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 Moule, H. C. G. 1841-1920. 
 The old gospel for the new 
 age 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/oldgospelfornewaOOmoul 
 
The Old Gospel 
 for the New Age 
 
 And Other Sermons 
 
 BY 
 
 PROF. H. C. G. MOULE, D.D. 
 
 Norrisian Professor of Divinity; author of "Secret Prayer " 
 "Commentary on Romans," etc. 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 Chicago, New York & Toronto 
 
 Publishers of Evangelical Literature 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1901 
 BY FLEMING H 
 REVELL COMPANY 
 JULY. 
 
TO THE REVEREND 
 
 CHARLES ARMSTRONG FOX, 
 
 INCUMBENT OF EATON CHAPEL, LONDON. 
 
 Friend in the Lord, thy voice has lifted oft 
 
 My listening soul on paths of light aloft, 
 
 In church, in chamber, or where thousands met 
 
 In that white tent by Derwent's margin set. 
 
 Now for thy lot awhile thy God ordains 
 
 Silence, and shadow'd sight, and burthening pains; 
 
 In brief, a cross of crosses ; yet (so fine 
 
 His art to use e'en ill to ends divine) 
 
 Ne'er to my spirit's ear and inward sense 
 
 Spoke clearer out in thee His eloquence. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 The following Sermons, it will be seen, were preached 
 in several different pulpits. They range in time over 
 several years. These circumstances will account for 
 certain repetitions, here and there, of theme and 
 thought, repetitions which might have been removed 
 by rewriting before publication. But it seemed bet- 
 ter to leave them as they stood, for the topics which 
 have been thus touched and retouched are of an im- 
 portance (whatever view is taken of them) which jus- 
 tifies reiteration. 
 
 May the true "Master of Assemblies" be pleased to 
 use for His glory whatever in this little volume is of 
 His truth. 
 
 Cambridge, Easter, 1900. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Old Gospel for the New Age - - - n 
 'He said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus 
 it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from 
 the dead the third day; and that repentance 
 and remission of sins should be preached in 
 His name among all nations, beginning at 
 Jerusalem.' — Luke xxiv. 46, 47. 
 II. The Secret of the Presence 31 
 'Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy Pres- 
 ence.' — Ps. xxxi. 20. 
 'Ill The Bright and Morning Star - ... 48 
 'I am the bright and morning Star.' — Rev. 
 xxii. 16. 
 
 IV. Self-Surrender and Its Possessions — I. - - 64 
 'Ye are not your own. — 1 Cor. vi. 19. 
 'All things are yours.' — 1 Cor. iii. 21. 
 V. Self-Surrender and Its Possessions — II. - • 79 
 'Ye are not your own.' — 1 Cor. vi. 19. 
 'All things are yours.' — 1 Cor. iii. 21. 
 VI. The Self-Consecration of the Christ - - 95 
 'Then said He, Lo, I have come to do Thy will, 
 
 O God.' — Heb. x. 9. 
 'Then said I, Lo, I have come ! I delight to do 
 Thy will.'— Ps. xl. 7, 8. 
 VII. The Individual and God - - - - -113 
 'But it is good for me to draw near to God.' — Ps. 
 lxxiii. 28. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 VIII. Two Cambridge Saints : Nicholas Ridley, Henry 
 
 Martyn - 130 
 
 'Whose faith follow, considering the end of their 
 conversation.' — Heb. xiii. 7. 
 IX. The Sight of Self and the Sight of Christ - 147 
 'When I saw Him, I fell at his feet as dead. And 
 He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto 
 me, Fear not ; I am the First and the Last : I 
 am He that liveth, and was dead ; and, behold, 
 I am alive for evermore, Amen ; and have the 
 keys of hell and of death.' — Rev. i. 17, 18. 
 
 X. 'Lovest Thou Me?' 164 
 
 'Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Lovest thou Me?' — 
 John xxi. 15-17. 
 XI. The Holy Spirit and the Love of God - - 176 
 'The Love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, 
 by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.' — 
 Rom. v. 5. 
 
 XII. The Angel's Visit 18S 
 
 'I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God, 
 and I am sent to speak unto thee.' — Luke i. 19. 
 
 XIII. The Ministry of the New Covenant - - 201 
 
 'Who also hath made us able ministers of the 
 New Covenant.' — 2 Cor. iii. 6. 
 
 XIV. The Lord's Brother : the Son of God - 216 
 
 'I saw James, the Lord's brother. It pleased God 
 to reveal His Son in me.' — Gal. i. 19; 15, 16. 
 
 XV. Living Stones - - 224 
 
 'Ye also, as living stones.' — 1 Pet. ii. 5. 
 
 XVI. Heart Purity 232 
 
 'Blessed are the pure in heart.' — Matt. v. 8. 
 
PROFESSOR MOULE. 
 BY W. ROBERTSON NICOLL. 
 
 DR. MOULE is the most influential member of the Evan- 
 gelical party in the Church of England, but he is besides 
 a teacher of all the churches. Dr. Dale, towards the end of 
 his life, in a letter to his friend, Mrs. Richard Davies, of Tre- 
 borth, wrote : "Mrs. Dale and I are venturing to send you 
 Moule on the Romans. I am reading it with great interest, and 
 I trust with profit. I do not always agree with him, but he has 
 a deep knowledge of the things of Christ, and there is some- 
 thing contagious in his earnestness. His theology will, I sup- 
 pose, recall to you the theology of your own earlier years." It is 
 as a devout and learned theologian that he is generally known. 
 He has been, and continues to be, a leader of what is known 
 as the Keswick School. But Dr. Moule is a many-sided man, 
 with wide interests in literature and in life. While tenacious 
 of everything that is vital in the old Evangelical theology, 
 he has a breadth of culture and sympathy which outsiders 
 scarcely understand. His career at Cambridge was excep- 
 tionally distinguished. He was Second Classic in the Tripos 
 of 1864, Browne's Classical Medalist in 1863, Fellow of Trin- 
 ity from 1865-81, and Dean from 1873-6, and for two years, 
 1865-7, Assistant Master at Marlborough. He is not only a 
 scholar, but a true poet. I do not say that this is proved by 
 the fact that he gained the Seatonian Prize at Cambridge six 
 times, but the first thing I ever saw from his pen was a little 
 volume of verses which he has not included among the list of 
 his works, but which contained some true and tender poetry, 
 while the first thing he ever published (in 1865) was "Apollo 
 at Pherse: a Drama on the Greek Model." Even from his 
 writings one might gather that he has a keen sense of humor ; 
 and he is, so far as I know, the only Evengelical in the Church 
 
 5 
 
6 
 
 PROFESSOR MOULE. 
 
 of England at present who is a master of English style. Some 
 of his finest passages might be set alongside of Dean Church's, 
 and bear the comparison well. While he has not spared him- 
 self in work primarily devoted to the edification of Christians 
 generally, he has found time to show himself a master in the 
 art of exposition. His commentaries on the Pauline Epistles 
 rank with the best. Dr. Moule, however, is even more of a 
 theologian than of an expositor. He has a perfect mastery of 
 the great Evangelical system, and knows how to keep dogma 
 in constant connection with living Christian experience. Noth- 
 ing so good of its kind as his small but packed "Outlines of 
 Christian Doctrine" has been done since Amesius published 
 his golden Medulla. To hear Dr. Moule one might be in- 
 clined to think that by temperament his piety would be a form 
 of quietism ; and certainly an element of quietism is not absent 
 from his writing. But neither is it absent from the New 
 Testament. I heard him once pray for the coming of the 
 Kingdom, for the deliverance of the Church from the dangers 
 that threatened her. He went on, "but let us not be anxious 
 even about this." 
 
 Dr. Moule was born at Dorchester in 1841, the youngest 
 son of the Rev. H. Moule, M. A., Vicar of Fordington. His 
 family is still represented in the district, where a visitor will 
 hear much of the living and of the dead. Into such particulars, 
 however, I do not propose to enter. Dorchester has been 
 made famous in English literature by Thomas Hardy and 
 William Barnes, and both of these came into close connection 
 with the Moule family. I remember first hearing of Fording- 
 ton when visiting the venerable poet William Barnes at Came 
 Rectory, Dorsetshire, more than twenty years ago. Mr. Moule 
 regarded, and regards, his father and mother with peculiar 
 reverence, and all through his writings there are allusions — 
 sometimes direct, sometimes indirect — to the happy and the 
 holy home where his youth was spent, and where he received 
 the convictions to which he has never been false. One of his 
 most beautiful poems was written in 1878, in Fordington 
 
PROFESSOR MOULE. 
 
 7 
 
 Church, where Dr. Moule was baptized, and where he first 
 ministered as his father's curate : 
 
 "Holy scene, and dear as holy, 
 Let me ponder thee this hour, 
 Not in aimless melancholy, 
 But in quest of Heaven-given power: 
 Seeking here to win anew 
 Contrite love and purpose true; 
 Near the Font whose dew-drops cold 
 Fell upon my brow of old ; 
 Near the well-remember'd seat 
 Set beside my mother's feet; 
 Near the Table where I bent 
 At that earliest Sacrament. 
 
 Let me, through this narrow door, 
 Climb the Pulpit's steps once more. 
 Blessed place ! the Master's Word, 
 Child and man, I hence have heard; 
 Awful place ! for hence, in turn, 
 I have taught, so slow to learn." 
 
 In his admirable little work on the "Evangelical School in 
 the Church of England," just published by Messrs. Nisbet, 
 he says, speaking of the Simeonite School, "My dear father 
 (1801-80), if I may be pardoned another personal allusion to 
 a memory evermore sacred to me, was a type of that noble 
 generation. In his early manhood in charge of a large country 
 parish, he procured a confirmation visit from Bishop Burgess 
 of Salisbury; the old man cheered the younger in his unas- 
 sisted efforts after thorough parochial care, saying how he 
 found everywhere that men of his opinions were the active 
 promoters of schools and diligent teachers of the young for 
 confirmation. Meanwhile men of these opinions were called, 
 like their leader at Cambridge, to not a little trial in the way of 
 social exile. The story is well known of the lady who could 
 not be driven in the Bishop of London's carriage to John 
 
8 
 
 PROFESSOR MOULE. 
 
 Venn's rectory at Clapham ; it would compromise the Bishop ; 
 she must be set down a little way off, at a tavern, where 
 Venn's two sons went to meet her. In 1829 a young clergy- 
 man came to begin work in his Dorsetshire parish. His neigh- 
 bors were not particularly sociable; and he learnt through a 
 friend, after a time, that at a meet of the hounds he had been 
 discussed, and pronounced a 'Methodist,' on whom it was not 
 necessary to call. But no one of that sort, so far as I have 
 heard, ever thought of airing such troubles as a grievance ; 
 they came in the day's work for God." Not that Mr. Moule 
 was without congenial clerical neighbors. His son says : "I 
 should like to linger over the recollection, ever brighter and 
 dearer to me, of a typical circle of the older Evangelical clergy, 
 the former members of the Dorset Clerical Meetings, men like 
 Henry Walter, Charles Bridges, Carr John Glyn, Reginald 
 Smith, C. W. Bingham, Augustus Handley, Edward Stuart, 
 T. W. Berridge, David Hogarth, a group whose manly, cul- 
 tured, unworldly lives and firm enlightened faith presented 
 a spiritual and social phenomenon which it would be diffi- 
 cult to surpass in its kind." It is worth recalling that Charles 
 Bridges, of whom Dr. Moule says that the remembrance of 
 him "shines on me like a ray reflected from the Chief Shep- 
 herd's face," died at Hinton Martell, in Dorset, in 1869. The 
 one objection I should take to Dr. Moule's little book on the 
 Evangelical School is that he does not sufficiently recognize 
 the immense influence of Edward Bickersteth, whose books 
 used to be found in the manses of Evangelical ministers all 
 over Scotland. 
 
 Dr. Moule's life work has been done as a teacher of theo- 
 logical students. He was the first Principal of Ridley Hall, 
 Cambridge, and occupied the position from 1881 to 1899. He 
 raised it to a position of high influence as the most important 
 institution of its kind. Now he has quitted it for the Nor- 
 risian Professorship of Divinity in the University of Cam- 
 bridge. There is every reason to expect that Dr. Moule will 
 now give the Evangelical party what it so much wants, an au- 
 thoritative and up-to-date exposition of its doctrines. He is 
 understood to be preparing a commentary on the Articles. Of 
 
PROFESSOR MOULE. 
 
 9 
 
 Dr. Moule as a teacher of theological students one might say 
 much, but it will be best to refer to his altogether charming 
 book entitled "To my Younger Brethren," the chapter on 
 Pastoral Life and Work. There the heart of the man is re- 
 vealed. No one will be surprised to find that he puts in the 
 forefront as a condition of ministerial efficiency, the secret walk 
 with God, prayer, and the study of the Bible. Andrew Bonar 
 tells us that in his busy life he endeavored to keep two hours 
 every day for actual prayer, and still was unsatisfied. He said, 
 "I can do more by praying than I can do in any other way." 
 In connection with this Dr. Moule lays great stress on the 
 study of the Bible itself. He urges that the Bible should be 
 read at whatever cost of other religious reading. It is a 
 very common thing to substitute practically for the Bible a 
 little library — Hires de piete, as the French would call them, 
 small good books. To the Higher Criticism as such he has 
 no objection. "The most earnest defender of the supernatural 
 character of the Scriptures may be, and very often is, as dili- 
 gent a higher critic as the extremest anti-supernaturalist." 
 But he is very much disinclined to accept many of the results 
 of criticism, opposing to them the testimony of Christ. Dr. 
 Moule frankly deals with the clergyman's relation to women, 
 warning curates against flirtation on the ground that if at- 
 tentions go beyond a certain line, while nothing but courtesy 
 is meant, a woman's life may be spoiled. He even urges his 
 men not lightly to seek marriage, not lightly to make engage- 
 ments even where they have a good assurance that all will be 
 spiritually well, if there is, a real probability of a married life 
 clogged with pecuniary perplexities. He thinks that there are 
 branches of ministerial work where a single man makes the 
 better minister, and says that no true servant of God will al- 
 low himself to think first of an opening for marriage and 
 then of an opening for ministry. In speaking of the prepa- 
 ration of sermons Dr. Moule is singularly silent about books. 
 He says almost nothing as to the general culture of the 
 preacher and the special culture, but he is quite clear as to 
 the necessity for good style. "A neat, straight, well-worded 
 sentence is not a mere literary luxury; it is a practical power. 
 
10 
 
 PROFESSOR MOULE. 
 
 It is far easier to listen to than a careless, formless sentence 
 is, and is far easier to remember." He commends Mr. Spur- 
 geon's style as more perfectly suited for every-day audiences, 
 and says that he happens to know that Mr. Spurgeon always 
 took great and systematic pains with his English. Dr. Moule 
 advocates a simple, natural, and luminous division of sermons. 
 
 It need hardly be added that the spirit in which this great 
 Churchman refers to other communions is invariably large and 
 charitable. Few men know more of the eminent Christian 
 teachers outside the Church of England, and he delights to 
 know that, "as regards the Scottish and Continental Churches, 
 it is not too much to say that, with the very rarest exceptions, 
 English Church writers of all schools regarded them as sister 
 Churches of the Reformation till about 1830," 
 
I. 
 
 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE 
 
 Preached in St. Bride's Church, Fleet Street, at the Ninety- 
 ninth Anniversary of the Church Mission- 
 ary Society, May 2, 1898. 
 
 "He said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved 
 Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day ; and 
 that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in 
 His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." — Luke 
 xxiv. 46, 47. 
 
 The preacher called to minister to you to-night 
 must needs feel his heart full of the future. He is 
 indeed conscious also of the past — a wonderful past, 
 a nearly finished century of grace and mercy, and 
 of the patience and faith of saints. How can he 
 not be stirred by the thought of those first days of 
 our Church Missionary annals, those original acts 
 of simple but supernatural obedience and reliance? 
 An unpraised, unheeded group of pious men, our 
 founders met to pray and to confer; they looked 
 out from a threatened England upon a world at war, 
 and they embraced the obligation to attempt from 
 England the evangelization of the world ! So began 
 the story so familiar to us, and so dear, and which 
 inevitably, by laws of human imagination, claims a 
 
 11 
 
12 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 peculiar realization as the landmark of a hundred 
 years aproaches. It is a retrospect vastly various 
 under all its unity — a long succession of suspenses, 
 of fluctuations, of glowing hopes, of heart-sickening 
 disappointments, of magnificent renewals of zeal, ex- 
 pectation, and advance. The first appeals to a Church 
 almost more skeptical than indifferent; the slow 
 growth of recognition and support ; the first sacrifices 
 and triumphs, in Western Africa, in New Zealand, 
 in India and Ceylon, in Abyssinia, among the north- 
 ern Redmen; the shocks and sorrows of the Niger 
 Expedition, of the Sepoy Mutiny, of the wars and 
 rebellion of China, of the wreck of the Maori race 
 and Church — yes, and of many a crisis of discour- 
 agement at home : such are some of the features of 
 our backward view. Then, nearer to us in time, we 
 behold an ever-opening India, and wide doors un- 
 barred on a sudden in Japan, and the long cloud of 
 mystery swept from Eastern Africa, and North- 
 western America silently transformed into a prov- 
 ince of missionary bishoprics. Then Hannigton 
 dies at the gate of Uganda, and the "Cambridge 
 seven" make London and England listen as never 
 before to the missionary call. A new departure is 
 manifestly taken. It is a new era in point of zeal 
 and purpose and provision of resources and offers 
 of service and organizaton of prayer and labor. 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 13 
 
 The believing Church among us betrays now a con- 
 sciousness larger and fuller than before that her 
 light is given her that she may shine; she exists to 
 be her Lord's implement for the evangelization of 
 the world. 
 
 So our yesterday is strong in us, in this place of 
 many memories, at this solemn date of period and 
 reflection. Yet the future, immortal child of the 
 immortal past, its effect and sequel, its longed-for 
 flower and fruit, is present here in even greater 
 power. We are met not for reverie half so much as 
 for resolutions and advance. The names of our 
 blessed fathers are dear to us, with an indescribable 
 sense of loyalty and honor; but we cherish that 
 sense not that we may build their cenotaphs, but 
 that we may carry on their work. 'Our Jubilee is a 
 commemoration, but it is much more besides; it is 
 a summons afresh to the foot of the atoning Cross, 
 and a new proclamation there of the power and 
 liberty of the Spirit, that we may go out in it before 
 our Lord to announce Him, the Liberator, to the 
 world. Our centenary year is a point of sight for a 
 wider landscape; but not only that we may review 
 and estimate achievements : much rather we are look- 
 ing forward, so far as mortal eyes can, into our 
 second century, and the twentieth of our Lord. We 
 want to see something, through whatever haze, of 
 
14 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 the vastness of the land in front, and how He would 
 have us enter in, and set our feet here, there, and 
 everywhere upon it, claiming it for Him. 
 
 I am only giving voice to all your hearts. In the 
 three years' preparation for our Centenary nothing 
 has been more prominent than the consciousness of 
 the overwhelming claims of the future. In every 
 possible way the Society has emphasized its resolve 
 (to an extent I had almost dared to call excessive) 
 to silence all congratulations, under the conviction 
 that the work is only at its threshold, and encum- 
 bered even there with incalculable arrears. It has 
 spoken as if there were little to utter, if anything, 
 save humiliation for the past, and penitent purposes 
 for the future : Nil actum rcputans, dum quid super- 
 esset agendum. And the "agendum" is vast, and 
 the night is coming down upon it, when no man can 
 work ! 
 
 To be sure, the non-Christian world has been 
 lately traversed for the Gospel as never before. 
 Three main masses of inhabited territory alone now 
 remain practically untouched — Arabia, Thibet, with 
 Nepaul on its southern side, and the great Soudan. 
 But the penetration of the world in its breadth has 
 only made us the more conscious of its depths. The 
 millions of the unevangelized earth have, as it were, 
 multiplied themselves before us, for we can count 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 15 
 
 them better, and we can realize them better, too, in 
 their greatness and in their need. Along with the 
 stronger consciousness of their claim upon us for 
 evangelization there grows the consciousness that 
 the evangelization of such populations, and under 
 such conditions, is no matter for forced marches, 
 hurried inroads or feeble occupations. It calls 
 for promptitude indeed, in the name of God. But 
 it calls for patience and for thoroughness as well. 
 In brief, it sets before the believing Church a task 
 scarcely apprehended hitherto in its true propor- 
 tions. It is a task which fills the whole immediate 
 future with its greatness and variety, with its awful- 
 ness and its hopes ; an enterprise compassable indeed 
 in Christ, but only compassable by a Church alto- 
 gether wakeful, "pressing towards the mark, for- 
 getting the things which are behind, and reaching 
 forth to those things which are before." 
 
 This deepening, gathering sense of the missionary 
 future embodies itself around us in many methods 
 and movements full of a new age. Within our 
 Society I need but name the still young and growing 
 work of the Gleaners' Union, with its fine simplicity 
 of plan, its ubiquitous extension, its living network 
 of contact and sympathy and its rich results. Quite 
 outside our organization, yet touching and touched 
 by it at innumerable points, lies the large sphere of 
 
16 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 spiritual influence whose center, in a certain sense, 
 is the tent at Keswick. From that center to a mem- 
 orable extent, notably within the last ten years, the 
 misionary impulse has powerfully vibrated in (I 
 venture to say) all the Reformed Churches, and 
 most of all, if I read the facts aright, within our 
 own. In no slight connection with this movement, 
 while going upon a perfectly independent line, the 
 Student Volunteer Missionary Union makes a sign 
 and landmark of the times. It is the spontaneous 
 issue of a deep loyalty to the Lord in our young edu- 
 cated Christendom, and as such it is an omen full 
 of the future and of a glorious hope. 
 
 Its now well-known Watchword is a call energet- 
 ically forward — "The evangelization of the World 
 within this generation." In no uninformed or un- 
 considering spirit that watchword is explained by its 
 responsible advocates. They do not mean an undis- 
 ciplined enthusiasm, nor the least tinge of weak 
 depreciation of long-tried methods and the glorious 
 veterans of the field. They mean no blind and narrow 
 indifference to the immovable claims of the work 
 of God at home, where never was the call so acute, 
 so intense, so awful as now, not for any laborers, 
 but for laborers true to the heavenly Word and filled 
 with the Holy Spirit of God. They avoid with 
 growing care a certain tone of chiding — I had 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 17 
 
 almost said of scolding — into missionary zeal, which 
 has sometimes marred earnest appeals, striking a 
 harsh discord with the blessed purpose of them. 
 They are, as I believe, aware of the grave spiritual 
 risks of an undue and premature pressure upon 
 young men and women to sign declarations and 
 promises. They know the need of waiting first for 
 full light upon the conditions of the work, upon the 
 whole range of personal duties, and upon God's 
 whole purpose for the individual as shown in the 
 build of character and faculty ; woeful have been the 
 mistakes sometimes made under oblivion of that 
 need. But what these youthful servants of God do 
 mean is a deliberate and believing "new departure" 
 in the study of the vast non-Christian world as it is ; 
 and so, in the realization of its tremendous need, and 
 so, in the response of the Church to the call of the 
 Redeemer, "Whom shall we send, and who will go 
 for us?" The blessing of the Almighty, in His 
 grace and guidance, be upon them! 
 
 So to the future tend all our hearts. These recent 
 drifts and currents of enterprise and aspiration all 
 betoken a great passage forward, a period already 
 upon us of large developments and marked transi- 
 tions, the free recognition of new conditions, and the 
 application to them of methods often new and 
 always ready for modification. True, this last great 
 
18 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 Students' Movement has wisely and rightly dis- 
 claimed all idle love of revolution for its own sake; 
 in particular it has affirmed a full belief in the high 
 value of educational and of medical missions, meth- 
 ods which have been sometimes assailed by a short- 
 sighted criticism. More, I think, rather than less, 
 as time rolls, and thought as well as faith develops, 
 the movement shows its true cohesion with the past. 
 But its gaze is on the future; it sets its feet, it 
 stretches out its hands, towards the time that is to 
 be, the things that are before. It appeals to the 
 Church to be ready for many a bold advance of 
 thought and of action in view of new regions, new 
 problems of races and of faiths, new conditions of 
 both the world and the Church, in an age when great 
 chapters of history are written before our eyes 
 within the limits of a month. 
 
 Let us be ready, in our Master's name, for the fu- 
 ture, for the new. 
 
 But now I call you to a line of recollection drawn 
 just the other way, yet in strong connection with 
 this curve of change. Amidst all conceivable other 
 alterations there is that which must be unalterable 
 to the end. Our beloved Society may, and must, 
 keep its mind open to all the counsels which its 
 Lord may give it through His providence. It must 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 19 
 
 be prepared, if the need should arise (I do not say 
 it will), to deal in courageous independence with 
 many a long tradition of method. But the supreme 
 question after all is not of method, but of Message. 
 And the Message, in its sacred essence, is of "the 
 things which are, and are to come." In the twenti- 
 eth century as in the nineteenth, in our second age 
 as in our first, the Gospel of the grace of God, the 
 Truth of sin and of salvation, the Word of the Cross 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ, lives and abides for ever. 
 It knows, likes its Source, no variableness nor shad- 
 ow of turning; to-day and to-morrow it is the same. 
 
 This is a movement at which such a reminder is 
 not out of season. At a time pregnant of change 
 and transition in many things it is easy to get an im- 
 pression that there must be change in all things. 
 And beyond doubt the thought of modifications of 
 the Christian Message has made itself abundantly 
 felt, and felt in the most various quarters, in our 
 day. There are advocates in numbers around us 
 who would altogether difference what they mean by 
 religion from what they mean by theology; we are 
 to hold the one off as free as possible from the other. 
 Perhaps it is the theology of the Evangelical Re- 
 vival ; perhaps it is the theology of the Reformation, 
 true ancestor of the other, and itself the genuine 
 heir, not only of the first days of the Faith, but of all 
 
20 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 that was noblest in the medieval schools as well; 
 perhaps it is the theology of St. Paul. Yes, we are 
 not to be too submissive now even before an Apostle, 
 even before the Vessel of election, chosen to bear 
 the Name before the nations and before Israel.* 
 Religion is to be disengaged from too close a cohe- 
 sion here. The warm messages of goodwill, of 
 brotherhood, of altruistic sacrifice, of instincts for 
 the unseen and the ideal, are not to be always en- 
 cumbered with the dogmatic chain of guilt and judg- 
 ment and expiation and faith and a mystic new 
 creation. We are even to beware of too strait and 
 exclusive a limitation within the lines of a Nicene 
 account of the person of the Man of Nazareth. 
 Many have been the manifestations of the Eternal 
 and the Good. Does not the Bible itself speak of 
 sundry times and divers manners? The mercy of 
 God is indeed in Christ; but is it in Christ alone? 
 Revere His character, carry out as far as you may 
 His precepts, imbibe His spirit; but beware of too 
 positive a theology of His origin and His being! 
 
 Other voices speak from a place far, far nearer 
 the center of the Gospel, yet in a tone, I dare to say, 
 never quite in concord with the full chorus of the 
 Apostles. We are counseled by some Christians, 
 perhaps, to remember the many-sidedness of the 
 
 * Acts ix. 15. 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 21 
 
 Gospel. It was given by its Lord for many ages 
 and for many races. It must be expected, in its 
 revolution upon its axis, to turn to this age, and to 
 that, another face than that which their forerunners 
 saw. It will be found to present to one race another 
 range of its truths than that which regenerated a 
 human family lodged upon another hemisphere. We 
 are to beware of making always one doctrine the 
 central and the radiating point. Or, again, if we do 
 so, we are to see that we centralize that truth which 
 alone can give significance to all the rest, and in 
 which lies already hidden all the glory, the hope, the 
 transfigured future, of man — the Incarnation of the 
 Eternal Word. To certain times, to certain regions, 
 another center, or what may have seemed such, may 
 have been fitly presented ; but for the world this was 
 provisional. Atoning Sacrifice is great, but Incar- 
 nation is greater. What truth, what range of truth, 
 can appeal as this can appeal to universal man, as 
 it ascends in its majesty before him, and he recog- 
 nizes in its mysterious splendor not only what God 
 is, but what he is, what Man is, that God is mindful 
 of him? 
 
 I do not think that I have misrepresented what 
 seems to me a powerful and prevalent element in 
 large regions of Christian thought around us, and 
 God forbid I should forget the strong relation of 
 
22 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 that element to unmistakable and all-important data 
 of the Scriptures. The Incarnation — it is indeed, 
 from one great view-point, the fact of facts, the 
 royal, the imperial glory of all truth and of all 
 spiritual joy. None but the Incarnate Lord of the 
 Scriptures and of the Creeds could be to us the 
 Eternal Word from the Eternal Heart, and could 
 bear away from us the immeasurable burthen which 
 in the Fall we had dragged down upon ourselves. 
 "When Thou tookest upon Thee Man, to deliver, 
 Thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb." "The 
 Effulgence from the Father's Glory, the Expression 
 of His Being, He took part in flesh and blood, and 
 by Himself purged our sins, and sate down" — who 
 but the Incarnate could so labor, and then so rest? 
 — "on the right hand of the Majesty on high."* 
 
 But this truth of all truths becomes another thing 
 when it is taken apart from its primary revealed 
 occasion and purpose for our race. And what I 
 humbly contend is that it is so taken when Christian 
 thought treats it as a Gospel in and by itself. It is 
 so taken when we presume to answer in the affirm- 
 ative the unanswerable question (unanswerable, 
 because Revelation is absolutely silent here, and 
 speculation is out of all its rights) : Would Incarna- 
 tion have taken place, if man had never sinned ? It 
 * Heb. i. 3. 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 23 
 
 is so taken from its true use in general when we 
 attempt to present an Evangeliwm to any race, in 
 any stage of development, in any tract of time, 
 which does not put into the foreground man's sin, in 
 its guilt (be this well remembered) as well as in its 
 power, and "the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" 
 in all its bleeding glory, the atoning work of Gol- 
 gotha, the Sin-bearer for the condemned, the Head 
 on which was laid the iniquity of us all, the Propitia- 
 tion for our sins, without whose blood-shedding is 
 no remission, but "in whom we have redemption 
 through His blood, even the remission of our sins." 
 
 Yes, as we prepare to travel into another century, 
 on our way to meet the Redeemer at His Coming, 
 this, and nothing other nor less than this, must be 
 the unfaltering watchword of our work and witness. 
 "God forbid that we should glory," in any climate, 
 amidst the listeners of any race, "save in the Cross 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ" ; in that ancient and won- 
 derful meaning of those words, in which they con- 
 note the sinner's guilt, the satisfaction of his Re- 
 deemer, our healing by His stripes, our rest because 
 of His agonies, our welcome because of His dark 
 deserted hour, our justification by His being "made 
 for us a curse," our life, our eternal life, because of 
 the unique and awful glory of His most precious 
 Death. 
 
24 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 Immeasurably more things than this central 
 splendor are contained in the Gospel of the Grace 
 of God. All the antecedent and unbought love of 
 the Eternal is in it; "for God so loved the world 
 that He gave His Only Begotten." All the living 
 glory of the work of the Eternal Spirit is in it; for 
 "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, that 
 we might receive the promise of the Spirit, through 
 faith," and might, by that Spirit, in His power and 
 fulness, experience a rest, and liberty, and purity, 
 and joy, and everlasting hope, which is heaven itself 
 begun upon the earth. In that Gospel — that revela- 
 tion of Him "who loved us, and gave Himself for 
 us," "who died for us and rose again" — lie at once 
 the law and the motive force of a sacrifice of self for 
 others which walks in simplicity and peace upon 
 heights which alien philosophies and other Gospels 
 attempt in vain effectually to climb. In it lie sug- 
 gestions of promise, of deliverance, of blessing, vast 
 as the universe of creation ; "the creation itself shall 
 be emancipated into the liberty of the glory of the 
 sons of God."* But, for us sinners, these truths all 
 roll their golden circles round the sun of the Atone- 
 ment. The "innumerable benefits" are all grouped 
 within the blood-besprinkled precinct of the Passion. 
 Without Christ, who died for our sins, and, having 
 * Rom. viii. 21. 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 25 
 
 died, is risen again, faith has no foothold, and con- 
 science no rest, and hope no eastern window, and 
 man knows neither himself nor God. 
 
 Once more, I dare to affirm it, not only here and 
 there, and at times, but at all times and in all places, 
 this is the Gospel. It is this, it is this alone, which 
 carries with it those two contrasted yet profoundly 
 connected notes, that man is tempted to be ashamed 
 of it, and that to believing man it is the power of 
 God unto salvation. It is abundantly possible to 
 construct a would-be Gospel of which it would be as 
 easy not to be ashamed as it is easy not to be 
 ashamed of the Platonic philosophy, or of the Kan- 
 tian. Into such "another Gospel" may be inserted 
 sublime conceptions of God, and of man, and breath- 
 ings after an immaculate purity, and sentiments of 
 universal sympathy, and promises of a golden fu- 
 ture, interminable and serene. But the true Gospel, 
 by its own account, is a thing which man tends to 
 be ashamed of, and which yet alone can come to him, 
 and take him, and lift him up to God's own high 
 places. And it is this because it insists upon ap- 
 proaching man as first a sinner, guilty, under sen- 
 tence — no mere unfortunate, waylaid upon the by- 
 paths of the Universe, fallen among thieves — but a 
 criminal, and in the grasp of law. 
 
 Its purpose with him is not benignant only, but 
 
26 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 glorious. It means to do much more than to restore 
 him to himself. It will transfigure him; it will give 
 him power to become a son of God; it will make 
 him partaker of the divine Nature; it will seat him 
 in the heavenly places with his Lord. He shall 
 tread uport all the power of the enemy, more than 
 conqueror through Him that loved him. He shall 
 never die; he shall appear with Christ in glory; he 
 shall be like Him, seeing Him as He is. But ante- 
 cedent to all this, and in direct order to it, the Gos- 
 pel has to deal with man as not an unfortunate, but a 
 sinner. It has to stop his mouth of the last falter- 
 ing self-justification, and to teach him how to put 
 out a mere mendicant hand to take a mere free par- 
 don, totally undeserved, and so to be welcomed in 
 Another's Name, and henceforth to know no master, 
 and no power, and no hope, beside Him who has 
 loved him the unlovely, and given Himself for him 
 the guilty. 
 
 And this is what "the flesh" is ashamed of. And 
 this is the power of God unto salvation. And this 
 is the inmost note and difference of the Gospel for 
 the whole world, unalterable as the race of man and 
 as the Christ of God. So it was in 1799; so it is 
 today; so it shall be in the unknown twentieth cen- 
 tury, yea, and usque ad tubani — till the trumpet shall 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 27 
 
 sound, till the Lord shall come again, and all the 
 saints with Him. Even so, come, Lord Jesus ! 
 
 If His own words of commission are indeed our 
 warrant, so it is. I have recited as our text that 
 most dogmatic of His recorded instructions to His 
 Church after His resurrection, in view of the evan- 
 gelization of the world. The whole burden of the 
 words is this — His dying work, His resurrection 
 power, the sin of man shown in His light, the for- 
 giveness of man given for His sake : "Thus it is 
 written, that the Christ should suffer, and should 
 rise again, and that repentance" — the recognition, 
 the confession, the forsaking of sin — "and remis- 
 sion" — amnesty, pardon, welcome, peace with God 
 — "should be preached in His name." All other 
 blessings, but these first, and in that order. For 
 these He suffered; for these He was exalted. He 
 is enthroned, "a Prince and Saviour, to give repent- 
 ance and remission."* And this, not to one race or 
 type of manhood rather than to another. Semite, 
 Hamite, Turanian, Aryan — all have sinned, and all 
 must thus be called and blessed. The message was 
 alike to "begin at Jerusalem," specimen and type of 
 whole regions of the Orient, and to extend "to all 
 nations" of every continent and every sea. 
 
 As the Master, so the servants. In the apostolic 
 * Acts v. 31. 
 
28 THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 writers we have chosen types of character pro- 
 foundly varied. In the regions and races they ad- 
 dress in speech, and in epistle, we have chosen sam- 
 ples of the world. The Hebrew is there, and the 
 Athenian, the Roman, the Levantine, the Galatian 
 Celt, the Phrygian of the remote Lycus, enamored 
 of the theosophy of the remoter East. To them 
 messages are sent by men as different in cast of 
 character and trend of thought as Paul, and Peter, 
 and John. But every messenger to every tribe and 
 mission sends a Gospel which, however rich and 
 varied, and locally adjusted in its circumference, is 
 the same thing at its center; it is the preaching of 
 the Cross. "First of all, Christ died for our sins; 
 so we preach, whether it were I or they." "He 
 nailed to His Cross the handwriting that was against 
 us." "Ye were redeemed with the precious blood 
 of Christ, the unspotted Lamb." "Christ was once 
 offered to bear the sins of many." "We have an 
 Advocate with the Father, and He is the propitiation 
 for our sins, and for the sins of the whole world." 
 "Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us by Thy 
 blood."* 
 
 "From error and misunderstanding," so runs the 
 
 Litany of the Moravians, "from the loss of our glory 
 
 * i Cor. xv. 3; Col. ii. 14; 1 Pet. i. 19; Heb. ix. 28; 1 John 
 ii. 2; Rev. v. 9. 
 
THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 29 
 
 in Thee, from coldness to Thy merits and Thy 
 death, preserve us, gracious Lord and God." 
 
 Is this old Gospel of the Cross a narrow gospel ? 
 Yes; just as narrow as the gate and as the way of 
 which our Master spoke of old. Is it a narrow 
 Gospel? No; in its beating heart, warm with the 
 blood of the Atonement, there lie, always ready for 
 infinite expansion, all the blessings for eternity and 
 for time which were lodged for us by the Father in 
 the Son, and liberated for us by the sacrifice of His 
 death; for ever blessed be His Name! 
 
 In that Name our missionaries, "the messengers 
 of the Churches, and the glory of Christ," go to all 
 the nations. They go to teach them many things, 
 yea, "all things whatsoever He has commanded." 
 They go to gather and to combine, to minister the 
 Lord's ordinances, to build up men in the Lord's 
 Body, to equip His disciples for His service ; to lead 
 them out into His holy war. But first and most 
 they go to preach, and to glorify, His Cross. 
 
 For themselves that Cross, borne for their own 
 salvation, is divine peace and power for their suffer- 
 ing as for their witness. "In that sign they con- 
 quer." It is their victory beneath the tropic sun, 
 and upon the arctic ice, in the long patience of the 
 
3 o THE OLD GOSPEL FOR THE NEW AGE. 
 
 manifold plowing and sowing, and in the joys of 
 the harvest-home of souls. And it is all in all to 
 them when the Master calls His beloved servant 
 aside, and bids him bow down and glorify God by 
 dying — in the shipwreck on the Indian deep, amidst 
 the death-damps of the Niger, by gun-shot be- 
 side the lake of the Equator, by the rebel murderer's 
 sword in Sierra Leone. 
 
 *** The references at the close are to the deaths of mis- 
 sionaries : Mrs. Smyth. Archdeacon Dobinson, Mr. G. L. Pilk- 
 ington, and the Rev. W. J. Humphrey. 
 
II 
 
 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE 
 
 Preached in the University Church, Cambridge 
 
 "Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy Presence." — 
 Ps. xxxi. 20. 
 
 And who are "they," of whom the prophet speaketh 
 this ? Is it a favored few, a selected and exempted 
 remnant, whom the care of the Eternal shall insu- 
 late from the open world, and remove into the 
 silence of the forests or the hills to contemplate and 
 to adore? Is "the secret," "the covert," some cur- 
 tained or cloistered circle where the wicked cease 
 from troubling, and where there is leisure to be 
 good? Is it a home with God beyond the grave in 
 the land far off, where the righteous enters into the 
 peace and light of immortality, resting upon his 
 bed ?* Is the promise restricted to priests and seers 
 here, or to the just made perfect yonder? No, it 
 is not so. The last preceding words tell us other- 
 wise. The "they" of this golden oracle are all 
 those who fear Him, all those who trust in Him. 
 * Isa. lvii. 2. 
 3i 
 
32 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 
 
 The humblest spiritual loyalist to God, the weakest 
 and the weariest and the busiest, who hides him- 
 self in Him, who commits the way to Him, who 
 commends the spirit to Him; this hidden life, this 
 secret of the Presence — it is for even him. 
 
 And it is for him (we read again in the preceding 
 sentence) as fearing thus, and as trusting thus, 
 "before the sons of men." It is for those who avow 
 the Lord as their King, and venture upon His 
 promises, "before the sons of men." In the thick 
 of human intercourse, amidst the shock and con- 
 flicts of human change, under the hot glare of 
 human observation, out of doors amidst the disso- 
 nance of the common day — it is there that this won- 
 derful promise of the Holy Ghost by the Psalmist 
 is to take effect. For so it runs, "O how great is 
 Thy goodness, which Thou hast laid up for them 
 that fear Thee; which Thou hast wrought for them 
 that trust in Thee before the sons of men. Thou 
 shalt hide them in the secret of Thy Presence." 
 
 Such is the scope of the promise, "for them that 
 fear Thee, them that trust in Thee." Such is the 
 place of the promise, "before the sons of men." 
 
 I attempted last Sunday* to speak of that great 
 fact of the Gospel, the autocratic rights of our Lord 
 
 * The sermon referred to is not included in this volume. 
 
THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 33 
 
 Jesus Christ over us, and His call to us for an 
 unconditional surrender of the whole of life to Him. 
 I aimed all along to remind you that the true 
 place for such a surrender and its issues is the field 
 of common life, "the next thing," "the duty that 
 lies near," the circumstances which as a fact are 
 ours. Surrender to Jesus Christ is not a thing re- 
 served for exciting occasions or artificial condi- 
 tions. It is for the Christian man to-day, under 
 the environment of this time present, in our own 
 generation, be its obstacles and its problems what 
 they may, so long as they are not of our choosing, 
 but of the will of God. And now I point you again 
 to that familiar field. I invite you out, as it were, 
 among the sons of men. And I say, as we survey 
 that scene of realities and of trial, that there, even 
 there, is the intended place not only for a genuine 
 recognition of the rights of Jesus Christ, but for 
 a profound enjoyment of His presence. That 
 bright secret is no curiosity for a spiritual museum. 
 It lives and moves; it is made for use. It is re- 
 vealed, it is offered, it is given, to be worn and 
 wielded amidst the wear and tear of all that is 
 present, of all that is practical around us as we are. 
 
 Such is one link between our theme of last week 
 and this. Surrender and the Presence, the Lord's 
 entire ownership over us and His invitation to us to 
 
34 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 
 
 live concealed in the Secret of His Presence — these 
 both, according to God in His Word, are things 
 altogether meant to work and reign in real life. 
 Nor is this the only tie between these two spiritual 
 facts. They not only walk the same path ; they are 
 locked there by strong embraces into one. They 
 are, I may say, two poles of one spiritual sphere. 
 Surrender is the negative thing where the Presence 
 is the positive. Surrender is the man's turning 
 from himself to his Redeemer, dropping in the act 
 the base plunder of self-love, and stretching out 
 arms capacious, because empty, towards Him. The 
 Presence is the Redeemer's meeting the man with 
 the fulness of Himself, with the gift of nothing less 
 than Himself to the creature who brings nothing 
 but necessities and submission. So the two spiritual 
 facts by their own nature eternally complement each 
 other. We have all often confessed this, aye, and 
 ourselves claimed to act upon it, as we have knelt, 
 believing and receiving, at the Table of the Feast of 
 Christ. "Here we offer and present unto Thee our- 
 selves, our souls and bodies, humbly beseeching 
 Thee that all we may be fulfilled, filled full, with 
 Thy grace." 
 
 That glorious complex, Surrender and the Pres- 
 ence, is the liberty of the life of grace and its 
 inviolable peace and its ever-springing power. In 
 
THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 35 
 
 that supreme paradox, the Gospel, these sacred para- 
 doxes have their vital place. An absolute submis- 
 sion is the secret of a perfect freedom. A super- 
 natural peace, an inward dwelling in the divine 
 Covert, is the secret of a life wonderfully enabled 
 for holy energy and action along the daily path. 
 
 But now, to look direct upon this latter, this hid- 
 ing in the secret of His Presence before the sons of 
 men. 
 
 The promise is akin, as you well know, to a whole 
 host of promises. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect 
 peace whose mind is stayed on Thee" ; "My presence 
 shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest"; "He 
 leadeth me beside the waters of repose" ; "The peace 
 of God which passeth all understanding shall keep 
 your hearts" ; "Peace I leave with you, My peace I 
 give unto you ; in Me ye shall have peace" ; "Come 
 unto Me, all ye that labor, and I will rest you; ye 
 shall find rest unto your souls." 
 
 Here first observe the paradox of such words, then 
 their promise. The paradox is, as I have said, that 
 the Christian life is, on the one hand, meant to know 
 no rest or holiday from obedience to the law of 
 duty, from hourly "serving our generation in the 
 will of God"; yet, on the other hand, at the very 
 heart of such a life there is always to be this mys- 
 
36 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 
 
 terious stillness, this secret place of peace. Not 
 from an inner tumult of wrestling energies is to 
 come that life's true power, but from this hidden 
 calm. The unfatigued willingness to suffer, to 
 sacrifice, to labor, to sympathize, to bestow, is to 
 leap continually from a spring in itself as silent as 
 it is profound. A life all activity (or perhaps all 
 suffering) at the circumference, and revolving 
 amidst the tangled things of the common hour, is yet 
 to move upon a central point of rest — 
 
 "With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps 
 On the soft axle." 
 
 The world, the flesh, the tempter — all will be 
 present, formidable parts of the Christian's circum- 
 stances ; but "Thou shalt hide him in the secret of 
 Thy Presence." Thronging duties may press him 
 hard, but "Thou shalt hide him in the secret of Thy 
 Presence." Sufferings of body, anguish of spirit, 
 may strike upon the life. And grace is no anaes- 
 thetic; the Christian is no Stoic: he is follower and 
 member of the Lord of Bethany and of Gethsemane; 
 he feels:, he grieves indeed; yet, "Thou shalt hide 
 him in the secret of Thy Presence." Or look an- 
 other way altogether. Take life in its most vivid, 
 its most pleasing interests and occupations. So 
 these things lie for the man in the line of the will 
 of God, and so the man fears Him and trusts Him 
 
THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 37 
 
 before the sons of men ; the paradox of grace is that 
 in these things also "Thou shalt hide them in the 
 secret of Thy Presence." 
 
 It is indeed an enigma, as is almost every other 
 great fact of the religion of the Bible. But none 
 the less, it is, it is indeed, a promise. "Thou shalt 
 hide them" ; "I will give thee rest" ; "Ye shall find 
 rest unto your souls"; "The peace of God which 
 passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts."* 
 
 Those last sacred words, remember, are a promise. 
 We are accustomed to hear them in another and 
 indeed a soul-moving form. As the hour of wor- 
 ship closes, as the communicants prepare to leave the 
 precincts of the Table, when 
 
 "The feast, though not the love, is past and gone," 
 then the pastor lets the flock go with the invocation 
 upon them of the peace of God. It is an invocation 
 rich in significance and power. But do not forget 
 that its divine original in the Philippian Epistle is 
 not an invocation, but a precise and positive promise. 
 True, it is a promise under conditions — above all, 
 under the condition that in everything we make 
 known our requests to God. But that granted, then 
 there follows nothing less than this certainty and 
 guarantee: "The peace of God shall keep your 
 hearts." Need I count it out of place and time here 
 * Phil. iv. 7. 
 
38 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 
 
 to point to that strong future tense, that wonderful 
 "shall," and ask myself, and ask my brethren, if we 
 have proved it true ? I will ask the question, I will 
 humbly press it on the soul. Here is the voice of 
 God, the warrant of God : Have we made our claim 
 under it, and found it to mean what it says ? Ah, I 
 am speaking to many, well I know, who have so 
 done and have so found. For myself, so far as a 
 sinful man may venture personally to affirm, I know 
 enough to dare to say the ground is good, if a man 
 use it lawfully. There is a peace of God, able in- 
 deed to keep, to safeguard the weakest and the most 
 treacherous heart. There is a Presence that makes 
 at life's center a stillness pregnant with positive and 
 active blessing. There is a "fulfilling" that can 
 counterwork the fulness of the thronging hours and 
 enable men, in the stress of real life, to live behind 
 it all with Jesus Christ, while they are all the while 
 alert and attentive for the next call of duty, and 
 the next. The Christian is indeed to be ever seek- 
 ing, ever aspiring upward, "not as though he had 
 already attained." He is to avoid as his most deadly 
 poison that subtle spiritual Pharisaism which plumes 
 itself upon a supposed advanced experience, and pre- 
 sumes to compare itself with others, and hesitates, 
 if but for a moment, to prostrate itself in confession 
 and penitence before the awful, the blessed holiness 
 
THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 39 
 
 of God. But none the less, the Christian is called 
 to a great rest as well as to a great aspiration. He 
 is called 1 to a great thanksgiving as well as to a 
 deep confession. He is called, he is commanded to 
 an entrance into the peace of God. It is not to be 
 the habit of his soul to say, or to sing, that he 
 shoidd be happy if he could cast his care on his Re- 
 deemer, and sink in His almighty arms. It is to 
 be his, on the ground of all the promises, to do it 
 and to be at rest in God. 
 
 Conditions there are, indeed, to that great peace; 
 so we have remembered. But they are conditions 
 each of them, in its nature, a heavenly blessing. 
 There is the condition of godly fear. There is the 
 condition of humble trust. There is the condition 
 of trust thus before the sons of men — let not that be 
 forgotten. There is the condition of coming direct 
 to Jesus Christ, to take the yoke of His word and 
 will. There is the condition of looking unto Him. 
 There is the condition of watching and of prayer. 
 But are these things a complicated and a grievous 
 burthen, a bundle of arbitrary exactions ? They are 
 so many forms only of that one great condition to 
 our finding what is laid up for us in our Lord, the 
 condition of coming into directest contact with Him- 
 self, and there abiding. Such contact, in God's 
 
40 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 
 
 own order, liberates into the believing suppliant the 
 virtues of Jesus Christ. Not peace only, but "His 
 peace," is given. 
 
 It is a wonderful thing to be permitted to watch 
 a life which you have reason to know is hid in the 
 secret of the Presence of the Lord. Some few years 
 ago I met a good man, humble and gentle, a mis- 
 sionary to Eastern Africa. He abode in the Pres- 
 ence. I could not but see it. I heard him tell, with 
 the eloquence of entire simplicity, how, in the tropi- 
 cal wilderness, in the deep night, he had waited for 
 and shot the ranging lion which had long been the 
 unresisted terror of a village clan. It could not be 
 the will of God, he reasoned, that this beast should 
 lord it over men; and so, as it were in the way of 
 Christian business, he went forth and put it to death. 
 And then I watched that man, a guest in my own 
 house, under the very different test of the incon- 
 venience of missing a train; and the secret of the 
 Presence was as surely with him then as when he 
 had lain quietly down to sleep in his tent on the 
 lonely field, to be roused only by the sound of the 
 lion's paw as it rent the earth at the open door. 
 
 I have marked the secret of the Presence as it 
 ruled and triumphed in young lives around me here. 
 I recall a conversation on the subject. It was with 
 a friend and student of my own, a loving Christian, 
 
THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 41 
 
 but also an ardent and vigorous athlete. Could 
 the peace of God keep him, he wondered and 
 inquired, when the strong temper was ready to take 
 fire in the rush and struggle of the game? And 
 the answer came in a quiet, thankful word, three 
 days later: "Yes, I asked Him; I trusted Him; 
 and He kept me altogether." 
 
 I have watched lives in which the secret of the 
 Presence has been drawn around mental studies and 
 competitions. It has made the man care for his 
 subject not less but more. It has made him not less 
 but more intent to do well, to do better, to do best ; 
 
 &\\wi>. But it has taken 
 the poison out of competition by bringing into 
 it Jesus Christ. And so has come the honest aim 
 to win knowledge and to train faculty for Him, 
 and to lay up just such prestige as might perchance 
 subserve His ends in His disciple's life. And 
 equally and at the same time it has prepared the 
 man's spirit for the blessed bitterness of disappoint- 
 ment. 
 
 The secret of the Presence can assert itself in our 
 times, as of old, in the awful hours of life. It can 
 give now, as long ago, to the suffering confessor 
 those divinas martyrum consolationcs which a pris- 
 oner of the Reformation found, with astonished 
 joy, filling not another's soul, but his own, in the 
 
42 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. , 
 
 grim dungeon. A few years ago, in a mountain 
 town in the province of Fuh-kien, in China, two 
 men, recent converts to the Lord, were beset by a 
 furious mob and hung up each to a tree, to be 
 beaten there to death. The elder, a sturdy peas- 
 ant, who had often pleaded with his neighbors, even 
 to tears, for Christ, fearing for the firmness of his 
 younger friend, called out to him: "Do not for- 
 get Him who died for us; do not deny Him." 
 "But, indeed," said the other, as he very simply 
 told the story soon after to his friend and mine, 
 the Rev. Robert Stewart,* "indeed he needed not to 
 say it; the Holy Ghost so filled me that I felt no 
 fear or trouble." Rescue by a detachment of Chi- 
 nese soldiery came just in time — not too soon to 
 have allowed the confessors fully to prove, not the 
 bitterness of death, but the glorious secret of the 
 Presence. 
 
 Now, God be thanked for conspicuous spiritual 
 miracles such as this and such as that great martyr- 
 triumph not many years agof in inner Africa, by the 
 shore of the Victoria Lake, when those young saints 
 of God ascended the fiery chariot, singing with loud 
 voices the praises of their Saviour upon their own 
 red funeral pile. His arm is not shortened that it 
 cannot save, even in such straits as these; the 
 
 * Afterwards himself martyred, July, 1895. 1 1885. 
 
THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 43 
 
 secret of His Presence is as powerful now as when 
 it worked open miracle in the Chaldean furnace. 
 But it is often well to turn from the swelling 
 thoughts suggested by the exceptional and the 
 heroic in the records of the Gospel, to the sober 
 questions of the uneventful lifetime; to the com- 
 mon scene and the transfiguring power of the blessed 
 secret there. And as I do so, a name, a face, a pres- 
 ence, rises on my soul. I see one whose life for 
 long, long years I watched indeed with microscopic 
 nearness. I see a Christian woman, surrendered 
 at all hours to the never-ceasing doing of the near- 
 est and least romantic duty; open on every side to 
 every appeal for aid, for toil, for love; the sum- 
 mer sunshine of the full and busy home ; the friend 
 of every needing, every sinning life, in the wide, 
 poor parish; experienced indeed in the pure joys 
 which come to hearts that forget themselves, but 
 called again and again to agonies of sorrow. And 
 I see this life, in its radiant but unconscious beauty, 
 at once and equally and with a living harmony, 
 practical down to the smallest details, and filled 
 with God; open to every whisper, to every touch, 
 that said "I want you," and hidden, deep hidden, 
 morning, noon and night, in the secret of the Pres- 
 ence. That life was a long miracle, "and long 
 the track of light it left behind it," to the praise of 
 
44 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 
 
 the glory of His grace who shone out from its 
 blessed depths. Let me give Him thanks for it, 
 indeed. It is not past ; it is not lost ; only hidden a 
 little deeper than before with Christ in God, where 
 
 "Yet once more I trust to have 
 Full sight of her in heaven, without restraint." 
 
 In Christ, a son needs not to say, Mater, ave at que 
 vale. The secret of the Presence includes both 
 worlds and folds them into one. 
 
 My brethren, as we draw our meditation toward 
 its close, I revert to the precise wording of my text : 
 "Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy Pres- 
 ence [b'sether paneyka], in the covert of Thy Coun- 
 tenance." It is a glorious stroke of divine poetry 
 — the covert, the secret, of His countenance. We 
 find kindred phrases elsewhere in the precious Psal- 
 ter — the shelter of the brooding Wings of the Eter- 
 nal, the abode in His mighty Shadow. But this 
 phrase stands out as a peculiar treasure — "the secret 
 of Thy Countenance." There is no shadow here; 
 it is "a privacy of glorious light." And what a 
 light! It is light that lives. It is a photosphere, 
 within which opens upon the happy inmate the sweet- 
 ness and the response of a personal, while eternal, 
 smile. It is not it, but He. It is not a sanctuary, 
 but a Saviour, and a Father seen full in Him, 
 
THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 45 
 
 giving to the soul nothing less than Himself indeed 
 in vivid intercourse. It is the Lord, according to 
 that dear promise of the Paschal evening, coming 
 to manifest Himself, and to make His abode with 
 the man, and to dwell in him, and he in Him.* It 
 means the spirit's sight of Him that is invisible. 
 It means a life, lived not in Christianity but in 
 Christ, who is our life. 
 
 And thus the word takes us — out in the open, 
 out before the sons of men and amidst the strife 
 of tongues — to the deep central glory of the Gospel, 
 that it may be ours in humble, wondering posses- 
 sion. The Gospel, the eiayyf\toi> — what is it ? Subordi- 
 nate^, it is many things. It is the revelation of 
 the redemption of our nature by the work of the 
 Incarnate Son wrought once and forever for us. It 
 is the message of the unutterable mercy of that 
 pardon which moved the prophet's awestricken won- 
 der: "Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardon- 
 eth iniquity?"-}- It is the message of the bringing 
 of the guilty in penitent faith into the sublime am- 
 nesty of the Holy One, because of His own gift of 
 His own Begotten, who died, the Just for the un- 
 just, the Propitiation for our sins. It is the mes- 
 sage of the more than restoration of our fallen na- 
 *John xiv. 23. t Micah vii. 18. 
 
46 THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 
 
 ture in our second Head. It is the bringing of life 
 and immortality out from shadows into the light.* 
 It is the revelation of wonderful possibilities of 
 benefit and blessing for this life present in even 
 its temporary aspects, ever since it has been possible 
 to say of all men, yea, of the lowest and the worst 
 of human persons or human tribes, "for whom 
 Christ died." But the inmost glory of the Gospel, 
 the mysterious central brightness of its message — 
 what is it? It is the giving by God of Himself 
 to man. It is man's union, and then communion, 
 with none other than God in Christ. For this was 
 given prophecy and preparation, patriarchs and 
 priests and kings. For this was Bethlehem and 
 Nazareth and Golgotha and Joseph's Garden and 
 the Hill of the Ascension and the fiery shower 
 of Pentecost. For this was righteousness imputed 
 and holiness imparted and the immortal redemp- 
 tion of our body revealed. Here, and no lower, 
 from our point of sight, lies the final cause of all the 
 saving process. It was in order that God, with in- 
 finite Tightness, and with all the willingness of eter- 
 nal love, might give Himself to man and dwell 
 in man and walk in him and shine out from him, 
 in measure here, hereafter perfectly. 
 
 So we will come and take, for He stands in act 
 * 2 Tim. i. 10. 
 
THE SECRET OF THE PRESENCE. 47 
 
 to give. So it shall be ours to say, in the sweet 
 English of a Hindoo Christian poetess : 
 
 "In the secret of His Presence how my soul delights to hide! 
 Ah ! how hallowed are the lessons that I learn at Jesus' side !" 
 
 We are invited, here and now, in Jesus Christ, into 
 the secret of the Countenance of God. To enter 
 there in the blessed Name is not presumption; it is 
 submission. And the result, the practice — what will 
 it be? The humblest walk of duty; the simplest 
 and least ostentatious, but most genuine denial of 
 the life of self; the daily up-taking of the unpre- 
 tentious cross; something always to do or to be 
 for others and for the Lord ; while in it and over it 
 and behind it all, rules a peace which does in sober 
 fact pass understanding, keeping heart and thought, 
 the safeguard of the secret of the Countenance of 
 our King. 
 
III. 
 
 THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR 
 
 Preached in the University Church, Cambridge, at the open- 
 ing of the Academic Year. 
 "I am the bright and morning Star." — Rev. xxii. 16. 
 
 This is the last place in Scripture where the glorious 
 Saviour bears witness to Himself. A few lines 
 below He once more promises to return : "Behold, 
 I come quickly." But of His own words regarding 
 His own excellence and majesty this is the last: 
 "I am the bright and morning Star." 
 
 The hours of the great vision were almost over. 
 The Apostle who had walked with Jesus long ago 
 as His daily friend had been entranced for awhile 
 into an experience of His presence as He now 
 reigned in "the power of an endless life"; and at 
 length the trance was closing. An influence alto- 
 gether from God had been imprinting on John's soul 
 the messages to the Churches and the future of the 
 Church ; and now at the end the spiritual Voice has 
 still this work to say; the Lord speaks of Himself 
 once more. Perhaps the shadows of literal night 
 
 48 
 
THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 49 
 
 were rolling from the rock of Patmos, and the literal 
 day-star shone out in the region of the dawn. But, 
 however, the spiritual view and the inner word were 
 all of the light and of the day — "I am the bright 
 and morning Star." 
 
 Our blessed Lord speaks here in a manner which 
 is all His own. Nothing is more deeply charac- 
 teristic of His utterances from first to last than 
 His witness to Himself. It is one of the main 
 phenomena of the Gospel, most perplexing on the 
 theory of unbelief, most truth-like on the theory of 
 belief, this self-witness of the Man of humility and 
 sorrows. Sacred Exemplar of all that we commonly 
 call self-denial, Jesus yet presents Himself always 
 and unalterably in terms of self-assertion, and such 
 self-assertion as must mean either Deity, however 
 in disguise, or a delusion (may He forgive the word 
 if its mere mention is irreverent), moral as well as 
 mental, of infinite depth. "I am the Truth; I am 
 the Life; I am the Bread of Life; I am";* such is 
 His tone. 
 
 And here we have the same tone, perfectly main- 
 tained, as the same voice speaks again from amidst 
 the realities of the Unseen. The imagery, indeed, 
 is lifted from earth to heaven. He who is the genial 
 Vine and the laborious Shepherd now also reveals 
 
 *John viii. 58. 
 
50 THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 
 
 Himself as the Star of stars in a spiritual sky. But 
 the novelty of the glorious term only conveys the 
 truth which had always stood in the very front of 
 the testimony of Jesus — the truth of His own sacred- 
 ness and glory; the doctrine that He, the Son of 
 the Father, is the ultimate peace and hope and joy 
 of the soul of man. 
 
 Let us inquire a little into this divine utterance. 
 Many treasures must lie hid in such a testimony so 
 spoken. Some of them, however few, we may hope 
 to make sure of as we go. 
 
 "I am the Star." For the moment we take the 
 sentence in this abbreviated form, for it will suggest 
 to us something of the reason for the use of the 
 starry metaphor at all. "I am the Star." Why the 
 Star ? Most certainly the word, with all its radiant 
 beauty, is no mere flight of fancy. Prophecy, not 
 poetry, gives us these last oracles of the Bible. If 
 we need a ready proof, we have only to recall the 
 clause just preceding, "I am the root and offspring 
 of David," words which are heavy with the golden 
 weight of prophecy and prophetic history; part of 
 the long testimony borne by Messiah Himself to the 
 divine nature and structure of those Scriptures which 
 had, as a matter of recorded and verifiable fact, be- 
 gotten the astonishing phenomenon of the definite 
 expectation of His first Advent. In close contact 
 
THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 51 
 
 with that sentence occur the words before us: "I 
 am the Star." Here also, then, is an appeal to the 
 prophets. And among the prophecies in which stars 
 form the symbol there is but one which can be 
 thought to point to Messiah — the prophecy of Ba- 
 laam. Balaam, as he heard "the words of God, 
 and saw the vision of the Almighty,"* had heard of 
 a mysterious Person, or at least a mysterious Power, 
 strong to conquer and to save, and had seen the 
 prospect figured to his soul as a Star, destined in 
 other days to rise from the horizon of Israel. And 
 the belief of the Jewish Church, before and in the 
 lifetime of Jesus, was that the Star of this old pre- 
 diction was the King Messiah. 
 
 No doubt the import of Balaam's words has been 
 variously explained. No doubt the whole doctrine 
 of definitely predictive inspiration has been, and 
 is, laboriously denied. But do we believe that these 
 words of the Apocalypse are themselves a divine 
 reality? Do we believe that both in, and thus 
 after, "the days of His flesh" Jesus undertook not 
 only to teach, but to foretell? And do we believe 
 that He was, and is, all that He claimed to be? 
 Then we have passed the point at which for any 
 a priori reasons we can think it seriously difficult 
 * Num. xxiv. 4, 17. 
 
52 THE BRIGHT AXD MORXIXG STAR. 
 
 to believe that He had been already foretold, how- 
 ever long before, as the Star of Jacob. 
 
 "I am the Star." Prophecy, then, spoke of Mes- 
 siah thus. The word indicated His kingly dignity, 
 touched and glorified with the light of Deity, or 
 of Divinity at least. So the Lord takes it up here. 
 He claims here to be the mystic King, immortal, 
 spiritual, divine; the regal Conqueror, quelling His 
 enemies and possessing His redeemed. This is 
 what appears under other forms in other and earlier 
 passages of the Apocalypse. "He had a name writ- 
 ten, King of kings"; the Lamb is "in the midst 
 of the throne," which is 'the throne of God and 
 of the Lamb." 
 
 But now we look further into the text. It not 
 only claims the ancient prophecy for Jesus as the 
 King of the new Israel; it expands that prophecy, 
 and brings truth out of truth from within it. For 
 the Saviour does not only assert Himself to be the 
 Star, the bright Star; his presentation of the glori- 
 ous metaphor has in it something new and special; 
 "I am the Morning Star." 
 
 Why was not the word "star" left alone in the 
 utterance? In pointing to Messiah as the star, 
 were not the ideas of brilliancy and elevation and 
 all that is ethereal sufficient? No, not sufficient. 
 Messiah Himself so qualifies the word by this one 
 
THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 53 
 
 wonderful epithet as to show Himself as not the 
 King simply, but the King of Morning, around 
 whom gather and shall gather forever all things 
 that belong to tenderest hope and youngest vigor 
 and most cheerful aspiration; such beginnings as 
 shall eternally develop, shall never contract into 
 fixity nor decline. He claims, where He indeed is 
 King, to be the secret of such juvenescence as noth- 
 ing else can ever give to the finite spirit. For His 
 Israel He claims to be the ever-blessed Antithesis to 
 all that has to do with decay and ruin, to all the woes 
 and weakness of melancholy, to all "profitless regrets 
 and longings vain." Not that He bids His follower 
 crush pain and ignore bereavement and forget the 
 past. But He asserts Himself the Master, the King 
 of a future which will far more than make amends 
 for the discipline of the present. And meanwhile, 
 being the Eternal One, He is always so present 
 with His own as to put them already into vital con- 
 nection with that future, and to pour its strength 
 and joy into their life this hour. 
 
 "I am the Morning Star." Such in part is the 
 import of this last testimony of Jesus to Himself. 
 It reminds His happy disciple that the beloved Lord 
 is no mere name of tender recollection, no dear relic 
 of a perished time, to be drawn sometimes in silence 
 from its casket and clasped with the aching fond- 
 
54 THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 
 
 ness and sprinkled with the hot tears of hopeless 
 memory. He is not Hesperus who sets, but Phos- 
 phorus who rises, springing into the sky through the 
 earliest dawn; the pledge of reviving life and grow- 
 ing light and all the energies and all the pleasures 
 of the happy day. And the word speaks of a 
 kind of joy for which the open noon would not be 
 so true a simile. It suggests the joys of hope along 
 with those of fruition; a happiness in which one 
 of the deep elements is always the thought of some- 
 thing yet to be revealed; light with more light to 
 follow, joy to expand into further joy, as the dawn 
 passes into the morning and then into the day. 
 
 We have matter here, then, for some thankful 
 thoughts on the blessings of light and happiness 
 and vigor and hope which are bound up with the 
 true idea of the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 Here we are reminded how remote from melancholy 
 are its principles and its motives. Here, indeed, is 
 One able to guide and enliven and develop the whole 
 of existence for His disciple; not only to prop his 
 dying head, but to animate the fullest energies of 
 his strongest prime; and then again, able with per- 
 sistent grace to be His blessing to the last, shedding 
 a morning light over the decline and shadows of 
 advancing years. 
 
THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 55 
 
 Let us take up some of these aspects of the truth 
 of our text and think awhile over their details. 
 
 i. First, then, we are reminded here that, as "His 
 commandments are not grievous," so the motives 
 He gives to animate His loving follower to obedience 
 are not melancholy. I would not be mistaken. The 
 religion of Jesus Christ is very far from teaching 
 that "there is nothing in God to dread." What 
 language can outdo the terror of the warnings of 
 the Saviour when He speaks of what is, according 
 to Him, the sequel, the necessary sequel, of that 
 wide road on which so many travel ? But this 
 is not to say that His motive principles are 
 things of gloom. It is not melancholy that looks 
 direct at realities and acts upon the view. It is 
 not melancholy to bid us gaze in earnest on the 
 unfathomable mystery, which is also the iron fact, 
 of sin, and tell us without reserve what sin must 
 lead to in the spiritual nature of things. Not to 
 do this would indeed be melancholy, for it would be 
 the reticence of a dreadful iron. But the Lord, 
 who speaks about the abyss, does so that He may 
 speak, with infinite earnestness and the smile of His 
 own welcome, about the rescue and the remedy. 
 And that remedy is no shadowed secret, no nocturnal 
 initiation; it is the morning light of the knowledge 
 of Himself. The life eternal, the destruction of the 
 
56 THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 
 
 second death, is the knowledge of Himself; and to 
 know Him is to live in light indeed. It is to touch 
 a sympathy boundless alike in its tenderness and in 
 its power. It is to deal always and everywhere with 
 One who is not poetic legend, but the central Rock 
 of history. He has proved Himself in the fields of 
 fact to be a reality forever; and He is exercising 
 at this hour in Human experience a personal in- 
 fluence too vast, too manifold, too peculiar, to be 
 explained by any mere memory of recorded and de- 
 parted power. 
 
 He being such, and such being the knowledge of 
 Him, what are in brief His sacred principles for the 
 man who seeks Him ? In their essence, simply these : 
 first to trust Him, then to follow Him. The soul 
 is directed for its repose and its life far from sub- 
 jective bewilderments of thought to things objective 
 altogether, because altogether His, not ours; to the 
 blood of His Cross, to the power of His resurrection. 
 And for its progress, for its hope, it is directed still 
 outward from itself, because still to Him; into the 
 ethereal open air of His will, His possession, His 
 glory. It is called every day and every hour to a 
 surrender of itself to Him; to the daylight reality 
 of a true self-dedication to One who does indeed 
 reserve to Himself the right to be silent when He 
 
THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 57 
 
 pleases, but who has proved Himself worthy of an 
 absolute trust in regard of His perfection of wis- 
 dom and power and love. 
 
 ii. Again, this glorious epithet of the Star of 
 Salvation, this morning-word, reminds us that not 
 for a part only, but for the whole of the earthly 
 course, early as well as late, late as well as early, 
 Jesus Christ is the true light to lighten every man. 
 Not for the sick-room only and for the death-bed is 
 His Gospel good. Let us often thank God that it 
 is good there. Many of us have stood and watched 
 in the face of others all that can be seen of death, 
 perhaps while the very "desire of our eyes" was 
 being taken from us* ; there we have felt a little of 
 the mighty difference between the moment before 
 death and the moment after. Or perhaps our own 
 life, even in its early prime, has hung in the balance, 
 and some of "the powers of the world to come" 
 have touched us through the thin curtain of extrem- 
 est weakness. One religion only will do at such a 
 time: the religion which has really dealt with sin 
 and with death ; the Gospel of a Redeemer who has 
 willed to die beneath the rod of His own law, and 
 has risen again with the keys of the Unseen forever 
 in His hand. 
 
 * Ezek. xxiv. 16. 
 
58 THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 
 
 "Jesus, I cast myself on Thee, 
 
 Mighty and merciful to save; 
 Thou wilt go down to death with me, 
 And gently lay me in the grave." 
 
 There is but one religion which can make such 
 language as this the natural speech of its followers. 
 Let us be glad that there is one. 
 
 But this same religion is not only the last light 
 for dying eyes : it is the star of the morning of even 
 this lower life. There is that in it — or rather in 
 Him who is His own Religion — which is, of all 
 things, fitted to enter with harmonious power into all 
 the confiding joys of childhood, and into all the wide 
 excursions and strong ascents of youthful thought 
 and will. One condition does the Lord propose to 
 the young soul, as to all souls — the condition of 
 submission to Himself. And where, through His 
 grace, that condition, in its true sense, is accepted, 
 there an element essentially of strength and gladness 
 will be found to develop within the life; a cheerful 
 assurance of a companionship most warm and ten- 
 der, because divine, of a vivid sympathy meeting 
 every true need of grief or happiness, of a wisdom 
 which concerns itself with every detail of every day, 
 of an affection to which the best endearments of 
 earth can but point as to their glorious archetype. 
 And above all this, and with it all, there will be the 
 
THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 59 
 
 power of the known presence of an invisible but 
 awful purity, and of the spoken promise — in con- 
 nection with that presence — of a final life of death- 
 less joy. And, without a law of unbending holiness 
 above it, without an immortal hope before it, the 
 gladness of the most youthful heart carries, lurking 
 beneath it, the sure causes of gloom and failure and 
 melancholy and decay. 
 
 Will my brethren who have just entered on their 
 academic course suffer me, in the sincerity of respect- 
 ful earnestness, to point this appeal direct to them? 
 Would you have this new life of yours rich beyond 
 all reckoning in possible happiness and good ? Would 
 you have it not merely safe, but glad, glad with a 
 pleasure which will bear looking into, and fruitful, 
 as it is meant to be, of results full of pleasure for 
 yourselves and others ? The sky for most of you is 
 bright with the morning of this world. Not that 
 many have not already tasted something of the sad- 
 ness of things. Many a man comes up here for his 
 first University term experienced already in loss and 
 sorrow. But these burthens in their fulness cannot 
 yet have come to the most among you, thank God ! 
 and the hope and joy of life prevail. Well, do you 
 really care to perpetuate hope and to make joy im- 
 mortal ? Do you care for that which will be in you 
 a well of youth springing up into the endless youth 
 
6o THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 
 
 of the sons of the Resurrection? Then assure your- 
 selves of Jesus Christ, who is the Morning Star. 
 Acquaint yourselves with Him in that special and 
 definite contact of faith which, finding Him to be 
 Saviour, inevitably also apprehends Him as Friend 
 and as Master. In Him so known you will find 
 that which will lend an immortal brightness to all 
 other things which, being pure, are capable of reflect- 
 ing immortality. You will find in Him an influence 
 which will intensify all just enjoyment and will 
 glorify all healthful knowledge by connecting it with 
 things to come — an influence without which nothing 
 else — no, nothing — can be safe from impurity and 
 decay; no social pleasure, no delights of reason or 
 imagination, no charm of letters or of art. Take 
 up these things and leave your Lord behind, and you 
 will be only carrying your possessions to their bur- 
 ial, with your face to the region of disappointment, 
 weariness and final loss. You will be on your way 
 to find the "hollowness" — on these terms — "of all 
 delight"; to be at length, above all things, tired of 
 your own principles of life and your own tone of 
 thought. But take up these things, as you can, and 
 make sure of your Lord with them, as you may ; re- 
 ceive them and use them for Him, and you are 
 bearing your possessions along the path of life and 
 light and day, straight towards the rich, eternal 
 
THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 61 
 
 issues of all the training, whether of affliction or 
 gladness, through which you pass under the leading 
 of Him who is the Morning Star of the Epiphany 
 of glory. 
 
 iii. In a few short years there may, there must, 
 come over you the sense of an approaching maturity 
 and fixity as to earthly conditions of life and action. 
 You will find, soon or late, that, as to this world, 
 your rate of movement in work and in enjoyment is 
 no longer what it was. But if, indeed, "Christ dwells 
 in your hearts by faith," there will be a charm there 
 which will not only console you under the change, 
 but will glorify it to you. As eternity approaches 
 you will more distinctly see the connexion between 
 it and time. The appointed task, even under the 
 burthen of the failure of outward power, will be 
 met by you as those only can meet it who know that 
 all things are links in the indissoluble plan of an 
 eternal Friend, and that the veil is already parting 
 which shuts out for a season the open view of the 
 perfection and acceptability of all His will. 
 
 Grace can work strange and beautiful contradic- 
 tions to the natural decay of our sense of enjoyment 
 of external things. I know of one whose life had 
 been spent in a city rich with splendid monuments 
 of the past, and it had been a life of dull indifference 
 to all things noble and fair. But his Redeemer at 
 
62 THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 
 
 length became a reality to the man, who then said 
 that never before had he seen the beauty and grand- 
 eur of the place where he had lived so long. They 
 had never truly come to his perception — till he dis- 
 covered the light of "the love of God which is in 
 Christ Jesus our Lord." 
 
 So we have traced a little way some of the sug- 
 gestions of this heavenly utterance. We have re- 
 membered the divine, the dear Redeemer, whose 
 Gospel is the very antithesis and antidote to that 
 melancholy which is always akin to perplexity and 
 weakness. We have seen in Him the true Secret for 
 a perfect security and perpetuity in the days of life's 
 full vigor, and then as the Revealer of that glorious 
 continuity of time with eternity which keeps the can- 
 cer of despondency out of our earthly maturity and 
 decline. 
 
 May we not, in conclusion, move a step further, 
 and find here a promise which is concerned also im- 
 mediately with the heavenly world itself? He who 
 here calls himself the Star is elsewhere called the 
 Sun.* We might think that he speaks here as, in a 
 certain sense, His own forerunner — the Firstborn 
 from the dead, whose own resurrection is the herald- 
 ing of His own final triumph. But it seems truer 
 to the analogy of His other metaphoric titles to view 
 * Mai. iv. 2. 
 
THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR. 63 
 
 this designation as belonging properly not to any 
 passing phase of His majesty, but to its essence for 
 ever. What elsewhere He claims to be, that in per- 
 petuity He is. On the Throne, as truly as on the 
 Cross. He is still the Lamb.* In the fields of 
 heaven He is still the Shepherd, "leading His flock 
 to the living fountains of water. "f And surely 
 in the upper skies He will likewise be for ever the 
 Star of Morning ; the eternal Pledge of a life which 
 will be forever young, of energies which will accu- 
 mulate without end, of a service before the throne 
 which will always deepen in its ardor and its tri- 
 umph, of discoveries in the knowledge of the Eternal 
 and His love which will carry the experience of the 
 Blessed from glory on to glory in a succession which 
 can never close. 
 
 Avidi et semper pleni, quod habent desiderant. 
 
 "At Thy right hand there are pleasures for ever- 
 more." 
 
 "Ever filled and ever seeking, what they have they still desire ; 
 Hunger there shall fret them never, nor satiety shall tire; 
 Still enjoying whilst aspiring, in their joy they still aspire."t 
 
 * Rev. vii. 17. t Rev. vii. 17. 
 
 t From the Latin of Damiani (eleventh century), translated 
 in "Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family." 
 
IV 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER AND ITS POSSES- 
 SIONS—I 
 
 Preached in the University Church, Cambridge, at the opening 
 of the Academic Year. 
 
 "Ye are not your own." — i Cor. vi. 19. 
 "All things are yours." — 1 Cor. iii. 21. 
 
 To-day, and again a week hence, I am called to this 
 pulpit to address my brethren in our Master's name. 
 Some continuity between the two occasions seems 
 desirable, and we shall find it in the contrasted mes- 
 sages of my double text, in its "not your own" and 
 its "all things yours." I read the two together to- 
 day, and shall do so again next Sunday ; we shall be 
 reminded thus that under the contrast, under the 
 contradiction, lies a strong connection. The "not 
 your own" and the "all things yours" are not only 
 statements, both true, but truths which act and react 
 on one another, "unto life eternal." But we will 
 also, in some sort, take the two apart for study. To- 
 day our main attention shall be given to "Ye are not 
 your own." 
 
 "Ye are not your own." And who are "ye"? All 
 bearers of the Christian name. First, of course, in 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— I. 65 
 
 the immediate intention of the passage, the members 
 of the mission Church at Corinth, about the year 57 
 of our Lord ; but then also, of course, all who succeed 
 them in their Christian position, therefore ourselves 
 to-day. It is not an inner and selected circle only ; 
 that is not the thought here. There is place indeed, 
 momentous place, for that view of things ; but that 
 place is not here. To the baptized man as such, 
 taken on his profession, to the rank and file of the 
 community, taken on their profession, as much as to 
 the most advanced and exalted of their leaders and 
 exemplars, this word was spoken then, "Ye are not 
 your own." And it is spoken so to-day. 
 
 I emphasize this manifest fact in order to be as 
 practical as possible in approaching, for myself and 
 my brethren, the conscience and the will. Too 
 often we are tempted, perhaps without any explicit 
 avowal to ourselves that we are doing so, to relegate 
 the really searching demands of the Gospel to the 
 full obedience, not of all Christians, but of some. 
 The most diverse religious tenets may give occasion 
 for such thoughts, or may seem to lend them an 
 excuse. They may be colored by convictions upon 
 the divine election ; or they may be connected with 
 a theory that in Christianity there is an allowed 
 lower level for the multitude, and a reservation of 
 "counsels of perfection" for the few. But theory has 
 
66 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 often little or nothing to do with the matter — it is 
 the subtle error of the will. The man hesitates or 
 declines to own that the claims of Jesus Christ are 
 impartial upon all who bear the Christian name, 
 because, whatever his opinions, he does not like the 
 claims. 
 
 "What, then ! Is this meant seriously and indeed ? 
 Am I only a piece of personal property after all? 
 I am quite ready to own an environment of obligation 
 around me. I have no wish to revolt, certainly not 
 theoretically to revolt, against a large range of du- 
 ties which I acknowledge as much as you do — duties 
 of truthfulness, duties of human kindness, duties of 
 reverence and worship toward the Unseen. I rec- 
 ognize the fact and mystery of 7 ought' in many 
 matters outside these. I do not claim to float in 
 vacuo, and to live merely at my pleasure, as regards 
 the use of my time and of my money, and the disci- 
 pline of my mind, with a view to an employment 
 of it for which somehow I am responsible. To be, 
 so to speak, a constitutional subject under a moder- 
 ate government of duty, reasonably to consider other 
 people in the concrete, and to own myself in a gen- 
 eral way responsible in the abstract — this is as it 
 should be. But you tell me much more than this. 
 You affirm that I, not only my surroundings and 
 certain relations and obligations which they generate, 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— I. 67 
 
 but I, am 'not my own. 7 I am willing, standing at 
 the center, to treat with respect the circumference 
 and its contents. But your words invade the center ; 
 they seize on me, they dare to describe me as a pur- 
 chase, as a possession, as the implement of another's 
 centripetal will. They label me a bondman, a slave — 
 abhorrent word! — no free contracting party who 
 may, and who will, be loyal within his rights, but 
 one who has no rights at all, in respect of his being 
 not his own. If you mean what you say, you mean 
 for me immensely much. You throw the lien of this 
 tremendous ownership over my whole being, over 
 my whole time, over my whole possessions. The 
 logic of such claims goes inexorably far. If I am 
 purchased, all that is contingent upon me goes with 
 the bargain. The slave of old could own nothing, 
 for he was owned ; his clothes and tools, as well as 
 his body, belonged absolutely to his buyer. So, ac- 
 cording to you, all that goes with me, all that is 
 thrown in along with me, is not my own ; for / am 
 torn from my center, and given over in to to to an- 
 other's hands. It is a hard saying; who can hear it?" 
 
 My brethren, I have attempted to report, as it 
 were, the protests, perhaps the avowed and energetic 
 protests, of many a human heart. I am supposing, 
 not what we should popularly call a bad case. This 
 is not a man definitely resolved on wrong, or stupidly 
 
68 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 insensible to the cry of conscience — a life which has 
 "altogether broken the yoke and burst the bonds." 
 Here rather is one who would claim, and justly, 
 much of our respect and our regard. It is a char- 
 acter largely attentive to common duties, perhaps 
 strongly attached to the high idea of duty in a cer- 
 tain valuable degree; a life from which we might 
 conceivably draw useful and even inspiring sugges- 
 tions, as we watch the probity and the kindliness, 
 and listen to the honest utterances of good-sense 
 and generous feeling. But even in face of such a 
 life, I do claim, not the less but the more because of 
 its conditions and of its protests, that our Lord 
 Jesus Christ and His Apostles altogether refuse to 
 rest content with the position. They do affirm — 
 He does affirm — that this man, all the while, is, in 
 fact, not his own; he is "bought, with a price." They 
 do say that "Christ died, and rose, and revived," 
 not only to shower upon this man benignant gifts, as 
 indeed He did, but also to be his autocratic Lord, 
 whether he is dead or living. They do uncompro- 
 misingly inform him that his true position, in respect 
 of his Redeemer, includes in it — deep within it, at its 
 center, at its heart — the relation of the implement 
 to the artificer, of the bondman to the owner, of the 
 limb to the will. They will not let him rest in a 
 dream of constitutional and contracting loyalty. 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— I. 69 
 
 They tell him that he is not his own, and they make 
 it plain to him in a hundred ways that if the fact 
 stands thus (and the Cross and the Resurrection are 
 their immediate evidence that it does), then the only 
 ultimate and adequate rest and Tightness for the 
 man is to assent and consent cordially to the fact. 
 Is the branch for the tree? Its life and freedom lie 
 in its absolute cohesion. Is the limb for the body? 
 Dislocate it, and it is in misery; amputate it, and it 
 is in corruption. Set it, and let it be employed in its 
 articulated subjection; it lives, it glows, it plays, as 
 it works, in a perfect life. 
 
 "/ belong." This is one of the great primal watch- 
 words of the Christian life. May they not all be 
 reduced in the last resort to two — "I believe, I be- 
 long"? "I believe," receiving my Redeemer in His 
 love and glory; "I belong," giving myself to Him. 
 Omit the one, omit the other, and you have a half 
 Christianity — "another Gospel, which is not an- 
 other." Confess them both, in the presence of God, 
 and before the face of man in the realities of life, 
 and Christ shall form Himself and shall glorify 
 Himself in you. 
 
 We have already begun to remind ourselves, with 
 that sort of reminder which only puts into order the 
 well-known contents of the mind, that the stern 
 watchword is, after all, pregnant of liberty and rest ; 
 
70 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 for we have already been passing from the thought 
 of who he is who is not his own, into the recollec- 
 tion of who He is whose own He is. We might 
 have lingered longer upon the other aspects. It 
 might have been well, did time serve us, to spread 
 out much larger, and think over much more in de- 
 tail the awful, the sacred, the infinitely salutary 
 truth of the duty of surrender. We might have dis- 
 cussed awhile the abstract fitness of the creature's 
 consent to its totally dependent and obliged relation 
 to the Creator, the strict impossibility of its being 
 right within itself till it is right in its internal atti- 
 tude towards Him. But if we would see the glory 
 of God so as to live and to love, we must make haste 
 to see it "in the face of Jesus Christ." In Him — 
 blessed be His name! — eternal Right draws near, 
 and, never for a moment losing its pure majesty, 
 transfigures itself with a wonderful smile into eternal 
 Love. In Jesus Christ duty (no longer a mere sub- 
 lime abstraction) is seen from one view-point dei- 
 fied, from another incarnate. It comes to you, in 
 Him, not only to command but to embrace. It is 
 personified in Him who is at once infinitely the 
 Righteous, and also the Propitiation for your sins.* 
 You hear of "claims," the claims of the Maker upon 
 His work, of the Cause upon His effect. It is well, 
 * i John iii. 2. 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— I. 71 
 
 but it is dark; it is cold, with the cold of mountain 
 summits beneath the stars; but you find that those 
 claims are the claims of the Lamb that was slain — 
 they are the claims of the Man of Sorrows. Their 
 Bearer has a heart, and a heart that was broken — 
 "for us men and for our salvation." He comes in- 
 deed to say to you, with unfaltering and unreserved 
 absoluteness, meaning every syllable as He says it, 
 that you are not your own. His hand opens itself to 
 clasp, to grasp, to use the being which He bought 
 so dear. And it is a hand awful with omnipotence ; 
 it might crush what it holds even into annihilation. 
 But behold the face, and in it see the will, the love, 
 the heart ! To that heart belongs that hand, and you 
 know, as you surrender yourself to its divine te- 
 nacity, that it will hold you solely for purposes which 
 are good and beautiful in the sight of a wisdom 
 which is only the all-seeing eyes of a love which 
 eternally passes knowledge, even the knowledge of 
 the human heart. 
 
 Holy Fenelon, in the twenty-second of his "Re- 
 flections for a Month," quoting and commenting on 
 a verse of Ecclesiasticus, "How great is the loving 
 kindness of the Lord our God, and His compassion 
 unto such as turn unto Him,"* writes thus : "Why 
 do we delay to cast ourselves into the depth of this 
 * Ecclus. xvii. 29. 
 
72 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 abyss ? The more we lose ourselves therein, in faith 
 and love, the safer we are. Let us give ourselves up 
 to God without reserve or apprehension of danger. 
 He will love us, and make us to love Him, and that 
 Hove, increasing daily, shall produce in us all other 
 virtues. He alone shall fill our heart, which the 
 world has agitated and intoxicated, but could never 
 fill ; He will take nothing from us but what makes us 
 unhappy; He will alter perhaps little in our actions" 
 (leaving, he doubtless means, the path of daily duty 
 unaltered externally), "and only correct the motive 
 of them by making them all to be referred to Him- 
 self. Then the most ordinary and seemingly indif- 
 ferent doings shall become exercises of virtue, 
 sources of consolation. Then we shall cheerfully 
 behold death approach as the beginning of life im- 
 mortal, and, as St. Paul speaks, 'We shall not be 
 unclothed but clothed upon, that mortality may be 
 swallowed up of life.' " 
 
 Even so. The claim is infinitely right. The 
 Claiment is the Lord who died for you and rose 
 again; who loved you and gave Himself for you; 
 whose insistence upon your surrender is but the 
 issue of an affection infinitely wonderful and full of 
 eternal promises. Wherefore, without a fear — for 
 nothing is more safe, more happy, as nothing is 
 more right — "present yourselves unto God, as those 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.—!. 73 
 
 who are alive from the dead."* Assent and consent, 
 at the feet of Jesus Christ, or rather, upon His heart, 
 to the fact that "we are not our own." 
 
 I speak to-day in this honored place to some who 
 are at the threshold of their Cambridge life. You are 
 just touching the verge of those three years or so of 
 early manhood which are like no other years, whose 
 imprint must be left on all after-time for gain or 
 loss — perhaps for glorious gain, perhaps for fatal 
 loss. My friends and brethren, we who have known 
 and loved Cambridge for years and years, bid our 
 welcome to every new generation with an always 
 deepening emotion. We know more and more, as 
 we live here, what, for those who join us, for those 
 who will soon succeed us, this place can be, in its 
 double grandeur as a school of learning and a school 
 of life. And in order that you may get not less out 
 of Cambridge, but more; that you may reap the 
 heaviest and the richest harvest, social, intellectual 
 and moral, from the field you are free of now ; that 
 you may be to the utmost and know to the utmost 
 and to the utmost be capacitated here, in the sense of 
 all that is true and wholesome and of good report 
 and serviceable to your generation — we beseech you 
 to remember the fact that you are not your own. I 
 am not here to deliver a studied homily upon either 
 * Rom. vi. 13. 
 
74 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 the perils or the splendid opportunities of Univer- 
 sity life; but I am here to appeal, in my Lord's 
 name, and as man to men, to any who shall care 
 to listen; to appeal to them to be sure that, alike 
 for strength and safety, for purity and pleasure, for 
 real work and real rest, for luminous and whole- 
 some insight into all true knowledge, for the opening 
 of the largest and deepest sympathies between heart 
 and heart, there is no secret like the daily, the hourly, 
 recognition of the fact, "I am not my own." 
 
 The directions and applications of it will vary in- 
 definitely, of course, with your varieties of charac- 
 ter, calling and surroundings. To the man of social 
 gift or aptitude, in whatever form, it will be a 
 continual reminder, delicate but intense in its per- 
 sistency, on the one hand, not to let his hours drift 
 and perish in gregarious idleness; on the other, to 
 understand that the golden talent of the faculty of 
 attraction and contact can be used every day by 
 your Lord, if you remember that you are never, 
 anywhere, your own. 
 
 The man conscious that mind is strong within 
 him by the gift of God, resolved for his part to 
 maintain the great studious traditions of this place, 
 in whatever walk of knowledge and thought, will 
 find in his assent to the ownership of Jesus Christ 
 not only the guidance and the caution, but the 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS. — I. 
 
 stimulus and, if I may so say, the clarification, of 
 his intellectual powers. You belong to Him Who 
 is Himself the primal Wisdom, whose "delights 
 were" (and are) "with the sons of men."* "In Him 
 are hid all the treasures of knowledge;" "In Him 
 all things," visible, invisible, material, mental, 
 spiritual, "consist."t In Jesus Christ is space 
 enough for the whole sphere of knowledge to re- 
 volve, with all its constellations. They who learn 
 and who think "in Him," shall indeed find, with 
 Newton, with Sedgwick, with Adams, Lightfoot, 
 Maxwell, Babington, that to serve Him is at once 
 security and perfect freedom, in the world of mind 
 as in the world of soul. 
 
 The man who sees himself, as he thinks, entrusted 
 with one talent only (perhaps he hardly dares num- 
 ber even one), will find in the recognized fact that 
 he belongs to Jesus Christ, the gold of heaven, al- 
 ready transmuting everything into itself. "The 
 common round, the daily task," met in Jesus Christ ; 
 the trust faithfully fulfilled, for His sake; the not 
 quite congenial study loyally pursued as duty; the 
 life of self-respectful habit; the unobtrusive but 
 distinct line of Christian obedience; the modest, 
 cheerful, reverent confession of the Redeemer's 
 name — here is an ideal which the man who just 
 * Prov. viii. 31. t Col. i. 10. 
 
76 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 knows he is not his own, but that Christ is his, may 
 realize every hour. And surely, so Scripture indi- 
 cates,* it is over lives like these that the heavenly 
 principalities bend with wonder, looking to see 
 "the manifold wisdom of God" worked out in our 
 mortal state. 
 
 And the man who glows with love, perhaps with 
 newborn love, to Him who has saved him, let me 
 say one word more to him about this life controlled 
 and quickened by the watchword, "Not your own." 
 The holy recollection will always animate you in 
 your spiritual activities. You will be impelled by 
 it to pray, and to watch, and to act, so that other 
 lives may find what you have found, or what, rather, 
 has found you. But your watchword will always 
 chasten you and control you. The same power which 
 keeps always burning the altar-fire of sacred love 
 will quench the false flames of a zeal that forgets 
 humility, an energy that despises loyalty, an en- 
 thusiasm that neglects duty. It will impel you in the 
 line, not of least resistance but of most fidelity; it 
 will consecrate for you the rule of discipline ; it will 
 glorify for you, with the will of God, your intellect- 
 ual labor, and its results ; it will make the class-list 
 and the degree important to you with an ambition 
 pure with the thought of God and of His will. Not 
 
 * Eph. iii. 10. 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— I. 77 
 
 to protect self, not to spare it, but because precisely 
 you are not your own, you will "exercise yourselves" 
 in the plainest and most prosaic obligations, in those 
 which on the mere surface may seem the least spirit- 
 ual of all, "to have always a conscience void of of- 
 fense both towards God and towards man." 
 
 Happy the life here which takes definitely the 
 motto "I belong — I am not my own ;" happy till over 
 its grave at length is written the apostolic epitaph : 
 "Having served his own generation by the will of 
 God, he fell asleep." That last word cannot be 
 uttered today without one reverent tribute to the 
 illustrious name* just transferred from our aca- 
 demical registers to the long roll of the departed. 
 Eminent, renowned, as a great medical man, con- 
 summate in the practice of his noble profession, a 
 genuine scientific inquirer and discoverer, a master 
 of wide and manifold knowledge, a teacher of the 
 first order, a leader gifted with that enviable class 
 of genius which knows how to call up, almost to 
 create, the energies of others for the highest ends, 
 brilliant in discourse and conversation, most excel- 
 lent as a friend, Humphry, to the still youthful end 
 of his long life, was emphatically one who "served 
 his own generation," seeking, assuredly, to serve it 
 
 * Professor Sir George Murray Humphry, M.D., F.R.S., 
 died Sept. 24, 1896. 
 
78 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 "by the will of God." And, quite apart from his 
 public energies, no one, I suppose, will ever know 
 all the unobtrusive and generous good he did behind 
 them — all the kindness, all the painstaking sympathy, 
 all the bounty where he heardiof need. Poor enough 
 is this eulogy; but it was impossible not to pronounce 
 it over the grave of one whose name and form have 
 been so familiar, so conspicuous here, through much 
 more than all my own Cambridge life rb y ap ytpas iari 
 
 0a vbvrviv. 
 
 Meantime ours is still the pathway, not yet the 
 goal. And for us, in the name of our Redeemer, 
 along the pathway and for the goal, the inmost 
 watchword must still be this, "Ye are not your own." 
 
V 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER AND ITS POSSES- 
 SIONS— II 
 
 Preached in the University Church, Cambridge 
 
 "Ye are not your own." — i Cor. vi. 19. 
 "All things are yours." — 1 Cor. iii. 21. 
 
 We gave our thoughts last Sunday to the former 
 limb of this double text. Nearly from first to last 
 we were occupied with "Ye are not your own," that 
 watchword of obligation, that oracle of surrender. 
 It claims for our Lord Jesus Christ nothing less 
 than ourselves; it invades the very center of the life, 
 and proclaims not the surroundings and the condi- 
 tions only, but the man, to be the property of the 
 Redeemer. "I belong, henceforth, not unto myself, 
 but unto Him who died for me and rose again." 
 
 We took note already last week of another side of 
 things. We remembered that under the strictness 
 and exigency of "not your own" there lies latent a 
 glorious world of liberty and life, the life of God in 
 man. This comes powerfully out in the context of 
 1 Cor. vi. What are the words which just precede 
 the "Ye are not your own" ? They are the assurance 
 
 79 
 
8o 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 to the Christian that "his body is the temple of the 
 Holy Ghost, which he has of God;" that he "is 
 joined unto the Lord, one spirit." He is property 
 indeed, in a sense the most practical and prosaic; 
 he is "bought, with a price." For St. Paul, no words 
 are too plain to urge that thought home. He knows 
 none of the dread felt by some theologians of what 
 they are pleased to call a commercial Gospel. 
 "Bought," "bought with a price," "bought out from 
 the curse of the law," "purchased with His own 
 blood" — such phrases, as you all know, lie at the 
 very heart of the Pauline message. But then, they 
 are vivified and glorified by the other elements of it. 
 The being is possessed as property; but he is also 
 possessed as living limb. Not only are his Lord's 
 rights over him; his Lord's life is in him. Not only 
 is he infinitely bound to do his Redeemer's will ; he 
 is so related to his Redeemer that he is wonderfully 
 empowered to do it; and his law of liberty is just 
 this — to do His will. 
 
 One pause of thought more before we leave last 
 Sunday's special theme, and take up the second 
 message of our text. The pause is for a reason per- 
 fectly practical. I stay to remind you why just 
 there, in that close of i Cor. vi., St. Paul says that 
 "you are not your own." He is not talking into the 
 air. He has a human heart in view. He is remind- 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— II. 81 
 
 ing a desperately tempted man in old Corinth — Cor- 
 inth with its worldly glitter and its seething vice — 
 how not to sin. There is the Corinthian convert — 
 the recent convert. His heathen heredity is in him, 
 his old bad associations are around him. Is it possible 
 for that man not to sin, not to fall, not to slide back 
 into the mire again, and float down the black river? 
 Yes, it is. But how? Not, in the judgment of the 
 Apostle, by any mere inculcation of "you ought" 
 and "you ought not ;" not by any mere words, how- 
 ever they may burn, upon the shame of wrong and 
 the eternal duty and beauty of right, of purity; no, 
 but by the applied power of God. It can be done, by 
 throwing at once into the very will and soul all the 
 force, all the weight, all the life, of the inmost and 
 most astonishing Gospel. It can be done, "in the 
 name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our 
 God." So he tells the sinful man, in the thick of 
 temptation, that he, having fled to Christ, is one 
 with Christ; he is "one spirit" with Christ; his 
 very body is "the temple" of the Holy One; he "is 
 joined to the Lord."* Let him say all this to him- 
 self, as fact. Let him say all this to the tempter, to 
 his face, as fact. So the tempted one shall "do 
 valiantly," and only so. He is weak indeed ; but 
 his Lord is present with him, is dwelling in him, in 
 * i Cor. vi. 17. 
 
82 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 every sense is in possession of him; and He "shall 
 tread down our enemies." In this war the Ark must 
 be in the battle, and nothing less than the Ark. 
 Jesus Christ Himself — for you, in you — must be 
 your victory, your triumph against the devil, the 
 world and the flesh. 
 
 "Not me the dark foe fears at all, 
 
 But hid in Thee I take the field; 
 Now at my feet the mighty fall, 
 
 For Thou hast bid them yield." 
 
 But it is time to come direct to that second mem- 
 ber of the text which I reserved for our particular 
 thought today: "All things are yours." What does 
 this mean? 
 
 It is worth our while first to recall something of 
 what it does not mean. It does not mean license, 
 the parody and libel of liberty. It does not mean 
 selfishness, the mind which grasps or which with- 
 holds at the dictate of self-will; this is not posses- 
 sion, but theft ; this, in its effect, is nothing but the 
 hard bondage and poverty of the being. It does 
 not mean, God knoweth, the faintest shadow of a 
 slur over moral distinctions — the bad dream that 
 you can be so spiritual as to be, even for one fraction 
 of a moment, emancipated from conscience; the 
 lying whisper that you shall not surely die of per- 
 mitted sin, because Christ died for you. 
 
 It does not mean a relaxation of the divine rule 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— II. 83 
 
 of self-sacrifice; let us be sure of this. It is not 
 spoken in order to throw the halo of the Gospel over 
 a life which, professing godliness, is yet secretly, 
 perhaps almost unconsciously, making itself as com- 
 fortable as possible for its own sake. It is not spoken 
 to help us to minimize the call to bear the cross, and 
 to serve the Lord in others, while we multiply and 
 magnify excuses for indulgences and enjoyments 
 which, however cultivated and refined, terminate in 
 ourselves. The words are not given us to insinuate 
 that, if we will but say "Lord, Lord," with a certain 
 fervbr, we may live as those who think that a man's 
 "life" does "consist in the abundance of the things 
 which he possesseth." 
 
 No, it cannot be so; we know that it cannot be. 
 The whole Law, and the whole Gospel, both look 
 the other way. They both equally belie reasonings 
 from "All things are yours" which only mean the 
 life of self come back again to the house left "empty, 
 swept and garnished." The solemn context of the 
 text is itself a warning. For what has gone just 
 before? See verse 17, for the stern menace that 
 "if any man defile the temple of God" — that is, 
 himself — "him shall God destroy;" see verse 13, 
 for the prophecy of the day of fire, when "every 
 man's work shall be tested, of what sort it is." And 
 
8 4 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 verse 18 conveys the entreaty not to be deceived 
 by a specious wisdom which prefers the world to 
 God. 
 
 But then, most certainly, the words have a mean- 
 ing, positive and beautiful — "All things are yours." 
 They are spoken indeed to those, and to those only, 
 who are not their own, but their Lord's possession. 
 But they do not merely restate that side of truth. 
 They give its contrast and its complement. They 
 turn the shield quite round, to show its other face — 
 and it is another. "You are not your own" — be sure 
 of that; it is an immovable" fact. "All things are 
 yours" — be sure of that also ; it is meant to carry to 
 you a magnificent message, affirmative, distinctive, 
 altogether its own. 
 
 For explanation and application, let us look first 
 at the near context, and read the short section com- 
 prised in verses 21 to 23 : "Let no man glory in man. 
 For all things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, 
 or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things 
 present, or things to come, all are yours ; and ye are 
 Christ's and Christ is God's." Here is the occasion 
 , here is the reason of the words. The Corinthians, 
 you remember, had been forgetting in a particular 
 way the grandeur of their direct, immediate, spirit- 
 ual relation to God in Christ. The'y had lost sight 
 in one quarter of what it was to be His own. They 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— II. 85 
 
 had been attaching themselves to human leaders, as 
 such, in a way which obscured their own wonderful 
 connection with the Eternal Love. They had given 
 themselves over to a party spirit, a divided and 
 vehement partisanship, which befitted rather the tools 
 of rival chiefs in a secular struggle than those for 
 whom even Apostles and Prophets existed as only 
 servants of the saints of God. Now, above this mis- 
 erable trouble they were to rise, in the recollection 
 of the fact that, because God in Christ had annexed 
 them directly to Himself, God in Christ was directly 
 concerned to make everything combine for their 
 fullest and most perfect good. They were not a set 
 of cliques ; they were the Family of God. Then they 
 had something better to do than to support or to ac- 
 claim a leader and lift him upon a pedestal. If he 
 was indeed a man sent from God, he was given to 
 them, not they to him. Taken as believers, they 
 all were the children for whom their Father would 
 do anything. Taken as a messenger, even an Apostle 
 was but a servant, ordered to do his uttermost for 
 them. Were they the Lord's, given to Him, with all 
 they had ? Then, by the law of divine relation, the 
 Lord, with all Fie .had, was theirs, given to them. 
 And He had all things. So all things, being His, 
 were theirs. 
 
 We have here at once a fact full of grace and 
 
86 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 glory. And it is lifted far above place and time. 
 Now as then, now and for ever, the man who be- 
 longs to Christ in truth, assenting from the soul to 
 the ownership of his Redeemer, is out and out His 
 property. But he is also, and at the same moment, 
 and with equal reality, His brother. In that deep 
 and inmost sense of the terms on which Scripture 
 dwells with inexhaustible and loving recurrence, he 
 is "a child of God." And his Father will do any- 
 thing for him. Nothing of his Father's resources 
 shall be grudged to him. Wisdom and love may, 
 and will, sort and sift, and in that sense limit the 
 things which shall be put actually into the child's 
 hands. But the whole wealth of the great home is 
 his, in the sense that he is the child for whom any- 
 thing shall be done. On him no resources are too 
 great to spend. His utmost good is watched for, 
 always and everywhere. His Father delights ex- 
 ceedingly to meet his wishes, and limits the meeting 
 of them only by the interests of the child; and He 
 has made those interests identical with His own. 
 
 Is not this a thought, let me rather say a fact, 
 with which every Christian man is to look around 
 and find life transfigured? "My Lord, my Father, 
 I am ever with Thee, and all that Thou hast is mine. 
 Thou hast put much actually into my hands, out of 
 Thy treasuries. I have but to open my eyes and 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— II. 87 
 
 count a few of Thy blessings, and they begin to 
 crowd and multiply upon my view. But behind 
 them lies the immeasurable wealth always latent in 
 the fact that Thou art mine, that Thou art devoted 
 to me. Not in dream or poem, but in 'a sober cer- 
 tainty of waking bliss,' I may confidently say this. 
 Thou art devoted to me. Giver of Thine own Son, 
 wilt Thou not, dost Thou not, with Him also freely 
 give me all things ?* All is mine ; some of the all is 
 in my hands, the rest in trust with Thee." 
 
 Adolphe Monod, great saint, great teacher, great 
 sufferer, lying on a premature couch of anguish and 
 death, forty years ago, at Paris, collected in his bed- 
 chamber, Sunday by Sunday, a little congregation of 
 friends ; Guizot was sometimes of the number. There 
 he addressed them, like Standfast in the Pilgrim's 
 Progress, as from the very waters of the last river, 
 speaking always on his lifelong theme, Jesus Christ. 
 The pathetic series of these Adieux a ses Amis et a 
 I'Eglise was gathered after his death into a volume. 
 Late in its pages comes a discourse with the title, All 
 in Jesus Christ. From this let me quote a few sen- 
 tences ; they deal with our theme of this afternoon : 
 "Be it wisdom, be it light, be it power, be it victory 
 over sin, be it a matter of this world or of the world 
 to come, all is in Christ. Having Christ, we have all 
 * Rom. viii. 32. 
 
88 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 things ; bereft of Christ, we have alsolutely nothing. 
 'All things are yours, and you are Christ's, and 
 Christ is God's.' Well, then, what is the result for 
 me ? I am poor, it may be. Yet all the fortunes of 
 this world are mine ; for they are Christ's, who Him- 
 self is God's, and who could easily give them all to 
 me, with Himself, if they would serve my interests. 
 The whole world, with all its glories, with all its 
 power, belongs to me; for it belongs to my Father, 
 who will give it me to-morrow, and could give it me 
 to-day, if that were good for me. I am very ill, it 
 may be. Yet health is mine, strength is mine, com- 
 fort is mine, a perfect enjoyment of all the blessings 
 of life is mine; for all this belongs to Christ, who 
 belongs to God, and who disposes of it as He will. If 
 He withholds these things from me to-day, for a 
 fleeting moment, swift as the shuttle in the loom, it 
 is for reasons wholly of His own ; it is because these 
 pains and this bitterness conceal a benediction worth 
 more to me than the health so precious, than the com- 
 fort so delightful. ... I challenge you to find 
 a thing of which I cannot say : 'This is my Father's ; 
 therefore it is mine; if He withholds it to-day, He 
 will give it me to-morrow.' I trust myself to His 
 love. All is mine, if I am His." 
 
 Let us, too, with the saintly Parisian pastor, look 
 at life, at real life, from this transcendent yet abso- 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— II. 89 
 
 lutely practical point of view. There is another side 
 of the message, as we will presently remember. 
 There is wonderfully opened to you in Jesus Christ 
 a secret of intense enjoyment, a delightful sense of 
 possession, for the sunny fields and morning hours 
 of life. But you will approach that fact the better 
 for a firm recollection first, that life is not all sun- 
 shine; and that is by no means your first business 
 to make it as comfortable as you can for yourself, 
 but to "gird up the loins of your mind" to do and to 
 bear and to "hope to the end ;"* and then that over 
 life thus considered the Lord can cast the glory of 
 the fact that in Him all things are yours. In Him 
 you possess the dominate circumstance ; you are not 
 its victim but its employer. In Him, in the ultimate 
 truth of the matter, you are lifted out of disappoint- 
 ment and its power. You may seem to sink, to 
 faint, to fail ; you may wear out ; you may be thrown 
 aside; your "purposes," as you see them, may be 
 "broken off." But are you Christ's? Are you a 
 limb of His body ? Are you the willing implement 
 of His will ? Then you are being somehow manipu- 
 lated and used by One who eternally succeeds, and 
 you, too, are successful so. It was thus that St. 
 Paul himself, in his last prison, was able to dictate 
 the words: "Nevertheless I am not ashamed;"! I 
 *l Pet. i. 13. t2 Tim. i. 12. 
 
9o 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 am not disappointed. From other points of sight 
 than this he might well be a disappointed man. 
 Taken apart from Christ, he was failing amidst a 
 whole world of failures; it looked as if his life's 
 work were being wrecked and extinguished by the 
 tremendous world-power, awakened to fear and 
 anger ; his teaching was travestied or discredited in 
 the Church; his heart's affections were lacerated; 
 himself by all men was forsaken. But he "knew 
 whom he had believed." He was in the hands of 
 Jesus Christ, and he knew it. And there he was in- 
 vulnerable to disappointment, in his all-seeing and 
 all-controlling Lord. 
 
 It is only when you are really armed in Christ for 
 the shocks and storms of life that you are really safe 
 to remember that you are enabled in Christ for a 
 double enjoyment of its joys. But now, it is even so 
 — you are so enabled. I dare with confidence to 
 affirm that the Christian believer, surrendered to his 
 Lord and at rest in Him, is, in a sense perfectly 
 human, however much it is also divine, the hap- 
 piest, the most cheerful man. This is natural ; it is as 
 it should be. It is for him alone that Humanity 
 wears all its greatness and Nature shines with all 
 her glory. More and more, as the world rolls on 
 and human insight grows with watching, a per- 
 vading melancholy threatens the heart which ob- 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— II. 
 
 serves and tastes, but is not in Jesus Christ. For 
 what is there, out of Him, and away from the cer- 
 tainties in Him of a life eternal, which is not already 
 touched by the shadows of an ultimate and illimit- 
 able death? But in Christ you see man redeemed, 
 and man's life invested in Him with a boundless 
 present interest, and with possibilities "unspeakable 
 and full of glory." In Christ, the Cause and Key- 
 stone of creation,* man sees the Universe at last 
 warm and living with a Soul. He loves the Artificer 
 in the Work; he understands and feels the Heart 
 within the Vesture, f To him the events of the day 
 are pregnant with the providence of his Father and 
 of his eternal Brother, and this gives them at once 
 a dignity and a hope unknown elsewhere. To him 
 the mountain and the forest, the flood and the cloud, 
 are the work, the characteristic handiwork, of his 
 inmost Friend. In Cowper's words, in the "Task," 
 in a passage of the highest order, he 
 
 "Acknowledges with joy 
 His manner, and with rapture tastes his style." 
 
 To him the largest incidents of his path and also 
 the smallest, are not only things to be somehow met ; 
 they are touches and pressures of the Hand which 
 manages everything "for good to them that love 
 God." He can deal with things so seen as more 
 * See Ps. cii. 26. t See Col. i. 16, 17. 
 
92 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 than a spectator. He is a son and heir upon his 
 Father's property. He is concerned; he possesses; 
 he is at home. 
 
 That is a noble sentence in the "Apology" of Aris- 
 tides (Chap, xvi.), where the observer of the Church 
 describes the cheerfulness of primitive Christian life, 
 and, let us add, of primitive Christian death. "As 
 men who know God," he writes, "they ask of Him 
 petitions which are proper for Him to give and for 
 them to receive ; and they thus accomplish the course 
 of their lives. And because they acknowledge the 
 goodnesses of God towards them — lo ! for them 
 there flows forth the beauty that is in the world." 
 
 "Never," said a thoughtful young Cambridge 
 man of a recent generation, "never, till I knew my 
 Lord indeed, did I really see the beauty of branch 
 and foliage in the trees." Yes, Jesus Christ can re- 
 store the loss mourned by the great poet; He can 
 more than "bring us back the hour of splendor in the 
 grass, of glory in the flower." In the Eastern wilder- 
 nesses a beloved friend of my own,* a missionary of 
 the Cross in the most difficult of fields, a man whose 
 inmost instincts ask for the cultured and the beauti- 
 ful (and, as to human arts, ask this now in vain), 
 has found God wonderfully present to him in Nature 
 
 * The Rev. H. Carless, M.A., of Corpus Christi College. He 
 died in the province of Kerman, in Persia, 1898. 
 
AND ITS POSSESSIONS.— II. 93 
 
 — cheering, uplifting, giving company. The con- 
 stellations of the Persian midnight have been alive 
 to him with the smile of his Master. The solitary 
 tree upon the hill, the tuft of flowers beside the up- 
 land track, have taken on them for his eyes a beauty 
 as of Paradise ; the thought of God in them has re- 
 sponded to the life of God in him. 
 
 "Heaven above is softer blue, 
 Earth around is sweeter green; 
 Something lives in every hue 
 Christless eyes had never seen." 
 
 "All things are yours; whether things present or 
 things to come." The one region is yours as truly as 
 the other. To-day is yours; your "to-day," young 
 man, with all its interests, its force, its hopes, with 
 all its contents and development; every step of all 
 the path — ay ! till it enters that eternal future which 
 already casts its solemn radiance upon to-day. "All 
 things are yours, whether life or death." Life is 
 yours, to enjoy heartily, to understand profoundly, 
 to use as your precious possession; for you are its 
 owner, for you are a child of God. And then, death 
 is yours. Wonderful words! — but so they stand, a 
 paradox of blessing. How much it looks as if we 
 rather were death's prey ! But in Christ the veil is 
 lifted, and death is found to be the possession of 
 His servant. The thing may come soon or come 
 
94 
 
 SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 late. It may advance slowly upon you, and in full 
 view ; it may strike you from an ambush, and in the 
 twinkling of an eye, as only last Tuesday, in our 
 midst, it struck an honored life,* and bade us (so 
 soon again after our last bereavement) t lament an- 
 other work cut short, another circle of many friend- 
 ships broken, another heart left desolate. Yet death 
 in Christ, O Christian man, is yours. It is not an 
 accident; it is a gift. It is not a spectre, hideous 
 with the relics of the sepulchre ; it is the Angel of the 
 Presence, stepping from within the eternal tent J to 
 lift its curtain for the believer's entrance in. It is 
 the "silent opener of" that "gate" as to the other 
 side of which we have just this revealed,§ that while 
 life for Christ is real, is happy, is rich, is free, is im- 
 measurably good, "to depart and to be with Christ 
 is far, far better" still. 
 
 *The Rev. F. Pattrick, Tutor of Magdalene College, died 
 very suddenly, October 6, 1896. 
 t See above, p. 46. 
 
 * See Luke xvi. 9. § Phil, i, 23. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE SELF-CONSECRATION OF THE 
 CHRIST 
 
 Preached on Christmas Day, in the University Church, Cam- 
 bridge. 
 
 "Then said He, Lo, I have come to do Thy will, O God." — 
 H£B. x. 9. 
 
 "Then said I, Lo, I have come ; I delight to do Thy will." — 
 Ps. xl. 7, 8. 
 
 I invite you this Christmas afternoon to a sursam 
 corda. Habeamus ad Dominwn; "Let us hold our 
 hearts up unto the Lord ;" let us kneel in recollecting 
 faith at the cradle of the Incarnation; and let us 
 look up from beside it to the heaven of heavens, 
 to ponder a little while that great antecedent to 
 Bethlehem, the Self-Consecration of the Eternal Son 
 to His incarnate life and work. 
 
 This lies here before us in the Scriptures of the 
 text, in the New Testament and in the Old. What 
 was the immediate occasion and impulse to the writ- 
 ing of Psalm xl. I do not ask; no certain answer 
 is even remotely possible. But for all who accept 
 without reserve the interpreting authority of the 
 apostolic Scriptures, it is settled by Hebrews x. that 
 
 95 
 
96 SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 the ultimate purpose of Him who moved the Psalm- 
 ist to write was to reveal to us the thought and in- 
 tent of the Christ Himself, in His will to come into 
 the world. 
 
 The consciousness of the Psalmist may have been 
 this, or it may have been that, as he took up his harp 
 and sung his wonderful song of joy and conflict. 
 There is nothing to entitle us to assert, as if we 
 knew, that his condition was not purely and 
 directly prophetic ; that he did not sing in a rapture 
 of the Spirit, in a state of holy second sight, easily 
 overleaping sense and time. On the other hand 
 there is nothing to entitle us to assert, as if we 
 knew, that such a rapture was then and there upon 
 him. But this we may affirm, if the witness of the 
 Christian Scriptures is adequate for us, that the 
 Psalmist's Inspirer, moving him to utter what he 
 did, meant, ultimately, to speak an oracle concern- 
 ing the King Eternal, the Christ of God. So the 
 Scripture, with both its hands, the prophetic and 
 the apostolic, lifts for us here the veil from no less 
 a secret than this. It discloses to us "the mind that 
 was in Christ Jesus," when, in the eternity which is 
 above our time, He, the Son with the Father, the 
 Son of the Father's love, the Son "beloved before 
 the foundation of the universe," willed to come down 
 and to become flesh. It utters to us the thought 
 
SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 97 
 
 with which He, being true God, elected to be also 
 true Man. It lets us hear His resolve to come and 
 to do the Father's will, in saving us. 
 
 "There, on the heights of primal Deity, 
 Before all worlds, Messiah will'd to part 
 Himself from glory, and in destined time 
 So parted, for us men, descending thence 
 With voice of consecration, 'Lo, I come 
 To do Thy will.' " 
 
 How shall we think aright, how shall we speak, 
 
 of such a thing? Here is a theme, if any, to make 
 
 us remember the vanity of words without the Spirit, 
 
 the paltriness of the tinkling of speech where the 
 
 Lord of love does not give and guide the message. 
 
 But may He, in His great mercy, not leave us alone 
 
 with this matter. Then, and only then, something 
 
 may be attained by our thought which shall indeed 
 
 be His. 
 
 Now, what have we in the whole Book of God 
 more wonderful in its kind than this revelation, 
 given us through the Epistle and the Psalm? It 
 comes with all the holy simplicity characteristic of 
 Scripture. Nothing is intruded here of that imagi- 
 native or rather fanciful detail with which even a 
 Milton can only spoil the theme of the counsels of 
 Heaven : 
 
 "In quibbles angel and archangel join, 
 And God the Father turns a school divine." 
 
98 SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 All is brief and unrestrained, but all is wonderful. 
 We are suffered to overhear eternal Voices speaking 
 to one another upon the Throne. By implication, 
 we hear One call, as if looking for agency and 
 messenger: "Whom shall I send? Who will go?" 
 And then from a height no lower, from a glory no 
 less excellent, Another answers : "Lo, I have come !" 
 The answer sounds in the tone of nothing less than 
 Godhead ; for it is the utterance of an absolute free- 
 will, issuing in action of absolute vonderfulness and 
 merit. But it is an answer also in the tone of sub- 
 ordination : it gives and yields, it speaks a personal 
 surrender to a personal disposal. He who here 
 "comes to do a will" in some sense not His own, is 
 immeasurably free of exterior constraints to sub- 
 mission. But He submits. And in His submission 
 a divine moral fitness strikes perfect harmony with 
 a divine moral freedom. 
 
 What shall we say of the words "O God, 0 my 
 God/' heard as we listen at the sanctuary door? 
 Can it be that even before Incarnation the Coming 
 One could thus address the Sender? Is the eternal 
 Subordination of the Son a warrant for such a 
 thought, under the safeguard of a full concurrent 
 confession of our Redeemer's proper Godhead? It 
 is hard to put the thought into form without running 
 into inferences, or at least associations, which touch 
 
SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 99 
 
 the border of Christian orthodoxy, if they do not 
 cross it. Perhaps we may rather see in the words 
 an anticipation, a wonderful prolepsis, in the divine 
 thought of the Speaker. That thought is consistent. 
 He says not "I go," but "I come/' or more literally, 
 in the Hebrew, "/ have come," as one who is already 
 in the region to which He wills to descend. In the 
 same sense, surely, He says "O my God," as if He 
 had already taken on Him the nature in which He 
 was to be able to say, "We know what we worship/'* 
 and to cry "Eli, Eli" from the Cross. It is the Son, 
 submitting and self-consecrating, even upon the 
 throne. It is God the Son of God, giving there this 
 infinite example of the glory of a holy surrender and 
 service, illustrating with the light unapproachable 
 the bliss and perfect freedom of a true Thy will be 
 done. 
 
 Many an echo from earth has answered that 
 heavenly Voice. One after another, sinful men in 
 their great need have come to the Son of God, to be 
 accepted by Him and united to Him. They have 
 been made one with Him in the double union of 
 righteousness and of life. They have received His 
 merit, the justification which the "Head, once 
 wounded," wrought out for the members. But also 
 they have been filled with His Spirit, the Spirit of 
 * John iv. 24. 
 
ioo SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 the Son, "which they that believe on Him receive" 
 out of His immeasurable fulness. And in the power 
 of that uniting and possessing Spirit they have 
 found, in their complete weakness, capacity to tread, 
 in measure, in His steps. Many a human heart in 
 receiving Christ has experienced as fact what 
 seemed once an incredible, or even a repellent, dream, 
 that it is good to be not our own. It has discovered 
 the blessedness of an unreserved submission, and 
 obedience, and servitude to the will of God; the 
 sober truth of the old confession, Tibi servire est 
 regnare; the strange but genuine joy involved and 
 conveyed in the full acceptance of that rule of life 
 given us by the Apostle, "Whether we live, we live 
 unto the Lord ; and whether we die, we die unto the 
 Lord ; whether we live therefore or die, we die unto 
 the Lord; whether we live therefore or die, we are 
 the Lord's.* Tersteegen's hymn, "O allersusste 
 Gottesville," gives utterance not to his own soul only, 
 but to innumerable others of the past and of this 
 hour: 
 
 "Thou sweet, beloved Will of God, 
 
 My anchor-ground, my fortress-hill, 
 My spirit's silent fair abode — 
 In thee I hide me, and am still." 
 
 Fe'nelon's dying whisper, summing up his life, 
 * Rom. xiv. 8. 
 
SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 101 
 
 Fiat voluntas tua, is not his only, but that of all true 
 
 disciples. Guyon's assurance is as good for us as it 
 
 was for her two centuries ago: 
 
 "Yield to the Lord with simple heart, 
 All that thou hast and all thou art; 
 Renounce all strength but strength divine, 
 And peace shall be for ever thine." 
 
 But these inmost spiritual joys of the Christian, 
 born out of the depth of a true surrender to the will 
 of God, are not original, but derived. They are all 
 descendants, and, as it were, reverberations of that 
 divine and primal joy of the Son when He said, on 
 the throne, in view of His descent: "Lo, I have 
 come, to do Thy will, O My God; I am content to 
 do it; yea, Thy law is within My heart." 
 
 It is a thing indeed for wonder and for worship, 
 to see here the law of holiness and happiness for 
 the disciple found first in its glorious idea within the 
 Godhead itself. The eternal relations of the Holy 
 Trinity make the archetype of all created goodness. 
 Within that secret place where the One is Three 
 and the Three are One, the bliss, the naKapibr^* of 
 Godhead, includes the blessedness of surrender; 
 "I delight to do Thy will." 
 
 As we listen from below to this heavenly colloquy 
 of sending and of submission, the Apostle stands 
 beside us, with his Philippian Letter, and bids us 
 * I Tim. i. 2. 
 
102 SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 read its message, and there learn in solemn detail 
 what this, "Lo, I come," was to be for Him who ut- 
 tered it. We open his second chapter, and we read 
 how "Christ Jesus looked not upon His own things, 
 but upon the things of others." "Being as He was 
 in the form of God" — iv p. 0 p<pv GeoO inr&p X w — in the 
 reality and glory of the Eternal Nature, "He counted 
 it not a plunderer's spoil, His equality with God 
 He did not deal with that supreme and rightful Dig- 
 nity as a thing to be used jealousy and for Himself. 
 "He made Himself void, by taking on Him Form 
 
 of Bondservant." iidvwo-ev eavrbv, px>p<t>r\v doGkov \afiuv. 
 
 He entered upon the conditions and experience of 
 human bond-service. He stooped under the yoke 
 of that absolute and obligatory service to the 
 Heavenly Father which is due from the created na- 
 ture. He came to be Man, and also to seem Man — 
 4v o/ioiu/xaTt ivepdnruv yev6p.evos — to be Man, undisguised 
 and open. And, so being, "He obeyed," and 
 still obeyed. He carried out the consecration 
 uttered in heaven into all the humble and all the 
 awful experiences of manhood and of earth. He 
 obeyed — i^xpi 6a.v6.Tov — "to the length of death ;" the 
 final submission was rendered when "He hid not 
 His face from shame and spitting," and stretched 
 forth His hands, and "made His soul an offering for 
 sin," and died "the death of the Cross." 
 
SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 103 
 
 Let our Christmas contemplation send us to 
 weigh again that familiar but inexhaustible para- 
 graph of the Philippians. We have heard the 
 fortieth Psalm; it gives us the purpose of the 
 obedient Redeemer, as it was spoken out in the 
 heaven of heavens. St. Paul in the message to 
 Philippi gives us that also. But he goes on instantly 
 to dilate on the Lord's action upon His purpose. He 
 leads us to see Him in His historical assumption of 
 our nature, as He took it on Him, and with it all its 
 essential relations to the claims of God. He calls 
 us to watch Him walking with men as the Servant 
 of God, till He walks at length, in the path of an 
 absolute surrender, to the encounter with human 
 sin, to the bearing of human guilt, to the endurance 
 of the divine sentence — to the shame, the horror, 
 the agony, of "the accursed Tree." 
 
 And St. Paul, more explicitly than the Psalm, as 
 was fitting, reminds us how the great Consecrator 
 of Himself to the Father's will thought all the while 
 of man as well as of God. True, the inmost and 
 ruling intention of that wonderful obedience was 
 the doing of the Father's will as such, the glorifica- 
 tion of the Father in the doing of His will. But 
 the context and argument of the Apostle remind us 
 that, under that supreme intention, the thought of 
 "us men and our salvation" was as perfectly present 
 
104 SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 to the exalted Christ as if there had been nothing 
 else to think of upon the throne. For how does 
 St. Paul come, in Philippians ii., to speak of the self- 
 surrender of the Son at all ? It is for a purpose as 
 human and as practical as possible. It is to bring 
 it home to the believer that he is to "look not upon 
 his own things but upon the things of others." 
 This the Apostle presses home upon the souls of his 
 converts, in the true manner of the Gospel, not by 
 an ethical abstract, but by the glorious Christian 
 concrete — by the motive of the love and of the work 
 of Christ. 
 
 To look upon the things of others — this, he would 
 have us to understand, as far as ever we can under- 
 stand it — this was what Christ Jesus did when He 
 dealt as He did with His "Equality," and took on 
 Him the nature in which He was to serve the will of 
 God, even unto death. He was thinking all the while 
 of us. He looked upon our things. He cared — 
 oh, how greatly did He care ! — for us. 
 
 I have heard it said of that true scholar and most 
 faithful servant of God, the late Professor Schole- 
 field, whom I still see and hear in his pulpit, as one 
 of the memories of my childhood, that worshipers 
 in his Church of St. Michael, in this town, observed 
 that he never could get through the Nicene Creed, at 
 the Holy Table, without an audible faltering of the 
 
SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 105 
 
 voice when he recited the words, "Who for us men 
 and for our salvation came down from heaven." 
 Scholefield was by no means a man of effusive and 
 demonstrative emotions. His manner was, in fact, 
 on common occasions, somewhat reserved and cold. 
 But he lived near his Lord. He was one who, 
 amidst the necessary publicities of his duty, spent 
 much time alone with Him, meditating closely and 
 deeply upon redeeming love. And so he entered 
 into something of the hidden depth of his Master's 
 heart and the hidden meaning of this wonderful, 
 "Lo, I have come," this "taking of the Bondserv- 
 ant's Form." 
 
 As we stand listening to the voice which thus, 
 even from the divine glory, speaks of surrender and 
 of service, let us take up the Scriptures once more, 
 and recall in shortest summary some of the truths 
 told us by the way through this utterance, "Lo I 
 have come to do Thy will." 
 
 i. First, the saying, taken in its context, speaks 
 of the exalted place which the sacrificial and atoning 
 Work of our Lord in death holds in the plan of Re- 
 demption. The Psalm, interpreted by the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, puts this into sacred prominence. 
 "I have come." So speaks the eternal Christ in 
 view of the mystery of His Incarnation: "I have 
 
io6 SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 come." As if to say that He is already on the 
 march, already in the work, already taking genuine 
 Manhood of a mortal Mother, so that the two 
 Natures, whole and perfect, never to be confused, 
 never to be divided, shall meet in ineffable union 
 under one Person, one Christ, that He may be, and 
 may work, in them both. But why does He come, 
 as to the immediate and urgent element of the pur- 
 pose? What is the aim set in the foreground of 
 the eternal thought, indicated in the Psalm and 
 developed in the Epistle? Is it, immediately, to 
 knit up mankind together into one? Is it, im- 
 mediately, to redeem the race by Incarnation? It is, 
 immediately, to be "Sacrifice and Offering." It is 
 to do at last the work which the altar, under the 
 old law, could never do. It is that the Incarnate, 
 being such, "might put away sins by the sacrifice of 
 Himself." Such was the first ruling purpose of the 
 Self-Consecration of the Son. The Self-Consecrator 
 had in view, above all things, His Death, His Sacri- 
 fice, His Expiation, His Propitiation. Psalm, and 
 Hebrews, and Philippians, all, in this matter, gravi- 
 tate upon the Crucifixion. "A body hast Thou pre- 
 pared Me." "He took share and share, with His 
 brethren, in flesh and blood, that by means of death 
 He might destroy him that had the power of death." 
 "Being the brightness of the Father's glory, by Him- 
 
SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 107 
 
 self he purged our sins." "He became obedient, even 
 to the length of the death of the Cross." 
 
 ii. Secondly, our Scriptures are eloquent of the 
 pain and yet joy of the untold Humiliation of the 
 Lord. They tell us of His willingness to be made 
 like us, with a likeness that should be no trope or 
 figure, but a reality to its depths. They reveal His 
 divinely free consent, in the full light of God, to 
 enter personally within the essential and sinless lim- 
 itations of humanity. He willed, as Man, to ex- 
 perience what is meant by growth and by develop- 
 ment, what it is to weep and to wonder, what it 
 should be to say, "Thy will be done," not only in 
 heaven, as the Son Eternal, but as the Son of Man, 
 under the olives of Gethsemane. He willed to cry, 
 when the last blackness gathered round the Cross, 
 to Him whose will He was wholly content to do, 
 "Why hast Thou forsaken Me?" He willed to 
 commit the outgoing Human Spirit into His hands, 
 in the awfulness of human death. 
 
 Are we to go further? Shall we say that He was 
 then consenting also to other limitations? Was 
 He committing Himself to such restrictions of in- 
 tellectual and, we must add (for this cannot be 
 wholly excluded), of moral insight, as would make 
 it possible that He should share with His brethren 
 not only their fatigues and sorrows, but their illu- 
 
io8 SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 sions and mistakes ? 'Etctvuaev iavrbv, says the Epistle ; 
 "He made Himself void." And the *c&««s,"the Ex- 
 inanition," became an almost synonym with the 
 Church Fathers for "the days of the flesh" of the 
 humiliated Lord. "He was in truth and nature 
 God," says the Alexandrian Cyril, "even before the 
 times of the Kenosis; and, again, "He became Man 
 and humbled Himself into Kenosis." Now, did that 
 Kenosis actually imply, what certainly the Fathers 
 little suspected it to do when they used the term, 
 the submission of our Redeemer to share, as a 
 Teacher, the fallibility of men ? It is not willingly 
 that I touch that supremely important problem. But 
 its present prominence in Christian thought seems 
 to forbid us, if we approach the region at all, quite 
 to pass it by. Only two suggestions would I offer 
 here, in much humility, but with a deep persuasion 
 that the matter lies close to the vitals of the Faith. 
 
 For one thing, it would seem to be a grave mis- 
 take of thought, when we are dealing with a Humili- 
 ation undertaken for a supremely benignant end, 
 accepted in order to the highest benefit of man, to 
 class under its idea a voluntary, a foreseeing consent 
 to be capable of mistakes, and so, inevitably, to be 
 capable of leading others to be mistaken, too. To 
 own that the Lord submitted, in a sublime surrender, 
 to the necessities of weakness and of sorrow, and 
 
SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 109 
 
 even that He abnegated awhile the consciousness 
 and exercise of Omniscience — this is one thing. But 
 it is a quite different thing when He is conceived to 
 have consented not to know, as a Teacher, that He 
 did not know — not to be aware whether He was or 
 was not mistaken in whatever He claimed the right 
 to say. Such a consent, if conceivable, would not be 
 easy to explain as part of a benignant purpose, an 
 element in a Humiliation divinely calculated for the 
 illumination of man. 
 
 The passage before us, in the Psalm and the 
 Epistle, seems to give intimations just to the con- 
 trary of the theory referred to. For it indicates to 
 us, by its previous and its following context, that 
 the Christ in His heavenly glory had already full in 
 view the ancient Ritual, and descended at the 
 Father's will not only to meet its inevitable defect, 
 but to fulfil its import, as all true and all of God. 
 What He thought of the old Order in the days of 
 His flesh, what He then said and did about the Law 
 and about the Prophets, was thus but the continua- 
 tion of His thought about them upon the throne. 
 
 For another thing, if we seek the true Scriptural 
 import of the Kenosis, the Philippian passage (its 
 original) must be consulted; and it seems to direct 
 us in a line just opposite to that which would make 
 fallibility an element in the Lord's Humiliation. 
 
no SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 "EKiuuuev iavrbv, fj.op<pr]v 5oi\ov Xa^iiv. If we interpret the 
 Greek phrase by well-recognized rule, we must 
 take the verb and the participle as contribut- 
 ing to give us, from two sides, one fact. "He made 
 Himself void," not anyhow, but thus — "taking 
 Bond-servant's Form." The "Avoidance" was, in 
 fact, just this — the "taking." It was the assump- 
 tion of the creaturely Nature, the becoming, in 
 Augustine's words, "Creature, as He was Man" — 
 quod ad Hominem, Creatura; and the assumption of 
 it in just this respect, that in it He became, by the 
 fact of it, — AoDXos — Bond-servant. But what is 
 the implication of that unique, absolute, unreserved, 
 unhindered Bond-service of the Incarnate Son? 
 What does it say to us in respect of His capacity to 
 do the Father's work, and convey His mind, and 
 deliver His message ? The absoluteness of this sub- 
 jection of the perfect Bond-servant gives us war- 
 rant not of the precariousness but of the perfection 
 of the conveyance of the Sender's mind. "He 
 whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God." 
 
 His own servant Paul was one day to claim au- 
 thority as messenger just because of the intensity 
 of his slavery. "Let no man trouble me, for I bear 
 in my body the stigmata of the Master, Jesus" (Gal. 
 vi. 17). The supreme Bond-servant, the Bearer of 
 the stigmata of the cross, has right then, indeed, to 
 
SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 in 
 
 claim our unreserved, our worshiping silence as 
 He speaks. He, in perfect relation to His Sender, 
 perfectly conveys His Sender's mind. ' He says 
 nothing but what his sender bids Him say. 
 
 But let us turn from discussion, and end where 
 we set out, in faith and in adoration, before the self- 
 consecrating Saviour. 
 
 We are keeping the festival of joy. The splendor 
 of God, once poured upon the field of the shepherds, 
 shines for ever upon this day. The great carol of 
 the warrior-angels, the choiring heavenly army, 
 cTpaTiii oip&vtos, sounds on for ever in our winter 
 sky. For us men God is made Man : 
 
 "Thou art my flesh and bone, 
 Thou dost my kindred own, 
 Thou Light of the eternal Morn ; 
 
 And sitting at Thy feet, 
 
 I find it passing sweet 
 To think that I too was of woman born." 
 
 But the roots of our Christian* joy are watered with 
 the sorrows and the sacrifices of our Redeemer. They 
 cost him dear. They involved His infinite Humilia- 
 tion. As we rejoice, let it be with that thought in 
 our souls. Let us bless Him with the love of peni- 
 tents ; let us follow Him with the love of witnessing 
 disciples. "Lo, I have come." So said the Son of 
 God, in view of His Cradle and of His Cross, as 
 
ii2 SELF-CONSECRATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 He saw them from above all the heavens. "Lo, I 
 have come to do Thy will." And we are His. We 
 are, through His grace, in Him. Then be it ours, 
 this day, this Birthday, to say the like, in our little 
 measure, as if we had never said it before, for His 
 sake and in His name. For trial, for humiliation, 
 for the death of self-will, for whatever may be for 
 us the cross, let us, His members, draw from Him 
 the power to say, "I have come," and to "delight 
 to do the will of Him that sent us, and to finish His 
 work." 
 
VII 
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD 
 
 Preached in the University Church, Cambridge 
 "But it is good for me to draw near to God." — Ps. lxxiii. 28. 
 "But as for me, approach to God, nearness to God, 
 for me is good." So we may render the Psalmist's 
 original words, with due attention to their emphasis 
 upon the person of the speaker. 'E/xoi a* t6 irpo<TKo\\d.a9ai 
 T<? Qev &ya66v iarc. so reads the Septuagint. And the 
 Vulgate follows: Mihi autem adhserere Deo bonum 
 est. 
 
 The whole stress of the sentence lies upon the 
 individual and independent decision. Let other 
 people, let the whole world, if it will, retire into a 
 distance from God, and live apart and to themselves. 
 My choice is made, definite, irrevocable, and, above 
 all, my own. To approach God, to abide close to 
 God, face to Face, spirit to Spirit, love to Love, per- 
 son to Person — this for me is good. This is my 
 summum bonum, nearness to Him. 
 
 I ask to address you this afternoon upon some 
 relations of the individual to God in Christ, relations 
 of spiritual access and intercourse. The theme is 
 
 "3 
 
ii4 THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 high, the ground is holy; let me remember and 
 beware. But the matter is quite as practical as it is 
 sacred ; it is of the utmost consequence to the actual 
 Christian life that we should think aright upon it, 
 and put what we think into use. Moreover, the 
 question is, if I do not greatly mistake, particularly 
 timely to some exigencies of our time. Fashions of 
 thought are largely abroad which call for a temperate 
 but firm reassertion, now and again, of the indi- 
 vidualistic aspect of the spiritual life; otherwise, 
 even its collective interests will suffer loss. 
 
 Let me speak first upon this latter and less general 
 topic; it will lead us directly on to what is more 
 abiding and universal. 
 
 Who does not know, then, that strong and mani- 
 fold drifts of opinion around us set towards all that 
 is corporate and collective? They touch and draw 
 us, like the secret currents of the ocean, in every kind 
 of connection, social, civil, and religious. In religion 
 the tendency is everywhere, in one mode of it or 
 another. Here and there the teacher, numerously 
 followed, lays his insistence upon collective "Hu- 
 manity," as the object of Redemption, as the organ 
 of Revelation. In Humanity he sees the developing 
 manifestation of God, who inbreathes and informs it 
 with His Spirit, and whose eternal Word is its 
 Archetype and its Sum. The term sounds on per- 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 ii5 
 
 petually through such teaching, like the theme of a 
 fugue ; we are occupied and impressed with the life 
 and growth of Humanity, its liberation from evil, its 
 education into advancing stages of good. The tend- 
 ency is to apply to it the whole biblical vocabulary 
 of salvation, from the first purpose of eternal mercy 
 to the glory that is to be revealed. 
 
 "The Kingdom of God," again, is a term charac- 
 teristic of whole types of influential thought ; I need 
 only name, for one, that of the school of Ritschl. 
 It is a term wholly scriptural; its true significance 
 therefore, of course, is altogether for the highest 
 good. But the risk is, a use of it ruled not by 
 Scripture but by speculation. As a fact, it has been 
 used largely to promote conceptions of man's rela- 
 tion to God under which the individual sinks and is 
 merged in "the Kingdom." He must seek his bless- 
 ings, if he is to be blest, only as he lives in its life, 
 only, if I may say so, through its large mediation. 
 
 In other quarters (though all these types of 
 thought often cross each other's borders) the great 
 word, Church, is made the resonant theme of all the 
 music. No matter, for the moment, what definition 
 in detail is given to the word; it denotes a sacred 
 Society, corporate and collective. The idea of such 
 an august entity fairly rules whole theologies, and 
 meets us at all turns. So presented, the Church as 
 
ii6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 such is the true object and recipient of salvation, the 
 seer, the teacher, of its message. It is the avenue 
 to Christ the shrine ; the way to Christ, the end. Nay, 
 rather, it, in its collectivity, is so joined to Him, so 
 filled, so impregnated with Him, that we cannot as 
 individuals touch Him with a sure touch except 
 through it ; scarcely, on the other hand, can we touch 
 it without therefore touching Him. 
 
 So I have heard, with deep attention, devout ex- 
 pounders exhibit and enforce the theory. They 
 repelled the suggestion that their doctrine gave 
 prominence to the Church at the expense of the 
 supreme prominence of her Lord. They contended 
 that so has He given Himself to her, so has He, for 
 our blessing, lodged Himself in her, that in her we 
 have Him. It is difficult to say too much of the 
 Church, just because of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Naturally, under such convictions the vocabulary 
 of salvation tends to be applied prevalently to this 
 great collective existence. The process of grace 
 from eternity to eternity is largely viewed as taking 
 place upon the Body rather than upon the member, 
 or, however, upon the member only through the 
 Body. Rather the Church than the soul, the man, 
 is the primary object of promise and of gift. 
 
 The tendencies thus roughly indicated carry in 
 them, every one, powerful elements of truth. Mere 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 117 
 
 individualism, if it means the individual's isolation 
 into self-sufficiency and self-will, is indeed a fatal 
 fallacy. Alike for him and all that is about him, it 
 is simply evil. As surely as the man was consti- 
 tuted not for himself but for God, so surely was he 
 constituted not for himself but for others. So con- 
 science intimates ; so Revelation affirms. The Bible 
 almost opens with the divine assertion that it is 
 not good for the man to be alone. Its last veil falls 
 upon the fair vision of a Society which is at once 
 the Bride with her Husband and the City with its 
 King. The history of Redemption develops all 
 along the magnificent idea of a hallowed Commun- 
 ity, related as such to God, receiving as such His 
 blessings, strengthening itself by the fellowship of 
 its members before Him, guarding His message of 
 grace and hope, and commissioned to convey it to 
 the world. "Glorious things are spoken" of the 
 Church of Christ. In the Epistles the words labor 
 with the effort to express its excellency. It is the 
 Body of the exalted Head, the Organ for His opera- 
 tion. It is the Spouse, the Object of His divine 
 complacency, and of the vast Sacrifice of His love, 
 nourished and cherished, and, at last, glorified by 
 Him. Race, and age, and rank, and sex, are all 
 merged in this wonderful aggregate : "You are all 
 one, one being, eU i<ne, in Christ Jesus."* 
 * Gal. iii. 28. 
 
n8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 The non-individual side of Christian life is indeed 
 prominent in the Scriptures. It may be distorted, 
 it may be travestied, but it is a vital fact. Men, 
 the best of men, may attempt impossible definitions 
 of the Church, but the Church is a mighty factor in 
 the plan of God. Things quite unpractical may be 
 said about cohesion and unity. They may be 
 preached, in their most exterior aspects, as almost 
 Alpha and Omega, as if collectivity of system were a 
 more vital thing than the eternal truths which touch 
 most directly the personal conscience and the per- 
 sonal will. Yet cohesion and unity are not only noble 
 principles to entertain ; they make altogether for our 
 practical blessing, temperately understood. The dis- 
 location of Christendom, the collision of Christians, 
 can never, as such, be according to the mind of God. 
 
 So those watchwords, familiar in our day — 
 "Church life," "Church work," "Corporate action" 
 — are abundantly salutary in their place. They have 
 a mission against the evils inseparable from a 
 thoughtless or a self-willed isolation, reminding the 
 individual that he cannot possibly live aright if he 
 lives and works in a would-be spiritual life, related 
 only to himself. Not only must his usefulness 
 greatly suffer if he labors, ever so hard, quite out- 
 side constituted connection; his own spiritual inter- 
 ests, his own innermost man, must bear loss, if he 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 119 
 
 elects to be either the hermit or the free-lance in- 
 stead of the member of the Body. 
 
 Yet, with all this full in view, I think it is season- 
 able to emphasize the other side of things. I spoke 
 in passing of distortions, travesties, impossibilities, 
 sometimes to be met with in the advocacy of Church 
 life and work. It is so. Definitions or descriptions 
 of the Church are often attempted which square 
 neither with reason nor Scripture. In the nature of 
 the case, in this world of the Fall, ideal and actual 
 never coincide. So Augustine long ago was con- 
 strained to own, when Donatism pressed the matter 
 on his mind. "Not only in eternity, but now," he 
 says,* "hypocrites" (the unreal) "are not associ- 
 ated with Christ, however they may seem to be in 
 His Church." Forgetting this, good men have tried 
 to define the Church in terms which cannot but 
 burst and yield when compared with the great 
 Scriptural tests, negative and positve, of incorpora- 
 tion into the Lord. And so is invited a resistance 
 which runs easily into an opposite and really indi- 
 vidualistic extreme. For the thought has tended 
 towards a spiritual tyranny, in which the Church 
 becomes the autocrat of conscience, and even the 
 temperate assertion of conscience against the autoc- 
 racy is taken as a kind of treason. So, two cen- 
 turies ago, the Roman community, ruled by the 
 
 * De Doctrina Christiana, iii. 32. 
 
i2o THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 Jesuit school, strove only too successfully to crush 
 the Jansenist protest, made by some of the noblest 
 Christians France, or Europe, ever saw — Pascal 
 among them; reluctant and distressed assertors of 
 conscience against the corporate idea. That case 
 represents — how many other cases of the past, and 
 of today ! 
 
 Great is the place and function of the Church ! 
 But that place is not between the soul and the 
 Redeemer. It is in the stress it has laid upon that 
 truth that the Protestant principle has done one of its 
 noblest services to the world. I found many years 
 ago a testimony to this in an unbiased quarter, in 
 an essay by the late Mr. J. S. Mill, on the Positive 
 Philosophy, printed in the Westminster Review of 
 April, 1865. Mill examines Comte's estimate of 
 types of Christianity, and takes him to task for his 
 complete misreading of Protestantism, as if it were 
 only negative, only destructive ; a mistake made by a 
 great many persons besides Comte, but only possible 
 for them, as for him, by defect of knowledge. 
 "Comte," says Mill, " misses one of the most im- 
 portant facts connected with Protestantism — its re- 
 markable efficacy, as contrasted with Catholicism" 
 (he means Romanism), "in cultivating the intelli- 
 gence and the conscience of the individual believer. 
 The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individ- 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 121 
 
 ual immediately to God is almost wholly a creation 
 of Protestantism. Even when Protestants were 
 nearly as persecuting as Catholics (quite as much 
 so they never were), still they maintained that the 
 true belief was not to be accepted from a priest, but 
 to be sought and found by the believer ; and that no 
 one could answer to God for him; he must answer 
 for himself." And Mill, standing himself outside 
 all creeds as he then stood (but I have heard pri- 
 vately what gives me right to think he died in the 
 faith of Christ) , goes on to comment, as well he may, 
 upon the power of this view of things to give stuff 
 and fiber to character, personal and national, wher- 
 ever it prevails. 
 
 Yes ; let the sacred function of the Community be 
 what it may, it must stand aside, after all, and leave 
 the ground open, when the soul, the mysterious per- 
 sonality, the man, rises up and goes in to claim in 
 Christ its access to the Father, awful, blissful and 
 in secret. "As for me, nearness to God for me is 
 good." For this, man was made in his creation, 
 waking up from the inscrutable mystery of its pro- 
 cess to the mighty fact that he was in the image of 
 his Maker. For this he was made again out of the 
 death and ruins of the Fall. Because of the Cross, 
 and in the power of the Spirit, he is admitted, he is 
 entitled, he is welcomed as with open arms to an 
 
122 THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 intercourse with God, mediated to him by the Son 
 of God alone, nothing between. Lift high the cur- 
 tains of the Holiest, for he must enter; yea, they 
 are already rent from the top to the bottom, that he 
 may pass within them, and stand with unveiled face 
 before the secret glory, and speak his whole 
 heart out to the heart of the Eternal, i^rk irapprqaias, 
 "with the liberty of saying anything" to his Father. 
 Let no Society, though divinely founded, no 
 ordinance, though of Christ's own giving, yet 
 needing mortal ministration, no sacred Class or 
 Order, however apostolic in succession, pass in with 
 him there. True, they can, and they should, help 
 him thither, show him the avenue, point him to the 
 door, reassure him of the Tightness of his entrance. 
 But he enters, himself alone, or rather, himself as 
 one with the one eternal Priest who stands there in 
 His own right, who has offered once for ever the 
 sacrifice of peace, and now for ever is occupied with 
 that other and resultant function of His solitary and 
 sublime sacerdotium — to be man's open entrance in 
 to God. 
 
 The whole record of Redemption is full of that 
 entrance in. Such was the divine delight in it that, 
 ages before the historic and, as it were, public open- 
 ing of the door, there was already a wonderful 
 anticipation. The saints of the Old Law are found 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 123 
 
 speaking their souls out to the Lord as the breath 
 and habit of their lives — nothing between, absolutely 
 nothing, but the fact of the promise and the covenant. 
 True, their colloquies with God were of infinite 
 significance to the community. Abraham under the 
 Syrian stars, Moses on the desert cliff, Jeremiah in 
 the courtyard in the beleaguered town, not only 
 supplied examples of individual "access;" their con- 
 versations with heaven made links in the story of 
 the redemption of the world. But, none the less, it 
 was in itself individual intercourse, personal, direct; 
 "nothing between." It was not the individual ap- 
 proaching God through the mediation of the com- 
 munity. A vast element in the phenomenon of 
 Scripture is the precise converse ; the voice of grace 
 reaches the community through the mediation of the 
 individual believer. 
 
 Think of the magnificent illustration of this in the 
 Old Testament, in the Book of Psalms. No doubt 
 the Psalms for the Jewish Church, as for the Church 
 Catholic, bore a liturgical significance; they passed 
 into common worship ; they became the voice of the 
 community to God. And obviously many of them 
 are public and corporate in Jheir form — the expres- 
 sion of the experiences of the chosen Race in its 
 collective sins and disciplines and blessings. But 
 set these aside, they leave a mass rich and wonder- 
 
124 THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 ful of purely individual Psalms, in which rises just 
 the call and cry of the Ego to the Eternal. "I have 
 trusted in Thy mercy; my heart shall be glad in 
 Thy salvation;" "I will fear no evil, for Thou art 
 with me;" "My soul thirsteth for the living God;" 
 "Thou hast known my soul in adversities;" "I love 
 the Lord, because He hath heard my voice;" "Thy 
 Word is a lamp unto my feet;" "Thou art my 
 portion;" "As for me, I will behold Thy face in 
 righteousness;" "As for me, nearness to God for me 
 is good." 
 
 Whatever part in the ages of the Psalmists was 
 played by the order and ritual of the Society, the 
 man, for his soul's inmost needs, was left alone with 
 God ; the servant went in to his Master to talk with 
 Him, and the door was shut. 
 
 To pass into the New Testament in order to study 
 individual converse with God is to take the clue of 
 a labyrinth endless in its depth and beauty. Of this 
 the words and the works of the Redeemer alike are 
 full. "I will; be thou clean;" "I will in no wise 
 cast him out ;" "I will manifest myself to him." The 
 incidents of the Acts are perpetually individual- 
 istic : the Eunuch in his carriage, Cornelius in his 
 chamber, Lydia by the river. Above all, we have 
 Saul of Tarsus, the man chosen by the Spirit to 
 contribute a third of its contents to the New Testa- 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 125 
 
 ment, and to develop all that is most comprehensive 
 and collective in the message of our salvation, but 
 led to do all this in modes of exposition where the 
 widest, the vastest principles come to us alive and 
 pulsating with the experiences of the man with God. 
 "In me there dwelleth no good thing;" "I am cruci- 
 fied with Christ;" "Christ liveth in me;" "He gave 
 Himself for me;" "I can do all things in Him;" "I 
 know whom I have believed ;" "He is able to keep 
 my deposit against that day." 
 
 My brethren, this is a magnificent individualism, 
 sanctifying, beautifying, vital. I hope I have guarded 
 myself from seeming to forget the other side in the 
 spiritual life. I have tried to label with as legible a 
 censure as I could the falsehood of the individualism 
 which means isolation to one's own will, isolation 
 even to one's own soul. But this is another thing; 
 yea, in its depth it is the antithesis to that. This is 
 an isolation to God, in the immediate intercourse of 
 the regenerate soul with Him, an intercourse whose 
 very possibility is denied, as you know, by arbitrary 
 and a priori speculation, but in vain ; E pur si muove 
 — it is an experienced fact. This is an isolation 
 which sends the soul out again, filled and expanded 
 by His presence, to contribute to the community, 
 to live no longer for itself, to be at His service in 
 others all the day, aye, and to see deeper into others, 
 
126 THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 their struggles, their sorrows, and their sins, than it 
 ever could do if it did not know itself in the light of 
 intercourse with God. For that intercourse there is 
 no substitute ; it knows no second-best. Would we 
 *>be "men in Christ" indeed? Then, "as for me, 
 nearness to God for me is good." 
 
 More than ever in our late and troubled time, so 
 intensely conscious in some of its aspects, so super- 
 ficial in others, the Christian must guard and use his 
 personal "access with confidence," through the Son, 
 in the Spirit, to the Father. 
 
 He will find his exercise of it imperiled from 
 many quarters. Sometimes, as we have remembered, 
 a mental theory will try to shut the door brusquely 
 in his face, with a doctrine of knowledge which is to 
 prove, forsooth, that God cannot personally converse 
 with the personality which He made in His own 
 image. Sometimes an overwrought ecclesiasticism 
 will not precisely bar the door, but load it with cur- 
 tains, offering rather the assistance of a third party 
 to carry the messages in and out. Far oftener the 
 obstruction will come from that common disposi- 
 tion of our period, with its unrest, its fatigues, its 
 materialistic ideals of good — the slack and indolent 
 disposition to "get our religion done for us," in one 
 way or another. But it matters little, by compari- 
 son, how the temptation meets us, under what mask 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 127 
 
 the watchful enemy will try to impede our personal 
 intercourse with the Everlasting Friend. It is vital, 
 anyhow, that we should resist, and enter in. 
 
 "Nearness to God," face to face, is vital, if we 
 would live the life which alone is real, y Sm-m faf. 
 "This is the life eternal, to know — to know the only 
 true God, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent." 
 And that knowledge cannot possibly be got at sec- 
 ond hand. 
 
 "Nearness to God" is vital, if we would be pure. 
 Would we have, would we retain, cleanness — not of 
 hands only, but of heart — inwardly and to the depth ? 
 It is the man who "hath the hope in Him that when 
 He shall appear we shall be like Him, seeing Him as 
 He is," who "purifieth himself even as He is pure."* 
 And to see Him then we must have seen Him now, 
 as personal faith alone sees "Him who is invisible." 
 Intercourse with God is the victorious secret of 
 heart-purity — intercourse direct, individual, alone. 
 The outward and inward foes to purity are strong 
 and subtle : woe to the man who undertakes them 
 in his own name ! But there is a power, which the 
 weakest Christian can seek, and find, and wield, 
 which is adequate for their absolute defeat: "they 
 shall fall and perish at Thy presence." 
 
 "Nearness to God" is vital, if we would be un- 
 * 1 John iii. 2, 3. 
 
128 THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 wearied amidst a world indifferent, even when not 
 positively corrupted, in the active strife for virtue. 
 They tell us that there is a perceptible decline in 
 England of strong enthusiasm for great moral 
 causes. Is it so? Then contribute your own weight, 
 at least, to the scale for virtue in her need against 
 the mighty. And if you would do so in the right 
 spirit, unhasting, unresting, patient, resolved, un- 
 embittered, absolutely convinced, be much in inter- 
 course with God. They who would indeed move the 
 world for righteousness need to have "the secret of 
 His presence" about them "before the sons of men." 
 And they must find that secret first — alone with 
 Him. 
 
 "Nearness to God" is vital for the right entrance 
 into all the energies and interests of a true life. You 
 must live for your work, whatever work the eternal 
 Master has chosen for you. You must live in it. 
 You, Christian students, must live in your mental 
 labor, and not play around its fringes. But you 
 cannot live on it; your life-power is in your God, 
 your Saviour; you must nourish it with Him, as- 
 similating Him ever more in the healthy hunger of 
 the soul. "He that eateth Me shall live because of 
 Me." Yes, he shall live, he shall move, he shall 
 indeed have power. 
 
 Sixty-two years ago, short of just three weeks,* in 
 * The Sermon was preached October 23, 1898. 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL AND GOD. 
 
 his rooms at King's, while the bell of this Church 
 was pealing for the sermon he was to have delivered, 
 sinking down at last after fifty-four years of strenu- 
 ous and vastly fruitful work in this place for Christ, 
 died Charles Simeon, clarum et venerabile nomen, a 
 glory to Eton, to Cambridge, to our English Chris- 
 tendom. If ever man labored, it was he ; touching, 
 you might have thought, the world around him with 
 ceaseless activities in his every waking hour, so great 
 was his record of tangible achievement. But no; 
 day by day his earliest waking hours, won by brave 
 self-discipline from sleep, were spent, all through 
 his life from young manhood onwards, in solitary 
 converse with God. His rooms were his oratory, 
 and so was the roof above them, where he paced the 
 leads alone in long intercourse with his Lord. Thence 
 flowed out the life spiritually so powerful. His last 
 surviving intimate, the honored William Carus, 
 seven years ago, in the bedchamber at Bournemouth 
 where shortly afterwards he passed radiant with love 
 and happiness to the world of light, spoke once more 
 to me of Simeon. And his thought was not of 
 Simeon's energies, but of the source behind them. 
 "That was a wonderful life," he said to me, "the 
 life he lived up there, all alone with God." 
 
 In our day, in our measure, for our life, our strife, 
 our toil, we also will seek and we shall find. "As 
 for me, nearness to God for me is good." 
 
VIII. 
 
 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS : NICHOLAS 
 RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN 
 
 Preached in the University Church, Cambridge, October 16, 
 
 1898. 
 
 "Whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversa- 
 tion." — Heb. xiii. 7. 
 
 This sixteenth day of October, as it happens, is a 
 date to be remembered in the Christian annals of 
 Cambridge. It is the day on which two of our 
 academic Mother's noblest sons, first one and then, 
 after a long interval of time, the other, laid down 
 their lives and slept in Christ. 
 
 On October 16, 1555, at Oxford, on a morning 
 of torrent rain and fitful sunshine, at a stake set in 
 Balliol ditch, in a fire lighted with difficulty and 
 delay, and which did its fierce work only by degrees, 
 died Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, late Bishop 
 of Rochester, formerly Master of Pembroke in this 
 University, "crying with a wonderful great voice: 
 In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum," 
 till the fire touched the bag of gunpowder, and the 
 cry was stilled. 
 
 130 
 
NICHOLAS RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN. 131 
 
 On October 16, 18 12, a young English clergyman, 
 chaplain of the East India Company, broken with 
 consumption and burnt with fever, alone of every 
 European friend, trying to reach Constantinople for 
 England by forced marches on horseback, expired 
 in the town of Tocat, near the southern shores of 
 the Black Sea. He was a Bachelor of our Divinity 
 Faculty, a Fellow of St. John's ; he had been placed 
 Senior Wrangler, at the head of a brilliant list, 
 eleven years before, in 1801. His name was Henry 
 Martyn. 
 
 Thus a coincidence of the calendar brings together 
 two lives and deaths, two names and characters, 
 separated by great lengths of period and circum- 
 stance, but on the other hand closely akin to one 
 another, in their relation to our beloved Cambridge, 
 in richness of intellectual endowment, in the life of 
 Christian faith and love, yea, the life hid with Christ 
 in God, and in the call, each man after the conditions 
 of his time, greatly to labor and greatly to suffer for 
 their Lord. 
 
 It has occurred to me that a brief commemoration 
 and consideration of these two lives and deaths may 
 afford not unsuitable matter for our attention on 
 this the first Sunday of full term in a new Cambridge 
 year. Ridley and Martyn seem to me to be, each 
 of them, a man singularly noble and suggestive as 
 
132 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS: 
 
 a type, a lesson, an animation. In particular, I 
 seem to see in them inspiring examples of what I 
 may call the University character, the character 
 receptive of and developed by the highest influences 
 of an English University. Widely differing in some 
 respects, as two strong individualities of quite dif- 
 ferent periods would be likely to do, they had some 
 great characteristics in common. They were emi- 
 nently men, in the courage and in the gentleness 
 which belong to the true man. Physically, each 
 was remembered by his friends as strong and agile ; 
 mentally, they were gifted far above the common, 
 and put their powers to indefatigable and lofty use. 
 In habits of life they both appear to have shown 
 that wholesome combination, the freedom of a per- 
 fect naturalness, of a kindly humor, of extended 
 interests, along with a self-discipline which, rooted 
 in the fear of God and nursed by an unswerving 
 rule of secret devotion before Him, touched their 
 whole conduct with its elastic but firm sway, pre- 
 paring them to sacrifice even more than to achieve. 
 Let it be added that, having well used the gifts and 
 training of Cambridge, they both loved her to the 
 end with a strong and beautiful affection. Martyn, 
 in his letters from the remote East, perpetually 
 recurs to her. Ridley, within a fortnight of the 
 fire, writes his last letters of farewell to the scenes 
 
NICHOLAS RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN. 133 
 
 and persons of his life — one of the grandest flights, 
 in my poor opinion, of all our older English prose, 
 not excepting Milton's own; and deep and tender 
 are the adieux he addresses there to his University 
 and to his College. 
 
 As types of Englishmen, of Cambridge students, 
 of believers in and servants of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, types differing yet deeply cognate, I think 
 that Ridley and Martyn may well engage us for a 
 little while. We will consider something of their 
 "conversation," their life-course, and of its "end." 
 I think we shall not deny that it is well with those 
 who "follow," who imitate, "their faith." 
 
 Nicholas Ridley was son of a Northumbrian 
 knight. I stood, last August, in what remains of the 
 somewhat grim fortified house, Willimoteswick, or 
 Willumswick, as the peasants call it, where first he 
 saw the light, about 1503, on the hilly sides of Tyne- 
 dale. Flodden was an event of his boyhood, and the 
 associations of Border warfare lived in his memory 
 to the end. In his Farewell he cheers his spirit for 
 the last fiery conflict for what with all his soul he 
 held for truth, by recalling how often he had seen his 
 kinsfolk and neighbors stand for their hearths and 
 homes, to the death, if need be, against the raiders 
 of the North. 
 
134 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS: 
 
 From school he passed to Pembroke here, and in 
 1522 his name appears in our ancient registers fourth 
 among the Wranglers, indicating a successful study 
 of the whole curriculum of his time. He was chosen 
 Fellow, and at length Master, of his College, and 
 took for some years an active part in the life and 
 business of the University. On the accession of 
 Edward he was called to the see of Rochester, as 
 a man eminent for learning and godliness, and an 
 avowed friend of the Reformation. From Rochester, 
 three years later, he passed to London. Another 
 short three years, and the advent of Mary and the 
 restoration of the Papacy consigned him to prison 
 in the Tower. Thence he was transferred to custody, 
 and to the most unjust of trials, at Oxford. Eighteen 
 months later, when, after a certain pause and inter- 
 mission, the burnings began again, he was called 
 with his elder colleague, Latimer, to die. At supper 
 overnight he bade his friends to his marriage. He 
 slept the night quietly out, and then the two heroic 
 friends passed, if I may borrow the language of John 
 James Blunt and of Julius Hare, "in their fiery char- 
 iot to heaven." 
 
 It would of course be altogether out of place and 
 occasion to attempt to exhibit Ridley's life and work 
 before you in any detail. It must be enough to 
 recall a few outstanding facts. He was the diligent 
 
NICHOLAS RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN. 135 
 
 administrator of his College, and also, in his vaca- 
 tions, the laborious and studious parish priest of 
 Heme, in Kent. As Bishop he appears to have won 
 the respect even of theological and political oppo- 
 nents by his incessant labor as preacher and chief 
 pastor, and by the beautiful and cheerful saintliness 
 of his domestic life. It was a life single to the last, 
 but eminently kindly and social, and full of winning 
 charities. At Fulham he showed filial honor to the 
 aged mother of his deprived predecessor, Bonner, 
 setting her always, in whatever presence, in the best 
 place at his table. 
 
 Altogether we seem to see in Nicholas Ridley a 
 high example of the English gentleman and the true 
 son of the English Church, as she moved forward 
 into purer light at the Reformation. He was the 
 man who, in his Pembroke days, was remembered 
 for his love of archery, and of fives, and of chess, 
 as well as for his tranquil piety and his large reading, 
 as reading began to be understood in the period of 
 Erasmus. He was the delightful converser at his 
 episcopal table, the Christian father of his servants, 
 the ardent friend of his friends in God, the practical 
 and far-seeing advocate of the destitute poor. He 
 was the dispassionate student of the great contro- 
 versy of his time, and arrived, amidst stormy sur- 
 roundings, in a serene conviction and without heat 
 
136 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS: 
 
 or hurry, at conclusions about the Papacy and about 
 the sacred Eucharist which made an epoch — I pre- 
 sume to say, a great and most salutary epoch — in 
 English theology. He was the courageous defender 
 of the rights and property of Church and School 
 against the greed of an unscrupulous Court, the un- 
 worthy circle around the high-souled and blameless 
 Edward. In 1548, Clare Hall, now Clare College, 
 would have been swept away for sordid purposes 
 but for the resolute stand of Ridley against the 
 Protector, Somerset. In things divine he was the 
 reverent lover of the past as to all which was really 
 primeval in it, and pure, and of good report; the 
 indignant rebuker of the pseudo-protestant spirit 
 which could make jests over eucharistic error. Yet 
 he did not spare the associations of a lifetime when 
 he conceived it his duty to advocate change in the 
 cause of Christ and of His truth. No man that 
 I have read of seems to me more finely to embody 
 the ideal of the Anglican Reform, the character 
 kindred to the spirit of the book of Common Prayer, 
 with all its piety towards the past, and all its yet 
 deeper piety towards spiritual truth and the open 
 Scriptures, educating the soul and mind in a worship 
 stately in its grave simplicity, and irradiated all over 
 and all through with the light of a reason large and 
 
NICHOLAS RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN. 137 
 
 open, and with the glory of a free approach to God 
 in Christ, for the whole Church equally and together, 
 in spirit and in truth. 
 
 Such, faintly outlined, was Nicholas Ridley, as he 
 was known. But the true life of the true man has 
 its pulse, of course, far behind the scenes. And 
 Ridley, alike in his prosperity and in his hours of 
 outward ruin, lived the hidden life with God, con- 
 versing with Him over His sacred Word. In his 
 Farewell, he lifts the veil from those secrets for a 
 moment, when he bids adieu to his well-loved 
 Pembroke: "In thy orchard (the walls, butts and 
 trees, if they could speak, would bear me witness) 
 I learned without book almost all Paul's Epistles, 
 yea, and I ween all the canonical Epistles, save only 
 the Apocalypse. Of which study, though in time a 
 great part did depart from me, yet the sweet smell 
 thereof I trust I shall carry with me into heaven." 
 
 Ridley's Walk is still shown in the grounds of 
 Pembroke. And the memory of our other academic 
 saint of to-day links itself also with a garden, a 
 grove green and fair in all its bowery colonnades, 
 the wilderness of St John's. Never do I pass the 
 borders of that pleasant place but the mind seems 
 almost to see, pacing its paths, rapt in thought and 
 prayer, young Henry Martyn. It was his chosen 
 resort for privacy, during the four years of his resi- 
 
138 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS: 
 
 dence as a Fellow in his College. On the eve of 
 his departure for the East he bade it farewell, on 
 Saturday, April 6, 1805 : "I passed most of the 
 morning in the Fellows' garden. It was the last 
 time I visited this favorite retreat, where I have 
 often enjoyed the presence of God." 
 
 Henry Martyn was born at Truro, in 1781, son 
 of a father who had been a working superintendent 
 in the mines of Gwenap, and had raised himself to 
 competence. He entered St. John's College in 1797. 
 According to his own sorrowing admission, he came 
 up careless of religion, and living altogether without 
 prayer. His spirits were high and his temper vehe- 
 ment, and to please and to distinguish himself was 
 his main purpose. Certainly he was well equipped 
 for distinction. He arrived totally ignorant of the 
 very elements of mathematics, yet he was head of 
 his Tripos and first Smith's Prizeman within three 
 years and a half; and this although his friends, as 
 they afterwards recalled what he had been, were 
 used to say that he was much more deeply interested 
 in philology and in literature than in number and 
 figure. A little iater he took the prize for the Latin 
 Essay over competitors of classical distinction. 
 
 But by this time he was a prayerless man no 
 longer. In his second year, his father's death cast a 
 
NICHOLAS RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN. 139 
 
 shadow over earth's brightness for him, and the 
 teaching- and friendship of Charles Simeon, strong- 
 est and tenderest of Christian guides and helpers, 
 was used to lead him to the feet of his Redeemer. 
 Faith, as it ought to do, only quickened and elevated 
 his intellectual life; he has left it on record that 
 nature and letters both seemed to present to him 
 new depths and beauties when he came to know the 
 Lord. But with that knowledge came also, of 
 course, the desire wholly to do His will; and His 
 will, indicated in many ways, led him, within a few 
 years, with Simeon's energetic and prescient encour- 
 agement, to devote himself to India — India, then 
 remote from England as no inhabited region of the 
 earth is remote today. He went out in 1805 as a 
 Company's Chaplain, at a time when missionaries, 
 as such, to the indescribable reproach of the then 
 policy of the Directors, were interdicted within the 
 British pale. But a chaplain had considerable free- 
 dom for occasional intercourse with the natives, and 
 Martyn used the opportunity. He gave his whole 
 mental power to Sanscrit, Hindoostanee, Arabic, 
 and Persian. He preached whenever and wherever 
 he could to native audiences; he did wonders of 
 achievement as a translator within his seven short 
 years of Indian life, and he powerfully impressed 
 the most cultivated and skeptical Europeans by his 
 
140 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS: 
 
 union of literary faculty and acquirement with 
 abundant cheerfulness, with attentive and faultless 
 courtesy, and with the purest and most courageous 
 godliness in daily life. 
 
 On furlough in Persia, where he traveled to per- 
 fect his Persian, he engaged often in discussion with 
 the Mahometan and mystic sages, and earned now 
 their threats and revilings as he confessed the God- 
 head of his Lord, and now their reverence as for the 
 holiest and most learned of the Franks. Sick at 
 last with the advances of mortal weakness, and with 
 the sorrows of a pure human love disappointed ( for 
 the chosen of his heart was never free to join him in 
 India), he set out on leave for England, and died 
 upon the vast journey overland. At Tocat his dust 
 now reposes ; in the garden of the American Mission 
 stands (or stood a while ago; we trust that the wave 
 of outrage of these latter days has spared it) an 
 obelisk over Martyn's grave, recording in four lan- 
 guages who he was and why he was buried there. 
 
 No English friend was with him at or near the 
 end; but that Presence which never fails the faith- 
 ful was not only about him, but felt and known 
 to be about him. true to the promise of our King 
 to those that love Him and do His will : "He that 
 hath My commandments and keepeth them, he it 
 is that loveth Me; and he that loveth Me shall be 
 
NICHOLAS RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN. 141 
 
 loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will 
 manifest Myself to him."* Martyn's journal was 
 carried on by his Tartar courier to Constantinople, 
 and so reached England. Its latest entry, written 
 at an unnamed place on the Persian border, is dated 
 October 6, 1812, ten days before the end: "No 
 horses being to be had, I had an unexpected repose. 
 I sat in the orchard" (another orchard than that of 
 Ridley's Pembroke), "and thought with sweet com- 
 fort and peace of my God, in solitude my company, 
 my Friend and Comforter. Oh, when shall time give 
 place to eternity? When shall appear that new 
 heaven and new earth wherein dwelleth righteous- 
 ness? There, there shall in no wise enter anything 
 that defileth; none of those corruptions which add 
 still more to the miseries of mortality shall be seen 
 or heard of any more." 
 
 So he touched the brink of that mysterious Jordan 
 which awaits our feet also, and so he passed over, 
 finding without a doubt that great word true, "If a 
 man keep My saying, he shall never see death. "f He 
 was but thirty-one years old, and he was never per- 
 mitted to receive one genuine convert as the fruit 
 of his personal Indian ministry ; but for eighty-six 
 years now his memory, his example, his pure flame 
 ♦John xiv. 21. t John viii. 51. 
 
142 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS: 
 
 of "zeal and love, recorded eminent," has borne 
 the fruit of a host of consecrations to the like labor, 
 in the name of the same redeeming Lord. 
 
 I have attempted thus to place before you some 
 slight memorials of these two saints and servants 
 of God, men of our race and land and Church, 
 men of our Mother Cambridge, each reflecting 
 indeed a peculiar honor on his illustrious College 
 here; but all such honors are our common property 
 besides. 
 
 It is, of course, with serious purpose that I have 
 spoken thus of Ridley and of Martyn. True, it is 
 a personal delight to contemplate such characters 
 and faces with a regard which for a while terminates 
 in them ; "it is good to look upon a man," above all, 
 upon a man of God. But it can never possibly be 
 well to let our sight of the saints really terminate 
 in them. We can see them rightly only when they 
 are asked to answer our gaze with their messages, 
 and, above all, to point us upward to look upon 
 their King. 
 
 As we prepare to close, then, what, in some great 
 particulars, is the message of these two lives to us ? 
 
 It comes partly through their differences. Not 
 to speak of personal characteristics, Ridley and 
 Martyn were called by their Disposer to walks and 
 
NICHOLAS RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN. 143 
 
 works widely differing. To the one was allotted 
 the magnificent but formidable period of the Re- 
 naissance and the Reformation ; to the other, a time 
 in which, splendid as many of its features were, 
 English culture had scarcely yet felt the full modern 
 impulse, and when English religion was only strug- 
 gling back with difficulty and by degrees into spirit- 
 ual power after a long abeyance. To the one was 
 assigned a public life and labor, extended over many 
 years, a formative hand at a great crisis of the 
 Church, a confession before unjust judges, and a 
 death of shame and agony. The other was called to 
 a work comparatively silent and private in its con- 
 ditions, under alien skies, an experiment often rather 
 than an achievement, to sickness, solitude, and an 
 early grave. 
 
 Such were some of their differences. They speak 
 to us the old message that "God fulfills Himself in 
 many ways" in His saints — in divers manners as 
 well as at sundry times; and they remind us that 
 for every life here, for every mind, for every will, 
 for every hand, so it be given over to the hand of 
 God, there lies ready the chosen and adjusted faith 
 and task, no two quite alike, "to every man his 
 work." 
 
 But the differences all run up, in Ridley and in 
 Martyn, into great features of likeness, of identity. 
 
144 
 
 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS: 
 
 Their lives were both of a piece, for one thing, in 
 their energetic and conscientious use of the gifts of 
 God, as well as of His grace, that gift which we 
 must rank apart. The academic stories of the two 
 are indeed akin. The Fourth Wrangler of 1 522 and 
 the Senior Wrangler of 1801 were both men who 
 knew the sacredness of the gift of mind, and in the 
 scene of study made it their first duty to be students, 
 reaping from this a harvest of power for their work 
 to come. Their lives, again, were of a piece as time 
 called them on to action, in respect of the recogni- 
 tion of the special work, allotted to their periods, 
 the purpose and power to "serve their own genera- 
 tion in the will of God." Nobly forgetful of ease 
 and self-protection, and never dreaming of the poor, 
 the pitiable, question, whether their convictions were 
 popular and in the fashion, they addressed them- 
 selves, the one to his part in the great crisis of the 
 national Church, the other to the dawning hope of 
 the evangelization of the world, as to the call of their 
 Master then and there for them. 
 
 But the deepest of all their likenesses, the thing, 
 rather, in which they were one — I beseech my 
 brethren, and you, my younger brethren, especially, 
 to recollect and weigh it — was their personal rela- 
 tion to Jesus Christ our Lord. In this, Ridley and 
 Martyn meet indeed and, as it were, are merged 
 
 * 
 
NICHOLAS RIDLEY, HENRY MARTYN. 145 
 
 together. Historically, their theology of His Per- 
 son, and also of His saving Work, was the same and 
 one. In spiritual experience, they knew, and they 
 lived by, the same certainties about Him. The 
 mighty truths recovered publicly for the Church at 
 the Reformation, and called into fresh and wonder- 
 ful effect in the memorable Revival of the eighteenth 
 century, the truth of Justification by Faith, that is, 
 of peace with God in a trusted Christ, and the truth 
 of the living Work of the Holy Spirit, free and 
 personal, glorifying Christ in the heart — these 
 truths, could we have put the question to them, would 
 have been affirmed with equal joy by the martyr of 
 Oxford and the confessor of Tocat. 
 
 They were what they were because of Him. 
 Christ in His merit for them, Christ in His life in 
 them, this was the last analysis of their "conversa- 
 tion" and of its "end." 
 
 To them, even as it must be to the latest of all 
 human generations, to "whosoever will come after 
 Him," He was not something only, nor much only, 
 but all — all for the burthened conscience, all for the 
 wandering and the fainting will, and for the mortal 
 mystery at last. With Him, as with their living 
 Law and Peace and Hope and Power, they lived 
 conversing. And so they caught His likeness on 
 their faces, till in each of them we see something of 
 
146 TWO CAMBRIDGE SAINTS: 
 
 Him. (And, oh, what dream of other ambitions 
 can ever soar so high at its utmost flight as the hope 
 that through the disciple may be somehow seen some 
 scintilla of the Master's brightness?) As Isaac 
 Taylor says, in a pregnant essay in his Saturday 
 Evening: "So far as Christians truly exhibit the 
 characteristics of their Lord, in spirit and conduct, 
 a vivid emotion is enkindled in other Christian 
 bosoms, as if the bright Original of all perfection 
 stood dimly revealed. The conclusion comes upon 
 the mind that this family resemblance springs from 
 a common center, and that there exists, as its arche- 
 type, an invisible Personage, of whose glory all are 
 in a measure partaking." 
 
 So it was then, so it is now; for "Jesus Christ is 
 the same, yesterday, and today, and unto the ages 
 too." 
 
IX 
 
 THE SIGHT OF SELF AND THE SIGHT 
 OF CHRIST 
 
 Preached in the University Church, Oxford 
 
 "When I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. And He laid 
 His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the 
 First and the Last : I am He that liveth, and was dead ; and, 
 behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen ; and have the keys of 
 hell and of death."— Rev. i, 17, 18. 
 
 I read these words with a very simple purpose. 
 They lie surrounded with mystery for their context, 
 and in their own terms they all "go off into mys- 
 tery." But I approach them for no elaborate in- 
 quiry; I accept them as they stand. Here, in the 
 faith of the Church of Christ, verified by the 
 heavenly Spirit to the believing soul, is a true record 
 of a true experience, when on that far-off Lord's 
 Day, upon the rock of Patmos, John of Galilee, ven- 
 erable, saintly, full of the Holy Ghost and of the 
 powers of the world to come, fell down as if dead at 
 the feet of his manifested Master. Then and there 
 was he touched by that Master's hand, while there 
 came upon his soul, not from within him but from 
 
 147 
 
148 THE SIGHT OF SELF 
 
 without, his Master's utterance. What spoke to him 
 was no mere issue of the action of his mind. It was 
 Christ's heart in Christ's words. It was He, putting 
 Himself in contact with the disciple ; it was He, tell- 
 ing him that he need not fear, and that the reason 
 not to fear lay altogether and forever in Him who 
 touched him. 
 
 It is tempting to try to collect in the mind the 
 astonishing imagery of the vision; as if we could 
 figure to ourselves the seer in his prostration, and 
 above him the Human Face which shone like the 
 sun, and the moving lips whose words were like the 
 voices of the sea. But such attempts at a misnamed 
 realization can do us little good. It is better to fall 
 back at once upon the inmost essence of the scene, 
 and so to realize it indeed. Behold the spiritual 
 phenomenon. Consider this prostration of the mor- 
 tal disciple — yes, though he is also the chosen friend 
 of the Incarnate God. See him collapsed before his 
 Lord thus manifested to his spirit, till he rises and 
 revives only by the deed and word of that Lord Him- 
 self. With this direct and simple purpose I place 
 this Scripture before you, asking you to suffer me 
 in a few remembrances and appeals over two large 
 truths embodied in the Epiphany, the Theophany, 
 of Patmos. Standing within its solemn glory, let 
 us first consider how man sees himself in the act of 
 
AND THE SIGHT OF CHRIST. 
 
 seeing the Son of God; then, how he is told not to 
 fear, in the Name, and only in the Name, of Him 
 whom he has seen. 
 
 May He, merciful and gracious, not leave us alone 
 with the subject of Himself. Without Him, our 
 essays of thought upon Him are sure to be futile and 
 beside the mark. But let Him be wiih us and we 
 shall not think in vain of what He is. 
 
 i. Here first, then, we have before us man seeing 
 himself, in the act of seeing the King, the Lord God, 
 the Lamb of God, the Son of the Father. He sees 
 Him, and is overwhelmed in seeing. 
 
 This, on the threshold, is a profound paradox. 
 Thanks be to God, Christians have learned to com- 
 bine habitually with the thought of the sight of 
 Christ ideas of great peace and joy. "I said, Behold 
 Me;" ''Look unto Me, and be ye saved." "He that 
 seeth the Son," he that gazeth upon the Son — 6 dewpZv 
 rbv ri6v — "and believeth on Him, hath eternal life." 
 "Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for 
 mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, the Lord's 
 Christ." And that association of thoughts is divinely 
 just. To look thither, to contemplate the Only Be- 
 gotten, to behold the Lamb of God, to do that effort- 
 less work, to learn the blissful quietism of that look 
 of faith, is life indeed. Who that has had his tired 
 
150 THE SIGHT OF SELF 
 
 and bewildered eyes at length lifted to that open 
 vision, he knows not how, can ever cease to rest and 
 to be glad in the light of it, knowing with an insight 
 which passes beyond analysis that in his manifested 
 Lord is really present for him, now and always, a 
 repose, a strength, a light, a gladness which is ulti- 
 mate, and satisfies? But then, this is only so be- 
 cause of the revelation of grace seen along with the 
 revelation of glory. It is because of the mercifully 
 revealed relation between the majesty of Christ and 
 the salvation of the beholder of it. Remove the 
 thought of that relation ; place together, in the way 
 not of contact but of contrast, the seer and the Ob- 
 ject of his sight, and it is otherwise then. Then, if 
 the sinner's insight into Christ is at all spiritually 
 true, he falls at His feet as dead. "In His light we 
 see light"; but we see darkness too; we see self, we 
 see the foulness and the guilt of sin, and the awful 
 rightfulness which utters over it the sentence of a 
 final exile into the outer night. 
 
 So it is all through the Scriptures. Primal man, 
 fallen out of concord with the will of God, hides 
 himself in the deep bower from that approaching 
 Voice of awful and eternal sweetness.* Abraham 
 stands at Mamre talking with his Divine Friend ; and 
 on a sudden he knows through his inmost being 
 * Gen. lii. 8. 
 
AND THE SIGHT OF CHRIST. 151 
 
 that he is dust and ashes.* Young Isaiah, in his 
 temple-trance, f sees 'the King, the Lord of Hosts'; 
 none other (if St. JohnJ may be our expositor here) 
 than the Christ of God; and he cries out that he is 
 undone. Job is pronounced perfect by God Himself 
 in the opening scene ; but he gets at the end an in- 
 sight into the Creatorship of the Eternal, which in- 
 stantly lifts him (it is even so that the fully awak- 
 ened spirit reasons) to an insight into His holiness, 
 and then he clasps his hand to his mouth, and ab- 
 hors himself, and repents. 5 Peter in the Galilean 
 fishing-boat feels Heaven near him in his Master — 
 and he implores Him to go away. If Saul falls help- 
 less and confounded when, in one tremendous mo- 
 ment, he sees the glorified Jesus without having yet 
 believed on Him. And here, last of all, is John, the 
 intimate, the chosen friend, the dear disciple, near- 
 est of the near in that sweet intercourse of old ; he 
 too sees in a terrible sunlight what Christ is — in 
 contrast with a saint; and he falls at His feet as 
 dead. 
 
 Here is indeed conviction of sin. It is not only 
 
 conviction of creaturehood, of frailty, of mortality; 
 
 it is conviction of sin. No one can ponder the 
 
 parallel scenes (for example, the scene where Isaiah 
 
 * Gen. xviii. 27. f Isairh vi. 5. t John xii. 41. 
 § Job i. 8, xlii. 5, 6. || Luke v. 8. 
 
152 THE SIGHT OF SELF 
 
 sees God, and cries aloud that he is a lost man), and 
 can doubt that John also, in this moment of vision, 
 felt in the very basis of his being that awful differ- 
 ence between fallen man and God which is sin ; that 
 icrT{pT) f ia f — that "falling short of His glory,"* which 
 man may totally ignore in his easy hour, or at the 
 most may attenuate and extenuate, but which in the 
 hour of spiritual vision he sees as a gulf immeasur- 
 able, impassable, except by the mercy of the Holy 
 One. 
 
 To see God, aye to see God in Christ, in a light 
 which shows His holiness, but which is not yet 
 transmitted through the revelation of redeeming 
 love, is an awful thing. "At this also the heart 
 trembleth, and is moved out of its place." "No man 
 shall see My face and live." 
 
 Yet, my brethren, suffer me humbly to affirm 
 that, awful as that sight is, it is divinely salutary. 
 Deep in the heart of all genuine human holiness lies 
 conviction of sin, the spiritual sense of sin, the hav- 
 ing been brought in truth and fact to something of 
 Job's abhorrence and John's prostration. I do not 
 mean a morbid and restless introspection. What I 
 mean is not so much inlook as outlook. It is not to 
 dwell with a perilous minuteness upon the pathology 
 of particular sins; this may be only the distorted 
 * Rom. iii. 23. 
 
AND THE SIGHT OF CHRIST. 153 
 
 counterfeit of a true self-examination. I mean 
 something at once deeper and higher : a waking up 
 of conscience to the awfulness of sin as sin; to the 
 spiritual fact that sin is the thing eternally abomi- 
 nable to the living God ; to the sight of it in the light 
 of His pure law, till sin, in the stern tautology of the 
 Apostle,* becomes to us "exceedingly sinful," be- 
 cause it is discord with the Will of God. 
 
 Such conviction has never been common. Is 
 it too much to say that in our own time it is 
 even more than usually scarce, and strange, and 
 out of the religious fashion ? Yet it affects the very 
 life of the soul, and so of the Church. Has any 
 great misbelief ever arisen in Christendom, and 
 there has not lain at its roots an enfeebled sense of 
 sin? It has been said, and I for one hold it for 
 truth, that the proof and certainty of the Faith is 
 fully seen only through the awakened conscience. 
 Then let us ask, and seek, and knock for conviction 
 of sin. For the sake of the depth and firmness of 
 our faith in Christ, and of our peace in submission 
 to His will, and of our serviceableness for His work, 
 let us dare to welcome the conviction, deep and 
 sacred, of the sinfulness of sin. 
 
 For this end, if only for this, let us set ourselves 
 anew to consider "the Inhabitant of Eternity, whose 
 * Rom. vii. 13. 
 
154 THE SIGHT OF SELF 
 
 name is Holy."* Let us often visit the ground (not 
 too much frequented now) where man puts his shoes 
 off his feet before God. Let us receive into our 
 religion the spirit of holy fear, that untormenting 
 but worshiping fear which apprehends the purity 
 of the King of Saints, which wonders at His mercy 
 as well as takes it; which exclaims with Micah.t 
 "Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth 
 iniquity?" while yet we see, with a faith only the 
 clearer for that holy wonder, that He stands engaged 
 (so that same Scripture tells us) "to subdue our 
 iniquities and to cast all our sins into the sea." 
 
 Such worshiping insights do not come to 
 spiritual indolence. They want wakeful care, and 
 guarded hours, that men may be alone before their 
 Lord. They want a humble submission to the 
 heavenly Word, with a willingness that light should 
 fall through it direct upon our darkness. But 
 we shall be well recompensed for the watching and 
 the submission. The sight of the Holy One is 
 the most abasing of all things, but it is the secret of 
 all joy. It is well to reach that joy by learning first 
 what it is to have nothing to say for ourselves — that 
 vital factor in true repentance ; and we learn this in 
 the sight of Christ's glory. Let us covet such sights 
 of Him as shall let us fall at His feet with nothing 
 *Isa. lvii. 15. t Mic. vii. 18, 19. 
 
AND THE SIGHT OF CHRIST. 155 
 
 at all to say. It is good to be there, and to be so. 
 To be so there is to be beneath the touch of His 
 hand, within the sound of His voice, as He says to 
 us, what only He has the right to say, "Fear not." 
 
 ii. With that word we are brought to the second 
 limb of the text. We come to find the man, thus 
 broken down by the sight of the Holy One, now 
 raised and reassured and greatly blest in the 
 name of Him whom he has seen. "He woundeth, 
 and His hands make whole." 
 
 Here, again, in these last pages of the Bible, we 
 have a spiritual phenomenon traceable through the 
 whole Volume. Always, where man finds himself 
 confounded before God, it is from God Himself and 
 from no alien region that the wonderful reassurance 
 comes. When Isaiah says, "I am undone," the 
 Seraph from above the throne brings him the fiery 
 sacrament* of pardon and of power. Job abhors him- 
 self because his eye sees the Lord, and the Lord per- 
 sonally accepts him, with abundant welcomes. Peter 
 shrinks in the boat away from his Master, and his 
 Master says, "Be not afraid." And here at Patmos 
 it is the same: "He laid His right hand upon 
 me, saying unto me, Do not fear; I am the First 
 and the Last, and the Living One; and I became 
 dead; and behold living am I to the endless 
 * Isa. vi. 6. 
 
156 THE SIGHT OF SELF 
 
 ages, Amen; and I have the keys of Hades and of 
 death." This is revival and reassurance to purpose; 
 a strong consolation, for its material and texture is 
 altogether Jesus Christ. Not a word is said of any 
 reason not to fear inherent in the disciple; not a 
 syllable comes, in that transcendent moment, about 
 the endeared and wonderful past of Galilee and of 
 Judea, those incidents of the most sacred of all 
 friendships, in the cottage, in the field, on the shore, 
 on the waters, on the hills. For the season, it is 
 as if earth were not, and John were isolated and 
 solitary in eternity, simply a sinner, cast down 
 before the glory of the Son of God. And the reason 
 for the "Do not fear" does not attach itself to John 
 at all. It is not, "It is thou." It is altogether, "It 
 is I." 
 
 "It sets Him well to commend Himself" ; so said 
 an aged disciple, in a northern cottage, about her 
 Lord and Saviour. "It sets Him, it becomes Him 
 well to commend Himself." Certainly it is char- 
 acteristic of His thought and utterance to do so. 
 Meek and lowly of heart, He is yet true to Himself, 
 and, being what He is, He must say the thing that 
 is. As in the days of His flesh, so here in these of 
 His glory, our Lord Jesus Christ is His own gospel. 
 He puts Himself into contact with the man at His 
 feet, laying upon him the hand which by its touch 
 
AND THE SIGHT OF CHRIST. 15? 
 
 is to signify and seal at once His claim, His blessing, 
 and that immediate union which His grace sets up 
 between Himself and His redeemed. And then He 
 tells him not to fear. And then, in order to this, He 
 recites the roll of His own majesty and mercy. "I am 
 the First and the Last, and the Living One" — 6 zzv. 
 He avows Himself originally and indefectibly 
 Eternal ; He is, He lives, from the Alpha that never 
 began to the Omega that cannot end. He is no un- 
 knowable Infinity. But He is Infinite, and to be so 
 known. In His timeless and necessary Oneness with 
 the Father, it is His not to become but to be, with 
 a Being full of the Fount of life. "And I 
 became dead" — ko.i tyevbwv V e K p6$ a mysterious para- 
 dox, in which a most wonderful event is inserted, 
 incorporated, into that eternity of being. In this 
 short phrase He intimates the whole mystery of the 
 Incarnation ; but He presents just that aspect of it — 
 short phrase He intimates the whole mystery of the 
 Incarnation; but He presents just that aspect of it — 
 mark it well — which sinful man, prone at His feet, 
 most needs. He does not articulate the thought now 
 of His blessed Birth, nor of His life, His speech, His 
 labor, His example; there is nothing said here of 
 Bethlehem, or of the years of Nazareth, or of the 
 fair borders of the Lake with the furrowed fields, 
 and the floating fishing-craft, and the listening multi- 
 
158 THE SIGHT OF SELF 
 
 tudes upon the flowery slopes. It is all the Cross ; it 
 is only and altogether the precious Death and Burial. 
 "I became dead." We read that sentence in the 
 light of the long Apocalypse, and what do we see 
 within it? The shame and glory of the Crucifixion, 
 the atoning and redeeming Blood, the sacrifice of 
 the Lamb, the Lamb not of innocence only but of 
 the altar — "as it had been slain." 
 
 Yes, the Lord's Death, in its peculiar, its unique 
 significance, appears always in these last pages of 
 Scripture as the central, concentrating Fact, given 
 for the wonder and worship of the heavenly elders 
 and the innumerable redeemed in the upper glory. 
 "Thou wast slain, and hast made purchase by Thy 
 blood out of every kindred" ; "Worthy is the Lamb 
 that hath been slain." And here first with His own 
 hand He strikes the theme of the mighty fugue — 
 "I became dead," naming explicitly His Death 
 alone out of all the history of His Humanity. Only, 
 and of course, He gives it not as isolated ; He glori- 
 fies it at once with His Resurrection. Without that, 
 the Death would be to us as nothing. Without the 
 Resurrection the Cross would speak to us no peace. 
 In the field of history, without the Resurrection, the 
 Cross would long since have faded into obscure and 
 conflicting shadows ; it would seem now at best one 
 more pathetic ruin of illusory beliefs, soon dropped 
 
AND THE SIGHT OF CHRIST. 159 
 
 out of the speech and at last out of the heart of 
 the weak votaries of a defeated and mistaken leader. 
 But "Behold, living am I, for the endless ages, and 
 I have the keys of Hades and of death." So the 
 Prince of the Cross stands over His prostrate 
 servant, to touch him, and to tell him not to fear. 
 It is not the slain One merely, but the slain One 
 risen, Master of Life, Abolisher of Death, He who 
 has passed victorious through the deep Unseen and 
 carried out its keys with Him, to hold for ever. The 
 Risen Christ ! Hear His Voice, feel His hand ! It 
 is "Christ which is our Life," for all this moment's 
 necessities of the soul, the man. And it is Christ the 
 imperial Ruler of the world of spirits, that world so 
 awful to human apprehension out of Him, but in 
 Him — for the man in Him — safe, hallowed, happy. 
 The hand that rests so gently on the contrite servant 
 is the hand which grasps the keys of death. All 
 things there, as well as here, belong to those who 
 belong to Him. Are you Christ's ? Then "all things 
 are yours" ; not only "Paul, and Apollos, and Ce- 
 phas," but also "life," and also, quite as truly, 
 "death."* 
 
 So in the great vision the Lord glorifies Himself. 
 "It sets Him well." He has to transfigure the trance 
 of fear into the rest of faith, and He goes the nearest 
 * 1 Cor. iii. 22, 23. 
 
i6o THE SIGHT OF SELF 
 
 way to do it. "I am He"; "It is I"; "Fear not." 
 John is lifted, in a single action, out of himself, to 
 find instant and absolute peace in Christ — Christ 
 eternal, sacrificed, risen, Lord of both worlds, and 
 in living contact with His servant. 
 
 What was so then is so to-day. In all other 
 things "the same, yesterday, and today, and for 
 ever," our Lord Jesus Christ is in nothing more 
 magnificently the same than in this — that He, 
 for the forgiveness, the acceptance, the peace, 
 the purification, the empowering of the sinful soul 
 of man, is, not something, not many things, not 
 the great things, but all. John's glorious brother 
 Paul, whose conversion still sheds on the Church 
 its great ray of witness to the Lord's eternal 
 power to subdue, to justify, to glorify — what says 
 Paul* of that all-sufficiency? "Of God are ye, 
 in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us 
 wisdom, even righteousness, and sanctification, and 
 redemption." All is there. The vast range of our 
 need is met by the circle, the faultless sphere, of 
 His supply. Righteousness, to justify the ungodly; 
 Sanctification, to separate us from sin to the living 
 fulness of a life in God; Redemption, body and 
 * I Cor. i. 30. 
 
AND THE SIGHT OF CHRIST. 161 
 
 soul, into the final glory; such is Christ. He does 
 not only give this. He is this. Christ is all. 
 
 Great and multifold is "the truth as it is in Him." 
 The central facts of grace themselves, to think of 
 them only, have aspects innumerable. But they all 
 stand in relation to the sublime simplicity of the 
 inmost heart of the Christian Gospel; out of that 
 relation they cease to be. That Heart of the system 
 is our personal Lord Jesus Christ; Christ all things 
 for the Christian, Christ all things in him. 
 
 What gives to faith, man's faith, its peculiar and 
 supreme position in the scheme of grace, from our 
 side? Why does St. Paul, but quite equally St. 
 John, and, above all, their Master, so emphasize 
 and accentuate the call for faith ? It is not because 
 of the merit, because of the virtuousness, because 
 of the beauty, of faith. Faith's essence is to look 
 out of and ignore itself, to forget itself, to be for- 
 gotten, to be in a sense as if it were not. Virtus 
 fidei est virtus objccti. Faith's power lies in what 
 it touches, in the boundless adequacy and excel- 
 lency of its divine Correlative, its glorious Object. 
 It lies in the Virtue of Him to whom we bring 
 nothing but our unutterable need, that we may take 
 from Him His all. It lies in the fact that it is a 
 void made for Jesus Christ ; it is a hand held empty 
 for that golden gift, Himself. 
 
1 62 THE SIGHT OF SELF 
 
 "God doth justify the believing man," writes 
 Richard Hooker, a name bright and venerable in 
 Oxford if anywhere, "not for the worthiness of his 
 faith, but for the worthiness of Him which is be- 
 lieved."* 
 
 Would we then believe indeed unto the life 
 eternal? Would we, in these days of uncertainties 
 and unrest, gravitate to our center, and be at peace? 
 Then let us not too much scrutinize and analyze our 
 believing; let us rather acquaint ourselves with Jesus 
 Christ. Christ, seen in His fulness, is the all-power- 
 ful magnet of faith. Get but a real view of Him, even 
 through the scarcely rifted clouds, and we shall not 
 question whether we can do so great a thing as to 
 believe; we shall of course believe (may I dare to 
 put it so?) in so great and so immeasurably good 
 an Object. The traveler over the ocean, asked to 
 embark upon a raft, t 7ri <rx^5ia% KivBweveiv, may reason- 
 ably falter. Invited to step upon the giant struc- 
 ture of the steamship, to enter some Lucania or 
 Campania, he trusts wholly, so far as human 
 warrants of safety can possibly go; but he forgets 
 his reliance, in the vast reason for it, and 
 he addresses himself to the business of his voyage. 
 
 But let our look upon that Object be the look of 
 
 * Discourse of Justification, ch. 33. 
 
AND THE SIGHT OF CHRIST. 163 
 
 those who rely upon it, wholly indeed, but not 
 lightly. Let it be the look of the contrite, who 
 have fallen at His feet, and there felt His hand, 
 and there heard His voice, deep as many waters, 
 sweet as the love of God : "Fear not ; for it is I, 
 Fear not, because of Me. I am the First and the 
 Last; I live; I died; I am alive for ever; I hold 
 the keys." 
 
X 
 
 "LOVEST THOU ME?" 
 
 Preached in the Chapel Royal, St. James's Palace 
 
 "Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Lovest thou Me?" — John xxi. 
 I5-I7- 
 
 Who that takes any delight in the Bible at all 
 does not take delight in the twenty-first chapter of 
 St. John? Who has not felt the benignant spell of 
 that narrative, in its indescribable simplicity and 
 depth, its gracious beauty and its soul-penetrating 
 power? Willingly we follow the last Apostle as he 
 recounts to us, in his uttermost age, with the photo- 
 graphic precision of an old man's recollection of 
 his prime, that wonderful memory. He leads us as 
 if into the very landscape of the Syrian lake. We 
 embark with him in the boat, as if we heard the 
 rattle of the oars, and the lap of the ripples on the 
 sides. We "ply the watery task" with him and his 
 comrades, as if we saw the vernal stars reflected 
 under our eyes in the dusky mirror of the deep. 
 Their weariness and disappointment, as the night 
 wanes and they have taken nothing, are as if our 
 own. And then comes up the morning over the 
 dark hills of Moab, and there stands a Figure on 
 
 164 
 
LOVEST THOU ME?" 165 
 
 the solitary beach, and there are callings to and fro 
 between beach and boat; and the nets are full and 
 heavy on a sudden, and the disciple plunges into 
 the water, to swim and wade to his Master's feet. 
 The whole group soon gathers round the fire of 
 coals; the fast is broken; and then there is a 
 colloquy about love and labor and martyrdom and 
 following. We have seen it, heard it, shared it all. 
 
 It was my happiness a few years ago to set eyes 
 upon the Lake of Galilee, gazing with strange emo- 
 tions upon the waters and the mountain-shores from 
 the garden of the Scottish Mission Hospital (scene 
 of a noble work for God) at Tiberias, and afterwards 
 from a boat, built probably on lines unaltered for 
 two thousand years, and worked by fishermen, clad 
 probably in the very fashion of the Apostles. 
 Wonderful was the charm of the thought that this 
 was indeed the scene of the Gospels; the eyes of 
 the Son of Man knew just those outlines of cliff, 
 and field, and shore, and that snowy dome of 
 Hermon looking on from the northern horizon. 
 His feet trod this shell-wrought strand, aye, and the 
 waves too into which those smooth waters can be 
 tossed so soon. Somewhere yonder, on the further 
 side (for surely it was on that more solitary margin), 
 this last scene of St. John's narrative was enacted ; 
 there was kindled the ruddy fire, there the water 
 
"LOVEST THOU ME? 
 
 flashed into silver as Simon Peter wrestled his way 
 through. Along that shore, whose line lies so dis- 
 tinct between lake and hills, he followed the steps 
 of Jesus, and turned to see John following too. 
 
 It was a moving thing to look thus with waking 
 eyes on the region as it is. Yet, such is the power, 
 the artless magic, of the narrative of the Apostle, 
 that I know not whether the actual gain to realization 
 was very great. The Gospel had created so visible 
 a landscape that the eyes had less to add to the 
 picture than I had hoped. 
 
 Yes, we may all in thought sit together by that 
 fair water, abundantly assured that St. John's picture 
 is as truthful as it is living, alike in scenery and in 
 action. We may draw nearer to the spot in thought 
 than I could draw by sight on that bright afternoon 
 of my visit; for our mental steps may tread, as my 
 feet could not do, that further strand, and we may 
 pause within sight and hearing of the very dialogue. 
 Look then, and listen. Jesus, in our hearing, is 
 asking Simon, the son of Jonas, "Lovcst thou Me?" 
 
 That we may better apprehend the depth and 
 wonder of that question, and its significance for 
 ourselves, let us stand by a little while and contem- 
 plate the Inquirer and the Answerer, and their 
 relation to each other. It is Jesus Christ asking; it 
 is Simon, son of Jonas, who is to reply. 
 
LOVEST THOU ME?" 167 
 
 Bcce Homo! — "Behold this Man," who requests 
 the assurance of the other's personal affection ! As 
 to guise and garb (we may certainly take that for 
 granted). He sits there, as much as ever, "in 
 fashion as a man." Yes, the group gathered round 
 the glowing embers by the lake-side is eight — seven 
 disciples, bodily present, real men; one Master, 
 bodily present, real man. He wears the dress of 
 His country; He speaks with its accent; the 
 morning sun throws His shadow upon the grass 
 and the stones. Yes; but also, He is the Son of 
 God, the Bearer of the sin of the world, the 
 Savior of the world, the Conqueror — the recent 
 Conqueror — of the grave. He has died the most 
 mysterious of deaths, because man has sinned, and 
 in order that man may be redeemed and saved. 
 He now is alive for evermore, in the power of an 
 endless and indissoluble life. Yet a little while and 
 He will quit the visible. He will ascend, to enter 
 the Unseen and to take His place on nothing less 
 than the universal Throne. He will have a great 
 place — "at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 
 angels and authorities and powers being made sub- 
 ject unto Him." 
 
 Nor is He unconscious of His ineffable dignities. 
 All through this scene by the lake St. John sets the 
 Lord before us as speaking and acting with an 
 
1 68 "LOVEST THOU ME?" 
 
 autocratic majesty only the more impressive because 
 of its absolute calm and ease. He claims to be the 
 center and repose of the whole devotion of His 
 disciples. He asserts, if the word assert can be used 
 without obscuring His omnipotent quiet, the most 
 absolute possible lordship over them, irresponsible 
 and ultimate : "If I will that he tarry till I come, 
 what is that to thee?" They, these Apostles, are 
 His mere property. And the souls for which they 
 are to labor equally belong to Him — "My lambs," 
 "My sheep." 
 
 Such is the one Party in the scene — our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, God and Man. in the serenity and 
 loftiness of His resurrection life ; Master and Com- 
 mander, as He has just shown Himself to be, alike 
 of nature and of man; "Head over all things" to 
 creation, to the Church, and to the soul. From 
 Him those simplest imaginable human syllables 
 come upon the morning air, Do yon love me? 
 
 Consider the other party in his turn. To us, 
 indeed, the man and the name are great and 
 venerable, as we think what St. Peter was in the 
 sum of his life, and what his work means for the 
 Church forever, and as we remember his present 
 glorified rest and joy above. But it is no irreverence 
 to recall the other side, as it showed itself there and 
 then. Who is this man who receives that question. 
 
LOVEST THOU ME?" 169 
 
 and prepares to answer? He is just a provincial, a 
 peasant, born and bred in a corner, trained to 
 common toil; a young man, we may assume, for 
 surely the Apostles all belonged to their Master's 
 generation — a young man, Galilean to the core, un- 
 cultured, plebeian, and, in point of character, "not 
 so much strong as strongly marked";* impulsive, by 
 no means always wise, capable indeed of tremendous 
 miscalculations and mistakes. He is just the son of 
 Jonas, the homely "pilot of the Galilean lake." The 
 heart in his bosom is warm and eager; but it is a 
 common human heart, and it is far from a sinless 
 one. Upon it, this very morning, lies, with an in- 
 describable shame and pain, the recent memory of 
 its most dreadful failure; that scene around. another 
 fire of coals, when a horrible bewilderment of great 
 fear, an abject terror for his mere mortal life, pos- 
 sessed him, and his own ears heard his own mouth 
 call heaven and earth to witness that he knew abso- 
 lutely nothing of Jesus the Nazarene. 
 
 Such is the second party. Of this man the Other 
 is asking, Do you love Me? 
 
 Now let us for the time put aside the answer to 
 the inquiry. I do not propose here to study, to dis- 
 
 * I quote the phrase from a well-remembered sermon by 
 the late Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Dr. W. H. 
 Thompson. 
 
170 "LOYEST THOU ME?" 
 
 cuss, St. Peter's language or St. Peter's feeling as 
 indicated by St. John. I ask to concentrate our at- 
 tention altogether upon the question, as asked — not 
 by anyone, but by Jesus Christ, who had died and 
 risen again, and who sate there now in His tranquil 
 majesty. 
 
 Not that I forget the fact that it is a question, and 
 expects an answer. No; I wish, above all things, 
 to prepare for the answer, and that not only as it 
 shall be given by Peter in the Gospel narrative, but 
 as "this same Jesus," who lives to-day and is present 
 in our assembly here, shall hear it spoken to Him by 
 our own human hearts. But for that very purpose 
 let us contemplate the question. 
 
 "Lovest thou Me?" How does this sound, as 
 regards the thought, the purpose, that lies behind 
 it? What does it say about the Speaker ? Perhaps 
 it carries with it at first, in our apprehension of it, 
 the air of a demand — a claim, the levy of a due, the 
 summons for an unpaid debt. Here is One who 
 knows (for He knows all things, and this assuredly 
 is a fact present to His mind) that the son of Jonas 
 is under immeasurable obligations to Him, and ought 
 to love Him. Most certainly Jesus, for Simon, has 
 done and borne incalculably much within the last 
 few wonderful weeks; Simon is infinitely and for 
 ever the better for the Cross and Passion. And be- 
 
LOVEST THOU ME?" 171 
 
 hind all, behind the atoning death, and the sin-cover- 
 ing merit, and the robe of righteousness, and the re- 
 sultant pardon and peace for this very guilty man — 
 behind it, and above it, there lies all that is implied 
 by the fact that Christ has not only saved Peter, 
 but first made him. He can claim the man's whole 
 being in the double name of Rescuer and of Creator. 
 
 Yes, all this is the very truth — truth for me and 
 for you, as much altogether as for that Galilean 
 penitent of old. But I do not think that we read 
 aright the thought and accent of the Lord in His 
 question, Do you love Me? if we read into it this 
 notion — the exaction of a right, the reminder of a 
 debt. He who knew the human heart perfectly 
 (for He has Himself a perfect human heart) would 
 not make so profound a mistake as to cast the 
 demand for payment into the form of an inquiry 
 about love. We mortals and sinners may make 
 such mistakes. There are those, no doubt, who 
 blindly seek to claim, merely as a due, the affection, 
 for example, of a child, the affection being regarded 
 as so much return due for so much care, or as so 
 much honor due to so sacred a relation. But Jesus 
 Christ knew well that human love, while it is possible 
 and sometimes amply right to state the theory of it 
 in terms of duty, can never be asked for, face to face, 
 except as just the free response to love; the return, 
 
172 "LOVEST THOU ME?' 
 
 the repercussion, of a tenderness that has first gone 
 freely out as the unselfish gift of the asker's heart. 
 
 Just this is the beauty, the glory, the magnetic 
 virtue, once it is apprehended, of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ's inquiry of us, Do you love Me? It is the 
 very touch which lifts the veil from the heart, not of 
 Peter, but of Jesus. In the very act of asking about 
 Peter's love for Him He discloses His love for 
 Peter — a love which is something infinitely different 
 from mere compassion, or mere benevolence, or mere 
 condescension. For it is a love which goes out 
 towards Peter so powerfully, so longingly, with such 
 contact and embrace, that it cannot rest without the 
 responsive gaze and clasp of Peter's love to Jesus. 
 The Lord is not just stooping to say, "It is your 
 privilege to love Me." He covets His sinful disciple's 
 love; He wants it; it is important to Him; it is 
 much to Him, because He loves the man with such 
 mighty love Himself. 
 
 What parent here does not understand it ? When 
 your little child first said, in the sweet broken sylla- 
 bles of childhood, "I love you," what did you feel? 
 That your rights were recognized so fitly and 
 so early? That filial and parental relations were 
 already on a proper footing? You felt joy, and the 
 purest thing that can possibly be called pride; for 
 your mighty love to your child made its dawning 
 
"LOVEST THOU ME?" 
 
 173 
 
 love to you indescribably great and important, and 
 the more so the more utterly unforced. Someone 
 has dared to apply to our Redeemer that very 
 thought, with a truth great as the simplicity of the 
 words : 
 
 "The little weary lambs 
 
 He gently beareth, 
 And on His breast their love 
 He proudly weareth." 
 
 Yes, Jesus Christ cannot ask if Peter loves Him, 
 and cannot ask, as He does today, if we love Him, 
 without betraying how much, how really, how 
 strongly, He loves us. 
 
 As I said just now, let us in this aspect of the 
 matter put aside the answer, and contemplate the 
 question, that is to say, the Questioner. 
 
 Oh, human soul, here before God to-day, listen 
 to the inquiry of Jesus Christ, and give yourself 
 time to understand what it means about Himself. 
 
 Are you acquainted with grief, perhaps such grief 
 — so long and deep — that it has seemed at last rather 
 to benumb the heart than pierce it, yet leaving the 
 consciousness of loss, of solitude, of change, only 
 too complete? Nevertheless, One stands beside 
 you who covets the love of your maimed and almost 
 paralyzed spirit. He would be so delighted to have 
 
174 "LOVEST THOU ME?" 
 
 it! For He greatly loves you. And listen, He is 
 asking, and it is for that very reason that He is 
 asking — Do you love Me? 
 
 He is acquainted with grief Himself, in depths 
 which He has sounded alone. The woe is over for 
 Him, but not the experience : "Souffrir passe; avoir 
 souffert demeure dtemellement." He understands 
 you, as sorrow understands sorrow; but He also 
 loves you, and He is avaricious of your love. Let 
 Him have it, Him the eternal Truth and Beauty, 
 but also the Brother and the Friend. And when 
 your love has met and satisfied His, believe me, 
 there shall take place a miracle at the point of 
 contact ''your sorrow shall be turned into joy." 
 
 Human heart, distracted, bewildered, preoccupied 
 with we know not what — dissatisfied, perhaps, apart 
 from Christ; perhaps, far sadder still, satisfied for 
 the time apart from Him — to-day let no word be 
 spoken by me of the vast truths which concern duty, 
 law, and judgment to come. It shall be enough 
 this hour to say once more, Listen to the asking 
 Christ. Behold the Son of God ! Behold the Man 
 of men ! You are profoundly important to Him. He 
 wants, He covets you; He will "proudly wear" 
 your love; He is asking whether it is for Him. 
 Let your heart meet His, and for you too the 
 contact shall work miracles; life shall be life to you 
 
LOVEST THOU ME?" 175 
 
 now indeed, temptations shall be trodden down 
 beneath you, pure joys all made purer, every purpose 
 lifted, every trial dignified, and "life and death and 
 then that vast for ever," shall be attuned, by the 
 magic of His sacred love, into "one grand sweet 
 song." 
 
 "That ye may know the love of Christ which 
 passeth knowledge." 
 
 "Lovest thou Me?" O Love, that lovest me so 
 much as to ask the question, Thou knowest that I 
 love Thee! 
 
XI 
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE LOVE OF 
 GOD 
 
 A Whitsunday Sermon 
 
 "The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, by the Holy 
 Ghost which is given unto us." — Rom. v. 5. 
 
 Somewhat more literally we may read : "The love 
 of God has been poured out in our hearts, by means 
 of the Holy Ghost which was given to us." 
 
 There is a divine simplicity about these words. 
 They speak of immense mysteries; of God and of 
 His inmost love, of the eternal Spirit and His in- 
 scrutable workings, and of what is a mystery only 
 less in order than the things divine — our human 
 heart. But the words which touch and indicate 
 these unfathonable things are the simplest possible. 
 Every one of them belongs to the plainest of plain 
 English ; the longest of them is but a dissyllable. And 
 this is no rare phenomenon in the heavenly Book. 
 Again and again the Bible speaks its plainest just 
 when it is leading us into the inner sanctuaries of 
 truth. It is full of truths which we cannot possibly 
 "find out unto perfection." But it speaks as if it 
 
 176 
 
HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 177 
 
 would tell us all about them that it can, all that we 
 can apprehend to our blessing. The falsely mys- 
 terious, which delights in "great swelling words," 
 has no place in the Bible. 
 
 Let us approach our text, and interrogate it. In 
 this its divine simplicity, what is it saying to us 
 to-day, on this great Sunday of the Spirit? We 
 will seek our answer under two or three special 
 titles. 
 
 i. "The Love of God": that is to say, the love felt 
 by God towards man, the personal affection of the 
 Almighty. Some have seen in the words another 
 and opposite reference, as if the Apostle meant our 
 love for God, our love of God, as an emotion gener- 
 ated, or liberated, in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. 
 And some, more mystically, have read in our text 
 the thought that the Spirit's work is to infuse and 
 diffuse within us the eternal Love itself in such a 
 sense that it becomes, as it were, our own, and 
 returns to its source in the incense of our surrender 
 to God, our delight and rest in Him. But the con- 
 text (verse 8) surely gives a decisive answer in favor 
 of the simplest, while most wonderful, of the refer- 
 ence: "God commendeth His Love tozvard us, in 
 that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." 
 That verse stands in close logical connection with 
 this, and the reference must be the same. 
 
178 HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 "The Love of God," then, His "marvelous loving- 
 kindness," as the Psalmist has it;* the tenderness 
 and endearment of Him who is Love, towards us 
 sinners, toward us who have fled from ourselves to 
 Him and "laid hold on His strength and made peace 
 with Him" in His own way — this is the particular 
 reference here of "the love of God." It is the kind- 
 ness of the eternal Heart towards those who believe, 
 towards the Lord's own, "the children of men who 
 put their trust" in the deep "shadow of His wings." 
 
 Abundantly true it is that the Scriptures speak, 
 amply, magnificently, of a love of God which is over 
 all His works. "God loved the world," and "so" 
 loved it — not the Church, not the saints, not the 
 chosen, but the world. With the love of an in- 
 finitely "faithful Creator,"! He loved, and loves, the 
 world, and from that love flows the whole tide of 
 benignant providence and all the sweetness of the 
 message of the Gospel to "whosoever will." But 
 this glorious exterior circle leaves undimmed to our 
 view in Scripture the "glory that excelleth," the 
 inner circle, the love of the Lord for His own, His 
 ransomed, His saved, "the flock of the high heavenly 
 Pastor, Christ" (to use Ridley's almost dying 
 words), those who "hear His voice and follow 
 Him," and whom He "knows by name." This love 
 * Ps. xvii. 7. 1 1 Pet. iv. 19. 
 
HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 179 
 
 is peculiar and distinctive, a light in the inner Sanc- 
 tuary, beaming above the Ark of the better Cove- 
 nant, within the veil where the Forerunner has 
 gone in.* 
 
 The two spheres are in concentric harmony. It 
 is so (if we may illustrate God by man) in human 
 things. Not seldom has been seen the beautiful 
 phenomenon of the philanthropist who is also the 
 ideal father, or ideal mother — a Fowell Buxton, an 
 Elizabeth Fry; a life which to the world is known 
 for its devotion to mankind in large and far-seeing 
 enterprises and sacrifices, but which to the nearer 
 circle is known as the glowing center of home affec- 
 tions and intimate friendships. And can we not 
 think so of the Eternal and Almighty? His uni- 
 versal lovingkindness — this is one thing, and a thing 
 more wide and deep than created thought can 
 measure. But His special, inmost love to His own 
 regenerate children in His own Son — this is another 
 thing, and nearer still to the heart of all life and bliss. 
 
 Of this the text is speaking. For the Apostle 
 has just been leading us up, along the golden stairs 
 of his great Epistle, to the peace and joy of those 
 who have obtained salvation. We have traveled by 
 the way of the Cross, by the way of faith, to the 
 wonderful rest of justification, and into the very 
 * Heb. vi. 19, 20. 
 
i8o HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 righteousness of God. We have heard how those 
 who believe possess peace with Him, and rejoice in 
 Him, and in the hope of His glory. And these are 
 the persons in view in this text of ours, with its 
 words about "the love of God." It is no vague 
 description, no portrait which may be meant for 
 anyone. It means not all and sundry who pass 
 under the Christian name ; would to God that name 
 and thing were so linked together that it could do 
 so ! But only those answer the description here who 
 have actually "come" to the personal Redeemer to 
 have life, only those who, by grace, have said "Yes" 
 to grace, and entered into Christ. 
 
 Such is the burthen and the bearing of the words. 
 Behold this inner love of God, His family love! 
 "What manner of love hath the Father bestowed" 
 upon that happy circle! It is as free and unbought 
 as mercy can be; for, as St. Paul goes on to say, it 
 first went forth in its tender power when they were 
 "sinners" — yes, when they were "enemies" and "un- 
 godly." But it is as genuine, as warm, as strong 
 and deep, as it is unmerited. The love of the Father 
 for His children of the new birth — behold what it 
 is ! "Now are they the sons of God" ; and hereafter, 
 when their Lord, their Elder Brother, shall be mani- 
 fested, it shall be manifested what they are made 
 
HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 181 
 
 for, in the love of God ; "they shall be like Him, for 
 they shall see Him as He is."* 
 
 ii. "The love of God is shed abroad" or, more lit- 
 erally, "hath been outpoured," "in our hearts." The 
 phrase is beautifully vivid. You cannot take it to 
 pieces and analyze it and explain the process, but 
 you can know what it means. To these human hearts 
 of ours, deep in these living, heaving, conscious 
 worlds within, in the very "springs of thought, 
 and will," and affection, there can be somehow 
 granted the view of this love as a fact, the sense and 
 grasp of this love as a possession. It is there, poured 
 out. It is no alien and separable insertion. It is 
 poured out. Like the shower from the soft cloud, 
 like the odor from the flower, it is there; shed 
 abroad, suffused, pervading, changing, beautifying, 
 glorifying all. 
 
 Manifestly it was not so once. These hearts were 
 once as little possessed of this wonderful outpour- 
 ing as the brown field in the year of drought is pos- 
 sessed of the genial rain. The "outpouring" is now 
 within, it is in the depths; but it was from above; 
 "not of yourselves, it is the gift of God."f 
 
 Does this view of the matter seem to any of us an 
 unreality, a thing of vision and enthusiasm? Per- 
 haps nothing in your experience corresponds to it as 
 * i John iii. 2. t Eph. ii. 8. 
 
1 82 HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 yet. You have never, perhaps, been much disturbed 
 in thought about your relations to God. His general 
 kindliness and benignity, His "world-love," has 
 seemed to you enough, or it seems to you sufficient 
 that you are by baptism a member of the "congre- 
 gation of the faithful." May you not on that account 
 reckon upon a special form of His general loving- 
 kindness? Well, let us at least ask the question 
 whether such a view of things squares with the 
 message of St. Paul. What he speaks of here is, 
 in his theory of it, a thing open and common, from 
 one point of view, to all believers, to them all and 
 to no other, while from the other point of view it is 
 a "secret of the Lord." It is a thing "outpoured in 
 the heart," in a way infinitely above nature, while 
 perfectly genuine and recognizable in experience. 
 Our text, and the paragraph of which it is a part, are 
 no flourish of unmeaning rhetoric. They point to a 
 divinely-caused change in the soul's knowledge of 
 the love of God. Do they point any of us to a 
 range of facts as yet indeed to us unknown, but 
 which is knowable, and infinitely good to know ? 
 
 There are those who know. "The secret of the 
 Lord is with them; He has shewn them His 
 covenant."* They may be slow to speak about it, 
 for fear of seeming to proclaim not their Master but 
 * Ps. xxv. 14. 
 
HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 183 
 
 themselves; but when they can rightly speak, they 
 have indeed a secret to disclose. "This I know, 
 thanks to His grace. Once I heard of Him, but did 
 not know Him; I did not, I could not, see or ap- 
 prehend the love of God. The fact of His love in 
 general, perhaps, I owned; but it was at best a thing 
 of distance and of shadows. Sometimes I wondered, 
 sometimes I asked of others, what it could be like, 
 what was the sensation, the consciousness, the expe- 
 rience, of 'knowing the love of God.' Now I know. 
 Whereas I was blind, now I see; whereas I was in- 
 sensible to that light and heat, now I love, because 
 He first loved me. My Father's smile is upon me, 
 shining through the Son, who is infinitely dear to 
 Him, and who has joined me to Himself. I had 
 once 'the spirit of bondage, unto fear.' Now I 
 'cry,' as with the confidence and simplicity of child- 
 hood at home, 'Abba, Father.'* Slow or sudden, 
 the change has come, the new life is here. The love 
 of God has been poured out in my heart." 
 
 This is no phantom, dream, or poem; it is an 
 experienced possibility. A human soul which 
 yesterday was full of misgivings about God, or 
 paralyzed in indifference to Him, to-day is able to 
 say, with strong and sober certainty, with the clear 
 persuasion of a true sight of Him in Christ Jesus, 
 * Rom. viii. 15. 
 
1 84 HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 "I know whom I have believed"; "He hath loved 
 me and given Himself for me"; "Behold, what 
 manner of love to me!"; "I am persuaded that 
 neither life nor death shall be able to separate me 
 from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
 Lord." 
 
 To-day, as ever, the eternal Friend stands at the 
 idoor and knocks, that He may come in with that 
 light in His hand, and make the dreary darkness 
 to be day. To-day, as of old, when that door is 
 opened, His entrance brings a wonderful reality of 
 joy: "I will manifest myself to Him."* 
 
 iii. Now in orjder we come to the glory of Whit- 
 Sunday. We name the name of that ever-blessed 
 Agent by whom, in the heart's depths, this work 
 is done, this love poured out, this Lord revealed 
 and introduced : "By the Holy Ghost." 
 
 To-day is Pentecost, the memorial of that great 
 hour of the eternal Spirit when He came indeed, 
 and behold, that small primeval Church, in the 
 supernatural strength of the joy of the Lord, the 
 joy which bursts radiant forth from the love of the 
 Lord, arose and shook the world, and brought it 
 such a blessing as it had never known before. To- 
 day the Church spreads out before us, large and 
 full, the truth of God about His Spirit. We are 
 
 * Rev. iii. 20 ; John xiv. 21. 
 
HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 185 
 
 made to hear to-day of His great work of visible and 
 public power, when the wind blew from the very 
 Throne, and the fiery tongues were showered from 
 the Seven Lamps that burn before it. And we are 
 made to hear also, in our appointed Scriptures, of 
 His personal, separate, secret work of heavenly 
 grace in the individual soul; of the Comforter's 
 dealing with the man so that the Father and the 
 Son come to him, and make Their abode with him; 
 of the Spirit's blessed "fruit" of pure and gracious 
 holiness; of the infinite necessity of His special 
 presence in us; for "if any man have not the Spirit 
 of Christ, he is none of His."* 
 
 Manifold are His gifts, His works. Vast indeed 
 is the importance to our life and peace of clear 
 views of what He is. It is blessed to know that 
 indeed it is He, not only it; that He is no mere 
 gale of power, no mysterious "somewhat" of efflu- 
 ence and influence, but the personal Friend and Lord, 
 coming to His temples, f to bless them with His own 
 loving gifts of life, of purity, of power. But for 
 this one time of meditation take this one sacred fact 
 about Him, this one side and aspect of the mighty 
 range of His glory and His operation. Think of 
 Him as the eternal personal Worker and Teacher, 
 
 * See John xiv., Acts ii., Rom. viii., Gal. v. 
 1 1 Cor. vi. 19. 
 
186 HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 understanding, handling, penetrating, knowing His 
 own way in that heart of yours, and taking His own 
 way to bless it. Recollect Him as somehow able, 
 in His personal action, to make the cold, indifferent, 
 sinful soul see, and apprehend, and know, and em- 
 brace, and answer to, the love of God — the inner 
 love of God. Remember Him as personally able to 
 manipulate that once rebellious will ; sometimes by 
 insensible degrees, sometimes by decisive convictions 
 and a crisis of change memorable to you for ever and 
 ever. Behold Him; He is the Convincer, bringing 
 home to us — home, indeed — "sin and righteousness 
 and judgment." He is the Revealer; He unveils 
 Christ, He explains Him and glorifies Him, and 
 applies Him as vital balm to the aching spirit, 
 which in the reality of its "exceeding need" applies 
 itself to Christ. Then does the man, this man of 
 like passions with us, receive in his heart the effusion 
 of the eternal Love. He knows it, and believes it* 
 The pardon, the more than pardon, he knows it 
 now; it is a fact; for Jesus Christ is a fact indeed 
 to him. He sees with a new intuition now some- 
 thing of his Lord's glorious beauty. He finds in 
 genuine operation the power of his Lord's presence 
 in him, its power to subdue iniquity, to annul the 
 tempter's besetting strength, to make it sweet and 
 *John iv. 16. 
 
HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE OF GOD. 187 
 
 pleasant to do "from the soul" the will of God; 
 studying to please Him who, in His astonishing 
 love, cares that we sinners should love Him. Yes, 
 the Spirit works, deep at the center, and so Christ, in 
 whom is the whole love of God, becomes there "a 
 living, bright reality," a joy unspeakable, the Secret 
 of the eternal Heart. 
 
 iv. "The Holy Ghost which was given unto us." 
 "Given !" Let us note that word as we close. He 
 is indeed a Gift, "the Gift unspeakable," the Gift of 
 God. Here is no mere evolution from within, nor 
 assimilation from around ; He is the Gift from above. 
 "From the height above all measure" must "the gra- 
 cious show descend" ; not otherwise can this knowl- 
 edge of the eternal Love be won by these happy ones, 
 these temples of the Spirit. 
 
 And may we also, such as we are, such as we 
 know ourselves to be, share the inestimable boon? 
 Is it not for the elite, the aristocracy, of holiness, 
 for apostles, prophets, martyrs, solitaries, heroes? 
 No, no; it is "not according to our works." It is 
 without such miserable price and money as man can 
 pay. It is on a better condition — "according to His 
 abundant mercy," and "for every one that asketh." 
 "For if we, being evil, give," as we delight to do, 
 "good gifts to our children, how much more shall 
 our heavenly Father give His Holy Spirit — to them 
 that ask Him?" 
 
XII 
 
 THE ANGEL'S VISIT 
 
 Preached at Keswick, before a Congregation of Ministers of 
 Religion 
 
 "I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God, and I am 
 sent to speak unto thee." — Luke i, 19. 
 
 Here is the utterance of an Angel, a voice of per- 
 sonal consciousness and experience from another or- 
 der of being than our own. But we men continually 
 pray, as our Master has bid us do, that the will of 
 God may be done on earth "as it is done in heaven." 
 Then many a priceless lesson for Christian life and 
 labor in general, and for the work of the Christian 
 Ministry in particular, may be rightly drawn from 
 what the holy Book reveals to us of the Angels, of 
 their life, their conduct, their attitude of thought and 
 will, what they are, and what they know themselves 
 to be. 
 
 This short sentence, our text, is a case in point. 
 Here comes an Angel from before the eternal Throne 
 to speak with Zacharias in the sanctuary on earth. 
 The man, awe-stricken, amazed, bewildered, falters 
 a request to his Visitor to produce, as it were, his 
 credentials, to give assurance of the reality of his 
 
 188 
 
THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 189 
 
 presence and the validity of his message. And the 
 reply is as we have read : "I am Gabriel, that stand 
 in the presence of God, and I am sent to speak to 
 thee." 
 
 In every part of this utterance there is something 
 which meets the heart of the human minister of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, and reminds him of essential 
 principles of ministerial life and function. May He, 
 who is Master at once of us and of "our eldier 
 brethren of the sky," speak to us articulately of these 
 things in the soul, as we study this sentence, spoken 
 on earth, yet from another world. 
 
 We might dwell awhile upon the Angel's utter- 
 ance of his own personal name, Gabriel, God's Man: 
 "I am Gabriel" ; listening with wondering interest to 
 this avowal that the voice comes from a personality, 
 an Ego, conscious, and willing, and denominated 
 personally, and that the speaker is in intimate and 
 living relations with a personal Supreme, our God 
 and his. But let us pass on at once (remarking 
 this merely by the way) to Gabriel's account of his 
 serving life, and of its inner secrets, and of its issues 
 in action for his Lord. And herein first note the 
 words : "I stand in the presence of God." 
 
 My brethren of the holy Ministry, here is indeed a 
 motto, a legend, for our ministerial lives. "I stand 
 
190 
 
 THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 
 
 in the presence of God." Observe the import of 
 each phrase. 
 
 i. "In the presence of God." The existence of the 
 great Angel was, and is, an existence in the Pres- 
 ence, in the secret of the Presence. He was what he 
 was, as abiding there, as knowing face to face his 
 eternal King, his Maker, Master. All. You know 
 possibly a singularly beautiful hymn, given to us by 
 the pen, or rather through the illuminated soul, of 
 a gifted Indian lady, Miss Ellen Goreh; a hymn be- 
 ginning, 
 
 "In the secret of His Presence 
 How my soul delights to hide!" 
 
 a hymn which may well be a hidden treasure in the 
 memory of every minister of Christ. Now, the 
 truth sung of in that hymn forms the law of the an- 
 gelic life, of the will and work of a Gabriel. Would 
 we do the eternal Will on earth as it is done by Ga- 
 briel in heaven? "In the presence of God" must be 
 our motto, not for times and places only which we 
 call sacred; no, "it is very meet, right, and our 
 bounden duty that we should at all times, and in all 
 places," abide in the Presence, "dwelling with the 
 King, for His work." 
 
 ii. But observe again. The blessed Hierarch does 
 not only exist "in the presence of God." Listen to 
 him: "I stand in the Presence." It is a note- 
 
THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 191 
 
 worthy stroke in this bright, sudden picture of celes- 
 tial life. In that Presence, undoubtedly, he rests, in 
 the sense of unutterable content, and walks, in the 
 sense of perfect internal freedom, and dwells, in the 
 sense of being eternally and inalienably at home. 
 But the fact which is above all present to his ethereal 
 consciousness is this : "I stand in the Presence." 
 
 Here is the attitude of the Servant. He is pro- 
 foundly intimate with the Master of his being; he is 
 admitted to, he is conversant with, the Sanctum, yea, 
 the Sanctum Sanctorum; he treads not the outer 
 court only of the Unseen, but its Holy Place ; he does 
 not "sit in the King's gate" only, he "sees the King's 
 face" in the King's innermost chamber. But, there- 
 fore, because it is the inmost place, and not the 
 outermost, because in a sense so divinely special 
 the King is there, therefore, while the Master sits, 
 the servant stands. 
 
 Such is the law of the blessed life of this immor- 
 tal messenger of God. Wherever he is, locally, as 
 we conceive locality, whether "in heaven" itself, 
 whether "caused to fly swiftly" to Daniel at the Per- 
 sian court,* whether at Jerusalem on his errand to 
 Zacharias, or at Nazareth on that surpassing errand 
 to Mary — always, "in spirit," he is "standing in the 
 presence of God." 
 
 * Dan. ix. 21. 
 
192 
 
 THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 
 
 We too must be there, and we too must there be 
 standing. Never, by the grace of our Master, let us 
 really forget, let us really quit, that spiritual atti- 
 tude, the position of the servant who stands, what- 
 ever, from other points of view, may be our blessed 
 privileges of liberty and of holy rest. 
 
 For Gabriel that standing attitude is immortally 
 lasting and the same. Nineteen ages have rolled 
 away since that hour of incense in the Temple; but 
 his station is the same. To-day, as then, Gabriel is 
 personally the same, the same "I" that spoke its con- 
 sciousness and its name to the wondering priest; 
 and to-day, as then, he is standing, upright and un- 
 wearied, in the Presence. And we, too, are never, 
 yes, truly never, to be released from our "standing" 
 there, from our attitude as the servants, the servants 
 ready for orders and action, who "see the King's 
 face," attentive to His Will. Never are we to cease 
 so to "stand" on earth, and never in the coming life 
 of heaven. 
 
 "For He hath met our longing 
 
 With words of golden tone, 
 That we shall 'serve for ever' 
 
 Himself, Himself alone — 
 Shall serve Him, and for ever. 
 
 O hope most sure, most fair, 
 The perfect love outpouring 
 
 In perfect service there."* 
 
 * Miss Havergal. 
 
THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 
 
 193 
 
 Let us look up to Him who "is able to make us 
 stand," that this "law may be written in our hearts" ; 
 that this may lie deep among the inmost secrets 
 of our ministerial will and work. "1 stand in the 
 Presence." 
 
 iii. But Gabriel has more to say: "And I am 
 sent to speak unto thee." 
 
 "I am sent." It is not my purpose to-day to dis- 
 course upon the principles and the warrant of minis- 
 terial commission, in the sense of ministerial author- 
 ity. Let me rather address myself to what is, after 
 all, the supremely important matter for the soul of 
 the minister himself — to the ministerial commission 
 as it suggests the thought of our subjection, our 
 servitude, to Another; of our being but means and 
 implements, yea, of our being in ourselves "nothing, 
 nothing," apart from the Sender of His servants. 
 
 "/ am sent," says the great Angel ; not merely, "I 
 come," "I am here," but, "/ am sent." I stand in 
 the Presence, a servant there. I have indeed such 
 an open vision of my Master's face as makes me, in 
 indescribable reality, His friend. But none the less 
 I am, eternally and absolutely, His servant; and 
 now, in regard to thee whom I address, I come 
 to thee simply as His servant, His servant sent 
 upon His work. My message is not what I have 
 thought fit to bring; I am enjoined to bring it. I 
 
THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 
 
 have not come to lord it over thee, and to impose 
 myself on thee; I am thy fellow-servant, and to 
 thee, ex aequo, I am sent. 
 
 The Angel's words in the sanctuary at Jerusalem 
 recall to me certain words, spoken in a very different 
 scene, and by a mortal speaker; they are found in 
 Genesis xxiv. That episode of the divine Book, self- 
 evidential of its own veracity and historicity, by 
 its union of minutely acurate "local color" with a 
 majestic moral simplicity, presents us with "Abra- 
 ham's servant," illustrious personage among the 
 goodly company of the saintly servants of Scripture. 
 We see him, this Eliezer (for we will take it for 
 granted that this is Eliezer of Damascus), the hon- 
 ored and honorable confidant of that memorable 
 master, who talks with him as with a friend in 
 God, and sends him on his errand graced with so 
 much equipage and dignity that the high-born Re- 
 bekah, at the well, accosts him, in the fine natural 
 courtesy of the East, as some great one: "Drink, 
 my lord." He is received into the house at Haran 
 with distinguished attention, and respectfully ques- 
 tioned about his errand to his hosts. And then he 
 speaks, introducing himself with the quiet dignity of 
 one who cares to seem only what he is: "I am 
 Abraham's servant, Abraham's ebhed, SoOUs, — , bond- 
 man." Yes, that is what he is. Abraham had either 
 
THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 195 
 
 actually purchased him, or he was the son of one 
 whom Abraham had purchased; "born in his house." 
 Under conditions of society then permitted by God, 
 he was Abraham's chattel, his piece of property, 
 and he said that it was so. This man of noble 
 heart and personal dignity, dignified by the intimacy 
 and confidence of the Friend of God, his master, 
 able to enter into the conceptions and purposes of 
 an Abraham, drinking deep of Abraham's spirit of 
 faith and patience — all that this man cares to say of 
 himself is this, 'T am Abraham's bond-servant, and 
 I am sent." He was not on his own business, but 
 his master's. So far from seeking his own, he was 
 (may we not say, looking at Gen. xv. 3?) actually 
 taking measures to shut himself out of a wealth 
 which might otherwise have been his inheritance. 
 It mattered not. He belonged; he was not his 
 own. "I am Abraham's servant." 
 
 This is a- noble picture ; I know none fairer of its 
 kind, even in the Scriptures themselves. But is it 
 not more than noble? Is it not written for our 
 learning? It is assuredly for us, who, in a sense so 
 special and so merciful, are called to be the servants 
 of the Eternal Friend of Abraham. It is for us, to 
 lay it upon us ministers of God and of His Word that 
 we never, no, never, pass ourselves off to those whom 
 we approach as anything but the bond-servants of 
 
196 
 
 THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 
 
 Christ, and therefore "ourselves their bond-servants, 
 for His sake."* 
 
 But Gabriel still stands by the golden altar and 
 the incense-cloud, and speaks to the old priest there. 
 Listen to him again with all the heart. Again let 
 him say the words, in our hearing, and for us : "I 
 stand in the presence of God, and I am sent." 
 Every syllable is instinct with the spirit which for- 
 gets the self of the servant in the peace and glad- 
 ness of the heavenly service. The Angel lives, not 
 unto himself, but unto Him whose face he sees, 
 and whose will he serves for ever. 
 
 We do not conceive of the angelic life as a life 
 stunted and confined, unsatisfied and ill at ease. 
 We think of it, and rightly — for such is the indica- 
 tion of the divine Scriptures — as a life that "excels 
 in strength/'f an( ^ whose course and tenor is a song 
 of mighty joy. Yes, but none the less (we should 
 instantly say "all the more," were the whole condi- 
 tions of happiness better understood by us), its law 
 is an absolute subservience to the will and glory of 
 God ; an eternal standing in the Presence, a ceaseless 
 going forth on the work to which the great Master 
 sends, and this in order to do and to say what 
 shall bring honor, not to the servant, but to his 
 King. The elect Angels, as by a sacred necessity of 
 
 * 2 Cor. iv. 5. t Ps. ciii. 20. 
 
THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 197 
 
 their nature and its bliss, shrink back from glory 
 and worship paid to themselves. If not Gabriel 
 himself, it was a true brother of his heavenly family 
 who said, when the entranced Apostle fell at his feet, 
 "See thou do it not, for I am thy fellow-servant."* 
 
 There is very little risk that any of our hearers, 
 any of our neighbors, should fall at our feet to 
 worship us. But there is more than a little risk — 
 such is the human heart in the breast of the human 
 minister — that we may, at the least invitation of 
 human applause, or even of human kindness, fall 
 down and worship ourselves. You know well what 
 I mean; the subtle temptations to self-praise, to 
 self-esteem, to an appropriation to ourselves of an 
 applause which is our Lord's alone, which can 
 spring from almost nothing — when the man is off his 
 guard. But by the grace of Him "whose we are and 
 whom we serve," by that immeasurable grace which 
 can possess even us, it shall not be. We will, in 
 watchful faith, entrust it to His power that it shall 
 not be ; that in this thing also, by His power work- 
 ing in us, His will shall be done in us on earth as it 
 is done in heaven. 
 
 Our work of ministry brings us often weariness, 
 and sometimes, if we are found faithful, it brings us 
 reproach. But does it not also, if in any degree at 
 * Rev. xxii 9. 
 
198 
 
 THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 
 
 all we are enabled to work for our Lord and in Him, 
 bring us also surprising gifts, ever and anon, of 
 allowance and of kindness from the brethren to 
 whom we minister? Yes; and in view of all this 
 we now humbly resolve, as in His presence, as 
 standing there, and sent only from thence, that 
 whatever henceforth of acceptance, or commenda- 
 tion, or affection, shall come to us as ministers of 
 Jesus Christ, it shall not be fuel for the flame of 
 self; it shall be "henceforth no longer for ourselves, 
 but for Him who died for us, and rose again." The 
 tribute shall not be slipped into our own purse, for 
 that is theft; it shall be passed on at once to the 
 Master to whom it belongs, for we belong to Him. 
 We will accept no secret and surreptitious bounties 
 behind His back. 
 
 I say this, my brethren, as myself desiring to hear 
 it, and as knowing that it will be welcome to your 
 hearts, taught by the Holy Ghost. It shall be so. 
 We too, like those who serve above, are called to 
 stand in the Presence. We too are nothing if not 
 the purchased bond-servants of the heavenly Abra- 
 ham. And as such we will appropriate no contribu- 
 tions to self-complacency in our work for our Mas- 
 ter, not even from our Master's friends. As His, 
 we are outside of it, we are above it, we are beyond 
 it. What He has given to us to be, to have, to hold 
 
THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 199 
 
 for Him, we will now and evermore be passing on 
 and giving back at once to Him whose only right it 
 is. 
 
 So I leave this utterance of the Angel's voice 
 upon our souls for our guidance, strength, and 
 peace, by the grace of our Lord and King. Be it 
 henceforth, more than ever yet, the inmost thought 
 of each pastoral heart : "I am the servant of Jesus 
 Christ; in His presence, standing in His presence, 
 sent from His presence, yet sent in His presence 
 still. I am nothing outside this. And I come, O 
 men and brethren, to you as a man who is not 
 your master, but only sent, 'under athority,' from 
 my Master, to speak to you, to serve you. I present 
 myself before you in all my pastoral life, in public, 
 in society, in private, in the Church, in the home, 
 everywhere and always, not as your oracle, not as 
 your spiritual chief, not as your lecturer, not as your 
 speculative philosopher, but as your fellow-servant, 
 who has come to bring you a message from One 
 who is absolute for me, and absolute for you." 
 
 It is an ideal of the pastoral spirit which is un- 
 speakably searching, certainly as applied to the 
 preacher's own heart ; and to the end of our chapter 
 we shall need to cry : "Enter not into judgment with 
 Thy servant." But it is an ideal which we are over- 
 
THE ANGEL'S VISIT. 
 
 whelmingly bound to set before our eyes and bind 
 upon our hearts. And it is an ideal which (not to 
 our glory), may be, and shall be, indefinitely brought 
 toward realization, as we welcome into our abased 
 spirits the fulness of the Holy One. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF THE NEW COVENANT 
 
 Preached at an Ordination in the Cathedral, Liverpool. 
 
 "Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Cove- 
 nant." — 2 Cor. iii. 6. 
 
 Some words are necessary, as we approach the 
 message of this text, by way of reminder of its 
 context and exposition of its phrase. 
 
 First, the context. The verse forms part of that 
 wonderful discourse concerning the trials, toils, 
 strength, and glory, of Ministry for Christ, which 
 occupies the opening chapters of this great Epistle : 
 a passage in which nothing is said about the exterior 
 of the thing, about gradations and subordinations 
 of rank, about divisions of labor and of honor; 
 but in which everything is said about the sacred 
 interior of all true ministration, about the spiritual 
 relations of the minister to the Lord, and to the 
 flock, and to the Gospel, and to himself. 
 
 Read these pages, honored brethren in Christ, 
 about to be admitted by the Church, as "the called 
 ones of Jesus Christ," to His definitely commissioned 
 service; read them, and mark them, and inwardly 
 
 201 
 
202 MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 
 
 digest them, by day and by night. If you want 
 searching (and we always want it), they will search 
 you through the soul. If you want solemnizing 
 and spiritualizing, if you want to be lifted out of 
 the desert of a mere officialism and routine into 
 the paradise of a life lived and a work wrought in 
 God, they will shew you how this can be. If you 
 want reanimation of soul about your coming rest, 
 and crown, and glory, about the faithful minister's 
 blessed prospects in death and in eternity, here you 
 will hear indeed a voice from heaven. Lastly, if you 
 want a new definition and affirmation to you of your 
 message, of your Gospel, of what you go out into 
 church, and mission-room, and street, and lane, and 
 parlor, and loft, and cellar, to report, and testify, 
 and teach, you will find it here, you will find it in my 
 text. 
 
 Immediately, the text is prefaced* by a confession 
 of man's personal incapacity for the ministry of 
 Christ. "We are not sufficient of ourselves to think 
 anything as of ourselves," "to reason out anything, 
 as from ourselves." He does not mean that we are 
 imbeciles in intelligence, that we are to abjure the 
 use of mind. The thought is that we are wholly 
 incapable of originating a Gospel, or of amending 
 one; of evolving a message out of our own con- 
 * Verse 5. 
 
MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 203 
 
 sciousness; of speculating out a Christianity; of 
 telling any man out of our own heads how the ruin 
 of his nature is to be repaired, and the burthen of 
 his guilt to be lifted off, how he is to find strength 
 and power to have victory over the devil, the world, 
 and self, how he is "to glorify God on earth, and to 
 enjoy Him fully for ever." He means that we can- 
 not excogitate answers to these things, as we could in 
 the case, for instance, of many questions of political 
 or of physical science. We are by nature dumb and 
 blind before the problems of salvation, before the 
 mystery of guilt and of spiritual impotence. To 
 know what to think about these things, and what to 
 say, is far above our own reach. 
 
 But then (the Apostle unfolds this also), we are 
 not below the reach of Him who can enable us to 
 know. He "hath made us able." He hath qualified 
 us, capacitated us, for His work. Sovereign in skill 
 and power, He has taken us from the dust and ruins 
 of the Fall, and from the thick darkness of our 
 ignorance of Him; has made us what He requires 
 as His instruments, and has taught us what we 
 require for His Message. With a fiat as creative as 
 that in Genesis, He "hath shined in our hearts,"* 
 and revealed to us the glory of the sinner's Saviour 
 and the saint's Head. He has quickened us from 
 * Chap. iv. 6. 
 
204 MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 
 
 the death of sin to the life which is hid with Christ 
 in God. He has shewn to us, and given to us, His 
 Son. He has shewn to us, and entrusted to us, His 
 Gospel.* So, we are able. We know our Master, 
 our message, and our strength. 
 
 One word, and one only, on the phraseology of 
 the text. I have ventured to read "new covenant" 
 in place of the "new testament" of the Authorized 
 Version. It is not lightly I do so. But I conceive 
 that the word Sutein), in every place, or almost 
 every place, of its occurrence in the New Testament, 
 answers better, both by usage and by context, to the 
 idea of a covenant than to the more limited idea of 
 a testamentary will. So I render : "He hath made 
 us able, competent, ministers of the new covenant." 
 
 I have spent some time in preface. But in this 
 case the preface is vital to the application, and has 
 already been conveying it in part. For we have 
 seen already something of the incapacity of man 
 to be a minister; of his profound insufficiency, 
 to think out a Gospel ; aye, and so to enter 
 with his soul into the Gospel, even when externally 
 revealed, as to teach it with living power, till a grace 
 which is altogether from above has "shined in his 
 heart" and shown to him Jesus Christ. And we have 
 * Chap. iv. 7. 
 
MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 205 
 
 seen, in the example of the Apostle and his co- 
 workers, what that grace can do. It can make the 
 blind see ; it can make the weak strong ; it can make 
 the dead live; it can "make us able." 
 
 My brethren in the ministry of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, after the ancient and holy order of the 
 Church of England, this is the first message of the 
 text to you and to your preacher : "We are not 
 sufficient; but He hath made us able." You, Pres- 
 byters and Deacons just about to be, you all have 
 to be, above all things, this in your ministration — 
 ministers of a message. And you are not sufficient 
 for it. And He, if you are as you say, hath 
 made you able. I weigh my words when I call 
 you all "ministers of a message." I do not forget 
 that the duty of the Deacon differs from that of the 
 Presbyter, in this respect among others, that while 
 the Presbyter is, as such, a commissioned minister 
 of the divine Word, the Deacon is so only by special 
 grant. But in the broad facts of actual Church life 
 I see this line of distinction greatly modified by in- 
 exorable circumstances. So I freely address you 
 all as distinctively ministers of the Word, and bid 
 you remember how the Reformed Church of Eng- 
 land, "from the first compiling of her public liturgy" 
 to this day, has put that Word and its ministration 
 in the full foreground. There it stands in her plan 
 
206 MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 
 
 of worship as described in the "Prefaces," and in the 
 examples of preaching presented in the Homilies, 
 and in the whole drift and burthen of this Office of 
 Ordination in which we are engaged to-day. You 
 are many things besides ministers of holy order, 
 stewards and dispensers of divine Sacraments. Yes, 
 but still, in the view of our mother Church, expressed 
 in her own authentic utterances, such is the supreme 
 importance of your work about the Word of God 
 that you are nothing if not messengers, nothing if 
 not witnesses of the revealed and unaltered Gospel 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ, the New Covenant in His 
 Name. 
 
 And oh, you are "not sufficient," brethren, "not 
 sufficient to think anything," not sufficient therefore 
 to preach anything, "as of yourselves." 
 
 Minister of Jesus Christ, are you setting out to- 
 day light-heartedly on your work? Are you as- 
 sured that you are the heir of all the ages, confi- 
 dent that you are a guide of the blind, satisfied 
 perhaps that old ways, views, and words have had 
 their day, and that you and your generation, by a 
 few bold strokes of accommodation, by the casting 
 overboard of a little more of the supernatural, by a 
 little more explanation-away of such stubborn words 
 as "sin," and "guilt," and "law," and "propitiation," 
 and "new heart," by a somewhat extended excursion 
 
MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 207 
 
 on the "down-grade" of religious liberalism, will 
 bring man and Christianity to terms? Or are you 
 trusting to do your clerical work, in its philanthropic 
 aspects, so well, and vigorously, and sympathetically, 
 that there will be little need for doctrines, broad 
 or narrow, while you educate, amuse, and befriend 
 your people into Christian virtue? Recur in time 
 to the Apostle's words, in view of the work, as he 
 at least understood it : "Not that we are sufficient 
 of ourselves to think anything as from ourselves ; 
 but our sufficiency is of God." You have to deal for 
 God with man — fallen, rebel, sinful man, "dead in 
 trespasses and sins." How to repair that ruin is a 
 secret known to God alone. As regards the answer 
 to that problem, you must not, you dare not, deviate 
 from His judgment in your estimate, from His reve- 
 lation in your scheme, from his Word in your mes- 
 sage. The modern world can, if it will, bandy about 
 the mysteries of the faith from magazine to maga- 
 zine, between installments of serial fiction. The 
 Apostle, who had seen Jesus Christ, said, "We are 
 not sufficient to think anything as from ourselves; 
 our sufficiency is of God." 
 
 Happy is the intending minister of Christ who in 
 j this respect has lost confidence in himself. Blessed 
 is the man that thus "fcarcth ahuays." Bright are 
 the ministerial prospects of him who has come to 
 
208 MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 
 
 that most reasonable of conclusions, that his message 
 must be humbly learnt at the feet of the Lord and 
 His Apostles, and must be lovingly and faithfully 
 delivered in the presence and in the peace of his 
 Master — as message, not as speculation, nor as rhap- 
 sody ; as message first, whatever else it be. 
 
 Are you, in the Christian poet's words, thus 
 "confident in self-despair" ? Then you are getting 
 hold of your "sufficiency." You are learning the in- 
 finity of your need, and that is the straight way to 
 getting into contact with the infinity of the Lord's 
 supply. 
 
 Let us resolve boldly thus to "fear always." It is 
 the sort of fear that does not shrink, but clings. It 
 does not bury "that one talent which is death to 
 hide," but it takes its Owner's advice every day how 
 to lay it out. It fears because of adoring love. It 
 fears not lest it should be true to Him. It cannot 
 bear not to glorify His beloved, His blessed Name. 
 
 Fear always thus. It will drive you to trust 
 always. It will keep you close to the fountain-head 
 of power and peace. It will constrain you to walk 
 with God. And the ministry which has not at the 
 back of it a walk with God may have a name, may 
 have a fame, to live, yet it is dead. 
 
 But of what in particular does the Apostle say that 
 we are "made able" to be ministers? "Able minis- 
 
MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 209 
 
 ter of the new covanant; not of the letter, but of 
 the Spirit ; for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth 
 life." You consult the context about the meaning of 
 this "letter" and this "Spirit" ; and you find that the 
 letter means the holy Law, immovable, graven in the 
 rock for ever, and divinely fatal to the sinner's hopes 
 if he would use it as his title to life; and you find 
 that the Spirit means the Holy Spirit, here named 
 as the crowning and concentrating blessing of the 
 Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. "We preach not," 
 he means, "as our distinctive message, the sacred, 
 the divine anathema ; we preach Him who has taken 
 it on His own immaculate head, and, in the infinite 
 merit of that sacrifice, now sheds into awakened 
 man's inmost being the Holy Ghost, the Lord, the 
 Life-Giver, to make the new heart, to teach the 
 art and practice of new and saving trust, to sus- 
 tain in the new life, to prompt the new song, to 
 unfold the new Covenant, to make all things new 
 from the inmost to the outmost of the man." 
 
 Now observe — all this is called the new covenant 
 (tj Katv^j huae^K-q) . I beg you to attend to that word. 
 It is out of the fashion of current religious thought ; 
 not often does the modern preacher discourse upon 
 the Covenant. The word is strict and definite ; and 
 too often now the drift even of evangelistic religion 
 is toward the vague, the fluid, and the lax. But 
 
2io MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 
 
 there stands the word in the Book of God, large and 
 prominent. And as I pause and ponder it, lo! out 
 of its rugged strictness and severity begin to spring 
 ideas of life, and love, and glory. I begin to see in 
 it precious and splendid intimations of a plan, a 
 compact, an agreement, for the blessing of believing 
 man, "ordered in all things and sure," deeds and 
 seals valid for ever in the eternal Court, oaths and 
 "promises to which the ancient hills are fleeting and 
 unsubstantial things. I draw nearer, and I study 
 deeper, and I see in this New Covenant a thing whose 
 settlement and security lie between the Father 
 and the Son. All its blessings are lodged in the 
 incarnate, sacrificed, and risen Christ, its Mediator 
 and Surety, lodged in Him for me, because for 
 all who come to God by Him. His covenanted 
 joys and treasures are mine in Him, and, because 
 covenanted, sure and certain; no fortuitous largess, 
 so to speak, of a precarious bounty, but possessions 
 ready sealed, and delivered over to the entitled 
 applicant with the majestic precision of the long- 
 matured determinations and vast securities of celes- 
 tial law. I ponder the word, I ponder the thing, 
 of which I am enabled to be the minister; and it 
 glows within my own soul as a living treasure 
 for my own profoundest needs. It is indeed a word 
 of rock, but its material is the "Rock of ages, cleft 
 
MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 211 
 
 for me" ; cleft for my hiding-place,* whence I may- 
 watch His goodness, and where the outskirts of His 
 glory may pass before me ; cleft for the issuing into 
 me of the eternal waters of the overflowing Spirit, 
 the Spirit of the Son of God, "which they that 
 believe in Him do receive."! 
 
 "The new covenant." Let us be very definite 
 about it, for so the Scriptures are. Do you want a 
 locus classicns upon the subject? You have it, 
 amongst other places, in Heb. x. 16, 17 : "This is the 
 covenant that I will make with them" — with them 
 that are sanctified, separated to God, by the one 
 Offering of Calvary : "I will put My laws into their 
 hearts, and in their minds will I write them; and 
 their sins and iniquities will I remember no more." 
 And as we turn to the fontal passage in Jeremiah 
 (xxxi. 33, 34), we find, as you know, that the order 
 of thought reverses that of mention. First, blessed 
 be God, is the present and abundant pardon, the 
 sure and covenanted acceptance, for the great 
 Mediator's solitary sake. Then, as a gift equally of 
 sovereign grace, and to be received with equal 
 simplicity in Him, is the writing of the laws — laws 
 as much as ever, strong and binding as on the tablets 
 of Sinai, but written now upon the heart, the thought, 
 * Exod. xxxiv. 19-23. t John vii. 39. 
 
212 MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 
 
 the understanding, love, and will, of God's new- 
 born Israelite. 
 
 Dear brethren in the Lord, will you accept and 
 put into use what in Jesus Christ is yours — ability, 
 full equipment, to be the living ministers of such 
 a Covenant? Will you make plain to men's thoughts 
 its glories, its divine origination, its lodgment in 
 Christ, its fulness and presentness of blessing? Will 
 you plead with men to be reconciled on covenant 
 terms with God? Will you beguile them, will you 
 adjure them, to come "into the bond of the cove- 
 nant," holding up before them the marvel of the 
 work wrought and the price paid to make it valid, 
 preaching it as "the New Covenant in the Lord's 
 blood, shed for the remission of sins"?* Will you 
 dilate with the emphasis, and interest, and unstudied 
 skill of the messenger who is in love with his 
 message, because it is his own life and joy, upon the 
 magnificent doublcncss of this Covenant? Will you 
 say strong things, strong as the Word of God, to 
 the true penitent, about a covenanted acceptance, 
 large, unreserved, secure, and present : "Their sins 
 and their iniquities will I remember no more"? 
 Will you preach heart-searchingly about sin and the 
 law, and yet, and then, preach also justification by 
 
 * See Matt. xxvi. 28, Luke xxii. 20. 
 
MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 213 
 
 faith, peace now with God through our Lord Jesus 
 Christ: 
 
 "Thy tears, not mine, O Christ, 
 
 Have wept my guilt away" ; 
 "Thy Cross, not mine, O Christ, 
 
 Has borne the awful load"? 
 
 And then will you preach that other limb of the 
 Covenant with equal insight, and decision, and 
 thanksgiving: "I will put My laws into their 
 hearts, and write them in their minds" ? Will you 
 make men sure that in the Mediator are treasured 
 both pardon and celestial holiness ; that in the Head 
 is lodged for the members life, and more abundant 
 life; that from Him, under covenant security and 
 seal, we are to receive — not generate, but receive — 
 in humblest reliance upon Him, that new nature, that 
 new heart, wrought by the Spirit in the regenerate 
 man, the heart which "loveth righteousness and hat- 
 eth wickedness," over which sin hath no more do- 
 minion, which walketh at liberty, keeping His com- 
 mandments? Will you make it plain that under this 
 august Covenant there is guaranteed to faith the 
 power of the indwelling and conquering Spirit, by 
 whom Christ dwells within, as truly as there is guar- 
 anteed to faith the blissful acceptance of the guilty 
 by reason of the once-offered Blood? Will you 
 evermore enforce on them, and on yourselves, the in- 
 
2i 4 MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 
 
 finite spirituality of the law, and the perpetual need 
 of the humblest confession of your sins? But will 
 you also, and meanwhile, make it largely and lov- 
 ingly plain to them that Jesus Christ, through His 
 Spirit, can peacefully empower the heart, by His 
 own saving virtue, to submit itself evermore beneath 
 His hands, that He may write that law upon it, 
 while the heart sings with solemn joy : "Thy com- 
 mandments are not grievous"; and that all this is 
 under covenant, oath, and seal, and secured for you 
 in the Mediator's hand? 
 
 I am sure these views of the Covenant are "as 
 the oracles of God." I solemnly call on you to 
 see if they are not, and, if they are, to resolve 
 that your ministry shall strike no lower key, no 
 weaker melody, nor less perfect harmony. Ponder 
 this great thing in your studies, on your knees, over 
 your Bibles, and in your work for men. Unfold 
 it, as the basis of all the variety of incidental topics, 
 in the sacred pulpit. And when you stand at the 
 Master's Table, make the Covenant indeed the theme 
 of your adoring thanks, and the couch of your happy 
 rest. Ponder the holy Cup in the light of cove- 
 nant truth. Drink it, and give it, with that truth 
 glowing in your own heart : "This is My blood 
 of the New Covenant"; "This cup is the New 
 Covenant in My blood." He that knows the Cove- 
 
MINISTRY OF NEW COVENANT. 215 
 
 nant, and clasps it, and ministers it, will indeed 
 venerate and love its Seal. 
 
 Go forth, in the name of the Son of God, to your 
 ministry of this "everlasting Covenant" made with 
 Him for every one that believeth. Advance to your 
 whole work with all your aims and thoughts simpli- 
 fied into this ; that you are set, by grace, upon glori- 
 fying God in this ministry of the Covenant. Let 
 me leave that word last upon your souls, that deep, 
 holy, immortal aim, to glorify God. "Supernatural 
 is the desire to glorify God," wrote that great saint, 
 Henry Venn the elder, a century ago; "it is the 
 bud and the blossom which brings forth all the fruit 
 the Church of God bears."* The Lord lead you 
 forth in peace thus to do His will, in His rest, and 
 in His strength, and for His sake, till you lie down 
 to die into His presence, taking your Master's words, 
 in your humble measure, upon your failing lips: 
 "I have glorified Thee upon the earth; I have fin- 
 ished the work which Thou gavest me to do." 
 
 * Memoir, p. 14. 
 
XIV. 
 
 THE LORD'S BROTHER: THE SON OF GOD 
 
 Preached on Trinity Sunday in St. Catharine's College Chapel, 
 Cambridge 
 
 "I saw James, the Lord's brother. ... It pleased God 
 ... . . to reveal His Son in me." — Gal. i. 19, 15, 16. 
 
 This is the Sunday of the Holy Trinity. The 
 seasons of the Church and their teaching have led 
 us, since Advent, through "the days of the flesh" of 
 the Lord Jesus, and up to His Ascent to heaven, 
 and then on to the Descent of the Holy Ghost upon 
 His Church. To-day they culminate in this supreme 
 and eternal truth. We are permitted, as it were, to 
 look through that door in heaven which was opened 
 to St. John in Patmos, and to see the Throne itself, 
 and the living Mystery of infinite while personal 
 Being which shines and reigns upon it. In oneness 
 of Nature, in threeness of eternal inner Relation, 
 behold our God! Lo! Father, Son, and Spirit; 
 bright Depth of reciprocal and almighty internal 
 love; immeasurable Fountain of that wonderful out- 
 flow, redeeming love ; the love that loved the world ; 
 "the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our Lord." 
 
 216 
 
LORD'S BROTHER: SON OF GOD. 217 
 
 I make no attempt this morning to discourse in 
 order upon the doctrine of the Trinity. But I take 
 occasion from the day to set before you some 
 thoughts akin to the mighty Theme, and meanwhile 
 as closely as possible akin to our hearts and lives. 
 After all, the central splendor of the truth of the 
 Trinity, for us men and our salvation, is our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, God and Man, Man and God. In Him 
 we know the Father. From Him we have the Spirit. 
 Him the Father gives us as His supreme Gift. Him 
 the Spirit glorifies to our hearts as His supreme 
 Theme. He is at once our Door into the heaven of 
 the throne, and the visible Form upon that throne 
 itself, in whom our God is seen. 
 
 Let us speak a little, then, of Jesus Christ — Son 
 of Man, therefore Man ; Son of God, therefore God. 
 
 i. "I saw James, the Lord's brother." So St. 
 Paul writes in the first verse of my text. It is a 
 sentence of the simplest and most prosaic matter of 
 fact. Looking back over twenty years or so from 
 the date of his writing, he recalls a certain visit to 
 Jerusalem. It was a visit to Peter, and it lasted just 
 a fortnight. As it happened, he did not meet the 
 other Apostles on that occasion; John and the rest 
 chanced to be out of the way. Only, he did see 
 
218 LORD'S BROTHER: SON OF GOD. 
 
 James, the Lord's brother. That is all; the subject 
 drops at once. 
 
 What a simple note, as from a diary! There is 
 no mystery here, nothing transcendental. It is a 
 mention as natural as if he had said, "I saw Timo- 
 theus on such an occasion," or, "I saw Sergius 
 Paulus." But think for a moment what it suggests; 
 reflect upon its witness to the recency and to the 
 absolute reality of the human biography of Jesus 
 Christ. No matter now what exactly was the 
 "brotherhood" between James and the Lord ; it was 
 anywise some human connection, such as might have 
 subsisted equally well between some other two 
 Palestinian men. As such, this little commonplace 
 allusion to an incident of intercourse carries us right 
 up, beyond all possible myth or legend, to the very 
 birth of Christianity. Here is a man recalling his 
 interview with another man at a time which was 
 much nearer then than the date of my degree is to 
 me now, or the d^te of my ordination — events which, 
 however, are as vividly present to me as many an oc- 
 currence of this year. And this man whom he re- 
 calls had shared a home with Jesus, had taken his 
 meals with Him, had very likely sat in the school 
 with Him, and worked with Him in the shop. He 
 would remember very well indeed His look, His 
 voice, His manner, just as I remember "the old 
 
LORD'S BROTHER: SON OF GOD. 219 
 
 familiar faces" of my father's home, or of my college 
 friendships. 
 
 Here, then, is the simplest possible fact for our 
 contemplation, from one side. A letter-writer, 
 whose letter betokens him a man of sane, vigorous, 
 and eminently practical character, recalls visits and 
 conversations which brought him across a friend 
 who happened to have been, not long before, a mem- 
 ber of a certain home-circle in Northern Palestine. 
 It is a common fact, artlessly told. But then, the 
 wonder of it from another side is just this, that it is 
 fact. That home-circle of Galilean Nazareth was a 
 then recent fact. And it embraced among other 
 members, two men, called "brothers" all around the 
 town. One was James ; the other was — "the Lord !" 
 James was "the Lord's" brother. 
 
 ii. This designation arrests us. "The Lord." It 
 is a term reverent and religious. What does it 
 connote about Him who, if James was His brother, 
 was also, and in the same sense, the Brother of 
 James? Let this epistle to Galatia answer the ques- 
 tion. Remember, it is a letter which, as I have just 
 said, bespeaks the writer a man not only of keen and 
 critical understanding, but of a large and balanced 
 wisdom. It is a document which carries on its face, 
 in its unselfish jealousy for all that is kind, true, and 
 mutually just and considerate, one of the surest 
 
220 LORD'S BROTHER: SON OF GOD. 
 
 guarantees we can possibly have that it is free from 
 emotional delusion. And its writer, remember, this 
 friend of "James, the Lord's brother," stands not 
 many years from the time when he first met James ; 
 as little as James was a myth to him, so little was 
 James' Brother. But James' Brother was neverthe- 
 less to him "the Lord/' in a sense upon which my 
 other text, and with it the rest of the Epistle, throws 
 the light of eternity itself. Think of such words as 
 the following and imagine them said now of one 
 whose brother you had known at school, or I had 
 known at College: "It pleased God to reveal His 
 Son in me" ; "Paul, an Apostle, not by man, but by 
 Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised Him 
 from the dead" ; "Our Lord, who gave Himself for 
 us, that He might redeem us" ; "I am crucified with 
 Christ; Christ liveth in me ; I live by faith in the Son 
 of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me"; 
 "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, 
 being made a curse for us"; "Ye are all one in 
 Christ"; "God sent forth His Son; God hath sent 
 forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying 
 Abba, Father"; "God forbid that I should glory, 
 save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ"; "In 
 Christ Jesus nothing availeth but a new creation" ; 
 "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your 
 spirit. Amen." 
 
LORD'S BROTHER: SON OF GOD. 221 
 
 Such, to the view of James' friend, was James' 
 Brother. To Paul, this wonderful Being, who was 
 practically his contemporary in human life, was, 
 on the other hand, Lord, Redeemer, immeasurably 
 more than man, Son of the Eternal, Object of saving 
 faith, mysterious Inhabitant of the heart. To reveal 
 fully His glories to the soul, God the Father must 
 interpose.* Once seen, once known, He is all in all 
 for the being who has found Him. Into Him a 
 Paul, with all his vast wealth of thought and will, 
 sinks, as it were, delightfully submerged and lost; 
 "I live, yet not I; Christ liveth in me."f He is not 
 called God in set terms indeed. But can all this 
 language mean less than Deity? Either James' 
 Brother is also God made Man, or Paul's language 
 about Him is high treason against the Almighty. 
 For it makes out the Brother of James to be man's 
 absolute Master and Possessor, man's inmost Secret 
 of eternal life, man's ultimate and adequate Object 
 of saving trust, man's Grace-Giver, man's all-satisfy- 
 ing joy and glory. 
 
 James' Brother; Son of God! 
 
 I know not whether I carry you with me, but to 
 my own soul, I must avow, this double utterance of 
 the Galatian Letter, written down within thirty years 
 *Gal. i. 15. tGal. ii. 20. 
 
222 LORD'S BROTHER: SON OF GOD. 
 
 of the Crucifixion, speaks with a quite peculiar power 
 about alike the solidity and the glory of the Chris- 
 tian's faith. It takes me up at one step to the very 
 first days of young Christianity, and there it shows 
 me with one hand a rock-surface of personal inci- 
 dents, seen in the broadest daylight of human life. 
 With the other hand it shows, me, set upon that plat- 
 form, moving and acting upon it, the splendor of 
 a certainty at once primeval, sober, and divine, that 
 the Jesus of human history is also the Lord of the 
 upper heavens, the mysterious Sacrifice for my sins, 
 the Life of my life, the Master of my will, "strength 
 of my heart, and my portion for ever." 
 
 My brethren, when I cast about for a theme on 
 which to address you in this sacred place, on this 
 my first occasion of privilege as a preacher of God's 
 Word in our College, it seemed to me that of all 
 possible choices it must be best to choose the supreme 
 Theme, Jesus Christ. So we have sought to consider 
 Him, simply Him, in the mystery, fact, and glory 
 of what He is. 
 
 He has passed before us as Man, our elder 
 Brother, Partner of man's life, Denizen of man's 
 home, cognizant of our whole human circumstances, 
 "able to be touched with the feeling of our infirmi- 
 ties." James' Brother knows all about human condi- 
 
LORD'S BROTHER: SON OF GOD. 223 
 
 tions, "in all points once tested like as we are, yet 
 without sin"; yes, blessed be His Name! "without 
 sin"; so that to His perfect sympathy is for ever 
 joined the omnipotence to help which, without moral 
 perfectness, could not be. He has passed and shone 
 before us, on the other hand, as the King of Glory, 
 the everlasting Son of the Father, the sinner's Par- 
 don, the disciple's Life and Strength and Purity 
 and blessed Hope beyond. 
 
 Behold the Man ! Behold the Lord ! "We would 
 see Jesus" — and we may. We would believe on Him 
 to life eternal — and we may. Such a Redeemer, in 
 the infinite nearness of His Manhood, in the infinite 
 fulness of His Deity, comes to meet our asking with 
 open and everlasting arms. Received, believed, 
 obeyed, He gladdens with summer sunshine every 
 corner of our days. He cleanses our very thoughts 
 — bright miracle! — by His presence in the midst 
 of them. He ennobles our every faculty, body and 
 mind, by using it for His will. And at the end — He 
 will not let us "see death"; "we shall see Him, as 
 He is." 
 
XV 
 
 LIVING STONES 
 
 Preached in St. Catharine's College Chapel, Cambridge. 
 "Ye, also as living stones." — i Pet. ii. 5. 
 
 We owe to this paragraph of St. Peter's a designa- 
 tion of our Lord priceless in its significance and 
 power. Here, and here only, in Holy Scripture, in 
 the sentence just before the text, He is called the 
 Living Stone. Repeatedly elsewhere, both in the 
 Old Testament and in the New, we read of Him as 
 the Stone, the Rock, Rock of Ages, Stone of the 
 Corner — Angular e Fundamentum. And we have in- 
 deed abundant Scriptures where He appears in all 
 the glory and in all the power of Life. "I am He 
 that liveth" 6 Zfo: nay, "I am the Life."* But 
 here only do the two truths meet in one magnificent 
 witness to His worth and glory; only here is He 
 named "the Living Stone." 
 
 It is a pregnant phrase, when the mind attends to 
 it and takes it in. Christ is the Stone. The word 
 speaks to us of all that is solid, massive, steadfast, 
 strong. It suggests at once ideas of immovable 
 *Rev. i. 18; John xL 25. 
 224 
 
LIVING STONES. 
 
 225 
 
 principle and ever-persistent purpose, and of capacity 
 at once to resist and to sustain. We read in it how 
 our Master is "the same yesterday and to-day and 
 for ever,"* in a fixity which the cliffs and crags may 
 picture, but to which all the while they are but as 
 fleeting shadows, as unsubstantial dreams, placed 
 beside Him who is "this same Jesus" t for ever and 
 for evermore. 
 
 But then, besides, Christ is the Living Stone. 
 Taken by itself, the rock-metaphor gives us all we 
 want of certainty and strength ; but there is nothing 
 in it of itself to warm the thought and to move the 
 soul to a personal regard. But behold! He is the 
 Living Stone ; He is Strength instinct with glowing 
 Life. This foundation, this bulwark, this massy 
 tower, "foursquare to opposition" — look at it again; 
 it is not it, but He. The Rock has voice, and eyes, 
 and arms, and heart. He lives, all over and all 
 through ; and it is with a life which pours itself out 
 in thought and sympathy and help and love, to 
 the refugee upon the Rock. 
 
 So speaks the Apostle, so by the Apostle speaks 
 the Holy Ghost, of this double glory of Jesus Christ 
 our Lord. But he has more to say, and of the same 
 kind. The Living Stone is One. But there are 
 many living stones. The Son of God is Only-Be- 
 *Heb. xiii. 8. f Acts i. IL 
 
226 
 
 LIVING STONES. 
 
 gotten. But there are many sons of God. Has 
 man, in all his weakness and in all his inner spiritual 
 death, touched Christ? Then the Stone gives man 
 His strength ; the Life gives man His life. And the 
 result is a living stone. And such living stones come 
 to be many; and a Hand, mighty to construct as 
 well as mighty to save, takes them, and builds with 
 them. They come together, in their strength and in 
 their life; and the strength is multiplied, and the 
 life flows with stronger and fuller pulses, and lo! 
 there results (to use St. Peter's words here), "a 
 spiritual household, an holy priesthood," "offering 
 to God by Jesus Christ" the mighty sacrifice of a 
 surrender and a service free, conscious, individual 
 and magnificently fraternal and combined. 
 
 This is a rich and animating ideal, is it not ? And, 
 like all true ideals, it is given to us, not for contem- 
 plation only, but to be realized, nearer and ever 
 nearer to its perfect truth. Look at it, with purposes 
 as practical as possible, from both its sides. Here 
 is the Christian man as the living stone. Here is the 
 Christian company as the structure of such living 
 stones. The stone precedes the structure in the 
 order of thought; so let us take the stone first, the 
 living stone, the Christian man. What is he to be? 
 What through Christ can he be? I emphasize that 
 word, What can he be ? For St. Peter, obviously, is 
 
LIVING STONES. 
 
 227 
 
 writing about a thing possible and actual : "You are 
 living stones ; you are being builded up as such." It 
 was a fact of human experience for these disciples 
 of the Asiatic Missions, these people recently sunk 
 and sodden in Levantine languor and vice, these help- 
 less slaves of pagan owners, as many of them were 
 besides. They had actually become to be living 
 stones. Then we in Cambridge, in England, in 
 Christendom to-day can really become the same. We 
 can, in Christ, every one of us be this, a living stone. 
 
 i. "A stone," a rock. Take the noun first. We 
 can, out of whatever weakness, be made strong in 
 God. Be our slightness and vacillation of character 
 what it may, it is as possible for us as for St. Peter's 
 converts to become stones. We can be solid, with a 
 quiet purpose for right which "reverbs no hollow- 
 ness." We can be stable, with a persistency of dutiful 
 conduct which is utterly different, different as clay 
 from dark, from the attitude of the Pharisee, but 
 which stays and lasts in the march of life, and is the 
 same. You know where to find the man, you can 
 count on him, you can be sure of him. He is steady 
 as a rock himself, to resist and to shame temptation, 
 and equally steady, if need be, to be leaned upon 
 with strong reliance by a friend in moral danger. 
 He can stand alone. He is not the poor slave of 
 drifts and fashions of opinion and practice. Con- 
 
228 
 
 LIVING STONES. 
 
 science and will have somehow coalesced within him, 
 and the compound is a rock of quiet character which 
 by no means slights popularity, but is never ruled 
 by it for an hour. 
 
 ii. Then take the adjective. He is "a living 
 stone." He is not too good (if there be such a good- 
 ness at all) to be profoundly alive with the life of 
 human sympathy, human insight, human affections, 
 the life which unobtrusively cares for and is at the 
 service of the lives around him. The living stone is 
 no such unhappy being that he can say, that he can 
 think, of others: "I am holier than thou." At his 
 Lord's feet, in his Lord's holy heart, he has found 
 an absolute corrective to such moral falsehood. Out 
 of nature he has been taken into grace. But then 
 by grace he has been led, if I may put it so, back into 
 a purified nature; he is natural, with a quick readi- 
 ness for every wholesome and honest sympathy ; im- 
 movable in principle, unchangeable in every duty of 
 the friend. 
 
 Such is the Christian as a living stone; a noble 
 ideal, and, let me repeat it over again, an ideal 
 meant to be realized, to be incarnated, in each and 
 every one of ourselves. This man has been; this 
 man can be. 
 
 As I speak of it, a beloved and beautiful memory 
 rises before me — a friend of my early undergraduate 
 
LIVING STONES. 
 
 229 
 
 days, called to die before his own degree, but first 
 called to live, as a living stone. Before he entered 
 Trinity College he had passed through a military 
 academy, a place which at that time was a scene of 
 deep moral pollution. Gentle and even facile as he 
 was by nature, God, just as he entered the" place, had 
 made him "a living stone." With quiet, unshaken, 
 unswerving steadfastness, under acutest difficulties, 
 he lived, and he was a rock. And by the time he 
 left the academy — I record a fact — vice was out of 
 fashion there. 
 
 But if the stone is such, what will the structure 
 be? Is it not a glorious thought, the possibility for 
 good, for virtue, for all that is most Christian, when 
 strength meets strength and life meets life in the 
 mighty fellowship and co-operation of holy friend- 
 ship, and conscious membership one of another, hand 
 joining hand and heart joining heart in the broth- 
 erhood of the faith and of the love of Jesus Christ ? 
 
 No living stone is meant to lie alone by the road. 
 It is made what it is in order to be built with others 
 into one, in a union of heart, of life, of work, full at 
 once of peace and power. 
 
 This is no unfit time* to lay a solemn stress upon 
 that thought. Sometimes the Lord's teachings are 
 * The sermon was preached February 4, 1900. 
 
230 
 
 LIVING STONES. 
 
 borne in upon us with an even awful weight by His 
 providence. We are at a crisis in our England's 
 life the like of which, I think, no living man has 
 seen; for who now lives to remember the Napo- 
 leonic Wars? It is a dread time; but it is a time 
 of sublime capacities for our highest good, and for 
 the genuine glory of our Motherland. For it throws 
 back each of us first upon himself and upon his God, 
 and then binds us man to man in what can develop 
 into an even heroic sympathy. But oh, that the sons 
 of England may be each, in this highest sense, a liv- 
 ing stone, and all stand together in that strength and 
 life, for God and man ! 
 
 Remember, as we close, that there is one secret, 
 and only one, for the strength, the life, and the 
 cohesion, in their inmost truth. Ultimately, that 
 Secret is the Lord Christ, the Living Stone — Christ, 
 in His contact, Spirit to spirit, with the man, and 
 with the men, who come to Him. From the 
 first, even to the last, there it must lie. The 
 Apostle gives it to us here : npds Sv irpocepx^voi — "to 
 whom coming" ; with a coming, as the tense of the 
 Greek participle indicates, which, though it must 
 have a beginning, is to be then continual. Tipo^pxii^voi 
 — "coming, and coming, and coming again"; for 
 pardon, for purity, for living power; touching 
 
LIVING STONES. 231 
 
 (as Antaeus touched his mother Earth, and was 
 strong again), still touching, the Living Stone, that 
 we also may be always "living stones," results of 
 Him. 
 
XVI 
 
 HEART PURITY 
 
 Preached in St. Catherine's College Chapel, Cambridge 
 "Blessed are the pure in heart." — Matt. v. 8. 
 
 You will expect me to finish the verse, and to recite 
 that supreme promise with which our Lord and 
 Master crowns His benediction : "Blessed are the 
 pure in heart, for they" — &n afroi they distinctively, 
 they only — "shall see God." And I have now thus 
 recited it, giving you the immortal words in full. 
 Yes, 
 
 "Blessed are the pure in heart, 
 Who God Himself shall see; 
 None may attain by other art 
 That last felicity." 
 
 But on purpose to-day I have left the promise 
 aside, that our thoughts may be given the more 
 directly and the more undividedly to the wonderful 
 benediction itself, and to just that point of infinite 
 import in it, the testimony of Jesus Christ to the 
 possibility of purity, to the fact that it can be said, 
 and by His sacred lips, of a veritable human being, 
 "He is blessed, for he is pure in heart." 
 
 232 
 
HEART PURITY. 
 
 233 
 
 Wonderful paradox, in that Book of profound and 
 pregnant paradoxes, the Bible. In the Bible, on the 
 one hand, we find the human heart — not exceptional 
 hearts, but the heart, the great abstract, realized 
 in each individual instance — described as "deceitful 
 above all things and desperately diseased" (for so 
 we should render Jer. xvii. 9). The Redeemer Him- 
 self affirms* that "out of the heart of man," as from 
 their very fount and origin, proceed "evil thoughts" 
 and all that is impure. Yet in this same Book, upon 
 the other hand, we read, if we will look for them, 
 just the noblest possible utterances about the moral 
 greatness for which man was made, and to which, 
 out of the wreck and mire of his fall, he can again 
 be lifted. The voice whose kind, truthful sternness 
 tells us all we can bear to know of our evil, is the 
 same voice which then tells us that we can be, not 
 in dream but in fact, not hereafter only but here 
 and now, filled with God's own pure good. We, no 
 beings of the skies, but we ourselves, to-day, may, 
 really may, be pure in heart. 
 
 It is something to recollect just this. If that 
 august thing, the Christian Gospel, is the very truth 
 (and it is either the very truth or the most complete 
 illusion that has ever mocked the world — it is possi- 
 ble to be pure in heart. That simple affirmation can 
 * Matt. xv. 19. 
 
234 
 
 HEART PURITY. 
 
 be as new life itself to the man who, longing to be 
 clean inwardly has well-nigh given up the thought, 
 as something which must at best be relegated to an 
 unimaginable future. Aye, and if there be a man so 
 deeply pitiable that he has never really yet had a 
 longing to be clean within, the quiet affirmation of 
 the possibility may be to him, too, the first breath of 
 life. It may generate just such a consciousness of 
 the absolute wretchedness of inward evil as is some- 
 times evoked by the mere juxtaposition with it of 
 the glory and the repose of inward good, presented 
 as a fact, and as within the reach. 
 
 Then let us affirm it to ourselves again. There is 
 such a thing, according to the Holy Scriptures, as 
 heart purity ; that is to say, there is such a thing as 
 a state of the human heart, in which the man, the 
 genuine man, the person of the present day and of 
 modern circumstances, entirely loves the will of God, 
 and entirely seeks to do it. There is such a thing 
 as a human heart which, habitually, and with the 
 joy of a steadfast sympathy, not only approves of 
 virtue, which is conscience, but rejoices in it, as at 
 once its liberty and its law ; or rather, not in it but in 
 Him, of whom virtue is but as the sunshine to the 
 sun. And such joy and sympathy is purity of heart. 
 There is such a thing as will, mind, and affection, 
 united, not divided, against the tempter and for the 
 
HEART PURITY. 
 
 235 
 
 will of God. There is such a thing as an internal 
 No to the siren-call of evil which is entirely true, 
 for it is but the other side of a Yes which "out of a 
 pure heart fervently" responds to the call of Christ. 
 There is such a thing, in very truth, not in legendary 
 periods but to-day, as an unreserved choice in favor 
 of what is wholly good ; a true deliverance from that 
 subtle and dreadful willingness to be tempted which 
 comes of a lingering relish for the horrible pleasant- 
 ness of sin; a response, not from the shifting surface 
 of the soul, but from its depths, to the whisper of 
 the eternal Spirit. Then it is no longer as if the will 
 for good floated and drifted on the top, while beneath 
 there was a deeper and a more secret will, desiring 
 the evil after all, and as if the best that could be 
 done was to crush down, as it were to batten down, 
 the evil under the good, driving it only deeper in, 
 and inevitably suggesting the thought that worse 
 mischief is but growing and festering there for re- 
 crudescence another day. No; it can be altogether 
 otherwise. Things can be true to virtue and to God 
 at those "first springs of thought and will" where 
 our true life runs up and out. The man, the real 
 man, can take his place among the blessed ones 
 who are pure in heart. 
 
 Do not let me be mistaken, as if I meant to say 
 that this same man can so be and so stand as to 
 
236 
 
 HEART PURITY. 
 
 walk out into the open, before the white light of 
 eternal Holiness, and say : "Look at me ; I have no 
 sin." The dream, under that awful light, of an ab- 
 solute sinlessness is, in itself, a moral discord, a sin, 
 a failure to see God aright. There is for us men, to 
 the last, no standing before the Throne but upon our 
 perfect Redeemer's merits, no immaculate veil but 
 His righteousness cast over us, no "way into the 
 holiest" but along the line of His sprinkled blood.* 
 In the noble words put by the poet into the lips of 
 his St. Agnes, the robes indeed were white, and the 
 flames was clear that lit the nocturnal pathway ; yet 
 
 "As these white robes are soil'd and dark 
 
 To yonder shining ground, 
 As this pale taper's earthly spark 
 
 To yonder argent round ; 
 So shows my soul before the Lamb, 
 
 My spirit before Thee ; 
 Such in my earthly house I am 
 
 To that I hope to be." 
 
 No, "if we say we have no sin" — and it is the 
 beloved Apostle who writes this "we" and "our- 
 selves" and "us" — "we deceive ourselves, and the 
 truth is not in us." "Enter not into judgment with 
 Thy servant, O Lord, for in Thy sight shall no man 
 living be justified."! The truth of heart purity will 
 no more bear than any other great spiritual truth to 
 * Heb. x. 19. 1 1 John i. 8, Ps. cxliii. 2. 
 
HEART PURITY. 237 
 
 run alone, irrespective of a balance. It is inevitable, 
 as the whole history of Christianity tells us, and its 
 record of dogmatic controversy in particular, that 
 when a side of truth, however great a side, is really 
 treated as the whole, it develops, or rather, is dis- 
 torted, into an error. But that principle cuts, of 
 course, both ways, and sometimes we have to see to it 
 that the cautionary side of a truth does not usurp 
 the attention due to the glorious positive to which 
 it stands related. So it is with heart purity. If 
 I do not mistake, men need sometimes to say to 
 themselves words somewhat like these : "It is quite 
 true that the subtle mystery of sin eludes my perfect 
 comprehension. It is true, profoundly true, that till 
 we see the Lord as He is, we shall never be fully like 
 Him ; that is, we shall never be wholly without sin. 
 It must needs be, then, that, to the last breath, I 
 hide myself from the eternal judgment in the "Rock 
 of Ages, cleft for me." But then, I will not forget, 
 I will remember with joy and hope, that, in a sense 
 relative indeed, yet magnificently true, things can be 
 so revolutionized in me — yea, to the depths, that my 
 heart can be genuinely cleansed ; my will can be hon- 
 estly attuned to the will of God ; not merely my as- 
 sent, but my love, not only my moral sense, but my 
 heart, can go out to that now beloved will. The 
 condition of me, a sinner, can be so dealt with that 
 
23§ 
 
 HEART PURITY. 
 
 the contrast with the troubled past shall be indefi- 
 nitely large and bright. Heart purity, in a sense con- 
 sonant with all penitent humbleness, yet a sense 
 strong and genuine, can be mine, so that I may "walk 
 worthy of the Lord, unto all pleasing," els iraaav 
 dpfricetav* "all meeting of His will." 
 
 Let us seek a large vision of that side of truth, 
 that wonderful wealth of the promises of purity. 
 
 But how shall this thing be? Can I answer better 
 than in the words of our Lord, spoken on an occa- 
 sion f close to the purpose of our present thoughts? 
 "Who then can be saved?" cried the amazed Apos- 
 tles. Shall we take up their question, and give it one 
 particular line? "Who then can be saved — from 
 himself? Who then can be saved, deep and at the 
 center, from the love and from the power of sin?" 
 "The things which are impossible with men are pos- 
 sible with God." 
 
 It is a question of a miracle; the requisite is the 
 action of none less than a Divine Person. We can, 
 in the grace and mercy of God, put ourselves in the 
 way of the action, even as helpless sufferers of old, 
 the blind, the halt, the palsied, the bleeding, put 
 themselves in the way of the Man of Nazareth. We 
 can, in some measure, search heart and life, and 
 really tell God about it. Within a considerable 
 * Col. i. 10. t Luke xviii. 26, 27. 
 
HEART PURITY. 
 
 239 
 
 range, we can cut ourselves off from known and pre- 
 ventable temptations. We can — we know it — com- 
 mand our eyes not to look on evil, not to trifle with 
 the sensuous till it sinks into the sensual. We can 
 read what God has said, in precept, warning and 
 promise, and we can speak — the more absolutely in 
 simplicity the better — to Him in prayer. But all 
 these are but fences round the Secret, or avenues up 
 to it. The Secret is the Wonder- Worker Himself, 
 trusted, welcomed in, summoned by the soul, to be 
 the conquering and liberating Presence in its great 
 need, and in its depths. 
 
 We shall never do it of ourselves. At the center 
 of things, man is powerless to be his own transfig- 
 urer; he can as soon run, he can as soon soar, from 
 his own shadow. But his Maker and his Redeemer, 
 as man yields himself to God, can lift him from that 
 shadow into light, and set him free indeed. What 
 is needed is — that Person, "dwelling in the heart 
 by faith," so to make His chamber clean. "Blessed 
 are the pure in heart." Then, "create thou in me a 
 clean heart, O God/' 
 
 "Come in, O come, the door stands open now ; 
 I hear Thy voice; my Savior, it is Thou." 
 
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