OF r/?;,V;' 
 
 JUN 24 1910 *j 
 
 BV 4310 .S64 1908 
 
 Speer, Robert E. 1867-1947 
 
 The Master of the heart 
 
The 
 
 JUN 24 1.910 
 
 Master of the Heart 
 
 By 
 ROBERT E. SPEER 
 
 Author of " Missionary Principles and Practices,' 
 '•'The Man Christ Jesus " etc., etc. 
 
 New York Chicago Toro/^o 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Ed.-^nburgh 
 
 y 
 
Copyright, 1908, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 ^ccoND Edition 
 
 New York- 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 ♦-■^ndon: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Ediuburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The chapters of this Httle book are not essays, 
 but addresses. They are not theological or liter- 
 ary, but practical. They were spoken in the first 
 place to the young men and women of the North- 
 field Conferences in the summertimes. They 
 present simply and earnestly some personal 
 aspects of Christian truth. They were reported 
 at the time and are printed here in almost their 
 original colloquial form, in the hope that in 
 some life they may make a larger place for our 
 Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. Their only merit 
 is their effort to exalt Him. 
 
 R. E. S. 
 
 New York. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEH PAGE 
 
 I. Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ 9 
 11. The Believing Heart .... 33 
 
 III. Christ's Appeal to the Doubting 
 
 Heart 56 
 
 IV. The Heart's Response to the Mas- 
 
 ter's Call .... » , *]2 
 
 V. The Inner Circle ..... 93 
 
 VI. Looking Away to Jesus . . .110 
 
 VII. The Unity of Hearts in Christ . 132 
 
 VIII. The Master, the Maker of Strong 
 
 Hearts 151 
 
 IX. The Master's Work for His Fol- 
 lowers ........ 167 
 
 X. The Burning Heart . . . .185 
 
 XL The Master, the Satisfaction of 
 
 the Heart 206 
 
 XII. The Uniqueness of Our Lord and 
 
 Master Jesus Christ . . . 223 
 
I 
 
 OUR LORD AND MASTER, 
 JESUS CHRIST 
 
 ONE of the most beautiful scenes in the 
 Bible is the picture which John draws 
 for us in the twentieth chapter of his Gos- 
 pel, of Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Jesus on 
 Easter morning. John tells us that before it 
 was light she had come to the grave, unable to 
 accustom herself to the loss of her Master. If 
 she could no longer have Him personally with 
 her, she would, at least, be as near as possible to 
 His body. She found the stone taken away, and 
 hastened back to the city to tell the Apostles that 
 the sepulchre was empty. Peter and John at 
 once ran together to the tomb, John, the younger 
 man, outrunning Peter. Not having the courage 
 of the elder man to go into the sepulchre, how- 
 ever, he waited until Peter came up and looked 
 in, and then together they noticed that Jesus' linen 
 clothes were there, but that He was gone. The 
 empty chrysalis of the grave clothes convinced 
 them of the resurrection, and they went away. 
 Mary Magdalene had evidently followed them 
 from the city, but remained at the sepulchre after 
 their departure. John tells us that as she was 
 
10 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 waiting there, she summoned up courage to look 
 in, and saw two angels in white, " one at the head, 
 and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus 
 had lain," and that after these two angels had 
 asked her why she wept, and she had answered, 
 " Because they have taken away my Lord and I 
 know not where they have laid Him," she heard a 
 sound over her shoulder, and turned her face 
 to see who was there. She turned only her face, 
 and, John says, supposed it was the gardener 
 whom she saw. He asked her the same question 
 which the angels had asked, adding, " Whom 
 seekest thou ? " The Lord's thought was of the 
 object of her search, rather than of the cause of 
 her tears. Finding that she failed to recognise 
 Him, and had turned back to the tomb again, 
 He called to her at last by name — " Mary " ; and 
 John says she wheeled about at once, her whole 
 body this time, with the quivering words, "My 
 Master! " I do not think there are many sweeter 
 things in the Gospels than that, or any sweeter 
 words than these which Mary used at the sepul- 
 chre— " My Master." The Gospels show that 
 nowhere in the Gospels did Jesus bid men to 
 call Him " King." He told no one to call Him 
 " the Son of God." He was both. But He did 
 tell them clearly that they did right in calling 
 Him " Master." 
 
 We use the word often nowadays. There is 
 scarcely any word that is so frequently on the 
 lips of earnest students in our schools and 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 11 
 
 colleges in describing Christ as the word " Mas- 
 ter," and perhaps there is scarcely any word that 
 is used so often with inadequate conception of 
 the full content of the personality of Christ. Men 
 speak of *' Christ and other masters." People 
 who do not think of acknowledging that Jesus 
 Christ is their divine Lord and only Saviour, 
 speak of Him as their " Master." It is not a 
 new thing that the word should be used even in 
 the way of thoughtlessness or insincerity or cant. 
 The same word that Mary used Judas also used 
 when he came to Jesus with his kiss — " Hail 
 Master." 
 
 It is right for each of us to use the words, 
 " My Master," but is it right for us to use them 
 without an appreciation of what they mean? 
 Glance back over the past year, and let us see 
 whether, tested by what we have done, Jesus 
 Christ has been our Master. Have we been 
 where we have been solely because we have 
 thought it would please our Master to have us 
 there? Have we regarded Him as in any sense 
 Master over the choice of electives, our relations 
 to men, the reading of books, all tastes and 
 habits of life, the form of business, the choice 
 of friends, the use of money, the expenditure of 
 time ? Or, tested on the touchstone of our plans 
 for the future, is Jesus Christ our Master? Are 
 we planning to do next year what we believe it 
 is His wish for us to do? Have we shaped our 
 ideals and tastes, our thoughts of life, with sole 
 
12 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 reference to the pleasure of the one whom we 
 call our Master? I think if we are honest with 
 our own hearts, no matter which test we use, 
 we shall see that in a very poor sense has Christ 
 been the Master of any one of us. And yet He 
 claims to be. " I," He says, " Your Lord and 
 Master." 
 
 What is covered by this claim of Christ's to 
 perfect sovereignty over us, and by our recogni- 
 tion of His right to the first place in our lives and 
 wills ? It will help us to answer if we take time 
 to think of some of those terms by which the first 
 Christians avowed their recognition of Christ's 
 right to this pre-eminence, especially two sets of 
 titles by which they referred to our Lord in the 
 first years of the Christian Church. First of all, 
 the title of Master, and those other names that are 
 associated with that. There are five different 
 words in the New Testament which are translated 
 master in our English Bibles. The first of them 
 (SiSao-KttAos) means simply teacher. It is the 
 word that was used by the two disciples of John 
 when they left their master, and turned to follow 
 Jesus, and said to him, " Rabbi," which is by in- 
 terpretation "Master, where dwellest thou?" 
 It was the word that Mary used on the resurrec- 
 tion morning. This was the simplest of the titles 
 by which the early Christians recognised the pre- 
 eminence of Jesus Christ. They acknowledged 
 that He was their Master in the sense that they 
 had now entered His school, and that whatever 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER IS 
 
 education they were receiving was an education in 
 which He held the place of pre-eminent teacher. 
 Now, our Lord teaches men still, who call Him 
 " Master " in many ways. There is a powerful 
 educational influence just in His presence. Many 
 times we forget the power of education which 
 there is in personal companionship, not in speech, 
 or in pressed influence only, but in the uncon- 
 scious influence of presence upon the thought and 
 judgment. There are thousands of men who can- 
 not think in their mother's presence of that of 
 which they can think when out of her presence. 
 There is a wrath against sin born in the presence 
 of Christ that cannot be maintained outside His 
 presence. There is love of tenderness, there is a 
 fondness for the likeness of His Father's counte- 
 nance, in the presence of Christ that is not be- 
 gotten where Jesus Christ's presence is not ex- 
 ercising the mastery of education over life. We 
 see this principle in the life of our Lord, in those 
 expressions in the prologue of the Gospel of John, 
 that declare to us that the face of the Word was 
 ever directed towards the face of the Father, Trpos 
 Tov ©eov — not that He was with God only, but that 
 He never looked at anything in itself, but only in 
 the face of God; that He saw this world not 
 in itself, but reflected in the face of God ; that He 
 judged life and all its values not as they ap- 
 peared in themselves, but as He saw them in the 
 face of God. Our Lord thought His thoughts 
 and formed His judgments in the educating pres- 
 
14 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 ence of God. And if He is my Master, He be- 
 gins in my life this process of education by per- 
 sonal influence; He makes me loathe or love 
 those things that I would not loathe or love if I 
 did not make Him my pre-eminent teacher in 
 this regard and feel always as I would feel with 
 Him. 
 
 The Apostles constantly appeal to this truth 
 when they hold before the eyes of the early 
 Christians the prospect of Christ's second com- 
 ing, and exhort them by the hope of His coming 
 to greater purity and strength of life. Why? 
 They appealed to them to cherish certain judg- 
 ments because, if Christ were there, they would 
 cherish those judgments; they appealed to them 
 to lead certain lives, because in Christ's presence 
 they would not be satisfied with any other kind 
 of life. " And now, little children, abide in Him, 
 that when He shall appear, we may have confi- 
 dence and not be ashamed before Him at His 
 coming.'* 
 
 But if Christ is my Master in any real and 
 complete sense He will be teaching me in other 
 ways than by this general educational influence 
 of His presence. Think of His masterful teach- 
 ing in the matter of prayer, in the matter of 
 service, in the matter of humility! Who ever 
 entered His school who was not taught lessons 
 in service and humility and prayer that none 
 but the Master could teach? Or think how He 
 sets Himself to be the lesson that we are to learn. 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 15 
 
 I like the way in which, after so constantly put- 
 ting things indirectly, the New Testament rises 
 with dauntless directness and says we are 
 not to feed only upon the influence of Jesus; 
 we are to feed upon Jesus. We are not alone to 
 live by the words of God that come out of His 
 mouth, we are to eat the flesh and drink the 
 blood of Christ. And so we are not only to 
 sit in our Master's school and have His influence 
 work upon our judgments in its mighty trans- 
 forming power, not alone to sit in His school 
 and be taught lessons of prayer and humility 
 and service — we are to set Him before us and 
 learn Him. " Ye have not so learned Christ," 
 said Paul in one of his choice expressions. 
 And Simon Peter conveys the same idea by 
 the phrase in which he describes Jesus by 
 the same term that was used to describe the copy 
 that a schoolmaster wrote at the head of the 
 wax tablet for his pupils, an iTnypdfXfjirj that they 
 should reproduce, " Follow in His steps." If 
 Jesus Christ is our Master — not in any perfunc- 
 tory sense, not in the sense in which we speak 
 of other masters — if He is our Master really and 
 sincerely and vitally, then you and I are pupils in 
 His school, and all our judgments take form from 
 His influence. We ourselves are little children 
 learning the lessons that He sets for us. Yes, 
 we are the little children who learn the lesson 
 that He Himself is. 
 
 The second word for " Master " occurs only 
 
16 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 once, and then in the Gospel of Matthew towards 
 the close of the Gospel, where Jesus says to His 
 disciples, " Have not many masters, for One is 
 your Master, even Christ, and all ye are breth- 
 ren." Ka$rjyr)Tr]<s is the Greek word, and it means, 
 literally, " leader," the man who goes before, after 
 whom the disciples go. It was a more pertinent 
 word, perhaps, in those early days when schools 
 moved about and walked after their teachers, 
 their pedagogues, but it is a pertinent word even 
 still. If Jesus Christ is my Master I set Him 
 before my eyes and give Him pre-eminence as the 
 leader of my life, and all that I am and do must 
 take shape for the path in which He leads me. 
 The very natures that He has given us demand 
 such a Master as Jesus Christ in just this regard. 
 No human life can get along without some kind 
 of a master of this sort. We make them for 
 ourselves out of our friends, we make them out 
 of dead heroes, or we find him in Jesus Christ, 
 our Master Leader, Himself. He sets for us the 
 example of our life, so that we deem those things 
 despicable which He deemed despicable, those 
 things loathsome which He despised, and only 
 those things beautiful and holy which lay close 
 and warm upon His heart. 
 
 Is Christ our Master, in this sense of setting 
 us as leader an obligatory example? We look 
 at His example, and the first thing that impresses 
 us is the breadth of His spirit. Probably the 
 influence of most of us is not felt beyond twentjr 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 17 
 
 or thirty souls. Christ's influence was unre- 
 strained and illimitable. They once tried to con- 
 fine Him to the city of Capernaum, where He had 
 had great success ; where people were willing to 
 give Him everything He needed. His disciples 
 suggested that they should localise their work 
 there. It was a rational course which they pro- 
 posed, but the breadth of His spirit would never 
 allow Him to stay within the borders of a single 
 village. He broke such bands asunder as Sam- 
 son had broken his in the days of his strength, 
 to let His love and effort go out widely, to all 
 the cities and villages of His country, and to 
 those other sheep who were not of that Jewish 
 fold. He spoke not of any one community or na- 
 tion, but of the world as His field. He told His 
 disciples He had a message which was intended 
 for the whole earth. If Christ is our guide, in 
 the sense that we are to follow Him, to possess 
 the same traits of character that marked Him, 
 then no one of us dare be narrow in our love or 
 our service. The world must be our parish, also. 
 Looking at Him still as our leader, our example, 
 we note, as a second thing that marked Him, 
 His self-sacrifice. Paul spoke of it tenderly 
 when he said, " Though He was rich, yet for our 
 sakes He became poor, that we, through His 
 poverty, might be rich." He spoke of it yet more 
 tenderly when he wrote to the Philippians that 
 he wished very much that they might have in 
 them that mind that was in Christ Jesus, who 
 
18 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 though He was in the form of God, thought not 
 equaHty with God a prize to be jealously re- 
 tained, "but made Himself of no reputation, 
 and took upon Him the form of a servant, and 
 was made in the likeness of men; and being 
 found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, 
 and became obedient unto death, even the death 
 of the cross." Yet a third characteristic was 
 His unwearied, unhesitating constancy, the un- 
 wavering persistence of the service He wrought. 
 He was weary or hungry; He worked on 
 still. The Son of man came to meet the needs 
 of men, and no obstacle was great enough to 
 hinder Him in His effort to meet those needs. 
 Is Jesus Christ our Master in the sense that our 
 lives are following His guidance, and seeking to 
 resemble Him in these respects? 
 
 The third word for " Master " occurs only in 
 the Gospel of Luke, and there about half a dozen 
 times. It is the word which Simon Peter used 
 after the night of their fruitless fishing on the 
 Galilean sea when Jesus bade them to cast the 
 net on the other side and they would find fish. 
 " Master, we have toiled all night and taken 
 nothing; notwithstanding, at thy word, I will let 
 down the net for a draught." It is the word the 
 disciples used when Jesus was asleep in the boat 
 among the troubled waves of the sea. '' Master," 
 they said, " carest thou not that we perish ? " It 
 is the word which the sons of Zebedee used when 
 they came to Him and said, " Master, we saw one 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 19 
 
 casting out devils in thy name. We forbade 
 him, because he followed not with us." ETrto-Tarr;? 
 is the Greek word. " Overseer," it means, the 
 one who has complete control over our methods 
 of service, the one who has a right to direct us 
 in our toil, to tell us the things to be done and 
 not to be done, the one to whom we look for 
 counsel and direction and advice, and under 
 whose rule we reverently lay all our schemes and 
 plans for His direction and control. Is Jesus 
 Christ our master in any such sense? Have we 
 given Him the pre-eminence honestly in this re- 
 gard, so that He has become the true overseer 
 of our lives, so that He directs us in our work? 
 Think of the immense amount of fruitless, flip- 
 pant, frivolous, shallow and squalid work done 
 in this world that would be undone at once by 
 men who took their directions from Him. Think 
 of all the tenderness of heart that would come 
 into the toil of men who were working under 
 His direction and following His methods in their 
 toil. I met an old man some years ago who told 
 me of a visit he had paid to the city of Dundee 
 in Scotland not many years after the death of 
 Robert Murray McCheyne, for whom the whole 
 of Scotland wept, although he died at the age of 
 only twenty-nine. He said that when he got 
 off in Dundee, he asked a man on the street if 
 he could tell him where McCheyne's home was. 
 " Oh, yes," said the man with a smile, pointing 
 him down the street to where McCheyne's church 
 
20 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 and manse were standing. Then he knocked at 
 the door where McCheyne had lived, and his old 
 sexton let him in and took him into the study 
 where McCheyne's books were still upon the 
 table, and he said, " Sit down here," taking him 
 up to the chair in which McCheyne worked, and 
 my friend sat down. " Now," he said, " put 
 your elbows down on the table," and he put 
 his elbows down. " Now," he said, " put your 
 face down in your hands," and he put his face in 
 his hands. " Now," he said, " let the tears fall. 
 That was the way my pastor used to do." And 
 he took him into the church and into the pulpit 
 where McCheyne had preached, and he said, 
 " Put your elbows down on the pulpit," and he 
 put his elbows down on the pulpit. " Now," he 
 said, " put your face in your hands," and he put 
 his face in his hands. " Now," he said, " let the 
 tears fall. That was the way my pastor used to 
 do." And that was the way our Master used to 
 do. As He drew near the city, we read that He 
 wept over it, and He cried, " O Jerusalem, Jeru- 
 salem, if thou hadst but known in this thy day 
 the things that belong unto thy peace; but now 
 they are hidden from thine eyes." I think one 
 reason why so much of our service is dead and 
 fruitless is because it has no vision of the over- 
 seeing Christ whose eyelids knew the touch of 
 tears, and who would direct those who would 
 follow Him as their loving and pre-eminent Mas- 
 ter, in ways of service that would find access to 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 21 
 
 the hearts of men as His way found access to 
 their hearts and holds them in absolute sover- 
 eignty still. 
 
 It is this mastery of Jesus Christ that will do 
 in the realm of our work what the teaching of 
 Jesus Christ will do in the realm of our thinking 
 and our judgment. There is a power in the 
 presence of Christ to quicken the sluggish life. 
 Who has not seen the torpid life touched by- 
 Christ? I have a friend who is a workman in a 
 steel mill. Some years ago he was not able even 
 to read. When he was converted, he could not 
 read a chapter in the Bible, but after his con- 
 version he made up his mind he must learn to 
 read in order to be able to study the Bible. He 
 has had no education except what he has found 
 in the mastery of Christ and in the study of His 
 word. And it is a treat to hear that man pray — 
 the rich, fluent dignity, the deep, reverent spirit 
 — and to sit down and talk with him is like talk- 
 ing with a man who had been at school at the 
 Master's feet, who had had all his sluggish in- 
 stincts touched by Christ and raised into new 
 life, whose torpid life had been quickened and 
 awakened by the living One. The dullest of us 
 can be touched by the power of Christ's mastery 
 when once His pre-eminence as overseer of life 
 is honestly and candidly recognised and the 
 whole life yielded up to His rule. 
 
 The fourth word that is translated " Master " 
 is the word Kv/atos." Most of the time it is trans- 
 
22 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 lated '' Lord." It is the word which Jesus uses 
 in the Sermon on the Mount when He says that 
 " no man can serve two masters ; either he will 
 hate the one and love the other, or cleave to the 
 one and despise the other." It is the constant 
 word in the New Testament of address to Jesus, 
 for reference to Jesus' power over life, and often, 
 instead of being translated Lord, it is translated 
 by our old word, Master. I think there is scarcely 
 any title of Christ's that is quite so familiar to us 
 as this, that we use so often in our prayers and 
 perhaps in our speech about Christ to one an- 
 other, nor any that we take upon our lips more 
 often in vain — Lord. What does it mean that 
 Jesus Christ should be my Lord? I heard Dr. 
 A. J. Gordon of Boston say once, not long before 
 he died, that there was nothing that gave him 
 such a thrill of pleasure as to hear a young man 
 call Jesus Christ Lord, if he had any knowledge 
 at all of the meaning of what he was saying — 
 Jesus Christ, Lord, the Owner of life, the utter 
 King of life, everything yielded up to His domi- 
 nating control. If Jesus Christ is my Master in 
 the sense of being my Lord, then all the plans 
 of my life must be laid down for His supervision 
 and judgment and authority. I go where He 
 sends me; I do what He tells me; I stay where 
 He bids me. We worry ourselves so many times 
 about our difficulty in finding the will of God. 
 The will of God is seeking every one of us with 
 more eagerness to discover us than we feel to find 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 23 
 
 that will. We cannot get away from the will of 
 God if we have the least desire that the will of 
 God should discover us and set us in the Father's 
 place. And the man who has once called Jesus 
 Christ Lord honestly — and no man can say that 
 honestly except by the Spirit of God — has at 
 once guaranteed to himself that his Lord will 
 put him in the place where He wants him to be. 
 It is of infinitely more consequence to our Lord 
 that we should be where He wants us than it is 
 to us that we should be there, and we may be 
 sure that He will see that that which He owns is 
 where it can be of greatest service to Him, and 
 that He will guard alike all its hours and its place 
 and vocation in life, if once it has yielded itself 
 to Him as King and Lord. If Jesus Christ is / 
 our Lord He is Lord of all our thoughts. I 
 know my own heart well enough, and yours, too, 
 to know that Jesus Christ is not Lord of our 
 thoughts. Read over again before you lie down 
 to sleep to-night what Jesus Christ had to say 
 about thinking — of the guilt of evil thinking — in 
 the Sermon on the Mount; what He had to say 
 with reference to certain standards of judgment 
 that had prevailed with reference to sin, and His 
 own views of sin as a thing not alone of the outer 
 act, but of the inner imagination and desire, and 
 then answer the challenge, " Can I say I am a 
 man of an untarnished heart and unsoiled mind?" 
 Who of us has brought every one of his thoughts 
 into captivity and obedience to Christ? Who of 
 
24 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 us has honestly yielded up his thinking to Jesus 
 Christ, his Lord? 
 
 The last summer of Major Whittle's life I 
 went in to see him one evening at Northfield, not 
 expecting ever to see him again. He was so 
 weak that they were watching with him day and 
 night. Only a few days before, when trying to 
 lift one of his arms from the coverlet, the weight 
 of the arm proved too much, and it had fallen 
 and broken on the bed. He lay there almost 
 unable to move, with the red sunlight coming in 
 and falling across the pale, wan face. The doc- 
 tor and the nurse were there at the time, and he 
 asked them to step out of the room for a few 
 moments. He told me the days were very long, 
 that he could not sleep more than a few hours 
 and that he waked up every night just a little 
 after midnight, and then had to He alone until 
 the sun came and the friends began to come in. 
 I asked him what he did during all those hours. 
 Well, he said, he gave all the time to thinking 
 upon Christ. He thought upon Christ in the Old 
 Testament types and prophecies; he thought 
 about His lovely life, the sweet things He had 
 said when He was here, all His ways with the 
 little children and with the poor and sorrowful, 
 and all the mighty things He had done; he 
 thought of Him as He is now at God's right hand, 
 and then he thought of Him as, in some sweet 
 day, when the eastern sky grows all ruddy with 
 the hope of His return, He will come back again. 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 25 
 
 Then he asked me what was the best thought I 
 had had that day, apologising by adding that 
 that was the only thing he could do now to 
 freshen up his own thinking, inasmuch as he 
 could not read and had only to recall what was 
 already stored in his memory and to live upon 
 what friends said to him. I told him I had been 
 thinking that day of what an immense blessing 
 it would be if ever>^ time a man's mind was re- 
 leased from the pressure of any objective duty 
 and free to go to its own place, if every time it 
 was at liberty from every external strain and 
 could do the thing that was natural to it, it would 
 fall back inevitably on Christ. 
 
 Yes, he said, he had often thought of that, and 
 he quoted a quatrain: 
 
 "As a wee bairn to its mither, 
 As a little bird to its nest, 
 I fain would lie down 
 
 On my dear Saviour's breast." 
 
 And then he opened up his heart and spoke to 
 me of Him. And I had a fresh revelation that 
 summer evening, as the light of the setting sun 
 streamed in over the face that was so near the 
 vision of the great land that, after all, is not 
 so very far away from any one of us, of the 
 beauty, of the transforming power, the sweetness, 
 the ineffable glory of the life that has made 
 Jesus Christ Lord of its thought. Have you 
 thought one single moment to-day only of Jesus ? 
 
26 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 Have we recalled to-day, spontaneously, I mean, 
 and not when it was forced upon us by someone 
 speaking to us, a single thing that Jesus said? 
 Has our imagination brought back to-day a single 
 incident or event out of the life of our Lord? 
 What else was the imagination given to us for 
 except to play upon Christ, except to make Christ 
 live again, except to bring back to us every 
 recorded event in His earthly life? I have 
 spoken of our thoughts. I will not speak of will, 
 of passion, of emotion, of taste, of use of time, 
 of standards of judgment. Over all these things, 
 too, Jesus Christ is to be Lord, if, with any hon- 
 esty of heart, I call Him my Master. 
 
 The last word that is used in the New Testa- 
 ment and translated " Master " occurs only 
 three times there, and twice with reference to 
 those who deny Him. Once it is found in one of 
 Paul's Epistles to Timothy, where he speaks of 
 vessels meet for the Master's use. Once it ap- 
 pears in the Second Epistle of Peter, where he 
 speaks of certain men who deny the Master that 
 bought them. Once it appears in the Epistle 
 of Jude, where he speaks of those who deny 
 their only Master and Lord. Aco-ttott;? is the 
 Greek word. " Emperor " will do for a transla- 
 tion for us, the One to whom we yield everything, 
 the absolute Ruler and King whom we joyfully 
 recognise as possessing us, all that we are and 
 have, and ever may be, possessing the thoughts 
 with which we awake in the morning, and the 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 27 
 
 thoughts with which we He down to sleep in the 
 evening, possessing our affections, all our human 
 relationships and friendships, possessing all our 
 tastes, possessing every activity and power of our 
 lives — Jesus Christ enthroned as absolute Em- 
 peror of life. There is a story of one of the 
 Napoleonic wars which relates how one of Na- 
 poleon's men was wounded on the battlefield and 
 the bullet lodged in the cardiac region. It was 
 before the days of anesthetics, and they took the 
 soldier off the battlefield and began to operate in 
 the hope of finding the bullet. He lay with his 
 eyes looking up into the surgeon's face, while 
 he cut closer and closer to his heart, until at last 
 the heart itself was nearly laid bare, and he could 
 almost feel the wind blow in upon it, while the 
 surgeon still probed for the bullet ; and he looked 
 up quietly in his face, and said haltingly, " Sur- 
 geon, I think if you cut much further, — you will 
 touch the Emperor." He had him there more 
 truly than he sat upon any throne, more truly than 
 he sat in any judgment hall ; there on the throne 
 of the soldier's life, and affection, and will, was 
 the Emperor. Is Jesus Christ our Master in 
 these senses ? If He is not, is He our Master at 
 all? If He is our Master at all, He must be 
 Master of us. Teacher of us, Leader of us, Over- 
 seer of us, Lord of us. Emperor of our lives. 
 
 I must add a few words in closing about that 
 other set of titles in which the early Christians 
 recognised the pre-eminence of Christ in their 
 
28 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 lives, — the name Saviour, and those other names 
 of our Lord that are analogous to that one. We 
 think sometimes that that is a term for men and 
 v^^omen who have not yet come into the Christian 
 life. Do we think so or do we feel more in need 
 of Jesus Christ as our Saviour now than we felt 
 before we confessed Him as Lord and Friend? 
 Professor Davis pointed out in his memorial ad- 
 dress regarding Professor William Henry Green 
 of Princeton that his Christian life began as a 
 boy of sixteen, in a deep sense of sin and of 
 Christ's power to save, and that sixty years of 
 busy, useful toil in Christ's Church, instead of 
 removing that sense, had only deepened it and 
 made it more keen and acute. The further on 
 we go in the Christian life the more sensible we 
 become of our necessity for the Saviour. The 
 unclean thought, the selfish ambition, the harsh 
 judgment, the unkind word, the low ideal, the 
 thousand and one things that are sin in our lives, 
 Jesus Christ alone can save us from. We need 
 Him to save us not alone from the coarse vice 
 which, let us hope, we laid away from us with all 
 temptations to it years ago; we need Him now 
 to save us from the infinitely more subtle tempta- 
 tions that come with every day of growth in the 
 Christian life. As men go on in the Christian 
 life, temptations drop from them. Yet tempta- 
 tions assail them more. Temptations, after all, 
 are a form of compliment. There is evil in this 
 world to be slain, and God apportions it to men 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 29 
 
 as He sees them able to bear it. If He allows 
 one man more temptation than another, He gives 
 him no more than he is able to bear, and only as 
 much evil as He sees that he is capable of slay- 
 ing, and as year by year we go on and feel the 
 Spirit of Christ nerving us for fresh strife and 
 struggle, Christ answers that sense of growth 
 by giving us more of battle with the evil one as 
 our share of the conflict with the sin and wicked- 
 ness in the world. And the purer and better we 
 grow the more deeply shall we feel the need of 
 Christ's salvation. I suppose Isaiah was one of 
 the holiest men of his time, but it was he who, in 
 the year that King Uzziah died, fell down in the 
 temple while the house was filled with smoke, 
 when he saw the Lord on high, and lifted up the 
 cry, " Woe is me, I am undone, I am a man of 
 unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people 
 of unclean lips. For mine eyes have seen the 
 King, the Lord of hosts." I suppose Paul was 
 as clean a man as there was in his time. But it 
 was he who pronounced himself the chiefest of 
 sinners. I suppose there was no man among the 
 Apostles more earnestly sincere in his desire to 
 follow Christ than Simon Peter, and it was he 
 who fell down on the shores of the Tiberian sea 
 crying, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 
 O Lord ! " And that man is the worst hypocrite 
 who, as he grows in his spiritual life, thinks he 
 has been growing away from the necessity of 
 Jesus Christ's saving work still in his life. Every 
 
so THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 fresh vision of Christ gives a fresh vision of the 
 man's own selfishness, and every fresh sense of 
 divine power is a fresh sense also of human 
 shortcoming. If Jesus Christ is to be pre-eminent 
 with us, Jesus Christ must each day be our 
 Saviour in a sense more real, more complete, 
 more overwhelming than we have known Him 
 before. 
 
 Jesus Christ, the Saviour? Yes, but more than 
 that, too. It was not enough for Him that He 
 should die for us. He insists afso that He must 
 live in us. Jesus Christ will be pre-eminent 
 in our life not alone as our Saviour from sin, 
 but as our life itself, until at last, if we will let 
 Him, He will make that true in us which He 
 made true in the Apostle Paul, so that we shall 
 be able to say what now, alas, we cannot say, 
 *' For to me to live is Christ." Christ, my life! 
 I met one summer, going home from a meeting 
 in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a man, now in 
 the Christian ministry. He told me, as we sat in 
 the same seat in the car, something of his past 
 life. He had run away from home as a boy of 
 sixteen, and enlisted as a private soldier in the 
 Union Army in the Civil War. He had yielded 
 up his life to vice until sin had almost slain his 
 character and eaten his will away. At last one 
 dark bright day he touched bottom, and Christ 
 caught him. And he told me that from that day 
 there had stood out before his mind without fail- 
 ure by day or by night, the message that flashed 
 
OUR LORD AND MASTER 31 
 
 across his soul that hour, " He died my death for 
 me that I might hve His Hfe for Him." Nine- 
 teen hundred years ago He did what He did on 
 my account, that now I might do something, 
 which is in a real sense the same, on His account. 
 He made me pre-eminent then, that I might make 
 Him pre-eminent now. Shall we not do it? Shall 
 we not give Christ the real first place in our lives ? 
 — I do not mean professionally, I mean vitally ; 
 so that when we lie down to sleep to-night, it 
 shall be with the living sense that Jesus Christ is 
 our Lord, our King and Ruler. When Cyrus 
 took captive the king of Armenia, and Tigranes, 
 his son, with their wives and families, and carried 
 them off to his capital, for several days they lay 
 under sentence of death, and then, at last, on 
 pledge of relinquishing all their claims and pos- 
 sessions, he set them free and let them return to 
 their own land. It is said that on the way back 
 they fell to discussing among themselves the glory 
 of the court of the great conqueror, and one 
 spoke of the splendid jewels, and another spoke 
 of the magnanimity of the king, and, at last, Ti- 
 granes turned to his wife, who had been silent 
 during the discussion, and said to her, " And 
 what didst thou think of Cyrus ? " " In truth," 
 replied she, " I never saw him." " Where were 
 thine eyes ? " said he. " I fixed them," said she, 
 " upon him " — referring to an offer that Tigranes 
 had made — " I fixed them," said she, " upon him 
 
32 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 whom I heard in my presence offer to lay down 
 his Hfe for me." She had eyes for none other 
 than him. I wish I had eyes for none other than 
 Christ, that in a real sense He might have with 
 me in all things the pre-eminence. Let us give it 
 to Him now. 
 
II 
 
 THE BELIEVING HEART 
 
 I WISH to speak now regarding the impor- 
 tance of our keeping, if we have it, and of 
 our regaining, if we have lost it, what might 
 be described as the beHeving heart; and what I 
 have to say here is suggested by the divergence 
 between the King James Version and the Revised 
 translation of a phrase in the first chapter of the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians. The old translation 
 runs, " The eyes of your understanding being 
 enlightened," and the Revised Version, " The 
 eyes of your heart." 
 
 There are a great many significant changes 
 made in the Revised Version as compared with 
 the old, but few of them, I think, are more signifi- 
 cant than this one. It is illustrative of the great 
 change that has passed over the thought of men 
 as to our nature and the nature of the great life 
 in which we live. We are only com.ing out from 
 the slavery of notions that prevailed for many 
 centuries. We are even yet but little delivered, 
 still there was a time when that slavery was 
 much denser and more servile than to-day. In 
 his " History of English Thought in the Eigh- 
 teenth Century," Leslie Stephen grounds his 
 33 
 
34 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 great admiration for Edmund Burke, whom he 
 calls the strongest mind that has ever worked 
 on the problems of English politics, upon the 
 fact that he was the first English statesman to 
 repudiate in practical politics the notion that 
 had prevailed until his time that a man was not 
 very much more than just a mathematical unit, 
 that his inner Hfe could be reduced practically 
 to an impersonal reasoning machine, and that 
 opinion was purely intellectual. It has been in 
 an intellectual intere^st, a gain to honesty, that 
 in politics, and in metaphysics, and in religion, 
 we have outgrown that old conception and are 
 unable any longer to think of a man as made 
 up of reasoning capacity, as a mathematical rea- 
 soning creature alone, or to think of our intel- 
 lect, if we separate it from the rest of our 
 nature, as constituting the only organ by which 
 we discover truth and create character. It has 
 been, of course, in a moral as distinctly as in an 
 intellectual interest. The deistic point of view, 
 and those temperaments which the deistic view 
 bred, although they do survive in a way in 
 schools of physical science to-day, have been made 
 permanently impossible for the world. We 
 know now that our nature is vastly richer than 
 men thought it was in the days between the trans- 
 lation of the King James Version and the open- 
 ing of the nineteenth century. We all of us 
 know that we come at a great deal of truth in 
 other ways than by the use of mathematical rea- 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 35 
 
 soning; and I suggest now that in a very prac- 
 tical way we try to think for a bit of the indis- 
 pensable importance in life of another faculty 
 than ratiocination, which, as the revised trans- 
 lators recognise, really exists; a faculty which 
 we now see and are not afraid to say that we see 
 St. Paul had in mind as an organ for the dis- 
 covery of truth and for the building up of char- 
 acter when he incorporated in his prayer for 
 these Ephesian Christians his desire that the eyes 
 of their hearts might be enlightened. 
 
 For, in the first place, the believing heart is 
 indispensable for the discovery of truth. I do 
 not say it is indispensable to the discovery of all 
 truth, although there is a sense in which it is 
 true that no truth can be discovered without it. 
 I do say that the truth he needs cannot be discov- 
 ered by any man unless one of the organs by 
 which he sets about perceiving it is the heart of 
 trust and faith. No man by mathematical rea- 
 soning can get at the whole truth. We know 
 that at all that range of truth that is personal no 
 man arrives by his mathematical reasoning; that 
 he gets at that, if he ever gets at it at all, by 
 quite other faculties than these. That is what 
 . Tennyson declares in his protest in " In Memo- 
 
 If e'er when faith had fallen asleep 
 I heard a voice, * Believe no more, 
 And heard an ever-breaking shore 
 
 That tumbled in the godless deep. 
 
36 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 "A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part 
 And like a man in wrath, the heart 
 Stood up and answered, * I have felt' " 
 
 He does not mean to shut out any one set of 
 faculties ; he simply means to assert in behalf of 
 another set its rights in our search after and dis- 
 covery of truth. 
 
 There is an illustration of what I mean in the 
 story in the last chapter of the Gospel of John, 
 where the disciples were out in the little boat on 
 the sea. Precisely the same intellectual facts 
 were presented to the minds of all those disci- 
 ples. They saw a man on the shore. There was 
 no difference in their eyesight that made one 
 man keener than another to discern His features, 
 and yet one of them spoke up after a moment, 
 the others still failing to perceive Who that Man 
 on the shore was, and said softly, " It is the 
 Lord " ; and the writer of that Gospel adds sig- 
 nificantly that it was the disciple between whom 
 and Jesus there was a peculiar sympathy who 
 first discovered this. He discerned with a dif- 
 ferent set of faculties from those which the other 
 disciples were using, or because those faculties 
 in him were better developed than they were in 
 the other disciples. Who this Man was Who stood 
 ttpon the shore. And I suspect we would have 
 just the same experience to-day if Jesus Christ 
 were actually to appear. Some of us would rec- 
 ognise Him long before others would, and some 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 37 
 
 of us would not recognise Him at all ; we would 
 deny utterly that it was Jesus Christ, simply be- 
 cause we would apply to His identification a set 
 of faculties futile to accomplish that end, and 
 we would not have in our hearts that enlighten- 
 ment of the eyes of faith that would enable us 
 to discern what could not be discerned otherwise 
 than in just that way. 
 
 That is one reason why so many of us live so 
 much poorer lives than others live, simply be- 
 cause we are content to get at truth with a 
 smaller number of faculties than other men use, 
 or because the eyes of our hearts are blinded, 
 short-sighted, less capable of vision, less accu- 
 rately trained, less enlightened than the eyes of 
 the hearts of other men. We look at a picture. 
 Precisely the same physical conditions are there 
 to every man's eye, but one man sees in it infi- 
 nitely more than another man sees in it, because 
 the eyes of his heart have been opened towards 
 it. A great many men reason themselves away 
 from the larger vision of truth. That is what 
 Mr. Chesterton complains of in his " Twelve 
 Types," that all of us are perpetually making 
 the error of using the word " superficial " in a 
 sense that is grounded on a fundamental mistake, 
 namely, that second thoughts are best, whereas 
 as a matter of fact, regarding most of our 
 lives, the first instincts are the only trustworthy 
 judgments we ever have. What we casually 
 and instinctively feel about the look of the 
 
38 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 skies, about the aspect of the trees, about 
 the faces of our friends, that, we must be- 
 lieve, he sayS; and not what we subsequently 
 reason out on the basis of all that, will remain 
 our vital philosophy to the day of our death. 
 That is the reason why little children are often 
 so much more accurate judges of character than 
 grown-up people. You can often deceive an 
 adult regarding trustworthiness of character 
 more easily than you can deceive a little child. 
 There is an alertness of instinct in the child that 
 touches the core of character more surely than 
 any of our mathematical measurements ever do. 
 You remember the story in the life of Robert 
 Morrison, who was obliged to come to this coun- 
 try in order to secure passage as a missionary 
 to China, and to whom Mr. Oliphant gave free 
 passage in one of his ships. While in New 
 York he was entertained at the home of a gentle- 
 man, who afterwards wrote in a paper, entitled 
 " Reminiscences of Dr. Morrison," published in 
 the New York Observer: " As the notice had been 
 very short, he was placed, for the first night, in 
 our own chamber. By the side of his bed stood 
 a crib, in which slept my little child. On awak- 
 ing in the morning, she turned, as usual, to talk 
 to her mother. Seeing a stranger where she ex- 
 pected to have found her parents, she roused 
 herself with a look of alarm ; but fixing her eyes 
 steadily upon his face, she inquired, * Man, do 
 you pray to God ? ' * O yes, my dear,' said Mr. 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 39 
 
 Morrison, * every day. God is my best friend/ 
 At once reassured, the little girl laid her head 
 contentedly on her pillow, and fell fast asleep." 
 The little child's measurement of Morrison had 
 been taken and she had gone in a moment home 
 to the real inner character of the man whom she 
 was judging, with an accuracy much quicker 
 than the stupid ways in which you and I 
 would have tried to get at and measure that 
 character. 
 
 Our hearts know a thousand things that we 
 never otherwise discover. Pascal was not speak- 
 ing extremely when he wrote in his " Thoughts " : 
 
 " The heart has reasons which the reason does 
 not know. It is the heart that feels God, not 
 the reason. There are truths that are felt, and 
 there are truths that are proved, for we know 
 truth not only by reason but by the intuitive 
 conviction which may be called the heart. The 
 primary truths are not demonstrable, and yet 
 our knowledge of them is none the less certain. 
 Principles are felt; propositions are proved. 
 Truths may be above reason and yet not be 
 contrary to reason.'* 
 
 Many of us, I suppose, have proved that a 
 lie is sometimes justifiable who know in our 
 hearts that it is not, and who to the end of our 
 lives will distrust the liar, no matter how much 
 rational justification we may find for his lie, be- 
 
40 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 cause back of all our intellectual reasonings 
 about it there is an instinct more accurate and 
 correct than these. 
 
 After all, love — one real, great love, by which 
 a man enters into the infinite with his life, is a far 
 more potent solvent of doubts than all of the 
 speculations he can spin out of the spider-body 
 of his thought. Real love, the breaking loose 
 of the man's true under-nature, the real deliv- 
 ery of the man to himself and to God, — that sets 
 more men free to the truth than any mathematical 
 attempt to demonstrate propositions or to imveil 
 the unseen. The believing heart for many of 
 us, for all of us, is the only road by which we 
 shall come to the truth that is most vital to 
 life. 
 
 The believing heart, in the second place, is 
 ever essential to the living of a consistent and 
 real life. There never was yet in the world an 
 absolutely consistent infidel. Life would break 
 down for the man who did not live practically on 
 faith, however much theoretically he may cast it 
 out of his life. You remember the verses which 
 have been wrongly attributed to Charles Kings- 
 ley: 
 
 " There is no unbelief ! 
 
 Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod, 
 
 And waits to see it push away the clod, 
 
 He trusts in God. 
 
 " Whoever says, when clouds are in the sky, 
 * Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by,* 
 Trusts the Most High. 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 41 
 
 "Whoever lies down on his couch to sleep, 
 Content to lock each sense in slumber deep, 
 Knows God will keep. 
 
 "Whoever says * to-morrow,' 'the unknown/ 
 * The future ' — trusts unto that Power alone 
 He dares disown. 
 
 "The heart that looks on when the eyelids closej 
 And dares to live when life has only woes, 
 God's comfort knows. 
 
 " There is no unbelief: 
 And still by day and night, unconsciously, 
 The heart lives by the faith the lips decry, 
 God knoweth why." 
 
 It seems to me a man may argue against infi- 
 delity on the simple ground of its absolute incon- 
 sistency with honesty and integrity of nature. 
 You cannot succeed, no man ever yet succeeded, 
 in living a faithless life, and for a man to com- 
 mit himself to a philosophy that excludes the 
 possibility of faith from life is to necessitate a 
 contradiction in his soul, for he cannot live at 
 all and live with no faith. To live a consistent 
 life or any life a man has to make room some- 
 where in him for a believing heart of trust. 
 
 It is the only way to live, not a consistent life 
 alone, but a life that is real. To believe, as we 
 do and must, and yet to play the sceptic, is just 
 as truly to lead an insincere and hypocritical 
 life, except that it is unconsciously done, as in 
 the case of the man who professes to be what 
 he is not, who claims to wear the badge of 
 
42 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 Christ's purity while he lives his life of sin. 
 The believing heart is essential to men and 
 women if they will live a real life. As one 
 thinks of the materialistic attitude of some pro- 
 fessors of science in our colleges there comes 
 to his mind the protest of Walt Whitman in be- 
 half of the faith that is back of the figures: 
 
 " When I heard the learned astronomer, 
 
 When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in col- 
 umns before me, 
 
 When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, 
 divide, and measure them, 
 
 When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lec- 
 tured with much applause in the lecture room. 
 
 How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 
 
 Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself. 
 
 In the mystical moist night air, and from time to 
 time, 
 
 Look'd up In perfect silence at the stars." 
 
 No man can break away from the unreality of 
 the mechanical chains of half -thinking, away 
 from the view that would make him a mere 
 physiological or intellectual machine, into the real 
 life and discover his soul without feeling the be- 
 lieving heart that is in him expand to lay hold 
 on the noble ranges of a real life. 
 
 Now, I do not mean, of course, that a man 
 should have a credulous heart. I believe that the 
 most credulous heart in the world is the unbe- 
 lieving heart, that the man who is most careful 
 about truth, the man who knows best the canons 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 43 
 
 by which to discriminate it, the man who is most 
 cautious about what he accepts, is the man who 
 has a believing heart. The believing heart shuts 
 us out from the possibility of believing a thou- 
 sand follies toward which the man of unbeliev- 
 ing heart is credulous. A few years ago we 
 received in the Presbyterian Board of Foreign 
 Missions an appHcation for appointment as a 
 medical missionary from a young doctor. He 
 sent in response to questions a list of references 
 whom the Board might consult regarding his 
 adaptation for missionary work, and the Board 
 sent to each of these men, of course, a list of 
 questions. Among the answers that came back 
 was quite a long and outspoken reply from a 
 doctor in an inland city in the State of New 
 York. With candour and evident honesty he 
 answered the inquiries, and then he went on at 
 the end to say : 
 
 " I do not attend church any more. I formerly 
 did, but stopped because I saw too much hypoc- 
 risy and I refused to be a hypocrite myself, so 
 I think you can trust my word." 
 
 On the basis of the testimonials this applicant 
 was discouraged, and the matter rested for a 
 time, and then I wrote to the doctor who had 
 sent this. I told him that I was writing to him 
 not in any official capacity, but, if he would let 
 me, just as a man to a man, and I wanted to dis- 
 
44 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 cuss with hlrrij if he was willing, the question 
 that he had raised. I said in substance : 
 
 " You do not regard yourself as justified In re- 
 fusing to do the good which your knowledge of 
 medicine enables you to do because yours, of 
 all professions, perhaps because of its very no- 
 bility, has so many charlatans and quacks in It. 
 You would not think of pleading this hypocrisy 
 as a reason why you should refuse to be a doctor 
 and as a doctor to do good in the world and alle- 
 viate human suffering." 
 
 I said some more things that are not essential, 
 and this is the letter that I received in reply: 
 
 " I thank you very much for your sincere let- 
 ter of recent date, but I fear you have under- 
 taken too tough a job even for the entire Board 
 of Foreign Missions. The reason stated In my 
 testimonial was of course the truth, and per- 
 haps was the primary cause of my present state 
 of mind. I am writing frankly, as you did. You 
 will notice I said ' too much hypocrisy.' I can 
 stand for some, as, of course, it Is necessary to 
 do, as you point out. But in my opinion there 
 Is more of It In church than In everything else 
 combined. Look over an ordinary congregation 
 in almost any walk of life. Take the men ; seven 
 out of ten do not do or try to do as they prac- 
 tically claim to do. A man in attending church, 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 45 
 
 in my opinion, acknowledges Christ as his Master 
 and Saviour and agrees to do as nearly as possible 
 what Christ would do in the same circum- 
 stances. Don't you think nine out of ten would 
 be nearer? Perhaps my definition of a hypocrite 
 is too exact, shall I say ? Perhaps I should relax 
 it a little. But a person who says one thing Sun- 
 day and another Monday is a hypocrite. A man 
 who goes to church on Sunday and prays to be 
 forgiven for the sins he has done during the 
 week and then goes and does them over again is 
 a hypocrite. Am I too severe ? Take the church 
 of which you are a member ; scan the congrega- 
 tion carefully; does not the result surprise you? 
 Mind you, I don't want you to think only of the 
 
 * scoundrels ' and ' charlatans.' But entirely out- 
 side and separate from this is an insurmountable 
 obstacle. I am not a Christian. I do not believe 
 in a personal God. I believe that every man 
 should do as nearly as possible what is right, as 
 laid down by Moses and Jesus. I believe that 
 Jesus was the greatest and best man that we 
 have any record of, but I do not believe that He 
 was the Son of God, for I do not believe that 
 God can have a son, any more than ' Nature ' or 
 
 * Electricity ' can have. I believe that the uni- 
 verse is governed by immutable laws and is ruled 
 by an all-powerful force. I believe that this 
 force is what we call * electricity.' This state- 
 ment must seem absurd to you and you must 
 think that my brain is turned, but I assure you 
 
46 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 that this is not the case. I have read and pon- 
 dered on this subject for five or six years, yes, 
 ten years. My rehgion is all I need. I feel abso- 
 lutely satisfied with it. What more do I want? 
 I threshed over this subject more than once with 
 my pastor, who is one of the brightest minds I 
 ever knew, and he has acknowledged that I 
 ought not to go to church, and he has said, * Al- 
 most thou persuadest me/ If at any time you 
 wish to hear from me further, write me. I 
 would be glad to hear from you anyway. I am 
 not a scoffer at religion, nor do I force my belief 
 on others. Probably not more than a dozen peo- 
 ple know what I believe, but if you wish, in the 
 future, I will explain my reasons for my belief." 
 
 This will suffice as an illustration of the cre- 
 dulity of the unbelieving heart. On this view, 
 when a man looks at a great landscape or the 
 shimmer of the moonlight on rippling water and 
 feels little thrills of joy run through his soul, it 
 is electricity. When his little child creeps up 
 into his arms, and the tears of a great love fill 
 his eyes and his heart warms and glows as wave 
 after wave of God's goodness sweeps over him, 
 it is electricity. When four or five thousand 
 men witness and cheer some great feat of hero- 
 ism, when a martyr dies for his faith, or a man 
 lays down his life for his friends, it is electricity. 
 Can there be anything more credulous than the 
 unbeHeving heart? It would be impossible for 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 47 
 
 us to lend ourselves to any such opinions as 
 these. Why ? Not because our minds are trained 
 differently so much as because our hearts are 
 believing hearts. The only road to a sincere 
 a;id complete life, a life that stands squarely, 
 that is ready for all the facts of the world and 
 the soul, is in the believing heart. You remem- 
 ber Von Sturmer's lines prefixed to Richard 
 Jeffries' "Story of My Heart": 
 
 "Dim woodlands made him wiser far 
 
 Than those who thresh their barren thought 
 With flails of knowledge dearly bought. 
 Till all his soul shone like a star 
 
 "That flames at fringe of heaven's bar. 
 
 Where breaks the surge of space unseen 
 Against Hope's veil that hangs between 
 Love's future and the woes that are." 
 
 That is what the believing heart does for a man. 
 And, once more, it is the believing heart 
 alone that makes it possible for men to find the 
 will of God. The will of God is not a 
 proposition to be demonstrated by syllogisms; 
 the will of God is an obedience discover- 
 able only to sympathy, and no one of 
 us will ever find the will of God for his life 
 unless he finds it by the believing heart that 
 opens to God and that responds with filial alac- 
 rity to every intimation of His will to us. A 
 Christian lawyer from Cripple Creek, Col., told 
 me once, as we talked over the question of how 
 
48 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 a man might get his life righted, of an experience 
 of his own years ago, when in a great deal of 
 perplexity he had gone to his old pastor to ask 
 him for help as to how he might get his life 
 directed aright. He said the old man simply 
 turned to the Thirty-second Psalm and read him 
 these tw^o verses: 
 
 " I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way 
 which thou shalt go; I will counsel thee with 
 mine eye upon thee. Be ye not as the horse, or 
 as the mule, which have no understanding: 
 whose trappings must be bit and bridle to hold 
 them in, else they wall not come near unto thee." 
 
 Then my friend said the old man shut up his 
 Bible and turned away. At first he felt no little 
 resentment at his pastor for this curt way of 
 replying to his inquiry, but when he went away 
 and thought it over he saw that the whole secret 
 of a right life lay just here, that the only way 
 in w^hich God could ever guide a man was not 
 by some mechanical instruction, not by fitting 
 a bit into the man's mouth and pulling him 
 this way and that with a rein, but by planting 
 in his heart His own Spirit and letting that 
 Spirit guide him. The boy goes away to college 
 from his father. How is his father to shape the 
 boy's life? There is no code of instruction that 
 he can give him that will cover all the emer- 
 gencies and exigencies of it. He can only try 
 to make that boy his boy, so that when he goes 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 49 
 
 the father's character will express itself in the 
 boy's life. I remember Dr. Trumbull's telling- 
 years ago of a Connecticut lad who had grown 
 up on a farm until he was about twenty years 
 of age, and then was going away into the city 
 to make his own fortune. On the last Sun- 
 day evening before he left home Dr. Trumbull 
 said the old father called his boy and said: 
 "John, you are going away from home to- 
 morrow to the city. I would like to have a 
 little talk with you before you go, if you 
 wouldn't mind." Well, the boy and the father 
 had always lived together a common life, and 
 the boy went out with his father to walk around 
 over the farm and hear his father's last counsel. 
 And they walked down to one of the meadows 
 where the boy had played from his infancy, up 
 over the hillside, where they watched the sun 
 set, as he had watched it for many years; down 
 through the fields and the orchards until they 
 came, after an hour's walk, to the back of the 
 house again, and the old man had said never a 
 word to his son. And when at last they came 
 to the gate of the garden and were about to 
 go in, the old man turned to his son and said: 
 " John, I have only one thing to say to you — 
 always do as you have a mind to." What better 
 could he say? That is the only way you can 
 guide a life. You cannot guide a life the way 
 you would guide a beast; you must guide a 
 life in life's way; and it is just so that we will 
 
50 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 get our guidance, if we ever get it, from our 
 Father. " My son," He will say to us, " have 
 you the mind of Christ? " " I hope so, Father," 
 will be our reply. " Well," He will say, " always 
 do as you have a mind to," and will say nothing 
 more to us. Unto the end of our days we will 
 get no clearer divine guidance for our lives than 
 that, and will need none. 
 
 Of the great Christians of the last generation, 
 George Miiller would stand out first before 
 many minds as an unreasoning, superstitious 
 mystic. May I read you out of his own life his 
 account of how he ascertained the will of God? 
 
 " I. I seek at the beginning to get my heart 
 into such a state that it has no will of its own 
 in regard to a given matter. 
 
 " Nine-tenths of the trouble with people is just 
 here. Nine-tenths of the difficulties are over- 
 come when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's 
 will, whatever it may be. When one is truly in 
 this state, it is usually but a little way to the 
 knowledge of what His will is. 
 
 " 2. Having done this, I do not leave the re- 
 sult to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, 
 I make myself liable to great delusions. 
 
 " 3. I seek the will of the Spirit of God 
 through, or in connection with, the Word of 
 God. The Spirit and the Word must be com- 
 bined. If I look to the Spirit alone without the 
 Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 51 
 
 If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, He will do it 
 according to the Scriptures and never contrary 
 to them. 
 
 " 4. Next I take into account providential 
 circumstances. These often plainly indicate 
 God's will in connection with His Word and 
 Spirit. 
 
 " 5. I ask God in prayer to reveal His will 
 to me aright. 
 
 "6. Thus, through prayer to God, the study 
 of the Word, and reflection, I come to a delib- 
 erate judgment according to the best of my 
 ability and knowledge, and if my mind is thus at 
 peace, and continues so after two or three more 
 petitions, I proceed accordingly. 
 
 " In trivial matters, and in transactions involv- 
 ing most important issues, I have found this 
 method always effective." 
 
 Surely in this method George Miiller reveals 
 himself as a man of as great practical judgment, 
 of as sound discernment of the method of the 
 Christian life as any Christian you could find in 
 this or any day. And the same method will 
 work in our case. If, to-day and to-morrow, we 
 want to know what God's will for our life is, we 
 will find it only as the eyes of our heart are 
 enlightened that they may see the things that 
 are excellent in the sight of Jesus Christ. 
 
 And lastly, the believing heart is the secret of 
 the possession of the things of chiefest value in 
 
52 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 life. It is the secret of strength and power. 
 Can you find in your acquaintance, now, or in 
 all human history, a man of power who was 
 not a man of a believing heart? Such men may 
 not have been Christians, but they had the atti- 
 tude of heart which should have made them so. 
 Whether Abraham Lincoln was a very evangel- 
 ical believer or not I do not know, but the heart 
 of a Christian was in him. He believed; the 
 eyes of the inner vision had been enlightened. 
 He walked through those dark days before his 
 flock as a shepherd. He stood in the midst of 
 those surging seas like a great rock on whose 
 base the waves broke with futility. He stood 
 there with power and strength, holding the love 
 and confidence of men, four-square to every 
 wind. Why? Because his heart rested on God. 
 You remember the laconic telegram he sent to 
 the war governor of Illinois. Governor Yates 
 had written a despairing letter to the great man, 
 whose patient heart was already bearing all 
 that human heart could bear, complaining that 
 hope was gone. All that Lincoln sent back in 
 reply was the brief message, ^' Dick, stand still 
 and see the salvation of the Lord." And if one 
 of us is a stronger man than another, if he has 
 more power over other men, if he is one of those 
 men who come in time to stand out above other 
 men with something of the eternal power of the 
 hills, so that other men rest their lives on him and 
 say, " While he believes I can believe," it is be- 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 53 
 
 cause deep in that man's life the eyes of his 
 heart have been enlightened to see, and he lives 
 by faith. 
 
 The believing heart is the only secret of love. 
 No one of us will ever learn to love who has not 
 a heart of trust and faith. And the best things 
 there are in the world are denied to us if the 
 eyes of our heart being unenlightened we have 
 not learned in the school of Christ to love. And 
 in those days when the storms beat on our lives 
 and we do not know whether the clouds will 
 ever break and the blue sky shine again; in 
 the times when it seems as though the very 
 foundations had dropped out beneath us; in 
 those times when we are numbered with the men 
 whom Professor Drummond describes in one of 
 his talks as the men who fight their last fight with 
 their backs against the wall, with no room, not 
 another step, to recede — if we shall have peace 
 at all in that hour, we shall get it through our 
 believing hearts. I read somewhere, years ago, 
 of a Swiss martyr who was condemned to be 
 burned, and as he stood, before the fire was kin- 
 dled around his stake, he turned to the judge 
 who had condemned him and said : " Sir, I 
 have one last request to make of you. It is that 
 you will put your hand on my heart first, and 
 then lay it on your own, and then tell the people 
 which heart beats more violently." Then he 
 stood in the midst of the fagots and the flames, 
 tranquil, unmoved, serene. Through the smoke 
 
54 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 and the heat he endured as seeing with his heart's 
 eyes by faith the invisible. 
 
 Some of us have lost it, haven't we? We 
 would give anything if we could slip back across 
 the years and get it again — that great heart of 
 trust that we had when we were little children. 
 Suspiciousness, furtiveness, doubt, indirectness, 
 unease, all those things which we know when 
 we think about them are the curse of character, 
 have slipped into our lives. Maybe we feel the 
 treasure going now. Whether it is going or 
 gone, we may have it again to-day. Shall we 
 not face any sacrifice rather than lose the be- 
 lieving heart out of life? What other loss can 
 equal this? 
 
 " Upon the white sea sand 
 
 There sat a pilgrim band, 
 Telling the losses that their lives had known. 
 
 While evening waned away 
 
 From breezy cliff and bay, 
 And the strong tides went out with weary moan. 
 
 One spoke with quivering lip 
 
 Of a fair freighted ship 
 With all his household, to the deep gone down! 
 
 But one had wilder woe 
 
 For a fair face, long ago 
 Lost in the darker depths of a great town. 
 
 There were some who mourned their youth 
 
 With a most loving ruth 
 For the brave hopes and memories ever green; 
 
 And one upon the West 
 
 Turned an eye that would not rtst 
 
THE BELIEVING HEART 55 
 
 For far-off hills whereon its joy had been. 
 
 Some talked of vanished gold, 
 
 Some of proud honors told. 
 Some spake of friends who were their friends no more, 
 
 And one of a green grave 
 
 Beside a foreign wave, 
 That made him sit so lonely on the shore. 
 
 But when their tales were done, 
 
 There spake among them one, 
 A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free: 
 
 * Sad losses ye have met. 
 But mine is heavier yet, 
 
 For the believing heart has gone from me.* 
 
 * Alas I ' those pilgrims said, 
 'For the living and the dead. 
 
 For fortune's cruelty, for love's sure cross, 
 
 For the wrecks of land and sea ! 
 
 But howe'er it came to thee. 
 Thine, stranger, is life's last and heaviest loss, 
 
 For the believing heart has gone from thee — 
 
 Ah ! the believing heart has gone from thee ! ' " 
 
 Oh, let it not go to-day ! Under the trees, in 
 our rooms, in the city street, let us kneel down 
 if it has gone and pray that it may come back 
 to us again as we open up our hearts of childlike 
 trust unto the Saviour in whom we beheve. 
 
Ill 
 
 CHRIST'S APPEAL TO THE DOUBTING 
 HEART 
 
 WHAT we have just been considering 
 generally is brought home to us con- 
 cretely in the Master's appeal to the 
 man who represented so well among the Apos- 
 tles the hesitant spirit of our own day. The 
 Christian centuries which intervened between the 
 Apostolic age and the Reformation are often 
 spoken of as the era of Peter. The Christian 
 centuries that have elapsed since the Reforma- 
 tion have been spoken of as the era of Paul. 
 Some have suggested that as the era of Peter 
 waned and gave place to the era of Paul, so the 
 era of Paul is waning to give place in our day 
 to the era of John. It may be true, and yet one 
 is sometimes inclined to think that this is the 
 age of Thomas. Above all the other Apostles 
 he seems to embody those types of character 
 which are finding dominant expression in our 
 own day. He was a man in whom the specu- 
 lative, reasoning nature was above the vital; a 
 man who naturally took a hesitant attitude; a 
 critical man ; a man full of scruples, whose opin- 
 ionative nature ruled the rest of his life. Every 
 time Thomas appears in the Gospel of John he 
 56 
 
APPEAL TO DOUBTING HE^ART 5l 
 
 is shown as a man wanting the vitaHtles and 
 the optimisms of the beheving nature. He was 
 a man in whom the critical and opinionative dis- 
 position had gained the mastery over the trustful, 
 hopeful, childlike disposition of faith. 
 
 He appears before us in his true character 
 especially in the scene described in the twentieth 
 chapter of John. He had not been present when 
 Jesus had appeared to the ten Apostles, and 
 when they told him of it he at once replied : " I 
 will not believe that He is risen from the dead 
 unless I can put my finger into the print of the 
 nails in His hands, and unless I can thrust my 
 hand into the wound in His side." It was a 
 very coarse way of stating even Thomas's desire 
 for some physical evidence of Jesus's resurrec- 
 tion, and it was an indication once again of his 
 want of that trustful disposition which would 
 have led an ordinary man to believe the testi- 
 mony of the ten Apostles and of Mary. 
 
 On the eighth day after this Jesus appeared 
 in the upper room when Thomas was present. 
 Jesus then repeated in their bald detail the condi- 
 tions that Thomas had laid down. " Thomas," 
 He said, " here I am. Reach hither thy finger 
 and put it into My hand. Reach hither thy hand 
 and put it into My side, and be not faithless, but 
 believing." 
 
 Now it is worth noting what the charge was 
 that Jesus laid upon Thomas. He did not criti- 
 cise Thomas's want of faith in any particular 
 
58 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 event; He criticised Thomas's moral and intel- 
 lectual disposition. He did not say, '' Now that 
 the evidence has been presented to you, be- 
 lieve in this fact of My resurrection " ; He said, 
 " Now that you have had evidence to convince 
 you of this one fact, can you not lay aside your 
 speculative, your debating, your opinionative dis- 
 position, and have a faithful and believing tem- 
 per, such as my other disciples here have? Be 
 not a faithless, but a believing man." 
 
 Then, strange to say, this man forgot all about 
 the conditions that he laid down, on the fulfil- 
 ment of which alone he said he was willing to 
 believe in the resurrection of Jesus, and without 
 any desire to apply the test he fell on his knees, 
 crying out, " My Lord and my God." He was 
 satisfied, not with the presentation to his physi- 
 cal senses of the evidence that he had demanded, 
 but with the touch upon his personality of the 
 personality of Jesus. His answer is the sublim- 
 est confession in the Gospels ; it affirms just what 
 he had been doubting — ** My Lord and my God." 
 
 Now, we have here the two great elements of 
 Christian life and faith and thought. On the 
 one hand the offered personality of Christ, wait- 
 ing to touch our personalities ; on the other hand 
 the accepting will of Thomas answering to the 
 offered personality of Jesus. These are the two 
 great facts of life, of thinking, of belief, of re- 
 ligion, distinctly of our Christian faith. 
 
 A divine personality is offered to the heart of 
 
APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 59 
 
 man. This is what revelation is. The substance 
 of revelation is not truth ; the substance of reve- 
 lation is person. What God was doing through 
 all the years of the Old Testament dispensation 
 was not slowly making men familiar with a few 
 veracious facts, or any system of principles or 
 truth. He was showing men Himself. The com- 
 munication of truth is only a means to the 
 communication of person, of spirit, of life. The 
 whole Old Testament dispensation was just a 
 long attempt on the part of God to reveal Him- 
 self to the heart of man under and over certain 
 laws, under and over certain precepts, under 
 and over certain principles or commandments. 
 When Moses asked His name, and who he 
 should say had sent him when he went as the 
 ambassador of God, Jehovah said to him, " 1 
 AM THAT I AM, and wheu anyone asketh thee 
 who sent thee, thou shalt say, I am hath sent 
 me." The God of character, the God of per- 
 son, the God of being; not the God of descrip- 
 tion, not the God of metaphysical idea, not the 
 God of intellectual notion; the real living God 
 of spirit and person and life, as He said to 
 Moses, was striving through all the years of the 
 Old Testament history to reveal Himself to men. 
 When Christ came, therefore, it was in pre- 
 cisely the same way, as a self-revelation to life. 
 He convinced Thomas in the little upper room — 
 Thomas, who thought he would not be con- 
 vinced except by certain physical evidences pre- 
 
60 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 sented to his senses — by the touch of His own 
 personaHty upon Thomas's spiritual nature, and 
 Thomas answered by the surrender of his own 
 life to Christ, " My Lord and my God." 
 
 Christ addresses His appeal to the whole per- 
 sonality, the willing nature, rather than to man's 
 opinion as supreme over the rest of his life. 
 You can see all through Christ's earthly history, 
 in the method of His dealing with men, hcfw He 
 strove to exalt this conception of His mission, 
 and how He sought to enable men to meet Him 
 on the plane of full personality, of highest testi- 
 mony. On the night of the supper Philip broke 
 in upon the answer which Jesus was giving to 
 Thomas's difficulty with the request, " Lord, 
 show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." He 
 wanted some physical manifestation of the 
 Father, some revelation of Him that would 
 coerce the senses, that would lead opinion into 
 bondage and force it, irrespective of the integ- 
 rity and dignity of the complete nature, to assent 
 to the presence of God and the claims of God. 
 
 Christ's answer was : " Have I been so long 
 time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, 
 Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the 
 Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the 
 Father? Believest thou not that I am in the 
 Father, and the Father in Me? The^ words that 
 I speak unto you I speak not of Myself, but the 
 Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works. 
 Relieve me that I am in the Father, and the 
 
APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 6l 
 
 Father in Me: or else — if that is too high, and 
 your heart does not answer at once to My heart, 
 if the spirit of man that is in you does not 
 instantly respond to the Spirit of God that is in 
 Me, well, I will drop down to a lower plane — 
 believe Me for the very works' sake." 
 
 Our Lord has every kind of evidence to pre- 
 sent to man. The man who cannot believe save 
 on the plane of historic proof can find evidence 
 enough on that plane to support Christ's claims ; 
 but what Christ strove for constantly with men 
 was to get them to assent to His claims upon 
 their lives on the high ground of the self-reve- 
 lation in Him of God the Father to man the 
 son, of the Spirit of God to the spirit of man 
 that is within men, that was born of the Spirit 
 of God, and that finds its true life and anchor- 
 age only in rich, responsive answer to the Spirit 
 of God. 
 
 The same principle was manifested in the par- 
 able of the Good Shepherd. He had told the 
 Jews that His sheep knew His voice and fol- 
 lowed Him. It was the only way in which they 
 discovered that He was their shepherd or showed 
 Him that they were His sheep. Every one whom 
 the Father had given Him would recognise His 
 voice and come to Him, and He would know 
 each one of them by name. That was too high 
 for the Jews, and John tells us that they took up 
 stones to stone Him. Then He drops down 
 again, as He did with Philip, to the lower level 
 
62 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 of argument, and says, " For which of My 
 works do you stone Me ? " They said, " For 
 none of Your works, but because You, being a 
 man, make Yourself God." He took up their 
 thought, not denying that He had made Himself 
 God, but contending that the works He had 
 done were in themselves sufficient evidence that 
 He was the Son of God, and that He had the 
 right to make these claims on the lives of men 
 that He was making on theirs. He would drop 
 down to the evidence of Thomas, to the plane 
 of Thomas's desire, whenever men insisted that 
 He should, but only when He had exhausted 
 His attempt to get the hearts of men to answer 
 straight and clear to His heart. But when Jesus 
 had once offered this lower physical evidence to 
 Thomas, Thomas wanted none of it. He had 
 come now into the presence of Christ, where he 
 was able to take in the kind of testimony he had 
 not been able to recognise before, and he an- 
 swered straight out of his own soul to the soul 
 of Christ. 
 
 I have a friend who has a distorted hand. Do 
 you think it is necessary for me every time I 
 meet that friend to ask him to let me feel his 
 distorted hand to make sure that it is he? I 
 know that when he and I sit down together and 
 our hearts have touched, that he and I are there, 
 without any gross sensual evidence gained by 
 feeling his withered hand. It was even so with 
 Jesus. He would let men feel, if they wanted, 
 
APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 63 
 
 the nail print in His hand. He would allow 
 men, if they must, butcher-like to thrust their 
 hands into the wound in His side ; but when once 
 He had offered Himself to men for the satisfac- 
 tion of their desire for that kind of testimony, 
 their desire for that kind of testimony was gone, 
 and they fell down on their faces before Him, 
 and the heart of man answered to the heart of 
 Christ with Thomas's cry, " My Lord and my 
 God." 
 
 Now, because Jesus Christ addressed His 
 word in this way to the highest in man, to what 
 is in man of God's nature, He was constantly 
 defining faith in properly corresponding terms. 
 There are very few passages in the Gospels 
 where Christ uses the word " faith " or the word 
 *' believe " to describe an intellectual attitude 
 toward certain truth. Constantly, Christ uses 
 faith as a term that is not applicable to the re- 
 lation of a man to an opinion, or of a man to 
 a thing. He uses faith as a term that is appli- 
 cable only to the relation of a person to a person. 
 I believe, not things that people tell me, I be- 
 lieve the people themselves, and my belief in 
 them is faith. A little child, knowing very little 
 of life, sits on the father's knee learning its first 
 lessons of life, and believes what the father tells 
 it. Now its beHef in what the father says is not 
 an act of faith, it is a fruit of faith. It is the 
 relationship of confidence between the child and 
 the father that makes the child believe anything 
 
64 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 the father says, and its belief in what the father 
 tells is simply one of the accessory sequences of 
 its faith in the father. Faith, with Jesus, is per- 
 sonal confidence in Himself. Faith, with Jesus, 
 is the answer of a man's soul to His soul, the 
 tourh of a man's personality, upon His person- 
 ality, the surrender of a willing life to Jesus 
 Christ as its Lord and its King. 
 
 Now, there is nothing unreasonable in this 
 view of faith. As a matter of fact, all Hfe rests 
 on faith of just this kind. Business life does. 
 What makes prosperity? The fact that times 
 are good? Not necessarily. Men's belief that 
 times are good. What creates a panic? Hard 
 times? Not at all, of necessity, but man's belief 
 that hard times are coming, man's want of con- 
 fidence, man's loss of faith. It often happens 
 that the years after a panic are really more 
 arduous years, less prosperous years than the 
 years during which the panic was upon men. It 
 is the loss of faith, the loss of the atmosphere 
 of trust, the loss of the spirit of confidence that 
 destroys society. It is the presence of faith, 
 of confidence, of trust, not primarily of opinion, 
 not primarily of intellectual agreement, that 
 holds society together. Opinion has its place, 
 but it is not the first place. 
 
 It is the spirit of faith and of trust that 
 underlies our physical life and makes it possible. 
 The veriest sceptic, as we have seen, is living by 
 trust. He is trusting in the continuity of nature. 
 
APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 65 
 
 which is only another name, and a poorer one, 
 for the fidelity of God. He is trusting to this 
 law or that, which is only an impersonal state- 
 ment of some one of God's minor activities. He 
 trusts that his food will work out certain results ; 
 that taking sleep will produce certain conse- 
 quences ; that when he walks out on the face of 
 the earth the stars will not fall down on him and 
 crush him. I say the most honest sceptic that 
 ever lived was compelled by the very necessities 
 of his life to confine his scepticism in the honest 
 application of it to only part of his life. It is 
 impossible for man to live except in the spirit 
 of confidence and faith. 
 
 Far more is this true in- the realm of our 
 higher life. We live, as Paul says, by faith. 
 We live by fellov/ship. We live by confidence. 
 We live by trust. We live, not by reasoning out 
 God's dealing with us, not by the adjustment of 
 certain mental opinions — no man gets more than 
 an inch or two toward the goal by that means — 
 but by the willing adjustment of the volitional 
 life to a trust in God and the laws of God. 
 
 And, accordingly, Jesus Christ in preaching 
 His gospel made His preaching pre-eminently 
 just an assertion of Himself. " Believe Me," He 
 said. " Believe in Me." We see this in all its 
 beauty in the last paragraph of the ninth chap- 
 ter of John, in the story of the man born blind. 
 After the man was cast out from the synagogue 
 Jesus found him, and said unto him, " Dost thou 
 
66 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 believe in the Son of God?" And he said, 
 " Who is He, Lord, that I may believe?" And 
 Jesus said, " Thou hast both seen Him, and He 
 it is that speaketh with thee." Immediately the 
 man responded, " Lord, I believe," and he wor- 
 shipped Him. 
 
 Even those parts of Christ's teaching which 
 are admired by people most hostile to Christ's 
 claims are fullest of Christ's assertiveness. I 
 wonder if you can find in all of Christ's teach- 
 ings anything more assertive of His claims, of 
 His supremacy, of His uniqueness, than the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount. And so at other times, " I 
 am the light of the world. I am the bread of 
 God which came down out of heaven to give life 
 to the world. I am the Messiah. I am the Son 
 of God. I and my Father are one." 
 
 Jesus Christ presented Himself in this way, 
 because that is just what He came here for. 
 Christ was not the preacher of the message, 
 Christ was the message. Christianity differen- 
 tiates itself from every other religion. Christ is 
 His own religion. A man who entered His re- 
 ligion entered Christ. The man who began to 
 learn His religion learned Christ. The man 
 who began to feed himself with what that re- 
 ligion provided, ate of Christ's flesh and drank 
 of Christ's blood. And so Christ made His word 
 a direct appeal to the will of men, to the whole 
 living nature of men, and never once an appeal 
 merely to that part of man which lies within the 
 
APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 67 
 
 sphere of his opinionative powers. Jesus Christ 
 spoke straight home to the whole Hfe of man 
 and demanded that man surrender all his will 
 and his whole Hfe to Him. BeHef, He told men, 
 was an activity of their whole nature, and not 
 a mere matter of their thought. Belief, He told 
 them, was the great and necessary thing. A few 
 acts of outside conduct, a few precepts as to be- 
 haviour, these were comparatively trifling mat- 
 ters with Him, because the great causative 
 forces of conduct are the important things. 
 What He wanted, as He told them, was to lay 
 His hand on that spring of life within, out of 
 which came the things which defile the true 
 life and which is the source of all man's external 
 conduct and behaviour. 
 
 Christ spoke right home to the personalities 
 of those to whom He spoke. In the midst of 
 great crowds He would separate Himself and 
 one man immediately from all the crowd, that 
 He might bear home to the heart of that one man 
 His personal offer of life. He would see in the 
 man's face, He would catch in the man's bear- 
 ing, some faint intimation that the man was hear- 
 ing, though far off, the true note of His voice, 
 and perhaps recognising in it the accents of the 
 Father's voice, and straightway Christ spoke 
 His message home to the heart and life of that 
 man. 
 
 He never tired of insisting, as He spoke to the 
 Jews, that their difficulty was not an intellectual 
 
68 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 difficulty. It was a moral and vital one. " Ye 
 will not come to Me," He said, " that ye might 
 have life. Ye cannot hear My voice because you 
 are not willing to hear My voice. Ye are not of 
 My Father, and therefore ye will not hear Me. 
 Ye are the sons of the devil and the works of 
 your father ye will do. I come in My Father's 
 name and ye will not receive Me. Some other 
 man will come in his own name and him ye will 
 receive." And so, over and over again, He told 
 them that what He wanted of them as a test of 
 their acceptance of Him was not mimic-like 
 repetition of a few formulas, was not crying 
 out in the market-places, " Lord, Lord," it was 
 a keeping of His commandments. " Ye are my 
 friends if you bring your lives into surrender 
 and obedience to Me." " If ye love Me, ye will 
 keep my commandments. If ye love Me, ye will 
 do what I have commanded you, and My Father 
 will love you, and We will come to you and will 
 make Our abode with you." 
 
 Jesus Christ is making His appeal to the 
 whole of our life; He is offering us the whole 
 of Himself to be appropriated by the whole of 
 ourselves. He is offering us His life in exchange 
 for ours. He is offering us Himself in ex- 
 change for ourselves. His divinity for our hu- 
 manity ; and all that He asks of us is not that we 
 should adjust ourselves to a certain opinionative 
 attitude toward Him — -we shall do that all right 
 in time if we do this other — but that we should 
 
APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 69 
 
 bring ourselves, as He Himself put it, into the 
 temperament and atmosphere of a little child. 
 " Except ye be converted and become as little 
 children, ye shall never enter, ye shall not even 
 recognise the kingdom of Heaven/' 
 
 But some one may say : " Is opinion, then, of 
 no account? May I think just what I please, so 
 long as I have right feelings toward Christ ? " 
 By no means. What a man thinks is of vast 
 account. It is one of Christ's own questions, 
 "What think ye of Christ?" Christ Himself 
 was always insisting that His appeal was ad- 
 dressed to the will of man as a reasonable will. 
 He made appeal in reasonable ways. He as- 
 sumed that man himself, even in his most voli- 
 tional life, is a reasoning creature, and He came 
 down to deal with men, in a measure no other 
 great religious teacher ever did, upon the plane 
 of man's inquiring apprehension, and ready to 
 make perfectly clear to men the enigmas of 
 His faith in His own good time. What I insist 
 on is that we are wrong in subjugating the will, 
 the life, the power of vision, the inalienable in- 
 stincts of being, and Christ Himself to our mere 
 opinionative nature; that we do despite to our 
 own life when we trample underfoot our own 
 constitution, when we pick out wilfully one de- 
 partment of our life and deliberately make all 
 the rest of our life the slave of that ; when in this 
 day we keep insisting that physical evidence, the 
 meanest and grossest kind of all evidence, is the 
 
70 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 only evidence which can accredit truth to us. 
 What I insist on is that Jesus Christ makes His 
 appeal to-day just as He did in the days of 
 Thomas, not to the putting of fingers in the nail 
 prints of His hands not to the putting of hands 
 in the spear wound m His side, but to the sense 
 that will be born in men whenever, with the 
 heart of a child, they desire to be made like 
 Christ, when they believe that they are Christ's 
 friends and that Christ is theirs; when they ac- 
 cept a moral attitude, a spiritual atmosphere, the 
 feeling of love and of kinship and of desire, the 
 surrender of life that led Thomas to cry, " My 
 Lord and my God." This is the foundation of 
 spiritual life, the foundation of all true life of 
 whatsoever sort. 
 
 Just in proportion as we understand this, and 
 perceive that Jesus Christ appeals to the highest 
 and most splendid in us, will He be able to lead 
 us out into His own fulness of power. " If any 
 man will do My will/' He said, " intellectually 
 he shall be freed from difficulty in time. He 
 that beheveth on Me, out from the depths of his 
 life shall pour torrents of living water. He that 
 believeth on Me shall do not only what I have 
 done, but greater things than these shall he do 
 because I go unto My Father." 
 
 Jesus is offering Himself to us in this vital 
 way, not in any dead, mechanical fashion; not 
 as a physical body laid outside of us, to be han- 
 dled as men handle the bodies of men which are 
 
APPEAL TO DOUBTING HEART 71 
 
 shells of men, not men; but as the living Spirit 
 of God, sent here to touch the living spirits of 
 men. And those of us who are His sheep will 
 hear His voice and will follow Him. And that 
 is the only essential thing. Everything else fol- 
 lows in its own good time, and doubt, perplexity, 
 hesitancy over this matter of opinion or that 
 matter, find their full solution in the lives of the 
 men who are willing to do His will. Shairp 
 gathers up what I have been saying in his verses : 
 
 "I have a life with Christ to live, 
 And, ere I live it, must I wait 
 Till learning can clear answer give 
 Of this and that book's date? 
 
 "I have a life in Christ to live; 
 I have a death in Christ to die; 
 And must I wait till science give 
 All doubts a full reply? 
 
 " Nay ; rather, while the sea of doubt 
 Is raging wildly round about, 
 Questioning of life and death and sin, 
 Let me but creep within 
 Thy fold, O Christ, and at Thy feet 
 Take but the lowest seat; 
 And hear Thine awful voice repeat. 
 In gentlest accents heavenly sweet, 
 
 'Come unto me and rest; 
 Believe me and be blest.'" 
 
IV 
 
 THE HEARTS RESPONSE TO THE MAS- 
 TER'S CALL 
 
 FROM one point of view, there are two 
 Christs. There is the Christ within. And 
 the experience of the Hfe in which Christ 
 dwells is expressed in Paul's great words : " To 
 me to live is Christ." " When Christ, Who is 
 our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear 
 with. Him in glory." " I am crucified with 
 Christ ; nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but Christ 
 liveth in me." Then there is another Christ — 
 the outer Christ. Of course the Christ who 
 would dwell within is the Christ without, until 
 the door of the life is opened to let Him in ; but 
 even when He has been admitted, there is an 
 outer Christ still — a Christ who lays a law upon 
 the Hfe as well as lives a Hfe within the life ; and 
 the words of the experience of the outer Christ 
 are such words as these: "A new command- 
 ment give I unto you." " Ye are my friends, if 
 ye do whatsoever I command you." 
 
 From one point of view there are two Christs. 
 
 And yet we know that there is only one Christ, 
 
 and that the outer is the inner Christ, that the 
 
 Christ who dwells within is the Christ, also, to 
 
 n 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 7S 
 
 Whom our eyes are turned without. They make 
 a vain endeavour who try to get along with one 
 or the other of these two Christs, excluding the 
 one with Whom they wish to have little to do. 
 Those who think they can have the Christ with- 
 out, without also accepting the Christ within, 
 or the Christ within without also accepting the 
 Christ without, can have neither Christ in His 
 fulness. 
 
 Now, the call of the Christ of the inner life is 
 such a word as this : " Verily, verily, I say 
 unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of 
 Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in 
 you." And the call of the outer Christ is such 
 a word as this : " If ye love Me, keep My com- 
 mandments." We must often be confused by 
 the effort of men to keep these two Christs apart, 
 and perhaps there are few of us who are not 
 often thrown into confusion by our own thought 
 of a Christ within and a Christ without, whose 
 missions we attempt to keep separate one from 
 the other. The two Christs are one. Is there 
 any call of the common Christ, following which 
 we shall be able to surmount the difficulties 
 which come from trying to sever the call of 
 the Christ within from the call of the Christ 
 without? I think there is such a call, and that 
 it was equally the primal and the final call of 
 Jesus to men : " Follow Me ! " 
 
 Our Lord walked by the shores of the Sea 
 of Galilee, and saw Simon and Andrew his 
 
74 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 brother casting a net in the sea, for they were 
 fishers, and He said to them, " Follow Me," and 
 they left their nets and followed Him. Walk- 
 ing further, He saw John and James, his brother, 
 mending their nets in their boat, and He called 
 to them, and they left their father Zebedee and 
 followed Him. A few days later, as He came 
 out of a city in which He had been preaching, 
 He passed a publican sitting at the receipt of 
 custom, and He said to him, " Follow Me," and 
 he rose and left his money tables and followed 
 Him. And it came to pass, as they were on 
 their way to Jerusalem, that one came to Him 
 and said, " I will follow Thee whithersoever 
 Thou goest." And He answered and said unto 
 him, " Foxes have holes, and the birds of the 
 air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not 
 where to lay His head." And He said unto an- 
 other, " Follow Me," and he said, " Suffer me 
 first to go and bury my father." He said to 
 him, " Let the dead bury their dead ; but go 
 thou and preach the kingdom of God." And 
 another said to Him, " Lord, I will follow Thee ; 
 but suffer me first to go and say farewell to 
 them that are at home at my house " ; and He 
 said to him, " No man, having put his hand to 
 the plough, and looking back, is fit for the king- 
 dom of God." And as He went on in the way 
 a young man came to Him, and said, " Master, 
 what good thing shall I do that I may have 
 eternal life ? " And He said to him, '' Why 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 75 
 
 askest thou Me concerning that which is good? 
 One is good, even God. Keep the command- 
 ments." And the man said to Him, " Which 
 commandments ? " And He replied, " Thou shalt 
 not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not 
 commit adultery; thou shalt not bear false wit- 
 ness; thou shalt honour thy father and mother, 
 and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'* 
 And the young man said to Him, " All these 
 have I observed; what lack I yet?" He said to 
 him, " If thou wouldst be perfect, go and sell 
 what thou hast and give to the poor, and thou 
 shalt have treasure in heaven ; and come and fol- 
 low Me." 
 
 Now, these were all calls of Christ to men 
 practically at His first meetings with them; but 
 if you study the Gospels, you will find that 
 Christ's call to men who had been with Him 
 for three long years was still the same, " Follow 
 Me." On the last night of His intercourse with 
 them, He knew no better way to sound them the 
 call of the inner and the outer life alike than in 
 these same terms : " For where I go," He said, 
 " ye cannot follow Me now. Your discipleship 
 must be incomplete for a little while; ye shall 
 follow Me afterwards." And Simon Peter said 
 to Him, '' Lord, why can I not follow Thee now ? 
 I am ready to go with Thee both to prison and 
 to death." And even at the end, when He 
 walked with Simon Peter, in one of the last of 
 all His interviews which are preserved to us in 
 
76 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 the Gospels, in the grey dawn of the early morn- 
 ing by the shores of Galilee, as He welcomed him 
 back to the new life and the new service, He 
 said to him, " Follow Me." " If I will that he 
 tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow 
 thou Me." 
 
 That was Christ's call to men. He did not say 
 to them, "Will you join My organisation?" 
 For at first He had no organisation to invite men 
 to join. He did not say to them, " Will you 
 accept these views that I am proclaiming?" For 
 when He first invited men to follow Him, He 
 had as yet proclaimed no views. He asked men 
 to join Him. He did not ask them to join an 
 institution; He did not ask them to believe in 
 His opinions; He asked men to join Him and 
 to believe in Him. It was on the personal re- 
 lationship to Himself that He laid all the em- 
 phasis; and even when years had passed away 
 and Christ's organisation had begun to develop 
 and His views had been set before men and He 
 called them into His life. He did not say to 
 them even then, " I wish you would accept these 
 views of Mine; they are the only truths." He 
 did not say to them, " I wish you would join this 
 fellowship of Mine; it is the only fellowship." 
 He still said to them, "Follow Me." At the 
 close of His teaching it was still the thought of 
 being personally united to Himself that He 
 would have understood to be the fundamental 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 77 
 
 thought of His kingdom. " I know My sheep, 
 and My sheep know Me, and they follow Me." 
 And when He set before His disciples in the 
 twelfth chapter of John's Gospel, with a clear- 
 ness and a fulness of intimation which He had 
 scarcely used before, the thought of His death, 
 His crucifixion, and His larger power. He still 
 spoke to them in these terms. It was not, " Be- 
 lieve now in these great views of My going 
 away, and all that for which My going stands," 
 but, " If any man serve Me, let him follow Me ; 
 and where I am, there also shall My servant be." 
 It is worth noting that Jesus Christ is the 
 only person in the world who dares to say to 
 men, " Follow Me." No other founder of a 
 great religion has based his religion on a per- 
 sonal following of himself. Confucianism, as 
 a religion, consists merely in the practice of 
 maxims, in memorising them, and in the mould- 
 ing of life on the basis of those ideas, now 
 twenty-five centuries old. It is a religion of 
 precepts and antiquarianism. Buddhism is a 
 religion of a method. Buddha proclaimed noth- 
 ing else than the discovery of a way; and by 
 his philosophy we are to learn simply the method 
 of satisfaction and absorption. Mohammedan- 
 ism is the rehgion of a book and a formula. 
 Twelve hundred years ago Mohammed wrote it 
 all down, never to be changed while the cen- 
 turies pass, so that 
 
78 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 "Though the world rolls on from range to range. 
 And realms of thought expand, 
 The letter stands without expanse or change, 
 
 Stiff as a dead man's hand. 
 While as the life blood fills the growing form 
 The Spirit Christ has shed 
 Flows through the ripening ages quick and warm, 
 More felt than heard or read." 
 
 Among all the teachers and leaders of men Jesus 
 has dared to stand out and to cry over the tumult 
 of life's sea, " Follow Me ! Follow Me ! " 
 
 I do not wonder that that call made on the 
 first disciples the impression which it did make. 
 In the first chapter in John's Gospel we read 
 that He was minded to go into Galilee, and He 
 said to Philip, " Follow Me," and Philip found 
 Nathanael, and without any other proof of 
 Christ's divinity than that contained in those 
 words, " Follow Me," and in Christ's person- 
 ality, said to him, " We have found Him, of 
 Whom Moses in the law, and the prophets did 
 write, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph." 
 By the interpretation of a phrase, Philip sprang 
 out of his dead lovelessness into the love and 
 the life of Christ; and I am sure that no life 
 has ever heard that sweet voice " that makes 
 whoever hears a homesick soul thereafter until he 
 follows it to heaven," saying " Follow Me," with- 
 out seeing back of that voice the lovely face of 
 the divine Messiah, the Lamb of God Who came 
 to take away the sins of the whole world. 
 " Follow Me." 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 79 
 
 But what does following Jesus Christ mean?*^ 
 I suppose that there is scarcely one of us who 
 would not claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ. 
 But what does it mean to follow Jesus Christ? 
 Well, what does it mean to follow any man? If, 
 when Mr. Hewitt defeated Mr. Roosevelt 
 and Mr. Henry George in the municipal cam- 
 paign for the mayoralty of New York City, I 
 had said that I was a follower of Henry George, 
 you would have understood, of course, that I 
 believed to an extent in Mr. George's views; 
 that I was supporting him in. his candidacy for 
 the mayoralty; that I was lending my influence 
 to his election; that I believed in his personal 
 character, and was willing to trust to him the 
 large responsibilities of the office for which he 
 was a candidate. Is that what it means to fol- 
 low Christ? Not much more than that, if Jesus 
 Christ was only a man. But Jesus Christ was 
 more than a man, and to follow Him means 
 more than simply to believe in His views, or to 
 have confidence in His character, or to be a 
 supporter of Jesus for the position which He 
 is claiming as spiritual King of all the children 
 of His Father. It means more than that to 
 follow Christ, for Christ demands of those who 
 follow Him what no man ever dared to demand 
 of his followers. He demands that every thought 
 shall be brought into captivity to His obedience; 
 He demands that all life shall be laid down at 
 His feet, and that He Himself shall be given the 
 
80 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 throne and sceptre in the human Hfe that would 
 call itself His. He claims in the life of every 
 man a surrender of the man's whole will, of all 
 a man's nature to Himself, and He offers, of 
 course, in exchange to give that which is of in- 
 finitely greater value — even the indwelling of 
 His own life. But that does not alter the fact 
 that He demands in those who would call them- 
 selves His followers what no man ever dared to 
 demand, what no man could ever expect to obtain 
 from his fellowmen. 
 
 What does it mean to follow Jesus Christ? It 
 means very clearly that my life must be like 
 Christ's life, not by any mechanical external 
 imitation. I think that many books that are 
 written in our day with the most earnest and 
 devout purpose make this great mistake of lay- 
 ing down for us rules of mechanical imitation 
 of Jesus, which are themselves the denial and 
 the distrust of the Spirit of Jesus, which is lib- 
 erty. There is no need of effort in making 
 one's Hfe Hke Christ's. Christ Himself will make 
 the life like His which is willing to assume 
 toward Him the attitude of discipleship, and to 
 say to Him, " Master, I follow Thee," for Christ 
 Himself will put into operation in that Hfe the 
 principles that make His own Hfe. 
 
 As one studies the Master's life, the principles 
 that made His life seem to fall into these five 
 classes. First of all, the principles that found 
 expression in what Paul called Jesus's empty- 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 81 
 
 ing of Himself, what the Buddhists call, with 
 reference to Sakya Muni, "the great renuncia- 
 tion." All that Gautama Buddha gave up was 
 his human, kingly crown, while what Christ gave 
 up was the crown and throne of a heavenly king- 
 dom, when with an infinite stoop of condescen- 
 sion He came down thence to walk to and fro 
 here among men. Surely, that was the first 
 great principle of Jesus's life. A life that would 
 be like Christ's must be imbued with that same 
 principle. Jesus Himself taught this. " If any 
 man will come after Me, let him deny himself, 
 and take up his cross daily, and follow Me." 
 He pointed out to His disciples that, first of 
 all, this great principle must be put in opera- 
 tion by His Spirit in their lives, which had ruled 
 His life, the principle to which Paul referred 
 when, in the second chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Philippians, he said : " Let this mind be in you ' 
 which was also in Christ Jesus; Who being in 
 the form of God, counted not equality with 
 God a prize to be jealously retained, but emptied 
 Himself, taking the form of a servant, being 
 made in the likeness of man and being found in 
 the fashion as a man. He humbled Himself and 
 became obedient unto death, even the death of 
 the cross." We who would follow JesMs Christ 
 must learn, first of all, to be like Him in this 
 absolute renunciation of self-life and self-pur- 
 pose. We must be willing " to give up the love 
 of life for the sake of the life of love." 
 
82 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 The second set of principles in Jesus's life are 
 the principles of testing and of endurance of 
 testing. When He began His ministry He went 
 out at once into the great temptation where He 
 was tried. For we have not a high priest that 
 was not tempted, or incapable of being tempted, 
 or that is unable to sympathise with us, but one 
 who was in all points tempted like as we; and 
 who in that " He Himself hath suffered being 
 tempted, is able to succour them also that are 
 tempted." Is it not true that the better the life 
 the larger its temptations? I believe, even 
 though it is not a true view, there is truth in 
 the view that the best compliment that God 
 can offer us is to suffer temptation to come to 
 us; for there is evil to be overcome in this 
 world, and that evil must be distributed among 
 those who are able to overcome it, and God 
 allows to us just that burden which is within 
 the measure of our strength. If He allows one 
 more or less than his brother, it is because his 
 ability to endure is greater or less than his 
 brother's. The holier a life is the larger its 
 temptations will be ; finer temptations, of course, 
 not so gross as the old; temptations accom- 
 panied with a larger power of resistance than 
 was possessed before, but temptations so bitter, 
 so hot, so keen, that the low, coarse life could 
 not conceive them if by any means they could 
 be expressed to it. To all of us the following 
 of Jesus, each step in the way, will mean a life 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 83 
 
 of larger temptation, and therefore a life of finer 
 fibre and of larger glory, and a life laid under 
 heavier responsibilities to resist. What if Jesus 
 Christ had played traitor to humanity in the 
 wilderness ? What if He had fallen when Satan 
 came to Him endeavouring to overthrow Him at 
 the beginning? All history since Christ, all his- 
 tory before Christ, would have been written over 
 with a great blur. The principle of temptation 
 in Christ's life was accompanied with a principle 
 of a perfect endurance; and it must be so with 
 us who would follow Him. 
 
 Then, thirdly, after His temptation, the Mas- 
 ter came out at once from the wilderness, and 
 stood forth before men to make His public dec- 
 laration. Imagine yourself, for a moment, in 
 that crowd that stood around Him, the carpen- 
 ter's son from the village of Nazareth, and hear 
 Him speaking, " I say unto you, that except 
 your righteousness shall exceed the righteous- 
 ness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no 
 case enter Into the kingdom of Heaven." " Not 
 every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall 
 enter into the kingdom of Heaven ; but he that 
 doeth the will of My Father which is in Heaven." 
 The most difficult confession you or I were ever 
 called upon to make was as nothing in compar- 
 ison with the self-declaration which Christ was 
 called to make that day when untried, fresh 
 from His obscure life, He stepped out into the 
 blaze of the scrutiny of all Israel, and said to 
 
84 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 those worshippers of tradition and of authority: 
 " Ye have heard that it was said by them of old 
 times, but / say unto you, I, I, I." And so 
 throughout His ministry. His preaching was a 
 declaration of difficult truth. He closed His life 
 with confessions as great as those with which 
 He began. Have you ever thought why Paul, 
 in charging Timothy, " I charge thee in the 
 sight of God, Who quickeneth all things, and in 
 the sight of Jesus Christ," added, " Who before 
 Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confession." 
 It was because Paul understood that among all 
 the great principles of Christ's life, scarcely any 
 was greater than that principle which found its 
 expression in His absolute fearlessness of asser- 
 tion of His message and His person and of the 
 relationship which had existed between Him, the 
 Son, and the Father Who had sent Him. If we 
 follow our Master, we must be in our confession 
 of Him before men as clear, as unqualified, as 
 strong, as He was, when, nineteen centuries ago. 
 He stood upon the hills overlooking the tremu- 
 lous blue waves of Galilee or faced Pontius 
 Pilate. 
 
 The fourth set of principles that controlled 
 Christ's life, and which He Himself will set to 
 control our lives, — ^how can they be expressed 
 better than by calling them the principles of 
 loving human tenderness, the principles which 
 governed, throughout, that career of gentle, little 
 Vinremembered acts of kindness and of love, th^ 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 85 
 
 life of " the first true gentleman that ever 
 breathed," that " very perfect, gentle knight " : 
 
 "And of His port as meeke as is a mayde, 
 He nevere yet no vileynye he sayde." 
 
 Those of us who would follow Him must show 
 those principles of loving tenderness which made 
 His life so sweet, so generous, so thoughtless of 
 all self-interest, so thoughtful of all innocence 
 and of all sinners, and let them govern also in 
 our lives and shape them after the fashion of His 
 own. 
 
 Last of all, there is the fifth set of principles, 
 which we must allow to control our lives, and 
 which are summarised in the great names of 
 Gethsemane, and Calvary, and Olivet. No one 
 enters into the life of Christ's discipleship who 
 does not seek, not the renunciation only, but the 
 very death of all his old low self and self-life. 
 For life is far more than just ease and gentle- 
 ness, far more than confession and the endur- 
 ance of the tests that God sends us. Life is a 
 daily dying and rising — as the old lines run: 
 
 '* As once toward heaven my face was set, 
 I came unto a place where two ways met. 
 One led to Paradise and one away; 
 And fearful of myself lest I should stray, 
 
 I paused that I might know 
 Which was the way wherein I ought to go. 
 The first was one my weary eyes to please. 
 Winding along thro' pleasant fields of ease, 
 
86 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 Beneath the shadow of fair branching trees. 
 *This path of calm and solitude 
 
 Surely must lead to heaven,' I cried, 
 In joyous mood. 
 *Yon rugged one, so rough for weary feet, 
 
 The footpath of the world's too busy street. 
 
 Can never be the narrow way of life.' 
 
 But at that moment I thereon espied 
 
 A footprint bearing trace of having bled, 
 
 And knew it for the Christ's, so bowed my head. 
 And followed where He led." 
 
 In the life of each one of us truly follov^ing 
 Jesus, these principles that make Christ's life 
 and Christ Himself Hving in these principles, 
 must be operating. 
 
 Is that all that following Jesus means ? From 
 one point of view, yes ; and yet there is one ele- 
 ment which has not had emphasis enough. Fol- 
 lowing Jesus means that I turn over to Jesus 
 all my judgments, all my tastes, all my opinions, 
 all my few talents for His use; that I sink in 
 Him all my interests ; that in the fine old phrase 
 of Ignatius, He becomes to me " my inseparable 
 life," and I have no longer any life " divided, O 
 Lord of Life, from Thee," All my life becomes 
 Christ's when I have once said to Him, as I 
 have heard His voice say, " Follow me," " Mas- 
 ter, I follow thee." 
 
 Following Christ means, of course, also, the 
 complement of this. As I hand over to Christ \ 
 all that I am and all that I have, Christ hands i 
 back to me all that He is and all that He has. 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 87 
 
 I say it very reverently. Our Master says to us 
 "Ye are My Master;" just as truly as we say 
 to Him, "Thou art My Master;" for He has 
 put at my disposal all that is His, even as I have 
 tried to put at His disposal all that is mine. 
 Nothing that He possesses is held back from me. 
 All those treasures of wisdom and knowledge 
 that are hidden in Him are made mine. He 
 Himself is made to me the unlimited horizon 
 of a new heaven and a new earth. Jesus Christ 
 gives far more than He asks from any of those 
 whom He asks to follow Him. Years ago, one 
 who was at that time perhaps the best known 
 astronomer of our country, in an address which 
 he made at Smith College when he was speaking 
 there one Sunday afternoon, quoted a hymn 
 which he said was his favourite hymn. I have 
 thought of it often as coming from him, a man 
 who had seen more things than any of us can 
 hope to see. This was the hymn he said he 
 loved best of all : 
 
 "Jesus, these eyes have never seen 
 
 That radiant form of thine. 
 The veil of sense hangs dark between 
 
 Thy blessed face and mine. 
 I hear Thee not, I see Thee not, 
 
 Yet art Thou oft with me; 
 And earth hath ne'er so dear a spot 
 
 As where I meet with Thee." 
 
 Only the old hymn errs in this : that Christ is not 
 "oft" with those that follow Him. "If any 
 
88 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 man serve Me, let him follow Me; and where 
 I am, there also shall My servant be." It is 
 one of the laws of the Kingdom of God that 
 Christ and His servant, His follower, can never 
 be apart. Though I go down into the uttermost 
 depths of the earth, even there will His love 
 protect me. Though I wander off out of the 
 sight of all men. His love is with me still. 
 
 "I know not where His islands lift 
 Their fronded palms in air, 
 I only know I cannot drift 
 Beyond His love and care." 
 
 Into the secret of His presence we go morning 
 and night. In the secret place not " oft " but al- 
 ways is the soul that is following Jesus privi- 
 leged to live and to walk, to wake and to sleep, 
 in Him. These things it means to follow Christ. 
 But even more. " Come ye after me," was 
 His word to those disciples on the shores of 
 Galilee, and what ? " Come ye after me, and I 
 will make you to be fishers of men." In other 
 words, " Follow me, and others will follow you." 
 Following Jesus Christ is the door to the influ- 
 ence we covet. I suppose that all of us covet 
 influence. There is nothing for which men 
 hunger so as they hunger for influence over 
 their fellow men. Until the new era dawned, 
 2,000,000 men came up to take the annual ex- 
 aminations in the civil service in China every 
 year. Men took these examinations year after 
 
THE HEAHT'S RESPONSE 8^ 
 
 year for seventy years. There were instances 
 of old men over a hundred years of age still try- 
 ing to pass the entrance examinations of what 
 was practically the great university of China, 
 so hot was their ambition after those positions 
 of influence and leadership which could be ob- 
 tained in no other way. Scarcely a year passes 
 in India that some of the young Hindus who fail 
 in the examination do not commit suicide, so dis- 
 appointed are they at having lost the chance of 
 rising into the positions of influence that they 
 desire. Few of us probably want anything more 
 than we want the ability to influence men and 
 women to follow Jesus. We do not long for a 
 crown of glory. We do long for the fulfilment 
 in our lives of that old promise in Daniel, that 
 they that turn many to righteousness shall shine 
 as the stars forever and ever. We would like 
 to feel as Paul felt, who was willing to be ac- 
 cursed from God for his brothers' sake if only he 
 might turn them to the light and joy of Christ. 
 We want to feel, as he felt, the thrilling eagef' 
 ness and joy of influence. 
 
 "Oft when the Word is on me to deliver. 
 Lifts the illusion and the truth lies bare. 
 Desert or throng, the city or the river. 
 
 Melts in a lucid Paradise of air. 
 Only like souls I see the folk thereunder 
 Bound who should conquer, slaves who should bf 
 kings. 
 Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder. 
 Sadly contented in a show of things. 
 
90 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 Then with a rush the intolerable craving 
 Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call, 
 
 Oh, to save these, to perish for their saving, 
 Die for their life, be offered for them all." 
 
 And here is the secret : " Follow me." " Come 
 ye after me, and I will make you to become 
 fishers of men." 
 
 Nor is even that all. " He that foUoweth me 
 shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the 
 light of life." I do not know the way I go; 
 you do not know the way you go. Now and 
 then we become conscious that the way is dark, 
 and we are far from home, and we cry for the 
 kindly Light to lead us on. " He that follow- 
 eth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall 
 have the light of life " ; He Himself stands wait- 
 ing by the side of those who are waiting with 
 willingness to follow Him, ready to lead us on. 
 
 " And although the way be cheerless. 
 We can follow calm and fearless. 
 Till we safely stand in the Fatherland." 
 
 Nor is that all. " If any man serve me, let 
 him follow Me; and he that followeth Me, him 
 shall My Father honour." He is calling us to- 
 day, as nineteen hundred years ago He called 
 over the waves of Galilee, saying, " Christian, 
 follow me." Shall we let Him pass by, with the 
 gleam of His white robe dying out of our sight, 
 and the sweet voice growing fainter and fainter 
 in our ears, and the radiance that always goes 
 
THE HEART'S RESPONSE 91 
 
 with Him sinking out of our sky; shall we let 
 Him pass ? Or, as He cried, " Follow me," shall 
 we turn to Him, knowing well what It means, 
 and rising up, leave all and follow Him ? 
 
 This is the whole of it. He, Himself, stands 
 waiting, with all of the Father's life and the 
 Father's joy and the Father's fulness, and the 
 Father's glory, ready to give them to us if we 
 will follow Him, and there is nowhere else that 
 they can be found. 
 
 "Long did I toil and knew no earthly rest. 
 
 Far did I roam and found no lasting home. 
 At last I sought them in His sheltering breast 
 
 Who opes His arms and bids the weary come. 
 With Him I found a home, a rest divine; 
 And I since then am His, and He is mine. 
 
 " The good I have Is from his store supplied, 
 The ill is only what He deems the best. 
 He for my friend, I'm rich with naught beside. 
 
 And poor without Him, though of all possessed. 
 All things may change; I take or I resign, 
 Content while I am His and He is mine. 
 
 "Whate'er may change, no change in Him is seen; 
 
 A glorious sun that wanes not nor declines. 
 Above the clouds and doubts He walks serene, 
 
 And sweetly on His people's darkness shines. 
 Whate'er may come, I care not nor repine 
 While I my Saviour's am, and He is mine. 
 
 "While here, alas! I know but half His love. 
 But half discern Him and but half adore: 
 
92 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 But when I meet Him in the courts above, 
 
 I hope to love Him better, praise Him more, 
 And sing and tell amid the choir divine 
 How fully I am His and He is mine." 
 
 Let us go with Him and be His, that He may 
 go with us and be ours. 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 
 
 AMONG the multitude who followed Jesus, 
 ^\^ attracted by the novelty of His doctrine and 
 the magic of His mighty works, there were 
 a few who heard in His doctrine the voice of the 
 Father and who perceived that the mighty works 
 were signs. How many men and women of sin- 
 cere and discerning faith were hidden in the 
 multitude we can not say. We know that there 
 were some hundreds of them. From among 
 these Jesus selected seventy, and sent them out 
 two by two before His face into every city and 
 place whither He Himself would come. Besides 
 these seventy He chose twelve, not to go out 
 from Him, but to be with Him, to learn His 
 ways and to acquire His spirit. And within 
 this circle He had another circle of three — 
 sometimes of four — who were closer to Him still. 
 Who the men were who composed this inner 
 circle we know. They were the first four dis- 
 ciples whom He had won — ^John and James and 
 Simon Peter and Andrew his brother. Apart 
 from the story in the first chapter of the Gospel 
 of John, which tells us so ingenuously of how 
 these four men became the disciples of Jesus, 
 we see on three different occasions three of them 
 
 93 
 
94 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 living in the closest relations with Him, and 
 on one other occasion all four close by His side. 
 Peter and James and John were the only three 
 whom He would suffer to go with Him when 
 He went into the room and restored the little 
 daughter of the ruler of the synagogue. We 
 read later that when He would be transfigured 
 He took Peter and James and John and went 
 up into an high mountain apart and was glori- 
 fied before them. Later, as the end drew near, 
 He sat on the Mount of Olives, over against 
 the temple ; and there were with Him Peter and . 
 James and John and Andrew. And last of all, 
 when He went down into the Garden of Geth- 
 semane, there were three whom He took along to 
 watch with Him — Peter and James and John. 
 As last in the old life so first in the new He drew 
 these men close to Him. To two of them He 
 appeared on Easter Day and then to all three 
 and perhaps to Andrew also on the shore of the 
 old sea where He had first called them to come 
 after Him. 
 
 What these men who made up the inner circle 
 daily saw and heard in their intimate relations 
 with Christ we may somewhat guess from what 
 we know that they saw and heard on these occa- 
 sions when we see them with Him. They saw as 
 no other men the tenderness of Jesus; they saw 
 as no other men the glory of Jesus ; they saw as 
 no other men the calm dignity and prophetic 
 discernment of Jesus, and they saw as none 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 95 
 
 others the exquisite suffering and sympathy of 
 Jesus. It is impossible that our hearts should 
 not long to have seen what they saw. We also 
 pray : 
 
 " Oh to have watched Thee through the vineyards 
 wander, 
 Pluck the ripe ears and into evening roam ! — 
 Followed, and known that in the twilight yonder 
 Legions of angels shone about Thy home." 
 
 But could we have seen if we had been there? 
 .AH the disciples were not in this inner circle. 
 How did Jesus come to have an inner circle 
 among His inmost friends? Was His choice 
 of these three men a matter of partiality and of 
 divine selection, or might any disciple who de- 
 sired have belonged to this inner company if 
 he had been willing to live as close to Jesus 
 as these? Whatever limitations were imposed 
 upon our Lord's selection of His friends by the 
 conditions of His earthly life, however narrow 
 the possibilities of membership in this inner 
 circle may have been when Christ was here, we 
 have His own word for it that now any man 
 who will may belong to the inmost company of 
 His friends. He Himself said to the woman 
 by Jacob's well that the day was coming — yes, 
 was now come — when those who worship the 
 Father will worship Him in spirit and in truth, 
 for the Father is seeking such to worship Him; 
 and in ways that seemed almost to exhaust His 
 own divine powers of appeal our Lord spoke to 
 
96 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 those about Him, and left to His disciples of all 
 days the most winning invitations to come and 
 join the most secret company of His own. He 
 speaks still as He spoke of old in His pathetic ex- 
 postulation to the Jews : " Come unto me. Ye 
 search the Scriptures, because ye think in them ye i 
 have eternal life ; and they are they which testify 
 of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye 
 might have life." We read that as He came 
 around over the brow of the Mount of Olives for 
 one of His last visits to Jerusalem, and emerged 
 from the shadow of the rock which, as Dean 
 Stanley says, hides the city completely from the 
 sight of the traveller imtil it bursts all at once 
 upon his view, He wept over it, and He said, " If \ 
 thou hadst known, even thou, the things that be- ) 
 long unto thy peace ; but now they are hid from / 
 thine eyes." From beside that rock on Olivet we 
 may still hear the invitations of His love. And 
 we read even in that stern chapter, the twenty- 
 third chapter of Matthew, in which. He de- 
 nounces so unhesitatingly and with so little com- 
 promise the hypocrisy and the blindness of the 
 Pharisees, that He could not even then restrain 
 the desire to invite men into the closest possible 
 relationship with Him; and He broke out at the 
 end of that chapter with the appealing cry, "O 
 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have 
 gathered thy children together as a hen gathers 
 her little ones under her wings, and ye would 
 not ! " For a surety the picture that John Bun- 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 97 
 
 yan draws of the man at the gate, of which 
 Barbara MacAndrew makes use in her poem, is 
 wholly justified by Jesus's own words. 
 
 " Thus day and night they are drawing nigh 
 With tears and sighs to the heavenly gate. 
 Where the Watchman stands in His majesty, 
 With a patience that never has said, * Too late I ' 
 
 " Let the sorrowful children of want and sin 
 Draw near to the gate whence none depart. 
 Let the nations arise and enter in, 
 
 For the Lord is willing with all His heart." 
 
 But we may say in our hearts, as we recall 
 in this way the Saviour's eager invitation to us 
 to be among His best friends, that our tempera- 
 ments preclude the possibility of our ever becom- 
 ing members of the inner circle. But the con- 
 stitution of the first inner circle is proof of the 
 capacity of every man to belong. A man may 
 say: "I am incapable by my disposition of be- 
 longing to the inner circle at all. I am vacillat- 
 ing, unreliable, impulsive, hasty in my spiritual 
 judgments. There are hours when I could be- 
 long, but there are other hours when I am far 
 away, and I would be but a hypocrite if I pre- 
 tended now that I could join and remain faithful 
 to that sacred company. I have always been in- 
 constant and unreliable and changeable and full 
 of moods, and the inner circle is not for me." 
 But Simon Peter was this sort of a man, and he 
 
98 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 belonged. Another may say : '' I am by nature 
 cool and undemonstrative ; my mind is not spirit- 
 ual — it is mathematical. I am all the time cal- 
 culating; I am frugal of my emotions. Much 
 that is said in religious meetings makes no appeal 
 to me. It does not touch me. If I were a man 
 of delicate spiritual sensibilities, as others whom 
 I know, I could join." But Andrew was just 
 such a man, and he belonged. Or one may say : 
 " I am hard in my judgments of others. I am 
 prone to severity. I am not of that generous 
 and charitable temperament which disposes men 
 to free spiritual fellowship. I have my opinions, 
 and everything has to bend to them. I cannot 
 let myself go. I am of a different sort from 
 the demonstrative men who belong in the inner 
 circle." But James was such a man, and he be- 
 longed. And as for all the men of love, John 
 was a member of this early inner circle, and 
 represents the right of every man whose heart 
 is tender toward Jesus — who, however weary he 
 may be of his own weakness and stern tovv^ard 
 himself, is all gentleness and love toward his 
 Lord Jesus, to come and abide with Him. For 
 such men John is the sufficient evidence that they 
 belong in the inner circle of the Saviour. 
 
 But how may men enter this circle, if it is 
 not a matter of election or of partiality, but is 
 open to every Christian man? How did these 
 first disciples enter? In the first place, they 
 esteemed membership in the inner circle as a 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 99 
 
 desirable thing — they wanted to belong; and as 
 Simon Peter said, far on in his life, they were 
 willing to sacrifice everything else for the sake 
 of belonging,' " Lord," he said, " we have left 
 all that we might be close to Thee." If there 
 be some of us who are not desirous of belonging, 
 we cannot get in. If there are other things 
 that we esteem as more to be desired than mem- 
 bership in the inner circle of Christ's friends, 
 we cannot enter. If we are esteeming some per- 
 sonal vice, if we are counting some personal am- 
 bition, if we are holding this or that taste as a 
 more valuable thing than membership in the 
 inner circle of Christ's friends, we cannot be 
 admitted there. But we can go in, just as these 
 first disciples went in, if we want to go — if we 
 count membership in the circle of Christ's closest 
 friends a worthy and noble thing, and if, count- 
 ing it so, we are willing to walk in the footsteps 
 of those first disciples who, when they heard His 
 voice, rose up and left all and came in. 
 
 In the second place, they followed Him. It 
 was doubtless hard work climbing the Mountain 
 of Transfiguration; but it was enough for them 
 that His figure went before. We know that it 
 was hard work for them to go into the Garden 
 of Gethsemane with Him. They were so 
 wearied that they could not watch with Him, 
 and fell asleep ; but still they followed Him. And 
 if one voice could speak to us again that is 
 silent nowj but is speaking in the courts of that 
 
100 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 upper City, I think that voice would tell us again 
 the story of the resolute and persistent following 
 of Elisha upon the footsteps of his master. The 
 true disciple will not be turned aside from fol- 
 lowing his Master. These men followed Jesus, 
 and therefore they must be with Him. When 
 He went to see His Father face to face on the 
 Mount of Transfiguration they were with Him 
 there. When He sat on the hill over against 
 the temple and thought on the boundless years 
 that were to roll before He came back again 
 they were with Him there. And when He went 
 down into the garden among the little olive 
 trees that were kind to Him, to fight out there 
 the last battle of all, they were with Him still, 
 and saw glistening upon His brow the sweat- 
 drops of blood. If men will follow Him He 
 will not flee from them, and they will find them- 
 selves through the sheer force of their follow- 
 ing in the circle of His inmost friends. These 
 first three not only wanted to be with Jesus 
 and to follow Jesus — ^they 2i\so_ wot. chedjmih 
 Him. Though their eyes were heavy with 
 slumber, they still would try to watch with Him 
 — and while they watched they beheld. So far 
 as they would not let their Master slip from 
 them, they perforce lived within the circle of His 
 closest companionship. And wherever, still fol- 
 lowing in the steps of these first who made up 
 the inmost circle of His dear ones, men are 
 eager for Christ's deepest companionship, will 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 101 
 
 follow Him whatever must be left that they may 
 follow, and will watch with keen and undimmed 
 eyes His footsteps, they will find themselves, as 
 Peter and James and John did nineteen hundred 
 years ago, in the inner circle of the Lord. 
 
 "If I ask Him to receive me 
 
 Will He say me nay? 
 *Not till earth and not till Heaven 
 Pass away. 
 
 "Finding, following, keeping, struggling. 
 Is He sure to bless? 
 Angels, Martyrs, Prophets, Virgins 
 Answer, * Yes.' " 
 
 But there are some things that will keep men 
 out of the inner circle of Christ. One of them 
 is ^ayerlessness. When we pray that we may 
 be brought and kept within the spirit of the 
 prayerful life we ask that He Who alone can do it 
 should enable each one of us to comply with one 
 condition of membership in the inmost circle of 
 the Saviour's friends. The prayerless life is 
 shut out of the closest companionship of Christ. 
 I imagine that many of us would be ashamed to 
 answer if anyone should ask and each one of us 
 should be obliged candidly to reply whether we 
 have the habit of personal daily secret prayer. 
 I was reading recently some extracts from the 
 diary and letters of old Andrew Bonar that may 
 persuade our hearts to a greater desire to rise 
 
102 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 beyond that prayerlessness of life which bare 
 the gates of the inner circle against men: 
 
 " God has this week been impressing much 
 upon me the way of redeeming time for prayer 
 by learning to pray while walking from place 
 to place." 
 
 " God will not let me get the blessing without 
 asking. Until I get up to the measure of at 
 least two hours in pure prayer every day I shall 
 not be contented." 
 
 " My chief desire should be to be a man of 
 prayer, for there is no want of speaking, and 
 writing, and preaching, and teaching, and work- 
 ing ; but there is need of the Holy Spirit to make 
 all this effectual." 
 
 " Pray for my new charge, for we have no 
 more than a few drops yet, and I believe I am 
 to blame. I work more than I pray." 
 
 " Fully convinced that the best thing that I 
 can do in my study and mode of conducting 
 work will be to give more time to prayer, and 
 always to give it the earliest place in my em- 
 ployments." 
 
 " In prayer in the wood for some time, having 
 set apart three hours for devotion ; felt drawn 
 out much to pray for that peculiar fragrance 
 which believers have about them who are very 
 much in fellowship with God." 
 
 " I must at once return, through the Lord's 
 strength, to not less than three hours a day 
 spent in prayer and meditation upon the Word„" 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 103 
 
 " I got away alone in the forenoon to the 
 hills, and spent five hours in meditation and 
 prayer." 
 
 At the age of sixty-six he writes, " The Lord 
 is teaching me more prayerfulness " ; and he 
 recalls a new lesson " in regard to the helpful- 
 ness of trying to pray every hour of the day, 
 though only for half a minute." 
 
 Do we pray with any such spirit of prayer as 
 this ? Our own hearts tell us that we lose much 
 of the sweetness of the inner circle of Christ's 
 friends which can be given only to those who 
 have learned in the life of unceasing prayer to 
 be receiving it from Him. Prayerlessness will 
 shut men out of the inner circle. 
 
 Carelessness will shut men out. Many of us, 
 perhaps, have thus far had no very high and 
 strenuous spiritual purpose. It is possible for 
 men to lose the joy of the inner circle of Christ's 
 closest friends because they have no care to be- 
 long to that circle nor any care to meet the con- 
 ditions of entrance thither. I think often of 
 that verse in our Lord's utterance after the feed- 
 ing of the five thousand, when He turned to the 
 multitude who had struggled so hard to find 
 Him, some rowing across the lake and some 
 coming around until they met Him on the other 
 side. '' Work, my friends," He said, not intend- 
 ing to dissuade them from doing things or from 
 drawing the tension of their life tight — '' work, 
 my friends; only work not for the meat that 
 
104 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 perisheth, but for the meat that endureth to ever- 
 lasting life, which the Son of Man shall give to 
 you." The emphasis of our Lord's declaration 
 falls upon that one word " work." He intends 
 men to labour, to agonise — that with all the rest 
 and peace and placid surrender of the Christian 
 life they should string themselves high also for 
 that spiritual effort without which prayer is 
 impossible and valueless, and without which 
 there cannot be any high and holy fellowship 
 with God at all. As Frederick Myers writes 
 in "St Paul": 
 
 "Let no man think that sudden, in a minute, 
 All is accomplished, and the work is done. 
 Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it, 
 Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun. 
 
 " Oh, the regret, the struggle and the failing ! 
 Oh, the days desolate and useless years. 
 Vows of the night, so fierce and unavailing, 
 Stings of my shame and passion of my tears I " 
 
 We pay for spiritual possessions with pain. 
 Then and only then they come deep and abound- 
 ing, the vast experience of God in Christ. 
 
 Another thing that will bar the gates of that 
 inner fellowship is uncleanness. Our Lord will 
 not entrust the pure chalice of His communi- 
 cated life to uncleansed hands. Impurity of life 
 will disqualify men for association with that 
 white and stainless Christ Whose eyes are too 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 105 
 
 pure to look upon iniquity — who, though He was 
 tempted in all points as we are, yet is without sin, 
 and cannot admit to the secret places of His 
 own pure heart one who tries to take in with 
 him any tainted way. Into that inner secret of 
 Christ's fellowship the man who would go must 
 go leaving behind him at the gate his sin and, 
 defilement. " Forasmuch," says John Bunyan, 
 '' as the passage was wonderful narrow, even 
 so narrow that I could not but with great diffi- 
 culty enter in thereat, it showed me that none 
 could enter into life but those that were in down- 
 right earnest and when also they left this wicked 
 world behind them; for here was only room for 
 body and soul, but not for body and soul and 
 sin." Into that hidden place where Jesus Christ 
 sits quiet forever with the circle of His dearest 
 friends, only those men can go who are willing 
 to go with clean hands and pure hearts. Into 
 that great city which lies beyond, whose gates 
 are pure jewels and whose streets are of pure 
 gold, and out from under the throne in the 
 midst of which there flows a river of water as 
 pure as crystal, there is to be admitted nothing 
 that worketh uncleanness or abomination or 
 any defilement; and into the inner circle of 
 Christ's friends here, no more than there, can 
 that man come who cannot come with hands 
 washed clean in the blood of Christ, a mind 
 stripped of foul imagery and a heart desiring to 
 be pure of all polluting things. As — 
 
106 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 " Beyond our sight a city four-square lieth, 
 
 Above the clouds and fogs and mists of earth; 
 And none but souls that Jesus purifieth 
 Can taste its joys or hear its holy mirth," 
 
 SO there is opened before us here a secret fellow- 
 ship with Christ made up of hearts ready in 
 Him to be kept purified. 
 
 Is that which is found in the inner circle 
 worth the cost ? In that inner circle with Christ 
 is the sight of the Father's face. None of the 
 other Apostles saw the Father's glory as those 
 saw it who that night went up with Jesus on the 
 Mount of Transfiguration and saw His raiment 
 made all white and glistening — whiter than any 
 fuller on earth could whiten it; who saw the 
 glory of God come down and rest upon Him, and 
 who heard the Father's voice speak out of the 
 clouds, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I 
 am well pleased." 
 
 Our Lord waits still to give new deep reveal- 
 ings : " I have had some delightful times and 
 passages since I came here, such as I never had 
 before," wrote Horace Bushnell while away 
 from home seeking health and finding God more 
 deeply than ever before. " I never so saw God, 
 never had Him come so broadly, clearly out. 
 He has not spoken to me, but He has done 
 what is more. There has been nothing debat- 
 able to speak of, but an infinite easiness and 
 universal presentation to thought, as it were by 
 revelation. Nothing ever seemed so wholly in- 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 107 
 
 viting and so profoundly supreme to the mind. 
 Had there been a strain for it, then it could not 
 be. Oh, my God! what a fact to possess and 
 know that He is ! I have not seemed to compare 
 Him with anything, and set Him in a higher 
 value; but He has been the all, and the alto- 
 gether, everywhere, lovely. There is nothing 
 else to compete; there is nothing else, in fact. 
 It has been as if all the revelations, through good 
 men, nature, Christ, had been now through, and 
 their cargo unloaded, the capital meaning pro- 
 duced, and the God set forth in His proper day, 
 — the good, the true, the perfect, the all-holy and 
 benignant. The question has not been whether 
 I could somehow get nearer, — nearer my God, 
 to Thee ; but as if He had come out Himself just 
 near enough, and left me nothing but to stand 
 still and see the salvation ; no excitement, no 
 stress, but an amazing beatific tranquillity. I 
 never thought I could possess God so completely. 
 What is to come of it? Something good and 
 glorious, I hope." 
 
 If any of you are hungry for a more living 
 touch with God, I speak to you of a place where 
 hunger can be satisfied. Someone is said to 
 have asked Lord Tennyson what was the great- 
 est desire of his heart, and to have got the answer 
 in reply that the greatest desire he had ever had 
 was to have a " clearer vision of God." Who 
 does not grow weary at times of what is said 
 about Him, of his own beliefs regarding Him, 
 
108 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 and hunger with an unappeasable hunger for 
 Him, and say over to himself the prayer of 
 George Macdonald: 
 
 " Oh, let me live in Thy realities, 
 Nor substitute my notions for Thy facts, 
 Notion with notion making league and pacts. 
 They are to truth as dream deeds are to acts, 
 And questioned make me doubt of everything. 
 O Lord, my God! my soul gets up and cries, 
 
 'Come, Thine own Self, and with Thee my faith 
 bring ' " ? 
 
 If any of us are hungry for something more real 
 than that which we have in our Christian lives — ■ 
 sick of the sham and the insincerity of them ; 
 the forms crumbling away beneath our touch, 
 while we have not reached to the great verities 
 that lie beyond them — here in the inner circle of 
 Christ's inmost friends we may come upon, if 
 we will^ a new and living experience of Him. 
 We shall enter into the secret of our God which 
 is with those who fear Him and who go to dwell 
 under the Almighty's shade. 
 
 There are some who will recall the quaint son- 
 net of John T. Napier, who worked in the office 
 of the Sunday School Times in Philadelphia, and 
 whose genius was cut untimely short: 
 
 "O weary soul, that yet with willing feet 
 
 Wouldst trudge o'er many a hard and rugged way 
 In uncomplaining toil, and never stay 
 Until within His courts thine eyes shall meet 
 
THE INNER CIRCLE 109 
 
 The splendour of His look, to thee be sweet 
 That word He spake: 'Unto me pray, 
 Not as the hypocrites, in blaze of day, 
 
 In public paths or in the open street, 
 
 "'But in thy closet kneeling; there within 
 Unto me make thy prayer, to me thy moan, 
 And I will hear in heaven where I abide, 
 And I will give thee cleansing for thy sin — 
 
 Yea, we together shall abide alone. 
 Shut thou thy door; heaven's gate shall open 
 wide/ " 
 
 We shall find these things if we want them — the 
 experience of God and the secret of the Most 
 High — in this near companionship of our Master 
 Jesus Christ. He is here as truly as nineteen 
 hundred years ago He stood before those Jews 
 pleading, " Ye will not come to me that ye 
 might have life." He stands here calling us, 
 calling us, calling us into the number of His 
 most intimate friends — into the limits of the 
 inner circle of those He loves. Do we not wish 
 to go in — further in than ever in all the years 
 that have gone by ? And when we think on what 
 is there, and what is to be missed if we do not 
 go in, are we not willing to pay the price? Are 
 we not willing? If we are, shall we not go in 
 together to the inner circle of our Master's 
 dearest, closest friends, and sit down there by 
 His side, to come no more out forever? 
 
VI 
 
 LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 
 
 THE first summer conference I ever at- 
 tended was the General Conference for 
 Christian Workers at Northfield more 
 than twenty years ago. At the end of my sopho- 
 more year in college I was persuaded to come 
 up by a friend who is now a missionary in India. 
 We lived in what was then called Hillside Cot- 
 tage, and the first night through a heavy rain we 
 made our way across the ploughed fields, where 
 the Auditorium now stands, to the evening meet- 
 ing in Stone Hall. Mr. Moody spoke that night 
 on Elisha's miracle in filling the waterpots with 
 oil and thus giving that widow woman money 
 enough with which to discharge her debt and 
 save her children from her creditors. I saw new 
 things that night. I saw the neighbours peeking 
 through the windows at the carrying of all those 
 water jars to the widow's house, the joy that 
 filled the widow's heart when her two little chil- 
 dren were saved from the clutches of her 
 creditor, and I understood for the first time what 
 our imaginations were given to us for, and how 
 living a book this Bible is. 
 
 Professor Drummond was present that sum- 
 mer and Dr. A. J. Gordon, and a great many 
 
 110 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 111 
 
 others whose Hving words left an indehble im- 
 pression on all the men and women who came 
 under their influence; but of all those we heard 
 that summer I think there was scarcely anyone 
 who left a deeper and stronger impression on the 
 lives of the men and women who had gathered 
 that month of August than old Dr. William 
 Henry Green. He was the foremost Hebrew 
 scholar in America and one of the simplest and 
 most gentle Christian men. The blessing that 
 came to me through him came indirectly, 
 through my friend who had persuaded me to 
 come. He was one of the most devout, earnest 
 Christian men I have ever known, and he was 
 making it his practice then to spend the first 
 hour of every day over a page in the Psalms. 
 He said he got that suggestion from Dr. Green, 
 who had once mentioned in one of his classes at 
 Princeton that for years he had been in the habit 
 the first thing every day of reading a page from 
 the Psalms, to nourish his life on the beauty and 
 glory that is there. I learned a great many les- 
 sons afterwards from Dr. Green, as did every 
 one who ever came under his influence. Any 
 who were in classes of his will remember the al- 
 most womanly tenderness of his love of Jesus 
 Christ, and the way in which he often broke down 
 in the midst of his prayers, having to pause for 
 a while until he recovered his self-possession 
 again and was able to go on to the end. I re- 
 member what I think must have been one of his 
 
112 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 favourite hymns, for he gave it out so often when 
 he led chapel services. It began: 
 
 " Enthroned on high, Almighty Lord, 
 The Holy Ghost send down." 
 
 and some stanzas down this couplet came: 
 
 " And bring us where no clouds conceal 
 The beauty of Thy face." 
 
 And nobody could feel that influence without 
 being able to trace back to those early morning 
 hours over the Psalms much of the power, 
 beauty and simplicity of the man's Christian 
 faith and character. Very many times since I 
 have come back to that suggestion of spending 
 the first moments of the day over a page of the 
 Psalms. They have this great advantage over 
 other portions of the Bible: they are so easily 
 detachable. We feel regarding many other 
 parts of the Bible that we scarcely have any 
 right to take to ourselves some isolated verse. 
 In the Psalms we feel that every verse may be 
 separated, that each throbs with some old moral 
 experience of long years ago, breathing out in 
 those old days struggles, conflicts, aspirations 
 and desires that are akin to those that fill our 
 own hearts. 
 
 I have been very much struck lately in read- 
 ing biographies with the way in which the lives 
 of great and strong men have received practical 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 113 
 
 nourishment from the study of the Psahns. In 
 Thring's " Life and Letters," a book which every 
 college man ought to read, you may recall the 
 way in which he speaks in his private journal of 
 the feeling he has that he was living over again 
 all the experiences of the men who wrote the 
 Psalms, and that what they wrote down there 
 in that ancient time was only forecasting the bat- 
 tles of his own life. Some of you doubtless re- 
 call the passage in Morley's first volume of the 
 life of Gladstone, in which he quotes an ex- 
 tract from one of Mr. Gladstone's diaries regard- 
 ing the place which the Psalms had filled in his 
 life : '' On most occasions of very sharp pres- 
 sure or trial, some word of Scripture has come 
 home to me as if borne on angels' wings. I 
 should put some down now, for the continuance 
 of memory is not to be trusted. ( i ) In the winter 
 of 1837, Psalm cxxviii. This came in the most 
 singular manner, but it would be a long story to 
 tell. (2) In the Oxford contest of 1847 (which 
 was very harrowing) the verse, * O Lord God, 
 Thou strength of my health, Thou hast covered 
 my head in the day of battle.' (3) In the Gor- 
 ham contest, after the judgment: 'And though 
 all this be come upon us, yet do we not forget 
 Thee; nor behave ourselves frowardly in Thy 
 covenant. Our heart is not turned back ; neither 
 our steps gone out of Thy way. No, not when 
 Thou hast smitten us into the place of dragons: 
 and covered us with the shadow of death.' (4) 
 
114 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 On Monday, April 17, 1853 (his first budget 
 speech), it was: 'O turn Thee then unto me, 
 and have mercy upon me : give Thy strength unto 
 Thy servant, and help the son of Thine hand- 
 maid.' Last Sunday (Crimean War Budget) it 
 was from the Psalms for the day : * Thou shalt 
 prepare a table before me against them that 
 trouble me ; Thou hast anointed my head with oil 
 and my cup shall be full.' " It was a surprise to 
 me to think that when Mr. Gladstone rose to 
 speak in Parliament before presenting his great 
 budgets, as he paused for just a moment before 
 beginning, the thing that was sometimes in his 
 mind was some verse from the Psalms, by which 
 he was nerving himself toward the vision of 
 great righteousness, and the fearless expression 
 of what he saw as the truth. I think we lose a 
 great deal, because we have not taken into our 
 lives the living message of the Psalms to men 
 who are fighting the battle and around whom 
 the dread adversaries are encamped. 
 
 I suppose one reason why we do not do this 
 is that the Psalms have become so commonplace 
 to us, their language is so familiar that there is 
 no longer any bite or tingle to it. For this 
 reason it is a good thing for a man to read the 
 Psalms in some other language — in French, 
 Spanish, German, or Latin, or to take some other 
 translation of the Bible than that to which he is 
 accustomed. I have gained a great deal of help 
 myself from reading the Psalms over in the 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 115 
 
 American Standard Revised translation, which 
 gives new significance to a great many old and 
 worn phrases. Take, for example, the marginal 
 reading of the first verse in the forty-fifth 
 Psalm. It reads, you remember : " My heart 
 overfloweth in a goodly matter; I speak of the 
 things which I have made touching the king." 
 Now, the revised margin is : " My heart over- 
 floweth with a goodly matter; I speak: my work 
 is for a king." Shame? I am speaking for a 
 king. 
 
 Or take the tenth verse of the fifty-ninth 
 Psalm. That reads : " The God of my mercy 
 shall prevent me." The new version reads: 
 " My God with His loving kindnesses will meet 
 me." Or take the third verse in the seventeenth 
 Psalm, if we want something by which to test 
 our lives, " Thou hast proved my heart : Thou 
 hast visited me in the night ; Thou hast tried me, 
 and findest nothing." Let the man who wants 
 something by which to check his inner moral 
 life when he lies down to sleep recall that old 
 word : " Thou hast visited me in the night ; Thou 
 hast tried me, and findest nothing of which I 
 need to be ashamed." Take for one other illus- 
 tration the verse, " They looked unto Him, and 
 were lightened." The new version reads, " They 
 looked unto Him and were radiant." I do not 
 know what word can come to us more appro- 
 priately than this word: the influence of looking 
 away unto Jesus Christ upon our lives and char- 
 
116 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 acters, the power of the vision of Christ to make 
 our lives, however scarred and clouded and shad- 
 owed they may have been, bright and radiant 
 with the purity and the beauty of His own life. 
 If you will read two passages, one from the Old 
 and the other from the New Testament (Ex. 
 xxxiv. 29-35; Matt. xvii. 1-9), you will have 
 the two outstanding Bible illustrations of this 
 power of the divine vision to transform the faces 
 of men. As Moses came down out of that secret 
 fellowship with God, he knew not, but others 
 knew, that there was a divine light shining on 
 his face; and as Jesus went up into the moun- 
 tain and knelt there in that prayer that lifted 
 His life from the lower levels into the very 
 highest and most unclouded fellowship with God, 
 His face also shone as the sun. His very gar- 
 ments became all white and glistening, whiter 
 than any fuller on earth can whiten them. And, 
 while doubtless these were two great exceptional 
 experiences, the principle that is in them is a 
 living principle still, that the same vision that 
 Moses saw as he talked with Jehovah, the same 
 vision that Jesus saw on the mountain of trans- 
 figuration, the vision that made their faces shine 
 as the sun, will have power to make our lives 
 all luminous and radiant, too. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the vision is doing this 
 still. You know that during the Boxer troubles 
 in China it was said that the Chinese Christians 
 could not have escaped even if they had tried. 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 117 
 
 because their faces betrayed them. There was a 
 Hght in their eyes which their heathen neighbours 
 recognised as characteristic of the followers of 
 Jesus Christ. They had looked unto Him, and 
 their lives were lightened by that look. A little 
 while ago Mrs. Edward Hume, from Bombay, 
 showed me photographs of her work in India. 
 Among the pictures which she laid down were 
 two that were conspicuous because of the great 
 contrast between them. The first of them was 
 a photograph of thirty women, all of them 
 dressed in dark garments, and in the middle of 
 the forehead of each one was a little ash dot, 
 showing that each one was attached still to the 
 old idolatrous Hfe. There was no need of that 
 mark to tell you that about them. The low 
 brows, the unintelHgent eyes, the very aspect of 
 dejection and hopelessness that lay across those 
 lives told the story without any sign upon their 
 foreheads. They had never looked unto Him 
 Who is able to throw radiance into the life. The 
 other photograph was a photograph of the same 
 number of women, all of them dressed in white. 
 There were no ash spots on their foreheads. Nor 
 was the absence of them necessary to tell you 
 that the light had touched those lives. They 
 were thirty girls that Mrs. Hume had long had 
 under her care. The influence of her life had 
 played on the lives of those girls. They had 
 passed with her through all the torture of famine 
 days in India, They had nursed the orphans 
 
118 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 when it was almost nauseating to do it. The re- 
 fining influence of unselfishness and sympathy 
 with suffering was stamped upon each life. A 
 light shone in it. They had looked unto Christ 
 and their faces were radiant. 
 
 And what has taken place in these lives all of 
 us have seen taking place in other lives. Any 
 one is to be pitied who has not a friend, many 
 friends, who have looked away unto Jesus Christ 
 and been made radiant, on whose faces there is 
 the visible light that comes from their having 
 caught the far-off vision of the beauty and per- 
 fectness of the Saviour. There is a chapter in 
 Dr. Trumbull's " Old Time Student Volunteers " 
 entitled " What a Boy Saw in the Face of Ado- 
 niram Judson." Years ago, long before he ever 
 thought of writing that story, in his boyhood 
 days in Stonington, Conn., when the journey 
 from New England to New York was by train as 
 far as Stonington, and then by Sound boats to 
 New York, Dr. Trumbull said the boys used to 
 play around the wharf in the evening in the 
 hope of seeing some great character of the na- 
 tion as he passed to or fro between New England 
 and the South. There was an accommodation 
 train that came in early in the evening, about 
 an hour before the express. Immediately after 
 the arrival of the express the boat put off for 
 New York. Often some one would come in on 
 the early train and have an hour to wait before 
 the boat left. One evening the accommodation 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 119 
 
 train came in, and he saw a man get off the train 
 whose appearance immediately attracted the boy. 
 He walked up to him, looking at him curiously. 
 Dr. Trumbull said he had never seen any such 
 light on a human face before, and at last it 
 dawned upon him that the man was Adoniram 
 Judson, of whom he had seen a picture. He 
 hurried up the street to find the local Baptist 
 minister to bring him to see whether this was 
 the great missionary. Sure enough, it was Ado- 
 niram Judson ; but the Baptist minister forgot all 
 about the little lad as soon as he saw the great 
 Judson, and fell into conversation with the mis- 
 sionary. The boy circled about meanwhile, look- 
 ing at that face. Fifty years and more had 
 passed away when Dr. Trumbull told me the 
 story. He had not forgotten, he would never 
 forget until the day he died, the beautiful light 
 that shone upon Adoniram Judson's face. He 
 had been with Jesus Christ, and the light was 
 there that shone like the sun, so that whoever 
 stood beside him saw that Someone had been 
 near him Who gave a radiance to life. 
 
 How many times each of us has practically 
 annulled his gospel, and frustrated the words in 
 which he has proclaimed the gospel simply be- 
 cause his face has borne no corroboratory evi- 
 dence of that which he has been speaking with 
 his lips. 
 
 I remember reading some time ago a chapter 
 in Dr. Murdock's '* Indian Missionary Manual " 
 
120 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 dealing with methods of presenting the gospel, 
 where he emphasises the necessity of presenting 
 it in the spirit of gentleness and love, and tells 
 of a discussion between a missionary and a 
 Hindoo disputant. The Hindoo became furious 
 and struck at the missionary's head with a big 
 stick. The spirit of the gospel which Lacroix, 
 who was the missionary concerned, manifested 
 by word and look was such that the Hindoo au- 
 dience burst out with the shout, " Victory, vic- 
 tory to Jesus Christ." What had won them? 
 Lacroix had been with Jesus Christ and Jesus 
 had touched his life so that the light that was in 
 Christ was shining through his face and bearing 
 testimony to the truthfulness of what he spoke, 
 and he acted as a Christian. A friend was speak- 
 ing recently of some of the sources of power 
 of a faithful and beloved missionary worker. He 
 was a humble and gentle man who had derived 
 his influence from his association with Jesus 
 Christ. My friend spoke of the way the Saviour 
 had gained control of this life in its expressions. 
 He told me how he had had to send once for a 
 plumber's boy to repair an old-fashioned chande- 
 Her made of glass pendants. It was an old fam- 
 ily heirloom, and the man to whom it belonged 
 valued it very highly because of the associations 
 connected with it. In repairing it the boy did 
 not notice that in turning it one way below he 
 was unscrewing it from the ceiling above, and 
 after a little the whole massive thing came down 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 121 
 
 in ruins on the floor. The lad stood dazed at 
 the havoc he had caused, and waited trembUngly 
 for the owner to enter, making ready for the out- 
 burst he felt sure would come. When the owner 
 came in he surveyed the wreck in silence, and 
 then turned to the frightened boy with the quiet, 
 kindly words, " Well, my lad, I trust you didn't 
 hurt yourself? " The lad was not a Christian at 
 the time, but that was the beginning of his be- 
 coming one. The look on that man's face, the 
 evident transformation of his life by the power 
 of Christ were irrefutable commendations of the 
 Saviour. He had looked away unto Jesus Christ 
 and been made radiant by it. 
 
 And unless we learn the secret of looking unto 
 Jesus Christ and having our lives transformed 
 by our vision of Him, what influence will we 
 have as we go out except the influence of nulli- 
 fication upon the gospel and reproach upon Jesus 
 Christ? If we want our Hves changed, here is 
 the secret that each of us may gain for himself 
 to-day. Looking away unto Jesus Christ and 
 keeping our eyes fixed there is the secret of the 
 radiant light. 
 
 First of all, it is looking unto Christ that gives 
 us the right conception of what character is. I 
 look away from Christ and I have one idea of 
 what constitutes perfect character. We are 
 forming, all of us, diverse judgments of ideals 
 and standards of life proportioned exactly to the 
 clearness of our vision of Jesus Christ. What 
 
122 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 ideals do we see? I was sitting in my library 
 the other day dictating some letters, and I hap- 
 pened to look up suddenly at Watts' picture of 
 Sir Galahad. There was a little yellow Hght 
 falling just on the face and nowhere else, and I 
 said. Is it possible that Watts put that light there 
 and I never saw it before? I examined the pic- 
 ture and found a stray ray of sunlight coming 
 in and falling upon Sir Galahad's face. I saw 
 anew what gave that picture its grace and power. 
 What Watts had painted was not Sir Galahad, 
 but what Sir Galahad was seeing. What was 
 there in the fresh, wistful, youthful face? What 
 was there was just the reflection of the far-off 
 vision of the grail Sir Galahad was following. 
 The purity, strength, and holiness of what he 
 saw were painted there in his life. The qual- 
 ities of character which he was beholding were 
 writing themselves on his face. And what, as I 
 have already said, is the significance of those 
 words in the prologue of the Gospel of John, 
 "and the Word was toward God," but that the 
 face of the Word was ever directed toward the 
 face of the Father, so that what we see in looking 
 toward the face of Jesus Christ is not so much 
 anything original as a reflection upon the life of 
 Christ of what He sees passing in the face and 
 heart of God? He is what He is in His character 
 because He is looking away unto what God is in 
 His character. We will have in our lives as we 
 go out precisely those ideals of character which 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 123 
 
 we see as qualities in Christ. Is our vision of 
 Him dim, obscure, oblique? We shall go away 
 with defective standards of judgment as to our 
 moral Hfe. Is our vision of Christ clear and un- 
 clouded and direct? If we have been brought to 
 where no mist conceals the beauty of His face, 
 we shall go with our standards of character pat- 
 terned after His own. 
 
 Looking away unto Christ not only gives a 
 man the right conception of what character is, 
 but it shames him out of evil character ; solidifies 
 him in the deliberate choice of the character 
 which is right. Every one of us knows the pos- 
 sibility of doing things under some circumstances 
 which we cannot do under other circumstances. 
 If we are living with our faces turned toward 
 our Lord Jesus Christ there are certain practices 
 that become absolutely impossible in our lives. 
 You cannot have certain thoughts if you are 
 aware that Jesus Christ is in the room, which you 
 might think, barring Him from your presence. 
 You cannot do certain things with your hands 
 realising that Christ is near and that at any 
 moment He may lay His pierced hands upon your 
 hands, that you can do thinking that the Saviour 
 is not near. 
 
 I was reading again not long ago the life of 
 Keith Falconer, and some of his boyhood letters. 
 In one he is speaking of the hymns of which he 
 was most fond. There were many that were dear 
 to him, but none so dear as the hymn we call by 
 
124, THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 the name of Rutherford, " The Sands of Time 
 Are Sinking/' especially the second stanza: 
 
 " O Christ, He is the fountain, 
 
 The deep, sweet well of love ! 
 The streams on earth I've tasted. 
 
 More deep I'll drink above. 
 There to an ocean fullness 
 
 His mercy doth expand, 
 And glory, glory dwelleth 
 
 In Immanuel's land." 
 
 And then in another he goes on to tell how with 
 this fresh, loving Christ, glowing all warm and 
 tender in his Hfe, new tests have come to him, 
 and certain things which were practicable to him 
 before he now finds to be utterly impossible in 
 his life : " I must say something about Jesus 
 Christ, because I think He ought never to be 
 left out; and that is the fault I find with parties 
 and balls and theatres: Jesus Christ Who is the 
 All in All is utterly left out." Suppose we 
 ran that rule across our lives. How much evil, 
 shame, sin, and impurity would vanish from 
 them! You remember the powerful story that 
 is prefixed to the eighth chapter of the Gospel 
 of John. What is the lesson of that story ? How 
 differently the presence of Jesus Christ made 
 things look ! Those men thought they were do- 
 ing a very fine thing when they got that poor 
 woman and resolved to bring her into Christ's 
 presence. Every man felt proud in the thought 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 125 
 
 of his own sinlessness as he dragged the tar- 
 nished woman into the presence of the Saviour. 
 How differently it looked after they got there, 
 when Jesus wrote with His finger on the ground 
 while the men looked and thought. How utterly 
 different everything began to look to these men ! 
 After a little while the oldest man slunk off, and 
 the next, and the next, and the next, until Jesus 
 was left with the woman alone. They did not 
 feel as they stood in Christ's presence as they 
 had felt out in the street. You and I know we 
 do not feel the same toward sin away from Him. 
 H only we could school ourselves into looking 
 unto Him every hour, every day, it would make 
 impossible many things that have stained and de- 
 filed our lives. 
 
 And looking away to Him would nerve us to 
 resist all evil and to do the things that are right 
 and good. You recall how the writer of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews makes use of this con- 
 ception. He is thinking of the Christian life as 
 a race to be run. On every side of the course, 
 banked up tier above tier, reach the tens of 
 thousands of those who have run their race and 
 won, and are now watching the living contest- 
 ants. At the end of the course, behind the goal, 
 he imagines the Saviour is standing holding the 
 chaplets of olive leaves in His hand waiting to 
 greet the runners as they come in. " Therefore 
 let us also, seeing we are compassed about with 
 so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every; 
 
126 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, 
 and let us run with patience the race that is set 
 before us, looking unto Jesus the author and 
 perfecter of our faith." We should rise up above 
 our craven fear of those adversaries under whom 
 we have again and again gone down, if only we 
 kept our eyes fixed on the Saviour there waiting 
 for us behind the goal. Looking away to Jesus 
 would shame many of us out of evil character. 
 It would form and perfect in us a more stainless 
 life. 
 
 Looking away to Jesus Christ Is the only way 
 in which to nourish and unfold in each of us 
 the perfect character. One of the addresses 
 which Professor Drummond gave here twenty- 
 one years ago was the address he published after- 
 wards under the title of " The Changed Life," 
 from the words, " But we all, with unveiled face 
 beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, 
 are transformed into the same image from glory 
 to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit." And 
 he told in that address the story which has 
 grown familiar to us, of the little Scotch girl 
 who had such a simple, exquisite character that 
 all those who knew her marvelled at the secret of 
 it, but to none would she betray it, until at last 
 she told one that when she was gone it would be 
 found in the locket she had worn about her neck. 
 Upon looking they found simply a scrap of 
 white paper, on which were these words, " Whom 
 having not seen I love." That affection for the 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 127 
 
 unseen Saviour Whom having not seen she loved 
 v^as the influence that had been moulding and 
 transfiguring her life. And there is not one of 
 us, however evil and coarse our character, how- 
 ever sin may have tainted us, who cannot be 
 changed. It may be gradual and long delayed, 
 though I believe it is possible for Jesus Christ to 
 change a man in a night. He could take any 
 of us this hour and make new men of us if we 
 would only deliver ourselves up unto His trans- 
 forming power. Some of you will have read 
 the story which Dr. James H. Taylor wrote some 
 years ago of the curious old New England char- 
 acter of the third decade of the last century 
 named Jake Parsons. The change in his life 
 was far-famed, so significant and revolutionary 
 had it been. He lay down to sleep one night an 
 absolutely drunken, worthless wretch, having 
 wellnigh lost his power of speech through his 
 dissipation, loved only by the fragment of the 
 family that was left to him. He woke up the 
 next morning an absolutely changed mati. For 
 nearly forty years after that he lived a life with- 
 out blemish or blot. Eight years after the 
 change some one asked him what had produced 
 it. This is the explanation he gave : " That 
 night Jesus Christ appeared in my sleep. His 
 face, as I saw it, seemed so pure, so lovely, and 
 so friendly to me that when I awoke I forgot my 
 old vices, and so loved my Saviour that I could 
 not displease Him. Why, the sight of the face 
 
128 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 of Jesus was so pure, so lovely, and so beautiful ! 
 He did not speak to me, He only looked at me; 
 but His look told me that there was hope for 
 me, that I could be forgiven, I could be purified. 
 I looked at Him and cried like a child ; I felt that 
 I was a vile, miserable, wicked wretch, filthier 
 than a dunghill. I cannot tell how I felt. When 
 I looked at Him I was too happy to be afraid ; 
 but when I looked at myself I was too afraid 
 to be happy. I forgot all about rum and to- 
 bacco, 1 was thinking so much about Christ, so 
 pure, so lovely, so beautiful, so friendly. He 
 was all heaven, all grace and beauty." One who 
 knew him well, so Dr. Taylor says, wrote : " For 
 thirty-five years he lived a blameless life, beloved 
 by everybody. On a fine summer morning, my 
 friend writes, the glorious old-new creature 
 would crawl out of doors, and seating himself 
 on the grassy bank in front of his humble home, 
 turning his sightless face to the sun to feel its 
 warmth, would say : ' The door is open into 
 Heaven, just a little crack, and I shall soon see 
 Jesus again. I shall know Him. He will look 
 just so.' So he lived until he fell asleep in 
 Jesus." 
 
 Each of us knows his own life, and just how 
 unlike the life of Christ it is. Conceited, self- 
 satisfied, pure but vain and self-confident, or 
 scarred with evil imagination, we may be bear- 
 ing about in our body the marks that will never 
 leave us, that tell the story of vices, haunted by 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 129 
 
 the sins we would forget, that cHng all the closer 
 to us the more we struggle to lay them down. 
 Or if it is not this, each of us knows the weak- 
 ness of his own heart. But there is One Who, 
 if we will look away to Him now, will take us 
 just as we are, and will deliver us, scarred and 
 full of shortcomings, and make us radiant with 
 His own light and glory and purity. Shall we 
 not let the transforming Christ make a trial with 
 us? 
 
 I went one Sunday afternoon in New York 
 City not long ago to a religious meeting, where 
 a man was talking to men about Hoffman's pic- 
 tures of our Lord. He had an excellent col- 
 lection of them in stereopticon slides which he 
 was showing to this crowd of men. He reserved 
 until the last Hoffman's picture of Jesus as a 
 lad talking with, the doctors in the temple. As 
 he threw the picture on the screen, a beautifully 
 colored picture, he told the story of how he 
 came to be in possession of his copy of it. He 
 had gone to visit Hoffman, he said, immediately 
 after the completion of that painting, and Hoff- 
 man gave him the first copy. He brought that 
 copy home and put it in his business office in 
 New York City. One day, as he was sitting 
 there, a judge from the Supreme Court of one of 
 the New England States came in to consult him 
 about some business. He saw the picture stand- 
 ing on the easel. Instantly his eyes were at- 
 tracted to it. He looked at it all the time he 
 
130 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 was discussing his business, and after the busi- 
 ness was over he sat a httle while still looking 
 at the picture, and then went away. Later in 
 the morning he came back and said, " I want to 
 see that Boy again." He was invited to sit down, 
 and he sat down and gazed at that face, at those 
 great open eyes, at that look of purity, which 
 speaks of such hope and strength for men. He 
 sat for nearly an hour looking at it, and then 
 got up, his eyes very moist, and walked away. 
 In the afternoon he came back and said, " I 
 would like to see that picture of the Boy once 
 more." The owner gave it to him, and said, 
 " Go into my private office, sit down and look 
 at it as long as you want to." He took the pic- 
 ture and went into the office and laid it down 
 in his lap and cried over it. An hour passed, 
 and then he came out and laid the picture down, 
 and with tears running down his cheeks he said, 
 '' The Boy has conquered me." And he went 
 out from the room with the picture of that Boy 
 lingering in his life and transforming it. He is 
 living now, said the speaker, in his own State, 
 an influential Christian man, teaching scores of 
 young men in his Bible class of Him unto Whom 
 he had looked away and by Whom he had been 
 changed. 
 
 I want to be changed myself very much in 
 many ways that I do not propose to tell any- 
 body else. But He knows, and I know He can 
 do it. It may take Him a long time — ten, twenty. 
 
LOOKING AWAY TO JESUS 131 
 
 fifty years — but I know that the changes I want 
 made He can make, and that even if He never 
 gets them made down here there will come a 
 day when I shall wake and be satisfied with His 
 likeness, seeing Him as He is. And that hope 
 is worth all the world. 
 
 Would that we might let Him begin to effect 
 His larger and richer results in our lives, that 
 every one of us might fix his eyes upon Jesus 
 Christ. Looking unto Him. He will make us 
 radiant. We shall walk in the light as He is in 
 the light. 
 
VII 
 THE UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 
 
 WHATEVER other ideals of the Christian 
 Church men may have formed, it is 
 certain that the conception entertained 
 by our Lord was that the Christian Church should 
 be a body of men and women who had learned 
 to love God and His Spirit and His Son with all 
 their hearts and minds and souls and strength, 
 and one another better than they loved them- 
 selves. Our Lord gave Himself, through His 
 short life, to the working out of this ideal. He 
 gathered around Him a little company of men 
 whom He loved with a great love, whom He 
 sought to teach what love was by revealing to 
 them a new kind of love in Himself. He hoped 
 to persuade these men to love one another with 
 the same love wherewith He Himself loved them. 
 By example He strove to reveal to them what this 
 new love that filled Llis own heart was, and to 
 lead them to have it for one another. 
 
 In some measure the early Church learned this 
 lesson. As the heathen world looked on, it was 
 the afifection that bound the Christians together 
 that most deeply impressed it. " Behold," they 
 said, " how these Christians love one another." 
 A great many came into the Church undoubtedly 
 13^ 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 133 
 
 drawn there by the warmth of friendship and love 
 which visibly united the early Christians. If one 
 had and another lacked, the one who had shared 
 his possessions with the one who lacked. The 
 early Church went out in power to begin its early 
 conquests for Christ because it went out with 
 a heart full of warm and unselfish love, because it 
 could say to a world filled with people who knew 
 no such fellowship : " Come, join our brother- 
 hood; we will love you; we will take you into 
 friendship; you too may belong to this unique 
 society of men and women who are all truly 
 lovers one of another." 
 
 " Now, for the first time," says Harnack in 
 "The Expansion of Christianity in the First 
 Three Centuries," "that testimony rose among 
 men, which cannot ever be surpassed, the testi- 
 mony that GOD IS LOVE. The first great 
 statement of the new religion, into which the 
 fourth evangelist condensed its central principle, 
 was based entirely and exclusively on love : ' We 
 love, because He first loved us/ * God so loved the 
 world,' * A new commandment give I unto you, 
 that ye love one another/ And the greatest, 
 strongest, deepest thing Paul ever wrote is the 
 hymn commencing with the words, ' Though I 
 speak with the tongues of men and angels, but 
 have not love, I am become sounding brass or 
 a clanging cymbal.' The new language on the 
 lips of Christians was the language of love. 
 
 " But it was more than a language, it was a 
 
134 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 thing of power and action. The Christians 
 really considered themselves brothers and sisters, 
 and their actions corresponded to this belief. On 
 this point we possess two unexceptionable testi- 
 monies from pagan writers. Says Lucian of the 
 Christians : * Their original law-giver had taught 
 them that they were all brethren, one of another 
 . . . . They become incredibly alert when 
 anything of this kind occurs, that affects their 
 common interests. On such occasions no ex- 
 pense is grudged.' And Tertullian (Apolog. 
 xxxix) observes : * It is our care for the helpless, 
 our practice of loving kindness, that brands us in 
 the eyes of many of our opponents. " Only look," 
 they say, " look how they love one another ! " 
 (They themselves being given to mutual hatred,) 
 " Look how they are prepared to die for one an- 
 other! " (They themselves being readier to kill 
 each other.) ' Thus had this saying been really 
 fulfilled : ' Hereby shall all men know that ye are 
 my disciples, if ye have love one to another.' 
 
 " The gospel thus became a social message. 
 The preaching which laid hold of the outer man, 
 detaching him from the world, and uniting him to 
 his God, was also a preaching of solidarity and 
 brotherliness. The gospel, it has been truly said, 
 is at bottom both individualistic and socialistic. 
 Its tendency toward mutual association, so far 
 from being an accidental phenomenon in its his- 
 tory, is inherent in its character. It spiritualises 
 the irresistible impulse which draws one man to 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 135 
 
 another, and it raises the social connection of 
 human beings from the sphere of a convention 
 to that of a moral obligation. In this way it 
 serves to heighten the worth of man, and essays 
 to recast contemporary society, to transform the 
 socialism which involves a conflict of interests 
 into the socialism which rests upon the conscious- 
 ness of a spiritual unity and common goal. This 
 was ever present to the mind of the great apostle 
 to the Gentiles. In his little churches, where 
 each person bore his neighbour's burden, Paul's 
 spirit already saw the dawning of a new human- 
 ity, and in the Epistle to the Ephesians he has 
 voiced this feeling with a thrill of exultation. 
 Far in the background of these churches, like 
 some unsubstantial semblance, lay the division 
 between Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, 
 great and small, rich and poor. For a new hu- 
 manity had now appeared, and the apostle viewed 
 it as Christ's body, in which every member served 
 the rest and each was indispensable in his own 
 place." 
 
 We must put it in this way if we would do 
 justice to the whole great truth as it lay in the 
 mind of Christ and as it was afterwards devel- 
 oped by St. Paul. It is true that the Christian 
 society is a band of men and women who love 
 one another with this great unselfish love. But 
 our Lord and Paul carried the thought of Chris- 
 tian society far beyond this. They thought of 
 the Christian society, as our Lord puts it, as a 
 
136 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 vine of which the Hfe-blood was Christ, of which 
 He Himself was the trunk, the disciples being 
 the branches, springing out from Him, all of 
 them bound together because they were common 
 branches of one vine, while there flowed through 
 them all, whether upper branches or lower 
 branches, large branches or small branches, the 
 one common tide of the single life. In Paul's 
 mind the Christian Church was a society of men 
 and women who loved one another with a love 
 so real, so full, so life absorbing, that he could not 
 think of any figure of speech more truly expres- 
 sive of it than to say that the Church was a 
 body, one organic unity, with hands, eyes, 
 feet, and ears, but one body, one common 
 life binding all altogether, so that the hands 
 could not say to the eyes, " We have no need 
 of you " ; nor the honourable parts to the unhon- 
 ourable parts, " We are not one with you," for 
 all were members of one body ; and the hearing, 
 smelling, tasting, walking, handling members, all 
 different in their functions and duties, were yet 
 bound together by one common life, separable 
 only at the pain of each and at the mutilation and 
 ultimately the death of the body which they all 
 made. If one member suffers all the members 
 suffer with it ; if one member is honoured all the 
 members are honoured with it; if one member 
 lacks, all the members want with it ; if one mem- 
 ber possesses, all the members own with it. 
 What a marvellous transformation would pass 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 137 
 
 over our Christian life if our conception of our 
 relationship to one another fulfilled this great 
 ideal of Paul. Now, what is malice but rejoic- 
 ing in the hardship and loss of others? But in 
 the body when one member suffers all the mem- 
 bers suffer with it and there can be no malice. 
 What is envy but repining when others are hon- 
 oured ? But if the body is all one no member can 
 be honoured and the other members not to be 
 honoured with it. What is selfishness but desir- 
 ing that which others have not, or being vexed 
 because others have that which we have not? 
 But if all the members are one body, one can 
 have nothing that all the others do not possess, 
 nor any lack anything for the want of which all 
 the others do not suffer, too. 
 
 You remember the old and quaint story of 
 Charles Kingsley. Two monks had lived to- 
 gether in a cave remote from men until at last, 
 wearied of the monotony of their quiet life, one 
 of them made the suggestion that they vary it 
 by quarrelling after the fashion of the world. 
 But the monk to whom the suggestion was made 
 said : " Brother, we have nothing to quarrel 
 about. How can we change our life? What 
 have we to quarrel over ? " " We will take this 
 stone," replied the other, " and we will lay it 
 down between us. And I will say. This stone 
 is mine. And you will say, No, the stone is 
 mine. And so we will quarrel after the way of 
 the world." So they took the stone and laid 
 
138 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 it down between them, and the first monk said, 
 " This stone is mine." The second monk said 
 hesitatingly, " I think, brother, the stone is 
 mine." " Oh, very well," said the monk who 
 had suggested the quarrel, " if the stone is thine, 
 take it." It was impossible that between those 
 two lives, bound in a real unity for years, there 
 should be any divergence. What one had the 
 other possessed. 
 
 It would be well if we realised this truth, that 
 there is no such thing as an isolated life. Every 
 attainment of every one affects every other, 
 every failure of every one affects every other. 
 There is no such thing as isolated sin or purity. 
 Your purity helps to make me pure, my sin 
 helps to defile you. In all this world we cannot 
 move faster than all move. There is no such 
 thing as a single life getting perfection alone. 
 We must remember that great saying of Paul in 
 the second letter to the Corinthians, " But we all, 
 with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the 
 glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same 
 image." Nobody can do it alone. Paul under- 
 stood this perfectly. You will find him striking 
 this note again and again in his Epistles, that no 
 solitary life can ever come to the fulness of 
 God's ideal for it alone. We shall only reflect 
 Christ perfectly as we all reflect Him ; we shall 
 only behold Him clearly as we all behold Him. 
 We are all of us hampering or helping one an- 
 other. Our lives are bound together not as our 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IX CHRIST 139 
 
 ten fingers may be interlaced, but as my hand 
 is a part of my body. Just as truly as my hand 
 is a part of my body are your life and my life 
 parts of one another, one common tide flowing 
 through them both. And all evil, disease, sick- 
 ness, and wrong in any one of us is just so 
 much crime against every other one of us. 
 Every victory, triumph, purity of life and soul 
 is just so much victory won for every other 
 human life. 
 
 It is true that the Christian Church is a gath- 
 ering of men and women who love one another 
 with a great and unselfish love. It is true that 
 it is a gathering of men and women who are 
 parts of one another, just as truly as our eyes 
 and our ears and our hands are members of this 
 one body of ours. I suppose that for many of 
 us putting it this way is a difficult thing. We 
 can understand how a physical body can be 
 united, but we do not understand how a great 
 mass of human beings can constitute an organic 
 unity as a body does. This is because we do 
 not know what Hfe is. It is true that we are 
 one with God in a far more real and true sense 
 than that our bodies constitute one organism ; 
 it is equally true that we are one with one an- 
 other in as true a sense as it is true that our 
 physical bodies are one physical unity. 
 
 But if we cannot take in Paul's great thought 
 we can grasp the other metaphor, in which he 
 thinks of the Christian Church as a great fam- 
 
140 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 ily of which God is the Father and in which all 
 the different men and women sustain to one 
 another a relationship of brotherly and sisterly 
 love, such as bound the Master, Jesus Christ, the 
 elder Brother, and His disciples together. Is 
 that true of the Christian church to which we 
 belong? Think of your church in your com- 
 munity. Is it a family in this sense? You 
 know how our Lord looked forward to Heaven 
 and made clear what it was to be, by speaking 
 of it as His Father's house, the home, the meet- 
 ing place of the family, where by and by when 
 all the struggle and work of life are over the 
 whole family will gather, as oftentimes the hu- 
 man family gathers at Christmas time or Thanks- 
 giving Day — the elder children who have gone 
 far away, the younger children who stayed at 
 home — and the whole unbroken family sits down 
 together in the evening, while the rich family love 
 binds them together into one. That is what the 
 Christian Church is meant to be — a gathering 
 of men and women loving as brothers and sis- 
 ters love one another; yes, even more than that, 
 loving with the kind of love that Jesus Christ 
 reveals in the family life of His own Father's 
 home. How daringly Paul puts this in the Epis- 
 tle to the Ephesians when he speaks of the re- 
 lationship between Christ and His Church as 
 being akin to what he calls that " great mys- 
 tery," the most close of all human relationships, 
 the relationship between husbands and wives! 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 141 
 
 " Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also 
 loved the Church." Both were to leave fathers 
 and mothers, and cleave to one another, and be 
 one. Here Paul says the great mystery comes 
 in — even as Christ and His Church are one. 
 
 The dearest and most intimate home life of 
 which we may know, that home where love 
 binds together in the closest and most unclouded 
 intimacy and confidence, where no angry word 
 is ever heard, where no angry look is ever seen, 
 where you breathe, as you cross the threshold, 
 the atmosphere which you know to be of that 
 other home, our Father's home — all this but 
 symbolises to us the relationship that should 
 exist between us as members of Christ's Church. 
 We ought to feel a great wave of love sweeping 
 over us, carrying us out of our lives of jealousy, 
 envy, malice, bitterness, and evil, and welding 
 us together in one deep consciousness of family 
 life, loving as one body in which we are mem- 
 bers one of the other. We ought to feel that the 
 Christian Church came into the world not to be 
 a form or a guild for worship, but to be first of 
 all a loving union of men and women bound 
 one to another in a consuming, absorbing, un- 
 selfish love. 
 
 Do we feel this in our hearts? Do we not 
 feel it now as we think of the beauty of Christ's 
 conception and ideal for His Church? Is there 
 not a great outgoing of our life toward those 
 other lives round about us, a great desire to be 
 
142 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 more to them, to love them more unreservedly, 
 to realise actually in our daily life what Paul 
 meant when he said that we were all of us one 
 body in Christ — suffering each of us with the 
 rest, honoured each of us with the rest, lacking 
 each of us with the rest? We are one body and 
 Jesus Christ is Head over all. 
 
 Would that it were possible to make all the 
 vital significance of this truth clear. Such unity 
 as this is an essential condition of our securing 
 the knowledge we need as Christians. There is 
 no such thing as knowing Christ fully all by 
 one's self. You may know a little bit of Christ 
 all by yourself, but you will never know Christ 
 fully outside of the brotherhood. It is only as 
 we all know Christ together that any one of 
 us can know Christ alone. I see one beauty in 
 Him, you see another beauty in Him. It is only 
 as we sit down side by side and each share with 
 the other the beauty that we have seen that each 
 of us can see Him in His perfect beauty. No 
 single member of the Christian Church can draw 
 off alone and apprehend Him or drink in the 
 fulness of the glory of His perfect character. It 
 is as we draw close together and love one an- 
 other with great discerning love that we are 
 able to apprehend the fulness that there is in 
 Jesus Christ. Most of us get our truth from 
 others. I can look back over the great lives 
 from which almost all I have got has come to 
 me. You can look out over the lives which 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 143 
 
 you know have made your life what it is. You 
 can think of so and so. He gave you this 
 thought about Christ. You can think of so and 
 so. She showed you this beauty about Christ. 
 It is as we all come to know Christ that any 
 one of us shall come to know Him. It is only 
 " with all saints " that we shall be able to com- 
 prehend what is the breadth and length and 
 depth and height and to know the love of Christ 
 which passeth knowledge. All may know what 
 one can never know. 
 
 And there are some truths that we cannot see 
 in any manner outside this Christian fellowship. 
 It is only as our hearts are filled full of the love 
 that binds all Christ's together that we can un- 
 derstand these truths. You remember that other 
 verse in St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, 
 " Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, 
 and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto 
 a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stat- 
 ure of the fulness of Christ." There is that 
 " all " again. We shall never come alone or 
 apart; we shall never come into this unity of 
 the faith and knowledge of the Son of God 
 until we all come. 
 
 One of the pathetic things of our day is the 
 way in which the Christian Church has lost what 
 men outside are groping after. Here is the im- 
 pulse that drives the socialistic movement of 
 our day. It gets its power from proposing to 
 supply what Christ came to give. He came 
 
144 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 that the hunger and thirst of men's hearts for 
 fellowship and equality should be satisfied. He 
 preached here in this world nineteen hundred 
 years ago a unity of life, closer, more intimate 
 than any ever known outside of the Christian 
 Church. Why shall we not go out into the 
 world to say : " O world, looking for fellow- 
 ship, seeking after unity of life, we have it all. 
 Here is the secret of it, if you will come with 
 us. And you will never find it unless you will 
 come with us, and join this society of ours, the 
 fellowship of God." 
 
 And just as such unity as this is essential to 
 Christian knowledge, it is essential also to the 
 efficiency of the service of Christ's Church in the 
 world. It is all one body, says Paul, but there 
 are diverse functions; different members have 
 different duties to discharge. If all the body 
 were an eye, where were the smelling? If all 
 the body were an hand, where were the seeing? 
 There are diverse functions, but it is all one 
 body. What a blessing it would be if we could 
 realise such a unity in Christian life and ser- 
 vice! We do feel it at times. We belong to 
 scores of different church bodies, but we are all 
 one. These differences are as nothing to us as 
 we sit together in the presence of Christ. In a 
 real sense it is true that we are one mighty 
 army and that our differences are merely divi- 
 sional separations. But I suspect that many of 
 us are missing God's personal spiritual blessing 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 145 
 
 for our lives because we do not carry the same 
 great thought into our individual life — the 
 thought that we are different members but one 
 body, some set to be apostles, some prophets, 
 some workers of miracles, some teachers, but 
 one spirit running through us all, each with a 
 peculiar mission and separate duty, but all one. 
 There is a German riddle that asks what is the 
 most wonderful thing that God has made. The 
 answer is the human face, that He has made so 
 many, and no two are alike. If He has made 
 so many human faces in the world and no two 
 of them alike, do you suppose He would dupli- 
 cate His life plans? Do you not suppose that 
 the great and rich Father of all our lives has 
 for each one of us a fresh, original scheme of 
 His own, a new, distinct idea for each of us? 
 He does not mean that any one is simply to 
 resemble somebody else. He means that each 
 of us is to be our own true self, to realise that 
 we are not to be like any one else save that we 
 have the same spirit that flows through them. 
 Each of us is to take up our own place and 
 duty in the body, whether humble or honourable, 
 each place glorious because we are all joined 
 together to the one Head from Whom we draw 
 our common glorious life. 
 
 And this ideal of unity is necessary not alone 
 to our knowledge and service, but also to our 
 prayer. The full power of prayer is found only 
 when it is corporate. The relationship of 
 
146 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 each one of us to God determines in some real 
 way the relationship of every one of us to God. 
 Nothing is more real in this world than an- 
 swered prayer, than fellowship in prayer. No 
 one of us can hope to realise in the prayer life 
 all that is there for us until every one of us 
 tries to realise what is there for us. It is only 
 as we all pray that any one of us can pray in 
 the fulness of the joy and power of prayer. 
 
 What a pathetic thing it is with so much de- 
 pendent upon the realisation of Christ's ideal of 
 unity for His people that we are willing to let 
 that unity be impaired? You know the things 
 that impair it. Falsehood destroys it. It is the 
 ground on which Paul argues against falsehood. 
 He does not say that lies are wrong because 
 they are contrary to the character of God, al- 
 though this is true. He does not say that lies 
 are wrong because they are dishonourable, al- 
 though this also is true. He says we cannot lie 
 because it disintegrates the Christian society to 
 He. 
 
 " Put away all falsehood, therefore," he says, 
 " and speak the truth one with another, be- 
 cause ye are members one of another." He 
 realises that falsehood is like a sort of anarchy 
 or disease in the body. And his conception is 
 that the only way in which the body can be one is 
 that it should have the absolute truth running 
 through it all. Every little lie, black or grey or 
 vermilion or white, bv which we soil our lives, 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 147 
 
 constitutes just so much schism and sin against 
 the unity of the body of Jesus Christ. 
 
 MaHce and evil speaking, and all unkindli- 
 ness impair the unity of this body. Oftentimes 
 in our own churches Christ's body has been 
 broken up through evil slander, gossip, unkindly 
 speech. We have all at one time or another 
 seen Christian fellowship impaired in this way. 
 " Behold how great a matter a little fire kin- 
 dleth ! " A perfect hell of power lies in these 
 tongues ! I remember when I first reached 
 China, taking a walk with a friend through the 
 streets of a Chinese village, and seeing for the 
 first time a Chinese dog open his mouth. I 
 stopped and asked my friend, " What is the mat- 
 ter with that dog's mouth ? " The inside was 
 not red like the inside of our dogs' mouths, but 
 blue, as though he had been eating berries. My 
 friend said : " Why, there is nothing the mat- 
 ter. That is the colour of the mouth of a Chi- 
 nese dog." How many Christians there are who 
 have the mouths of Chinese dogs, not red and 
 clean as Christian mouths ought to be; but 
 stained and defiled with malicious speaking, un- 
 kindly and ungenerous talk, with all that kind 
 of conversation which is death to Christian 
 unity. Will we backbite, be ungenerous and 
 un-Christlike in our talk when we walk in all 
 the sweetness and confidence of our Father's 
 house? Shall we not resolve that we will cease 
 from this sin of unkindly, un-Christlike speech, 
 
148 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 to which Paul refers all through his Epistles as 
 much as to any other sin save the sin of im- 
 purity, and thus promote the unity and harmony 
 of the body of Christ? 
 
 And we know, last of all, what Is to promote 
 and increase this unity binding all Christians 
 together into one. As we draw near Christ we 
 draw near to one another even to the ends of the 
 earth. Dr. Trumbull Backus used to say that he 
 always knew as he looked over the report of the 
 church treasurer on what days the communion 
 services had fallen by the size of the missionary 
 offering. Invariably whenever the offering fell 
 on a communion Sunday the missionary offer- 
 ings were from twenty-five to fifty per cent, 
 greater than on any other day. On the days that 
 the people drew nearest to Jesus, when their 
 hearts were melted and tender with His love, on 
 these days they drew near also to the uttermost 
 parts of the earth. What draws us close to 
 one another at any time is the fact that each 
 one of us is drawn close to our Lord. If only 
 each one of us had Him perfectly for our Head 
 then all of us would be perfectly members 
 one of another. Forgiveness draws us together, 
 and there is nothing so severing and schismatic 
 as the spirit of unforgiveness. If any one of 
 us cherish in our hearts any bitter feeling, any 
 animosity, any hatred against any other human 
 soul, we are making it impossible that we should 
 be true members of the Church of Christ. I 
 
UNITY OF HEARTS IN CHRIST 149 
 
 heard of a church once in which there were two 
 brothers who would not speak to one another. 
 Is it possible that any blessing of God could 
 come down upon that church? If there is any 
 hate in our hearts, any unkindliness, let us lay 
 it aside. If there is any person in all this world 
 against whom we are bearing a grudge, let us 
 at once go or write a letter to that person for- 
 giving him freely from our hearts now. If we 
 forgive not our brothers their trespasses, neither 
 will our Heavenly Father forgive our trespasses. 
 There is nothing so much like the cross of Christ 
 as forgiveness. When we have lifted up every- 
 thing in our lives until all the self-pride, bitter- 
 ness, malice, and envy are all dropped out of 
 them, then we know in part what the cross meant 
 to Christ, then our hearts all tender will be ready 
 to enter into the secret of Christ's uniting love. 
 And if we will draw, all of us, close to Him in 
 a great common service, as well as in love and 
 forgiveness, we shall find ourselves realising 
 increasingly the communion of saints and the 
 unity of the body of Christ. 
 
 Whatever may be the differences which sep- 
 arate all those who belong to Christ from one 
 another here on the earth — the incidental dif- 
 ferences of speech, of complexion, of manner of 
 life, of history and tradition — back of all these 
 the common love for our common Lord ought 
 to bind us all together into one, be we Chinese, 
 Japanese, African, Armenian, Bulgarian, Amer- 
 
150 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 ican, or English. From whatever land we come, 
 to whatever denomination we belong, whatever 
 our social condition may be, if we are Christ's 
 we are one another's also, and all of us are one 
 body in Him. Jesus is waiting to reveal to us 
 how one we are, how unreal are all the social 
 and caste lines that divide us, how un-Christian 
 all the lines of separation are that are run by 
 wealth or education or social inheritance ; that, 
 after all, the one fundamental fact of the Chris- 
 tian life, if we have that life at all, is that we 
 are God's, and therefore one with all who are 
 God's ; that I am your friend and you are my 
 friend; what you have is mine and what I have 
 is yours ; your honour is my honour, and my 
 shame your shame, and the sufferings of one the 
 sufferings of us all. When we have learned this 
 we shall have received the Christian inheritance 
 and have entered into the experience of the re- 
 peated and solemn affirmation of our creed, " I 
 believe in the Communion of Saints." 
 
VIII 
 
 THE MASTER, THE MAKER OF 
 STRONG HEARTS 
 
 ** TESUS looked upon him, and said. Thou art 
 J Simon, the son of John: thou shalt be 
 called Cephas (which is, by interpretation, 
 Rock)." These words of our Lord were spoken 
 on the day on which He called his first disciples. 
 The day before John had borne testimony that He 
 was the Lamb of God, and this day, seeing Jesus 
 passing by, had gently constrained two of his 
 disciples, John and Andrew, to leave him and 
 follow Jesus. After they had satisfied them- 
 selves, Andrew found his brother Simon and 
 brought him to Jesus. 
 
 I suppose there were some other people stand- 
 ing around when Andrew and Simon came; un- 
 doubtedly John must have been there; and one 
 can imagine the looks of surprise, perhaps the 
 play of a sneer on the lips of some, as Jesus 
 spoke thus to Simon : " Thy name is Simon ; thy 
 name shall be Cephas, which is by interpretation, 
 Rock." Simon, rock! Why, he was the most 
 vacillating, changeable, unreliable fisherman on 
 the sea of Galilee. We picture John and Andrew 
 exchanging glances of astonishment at the idea 
 of fickle Simon ever being called rock. Perhaps 
 151 
 
152 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 the first influence of Christ's words upon Simon 
 may have been the same. One can imagine 
 the flush of shame that would rise to his cheeks 
 as he was thus singled out for the gaze of the 
 bystanders as the man who had been weak and 
 changeable, but who was now to be called rock. 
 " Rock," Simon would say to himself, " call me 
 rock! This man is giving me a nickname, and 
 taunting me." And then, back of the first flush 
 and feeling of shame there came pulsing through 
 all Simon's veins the sense of his discovery. He 
 was ashamed of his fickleness. Nobody else 
 taunted him with it with half the bitterness with 
 which he taunted himself. Here, at last, he 
 stood before a man who had discovered him, who 
 had found out his own deepest sense of discon- 
 tent, who was giving him a new name, and with 
 the new name the promise of a new character. 
 " I know thee, Simon," Jesus said ; " I know 
 thy reputation here; I have watched thee for 
 many years, and know thee well as the man of 
 most notorious uncertainty and vacillation of 
 character to be found among the fisher folk here ; 
 and I know, too, that deep down in your soul 
 you want a better character. Your name has 
 been Simon ; it shall be Rock." All Simon's soul 
 must have thrilled, as he stood at last before a 
 man who had thus found him in the depths of 
 his life, and who promised him, with a new name, 
 the satisfaction of the deepest longings of his 
 heart. 
 
MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 153 
 
 We read that on the next day the Saviour was 
 minded to go forth into GaHlee, and He findeth 
 PhiHp, who was of the village of Andrew and 
 Peter. And when Philip had satisfied himself 
 of the Saviour, he went to bring Nathanael to 
 Him. And when Nathanael came, Jesus, seeing 
 him, said to those who stood by, " Behold an 
 Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile ! " " Whence 
 knowest Thou me ? " was Nathanael's exclama- 
 tion of surprise. Jesus's answer to him, though 
 in form different, was in spirit the same that 
 He had given to Simon Peter. He had discov- 
 ered Simon at depths below the surface ; He had 
 promised Simon that which he was* not, but 
 which he wanted to be. He revealed now to 
 Nathanael that he understood what lay back of 
 the surface of his life, too. " I knew thy long- 
 ings, Nathanael," He says, " as thou wast under 
 the fig tree there. I knew thy meditations upon 
 that ancient day when Jacob, not so far away, 
 laid his head down by night on a pillow of stone, 
 and the heavens were opened above him, and the 
 angels of God ascended and descended above his 
 head. Thou hast been wondering whether those 
 old days would ever come back again, whether 
 the privileges of such association with God, of 
 such divine fellowship, were for the fathers and 
 the patriarchs alone. Thy heart has been covet- 
 ing an open heaven once again. Verily, I say 
 unto thee, thine own eyes shall see the heavens 
 open, and the angels of God ascending and de- 
 
) 
 
 154 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 scending upon the Son of Man." I imagine there 
 were no smiles among the bystanders this time, 
 but deep down in Nathanael's soul there must 
 have been the same pulsing sense of new discov- 
 ery, the same sense of having been found at last 
 by some one who knew what no other knew about 
 the deeper longing of his heart, and who in the 
 act of revealing him to himself had held out the 
 promise also of fulfilling the aspirations of 
 his soul. 
 
 Now there is one truth that lies right on the 
 rface of these two sweet incidents in the early 
 public Hfe of our Lord. It is, that every man of 
 us is two men, that every man is made up, first, 
 of the man as he actually is on the surface, as 
 perhaps he appears to himself, as certainly as he 
 appears to his fellow men, and the deeper man 
 underneath, as he may be, as God wants him to 
 be, as perhaps the man himself longs to be, as 
 Jesus Christ the Master of men can make him. 
 And Jesus sees both of these two men. We read 
 in the next chapter of this Gospel that He need- 
 eth not that any should bear witness of what is 
 in a man, for He Himself knows all that is in 
 man, all that there is of actual striving with sii 
 and failure, all that there is of delicate desirq 
 after something holier and stronger that thus farj 
 has eluded the man. He knows the two men' 
 that are in each one of us, and He discovers thgrn 
 to Himself and to us. 
 
 Sometimes He finds the actual man without 
 
d 
 
 MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 155 
 
 better than the ideal man within. The man back 
 of the curtain, where He Himself is piercing to 
 the realities of the man, is basely different from 
 the man as he appears to the world without. 
 That was the case with Judas. Ju^as passed ^o 
 ^friend forthree^j^ars. The very night c * 
 betrayal not one of the Apostles could guess wh' 
 the traitor was, but all the time Jesus knew that 
 he was the one who was to betray Him. Back 
 of the surface of fidelity He saw the treasonable 
 heart. The r^^l rnaji in Judas as Jesus saw him 
 was worse than the outer man in Judas as men 
 saw him. 
 
 Sometimes one man is no better than the other, 
 but all that there is in the man lies on the surface 
 of his life. I think that was the case with the 
 rich young ruler who came to Jesus, and whom 
 Jesus, when He looked at him, loved. There 
 was nothing more to the man than showed on the 
 surface. The moment that Jesus put His finger 
 on the core of the man's soul, He found that 
 what was back of the man was no more than was 
 on the surface of the man. There were no real 
 longings that were not already realised in his life, 
 so far as he was truly desirous that they should 
 be. There were none of those deep dissatisfac- 
 tions, those earnest discontents, those aspirations, 
 hestitating at no price, after something beyond 
 his experience that lay in other men whom Jesus 
 touched. And the moment Jesus found his shal-/ 
 lowness, that there was nothing to the man ex- 
 
156 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 cept what showed, and discovered this to the 
 man himself, the young man turned away from 
 Christ. 
 
 [^nrhere are other men in whom what does not 
 I appear is better than what does, in whom the 
 hidden ambition of the Hfe, unknown of men, is a 
 holier and a better thing than the life that thus 
 far men have seen. That was the case with 
 Simon. There he stood, the object lesson of 
 vacillation and pliability. Deep down in his soul 
 was a discontent with that reputation, a desire 
 after a solid, steadfast character; and Jesus, 
 looking into him, saw that the surface of his 
 life covered over this better and deeper and 
 richer longing within. " Thou art called Simon," 
 He said to him ; " thy name shall be Rock." 
 
 And just as our Lord Jesus Christ was dis- 
 covering men when He was here He is discover- 
 ing men still. He is here now with each of us, 
 scrutinising alike the surface and the core of our 
 lives. How doe^ He find us? Does He find 
 no more back of the surface tTian lies upon the 
 surface? There are many men who are clean, 
 decent fellows, not intending to commit any 
 crime, with their wills firmly set to hold aloof 
 from all coarse vice and sin, men who pass as 
 good fellows in the world, sociable, more or less 
 Christian men, and that is all that can be said of 
 them. There is nothing back of the life that 
 is not on the surface of it. Does Christ find any 
 of us so, with no longings beyond our attain- 
 
MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 157 
 
 ments, with no desires behind that which Hes 
 already printed plain on the surface of our lives? 
 
 Maybe He finds some of us worse than we . 
 appear. Outside we are clean, but we are I 
 tainted within. We have been passing as ( 
 leaders; we may have been called to foremost 
 positions in Christian service; we may be 
 looked upon at home as clean and Christian men, 
 and down at the core of our lives there may be 
 something despicable and defiling. Maybe we 
 are gentlemen without while inside we are rot- 
 tenness and dead men's bones, outside clean and 
 attractive to the sight of men, while we carry 
 with us inferiority and vileness of spirit with- 
 in. As Jesus, with those eyes of flame that 
 pierce the very joints and marrow, scrutinises 
 our lives, does He find us actually worse as His 
 eyes see us than we show ourselves to men, or 
 even to ourselves? 
 
 Perhaps He finds us better than we appear.! 
 Perhaps as He looks upon us He sees more in^ 
 us than we have seen even in ourselves as yet, 
 and far more in us than our friends see. Maybe 
 they are calling us Simon. Maybe they say: 
 " Yes, I know that fellow. He pretends to be a 
 Christian man. You cannot place any reliance 
 on his word ; there is no solidity in his character ; 
 it is all profession and no reality beneath " ; while 
 Jesus sees within a deep sickness of soul, a hun- 
 gering and thirsting after that which we know 
 better than any other man that we are not. Pos- 
 
158 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 sibly, looking upon us, Christ does find us tar- 
 nished without, but longing to be cleansed and 
 free within. Some time ago a little fellow 
 from a Southern college said to me : "I am 
 tempted dreadfully with evil thoughts, and when 
 I fear that I am going to be tempted and I fight 
 against them, the thoughts come all the more — 
 just at the time when I hate them the most and 
 most desire to be free from them. The very 
 fact that I strive to avert their coming brings 
 them on, and I fight day and night against them. 
 How shall I free myself from them ? " Now 
 any man looking on this boy's life without, as he 
 looked on his own life without, saw tarnish and 
 stain, saw the soil and the defilement of the evil, 
 but only Jesus saw beneath the passion of dis- 
 gust at it all, the great longing desire to be free, 
 while yet the desire to be free only forged the 
 chains, as it seemed to him, more strongly upon 
 him. It may be that there are some of us worse 
 soiled than by evil thoughts alone, tarnished with- 
 out, yet who, as Jesus sees us, are longing for 
 cleanliness and purity within. Possibly, as we 
 look on the outside of our lives, and as our fel- 
 lows look upon them, they are coarse and selfish 
 lives, heavy with all sorts of narrow desires and 
 tastes and aspirations, while all the time deep 
 within we want to be unselfish. Our self-con- 
 sciousness is felt to be a curse by us ; that em- 
 phasis upon our own will and our own ways that 
 shuts us out from richest generosity of spirit is 
 
MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 159' 
 
 more detestable to us than it could be to any one 
 else. Maybe we are very conscious of our want 
 of attainment, but full of eagerness and keen de- 
 sire to get hold of that which is best and which 
 we most truly need. Jesus, looking upon us, sees 
 us not alone full of the failure of the outer 
 shortcomings, but beautiful with the inner desire 
 to be perfect and unselfish and true. 
 
 Perhaps as Jesus looks down upon us He sees, 
 as no other man sees, the intense and bitter 
 struggle with the disposition to be satisfied with 
 something less than what is best. Perhaps as 
 He looks upon us to-day, just as He looked upon 
 Simon Peter that spring day by the shores of 
 the sea of Galilee, He sees us, as He saw him, 
 weak, pliable, fickle, unreliable men without in 
 our relations with other men, possibly in our 
 control over ourselves ; but back of all He sees the 
 irrepressible sickness with ourselves, the great 
 desire that He Who said to Simon, '' I know 
 you, you shall be called Rock," should say that 
 same thing to us to-day : " I know you, unreli- 
 able, impulsive, uncertain, and yet eager also to 
 be firm set in truth and righteousness. You shall 
 become what you desire." 
 
 Now, it would be a dreary message simply 
 that Jesus sees through us, that we cannot play 
 ofif any sham on Him, that He knows exactly 
 what is hypocrisy in us and what is reality, that 
 His eyes can never be stayed on the outside but 
 will drive home clear to the inner truth of our 
 
160 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 souls. It would be a poor message if we could 
 only console our hearts with the thought that 
 Te sus Christy cannot be cheated in us. It was not 
 enough for Him that day on the shores of the sea 
 to say, '' Simon, I know you, I know your repu- 
 tation on this coast, I know your character thor- 
 oughly " ; He went on to hold out to him the 
 promise of becoming that which he was not, of 
 being that which he longed to be. " Thy name 
 has been Simon: thou shalt be called Rock." 
 And Jesus is looking down upon us now, not 
 alone clearly distinguishing just the sort of men 
 we are, but holding out to us also His promise 
 to make us the kind of men we would like to be, 
 and to remould us, defaced, blemished, scarred, 
 incomplete, howsoever we may be, into the like- 
 ness of His own perfect and glorious image. 
 " Thy name has been Simon : thou shalt be called 
 Rock." 
 
 There is something wonderfully attractive, 
 something that speaks home to the conscious 
 needs of our hearts, in this thought of the 
 stability and power of Christ, which He is able 
 to impart to us, and to make a part of our own 
 personal character and hfe. From the very 
 beginning Israel loved to conceive religion so. 
 They were ever speaking of the Lord God as 
 their everlasting Rock Who could not be moved, 
 in Whom they could stand impregnable and un- 
 assailable. Moses sang, '' He is the rock. His 
 work is perfect: ascribe ye greatness unto our 
 
MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS l6l 
 
 God. For their rock is not as our rock, even 
 our enemies themselves being judges." And 
 there was David, in the day when the Lord deHv- 
 ered him out of the hands of his enemies and out 
 of the hand of Saul, singing, " The Lord is my 
 rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my 
 God, my strong rock, in Him will I trust; my 
 shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high 
 tower." And there is yet again his cry in 
 one of the psalms that is attributed to him: 
 " Hear my cry, O God ; attend unto my prayer. 
 From the end of the earth will I call unto Thee, 
 when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the 
 rock that is higher than L For Thou hast been 
 a refuge for me, and a strong tower from the 
 enemy." A poor people hunted out of their 
 own land, driven to and fro over the surface of 
 the earth, who found no shade of trees, but who 
 dwelt only under the shadow of a great rock in 
 a weary land, Israel loves to lean still on the 
 Lord God its rock. An old Jewish legend is 
 said to be referred to in Paul's First Epistle to 
 the Corinthians, where we are told tliat all 
 through the wilderness journeys the rock that 
 Moses smote in the wilderness followed Israel, 
 and they drank of that rock. And that rock, 
 Paul says, was Christ. And the very core of all 
 religion lies in this, the binding back of life into 
 its solid moorings in God. Religion is the tak- 
 ing of that which is adrift, of that which is out 
 chartless and masterless, and bringing it home to 
 
162 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 its just relations in the impregnable and endur- 
 ing God. 
 
 Jesus stands waiting to set our feet in rock; 
 and it does not matter where we go, we shall 
 need each one of us to have Him do in us this 
 mighty ministry. Some of us may be going into 
 business life. We shall need nothing more as we 
 go there than that He should set our feet se- 
 curely in an immovable righteousness and steadi- 
 ness of character. Mr. Richard Croker is not 
 an admirable man, but there are two things 
 that are said to his credit. One is that 
 he speaks his mind without fear, and the 
 other is that he keeps his word without false- 
 hood. Some time ago the Evening Telegram 
 printed an interview with him, in which he was 
 reported to have said : " I don't propose to pose 
 as an adviser to the young men of this city, but 
 speaking solely from my personal observation, I 
 should say that all that is necessary for the truly 
 ambitious young man to do is to possess himself 
 of those principles which go to make up the prac- 
 tical business man, and those are, in my judg- 
 ment, first of all, integrity, pluck, perseverance 
 and sobriety." The same truth was better said 
 by a better man in " Under the Old Elm." 
 
 "The longer on this earth we live, 
 And weigh the various qualities of men, 
 
 Seeing how most are fugitive 
 Or fitful gifts at best of now and then, 
 Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen, 
 
MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 163 
 
 The more we feel the high, stern-featured beauty 
 
 Of plain devotedness to duty. 
 Steadfast and still; not fed with mortal praise: 
 
 But finding amplest recompense 
 
 For life's ungarlanded expense 
 In work done squarely and unwasted days." 
 
 If we are going out into business life, let Jesus 
 speak to us His message of power and turn us 
 from pliable Simon into enduring Rock, making 
 us rigid with His righteousness. 
 
 Every one of us, whatever his or her particu- 
 lar work is to be, must expect to be tried by seven 
 times hotter temptations than have ever tried 
 us before. Every fresh privilege is only a fitting 
 of men for fresh temptation. And we can be 
 sure as we go out with larger powers to fight 
 with that which is vicious and evil, that we shall 
 have more of it to struggle against. Tempta- 
 tions will come to us with fresh power. The 
 adversary in yet more insidious ways will creep 
 subtly in and try us at some new place. 
 We shall need Christ to stand by us and 
 put rock i^ us, need Christ to stand by us and 
 make us steadfast to fight against him who fights 
 against us, to clothe ourselves with all the 
 armour of God aijd then to stand, and having 
 done all, to stand still, until at last, having over- 
 come, we sit down by Christ upon His throne, as 
 He overcame and was set ddwn by the Father 
 upon His throne. 
 
 Some may have to stand all alone in their col- 
 
164 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 leges or circles of companions. It is an awful 
 thing to try and pull other men up to a higher 
 spiritual level. There is no other work in this 
 world that drains men so, that tears the very soul 
 as the attempt to make plain to other men some 
 larger spiritual vision and to turn them to its 
 obedience. It would be a far easier thing to go 
 out and plough. Many will have to stand alone 
 in this way. May Jesus, who Himself stood, 
 help us to stand and breathe into us the very dis- 
 position of stone. In all of our service of Christ, 
 wherever we go now, or whatever we are to do, 
 we need to be given, each one of us, more of 
 that new character which came to Simon when 
 Jesus found him and gave him his new name. 
 
 One of the wonderful things about our Lord 
 Himself was the way He stood against everything 
 that assailed Him whether from within or from 
 without, and counted nothing too great a sacrifice 
 for His ministry and His Father's love, the way 
 at last, when all turned against Him, when every 
 disciple fled, when even John turned and left with 
 the rest. He remained unmoved, immovable. 
 Some of you will recall the old lines of Irving 
 Brown in the Albany Law Journal back of which 
 as we read them rises the vision of the enduring 
 and the immovable Christ, in which he con- 
 trasted the lions of Trafalgar and Lucerne. 
 
 " The drowsy lions of Trafalgar lie, 
 With pride and conquest sated, 
 Round about the victor's column. 
 
MAKER OF STRONG HEARTS 165 
 
 Travellers pass by without a glance 
 
 And oftener without a thought of all the glory buried 
 
 there 
 That makes the Lion Island's fame so fair. 
 
 '* Thou solitary lion of Lucerne 
 Defeated, gasping on an alien shield, 
 To thee the strangers' steps in fondness turn, 
 Thou dying majesty. 
 
 To thee we yield the tribute due to loyalty and love, 
 Unshaken as the solid cliff above." 
 
 So may our Lord Jesus Christ, Who so stood 
 that all the powers of hell could not shake Him 
 in His standing, give us of His own strength to 
 stand with Him. 
 
 I stood some years ago outside the wall of 
 the city of Seoul, in Korea, on the banks of the 
 river Han, and I thought of that great scene 
 thirty years before, when the Tai Won Kun, who 
 for nearly a generation was the baleful curse 
 of that land, ordered the death of all the Catholic 
 Christians of Korea, and they were brought 
 down, thousands in number, to the shores of the 
 Han. The priests and the bishops had arrows 
 thrust through the lobes of their ears and the 
 muscles of their chests, and were obliged to run 
 up and down the sandy bank of the Han until 
 they fell exhausted, and one by one the multitude 
 of Koreans, women, men, and little children, 
 poor, simple people, deemed by the Japanese and 
 Chinese alike as cast off In the world and feeble, 
 knelt down, and for their Master, Jesus Christ, 
 
166 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 were willing to die, and did die, until the water 
 of the Han ran red to the Yellow Sea. That 
 scene was later brought back by a letter from 
 a missionary in the city of Ning-po in China, 
 describing a meeting of the Synod of southern 
 China, about the time of the Boxer storm, in 
 which in a farewell address the oldest minister 
 in the Synod rose and spoke to his friends of the 
 fiery trials which he felt were coming upon all 
 who confessed Jesus Christ in China. He ad- 
 vised the other pastors to prepare their people 
 by reading to them from the Bible the passages 
 about the martyrs of the early Church, and to 
 tell them the stories of the Christian Church 
 through all the ages, that they might be made 
 ready to stand immovable, steadfast, and true, 
 in the day of fire and of sword. 
 
 Feeble as dust, fickle, changeable, unreliable 
 Simons, all of us, needing each of us to have 
 given to him the strength which Christ possesses, 
 once again, as in the days of old by Tiberias, the 
 Master stands offering to change every man 
 from Simon to Peter, to take us just as we are, 
 no matter how unsatisfactory, vacillating, un- 
 true, and make us by His grace. Rock, rigid 
 Rock. 
 
IX 
 
 THE MASTER'S WORK FOR HIS FOL- 
 LOWERS 
 
 IN the beginning of the great prayer of our 
 Lord which is recorded in the seventeenth 
 chapter of the Gospel of St. John, occurs this 
 sentence : " I have glorified Thee on the earth ; 
 I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me 
 to do." 
 
 Surely none but the lips of Christ would have 
 dared to utter these words. What is peculiar 
 and personal in them, however, is not the idea 
 that our Master had a work given Him by God 
 to do. I think we are at times disposed to think 
 that that was the distinctive and peculiar thing 
 in the life of Jesus, and unmistakably it was an 
 emphatic thing. How many times He Himself 
 refers to it ! " My meat is to do the will of 
 Him that sent Me, and to finish His work." 
 " I came not to do Mine own will, but the will 
 of Him that sent Me." ''He that sent Me is 
 with Me; He hath not left Me alone, for I do 
 always those things that please Him." 
 
 Because Jesus was often insisting upon this 
 and because so manifestly what Jesus was about 
 in this world was the work of God, we are some- 
 
 16T 
 
168 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 times led to think that His life evidenced a 
 working of God which we may not be privileged 
 to have in our lives, and we often draw the line 
 of distinction between our Lord and ourselves 
 here, admitting that God had given to Him a 
 great work to do in this world and admitting 
 sadly that we do not believe that He can or 
 intends to give us any such work. But surely 
 instead of being most remote from us at this 
 point, it is precisely here that Jesus Himself 
 fully reveals the real and essential significance 
 of our Hfe; instead of setting Himself off 
 from all other men in declaring that He had a 
 work given Him of God to do, He was ranging 
 Himself in this with all His brethren. We as 
 truly as He have each one of us a specific God- 
 assigned work in the world. 
 
 Jesus often touches upon this truth in His 
 parables. He tells us that the kingdom of 
 Heaven is like unto a householder who went off 
 into a far country, leaving to each of his servants 
 his own work. And He makes it plain that this 
 is not alone the work of each servant for himself, 
 but God's work for each servant. The work 
 which we are trying to do in this world is our 
 work surely enough, but it is not our work for 
 ourselves in any such true sense as it is God's 
 work for us, and we get the chief comfort and 
 contentment out of our lives from that convic- 
 tion. The truest joy which any man can find 
 in his life is in perceiving in it some unfolding 
 
WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 169 
 
 of God's purpose and in recognising in the thing 
 that he is trying to do not a work that he has 
 picked up at random here, but a particular piece 
 of work set for him, set for him long before he 
 himself ever came into this world, by the loving 
 purpose of his Father. 
 
 Conceive for a moment the irresistible strength 
 and power of such a conception of life as this. 
 Not every man can do everything that he will, 
 but every man can do everything that God wills 
 that he should do, and neither life nor death, 
 principalities nor powers, things present nor 
 things to come, can prevent any man from doing 
 in this world the work which God wants him 
 to do if the man will take his work from the 
 hands of God and do it. 
 
 This is no narrow conception of life. To hold 
 this view of life does not require a man to nar- 
 row his thought of the things allowable to him 
 within the Hmits of a certain few occupations 
 and duties. John Tauler was telling the truth 
 when, seven hundred years ago, he wrote: 
 
 " Every art or work, however unimportant it 
 may seem, is a gift of God; and all these gifts 
 are bestowed by the Holy Ghost for the profit 
 and welfare of men. Let us begin with the low- 
 est. One can spin, another can make shoes, and 
 some have great aptness for all sorts of outward 
 arts. These are all gifts proceeding from the 
 Spirit of God. H I were not a priest, but were 
 living as a layman, I should take it as a great 
 
170 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 favour that I knew how to make shoes, and 
 should try to make them better than any one else, 
 and should gladly earn my bread by the labour 
 of my hands. There is no work so small, no art 
 so mean, but it all comes from God and is a 
 special gift of His. Thus let each do that which 
 another cannot do so well, and for love, return- 
 ing gift for gift." 
 
 It was the same perception of a divine truth 
 that led his friends to inscribe on the tombstone 
 of David Golf in Scotland : " David Golf, Shoe- 
 maker by the grace of God." Any work which 
 God assigns to a man is worthy work for that 
 man to do, and if it be very humble and secular 
 as men regard it, it is yet the most spiritual and 
 divine work that the man can take up, if God 
 gave it to him. 
 
 On the other hand, this conception of life does 
 not tolerate any maudlin breadth. There are 
 young men in our colleges who are answering 
 the missionary call by saying that they expect 
 to stay at home and earn money for missions. 
 There is not a verse in the Bible that justifies a 
 man in believing that God has ever called or ever 
 will call a man primarily to make money, and I 
 have never been able to persuade myself from 
 studying the character of God that He would do 
 such a thing as that. There are men whom God 
 calls to some living spiritual service who earn 
 money by the way, and they are bound to admin- 
 ister that money as a trust ; but I do not believe 
 
WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 171 
 
 that God is opening before any man, or ever has 
 opened before any man, the door to escape from 
 a Hving spiritual service under the pretext that 
 he is to earn money that the spiritual service of 
 other men many be maintained. William Carey 
 said that he cobbled shoes to pay expenses, and 
 that is all that cobbling shoes or stock-broking or 
 keeping a bank is good for, either to pay ex- 
 penses or to serve men. The real purpose of a 
 man's life is to pay expenses In these ways and 
 to use himself, use himself utterly in the living 
 work of God. It is a fine thing that God makes 
 work His gift and not money and not fame, nor 
 this thing nor that thing, but just living work, 
 and that every day He gives to each man of us a 
 work for that day and offers to us the joy of 
 conceiving it as a personal partnership with.. 
 Himself. " To every man his work." 
 
 In the second place, it is a possible thing for 
 every man to discover just what the work of God 
 for him in this world is. There is not one man 
 who cannot discover the precise work which God 
 has for him to do. As a matter of fact, God 
 is more anxious that we should discover that 
 work than we are to discover it. We often tor- 
 ture ourselves with the contrary thought, sup- 
 posing that we are anxious beyond God to get 
 into just our right place in this world, whereas, 
 all the time, the living God Himself, to Whom 
 our life is of more importance than it is to us, 
 has been far more anxious to guide us into 
 
172 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 that precise place which He has made for us 
 than we are to be guided. 
 
 Not only can each of us find what the work 
 of God for us in this world is, but each of us 
 must find that work. Life is a wasted thing, 
 Hfe is missing its real purpose here in the world, 
 life is sin — which simply is missing the purpose 
 — until we have discovered for ourselves what 
 God's work and will for us may be. 
 
 I. How can we discover the work of God 
 for us in the world? First of all, God does not 
 propose to reveal it to us by any ecstatic emo- 
 tion or by any mechanical external pressure. 
 God has guided men in these ways ; but no man 
 has any right to demand that God should guide 
 him so. When God works within my heart, will 
 not His workings be so perfect that they will 
 seem to be the motions of my own heart? God 
 will not coerce our spirits ; He will not in any 
 objective way throttle our liberties. Whatever 
 guidance we get from God will be in the way of 
 the movings of the Spirit of God along the chan- 
 nels of the orderly activities of our own life. 
 
 n. In the second place, as Horace Bushnell 
 points out in his great sermon, " Every Man's 
 Life a Plan of God," there are certain things 
 that must be excluded. We must exclude, first 
 of all, the desire to be singular. The man who 
 is ambitious for some peculiar thing, who is 
 tying God down to the revelation of some indi- 
 vidual and singular project for himself, is pre- 
 
WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 173 
 
 venting that divine leading which is only given 
 to the soul that is pliable in His hand. 
 
 Second, v^e must exclude the copying of any 
 other man's life. I look at my friend and his 
 life so rich in all strengths and blessings, so set 
 in all rigidity of truthfulness, so strong and 
 clean in all its human ministries, and I v^ant to 
 pattern my life after his. The rich God is too 
 rich to give me the cast-off clothes of another 
 man's life. He proposes for me an original and 
 vital project of my own, and He does not expect 
 me as I seek His will for myself to ape the life 
 of any other man. 
 
 Thirdly, we must exclude insistence upon 
 knowing the whole thing at the beginning. That 
 was the difficulty of some of the disciples on the 
 last night. " Lord," said one of them to Him, 
 " we know not whither Thou goest ; how can we 
 know the way ? " Men are perpetually making 
 that mistake, thinking that unless they can see 
 the goal they cannot see the road thither. Now, 
 the living God cannot reveal to any man his 
 whole life. We have as yet no intellectual con- 
 ceptions in which to phrase our future life to 
 ourselves. If Christ should unveil it before us 
 it would be to us a strange and unintelligible 
 thing. We must be content to take God's guid- 
 ance of our lives step by step as we are able to 
 bear it. 
 
 III. Now, with these warnings, in the third 
 place, consider^ first of all, the character of God. 
 
174 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 That makes it impossible for any man to be a 
 saloon keeper or go into the business of keeping 
 a dive. God could not approve it, and whatever 
 is inconsistent with the character of God, it is 
 not possible for any Christian man to do. Now 
 that may seem like a very obvious suggestion, 
 but apply it and see what a great swath it cuts 
 through life. How many things that perhaps 
 we have been cherishing as possible become in- 
 stantly impossible the moment we sit down to 
 estimate them again in the light of what we 
 believe to be the character of God! 
 
 Let us consider, in the second place, our own 
 relation to God, as men who belong to Him, who 
 have no right to set ourselves up in the world 
 in business independently of God, who are here, 
 as His workmanship, our whole Hfe depending 
 upon Him. Whatever we do in life must be 
 something that recognises our utter dependence 
 upon God. 
 
 Let us take account, thirdly, of our own moral 
 judgments. Many a man makes his life decision 
 in the face of the light that shines in his own 
 moral life. He sins; he knows he sins. When 
 a man deliberately follows some selfish end when 
 there is opened up before him an unselfish ser- 
 vice he is sinning, and he knows that he is sin- 
 ning against his own moral judgment. On the 
 other hand, a man may unconsciously walk into 
 sin with the approval of his moral judgment. 
 Not everything that my moral judgment tells 
 
WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 175 
 
 me is right, is right. The thugs committed mur- 
 der with the most rehgious motives ; are they 
 therefore justified in their course? The fact that 
 a man's moral judgment allows him to do a thing 
 does not justify him in doing it. While a man 
 must consult his moral judgment and do nothing 
 that his moral judgment condemns, it is not 
 enough for any man to say that his moral judg- 
 ment approves. Is his moral judgment right? 
 
 In the fourth place, he must consult, there- 
 fore, that one corrective of a man's moral judg- 
 ment — the law of God as revealed in the Word 
 of God. It was given us for the purpose of 
 setting erroneous moral judgments right and for 
 establishing those standards of life which are 
 to be the norm of our moral judgment. 
 
 In the fifth place, let each of us consult his 
 own friends. They know us. We need to con- 
 sult our friends, although we may disregard 
 their advice. Many times men are called to do 
 this ; and many are first born into the real sense 
 of what it is to be a man by refusing to follow 
 the advice of friends. Not every father's advice 
 even is infallible. And many a time a man will 
 consult his friends and follow their advice, and 
 many a time also he will consult his friends and 
 not follow their advice. 
 
 He must consult also not alone his friends, but 
 that greatest Friend of all Who is perpetually 
 guiding man's life by the providences that sur- 
 round it and are shaping it. Who brought you 
 
176 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 here ? God. Who forced on your mind the con- 
 sideration of a certain Hne of Hfe work? God. 
 You may say the considerations that are pressed 
 on you to take up that Hfe work are considera- 
 tions that would force every man into it. No, 
 they are not, and you know that that is no honest 
 reason; for God brought you to face those con- 
 siderations ; He did not bring other men to face 
 those considerations. I may stand on the shore 
 of a river where there are drowning souls, and 
 I ma}^ say that no obligation rests on me to save 
 those drowning souls that does not rest also on 
 every man, but I know that I am playing with 
 the truth in saying this ; not every man is stand- 
 ing on the bank of the river, and I am. Not 
 every man is looking out on the world of need 
 to-day ; you are, and you are looking out upon it 
 because God brought you face to face with it, 
 and because there is a loving providence in your 
 life guiding and directing you toward its need. 
 This is a thing to be weighed now by you or it 
 may be weighed some day against you. 
 
 Last of all, it is necessary for each of us, hav- 
 ing guarded ourselves against these dangers and 
 having followed these various courses of help, 
 to go straight to God with the matter and to 
 trust Him to guide us, and then walk straight 
 forward with a quiet heart, certain that He has 
 guided us as we have asked Him that He should. 
 God has a work for each of us to do, a partic- 
 ular individual work that will never be done in 
 
WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 177 
 
 this world unless he to whom it is assigned does 
 it, and He has given us the means of discover- 
 ing that particular work of His for us. 
 
 IV. In the fourth place, this is the thing that 
 the man is to do. " The work," says Jesus, 
 *' which Thou hast given Me to do/' And you 
 know how Jesus did it. His disciples came back 
 and they marvelled as they saw Him sitting by 
 Jacob's well talking with a woman, and they 
 said, " Hath any man brought Him aught to 
 eat ? " And Jesus said, '' My meat is to do the 
 will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His 
 work." And you know how He poured His 
 life into the doing of that will so that, as His 
 disciples said, the zeal of His Father's house ate 
 Him up. He even took no leisure so much as 
 to eat. Every true life that has walked with 
 Him and has learned the secret of His life has 
 done thus the work that God has given it to do. 
 
 All the great things that have ever been accom- 
 plished in this world have been accomplished by 
 men who had a will to work. Take the life of 
 Richard Knill. Where was the secret of that? 
 In the advice that Venning, the philanthropist, 
 gave him : " Knill, labour for Jesus Christ as 
 long as you have a drop of blood in your 
 body." Take the life of T. H. Huxley. What 
 was the secret of it? The motto of his Hfe: 
 " Like the stars, without haste, without rest." 
 Take the life of Samuel Bowles. Friends said ^ 
 to him, " Mr. Bowles, you are ruining your / 
 
178 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 health with overwork." " I have the Hnes 
 drawn," was his reply, " and the current flowing, 
 and by throwing my weight here now I can 
 count for something. If I make a long break or 
 ' parenthesis to get strong I shall lose my oppor- 
 tunity. No man is living a life worth living 
 unless he is willing, if need be, to die for some- 
 \ body or something." 
 
 And so St. Paul in his talk with the Ephesian 
 elders at Miletus : *' I count not my life as dear 
 unto myself, so that I may finish my course with 
 joy and the ministry which I have received of 
 the Lord Jesus to testify the Gospel of 
 the grace of God." I like the missionary enter- 
 prise on this account; because it sets before us 
 a definite divine work in the world to do and 
 gives a man a chance to spend his life in doing 
 it. Yes, it gives him a chance, if he wants it, to 
 lay down his life in doing it. And, after all, 
 what was life given to men for? Many of us 
 are content to make a living, live a comfortable, 
 quiet, decent life, and then at the end turn over 
 and die; and that will be the end of it all — no 
 great thrilling passion in it, no great divine vi- 
 sions overcoming it and overpowering it, no 
 great sympathy with Jesus Christ in His work 
 of sacrifice and of service in the world. But was 
 life given men to nurse in velvet and to keep 
 as long as they could? Life was given to men 
 to burn up, to spend and to spend out clear to 
 the end. Some Christians do not realise this, 
 
WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 179 
 
 but to others the view of the Saviour regarding 
 His own priceless Hfe has been given, and they 
 see that Hfe is a trust to be used, not a treasure 
 to be hoarded. As a mother wrote of the death 
 of a daughter killed during the Boxer troubles 
 in China: 
 
 " The bitterest part of our trial was the faith- 
 less reproaches of fellow Christians because of 
 what they called the waste of such valuable lives. 
 My soul was literally torn with anguish by such 
 words. They seemed to reflect dishonour on our 
 Lord, and my constant prayer is that He may 
 vindicate Himself and His servants, so that no 
 one can doubt that all has been according to His 
 wise purpose. 
 
 " Personally, we have gone through the Val- 
 ley of the Shadow — but He has been with us, 
 and the days of our deepest sorrow have been the 
 days of His greatest nearness. We have been 
 like distressed children clinging close to the 
 strong and loving Father's side, and it has been 
 sweet to be made so conscious of His protection. 
 The earthward side of my dear one's death is 
 very dark, mysterious; but I thank God for the 
 glory of the heavenward side. I thank Him, too, 
 that the suffering was at longest measured by 
 hours, but the glory is for eternity. Oh, what a 
 Master we serve; what an inheritance He has 
 purchased for us I " 
 
 Many a man who is moving around with grey 
 hair, having lived out a long term of years, 
 
180 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 has wasted his Hfe; but those missionary- 
 martyrs had not wasted theirs when they laid 
 them down there, in their fresh beauty, in north- 
 ern China. Jesus Christ did not waste His Hfe 
 when He died at the age of thirty-three upon a 
 cross when He might have hved on, if He had 
 wanted to, ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more. 
 He conceived that hfe was given to Him to 
 spend, and He spent it in doing the work that 
 His Father had given Him to do. 
 
 In Leonard Huxley's life of his father you 
 will find a letter in which Huxley speaks of the 
 death of Chinese Gordon at Khartoum in the 
 Soudan. Chinese Gordon was the man whom 
 above all other men, unless it was Darwin, Hux- 
 ley admired, deeming him the most refreshing 
 personality of that generation, and he is speaking 
 in this letter to Sir John Donnelly of Gordon's 
 strange death in the Soudan ; and he says : " I 
 imagine that the manner of his death was not 
 unwelcome to himself. Better wear out than 
 rust out, and better break than wear out." For 
 what was life given to men for except to fling 
 it with all the energy and power that it holds 
 against sin and for the thing that is right and 
 good and holy in the world? Each of us has a 
 work to do, and must do that work while life 
 lasts, as Jesus Christ had a work to do and 
 made it His meat and His drink to do it and to 
 bring it to a finished end. 
 
 y. I said at the beginning that no lips but 
 
WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 181 
 
 our Lord's would ever have dared to speak those 
 words, and I said also that what was peculiar 
 and individual in them was not the fact that 
 Jesus had a work given Him of God to do. I 
 would say now that the thing that was distinc- 
 tive and pecuHar was the fact that Jesus was able 
 to say, " I have finished My work." Nobody 
 else in this world ever said that. Each one of 
 us looks at his work as he has done it up to this 
 day. If he should die to-day much of it would 
 have to be undone, and the man who tried to 
 pick it up would be torn with the splinters that 
 are sticking out from it. It is no finished, pol- 
 ished piece of work as Christ's was. Some of 
 you may have seen in one of the marine journals 
 a little while ago an interview with President 
 Hill of the Great Northern, in which he spoke of 
 men's experience in taking hold of the life work 
 of other men who had gone before them, of the 
 necessity that they had been put to of undoing 
 much of it, of the ambition which he felt to do a 
 man's work in such a way that when he let it 
 go nobody would need to undo any of it. And 
 beyond that, even if a man is able to leave his 
 work so that other men can take it up and find 
 no imperfection in it, how much is there yet of 
 shortcoming in it all, things we wanted to do 
 that we never did. Leonard Huxley writes of his 
 father, that his hands were full of a great burden 
 of investigations he wished to make that were in- 
 complete, and there were scores of questions 
 
182 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 in his mind that he wanted time and strength 
 to consider, but for which time and strength 
 were not given. What human Hfe is there of 
 which we could not say that? And the richer 
 and the more glorious it is, the fuller it is of 
 unfinished and uncompleted projects. 
 
 And even beyond all this, long before we have 
 ever got to the end of our race our strength has 
 failed us and our pace has lagged and we have 
 fallen short of our own ideals for ourselves. 
 There is not one of us who carries his bat 
 through to the end of the game. Long before 
 the game is ended we have grown tired and 
 have fallen down. 
 
 I said that no lips but Christ's could ever say, 
 " I have finished my work." Some of you may 
 be remembering words that the Apostle Paul 
 wrote that seem to contradict that statement. 
 It was his ambition to finish his work. " I count 
 not my life dear to myself, so that I may finish 
 my course with joy"; and he wrote, in the last 
 of his Epistles, " I have fought a good fight. I 
 have finished my course." But did he finish his 
 work? He finished his course and came to the 
 end, to be sure, but did he finish his work? Why, 
 men are fighting to this day over the work of 
 the Apostle Paul who are agreed over the work 
 of Christ. The work of Jesus stands complete, 
 polished, finished. No man can add one word 
 to it or subtract one word from it. You cannot 
 say as much as that even of the work of the 
 
WORK FOR HIS FOLLOWERS 183 
 
 Apostle Paul himself. Alone of all those who 
 have ever lived, Jesus finished His work. He 
 carried it through to the end. All the shame of 
 that dark hour and the stinging pains of those 
 nails in His hands and His feet did not obscure 
 His vision of His work. He opened there in 
 the last hour of all the gates of the kingdom of 
 heaven to one of His dying companions; He 
 prayed that the Father might forgive the mur- 
 derers who knew not what they did, and He 
 made a home for His mother. At the very end 
 He was rounding out the perfect work of His 
 life. Men now and then have come near to that. 
 It is told of old Father Taylor, the seaman's-^ 
 chaplain in Boston, that once in his old age, / 
 when he was in his dotage, he came in a corridor ' 
 to a great mirror and he saw an old man there. 
 Not recognising it as himself, he went up to him, 
 and he said : " Old man, I wish you would come / 
 to Christ; you haven't very much life left. [ 
 Your sun will soon set ; the night of death is just ^ 
 ahead. Forsake your sins now and come to 
 Christ before it is too late." And you 
 know that among the last things recorded of 
 John Eliot, apostle to the Indians, was the scene 
 described by one who went in and found him on 
 his death bed. There was a little Indian girl i 
 standing by the bed, and John Eliot was teaching | 
 her the alphabet; and when somebody remon- I 
 strated with him because he was using up his 
 strength and overtaxing himself, he reminded 
 
184 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 them of Christ. Jesus finished His work. He 
 finished His work in the sense that until the very 
 end He was rounding it out to completeness. 
 He finished it also in the sense that He did it 
 absolutely truly — no omitted thing in His life; 
 no committed thing that He afterwards repented 
 and grieved for. We measure our own life over 
 against His to-day, besmirched and ragged, torn 
 through with schism and rent and imperfection. 
 Who are we that we should even be given a 
 work of the Father to do like Christ's ? And yet 
 if it be true that the work given us is God's 
 work for us to do, we may hope also that it is 
 God's work for us also to complete it, and that if 
 we try to round out perfectly this day, filling it 
 with as much loving ministry, as much abhor- 
 rence of sin, as much detestation of every evil 
 way, as much tenderness toward little children, 
 as much love of what is pure and worthy and 
 beautiful as we can, by His grace at last it may 
 be possible for us also to say, as Christ said : " I 
 have glorified Thee on the earth. I have finished 
 the work which Thou gavest Me to do " ; and 
 until then we have no ambition that it should end. 
 
 " I ask no heaven till earth be Thine, 
 No glory crown while work of mine 
 Remaineth here. When earth shall shine 
 
 Among the stars,' 
 Her sins cast out, her captives free, 
 Her voice a music unto Thee, 
 For crown, more work give Thou to me. 
 
 Lord, here I am." 
 
X 
 
 THE BURNING HEART 
 
 THERE passed away a few years ago from 
 the United States Senate one of the most 
 conspicuous of our national politicians. 
 Some would be disposed to say one of the most 
 notorious, but it is only fair, both to him and 
 to the nation, to say one of the most conspicu- 
 ous. One of the ablest of the New York daily 
 papers, the day after his death, published a just 
 and discriminating analysis of his character, in 
 which the man's good qualities were fairly 
 recognised. Attention was called to his 
 moderation, to his restraint, to his usual 
 clear-headedness, and to his patience. Those 
 were the Christian qualities of the man. But 
 the editorial went on to point out that side by 
 side with great good qualities like these the man 
 was marked by fundamental weaknesses. He 
 was without the imagination, the fine sense of 
 public feeling, the look beyond mere tactical ad- 
 vantages, that the statesman needs. He lacked 
 the perception and the inspiration of vital be- 
 liefs ; the genuine enthusiasm for a principle 
 vitally believed in he seemed never to have 
 shared or understood. These were the great 
 Christian qualities that the man lacked. Hq 
 185 
 
186 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 had no great vision of the truth ; he never knew 
 what it was to have made a great moral choice 
 of the truth as against all falsehood, and there 
 never burned in him any deep and intense de- 
 votion to a principle for its own sake or to the 
 truth even until death. And those are the three 
 qualities, surely, which are essential to a true 
 character : a clear perception of the truth, a 
 decisive moral choice of the truth, an intense 
 service of the truth with all the zeal of the soul. 
 Now every effort has been made in God's 
 education of us to confront each one of us with 
 a clear statement of the truth. Again and again 
 appeal has been made to us to make a deliberate 
 moral choice of the truth and the right. And 
 the remaining question is whether, as we look 
 out upon the scenes of daily life, we are going to 
 carry with us into the testings and the services 
 and the duties of the days that intense spirit of 
 devotion, that genuine earnestness of heart, with- 
 out which we will not be able to keep either the 
 vision of the truth or the choice of the truth 
 which we may have made, and without which 
 we shall not be able to make that impress on 
 the world which God has commissioned us to 
 make. I do not know how better to state this 
 quality of character than in one phrase in the 
 twelfth chapter of Romans, the phrase which is 
 found in the heart of the verse that runs, " Not 
 slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving 
 the Lord." 
 
THE BURNING HEART 187 
 
 Now, that word " fervent " does not do jus- 
 tice to the word which Paul used. The word 
 that Paul wrote means literally " boiling." 
 Paul's idea was of a man with a hot and burning 
 heart. Let us tone the word down, if we wish 
 to, and call it simply " earnestness," a real de- 
 votion to the thing to which we have now com- 
 mitted our lives. Is that earnest glow now 
 really burning in our hearts? 
 
 We need this earnestness in the warfare in 
 which we are now engaged, in which we are to 
 continue to be engaged, with evil and with sin. 
 It would be a fine thing if we might believe some 
 of the counsels that are spoken to us, that these 
 lives of ours were meant to be dress parades, 
 that there is no enemy to fight, that all that we 
 need to do is just to shut our eyes to the foe and 
 that that extinguishes him. We know perfectly 
 well that we are engaged in a war. As St. Paul 
 says, in Myers' words: 
 
 "Battle I know as long as life remaineth, 
 Battle for all." 
 
 It will not deliver us from the reality of that 
 battle to try to be nice toward sin. Sin only 
 asks of us that we should persuade ourselves 
 that it does not mean to fight in order to thrust 
 us in the back the moment we have begun to 
 trust that the war is done. From the beginning 
 to the end of the Bible it is military metaphor. 
 
188 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 I do not know what those men are going to do 
 with the moral message of the Bible who make 
 Christian experience a gentle and uncontrover- 
 sial thing. The whole New Testament is full 
 of the idea that Christianity is a strife, and that 
 the man who takes up the Christian life takes 
 up a struggle that will never close until his life 
 closes, and maybe not then. We are told re- 
 peatedly there that w,e have great enemies who 
 are waiting for our souls, that we wrestle not 
 with flesh and blood — that were an easy con- 
 flict — ^but with principalities and powers and 
 with the spirits of darkness, who lie in hiding 
 for us when we are least aware. Our adversary, 
 the devil, goes up and down like a roaring lion, 
 seeking whom he may devour, whom we are 
 bidden to resist steadfast in the faith. And you 
 remember the vivid verse in the beginning of 
 the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the He- 
 brews, where the writer of the Epistle evidently 
 has in mind the young Hebrews or Hebrew 
 Christians of his day, I suppose the second 
 Christian generation, and is comparing the fight 
 which they were making against sin with the kind 
 of fight which their fathers had made and the old 
 Jewish heroes and heroines before them. " See- 
 ing," he says, " that we are surrounded with so 
 great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with pa- 
 tience the race that is set before us, looking unto 
 Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. As 
 for you, you have not begun to fight yet. Ye 
 
THE BURNING HEART 189 
 
 have not yet resisted unto blood striving against 
 sin." Now, all the context is a story of men 
 and women who resisted unto blood, some of 
 whom were sawn asunder, others of whom were 
 torn with wild beasts; and in comparison with 
 all that devotion to righteousness and that will- 
 ingness to battle even to death against sin, the 
 writer of the Epistle speaks to the young men of 
 his day and says, " As for you, you have not 
 yet offered the manly resistance of your blood." 
 You remember the picture in " The Seawolf " 
 of the man who was put to work, unaccustomed 
 to such toil, amid the ropes of the rigging, and 
 compelled to work until the ends of his fingers 
 were worn off and the blood ran over his hands. 
 Well, that is the kind of fight that the writer of 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews thinks men ought to 
 wage against sin. And, after all, all life that 
 is worth anything is the letting out of blood, 
 whether it is in the accompHshing of good or 
 in the suppression of evil. Somebody asked 
 Quintin Hogg once, the founder of the Poly- 
 technic Institute of London, a man who put a 
 large fortune into the accomplishment of his 
 work, but who laid down something beside that 
 was worth more than a fortune, " Mr. Hogg, 
 how much does it cost to build up an institute 
 like yours? " " Only one man's life blood," was 
 Mr. Hogg's reply. And how much does it cost 
 to wage a successful warfare against sin? Only 
 one man's life blood. Every heroic story of 
 
190 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 conflict with sin has been written with ink of 
 blood. Every separate achievement and victory 
 in it has been won by the letting out of life; 
 and if you and I are to wage any war- 
 fare at all in this conflict that gives promise of 
 success we must go into it with intense and 
 burning hearts. 
 
 Now, one great difficulty with the religion of 
 our day, I think, is just here. There is an 
 anaemic softness that has come over it that leads 
 a great many men to loosen their grip on the 
 old militant purpose of a warfare against sin. 
 There is a passage in Cardinal Newman's 
 " Apologia " in which he sets forth his idea of 
 a real religion, and frankly expresses his wish 
 that the religion of Great Britain were fiercer 
 and gloomier and more terrible than he found it 
 to be. I think in our own land it would be 
 a better thing if our religion were a little fiercer, 
 if we got into it more of that spirit that we 
 put into some of our non-religious conflicts, if 
 we understood that in this great battle for our 
 souls we are to fight with evil and wickedness 
 even to the knife, and with the knife to the hilt. 
 When Christ masters men's hearts they will 
 blaze as His blazed against sin. 
 
 And sometimes this will involve violent con- 
 flicts with men. There are bad men in the 
 world, and we are not meant to go hand in glove 
 with all men. We are meant now and then to 
 confront our man. It is all very well to say 
 
THE BURNING HEART 191 
 
 that the battle with sin is to be an impersonal 
 battle, and indeed we should keep it so just as 
 long as we can. We are to hold on even to the 
 bad men with the truest love, but there are 
 men who go beyond the bounds ; there are men 
 who put themselves where at last the only thing 
 for Christian men to do is to confront them 
 and fight them as themselves the emissaries and 
 the friends and the incarnation of that evil 
 against which we must manage somehow to 
 drive home and war in the name and spirit of 
 Christ, who made no compromise with it even 
 though it cost Him His life. We may be sure 
 that as we go out through life we shall only go 
 in the spirit that makes victory certain if we 
 go with burning hearts of hatred against all 
 evil and sin. 
 
 Now, there are four different attitudes that 
 men take toward sin. There is the attitude of 
 indulgence, there is the attitude of indifference, 
 there is the attitude of ignorance, and there is 
 the attitude of indignation. It is a good thing 
 for a man to be ignorant of such sin as he can 
 — no man needs to know it in order to be influen- 
 tial ; the power of experienced sin is not as great 
 as the power of innocence that has met sin and 
 vanquished it without surrendering its innocence. 
 It is not necessary for any man who would be 
 a man of power to acquire intimacy with sin. 
 But there are many sins of which we cannot 
 be ignorant. They rise right up out of our own 
 
192 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 hearts, they confront us in the Hves of our 
 friends. Against these sins, whether in us or in 
 other men, the only right Christian attitude is 
 the attitude of a hot indignation. When we 
 think of what sin has done, when we think of 
 the Httle children who are bearing its scars in 
 their innocent bodies, and will bear them until 
 they die, when we think of all the purity that 
 has been wrecked by it, when we think of the 
 treason with which sin will make truce and then 
 stab beneath that flag, when we think of the 
 spirit of sin which leads it to poison its enemies' 
 wells and fight under every rule abhorrent to 
 right men, there is nothing for men to do in 
 their conflict with sin but to be hot against it, 
 and to go out into the battle with that boiling 
 spirit which was the spirit of the Lord whom 
 the fires of His zeal consumed. 
 
 And we need this spirit of earnestness not 
 alone in our conflict with sin; we need it also 
 in fidelity to our principles and convictions. 
 There is a philosophical spirit — or that is the 
 way men dignify it — in our day that makes a 
 man unwilling to collide with another man in 
 the advocacy of his principles and his convic- 
 tions. If he cannot get the other man to take 
 it softly he will not try to get the other man to 
 take it at all; and there are many men who will 
 not stand for moral principles which involve any 
 rigidity of attitude or interfere with other men's 
 liberties. But there are antagonistic principles; 
 
THE BURNING HEART 193 
 
 you cannot get them together, and the only way 
 in which this world can move on into that great 
 kingdom where the true and pure things prevail 
 is by virtue of the readiness of the men who 
 have the truth not to be afraid to let that truth 
 come in conflict with the error and the false- 
 hood. 
 
 After all, no movement will run that does not 
 run on men. There is, to be sure, a power in 
 the truth apart from its embodiment in men; 
 but after all the only way that movements work 
 in the world, the only way that truth accom- 
 plishes results in social order, is when the move- 
 ments work and the truth accomplishes by and 
 in and through men. It would be an easy mat- 
 ter to run back over the history of. our own 
 land in its politics ; it would be a very easy 
 thing to run back over the history of the Church 
 and show that movements are just as strong as 
 the men in them are earnest. What made the 
 Reformation what it was was the great robust 
 German, the unbending Genevan, the unfright- 
 ened Scot back of it. There never would have 
 been any Reformation with Erasmus. " I was 
 always timid," he says ; " I never could bear 
 confusion. There are times even when a man 
 must suppress the truth. What am I, a mere 
 worm, that I should disturb the state?" Then 
 there rose up a great, rough German who looked 
 out on the world with no such timid soul, who 
 Relieved that when men had the truth they were 
 
194 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 to fight for the truth, were to carry the truth 
 against the world, and with his strong shoulders 
 by God's grace Luther moved the current of 
 human history. And the current ran without 
 the deflection of weakness or fear across the 
 cool minds and hot hearts of John Calvin and 
 John Knox. 
 
 As we go out through life, we must go as 
 propagandists. Christian men cannot go out 
 with their lights hidden under a bushel; they 
 cannot go out with the savour and the power 
 of their salt concealed. If our faith is not true 
 we should change it; but if it is true, we should 
 subdue the world to it. We need not only to 
 be earnest in our battle with sin: we must be 
 dead in earnest also in the convictions that we 
 hold. We believe in the divinity of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ. We must refuse to compromise 
 this truth. We must not allow the foundations 
 to be taken out from under the Christian Church, 
 that stands, if it stands at all, on Him; and I 
 believe that we who believe in Him, who know 
 that He is the only Saviour of the world, have 
 no dispensation from Him to go out into the 
 world and allow our Lord to be trampled under 
 foot and His cross to be made of none effect. 
 " Fervent in spirit " means that with heat of 
 heart we are to hold immovably by our princi- 
 ples and our convictions. 
 
 Being fervent in spirit means much more — 
 that our hearts are to be warm in fellowship. 
 
THE BURNING HEART 195 
 
 Christian men ought to display in their brother- 
 hood a relationship so real, so powerful, so deep, 
 that it will not be necessary for men to set up 
 all these fictitious brotherhoods outside the 
 Christian Church. These organizations are a 
 great reproach to Christ's brotherhood. They 
 have grown up, many of them, because we have 
 not shown the real spirit of brotherhood in the 
 Church, because we have not shown a heat of 
 heart in our relationship to one another. Life 
 is broken into castes. Human fellowship is fet- 
 tered by artificial conventions. In his life of 
 Stonewall Jackson, his British biographer points 
 out that when he went to West Point life there 
 was hedged in, as life everywhere is hedged in, 
 by all kinds of traditional limits of conduct. 
 Now, Stonewall Jackson would have none of 
 these things, and he was a strong enough man 
 to set up his own standards against the stand- 
 ards of the crowd. And in much of our Chris- 
 tian life such crowd ideals as these prevail. We 
 must feel in our hearts that great passion for 
 one another of which Peter speaks, " That see- 
 ing our hearts have been purified by obedience 
 to the truth unto the unfeigned love of the 
 brethren, we should love one another from a 
 pure heart fervently." How infrequent a thing 
 it is for a man to say to a man, " My friend, I 
 love you." We shut all that down deep in our 
 hearts and allow no such confessions to emerge. 
 And this is a small thing. Do we feel and prove 
 
196 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 the love? Where is the real commanding hu- 
 man brotherhood, though unexpressed in words? 
 I do not wonder that men who want the fellow- 
 ship of hearts set up all kinds of brotherhoods 
 outside of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are 
 seeking what Christianity was meant to give 
 them. Surely we ought to go out to illustrate in 
 the world the reality of the great fervent brother- 
 hood of Christian men. 
 
 And, once more, we need this earnest spirit in 
 our service of God and man. Consider for a 
 moment the example of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 in this. His brethren came once to Him assured 
 that the man had gone mad. He took no leisure 
 so much as to eat He had made it so fully His 
 meat and drink to do His Father's will that He 
 actually neglected the meat and drink of which 
 His body stood in need. And you remember 
 the great words into which He condensed the 
 whole spirit of His life : " We must work the 
 works of Him that sent Me while it is day, for 
 the night is coming when no man can work." 
 
 When we turn from His life to the life of 
 St. Paul we find another hot-hearted life, the 
 kind of man who, when he was a Jew, was a 
 Jew to the full, and when he became a Chris- 
 tian was likewise to the full a Christian man, 
 and who at last rejoiced when he was counted 
 worthy to lay down his life for Christ. We are 
 reminded in connection with him of the fine words 
 of Thomas Fuller of Cromwell's time : *' The 
 
THE BURNING HEART 197 
 
 good soldier grudgeth not to get a probability of 
 victory by the certainty of his own death, and 
 fleeth from nothing so much as from the men- 
 tion of fleeing; and though the world call him 
 a madman, our soldier knoweth that he shall 
 receive the reward of his valour with God in 
 Heaven, and making the world his executor 
 leave it to the rich inheritance of his memory." 
 The men who have been good soldiers of Jesus 
 Christ have gone forth in His service with such 
 a heart. They have not been lukewarm men; 
 they have not been men who gave Christ part 
 of their hearts and held back the rest ; they have 
 been men who have gone after Him into ser- 
 vice with all the heat of devoted lives, who have 
 served Him with the single-mindedness with 
 which John Brown, for example, served what 
 he conceived to be his cause. Now you may 
 call John Brown a crazy man if you please. 
 Governor Wise of Virginia did not think he was. 
 Somebody spoke in that way once about John 
 Brown in Governor Wise's hearing, and he re- 
 plied : " They are mistaken who take Brown to 
 be a madman. He is a bundle of the best nerves 
 I ever saw ; cut and thrust and bleeding, and in 
 bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, 
 fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is 
 cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but 
 just to him to say that he was humane to his 
 prisoners, and he inspired me with great trust 
 in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a 
 
198 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful, 
 and intelligent. He professes to be a Christian, 
 in communion with the Congregational Church 
 of the North, and openly preaches his purpose 
 of universal emancipation ; and the negroes 
 themselves were to be the agents, by means of 
 arms, led on by white commanders. 
 Colonel Washington says that he was the cool- 
 est and firmest man he ever saw in defying dan- 
 ger and death. With one son dead by his side, 
 and another shot through, he felt the pulse of 
 his son with one hand, held his rifle with the 
 other, and commanded his men with the utmost 
 composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to 
 sell their lives as dearly as they could." 
 
 Mr. Sanborn, his biographer, relates that one 
 day in Charleston Jail a minister came to call 
 on him and defended slavery as a Christian in- 
 stitution. " My dear sir," said the old man, 
 " you know nothing about Christianity. You 
 will have to learn its a b c. I find you quite 
 ignorant of what the word Christianity means." 
 And when the man looked at him, very much 
 disconcerted, John Brown softened a little : " I 
 respect you as a gentleman, of course, but it is 
 as a heathen gentleman." And it was exactly 
 that intensity of feeling in the old man that made 
 him willing for the sake of his cause to lay down 
 his life, and the heat of his passion set this land 
 on fire. 
 
 Christian men are to serve Christ and men 
 
THE BURNING HEART 199 
 
 with no less sacrificial devotion. General Arm- 
 strong was this type of Christ's servant. Gen- 
 eral Marshall says of him and his attitude to 
 difficulties : " For most people an obstacle is 
 something in the way to stop going on, but for 
 General Armstrong it merely meant something 
 to climb over, and if he could not climb all the 
 way over he would get up as high as possible, 
 and then crow." As he said himself, " I have 
 had a taste of blood, i. e., I have had the taste 
 of life and work — cannot live without the arena. 
 I must be in it. . . . Despair shakes his 
 skinny hand and glares his hideous eyes on me 
 to little purpose. I feel happy when all my 
 powers of resistance are taxed." He believed 
 that all men were called on to wage a great war 
 for God, and that in their warfare for God they 
 were meant to work and fight in an even in- 
 tenser spirit than that in which they would work 
 and fight for their native land. You re- 
 member Chinese Gordon's experience with Li 
 Hung Chang. Now, Chinese Gordon was a 
 man of peace. He did not usually carry a 
 weapon, but he went and hunted once for the 
 life of Li Hung Chang. Li Hung Chang had 
 lied to him. He had promised to save the lives 
 of the Taiping princes taken in the city of Soo 
 Chow, and then he had them executed, and once 
 in his life Chinese Gordon's temper got beyond 
 his control. He took a revolver and went on a 
 hunt for Li Hung Chang, and. if he had ever 
 
200 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 found him Li Hung Chang's subsequent career 
 would never have been fulfilled. I imagine that 
 Gordon was glad afterwards that he did not find 
 him, but I imagine that he was glad also to the 
 last day that he went and looked for him, that 
 he had in his heart the spirit that made him 
 desire to resent a great crime and wrong, that 
 put him in his " sparring mood," as one of the 
 gentlest of our women missionaries put it just 
 a little while ago — that put him in his " sparring 
 mood " against all evil and sin. Are we ever in 
 a " sparring mood," or are we living hand in 
 glove with all sorts of tepidity and weakness, 
 and in surrender to sin and quietness and indo- 
 lence and spiritual torpor and cowardice? Is 
 that our spirit, or have we hearts hot to do in 
 the world the work of God? It is all put for us 
 in one of Dr, Bonar's hymns: 
 
 "Time worketh. Let me work too. 
 Time undoeth. Let me do. 
 As busy as time my work I ply 
 Till I rest in the rest of eternity. 
 
 " Sin worketh. Let me work too. 
 Sin undoeth. Let me do. 
 As busy as sin my work I ply 
 Till I rest in the rest of eternity. 
 
 " Death worketh. Let me work too. 
 Death undoeth. Let me do. 
 As busy as death my work I ply 
 Till I rest in the rest of eternity " 
 
THE BURNING HEART 201 
 
 And now, lastly, not alone do we need to have 
 hearts hot for battle with sin, hot in fidelity to 
 our great principles and convictions, warm in 
 their love for the men who with us love our 
 Brother, the Lord Jesus Christ, and for those 
 who ought to love Him, warm in their devotion 
 to their duty in the world, but they must be 
 warm also in their personal love and loyalty to 
 the Master of Hearts, the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 Whatever of life and power we have ever re- 
 ceived, we have received because of our living 
 contact with Him. It has not come to us be- 
 cause of any preaching of high ethical doctrine; 
 it has not come to us because of any general 
 atmosphere, save as that itself is the product 
 of our Lord's personal power. Whatever has 
 come to us of heavenly good has come from 
 our divine Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the 
 Life and the Light of men ; and if we are going 
 to keep it as we go on our way we shall only 
 keep it because we walk in a warm and earnest 
 fellowship with Him. And that fellowship in- 
 volves a real life of prayer, a Hfe of prayer in- 
 tensely real. There is no more Scriptural ad- 
 jective to use about it than just this adjective, 
 " earnest." There are two places in the New 
 Testament where this word is used with refer- 
 ence to prayer: once in Luke's account of our 
 Lord's prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, 
 " And He prayed yet more earnestly, and the 
 sweat stood out on His brow as it were great 
 
202 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 drops of blood." Now, If you will look in your 
 tjreek Testament you will find that the word that 
 is translated here " earnestly " is a word that a 
 Greek might have used in describing a race be- 
 tween men or horses, when at the very last, 
 when the two men come down breast and breast, 
 or the two horses neck and neck, one leans for- 
 ward with just an extra strain, and by that 
 strain prevails. Luke's idea is that our Lord 
 prayed strainingly, and how strainingly He 
 prayed we may judge from the fact that His 
 sweat was red blood. The other place where the 
 word occurs is in the last chapter of the Epistle 
 of James, where we are told that Elijah prayed 
 earnestly. Now the Greek word is not the same 
 there. If you will turn to your Greek Testa- 
 ment you will find that it says He prayed " in 
 prayer." That is. He did not describe God in 
 prayer; He did not issue a moral exhortation in 
 prayer; he did not do anything in prayer but 
 pray; He prayed in prayer, and the English 
 translators have correctly said He prayed ear- 
 nestly. Can we apply such terms of description 
 to our prayers? Are we earnest in them? Do 
 our prayers reach down and grip the bottom 
 cords of our hearts? 
 
 And do our hearts burn within us toward 
 Christ? In southern China, some years ago, 
 in a city on the borders of the province of Hu- 
 nan, I talked with a young Chinese Christian 
 man. He was a graduate of a college in the 
 
THE BURNING HEART 203 
 
 far north. He had come a thousand miles away 
 from home to preach Christ among his own 
 countrymen. He was one of the most intelli- 
 gent Chinese Christians whom I had met. And 
 I was asking him many questions regarding his 
 nation, and especially regarding the life and 
 spirit of the Chinese Christians. And when I 
 was through he said, " Mr. Speer, you have 
 asked me a great many questions, and some of 
 them have been very difficult. You have asked 
 about the Christians in China. Now, I would 
 like to ask you one question. You know what 
 the Christians in your country are like. Are 
 they all men and women of burning hearts ? " 
 It was a quaint Chinese idiom of which he 
 made use, but that was its literal translation. 
 He desired to know if we were all of us of 
 burning hearts. What would you have said to 
 him? What would you have said to him about 
 yourself? What would you have said to him 
 about the great mass of our so-called Christians ? 
 Are we of burning hearts? Have any of our 
 hearts burned within us as did the hearts of the 
 two who walked with the Saviour that evening 
 long ago? Have our hearts ever burned within 
 us while He talked with us by the way? Are 
 our hearts now aglow in a great and tender love 
 for Jesus Christ? Oh, whatever else our hearts 
 may be cool about, let them at least be warm 
 toward Him who loved us and gave Himself 
 for us and whom having not seen we ought to 
 
204 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 love. Are we sure, as we look at our hearts 
 now, that we are in the right relationships regard- 
 ing our lives? Perhaps some of us have put off 
 to this moment great decisions which we know 
 we ought to make, and our wills are trembling 
 in the balance now; a feather's weight of influ- 
 ence would carry them over. And I suppose 
 some of us — who have heard Christ asking 
 us for our lives, for our wills, for our hearts — 
 will refuse and instead of handing them over to 
 Him will go on retaining them in our own 
 control. There are many who have seen the 
 great vision of a service of the world who are 
 still going on their way without yielding up their 
 lives to its glory. " Though you and I are 
 very little beings," said Samuel J. Mills a hun- 
 dred years ago, " we must not rest satisfied till 
 we have made our influence extend to the remot- 
 est corner of this ruined world." The tempera- 
 ture of our hearts toward Christ will determine 
 the issues of our decision. 
 
 " 'Tis not for man to trifle, life is brief 
 
 And sin is here; 
 Our age is but the falling of a leaf, 
 
 A dropping tear. 
 We have no time to sport away the hours, 
 All must be earnest in a world like ours. 
 
 " Not many lives, but only one have we, 
 One, only one, 
 How earnest should that one life be. 
 That narrow span. 
 
THE BURNING HEART 205 
 
 Day after day spent in blessed toil, 
 
 Hour after hour still bringing in new spoil." 
 
 Until at the last, the work of the day done, the 
 battle over and the long shadows of the evening 
 falling across the land, we make our way home. 
 What will our greeting be from Him who is 
 waiting for us by the setting of the sun ? 
 
XI 
 
 THE MASTER, THE SATISFACTION OF 
 THE HEART 
 
 *' Y AM the way, the truth, and the life." 
 I These words were spoken by our Saviour 
 -°- in answer to the second of the four inter- 
 ruptions which He suffered from His disciples 
 in the upper room on the night on which He 
 was betrayed. He had been speaking to 
 them of the characteristic of the new Chris- 
 tian society, as a body of men whose love for 
 one another marked them as Christ's. Simon 
 Peter, intent, as most of us are, on future des- 
 tiny rather than on present duty, caught up some 
 remarks of Jesus about His intention to go away, 
 and passing by altogether His command to love, 
 the most significant thing that He had said, 
 asked Him whither He was going. Our Lord 
 answered Simon's inquiry, and left him dumb- 
 founded with what He told him of his own 
 heart. I do not wonder that the body of dis- 
 ciples was thrown into consternation by this 
 remark of Christ's. They had heard Him say a 
 little' while before that one of them was to betray 
 Him ; they had heard Him say now of the leader 
 of their company that that very night he would 
 deny Christ before the cock had crowed. What 
 
 206 
 
SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 207 
 
 confidence could there be in man any more? 
 Looking out upon their troubled faces, Jesus 
 said : '' Let not your hearts be troubled. You 
 have lost all confidence in one another, you have 
 no confidence in yourselves, but you believe in 
 God ; believe also in Me. In My Father's house 
 are many mansions : if it were not so, I would 
 have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 
 And if I go, I will come again, and will receive 
 you unto Myself ; that where I am, there ye may 
 be also. And whither I go ye know the way." 
 Then Thomas broke in, here as always, as Mar- 
 cus Dods says, " the mouthpiece of the despond- 
 ency of the twelve." " Lord," he says, " we 
 know not whither Thou art going ; how can we 
 know the way ? " It may have been reprehen- 
 sible in Thomas to have doubted so much and to 
 have had such a chronic disposition of despair, 
 but it was not reprehensible in him to carry his 
 doubts and his despondencies to Jesus. Think 
 what we should have lost if he had not spoken 
 out the frank, blunt feelings of his heart to the 
 Saviour. If he had not told the Lord this night 
 in the upper room that he did not know where 
 He was going, and, therefore, could not know 
 the way, we might not have had this priceless 
 saying of Jesus, " I am the way, and the truth, 
 and the life." 
 
 Let us think, for a moment, of this declara- 
 tion as a whole, of the bold comprehensive claims 
 of it. A man can at the most show to others the 
 
208 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 way, says Gess; he cannot claim himself to be 
 either the way, the truth, or the life. Jesus is 
 uttering here another of those great declara- 
 tions that separate Him from all men and all 
 other teachers of religion. " I am the bread of 
 Hfe." "I am the light of the world." '^ I, 
 if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all 
 men unto Me." " I am come, not to condemn 
 the world, but to save the world." " I am the 
 way, and the truth, and the life." Now, Jesus 
 does not say, as other masters, " I show you 
 the way, and the truth, and the life." He came, 
 as has often been said, not to proclaim a mes- 
 sage, but that there might be a message to pro- 
 claim. Jesus Christ did not only preach the 
 gospel; He was the gospel. In this thing Jesus 
 sets His religion ofif against all other religions. 
 Buddhism, as has often been pointed out, is 
 the religion of a method; Mohammedanism is 
 the religion of a book; Christianity is the re- 
 ligion of a person. It is Jesus. Whosoever 
 enters it, enters Him; whosoever would learn its 
 lessons, learns Him; whosoever would feed 
 upon its nourishment eats His body and drinks 
 His blood. " I am," said Jesus, " the way, and 
 the truth, and the life." 
 
 Now we cannot, at the very outset, over-em- 
 phasise the significance of Jesus Christ's having 
 declared that He was Christianity. In some of 
 our colleges we organise ourselves into Chris- 
 tian bodies on the basis of some common spiritual 
 
SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 209 
 
 sympathies; all the people who have any admir- 
 ing regard for religion are affiliated on one com- 
 mon basis and in one common organisation. 
 Our religion degenerates into a common ethical 
 sympathy, into the adoption of a few indefinite 
 religious principles, and has divorced itself from 
 a person, from loyalty to the supreme and unique 
 claims of Jesus Christ Himself. Now Chris- 
 tianity was Christ to Paul. I cannot conceive 
 of Paul's being able to understand any kind of 
 Christianity that was not Christ, that did not 
 root itself in Christ, that did not lead on to 
 Christ, that did not guard as with anxious jeal- 
 ousy the deity and the uniqueness of Christ. 
 And the hymns of Christendom find all of Chris- 
 tianity also in Him. 
 
 " Oh, Thou art all to me ! 
 Nothing to please I see, 
 Nothing apart from Thee, 
 Jesus, my Lord!'* 
 
 "Thou, O Christ, art all I want; 
 All I need in Thee I find." 
 
 It was this sense of the indissoluble relation- 
 ship between the Christian faith and Christ Him- 
 self that led Robertson of Brighton, for example, 
 to say, as he talked to working men in the town 
 hall of Brighton regarding infidel publications, 
 " I refuse to permit discussion respecting the 
 love which a Christian man bears to his Re- 
 
210 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 deemer, a love more delicate far than the love 
 which was ever borne to sister or the adoration 
 with which he regards his God, a reverence more 
 sacred than ever man bore to mother." When 
 Jesus, standing in the midst of His disciples, 
 told them that He was everything, He made it 
 impossible for all time for any disciple of His 
 ever to compromise His claims or ever to sur- 
 render one whit of that which Jesus Christ alone 
 is, " I am the way, and the truth, and the life." 
 
 Let us think a little while on these things that 
 Jesus Christ said He was. " I am the way," 
 He says. What way? He goes on in this same 
 verse to indicate what way He means, for " no 
 man," He says, " cometh to the Father but by 
 Me. I am He who opens to men the way to the 
 Father and the Father's heart." Now apart 
 from Jesus Christ human history Is one thing; 
 with Jesus Christ human history is a different 
 thing. Omit the incarnation and human history 
 reads in the terms of man's search after God, 
 and His only answer is silence on the Father's 
 lips, whatever is in the Father's heart; with 
 Jesus Christ human history reads in the terms 
 of God's search after man, with pathetic pleas 
 upon the Father's lips and pathetic love in the 
 Father's heart. " I am," says Jesus, " the way 
 home for men to the heart of the Father." 
 
 Now, as Augustine says, men must find that 
 way, because we were made for God and we can 
 never rest until at last we find our resting place 
 
SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 211 
 
 in Him. And all human history, the whole tale 
 of the best experience of men, is but the confes- 
 sion of their longing after the way home to the 
 Father's heart. Those of you who have read the 
 " Life and Letters of Romanes " will recall the 
 picture there of the discontent, the utter rest- 
 lessness of heart of the man who had once rested 
 on the Father's arms and who had experienced 
 the vision of the Father's face, and who has 
 gone out but must come back again to the 
 Father's love. Many a man and many a woman 
 feels a hunger that will not be appeased until at 
 last it feeds itself upon the Son of God who is 
 the true bread come down out of heaven. The 
 knowledge of God, which Jesus Christ intends 
 to give us through Himself as the way, is the 
 goal of all our irrepressible human longing. 
 
 You remember the character of Calista in 
 one of Cardinal Newman's finest tales, the story 
 that contains the wonderful picture of the locust 
 plague in northern Africa, and her cry, " Oh, 
 that I could find Him ! On the right hand 
 and on the left I grope and touch Him not. 
 Why dost Thou fight against me, O First and 
 only Fair?" And you remember the same 
 longing expressed in one of Mr. Matthew Ar- 
 nold's essays, in which he quotes — Mr. Hutton 
 says he could not have been the first to use 
 them — the words of Israel : " Thou, O Eternal, 
 are the thing that I long for. Thou art my 
 hope, even from my youth." And you remem- 
 
212 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 ber the passionate expressions of this longing 
 in the Psalms: ''As the hart panteth after the 
 water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, 
 
 God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the liv- 
 ing God. O God, Thou art my God ; early will 
 
 1 seek Thee; my soul thirsteth for Thee, my 
 flesh longeth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land 
 where no water is." And nothing appeals to 
 us quite so much, I think, as we read the lives 
 of good men as those great experiences in which 
 they have entered at last into the fulness of the 
 consciousness of God. Is there one of us whose 
 heart does not hunger for such a satisfaction in 
 God as this? How shall we find this longed-for 
 way to Him? I, says Jesus, am the way. In 
 Christ we find it, home. 
 
 " It shall be 
 A face like My face that receives thee; 
 A man like to Me 
 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by forever; 
 A hand like this hand 
 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. 
 See the Christ stand." 
 
 When our hearts long for the way, Jesus 
 Christ stands before us saying to us, " I am the 
 Way, the Way home for the lost child, the Way 
 that ties the two worlds together, the Way from 
 the seen into the unseen, the Way from the 
 present into the everlasting, the Way out of our 
 restlessness into the perfect rest of God, the 
 Way that can never weary or grow old." I 
 
SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 213 
 
 like the phrase in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 "a new and living way," a way that we can 
 never tire of, a way in which each of us shall 
 be finding in Jesus Christ every day some new 
 and fresh discovery of love and be resting our- 
 selves in His inexhaustibleness Who said, " I am 
 the way." 
 
 The early Church made a noble use of this 
 word, and it became a synonym of Christianity, 
 so that Luke tells us when Paul set out from 
 Jerusalem to Damascus, with letters hunting 
 for Christians, it was that he might find any 
 who were of " this Way/' and bring them bound 
 to Jerusalem. We read that in the city of Ephe- 
 sus no small stir was aroused regarding " the 
 Way " ; of Felix, that he was better acquainted 
 than others with " this Way," and we hear Paul 
 himself saying, that in those old days " I myself 
 persecuted those who were of the Way unto 
 death." Christianity is not a terminus: it is a 
 progress. Jesus Christ Himself is not an at- 
 tainable end; He is a route; He Himself is 
 fathomless and inexhaustible, and when once we 
 have set our feet in His way, He leads us on and 
 on forever to larger and richer things every day, 
 and to an end that never is to be found. " I," 
 says He, " am the way." 
 
 " I am the truth," says Christ ; " the gathering 
 up into one of all that is eternal and absolute 
 in this changing world. Primarily I am the 
 truth about God, and the way to Him, but, more 
 
214. THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 than that, I am all the truth that men need 
 know to live by in this mortal life of theirs." 
 Mark once again the calm assurance of Jesus; 
 He speaks as though all the problems of life 
 were perfectly clear and simple to Him. I heard 
 a very suggestive paper a little while ago read 
 before a large gathering of Christian men, in 
 which the writer took the ground that we must 
 shift the whole line of Christian work and teach- 
 ing, that old problems that a generation ago 
 you could take for granted as settled are now 
 regarded as open problems, such, he said, as, 
 Is there a God? or Is there an immortal life? 
 Perhaps there was more or less truth in this 
 view; at any rate, we are ever perplexing our- 
 selves over many questions that seemed to Jesus 
 to have been just as clear as the sunlight, never 
 to have been confused in his mind by a soli- 
 tary doubt ! " I am the truth," He says. Men 
 debate as to whether there is any truth, or as to 
 whether, if there is truth, we can ever know we 
 have found it, while Jesus stands before us all 
 the time telling us that He Himself is the truth. 
 He is the truth about man. He tells us what 
 man is, and what man may be. We measure 
 ourselves over against Him, and for the first 
 time we realise ourselves. We hold ourselves 
 aloof from Him, and our ideals seem glorious, 
 and our attainment passable, and our sins venial. 
 We measure ourselves against Christ, and we 
 abhor ourselves in dust and ashes. We stand 
 
SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 215 
 
 up face to face with Him who is the truth about 
 man, and for the first time we understand what 
 we are ; all the misery and the flaw of our lives, 
 all the shame and the loathsomeness of our 
 shortcomings. And we look up into His face 
 once again, and we see there not alone what we 
 are, but what we may be. We hear Him speak- 
 ing of Himself as the Son of Man ; we hear Him 
 telling us that the Father sent Him to show what 
 in the Father's mind we are, and that we may 
 hide ourselves in Him. Jesus Christ is to us 
 the truth about ourselves as we are and as we 
 may be. 
 
 He is to us the truth about God. Men com- 
 plain, a large and growing class of men, of our 
 anthropomorphic statements about God. Can 
 we think of Him otherwise? We know our- 
 selves only and have none but anthropomorphic 
 metaphors in which to speak of personality or 
 being. And Jesus Christ comes to us as a man 
 to make God plain to us and vindicate once and 
 forever our human ways of speaking about God. 
 As good Pascal said years ago : " Not only do 
 we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we 
 know ourselves by Jesus Christ alone. Apart 
 from Jesus Christ we know not what is our life, 
 nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves." We 
 are lost in our thought even until we stand be- 
 fore Him Who, in that upper room before His 
 confused disciples, said, " I am the way ; I am 
 the truth.'' 
 
216 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 Notice, once again, He does not say that He 
 teaches the truth. We speak about " Christ and 
 other masters," about Jesus as a teacher of truth. 
 Jesus Christ is Himself the truth. As Thomas 
 Erskine, with all his peculiar views, wrote to 
 Lady Elgin, " I believe all notions of religion, 
 howsoever true, to be absolutely worthless. 
 Christ is far above all doctrines about Him, 
 however true. Christ is the truth. A doctrine 
 that can be separated from Himself is a vanity 
 and a deception." And those of us who think 
 that we can cultivate the religious life while we 
 stultify Christ's claims, those of us who think 
 that we can cherish the sympathies of Jesus 
 while we deny the character of Jesus, are simply 
 forgetting that Jesus Christ is not the teacher 
 of a separable truth, that Jesus Christ Himself is 
 a personal, and living, and incarnate truth. To 
 be sure He did come to reveal truth to men. In 
 the case even of any of us who are not Christians, 
 all our ideas of God are borrowed from Christ, 
 all our true ideas of human nature are borrowed 
 from Christ, all our worthy standards and con- 
 ceptions of life are borrowed from Christ. Even 
 to those who have not taken Jesus Christ as 
 Himself the truth, Jesus is the teacher of truth. 
 What He said that day in answer to Pilate's 
 taunt, " Art Thou a king, then ? " " Thou sayest 
 that I am a king. For this purpose I was born, 
 and for this purpose came I into the world, 
 that I might bear witness to the truth, and he 
 
SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 217 
 
 that is of the truth hears My voice," is true still. 
 Jesus Christ has come to teach men truth, and 
 if honest men and women in Christian lands 
 would strip out of their life and thought the 
 truth that they owe to Jesus Christ, they would 
 see instantly how poor and inadequate the life 
 and the thought that are left to them are, and 
 how utterly and absolutely they stand alone in 
 the truth that Jesus Christ is. "The word be- 
 came flesh," says John, " and dwelt among us, 
 full of grace and truth." O perplexed heart, 
 that questions sometimes as to where truth is 
 and knows not where its foundations are to be 
 found, that, perhaps, many times has sympathised 
 with poor James Thomson's wail about 
 
 "The sense that every struggle brings defeat, 
 Because fate holds no prize to crown success; 
 That all the oracles are dumb or cheat 
 
 Because they have no secret to express. 
 And none can pierce the great dark veil uncertain. 
 Because there is no light beyond the curtain, 
 But all is vanity and nothingness," 
 
 remember that One has come out from behind 
 that curtain. Himself full of grace and truth, to 
 say to men perplexed and women distressed, " I 
 am the way ; I am the truth." 
 
 " I am the life," added Christ, " the way, the 
 truth, and the life." The death which cast its 
 shadow over the eleven and over Himself should 
 itself be swallowed up in life. Standing there 
 beneath the shadow of His cross, before the 
 
218 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 Open grave over which the stone was to be rolled 
 to hide His burial, Jesus Christ, the frailest life 
 in the world, declared to men, " I am the life." 
 All the longing of our day is answered by this 
 assertion of Christ's. The term " life " has be- 
 come the catch-word of our time. Once and 
 again men speak about it who have no notion 
 whatever of what Jesus Christ meant by life, 
 who simply mean by life some expansion of 
 tastes, some enlargement of one's range of 
 vision, some greater reach of sympathies, life 
 that is to end when conscious being ends, which 
 will be when the body lies down and dies. There 
 are scarcely any lines more quoted than the lines 
 of Tennyson's, in which he gives voice to this 
 longing of our day: 
 
 "Tis life wherever our nerves are scant; 
 Oh, life, not death, for which we pant, 
 More life and fuller that we want." 
 
 Life is the great word. Not love or truth or 
 duty, but Hfe. The new theologies build around 
 it. The poets and the poetesses sing of it, 
 though they do not mean what Christ meant. 
 We cannot suppress, if we would, dissatisfaction 
 with contraction, with narrowness. We hun- 
 ger for perfect energy, for perfect liberty to use 
 that energy, for boundless scope of life, for end- 
 less development. The way a little child shrinks 
 from being shut up in the dark is only the indi- 
 cation of the way all our life covets liberty and 
 
SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 219 
 
 freedom. It struggles frantically against that 
 sense of contraction, of narrowness, of limita- 
 tion, of death which comes to it in confinement 
 in the gloom. Our souls rise up in revolt 
 against the sense of termination, against the feel- 
 ing of narrowness, against anything that shuts 
 them out from perfect liberty of destiny. What 
 Tennyson writes about wages is the cry of the 
 soul of each of us: 
 
 "Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, 
 Paid by a voice flying by to be lost on an endless 
 sea; 
 Glory of virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the 
 vi^rong. 
 Nay, but she aimed not at glory — no lover of glory 
 she: 
 Give her the glory of going on, and still to be. 
 
 "The wages of sin is death; if the wages of virtue be 
 dust, 
 Would she have had heart to endure for the life 
 of the worm and the fly? 
 She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the 
 just, 
 To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer 
 sky: 
 Give her the glory of going on, and not to die." 
 
 Our souls rise up in war against the thought 
 of ending, and as they struggle with their lim- 
 itations and their chains, the great Deliverer 
 comes, as He stood that night before the little 
 
220 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 group shocked with the sorrow of His depar- 
 ture, and says to us, " I am the life." All that 
 longing for life which even the narrowest and 
 smallest human soul can never suppress, Jesus 
 Christ promises to complete and to fulfil. He 
 Himself is ready to link us to that supernatural 
 connection which means life divine. There is 
 no physical difference visible in the life that 
 has accepted Christ and the life which has re- 
 jected Him, or that has not yet taken Him in His 
 fulness, but the eye of God sees a difference as 
 great between noonday and midnight. The soul 
 that has accepted Jesus Christ is tied to God, 
 the living God, with ties that cannot be broken, 
 with all the channels of intercourse open in the 
 fulness of their wealth and treasure between it 
 and God, the living God. " I am the life," says 
 Jesus Christ, " the resurrection and the life ; so 
 that he that believeth on Me, though he were 
 dead, yet shall he live again; and he that liveth 
 and believeth in Me shall never die." " I am the 
 way, and the truth, and the life." 
 
 What an unsatisfied, discontented lot ours 
 would be if there were no such voice as 
 this speaking in our ears, out of the ineffable 
 life, a message of real life to our dead souls, " I 
 am the life." How weary, and wretched, I say, 
 it would be if what Mr. Arnold has written in 
 " Obermann Once More " were true : 
 
 "That gracious child, that thorn-crowned man, 
 He lived while we believed, 
 
SATISFACTION OF THE HEART 221 
 
 "* While we believed on earth He went 
 And open stood His grave. 
 Men called from chamber, church and tent, 
 And Christ was by to save. 
 
 " Now He is dead ; far hence He lies, 
 In the lone Syrian town, 
 And on His grave with shining eyes 
 The Syrian stars look down." 
 
 " I am the wilderness, and falsehood, and 
 death," Jesus said ? Oh, no ! "I am the way, 
 and the truth, and the life." The way home 
 to the Father's heart, the truth for your per- 
 plexed souls to find, the life to satisfy you 
 utterly ; " I am the way, and the truth, and the 
 life." 
 
 Oh, my friends, will we not let Jesus Christ be 
 Himself to us? Why will we insist on taking 
 only a fraction of His gifts, while he offers us 
 in Himself a satisfying way, a satisfying truth, a 
 satisfying life? Shall we not answer rather a 
 Kempis's appeal in the third book of his " Imi- 
 tation"?— 
 
 " My son, the more thou canst go out of thy- 
 self, so much the more wilt thou be able to enter 
 into Me. 
 
 " As to desire no outward thing produceth in- 
 ward peace, so the forsaking of ourselves in- 
 wardly joineth us unto God. 
 
 " I will have thee learn perfect resignation of 
 thyself to My will, without contradiction or 
 complaint. 
 
222 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 "Follow thou Me. I AM the way, the truth, 
 and the life. Without the way there is no going ; 
 without the truth there is no knowing; without 
 the life there is no living. I am the way, which 
 thou oughtest to follow; the truth, which thou 
 oughtest to trust; the life, which thou oughtest 
 to hope for. 
 
 " I AM the way inviolable, the truth infal- 
 lible, the life that cannot end. 
 
 " I AM the straightest way, the highest truth, 
 the true life, the blessed life, the Hfe uncreated. 
 
 " If thou remain in My way, thou shalt know 
 the truth, and the truth shall make thee free, and 
 thou shalt lay hold on eternal life." 
 
XII 
 
 THE UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD AND 
 MASTER JESUS CHRIST 
 
 IT is a very significant fact that in our 
 thoughts about men we are unable to come 
 to the Ufe of Christ without an altered feel- 
 ing. This is true even if we have been thinking 
 of religious men, of men to whom we owe some 
 debt of the deepest character, toward whom our 
 temper is naturally reverent. As we pass one 
 after another of these men before our eyes, and 
 our gaze at last falls on Christ, no matter how 
 loving our thoughts may have been, they are 
 touched with a new tenderness and our rever- 
 ence deepens into awe. And this is equally true 
 if we turn from the thought of men as religious 
 leaders and think of them just as men who have 
 swayed the minds and wills of their fellow men. 
 We cannot think about Jesus Christ in any such 
 list of men with the same feeling with which 
 we think of others. There is not one other 
 great leader about whom we cannot speak 
 humorously or jocosely if we wish, or with a 
 little pleasantry, but we cannot speak in that way 
 about our Lord. When we come to Him 
 
224 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 It is as though a still voice whispered in our 
 ears, Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the 
 place whereon thou standest is holy ground. 
 
 But someone may say : " We have simply 
 grown up in a Christian atmosphere, speaking a 
 language that is infiltrated with Christian ideas 
 and terms. What we have inherited from those 
 who went before us makes it impossible for us 
 to speak lightly of One Who was so dear to 
 them, however our thoughts differ from their 
 thoughts about Him." But it is true even of 
 men who have shaken themselves free from the 
 Influence of education and association that they 
 feel this same spell when they come to think 
 and to speak of Jesus Christ. Mr. John Morley 
 surely has done, as far as any man can, the work 
 of separating himself from the external influ- 
 ences of the atmosphere in which he lives so far 
 as thoughts about Jesus Christ are concerned, 
 and in his essay on the book entitled " Super- 
 natural Religion" he says he might say some 
 things derogatory of Jesus if he wished, but 
 that he will not say them. If they are true 
 things, why does he not say them? If there 
 are some things that he knows about Jesus 
 that other people do not believe to be true about 
 Jesus, why should he not say them so that other 
 people may have their opinions about Jesus cor- 
 rected? And it is said that when Renan pub- 
 lished the popular edition of his great work on 
 Jesus he deliberately omitted from It those pas- 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 225 
 
 sages which had been most unkind and unsympa- 
 thetic in their reference to Christ, because he 
 said it was not necessary to tell those true things 
 to the people. Why did they deal with Jesus 
 in this way? If it had been Napoleon or Julius 
 Caesar, Mr. Morley and Renan would not have 
 felt so, but they did feel so about Jesus Christ. 
 It is very strange. 
 
 And the strangeness of it is accentuated when 
 we stop to reflect upon the scantiness of what 
 we know about Jesus. Here was a short life 
 of thirty-three years, and of the first twelve 
 years of it we know only one or two or three 
 incidents. The next eighteen years are an utter 
 blank, and of the last three years of it the doings 
 and the sayings of a few days only are 
 chronicled. We think sometimes that the 
 Gospels tell us what Jesus did every day, but if 
 you enumerate all the different days of Christ's 
 life with which the Gospels deal you will find 
 that they show us Christ in a very small portion 
 of His public life. How small is the volume of 
 what has been told us about Jesus ! You can 
 read it all through in one afternoon, and yet 
 there is not one of us who would undertake, 
 short of many days, to explain the significance of 
 Christ's life. Men would venture to give in 
 fifteen or twenty minutes the important lessons 
 of Napoleon's life, or of the life of JuHus Caesar, 
 about both of whom we know much more in vol- 
 ume of material than we do about Jesus, but 
 
226 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 none of us would attempt that in the Hfe of 
 Christ. 
 
 Our feeling about Christ becomes more sig- 
 nificant still if we turn from thinking of the 
 scantiness of the records of our Lord's life to 
 think of the insignificance and obscurity of that 
 life itself. What did the great world in which 
 He lived care for Him? What did it know 
 about Him ? Away off in a remote and despised 
 province of the Roman empire, He lived and 
 died, making a little disturbance locally, the 
 news of which I suppose never reached the ears 
 of anyone who cared for it at all in Rome. What 
 a simple unknown life it was, a peasant lad, a 
 tradesman, uneducated according to the facti- 
 tious standards of His day, going about for a 
 few years saying words to the people, gathering 
 a little company of friends about Him and influ- 
 encing them, doing kind and loving things, and 
 then dying on a cross between two thieves. That 
 was all, and yet you and I cannot think of it 
 without trembling lips and a thrill in our hearts. 
 
 Why should it be that in this way Jesus is 
 singled out from all other persons who have ever 
 walked about on this earth? I think one chief 
 reason is found in the claims that He made for 
 Himself and that were made for Him. Take His 
 own simple declarations about Himself : " I am 
 the good shepherd," " I am the door of the 
 sheep," " I am the true vine," " I am the light of 
 the world," " I am the bread of life," and " The 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 227 
 
 bread which I will give is My flesh, which I will 
 give for the life of the world." Of course it is 
 possible to say that these are only bold oriental 
 metaphors, and that they seem to imply more 
 than they actually contained in the thought of 
 Jesus, but you can turn to other things that 
 Jesus said and find that these metaphors not only 
 did not contain more than the truth, but barely 
 hint at truth which on every side overflows them 
 and which the metaphors cannot contain. What 
 did He say about His relations to the Father? 
 " The words that I speak unto you, I speak not 
 of myself, but the Father, which dwelleth in 
 Me, He doeth the works." More than that : " I 
 am the way, the truth, and the life; no man 
 Cometh unto the Father but by Me." And more 
 than that: "I and the Father are one," "He 
 that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." 
 
 But there are many who say that all these 
 declarations of Jesus and these claims that He 
 makes are contained in one Gospel, and that 
 that Gospel's authorship is disputed, and that 
 the accuracy of its representations of Christ's 
 words is very questionable. Fall back on the 
 Sermon on the Mount, if you wish. The people 
 who throw out the Gospel of John, who discredit 
 the claims of Christ, who try to pare down what 
 is said about Jesus's deity by the evangelists, 
 exalt the Sermon on the Mount. But the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount makes its own claims for 
 Jesus Christ. The very note of authority in the 
 
228 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 beatitudes is a divine claim. Who is this young 
 man Who stands up saying who the persons are 
 to whom the kingdom of God shall belong? 
 Who is this man from Galilee Who dares to 
 declare by whom the whole earth is to be pos- 
 sessed, Who sets on one side all the teachers of 
 the Jewish nation, and stands Himself on the 
 other side, and says, " Ye have heard that it hath 
 been said by them of old time so and so, but I 
 say unto you," and Who declares that at the 
 last day of all not every man that says to Him, 
 " Lord, Lord," shall enter the kingdom of 
 heaven, but the man who has done His Father's 
 will ? " In that day / will say unto you, Depart 
 from Me ; / never knew you ! " And Jesus 
 closes the sermon with a declaration as to whose 
 are the stable lives and whose the unstable : " He 
 that heareth My words and doeth them not, is 
 like the man that built his house upon the sand." 
 Jesus Christ said marvellous things about Him- 
 self. 
 
 But is it not even more marvellous that, hav- 
 ing said them, people think Him modest? If 
 one were forced to lay his finger on one single 
 characteristic of Christ that is universally ac- 
 knowledged, and that is an unconscious confes- 
 sion of His Divinity by every one who acknowl- 
 edges this characteristic in Him, it is His 
 humility. For Jesus Christ was the most boast- 
 ful, the most arrogant person who ever lived 
 if He was not Divine, "I am the way, the 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 229 
 
 truth, and the Hfe." " I and the Father are 
 one." " No man cometh unto the Father but 
 by Me." What modesty or humlUty can be 
 found in those words if they are not true? 
 Grant that Jesus Christ was what He claimed 
 to be, and He is the humblest and most lowly- 
 minded person who ever walked about among 
 men. But, if Jesus was not what He claimed to 
 be, how does it come that the whole heart of man 
 turns to Him and believes that He spoke the 
 truth when He said, " I am meek and lowly in 
 heart " ? 
 
 I am not speaking, now, with any special pur- 
 pose to convince any who may not be persuaded 
 of our Lord's deity. He rises up before our lives, 
 and we know that what He has done there none 
 but God could do. He stands out before our 
 hearts, and what He is to us we know that none 
 but God could be. But I would speak of some 
 things in Jesus that were most divinely human 
 in Him, and which, one might almost say, those 
 people who believe least in His deity are under 
 chiefest obligation to repeat in themselves. For 
 that is the difficulty in which many of those 
 who do not regard Jesus Christ as the strong 
 Son of God involve themselves. If Jesus Christ 
 was what He was just as a man, then these are 
 the very people who are under chiefest obligation 
 to repeat those qualities in Jesus which they al- 
 lege it is possible for a mere man to display. 
 Those of us who regard Jesus Christ as God 
 
230 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 can believe that there were some things in Him 
 difficult for us to attain. 
 
 Think for a moment, first of all, of Christ's 
 sincere directness of character. There are 
 sinuous people, furtive, indirect, disingenu- 
 ously reticent, whose life does not ring 
 genuinely true, who speak to you with an 
 averted eye, who do not carry with them 
 the tone of a robust sincere integrity of life. 
 Jesus was not that kind. There was a 
 large ingenuous candour about Him, a direct 
 sincerity and reality in His life that made Jesus 
 Himself the standard of truth in character in 
 the little band of disciples in whose midst He 
 stood and in human life since down to this day. 
 
 We see the sincere directness of Jesus in His 
 methods of work. He was no manipulator. He 
 dealt not with institutions, but with life. His 
 disciples were pressing Him constantly to be- 
 come an institutionalist. They pointed out to 
 Him the risk He was running of leaving His 
 kingdom disorganised. They wanted Him to 
 appoint the places, to assign positions of author- 
 ity, but Jesus steadfastly refused to do so, and 
 died without ever having accomplished what His 
 disciples desired. He had comparatively little 
 interest in institutions as such ; He built on the 
 life that is back of institutions. He was dealing 
 not with outer laws, but with inner principles 
 of life. His word constantly was not. Thou 
 shalt dOj but, Thou shalt be. He does not say, 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 231 
 
 *' Do the perfect things, as your heavenly Father 
 does them," but " Be ye perfect, even as your 
 heavenly Father is perfect." 
 
 Of course, from one point of view Christ was 
 compelled to do this. Many people appeal to 
 Christ's example in His attitude toward govern- 
 ment as justifying Christian men and women in 
 holding aloof from political duty. They quote 
 His words, " My kingdom is not of the world," 
 and they point out also how He held Himself 
 free from any political relationships. He had 
 none, for one thing, but the reason why He 
 taught that His kingdom was not of this world 
 was that the only kingdom that will ever prevail 
 over this world is a kingdom that is not of it. 
 Jesus would have ended His ministry before He 
 did and would have failed in it before He ended 
 it if He had not pursued the principles that He 
 did pursue. Fie stood before the institution 
 of human slavery, and never mentioned it once 
 in all His teaching, or spoke one word of loath- 
 ing or hatred of it. He simply taught that men 
 were all children of one God and that justice 
 was to prevail among men. He said to His 
 disciples when He gathered them together on the 
 last night of all, " A new commandment give I 
 unto you, that ye love one another." And that 
 was the doom of human slavery. He stood be- 
 fore half of the human race shut out of its 
 rights. He never said one word about woman's 
 equality with man, but He never said one thing 
 
232 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 that did not imply it. Pick out any ten or a 
 dozen of Christ's commands, and they are not 
 masculine commands ; they apply equally to men 
 and women alike. And when He exalted 
 those qualities which are the qualities of the 
 woman's heart, when He said to men, " Come 
 unto me all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, 
 and I will give you rest, for I am meek and lowly 
 in heart," Jesus Christ made women free. 
 
 We can see Christ's luminous honesty and di- 
 rectness in His teaching. I once heard a law- 
 yer in Pennsylvania, who was one of the most 
 successful lawyers in the state, speaking of how 
 the truth shone round him often as he stood 
 before a jury. " Sometimes," he said, '' I can see 
 it flashing, like the lightning in the sky, around 
 my mind, or it blazes out like the very fierce- 
 ness of the noon, and I am in agony and fear lest 
 I cannot put it into words which will convey 
 it to the minds of other men." There are 
 men who cannot perceive truth, and there 
 are other men who cannot express it after 
 they have perceived it. The sincere directness 
 of our Lord's character displayed itself in the 
 way He spoke as never man spake, and said 
 things that the little children could understand, 
 that old people who are ignorant can rest their 
 dear heads upon and comprehend. 
 
 Are we like Christ in His sincere directness 
 of character? How much of deceptiveness 
 there is in us, how much of white falsehood in 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 233 
 
 our social conversation, how much of evil tinge- 
 ing our judgments of one another and making 
 wrong imaginations in the chambers of our heart ! 
 How much we need to be changed to be like 
 our Lord Jesus Christ in the sincere purity of 
 His character and of His life! 
 
 Think once again of the calm confidence of 
 Jesus. We see it in His pursuit of this method 
 of which I have been speaking. Now this is 
 the hardest method in the world to pursue. I 
 venture to say that no Christian leader has ever 
 arisen without facing the same temptation that 
 the disciples forced upon Jesus, the temptatiqn 
 to create a sect, to erect a party, to build up a 
 machine. It is one of the temptations that con- 
 front every Christian man, to strive to do that, 
 rather than just to let the grains fall into the 
 ground and die and trust the Lord of the harvest 
 to bring the harvest in His own good time. The 
 divine faith of Jesus Christ is seen in nothing 
 else more clearly than in His readiness to pursue 
 this plan of recklessness of result in His pubHc 
 work and life. 
 
 I bid you think of the significance of this spirit 
 of confidence in Jesus. Who was He? A man 
 with no influence behind Him, a man command- 
 ing no wealth, a man possessing none of the 
 qualities that were supposed to be essential to 
 leadership in His day. This man was confident. 
 Think of what it was He was confident about. 
 He proposed a project that was universal when 
 
234 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 the world was barely known, a small fraction of 
 it known to His contemporaries, a great section 
 of it absolutely unknown to them, a project not 
 alone to absorb the whole world, but to run 
 through endless ages of time. No mere man 
 sits down before a perpetual project; no man 
 proposes a universal dominion. A man from 
 Galilee, out of which arises no prophet, proposes 
 to establish a universal and an eternal kingdom ! 
 And mark the confident spirit of Christ as He 
 sets about His work. There are no moods or 
 despondencies in it. We speak of the Transfig- 
 uration and the agony of Gethsemane as moods. 
 These are not moods. They are triumphs, con- 
 flicts, epochs of struggle and victory, but not 
 moods either of exaltation or despondency. Con- 
 sider the life, beset on every side, pressed down, 
 not one single soul to understand or sympathise 
 with it, crushed within limitations against 
 which it wrestled beyond the possibility of any 
 one of us to understand, and yet walking with 
 quiet, calm evenness of will and heart through it 
 all, with never one moment's hesitation as to the 
 certainty of final and complete victory, speaking 
 quietly of His Gospel as to be preached every- 
 where, of all nations to be made His disciples, of 
 the tale of a woman's love to be told wherever 
 throughout the whole world the knowledge of 
 Him and of His salvation should go. Think of 
 the confidence, the calm steadfast rest of Jesus 
 Christ, who never doubted either His project 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 235 
 
 or Himself. We know men who never doubt 
 themselves, but sometimes doubt their projects; 
 and other men who never doubt their projects, 
 but often doubt themselves. But here was One 
 Who doubted neither His mission nor Himself. 
 We very greatly need to be like our Lord 
 Jesus Christ in this. When we have a sense of 
 having failed utterly, when we look back over 
 our life and it seems only havoc and shipwreck, 
 He can help us also to rest with perfect con- 
 fidence in Him Whose will we have come 
 to do. 
 
 Think, thirdly, of the unselfishness of Jesus. 
 I am not speaking of the unselfishness of the 
 incarnation, though that grows ever more mar- 
 vellous and incomprehensible. I do not see how 
 any reverent man or woman can grow old in 
 human sorrow and experience without standing 
 each day with fresh wonder before the miracle 
 and the marvel of the incarnation. We speak 
 about the agony of Christ's death. It was de- 
 liverance to Him. The agony of Christ's Hfe 
 here on earth was not in the end of it, but in the 
 continued endurance of it while He lived, hedged 
 in with the standards of our moral life with all 
 the fresh high judgments of heaven in Him. 
 In Browning's Karshish is the story of Lazarus 
 come back from the grave to live still among 
 people who are bound to this present world 
 while Lazarus, perforce, must move about 
 among them carrying always in his heart 
 
236 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 heaven's standards and visions. Our Lord 
 Jesus had to do that all the time He was here, 
 and the unselfishness of it passes all understand- 
 ing. When with that infinite stoop of conde- 
 scension our Lord emptied Himself, buried Him- 
 self in a grave that was many times more real 
 a grave to Him than Joseph's clean and new- 
 made tomb, even the grave of our human flesh, 
 and went about amongst us imprisoned in this 
 charnel house of our humanity, there v/as the 
 real object lesson of unselfishness. 
 
 But I am not thinking of that, but of the un- 
 selfishness of Jesus's human life, of His careless- 
 ness of the little things, the food and the shelter 
 and the raiment; of His contempt for all the 
 things that men counted great, and valuable, and 
 worthy, of the absence of all wilfulness and 
 caprice, the most contemptible and yet the most 
 common marks of selfishness, from His life ; the 
 absence of all the self-pride which showed itself 
 in His constant loving forgiveness of men, and 
 that great unselfishness which displayed itself 
 in His contempt of death. It is the one thing 
 in one of our best known lives of Jesus which 
 mars its beauty, that it accuses our Lord of cow- 
 ardice in Gethsemane, says that He was young, 
 that the thought of death was abhorrent to 
 Him, that the tides of youthful life were run- 
 ning in His veins and He could not look forward 
 with equanimity to the dark shadows of the 
 grave. Ten thousands of His friends have 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 237 
 
 walked up to the jaws of death without fear. 
 There w^ere two Httle children in one of the 
 villages, near Pao-ting-fu during the Boxer 
 massacres who looked right up into the eyes of 
 the Boxers when they came into their village 
 and threatened their lives, asking them if they 
 were believers in the Christian's God, and they 
 replied, " Yes, we are," refusing to deny that 
 they were the heavenly Father's little chil- 
 dren under the edge of the overhanging sword. 
 Was Jesus Christ less brave than these little 
 Chinese children who died for His name? He 
 was not afraid of death in Gethsemane; it was 
 not the death upon the cross from which He 
 shrank ; it vx^as death before the cross. He feared 
 that He might not live to die for the world upon 
 the cross, that the agony which He was facing 
 in the garden might so far overtax His 
 vital energies that He would never live to come 
 to the cross ; and therefore, as the writer of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews says, with strong cry- 
 ing and tears He called unto Him that was able 
 to deliver Him from death, and was heard in 
 that He feared. Selfishness of every sort was 
 as distant from the nature of Jesus as the noon- 
 day is from the midnight. Oh, friends, so 
 bent upon our ways, so set in all our little 
 caprices of taste and of judgment and of 
 opinion, how much we need the great, divine 
 unselfishness of Him Who emptied Himself and 
 became of no reputation, and took on Him the 
 
238 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 form of a servant,, and became obedient unto 
 death, even the death of the cross! 
 
 Think once again of the way Jesus Christ 
 bound up in Himself a.ll great qualities in unison 
 and balance. It is true that many of the quali- 
 ties that Jesus displays have been found in 
 others. There are men who possess great quali- 
 ties, but there has never been a man who pos- 
 sessed all great qualities balanced by their proper 
 counterparts. Jesus alone took everything that 
 is great and worthy and so balanced it with its 
 contrary desirable quality as to keep His life 
 free of distortion. Buddha exalted poverty 
 and preached the contemptibleness of the things 
 that men prize, and what is the consequence? 
 There is a palsy as of death resting on all the 
 lands where Buddha's influence abides, while 
 wherever Jesus's influence has gone men have 
 set to work with their hands, with their minds, 
 with their hearts, and the people whom He has 
 shaped are doing the whole work of the world. 
 Balance off in Jesus each quality you think ad- 
 mirable with the quality needed to safeguard it, 
 and you will begin to get some conception of the 
 marvellous beauty and perfectness of that unique 
 life. Innocent He was, and yet He had power ; 
 can you make that combination in your life? 
 Pure He was, and yet; He was not hard or unin- 
 telligent toward evil;; can you make that com- 
 bination? We love innocence and we lose influ- 
 ence. We love purity, and we become hard 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 239 
 
 and uncharitable. We fling ourselves against 
 sin, and it is soon stern hatred not of sin alone 
 but of the sinner also. Alone of all those who 
 have ever taught among men Jesus Christ stands 
 out as the One in Whom no defect but instead 
 the perfect balance of just character was found. 
 In this we all need to be like Him ! We love 
 truth, and grow soft. We hate lies, and grow 
 hard. We set ourselves against sin, and before 
 we know it our hearts have lost the tenderness of 
 Christ No one has ever walked with a perfect 
 balance of Hfe such as marked Jesus; and if 
 there be one of us who says that Jesus was only 
 human we stand in a position of strange respon- 
 sibility and obligation; for if nineteen hundred 
 years ago that peasant of Galilee was the kind of 
 man He was, we of to-day, with all the advan- 
 tage of what has taken place in this world by 
 His influence, are bound to be better men than 
 He. 
 
 Think, lastly, of the sinlessness of Jesus. He 
 said, " Father, forgive them," but He never said, 
 " Father, forgive Me." Alone of all who have 
 lived, Jesus Christ was able to live His life with- 
 out ever asking forgiveness. He challenged 
 men to find a flaw in Him. " Which of you," 
 He said, " convinceth Me of sin ? " And while 
 that was only an appeal, of course, to human 
 standards of measurement. He went far beyond 
 it : "I am unable to find any flaws in Myself. I 
 do alway those things that please Him." Now 
 
240 THE MASTER OF THE HEART 
 
 the greatest love in this world springs always 
 from the deep sense of forgiven sin. That is 
 what Jesus said in Simon's house. " Simon, 
 who thinkest thou would love most, the one who 
 has been forgiven little or much ? " " Why," 
 said Simon, " the one who has been forgiven 
 most would love most." And yet here was one 
 who was never forgiven at all, who loved most. 
 You cannot keep up human piety without re- 
 pentance. There never was a holy character that 
 was not built on the consciousness of forgiveness. 
 You can search human history through and the 
 world from end to end, and not find in it one su- 
 premely good character that is not built on re- 
 pentance and the sense of forgiven sin; and yet 
 those things are totally absent from the life of 
 Jesus. He stands out the one unique and stainless 
 life. And I think that when we have got back of 
 all that people say about Him, we will discover 
 that that is the root of His enduring influence 
 still. It is not the teaching of Jesus ; it is not the 
 miracles of Jesus ; it is not the general beauty of 
 Jesus's character. Men may dwell on these 
 things wisely; they do not know the human 
 heart if they think that these explain the 
 hold of Christ on human life. That hold rests 
 on Christ's sinlessness, and the deepest con- 
 sciousness of man knows that It rests there. Back 
 of all that is superficial in our thought there lie 
 principles of action and of conviction that root 
 themselves in this truth, that Jesus was of men 
 
UNIQUENESS OF OUR LORD 241 
 
 the only one who never needed to say, " Father, 
 forgive me, for I have sinned." Far and wide 
 through this world the hearts of men and women 
 have turned to Him in the past, and turn to Him 
 to-day still, and will turn to Him, until at last 
 the ages are done, because deeply in their souls 
 the Spirit of God is telling them that there is 
 One who having been tempted in all points like 
 as they are, yet without sin, is able Himself also 
 to succour them that are tempted. The glory of 
 our Master's life, the power of His life, the 
 beauty of His Hfe, the secret influence of His 
 life, are found in this which sets Him off from 
 us alone. He was not of us ; He became of us 
 that we who are not of Him might become of 
 Him. He was not like us, and He became like 
 us that we who were not like Him might become 
 like Him. *' I gave, I gave My life for thee," 
 is His word, and it was a perfect life that He 
 gave. Let us answer Him back from our lives 
 of flaw and imperfection : " Thou alone art 
 worthy ! Here is my life for Thine ! " 
 
 END 
 
Theological Semmary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 01127 8597 
 
 
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