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"^ \ A Friend's Beautiful Tribute 
 
 DEC211971 I A*^ memorial service held in 
 
 the Brick Presbyterian Church, 
 yj. ^Ky^^y New York City, the other Sun- 
 
 ^C'G/CAL %V^^^^ day evening, for the Rev. Dr. 
 
 William R. "P shards, the late 
 pastor, the Rev. Dr. Henry 
 Stimson, pastor of the Manhat- 
 tan Congregational Church of 
 New York, a life-long friend 
 of the deceased clergyman, 
 made an address from which 
 we quote a few sentiments, 
 which will awaken deep interest and prompt high 
 aspiration. ' They are as follows: 
 
 "When I think of our brother as I first knew him 
 in his New England home, in the company of his 
 mother and sisters, I think of him as an old-fash- 
 ioned Christian. Brought up in the atmosphere of 
 a country parsonage, surrounded with gentle faces 
 and quiet voices, in an atmosphere of love and 
 purity, and steadfast devotion to the welfare of 
 others, where prayer was constant and faith was 
 simple and satisfying, and life was well ordered as 
 in the fear of God, he began his career with that 
 preparation which went far in making him the man 
 he was. 
 
 "When I think of him as he was in college, and in 
 the seminary, it is of a beautiful youth, a fine 
 scholar, a leader of men; but gentle, kindly, self- 
 composed, and one of the best loved men of his class. 
 "As we have known him of late, older and bur- 
 dened with the care and the responsibilities of a 
 great city parish, there was the same reserved 
 strength, the same self-control, with the ripening 
 judgment and the increasing force of the same self- 
 forgetful personality. Beneath all was the humor- 
 ous, playful spirit, which found its opportunity for 
 expression in the intimate companionship of his 
 friends. He was a gift of God to this great church, 
 and to the community, whose value can hardly be 
 expressed." 
 
 The brotherhood of the ministry, illustrated in 
 this tribute of a friend, is expressed by the apostle 
 in his reference to a dear ministerial companion in 
 these words: 
 
 Who is a beloved brother and a faithful minister and fellow- 
 servant in the Lord. (Col. 4 : 7.) 
 
 ^ BX 9178 .R47 F6 
 
 Richards, William Rogers, 
 
 1853-1910. 
 For whom Christ died 
 
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FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
William R. Richards, D.D. 
 
^be ipresbi2terian ipulpit 
 
 _ « — 
 
 DEC21 ]9/i. 
 
 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 WILLIAM R. RICHARDS, D. D. 
 
 Pastor of The Brick Church, New York 
 
 The word is very nigh unto thee, . . . 
 that thou mayest do it. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION 
 AND SABBATH-SCHOOL WORK 
 
 1902 
 
■if: 
 
 ^4 
 
 Copyright, 1902, by the Trustees of 
 The Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath- 
 School Work. 
 
 Puhlix/ted November, 1902. 
 
PUBLISHERS' ANNOUNCEMENT 
 
 This is one of a series of sermons entitled, 
 '* The Presbyterian Pulpit," which will be issued 
 from time to time during the coming months. 
 Each volume will contain eight sermons. The 
 preachers selected are those who are well known 
 and whose sermons have been greatly blessed. 
 The first of the series contains eight sermons 
 preached by George Tybout Purves, D.D., LL.D. 
 The second contains eight sermons of the Rev. 
 William R. Richards, D.D., Pastor of The Brick 
 Church, New York city. Two other volumes 
 will be issued during the autumn — one furnished 
 by President M. Woolsey Stryker, D.D., LL.D., 
 and another by Prof. Herrick Johnson, D.D., LL.D. 
 These will be followed by other volumes from time 
 to time. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Brother for Whom Christ Died . 3 
 II. A Complaint and an Answer . . -23 
 
 III. The Monotony of Sin . . . -43 
 
 IV. The Three Taverns : A Missionary 
 
 Sermon 61 
 
 V. The Power of Personality : A Word to 
 
 Students . . . . . .81 
 
 VI. " But if Not" loi 
 
 VII. "The Gates of the City" . . . 121 
 VIII. The Home of the Soul .... 141 
 
I 
 
 THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST 
 
 DIED 
 
FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 " And through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, 
 for whom Christ died?" — i Corinthians viii. ii. 
 
 " The brother for whom Christ died." What an 
 extraordinary thing to say ! Did the Son of God 
 then risk His life for the sake of some one man ? 
 For us the words may have lost the sound of 
 strangeness through long use in the familiar lan- 
 guage of hymn and prayer : " I gave My life for 
 thee " ; '* Rock of ages, cleft for me." But has 
 the thought grown perfectly familiar to you? 
 If perchance you had never heard the sound of 
 the words before, might it not now seem strange 
 and audacious, if some one should tell you that 
 the Lord Jesus died for the sake of one man ? 
 
 If it were said that Christ died for the whole 
 world, we could more easily believe it, for the 
 whole world is a very large thought. All those 
 innumerable people through all the generations 
 
 3 
 
 
4 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 who make up the people of the whole world — 
 there is an immensity about it that staggers one's 
 reason. You seem to be dealing with almost in- 
 finite quantities. Even Caiaphas, the high priest, 
 in his mood of heartless calculation could say : 
 " It is expedient that one man should die for 
 the people, and that the whole nation perish not." 
 
 Oh, but this word of Paul's is very different 
 — not so easily credible ! See that weak brother 
 over there, whom you have been slighting as a 
 somewhat contemptible character. " Be careful," 
 Paul says ; ** the man is worth more than you 
 think ; that is the veiy man for whom Jesus 
 Christ died on the cross." So far as I know, 
 Paul was the first of the apostles to put the amaz- 
 ing thought into words, that Christ cared enough 
 for any one man to give His life for him. 
 
 It would be interesting if we could know how 
 Paul himself ever came to believe such a thing 
 and dared to say it. For really something like 
 this hard faith is what we all most sorely need 
 for our comfort to-day, — to be able to believe in 
 a God who can have such care for men, one by 
 one, such personal affection toward one man. Is 
 there such a God ? It is the great question that 
 is likely to confront any of us some day, in time 
 of trouble, when we look up into the sky, and 
 
THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 5 
 
 say : " Is there any one there — can I be sure there 
 is — who cares for me ?" 
 
 A distinguished scientific writer of our time, 
 the father of so-called agnosticism, lost a little 
 child whom he loved devotedly. A friend of his, 
 the late Canon Kingsley, wrote to the afflicted 
 father, trying to comfort him with thoughts of 
 God. But the answer, while perfectly courteous, 
 was one of the saddest letters a man ever wrote. 
 Mr. Huxley said that to him all other religious 
 questions seemed matters of " comparatively small 
 moment in the face of the impassable gulf be- 
 tween the anthropomorphism of theology and the 
 passionless impersonality of the unknown and 
 unknowable which science shows everywhere 
 under the thin veil of phenomena." That is to 
 say. Christians have beHeved in a God in some 
 way like ourselves, a Father in heaven who loves 
 us and cares for us as we care for one another — 
 that is anthropomorphism : while all that this 
 scientist could find underneath the visible world 
 was an unknown and unknowable somethine. 
 a " passionless impersonality," like the force of 
 gravity or electricity, mysterious, everywhere 
 present, awful ; but you could not possibly love 
 it, or pray to it, or count on its sympathy. 
 
 It goes its way, majestic, relentless ; but if you 
 
6 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 cross its path it will destroy you in a moment, 
 with no care for you, or your joy, or pain, or life, 
 or death. It is a " passionless impersonality," — 
 that was all Mr. Huxley could find where Chris- 
 tians have looked for God. So he said there 
 was an impassable gulf between his way of think- 
 ing and their way of thinking. He was right ; it 
 is an impassable gulf Now the question is. How 
 has any one ever been able to pass over that im- 
 passable gulf? 
 
 There might be some one in this room who had 
 been standing on the dark side of that gulf; how 
 would it be possible for him to pass over to the 
 bright side, and begin to believe in a personal 
 God, a Father in heaven? 
 
 Now our text comes from a man who had 
 // crossed that gulf that separates agnosticism from 
 faith. His feet are planted firmly on the other 
 side of it. The unseen Being was not a passion- 
 less impersonality to Paul. For what he thought 
 of God was all bound up in what he knew of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ ; and here in our text he says, 
 " Shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ 
 died ?" He is speaking of some weak brother 
 in the Corinthian Church ; some particularly un- 
 important member, a man of no account, as we 
 say, a sort of nonentity. Even the kindest hearted 
 
THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 7 
 
 and most charitable people there would be apt 
 to say of him that it would be little loss if he 
 dropped out; really he was hardly worth the 
 trouble of writing his name over on the roll, 
 when they got out a new edition of the year 
 book. That is the man Paul is talking about — a 
 weak brother; but it is this weak brother and 
 Christ; and he says — what did he say? That 
 Christ cared more for the weak brother than we 
 seem to care for him ? That Christ would have 
 done more for the weak brother, or borne more 
 from him than we seem willing to do or bear? 
 That Christ loved this weak brother better than 
 we seem to love him ? All that would have 
 been true, certainly, but that was not quite what 
 Paul wrote ; he puts his meaning into a phrase 
 far stronger than any of those. It is that that 
 weak brother is the man Christ died for. Human 
 language cannot go farther than that. Oh, what 
 an impassable gulf there is between such a be- 
 liever in Christ and that hopeless father who, 
 looking up in his anguish, could find no trace 
 of any God who really cared what became of his 
 dear little child. Paul believes in a Christ who 
 cared so much about that little child that He died 
 for him. Now my question is, How did Paul 
 learn to beheve that? how did he cross the im- 
 
8 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 passable gulf so successfully ? how did he get his 
 feet planted so firmly in faith in a Lord who 
 cared enough for each one of us to die for us ? 
 
 Well, Paul's faitli in Christ began somehow in 
 that vision of which we read in The Acts, when he 
 was journeying to Damascus and saw the light 
 and heard the voice calling him by name. That 
 was an event which meant so much to Paul, and 
 Paul has counted for so much in the creation of 
 Christian belief in other men's minds through all 
 the ages since, that we are apt to name his con- 
 version among the great events in the world's 
 religious history, second only to the great events 
 in the life and death of Christ Himself. But of 
 course the conversion was only the beginning of 
 his faith ; and we know very well that such a man 
 would never be content to stop with a beginning. 
 It was never his way to think that he had already 
 attained. So long as he lived he was always for- 
 getting the things behind, and reaching forth to 
 the things before, and pressing toward the mark, 
 that he might know Christ. So our question is 
 not about his conversion, but about his progres- 
 sion in the Christian faith, how he ever came to 
 know Christ well enough to say of Him the ex- 
 traordinary thing that he says in this letter to 
 the Corinthians, that Christ died for that weak 
 
THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 9 
 
 brother. How did Paul get so far as that in 
 believing in Christ's care for us ? 
 
 Well, to answer this we ought to look into the 
 letter itself, and see just what the writer was talk- 
 ing about when he said this thing ; what the actual 
 course of thought was that led up at last to such 
 an extraordinary statement. How did he come to 
 be talking about that weak brother at all ? 
 
 If you look back through this eighth chapter, 
 you will find that it is not a treatise on theological 
 mystery — not at all. It is not as if a man had sat 
 down to argue about the existence of God, or the 
 person of our Lord Jesus Christ. The chapter is 
 directly and intensely practical. That question, 
 so troublesome in those days, about eating meat 
 offered in an idol temple, had come up. Some of 
 the Corinthians were intelligent enough to see that 
 this meat was as good as any other. The idol 
 could not possibly hurt it, for the idol was nothing 
 at all, only a dead block of wood or stone. But 
 there were others in the church not so intelligent, 
 who could not yet see all that ; and if they should 
 be led on by their neighbor's example to eat that 
 meat it would be against their own conscience, and 
 therefore for them a kind of sin. 
 
 These weak brothers are an exasperating lot of 
 people. With their irrational scruples, it is easy 
 
lo FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 to despise them, and to say impatiently that you 
 do not care what becomes of them and their absurd 
 conscience. But Paul says : ** You must not do 
 that." He says : " I would rather not eat another 
 bit of meat as long as I live than do that poor 
 fellow any harm. I am always putting myself out 
 in all possible ways to keep people like him from 
 harm : every day of my life I am becoming all 
 things to all men, in the hope of saving some of 
 them." That is the substance of this chapter; it 
 is full of practical Christian advice as to the care 
 that they must show for one another, care for each 
 member of the church, even for the very weakest 
 brother of all. 
 
 Now, right in the midst of that commonplace 
 practical counsel, he throws out this thunderbolt 
 of a theological statement : " Christ died for that 
 weak brother." Do you not see how it was that 
 Paul worked up to this statement ? Do you not 
 catch his unconscious logic ? Can you not trace 
 the lines of that bridge which actually led him 
 over that impassable gulf from agnosticism to 
 trust ? Why Paul learned to believe in a Christ 
 / who cared so much for men, by caring so much 
 for rqen himself — that was the bridge. It had 
 been the one business of this man's life for years, 
 the thing he had thrown himself into with all the 
 
THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED ii 
 
 intensity of his nature, — to care for men ; caring 
 for them one by one, taking infinite pains to know 
 them, studying out their individual peculiarities, 
 making allowance for all their weaknesses, making 
 the most of all their excellences, working for them 
 when present and thinking and worrying about 
 them when absent — "the care of all the churches " 
 was on him. " My little children," he writes to 
 one specially troublesome group of them, " of 
 whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed 
 in you" — he cared so much for them. He used 
 to pray for them one by one. I do not know to 
 how many of these churches and individuals he 
 writes that he remembers them daily in his prayers. 
 He cared for them with an individual particu- 
 larity of interest, one by one. His sympathies had 
 been growing strong and deep and broad. His 
 heart had grown by exercise large enough to take 
 in all these many friends of his, these his many 
 spiritual children, so that each of them had his 
 own place in Paul's affection. Some of you may 
 have in your own home a half dozen children ; 
 but each has his own place in your affection ; you 
 love each one as if no others were there. Now it 
 was hardly a figure of speech for Paul to call the 
 many converts in his many churches his spiritual 
 children, — all of them; telling each one that he 
 
/ 
 
 12 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 cared for him as if he were the only one, as if no 
 others were there to care for. This was the man 
 who, after all these years of exercising his own 
 heart in caring for others, had at last come to 
 believe in a Lord who might care enough for each 
 one of us to die for us. " Through thy knowledge 
 shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ 
 died ?" 
 
 You see Paul's rule for learning how to believe, 
 if he drew it from his own experience, would be a 
 very practical rule. It was by much doing that 
 he had grown so strong and triumphant in beHev- 
 ing. The Master Himself had said : '* He that 
 doeth the will shall know of the doctrine " ; this 
 servant had been doing, and he had come to know 
 and believe. So, if we take Paul for our architect 
 for that bridge which shall carry any of us over 
 the impassable gulf from agnosticism to faith, he 
 will show us that the bridge must be built up 
 solidly, stone by stone, of simple deeds of loving 
 care for others, a care like that which we had 
 wanted some God to show toward us. 
 
 The text is thrown into the chapter by way of 
 argument; Paul argues from Christ's treatment 
 of the weak brother to the treatment that we 
 ought to show him. If Christ died for him we 
 ought at least to take some pains not to injure 
 
THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 13 
 
 him. That is the conscious logic of it, and any- 
 one can see that this argument had, and ought to 
 have, tremendous power in shaping Paul's own 
 daily conduct. There is another logic in the 
 matter, unconscious perhaps, but very powerful, 
 working the other way — not from Christ on to 
 Paul, but from Paul back to Christ. Here is the 
 visible phenomenon of Paul himself giving his life 
 in loving care for others — and of course he did 
 not stand alone in it. We only name him as a 
 specially conspicuous representative of a great 
 class of people then and since who have been con- 
 trolled by the same motive of loving service. 
 Now, you take him as the starting point of your 
 argument ; what shall be the conclusion of it ? 
 Here you see the visible effect ; what must be the 
 unseen cause ? For you know we are constantly 
 using logic in both these ways, reasoning from 
 known causes forward to future effects, and also 
 reasoning from present observed effects back to 
 unknown causes. When we started with Christ 
 and His cross as a known cause, then the logical 
 effect ought to be a life somewhat like Paul's. 
 But now, on the other hand, if you did not yet 
 know the cause, starting with Paul's life, or any 
 similar life, as a visible effect, and reasoning back- 
 ward logically, you ask, What is the cause of 
 
14 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 such a life ? And you may ask, and keep on ask- 
 ing, but you will never get a satisfactory answer 
 until you find it in something Hke the divine love 
 of Christ. 
 
 This world-wide phenomenon of Christian self- 
 sacrifice, where one is willingly giving his life for 
 others, living for them daily, sometimes dying 
 for them — is going on everywhere. Amidst the 
 cruelty, the selfishness, the heartless competition, 
 the hard struggle for existence, which have made 
 up so much of the history of the world, — in the 
 midst of all these you find this very different phe- 
 nomenon of willing sacrifice, this loving care of 
 one for another. This is the observed fact among 
 us creatures ; but what is the cause of it ? Why, 
 you must look for the cause somewhere back in 
 the heart of the Creator. God's love for us is the 
 cause of all our loving one another. It may work 
 in the hearts of some who never heard of the 
 gospel, but it comes from God. It was the love 
 of Christ that constrained Paul to his loving care 
 of the brethren. Paul used this logic about him- 
 self, though it might be unconsciously ; and every 
 time he did a kindness for one of these fellow- 
 Christians it made him a little surer of the reality 
 of Christ's love for them all, until at last he could 
 make this astounding declaration, throwing it in 
 
THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 15 
 
 quite as a matter of course : " Look at that weak 
 brother over there ; take good care of him ; that 
 is the man Christ died for." 
 
 So, if you were talking with a man who had no 
 faith in a personal God, and mourned that he had 
 not — as Huxley told Kingsley that he envied 
 him, confessing himself on the dark side of the 
 impassable gulf, where he could find no power 
 back of the visible world except a "passionless 
 impersonality " — if you really want to help him 
 toward faith, show him the life of some Christian 
 like Paul, who has really given himself to the 
 work of helping and saving others because he 
 cares so much for each of them. Better yet if 
 you can find one still living. And when your 
 friend has looked long enough at this spectacle 
 to be somewhat interested and attracted by what 
 he sees, then persuade him to go and do some of 
 it himself Enlist him in the same kind of loving 
 service. Get him to caring for his neighbors, and 
 putting himself out to serve them, until each of 
 them begins to seem to him worth caring for. 
 
 I am sure before your friend has gone very far 
 in that kind of action he will find that the other 
 shore of the impassable gulf draws nearer; and 
 where he used to talk about a " passionless imper- 
 sonality," it begins to seem easier for him now to 
 
i6 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 look up and say, " Our Father." If the man goes 
 on far enough in that kind of action, and hand in 
 hand with such a companion as the apostle Paul, 
 really throwing his life into the same kind of self- 
 forgetful service, willing to take great pains for 
 each unfortunate brother whom he could hope to 
 help, some day, I think, these strange words of 
 Paul's will come back to him ; — only the man will 
 learn with a start that the words no longer seem 
 strange to him : " That weak brother for whom 
 Christ died." " Why, of course," he says to him- 
 self, *' that explains it. That is the reason why 
 I have been caring so much for the poor fellow. 
 It was the Lord all the while who was moving 
 my heart to care for him : the Lord who Himself 
 cared for him enough to die for him." 
 
 So now the man finds himself safely across the 
 impassable gulf. He has been doing the will, and 
 has come to know of the doctrine that it is of 
 God. 
 
 Since writing these words, I have seen an utter- 
 ance from Professor Francis G. Peabody, of Cam- 
 bridge, which I should hke to quote to you : 
 " No sign of the times is more instructive than 
 the effect of social service upon social life. The 
 critics, the philosophers, and the lookers on are 
 afflicted just now with an epidemic of social 
 
THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 17 
 
 pessimism. Political methods seem debauched, 
 municipal conditions degenerate, the burden of 
 poor-relief increasing, and the tone of prosperous 
 life degraded by commercialism, until, as Matthew 
 Arnold said, * The upper classes grow materialized, 
 and the middle classes vulgarized, and the lower 
 classes brutalized/ And meantime who are the 
 social optimists ? They are the people who, as 
 Kipling says, are doing things. . . . Social service 
 renews social life. He that wills to do the will 
 comes to know the doctrine. He that loses him- 
 self for others' sakes comes to find his own life 
 worth the living. . . . The secret of the worth 
 and significance of life is hidden from the many 
 who are wise and prudent and disclosed to those 
 who lend a hand." 
 
 There are many persons in the community who 
 would not call themselves agnostics, for they have 
 never thought of doubting the existence of a per- 
 sonal God as He is revealed in the Bible : but 
 what they cannot yet believe with any comforting 
 assurance is that this God has any loving care for 
 them. They have never learned, — or if they once 
 knew they have now forgotten, — how to say, " My 
 God," " My Saviour." There might have been 
 some such unfortunate hearer in the church in 
 Corinth who could not find the peace that his 
 
1 8 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 friends found through beHeving in Jesus. The 
 heavens still seemed dark and empty above his 
 head; his prayers brought no answer; he felt him- 
 self as one rejected, as if he had committed the 
 unpardonable sin. What sort of advice do you 
 think Paul would have offered to such a man ? 
 For my part, I doubt whether he would have 
 offered him any advice at all in words ; but I 
 think he would have enlisted the man in some 
 practical service for some neighbor of his, some 
 weaker brother who needed his helping hand. 
 So it would have gone on until the poor doubter 
 had caught enough spiritual enthusiasm, and be- 
 come enough concerned about this weak brother, 
 to lose sight of his own selfish spiritual troubles ; 
 and then some day he w^ould learn that the grace 
 of God which he had been vainly seeking had 
 now found him. 
 
 Now he believes. " The reason why I care for 
 that weak brother," the man says to himself, "is 
 because Christ cared enough for him to die for 
 him. Yes, and because He cared enough for me 
 to die for me." For you notice that was the way 
 the conviction grew with the apostle himself 
 The Christ who cared for the weak brother cared 
 also for Paul. This man who had learned to care 
 so much for each of his converts, and had learned 
 
THE BROTHER FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 19 
 
 to think of the weakest of them as one for whom 
 Christ died, — it is he who has given us in his 
 Epistle to the Galatians that other wonderful con- 
 fession of faith : " I live by the faith of the Son of 
 God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." 
 There is personal assurance for you. No wonder 
 the same man could say afterwards, in the imme- 
 diate prospect of martyrdom, " I know whom I 
 have believed." 
 
 But we have been trying to trace the practical 
 steps by which he had reached that assurance. 
 All the way through he had been doing the will, 
 and so had come to know. It was while he him- 
 self was devoting his life to caring for men that 
 he learned so much about God's care for them 
 and for him. 
 
 Do you wish to get safely over that impassable 
 gulf? Do you wish to get your feet planted firm 
 on the blessed certainty on the other side ? Do 
 you long to know that God cares for you, — that 
 Christ cared for you enough to die for you ? 
 Then do you go and find your weak brother and 
 care for him. " He that doeth shall know." 
 
II 
 
 A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 
 
II 
 
 A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 
 
 « And the children of Joseph spake unto Joshua, saying, Why 
 hast thou given me but one lot and one portion to inherit, seeing 
 I am a great people." — Joshua xvii. 14. 
 
 It is the language of complaint against the 
 orderings of divine providence; these children 
 of Joseph, the two tribes of Ephraim and Ma- 
 nasseh, had grown very great among the tribes 
 of Israel, and they complained that they had not 
 been given a proportionately great lot of land. 
 They brought their complaint to Joshua, and ex- 
 pected him quickly to attend to it, seeing that he 
 himself was of the tribe of Ephraim. 
 
 We may take these discontented tribesmen as 
 a type of the discontented of every age who have 
 been ready to complain that the lot assigned 
 them has not been equal to their ability or their 
 desert. Such complainers have been very com- 
 mon. 
 
 You will see the children in the nursery at the 
 cutting of the cake, each watching jealously, and 
 loud in his complaints if brother seems to get a 
 
 23 
 
24 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 crumb too much in his portion, and he himself a 
 crumb too little. The world is full of people 
 who are children grown a little larger, without 
 leaving their childish quarrels and jealousies be- 
 hind them. Our text sets before us a striking 
 example of that kind of fretful and jealous com- 
 plaining. 
 
 Now let me say at the outset that, under some 
 circumstances, this complaint, as addressed to the 
 man Joshua, might have been just; if the whole 
 land had been conquered, so that there was no 
 more to be had, and now in the division one 
 tribe with only a few thousand people in it were 
 given as large a portion as another tribe with 
 hundreds of thousands of people in it — that were 
 a wrong that ought to be righted. 
 
 There has often been a great deal of that kind 
 of injustice in the human distribution of the va- 
 rious opportunities of life. To correct it has been 
 the great aim of every true reformer. We have 
 all learned, in theory at least, to set our faces 
 against monopoly in land, or any other kind of 
 monopoly. Wherever there is only so much of 
 any valuable commodity to be had, and some one 
 favored individual or family or tribe has got the 
 whole of it, or an undue share of it, we all join 
 in the complaint and the demand for redress ; as 
 
A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 25 
 
 it was in France, for example, or indeed in any 
 country of Europe, before the great Revolution ; 
 when certain favored classes owned nearly all 
 the land there was, while the mass of the people 
 lived by sufferance in a country which in no 
 sense belonged to them ; here a crowded village 
 of peasants nearly starving, and over there a sin- 
 gle noble family using its vast estates for pre- 
 serving game. It may not always be easy to say 
 who is to blame for such an outrage, or just how 
 to correct it; but if we can in any way get the 
 ear of Joshua we shall tell him that such a dis- 
 tribution of the world's opportunities is an awful 
 wrong, and must somehow be set right. 
 
 There is no reason to suppose that we have 
 got all these wrongs righted yet, or ever shall 
 till the Millennium. We are still a long distance 
 from our goal. But the goal is to offer to every 
 child ever born into this world an equal chance 
 with every other to make the most of that one 
 life he has to live here. An equal chance, I say ; 
 whether or not the child improves it will be for 
 him to determine ; but we hold ourselves ready 
 to hear the complaints of those who have not had 
 that equal chance. So I would say with all pos- 
 sible emphasis, that under some conditions such 
 a complaint as these men of Ephraim brought to 
 
26 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 Joshua might have been entirely just, and worthy 
 of the most careful consideration. 
 
 But in fact the conditions were very different 
 from that ; the land had not all been conquered 
 and occupied ; ** there remaineth yet very much 
 land to be possessed " ; the opportunities for each 
 tribe were still practically unlimited; the only 
 question was, would they improve them? And 
 here was this tribe of Ephraim complaining that 
 though it was so great and strong, it had a very 
 small inheritance. But Joshua stopped them just 
 there ; the blunt old soldier has very little patience 
 with that complaint. He answers them out of 
 their own mouth. '' If you be a great people," 
 he says, " then get you up to the wood-country, 
 and cut out a place for yourself; if your Mount 
 Ephraim is too narrow for you, find a broader 
 territory." They seemed to think that because 
 they were so big a tribe, some one else ought to 
 conquer and clear a great territory for them ; 
 but Joshua answers : " The land is open ; if you 
 are a big tribe truly, go out and conquer and 
 clear that large inheritance for yourself" 
 
 Now Joshua stood to the various tribes as a 
 representative of divine Providence. Many of the 
 complaints that men bring against Providence 
 ought to be answered as this bluff old soldier 
 
A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 27 
 
 answered his fellow-tribesmen. For in substance 
 the complaint is that we deserve a better portion 
 than we have received ; the answer is that, if we 
 really deserve it, w^e must go and get it ; there is 
 nothing to hinder; the land is open; there is 
 room enough yet. However it may be in other 
 countries, here in America, thank God, the land 
 is still open ; there is room and to spare for all 
 the tribes ; and if these querulous men of Ephraim 
 are really speaking the truth, and if they are 
 really worthy of a larger inheritance, there is 
 nothing in the world to prevent their getting it. 
 
 I do not say that all the good things of life are 
 equitably distributed among us ; far from it ; for I 
 think some people have a great deal more than 
 they deserve, and a great deal more than is good 
 for them. Our national wealth has been increas- 
 ing at such a portentous rate of speed that it yields 
 a large overflow which no one can be said fairly 
 to have earned ; and the way this overflow is dis- 
 tributed among the people perplexes our sense 
 of justice not a little; I do not think the worthiest 
 tribe always gets the biggest share of that surplus, 
 that unearned increment. 
 
 But that has nothing to do with the question 
 before us this morning. If some men get more 
 than they deserve, more than they have earned, 
 
28 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 we may leave it for them to settle that with 
 Providence as best they may. If some of the 
 tribes should feel impelled to come back to Joshua 
 with the title deed of a portion of their allotment, 
 saying, " It is too much for us ; we do not deserve 
 it all ; we cannot use it all ; take some of it back," 
 we can leave Joshua and that tribe to settle it 
 together. To-day we are interested in a tribe that 
 brought the opposite complaint, that it had re- 
 ceived too little. And such are the common com- 
 plaints even in this land of promise, but I think it 
 is still possible for Joshua to reply to such a com- 
 plaint generally : " If you say that your portion is 
 too little for your abilities, then go and win more." 
 You see the trouble with the people of Ephraim 
 was that they expected to profit by a kind of 
 favoritism. Joshua was their own fellow-tribes- 
 man, and they expected him to give them land 
 that some other tribe had already conquered and 
 cleared. They thought so big and strong a tribe 
 as theirs ought to be able to get all the land they 
 wanted without fighting and working for it ; that 
 some favor ought to be shown them because of 
 their size. But Joshua answered, " If you really are 
 big and strong, that is the very reason why you do 
 not need any favor or partiality ; use your strength 
 hke men, go and get your own inheritance." 
 
A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 29 
 
 It is much as if some boy were beginning to 
 work in his father's business estabHshment, and 
 says to his father : *' Of course you will give me 
 an easier place than the other clerks, and better 
 pay, because I am your son." But the father, 
 happening to be a man of some discretion, answers : 
 " If you are a true son of mine, you will not be 
 needing favors. The advantages that you have 
 been enjoying ever since you were born in our 
 home ought to enable you to give favors rather 
 than ask them. If you feel yourself capable of 
 filling a higher position and earning more pay than 
 your fellow-clerks, go up and win the position ; 
 the way is open." Not all earthly fathers are wise 
 enough to make that response to their children ; 
 our feelings often run away with our judgment; 
 but that is the response which the heavenly 
 Father through His providence makes to His 
 children when they come with such complaints. 
 There is no respect of persons with Him, and the 
 providential answer to each complaint is : " If you 
 are, as you say, big enough for a bigger position, 
 go and get it." Listen once more to old Joshua's 
 words ; he stood there on this occasion, I think, 
 as a true prophet, a spokesman for God ; ** If 
 thou be a great people, then get thee up to the 
 wood-country ; and if it be too narrow for thee, 
 
30 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 then cut down for thyself there in the land of the 
 Perizzites and of the giants." 
 
 That is the way the larger inheritances are 
 really won. Oh ! it would be a good thing for 
 many of us in our moods of idle complaining if 
 we could study a little biography ; if we could come 
 to understand by what hard effort and fighting 
 some of our neighbors have won their inheritance, 
 some of those perhaps whom we were most dis- 
 posed to envy as if they were petted children of 
 fortune on whom her favors had been showered ; 
 if we could know by what terribly hard work they 
 had first proved their fitness to receive them. 
 
 Joshua's answer did not suit the men of Ephraim 
 at all. They drew back in dismay. " The hill is 
 too small for us," they kept on saying, " and the 
 broad plain about it is full of Canaanites, and they 
 have chariots of iron." That was not what they 
 wanted at all ; where was the advantage of being 
 a big and popular tribe, with their own tribesman 
 for judge, if they must go and carve out a future 
 for themselves by hard working and fighting, like 
 any other family of people ? But Joshua is firm : 
 that is just what they will have to do. "If you 
 want more room, the mountain is yours," he 
 says. "And you must cut down the forests and 
 make more room for yourselves ; and if that is not 
 
A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 31 
 
 enough, spread as far as you will over the plain, 
 and drive out the enemies that are there, terrible 
 iron chariots and all ; for ye are a great people 
 and strong ; there is your inheritance." 
 
 It is a good word for any of us who are looking 
 forward over the future with its opportunities. 
 Not many of us are altogether satisfied with the 
 past allotment. The mountain so far opened has 
 been too narrow. We have a notion that we were 
 made for something a little larger. The young 
 men especially — and you know these children of 
 Joseph stood for the young, for Joseph was next 
 to the youngest of all the sons of Jacob. Always 
 the young men, young merchants, lawyers, doc- 
 tors, authors, whatever they are, are looking for 
 more room. They hope that the coming year 
 will furnish more room. And that is well. Only 
 how do you propose to get it ? Are you coming 
 up in the spirit of greedy place-hunters : expecting 
 some one else to win and clear an inheritance for 
 you, to put your neighbor out, and to put you in? 
 If so, I think each new year's providences will 
 silence your complaint with some such calm re- 
 sponse as Joshua gave to his tribe when he said : 
 " If you are big enough, and strong enough, to 
 deserve a larger inheritance, then you must be big 
 and strong enough to go and win it." 
 
32 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 But I am impatient to broaden the scope of 
 our subject, so as to make it more worthy of the 
 place where we are met together. For we must 
 broaden it a good deal to make it fit well with 
 the breadth of the gospel of Jesus. The kinds of 
 opportunity we have been speaking of, however 
 valuable in their place, are not the kind that Jesus 
 encouraged His disciples to seek most earnestly, 
 and neither did He promise that they would 
 always find them. Furthermore, His gospel is 
 not preached only to the young, or to the big and 
 strong tribes, like Ephraim and Judah in their 
 central positions of influence, but it offers its mes- 
 sage with peculiar urgency and tenderness to the 
 smaller and less favored people, like little Dan, or 
 dwindhng Simeon and Reuben ; or, far away in 
 the north, Zebulon and Nephthalim. You re- 
 member that beautiful prophecy which Matthew 
 puts at the very beginning of his account of our 
 Lord's ministry : " The land of Zebulon, and the 
 land of Nephthalim, . . . Galilee of the Gentiles ; 
 the people which sat in darkness saw great light ; 
 and to them which sat in the region and shadow of 
 death light is sprung up." I have spoken of the 
 opportunities that the future may open before big, 
 strong Ephraim, boasting in the vigor of his youth. 
 What opportunities are there for any who have 
 
A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 33 
 
 seemed to themselves small, enfeebled, and dis- 
 couraged, and sitting in the region and shadow of 
 death ? Why, the very best opportunities of all, 
 perhaps, if only they are willing to seize them and 
 use them. 
 
 Do you remember the impatient murmur of 
 our great Puritan poet when first his blindness 
 came upon him, " ere half his days in this dark 
 world and wide " ? A man who in his youth had 
 been so brave and resolute in using to the utmost 
 every talent his Creator had lodged with him, 
 now his soul is more bent than ever to serve his 
 Maker and present a true account; but this 
 dreadful blindness stops him ; and he cries, " Doth 
 God exact day labor, light denied ? " But the 
 answer is, 
 
 " Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best." 
 
 and, 
 
 " They also serve who only stand and wait." 
 
 Do you remember that other earlier servant, 
 greater than Milton, but with a like impetuous 
 spirit, who had prayed God again and again to 
 take from him that thorn in the flesh which weak- 
 ened and humbled him and hindered his activity 
 at the very time when his soul was most bent 
 to make every talent serve his Maker; and the 
 3 
 
34 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 answer came, " My grace is sufficient for thee : 
 for My strength is made perfect in weakness " ? 
 
 Add those messages, if you will, from Milton 
 and from Paul, to the message that we have been 
 studying from honest old Joshua : so we may gain 
 some faint conception of the rich abundance of 
 opportunity that God is really opening before every 
 one of us every day of our lives to render to Him 
 some honorable day's service. So long as we felt 
 young and strong there was opportunity to serve 
 Him by using that strength in manfully over- 
 coming difficulties, cutting down the forests, and 
 driving out the enemies with their chariots of iron. 
 But when disappointments come, or sickness, or 
 the infirmities of age, there is our opportunity to 
 render service to God, — and it may be the most 
 acceptable service of all, — in bearing this trial 
 with resolute good cheer. So every day and 
 every year are bringing to every one opportunity 
 for the largest, best, most honorable and most 
 acceptable service he has it in him to render. 
 
 Oh ! but it is hard work — hard work to win 
 and clear that inheritance — always hard work ; 
 hard to do things efficiently; harder still to en- 
 dure cheerfully and to wait patiently. 
 
 At first we were not looking for such hard 
 work. We were like those men of Ephraim, 
 
A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 35 
 
 hoping- to come into our inheritance by some 
 easier course; we were to be treated as favored 
 children. A lot that some other had taken and 
 cleared was to be handed over to us all ready 
 for our enjoyment. We expected to inherit our 
 father's triumphant faith in God, his firm assur- 
 ance of the reality of things unseen, his bright 
 hope of heaven, his power of prayer, as easily 
 as we expected to inherit his dollars or his acres. 
 But some day when we wake up to a sense of 
 the fact that it is not so, that we have not inher- 
 ited these things, we are surprised and almost 
 indignant. Instead of those broad territories of 
 Christian faith on which we have been counting, 
 we find ourselves cramped in a position that 
 hardly gives us room for the soles of our feet — 
 when the time of stress comes, and our easily 
 inherited faith is put to the test and crumbles 
 away from us ; when we begin to need most 
 the help of prayer, and find that we never have 
 learned to pray ; when we need most a Saviour 
 from the awful assault of temptation, and find we 
 have made no personal acquaintance with any ; 
 when we most sorely need the promises of the 
 Holy Book, and find we never have made them 
 ours, and that we do not know even where to 
 look for them between the covers. 
 
36 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 Oh ! it is very hard ; we had flattered ourselves 
 that the entire higiiway reaching from the cradle 
 to the grave, and to the heavenly home beyond 
 it, belonged to us, bestowed upon us by some 
 divine favoritism, because of the happy circum- 
 stances of our birth in Christian homes ; and now 
 under this storm of doubt and trouble it all has 
 disappeared. Everything behind us and before us 
 and above us is gone. We are sure of nothing 
 but this present moment, this little instant of time 
 on which we stand. Why, it seems to us that no 
 benighted heathen in Africa is left more com- 
 pletely without God and without hope than we 
 disinherited children of the faith. 
 
 That is a common experience, I believe, and 
 comes sooner or later to many who have been 
 reared in Christian homes, and it seems very hard 
 to us. But when we begin to speak or to think 
 our complaints over such treatment, the question 
 comes back out of the silence : " Of what are you 
 complaining? What better have you deserved? 
 If there is enough character in you to deserve a 
 more spacious faith, there must be enough to go 
 out and win it." But to win a faith in God will 
 mean hard working sometimes, and hard fighting 
 sometimes, and hard waiting and much patient 
 enduring. That is the way other men have 
 
A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 37 
 
 learned — it is the way your own father learned 
 to believe and pray. And every year will give 
 you plentiful opportunities — every day of every 
 year is full of them — for driving back these cruel, 
 insolent doubts, and winning a faith that shall be 
 yours to keep forever. 
 
 Oh, let us have done with this idle complaining 
 against God. The Judge of all the earth does 
 right — be sure of it — in distributing gifts, both 
 temporal and spiritual. When the time comes 
 that we can look back and see the whole course 
 of events by which the land has been portioned 
 out among the different tribes, we shall see that 
 no one of them has anything to complain about ; 
 no tribe has received from God a smaller portion 
 than it had fairly earned. 
 
 No; no tribe, no man, has received from God 
 a smaller portion than he has fairly earned. 
 Rather, we are continually receiving from God 
 larger portions than we have fairly earned. God 
 is just to all ; He never ceases to be just, but He 
 is also wonderfully generous and gracious. 
 Every day of our lives — this day — what a mul- 
 titude of forfeited opportunities He renews to us ! 
 How He turns even our failures, cowardices, and 
 sins, into new and unexpected offers of inherit- 
 ance! 
 
38 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 We could not understand this at first ; we did 
 not know it so long as we were boasting and 
 complaining. The answer that came to us then 
 was like Joshua's stern answer to the men of 
 Ephraim, " If you say you deserve a larger in- 
 heritance, then go and win it. You shall be given 
 all you earn." But the moment we drop that 
 foolish, fretful, boastful pride, and begin to con- 
 fess our own fault and weakness ; and to ask God 
 of His mercy to help us, though we do not de- 
 serve His help ; like the poor boy in the parable 
 who came back from his folly, crying, " Father I 
 have sinned, . . . and am no more worthy to be 
 called thy son"; then our answer does not come 
 to us through such a one as Joshua. The stern 
 old soldier must step aside ; for God begins to 
 speak to us through the lips of His well-beloved 
 Son, Jesus, who came to bless the unworthy. 
 In our confessed weakness He begins to make 
 His strength perfect; in our confessed sin. He 
 begins to make His grace sufficient ; in our pov- 
 erty. He grants us some share of His eternal in- 
 heritance. Then He will send us out to go in our 
 turn on like errands of helpfulness. When we 
 have learned from Jesus, there will be no time 
 left to worry that so little has been done for us ; 
 for we shall always be wondering how we can 
 
A COMPLAINT AND AN ANSWER 39 
 
 do more for some one else. When we have 
 learned from Jesus, it will seem to us that the 
 choicest opportunity of all is that of doing a 
 kindness or a service for some neighbor. 
 
 I do not know just how much the men of 
 Ephraim learned from Joshua's counsel— enough, 
 one would hope, to shame them out of their idle 
 complaining. But if instead of Joshua, our Cap- 
 tain, Jesus, had stood among them, He would 
 have made those strong Ephraimites from that 
 time on a sort of champions among all the tribes. 
 Their battle-cry would have been, ** We that are 
 strone oueht to bear the infirmities of the weak, 
 and not to please ourselves." Wherever they 
 could learn of any other weaker tribe that fal- 
 tered under the assault of its enemies, any tribe 
 that began to be enfeebled by age, or disheart- 
 ened by failure, or in any way disinherited, — for 
 the converted Ephraimites that would be the 
 dearest opportunity of all, — not a chance to get 
 more land for themselves, but a chance to do 
 more service for their brethren. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE MONOTONY OF SIN 
 
Ill 
 
 THE MONOTONY OF SIN 
 
 " And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord : 
 he departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, 
 who made Israel to sin."— II. Kings 14 : 24. 
 
 Some years ago the Sunday-school lessons in 
 the International Course were appointed for several 
 months from the historical books of the Old Testa- 
 ment. They included the history of the Northern 
 Kingdom of Israel ; and I well remember the gen- 
 eral agreement among scholars and teachers that 
 it was not an interesting series of lessons. While 
 the study lasted there was a good deal of com- 
 plaint that the series had not been wisely selected. 
 
 But when we reached the end and looked 
 back over the whole period, there was at least 
 one instructive fact to carry away, namely, that 
 wickedness is apt to be a monotonous, tiresome 
 thing. We had been studying the lives of a series 
 of bad men ; and when we had learned about one 
 of them, it appeared that we had learned nearly 
 all there was to tell worth telling about all of 
 them. It was nearly the same lesson, Sunday 
 after Sunday, only with a different name for the 
 
 43 
 
44 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 king. It happened that the first of these northern 
 sovereigns was named Jeroboam, son of Nebat : 
 and he set the fashion of sinning against God by 
 worshiping golden calves. And whenever one 
 more king died and the historian was writing a 
 record of his life, the regular thing to say was : 
 " He departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam 
 the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin." 
 
 We grew tired studying that same thing over 
 every Sunday for six months : but just think how 
 tiresome it must have been for the people of the 
 kingdom of Israel to go on living that same thing 
 over and over for two hundred and fifty years. 
 Intolerable monotony ! Really it seemed that the 
 whole nation might have given a sigh of relief 
 when at last the Assyrians came up and con- 
 quered them and took them off into captivity in a 
 strange land, where they might hear no more of 
 " Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to 
 sin." 
 
 That may be an instructive chapter of history, 
 I think, for the very reason that it is not at all an 
 interesting chapter, but so desperately monot- 
 onous. For the lesson is that when a king, or a 
 people, starts out to be bad, before they are 
 through, they will find it intolerably tiresome and 
 uninteresting and slow. 
 
THE MONOTONY OF SIN 45 
 
 Of course, that has not been the common idea 
 about sin — not at all. Men think that goodness 
 is the uninteresting and old-fashioned affair, and 
 that sin is the novelty, entertaining, vivacious, 
 venturesome, anything but slow. We call a bad 
 man fast. Men are tempted to do wrong for the 
 sake of the novelty, pleasure, change, and exhil- 
 aration of spirit, that it promises them. 
 
 Now if that promise is a lie, it will be well to 
 know it ; and it is a lie. These sinners often cul- 
 tivate the manner of being audacious, venture- 
 some, and brilliant ; but, after all, how little orig- 
 inality has appeared among them within the last 
 six thousand years ? 
 
 You read the pages of history, and as far back 
 as you can go you will find our latest styles 
 of wickedness already old-fashioned — cruelty, 
 avarice, unprincipled ambition, licentiousness, 
 drunkenness. The archaeologists have been shed- 
 ding much light on these subjects within the last 
 few years, and, judging from what they tell us, if 
 you should take one of old Pharaoh's courtiers 
 through the streets of New York some night, 
 trying to show him modern life in its most start- 
 ling and novel varieties, you would soon catch 
 him yawning. "We had all that in Egypt," he 
 would say, " before the pyramids were built. You 
 
46 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 have nothing new in what you call New York." 
 Or if it were one of Nebuchadnezzar's nobles he 
 would rub his eyes sleepily and say : " Yes ; but, 
 you know, we did these same things rather better 
 in the good old days in Babylon." Or if you 
 should take a Roman senator of the days of the 
 Empire to some luxurious scene of debauchery, 
 he would complain that it all seemed rather tame 
 and insipid compared with the spreads that Apicius 
 used to give in Rome before he committed suicide 
 — poor fellow. ** Suicide ! What in the world did 
 he commit suicide for ? " " Oh, he got tired to 
 death of it all after a while." 
 
 So one of the revelers of the old French kingdom 
 would be reminded of his own Paris ; and one of 
 George the Fourth's boon companions, of London 
 and Brighton. Not a man of them all would 
 admit that the fast society of New York had dis- 
 covered any really novel way of going to perdi- 
 tion. Always some old Jeroboam or other, whose 
 monument crumbled into dust a thousand years 
 ago, had set the fashion for each of these latest 
 novelties in wickedness. 
 
 There are novelties in our modern world ; but 
 to discover them you will need some other guide 
 than these leaders in the ways of sin — the useful 
 inventions of our day, for instance: the steamship. 
 
THE MONOTONY OF SIN 47 
 
 the railway, the printing press. " There is some- 
 thing new indeed," our resurrected ancient would 
 say. " We had some ancient arts of our own : 
 simple contrivances that looked in this direction ; 
 prophecies, of which this is the nobler fulfillment ; 
 but nothing up to this. Tell me the names of the 
 men who introduced these refreshing and rejuve- 
 nating novelties to the aged world." 
 
 Or the freedom of our day, and the compara- 
 tive equality ; no slaves at one end of the social 
 chain, no irresponsible despots at the other ; the 
 law of the land as a power ruling over all ; the 
 respect shown for honest labor ; the reverence for 
 woman ; the public peace and security ; the safety 
 with which a man may travel round the world un- 
 armed and unharmed. Not that we have attained 
 perfection along any of these lines ; but, as com- 
 pared with what used to be, we have here some- 
 thing that might bring an expression of lively 
 interest back into the face even of an Egyptian 
 mummy if you could once set his heart beating 
 again and get the breath of life back into him. 
 
 But then suppose, leading your visitor from the 
 past a little further, you could show him an or- 
 phanage, or a hospital, or some such charity. I 
 can see his stare of amazement. Nothing like 
 that in Egypt or Babylon ; nothing just like that 
 
48 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 even in Rome. " That," he says, ** is a stranger 
 novelty than the steamship, for we had a kind of 
 ships ; or the electric light, for we had a kind of 
 lamps. But a home for helpless, destitute chil- 
 dren ! We had nothing like that. We left them 
 on the hill to starve ; or bred them up to be sold 
 as slaves, or trained for the legions. This is a 
 new idea. Who does such a thing as this ? Why 
 does he do it?" I fear he might find people here 
 in Christian America who could not intelligently 
 answer either of these questions ; but I should Hke 
 to watch the eager interest with which a quick- 
 witted ancient, like Elijah, or Plato, or Seneca, 
 would ask those questions about our modern 
 Christian charities. 
 
 Well, from such tours of discovery you might 
 bring your visitor back with you to a place like 
 this — some Christian church. I doubt whether 
 you could keep him awake through the sermon ; 
 but, if he were an ancient worthy of the honor of 
 coming back to earth, I should like to watch his 
 face through the reading from this book of such a 
 story as the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. " Why, 
 yes," he might say ; " that sounds familiar. I 
 have seen plenty of unfortunate creatures put to 
 death on the cross. We thought nothing of that." 
 But when he learned that after all these ages the 
 
THE MONOTONY OF SIN 49 
 
 nations of earth are still drawing inspiration for 
 all these works that seemed to him newest and 
 most interesting from the life and death of that 
 Man who was crucified long ago outside the walls 
 of Jerusalem — "There is something to study into," 
 he would say. " It is new indeed that a shameful 
 cross could be transformed into so glorious an 
 emblem of power." And I can see the man who 
 had turned in weary disgust from all the costliest 
 wickednesses and luxuries of our modern world 
 because he and his neighbors had been sated with 
 the Hke long ages ago — I can see him taking his 
 seat with attentive interest at the feet of any plain 
 man, or woman, or child, who could tell him any 
 part of the new secret of Christian love and devo- 
 tion. 
 
 Ah, I wish we could learn the truth of it with- 
 out waiting two or three thousand years to have 
 our eyes opened, that some earnest purpose — 
 some real devotion, such as Jesus Christ taught to 
 men, is what brings zest and life and variety and 
 refreshing progress into this weary old world : it 
 is the salt of the earth. 
 
 Wickedness in its various forms has promised 
 
 all this to men, and has lied. Sin, — I suppose it 
 
 began some time by some one's perverse invention ; 
 
 it was new then ; but so long ago as we know any- 
 
 4 
 
50 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 thing about the world sin has been always old- 
 fashioned, stale, weary, flat, unprofitable. One 
 Jeroboam will set the style for a hundred thou- 
 sand senseless, servile imitators ; and Jeroboam 
 himself copied some Aaron or other sinner a little 
 further back. Wide is the gate and broad is the 
 road that leadeth to destruction, and many there 
 be which go in thereat ; and they all fall into the 
 same monotonous gait before they have gone far. 
 Use your own eyes and see if this is not true. 
 Watch a company of gamblers ; the same monoto- 
 nous throwing the dice, or shuffling the cards, 
 hour after hour, all night, every night if the infatu- 
 ation has thoroughly enslaved them. A friend of 
 mine chanced to pass the night in Leadville in its 
 so-called prosperous days ; and in the evening, 
 walking about to see the town, stepped into one of 
 its gambling establishments. After watching the 
 men for a little while he went back to his lodging 
 place and tried to sleep. Not succeeding well, he 
 rose the next morning at the first break of day 
 and walked out into the street again. He soon 
 found himself in front of the same gambling estab- 
 lishment, and, listening, could hear behind the 
 door the click of the game. He pushed open the 
 door and found everything going on much as he 
 had left it the evening before. " Has not the 
 
THE MONOTONY OF SIN 51 
 
 game stopped yet ?" he asked an attendant. "The 
 game never stops," was the answer. My friend 
 got such an impression as he never had received 
 before of the " worm that dieth not, and the fire 
 that is not quenched." " The game never stops." 
 
 You talk of the intolerable sameness of some 
 manual trades, where a poor artisan is kept at 
 his bench for hours — close air, cramped position, 
 wearisome monotony of motions. But k\v artisans 
 have more to complain of in this particular than a 
 thoroughgoing gambler — only he does not know 
 enough to complain. He is chained to the longest 
 hours, often the closest air, the most intolerably 
 monotonous succession of motions, and he cannot 
 get out of that groove. Give him a million dollars 
 to-morrow, and ask him what he will do with it : 
 " Go on gambling for larger stakes." The game 
 never stops. So far as variety goes, you might 
 as well spend your life putting points on pins. 
 
 Or take the sin of profanity. Why, a parrot 
 can learn to swear as well as a man, I am told 
 it is an accomplishment which those grotesque 
 birds are specially apt to pick up — and no wonder : 
 there are no other forms of human speech which 
 are repeated with such wearisome sameness of 
 reiteration. If you want to be an original con- 
 versationaHst, you might better make up your 
 
52 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 mind never to speak at all than learn to swear. 
 Half a dozen phrases to apply to all possible 
 events and conditions ! It is really pitiful to see 
 the noble faculty of human speech shrunken to 
 such narrow dimensions. I have seen a dog that 
 could express more sentiment and more intelligent 
 judgment by the wagging of his tail than some 
 men can express by a half day's conversation — 
 the same oaths over and over and over. 
 
 Yet boys just out of the nursery are tempted 
 to swear because they think it is startling, ven- 
 turesome, original, spicy. Every oath they can 
 learn was stale a thousand years before they were 
 born. So far as originality goes, I would rather 
 be a street peddler who tramps about the town 
 hawking his one commodity with a single cry; 
 for at least he has some rational object in it ; 
 and when the day is done he can count up his 
 gains and spend the evening talking of something 
 else. The inveterate swearer's day never is done, 
 and he has no evening when he can talk of any- 
 thing else. 
 
 Have you studied the air of those people who 
 have really made it their business to find their 
 pleasure in dissipation, searching out for them- 
 selves the most startling and daring forms of 
 selfish entertainment ? Their faces grow jaded so 
 
THE MONOTONY OF SIN 53 
 
 quickly ; they are so soon tired of life ; it takes so 
 short a time to complete the whole circuit of 
 novelties for them. I overheard a man of this 
 type, who apparently was entertaining a party of 
 friends with accounts of what he proposed to do 
 the coming summer. He kept them laughing 
 heartily until he broke off with the words, " Unless 
 they put me in Greenwood first, and the sooner 
 they do that the better." Then he added : " Any 
 man of my age would say the same thing. You 
 young fellows, twenty-five years old, think it is 
 all very fine, but a man of my age knows. The 
 sooner they put me in Greenwood the better." 
 
 Ah, but there are people in this world, thank 
 God, to whom the experiences of life have not 
 been teaching that melancholy lesson — those who 
 have let God lead them on in courses of devoted 
 service. Every honest workman who fulfills his 
 daily task with a godly purpose toward his family ; 
 every bright-minded scholar, inventor, or discov- 
 erer, who has opened np new regions of the uni- 
 verse for the good of his race ; every reformer 
 who has set his eye on some distant height of 
 liberty or righteousness, to which he would lead 
 the people — such men may often have been ex- 
 hausted and sometimes discouraged, but at least 
 their faces are kept free from those ugliest lines 
 
54 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 of disgust and weariness of life. Life has stayed 
 interesting to them ; its successes, and its failures 
 also, are at least interesting. They mark some- 
 thing new ; steps along the line of progress into 
 new fields. If the aim is really high and worthy, 
 such a man, so long as he lives, finds life grow- 
 ing always more interesting. The future has 
 always meant more to him than the past. He 
 holds his face forward Hke a prophet. Death 
 itself cannot suppress in his breast this strong 
 interest and hope for what is beyond. It is 
 through such men, with their confident expecta- 
 tions, that the revelation of eternal life has been 
 confirmed to our race. 
 
 This is a lesson that all the ages have been 
 teaching — that service makes life fresh and inter- 
 esting. But the real secret of it, the secret of 
 service itself, is love. Jesus Christ, who gave His 
 life for men, first clearly taught the world that 
 lesson. It is love like His own, love caught from 
 His own. 
 
 One would like to persuade everybody to be a 
 good Christian, partly for the reason that it would 
 make the world so fresh and entertaining to every- 
 body. Really, if there were no other reason, it 
 would be well worth while for some people to 
 begin to follow Jesus Christ for the novelty of it. 
 
THE MONOTONY OF SIN 55 
 
 Such a refreshing change for a man who has 
 always Hved to please himself until he is tired 
 to death, to begin to think of some one else, and 
 to live for some one else. You remember the 
 beginning of Christ's miracles, which He did in 
 Cana of Galilee — shall we call it a miracle or 
 parable ? — when He made the water wine. When 
 the ruler of the feast tasted this most delightful 
 beverage, not knowing whence it came, he said 
 to the bridegroom : " Every man at the begin- 
 ning doth set forth good wine ; and when men 
 have well drunk, then that which is worse : but 
 thou hast kept the good wine until now." The 
 speaker knew all about the ways of common wine- 
 drinking : its brilliant promise of pleasure, its 
 speedy degeneracy : the best first, and when men 
 have well drunk, then worse and worse and 
 worse. One need not wish a more convincing 
 temperance argument than has come down from 
 the lips of that ancient toastmaster of Cana, that 
 expert in the bright promise and miserable per- 
 formance of the wine-cup toward its deluded 
 votaries. " But thou," he said, noting this one 
 strange exception, and knowing not that Jesus 
 was the cause of it, " Thou hast kept the good 
 wine until now," till the end of the feast. 
 
 So it was ; but even after a lifetime of drinking 
 
$6 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 from that cup which Jesus holds out to His friends, 
 I suppose no one could be quite accustomed to 
 its delightful contrast with the intoxications of 
 earthly pleasure. For here each succeeding ex- 
 perience of the pleasure comes " a sweet and glad 
 surprise"; it is always something new. A man 
 who has once learned from Jesus his Saviour to 
 love and serve devotedly could live the longest 
 life through happily, and at the end come back to 
 his divine Friend, saying : " Thou hast kept the 
 good wine until now." And I suppose as the 
 seasons of eternity roll round still he could say : 
 " Thou hast kept the good wine until now." 
 
 Which kind of life shall we choose ? Let me 
 leave with you two contrasted pictures. One is 
 from the pen of the great English satirist who 
 once wrote this description of the employments 
 of Vanity Fair : " Pursuing what mean ends ; 
 grasping and scrambling frantically for what petty 
 prizes ; ambitious for what shabby recompenses ; 
 trampling from life's beginning to its close through 
 what scenes of stale dissipations and faded pleas- 
 ures " ; — that is, as our text puts it, forever and 
 ever repeating over and over the identical sin of 
 some old Jeroboam son of Nebat, who long ago 
 first made the people to sin. That is the one pic- 
 ture, the one leader. 
 
THE MONOTONY OF SIN 57 
 
 But the other leader, the other picture, is this : 
 " Thou, Lord Jesus, hast kept the good wine until 
 now." Which leader do we choose to follow 
 through the coming years ? 
 
IV 
 
 THE THREE TAVERNS: A MIS- 
 SIONARY SERMON 
 
IV 
 
 THE THREE TAVERNS: A MISSIONARY SERMON 
 
 " And from thence, when the brethren heard of us, they came 
 to meet us as far as Appii forum, and The three taverns : whom 
 when Paul saw, he thanked God, and took courage." — Acts 
 xxviii. 15. 
 
 On the Mount of Transfiguration Peter saw his 
 Lord glorified, and he felt it good to be there, 
 and proposed to make three tabernacles and stay 
 there. It was not a wise proposal ; the evan- 
 gelist's comment on it is that " Peter knew not 
 what he spake." Dr. Babcock's comment on the 
 same verse is beautiful : " If the mercies of God 
 have blessedly beset us, let us not build three tab- 
 ernacles that we may abide ; but rather, like Paul, 
 call the places where our mercies meet us Three 
 Taverns, then push on, thank God, and take cour- 
 age. Every attainment is to be a footing for new 
 attempts, and every goal a point of departure." 
 A beautiful thought to connect with this old 
 resting place on the Appian Road. It was only 
 a resting place, not a place where any traveler 
 would think of building his permanent home. It 
 
 61 
 
62 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 was a place to catch your breath for a moment 
 or two, and get a little food, and bait your horse, 
 and then with revived courage push on toward 
 Rome. 
 
 You know for Paul these three taverns stood 
 near the end of a very long journey, for all his 
 life he had been moving toward Rome. By birth 
 he was a Roman citizen ; and yet his eyes had 
 never seen the great city of his citizenship ; but 
 now for many years he had felt himself drawn 
 toward it by an attraction that grew stronger 
 and stronger, till it was beyond resisting. This 
 was not the idle curiosity of a tourist or an 
 antiquarian ; it was not that he longed to see the 
 old Forum and the Temple of Jupiter and the 
 splendid palaces of the Caesars. Not that; but 
 Rome had now become the center of the world, 
 the heart from which throbbed forth the vital cur- 
 rents of the world's civilization ; for this was the 
 period when that third great wall encompassed 
 the city ; not the first wall of Romulus, with its 
 limited inclosure around the Palatine Hill ; not 
 the second of Servius TuUius, a little larger, but 
 barely inclosing the Seven Hills. In Paul's day 
 the wall of Rome followed that immense circuit 
 at the very boundaries of civilization, up in Britain, 
 and through the German forests, and far eastward 
 
THE THREE TAVERNS 63 
 
 into Asia, and southward into Africa, wherever 
 the Roman legions were beating back the barba- 
 rians. That was the wall. The center, the heart 
 of that magnificent world-empire, was still the 
 ancient city on the banks of the Tiber. It was 
 almost beyond the powers of the human mind to 
 conceive such a stretch of dominion as Rome had 
 now acquired. The world had known nothing 
 like it before ; the greatest of earlier empires, 
 Egypt, Babylon, Macedonia, only ranked now as 
 subordinate provinces of Rome. The great Julius, 
 and each of his successors after him, did " bestride 
 the narrow world like a Colossus " ; but generally 
 the stride was too much for the man. His head 
 was crazed by such an elevation. A strange 
 streak of madness became the hereditary curse 
 of the imperial family. Tiberius, Caligula, Nero — 
 they all were maniacs, and not many of the line 
 were altogether sane. No family of men had 
 yet been developed on the planet whose faculties 
 would be commensurate with this immense expan- 
 sion of power. Indeed, since the death of the great 
 Augustus I am not sure that a single man had 
 appeared on earth with thoughts and ambitions 
 large enough to match the power of the Caesars, 
 except one ; and that one was this impatient trav- 
 eler who now caught his breath for a little while 
 
64 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 at the Three Taverns before he started on for the 
 last stage of his journey toward Rome. God had 
 raised up one man at last and made him big 
 enough to discern and use these matchless oppor- 
 tunities of the Roman Empire. 
 
 We have always recognized the hand of divine 
 providence in the growth of Rome's power as 
 preparatory to the spread of Christianity. As in 
 Palestine God had been dealing with His own 
 chosen people of Israel through the ages, reveal- 
 ing His will through their prophets till at last 
 the Christ was born among them ; so in Italy He 
 had been raising up another people, and making 
 them strong to fight and wise to organize and 
 skillful to build, that they might break down the 
 narrow national boundaries of antiquity, and bind 
 the many nations together by bonds of a common 
 law and common language ; building out also 
 every way those grand roads on which Christ's 
 missionaries might march swiftly on their errands 
 of salvation ; I say we have always recognized 
 this providential purpose in the growth of Rome's 
 political power. But within the last few years 
 the scholars have been making clearer to us how 
 large a part was played in carrying out that provi- 
 dential purpose by this one man Paul, for he was 
 in truth a Roman citizen. He was a Jew also, a 
 
THE THREE TAVERNS 6$ 
 
 Hebrew of the Hebrews ; but his thoughts of gov- 
 ernment and law were rather Roman than Jewish. 
 He made friends with a Roman centurion more 
 easily than with a Jewish priest. Almost from 
 the beginning of his missionary labors he availed 
 himself of the Roman provincial organization ; he 
 adapted himself to it, or rather constrained it to 
 serve him, his deliberate purpose being to claim 
 for Jesus Christ that whole world which Rome 
 had brou^t into the unity of a common law and 
 civilization. 
 
 No more enlightening book on any biblical sub- 
 ject has been published within the last decade than 
 the work by Professor Ramsay, of the University 
 of Aberdeen, in which he treats of these very facts, 
 and to which he gives the significant title, " St. 
 Paul, the Traveler and the Roman Citizen." Yes, 
 he was f/ie Roman Citizen. Other men might 
 claim some partial and superficial relation to the 
 privilege of citizenship, like that chief captain in 
 the castle in Jerusalem, who said, with a sigh : 
 " With a great sum obtained I this freedom" ; but 
 Paul could answer, " I was free born." No wonder 
 then that Paul should have been drawn by so 
 strong an attraction to the imperial city where he 
 belonged by birth, and should have been writing 
 for years to the Roman Christians of his earnest 
 
 5 
 
66 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 longing to visit them, and to preach the gospel 
 among them. .That was the one city in all the 
 world big enough for this man ; and this was the 
 one man now living in all the world big enough 
 for that city; and one of the great purposes of 
 divine Providence for that age was faiHng its ac- 
 complishment until the man and the city were 
 brought together. Now the long journey is near- 
 ing an end ; the many delays and interruptions 
 are behind him ; he is about to enter the last 
 short stage of it. The Three Taverns is only 
 seventeen miles or so from the Forum itself; 
 and the tired traveler thanks God and takes 
 courage, and pushes on toward his destiny in 
 Rome. 
 
 This man of whom we speak was the great mis- 
 sionary of the early age. Of all the believers, he 
 was the first fully to grasp the meaning of the 
 Master when He said, " Go ye into all the world, 
 and preach the gospel to the whole creation"; 
 " Ye shall be my witnesses . . . unto the utter- 
 most part of the earth " ; " All authority hath 
 been given unto me. ... Go ye, therefore, and 
 make disciples of all the nations, . . . teaching 
 them to observe all things whatsoever I com- 
 manded you." Others had heard it ; but they 
 were only Jews, their eyes darkened, their minds 
 
THE THREE TAVERNS e>^ 
 
 narrowed by Jewish prejudice, and they did not 
 understand. But this man, though a Jew, was a 
 Roman also, born to the freedom of the empire, 
 and when he heard the words of Christ he 
 quickly understood their meaning ; so the world 
 became his parish. With boundless ambition he 
 started forth to conquer the world for his King. 
 lie stands forth for all time as the example and 
 leader of Christian missionaries. 
 
 We want the imperial ambition of the great 
 apostle in our modern Christianity. I say im- 
 perial ambition ; it is so fine a word that one can- 
 not afford to drop it just because it has been used 
 in partisan political discussion. I do not propose 
 to take sides here on disputed questions of national 
 administration ; I do not wish to raise those ques- 
 tions at all. Paul would not have felt called upon 
 to choose sides as between the policies that had 
 been dividing the Roman poHticians, the policies 
 of Marius and Sulla, or of Pompey and Caesar, 
 or of Octavius and Marc Antony. There had 
 been bitter partisan strife, cruelty, crime, and wrong 
 enough in the process of Roman aggrandizement. 
 But here, in the providence of God, stood now the 
 result of that process, this world-wide empire— in 
 some ways a grand and beneficent result; and 
 Paul was the man whom God had raised up to 
 
68 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 use that result for grander and more beneficent 
 purposes than a Caesar ever dreamed of. 
 
 So for us American Christians, whatever we 
 may think of the process of national development 
 for the last few years, we stand to-day facing cer- 
 tain accomplished results. Of course, as citizens, 
 voters, we are still concerned with questions of 
 governmental policy, and we must try to settle 
 them as best we can ; but, as Christians, we are 
 also concerned to use the result, whatever it may 
 be, for the honor of our Master and the further- 
 ance of His work of saving the world. The point 
 I want to make is that we American Christians 
 are facing to-day an imperial opportunity as truly 
 as Paul was at the Three Taverns. If Paul's 
 breath began to come quicker there because he 
 could almost see Rome, I like to imagine how 
 charged with excitement he would be if he could 
 stand side by side with you and me this morning. 
 If he had occasion to thank God then that he had 
 been born a Roman citizen, I cannot seem to 
 measure the gratitude that would fill his heart to- 
 day could he find himself an American citizen. 
 Let us think of him as standing among us ; let us 
 try to catch his spirit. Let us call this particular 
 Sunday our Three Taverns, and catch our breath 
 for a little while as we turn our eyes forward. 
 
THE THREE TAVERNS 69 
 
 It is as Christians that we are looking forward, 
 as servants of Jesus Christ, who must be eager 
 to obey our Master's command and win the 
 whole world for Him. What we want is an 
 opportunity to do that — we are looking for an 
 opportunity, and what sort of an opportunity do 
 we see ? 
 
 I was reading lately an account of that strangest 
 of modern inventions which they call wireless 
 telegraphy ; how ships have been speaking each 
 other comfortably over leagues of ocean, and 
 through leagues of impenetrable fog ; how signals 
 have crossed the narrow seas, and now perhaps 
 the broader ocean ; it is as if the poet's dream had 
 come true of " Heaven's Cherubim horsed upon 
 the sightless couriers of the air " ; so that men 
 gravely propose before many years to be sending 
 these messages from England to New Zealand 
 through the air ; indeed, to arrange it so that at 
 any point on the earth's surface you can lift up 
 your voice and speak, and within a minute frac- 
 tion of a second at any other point on the earth's 
 surface whoever had the rightly tuned ear might 
 hear your word. It is a wonderful invention, or 
 should I say discovery ? It staggers the imagina- 
 tion ; and yet it seems only a type of the strange 
 historical processes of the last few years by which 
 
70 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 the ends of the earth have all been brought within 
 speaking distance of our own America. 
 
 How short a time it was ago — and yet how 
 long it seems — that we still supposed ourselves 
 indifferent politically to everything passing on the 
 other side of the ocean. Foreign nations, rating 
 us at our own estimate of ourselves, were con- 
 temptuously indifferent to us and ignorant of us. 
 The other day I came across a newspaper clip- 
 ping, less than five years old, in one of my pigeon- 
 holes, giving quotations from some of the Madrid 
 newspapers of that date. Listen to this : ** Word 
 has just been received here that the Indians are 
 rising against the Yankees in Illinois, Ohio, and 
 other places. The farmers are petitioning the 
 Government to protect them from the bloody 
 savages, who are burning houses and killing on 
 every side. ' Buffalo Bill,' a notorious outlaw 
 and leader of a band of half-breeds, has risen 
 against the American Government, and is burning 
 towns near his birthplace in New York." Or 
 this : " There is but one railroad to transport the 
 few thousand Yankee soldiers from the remote 
 interior to the eastern seaboard ; and that is an 
 old and poorly constructed affair. At one place 
 this railroad passes over Niagara Falls, a cataract 
 one thousand feet high, near Labrador. At last 
 
THE THREE TAVERNS 71 
 
 accounts the bridge was in a very dangerous con- 
 dition." Or this : " The country is not fit to 
 hve in. The cHmate is execrable. Avalanches 
 threaten the principal cities. As for the people, 
 besides the few whites engaged in business along 
 the eastern shore, the remainder of the country is 
 one vast plain, covered with Indians called cow- 
 boys and vast herds of roaming cattle." Those 
 papers were published in Spain, to be sure, and 
 the other nations were not quite so indifferent to 
 facts ; but it may give a notion as to what many 
 of them were thinking about us — if they took the 
 trouble to think at all — five or ten years ago. 
 
 Now, is it not edifying to note the solicitude 
 with which each ambassador tries to make it 
 appear that his people was America's one stead- 
 fast friend through the troublous days of the 
 Spanish war ? The late friendly visit of the Ger- 
 man Prince was very pleasant, but it did not occur 
 to his imperial brother to send him five years ago. 
 We have suddenly stepped into a place of great 
 importance in the eyes of all the nations of the 
 earth. 
 
 Meanwhile, willing or unwilling, we find our- 
 selves planted for the time in the far East. We 
 find our soldiers marching side by side with the 
 armies of Europe in the relief of Peking ; we find 
 
72 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 our Government suggesting and doing much to 
 secure the poHcy by which a settlement is reached 
 in China — the pohcy of the open door ; and, as a 
 consequence, we find our Government the one 
 toward which the Chinese rulers and people look 
 with some confidence for just and friendly treat- 
 ment. So it has come to pass that every word 
 spoken at Washington is quickly heard over there 
 at the uttermost parts of the earth, and treated 
 with new deference. That is to say, the current 
 of events has swung us, willing or unwilling, into 
 this position of commanding world-wide influence 
 and responsibility. Our comfortable provincial 
 wall, behind which we had sheltered ourselves for 
 more than a hundred years, is gone forever ; and 
 for good or ill, we Americans have joined hands 
 with the remotest peoples of the earth. Now, that 
 is what we see as we look ahead from our Three 
 Taverns on this particular day and year of grace. 
 That is the opportunity. 
 
 What shall we make of it ? If we were a lot of 
 Pharisees, hugging to ourselves our narrow Jewish 
 prejudices, I suppose we should make nothing of 
 it. We would think it our one business to mo- 
 nopolize the blessings of our religion for our own 
 profit; to shut the Gentiles out of our holy place. 
 But if we are Christians, if any of the Spirit which 
 
THE THREE TAVERNS 73 
 
 Christ breathed into His great apostle has been 
 breathed into us, these signs of the times will 
 make us tremble with excitement. Once more 
 by conflicts of the nations, by the shock of fleets 
 and armies, the way has been opened before us. 
 Once more God has set before His Church an 
 imperial opportunity to reach the whole world 
 with His message. Eighteen centuries ago the 
 apostle, born to the freedom of the Roman Empire, 
 found large scope for his ambition. He might 
 have found still larger scope had God set him in 
 the world to-day — an American missionary. Oh, 
 that God would give His own people among us 
 courage and magnanimity enough for so great an 
 opportunity ! 
 
 You may be sure that other elements of our 
 national Hfe are awake to the present opportunity, 
 and are trying to make the most of it in their 
 several ways ; but their attempts may or may not 
 conduce to the good name of our people and the 
 welfare of the world. Our politicians are awake 
 to it, and already are trying to make political capi- 
 tal out of the present state of affairs, to count on 
 the one side or the other at the next Presidential 
 election. Our merchants and manufacturers are 
 awake to it, quite properly so, and are fully deter- 
 mined not to be robbed of their share of the im- 
 
74 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 mense market opening up on the other side of the 
 world for the products of civilization. Our dis- 
 tillers and brewers, I suppose, are awake to the 
 opportunity — not to say our gamblers and all the 
 purveyors of vice. 
 
 In every newly opened foreign port the Ameri- 
 can flag is likely to wave over some establishment 
 which will be a curse to its neighborhood and a 
 reproach to our nation. These various sorts of 
 people are wide enough awake to what they re- 
 gard their own interests in the present emergency ; 
 but we cannot believe that any of them have fully 
 opened their eyes to God's purpose in this present 
 emergency. Just as the apostle was the one man 
 to face the power of a Caesar, and not be crazed 
 by it, so there is just one institution in America 
 which can, if it will, get the divinely intended use 
 out of this imperial opportunity which opens be- 
 fore America, and that is the Church of Jesus 
 Christ. The ends of the earth have been brought 
 together. The white man, and the yellow man, 
 and the brown man, and the black man touch. 
 The result may be immeasurable disaster to all ; 
 but you and I have in our hands the power of de- 
 termining that the result shall be rather infinite 
 blessing to all. Oh, that we might see something 
 of what Paul saw from the Three Taverns, when 
 
THE THREE TAVERNS 75 
 
 he thanked God and took courage. Oh, that 
 something of his imperial ambition might take 
 hold of our modern Christianity. Oh, that we 
 might discern a little of God's saving purpose in 
 this sudden extension of American influence over 
 the whole world. 
 
 I have spoken of Paul's imperial ambition; I 
 might have called it his prophetic discernment; 
 he saw the vision, and he obeyed. But you must 
 not think that he always saw it so clearly as to 
 make the obedience perfectly easy. Both the 
 seeino- and the doing called for heroic resolution. 
 Difficulties and discouragements were his daily 
 lot ; without were fightings and within were fears. 
 Rival teachers traveled after him wherever he 
 went, undoing much of his work. His most 
 promising converts often apostatized. He some- 
 times expressed the fear that he had run in vain 
 and labored in vain. He was no stranger to moods 
 of depression ; and evidently one of these moods 
 was threatening to settle over him as he ap- 
 proached the Three Taverns. There he was, 
 almost in sight of Rome. So near the end of 
 his long journey, and at the end what if he should 
 find nothing but failure and disillusionment ? But 
 now certain brethren from Rome, hearing of his 
 approach, came out to meet him. It was a very 
 
-76 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 simple act of Christian courtesy. We do not 
 know their names, — very plain people, I fancy, — 
 but they had kind hearts. They believed in 
 Christ, and in Paul, His servant, and so they came 
 out to meet Paul as far as Appii Forum and the 
 Three Taverns ; and it was when he saw them 
 that his faith flashed up again, and he thanked 
 God and took courage. 
 
 I suppose it takes a certain heroism of faith 
 to-day fully to believe in the coming triumph of 
 Christianity. The obstacles are immense, the 
 progress is slow ; there are perils and persecutions 
 abroad ; some of the bravest, as we remember here 
 with emotion, falling at their posts. Worse yet, 
 there is much to discourage us at home, in the 
 decay of faith and the spreading corruption of 
 morals ; the diminishing accessions to our churches, 
 the advance of secularism. It takes a certain 
 heroism of faith for a modern American to believe 
 that the cross of Jesus Christ is still the sign of 
 victory. We often are depressed by the outlook. 
 It is a comfort to me to know that the great 
 apostle also knew the meaning of depression. 
 But at the Three Taverns he was lifted out of his 
 depression, and he found heart again to thank 
 God and take courage. So shall we find heart 
 to-da)\ A faith for which men and women have 
 
THE THREE TAVERNS 77 
 
 been laying down their lives in martyrdom, as 
 they have within the last few months in China, is 
 not a dying faith. If some brave soldiers are fall- 
 ing at their posts, others start for the front. Yes, 
 the difficulties are evident enough, but, after all, 
 this has been a year of almost unexampled mani- 
 festation of divine power on the mission field. 
 Have you heard of those extraordinary religious 
 movements this last year among the students in 
 the Universities of Japan and China ? And, here 
 at home, have you heard of that University For- 
 eign Mission, the first effort of the kind in this 
 country, which is taking shape even now among 
 the students in New Haven ? I tell you, there is 
 enough to see from our Three Taverns to set an 
 apostle, if he were here, thanking God and taking 
 courage. 
 
 Perhaps most of us would hardly like to class 
 ourselves with the apostle. That clear discern- 
 ment, that burning enthusiasm, that imperial am- 
 bition, which made him the first man of the aee 
 seem beyond our reach ; they belong to creatures 
 of more heroic mold. But I Hke to think of 
 the other parties in that little conference, those 
 brethren who came out to meet him there at the 
 Three Taverns. By the utmost stretch of my 
 imagination I cannot see myself filling Paul's 
 
78 FOR WHOM CPIRIST DIED 
 
 place ; but it does not seem altogether impossible 
 that by God's help I might have filled the place 
 of one of those brethren. 
 
 You and I have not come up to our Three Tav- 
 erns this morning as great leaders of the Church 
 in her missionary enterprise ; but we might, by 
 this day's doings and givings, show enough kindly 
 interest in the enterprise, that the apostle himself, 
 if he were here — or the apostle's Master, if He 
 were here, would thank God and take courage. 
 
V 
 
 THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 
 A WORD TO STUDENTS 
 
V 
 
 THE POWER OF PERSONALITY : A WORD TO 
 
 STUDENTS 
 
 " Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming 
 of the great and dreadful day of the Lord." — Mal. iv. : 5. 
 
 This is part of the very last sentence of the very- 
 last book of the Old Testament ; in other words, 
 it has been placed where it must stand for a kind 
 of climax of all that the Lord had chosen to reveal 
 to his ancient people. The time was one of un- 
 certainty and apprehension. These Jews, lately 
 returned from their exile in Babylon, were much 
 perplexed, and in danger of complete demoraliza- 
 tion. To save them from this, the prophet gives 
 a clear promise of tlie coming day of their God ; 
 and to make this promise as clear and expressive 
 and impressive as it could possibly be made, he 
 names it from a man. " I will send you Elijah." 
 Think what a tremendous impression that man 
 Elijah must have made on the people of his own 
 age — that now, five hundred years after he was 
 dead, his name should still seem more significant 
 
 6 81 
 
82 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 than any other word in the entire Hebrew vocabu- 
 lary to show men what the day of God must be ! 
 
 It gives us some sense of the power of human 
 personahty. It seems that God's greatest piece of 
 work so far was not the sun, or the moon, or the 
 stars, or any other material thing ; not the plagues 
 of Egypt, the dividing of the Red Sea, or any 
 other miracle of Providence ; but a greater work 
 than any of these, outranking them all in the order 
 of revelation — nothing else than the raising up of 
 one such man as Elijah. That is the last word of 
 the whole old Covenant : " I will send you Elijah 
 the prophet." 
 
 Yes, it shows the power of human personality — 
 that is, the possible power; but evidently a power 
 not always actualized, for if you turn back to the 
 days of this same Elijah, the impression made 
 upon you by the mass of the people generally is 
 not of strength, but of contemptible weakness ; 
 they seem of no character, no conviction, no faith, 
 no religion of their own, and no politics and no 
 morals ; bowing before Baal yesterday ; to-day 
 crying, " Jehovah, he is God " ; to-morrow bowing 
 before Baal again — mere weathercocks, blown 
 about by every wind of doctrine, always going as 
 they were drawn by some stronger force from with- 
 out; hardly fit to be called men and women, but 
 
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 83 
 
 rather the shapeless clay which might possibly be 
 formed into men and women. " How long are 
 you going to limp back and forth between two 
 opinions ?" the strong prophet cried to them con- 
 temptuously. It makes one think of the wretched 
 crowd of shades whom Dante says he saw on the 
 nearer side of the river Styx, who had not dis- 
 tinct character enough to get them into hell, for 
 " Divine justice and mercy both spurned them," 
 the poet says. Among all these people just two 
 persons were well worth naming — one was this 
 man Elijah, champion of the righteous God, and 
 the other was Jezebel, the young, beautiful, daring, 
 cruel Phoenician princess, who had lately become 
 the wife of Ahab, and at once proved herself the 
 real ruler of the nation. They are the two living 
 characters in the drama. You may have seen in 
 some old picture an angel and a devil playing at 
 chess for the soul of a man. You seem to see 
 Elijah and Jezebel playing for this nation Israel ; 
 but the nation itself, the mass of the people, have 
 no say in the matter; the best player will get 
 them. 
 
 At first the contest would have seemed ridicu- 
 lously one-sided. Jezebel, sharing the throne, 
 had all the resources of the state at her disposal, 
 and with the further distinction of her birth, for 
 
84 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 she was a princess of Phoenicia. You know the 
 preeminence of the Phoenicians at that period in 
 the world's civiHzation ; hke the Athenians at a 
 later date, they were now the leaders in com- 
 merce, wealth, letters, art — the parent state of 
 Carthage. Their religion was the worship of 
 Baal — that is, the Sun, that great god of the day, 
 who under one name or another seems to have 
 dominated almost every system of ancient poly- 
 theism. If you ride up the long valley or pass 
 between the two Lebanon ranges, a little back 
 from ancient Tyre and Sidon, your guide will point 
 out to you along the ridge of these two ranges, at 
 intervals of a mile or so, the sites of ancient temples 
 of Baal, where, I suppose, the priests of that god 
 watched for the very first gleams of the rising sun, 
 that they might offer their adoration. Just at the 
 summit of the pass you come upon the magnifi- 
 cent ruin of Baalbec — the great temple of the Sun, 
 the wonder and despair of later architects. Those 
 immense blocks of stone, so deftly fitted to each 
 other in the wall, — blocks more than twenty feet 
 wide, some of them seventy feet long, — mark the 
 strength of that religion which Jezebel was suc- 
 cessfully introducing among the Israelites. The 
 power which laid one above another the several 
 courses of that ancient Phoenician temple was the 
 
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 85 
 
 very power which this ancient Phoenician princess 
 held in her hands. How irresistible it was ! No 
 wonder the weak nation of Israel had proved 
 tractable to such a ruler — all the people bowing 
 the knee to Jezebel's god Baal. To outward ap- 
 pearance the queen had gained the entire people — 
 every soul in the land, except one man. 
 
 Ah, but that was just it; he was a man; and, 
 as a man he weighed more than any stone in the 
 great temple of Baal ; more than all those temples 
 together. For a time it did not look so ; it seemed 
 he must be crushed — this one man against king 
 and queen and people and priests. The queen 
 thought so, for she vowed she would have his 
 life to-morrow. He himself thought so in a mo- 
 ment of weakness, and prayed despairingly that 
 he might die. " It is enough," he said. But it 
 was not to be so. By some secret power that 
 had come into him, this one man would yet 
 outpuU them all ; some day the people would 
 see Queen Jezebel dying in miserable defeat and 
 humiliation ; and that temple of Baal tumbling 
 into ruins, good for nothing except to amuse a 
 tourist's holiday ; while the nation of Israel would 
 be drawn the way that one man of God had pulled 
 them ; and even five hundred years after his death 
 prophets would still be using the name of that 
 
86 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 one man and the splendor of his triumph to invig- 
 orate the people's faith. " I will send you Elijah 
 the prophet before the great and dreadful day of 
 the Lord." 
 
 I do not know how fully Malachi understood 
 what he was saying, but the words standing at 
 the end of the Old Testament become for us a 
 prophecy of Jesus Christ. And surely there was 
 no better way to give the ancient Jews some sense 
 of what the coming Christ's day would be like 
 than to connect it with the name of some strong 
 human character such as Elijah. For Christ's 
 work was to be one great illustration of the tre- 
 mendous power of personality. That is what the 
 Christian doctrine of the incarnation means : it 
 means divine personality ; that all power, the 
 Almighty Himself, who before had surrounded 
 men as an awful presence which they never could 
 hope to escape, but never could quite reach — that 
 this Almighty Being had now set Himself before 
 human thought, and brought Himself into human 
 history, through this one person, Jesus Christ, the 
 unseen God henceforth personified to our race in 
 Jesus Christ His Son ; and so all those vague 
 divine attractions which had always been pulling 
 the wayward souls of men toward holiness and 
 truth become henceforth concentrated and per- 
 
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 87 
 
 petuated and continually revived in the personal 
 influence of Jesus Christ. The whole power of 
 the Christian religion for saving nations and men 
 measures for us the personal influence of Jesus 
 Christ; and the final triumph of Christianity, when 
 it comes, will be the triumph of personal force 
 over all opposing conditions. 
 
 What a pov/er it was that was set loose in this 
 world when that one Child was born in Bethlehem ! 
 How httle they could appreciate the reach and 
 sw^eep of this power who first looked upon this 
 Child lying helpless in the manger ; or even those 
 who afterwards heard the Boy questioning wisely 
 in the temple ; or even those who still afterwards 
 saw the Man healing certain sick people, calming 
 the winds that blew over a little lake, feeding a few 
 thousand hungry men and women ; or even those 
 who saw Him hanging on the cross, then risen 
 from the grave, and then ascending into heaven ! 
 Many people to-day are finding it hard to believe 
 what the New Testament relates concerning those 
 supernatural works of Jesus Christ ; but whether 
 you have learned to believe or not, all those works 
 put together, as exhibitions of power, do not com- 
 pare W'ith what our own eyes see in the world 
 to-day of the personal influence of Jesus. You 
 have heard that oft-quoted remark of Napoleon's 
 
88 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 (whether the Frenchman ever said it or not does 
 not matter much ; he could not have said a truer 
 thing) when he is said to have contrasted his own 
 crumbling empire and those of Alexander, Caesar, 
 and Charlemagne — empires founded on force and 
 soon passing away — with the empire which Jesus 
 Christ founded upon love ; and " at this hour 
 millions of men would die for Him." 
 
 There never has been anything like it in the 
 world as an exhibition of enduring personal force. 
 No wonder if the old prophet, gazing toward the 
 future glory, found himself unable to give any fair 
 description of what he saw, any suitable announce- 
 ment of the day of such a Lord, except by using 
 some personal name, the name of some well- 
 known man, whose enduring personal influence 
 would at least faintly suggest to the people what 
 the Christ's saving power shall be like. 
 
 Elijah, and afterwards John Baptist, were fore- 
 runners of Jesus Christ ; and so by prophetic 
 analogy we can reason up from them to Him. 
 But He Himself encouraged men to reason on 
 from Him to His disciples. They should do 
 greater works than He ever had done, He said ; 
 for the same kind of power that Jesus Christ 
 exercised through His divine character has now 
 been committed to every Christian to be exer- 
 
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 89 
 
 cised. Wherever that kind of power is used, it is 
 still the greatest power known. The most glori- 
 ous chapters of history are those that tell of some 
 man here and there, some soHtary Elijah against 
 Israel, or " Athanasius against the world," as the 
 saying was ; or Martin Luther before the Imperial 
 Diet with his, '' Here I stand ; I can do none 
 other; God help me, Amen" — some man who 
 by the magnificence of the manhood that was in 
 him, by his immeasurable personal force, has been 
 strong enough to set his own strength against the 
 world, and actually pull the world his way. 
 
 But where could any man get such power as 
 that ? The mere wording of the question compels 
 the answer, that in some way he must have got 
 it from God. " The Spirit of the Lord had come 
 upon him," they used to say of Elijah and the 
 other old prophets. " He was filled with the Holy 
 Ghost from his birth," they said of John Baptist. 
 " He was none other than God Himself manifested 
 in the flesh," they said of Jesus. And Christ's 
 word to His disciples was, " Ye shall receive power, 
 after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you." 
 The power is from God. 
 
 Oh, but we have been so apt to think that the 
 Spirit of God, if He ever came into a man, would 
 crush out of him all strong and interesting indi- 
 
90 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 viduality, levelling all sorts of men and women to 
 one monotonous plane of pious commonplace. 
 But can it be so ? That God whose works have 
 never shown any of that depressing uniformity ; 
 who gives a little different shape to every leaf, a 
 little different shade to every flower — these traits 
 of separate personality to every several thing He 
 ever made ; when He comes to deal with men and 
 women, the only earthly creatures He has who 
 really deserve to be called persons, do you sup- 
 pose that with them His purpose will be to crush 
 out and smooth away all these attractive personal 
 traits, and exalt His own glory by rubbing but 
 His own creation ? No, no ; look at a man like 
 Simon Peter, before the Spirit of God filled him, 
 and then afterwards : before it, that trembling 
 coward in the high priest's palace ; after it, that 
 audacious denouncer of the whole Jewish nation 
 on his Pentecostal pulpit — look at him, if you 
 have ever thought that breathing in the Spirit of 
 God could make a man smaller. The man was 
 only half-made before ; the best part of him had 
 not appeared ; no one dreamed how much was in 
 him, and he himself least of all. He never came 
 to himself until he came to God — until the Spirit 
 of the living God came into him. 
 
 We are talking about the power of human per- 
 
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 91 
 
 sonality — the possible power ; the power of man- 
 hood, when you can really find a full-grown man. 
 Do you know% if there is any place in this world 
 where one ought to make sure of finding at least 
 one or two of them it should be in a great school ? 
 Our colleges and universities are homes of learn- 
 ing, of course ; but that must not be the whole 
 of it, nor the best of it. That a scholar should 
 have read through a few books, more or less, 
 may be important, but it is not the most important 
 matter. In what we call a liberal education, as 
 distinct from a merely technical education, the 
 mere learning is always subsidiary to culture — 
 culture of manhood. Men are what we want. Not 
 mere depositories of information — your library is 
 that ; or calculating or investigating machines — 
 your laboratory is that ; but men who have really 
 come to themselves, who have been lifted out of 
 the disorganized mass of commonplace humanity ; 
 who have some personal conviction and personal 
 character, and therefore, in the long campaign of 
 light against darkness, order against chaos, right 
 against wrong, heaven against hell, can exert some 
 personal force for determining events. 
 
 They needed such men long ago in the olden 
 time, when poor Israel, like a flock of foolish 
 sheep, were ready to trot after any and every 
 
92 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 leader who whistled to them — all worshiping 
 Baal one day, the next day all crying, "Jehovah, 
 He is the God." At that time, what saved the 
 entire nation from ruin was the presence among 
 them of one man of culture. I say of culture; 
 Elijah's scholarship we have no means of testing, 
 though, I suspect, he might have stood even such 
 an examination better than most of his contempo- 
 raries ; for it appears that " the sons of the 
 prophets," the scholars of the day, all owned him 
 as master ; but, at all events, his culture we can 
 test, for we know that he was a man grown ; he 
 had come to himself; he stood for personal power 
 enough to hold back a whole nation from apostacy. 
 They needed such a person then, but I think 
 we have almost equal need of such persons to-day. 
 Any description of the strange characterlessness 
 of the masses of people in ancient Israel would 
 not need very much changing to fit it to the 
 masses of people in a modern state — so many of 
 them without convictions of their own, or faith, 
 or morals, or political principle. You can find 
 nothing stranger in all Jewish history in the way 
 of religious vagary than our own time has seen in 
 the growth of Mormonism out in Utah. I doubt 
 if a complete record of Jewish political history 
 would reveal anything stranger than some of the 
 
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 93 
 
 infectious delusions that have afflicted our voters 
 from time to time on the subject of the currency. 
 And as to morals, the deal that Queen Jezebel 
 made with the elders of the city by which she got 
 possession of poor Naboth's vineyard for her hus- 
 band, the king, was no more unscrupulous than 
 some of the manceuvers by which the saloon- 
 keepers and lawbreakers have maintained their 
 power over the municipal government in our larger 
 cities. The masses of the people cannot be ac- 
 cused of enjoying all these things, — they are 
 ashamed of them, but they seem not to know 
 enough to stop them ; they appear to be drifting 
 about after every chance leader in politics, in 
 fashion, in moral custom, in religious belief Each 
 new doctrine, however crazy, has its host of dis- 
 ciples. What we need, and always have needed, 
 and always shall need for the public safety, is a 
 man, here and there, among the crowd — one who 
 is no longer a child blown about by every wind 
 of doctrine, but a man grown, able to think his 
 own thoughts, see with his own eyes, choose his 
 own ground and hold it, whatever others say and 
 wherever others go — that is, a man of culture, 
 strong enough to stand for something, and leave 
 a mark that will stay in the course of human 
 events. 
 
94 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 I would be far from saying that such culture is 
 to be found only among college graduates. To 
 think so would be the height of scholastic pharisa- 
 ism. But I will say that a chief purpose of all 
 university training must be to furnish that kind of 
 culture, and that any graduate who fails to show 
 some degree of it has not made the best use of 
 the privileges afforded him. 
 
 The whole world has been moved more than 
 once by what started quietly in some college — 
 two or three students moving each other, or all 
 moved by a teacher, and the movement spreading 
 to the ends of the earth ; two or three college 
 boys praying round a haystack at Williamstown 
 fourscore years ago, and soon all the nations of 
 heathendom will be covered with American mis- 
 sions. Wesley and two or three others at Oxford 
 roused to more earnest prayer for the Spirit of 
 God, and soon a new wave of spiritual power will 
 be felt all over Christendom. Indeed, the later 
 revival in the Church of England whose end is not 
 yet, started with Newman and Pusey and Keble 
 and other scholars at Oxford. Back a little further, 
 Luther and another scholar or two at Wittenberg, 
 digging earnestly into the old Bible, and soon all 
 Europe will be shaken by the great Reformation. 
 And long before, in Galilee, the beginning of 
 
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 95 
 
 the gospel was that the Master drew a few dis- 
 ciples about Him. "The Master"; for you know 
 that is the one commonest title for our Lord in 
 the gospel history ; and the word does not mean 
 master in the sense that one might be master of a 
 house, or of a ship, or of a company of servants : 
 it is the schoolmaster, teacher; and, therefore, 
 those who turned to Jesus were disciples, scholars. 
 In other words, it was a little college which Jesus 
 estabhshed in GaHlee as the beginning of His 
 church and kingdom — a college without endow- 
 ment, without dormitories or lecture halls, without 
 library or fixed place of abode, or any other of 
 the kinds of equipment which can be purchased 
 with money. But this college had forms of equip- 
 ment such as never can be got with money. 
 There was a Teacher, and there were learners, 
 all associated in such ways that they should be 
 of the greatest possible service to one another; 
 and, indeed, a spirit of very cordial good fellow- 
 ship among these learners was one of the best 
 lessons they got from their teacher — that they 
 should love one another as He had loved them. 
 The result of a course at that little college was to 
 turn out men — men with such solidity of man- 
 hood in them, that is, so invigorated by the spirit 
 of God which their Master had breathed into 
 
96 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 them, that they would start out from their studies 
 with Him and proceed to turn the whole world 
 upside down. 
 
 Have you reflected that the only work that 
 Jesus did in the world whose results seemed to 
 survive after His own short life came to an end, 
 was the founding and teaching of this college? 
 The people had expected other things and greater 
 things of Him for a while. Many were amazed by 
 His wonderful works for a while ; the multitudes 
 were stirred by His strange tone of authority; 
 rumors were in the air that He should be made 
 a King. But, one day, His enemies took Him 
 and nailed Him to His cross, and then all those 
 anticipations of greatness vanished. After Christ 
 was gone, the only discoverable result of His work 
 in the world was this little company of disciples 
 left behind Him ; this little company of learners, 
 young men whom He had drawn about Him and 
 kept near Him, making them trust and love Him, 
 teaching them, patiently working some true man- 
 hood into each of them. So the humble personal 
 influence exerted for two or three years over these 
 twelve scholars proved to be the beginning of the 
 power of Jesus to move the whole world. 
 
 In every college community there is still a great 
 chance for a man to count for something. Even 
 
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY 97 
 
 in a college there are apt to be many who have 
 not yet learned anything better than to swell a 
 crowd and drift with a crowd. But wherever you 
 can find among them a man who has some faith 
 of his own, some conviction, some moral principle, 
 and who can stand for his principles, though he 
 should have to stand alone, even in college that 
 is a most valuable discovery; every such man 
 counts. 
 
VI 
 
 "BUT IF NOT" 
 
VI 
 
 "BUT IF NOT" 
 
 " But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not 
 serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set 
 up." — Daniel iii. i8. 
 
 There are two books in the Old Testament 
 which have stirred up an unusual amount of 
 critical controversy — the Book of Jonah and the 
 Book of Daniel. Some of us, who are tired of 
 controversy, and would rather feed our souls with 
 such truths and scriptures as we can be sure of, may 
 have incHned to neglect these books for this rea- 
 son ; but it is a mistake. However you understand 
 them, and to whatever human authors you credit 
 them, these two books stand among the greatest 
 even of these inspired writings : the Book of Jonah, 
 with its splendid revelation of God's compassion 
 toward all His creatures, even to the little chil- 
 dren and the dumb cattle of the heathen city of 
 Nineveh ; and the Book of Daniel, which offers, 
 as Dean Stanley says, " the first essay at a philos- 
 ophy of history — the first recognition of the truth 
 that the story of the fortunes of humanity is not 
 
 lOI 
 
I02 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 a mere disjointed tale, but is a regular develop- 
 ment on a majestic plan, in which the divine 
 economy is as deeply concerned as in the fate 
 of the Chosen People." 
 
 But the Book of Daniel is more than a philos- 
 ophy of universal history : it is also a sort of epic 
 of martyrdom. Our Lord said, in His Beati- 
 tudes : " Blessed are they which are persecuted 
 for righteousness' sake : for theirs is the kingdom 
 of heaven " ; and if you want a whole book full 
 of splendid illustration and confirmation of that 
 saying, you find it in this Book of Daniel. 
 
 Take these Hebrew children, with their outland- 
 ish names, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego : 
 they seem to stand as typical representatives of 
 all God's martyred saints in all the ages; the 
 fierce heat of that furnace, seven times heated, 
 with which King Nebuchadnezzar threatened 
 them, brings to our thought all the hot fires of 
 persecution wherever and whenever they may 
 have been kindled ; it might be in Babylon, or it 
 might be in Jerusalem, or in Rome, or at Smith- 
 field, or at Oxford, or in Paotingfu. 
 
 " Will you, or will you not, fall down and wor- 
 ship my golden image?" says the king. In the 
 record his name happens to be Nebuchadnezzar ; 
 but it might be almost any other name ; for that 
 
"BUT IF NOT" 103 
 
 is the kind of question despotic kings and queens 
 have always been asking of their subjects. " Will 
 you, or will you not, fall down and worship the 
 image that I have set up ? " And most of the 
 people have always made haste to answer, ** Why, 
 yes, your majesty, anything you say." For is not 
 this speaker the king, and has he not the power, 
 if they displease him, to cast them into the burn- 
 ing, fiery furnace ? Indeed, most of the people 
 fall down and worship his image before he has 
 had time to ask them to worship it. 
 
 But there may be some who hesitate, some 
 three or four — non-conformists, you might call 
 them — who are not quite ready to take their 
 rehgion at a king's command, or to put their 
 conscience into his keeping. They hesitate, as if 
 they might possibly refuse to fall down and wor- 
 ship. And when the angry king turns toward 
 them and says, for the last time, ** Will you bow 
 down and worship? Quick; answer yes or no," 
 I tell you the whole world waits to hear the an- 
 swer. It will be worthy of an epic poem if they 
 give the right answer. In comparison with them, 
 all the rest of the nation are of no account now ; 
 those other people w^io will worship obediently 
 whatever the king says, — Bel, or Dagon, or Baal, 
 or Jehovah, or Nebuchadnezzar's image, — they are 
 
I04 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 not worth counting now ; we do not care whether 
 there are a hundred of them, or a hundred million. 
 But these three men, who have nearly decided to 
 settle the great matter for themselves — the most 
 important question of human history so far has 
 been. What sort of reply are those three men 
 going to make to the king? If, after a pause, they 
 should answer, with the rest, " Yes, O king, we 
 will fall down and worship with all the rest of the 
 people. It must be right, since the king com- 
 1 mands it and all the people do it ; and, anyway, 
 I that furnace is too hot to think of; we will con- 
 i form " — if that is their reply, then instantly these 
 men lose all interest for us. Turn over the page ; 
 see if we can find any other man or set of men 
 better worth reading about. 
 
 But if these three men will not say " Yes," if 
 they still maintain their stubborn non-conformity, 
 then we do not turn over the pages. We have 
 to wait, the whole world seems to be waiting, for 
 their further reply. 
 
 In Babylon these three men would not say 
 " Yes " ; the king's act of uniformity would not 
 work with them. They said ** No "; and they said 
 it deliberately, thoughtfully, facing all the possi- 
 bilities of the case, and in the face of them all they 
 still said " No." Let me read their answer in full, 
 
"BUT IF NOT" 105 
 
 for men have not often spoken words better worth 
 hearing. 
 
 " Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, answered 
 and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are 
 not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be 
 so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us 
 from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver 
 us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it 
 known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve 
 thy gods, nor worship the golden image which 
 thou hast set up." 
 
 They face these two possibilities : " If it be so " ; 
 ** if not," It may be that their God will yet deliver 
 them from Nebuchadnezzar's power. The com- 
 mon run of people could not so much as conceive 
 of that possibility. Nebuchadnezzar's power 
 seemed so great and manifest that they believed 
 it irresistible. None could deliver any one out of 
 his hand. Their sense and imagination were alto- 
 gether overwhelmed by his royal magnificence. 
 But there always have been some who could see 
 more clearly, some three or four men who were 
 not quite so much dazzled by Nebuchadnezzar. 
 His power is great, but they can see that it is not 
 absolute or eternal. There might be some hopes 
 for an opposition party even in Babylon ; and if 
 some day the king issues a particularly outrageous 
 
io6 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 decree, they think there is a chance that it might 
 be successfully resisted. If the chance seems a 
 fairly good one, not a few men in the kingdom 
 will be willing to take it. In the language of our 
 text, so long as they think that God is likely to 
 deliver them out of the hands of Nebuchadnezzar 
 they will not fall down and worship the king's 
 golden image. You might name Erasmus as a 
 conspicuous representative of that kind of non- 
 conformists. 
 
 That kind of non-conformity is a useful thing, 
 too, so far as it goes. It is a sort of faith in the 
 invisible. To believe that Nebuchadnezzar is not 
 so bisf as he looks ; to beHeve that there is some 
 Being stronger than he ; and that if brave men set 
 themselves vigorously enough against his tyranny 
 they may probably succeed ; it is a good thing. 
 We are glad to find as many such believers in the 
 kingdom as we can. If there should prove to be 
 enough of them, and if their opposition is earnest 
 enough, even proud King Nebuchadnezzar will 
 think twice before he tries conclusions with them. 
 The king might bluster savagely, but if he had 
 found anything like half his subjects holding their 
 heads high before his image he would have dis- 
 covered some way of modifying that edict. But, 
 however useful that kind of non-conformity, it is 
 
"BUT IF NOT" 107 
 
 not the very best ; for what if it should prove that 
 the king is able to carry out his threat ? This time 
 everything is going his way, and nothing is left 
 for the opposition except that burning fiery fur- 
 nace. Well, then, these people, Erasmus and 
 others of that temper, are careful to make their 
 peace in time. If the true God is not going to 
 deliver His servants from the king, then they will 
 have to change sides. 
 
 But in Babylon were three non-conformists of a 
 stiffer temper. " If it be so," they said hopefully; 
 ** but if not, even if our God will not deliver us, 
 we are not going to worship your golden image." 
 
 Ah, friends, that is the one thing that makes 
 any city or any land really worth reading about— 
 if it has had two or three such men in it. It is 
 the one thing that makes this old world of ours 
 worth reading about, to know that in the worst 
 of times it has had two or three such men in it. 
 " Even if God will not deliver us, we are not going 
 to worship the image." 
 
 In times of religious persecution they are what 
 really count ; and in other times, too ; for there 
 are other tests that try men's souls besides the hot 
 fires of persecution. Take it in the commoner 
 relations of life, as regards such simple matters as 
 honesty, we will say. In what we call the busi- 
 
io8 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 ness world, there has been set up an immense 
 golden image, which receives the worship of 
 crowds of people. Literally, they " fall down " 
 and worship it. They flill quickly, and they fall 
 far from every standard of uprightness in their 
 reverence for that golden image. 
 
 It is a pitiful spectacle, humiliating, to see what 
 men will do, and women, for the sake of money — 
 how far they will stoop, how low they will grovel, 
 for the sake of money. Every one can tell you 
 about this worship of the golden image ; even the 
 cartoons in our comic newspapers are full of im- 
 pressive sermons on the subject. They show you 
 the crowd falling down and worshiping the golden 
 image ; and it is always shown in a way to make 
 you ashamed that you should have to acknowledge 
 any sort of relationship to that ignoble crowd. 
 
 But whether the picture shows them or not, 
 you know that there are some exceptions — men 
 who have not fallen down with that crowd of 
 idolaters. Every community holds some few men 
 of clearer discernment who can see that any par- 
 ticular image which the people are worshiping is 
 only plated after all. They can see that the abject 
 worshipers of the image are likely to be disap- 
 pointed ; for in the long run, in the larger outlook, 
 they see that " honesty is the best pohcy." They 
 
"BUT IF NOT" 109 
 
 see it; that is to say, they believe it; it is not 
 direct sight of the eyes, but a kind of faith ; they 
 beheve with a good deal of confidence that it will 
 pay them better in the end to be honest; that 
 the honest God of things as they are is stronger 
 than the braggart Nebuchadnezzar and his golden 
 image. Therefore, generally, they will not bow 
 down. They have faith enough to keep them on 
 their feet most of the time. Would there were 
 more even of that kind of honesty in the world — 
 the kind of honesty which stands because it is be- 
 lieved to be really the best policy. 
 
 But, after all, every man knows in his own soul 
 that if that is all, it is not the truest, purest hon- 
 esty. Just suppose it should prove in any par- 
 ticular instance that honesty is not the best policy; 
 in this particular instance the honest man is going 
 to be ruined and disgraced, and the dishonest 
 man is going to make a fortune, and live and die 
 respected of his neighbors ; it happens so occa- 
 sionally. The worshipers of the golden image 
 are going to get the gold occasionally, and the 
 three true men are going to be cast into the burn- 
 ing, fiery furnace ; and there is none who will 
 deliver them out of the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. 
 Well, thank God, three or four men are going to 
 stand firm on their principles even then. Even if 
 
no FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 honesty is not the best pohcy, they will be honest. 
 EvenTirTjrod should not deliver them, they will 
 not fall down and worship the golden image. 
 Thank God, there are some such men of the true 
 martyr spirit even in the business world ; the 
 world is not worthy of them, but its credit rests 
 upon their shoulders. 
 
 Some of us were touched a few years ago by 
 an example of faithfulness to principle on the part 
 of a few college lads in Paris. These American 
 collegians had been invited to go over and com- 
 pete in the games at the Paris Exposition ; but 
 they would not consent to go unless the authori- 
 ties would agree that the games should not be 
 held on Sunday. At first the college boys all 
 stood together in this demand, with the hope that 
 their united demand Avould be effectual and they 
 would be delivered from the necessity of stooping 
 to the continental ways of Sunday-keeping. But 
 just at the end it was found that their demand 
 had not been effectual ; their God had not deliv- 
 ered them ; the games were coming off on Sunday. 
 
 Then some of the boys weakened. I do not 
 undertake to pass judgment upon them ; I do not 
 know what their personal convictions may have 
 been. At all events, some of the boys surrendered 
 their former position. But we were proud that a 
 
"BUT IF NOT" III 
 
 goodly number of the boys did not weaken. It 
 was a hard test for a handful of lads, so far from 
 home, in a land where every one would be dis- 
 posed to laugh at their scruples ; and it meant 
 that they were relinquishing honors almost cer- 
 tainly within their reach, so that their long journey 
 must go for nothing; but they would not sur- 
 render their conviction, whatever happened, even 
 if their God would not reward their faith by bend- 
 ing the arrangements their way ; these boys would 
 not fall down and worship the image which Nebu- 
 chadnezzar had set up. 
 
 I thank God that our American colleges are 
 turning out some boys of that quality. The 
 record these students made counts for more than 
 if one of them had outrun a locomotive, or jumped 
 over the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Oh, I wish 
 more of us could reach that toughness of convic- 
 tion with regard to our Sunday-keeping and every 
 other kind of principle, that we might say, " If 
 it be so, we believe our God is able to shape 
 things so that obeying His will need not work us 
 any real inconvenience or loss," — and very often 
 He does — "but if not — but if not, be it known 
 unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, 
 nor worship the golden image which thou hast 
 set up." 
 
112 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 But these words not only bear upon questions 
 of practical duty ; they bear also upon the deeper 
 questions of personal faith. Those of us who con- 
 fess the Christian faith believe that our God can. 
 and will, keep our souls safe in life and in death, in 
 this world and in the world to come ; that He will 
 make all things work together for good to us ; 
 that He will withhold no good thing from us. So 
 long as we believe this confidently, we can serve 
 Him in dark days with a kind of triumphant joy. 
 But suppose the time should come when this 
 bright faith is darkened; or suppose others of us 
 have never yet attained it ? We should lik e to 
 believe all this; we tn^to; we hope that Jt may 
 be true ; but we are encompassed by a great deal 
 of doubt about it ; everything beyond this little 
 present which our eyes can now see seems so 
 dreadfully uncertain. This was the state of the 
 old Psalmist when he said, " As with a sword in 
 my bones, mine enemies reproach me ; while they 
 say daily unto me. Where is thy God ?" He had 
 no answer ready. 
 
 If not, what then ? If perhaps this hope of a 
 Christian is only a delusion, and we shall have 
 suffered so much, and denied ourselves so much 
 for nothing, what shall we say to that? Oh, 
 friends, remember there have been some men who 
 
"BUT IF NOT" 113 
 
 could say even then that they would hold fast to 
 this better hope, this purer purpose. " If not, be 
 it known unto thee, O king, — even if our God is 
 not going to deliver us, even if there is no God to 
 deliver us, — we will not serve thy false gods, nor 
 conform to thy degrading and sensual idolatry." 
 
 When John Bunyan was a prisoner in Bedford 
 jail, as he relates afterwards, it lay much upon 
 his spirit that his imprisonment might end at the 
 gallows for aught that he could tell. Yet it was 
 not hanging that he feared so much as that when 
 the time came to die he might be left without a 
 savor of the things of God, without any evidence 
 upon his soul that all was well. *' But, even 
 so," he said, *' 'twas my duty to stand to His word, 
 whether He would ever look upon me or no, or 
 save me at the last. Wherefore, thought I, the 
 point being thus, I am for going on and venturing 
 my eternal state with Christ whether I have com- 
 fort here or no. If God doth not come in, thought 
 I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfolded into 
 eternity — sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. 
 Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do ; if not — if 
 not, I will venture for Thy name." I do not think 
 Jolin Bunyan ever said a finer thing than that in 
 the whole Pilgrim's Progress. It ranks him with 
 the three Hebrews before Nebuchadnezzar's fiery 
 8 
 
114 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 furnace. " Lord Jesus, if Thou wilt catch me, do ; 
 if not, I will venture for Thy name." Something 
 like that, I think, must be, generally, the begin- 
 ning of a Christian's faith. It is not the end of it ; 
 the full assurance may come afterwards, the peace 
 of God that passeth understanding, but at the be- 
 ginning, to believe does seem more like a venture. 
 " If not, I will still venture." Even in all the un- 
 certainty, what we know of Jesus makes Him more 
 to be desired, and worthier to be chosen and fol- 
 lowed than all that we know beside. As that 
 heathen of Galilee says in Gilder's poem : 
 
 " If Jesus Christ is a man, — 
 And only a man, — I say 
 That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
 And to Him will I cleave alway. 
 If Jesus Christ is a God, — 
 And the only God, — I swear 
 I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
 The earth, the sea, and the air." 
 
 The faith starts as an " if," " if," '' if," but it may 
 lead at once into a very definite and lasting deter- 
 mination of the will. 
 
 In Babylon the test was a literal persecution 
 of those who feared Jehovah and would not wor- 
 ship idols. Persecution in one of these oriental 
 empires is a terribly serious matter ; they are ex- 
 
'•BUT IF NOT" 115 
 
 perts out there in the art of inflicting pain. The 
 fire can be very hot, the king's rage very fierce. 
 It is a horror to think what true men and women 
 have suffered when they would not fall down and 
 worship in accordance with the whim of one of 
 those oriental rulers. 
 
 Within the last few years the world has been 
 horror-stricken at the report of atrocities in China ; 
 but, remember, it is no new thing. " Beloved," 
 Peter said to some of the sufferers of his day, 
 " think it not strange concerning the fiery trial 
 that is to try you, as though some strange thing 
 had happened to you." It was not a strange thing 
 — not a new thing. It was what had happened 
 from the beginning. It happened to all but one 
 of our Lord's apostles ; it happened to the Lord 
 Himself; and He had said to them, " So perse- 
 cuted they the prophets that were before you." 
 
 People say sometimes that missions ought not 
 to be maintained where they involve risk of so 
 much pain and loss. If they really mean what 
 they say, they should counsel their friends to 
 be honest only when it promises to be the best 
 policy ; they should counsel John Bunyan to yield 
 at once to Charles's stupid act of uniformity, and 
 the Pilgrim fathers to swallow their scruples and 
 never set sail for savage New England; and 
 
ii6 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 Luther and Knox and the other reformers to 
 keep their perilously unfashionable protest to them- 
 selves ; and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, 
 to fall down flat before the golden or any other 
 image that the king might set up ; and Peter to 
 go on denying his Lord ; and Jesus Himself to 
 choose the devil's way to the throne instead of 
 God's way of the Cross. They would always find, 
 and would find to-day, crowds of people ready 
 to follow such counsel. But they must cut the 
 whole Book of Daniel out of their Bible, and 
 many other choice passages also. This Bible 
 preserves for us the memory of men and women 
 who would not follow such counsel ; they would 
 be stoned rather, and sawn asunder, and slain 
 with the sword. " The world was not worthy " of 
 them. No, the world was not worthy, but the 
 
 I I IMIIIII 
 
 presence of such people is the only thing that has 
 kept it worth living in, or its story worth reading. 
 Thank God, there have been two or three who 
 could say, " If we are not delivered, be it known 
 unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, 
 nor worship the golden image which thou hast 
 set up." 
 
 "If not," "if not,"— ah, but their God would 
 deliver them. The writer of this epic of martyr- 
 dom has left no doubt of his conviction on that 
 
"BUT IF NOT" 117 
 
 point. If not, they would still be true to Him; but 
 He will, — in this world or in some other. He will. 
 When the story is ended, you will find not so 
 much as the smell of fire upon their garments. 
 Their story, and the story of other brave martyrs 
 like them, is one thing that gives us our surest 
 confidence in a blessed Hfe beyond for God's ser- 
 vants. 
 
 " Where, oh where are the Hebrew children ? " 
 we sing with our little ones ; and *' the Hebrew 
 children " mean these three brave Hebrews in 
 Babylon — '* Safe home in the promised land." 
 We know they are safe ; something in our hearts 
 tells us they must be safe ; and we go on to say, 
 ** By and by we'll go home to meet them, safe 
 home in the promised land." Their God did de- 
 liver them ; He does deliver them ; He will deliver 
 them. It may be by the way of a cross ; but it is 
 a cross that brings a crown. 
 
VII 
 "THE GATES OF THE CITY" 
 
VII 
 
 "THE GATES OF THE CITY" 
 
 '*0n the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the 
 south three gates ; and on the west three gates." — Rev. xxi. 13. 
 
 John here describes in vision the New Jerusa- 
 lem, Holy City of God ; but when we read the 
 prophecies of this Book of The Revelation, it 
 sometimes occurs to us to ask whether its several 
 visions are intended to depict something now in 
 heaven, or something that some day shall be on 
 earth. It is not always easy to say; but certainly, 
 in this case, the Holy City, whether in heaven or 
 on earth, stands for the grand consummation of 
 all things, the reward for all the labors of God's 
 saints, the end of all their hopes and desires, the 
 final answer to all their prayers. It is John's 
 emblem for that one far-off divine event to which 
 creation moves. 
 
 How reassuring it is in these days of rapid 
 municipal growth that the inspired symbol of all 
 good for mankind should be a city ! For the 
 world's cities are now growing so fast, and their 
 swift growth brings us so many of our most dis- 
 
/ 
 
 122 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 tressing and perplexing problems, of health, of 
 social life, and of government. From every pleas- 
 ant countryside, and from other lands, streams 
 of population are flowing into the mammoth city, 
 even as the ancient moralist used to complain 
 that the Orontes and all the other rivers of the 
 East were emptying their polluted waters into 
 imperial Rome. Our hearts often grow sick at 
 the sights and sounds set before us. We can 
 sympathize with poor Cowper as he sang, " God 
 made the country, man made the town." Yes, 
 but in a deeper sense God made the town also ; 
 and here our text teaches that the triumphant 
 ending of God's entire work of creation and re- 
 demption must be depicted as nothing else than a 
 city that is compact together, whither the tribes 
 go up, the populous capital of a great kingdom, 
 a new Jerusalem. That is the Biblical ideal. As 
 Phillips Brooks once said, " The story of revela- 
 tion which begins with a garden ends with a city." 
 In olden times every real city must have its wall, 
 a defense or barrier separating between the safe 
 friendliness within and all possible foes and perils 
 without. In the case of Jerusalem, it happens 
 that the walls are still there, forming a most con- 
 spicuous feature of the city. From whatever direc- 
 tion you approach Jerusalem, whether you ride up 
 
"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 123 
 
 from the southwest across the valley of Hinnom, 
 and the first view of the ancient capital that bursts 
 upon you is of those massive towers and the long 
 battlemental rampart crowning the heights of 
 Mount Zion ; or whether, approaching from the 
 north, you draw near to the beautiful Damascus 
 Gate, with the long stretch of wall running over 
 the hill and out of sight to the right hand and the 
 left; or, looking down from the east, from the 
 Mount of Olives, upon the old temple area, you see 
 its fortification towering at a dizzy height above the 
 Kidron Valley ; always a chief part of the impres- 
 sion which the city makes upon you will come from 
 this massive circuit of its wall. So, if you should 
 choose to walk round about the city, outside the 
 wall, letting your mind call up the ancient days 
 of savage warfare when those great stones were 
 set in place, it would be easy to feel that all safety, 
 happiness, holiness, and friendhness, must be found 
 within that charmed inclosure, and all peril and 
 cruel enmity without. 
 
 Of course, it is not so now. The old wall 
 stands as a relic of the past — an interesting, his- 
 torical memorial of times very unhke our own. 
 Really, the open country outside might seem to 
 our taste more wholesome and attractive than the 
 foul oriental city within. Yet, however antiquated 
 
124 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 and useless, there the great wall stands ; and it 
 stands a most impressive token of a truth which 
 is not antiquated, but true eternally. For there 
 are — and must be — walls, barriers, between all 
 those things which belong in the Holy City of 
 God and those other things which never can be 
 admitted to it ; not, perhaps, a wall of stone and 
 mortar, for that is at best a somewhat bungHng 
 contrivance of separation, often shutting out what 
 belongs in, and letting in what ought to be shut 
 out. In our modern cities and States, and in the 
 whole structure of modern civilized society, we 
 have learned to avail ourselves of more searching 
 methods of discrimination than any stone wall. 
 Those barriers that separate between wholesome 
 knowledge and dangerous ignorance, between 
 culture and vulgarity, between public health and 
 infectious disease, between purity and vice, between 
 honesty and crime — the safety of every modern 
 city and State depends on such separating lines ; 
 and they are vastly more rigid than the stone wall 
 of any ancient capital. So, when the apostle saw 
 in vision the New Jerusalem, that perfect com- 
 monwealth of the saints, which is in heaven, and 
 shall be on earth, it was no narrow Jewish preju- 
 dice, but a deep prophetic insight which sur- 
 rounded the city for him with a wall great and high. 
 
"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 125 
 
 That city of God does not yet appear on earth, 
 but the present visible emblem of it is the Church 
 of Jesus Christ ; and one conspicuous feature of 
 the Church as first established was its wall sepa- 
 rating it from the world. " Come out from among 
 them, and be ye separate, and touch not the un- 
 clean thing," was always the tone of apostolic 
 preaching. " In the world, and yet not of the 
 world" ; wicked men surrounding it on every side. 
 "And such were ye," the apostle writes to his 
 converts ; but now ye are washed, ye are sanc- 
 tified ; ye have come out of that defilement and 
 into the pure fellowship of the saints, into the 
 household of God ; therefore be separate from 
 them. The safe and holy city where ye now 
 dwell at peace with God must be separated from 
 this surrounding wickedness by a great and high 
 wall of divine protection and sanctifying grace. 
 Make the most of this wall ; be ye separate. 
 
 I say that was the tone of apostoHc preaching ; 
 and in our later times, whenever there come sea- 
 sons of special religious awakening, you will find 
 God's people more ready to accept these same 
 admonitions as intended for us. The Church of 
 God on earth, like the city of God in heaven, 
 needs some wall great and high between those 
 whom Christ has redeemed and those who still 
 
126 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 accept the dominion of evil. That was what John 
 saw in his vision — a wall great and high ; and that 
 is a most important symbol of truth as regards 
 the Church of Jesus Christ. 
 
 But John saw also that the wall had twelve 
 gates, gates that never were shut ; and, by all 
 means, we must remember this part of the vision 
 — on the east three gates ; on the north three 
 gates ; on the south three gates ; and on the west 
 three gates. From whatever quarter the weary 
 traveler comes, or the panting fugitive, let him not 
 be disheartened by the height and massiveness of 
 the walls encompassing God's city; they are for 
 his protection, not his exclusion ; for wherever 
 he comes from, a gate will stand straight before 
 him to receive him : always open, for the gates 
 of that city " shall not be shut at all by day, and 
 there shall be no night there." 
 
 Now what does this part of the symbol mean ? 
 What would it m.ean to a Christian of John's day 
 if he had stood by the literal Jerusalem and had 
 seen gates opening on every side ? 
 
 " On the east three gates." I think that meant 
 for John that the religion of Jesus held its doors 
 open for all the men of the East. Christianity was 
 one of the oriental religions. It had and it has 
 room in abundance for that great continent of Asia, 
 
"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 127 
 
 those regions of the earth where people lived when 
 the earth was young ; when our whole race was 
 in its childhood ; when men used to look upon the 
 heavens and the earth with the large-eyed wonder 
 of little children, rather than with the careful cal- 
 culation of our maturer humanity. That is Asia. 
 And there is room for Asia, and the whole of 
 it, in the city of God. The first Epiphany was 
 through the ministry of the wise men who went 
 back to their own place in the East. Let our 
 missionaries take their largest invitations east- 
 ward ; they cannot outmeasure that of Christ ; for 
 three is the perfect number ; and " on the east are 
 three gates." 
 
 " And on the north three gates." As John 
 looked northward he would have seen those 
 hardy northern nations who in his day were just 
 beginning to stir themselves in their great German 
 forests ; and Rome trembled at the exhibition 
 of their unexhausted and incalculable energy. 
 Rome was very big, but not big enough to make 
 room for all these northern barbarians. But John 
 knew there was room for them, and for all of 
 them, in the Church of Jesus Christ. In the six- 
 teenth century, when a young German named 
 Luther takes his stand against the world, we shall 
 learn how Christianity has united its own strength 
 
128 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 with those lusty barbarians for the glory of God 
 and the good of men. *' On the north three gates." 
 
 " On the south three gates." As John turned 
 toward the south he would see those softer 
 tropical races who, lacking the stimulus of win- 
 ter's cold and want, have spent their lives in a 
 kind of perpetual infancy, never outgrowing the 
 follies and fickleness and unthinking cruelties of 
 little children, never reaching the robust vigor 
 and virtue of manhood. A very low type of 
 people. But there is room even for them in the 
 Church of Jesus Christ. That Ethiopian whom 
 Philip saw riding in his chariot will be one of the 
 earliest of Gentile converts and messengers. Those 
 savage children of Africa, or of the islands of the 
 Southern Seas, were not beneath the Saviour's all- 
 embracing compassion ; and there must be some 
 special provision for welcoming them into the 
 freedom of His city. " On the south three gates." 
 
 " And on the west three gates." What would 
 John see as he looked westward, out beyond the 
 pillars of Hercules ? Whether he saw it or not, 
 the Star of Empire would go that way. A mighty 
 civilization would be developed by the northern 
 peoples when they turned their faces westward; 
 there lie the nations of modern Europe, Eng- 
 land, with its empire, America. This west — with 
 
"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 129 
 
 its commerce, its greed for gold, its inquisitive 
 science, its secularism and materialism, the roar 
 of its mills and railroads and steamships ; a civili- 
 zation so fearfully complex, offering the sharpest 
 possible contrast to those simple conditions of 
 life among which Christ and His disciples had 
 founded the infant Church. Yet within that 
 Church room must be found for the west. Paul, 
 the first great missionary, will steadfastly set his 
 face westward toward Italy and Spain. All these 
 amazing developments of the last few centuries 
 were not omitted from the divine view when God 
 was preparing salvation for the world. He in- 
 cluded them all in the architectural plan of His 
 great city. " On the west three gates." 
 
 Oh, what a magnificent picture the inspired seer 
 has set before us of that city whose builder and 
 maker is God — that city which God is preparing 
 for all His children ! Not the old Jerusalem, 
 capital of the little Jewish state, a city once highly 
 favored, but selfish and unfaithful, and her glory 
 soon to pass away ; but the new Jerusalem, a city 
 of more generous magnitude ; for the nations of 
 them which are saved shall walk in the light of it, 
 and the kings of the earth do bring their glory 
 and honor into it ; and its wall is great and high, 
 to shut out from it everything that defileth, and 
 
 9 
 
I30 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 worketh abomination, and maketh a lie. But in 
 the wall there are twelve gates, and they shall not 
 be shut at all — on the east three, and on the north 
 three, on the south three, and on the west three. 
 
 It is the heavenly Jerusalem, that city which 
 does not yet appear on earth ; but every true 
 church of Jesus Christ should stand as a copy 
 of it, like the ancient tabernacle, being made after 
 the pattern which has been shown us in the 
 Mount. As we have seen, a wall surrounds every 
 church — a wall of scrupulous separation from the 
 pride and greed and selfish ambition and cruel, 
 corrupting pleasures of a godless world ; but the 
 wall must be furnished with ever-open gates, 
 opening on every side — on the east, on the north, 
 on the south, and on the west. For our text 
 does not stand alone ; it only gathers up into one 
 expressive symbol a multitude of great and pre- 
 cious promises and invitations from God's word. 
 So what would it mean for this Church to hold its 
 gates open on every side ? 
 
 " On the east three gates." It is not pressing 
 the figure too far to say that every true church 
 must still hold its doors wide open toward the 
 regions of the sun-rising, where the children live 
 who still look upon the heavens and the earth 
 with the same large-eyed wonder as of old, where 
 
"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 131 
 
 the dew is not off the grass and the freshness of 
 earth's delights has not yet been scorched and 
 withered by the burning heat of noontime ; the 
 region of primeval mystery, the East, old as Eden, 
 but still to be found in every home which has a 
 nursery or a cradle. Toward this great sunrise 
 continent, with its boundless populations, — more 
 than half the people of the earth, — toward all these 
 innumerable little children, every true church 
 of Jesus Christ must hold its doors wide open. 
 Three gates — the perfect number, the largest, 
 freest preparation for welcoming them all in ; the 
 seal of baptism placed upon their foreheads ; the 
 tender watchfulness and earnest prayer of father 
 and mother and all who love them best at home ; 
 the careful nurture of Sunday school and mission 
 band, and anything and everything that may en- 
 courage the steps of these little children into the 
 paths of Christian service and train their lips to 
 Christian confession and praise. When our Saviour 
 said, " Suffer the little children to come unto me, 
 and forbid them not " ; when He said, " Except ye 
 be converted and become as little children, ye 
 cannot enter into the kingdom of God," He was 
 announcing with all possible emphasis that every 
 true church of His must have three gates, and 
 three gates always open toward the sunrise. 
 
132 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 " On the north three gates." The north, where 
 John saw the formidable young nations ; it is 
 the region of boundless, inexhaustible energy. It 
 is the youth of Wordsworth's poem, who " daily 
 further from the east must travel, but still is 
 nature's priest, and by the vision splendid is on 
 his way attended." The young men and young 
 women, no longer little children, but not yet arrived 
 at the hot noontide of middle age, possessing not 
 much of the treasures of experience — there is 
 something barbarous in their unreasoning hope 
 and exuberant vitality — no limit to their strength, 
 and no guessing how they will use it. It might 
 be in some disastrous Gothic invasion, like those 
 which wrecked the ancient Roman world ; it 
 might be in some awful French Revolution, like 
 that of a hundred years ago, or any other out- 
 break of delirious enthusiasm and unbridled pas- 
 sion. For the north is a stormy region. We 
 are afraid of these young men. Old Charlemagne 
 wept when he first saw the sails of the Northmen. 
 Yet, for good or for ill, the future of the world is 
 with them. The strength is theirs ; the hope is 
 theirs ; the possibilities of romantic heroism are 
 theirs. All the elements of life are still unex- 
 hausted with them. The Church of Jesus Christ 
 unshrinkingly holds her doors wide open toward 
 
"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 133 
 
 all these terrible young men and young women. 
 The very first disciples were a company of young 
 men. The greeting of an apostle was, " I have 
 written unto you, young men, because ye are 
 strong." " On the north three gates." 
 
 It does not say that these young people must 
 first circumambulate the city and beg an entrance 
 at the eastern gates, or at the western gates, where 
 they do not belong. It does not say that these 
 young men must try to pass themselves off deceit- 
 fully for ignorant babies, or for exhausted patri- 
 archs ; but as young men they are welcome in 
 the Church of God. The directest way stands 
 open for them from what they now are, out in the 
 world, under the dangerous leadership of passion 
 and pride, to what Christ would have them to be 
 when they have accepted His gracious mastery. 
 " On the north three gates." 
 
 " On the south three gates." The south. When 
 you turn your face that way, you are looking 
 toward those regions of the earth where the 
 creation of man might be charged with failure ; 
 where the inferior races live — soft, nerveless, igno- 
 rant, idle, vicious, without ambition ; not truly 
 childlike, but childish ; humanity in its most hope- 
 less degradation. Men will tell us of the " white 
 man's burden," and argue, with some reason, that 
 
134 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 unless the stronger races of the north are willing 
 to assume some responsibility for these degenerate 
 children of the south, and to help carry their bur- 
 den for them, there can be no hope of better things 
 for them. But you do not need to travel to Africa, 
 or the islands of the Southern Seas for these speci- 
 mens of human failure ; they are about us every- 
 where — the criminal classes, the vicious classes ; 
 many of them born so, our statisticians tell us ; 
 men and women congenitally predestined to vice 
 and crime. 
 
 Now, how will the Church of Jesus Christ bear 
 herself toward this sad problem ? " On the south 
 three gates." There is the answer; that is the 
 pattern showed us on the Mount. If we would 
 be true to the heavenly pattern, we must beware 
 how we ever fail to hold those three southern 
 gates of the city wide open — three of them ; as 
 many for the south as for the east, or for the 
 north ; as wide an entrance and as friendly a wel- 
 come for some discouraged drunkard or outcast 
 as for the purest little child or the most hopefully 
 ambitious young man. No one would claim that 
 we have ever succeeded in copying that pattern 
 very perfectly ; it is hard to copy. But that is the 
 pattern set us by our Lord's precepts, and abun- 
 dantly reenforced by His own example ; He was 
 
"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 135 
 
 so tenderly compassionate toward sinful men and 
 women and so strangely hopeful for them. The 
 publicans and sinners, if they were willing to 
 enter, could be so sure of a welcome when Christ 
 Himself stood at the door. " On the south three 
 gates." 
 
 But how about the west, whither the Star of 
 Empire turned when those strong young German 
 races grew older and more knowing? In some 
 ways the world makes its best showing out here 
 in the west ; this is the ripe maturity of the world's 
 day. But that means that the shadows are length- 
 ening ; the sunset will come after a while, and the 
 day will be ended. It is a serious thought that 
 civilization reaches a kind of period in this western 
 continent. If we fail here, the earth affords no 
 room for further experiments. It is a serious 
 matter for any man when his own day passes the 
 meridian. He has reached middle age, and hence- 
 forth begins to grow old. The shadows are 
 lengthening, and will lengthen faster and faster 
 until sunset comes, and " evening star, and after 
 that the dark." Of course, age has some advan- 
 tages of its own. The old man knows more than 
 the boy, and he generally owns more ; he has 
 shaken off some illusions, outgrown some of his 
 earlier follies, moved beyond the reach of certain 
 
136 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 kinds of temptation, grown dexterous in certain 
 convenient habits of work and decent behavior. 
 Age is a good time for carrying his enterprises 
 forward toward completion, for writing the last 
 chapters of his book, rounding out his fortune, per- 
 fecting his invention. But every one knows what 
 a bad time old age is for making beginnings. Can 
 an old beggar acquire the habits of steady indus- 
 try? Can an old thief attain the reputation or 
 maintain the virtue of honesty ? Can an old dunce 
 ever grow wise ? Or, even when these older men 
 have fallen victims to misfortune without fault of 
 their own — is there anywhere a more pathetic sight 
 than an old merchant looking hopelessly for a 
 place in a store, or an old preacher looking for a 
 charge ? The world's cities seem to have no en- 
 trance gates in their western wall. 
 
 Now what attitude shall the Church of Jesus 
 Christ take toward the old men and the old 
 women who are still without the wall — those who 
 have passed all the days of their lives without 
 ever beginning to believe and confess ? " On the 
 west three gates." That is the answer. Just as 
 cordial a welcome, just as free an entrance for the 
 most discouraged old man, if only he will come, 
 as for the hopeful youth or the happy little child. 
 For you remember our Lord's parable, " It was 
 
"THE GATES OF THE CITY" 137 
 
 about the eleventh hour that the householder 
 went out and found others idle, and saith unto 
 them, Why stand ye here all the day idle ? And 
 when they answered that no man had hired them, 
 he saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard, 
 and whatsoever is right that shall ye receive." 
 
 ** Oh, there is a wideness in God's mercy like 
 the wideness of the sea." Who can measure 
 it ? Who can measure the all-embracing com- 
 passion of Jesus Christ ? Who can set limits to 
 the versatile hospitality of the city of God ? Since 
 these gates of the city do stand so wide open for 
 all sorts and conditions and races and ages of 
 men, why should any of us refuse longer to enter 
 in ? *' The Spirit and the bride say. Come. And 
 let him that heareth say, Come. And let him 
 that is athirst come ; and whosoever will let him 
 take the water of life freely." " On the east three 
 gates ; on the north three gates ; on the south 
 three gates ; and on the west three gates." 
 
VIII 
 THE HOME OF THE SOUL 
 
VIII 
 
 THE HOME OF THE SOUL 
 
 " Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations." 
 — Psalm xc. i. 
 
 A DWELLING PLACE, and that means home; and 
 there is hardly a word in our language, or in any 
 language, that means more than home. It means 
 the safest place for us, the best known place, the 
 place that always stays the same, the place where 
 our dearest ones live with us, where our life 
 began and where we instinctively hope that it 
 may end. Sometimes we chose to leave it for 
 a while. We used to run out of doors gladly 
 when the sun was shining and we felt strong and 
 well. In our more venturesome moods we would 
 attempt larger excursions over the hills. But all 
 the time we must be sure that we could be safe 
 home again at night fall when we were tired. It 
 grows cold outside and the right place to be is 
 before the blazing fire at home. There come 
 fierce storms of rain or snow outside and the 
 place to be is safe indoors at home. If ever we 
 were sick, in pain, hurt by some one's unkindness, 
 
 141 
 
142 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 lonely because of the great world's neglect, — oh, 
 then we thanked God if anywhere in all the world 
 there was for us some place of refuge that we 
 could call home. I am speaking of what life 
 meant to us when we were little children, years 
 and years ago. 
 
 When we grew older life became more com- 
 plicated and artificial, and our own feelings were 
 somewhat benumbed by the multitude of new 
 thoughts and ambitions, and then many of us were 
 willing to wander farther from the old dwelling 
 place. Our journeys were longer and more fre- 
 quent, and at times we seemed not to have much 
 thought of ever coming back ; we seemed birds 
 of passage without need of any home at all. 
 
 But the old nature was in us still, and a very 
 little thing would be enough to wake it up — a dis- 
 appointment, a failure, a single touch of sickness, 
 some strain of an old song, some old picture 
 discovered in the bottom of the drawer — and sud- 
 denly the grown man finds himself as homesick 
 as a five-year-older could be. Only the malady, 
 when it strikes him now, is more desperate than 
 in the earlier days ; for now where is his home ? 
 He has lived at one time or another in a score of 
 houses ; many old friends have passed out of his 
 life ; his parents, one or both of them dead per- 
 
THE HOME OF THE SOUL 143 
 
 haps ; his brothers and sisters scattered — perhaps 
 it had been easier if some of them were dead; 
 other new friends have come into his life, and 
 some of them Hve here, some there ; so that many 
 houses have grown a Httle homeUke to him. But 
 what one place is there in all the world that 
 can mean for him now so much of home as his 
 father's house used to mean when he was a boy ? 
 
 Still the word " home " does mean much even 
 to the oldest of us. A homeless man or woman, 
 a man without a country, always seems to us one 
 of the most pitiable of creatures. This lot seems 
 to us the opposite of all that human life ought 
 to be. He is always exposed to danger, lone- 
 liness, bewildering change, strangeness. 
 
 This Ninetieth Psalm, according to its title, is 
 the prayer of Moses, the man of God. Certainly 
 the Psalm would be worthy of such a writer and 
 well suited to such an occasion. That wilderness 
 episode in Israel's life meant that they had no 
 home. They were always moving, moving — all 
 the year, and then another year, for forty years. 
 Never settling down at home, always moving — you 
 might well call such an experience a wilderness. 
 Old Egypt, the land of bondage, had been bad 
 enough ; but, at least, there were homes in Egypt ; 
 and no wonder if at times the people longed to 
 
144 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 turn back into Egypt. Homes had been prom- 
 ised in Canaan, but that promise was for the 
 benefit of their children. These adult Israelites 
 through one long forlorn generation must be 
 always moving. And the long-continued home- 
 lessness taught them something. For all time to 
 come the memory of that homeless wilderness 
 would make them value the homes that God 
 should give them in Canaan. 
 
 So for us, every journey that we ever have to 
 take abroad, every enforced or voluntary change 
 of place, may still teach us some of the same 
 lessons that the Israelites learned from their wan- 
 derings in the wilderness. 
 
 But the passage of time also teaches some of 
 these lessons. Go back in after years to the old 
 house that you once called home, after that house 
 has passed into the hands of strangers, and see 
 how much it means to you now of what it used 
 to mean then. There may be one particular 
 house still standing in some distant city which 
 once for a little while meant more than all the 
 rest of the world to some one of you. It was the 
 earliest home that you can remember ; but years 
 ago — twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years ago — 
 you and yours moved out of it. Who may have 
 lived in it since you do not know. The old 
 
THE HOME OF THE SOUL 145 
 
 house may stand there entirely unchanged to out- 
 ward appearance. There is the doorstep on 
 which you used to play, the iron balcony before 
 the parlor window, the dark passage leading 
 through to the area, the nursery windows above — 
 can you not see it all ? I can ; not one brick or 
 windowpane changed ; and your heart is always 
 tenderly moved toward what used to be your home. 
 But you have never once set foot inside of it for 
 forty years, and now probably never will. It is 
 no home now ; there is no shelter there for you, 
 no dear companionship. You can travel back, if 
 you choose, to the old house. The barriers of 
 space now separating you from that home of your 
 childhood could be passed over any day in a few 
 hours, but the barriers of time separating you 
 from it are insuperable. Go to-morrow and walk 
 up the old street, mount the old steps, enter the 
 old door — you have not reached the old home, 
 for that is still forty years away. 
 
 A graduate of some years' standing goes back 
 to his college, or tries to ; but has he really come 
 back ? Is this the old college ? The city bears 
 the same name on the map, and the streets about 
 the campus bear the same names as when he used 
 to walk them. Some few of the buildings fit into 
 places in his mental picture. But where are the 
 
 c 10 
 
146 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 men, his dear associates in work and play ? He 
 counts himself happy now if he can find one or 
 two of their children in the old halls. 
 
 Ah, friends, this journey of time that we are 
 always making is the irrevocable journey. We 
 might travel back over a thousand leagues of 
 space; we cannot travel back over one moment 
 of time. This is the stern compulsion which has 
 always been unsettHng us, ostracizing us, making 
 homeless exiles of us. We step into each new 
 day of our lives as a company of immigrants. 
 The old country — that dear yesterday where we 
 thoueht we had a home — has been left forever 
 behind. We never shall see its shores again. 
 We have crossed the broad ocean of the night ; 
 and here we are, disembarking in a strange land, 
 to make a new home in it, if we can. 
 
 This is the pathos of human life. This is what 
 has always made those wilderness wanderings of 
 ancient Israel seem like a type of man's story on 
 earth ; it is this ceaseless journey of time. Even 
 though a man should spend the whole period of 
 threescore years and ten without ever moving a 
 hundred miles from the spot where he was born, 
 he moves as swiftly as the rest down this river of 
 time, and, therefore, can find no continuing city, 
 no spot which he can go on calling home. Even 
 
THE HOME OF THE SOUL 147 
 
 after the Israelites had crossed over into Canaan, 
 and found cities for habitation, they would still be 
 moved to sing or wail this Ninetieth Psalm : " We 
 spend our years as a tale that is told." " Thou 
 earnest them away as with a flood ; they are as a 
 sleep : in the morning they are hke grass which 
 groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and 
 groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and 
 withereth." 
 
 How pathetic it is to watch the efforts of men 
 when they have tried to turn back or check the 
 current of this river of time ! We appoint our 
 commemorative anniversaries, links holding us to 
 the past. We band ourselves together in ancestral 
 societies. We build monuments to the heroes 
 that have been. We make pilgrimages to old 
 houses and old shrines. We try in all ways and 
 by all means to attach ourselves to something 
 fixed, something that even time cannot change. 
 If we can find anywhere some structure Hke those 
 great pyramids of Egypt which have really stood 
 unmoved and immovable from before the time 
 when Moses sang this psalm, we begin to exult 
 in the discovery, as if now with our own hand we 
 had been able to lay hold upon the satisfying 
 homelike changelessness of eternity. But in a 
 moment we draw back shuddering ; for the great 
 
148 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 monument, when we touch it, proves to be nothing 
 but a grave ; the chill of death is there ; nothing 
 like a home for any living man. The vast pyramid 
 itself is not big enough to dam up any part of the 
 channel of time's river, or to make that current 
 run more slowly for one living human being. 
 
 So Ave feel ourselves exiles still, wanderers, 
 awaking every morning on the further unfamiliar 
 shore of a boundless sea. A home is what we 
 want ; who will give us a home that we can keep ? 
 
 The psalmist connects this homelessness of 
 man with his sin. " Thou hast set our iniquities 
 before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy 
 countenance " ; therefore " we spend our years as 
 a tale that is told." Of course the old history of 
 Exodus declares that this was the reason why the 
 people and Moses himself were compelled to wear 
 out their lives in the wilderness ; it was because 
 of sinful unbelief Always it is a deplorable con- 
 sequence of sin that it estranges men, isolates 
 them from God and also from each other. The 
 prodigal's selfishness soon drives him along that 
 journey into the far country ; and the most deso- 
 late picture of the final ruin of sin is in those 
 words which our Saviour used to speak so sor- 
 rowfully, " the outer darkness." Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Jacob, and all the prophets would be gath- 
 
THE HOME OF THE SOUL 149 
 
 ered in the home ; and many more coming to sit 
 down with tliem from east and w^est and north 
 and south ; all sitting down at the family feast ; 
 but there would be some left outside homeless, in 
 the outer darkness. It was their sin that had shut 
 them out, their selfishness and pride and angry 
 rejection of God's goodness. That is what sin is 
 always doing, in this world as well as in the world 
 to come : it shuts men out. Selfishness, pride, 
 malice, uncharitableness, distrust, — they shut a 
 man out from home, from any home, from every 
 home. Suppose you see one of these poor home- 
 less wretches and offer him your hospitality. 
 You may even try to force it upon him ; you open 
 the door of your house and call and beckon to 
 him as he stands shivering out in the cold and 
 storm and dark. You may even catch hold of his 
 body, and drag his body in through the door, and 
 sit his body in the easiest chair before the blazing 
 fire, or push his body up to the table, bidding him 
 eat. But so long as that strange, cold, distant 
 spirit dwells in him, whatever you do with his 
 body, he, the man, is still outside in the cold and 
 storm and dark, and your friendliest hospitality 
 cannot reach him. 
 
 This Book tells how the kind Father of all sent 
 His own Son to those who were shivering in the 
 
I50 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 outer darkness of sin, that He might invite and 
 draw them into the house ; but if they would not 
 be persuaded, even the Son of God could not 
 bring them in. Such a man carries the gloom of 
 the outer darkness as a prison wall about him 
 wherever he goes. *' Which way shall I fly ? " 
 Milton's Satan cries ; " Which way I fly is hell, 
 myself am hell." And what the poet called Satan 
 was only a putting together of various things that 
 he had discerned in the sinful heart of man. 
 
 Henry Drummond says that " no worse fate 
 can befall a man in this world than to live and 
 grow old alone, unloving and unloved. To be 
 lost is to live loveless and unloved." It is the 
 outer darkness, that curse of eternal homelessness. 
 
 Hawthorne, in one of his stories, tells of a 
 young girl, an artist at Rome, who felt such a 
 curse falling upon her, not for sin of her own, but 
 because she had witnessed another's crime. " This 
 awful loneliness enveloped her whithersoever she 
 went. It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal 
 days ; a mist between her eyes and the picture at 
 which she strove to look ; a chill dungeon, which 
 kept her in its gray twilight and fed her with its 
 unwholesome air." Afterwards, when she found 
 words to tell another her trouble, she said : " I 
 am a motherless girl, and a stranger here in Italy. 
 
THE HOME OF THE SOUL 151 
 
 I had only God to take care of me and be my 
 closest friend ; and the terrible crime thrust itself 
 between Him and me ; so that I groped for Him 
 in the darkness, as it were, and found Him not ; 
 found nothing but a dreadful solitude, and this 
 crime in the midst of it." For a little while, suffer- 
 ing for another's sin, the poor girl felt the horror 
 of the outer darkness falling about her. 
 
 Now this is the explanation that the psalmist 
 gives of the sad homelessness of human life — all 
 these weary, aimless wanderings through a thirsty 
 wilderness — it is because of sin. 
 
 There was a home all the while; there is a 
 home always ready for all ; its doors always open, 
 its table always spread ; the very servants in that 
 home have bread enough and to spare ; but we 
 in our lonely exile were perishing with hunger 
 because of our sin. 
 
 What, then, was the home that we might have 
 enjoyed except for our sin ? Our text gives the 
 answer. " Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling- 
 place." " Before the mountains were brought 
 forth, or ever Thou hast formed the earth and 
 the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, 
 Thou art God." Thou, God, art our dwelling- 
 place, our home. 
 
 What a beautiful thought that was to come into 
 
152 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 the mind of one of those exiles in the wilderness ! 
 What comfort it brought him ! No matter now, 
 though he was condemned to spend the days of 
 his earthly life wandering in that solitary way, 
 finding no city to dwell in, hungry and thirsty, hib 
 soul fainting in him ; no better shelter than the 
 black tents of the Bedouin ; always on the go ; 
 breaking camp every morning, and moving on as 
 if with the fate of the wandering Jew himself; 
 never entering Canaan, only looking over into that 
 country of homes. It was no great matter ; for 
 when once Moses had learned this blessed secret 
 of faith, he was no more an exile. The dry wil- 
 derness itself had grown dear and homelike to 
 him, for His God was there ; and God was his 
 dwelling-place ; he lived and moved and had his 
 being in God ; and he knew it at last, and in the 
 knowledge of it was blessed. 
 
 All the best things that other men look for in 
 the earthly home this man could find in God. 
 We love our home because it is the safest place ; 
 but surely that man who had discovered that he 
 was living in God was safe, knew that he was 
 safe ; he had almost a direct consciousness of 
 safety, and could " endure as seeing the invisible." 
 We love our home because it is the best known 
 place to us, the place that has grown dear and 
 
THE HOME OF THE SOUL 153 
 
 familiar, that does not change ; where those whom 
 we love best live with us ; where our life began 
 and we should hope that it might end. But 
 surely God had become all that to this man ; in 
 all these ways God was his home. No change 
 of place could take him away from God. If he 
 ascended into heaven, he would find God there. 
 If it were possible that some fierce enemy seize 
 him and drag him down to hell, his dear home 
 would be waiting to shelter him there. If he took 
 the wings of the morning and dwelt in the utter- 
 most parts of the sea, his home is there. No 
 change of place could pull him away from home. 
 Neither could any change of time. From ever- 
 lasting to everlasting his home stands firm. "A 
 thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday 
 when it is past, and as a watch in the night." 
 Before the first stone of the pyramids was laid ; 
 before the mountains were brought forth ; and 
 after they all have gone, and the earth and the 
 heavens, " Thou art from everlasting to everlast- 
 ing " our home. He was the God of the fathers, 
 of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. He shall be 
 the God of the children. The generations are all 
 bound safely together in Him. Even time, which 
 destroys all things else, has no power to harm 
 the man who has found his home in God. 
 
154 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 Oh, what a comforting faith that would be ! 
 What a sublime prayer it is that comes down to 
 us from the solitudes of that Arab desert ! If we 
 could only hope to have a faith like it in these 
 modern times, and in this western world. 
 
 Ah, but we can ! We who have once heard the 
 voice of Jesus ought to know better than Moses 
 himself how much the words meant when he 
 called the Lord his dwelling place, his home. 
 For Jesus made it his life-work to seek out those 
 who were lonely and bring them to their home in 
 God. And Jesus knew how. He had a large 
 experience in homelessness. It began as soon as 
 He was born. Mary was far away from the famil- 
 iar Nazareth home when Jesus was born. There 
 was no room for them even in the inn ; the Holy 
 Family were a kind of shelterless outcasts in 
 Bethlehem. When He began his ministry no 
 earthly home went with the office ; " the foxes 
 have holes, and the birds of the air have nests ; 
 but the Son of man hath not where to lay his 
 head." Even when He died, it was in another's 
 grave, a borrowed grave, that they laid His body 
 away. Homeless Himself, by his own experience 
 He was able to feel for all who are homeless and 
 lonely. He has felt for them ; He has been show- 
 ing his sympathy ever since, and teaching them 
 
THE HOME OF THE SOUL 155 
 
 to find their home in God, to rest in a sense of a 
 Father's care. 
 
 Moreover, Jesus has bound many of these poor 
 souls together in the new human fellowship of His 
 Church, by the love that they all feel for Him ; He 
 has breathed His own Spirit into their hearts, 
 saying, " I am with you alway, even unto the end 
 of the world " ; so that He shall Hve in them, and 
 they in Him, forever. 
 
 How beautiful it is to read the testimonies of 
 those who have received from Jesus Christ this 
 gift of a home with Him, a home in God. Peter 
 writes to his friends about Jesus Christ, " Whom 
 having not seen, ye love ; in whom, though now ye 
 see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy 
 unspeakable and full of glory." John says, " If 
 we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His 
 love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we 
 dwell in Him, and He in us, because He hath given 
 us of His Spirit." It was John too who could see 
 that vision, partly of heaven and partly of earth, 
 when " the tabernacle of God is with men, and He 
 will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, 
 and God himself shall be with them, and be their 
 God." In the Epistle to the Hebrews we read 
 that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and to- 
 day, and forever, and also the promise : " He hath 
 
156 FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED 
 
 said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So 
 that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and 
 I will not fear what man shall do unto me." And 
 Paul, — Paul who felt himself the chief of sinners, 
 who had been forgiven much and therefore loved 
 much, — is very bold, and dared to say : " I 
 live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." He said, 
 " I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor 
 angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things 
 present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, 
 nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us 
 from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
 Lord." Ah, that man had found a home which 
 would go with him always and everywhere ! No 
 change of place, nor of time could part him from it. 
 Nothing could rob him of its safe shelter and com- 
 forting endearments. For life or death, for time or 
 for eternity, his Saviour had given him a home in 
 God. 
 
 How much farther these Christians had gone in 
 their knowledge of this subject than Moses with 
 his psalm could go ! A single gleam of inspiration 
 flashed upon him ; one vision from the mountain 
 top ; by one tremendous effort of faith he cried, 
 " Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place " ; but 
 that is all. As if exhausted by the effort he sinks 
 back, and the rest of the psalm goes on in a 
 
THE HOME OF THE SOUL 157 
 
 minor key to set forth all the melancholy cir- 
 cumstances of our human need. On the moun- 
 tain he saw God ; then the vision passes, and 
 he is on the plain again. 
 
 But these disciples of Jesus can go on talking 
 of their dear refuge in God all the day long, 
 through the whole chapter — almost as one would 
 speak of a common earthly home. He is with 
 them in the plain ; and by a thousand homely 
 figures and instances they tell us how their Lord 
 has been ever with them, to keep them safe and 
 to make them glad. 
 
 So that is the refuge we all may have, and we 
 all need it sorely. We are like a company of 
 travelers, wandering on homeless, whither we do 
 not know. This day slips by quickly while we 
 talk about it ; and then comes the dark, and then 
 perhaps another day ; but we enter it as strangers 
 in a strange land. Yet it is our privilege, if we 
 will trust the promise of Jesus, to move on into 
 this strange new country as cheerful and fearless 
 as some little child at home, who sees above him 
 the roof and all about him the safe walls of his 
 father's house. Lord, from everlasting to ever- 
 lasting Thou art God, and Thou art our dwelling 
 place, our home 
 
NEW YORK CITY— In the Brlcli 
 I*resbyterian Churcli, Sunday morn- 
 ing, tiie pastor, the Rev, William R 
 Richards, preached to a large congre 
 gation on "Following Jesus." He tool< 
 jfor his text Matthew ix:19, "And 
 ffesus arose and followed him an<! 
 so dill his disciples," and said: 
 
 The question comes to us, What il 
 meant to be a Christian at the time 
 when Jesus was living on the earth* 
 Of course, ftie word "Christian" had 
 not then come into use, hut the fad 
 Is the Christian life existed, and oui 
 question is, "What was it lilie, how 
 it began, how it showed itself, bj 
 what upward step would a man prove 
 that he had made the great choice 
 and had become what we would now 
 call a Christian? If we want to kno^ 
 we have to look into the gospel o! 
 history, and, looking there, we fine 
 a plain and emphatic answer in on€ 
 word, the word "follow." For the 
 common way of announcing that auj 
 man had made the great choice foi 
 Jesus was to say, "He rose and foL 
 lowed Him." There are sixty-nin< 
 places where we read of one and an 
 ojther and of many at once who fol- 
 lowed Jesus. That is the historic pie 
 ture of the Christian life in those 
 days. It is the leader walking here 
 and there about the country and his 
 disciples following Him. In the beau 
 tiful parable Jesus is described as 
 the shepherd going on ahead and his 
 sheep, who proved they were his sheep 
 because they knew His voice, follow 
 ing him. That is the regular ordei 
 of the sacred history: Jesus going 
 before and the others following. Bui 
 there is one singular marked excep- 
 tion to that order. It is all the more 
 striking because it stands alone, JusI 
 once in the gospel of history this 
 term is used in the other order. Some 
 one else is leading, it is Jesus that is 
 following. Who can this other leader 
 be who spoke with such authority that 
 Jesus followed him? You might thinly 
 It was some great teacher and lead- 
 er experienced in the things of God, 
 But it was not so, because after 
 Jesus had once claimed the position 
 as teacher He never consented to fol- 
 low another teacher. Or perhaps 
 some 4P«preme ecclesiastic, who, be- j 
 cause of his sacred offlce could take | 
 precedence of Jes\is. But it was not : 
 «o. for if vnu look \ntn th« history I 
 
 you find that our Ix)rd nes ' 
 
 moment rendered sucli supremacy tS 
 any church official. His word was ^% 
 ways "Follow me." Or you mighi 
 think it was some civil ruler, like^ 
 King Herod or Pilate, or the great^ 
 Caesar himself at Rome. But it w^s-: 
 not so; He never consented to follow; 
 any great man on earth. He did say, 
 "Render unto Caesar the things that 
 are Caesar's," but He was talking 
 about taxes, not His personal allegi- 
 ance; that was not one of the things 
 that were Caesar's, It was not at the 
 summons of any person that Jesus 
 rose up and followed. What was it, 
 then? 
 
 You remember the story. The man 
 was named Jairus. He was, it is 
 true, a ruler of the synagogue, but 
 thftt meant little more than the leader 
 dt a prayer meeting. It would have 
 been just the same had he been a 
 beggar. He was a beggar on this oc- 
 casion: "While Jesus spake these 
 things, behold, there came a certain ' 
 ruler, saying, My daughter is even 
 now dead, but come, and lay thy hands 
 upon her and she shall live. And 
 Jesus rose up arid followed him." The 
 secret is out. There was a man who 
 could speak for a moment in a tone 
 of authority, then, to Jesus, because 
 he spake through more immediate 
 contact with the world's sorrow and 
 and pain and need; that was what 
 gave him his precedence. Lead on, 
 man! Jesus follows. How strange! 
 It seemed to me that we might take 
 this as one of the passages that re- 
 mind us of the Lord's humanity, show- 
 ing how He was shut out by limita- 
 tion of knowledge, how He must wait 
 until some one came and showed Him i 
 the home where the shadow of deatli 
 was. I suppose it is true in some 
 sense, but as you muse upon, you feel i 
 it was also an illustration of His | 
 Godhood. What kind of message is 
 it that comes with authority to the 
 ears of the Creator? Some story of 
 His creature's need. It is our weak 
 ness that moves God, our humility, 
 emptiness. It is our cry of emptiness 
 our cry of need, that moves God. It 
 it were possible to conceive of such 5' 
 thing as the limitation of tX^e knowl- 
 edge of God— if you could conceive of 
 yourself as going into the presence 
 of God and informing Him tha,t some- 
 where in some forgotten corner of 
 His nnivors ft there was some unknowJi 
 
pceSLtwre, unknown to Him, that wae 
 jperishing for want of Him, and you 
 were the only guide qualified to show 
 the way to that creature, we may 
 say, with all reverence that you could 
 expect God Himself to rise up and 
 follow you. And Jesus rose up and 
 followed Jairus to the house of sor- 
 row. My friends, let us comfort our- 
 selves with the assurance that any 
 such message as that will move the 
 Ijori today just as in the days of 
 Jairus. Whatever pain or sorrow 
 there is in your own house or the 
 house of your friend, you may go to 
 Him straightway and tell Him, and 
 when you return you may be sure 
 that you are taking His presence with 
 you. Be sure a man of that kmd is 
 a privileged character; he takes pre- 
 cedence of all. When Jarius has fin- 
 ished speaking, Jesus rises up and 
 follows him. 
 
 Now that is only the first part of 
 our Text. This is the second part: 
 "And so did His disciples." As dis- 
 
 :iles it was their business to follow 
 ucisus, and now Jesus was following 
 I Jairus. Is not this a most excellent 
 example "for any loyal church? The 
 ! question that ought to come to us & 
 the question of leadership, human 
 leadership of a Christian church, and, 
 of course, I shall often expect to And 
 that kind of leadership in the cti:»^ 
 itself. Men and women experieacad 
 m tne llilngo of God who can serve 
 a^ leaders for their younaer l3rethren. 
 It was so in the days of the apostles. 
 Men like Paul v,'ho charged the 
 younger members that the.y sh-,nld 
 follow liim as he was following Christ 
 land it was safe counsel. There are 
 leaders in the church, but the ques- 
 tion which our text suggests is wheth- 
 er there may ever be any kind of 
 safe leadership inside the church from 
 outside the church. If any man from 
 outside appears and says "come," 
 would it ever be safe for us to fol- 
 low? Certainly not always. If Chris- 
 tian people afe too ready to walk af- 
 ter everybody who beckons them 
 they are likely to wander away from 
 the Master, There comes some new 
 teacher with great pretensions of vls- 
 dom who says, "Come, I will lead you 
 Into higher regions than your master 
 has been able to show you." Any 
 church that follows such may make 
 up their mind that thev will soon lose 
 the Master. Or, again, It may be 
 
 some high ch-jrcii official who says he 
 will lead you to regions of religions 
 assurance that you have not found In 
 following your Master. In the old 
 days it would have been the High 
 Priest; In our day it might be the 
 ancient and splendid hierarchy of the 
 army of Rome, but you and I are per- 
 suaded that It is more blessed to fol- 
 IfiSrl^ Master "who not havinsr nr^n 
 we love." Christ has never consent- 
 ed that we should follow ahy human 
 priest. Then, again, the churcli 
 might consent to follow Caesar or 
 some representative of nolitical newer, 
 in the world." In following Caesar^ 
 we run the risk of losing the more 
 important guidance of Jesus. No po- 
 litick power, no human prestige, no 
 wisdom of the human understanding 
 is a safe guide for any church ot 
 Christ. 
 
 Then can you conceive dT any hu- 
 man leadership that It would be safe 
 for the church or disciples to follow? 
 Yes. • Here is this man, .Talriis. who 
 comes from outside with this pitiful 
 storv, and Jesus rises and follows 
 him." and so do His disciples. Any 
 man who knowns the way to any kind 
 of human sorrow or need or wrong 
 mav claim a hearing from any church 
 of Jesus Christ, and If in the hearing 
 they find he knows the way better 
 than we. he may claim not only a 
 hearing, but the followlnsr from the 
 church of Jesus Christ. It is direct 
 Imitation of His examnle. The church 
 has often been t-no slov/! eometimes 
 because we did not like tlie man who 
 called. The personal cha^act'^r of the 
 leader does not come ir-to the ques- 
 tion at all. We want aH those in 
 sorrow to know that the best nlace 
 to come is alwavs the c^nrch of Jesus 
 Clirist. That the mefs^ge will re- 
 cieve the promntest attention, and no 
 poor .TMrus need ever fry home along. 
 Once his story was finished. Jes-.js 
 got un and folio wel him. and so dW 
 His disciples. If vv>» are di^cioles. 
 it is our business tn he following 
 Christ. But how to follow Him? Who 
 will lead us? I haTo no doubt that 
 sometimes our Lord si^ows us the-way 
 bv those older and wiser in thp church 
 and sometimes He eAereises His Lead- 
 jership through those without the 
 church, messengers telling us of some 
 one who needs heli' . and our business 
 as Christians, not *J?ilv as churches. 
 
- indiVidua] ; 
 
 always for that fffpeal. lool<in2: only t 
 to the T>ath that K^ads to the house 
 where thev need lis. We cannct see 
 ■IP face of Jesus, ?7e. cannot hear His j 
 lice; it may ev€ii seem to some of ' 
 us that we have ^ost the comfortina; ; 
 «ense of Jesus fn our hearts, We 
 k why He did not leave some guide 
 horn we coulc? fG'^ and follow and 
 who would lead lis back to Him and i 
 before the words are o-jt nf our lins j. 
 here stands thlg Jairus. "Come " he ? 
 says, and you llftteu and you rise up i 
 and follow him. find as scon as you do ' 
 something tellfi you that you are not 
 j any longer walking alone. That lost 
 ' companionship jou were mourning for 
 has been restirtfed to you. This was 
 His guide, and, yon have done well 
 to follow hfni. 
 
 This is not ifiy fancy. T^et me read 
 
 you the plain words of the history: 
 
 "While he spake, behold! there camv-? 
 
 a certain rjt.^r, and when he saw 
 
 I Jesus he fell «.t his feet and besought 
 
 I him, saying, 'My little daughter Heth 
 
 ! at the point of death. I pray thee 
 
 ! come and lay thy hand upon her and 
 
 ' she shall live, and Jesus arose and 
 
 ■ followed hl^n, and so did his dls- 
 
 ci])](^s." 
 
^y^ /*»» 
 
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