1 1¥ » ^ PRINCETON, N. J. ^' Shelf.. BX 5133 .H65 L6 1882 Holland, Henry Scott, 1847- 1918 . Logic and life Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/logiclifewithothOOholl LOGIC AND LIFE tout I) otljer Sermons BY THE REV. H S. "HOLLAND, M. A. SKNIOH STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S 1882 SONS Copyright by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Trow's Printing and Bookbinding Company 201-213 East 12th Street, NEW YORK. INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. The casual reader of this volume, however carelessly he may turn its leaves, can scarcely fail to find his attention arrested by many passages which are striking for fervid eloquence and weighty with profound re- flection. Should he be led, by the promise of its title, to select here or there a single discourse for a more careful perusal, he will find not a few which are alike remarkable for originality of thought and eloquence of speech. The theological positions of the author may indeed not always commend themselves to our reflective judgment. His interpretations of the Script- ures may now and then seem to be open to criticism, and yet we shall not be able nor shall we care to with- stand the rush of the highly-wrought periods and the accumulated force of the spiritualized imagination of this truly eloquent preacher. To these excellencies and attractions there are others which we do not so often find in a volume of published sermons. Prominent among them is this feature, that iv Introductory Notice. he adapts himself, with generous sympathy and yet with spiritual mastery, to the science and the specula- tion of the times. lie distinctly recognizes the spirit of the present generation, the so-called Time-Spirit, of thought and feeling in respect to Christian Truth and the Christian Life, which prevails among the most thoughtful and best cultivated men of the most influ- ential of the English Universities. lie bravely meets their difficulties by carrying them to higher planes of thought than Mr. Spencer or Mr. Mill can attain, and often, with masterly skill, enthrones Christian Philoso- phy in its lawful seat, and asserts for it regal honors from the instructed intellect and the sympathizing hearts of all right-minded Christian scholars, whether their field of activity is Nature, or History, or Letters. Most of these sermons were originally preached in a University pulpit. They are not, however, " University sermons" in the technical sense of the phrase. There is very little of the stiffness, the formality, or the remoteness from human sympathies and associations which often, not to say usually, characterize such sermons, while their suitableness to men of the most consummate culture is manifest on every page. We have not written these lines because we suppose that these discourses need any words of ours to recom- mend them to the many, readers in our country who will not fail to welcome them with cordial and appreciative sympathy. If they should serve to bring Introductory Notice. v the volume to the notice of any who otherwise would not have read its contents, they will, we are confident, thank the writer for this humhle service. K P. Yale College, July, 1882. \theologigal PREFACE. The publication of Sermons needs always an apology. Sermons are written, and given, for a momentary purpose, without any intention that they should assume, in print, a permanent existence, or he de- tached from the occasion and the congregation for which they were originally designed. Why, then, give them this unintended permanence, this unforeseen detachment ? Why address the reading public as if it were a gathered congregation ? Why throw loosely abroad what was delivered within the shelter of a Church ? That which was appropriate under the one set of circumstances is hardly likely to be appro- priate in the other. This is true ; and, yet, I would attempt a defence. We, clergy, suffer under difficulties in this matter. We cannot lie quiet, while we slowly accumulate the materials for a book. We, of necessity, find ourselves preaching : and, naturally, we speak of what is uppermost in our minds ; and so we tell our secrets ; we announce ourselves as we move f If we happen vi Preface. to be following out certain directions of theological nought, then, just as the molehills tell the lines of lie burrowing mole, so we throw out, in sermons, the .lanifest tokens of our path. Those, therefore, of us, \o whom it is, in any small way, given of God to write a book, practically write it in bits. We cannot store our material : such thinking as is possible to us manifests itself, step by step, under the pressure of immediate demands. What, then, are we to do, when we see that it might be right for us to believe that our work would not be quite useless or unhelpful to others than those who heard us speak ? Are we to recast it all ? A good deal might be said for this; and yet, it would be to us ourselves an irksome and unhealthy task. It is one thing to delay production : it is quite another to reproduce and refashion what has once already taken form and shape. Again, we have moved on : we are occupied with other conditions of the problem : we can- not easily revive the old ardour with which we expressed our first intuition of this or that aspect of things. The result, therefore, of re- writing our own productions would be an inevitable deadening of all the work : we should re-write them, wearied and bored ; for though, perhaps, the public will not believe it, very few of us are fond enough, or proud enough, of our own handiwork, to be able to enjoy the process of remaking it. We should be heartily sick of it before we had done ; and if it Preface. vii was written wearily, it would be read wearily. It might gain, in arrangement, in unity, in completeness : it would lose in everything else. I therefore venture to put out these sermons, just as they were delivered : only, I would say, that they are printed for the purpose with which books are written, rather than for that with which sermons are preached. They are offered, not as hortative addresses, so much as for the sake of laying before the minds of many who now find themselves astray, or in peril, amid the tangle of life, some such inter- pretation of the natural and spiritual worlds in which we move, as may possibly assist them in detecting their coherence with the truth, as it is in Christ Jesus. It is presumptuous to use such high words about an interpretation so partial, aud frag- mentary, and slight, as is given in this book : it does but attempt to suggest how strongly and how master- fully the faith which was held by St. Athanasius, the faith in Christ of St. Paul and of St. John, would, if known as they knew it, lay hold of the wealth of modern science, and of the secrets of modern culture, and of the desires and tbe necessities of modern spirit. We have lost much of that rich splendour, that large- hearted fulness of power, which characterizes the great Greek masters of theology. We have suffered our faith for so long to accept the pinched and narrow limns of a most unapostolic divinity, that we can hardly Vlll Preface. persuade people to recall how wide was the sweep of Christian thought in the first centuries, how largely it dealt with these deep problems of spiritual existence and development, which now once more impress upon us the seriousness of the issues amid which our souls are travelling. "We have let people forget all that our Creed has to say about the unity of all creation, or about the evolution of history, or about the univer- sality of the Divine action through the Word. We have lost the power of wielding the mighty language with which Athanasius expands the significance of Creation and Regeneration, of Incarnation and Sacrifice, and Redemption, and Salvation, and Glory. It is needless to say that this little book does not pretend to attempt the task here suggested. But it may, possibly, just serve to remind some, who could undertake it more worthily, that such a task ought to be done : or it may happen, by good grace, to relieve a little the difficulties that haunt many souls, by hinting to them the possibility that Christianity holds in its heart solutions that they have disregarded, and which it would be well worth while for them to consider and gamine. It may just help to recall with what vivid •jlity the faith of Christ could speak, if we only would it, to the actual needs of the day and of the hour ; and with how close a touch, with how clear a mastery, it could show itself at home in a world that we fancied so strange to its spirit, and so remote from its words Preface. ix and its habits. If here and there it could make this credible to some who now suffer and are distressed through the traditions that have cramped the large significance of the Catholic creed, then all will be well with it; it will hsve done such w>tk as was possible for it. The Sermons, though detached, follow a certain sequence. The first three, which were preached before the University of Oxford, attempt to suggest some of the conditions under which the intellectual approaches to a creed must be made. The two following touch on the moral needs and efforts which are presupposed by the coming of Christ; and the next four attempt to interpret the nature of the response made to these moral necessities by the Sacrifice of the Cross. After this follow four sermons on the spiritual temper which is essential to any realization of the faith, — the seeing eye, the awakened spirit, the upward look, the instinc- tive kinship. I then make an effort to exhibit and justify, in some slight measure, one or two of the central dogmas of the Creed, — e.g., the Trinity, the Incarnation : and after these sermons follow three attempts to show some aspects of the office and work of the Christian society at large, and of its responsibilities in face of the civil and social facts of the time. The last two sermons touch on the nature of the soul's advance in faith, and on its outlook to a better land. The rough sequence here indicated does not pretend X Preface. to give to the book the integrity and fulness of a complete treatise. It does but thread loosely together a few fragmentary suggestions, which may possibly make the growth of faith easier to some who now find their free movements hampered by masses of facts, which they know not how to array into harmony with the life which the spirit desires. Such might feel themselves released from the bondage of fear, and .might go forward with a gladder confidence, if they could once put their inward belief into an intelligible relation to the world of outer fact. Even a mere glimpse into the possibilities of such a consistency, within and without, is a relief to the hindering pressure, and carries with it good cheer. But it must not be supposed for one moment that any such glimpses or suggestions will be sufficient to make faith exist in those who, as yet, have it not. Faith is not made by argument. It seeks, indeed, for rational solution of life's mysteries ; it grows through gaining hold of them ; but its origin, its creation, is not in these. " The depth said, It is not in me." Not from things without, but from the heart within, cometh wisdom: there, in the inner places of the soul, in the secret will with which a man fears the Lord, and departs from evil, is the true place of spiritual understanding. Intellectual solutions can only be of value to those whose whole being already hungers after righteousness, and loathes sin, and wills to do the will of God, and abides loyally in such truth Preface. xi as has been made open to it, and seeks, with, earnest, prayerful zeal, deliverance from an unworthy slavery in which it knows the good and does the evil. It is Christ, not reason, that makes the believer free: and it is the Spirit of God alone Who knoweth the deep things of God. Faith, then, is not created by reason, but " cometh of God " only. But, since the Christ in Whom we are made free is the Word of God, therefore, oil the working of reason is prophetic of Him Who should come : and, by His coming, it is made perfect in Him Who is the Power and Wisdom of God. Here, then, is at once the limitation, and also the justification, of all our efforts to exhibit the intelligibility of our creed. Deus, vera et summa Vita, Qui inveniri Te facis, et pulsanti aperis ; Quern nemo quaerit, nisi admonitus : nemo invenit, nisi purgatus; Quern nosse, vivere est: Te labiis et corde laudo, benedico, aaoro. CONTENTS. SERMON I. iLogic, anti 3Life. PAGE The Word was with God. — St. John i. I ..... I SERMON II. STrjc Ucntuve of ftrason. Through faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God. — Heb. xi. 3 21 SERMON III. dfje Spirit, anlJ its Interpretation. What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him ? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.—i Cor. iL II 41 SERMON IV. Cfje dost of Jffloral ifHobemctrt. Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more. — St. Luke xii. 48 62 XIV Contents. SERMON V. drjrist, tije Justification of a Suffering aJHorlo". PArjrrr> ana SrjcyljtrD. For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind. — Sr. John ix. 39 . . , ^2 SERMON XIII. ?Lobe, tf)c Earn of itfr. Thou shall love the Lord thy God ; and thy neighbour as thyself. — Sr. Luke x. 27 X gg SERMON XIV. Cljc i3Irssing of (Goo aimightg, tfjc jFathcr, trje Son, ano tfje Jljolg ffih-ost. J looked, and behold, a door was opened in heaven. — Rev. iv. I . 212 SERMON XV. £he fflcckness of ffioo. The Son of A/an came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give //is ti/e a ransom /or many. — S r. Matt. xx. 28 . 227 xvi Contents. SERMON XVI. GEfje iftofocrs tfjat be. PAGE There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of Cod. — Kom. xm. I c 240 SERMON XVII. CEfje Sfooro of St. jJHicfael. There was war in heaven : Michael and his angels fought against the Drag-on. — Rev. xii. 7 254 SERMON XVIII. Cije IStmcjDom of ftigfjtcousnrss. Are your minds set upon righteousness, 0 yt congregation : and do yefi.. '^ - thing that is right, O ye sons of men. — Ps. IviiL 1 .271 SERMON XIX. STfje pruning of tfje Fine. / am the true Vine, and My Father is the Husbandman : Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away, and every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth it that it may bi ins; forth more fruit. — St. John xv. 1, 2 28s SERMON XX. €fy SIctu, ano tfje Shaking. Then shall the Kingdom of Heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the Biidegroom. — St. Matt. xxv. i 305 LOGIC AND LIFI tDttl) otljcr £>crm0ii0 4 SERMON L LOGIC, AND LIFE. *' GTfje iMaort) foas foitf) fflofi."— St. John L i. One main lesson that all of us are steadily learning from many teachers, and with varying effect, is the reality, and universality, of movement. That fixed and solid framework of things which men called Nature, and in which they seemed to see the very image of rigid and unchanging law, the shadow of God's own Per- manence, of His constant and enduring Immutability, has been broken up under the keen insight of the new criticism. It has felt the sway and swing of motion : the activities of a living process have been seen to shoot along all the inner passages of its huge bulk : it has become in our eyes no fixed embodiment of law, but a moving, growing, changing mass, building itself up by slow and laborious pressure, by endless transforma- tion : its very rocks, the type of all solid immobility, have been watched at their growth, have been detected in their silent changes : the whole round world has been set moving ; it has been in motion from the first, and still its movements proceed ; from hour to hour it ceases to be what once it was, it passes on towards new arrangements and novel combinations. Nor is it otherwise with that other world in which A 2 Logic, a?id Life. man loved to find the reflex of eternal Fixity. The world of spirit, of reason, of intuition, offers u» no more, apparently, the picture of a Median kingdom, ordered from end to end, whose laws and instit^ions never know the weakness of change. Our eye no longer falls upon a table of unalterable commandments, set up in the thoughts of savage and civilized alike, pre-supposi- tions, decrees, assumptions, to which all rational beings instinctively conform. Here, too, the light of criticism detects movement at work within all that seems most fixed : it exhibits growth and change in operation upon the mind itself, forming its first intuitions, building up its premisses, shaping its gradual action. More than this, the very emotions themselves, — the primary efforts of sensation at the root of all our being, — have known the slow process of formation and transformation. Man does not feel as once he felt, any more than he thinks as once he thought. It may, indeed, well be doubted whether the detection of movement in all worlds can conceivably represent the final or absolute aspect of things ; but it at least carries us a long way ; it is obviously true over an immense field of fact. And I have ventured therefore to recall, without discussion, its larger significance before noticing its results in one peculiar direction. All things, then, are undergoing a process of shift or change, — that is anyhow what we learn : within as well as without, a deep and silent movement is everywhere at work, altering, transposing, correcting, enlarging. We hardly feel it, or hear, except that now and again there is a sudden and awful shake, as some ponderous Logic, and Life. 3 mass heaves or tumbles : for a moment we stop, and strain our ears to listen to its hollow thunder, its dim reverberation; but that is all: only that soon, upon the surface of life, results appear that were not there before : we are startled to encounter strange evidences of those deep, unknown convulsions : something has occurred, we see, that alters the face of things : we note down a change. Now, one such change we can certainly all observe in the nature of modern argument. Men nowadays dislike deduction ; they distrust all positive reasoning : they are not overcome by logical proof : and naturally. For it was one thing to argue, when reason was regarded as possessed of a scheme of abiding and irresistible rules, without which it could not act, and with which it advanced to new ground, by a certain process of its own, a process over which it possessed entire control, which it dominated from end to end, and by which it reached results which its own innate criticism could ascertain, test, overhaul, ratify : it was one thing for men to meet each other in the tournament of Dialectic, when each was supposed to possess the same identical weapon 'is any other, the same reasoning faculty, in the same condition of use, obeying the same stipulations, wielded with perfectly equal facility. But argument becomes quite another thing, when the means of argument is not so much a tool as an organ, a function, the constitution of which is no necessary and unalterable scheme, with certain uses and characteristics of its own, from all eternity; but rather a living formation, moulded by long and slow efforts, determined, more or less, by experience and habit, susceptible of a thousand in- 4 Logic, and Life. fluences from external conditions, itself a living, fluid, moving substance, capable of infinite variety, changing as the years change, possessed, it may be, of a peculiar unity and identity of type which it preserves throughout all its changes, but still, for all that, capable of a thousand different degrees of development, so that its action in one man may differ indefinitely from its action in another, its force and effectiveness depending always on the stage of development attained. This is reason, this the mind, as many men now fancy it : and if so, they naturally and instinctively reject all possibility of an infallible and universal logic, to the convincing necessities of which all must bow. Such logic only represents the present momentary structure that your mind has taken at this particular stage of human history: it lias force to you to-day : but once it would have been a sheer impossibility, and to-morrow will already have affected its validity, and have begun to turn it into idle antiquarianism. From such a point of view as this (the exact accuracy or limitation of which I do not now propose to discuss), we do not depend for our position on posi- tive argument, on producible proofs. These pass us by : they sound thin and unreal ; we do not know what to make of them : they may seem as convincing, as unanswerable, as ever, but we do not somehow care to take the trouble to answer them : we do not believe in them ; a syllogism, a dilemma, all the old apparatus, is accepted with respectful attention, but it does not persuade, it does not really move or influence ; it has lost its compelling force. More especially is this true Logic, and Life. 5 in the highest and fullest subjects. In politics it has long been proverbial. "We learned there long ago that constitutions were not made, but grew ; that there was no rigorous and imperative logical standard ; that systems depended on the temper of the people, on the assumptions which were natural to the genius of one nation, but which, in another, you would look for in vain ; that there was no forcing things down men's throats, no possibility of moving the masses by sheer, unalloyed reason, no security that an argument which availed with one class would equally affect another, or that an appeal to this or that motive could be counted upon as a constant quantity over all time and in all places. And Science, now, by its emphasis on experience, trains men to a like indifference to the force 01 aoscract argument ; indeed, it itself is almost as indifferent as common sense to the necessities of logical consistency. It is perfectly content, in most cases, to fall in with a philosophy which denies the validity of all those palmary hypotheses on which Science itself depends : yet it can only be sheer indifference to logic which makes it put up with a bedfellow so uncongenial and treacherous. In reality, what does it matter to Science if its assumption of permanent Causality be, according to its own chosen logic, unproven, unverified, absurd ? It still goes on its way with robust assurance ; for, at the bottom of its heart, it knows that it can dispense with an appeal to deductive consistency, so long as it has that far more convincing ally on its side, the alliance of its own inherent belief in itself — a belief warranted by the as- sent of all reasonable men to whom its assumptions have 6 Logic, and Life. become the natural and undeniable facts, that Science assumes them to be. Not for a moment do we, or any one else who has once realised the scientific aspect of the world, doubt its reality, its trustworthiness, its sure- ness of foot. Whither it carries us, we follow : we may dispute its entire universality : we may believe that we see its limits : but, while we are on its ground, while we are moving within its dominion, we, if we have once understood its appeal, are su*e to accept its arguments, and proofs, and conclusions ; we feel it foolish to deny them : we should be attempting to fly from our own minds if we tried to avoid their persuasive force, — a force that retains its vigour undulled and undiminished in spite of the most obvious weakness of its speculative ground- work. I do not intend to imply that Science has no rational consistency, but only to notice this, that it can audaciously refuse the assistance of any logical certainty, without apparently loosening at all the binding power of its appeal, so sure is it of men's spontaneous assent. And, if this attitude of mind is already recognised in Politics and in Science, we shall not be surprised to find it affecting the character of the arguments that avail in the still more complex fields of Religion. Men do not care much for logical proofs of the being of God, or of the possibility of miracle. Reason may assert, perhaps unanswerably, the intellectual necessity for the existence of a single Supreme Creator ; it may ex- hibit irresistibly that any logic, based on mere empiricism, is powerless to demonstrate the necessity of irreversible laws in Nature. Still men remain as doubting, as un- easy, as before ; still the pressure of Science continues Logic, and Life. 7 to drive steadily against the miraculous; still the creep- ing tide slides in almost like some blind and enormous fate, that has no ears for our voice to enter, and moves by some impulsion, alien to our cries, untouched by our endeavours. We still carry on the war of argument ; but the results of the conflict seem too distant to be taken into much account : and we have but little heart to throw into dis- cussions, which, endless themselves, yet have no distinct end to attain, and achieve so little, and convince so few. After all has been argued out, men throw over the argu- ment: for behind the intellectual battle lies the region of conviction, that mental condition which is sensitive to one appeal and not to another, — that mental condition which cannot be gainsayed, cannot be upset or discomfited by any momentary difficulty, — that mental atmosphere which admits one impression and repels another by some instinctive method of its own, — that mental struc- ture which the long years have laboriously built, and which nothing but the long years will ever unmake, or refashion. What is the need of struggling over this or that logical detail ? At the end of it all, the man under attack will pass all argument by with a wave of his hand : miracle, for instance, he will say, cannot offer itself in any conceivable shape to my imagination ; it is no good proving to me that it ought to appear perfectly probable : as a fact, its improbability increases every time I look at it. Such is the state of things, — it exists as well for us as for those who differ from us : we have the same sense as they of hollowness and insufficiency and 8 Logic, and Life. remoteness, as we listen to old abstract argumentation, while it deals with the living things of spirit and of God. True, we may still believe that that high meta- physic has its place, has its office, has its reality ; but yet we seem to be standing for the time on some different levels to it : and on these lower levels we hardly know what to say to it, or where to rely upon it : we feel hazy and uncomfortable as it delivers its decrees : we seem to have so little grip upon its method, the words may sound strong as ever, yet the tale has but little meaning for us : it fails to make its entry good within the substance and fibres of our real life. This is our condition : and if this is so, it may be well to examine a few of the characteristics of such a state of mind ; for only by understanding it can we control it ; and only by retaining it in our control can we avoid sinking in irrational submission, under forces that may carry us whither' we would not. Suffer me to touch on one or two of its obvious principles and perils. This modern way of regarding things does not in reality suppose itself irrational, be- cause it distrusts abstract argument : rather, it is the conception of reason itself which is changed ; reason is regarded, not in its isolated character as an engine with which every man starts equipped, capable of doing a certain job whenever required, with a definite and certain mode of action ; but it is taken as a living and pliable process by and in which man brings him- self into rational and intelligent relation with his surroundings, with his experience. As these press in upon him, and stir him, and move about and around Logic, and Life. 9 him, he sets himself to introduce into his abounding and multitudinous impressions, something of order, and system, and settlement. He has got to act upon all tins engirdling matter, and he must discover how action is most possible and most successful : he must watch, and consider, and arrange, and find accordance between his desires and their outward realisation : so it is 'that he names and classifies : so it is that he learns to expect, to foretell, to anticipate, to manage, to control : so it is that he rouses his curiosity to ever new efforts, and cannot rest content until he has got clearer and surer hold on the infinite intricacies that offer themselves to hand, and eye, and ear, and taste. Continually he re-shapes his anticipations, continually he corrects his judgments, continually he turns to new researches, continually he moulds and enlarges, and enriches, and fortifies, and advances, and improves the conceptions which he finds most cardinal and most effective. Undis- turbed in his primary confidence that he has a rational hold upon the reality of the things which he feels and sees, he acts on the essential assumption that, in ad- vancing the active effectiveness of his ideas, he is arriving at a more real apprehension of that world which he finds to move in increasing harmony with his own inner expectations. This effective and growing apprehension is what he calls his reason : and its final test lies in the actual harmony, which is found to result from its better endeavours, between the life at work within and the life at work without. Iteason is the slowly formed power of harmonizing the world of facts : and its justification lies, not in its deductive certainty so IO Logic, and Life. much as in its capacity of advance,. It proves its trust- worthiness by its power to grow. It could not have come so far if it were not on the right road : it must be right, because ever, in front of it, it discovers the road continuing. Eeason moves towards its place, its fulfil- ment, so far as it settles itself into responsive agreement with the facts covered by its activity, so far as its expectations encounter no jar or surprise, so far as its survey is baffled by no blank and impenetrated barriers. Every step that tends to complete and achieve this successful response tends, in that same degree, to enforce its confident security in itself and in its method. Now, whatever be the metaphysical problems which such a position leaves untouched and unresolved, one thing, at any rate, it must bring forward into clear and emphatic distinction, and that is the serious, the tremendous responsibility incurred by us in our use of Eeason. In former days, the working of thought was regarded as beyond our control : it s was a separate faculty, endowed with laws, principles^ schemes, methods of its own : its announcements proceeded by some infallible and necessary rules, identical everywhere, identical in all : we had no more to do with its ways and customs than we had with the arrangement of heart or brain. It was a tool that had one use and no other. But now it appears that we have to do, more or less, with the actual construction and nature of the reasoning organ itself. This construction is alive, and every instant sees it change : it is no isolated faculty where workings can continue, or be watched " in vacuo," as we can watch the movements of a machine even Logic, and Life. when it lias no material to work upon. Rather is it to be held in unbroken connection with the facts on which it works, for only in relation to them is its success, its truth, obvious, or verifiable, or intelligible. Its force, its persuasive potency over the man in whom it acts, lies in the manner in which it offers to group, and arrange, and present a certain body of fact. If it can so order the various and manifold facts before the man, as to make him feel them to be in harmony with the whole mass of his experience, so that he can move up and down the domain covered by his knowledge with ease, and regularity, and evenness, and fair consistency, then he accepts its work with secure and unhesitating peace. But, if so, everything depends on the character of the facts before him, and on the nature of his main experiences. The excellence of a piece of reasoning lies simply in its adaptive facility, in the response it evokes between those particular new impressions and the mass of older and habitual experiments. Change the facts, or the experience, and its excellence disappears, — it becomes unintelligible. It is on our inner and actual life, then, that the action of our reasoning depends. Deep down in the long record of our past, far away in the ancient homes and habits of the soul, back, far back, in all that age- long experience which has nursed, and tended, and moulded the making of my manhood, lies the secret of that efficacy which reason exerts in me to-day. That efficacy has, through long pressure, become an imbedded habit, which, if I turn round upon it and suddenly inspect it, will appear to me inexplicable. Why this 12 Logic, and Life. gigantic conclusion ? Why this emphatic pronounce- ment ? Why this array of dogmatic assumptions ? I may take those assumptions up in my hands, and look them all over, and poke and probe them, and find no answer in them for their mysterious audacity. No, for they have no answer within themselves : their answer, their verification, their evidence, their very significance, can only be got by turning to, and intro- ducing all that vast sum of ever-oatherin" facts which the generations before me, under the weight of the moving centuries, pressed into these formulae, ordered under these categories, wielded by the efficacy of these instruments, harmonized, mastered, controlled in obedi- ence to these judgments, — judgments which justified their reality and their power by the constant and unwavering welcome with which the advance of life unfailingly greeted their anticipations, and fulfilled their trust. I am, of necessity, blind to their force as long as I have no corresponding experience, — as long as that body of fact which they make explicable remains to me unverified and unexplored. What to me, for instance, can be the potency of the conception of Soul, if I have no soul-facts that require explication ? I feel the need and necessity of a name only when there are certain pheno- mena before me which no other name suits or sorts. What need or necessity, then, can I see for the word Spirit, unless I have, within my experience, those spiritual activities which were to my forefathers so marked, so distinct, so unmistakable, so constant, that it became to them a mental impossibility to retain them under a material name, and a practical impossibility to Logic, and Life. 13 carry on an intelligible common life without distinguish- ing those activities from the motions of their flesh ? What sense or reason can I discover for the assump- tion of a God, unless I can repeat and re-enact in the abysses of my own hidden being those profound im- pressions, those ineradicable experiences, those awful and sublime ventures of faith to which the existence of God has been the sole clue, the sole necessity, the one and only interpretation, the irresistible response, the obvious evidence, the unceasing justification ? And yet how difficult is the matter to which these announcements apply ' The complexities of the physi- cal world make it hard enough, without persistent experience of the facts, to understand the full force of the intellectual expressions in which Science sums them together. But here, in the spiritual world, the experience must be yet more attentive and per- sistent, if it is ever to appreciate the proclamations made about Soul and Spirit and God. For, how far more intricate is the matter with which these ex- pressions deal ! How infinitely subtle ! How many- sided ! How quick, and changing, and complex ! How swiftly its phenomena enter and pass ! How multitudinous its operations ! How far-reaching its activities ! How profound its surprises ! How con- fusing and startling, and dazzling, and astounding all its sudden and rapid transitions ; all the fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, all its high instincts, its first affections, its shadowy recollections ! Who is it that is going to pronounce, at a glance, on the value of t lie formulae, by which men have brought under intclli- Logic, and Life. gible order this vast and overwhelming world of spiritual impressions ? No ! Only in intimate and undivided communion with the facts which they express, have the announcements of the reason, on any field of knowledge, any intelligible value ; and no one, there- fore, who does not live, and move, and have his being, in constant intercourse with this spirit-life can enter into the deep necessities of its laws, any more than an untrained savage would be sensitive to the potency which an experimental proof exercises over the disci- plined intelligence of a scientific explorer. We must live in no casual contact with spirit, if we ever intend to understand it. For Reason tells us nothing trustworthy of itself ; it is in its applicability to fact that its surest test lies : it is by its sense of its steady advance in expressing the facts that it feels its true security: it is 1 y long and active familiarity with the facts that it appreciates their ultimate necessities. This, which is the rule under which Reason has laboriously built up the facts of natural experience into an ordered world, must be the rule also of all its dealings with that large mass of spiritual facts out of which it learns, by patient experience, the form and fashion of super- natural life. Slowly the significance and the harmony of those spiritual events grow luminous; and their perspective reveals its steadier outlines. By touching, by handling, by tasting, by apprehending these spiritual facts, Reason forces its way along ; it compels them to exhibit order, it shifts and moves and crosses them from place to place ; it corrects, it extracts, it penetrates their significance, until the day breaks clearer and purer, Logic, and Life. 15 and the strong powers that hold the spiritual fabric in adamantine chains stand out with visible, with undeni- able insistence, and tbe great vision opens, and the large spaces become light, and the sun leaps out, and the vast heavens are aglow, and all about and around him a fresh life spreads, lordlier than the natural, in ordered and abundant wealth of colour, and splendour, and peace. It is a new and supernatural world that now at last lies in broad and solid expanse under his spiritual eyes, and it does so, because he has fed his rational experience with unfailing supplies of supernatural fact. This, and this alone, is the rule by which his reason can achieve its task or discover its justification : this is the sole law of its highest endeavours. Yea, for, in so doing, it obeys the law of that Divine Reason in Whose image it is made, — of that Word, of Whom it is said, " the Word was with God." The Word, the sole source and spiing of all our intelligence, Who is the thought and reason of the Eternal, has never ceased to hold unbroken communion with that God, Whom it is His high privilege, His endless joy, to see, and know, and understand. The Word, now and ever, remains " with God." Away from God, apart from that resolute and enduring intimacy which knits Him by the bands and cords of unfailing love to the very heart and life of the Most High, there would be no possible intelligence of what God is, no perfect and absolute knowledge, no power of final revelation. In His Sonship lies the secret of all His knowledge : bound to the Father, turned ever to the Father, never alone, but for ever with the Father, for i6 Logic, and Life. ever abiding in that endless intercourse, that loyal familiarity, that glory of the Father's nearness, of His presence, of His power, in that union which He had with God before the worlds were — so, and so only, can the Divine Reason fulfil its perfect work; so, and so only, can it penetrate, and achieve, and comprehend ; so, and so only, can the Son know the Father, even as the Father knoweth the Son. Because the Word was ever with God, therefore He ever knew God. Because He abides constantly in that faultless love; therefore, and therefore only, does the Father show the Son what- soever He doeth : and no man knoweth the Father but that one Eternal Son. "The Word was with God." Communion with God is the secret of Divine wisdom : out of the abiding and familiar intimacy of the Son with the Father flows the wealth of the Word's high knowledge. He knows, because He abides in the bosom of the Father. This is the law of intellectual life in its highest conceivable expression, in that Word Who is the Thought and Beason of God Himself : this law, then, regulates the exercise of reason from end to end of its domain : in this lies the secret of its force, the condition of its success : and we, on our lower level, we, whose reason works in the image of the Word, in Whose light alone we see light, can win our intellectual way only through conformity to the primal conditions under which the Word of God moves forward to His victorious apprehension. We can only understand that in which we abide, with which we have intimate union, to which we are Logic, and Life. 17 ourselves conformed ; that which we handle, and taste, and feel, and see. The closer our contact, the securer grows our knowledge ; and only out of the growing pressure of familiar intercourse can our reason gain ever-quickening activity, ever -increasing assurance. Thought is our power of allying oiTselves to facts, our power of acquiring consistency with them, so that the world within corresponds with the world without. It therefore shifts and changes its fashions and forms, its features and expression, according to the nature of the facts before it, according to the shaping of the world with which it deals. Its instinctive sympathies, its sense of security, its touches of persuasion, its effective pressure, all vary infinitely according to the character of its abiding habits, according to the range of its experiences. This, then, it is which throws such awful reality into our intellectual responsibilities ; this it is which makes its difficulties so anxious, so deep, so intense. We cannot estimate the judgments of reason from outside : we have no machine that will test and weigh them oft- hand ; we can never have one glimpse of their efficacy or their reality without entering ourselves within the circle of their proper fascination, without passing in within the range of the experiences of which it is their sole claim to be the supreme interpretation. How different, now, becomes the aspect of such arguments as those on which we have already touched ! — such argu- ments as protested that every step of advanced familiarity with the methods of Historical Criticism, or with the presentations of Natural Scieuce, made it seem harder B iS Logic, and Life. to conceive the possibility of miracle or the ration- ality of prayer. Perfectly true ! but what else would you expect ? For what intimacy, what sympathy have these empirical sciences with those facts in relation to which alone prayer and miracle become conceivable ? Such sciences classify and interpret our Past ; but they have nothing to do with that tremendous world from which we win nerve and force to break with our Past, to throw off its hold, to shatter its fetters. Such powers as this they never profess to interpret; they abandon any claim to conti-ol or examine. With all that has been they can deal ; but all that may be, all that ought to be — all the wide sea of possibilities that have never yet been — these they abandon to the unknown. And yet, are there no such possibilities to be seen or found in our lives'? Is the influence of the Past the sole factor of importance in the shaping of our days ? ' Have the possibilities of the Future no present and actual force within our souls to-day ? Is there no world of spiritual fact ever grouping itself round about these possibilities that are alive and at work within us ? Do we never feel or know the live and sensible energies of hopes, aspirations, ideals, regrets, remorse, repentance, absolutions, renewals ? Are conversions, couvulsions, spontaneities, resistances, revolts, revolu- tions, awakenings, — are such movements as these within the profound recesses of the soul all unreal, all fanciful, all unregarded ? Nay, surely these are our realities, these are the master-light of all our seeing ; and it is in face of realities such as these that Prayer and Miracles, which are the witnesses of a power to change the Present and transform the Past, assume intelligible Logic, and Life. 19 validity. Often and ofteu we have, surely, all of us found it so. It is after lon^ and habitual neglect of the miraculous and spiritual elements that enter into the texture of our own existence that we find the formulas of faith so perplexing, so irrational, so alien, so repellent. Only by constant and customary contact with those strange invisible powers that underlie our own sensible life, and move it so deeply, and enforce such superhuman demands, — only by abiding within the presence of these imperious mysteries, sensitive to their touch, responsive to their appeals, unstartled by their thrilling messages, — only so can the mind learn to admit within the lines of its possible experiences facts that claim to be miraculous. For only to such can miracle be welcome as a congenial ally, an expected and warranted guest whom they greet with ready ease ; and this ease of entry, this congenial welcome, it is which constitutes rationality. Reason, whose whole aim it is to give unity and harmony to the whole round of life's experiences, is satisfied as long as her expecta- tions feel no shock, as her harmony is unbroken ; and no such break, no such shock, disturbs or discomforts her, if the miracle without finds an effective response in the daily miracle within. Its entry stirs no tumul- tuous repulsion in a world where its appearance is so familiar, and its advent so long looked for. Deep down, then, in the dim recesses of each man's soul lie the secret springs of his logical thinking. His thought belongs to the very essence of his being, and with the innermost life of that being it, too, lives. Its exercise and use are inseparable from his mental habits and spiritual history; it works under the thousand 20 Logic, and Life. influences of custom, of intercourse, of familiarity ; and, if so, God Himself can only seem a rational solution to those who live in constant contact with the problems which His existence solves. The Incarnation can never be rational to any but those who know now what it is to have the Word of God alive and speaking within their souls. The Atonement can only appear rational to such as have sounded, in their own experi- ence, the awful waters of remorse, or have been eaten by the devouring agonies of corruption, or have felt the horror of that gross darkness which settles down as a soundless night, without star or lamp, without any movement of hope, or joy, or love, upon those who find themselves, to their miserable dismay, to be sold unto sin. Have we then known anything of this terrible drama ? Have we wrestled and striven in this tremendous war ? Have we moved about among these wonderful and sur- passing powers that are alive within our life ? Have we unlocked and entered these dark chambers ? Have we groped with patient hands along the length of their dim walls ? And if not, who are we, that we should be giving rapid and daring decisions about questions which, without this, cannot possibly to us have the slightest intelligible meaning ? The time has come, it is true, for answers to be given to questions that press for solution in the realm of the supernatural ; but no answer what- ever will be possible to any but to those who have aided and trained their reason for the task by long habit and continual trial, by persistent watchfulness and intimate experience, by sober attention and practised handling, and the instincts that follow on patient experiment. SERMON IT. THE VENTURE OF REASON". '" Cljroitgfj faittj, foe unocrstantJ trjat trie morlDs Sucre frames bg tije £53aro of CKoo."— Heb. xi. 3. As we look back and sift the conditions under which the childhood of the human race has made its advances into manhood, we habitually notice a double-sided character. First, we are met at the start by a whole world of emotion — impressions, feelings, affections, im- pulses ; these move, and change, and shake, and com- pel the whole man. He is their creature ; from them he derives all impetus ; under their sway he is pushed along the pathways of life. His words, the lonely relics of an unrecorded story, are stamped with the super- scription of this sensual dominion : they keep down on the low levels of physical imagery : they seem hardly more than the spontaneous and unthinking outcome of fleshly instincts. His whole being is cramped and con- fined in all its movements under the tight pressure of the physical network within which he lies meshed : the stress of physical needs, of physical passions, impels all his activities, and lends motive to all his desires. So we see him start ; and yet out of that chaos of impulses, out of those blind motives of sense, a strange order mysteriously springs — a new life emerges, as a rainbow The Venture of Reason. hovers, fresh and free, over the edges of the flying mist ; and this new life does not pass and die with the mist out of which its beauty grew ; it steadies itself down ; it wins for itself, by slow and patient degrees, a solid settlement, a positive endurance : it orders all its ways, it sorts and places its materials : it fashions its cham- bers, and lays down its laws : it discloses increasing capacities of self-control : it adapts itself to novel arrangements : it extends the sway of its inventions : it discovers principle, and rule, and regularity there where all had been confusion. Under all the shocks of chang- ing impressions, it presses forward its old and steady laws of combination, it builds up its unshaken walls. So, out of the tumult of passion, grows and develops the mysterious fabric of social order ; and the greatest surprise is this, that all this process, as we read out its history, gives a reasonable explanation of itself. It is open to scientific exhibition ; it commends itself to thought ; and, by so commending itself, proves itself to have been fashioned under the control and direction of reason. For to be susceptible of historical treatment it must be rationally constituted ; and if so, then we have lu conclude that reason must have been at work from the first : a rational order cannot have been motived by irrational impulses. The passions, then the impressions, with which we began were never wholly what they seemed ; they were from the very beginning the passions, the impressions, of a rational man, and so won for them- selves a capacity which never lay in the correspondent affections of the animal. This capacity was not given then, from outside, was not imposed ; for the closer we The Venture of Reason. 23 probe history, the more obviously and undeniably do we find that this masterful supremacy in the ordering and making of life lies within the passions themselves. It is the instincts themselves that push nations into these novel social arrangements ; it is the instinctive pressure of impulse that actually works the change. Affections, feelings, emotions, are the real and living agents who make history what it is ; conscious and critical reason plays in the drama but a subordinate part. And yet the result is rational. It is not that irrational forces are made use of by reason to produce rational results, but the wonder is that these rational results issue out of the action of these very forces which appear so irrational. These forces, then, if they are the factors of society, of civilisation, must hold within themselves the secret of the issue ; they cannot be empty of that reason, the existence of which their whole activity proves and exhibits. The passions of a man are themselves in- telligent ; they move under the motives of reason. So we conclude from history, and so we find in ourselves. We each individually reveal a character built up out of feelings which, at first sight, we clos-s with the instincts of the animal, or attribute to the blind influences of fleshly impressions. And yet, after all, it is out of these that our rational character emerges ; it is out of these feelings that we elaborate a history which is perpetually advancing its problems, its needs, its solutions, its satisfactions ; it is in these very feelings that we make manifest to all who have eyes to see, or ears to listen, the tokens of an enduring self, whose actions men can count upon and calculate, whose 24 The Venture of Reason. movements they can classify and connect, whose growth they can confidently anticipate. And still deeper down in our self-study, we discover strange effects in those impulses which at first we called animal. They are not content to lie back behind the narrow barriers within which the simple passions of that dim animal world run their unchanging round. They break through that ancient monotony ; they take to themselves larger powers ; they feel their way towards new possibilities ; they increase the force and extend the range of their desires. The passions, in becoming human, are no longer animal. It is not that they are differently managed and treated ; it is that they themselves are changed ; they themselves desire what no animal desires ; they themselves exceed, as no animal exceeds ; they themselves disclose in their very excess a secret instinct of self-discipline, in which lies the seed of the new law, the law of Purity and Holiness. The appetite that is capable of self-assertion is driven by its own inner necessities to the task of self-control. Morality, as we look at it closely and carefully, is no system imposed on passion from without ; it is itself the very heart of all desire, the very principle of all human impulse, the very inspiration of all passion. Out of the growth and increase of these vaster passions, righteous- ness springs like a flower to perfect, like a revelation to interpret, all that without its manifestation is left unfulfilled and unexplained. And if so, then these passions, these impulses, cannot be altogether blind and unpurposing. They have it in them to produce a rational order ; they hold, hidden within their extrava- The Venture of Reason. 25 gance, the mystery of control ; they inevitably tend to- wards temperance and chastity. They are, then, already rational ; they are, from the very start, already moral All history, then, whether of ourselves or of nations stands as a witness to the rational and moral neces' sities that underlie, and stir, and move, and invigorate, and propel the passionate instincts of our living humanity. Reason does not watch and rule from above, merely looking out from its high castle windows upon the surging and unruly mob that sweeps up and down the passages of the loud, unsteady city. It descends disguised often under some dark-hooded cloak and mixes in with the loose and free tumult of the' crowds; it lends its far-reaching skill to their uses ■ it sends up its voice into their cries; it lets them see' through its eyes, the larger horizon ; it feeds, with its' strength, their daring aspirations. The world of human passion feels, from end to end, the quiekening move- ments of this infused and invigorating power. So much it seems almost imperative to conclude But this recognition, so full of force, so rich with light, leads us inevitably to expect the truth of its counter proposition. If man, as it appears, is no animal with reason attached, but rather is so entirely and perfectly one that that which was most allied to the animal loses its sheer animality by contact with the new gift of thou-ht -nd itself is affected all through by a strange, trans-' iorming force, and becomes itself an advancing instead of a stationary kingdom, and exhibits novel effects and wins unlooked-for range-if impulse is so changed by 26 The Venture of Reason. being advanced from association with instinct to associa- tion with that which, at least, is so different from instinct that we call it reason ; then will it not also, be most likely that reason, too, will be no entirely separable thing, isolated, removed from all direct hold on that which it so directly inspires ? If the passions dis- played in human action be indivisibly penetrated by reason, will man's reason so energize as to exclude the inter-action of passion ? Will it not — does it not exhibit, throughout all its activity, the intimacy of its inner communion with those passions in which it so vigorously acts ? If impulses are rational, is not reason impulsive ? If feeling be instinct with reason, is not reason instinct with feeling ? If the one is so sensitive to its contact with the other, will the latter remain untouched by the same undivided contact ? We may with ease distinguish the two, and the distinction we draw may be genuine and real : but yet, for all that, it need not be final ; and indeed it cannot be final, if the man in whom both distinctions meet is himself indivisibly and inseparably one. He, the man, lives with the same self within either half of his life : he, the man, is as passionate as he is rational, and as rational as he is passionate : he recognises himself as readily, as entirely, on the one side as on the other of our dis- tinction : in both he equally lives, moves, and acts, and with neither can he peculiarly or exclusively identify himself : in and out of both chambers he passes freely ; in both, he knows himself at home; the passions are his and his only, such as none but he could have and feel. The reason is his, and his only, such as none but only The Venture of Reason. 27 he could accept, or use, or understand; from him botli feelings and thoughts derive all their reality, all their character ; divorced from him, they would he, both of them, shadowy and unintelligible. Bonded together in his indissoluble personality, they move together when they move at all ; they are penetrable by each other's influences, they are touched by each other's infirmities, they respond to each other's invitations, they move under the pressure of mutual motives. Neither, in the final resort, would be explicable, except by the interpretation of the other. No single feeling that that one man feels could ever finally be con- ceivable as a feeling that might have occurred to any one else. It is intelligible only in its context with that one man's life: it is an expression of his being, of his character, of his thoughts, and of no one else's, in all the wide world. And again, no single thought that that same man thinks can ever finally set itself loose from the fibres that knit it up by infrangible bonds into that organic unity which is the self, and which feels as well as thinks. The reason in man is human ; that is all we mean. It does not act or live on its own account in abstract isolation : it does not work alone : it is not itself pos- sessed of substantial and independent being ; it belongs not to itself, but to another — to a man, to a being, that is, who is not only rational, but also imaginative, im- pulsive, sensitive, moral, spiritual. It is under this man's impulse that it argues and discusses ; it is part and parcel of his corporate and complex existence. The whole long chain of its syllogisms is never mechanical: 28 The Venture of Reason. it is alive along all its length, and feels at every joining the throbbing currents of his moving life. It is against the very law of reason's existence to separate it from all that, without which it would not be what it is. In such separation its energy dwindles, its leaps of ad- vance cease, its bracing courage dies down, and all its potency disappears. We know not whence it drew its old force ; we cannot entice it into its ancient audaci- ties. Its rapid and intuitive connections, once so cer- tain, so necessary, so imperious, all break up and vanish ; the thread is cut, and the beads are all scattered. Now, if so, what follows ? Does it follow that, since reason derives its use and force from the particular man who works it, all thinking is therefore purely individual — the peculiar property of each separate rational soul ? Does no one man think as any other man does ? The answer to that question can surely be given only by turning to the results that follow the exercise of each man's reason. What is the issue of this exercise ? Does he find himself, when he thinks, out of all accord with what other men are thinking ? Are none of his arguments theirs ? Are their conclusions never his ? Amid all the intense variety of individual character which enters into the play of thought, are there no large and decisive unities that display them- selves ? Are there none that continually advance, and grow, and gain power, and enlarge their testimony, and establish confidence ? Do men find that there follows, on the use of their reason, a sense of bitter loneliness, of horrible isolation ? Do they, the more they think, hold ever more aloof from their fellows ? Do they find The Venture of Reason. 29 themselves thrown hack, shocked, jostled, when they utter their minds ? Are they, when they try to argue or discuss, ever running their heads against hard walls ? Or is it not exactly the contrary ? Is it not in ignorance of each other's minds that men meet with rude rejections, and hatter vainly against blind barriers ? Is not the exercise of thought one long and delightful discovery of the identity that knits us up into the main body of mankind ? If ever we do succeed in putting our thoughts into words that others understand, is it not a sure road to their hearts ? Do they not run to greet us with open arms ? Our sympathies, our hopes, our desires, do we not, when once we can find a language to express what they are to us, re-discover them all in the souls of uui' fellows ? Is not all language one enduring and irresistible witness to the reality and depth of the communion which our thought arrives at, as soon as man touches man ? And each new tongue or dialect brings with it new and delicious proof. There, in its forms, and assumptions, and ideals, and bonds, we read out what we within ourselves know and understand. It is our own mind that rises up reflected in this mirror. We enter into its most intricate ways with ready delight. Even its most surprising turns become intel- ligible as we watch them. Something in us wakes up from long slumber at the kiss of this strange arrival ; something in us responds and welcomes and admits. And history, again, at first so startling, so odd, so repellent, yet only requires study to open its secrets. The more we throw the light of careful thought upon its records, the more intelligible it becomes. We find 3Q The Venture of Reason. ourselves no longer repelled. Our minds mix freely with the old fancies and doings. Here, too, Ave have only to watch, and some familiar things emerge. The confused babble steadies its voice into the harmonies of a music that we feel and enjoy. The sense of nearness and of intimacy grows stronger and firmer, and over all there comes a look of friendliness and a touch of kindly kinship. And, indeed, what is it that we intend to express by that hard word " civilisation," that word which re- minds us of such thronging miseries, and yet cheers us always with a sense of inexhaustible promise, if it is not this — that, in spite of all encumbering sorrows thatburden and trouble our way, in spite of the wide and desolating cruelties that haunt and disfigure our advance, it is yet worth all the pain to know, with increasing recognition, that large fellowship of mind, and heart, and will, which is for ever disclosing its untold resources, its unnumbered delights, to those who dare to believe that " God hath made man to be of one blood over all the face of the earth"? Men are indeed of one heart and one mind, and might have all things, if they would, in common. This is the promise. And civilisation is the secured discovery that this good news is true. It is the growing acknowledgment how joyful and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. Reason, then, though exercised under the inspiration of each varying and separate character, does yet testify, by the social community in which its working inevitably issues, that it is no isolated or isolating agency; that its activities work in the mass, and signalize an irresistible unity of law, and life, and movement. But if so, it The Venture of Reason. 3i follows from what has been said that this unity must be looked for, not in the mere mechanism of reason — for reason is no mechanical instrument that any one who uses, inevitably uses in one way : reason, we say, is instinct with personal life throughout all its uses. And if it testifies to unity, then that unity must be looked for behind the formal rules and regulated motions of that abstraction which we call reason ; it must be discoverable in the very heart-life of the per- sonal character out of whose energy reason proceeds. There, far back in the deep recesses of our innermost being, in that last home of self-existence, even there, it would seem, we discover no separate, no lonely life ; even there penetrates and prevails the sway of common movement, the strong influences that knit, and bind, and gather together. Unity is no accident made possible, to individuals essentially different, by the incidental exercise ot a common reasoning faculty. Rather the use of the faculty gives steadfast proof that the individuals in whom it so essentially inheres are not divided and distinct, but are pervaded and possessed by ineffaceable unities, by ineradicable identities, which testify to their power and presence by every word that is spoken, by every deed that is done. It is we ourselves who are discovered in the common, the universal necessities of thought ; it is we ourselves, and not merely our " laws of thought," who are then discovered to be at one with our fellow-men, to be bound up with them into a union so radical that we call it " necessary," so irrevocable that we call it " absolute." It is our very self that cannot act without revealing within itself those essential 32 The Ventiire of Reason. assumptions which all men instinctively adopt, and none can finally avoid. To return, then, reassured, to our first point. At the roots of all reasoning lies the personal, the individual man : it is he from out of whom the reasoning issues : it is his living personality which endows it with motion, and being, and act. No wonder, then, if all reasoning starts with some primary assumptions : they are inevit- able, since reason itself, the faculty of thought, has no independent existence of its own, but assumes always, behind it and in it, a living person, from whom it derives its existence, by whom it is set in action, in whom it finds its home, in whose energy it works, in whose service it is alive. Here, then, is reason's assumption. It is not complete in itself ; it assumes a life which is not thought nor feeling, but is a single man, who both thinks and feels at once ; who never altogether ceases either to think all the time that he is feeling, or to feel all the time that he thinks. Without such assumption, reason cannot begin : without it, it has no intelligible force, no valid security, no confidence in itself. It can- not find reasons to justify its root-princip]es. No ; how should it ? Its roots are imbedded in the man from whom it wins its life, and draws its succours and supplies. " In his existence lies its sole justification : in the light of his character alone can its working be seen and unders^od : to him all its quick motions, all its rapid transitions, are intelligible, are logical, are irresis- tible, are necessary, for they are himself. And, if it appears that these primary principles, which all reasoning assumes are not private and peculiar, but The Venttire of Reason. 33 large, common, universal, then we are driven, not to drop our first conclusion, but to believe a second ; to believe that each single human being, who is himself the ground and justification of all the reasoning that he puts in action, testifies as he reasons to that binding fellowship which enters into, and penetrates, and possesses all his inward personal life — testifies to the intense and over-mastering reality of that common blood and brotherhood which encompasses and embraces all mankind, sealing on each soul its irrevocable stamp, animating each with its exhaustless breath, fashioning each to the liking of its dominant and imperial will. Reason begins, then, with an assumption, an assump- tion that abides with it from the beginning to the end of its unceasing process ; an assumption that all its action continually asserts, and continually verifies. It assumes the life by which it lives, the personality which it unwaveringly expresses. Without this assumption it cannot start, and that first assumption it never abandons : all its after-success, all its advances, are but a continuous disclosure of the full significance which that initial act included and involved. Slowly man discovers the rich wealth of meaning with which an enlarged experience abundantly fills the simple and naked assumption, which his own free action con- stituted at the first to be the rule and scheme of all his thinking. Every touch, every sight, every sound, bring in to him their delightful confirmation, and ratify, with unfaltering faithftilness, those earliest movements in which his intelligence first asserted itself, that primary act of courageous anticipation, which leapt out from c 34 The Venture of Reason. the dark silence of his spirit at the first moment in which he felt the greeting of a world outside himself. In that initiating act he has anticipated the whole round of knowledge ; every motion forward is but a new discovery of the marvels that lay hidden in that bold claim with which he demanded the submission of all experiences to the conditions which he, without warrant, seemingly, and without a prospect of proof, asserted his right to impose upon them. The right was asserted without its proofs ; the claim was, indeed, made without sanction or warrant. Who could say that man had the right to believe himself in possession of the power to know and grasp the real principles of things ? But he had the courage to enforce his claim, to anticipate his warrants, and, ever since that daring self-assertion, the proofs have been pouring in with overwhelming abundance to justify and sustain it. In what, then, does reason begin ? How should we describe the act from which it issues ? It is an act, a movement, by which the inner man, that soul and substance of all the thoughts and all the feelings that express him, steps forward, at the touch of an outward world, and asserts his kinship, his alliance, his union, his communion, with that which has advanced to meet him from without. He recognises it, he welcomes it, he runs out, to fall, as it were, into the ready embraces of a brother : he lets himself go in confidence and security, as a bird that drops from branch or tower upon the large and steady spaces of the enfolding ah' : he letfps with a free spirit into these moving waters of encircling life, and, lo ! as with hands they receive him, The Venture of Reason. 35 as with arms they uplift him, and in the hollows of their deep hosom he finds himself carried, and at peace. Now, what word have we by which to describe an act at once so presumptuous and yet so trustful ; what word, if it be not the word " Faith " ? Faith is just such a movement forward of the entire being, under the compelling impulse of its own inward daring, to greet the advent of a novel visitant, who is at once strange, and yet instinctively familiar. Faith is that act of prophetic anticipation which risks everything on a venture, which nothing but the results can ever justify. Faith is that which lies shut up and asleep until the wakening touch of this incoming guest approaches, and stirs, and arouses ; and then, at the first moment of the contact, does not so much think, or feel, as will that a future for itself should spring out of that momentary union. It wills in the power of some instinctive sym- pathy; it wills to trust itself to the fascination that draws it forward ; it wills to rely upon the kinship that it assumes ; it wills itself to be one with the arriving life. At the back of all the impressions of feeling, at the back of all the spontaneities of thought, lies the deep strength of energetic self-assertion which men call will ; a self-assertion that presumes so far, not out of the blind- ness of pride, but out of the brave freedom of a child- like trust. It pushes out, it presses forward, it puts forth its force, because it is so true to the calls that summon it into action, because its innocent simplicity relies so readily on the genuineness and reality of all that it encounters. Such energy flows out into ills wishes, that it seems to compel their realisation; so 36 The Venltire of Reason. actively does it desire to know, that it seems to enforce things to conform to the conditions of its knowledge : they bend to the sway of its strong and effectual desires ; it imposes upon them, as we say, its categories ; and yet this imposition is, after all, nothing but its own natural and willing conformity to the conditions of that outward existence with which it so resolutely intends to unite itself, and so passionately believes itself to be akin. This is the paradox of knowledge; and this strange combination of passive submission with victorious activity is surely an exact repetition, on lower levels, of the characteristic working of that spiritual faith which we know better as it meets us in the highest walks of life — that faith which relies so ardently upon another, so desperately disbelieves in its own powers, that it itself acquires the force to achieve that which it asks for from another, and, in answer to its loud appeal for help and deliverance, is told that its own inherent energy has obtained the good result, " Thy faith hath made thee whole !" Reason, then, dates its birth from some act in which it at once received from without, and yet assumed, and asserted, and presumed, from within ; some act in which it both accepted impressions and yet imposed cate- gories. And such an act corresponds to the nature of faith, — faith which is at once receptive, yet assertive : the extreme of passivity, and yet the extreme of activity. Eeason starts with an act which assumes and anticipates all that it afterwards discovers, and faith is that in us which is prophetic. It antedates its results : 1 he Venture of Reason. 37 it pronounces all done from the moment that all has begun : it seals to us in one momentary act that which a long and complicated process will afterwards realize and fulfil ; a process that could not begin except by assuming its own possibility, by which assumption it is indeed made possible. By believing that it has, it does verily receive. Once more, reason must begin in a movement of the entire man; and such a movement is faith ; faith which carries the whole being along in despite of feelings, and in defiance of proof, by an energetic exertion of its living will, which leaps forward, and lays hold of, and clings close, and cleaves fast to, an object to which it becomes, by the very force of that vivifying impulse, assimilated, and united, and akin. That prime movement forward to salute the approach of a message from elsewhere, that first grip on the incoming life that meets it from outside, is an inspiration of the will preceding reason; yet not for that irrational, since it issues in reason, which spreads its powers in perpetual and enduring witness to the rational Tightness of that act of trust from which it wins all its sanction and all its authenticity. And can it be, then, that even in the barest exercise of reason we have stepped out into such deep waters ? Is it indeed true that, in every motion of thought, we have already let go of all ropes and stakes that could give us a hold on the solid and steady earth, and can feel the ground no longer under our feet, but are being lifted and borne along by strange waves, in which we float suspended and amazed ? Is it impossible even to 38 77/ c Venture of Reason. think without abandoning ourselves to a movement, of which we can have but doubtful experience, and know not at all the issue ? Is it contrary to reason's own law, that we should desire to secure certainty before we dare to act ? Does reason itself refuse to exist, except to those who venture with no faint heart to follow the fascination of hope ? Is it impossible to be rational without passing beyond the bounds of reason, without surrendering reason itself to the compulsion of a prophetic inspiration ? Does all flunking hang on an act of faith ? Can it be true that we can never attain to intellectual apprehension unless the entire man in us throws his spirit forward, with a willing confidence, with an unfaltering trust, into an adventurous move- ment ; unless the entire man can bring himself to respond to a summons from without, which appeals to him by some instinctive touch of strange and unknown kinship to rely on its attraction, to risk all on the assumption of its reality ? A touch of kinship ! Yes, kinship alone could so stir faith : and the call, therefore, to which it responds must issue from a Will as living, as personal, as itself. Ah ! surely, then, " God is in this place, and I knew it not." From the first dawn of our earliest intelligent activity we move under the mighty breath of One higher and lordlier than we wot of: we walk in the high places, we are carried we know not whither. Not for one instant may we remain within the narrow security of our private domain ; not for one moment may we claim to be self-possessed, self-contained, self- centred, self-controlled. Every action carries us out- The Venture of Reason. 39 side ourselves ; every thought that we can think is a revelation of powers that draw us forward, of influences that lift us out of the safety of self-control. To reason is to have abandoned the quiet haven of self-possession ; for already in its first acts we feel the big waters move under us, and the great winds blow. We live by trust : life in its most rational and experimental form is still a venture, a hope which only justifies itself by its success. We can never escape the risks of faith, can never hold back and refuse to move till we are sure of our footing : so to hold back is never to begin. Every- where faith makes its awful demand : everywhere we walk, not in the flesh, not in ourselves, but in tbe Spirit ; in all things, we must believe that we have, in order to receive. Not even reason itself can shirk the impera- tive call. It, too, must make its leap into the dark. It, too, must surrender itself to the violence of an irresistible hope. It was no new law to which our Lord finpealed when He bade His beloved " Have faith in God." His appeal only called forward into new energy that which was already the profoundest secret of all our life, the base and substance of our being. All our whole nature stirred and awoke at the great summons, just because there is nothing in us which does not know and obey the inspirations of faith. The very first moment of our experience had felt its motive and followed its impulse. " Whither, then, 0 my God, can I fly from Thy presence ? If I ascend up to heaven, Thou art there : if I go down to hell, Thou art there also ! If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 40 The Venture of Reason. even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me." Not only in the high places of Thy revelation do I find Thy tokens ! Not only at the close of my long pilgrimage do I throw myself upon Thy heart, or fall before Thy feet ! Not only there, but from afar I greet Thee ; from the lowest levels of my rational soul ! In Thy name, even there, I move forward ! By faith in Thee, from the first hour, I set out ■ Upon Thee I did cast myself when first my thought stirred itself into life ! Thine arms, even then, were under me ! In Thee did I put my trust ! Oh suffer not that earliest faith to fail until it carries us up to that nobler faith which they exercise, who, in that they have believed in God, believe also in His Son ! "Leave us not, neither forsake us, 0 Lord God of our salva- tion ! " SERMON ITT. THE SPIRIT, AND ITS INTERPRETATION. " SSaijat man Itnoforth tije things of a man, sabe X\)t spirit of man Suljidj is in Jjtm ? £bm so trjt things of Coo knofaetjj no man, but tl)E Spirit of ffioo."— i Cor. ii. u. "A man who would write the history of a religion must believe it no longer, but must have believed it once." So pronounces the great French critic ; and yet, in what a dilemma are we landed by this incisive epigram ! How, then, are we to prepare ourselves for historical and critical treatment of religion ? How can we be sure of securing the fit conditions ? Can we believe experimentally merely for the purposes of discovery ? Can we be certain of being able to cease from our belief at the moment at which we propose to begin our critical examination ? Or must all then be left to happy chance ? Must the historical study of religions be confined to those who have happened by good luck to fall outside the faiths which once they held ? It is an awkward test to have to apply to candidates for the study. And, again, are we to consider them fortunate or unfortunate to find them- selves so qualified ? Which is the healthier condition of mind, — the earlier, or the later ? If the later is the more natural and the more perfect, how can the earlier 4 2 The Spirit, and its Interpretation. be at all sound or entire ? And, if not sound, how can it be the essential groundwork of the critical temper ? It can hardly be that the later temper is a product of the earlier, — that the natural evolution of uncritical faith is into critical doubt. For what happens in the loss of the temper of faith is, that we abandon the attempt to develop our faith. We call upon other and alien forces to fructify within us : we move under other influences; motives, once unfelt or disregarded, now stir us strongly; the old powers that once lifted us are withdrawn : we are in a different road, travelling along a different line. Once we tried one road, now we are trying another. It is not merely that we have spiritualized old ways of conceiving our religious aims ; but what we now require for our present purpose of unbiassed criticism is, that we should have passed out of that temper which moves by some inspiration of faith, into that which no longer knows the witchery of such attractions : and such a temper cannot be the normal product of the earlier mood ; and, if not its normal product, when and how can it be normal to break with the old and adopt the new ? Is it a matter of regret, or of victory ? These questions seem as end- less, perhaps, as they are frivolous ; and yet surely it is just such questions as these which M. Kenan leaves us to the last in doubt whether he has ever clearly faced and answered. He loves, for instance, the high Eoman ideal, — the Petrine Legend. You can read his picture of the early Christian centuries without dis- covering any more trace of the Eastern Church than / you would find in the Forged Decretals. He enjoys the The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 43 flavour of this bold conception ; but is this enjoyment, we keep asking ourselves as we read, so piquant, because the conception is so unreal, so legendary ? Or, again, he bids us cherish the brave and beautiful defiance which the religions have hurled at the inevit- able doom of Death : but are we to cherish them because the doom is inevitable ? Does the bravery of the defiance, then, lie in its hopelessness ? Does the beauty of the dream lie in our knowledge that it will vanish away ? Is the glory of a faith, that glad glory which bewitches, to be found in the splendid daring with which it lies ? Are we to regret the falsehood of 1 the " sweet Galilean Vision," or to rejoice in it ? Such are the puzzles in which he leaves us ; and I would ask, is not this the paradox which haunts so much of the sympathetic modern criticism, — the paradox which lies at the heart of the delicious joy with which we enter into and revive the very charm which dead things once exercised ; a joy whicli has in it the pride of successfully proving our capacity to embrace within the range of our sympathy that which is not ours, as well as the sense of freedom from the fearful anxiety which would belong to any passionate belief that the charm was real ; and, moreover, carries with it also the pathos which distils from all memorials of buried delights. "We are, many of us, I think, brought into a certain confusion of mind by the very variety of our emotional exercises. We idealize the Past instead of the Future ; we throw ourselves into the feelings and passions of a hundred dead generations. But such idealization works 44 The Spirit, and its Interpretation. upon us with less practical force than an imaginary future ; for its very charm, if we would confess it, is often the laziness with which we can afford to regard ideals which, fair and enthralling as once they were, have this additional fascination now, that their day is over, and they are perished for evermore. There they lie, all at peace, in their white shrouds ; sweet visions that once drove hearts this way and that ! How gracious were those eyes, now closed to us ! how swift those limbs, now cold and still ! Pleasant it is to stay or watch by their silent tombs, and picture their lovely life, and dimly feel the ancient sway ; and yet, for all that, know that we have not got to do and die, as those once did, whom these visions drew into pain, and anguish, and heroic graves ! We seem, as we revive the lost scenery, to be admitted to enjoy what those of old once saw, and felt, and followed ; and yet we have in the background the proud confidence that we are free from the tyranny of that bewitchment by which they were mastered. We can see its limit ; we can trace out the story of its fall ; we are not captured in its bondage, to be persuaded, as they were, that there was no vision that could fascinate as this, which maddened them with such strong desire. No ! When we have done with this of theirs, we have a hundred others as good, to which we can turn, which we can revive, to which we can give ourselves, until we are tired again with that, and ready to try the power of another. We are free from all, because we can criticise them all : but, then, do we really think that we know what they meant to the men who pursued them ? Nay, surely ! for to them each of these The Spirit, mid its Interpretation. 45 fair visions seemed the one and only victory for which it was well worth while to give up all else and die. It was the entire singleness, the utter supremacy of that one vision over all others, that gave it its power, that accounted for its marvellous sway : unless you see it in its masterful, and energetic, and compelling predomi- nance, you do not see it as they saw it, nor understand it as they understood it. To them it was not one among many. For in it they believed ; and to believe, what is it but to be subdued by the apparent predominance of one aim over all others ? And we are shut out from understanding this subdual which is belief, so long as to us the aim is one which moves us indeed, but moves us only as many other ideals move us. M. Kenan himself sees further than this. To criticise a religion, to know it, to appreciate its history, you must, he allows, have once, genuinely believed it ; you must have passed under the mastery with which it swept up the whole of your manhood into its single dominion ; you must have known how it filled, with its one imperial impulse, the heavens, and the earth, and the sky, and the sea, and the wind, and the fire, and all the silent spaces, the unseen movements, of those deep abysses where God and the Spirit touch, and mingle, and speak. And yet strongly as he asserts this necessity, he still protests that all this must have ceased before the critical understanding can undertake its proper work : the sympathetic appreciation of its object, which is impera- tively required in order that the criticism may be thorough and vital, must yet be but that melancholy 46 The Spirit, and its Interpretation. and pathetic tribute which the living pay to the mighty dead. Can this be an intelligible position ? Does not the double demand betray to the light, by its epigrammatic vigour, a confusion which is continually troubling us, with a dark sense of perplexity, in ways more subtly concealed ? For instance, we travel along with tbe general and obvious theorizing about the freedom from preconception which must signalize the perfect his- torian, until we find ourselves slowly and surely shut out from any power to measure or gauge the forces that build up history : for these forces are passions, — the passionate clinging to the right ; the passionate loathing of wrong ; the strong pressure of national cravings ; the tempestuous rush of young movements towards new ideals ; and how can the cool indifferent reason, that cares not which way the battle goes, propose to weigh, and sift, and estimate such forces as these ? By what standard can it judge them ? What balances has indifference by which it can test the fury of warring opposites ? Without some living interest in the issue, history looks to us as the wild medley of madmen, whose rage, and anxieties, and designs fill us with a painful distress at their reckless exaggeration, at their ungentle obstinacy. Something is wrong, then ; the historian must have a cue by which to disentangle this disorder : he must see, and make for, a right and a wrong : he must compel us to pass under the anxieties that harass the onward movements of the good : he must fill us with indignant wrath at the terrible work- ing of the wrong. So we are pulled up, yet without making quite clear The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 47 to ourselves how far or in what sense we are limiting our original position, that the historian is to be free from all partiality. Or again, in theology, we go on pretty freely with those who plead that if truth he the sole aim, the searcher must surely he loose from all presuppositions that bind him to a particular conclusion, until it is at last provokingly suggested that the possession of a belief is a positive disqualification for a theologian. Here we draw up again. An absurdity has come about; yet where exactly is the flaw in the argument? It is not so easy to say ; only we feel that, somewhere or other, there is a limitation to our first position ; but where it falls, is left to our private common-sense to determine ; and each of us roughly places it there, where he himself habitually happens to arrive at assumptions which, to his mind, may fairly be considered final. It is this difficulty, underlying and troubling our common discussion, which is brought to a head in the formula I have quoted from M. Eenan; and I would ask you to consider for a few moments whether the truth of the first half of the statement will not, of necessity, turn the second half into paradox : whether it be not a bit of grim humour to suggest that the critic, in the field of religious belief, requires for his task the use of two inconsistent and divorced tempers. To give the adequate history of a religion, then, you must first have believed it. This is our primary datum : and this means surely that the elements of that rational intelligibility, which comes to the surface under the action of the critical reason, are to be found within the living material of the belief itself. 48 The Spirit, and its Interpretation. Eeason does not find its ground, its justification, its credibility, its evidence in itself, in its own separate and distinct working ; it goes for these to that on which it works. There lies all its intelligibility. The gain achieved by the reason is simply the disclosure that the belief was already rational. All that it dis- closes was already the life and substance of that effort which we call Faith. Eeason does but parallel within its own region, on its own conditions, that temper of mind which held secreted within it all tbat which now emerges into intelligible form. It offers an equivalent to what has before been felt : and if so, then the man who knows both sides can alone appreciate the value of the equivalence. To him, indeed, the living agent in both fields, this equivalence is no arbitrary and inexplicable symbolism : for lie comes to himself in each : he is the same being in each : he is sure of his own identity throughout, and cannot, therefore, treat the two fields of his life as if they were sundered by a blind gulf: but still his ultimate consciousness is simply the direct consciousness of the reality of this parallelism between the matter of his thought and the form which thought gives it. And any process of reasoning, therefore, any structure of thought, is only really intelligible to him when it conveys to him something more than it actually says ; when it suggests that of which it offers an image; when it enables him to assume all that it embodies, and reflects, and refashions, and exhibits. And what an immense task has reason undertaken, then, when it attempts the critical portrayal of a spiritual faith I The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 49 A task genu inn, indeed justifiable, fruitful, progres- sive; but yet bow vast, bow complicated, bow delicate ! It has undertaken to offer and present an intellectual parallel tbat will answer and correspond, in all its parts and proportions, to that huge emotional movement which expresses itself in an entire religion. It proposes to carry this whole body of spiritual activity across from one region of life into another, that it may make it intelligible by the very fact of giving it its double, of presenting to it its adequate equivalent. To appre- ciate such a task, we must recall to mind the depth and subtlety of tbat with which its reason has to deal. How can we measure its wonder, its overwhelming profundity ? Let us example it by that other mode, by which we attempt the measure of our emotions, the mode of Art. Art, as well as thought, offers to explain our inner movements of soul by repeating them in a new region, and by the aid of a new material ; and the complexities of the arts, therefore, are but an effort to gauge com- plexities of spirit. A piece of orchestral music, with its web of inter- woven melodies, its mazes of winding sound, its con- course of respondent instruments, its rhythmic sequences, its intricate variety of repetition, its rises and falls and balanced counterparts, its pauses, its refrains, its quad- ruple movements, that meet, and sunder, and return, and retire, its long and linked sweetness, its storm of gathered forces, its full and flowing wealth of multitudinous harmonies, — all this most subtle and powerful fabric of our invention, almost infinite in its manifold appliances, D 50 The Spirit, and its Interpretation. is but the machinery by which we attempt to embody and represent one small portion of that enormous world of spiritual life, which is alive within the range and compass of any single human soul. Not all the utmost elaboration of that marvellous musical skill can go be- yond the limits of those passions which we hold, every one of us, within ourselves; and can use, and exercise, and enjoy, whenever the quickening touch of some sympathetic motion flashes out upon us from within or from without. Not all the tremulous voices of the flutes, not all the swift sighings of the violins, not all the noise of clanging trumpets or of shudder- ing drums, can equal or exhaust the splendour of our daily human joys, the throbbings of our loves, the quick pulsations of our fears, the nerveless sinking of our stricken hearts. The lovers that move on still evenings along the sheltering lanes, the mourners that creep back from a silent grave to a sullen and desolate home, these know more than all that storm of sound will ever say. As we listen to high music, rapt and uplifted, we learn what it is that we ourselves have been, what it is that we have felt, what it is that we could be, if the call came, if the blow struck, if the light broke in, if the darkness swept down. AVe are surprised, it may be, to discover all that is possible. We are carried forward to explore new regions of our souls as yet untouched and untrodden : there is much, we see, to open out, much to free, much to expose and expand : fresh springs of feeling are set loose : the doors and windows of all hidden chambers are flung open : at the kiss of this sweet music, all that had slept in The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 5 1 frozen silence leaps upward into movement, startled by the touch of joy, or the sudden quickening of some tender thrill. We are surprised : yes ! but we are not surpassed, we are not outdone, we are not dismayed or disappointed : still we have it in us, we are assured, to be all that the music can ever tell. That huge and intricate life, whose long story it is imagining, is ours, is shut up within our souls: we have felt it stirring, we recognise it all, we understand. This is why it speaks home to us, speaks with such familiar voices, with such intelligible pathos, with such illuminating eloquence; and far as the musician's ingenuity may ever reach, still all he can ever achieve will but continue to reveal the untold depths, and height, and length, and breadth of those emotions, under whose sway we now are moving, — of those impulses which we ourselves can, even now, in strong and passionate hours, both touch, and taste, and handle. Here, then, in those mazes of musical writings, with all their elaborate and bewildering symbols, their endless intricacy of mechanism, we see some sample of the measurement demanded by the play, and motion, and variation of that spiritual stuff which makes our original and essential life. We might example it again in the familiar instance of a people's literature. How huge is the effort there embodied ! The very grammar itself of each separate tongue is a marvel of ingenious and manifold devices by which every shade of changing significance may find its expression. And yet this is but the beginning. That language, already in its barest grammatical form, 52 TJie Spirit, and its Interpretation. a most intricate structure, is taken up, and turned and twisted this way and that, with a thousand thousand minutely different transpositions, into periods suhtly varied, modulated by ever-shifting intonations, with unwearied persistence, with infinite pains, that at last it may succeed in giving some slight gradation of sentiment which no single expression had yet adequately conveyed. This or that feeling remains hidden and lost, restless and uneasy, until some tiny Transference of phrases, some curious change, indescrib- able and unanticipated, in the sequence of the words, attains victorious utterance through some prophetic lips : we recognise it in an instant. That is what we waited for: that is the^ word : no other but that. A hundred poets had striven to say it, but no one till now could exactly seize what we felt and knew. So delicate are the balances, so minute the scales with which we test our inner life ! And if this is so, if this is true of all that stuff of human passions which music and literature attempt to parallel and measure ; if each separate emotion of the heart be capable of such consummate and minute intricacy of difference, what, then, must be the power, and fulness, and depth of that supreme spiritual movement in which the entire man, gathering up into a single effort all that builds up his humanity, all his aspirations of love, all his passion of desire, all his vehemence of curiosity, all his indignation at wrong, all his desperate horror of remorse, all his bitterness of desolation, all his .hunger for help, all his straining after righteousness, all his inspiration The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 53 of hope, all his terror of death, all his searching of soul, all his agony of sin, all his audacity of faith,; — summoning the whole body of emotional impulses to his succoiir, throws himself forward with indomitable devotion, with unutterable effort, into the arms of God ? This is religion : this is the supreme moment which crowns that strange and secret life which all the powers of art have for so long striven to test, and weigh, and sift, and sort, and distinguish, and arrange. They have spent their strength again and again in giving some echo, some reflection of that gladness which any man and maiden feel when first they know the response of love ; and, lo ! here is a love, dominant and high, under the pressure of which men have cast to the winds all the treasures of that lower human love in which art has found so inexhaustible, so unutterable a theme ! Here is a sorrow which all the pangs and pains of earthly desola- tion do but faintly portray, the sorrow of an eternal love ! Here is a death whose horror and woe the bodily corruption does but seal and confirm ! "Who can tell, then, the immensity of this huge world into which we have entered ? Who can penetrate or number its spaces, its secrecies, its maze of marvellous chambers, its halls, its towers, its ways, and paths, and wander- ings 1 If the lower emotions demanded all that subtle and delicate handling, then the highest emotion will be yet more sensitive than they. It will hold a richer abundance of mysterious charms ; it will repel, far more than they, imperfect and unworthy expres- sions : it will appreciate yet stronger differences and yet more rigorous distinctions. 54 The Spirit, audits Interpretation. Nor is this all. The sum of the difficulty is yet to come. This peculiar sublimation of the entire man, which crowns his emotional and spiritual activity, and which we name religion, wins for itself strange and novel conditions. Here, at the summit of fleshly life, we pass over the fleshly limits ; the whole movement upward, which has tended throughout to surpass itself, to overstep its natural boundaries, to generate fresh motions as fast as it completes them, to reach out after discoveries of wider range and larger meaning than any yet attained — this movement does here, at last, in religion arrive at that transcendence after which it has strained from the first. Here, at last, it does not merely push out feelers into an unknown beyond, but is conscious of a response that meets it from without, of a fulfilment which enters in to answer its efforts, of a correspondence between its inward dreams and its outward experience. For long it has pushed and thrust into the dark ; it has known only the dim stir of flying cries that spoke and flew away. Now there are hands that touch, there are arms that uphold, there is a voice that abides, there are words that greet it with effectual welcome. Powers from afar mix and mingle with its endeavours : an unknown glory dazzles it with sudden consecration : blessings move down from above charged with the grace of abounding consolation. That mystery of the unseen, in all other fields vague and insecure, has now in the region of religion be- come steady, and certain, and persistent. The super- natural has discovered itself, has set loose its forces so long restrained : it puts out its strength and works. The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 5 5 And under this strong working that now interweaves its motion into the intricacy of human efforts, man's impulses receive their transfiguration. They win for themselves solidity, consistency, security. They no longer grope, they touch ; they no longer feel, they grasp ; they no longer waver, they make for their aim, they go forward with glad confidence ; they have found the path which no fowl knoweth ; they pass in within the golden doors ; they are raised from tentative emotions into assured beliefs ; they have transcended their former hesitations, their loose and irregular movements ; they have been shot through by a new fire, the flame of the spirit ; they are uplifted into a faith. Now, for them, that which they report, that which they touch, that with which they hold com- munion, asserts undoubted dominance over all the lesser motives of the heart and of the spirit. It is not made known, except as supreme, alone, victorious, worth more than silver, or rubies, or coral. This is the peculiar significance of a faith. It cannot be held as one emotion among many. It leaps into some strange solitude of power. It lays triumphant and masterful pressure upon the swarming desires, upon the struggling will. Its strangeness lies in this mastery : it is not significant, if it is not imperious. Yet, whence comes this royal rigour, unless we may assume the entry in upon the scenery of human wishes of that mysterious Power, invisible, eternal, of whose action we have just spoken — that action which breaks in from some world beyond upon the drama of our passions and our prayers ? This is religion. It is the crowning and transcendent 56 The Spirit, and its Interpretation. movement which reason undertakes to rationalize, and rightly undertakes. It is not the right that we are questioning. If religion is the ^expression, the act of the entire man, and not merely of some peculiar and isolated organ in his being, it is inevitable that reason, which is part and parcel of that wholeness which is the man, should have its say about that action in which it itself, in its corporate capacity, as bound up with the unity of spirit, has already borne its share. It is in- evitable ; it cannot be excluded from that which is its i to. Who, indeed, would desire its exclusion ? Such office of rational interpretation is thought's highest and noblest labour, without which the spiritual movements themselves would work in oppressive and discouraging darkness, without freedom, without joy. They would miss their natural fruit, the blessed fruit of intelligent self-discovery ; they would lack their true and perfect development. Nay, it is just because the entire activity of faith is so eminently and intimately related to reason that the difficulty of which I speak is»so pressing. For it is not from outside or incidentally that thought touches the works of faith : it penetrates the whole mass : it is woven into the fabric itself : it is inherent in the struc- ture, in the constitution, in the material. Its office is to disclose this, its pre-existent presence ; to unfold its secret prevalence, that prevalence in virtue of which it finds itself now enabled to bring forward, to estimate, to manipulate, to define the whole articulated scheme, allotting the due balance, the fit proportion of part to part, of part to whole, rendering account of the distinc- The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 5 7 tions, distributing tiie gradations of force, justifying the fluctuations, and changes, and advances of the spiritual momentum. This is its labour ; and no wonder, then, that such a work can only be attempted with success by those whose reason has, at least once, enjoyed a living and energetic contact with that which it proposes to unravel. No wonder, perhaps, if it should be found impossible to ensure positive advance, unless this contact be still preserved fresh, and effective, and inspiring. For can it be believed that thought can afford to permit this fortifying, interpretative touch to become a fading memory, already past and gone ? Can it work securely on the basis of an inspiration which has already, for it, ceased to be justifiable, and therefore rational ? Even if it can recall something of its lost emotion, yet the very fact that that emotion is now an impossibility turns all its niceties of difference into empty and frivolous distinctions: the edge is taken nil its subtle varieties of flavour: they no longer possess this ancient significance. Can we ever efficiently recall them, any more than we can requicken into actual revival the quiver and sting of any other vivid sensation long dead and gone ? Surely they slumber in remembrance, they touch us with the unreal doubtfulness of dreams ; and yet it is in their vividness, their sharpness, their unmistakable effect, that their rationality lies. They are susceptible of intelligible distinctions — these spiritual sensations — only because they are so sensitively differ- ent, only when they are experimentally distinct. And if it be hard to recall the varied impress of these 58 The Spirit, and its Interpretation. abandoned spiritual emotions, how much harder yet to recover and revive that which can never be again ; that peculiar emphasis which raised them from a feeling into a faith ; that touch of mastery, of supremacy, which gave them a dominance such as no other emotions con- veyed or contained ; that prophetic power which turned them from passing impressions into permanent symbols, into secure revelations, into sacramental moments such as seal us to themselves, moments not possessed but possessing, not our own but come from afar, not acci- dental but of eternal validity ? Does this mean that no religious criticism is possible except to those in full belief ? Who would venture to assert what facts would so obviously gainsay ? We are far too mindful of all the brilliant and suggestive gains won out of the critical struggles of the last fifty years to make such a limita- tion possible to us. The movements of the human spirit are indeed too complicated and varied to be covered adequately by any one rule, or formula: or, again, a principle may be valid, a formula absolute, and yet the traces of its working may lie hidden amid all the manifold intricacies of the material with which it deals, and often it will appear to be contradicted as a law by the very effects it produces. The lights, for instance, that in our time come flashing in upon the Christian problem, from a hundred opposing points, may be but witnesses that the very intensity of partial and one-sided belief may enable it to penetrate more deeply into this or that recess of the faith, and to drag out the intimate secrets there lurking into clearer The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 59 intelligibility tlian had ever been possible to a more balanced and entire belief. So, again, there are differences in the degree in which the presence of faith will affect the various fields of study. The examination of the documents, of their origin, of their production, differs widely from the eluci- dation of dogma, as every one would admit. It is more difficult to detect, what I would especially notice this morning, how widely the historical criticism of a religion depends for its results on the spiritual temper, on the spiritual apprehension of the critic. Yet his estimate of what is probable, of what is possible in the past, his calculation of motives, of forces, his interpreta- tion of conduct, must all turn on his capacity of vivid and experimental insight into the nature of those Presences and Powers, whose effects he is measuring, and whose significance he professes to declare. It is at once rational and inevitable that a difference of belief as to the character of the forces engaged in the making of human history should involve our distrust of any historian, between whom and ourselves such difference lies : it is natural that any emphatic difference of the kind should issue in a collision of interpretations : and it is rational and inevitable, therefore, that, without presuming to limit the right of others to jud_;e and weigh the story of the Past after their own mode and by their own standards, a Church which has a faith about life should yet endeavour to secure for itself a succes- sion of students, who will come to the interpretation of her history with a spirit that is sensitive to all the forces which she believes to have been at work ; a spirit 6o The Spirit, and its Interpretation. that feels and knows as its own the aims and the inspira- tions that, as she believes, have moved men and women in the days that are dead ; a spirit that applies her standards to the motives of conduct, and calculates probabilities according to her estimate of the chances, and weighs out profit and loss by her rule and balance ; a spirit that instinctively hopes what she hopes, trusts what she trusts, ignores what she ignores. " To write the history of a religion a man must have believed it once." Yes ! and if it be needful once, then — if the criticism is ever to be other than fragmentary, if it is ever to be vital, and fruitful, and entire — it cannot but be needful always : for to have lost the belief is, as the formrua confesses, to have lost the key to its history. It is, surely, only in sad irony, in bitter mistrust, that it is added, " he must have believed it once, but he must believe it no longer." Has belief, then, by its own faithlessness, incurred this taunt against its honesty, its uprightness, its courage ? Has it, indeed, feared to face its own problems with the reality and the singleness of heart which unbelief can bring to their unravelling ? Has its sincerity, then, fallen so low that it cannot be trusted to use an equal scale ? Has it had to appeal to those who have not enjoyed its good chances, nor possess its excellent tools, to assist it in the task for which it alone is adequately equipped ? These are solemn questions for us. They cannot be dismissed by a brave word of frank denial : they arouse in us shameful and humiliating doubts. We ought to have seen for ourselves long ago much that now we are The Spirit, and its Interpretation. 6 1 shown by others' guidance. We ought to have learned to correct our blundering misapprehensions, without having had to undergo such late and painful schooling. It is for us to bow our heads in confession and penitence before a God of truth, a God Who mightily secures us against all those perils which we so dreaded to face, and to ask ourselves, one and all, in the light of His instructing Spirit, what faithless fears we have allowed to hinder us, what mistrust of His power yet corrupts our honesty, what sloth yet blinds our eyes to that new dawn which is smiling in at this hour upon our night of dreams, illuminating our languor, and reproaching our unready sleep. SERMON IV. THE COST OF MOEAL MOVEMENT. " iHlnto Mjomsotbcr mud) is gibrn, oHnm sfjall ucmuch rcquirco : anB to toljom mm fjafac tommittro mucfj, of rjim tljcg will ask tljc more." — St. Luke xii. 48. Lent cannot but enter into this life that we lead at Oxford with the sharp shock pf a surprise. It is a time that asks for strong lines, and downright colours, and clear-cut forms. It supposes that we can mark out our days according to the needs of the moral life: that we know undoubtingly what good is, and what evil is ; what we aim at, and what we lack : that we can define our habits, and can set to work at shaping our tone and temper by a rigid canon and with decisive tests. It assumes, above all, that there will be already in us such a fervent desire for holiness, such a horror at the corruption of sin, that we shall be ready by a certain hour, at a certain day, to give especial emphasis to our search for the one, to our strife against the other. So Lent thrusts itself in, rough and abrupt, and how does it find us ? It finds us mingled together, Christian and unchristian, good and bad, sinner and saint, all engaged in the same work, fashioned in the same mould, moving amid the same interests, mixing in the same crowd, clothed in the same garb, sensitive to the same The Cost of Moral Movement. 63 feelings, talking the same talk. Nor does this outward appearance belie the inward condition of things. We look within ourselves, and still the same confused uni- formity puzzles us with its indistinguishable sameness. Within, as well as without, no sharp dividing lines start out into distinction : no rigid black clashes against as rigid a white : a thousand influences cross, and inter- mingle, and intertwine, and each of them seems to come equally from faith or unbelief, from Christianity or paganism, from good or from evil, from heaven or from hell. We cannot analyze their elements ; we cannot sever their kind ; we cannot fix their origin, cannot tell, with any precision, whence they come, nor whither they go : they meet, and move, and part again, and reappear in strange shapes and shifting scenes, at one moment greeting us as angels of light, at another we seem to catch sight in them of the devil's leer, and to hear echoes of some sudden shout of demon-laughter. One feeling is fair, yet as we look at it, it dwindles, and withers, and grows old : another strikes in upon us, at first forbidding and uncouth, yet under our very eyes it changes, it stirs with hidden powers, it is transfigured with light and loveliness. Which are we to believe ? Which are we to follow ? Lent puts the knife into our hands ; but what are we to cut out of our lives ? Which is the evil that is to be hacked and hewn ? Which is the good that we must die to preserve ? Nothing comes to supply us with a clear answer. None of us are put to searching proof. It is, for instance, action that forces strong decisions : it is action that sharpens trials, and reveals flaws: it is then that the leak breaks out, 64 The Cost of Moral Movement. that the weak planks start. But we, we are shut out from much action : we are not forced into difficult situations, nor driven to stake all on perplexed issues, nor dared to test all the praotical thoroughness of our convictions. Nor, again, do violent temptations often lay brutal hands upon us. These come to those who have hard work and little satisfaction, to men who find few pleasures at hand, few and meagre interests to absorb them, narrow and mean surroundings, without refresh- ments and without ease. But we are whipped by no such scorpions. We have no such compelling hunger. We have endless vents for excitement; we can spend ourselves in infinite directions; we can feed our emotions ; we can expand our sympathies; we are nursed along softly ; we feast on fat things, on wines of the lees well refined; our sensibilities are not imprisoned or un- regarded ; things about us are full of grace, of gentleness, of fair delight. We may indeed fret amid all this easy wealth, we may waste ourselves in the littleness of dis- content, but such tempers as this do not lead to great and awful sins. There is no flow of unrealized passion to be gathered up behind huge and silent barriers, until the main bulk of our being hurls itself down evil channels in some vast and thunderous outbreak. There is nothing, therefore, to produce any violent and startling difference between man and man, between one act of our own and another: varieties of faith exhibit no bold contrasts in practice. If we have a creed, we seem no better than another : if we have none, we seem no worse. Materialism is not coarse, nor idealism ex- The Cost of Moral Movement. 65 travagant. The common culture which fashions us all ensures to us all the same sensitiveness to ugliness, to absurdity ; and, since violent sin is both absurd" and ugly, we all have a horror against it. We have all of us, too, the same duties towards younger men than our- selves : we are responsible for our example : we are held back, by the necessities of our position, from any peril- ous break with traditional codes, from any offensive affront to principles, or standards that we ourselves do not happen to hold. We live very near each other : our life is in public : it is open to all men to see what we do : we are discussed, criticised, observed, by young and old, by parents and pupils, by authorities and followers, by enemies and friends. We cannot be heedless ; we dare not be secret. Everything conspires to check all that outrages, all that shocks. It is almost impos- sible for any of us to sin hard and broad. And the result is that the lines between good and evil are difficult to seize : they float vaguely in this large atmosphere : they vanish as we try to fix them : they slip from under our hands as we feel after them : subtle, shadowy, impalpable, they come to seem, at last, but light and airy distinctions to which it is hard not to be indifferent, and it is into such a dreamy, indis- tinguishable, hazy world as this, that Lent abruptly thrusts its rigid and imperative demand. It does not politely refrain from introducing itself into such an ordered and gentle place. Still it presses in: still it seems to be confident of work to be done : still it talks hard words, and lays down rules of austere defiance. Sackcloth and ashes, fasting and contrition, penance E 66 The Cost of Moral Movement. and judgment, God and devil. These are phrases, it insists, of real meaning to us as to all ; for through us, too, the lines of distinction are in reality being ran, sharp, vivid, decisive as ever. The judgment is sunder- ing good and evil with unwavering sureness. Clear through all this thick and misty air, amid the close and matted trees of the luxuriant garden, the voice of God is forcing its way, resistless as the sound of a trumpet, steadfast as an arrow, piercing as a two-edged sword. We cannot escape it: we know this too well. Forget it as we will, conceal it as we may, there is, we dimly feel, a trespass in our tent, there is sin in our clothes : somewhere, hid in the earth, in the secret places of our lives, there lies buried some goodly Babylonish gar- ment, some wedge of Canaanite gold. It is little, it is nothing, it is unperceived, it is hardly worth noticing. We ourselves do not understand or recognise its shame, its corrupting influence ; yet the eternal issues of right and wrong are working themselves out upon it, are involved in it. To us, too, as surely as to the drunkard or the adulterer, the charge is made, " There is an accursed thing in the midst of thee, 0 Israel \" " Thou canst not stand before thine enemies, except ye destroy the accursed thing from among you." How can we discover our curse ? How can we rend this veil which hides our sins from us ? The very means and instrument of our confusion are surely the means and instrument of our escape. This culture, this intellect, this power of subtle analysis which can break up so much in that present life before us, that once stood out rough and distinct, The Cost of Moral Movement. 67 can also, by extending our vision far beyond this presen^ exhibit the immense and awful import of those minute differences in thought and act which it has reduced to such slight and momentary bulk. It can recover for us in the gross that solid evidence, that sure footing, which it seemed to dissipate in the particular. It can carry us down long centuries of history, it can move us freely up and down huge layers of social life, and there can manifest, " writ large," the steady laws that are ener- gizing within our small and fragmentary existence. Here, in history, it offers us a canon by which, at least, to estimate the reality and force of that which we are required to do. It may not answer all our questions of what is to be done ; but, at least, it will measure for us what has been the nature and extent of the task which is laid on us, as it once lay on our forefathers. What standard, then, does the scientific study of history reveal by which we may have our eyes opened to the intensity and the reality of the eternal judgment that is being enacted now in the moral 9phere of our daily life ? Let us consider the change, the progress with which we are concerned, in which we are bearing our part, i.e. the spiritual advance of the human race. What is this change ? How has it been accomplished ? Placed individually in the presence of the uncivilized man, and comparing ourselves with him, we find the same vagueness often creeping over us, the same timid uncer- tainty, when we attempt to compare ourselves with other men in Oxford. He is shrewd, shrewder perhaps than we are ; he is dignified, polite often, eloquent perhaps, loyal, 68 The Cost of Moral Movement. with a noble simplicity, with a quick and high imagina- tion. We are staggered, we wonder for a moment where all the difference lies; and indeed it is hard to tell, until we place this savage within the circle of conditions which we call civilization. Then there suddenly reveals itself a tremendous lack. That which we carry easily and unconcernedly as the air in which we move is to him a frightful nightmare, an impossible, an unintel- ligible burden. The self-restraint, the steady control, the unfailing purpose, the large and delicate discern- ment, which we exercise almost without an effort, and by which we manipulate our forces and maintain our course, are out of his range, are beyond his faculties. They are to him mysterious powers, before whose presence he is instinctively prepared to bow. Something there is which a white man holds in hand and wields ; something which is not cleverness, nor force, nor courage, for all these he himself possesses ; but which, whatever it be, fascinates him, subdues him, commands him. This power it is which enables the white man to deal with the infinite complexity of a complete society with ease and assurance, while the savage, in the face of the same social circum- stance, loses his head, loses his will, loses his self-control. He cannot fix his aims, cannot bend his energies, cannot retain his steadiness. He becomes the careless prey of all the shifting and unruly impulses which the stern discipline of his primitive necessities had kept under and mastered. His simplicity breaks up ; his vigour dies down ; his dignity and self-respect sink back into effete- ness. If he would save himself from becoming the prey of a vile sloth, or of viler vices, he must fly far from The Cost of Moral Movement. 69 this bewildering chaos, which confuses, and baffles, and paralyzes, and terrifies him. And not only when intro- duced into our ordinary life does the savage reveal his diflerence from us ; when we look at his own ways and manners the same shock meets us. This very man, who, at first sight, seemed so like ourselves, so intelligent, so tender, so noble-minded, shows himself suddenly capable of brutal cruelties, which he can laugh at and chuckle over, while our very blood turns cold with unspeakable horror. He can allow and enjoy customs, low, foul, loathsome with filth and impurity. There are frightful possibilities of rage, of barbarity, of reckless, extravagant evil, lying latent there within him. He may at any moment break loose from all restraints ; at any moment he may be whirled by his passion far out of the ken of our ex- pectations. Or again, as we look still closer into him, a strange incapacity to keep at a fixed level begins to show itself. He cannot sustain himself up to the rigour of the demands which we think natural between man and man : he is false, he fails to keep his purpose : he drops back so swiftly from that standard up to which our presence had drawn him : he is unsteady, we cannot count on him : the movement within him is too restless and fitful : and, moreover, below its changing surface, there is a deep-seated content which we are powerless to stir, a coutent which keeps his life down at the same dead level through all the dragging centuries without any perma- nent aspiration, without any laborious curiosity, without growth, or change, or novelty, or hope of better things, or sense of " stepping westward." There is then a gap between us and him — a gap not caused by any vital differ- 70 The Cost of Moral Movement. ence of faculties, for his whole nature corresponds so closely to ours that it is difficult to detect at first any disunion; but rather a gap made evident by some difference in capacity to put those faculties to full use, by some lack of scope and extension in their exercise, by a lack of resolution, of solid insistence, of steady grasp, of unswerving will, a lack, that is, of all the qunlities that could deal successfully with a formal and civilized society. It is in all this that the change is felt : it is here that the advance is made evident : and history is our record of the i'orces which it has taken to work that change, of the effort which that advance has cost. Those forces have been terrific, that effort has been supreme. The record points us back, beyond itself, to periods whose meaning we may read in the primitive people of to-day : periods in which the ever-shifting, yet ever-unchanging populations of the nameless days first felt the strong action of the forces that were to fashion them anew, under the hand, we would believe, of some remorseless power such as we see now sweeping men together into some rough and ready system of order in Dahomey or Ashantee. Tt is might in its most murder- ous aspect : yet, at least, it arrests that unresting move- ment under which the endless generations of savage life gathered, and grouped, and parted asunder, without purpose and without issue, as clouds of driving sp^d that rise and fall in empty uncertitnde under the barren breath of desert winds. Bound up with this earliest pressure, there is slaughter, there are often fiendish rites of bloody sacrifice ; but there is also solidity, and there is something of aspiration. The advance has begun. The Cost of Moral Movement. 71 We know not how many such efforts may have arisen, and then died away in failure, before the might of some prevailing conquests has succeeded in securing a perma- nence. Only dim hints and glimpses are left us of all the loug and unrecorded strife by which, through slow and patient struggles, man disentangled himself from the necessities of the mere hunt for food, and found strength to spare for the larger issues, in which lay the beginnings of a formal society. We can but guess at the pangs of those huge births which set vast hordes of men moving with something of compactness, something of fixed intent, across our earth from out of the dark heart of the mysterious East. Only we are sure that such immense impulses can never have been begun or fulfilled without throes and agonies, without slaughter and misery, without hunger and tears ; and when, at last, their wanderings found a goal, and they succeeded in attaining to what we should recognise as a civilization, how unutterably awful were their swift and terrible failures ! Again and again mankind appears to have attained to social power, to city life, to wealth, to ease, and then to have broken down miserably, helplessly under the strain : the feat was still beyond the measure of his powers, he could not sustain the needful, the imperative self-mastery : he sank, exhausted by his own exertions, into deplorable weakness, he drained away his strength under the sapping fever of maddening vices, he relapsed into a hideous and sickening corruption. One such failure of man's earliest efforts, it may be, is revealed to us, below layer after layer of the alter lives that rose up upon its ashes, in the burnt and 72 The Cost of Moral Movement. wasted citadel of Troy; and another lies hidden, we know, under the dreary darkness of the Dead Sea waters, while yet another had to perish, root and branch, under the unsparing sword of Israel that hewed its hosts to pieces, hip and thigh, at the going down to Bethhoron, and by the waters of Meroin ; for God had looked down and seen that the wickedness of man was very great ; and the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah fire from the Lord out of heaven ; and Abraham rose early on that morning on which Lot hasted for his life into Zoar, and behold the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. So enormous, so terrible was the cost that had to be paid before the effort after an ordered life could attain a steady foothold and secure the possibility of advance. It was done, at last, in the realization of those gigantic empires — Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian — in which the far-seeing prophets of Israel recognised the elements at last of a continuous and unceasing historical process — a process which should no longer die down utterly at the ending of each separate attempt, but one which would pass on from one stage to another, unexhausted and unshattered, until it gathered itself into the larger fulfilment, the final and perfected triumph of the empire of God. Yet for the accomplishment and the sustenance of this orderly progress what untiring struggles, what dauntless energy, what infinite love ! It is appalling merely to let the imagination faintly recollect the multitudinous hosts that sweep hither and thither in endless battles across the scenes of those old stories, the fragments of which we find scattered up and The Cost of Moral Movement. 73 down the pages of our Old Testament; stories in which all the slaughters and destructions of Jerusalem must have formed but brief samples of the work that was continually proceeding ; stories whose frightful vast- ness still astounds us, as it reflects its terror in the long lines carved or drawn on the memorial palaces of Nineveh and Babylon. Line upon line of soldiers marching in eternal wars; line upon line of captains pointing ever forward from their advancing chariots to new scenes of carnage ; line upon line of captives — men, women, and children — dragged weeping in chains from home to desolate exile ; line upon line of tortured prisoners, of massacred populations, of sacked cities, of bloody and remorseless victories. There, written in letters that burn, we read the awful record of the Titanic forces which built up those empires, out of which our own civilization first established its foundations, first achieved its solidity. I need not recall all the misery and the pain, the tumult and the shouting, the blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke that had to accompany the uplifting of all this old-world life into the purer and freer air of Greek and Eoman civilization. The step up which the human spirit then mounted was not won, we know well, without the payment of its full price ; and still the debt was uncan- celled. Still, long after the Caesars had ceased from their labour, the framework of Eoman law, so slowly and painfully reared, trembled and tottered, threatening again and again some disastrous collapse. Still it was only sustained against assault by dint of sonic strenuous effort which mastered the assaulting power, and subdued 74 The Cost of Moral Movement. it to the higher service, at the risk of fearful loss, and with a daring disregard of all that it might cost. I can hut bint at a few instances. It is with a burden of buruiliating disgust that we can venture to remember the unspeakable brutalities, the sickening tortures, that crowd the annals of the Middle Ages, and bear witness to the severity of the struggle by which the savagery that found a vantage for itself in Teuton feudalism had to be tamed into conformity with the needs of fixed justice and the demands of the moral code. Or again, there are dark passages of history in which we dimly perceive through the darkness the martyrdom of those nameless thousands, who, amid the chaos of the Renaissance, first asserted the protest of the peasant against his dreary and forlorn exclusion from those circles of public right and social life. Once more, we our- selves have known, have almost tasted, the bitterness of the fight by which the cruel pride and careless indifference of dominant classes have been broken and avenged, and by which the large freedom and massive movements of an entire humanity have become at last actual possibilities, definite factors of society, real elements in our spiritual growth. And even at this very hour 1 the removal of deaden- ing and unassisting matter from our civilized life, the introduction of new and capable material, the extension of the sovereignty of social and moral right over a fresh area, can only be accomplished at the old cost and with still unslackened efforts, by the thunder of battle, by the sweat, and the blood, and the wounds, 1 1878. The Cost of Moral Movement. 75 by the weeping, the hunger, the despair of the widow, and the orphan, and the destitute. Such are the forces, such the deeds, which, while attesting and measuring the burden of our sin, do also attest and measure that pressure and strain which the Word of the Lord has brought to bear upon the spirit of man, driving, compelling, uplifting him to stronger action, to quicker motion, to wider command. And within, the upward stirring of the soul to meet and grapple with the force that bore down upon him from without, has been not less vigorous and not less intense. Continuously, unweariedly, uiiflaggingly, the energies of the inward man have pressed forward, have strained, and battled, and striven, and so alone have kept themselves level with their work, have won their way to the requisite expansion and power. They have made their effort in- a thousand strange and fantastic forms ; but still the effort was made, and by that effort the day was saved. That upward effort we encounter at its first start, in the mad excitement of devil-dancing, in the phrenzy of Shamanism. We shudder at its sterner passion in the Eed Indian medicine-man, who can hang by ropes fastened through his flesh from sunrise to sunset, with his eyes ever fixed on the moving glory of the sunlight, that by this masterful exhibition of the spirit's strength he may win control over the minds of his fellows. In all this the soul is alive and stirring. It is testing itself, stretching its wings, feeling after an increase of power, breaking down the barriers that hinder and cramp its freer action. We find its handiwork, its method, again 76 The Cost of Moral Movement. in finer and steadier form in the austere disciplines of India ; in the marvellous endurance and relentless audacity with which the fakir can give his body over to unceasing pain, to unutterable torture. In that torn llesh and wasted frame we surely have no doubtful evidence of the fury with which the spirit of man beats against the bars of its prison, of the intensity with which it pushes its claims for a larger field, for a fuller vision. Higher still, and not less vigorous has the effort become, in the nobler passion, the des- perate self-sacrifice of Sakya-Mouni. The standard of heroic devotion is fast rising. Buddhism has carried it forward, has set it high. The spirit begins to under- stand the full significance of its work : its ideal has begun to disentangle itself from its early grotesqueness : it has gained shape, and charity, and truth. Yet the clearness of the issue does not diminish the struggle, and the pains of attaining it ; the cost is sharp and severe as ever. We have but to turn to the language of those who knew clearest of all ancient peoples the direction of man's upward movement, in order to esti- mate the hard and painful strife through which alone the higher spirit forces its advance. There, from the Jews, we learn that the tortures of the flesh with which w T e began the tale of man's aspirations have not ceased their rigour by their passage upward into the regions of the soul. The scorn, and hatred, and shame through which man's rising effort after holiness has to burst its way, are not less bitter than the wildest bodily agonies with which they mingle their assaults. " I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out The Cost of Moral Movement. 77 of joint : my heart is like melting wax." " My strength is dried up like a potsherd ; my tongue cleaveth to my gums : I am brought into the dust of death." " The waters are come in, even unto my soul. I stick fast in the deep mire : I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me. I am weary of crying ; my throat is dry : my sight faileth me for waiting so long upon my God." " Thy rebuke hath broken my heart ; I am full of heavi- ness: I looked for some to have pity on me, but there was no man, neither found I any to comfort me." " There is no health in my flesh, neither is there any rest in my bones." " My wounds stink, and are corrupt." "My loins are filled with a sore disease: there is no whole part in my body. I am feeble and sore smitten : I have roared for the very disquietness of my heart." " My heart panteth, my strength faileth me : the sight of mine eyes is gone from me." Such are the voices sounding through the storms of the long centuries behind us, telling of the torments and of the pangs under the sharpness of which man's soul has been quickened into a diviner sense of the worth of righteousness, and under the discipline of which he has mastered, with a fuller consciousness, the power of that image of God that lives and is astir within his beincr. And still, as the standard of spiritual life rises, it raises with it the measure of intensity by which man's soul must press forward to fulfil it. The uplifted cross towards which all men are drawn with an infinite pas- sion of desire has not lowered,_but heightened, the rigour of the strain, the austerity of the struggle. It is now no longer, a wonder or a puzzle, but it is the very mark 78 The Cost of Moral Movement. of a chief Apostle of Righteousness that " he should be a fool, be weak, be despised; that he should hunger and thirst, and be naked and buffeted, and have no certain home : be reviled, persecuted, defamed, the filth of the world, the off-scouring of all things : troubled, distressed, perplexed, cast down, always bearing in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus : in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonment, in tumults, in labours, in watchings, in fastings, as dying, as chastened, as sorrowful, as having nothing." This is the discipline through which they pass, who fully know the meaning of God's secrets : through this they perfect the new creature. Nor has humanity been false to the standard given in Christ and realized in St. Paul. From that hour to this, its devotion has been set in this high key ; its morality has clung to this uplifted aim. This en- thusiasm for righteousness it was, this burning horror of evil, \\h : ch threw Augustine down xmder the fig-tree in the Lombard garden, when he " gave the rein to his tears, and the floods of his eyes broke out, God's accept- able sacrifice, and he cried aloud in pitiable cries, How long, 0 Lord, how long ? And he rolled on the ground, and wept in the bitter contrition of his soul." This it was which crowded the cells of Antony, of Bernard, of Francis, and of Dominic ; this which drove the spirit of Bunyan out on its passionate pilgrimage ; this which has moulded the devotions of and inspired the deeds of countless Christian souls. But I do not want to stop and tell what is familiar to you as to me ; only I would insist here in Oxford, on this first Sunday in Lent, by all the memories of the Saints of The Cost of Moral Movement. 79 God, on the immense cost, the appalling severity of the effort which has been spent on lifting man's spiritual faculties from the state of the savage to the condition in which we find them in ourselves to-day. That difference when we stood face to face with him was not so easy to distinguish : only in actions, in dealing with facts, in moving amid the vast detail of an ordered civilization, we found a lack of grasp in him, a lack of moral steadiness, a lack of delicate spiritual perception. This grasp, this steadiness, this delicate perception is what we instinc- tively possess, and we have won it at the cost of all the struggle that I have described. We are the result, the fruit of all this weary toil, this tremendous strain, this age-long conflic^. Through wars without, through tumults within, the deed has been done, and the fight has been fought. Still humanity has pressed forward, through the smoke, the ruin, the disaster, tern, scarred, battered, and bloodstained; and small and meagre as the prize of victory seems to us, it is one that we have no choice but to accept as worth all the cost. We have no choice, for to that humanity we already belong, body and soul. That struggle has made us what we are ; that pressure is behind us ; that strain has drawn us to where we now stand ; that fiery discipline, that passion for right, those desperate aspirations, have moulded and fashioned our souls. They are all still alive without and within us : in them we are carried along ; on them we are up- - lifted ; by them our whole being is fostered and fed. They have passed into our very blood; they have pene- trated our every fibre and nerve ; they are the very stuff So The Cost of Moral Movement. of our lives. And since it is the moral necessity of our being that we should raise into conscious realization the force to whose secret working we owe our creation and sustenance, it is therefore our imperative duty that we should enter with a full and thorough will into the lists of this hard fighting. We may not stand outside; we may not be content to run the eyes of our intel- ligence over the episodes of this battle, and mark down its critical moments, and analyze its issues ; for that battle is ours : its issues are even now astir in our veins : we are ourselves implicated in the agonies of its crisis. Not alone, then, may the intelligence scan the field, but the will must bow down, and enter into the terror and the tumult of the onset. Are we alone in Oxford to be free from the labour and the pain of that spiritual upheaval by which the world has moved for- ward ? May we sit here in comfortable ease, and suck dry the fruits of a well-ordered life, which the desperate conflicts of a thousand generations have won for us ? Surely the water of those clear and delicate habits which seem to us so natural and so facile is " the blood of men that went in jeopardy of their lives " long ago, and we may not lightly slake our thirst with it. Surely on us, too, as literally, as severely as on the millions who toil and struggle against the blackness of evil things in our dark and cruel cities, the shadow of the primal curse has fallen, " In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." SERMON V. CHRIST, THE JUSTIFICATION OF A SUFFER- ING WORLD. " leaning maDc fcnohrn unto us ttjc mustrrg of Itjis bill, accorbing lo |t?is gooU pleasure baljtcfj ?f)c rjath. purposro in Jtjimsrlf: tijat in tijc Dispensation of tfjc fulnrss of timrs lt?c migljt gatljcr togctljrv in one all tfjings in liErjrist. En tiiSiljom also toe fjauc obtained an inheritance." — Eph. i. 9-1 1, Such words as these of St. Paul spring out of that first bewilderment of joy which belongs to the sense of discovery. Christ is still a newly discovered wonder, and the wonder of the newness stiR fascinates, still overwhelms. The secret of God has broken out of the silence of the eternal counsels, swift, sudden, and unforeseen. The night has fled away as a dream, the sun has leapt at a bound into high heaven : the mystery kept hidden from the foundation of the world has in the twinkling of an eye been made known, and behold all things are become new. The eyes, so long sad with blindness, are, even in a moment, gazing on the things into which angels have desired to look, the things which prophets and kings have for age after age longed to see and have not seen. To us all it is so different, to us all this new joy of the discovery is so strange, so unfelt. We have grown up all our lives in the very midst of the revealed r 82 Christ, the Justification counsel : it lias been familiar to us as air, and sky, and trees : we have breathed it, fed on it, drunk of it, con- sciously or unconsciously, every year, and day, and hour : we have belonged to it from our mother's womb. We have never known what it is to live outside it or with- out it. The Christian interpretation of life has inter- twined itself with our very lives. Our thoughts, our feelings, our very senses have long been moulded by it. Grace is our nature, and this naturalness of grace becomes often itself an argument against grace. We seem so easily, so naturally what we are, that we can- not recognise the immense effort that it has required to make us what we have become ; and when once we have lost sight of the need of this effort, we have lost the cue to all the counsels of God. We can see no need for this laborious machinery ; no significance in these elaborate dogmas ; the whole scheme of redemption seems useless, unnecessary, too big for its work, un- naturally extravagant: and at last the birth of a God- Man appears to us an immense call upon our faith, with but little meaning to our experience ; it seems to have but little relation to fact, to reality, and so at last the question begins to creep forward, why this enor- mous strain upon our reason, in order to accomplish so little result ? It is a mere dogma, a scheme that hangs in the air ; it has no foothold. So we suspect, so perhaps we begin to say to ourselves, or even, some of us, aloud to others ; and therefore it is most necessary at Christmas time, especially now 1 that the first hearty enjoyment of the happy season is passing, to reflect 1 Sunday after Christmas. of a Suffering World. 83 seriously and with pains on the long labour of the> centuries behind us, on the inconceivable effort which it has cost to make our life what it is. For only if we realize this labour and effort, can we estimate the reality or the amount of forces required for the task ; and only when we have clone something to measure the forces required, can we learn what the Incarnation has accom- plished, or make God's scheme intelligible. What, then, is the mystery of God's will in gathering together all in one in Christ ? Why was the Incarna- tion the true and only secret, the fit and only instru- ment ? What did it actually do ? Why was it such an immense relief to St. Paul ? Let me take it very broadly. What is the primary plan of God, as we see it in Nature ? For this is the plan that Christ came to fulfil. Science tells us it in language that astounds us by its consistency with what we look for. Science takes to pieces this fresh, fair world of ordered and harmonious life, which floods us with the rich splendour of its beauty ; it breaks it up, it leads us through the veil behind the scenes, and there we are stunned and bewildered as we gaze on the endless, infinite, unceasing struggle which sustains the outer frame of things : we look back through countless ages, and listen to the rough roaring of the fiery furnace, out of whose stormy chaos the chilled fragments of harder matter slowly coalesce : we are told that it is by the gradual dearth of heat that the colder shell of the world grows stiff, by death and decay of its first life of fire that the very shape of the world masses itself into outline and sub- stance : the law of surrender, of self-sacrifice, has already 84 Christ, the Justification begun to work. We are shown a wild chaos of heaving stuffs, cracking, tumbling, rent, shattered, and yet, out of it all, a sweet rhythm of order continually shaping itself, continually becoming stronger and more im- perative, even as valley and river, mountain and sea, part off into distinct and established arrangement. And yet this order is not something alien to the chaotic matter ; not something forced upon it in spite of it, as the old philosophers fancied ; but is itself the residt of the very same forces which make the noise and turmoil of the chaos ; the very principles which dash the particles of our earth together in confusion, also, and at the same moment, sort, and select, and separate them into order. The very law which shrivels the earth's surface into rents, and freezes it into a deadly stiffness, so shrivels and so freezes that the ordained purpose of a habitable world is fulfilled. Such are the features of this first period. We look on and it is the same. For a thousand ages the rains and storms beat down over the desolate hills, the ice grinds and sends them to powder ; and, lo ! the very decay of the hills is itself the law by which broad lands spread and grow deep and rich. Or, again, hidden swarms of living' things in silent seas perish for myriads of genera- tions, and yet the very constancy, the very unchange- ableness of their waste lays the even layers of man's home. It is not that there is one law of death and quite another of life, but that the very principle of death is turned into being the principle of a fuller and richer life. We look on to the animal creation ; still we meet the same awful law of destruction, of endless struggle. of a Suffering World. 85 Strange dragons and monstrous serpents fight, and rend, and devour in dreary marshes, and at last die out un- lamented and forgotten before the advent of a newer and stronger generation. Vast floods sweep over the globe, wiping out its teeming life that another race may enter into the heritage : the whole of earth and sea is full of deadly hunt and of cruel capture, of breathless escape, of haunting fear : fish follows hard after fish, bird flies from bird, beast preys on beast, and yet the very eagerness of the hunt itself works ever new wonders of order and beauty : out of this very whirl of death, still the higher life rises and prevails — rises under the very pressure of the need, prevails by the very necessities of weakness. It is not one law that allows slaughter and another that produces strength : not one law that says, " Devour," and another that says, " Be beautiful ; " but out of the very conditions of the combat arises the fair glory of strength ; the very voice which ordained the decree " Be fruitful and multiply " seems to have said also, " Slay and eat." I do not ask now by what act of evil this law of suffering may have made itself a necessity. I only say that God has con- sented to work out His scheme in it and by it ; and that, if so, then He must have seen and prepared some issue, the worth of which would render all the means used tolerable, intelligible, justifiable. We gaze and wonder at this terrific process of creation ; and if we ask in awe and amazement what is the end of all this, what is the purpose to be achieved, we are told " Many Man is the final achievement in which all this preparation issues. Man is worth 86 Christ, the Jtistification " ' ' S ■ — all this infinite toil, this age-long effort, this endless struggle, this thousand-fold death. He is its justifica- tion : it all is very good since it all rises up into his crowning endowment. We turn to look at man, then, man as this world's fulfilment ; what has he done to be worth it all ? Man offers himself, to our first gaze, as did Nature, robed in the majesty of his gifts, rich in the multi- tudinous array of his powers. He has subdued the earth ; he has reaped its wealth ; he has surrounded himself with a fair garden of fruits and of flowers ; lie has reared large fabrics of law ; he has guided and controlled kingdoms into the sweet and ordered ways of peace ; he has prepared for himself lovely works of grace ; he has won for himself gold, and jewels, and pleasant odours, and all delicious things. He has sent his spirit abroad to sift, and to weigh, and to understand, and to measure, and to describe all sights, and all thoughts, and all imaginations : his handi- work, as did Nature's, forms a wonderful and exquisite vision. But once more the deeper knowledge lifts the veil : we look behind, and here, as before, we see no rest and satisfaction ; here, as before, we discover be- hind the outward result all the fearful and tremendous straining by which alone this order lives. Man has no appearance of being the perfect and complete crown of creation ; nay, rather, he toils and wins his way forward by the same laborious pains as the rest of the animal and vegetable worlds. He, too, slowly, blindly, confusedly, struggles forward towards a goal that he knows not of: by continual effort, through ruinous of a Suffering World. 8? disasters, through scars, and tumult, and fightings, beat- ing his way along against buffeting winds and swallow- ing waves, in sorrow, sickness, and woe unspeakable, he wins by hard degrees the higher life. Indeed, with man the gloom thickens yet deeper : for in him, first, we discover plainly a wilful aggravation of the perils and the pains. He infuses into his life wasteful dis- order ; he spoils and degrades his power of movement ; he struggles, savagely, against the good of his fellows. He creates for himself a history, that tells, in dreary records, of miserable infamies, and bloody shame. This it tells; and it suggests what it cannot tell of the hundred times ten thousand who have fallen in the red carnage of uncounted wars, or have starved pitiably * under freezing skies, or have been swallowed up, after wild thirsting for each other's blood, by lonely and remorseless seas ; and still, shudder as we will at the ghastly story, history compels us to confess that even this long agony has been turned to the higher use : out of it has grown an ordered life; the disobedience itself has been made to do service : out of his weakness man has been made strong. These suffering genera- tions have been controlled by a purpose to which they were blind ; they have served their turn ; they have by their disasters advantaged those who came after. Out of the chaos of struggling and blinding agony, the fair framework of our everyday present lives has reared itself: men have fought, and starved, and miserabiy perished, for ambition, for luxury, for causes dimly guessed, and beliefs that could never be expressed : yet the very shock of their ignorant armies has, in spite of 88 Christ, the Justification itself, established and strengthened the sanctuary of social life. So it has ever been, so it is still. Man has not yet entered into his rest : still the same rule of woe, of poverty, hunger, famine, disease, holds good : still our civilization rests on this vast under-world of terrible ruin : still, alas ! it fails to win its way forward from an evil state to a better, except by the old familiar road of war, — war, with all its terrific slaughter, its wounds, sad cries and groans, its nameless cruelties, its broken hearts, its weeping women, its horrible terror, its helpless, hopeless despair. We close our eyes : we dare not look into the awful nightmare of pain and loss : we cry aloud, " 0 Lord God ! 0 God most merciful, most mighty ! what can it be that is worth all this cost ? What precious thing can it be for which -such a price may well be paid V Many a nation has tried to answer this question. The worst have said, " My happiness is worth it all," and have tried to make the whole scheme serve their expe- diency : their shameless presumption has received its answer in their miserable fall. The nobler have said, " Freedom and law, these are worth it all ; to win them we are content to die." Such people have had their reward ; they have lifted the banner, and men have borne witness to its truth by flocking to greet it : we have all lived by their light, but something still has been wanting : man missed something yet, he was rest- less, he overthrew each system of free law that he had found : for still he hungered, still he dared not say, " Here I may rest, here in this my earthly freedom I am worth the woe of the world." No ; this answer has cf a Suffering World. 89 never wholly satisfied, never has fully justified itself; the bargain is felt to be a bad one, the price paid is extravagant. Man cannot find in himself the worth of all this age-long sacrifice. One nation only kept its head clear, and seized the clue. Its history told it the same tale as other histories : for the Old Testament is no dream of some fancy world that a God of our imagining might have made, but is a real story of this very earth we live in ; and there- fore it, too, told its tale of murder, of floods that destroyed, of generations that went down to the dust of a disastrous death, of cities swept into fearful ruin by fire and brimstone : it told of plagues and weepings, and of slaughter ; of armies engulfed in mighty waters ; of wandering peoples that leave their bones to whiten the dreary wildernesses ; of wicked populations sunk in sin that have to be rooted out and hewn to pieces, man, and woman, and child ; of fallen enemies smitten through the temples by the hammer and the nail ; of adulterous queens trodden under the feet of horses, and devoured by the teeth of dogs ; of kings slain in high places of the field ; of people that fall under pestilence and famine. Such was this nation's history, and yet it never became wholly bewildered : it looked all the terrific story in the face, and still proclaimed that God held its life in His hands, nor had He ever fainted, nor grown weary: through all it pressed forward, until out of the very midst of carnage it slowly raised the ideal that God had planted in its heart, — the temple that God had shown its great leader in the Mount. In all the disasters it saw sin punished, and the right chastened 9 o Christ, the Justification and directed ; and, more than this, it detected and announced that a single purpose of God was slowly being achieved. Nor did it stop even there, but, when it sadly recognised that this achievement was far off from the present generation, nor was to be found by it in a present land of milk and honey, it failed not, but rose to the height of its great argument : it was content to forego it for itself, to lie down and die, if only in the end this purpose should be accomplished in its children's children : it was prepared to live by promise, and not by right, to see the promise afar off : it was enough for it that the fulfilment would come, that all was working towards that which should be, but which it would never see : God would bring something to pass worth all the cost : it would come : for He, the Eternal, could not fail. Enough for them that it should be hereafter, that God in His own good time would bring in His salvation : enough for them this hope, even though their holy kingdom was split into fragments, even though the very fragments were broken in pieces like a potter's vessel, even though the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Greek, the Eoman, swept over their desolated fatherland, and defiled the beauty of their sanctuary. Still, more confidently, more proudly, more defiantly than ever, their prophets proclaimed that the Lord was yet, even in this, working out His salvation, was bringing in His holy day. Yea, let Rachel refrain her voice from weeping, and her eyes from tears, though she gazes on the slaughter of her children in bloody Eamah • for " there is hope in thy end, saith the Lord." of a Suffering World. 9' AVhat hope ? What was this end ? The lines of the Jew's answer are distinct. Wisdom, righteousness, knowledge of God in the heart and in the head of man, this was most certainly the end for which he hoped. This would be the comfort to Jerusalem, this would repay her for all her pangs — " Holiness unto the Lord" — Spiritual Holiness that knows God, and lives in His image. This, if this could be obtained, would be worth all the pains that had been paid. To win this, the Jew would be content to see Jerusalem a heap of stones, and all her pleasant palaces as ruinous heaps : to win this, he could endure to be carried away beyond Babylon, to be an outcast among the people, the off-scouring of the nations. Let him only at last attain to the favour of God, the light of His presence, the delight of His peace, and this would be, indeed, to give him double for all his evil. This would make all the trouble of the captivity but a very little thing. Here, then, is our guiding clue, — the one nation in all the world which discovered a permanent purpose of God in history ; the one nation which succeeded in finding a path through its own disasters, so that its own ruin only threw into still clearer light the principles of God's ordained fulfilment — this unicpue nation pro- nounced that this fulfilment, this justifying purpose, was to be found in holiness of spirit, the union of man with God, Whose image he is. Accept this as man's end, and no destruction appals, no despair overwhelms ; for this is the higher life, which is worth all the deaths that the lower can die ; this is the new birth, which would 92 Christ, the Justification make all the anguish of the travailing he remembered no more. That the Jew was right, experience has made certain ; the historical facts hear their unwavering witness. The Jewish people did live by the power of this faith, through such ruin and peril as no other people have succeeded in conquering or enduring ; and what is more, the books of the prophets are an indisputable proof that the clue which they had discovered grew steadier, * clearer, and stronger, the more bitter and perilous the test. By this testimony of facts, then, they were shown to be in possession of the secret which overcometh the world, the secret which reconciles this carnage with the will of a gracious and merciful God, Who desire th njDt that any should perish. But to know the secret was one thing, to achieve its fulfilment was another. It was good to recognise that all suffering would be worth enduring, if, at last, the righteousness of the law should be revealed in a people in whom the Lord, the Holy One, delighteth ; but where was to be the appearing of the holy people ? Was Israel, the chosen, the beloved, was it able to achieve this fulfilment of all men's labour ? God is ready; is man prepared ? " Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened," cried the prophets to Israel, " but, alas, your iniquities have separated between you and your God; your sins have hid His face from you; your hands are defiled with blood, your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies ; none calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth." So it was. The one possible end — the achievement of a Suffering World. 93 of holiness — was itself become impossible to the only people who recognised it as their end. And the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no judg- ment ; and He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor. " Therefore He Himself put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation upon His head, and was clad with zeal as with a cloak." There, at last, on Christmas Day, in the very midst of the toiling genera- tions, on the blood-stained earth, at the world's darkest hour, with trouble behind and terror before, between the sword of Herod and the iron heel of Rome, amid the oxen that had perished age after age that man might be fed, and the asses that had bowed for centuries to blows and burdens that man might be at ease, in the very flesh that had for so long endured bruises and stripes, the scourge and sword and spear, with the very human soul which had wept and mourned under the chastisement of sin, under the tyranny of the oppressor, a little Babe lay in the stable of an inn, born of a pure Virgin, Himself free from all spot and taint of sin, a beloved Son of the Most High and Holy, Who inhabiteth eternity; a Man after God's own heart ; a Man in whom He is well pleased ; a Man who will love righteousness and hate iniquity as no man has ever had the spirit to love and hate them before ; and Whom therefore God will anoint witli the oil of gladness above. His fellows; and in that anointing of gladness, that Christ of holy joy, all the sorrowful sighing of the poor will at last and for ever lie done away. My brethren, we announce our belief in a great, a 94 Christ, the Justification tremendous fact at Christmas; but is it a little thing that the day demands ? God incarnate in the flesh ! a God-Man ! It is a serious, a perilous dogma to assert ; our faith quails and trembles. But, then, remember what it is which we assert it to fulfil, — nothing less than the justification of a suffering world. We say that we believe in a Divine order ; that life, that history, are to be made rational, made intelligible in Christ ; and not some other life, some other history than what has been ; not some pleasant, easy fairy facts, but such actual life, such actual history, as is, for instance, now being enacted on the frozen hills of Kars, 1 in the butcheries of Bul- garia, in the slaughters that have heaped with the crowded dead the passes of the Balkans and the fields of rievna. We have got to justify dealings such as these that fill the long vista of human history. We have got to supply ourselves with something that is worth all this, worth all the blood that God has left men free to shed ; worth all the tears that God has had to see women weep ; worth all the pain that God has allowed the animal creation to endure ; worth all the process of unceasing sacrifice by which God has per- mitted this earth, with all that is therein, to rescue itself from sin, and rise to the higher life. Is the long roll of toil and anguish to find its rest, its satisfaction in man as he is 1 Can the law of sacri- fice be arrested in him ? Are we, we civilized English- men, worth all this cost ? Can we offer ourselves to this labouring, suffering world as its rational justifica- tion, as God's perfected work ? Can we cry to the of a Suffering World. 95 millions upon millions who have perished in nameless woes, " Eejoice, forget all the pangs of your world long travail ; for I, a man, an educated Englishman, am born into the world ? " Surely, surely, if we measure history carefully and soberly, without Christ there is no rational God; without Christ the whole fabric of the world shatters into ruinous fragments, or stands only as a slaughter-house in which men tear each other down into unavailing misery, into meaningless deaths. But if the Jew was right, and Holiness is worth all the struggle and all the agony, then we, too, to-day, who feel the terrible insufficiency of our own holiness to repay God for all the ruin of the Past; we, who know too bitterly our own utter and foul wickedness, our ugly lusts, our cruel vanities, our pitiful weakness, our horrible selfishness, our greed, our jealousy, our anger, our impatience, our idleness, our malice, our unkindness, our worldliness, our shame and hypocrisy ; we, who an; bowed down under the bondage of horrible sin ; we can leap up into the vast joy of belief which filled the soul of St. Paul, as he saw the mystery of God's purpose accomplished in Christ. The Holiness of God incarnate in the flesh of this labouring humanity, the holy linage of God's perfect righteousness taking upon Himself the whole agony of man, accepting on His shoulders the burden of all this awful woe, resigning His spotless Spirit to the grief of all this bitter desolation, dying the death which justifies all death, in that it turns death itself, by the honourable way of sacrifice, into the instrument of the g6 Christ, the Justification higher inheritance, into the sacrament -of righteous- ness, into the mystery of holiness, into the pledge of perfect peace ; this, and this only, makes a consumma- tion by which the effort of God's creation achieves an end ; this, and this only, is a secret and a victory worthy of the merciful God in Whom we trust. I need not spend many words on the practical appli- cation of this. It is practical enough sometimes just to draw out and study God's Truth ; and if we meditate on it, it will enforce on us its own applications. Only I would implore you to realize that we are saved only by being well-pleasing to God; and we are well-pleasing only if He can recognise in us the fruit and crown of all this long travailing, the satisfaction of all this immense effort of creation ; and that is, the Holiness of Christ. Our salvation, then, is no light, easy task. Alas, for those who think that a prayer or two of their own, and a few good-natured acts of their own genial kindness, will satisfy this terrific demand ! Alas, for those who cannot offer to God at the great 1 lay of Decision a worthy compensation for all the iniquity, all the pain, all the toil that He has been compelled to allow ! Alas, for those who insult the reason of God by dreaming that a decent and delicate idleness will serve to repay the cost of all this laborious patience ! Alas, above all, for those who complain and murmur because the agonies and weariness of a thousand gene- rations have not secured their easy, pleasant days without a loss and without a sorrow, as if the blood and of a Suffering World. 97 tears of millions might well be slied, in order that they themselves might enjoy comfort and ease ! Alas, for those who trifle frivolously and selfishly in the face of those stern, unchanging laws which, in the terrible tumult of living history, display before our eyes the awful character of the crisis in which we stand. We cannot mistake it. The God before Whose Judg- ment Bar we look to appear hereafter is one, Whose Mercy sees it possible to permit all this horror of war and blood, wherewith we fill His earth, if only, at the last, He may attain in us that which He desires. So dear, so precious, to Him is the Hope towards which He toils. What, then, can avail to please Him, on that day, when He counts up the gains of all His long husban- dry ? What can avail if it be not Christ Himself, Christ the Blessed, the Holy, the Beloved, in Whom God is for ever well pleased ? O Jesu, in Whom we all may be made desirable ! 0 Lord, Redeemer and Saviour, Prince of all Holiness and Peace! We have sinned, we have done amiss, we have fallen, we have gone astray, we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under the table of God ! Enter Thou, therefore, into our souls. Possess our spirits with Thy Spirit, our body with Thy Body, our blood with Thy Blood. Feed us with Thyself, Who art perfect Righteousness. Lay hold of us by Thy Grace, Who art the Truth and the Life. Uplift us, mould us, transform us by Thy own power into Thyself, into the image of the Holy and the Eternal. We will shrink from no suffering, we will endure all, in the gS Christ, the Justification of a Sttffering World energy of Thy broken Body and outpoured Blood, if only we may be drawn upward into the Likeness of Thyself, into the Joy of Thy Holiness! Fill us with sorrow, if so only Thou canst fill us with Thyself : for only by abiding in Thee, only by eating Thy Flesh and drinking Thy Blood, only by fastening on the Grace of Thy perfect, holy, and sufficient Oblation, can we hope to pass from Death into Life, and to be raised up at the Last Day from the lowliness of the grave to the Holiness of Heaven ! SERMON Vt. THE SACRIFICE OF INNOCENCE. " (That £ mag 30 unto tf}e altar of ffloo, tbtn unto tije