath, of revenge, of servility, of sensual lusts, of rapacious covet- ousness, of despotic ambition, or other growth of evil, it not only repels from itself the celestial in- fluence, but it creates methods of action, forms of society, laws and institutions extending from the individual or the family through aU relations, even to the widest, of nations and mankind, sharing altogether in the repulsion of the good, in the in- corporation and organism of the evil. Eeligion itself becomes their subsidy. It is distorted into whatever shapes the predominant power assigns. Its native freedom gives place to unnatural ser- vility ; and, despoiled of its commanding authority, it learns to creep and cringe and pander to despotic 66 THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. will. In the seat of a Moses, sit scribes and phari- sees. Apostolic service is supplanted by papal domination. The freedom and humility of Jesus pass into the mingled pride and despotism and vassalage of churches and saints desecrating the hallowed name. The whole is symbolized in the simple fact, Herod reigns in Jerusalem. In such days let the Love which embraces all come out into new revelation ; it is, in very deed, holiest seed, sown, however, in unkindly soil ; purest light, enter- ing with its very birth into the midst of black clouds ; divinest life, seeming to fall into the very realm of death. There is somewhere kindlier soil, over which immortal fruit shall grow ; clearer air, which shall receive and transmit the descending rays ; there are even graves into which the voice may reach, calling up forms instinct with the great in- spiration. Wherever, in fact, the prepared souls are, there the Spirit enters and finds welcome. The Presence, unseen of others, is perceived of them. It is the pure in heart who see God ; the impure see but the reflections and shadows of themselves. The quenched orb rolls around to find the ray, but brings no dawn ; the eye once opened and health- ful rests and is still, while of itself the majestic vision rises and flows in. It is a natural corre- spondence. A dim desire is raised into clear in- sight. The whole is fulfilment of secret, it may have been unconscious, hopes. It is one with the Divine Energy which in each regenerate soul re- veals itself amidst just such antipathies and resist- ances of evil, and wins the victory which the THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS, 67 heart so gladly yields. And gladly now the quick- ened soul hears the new voice, and sees the new vision, and takes its long way to welcome and worship the Most Holy. Really, there is never such a thing as new Truth, new Love. Truth is nothing other than the ever- lasting reality, the absolute existence; Love is nothing other than God's own Life communicat- ing itself for ever throughout man and nature. And still further ; these are not actually two, but one. Love is soul of Truth; Truth is body of Love. The one lives, warm, glowing, within the affections ; the other is the same thing revealed in the thought to the understanding. Truth, in other words, is Love consciously present. But Truth, dwell where it may, knows itself. There is an in- stinct in the living heart, which distinguishes life from death; in the true love, which sympathizes with all the forms it creates and pervades ; in the divine reality, which draws whatever is substantial from out the shadows and shows that surround it. He who is taught of God, recognizes both the teaching and the Teacher ; he whom the Spirit of truth quickens, let him see that truth, that spirit, anywhere, knows himself within the circle of kin- dred, not an alien. Through diversities which the one Power worketh, amidst even confusions and discords, seeming to mingle all elements and things, as in chaos, the silent attraction runs, gathering its children into the true communion, embodying them in the holy and universal Church. As the eye ad- justed to the night, not the day, shrinks, dazzled 68 THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS, and blinded, from the sun, the eye, conformed to the sun, perceives, meantime, whatever the sun illu- mines; so while the godless man turns away from everything divine, the soul, becoming godlike, sees and loves the godlike nature, present in all holy deeds, in all true words, in all real existence. He who doeth good cometh to the light, which is one with it, away from the darkness which is as palpa- ble and heavy to his inner eye, as to his outer, the pressure of a clouded midnight. It has been illustrated historically. During the lifetime of Jesus, it was not only because he turned men from their former ways of thinking and feel- ing, but because he gave them what they previously wanted and waited for, what the desire sought, though the thought could not define it, that we see so many gathering about him and following him. And just in proportion to their spiritual prepara- tion, we find them continuing with him or turning from him. If, ignorant of his essential principles, there were those who went after him for curiosity, for gain, for ambition, for any low purpose, they left him as soon as they saw him putting these things aside and discovering his real divineness; whereas, they who loved him for this remained with him even to the end, and, though fear or other cause might mislead them for a while, still kept him near their hearts, and came back in those better hours which restored both him and them- selves. When, afterward, these first disciples of the Lord went to bear the good tidings among Jews and Gentiles, it was the same. The interior light THE^^ECRET ATTRACTIONS. 69 illumines every man ; but as men receive before- hand the secret irradiations, and follow their guid- ance sincerely, they are pre-adjusted to the new order, fitted for the new day, prepared to become its children. When, again, in later times truth has emerged from its eclipse ; when amidst masses of empty dogmatism and of dead works, the voice has summoned men to repentance, to reformation, to the real spirit and the fountain of life ; it may have been in days dark and evil like those in which Jesus was born, — there may have been other Herods and other Caesars, later Jerusalems may have been troubled, Christian pharisees and Christian priests may have raged with envy, wrath, and fear, — but the light has been seen, the voice heard, in some distant and obscure 'East, and kindred minds have risen to greet the dawn, and take in its melodies to their deepest love. Whoever saw, whoever refused to see, the star ; whoever heard, whoever refused to hear, the angelic voice; it was enough for them that they saw, they heard ; they must go, they can- not foretell whither, but somewhere, and it proves their Bethlehem. They find the living word, of which man partakes as celestial manna ; they dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. Thus it has been in the past; thus, to say no more, in the history of Jesus, in the missions of his Apostles, in the period of the Protestant Reforma- tion. Thus it will be in the future, as it is in the passing day. The law of spiritual election is eter- nal. It becomes us to inquire how it is manifested now, rather, we might say, what of the opposing 70 THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. attractions draw us to the Lord, what away from him. Amidst the numerous expressions, such many- deem them, of the Eternal Truth, or semblances, such most perhaps think, illusions playing with men even to mockery before they vanish, insub- stantial and fugitive as shadows of fleeting clouds, it is not for us surely to embrace the phantom for the reality, nor yet, on the other side, to prejudge and cast off any reality as if it were deceptive. But it is our duty, let us make it our deed, to try the spirits as they come, which are of God, which of evil ; to prove aU things, holding fast the good, letting all else alone; to sever from the wasting dross, and keep untouched, the imperishable gold. Take indeed only the True for true, the Real for real ; but take that, and cleave to it ; come whence it may, bid it welcome ; spoken by whose lips so- ever, none can soil it, hear it, and perceive; sur- rounded by whatever prejudices and contempt, bearing any name of reproach, open the heart wide to its entrance ; threatening any consequences never so disastrous, risk these and follow whither it shall lead. Accept that as supreme, and share its destinies. The world may leave us doing so ; the world will leave us certainly; rather let us forestall the desertion by forsaking the shadows of the world for the substance of God. There are which will not leave us ; faith and hope and love, these will go with us, companions in the deepest solitude, comforters in the saddest sorrows, dearer friends in the societies of men, giving rest to our weariness, and light to our darkness, peace after THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS, 71 war and an everlasting Sabbath. Never more than, at this very hour were these angels needed. Never more wearily were men looking for some sign of hope, some star in the East, to lead them into the city of God, and stand over where the young child is. For ijiyself, and others have said so till the thought has become trite, I have been accustomed to deem the cycle in which our times revolve, the same is true, too, concerning all times, full of signifi- cance, full, let me add, of actual, if often uncon- scious, prophecy. Now, after the course which the world has pursued so long ; after the rise and fall, of its ancient dynasties, after the growth and decay of its Catholic institutions, its Protestant schismsi and scepticisms and sects; now, throughout life and society, agitated everywhere from surface to centre, man seems as roused anew to propose the grand and awful question of his own destiny. Christendom has scarce another problerri to suggest or solve. Every state of thought and feeling con- tains it either latent or open. The philosopher presents it to the mind; the poet sings it to the soul; the laborer groans it forth in his toil and his poverty; embattled hosts now resound it in thunders of their artillery, now rest in terrible wait- ing for some hour of better auspices ; states and churches tremble as it rolls over them. Millions upon millions cry with loud voice, or hold it in with stifled breath, — Where the true law, the sure hope, of mankind ? We have sinned, and toiled, and mourned together. We have seen hope going out after hope. Our heavens are darkening above 72 THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. US, our earth is quaking beneath us. The old, we feel, has failed us ; something new must come, or we die. Sure there is an infinite Love, an ever- lasting Wisdom. Sure the Father must love his children ; least of all can we think he will leave them in their sorrow. Tell us, ye prophets of the Lord, tell us, lovers and teachers of your brethren, where and what is the hope of our redemption. That hope, it may be born even now. Certainly the age is waiting for it, as they tell us the older time was waiting for the Messiah before Jesus came. Wise men also there may be, coming from their solitudes of earnest thought and sacred doubt, to seek its birthplace now. Not the less may there be now tyrants and pharisees and imbruted people, whom it rouses only to fear and hate, portending change. For us, it is to say with whom of the parting multitudes, with which of the conflicting interests, we will unite ourselves in this day of awful judgment, in this hour teeming with prom- ise of the regeneration. The choice is our own, our own the course and the end. Nothing evil be there suffered in us, nothing felt unkindly, nothing thought carelessly, nothing spoken falsely, nothing done rashly; yet, without swerving, without falter- ing, be it ours to watch and interpret the mysteri- ous star ; ours, to wait for its course from distant obscurity, through its approach to enlighten the world ; ours, to follow till we rejoice with exceed- ing great joy to behold it standing over the scarce heeded life. Onward let us follow, filled with the heavenly vision, even to the more heavenly pres- THE SECRET ATTRACTIONS. 73 ence. We too would worship the Divine Child; we would offer, richer than gold, more fragrant than frankincense and myrrh, this one gift, ever- lasting consecration to the obedience of God and the service of mankind. SERMON VI. PALM DAYS* John xii. 12, 13. ON THE NEXT DAT, MUCH PEOPLE THAT WERE COME TO THE PEAST, WHEN THET HEARD THAT JESUS WAS COMING TO JERUSALEM, TOOK BRANCHES OP PALM-TREES, AND WENT FORTH TO MEET HIM, AND CRIED, HOSANNA ! BLESSED IS THE KING OP ISRAEL THAT COMETH IN THE NAME OP THE LORD ! It seems nothing strange to us that they received him so. The whole wonderful history of Christen- dom is now seen gathering about him, as it has proceeded from him ; and we scarce think how this was all future then. They saw the son of Joseph ; who conceived the Divine Manhood wherein he appears Son of God ? They saw the Nazarene ; who discerned the triumphal power wherein he shines as Lord of Glory ? Prophet, some counted him, and so heard his word gladly ; Messiah, they probably trusted that it was, destined to redeem and exalt Israel, else they would hardly have met and hailed him as its King. Others, however, deemed him either impostor, deceiving the people, or maniac, whom a demon controlled. Altogether, * Delivered the Sunday succeeding a Floral Procession, Jnly 4., and a few weeks after the celebration of June 17, 1850. PALM DAYS. 75 the judgment of the Jews, even of the disciples, is crude, contradictory, chaotic. To the height of his great idea they were wholly unable to rise ; to the beauty of his spirit they could look but with the dimmest insight ; to the divineness of his deeds they were seldom and slightly sensible. But now and then something would arouse them to admiration of the miracle which was passing daily before them. Words of celestial sweetness would come down to them from the mountain ; and their souls took in a deeper life than they knew. Works of surpassing might were done in the house or street, or on the waters ; and they followed either with ear to hear, or with appetite or curiosity to be sated, or with their sick to have them healed. Now has appeared a fresh wonder, — Lazarus is risen ! The chief priests consult to kill Lazarus also, that one excitement to faith may be put away ; the crowd have been stirred to an enthusiasm which cannot yet be suppressed. The people, always credulous, so the elders affirm, ignorant of the law, nay, — for this also they pro- nounce them, — accursed, and in reality little un- derstanding the prophetic significance of their deeds and their words, come out to meet him as he goes up to Jerusalem ; they bear palms in their hands, as if the victory were won already ; they hail him as Prophet coming in the name of the Lord ; they ex- ult, for the nation has received its King. How many, think ye, of these thronging men stood a few days after by the cross ? We can interpret, though not perfectly yet, this symbolic utterance. But — this is what I would 76 PALM DAYS. just now remark — the very minds from which it proceeded probably could not. As afterwards of the crucifiers, so now of the worshippers, it may be said, they knew not what they were doing. That which with us seems fitting and beautiful homage to the Divine Presence in humanity was with them, I presume, a mere outbreak of mingled religious and political hope awaiting the deliverance of a single nation, excited at this time by wonderful facts which attested, as they thought, the fulfilment of every promise by this destined Monarch of Israel. Their enthusiasm might be expected, not only to subside, but to turn even into the rage of disap- pointed ambition, so soon as its object is seen, not rising to ascendency, but falling beneath hostile power. The fall is, however, only apparent and tempo- rary. When the belief was established, that, risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, Jesus should, even in that generation, reappear in clearer splendor and victorious power, enthroned, judging and governing nations and the world ; then those who remained or who became his friends renewed in their minds readily the faith, the hope, the triumph- ant joy, which had been shaded by the cross. The risen Lord will come speedily to his temple ; he will gather the nations around him ; he will over- throw the enemies, by whom justice is oppressed ; he will reveal his glory through the splendors and magnificence of the New Jerusalem ; and of this greater kingdom there shall be no end. Lift up your heads, and rejoice, — such the first apostolic PALM DAYS. 77 promise, — for your redemption draweth nigh ! Thus, I apprehend, this story may be considered, in its historical connection, as an earlier utterance, through deed and word, of the very feeling and expectation prevalent through the first Christian age. It was the day and the festival of the Palms. If the Lord is not yet enthroned, the hour is near, and he shall soon enter with regal majesty into the city of God opened on earth. The generation passed in which the Messiah should come in the clouds, every eye seeing him, nations gathered before him, the good and the evil separated, and his doniinion established. The gen- eration passed ; and no eye saw the things waited for so long and so earnestly. But, unseen as the Lord still continued, and whether men thought him dis- tant or near, he had come really ; the generation did not pass without fulfilling his word. As during his earthly life Jesus disappointed the Jewish hope, so through his celestial state he disappointed none the less the Christian hope ; as the former was lowly, depressed, it might be deemed servile, instead of royal and angelic, so the latter was invisible and silent when a mighty form and heavenly vision were expected. The form was indeed too great, the vision too heavenly, for such exhibition. Within the depths and heights, the secret and substantial realities and powers, of the spiritual spheres the Lord dwelt in his glory, leading forward through ages of ages the majestic course of his universal and everlasting dominion. From Jerusalem the true Word went forth to rouse and quicken mjin- 7* 78 PALM DAYS, kind. It entered into the heart, even when clouded and veiled to the eye. From the Indies and the Indian Sea to the Atlantic, in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, wherever the Roman Empire stretched, and beyond its limits, not only was the message borne, but the Unseen Power revealed : a new king- dom has risen, and is growing into supremacy. Whatever, down to this time, distinguishes Chris- tendom from Judaism, and from all ethnic develop- ments, both ancient and modern, may be considered as fruit, not indeed of a technical and dogmatic Christianity, but of that Divine movement through- out the world and the ages, of which Jesus Christ is the highest and central expression, and Christian- ity, truly such, the permanent effect. Yet because, while One stood among them supreme, they knew him not, therefore men continued to look for his coming as some grand outward pageant. They extended his promise from the period bounded by his own age to some time far off in the future ; and from a dominion and a judgment existing on this earth, leaving it unscathed, nay, surrounding it with celestial brightness and beauty, they converted it to a process in which the earth should be literally burned with fire, and another order of things arise in other spheres of existence ; the Messiah coming visibly to the sense, to destroy, to judge, to remove all, living and dead, into some unknown region, some world growing, perhaps, out of the ruins and ashes of this. So men kept still and for ever the idea and the prophecy of the Messiah alive in their hearts. Jesus had been crucified and buried ; this PALM DAYS. 79 was open and undeniable. The generation had passed, still he remains unseen ; this is equally open, equally undeniable. But the faith failed not ; interpretations of the promise, such as Apostles did not think of, preserve it, and nourish the unfailing expectation. Age after age, as the promise is repeated, much people, coming to the new feast, gather and take with them branches of palm- trees, and go forth to meet him, echoing in fresh strains the old hosannas, blessing him who shall come at length to judge and to govern with kingly power a race from which the distinction of Gentile and of Jew shall have passed away. The time has come at length, when men are seeking to discern and interpret the characters of the Messiah graven, as it were, into the Eternal Truth, rather shining out of it as Sun, not limited to personal appearances, not bounded by natural and historical forms. With the great Apostle, they have come to see the Christ after the flesh, rising into the Lord from heaven, inward, living, effective, as quickening Spirit. Within the new creation, — away from which the old heavens roll off shadowy into a widening distance, wherein the weary sun is becoming dark, the moon ceasing to give light, its stars, once so bright and so high, falling from their spheres, the earth wearing out beneath, while there is no more sea, — other heavens arise, clearer skies, radiant with holier lights, the sun of a greater day, for the serene and silent evening, moon and stars of diviner beauty ; if indeed we may not ascend higher, where is neither moon nor star, but 80 PALM DAYS. one only light of one everlasting fountain, for the Lord is the light thereof. Nature, Man, History, and the grand epitome which the Gospels present of all, are transfigured, exalted, expanded into ex- pressions of Jesus Christ, not a changeful and pass- ing form, but the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Oh ! well may he who beholds so blessed a vision go forth exulting ! Let him bear the palms in his hands, welcoming the Divine Presence, and blessing with unceasing hosannas the love which overflows him. There are several ways in which our age is utter- ing its hope and its reverence. "We have those who to this hour expect the near visible appearing of the very same person who was crucified ; this, so they trust, shall purify the earth, and make all things new. We have those, again, who through the clouds — such is their interpretation of historic and prophetic Scripture — perceive the sun which has drawn those clouds about his face, else of insuffer- able brightness, and which gilds them, as they float over us, with morning rays. We have, it may be, those who look farther still, and deem Nature, not less than Scripture, a mysterious book of God, and who seek in all its promises the divine order and laws, and even beyond their consciousness drink in each hour of the secret influences : the mind beholds the glory, the soul lives embosomed in the beauty. And History, that large and often sombre volume, inscribed so long with characters even of blood, and inwrapping what seems a lawless chaos, comes to unroll itself, and to reveal a virtue not its own ; PALM DAYS. 81 while the hand of man has been writing out its discordant passages, an unseen Power guiding the whole, and creating order and immortal forms of love. The universe and all time thus reveal for ever the image of God, the Saviour of the world ; where not the historical person, still the immeasurable manifestation of divine love and wisdom. Between these extremes of those who look for a visible exhi- bition, and those who seek a spiritual insight, we might find perhaps all gradations of thought and feeling, intermixtures of light and shade, as men come nearer to the one side or the other ; as they have the more of sense or of spirit, of sight or of faith, of natural affection or of divine charity, of proud judgment or of childlike trust, of external fancy or of internal reason, of some or other of the endless diversities by which human nature turns itself, severed in its parts, one in its essence, toward the infinite aspects of the universe. But every- where among thinking and believing men we see reproduced, in our own times, the" antique story. The majestic Presence reappears ; and souls gather about its regal or its lowly course with the symbols and the hymns of their jubilant hope. I need not describe the scenes of the last week. I may but just allude to an occasion kindred with them in its origin and its significance, though dif- ferent in its forms, which a few weeks since called forth commemorations of a great though fearful deed. With these I may likewise connect the gatherings, a little earlier, of so many religious men and philanthropists, in earnest prosecution of the 82 PALM DAYS. various ends which they seek in behalf of what they deem truth and humanity. There, amidst these gatherings, men spake in reverence of the Bible, that they might help its wider diffusion and its deeper influence. There they took counsel, that they might with the greater effect send forth mis- sionaries of what they believe its truths to the nations. There they repeated the angelic voice of peace on earth and the Divine law of human freedom. There they sought the one spirit, of wor- ship rendered to the Lord, of wisdom asking for the truth, of kindness broad and deep as human- ity. Of these wider and sublime ends the later commemorations are partial symbols. Now that the heated passions of a departed century have had time to subside and give place to calmer thought, what justification can a man offer for the glow of feeling with which he sees or remembers Bunker Hill, but that there is something greater in it than the eye discovers ? That men once met in terrible conflict of heart and hand, reddening the green earth of that beautiful June, who can remember without horror ? But the mind converts the dread- ful fact into a glorious idek ; and now that the dust and smoke, and the very men, have all passed for ever away, to the mind there stands alone that one form, more solid and enduring than the granite by which it is surmounted, throwing from itself all fetters, all force, all threats, effluence and image of the Divine Essence, immortal Freedom. So with the processions, and the branches from the trees, and the summer flowers, of our last palm day ; what- PALM DAYS. 83 ever of wrath, of revenge, of bitter taunt, of fierce threat the' men of another day, stung to rage by the feeling of oppression and injury, may have breathed into the Declaration which has made it memorable, it is for us to put aside, seeing nothing, giving honor to nothing, but the grand aspect of Man, proclaiming his divine origin and birthright, and kneeling in prayer and consecration to the Supreme Parent. Through such assemblies of men, whether for the original achievement or for the suc- ceeding triumph, we may find selfishness, pride, envy, wrath ; we may see what we entered rever- ently as a temple oftentimes converted rather to the pantheon, and instead of the Father of our Lord Jesus, gods evil as those of the older or later my- thologies ; but these are hourly passing, like the same shadows, into their own places and relations : noth- ing remains of them but the looser drapery with which they continue at once to cover and to express everlasting realities. We might go farther. We might pass beyond the few facts which move us so strongly, to the cir- cle of universal history. We might, — if our knowl- edge of what man has been and has done, and of what the Divine order and laws are could reach far and deeply enough, — we might convert all facts into one grand series; the shapes manifold, not seldom dark and deformed, the courses winding often and distracted to the eye, all rising at last into sym- metry and beauty, as each instant evolves in its own methods the Divine Love going forth to redeem and bless the universe. With such insight we may 84 PALM DAYS. read of this approach to Jerusalem, not as ancient story, once true, now past, but as permanent real- ity. Evermore, in calm or in tempest, through peace or war, amidst love or hate, as men and as nations rise and fall, the regal Presence is there, in its lowly grandeur. Nature is obedient to the hand which guides it, as it bears the Master onward. Men, little aware of the meaning in their deed, scarce knowing whom they worship, gather in tri- umphal celebration. Or else, in equal unconscious- ness, thinking the great apparition only some darker portent, they seek to obstruct, nay, perhaps, to de- stroy it. All in vain ! Pharisees hate, priests plot, the traitor is ready, the governor is cowardly, the peo- ple are misled : nothing can hinder, the victim of jealous and ambitious rage is abandoned and cru- cified. What then ? It is only the outside which falls off and perishes. The reality survives, and lives even in heightened power. The law indeed of Divine Life always involves death of whatever is alien to itself, so that, free from encumbrance, it may grow to new issues. The crucified lives ; the sufferer sits at the right hand of God ; it is really the despot in his triumph who dies. Jesus is con- demned and rejected ; Caiaphas and Pilate are hon- ored ; the Divine Man is overwhelmed by the Priest and the Ruler; a simple fact containing a universal law ! This is first, not last. The end Cometh ! Jewish Priesthoods, Roman Procurator- ships, expired long ago : the Lord is risen. Out from the abyss which, they thought, buried the suf- ferer, hath appeared no mortal shape, but the Love PALM DAYS. 85 itself of God, brighter than the sun coming, as the ancients deemed, from the ocean in which it had bathed itself for the night, that it might rise the fairer and go forth the more glorious on its morn- ing course. Oh ! fear thou never, trustful spirit, though the hosannas of the crowd be followed by the reproaches, the Sneers, the threats of the power- ful ; though the path over the strown palm-branches lead to the lonely watch and its prayer of exceeding sorrow ; though the shout which announces the King of Israel die away in the mockery which hails him such, as it puts on his head the crown of thorns ; though the very Son of God dies by hands of men. Be still of good cheer ; he lives for ever, re-appearing in each new mission and vision of the Lord. He lives, bosomed in the Father, if outcast of men. Leave him not in his desertion and his loneliness. As he goes, amid regal pomp, to- ward the seat of his power, of the multitudes thronging around him there will be enough to join in the exultation. Prepare thou for an hour of sterner trusts. It will be wanted of thee to watch amidst the midnight shades of Gethsemane. It will be wanted of thee to follow amidst another crowd, infuriated by hate, and bent to destroy ; to follow when thou canst give only the confessions and the tears of thy love. It will be wanted of thee to stand, unshaken, unmoved, when dangers press and hope is faint. Thine it is, not to deny, with Peter, thy dearest trust ; not, with another disciple, to remove far off; but to stand just as near 8 86 PALM DAYS. to the cross as ever thou hast stood to the tri- umphal procession. Neither think the vision or the service obsolete, nor yet reckon it to be fulfilled in reverence, accord- ing to established modes, of the Messiah as he lived of old. The service is always new, for anew •with each age the vision shines ; God becomes mani- fest in the processes of humanity, and every man is called to choose whom he will worship. Not he who echoes loudest the universal voice, praising the heroes, saints, prophets of old ; not he who dis- courses most eloquently of the deeds and prowess of the past; not he who highest extols the work which ancient manifestations of the Messiah have wrought for us, is truest to the Lord, most faithful to his country, most loving to mankind ; but rather and only he who lives most divinely this passing hour, — who fills up the opening idea of present duty, praying and laboring now for the day which shall bring a new jubilee, united with that spirit of the Lord which rests on each anointed soul, prom- ising good to the poor, healing the bruised heart, freeing the captive and the slave, opening the prison, and hastening the great year of universal redemption. SERMON VII. INFLUENCE AND EECEPTION. 2 CoE. iv. 10. IHAT THE LIFE ALSO OF JESUS MIGHI BE MADE MAKIl'EST IK CUE BODY. There is one absolute Life. It reveals itself in the forms of nature and in the capacities of man. During the period of departure from it which sin is, — a state of death, and therein of spiritual uncon- sciousness, — the Life impersonated itself in Jesus Christ. So, according to the thought of John, the Life became apparent ; so men saw it, and, having been first beholders, were thence witnesses and messengers announcing it to their brethren. In this general observation is suggested the'very essence of Christianity. It is not a form of worship, not a rule of conduct, not a system of ethics, not a scheme of doctrine, but the manifestation of the Life. And in this view the Christ, the living, historical man, becomes to us more than any particular word which he spake, more than the greatest deed which he wrought, more than any measure of suffering which he endured. The Christ ! He is no other than the Life which was with the Father, the Word which was with God, impersonated, and dwelling, as in 88 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. temple or shrine, among men, the perfect Image of God. Jesus! No other than the same primeval Life appearing unto men as their Saviour, the true God's Presence in the soul of Humanity. But one Saviour, indeed, one Christ ; yet the undivided Essence reveals itself in different aspects and agen- cies. There is the Christ after the flesh, the transi- tory, historical image of God ; there is the Christ according to the spirit, the permanent, unseen Word, the living light of all men. The outward presents to us the inward, the- inward interprets the outward. As we come into vital connection with the Lord, this his life becomes manifest also in our persons ; the great fact in which Christianity, from an exter- nal form, passes into an internal reality. I would it were in my power to convey my thought in some proportion to my estimate of its importance. In default of this, I will illustrate it as I can. I. I begin, then, with this general remark : All living existence is in its very nature communicative of its own elements. We have types of this uni- versal law in all the finer qualities of what seems to us inanimate nature. The sun, never appearing to grow dim, is yet always imparting of its heat and its light, that all things are warm and bright through its presence. The air, we know it only in its unceasing circulation, nourishing and quicken- ing nature. The ocean is for ever giving itself out to air and earth. The earth, losing nothing of its prolific powers, is always developing them in end- less forms of growth. Every flower is prodigal of its hues and its fragrance, and of the seminal vir- INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. 89 tues which it infolds within its bosom. Each ani- mal tribe reproduces its own nature and qualities in a successive generation : man lives anew through the revival of humanity in children and their per- petual offspring. Over and above this physical transmission is an intellectual, a moral and relig- ious influence, which never ceases to flow through the race. From the vital energies of the parent the child receives essential qualities of the new be- ing. As leaf from branch, or branch from stock, so child grows from parent. Nor only through deri- vation and birth ; other channels there are of com- munication. Words, deeds, are not mere shadows ; they are rather wings of thought and love, by which soul flies to soul, and the greater broods over and inspires the less. Thought is vital. Love is one with life. Each is reality, substance, not unreal, not unsubstantial. Thought is the man thinking, or rather cooperating with the Infinite Mind, and growing by the presence. Love is the man loving, or rather accepting and renewing the universal be- nignity, and receiving with every movement and every prayer a higher inspiration. The word of man, the deed of man, is in the same way the man himself giving forth that which is in him, the thought, the life, the love, the very and imperishable self. And as through the senses, and the organism to which they belong, we receive impressions from nature, as warmth and light from the sun, hues and fragrance from flowers ; as we breathe the air, and so live ; as we drink the water, and are refreshed ; as we receive food; and therewith nourishment and 90 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. strength ; so through senses of a higher order, and the spiritual power to which they belong, do we re- ceive other and more truly vital influences from par- ents and friends, from nature and society, as they give forth of the qualities which they organize and communicate. Soul is for ever entering into soul. All converse between men is worthless, save as it is thus intimate and vital. No man, it has been said, can teach another. Perhaps not. But through in- evitable provisions of nature, every man may do more than teach another ; through secret channels, through mystic sympathies, unconsciously to him- self, with dim consciousness to his brother, his life may flow stream-like into other soul, and there spring forth anew ; as was anciently fabled of the fountain of Arethusa, that its waters were from Greece, and after passing under the sea without mixture, came out all fresh and living in the Island of Sicily. Always, when men do really commune, when their hearts do burn within them as holy words are spoken, as good deeds are done, I verily believe there is a substantial communication, a giv- ing and receiving of the very spirit which is in them. Is it only in outward nature and natural laws that influence real and effective is for ever flowing ? Nay, the truest, deepest, mightiest influ- ence is the life that is in a man flowing forth of his soul into other's soul for renovation and blessing. This is universal law. See it now working in Jesus Christ. The Divine Life-Essence fills him, and is centre and soul of his existence. The Father is in him, he in the Father, — a' union so intimate INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. 91 that he can say, Whoso hath seen me, hath seen the Father : I and the Father are one. In virtue of this high consciousness, he declares himself Life of the world. Not only does he discover, as teacher or prophet, the coming forth of man to an imper- ishable existence, nor only present this as a fact in the remote future, but declares it the existing reality to whoever welcomes him to his soul; because, saith he, I am the Resurrection and the Life ; not I declare it, not I prove it, not even I make it abso- lutely certain, but I am it. And as he liveth, so shall all receiving his spirit live also. This life of Jesus continually revealed itself through the course of his itiinistry. It was the soul of his deeds, the source of his words, the support of his sufferings. It stood erect amidst the trials which seemed to depress it ; it was strong even in death, and through death attained its completeness. He had several companions. Imperfect as their perception of his glory, they yet saw something of it, and felt of it still more than they saw. Think this not strange. I have known a boy charmed with the melody and the beautiful visions of a poem, such as Comus, when yet he knew not, and all the time was aware that he knew not, the full meaning of that which went like music to his soul. There was an attraction which drew him on ; and the magnetic power was still above him and drawing him farther. The divine attraction of the highest life reached and drew forward those simple ones. The music which led the shepherds to the manger was not sweeter than flowed evermore 92 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. through words and deeds of Jesus. As the clouds, surcharged with gathered waters, drop down upon the earth, so fell on their waiting souls his words of promise. And as the earth opens her besom to drink in the rain from above, so drank their spirits of the descending influence, and grew, though they might know it not. As sun he shone ; as stars they received the beams, and were glad ; but they might wait long before they understood what were all the illuminations which fell upon them. And , when the last dark hours are over, — those hours in which their faith faltered, and their love was found insufficient for the trial, — new insight would natur- ally succeed. The Life re-appears from the realm of death. Principles are seen over which mortality hath no power, because with them the mortal quali- ties have nothing in common. The Spirit de- scends, and they know the Lord. The vast conti- nent of truth, on whose coast they had been pass- ing so long beneath evening shades, succeeded by deeper midnight, but from which brighter lights had shined and sweetest voices had floated to them, is now open and radiant ; its mountain heights, with their pure, celestial air, its river-valleys, with their groves and Edens, its whole uncontained \ sphere of new and divine beauty. Death itself had made it more open. Always, when the friend whose existence has enlivened us, ceases to be longer with us, — when that power which had attracted us, often it may be unheeded, is with- drawn for ever, — we feel it the more secretly and intimately. There is, indeed, a resurrection. The INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. 93 dead is alive to us. The immortal qualities re- main, perhaps fairer, in our souls. How truly so in this greatest instance ! The Life itself, all so sweet a«d sacred as it flowed into the heart through daily intercourse, is doubly consecrated now. It is seen concentrated, perfected, exalted, in- death. Whatever of its own influences had pene- trated those trusting souls up to this hour, is within them henceforth as life of their lives, as ele- ment of a perpetually developing existence and activity. While they go forth among their own kindred, and the scattered nations, declaring that Jesus is the Christ of God, their word is of his presence remaining in their secret consciousness, as really as of his deeds and words such as they had been outward facts in history. Not more really did they bear the image of the parent, through whom existence came to them, and by whom their childhood had been nourished, than they bare also the divine image which thus impressed, enlivened, illumined, ennobled them ; in virtue of which they perceived themselves likewise sons of God. The disciples, in their turn, pass from men. Not however until the same life of Jesus had been manifested in their own course; and when this outward manifestation hath ceased, the vital pres- ence is still nearer and more sacred. According to the universal laws of communication, of influ- ence, of reception, not so much their own qualities, which were absorbed, or at the least transfigured, by the power of their Lord, as his character itself which they represented and imaged, formed the 94 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. source and centre of the great process now-going forward in the world. Not Paul, not Peter, not John, is the quickening energy, the inspiring type, but the Christ of God, the Life itself which, they saw, and of which they testified ; of which they partook, and so communicated ; into which they were incorporated as members of its body, and so, like organs, channels, veins, helped to distribute it through the whole system. And so far forth as this vital principle went out to those who suc- ceeded them, and has continued to live and operate through each generation, so far has the life of Jesus become manifest in the Christian ages. Not by priestly rites, not by outward baptisms, not , by formal prayers, not by traditional ceremonies or dogmas, but by the spiritual essence communicat- ing itself through spiritual agencies, through love and purity, through obedience to the highest and devotion to the lowest, through righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The virtue which Jesus perceived going out of himself to heal and bless is the same virtue wherein his disciples wrought mighty deeds, and through them it hath passed into his whole body, empowering each of its members also to do the deeds of beneficence and blessing. Just so much of this virtue as the Church of these eighteen centuries has received and developed, so much has it answered to its true idea as body of the Lord ; just so much of this virtue as the Church has failed to receive and develop, so much has it failed of its genuine char- acter, and been other than its name imports. That INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. 95 only is the true Church in and through which the life of Jesus makes itself manifest really and practically. This all may be considered as having exclusive regard to the principle deposited in the heart, irre- spective and independent of a continued personal presence. Suppose but the past fact of the history of Jesus Christ, with his influences so flowing through numberless processes, in particular gath- ered into the written records and secured by their wide diffusion, the effect must be, such it has been, as much beyond that of common friendship, or the stories and words of heroes and bards and philoso- phers, as his own nature is higher and greater. But this is far from exhausting our idea. The Life embodied in Jesus has not ceased as an actual power of the universe. He is not dead, but liveth. He is not distant, but nearer ; not the visible and limited person, it is true, but the unseen and illim- itable spirit. His departure from earth is rather relative than absolute. It is departure from our sight, not departure from the sphere of our exist- ence. Sometimes we think, what may be very pos- sible, what is indeed not at all unlikely, that our friends, when we see them no more, are yet near us and with us, angels of divine mercy, ministers of love and truth, through whom the Father com- municates of his gifts. In absolute reality, the Lord is still and for ever consciously present to mankind. Although, by the spiritual elevation and glory which makes him impalpable to our senses, absent in appearance, he yet, through that very exaltation, is nearer to us, more perfectly with 96 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. US, than if clothed with a mortal body. The Lord is now the Spirit ; that Divine Presence, that quickening Power, encircles us, fills us, attracts us for ever. Besides the perpetual manifestations of himself in Nature and in Man, God came forth into clearer presence through the historical person, and so became known as Father. As the outward form passed away, leaving its constituent princi- ples, its divine elements, deposited in the souls of disciples, the Father renews his manifestation, making it spiritual and inward by the immanence and power of God in us. This real presence of the living God within us is not only the highest dis- covery of Christianity, but is Christianity .itself. " The Lord is in this place, and I knew it not," ex- claimed the old patriarch in the morning, as he arose from his mysterious night visions. The Lord fills the universe ; the supreme Spirit dwells deep in soul as in nature ; the very Life which Jesus con- tained and revealed is a present reality, not a mere memory of man ; so may the Christian exclaim, and rejoice in the dawn which it brings of ever- lasting day. For the Divine story which repeats to us from the Gospels and throughout Christen- dom the name and the words and deeds of Jesus, we thank God; we thank him also for all noble lives inspired by his story and his example ; but of the greater revelation, — the Lord with us and in us, the Eternal Life unveiled in present experience, — we may rather be silent, as men have always been wont in temples and before their God. It may not be the Divine order that the Infinite INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. 97 should appear any more in such forms as old tra- dition delivers. No voice at evening or morning may come to us, as once among the trees of Eden ; no audible converse ; no angelic shapes, such as Abra- ham welcomed to his tent, such as Lot took into his house ; no wrestling, as of Jacob ; no burning bush or burning Sinai, as to Moses and to Israel ; no majestic vision, as to Isaiah and Ezekiel and other prophets ; no celestial message, as to the young Mary ; no hosts of heaven, no angelic song, as to the shepherds around Bethlehem ; no sensible intercourse even with God's great Image to our world ; — all such things may, perhaps, have fallen out of the mighty series of agencies wherein the Highest shall raise and bless mankind. Perhaps they may belong to the immature and childish things, which are put off as manhood comes on ; robes, it may be, which the truth needed to assume, so that unspiritual eyes might recognize its divine form, otherwise unknown, but which it drops, now that the sight is purged to clearer vision. For sure it is something greater to see the Lord for ever pres- ent, life and light of all, than now and then to wonder, with amazement ever so profound, at some strange and transitory shadow of his coming. Why ask tabernacle or temple, cloud or light resting on it, filling it, when the universe is opened, and it is- all one radiant shrine of God ? when this very body, no longer a mere piece of earth, is itself temple, instinct with Divinity ? when the soul, through its mysterious depths and heights, lives everywhere in celestial light? Here is in very deed Immanuel j Godi 98 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. is actually with us. Here is the Infinite Love ; the secret spirit breathes itself forth without ceasing to the Father. Here is the well-spring ; nor do we only draw the healing water from its transparent depths, but we rejoice as they flow forth in ever- lasting streams. Here is the Resurrection ; and while we repeat with ancient triumph, The Lord is risen! we feel also that he liveth, not only as the Christ of Apostolic history, but as the present im- age of God in our souls. Here is the Life, tran- scending death, source of salvation ; and we feel its universal pulsations, we bless the bright charac- ters of its silent word, we walk in its fulness of light. Through the joys and the sorrows, the hopes and the fears, the conflicts and the victories, of this fluctuating state the immortal energy is made manifest in our mortal body. II. That this great fact of influence may come to us, however, in the fulness of its practical effects, it is necessary that we obey the corresponding law of reception. The light shines, but there are dis- eased, even blind eyes ; the life exists, but there are paralyzed, nay, dead bodies. The Beatitudes are all eternal, though not all men are conscious of their bliss ; the kingdom of the heavens is in itself everlasting, but all are not poor in spirit ; the foun- tain of comfort is inexhaustible, but some do not go mourning to it ; the earth is open and rich for all her children, some are not meek ; righteousness gives for ever a divine festival, there are who do not hunger and thirst for it ; mercy, sunlike, per- vades and penetrates the universe, there are souls INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. 99 which do not welcome its beams ; God is, there are hearts not pure to see him ; and while his peace, an infinite Sabbath, encircles nature, and broods over every soul, there are some who choose war, and will not dwell within the serene regions. Al- ways the blessedness of the free communication de- pends on the unobstructed freedom of the reception. Nor does anything hinder this freedom, save as sin interposes itself between the Lord in his glory and man in his darkness. Whence, to put away sin, to abandon everything which we perceive to be evil and false, is the first and necessary condition of knowing the divine gift. Let this whole law be illustrated by an instance, which may be accepted as imaginary, but which, at any rate, might be fact ; nay, which has, in many cases, been substantially the fact. A man is in doubt concerning the recti- tude of some course which, with many others, and without censure from any, he is pursuing. As, in addition to the perfect innocence which common judgment attaches to it, the pursuit connects itself with his habitual method of life ; as the continu- ing in it brings no loss, but some gain, and the leaving of it must separate him from general sym- pathy, and expose him, at the least, to ridicule, per- haps to scorn ; and as, beyond this, he may him- self find occasion to reconsider his own decision and regret it, when regret must be unavailing, he cannot allow himself to pronounce a rash and pre- mature sentence. For hours, for days, of earnest thought and prayer, he gives himself to the ques- tion, until the answer comes at last, too clear to 100 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. evade, and demanding, as the Truth always de- mands, the action corresponding with the conviction. The soliloquy of the soul becomes then such as this : The Truth is evident, but the world is all against it ; the Truth is there, but nothing else than Truth, and the Being whose form and image Truth is ; every personal interest, every private feeling, and every social relation are against it. And as soon as the irrevocable deed is done, I too may join the general voice, which shall censure my departure from custom, and shrink from the prevalent sneer at a foolish scrupulosity, dignifying itself as con- scientiousness. Be it so ; let the light go out, and only darkness overspread me for ever ; that is noth- ing against the assured duty ; mine it is to obey the present vision ; the future must take care for itself. So the man obeys the law as it reveals it- self in his own soul, and finds it to be light, not darkness ; while for shame and regret there comes nothing less than joy in the Lord. His soul is new opened, and into its silent depths he feels the peace of God going down, a living stream, such as he has never found before, flowing from above, and well- ing up out of the fountain which it has filled in his heart. He sees no shadow now, but substantial reality of the Divine Presence. Such experience, I maintain, is no fanaticism, no fancy, no delusion. It gives the true, let me add, the sole, method of entering into life; forsaking sin, that is, keeping the divine commandments. When this is done, all is done ; the only obstruc- tion is removed, the only cloud dissolved, the one INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. 101 eclipse which shaded the spirit passed off: there stands the undimmed sun, here rests the day, and that day is Sabbath. From an experience so sim- ple, so spontaneous, so full of unsought peace, comes a fresh interpretation of the law, so often re- duced to ecclesiastical formalism, which Jesus pro- nounced with such solemn emphasis, " Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I also confess before my Father which is in heaven ; but whoso- ever shall deny me before men, him will I ?ilso deny before my Father which is in heaven." A man may discover something of the great reality; then, finding it unappreciated, perhaps even despised, by the world, he chooses to shut up the vision in his own heart, hoping to keep it unsullied there, with- out giving it forth to ungenial minds. And there seems some reason in his seclusion ; why thrust the precious element into the midst of an atmosphere sure to debase or reject it ? — why sow the divine seed into a soil whence it can draw no growth ? — why cast the holiest things amidst, profanations and contempt ? — why lay them out in the presence of brutal hearts, which will add to their scorn of the gift hatred, wrath, persecutions, sneers, calumnies, against the giver ? Eeason enough, it may seem, for concealment ; the man and the truth outraged, and none blessed. Certainly it is sad ; not the less is it true, however, that the spiritual life demands, rather contains in itself, the germ which produces, as growth and fruit, confession, communication, utterance of word, utterance of deed. The aban- donment of a sin, the abnegation of a falsehood, 9' 102 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. the work of mercy, the speaking of thought, when both speech and thought are alive with love of truth, each is confession ; so that the most retiring and silent man cannot live a day with his fellows but he declares, however unconsciously, his faith or his unbelief, his love or his hates. Either he reveals his vision in obeying it, or betrays his blindness or his selfishness in disobeying. There is no alterna- tive ; whether to obey or to disobey lies in the man's choice, not to shift off both by some cun- ning or evasion. Which to choose, he is free ; to choose, is a necessity. Again, the confession is necessary action of the faith which grows by exer- cise, as the denial is forceful suppression of the faith, which wastes by inaction and perishes by apostasy. We speak oftentimes in reverence of martyrs, as a select and noble band, with whom we, living in more quiet times, have little in common ; of apostates, as equally distant from us alike by their infidelities, their meanness, and the peculiari- ties of their condition ; forgetting, that, as martyr- dom is always within, so it is in veriest reality the service of every day through all times, and as apos- tasy is first in the heart, not in the tongue or the hand, so it is simply the faithlessness which we need to put away from us every hour. And so, too, the recompense of each is near, not remote ; the Truth, as it is admitted within us, opens its foun- tains of love and joy, as it is rejected, leaves us parched and famishing in the desert of our own lusts. As in all vegetation it is needed that the vital INFLUENCE AND EECEPTION. 103 element should circulate through the whole product, not confined to the root or the trunk, but diffused into every branch and fibre, running out through each twig, expanding in each leaf, swelling in the bud and blowing in its flower and growing in its fruit, so that recession from either brings so much death, and when the free current is stopped, even in an outer limb, imperfection and decay begin, and when it narrows its circuit more and more, drawing itself into its centre, the whole is becorhing a dry and mouldering mass ; so through the full circle of man's nature and powers the Divine Life must continually stream ; the heart must be fresh and warm with it, and the head clear, the hands strong with its might, the feet swift, the tongue quick to receive and give it forth ; the feelings must drink it in, the thoughts flower in its morning dew, the words and deeds must be instinct with its central fire ; else as the life is suppressed in any one of these, it is weakened in all ; as it declines from the outer, if they seem but off-shoots, it is because the decay has begun within, and though the tree be not plucked up by the roots, yet it falls by the equally sure and wasteful doom of internal dissolution. The pro- cesses are all the time going on ; they do not turn back or aside. We have not to wait for some great gathering of all men in upper air, before a throne set above the clouds, to hear, as with words sound- ing to the ear, those terrible tones of denial in the presence of the Father ; the instant we deny the present Truth, whether we heed it or not, it is in its reverse the desperate sentence ; the sun above us is 104 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. clouded, through the higher spheres formless and murky shadows roll up from beneath, and out of the deepening gloom the voice comes back to the faithless man, — echo, which no distance can escape, no time can silence, of his own falsehood. Whereas in confession, in the very act and instant of con- fession, of the mighty Presence, especially when threatened with extremest evils, the Word, so near as to be within the mouth and the heart, opens the heavens, shining through them like the sun, and draws the truthful man upward by secret elective attractions, and gladdens him with benignant visions and immortal hopes. Persecuted he may be by darker powers, but even violence urges him nearer to the Light ; reviled he may be, but holier sympathies embrace him ; men and the world may thrust him out over the infinite void, but the Infi- nite is there, and the seeming void spreads beneath him as substantial ground of a new earth over which new heavens are bending. He cannot be deserted ; in his deepest loneliness the Father is with him. The Life of Jesus' has thus one method of mani- festation ; freely communicated of the Lord, it can be received only through corresponding freedom on our part, that is, by the heart raised above the con- sciousness of sin, and aspiring to do the will of God. So Jesus said, If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. So Paul hath taught us to reckon ourselves dead unto sin, and alive unto God in Jesus Christ our Lord. And so does all experience concur with the anticipations of reason INFLUENCE ANB RECEPTION. 105 to mark unshrinking obedience, purity of heart, and fidelity to the law written in it, involving calm endurance in affliction, frank confession of the Truth before men, warfare against all sin, resist- ance to temptation and victory over it, as the only method by which we pass out of the darkness which covers the world into the light which encircles and fills the children of God. Upward into the open heavens we must look continually, not only for the infinite ideal, but for the sun-rays which reveal it, and for the strength, greater than of nature, to body it forth ; and while we rise into those holier realms of faith, of hope, of love, we perceive evils' sinking away beneath us, and good for ever expanding and shining above us. So com- pletely do spirit, soul, and body, life, speech, and action, the mystic power and the natural form, interpenetrate and react upon each other. So John, as he muses of the secret and unseen life, and Matthew, when he repeats the commandment to do the deed, come together, and each fills out the other's word. The true recompense of well-doing is a vital power to do still better ; the fruit of the spirit is good deed, surcharged with the seeds of new birth and larger growth. Nor let us suffer to fade from our soul this great fact, — that the Divine Presence to us, the internal dominion of God, the Christ living in us, the life of Jesus manifest to the soul, is of absolute and uni- versal supremacy. It claims submission of all, but yields submission to none ; it requires unqualified obedience, but grants no indulgences ; it concedes 106 INFLUENCE AND KBCEPTION. nothing to prejudice or interest ; it knows nothing of compromise, whether in the private deed, the social intercourse, or the broader relations of Church or state ; all must obey it, not it them ; amidst conflicts of opinion and of action, for ever immov- able and imperial. Its type is the calm and pas- sionless sky ; clouds cover it and pass away, winds blow and rest, air, earth, and ocean change under it with the seasons and their influences, night brings out its moon and stars, day comes with its solitary sun ; but the sky looks out in' unbroken serenity for ever. There are, in the smaller world of man, instincts, and appetites, and passions, many and changeful ; there are affections, personal, domestic, social ; there are relations to nature, to country, to the world, with their various attach- ments ; there are religious sympathies and rever- ence ; and there is the individual infolding all these within one distinct existence ; while, over all these earthly elements the heavens stand. Not these human things, but the heavens do rule. Through these, the heavens pour down influence ; and as in outward nature the higher penetrates the lower, the light and heat descending through air, and earth, and water, and all finer essences through vegeta- tion, and vital forces through motion and growth ; so within us the heavenly principle enters and circulates through the earthly organisms, never losing its own supremacy, but striving always to subordinate, to harmonize and hallow the whole. The man is, perhaps, unwilling to obey ; but it accepts nothing else. He asks for real good, but loves money t INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. 107 the law has not gone into silence, Sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor. He would win truth, yet he toils for the praise of men : the stern interdict is there, Never to him who, forgetting God, seeks honor of men, comes the divine faith. He is voluptuous, self-indulgent, ostentatious, proud : it follows, of course, that the love of the Father is not in him. He would gladly seek the Christ, but there are interfering claims of kindred : not the less clearly sounds the voice. Follow me ! There are friends, whom he would not grieve ; there is society, whose peace he would not disturb ; there is his country, which he loves, and whose laws he would observe ; there is the Church, with its holy and ancient institutions : it has come to pass, that all these unite their call to something unlike and even contrary to the living word ; so he cannot obey both, this is out of the question. There is his very subsistence ; perhaps he knows no way to get it honestly ; what shall he do ? The law is inexorable ; it comes down as fresh this instant, as new, as old, as when articulated through the lips of Jesus, " If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Compute, then, the cost of living above the rules and methods of the age, — of accepting the Law higher than any will or any conceit of man can establish, — it will be found, that, so doing, thou shalt rise into truer life, but first thou must die to the false and shadowy ; thou shalt ascend with the Christ, but first thou must be 108 INFLUENCE AND RECEPTION. crucified with him ; thou shalt dwell in a celestial region, but first thou must renew within thee that ancient story, getting thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house. The necessity is present and eternal ; to gain the higher we must leave the lower. Thus everything has its price ; pay for it, and we receive. Surren- der conscience, sincerity, manliness, justice, Christ, to the bidding of men or of our own lusts or ambi- tion, our expectations will not, indeed, be fulfilled, but the equivalent will certainly be obtained ; there can be no fraud in the transfer, value must be received ; but it was no part of the arrangement to retain what was paid away. Surrender, on the contrary, selfish ends and worldly things, property and friends, sympathies dearer than the blood of our own hearts, and all which false religion or human tyranny demands, to the gentle bidding of the Lord, there is equal certainty ; we shall obtain what he givesj — the power of obedient and holy living : that is enough. SERMON VIII THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. I. Mythology of the Chitech Jeb. X. 11. THE GODS THAT HAVE NOT MADE THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH, EVEN THET SHALL PEEISH TKOM THE EAKTH, AND FKOM UN- DEB THESE HEAVENS. The True Religion ! Men have never ceased to ask, either consciously or unconsciously, what it is. The question suggests, indeed, the great problem of humanity. The historical form in which Religion has presented itself to the mind of Christendom makes it to us essentially the same question with another, — What is Christianity ?. In going back to the earlier legends of nations, we find religion scarcely brought into connection with humane sentiments. Pantheons we may have, temples of aU divinities, gods above, below, around', in sky, air, earth, sea, of various classes and charac- ters, attached to places, to nations, to offices, all re- ceiving, through consecrated priests, offerings and services corresponding to their manifold peculiar- ities. Scarce a deity, however, is lover of man as man ; and if there be, like Prometheus, one in whom philanthropy excites beneficence to the hu- 10 110 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. man race, he, forsooth, is chained by stronger power to some Caucasian rock, that through long ages he may suffer for his infidelity to the Supreme Will. Even the conception of the Hebrews, purer, broader, more universal, as it appears in the Law and the Prophecies, seems by no means to have disengaged itself from local and national limitations. They thought of Jehovah as the patron of Israel, rather than as the Father of Man, blessing his favorite people with richest gifts and promises of greater, but going forth as fierce and vengeful warrior against their enemies. So soon as among the Greeks an earnest ethical spirit, a love of the wis- dom which, instead of floating in clouds of distant speculation, descends to the common ways of men to guide their lives, embodies itself, as in Socrates, it is seen detaching itself from the theology, that is, the mythic doctrine and belief: the philosopher wars with the poet ; the moral sentiment pronounces the stories of the gods false, in anticipation both of the scientific intellect and of the Christian Gos- pel. So, too, Confucius is represented as leaving the theology (which is much of the mythology) of the East, out of the circle of his thought and action and discipline, directing men, not to fables, but to facts ; not to distant and shadowy gods, but to the real things lying near them for daily use ; prescrib- ing the several offices demanded by the nature apd the relations of mankind. If the Hebrew Prophets, calling men to abandonment of sin and to a higher rectitude, retain the more ancient form of the relig- ious sentiment, delivering their sublime utterances THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. Ill in the name of the Lord, it is that the theology was purer and larger, approaching nearer to the destined form of Divine Philanthropy, and making sincere virtue one with the Law and the Will of the High- est Being. Christianity supplies the perfect atone- ment of God and Man, of Religion and Virtue. Its first historical fact is precisely this, the Divine Man ; so that no sooner is it clearly understood, than we see the contrasts turned to harmonies, true theology becoming soul of genuine virtue, piety the source and nutriment of charity and its kindly deeds. Reborn, we perceive unity drawing the di- verse together, the Divine Life entering, informing, quickening, glorifying Humanity ; worship enlivens virtue, virtue gives body to worship ; religion is hu- man, morality becomes divine. This Unity, let me repeat, Christianity has set forth as a fact in history, though without either demonstrating it as a theo- rem or decreeing it as a doctrine, much less with-, out staining and discoloring it by creeds and sys- tems. As fact, as story of an individual life, the Gospel was first announced. It was not as theorists or teachers, either of theology or of ethics, that the Apostles went out on their grand mission : it was as heralds and witnesses of what they had really seen and heard of One with whom they had lived, to whose daily speech they had listened, whose wonderful deeds they had known in the hour of their occurrence, and in whom, amidst the conditions of an earthly manhood, they had discerned qtialities betokening the Son of God. This grand fact, this 112 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. Divine Humanity, pronounced, acknowledged, in- troduced as a quickening element into the course of the ages, becomes a permanent tradition. From Ufe it passes into history, from history to dogma, and, at this latter stage, opens a new series of spec- ulative inquiries, and a ground therein for fantastic tales. It identifies itself with a theology, strictly so called, a science of God, a doctrine and belief concerning the Divine Nature as it is in itself, over and above its relations to mankind ; a theology, let me add, more strictly such as setting forth the Word of God incarnate in Man, and for ever speak- ing the Father. Like the earliest Christian records contained in the New Testament, the first formula which has come to us of Christian belief, known as the Apostles' Creed, is characterized by its simpli- city, as of historical statement. It is not theoretical. It propounds no speculation, as it indicates no .question concerning the nature of Jesus Christ and the interior relations wherein he stands to God. It merely restates, in brief outline, some things ac- knowledged as facts, of his birth, of his life, of his death and its sequels. The next formulas which we meet in the course of Christianity, such as those of Nice, of Constantinople, the Athanasian Creed, and others, earlier or later, present another aspect. What they have of historical form comes from the ancient Confession : what they have of their own is theoretical and dogmatic. They pronounce, under solemn sanctions, expressed or implied, certain speculations concerning the primitive Divine Fact. Herein appears the distinct development of a my- THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 113 thology within the Church ; a mythology, however reluctant we may be to confess it, as truly such as had earlier grown up amidst the hills and the isles of Greece, or in the remote and mystic East, or among the stern and awful wilds of Northern Eu- rope. It grows and spreads all over the growing life of Jesus, covering, compressing, sometimes al- most concealing, the Divine Reality. I can by no means lay open now the whole of this medieval mythology. I can simply set forth certain of its particulars, as indications of its gen- eral nature. If we begin with the Divine Idea, we perceive, as first in the series of its developments, the division of the Godhead into three, distinct as in person, so likewise in office, the mutual trans- actions and covenants passing originally within their supernal society, thence transferred, as it were, to this earth as the theatre of their manifestation in the introduction and progress of Christianity; the consequent elevation of Mary, deemed mother of God ; the corresponding elevation of saints, analo- gous to that of the ancient heroes ; the regenerative power of Baptism, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the Divine Body and Blood, the mystic virtues of all the Sacraments, and ' the su- premacy of the Church within which all these di- vine elemeints are combined. If we begin with Man, we perceive ancient traditions grown into dogmatic theories ; the sacred story, for instance, of the Eastern garden and its original inhabitants, expanded into definite pictures of a primeval para- dise, another form of the golden age, and the tran- 10* 114 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. scendent grandeur and perfection of the father of our race. The seducing serpent, losing the dim outlines of the earlier conception, is wrought into palpable and permanent shape as the leader of hosts warring against God and tempting man, the Prince of Demons. Herewith are interwoven fictions, as we know, concerning the origin of evil and its transmission, equal fictions combining, with the simple and grand truth of the justice and the mercy of the Divine government, images which religious faith suggested and poetry wrought into form, mak- ing beautiful or horrid the heights and the abysses of the unseen worlds. Thus Dante, for example, thus Milton, to name no more, where so many might be found, are as really mythological as Homer or Virgil; neither the heathen nor the Christian poets, inventors of fables, but singers rather of those which their times identified with religion. Dante gives us the mythic religion at its culmination in the fourteenth century ; how far, by the intervening schism in the Church, modified in the seventeenth, we may learn of Milton. How far, moreover, these imaginative aspects of Christianity proceed from real truth, how far the reverse ; wherein they give us permanent symbols, wherein only perishing idols, I must now dismiss from the thought. Only let this' be said : just as those Eastern gods, that made not the heavens and the earth, but which were themselves made by men's fancy, as their statues and temples by men's hands, stood apart from many conditions of com- mon life, such the limitation of their natures ; so, THE COURSE OP CHRISTIANITY. 115 from a similar limitation, these idols of Christen- dom. The Spirit, though one, is absolutely omni- present, shut out nowhere, from nothing, the least or the greatest. These phantom-shapes, however numberless, have their limits ; there will be times and states in which the consciousness of them as inti- mate realities fades away. Precisely with the fad- ing of this consciousness the deeper elements of our nature become obscure. The heavens are closed, the earth only lies open. God is withdrawn, man remains alone. Humanity, that is, comes to be divorced from religion ; Christianity ceases to be Divine Philanthropy, passing into worship of the higher powers according to the traditions, established as devotions or as rites, of the mythology which has overgrown the reality and the spirit. Well, indeed, it is, that God never actually leaves man : so, be- cause he is a universal Presence, not a local genius, not a partial force, therefore in every soul, of Greek or Jew, Frank or Hindoo, English or Chinese, Chris- tian or Heathen, of all nations and ages, some ema- nation of the eternal fountain, some ray from the celestial sun, some inspiration of truth instinct with love, even if obstructed and covered up, must of necessity still and for ever dwell. Well it is, more- over, in the course of Christianity, that the Life which it introduced into the history of mankind, imperfectly understood, dimmed by superstition, distorted into a stupendous system of fable, still lived on ; that the light which it bore, as into the very sepulchre, if amidst the damp and unhealthy air it grew dim and cast faint shadows over the 116 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. walls and through the whole gloom, was yet too strong ever to go out. Those shadows were none the less shadows ; the fable none the less unreality. To love God thoroughly, we must emerge into some less darkened sphere ; to love man divinely, we must see him, no longer outcast or slave, but son of the Father. "Wholly the mythology has not yet passed away. Wholly, therefore, existing Christianity has been neither humanized nor glorified. The very essence of all mythology consists in this quality, which has already been ascribed to it, — limitation of the Di- vine Presence. This limitation may pertain to the nature, the person, the place, the time, the office, or any attribute or relation. Beyond or outside the limited sphere, the god or spirit is consequently inoperative. Religious service, of course, is com- mensurate only with that sphere. Thus, if it be Neptune who rules alone over the sea, then I will invoke him at sea, and when he has saved me from its perils, will hang up my wet robes to him. But when I have gone into the woods, I will let sea- gods alone until I need, and do my homage to Silva* nus, or to some nymph of the forest. While I am celebrating the rites of Bacchus, it is net unbecoming if I make myself drunken ; let me leave the merry bout, and enter the service of Minerva, I will try to be sober : let me be wise, if I can, as the stoic here. Very likely the time may come along when I shall throne all the gods above the clouds, and not trouble either them with my cares or myself with their laws. Transfer the thought to the idolatries THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 117 of Christendom, Set before me the Lord of hosts, as really the God summoning and leading armies to battle, clothed to my thought with wrath as with a garment, making his sword red with the blood of his enemies ; why not think to serve him by falling into his train, listening to his call, cherishing wrath, inflicting vengeance, rushing into the fierceness of selfish strife ? Unveil to me the Father : how can he be seen but to be loved? Limit, then, his Fatherhood, that while boundless love looks out on a portion of his great family, his countenance bends lowering and full of fury on the rest, joy freezes at its very source ; me, should he compass with his benignity, yet can I heartily bless the kindness which he grants to me, but refuses to my brother ? Show me the god-like tenderness of Jesus, it moves my soul to its depths ; then weave your fictions of a Second Person in the Godhead appeasing the wrath of the First, offering satisfac- tion to his avenging justice, sprinkling his blood over the burning throne, turning the wrath to love, — one shudders at the very thought, the true heart in- stinctively repels it, in no way can it be borne at all but as we bear ancient fables of the Gods, translat- ing them into metaphor and broken vision of some clouded truth. Taking it as literal representation of Jesus, of his Father and our Father, we shrink from it as some dark and horrid phantom ; the soul may be subdued to tremble before it, but the soul cannot be subdued to surrender its involun- tary and indestructible horror. Go through all fables which the ages have accepted as doctrines ; 118 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. like these, they sometimes touch the spirit only to darken, in other cases they fail to reach and pene- trate some portions of our nature. If in these lat- ter instances they do not make the sun black, they leave in us deeper recesses than its rays pierce, and lead us by night through sunless and desolate ways. They point to dim and distant shapes, which they pronounce divine and celestial ; they breathe not to the soul one omnipresent Spirit. They send not the life-blood out through all its courses even to every particle of living flesh ; rather they draw it back, that the body grows cold and dead, and the very part into which it is urged seems bursting with the rush and the distention. " Religion," let me quote the language of Chan- ning, " has been made a separate business, and a dull, unsocial, melancholy business too, instead of being manifested as a truth which bears on and touches everything human, as a universal spirit which ought to breath through and modify all our desires and pursuits, all our trains of thought and emotion." The preacher seems himself to have fallen unconsciously into the error which he would expose. Religion he speaks of as a truth, a spirit, though a universal spirit. Really, as God is the only life of the universe, so the one absolute truth, the one universal spirit, in all and through all cycles and orders of existence, so Religion as the devout consciousness of this Presence, presents, not a truth, as one truth among others, not a spirit, as if there were spirits separate from this, but the Truth, the Spirit, permeating and quickening the whole and THE COrESE OF CHRISTIANITY. 119 each thing, in which is everything real, separate from which is nothing but dissolution and death. To pass from this partial criticism. We naturally ask the reason of the sad fact so distinctly stated. The writer explains it only by recurrence to the historical development of Christianity. Th'is, however, reduces itself to the statement, that the modern fact is likewise an ancient fact. How came it to be fact at all ? How came Eeligion to be then, as now, this separate business? How came Christianity to be monastic, priestly, scholas- tic, ever ? The answer lies in the nature of man. One step further toward the answer, and so toward explaining the weary orphanage, even of Christen- dom, we may perhaps proceed. Christianity, that is, the Divine Humanity, is a fact too vast for the comprehension of the times in which it appearedj and by which it was followed. They kept the story; they could but poorly interpret .the idea. They saw enough to revere the Son of God ; they could impart but imperfect expressions, either of the Divine Beauty which he imaged, or of the Human Regeneration which he prefigured. Almost in proportion as his spirit failed from their hearts, they enshrined him in their temples. They deified and worshipped him as the sufferer on the cross, as the conqueror of death, with words and forms naturally multiplying to supply the void left in the soul unconscious of the present Christ raising it through secret sorrow to inward life and joy. Ob- solete mythologies revive by being new named. The beautiful god of a new Pantheon or a higher 120 THE COURSE OP CHRISTIANITY. Olympus, Jesus has become, rather than the human image of the Omnipotent Love. By the very nature of a Christianity, supposing as its very essence spirit absolutely unconfined, thus converted into a mythology which involves necessity of limi- tation, a separation from some things must be'pro- duced. The finite cannot reach through the uni- verse, entire and vital in every part. Religion, thus limited, so confined by metes, fenced off from some fields of thought and activity, loses its charac- ter as the Universal Presence, felt, welcomed, loved, rejoiced in, obeyed, flowing through all the currents of life in everlasting communications of itself, and becomes a measured form, an enshrined image, honored, worshipped in its place, but hardly ex- pected to intrude into the spheres of secular ac- tivity. It becomes more plainly than we think an insulated thing ; an island severed as by some deep sea from- the broad continent of human life and business ; the cloister is there, the church, men go there to confession and prayer ; that is all. The very penance of their seclusion and worship may reconcile these to their consciences, and they come back to the mainland comforted to sin a little more ; at least, to keep separate things apart, to be religious in the place and time for religion, to be something else in other places and at other times. Two false elements are thus seen to enter into the composition of this mythological Christian- ism, the basis of that idolatry with which Protes- tants have so often charged the Roman Church, THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 121 hardly suspecting, meantime, how much of both they have themselves retained. The first is indicat- ed in the very name, fiction taken for fact, shadow for substance, unreality for reality, and this in the highest region of thought, establishing human doc- trines and rites for the present inspiration of the Lord. The second, involved in the preceding, is the deformed idea which this whole process generates of the Divine Being. Not only withdrawn is he from portions of his own world, but, where he is allowed to dwell in himself and his conceded realm, he exists as other than infinite love, absolute justice, supreme beauty, universal Father. In the fables of those gods which have already perished, or are now doomed to perish, from the earth and from under these heavens, we have types perpetu- ally recurring of what he has seemed, even if unconsciously, to the interior thought of many Christian ages. How distant and obscure, mean- time, every vision of his image in the gentle and humane life which opened the majestic course of Man reborn on a new earth, beneath new heavens! Just look at a very few from unnumbered exam- ples in past history. It is said, that when William of Normandy was hoping for the crown then worn by Harold, he' sought and gained the Pope as patron of his claim. Harold and his followers are excom- municated. To William the Eoman Father sends a consecrated banner and a ring with a lock of Peter's hair in it. To such depth of superstition has the Christian belief sunken ! Follow now the march of sanctified selfishness. The night before 11 122 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. the terrible battle of Hastings is given in his army to devout silence, to prayer an'd other religious ser- vices. Nor does this mythical Christianity pass from their memories in the exultation of victory. The fierce fight is ended ; the sun is going down unseen by thousands of eyes which opened with its rise ; the English king and his brothers are fallen in their last field ; the insatiate ambition of the Conqueror has reached the fulfilment of its lusts and its pride through such fell feats, as if instigated and upheld by some infernal demon. The hellish scene is closed by solemn thanksgiving, as if to God! At a later day, glorying in the name of Reformation, and on the ecclesiastical arena, some- thing more than two centuries ago, such a thing as this occurred. A young preacher, father to the saintly Leighton, moved by the falsehoods, as he deemed them, of the English Church, directs his missile against it in the shape of a Plea against Prelacy. The blow seems not unfelt. The fer- vent assailant of the stupendous power is met by judicial tyranny. He is doomed to pay a large fine ; he is deprived of his ministry ; he is twice set in the pillory ; he is publicly whipped ; his ears are cut off and his nostrils slit ; he is branded on the cheek ; he is doomed to perpetual imprisonment. The clergyman, afterward so renowned in the reign of the first Charles as Primate of England, and who shared the same fate with his king in the aw- ful reaction and retribution, is reported to have added to the enormity of such a sentence his voice of thanks to the fabled Power which he named THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 123 God, which the Church had taught him to pro- nounce Father of the Lord Jesus. Parallels to these stories might be multiplied almost without number. It will be well for us, when they are dis- tinctly seen and declared to belong, not to Christi- anity, but to mythology formed into idolatry, flow- ing originally from the limitations of human nature, now taking up and bearing on its strong current cer- tain names and facts derived from the submerged principle itself. From a vital reality, religion has now become, not a fable only, but worse, a baptized sin. It has ceased with us to be easy to enrobe such deeds as these with sanctity. Sin has another resource. The ultimate state to which present tendencies converge may be this. The Norman warrior is not dead, the judicial tyrant, the ecclesi- astical bigot. But God is too certainly the Father, Jesus is too gentle and loving, the Holy Spirit is too pliainly symbolized by the dove, not the vulture, for selfish men readily and boldly to surround atro- cious deeds with religious sanctions. Sometimes even this may be done now ; but it is not the mode. We have a different fashion. Religion is at one time silently dismissed, at another shoved rudely aside. God is just locked up in church or closet, all ready to be visited when the hour or the day comes ; but he must not be soiled by the dust of the streets, or profaned by the lighter ways of the world. Now they can doom men to murder or imprisonment or slavery ; they can rush into the whirl of unjust traffic or soulless politics ; any sin, 124 THE COURSE OF CHEISTIANITY. private or public, they can perpetrate undisturbed ; what has the name of God to do here ? If we do not worship him devoutly, the sin is great, and the punishment or repentance must be great ; but this trade, this vote, this speech, this story, belongs somewhere else : there is no worship thought of here. It is like something I have read of in ancient Egypt. A body is preserved through some embalming process, and kept a year in the house, shut up, however, in some niche, very sacred of course, and honored there by homage and offerings. There is no living soul, no constant presence, no hourly communion ! It is neither god nor man, but corpse ; if worshipped, only idol. Religion has dwindled to idolatry long ago ; the very service of the embalmed body has become rare and care- less ; when men go forth into the field of labor or of strife, into the shop of the artisan, into the counting-house, the study, the office, the street, the senate, or the ship, religion is only remembrance or hope of devouter retirements : God is not with them now. Negative as the view presented may seem, there has been, I trust, an affirmative seen to run all the way through it. If it be repetition, let me bring out this affirmation into distinct and definite an- nouncement : True religion is the Infinite Life revealed in the soul, harmonizing the whole man with its own nature and order and laws. Christi- anity, really such, is the same Infinite Life first em- bodied in the One from whom the name is derived, thence communicated through and from Him in his THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 125 permanent spirit. This Life, again, is no other than the Lord producing, through perpetual inspirations, the consciousness of his universal Presence. God is, moreover, no other than the sublime apostolic word hath declared. Love. This is his essence, his nature, his inspiration. Infinitely he must love each soul and the whole human race. Christ, that is, Christianity in its type and source, is the Divine Love impersonated in the Human Form through which it flows without alloy, blessing all whom it reaches, as it draws them within the circle of its at- tractions and its communion. For us, this Christian fact, and all creeds and forms and deeds connected with it, are unavailing without the inward experi- ence ; for us, their whole worth and effect are simply found in the Divine Presence welcomed to us ; in the Love which flows from the Father, consecrating us to the service, not of religious fables, not of fabulous theologies, not of local and temporary interests, but of his image in the filial humanity. Let the service, thus begun, destined to such issue, flow, moreover, with full and steady current, never devious, never wasting itself in idle wanderings, if it may perchance return into the holier current, but still and for ever onward, obedient only to the heavenly attraction. ir SERMON IX. THE COURSE 01" CHRISTIANITY. II. DoCTaiNE OF THE ChURCH. Jer. vi. 16. STAND YE IN THE WATS, AKD SEE, AKD ASK FOE THE OLD PATHS, ■VVHEKE IS THE OOOD WAT, AND WALK IHEKEIN, AND TE SHALL EIND EEST UNTO TOUR SOULS. I REMEMBER a bcautiful passage in which Homer describes the introduction of a bard among the princes gathered at the house of Alcinous, receiving on his island the wandering Ulysses. A herald comes forward, leading the dear and venerable man ; him the Muse loved too, though with the good she gave she mingled ev^l ; his eyes she dark- ened, but she gave sweet song. It has seemed to me type of the Church in many of its periods. The world has been driven, as over all seas, tossed by tempests and wrecked, borne, as if desolate and naked, even to the islands on which it finds some- times a short rest in its weariness, and becoming sorrowful even at the feasts which offer their cheer. The Church, meantime, even in darkest hours, its sun long eclipsed, its moon dimmed, its stars fallen or turned to baleful meteors, the very eyes with which it once looked out and upward bereaved of THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 127 sight, has still retained the word and the music of that divine gift which the older inspiration brought. Out of the gloom, through deep shades, we have heard the sweet song of salvation. Gladly still we might stay to listen and drink in the voice, but that the hour has come summoning the soul to new toil, which compels us, even in the strains we have heard and are hearing now, to sever what in them is of celestial birth from what is earthly and even infernal, marring now the whole old concord. The soul is divine, but from under ribs of death it can- not always send up the words of life. We may then leave the typical shadow, coming nearer to the historical reality. An infallible external standard of Divine Truth ; in other words, Christianity perfectly represented in some outward expression : this, if we go back to the beginning of the sixteenth, as well as to the entire course of the fifteenth, centuries, contains, we may pronounce the universal belief, or doctrine, of Chris- tendom. In its western portion, to which we may now limit our observation, the division in regard to the position of this infallible authority goes onward even to irreconcilable hostility. Those claiming to be Catholic, all are aware, declare it to exist within their Church. " The reason of man," into such form we *nay translate their affirmation, " anticipates, as fruit of the Divine Goodness, the formation of a body weaving all its members into universal com- munion, perpetuated in its organization and laws, containing in itself the vision, and proclaiming with highest authority the oracles, of Eternal Truth. 128 THE COURSE OP CHRISTIANITY. The promise of the Lord insures .the fulfilment of this aspiration : On Peter, as the rock of its foun- dation, be assures us that he will build an invinci* ble and indestructible Church. The assurance is verified. The promise is fulfilled. Behold the im- pregnable fortress ! Behold the finished and ever- lasting. Temple ! Ages have rolled over it, dashing and flaming against it with their torrents of error; embattled hosts have exhausted themselves in fierce assaults ; persecutions from without, discords from within, schisms, heresies, apostacies, these have been innumerable and incessant ; not a pillar has been shaken, not a breach opened ; the waU is still rising unchecked, grand, majestic, from its immov- able foundation ; the dome pierces the clouds ; saints and penitents kneel for ever within its sanctuaries, and see angelic visions and hear heavenly hymns and meet the Lord. The memories and the mon- uments of Apostles and Martyrs give forth their immortal fragrance ; the records of ancient revela- tions, the traditions living in sui;e faith and reverent love, the prayers of saints, the charities of the de- vout, the communion of the faithful throughout time, reaching upward to the presence of those un- counted spirits who dwell in heaven, reaching on- ward to their swelling myriads in the future, all, all are imbosomed in this serene and perpetual realm of God. Behold here Christianity embodied ! Be- hold here the holy Catholic Church ! " A sterner voice sounds out in protest : " Fine rhapsody this! Divine Ideas and human fancies, thou hast stitched them all together, then stained THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 129 with gaudy hues the robe of thy fiction, making the whole show to the eye far other than the real- ity ; bright as the painted windows of thy cathe- drals, but brittle as the glass. The brilliant hue lighting up the face over which the shadow of death is passing unseen ! Thine anticipation of the rea- son in behalf of a Papal Supremacy; sheer delu- sion, which thou hast suffered thyself to be played with and mocked ; gleaming and fading fantasy, no solid, sunlike reason. Thy promise of the Lord I I grant it gladly, as he spake, not as thou turnest it to falsehood. Never on the person of Peter does the Church rest, can the Church rest : for ever it rests on the Lord alone and his Truth confessed, even as Peter confessed ; builded on this Rock, the holy ed- ifice stands indeed impregnable, neither counsels nor powers of Death can ever reach to move it. Not thy proud and deceptive Church is that ; nor is there anywhere man or body of men to hold from it assurance of infallibility. Then for thy Roman Church, falsely calling itself Catholic, that is no city of God, but rather lurking-place of dragons. Like its ancient prototype, the Rome of the Caesars, such its corruption that it is breaking and crumbling through its inward rottenness, unable longer to bear either its vices or their remedies. Stand not in such apostasy from the Truth, such schism from the Church, to tell us of communion ; thou hast none there ; of infallibility, this is found but in the Word of the Living God. Meantime, from out the rub- bish of the unhallowed tabernacle we have drawn what has long been forgotten, the Divine Oracle. 130 THE COURSE OP CHRISTIANITY. The Scripture is here, pure, divine, as it came down in other ages from the holy fountain. Out of it we drink quickening waters ; vernal airs breathe from it of a higher paradise; the nepenthe this which relieves us of every pain, the secret virtue that un- locks every clasp with which sin has bound heart and limb, the touch which removes the leprosy, the voice which bids and strengthens the paralytic to ►walk, which rends the very tomb and calls out the dead, free, joyous, in open vision of the heavens. The solemn Protest, before which falsehood slinks away, leads us out to meet and welcome pure Re- ligion, Christianity reformed after the ancient pat- tern showed by Prophets and Apostles. We have stood in the ways which Rome would shut up ; we have asked for the old paths, so long deserted and concealed ; here is the good way wherein we would walk henceforth ; rest we find only here to our wea- ried souls." Infallibility thus transferred from the Church to the Bible, another question necessarily comes for- ward : This same Scripture, who shall interpret it ? Theoretically, such the position to which the reformative movement is driven, whether it will or no, there can be but one answer: Bach person for himself. A predominent influence there is,, notwithstand- ing, all ready to prescribe the results to which each person shall come. The new Papacy has little hes- itation in pronouncing what we shall find written in the sacred books, The Doctrine of the Primitive Church, in particular as it was expressed in the THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 131 venerable symbols, known as the Apostolic, the Ni- cene, and the Athanasian ; such, at the very least, is the judgment of Protestantism. It ought to be better understood, at any rate oftener remembered, than it is, that along with no small measure of the Pa- pal despotism, the Reformed churches brought with them the substance of the doctrine which the Pa- pacy had established : deriving thus its own system of doctrines from the Power denounced as Babylon and Antichrist ; building them on other ground, the Bible instead of the Church ; and changing the re- lation of faith in the Christ whom they present ; whereas the Catholic sought justification in works as well as faith, the Protestant making justification by faith alone the great test of the true Church ; whereas, again, the Catholic extended justification to the whole process of renovation to inward and true justice, the Protestant limiting it to the appro- bation or acceptance of the believer as just, at least as pardoned, in the judgment of God. The Bible presenting God reconciled to us by the propitiation of Christ received only by faith ; this is precisely the starting-point of Protestantism ; herein its sep- aration from the earlier Church, herein its appre- hension of true Christianity. To the present time, amidst all its variations, through whatever is deemed orthodox within its entire domain, this stands out as centre, substance, ground, of the entire system. Whatever may have been the private thought, and teaching of the many connected with it through birth and education, or through personal sympathies, this has continued the informing principle of all its 132 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. public creeds and established formulas. If, as we have contemplated the two grand divisions of Chris- tendom, expressing their mutual antagonisms, so we might put this later system into the mouth of an imagined teacher, I have thought it might sound ' thus : " Man ! be sure, thou art radically, naturally, throughout thy whole self, depraved, alienated from God ; an outcast from Paradise, whither thou canst not return ; a branch severed from the living tree, lying dead, and destined to the flames of everlast- ing wrath ; a victim of the punishment to which al- mighty and irreversible judgment hath doomed thee. There is mercy still. The Father hath given his equal Son to endure for thee this tremendous pen- alty, by sufferings, whatever their amount, at least equivalent to the punishment which is due to thee ; to exhibit and vindicate the Justice which only Death can satisfy ; to remove those hinderances in an immutable Law and Government which lie be- tween thy guilt and Divine Forgiveness. Confess from the heart thy complete sinfulness ; believe in the Divine Victim of this mighty substitution ; cast away thy deeds, righteous and unrighteous, as worthless and filthy ; through faith alone in this vi- carious suffering, thou shalt be saved from the curse. Into new relations thou shalt enter now with God ; those rewards and blessings which he gives in vir- tue of the one oblation, all worth of thine abjured, he shall grant to thee for the merits of his Son." Into this call of Protestantism to Man, into this its scheme of redemption, let me repeat, enter as vital elements, as inseparable parts of one compact sys- THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 133 tem, all those doctrines which in its earlier creeds the Church proclaimed, which thence into their con- fessions and theologies the modern Orthodoxies have derived, and continue to state and prove from the Bible. The whole, considered in the aggregate, is Christianity as doctrine ; just as the same whole, received in hearty belief, is Christianity as expe- rience. The process of seeming disintegration does not stop. There are interpreters of Scripture — such, accurately stated, the character of Protestants, so long as they follow the genuine tendencies of their first doctrine, pronouncing the Scripture their ideal and measure of religion — who come to very differ- ent conclusions. " We, too, have renounced Church and Pope for Prophets and Apostles," they declare, with great simplicity, "and have applied ourselves to diligent study of their holy words. We find it, however, quite otherwise than we had been taught. We have looked in vain for the ancient doctrines. Nothing have we been able to discover in them of the first man's sin imputed to his postierity ; nothing' of God demanding a sacrifice to appease his wrath, to satisfy his justice, to exhibit either his displeas- ure or his righteousness ; nothing of Christ's obedi- ence imputed to any other, much less for his faith alone to the believer ; nothing of three distinct co- eternal and co-equal Persons in the One Godhead. These, and the like of these, so they seem to us, are corruptions of the Church departing from the sim- plicity of the Scriptures into winding and intricate methods of a false speculation mistaken for true 12 134 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. wisdom. So far, indeed, as we can understand the Scriptures, Christianity consists, not in these doc- trines at all, but in simple belief that Jesus is the very Messiah, going forth into sincere endeavor to learn and to obey the Divine Laws which he re- vealed and fulfilled." Besides Socinus, anS the many who have confessed sympathy with the move- ment known as Unitarian, we find, even of those who retain more or less of the ecclesiastical doc- trines, not a few by whom such processes of thought have been encouraged; as Chillingworth, announ- cing, without interpreting, the Bible alone as the Re- ligion of Protestants ; as Milton, admitting within the compass of Christianity all who accept, as ulti- mate authority, interpret as they may, the Sacred Scripture ; as Taylor, reducing all necessary faith to the simple recognition of Jesus Christ as our Re- deemer ; as Locke, searching the whole New Tes- tament to prove that the entire demand of Christi- anity resolves itself into belief that Jesus is Messiah, joined with repentance from sin and obedience to God. Let me speak of it as a singular fact, that the very year, I think, in which a Congregational minister from our own New England was uttering, as simple Cobbler of Agawam, the sternest denun- ciations against " tolerations of divers religions, or of one religion in segregant shapes," an Episcopal preacher, raised afterwards to the dignity of prelate in his own church, was advocating, not toleration only, the liberty of prophesying, but the simple reference of Christian belief to those artless state- ments which make up the Apostolic Creed. THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 135 The methods of seeking Infallibility from without seem almost exhausted. The Catholic Church ! we have seen it cleft asunder ; the Bible ! of that we see contrary interpretations advanced and multiply- ing. Amidst these diversities, amounting to abso- lute contradictions, it is not unnatural that a new method should be sought, that another element of Christianity should be evolved, to become the germ of a large and widening growth. " Away with your Catholic dogmas," the fervent spirit exclaims alike to priest, to preacher, and to people, " Away with your strifes of notions and of words, your hu- man devices, falsely claimed to be divine, of creed and system ; away with your talks of history and the dead old times. Believe with Athanasius or Arius, with Augustine or Pelagius; study Calvin or Socinus, boast of Cranmer or of Knox, listen to Baxter or Taylor or Bunyan, cleave to the ancient Orthodoxy or rejoice in new heresies; pile up in your system all Catholic lumber, a rotten mass, or cut out and throw off all but some single branch which you think still sound and green ; it is all van- ity and emptiness. Things are all dead, when they have fallen off from the Life. Only the Spirit lives and gives life. Turn from forms of church and letter of Scripture, from decrees of synods and in- terpretations of scholars, to the inward teaching. There is the Voice which will never cease or mis- lead, if we but hear and obey. There is the Light which never goes out, be we but obedient to the heavenly vision. The Word of the Living God, no soulless dogma, no questionable letter, is very 136 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. near unto all, dwelling in the inmost heart. This is the true Christ, the real Immanuel, God for ever with us." As Catholidsm and Protestantism both connect themselves so reverently, perhaps some may say so timidly, with the Past, thus appearing to exaggerate the historical element; so this call to the Inner Light which produced Quakerism may be deemed an exaggeration of the spiritual, or, if that cannot be, then an unnatural contempt of the historical, or, speaking more generally, of the whole outward or- der of existence. Types stand now before us of severed harmonies. The Natural and the Spiritual, no longer united in mutual sympathy, have parted, apparently never to meet again ; they stand aloof, fronting each other as in disdain, a dark and swel- tering abyss sweeping, deepening, widening be- tween ; while as we look to the opposite sides, the one gradually crumbles, breaking into thousands of looser pieces, the other slowly thins into vapor, floating away from our sight, the discords still loud and harsh as ever. Shall things continue so ? Shall nature remain godless ? Shall spirit disappear, as if it were not ? Virtually this was the secret, if not spoken, question of Christendom during the last century ; sometimes answered by direct avowal even of Atheism. A more consoling answer came forth in the re-anhunciation of the ancient doctrine, that, as God is the Infinitude of Being, so the Universe through all its forms, all its states, all its courses in space and in time, in the whole, in each thing and person, not only exists by his Creative THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 137 Power, but embodies ideas, corresponds to exem- plars, in his Living Essence. Let me present the doctrine nearer to the Ecclesiastical formula : — The Church, this is presupposed, and its imperfect Christianity, are already dead. The last judgment, by which both are doomed, has passed ; therewith the Coming of the Lord has arrived, though not apparent to any outward vision, yet revealed in the interior perception, through those correspondencies of which Nature is the permanent receptacle, of which History is the monument, and according to which inspired Scripture is always written. The great revelation in this higher order is of the Divine Humanity, wherein the Lord is raising mankind from evil and from error, and introducing within the consciousness influences from celestial and spir- itual spheres of love and wisdom ', we cooperating, meantime, with the divine process through aban- donment of sin and acknowledgment of the Lord. Through which cooperation, moreover, we are joined to the Lord in a union which opens our souls to his perpetual influences. I could by no means think of presenting any- thing like a full statement, or even outline, of what, through centuries and so many divisions, the Church has taught or proclaimed as its Doctrine. I have sought only to indicate what seemed to me certain larger and more significant of its developments. Enough, however, you may be ready to exclaim, and more than enough, to make the everlasting con- fusion appear still more confounded. After these statements, set up as if to be toppled down ; after 12* 138 THE COURSE OF OHKISTIANITY. versions of Christianity, turning it into such con- flicting shapes, overturned each in its time, and leaving dreary ruins, we would look gladly toward something which might promise stability, giving us assurance of enduring rest. But old and new fail us alike. It is a perfect maze, an inextricable la- byrinth, a wide and widening wilderness ; if we should ever get in, as indeed we have some expe- rience, we certainly see no path through, we know no path out. What shall be replied to this ? Sim- ply, that things are not always just what they seem. Discord and chaos as this appears, there is yet in it a real order, a secret concord. We remember, moreover, that it is out of the darkness, the void and emptiness, the days of the unfolding creation are represented as beginning and going forward in their majestic procession. As of the Light gener- ating endless colors, so likewise of the Christian Doctrine endlessly diversified, we may pronounce it at once the same, and yet other. True Religion is always one in essence, always manifold in expres- sion. Human interpretations of it are necessarily imperfect ; the more as men least understand it, the less as they come nearer to understanding it. Christ, it has seemed to me, is in reality Chris- tianity, the entrance of God into humanity. The Church, truly such, the Church so far forth as it is Church, is the Christ embodied, the Christ repro- ducing and prolonging his life and vital influence in earthly forms of human existence. Obviously this fact, the communion of the Divine and the Hu- man, the union of the celestial and the terrestrial, THE CpUKSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 139 makes certain and necessary these numberless ap- pearances of Truth. Recall what has been now brought before you ; drop sectarian names and dis- cords, translate history into idea ; what is the re- sult ? A worship of the Lord universal as his Pres- ence acknowledged in the heart, striving to estab- lish itself among outward realities ; a piety, rejecting whatever it perceives profaning holy things ; a soul, reverently seeking the Lord in those words of his which the ages have kept ; a reason, disengaging the truth, which the words announced, from errors which have perverted them ; a conscience, evolving both from them and from its own mysterious depths an eternal law ; a spirit, through its inner vision detecting reality in appearance, essence in form, permanent quality in winged and flying words ; these, and thousand kindred elements, are earlier and more lasting than sects and churches. They preexist and are perennial in humanity. Only through separateness and partiality of development do they breed contradiction and falsehood and moral chaos. That is, the Catholic and the Protestant, the Lutheran and the Socinian, Fox and Sweden- borg, and, if you will add any other name, are all existencies, latent or open, in ourselves, essential elements of our own natures ;• changes in our states developing each, and imperfection of development giving birth to discord and confusion. Each is true, so far as it reveals and afSrms itself; all are false in their denials and contradictions. To the latter thought let me solicit a more dis- tinct attention. The Catholic is true in his idea of 140 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. the Church, so far as the Church really exists, one living body of the Lord, pure, holy, full of Divine Truth. With equal truth, the Protestant affirms that this high character demands actual realization through other influences than tradition, through communion more intimate than outward sacra- ments ; with equal truth, he refers every question to the mind applying itself to earnest investigation of the Scripture, let him add, every word proceeding, through nature, through history, through the soul, out of the mouth of God. The Church has been right in charging man with sin, and proclaiming the Saviour, and urging the necessity of Repentance and Regeneration. The very rationalist, let not his service be denied ; his is a great, though many may count it a lowly and even mean, task, to search out and state-the religious fact, the historical develop- ment of Christianity, just as it originally appeared ; to bring the past, as if visible, into the present. Not less is the Inner Light a perpetual reality ; lior can men truly call Jesus Lord but by the spirit. When, moreover, this light comes as a splendor of the New Jerusalem, when the glory of the Lord arises as the dawn of a higher day, throwing back its beams over the past, and making even its dark pas- sages radiant, as well as laying them over the lengthening future that the whole overflows with gladness, what shall hinder our Welcome and our joy ? All things, even what may have seemed dead words, and dark, cold dogmas, live and glow in the celestial Love and Wisdom. Severed things are united, the most diverse converge to one centre, THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 141 the scattered limbs of Osiris are drawn, not gath- ered, to the whole body, a secret attraction brings all to their places, order pervades the whole system, all is harmony and beauty. Standing thus, whether we call it at the meeting or the parting of the ways, let us continue to ask for the paths older than churches or the ages ; let us inquire where among them all is the good way, waiting for the answer, whencesoever it may come ; then, lead it whither it may, through joy or gloom, amidst society or in utter loneliness, through calmness, as of celestial spheres, or through turbulences, as of a stormy world, let us follow it on. Be sure it leads us upward. Walking therein, we shall have guid- ance through every doubtful passage ; even if de- serted of men, and disturbed from without, we cannot fail of finding rest to our souls. SERMON X. THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. III. Ethics of the Chttech. Matt. xxiv. 12. BECAUSE INIQUITY SHALL ABOUND, THE LOVE OF MANT SHALL WAX COLD. Moses, Confucius, Plato, these three may be taken, I have thought, as types of the highest ethics antecedent to the Christian era. Each is distinctly marked ; the first, by his perpetual reference of all duty to the divine commandment ; the second, by his steadfast acknowledgment of the family ties reaching through the whole commonwealth ; the third, by his logical demonstration of the essential and imperishable idea of rectitude. The theolo- gian, the socialist, the idealist, they may be deno- minated according to modern speech, as they seek respectively to proclaim divine laws, to reproduce domestic offices, and to illustrate intellectual es- sences. The chemists analyze the various forms, regarded as combinations, which exist for us in nature. They reduce to finer elements, not only solid masses, as earths, metals, vegetables, animals, but THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 143 the water as it flows in streams or floats in vapor, and the very air so impalpable and so hidden. Nay, the light, discovering and glorifying all things, itself deep mystery, as if it were many rather than one, paints its myriad hues over sky and earth, over sea and land, giving a separate tinge to each leaf and flower, and divides itself into the seven lines of the rainbow, continuing in its own nature un- colored, unshaded. Such, however, is the order of things, that the forms or powers evolving these several elements are as really one and integral as the elements themselves, as simple, as perfect. So likewise in the moral order. "We may separate in our thoughts law, kindred, idea ; God, man, truth ; worship, affection, reason ; but the analysis fails of giving us the real fact as it exists in the universal nature. These are elements into which thought resolves them in its chemical processes ; but God holds them united, all whole and simple ; nowhere to him divergent rays, severed lines, mechanical combinations, naked and uncombined elements, but each thing and the whole at once, we might say, perhaps, absolutely simple and infinitely com- plex. Christianity is the religious expression of this law as it develops itself in history. All which there is in Moses, all in Confucius, all in Plato, may be discovered in Jesus the true Christ, when we come to analyze his story, his words, his deeds, his life ; and yet he really is neither the one nor the other, more than nature is one or other, or even all, of the elements into which we may reduce its numberless forms, more than the sun is that which 144 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. chemistry would give us, if its analysis could be applied to the glorious orb. The Christ.comes of God, as radiance of central light ; the Christ comes to man, as inflow of holiest inspirations ; the Christ appears within the sphere of mind, as ideal of peri- feet goodness and beauty. He is the Reality, the Substance of all symbol and promise, which the Apostle proclaims, which the Lawgiver translates into edict for the government of society, which the- Philosopher loves and searches out as the true wis- dom, and the source of human good. I do not find him ever with Moses drawing out a divine commandment into. a separate and defined statute; I do not find him, as has been sometimes said of Confucius, cementing mere natural and social re- lations, in either oblivion or silence of the Divine"- Presence ; nor yet with Plato, speculating on the eternal ideas even of the Just, the Good, the Beauti- ful. Not the less, but rather the more, do I per- ceive these all in: him. He takes them up, as it were, into himself; they dissolve into his essence; they are raised and, transfigured by the elevation and fulness of his perfection. God fills him, and overflows ; man he is, living through every deed and every word ; virtue with him is neither statute to the conscience, nor rule to the conduct, nor idea to the intellect, but the whole interior life which the limitations of our thought divide into these and other aspects and sections, the Divine Manhood vital in every part, spontaneous and complete in all its movements,, penetrating and encircling the entire range of the spheres from heaven to earth, THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 145 from God to man. Forth of the Father, still im- bosomed in his love, he cometh evermore ; to man he gives out, unstinted, unmeasured, immeasurable, the divine influence which fills and exalts him ; his death the symbol, as his life the source of all ; giv- ing no less than himself for the redemption and the regeneration of the world. Thus the Divine Beauty shines in humanity ; thus it dwells in him, enshrined and impersonated. He does not reason about it ; he lives it forth, and in living imparts it. Herein is the soul of Christian ethics. There is no exclusive theocracy, there is no regulated policy, there is no speculative philosophy. No series of rules is prescribed, not even a law of conduct imposed, no system of doctrine suggested. Chris- tianity has been divided, I am aware, by systema- tizers into these two parts, doctrine, precept. In the common use of these words, I am persuaded, it is neither the one nor the other. Draw out any model of doctrine, put it into precise and definite words, pronounce it complete statement of absolute truth ; then set it by the side of some word or deed of Jesus, or bear it within the circle of his spirit ; and see how soon the definition dissolves, the whole system, which looked so large and stable, floats aside, dwindles, thins itself out, and disap- pears like a vapor. Take, then, a precept, or any collection of precepts, or a theory of morals calling itself Christian or philosophical ; hold the prescript up, bound by sectarian limitations, fettered by defi- nitions and logic ; hold it within the morning light of the life in Christ ; and see once more how soon 13 146 THE COURSE OV CHRISTIANITY. this also wanes and fades. Doctrines, precepts, these all are at the utmost but isles which the spirit taketh up as very little things ; not to say how many times they are really less than that, illusions created by the distant and dim mingling of sky or clouds and sea, while we lie gazing on them, deceived and becalmed. But contemplate Christianity as the very and living Christ, the human image of the Divine Soul, borne to us in the ancient message as the spirit of love impersonated in the lowly and risen Nazarene ; there is no shadow, no illusion, nothing little, all grows large and stable and luminous ; a life is here which flows into us, and at once quickens, expands, and enno- bles our whole being. As nature, its qualities, its energies, its processes, its laws, are gathered into each thing, or the minuter portions of things, as the leaf or filament of the flower, or the very dew-drop; as the world, its elements and vitalities and powers are taken up into the human form and growth, so the universe is, as it were, gathered up into the Christian type of humanity and all its manifold expressions. Hence, instead of being anything limitable, anything to shut up in definitions, or to narrow within logic or letter, the true Christianity is really boundless as existence, free, spontaneous, like air or light or life. I have always fiked the phrase which stands as title to a book usually deemed infi- del, " Christianity Old as Creation." Old, we might say, modifying the language, as the earliest revelation of God ; old as the Ancient of Days, summoning them forth, and arranging them in THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 147 their everlasting procession, by the same creative word which has embodied and enshrined itself in the first-born Son of God. Christianity ! let it stand for us as the grand historical expression of the entrance and revelation of the Eternal within the world and the soul of man. Hence, apart from all particular errors in the dog- matic and ethical systems into which Chrisitanity has been wrought, there is this as general, perhaps universal : They mistake its very idea. They take for system that which transcends all system, as the daylight spreads above and beyond all limits ; they take for dogma that which overlooks all dogmas, as the sky overlooks the little islands and hills ; they take for ethical rule that which outlives and sways rules, as the vital power sways and outlives the bodily organs. But into such error, reaching to the soul itself of morality, Christendom has fallen. From a living and immanent power, a sub- stantial and everlasting fact, the history of Jesus soon dwindled into dogmatism, and became the starting-point and centre of speculative and polemic efforts. With the Jewish rabbi who came to Jesus by night, emblem of his own dim vision, as well as sign of bis fearful faith, believing that the teacher was from God because he wrought great works,. Christians, unconscious of his absolute divineness, grounded such belief as they have on the same signs of power, thence assumed his words to be true, whether they felt them such or not, accepted what they read in the Gospels or heard from tradi- tion, and out of these traditions and interpretations 148 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. framed their creeds, sanctioned them by solemn decrees, proclaimed them to be the faith in which alone men could be saved, without which they must doubtless perish for ever. The consequences, as regards ethical thought and moral duty, might be foreseen. The old moralities they may by no means deny ; causes, other than theological, may hinder them from even neglecting them ; but insen- sibly they will be losing sight of them as they fix their minds and efforts on the construction of the new doctrine. Virtue fades before faith ; nay, virtue becomes, by a new transformation, the very form of faith, faith itself having become beforehand acceptance of the ecclesiastical dogma. Love to God may be retained as the first and the source" of all the virtues ; but it is God as .defined by the logic and the authority of the Church, rather than the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Love to the neighbor may be demanded as second and com- plement to the primal law ; but it is the neighbor constituted by political and ecclesiastical sym- pathies, rather than man in all varieties of condi- tion and of worship. Once stranger or foreigner and enemy had been associated in name and in feeling Barbarian, the Greek called and deemed others than the natives of his own beautiful region. Philistine and Chaldean the Hebrew could scarce speak of but with hostility ; nay, with the Samari- tans, worshipping the same Divinity in another place, they declined all friendly intercourse. The old scion is grafted into the new stock. The off- spring of Hebrew, Grecian, Eoman antipathies is THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 149 baptized and reborn into the Christian Church. A new commonwealth this has grown to be, taking up and consecrating the partialities, the jealousies, the very enmities, of the effete systems which it has cast off. God becomes patron of the Church ; wor- ship, of course, becomes sectarian ; and where the appearance is of the widest Catholicism, the Church is really a monstrous schism. To its distorted vision, the unbaptized, infidel or heretic, is Sama- ritan, barbarian, foreigner, enemy. Herein is the germ of the opinion which finally became the dog- matic distinction of Protestantism. Virtue has ceased to be perfection of manhood, and become fidelity to the Church ; virtue, severed from the decreed faith, is but splendor of sin. It is reserved for Protestantism to avow the conclusion, that only faith, accepting the traditional Christ for its right- eousness, is of any avail in the judgment of God. To both Catholic and Protestant, a Socrates, devoted to the pursuit and the announcement of the supreme good, may be no better than outcast from the sphere which he loved ; to the former, a Simon, standing, through the cold of winter and the heat of summer, wet by the damps of night and scorched by the sun at noon, idly reverent on his solitary pillar, is no less than saint ; to the latter, Paul, exalted above all teachers, seems higljest and holiest, not as the grand prophet of Christian free- dom, but as the logical Apostle of the new doctrine, whose centre and soul is justification by faith alone. I have thought we might even say, that the time has been when even the seraphic love of John 13 • 150 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. drew men with less of sympathetic attraction than the storied thunder rolling from his lips over infidel or heretic. Moses drew his ethics from the voice speaking, as he was able to hear, out of heaven. Confucius extended the simple laws of the family to the commonwealth. Plato contemplated in the mind, as in a mirror, the great idea of the beautiful and the good united in one. The Church, wander- ing from its Eden and its tree of life, enthrones the tradition of its Christ, proclaims that tradition a tree of saving knowledge, and calls mankind thither to regain the lost paradise. Its word of God has dropped the spirit from the letter. For the family, reaching from earth to heaven, it has sub- stituted the sect bound together by creed and rite. For the immortal idea and image of divinity, it has established and deified its own institutions of belief, of worship, and of duty. Let no injustice be done even to the lowest state of the declining Church. Let it be remem- bered there is a brighter side to the delineation. The religious and moral sentiment is never wholly absent from any state of society, perhaps not from any individual mind ; and amidst all depravations and perversions, the purer essence dwells some- where, however oppressed, glimmering, if it be through the murkiest atmosphere. To which have been added in the Church all great expressions of the divine sentiment, Hebrew, Grecian, prophetic, philosophic, and, above all, those of the Lord him- self, and of the disciples of the earlier ages. Faith, hope, love; sincerity, devotion, beneficence ; truthful- THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 151 ness of ministry, constancy in martyrdom, purity tiiroughout life ; grandest examples of gentle and heroic virtue ; these have all existed in the Church, these all remained as sacred and enduring memo- rials; these continued, even in the darkest and least spiritual seasons, to kindle a divine enthusi- asm, to excite and sustain devout aspirations. All this, and more than this, may be said even of the corrupt and unreformed Church. At the same time, whether in reformed or unreformed communions, acquiescence in external authority, substituted for faith of love and reason ; unworthy conceptions of God, concealing or obscuring the glory of the Fa- ther ; asceticism, grounded on the presumption of intrinsic evil in nature, passing into degrading esti- mates of man, and vitiating the laws and relations of society ; and other errors akin to these, pene- trating theology and ethics, the worship and the teaching of ages, could by no means fail of obstruct- ing the growth, the full expansion and maturity, of that divine life, whereof a pure and noble morality is at least the flower, perhaps we might say, rather, the fair and fragrant rind, encircling, protecting, completing the immortal fruit. From such errors, hinderances of the heavenly growth, it has some- times come to pass in fact, that, instead of being first to announce great truths for the redemption of society and of souls, and to strive for their instant application to human sins and woes, the nominal and traditional Church has even been slow to receive such truths when private souls have been roused to proclaim them. The Church, in the very 152 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. moment of declaring itself the great, if not the single, instrument of communicating the true life to the world, has not been content with letting divine truth outstrip her tardy, nay, backward steps : she has been foremost to delay and obstruct the higher missions, to check, to silence, to pervert the new prophetic voice. I would it were not true ; but what history has written is written ; there can be no erasure. Such results, even to this last extreme of seeking to quench the spirit, are natural, they are inevitable, in the states and the relations into which through successive processes the Church had been conducted. In its Roman form, the purity of religious ethics, a divine morality, was corrupted, not only by the falseness of its dogmas, but by the worldly ele- ments which it incorporated into itself through its transitions from the primeval humility and service to the mediaeval hierarchy, the pride and pomp of its suprenie dominion. In the Protestant denomi- nations, an equal effect was produced, not only by the old falsehoods which they retained and the new which they set forth as doctrines of Scripture, but by their early and perpetual servility to the Powers, royal, noble, or popular, of the states within which they have grown into existence and recognition. In both, iniquity abounded, was even canonized, either in the church or in the state. It was of necessity, that the love of those many to whom the Church, in some or other of its aspects, ap- peared as divine incarnation of the truth, should wax cold. What have they to love, now that the THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 153 Lord is taken away from their sight, and a dis- torted image is put in his place ? Oh ! that is the real hour of darkness, when the Church takes joy to itself from the smiles and the favors of the godless world, and the devout either linger in it, or go away from it, weeping bitter tears, like children for a mother hiding her shame and nourishing her pride iDy the gayeties with which false wooers have be- dizened her. Thus, all along through the history of Christen- dom, two currents have flowed on together ; the pure stream from the fountain of God, and the cor- rupted course of this world, made up of the thou- sand secret springs and polluted influences for ever pouring themselves into it. Christianism, as we may call it, to mark its schismatic and sectarian character, not the living Christ imbodied, but the disfigured, diseased, monstrous image which has supplanted him in the existing habits and morality of Christendom, is itself to be brought within the domain of conscience and to be judged. It is not enough to say that individual men are good or bad, true or false, according to this law : the law itself must be summoned before the judgment-seat, and the falsehoods and the evils which it has gathered about it must be severed from the living truths and the celestial good which it has compressed and distorted. Only so shall the Christ stand forth, not wrapped about with grave-clothes, but dressed in heavenly robes, and man arise with him, casting off the works of darkness and putting on the attire of light, growing up in the Lord to communion with 154 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. his Father and our Father, with his God and our God. There are two prominent and apparently contra- dictory forms, in which, during our own times, the moral laws are presented in their relation to Chris- tianity. If we go to the assembly which the one collects, we shall hear, indeed, of social duties, of good morals in general ; but the burden of its mes- sage will be this : " Man ! trust thou never, not in the least, to thy morality. This may commend thee to friends and the world. This may adorn thine exterior, nay, make thee happier in life, more serviceable to those about thee, and to society at large. But beware of deluding thyself. Thine own good works are essentially worthless. Thy deeds, the best of them, are all unrighteousness. Where thou dreamest of goodness, there the Divine eye sees nothing but evil. Those are but filthy gar- ments hiding thy deformity, which thou wearest as clean and beautiful robes. Cast them off. Reject thine own both righteous and unrighteous deeds. There is nothing which God can approve and bless, but the righteousness of another strain, with which faith alone invests the soul, in which thou shalt re- ceive, not the desert of thy sin, but the reward of its merit." If, leaving this, we go to the other assembly, we may hear, indeed, of faith and prayer, but the scope of its message is this ; " Pure morality is one and the same with real Christianity. Not to men only does virtue commend us ; it is beautiful also to the eye of God. Not the exterior alone does it adorn, but the interior. Not only happier does it THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 155 make us and of more service to mankind ; it is an inspiration of truth and purity throughout all our relations. The righteousness of God is never an outward vestment laid over us by another ; it is a sincere virtue, a genuine morality, begotten and growing in our own souls and characters. Let this be the sole assurance and pledge of the favor with which God shall bless us for ever." Between these seeming, these actually verbal contradictions, what shall we say ? Much, indeed, we might say ; let it be compressed to something like this : Virtue is indeed all, both to God and to man. But it must be inward power, not outward show ; true substance, not unreal form. Morality, to be anything vital and effective, must grow forth of living principle, and receive life and direction from the eternal spirit. Righteousness must be no filthy garment, but the pure robe woven in the soul, and clothing it with celestial beauty. All must be genuine, nothing false. All must live from the Lord, nothing die, as it must if separated from his life. The mere outside, an empty shell, of virtue, that is worthless, impotent, dead ; never to the superficial and heartless moralist can it be said too plainly, too loudly, " One thing thou lackest." That one thing is precisely what he boasts ; he lacks the true morality ; let him seek that true, living, divine morality, the righteousness whose fountain is the influence of God within the soul, •whose movement is beneficence to men, whose end is fulness of love. To such higher ground the spirit calls us now and 156 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. ever. Pointing back to the past, pointing on to the future, the sins, the fears, the hopes of both, the spirit saith now to man. Thine is a diviner life, a holier character, than thou seest here. Thine it is, in thyself and in the world, to rescue worship from superstition, and charity both from dogmatism and from inertness. Thine, to raise the soul from death ; thine, to behold and to reveal the infinite beauty of virtue, inspiration of God, blessedness of man ; thine, to breathe it as hallowing life through all the forms and relations of humanity. Live truly ; so shalt thou know the Truth. Love ; so shalt thou rise transfigured, and become a perpetual benedic- tion. The Lord shall fill thee, and through thee shall renew and bless the world. SERMON XI. THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. IV. Politics of the Church. Matt. xx. 25-28. ye know that the pkinces of the gentiles exeecise do- minion over them, and thet that ake great exekoise anthokitt trpon them. ect it shall not ee so among you : but whosoevek will be great among you, let him be your minister ; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him ee your servant : even as the son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. A STRANGE combination of words to the eyes and the ears of men in our times ! Politics of the Church! Scarcely less it may seem than sheer contradiction, now that the Church eschews politics, and politics flout the Church. The saints, forsooth, repel secular intrusions, and the statesmen sneer at the religious as innocent of all .acquaintance with their profound mysteries. They part by mutual con- sent, the hermit to his poverty and his prayers, the civilian to his pride of place and of wisdom. This fact, however, of our times, will soon come up again ; the relations, historical and intrinsic, of the divorced powers will be referred to; meantime, let us just turn to the ancient story, which introduces the words that have been read, containing the great 14 158 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. principle of Divine government ; not dominion, but ministry ; not authority, but service. The mother of James and John, together with her sons themselves, has come to Jesus seeking for them the highest dignities in his expected and ap^ preaching kingdom. Of course she knew not what she was asking ; for in that case she would have asked, and they desired, persecution, toil, death, as soon. "What they really wanted is plain enough ; and the answer is full of truth. It has not correct- ed, however, the old mistake. To this very hour the same desire of political rank and favor contin- ues. With one difference, let it be said. Men sel- dom come to Jesus in pursuit of it ; farthest from him in this case is usually deemed best. Ambition rarely trusts to religion as the power to fulfil its restless desires. The Jew, filled with the ' memory and the hope of the Theocracy, naturally sought the aggrandizement of himself and his family from its destined restorer and Messiah. The Roman Christian, connecting his devoutest sentiments with the pomp and power of the mediaeval Church, might hope from it the greatest secular advancement. A change, we know, has come. The Christian, nom- inally such, of our day, has lost little or nothing of the old, selfish ambition ; eagerly as the veriest un- believer, he asks and toils for rank, for honor, for office. But then he detaches this from his religion. So far as this goes, the unbeliever is not more un- believer than he. He studiously separates earth from heaven, State from Church, the secular from the eternal, his own opinions and conduct, as con- THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 159 nected with the world, from his belief and his ac- tions, as relative to the law and the promise of God. Bad as this is, it is well in one aspect. It indicates an elevation in the view taken of Christianity, when men, even so circuitously, confess that it de- mands something higher than their low-thoughted care and deed. The Jew and the mediaeval Chris- tian seem never to have dreamed of any such chasm between the religious faith and the political selfish- ness. But another step is wanted, sacrifice of the lower and selfish impulse to the Divine and univer- sal inspiration. The One Presence, that must be confessed one in heaven and earth, in Church and State, in the eternal and the secular. Hence the man must be one also, and godlike, in his public relations and offices, and in his private faith, affec- tions, and duties. Whatever his secret conviction assures him to be wrong, that he must decline to do as servant or agent of the people or the govern- ment. Whatever an equally secret conviction re- quires of him as duty, that he must insist to do, though people denounce and government forbid. The voice in his own conscience must be acknowl- edged imperative beyond all the words of men, despite the institutions of ages and nations. Let the whole existence pass forth into communication of itself for the service of mankind ; be the highest aspiration to serve, not to command. Thus it is the Lord reigns ; not by grand ministries rendered unto him, but by the infinite ministry wherein he gives himself in service to all. In setting forth more distinctly the relations which 160 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. Christianity lias actually sustained to governments and commonwealths, I have thought nothing could be better than, if possible, to illustrate them by a series, such as painters sometimes give us, of his- torical pictures. The first, if I could draw it, should present the trial of Jesus by Pilate. Let the Ro- man Governor, surrounded by the ensigns and em- blems of the Eternal City, representing the imperial power to which the world yields submission and does homage, sit there on the judgment-seat. Near him let the High-priest stand, clothed in his gorgeous oriental robes, representing the sacredness of those laws which came through Moses, yet commending, as it were, the majestic Theocracy to the Roman Procurator, subjecting even Moses to Caesar. Let each subordinate figure, of soldier, priest, people, go to unite these concurrent agencies of the Empire sustained by gods of the Pantheon, and of the Priesthood claiming oracles of the Lord. Before this magnificent array, this formidable tribunal, let me set, if it could be done, the one soUtary form. The very disciples have fled. There is no show of power, no procession of ministers, no sacred sym- bol ; there stands the man, alone. If there were then some method of transferring sound, like figure, to an outward delineation, I would try to preserve the very tones, as well as the words, of which his- tory has given the outline. These at least we will endeavor to interpret from the silent expressions of the picttire. The trial proceeds. " Thou clairaest to be King" ; this is the charge, this the crown of thorns set on his head at once signifies and mocks. « I am THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 161 King," — I shrink from the attempt to repeat in other words his simple answer ; let me set forth as I can the meaning which it seems to me to involve. " I am King. The Empire which thou, Governor of Judea, servest at this hour, has grown up from the selfishness and violence of human impulses and thoughts. Through proud ambition and worldly policies it has advanced, until it overshadows and controls the nations. The Priesthood which thou, son of Aaron, holdest in charge, is fallen now to servile use, and is but lingering remnant of what at first was but shadow of a nobler service. Both Empire and Priesthood shall pass away. Derived from earthly sources, or corrupted by human sins, both shall disappear as waters losing themselves in the sand. Mine is a priestly kingdom, a regal priesthood, greater than human monarchies or pon- tificates ; mine, the celestial power which shall sub- due to itself all earthly dominions. I am King, consecrated, crowned, enthroned, of the Father ; whence cometh to me all power in heaven and on earth. The hour approaches when ye shall see the heavens open, and from the supremacy of my throne, the kingdoms of the whole earth united in homage and obedience to me." Amidst the crowd whose fierce and frenzied countenances express the fury demanding his crucifixion, one calm brow marks the sublime consciousness, seeming still to say, " From the Divine Love come I forth, king of man- kind ; my kingdom is established in sacrifice and in service, not in appropriation of wealth and of lordships." W 162 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. We have seen the supremacy of service. The next picture should give us a scene different alto- gether in the respective attitudes assigned to the Christ and the Cgesar. Let it open to us the great hall at Nice, nearly three centuries later. Hun- dreds of Christian preachers and bishops are there ; they have come from Africa, from Europe, from various regions of Asia, gathered, honored, sup- ported, by the first Christian Emperor. The silence in which they had been waiting for his entrance is now giving place to the reverence with which they receive him. Here are the trumpets ; they have announced his approach, and the great assembly stand as with dazzled eyes before the mighty Prince, fair in person, heroic in mien, clad in pur- ple, his silken sash raised with gold and glittering with diamonds : more perfectly than ever he seems to them like a god ! On his side I would try like- wise to depict the religious deference, the royal humility with which he appoints for himself a lower seat than theirs, confessing thus the supreme worth of the true faith, the conquering power of the cross. Jerusalem has long since fallen ; but the unseen sceptre, borne from the desolate city, is wielded now by. Roman hands. The glory has departed from Israel ; but the Emperor of the world adores the crucified wonder-worker of Nazareth. The long series of persecutions wherein the State acted in perpetual hostility to the Church, has now passed into the era of mutual deference : the two have become at last coordinate powers in the Empire. We may now pass over several centU- THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 163 ries, until we observe at length, not a single picture, but the successive forms of a moving panorama. Let the first group present, as its central figure, the Roman Bishop, his shepherd's crook grown now to- more than regal sceptre, the wreath of thorns exchanged for richest crown, his lowly seat the throne of Christendom. Rome has become the Christian Jerusalem, and through its pontiffs oracles are announced, not to some little Judea, but to na- tions united as tribes within a larger land of prom- ise. Around their consecrated Father, kings stand or bow, doing homage to him, even as lower down nobles and chieftains, served in their turn by peo- ple and armed hosts, render kindred homage to them. To this highest group in the majestic pro- cession, succeeds the view of a vast assembly gathered under the open sky, peasants, soldiers, nobles, priests, monarchs, then in the midst, above them all, the hermit summoning them to the holy war. He points with impassioned gesture, he looks with fiery gaze, to the East, where the sepul- chre is captive to the infidel : the myriads drink in the spreading enthusiasm. As Peter and his stern hearers go from the plain, see next the march to the rescue. Italy pours forth her sons from beneath Apennines and Alps ; France is there foremost, bold and ready for battle ; Britain giv.es prince and peo- ple from her island realm ; Switzerland from the mountains, Germany from city and forest, rush to- ward the holy place ; the Christians everywhere are on the way. The movement advances over land and over sea, through march and encampment, 164 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. through battle and siege, until Jerusalem rises up before us. The scene closes with the warrior amidst the recovered city, riding in blood to his horse's bridle, then prostrating himself as in low- liest submission before the Crucified. The cross had long ago been hailed as promise of victory. The cross has now come to be worn on the shoulders of embattled men, representatives of a Christendom acknowledging Jesus Christ supreme. Some ages intervene ; then another type of Christianity, amidst the secular powers, is presented. We may have seen the portrait often enough to recognize the predominent form it re- veals. Luther is there ; on the one side of him, Frederic of Saxony, on the other, Leo, the Pope of Rome : representatives of the Catholic Church and the imperial power, and friends of the monk who is now threatening and shaking both, confronting each other with mingled defiance, fear, and hope. I would give a twofold aspect to the Reformer. His strong, stern countenance is all sternness, as it bends itself on the Pontiff and the signs of antique pomp. There seems, I fear, even a proud contempt, I am sure a daring scorn, as if he would love to trample down Rome and its vanities, the Popedom and its idolatrous sanctities. A Christian Goth fighting to the death against the city, where the priest has succeeded the general! Toward his princely patron, his look is other than this, aU gen- tleness and reverence ; it seems a homage not unmixed with servility, a submission as if this man were sent of God to govern. The fierceness, the THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 165 untamed wildness, of the Goth has all passed now ; look, gesture, all bespeak subserviency to a power which may not be questioned. So, while Protes- tantism has continued until now to pursue the Pa- pacy with unrelenting hate, it has doomed its Chris- tianity to servile reverence of the political powers, whatever they might be, sometimes almost crouch- ing beneath them, as in appeal for patronage, or at least protection. The very posture acknowledges at once complete separation and conscious inferi- ority. Thus we have seen Christianity, the very Christ, in the presence of hostile polity; We have seen it, the rising hierarchy, welcomed by friendly power. We have seen it, the patriarchal Church, enthroned over reverent nations. We have seen it at last, the repelled and repelling body, servile to political patronage. Here we may pause awhile to collect our thoughts. We feel that in neither of these atti- tudes, save the first, its Messiah before the Tyrant, is Christianity true to itself. I cannot wonder, that from a church dazzled, like that of the fourth cen- tury,- by the imperial splendor, and exulting in the conversion and support of the Caesar conquering by the sign of its humiliation, should have proceeded those ecclesiastical institutions, which, under relig- ious names, organized into one immense despotism the perverted principles and powers of the celestial kingdom. The very crusades were a natural sequence. Nor is it strange, again, that, oppressed by this over- mastering tyranny, Luther, as WicklifFe before him and Cranmer afterwards, turned to kings and prin- 166 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. ces as representatives of the crushed and silent multitudes in their protest against the wrongs which all felt together. It is none the less true, that these reformers, so doing, failed to present the native, erect attitude of Christianity. Nor has that attitude been yet recovered. The Roman Popedom has been losing more and more, until it is nearly shorn, of its regal strength. The Protestant denom- inations have never been able to acquire it : if ever they have striven to wear the locks which fell from the depressed head, yet it was never a natural growth, and the power could not come with the attempt. This diminution of power in the course of Christianity, is destined, we may by no means doubt, to appear as a blessed fact in the history of mankind. For the present, however, it shows something of its darker side. Connected with the revolutionary deeds, and the equally revolutionary speculations, of the later centuries, it has contrib- uted to the disjointed state in which society, no longer cemented together, no longer holding by any palpable bond of unity, lies severed, scattered, broken, and maimed. If, indeed, I could be per- mitted to continue the representation by ,picture, I should rather choose some mythic image, a silent metaphor, such as the one, so trite because so fit, of the Egyptian Osiris, slain, mangled, limb torn from limb, the parts thrown wide asunder. Or, as emblem of our bereavements and our sorrows, the soul widowed of its life, I might take that other ancient legend. Admetus gained of the gods immunity from death, if he could procure THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 167 some other person to die for him. His friends were not ready to save him at such a cost ; neither his father nor his mother could consent yet to go down into the darker under-world. Only his wife Alces- tis ; she loved him well enough for this. Her woman's heart was strong to accept the burden of destiny. Now, she has gone, but the joy of his life has expired with her. The husband lives, widowed. The dark hour has passed ; for light, he has only deeper gloom. His pomps of power, his splendid palaces, all the appurtenances of his gran- deur, all which remains to him of the departed one, are only monuments of death, memorials and sources of perpetual sorrow : neither calling on the earth nor looking up to the heavenly lights, can he find joy rising up to him from beneath, coming down on him from above. Oh ! better it were that the twain die together, if both may not live ! Let the symbols interpret themselves. Man in his associated state, ecclesiastical, political, social, even domestic, has been persuaded to save himself, his outward existence and prosperity, by sacrifice of his interior and central life. The love wherein alone is his heaven he has surrendered to the abyss of his own selfish ambitions and lusts. He wan- ders bereaved and forlorn, amidst the sorrows which gather about his ancient splendors. Shall his Aleestis come back to him from the depth ? The answer of a higher hope comes even to us; it comes in the inspired question, which promises a divine response. It comes in the greater aspiration, breathed from Heaven, which Heaven will surely 168 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. fulfil. The love is not extinct, only hidden ; the life not ceased, only there is a healing sleep ; the light is not put out, it is only distant and dim. There are souls even now waiting for the better hour. There are souls, praying to the Father, Thy kingdom come. Into souls such as these celestial influences have flowed, which shall sooner or later penetrate society, and quicken the barren wastes to verdure and beauty. Souls of so high mood never ask such meagre things as the coalition of a corrupt Church and an ambitious State ; their prayer is, that both may be renewed ; that the spiritual body, filled with life frorri the Lord, may grow to its perfection ; and that this one life, circulating through all the forms and relations of society, may raise them into communion with itself. They ask that the_ long widowhood of humanity may cease, through the love which flows from the Father, pene- trating its inmost spirit and clothing it with new bridal robes. I cannot, if I would, at this time set forth the changes now passing in kingdoms and common- wealths, through those ministries of love which shall become at last the confessed supremacy. I can only say, that, whatever now exists of good and of just, whatever of divine love and peace, scattered and even hidden over all the earth, shall be taken up into the divine government of service ; that, on the contrary, whatever of conduct, of usage, of statute, whatever of national constitution or of political arrangement in any form, contradicts the divine and immortal principles, must inevitably THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. 169 pass away, just as it certainly ought to pass away. The Christ of God is not more really head of the Church than he is king of the nations. It was a glorious idea, dimly though it floated before the mind, and mingled as it was with darker thoughts and fiercer passions, the idea which attracted those German Anabaptists and the seekers of the Fifth Monarchy in the time of the English Common- wealth. To their eyes, but partially opened, seeing much before them, but little clearly, reality stood forth amidst shadows, shadow-like itself : but it was reality. The true hope of man, even in political and the most outward things, is no other than the government of God, — his will done on earth, even as it is done in heaven. This is Christianity. And the true Christian, in proportion as his faith becomes more vital and effective, ceases to perceive any other government, any other Christianity. To that, to that alone, we may look in fearless trust. We bewail the reverses of freedom and of right in European struggles ; we ought to mourn over the oppressions and degradations to which the heavenly gift is still doomed on our native soil. Those reverses, those oppressions, those degrada- tions, shall, we trust, have end. The clouds, black as they may look, are touched ; and through them, lining their edges and fringes with gold, shines a new sun. That morning light reveals the Love which comes evermore afresh to serve, in ser- vice to govern, mankind. Beneath its radiance and its attractions, the scattered fragments of the godlike Osiris shall be drawn together, not one 15 170 THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY. lost, and higher life shall fill the whole, making all one. A holier strength shall rescue the life of man from death. The floor and the roof of his beauti- ful house, the earth and sky, shall resound no longer his hopeless wail ; a diviner joy shall come over him, brightening even the grave, as it opens the heavens. No tyranny now ; for all shall freely serve. No anarchy now ; for Truth shall reign as king, and the life of its universal law shall be the Infinite Love, SERMON XII. THE WORD OF THE EEFORMATION* Gal. ii. 19. 1 THROUGH THE LAW AM DEAD TO THE LAW, THAT I MIGHT LITE UNTO GOD. If, among those who regard the Protestant Refor- mation as a fruit of the Divine Truth and a germ of human improvement, there were the readiness sometimes manifested to observe festivals and anniversaries, we should have hardly seen the last month pass without its sacred pomps. More than three centuries and a quarter since, its thirty-first evening may be considered as opening the first scene in the grand series of actions with which these centuries have been crowded, and of which, as we look forward to the future, we can scarce deem ourselves able to foresee the greater issues. Two singular facts, the one outward and public, the other inward and secret, — the former a course of deeds, the latter a process of experience, — had conspired to bring this event to pass. During the pontificate of Leo the Tenth, the sale or grant of indulgences, it is well known, had become common * Deliyered the first Sunday in November. 172 THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. in Europe. Between the defenders and the op- posers of Rome, it is true, there has not been per- fect agreement in regard to the efEcacy ascribed to these indulgences. In Germany, however, their power to remit certain penalties supposed to be due to sin was certainly set forth in no measured lan- guage by Tetzel. The magnificent edifice denomi- nated St. Peter's, at Rome, is not only monument of the genius which devised it, but assurance of the vast contributions which, among other things, the proclamations of indulgence secured. Whether intended or not by the rulers of the Church, it is probable, to say the least, that there were those, and those not a few, who hoped to escape, through the powers of the Church procured by these contributions, from the dreadful punish- ments which had been depicted as awaiting them, and to obtain the blessing, where they had feared the curse, of God. At any rate, minds dissatisfied with them have understood them to encourage this groundless hope. So stands it, this potent agency of ecclesiastical wealth and grandeur, during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. The world hears little of indulgences now ; to us, they have passed into old history ; with us, they are remembered but with the delusions and follies into which men have always seemed so prone to fall, misled and bewildered ; among us, there may perhaps be those, far from untaught in better things, to whom the very word sounds strange and new. But the world has come to know Luther's story well. His is a name new to none, strange to none. THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. 173 Loved or hated, acknowledged as herald of dawn- ing truth or rejected as emissary of darkness, he is not forgotten. What is the place, void of influ- ences which have flowed into it through his life ? What the region, at least of Christendom, but is full of his labor ? Yet, at the instant Tetzel is enriching the magnificent Popedom from the treas- ures of Germany, Luther, sorrowing or rejoicing, dwells unknown in his monk's cell, and sometimes goes out to beg bread. This man deserves some thought. Let us glance at the outline of his earlier history. Martin Luther was born of peasant parents the 10th of November, in the year 1483. Born of parents, let it be added, sincerely pious accord- ing to the sentiments of their age, so brought and trained within the bosom of a Church, at once containing in its services the source of salvation, and associating with itself the sacred memories of nearly fifteen centuries. The theology of fear has already gained complete establishment ; his parents receive it, and, according to its genuine spirit, educate him in its discipline and its faith. Their own treatment of the boy was severe ; and so too was that which he sufi'ered in the school to which they sent him. The religious sus- ceptibilities of his nature appear to have been early excited, and in a manner corresponding alike to the theology which surrounded him, and to the severity which aided in calling them forth. To him the whole spiritual sphere was one vast realm of darkness and terror. It might seem likely that 15* 174 THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. the thought of One who was supposed to have satisfied the justice of God and to have appeased his wrath, should do something to soothe the deep and unceasing disquietude ; but even Jesus Christ appeared to him, not as Saviour, but as angry Judge : he turned pale to hear his very name. Eastern, western, and northern mythologies had contributed their different images of abysmal wrath to complete the catholic ideas of purgatory and hell ; nor is it probable that the tender mind conceived otherwise of the Son of God, than as enthroned in mid heaven, amidst angelic legions, mankind gathered and trembling before him, a por- tion indeed loved of him and saved, the many with himself doomed and thrust down to those fiery depths. Dante had already emerged as from the night of woe, already repeated the dark charac- ters written on the summit of the infernal gateway ; the awful threat to whoever passed within ! " Through me he goes into the sorrowing city, Through me he goes into the eternal sorrow, Through me he goes among the outcast race. — Leave every hope, all ye that enter in." Those dreadful visions, read as fictions now, which we contemplate as stupendous creations of an individual mind, were really but the terrible aggre- gate of what the nations for ages actually believed veritable realities. The very Judge, over whom no shade of anger should fall, whose soul should be for ever clear and serene as cloudless morning ; the Christ, on whose brow majestic gentleness is for THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. 175 ever enthroned, from whose eye benignity shines forth, as from a boundless sun, whose hand is up- lifted never but to bless ; the same Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem in the feeling of its sins, the fore- sight of its woes, and wept with the sisters of Lazarus when their brother died, and gave himself, living and dying, freely for us all; even he, so dis- torted has the Christian belief become, can be really thought of as unrelenting executioner of merciless vengeance, stern and inexorable as a Grecian Pluto or a Scandinavian giant despot. The sensitive boy, beaten sometimes at home until the blood flows, beaten continually at school, is thus bereaved of the highest solace. The grave itself is overclouded ; none but the dimmest hope gleams through it. A mightier despotism frowns on him from above ; how shall he bear or escape its everiasting inflictions? In his twenty-second year the sudden death of a friend, either by assas- sination or by a stroke of lightning, and a thun- der storm, in which, as the bolt strikes the ground at his feet, he feels himself compassed with the terror and anguish of death, concentrate and deep- en his earlier impressions. Great literary hopes had been rising before him ; but these he now casts aside. He forsakes the world, and retires to the con- vent. With other pursuits of his sacred course, he applies himself to theology and the Scriptures. Disquieted still by consciousness of sin, he seeks rest, but does not find it. He performs most duti- fully the prescribed works ; but they bring no peace to his soul. Neither in repentance, which he does 176 THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. not perceive to have completed itself in him, nor in love answering to the Divine Love, to which he is urged by a teacher of wider experience, can he reach the end of his long and weary toil. An old monk repeats to him the familiar words, I be- lieve in the remission of sins. Not, the monk adds, that sin is forgiven to David or to Peter ; the man- date of the Lord is, that we believe, as individual men, that sin is forgiven to ourselves. In this con- fession, he begins to perceive an alleviation of his terrors. The Epistle to the Romans supplied him afterwards with the elucidation of his new view. The very phrase, righteousness or justice of God, had been hateful to him, from .its expression of the justice, as he thought, with which God punishes sinners. He rests at length in another interpre- tation, connecting inseparably justice or righteous- ness with the faith wherein alone the sinner is jus- tified, forgiven, quickened into new life. This faith, let it be distinctly remembered, is no other than that God does really forgive me, and rescue me, sinful as I may be, from impending wrath. All is so cleared to his thought by the single principle repeated by the same old monk from Bernard : " The testimony which the Holy Spirit applies to your heart is this. Thy sins are forgiven thee." Thenceforth those horrid images of the mediaeval hell, with their lightning flashes and their burning bolts, pass off into separation and distance. They are not dis- solved, for they still encircle other minds with all their threatenings and all their horrors ; but it is in the far horizon, leaving his sky clear, himself un- THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. 177 scathed and safe. The gates of Paradise seem open, instead of the portals of the abyss ; and for the despair which had stood near him so long, he rejoices in the hope destined to brighten and guide his future days. I am not to say now how far this process of Luther's experience and its issues are genuine expressions of true Christianity. I state the fact as it appears in the story, — the fact which gives us, I think, the Luther virtually completed, which infolds, not the secret of one life only, but the essential principle evolved through centuries of churches de- nominating themselves reformed. The very instant Luther repeats with a confidence grounded on per- sonal conviction, not on baptism or other sacrament,, not on tradition or absolution, not on Pope or Church, I believe in the forgiveness of sins, the doctrines and rites of the Church may still hang about him as uncast garments, but they are no longer elements and conditions of his spiritual life.. It may be years before he throws them off; but even while he wears them, they belong to the time, not to the man. The shoot may be slow or swift of growth ; but sooner or later it will disengage itself from the shell which covered its seed. The flowers of the vernal thought w;ill of themselves swell and bud, they will open their leaves and breathe out their fragrance, above the teguments by which they had been covered and compressed. Bring now these two facts together, the seller of indulgences, the soul rejoicing in the righteousness of God by faith. The proclamations of Tetzel are 178 THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. contradicted by the experiences of Luther. The hostile elements can scarce meet but in conflict. A faithful son of the Church, confident that the Church will sustain his doctrine, who would have shrunk from the excommunication which after- wards he despised and retorted, Luther, as obedient Catholic, goes out to expose errors, such he deems them, subversive of the faith and the hope of Chris- tianity. A holy festival is approaching at Wittem- berg. Its church is filled with relics, set forth in gold and silver and precious stones. Crowds are pressing into the city. Whoever comes to the church that day, so we are told, vhas assurance of plenary indulgence. One great heart is moved by the falsehood. The evening before the 1st of November, fifteen hundred and seventeen years succeeding the birth of Christ, the deed is done. Luther attaches to the door of the church into which the multitudes should press on the morrow a series of declarations, ninety-five in number, invalidating the very hope which draws these swarms of men together. Repentance, not a par- tiaular penance, but the general course of life ; for- giveness, not absolution from the Pope, but grant of the Supreme Father, declared and confirmed by the Pope ; charity, or beneficence, better than all penance or indulgence ; the sin of those who laud indulgences ; these are some of the maxims by which, little as they thought then, simple as we think them now, Christendom is destined so soon to be shaken and rent in sunder. " It is better," such his emphatic conclusion, " through much trib- THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. 179 ulation to enter into the kingdom of heaven, than to gain a carnal security by the consolations of a false peace." What followed this fervent deed of the young monk, now lacking a few days of thirty-four years, I am not to describe. Neither he, nor any of the multitudes gathered at that feast of All-Saints, even suspected. It was one of those great deeds, not done as great, not looking great to the eye, but done simply and looking small, on which the mightiest moments hang. That was an evening such as seldom can be recalled in the courses of the ages. There is one greater, which the heart of man will never forget. Of neither will the results ever cease : if the former reveals the Lord in his divine tenderness, the latter restores his memory from illusions which had gathered over it, and leads us in undimmed faith to the Father. The first, perhaps the best, fruit of the movement thus imparting its electric power to the nations, is indeed precisely this. It brings all men on one com- mon ground, without anything intermediate, before the Infinite Presence. Pope, priest, and Church, in- dulgences and sacraments, all are swept away from the sky, so that the soul of each is alone with the Highest. None may condemn, none can acquit; let men pronounce the divine judgrrients if they will, it is now brought into palpable apprehension, that this is all they are able to do : they may pronounce, perhaps truly, perhaps falsely, but they can never communicate. Power resides only in the present God. 180 THE WORD OP THE REFORMATION. The second great idea contained in this move- ment, not slightly related to the former, regards what is usually set forth as its central doctrine, Jus- tification by Faith. I am far from thinking that the new opinions on this subject were wholly right, still farther from admitting that the expressions through which they conveyed themselves to the world, were true to the meaning itself of the spirit which they sought to draw forth. Excuse me, should I seem for a while abstruse in the few remarks illustrating this grand point. The Catho- lic, that is, the whole, Church to this time appears to have accounted justification essentially one with the regeneration and sanctification of man, the communication from the Lord of an inherent jus- tice or righteousness, in virtue of which he becomes really righteous, instead of being merely pro- nounced such by reason of another's righteousness imputed to him. But this justice, righteousness, holiness, it seems to have been believed, according to the decree promulgated afterward by the Coun- cil of Trent, was not only nourished and aided, but conferred, moreover, by what were denominated the sacraments ; — a sacrament being in fact, according to its definition, a thing subject to the senses, which from God's institution has the power both of signifying and of working out sanctity and justice. Thus baptism confers purity ; the eucharist presents and imparts divine life. The idea of justification, Luther seems to me to have narrowed and lowered, when he limited it to the remission of the penalty or the imputation of merit, THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. 181 as well as to have introduced a kindred error, when, excluding all virtue from it, he restricted its condi- tion to faith alone. Yet, after such abatements, there was an advance made by him, I verily believe, even in his mistaken article of a standing or a falling church. His voice summoned men to some- thing deeper, more inward, more vital, than a justifi- cation which, if verbally true, had become superficial, outward, dead. The spirit which moved him was wiser than he could interpret or fully understand. Through his cruder utterances, through words, sometimes erroneous, often rash, the spirit breathed ; and mankind awoke, as by sound of trumpet, to the perception of a new day rising upon them, to the hope of a truer life and of nobler works which it should call into being. As at this distance we can, let us interpret the voice, not of the person, but of the spirit ; — " Sons of men, be not deceived. It is not holiness, it is not true justice, it is not real and living righteousness, which ye receive in these sacraments of your corrupted and heathenish church. Dream not that the baptism of the priest will make you pure. There is a deeper purity ye need, in which is your life ; only from communion with the Lord can ye derive it. Dream not that the divine life comes to you with the consecrated bread ; it descends from the open heavens, its sources are within ; no sacrament, nothing but the immediate Presence, answering to the filial prayer, can impart it. Away with this vain confidence in a priest- hood, false in its pretences, impotent to confer any heavenly gift ! Penances ! let them give place to 16 182 THE WORD OP THE REFORMATION. life-long repentance and obedience. No such out- side works can make you just; justice proceeds from holier depths. These are dead works ; let them alone. This ecclesiastical Christianity simply re- vives the Pharisaic Judaism. It is faith, inner and living faith, separate from such a body of death, by which ye must be justified ; else ye are not justified at all. Faith alone I Yet not alone, much less dead ; for ii is instinct with the vital breath of God, and grows for ever upward, bearing immortal fruit of the spirit." The Eeformer may have said and done stranger things than he really did : it hinders not, that the' Reformation means this. Human misinterpretations may have divorced charity from faith ; the Holy Spirit unites them in everlasting marriage. Luther may have made towns and fields of Germany ring with the cry, Faith alone ; England may have echoed it through her island-realm, and borne it over western waters to a new continent ; myriads of churches may have taken it to their hearts for centuries : if a dogmatic error, it contains a vital truth. It is another pro- phetic utterance ; another Prepare ye the way of the Lord! another Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand! Substance for shadow ; life for show ; spirit for ritual ; power for form ; the living soul for the decorated corpse. So the human word is always one thing, the divine meaning another ! The opinions of the reformers, the dogmas of the Church, the volumes in which Luther's ardent soul engraved its fiery characters, the variations of Protestants and immobilities of Catholics, the THE ■WORD OF THE REFORMATION. 183 wars of tongue and pen and sword which they have roused, the masses of words and deeds which these centuries have piled up in growing accumu- lation, these all may pass with the racking clouds, but the cloudless sky stands in undisturbed repose ; with the rolling waves, but the deep sea reaches into depths of silentness ; with the fading flowers and sere leaves of autumn, but the serene nature lives on, the richer for every growth, nay, for every decay ; with man himself for ever changing, dying at last, but, gathering within himself all the powers of his life, he moves quietly forward to the fulfilment of his destiny. The islands may sink, or be taken up as a little thing ; but God is. If from these movements of the past, these cir- culations of the spiritual orbs in the expanse above us, I have been able to draw some tones, however faint, of the spheral music ; if from the story of one single evening, now fallen into the deepening lapse of centuries, I have brought any assurance of that iirit which never declines, over which millenniums roll, but it stands ; if, above all, we bear hence with us strains drawing our souls into the heavenly pro- cession, then also shall this lowlier hour pass not away without leaving its benediction. Then to us death is abolished, and life opens an infinite paradise. Outward symbols and forms are transparent; the glory shines through them for ever. Old things disappear ; the oldest and the youngest are become new with the dew of perpetual youth. Through the disciplines by which they teach us, we become dead to the law, whether Hebrew or Catholic, 184 THE WORD OF THE REFORMATION. ancient or modern ; not as sunken below the spirit which it embosoms, but as raised above the thral- dom of its rules and forms ; not as anarchic and lawless, but as quickened by divine sympathies into harmony with the spirit of life, in whose virtue we too live unto God. SERMON XIII. THE MIDDLE OP THE NINETBENTH CENTUEY. Psalm xo. 12. so teach us to numbek cue dats, that we mat applt oue hearts unto wisdom. Another year has passed. How much do those simple words contain ! Winter has melted into spring ; the sun going forth in his strength has quickened the earth, bringing out buds, leaves, flowers of all hue through their successive seasons, and, as summer gave place to autumn, the wealth of its fruitage and harvest ; as the 'sun again retired from us, winter returns once more, not to stay, but to leave us for the year to describe and fill another cycle. AU animal existence has shared in the coming and going of the seasons. From the torpid kinds, sleeping away the months of cold in forest or cavern, to the liveliest, seeming to find everywhere a sphere of action and joy, all have met the year through its unceasing changes with a secret correspondence to whatever it has brought. Nay, could we but have stqod by any one thing through the last twelve months, no matter how little and apparently mean, the flower, or even the weed in pasture or wood, what a complete history would its journal give us ! The seed lying there 16* 186 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. under the winter snow, its mysterious processes through influences of the spring, its breaking through the overlying earth with tender shoot, its daily growth and nightly sleep, its parting into tiny branches, its wonderful formations of leaves, the preparations for bud and flower, and after all these advances, the several stages of its decline, untU it disappears in the general desolation ; a whole history this. Only because so common, is the miracle overlooked. Were it so -that the last spring a little earth had been suspended in the air, which we could have seen every day, and but one such growth had appeared in it through clear- est transparency, — the first time exhibited to men, then withdrawn from every eye, — there would be no end to the wonder and the speculations of men. Now, that for thousands of years a greater earth covers itself every year with myriads on myriads of these magic forms, we pass in the midst of them scarce thinking of their presence. We remember the Arabian tale of Aladdin's lamp, and the mag- nificent creations which arose at his wish. We remember the Grecian story of the man whose touch turned everything to gold. Nature renews each year grander processes of creation and trans- mutation. Wherever her lamp goes with its peren- nial influences, palaces rise and Edens bloom. Her touch petrifies no living thing, but enriches all with fresh and fluent beauty. I have marked when the hand of man has shovelled from some spot every green thing, or a deep slide has carried down with it the mountain earth with its trees and the MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 187 matted roots, how soon nature asserts her own, and the bare clod pushes out its grass and the shoots of new trees. She will keep on her antique way through everlasting recreations. The Arabian tale is but type of each spring, each morning, each birth of vegetation : the Grecian Midas is fading shadow of universal existence. The undulations of beauty are infinite and perpetual. Not less in the life of man than in the growth of nature. A year of the human being ! Suppose a perfect journal of that also, recording from day to day what each has brought. A little child has blessed the family with its tears and its smiles. Who can measure the progress of the infant through these few months 1 The boy or the girl has gone on opening new depths of affection, new powers of thought, new capacities of virtue. The youth has been ripening to maturity. And the man or the woman, if true to the secret laws of being, has been quietly growing into richer and serener beauty of soul. Nay, the old have not escaped the vital law ; and if, as must needs be, the outer por- tions of nature have entered into decline and decrepitude, yet the inner elements of love and faith and hop& may bloom in a spring which has already touched them, while winter still covers other things ; as a sweet and humble flower I have seen all fresh and fragrant when yet the drifts were not gone, and hence, perhaps, they called it snow- drop. True virtue grows for ever. And if during the last year there has been a single soul among us constantly striving for perfection, that one fact is 188 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. greater than all revolutions of nature or of nations. It has become a trite saying, The good man strug- gling with adversity is a spectacle for gods to see ; whether struggling with adversity, or more danger- ously, perhaps, assailed by prosperity, the man whose one aim has been to maintain truth to the Divine Laws, is the noblest spectacle which the year has given us. Our published journals have overflowed with notices of Rome and the Pope, of France and Napoleon, of Austria, Russia, Hun- gary, and, nearer homcj of diurnal politics and Cali- fornian gold. Our religious presses have continued to circulate the anniversary reports and speeches, and to tell us how it is with the several denomi- nations of Christendom, and their projects and pros- pects of wider extension. I complain of none of these things ; I wish only we did not so much for- get greater things. These absorbing topics may, for aught I know, be unknown to the angelic spirits, if such there are, who come as ministers of heaven to earth, but sure I am, that, if the angels serve men at all, they are drawn by strongest attraction to the soul whose life already reaches into their own sphere, whose love is one with theirs, and to whose vision external things appear lovely only as types of the internal reality, and of worth only as means of perfection. And if, through worlds unseen by us, they spread reports of human things, it is how the battle goes of the spirit with the flesh, of the celestial with the infernal, of the divine with the demoniacal ; how the soul rises from the abyss and walks in light; how its heaven is shining MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 189 above it, and its earth nourishing the hidden life. When, in fact, these things are passed out of the present, and have become parts of universal history, holding just their ovi^n place and proportions, then are Rome and Pope, France and Napoleon, Aus- tria, Russia, Hungary, politics and gold, all turned into metaphors, and made worthy or worthless as they signify the grand or the mean souls whom they represent. Nations and churches are tempo- rary, dissoluble compacts ; men and women are im- mortal and indissoluble. Nations and churches crumble with the earths and palaces and temples which they buUd ; men and women outlive them, offspring and kindred of the Power which spread the earth and the sky. Bach is pilgrim, and his progress is for ever upward or downward. Let it be but upward, and the angelic ministries are always ready to serve him. So great the history, though for one year only, of the private soul ! But we overlook the palpable man in the vague appre- hension of an abstract mankind, as we overlook the single snowflake in the broad drapery of win- ter, or the single bud in the universal blossoming of spring. ReaUy all things are individual. They may be like each other ; they may be linked into each other; they may receive and give mutual influences ; they may become communions ; but they are individuals after all. I may seem to have spoken with disparagement of the remarkable movements abroad and at home. I say they are nothing to the birth and growth of the soul. But they have really greater magnitude 190 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. than our thought has given them. The mere writ- ing of so many letters is a small act ; but the soul of a Milton combining them into the expressions and excitements of its creative energy, and so quickening ages by the entrancing melodies which they contain, is far enough from small. The mark- ing of canvas on the walls of some temple with several colors is nothing to speak of; but the mind of a Raphael, converting them into images of grandest life, elevates paint to significance. Rome itself with its. Coliseum, its St. Peter's, its relics of ancient arches and columns ; Rome itself, not as the city embosomed in the Campagna, but as spreading republic, colossal empire, or seat of the imperial bishop, is of little import. But as name standing for so many men and women as have entered into its long history, and have at once helped to make it this exponent of themselves, and received from it an influence ennobling or debas- ing their natures, it is of greatest significance. I cannot much care whether Pius the Ninth be called Pope, Bishop, or Fisherman, whether he wear the splendid robe which he has worn thus far or doff it for a dress simple as that in which George Fox went out in the beginning of his holy warfare ; but it is something I cannot be indifferent to, that Pius the Ninth be really the faithful man, fulfilling his des- tiny by perfection in the service of his brethren. Whether a Bourbon or a Bonaparte bear the name of chief ruler in France is not the question, nor even whether king or president, hereditary or chosen ; the heart asks something which distances and dwarfs MIDDLE OP THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 191 these idols. Let the millions living on its beautiful soil grow to the fall perfection of human nature ; be the institutions such as shall aid all, depressing none, raising none to unjust power. Our sympa- thies have gone forth in behalf of the Hungarian insurgents ; but we can have no other interest for them than for their Austrian oppressors and their Russian invaders, that the oppressed may be re- deemed, that the tyrannous may become fraternal and just, that all may combine their powers for the freedom, the virtue, and the peace of all and of each. When I turn to our own country, resound- ing as it has resounded this year, with those voices of sympathy, I could earnestly ask that they were deeper and proved themselves more thoroughly sin- cere. "Whatever be the destiny of these American States, to remain for ages a confederated republic or to pass into new relations and originate various communities, adjusted to changes yet unforeseen in the structure of society, this is the precise end which all should seek, — that the whole people whose shores are washed by the Atlantic and the Pacific Seas be complete in all the virtues of humanity, and that their relations and their laws be all accom- modated, not to the aggrandizement of any, but to the perfection and therein the well-being of each., Man for King, for State, for Church, has been the tacit or the spoken language of history ; man for the greatest good of the greatest number, has been the virtual theory of an economical philosophy* Both suppose the individual less than the aggregate. A higher principle must be confessed, — all for man. 192 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Governors, kings, societies, churches, laws, for each individual ; the solitary man, no longer their tool, but the object of their perpetual ministries ; all united for service of each. So may we review, with profound religious interest, the intense energies called forth, even though sometimes seeming to be suppressed, on an outward plane, and even im- paired as well as stained with blood. They are movements on the dial-plate, showing us the hour to which the human mind originating them has come. They are more, they are heavings of the chaos over which the spirit is even now brooding ; these must precede the influx of light and order. After six days comes the Sabbath. But I may have anticipated another recollection. The hour which closed the last year, closed also the first half of the nineteenth century. And what a period! I know there is an illusion in distance. As the largest objects, mountains, lakes, oceans, grow small and finally lose themselves in the far off obscurity, while the smaller things, hills and trees and brooks, appear to the eye greater, and remove by their presence the sight, it may be, of what lies beyond their horizon ; so do the things of our own age swell into disproportion, the remote dwindling and finally lost. The historical period of the world can be hardly regarded as yet covering more than three millenniums, if even so long a time ; as many thousands, which common tradition assigns to its present order of existence, how many in reality none can tell, having disappeared in the lapse of time and the loss of authentic monuments. Yet MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 193 within this brief period what mighty changes! Nation after nation, like wave after wave, has risen and lifted itself up, then sunken beneath the rush of higher waters, rolling, heaving, breaking, in perpetual undulation. Religions, sciences, litera- tures, have shared in the revolutions. It was to their contemporaries a darkening of the sun and moon, a falling of the stars, a quaking of the earth, a divine judgment and wrath, when Babylon fell, when Persia sunk, when the Grecian cities were taken up as parts of a wider Macedonian realm, when Jerusalem and therein Judea perished, when the very city proudly called eternal yielded to the terrible invasions of northern swarms ; when, in one word, any great empire has been subdued. So not the less is there eclipsing greatness in the successions of rising dominion. To the Babylo- nian what so glorious as Babylon ? To the Per- sian, as the empire of Cyrus ? To the Greek, as Sparta and Athens and Thebes ? To the Macedo- nian or the Roman, as those conquering dynasties ? And so through later ages. Yet great as these wonders of growth and decay, T have felt as if we might not be wholly deluded in seriously deeming the last half century preeminent in the magnitude of its issues. All things had been prepared, and were ready, waiting for the hour. Christianity — pure or impure — had completed eighteen centuries, and gathered into its nomi- nal sphere all the more powerful nations of the earth. Protestantism had riven the bonds of a hard conformity, and revealed the strength 17 194 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. of the individual. England, stirred by the new spirit, had rejected the Stuarts, and through suc- cessive struggles had defined partially, rather, we may say perhaps, implicitly acknowledged, the rights of the people. Her American colonies had repeated, and finally carried farther, the acknowl- edgment. France had joined her, and, imbibing the spirit into mind conscious of oppression, had reproduced the scenes of the English Commonwealth and the American Revolution. And during these hours of convulsion, she had brought out the mighty power which should sway them for a while ; which should concentrate the roused energies of the na- tion, and shake the earth by the intensity of their action. The first days of the opening century closed a fruitless correspondence between the two great governments of Europe, looking toward the establishment of peace, and determined war as the stern arbiter of their quarrel. The fourteenth of June wrought the field of Marengo into the wild story of Napoleon's earlier career. Thus passed in blood the terrible dawn of the nineteenth century. So, we might add, the whole of its dark morning. The first word, I could almost say, which those whose memory begins with either of the first fif- teen years of the century ever heard pronounced was war ; the first forms with which their imagi- nations were touched were those of fierce men contributing their proportion to the millions whose blood drenched Europe during that awful baptism. A longer period of peace, interrupted indeed by occasional revolutions and wars, but disturbed by MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY no general conflict summoning Christendom to arms, has succeeded. Amidst those more conspicuous scenes, surviving as well as preceding them. Science, especially in the departments of nature, and in its applications to practical use, has advanced with wonderful ra- pidity. The proud monuments of ancient and mediseval grandeur, obelisks, pyramids, towers, temples, castles, may never be equalled ; higher free- dom, gentler manners, simpler and purer worship, may supplant them by products less costly and grand, but more harmonious with the celestial ideas of love and communion. Literature has be- come more vital than during the century which felt the withering influences of licentiousness enthrone(^ as in the second Charles, and of irreligion infecting Christendom with its unholiness and its sneers. England, France, and Germany, to say nothing of our own country, have given us, if not the fulfil- ment of our aspirations, yet at the least prophetic intimations of truths, yet to be said or sung, or, bet- ter still, lived from the heart of man. Religion shares in the tendencies which have been developed. The half-century has been indeed characterized by criticism ; its very wars, the severest criticism, wherein the sword, not the pen, wrote out its bloody sentences on the institutions, the dynasties, and the men, whether of the past or the present ; science and literature, judgments also on theories and traditions, quite as much as original discoveries or creations ; nor could Religion exempt itself from the inquisition which leaves nothing unquestioned. 196 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Doctrines, the growths of ages, established by reverened authority, have been examined through their several phases from their origin, and dealt with as the individual mind may have thought due. Protestantism, full it seemed of impious au- dacity, first dared to assail the authority of the Church. The criticism has gone on, and the Bible itself is submitted to its arbitrament. I know men fear this unrelenting process. They say the foun- dations are endangered, if not actually moved or thrown down ; they tremble sometimes, as if irreligion should sweep over us as a deluge, and bear away whatever is left of the old reverence and the devout trust. For some reason, I cannot my- self share in the apprehension. I look with cheer- fulness and hope on any the most searching criti- cism of theological doctrines and the Christian records. If the Church can be overthrown, it ought to be overthrown. If the Bible can be di- vested of its divine character, it ought to be so divested. The law is universal. Every thing must live which deserves to live ; every thing deserves to die so soon as it shrinks from inquiry, and fortifies itself by custom and hereditary homage. God is imperishable ; error and sin pass like shadows and darkness. The Bible, the Church, the State, all things, so far as divine, and wherein divine, are im- mortal ; so far as undivine, and wherein undivine, are mortal. The discrimination and the judgment can be made only by most thorough research. God speed, he surely will, every honest inquiry ! Meantime, there is something greater than intel- MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . 197 lectual inquiry and belief. It was not the stream or the water of the Pactolus which enriched it with beauty : it was the gold of its sands. The stream of thought has been flowing for ever, and its waters have come to us in thousand currents or eddies, calm and clear, or dark and disturbed, sometimes pure and sunny, sometimes shaded by passing clouds, or stained and discolored ; but the gold is always there. The soul of goodness lives through all. For that we may be searching for ever ; that it is our blessedness to gather into our bosoms and cherish for ever. And in reviewing the last half- century, I rejoice to believe this consciousness has been rekindled. We have looked at certain exter- ternal manifestations : really, they may be regarded as expressions of internal elements which could work no otherwise than they have worked ; they give us secret ideas, scarcely defined, it may be, to the very spirit, yet developing themselves afresh with each new fruit of their growth. War was the blind struggle for what now proclaims itself in the grand formula, however poorly realized. Freedom, Brotherhood, Equality. Science has passed from abstraction and isolation into the cities, the fields, "the roads, the seas, the mines, everywhere it can find man to bless. The laws of celestial order and their archetypal correspondence with the course and methods of nature and of human life, are accepted as principles of a divine communion, and men essay to construct society according to their appre- hensions of such laws, deemed demonstrable and 17* 198 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. everlasting as those of the celestial luminaries and of earthly forms and movements. These men may be mistaken; but they certainly show the secret aspiration, they body forth the prayer, perhaps un- spoken, for human redemption. The tendency-appears in aU things. Its chief de- velopments at this moment are twofold ; the intel- lectual, in the form of search through the shows of things for the universal reality ; for the inner mean- ing of nature, history, scripture; for the per- manent truth which each brings with it; for the Divine love of which the whole is effect and sym-; bol ; and the practical, in the form of action, for remedy of the evils which the ages have accumu- lated and left as an unwelcome inheritance to us ; and for inspiration or production of the good which we hope for the coming future. By such expres- sions, infantile yet perhaps, but articulate and musical, art, literature, science, religion, action, are penetrated. To me they seem prophetic. I re- joice, not so much in the things themselves, as in their promise. I see something of their defects; but I hail them as angels of God, though their robes may be now and then soiled with the dust of this earth. I cannot forbear to name especially the movements in behalf of peace, inspired by the angelic voice which told of the birth of Jesus, and by the divine spirit of his self-abandoning life ; in behalf of freedom, generated by faith in God's infinite justice, and by sympathy with his enslaved, outraged, sorrowing children ; in behalf of temper- MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 199 ance, urged on by the horrid spectacles of vice, pollution, and poverty, which indulgence created ; in behalf of a social order embodying eternal laws in human fellowship, to which as suggestions of the greatest problems, if not as their adequate solutions, every humane impulse seems at once and instinctively to draw us. Of these movements and others akin to them, compared with the more generally recognized forms of religion and benevo- lence, I shall not undertake to define the relative significance and worth. I specify them the rather, that their religious claims and character seldom connect themselves with the more regular order of worship, while in reality they should, and let me add they must, let me predict they will, come to to be confessed and felt as necessary and integral portions of our common Christianity. Two words, consecrated by the life of Jesus, have become al- most appropriated to the vocabulary of contempt, — reform., philanthropy. Yet the unseen spirit which is now moving the course of humanity breathes them forth as they were never uttered be- fore, and by the powers which they signify will yet overturn and renew the earth. In reviewing at such length the year, and the series of years which it closed, I have left perhaps too little time for those practical applications which the hour suggests. Something I cannot forbear to say. Standing thus between the five decades which have left us, and the five through which some of you will live, what, we naturally ask is, our duty ? Near their commencement a preacher 200 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. spake these words : " Of the period of which we have seen the beginning, none of us can see the end. Long ere the century closes, all of us, young or old, rich or poor, will be numbered with the dead. The silver cord will be loosed, and the golden bowl broken, and every spirit will have re- turned to the God who gave it. It is a reflection, in truth, to which no ignorance nor barbarity hath rendered the human mind insensible. Even amid all the licentious worship of antiquity, it was upon these occasions the plaintive call of the herald, — Come to those solemnities, which no living eye hath seen, and which no eye will see again." Not so now. There may be listening to my voice some who shall, fifty years hence, hear, if even one may not himself utter, the words which shall then recall the lapse of such a period, and try to depict the en- larging future. Few, however, can hope — if hope it be — to greet that day. The grave has already closed over most who saw the century begin. Their survivors can be with us but a little time. Those of us whose lives began near its beginning shall hardly see its close. Parents, children, hus- bands, wives, brothers, sisters, the venerable, the youthful, the loved and revered, have already, how many! passed on to where no eye sees, where no voice is heard. No voice, save the silent call, Come hither. That call we for ever hear; we must soon obey. Departed ones, whether ye are with us unseen, and hear us speak our love, or whether ye dwell in dim and distant separation, unknowing of us as we are unconscious of your MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 201 presence, it is not long that we shall stay behind. We are following fast. Following fast to the ocean mystery whence ye came, whither ye have re- turned ; whence we came, whither we are return- ing. Might we be worthy to join those who fought the good fight, who finished their course keeping the faith ! How shall we become thus worthy ? How pre- pare ourselves alike for the service of a higher com- munion and for the duties and the destinies of the majestic period into which we have entered ? To answer the question fully were to exhaust the whole round of human duties and obligations, To answer it briefly, but in universal language, were to repeat the great words, Love the Lord thy God with thy whole soul, and, as he loveth thee, so love thy brother. If anything more precise and definite be sought, then I think it may be compre- hended in a few thoughts : a single sentence might comprise its moment; — Let us adjust ourselves to the divine processes of the age. But this demands earnest investigation. Amidst the chaotic upheaving, wherein we may see little but a formless void, an abyss overspread with dark- ness ; beside a very Babel, where the diversities of tongue and the conflicting ambitions seem to scat- ter all abroad in utter confusion, one may, perhaps, despair of finding anywhere aught of order, of light, or of unity. Yet despair not. Wait but a while, and the spirit is seen brooding over the abyss, light shines, order rises, godlike, from the depth. Wait but a while, and the confusion of 202 MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. tongues shall disappear through the presence of the celestial interpreter revealing the One in All. Be slave to no party, to no man. Listen only to the serene voice, obeying which we shall be free. This obedience may loosen friendship, and compel us to go alone. But feg,r not solitude. If men will go with us into the mountain of God, let us rejoice in the communion ; if they prefer to stay below with the crowd, and to worship idols, we may mourn for their blindness and servility ; but we must not join them. A calm, humble, non-conformity produced through communion with supernal love and truth, to this we must come, and therein we shall readily discern the divine in all things. This adds to earnest investigation of the divine processes in humanity the twofold attitude of separation from the evil, however consecrated by religious homage, however honored by ancient usage, however fortified by human institutions, and of union with the good, however new to religion and to usage, however alien from the laws and establishments of men. Here is the great battle of humanity ; we must bless men by hazarding their curse. We must live the divine life, though it dooms us to constant isolation. The world will tell us we must go down into its ways, to do good to those who pursue them. We must turn away from the deceptive promise and walk with God. We must do it earnestly, relying each on himself, " As only in his arm the moment lay Of Tictory." MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 203 Thus Thrasybulus, when he led his friends to deliver Athens from the thirty tyrants, told them it was necessary so to do that each should be con- scious to himself of being chief arriong the causes of victory. So they did. The tyrants fell ; the day was won. SERMON XIV. THE "WANT OF THE AGE. Psalm iv. 6. IHEEE BE MANY THAT SAT, WHO WILL SHOW US GOOD? LOED, LIFT THOU UP THE LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE UPON US. ME^ have often a half-belief, seldom a whole sight of their greatest want. They seek every- where an uncertain good ; it is only here and there that the diviner aspiration becomes distinct and articulate. It can hardly be without use to search out, if we may perhaps find, the true want of this age, — the aspiration, however dimly perceived, how- ever feebly uttered, which is yet struggling toward consciousness and prayer, Signs of the times, characteristics of the age, such are our.every-day topics ; whether we are conservative or reforma- tive ; whether we approve or condemn ; whether our review be full of eulogy or full of criticism, and our anticipation be bright with hope or dark with fear. Every now and then, also, we believe, some crisis has come, or is just at hand ; nay, let the thinker be accustomed to connect the passing fact with the spiritual idea and the scriptural language, he shall deem this crisis strictly such, a judgment, — the day wherein the Lord himself is coming THE WANT OF THE AGE. 205 forth in the greatness of his power to separate the good and the evil, and to arrange men, according to their characters, on the right hand or on the left. And sometimes, again, they will sneer at this solemn method of viewing things, and assure us that the universal order goes on unbroken after all these events so mighty to our view. "A great crisis is impending," this man earnestly exclaims. " There have been a thousand just as great since I can remember," that man retorts with a smUe, all incredulous, half conternptuous. There is truth in what both say ; for, rightly viewed, everything is great ; the crisis, the judgment of truth, is everlast- ing ; and no sooner does the man, or the church, or the nation bring out a latent spirit into open action, than at once a trial comes. The spirit enters into relations the most searching and perma- nent with the universe and its laws ; it passes into the immense furnace which proves every metal, and severs the imperishable gold and the corrupt- ible dross with unerring precision. So the day of judgment is always near. Not these, however, are the aspects under which I would now invite you to study the hour. Not its crises, its signs, its characteristic features, are before us, but its want. What is that? This question different persons will answer differently. Let us seek to answer it according to the highest insight which it is in our power to attain. If we should propose it to the predominant spirit of the world around us, the answer would seem to be, — let me not say, would really be, but certainly 18 206 THE WANT OF THE AGE. would seem, — Material commodity. There is, in- deed, the incessant toil for wealth, the want for ever new which avarice creates, but cannot satisfy. Yet this is not commonly the ultimate purpose. Let wealth be gained, it is not generally hoarded. The rich man — and that almost every young per- son hopes to become, and even the aged, in their despair of attainment, deplore they cannot be — seeks for himself a commodious, or even lofty man- sion, grounds as extensive and as adorned as he can command, a table richly furnished, and all things, in a word, connected with his outward estate, ad- justed at once to his own convenience and to the admiration of others. By such means he would not only supply his wants, but separate himself from the people around him, and have those who pass by point him out as the rich or the great. Nor can we fail to see how to such ends all things are made subservient. It is not strange that labor should take this direction, for labor brings wealth and naturally increases the thirst for it. It is not strange that commerce goes the same way, for commerce concerns itself continually with gain, and seeks in this its crown. But out of this domain, in the very realm, one would presume, of mind, the fact is much the same. We have be- come familiar with the boasts of progress in science and its applications to practical use. We go back to Bacon, and celebrate the method of re- search which he marked out; then, through the long and brilliant line of his successors, we recount the greater names, and those discoveries which THE WANT OF THE AGE. 207 have made them illustrious. Two facts herein strike the mind; the first, that the predominant tendency has been to the natural sciences; the second, that these have been sought with primary reference to the commodities of outward life. A strongly marked distinction is made between the theoretical and the practical ; and while the former is not seldom scouted as worthless, the latter is raised to the highest esteem and ascendency. It aids navigation, we are told ; it multiplies the re- sources of commerce ; it improves the soil and its products ; and through such means it enables men to become rich, and to surround themselves with accommodations and luxuries. Beyond this, more- over, the connections which bind together the differ- ent parts and varied interests of a nation are found, not in moral affinities, but in pecuniary advantage. The elements of its union are not sought in rev- erence to God diffused through the whole people ; in recognition of a secret justice which governs and judges all, of a vital love whose currents flow through the whole being ; in obedience to the com- mon laws of unchangeable rectitude and of abso- lute freedom ; no such thing ; but they are reduced -to the simple constituent, advantage. We can scarcely have failed of hearing the Constitution of our own country reduced to little else than a treaty of commerce, and the Union, which it represents, to a compact of reciprocal advantages. So Finance becomes the great problem of the state, and the economist supplants the statesman. Even Eeligion is reduced from its high and spiritual supremacy. 208 THE WANT OF THE AGE. and made handmaid to Wealth. I have actually heard and read appeals to men in its behalf ground- ed on the help it ministers to wealth. " Pay so much for support of the Christian ministry ; more will come back to you through the increased security and value which it shall give to your prop- erty," just so men have been seriously urged to sustain religious institutions, — to support the Gos- pel, they dared to call it. Through these several indications, men are expressing their sense of what they need. I do not think they do justice to themselves ; they have higher aspirations, which somehow fail of expression : may they find utter- ance and response ! The simple statement shows, that this outward utility constitutes by no means the real, however it may be the seeming, want of our age, of any age. Would to God men might come to see it, to feel it ! First let me say, however, that I would have these commodities acknowledged and made sure to all men as they are able to avail themselves of them. I verily believe them meant of God for the common inheritance of his children ; but not as ends, not as ultimate issues, not as objects of highest desire and pursuit. And my complaint of labor, of commerce,, of science, of politics, of religion, is not that they help men to outward advantages; but that they are so perverted as to produce at least the tacit feeling, that such advantages are the first and last things, — ends, not means, and secondary even as means. The great want is not found here. Where is it THE WANT OP THE AGE. 209 found ? Rather, What is it ? I ask again. When I have looked over the state of the world ; when I have thought of the sins which prevail, and of the woes which they bring ; when I have then turned to the contemplation of the Divine Presence and the celestial order, and how the Infinite Love must intend something greater, something more like itself than I saw before me, the question has often come to me whether there is not some effective remedy, some Gospel, which will not only declare the prom- ise, but insure the fulfilment, which will add to the sweetness of its own word the power over the soul wherein it shall be felt as a life and a fulness of peace. And yet I can think of no word more pen- etrating than Father ; of no power more energetic than his life in Jesus Christ, flowing into the heart of humanity, redeeming men from sin and unit- ing them in love ; of nothing wJiich shall bless us if his Spirit dwelling in us be forsaken. Still I can hardly help asking, whether, after the failures of the past, there may not be hoped before long some angel whom men cannot choose but hear. Or is it so desperate a case that it must be given up, and we regain such content as we may with the stern destiny to incurable evil ? Surely there can- not be lack of resources in the Infinite Being. Surely, too, we might think, there is a capacity which may be reached in every soul of man. How many remain unreached, notwithstanding ! And of those whom heavenly voices reach, who has received and obeyed them wholly ? Must it be so for ever ? 18 • 210 THE WANT OF THE AGE. This involves the question, whether our want is of other and higher message than has come to us. If Christianity be the highest and greatest of pos- sible revelations, it might seem that the hope is baseless. But a little thought corrects the im- pression. Christianity may be perfect and inex- haustible, though never as yet fully interpreted. It is revelation of the Father ; it is the living Image of the Unseen Love ; it is the Spirit of the Eternal ; it is introduction of illimitable Laws into human life and society ; therefore it is itself illimit- able. But we may, notwithstanding, transcend all past interpretations and applications of this celes- tial manifestation. And if a Moses, a Paul, a John, or, in later times, a Luther, a "Wesley, a Swedenborg, without the common methods of in- fluence, through the spiritual powers with which in different kinds and degrees they were endowed, have gone so far down into the depths of human sympathy and faith, and have built up families of mankind on the ground of their great ideas, why despair now ? May not the Father raise others as nearly such as changing exigencies require, and send them out on their great errands ? Perhaps they have spoken already ; perhaps they are speaking now ; their living voices or their written words may be now gone forth to rouse the sleeping, to quicken the dead, to reveal unto men that king- dom of God which is within them. Then it may be no single man of wonderful gifts whom the hour demands. I have- heard one of our contempo- raries lament, and just so he laments in writings THE WANT OF THE AGE. 211 which many have read, that the poet is wanting. Perhaps he may be in error, not only in regard to the service from which he may hope, but in regard to the method in which our age is to advance. He may perhaps sigh for the man separate from his brethren, and leading them forward, while it may be meant that no such separation occur, but that rather all move on together, stirred by heavenly inspirations and obedient to one voice which sounds alike to each. He may possibly be dissatis- fied with the man who loses himself in humanity. He may forget that the highest state is that in' which the greatest becomes the least ; that it is the Lord only who for ever serves, for ever unseen ; and that, in proportion as we approach him, we lose all separateness from others and disappear, absorbed in the whole. The poet, such as the world has deemed him, shines by himself. That is not the want ; but of the man no more shining by himself than a ray detaches itself from the light, or a par- ticle from the air, or a drop from the ocean. The poet such as this rises into the prophet or the saint. Such, be it poet, prophet, saint, might not a few only be, but all the people of the Lord ! Call it which you will, the soul of the thing, the real essence appearing under all forms, is one. The true poet is prophet, and sings not from him- self, but from the Spirit of God which overflows within him. The true prophet is saint, and speaks, not of a dead thought, but of a living love, which worships and obeys, as well _ as sees and declares the vision. Blessed always are the pure in heart. 212 THE WANT OP THE AGE. for they shall never cease to see God. They shall see him everywhere, so as he makes himself seen. Nature shall be alive with him, man shall become his perpetual image. History, from its outline through all its details and relations, shall shine out in his radiance. Every deed of man, every word spoken or written, so every book and every thing, shall discover the secret spirit whence all proceeds. The heavens are open, and angels ascend and de- scend for ever ; there is wanted only the pure heart, the prophetic soul, to perceive the everlasting fact. What is wanted, then, is precisely this prophetic soul. Recall the things which mankind have thus far gained; the material commodities, whether furnished by nature or gained by labor ; the discov- eries of science and the applications of them to useful arts ; the relations which commerce has established among men, and the forms and meth- ods of society which they have produced ; the laws, moreover, of intercourse, which they have helped to reveal or establish. Then add what has been achieved in the realm of mind, apart from what is merely outward and practical, the culture of thought and character, the creations of art, and the demonstrations of pure science. All these exist for something greater than themselves. Of some I have spoken as seeming to indicate out- ward advantage as the want, certainly the wish, of men. Of each there have been minds toiling in pursuit, with an irrepressible energy. For higher issues than they saw, men have been so doing. Every fact, the moment it exists, becomes pros- THE WANT OF THE AGE. 213 pective and productive. It falls as seed, which can never perish, however it may be hidden or for- gotten, into the great field of Time, and goes to swell the harvest. The prophet sees this germinant power, this growth of God ; and, taught by the spirit that fills him, men learn to avail themselves of the divine gifts. There are analogies in all his- tory. Let me speak of two : the one, in religious faith ; the other, in scientific investigation. Chris- tianity had existed now more than a thousand years ; it had gathered around its few simple ideas and the majestic life from which it grew whatever the philosophies and the mythologies of the nations could impart ; it had become a mightier Rome than the Empire which it supplanted, when the spirit pervading it found expression in Dante. He may be praised as the poet ; he may be extolled for his mighty powers ; but his precise distinction is this, he embodied medieval Christianity. The currents of centuries ran onward to him as the pre- destined reservoir, and rose again out of him as out of a living fountain. The whole gathered itself into this one ; and, henceforth, even when all the mythological drapery falls off, the living faith stands, grand and monumental, for the quickening of man- kind. The other case is Baccn. Over the whole realm which science had won, nay, which it might hereafter v/in, he turned his acute and discerning eye. What was known and defined, he transferred to his delineations ; where obscurity rested over the scene, he stated it ; by what methods we might go forward into the unknown, he endeavored to teach 214 THE WANT OF THE AGE. men. So that he stands likewise before us, not as a person, but as the embodied science of his period ; — a vantage-ground, moreover, to which the inquirer may go up, thence to look further oif into the intellectual region, and to see more clearly the paths by which it is traversed. _ The age wants now something vast and pro- phetic, the spirit which shall take up into itself all the truths which all the generations have learned ; which shall perceive wherever there is defect, wher- ever there is redundancy; which shall detect the errors of past thought, and open the course of future research ; and which shall do this, not from the lower ground of vanishing appearance, but from the higher ground of permanent reality. The fact is indeed never overlooked, but always under- stood, its meaning pronounced, its life evolved. So science becomes prophetic. Perceiving everywhere the communion of heaven and earth, the presence of God in all things, contemplating the creation, not as an old and decaying work, but as an activity for ever renewing itself, it revives the song of the morning stars. Its filial joy bursts forth, into the shout with which angels and spheres greet the per- petual incoming of the Father. To meet this new revelation, the ages and jhe nations seem now to gather in waiting and expectation. To the man whose eye sees the vision, whose soul drinks in the spirit, all things come with angelic ministries. The East serves him with its mystic silence ; the West soothes him with its gentle evening ; the South sheds over him its pure light ; the North makes him THE WANT OF THE AGE. 215 strong with its strength. To him ancient ages and nations unroll their divine volumes, modern ages and nations give forth of their deed and thought. To him the future is inspiration and hope ; from the present, which fills him with its life, he goes calmly on, neither staying in the old nor hasting to the new, sure of the final issues. Christendom, with all its spiritual ideas, survives in his soul. As it goes from the banks of the Jordan to those of the Tiber ; simple as in its early heralds, grand as in its later growths, signified by the upper chamber or the open field in which it once spake, or by the vast cathedrals and the solemn pomps of its triumphal day ; there is never a divine idea which it an- nounces in words or bodies forth in emblems, but -it enters into him, and rises in his soul to the high and comprehensive sphere of the Life in God. Nor is he prophet only. The man of business does not more readily, more constantly, more decis- ively, convert all his skill and all his resources into means of achieving his ends, than he whom this spirit fills converts all his perceptions and powers into methods of universal improvement. He is true saint ; asking no retirement, for God is ever with him ; seeking neither temple nor wilderness, for he is alone temple of the Highest ; practising no austerities to chastise himself, for his whole nature is sacred ; performing no penances, for he has only to raise his eye, and see the Father ; curs- ing nothing, for his soul rejoices in the universal benediction. The Holy Spirit which teaches and 216 THE WANT OF THE AGE. hallows him, separates him from men and the world, not by exhausting his human sympathies, but by gathering them all, alive, fresh, powerful, into his soul ; that, be there joy or sorrow, good or evil, vice or virtue, wealth or want, he is touched by it ; blessing oppressed innocence, denouncing enthroned wrong ; remembering the forgotten, hon- oring the despised, receiving the outcast, and, even when the leprosy of vice has driven the guilty from the presence of men, prepared to take them to his bosom, fearing no pollution from the touch. His saintly pureness not only surrounds him with a pro- tection against evil, so that if he were to pass through flames as of a fabled hell, they would part in sunder and leave him unscathed, but empowers him to communicate of his own life a blessing to mankind, so that if the bad repel him, yet open souls will accept his presence and drink in its peace. It may be secretly felt, after all, if not openly said, that this is a want which, supposing it to exist, can never be supplied ; either the delineation is alto- gether shadow, or no man can ever fulfil the destiny to which we seem appointed. Be it so or not, let each seek to come as near it as he can ; remember- ing always that the possibilities of manhood are far from having been determined. The resources of any soul are as yet greater than we have learned. There has been one Son of man, at once presenting the ideal of perfection in his life, his deed, and his word, and strengthening us by his immortal spirit to live even as he Uved ; one Son of God, empowering THE WANT OF THE AGE. 217 US also to become children of the Father ; one Messiah, through whom we, too, may be consecrated as kings and priests ; one Prophet, in whom the Everlasting Truth shines into our souls that we may give it free course ; one Image of God's Pres- ence, revealing the perpetual reality ; one quicken- ing Power, wherein we are dead to sin and alive unto God. So we may never despair. Honored of men for intellect, for action, for eloquence, we may not be, perhaps ; nothing can hinder us, if we but strive earnestly and without ceasing, from attaining the conscious union with the Lord, Avhich shall make us fruitful in every good work and word. And if no single person makes the ideal complete in his own life, yet each may receive his own gift, and all united in the harmonies of infinite diversities may round and fill the entire circle. This conducts us to the great want. It is not of one holy prophet ; it is not of many such ; it is of no man as an individual ; — it is of that which speaks through the prophet ; which lives and blesses in the saint ; which unites men in one aspiration, one hope, one destiny; which is alike begin- ning, and midst, and end of all : the Spirit of the Living God, connecting us indissolubly with him, and quickening us to obey for ever his own law of love and service to mankind. This, this present inspiration, is the precise want of the age; the first and perpetual want of each human soul. Let the many, toiling for outward conveniences 19 218 THE WANT OP THE AGE. or for selfish pleasures, say, with restless anxiety, Who will show us good? Be ours the earnest prayer, which alone breathes out the inmost instinct of man. Lord, lift thou up the light of thy counte- nance upon us ! SERMON XV. THE PROPHETIC POET. T>A.v. xii. 3. THET THAT BE WISE SHALL SHINE AS TEE BBIGHTNESS OF THE FIBMAMENI. Among the later announcements from Europe, I have noted this one : The Poet Wordsworth is dead. The fact is noticed, that is all. No com- ment on his character ; no statement of his age ; no other allusion to his history than is conveyed in that one word, the Poet. There was a time when that word had a sanctity and grandeur. In the simplicity of earlier ages it indicated a relation to higher spheres of the soul than those of the earth. The poet was thought to derive his power from a celestial source ; it was gift, of the Muse who loved him ; nor did he sing but in obedience to the energy which wrought in him. The Hebrew bards, with a simpler conception of the invisible powers, uttered their songs and their prophecies — so we call them — with a seeming consciousness that they were not their own, but words of the One Myste- rious Being ; and when the Jewish Christian came to quote the language of Grecian poetry, he referred 220 THE PROPHETIC POET. it to prophet of theirs, showing that to his mind the radical idea of prophet and of poet is one. Of modern poets there are to whom this feeling has not been wholly unknown. Milton, beyond most' others, deeming the genuine poet himself a true poem, gathering, arranging, embodying, quickening the highest and noblest elements, and confessing the inspiration which, he says, must be devoutly invoked for the w^orthy fulfilment of his grand idea. But usually within these last centuries poetry has been degraded from inspiration to art, and so has let itself become invention and fiction rather than rhythmic utterance of Divinest Truth. Nay, it has been made, as the Socrates of Plato said of Rhetoric, a sort of culinary thing ; nor even that in the best way. Not the solid nutriment of the soul has it professed to bring from its kitchen, but the delicacies and ornaments of the feast. To give pleasure, not to impart life, has been its declared end. And why not, when it had ceased to live originally, spontaneously ? — when it had become imitative and secondary, in- voking the Muses as those did who meant their prayer, and letting God go save where the act de- manded that he should come in as complement to the design ? Again, the prophet-bard is not mere singer ; he is wise man, the wise man of his age. It must be so. His inspiration — a real fact, not a fictitious embel- lishment — is from the Infinite Wisdom. The holy light shines into him, purges away the mists, dis- pels the shadows, and reveals the eternal laws. The vision excites those melodious thoughts which THE PROPHETIC POET, 221 naturally go forth into words and forms of har- mony. The element of prophetic wisdom dwells, open or hidden, in every soul ; the true poet, the prophet of wisdom, is he within whom the element is opened to clear consciousness, united with organs apt to give it form and expression. So his words become oracles. They pass into proverbs ; and men, unaware of their origin, and unconscious of the musical philosophy, repeat them and acknowl- edge them laws of life. I have heard of some person remarking, ludicrously enough, that Shake- speare had collected a great many common sayings ; and, I suspect, most persons, if they were to read the old Grecian poets, would be struck with the observation how little they contain which experi- ence and education have not made already familiar. Theirs it was, not to invent anything strange and new, but to weave into their strains so much as they perceived of the wisdom which lies before us and sleeps within us all the time. Nay, the true poet used to be no visionary recluse. Moses was the deliverer and lawgiver of a nation. David was a monarch, now fugitive, now triumphant. The great Hebrew prophets stood before kings and nobles, and spake to cities and nationSj heralds of the heavenly power, speak- ers of the eternal word, representatives of the law which all should obey ; penetrating to the con- science through their exposures of sin, moving the hearts of the proud by their discoveries of the aw- ful mystery, cheering the poor, the sad, the oppressed by their promises of redemption, and depicting a 19* 222 THE PROPHETIC POET. celestial order on earth which has not yet ceased to shine as fire by the night through which man is still wandering in the wide, deep waste. If no- where else the prophet-bard has wrought impres- sions so deep, it is not that his office is other, but that it has been less perfectly fulfilled ; that, in dimmer light or feebler power, he has failed so clearly to discern, so strongly to utter, the Divine Idea. And yet we need not forget such facts as this one : that the mind which had sung the Christmas Hymn and revelled in the boundless beauty of Comus, and which nourished in itself the hope its Paradise at last accomplished, spent the splendor of its midday, the self-devoted cham- pion of freedom, in the turmoil of politics; and only when desertion and blindness came over him with the wreck of his cherished commonwealth, abating no jot of heart or hope, Milton steered right onward to the work of his life, the speaking of majestic words to the posterity which be felt to be his audience. Such was the poet once. And I could scarce restrain these thoughts when I read that Words- worth had really gone to the great assembly of the sainted ones. If this were the place or the time, I should by no means deem myself able to assign his rank among the bards of all ages. But there is one thing which has characterized him, and which, I think, entitles him to a religious remembrance. It is not any pretence — for he spurned all pretence — of devotion : it is not any innovation — though there is something of this — in his method of writ- THE PROPHETIC POET. 223 ing : it is not his reverence — though he felt it in a degree to beget, as some of us believe, erroneous opinions on great subjects and attachments to vicious institutions — of the ancient in religion and in the state : it is, that, earlier than most, — probably beyond his own distinct consciousness, — he imbibed the prophetic spirit of that philanthropy which is striving through such sorrows to bless our age, and let it flow without restraint through his greater works. Homer went back from his own age to find heroes in the Trojan war. The Grecian dram- atists sought theirs either in the religious mythology or in the traditional histories of what had become ancient. Pindar celebrates victors in the Games, and draws his materials from the heroic times. So Virgil ; and even Lucan, selecting a nearer subject must yet extol the hero. In the Christian ages, Dante goes into the three worlds of religious mys- tery ; Tasso follows the crusaders ; Spenser allego- rizes the virtues and the vices ; Milton reverts to a primeval paradise ; and Shakespeare, whether he sympathize more or less with the common man, leaves us to infer the diviner relations and affections. Thomson had indeed opened more widely the sources of the beautiful in common nature ; and Cowper had invested common man with a real, though stern and sombre, religious interest. Words- worth perceived the heroic principle in every-day life, and essayed to bring Lt out in strains which should emulate the older epic. They sneered, they ridiculed ; grave critics saw no authority for this in their books and rules, and it would never do. 224 THE PROPHETIC POET. But the poet saw, and walked calmly on. The shepherd-boy, reverent in still worship on the moun- tain-top,; the poor woman, left of her husband for the wars, wasting away as wife and widow ; the solitary sceptic, in his sorrow and his aspirations ; the pedlar, gathering and imparting wisdom as he went on his quiet way; maternal love, which idiocy but wakens to deepest tenderness ; in a word, hu- manity just as truly revealed in the field as in the senate, in the lonely cottage as in the lordly palace, and beautiful as creation and image of God, not as warlike energy and conspicuous heroism, revealed to him the highest elements of poetic beauty and religious sympathy. He needed not the great mountain, seen through the whole circuit of the horizon and clothed with gro^sfth of corresponding grandeur ; he was touched too deep for tears by the pansy at his feet or the violet giving out its frag- rance by the tiny brook in meadow or pasture. There was nothing so little, but he saw it expand- ing to infinitude. I think we may perceive some parallel with a kindred spirit of our own New Eng- land ; and, as Channing preached and wrote in his fervid prose, so Wordsworth spoke through his numerous verse; the divine imaged in filial humanity. Not far from the time of his birth was born another, who, for his hour, seemed to sway the destinies of Europe. The name of Napoleon Bonaparte is familiar to every ear. Appearing, through the strength, the rapidity, and the sagacity of his powers, amidst the confusions of the French THE PROPHETIC POET. 225 revolution, he advanced in a little while to the summit of power. Italy, Spain, Germany, Hol- land, are prostrate beneath him. England seems left almost alone against an indomitable foe ; and on her shores, it is often feared, he will land an in- vading host, before which who shall stand ? Nel- son has fallen in the midst of- victory on the ocean ; the possibilities of the future by land and sea are all uncertain ; lives the man now, dwells there any- where the power, to stay this new scourge of God ? Wellington leads the hosts of England ; they come from the snows of Russia and the fields of Ger- many ; the strife grows deeper, more terrific ; alter- nations of victory and defeat ; hope and fear mingle in awful apprehensions : the imperial chieftain dies at last, a fallen man, on a distant isle. The poet, meantime, amidst all this din of arms, while proud men are cherishing their ambition in the hopes of what this confusion may work out for them, dwells in his own calm thoughts ; sharing, indeed, in the common feeling, and sometimes, in lofty tones, cheering his countrymen to manly daring and deed, but for the most part meditating the muse whose gentler voice should bespeak the divine peace of the soul, and draw mankind by its lyric power from wild and rocky savageness into the opening city of God. The noise of those battles has long ago ceased ; the thunder of the cannon, the trampling of horses, the terrible fire of infantry, the cries of the fallen, the rush and the shout of the pursuing, all are still now. Still, save as men renew the tale, or as Europe and the world con- 226 THE PROPHETIC POET. tinue, and will continue, for ever, to drink in the secret influence of those mighty ideas which bat- tled in the awful death-struggle, and which survive in their everlasting courses to organize new forms, to develop new energies, to work out new and un- told effects. The poet's voice, still then as the quiet brook in June, scarce heeded, perhaps, in the louder sounds of the fray, has risen higher now ; and through thousand organs is echoing to our race the message of Divine Humanity. What comes of self expires with self. The ambition which sets its foot on thrones, or which exults in personal fame, passes and perishes ; the love which seeketh not its own, but blesseth for ever God and man, lives eternal as its source ; its divinity can never grow old. The warrior was greeted with loudest exultations, fields poured out their laborers, cities their myriads, men, women, children, to meet him and raise their loud invocations of life to the emperor; the poet all this time walking alone among bis hills, or beside his lakes, scarce observed in the streets of cities. But which is felt in the hour of holiest thought ? Which breathes deepest inspiration into the soul when it gives forth its secret prayer? Which touches the fountains of sincerest sympathy with universal nature and with sorrowing, toiling man ? I may dilate with the am- plitude of those stern feats by which fields are won and nations subdued or rescued, but I feel myself knit to the divine and the human only when the infinite beauty is so revealed that I perceive and feel its secret attractions, and can no longer choose but worship and love. THE PROPHETIC POET. 227 The poet, more nearly than most in our age, ap- proaching the primitive idea of the man filled with God, and raised above himself, has gone from us. He had outlived his contemporaries. He had seen the fruit of his sowing ; otherwise than the Roman chieftain who passed in the midst of his days, he was happy in the opportunity, of death ; the one, by dying so early, escaped sight of the evils im- pending over his country ; the other, by living so long, went forth amid the blessings of quickened souls. The sentiment of humanity, the devout and beneficent life, which many have sought to make real in the cloister or in great achievements, he had seen in the lowliest pathway of life, making all one serene Sabbath, and had sung in words which mankind will not willingly let die. If thus I may seem to have spent this little op- portunity of addressing you in mere eulogy of a man, a man too whom many of you may neither know nor care for, I can only say this is not my purpose. It is not the person I wish to commend ; it is not any distinction by which he is severed from others I would seek to make prominent. A prophet — suppose unconsciously such — of the great future, wherein love shall supplant hate, and peace shall succeed war, and freedom shall dissolve all slavery ; who has spoken what the heart asks, and deepened the humane current which he helped to flow, let him only stand as one symbol of our hope, one ex- pression of the secret spirit which we meet when we enter into our closets, and shut the door, and are alone with the Father. The virtues and the 228 THE PROPHETIC POET. defects of the man ; the excellences and the im- perfections of the poet ; the clearer tones, or the indistinct utterances of the herald ; the place, high or low, which he may deserve and hold among the good of all ages, I have hot presumed to ask : only this I have said, A voice has fallen into silence which, amidst turmoil and strife and hate, heralded the era of love. I bless God for the morning and the spring, for the sun and stars and earth, even for the flowers which the melting snows reveal ; and shall I not the rather bless him for those souls whose life has passed into mine ; for those gentle forms, even though my eye hath never rested on them, and the sky of my native land has never stood above them, which have been one so long with the dearest prophecies of the heart ? It is in no man's choice, the destiny to eminence among men, or that of lowness and obscurity. Not only the martial energies which have in these later days awakened admiration toward a Napo- leon, but those intellectual powers which have brought the thoughts of a Wordsworth into in- timacy with so many kindred minds, are second- ary, not primary. No power even of the body, much less of the mind, is to be contemned ; but every capacity of both is to be filled, ennobled, sanctified, by higher influence. The Word which the Hebrew Scriptures proclaim is inscribed on every form of nature, in every power of the soul ; let the eye be but purged of its film, that it may see and read. The spirit which the Christian Prom- ise assures is nearer than the breath itself we THE PROPHETIC POET. 229 breathe, broader than the atmosphere which sur- rounds the world ; let the heart be but open for its everlasting inspirations. The unseen Power which the ancients dimly apprehended and impersonated in the Muses are with us and in us ; let us but in- voke and obey the One Love, which they shadowed once. I read lately some statements concerning the presence and the power of the electric fluid, that it spreads throughout all nature, that it fills every atom ; nay, that a single water-drop contains enough of its latent energy to charge a large bat- tery four hundred thousand times over. So the farther we recede from the gross and dead phe- nomenon to the finer and delicate influences of nature, do we reach into the sphere of hidden powers. Could we bring out, not the electric powers latent in the water-drop, but the electric spirit itself, of which this is symbol, the latent gift folded up in the human bosom, — in your souls, my friends, and in mine, — enough might be de- veloped to charge the great battery of the world. The lightning flash should go forth, not to burn and scathe and blacken the forms it touches, but to quicken, to glorify, to irradiate with celestial beauty the life and the orb of humanity. There is a divine electricity filling each soul, unheeded ; in- finite within its every atom, who shall lay it open, and let it go forth on its creative missions ? Therein is our true wisdom ; all else, delusion ; all else, child of time and of earth, making us, perhaps, cunning and thrifty ; this only, daughter of eternity, coming in Heaven's own spirit to renew the world 20 230 THE PROPHETIC POET. and enrobe its children with celestial radiance. Here is the spring of all generous activity; the fountain of practical virtue. The divine order of the universe arises in the soul as the sun-like law of the Highest ; and the new spring becomes ' alive, and opens to divinest influences and progressive perfectionment. More than poet, more than proph- et, the humblest soul attains to be; the form itself which the poem translates into words and melody, the reality which prophecy foreshows in the brightest visions of its spirit. They that be wise with this highest and lowliest wisdom, shine as the brightness of the firmament. SERMON XVI. CAN TE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS?" Matt. xvi. 3. TB CAN DISOEEK THE I'ACE OF THE SKY ; BUT CAN TE NOT dIsCEBN THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES ? It is strange how little we perceive of the mean- ing there is in things. The seasons come and go, full of divine voices and influences ; yet how sel- dom are they to us more than successive hours of growth, liiaturity, decline, and silence ! Day passes, and night ; we work and talk and sleep ; what is there more ? Earth, air, sea, sky, with the bound- less forms of each, are open to us continually ; we take their first gifts, and rejoice in them ; we study perhaps something of the facts which they present, and out of our observations, our analogies, our generalizations, we construct sciences, as of geol- ogy, chemistry, electricity, astronomy, and the like. We see the numberless tribes of animals, from the lowest, as it joins unconscious vegetation, to a higher rank of existence, up to the largest or fairest which swims in the waters, or soars in the air, or walks the earth. Encompassed by everlasting mystery * Preached August 1, 1852. 232 CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? around us, we feel the presence of the same mys- tery within us, revealing itself, yet remaining mys- tery, in the forms and powers of our own nature. Yet, much as we see, much as we hear, how little do we see, because we do not look and seek ! how little do we hear, because we decline to listen and obey ! The heavens are over all ; why so closed to us ? The spirit of love encircles, penetrates, and fills the whole of nature and of soul ; why so remote from our consciousness ? The centres are as near us as the surfaces ; why dwell we so constantly upon the outside, the shadow surrounding us with its dimmer and floating shapes, the substance escaping from us, unseen, perhaps unsought ? "When we notice this prevalent oblivion of the Highest, it enters at once into the common course of experience, the ignorance which has marked, each age of mankind concerning the secret powers which excite and fill it. The eye sees what it' is fitted to see. The mind foretells according to the discernment which it has acquired in its relations to the past and the present. All of us see the sky, the sun and stars, and the clouds ; all of us hear and feel the air as it comes in the calm breeze, or as it sweeps by in wind and storm. Most of us acquire also some knowledge of the order in which these things appear, and so from day to day, from night to night, are able to foretell some of the greatest changes which are near. To the spirit, as looking into nature, so likewise looking into soul, into his- tory, into the monuments of men and nations, there is as real a presence of the true sky, the CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS ? 233 spiritual expanse which overarches the creation, with its infinite sun and its everlasting stars ; as real a breathing out from celestial spheres of the vital air which quickens and refreshes the soul, and is indeed life of all existence ; and so to the spirit the secret elements and powers of each age are open as in sunlight. Hence to the worldly man, things look according to one organ and law ; to the heavenly man, they look according to another organ and law. And as the former is seer within his own range, so the latter is seer and prophet within his range. Those Jews, superstitious Pharisees and unrev- erend Sadducees alike, who looked at evening to the sky and understood its signs and promises of the morrow, could also look back into the antiquity of their own nation, and discern amidst its dim shades the majestic shape and the grand truths of Moses. They knew full well that God spake by Moses. It was with them infidelity to deny this, scepticism to question it, and a curse to be igno- rant of his law. Moses had shown signs from Heaven ; it was he be sure who for long years had fed the people in the Arabian desert with the food of angels. Who had done the like 1 Such, when they stated it to their own thoughts or to the ques- tions of others, the ground on which they were willing to set their faith. As always, at least next to always, that of which they were distinctly con- scious in the elements and grounds of their belief, was other than the true reality. The religious sen- timents of the whole nation, through more than a 20" 234 CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? thousand years, had been gathering themselves about Moses as the great prophet of Grod, the great lawgiver of the people destined to surpass all others. These sentiments, identifying worship and patriotism, attaching both to Moses and his law, growing deeper and broader through successive generations, filled the Jewish mind in the age of Jesus. Not really that Moses gave the fathers bread from heaven, much less that he spake divine words of which all ages may receive virtue and life, did they believe ; but then the ancestral rever- ence and pride kept the belief alive, substituting a national and religious prejudice for an individual and spiritual faith. What was divine in Moses, therefore, eluded their insight ; they saw but the grand figure which time had painted and was con- tinually enlarging on the clouded outline of antique story. Had it been their lot to live some centuries earlier, the same principles precisely which consti- tuted their belief in Moses woald have bound them to his enemies. Suppose them to have been Egyp- tians in the days of the Pharaohs ; they stand there before the king when the returning fugitive comes into the sublime presence. The old murderer — for it is time now that he should be hoary with age, and some may not have forgotten how he fled so long ago — is here again, and with strange and proud words. He has seen the Lord, so he de- clares, in an eastern mountain, and received a mes- sage from him. He need go no farther ; these Egyptian Pharisees, these Egyptian Sadducees, at once see. God, they know well enough, spoke CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS ? 235 ages ago by some old prophet ; — they would have named him very likely, though his name is forgotten now ; — that prophet gave sign of his mission, and this rich and mighty Egypt is monument of his truth. For thee, vain Hebrew, whence comest thou?. where thy sign from heaven ? The unrelent- ing Hebrew goes on notwithstanding. " The Lord who hath appeared to me," he declares, « calls thee, great king, to let the people go free whom thou boldest in bondage." If it had not been enough before, it is more than enough now, to put Moses out of all fellowship with king and court, as well as Pharisees and Sadducees. To expect that Egypt shall dismiss from its service a multitude so large of servants from whom so much labor can be secured ! To presume that of his own consent the Pharaoh shall surrender such a source of income and magnificence ! They know no God demand- ing this ; it is either dream of enthusiasm or malig- nant imposture which calls for any such thing. So Moses, lonely old man, goes away : the great men and the wise men see no sign, nor the devout either. Moses goes away from the Pharisees and Sad- ducees at the court. He goes to his own kindred. There, among the bricks and in the mortar are the hard and weary laborers, to whom he tells his story. With them, I know, nay, with the king himself, he prevails finally ; but here also, we can scarce doubt, he found cold welcome. " Ah well, those are fine things thou hast told us, and we are really tired of these long toils. But there is no use in seeking 236 CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? change ; the time has not come yet, and if it had, thou art not the man for the time and the work. God spake by Abraham ; he continued to speak through Isaac and Jacob, even to Joseph. But the age of revelations and miracles is past. It is only fancy of thine that thou hast seen the Lord. At any rate, give us thy sign." Ah, my friends, the Moses just coming back from the sheepfolds and pastures wherein he had been serving so long is quite other than the Moses whom now three thou- sand years have been surrounding with their hom- age and enlarging by their reverence ! No Pharisee, no Sadducee, greets the new Moses. Every Phar- isee, every Sadducee, throws before you the old Moses, not to cheer and strengthen, but to discour- age and weaken, for that Moses is thus far final. It were but repetition of the same fact in varying circumstances to follow down the courses of He- brew history, naming Elijah, Isaiah, and other of those grand prophets, the godlike heroes of their ages ; to depict before you Paul in Jerusalem, at Ephesus, at Athens, at Rome ; to suggest the later names of which nd time is wholly barren, shining with their own light, eclipsed though it may be by the secular darkness, mistaken for light, throughout Christendom. Nor need I pass beyond this line of Hebrew and Christian traditions to give you Pythag- oras, either at Crotona or fleeing from it; Soc- rates, in the streets or markets of Athens, or wait- ing death in its prison ; or other sage, other lover or speaker of wisdom in East or West, ancient or modern. In each several instance, it has been the CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? 237 same ; there has been the Pharisee, with his sanc- tities of creed and his ritual of worship ; there has been the Sadducee, with his pride of science or of wealth, and his frosty and freezing sneer, and the two have joined hand in hand, if not heart to heart, to repel the fresh faith, the living worship, the con- sciousness of God and Truth, which could not choose but give utterance to its soul. The signs of those times when Jesus lived ! Wherever there is Pharisee now or Sadducee, calling himself Christian, he sees them plainly- enough, and only wonders that the old generation was blind. He does not need to send, with John from his prison, to ask whether the Messiah was there. The blind saw, touched by the moistened clay ; the lame walked, strengthened by a mighty word ; the lepers became clean, the deaf heard, the dumb spake, the very dead heard a quickening voice, and demons were powerless against the new revelation. A modern Pharisee may readily sum- mon Apostles and early disciples before him, and make trial of the witnesses, balancing probabilities and arguments ; even the Christian Sadducee stands astonished at the demonstrated miracles, which men saw who could not be deceived, which men reported who would not deceive. This Jesus, it is clear to him, has shown greater wonders than even Moses. There were, indeed, the powers of Moses which compelled the tyrant to relax his grasp of enthralled men, and there were the won- ders of the desert : but this prophet, like unto Moses, only greater than he, certainly wrought 238 CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? wonders and put forth powers as really forming the miracle ; nay, has he not through the whole shown us virtually the clearest sign from heaven ? Be- sides all this, as the modern Christian reviews those times, there is another thing which comes in with the miracles of Jesus to confirm the whole. Those were times which needed, most deeply needed, just this revelation. Leaving out of the case, what yet is so manifest, the religious and moral apostasies and corruptions of Greek, Roman, and Barbarian, we see the Jews themselves in a constant lapse to dissolution. The Pharisees, all know, were hypo- crites, wicked men marked with sanctity ; the Sad- ducees, all know, were unbelieving, undevout, proud worldlings ; the common people, unlearned them- selves and taught by such unfit masters, could reach no height of purity and goodness. Some recluse pietists there seem to have been ; but their piety was vitiated by superstition and asceticism, and the mark which they made on their age was slight. So dark, almost desperate, the condition of those times ! What could recover mankind, falling into such ruin, but precisely this appearing of the Lord? They certainly did not think so then. Here were children of Abraham, disciples and teachers of Moses ; saints so devout as to pray when they went out into the streets, not ashamed to be seen by the throngs ; givers of alms perfectly willing that their good work should be published for encouragement to others ; a whole nation ready three times a year to celebrate the deeds of the Lord to their fathers, CAN YE NOT DISCKEN THE SIGNS? 239 and to praise, with older patriarchs, the later kings, as David and Solomon. Sepulchres are built for prophets ; monuments to just and virtuous men are adomed. It was certainly far from — I wiU only say the common sentiment — to call the preemi- nently righteous of that time a brood of vipers ! Men who called them so were certainly not likely to be hailed as prophets and Messiahs. What have we here ? Amidst a corrupt age, self-flattering and boastful, appears a young man from Galilee, his city Nazareth, out of which no good thing can be looked for, his father reputed to be a mechanic there, and himself without educa- tion in any school. Near the banks of the Jordan, in a mountain not far from the lake of Galilee, or in a boat on its waters, at Nazareth, sometimes at Jerusalem, where he joins with his people in their festivals, and on his way to or from his temporary abodes, — for he acknowledges that he has no place where to lay his head, — he speaks such words, and in such a tone, as to gather and astonish the many who come to hear him, and does, moreover, so they solemnly declare, works as astonishing as his words. What then ? The people are deluded, as they are always deluded ; the rulers and Pharisees are too wise to be drawn in by the young fanatic; and as for his miracles, the solution is ready. There is an immense Pan- demonium ; over the lower demons presides one, their prince, who helps him do such things. On the whole, he hath a devil, and is mad; why hear him? The whole may be taken out of 240 CAN VE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? the circle of personal narrative, and made the " living symbol of fact as universal as celestial truth penetrating into the sphere of darkness and sin. Recall a point already touhced. The very prin- ciples which made the persecutors of the prophets honor Moses, which extol ancient philosophers and sages against all lovers of wisdom in our own day ; which overflow with admiration of Christian apos- tles and reformers, in contempt of any who may seek to correct the wrongs of the present ; nay, which worship Jesus now, rejecting, perhaps sneer- ing at, the aspiration for immediate and conscious communion with the Lord, are those which in- volve incapacity to perceive the signs, — the real, undecaying signs, — of those seasons and of our seasons. They neither perceive nor honor the realities of which they magnify the names. As it is not Nature which the selfish and worldly man sees and converts to his service, but the great work- shop within and by which he may bring his private ends to pass ; so it is not Moses, it is not Paul, it is not Pythagoras, it is not even Jesus, whom the same man, standing by the temple of truth, sees and accepts, but only the lengthening shadows which these forms cast over the successions of ages. If Jesus were present and living now, just as he was in this discourse with the Jewish sectarians, I do verily believe, not only that many would reject him, but that they would reject him in the same spirit, and for the same reasons, which produce their pres- ent belief. What they believe is not his spirit, his CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? 241 truth, the power of his life, but the wonder-worker who has crowned his earlier miracles by the cre- ation of a Christendom within whose bosom they merely chance to have been born and nurtured. Spiritual and godlike in himself, he necessarily formed in time an outward development. The world accepts this development into its own order ; only the pure heart is drawn to the inner and eternal life. We might begin with any hour in the history of Christendom, nay, we might begin with any in- stant in the course of the human race, and say that here is, and hence starts forth in new activity, a Divine Presence, the Life of Truth, the Power of God, yet unrecognized by seekers after outward signs. Be there, shown to the eye, transferred from the spheres of love and insight into the pal- pable forms of attested fact, some exhibitions of spiritual existence and power, these they can per- ceive and acknowledge. Of the God for ever with- in, of his kingdom as it comes unobserved, silent, they think no more than sleeping men of those physical laws which regulate the changes of night and day, fulfilling themselves in the work of the one and the rest of the other. This is the first sad want of our own iimes, — want of faith in the unseen and everlasting reality of things, failure to perceive that, as light needs no second, and air no evidence, and no element of nature other proof than its own presence, so the reality, the Truth which God is, needing no sign, demanding no dem- onstration, is its own sign, its own demonstration 21 242 CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS S revealing its serene and sunlike beauty for ever, asking only ready heart and open eye to see. There are illusions, it is true ; men have been played with thousands of times by merest shadows ; they are played with and mocked now. False spirits go forth into the world always in company with the true spirit. Nothing the less does the true spirit distinguish between them, knowing them because it first knows itself. Let me return, how- ever. We may begin, it has been said, anywhere, and find the unrecognized presence. It is well enough to begin where we are accustomed now to begin with our thought of all prominent tenden- cies, the Protestant Reformation. Not wholly di- vine, we must confess, yet, none of us can think, wholly the reverse. Nay, this infolded the great principle of human perfection, the immediate rela- tion of God to man. Out of this simple idea, whether distinctly seen or indistinctly, grow natur- ally the thoughts and impulses which three cen- turies, a very short spring morning, have just begun to quicken into life and growth. The Papal Church was the first thing seen throwing its media- tions and obstructions between the spirit of the Lord and the receptive power of man: so this must away. The creeds and impositions of the sects, coming really from the detested Papacy, but strug- gling to ground themselves on the Bible, are seen by some few to serve us in the same way, flaming swords turning every way to repel us from the Tree of Life, while they are held out as hands to reach us the fruit : we may just let them alone, and enter CAN' YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS ? 243 into the holier Eden. The revelation stops not with the Church. God is immediately present to the soul of man : whence, then, those intrusions of official dignities and of social institutions ? If not through Pope, or Priest, or Church, then why more through King, Magistrate, Society, should God be compelled to enter his own world and govern his own children ? Pope, Priest, Church ; King, Magis- trate, Society, are but men or combinations of men. The spirit is not confined to them, not indeed nearer to them than to others, often less near. Who thinks God so present to Pilate and Herod, to chief-priests and the holy Sanhedrim, as to the man whom they are trying for his life, and whom the powers have prejudged to the cross ? Nay, for a far lower instance ; who of our New England questions that more of God lived and spake in the solitary man who could do nothing against his conscience, than in the grand imperial assembly with the fifth Charles at its head, reinforced by the whole sanctity and greatness of the Roman court? But these are grave questions, graver than we may have thought. There is so much stirring decla- mation about them, — so much admiration of their heroism or divineness, — that we forget their per- ennial meaning. The spirit, neither needing nor giving other sign than itself, is God's angel, man's light and worth and power. It is this which makes the earth quake even now. It converts from theoretic speculation into vital efficiencies those niighty utterances, Freedom, Brotherhood, Equal- ity. Let government make will the law for nations 244 CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS 1 impoverished and groaning under its tyranny ; let rich and proud masters suborn states and kingly or other dominion to the bidding of their avarice and ambition ; let churches lend themselves to the con- secration of tyranny ; let pulpits resound with the announcement of peace to tyrannous men and des- potic governments ; the sun shines still ; the secret attractions of the universe are going on as even and true as ever. Christendom is shaken from centre to surface ; men do not see the sign of God, so they rush to fierce battle; but God is not with- drawn ; fast as they plough the ground with their swords, hp sows in the furrows seeds, not one of which can ever die, of freedom and peace and celestial love. Amidst the sinking wreck of the old feudalisms there remains, cursing the continent and the islands of the new hemisphere, one colos- sal injustice, offspring, born in thick darkness, of pride and avarice, nourished by vilest lusts, sup- ported by {)olitical power and commercial interests, guarded by laws, prolonged by prejudice, and the whole mass of cruelty and pollution covered over and decorated with mild epithets and holy words : it avails not, — the universe is not stopped by men's wills or by acts of parliament or congress : this day reminds us of the silent power which moved the heart of a great people, until wealth, politics, par- liament and king bowed to the spirit which they resisted while they could, of which they became ministers when they must. These and the like instances we confess, after all is over : when the old sun has been darkened, and the old moon has CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? 245 ceased to shine, and the stars have fallen from heaven, we perceive the revolution ; and when, in the midst of the darkened theatre, another light shines, the sign makes itself outward in the organ- ization of a new order, the rising of another sun, the moving of another moon,, the planting of other stars, then indeed we see. The true spirit sees earlier, and works with the Lord. Instances and illustrations are numberless. I have taken occasion of this day to suggest them with a twofold desire ; first, to invite your sym- pathy with that divine spirit which signified its presence in the deliverance of its children from West Indian bondage, and your cooperation with the same spirit as it still moves amidst the deep darkness over the abyss and the surging waters of our national sins ; next, and neither to forgetful- ness of the former more than to neglect of the latter, to invite you, through contemplation of the presence so seldom recognized in its services, to seek and associate yourselves with it through the whole circle of your relations and activities. With that, I mean, and nothing else. I do not ask you to welcome every pretence, to rejoice in every show, to follow every or any phantasm. Keep -the mind clear as the cloudless air ; Iceep the soul pure and calm as sun or star ; keep the life entire and erect as the pine-tree rising from its mountain-root above the clouds ; keep your whole course smooth, open, unswerving, as the fairest dream of the path to heaven. So neither accept the shadow nor reject the substance ; neither admit the false nor dismiss 21* 246 CAN YE NOT DISCERN THE SIGNS? the true ; neither sneer with the scoffer, nor hate with the harsh, nor bend with the weak and credu- lous, nor yet refuse to inquire with prejudiced and obstinate minds ; but out into the boundless world, heart, head, eyes, open and clear ; the inner senses trained and exercised, like the outer, as these to dis- tinguish forms, colors, movements, and all other things corresponding to them, so those to distin- guish the good, the true, the beautiful, even amidst their opposites ; what eye does not see, what ear does not hear, what the understanding does not apprehend, that to see revealed through the eternal spirit. The Lord is here, is there, is everywhere, in the private heart, in the public deed, in the age, all its hours, all its movements ; let us only seek, that we may find ; let us listen that we may hear ; let us drink in the heavenly influence, that we may go forth, strong and gentle, to the work of life. Ask not for other sign from heaven, when heaven itself is open. Ask not for other sign, when the Divine Light encircles and fills us ; when the Mes- siah of love, of wisdom, of power, is alive this very day ; when the angels of the Lord are coming to us, messengers of his goodness, in this wonderful Nature which he fills, in this deeper wonder of soul which he inspires, and in those cycles of ages which he is for ever rounding and renewing. SERMON Xyil. REJECTION OF EVIL. Mat. iv. 10, 11. THEN SAITH JESUS TJNTO HIM, GET THEE HENCE, SATAN J POK IT IS WRITTEN, THOU SHALT WOKSHIP THE LOBD THT GOD, AND HIM ONLT SHAI.T THOU SEEVB. THEN THE DEVIL LEATEIH HIM, AND BEHOLD, ANGELS CAME AND MINISTEBED UNTO HIM. It is among our most common problems, the process by which from evil man is redeemed to good. Some affirm the necessity of fully exposing and denouncing the sin ; others ask a gentler and more silent operation. The question has come to sustain a special relation to those efforts by which men are seeking to remove the private vices, the public wrongs, the social discords, the political injustice, the religious infidelities, or other forms of evil, by which general attention is excited. Not confined, however, to these, but applying equally to that larger man, society, and to that smaller society, the individual man. That man may be blessed, these, it is seldom, if ever, denied, must be removed. The spirit can erect itself only by freedom. The man can be perfect only by expulsion of the inhu- man. But the process ? " Set before the mind an ideal perfection ; insinu- 248 REJECTION OF EVIL. ate the mild influences of love and serene truth. As the waters of the great ocean make their way into all the bays and inlets, over smooth beaches when the tide comes in, and among the crevices of rough, jutting rocks ; so flow truths of their greater ocean in upon opening minds. They reach and fill all avenues of the spirit. Their life quickens humanity ; and its calm face comes to mirror the infinite which from above enters into its bound- less depths. The sun shines, thence day, and all which is ungenial disappears. Life itself flows calmly through us, and is perfect as it is gentle, nay, unconscious. The true process of elevation. Let men live in the true ; then evil will fall off, as with- ered buds fall through the growing of the fruit, as autumn leaves drop when they have become sere and dead." ' Such the thought with which many meet the problem. " This is all vain. Feed men with roses, would you? It is all idle. They crave stronger food. They are famishing; they are dying: they seem like corses stretched out and dressed for the funeral. And who is he that thinks life will come back through such diluted appliances ? No. This will never do. The dearest influences of love are not more to these hardened souls than waters beating on the solid rock. A flood must come ; a flood bursting through and bursting over the thickest incrustations, and rending the mountains. Talk of kindling a lambent flame in the houses of Sodom : nay, let the fire and brimstone consume them, and a dead sea sweep over and sweep away REJECTION OF EVIL. 249 the whole vast sphere of corruption. Sin, throned in its palaces, and surrounded by its proud bul- warks, defies all these quietudes, and laughs your philosophy to scorn. For severe diseases, severe remedies : bind up and soothe and heal a sprain ; but cut off the putrefying limb. Then, again, it is more than growth we need : if the dead leaf will fall, and the fruit pushes off the flower, yet dying limbs and enfeebling excrescences and noisome in- sects are got rid of in other ways. To men sunken in sin, be there never promise of peace ; only the stern voice in the desert. Repentance or death is the only alternative." Such the spirit with which others may meet the same great problem. What shall we say to both ? Something, it seems to me, like this : Gentle insinuation of truth ! But be sure it is the truth ; be sure it is really in- sinuated, introduced, borne into the thoughts of men ; be sure, also, that the gentleness is sincere and genuine. Then the principle is indeed right ; but it is an affirmative, not a negative : it forbids not exposure and denouncement of sin ; it simply shows the secret power and process of redemption. Bold denunciation of the evil ! But be sure it is evil ; be sure it is sincere denunciation ; be sure it is boldness of the true and loving heart ; then out with the strongest word, the bravest deed. Reject the evil as evil ; otherwise none shall ever find the good. Our very word gentle, as anciently used, sug- gests to us the image, not of a passive, sluggish kind- ness, but of an active, heroic energy, like what old legends give us of armed knights going out to pro- 250 REJECTION OF EVIL. tect innocence and overthrow violence and injustice by their brave deeds and their true loves. The genuine prophet speaks out the word of the Highest; and if his daring be gentle, yet his gentleness is daring. The question goes somewhat deeper. Sin should be exposed and extirpated through the vital oper- ation of love. But then sin is an inward thing, a pest of the soul, a death of the spirit. Hence men differ in regard to the method of treatment. It does little for man, some will think, to expose and remove special forms of its external development. Thus the surface alone is reached, and the work is, besides, merely partial, not integral ; fragmentary, not complete ; here and there a piece is broken off, but the mass remains still, large and heavy as before. Whereas, the thing wanted is destruction of the mass itself, a complete and integral process, a regeneration wrought in the very heart. True, this is the great end, birth of the celestial life, elevation of the whole man into the realm of purity and peace. But he rises, according to the laws of his nature, through successive and special toils : he is not this moment down on the low earth, and the next beyond the clouds, no intermediate efforts and movements. We have never the infant at its birth, expanded into manly dimensions, and strength- ened to maturest energy. The Divine Life first exists, thence grows, becomes conscious of itself, consecrates its activities, encounters and overcomes temptations, gives itself forth in successive services, surmounts aversion and abandonment, and thus REJECTION OF EVIL. 251 ascends to the glory which it for ever embosoms. But all these are single, we may say special, deeds and stages. At the same time they are more than partial and fragmentary. They are the whole man in each instant fulfilling the present service. The least particular becomes thus great and universal, even infinite. When the temptation of appetite comes, say not. This is but partial, I will make no resistance until I am called to fulness of action ; make the action full and perfect by resistance of the whole being to the false promise. Say not. This is something superficial altogether, I reserve my strength for inward and deeper conflicts ; make the conflict inward and deep by the spiritual powers which it shall summon and develop. Soon enough will the internal strife be evolved. From its cavern- ous deeps pride will appear, urging a presumptuous confidence in personal worth or power, and prompt- ing its own arrogant impulses. And selfish ambi- tion will strive for empire, seducing the soul, if it can, to the service of any evil for accomplishment of its ends. " Worship me," such the condition which evil seeming good will propose, " and thou shalt possess the world and its glory." No man escapes the solicitation ; into the easy hearted and unspiritual it winds its way, like some siren music, and steals him from himself. Through these suc- cessions of trials there is needed with each a calm foresight, a steady watchfulness, a resolved energy, a spirit surmounting sense, a humility exalted only by trust and consecration to the highest, and, as soul of all a love, inspiration of the Father, which 252 REJECTION OF EVIL. expels at once outward lusts and inward selfish- ness. Let it be added, that each of these evils becomes manifest in special, you may call them partial and superficial instances. Appetite, prompting to in- temperance, — no abstract thing this, nothing to be conquered in the general, the particular overlooked. The jovial society has gathered ; mirth has begot- ten mirth ; voice has echoed voice ; all is gay this festive hour. The wine-cup passes from hand to hand ; who shall spoil the joy ? A very small thing this of itself, the drinking or the declining of the little draught. Very small, if it were merely so much of a cheerful bout ; something larger, if it be the taking of a deadly poison, the beginning or the heightening of intoxication, the sacrifice of con- science, the servility of principle to pleasure or vanity or others' wills. The special deed is now expanded into an universal symbol. The surface is touched at every point by radiations of the cen- tre. As, they tell us, all things meet in man ; as, so some think, all organs are made up of minute organs precisely the same with the larger, and these minuter of others, again, still finer, an indefinite aggregation ; and as, even this there are those who believe, each deed of man contains in it the whole man with every element and power ; so does this simple act, whether of consent to intemperate indul- gence or of sincere refusal, contain more than itself; it is the whole man in the present instant yielding to wrong or surmounting wrong for the sake of right. Just so we remark of other cases. The REJECTION OF EVIL. 253 rich man, surrounded by signs of his wealth ; the scholar, conscious of his erudition and his great- ness of thought ; the artist, rejoicing in the forms of his creation ; even the strong man, exulting in his strength, or the beautiful in his symmetry and grace ; these, and whoever else there be possessing outward advantages or inward gifts, are in danger from the incursions of pride, not as an abstraction from these particular occasions, but as the instant conceit, the swelling and vaunting of the spirit filled by precisely these details. So, likewise, if we trace the progress of selfish ambition. A Macbeth is not seduced by some universal idea, some formless entity ; just this crown of Scotland which Duncan now wears dazzles and fascinates him ; that he would have. How shall he have it ? Just as all ends of the same selfishness must be reached. There is a bowing down of the nobler principles to the ignoble impulses ; there is a pursuit of seem- ing good through service of real evil ; the Devil is worshipped as if God. Each step of the process, each deed done in carrying it out, is accumulation of whatever had passed, and involves whatever is yet to come. It was when the unearthly voices first uttered their promises, that he should have silenced the echo rising involuntarily perhaps in his heart. To these he listens with glad consent. And these are prologues to the acts which followed. In at length for the crown, he cannot out. Each sin not only involves the whole, but creates what is deemed a necessity for the next, until he wins at once the crown, the misery, and the death of a 22 254 REJECTION OP EVIL. usurping tyrant. On lower planes of life and action it is just so. Precisely that selfishness of ambition which impels the rapacious conqueror or the murderous usurper finds scope for itself in social and domestic relations. We see the Macbeth, not only in the proud castle or on fields of battle, but in the street, the parlor, or the kitchen. There are states of society wherein men will buy and hold their brethren as slaves, not for gain or for service only, but for exercise of that imperial spirit which the broadest sphere of dominion would merely excite, but could never satisfy ; there are other states in which this usurpation cannot be reached, but men will find something of compensation in a despotism as complete as they have power to com- mand, the master or mistress lording it over a household, an older son over younger brothers and sisters, these over domestics, of the latter, those who have some personal or accidental advantage, over such as are inferior. We may readily see the lord- ling, — just go out of doors, and you meet him, — whose very posture and gait, and cast of eye or tone of voice, reveal the secret temper ; the demon seems almost audibly declaring his promise, and the worship certainly marks itself in every expres- sion ; the man is serving evil to gain — he deems it — good, at any rate, an imperious dominion. Illustrations of this, as of every other, form of evil, might be multiplied indefinitely ; all showing, that it is indeed in form that evil always exist, in deed and not in abstraction, and that as such, in the very instant it appears, it must be met and over- EKJECTION OP EVIL. 255 come. The present bait must be rejected ; the present falsehood must be confessed and abjured ; the present sin must be condemned and forsaken. The very promise vsrhich the Devil makes to us must be answered with the Get thee hence, Satan! We may mark, however, a method by which evil may be assailed partially and superficially. It is that in which our repugnancies proceed from the lower impulses disconnected with the higher. If we reject gluttony and drunkenness, simply be- cause they make us poor while we would be rich, or any sensual indulgence, because, it darkens a reputation which we would make bright ; if we put away the seeming of pride, because it makes us hateful, and we would be honored ; if we decline ambitious ascents lest we should fall prematurely, while plotting- all the while more effectual means of personal elevation ; if, in a word, we check any particular current of selfishness, that the whole stream may become more full and sweeping ; there is really no deep and vital process carried forward. The name may be changed, the evil remains. I will go farther than this. The first movement in the true life is self-renunciation ; a renunciation, unqualified, absolute, complete. Only when man loses himself, can he find himself. This may be, perhaps, the great idea from which mythologies have derived their sayings of a final absorption of created things in the uncreated. A man absorbed in the Supreme Essence, so soon as, with the awful fear of he knows not what, in the immense possi- bilities of the universe, he lets the whole pass by 256 REJECTION OF EVIL. leaving him desolate and alone, trusting only to the Unseen, finds himself no longer alone, no longer desolate. By losing even his life, he has found it. The demons ate gone, and angels minis- ter unto him. But there is one grand condition by which the blessing is guarded. The renunciation must be literally unqualified. If a person says within himself, " Now let me try some other way of happiness than has misled me hitherto. Now I will surrender these worldly pursuits, bringing me nothing but disappointment and anxiety, for those heavenly gifts which I believe will make me content and bring no care " ; be sure he will be deceived. It is with him only a spiritual bargain. He sells off his present goods, to purchase a better stock ; rather, he invests what he holds in something safer and yielding a larger income for the future. He may be satisfied to live somewhat poorly now, wait- ing for the Indian treasures and the luxurious par- adise which a few days will bring him. Alas ! his is an empty phantom, a bewildering shadow, a deathful delusion. What odds do time and place make in the great principles of the Divine Life? The selfishness, which asks for heaven, just 'as it grasps earth ; which would find indulgence and grandeur and power after death, just as it seeks them before death ; which is proud of spiritual attainments and turns them to means of aggran- dizement, just as it is proud of any temporary thing and turns it to kindred use ; is but the spirit of darkness transforming itself into angel of light, and seduces the wandering soul only the more REJECTION OP EVIL. 257 surely, because the evil is more concealed and the good more obtrusive. Not in dying for the sake of living, but in dying to the self wholly without thought of reward, comes the true life. Not in giving up earth for the sake .of heaven, is heaven won, but in sacrificing the world without demand of compensation, comes the real heaven. Not in worshipping the self through God, but in worship- ping him alone, the self removed, is peace found. Then, never else, the Devil leaveth us : behold, then, never else, angels come and minister unto us. 22" SERMON XVIII. REPENTANCE. Matt. iv. 17. JESirS BEGAN TO PEEACH, AND TO SAT, EEPENT. I WOULD not treat the great subject of Repent- ance, more than any subject, dogmatically. It is a matter of immediate, practical, nay, vital concern. The word'itself, as commonly used, all are aware, perhaps, does not go deeply enough into the heart of the matter : more strictly, it would be change of mind, supposing, with this internal transition, a correspondence in the external character, amend- ment or Reformation. The extent of this change is in direct proportion to these two things, the sins, on the one side, of which the man or the society is guilty, and the law, on the other, which claims obe- dience. Hence, instead of being a work wrought at once and done up for ever, it is a process com- mensurate with the evils forsaken through the whole course of existence. Each age, however, as well as each man, may want some peculiar modifi- cation of the duty. Thus in the time when John and Jesus addressed the Jews, there was an almost universal state of mind to which it stood in antag- onism. Proud of ancestral greatness, boasting of REPENTANCE. 259 Abraham as their father, of Moses as their leader and lawgiver ; of the prophets who had illustrated their earlier history ; recalling the grandeur of their monarchy when David reigned and Solomon eclipsed the glories of the East by his wealth and pomp ; exulting in their Scriptures, filled with divine oracles, and in the absolute Being as their God ; gathering often in Jerusalem at their festivals, and as in the temple, so likewise in the synagogues, renewing their allegiance to the ancient worship ; they deemed theirs the nation chosen and loved of God ; and in the complacency of a common worth each individual shared. True, they had dark re- membrances, and a humiliating present. Their fathers had been captives in Babylon ; when deliv- ered, it was not by their own valor and prowess, but by foreign powers, nor had they ever regained a distinct national independence. And now, after various revolutions, they have become with other people of the East and of the West, vassals of the colossal empire, which from a single city on the banks of the Tiber has spread itself near the known , bounds of the world. This very depression is, how- ever, an excitement to their pride. The man or the community, calmly conscious of undisputed greatness, and dwelling in unquestioned freedom, may pass on without betraying to others or even perceiving any tumultuous workings of the selfish and ambitious spirit. Not so when the greatness is disputed, the freedom questioned or suppressed. Then comes a different order of feelings ; what had been latent becomes open ; what had been silent 260 REPENTANCE. takes voice ; the quietude of strength gives place to the agitations of irritated weakness. With the Jews there existed a peculiar occasion for this development. The hope, which neither individual nor society can ever entirely surrender, was not a vague and shapeless aspiration, but a palpable and personal form. A prophet like Moses; a son of David sitting on the throne of his father ; a greater Solomon, wider dominion, more extended and en- during peace ; an anointed of the Lord, whom no power could resist, and by whom Israel should be raised to highest grandeur ; all this stood before them as a distinct promise, a divine assurance ; the Caesar should fall before the Messiah ; the gods of the nations should shrink at the presence of the Lord of hosts. So was the Jewish spirit kept alive in every heart. Meantime, the directly religious feeling of the nation is equally sustained and developed. Indeed, the theocratic character of their nation, just as the same character under other forms of belief and wor- ship in other ancient nations, necessarily tended to augment the religious habitudes of Jewish society. There was particularly the Pharisee, the strict and devout religionist of his day ; the perfect Jew, in pride of national worship, remembrance, and hope, honoring himself, and honored by others as the saint. And he, not the rarer and more silent Sad- ducee, nor the member of poorer and obscurer sects, formed the type of Judaism in that age of promised exaltation and of real depression. Over against this stands another type of char- KEPENTANCE. 261 acter. The man is there, who feels, not in pride, but in humility, that in the infinite spirit which fills him, he is before Abraham; that through the same spirit he is not a Moses, the giver of a law, but the life and light of the world ; not the son of David, but his lord ; greater than Solomon, one with the Father. Those boasted and trusted Scriptures have their worth, not as old oracles, but as witnesses to the divine love and wisdom which he embodies. God is not patron of a nation, but father and lover of mankind. Feasts, temples, rites, Sabbaths, the Man now revealed is greater than they. No local worship, but the worship of soul and truth, of service and deed, commensurate with the presence of the infinite spirit. No flattery of national or individual pride ; no selfish and am- bitious revolt even against the tyranny which galled them. No Judaism of worship or of patriot- ism ; no Pharisaism separating itself by religious ceremony from the common duties and the silent charities of daily life. The Messiah is here ; but the whole Jewish hope is dissolved. The kingdom of God is proclaimed ; but the proud age is doomed to pass in the destruction of temple, priesthood, city; in the dispersion of the nation and the opening of an era rejecting all ancient and consecrated forms. Then there was the Grecian, the Roman, the person, the society, of every class and tribe ; each with his own worship and his own sins. The dis- ciples of Him who thus embodied the divine prin- ciples and kingdom in himself, call them to the 262 REPENTANCE. same vision : " Grecian, boasting of thy former power and intellectual splendor, of thy poets, thy sages, thy heroes, worshipping stUl thy gods, as Homer sang of ' them ! Roman, exulting in thy superiority, the world lying at the feet of thine Emperor, images of primordial grandeur and of present power mingling with all thy worships, a world vanquished beneath thee! Nation, tribe, man, wherever, whoever, thou art! These are false ideals all. Lo ! the divine form ! The soul of all things is revealed. Vanities of wealth, vanities of power, vanities of religion, these are which the ages have accumulated. The perfect man is here. Your Joves, your Odins, your Hercu- lean forms, your demigods and heroes of all names and feats ; they belong to another epoch ; the times of ignorance are passing ; now let there come a change of mind, — a new epoch, a new type of character, new elements of conduct, new laws of worship and service. The Divine Man is revealed, great in love, great in humility, great in gentleness, in forgiveness, in childlike temper and sympathy." To the Jew, repentance was then the passing over a chasm wide and deep as severed his national and Pharisaic spirit from the pure and lowly spirit of Jesus. To the Greek, the Roman, or other Gentile, it was the passing over a chasm equally broad, equally deep ; on the one side, the traditions, the maxims, the splendid vices of his antiquity ; on the other, the. pure and unresisting loves, the serene and gentle virtues, of the crucified. A nominal Christianity has at length gained REPENTANCE. 263 establishment. The crucified man is crowned as God. The name once so hated is inscribed on the banners of princes ; and the cross, no longer ex- pression of contempt, is ensign of victory and of power. A vast Christendom has grown up; Rome its centre and capital; Europe enlarging and strengthening itself amidst the new forms of its faith and its worship. Regard the period of the Crusades as the culminating point of this Christian dynasty. How spake the new spirit then? Let us imagine some preacher of its existing type, as a Peter the Hermit ; " Christians ! for such your bap- tism has made you, children of God, brothers of Jesus Christ, partakers of the Holy Spirit : the divine Trinity has redeemed and blessed you. And here, at this consecrated festival, as the priest gives you the holy bread, it is indeed holy bread, the very body of the Lord, and ye receive of God his own life and grace. And so blessed, shall ye do deeds less than the unbaptized and unregenerate fathers? See ! There in the East infidels profane the sepul- chre of God. His mother mourns over the desola- tions. What ! the heroes of Israel vanquished the profane tribes of Canaan ; wiU ye not drive out the profaner enemies of the cross ? Nay, the Grecians conquered the Persians ; the Romans, Hannibal ; and these were but pagans ; shall not ye, bearing the cross, exhibit its power over the crescent and every ensign of unbelieving triumph ? " Now in all this we see but new names for the old spirit. They are no longer Jews, Grecians, Romans, Gen- tiles, but Christians, that is, men baptized and in- 264 REPENTANCE. structed into a system deriving it origin from Jesus Christ, but infolding precisely the same worldly and selfish element, as those earlier forms. Let us suppose an Apostle,'like John, or even the Lord himself, addressing nations assembled on such a day. How unlike the words ! " Your bap- tism is nothing without a pure heart ; your recep- tion of consecrated bread is nothing without the sincere love of God and of man in your souls and your deeds. No forms of ancient greatness are anything to you ; neither Jewish, nor Greek, nor Roman, no demigod, no hero. Be pure in heart, be meek, be lowly, cherish the soul of love, free yourselves from wrath, from revenge, from violence, be ye for ever praying, for ever blessing ; then shall ye find rest. Nowhere else. God is love. This the central trath of the universe. Live in this truth, live in love, and God is in you, ye in God." Thus compared, the Christianism of the Middle Ages and the life of the Lord are severed by a chasm scarcely less broad than that which parted from it the .Judaism and the Gentilism of the apostolic age. I have thus recalled your thoughts to the past, not for theoretical speculation, but for practical and palpable illustration. The true Repentande, to the Jew, to the Greek, to the Catholic, supposed a radical separation from the existing spirit, national, rieligious, let it be added, individual, of his country and his age. The true Repentance, to the Ameri- can, in this nineteenth century, is no less radical separation from the existing spirit, national, relig- REPENTANCE. 265 ious, individual, of his country in the present age. More than forty years ago, Buckminster spoke of the love of money as threatening to reduce our country almost to unlettered barbarism. And the common impression, I apprehend, still is, that the love of money is the special sin of New England at least. I do not question either the prevalence or the evil of this spirit. But I think it is only secondary. The radical element of character in the American confederacy is English, modified by the peculiarities of the position into which it has been thrown. Now, the distinguishing vice of the English character, both in Europe and in America, is lust, or I may rather say, pride of power. Money is sought indeed ; not, however, for money's sake so much as for the help which it gives in the acquisi- tion of power. In England, with all its wealth, the end sought by its commerce, its labors, its methods of government, is not, I think, wealth, but suprem- acy of dominion. The Church itself is a portion of the national power; its religion sanctifies and establishes a government on whose subjects, it is boasted, the sun never sets. So in this country. From the highest station of official dignity or indi- vidual influence to the lowest, through all interme- diate gradations, the prevalent idea is the prowess of the American Union. The Church is less inti- mately related to this idea, so is less reverently honored ; but, on the other hand, conscious of the want, the Church learns to fawn on the civil power ; to cringe, to flatter, to extol its American spirit. And however it may have been once, religion itself, 23 266 REPENTANCE. at this moment in our country, is presented in the humiliating attitude of servility ta the secular influences. Let a form of oppression become law- ful ; let a course of aggressive hostilities be entered into by the state, however unjustly ; let a system of legislation or of action, however immoral, be fixed by established authority, and how soon is the voice of religious remonstrance hushed! The false max- im. Religion has nothing to do with politics, — in- volving, of course, the tremendous assertions, that Religion, by which is necessarily meant, in our pountry, Christianity, has nothing to do with making those laws which are to govern ourselves and our children, none can say to what extent or through what duration, and that Christianity has nothing to do with the temporary measures, such as making war or peace, establishing or overthrowing slavery, and the like, — a maxim as profligate as it is false, and, if carried out to its legitimate applica- tions, grossly atheistic, — has still attained a strong hold of the American mind, and has secured in many eases the obsequious acquiescence of church and pulpit. The falsehood, the atheism, on the one side, and the servility, on the other, have their first foundation in this same pervading pride of national greatness, joined on the ecclesiastical side by the hope of upbuilding through political sym- pathies the form of religion which the sect adopts. This central idea shapes the type of character which forms the universal pattern, besides operat- ing directly to produce its own image in the indi- vidual. If the country must surpass the whole REPENTANCE. 267 world by its power, then the person must surpass every other man. The very child catches the infec- tion of this pride ; and what Britain has done on oceans or foreign shores, and what our country has done on its borders or coasts or seas, or in its ag- gressions on Indians or Mexicans, he must do with- in his own narrow circle ; blow for blow, strife for victory, struggle for power, in the nursery, on the playground, in the school-house. With the same domineering pride he grows up, and either glories in his ascendency, if he can reach it, or slinks away dispirited, envious, revengeful, if he fails. The European race in America has trampled on the African, and when a -better sentiment, and still more, felicitous circumstances, have hindered the extreme of irresponsible despotism, the same des- potic temper finds its gratification in contempt, in sarcasm, in calumny, in exclusion, in cold and bitter sneers. Less, indeed, of religious formality do we find connected with this pride of power ; but what there is, as has been said, panders to it. And wherever the man is found most truly representing this local spirit, this American prowess, no matter what the depth or the shallowness, in other respects, of his principles and his soul, he stands out thence- forth as the most applauded model. Now, true repentance is not barely sorrowing for our depravity ; not barely putting aside those bad habits which violate the common forms of morality ; not barely putting on a religious profes- sion and demeanor : it is more than this ; it is separation from the prevalent spirit and maxims of 268 REPENTANCE. an unchristianized society, and entering into the heavenly kingdom of love and purity and peace. It is ceasing to be Jew, whether Pharisee or Saddu- cee ; ceasing to be Greek or Roman, barbarous or refined; ceasing to be Gentile, superstitious or atheistic ; ceasing to be Catholic of Middle Age or Protestant of later day; ceasing to be English or American, rejecting the models presented us by both, the principles by which both have been governed, the spirit by which both are animated ; ceasing to be sectarian and national and selfish, and becoming Christian, human, lovers of man : all, indeed, retaining our organic peculiarities, indi- vidual, social, religious, national, but accepting the celestial light in which these shall be transfigured and exalted, and wrought, amidst endless variety, into universal harmony. SERMON XIX. UNKIGHTEOrS DECREES.* IsAiAn X. 1, 2. WOE UNTO THEM THAT DBCKEE UNEIGHTEOUS DBCEEES, AND THAT WEITE GEIEVOUSNESS WHICH THBT HAVE PEESCEIBED ; TO TUEN ASIDE THE NEEDY EEOM JUDGMENT, AND TO TAKE AWAT THE EIGHT FEOM THE POOB OF HT PEOPLE, THAT WIDOWS MAY BE THBIE PEBY, AND THAT THET MAY BOB THE rATHEELBSS ! I HAVE approached this service, I confess, with some sadness. I could not conceal from myself the fact, that to many my views are offensive ; that to more, the public statement of them may seem need- less, if not worse ; and that in such effusion of my sentiments as this I may be deemed alike traitor- ous to the country which has given us birth and disobedient to the religion wherein is our eternal life. Nay, to do this on an occasion like the pres- ent; in the very hour which sets before us the symbols of love and peace, to thrust into the midst of us elements of discord, may seem as ill-timed as it is ever injudicious. If I felt that apology were wanted for the choice of time, I might say * Delivered in the Pirst Church, Salem, April 6, 1851. 23* 270 UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. that the time has not been chosen by me, but rather forced upon me. I have not chosen to see the week closed by one of those deeds which con- nect our age and our country with the darkest ages and the lowest civilizations. I did not chose that our metropolis should, within the last three days, be the scene of a transaction, however covered over by forms of law, which ought to stand out in our minds as one with the crimes before which all seem overwhelmed. A man is seized for the avowed purpose of enslavement ! So familiar has the thing become to our minds, so natural under our institutions, so congruous with our prejudices, that the statement of the fact turns the solemnity with which it is repeated into ridicule. Suppose the sufferer had been a Kossuth, a Washington ! He is unquestionably a man. The terrible deed has moved me, let me not presume as it ought, but as I can be moved. It succeeds, at no great distance, a similar outrage, which terminated, we remember, in the signal defeat of national injustice. Bach is but one of several crimes which have been perpetrated in different parts of the country within a few months, under forms of law. They put into deed, they clothe with actual body, what took the shape of statute about a year ago, what has pos- sessed the nation as spirit, we cannot say how long. It is all but culmination of that series of wrongs, beginning in the traffic, now pronounced piracy by law, on the coast of Africa, which dooms the victims, after all the horrors of the middle pas- sage, to the more protracted hoiTors of a life-long UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. 271 captivity, of inevitable vassalage to others' will, in one vsrord comprehending all monstrous things, of slavery. The condition itself may be local ; but, let me add, as essentially connected with the historical developments before us, the principle originating and sustaining it is by no means local. That principle is dominant in our country. It reaches and pene- trates the whole, from the Northern hills and lakes to the gulf which washes the Southern plains, from the ocean out of which the sun comes up, through the immense inland, to the far ocean into which a few only as yet see it go down. Nor wider its dif- fusion than it is deep in its influence. It is not merely inwrought into our customary thought and action, but made effective in our feelings and our institutions. It detaches us from man, and makes us a class ; we are not humane, but Anglican, and extol as our destiny the deeds and their results which mark our rapacious and cruel course. It debases our laws. It enthrals our Federal and our State governments. It corrupts our sentiments, despoils us of the spirit, from which it instinctively shrinks, of freedom, and converts us to instruments of despotism. It suborns religion itself, so that if we could believe the teachings which it has uttered in the holiest name, God himself approves the en- slavement of his own children, and demands of the individual obedience to enactments which, he is assured, contradict the eternal laws. For reason that this spirit thus prevails, and that it is thus generating a soulless infidelity, a real atheism under divinest names, I speak now what I feel is 272 UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. never out of place in the pulpit, never out of • season on the day consecrated by our memories of the prophetic resurrection. For this reason, I speak now as a preacher. Let others judge for themselves ; I am convinced that the preacher is, not an echo, but a herald, — that the very word signifies ; that, instead of swelling and strengthening the tide of a proud national senti- ment, he is to breast it, and, as he can, turn it back; that, instead of catching up and repeating the mis- interpreted, and so deceptive, words by which selfish politicians and mercenary patriots would seduce men from the service of truth and love to the ac- complishment of their personal or partisan ends, he is to come always fresh and serene from the shrine of hia communion and give forth the oracle uttered in his soul ; and that, just in proportion as the word of the Lord is rejected, and false words substituted for it, he is to make his protest more emphatic, his voice for truth clearer and more decisive. For this reason, I speak now when we recognize the Divine Presence. I verily believe all worship -worthless, while it leaves, undisturbed, untouched, that spirit whose last signal manifestation has be- <;ome known to us all. Is it possible for a man to love God with the spirit which hates his brother ? — to worship the Highest with the temper servile to the lowest ? My friends, I would that we might come together with pure hearts and clean hands ; but the heart is not pure while this worldly element is in it, the hands are never clean which sustain this mass of pollutions. UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. 273 For this reason, I speak in the hour of our Christian festival. It is a vain thing to join in that, then go away to cheer the slave-hunt. It is a vain thing to eat and drink a little in memory of the Philanthropist, then go avpay to do substantial deeds, to speak strong words, in behalf of the tyranny which crushes men by myriads. I cannot choose but remember that Jesus declared himself to have come that he might rescue such, that he might open the doors of the prison, that he might break every yoke, that he might free the oppressed, that he might proclaim the Jubilee. I cannot for- get that he ate and drank with publicans and sin- ners, to the scandal of the rich and self-righteous. I cannot forget that he came to the hour which we celebrate, because he declined conformity to the public opinion of his times, and lived in harmony with a law higher than the acknowledged constitu- tions and laws. And I would that ours may be communion with his spirit, that we may not barely feed a devout sensibility, but quicken a living power ; that, beside a gentle movement of affection as the air breathes over it, we may receive an in- spiration which shall fill and sway our whole being, and make us heroic workers with God in the re- demption to which he consecrated his Son. For reasons enough, I have read you those words of the ancient prophet. I wish we had such words spoken to us now ! Words quite unlike them have become common. Flatteries of power, at least obedience to its dictates, and even sneers at con- scientious men, are not unknown. Only this week. 274 UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. I read a remark ascribed to Napoleon, apparently approved, that the most troublesome men in the state are those of good intentions but bewitched consciences. It is nothing new. There was once in the East a king, according to the standards even of his age, preeminently evil. He forsook the true worship, and introduced false worship. Under his reign, the heralds of the higher law were persecuted, even to death, and those of the lower exalted by royal patronage. A single instance shows his moral character. He wanted a field held from his ancestors by another man. Attached, as is natural, to his ancestral lands, this neighbor declined even selling it at any price, or exchanging it for a better. The proud and rapacious king was overwhelmed by the repulse. A plot, however, is laid and ac- cepted for obtaining the vineyard, — simply to bring witnesses against the innocent man, testifying that he had blasphemed God and the king. The charge is made out, and the condemned man put to death in due process of law ; the king then takes pos- session of his vineyard. Such the character of the Eastern monarch. But there were still left men who had conscience of God and a higher law. One of these was a lonely seer, a stern devotee ; who could pray with the strongest faith, and ridi- cule superstition with sharp irony, and kill its priests with the sword ; faithful and noble up to the height of his loftiest conception. The proud king and the puritan citizen used to meet some- times, and sharp words occasionally passed be- tween them ; for the potentate would do wrong, rNRIGHTEOTJS DECREES. 275 and the orienta] puritan would tell him of it to his very face. Somehow he had failed of advantages furnished in later schools of prophets! Two of their conversations contain these significant pas- sages. The man of "bewitched conscience" sought the king in the vineyard which "he had gained through murder. The king breaks out to him, " Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?" And he answered, " I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the Lord." An earlier conversation was equally, per- haps more strikingly, illustrative of Napoleon's saying. There had been a long lapse of time with- out rain ; and this appears to have been regarded on both sides as a divine judgment, — as a trouble inflicted of the Divine Powers. They meet. The king exclaims reproachfully, " Art thou he that troubleth Israel?" The terrible retort succeeds, " I have not troubled Israel, but thou and thy father's house, in that ye have forsaken the com- mandments of the Lord, and thou hast served Baalim." Yes, it is truly so ; when a usurper would subject the nation which nurtured hiin to his will ; when he would combine its utmost capa- cities of destruction to subdue neighboring states,. and ally them all against the independence of every realm in the continent; when he would follow hi& destiny by land and by sea, wherever his step could fall, to establish himself as the Great Emperor,, he must have found men of good intentions, who had not suffered the conscience to die out of them, very inconvenient: they would trouble him. Such 276 UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. men must have convictions of their own ; they can- not be parts and mere tools of the despot. So the early Christians troubled the venerable and holy Sanhedrim at Jerusalem. So they troubled the Roman governors and courts there, and all over the mighty empire. Paul was found troublesome ; and John, if we may believe tradition, troubled the state. They must have seemed quite troublesome, to get so often imprisoned, beheaded, stoned, cruci- fied, burned, cast to the lions, punished to the ex- treme limits of ingenuity and of suffering. Then Luther and his friends ; the English Reformers and Puritans ; even the Quakers, with all their silence and quietude ; our fathers, with their puritan the- ology and their republican tendencies ; in a word, all truly conscientious men, wherever and whenever they have been born or brought into societies choosing to sacrifice conscience to gain, duty to expediency, and the laws of God to the conven- tions of commerce, were simply pests and disturb- ers of good order. Let them stand firm, nor quail before tyrant power. Let them stand firm, nor ever be ashamed of the faith that is in them. Let them stand firm, nor yield jot or tittle to threat or promise, to sneer or praise, to contempt or adula- tion, to loss or gain. Let the highest which their conscience has come to know be followed through whatever reverses, and trusted even to the sacrifice of all things. It is no new thing, this conflict of the private conscience and the public will. It is no new thing, that kings should decree unjust laws ; no new thing. UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. 277 that a proud nobility should oppress a lowly mul- titude, the patrician spurn the plebeian ; no new thing, that democracy or republic should prescribe grievous enactments. All of them have, times without number, turned aside the needy from judg- ment ; all have taken away the right from the poor of the people : widows have been their prey, the fatherless have been robbed by them. All ancient kingdoms, aristocracies, republics, are full of exam- ples. All modern history overflows with examples. On the ruins of that Roman Empire which fur- nished the immense embodiment of human ambi- tions and cruelties, — whose very name is identified with rapacious strength, — arose other governments, severed, discordant, yet all inspired by similar prin- ciples, and marked in their courses by similar enor- mities. The feudal system, as established through the different nations, and the Roman hierarchy which held them within one Christendom, who questions, that, with the good which was in them, as there is a good in the essence of all things which exist, there was incalculable wrong ? In Europe, in America, at this very moment, who is the man to deny that in all their governments there is still an affluence of evil ? Nay, the first feeling with which we think of history, modern as well as ancient, is like that with which we review some record of ter- rible crimes. It is no new fact; but it is fact.. And I say the fact is one for us to think of ; — to think of, not in reference only to the past, but in reference to the present and the future. Decrees, as manifestly unrighteous as were ever promulgated, 24 278 UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. have been established in our own republics ; griev- ousness heavy as has weighed down suffering man in any age they have prescribed in the American Congress ; the needy have been as eflfectually turned aside from judgment, according to the prin- ciples of eternal justice and of inalienable freedom, as in Judea, in Greece or Home, or later, by noble, king, or pontiff; from the poor of our people, nay, let us call them, as the text implies, the people of God, the right is taken away : we need not pursue the parallel ; it can be known of all men who have eyes to see, it can be felt of all men who have hearts to feel. But, we are told, laws must be obeyed until they are repealed. I deny the assertion ; you deny it every fourth of July you celebrate. I deny it on higher ground than national prejudice and tempo- rary expediency. Not because here is a wicked law do I affirm that this may be disregarded, going no further ; nor, if this were a good law, would I therefore say that law should be always obeyed. I take a broader, higher, permanent view. I affirm that what constitutes anything a true law, what alone gives it authority and imposes obligation to obedience, is simply its justice, its benevolence, its origin in the Divine character, its harmony with the Divine will. Tell me never of the duty to submit to higher power ; I confess no such duty save as that power comes of God who is love, not of Devil which is selfishness and injustice. Tell me never of the divine right, — of kings you will not, for that you have cast off, — but of republics and the UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES- 279 people ; for this is just as baseless, just as shadowy, just as false a phantasm. Tell me never, again, of the social compact, of the concession alleged to be made of some portion of my rights in order to secure others more valuable ; allow it, but it is not in the case before us any concession — supposing there were concession — of my own rights, but of other men's rights ; — allow that I might rightfully surrender my own liberty, how follows it that I may rightfully surrender my neighbor's liberty, for the sake of good fellowship with his enslaver? But I go further. I deny this fiction of the social compact. At any rate, no person but myself can make me party to a compact which I disclaim, nay, to* any compact whatever. It is my own act, no other person's. But I am bound by no compact of my own to aid in restoring the fugitive slave ; I am bound by no compact of any kind to obey the law which reclaims him. Or if I am bound by some compact unknown to myself, show it to me, and I will hasten to be rid of it. A true law is binding in fact, because it is law, not because I have en- gaged to obey it. A bad law is never binding, be- cause its badness annuls it, and if I have promised, even with an oath, to obey it, then I am to repent of my engagement and put the sin away from me. It is sometimes said that if the laws be such we cannot obey them, we ought to leave our own country and go where the laws may better agree with our consciences. Grant this could be done, yet I say the declaration is reasonless. God gave me life beneath this American sky, not the govern- 280 UNRIGHTEOUS BECREES. ment ; God has placed me on this American soil, not the government ; God is to me the source of all ray rights and privileges, my obligations and duties, not the government. And where he gives me existence and a sphere of action, there am I to stay without asking whether before or since my birth tyrants have presumed to set up their laws over it. Then, again, a few scriptures are hurled against the doctrine of exclusive obedience to the Divine in Law. To Caesar, the things which are Caesar's. Not, however, the things which are not Caesar's. To all, their dues, their own ; to none, however, that which belongs to others, their due, their own. To God, the things which are God's. So when Caesar usurps what is not his, but God's, I will try to ren- der what I can to him whose in reality all is, even against Caesar, when in his rapacity he would rob even God. Then Paul is for ever at hand. The passage I shall assume to be familiar to you all. Let us now mark a few things. Whatever is writ- ten in a broad and unqualified manner, as an oration or a letter, must, of course, be limited and qualified by the universal maxims of common sense. A man like Paul, could not, for instance, be imagined to require of those to whom he wrote, that, supposing the magistrates required them to abjure their faith, they should do it. So, too, what- ever is thus written must be limited and qualified, or rather interpreted, by the conscious and deliber- ate action of the writer. But Paul's own life, though consistent always with what he received as authoritative law, was of his own choice pread- UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. 281 justed to relations with the governments, whether in Judea or Rome, which brought against him prose- cutions, trials, punishments, and finally death. Fur- ther, let us take his own qualifications, or, as they may be truly called, grounds, of the doctrine which he teaches. The powers of government are of Divine appointment, therefore we should submit. But he nowhere teaches, that if impious and auda- cious men usurp those powers, and wield them for the destruction of justice and truth ; if they com- mand, on penalty of death, sacrifice to the false gods and rejection of the Messiah ; if they require Christians in any way to violate the principles and the laws of Jesus, these requirements should be ful- filled, these edicts obeyed. He adds, Rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil : The magis- trate is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid ; for he bear- eth not the sword in vain ; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Such his statement of government ac- cording to the idea which it represents, so far as apprehended by Paul. Now let us suppose a case of fact :.the ruler becomes a terror to good works, not to the evil ; he forbids doing good, and punishes it according to the fashion of his time ; he requires doing evil, and follows it with favor. He becomes the minister of injustice, executing wrath upon him that doeth good. The case is perfectly supposable ; bring it before Paul ; what would he say ? His whole life is the answer. He disobeyed the powers, and suffered for it. Precisely this, his steadfast 24* 282 UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. obedience to the Voice which power forbade him to utter, is the crown of his glory, the pledge of his everlasting remembrance. Precisely this it is which has consecrated the saints, the sages, the heroes, the martyrs of all ages. They heard a voice which others did not hear, or hearing, rejected ; they saw the vision which others did not see, or seeing, for- sook ; and away from the world, they went truly on their solitary path until the world raised them by its persecutions to the stars. Even if it were otherwise ; if we had no prece- dents of great and toiling men in the past ; or if, through ignorance or from any cause, Apostles and wise men had failed to set forth the right of the private conscience, and the absolute supremacy of the law which it perceives written within it ; still that law stands independent, unalterable, everlast- ing; allowing no evil, even to escape evil or to ad- vance good ; not the servant of power, but the foun- tain and the guide of power ; not the creature nor the thrall of empires or republics, but their ruler, executing itself according to its own judgments on them all ; with the revelation of its reality to the soul, assuring us of our obligation, not our right only, our absolute obligation, to put beneath us all stat- utes, all powers, which we see to contradict itself. It bids rulers or people, if they would have their decrees obeyed, to have them first fit to be obeyed, and denounces their tyrannies as what true men should disobey for their reverence of order and of law. It bids the individual, as he would do hom- age to the majestic form of law, to withhold all UNRIGHTEOUS DECREES. 283 respect from the monstrous abortions, the infernal shadows, which take its name, and put on its robes, and exercise its functions, only to profane them and to degrade men, nay, to dethrone God. I would beseech you, for the reverence of God and the love of Jesus, to receive this word. I mean it for the hour. I mean it for laws now existing. I mean it, in the full persuasion that this, this, is the very time, when, to obey God, we must disobey men ; when, against cruel edicts and heartless customs, against the powers of states and the falsehoods of churches, and the thousand sophistries which are urged to make the worse appear the better reason, we are to stand fast by the oracle, hearing and do- ing that, and only that, which it bids : — So God is with us ! / SERMON XX. THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. Lt7KE xii. 57. WHY EVEN OP T0UE8ELVES JUDGE TB NOT WHAT IS BIGHT ? A YOUNG man, just passing out of boyhood, read the volume in which Price set forth his high and fervid conceptions of the eternity, the independence, and the worth of virtue. To his mind there was something of significance in thoughts compressed into such declaration as this : " Virtue is of intrin- sic value and of indispensable obligation ; not the creature of will, but necessary and immutable ; not local and temporary, but of equal extent and antiquity with the Divine Mind ; not a mode of sensation, but everlasting truth ; not dependent on power, but the guide of all power." Not far from the same time he read also the words of a sainted man, from whose lips he had often heard most im- pressive exhortations to the true life, in whose char- acter he had seen the majestic beauty of goodness, and by whose serene faith in his last hours the im- mortal hope had become more intimate to the soul. There, among words consecrated by reverend mem- THE Eternal rectitude. 285 ories as well as by their own simple holiness, he read and continued to read, and took into his soul, the thought instinct with power, that " some actions and feelings are intrinsically, or independently of consequences, wrong ; others are, in like manner, right." « No circumstances," he was taught, " can make malignity right nor benevolence wrong ; no supposed utility can render it right for innocence to be oppressed or crimes rewarded." There he read that the worth, not of our characters only, but of our very existence, depends on our attention and obedience to this supreme law, and that it is bind- ing on us by reason of our nature itself, and there- fore broad and profound and enduring as that nature. " Neither," we were told, "can any change in your circumstances exempt you from its obliga- tions. It consents to no compromise. It yields nothing to the selfishness or the passions of men. Do not imagine, therefore, that in consequence of forming new connections, or of meeting new occur- rences, the rules of virtue will be either annihilated or altered. Whatever may be the opinion of others, do not readily acknowledge that as innocent which you have been in the . habit of contemplating as base or vicious." The principles of this immutable morality were represented as absolutely perfect and unqualified. " It is just as absurd to talk of excess in virtue, as to speak of excess in the straightness of a line. It is just as absurd to say that exorbi- tancies can arise from the excess of virtue, as to say that two lines may coincide so precisely as not to coincide at all." So absolute, indeed, of such im- 286 THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. perial authority, that the fervent preacher exclaimed, " Independently of our choice, independently of the choice of angels or of any being in the universe, there are such things as truth and error, moral recti- tude and moral obliquity. The nature of these can neither be altered nor confounded. Should the most elevated of creatures, or even, were it possible, should the Deity himself choose and proceed in opposition to that eternal rectitude which it is the glory of his character to have maintained, still that which is wrong would never become right, neither that which is right ever become wrong. In truth and morals there is perfect immutability." On thoughts such as these the young soul fed and grew. The man felt their reality and power ; he loved them ; he believed them from the love which is truer than thought ; his heart gave out the quickening currents without which there is, to be sure, the sightless ball, but through which only there is the eye seeing by the lights of heaven the numberless forms which they reveal. Later, he read the demonstrations of the grand ideas in the . volumes of Clarke and of Cud worth ; he was drawn farther onward, to contemplate them through the sublime visions of Plato : still they grew clearer, brighter, more beautiful. Suppose the case of another young man taught in a different school. Religion and virtue, he is assured, are by no means of independent, eternal, unchangeable, obligation and v^orth. Possibly they may be devices of priests and politicians to keep men in subordination and tranquillity ; at any rate THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. 287 virtue is only or chiefly the method of expediency. Something is found useful to mankind, useful, that is, to the personal and external advantages sought by individuals and societies ; something, which attained, will make us happy sooner or later, unat- tained, will leave us poor and afflicted ;' something, which will keep society quiet and even advance nations to wealth and power. This is virtue. Meantime, the interior sentiments of love, of rever- ence, of devotion, are neglected, if not despised. For majestic ideas, for religious aspirations, for ear- nest prayer, for secret belief held even at the peril of private interest or of public repose, no sympathy has been cherished ; nay, the whole of this order of thought and life may be turned over, as it some- times is, to the sneers which every age so compla- cently repeats at the sight of saint or sage. Enthu- siast ! Visionary ! Fanatic ! Such the greeting with which he sees the world meet all who would live above it, and draw it toward the celestial state. He is encouraged to faU in with the current ; un- happily he may be prone enough to do so without solicitation. His course is chosen. His method of life is determined. The expedient is to him the right ; the useful is to him the virtuous ; his pur- pose is selfish happiness, his rule the fashion of the world, his impulse appetite of pleasure or wealth or power or other outward thing ; whatever is unmeas- ured and unbounded he has dismissed as unsub- stantial and shadowy. This is the soberness of his common sense, this his safety to himself and to society ; he goes on his way without scruple and 288 THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. without censure, looking for success to his pru- dence, and cheered by the large company with which he walks. Friends gather about him, it may be ; rivals in the chase of gain acknowledge his sagacity ; he may succeed in gaining such a repu- tation that' elders shall commend him as a model to the younger, parents to their children, urging them to like steadiness of conduct and assuring them of the issue. He will be misled by no thin moonlight theories ; he will follow no shadow of a dream ; he will be prudent, moderate, judicious. There is nothing impracticable here. The Church will be safe from innovation or rebuke, the state from rebellious ideas, and his party or sect from the perpetual annoyance of the man who will have his own way. Such the estimation of the world ; such the course of action which he pursues in subjection to its spirit and prescript. "With the two cases before you, let me ask you solemnly to consider this one question. Of these young men, which is seeking the higher end ? For, let me add, we may suppose in neither the example of a grossly vicious man, or even of one openly irreligious. Each may be considered as aiming to live according to his view of life, its ends, its pursuits, its principles. The question, then, broadens into another. Whose is the true conception of life ? Or again, Does the doctrine of expediency contain the whole duty of man ? Is he to put aside youthful enthusiasms, infinite hopes, inward aspirations, and to limit himself to the common estimates which unspiritual judgment sets upon THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. 289 things ? Precisely the question, which, with infi- nite variety of language and with reference to all relations internal and external, sometimes con- sciously, oftener unconsciously, the age is continu- ally pressing upon us and calling us to answer ! To answer, moreover, not by suggestions of change- ful opinions, but by living deeds ; to answer by religious faith, by immortal hope, by divine charity,, or by oblivion of these in practical atheism and worldliness and selfish aims. It is of little mo- ment which among the thousandtheories we may take up ; the whole resolves itself into this single alternative, either there is an eternal rectitude which each man is capable of perceiving and fulfiilling, or there is not. If there is not, then indeed virtue is but a shadow for ever alluring us, for ever breaking its phantom promise. If there is not, then is there no spiritual sphere encircling and filling us ; duty is a word without meaning, conscience is but a deception and an annoyance ; let the seeming go for the real, the celestial for the earthly, and God for self. Then pleasure of body or sensuality of soul, then wealth, or rank, or power, or beauty, or any other personal or perishable end may be con- fessed chief; nothing is absolute, nothing real but the outward and temporary ; and where all is relative, fleeting in its duration and fluctuating while it endures, let each follow his own taste in choosing what to seek and how to live. But on this supposition we may have dwelt too long ; it is all baseless, we feel it sinking from under us, and would not try to hold it up. There is an eternal 25 290 THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. rectitude. Our own souls live in the glorious vision. All good men have attested it by their deeds, all bad men in their apostasies. Nature and history reveal it evermore, brighter than stars or sun, one with the Divine Soul living and un- veiled through the perpetual processes of humanity. In forgetting or disobeying this immutable law, the young man or the old man, every person in eivery condition, forgets and abandons his true being. He betrays himself to his only enemy. Nothing will make up for the waste. He may become rich ; he may gain learning or the renown of eloquence ; he may be consecrated as idol in the Church, or ex- alted amidst the boast of a nation to its highest dignities; he may rise to the loftiest height of what the world calls success : it is all in vain. Faithless to virtue, he has at once surrendered the only true success and drawn on himself the only permanent evil. Amidst tremblings of hope he cast his die ; the movements which it brought him were triumphant for the while, but as surely they brought utter failure for the end. Nor yet has it availed the lover of the Divine Idea, if he stayed in admiration of its beauty, with- out so taking it into his soul that it. should pervade and control the activities of his life. He may be lifted up by the grand images of an infinite justice or love, as he is lifted up by the grand pictures of the painter or the poet, or by the swelling strains of the organ or the hymn, and then go away with only the remembrance of what he has seen or heard, no soul of kindred beauty called forth THE ETERNAL EECTITUDE, 291 within him, no heavenly music answering it in the worship of pure and loving deeds. He goes away from the vision, disobedient and selfish, living amidst higher aspirations the low life of the sen- sualist or the worldling. There have been some, sitting by their firesides, or walking in the green or ripe fields, amidst the freshness of spring or the rich haze of autumn, who would be delighted with country life, and ready to leave everything for the freedom and repose which the culture of the soil promised them : a few days' labor in planting or weeding or reaping is quite enough to cure their enthusiasm. Just so here; as the eye looks over the serene realm of virtue, as it sees the vital free- dom, the divine peace, the sunny brightness and beauty, which fill it, there springs in us the delight which we cannot withhold, becoming, it may be, the longing which rises even into prayer. Within that hallowed region we would live; to that height we would gladly go up, — there, where god-like beings dwell, nothing can shake their everlasting seats, where winds blow not but as gentle breezes over fragrant flowers, where rains fall not but as refreshing showers or morning dews, where snows drive not in the winds, but it is ever a mild and soothing air, stained by no cloud, and a pure splendor resting over it, — there we would rejoice in the boundless sunlight. But to take our way far up the steep ascent is another thing. It is never with easy wings we fly thither, upborne and raised higher only by some strong wind. The height has its vast mountain-side. 292 THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. which we must climb or tread alone ; cliffs rise into clouds which we cannot choose but pass; caverns yawn as into an abyss along our way; other than gods gather oftentimes about us, invit- ing us to smoother by-paths ; blasts from beneath strike and chill us, storms seem lowering from the clouds which we have not surmounted : it looks not at first, be sure, this rugged steep, like an East- ern paradise, the toil of our way can be never a pastime, the pilgrim is sorely tempted, and may yield, perhaps, to go back or aside, choosing an- other life and some lower abode than towers so far above him. The heart must love, that is first of all, and then the hand must reach forth, the feet press on along the path, or if the path seem lost in forest or crag, still upward. This done, the un- clouded sky stretches above. The selfish, worldly man stays below, striving to be content, perhaps sneering at the devout spirit ; the sluggish devotee, seeing, admiring, desiring, even praying for the vision, lingers and rests in the dim shades, the work is too hard for him to try with steady will : only he who forsakes all wins. He wins virtue itself. This is the prize as well as the race. This indeed becomes his life, his blessedness. The eternal rectitude raises him into its own sphere. Milton tells us, and tells us truly, of " The crown that Virtue giTes, After this mortal change, to her true servants, Amongst the enthi'oned gods on sainted seats." THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. 293 Truly, Virtue gives this crown, and gives it here- after. But if any one thinks therefore of the crown rather than the service, let him remember that the very crown is virtue, not something else and better. Yet something else men have dreamed. And so we have been taught always, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, to seek rather what virtue gives than what virtue is, the reward rather than the service, the felicity rather than the life, the'^ dowry, let me say, rather than the bride. Such the illusion which has misled us. Ijet it be put away. Let us remember that Virtue itself, the immutable reality whereof the young man heard the sages speak their angelic words, is in very fact the all in all. Be its gifts what they may, be its rewards bright and eternal, or even if it were, that, in giving itself now, it had given enough and reserved nothing for the future, we might not complain : this is our heaven. I remember to have read, in one of our older divines, the story of some ancient woman, " grave, sad, fantastic, and melancholic," the writer tells us, met once in the way with fire in one hand and water in the «ther, going out, so she told the bishop who asked'^her what these things meant, with the fire to burn up heaven, and with the water to quench the flames of hell, that so men might serve God with- out either fear of punishment or hope of reward. We need not smile at the enthusiasm, nor stay to think how foolish or how wise the project; let it be the one or the other as you choose ; but I have this to say : Suppose the grave fantasy turned to 25* 294 THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. graver fact, and the heaven of men's hopes, too often a sensual paradise, and the hell of men's fears, as often a mere fiery dungeon, perished at last, it could never alter the reality of things. True virtue, wherever it exists, is the real heaven, depart- ure from it, that is, sin, everywhere, now and for ever, is the red and only hell. So the enthusiasts for virtue have always told us, and after all have gone in most cases to alluring us by the promise as of something better, or to threatening us if we sin with something else, as if there could be worse. Question it never, my friends, heaven and hell are no fables ; they are conscious realities. True vir- tue, let me repeat, is heaven ; sin is hell. It is so here, it is so there, it is so everywhere, now and for ever. Ask not a better heaven, there cannot be, than to live divinely ; nor deprecate a worse hell than to live unworthily, disobedient to God, false to the soul. So great, so final, so absolute is virtue, the life, the beauty, the bliss of man. One other and like thing I wish to say. The language has been repeated already, the thought is full of grandeur : " Should the Deity himself choose and proceed in opposition to the eternal rectitude, still that which is wrong could never be- come right, neither would that which is right ever become wrong." True, most surely, supposing God one thing, rectitude another thing. But as we rise in our faith, and the insight strengthens and ex- pands, this separation vanishes ; God becomes the very soul and essence and quickening spirit of Virtue, Virtue, the very influence and inspiration THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. 295 of God wrought into the life and activity of man. He is it, and dt is he. Nobly has it been said, " To be God, and to be essentially and infinitely good, is the same thing." Take Goodness away. Virtue, Rectitude, you have taken God away ; be good, be virtuous, be just up to the height of the great idea, you have invited and welcomed God into the open soul. And as virtue has given us heaven, so does it give us God ; rather as it is heaven, so likewise is it God with us. Granting all this as theoretic truth, men may suggest, perhaps, another question : " We con- fess," they say, " whatever your sublime enthusi- asts affirm of an independent, immutable law, and of the necessary distinctions which it establishes between the good which is one with it, and tl^e evil which is discordant from it. All this in oppo- sition to the unthinking, to the worldly, to the selfish and sensual, to the votary of pleasure, the slave of money, the disciple of a vain and soulless expediency, we confess readily and cheerfully. Nay, let this theory become practical, and not stay stupidly dazzled with the vision which it declines to follow, admiring good, then choosing evil, and for the reality of deed substituting a phantom of worship. But here precisely we find ourselves un- able to stitch our thoughts and voices into these rhapsodies. You seem to refer each person to some private standard ; we believe he owes greater reverence to the gathered wisdom of mankind. By gradual steps, the race has reached its present state of knowledge. There are the books of the 296 THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. learned, the words of sages, the lives of saints and heroes. There are the testimonies of old experi- ence grown to be prophetic. There are the cus- toms of civilized ages and nations. There are the laws which the fathers enacted, improved by the necessary criticisms and amendments of their wisest sons. For what concerns, moreover, the direct relations of men to the Author of their existence, there are the volumes of theology, the sermons of studious preachers, the churches with their observances and symbols, and the Bible with the lights of criticism and interpretation. So many the expounders of those laws, indisputably eternal, which Nature represents, which God em- bosoms and reveals. Let the individual receive such instructions humbly, nor presume in departure from them to seek the less sure and probably de- ceptive responses of his own thought." This, if briefly, yet fairly stated, is, I believe, the secret, if not conscious and confessed, feeling predominant in the more devout minds of the age. It suggests truths which need not be questioned, much less denied or despised ; it infolds, likewise, an appeal to modesty, which we naturally hesitate to meet with other than silence. To render of any practical use, however, the fact of immutable rectitude, we feel that there is demanded, not the possession only, but the acknowledgment by each person of some- thing within himself, some power of judgment, some capacity of perception, some law to be dis- covered, and some instrument or sense to discover it, which is decisive and ultimate. Nay, this seems THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. 297 to me supposed under the very objection. Let me accept the ground of conformity ; there is an ancient wisdom, which I will only learn in order to obey; there is a prophetic experience, which without question I will hear; there are laws, which I ask only to know that I may keep ; there is the Church, there is the Bible, to both I cheerfully sub- rait. All this I may do from mere sloth, from idle caprice, from servility to custom or attachment to whatever is antique or magnificent ; but to do so puts me thus far out of the range of religious and conscientious thought and. action. If, however, I do it from religious conscience, then it assumes con- science as ultimate and decisive. It assumes that, by one wide sweep of thought, one comprehensive judgment of conscience; wide as the compass of my action, comprehensive as the sphere of my life, I make over the decision of my conduct to this, whether social, political, ecclesiastical, or other au- thority. It is thought abdicating its own preroga- tive. It is conscience committing itself to some other power deciding for it the law which con- science only can interpret. All deeds, done under the conditions of this transfer, this allegiance to a foreign dominion, refer themselves back to the first surrender, that is, to the very principle which I have renounced. To each disciple even of the Eoman Church, only let him be such of a genu- ine conviction, of a thoughtful election, there must have been at the outset, there must be so long as conviction or faith determines him, a private judg- ment to hold no private judgment. To each ad- 298 THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. vocate and vassal of absolutism and unquestioning obedience in the state, suppose him also thinking and conscientious, there is actually the same pri- vateness of judgment which leads him to surrender private thought and deed to the superior power. So that, in urging the prerogative of personal judg- ment, we do but avow and urge an unceasing reference to that which really, however uncon- sciously, is and must be the final arbiter with every thinking and conscientious man. "Why, then, should any appeal to modesty hinder our frank confession of judging even of ourselves what is right ? My thought may not control your thought, nor your thought, mine; my conscience may not ask dominion over yours, nor yours, over mine ; but to each of us the highest thought, the judgment of conscience, or rather of that mysteri- ous power which creates and guides both, not only is, but ought to be, through the whole course, in all the relations of life, holier than pontiff or Church, mightier than king or emperor, more decisive than decrees of synods, or parliaments, or congresses, authoritative above all statutes of nations and all interpretations of their courts. The law is written on my heart; the interpreters are within me, search- ing it out and pronouncing judgment ; who shall hinder me from the appeal which God commands me to take from the verdicts of men to the higher tribunal ? This crown God has set upon my head ; let no man presume to pluck it off. I propose hereby no contempt of old wisdom, more than pride of new. I propose only the rev- THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE. 299 erence and service of the wisdom which is peren- nial. The history of the world, could it be written and read, which it has not been, which it cannot be yet, for its courses and destinies are but in their infancy now ; the history of the world, could it be opened from within outward, would give us one continuous illustration of the Eternal Laws. Na- ture, from earth to heaven, through its several gra- dations from the lowest degree the whole way to the highest, is but effluence and mirror of those same laws. So, too, the single form in Nature, the individual person in Humanity ; that, effect, this, image, of the Supreme. The materials of thought are thus everywhere present. The same sky from whose stars came all the lights of elder wisdom bends over us, and its morning red kindles in our East. All books, men, things, the past and the present, are mirrors yet unbroken of celestial ideas, of inftnortal truths, of laws outliving all decay. The eye, moreover, to see the Divine Beauty, the ear to hear the still voice, the sense to discern be- tween good and evil, comes now with the freshness of morning from the Father, and rejoices to wel- come the symbols of his Presence. Why let my eye do nothing but show the way to some path which the world has opened, then look with bor- rowed eye and see with the dead world's light ? Invite rather the celestial vision ; summon the divine faculty; walk beneath the everlasting sky. Why let the world distract me with its discords ? Celestial spheres are pouring out their music for ever ; listen, and the soul shall take in strains so 300 THE ETERNAL KECTITUDE. sweet it shall ask to hear them and obey for ever. Why let any sense of the spiritual reality grow- dead or dull, while God is for ever exciting and exercising it to the clearest perception and most perfect culture ? For others, they must follow the reason and conscience according to their own un- derstanding and choice, unless sadly with the mul- titude they yield carelessly to custom, to prejudice, to passion ; for myself, I would neither boast nor promise, as if exulting in a past, alas ! so poor, or trusting in a future so dimly seen ; but for both you and myself, and for all, I know no better prayer than that, unswerving and unresting, with uplifted eye, with toiling hand and steadfast foot, the head clear, the heart fresh, the fervor of youth glowing, even burning, into the thoughtfulness of age, God's own spirit unquenched in us, his light uiidimmed, we may go forward in cheerful obedience, our path brightening every hour as it ascends toward the perfect and perpetual day. SERMON XXI. PERFECTION IN LOVE. Matt. t. 48. be te thehbfokb pebpect, even as xotje father which is in heaven is pebpect. Tacitus, writing of the character and customs of the Jews, says there was among themselves ob- stinate fidelity, ready commiseration, but against all others fierce hatred. Compared with the com- mon standards of their contemporaries, they may be acquitted, perhaps, of such extremes as to justify the .prejudice by which they have been so long con- demned ; but really, when compared with the higher ideas of a pure morality, they must be con- ceded to have furnished, in their modes of thought, in their national conduct, even in their social rela- tions, in their worship, in their very psalms and prayers, a savage hostility, an immitigable revenge, a murderous violence. Theirs was not the un- tamed fierceness of the primeval warrior alone, but that fierceness consecrated as a religious senti- ment, their supreme divinity regarded as inspire! of the destroying energy and patron of its sternest achievements. 26 302 PERFECTION IN LOVE. The very historian by whom they are reproached with this universal hostility, may be cited as fur- nishing in his own persoa a dark expression of the same temper. He records with exultation the slaughter of sixty thousand men among the Ger- man tribes, without the agency of the Romans ; and asks that there may remain among the nations, if not love to the Romans, at the least mutual hatred, since, he adds, while the destinies of the empire are pressing, fortune is able to present nothing greater than the discords of our enemies. Nay, this hostile spirit, connected among the Jews with their worship, I find in an old Greek historian not dissevered from the solemnities of a death-bed radiant with everlasting hope. Cyrus, supposed to have been set forth by Xenophon as the model of a prince, after discoursing in the grandest man- ner of his past and his future, of the life he has lived and the immortality which awaits him, is said to have spoken thus to his son : " And this remember as my last ; doing well for your friends, you will be empowered to punish your enemies also." Not unlike is the language of Isocrates to the son of his friend, whom he addresses in the most beautiful morality of his time. Not so true, this ! " Deem it alike base to be surpassed in injurious deeds by enemies, and to be outdone in benefits by friends." But among the ancient ex- pressions of reciprocal hostility, whether manifested in public transactions or in private courses of life, I find myself peculiarly struck by that which closes the history, by Sallust, of the Conspiracy of Cati- PERFECTION IN LOVE. 303 line. The battle has been fought and terminated, the great conspirator still breathes, with wonted expression of ferocity, amidst the dead bodies of those with whom he fought. Now that all is over, " many," the historian adds, " who have gone forth from the camp for the purpose of see- ing the sight or of gathering spoil, in turning over the hostile corpses, discovered, some a friend, others a guest or relative ; there were also who recog- nized their own enemies. So variously through the whole army, joy, grief, sorrow, gladness, were stirred." So when the Jew said, It hath been commanded. Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and shalt hate thine enemy, he not only repeated the traditional precept of his fathers, but gave verbal expression to the prevalent maxim of the ages ; a maxim which has not yet become obsolete in practice, however it has been regarded in theory. Go where we will indeed, among Jews spurning others as dogs, or Greeks marking foreigners as barbarians, or Romans justly denounced by a Caledonian chief as ravagers of the earth, I have seen nothing of deeper ferocity than the imprecations with which a Christian minister, nominally such, visited the Irish at the time of an invasion during the civil wars of the seventeenth century : " I beg, upon my hands and knees, that the expedition against them may be undertaken while the hearts and hands of our soldiery are hot ; to whom I will be bold" to say briefly, Happy is he that shall reward them as they have served us, and, cursed be he that shall do that 304 PERFECTION IN LOVE. work of the Lord negligently. Cursed be he that holdeth back his sword from blood ; yea, cursed be he that maketh not his sword stark drunk with Irish blood ; that doth not recompense them double for their hellish treachery to the English ; that maketh them not heaps upon heaps, and their coun- try a dwelling-place for dragons, an astonishment to nations. Let not that eye look for pity, nor that hand to be spared, that pities or spares them ; and let him be accursed that curseth not them bitterly." A ministry breathing such a spirit has been called Christian ! It is not my design now to dwell on the fierce and revengeful character of war, though several of these passages might seem to indicate it. My pres- ent purpose is broader. These cruel sentiments, embodied as they have often been in national ani- mosities, are really principles of individual men and women. They belong to the private heart. They speak and act through private deeds. They mingle with the transactions of daily life. They reveal themselves in the street and the market, io the neighborhood and the family, in the parlor and the closet. They stand out in the conflicts of party and in the discords of sects, in the popular harangue and the pulpit service, in suits at law and in petty scandal. The great enormities of hatred are not to be deemed isolated cases of evil, but its completed expressions. They lie folded up in our hearts, as the poisonous growths and effluvia of the fabled Eastern tree within the very root or germ. Yet again, the Divinity with men is always as PEEFECTION IN LOVE. 305 they themselves are. The Jew, withdrawn from surrounding mythologies, still attached to his Jeho- vah attributes of wrath and revenge ; his sword is drunk with the blood of his enemies." The Greek and the Roman beheld in their gods the prototypes of their own fierceness and selfish hate ; and if the CsBsars, following their ancestors, overspread the world with monuments of their ambition and ra- pacity, they were not worse than the deities whose temples they consecrated, and to whom their sacri- fices were offered. And let me say likewise, the later imprecations of word arid of deed, offered in the name of Christ, connect themselves as naturally with the debased conceptions of God which suc- ceeded his benignant revelations of the Father. A God raining eternal vengeance upon his enemies or quenching his fiery wrath in the blood of the victim pierced for them, — what is it but the perpetual lesson of hatred and wrath? It is the Celestial Power revealed hating his enemies, and making his hatred conspicuous even through gleams of mercy and names of justice. There is a greater law. The heavens are over all ; the earth is underneath all, and yields to aU its fruits. It is not night to the atheist^ while day . shines for the devout. The sea severs not the wicked from the innocent either in its calm or its storm. The air is one whether man walks in it to worship or to revile. The elements and combina- tions and powers of the universe, flowing from one fontal love, are unchangeably filled with it, and look with the same serene beauty, and give forth 26* 306 PERFECTION IN LOVE. the same benignant issues, whether man heeds and blesses them, or hates and curses. The uprooted oak does not fall because a bad man is passing under it, more than it stands for the good man to escape. The universe and its unstinted soul go on their way, leaving every man to create his own good or evil out of the material of his own life and will and action. So does God know nothing of enmity. Nay, through the courses of time, the One Soul is always living. The sacred fountains never roll back, onward they flow for ever. Justice and all things never reverse themselves ; history reveals an unfolding order wherein all crafts and crooked policies and wrong deeds of men are dis- solved in the immovable truth of God to the laws of his boundless philanthropy. The seeming of evil passes into the reality of good ; and the good, never ebbing, flows continually higher, and covers all the strands of existence. Before the face of the Lord hate vanishes, only love is. Our harmony with the Father and with his universe is only as we enter into the same sphere of infinite goodness. The man who hates another, separates himself from the divine order. His sun is darkened; the s'tars fall from his heavens ; his moon. withholds her light. He kindles a flame to burn and scathe his own earth ; he opens his own Hinnom Valley, and throws himself into its continual fires. He nour- ishes the worm which devours, the fire which burns, amid "its outer darkness. Whereas, in the same world, surrounded by the same external conditions, the man whose whole soul is love finds himself in PERFECTION IN LOVE. 307 a state precisely opposite. That love is mirror of an infinite sun ; within the expanse which encircles him fixed stars and undimmed moon shine ; his earth is always green, and airs of Paradise float over it ; the heavens are opened, and he ascends into their calm sphere, and drinks in their holiest influences. Let enemies plot against him ; let them assail his person, seize his possessions, belie his character, treat him with bitter sarcasm or proud contempt ; let them persecute him as wicked, or spurn him as worthless ; let their secret hatred reveal itself in casting him from their society, throwing him out of their bosoms as the sea-waves throw up the loosened sand and drive it, as they dash, against the beaten rock ; what then ? It is not well with them ; it is well with him. The peace of the universe is in his soul ; he cannot go, living or dying, where a divine aspect is hidden from him. They tell us, in old fable, of the shield bearing the Gorgon head, which turned all who looked upon it to stone ; but toward him through the whole circle of the universe, a face looks for ever which penetrates his whole being with its benignity, and, instead of the petrifactions of self- ishness, makes him vital in every part, and draws him into perpetual co-operation with the spirit which it expresses. Nay, hate is of itself that petrifying . power, and the unloving heart sees it never but to become hard and adamantine. Bitterness embit- ters ; scorn begets scorn ; contempt invites con- tempt; pride either reproduces its own assumption or rouses the revenge of envy ; enmity is sure to 308 PERFECTION IN LOVE. form its offspring in others' breasts to roll back and sting its parent ; nothing is strong enough in the midst of these enchantments of selfishness to pro- tect the soul from their deadening influences, save this simple energy of unquenched love. Let this live and grow, freely, fully ; then does enmity from men but reverse its own processes, and, driving it to the celestial fountains, minister to its supplies of new wealth and sweetness. Beset by pride, it grows the humbler; by contempt, it returns the deeper reverence of the soul ; by scorn, it joys the more to rise into that holier sphere which overlooks it. The God within it can never be embittered, but in the instant turns all elements of bitterness into nourishment of his own eternal life. No other than a love like that which pervades the universe, impartial, absolutely without limit, answers the idea of perfection. All other leaves something in the man untouched, something in- complete. There is a selfish affection ; and this seeks and draws always to the kindness which is seen ministering to its gratification. There are in- stinctive affections ; and these, like tendrils of vines formed to clasp and grow around whatever they reach, entwine the various relations of the family, nay, of the neighborhood and the country. There are individual affinities ; and they hold in friendly connections those whom they have drawn together. But all these instincts, affections, sympathies, fail of completing the character, making it one harmo- nious whole. The selfishness which fastens itself more strongly to what favors itself, we readily per- PERFECTION IN LOVE. 309 ceive, repels and annoys as intensely whatever de- clines such ministries. When no broader principle develops a greater communion, domestic attach- ments may become almost the measure of exclu- siveness to such as are out of their range. Friend- ship, when but a partial connection, may coexist with the coldest insensibility, nay, with the bitter- est contempt, to men whom it has not chanced to embrace. And patriotism, so often lauded as if the noblest virtue, has been found in different ages, as circumstances have varied, parent of hostile prej- udice and most cruel aggressions, patron of des- potism and injustice, champion of might in its war- fares against right, arming the tyrant to tread down people rising for freedom, and joining itself with the lordling in the oppression of his slaves. Quali- ties like these not only may be, but in fact often are, seen in conjunction with the utmost meanness in commercial transactions, and with the lowest principles of religion and general morality. Not to be censured therefor, not even to be under- valued ; they have their own place in the construc- tion of our nature, and let them hold it, but ex- alted, purified, consecrated by that divine love in which they lose all their partialities and let go their limitations to welcome the universal. I know there are objections. We demand, it may be said, a love which excludes all discrimina- tion. Benefactor, parent, brother, sister, family, country, all to be reduced to the same category with those from whom we have received no benefit, and may have suffered injury ; with those of un- 310 PERFECTION IN LOVE. known or alien families ; with foreigners and na- tions distant, if not hostile. Even the virtuous we may be deemed to confound with the vicious, as entitled to no higher regard, to no friendlier offices. But this objection simply mistakes the principle. The sensual affections are of course elements of our nature ; but they are not the su- preme and perfect law of our nature. They are subordinate ; and when they break loose from the higher law, they become, no longer servants, hence- forth tyrants of the soul. In their due subordina- tion and harmony, they are at once ennobled and exalted ; humanity goes up with its Redeemer into the mountain, and is transfigured. Natural affec- tions, penetrated by divine radiance, shine sunlike ; their robes of descending thought become white as the light. As the bodily life with its appetites sur- passes and subjects the mere body itself; as the human affections regulate the body. and its vitali- ties ; so does this divine love preside over and con- trol all inferior propensities and powers. The heavens, with their sun and stars, are above the earth; let the earth disturb the serene order and break loose from its orbit, then all above and below mingle together in undistinguished confusion and chaos. Be thankful to thy benefactor ; but let him never win thee to forget thy relations to the Eternal Truth. Love thy parents, thy children, thy wife, thy brother and sister; but suffer them never to seduce thee from thy filial love to the Highest, and thy fraternal communion with the great family in heaven and on earth. Be true to thy PERFECTION IN LOVE. 311 friend ; be none the less true to that law which commands both him and thee. Allow thy country to be dear to thee ; but meet its d«mand of thee to uphold its injustice with resolved denial. And when benefactor, friend, parent, wife, child, country, seek to excite in thee hatreds of their own, and to merge thy life in their self-will, then obey the voice which calleth thee to go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the higher region which it shall show thee. Such the discrimination of thine impartial love; and so reveals it the nice precision with which it severs the evil and the good, virtue and vice. So the man becomes perfect. And now, after what may seem a circuitous course, I return to the word of Jesus from which we have proceeded. This I apprehend to be his real meaning. He is not suggesting every aspect of perfection ; but from the point of its contrast to the false max- im. Love thy neighbor, hate thine enemy, pro- ceeding by a striking series of antitheses, and by appeals to the Divine Character revealed in nature, as well as by intimations of the insuffi- ciency and incompleteness of partial affections, to enjoin that true perfection, that completeness of the human being, which consists in a love which enmity cannot overcome, which no curse can hinder from blessing, whose beneficence no hatred can stay, whose prayer despiteful usage and persecution do but excite to fervor, and in which we become sons of the Father, whose 312 PERFECTION IN LOVE. sun shines and his rains fall whether men serve or reject him. So, quickened by such a life, even we, raised above all selfishness and limitation, grow to be perfect, even as our Father who is in the heavens is perfect. SERMON XXII. THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. Exodus xxt. 40. look that thou make them aftbe their pattern, which was showed thee in the mount. There is an ancient thought which assigns all existing forms as analogies or correspondences to certain ideas, substantial and permanent in the creative mind. Detaching the thought from those mythical images which have sometimes surrounded it, Christians of a meditative cast have not unfre- quently reproduced it in their attempts at the solu- tion of the great problem of creation. That which is seen, proceeding from that which is unseen, cor- responds to it as copy to original, as symbol to idea, nay, they tell us, as effect to cause. It is but repetition and expansion of the thought, that within the Divine Mind, one with its very essence, dwell those eternal principles, those sunny and undeclin- ing ideas, to which nature and life perfectly cor- respond, as from them nature and life for ever proceed. More truly we might say, not principles, not ideas, as if they were manifold in the first 27 314 THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. Being, but the principle itself, the absolute idea, one and unchangeable in his infinitude, which produces numberless types and aspects of the one essence in its everlasting developments. Thus, from its own central fountain Infinite Love for ever flows, forming sphere after sphere, and filling each with its influence. From that radiant centre, out to the dim limit of its circulation, the harmony is complete amidst the boundless diversity. The highest heavens receive and image forth the Love which, as sun, warms and quickens their immense cycles. Transparent as the air, they let the irradia- tion flow through them into lower celestial and intellectual spheres. To the dimmest region of mind, where it seems scarce to have emerged from the clouded abyss, softened and shaded to the feeble sense, it flows on. Down into the darker realm of animal instinct; lower still, into the circles of unconscious growth ; onward thence through the successive appearances of the mineral kingdom to the atom which seems almost to unite the severed states of existence and of nonentity. Deep calling unto deep, is for ever answered, from the height to the abyss. The Word which utters itself in perpetual creation, receives evermore the echoes it awakens in suns and worlds going on their soun(Jing and majestic path. The Life whose efflux quickens all existence, inspheres itself in the myriads on myriads walking their earths or, unseen of us, dwelling in their spiritual mansions. The Love which is parent of all lives through the worlds, and glows at once in the wor- THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. 315 ship of the angel, in the manifold affections and service of the man, and in the very instincts of the animal tribes. Such the universal correspondence, the lower to the higher in degrees of constant ascent, and all and each to the Highest. A tabernacle or tent is of itself a small thing. To hew and set up so many boards ; to weave and dye so many curtains, and hang them around and above ; to put within them an ark, however rich without, with its contents of law written on pieces of stone ; to draw the veil before this secret place ; to arrange outside of it the table and the lamps, — these are by no means the greatest things. There might be wealth here, there might be something of architectural beauty ; but certainly much greater things than these exist. Nor, indeed, does the artistic spirit, the love and culture of art as art, appear to have been yet generated. The whole is religious. The tabernacle is symbol. As ever among the nations statues and pictures of their gods and heroes, and other mystic creations of de- vout genius, represent and body forth ideas such as the times accept, so this structure of the Hebrews. They might dimly conceive the symbolic meaning ; but they ceased not to reverence it as the palace of their Divine Monarch. And Moses himself, on the mountain, — alone, or with those of nearest kin- dred to his own inspiration, — amidst mysterious splendors from above, beholds divine visions. The pattern is shown to him there, — in that mountain, — and to that everything is to be adjusted. What he sees with the Lord, he is to make real with 316 THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. men. The mountain idea is to descend and be- come palpable as fact. Whether this pattern was simply the plan, such as an architect might draw of. some proposed edifice, or whether a spiritual form spiritually seen, I shall not stay to inquire. Nor more, shall I touch any question regarding the narrative of which it is part. AH we need say for the spiritual ends we now seek is this : The record suggests the great law of correspondence, the answering of the lower to the higher, of the earthly to the celestial, and the activity of man in extending it out of the products of nature into the creations of his own power. Rather, I might say, let the same spirit which is for ever fulfilling its own ideas in the universe carry them out equally through the spheres of human activity. Man is at once the microcosm, — the compre- hension of the universe in little, — and the Divine temple. Nay, for the very reason that he thus compresses the all into himself is he temple of God. That old tabernacle, reared in the Arabian desert, and perished long ago with all the ritual it gathered about it, served for its season to symbol- ize the presence of God. That was its end. Really, there is no such thing reared by man as temple or tabernacle now. The Christian seer saw no temple in the New Jerusalem. For ancient temple and tabernacle signified the indwelling of the God. It was his palace or tent, his dwelling- place. As the Delphic god near his oracle, as Diana at Ephesus, as all divinities in a Pantheon, THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. 317 SO Jehovah, the old Hebrew might think, dwelled in this movable tent, and in the magnificent tem- ple answering the same end afterward reared in Jerusalem. Of the New Jerusalem, on the con- trary, we are told, the Lord God and the Lamb are the temple. The Divine abode is the fulness of his own being. And yet again, the human body is represented as his temple ; so likewise we might say, the great communion of saints. Nay, we may look through the unmeasured compass of the creation, through suns and their systems, to the line which bounds thera all, and exclaim, This, this, the immense universe, is his temple. But no sooner do we so exclaim, than a new vision opens to us : it is not the universe which contains God ; it is he who contains and comprehends the universe. He lives not as shut up and sheltered within those walls which seem stretching out into the infinite ; he holds them all as within his embrace, moves in all their pulsations, alike conscious and controlling, and quickens them to wider developments through the Presence in which they move, as snow-flakes through a serene air, or rest, as flowers, on the bosom of a green earth, — uncontained, containing all, — Temple of the universe. The great world is symbol of him ; type of the everlasting archetype. The little world 'which man forms is symbol also; man's life and being and movement in him as present source, God's existence enshrined in man. " The temple of God is holy, which temple ye are," saith a great Apostle of truth. Holy in nature, as all which he hath made is holy. Holy 27* 318 THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. let it Be by conscious and voluntary devotion, for such is the great law of hunaan action. Remember, O man ! thine is a greater charge than was given to Moses in the mountain ; a diviner work to do ; a sanctuary more perfect and enduring to build and consecrate; symbols of a purer service to gather and interpret ; a worship of deeper import to ren- der without ceasing. The Universal Spirit thy God is, not the Jehovah alone of Israel, not the Monarch of nations; neither on the Samaritan mountain nor at Jerusalem, in no house made with hands, and by no rites and pomps, exists this worship, but in that spirit wherein the Father breathes divineness into the heart, in that truth through which he com- municates of his own reality and power to the childlike mind. Thine it is, son of the Eternal! to construct on the earth, and of the materials which thy nature furnisheth, the true temple to thy Father. How shall it be builded ? There are in life hours of higher aspiration. There are hours when, like Moses, the spirit goes up into the mountain. The confusion, the tumult, the follies and sins of the world and the past, lie still, as if wrapped up in the morning fog which spreads over plain and valley. The sun shines on the mountain ; the spirit bathes in its glory. Some think that nothing inscribed on the human memory can ever die ; some things may be covered and dimmed for a while, but the hour must come when the whole will be revealed, and the history of life will open its entire volume • — every character to the least jot and tittle — to THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. 319 the silent and wondering eye. These hours of illu- mination sometimes approach toward this univer- sal remembrance. The stream is seen as in sun- light, from its deep fountains to the point it has now reached ; and a deeper amazement still ! — the grand possibilities of its future course, the deepen- ing and widening channels in which it may flow forward, pure, serene, imaging the heavens, even to the great ocean which feeds and receives it, or else the tortuous currents, narrow, heaving, black, throw- ing up thick mire from beneath, onward to the abyss ; realizing the ancient fables of infernal rivers and torrents ! So, when memory pictures its living characters on the past, hope reveals its heaven, fear its hell, in the future, both the past and the future looking unveiled into the eye, and reaching into the heart as with electric power. Then open visions of a truer life. .Then shine out of the sky which spreads over us ideas of a diviner worship. The old temples and shrines and gods of our idolatry float down the infernal stream ; the pattern of a holier sanctuary comes down from heaven, and rests on the mountain. The voice sounds with the vision. See that thou build up thyself after this model. See that thy life make these ideals real- ities, and fulfil their grandest prophecies. It is not for thee to dwell on the mountain amidst the tran- scendent glory ; for thee it is appointed that thou walk on the lower grounds, amidst the struggles and turmoil of men ; yet see to it that thou never forget the heavenly vision ; be never disobedient to it, see that thou frame thy being like thy vision and thy prayer. 320 THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. Youth is often, I fear oftenest, the period of most fervid enthusiasms. It shrinks instinctively from baseness, from servility, from injustice. Let the tale be told of cruelty and oppression ; the young spirit burns with generous indignation and sponta- neous sympathy. Let the prophecy be announced of a brighter epoch, of freedom and of peace de- scending in a new baptism on the crushed heart of humanity ; the spirit, if unperverted by falsehoods of education and society, leaps forth with jubilant echo to greet the glad future. Selfish pursuits have not yet clouded its vision. Cold words and colder deeds, the bitter sneer and the boast of pride, and the hatred or neglect of the world, have not yet frozen into the flowing life. Noble attempts have not yet been baffled by the oppositions of men, associates it may be, nay, bosom friends. These come later ; and too often the fervent youth passes into the icy man ; the flowering enthusiasm withers and becomes sere, lifeless, a forgotten thing among the rank weeds which ignorance and self- ishness cherish in the faded and fruitless Eden. Happy the young man who escapes the doom; whose youth flows unchecked, with full stream, into the pure and serene currents of a wise and humane manhood ; whose enthusiasm is only gen- tler, not less earnest, — only deeper, not less strong, — only wiser, not less fervid, through the influences of advancing years, and even through the disap- pointments and contradictions which assail it, as well as the successes and the sympathies which sometimes greet it. Soul rejoicing now in the youth of thy hopes, on ! Be undismayed. This THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. 321 mountain of the Lord is not thy place ; thou must down into the cloudy and rough ways of men. But the vision thou hast seen in this divine soli- tude, carry that in thy soul for ever. The spirit that hath breathed and brooded over thy soul, let it quicken and shape thee as it will. The idea which has shined into thee of a redeemed and glorified humanity, let it grow in thee to manly freedom and celestial glory. Temple of God thou art ; let him fill thee with his own holiness. I know well that the life spent in the lowliness of our common business and relations seems a little thing, and that common, every-day duties look mean. Especially, one would say, this is a great degradation, from the mountain to the valley ; from the splendors of the Lord to the obscurities of man ; from the vision of celestial ideas to the doing of petty deeds; from worship before the mysterious pattern sanctuary to the raising up, piece by piece, of the small tent-work set for the daily task. A day of this lifetime of ours ! How poor ! To awake with the morning sun, to clothe and feed one's self, to go out and work, or buy and sell, through the many hours, to return at evening, and soon sleep again till morning, this the history of a day, the history of life. Resemblance slight enough to the building and consecration of a tem- ple to the Infinite Father ! Such the first view. But it is all superficial and scanty. A day is larger and deeper than this. And the life, made up of watchful days and nights of rest, reaches out into higher relations, and its least of things do 322 THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. really become infinite through the spirit in which they are wrought. There is the wonderful analogy before us always. The day with God, — how passes that? He is for ever doing things, how minute to the sense, how small and insignificant. He does not sit enthroned in some magnificent palace, rolling out vast systems of suns and their earths, all complete and infinite. Suns and worlds flow from him indeed, but not the less does he spend himself on the minutest thing upon their surface ; the particle of air, the ray of light, the petal and scent and hue of the flower, the atom which floats in the air or lies on the cold earth. He does not decline to open the snow-drop, because he has worlds waiting on his word ; he lets not the mist- wreath pass untinted, because he has suns to lead on their bright tracks, nor stays he the soft evening breeze, because he has planets to send out on their everlasting circuits. Nay, there is to him no great, no small ; no high, no low ; rather, all is great through the grandeur of his presence, all is high through the attraction which draws the whole within the circle of his love. The leaf is as an earth ; the flower, as a solar system ; the cloud, as a globe ; the ray, as a sun. Just so does our life, seeming little, become really great by being god- like, and its least and lowliest deeds cease to be small and low through the inspirations which fill and ennoble them. A gentle word, a kind deed, a truthful thought, a loving affection, are no longer mere word, deed, thought, affection, but are ex- panded and elevated into gentleness, kindness, THE PATTERN SHOWED IN THE MOUNT. 323 truth, love, the very soul and unconfined essence of goodness. The tabernacle we rear may be made up of earthly materials, but not only is its pattern celestial, even its structure and form are product and image of the One Spirit which fills both heaven and earth. Perfection of character is thus wrought of the spirit of love coming down from the heavens, resting on the earth, blessing even the smallest action, that, however it may seem to the eye, it is great in the divine holiness, and reproduces in us and in every deed the Life once revealed from heaven, which, in solitude, in the family, in society, in temptation or victory, in joy or sorrow, in action or in rest, in birth, in growth, in death and ascension, has become the consecrated arche- type, the prophetic symbol, of our regeneration and our perfection. SERMON XXIII. THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY.* Acts xxir. 14. THIS I CONFESS UNTO THEE, THAT AFTEE THE 'WAT WHICH THET CALL HEKESr, SO WOKSHIP I THE GOD OP MT EATHEES. This day closes the service to which, a few years ago, you invited me. I shall endeavor to improve these, its last hours, by bringing into some general statements the principles which appear to me high- est and holiest, and which, in one form or another, I have sought to illustrate and apply during my ministry. I am far from offering them as a creed which any man is authorized to impose on others, or even to prescribe for his own future acceptance. Sure indeed I may be, that the great Ideas are Eternal Realities : the assurance, however, does by no means extend to the several forms into which the Faith grows. The truth is one thing, and ever- lasting ; the conception of it is another, the expres- * Delivered in the First Church, Salem, February 22, 1852. THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 325 sion, a third, and both temporary and changeful. Let me not, then, be understood to speak as the dogmatist, but only as a man setting forth, as he is able, the grounds and the topics of his convic- tions. The first question of all is this : Whence do we derive our religious ideas ? There have not been wanting in the past those who referred them to such low sources as either fear generating super- stitions, or policy contriving gods and enacting worships. To such sources, however, we may re- joice, our own age seldom, if ever, carries us back : there seems rather a general consent that they flow from some fountain, latent at least and perennial, even if not conscious and outgnshing, in the very nature of man. What brings them out from their secret haunts, — what invites the stream forth from darkness and silence into light and movement, — is among the chief inquiries which our age has essayed to ask, and which men have answered, some in one way, others in another. The Ration- alist, exclusively so, may pronounce all religion the natural development of our own reason, either in itself alone or in conjunction with sentiment and affection. The Supernaturalist, exclusively so, may confine its origin to some revelation vouched, as well as given, by outward miracle. The two highest forms of religion, the Hebrew and the Christian, have been next to universally regarded, by those who received them, as products and mon- uments of extraordinary, special, miraculous com- munications from the Divinity. Besides this, it has 23 326 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. been thought, almost as commonly, that the Scrip- tures of the Old Testament and the New are strictly Divine writings ; the majority, perhaps, assuming the character of Catholics, connecting with them, as also divine and infallible, the decrees of the Church ; minorities, meanwhile, as dissentient or reformed, excluding the Church from its assump- tions, and limiting infallibility to the Scriptures. Christendom holding such positions, and presenting such rules of faith and of worship, there have been and are a few disposed to regard the whole matter differently; who, as they find in the Church only men giving forth the religious sentiment more or less clearly, so deem themselves to find in the Bible only a series of books giving forth more or less clearly the truths of the universe. At any rate, neither in the Church nor in the Bible, neither in saints of later times nor in prophets, even the high- est, of ancient times, do they perceive the origin of religion : if there were no deeper objection which philosophy, searching into the depths of the soul and of nature, could bring to the suggestion, there would remain the historical fact, that devout men lived before either Church or Bible, and who could never have known the names or the facts connected with either Judaism or Christianity. Say that they derived their conceptions from some earlier, as a primitive, revelation, of which records and known traditions have all perished ; it may be replied. Grant such revelation, as hypothesis, yet nothing is it above hypothesis. It may have ex- isted, it may not have existed. If it cannot be THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 327 denied, neither can it be affirmed. At all events, there must be capacity for religion in nature, other- wise this or any other revelation would have been impossible. Standing at this point, and gathering around us all the forms and records of religion, — those of the Bible and the Christian Church, as highest, — we need be straitened by no creed nor no denial ; we need be shut up within no creed, within no denial. We may consent that the Bible is inspired, or dis- sent, or doubt ; that the Church is penetrated by the Holy Spirit, or perceive in it only spontaneous growth of religious communion ; that the Truth opens into outward revelation, or recognize in it the natural object of thought ; — only we may not dogmatize. We may not claim the truth as fully possessed ; we may not decline research and change. To change, we know full well, men are averse ; to capricious or wilful change, with good reason; but to change, as effect of broader pros- pect and clearer sight, we should continually aspire. Let us not shrink, then, from going up some height, to which older creeds did not reach, to which the guides of our youth did not point, and below which the past of our lives has been spent. Nay, as the swan was fabled to sing sweetest, if not first, when death drew near ; so let us learn cheerfully, to the last hours of life, new notes of the celestial music, willing, if so be, to utter a voice all fresh and young as it passes through the clouds to mingle with higher and everlasting melodies. Standing, let me say again, at a position entirely independent 328 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. of external authority, — regarding religion as earlier than prophets, books, or churches, however well or however ill prophets, books, or churches may have received and expressed it, — we feel ourselves at liberty to welcome all light, whatever the source from which it flows, and to follow it through change after change which it opens in our views and es- timates of the topics, whether old or new, that arise within our own experience or present theniselves in the varying aspects of society. We strive sim- ply to take with distinct consciousness the ground which unconsciously nature in every man is seek- ing to take ; the truth, through whatever avenues it comes to us, into whatever courses or consequences it leads us, seen and accepted by personal and in- dependent perception. For myself, I see no essen- tial discrepancy between the opposites, usually brought together as antagonisms, of Rationalism and Supernaturalism. Their apparent hostility, and the actual controversies thence proceeding, seem to me to grow from the narrowness, the ex- clusiveness, and the negations of both : let each be penetrated by a broader, more comprehensive, and affirmative spirit, then a reconciliation is effected. Supernaturalism asserts for its central principle the communication of all truth from the Supreme Spirit ; but it is reason certainly which accepts and acknowledges it. Rationalism asserts for its cen- tral principle the existence and the power, to dis- cover or evolve truth, of this same reason ; it is the spirit, however, of which the truth is radiance and image, whence it proceeds. Nay, the reason in us THE -WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 329 is itself eye which the spirit at once plants, enlight- ens, and fills. God gives, man receives ; when the heavens are opened, then over sons of men are angels seen descending. But when Kationalism, shrunken, as the name itself may be thought to sig- nify, into a shrivelled dogmatism, sneers at all en- thusiasms and ecstasies and inspirations, then the devout soul, repulsed and mocked, turns by natural aversion away; just as when Supernaturalism, -drawn up into the mere shell of effete opinion, throws out its blackness alike over the lights of reason and the fervors of love, then the thinking mind goes back into itself for a truer faith and a holier worship. Acknowledge the permanent communion between the Lord and the obedient soul, or rather make that communion real in the life, the antago- nism ceases at once ; there is no more conflict of the Divine Light and the human eye, than of the sun shedding day from the skies and the quickened limbs and powers of the man rejoicing in its rays. Passing by the conflicts of sects and of narrow thoughts, let me call you more directly to the true source of all genuine religion. Spirit is in very deed the Universal Presence. There is more than the genius which planned, or the skill which con- structed, the watch or the ship, or even the globe of earth, or the realm of stars ; more than the kind- ness which adjusts mechanical processes to good uses of animals and men ; more than a power so great that nothing we know can resist, and which we therefore call almighty. What is commonly called natural theology may trace out appearances of such 28" 330 THE WOKSHIP CALLED HERESY. beneficence in the outward order of things, none need complain, much less censure or revile ; the re- search is innocent, and may perhaps enlarge science and excite devotion. Let not the scientific theologian complain any more of the mystic mind, nor censure or revile him who believes he sees something deep- er and more inward, and who, when he has gone to the utmost of his present sight, waits within the door of the temple in reverent silence for a greater oracle from the mysterious shrine. What, indeed, is he, this devout mystic, but the infant seer amidst an infinite of mingled midnight and morning? The spirit, which eye seeth not, which ear heareth not, which understanding conceiveth not, is really felt always, transcending all, penetrating all, con- cealed like the finer essences and lives of things, yet like them appearing in the forms which it quickens, and the fruit which it fills and ripens. It breathes in the air, its first natural symbol ; it moves in the water, looking over its face as in the morn- ing of creation ; it glows in the flame, and shines in its light ; it pierces the earth, so that its soils are productive ; it pushes forth the living virtues of the seed, and pervades the whole growth, so that nature is full of verdure and beauty. Throughout the wide and glorious home which it thus opens it creates and sends forth uncounted myriads of animal forms, all alive through its presence, all active through its impulses, all fulfilling, however unaware, its won- derful destinies. •Thus far spirit is present without exciting con- sciousness of itself. It culminates in man as he THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 331 perceives it alike in nature and in himself, and as thus he becomes, first interpreter, then minister, not of nature only, which limits him to science and its offices, but of spirit, the common parent of all, wherein he rises and expands into the sphere of in- spiration and the services which it enlivens. Inspi- ration ! The days of this, we continually hear, have ceased. Very likely some methods of it once known have ceased. Woe to man, if with these the real- ity has passed away ! Nature lives now through her whole domain by the same virtue which dwelled in her, and created her harmonies and her beauty, when Hebrew bards sang praises to the Lord, and Hebrew prophets went out touched with altar-fire, and Christian Apostles bore mighty witness to the Son of God. The same sky was over them which is over us, and' the same earth beneath ; the sun and stars, still unchanged, shine over the fields and lakes and brooks of Palestine, and over the sea, young now as then, whose waters wash the three continents, and over other lands and broader oceans than the ancients saw. The spirit has gone from none of these, more than the undecaying forms. We, too, live now just as they lived then ; the life which quickened them renews itself in us ; the mind which stirred thought in them stirs thought in us ; the soul which loved in them loves equally in us ; the awful reverence with which they looked toward the Divine Mystery comes over us also, save as it may be softened by more filial trust ; within us, around us, rests an everlasting Sabbath. The voice once heard among the trees of Eden 332 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. comes as fresh and full now to the soul which dwells in celestial love. Faith in this is the very thing which our age wants ; faith in perennial inspiration, faith in the real presence of the One Spirit. Men do not be- lieve in it ; much ks they are shocked by appear- ances or imputations of atheism, not less do they seem shocked by any serious and thorough expression of the God within us, existing before all time, who can never grow old. The omnipresence of the Lord is everywhere the assertion of a creed ; how seldom a consciousness of the heart ! It is overlooked, un- thought of, unregarded ; the consequences, not only as connected with the intellectual conception of Christianity, but as connected with the interior life and the principles, methods, and relations of action, are precisely what might be foreseen from such ob- livion of the Highest. Selfish and sensual impulses become dominant and supreme. Before the im- personal truth men are, it may be said, necessarily humble and unselfish ; but when, as now, the im- personal truth vanishes, and is out of sight, the per- sonal is exaggerated, swollen, distorted ; pride boasts, sense lusts, the self rages and raves ; the man be- comes what we might imagine the natural world would represent, supposing its order all inverted, its streams running backward, the ocean swelling up from its depths over fields and mountains, the at- mosphere going up from the earth away beyond the highest star, the sun grown dark, fire running through the ground on which we tread, — the whole one boundless scene of desolation and of THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 333 chaos. Out of the inward misrule, — out of the absence of a divine government recognized and obeyed within, — anarchic influences flow forth into the entire compass of character and of social rela- tions. Hence slavery, the soul enthralled to am- bition or avarice. Hence war, concentrating all elements of slavery into the violence of the in- stant conflict. Hence tyranny calling itself govern- ment ; hence private vices and public outrages ; hence hostilities of individuals, of families, of par- ties, of clans, of sects, of nations, of races, and the consolidation and permanence of these hostili- ties by means of confederacies and statutes. Sim- ply because God is not in the thoughts, but dropped out of them as something out of mind, the thoughts are godless, selfish, inhuman, unjust, cruel. And because the thoughts are godless, selfish, unjust, the deeds which they shape, the words which they suggest, the institutions which they create, are of the same character. Thus, as in free reception of the present inspiration we find the source of all good, so in wilful rejection or oblivion of it we find the source of all evil. With this faith in the immediateness of the Di- vine Presence, we may proceed without difficulty to considerations of the various methods by which the religious sentiment is developed. Of these, the first in the historical order is the mythological. This gives us, not one spiritual essence transcend- ing all existence and comprehension, but scattered and fragmentary forms, such as outward nature contains or human art can copy. Egypt, Chaldea, 334 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. India, Greece, Rome, and otlier ancient nations, whose service of false gods survives to these times, furnish examples of this. Sensual and gross as it has always been, the day may yet come when its fables, better understood, shall add new symbols of the Unseen Being, and bear us into higher con- ceptions of his manifold relations to mankind. The second is the monotheistic. Amidst the idolatries of Eastern tribes, some elect men, the fathers of a wonderful people, were raised, through influences little known and seeming strange to us, above the level of the current thought. They cast off the wor- ship of idols, acknowledging only the One whom no image represents, and transmitted the faith to their children. The determination with which these men, followed by some in succeeding ages, priests, rulers, kings, and especially those truest of heroes, the prophets, clave to this faith, and called their countrymen to it, has not only ennobled the He- brew name, but established, wherever it now exists, the worship of one God. The third and highest, I need scarcely add, is the Christian. But through the whole succession, upward to this, and beyond what the Christian Church has yet perceived, let it be remembered, God has continually discovered so much of himself as men were able to receive, while as each preceding state gives place to another, it leaves not a worthless mass, but a series of signifi- cant myths or types wherein men of divine light shall trace new characters of eternal truth. These characters may be found in other tradi- tions; chiefly, however, in sacred books, such as THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 335 those of India or Persia, not to speak of the mythic or philosophic relics of the Egyptians and the Greeks. None of them are insignificant. So soon as the spiritual principles out of which the forms themselves of religion sprung, shall be adequately interpreted, such books will cease to be dead monu- ments of a dead past, and become living expres- sions of the unfolding eternity. And so much higher as is the idea of God represented by Abra- ham, Moses, and Isaiah, still more by disciples and apostles of Jesus, than the ideas represented by Hesiod or Homer, or other mythologists, just so far the Scriptures, which celebrate to us the coming of light out of darkness, must stand above all these mythic books ; their inner life and spirit the infinite love and the everlasting wisdom.. A similar view may be taken of the whole his- tory of the world. It gives out to the sphere of sense, not the lives and actions of men and nations only, but the Divine powers from which their courses and destinies proceed. Men talk of sacred history and profane ; really, there is no history but sacred. Whatever is good, flows immediately from God ; whatever is evil, comes of his goodness im- perfectly developed and received ; nor is there any retribution coming back to men for their deeds but it bears with it new testimonies to the justice, one with the mercy, which, whether secret or open, continually penetrates the universe. So history throughout is sacred, nay, divine, however it may seem when written by the human pen, itself a mighty volume laying out the eternal mysteries, — a 336 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. larger Bible alive with the highest inspiration. It asks but the open eye to read the wondrous hiero- glyphs. The same processes of devout thought which applied to religious myths and worships, and to the education, that is, the history, of mankind, carry us sooner or later to the first principle, when transferred to nature in its manifold existences, conduct us, it need scarcely be added, to the same principle. Whence, as there is given us the whole realm over which either consciousness or observa* tion reaches, from the inmost affection out into all its issues of life, of speech, of deed, and beyond into all the numberless forms of creation, their relations and movements, stand at what point we may, still are we within an infinite circle which God for ever describes and fills ; no particle so minute as to lose itself, so distant as to pass off from him; no sweep so wide but his providence is larger ; no waste but his life hinders or repairs. It has been said, not without wisdom, " His centre is everywhere, his cir- cumference nowhere." The perfection which we ascribe to Jesus Christ is precisely this, that he completely received and gave forth this Divine Fulness. His existence, moreover, opened, not only an advanced order of things, but an order, an epoch, which may be truly denominated a new creation. The ages preceding it developed those elements of our nature which constitute vital power, conscious energy, mind act- ing through the body upon outward things, whether spontaneous and free from constraint of law, as the Greeks sometimes appear, or controlled by law THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 337 and servile, as the Jews were. The type of this state is given in the antique conception of the first man formed from the earth and kindred with it, yet penetrated by the breath of the Almighty that he becomes living soul. The ages which the Lord Jesus introduces evolve higher elements, eternal life, holy spirit, heavenly principles flowing into, filling, exalting the mind, a spontaneous and youth- ful freedom acquired, not by casting off law, but by graving it into the heart. The type, as the source of this state is given in the fresh perception of the second man, coming from heaven and kindred with it, so thoroughly one with the Father, that to us he is quickening spirit. What thus he was, that he gives us to become. His whole history broadens into permanent symbol of the Divine Principle en- tering into human relations, soothing sorrow, resist- ing temptation, removing sin, overcoming the world, exalting itself through weakness and death, and penetrating the whole nature so that it becomes god-like. Seen of us as the Christ, he recalls us to the same Christ, the image of God in ourselves ; and as we come to perceive him, nqt in his tempo- rary limitations, but in his essential and abiding reality, we learn what is meant by such declara- tion as this, " The Lord iS the Spirit." Not, to be sure, the fleshly and perishable form ; but, whether portrayed in the Gospels, or extolled in the Epistles, or re-appearing amidst the grand visions of the Apocalypse, or worshipped by churches to which he has given name, or indicated by those analogies which nature and man present, or interpreted by 29 338 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. experience of his purity, love, and wisdom within us, he shines forth as the Light ; he is the Life, the Father breathes love and peace, spirit is revealed, and that spirit quickens. The mighty Presence, thus drawing all things to harmony, quickening the dead, freeing the enslaved, purifying the sinful, giving, in a word, whatever is divine, whatever is human, let us gladly confess as central, let us ac- cept and bless as supreme. To the Lord of lords, to the King of kings, let every knee bow, let every heart give forth its love, and listen with reverent and cheerful obedience. SEEMON XXIV. THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. II. Acts xxiv. 14. THIS I CONFESS TmTO THEE, THAT AFTEE THE WAT 'WHICH THEY CALL EEBESY, SO WORSHIP I THE GOD OF MT FATHERS. The heresy which Paul confesses does not limit itself to difference of opinion from those about him. Other thoughts than they he has indeed enter- tained ; whatever distance there might be between his view of the Divine Being and theirs, implied in fis belief that Jesus is Son of God and their dis- belief, he was not unready to acknowledge. But there is more in it than this. Conviction is with him more than opinion ; it is faith. The faith with him goes beyond speculation, and evolves love, activity, earnestness of devotion to the ser- vice which it assigns. It is ground of a real wor- ship. Herein he differed widely from many, both his own countrymen and foreigners. "What depth of religious sincerity was there in most of those about him ? They were not, I presume, conscious 340 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. hypocrites. They did not boast of their relation to Abraham, and despise the venerable patriarch. They did not glorify Moses in words, and sneer at him in their hearts. They did not assert that Jehovah alone is God, and really believe that the gods of Babylon or Rome were truer and mightier than he. And when they went up to Jerusalem at the holy festivals, or brought their sacrifices to the altar, they doubtless took it for granted that these things were right and ought to be done ; nay, the long ages of their history, passing before their thought in majestic procession, could scarcely fail to waken reverence, and, if not devout feeling, yet emotions sufficiently like it to pass for real piety. But there was no depth of faith after all ; not even anything deserving to be called religious faith. They received the doctrine of Moses and practised its rites, with no more free, spontaneous heartiness than their idolatrous contemporaries the doctrines and rites which came down to them from times still more ancient, and from names which, if less ancient, were not less honored. They held the faith of Abraham, just as Abraham's neighbors in his own times rejected it; on like grounds, for like rea- sons, with like spirit ; and the very men who ex- tolled Abraham and Moses and the Prophets against Jesus and the Apostles, would in other ages have mocked the enthusiastic wanderer from his native home, obedient to a voice deemed of the Lord, and distrusted Moses in Egypt or the Arabian wilder- ness, and joined with the enemies and persecutors of the Prophets when they spoke the word of God THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 341 against the will and the pride of man. The proof is all near. Him who was more ancient than Abraham, more divine than Moses, the Prophet through whom Truth lived and spake as never be- fore or since, they have rejected and crucified ; and his great Apostle it is whom they are now seeking to destroy. It is all fidelity to their religion and their nation. Just so through all time. There is not much conscious and positive infidelity ; perhaps there is still less of real faith. Most men revere the tra- dition, and acquiesce in its doctrines and rites. Question in their presence either the principles which the Bible is supposed to teach, or the claims of the Bible itself to divine authority, and there is a wide shock, — I will not say deep, for the sentiment which the scepticism touches is not deep, — but it is wide, and perhaps tumultuous. It rouses contro- versy. It opens or shuts pulpits. It rends churches and societies. It brings out Protestant priests and Christian Pharisees to hold up the threatened faith. Nay, sleek Sadducees, always counted half infidels before, and men who have all of Epicurus but the philosophy and the virtue, are at once out as de- fenders of the Faith. And yet, the very instant the everlasting principles of the Bible are announced, and its divine inspirations are breathed forth in fresh utterances, — the very instant the Power which said to Moses, " I am," and whom Jesus revealed as his Father and our Father, is once pronounced the Present Reality, his law supreme against all false- hoods and tyrannies of men, — another cry comes 29* 342 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. forth ; still standing by the Bible and the Church, — still conservative and faithful, — these same Phari- sees, Sadducees, Epicureans, are assiduous in the effort to identify God with human wickedness, and to find in the Bible charters authorizing all enormi- ties. Meanwhile, the multitudes of men, born like those others into their religion, as they are born into certain latitudes and longitudes, look on, — some cheered and quickened by the morning prom- ise, — most, alas ! carried away passively with the prevailing current into deeper and cheerless dark- ness. Such, I seriously fear, is the religious, or rather irreligious, condition of our own times. There is not faith, but passive reception and un- questioning acquiescence. Then it may be there are those who think. The- ology is the grand and comprehensive science. Re- duced to such idle questions as have sometimes called forth its polemics, and discussed with such meagre logic, and in such shrivelled spirit, as it has sometimes been, it is indeed far enough from grandeur and comprehensiveness. But elevated to its true character and position, the knowledge of God as acquired through all methods of his mani- festation, it is the highest, the broadest, the deep- est ; it surrounds all other science, it penetrates all other, it includes all other. God, his universe, his laws and its harmonies : what else is there ? and this is the problem at which true theology works for ever. Seen in some such light as this, it has attractions for the intellect as really as for the af- fections, and for the spirit whence both intellect and THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 343 affection derive their existence and their nutriment. Drawn by these attractions, a man may come to theology with quite such a disposition as that which draws him to arithmetic or geometry, or the appli- cations of each to natural science, to practical pursuits, or to fine arts. That is, theology may be to him mere science. To convert it into life ; to incorporate it with his heart ; to drink its inspira- tions as living waters flowing fresh from the fount of God ; to body forth its majestic and everlasting ideas in the deeds of his every day, and to supplant by them the evils of mankind and the wrongs of society, may scarce enter into, his thought, still less into his earnest aspiration and his vigorous effort. His would be faith, if faith were only scientific observation ; he would be theologian, if theology were only a divine geometry, and Christian if Chris- tianity were only thoughtful speculation of the char- acter and the traditions of Christ. Possibly, too, something may yet remain of the old love for disputation. There may be Christian sophists, as there were Grecian sophists ; caring little for the real truth of things, but delighting to discuss things; doubting, perhaps, the absoluteness of any truth, and, in their indifference to the religious and moral elements, ready to support whatever is opposed, cultivating those arts of reasoning and of speech by which they can make the worse ap- pear the better reason, and disperse goodness and truth as a clear wind scatters the beautiful clouds of the morning. Cicero reports to us of Cato, that, led into the doctrines of the Stoic philosophy by 344 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. learned teachers, he seized them with earnestness ; not, he adds, for the sake of disputing, as a large number receive, but for the sake of living according to them. I hope the case is rare of the man study- ing the Divine philosophy for disputation, making it, not so much even a gymnasium of the mind, where- in its powers may be strengthened, as an arena for combat of gladiators trying their strength and their weapons each for other's overthrow. Let it be rather the stoicism of the man, not instigated by in- tellectual emulation, but inspired by Divine aspira- tion, and striving, not to seem virtuous, but to be the reality which virtue creates. Least of all things is Christianity for disputation ; most of all for the life, its quickener, its guide, its source, course, and issue. This brings us back to the Pauline heresy. There is something besides acquiescence in tradition old or new, heathen, Jewish, or Christian; something greater than science, though the Divine laws and order of the universe be the problem ; something purer and holier than knowledge won for speculation or discussion. There is worship ; there is service. The highest service of which we have yet con- ceived — the worship transcending all others yet known, however the method of it may be regarded as heresy — derives itself from the secret inspira- tion developed in an inward experience. From the combined influences of a deep fear, on the one side, of the invisible powers, and of a consciousness equally deep, on the other, of our own sinfulness and weakness, men have accepted worship, of which a chief end has been propitiation. As if God THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 345 were jealous, wrathful, vindictive, they, meantime, helpless as well as guilty, they have reared altars, and sacrificed beasts, and even their own children, to appease the Divinity, and to secure pardon and protection to themselves. From these conceptions and methods even the monotheism of the Hebrews failed to extricate them. Nay, Christendom has prolonged the sentiment from which these expia- tions proceeded ; and, though neither priesthood nor altar nor sacrifice is now extant in our worship, the absence is not owing to the elevation of the faith, so much as to the historical fulfilment of the idea : one high-priest is supposed to have completed in himself the whole law of expiation. Hence all true worship is supposed to have its basis and its origin in the recognition of this one sacrifice. Like^ all other established opinions and forms, this, of course, is not wholly false and worthless : there is gold in it as well as brass and lead. First, it is evi- dent fact that man is sinful and weak. Whatever our theories of sin, its origin, its nature, its extent and its influences, be it something positive, or only negative, and the imperfection of an undeveloped nature, yet here it is, apparent to our conscience so soon as the infinite ideal arises over it, and exciting the terrible struggles through which the soul advan- ces to freedom. Secondly, it is equally evident that the redemptive power is divine. Whatever, again,, our theories of redemption, its nature, its grounds, its methods, and laws, whether we refer it to in- fluences reaching beyond our experience out into the mysterious spheres of the Divine government, 346 THE WORSHIP CALLED HEEE8Y. or operating exclusively within the souls of men as truths and powers, yet in either case it is of God, gift of his love, fruit of his spirit, effect of his pres- ence. Whatever relation to it, moreover, we as- cribe to Jesus Christ, and however we connect him on the one side with God as medium of his gift, or on the other with man as receiver of the boon, it is never to him as separate from the Father we can ascribe it, but always to the Godhead, whether as dwelling with its fulness in him, or as revealed in all forms and processes of the universe. Conscious of sin, assured that the power in which we become free from it is divine, we need not wonder at the crude theories which have grown out of conceptions so simple, nor at the relations which they have as- sumed to religions worship. The first thing to be done, is something greater than criticism of what we may deem mistaken worship : it is to lay the foundation of true worship in ourselves. " If thou wiliest to be good,", such the sententious maxim of Epictetus, " first believe that thou art evil." Trouble not thyself about the controverted questions and dogmas concerning sin ; look at the real fact, the absolute ideal, the infinite rectitude, the eternal law ; and with the full light of its own glory, let it pour itself forth over and through the soul and the conduct, discovering sin, whatever darkness covers it ; opening every recess in which it may have lain hidden ; and, as each evU appears, surrendering it, leaving it behind thee and beneath for ever. So shall the love of the Father descend into thy soul, and with the first beam w^hich, after the dark night. THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 347 touches thine heart, responsive strains shall sound out upon the morning air, and, amidst the min- glings of the sunlight and the undying music which it calls forth, thou shalt go up into the visions of the Lord. As there may be some overlooking the outward applications of truth in behalf of an in- ward experience, so not the less, I fear, some may secretly laugh at these silent meditations and rap- tures, as if they were unreal, fantastic, illusive. Eeally, these belong to the grounds and the princi- ples of the immortal life. In these worship begins, there precisely where the spirit of God reveals itself in the spirit of man. But it stops not there. When a tree is dead through natural decay or through some outward violence; even when, as at this season, its vital powers are drawn in and shut up, there is no such thing as growth ; the branches are bare and leaf- less ; it is real or seeming death. Just as soon as the spring comes on, and sets the secret currents free, the whole is changed. There has been no newj strange power at work ; nothing appears but a warmer sun up in the skies, and a warmer earth and air about us. But there are swelling buds and green leaves, and thousand flowers, all shooting into life and beauty. The hidden power, according to its nature, projects itself outward, and creates and fills and perfects these new forms. From within, outward ; this is in two senses the law ; for as the outward grows from within, so likewise does the inward seek, as it were, and seek for ever, to pro- duce the outward. So does God, the inmost of all, 348 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. for ever go forth to produce, to fill, to complete at once a whole, as the boundless universe, and the parts, as its several provinces, corresponding to his own nature. And,- as he dwells in us, he seeks con- tinually to fill up all the circles of our own being and relations. While unconscious of his presence, men may spend their long winters, content without growth, and as if stiffened by death ; but so soon as they perceive his life moving within them, they demand something besides ; they would have the chaos part off into heavens and earths, and out of darkness light to shine, out of cold warmth to glow, and the successive days of an immortal spring to evolve forms answering to the interior and creative love. This is but metaphorical statement of the neces- sity which there is in true worship, to make itself a fact among the facts of life, nay, to make itself the central and controlling power in all human con- cerns. It is boundless in its applications ; it is re- formative and regenerative in its influences. It is more than prayer, more than thanksgiving, more than hymn, mo're than any or all, which we call religious observances. Beginning, as we have seen, in the heart oppressed by sin, through its redemp- tion, into its final freedom, it proceeds out to renew the same great process everywhere ; to arouse men from slumber in sin, to urge repentance, to enthrone in all hearts the love which has blessed itself, and throughout the compass of its activities and rela- tions, to establish correspondences with its own as- pirations, promises, and hopes. As the tiller of the THE WORSHIF CALLED HERESY. 349 soil removes the stones, and drains the marshes, and breaks it up- with the plough and the harrow, and when it begins to yield its growth, seeks to rid it of the weeds which mingle with the corn, all that he may fulfil the anticipation of his own mind in the harvest; so does the true worshipper, whenever the soil is ready for culture, go through analogous pro- cesses to fulfil the higher prophecy of his own devout and loving spirit : even when the immediate work seems destructive, it is really the reverse ; he would remove obstructions, that growth may be without hinderance. The prominent conditions under which this wor- ship is rendered, are those of the person, of the family, of the neighborhood, of the Church, and of the commonwealth, including, of course, all the methods by which the welfare and perfection of each are sought. Now, whether the principles ap- plied to the person, to the family, to the neighbor- hood, and to the Church, are right or wrong, I am not aware that among ourselves at this day they are explicitly and palpably shut out of the ac- knowledged province of Christian influence. It i& admitted, apparently, that the preacher of Jesus Christ may proclaim him to be the model and the inspirer of those sentiments and habits which con- stitute the moral beauty of the individual, such as kindness, humility, self-government, reverence of God, and justice to the neighbor. There is equal ap- pearance of its being admitted that he may declare him also to be model and life of those qualities, es- pecially the social affections, sympathies, and chari- 30 350 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. ties, out of which the peace of neighborhoods springs, not less than of those domestic attach- ments, involved in the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, mas- ters and dependants, which draw families to concord and improvement. Within the Church, especially, this claim in behalf of the spiritual life, as bodied forth in Jesus Christ, is not only admitted in words and theory, but directly advanced. Nay, so much as this may be granted of its relations to the com- monweedth, that it contribute its authority and sanc- tion to established institutions, which, whatever they may chance to be, men are accustomed to connect, if not identify, with order and with law ; and in extraordinary contingencies, that it sustain the pre- dominant sentiment of the people and the age. Per- haps, indeed, the limitation, if we do not rather call it the interdict, now so general and imperative, which confines itself in pretext to a single point, — exclusion of the religious principles and worship from the compass of politics, — may be only appar- ent, not real ; the true difficulty lying, not in this direction alone, but in every direction which Chris- tianity may talce out of its prescribed methods. Thus, if among men professing Christianity, yet addicted to drunkenness or gluttony, to polygamy or other unchaste habits, to duelling, to extortion, to dishonesty in commerce, to the purchase of re- ligious indulgences, or, in one word, to any habit which we pronounce sinful, whether related more immediately to the person, to the family, to the neighborhood, or even the Church ; if, I say, among THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 351 men addicted to gross vices, even tolerated by the laws and the States, a preacher should go forth, and expose them with plainness of speech, de- nouncing such sins, and calling men to repentance, to amendment, to temperance, to purity of heart and life, to gentleness, forbearance, and forgiveness, to honesty, to freedom of soul, in one word, to whatever is contrary through its virtue to predomi- nant usage ; the result would be the same in kind as if he had pursued the same course in relation to kindred evils, suppose them wrought into the structure of government and the statutes of the commonwealth. The difference would be found chiefly, if not wholly, in degree ; the hostility with which a power so thoroughly organized as a politi- cal community, and wrought so effectually into the hearts of individuals as well as into the councils of the nation, making itself felt with so much greater readiness, and through means so much more nu- merous and searching, than any number of uncom- bined individuals are able to command. Every person attached to his vices is averse to the religious faith which condemns them. Every family, pervaded by false sentiments to which it clings ; every neighborhood, every society, every church, is possessed with similar aversion to the same antagonistic principle. There is the reluc- tance to disturb old customs, to break off fixed hab- its, to interrupt what seems order and permanence, to accept innovations, to enter upon new courses, impelled by fresh convictions, and guided by other principles. All this, besides the repugnances, per- 352 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY.' haps fiercer, growing out of perverted appetites and passions strengthened by long indulgence. Of these views, the whole history of the world is filled with instances. We are continually reminded of the perfect example of Jesus ; so wise, so calm, so gentle, so forbearing, never striving! never crying aloud, never uttering denunciation, never lifting his voice in the street, so tender that the bruised reed could not be broken by his hand, nor any but the sweetest solace could flow from his lips. I will not stop to inquire how far this conception of his char- acter is adequate, how far it is partial and false : I will only recall the palpable fact, that, admitting all which is affirmed, it proves still the contrary to that which it is for ever brought to maintain. How long did they bear with the gentle Nazarene ? No ; it is neither false morality nor false religion only, nor yet only false politics, but each of them, and with thfem all other evUs, which reject the heresy of a worship supplanting them by virtue, by truth, by justice, alike in public and in private relations. Such is the worship rendered to the universal Fa- ther. Its source is inmost experience of the devout heart ; its living stream goes out into all the deeds of a consecrated life ; it rests on the family with a divine benediction ; it makes neighborhoods pure and peaceful ; but there it does not stop. Out it goes with full and gentle flow till it meets mounds which churches and sects throw up to stop its courses, and it just sweeps them away. On it passes still, until it finds obstructions of kingdoms and republics : what then ? shall it turn back at THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 353 their bidding? Let the old story of Canute an- swer. It is the heavenly attraction, not the kingly commandment, which draws and moves the waters of life. My friends, there has been one reformation sever- ing Christendom. Its simple utterance was, Nei- ther Church nor Pope is master of the individual soul; the Lord alone is supreme, alike over Church Pope, and individual. Another reformation is need ed, — I trust is approaching. Its voice shall be terri ble to despotic kings and equally despotic republics, as that of Luthei to a proud and vicious hierarchy Its voice shall be heard before thrones, and in par^ liaments and congresses. Ye may not invade the sacred precincts of the soul worshipping God through service to his children. This Word, in truth, wider than the prophet had seen, germinant as he had never .thought, sounded more than two centuries ago, probably over the very soU which is under us, out into the growing villages and the deep forests then surrounding this very spot so early consecrated to the Highest. I have often felt as if I could gladly remind you what befits a place hallowed by such memories as thig, and how unworthy to stand as minister of God where Eoger Williams pro- claimed soul-freedom I ought to feel myself, if I forbore to speak words which men receive not now. Such words he spake ; and a winter-wilderness was his reward. Such words, let me bless God, he has enabled me to speak also. Saith any one, they are not the same ? let me still repeat the affir- mation, They are the same, expanded and applied 354 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. to new relations and circumstances. Soul-freedom, this was the grand watchword of Roger Williams, the true hero of New England. Soul-freedom ! I proclaim it once more, now for the last time here, where he sent out the winged word on its great mission to the world. Soul-freedom ! Beneath a despotism enthralling its millions and seeking to silence every voice, and to paralyze every hand lifted for their enlargement, I repeat that word which shall yet have power within prostituted churches, and even so far as the halls of legislation. Soul-freedom ! Freedom to worship God ! It is trodden down now, as it was trodden down then ; but the spirit, which drove at last the combined priest and ruler to allow men to speak and pray from their hearts when they sought the Sunday service, shall drive priest and ruler to allow them to speak and pray, and act too, according to their inmost faith every day of the week, and every hour of the day, without threat, without either restraint or reproach, finally, without the counsels of the republic itself exhausted to repress them. In com- mon with his age, Williams pobably limited his full consciousness of worship to services such as those of prayer, of preaching, of directly religious character. Our idea of worship is broader ; at least it ought to have become broader. It covers the whole life in all its deeds and all its relations ; so that he who would put the weight of a finger on my conscience regarding any deed whatever to which it calls me, does as really invade my relig- ious freedom, as he who requires me by an equal THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. 355 pressure to subscribe, or to reject, a certain creed, to pray or not to pray, at certain times and places. Soul-freedom, unlimited and everlasting! Blessed be God for thee, banished prophet, who hast left this hallowed word for a memory, may it become a full reality ! within these walls, and throughout this city now blessing thee whom the fathers re- jected. Here, my friends, is the error, such has been my solemn conviction many years. We have had a Christianity begging permission of human power to go forth and only comfort sorrowing hearts ; be sure it will disturb no peace, it will bring no sword, though Jesus said he would bring the sword, not peace. It should have been, O may it soon be ! the Christ, the true image of God with us and in us, announcing through open and bold lips his own supremacy, commanding men, churches, and nations to subordinate themselves and all theirs to his One Living Law. O for the clear, full sound of that voice. The Lord is supreme ! We but half say it now, who proclaims it as herald and mes- senger of his truth. Come, prophet, crying in this wilderness. Prepare ye the way of the Lord ; make his paths straight. Come, Angel of the Lord, bearing thy last glad message to the weary earth. The kingdoms of this world are become the king- dom of the Lord; and he, only he, shall reign for ever and ever. I feel a real reluctance to pass from these ex- pressions of higher thought and hope to anything directly personal. And yet, in the presence of so 356 THE WORSHIP CALLED HERESY. many whom I love, and towards whom I am sen- sible of obligations which I trust will never be for- gotten, it might seem ungrateful, perhaps would' really be so, to close without other words. I can- not be ignorant of feelings adverse to me ; but of that I would rather be silent now, and silent for ever. I confess to you, my friends, I have been more oppressed by the kindness of so many. Whether all my views were or not accepted as true ; whether it was wise to express them or the reverse, according to their judgment ; the- thought of those who have so generously confessed my sincerity ; who have, I fear, esteemed me more' than I deserve ; who have proved themselves more' than personal friends, — has, let me repeat, really oppressed me. May my future course make me worthier of a confidence so generous, so full, and unreserved ! As your minister, I meet you no more. As your friend, I would never cease to re- member you. Drawn may we be to each other by deeper affections than those generated by the inter- change of social offices, even by the faith which trusts, through joy and through sorrow, in the Fa- ther of all ; by the hope which, recalling the departed and awaiting our own changes, looks through death to the Life ; and by th& love, greater than both, in- spired of the Lord, which gathers all who receive it into one great family, whether rejoicing in heaven or toiling on earth. My friends, the peace of God be with you for ever ! THE END.