oemee tere cae are : . wee oi Verenss eed a Oe oes Be lade ers . ees eee ce ed or ry Peccery! oe ee at buh iM P= ¥ aN if k ake Meee ven phe Mt * yo a : Wk Oats SAS eR pe s 232.05 Waaagg THE AVERA | » + Bible Collection, Library of Trinity College, DURHAM, N. C. * *, fo CHE INSPIRATION OF OUR os a FAITH a SS THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH SERMONS By JOHN WATSON, D.D. “TAN MACLAREN”’ Author of ‘*The Mind of the Master,’’ ‘‘ Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush,” etc. NEW YORK A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 3 and 5 West Eighteenth Street Near Fifth Avenue sy oie 3 Copyright, 1905 By A. C. ARMSTRONG AND § Re E Published, November, 1905 : ; ; : , : ' t Bor (Div. S ; To * James Oswald Dykes witb as Respect and Gratitude Poh Gite Vil CONTENTS THe INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH . ENTHUSIASM OPTIMISM Jesus’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION VISION CONVERSION THe PASSION OF GOD . Jesus’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS WoRLDLINESS A FRAME OF MIND . 9 PAGE 13 26 39 5° 61 72 85 98 108 I22 Io XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII CONTENTS PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE THE CONDITION OF SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE . FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION, THE METHOD oF JESUS CHARACTER THE SPRING OF LIFE . CHARACTER JUDGED BY ITS TREND THE IMMANENCE OF GOD . REASONABLENESS THE TOUCHSTONE OF TRUTH . CONTEMPORARY FAITH . POSITIVE RELIGION , -< « 2 enee THE REASONABLENESS OF PRAYER THE DIVINE CHARACTER OF THE STATE . IMPERIAL PATRIOTISM PAGE 133 147 157 167 179 190 203 214 227 239 249 XXII XXIII XXIV CONTENTS THe GLORY OF THE CITY . Tue Bopity PRESENCE OF CHRIST THE SOLIDARITY OF MAN AND GOD . DIVINE SERVICE A SPECULATION THE Duty oF ENCOURAGEMENT . THE POWER OF OTHERWORLDLINESS THINGS WHICH REMAIN , , THE ETERNITY OF THE UNSEEN 310 324 335 348 y f A wet + . ‘ig. I THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH “Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spike- nard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.”—.S?#. John xii. 3. = religion and poetry breathe a common air, and rule over a common kingdom. They have to do with visions which love alone can realize, with questions to which reason has no answer, with feelings which elude expression in words. Fancies that broke through language and escaped. The Saint and the Poet are both born from above, and by their inner sight they behold two worlds. They have their being in the perfect ideal of this visible life. Unto them belong “the original gift of spreading the atmosphere of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situa- tions, of which for the common view custom had bedimmed all the lustre, and dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops.” Religion robbed of emotion is a system of philosophy, or a code of morals, 13 14 THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH without imagination or inspiration. It may be potent within a provincial sphere, it can never be universal and omnipotent. The angels do not sing over its coming; their legions are not ready for its aid. No religion has ever been touched with so beau- tiful an emotion as Christianity. Its sacred book opens with a garden where the soul of man walks with God in the shadow of the trees before it goes out on a long wander year, and closes with another garden whither the soul returns after its bitter travail, white and victorious. A world, foul with sin, is hidden beneath the deluge, on whose black waste of waters floats the Ark of God with a rem- nant of the race, and the angel of death smites the firstborn of the oppressor, that the oppressed may go free. The waters of the sea stand in crystal banks to allow the people of God to escape; the newborn nation is fed with manna from Heaven, and water from the flinty rock; and they come at last into a land flowing with milk and honey. The earth is full of voices and revelations to spir- itual souls, and the visible world becomes the parable of God. The Eternal will yet set up His kingdom among men, and the sufferings of the THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH 15 race are to end in an age of gold, when there will be nothing to destroy in all God’s holy mountain, and a little child will lead men captive. The Old Testament moves forward with a rhythmic step to the coming of the Messiah. It was fitting that Jesu’s own life should be heralded with singing, the song of angels, the Magnificat, and the Hymn of Simeon, for from beginning to end it was an idyll. If the mighty archangel who stands in the presence of God announced His coming, the young child was born among beasts of burden, and cradled in a manger. At twelve years old He amazed the doctors in the Temple by His questions, at thirty years He is tempted of the Devil in the wilderness. He comes from the waters of the Jordan, where He has taken up the burden of His life, to change the water into wine at a marriage feast. Unto appearance He is the poorest of men; without a home of His own, eating the plainest food, living with the lowliest people. Yet men fell back from before His face, death yields up its prey at a word, the sick gather for healing to His feet, the very winds and waves obey Him. What devotion of the people to Him, what dark conspiracy of enemies against Him, 16 THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH what picturesque interviews with inquiring souls, what lonely hours on the mountain side! What a tragedy of suffering, what a triumph of good- ness! Without the learning of the schools He confounded the Rabbis, with the simplest of images He taught the deepest truths. Along the paths of the country, on the grass of the mountain side, from fishing boats, in village synagogues, in the High Priest’s palace, and in the Temple of great Jerusalem He delivered His soul. Across the sea, along the shore, In numbers more and ever more, From lonely hut and busy town The valley through the mountain down. What was it ye went out to see, Ye silly folk of Galilee? The reed that in the wind doth shake, The weed that washes in the lake, The reeds that wave, the weeds that float, A young man preaching in a boat. The same emotion touches that society which Jesus created, and which we call sometimes the Church and sometimes the Kingdom of God. Every member is a son of God, and a brother with all his fellow Christians: he is a servant in the work of God, and a soldier in God’s battle. Im- perfect to sight he is a saint in idea, and though THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH 17 he be as poor as Christ on earth, yet he is an heir of God. To him belong great treasures, where the thief cannot steal, and his future dwelling is our Father’s House. Dying, he sees the heavens open, and Jesus at God’s right hand, or living he beholds the new Jerusalem come down from Heaven as a bride adorned for her husband. Tortured in the Roman arena, or burning at the stake, he sings hymns of triumph, counting it all joy to suffer for Christ. From time to time this emotion bursts forth like a new spring and makes green the wilderness of the Church. St. Francis forms his order of poverty, and St. Bernard sings hymns of praise to Jesus. Xavier in his mission- ary zeal stretches out his hands to the far East and cries, ‘‘ More sufferings, Lord, more sufferings.” The Moravians surrender their goods, and go forth to conquer the Arctic regions for Christ. Father Damien dies with his lepers, and Livingstone falls on sleep upon his knees in Africa. The women of the Salvation Army nurse the outcasts of society, and crowds of people are moved by an evangelist as when the wind sweeps over ripe corn. Chris- tianity takes for its symbol the Cross on which its Founder died, and by the victory of humility TOE 2 18 THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH Christianity has conquered. Our faith has only two rites—in one the baptized buries the past and begins life as a new creature; in the other com- municants are united in one fellowship of suffer- ing with Christ and His disciples, and pass from hand to hand The Holy Cup With all its wreathen stem of passion flowers And quivering sparkles of the ruby stars. What do you call this? Fact, doctrine, con- duct? Surely, but something else and something more. It is poetry, the most revealing and the most inspiring which our ears have heard. Chris- tianity is not founded on logic but on passion. We are not moved by argument but by devotion. Christianity is a sublime emotion. When that ceases for a time our religion dies down to the roots, as in winter time: when there comes a bap- tism of new feeling Christianity bursts into spring. It was the great achievement of Schleiermacher, to distinguish religion from knowledge, declaring that “quantity of knowledge is not quantity of piety,” and also to distinguish religion from mor- ality, for “while morality always shows itself as manipulated, piety appears as a surrender.” THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH 19 When your material is human life you can do nothing of the first order unless you call emotion into play. While a law stands it must be obeyed, but if it be unjust you make your appeal from law to righteousness, for law is only a code, right- eousness is a passion. We make provision for the poor and they receive bread according to rules, but let some sudden tragedy overwhelm our fellow men, then we appeal to pity. We are not assessed by tax gatherers, we assess ourselves by love. Relief is a regulation, pity is a passion. When the national affairs move with regular ebb and flow, politics are sufficient. When the common- wealth is among the breakers we cast ourselves on patriotism. Politics are but a system, patriotism is a passion. If a province of the Empire be orderly we ask ability of its ruler; if a province be discontented we demand sympathy. You can manage without emotion, you cannot change; you can carry on, you cannot create. Is it not emotion which dignifies human life? Without its play friendship would be only acquaint- ance, marriage would be a social partnership, par- ents would be legal guardians and the home would be an hotel. Without emotion human society is 20 THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH a joint-stock company, with it society is the family of God. Every movement which has stirred the depths of life, and changed the face of history, has sprung from some profound sentiment. Love for Jesus established Christianity on the ruins of the Roman empire, and saved civilization from anar- chy. The same passion swept over Europe like a tidal wave, sending forth the chivalry of Christen- dom to redeem the holy sepulchre from the Moslem. It was a mingled passion of indignation and pity, kindled by the earnestness of Wilberforce, and fed in later years by Mrs. Stowe’s novels and Whit- tier’s poetry which struck the shackles off the slave. We ourselves have seen the geography of Eastern Europe recast, Germany united, Italy redeemed, Greece delivered from the Turks by the spirit of nationality. And we have seen the heart of our own people wake at last to the suffering of the poor, and a newborn sympathy do more in ten years than could have been done in fifty by law. Rely upon reason and conscience alone, and refuse the aid of emotion, and you could not have social reform, the emancipation of the slave, national freedom, or Christianity itself. Is it not disappointing that the chief charm of THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH 21 our religion has been often filched away from us, sometimes by dogmatic theologians, sometimes by unliterary critics? The idyll of the Garden of Eden has been reduced to a legal negotiation with parties and parchment, with seals and conditions. The inspired visions of prophets have been precipi- tated into theological science. The exquisite say- ings of Jesus are tortured into the shape of dogmas. And _ squalid ecclesiastical controversies between Catholics and Protestants are thrust into the mag- nificence of the Apocalypse. What avails that wealth of spiritual beauty which has created modern literature, architecture, painting, and music, if those who love it place their Scriptures on the level of the six books of Euclid? Another school less theological and more critical spend their strength in analysing the documents. They reject the miraculous and minimize the romantic till Christ be only another Rabbi, and nothing remains of His teaching but a few frag- ments. Christianity for this kind of man is only another parchment. The wild-flowers that one saw yesterday wet with dew are to-day dried and ticketed in a herbarium. No doubt the two schools proceed on different principles and have different ae a } — S 22 THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH ends in view, but they both accomplish the same result. They reduce poetry to prose, and in the process Christianity ceases to convey half her truth, and loses all her fascination. For now our faith hardens into a scholastic creed or shrivels into a few severely edited fragments of literature. The picture is so many feet of canvas; the angel is a piece of marble, the regimental flag a yard of cloth. It is not by such things the soul is stirred or life is changed. The spikenard has been sold for three hundred pence, and there is no fragrance in the house. Some persons, however, are haunted with a suspicion that in so far as you exalt the emotions of Christianity you undermine its reality. They prefer the ten words of Moses as recorded in the © Pentateuch to their interpretation in the Sermon on the Mount and are more at home among the Proverbs of Solomon than with the parables of Jesus. Both the rhetoric of the prophets and the imagery of Jesus have been a perplexity to them, and they are never content till the clusters of grapes have been stripped from the branches and the richness thereof bottled in creeds. They are afraid that when one passes from prose into poetry he is THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH 23 leaping from the solid reck into the air. They do not understand that emotion can bring us into regions of truth which reason cannot reach, and that a parable of Jesus may be quite as much in touch with fact and therefore quite as true as an article in a confession. Instead of poetry being less charged with truth than prose it is the other way, for poetry comes in where prose has given up the struggle. If truth be perfectly common- place then it may be stated in the most prosaic style, but there are truths, especially in religion, which defy ordinary means of expression, because they are so subtle and spiritual. What cannot be achieved by speech may be attained by painting or music, wherein the thoughts of which we have been hardly conscious are expressed for us and embodied. And this has been done for religion in the emotion of our faith. The Te Deum is not _less but more true than the Athanasian Creed, the “Tn Memoriam” of Tennyson than Butler’s Anal- ogy, George Herbert’s Poems than the Confession - of Faith. For any one to suppose that in religion emotion is an unsafe guide is to believe that a land surveyor’s plan of Heaven would give us a truer idea than the revelation of St. John. When we 24 THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH move through the prophecies of Isaiah or the con- versations of Jesus, we are not being taught by catechism, but we are living in an atmosphere which passes through the pores of the soul. Other people are apt to suspect that emotion is an alternative to action, but emotion rightly di- rected is the highest motive power. What can never be accomplished by the most convincing argument or the keenest sense of duty can be wrought by the impulse of love. A mother will make sacrifices which no one can ask of a nurse; the best drilled conscript will never touch the hero- ism of a patriot fighting for his home; the true artist who serves art as Jacob for Rachel will expend labour on his work you could never obtain from a hireling. The action which is charged with emotion has an engaging beauty, and to emo- tion must be credited the great successes of life. Without the teaching of Fichte Germany had not girded her loins afresh to face the first Napoleon; had Mazzini never wrote, Garibaldi had never delivered Italy. Beecher from his pulpit did as much as Lincoln with his armies to free the slaves. First there is the emotion which sets men’s hearts on fire, and then there is the deed. Christianity THE INSPIRATION OF OUR FAITH 25 obtained her martyrs, and won her victories, not because men reasoned that Christ was the Son of God, or concluded that His law was the most per- fect righteousness, but because multitudes of ordi- nary people loved Him with all their heart and were prepared to die for Him. When women like Mary gave the best that they possessed to Christ in the hour of His defeat, and before He was crucified poured over Him the spikenard of their love, the future of Christianity was assured, and Christ al- ready had ascended His Throne. Teche ENTHUSIASM “They said: ‘ He is beside Himself.’”—S¢. Mark iii. 21. ANY years ago some of us were much im- pressed by a little work entitled Modern Christianity a Civilized Heathenism, and it -still lies upon one minister’s shelfi—to be taken as a tonic when one’s religious constitution is relaxed. It is an extreme book, but the anonymous author fairly makes his chief point when he insists that the difference between Christ and Christians is that the Master was always in deadly earnest, and that we are generally tepid; and when he points out that Christianity does not suffer to-day at the hands of the world because it is so soft and in- offensive, but that if it followed in the steps of Jesus Christianity would again be cast out from society. His most bitter passage is a comparison between two clergymen, one who is concerned with the innocent pleasures of life, and has a tender regard for his dinner, and another who has surren- 26 ENTHUSIASM 27 dered everything for Christ and dies of fever caught in the discharge of duty. ‘‘Mad,” says the au- thor, coming to his climax, ‘“‘simply means different from other people; and if Jesus lived in our days, Christians would be so astonished at His conduct that they would put Him in an asylum.” This point has been made by two other free lances of our time, by Laurence Oliphant in his Piccadiliy, and by Mrs. Lynn Linton in her Joshua Davidson. It is indeed a point which comes very handy to the candid critics of the Christian Church, and which in certain moods must give every sin- cere Christian cause for uneasy thought. Our text reminds us that the situation actually occurred in Jesu’s life, and was not the least pain- ful in His experience. He was inured to insult and abuse, but there are strokes which pierce the heart. When Jesu’s own mother and brethren came at the moment of high popularity, and ex- plained that He was not in His senses, it was a stroke of Satanic cruelty: And what lent bitter- ness to the incident was this—they did not object to His work, but to the spirit in which He did it. They would have wished Him to do God’s will cautiously—being careful about His meat and 28 ENTHUSIASM drink; they were dismayed because He did God’s will intently, forgetting Himself altogether. Jesus was counted mad simply because He was enthusi- astic, and the incident is therefore typical. Our Master illustrates that passion for religion which is prepared to sacrifice everything, even life itself, in the service of God, and His family represents for the time, the worldly mind which regarded Him with angry suspicion and has been pouring cold water on enthusiasm ever since. Two states of mind are contrasted—one inspired and self-forget- ful, the other prosaic and self-regarding. And they will always be in collision. One does not mean in saying this that passion has been an inseparable feature of Christian char- acter or that the thermometer has always stood at blood heat in the Christian Church. It were not difficult to find congregations so self-controlled that they are little better than an aquarium of cold- blooded animals, and individuals who are in no more danger of excitement than a marble statue. In the eighteenth century they used to praise a person on his tombstone because he exhibited religion without enthusiasm, and even later it was necessary to write books in defence of enthusiasm. ENTHUSIASM 29 Thousands of Christian folk of our own time regard religious emotions with grave distrust, and are ever making a plea for decorous piety. Whatever may be said of their correct and well bred ideals, it is worth remembering that upon their conditions the kingdom of God would never have existed and that if enthusiasm died out the obituary of the Christian Church should be prepared without de- lay. From time to time a tide of emotion has swept through the Church, cleansing her life from the pollution of the world and lifting it to a higher spiritual level, as when the ocean fills the bed of a shrunken river with its wholesome buoyant water. Every such springtime has been a lift to religion, and has been condemned as madness by the world. It was a tolerant world before which St. Paul stood when he was tried by Festus, one that could appre- ciate manliness and honesty. Festus indeed was full of respect for Paul, but the moment the apostle introduced his religion the Roman spoke with an- other voice. It was not so much that Christianity was dangerous as that it was unintelligible. It belonged to another order of things, and St. Paul was beyond his ken. ‘‘Much learning doth make thee mad,” said the Roman magistrate. Centuries 30 ENTHUSIASM passed and there came a day when the forgiveness of sins was sold for money, and the morals of the clergy were an open scandal. Luther arose and pled for the cleansing of the Temple, and the Festus of the time was not angry with his Paul. “Brother Luther,” said the Pope, “has a fine genius;” by which he meant that Luther was crazy, and they also said in Rome that if Christian- ity were a fable it was at least a profitable one. One sees the perpetual contrast in Luther and in Pope Leo X—the passion of faith and the compo- sure of culture. The spirit of God stirred amid the dry bones of England in the eighteenth century when great ladies offered themselves to the ser- vice of Jesus, and the faces of colliers were washed white by the tears of penitence. And we know what the respectable and religious world said: ” “a9 windmill “low follies,” “‘a man out of Bedlam, in their heads,” ‘‘fools,’ and “fanatics.” One does not count such words as evidence against Wesley and Whitefield; he immediately concludes that spring has succeeded winter, and that the Church has been afresh endued with power. But we must not run away with the idea that in criticizing enthusiasm the world is deliberately ENTHUSIASM 31 criticizing Christianity. The historical attitude of the world to religion is one of large toleration, and somewhat less sympathy. Religion is an instinct and must be fulfilled just as a man must eat and drink. Let every man therefore get a religion which will suit him, and let him hold his tongue. It is after all an irksome necessity, and if you are fortunate enough to find any kind of god with whom you can live on good terms, be thankful, but do not trouble your neighbor with your private affairs. “A Catholic are you? Very good. A Protestant? Quite so. Recently I have become a Theosophist. Really!” The world yawns, for it is not interested in your religious fancies. You are at liberty to be anything you like provided you are not troublesome. One may also admit that the world has a kindly feeling to organized Christianity. It likes an aesthetic Church, and has no objection to a Christian minister if he be a cultured man. It will say the Apostles” Creed on occasion provided you do not attach any definite meaning to a number of the clauses, and considers the Burial Service the most decent way of closing a man’s career. A con- ventional Christian will have no difficulty in coming to terms with the world; his difficulty will begin 32 ENTHUSIASM when he meets the eye of Christ. But suppose one is so possessed with the spirit of Jesus that he in- sists on carrying Christianity through his thinking, his business, his home life, his politics, you have another state of affairs. His friends may not say that he is insane, and they will not willingly perse- cute him, but they will lift their eyebrows and remark that this kind of thing is imprudent for a man with a wife and six children. They may even feel it their duty to take him aside some day and speak to him as one who is overstrained. Had St. Paul contented himself with a theological discussion about Jesus in rabbinical circles, he would have been left in peace, and we might never have heard his name. But when he counted all things but loss for Jesus Christ, then even the tolerant Roman Government was obliged to suppress him. Had Luther written respectful notes to his Holiness hoping that he would consider the state of the Church in his leisure moments he would have got a letter from a secretary saying that his Holiness was obliged for his communication. When he nailed his challenge to the church doors of Wittemberg there remained nothing now but war to the death. One may regret that the peace of society should be ENTHUSIASM 33 broken by religion, but the Kingdom of God stands in enthusiasm, and in the last issue it is justified in all her children. There are two convincing pleas for enthusiasm and the first is its reasonableness. A man may be keen about many interests, but of all things he ought to be keenest about religion. We are indulgent to enthusiasm in many departments, from football to collecting matchboxes, and are willing to give to every innocent fad a good-natured benediction. Why should this polite tolerance for every man’s hobby harden into persecution when his mania is the Kingdom of God? Why should a gladiator be sane and St. Paul be mad? Ah, the reason is not obscure. What is eccentricity but motion from a different centre? There is the centre of things unseen and eternal, and the centre of the things seen and temporal, and the lives pivoted on those two points cannot be harmonized. Suppose thirty years ago that a scientist had told a rustic that we should soon be able to speak to people in Paris through a wire, the rustic would have left his com- pany with celerity, and kept his children off the road for that day. But the scientist was only a few years ahead of the people, and the boldest Christian LF. - 3 34 ENTHUSIASM dreamer is only anticipating the good time which is coming. Place a dozen cold-blooded and hard- headed men in a meeting of the Salvation Army when the Army is on fire, and they will think of Bedlam. Take half a dozen Salvation soldiers to the Bourse of Paris when there is a crisis in Euro- pean affairs, and the Salvation men will be aghast. Madness must be defined by the standard of sanity. If any one believes that the Kingdom of God will remain when this world has disappeared like a shadow, then he is right to fling away all that he possesses, and himself too, for its advancement and victory. My second plea for enthusiasm is its success. Take if you please the enthusiast who has not always been perfectly wise, and whose plans any one can criticize; the man who has not had tangi- ble success. It does not follow that the cause of God is condemned in him or has lost by him. There is something more important than results which can be tabulated in reports; there is the spirit which inspires action and without which there will be no report to write. Unless enthusiasm is stored on the high water-shed there will be no stream to drive the mills in the valley below. “It ENTHUSIASM 35 is magnificent,” said a French officer when the six hundred charged at Balaclava, “but it is not war.” Certainly it was magnificent, and perhaps it was war. Those heroes will never be forgotten in English literature or in the annals of the English race. They fell at our Thermopylae, and as long as the English flag flies the charge of the Light Brigade will quicken our pulses. Gordon’s death was a calamity, but it was not waste. Without his self-forgetful devotion we should have lost one of the most inspiring examples for our officers, and for the young men of our congregation; we should not have Gordon institutions throughout the land, and a heartening message for our lads. When a knight dies in his steel armour it doesnot matter much in the long result whether he lost or won. Every one who saw him fall, fearless to the last, leaves the lists with a higher idea of manhood. We are hag-ridden in the Church of God by the idea of machinery, and we forget that the motive power of religion is inspiration. Boards are an excellent device for management, they are helpless for creation. No resolution of any court, however cleverly drawn up, can produce a prophet or a martyr. He comes from God and does his work 36 ENTHUSIASM in his own way; he is severely criticized by all kinds of futile people, and then he returns to give in his account to God. Was it failure when the men of the Church Missionary Society died at Uganda, and the men of the Baptist Mission fell one after another on the Congo? It was high fail- ure, that kind which turns the world upside down. You can always get prudent people; they are at a discount in their multitude. ‘‘The world,” some one has said, “‘is filled with the proverbs of a base prudence which adores the rule of three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, and only asks one question—Will it bake bread?’? What we have to search for high and low is imprudent people, self-forgetful, uncalculat- ing, heroic people. ‘‘Give me,”’ says another, ‘“‘one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such men will shake the gates of hell and set up the Kingdom of God upon earth.” Were the infection of en- thusiasm to spread over the Kirk we should see the Kingdom of God coming with leaps and bounds. Has God baptized any of my readers into this spirit? Be thankful that in an age of indifference, ENTHUSIASM 37 when enthusiasm has departed from literature and politics, the good fire is burning in your hearts. Do not give any heed to the criticism of cool or clever people. You have other spectators than this present world; a cloud of witnesses is bending over you and bidding you be of good cheer. If the world does not understand you they understand, for in their day they have suffered and conquered. If you do not hear their voices on account of the rabble’s laughter, you will hear them in eternity’s stillness, and if, carried away for the moment by the strength of the hostile tide, you fling up an empty hand to Heaven, it will be caught in the hand of Christ. Has God denied you this gift of enthusiasm? Then do not hinder the enthusiast by your side; do not chill him with a spray of cheap common- sense, or discourage him by your friendly disap- proval. If there be not in you the heart to plunge into the river and save the drowning man, then for Heaven’s sake and your own sake do not stand on the bank and criticize the style of the swimmer who with labouring stroke is bringing his uncon- scious burden to the shore. Surely that is the meanest thing that any one from his coign of safety 38 ENTHUSIASM can do. Can you not find somewhere in you a cheer for the gallant struggler? Will you not stretch out your hand to help him as he nears the bank? And will you not pray that God may touch your soul also with that fire which burned as a pure flame in the heart of Jesus, and has never quite died out from the heart of the Church? Mastered by this madness Christ laid down His life for our salvation; by this madness the world is being redeemed. III OPTIMISM “Go ye therefore and make Christians of all nations.”— St. Matthew xviii. 19. PONG the characteristics of Jesu’s teaching which have passed into the higher con- sciousness of Christianity is an inextinguishable optimism. When He was only a village prophet, Jesus declared that the social Utopia of Isaiah was already being fulfilled, and when He gave the Sermon on the Mount He spoke as a greater Moses, legislating not for a nation but for a race. If He called apostles they were to disciple every creature, and if He died it was for a world. His generation might condemn Him, but they would see Him again on the clouds of Heaven. His death would be celebrated in a sacrament unto every genera- tion, and being lifted on a cross He would draw all men to Him. The apostles who failed in His lifetime would afterwards do greater works than Himself, and He Who departed from their sight would return in the Holy Ghost and be with them 39 40 OPTIMISM for ever. He looks beyond His own land, and embraces a race in His plans. He ignores the defeats of His own ministry, and discounts the victory of His disciples. He teaches, commands, arranges, prophesies, with a universal and eternal accent. This was not because He made light of His task or of His enemies; no one ever had such a sense of the hideous tyranny of sin or passed through such a Gehenna, but Jesus believed with all His heart and mind in the Kingdom of God, that it was coming and must come. He held that the age of gold was not behind, but before hu- manity. This high spirit has passed into the soul of Christ’s chief servants. The directors and pion- eers, the martyrs and exemplars of our faith have had no misgivings; the light of hope has ever been shining on their faces. St. Paul boasted that he was a freeborn Roman, but he was prouder to be a member of Christ’s commonwealth, whose capital was in Heaven, and in which all nations were one. He was a loyal subject of Caesar, but he owned a more magnificent emperor at God’s right hand. Above the forces of this present world he saw the principalities and powers in the heavenly places OPTIMISM 41 fighting for his faith. Scourged and imprisoned he burst into psalms, and he looked beyond his mar- tyrdom to the crown of righteousness. Shackled to a soldier he wrote letters brimming over with joy, and confined to a barrack room he caught through a narrow window the gleam of the eternal city. Never did he flinch before a hostile world, never was he brow-beaten by numbers, never was he discouraged by failure or reverse. He knew that he was on the winning side, and that he was laying the foundation of an everlasting state. You catch the same grand note in St. Augustine with all his horror of prevailing iniquity; in the medieval hymn writers celebrating Jerusalem the Golden, when clouds of judgment hung over their heads; and in the missionaries of the faith who toiled their life through without a convert, and yet died in faith. They might be losing but their Command- er was winning. The Cross might be surrounded with the smoke of battle, it was being carried for- ward to victory. They were right in this conviction, but do not let us make any mistake about the nature of this triumph, else we shall be caught by delusions, and in the end be much discouraged. It will not be 42 OPTIMISM ecclesiastical, and by that one means that no sin- gle Church, either the Church of Rome, or the Church of England, or the Church of Scotland will ever embrace the whole human race, or even its English-speaking province. One cannot study Church History since the Reformation, or examine the condition of the various religious denominations to-day without being convinced that there will always be diversity of organization, and any per- son who imagines the Church of the East making her humble submission to Rome, or the various . Protestant bodies of the Anglo-Saxon race trooping in their multitude to surrender their orders to the Anglican Church has really lost touch with the possibilities of life. Nor will the triumph be theo- logical in the sense that all men will come to hold the same dogma whether it be that of Rome or Geneva. There will always be many schools of thought within the Kingdom of God just as there will be many nations. Neither one Church nor one creed will swallow up the others and dominate the world. He who cherishes that idea is the vic- ° tim of an optimism which is unreasonable and undesirable. The Kingdom of God will come not through organization but through inspiration, Its OPTIMISM 43 sign will not be the domination of a Church, but the regeneration of humanity. When man to man shall brother be the world over, and war shall no longer drench cornfields with blood: when women are everywhere honoured, and children are pro- tected: when cities are full of health and holiness, and when the burden of misery has been lifted from the poor, then the world shall know Christ has not died in vain, and His vision shall be ful- filled. A fond imagination which only tantalizes and disheartens! It is natural to say so, but magnifi- cent dreams have come true. Suppose you had been on the sorrowful way when Jesus was being led to His doom, and women were pitying this innocent prophet whose hopes had been so rudely dashed, and whose life had been so _ piteously wasted. ‘‘Ah!”’ they cry, “His illusions have been scattered, and His brief day is going down in dark- ness.’ It appeared so, but was it so? Suppose while the kind-hearted people were talking, some one had prophesied the career of Jesus. They would have laughed and called him a visionary, yet which would have been right, the people who judged by Jesu’s figure beneath the A4 OPTIMISM cross, or the man who judged Jesu’s power through that cross? the people who looked at the mob of Jerusalem, or the man who saw the coming gen- erations? There are two ideas of Christ’s cruci- fixion in art, and each has its own place. There is the realistic scene with the cross raised only a few feet from the ground, a Jewish peasant hanging on it, a Roman guard keeping order, and a rabble of fanatical priests as spectators. That is a fact, if , you please, down to the colour of the people’s gar- ments and the shape of the Roman spears. Very likely that is how it looked and happened. There is also the idealistic scene with a cross high and majestic on which Christ is hanging with His face hidden. Behind there is an Italian landscape with a river running through a valley, trees against the sky, and the campanile of a village church. At the foot of the cross kneels St. Mary Magdalene, on the right at a little distance are the Blessed Virgin and St. Francis, on the left St. John and St. Jerome. The Roman soldiers and the Jewish crowd and that poor cross of Roman making have dis- appeared as a shadow. The great cross of the divine Passion is planted in the heart of the Church and of the race for ever. Facts? Certainly, but OPTIMISM 45 which is the fact, that or this? Which is nearer to the truth, the Christ of the sorrowful way or the Christ at God’s right hand ? Have there been no grounds for optimism? — Has the splendid hope of Christ been falsified? One may complain that the centuries have gone slowly, and that the chariot of righteousness has dragged upon the road. But Christ has been coming and conquering. There is some difference between the statistics of the Upper Room, and the Christian Church to-day; between slavery in the Roman Empire and to-day; between the experience of women in the pre-Christian period and to-day; between the reward of labour in Elizabeth’s Eng- land and to-day; between the use of riches in the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the twen- tieth; between pity for animals in the Georgian period and to-day. If we are not uplifted by this beneficent progress, it is because we have grown accustomed to the reign of Christianity, and are impatient for greater things. We are apt to be pessimists, not because the Kingdom of God is halting, but because it has not raced; not because the Gospel has failed to build up native churches in the ends of the earth with their own forms, 46 OPTIMISM literature, martyrs, but because every man has not yet believed the joyful sound. There are two grounds for the unbounded optim- ism of our faith, and the first is God. How did such ideas come into the human mind? Where did the imagination of the prophets and apostles catch fire? where is the spring of the prayers and aspira- tions of the saints? Whence do all light and all love come? Surely from God. Can we imagine better than God can do? Can we demand a fairer world than God will make? Were not the Greek philosophers right in thinking that our ideals are eternal, and are kept with God? It is not a ques- tion of our imagining too much, but too little, of being too soon satisfied. So soon made happy? Hadst thou learned What God accounteth happiness, Thou wouldst not find it hard to guess What hell may be his punishment For those who doubt if God invent Better than they. The other ground for optimism is Jesus Christ. Does it seem that the perfect life for the individual, and for the race, is too sublime: that it is a dis- tant and unattainable ideal? It is well enough to give the Sermon on the Mount, and true enough OPTIMISM 47 that if it were lived the world would be like Heaven, but then has it ever been lived? Yes, once at least, and beyond all question. Christ lived as He taught. He bade men lose their lives and He lost His; He bade men trample the world under foot, and He trampled it; He commanded men to love, and He loved even unto death. This He did as the forerunner of the race. Why not again with Christ as Captain? Why not always, why not every- where? Is not He the standard of humanity now, and is not He its Redeemer? Has He not been working in the saints who have reminded the world of God?” Will He not continue to work till all men everywhere come to the stature of perfection ? Only one institution in human society carries the dew of its youth; and through the conflict of the centuries still chants its morning song. It is the religion of Jesus. I do not mean the Christian- ity which exhausts its energy in the criticism of documents, or the discussion of ritual—the Chris- tianity of scholasticism, or ecclesiasticism, for there is no lift in that pedantry. I do not mean the Christianity which busies itself with questions of labour and capital, meat and drink, votes and politics, for there is no lift in that machinery. I 48 OPTIMISM mean the Christianity which centres in the Person of the Son of God, with His revelation of the Father, and His Gospel of Salvation with His hope of immortality and His victory of soul. This Chris- tianity endures while civilizations exhaust them- selves and pass away, and the face of the world changes. Its hymns, its prayers, its heroism, its virtues, are ever fresh and radiant. If a man de- sires to be young in his soul let him receive the spirit of Jesus, and bathe his soul in the Christian hope. Ah, pessimism is a heartless, helpless spirit. If one despairs of the future for himself, and for his fellows, then he had better die at once. It is despair which cuts the sinews of a man’s strength and leaves him at the mercy of temptation. Do you say what can I do, because the light round me is like unto darkness? Climb the mast till you are above the fog which lies on the surface of the water, and you will see the sun shining on the spiritual world, and near at hand the harbour of sweet con- tent. True, we must descend again to the travail of life, but we return assured that the sun is above the mist. Do you say what is the use of fighting, for where I stand we have barely held our own? Courage! It was all you were expected to do, and "OPTIMISM 490 while you stood fast the centre has been won, and the issue of the battle has been decided. It was a poet who had his own experience of adversity, and was cut down in the midst of his days, who bade his comrades be of good cheer. Say not, the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars. It may be in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward look, the land is bright. LF. 4 IV JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION “A certain man said unto Him ‘Lord, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest.’ And Jesus said unto him, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.’”—St. Luke ix. 57-58. 12 what is rare be remarkable, then this incident when Jesus refused three disciples is the most remarkable in His life, and comes upon us with a shock. One can find many occasions when Jesus encouraged men to become His disciples, no other when He set Himself to discourage them. His preaching was one long invitation to enter the King- dom of God; He used to say with emphasis that He would cast none out: He made social pariahs wel- come; He sat at meat with publicans. But it is evident that Jesus on occasion could be cold in manner, could damp out enthusiasm, refuse offers of allegiance, speak forbidding words, and close the gates of God’s Kingdom in a man’s face. Three 50 JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION J 51 men heard Jesus preach, and were so moved that they resolved to join His fellowship. The first He repelled by an extreme illustration of the hardship of a disciple’s lot—he would not have where to lay his head; the second He daunted with an almost impossible commandment—that he should leave without burying his father; the third He declared unfit for His Kingdom—because he wished to bid his friends farewell. This was the drastic way in which Jesus dealt with three apparently honest men. The action of the Master is so unexpected that one begins to look below the surface for reasons, and the case of the Scribe, to go no farther, explains the situation. One gathers that he had been arrested, impressed, convinced, and finally carried away by the teaching of Jesus. What freshness, reality, in- sight, grace! Jesus of Nazareth is a prince of Rab- bis, and must certainly found a new school. The Scribe will attach himself to this master of the future and become His follower. He will go with Him to the synagogues of Galilee or the Temples of Jeru- salem. He will not be ashamed to stand by His side in great public controversies, or to support His doc- trine. Unfortunately for the enthusiastic student this was not the kind of loyalty Christ asked from 52. JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION His disciples: His demand was for something more practical and commonplace. Jesus was not a Rabbi, dazzling people with original views, and asking them to accept new creeds. He was a master calling on men to live a certain life, and to fulfil a certain law. His disciples were not to be students idolizing a bril- liant teacher, but servants obeying a daily law. This Scribe must do more than change his opinions, he must change his company. His idea was to follow Christ’s lead in the synagogue amid the debates of the learned; he must go with Christ to the field in the service.of ordinary people. He was willing to put on Christ’s doctrine as one puts on a fashionable dress. Was he ready to identify himself with Christ’s society? ‘You wish,’ said Christ, “to be My disciple, and you think of discipleship from the Scribe’s standpoint. Understand that wild animals live more comfortably than I. Is My cross as grate- ful as My creed?” We gather that it was not, and that the Scribe’s exuberant impulse disappeared be- fore this chilling prospect. If it should seem that Christ dealt rather hardly with this overflowing Scribe, let us remind ourselves that it was in perfect keeping with His attitude to mere emotion. His teaching had always a keen edge JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION 53 to that large class which is more inclined to gush than to do. There was a son who was most polite and said that he would go to till his father’s vine- yard, but he never went. That is emotion. There is a shallow soil in which the seed springs up suddenly, grows quickly and as soon as the sun has risen with- ers away. That is an emotional nature.. There was a householder who made ambitious plans for a tower, and laid a big foundation, and could get no farther, and was laughed at for his foolishness. That is the feebleness of emotion. There were certain people who stood at the door of the Heavenly Kingdom, and expected to receive a welcome because they could say “Lord, Lord,” but had no entrance because they had not done the will of God. That is the end of emotion. True emotion which resulted in brave action never failed to receive its meed of approbation from Jesus, to whom the tears of Mary Magdalene and- the spikenard of Mary of Bethany were most dear. But Jesus was never weary of denouncing false emotion which ends with itself, and He has done all He could to save His disciples from its en- ticing snare. The Master was not content to pillory this shallow feeling in parables; He did not spare it when it ap- 54 JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION peared in those whom He loved, and considered sin- cere. No one appreciated more deeply the enthu- siasm of women, none ever appealed more success- fully to the immense devotion of a woman’s nature. But none has ever been more faithful in warning women to bring their engaging sentiments to the touchstone of action. When Salome, motherlike, asked that her sons should sit on thrones in Christ’s Kingdom, He reminded her that they must first drink His cup and be baptized with His baptism. When Jesu’s words greatly moved some hearer’s heart, and one cried out “‘ Blessed is the woman that bore Thee,’ He could not let her pass without de- claring another person still more blessed—the one who heard His Word and kept it. But never did Jesus so condemn fruitless emotion as on the way to the cross. The daughters of Jerusalem had been less than women if they had not wept when Jesus passed, weak with suffering, bearing on His body the marks of the scourging, and tottering beneath the weight of His cross. They did weep, but that day their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons had cried, “Crucify, crucify Him.” It was rather late to pity Him now; their tears were a poor atonement for the crucifixion. Better now to weep for themselves, and JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION 55 for their children, since the judgment of God must be hanging over fanatical Jerusalem. There is a vast difference between the tears of penitence and the tears of pity; between the women who afforded Christ a home and the women who came to look at Him in the “Sorrowful Way.” Certainly Jesus cannot be said to have encouraged emotion, and people of various kinds may benefit by His discipline. For instance, some person of refined nature is charmed by Jesu’s teaching in the Gospels. He has never heard anything in literature or religion to compare with Jesu’s parables, beatitudes, com- mandments, and discourses. Like the Scribe he also will be a Christian and will follow Christ any- where, but is he prepared to be one with the Peters and Johns who make up the Christian society, and -be their brother in the love of God? That is another matter. A second person with a sympathetic heart is much touched by Jesu’s compassion for the mis- erabies. No religion and no party is so full of pity, and so it must be good to be a Christian. Yes, but suppose that Christ should expect more than an esthetic interest, that He should ask His disciples to make definite sacrifices for His sake. That is an- other matter. Or a third person has a quick sensi- 56 JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION bility and is much affected by Christ’s promise of mercy. But he forgets that not one sin can be for- given until he has pardoned his own enemy, till he has abandoned his favourite vice, till he has made restitution for wrongdoing. That is another matter. Impulses to admire what is true, to sympathize with what is sad, and to be reconciled to God, are in themselves excellent, but let it be clearly understood that though Christianity may begin with feeling it must end in practice, and that the best thing for an enthusiastic person is to ask this question—Am I ready to share Christ’s cross? There are two reasons why Jesus was so critical of emotion, and so anxious that it should be rigidly tested, and one is that Christianity itself is charged with the most beautiful emotion. Some religions are not likely to excite any one, as for instance an ethical code. One can no more wax hot about morality than over the multiplication table. When a man has no more generous idea of religion than paying his debts, and going to church, he is in no danger of heated feelings. But Jesu’s teaching is not a series of commonplaces, nor is His Kingdom a mechanical institution. His religion is an evangel, a revelation, a splendid imagination. When the spirit of Chris- JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION _ 57 tianity touches our soul we must take care while we rejoice in the ideal that we lay stress on the real; while we set our sails to the favoring gale that we have a solid keel on our ship. It is good to believe in God’s fatherhood if we keep within us a child’s heart; good to teach human brotherhood if we be doing a brother’s part; good to magnify the cross if we are carrying our own; good to think of Heaven if we have its earnest in holiness within. None could have heard the Sermon on the Mount without wish- ing to accept its persuasive principles, but Jesus warned His hearers that unless they carried His words into action they were building their house upon the sand, and He insisted that the house of the soul must stand on the rock of practical obedience. The other reason springs from the constitution of human nature; emotion is so seductive. The heart has a more delightful climate than either the con- science or the reason, and they who make their home there are apt to be enervated. Enthusiasm about some good cause, admiration of some brave deed, sympathy with some tale of suffering, indignation at some flagrant wrong, even personal grief over some loss, are subtle pleasures. The nerves of the soul vibrate; we have the experience of a gentle electric 58 JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION shock. People read sensational pictures, go to the theatre, follow criminal trials, and officiate at trage- dies, because sensation is a luxury. Add religion to feeling and you raise it to its highest power. Nothing can be more agreeable to a sympathetic nature than to sing hymns of passion, to dwell on the love of God, and the sufferings of Christ, to talk about spiritual experiences and heavenly hopes. Nothing can be harder than denying ourselves, and keeping Christ’s commandments, and serving others, and submitting to the divine grace. Nothing is more severe than duty, nothing is more soothing than sentiment. Many persons therefore prefer to take their religion in feeling rather than in practice. There are men to whose eyes you can bring tears by a few words, but from whose pocket you could not wring money by e eloquence of Demosthenes: and women who have a becoming enthusiasm for goodness in the drawing-room, but who would not sacrifice their pleasures to deliver a soul from death. If there be no correspondence between emotion and action, then religion is an inflated paper currency with no gold for its redemption, and the issue must be spiritual bankruptcy. There is a nervous disease in which the blood JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION - 59 which ought to nourish the muscles has been with- drawn to the head, so that the muscles are depleted and the brain is congested. The patient can do no work, but he is eager, feverish, restless. The spiritual nature is subject to a similar disease; the energy which should expend itself in action is swallowed up in sentiment; there is an overflow of emotion, and a paralysis of action. Alone in our room with an in- spiring book there is nothing which we do not achieve. We nurse lepers, rescue the fallen, die at the stake, make costly sacrifices, move multitudes, trample sin under foot, and annex the whole king- dom of virtues. We are St. Paul, David Livingstone, Florence Nightingale, and General Gordon all in one. We are in a third heaven of sublime devotion, then we lose our temper because some one recalls us to a household duty, or reminds us of an unanswered letter. We oscillate between imagination and selfish- ness, between passion and indolence. We are de- ceiving ourselves daily, counting what we would like to do, the same as what we do. Let us be more faith- _ ful with ourselves, and more suspicious of every emotion which has not been reduced to action. Idle excitement destroys the very tissue of the soul, and will leave us impotent for any good work, till at last 60 JESUS’ CRITICISM OF EMOTION we walk in a vain show with a profession growing ever higher, and a practice sinking ever lower. The final judgment of life after all is not emotion but action. Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control That o’er thee swell and throng; They will condense within thy soul And change to purpose strong. But he who lets his feelings run In soft lascivious flow Shrinks when hard service must be done And faints at every blow. Faith’s meanest deed more favour bears Where hearts and wills are weighed, Than brightest transports, choicest prayers, Which bloom their hour and fade. V VISION “Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”—A cts of the A postles ii. 17. NE cannot quote this high word of Hebrew prophecy without the danger of prejudice. We are living in a day when the function of vision is depreciated and the faculty itself has almost ceased. The blood of the new century is thin and cold; its hopes are few and dim. The great poets and novel- ists are gone, or are silent; there is no writer left for whose new book we watch as for the breaking of the day, and whose reading would sustain us through the labour of life. No master is rising in painting or in music to interpret modern life and add new provinces to the kingdom of Art. Science, which last century had a career of such matchless success, is now gath- ering the fruit of her past discoveries. No wonder that thinking people are cynical, and literature is pessimistic, and that Mr. Pearson in his National Lije and Character declares that there are no more conquests for the race. In this age of prosaic - thought and pedestrian morality vision suggests everything that is unreal and ineffective—fanati- 61 62 VISION cism, extravagance, sentimentality. Action is a syn- onym for everything that is practical and successful —industry, shrewdness, and capacity. We are afraid of a visionary because he is an incalculable element; he will take up with lost causes, propose unprofitable schemes, tamper with ancient institu- tions, and be indifferent to the motive of money. The practical man, with the multiplication table for his creed and the sphere of sight for his province, in- spires you with confidence. Just in proportion as a man is cleansed from the visionary element is he ser- viceable for the mission of life; just in proportion as he sees visions is he unreliable. If young men began to see visions and old men to dream dreams it would be perilous both for Church and State. “Facts,” we insist, ‘‘ give us facts,”’ and we secretly add, “Beware of fancies, for they too often mean vision.” Certainly let us always keep in touch with fact. But what about the chief fact of nature itself? Two worlds are ours, and each must be discerned by its own faculty. One is made up of places, people, cir- cumstances, possessions—the physical; the other of ideas, feelings, affections, expectations—the spir- itual. We are conscious of the house we live in, the faces that look at us, the task we do, the afflictions that befall us. We are conscious also of the sins that ‘VISION 63 are past, of the love we have tasted, of the aims we cherish, of the sorrow that wounded our hearts. Both worlds surround us, one of them tangible like water, the other intangible like air. We see one with our eyes, we fell the other with our soul. God keeps His holy mysteries Just on the outside of man’s dream, In diapason slow we think, To hear their pinions rise and sink While they float pure beneath His eyes Like swans adown a stream. Things nameless, which in passing so, Do touch us with a subtle grace, We say who passes? They are dumb, We cannot see them go or come; Their touches fall, soft, cold as snow Upon a blind man’s face. In truth the physical represents the spiritual, and just as we have vision we detect the soul of things. To one man a poem is so much printed stuff, to an- other the interpretation of life. A picture is to one so much brilliant colouring, to another a window into eternity. An oratorio is to one so much harmonized sound, to another an epic of righteousness. A face is to one so many features, to another a biography. With sight you possess the outer world, with vision you enter into the inner world. Poets only illustrate this faculty, they do not monopolize it. No one is unconscious of the unseen, no one is insensible to its 64 VISION influence. As the waves lap the soft sand, and leave their trace, so does the unseen impress our soul. Let the most prosaic man see the “rose of dawn,” the expanse of ocean where the sunbeams bathe at noon, the mists wreathing round a mountain top, the corn falling before the sickle, the sun going down blood red behind the western hills, and there will be Stirrings of his soul which dart Through the barrier of flesh. He will remember his boyhood, he will revisit his home, he will be filled with tender imaginations, he will make strenuous resolutions. When Words- worth’s ‘Country Girl” heard a thrush singing in London she was again in the North Countrie. -A mountain ascending, a vision of trees, Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on, through the vale of Cheapside. Vision as well as sight is a faculty of our nature. Yes, and what about the facts of life—the action of which we make so much? If you wish to discover the source of a man’s strength you must trace his life to some secret spring amid the everlasting hills. As the years come and go his life will re-inforce itself from many quarters, and cut its channel through many rocks, but every great life is a jet from the central waters, and on to the eternal sea will carry its first colour. Some felicitous phrase in a sermon VISION 65 reveals the living Christ, as when an unknown monk drops the curtain from an Ascension. Some revela- tion is given to the agonized heart wrestling through the darkness unto the breaking of the day. Some sorrow fills the atmosphere with tears and brings the horizon nearer where earth and Heaven meet. No man tells what he has seen, nor is he able to explain what happened, but the vision will remain till the last of earth’s shadows pass, and the man knows even as he is known. Moses beheld in the desert a bush burning with fire and not consumed, and in that day entered upon his life work. Nothing would ever daunt that man’s faith who for the briefest moment had caught the sheen of the Divine Presence. The rocks of the desert would yield water to God’s people, and the skies drop manna; across the desert he would see the land flowing with milk and with honey and be content to die. For him hence- forward the world was transfigured, and “every common bush” was “afire with God.” King Uzziah’s death chamber, that satire on human power, is suddenly changed into the heavenly tem- ple, and Isaiah consecrates his life to the Holy One of Israel. St. Peter catches, as it were through a rent in the peasant garments of Jesus, the spiritual LE. 5 66 VISION splendour of His nature, and confesses the prophet of Nazareth to be the Son of God. St. Paul, torn between the grip of hereditary religion and the pleading of Jesus’ spirit, receives the heavenly revelation and goes forth to conquer the world for Christ. St. John, flung like a dry seaweed on the coast of Patmos, beholds the open Heaven and Jesus at the right hand of God, and writes the epic of salvation. John Bunyan is cast into Bedford Gaol, and in that fortunate solitude dreams the Pilgrim’s Progress. St. Francis goes out from the supper table, and beneath the sweet Umbrian sky woos his bride of poverty. No bush is common to him who has eyes to see; a cell becomes a universe to him whose soul is receptive. A lonely island is the annex of Heaven when a man has a pure heart. Sublime experiences which come and go swiftly, but do not leave a man the same. The sun sets, but the afterglow remains. The vision is hence- forth a light upon the man’s path, and a burning hope within his soul. Without vision how could any man have endur- ance or patience? What is the testimony of sight? A ghastly struggle for existence, a masterful princi- ple of evil, a perpetual human disability, a weary round of suffering, and then the silence of death, . VISION 6y with only here and there some achievement of faith, or some victory of righteousness to illuminate the darkness. What is the testimony of vision? An undying purpose of God, a regulated discipline of the soul, a constant environment of the spiritual and the long vista of everlasting life. Sight can only show us the shadow, but vision reveals the substance. Sight shows us the means, but vision the goal to which things are moving. Sight shows us what is, but vision assures us what ought to be, and what shall be. There are four persons who need the life of vision, and the first is the man with the narrow life. Just as you look on the things which are seen or unseen your life will be commonplace or heroic, your labour drudgery or service, your mind a foun- tain of bitterness or sweetness, your outlook a dead wall or the eternal horizon. What a handful of bare facts are the incidents of your life—there are not enough to make a paragraph from the register of your birth to the register of your death. Cast this dry seed into the fostering soil of imagination, and what a harvest. Your birth—did not your soul come from God “with trailing clouds of glory?” Your home—is it not the prophecy of our Father’s House? Your business—is it not your task in the 68 VISION great household of Christ? Your marriage—is it not the sacrament of the divine love? Your death —will it not be the revelation of the spiritual world ? This poor letterpress is changing into a poem. What a wealth of glory may be poured into obscure lives, as when a highland cottage is filled with the light of the setting sun, because the window is open to the west. William Blake lived with his wife in two rooms, and when the fashionable world beat upon his door he saw it come and go unmoved. “Leave me,” he prayed, “my visions, and peace.” Vision is also the consolation of the man with the hard life. There are trials which cannot be belittled or talked away, as for instance an incura-. ble disease, disappointing children, an empty home, a secret sorrow. This is a case where the unseen world must be brought in to redress the balance of the seen. There are two scales to the beam, one hanging on this side of the veil, full of tribulation, the other beyond the veil, weighed down with heavenly recompense. Consider the peaceable fruits ‘of righteousness, the victory of tribulation, the fel- lowship of suffering, the company of Heaven. Matthew Arnold was greater as a poet than as a critic, and he was never finer than in one of his religious pieces. VISION 69 *Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver through his windows seen In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. I met a preacher there I knew, and said: “Tll and o’erworked, how fare you in this scene?” “Bravely!” said he, “for I of late have been Much cheer’d with thoughts of Christ the Living Bread!” Oh, human soul! as long as thou canst so Set up a mark of everlasting light Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow, To cheer thee and to right thee if thou roam Not with lost toil thou labourest thro’ the night, Thou mak’st the Heaven, thou hop’st, indeed thy home. Another who needs vision is the man with the busy life. If it be not always easy to realize God in solitude, it is hardest to believe in the spiritual when one is occupied every day with the material. It is not wonderful that men of affairs are apt to be worldly; it would be wonderful if they were unworldly, for the dyer’s hands must take the colour of the dye he works in. Unless a merchant corrects his sight by vision, how can he preserve a spiritual atmosphere? His one hope is that of the diver, who as he goes down through the encom- passing waters is supplied with air from above, so that while he gathers treasure in the depths he breathes another world. When some speculators went to Faraday and showed how he could enrich himself by his discoveries, the father of modern 4O VISION science answered, “I am too busy to make money.” He was impervious to worldly ambition, because he was consecrated to science. You may trust a man with any earthly riches who has his treasure in Heaven; you may place on his head any crown who has seen Christ’s crown of thorns; you may ap- plaud him to the echo who is watching the lips of Christ. Vision has many a victory for the martyrs, but one of its chief victories belongs to the man who, immersed in the affairs of this world, is a citi- zen of the world to come, who has Sought the soul’s world—spurned the worms. And, last of all, vision is the only reinforcement of the Christian soldier. The true man does not grudge his sacrifice of time or toil if he can see its fruit, but what he sees is often waste and defeat. He envies the builder whose wall rises before him foot by foot, the ploughman who adds furrow to furrow across the stubble, the fisher who comes home at daybreak with his boat full. If he were only sure that his work was not in vain, if he could only see the Kingdom of God coming. This he cannot always see, and therefore he must believe. He must cleanse the vision of his soul, and look for- ward. He must turn his eyes from earth unto the city which is coming down from Heaven like a VISION 71 bride adorned for her husband. And for the suc- cess of that day he must live, and fight, and die. His visions will one day be sight; his dreams will one day be fact. Happy he whose inward ear Angel comfortings can hear O’er the rabble’s laughter; And, while hatred’s faggots burn, Glimpses through the smoke discern Of the good hereafter. Knowing this, that never yet Share of Truth was vainly set, In the world’s wide fallow; After hands shall sow the seed, After hands from hill and mead, Reap the harvests yellow. Thus, with somewhat of the Seer, Must the moral pioneer From the Future borrow; Clothe the waste with dreams of grain And, on midnight’s sky of rain, Paint the golden morrow! VI CONVERSION “Repent ye therefore and be converted.”—Aets iii. 19. OSTER used to say ‘“‘Wemust put a new face upon things,” and there are times when one would like to gather the whole mass of religious terminology and bury it in the depths of the sea, because one is afraid that the beauty of many spiritual ideas is concealed by their shabby garments. The words in which we clothe them are like Scottish bank notes, which were perfectly clean when they were first issued, but have been soiled as they passed through many greasy hands. When the religious term was created it expressed a genuine experience of the soul in a becoming fashion. After it had been repeated by men who did not feel its power, it degenerated into cant, and we should wish to see it withdrawn. Yet that unpleasant bank note has the same value as at the beginning of its career, and a 72 CONVERSION 73 religious experience is eternal. No word has been more despised in worldly society or more laughed at in certain circles of literature than conversion. But conversion states one of the most profound realities of the spiritual life, and affords one of the most convincing evidences of an unseen world. “Blame not the word con- version,” says Carlyle; “‘ rejoice rather that such a word signifying such a thing has come to light in our modern era, though hidden from the wisest ancient.... What to Plato was an hallucination and to Socrates a chimera is now clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys and the poorest of their pietists and methodists.”’ The idea of conversion is not the monopoly of one religious school nor of any single religion. The revival preacher of the Protestant Church corresponds to the preaching friar of the Roman Church, and the ascetic of Christianity is repre- sented by the fakir of the East. The Incarna- tion is at the base of Buddhism, and the doctrine of the Trinity is embodied in the ancient Egyptian religion. There has been no religion without conversion,and where philosophy replaced religion 74 CONVERSION you haveconversion. When one of the philosoph- ical revivalists, as Dr. Dill tells us in his Roman Society, was holding a meeting, an Athenian of the better class came in, careless and intoxi- cated. As he listened to Zenocrates he was deeply impressed, and tearing off his garland of roses he began a new life and lived to become himself the head of that academy of philosophy. Plutarch used to go out upon a mission, and after he had preached he would invite men to remain behind and open to him their spiritual troubles. Conversion is a human incident, and its records are among the most real of human documents. Conversion is to be carefully distinguished from regeneration. Regeneration is the abso- lute act of the divine spirit ; the human soul is altogether passive ; regeneration can only take place once. Itisthe great mystery of life and the supreme act of the Eternal. God gives us spring inthe physical world, in the spiritual world He renews the soul. No man can regenerate his neighbour, and no man knows when he was re- generated himself. ‘‘ The spirit bloweth where it listeth.” Conversion is within the sphere of human CONVERSION 73 experience, and in it the will of man co-operates with the will of God. The word means to turn round and to go in the opposite direction. When the human soul leaves God it goes from home ; when the human soul returns to God it returns home, and this turning round and this going back is conversion. Regeneration is the spiritual counterpart of conversion, and as regeneration is a Supreme act of God, conversion is the supreme experience of the human soul. Professor James in his Varieties of Religious Experiences, the most scientific book on the phenomena of the religious consciousness which has ever been published, refers to two classes whom he calls the “‘ Once Born ” and the “‘ Twice Born.” He is really thinking of conversion, not of regeneration, and he suggests that while every one needs to be regenerated there are people who do not need to be converted. ‘“‘ God,” hesays, “has two families of children on this earth, the ‘once born’ and the ‘twice born.’” Of the latter he writes—“‘ God is to them the impersona- tion of kindness and beauty; of human sin they know perhaps little in their own past and not very much in the world, and human suffering 6 CONVERSION does but melt them to tenderness.” Are we not accustomed too readily to assume that every human being has spent his first years in wandering from God, and that there must come a time for him to retrace his steps. But is this so? When we offer our children to God in prayer at birth, does the prayer count for nothing ? When we present our children at the font in baptism does the act mean nothing? Why should we take for granted that the child has not then been set with its face towards Heaven? Why should we not take heart of grace and believe that the child has been converted? Have we never known people who have always had the light of God’s face upon their life, and who all day long have chanted their morning song? Have we never had friends among the once born, and whose whole life has been a unity? I do not mean they did not sin ; converted people sin. Or that they were perfect ; converted people are not perfect. But their faces were in the right direction from the beginning. One of the most charming and oldest ministers of Jesus Christ in America, Dr. Everett Hale,of Boston, says—“‘I always knew God loved me and I was always grateful to Him CONVERSION 77 for the world He placed me in. A child who is early taught that he is God’s child, that he may live and move and make his being in God, will take life more kindly, and will probably make more of it, than one who is told he is born a child of wrath.” People are troubled because they cannot remember the day of their conversion. Does it matter very much that one does not know when the sun rose in his room if he was in the light when he waked? Some hand opened the shutters early when he was unconscious. Behind him was a race of godly ancestors ; one gave him the colour of his eyes: another the way he walked : athird his pleasant temper: a fourth his trick of imagination; whyshould not they also have given him his faith? Let him be thankful that he belongs to the happy class who have no bitter regrets, no broken lives, no ugly memories. There are other people who will require to be converted several times before they come to the Heavenly Kingdom. St. Peter was once a fisher- man and learned to use rough language. He met Jesus and became a changed man—that was his first conversion. Then came that awful tragedy when he denied his Lord with an oath just as he 78 CONVERSION used to swear at a fellow fisherman on the Lake of Galilee. He had turned round the wrong way, he was diverted. His Lord prophesied that he would repent, and in anticipation of that day Jesus said to him—‘“‘ When thou art converted strengthen the brethren.” He went out and wept bitterly—that was his second conversion. When St. Paul rebuked him afterwards for his temporizing conduct, and called upon him to be more straightforward, that may have been a third conversion. One feels that the apostle John had never been converted because he had always been in fellowship with God; one feels that the apostle Peter would be converted several times before he came to perfection. There are other Americans beside Dr. Hale, and I knew a Western who was not particularly well read nor particularly cultured in manner. He was a man who had lived through hard times and had done rough deeds. One day he intro- duced me to a woman with much respect. “‘ She is,” he said, “‘ the widow of the minister who con- verted me the first time. I have been converted six times, but the first was the hardest.” His was the experience of the apostle Peter. He had CONVERSION 79 been turned round more than once, and Ihad an impression the last time I saw him that he had passed through his crowning conversion. If any one is conscious of conversion, once or more, he never can doubt the grace of God, or the immor- tality of his soul, or the world to which he belongs. Within his own life he has the evidence of the direct interference of God. It is impossible to standardize conversion, because you cannot reduce human nature to a uniformity. As long as every man has his own history, ancestry, and idiosyncrasy, there will be many kinds of conversion. There is only one God to return to and one Father’s House,but these are innumerable far countries, and John Bunyan is not the only man who has been converted. Perhaps the most conventional conversion is moral, when a man is turned from sin to holiness. Some people are kept from God not by worldliness or unbelief, but by the power of fleshly sins. From their childhood they have been held in the bondage of the senses, and they have been the slaves of their passions. They may not have sinned in act, but they have sinned in their im- agination. It does not follow that their nature 80 CONVERSION is coarser, it may be richer; their blood may not be fouler, it may be redder. A spring of water if it be banked will water a glen, if it run at large will make a morass. Their conversion will not be the destruction but the redemption of their passion. St. Mary Magdalene went astray from the wealth of her love, and when her soul came back to its home she washed Christ’s feet with her tears. Her passion was glorified, and according to an old tradition, when the body of Christ was taken down from the cross, St. Mary Magdalene had His feet again, and this time she washed away, not the dust of the road, but the blood where- with He had redeemed her. St. Augustine had a nature fired with the African sun,and he fought hard with the awful tyranny of his lusts. “‘How long,” he cried, “‘O Lord how long.” With a single blow in the garden scene Christ broke the chain of sin, and later St. Augustine wrote—‘‘ Thou didst cast out my sins by coming in Thyself, thou greater sweetness.” Another form of conversion is spiritual, and it is the experience, not of a publican and sinner, but of a Scribe and Pharisee. He has not gone astray as the sinners do; he has lived with God CONVERSION 8r all his days ; he is not the younger but the elder brother. But there are two ways of living with God. This man has not been docile, he has been servile; he has not been filial, he has been menial. His idea of God is a hard task-master, and his spirit has been that of a hireling. It is an unspeakable change when a Pharisee discovers that God is not hard or uncharitable, but that He is gracious and magnanimous. When St. Paul found that he was not expected to live in the gloom of Mount Sinai, but in the light of Calvary,and that God was not a lawgiver but a father, he was converted from legality into grace. One day our Scots saint, Erskine of Linlathen, met a Highland shepherd on the moor and said to him, “ Donald, do you know the Father?” The Highlander only knew the “ creator,” “ lawgiver ” and “judge:” so Mr. Erskine preached his Gospel of the Fatherhood to him. Next year he was on the moor again and the shepherd came to him and said, “‘ I know the Father.’”’ Dr. Chal- mers, our chief Scots Kirkman of recent times, had the same experience and the same kindly trans- formation. He was always an exemplary parish clergyman, but for many years he had no sense LF. 6 82 CONVERSION of the spirituality of religion. There came a great change over him, and from that day he was a power in Scotland, and he tasted the fullness of life. On the last night of his life as he walked in his garden he was overheard saying, ‘‘ Oh my dear Heavenly Father.’’ He lay down to sleep, and in the morning they found he was with the Father. A third form of conversion is intellectual. Nathaniel was not able to believe that Jesus was the Messiah on account of scripture difficulties, and St. Thomas could not believe that Jesus was the Son of God on account of rational difficulties. The solution of both problems, and of every other religious problem, is found in Jesus Christ Himself. When a man perplexed on every side places himself in Christ’s hand to see whether Christ will lead him, and what Christ will do with him, that is conversion. Mr. Romanes in A Candid Exam- ination of Theism wrote—‘‘ There can no longer be any doubt that the existence of a God is wholly unnecessary to explain any of the pheno- mena of the universe.”” Afterwards he wrote A Candid Examination of Religion, and he quotes as expressing his own feelings: CONVERSION 83 The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one, Yet the light of a whole life dies, When love is done. And he adds—“ How great then is Christianity as being the religion of love, and causing men to be- lieve both in the cause of love’s supremacy and the infinity of God’s love to man.”” Two candid examinations, and between them a conversion. There is one other form of conversion which is practical. One may be neither a sinner, nor a Pharisee, nor a doubter, and yet come short because he is doing nothing with his life. He is easygoing, luxurious, pleasant, useless. Con- version for him will be the call to service, per- haps in a Sunday school, or in a workman’s club, perhaps to work among the sick, or to enter a town council. A young Italian was feasting with his friends, centuries ago. He wearied of the wine and of the jests ; he went out and stood beneath the clear blue Umbrian sky. When his friends joined him they said—“* You are in love ;” and he had the distant look of a man whose thoughts were in another world. ‘I am,” said St. Francis, “in love, and my bride is called 84 CONVERSION poverty.” No one has been anxious to woo her since Jesus lived, and he was going to serve her all his days. We know how loyal he was to his love, and it was a distinguished Frenchman, and not a believer, who said that there never had been a Christian like St. Francis since the days of Christ Himself. And that is the last and most beautiful kind of conversion—conversion to the service of our fellow men under the constraint of Jesu’s love. VII THE PASSION OF GOD **Tn all their affliction he was afflicted.””—Isaiah Ixiii. 9. HE idea of God when not guided by the spirit of Christ is apt to oscillate between a ferocious deity who is simply an incarnation of the remorseless laws of nature—a sublimated chief magistrate, and an imbecile deity whois too good- natured to punish sin at all—an exceedingly ~ foolish father. The former God cannot be loved, although He may be obeyed, as one obeys the law of gravitation, and the latter cannot be respected although He may be liked, as one likes an inoffensive person. Were we compelled to choose between the two we had better take the magistrate, for this world would not be worth living in to-day, and the world to come would have no attraction, if the reins of government were in the hands of a deity who made no dis- tinction between righteousness and unrighteous- ness, the being whom the French with friendly 85 86 THE PASSION OF GOD and contemptuous pity call “the good God.” With Christian thought we rise to a higher level, and the spiritual genius of the Bible is shown, not in the reconciliation of mercy and of justice, which is a clumsy device of second-rate theology, but their inclusion in love. Love taking ven- geance on sin which has wronged the human soul is justice ; love redeeming the soul is mercy. The conflict of emotion in the nature of God which the prophets do not hesitate to describe, as for instance—‘‘ How shall I give thee up, Ephraim, how shall I deliver thee Israel? My heart is turned within me. My repentings are kindled together,” is not a contradiction. It is rather the play of parts in music which leads us to final unity; the mixture of contending colours in tapestry which blend into one pattern. Hebrew piety has taught us two truths regarding God which are not always united in human thought, but which are necessary to the perfect idea, and the first is not His sympathy but His spirituality. With travail of soul the saints of the Old Testament extricated the Being of God from the phenomena of nature and safe- guarded His personality from the abstractions THE PASSION OF GOD 87 of philosophy. God who made the clouds His chariot and rode upon the wings of the wind was the creator of the ends of the earth, and He who was the source of righteousness and power dwelt with the contrite and humble heart. Mono- theism stands midway between the extremes of Atheism—the denial that there is any God, and Pantheism—the affirmation that everything is God. Monotheism means one God over all, the same yesterday, to-day,and for ever, and it is the basis of all sound thinking. As often as the spirituality of God is obscured, either when He is imagined as a blind force, or as an imper- sonation of sentiment, the religious consciousness must fall back on Jewish thought both for health and for strength. Surely it was enough for one school of religious thinkers to bequeath this heritage to the world ! But it was an even greater achievement when the prophets of Israel infused that pure spirituality with a most intimate sympathy and convinced many generations that the Holy One of Israel is the most gracious Deity who has ever entered into the heart of man. When the prophets had grasped the transcendence of God and imagined 88 THE PASSION- OF GOD Him raised above this world, which had been created by the word of His power, and reigning over mankind which is the instrument of His will, they might well have been so occupied with His majesty as to be unable to compass His pity. Yet there is no emotion of the human heart they did not assign to God, no tender relation of life they did not use to illustrate His love. He isa husband whose affection has been wasted upon a heartless woman, and whose honour has been stained by her unfaithfulness, but who still follows her with entreaties to return, because he cannot bear the thought that she, who was once his wife, should perish in shame. He is a father who used to hold his little son by the arms and tempt him to walk, and now when the lad has grown to be a man, and played the fool exceed- ingly, still remembers how Ephraim looked in his youth and what he was to his father long ago. He is a herdsman who has treated his flock with the most tender care, and yet they have dealt with Him more stupidly than the unreason- able animals with their master; ‘‘for the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib, but Israel doth not know, my people doth not THE PASSION OF GOD 89 consider.” From every page of Isaiah and Hosea the Holy One of Israel stretches out His hand to a rebellious and gainsaying people. Everywhere the words burn to your touch, and you feel throughout the Bible the throb of the divine heart. As time went on the prophets began to hope that God Who had sent so many messages to suffering men, and had given them such help in their misery, would not be able to contain Him- self in the security of His heaven, but that He would come after a visible fashion into the midst. of this human Gehenna. Is not the Incarnation of Christ the convincing climax of the divine sympathy ? Jesus born of the Virgin Mary and crucified upon the Cross of Calvary is God with us, baptized into the very depths of human suffer- ing. When Jesus came and lived among us the heart of God was laid bare, and every one can see in the Gospel that patient wistful love which inhabits the secret place of the universe. As the father sits upon the housetop, and watches the crest of the hill, that he may catch the first glimpse of the returning prodigal ; as the house- holder makes ready his feast and sends for his go THE PASSION OF GOD ungrateful guests; as the vine master appeals to his disloyal tenants by his own son, we learn the expectation of God. As Jesus takes into His arms little children whom superior people have despised, and casts His charity over penitent women whom Pharisees cannot forgive, and mourns at the tomb of Lazarus over a friend whom He cannot afford to lose, one learns the graciousness of God. As Jesus turns sadly from Nazareth, the city of His youth, which had re- fused Him, and reproaches Capernaum, the city of His choice, which did not believe in Him, and weeps openly over Jerusalem which knew not the day of her visitation, one learns the regret of God. And as Jesus appeals to the disciples, ‘‘ Will ye also go away ?”’ and prophesies with a sad heart that every one of His friends will forsake Him, and is cast into a deep gloom by the betrayal of Judas, we learn what is almost incredible, but most comfortable, the dependence of God. The cross is not only in the heart of human life, it is also in the heart of God. He is the chief of all sufferers, because He is the chief of all lovers. One does not forget, while insisting on the fellow suffering of God, that there is a certain THE PASSION OF GOD oI danger in analogies between the human and divine, and one lays to heart the warnings against Anthropomorphism. But we must not allow ourselves to be beaten by big words, and we can surely distinguish between what is real and unreal. Has it not been the religious expert—the saints, the mystics, and the prophets, who have most loved to dwell upon this likeness between God and man? Has it not been the non-religious expert, the philosophers, the scientists, the men of letters, who have been most inclined to ridi- cule this argument from the seen to the unseen, and this representation of the divine nature in terms of human experience. If ever the Spirit of God inhabited the human breast, He inspired the Hebrew prophets and Jesus confirmed their character of God in His Evangel. It sounds wise to say that we ought not to think of God as “‘a magnified non-natural man,” but when you drive this argument to its conclusion it comes to this, that we must give up thinking about God altogether. It is a plea, not against Anthropo- morphism but for Agnosticism. What other life can we reason from except the highest we know? What other language can we use than 92 THE PASSION OF GOD that which clothes the ideas of this life? When we stand on the height of our conscience, and declare with confidence that truth is right and a lie is wrong, are we not entitled to believe that what is righteous with us is righteous with God, and that what is unrighteous on earth is unright- eous in Heaven. Was not John Stuart Mill right in essence when he said that if God sent him to Hell for refusing to declare that wrong was right, to Hell he would go? When we make a sacrifice for those whom we love and stand upon the height of our heart, may we not be sure that our love is the outcome of the passion of God, and that if we deal kindly by our flesh and blood He will be ten thousand times more kind to us all? As Sir Oliver Lodge said in the Hzb- bert Journal—“ Let not any worthy human attribute be denied to the Deity. Therearemany errors but there is one truth in Anthropomorphism whatever worthy attribute belongs to man .... its existence in the universe is thereby admitted. . . . We must blink nothing— evolution is a truth, a strange and puzzling truth; ‘the whole creation groaneth and travail- eth together,’ and the most perfect of all the THE PASSION OF GOD 93 sons of men, the likest God this planet ever saw— He to whom many look for their idea of what God is, surely He taught us that suffering, and sacrifice, and wistful yearning for something not yet attainable were not to be regarded as human attributes alone.” As Newton could have prophesied from the properties of a drop of water the possibility of an Atlantic, so from human nature atits best we can imagine God. Our analogies may be but shadows, but they are the shadows of reality. God’s ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts, but this is not because they are worse, but because they are better. It is not foolishness to compare God to an earthly father, only we must remember that the heavenly transcends the earthly wisdom to an infinite degree. “If ye then being evil know howto give good gifts un- to your children,” said Christ,“ how much more shall your Father which is in Heaven give good things to them that ask Him.” It is not foolishness to compare God to a mother provided we remember that as Heaven is higher than the earth, so the tenderness of God transcends even a mother’s faithfulness, and for once a mother is 94 THE PASSION OF GOD disparaged beside the compassion of God. “Can a mother forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb ? Yea, she may forget, yet will not I forget thee.” With this glimpse into the heart of God we gather riches for our creed because we learn the idea of a loveable God. It is possible to think correctly about God, but not kindly. Perhaps the most masterly definition of God in all theology is in the Catechism of the Scots Kirk: ‘“‘Godis a spirit infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” According to a pleasant story, the divines of the Westminster Assembly were so overcome by the majesty of the subject that they besought God by one of their number to illuminate their minds, and the Scots minister who offered prayer used those words. They were accepted as an immediate answer, and by the standard of theology there could not be a more comprehensive description of God. And yet this noble utterance has one defect ; it satis- fies the intellect, it does not touch the heart. It is theology—a study in pure being; it is not religion—for it barely suggests a person. With THE PASSION OF GOD 95 all its careful selection of attributes it does not, from beginning to end, mention love—the word ofall others one would have expected, and which embraces all attributes. If one is exercising his intellect he can have no better guide than this definition, if his heart be tired he will find it a marble pillow. Why did not those learned divines inquire of that apostle who once laid his head on Jesu’s bosom, and felt the heart of God beat ? Suppose they had taken the words of St. John and written ‘‘ God is love.” Why did they not sit at Jesu’s feet who had lain in God’s bosom and revealed the Father. Suppose they had heard Jesus and had written ‘Our Father in Heaven.” Would it not have made a differ- ence both in many hearts and many homes if generation after generation of children had been asked ‘‘ What is God?” and learned to answer for their life long ‘My Heavenly Father.” No doubt the God of the Catechism and of the Gospels is one, as the mountain is one from its base to its summit. But the lofty peak is only for the trained climber, and even he may lose his head on the perilous ascent. It is wiser for ordinary people to find their resting- 96 THE PASSION OF GOD place in the clefts of the rocks where the flowers are — blooming in theeye ofthe sun. Master thinkers miss their footing when they speculate on the Being of God, but the simplest can hide himself in God’s protecting love, who is perfect father and mother, perfect husband and friend. With this glimpse into the divine heart we also gather riches for the struggle of life, because we have a sympathetic God. It is hard enough in any case to pray unto one whom we cannot see, and it is beyond our power if we imagine Him untouched by this world’s agony, which breaks beneath His feet as spray upon the base of a cliff. How can a transcendent God understand us any more than we can enter into the feelings of an insect on which we placed our foot this morning ? But an immanent God, united to us by the Incarnation, and dwelling in us by the Spirit, who is affronted by every sin, wounded by every ill-usage, and disappointed by every rebuff, draws out our heart. He must feel because He has suffered. Behold! He also stretched out Hishand and no man regarded; He has been betrayed and put to shame in His own house. He carries upon Him the burden of the THE PASSION OF GOD 97 world’s care and sorrow; He has had prodigal children, and been broken-hearted by His own friends ; He also has been misunderstood, perse- cuted, insulted. What trial of man has not also been the lot of God? What sorrow has not been tasted by God ? What sin has not been committed against Him ? Before we pray He has heard us, not only because His ear is open to our cry but because “‘ In all our affliction He has been afflicted, and so the Angel of His presence saves us.” Think not thou canst sigh a sigh, And thy Maker is not by ; Thinkest thou canst weep a tear And thy Maker is not near. O He gives to us His joy That our grief He may destroy, Till our grief is fled and gone He doth sit by us and moan. Outside holy scripture there has not been a more intimate apprehension of the fellow suffer- ing of God than these words of Blake. He doth sit by us and moan. LF. 9 VIII JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY “Then Jesus beholding him loved him.’’—S?. Mark’s Gospel x. 21. HEN it is recorded in this vivid gospel, as by one who had seen the affection in the Master’s eye, that Jesus loved the young ruler, we ought to allow their full meaning to the words. Jesus was not one to mistake a pleasant manner for a true heart, or to bestow. the approval of emotion where His judgment condemned. He searched men as with fire, and called each man by his own name. If Jesus looked with favour upon any one and made over- tures of friendship to him, then be sure that man deserved well of the eternal law and of all good people. This ruler did not make the highest claim, nor did he trade upon false pretences. He did not profess religion—the passion which fills the soul with love unto the Deity, and moves one to sacrifice everything for an unseen cause. 98 JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY — 99 What he professed was modest and becoming, that he had been an obedient son, that he had lived cleanly, that he had not told lies, that he had done his duty by his neighbour, that in short he had carried himself as a kindly and honourable gentleman. This he was, and because he was this Jesus loved him. And the attitude of Jesus to this kind.of man suggests various useful ideas, and is also charged with encouragement. Upon the face of it Jesus did not regard a person who is moral, but not religious, as utterly depraved. The depravity of such people is laid down in certain Church standards, and is still, one gathers, believed by many. “ We are,” says an ancient document which was deliberately written in England and hastily adopted in Scot- land, “indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.” If % is also asserted in the same Confession that the ‘ ‘works of an unregenerate man are “sinful and cannot please God.’ Those deliverances are supported by quotations from various parts of holy scripture, not, however, so much from the Gospels as from the Pentateuch. People have been browbeaten by those statements into words 100 JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY of self-condemnation against which they have no corresponding experience, and which they would justly resent on the lips of their best friends. They also have taken from such teaching a pessimistic view of human nature, so that there is a striking difference between the theory of what their neighbours are and the working treatment of the same neighbours. If a person seriously believed such words then he would hold that those whom he loves, and with whom he lives, as well as those whom he knows abroad and with whom he deals, are by nature, to use the words of one of our most beautiful hymns, False and full of sin Really he treats them as absolutely straight- forward, and relies upon their integrity. Under the influence of this morbid theology one would regard his child as a son of the devil, but with the evidence of experience he treats him as a son of God. Which creates an artificial atmo- sphere, and prevents us getting into touch with reality. : This doctrine of humanity is first of all wrong in theory, for it does not explain the situation. JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY Iotr If a person be by nature absolutely corrupt, then there is no possibility of salvation for him. Sal- vation is not the creation of another being, it is the restoration of the present being. If the house be so infected that there be not in it one sound stone, then it must be pulled down to the foundation and its very material scattered. Nothing will remain but an empty site, and upon it another house may be built. If I am bad through and through, then my reason, my heart, my will are all unreliable. They must go, and what remains? If a man has a weak spot in one of his lungs he may be cured, if both lungs are thoroughly rotten he must die; for there is no sound spot from which recovery may begin. Granted health somewhere, then nature can work from that centre and drive the disease out in an ever expanding circle. And Jesus believed that in every man there was a core of goodness, and to it He appealed. Y This doctrine is also wrong because it is not confirmed by facts. What shall we say of the patriot who is not a saint but who dies for his country ? Is not patriotism in itself, even when not crowned with religion, a good thing? What 102 JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY of the artisan who refuses to turn out scamped work, and yet who may not always live as we should wish him? Is not his honesty of purpose a good thing ? What of the merchant who is a sceptic but who has never failed to meet his obligations ? Is not integrity a good thing? / What of the mother who passionately loves her child, but has never been converted? Is not love a good thing ? Are we not bound to hold when we face life that patriotism and honesty and integrity and love are absolutely good, and have nothing whatever to do with depravity, and that so far the people who produce them are good also. To say that people who are not pious are depraved is an absurdity, for we know that many persons who are not religious practise higher morals, in business especially, than some who are. When Jesus considered this young man’s life the Master loved him, and He did not \_ love what was not good. Jesus’ appreciation of the young ruler also reminds us that the more morality there is in the community, the better both for Church and State. One is moved to enter a humble protest against that indirect depreciation of morality JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY 103 which consists in bidding men beware of good works, and warning them that it is not by such works they will be saved. As if the average man, or even the average Christian, were stagger- ing under the weight of his superfluous morality. As if any one were likely to be saved who had no good works. It is no use commanding men to lay their “‘ deadly doing down,” for there is no man doing too much in the way of goodness. It were better to warn men that the grace of God is wholly ineffectual and has failed with every man whom it has not made straight and charitable. It is a wholesome change in ethics from the modern hymns to the Old Testament Psalms ; it is rising from the warm enervating plain of Italy to the cold bracing highlands of the Enga- dine. Not only have the Psalms an incomparable majesty which no hymn except the Te Deum rivals, and an unaffected tenderness which no hymn, except perhaps “‘ Rock of Ages,” has ever touched, but the Psalms have also an ethical tone which is wanting in many popular hymns. If the soldier of Christ wishes to brace himself for strenuous living, and the discharge of daily duty, he can hardly find a hymn to make the 104 JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY blood move in his veins. He turns with satis- faction to Psalm i., where the doctrine and the practice correspond. The man who walketh in the law of the Lord, that man shall stand; the man who does not walk in the law of the Lord, believe what he may or say what he please, will be scattered like chaff before the wind of Heaven. / And Jesus’ treatment of this excellent young man suggests that one object of Jesus’ mission is to raise morality into spirituality. As one has pointed out there are four stages in the develop- ment of our nature—animality, intellectuality, morality, spirituality. Most people will allow that morality stands above the first two, but many forget that there is something higher. Moses brought men to the level of morality, Jesus led them to the level where morality passes into religion. Itwas not His business to enforce the Ten Commandments, it was His to replace them by the principle of love. Jesus does not treat the moral man as an outcast, but claims him as His disciple. He does not reproach him, He approves him and desires to reward him. Can a man stand before the grave of his father - JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY 105 and mother, no doubt with many regrets, but yet without shame? Jesus, the Son of Mary, hastens to his side. He is a good son and for him there remains a recompense, both in this world and that which is to come. Has he done his work to the utmost of his ability? Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth, gives him His hand. When the fire comes and burns up the pretensions of hypocrites his sound doing will stand. Has he been a loyal husband, and a faithful father ? Jesus who glorified the family gives him His benediction, and nothing can make it void. This is a moral man, and he is ranking very high/ i But something still is wanting, and Jesus would fain supply it. The Master desires to take that love which gathers round wife and child and raise it till it consciously touches God. He wants to take that work which has been so true and thorough, and change it into the direct service of God. He wants to add our Father’s House to the earthly home, and open the vistas of immortality. Jesus has not come to take anything away ; He has come to raise everything to the highest levelso that the man may stand, not only on the height of his intellect and of his 106 JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY conscience, but of his soul, where he can see the Land of Promise. Morality is like the clean and well chiselled marble of the ancient story, beauti- ful, but cold. | When the Spirit of Jesus touches it the stone reddens and lives. Religion is morality touched with emotion, till, instead of duty we speak of love, and to the treasure of a good conscience and an honourable life are added the peace which passeth all understanding, the joy unspeakable and full of glory and that vision of God which in itself is life everlasting. It was not in vain that the young ruler kept the Commandments; it was because he kept them that Jesus loved him. It is not in vain that any man has lived bravely outside religion, it is because he has done so well that Jesus desires to have him for a disciple. No faithfulness of service in any province of life, and no ministry of charity, have passed unnoticed by Him who alone understands human nature, and who is our Judge. Our Lord has a welcome for all men who will come to Him, even the thief upon the cross; but of only one seeker in the Gospels is it written that Jesus loved him. He was not a reprobate, nor was he a Pharisee, he was a well JESUS’ APPRECIATION OF MORALITY 107 living and high minded man. If he had been able to make the last sacrifice then one dares to think the young ruler would have become a chief apostle, and the rival of St. Paul. When, there- fore, one like the young ruler approaches Jesus, the Master sees a man after His own heart. When such a one refuses the cross which alone can raise him to his full manhood the Master is bitterly disappointed. And that man _ suffers the chief loss of life. IX CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS “Herod set Jesus at nought.””—St. Luke xxiii. 11. HEN the tide of circumstances flung Herod and Jesus together for a brief hour, one has an illustration of the inexhaustible irony of history. The world has not afforded another contrast so vivid and arresting. It was a sudden collision of extreme moral oppo- sites which first arrests the imagination and then searches the soul. We are always inter- ested when the East meets the West, wondering what the aliens will think of one another, what they will say, what they will do, and what will be the result of the incongruous meeting. And by an irresponsible action of Pontius Pilate, anxious on any terms to get rid of Jesus, the Master was brought to Herod’s palace, and stood before him a helpless prisoner. Christ and Herod could not be called entire strangers. They had been living in the same 108 CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS 109 province as public men for more than two years, —one as a prophet of God, the other as his king. For it is worth remembering, if only for the grim humour of human affairs that Herod Antipas was our Lord’s titular monarch. Each had been moving in his own orbit, and fulfilling the bias of his own nature. Jesus had been so- journing in the villages of Galilee and working among the poor folk He loved. Herod had been feasting in his gorgeous palace on the Lake of Galilee, or in the castle where he held John Bap- tist prisoner.’ As people may live in the same district and have nothing to do with one another, so Herod and Jesus were contemporaries in Gali- lee, and so far as we know never met, because one was in the higher circle of society, and the other was in the lower. Of course they had heard of each other in their different spheres, and they had spoken of each other in the_hear- ing of the people. Herod listened with troubled ear to weird reports of Jesus’ words and de- clared with a thrill of superstition that He must be the ghost of John Baptist. Jesus on His part was warned to beware of Herod, and for once in His life spoke of a man not with hot IIo CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS. anger, but with utter contempt. “Tell that fox,” He said, and “fox” sounds strangely on Jesus’ lips. The Master had been often indignant both with friends and with foes, but this was worse that heat. Better far that Christ should turn upon one as He did on Simon Peter, and say, ‘‘ Get thee behind Me, Satan,” than to call him a fox. The prince thinks of the prophet as the revengeful spirit of his victim, raised to trouble him. The prophet dismisses the prince from His thoughts, with this scornful by word as moral vermin. Between these two there is a spiritual repulsion which could never be over- come, and now Christ stands bound before Herod and his petty court. The Master is at the mercy of the fox. It is an absolute reversal of everything that is fitting. Christ as subject and prisoner, Herod Antipas as Tetrarch and Judge. Consider for an instant the two figures which are beneath one roof, and in such a mad relation to one another. This princeling who set Jesus at nought was as miserable a creature as could be found if you had searched the world over. He belonged to the evil Idumean house, and CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS III was the son of that Herod who slew the children of Bethlehem ; he was the cesspool of his race, and into him had poured all their iniquity with little of their capacity. Antipas was a libertine, a tyrant, a coward, and a sycophant. There was not in him a hint of goodness, save his early slavish respect for John Baptist, which was not however so strong as his vices. There was no place in his heart where a noble thought could lodge; there was no conscience left to which a successful appeal could be made. That was Herod—and what of Christ ? We all know ; there is no need for description, nor opportunity for controversy. Sometimes acritic, bereft of spirit- ual sanity, or intoxicated with the cant of un- belief, will pretend to detect flaws in the char- acter of Christ. But he is left unanswered, with the people who argue that the world is flat, or that Bacon wrote Shakespeare; or that Jeffries was a just judge, or that the Borgias have been much misunderstood. The world may have difficulties about Christianity, but it has made up its mind about Christ. Whether He be God or not, He is at least the bright and perfect excellency of humanity. No, history has never I12 CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS - done anything so ironical as when it set Herod to judge Christ. Could you imagine Herod, being what he was, doing anything else than mock Jesus? Had Jesus still possessed the suffrages of the fickle mob, and the air been still sounding with Ho- sannah instead of Crucify, Herod had never set Jesus at nought. Had Jesus been a high priest, holding aristocratic office, and representing a powerful tradition; had He been a Roman officer with the power of Caesar behind him; had Jesus been the rich man of Christ’s parable, building larger barns every year; had He even been a famous Scribe with authority among the mob of Jerusalem; had He been Caiaphas, or Pontius Pilate, or Joseph of Arimathea, Herod had given Him respect, at least from the teeth. Had Jesus even complied with his insolent desire, and performed miracles to amuse him and his courtiers, Herod had either crouched in terror at the signs of power, or been vastly amused as by the tricks of aconjuror. But Jesus friendless, powerless, silent, how could the Tet- rarch appreciate Him? You must go by what you know, and what you respect, and Herod CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS 113 appraised Jesus by the only standard of his com- mand, the standard of the world. What has he got? Votes? Ah! me, none now. They have all turned, save a faithful few, to the other side. Rank? He was a carpenter, and now He is a prophet. Riches? Not enough to buy a grave. Do you say goodness? Yes, He has goodness, like that of God Himself. Is that all? Do you expect Antipas to take goodness ser- iously ? There are men to whom the most radiant goodness, uninvested with substantial glory, is a fourth dimension—something which you may argue exists, but which they can never realize. The idea that a man without a far- thing, without a friend, who has no position in society, who has failed in his enterprise, may yet be great through character, was quite beyond the range of Herod’s vision. No! Jesus was simply a man who had made some noise, and tried His hand at being a prophet, and missed His chance, and had come to grief. He was a negligible quantity who could be treated as any- body pleased. There had been a faint anxiety in Herod’s mind lest Jesus should have some magical power, and become troublesome. It LF. 8 II4 CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS was clear now that Hehad none, for if He had, of course He would have used it to please Herod, and secure His own safety. Herod had beheaded John Baptist with some misgivings; He had been uneasy about Jesus, but his mind was now relieved. If Jesus ever had been a force He was a spent force—He could not strike back. And Herod could insult Him with safety. Jesus had called Herod ‘‘ fox”; well, time brings its revenge, and Jesus was now in the fox’s power. We can create the scene, the jibes of Herod, the laughter of his satellites, the poor humour of the gorgeous robe. It was not kingly, it was not manly, but it was natural—it was Herod. When the court had been satiated with amusement they sent Jesus back to Pilate. This kind of scene is very exasperating, and one does not willingly look upon it. But may it not be a picture, magnified to heroic size, and flung upon the screen of sacred history, of what has always been going on, and is going on still? Does the suspicion never cross one’s mind that he may be doing ina more decent way what this princeling did after his fashion long ago? Is our vision so keen that we have never CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS 115 missed the beautiful when it was before our eyes ? Is our judgment so perfect that it has never gone astray? Have we made no mistakes in the depreciation of goodness, and the admira- tion of badness? One can neither study his- tory nor contemporary life without discovering that the average man has never been tardier than in the recognition of moral greatness, when it happened to be separate from rank, and power, and numbers and success. Never more foolish than in despising the lovely but helpless great- ness of some lonely soul. We speak compara- tively, of course, for we can find no other Christ, only reflections of Him; we can hardly pro- duce another Herod, we must take in his stead respectable people. And perhaps the irony is subtler when this kind of Herod sets some humbler Christ at nought. Can one find, for instance, any worse sinner than that historical body which ought to have the keenest appreciation of goodness and extend to it the quickest recognition—I mean the Church of Jesus Christ. Hundreds of times during the nineteen centuries since our Lord was insulted by Herod have men, spotless in their lives, and 116 CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS famous for their works, stood before tribunals to be cruelly and unjustly judged. For what ? Because they refused to say what they could not understand, or what they ‘believed to be false. Did it help any of them in that hour that they were holy men? Not one whit. It made their judges more anxious to condemn them, and an ecclesiastical court trying a man for heresy is the only court that will refuse a testimony to character as irrelevant. Yet if it be anything it is a moral court, and if it knows anything it ought to understand that spiritual knowledge is conditional upon holy living. Did it matter that in many cases the judges presiding over such courts and dealing with such men were not beyond reproach ? Not in the slightest. When the unworthy judge sent the good man to death, rarely any one cried shame. John Huss came to the Council of Constance with a safe conduct, and was burnt, but a little later the Borgias reigned in Rome. The Society of Friends, the most Christlike of all religious bodies, was per- _ secuted for years in England, and evil living ministers left untouched. McLeod Campbell, one of the most saintly ministers of the Scots re CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS 117 Kirk, was cast out by an almost unanimous vote of the chief court because he gave Christ’s love too wide a range, but as a moderate drunkard in the former half of last century he had been perfectly safe. Have we finally learned that it is far more important that a man live like Jesus than think with us, and do we to-day recognize holiness of character as a finer test than correctness of opinion ? Pass from the Church to the State and com- pare two types of men which appeal for our suffrages and support. One is smart, shrewd, unscrupulous and time serving, who will suit his views to the day, will conciliate every dangerous interest, will seize every opportunity of harass- ing his opponents, and will make a gain for his party out of the welfare of the State. We know - quite well that he is morally a low-class man. The other is earnest, thoughtful, high-minded, and honourable, who will say what he believes to be true, and do what he thinks to be right, who has no private ends to serve, who will sac- rifice everything for the good of the common- wealth. We know quite well that he is mor- ally a high-class man. The one is clever, so 118 CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS clever that we chuckle over his adroitness, as if he were a thimble-rigger. The other is good, so good that we are uncomfortable with him, as if he were a saint. Which will more likely gain the ear of average people ? Will cleverness be condemned because the-man is worthless? Will goodness be approved, though it be not showy ? Is not unscrupulous cleverness admired and rewarded if the man be a partisan? Is not self-sacrificing and capable goodness depreciated and rejected because the man refuses to be the tool of a party or the instrument of shady interests ? And is not this the contempt of goodness ? Are we not committing the same lamentable mistake in private society? By our side people are living gloriously, but their excellence is that of the Kingdom of God—faith and patience, sacrifice and purity. They are refusing ease, they are disdaining mean work, they are sink- ing themselves, they are toiling for no seen reward. It may be a wife or a husband, or a friend or a fellow labourer, and our eyes have been holden, while all the time we are vastly impressed by people who are bright, and witty, and handsome, and fashionable. We wish to CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS II9 be like them; we make disparaging comparisons between them and the bearers of Christ’s cross. Fools that we are, to live day by day beside this heavenly beauty, and to hanker after the tinsel of worldly character. The day may come when we shall wake to realize our loss, when the light fades from our home, and the Christ by our side is taken. We shall understand then what we have belittled, and how we have sinned. No one can exaggerate the calamity of this contempt ; it is a sin against the Holy Ghost. Where could Herod find that day the most con- vincing revelation of the Almighty? Not in the Temple of Jerusalem, with its splendid buildings and hallowed memory, for its min- isters were unbelieving priests. Nor in the synagogue, with all the reading of the prophets and the preaching of the law, for there fanatics were wrangling about vain doctrines. The ’ dwelling place of God that day was a man clothed in poor garments, and rejected by all. There was in Jesus more of God than could be found in a whole world, and He was set at nought. How unconscious we are of our worst errors, and of our spiritual disasters. Herod, profane 120 CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS as he was, would have thought it dreadful to have rifled the Temple, and carried away the sacred vessels, to have used the veil of the holiest of all for a curtain in his banqueting chamber, and to have set the golden candle- sticks among his wine cups. But that would have been a trifling sin beside this fearful sac- rilege of insulting Jesus. We all have our ideas of reverence and would not lightly outrage them. We bare our heads in a church, because God meets His people there, we treat the Bible differently from other books, because God in a special sense speaks there. So much we do for a house and for a book, and we make little of those in whom God is living, Who are fulfilled of Godhead as a cup Filled with a precious essence. Be sure there is no revelation of God so near, and so clear, none which can do so much for us, or which lays on us such a responsibility, as the character of good people. It is visible, active, flesh and blood goodness, the very incar- nation of the divine grace. You remember how in Browning’s Christmas Eve the super- CONTEMPT OF GOODNESS 121 cilious visitor found that God had been among the poor chapel folk, and how God was leaving him because he had despised them. No face; only the sight Of a sweeping garment, vast and white, With a hem that I could recognize. To have the hem of Christ’s “ sweeping garment ”’ touch us, and then to fling it aside with con- tempt, because it comes in the shape of ordinary people, is not only one of the master sins, but also one of the irreparable losses of life. Xx WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND “ And be not conformed to this world.’”,—Romans xii. 2. S “world” has various meanings in Holy is an ambiguous ‘ > Scripture ‘‘ worldliness ’ word, and we must understand what is intended by the world against which the apostle warned those Roman Christians, and whichthroughout the apostolic writings is regarded as the enemy of the soul. Sometimes world means the earth, which is the home of the race, and sometimes it means the race itself. It goes without saying that none of us should look askance on this fair creation as if it were a snare for the soul, or restrain our affection for our brethren as if there lurked a subtle danger in human love. When an ascetic went forth to fulfil his vocation without bidding his mother good-bye, and when he walked the livelong day by the Lake of Geneva and never looked upon its beauty, he neither gained any merit of self- denial nor conquered any sin. He despised the 122 WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND 123 love of home and the works of his Heavenly Father, and closing his eyes to one innocent world outside his soul he set up another of spiritual pride within. For the artificial religion which regards natural affection and physical beauty with suspicion there is no sanction in the teaching of our Master, who amid the agonies of the cross bethought Him of His mother, and to whom nature was an endless delight. It is a morose fanaticism which would confound love with idolatry; it is an unredeemed barbarism which mutilated the statues on the Acropolis, and the cathedrals of our own land. The physical world Jesus used as a parable of spiritual things, and for the world of men He laid down His life. As often as religion is hostile either to loveliness or to love, it is not to be praised for unworldliness, but to be condemned for ignorance, which understands neither the works of the Lord nor the sympathy of His heart. It was of another world Jesus was thinking when He said in His last discourse, ‘‘ Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world,” and of which St. John wrote, “‘ Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” Before His mind was that Jewish generation which from the be- 124 WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND ginning had suspected Him, and which in the end came to hate Him, with its vain traditions, its hollow conventions, its overweening self-righteous- ness, its hatred of foreign nations, and its indiffer- ence to brotherly love. This world had its own attraction and power ; it could enrich and honour, or it could persecute and destroy a man. And the temptation which beset Christ’s disciples was to come to termswith their world, to repeat its acts, to accept its ideals, to further its ends. Once this world cast for a moment its tangling net round Simon Peter, and the apostle besought his Lord to avoid the cross. And the same influence led Judas Iscariot captive, when for thirty pieces of silver he sold his friend, and gaining as it seemed at one stroke the whole world lost himself for ever. When St. Paul lifted up his voice against the world, and besought the Christians committed to his charge to be separate from it, he was thinking of that imposing paganism which was ever fronting them. With its love of pleasure, its glorification of power, its imperial pageantry, its idolatrous temples, its unredeemed Art, its seduction both for the senses and for the intellect, paganism cast its glamour over the new Christian WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND 125 converts. Writers so far apart as Cardinal New- man in his Callista and the author of Quo Vadis suggest to our minds the fascinating atmosphere into which Christianity was born, and where in its youth it had to fight the good fight of faith. Beneath the beauty of form and colour, the magnificence of ceremonies and arms, the arts and riches of civilization, that was an unclean and leprous world. Whether they lived in Corinth, with its unblushing worship of lust, or in Rome, which was the moral sewer of the world, or in Ephesus, where Christians were tempted by the deeds of the Nicolaitanes, or in Pergamos, where there were those who held the abominable doc- trine of Balaam, or in Thyatira, where Jezebel seduced God’s servants, or in Sardis, where only a few had not defiled their garments, Christians had ever to stand on guard. No wonder that some in Corinth had fallen through the lures of the flesh, or that a Demas had forsaken the faith before that imperial magnificence. Christians had to choose between their Lord and their world, and it was a world hard to escape or to resist. It is evident that the world of to-day has changed, and it is unreasonable to require of 126 WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND modern Christians the line of action which was necessary in the first century. The spirit of Christ has counted for something during nineteen centuries, and Western society is not arrayed in arrogant hostility to the claims and ethics of our Master. His disciples are neither persecuted nor seduced after the fashion of the former days, and it is not necessary to preach that separation which once was compulsory, nor to warn against the gross temptations which once beset the disciple from street and temple, from book and Art. Religious writers have shown a want of historical insight in adopting those fiery denunciations of the world which applied to the Corinth of St. Paul and the Rome of Juvenal. This does not mean that there is no anti-Christian world or that Christians have not need to watch and pray; it only means that war has changed its form, and instead of the clash of swords we have the unseen danger of the rifle. We have to get to the prin- ciple which underlies all forms, and what con- ° stitutes the world in every age is devotion to the material instead of to the spiritual. It is the over- weening appreciation of pleasure, rank, riches, learning, and Art. If any one values silver and WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND 127 gold more than character, or loses his self-respect before persons of high station, or assigns duty a second place to ease, or is more concerned about the opinion of men than the judgmént of con- science, or is better pleased by the triumph of a party than the reign of righteousness, or is satis- fied with Art which has no high purpose, to whom in short the things which pass are more than the things which remain, you see the power of this world, and a worldly man. Worldliness in essence consists not in certain acts of the outer life but in a certain temper of mind. A woman need not be worldly because she dresses well, and has an engaging manner, and is popular in society, for in this case there would be nothing so worldly as a flower ; and it does not follow that a man is worldly because he is success- ful in business, or obtains high office, or is praised by his fellows, for this were a reflection on capa- city, enterprise, and good-humour. Unworldliness must not be identified with a squalid appearance, a forbidding countenance, slackness of work, or Pharisaism of tone. It does not prove worldliness to play games, to read fiction, to enjoy sport ; it is not more worldly to play billiards than bowls, 128 WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND to take a hand at whist than to talk scandal, for young people to dance rather than join in the silly games which used to be a substitute for dancing, or to take a walk on Sunday rather than to sleep at home. Worldliness has been too much defined by artificial observances and conventional tests, so that a person was counted unworldly not on account of his likeness in character to Christ, but because he did not do certain things which the religious party of his day disapproved. Worldliness is a tricky and capricious spirit which disappoints and surprises by its dwelling places. When the Church of Christ chooses men for office, not on account of their spirituality, but of their possessions, or when a man is placed in the chair at a religious conference, not for his capacity, but for his title, or when the success of the ministry is estimated by statistics of seat-holders and of money, or when the officers of Christ’s Church make bargains with politicians, or when an aged Christian on whom the world to come is already _ breaking babbles about his investments, or when some pious woman who often laments the decay of religion, complains of a social slight, then you see worldliness in its most dangerous form, making WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND 129 itself at home in the very sanctuary of God. When on the other hand you see a woman giving her husband to death in the service of his country, or a man of science living in bare simplicity that he may pursue his discoveries, or a writer scorning to fall beneath his ideal for the sake of gain, or a teacher declaring an unpopular opinion for the love of truth, or a person in society showing special courtesy to people of humbler rank or plainer appearance, or a working man sacrificing his own interest for the benefit of his less gifted fellows, you have the satisfaction of recognizing unworld- liness where you were not prepared to find it. It may be safely said that worldliness has never had a more instructive illustration than in ecclesiastics, ’ and unworldliness a more convincing illustration than in men of science. That worldliness which seems consistent with the most rigid orthodoxy, and that unworldliness which has sometimes risen to its height in the atmosphere of reverent agnosticism, can be studied in two characteristic biographies of our own time. One is that of a late Bishop of Oxford, a man of honourable family, large social influence, most brilliant gifts, and undeniable personal piety, and LF. 9 130 WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND the other is the life of the pioneer of natural science in our day, and one of the most patient lovers of knowledge of any day, Charles Darwin. The former was not only, as we fully acknowledge, a devout private Christian, but also a high ruler in the Christian Church, yet he divided the energy of his public life between two ends, toiling in the service of the Church, and scheming for his own advancement. When he was not defending the Christian creed he was canvassing for promotion, and how to reconcile the piety and the intriguing passes one’s imagination. The latter was an agnostic who with sad honesty found himself unable to accept the Christian faith, and who con- secrated to science his strength and his means. He was a man without greed of wealth, indifferent to public honour, patient of criticism, ready to admire every successful worker, and maintaining a hospitable mind for truth from any quarter, a modest, pure-living, retiring, self-forgetful student. The ecclesiastic represents the type of worldliness tinged with religion, the naturalist the type of unworldliness with no conscious aid from religion. And the climax of the contrast was reached when at a meeting of a British association at Oxford the WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND 131 eloquent Bishop denounced Darwin and his views with, as has been said “ inimitable spirit, empti- ness and unfairness.” He finally allowed himself to ask Huxley whether he was related on his grand- father’s or his grandmother’s side to an ape, and Mr. Huxley replied—“‘If there were an ancestor, sir, whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man of restless and versatile intellect who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to ob- scure them by an aimless rhetoric and distract . the attention of his hearers from the real point by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.” The audacity of worldliness, which settles within the province of faith itself, and the subtlety which is Proteus-like in its disguises, warns Christians to judge themselves with care and severity. If our Master did anything, He founded a society whose standard was to be character, and whose ends were to be spiritual, in which the things which are true and beautiful, and gentle and gracious are to be counted the chief good. Was it worth His dying if the brotherhood of Galilee should become a huge 132 WORLDLINESS: A FRAME OF MIND. trust, quarrelling over property, tyrannizing over men’s consciences, giving precedence to the rich over the poor, and rivalling the rulers of this world in its cunning? Was it any use His calling men, and inviting them to carry His cross, if the only difference between the disciples of Christ and the children of this world be the profession of a creed which is divorced from obedience, and the practise of a Pharisaic holiness which stands rather in the washing of hands and the titheing of mint, than in a clean heart and the service of men. XI PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE THE CONDITION OF SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE “ Tf any man will do His, will he shall know of the doctrine.” —S#. John vii. 17. T is startling to notice the class in the Jewish nation which was most perplexed by Jesus’ teaching and the class which entered most kindly into His mind. As it happened, there was one audience which by its intellectual culture, its minute Biblical knowledge, its religious traditions, and its Church instincts, seemed to have been specially prepared for Jesus. And it also hap- pened that He had another audience which, by its want of education, its ignorance of theology, its exclusion from the religious circle, and the burden of daily labour seemed to be incapacitated to receive His spiritual message. One would have predicted that the Scribes and Pharisees would have had an easy mastery of Jesus’ doc- trine, and that the common people would have 133 134 PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE found it a foreign language; but it was the experts with all their advantages who failed, and the unlearned who succeeded in this new school. Although we are so accustomed to the Gospels, there are still times when one is utterly perplexed, because the religious circle of Jesus’ day had not the remotest idea that He was the long- expected Messiah, or even that He wasa perfectly convincing teacher of religion, but came to the conclusion that He was a dangerous heretic and a destroyer of faith. And one is also per- plexed that the outside circle who were despised by the Pharisees and talked down to, just as outside people are judged and preached to by the religious circle to-day, should have responded to Jesus so quickly, and should have given Him such satisfaction. It was as if the recognized religious class of our day who address meetings, and ask people if they are converted, and talk of their neighbours as worldly, and are very keen about certain doctrines, should have denounced Jesus and persecuted Him when He came with His Sermon on the Mount, and His parables of the divine love, while a large number of quiet people who have never made any profession and have PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE 135 never dared to consider themselves religious should have deeply appreciated Jesus and have become His faithful disciples. If you imagine this state of things you will understand how perplexing the situation is and must always be until we get its key. Jesus Himself was not surprised, but declared that while there was no obstacle to the people understanding His doctrine,the Pharisees laboured under a hopeless disability. They considered it enough to judge Christ’s words by the intellect, and did not feel it necessary to obey them in life, while the people who made no pretensions to expert knowledge forsook their sins, and so qualified themselves to receive Jesus’ teaching. It was a question of method—how to understand —and since the Pharisees clung to their arid theology they made no progress, whilst the others accepted the ethics of Jesus andsoattained. The Pharisees, notwithstanding their knowledge, which is not to be despised, failed to understand the evangel of Jesus, because, as He used to insist, they had the wrong temper of life. They re- ceived honour of men, contending for chief seats in the synagogue and upper places at feasts, 136 PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE making much of traditional doctrine and social customs, being self-righteous about themselves and censorious about other people. The people, notwithstanding their ignorance, which is never to be made light of, received Christ’s Gospel, because they had a humble idea of themselves, were penitent about their sins, did not stand at the corner of the streets offering public prayer, were anxious to do better and were willing to keep Christ’s commandments. The Pharisees would not obey and so they could not know, the people did obey and so they came to know. It was a question of moral not intellectual disability ; or, in other words, right living is the road in the spiritual world to true thinking. As this is a very grave principle and has a most searching application, we ought to fix in our minds what exactly Jesus intended by His words when He speaks of knowing the doctrine and doing the will. By true thinking He does not mean being acquainted with the various dogmas which scientific religion has from time to time created and into whose mould the fluid idea concerning spiritual truth has been run. Dogmas are the achievement of the intellect, and the PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE 137 Pharisees were exceedingly strong in their dog- matic knowledge. When Jesus speaks of doc- trine He is referring to the burden of His own teaching, and the sum of all His teaching was God. His aim was to impress the mind with a certain idea of God, and it was a moral rather than an intellectual conception. You do not find Jesus enlarging upon the existence and attributes of God after the manner, say, of the Athanasian Creed. He said nothing about the being of God, but He endeavoured to convince men that God was the merciful and faithful Father of the human race ; that He loved men, both good and bad, with a patient fatherly love ; that He desired His children to abandon their sins and come home to His fellowship ; that He was ready to receive them if they would only trust and obey Him. This was not theology, it was religion. It was not God’s being but God’s doing that Jesus preached, not His nature but His character. He desired not that men should solve problems about God, but that they should have fellowship with Him. No man, however learned, will ever be able to comprehend God: no man, however ignorant, if he has begun to obey in all 138 PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE sincerity may not have a true knowledge of God. : Again, when Jesus lays down this condition of obedience He speaks with careful and charitable qualification. He does not say that before a man can know God he must be able to do God’s will, for this were to dash our hopes to the ground. No one has ever been able to do God’s will per- fectly, save Jesus Himself, just as He alone has had a perfect knowledge of God. What Jesus asks is that a man desire to do God’s will, that he be not tricky or insincere like the Pharisees, playing false with God and with his own con- science in the matter of duty, but that wherever he sees the path before him he strive to walk therein. As one hassaid, “ It is not the finding out what God desires to be done which is difficult, it is the doing it.”” Our conscience in nine cases out of ten tells us what to do as clearly as if a voice spoke from Heaven, and in the tenth case light would arise to the righteous. The Pharisees, for instance, were perfectly aware that they had not done their duty by the people; that was one reason why they were angry with Jesus, and why they were alienated from God. Their pro- PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE 139 fessions were enormous towards God and insolent towards men; their practice was very faulty towards both. If we hear our conscience and set our face to duty, it will be with us as with the traveller who ascends the Gemmi Pass. When he comes to the foot of the precipice along whose ledges and through whose crevices the narrow path ascends, the mist may be lying heavy, and at first he may not find the starting point. Once his feet are upon the path, although he cannot see beyond a few yards and has no idea how the path may wind it is only a matter of dogged and careful perseverance. With every step the mist grows more luminous, glimpses of the crest can now and again be caught, and suddenly the traveller comes out from the cloud into the clear sunlight on the height, with the spotless snow around him and the blue of God’s heaven over his head. He that wills to do God’s will shall come to know God’s will before set of sun. It were difficult to mention a more dangerous fallacy in the religious world than that which separates life from truth, and supposes that a person may know without doing or do without knowing. And few of us have escaped its con- 140 PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE tagion. We have made a distinction like that which obtains in physical science, where one department deals with the principles of mathe- matics, and another applies those principles to the forces of nature. We imagine that there may be two spheres in religion, one of pure and the other of applied truth. So we speak of a person who knows the truth well without practising it, and of another who lives excellently but who is ignor- ant of the truth. If this were really so it would be an awful calamity, for what could be more injurious to himself than for one to enshrine the knowledge of God in the unholy place of a wicked life, or anything more cruel than for one to be bravely doing his duty and yet to be left in the outer darkness regarding God. As a matter of fact either position is a moral contradiction. No doubt it is as easy for a selfish man to learn his Catechism as to learn Euclid, but this is neither _ to know God nor to be saved. It is also possible | for one to keep the commandments of Jesus and om yet not hold the Christian dogma, but it does not follow that he does not know God. It is repulsive to the moral sense to believe that one who is not keeping Christ’s law can have Christ’s revelation PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE I4I of the Father, or that one who carries Christ’s cross can miss the light of His Father’s face? Christ’s deliverance, that you must obey in order to know, is in keeping with His idea of faith. Faith with Jesus was a moral word, and had to do with the will. It meant trust, surrender, loyalty, service; it meant “‘ follow Me,” and by following Me know My Father. Our Master believed that there was in every man a faculty of divine knowledge, which may be called the moral sense, and to this faculty Jesus appealed. He did not disparage reason, but as a religious teacher He did not desire to place on reason a burden it could not bear. God is not reason but love, and it is therefore as impossible for reason to know God as to see a picture with your ear. We would not allow ourselves to say God is able— it is profanity ; we gladly say He is kind—it is piety. Reason has her own province, the acquisi- tion of intellectual knowledge ; the moral sense has her province, the acquisition of spiritual knowledge. As one has said, “‘ In things secular we must know in order to love, in things spiritual > which means that the knowledge of God comes through we must love in order to know,’ 142 PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE fellowship of character. As a pool reflects the sun in its bosom, so is God revealed in the mirror of our soul. Just as the moral sense is bright shall we see God, just as it is dark shall we miss the heavenly vision. It will not help us that we be clever if we be proud, it will not hinder us that we be simple if we be humble. There are two people whom Jesus’ words ought to warn, and the first is the man who supposes that he knows the doctrine, but is not doing the will. Is he sure that he knows anything which counts when his knowledge is so absolutely divorced from life? Hehas a very strong theory about the inspiration of the Bible, but what good is his devotion to the letter when the spirit of the Book has not affected his heart ? He believes that he knows God, but how can he, for God is love, and this man is not loving his brother? He is very keen about the deity of Christ, but what right has he to speak of Christ since he will not carry Christ’s cross in mercy and humility. He is convinced that his sins are forgiven, and prates about assurance, but can they be loosed if he will not give quittance to his brotherman.? He has an unfaltering confidence that he will reach PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE 143 Heaven when he dies, but what place can he have in Heaven who to-day is carrying a hell of unclean or malignant passions in his heart ? The other person is one who is proud of his scepticism, and complains that he cannot know, while all the time he is refusing to obey. Granted that the Holy Trinity and the Sacrifice of Christ are mysteries, and that God Himself is the chief mystery of all, he ought to remember that everything in life is not a mystery. It is’ open to us all to do our daily work with a single mind, to be patient amid the reverses of life, to be thoughtful in the discharge of our family duties, and to be self-denying in the management of our souls. Duty at any rate is no mystery, and it is grotesque that a man should proclaim that he cannot believe the most profound truths when he is making no honest effort to keep the plainest commandments. It has been my lot to hear a young man explain that he could no longer be a Christian because he had been reading Herbert Spencer, and to urge him to lay Spencer on the shelf and to try to be a better son to his widowed mother. Till he was a faithful son one paid no attention either to what he did or what he didn’t 144 PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE believe about God, any more than to what one tells you about the stars who is looking through a blind telescope. And it has been my satisfaction to receive a letter from a woman who has had a hard battle to believe, saying, ““I have come to the conclusion that work is the panacea for a multitude of evils. I have nowno time for brood- ing over unfathomable mysteries. The sorrows and the sufferings here (she is nurse in a great London hospital) are stimulating rather than depressing, being so much material for work, and one forgets self entirely through the long day.” Jesus’ word has great comfort for two people, and the first is the man who is harassed by many perplexing questions but who is doing his duty bravely. Courage, I dare to say to you, and patience. Noone ever carried Christ’s cross with- out coming near to Christ Himself, and where Christ is, the light is sure to break. No sacrifice you make, no service you render, but is bringing you nearer to the heart of things, for the heart of the universe is love. Watch as those who watch for the morning, and watch at your work, for the day will break and it will come with morning songs. St. Thomas could hardly believe any- PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE 145 thing, but he was willing to die with Christ, and Christ showed him His wounds. The other person is one who laments the simplicity of his intellect. Be of good cheer, I would say to you, and do not despair or despise yourself. The Master thanked God that He had hidden the deep things from the wise and had revealed them unto babes; He also set a child in the midst of the disciples and told them that if any one desired to be great he must become as a little child. It is not through deep thinking but faithful doing that one comes to know the mystery of God, and faithful doing is within every one’s reach. The path which philosophers and scientists have often missed has been found by shepherds on the hills, and by working women. Mary of Bethany and the fishermen of Galilee knew more of God than the scholars of Jerusalem. St. Francis, his disciples said, carried on him the wounds of the Lord Jesus, and an ancient master represented them blazing with light as he lay upon his bier, so that the dead body of the saint was set in the brightness of the stigmata. It was a parable that no one may separate light from love or Christ’s teaching from Christ’s cross. LF. 10 146 PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE Just in proportion as we are made partakers of His sufferings shall we be partakers of His gospel, just as we are willing to do the will of God shall we know the doctrine of God. And step by step we shall come to know God Himself, Whom to know is life everlasting. XII FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION, THE METHOD OF JESUS “‘T am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.””—S#. Matthew v. 17. T is evident that our Lord’s critics had been denouncing Him as an intellectual and social anarchist, and one can imagine their evi- dence. Here, they would say, is one who has assumed the office of a prophet,and what is the line of His teaching ? He blows aside the vener- able tradition of the fathers as if it were scum on the surface of the water; He belittles those social rites which have been a fence round the national life; He shows no respect to the religious party, but associates freely with the outcasts of society. He even dares to correct Moses him- self, saying, ““ You were told to do that, but I tell you to do this.” There will soon be no truth so sure that He will not upset it, no custom so whole- some that He will not abolish it. He is attacking 147 148 FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION the foundations of Church and State, loosening the faith of the individual, and breaking the bonds of society. Perhaps it would be somewhat un- scrupulous to put the case in this way against Jesus, but the Pharisees were not fastidiously honourable in their controversies. And if our Lord had taken up the same position in our day would He have been treated with much more candour ? Suppose a person in Christ’s time were a prejudiced theologian, or had an obstinate temper, was it not natural that he should be shocked by the sayings of Jesus? And so he may have come honestly to believe that Jesus was not a builder but a destroyer. It is also evident that Jesus keenly resented this charge, and one can understand His reasons. When He was called a glutton and a wine bibber He was not gravely concerned, for a gross slander answers itself : when He was called a revolution- ary there was enough truth in the criticism to make it dangerous. He did appear on first sight not to improve but to reverse the past, not to attack abuses but to uproot institutions, and if this had been so it would have been a serious reflection, both upon the wisdom and the work FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION 149 of Jesus. Destruction is not the principle of growth in any province of God’s universe. Nature advances, not by catastrophe but by evolution. The buds of next year are already visible when the leaves of autumn fall; types merge in higher antitypes ; and so God works everything up into something better. Nations advance most surely, not along the line of revolution but of reform. Science would stultify herself if she cast down the achievements of past knowledge and began with every generation to build upon an open site. The teacher who has no piety for former things, and attacks what has been most firmly held, is to be gravely distrusted. He has neither humility nor sanity. He may produce a sensation, of real action he is incapable. No success can be obtained by negative teaching, no progress can be achieved by assault. He only does permanent work who builds upon “the foundations of many generations”; who is not a destroyer but a fulfiller. Had the opponents of Jesus been able to take a fairer view of His work, they would have found that He was the opposite of what their fears painted. He did the highest honour to Moses, 150 FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION for He charged the ten commandments with a new spiritual meaning, and invested them with a new spiritual beauty, so that the greenery of spring came upon the bare branches, and the austere words of Sinai changed into the command- ment of love. If Jesus gave little heed to the washing of hands, and the titheing of mint, He taught His disciples the higher duty of a clean heart, and identified holiness not with ritual but with righteousness. Under His spirit the God of Abraham and Jacob became our Heavenly Father, to be worshipped the world over wherever there was an honest heart. What the prophets had imagined Jesus revealed, and upon the strong morality of Judaism He raised that more generous kingdom, which is righteousness, peace and joy. If the temple of Jerusalem was to pass away the whole world would become the Temple of God, and if the Jewish nation lost their exclusive position as the “‘servant of the Lord,” the sceptre of a greater David would rule from the rising to the setting of the sun. If old forms perished, the ~ spirit would have freer course; if an over-ripe harvest fell before the sickle, it was to be the seed of wider fields. FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION 151 Fulfilment is the guiding principle of all success- ful progress and ought to contro: every depart- ment of action. When, for instance, we attempt the regeneration of society, repression may be ~ needful as a temporary measure; but repression ~ isa policy of despair. It coerces, but it does not control; it terrifies, but it does not satisfy. We ought to go to the root of the matter and find out the causes which create the vices of the people. It is not enough to lessen the temptations to drunkenness, for instance; we must find out the reason why men play the fool after this fashion. Were we to shut up the drunkards of the country in one inebriate asylum, and then prevent every other person from obtaining intoxicating drink, we should not have secured the salvation of the nation or have fulfilled the mind of Christ. Why do men drink and do the other things? What are they seeking after? Is it not the case that they go to public-houses because their own homes are not attractive; that they intoxicate them- selves because they have no more wholesome excitement; that they are thriftless because with irregular labour they have no inducement to save; and that they sink to the depths of 152. FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION misery because they have no hope? The gaol, the asylum, and the casual ward are not the answer to this problem, nor all the laws that can ye passed by Parliament. The springs of disease must be staunched, and the hopelessness of the people lifted. Recently a brewer told me that the takings of his company over a large number of public-houses were going steadily down because the working men preferred to spend the evening in a music-hall. This is one of the best things I have ever heard of music-halls. They have done what a temperance appeal could not accomplish— because they have not robbed, they have sub- stituted. You cannot repress human nature, but you can direct it ; you cannot kill its instincts, but you can raise them. When every man has a decent home and access to pure enjoyment, then the gross evils which batten upon the multitude at the base of society will disappear, and the corporate life of the people will be redeemed, as when some hideous waste strewn with obscene tubbish is covered by green grass and white flowers. The same principle holds in the elimination of sin from an individual life, To sin is to miss the FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION 153 mark; the arrow went astray, and struck the wrong place. Every vice is the inversion of a virtue, it is degenerate goodness. Discontent- ment is the querulous ghost of a high ambition which might have attempted bold things. The black mood of jealousy is distorted affection. Avarice is the corruption of the desire of posses- sion. Bad temper is the heat which might have been wholesome indignation. Lust itself is the loathsome travesty of love. Moralists of the second order would advise a man to put his sins under lock and key: Jesus teaches men to expel them. He would transform temptations to sin and make them incentives to holiness ; He would have us concern ourselves not with the destruction of the evil but with the cultivation of the good. When one works with his might he has no time to be fretful. When he regards his neighbour with charity he has no room for envy: When he expends his enthusiasm on the highest ends he has no steam left for peddling quarrels. When one loves the best he knows, he is raised above low passions. With this principle of fulfilment we ought also to approach the erroneous ideas which affect the 154 FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION popular mind and are rivals of the truth. It is the cheapest plan to denounce them, and to mock the people who are satisfied with such make- shifts. It is not good policy, for it does not make converts of the heretics, and it is apt to make Pharisees of the censors. Does it not stand to reason that people would not listen greedily to such pseudo gospels unless they were in search of something, and would it not be wiser to give them what they seek in its most perfect form ? Their mistakes are unconscious petitions for truth, their halting systems are unidentified frag- ments of knowledge. Ritualism is the longing for symbols which Jesus met in His parabolic treatment of nature and His institution of the Sacraments. It is the effort of the vine to climb by a framework nearer to the sun, and any excess is best cured, not by removing but by extending the principle till all life become the transparent veil of the divine. Positivism is an effort to get at reality and the discovery of God within humanity. Where mercy, grace and pity dwell There God is dwelling too. He who finds God in a pure woman or in a noble FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION 155 deed will surely not miss Him in His heaven. Agnosticism is the re-action from an unlicensed affirmation about spiritual mysteries, and has its own place in Christianity where Jesus treated the unseen world with such suggestive reserve, and taught men that he who did the will of God would come to know God’s truth. What has given ‘‘Christian Science” its attraction is the authority of the mind over the body, and was. not Christ for ever teaching the supremacy of the spiritual? It is wiser to give a man what he is seeking after than to denounce its imperfect substitute. It is, indeed, of no use to take away unless you can bestow, and therefore the wise missionary of to-day finds out what the non- Christian religion means, and shows that it is a prophecy of Christ. It may be expedient some- times to defend Christianity, it is better to pro- claim it ; it may be necessary sometimes to attack another religion, it is more gracious to satisfy it. It is the unknown God whom men are seeking through many systems and after many fashions ; it is the known God whom Jesus reveals and presents to us all. Just as religion appears to us a fulfilment or a 156 FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION destruction of life, shall we come to love or hate it. If religion be nothing but a refusing and denying, a repressing and mortifying, then it may be a necessity; it is also a burden. But this is not the religion of Jesus as He taught and illus- trated it in the life of Galilee. With Him religion was not a bondage, but the breaking of fetters, that the sons of God might enter into the liberty of their Father’s House; not the limitation of the frontiers of human nature, but the conquest of new unimagined provinces; not the imposition of a catalogue of commandments, each forbidding something, but the entrance into a world of engaging virtues; not another dreary shadow cast across human life, which is joyless enough already, but the rising of the sun with healing under his wings on the reason, the conscience, and the affections of every man. Religion according to Jesus not only calls us to the marriage feast of life, religion turns its water into wine. XIII CHARACTER THE SPRING OF LIFE “A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things; and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.’’—