1 
 
PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev. John B. Wiedin^^er 
 
 BX 5133 .F3 E8 1887 
 Farrar, Frederic William, 
 
 1831-1903. 
 Everyday Christian life 
 
1 
 
OBallantgnt ^vm 
 
 BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. 
 EDINBURGH AND LO.NUOX 
 
OR 
 
 SERMONS BY THE WAY 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC W. FARRAR D.D. F.R.S. 
 
 Late Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge Archdeacon and Canon of 
 IVestfnins/er Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen 
 
 AUTHOR OF "the LIFE OF CHRIST*' ETC. 
 
 LONDON 
 Wm. I3BISTER Limited 
 
 OG LUDGATE HILL 
 1887 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 N the title to this volume of Sermons, 
 I have endeavoured to express the 
 humbleness of their pretensions. They 
 are ordinary parochial exhortations, mainly de- 
 livered on Sundays after Trinity, during that 
 great division of the Church's year in which 
 she endeavours to impress on us the reiterated 
 lessons of daily duty — that duty towards God, 
 and duty towards our neighbour, on which hang 
 all the Law and the Prophets. 
 
 The work of preaching, which so many despise, 
 is full of anxious responsibility. The anxiety 
 of any sincere and honest man is only to teach 
 the truth so far as God has enabled him to see 
 it. I can imagine no calling more vulgar or 
 
vi 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 more miserable than that of the preacher, if he 
 has in view anything but the edification, the 
 moral advance, the religious instruction, the 
 spiritual awakenment of his congregation. And, 
 among many other perils of unfaithfulness, he 
 must be on his guard lest, through carelessness 
 or indolence, he fail "rightly to divide the 
 word of truth." 
 
 The elements of our religious belief come to 
 us not from one source but from many. Our 
 religion is Natural — for it is confirmed by, and in 
 part even derived from, that great Book of God 
 which is the nature of created things. It is 
 Historical — for even our shortest creed mentions 
 the name of a Roman Procurator, and refers 
 to facts which took place in the course of 
 historical events. It is Revealed — for its most 
 essential truths were brought to light by the 
 Son of God, and were such as man's unaided 
 intellect would never have discovered. It is 
 Scriptural— for it refers as its ultimate authority 
 to the Word of God, contained in a sacred book. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Vll 
 
 It is Experiential — for its convictions are 
 brought home to us by the teachings of provi- 
 dential circumstance, which now bright, no\V 
 sombre, are woven like warp and woof into the 
 web of our little lives. It is altogether Super- 
 natural — for its deepest and holiest intuitions 
 are uttered by the Spirit of God within us ; they 
 are the voiceless whispers heard within the 
 silence and darkness of that Holy of Holies 
 which is the regenerate soul of man. It is the 
 duty of the preacher, so far as lies within his 
 power, to bring out some parts at least of these 
 many-sided revelations ; he must try ever to 
 keep before the minds of his hearers the illustra- 
 tions, the facts, the messages, the confirmations, 
 the hopes, the gleams of inward light which 
 radiate in constant pulsations from the divine 
 centre of the Christian's life. 
 
 But while the Gospel and its lessons may be 
 considered under numberless aspects they may 
 all be summed up under these two heads — 
 lessons of doctrine, and lessons of practice. A 
 
viii 
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 teaching exclusively doctrinal might appeal 
 only to the understanding, and might result in 
 nothing but an intolerant Pharisaism ; a teaching 
 exclusively practical might only resemble a 
 child's flower struck in the sand, which has no 
 root. Doctrine and morality can never be 
 dislinked from each other, for it is their per- 
 petual connexion which constitutes the unity of 
 Scripture. In this matter St. Paul sets us a 
 consummate lesson. Nearly all his Epistles fall 
 into two well-marked divisions, in one of which 
 he lays down the foundations of all Christian 
 truths, while in the other he rears the super- 
 structure of moral exhortation. But we may 
 appeal to a higher authority even than that of 
 the Great Apostle. For the same remark holds 
 true of the teaching of Him who spake as never 
 man spake. What were all His miracles but 
 lessons taught in action t What were all His 
 parables but eternal precepts springing out of 
 eternal truths 1 
 
 The lessons which I have tried to inculcate 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 ix 
 
 in the following sermons are not mainly doc- 
 trinal. Yet I do not think that in any one of 
 them, however immediately practical its aim, 
 the great essential doctrines of the Gospel have, 
 even for a moment, been left out of sight. 
 
 With these words then I send them forth. 
 No one can feel more deeply than I do their 
 manifold imperfections. But if He deigns to 
 bless them. Who can use the humblest instru- 
 ments for the furtherance of His kingdom, there 
 may be some readers to whom they will not 
 have been addressed in vain. 
 
 FREDERIC W. FARRAR. 
 
 Westminster, 
 
 Oct, 1887. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. HEAVEN IN EARTHLY HOMES . . . -13 
 
 II. HOW TO MAKE EARTH LIKE HEAVEN . . -31 
 
 III. WHAT TO THINK ABOUT 46 
 
 IV. CHILDREN, AND THE CHILD CHRIST . . . 60 
 V. UNSEEN REALITIES 70 
 
 VI. WHEREWITH TO MEASURE LIFE .... 82 
 
 VII. THE ESSENTIALS OF PRAYER .... 93 
 
 VIII. THE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE . . . .110 
 
 IX. THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS AND THE EX- 
 AMPLE OF THE SAINTS .... I28 
 
 X. THE BIBLE I43 
 
 XI. TEMPTATION 1 59 
 
 XII. SELLING THE BIRTHRIGHT .... I74 
 
 XIII. KNOWN BY ITS FRUITS I90 
 
 XIV. DEATH-BED REPENTANCE . ... 20$ 
 
 XV. OF THE INNER REVERENCE OF A MAN FOR HIS 
 
 OWN PERSON 218 
 
xii CONTENTS, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XVI. HONOUR ALL MEK 234 
 
 XVII. COUNSELS TO THE DEFEATED .... 248 
 
 XVIII. THE SERVICES OF THE DESPISED . . . 264 
 
 XIX. THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS , . . 282 
 
 XX. THE TRUE GLORY OF HUMANITY . . . 289 
 
I. 
 
 Ibeaven in Battbl^ Ibomes. 
 
 A NEW year's sermon. 
 
 "But, according to His promise, we look for new heavens 
 and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." — 2 Peter 
 iii. 13. 
 
 OPE," says the poet, "springs eternal 
 in the human breast." We are ever 
 looking forward to a golden time, 
 which like the splendour of the rainbow, flying 
 before us as we advance, leaves us only amid the 
 driving rain. Man," adds the poet in the next 
 line, " never is, but always to be blest." His hap- 
 piness is much more often a thing of memory or 
 of hope, than a thing of fruition. In vain he 
 experiences the perpetual disenchantment of new 
 years. In vain he finds 
 
 New times, new climes, new lands, new men— but still 
 The same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill. 
 
 In the minds of the early Christians there was a 
 strange mixture of feelings as regards the present 
 life. They were looking forward with constant 
 and eager expectation for the coming of the 
 
14 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 Lord. The word used to describe this yearning 
 (ttTToicajoaSoicm) implies the head and neck strained 
 eagerly forward to catch sight of some approach- 
 ing chariot. Their watchword was Maranatha, 
 "The Lord is at hand." They thought that 
 any morning might witness the flaming advent 
 of their King. They never knew whether the 
 scarlet clouds of sunrise might not herald some 
 world-catastrophe. Misunderstanding some of 
 the reported sayings of Christ, mistaking, like 
 the disciples, sometimes the spiritual for the 
 literal, sometimes the literal for the spiritual, 
 they were tempted into the feverish and unprac- 
 tical restlessness against which St. Paul so 
 earnestly warned his Thessalonian converts. 
 And when the Second Advent on the clouds of 
 heaven was so long delayed, the natural result 
 was first disappointment, and then in some 
 minds unbelief. " Where," they asked, ''is the 
 promise of His coming.^" And all that the 
 writer of this Epistle can say in answer, is to re- 
 assert to them that as certainly as there had 
 once been a deluge of water which drowned the 
 old world, so certainly shall there be a deluge of 
 fire to destroy the world which now is. The 
 earth, he tells them, is " stored with fire." The 
 day shall come when her volcanoes, bursting the 
 seals which repress the impatient earthquake, 
 shall bellow destruction from their fiery cones, 
 and the world, with its elements melted by fer- 
 
HE A VEN IN EARTHL V HOMES. 1 5 
 
 vent heat, shall become but a burnt-up cinder 
 like her attendant moon. So too say the other 
 Apostles. " This world," says St. Paul, passeth 
 away, and the fashion thereof." I saw," says 
 St. John, " a new heaven, and a new earth ; for 
 the first heaven and the first earth are passed 
 away." 
 
 And we may still retain that hope of, nay, 
 that sure belief in, a new heaven and a new earth 
 in the eternity which is to be. But now, at the 
 beginning of this new year, the question is, 
 whether it need be a Jwpe only } whether even 
 here and now the new heaven may not spread 
 over us its soft empyreal azure, and the new 
 earth may not at least begin to rejoice for us 
 and to blossom as the rose ? 
 
 Is this possible 1 
 
 I. My friends, let us have no illusions. Illu- 
 sions, self-deceiving dreams, beliefs into which 
 we have wdlfully persuaded ourselves, can give 
 but a base and pitiable happiness ; the happi- 
 ness of the maniac who takes the twisted straws 
 of his cell for a royal crown. If anything be 
 trustworthy, truth is. Let us above all be true. 
 Let us, before proceeding any farther, look at 
 things as they are. The duty of courage, the 
 duty of sincerity requires us to face realities, not 
 to dwell in an atmosphere of rosy optimism. 
 When we have seen things as they are, we can 
 better judge of things as they might be. 
 
i6 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 Look first at this material world, ''our poor 
 home, our transitory dwelling." It is filled un- 
 doubtedly with beauty and goodness. The 
 wonder and the power of the visible things 
 reveal indisputably the Invisible Creator. If we 
 have faith even as a grain of mustard-seed, 
 
 The world's no blank for us, 
 
 No blot ; it means intensely, and means good. 
 
 I know no surer refutation of atheism, no surer 
 proof that God is, and that God is good, than 
 the fact that He has created in us an instinct for, 
 and a love of beauty, and has also abundantly 
 gratified that instinct in every common sight 
 and sound. '' By the greatness and beauty of 
 the creatures proportionably the Maker of them 
 is seen." All common things are lovely so far 
 as man leaves them so ; and in their loveliness 
 we read the very autograph of God. Through 
 every gateway of the senses flow pure and 
 delightful impressions to the healthy soul. 
 There are delicious fruits of autumn, there are 
 fragrant odours of spring. For the ear there is 
 the song of birds, and the murmur of the sea, 
 and the warbling of the vernal breeze, and 
 "angehcal soft trembling voices," and silver 
 song's and solemn instruments. And for the 
 eye what wealth and worlds of beauty, " fire, 
 and the swift air, and the circle of the stars, and 
 the violent water, and the lights of heaven." 
 
HE A VEN AV EARTH L V HOMES. 1 7 
 
 We look upwards and there is the overhanging 
 vault fretted with the golden fire of its sunrise 
 and sunset, and silvery clouds, and " the floor of 
 heaven inlaid with patines of bright gold." We 
 look downwards and there is the green grass 
 with its daily miracle of humble flowers. The 
 Alpine summits, the rose upon their flushing 
 snow, the blue distant hills, the yellow wealth of 
 harvest, the trees in their " green plenitude of 
 May," the dewdrop sparkling like a diamond in 
 the bosom of the rose, the gorgeous conflagra- 
 tion of autumn lending beauty even to decay ; — 
 the laugh of summer waters, the colourings of 
 the shell upon the shore, the iridescence of the 
 peacock's wing — are not these signs that God is 
 Love? Since the days of Job, mankind has 
 seen that it is only a Father of mercies who 
 could have endowed with all this glory and 
 melody the hearing ear and seeing eye of love. 
 When we think of these things only, we might 
 almost say that a new earth is not to be desired. 
 Alas ! the dream is soon broken. We soon 
 recognize that there is a crack in everything ; " 
 that there is not beauty only but fearfulness. 
 Year by year there is death on the mountain 
 slopes, and ruthlessness in fire, and shipwreck 
 on the sea. The more terrible aspects of Nature 
 are less common than the lovely ones, but they 
 exist. The storm blackens the sky, and bufl"ets 
 the tormented waves ; the great winds of God 
 
 B 
 
i8 
 
 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 howl over devastated lands ; the all-shattering 
 lightning smites like an angel's sword of flame. 
 I need not quote once more the terrible indict- 
 ment of Nature in the posthumous essays of 
 John Stuart Mill, who describes her as being 
 more cruel and refined in torture than a Nabis 
 or a Domitian. But take the spontaneous testi- 
 mony of our greatest living writer of prose, and 
 of our poet -laureate in verse. "Besides the 
 fearfulness of immediately dangerous pheno- 
 mena," says Mr. Ruskin, " there is an occult and 
 subtle horror in many aspects of the creation 
 around us, calculated to fill us with serious 
 thought even in our times of quietness and 
 peace Wrath and threatening are in- 
 variably mingled with love The blasted 
 
 trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak 
 winds, the roar of the black, perilous, merciless 
 whirlpools of the mountain streams, the continual 
 fading of all beauty into darkness and of ail 
 strength into dust — have these no language for 
 us?" And in The Cup," by Lord Tennyson, 
 after the invocation to the Divinity, " whose 
 breath is balmy wind to robe our hills with 
 grass," you may read the tremendous counter- 
 invocation to the same power. 
 
 O Thou that slay'st the babe witliin the womb 
 Or in the being born, or after slayest him 
 As boy or man. O Thou whose stormy voice 
 Unsockets the great oak, and rears his root 
 
HE A VEN IN EARTHL V HOMES. 1 9 
 
 Beyond his head, and strows our fruits, and lays 
 Our golden grain, and runs to sea, and makes it 
 Foam over all the fleeted wealth of kings 
 And peoples ; 
 
 Whose arrow is the plague, whose quick flash splits 
 The mid-sea mast, and rifts the tower in the rock, 
 And hurls the victor's column down, with him 
 That crowns it : 
 
 Who causest the safe earth to shudder and gape 
 And gulf and flatten in her closing chasm 
 Doomed cities, hear ! 
 
 Whose lava-torrents blast and blacken a province 
 To a cinder, hear I 
 
 Whose winter-cataracts find a realm and leave it 
 A waste of rock and ruin, hear 1 
 
 Yes, we look even at inanimate nature, and^ 
 in spite of all its glory, we must still sigh for a 
 new heaven and a new earth in which destruc- 
 tion shall not run riot, nor the life of man be the 
 sport of forces which, even if they be in their 
 totality beneficial for the race, are yet for the 
 individual "blind as fate, brutal as tyranny, 
 merciless as death." 
 
 II. We turn to the v/orld of man. Here, 
 again, how much is there which is beautiful and 
 full of hope. " What a piece of work is man ! 
 how noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in 
 form and movement how express and admirable ! 
 in action how like an angel ! in apprehension 
 how like a god ! " And yet when we look at 
 man, whether self-revealed in history, or self- 
 portrayed in literature, or visible to us in daily 
 life, while we rejoice in much that is bright and 
 
 B 2 
 
20 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 noble, how clear does it become once more that 
 human nature also has a crack in it. In history, 
 even if we search no farther than the Bible, what 
 a scene is presented to us ! The epitaph on 
 the antediluvian world is that The wickedness 
 of man was great in the earth, and that every 
 imagination of the thoughts of his heart was 
 only evil continually/' And no sooner had the 
 Flood ceased to rebaptize the world than man- 
 kind is smitten once more with the curses of 
 drunkenness, and apostasy, and lust. What 
 horrible devil-worship, what merciless ferocity 
 reigned in the old world-empires of Assyria and 
 Babylon, and Egypt ! What passions of dis- 
 honour cankered the fair civilizations of Greece 
 and Rome ! What a deep hypocrisy — bred in 
 the vain idolatry of forms and traditions and 
 the servility of the human intellect — corrupted 
 into complacent Pharisaism the religious pro- 
 fessions of the Chosen People ! Then Christ 
 came. But even amid the dawning light, what 
 grievous wolves leapt in among the flock of 
 God ! Will-worship, the heretical vanity of 
 systems, the pride of priestly rule, the blind 
 falsehoods of tradition, the materiahzing of sacra- 
 ments, how soon did they overshadow the Church 
 of Christ ! 
 
 Then look at all the long centuries of the 
 Middle Ages, with their unnatural self-tortures, 
 their usurping Papacy, their deep-seated cor- 
 
HEA VEN IN EARTHL V HOMES. 
 
 21 
 
 ruption, their horrible enginery of persecution 
 and intolerance. Look at the state of nations 
 even now — these petty wars with poor savages ; 
 these distracted confusions of party politics ; 
 these race hatreds, so fierce and so blind ; this 
 desire to repudiate all national profession of 
 religion ; this indifference of the great mass of 
 the laity to the general alienation from God ; this 
 eagerness for a purely secular education ; this 
 choosing of men without religion for representa- 
 tives of Christian, or what once were Christian, 
 communities ; this worship of material things 
 even in religion ; these godless masses ; thi.^ 
 daily increasing leprosy of depraved, malignant, 
 and vulgar literature ; this vast national patron- 
 age of the drink, which brings blight and madness 
 and murder into so many thousand homes; this 
 glaring contrast between fierce poverty and the 
 selfish luxury of wealth ! Is all this tolerable ? 
 Does it in any way represent Christianity ? Is 
 it to last for ever ? Is there nothing in the 
 world of man, even more than in the world of 
 Nature, to make us yearn for the new heaven 
 and the new earth ? 
 
 Does not this glance at the world of man 
 almost make us say with Cardinal Newman, " If 
 I looked into a mirror and did not see my 
 face I should have the sort of feeling which 
 actually comes upon me when I look into the 
 living, busy world and see no reflexion of its 
 
22 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 Creator ; " or confess with the blameless King 
 of the Idyls : 
 
 I saw God in the shining of the stars, 
 I saw Him in the flowering of the fields, 
 But in His ways with man I found Him not ! 
 
 III. And so again with our little individual 
 lives. The Christian may^ like St. Paul, be 
 quite content to stay here as long as God places 
 him here, to serve (if he may haply serve) his 
 brethren ; but are there many Christians who 
 can help feeling that to depart and to be with 
 Christ, to enter that new heaven and that new 
 earth, would be TroXXfo juuXXov Kptiaaovy far, far 
 better ? For life, too, at its best, has a crack in 
 it. Somehow, the trail of the serpent is all over 
 it. The most perfect man is imperfect, the 
 most innocent man has his weak point. The 
 infant Achilles in the Greek legend is dipped in 
 the waters of the Styx^ and the touch of the 
 wave makes him invulnerable ; but the water 
 has not touched the heel by which his mother 
 held him, and to that vulnerable heel the death- 
 ful arrow finds its way. Siegfried, in the 
 "Nibelungen Lied," bathes in the dragon's 
 blood, and it has made him, too, invulnerable ; 
 but, unknown to him, a lime-tree leaf has flut- 
 tered down upon his back, and into the vital 
 spot, where the blood has not touched his skin, 
 the murderer's dagger smites. Everything in 
 the Icelandic Saga has sworn not to injure 
 
HE A VEN IN EARTHL V HOMES. 23 
 
 Balder, the brightest and most beloved of all 
 the Northern gods, but the insignificant mistletoe 
 has not been asked to take the oath, and by the 
 mistletoe he dies. These are the dim, sad 
 allegories by which the world indicates that 
 even the happiest man cannot be all happy, nor 
 the most invincible altogether safe, nor the 
 best altogether good. Whatever may be the 
 blessings which God has given to us in life — and 
 to the poorest of us He has given, if not more 
 than we desire, far, far more than we deserve — 
 yet is there one among us all who must not 
 yearn for the new heaven and the new earth ; for 
 the treasures which neither moth nor rust cor- 
 rupt, nor thieves break through and steal; for the 
 inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and 
 that fadeth not away ? 
 
 IV. But now, after this necessary survey, 
 after seeing and admitting that every earthly 
 blessing has a flaw in it, I return to my first 
 question. While we cherish no illusions as to 
 the presence of wickedness and sorrow and peril, 
 we still ask, Is it wholly impossible for us, here 
 and now, to spread over our heads some of the 
 azure of that new heaven, and to make the new 
 earth begin at least to blossom as the rose ? and 
 I answer. Yes, it is possible ; it is in our power, 
 if through the o'er-arching azure we can gaze 
 into clear openings of the empyrean, and there 
 by the eye of faith see Jesus standing at the right 
 
24 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 hand of God. I answer, Yes, it is possible to 
 the sincere, the humble, and the faithful ; to all 
 who feel and have experienced that love and 
 duty can make a little heaven even on this sad 
 earth. 
 
 i. For what is our conception of the new 
 heaven and the new earth which we desire ? 
 Is it a mere absence of annoyances } Is it an 
 egotism expanded to infinitude ? Is it a sen- 
 sual Mohammedan Paradise ? Is it a selfish 
 Palace of Art ? Is it a city paved with gold, or 
 a pagoda of jewels like the New Jerusalem of 
 St. John in its mere external aspect Childish 
 must we be indeed if we have not got beyond 
 these symbols ; if we do not know that man is 
 in his essence a spiritual being, and that for a 
 spiritual being there can be no felicity save in 
 spiritual conditions — in communion with God, 
 in serenity of mind, in purity of heart. We, 
 according to His promise, look for new heavens 
 and a new earth, ivherein dwelletJi righteousness. 
 Shall we ever enjoy that heaven hereafter ? Yea, 
 if we truly seek it now. But " are your minds 
 set upon righteousness, O ye congregation } 
 and do ye judge the thing that is right, O ye 
 sons of men 
 
 ii. It is not possible for me here, at this time, 
 to show more fully how, if righteousness be the 
 one characteristic of the new heavens and the 
 new earth, it is possible for us, in this new year, 
 
HEAVEN IN EARTHLY HOMES. 
 
 to further the reign of righteousness, and so to 
 foretaste the heaven which is so near us all, if 
 we would but enter it. But it is perhaps possible 
 for me, in conclusion, to give one illustration, 
 to show to how large an extent the happiness 
 of heaven is in our own power even upon a sad 
 and guilty earth, because that earth has been re- 
 deemed by Christ. Let this my one illustration 
 of the truth be taken from the one fairest and 
 sweetest sphere of all life — our homes. 
 
 If there can be any place upon earth su- 
 premely blessed, it is, it ought to be, an English 
 home. If there be one field of asphodel on this 
 side of the grave, if there be any place over 
 which God's angels of peace may rest for a 
 moment on their messages of mercy and wave 
 their purple wings, it must surely be in Christian 
 homes ; in homes around which cluster the sweet 
 memories of childhood, trained in love and duty; 
 " where youth shines like a star ; " where there 
 may always be an ark of refuge and a haven of 
 rest amid the storm of troubles and injustice ; 
 where so many voices speak to the ear in music, 
 and the quiet peacefulness of old age is almost 
 as beautiful as the glad enthusiasm of younger 
 days. 
 
 Now here is the point which I want to illus- 
 trate : our homes exactly resemble our lives in 
 this, that they are indeed liable to troubles and 
 calamities which are wholly beyond our power. 
 
26 
 
 EVERY DA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 and yet that if righteousness dwell therein, if 
 they be enriched with the beauty of holiness, if 
 Christ be there a never-exiled guest, they will, 
 in their measure, partake, here and now, of the 
 blessedness of the new heaven and the new 
 earth. Alas ! we admit that, as in the world, so 
 even in our most cherished homes, there must 
 be a flaw in the jewel of any earthly happiness. 
 Even in Paradise there was the snake. Do what 
 we will we cannot shut out care, or sorrow, or mis- 
 fortune, or even calamity. Even in an English 
 home there may be a prodigal ; a warped slip of 
 wilderness even among the trees of God. And 
 care may enter, and bitter poverty. Nor from 
 any home, as this dark shadow shows, can we 
 keep out the step of death. The dart of the 
 last enemy can pierce even through the holy 
 atmosphere of love, and sooner or later in the 
 desolate house, which was once so happy, must 
 flow the tears of the widow and the fatherless. 
 
 For every one of us, as well as for those who 
 mourn in this church to-day, is waiting that 
 Shadow with the keys. We all, in turn, must 
 face our forlorn hours of bereavement. For us, 
 too, sooner or later, our house must be left unto 
 us desolate. How, then, in such a world as this, 
 can we do otherwise than yearn for that new 
 heaven and new earth, where God shall wipe all 
 tears from off all faces, and whence sorrow and 
 sighing shall flee away ? But mark, my friends 
 
HEA VEN IN EARTHL V HOMES. 27 
 
 the lesson. These natural sorrows are, and are 
 meant to be, full of blessedness ; the light of 
 God shining upon them transmutes them into 
 heavenly gold. The wounds which God makes, 
 God heals. The fire which kindles the grains of 
 frankincense upon His altar, at the same time 
 brings out their fragrancy. All that He sends, 
 if borne submissively, becomes rich in mercy. 
 Upon the troubled soul which seeks Him His 
 consolations increase ''with the gentleness of a 
 sea which caresses the shore it covers." Even 
 in the hour when we have committed our beloved 
 to the dust — 
 
 Through thick pangs, high agonies, 
 Faith unto life breaks, and death dies. 
 
 A brittle thing is our earthly happiness — 
 brittle as some thin vase of Venetian glass ; and 
 yet neither anxiety nor sorrow, nor the dart of 
 death, which is mightier than the oak-cleaving 
 thunderbolt, can shatter a thing even so brittle 
 as the earthly happiness of our poor little homes, 
 if we place that happiness under the care of God. 
 But though neither anguish nor death can break 
 it with all their violence, sin can break it at a 
 touch ; and selfishness can shatter it, just as 
 there are acids which will shiver the V~enetian 
 glass. Sin and selfishness — God's balm does 
 not heal in this world the ravages which they 
 cause ! Drink, unbridled passions, absorbing 
 egotism, headstrong indifference : these are fatal 
 
28 
 
 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 to the happiness of any home. But these can 
 be avoided. The misery which these induce is 
 a self-chosen misery. Where these are, there 
 indeed the wedded calm of homes is disastrously 
 ruined. Self-assertion, self-will, selfishness, the 
 inability to bear and forbear, the refusal to bear 
 one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of 
 Christ, the absence of healing, holy^ self-abne- 
 gating tenderness — these are indeed the begin- 
 ning of troubles. Too many know it by bitter 
 experience. They see the fires of hell redden 
 upon their hearth, and coldness succeed to love, 
 and cruelty to coldness ; and if drink comes in, 
 as it often does, in such cases, brutalism succeeds 
 to cruelty. But even short of these immeasu- 
 rable calamities — 
 
 Alas ! how light a cause may move 
 
 Dissension between hearts that love ! 
 
 Hearts that the world in vain had tried 
 
 And sorrow but more closely tied ; 
 
 That stood the storm when waves were rough, 
 
 Yet, in a sunny hour, fall off, 
 
 Like ships that have gone down at sea 
 
 AVlien heaven was all tranquillity. 
 
 Better," says Solomon, ''is a dinner of herbs 
 where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred 
 therewith." 
 
 What then, in brief, is the one best, surest 
 secret of a happy home ?• It is that it should be 
 a home wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein 
 dwelleth the fear of God, wherein dwelleth love. 
 
HE A VEN IN EARTHLY HOMES. 
 
 29 
 
 And since this is in our power, therefore the 
 blessedness which is deeper and more enduring 
 than happiness is also within our own reach. 
 And so it is with the world. If we make of this 
 world, so far as we are concerned, a world where- 
 in dwelleth righteousness, so far do we anticipate 
 the fruition of the new world, the new Jerusalem. 
 Let us aim at this tranquil, this sober happi- 
 ness of quiet and confidence and peace in God. 
 This is no chimaera. The possibility of win- 
 ning this is no illusion. In our patience let us 
 possess, let us acquire our souls. The world 
 will still be the world. There will still be the 
 pestilence which walketh in darkness and the 
 arrow that flieth in the noon-day. The animal- 
 ism of brutal passions will still crowd our streets 
 with the infamy of its victims and the wretched- 
 ness which dogs their heels. There will still be 
 envy and hatred and malice, and lies, and 
 sickness, and poverty, and death ; but the 
 world in w^hich our inmost souls shall live and 
 move and have their being will even in this 
 life become an anticipated fruition of the new 
 heaven and the new earth. The outer world 
 may still continue for many a long year, it 
 may be for many a long century, to grope 
 in Egyptian darkness, in darkness which may 
 be felt ; but our souls, like the children of 
 Israel in Goshen, may have light in their dwell- 
 ings. For God is light, and he who dwelleth in 
 
30 E VER YD A V CHRIST/ AN LIFE. 
 
 God dvvelleth in light ; and where God's light 
 is there is wisdom and safety, and a peace 
 which the world does not even attempt to 
 give; and which, happily, neither its malice, 
 nor its wickedness, nor its misfortunes can ever 
 take away. 
 
II. 
 
 ITdow to ma??e lEartb UF?e IFDcavctt. 
 
 "Wherein dwelletli righteousness." — 2 Peter iii. 13. 
 
 AST Sunday we began the New Year 
 by considering our hopes of the New 
 Heaven and the New Earth, and by 
 asking ourselves the question whether, even here 
 and now, we might not enjoy at least a foretaste 
 of the fruition of that realm of God. We did 
 not hide from ourselves that everything earthly 
 is transitory and imperfect ; that alike the 
 material world, and the whole estate of man, 
 and our individual lives, groan and travail in 
 pain together even until now, awaiting the re- 
 demption of the body. But we inquired 
 whether we may not hasten the blessed resti- 
 tution of all things to their ideal beauty and 
 happiness, even as in the previous verse St. 
 Peter speaks of Christians as expecting and 
 hastening the Advent — the Day of the Lord. 
 And we took from the sphere of home life one 
 single illustration of the certainty that we can 
 
32 
 
 EVER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 ourselves make unspeakable differences in the 
 blessedness or misery of the conditions which 
 surround us. It has been said of marriage by 
 a wise writer that 
 
 It locally contains or hell or heaven, 
 There is no third place in it. 
 
 Since an English home may be to us, as we 
 make it, a heaven or a hell^ clearly no small 
 part of life depends upon our own choice of 
 good or evil; and if, in a sphere so wide, we can in 
 a measure anticipate, even here and even now, 
 the new heavens and the new earth, there is 
 reason to believe that we could do so in still 
 larger measure — that we could thus, as it were, 
 antedate the coming of Christ's kingdom, and 
 lead on the lingering years. 
 
 There are two great spheres of public activity, 
 politics and business; and for each of us pri- 
 vately there is the domestic, the social, the 
 individual life. Let me try to show this even- 
 ing, how, not in our homes only, but through all 
 our lives, living as children of the kingdom, we 
 may anticipate something of its final blessed- 
 ness. I shall not attempt to exhaust the sub- 
 ject, but only to illustrate it. Yet if you will 
 grasp the general thought with all the vast 
 responsibility which pertains to it — if you will 
 regard the elements of the highest blessedness 
 to which man's spirit can reach as things not 
 
MAKE EARTH LIKE HEAVEN. 
 
 33 
 
 distant, not Utopian, but perfectly attainable — 
 you will soon see that God has not mocked us 
 with a dream, or dazzled us with a mirage of 
 the wilderness, but that He places within our 
 reach the happiness which is our being's end 
 and aim, that He has told us the secret which 
 unlocks the eternal treasure-house of spiritual 
 peace. 
 
 2. " We, brethren, according to His promise, 
 look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness." You see St. Peter's 
 conception of the new universe. Its one charac- 
 teristic to him is righteousness. Is righteous- 
 ness attainable by man.'' If it be, then the 
 essence of God's kingdom is not beyond man's 
 reach. If righteousness be attainable here and 
 now, then here and now we may at least enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven. Is our conception 
 of happiness identified with righteousness } Is 
 that the thing which we desire } Is that our 
 ideal t Is that the one goal to which we are 
 stretching forward in the heavenly race } If so, 
 then for us, even here and now, "the path to 
 heaven lies through heaven, and all the way to 
 heaven is heaven." What sort of a condition 
 answers to the heaven of which you dream, for 
 which you sigh 1 Is it a state of things which 
 you vaguely call glory 1 Is it a starry crown — 
 the symbol of supreme self-aggrandisement t 
 Is it a golden throne, the summit of individual 
 
 C 
 
34 
 
 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 exaltation ? Is it the rest of an untroubled 
 indolence ? If so our heaven may prove to be 
 indeed a chimaera both now and hereafter. 
 Such notions of heaven betray the unsuspected 
 fact that, after all, our high spiritual hopes 
 resolve themselves into mere earthliness — into 
 an ill-concealed amalgam of vanity and selfish- 
 ness. 
 
 The true conception of heaven is holiness. It 
 is the elimination of baseness and of sin. So says 
 David. Who shall ascend into the hill of the 
 Lord, or who shall rise up in His Holy Place ? 
 Even he that hath clean hands and a pure 
 heart, and that hath not lift up his mind unto 
 vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour. He 
 shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and 
 righteousness from the God of his salvation. 
 This is the generation of them that seek Him, 
 even of them that seek thy face, O Jacob." 
 
 So, too, says St. Paul. I have fought the 
 good fight, I have finished the course, I have 
 kept the faith ; henceforth there is laid up for 
 me the crown of" — the crown of what? Nine 
 persons out of ten will fill up the word with 
 " glory " — " the crown of glory ; " but that is not 
 what St. Paul says : what he says is hence- 
 forth there is laid up for me the crown of right- 
 eousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, 
 shall give me at that day, and not only to me, 
 but also to all them that have loved His appear- 
 
MAKE EARTH LIKE HEAVEN. 
 
 ing." A crown of righteousness ! Well, but that 
 is a crown which many of God's children have 
 worn visibly here on earth. Ah! how childish 
 beside that unseen crown is the round and top of 
 sovereignty which glitters on so many an uneasy 
 brow ! Glory ! The world gives the name of 
 glory to mere tedious pomp. It sees no king- 
 liness in the persecuted misery of godlike souls. 
 " Art Thou a king, then ? " asks the cowardly, 
 blood-stained Roman Procurator, in undisguised 
 astonishment, with unconcealed contempt, of 
 the poor Prisoner who stood before him — " art 
 Thou a king, Thou poor, worn, tear-stained out- 
 cast, forsaken of every friend, of every subject, 
 in thine hour of bitter need ? " 
 
 Thou sayest " — such was the calm answer — 
 " thou sayest that lama king." Ay ! but the 
 crown is not a crown of pride, the kingdom is 
 not of this world. And so have all God's saints 
 felt. Do you look upon heaven as a reward, 
 or a personal honour ? An unhmited treasury, 
 or a sort of glorified star and ribbon } It is 
 nothing so trumpery, or so commercial ; and if 
 it were it is not our poor shivering virtues that 
 would deserve it. It is not a reward ; it is the 
 gift of God. Do you want "to go to heaven ? " 
 as they phrase it. Well, you may go to heaven 
 now if you really desire it, and if you know 
 what heaven means. ^'Go to heaven!" My 
 friends, heaven is a temper, not a place. What 
 
 C 2 
 
36 
 
 EVERY DA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 do you pray for, when you pray for heaven ? 
 What was the reward for which the saints 
 have looked ? A white robe ? a golden harp ? 
 a house of gems ? to be praised by all men ? to 
 be avenged on their enemies ? No ; but when the 
 vision said to St. Thomas Aquinas, Thou hast 
 written well of me, O Thomas ; what reward 
 dost thou desire ? " Non aliamy nisi te, Domine — 
 " No other reward than Thyself, O Lord ! was 
 the meek and rapt reply. Did not David say 
 the same } " Thou, O God, art the thing that 
 I long for." " Whom have I in heaven but Thee ; 
 and there is none upon earth that I desire in 
 comparison of Thee t " Are our souls thus 
 athirst for God } Amid the eager competition 
 of business, amid the mad desire for pleasure 
 and for gold, how many of you are seeking first 
 the kingdom of God and His righteousness } 
 Ah ! my friends, if God and His righteousness 
 be our conception of heaven, we may attain 
 thereto — ay, without money, without price. 
 
 If righteousness be the one characteristic of 
 the new heaven and the new earth, it is here 
 within reach. If God be the one object of our 
 desire, and oneness with Christ our single aim, 
 why may not the best of heaven lie about us 
 now } " As the hart panteth after the water 
 brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, O 
 God ! " Which of us can honestly say that } 
 If we can, happy are we. " Blessed are they 
 
MAKE EARTH LIKE HEAVEN. 
 
 37 
 
 that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
 they shall be filled." 
 
 Modern science has shown us why the deep 
 sky is blue ; and here in a London lecture-room 
 you may see the azure of the firmament enclosed 
 for you in a tube of common glass. Oh, my 
 friends, would that we could see how possible it 
 is for us to make our lives like that tube of glass, 
 and to fill them with the spiritual azure of the 
 new heaven ! And if each of our lives were full 
 of heaven, how widely would it diffuse its lovely 
 radiance, how soon would that new heaven glow 
 over all the darkened world ! 
 
 3. But I can only give you some passing 
 illustrations of this possibility, taken from 
 various spheres or elements of our private and 
 public life. 
 
 i. Millions of men are engaged in one form or 
 other of trade and commerce, and every one of 
 us is more or less occupied in affairs with which 
 money is concerned. Now one main element 
 of righteousness is stainless honesty, inflexible 
 integrity. Have you ever thought how im- 
 mense an amelioration would be introduced into 
 the conditions of life if perfect integrity, if stain- 
 less honesty were, as it might be, the invariable 
 rule ? How keenly does the Book of Proverbs 
 express the world's experience of the common- 
 ness of cheating, and quackery, and selfish 
 struggling competition, and the incessant aim 
 
EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 to over-reach and to defraud, to make unjust 
 gains, to win all we legally or illegally can, not 
 the fair and honest profit and proportion ! But 
 the Christian must ever pray, "Let integrity and 
 uprightness preserve me, for I wait on Thee." 
 
 Eliminate from all money concerns the ele- 
 ments of fraud and immoral custom, of scramble 
 and selfishness, of puff and push, of the dis- 
 honesty which postpones or will not pay just 
 debts, of the counter-dishonesty which wrings 
 from the fair payments of the honest the bad 
 debts of the dishonest : eliminate the robbing of 
 the hireling of his wages, and the grinding the 
 faces of the poor, and the making gain of the 
 appetites, or the wants, or the miseries, or of 
 the guileless inexperience of others ; eliminate 
 the fraudulent dealing with trusts, the playing 
 tricks with money, the forgeries, the bubble 
 companies, the gambling speculations, the rings 
 of middlemen, the cooking of accounts, the tam- 
 perings w^ith markets — get rid of all this net- 
 work of the base and evil spirit of Mammon, 
 this manifold enginery of temptation which 
 Satan puts into the hands of those who, making 
 haste to be rich, shall not be innocent — and can 
 you estimate the greater heavenliness which 
 would then be introduced into human society ? 
 Truly the love of money is a root of all evil ; 
 only the fewest know how to win it wisely, to 
 spend it nobly. Men try in vain to serve God 
 
MAKE EARTH LIKE HEAVEN. 
 
 39 
 
 and Mammon. "They do not disbelieve in Christ, 
 but, Hke Judas, they sell Him." They palter with 
 God for gold. If we would pour but one ray 
 of heaven into the shut house of hfe, the first 
 essential for each and for all of us is absolute, 
 perfect, inflexible integrity. " He that walketh 
 in his uprightness feareth the Lord. 
 
 ii. Nor less essential to our new earth here 
 is perfect Purity. Can you — can any mind 
 short of the Infinite — at all measure the depth 
 and the width of shame and misery with which 
 life is flooded by the violation of God's law 
 of chastity ? Who shall tell how many millions 
 are the lives in which, because of uncleanness, 
 their root has been as rottenness and their 
 blossom has gone up as dust ? He who sins 
 against this high inexorable eternal law does 
 so verily with his eyes open — he goes like a 
 bird to the snare of the fowler, like an ox to 
 the slaughter, like a fool to the correction of 
 the stocks — he goes knowingly to the banquet 
 where the dead are, and the guests in the 
 depths of hell. Immeasurable is the curse 
 which impurity introduces into human life ; 
 immeasurable the wrongs which it inflicts upon 
 the innocent ; immeasurable the certain and 
 awful retribution which it drags down upon 
 the guilty. Alas ! we need go no farther than 
 the shameful streets and agonizing hospitals of 
 great cities to know the horrors of disease and 
 
40 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 wretchedness which follow in the wake of God's 
 insulted and violated laws ! And yet they do 
 not reveal one thousandth part of the desperate 
 evil. Let us not speak of it : but look and 
 pass. But to every young person here present 
 most earnestly would I say, Beseech Almighty 
 God that He may teach you how benevolent 
 and how inexorable is the law of purity. 
 Cherish the unsullied crystal of that heavenly 
 innocence. When the serpent creeps in, the 
 bliss of God's Paradise is gone. You can never 
 know what heaven is — you can never know the 
 serenity of perfect peace — until you keep your 
 mortal bodies in temperance, soberness, and 
 chastity. Knov/ ye not that your bodies are 
 temples of the Holy Ghost who dwelleth in 
 you — except — (oh! what a fearful "except"!) 
 — except ye be reprobates? "Blessed" — our 
 Saviour s own lips said it — " blessed are the 
 pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
 
 iii. Once more — (for, as I said, I desire only 
 to illustrate the subject, not to exhaust it) — with 
 perfect integrity, and perfect purity, there must 
 also be perfect love in the new heaven and that 
 tender charitable truthfulness which is a part of 
 it. We need a new heaven and a new earth, 
 most of all, because so many men by hatred 
 and by untruthfulness^ as well as by dishonesty 
 and uncleanness, turn earth from a possible 
 heaven into an anticipated hell. Of all piti- 
 
MAKE EARTH LIKE HEAVEN. 
 
 41 
 
 able lives the most pitiable is tliat of those 
 who make money by pandering to the envy 
 and malice, which are the most snake-like of 
 human infirmities. I know that the world — 
 alike the fashionable world and the vulgar world 
 — does not think so. Alike in the back street 
 and the luxurious drawing-room^ men think 
 that scandal is amusing, and take lies for wit. 
 Other vices ally men to brutes, but of male- 
 volent falsehood man has the sad and degrad- 
 ing monopoly. It is, I say again, impossible 
 to estimate the extent to which bad men, and 
 bad W'Omen, for their own interests, add to the 
 misery of life, when their throat is an open 
 sepulchre and the poison of asps is under their 
 Hps." Enough of this also. Earth would be a 
 comparative Paradise if men loved each other, 
 as now they envy, hate, and belie each other, 
 till even the sphere of religion rings wdth the 
 bitterness of unscrupulous and intriguing faction. 
 " She thought to herself," writes a modern 
 novelist, " how delightful it would be to live in 
 a house where everybody understood, and loved, 
 and thought about every one else. She did not 
 know that her wish was just for the kingdom 
 of Heaven." 
 
 Now I appeal to every one among you to tell 
 me whether you do not clearly see that life 
 W'Ould be utterly different if men would make 
 it different ; unutterably more blessed if men 
 
42 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 sought or cared for the elements of blessedness. 
 Oh ! that men would but be true men, and that 
 women would be the holy and gracious things 
 which God meant women to be ; for when they 
 indulge themselves in these sins they cease to be 
 true men or true women. The man whose heart 
 is ever burning with envy, and hatred, and sullen 
 jealousy, and mad ferocity — is he a man, or a 
 jackal, or a tiger? The man who has enslaved 
 himself to lust and drunkenness ; the man who, 
 smitten with the wand of the foul enchantress, 
 rolls with pleasure in a sensual sty — is he still a 
 man, or has he become akin to the ape or the 
 swine ? The man who is given over to lies and 
 malignities, has he not sunk into a serpent, as 
 he hears the serpent's curse ? Expel from the 
 human heart the ape's vileness, the serpent's hiss, 
 the tiger's fury, the vulture wings which hasten 
 to carrion ; and then indeed man will become 
 but little lower than the angels, crowned with 
 glory and honour ! Man may be like the brutes 
 or like the angels, as he will. A society of 
 men as God meant them to be, a true Church 
 of Christ — ah ! it would be a place which 
 angels themselves might love. And we might 
 help, each one of us, to make earth so. And 
 the more heartily we do this, each for our- 
 selves, the more surely will others do it, for " it 
 is astonishing how much good goodness makes." 
 4. And, in conclusion, be it small or be it 
 
MAKE EARTH LIKE HE A VEN. 43 
 
 great, a Church, an ideal Church, a Church of 
 Christ, there shall be_, and a Church of Christ 
 there is ; and therefore, even here and now, we 
 may behold, we may belong to, the new heaven 
 and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteous- 
 ness. Let us not be impatient about it ; let us 
 not despair. If we do we shall not understand 
 the true spirit of the saints of God. They ever 
 felt, even in the worst of times, that "God's 
 kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and His 
 dominion endureth throughout all ages." Days 
 of darkness they have known, days of vexation, 
 days in which God seemed to be almost terribly 
 silent, and yet they have been "pressed on every 
 side, but not straitened ; perplexed, yet not 
 to despair ; persecuted, but not forsaken ; cast 
 down, but not destroyed!" When the wild beast 
 from the sea was wallowing in the blood of the 
 martyrs ; when the fires of hell lit the darkness of 
 those gardens on the Pincian Hill ; when a Decius 
 or a Diocletian was Emperor ; when a l\Iary or 
 a Philip, a Bonner or an Alva tortured or slew 
 the saints of God ; when the feeble spark of 
 heaven's light seemed certain to be quenched 
 under the raging and swelling tempests of the 
 world's persecuting hatred, they have still not 
 feared for Zion ; they have still said, " God is 
 in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be 
 moved, God shall help her and that right early." 
 However dark the horizon, whether of the State, 
 
44 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 or of the Church, or of our individual lives ; 
 however ominous the clouds that may seem to 
 loom upon our future, that horizon is not half so 
 black, those clouds are not half so lurid, as in 
 the days of Claudius and Nero ; and yet even 
 in those days, when Jews loathed the Gospel and 
 Gentiles were striving to stamp it under their 
 feet, when intellect spat upon it and philosophy 
 spurned it, and armies smote it and malignity 
 insulted it with shameful Hes; even in those days 
 the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews fear- 
 lessly spoke of it to poor slaves and artisans as 
 a kingdom that could not be moved. Upon its 
 present certainty he founded its future perma- 
 nence ; and that his brethren might feel its 
 blessedness now, and enter on its future heritage 
 together, he adds the exhortation which I 
 would fain leave with you: "Wherefore we 
 receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let 
 us " — let at any rate, no matter how much 
 evil is around us, no matter how vehemently 
 the world still goes on its own evil way, 
 with its companions the flesh and the devil ; 
 no matter how much the nominal Church is 
 tainted by the faction, the materialism, and the 
 base methods of the world — " let us have grace 
 to serve God acceptably, with reverence and 
 godly fear." Let us do this, and we shall have 
 begun already to enter into that new heaven and 
 that new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. 
 
MAKE EARTH LIKE HE A YEN. 45 
 
 Addison tells us how he once talked with a 
 Rosicrucian about the great secret. " He talked 
 of it as a spirit that hved in an emerald, and 
 converted everything that was near it to the 
 highest perfection it was capable of. ' It gives 
 a lustre,' said he, 'to the sun and water to the 
 diamond. It irradiates every metal, and enriches 
 lead with all the properties of gold. It heightens 
 smoke into flame, flame into light, and light into 
 glory/ He further added that a single ray dis- 
 sipates care, and pain, and melancholy from the 
 person on whom it falls. * In short,' said he, * its 
 presence naturally changes every place into a 
 kind of heaven.' At length I found/' says Addi- 
 son, "that his great secret was nothing else but 
 content." — But to make a heaven requires some- 
 thing more than content ; it requires righteous- 
 ness — new heavens and a new earth wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness. ^ 
 
III. 
 
 Mbat to zmn Hbout. 
 
 " Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
 things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever 
 things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
 are of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be any 
 praise, think on these things." — Philippiaxs iv. 8. 
 
 T. PAUL seems as if he could not 
 break off his glad, humble, grateful 
 letter to the beloved Philippians, whose 
 generosity to him while he was a prisoner had 
 touched his lonely heart. Several times he 
 seems to be on the point of ending it, but 
 cannot resist the desire to give one more solemn 
 and hopeful message. He has already told 
 them to rejoice in the Lord ; to let their gentle- 
 ness be known unto all men ; to lay aside all 
 nervous anxiety about their future, secure in 
 faith and prayer ; and so, he says, the peace of 
 God, better than any device of man, shall 
 stand sentry over their hearts. Then follows 
 this verse. He tells them what to think of, 
 what to value and make of great account, what 
 
WHAT TO THINK ABOUT. 
 
 47 
 
 to practise in their lives. And if they do this 
 he says that the God of Peace will certainly 
 be with them. 
 
 2. The things which he suggests to their 
 meditation and practice fall into three groups. 
 He bids them think of things which, absolutely, 
 are things real, and things awful ; to think 
 of whatsoever things, relatively to man^ are 
 just ; and of whatsoever things are, relatively to 
 themselves, chaste and pure. Then he sums up 
 all these things with reference to the moral 
 appreciation of them, as being lovely and of 
 good report ; as making up the sum total of 
 virtue, as being the sole things worthy of 
 praise. These things, he tells them, should be 
 their absorbing meditation — their lifelong care. 
 Let us look at them a little more closely, if 
 so be that we may find grace to obey these 
 golden counsels of the great apostle to us 
 Gentiles. 
 
 3. Whatsoever things are tniey The word 
 has a fuller and deeper meaning in the Bible 
 than now it has. Truth with us means the 
 opposite of falsity in speech, but in Scripture it 
 means the opposite of all unreality, all sham_, 
 all semblance. St. Paul bids them to think habit- 
 ually of all that is real ; on the substance, not 
 on the shadow ; on the eternal, not on the tran- 
 sitory ; on God, not on the world. He means 
 the same as David meant when he prayed, " Turn 
 
48 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 away mine eyes from beholding vanity," — i.e., 
 from dwelling on what is hollow and empty — 
 " but quicken Thou me in Thy law." He means 
 the same as our Lord meant when He said, 
 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the 
 earth, where moth and rust doth consume and 
 where thieves break through and steal, but lay up 
 for yourselves treasures in heaven." In this, as 
 in all else that is valuable, the sacred authority 
 of Revelation does but emphasize the universal 
 experience of the world. The vanity of human 
 wishes, wishes that disappoint equally in their 
 frustration and in their accomplishment, wishes 
 which are almost more bitter in their fulfilment 
 than in their unsuccess, is a lesson common 
 alike to Solomon the disenchanted king, and to 
 Juvenal the heathen satirist ; it is the lesson 
 alike of Paul the Apostle, and of Horace the 
 Epicurean. What is the world, and what the 
 things of the world } Scripture and experience 
 teach us that they are like a mirage in the 
 wilderness — bright, enchanting, full of promise, 
 ending only in scorching drought and glaring 
 sand. In the famous vision of Mirza our 
 moralist describes mankind chasing bubbles on 
 a bridge of three score and ten arches, which 
 spans the rolling waters of a prodigious tide, and 
 sinking through hidden trapdoors into the abyss 
 in the midst of their vain chase. Shakspeare 
 speaks of the soldier 
 
WHAT TO THINK ABOUT, 
 
 49 
 
 Seeking the bubble Reputation 
 E'en in the cannon's mouth. 
 
 Our Poet Laureate makes his weary queen 
 exclaim, 
 
 Oh, bubble world, 
 Whose colours in a moment break and fly. 
 
 What is a bubble ? It is a thin globe of water en- 
 closing air, with which children play. It glitters 
 in the air like a ball of opal and emerald ; but 
 leave it alone, and in a few seconds the black 
 spot will show itself amid the colours of the 
 prism, and nothing is left of the radiant phantom 
 but a pellicle of impure water. Man himself, apart 
 from God, is but such a bubble. " To appear, 
 to gleam, to disappear — to be born, to suffer, to 
 die ; there is the resume of our ephemeral lives.' 
 In youth, they " shine like a bubble, or the 
 colours on a dove's ncck^ or the hues of the rain- 
 bow, whose very image is fantastical in a few 
 seconds appear the dark spaces of manhood's 
 trouble, of care, of sickness, and of age; and 
 then — ashes to ashes, dust to dust ! And as 
 is man, so, still more, are the things which man 
 pursues. They look beautiful when they float 
 above our reach ; but touch them, and they 
 burst. 
 
 This world is all a fleeting show. 
 
 For man's illusion given ; 
 The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, 
 Deceitful shine, deceitful flow ; 
 
 There's nothing true but heaven. 
 
 D 
 
so EVERY DA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 And false ihe light on glory's plume, 
 
 As fading hues of even, 
 And honour's wreath, and beauty's bloom. 
 Are garlands given to the tomb, — 
 
 There's nothing true but heaven. 
 
 So sings the light gay poet ; so also says St. Paul. 
 "The fashion of this world passeth away." 
 
 Well then, if you would not be utterly dis- 
 appointed — utterly and inevitably, and most 
 miserably — '^Whatsoever things are rcaV — 
 Godj the Soul, Eternity, the Gospel of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ — " think on these things." 
 
 4. And "whatsoever things are honourable." 
 The word at/iva means "noble," ''grave," 
 '^reverend," "seemly." It is an exhortation to 
 dignity of thought as opposite to meanness of 
 thought. It invites to the gravity of self-respect. 
 Most of the many base things which men say 
 are said anonymously, or on false pretexts, with 
 the pretence of aims more reputable than those 
 by which they are really influenced. Men and 
 women often deceive even themselves. They 
 act and speak and write ignobly, and persuade 
 themselves that they are actuated by sincere 
 and lofty motives. A high sense of our dignity 
 as redeemed ennobled beings would render im- 
 possible nine-tenths of the small, mean, envious 
 baseness of which the whole world is full. 
 Almost every vice and sin is, of its very nature, 
 not only sinful, but also unseemly and degrading. 
 
WHAT TO THIXK ABOUT. 
 
 5 
 
 It is the tendency of all sin to drag us down, 
 to make us often the more contemptible the 
 more proud we are. " Sin is the greatest and 
 highest infelicity of any being. It depraves the 
 soul within itself, vitiates its powers, deforms its 
 beauty, extinguishes its light, darkens its glory, 
 disturbs its tranquillity, violates its harmony, 
 destroys its life." 
 
 When a man fills all his thoughts, and there- 
 fore all his life, with wicked aims and forbidden 
 desires he ignores the essential and transcendent 
 dignity of his immortal nature — the dignity of 
 God's image upon him, the sign of his redemp- 
 tion, which was marked in baptism upon his 
 forehead. Oh ! let us strive to cherish more and 
 more in our hearts, ere it be too late, that honest 
 and haughty self-respect which shrinks from 
 every baseness as from a stain — that nice and 
 delicate fastidiousness of honour for ourselves 
 which cannot plunge itself into what is mean and 
 vile. 
 
 " No one will ever know it ; " so argues the 
 subtle tempter. But the answer is, Get thee 
 behind me, Satan." Though none ever know it, 
 / shall know it — God w^ill know it ; it will lie for 
 ever like a spark of fire upon my agonising con- 
 science ; the sense of it will humiliate me ; the 
 guilt of it will drag down my life. Nothing 
 becomes too bad for human beings, young or 
 old, who have once lost utterly their self- 
 
 D 2 
 
52 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 respect. From that moment they fall headlong 
 from their true estate, and they are miserably 
 conscious of it. Why is this sea of life strewn 
 with hopeless wrecks ? Why are these crowded 
 cities so full of ghosts? Could that wretched 
 man hang about the public-houses and the 
 corners of the streets ; could he sink so low 
 as to live on the grinding toil of his wife, and 
 to squander on his blighting crave for drink 
 the money which should go to feed and clothe 
 the dirty, ragged, depraved children, whom he 
 is training up to be as great a curse to the world 
 as himself.^ could he have sunk to this loathly 
 worthlessness of degradation if he ever thought 
 of whatsoever things are honourable ? 
 
 Could that draggled, miserable, unwomanly 
 woman live in the horror of drink and vileness 
 if the dignity of pure womanhood had not been 
 eaten away out of her heart ? 
 
 Could that foolish youth run greedily with 
 open eyes into disease^ and shame, and death — 
 selfish, blasphemous, improvident — if he had 
 ever kept in his soul the truth that man was 
 made to glorify God here, and live with Him 
 for ever in heaven hereafter ? Under the pure 
 and infinite majesty of the midnight with all its 
 stars you may see scenes of infamy ; you may 
 hear words of leprous defilement, or see two 
 women reel out of the gin-shop to tear each 
 other to pieces in the street, till it seems mar- 
 
WHAT TO THINK ABOUT. 
 
 53 
 
 vellous that the insulted heavens do not darken 
 themselves with wrath, or gleam into avenging 
 flame, to overwhelm in deserved destruction the 
 human beings who have sunk themselves so un- 
 utterably low. Ah ! may God preserve every 
 soul of every man and woman and boy here 
 present from such a hell ! I know no advice 
 more deep-reaching to young men than this : 
 Respect yourselves ; honour and reaHze your im- 
 mortal nature. Whatsoever things are seemly, 
 majestic, dignified, awful — God, judgment, 
 eternity — whatever elevates and ennobles you, 
 and delivers you from the coarse seductions of 
 present temptation — think on these things. 
 
 5. And " whatsoever things are just'' Justice 
 is one of the most elementary of human duties ; 
 ay, and one of the rarest. Men's thoughts are 
 commonly swayed by their interests, tainted by 
 their prejudices ; they judge by appearances ; 
 they judge unrighteous judgment ; they are 
 warped by unreasonable antipathies ; they use 
 false balances and unjust weights in judging of 
 one another. I know few just men. One of 
 the very purest and noblest characters in Greek 
 history was known as "Aristides the Just." 
 Not long ago there died a clergyman who had 
 won among his schoolfellows at Winchester the 
 honourable nickname of " Aristides the Just." 
 He had borne that name for life. He had never 
 sullied it. He carried it with him to the grave. 
 
54 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 When a friend was asked to write his epitaph 
 his answer was, Carve him a monument with 
 three words on it, * Aristides the Just,' and leave 
 him to sleep in Jesus." Try to imitate him. 
 Try to be what so very few are, habitually fair — 
 Whatsoever things are just, think on these 
 things." 
 
 6. And whatsoever things are purer Ah ! 
 that this warning might reach the heart of every 
 one of you, and inspire you with the resolute 
 effort to banish from your minds everything 
 that defileth. As on the one hand there is 
 nothing in this world more exquisite than a soul 
 from which the bloom and dew of innocence 
 have not been swept away ; as there is nothing 
 more divine on earth than the indignant blush 
 of modesty on the pure young cheek ; so there 
 is nothing more wretched than he whose soul is 
 a desecrated temple abounding in chambers of 
 unclean imagery, haunted by the spirits of 
 impure and polluted thoughts. Alas ! this un- 
 sullied loveliness of soul is only possible to those 
 who guard it like the golden apples of the 
 Hesperides. It is gone for those who dwell 
 upon unhallowed thoughts ; who long for the 
 poisonous fruit of the tree of the knowledge of 
 evil ; who indulge in a base and morbid curiosity ; 
 who have once given themselves over to work 
 all uncleanness with greediness. Remember 
 that thoughts are under our own control ; that it 
 
IV//AT TO THIXK ABOUT. 
 
 55 
 
 is our own fault if we indulge in them ; that the 
 thought of wickedness is sin ; that God sees and 
 knows our most secret thoughts ; that impure 
 thoughts voluntarily encouraged lead inevitably 
 to fatal deeds and blighted lives. There is no 
 more sure way to blast, as with the poisonous 
 breath of a sirocco, every green leaf and fair 
 flower of youth thm to subject it to the hot 
 breath of lewd imaginations. I can imagine 
 no worse misfortune that could happen to any 
 youth than wilful and guilty indulgence in the 
 pollution of debased and debasing thoughts. 
 He can eject, he can suppress, he can refuse 
 them a lodgment if he will ; and if he does not 
 — oh, youth, thou art indeed unhappy ! 
 
 7. And "whatsoever things are lovely'' — win- 
 ning attractive thoughts that live and are 
 radiant in the light. If you think of such things, 
 the baser and viler things will have no charm 
 for you. Try, then^ above all, " the expulsive 
 power of good affections." Empty by filling ; 
 empty of what is mean and impure by filling 
 with what is noble and lovely. When the 
 Argonauts sailed past the treacherous rocks of 
 the Sirens they sailed in perfect safety, because 
 Orpheus was one of them, and the song of 
 Orpheus was sweeter, more delightful, more full 
 of noble witchery than the Sirens' vile, volup- 
 tuous strains. Let your souls be filled with the 
 music of Him whom the early Christians 
 
56 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 delighted to represent as Orpheus charming the 
 wild beasts of bad passions by his harp. 
 
 Your souls are a picture-gallery. Cover the 
 walls of them with things serene, noble, beau- 
 tiful, and the foul and fleshly will only seem 
 revolting. Hang this upon the wall of your 
 room," said a wise picture-dealer to an Oxford 
 undergraduate as he handed to him the engrav- 
 ing of a Madonna of Raphael, "and then all the 
 pictures of jockeys and ballet-girls will disap- 
 pear." Try the same experiment within your 
 souls. Let their walls be hung with all things 
 sweet and perfect — the thought of God, the 
 image of Christ, the lives of God's saints, the 
 aspirations of good and great men, the memo- 
 ries of golden deeds, noble passages of poetic 
 thought, scenes of mountain, and sunset, and 
 ocean. Oh, do this, and there shall be no room 
 for the thoughts of carnal ugliness, which de- 
 prave corrupted souls ! 
 
 8. And "whatsoever things are of good 
 report!' Here is the difference between the 
 children of the world and the children of the 
 kingdom. The world delights in whatsoever 
 things are of ill report — base stories, vile innu- 
 endoes, evil surmises, scandalous hints. The 
 world revels in envy, hatred, malice, and all un- 
 charitableness. It finds nothing piquant for its 
 base and jaded appetite in the beauty of fair 
 deeds and noble purposes ; but tricks, and inge- 
 
WHAT TO THTWK ABOUT. 
 
 57 
 
 nious lies, and backbiting, and stabbing reputa- 
 tions in the darlc — these the world and the flesh 
 and the devil find amusing ; these things flatter 
 their innate ignobleness ; on these things they 
 gloat and feed. Do not you be content to 
 degrade yourselves into sponges saturated 
 from the stagnant goosepond of city gossip." 
 You, if you would be noble, if you would be a 
 Christian at all, have nothing to do with these 
 things. " Hear as little as you possibly can to 
 the prejudice of others; believe nothing of the 
 kind unless you are forced to believe it ; never 
 circulate, nor approve of those who circulate, 
 loose reports ; moderate as far as you can the 
 censure of others; always believe that if the 
 other side ^ vere heard a very difl"erent account 
 would be given of the matter" — that is 
 thoroughly good advice. Above all remember 
 thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Whatsoever 
 things are of good report, think of tJiese things. 
 
 9. So, then, if there be any virtue, if there be 
 any praise, think on these things. The form of 
 expression does not imply the least doubt that 
 there is virtue, and that there is praise, but it 
 means "whatever virtue^ whatever praise there 
 be." It involves an appeal even to pagan 
 morals and sensibihties. Virtue is not a Chris- 
 tian word ; it occurs scarcely once in the Bible. 
 Why } Because it is a word which belongs 
 rather to heathen ethics than to the Gospel, 
 
58 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 rather to Plato and Aristotle than to St. Paul. 
 Not that it is not beautiful, more beautiful (as 
 Aristotle says) than even the morning or the 
 evening star. But in Christianity it is super- 
 seded by something deeper, purer, brighter, 
 higher. The morning and the evening star 
 vanish into a sea of lustre when the sun has 
 risen ; and virtue is nothing in comparison with 
 holiness. Yet even ordinary heathen virtue 
 meets with its own praise ; and even virtue and 
 human praise bid us think of whatsoever things 
 are real, seemly, just, pure, winning, of good 
 report. How much more then does the loftier 
 standard of God's praise, and of holiness, make 
 this demand upon us ! Think, then, oh, young 
 men and young women, above all think on, take 
 account of these things ! For these things, St. 
 Paul tells you, are the secret of the peace of 
 God. Thought passes into action. The thought 
 becomes the word, the word the deed, the deed 
 the habit, the habit the character, the character 
 the eternal being of our souls. The evening air 
 clad in the beauty of a thousand stars " is not 
 lovelier than the character of him whose whole 
 being is passed in the region of eternal realities ; 
 who knows the awful reverence which is due from 
 every man to his own soul ; who loveth the thing 
 that is just, and doeth the thing that is lawful 
 and right in singleness of heart ; who keeps the 
 temple of his soul pure and bright with the 
 
IV//AT TO THINK ABOUT. 
 
 59 
 
 Presence of the Holy One ; who loves all that is 
 beautiful whether in Nature or in Art; who hates 
 whatever is ignoble and loves his neighbour as 
 himself. What has such a man to fear ? The 
 eternal forces are with him. His heart, his hope, 
 his treasure are beyond the grave, and ever and 
 anon in moments of permitted rapture, he sees 
 the heavens open and the angels of God ascend- 
 ing and descending upon the Son of Man. 
 
IV. 
 
 Cbilbven, anb tbe Cbilb ChxiBt 
 
 Preached in Westminster Abbey ^ Innocefits' Day. 1886. 
 
 '* And the child grew, and waxed strong, filled with wisdom : 
 and the grace of God was upon him." — Luke ii. 40. 
 
 K^yajY short sermon this afternoon, my chil- 
 JkJ^bI dren, will be addressed to you alone. 
 
 I shall think of you, and not of all the 
 other persons who are here present. A good 
 bishop, who now for many years has gone to his 
 rest, told me that once, after he had been 
 preaching in a London church, he saw a little 
 boy standing by one of the pews with red and 
 swollen face, crying as if his heart would break. 
 The kind wife of the bishop stopped and said to 
 the child, What is the matter wath you, my 
 little fellow 1 " And he, pointing to the bishop, 
 said, " The man spoke to me ; the man spoke 
 to me." The preacher had not been thinking of 
 children at all ; but something in the sermon 
 had touched the little boy's heart, had sped hke 
 an arrow to its mark in his conscience. Now it 
 
CHILDREN, AND THE CHILD CRHIST. 6i 
 
 will be very far from my object to trouble the 
 heart of any one of you to-day ; but when you 
 go away I should like you to think, each one of 
 you, that " the man spoke to me." 
 
 I. It was only on Saturday that we kept the 
 joyous festival of Christmas, and yet the three 
 days since then have been da\'s sacred to 
 martyrs — that is, to those who for Christ's sake 
 were cruelly slain ; — first, the youn^ man, St. 
 Stephen, then the old man, St. John, and to-day 
 the little innocent children whom Herod mur- 
 dered when he wished to slay the child Jesus. 
 And the reason for this is to teach us that while 
 Christ came to make us happy, yet we must not 
 therefore think that we shall escape trouble. It 
 is to teach us that all Christians — young men, 
 and old men, and even little children — must 
 learn to deny themselves for Jesus' sake. Those 
 little innocents at Bethlehem are not the only 
 children who have perished even in childhood. 
 In cruel wars, in the sieges of cities, in famines 
 and plagues and shipwrecks, many and many a 
 little child has perished ; and sometimes when 
 men hated and burnt each other for religious 
 opinions, even little children have had to die for 
 Christ's sake—martyrs, like those holy innocents, 
 in deed though not in will. And though none 
 of you will ever be called to die in your child- 
 hood for Jesus' sake, yet God, in His unseen 
 providence, may send you pain, or sickness, or 
 
62 
 
 EVEJ^VDAV CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 accident, or even death ; or you may have to 
 weep for the loss of the father or mother who 
 loved you so tenderly ; or He may cause you to 
 suffer, as thousands of poor little children have 
 to suffer, from poverty or hunger or unkindness. 
 I know that to most of you God is so loving and 
 tender that He spares you from all these trials ; 
 yet even then — and then, indeed, all the more 
 out of love and gratitude to Him — you must 
 learn, for Christ's sake, to be unselfish ; and to 
 give up many things ; and to do what others like, 
 not what you would like ; and to be obedient, 
 when you would rather do something else ; and 
 to go to lessons, when you would rather play ; 
 and to go to bed, when you would rather sit up ; 
 and to get up, when you would like to lie in 
 bed ; and to be meek and gentle and forgiving 
 when you are tempted to speak angry words, or 
 to be proud, and wilful, and troublesome. And 
 you should try to learn this all the more because 
 God has been very good to you, and because the 
 Lord J esus Christ, being so rich, yet for your sakes 
 became poor. Shall I tell you what a princess 
 wrote — the Princess Amelia, who was an aunt of 
 our good Queen Victoria, and who after long and 
 painful sickness and trial died at an early age ? — 
 
 Unthinking, idle, wild, and young, 
 I laughed and danced, I talked and sung. 
 And proud of health, of freedom vain, 
 Dreamt not of sorrow, care, or pain. 
 
CHILDREN, AND THE CHHD CHRIST. 63 
 
 Oh ! then, in those bright hours of glee, 
 I thought the world was made for me. 
 
 But when the hour of trial came. 
 And sickness shook my feeble frame, 
 And folly's gay pursuits M'ere o'er, 
 And I could sing and dance no more — 
 Oh ! then, I thought how sad 'twould be, 
 Were only this world made for me. 
 
 You too, my children, must learn that the 
 world was not made for you, but that you must 
 think of others, and be obedient, and sweet, and 
 kind. 
 
 2. Now, whenever you are tempted to be rude 
 or wilful or unloving, think that your Lord and 
 Saviour Jesus Christ, who loved you so, and 
 died for you, and is your Good Shepherd, and 
 would fain carry you Hke lambs in His bosom, 
 was once a little child like you, and wants you 
 to be good and holy as He was. 
 
 Was not ouv Lord a little chilil, 
 
 Taught by degrees to pray, 
 By father dear and mother mild 
 
 Instructed day by day ? 
 
 Yes, He was once a little child, subject to His 
 parents at Nazareth, so that He knows all your 
 temptations, all your little troubles. And it 
 was just such little children as you that He took 
 up in His arms, and laid His hands upon, and 
 blessed. Is it not wonderful to think that He, 
 the Lord of Time and all the worlds, came to us 
 once as a little babe, and played as a child in 
 
64 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 the shop of the carpenter at Nazareth ? There 
 was once — so Luther tells us — a pious, godly 
 bishop who had often earnestly prayed that God 
 would show him what Jesus was like in His 
 youth. Now once the bishop had a dream, and 
 in his dream he saw a poor carpenter working at 
 his trade, and beside him a little boy gathering 
 up chips. Then came in a maiden, clothed in 
 green, who called them both to come to the 
 meal, and set bread and milk before them. All 
 this the bishop seemed to see in his dream, 
 standing behind the door that he might not be 
 seen. Then the little boy began and said. 
 Why does that man stand there ? Will he not 
 come in also and eat with us?" And this so 
 frightened the bishop that he woke. But he 
 need not have been frightened, for does not 
 Jesus say, *^ If any man hear My voice, and open 
 the door, I will come in to him, and sup with 
 him, and he with Me." And whether the dream 
 be true or not, we know that Jesus in His child- 
 hood and youth looked and acted like other 
 children, ''in fashion like a man," "yet without 
 sin." 
 
 3. And there have been pure and sweet and 
 holy children who have thought so much of the 
 child Jesus that they have seemed to see Him. 
 There was once a boy whose name was Edmund 
 Rich, and who is called St. Edmund of Canter- 
 bury ; and his brother tells us that once, when, 
 
CHILDREN, AND THE CHHD CHRIST. 65 
 
 at the age of twelve, he had gone into the fields 
 from the boisterous play of his companions, he 
 thought that the child Jesus appeared to him, 
 and said, Hail, beloved one ! " And he, won- 
 dering at the beautiful child, said, Who art 
 thou, for certainly tliou art unknown to me?" 
 And the child Jesus said, How comes it that I 
 am unknown to thee, seeing that I sit by thy 
 side at school, and wherever thou art, there do I 
 go with thee ? Look on my forehead, and see 
 what is there written." And Edmund looked, 
 and saw the name "Jesus." " This is my name," 
 said the child ; " write it on thy heart, and it 
 shall protect thee from evil." Then He dis- 
 appeared, on whom the angels desire to look, 
 leaving the little boy Edmund with passing 
 sweetness in his heart. 
 
 4. Now you, my children, may never see the 
 child Jesus even in vision as Edmund did, and 
 yet you may all see Him, every one of you, by 
 the eye of faith. There lived, fifteen hundred 
 years ago, a saint whose name was Jerome, and 
 he loved so much the thought of the child Christ, 
 that he left Rome, and went and lived for thirty 
 long years in a cave at Bethlehem, close by the 
 cavern-stable in which Christ was born. And 
 wdien men wished to invite him by earthly 
 honours to work elsewhere, he said, " Take me 
 not away from the cradle where my Lord was 
 laid. Nowhere can I be happier than there. 
 
 E 
 
66 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 There do I often talk with the child Jesus, and 
 say to Him, *Ah, Lord ! how can I repay Thee?;' 
 And the Child answers, ' I need nothing. Only 
 sing thou " Glory to God, and peace on earth." ' 
 And when I say * Nay ! but I must yield Thee 
 something ; ' the Holy Child replies, * Thy silver 
 and thy gold I need not. Give them to the 
 poor. Give me only thy sins to be forgiven.' 
 And then do I begin to weep, and say, ' Oh, 
 Thou blessed Child Jesus, take what is mine, and 
 give me what is Thine ! ' " 
 
 Now in this way, by the eye of faith, you 
 may all see the Child Jesus, and, "unseen yet 
 ever near," you may feel His presence, and He 
 may sit by your side at school, and be with you 
 all day to keep you from harm, and to drive 
 away bad thoughts and naughty tempers, and 
 send His angels to watch over you when you 
 sleep. 
 
 5. But remember that the surest way not to 
 see Jesus, but to displease Him, is to do any- 
 thing which you know to be wrong. You must 
 always remember, when you think of Him 
 that— 
 
 The most childish sin that man can do 
 Is yet a sin which Jesus never did 
 When Jesus was a child, and yet a sin 
 For which in lowliness He came to die. 
 
 So I hope that, morning and evening, you 
 fold your hands and lift up your hearts in 
 
CHILD REX, AXD THE CHILD CHRIST. 67 
 
 prayer, that in His love to you He may make 
 you like Him, and may come and live with 
 you always even till you die. You need not 
 be afraid what you say to Him. He loves and 
 will hear the simplest prayer, if only it is sincere. 
 Once there was carried into a great hospital a 
 poor little ragged miserable boy, who had been 
 run over in the streets and dreadfully hurt. 
 And all night he kept crying and groaning in 
 his great pain ; and at last a good youth, who 
 lay in the bed next to him, said, My poor 
 little fellow, won't you pray to Jesus to ease 
 your pain ? " But the little wretched sufferer 
 had never heard anything at all about Jesus, 
 and asked who Jesus wa?. And the youth 
 gently told him that Jesus was Lord of all, and 
 that He had come down to die for us. And 
 the boy answered, "Oh, I can't pray to Him; 
 He's so great and grand, and He would never 
 hear a poor street-boy hke me ; and I don't 
 know how to speak to Him." " Then/' said 
 the youth, '^won^t you just lift your hand to 
 Him out of bed, and when He passes by He 
 will see it, and will know that you want Him to 
 be kind to you, and to ease your pain } " And 
 the poor crushed suffering boy lifted out of the 
 bed his little brown hand, and soon afterwards 
 he ceased to groan ; and when they came to 
 him in the morning the hand and the poor thin 
 arm were still uplifted, but they were stiff and 
 
 E 2 
 
68 E VER YD A V CHRIS TIA N LI EE. 
 
 cold ; for Jesus had indeed seen it, and heard 
 that mute prayer of the agony of that strayed 
 lamb of His fold, and He had grasped the little 
 soiled trembling hand of the sufferer, and had 
 taken him away to that better, happier home, 
 where He will love also to make room for you 
 and me, if we seek Him with all our hearts, 
 and try to do His will. 
 
 6. I have only one word more to say to you, 
 and that is to tell you one other way in which 
 you can see that dear Lord who died for you. 
 You may see Him in prayer, and you may see 
 Him by always trying to be good, and you may 
 see Him also in the poor whom He loves, and 
 by being kind to them, and to one another, and 
 to all. You don^t know what it is to be sent to 
 school in the morning without a morsel of break- 
 fast, and to come back to find no fire to sit by 
 and nothing but a scanty crust of bread to eat. 
 You don't know what it is to be sent out shiv^er- 
 ing and in rags into the snow, and to be kicked, 
 beaten, and starved by drunken fathers and 
 mothers. But these sad and cruel things happen 
 to many little English children in these London 
 streets, who are not blest as you are. And Jesus 
 says to you, " In helping these you help Me." 
 Would it not be a terrible thing if some day He 
 were to say to you, I was hungry and ye gave 
 Me no meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no 
 drink ; I was naked, and ye clothed Me not ; I 
 
CHILDREN, AXD THE CHHD CHRIST. 69 
 
 was sick and in prison, and ye did not visit 
 Me" ? Ah no ! let Him rather shed on you the 
 blessing which He promises to those who give 
 even a cup of cold water in His name to one of 
 His little ones ; and then He shall some day say 
 to you, before His glittering angels, Inasmuch 
 as ye did it unto one of the least of these My 
 brethren, ye did it unto Me." 
 
V. 
 
 'Qnseen IRealities* 
 
 *' The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which 
 are not seen are eternal." — 2 CoR. iv. 18. 
 
 Y friends, we have been living through 
 weeks which will be memorable in 
 history, and amid the unique celebra- 
 tions of an event which can hardly by any 
 possibility recur in the lifetime of any person 
 now living. To most, perhaps to all of us, it 
 has been, in one way or another, a time of 
 excitement. Numbers have been much occu- 
 pied about such matters as whether they had 
 or had not received an invitation to this or that 
 ceremonial ; or why such a one had a ticket when 
 they had not ; or whether the inch-broad realm 
 of their supposed claims has been infringed ; or 
 whether the inch-high grandeur of their imagi- 
 nary dignity has been affronted. What vexation 
 about supposed slights ! What woundings of 
 irritable sensibilities ! Many of us have been 
 moving through a world of the infinitely little, in 
 which the exaggerated demands of clamorous 
 
UNSEEN REALITIES. 
 
 71 
 
 egotism have run riot on every side. At such 
 times it is more than ever difficult to keep up 
 our reverence for the true grandeur of human 
 nature. We get a little weary, and long for rest. 
 
 But how, if we ourselves have been vulgar 
 with the vulgar, little with the little, selfish with 
 the selfish ; if we, too, have allowed ourselves to 
 be disturbed by trivial annoyances ; how, if we, 
 too, have been guilty of absorbing egotism, and 
 not risen above the eternal spirit of the multi- 
 tude } How strange it is that few, even of the 
 best of us, attain to the estimate of things at their 
 right value ! What is the outcome of the mere 
 external pageantry of the Jubilee, apart from the 
 lessons v/hich here at least we have tried to draw 
 from it ? We have seen two or three ceremonials ; 
 are we the wiser, are we the happier, are we 
 the better for them, except so far as we have 
 associated them with thoughts of gratitude to 
 God, with the good resolves of prospect, with the 
 wise experience of retrospect At any rate, is 
 it not time now at last to remind ourselves, with 
 Marcus Aurelius, that, apart from our spiritual 
 life, "the idle business of shows, plays on the 
 stage, a bone cast to little dogs, a bit of bread 
 in fishponds, labourings of ants, and burden- 
 carrying runnings to and fro of frightened little 
 mice, puppets pulled by strings — this is what 
 life resembles." Shall a Pagan teach us to esti- 
 mate things as they are 1 Well, this is how that 
 
72 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 best and greatest Emperor of Rorae thought 
 about his own grandeur : " This Falernian wine," 
 he says, " is only a Httle grape-juice ; and this 
 imperial purple robe some sheep's wool dyed 
 with the blood of a shell-fish." Whenever we 
 are tempted to be absorbed in worldly things we 
 ought to lay them bare and look at their intrinsic 
 unreality. We have seen princes and great officials 
 resplendent and purpureal in gold^ and pearls, 
 and broidered array ; but a man is just as great 
 as he is in the sight of God — no greater. The 
 only true grandeur of men and women is to be 
 good men and good women ; and wisely does 
 Milton sing of the father of our race — 
 
 In himself was all his state. 
 
 2. Since, then, we have been living, outwardly 
 at least, amid the display of things seen and tem- 
 poral, fain would I recall your thoughts from 
 their thrice-doubled emptiness.* They derive 
 from the unseen eternal things all such small 
 reality as they possess. A person of distinction 
 pays us some small attention, and we are in a 
 flutter of delight ; alas ! in the reality of things 
 some small unnoticed act of daily life, some 
 trivial unregarded kindness, some tiny effort to 
 conquer a besetting vice, some little word spoken 
 in due season, is of ten thousandfold more 
 importance than if all the kings who were ever 
 crowned smiled upon us in full assemblages of 
 
 * Eccl. i. 2. 
 
UNSEEN REALITIES. 
 
 73 
 
 the nobles, and made us peers and princes, and 
 hung gold chains around our necks. 
 
 3. In the Grosvenor Gallery this year there is 
 a picture by a young painter, which is full of 
 suggestiveness. It is called " The Shadow of 
 the Saint." After some glad and gorgeous 
 revel two young Pagan girls are returning home. 
 They are richly dressed ; they are flushed with 
 pleasure ; the world is all before them ; they 
 are beautiful in the roses of their youth. Sud- 
 denly, on the moonlit wall, they are startled by 
 catching sight of the shadow of the gaunt weird 
 figure of a man who is kneeling on the top of 
 a pillar with hands uplifted in an agony of 
 supplication. It is the shadow of St. Simeon, 
 the Stylite or pillar-saint, who, in accordance 
 with the deepening superstitions of the fifth 
 century, lived for years on the narrow summit 
 of a column, the sun smiting him by day, the 
 moon by night. Into the heart of those two 
 young girls is suddenly flashed the terrific con- 
 trast between the saint's life and theirs. They 
 are living exclusively for the things seen and 
 temporal ; for the fashion of this world which 
 passeth away ; for a pleasureless pleasure which 
 shall sicken sooner than the flowers around 
 their hair. He, however crudely, yet with the 
 sincerity of an awful self-sacrifice, is living for 
 the things unseen which are eternal. They are 
 living for youth, which vanishes like the shadow 
 
74 E VER YD A V CHRIST/AN LIFE. 
 
 of a bird's wing ; for a life which is itself as the 
 track of a boat's keel in glassy waves ; for a 
 world which, with all its kingdoms and the glory 
 of them, is but as a bubble which a touch destroys. 
 He is living for God, and for a life beyond life. 
 They, living in pleasure, are dead while they 
 live ; he, dead to pleasure, dead to self, is alive 
 unto God. The form which his self-denial 
 takes is corrupted by a thousand perversions of 
 error and ignorance ; but ignorance and error 
 are but as motes in the heavenly sunbeam of 
 sincerity, and in a distracted and dissolving age 
 the Stylite was at least a witness to the men 
 and women of his time that they had souls ; 
 that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance 
 of the things which he possesseth ; that the life 
 is more than meat and the body than raiment ; 
 that he who findeth his life shall lose it, and 
 he who loseth his life for Christ's sake and the 
 Gospel's, the same shall find it. 
 
 4. Awakenment then to the truth that our lives 
 are in substance as a wreath of foam upon the 
 water, and in duration as but a moment in the 
 being of the eternal silence ; awakenment to the 
 existence of the eternal unseen realities — how 
 much lies in those words ! Which is our condi- 
 tion at this moment ? Does it most resemble 
 that of the young girls or that of the awful saint ? 
 Are we living for the shadow or for the sub- 
 stance ? for the reality or for the dream ? 
 
UNSEEN REALITIES. 
 
 75 
 
 5. The poet Wordsworth describes a boy 
 whom he had known, a boy who died early, into 
 whose heart, as he wandered by the diffs of 
 Windermere, the voice of mountain torrents 
 was carried, 
 
 Or the visible scene 
 Would enter unawares into his mind 
 With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 
 Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received 
 Into the steady bosom of the lake. 
 
 Now it is rarely enou^^h that men find leisure 
 from their strenuous frivolities to notice even 
 the glory and wonder and power of the world 
 around them ; but alas ! how many die without 
 having once taken in the thought of God, 
 without love of God, without prayer to God, 
 without obedience to God. Yet to live so is not 
 to hve at all. It is but the beating of the pulse ; 
 it is but the drawing of the breath ; it is but to 
 be as the beasts that perish. God and Death 
 and Judgment and Eternity — these things stare 
 us in the face, loom everywhere around us, and 
 to them we are deaf and blind, while trifles 
 lighter than air assume to our distorted vision 
 an immense significance. 
 
 6. What shall arouse us from this torpor and 
 stupidness We read in many Christian bio- 
 graphies of men, who, walking after their own 
 hearts' lusts, and eating the fruit of their own 
 devices, hive suddenly and for the first time 
 
76 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 been startled into reality. It is told of Raymond 
 Lully, the Doctor illuminatus, once known for 
 his valour and gallantries, that his whole life 
 was changed when a lady, whom he had been 
 wooing, showed him that she was stricken with a 
 mortal and terrible disease. It is told of Francis 
 of Assisi, in his youthful gaiety, that the ex- 
 periences of defeat and imprisonment turned 
 him from a worldling into a saint. It is 
 told of Ignatius Loyola, the brave Spanish 
 cavalier, that the agonies of a fractured limb, 
 which blighted all his life, drove him to give up 
 his soul to God. It is told of Francis Xavier that 
 he was utterly disenchanted of the world's plea- 
 sures by the ever-repeated question of Ignatius, 
 What shall it profit a man if he shall gain 
 the whole world and lose his own soul } " It is 
 told of Luther that the sudden death of a friend 
 and fellow-student by a flash of lightning broke 
 up within him the fountains of the great deep of 
 religious emotion. It is told of De Ranee, the 
 reformer of the Monastery of La Trappe, that, 
 when he was a dissolute and worldly priest, he 
 was shocked into soberness by coming unex- 
 pectedly upon the dead body of the lady whom 
 he loved. It is told of Colonel Gardiner that, in 
 an hour of guilt and shame, he suddenly saw a 
 vision of Jesus on the Cross, and was startled 
 into true repentance. Why should I go on } No 
 doubt in buffetings of calamity, in prostrations 
 
UNSEEN REALITIES. 
 
 77 
 
 of illness, in rude shocks of divine intimation 
 — or again^ in spasms of agonizing disenchant- 
 ment, when the Dead Sea apples have crum- 
 bled into bitterness, and the world itself has 
 seemed at a touch to slip into dust, like the body 
 of some exhumed king — men have been brought, 
 in one moment, to recognize the things which, 
 though unseen, are alone eternal. Having 
 been blind, lo ! at the touch of Christ they see ! 
 But is it not sad and strange that such penal 
 dispensations should be so often necessary ? 
 Should not Reason and Conscience, and universal 
 experience, suffice us for this end ? The myrrh 
 does not yield its fragrance unless it be incensed 
 and crushed ; the scented tree must be smitten 
 by the axe before its perfume can flow forth ; 
 but why should life be only rendered holy and 
 serious by pain and retribution ? Ah ! my 
 friends, depend upon it that God does not 
 willingly afflict us ; that His afflictions are 
 meant in saving mercy, because other means of 
 arousing us have failed. How often does He 
 say to us — " Be ye not like the horse and the 
 mule which have no understanding, whose 
 mouths must be held with bit and bridle lest 
 they fall upon thee." How much more gladly 
 would He say to us, " I will guide thee with 
 mine eye/' 
 
 7. My friends, we cannot live lives worth living, 
 or lives worth anything, until we live in the light 
 
78 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 of the unseen. One of the noblest of human 
 soulsj in the grandest of visions, tells us how 
 he was saved from wandering blindly among 
 the wild beasts in the dark and savage wood ; 
 how he was enabled to climb the difficult hill 
 into the Paradise of God's sunshine, and to gain 
 forgiveness and strength through Christ our 
 Lord. And how was he delivered ? By the 
 combined influences of reason, and divine know- 
 ledge, and heavenly grace, leading him to see 
 the things that are and to see them as they are. 
 He was led by these great angels to face the 
 eternal realities. He trod first the ghastly 
 abysses of hell ; he saw as with his own eyes its 
 loathly fiends, its rage and suicidal agony, its 
 flakes of slow-raining fire, its pools of blighting 
 ice, its rivers of boiling blood. And then, 
 escaping like some half-drowned swimmer, with 
 difficult spent breath, he toiled painfully up the 
 steep mountain of penitence, while angel wings 
 ever and anon brushed away from his brow its 
 fatal brands. And then, at last, purified by the 
 blood of his Saviour, he walked in light as God 
 is in the light, and, mingling amid the living 
 rubies and topazes of heaven, he gazed on the 
 throne of the Almighty. It was a vision^ but a 
 vision which may Christ open all our eyes to 
 see ! Would that all our old men might see 
 such visions, and all our young men dream 
 such dreams ! For such dreams are the sole 
 
UNSEEN REALITIES. 
 
 79 
 
 realities. The unseen things are all around 
 us ; they alone are eternal. Get rid alto- 
 gether of the error of an ignorant theology 
 which confounds the eternal with the future. 
 St. Paul does not say " the things which are 
 future are eternal," but " the things which are 
 not seen are eternal." Unseen they may be to 
 us, yet they are neither distant nor future ; they 
 are here ; they are now ; they alone give any 
 meaning or grandeur to the beatings of the 
 heart. Phrasemongers describe an execution, 
 and say that the man was " launched into 
 eternity ; " friends speak of a death-bed, and say 
 that their friend "passed into eternity." Such 
 talk is mere confusion. No man can pass into 
 eternity, for he is already in it. The dead are 
 no more in eternity now than they always were, 
 or than every one of us is at this moment We 
 may ignore the things eternal ; shut our eyes 
 hard to them ; live as though they had no 
 existence ; nevertheless Eternity is around us 
 here, now, at this moment, at all moments ; and 
 it will have been around us every day of our 
 ignorant, sinful, selfish lives. Its stars are ever 
 over our head, while we are so diligent in the 
 dust of our worldliness, or in the tainted stream 
 of our desires. The dull brute globe moves 
 through its blue ether, and knows it not ; even 
 so our souls are bathed in eternity, and are 
 never conscious of it. As little can we get rid 
 
8o E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 of the ethereal air of Eternity as the world can 
 get rid of the blue spaces of ether through which 
 it moves. 
 
 8. Let us then strive — ere it be too late for 
 this life — to see Him who is invisible, and the 
 things which are unseen. It is only to the 
 earthly life, only to the sin-blinded eyes, that 
 God is invisible, or that the Eternal is unseen. 
 And if we are indeed so plunged in guilt and 
 folly that we cannot see them, let us pray to 
 God that He would reveal them to us at all 
 costs. The fearful youth in Dothan, when the 
 Prophet opened his eyes, saw all the mountain 
 around him full of chariots of fire and horses of 
 fire. Oh ! if we were but awakened out of the 
 torpor and self-seeking of a life without God ; 
 if but one ray of God's light could stream into 
 our souls — how would that glory out-dazzle 
 the feeble and flickering tapers of earth ! — 
 how would its aching, revealing, overpowering 
 splendour show to us in one moment the 
 differences between the death that we call life, 
 and the life which we regard as death. And 
 sometimes, as we have seen, it does happen that 
 thus suddenly God opens the eyes of men ; but 
 it is not the normal way. He leaves us ordi- 
 narily to the common dispensations of His daily 
 Providence, and if we be not utterly faithless, 
 and utterly absorbed in our own frivolities, 
 they are abundantly sufficient to emphasize 
 
UNSEEN REALITIES. 
 
 8i 
 
 the lessons taught us by Christ^s Gospel and 
 Christ's example. 
 
 Beneath our feet and o'er our head 
 Are equal warnings given, 
 Beneath us He the countless dead, 
 Above us is the Heaven. 
 
 Let these suffice us. Death is everywhere ; 
 God is everywhere : will we not see them } The 
 lesson which I have tried to impress upon you is 
 the lesson of many Scriptures. It is " Walk by 
 faith, not by sight." It is — " Set your affection 
 on things above, not on things on the earth ; 
 for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ 
 in God.'" It is — " I am crucified with Christ, 
 nevertheless I live." It is — " The world passeth 
 away, and the lust thereof ; but he that doeth 
 the will of God abideth for ever." 
 
 F 
 
VI. 
 
 Mbcrewntb to /iDeasure %itc. 
 
 "According to the measure of a man, that is of an angel." — 
 Rev. xxi. 17. 
 
 HERE is a wonderful significance in 
 these words, a significance which — 
 (as is so often the case in Scripture) — 
 is perhaps far beyond, and even outside of, their 
 immediate appHcation. The measure of a man 
 is here identified with the measure of an angel. 
 Here is a divine scale of measurement, and one 
 which, if we would apply it to our lives, would 
 make them sublime indeed ! 
 
 I. Sursitin corda — ''lift up your hearts" — is 
 the ancient appeal of our liturgies which imps 
 the flagging wings of devotion, and stimulates 
 us in the midst of worship, more and ever 
 more, to raise our aspirations heavenwards. In 
 Cicero's famous " Dream of Scipio," the hero's 
 spirit passes in vision to the region of stars, 
 and since his eyes are ever turned to the small 
 earth which he has left, his guide says to him ! 
 " How long will you keep your eyes fixed 
 
WHEREWITH TO MEASURE LIFE. 83 
 
 downwards ? " It is the question which comes 
 to the souls of men in a chorus of appeals, if 
 we would but listen to them ! It is the curse 
 of our race that, though God made our souls, 
 like our bodies, upright, and fitted to gaze on 
 heaven, we walk, like Mammon, with earthward 
 eyes — as though we sought heaven there ; or 
 as though our thoughts were more with the 
 trodden gold, than with 
 
 Aught divine or holy else enjoyed 
 In vision beatific 
 
 You will all remember the powerful allegory 
 of Bunyan, interpreted farther by the genius 
 of a living painter, of the man raking, with 
 eager wo', fish eyes, amid dross and baubles, 
 while over him, wholly unheeded, stands his 
 sorrowing angel with the despised and starry 
 crown. If we look on earthly treasures and 
 domains it should rather be, as Dante did, when 
 bidden to gaze down from the seventh circle of 
 the heavens. " I saw this globe," he says. 
 
 So pitiful of semblance, that perforce 
 It moved my smile ; and him in truth I hold 
 For wisest who esteems it least : whose thoughts 
 Elsewhere are fixt. 
 
 Think how Christ contemned the offer of the 
 kingdoms of the world and the glory of them ! 
 It is no slight matter that we are considering. 
 Men will be lofty or low according to the 
 
 F 2 
 
84 
 
 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 objects to which they direct their souls ; accord- 
 ing to the scale with which they measure their 
 lives. If they think on things pure, and true, 
 and lovely, they will reflect these qualities, even 
 as the angels reflect the glory of God on their 
 many-coloured plumes. But if their ideal be 
 dwarfed and miserable, their lives too will be 
 small and mean. It is impossible to exagge- 
 rate the importance of having worthy ideals. 
 Tell me whom you admire and I will tell you 
 the drift of your character. Show me what 
 }'our ideal is, and I will show you what you 
 yet may be. 
 
 2. You may judge of this by large as well as 
 by small examples. Take in your hands the 
 great book of History, and see how grievously 
 nations have sufl'ered when their multitudes 
 have been misled by false admirations. Such 
 ideals are like the wandering fires which flicker 
 only over the swamps of death. Athens was 
 great while she had such statesmen as an 
 Aristides and Perikles ; the sun of her glory 
 set when an immoral demagogue, like Kleon, 
 became the idol of her mobs. Republican Rome 
 was greats when she was led by a Fabricius or a 
 Scipio ; she sank into abysses of degradation 
 when her youths followed a Clodius or a Catiline. 
 Imperial Rome was never a worse sink of in'- 
 quity than when a Nero was popular, though 
 he soiled the very name of humanity; she was 
 
WHEREWITH TO MEASURE LIFE. 85 
 
 never happier than when, in each honourable 
 home, was seen the noble bust of Marcus 
 Aurelius. Watch the certain degeneracy of 
 nations when they are demoralized by the 
 ignoble brilliancy of a bad success ; when the 
 best leaders are too good for the days in which 
 they live ; when the sensibility of honour is 
 branded as weakness, and unscrupulous reck- 
 lessness regarded as leadership. In what sort 
 of state was Italy when Caesar Borgia mag- 
 netized her admiration ? Did France suffer 
 nothing from the sanctimonious, sanguinary, 
 licentious pomposity of Louis XIV. or the un- 
 blushing depravity of the Regent Orleans ? 
 Was there no difference between the moral 
 nobleness of England when Puritans ruled and 
 Milton sang, and when harlots toyed with the 
 crown of the Confessor and the few faithful men 
 were shocked by the plays of Wycherley and 
 the orgies of Whitehall ? 
 
 3. But perhaps we may be misled if we make 
 our inductions too broad. Look then at sec- 
 tions and phases of society only. Consider 
 how any class of society is degraded when it 
 acquiesces in, much more when it admires, im- 
 moral favourites. How many lives were ship- 
 wrecked, how many souls imperilled in England 
 when the drunkenness, the gambling, the adul- 
 teries of her ruling class were regarded as venial 
 peccadilloes ; when men thought that they had 
 
86 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 covered Wilberforce with ridicule if they called 
 him Saint," and when Pitt was openly sneered 
 at because his life was pure. What becomes of 
 classes to whom a drunken prize-fighter or a 
 ribald slanderer appears a consummate hero ? 
 or to whom such a thing as Beau Brummel 
 seems the summit of gentility ? or who rush to 
 erect statues to a swindling speculator ? Or 
 look again at a Public School. Is its case ever 
 more desperate than when the popular hero 
 among its boys is a boy of debased character 
 and corrupted habits ? If you want to see de- 
 gradation spread with the rapidity of wild fire, 
 rage with the fierceness of an epidemic, observe 
 what takes place in a school or a college when 
 admiration for the Belial grace of some child of 
 the devil confers prominence upon everything 
 which is execrable and impure. 
 
 4. To each of us then individually, and to 
 our nation, and to our Church, it is of supreme 
 importance that we lift our eyes to the galaxy of 
 great examples and reflect the luminous virtue 
 of heavenly ideals. And that is what I mean 
 by measuring life with the measure of a man, 
 that is of an angel. Oh ! if men would only 
 think what it would be, in just and natural retri- 
 bution, to spend an eternity with the wretches 
 in whose steps they have secretly walked ! How 
 will the treacherous dealer, who has dealt trea- 
 cherously with his friend, or his family^ or his 
 
WHEREWITH TO MEASURE LIFE. 
 
 87 
 
 country, like to be welcomed into Gehenna by 
 the face of Judas and to writhe under the traitor's 
 kiss ? How will the unclean like to be con- 
 demned to the companionship of those whom 
 their sins have blighted — to be indissolubly 
 bound to the corpse of dead desires in that 
 darkness where there is weeping and gnashing 
 of teeth ? 
 
 But bad men, when they have become tho- 
 roughly bad, get to hate and curse the silent 
 reproach of great ideals ; and if, like the devil, 
 they stand abashed for one involuntary moment 
 in the presence of virtue, the next moment they 
 are striving to corrupt its stainlessness with 
 temptation, or to stain its memory with lies. 
 When you see bad men, stimulated by party 
 hatred, or steeped in social vice endeavouring to 
 drag honoured names through the mire, there 
 you see the very work of him who is called the 
 Accuser of the brethren. The sole hope of 
 humanity is in its good and holy men. All 
 earth's purest and noblest come and lay garlands 
 at the feet of these statues, but the crowd of the 
 vulgar clamber up the pedestal with no other 
 object than to injure and to deface. 
 
 Hence one of the worst of signs in the present 
 seems to me to be the fondness of men, and 
 above all of the j^oung, to read and dwell on 
 what is ignoble, not what is lofty ; what is 
 petty, not what is great. How can a man have 
 
88 
 
 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 any light or sweetness left in him who delights 
 to feed himself on calumny and falsehood until 
 the devil has drawn down his soul into incurable 
 littleness, as the worm " draws in the withered 
 leaf, and makes it earth ? " 
 
 5. On the other hand, I have hope for youth, I 
 have faith in manhood, when I see men choosing 
 lofty ideals, turning with scorn from all that is 
 frivolous, leaving things base to perish of their 
 own natural corruption, making of their imagina- 
 tions a picture-gallery from which they exclude 
 everything that defileth, claiming their affinity 
 with all things worthy, and measuring their lives 
 with the measure of a man, that is of an angel. 
 Such thoughts produce pure and high-souled 
 men. A great writer tells us how once such a 
 youth came into his rooms, and taking up by 
 chance Andrew Marvell's poem of The Nymph 
 complaining of the Death of her Fawn," read 
 the lines — 
 
 Had it lived loni^, it would have been 
 Lilies without, roses within. 
 
 The young man died, and " I felt," he says, 
 ''that I had entertained an angel visitant. The 
 fawn of Marvell's imagination survives in my 
 memory as the fitting image to recall this beau- 
 tiful youth ; a soul glowing like the rose of 
 morning with enthusiasm, a character white as 
 the lilies in its purity." 
 
WHEREWITH TO MEASURE LIFE. 89 
 
 6. Can one ask, without a sigh, whether it is a 
 common thing for men thus to measure their 
 lives with the measure of a man, that is of an 
 angel ? 
 
 i. The other day a new journal was started, 
 and in the first sentence of its prospectus, I am 
 told, it had the words that " undoubtedly a man's 
 first consideration in life is how to make money/' 
 It was meant quite seriously ; it was not in the 
 least intended as a satire. And to what mul- 
 titudes among us is not the love of money a 
 root of all kinds of evils ? If all were to go 
 home and consider what proportion — shall I say, 
 rather, how insignificant a fraction — of their 
 means they spare for the needs of their Church, 
 the glory of their God, and the good of their 
 fellow-men, I think that they would blush. Ah ! 
 let not our souls sink into Manmion-worship, 
 which is like a sea of pitch, bubbling only with 
 the sighs of those who welter therein. Can you 
 bury that dross with you in your graves } Do 
 you know how soon it will drop from your 
 relaxing grasp t Can you aver chat it gives you 
 any real happiness 1 — But the worshipper of 
 Mammon — by what does he measure his Hfe t Is 
 it not by the measure of the wretchedest spirit 
 that fell ? — not by the measure of a man, that is 
 of an angel. 
 
 ii. Or the man who has by slow degrees 
 slipped into that most hapless, most abject 
 
90 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 thing — a drunkard ; the helpless bondslave of a 
 dead poison, for which he destroys himself by 
 moral and mental suicide ; sinking himself lower 
 and lower into shame and ruin, into penury and 
 rags ; becoming, perhaps, in some drunken orgy, 
 a felon, or even a murderer. Oh, by what 
 measure does such a man measure his Hfe ? It 
 is by the measure of a fiend — not by the measure 
 of a man, that is of an angel. 
 
 iii. Or, again, they who, like natural brute 
 beasts made to be taken and destroyed, cor- 
 rupting themselves in those things which they 
 know naturally, sell themselves to do evil, and 
 to work all uncleanness with greediness ; they 
 who can dare for their own vilest selfishness to 
 poison the b:ood and degrade the morals of the 
 race, making it sometimes better for themselves, 
 better for mankind, if they had not been born — 
 by what measure do they measure life } Is it 
 not with the measure of a beast — not with the 
 measure of a man, that is of an angel t 
 
 iv. Or, once more, the average^ everyday, 
 ordinary man, whom St. Paul calls the carnal 
 or vulgarly selfish man, whose whole life is the 
 common average of compromise ; the Mr. Any- 
 thing, the Mr. Facing-both-ways, who never 
 knew what it was, even as a boy, to be fired 
 with a great thought or to glow with a noble 
 enthusiasm ; who has done nothing for the world 
 beyond consuming its fruits in selfishness, as 
 
WHEREWITH TO MEASURE LIFE. 
 
 91 
 
 though it were only meant to be a feeding- 
 trough — by what measure does he measure Hfe ? 
 Is it not by the measure of a world without 
 souls — not by the measure of a man, that is of 
 the angel ? 
 
 Oh ! let us strive that we may not be like 
 these ! For in one last word, he who would make 
 life what God meant it to be, he who would make 
 the angel's measure a man's measure^ must learn 
 above all things one great divine lesson in two 
 aspects. He must learn respect for humanity ; 
 respect and reverence for human nature in him- 
 self, respect and reverence for it in others. 
 Those subjects are far too large to pursue now 
 at the end of a sermon, but we have learnt the 
 very deepest secret of them when we remember 
 that true human nature is not only angelic but 
 divine ; that Jesus Christ our Lord became 
 man, and so took up the manhood into God. 
 In our faith in the Incarnation lies the very 
 heart and essence of our Christianity. The 
 most awful sanctions of purity, the most living 
 impulses to nobleness, the most powerful stimulus 
 to active service, lie in that. To purity — for know 
 ye not that your bodies are temples of Christ, 
 who dwelleth in you, except ye be reprobates t 
 To nobleness — for He taught us to follow His 
 example and walk in His footsteps ; to loving 
 service — for can there be work more nobly 
 blessed than to live for the good of those souls 
 
92 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 for which Christ died ? Ah ! he who has these 
 aims, he who measures his Hfe by the measuring 
 reed of these high purposes, measures it as 
 angels measure it, and so measures it indeed 
 with the measure of a man, that is of an angel — 
 nay, rather of the King of the Angels. For 
 what are the angels themselves even, in respect 
 of Christ ? What but " sparks from the un- 
 emptiable fountain of his glory;" what but "dew- 
 drops on the head of the bridegroom lost in the 
 splendour of His hair." They may help us ; the 
 thought of them may ennoble us ; their glittering 
 faces may look down upon us from the lucent 
 cloud of witnesses, compassionate and pure. 
 They may be to us as our high-born kinsmen," 
 we may see their waving robes in the flash of 
 the sunlight, we may hear their voices in the 
 music of the wind : but their glory is but an 
 effulgence of Christ's glory ; they are but 
 ministering spirits of that Lord of whom it is 
 written — " And let all the Angels of God worship 
 Him!" 
 
VII. 
 
 Ube ]£50ential6 of IPraycv* 
 
 Then answered they, and said before the King, Tliat Daniel 
 , . maketh his petition three times a day." — Daniel vi. 13. 
 
 HE noble story of Daniel, and how, 
 preferring the peril of death to the 
 abandonment of prayer, " his windows 
 being open in his chamber towards Jerusalem, 
 he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, 
 and prayed and gave thanks before his God as 
 he did aforetime," naturally turns our thoughts 
 to the subject of prayer. But it is, of course, 
 impossible in one sermon to treat comprehen- 
 sively or exhaustively of that great theme ; nor 
 is it at all my wish to do so. The object of 
 this sermon will be what I desire the object of 
 all sermons to be — namely, as simply as I can, to 
 help forward myself and you as we climb the 
 uphilhvard path of the Christian life. For that 
 Christian life no means of grace is so absolutely 
 indispensable as prayer. The soul of man is 
 like a kindled brand ; so long as the air breathes 
 on it, it will retain till the last its genial warmth 
 
94 
 
 EVERY DA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 and crimson glow ; but let the air stagnate 
 around it, and, flake on flake, the white ashes 
 will gather over it, and the fire will die away 
 within it, and under those ashes it will be left 
 black and charred, a cold and useless log. 
 What the breath of wind is on the glowing 
 brand, that prayer is to the soul. Let a man 
 or a woman live a prayerless life, and all the 
 light and the fire and the glow, all the wisdom 
 and generosity and love will die away, because 
 these are the result of spiritual grace alone ; 
 and covered with the dead, white embers of its 
 own selfishness and pride, the soul will soon 
 become cold and dead and hard — a useless thing, 
 half consumed with impenitence and sin. 
 
 Or again (and I entreat you do not regard 
 these as figures of speech, or metaphors, but as 
 the clearest way of bringing before you the 
 deepest realities), the soul of man has been 
 compared to a field. Sometimes over the fields 
 there passes a wind which dries the plants, and 
 then we see their withered stems droop to the 
 earth; but when the dew falls they are refreshed 
 and lift their fading flowers. So there are burn- 
 ing winds — of passion and of avarice, of trial and 
 of temptation — which pass over the souls of men 
 and wither them. Prayer is the dew of God, 
 which falls upon them and restores their Ian- 
 * guishing beauty. 
 
 And since that prayer is of such excellent 
 
THE ESSENTIALS OF PRA YER. 95 
 
 value, let us plainly and simply try to see 
 first, what prayer is ; next, what it may do for 
 us ; and thirdly, what is necessary to make it 
 true prayer, and something more than the dumb 
 moan of the suffering animal, something more 
 than the scream of the hawk or the murmur of 
 the gnat. Something more ? — alas ! is it not too 
 often something less ? — less sincere, with less of 
 meaning in it than the roar of the young lions 
 when they suffer hunger, or the cry of the young 
 ravens in their wind-rocked nest ? 
 
 I. First, then, what is prayer ? Some of you 
 will think at once of the words of that exquisite 
 hymn : — 
 
 Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, 
 
 Uttered, or unexpressed ; 
 The motion of a hidden fire 
 
 That trembles in the breast. 
 
 Prayer is the burthen of a sigh, 
 The falling of a tear, 
 • The upward glancing of the eye 
 When none but God is near. 
 
 Prayer is the simplest form of speech 
 
 That infant lips can try ; 
 Prayer the sublimest strains that reach 
 
 The ^Majesty on high. 
 
 Prayer is the contrite sinner's voice 
 
 Returning from his ways, 
 While angels in their songs rejoice, 
 
 And cry, Behold he prays ! " 
 
96 E VER YD A V CHRIS TJA N LIFE. 
 
 Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, 
 
 The Christian's native air, 
 His watchword at the gates of death, 
 
 He enters heaven with prayer. 
 
 You could not, indeed, think of a better 
 answer than this in general, but you may desire 
 something different and more specific. Prayer, 
 then, according to the definition of many Chris- 
 tian writers, is "a Hfting up of a pure mind unto 
 God, whereby we ask something of Him." But 
 there are various kinds of prayer. " I exhort,^' 
 says St. Paul, "that, first of all, supplications, 
 prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be 
 made for all men.'"' Here there are four kinds 
 of prayer — siLpplications — i.e., special petitions 
 to supply our need, and because of our in- 
 sufficiency ; general prayers — the reverent ado- 
 ration of God, the expression of our entire 
 devotion ; inteixcssions — prayers both for others 
 and for ourselves, urgent, intense, personal soli- 
 citations, poured forth because of our confidence 
 as children towards the heavenly Father of whom 
 we ask ; thanksgivings — showing that we go to 
 God not only because of our hope, but because 
 of our gratitude ; not only from our own self- 
 interest, but from our love. Prayer, then, is 
 something more than the uplifting of a pure soul 
 to God, in which we ask something of Him. It 
 is also a friendly talking with the Lord, from a 
 high and kindled affection. It is the pouring 
 
THE ESSEXTIALS OF PRA YER. 
 
 97 
 
 out of a contrite heart, with a sure persuasion 
 that God will grant our requests. It is a Chris- 
 tianas intercourse with God, his sanctuary in 
 troubles, his remedy for sins, his cure of griefs ; 
 it is an abstract and summary of religion ; it 
 celebrates God's attributes and confesses His 
 glory and reveres His person, and implores His 
 aid and gives thanks for His blessings ; and as 
 regards our own state of mind when we are 
 praying, it is the peace of our spirit, the stillness 
 of our thoughts, the rest of our cares, the calm 
 of our tempest, the issue of a quiet mind, the 
 daughter of charity, and the sister of meekness/' 
 My brethren, let us fully understand this at the 
 outset — true prayer is much more than asking. 
 " It is praise, it is congratulation, it is a colloquy 
 in which the soul engages with the All-wise and 
 the All-holy ; it is a basking in the sunshine, 
 varied by ejaculations of thankfulness to the Sun 
 of Righteousness for His light and His warmth. 
 It is nothing less than the whole spiritual action 
 of the soul turned towards God as its true and 
 adequate object, and in this sense it is clear that, 
 as to much prayer, the question whether it is 
 answered or not (a question which is by sceptics 
 so often and so coarsely urged) can never arise, 
 for the simple reason that no answer is asked 
 for/' For such prayer is, to a very great extent, 
 its own answer. Its blessedness requires no 
 further fruition than itself. In such high hours 
 
 G 
 
98 E VER YD A V CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 
 
 thought dies away into rapture and beatitude. 
 As distinguished from the mere ejaculations 
 of our agony, or cries of our alarm, or reitera- 
 tions of our selfishness, I would define prayer 
 as the reverent intercourse and intense com- 
 munion of the soul of the Christian with his 
 Father in Heaven. 
 
 II. This, then, being what prayer is, do you 
 ask what prayer can do for us ? I answer with- 
 out hesitation. Everything I More than one saint 
 like St. Francis, and Uke Wesley, has left behind 
 him the record that God has never refused him 
 anything for which he seriously prayed. It can 
 gain for us everything ; not, perhaps, everything 
 that we wish — for, like the Israelites of old, we 
 may wish what is very evil for us — but every- 
 thing that we ivaitt. Christ gave no limit to 
 His promise, "Ask and ye shall receive." In 
 the old world prayer subdued kingdoms, it 
 stopped the mouths of lions, it opened and 
 closed the doors of heaven, in the mid fires of 
 the furnace it set the angel of the dew. Do you 
 say that it works no miracles now t I am not so 
 sure of that. If we had but faith enough I be- 
 lieve that we should still remove mountains, still 
 dispel the clouds, still draw the rain from heaven, 
 still raise the sick, still open prisons, still loose 
 the chains of the innocent, still find an ano- 
 dyne for the anguish of the distressed. And are 
 these the only miracles } Are spiritual miracles 
 
THE ESSEXTIALS OF PRA YER. 
 
 99 
 
 nothing ? Is it no miracle b\' pra}'er to do what 
 we can all do — wash away our sins, repel our 
 temptations, quench persecutions, encourage the 
 faint-hearted, lead back the wanderers, feed the 
 poor, raise the fallen, stay the falling, uphold 
 them that stand ? Is it no miracle to make the 
 rich humble and the poor contented ? No mira- 
 cle to touch the hearts of the selfish, and open 
 the purse-strings of the mean ? Are you in 
 sorrow ? Prayer can make your affliction sweet 
 and strengthening. Are you in gladness ? Prayer 
 can add to your joy a celestial perfume. Are 
 you in extreme danger, whether from outward 
 or inward enemies? Prayer can set at your 
 right hand an angel whose touch " could shatter 
 a millstone into smaller dust than the flour it 
 grinds," and whose glance could lay an army 
 low. When St. Felix of Nola was hotly pursued 
 by murderers, he took refuge in a cave, and in- 
 stantly, over the rift of it, the spiders wove their 
 webs, and seeing this, the murderers passed by. 
 Then said the saint, ''Where God is not, a wall 
 is but a spider's w^eb : where God is, a spider^s 
 web is as a wall." W^hat will prayer do for you ? 
 I answer, All that God can do for you. When 
 He bids us pray it is as though He said to u:\ 
 " Ask what I shall give thee." We toil and moil 
 and scrape, and make ourselves anxious about 
 the dust and dross of earth, and all the w^hile 
 God is holding forth to us in vain the crown of 
 
 (; 2 
 
loo EVER YD A V CHRIS TIAN LIFE. 
 
 i m mortality, and the golden keys of the treasuries 
 of heaven ! 
 
 III. But having thus touched briefly on what 
 prayer is, and what it can do for us, let us touch 
 with equal brevity on other points. And here 
 do not think that I shall stop to give you any 
 external or mechanical rules. All our Saviour 
 says is, "Ask," "Seek," "Knock." You can 
 pray as well on Gerizim as in Jerusalem, and in 
 London as on Gerizim, and in a drawing-room or 
 a workshop as on Sinai, and in your own room 
 as in the holiest minster, and by the altar of 
 your own bedsides as on the slopes of Olivet. 
 
 Dost thou wish to pray in a temple } Pray 
 then in thyself, but first be thou a temple of the 
 Lord." It is right — common sense teaches us, 
 common experience teaches us, the example of 
 our Saviour teaches us — that there should be 
 also special times of prayer, and solemn places ; 
 but Scripture teaches us that there is no time 
 improper, and no place unacceptable, be it the 
 subterranean prison, or the sick bed, or the 
 tossing ship, or the whale's belly, or the lion's 
 den. Nor does it teach us that prayer need be 
 long or short. The seven words of the publican, 
 " God, be merciful to me the sinner," gained 
 him the inestimable boon of forgiveness. The 
 nine words of the dying thief, " Jesus, remember 
 me when thou comest in Thy kingdom," flung 
 wide open for him that very day the gates of 
 
THE ESSENTIALS OF PRA YER. loi 
 
 Paradise. Nay, even the voiceless prayer of the 
 ]\Iagdalene, the prayer that lay in dishevelled 
 tresses^ in silent tears, won for her those precious 
 words, " Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace." 
 So that if you ask when, where, and how to 
 pray, I answer with a good archbishop of 
 former days, " When ? always without ceasing. 
 Where ? in all places, especially the house of 
 prayer. How t from the heart, lifting up pure 
 and clean hands, that is to say, in faith and 
 in love. Our prayer feathered with these two 
 wings flieth straight into heaven." 
 
 And if you ask me one question more, and 
 say, " WJiat should we pray for ? " I answer, 
 " Everything which you need." Do you inquire 
 whether you may pray for earthly blessings ? 
 I answer, Certainly you may, both for yourselves 
 and for those w^hom you love. Remember only 
 two things — one, that to ask only or mainly for 
 earthly blessings is a dreadful dwarfing and vul- 
 garization of the grandeur and holiness of 
 prayer, as though you asked for a handful of 
 grass when you might ask for a handful of 
 emeralds ; the other that you must always ask 
 for earthly desires with absolute submission of 
 your own will to God's, lest God should grant 
 you your own bane, and ruin you at your own 
 desire, giving it you, and sending leanness into 
 your bones. Seek first the kingdom of God and 
 His righteousness, and all other things shall be 
 
102 
 
 EVER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 added unto you. That prayer of an unhappy 
 queen, Oh, keep me innocent ; make others 
 great ! " — that prayer of a great saint, Give me, 
 O Lord, a noble heart, which nothing earthly 
 may drag down ! " — that prayer of a sinful yet 
 saintly king, Teach me to do the thing that 
 pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God ; let Thy 
 loving spirit lead me into the land of righteous- 
 ness " — those are amongst the best prayers I 
 know, because they are most in accordance with 
 that prayer which Christ Himself has taught us, 
 which, out of seven petitions, has but one for any 
 earthly blessing, and that only for daily bread, 
 and of which the keynote is, " Our Father, which 
 art in heaven/^ 
 
 IV. But remember, lastly, that prayer will 
 not be heard unless it has certain qualities, 
 without which prayer is not prayer at all. 
 What, then, is necessary to all prayer in order 
 that it may be true prayer ? I can mention 
 but one or two of the main essentials and those 
 but briefly ; and yet sufficiently, if you will test 
 them for yourselves. 
 
 i. The first requisite, then, is faith. A true 
 prayer must be animated by faith ; faith in the 
 God to whom it is addressed ; faith that He will 
 hear, and if it be a right petition will truly 
 answer it. He that cometh to God must believe 
 that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them 
 that diligently seek Him. Christ, when He 
 
THE ESSENTIALS OF PRAYER. 103 
 
 prayed, went up sometimes into a mountain : 
 we, when we pray, must always breathe this 
 mountain air of faith ; we must cUmb up to the 
 rock which is higher than we. We must con- 
 sciously believe and feel that we are passing by 
 prayer into that awful solitude of the soul, which 
 is the very audience-chamber of the Almighty, 
 or our prayer will soon become as meaningless 
 and as mechanical as those which are muttered 
 in the monotone of unknown tongues, or as 
 those of the Tartar, who writes his supplications 
 on the fans of a mill, and thinks that prayer is 
 being offered if the mill be but caused to spin 
 round by wind or wave. 
 
 ii. Then, secondly, our prayers must be uttered 
 in sincerity; they must not be of the lips, but of 
 the heart. The prayer of the wicked, who still 
 in their hearts mean to be Avicked, is sin. There 
 is no preparation for worship like singleness of 
 heart. I will wash mine hands in innocency ; 
 and so will I go to thine altar, O Lord ! " 
 "Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle? 
 Who shall dwell in Thy holy hill ? He that 
 walketh uprightly and v/orketh righteousness, 
 and speaketh the truth in his heart .... He 
 that doeth these things shall never be moved." 
 How can he invite God into his heart whose heart 
 is fu.l of idols which he will not reject } How 
 can God dwell in the same heart with [Mammon ? 
 What communion hath Christ with Be'ial ? How 
 
104 
 
 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 can he pray, " Forgive us our trespasses," whose 
 soul is full of malice, envy, and hate ? How can 
 the drunkard pray, "Lead us not into temptation," 
 who means that very day to go to the public- 
 house ? How can the tradesman pray to be 
 just and honest who has no intention to mend 
 his false balance, or improve his adulterated 
 goods ? Therefore cleanse your hands, ye sin- 
 ners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. 
 Ah, my brethren ! the very worst and deadliest 
 of all hindrances to sincerity of prayer is a 
 bosom sin. It is like an evil spirit seated on 
 the temple-roof, mocking at every hollow utter- 
 ance, and scattering the unhallowed incense 
 with the beating of his wings. Ah no, my 
 brethren ! we cannot be both pardoned and 
 retain the offence. If we pray with a secret 
 determination to continue in sin we pray false 
 prayers, and cannot be heard. It is as if a man 
 prayed to be healed, while shrinking from the 
 necessary pain and the necessary effort of 
 healing, he determined to leave the shaft-head 
 rankling in his wound. Oh ! try to make your 
 prayers sincere! It is said that in Japan there 
 is a prayer called the "Mirror-prayer" — the 
 \vorshipper holds up a mirror or looking-glass, 
 and on beholding his image in it says, "O God, 
 look into my heart as I see my face in this 
 glass." Does it not imply the same thought as 
 David did, when he said, " Try me, oh God^ and 
 
THE ESSENTIALS OF PR A YER. 
 
 seek the ground of my heart ; prove me and 
 examine my thoughts " ? 
 
 iii. Then, thirdly, our prayers must be offered 
 with earnestness. Jacob's prayer was truly 
 called a wrestling with God. It is thus that the 
 kingdom of heaven sufifereth violence, and the 
 violent take it by force. Prayer is as an arrow ; 
 if it be drawn up but a little it goes not far, but 
 if it be pulled up to the head flies strongly, and 
 pierces deep ; if it be but dribbled forth of 
 careless lips it falls down at our foot. The 
 strength of an ejaculation sends it up into 
 heaven and fetches down a blessing. Heartless 
 motions do but teach us to deny ; fervent suits 
 offer violence both to earth and heaven." Will 
 you let our great poet teach you ? Will you 
 remember what the wicked king says in the 
 splendid tragedy 1 — 
 
 My words fly up, my thoughts remain below ; 
 Words without thoughts never to heaven go. 
 
 iv. Again, true prayer must be sustained by 
 persevej'ance. We must pray without ceasing. 
 We ought always to pray, and not to faint. 
 If we pray often we shall pray oftener. How 
 is it (is it not a shame to our Christianity }) 
 that the votaries of false religions are, not 
 rarely, far more frequent and far more fervent 
 in their prayers than we Christians are ? IMore 
 
io6 
 
 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 than once are we told that our blessed Lord 
 prayed all night long, and what He taught us 
 by example He taught also by precept. " The 
 friend, who is at rest with his family, will rise at 
 last to give a loaf to the hungry applicant. 
 The unjust judge yields in the end to the 
 resistless eagerness of the widow's cry. Our 
 Lord's blessing on the Syro-Phcenician woman 
 is the consecration of importunity with God." 
 Let, then, our prayers be " the key that opens 
 the day, and the lock that shuts the night," 
 and also from morning to night our staff and 
 stay in all our labours, enabling us to go cheer- 
 fully up to the mount of God. 
 
 V. And, lastly, prayer in its highest effort 
 should be free from distraction. It requires a 
 holy vacuity " of thought, a " denudation of 
 the mind" from the vanity and the uncleanness 
 of earthly images. And so true prayer requires 
 preparation. "When thou prayest," sa3^s our 
 Saviour, " enter into thy chamber, and when thou 
 hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which 
 is in secret." She who is cumbered with much 
 serving cannot sit duly at her Saviour's feet, nor 
 can they be guests at the King's banquet whose 
 hearts are with their land or their oxen, with 
 their pleasures or in their purse. " Before 
 praying," says the Book of Wisdom, " prepare 
 the heart, and be not as a man who tempts 
 ' God." The soul that tries to soar up to God 
 
THE ESSENTIALS OF PRA YER. 107 
 
 with no attempt to allay the violence of its own 
 passions and the darkness of its own sin, is like 
 that little lark, described in one of the greatest 
 and most eloquent of our divines, rising from 
 his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing 
 as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and 
 chmb above the clouds ; " but the poor bird 
 was beaten back by the loud sighings of an 
 eastern wind, and his motions made irregular 
 and inconstant, descending more at every breath 
 of the tempest than it could recover by the 
 libration and frequent weighing of its wings 
 till the little creature was forced to sit down 
 and pant, and stay till the storm was over, 
 and then it made a prosperous flight, and did 
 ride and sing as if it had learned music and 
 motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes 
 through the air about his ministrations here 
 below." 
 
 Ah, my brethren ! w4ien we think over 
 all this the sad thought rises. Have we ever 
 prayed ? Do we really know what true prayer 
 is — so inspired by faith, so animated by sincerity, 
 so filled, with earnestness, so sustained by per- 
 severance, so free from distractions ? " We have 
 said our prayers," you answer, morning and 
 evening for ever so many years." Yes, my 
 friends, doubtless you have, and perhaps it was 
 some beloved mother who first taught you to 
 fold your hands together, and bow your heads 
 
loS EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 beside her knee. But, ah ! to say our prayers is 
 one thing ; to pray is quite another. It was no 
 languid formula learnt by heart — it was no 
 drowsy and mechanical petition — it was no 
 earthly request for some selfish end — it was no 
 cry of a Baal worshipper on Carmel striving to 
 arouse his idol into impossible animation, that 
 Saul was uttering when the Lord said of him to 
 Ananias, " Arise, and go into the street which is 
 called Straight and inquire for one called Saul of 
 Tarsus, for behold he prayeth." No, but it was 
 an impassioned pouring forth of all the heart ; it 
 was an awful wrestling of the soul with God ; it 
 was the resistless cry of determined agony, " I 
 will not let thee go except thou bless me." Ah ! 
 if there were more prayer there would be less 
 sin, for it has been truly said that either sinning 
 makes us leave off praying, or praying would 
 make us leave off all wilful sinning. My 
 brethen ! young and old, rich and poor, Pharisee 
 or Publican, will you now make this sermon what 
 God means it to be, a direct and immediate 
 message to your soul by doing one thing, 
 namely, by pra\'ing — not saying yoiw prayei's, 
 but praying — really praying to God, praying, 
 perhaps, for the first time in your lives, one 
 real prayer, for yourselves, for me, for this 
 land, for all mankind } If you cannot get 
 farther, will you pray for yourselves, for your 
 own souls Will you wrestle with God for 
 
THE ESSENTIALS OF PRA YER. 
 
 peace and purity, for pardon and change of 
 heart ? 
 
 Oh Thou by whom we come to God, 
 
 The life, the truth, the way, 
 The path of prayer Thyself hath trod, 
 
 Lord, teach us how to pray ! 
 
VIII. 
 
 TLbc Sanctiti^ of pnnciple, 
 
 "A perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God.' 
 Job ii. 3. 
 
 MID the minutiae of controversial theo- 
 logy ; amid the multiplication of cere- 
 monies, rites, and forms ; amid the 
 ceaseless elaboration of systems ; amid the 
 ambitious self-assertion of parties, their intrigues, 
 their jealousies, their struggles, their ignoble 
 warfare — it is most desirable that not only 
 those of us who are weary of all this wordy 
 strife, but that all of us alike should constantly 
 look back to the simplest and most primary 
 elements of the revealed will of God. That is 
 what I shall try to do this afternoon. I 
 shall not indeed ask you to rest there. The 
 experience of mankind proves sufficiently that 
 something more is needed. But since we, as 
 Christians, do through God's mercy presumably 
 possess that something more, even for us it 
 may prove a searching test, and a blessed 
 stimulus, to cast a backward glance at the 
 
THE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE. 
 
 Ill 
 
 fundamental truths of religious life. ^lan is no 
 angel ; he cannot soar to the blue sky or storm 
 heaven with angels' wings. Slowly and toilfully, 
 and step by step, must he mount, as on a ladder, 
 above his earthly and sensual tendencies^ and 
 never can he venture to scorn the low degrees 
 by which he did ascend. Now the lowest step 
 of the religious life is obedience to the moral 
 law, and our time can never be lost w^ien we 
 are gazing at large duties based upon infinite, 
 eternal sanctions. The plain Ten Command- 
 ments are to our Christian life as the primitive 
 granite on which the world is built. 
 
 2. The moral law! Perhaps, like the young 
 ruler, you think that quite too elementary, and 
 some may be inclined to say, ''All these things 
 have I kept from my youth." Well, I do not 
 think so. We look round us on the so-called 
 religious and the so-called irreligious world, on 
 what calls itself the Church and on what is called 
 the World. And we do see indeed a true Church 
 — an Ecclesiola in Ecclesia — a Church drawn 
 from all denominations — Romanists, Protes- 
 tants, Anglicans, Dissenters — a Church composed 
 of none but the good and the sincere, who, 
 because they are meek, gentle, humble, devout, 
 loving, are all of one religion, and who (as 
 William Penn said) shall all meet and know 
 each other in heaven when the various masks 
 and liveries which now hide them from each 
 
112 EVER YD A V CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 
 
 other have been stripped away. But what we 
 see in general is the great mass of man- 
 kind, Hving faithfully indeed to this or that 
 requirement of the moral law, but each ignoring 
 it, despising it, trampling on it, thinking that 
 they will escape its penalties in some one par- 
 ticular direction of besetting sin : and when we 
 consider the lives of those who specially regard 
 themselves as the Church — of men who hold 
 themselves to be religious persons — we con- 
 stantly observe how they weaken the moral law 
 in theory, and show themselves indifferent to 
 it in practice. They lay much greater stress on 
 outward observances and on orthodox belief. But 
 externalism and orthodoxy, both together, are 
 lighter than vanity itself, if they are dissociated 
 from moral rectitude. A man may be as tech- 
 nically orthodox as Torquemada, as rubrically 
 scrupulous as Charles V., and yet may deserve 
 the condemnation of men and the most heavy 
 wrath of God. They who profess to belong to 
 the religious world would not indeed murder, 
 or commit adultery, or steal ; but they too 
 often forget that there are other things in the 
 Ten Commandments besides these. He who 
 keepeth the whole law," says St. James, with 
 profound insight, "and yet offendeth in one 
 point is guilty of all." Why.? Because he 
 breaks the principle of obedience ; because he 
 ' violates the majesty of law as law. Most of us 
 
'I HE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE. 113 
 
 belong, I suppose^ nominally to the religious 
 world. Ought it never startle us to observe 
 that some of the most overwhelming denuncia- 
 tions of the Saviour and of His Apostles are 
 aimed at the religious world ? that Jesus told 
 the Pharisees that the publicans and harlots 
 were being more freely admitted into His king- 
 dom than they ? The members of the religious 
 world do not often commit flagrant crimes ; 
 but have they never so much as read in the 
 Commandments : " Thou shalt not bear false 
 witness against thy neighbour " ? and do they 
 never break that Commandment ? Have they 
 ever noticed that Christ and His Apostles 
 again and again place Charity " at the very 
 summit of all the virtues, and sum up the whole 
 law in love ? And do they not constantly dis- 
 play that spirit of hatred which brands their 
 Christianity as essentially anti-Christian, and 
 their gospel of love as the bad spell of hate ? 
 When they do this let them be warned that the 
 man who strives to be faithful to the moral law, 
 be he even a heathen or a heretic, may be 
 nearer to the kingdom of God than they. The 
 Pharisees were conspicuous for orthodoxy and 
 scrupulosity, and yet Christ^s words to them 
 were charged with eternal lightnings. The 
 Good Samaritan was a heretic, and yet Christ 
 chose him as a type of the noblest self-denial : 
 not (observe) not because scrupulous obser- 
 
 H 
 
114 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 varices are a sin, or because heresy is not an 
 evil, but because holy living is transcendently 
 dearer to God and more necessary for man than 
 theoretic orthodoxy and outward conformities. 
 
 By their fruits ye shall know them/' St. 
 Jerome and others have dared to alter that 
 verse into **By their doctrines ye shall know 
 them." It is a disgraceful perversion of the 
 words of Christ. He that doeth the will shall 
 know of the doctrine. He that does but repeat 
 the formulae of the doctrine, were he even to 
 compose the whole siLimna theologiae may still 
 be in the gall of bitterness and the bond of 
 iniquity. I think then that, alike for religious 
 and for irreligious men, it is most necessary to 
 turn our thoughts often to what is called "mere 
 morality." The will of God towards us is our 
 santification — that is, that we should Hve holy 
 lives — that is, that we should obey His law. 
 Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord, 
 and who shall stand in His holy place t The 
 man who most insists on rigid practices and 
 anathematizing creeds } No, but "he that hath 
 clean hands and a pure heart, that hath not lift 
 up his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive 
 his neighbour." O man, what doth the Lord 
 require of thee 1 To be able to repeat correctly 
 the innumerable propositions of dogmatic 
 theology } To build seven altars, and offer on 
 every altar a bullock and a ram } Nay, but to 
 
THE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE, 1 1 5 
 
 do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly with thy God ! We hear much of 
 whole burnt offerings and sacrifices, or what in 
 modern times correspond to them, but we see 
 very little of loving God with all the heart and 
 our neighbour as ourselves. And therefore it 
 needs to be proclaimed more loudly than ever 
 in these days, I will have mercy, and not 
 sacrifice ! " " Behold, obedience is better than 
 sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of lambs." 
 
 I spake not unto your fathers as concerning 
 sacrifice; but this I said unto them, ' Obey my 
 voice.' 
 
 3. Obey my voice ! Look back to Eden. 
 What was God's revealed will to our first 
 parents } This — that they should not eat of 
 the forbidden fruit. Look back to Noah. What 
 was the dispensation to him } A prohibition of 
 bloodshed. Look back to Moses, the mighty 
 lawgiver. Was not his whole system based on 
 and centred in " Thou shalt " and Thou shalt 
 not " Did not the cherubim guard with their 
 golden wings, in the holy darkness, the tablets 
 — alas ! the shattered tablets — of his moral 
 law 1 Look back to all the Prophets. Is not 
 the one burden of them all from Samuel to the 
 Exile, I hate, I abhor your feast-days, but 
 let judgment run down as waters and righteous- 
 ness as a mighty stream" } Look back to the 
 Apostles. Is not their most incessant lesson 
 
 H 2 
 
ii6 
 
 EVERY DA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 that men should walk soberly, righteously, and 
 godly in this present world ? Look to Him 
 Who is the truth, and in Whom alone is no error, 
 and when the multitudes were gathered dense 
 around Him, and He opened His mouth and 
 taught them, saying — what did He say ? Not 
 one word about orthodoxy, not one word about 
 ceremonies, but, " Blessed are the meek, and 
 the merciful, and the pure in heart." 
 
 And yet with strange perverseness, alike in 
 their religion as in their irreligion, men set aside, 
 and have constantly set aside, the plainest 
 teachings of this moral law. In theory theo- 
 logians and Jesuits have often taught that men 
 may do evil that good may come ; and in 
 practice Popes and priests have not only sanc- 
 tioned despotic tyrannies, and immoral institu- 
 tions, and exterminating wars — but have given 
 licence to murder, and to trickery, and to false- 
 hood, and have again and again adopted 
 methods untruthful, unjust, and unscrupulous, 
 if they did but further their party ends. The 
 sum and substance of the moral law, as Christ 
 set it forth, is truth and love ; and the sum and 
 substance of the religious life, as the religious 
 world sets it forth, has very often been nothing 
 less than pure delusion and bitter hate. 
 
 The simple fact is that only the fewest men — 
 only the truest and purest and loftiest of the 
 saints of God — are, in the highest sense, men of 
 
THE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE. 117 
 
 principle. Principle is derived from a Latin 
 word, and means properly a beginning ; it is the 
 absolute major premiss of a practical syllogism ; 
 an universal, exceptionless affirmation that we 
 ought to do, or not to do, some thing or some 
 kind of thing. And " a man of principle " is a 
 man who is guided by this conception, not only 
 as the main but as the sole spring of all his 
 actions, and whom therefore you can absolutely 
 trust. Now many men, even who call them- 
 selves religious, are not men of principle. They 
 are Jesuitical ; they are time serving ; they are 
 double-tongued; they are not to be trusted: 
 The magnet of their compass has been tam- 
 pered with, has been deflected by alien in- 
 fluences. Truth is a part of God's eternal law ; 
 yet there are subjects respecting which the 
 smallest temptation will make them swerv^e from 
 the truth. They will easily and frequently be 
 surprised by fear into manslaughter upon the 
 truth. They will suppress one whole side of the 
 truth to serve a purpose. They believe in truth 
 generally ; but they think it quite excusable to 
 lie for God. Society perverts them into what it 
 calls white lies. Self-interest will make them 
 give a wrong return for their income-tax, or 
 habitually use the false conventional phrase, or 
 understate their real means that they may make 
 an excuse for the niggardliness of their charities. 
 Honesty again is a part of God's moral law. Yet 
 
1 1 8 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 one man, even if he seem to be religious, will put 
 money to uses for which it was never meant ; 
 or will raise money on trust deeds, half deceiv- 
 ing himself with the intention to put it back ; 
 or will plunge into the idiotic folly of betting 
 and gambling, till his delicate honesty is gone ; or 
 will adopt dishonest professional tricks in making 
 his fortune ; or will defraud others of their just 
 dues ; or, making haste to be rich, will flood 
 the country with lying advertisements ; or will 
 speculate on the Stock Exchange ; or will foster 
 bubble-companies, heedless of the ruin and 
 misery which they cause. Such men may be 
 deemed respectable men ; they may even pass 
 for religious men ; but they are not men of 
 principle : they have never learned to estimate 
 aright the eternal grandeur of the moral law. 
 
 4. A man of principle is one of the noblest 
 works of God. You might trust him amid poverty 
 with untold wealth, and he would not touch it. 
 If he has told you anything you may rely on it 
 absolutely and totally, knowing that it is said 
 with no subterfuges or second intentions. It 
 may be said of such a man as of the ancient 
 Fabricius, that it would be as easy to turn the sun 
 from its course as to turn him from the path of 
 duty. He is not "pale in virtue and faintly dyed 
 in integrity;" the colours of his soul will last, for 
 they are crimson in the grain. His faith in the 
 moral law is absolute. He has accepted it in 
 
THE SA NCTIT V OF PRINCIPLE. 1 1 9 
 
 the abstract, and will not pare it down by- 
 exceptions and compromises as though it were 
 to be valued sometimes indeed, but not always ; 
 or up to a certain point, but not beyond. He 
 scorns the lamentable trick of reopening ne- 
 gotiations with the subtle spirits of moral 
 casuistr)'. If he comes to the parting of two 
 roads, and one deflects ever so little from the 
 straight course, though that road be bright and 
 pleasant, and the other fraught with misery 
 and peril, yet he will keep to the straight 
 uphill path. The fear of hostile influences will 
 not terrif}^ h'm, nor the love of popularity make 
 him swerve. Surrounded by the world's oppo- 
 sition, fat bulls of Bashan encompassing him on 
 every side, the butt of slander, subjected in all 
 he says and does to the strongest glare of malig- 
 nity — still if his Church lies, if his nation lies, 
 if the world lies, he will teli them that they lie, 
 and will set his back against a rock, and face 
 them, and, if need be, perish. Yes ! because he 
 believes that, though he may perish, truth is 
 as ''invulnerable as the sunbeam," and no stab 
 can kill the soul. Like John the Baptist, 
 such a man will denounce the crimes of kings ; 
 like Athanasius, he will withstand the faithless- 
 ness of religions; like John Wesley, he will 
 face the obloquy of Churches ; yea, and he will 
 act thus though these things only seem to lead 
 on earth to absolute and final failure. Shall we 
 
120 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 ask the poets, who are often more of prophets 
 than our preachers, to describe to us such a 
 man ? Here then is one : — 
 
 Who M'iih a toward, or untoward lot, 
 Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not, 
 Plays, in the many games of life, that one 
 Where what he most doth value must be won ; 
 Whom neither shape of danger can dismay, 
 Nor thought of tender liappiness betray. 
 This is the Happy Warrior ; this is he 
 That every man-at-arms should wish to be. 
 
 And here another: — 
 
 He's a slave who would not be 
 In the right with two or three. 
 He's a slave who would not choose 
 Hatred, slander, and abuse, 
 Rather than in silence shrink 
 From the truth he needs must think. 
 
 And here one more : — 
 
 Take thou no thought for ought but truth and right, 
 Content, if such thy fate, to die obscure ; 
 Wealth palls, and honours ; fame may not endure 
 And loftier souls soon weary of delight ; 
 Keep innocence ; be all a true man ought ; 
 T.et neither pleasures tempt, nor pains appal ; 
 Who hath this, he hath all things having nought, 
 Who hath it not hath nothing having all. 
 
 5. Now is there any one in this congregation 
 so ignorant as to think that such characters have 
 nothing to do with reh'gion } I say that this 
 moral integrity is reh'gion ; this is principle ; 
 this is conduct ; this is the highest result of faith. 
 
THE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE. 
 
 121 
 
 To live thus is to have our will in accordance 
 with the Divine will ; it is to be crowned and 
 mitred kings and priests over ourselves; it is the 
 absolute adoption of the dictates of the Divine 
 Mind by the individual soul ; it is the result of 
 the will swaying the reason, and love swaying 
 the will ; it is unity with God. The man of 
 principle has learnt the sacredness, the eternity, 
 the awful axiomatic necessity of law. With 
 Sophocles, he recognizes its eternity — that it 
 had its birth neither to-day, nor yesterday, but 
 lives for ever, and no man knoweth whence it 
 appeared ; that it was born in the empyreal air, 
 and the mortal race of men did not beget it, nor 
 .shall oblivion lull it into sleep. He says of law, 
 with Hooker, that ''her home is the bosom of 
 God, her voice the harmony of the world ; " and 
 with Kant, that ''grander even than the starry 
 heaven above is the moral law within." He 
 knows further that God has consigned the 
 guardianship of the moral law to Duty and Con- 
 science, and into the hands of those strong angels 
 he places his right hand and his left hand to guide 
 him along the straight path of life. They fill 
 his soul with the sanctity of immeasurable obli- 
 gations. Offering him no delight, promising him 
 no earthly reward, enjoining submission and de- 
 manding reverence, yet never deigning the use 
 of force, Duty holds up before him the naked 
 rule, before which all his inclinations are dumb. 
 
122 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 and he uplifts his eyes to her until the coun- 
 tenance of this stern angel begins to wear the 
 most benignant grace of Godhead. And Con- 
 science enforces all the requirements to which 
 Duty points. Conscience, the blushing spirit 
 which mutinies within the offender's breast 
 when he does wrong — Conscience, " the abo- 
 riginal vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informa- 
 tion, a priest in its sanctions, a monarch in its 
 peremptoriness." And so highly does the true 
 man reverence these guardians of his life, that 
 he would face fire and torture rather than face 
 the anguish of self-reproach which comes upon 
 him when he has deserved their frown. 
 
 And what can any man better follow than 
 the guidance of Law, Duty, Conscience, these 
 cherubim of God } Have not their few simple 
 utterances every sanction which they can pos- 
 sibly receive from heaven above, and from the 
 earth beneath, and from the waters under the 
 earth ? He who lives thus, in real not in con- 
 ventional obedience to the moral law, is in 
 accordance with the whole teaching of Scripture, 
 of which the very essence is " Keep innocency, 
 and do the thing which is right, for that shall 
 bring man peace at the last ; " and in accor- 
 dance with the whole teaching of Christ, which 
 is, ''If ye love Me, keep My commandments." 
 
 Could there then be a higher outcome of the 
 education of life than that man should learn to 
 
THE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE. 123 
 
 give perfect unquestioning obedience to the de- 
 mands of Love, Honesty, Purity, Truthfulness, 
 thus made manifest as .the will of God ? But I 
 would conclude with two most necessary cau- 
 tions. The one is, Let none of you suppose 
 for a moment that it needs no more than the 
 appeal to reason and to honour to secure obedi- 
 ence to this moral law. This, as all history 
 proves, is a fatal error. The Gospel itself is the 
 answer to that error, for the Gospel is God^s 
 remedy for man's universal failure to keep His 
 commandments. The necessity for the death of 
 Christ lay in this, that all men had sinned and 
 come short of the glory of God. You cannot 
 get rid of revelation. You cannot replace God. 
 Neither philosophy, nor literature, nor civiliza- 
 tion, nor anything else can provide you with 
 any substitute for that forgiveness which is the 
 sole work of Christ, and that sanctification 
 which cometh only of His spirit. Honour ! Will 
 that save you from vice and sin t Try it amid 
 the great interests, the great passions, the great 
 fears of life, and you will find it no better 
 defence than a reed shaking in the wind. You 
 might as well substitute an earthborn meteor 
 for the sun, an earthborn cloud for the blue of 
 heaven. For the human race in general, 
 morality, apart from religion, is a non-reality ; it 
 is the shadow of a dream. Look at Greece, 
 look at Rome — so civilized, so splendid in art, so 
 
124 
 
 EVERY DA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 rich in intellect ; then look at the orgies of sen- 
 suality which swallowed up their glory and 
 grandeur as in the slime pits of Gomorrah ! 
 Look at the atheism of the Renaissance in the 
 fifteenth century, before the Reformation had 
 begun, and then read the unanimous testimony 
 to the abysses of its moral corruption, and the 
 obliteration of virtue which followed the boast 
 of its godless illuminism. Look at the wit 
 and learning of the eighteenth century, the period 
 of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, in France, 
 and see how it ended in the Carmagnole and the 
 Guillotine, and the worship of a harlot on the 
 polluted altars of Notre Dame. Nay, look at 
 France in this day. When she emerged from 
 the burning fiery furnace of the Franco-German 
 War, after the catastrophe of Sedan and the 
 conflagration of Paris, men like Renan and 
 Alexandre Dumas fils proclaimed in clear tones 
 that her collapse was due to the moral failure 
 bred of atheism. But now once more we have 
 heard her statesmen ridicule in their speeches 
 the very existence of a God ; we have seen the 
 name of God expelled from her schools and 
 erased from her statute book ; and with what 
 results ? A society honeycombed with vice ; a 
 literature reeking with impurity ; a nation which 
 alone in all Europe is stationary in numbers! 
 And in one of his very latest writings we find 
 the high priest of her culture, the consummate 
 
THE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE. 125 
 
 master of her style, the foremost 6f her scholars_, 
 he who wrote the Vie de Jesus," openly arguing 
 such detestable and nation- destroying theses as 
 that Nature is indifferent to chastity, that 
 drunkenness is possibly commendable, and that 
 frivolous persons are perhaps in the right. Ay 
 so ! When the God of Sinai is forgotten it is 
 never long before men begin to dance before 
 the gilded calf, and to proclaim, These be thy 
 Gods, O Israel, that brought thee out of the land 
 of Egypt." 
 
 6. There are many youths among my hearers, 
 and to each and all of them I say that they 
 cannot see the face of God unless they keep 
 their bodies in temperance, soberness, and 
 chastity ; and they cannot keep their bodies in 
 temperance, soberness, and chastity save by 
 striving ever for fellowship with God in Christ. 
 It is not the grandeur of the moral law alone 
 which can help you, unless through the cloud 
 and flame of Sinai you can see the face of 
 Christ. Only when you do this can you utter 
 with Joseph, when faced with sudden tempta- 
 tion, the eternal protest of innocence and faith- 
 ful youth. Beware of sa}^ing that you have not 
 made up your mind. He who has not made 
 up his mind to be on the side of purity and 
 righteousness, has made up his mind to be on 
 the side of vice and sin. Once, in 1750, 25,000 
 French soldiers were encamped at Klosterkamp, 
 
126 
 
 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 and a young officer, the Chevalier d'Assis, 
 advanced alone into a wood to reconnoitre. He 
 was instantly surrounded by an ambush of the 
 enemy, and, while the bayonets pricked his 
 breast, a stern voice whispered in his ear, " Make 
 but the least noise, and you are a dead man." 
 Without one second's hesitation the young man 
 shouted at the top of his voice, " A moi, Au- 
 vergne ! The enemy are here ! " Instantly he 
 fell, pierced with a score of bayonet- points. He 
 fell, but the French army was saved from the 
 surprise. You see that, with that brave youth, 
 military duty had become a habit and an in- 
 stinct, to be instantly obeyed even on pain of 
 death. And so, if you would be safe, must it 
 be with you. With you too, as soldiers of Christ, 
 the love of God must be an unerring light. Be- 
 fore it is too late faith must pass into purpose, 
 and purpose into a dogged determined resolution. 
 In God's army there can be no neutrals ; in the 
 borders of God's kingdom there are no debat- 
 able grounds. Lands of which the ownership 
 is in the least uncertain belong to the Evil One. 
 He that allows himself to dally with any 
 vice does nothing in reality but entertain an 
 evil demon. This is what Elijah meant, " How 
 long halt ye between two opinions } If the 
 Lord be God, follow Him ; but if Baal, then 
 follow Him." This is what St. Paul meant, 
 when he asked, "What fellowship hath right- 
 
THE SANCTITY OF PRINCIPLE. 127 
 
 eousness with unrighteousness ? and what com- 
 munion hath Hght with darkness ? And what 
 concord hath Christ with BeHal ? " This is 
 what Christ meant, ''No man can serve two 
 masters." It is only when a man seeks God, 
 and loves Him with all his hearty and strives 
 consciously and earnestly to walk in the steps 
 of his Saviour Christ — it is then only that he 
 really begins to apprehend the full grandeur 
 of the moral law — then only that he becomes 
 " a perfect man, and an upright, one that feareth 
 God and escheweth evil." 
 
IX. 
 
 Ubc ipossibilit^ of (3oobnes6 an^ tbe 
 Bpmple of tbe Saints* 
 
 " Called to be saints." — i Cor. i. 2. 
 
 INCE the seventh century one day of the 
 year has been dedicated to the memory 
 of All Saints, and in many religious 
 communities, since the tenth century, another 
 day is set apart for the commemoration of All 
 Souls. This latter day has been dropped from 
 our calendar only because it was mixed up with 
 Romish views about purgatory and masses for 
 the dead. Otherwise a day devoted to medita- 
 tion on A// Souls — in the strictest sense of the 
 word — in connection with a day of All Saints, 
 suggests thoughts as solemn, and, I trust, as 
 profitable as almost any which could be pre- 
 sented to human contemplation. 
 
 I. The great procession of mankind in its 
 unnumbered millions is ever sweeping across the 
 narrow stage of life, issuing from a darkness in 
 which they are not, passing into a darkness in 
 
THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS. 129 
 
 which they are no more seen. We watch that 
 procession as it winds through the long cen- 
 turies of history, and we note its most striking 
 figures. Some are Kings, who built pyramids 
 and subdued nations, and held absolute sway 
 over the destinies of their fellow-men ; some are 
 Poets '-'with their garlands and singing robes 
 about them ; " some are great Discoverers, who 
 enlarged the powers of man over the forces of 
 Nature ; some are great Philosophers, who 
 widened the limits of human thought. Here, at 
 the central spot of the life of a great people, we 
 are surrounded on all sides by the tombs and 
 cenotaphs of such famous men as these ; but it is 
 not of such as these that the great procession is 
 mainly composed. The vast masses of it, like 
 the vast masses here gathered to-day, consist of 
 a nameless throng — the poor, the ordinary, the 
 average, the undistinguished; men whose little 
 lives gleamed for a moment out of the eternities 
 and disappeared ; men who lie in earth's millions 
 of nameless graves — the meaning, and even the 
 bare fact of their existence as much obliterated 
 from all human memory and from every human 
 record as though it had been a speck of foam on 
 the immeasurable sea. 
 
 To our eyes mankind is mainly divided into 
 the eminent and the obscure ; the known and 
 the unknown; the great and the small; the 
 rulers and the ruled ; the learned and the igno- 
 
 I 
 
1 30 E VER YD A V CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 
 
 rant ; and it is to the latter classes — those whom 
 the world call the unimportant, the insignificant — 
 that the great multitude of every generation 
 have always belonged. Savage and civilized, in 
 every age, in every region, the immense majority 
 of men — some with lives that came to nothing, 
 some with deeds as well undone " — have vanished 
 like a bubble, have " sunk as lead in the mighty 
 waters." After a year or two they are forgotten 
 in the grave for evermore. " There the wicked 
 cease from troubling, and there the weary be at 
 rest ; there the prisoners are at ease, they hear 
 not the driver's voice. The small and great are 
 there, and the servant is free from his master." 
 
 2. But to the eye of God — to the eyes it may 
 be of all good and evil spirits — the aspect of 
 that procession is very different. To them the 
 inch-high differences of human rank have no 
 existence. For them the thistles of human 
 loftiness have no elevation, and the mole- 
 hills cast no shadow. They, as they gaze on 
 this marvellous procession of human life, know 
 only the difference between the good and the 
 evil; between those who fear God and those 
 who reject Him ; between those who love and 
 those who only hate and injure their neighbours ; 
 between the holy and the unholy ; the forgiven 
 and the impenitent ; the saved and the unsaved 
 souls. 
 
 3. In the fine gradations of human character 
 
THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS. 131 
 
 and the complex motives of human action^ it is 
 only in certain marked instances that we can 
 make any such broad distinctions. We can see 
 that some men have dared to be eminently 
 good, and that other men have been conspicu- 
 ously and infamously bad. But most men's 
 lives and characters wear in our eyes a very 
 mixed aspect. They show interchanging ele- 
 ments of good and evil, which run together 
 like warp and woof in the varying web. We 
 see human sin and weakness even in the good ; 
 we see here and there a gleam of sainthness 
 even in the unsaintly. Only the balances of 
 God are perfect. He alone, putting the just 
 weights in the even scales, can pronounce on 
 the whole life of most men that they " did that 
 which was good," or "did that which was evil," 
 in the sight of the Lord. But though we can 
 never pronounce judgment on the future of any 
 man, we cannot help seeing that many have 
 been, according to all human estimate, bad 
 men and bad women, and that some few have 
 been the saints of God. 
 
 4. Bad men and bad women — we think of 
 them with pain and shrinking sorrow ; we think 
 that for mankind, at any rate, it had been better 
 if they had never been. All those who have 
 lived only to gratify the mean and sensual 
 egotism of a hungry, shivering self; all those 
 whose lifelong example has deepened man's 
 
 I 2 
 
 I 
 
132 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 feverish thirst for gold ; all those who have 
 heaped up for themselves riches as for a day of 
 slaughter by oppression, robbery, or wrong ; all 
 who by the unlawful indulgence of their lowest 
 passions have contributed to poison the life- 
 blood of mankind ; all whose words or writings 
 have infected the stream of life with the leprous 
 distilment of polluted thoughts ; all those who 
 by the shameful perversion of art and literature 
 have corrupted and inflamed the disease of 
 morbid imaginations ; all who have helped to 
 degrade life from its sweet and serious sanctity 
 into vulgarism and frivolity ; all who have been 
 the greedy and cruel disseminators of gossip, 
 slander, and lies; all whose example has rendered 
 the actions of men viler, and their thoughts more 
 trivial ; all who have striven to hand on and 
 to perpetuate evil traditions ; all who have 
 flourished by the causes of human misery and 
 ruin ; all who have delighted to hate, envy, 
 revile, or depreciate their fellow-men; all the 
 idle cumberers of the ground whose root has 
 been as rottenness and their blossom gone up as 
 dust ; all whose god is their belly, whose glory 
 is in their shame, who mind earthly things — the 
 world may give them fortunes, or coronets, or 
 loud applause, but these are bad men and bad 
 women. And if all mankind had been as these 
 have been and are ; if there had been no salt of 
 the earth amid its corruption, no twinkling 
 
THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS. 133 
 
 stars amid its midnight ; if, like the seething of 
 the grape-bundles in the uncleansed wine-vat, 
 earth had been nothing but a ferment of man's 
 vileness, vanity, and lust ; if there had been none 
 on earth but those four classes whom God most 
 hates — mockers, liars, hypocrites, and slanderers 
 — then, indeed, earth had been an anticipated 
 hell. " Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and 
 whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and 
 whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." 
 
 5. But, oh, with what unspeakable relief do 
 we turn from these works of darkness, and them 
 who delight therein, to the saints of God ! In 
 them is the healing of the world. 
 
 Do not think of the mere title "saints." 
 That is at the best an imperfect and precarious 
 title. It has been given to some, at least, of the 
 unworthy, and denied to many of the worthy. 
 On All Souls' Day we may think not only of all 
 whom the Church has called ''saints," but also 
 of the long line of the heroes of faith in olden 
 times ; of the patriarchs — Enoch the blameles?, 
 Noah the faithful, Abraham the friend of God ; 
 of the sweet and meditative Isaac, the afflicted 
 and wrestling Jacob. We may think of Moses, 
 the meekest of men ; of brave Judges; of glorious 
 Prophets ; of patriot Warriors; of toiling Apostles; 
 of the many Martyrs who would die rather than 
 lie. We may think of the Hermits who, from 
 the guilt and turmoil of life, fled into the soli- 
 
134 
 
 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 tude of the wilderness ; of the Missionaries — 
 St. Paul, St. Columban,St. Benedict, St. Boniface, 
 St. Francis Xavier, Schwartz, Eliot, Henry 
 Martyn, Coleridge Patteson ; of Reformers who 
 cleared the world of lies like Savonarola, Huss, 
 Luther, Zwingli, Wesley, Whitfield ; of wise 
 rulers like Alfred, and St. Louis, and Washing- 
 ton, and Lincoln ; of the writers of holy books 
 like Thomas a Kempis, and Baxter, and Bunyan, 
 and Jeremy Taylor ; of the slayers of monstrous 
 abuses like Howard and Wllberforce ; of good 
 bishops like Hugo of Avalon, and Fenelon, and 
 Berkeley ; of good pastors like Oberlin and 
 Fletcher of Madeley, and Adolphe Monod, and 
 Felix Nefif; of all true poets, whether sweet and 
 holy like George Herbert, and Cowper, and 
 Keble, and Longfellow, or grand and mighty 
 like Dante and Milton. These are but a few of 
 the many names of those who have reflected the 
 glory of their Master, Christ ; and who walk 
 with Him in white robes, for they are worthy. 
 My brethren, if you would comfort your hearts, 
 if you would strengthen your good resolutions, 
 if you would retain that high estimate of human 
 nature which so often threatens to succumb 
 when we look at the sickening exhibitions of 
 moral revolt and disorder on every side of us, 
 most earnestly would I urge you in an age like 
 this to make yourselves acquainted with Christian 
 history and Christian biography, as an antidote 
 
THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS. 135 
 
 to the degeneracy of these worldly and evil days. 
 From earth's mire and darkness lift up your eyes 
 to this starry path of great examples. When 
 evil, and baseness, and triviality are being thrust 
 upon us on all sides ; when men take it for a 
 sign of genius to sneer and to depreciate — amid 
 all this fuss, and chatter, and hurry — amid 
 reams of frivolous fiction, humiliating chatter, 
 and unprofitable controversy, have we no time 
 to think of things eternal 1 — have we no desire 
 to possess our souls in peace and nobleness ? — 
 have we no need of something to keep alive our 
 faith in the dignity of man ? 
 
 6. I, for one, find that ennobling element of 
 thought in dwelling on the life and sufferings of 
 Christ, and next in considering the blessed 
 example of those who have followed Him bear- 
 ing each his own cross. Let me point out two 
 of the many ways in which it seems to me that 
 this contemplation of these, our worthier and 
 nobler brothers in the great family of Christ, 
 may be most blessed and useful to us. 
 
 (i.) In laying down the laws of observation, 
 the great philosopher of the Novum Organum 
 describes what he calls "the prerogative of 
 instances," and among them he speaks of 
 instances which he calls ostensivcs or ehtcescentes^ 
 instances which show any quality in its purest 
 exaltation, in its fullest vigour. Now the saints 
 of God furnish us with just such instantice elu- 
 
1 36 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 cescentes of pure and possible human goodness. 
 They show us how, through faith in Christ, and 
 by the Spirit of Christ, and because of prayer 
 to God through Christ, men weak as we 
 are, tempted as we are, yet did gloriously and 
 conspicuously triumph over sin, the world, the 
 flesh, and the devil, and thereby proved to us 
 that we can do the same. They refute the 
 excuse of our feebleness ; they cut away the lie 
 of our inability. 
 
 (ii.) It needs, for instance, but a short experi- 
 ence of life to see that the mass of men are 
 greedy and selfish. Self is the all but universal 
 idol — is for millions the sole law of existence. 
 Men jostle each other, and struggle in the press 
 and trample savagely on fallen rivals, and show 
 the brutal spectacle of that perverted life which 
 lives and dies only for itself. And yet it is pos- 
 sible for men to become — and thousands of men 
 have become — perfectly, beautifully unselfish, 
 caring honestly for the happiness of others more 
 than for their own. St. Macarius the hermit 
 lived in the desert m a little community of soli- 
 taries. One day there was brought to him that 
 which in the hot desert is the most tempting and 
 exquisite of all luxuries, a bunch of fresh purple 
 grapes with the bloom and mist of their deli- 
 cious ripeness upon them. Macarius hated the 
 thought of taking them himself; he preferred 
 that another should enjoy the boon, and handed 
 
THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS. 137 
 
 it to one of the brothers ; but the same motive 
 was strong in him, and he gave it to another. 
 But, again, this other preferred the enjoyment of 
 a companion to his own ; and so, in the absolute 
 unselfishness of that little community, the un- 
 touched, tempting grapes were handed from 
 one to another, none wishing to keep what 
 would be pleasant to his fellow, till at last they 
 were handed back to Macarius again. Unselfish- 
 ness, you see, had become as completely the 
 law of that little brotherhood as selfishness is 
 the law of the common world. Oh, how in- 
 finitely lovelier is the spectacle presented by 
 these saints of God and their love for one 
 another, and their wish that others should be 
 blessed, than is daily presented in this hard, 
 mean, modern world ! 
 
 (iii.) Again, we need not look far to see the 
 Pride of men. It is so common that it seems 
 to be as strong in the poorest and meanest as in 
 the great. We see it, and its weak satellites, 
 conceit and vanity, in the look of men ; it is 
 shown in their gait ; we hear it in their very 
 accents. And never was the tendency stronger 
 than now to be self-assertive ; to be vain ; to 
 say to every one else, ^' I am just as good as 
 you ; " to resent with fierce bitterness the notion 
 that " They call this man as good as me." Pride 
 is the one Protean spirit, which takes many 
 forms in envy, hatred, backbiting, spurious 
 
1 38 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 liberty, false independence. And yet it is quite 
 possible even for man, proud man, to become 
 resigned, humble, submissive, meek ; not to seek 
 great things for himself; to take the lowest 
 place ; to think others better than himself. St. 
 Thomas of Aquino was by far the greatest man 
 of his age, of noble birth, of ancient lineage, of 
 hne appearance, the most consummate theo- 
 logian, supreme in learning and goodness, the 
 friend of Popes and Kings. In position he was 
 but a humble monk. One day at Bologna, a 
 stranger arriving asked the Prior for some one to 
 help him to get provisions and carry his basket. 
 " Tell the lirst brother you meet," said the Prior. 
 St. Thomas was walking in meditation in the 
 cloister, and, not knowing him, the stranger said, 
 " Your Prior bids you to follow me." Without a 
 word the great teacher — the Angel of the Schools, 
 as he was called by the affection of his admirers 
 — bowed his head, took the basket, and followed. 
 But he was suffering from lameness, and since he 
 was unable to keep up, the stranger rated him 
 soundly as a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow, who 
 ou2;ht to show more zeal in religious obedience. 
 The saint meekly bore the unjust reproaches, 
 and answered never a word. "Do you know 
 whom you are speaking to and treating in this 
 rude way ? " said the indignant citizens who wit- 
 nessed the scene. " That is Brother Thomas of 
 Aquino." " Brother Thomas of Aquino ! " said 
 
THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS. 
 
 139 
 
 the stranger in amazement ; and immediately 
 throwing himself on his knees, he begged to be 
 forgiven. " Nay," said St. Thomas^ " it is I 
 who should ask forgiveness, since I have not 
 been so active as 1 should have been." And 
 this humility, so rare in little men, was the chief 
 characteristic of this truly great man. Once, 
 when reading aloud in his monastery, the Prior 
 thought that he had made a false quantity, and 
 corrected him ; he instantly altered the word. 
 
 Why did you not tell him that you were right } " 
 asked the monks afterwards. " The quantity of 
 the word was of no consequence," he answered 
 
 but it was of consequence that I should be 
 obedient." Once again when he was addressing 
 a vast congregation in one of the chief churches 
 of Paris, an insolent intruder beckoned to him to 
 stop, and aimed at him an abusive harangue. 
 The saint waited till he had ended, and then, 
 without one v/ord of anger or resentment, calmly 
 continued his discourse. From that disciplined 
 and noble heart all pride had been expelled. 
 " Give me, O Lord," such was his daily prayer 
 — " Give me, O Lord, a noble heart which no 
 earthly affection can drag down ! " 
 
 7. I might give other instances no less decisive 
 of the attainment of other virtues by weak 
 mortal men. I might show, for instance, how 
 the saints of God have attained a perfect purity, 
 or a perfect contempt for all worldly ends ; but 
 
140 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 let me rather point a second great lesson. If it 
 be an infinitely better and greater thing to be a 
 Christian than to be a King ; if the poorest 
 Lazarus who ever lay at a rich man's gate may 
 be nobler and happier than the most gorgeous 
 Dives, then how far higher must it be than every 
 human distinction to be a saint of God ! Yet, if 
 every other avenue be closed to us, this highest 
 of all ambitions is open to the humblest of us 
 all. And what a true end and aim in life is this ! 
 If at any time we be inclined to despair amid 
 the waves of misfortune and the malice of our 
 fellow-men ; if weary of injustice and discourage- 
 ment we sometimes feel almost driven to say 
 with Elijah, "And now, O Lord, take away my 
 life, for I am not better than my fathers ! " is 
 there no comfort in the thought that God is not 
 unjust and contemptuous like man ? Our earthly 
 misery or lowliness ; the poverty of our intel- 
 lectual gifts ; our failing efforts ; our waning 
 powers ; our many feeblenesses and imperfec- 
 tions, so they be not stained with wilful sin, do 
 not make us any lower in the sight of God. In 
 spite of all such things, we may have attained 
 by His grace the highest and best that life has 
 to offer. Even the Church has given her title of 
 " saint," not only to great Popes Hke St. Leo or 
 St. Gregory, and Kings like the Confessor and 
 St. Louis, but to some of the very humblest of 
 the low. Can you imagine a lowlier lot than 
 
THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS. 141 
 
 that of a servant-of-all-\vork ? Yet such, and no 
 more, was Santa Zita. At the age of twelve she 
 left her little mountain village to become a 
 servant to a family in Lucca, and in that poor 
 service she continued till, at the age of sixty, 
 she died. Often reviled, often beaten, often 
 forced to hard menial duties, without one mur- 
 mur she served in singleness of heart, and out of 
 her poverty she fed the hungry and clothed the 
 naked with a garment. And yet even in such a 
 lot men saw her happiness, and her sainthood ; 
 and thirty years after her death Dante, the 
 greatest of poets, speaks of a burgher of Zita's 
 proud and warlike city of Lucca simply as one 
 of Santa Zita's elders.''' The warriors, the 
 bishops, the nobles are designated only as 
 fellow-citizens with the servant-of-all-work. 
 What more would we have, my brethren, if even 
 through so deep a valley of humiliation there 
 still lies the path to heaven } Let us set our 
 affection on things above, not on things on the 
 earth ; for, you see, a life spent in brushing 
 clothes, and washing crockery, and sweeping 
 floors — a life which the proud of earth would 
 have- treated as the dust under their feet ; a life 
 spent at the clerk's desk ; a life spent in the 
 narrow shop ; a life spent in the labourer's hut, 
 may yet be a life so ennobled by God's loving 
 mercy that for the sake of it a King might gladly 
 yield his crown. 
 
142 E VER YDA Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 8. And, in conclusion, thank God there have 
 been and are in the earth tens of thousands 
 holy and faithful, and therefore essentially 
 happy and full of inward peace, like that poor 
 servant-girl. " After this I beheld, and lo ! a 
 great multitude which no man could number, 
 of all nations, and kindred, and people, and 
 tongues, stood before the throne, arrayed with 
 white robes and palms in their hands." Oh ! 
 when in a moment you hear those words, set 
 to the mighty music of the anthem, will you 
 not think of their solemn and glorious meaning } 
 
 Will you be of that great innumerable mul- 
 titude of the redeemed ? Amid the great pro- 
 cession of humanity will you make up your 
 minds that you will be poor or rich, low or 
 high, successful or unsuccessful, belauded or re- 
 viled as God shall please ; but that you will not 
 be of the bad men and bad women, who by 
 mean passions, and vile lusts, and bitter hatred, 
 and lying words have made the world worse, 
 and all life darker for their fellowship } If not 
 now, when ? Ah ! seek even now the grace of 
 God's Holy Spirit, that you may leave the base- 
 ness of the malicious, the greed of the worldly, 
 the shame of the unclean, and be blessed for 
 evermore ! 
 
X. 
 
 cbe :Bible. 
 
 " Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable." 
 2 Tim, iii. i6. 
 
 HOSE to whom it is my duty to speak 
 about sacred things know my constant 
 desire to illustrate the truths of God 
 from ever>^ aspect of the life and work of men. 
 The fact that I do so is not accidental. It is 
 my fundamental conviction that God, revealing 
 Himself in many parts and in many ways, 
 desires that we should not confine our thoughts 
 to any one of those fragments or sources of His 
 teaching. His wnsdom is a TroXu-otKjXoc ao^ia — 
 a richly diversified wisdom. It makes a vast 
 difference whether we regard God as a Being 
 infinitely distant from us, as a Being who has 
 spoken to us once in Scripture and speaks no 
 more, or whether we think of Him as speaking 
 to us always and in many voices. He has made 
 of one all nations, that they should seek God, 
 if haply they might feel after Him and find 
 Him, though He be not far from each one of us ; 
 
144 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 as certain even of the heathen poets said, For 
 we are also His offspring." 
 
 I. My purpose, then, is to speak to you at 
 different times of some of the great diverse 
 sources of revelation ; to treat of the Bible^ and of 
 Nature, and of Poetry, and of Art, and of His- 
 tory, and of Experience, and of the Conscience, 
 as the eternal teachers of mankind, and thus to 
 show from how many sources we may learn 
 God's will, and how unanimous as well as how 
 solemn are the lessons which they set forth. 
 For inspiration is a continuous energy of the 
 present, not a mere exhausted and isolated 
 spasm of the past. Pentecost was not a single 
 outpouring. There are many Pentecosts. The 
 Holy Ghost was not given once, or once only. 
 He is constantly descending into all holy hearts. 
 Our God is no sun that once shone and now 
 has set ; no, but He is always in the meridian. 
 He is 
 
 No ebbing tide that left 
 Strewn with dead miracles those eldest shores 
 For men to dry, and dryly lecture on, 
 Himself henceforth incapable of flood. 
 
 No ; but our God is a living God, and our Christ 
 a living Christ, and the Holy Spirit is with us. 
 Yea, except we be reprobates. He is in us now 
 and for evermore. 
 
 I place the Bible first because it must ever 
 continue to be of the supremest importance to 
 
THE BIBLE. 145 
 
 the race of man. It contains the record of God's 
 special revelations to one chosen people^ and of 
 that final, all-inclusive revelation wherein He 
 hath spoken to us by His Son. The Bible is 
 not by any means His only revelation, but it 
 contains the words spoken by Him who was 
 the Word of Life, and also the clearest, directest 
 lessons which He has ever spoken to man through 
 the mind and utterance of his brother man. Take 
 but one illustration of its unique supremacy. 
 After all these thousands of years of the world's 
 existence, after all the splendours of literature 
 in all nations and in all ages, there is no book 
 in the whole world which can supersede it as an 
 instrument for the education of the young. 
 After all these millenniums it remains the most 
 uniquely glorious book in all the world. Alone 
 of all books it is circulated in hundreds of 
 millions of copies in every tongue. " Its eclipse 
 would be the return of chaos, its extinction the 
 epitaph of history." " Its light is like the body 
 of heaven in its clearness, its vastness like the 
 bosom of the sea, its variety like scenes of 
 nature." The testimony on this subject, of a man 
 like Professor Huxley, a leader of modern 
 science, will not be suspected. "I have been 
 seriously perplexed to know," he says, " how the 
 religious feeling which is the essential base of 
 conduct can be kept up without the use of the 
 Bible. The pagan moralists lack life and colour, 
 
 K 
 
146 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 and even the noble Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, is 
 too high and refined for an ordinary child. For 
 three centuries this book has been woven into 
 the life of all that is best and noblest in English 
 history. It forbids the veriest hind, who never 
 left his village, to be ignorant of the existence of 
 other countries and other civilizations, and of a 
 great past stretching back to the farthest limits 
 of the oldest nations in the world. By the study 
 of what other book could children be so much 
 humanized and made to feel that each figure in 
 that vast historical procession fills, like them- 
 selves, but a momentary interspace in the 
 interval between two eternities, and earns the 
 blessings or the curses of all time according to 
 its efforts to do good and hate evil, even as they 
 also are earning the payment for their work } " 
 
 2. Unhappily, however, in age after age, the 
 Bible has been liable to such boundless misin- 
 terpretations that it is not possible or honourable 
 to speak of it as the most blessed among the 
 teachers of mankind without admitting, as St. 
 Peter did eighteen hundred years ago, that it is 
 liable to terrible abuse. Century after century 
 men, misled by their religious teachers, have 
 failed to see what the Bible is. They have made 
 a fetish of it, and under plea of its sacredness 
 have taken advantage of its many-sidedness to 
 get rid of its most essential teaching. They 
 have made it like the faiiieani monarchs, who 
 
THE BIBLE. 
 
 147 
 
 were surrounded with splendid state imd almost 
 divine reverence, while care was taken that their 
 real voice should be never heard and their real 
 wishes never known. It would require volumes 
 to tell how^ the Bible has been wounded in the 
 house of its friends ; how men have set up 
 claims for it which it never makes for itself; 
 how false the principles on which it has been 
 judged ; how gross the arbitrariness with 
 which it has been misinterpreted ; how inso- 
 lent the usurpation with which it has been 
 monopolized ; how it has been loaded with 
 preposterous glosses and locked up in ahen 
 tongues. Popes tried to keep it for their exclu- 
 sive interpretation. The English priesthood 
 made it crime to possess, and death to read, 
 the Enghsh version of Wycliff. Bishop Tunstall, 
 of Durham, bought up and burnt the copies of 
 Tyndale's version. Thousands were slain and 
 tortured for trying to learn from it in the Albi- 
 gensian crusades, and thousands more in the 
 dark days of Alva and Philip. Lfen have used 
 it as an excuse to hate, to curse, to burn, to hunt 
 down each other. They have torn it into shreds, 
 and turned each shred into the fluttering ignoble 
 rag of some party pennon. They have dis- 
 located its phrases and built false theologies on 
 the perversion of its texts. Even in the second 
 century St. Irenaeus compared the reasonings 
 drawn from the Bible to ropes of sand, and the 
 
148 
 
 EVERY DA y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 systems framed from it to mosaics of a dog or 
 fox made b}' breaking up the fragments of the 
 mosaic of a king. Starting from the false 
 assumption that the Bible was verbally dictated 
 and homogeneously supernatural, men have 
 used this or that narrative, this or that sentence 
 of it, to found systems utterly alien from its 
 general purport, and to defend atrocities entirely 
 abhorrent to the noblest spirit which it inculcates. 
 Through the narrow wicket of a text they have 
 let in the crimes and tyrannies which were 
 meant to be excluded by every wall and buttress 
 of its general structure. There is scarcely one 
 single form of theological heresy, or of political 
 outrage, or of social wrong, which has not 
 pleaded Scripture in its defence. Christ de- 
 nounced with burning indignation the whole 
 system of Pharisaism, yet Pharisaism pretended 
 to base itself on texts. The immense usurpa- 
 tions of the mediaeval papacy were built, like 
 an inverted pyramid, on the needlepoint of one 
 perverted text. The odious ruthlessness of 
 Calvinism, which turned God into Moloch and 
 man into mere fuel for endless flames, pro- 
 claimed itself as the only logical inference from 
 Scripture texts. The slaveholder defended by 
 texts his hateful interests ; the Mormon defends 
 by texts his detestable polygamy ; the English 
 clergy defended by texts their slavish tenet of 
 passive obedience ; the Romish priests defended 
 
THE BIBLE. 
 
 149 
 
 by texts alike the despotism of one tyrant and 
 the dagger-thrust of the assassin by which 
 another fell. Nor were the Puritans any wiser. 
 Preaching before Parliament in 1646, I believe 
 in St. Margaret's Church, Stephen Marshall 
 said, "He is a cursed man that withholds his 
 hand from the shedding of blood, or who shall 
 do as Saul did, slay some and save some," 
 instead of slaying all. The Inquisition lit its 
 fires, and turned its racks, and plied its thumb- 
 screws on the authority of texts. Texts have 
 been used to crush freedom in her cradle, and to 
 strangle science at her birth. Because the 
 Scriptures are a most precious gift of God, the 
 devil has taken special pains to turn them into 
 a most potent instrument of evil. Disguising 
 himself as an angel of light, he has persuaded 
 men to make Scripture an idol. Now God will 
 have no idols, not even if they be sacred things. 
 Our greatest poet has told us that " The devil 
 can quote Scripture for his purpose." And all 
 this horrible abuse of God^s precious gift has 
 sprung from the false dogma that inspiration 
 supersedes the ordinary limitations of human 
 imperfection, and that every word and letter 
 of Scripture is supernaturally dictated by God. 
 It is time, it is high time, it is of infinite im- 
 portance to the whole future of Christianity — 
 it will be but a tardy reparation to the insulted 
 majesty of truth — that this lying for God, this 
 
ISO EVERYDA Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 degrading and ruinous idolatory of the letter, 
 should be for ever swept aside. The errors 
 which have been built upon it, the cruelties 
 which have been perpetrated in its name, are a 
 record which, more than any other, angels — 
 
 Blush to record, and weep to give it in. 
 
 3. And as these false views of an unscriptural 
 bibliolatry must be repudiated, so must plain 
 facts of a divine history be constantly borne in 
 mind, (i.) One is that the Bible is not a single 
 book, but, as Edmund Burke said, " an infinite 
 variety of the most venerable and most multifari- 
 ous literature.'" It is not one book, but sixty-six 
 books, of which some are separated from others 
 by a space of fifteen hundred years. It is not 
 one homogeneous utterance, but a series of frag- 
 mentary and manifold utterances, by writers of 
 very different degrees of goodness and enlighten- 
 ment. Some of it is History written at unknown 
 epochs by unknown writers. Some of it is 
 Poetry, varying from the wailing cry of the 
 penitent to the triumphant war-song and the 
 glowing epithalamium. Some of it enshrines 
 the shrewd experiences of mundane wisdom and 
 the eager speculations of dawning philosophy. 
 Some of it is Prophecy — that is, for the most 
 part, impassioned moral preaching, the denun- 
 ciation of national sins, the threat of doom to 
 guilty cities, and above all, the ever-brightening 
 
THE BIBLE. 
 
 promise of the great deliverance and the Great 
 Deliverer to come. These are the thirty-nine 
 books of the Old Testament. And then, after 
 an interspace of four hundred silent years, you 
 have the twenty-seven books of the New Testa- 
 ment — viz., four Gospels, one narrative, twenty- 
 one letters, and one Apocalypse, the writings of 
 Apostles and Evangelists, which are the final 
 and essential part of revelation, because they 
 record for ever the words and work of our 
 Saviour Christ, and of those whom He sent forth 
 to be His witnesses to all mankind. 
 
 (ii.) And this naturally involves the second 
 fact that the Bible is by no means all upon 
 the same level of moral and spiritual value. 
 The morality of the Old Testament is not only 
 elevated by, but in many respects corrected and 
 superseded by, the morality of the Xew. The 
 Elijah spirit is not the Christ spirit. Some 
 things were permitted by Moses, not because 
 they were either divine, or perfect, or good, or in 
 themselves right, but because the Jews were 
 stiffnecked and immature. They consisted of 
 statutes which of themselves were not good and 
 judgments by which they should not live. The 
 New Testament is to the Old as sunlight to 
 moonlight, as substance to shadow, as that 
 which is eternal to that which waxeth old and 
 passeth away. 
 
 4. It is the neglect of this last truth that has 
 
152 E VER YD A V CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 
 
 been a main source of peril and mischief. Let 
 one instance suffice. When Rene, Duchess of 
 Ferrara, daughter of Louis XII., wrote to Calvin 
 that we were not to follow David's example in 
 hating our enemies, Calvin curtly and peremp- 
 torily wrote back to her that such a gloss would 
 upset the whole Bible ; — ^just as if Christ had 
 never said the very contrary ! Herein the great 
 Reformer showed himself more ignorant than 
 the humble minister in " Old Mortality." " By 
 what law can you justify the atrocity you would 
 commit } " asks Henry Morton of Balfour of 
 Burley. " If thou art ignorant of it," replied 
 Burley, thy companion is well aware of the 
 law which gave the men of Jericho to the sword 
 of Joshua^ the son of Nun." But w^e," answered 
 the divine, live under a better dispensation, 
 which instructeth us to return good for evil, and 
 to pray for them who despitefully use us and 
 persecute us." 
 
 5. The roots and fibres of errors like those on 
 which I have touched are so intertangled in the 
 network of modern religionism, with a thousand 
 other forms of the misuse of Scripture, and with 
 deep ignorance respecting its real nature, that 
 these warnings have become most necessary. 
 The Infidel and the Secularist find their chief 
 allies in the bigoted blindness in which, even in 
 this nineteenth century, the timidity of religious 
 teachers suffers the mass of Christians to remain. 
 
THE BIBLE. 
 
 153 
 
 Nay, our modern sceptics are themselves led 
 into terrible perplexity by their own ignorance 
 of what all the most competent teachers really 
 hold. Suffice it now to say that the essential 
 Bible to us is not everything which we find in 
 the four corners of the sixty-six books which we 
 bind up in one volume and call the Bible, but it 
 is the message of God to ourselves, which every 
 heart and conscience may find in the whole tenor 
 of its truest and noblest teachings. The Word 
 of God contained in Scripture becomes self- 
 luminous when it has been once illuminated by 
 the teaching of Christ Himself. Young men, 
 when the Infidel makes micrry over this or that 
 story, or impugns this or that sentiment of the 
 Old Testament, if you do not know what is the 
 proper and easy answer to give him, tell him so ; 
 but tell him at the same time that you will con- 
 sult those who do. And meanwhile you may 
 most safely assure him that by such criticisms 
 he is no more shaking the foundation of Christ- 
 ianity or diminishing the awful verity of religion 
 than he would be shaking Westminster Abbey 
 if he took out a loosened stone from one of its 
 pinnacles, or pointed to an outworn epitaph 
 upon its floor. 
 
 6. But, having eliminated these mistaken views 
 we may dwell without stint on the priceless value 
 of Scripture as a whole, of Scripture in its best 
 and final teaching, to the heart of man. It con- 
 
154 
 
 EVERY DA Y CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 tains in germ nine-tenths of all that is best and 
 noblest in the literature of two millenniums of 
 Christianity. Warriors have fought for it, and 
 martyrs bled. The Talmud and the Koran, 
 nay, even the Books of the Buddhists have but 
 stolen its brightest gems. It exercised the toil 
 of Origen and Jerome, and fired the eloquence 
 of Chrysostom and Augustine. It dilated the 
 supreme and immortal songs of Dante and of 
 Milton. It woke the intrepid genius of Luther, 
 and the burning zeal of Whitefield, and the hal- 
 lowed fancy of Bunyan. It inspired the pictures 
 of Fra Angelico and Raphael, and the music of 
 Handel and Mozart. "There is scarcely any 
 noble part of knowledge," says Hooker, " worthy 
 of the mind of man but from Scripture it may 
 have some direction and light." The hundred 
 best books, the hundred best pictures, the hun- 
 dred best pieces of music are all in it. " The 
 literature of Greece/' says Theodore Parker, 
 '* which goes up like incense from that land of 
 temples, has not half the influence of this book 
 of a despised nation. The sun never sets upon 
 its gleaming page." " What a book ! " exclaimed 
 the sceptic Heine, after a day spent in the un- 
 wonted task of reading it. " Vast and wide as 
 the world, rooted in the abysses of creation^ and 
 towering up beyond the blue secrets of heaven ! 
 Sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfilment, birth 
 . and death; the whole drama of humanity, all 
 
THE BIBLE. 
 
 155 
 
 are in this book." In this book," said Ewald, 
 picking up a New Testament which had fallen 
 to the ground when Dean Stanley visited him 
 " is all the wisdom of the world." 
 
 7. Or test it by the immeasurable comfort 
 and blessing which it, and it alone, has brought, 
 and evermore can bring, to men. Millions have 
 loved it passionately who have cared for no 
 other literature, and it has led them through life 
 as with an archangel's hand. " Into Thy hands 
 I commend my spirit." Augustine, John Huss, 
 Jerome of Prague, St. Bernard, Luther, Melanc- 
 thon, Columbus, Francis Xavier — and I wonder 
 how many thousands more — have died with 
 those words upon their lips ! " That book, sir," 
 said Andrew Jackson, President of the United 
 States, pointing to the Bible, when he lay on his 
 death-bed, " that book is the rock on which our 
 Republic rests." 
 
 I have only one book now," said the poet 
 Collins, " but that is the best." " Bring me the 
 book," said Sir Walter Scott to Lockhart on his 
 death-bed. "What book.?" asked Lockhart. 
 " The Book— the Bible," said Sir Walter, " there 
 is only one." Every shallow and ignorant Free- 
 thinker fancies that he can demolish the Bible. 
 He might as well try to demolish the Himalayas. 
 The greatest men have esteemed it most. 
 
 Infidels try to deride the Bible because (they 
 say) it contradicts science. Now I have quoted 
 
156 
 
 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 the testimony of the most eminent living man of 
 science, and I will quote one of the illustrious 
 dead. Once when Faraday was ill his arm was 
 resting on a table upon which lay an open book. 
 " I fear you are worse," said Dr. Latham. It 
 is not that," said Faraday with a sob, " but why 
 will people go astray when they have this blessed 
 book to guide them ! " 
 
 And its words speak to the ear and to the 
 heart as no other music will, even after wild and 
 sinful lives. Though I walk through the valley 
 of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for 
 Thou art with me, Thy rod, and Thy staff, they 
 comfort me ; " those words were repeated by his 
 physician to Daniel Webster on his death-bed ; 
 and the great man faltered out, " That is what I 
 want ; Tny rod — Thy rod, Thy staff- — Thy staff." 
 They were the last words he spoke. 
 
 8. I would then urge you all to a constant 
 and reverent — but at the same time a wise and 
 spiritual — study of this sacred book. " If we be 
 ignorant," say the translators of 1611, the 
 Scriptures will instruct us ; if out of the way, 
 they will bring us home ; if out of order, they 
 will reform us ; if in heaviness, comfort us ; if 
 dull, quicken us ; if cold, inflame us. Tollc lege; 
 Tolle lege!' But the Bible is not a charm or an 
 amulet, that it should do this of itself The 
 blessings which it can bestow depend on your- 
 selves and on the grace of God which you seek 
 
THE BIBLE. 
 
 157 
 
 in prayer. Read as a scoffer, read as a 
 Pharisee, and it will be useless to you. Read it 
 rightly, and it will indeed be a light unto your 
 feet and a lamp unto your path. Read it teach- 
 ably, read it devotionally. The knowledge of 
 Scripture " is a science not of the intellect, but 
 of the heart." Read it above all as Christ 
 taught us to read it : not by entangling your- 
 selves in the controversial and the dubious, but 
 by going to the very heart of its central signifi- 
 cance. Have you no Reason to guide you, no 
 Conscience lighted by 'God and lighting to God ?' 
 Have you no Spirit of Christ to teach you that 
 you must read its lessons — not conceitedly, not 
 with self-satisfaction, not through the lurid mists 
 of some anathematising theology, not with the 
 blind and furious eyes of party suspicion or fac- 
 tious hate — but into "the soul's vernacular" and 
 with the eyes of love ? Treat it as a heap of 
 missiles to be hurled at your neighbour and his 
 opinions, and there will be no end to your follies 
 and errors. You will but distort it, as so many 
 have done, to your own perdition. Read it in 
 humility and in love, and then no Urim which 
 the High-priest wore has ever gleamed with 
 such lessons as it will reveal to you. However 
 much.it be mingled with mysteries which we are 
 not required to unravel, and difficulties which 
 we are not able to solve, ''it contains plain 
 teaching for men of every rank of soul and state 
 
158 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 in life, which, so far as they honestly and impli- 
 citly obey, they will be happy and innocent to 
 the utmost powers of their nature, and capable 
 of victory over all adversities, whether of temp- 
 tation or of pain."* 
 
 * This Sermon is of course only a fragment. It was only 
 meant to clear the way for many others on separate books of 
 Holy Writ. 
 
XI. 
 
 ITcmptation* 
 
 Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation." 
 INIatt. xxvi, 41. 
 
 E spoke, last Sunday, of principle ; the 
 sanctity of it ; its foundation in the 
 moral law ; the rarity of men of prin- 
 ciple in the highest sense even among religious 
 men. Now surely, to any who think at all, it 
 should be the most tremendous problem of our 
 life that God has revealed His will, and that 
 man lives in all but universal disobedience to 
 that will. None of us can pretend that it is for 
 lack of plain teaching. It is not possible even 
 to conceive how God could have made more 
 clear to us than He has done that the eternal 
 laws of right-living are Worship, Obedience, 
 Love, Honesty, Purity, Truth, Contentment. He 
 teaches us by every one of His Bibles that such 
 is His will. He so teaches us in Scripture, from 
 the first page of Genesis — " In the day that thou 
 eatest thereof thou shalt surely die " — to the last 
 of Revelation — " Without are dogs, and sorcerers, 
 
i6o EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, 
 and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." He 
 teaches us in Nature. Nature says : I make no 
 exceptions. I admit no compromises. I know 
 forgiveness of sins. If my word is disobeyed, 
 my blow falls." He teaches us by Experience. 
 Experience points, with her lean and palsied 
 finger, to the earth wrinkled with the graves of 
 the innumerable dead who have never lived- 
 He teaches us by the Living Voice of Christ. 
 Christ says, quite unmistakably, " If thou wilt 
 enter into life, keep the commandments." Nay> 
 even the enemy of souls himself bears witness to 
 the sanctity of moral laws. When men would 
 fain cast the blame of their vileness on him, 
 he says "Ask your own consciences honestly 
 whether I have ever deceived you ; whether I 
 have ever tried to make you believe that a bad 
 action was a good one. It is you who uphold 
 the kingdom of darkness, which else would 
 tumble down. The sin and the vice are your 
 own choice. You give life to them, and they 
 are your death. I do not deceive. I tempt." 
 
 I. But yet, though God has written His will 
 in sunbeams and in flame, has uttered it in 
 thunder and in music, we have the awful fact, 
 that sin is universal. Some men are indeed 
 incomparably viler, and more villanous than 
 others, but all have sinned and come short of 
 the glory of God. As race after race passes 
 
TEMPTATION, i6i 
 
 across the stage of history, we see their favourite 
 sins, whether of avarice, or lust, or blood. As 
 man after man makes his brief passage between 
 the two eternities, we see the traces, or read the 
 story of his vices or failings. Men differ, as I 
 have said, in all degrees : some sin habitually ; 
 others fall but rarely, and only under sudden 
 overwhelming temptation. Some sin continu- 
 ously from the cradle to the grave, and repent 
 not; others have sinned indeed, but they are 
 washed, but they are justified, but they are 
 sanctified. I do not need to prove this. It is 
 enough to appeal to your own consciences, to 
 your own experience. Look back over the 
 faultful past of your life — back to the days of 
 your happy childhood. Remember your first 
 conscious act of sin ; the first time you took sin 
 consciously by the hand ; think how infinitely 
 better it had been for you had you gained that 
 battle. Trace all the consequences of that first 
 time that you did violence to the majesty of 
 God^s Law ; of that beginning of sin which is as 
 the letting out of water, and of which the 
 stream so rapidly became, first ankle-deep, then 
 knee-deep, then to the waist, then waters to 
 swim in, waters that could not be passed over. 
 Think of all that, at this moment, you might 
 have been ; of all that you are not ; of all that 
 you are. How was it that you individually 
 dashed yourself against that wall of adamant ? 
 
 L 
 
1 62 E VER YD A V CHRIST I A N LIFE. 
 
 How was it that you, too, braved that eternal 
 inexorable penalty ? Yes ! You have more 
 or less met the awful problem in your own life 
 — have you never seen it working in the lives 
 of others ? Some of you are parents. Has no 
 father here watched, with aching heart, the 
 departure of his prodigal into the far country, or 
 seen him sitting in rags among the swine ? Has 
 no woman here had to echo the passionate cry 
 of Lemuel's mother " What my son ? and what 
 the son of my womb ? and what the son of my 
 vows ? " You trained them well — have none of 
 them proved false to the guide of their youth 
 and the covenant of their God? The sons of 
 the sweet Psalmist of Israel were Amnon and 
 Absalom. The sons of Eli were Hophni and 
 Phinehas. Well, how is all this ^ What is the 
 explanation of the tremendous problem — that 
 God's will is holiness and man's life is sin ? 
 
 2. The whole explanation lies in one word of 
 mystery ; in one word of terrible omen for the 
 human race — Temptation. Temptation indeed 
 is not sin. We all must be tempted ; but not one 
 of us need yield to temptation. Life is of its 
 very nature and necessity a moral warfare. To 
 shirk it is impossible. It is a vain resistance 
 to God's will to try to fence any soul from 
 ever incurring it. Sooner or later, whether 
 we are prepared or unprepared, " the tempting 
 opportunity meets the susceptible disposition/' 
 
TEMPTATION. 
 
 163 
 
 and no child of man wholly escapes the fatal 
 influence. One only who wore earth about Him 
 has been tempted like as we are, yet without sin 
 — One only — the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 3. The mystery we cannot explain ; but the 
 histor}^, whether veiled in allegory or not, we 
 know. Scripture gives it us in a few verses. 
 The man and the woman were placed in Eden — 
 happy, innocent, with but one prohibition — as 
 clear as God's utterance could make it, as fenced 
 about v/ith warning menace as their nature 
 could understand. How then came they to 
 fall .-^ It is the old, old, thousandfold-multiplied 
 experience. Eve lingers near the place of 
 temptation; then comes the thought of doing 
 wrong, the cherished imagination of the for- 
 bidden fruit ; then the " I w^ould, but dare 
 not;" then the '* I wish it were not wrong;" 
 then the fatal doubt—" Yea, hath God said ? 
 is it after all wrong } then the rash tumultuous 
 act ; then its repetition ; then the fatal per- 
 sistence ; then the tempting of others ; then the 
 inevitable consequences — the death physical 
 moral, spiritual ; the shame of lost virtue ; the 
 agony of penal results ; the driving forth from 
 Eden ; the fair life whose root has become as 
 rottenness, and whose blossom has gone up as 
 dust. In one form or other, to a great extent or 
 to a small extent, having long ago repented^ or 
 having not repented but only suffered from 
 
 L 2 
 
i64 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 remorse and fear — we have all gone through it ; 
 all disobeyed the will of God ; all fallen from 
 perfect obedience. The sentence of death has 
 passed upon us ; and, unless we have repented 
 long ago in dust and ashes, the flaming sword of 
 the cherubim waves every way between us and 
 the Tree of Life. Which of us all shall cast the 
 stone at our fallen father Adam, at our frail 
 miserable mother Eve } Have we made any 
 wiser choice ? If they did so badly, did not 
 God put it afresh in our power to have done 
 better ? After millenniums of experience have 
 proved that the crude apple which perverted 
 Eve was so ruinous and so bitter, have we not 
 plucked it } Have not we too been driven from 
 the Eden of innocence ? Was it only in that 
 garden by the Euphrates, or is it also in the 
 ruined garden of every human soul, that by the 
 Tree of Life there grows also the Tree of the 
 Knowledge of good and evil 1 
 
 4. Man has fallen, and men fall, because 
 there is an influence of evil without us which 
 we call Satan, the Accuser, the Tempter, the 
 Destroyer ; and there are principles of weak- 
 ness and corruption within us which we call a 
 fallen nature, or an hereditary taint, or original 
 sin. The two work together. Satan secretly 
 co-operates with our evil tendencies. "Like a 
 pirate at sea he sets upon us with our own 
 colours." He comes as a friend ; he comes in 
 
TEMPTATION. 
 
 165 
 
 the disguise of an angel of light ; he comes as a 
 false principle of religion quoting a multitude of 
 texts ; he comes as freedom and pleasure, with a 
 smile on the lip and light in the eye, and finds 
 access to us, and makes our passions strong and 
 strange. We yield to him the reins of our 
 soul's chariot, and he leaps into it, and then the 
 direction is certain, and the road is broad, 
 and the course downwards, and the pace is mad," 
 and at the bottom is — the abyss. The Spirit of 
 God leads us gently. He guides us with his 
 eye ; but when, betrayed by our unrestrained 
 appetites, we have once made a league with 
 death, and a covenant with hell, then the devil 
 sweeps us onward as with the breath of a 
 tempest. All the devils in hell cannot 
 force us to commit one sin. The weakest, 
 youngest Christian, if he chooses, can laugh 
 them all to scorn. We cannot charge our sins 
 on them : over our free will they have no 
 power. But men betray to the enemy the 
 wicket-gate of the fortress of their own souls. 
 Until we do that the fortress is impregnable ; 
 when we betray but a postern to them it is 
 terrible odds but they will become the masters 
 — masters tyrannous and cruel ; and, since 
 Reason, and Conscience, and Innocence were 
 the strong garrison, one by one they will doom 
 that garrison to death. 
 
 5. Thus is it, then, that men sin. You may 
 
1 66 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 bind the passions as with cords, as with fresh 
 green withes ; but when they have thus been 
 betrayed to unholy guidance, they rise up in 
 their mad revolt, and the bonds of reason and 
 conscience become but as tow which the flame 
 has touched ! And those bonds, once broken, 
 are never so strong again. Nay, they are re- 
 placed by other and fatal bonds, the thousand- 
 fold fetters of habit, in that dungeon of vice 
 whose bars are of iron and its gates of brass. 
 Hence you will see that the best way of con- 
 quering sin is to disown it ; to have nothing to 
 do with it ; never to parley with it ; never to 
 linger in its precincts ; never to tamper with its 
 instruments ; to spurn its whispered casuistry ; 
 to say " I cannot — I ought not — I will not." If 
 you would not become the slave of sin, allow it 
 no place in your imagination ; suffer it no 
 admittance into your thoughts. For directly you 
 yield to it passion will produce in your mind 
 the fatal effect of a mirage in the desert ; and 
 then, turning your face from the right road, you 
 will gaze and gaze to madness on a vanishing 
 delusion, which will make you forget all truth 
 and all duty, and after whose empty images you 
 will pant in vain ; till at last, lost, thirsty, weary, 
 fainting, disillusioned, despairing — bitten by 
 fiery serpents — the vulture beating over your 
 head its fetid wings — you lie down, to leave one 
 more carcase in the wilderness, whose scorched 
 
TEMPTATION. 
 
 167 
 
 wastes are whitened by so many bleaching 
 bones. 
 
 6. And bear in mind, my brethren, that to each 
 separate soul of you temptation comes most 
 awfully in the form of one sin ; and the final ruin 
 of a soul is often accomplished by one fatal act 
 of sin. It is true indeed that sins are rarely 
 isolated. They are enmeshed together by mul- 
 titudes of links. He who has been consciously 
 and deliberately guilty of one vice breaks down 
 within him the hedge of God's vineyard, and 
 through the gap, where at first only one or 
 two little foxes have crept to spoil the vines, 
 soon the wild boars rush in to trample all 
 things under their polluting hoofs. Still, it 
 is mainly in one direction that the desires 
 of the flesh become also desires of the mind ; 
 and so in one man it is avarice, in another 
 drink, in another hate, in another dishonesty, 
 in another concupiscence, which becomes the 
 Aaron's rod, and swallows up all other 
 offences. When a man has a besetting sin — 
 that victorious, all other evils are victorious 
 in him ; that conquered, he is safe. And as it is 
 one sin which destroys a man, so it is often one 
 act of sin which decides his fate. It is the nature 
 of temptation, when unresisted, to increase in 
 intensity, and then a man advances step by step 
 into crimes of dreadful heinousness, and does 
 what he would once have repudiated with indig- 
 nation, and becomes what he would once have 
 
1 68 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 regarded with abhorrence. And hence — since 
 Satan tempts, since sin deceives, since the will is 
 weak ; since, in the perversion of the reason and 
 the silencing of the conscience, the moral law 
 loses its grandeur; since vice grows in seductive- 
 ness, and temptation in intensity — for all these 
 reasons the world is what it is, and God's educa- 
 tion is frustrated, and men sell themselves to the 
 powers of evil. 
 
 7. But now, while we see, while we ought to 
 see the numbers of the terribly wounded in this 
 battle-field of life ; while we see, while we 
 ought to see the fearful power that lies in 
 temptation — let us not for a moment stop at this 
 point ; let us not for a moment rest content 
 with the callousness of immoral acquiescence, 
 or the stupor of faithless despair. It is simply a 
 crime against God to deny the strength and 
 freedom of our will, to talk of destiny, to apolo- 
 gize for vice by statistics, to charge our sins 
 upon Satan, or upon God. To talk thus, to 
 make our strong passions an excuse for our 
 weak reason, is faithlessly to ignore the power of 
 grace and the gift of Christ. Listen to what St. 
 James, the Lord's brother, says : " Let no man 
 say, when he is tempted, ' I am tempted of God," 
 for God has nothing to do with evil ;* neither 
 tempteth he any man ; but every man is tempted 
 when he is drawn away of his own lust and en- 
 
 * 'ATreipaarSs can kukQv. 
 
TEMPTATION. 
 
 169 
 
 ticed. Then, when lust hath conceived, it bringeth 
 forth sin ; and sin, when it is full-grown, gen- 
 dereth death." Hear what St. Paul says : " There 
 hath no temptation taken you, but such as man 
 can bear, but God is faithful who will not sufter 
 you to be tempted above that ye are able, but 
 will with the temptation make also the way 
 of escape." Notice two things in that most preg- 
 nant utterance. In the first place, St. Paul says, 
 Your temptation, be it what it may, is but a 
 human temptation.* In other words, do not for a 
 moment pretend that your case is exceptional. 
 That is half vanity and half a lying excuse. 
 How often have men and youths said to me, '" It 
 is so difficult to be good ! " Difficult, yes ! and 
 if you do not try with all your heart, not only 
 difficult but impossible. Difficult, yes ! but yet 
 so completely possible to the very weakest of 
 you all, that, if you will use the appointed means 
 which God has placed in your power, the diffi- 
 culty should be as little a barrier in your heaven- 
 ward path as the gossamer threads of summer 
 to one who strides across the morning fields. 
 When you are tempted, instead of basely assum- 
 ing that you cannot but yield, be sure of this, 
 that your temptations are not abnormal tempta- 
 tions, that they are not excessive temptations, 
 that they are apportioned to your feebleness ; 
 that they are but as your day ; that they 
 
1 70 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 are but such as thousands, no better, no 
 stronger, not placed amid less temptations 
 than you are, have triumphantly overcome. 
 And this is the blessed certainty which every 
 true soul .strengthens for us. This is the 
 blessed example which every saint of God, how- 
 ever weak, contributes to the redemption of all 
 the world. Every boy who has led a pure life 
 in an impure school ; every youth, who, in a 
 shop or in an office, where all around him bet, or 
 gamble, or indulge in obscene talk, or add the 
 miserable quota of their personal sensuality, at 
 once to their own ruin, and to the world's agony 
 and shame — every youth, I say, who in such 
 surroundings will not do as others do; every 
 youth in such a school, or shop, or office, who 
 openly refuses to bet, or gamble, or drink, or 
 join in one word of foul talk, and who shows 
 open scorn and discountenance of impure lives; 
 every saint of God, who has passed his whole 
 life it may be in the burning fiery furnace of 
 temptation, yet over whose garments not even 
 the smell of fire has passed ; yea, every good, 
 true man — every man of principle — and their 
 name, thank God, is legion, and I heard the 
 number of them, and it was ten thousand times 
 ten thousand and thousands of thousands — all 
 who have either lived holy lives from childhood 
 upward, or who, having erred, have repented in 
 dust and ashes, and given their lives to God — 
 
TEMPTATION. 
 
 171 
 
 every such boy, every such youth, every true man, 
 every soul that bravely struggles against sin, every 
 saint of God — yea, even every beaten soldier who 
 is persecuted but not forsaken, cast down but 
 not destroyed, is a living proof that our tempta- 
 tions are not stronger than we are able to bear. 
 
 And what is the second point in St. Paul's 
 memorable sentence ? It is that God will with the 
 temptation make also a way to escape. A way 
 to escape — the general way — the way by which 
 alone every temptation can be resisted. What 
 is that ? It is to put on the armour of righteous- 
 ness; to make straight paths for the feet ; to watch 
 against every careless hour and every sensual 
 snare ; to pray — to live in noble and conscious 
 communion with the Living and Eternal God in 
 His Son our Saviour Jesus Christ. But it is 
 more than this. It is to cherish a sense of the 
 moral law as God^s will ; it is to write that law 
 in our heart, and inscribe it on the tablets of our 
 mind ; it is to drive out sin by the constant 
 effort after holiness. In the original, however, 
 it is not a way to escape, but something much 
 more blessed, because more specific — God will 
 not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are 
 able, but will with the temptation make also (as 
 our Revised Version rightly renders it) the way 
 of escape." The modes of escaping different 
 temptations are different, but each temptation 
 has its own special mode of conquest and 
 
172 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 deliverance. Temptations of the flesh and of 
 the senses can only be met and overcome by 
 flight ; others must be met sword in hand. 
 Some can only be beaten down by incessant 
 blows ; others must be stabbed to the heart at 
 once with a single death-wound. Experience 
 very soon teaches you this if you are in earnest. 
 Each temptation has its own special fortress — 
 storm and sack that fortress with a resolution as 
 of life and death. Each temptation entrenches 
 itself in its special time or place of vantage. 
 The day and the night have their own tempta- 
 tions. There is a pestilence that walketh in dark- 
 ness, and there is a demon that destroyeth in the 
 noonday. Youth has its own temptations, and 
 middle age, and grey hairs. Men have their 
 own temptations, and women theirs. The hour 
 of idleness and the hour of toil, the school and 
 the holiday, the office and the home, the toil of 
 the hand and the efl'ort of the brain — there is 
 not an age, there is not a temperament, there is 
 not a profession which has not alike its own 
 special temptation and alike its own special 
 way of escape. What each separate way is it 
 would be impossible to tell you, nor is it needful, 
 for you can easily learn it if you choose. God 
 will tell you ; your reason will tell you. In 
 every sermon you hear, in every true prayer you 
 utter, you will find it. Ah ! but have you the 
 self-knowledge, the sincerity, the will to seek it — 
 
TEMPTATION. 
 
 173 
 
 the will to use it when discovered ? Will you 
 watch and pray lest you enter into temptation ? 
 or will you too join the vast ruined multitude 
 who have sinned, and suffered, and not repented ? 
 If so, W'hat will happen to you ? I will tell you : 
 Sin wdll grow worse every day. Temptation 
 will grow stronger every day. Resistance wall 
 grow fainter every day. Habit will grow day 
 by day more tyrannous ; the will day by day 
 weaker ; God day by day more silent to you. 
 Punishment will day by day grow more inevit- 
 able and more severe. So will the river of your 
 life glide, it may be with fatal smoothness, to 
 the whirling rapidsj and the rapids end in the 
 wild leap of the cataract. And then ? Then, 
 after death. Judgment! Ah! be warned in 
 time. We entreat you that ye receive not the 
 grace of God in vain, for he saith, " I have heard 
 thee in a time accepted ; in the day of salvation 
 have I succoured thee. Behold, now is the 
 acceptable time; behold, now is the day of 
 salvation." 
 
XII. 
 
 SelUna tbe JSirtbnobt 
 
 "Who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. 
 Heb. xii. i6. 
 
 HE words refer, as you know, to the 
 story of Esau ; but on that story I do 
 not now purpose to dwell. You will 
 all remember the single fact, that the rough 
 hunter came in tired and ravenous from his 
 field sports, and seeing his brother Jacob with a 
 bowl of sodden lentils — the commonest kind of 
 food — broke out with the eager words, " Feed 
 me I pray thee, with that red, red food."* You 
 know how the smooth, mean man, his brother, 
 cunningly playing on this animal voracity, said 
 " sell me this day thy birthright ; " and Esau 
 replied, " Behold I am at the point to die, and 
 what profit shall the birthright do to me ? " So 
 Jacob made him swear, and gave him bread and 
 pottage of lentils ; and then, as though the 
 sacred historian, with subtle and solemn irony, 
 would lengthen out the fatuity of that one 
 
 * Gen. xxvi. 30. Heb. (Ae red, this red.'^ 
 
' SELLIXG THE BIRTHRIGHT. 175 
 
 moment, so pregnant with fatal consequences — 
 as though he would let Esau make the most of 
 his meal, his pottage, his smoking bowl of red 
 lentils — he says " and Esau did eat, and drink 
 and rose up, and went his way." 
 
 But, however leisurely the description, the 
 conclusion and the consequence must come at 
 last : " so Esau despised his birthright." 
 
 It was done in a moment ; but such moments 
 cannot occur except as the epitome of years. 
 There is a plant which is fabled to rush into 
 crimson blossom once only in 100 years; but 
 even then all the 100 years have been causing^ 
 have been maturing, that one crimson flower. 
 So it is with every great sin. It is but the 
 ripened fruit of hundreds of Httle tendencies. 
 Esau's guilty moment was but the expression 
 and heritage of all his past life. And he thought 
 nothing of what he had done. He went his way. 
 He hunted as heartily, and slept as heavily, and 
 married his heathen wives, and knew nothing of 
 what he had lost and cared nothing for what he 
 had lost ; and then at last, with one stroke, the 
 consequences fell upon him. 
 
 It was as a youth that he had sold his birth- 
 right ; it was as a man, it was forty years after- 
 wards, that the seed of that youthful profanity 
 set into the bitter fruit of irreparable grief. It 
 was forty years afterwards that he stood before 
 his aged and trembling father, and found that 
 
1 76 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 what he had sold for a mess of pottage was not 
 only the birthright, but the blessing, the glory, 
 the dominion, the prosperity, of years. He 
 had sold his happiness ; he had sold the eternal 
 jewel of his soul; and that for naught. "And 
 when Esau heard the words of his father, he 
 cried with an exceeding great and bitter cry, 
 and said unto his father ' Bless me, even me 
 also, O my father ; ' and again, " Hast thou 
 not reserved a blessing for me ? " and again, 
 " Hast thou but one blessing, my father ? 
 Bless me, even me also, oh my father. And 
 Esau lifted up his voice, and wept." The strong 
 man was broken down. The cry of remorseful, 
 unavailing agony was wrung from that rough 
 heart. He read his boyish sin under the terrible 
 glare flung upon it by its consequences. " For 
 ye know that even when he afterward de- 
 sired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected 
 (for he found no place of repentance) though he 
 sought it diligently with tears. Afterward^^ 
 — ah ! how into that word " afterward," is 
 crushed the unutterable bitterness of many 
 myriads of lives ! It is the word which men 
 force God to use. Yet will I bring one more 
 plague upon Pharaoh ; afterwards he will let you 
 go." Afterwards 1 — ah ! why not before that 
 last, that fatal, irremediable plague } 
 
 It is the epitome of retribution. The wine 
 moveth itself aright in the cup — red, luscious^ 
 
SELLING THE BIRTHRIGHT. 177 
 
 alluring : but " afterwards it biteth like a serpent." 
 It is the death-knell in the ear of lifelong trans- 
 gression. It is appointed unto all men once to 
 die, and afterwards — after death — the judgment. 
 "Afterwards;" "too late;" "if thou hadst 
 known," "it might have been." Ah! those 
 are to the sinner the saddest^ the most terrible 
 of words. 
 
 Now I leave entirely on one side the story of 
 Esau, full as it is of pathos and of warnings. 
 I want to fix your minds not on him, but on the 
 nature of his sin. " For one morsel of meat," 
 avrt \iiaQ (dptoaswg, for one meal — i.e., in one 
 moment, by one overpowering impulse — for the 
 gratification of one fierce desire — he sold his 
 birthright. He sold it because he despised it ; 
 and he despised it because it was not a thing 
 which he could see, or eat, or drink, or grasp 
 with both hands ; because it was a glory and a 
 blessing which pertained not to the body, but to 
 the soul. That was his sin ; that is why he — 
 the gay bright hunter, with his superficial virtues 
 dragged down by the mill-stone of his vices — 
 stands in Scripture as the eternal type of the 
 sensual and the profane. 
 
 2. Alas ! my brethren is this sin — this con- 
 tempt for the spiritual, this despising of the 
 birthright — is it so rare ? Is it not the very 
 commonest of all sins ? Is it not distinctively 
 the sin to which every one of us is tempted ; 
 
 M 
 
178 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 of which, in greater or less degree, in some 
 form or other, nearly all of us are guilty ? 
 And why ? Because all men have not faith ; 
 and this sin is the absence of faith, the 
 opposite of all faith. For faith is the power 
 to recognize the spiritual, and to trample 
 on the carnal. It is the illuminated eye of 
 the heart, which makes the whole body full 
 of light. It is the spiritual insight which looks 
 to the unseen from the seen ; to manhood 
 from youth ; to age from manhood ; to death 
 from life ; to God from death. And want of faith 
 often looks like the sin of a moment, but it is 
 the abstract of a tendency, it is the habit of a 
 life. It is that profane self-indulgence to which 
 an ideal blessing is as nothing compared to a 
 momentary pleasure. It is the sin which, selling 
 itself to do evil, sells itself always for naught. 
 It sells the distant for the near ; the true for the 
 false ; the substance for the shadow ; the Eternal 
 for the temporal ; the peace of life for the follies 
 of boyhood ; the hopes of the years of the right 
 hand of the Most High, for turbid, evanescent, 
 and envenomed pleasures. It is as when a man 
 amid the snow will yield to sleep, though he 
 knows that sleep is death. It is as when the 
 wrecked sailor will drink the brine, though he 
 knows that to drink it is to die. For that sleep 
 for that drink they sell their lives. Even so 
 men sell their souls for sin. For the indulgence 
 
SELLING THE BLRTHRIGHT. 179 
 
 of an unbridled passion, for the tyranny of an 
 overwhelming habit — thus man despises his 
 birthright. 
 
 3. Each of you has that birthright — for each 
 of you is a child of God. What then is our birth- 
 right ? It is the synthesis of all spiritual bless- 
 ings. It is that God is mindful of us ; that He 
 regards us ; that we are His people, and the sheep 
 of His pasture ; that He has made us a little 
 lower than the angels to crown us with glory and 
 honour, wq \apilv ear avOpujirog rjv avOpivTrog ij. 
 How gracious a thing is a man, if he be but a 
 man ! — if he be but a human being — a human 
 being with the dignity of God's image unoblite- 
 rated upon him ; not a creeping thing, or a fiend, 
 or a slave or a beast. 
 
 What is your birthright ? It is a body richly 
 endowed with healthy and strength, and capacity 
 for happiness ; it is a mind, thrilling with bright 
 affinities for all things beautiful and high ; it is a 
 spirit, in which are folded the wings which can 
 soar to heaven, and hold communion with the 
 Divine. 
 
 It is Life : the innocent brightness of child- 
 hood, the spring of youth, the force of manhood, 
 the snowy and sunlit heights of age. It is a 
 happy Death ; for death is to God's children 
 but the vision and the Sabbath of God. It is to 
 enter the rejoicing streets of the New Jerusalem ; 
 it is that everlasting felicity in which all God's 
 
 M 2 
 
1 80 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 redeemed "shall clasp inseparable hands in 
 joy and bliss in over-measure for ever." It is 
 to be Kings, and Priests, and Prophets here : 
 Kings, to whom is uttered the lordly word 
 Dominamini ! — Rule ye over all that is vile 
 and base; Priests, in the white garments of 
 purity and holiness ; Prophets, to speak God's 
 messages as from lips touched with hallowed 
 fire. "Brethren, now are we the children of 
 God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall 
 be ; but we know that when He shall appear 
 we shall be hke Him, for we shall see Him as 
 He is." Children of God: it is "an immense 
 pretension ; " yet this it is to be a man ; this is 
 the birthright of every one of you ! 
 
 4. Alas ! is not all this a dream } Is it the 
 entrance upon this birthright which we see in 
 the groaning and travailing creation, in ruined 
 earth and sinful man ? Men ! — are these men 
 that we see on every side around us, or are 
 they " hungers, thirsts, fevers, appetites" " What 
 is man, if the chief good and market of his time 
 be but to sleep and feed ? — a beast, no more ! " 
 Yet what more are many men doing } I was 
 looking out, not long ago^, upon a very stormy 
 sea. The winds howled ; the troubled waves 
 were dashing themselves into spray upon the 
 rocks. Many vessels were in the bay; they 
 could not move for the hurricane, but could only 
 trust to some anchor in the sands, and were 
 
SELLING THE BIRTHRIGHT. i8i 
 
 tossed wildly up and down. In the night the 
 anchors of two of them slipped their hold, and 
 they were hurled helplessly in total wreck upon 
 the shore. There was no beauty or glory in 
 those poor ships ; it is the beauty and glory of 
 a ship when her helm is firmly grasped, and the 
 obedient wind swells her white sails, and the 
 cleft wave bears her onwards towards her haven — 
 " a plume and a power." And so it is with man. 
 There is no glory or beauty in him when, on the 
 little vessel of his life, he staggers to and fro like 
 a drunken man, and is at his wit's end ; when, 
 upon the sea of life, he is shattered upon the 
 sunken reef, or welters, a dismantled hulk, upon 
 the watery waste. Again, I ask, do men keep 
 their birthright ? My friends, our birthright 
 is Innocence, Holiness, Peace with God, Life, 
 Light, Immortality. Where is the holiness of 
 the liar, the schemer, the blasphemer 1 Where 
 the innocence of the drunkard ? Where the 
 peace with God of the impure ? What fellow- 
 ship hath light with darkness, and Christ with 
 Belial, and the temple of God with idols ? Are 
 these men fit to die ? Ask rather, are they fit 
 to live ? When we walk through great cities 
 and see the fearful lives of many there — the 
 brutal coarseness, the hideous cunning, the un- 
 fathomable corruption — where is the birthright 
 of these ? When we mix among the middle 
 classes, and note the moiling avarice, the vulgar 
 
1 82 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 self-absorption, the mean hopes — where is the 
 birthright of these ? When we watch the Hves 
 of many of our youths of the upper classes — the 
 gilded youth, as men call them — their ignorance, 
 their irreverence, their libertinism, their gambling 
 and betting, and drinking, and uncleanness — 
 where is the birthright of these ? 
 
 Nay, when one looks forth even on the general 
 spectacle of mankind, and sees (as one has said) 
 the evidences of insane religion, degraded art, 
 merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, 
 and vain or vile hope in which the nations of 
 the world have lived " — oh ! if there were no 
 other side of the story, might we not be tempted 
 with him to regard the race itself as "half- 
 serpent, not yet extricated from its clay " ? It 
 is not individuals only, it is the whole race of 
 man that must cry aloud, " The crown is fallen 
 from our heads, for we have sinned ! " 
 
 5. Thank God, there is, as I said, another aspect 
 of humanity. There are among these crowds some 
 who have not sold their birthright ; some who, 
 even in Sardis, have not stained their raiment ; 
 the holy, and the brave, and the merciful, the 
 white souls who have toiled and fought and 
 overcome ; souls transparent as crystal, active 
 as fire, unselfish as the ministering spirits, sweet 
 and tender as grace ; strong, generous and en- 
 during as the hearts of martyrs." But how comes 
 it that all are not such t — that far, far the most 
 
SELLING THE BIRTHRIGHT. 
 
 183 
 
 are not such ? Is it not because, for one morsel 
 of meat, they have sold their birthright ? Ah ! 
 they sit down at the banquet of sin, but they 
 never escape the payment of the terrible reckon- 
 ing. Satan is a harder bargainer than ever Jacob 
 was. He grants the momentary desire, but he 
 exacts, sooner or later, to the uttermost farthing 
 the lifelong forfeiture. After the red pottage 
 comes the exceeding bitter cry. After the one 
 hour's disgrace, or the long pleasureless yielding 
 to temptation, comes the hard entail of suffering, 
 the leanness in the bones, the quickly sated 
 passion cursed by its woful progeny, the pitiful 
 writhing in the heart of ever-yearning and never 
 satisfied desires, the life-in-death of paralytic 
 vice, the thundering downfall of once-cherished 
 hopes. The consequences come as diversely as 
 the sin, but they do come ; sometimes creeping, 
 snakelike, through the dry leaves of a wasted 
 life ; sometimes bursting out as from a thicket, 
 "terrible and with a tiger's leaps;" sometimes 
 slowly torturing ; sometimes waiting to smite 
 once, and smite no more. But whether they 
 come soon or late, they will come, and we cannot 
 avoid them. The comedy is short, but the 
 tragedy is long. God came not to Adam till 
 the evening; yet He came. The fire fell not on 
 Sodom till the evening ; yet it fell." The devil 
 who despises men very much, and who especially 
 loves to fool the young to the top of their bent, 
 
1 84 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 and to "laugh at them as they strut to their con- 
 fusion " — he has a bitter, lying proverb about 
 sowing wild oats first and growing good grain 
 afterwards. He must indeed despise those who 
 accept the lie, against which even all bad men 
 witness, against which not Scripture only, but 
 reason too, and conscience, plead trumpet- 
 tongued. Sow wild oats and you will reap what 
 you sow — wild oats, which are not food, which 
 are poisonous, which starve the soil. Sow to 
 the flesh, and you will reap what you sow — cor- 
 ruption. " Every act of yours is a seed planted 
 in heaven or hell ; and between the fruit and 
 the seed you will find an inevitable congruity." 
 Or again^ to change the metaphor : the powers 
 of evil hold out to you the bait of sin, and 
 persuade you that by a snatch at it you may 
 seize the glittering lure, and escape the lace- 
 rating hook. Well, they may give the sinner 
 plenty of time, and let him play, and plunge, 
 and seem to escape ; but unless One hand break 
 the line, St. James in two words gives you what 
 always must be the result at last — StXta^o/xtvoc 
 Koi l^^XKvaduQ — " enticed and drawn out ; " the 
 fish is dragged — torn, gasping, dying — upon the 
 shore at last. 
 
 6. " He found no place of repentance, though 
 he sought it carefully with tears." He did find 
 place of repentance if he sought it. The door 
 of repentance is never closed. None who have 
 
SELLING THE BIRTHRIGHT. 185 
 
 sought it have ever failed to find it. No matter 
 how bad or foohsh they have been, the Heavenly 
 Father rejoices to welcome back His returning 
 prodigals. The words so translated may mean 
 that he found no means to change his father's 
 mind, or his own mind ; or no room for any 
 change of purpose in such a way as to repair 
 the earthly consequences of his carnal folly. If 
 the text did not mean this, it would be contrary 
 to the tenor of all Scripture. But it does mean 
 this. It means the irreparability of earthly con- 
 sequences. It means that even to be forgiven is 
 not the same thing as to be innocent ; and that 
 even to repent is not to recover the perfect 
 birthright and the unimpaired blessing. The stain 
 remains, the shame remains, the scar remains, 
 the memory remains ; and life is not, nor ever 
 can it be, all it was, all it might have been. 
 The very best thing in all the world is never to 
 have sold the birthright ; the next best thing is 
 to recover it, if not for this world, yet for that 
 which is to come. 
 
 7. Well then, my friends, what I have been 
 trying to tell you all along, is the one aim and 
 object of all God's education of us in life. It is 
 the cherishing, the preserving, the securing of 
 your birthright. Since life is a magnificent and 
 immortal birthright ; since many men lose or 
 impair it ; since none who so sell it can, in this 
 world, wholly recover it ; since all sale of it leads 
 
1 86 E VER YDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 to vain tears at last — the pang for what is lost, 
 and the pang for what is done ; you will see 
 what is the highest, what should be the main 
 lesson which God would teach you. It is in 
 youth that the birthright is most often sold. A 
 man scarcely ever becomes a felon unless he has 
 begun the career between the ages of fourteen 
 and twenty. The sway of life, the bias of 
 character, the deathful dipping of the scale to 
 the side of evil, is mostly decided in early youth. 
 This, then, should be your aim, the aim of every 
 man who would make something of his life — to 
 keep his birthright unimpaired ; not to sell it for 
 a mess of pottage, not to sell it for the careless 
 hour or the sensual snare. That youth is in the 
 highest sense well-educated who by God's grace 
 passes into the battle of life strong, self-denying, 
 pure ; scorning mean pleasures, scorning vulgar 
 comforts, scorning idle uselessness ; brave to 
 meet danger, brave to defy sin, brave to fight 
 in the cause of God ; strenuous to do and to 
 dare ; ready to spring to the front in every good 
 cause ; not following the multitude to do evil. 
 To be thus is to have the birthright of a man ; 
 and again I say, \a^iiv 1(st avOpwirog 7]v 
 avOpbJTTog y — How gracious a thing is a man, 
 if he be but a man indeed ! 
 
 8. But, lastly, how are you to be this ? How 
 are you to be profitable members of the Church 
 and Commonwealth, and hereafter partakers 
 
SELLING THE BIRTHRIGHl. 187 
 
 of the immortal glory of the Resurrection ? " 
 Christians only know one way. You have a 
 higher and a lower nature ; there is an Adam in 
 you and a Christ in you. To strengthen the 
 higher, to control the lower ; to enlist on the 
 side of the higher every pure spiritual influence ; 
 to help you to win the tranquil mastery over 
 yourselves ; this should be your aim. And to 
 help you in it you must learn the prayer — 
 
 God ! harden me against myself 
 
 This traitor with pathetic voice 
 
 Who craves for ease, and rest, and joys ; 
 
 Myself, worst traitor to myself, 
 
 My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe, 
 
 ■Sly clog whatever road I go. 
 
 But schools and schoolmasters can never teach 
 you this prayer, unless they also teach you that, 
 
 One there is can curb myself, 
 
 Can roll this strangling load off me, 
 
 Break off my yoke and set me free. 
 
 That one Is Christ. To lead you to Him ; to 
 teach you to place your souls in His keeping ; 
 that is the richest and most blessed boon your 
 experience can confer on you. And it is hap- 
 piness. Do not think th-at self-reverence and 
 self-conquest will make you weak or sad ; nay, 
 the suppression of evil will be to you a forceful 
 spring of good. Religion is no haggard and stern 
 monitress waving you from enjoyment ; she is a 
 strong angel leading you to noble joy. The 
 
1 88 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 Bible is not a book of repressions and prohibi- 
 tions ; it is a book of kindling inspiration. God 
 would not have you crouch, like a poor timid 
 startled creature, torturing yourself with a 
 terrified watch over your lower desires. He 
 would see you stand erect and manly, like a 
 victor_, in heroic confidence with these enemies 
 beneath your feet. Do you love freedom ? You 
 would be base if you did not ; well, and Christ 
 will make you free: Would you have life } 
 You would not be a man if you did not desire 
 it ; well, and Christ has come that you may 
 have life, and have it more abundantly. He 
 would make you run and not be weary, walk 
 and not faint. " Happy the youth who, with no 
 inner shame or treachery to hide, can lift his 
 eyes to the white sunlit peak of purity, and hear 
 from it no stern voice pealing doom." And that, 
 and more than that, is the happiness of all who 
 do not sell man's sacred birthright. For 6poo 
 years God has been trying to train such — such 
 have been the best and noblest of men. Would 
 you, too, be worthy sons of your Heavenly 
 Father } Then array yourselves under the ban- 
 ner of your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 
 Against sin and selfishness ; against wrong and 
 robbery ; against greed and oppression ; against 
 slander and drunkenness ; against impurity 
 and lies ; against social cynicism and pohtical 
 corru ption ; against godless immorality and 
 
SELLING THE BIRTHRIGHT. 189 
 
 Pharisaic relig-ion, FIGHT ! Flash, if you can, 
 the electric fire of nobleness into callous slum- 
 bering hearts. England has need of you ! God 
 has need of you ! 
 
 I speak unto you, young men, because ye are 
 and should be strong in the Lord. If you would 
 be strong, seek Him in daily prayer; seek Him 
 by holy self-dedication and resolute purpose ; 
 seek Him in hallowed Sundays and earnest 
 communion. Prepare yourselves to do His work 
 in your own hearts and in the world, and it will 
 not be long ere, stirring the blood like a trumpet, 
 you shall hear His voice sound forth its clear 
 call to you. Be faithful unto Him ; be faithful 
 unto death, and He will give you a crown of 
 life. 
 
XIII. 
 
 Iknown Its jfrutts. 
 
 *'By their fruits ye shall know them," — Matt. vii. 20. 
 
 [BS^^HIS principle of our blessed Lord is 
 l^w!? capable alike of a universal and of an 
 Iffaratyy i individual application. It is astonish- 
 ing, when we think of the matter, how few and 
 „ how simple are the rules which alone are 
 necessary to guide the conduct of mankind. 
 Nor are those rules in the least degree doubtful. 
 The witness borne to them by every voice of 
 nature, of experience, and of revelation in every 
 age of the history of the world is absolutely 
 unanimous. They are "as universal as our 
 race, as individual as ourselves." No people 
 has ever framed its laws in accordance with 
 them, without finding their necessity and 
 blessedness. No man, no woman has ever 
 moulded life in obedience to them without 
 saving their life thereby from failure and ship- 
 wreck, and without brightening it with the sun- 
 light of that best happiness, which, even in the 
 
KNO WN B V ITS UITS. 1 9 1 
 
 midst of sorrow and trial, God never withholds 
 from them that love Him. 
 
 Now, these truths were put to the test on a 
 scale peculiarly vast after the death of Christ. 
 The feebleness of the instruments which secured 
 the victory of Christianity was designed, as we 
 are expressly told, to prove that conduct and 
 character are of transcendently higher impor- 
 tance than genius or force ; that the ultimate 
 government of the world is not by might, nor 
 by power, but by the Spirit of our God. He 
 chose the foolish things of the world to confound 
 the wise, and the weak things of the world to con- 
 found those that were mighty ; and base things 
 and things despised, yea, and things which are 
 not, to bring to nought things which are. 
 
 The intellect of Greece was keen, her poetry 
 splendid, her art unrivalled, her eloquence over- 
 whelming ; and yet when the poor worn Jew of 
 Tarsus trod the streets of Athens a hunted, 
 persecuted man ; when his bent frame and 
 feeble steps passed along her avenues of noble 
 sculpture ; when his strange words were jeered 
 at by philosophers under the shadow of the 
 Acropolis ; when the Stoic mocked at the mes- 
 sage of Jesus, and the Resurrection, 
 
 And the soft garden's rose-encircled child 
 Smiled unbelief and shuddered as he smiled ; 
 
 who could have believed that the might and 
 glory of the future was with the poor Jew, not 
 
193 E VER YDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 with those philosophic and gifted Athenians ? 
 Who would have guessed that, in spite of her 
 aegis, and flaming helm, and threatening spear, 
 the awful Pallas of the Acropolis should be 
 forced to resign her Parthenon to the humble 
 Virgin of Nazareth ? Not many years after- 
 wards that same suffering missionary who 
 had been ridiculed in Athens was dragged a 
 prisoner to Rome. At that time her Caesar 
 seemed omnipotent, her iron arms unconquer- 
 able. And Rome did not yield without a 
 desperate struggle. She strove to crush and 
 extirpate this " execrable superstition " (as her 
 great writers called Christianity) with sword 
 and flame ; she made Christianity a treason ; 
 she made her Coliseum swim with the massacre 
 of its martyrs. Yet it was all in vain ! The 
 worshippers of the Capitol succumbed before 
 the worshippers in the Catacombs. The thirty 
 legions, the white-robed senators, the ivory 
 sceptre, the curule chair, were all defeated by 
 the Cross, which was the vilest emblem of a 
 slave's torture ; and the greatest of earthly 
 empires with her dominion yet unimpaired em- 
 braced the gospel preached by the unlettered 
 peasants of the race which she most despised. 
 Why was it } It was because a tree is known by 
 its fruits, and every tree that bringeth not forth 
 good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. 
 The fruits of heathendom had been selfishness, 
 
KNOWX BY ITS FRUITS, 
 
 193 
 
 and cruelty, and corruption ; the fruits of 
 Christianity were love, joy, peace, long-sufter- 
 ing, temperance, goodness, faith, meekness, 
 charity, and the leaves of that tree were for 
 the healing of the nations. 
 
 We are naturally reminded at this time of the 
 dawn of Christianity, because during this year a 
 little newly discovered tract has been published, 
 which was written by an unknown Christian in 
 the first centur}' of our era. It is called "The 
 Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," and was 
 written by a man w^ho might have grasped in 
 friendship the hand of Paul or John ; nay, whose 
 young eyes may possibly have gazed on the 
 Lord of Life. Most seasonably does it remind 
 us of what Christianity was in the golden dawn 
 of its early purity. In a complicated age like 
 our own, in an age when Christianity is engaged 
 in a death-struggle with various forms of un- 
 belief, and is entangled in a thousand enfeebling 
 elements of conventionality and compromise, it 
 is most deeply desirable for us to remind our- 
 selves of what Christianity in its very essence 
 was and is ; to look once more at the rock 
 whence we were hewn, and the hole of the pit 
 whence we were digged. 
 
 I. The little book is not, indeed, a statement 
 of Christian doctrines. They are assumed as 
 known already. It is addressed to Catechu- 
 mens — in other words to converts from heathen- 
 
 N 
 
194 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 dom, who had already learnt to believe in the 
 Father who made, in the Son who redeemed, in 
 the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth. Starting from 
 this basis, the instruction given to these candi- 
 dates for baptism is not unlike the preparation 
 given to our own candidates for confirmation. 
 "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," as 
 here represented, reduces itself to this — the duty 
 and blessedness of a holy life ; the sustenance 
 and renewal of that life by sacramental com- 
 munion with Him who is the Lord. 
 
 2, Accordingly, the first section of the book 
 is purely moral. It is called the Two Ways — 
 the Way of Life, and the Way of Death. The 
 writer, like the Apostles, feels that a Christian 
 profession without a holy life is but a sounding 
 brass and a tinkling cymbal. He therefore lays 
 down in the plainest manner that the way of 
 righteousness is life — that it is a way of health 
 and safety, of strength and joy; and that the 
 way of sin and vice is the way of shame, of ruin, 
 and of death. The converts to whom these 
 instructions are addressed came from amidst the 
 degradations of Paganism. Their lot may have 
 been cast in cities like Athens, wholly given to 
 gossip and idolatry ; or in marts like Corinth 
 the head-quarters of a seething corruption ; or 
 amid the meanness and misery of the neglected 
 masses in vile, slave-crowded capitals like Rome 
 or Ephesus ; or in little provincial towns like 
 
KNOWN BY ITS FRUITS. 
 
 195 
 
 Pompeii or Herculaneum, which in their out- 
 ward brightness were as whitened sepulchres, 
 defiled with every form of abomination. It was 
 necessary, therefore, that they should be taught 
 ■ — nor is it possible to open any newspaper, on 
 any day in the year, without the proof that it is 
 still necessary that men should be taught — as 
 the first elements of Christian morality, that 
 against fraud, and cruelty, and lust, the 
 Almighty has fixed the stern prohibition of 
 His eternal laws ; that the way of ]\Iammon, 
 the way of greed and luxur\', the way of guilty 
 self-indulgences, the way of murder, and adul- 
 tery, and theft, are the broad path which leadeth 
 to destruction ; and that modesty, and holiness, 
 and purity, and self-denial are the way of life 
 which alone leadeth to fulness of joy. 
 
 3. And this teaching is given in the simplest 
 way. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles " 
 shares the characteristics of all the literature 
 which has come down to us from the earliest 
 Christian age. In literary form it cannot com- 
 pare for a moment v/ith the great classics of 
 Greece and Rome. It does not fascinate us 
 with the charm of genius, or overwhelm us with 
 the pomp of rhetoric, or dazzle us with the 
 flashing gleams of wit. In its prohibition of 
 vice it has none of the gloom and grandeur of 
 Tacitus, or the rushing denunciation of Juvenal. 
 Why, then, was it that the future of the nations 
 
 N 2 
 
196 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 lay with the writers of such humble Httle 
 treatises as this ? It was because they offered 
 to the world something intrinsically diviner, and 
 infinitely more needful, than eloquence or in- 
 tellect — even a deep and living piety. The 
 spirit which glows in these early Christian 
 writers is that of the warmest love to God 
 and the deepest interest in man as man. The 
 pure, vigorous morality which sprang from these 
 feehngs was the one thing most needed for a 
 world effete with the decrepitude of vice. By 
 their fruits ye shall know them." While the 
 works of every contemporary heathen author 
 reek with the sickening details of folly, vice, and 
 crime, these humble Christian pastors are ever 
 burning with love to God and men, exhorting to 
 a life of purity in imitation of the life of Christ. 
 Now here you have the secret of Christianity. 
 Tertullian gives it when he says, " You heathens 
 live wicked lives ; we only are innocent." Her- 
 mas gives it when he describes the tower of the 
 Church as upheld, not by its inherent strength, 
 but by the fair, flower-like hands of a choir of 
 virgins, who are Love, and Faith, and Purity, 
 and Temperance, and Peace. 
 
 4. Some one, however, may say that the better 
 heathens also preached morality, and preached it 
 with a passion and a grace which, in these early 
 Christian writers, are rarely found. Yes ; but the 
 power of Christianity lay in this : it gave to 
 
KNO WN B V ITS FRUITS. 197 
 
 moral laws which were as old as the world itself 
 a new intensity ; it enforced them with diviner 
 sanctions ; it brightened them with fresh hopes ; 
 it endowed men with spiritual life to realize their 
 obligations, and uplifted them with supernatural 
 assistance to fulfil these demands. The theory 
 of morality is valueless unless it has power also 
 to secure its practice. Why was it that truths 
 which had failed to sway the conscience of 
 corrupted Greece when wrapped in the golden 
 haze of Plato's imaginative eloquence, or when 
 they were published in the busy haunts of 
 Athens by Socrates — why was it that those 
 same truths — which had failed though preached 
 by such great and mighty teachers to pro- 
 duce any adequate or general result — did 
 reach^ did reclaim, did regenerate the world, 
 when first preached by the Rabbi of Tarsus 
 and the fisherman of Galilee ? Why did 
 the torch which had failed to illuminate the 
 world when it had been upheld by such strong 
 hands as those of the great men in Greece and 
 Rome, shed so sunlike a splendour over a world 
 of sin when carried in the weak grasp of the 
 early Christians ? I will tell you why it was. 
 It was because behind the truths, behind the 
 preachers of Christianity, lived and moved, 
 unseen yet ever present, 'the mighty force of 
 Christ. Why does the Hght of day spread itself 
 over the earth ? Because it is drawn from the 
 
iqS ever yd a V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 inexhaustible fountains of the sun in heaven. 
 Why does the march of tidal waters flush 
 the rivers, and flood the great bays with its 
 lustral wave ? Because the swing of the living 
 ocean is behind the harbour bar ! 
 
 Yes ! the force of Christianity was Christ ; 
 Christ, not preached in eloquent words of man's 
 wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and 
 power; Christ not inurned in orthodox dogma 
 but felt in the inmost heart. The reason why 
 these poor early Christians subdued the world is 
 because they were not good merely, but holy ; 
 not moral merely, but full of the indwelling 
 Spirit of God. It wrought in them a mighty 
 and inexplicable change. It presented to the 
 world the hitherto undreamed of spectacle of 
 men who had shifted the moral centre of gravity 
 from self to God. When Justin Martyr was led 
 forth to be scourged and beheaded, he was 
 bidden by the scoffing heathen to explain to 
 them the mystery of Christ. I am too little," 
 he answered, " to say anything great of Him." 
 Yes ! but the force of the gospel rested, not in 
 what its preachers said, but in how its children 
 lived. 
 
 5. "By their fruits ye shall know them." 
 When the Pagans asked how Christians attained 
 to goodness they were told that it was by con- 
 version — it was by being born again. " While 
 I languished in darkness and deep night," says 
 
KNOWN BY ITS FRUITS. 
 
 199 
 
 St. Cyprian, tossing upon the sea of a troubled 
 world, I thought it, according to my then habits, 
 altogether strange that, being quickened to new 
 life by baptism, a man might put off the past, 
 and transform his whole self in mind and heart. 
 * How,' said I, 'is it possible for a man to change 
 alike his character and his habits ? How can 
 the luxurious man learn frugality ? and he who 
 has shone in costly apparel come down to simple 
 dress ? and he who has been proud bear to be 
 humble ? ' " Well, this was the perplexity of 
 Nicodemus long ago, How can a man be born 
 again when he is old ? " And our Lord replied 
 that he must be born again of water and of the 
 spirit. And Cyprian continues : " But when 
 the stain of my past was washed away, a light, 
 pure and serene, poured into my heart. I was 
 transformed into a new man. The wavering 
 mind became firm ; the dark becamie light ; 
 strength came for difficulties ; that which I 
 had thought impossible became a practicable 
 thing." 
 
 6. " By their fruits ye shall know them." Men 
 who had been converted, w^ho had been born 
 again, however poor, however weak, however 
 unlearned, could not fail. I might show you in 
 a hundred ways what these Christians did. 
 Look how they purified domestic life, in an age 
 infamous for divorce and uncleanness. On an 
 ancient Christian ornament the wedded pair 
 
200 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 join hands over a nuptial altar, and the Presbyter 
 utters the words, Vivatis in Deo, May ye live in 
 God ! " How can I paint," says Tertullian, 
 the happiness of a marriage which the Church 
 ratifies, the sacrament confirms, the blessing 
 seals, angels announce, and the Lord approves ? 
 What a union of two believers ! — one hope, one 
 vow, one discipline, one worship ! They go 
 together to the church of God, to the table of the 
 Lord. They share each others' persecution and 
 revival. They delight to visit the sick, to supply 
 the needy. They sing, they pray together. 
 Christ rejoices to hear them. He gives them 
 His peace. Where two are together in His name, 
 there is He, and where He is, there the evil one 
 cannot come." Behold," says Tertullian in 
 another place, " the heathen say, ' How these 
 Christians love one another ! ' Yea, verily this 
 must strike them, for they hate each other. 
 * And how ready these Christians are to die for 
 one another ! ' Yea, verily ; for they are rather 
 ready to kill one another.^' When he witnessed 
 the virtues of Anthusa, the mother of St. Chry- 
 sostom, the Pagan Sophist, Libanius, exclaimed 
 with envy, BajSat, olai Trapa XpLdTiavoXg jwciikIq 
 ti(TL : " Heavens ! how noble the Christian women 
 are ! " 
 
 Once more, the Christians of that day were 
 poor — yet how they helped each other ! When 
 the deacon St. Lawrence was asked, in the 
 
KNO WN B V ITS FRUITS. 
 
 20 1 
 
 Decian persecution, to show the Prefect the 
 most precious treasures of the Church at Rome 
 he showed him the sick^ the lame, the bHnd. 
 
 " It is incredible," said Lucian, the Pagan 
 jeerer and sceptic, " to see the ardour with which 
 those Christians help each other in their wants. 
 They spare nothing. Their first legislator has 
 put it into their heads that they are all brothers." 
 "These Gahleans," said Julian the Apostate, 
 " nourish not only their own poor, but ours as 
 well." Such were the testimonies which were 
 won even from the heathen in that first age ! 
 
 7. My friends, are we Christians 1 Are we all 
 Christians I told you not long ago of how a 
 living sceptic had spoken of " a hundred million 
 Pagans in the world, masquerading as Chris- 
 tians ; " and a living clergyman has written a 
 book called " Modern Christianity, a Civilized 
 Heathendom." Now I will not ask whether in 
 this city, in this nineteenth century, our society 
 presents these ideal pictures of the life of con- 
 verted men, these pictures of high and pure 
 morality, of large and ungrudging magnanimity, 
 of sweet and perfect domestic love ; or whether 
 we see a levity and a vileness, a grasping and 
 a luxury, or a callous indifference and a hard 
 selfishness, an intense and passionate mammon- 
 worship, a deep-seated hypocrisy, and a grievous 
 recrudescence of the spirit of falsehood. I will 
 not ask whether after nineteen centuries of 
 
202 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 Christianity we have an abundant supply of 
 honest, plain-saiUng men, who will do tough 
 work and live pure lives, and speak no slander, 
 no, nor listen to it. I will not ask these questions. 
 Ask them searchingly of yourselves. But look 
 at one fact. In the year 252 a plague raged 
 in Carthage. The heathens threw out their 
 dead and sick upon the streets, and ran away 
 from them for fear of the contagion, and cursed 
 the Christians. St. Cyprian, on the contrary, 
 assembled his congregation, and told them to 
 love those who cursed them ; and the rich 
 working with their money, the poor with their 
 hands, never rested till the dead were buried, 
 the sick cared for, and the city saved from 
 destruction. 
 
 Again, in the year 263, there was a plague in 
 Alexandria. ''AH things," wrote the Bishop of 
 Alexandria, the great Dionysius, "are filled with 
 tears and groans for the multitude of the dying 
 and dead. There is not a house in which there 
 is not one dead. But we rejoice in the peace of 
 Christ. Most of our brethren by their exceeding 
 loye, not sparing themselves and adhering to one 
 another, were constantly ministering to the sick 
 without fear and cessation, and healing them in 
 Christ." 
 
 That was sixteen centuries ago. Well, in this 
 year, 1884, we have cholera in Europe; and 
 Marseilles, and Toulon, and Aries, are Christian 
 
KNO WN B V ITS FRUITS. 
 
 203 
 
 cities ; and Christian examples have been shown 
 there by the noble few ; but I ask you was 
 there anything better than heathen Carthage 
 and heathen Alexandria in the pusillanimous 
 selfishness, the reckless terror, the headlong 
 flight, the wild stampede of paltry cowardice, 
 which not only hundreds, but thousands, and 
 tens of thousands of nominal Christians in those 
 cities have displayed ? Who, reading that miser- 
 able story, and having thrust upon him the things 
 that are thrust upon us every day, would not 
 exclaim, not only, God, give us saints ! " but 
 even, " God, give us men ! " I ask again, are we 
 Christians ? If so, then by our fruits we shall be 
 known. It will not in the least help us merely 
 to say we are, if we live as though we were not. 
 But this I will say — and this too the author of 
 the little first-century tract to which I have 
 alluded teaches — that if we are Christians we 
 ought to be communicants. The moral life, still 
 more the holy life, cannot be kept strong and 
 living within us save by communion with Christ ; 
 and the Communion of the Body and Blood of 
 Christ in the Supper of the Lord is one of His 
 own appointed means of at once nourishing, 
 and testifying, and renewing our communion 
 with Him. I dwell no further on that topic 
 now, because I have addressed you upon it so 
 often. We are about to kneel together at the 
 Supper of the Lord. All who come to it in 
 
204 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 humility and penitence, in faith and love, know 
 well the richness of the blessing which they 
 there receive ; they who turn away from it are 
 alienating themselves from the brotherhood of 
 Christians who in all ages have felt it to be 
 their duty and their joy to obey the loving com- 
 mand of their Lord : *' Do this in remembrance 
 of Me." 
 
XIV. 
 
 Deatb^beb IRepentance* 
 
 Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live." 
 2 Kings xx. i. 
 
 ESIRING to turn our thoughts from 
 the clamorous and dazzling urgency 
 of the world, and to fix them on the 
 things not seen, I spoke, two Sundays ago, of 
 the eternity, amid which, whether we will or no, 
 we live and move and have our being. When 
 shall we feel the existence of those unseen 
 realities ? There are some, but perhaps not 
 many, who fix their hopes on the supposed 
 power of death to awaken them from the dream 
 of a sinful life. On the other hand, there are 
 undoubtedly far more who hope in a postponed 
 repentance, and vainly trust to that shifting 
 and dragging anchor to hold the frail vessel of 
 their soul amid the storm. Like the yet un- 
 converted Augustine, they pray to God, it may 
 be, to deliver them from their sins, and hope 
 that He will not hear them just yet. They 
 
206 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 wish to be pardoned, and yet to retain the 
 offence ; and think that, on the bed of death at 
 any rate, or when old age has turned their 
 lives to ashes, and rendered impossible the 
 pleasures of sense and of the world, they will 
 have leisure, and desire, and opportunity to turn 
 to God. Now I wish to show you that of all 
 hopes this, at any rate, is the most absolutely 
 futile. 
 
 I. In the first place, it is a great mistake to 
 suppose that all persons, or even the majority, 
 have anything which can be called a death-bed. 
 They live in the full blossom of their sins and 
 vanities till in due time, one by one. 
 
 Some with lives that come to nothing, some with deeds as well 
 undone,. 
 
 Death comes suddenly and takes them where men never see the 
 sun. 
 
 Thousands die by what we call accident. They 
 are cut off as in a moment : as by a lightning 
 flash. Thousands more pass into the unseen 
 world, not down the lingering declivities of 
 disease, but by some swift and sudden de- 
 parture. As I look back upon life's memories, 
 I recall many an instance in which men and 
 women have seemed to be in their usual health 
 up to the very week, or even the very day, on 
 which they died. They have had no misgiving, 
 no intimation, no foregleam of the awful event 
 
DEATH-BED REPENTANCE, 207 
 
 which was so close to them. The Shadow with 
 the keys has awaited them on the broad road- 
 side, and they have been unconscious of his 
 presence until his icy touch has stilled their 
 hearts. Their life ends as though a trivial 
 everyday sentence should stop short without so 
 much as a comma. They are snatched away 
 from the midst of their most ordinary avoca- 
 tions, feverishly busy about all things, save the 
 one thing needful. 
 
 But even when the death is not thus abso- 
 lutely sudden, how often have I seen persons 
 who were ill wholly refuse to believe or realize 
 that their sickness was unto death. Almost 
 till the day of their departure they have talked 
 quite confidently of what they intended to do 
 when they rose from the bed of sickness ; have 
 perhaps even seemed to themselves to be much 
 better just before they sank into the long 
 swoon which can only end in the last fluttering 
 sigh. " O God, they have deceived me then ! 
 and this is death ! " was the startling exclama- 
 tion of a sinful English king, and with those 
 words he sank back and died. And very 
 commonly for hours, and even for days before 
 death, men and women lie quite unconscious ; 
 the pulse still beats, the breath still labours, 
 possibly the tongue still murmurs, as the im- 
 agination floats amid the confused reminiscences 
 of the past, and babbles of green fields far 
 
2o8 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 away. But no voice of exhortation can reach 
 them then ; they can gather no thought into 
 consecutive meaning ; they can breathe no 
 prayer to Him into whose awful presence they 
 are about to enter. 
 
 ii. Again, even when men have a conscious 
 death-bed, how often does it happen that they 
 cannot summon up their energies to think or 
 pray. When the flames of a fever have begun 
 already to calcine the tablets of the memory, 
 or confusion clouds the troubled soul, or agony 
 absorbs the faculties, or the pressing needs of 
 earth are still terrifically urgent — ah ! it is not 
 easy then to set about the one task of life, 
 which is^ of all others, the most awfully im- 
 portant. 
 
 iii. Once more, in that dread hour, the very 
 capacity for repentance seems often to be 
 paralyzed. Men see, they know, they confess 
 the waste and guilt of miserable lives ; but 
 anything more seems to be too late, seems to 
 be beyond their power. Many who have been 
 recovered from drowning have recorded that 
 at the moment when they sank for the last 
 time, and the dread struggle was over, they 
 saw, in one flash of light, and with remorse and 
 shame, every event of their past lives vividly 
 portrayed, backward, in reverse order, from the 
 moment of their death. Yet I cannot recall a 
 single instance of any one who has said that he 
 
DEATH-BED REPENTANCE. 209 
 
 was thereby moved to repentance. Remorse 
 and repentance are two very different things. 
 Repentance leads back to life ; but remorse 
 ends often in the painless apathy and fatal 
 mortification of despair. 
 
 iv. Experience on a large scale confirms all 
 that I have said. It happens not unfrequently 
 on battlefields, in earthquakes, in shipwrecks 
 that men are brought in large multitudes face 
 to face with death. On such occasions we 
 scarcely ever hear one whisper about repent- 
 ance. It is indeed sadly notorious that, when 
 vessels seem doomed to inevitable destruction, 
 the first impulse of the sailors is to burst open 
 the spirit stores, and drink to intoxication, that 
 they may die like natural brute beasts made to 
 be taken and destroyed. A quarter of a cen- 
 tury ago, a huge vessel from California, named 
 " The Central America," foundered at sea by 
 night. A few survivors only were picked up 
 m by the crew of a vessel which, sailing through 
 the darkness, was startled to hear voices from 
 the ocean waves. Those survivors told a 
 strange tale. The sailors when all hope was 
 gone had rushed to drink and die. The vessel 
 had on board many successful gold-diggers. Of 
 these some in their despair flung their gold 
 wildly about the deck, and some as wildly 
 scrambled for it. Others loaded their belts 
 and pockets with all the gold that they could 
 
 O 
 
210 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 carry, and when the ship went down, they too 
 sank like lead amid the mighty waters. 
 Another, floating on a plank, was chilled to the 
 heart by the frightful loneliness of that mid- 
 night sea, and rejoiced when in the struggling 
 starlight he saw a plank carried near him to 
 which was lashed another sufferer. The wave 
 flung the plank beside him, and he gazed upon 
 the features of a corpse ! But the strangest 
 tale was that of one who told that, as he floated 
 amid the darkness, expecting instant death 
 from the lashing surge, he heard the voice of 
 his mother, long since dead, say to him quite 
 distinctly " Johnnie, did you eat sister's grapes ?" 
 And then he recalled, what for long years he 
 had wholly forgotten, that, as a little boy he had 
 been sent by his mother to buy some grapes 
 for a sister dying of consumption, and had 
 eaten them on the way, and told a lie about it ; 
 and the sad reproachful question of his mother 
 had been v/ritten on those pages of memory 
 which are the Book of God, and its letters had 
 gleamed out fitfully under the weird lamp of 
 death. But not one of all these said one word 
 about being moved to repentance at that dread 
 hour. Often indeed the memories of that hour 
 are very partial. One little incident — one 
 childish error or boyish sin — flashes into 
 prominence ; and deadlier and graver crimes 
 are wholly forgotten. " The last thoughts of 
 
DEATH-BED REPENTANCE. 211 
 
 this unhappy man," we read in a recent story, 
 "went back upon his early days; and things 
 which he had passed without thinking of stood 
 before him like his tombstone. None of his 
 recent crimes came back now to his memory to 
 disturb it ; there was time enough after the 
 body for them ; but trifles light as air w^hich 
 had first depraved the mind, and sins whose 
 repetition had made slippery the soul — these, 
 like the alphabet of death, grew plain to him." 
 
 2. Have I not then said enough to show 
 that he who relies for pardon or for penitence 
 upon death and death-beds is leaning all his 
 hopes upon a spider's web ? I do not say that 
 even then there may not come, as there came 
 to that miracle of mercy, the penitent thief upon 
 the cross, pardon and peace even in those 
 dread hours. That one instance is given us 
 that we should not despair ; that one only that 
 we might not presume. Shall I illustrate to 
 you how precarious and how terrible is the 
 dependence on that chance } A boy Avas let 
 down over a cliff in the Hebrides to gather 
 sea-birds' eggs, and while he stood on a ledge 
 of the precipice the rope swung out of his 
 grasp. What should he do Above him was 
 the sheer cliff ; before him the swaying rope ; 
 beneath him the shattering fall and the cruel 
 sea. The rope still swung ; if he sprang to it 
 as it came nearest him he might be saved ; 
 
 O 2 
 
212 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 an instant more and it would be too late. It 
 was one of those instants on whose tremendous 
 resolution depends our fate, and whose blood- 
 curdling agony in one moment turns the young 
 hair white. There was no time to think. He 
 sprang, and he was saved ; but the chances 
 were ten thousand to one that he would have 
 fallen ; that, paralyzed with fright and agony, 
 he would have found impossible the grim 
 resolve. Would you like to leave all to the 
 horror of such a moment Will you risk all 
 on that dangling rope of a death-bed repentance 
 when you stand alone on the precipice of death, 
 and have to leap the awful chasm which is 
 cleft between this world and the world beyond 
 the grave t 
 
 3. Earnestly then would I say to you trust 
 not in death ; trust not in death-beds ; death 
 cannot save you ; a death-bed you may never 
 have ; and if you have a lingering death, it may 
 come in circumstances which render penitence 
 impossible. Trust not in death ; trust not in 
 death-beds — trust in life ; trust in God ; trust on 
 Christ's help in the living present which alone 
 is yours. 
 
 Let your thought of death be rather the 
 present stimulus to repent of your sins, to seek 
 your Saviour. Remember how short your time 
 is. In the fourth century there lived a bad 
 patriarch of Alexandria named Theophictus. 
 
DEATH-BED REPENTANCE. 213 
 
 He had lived for envy, and hatred, and religious 
 intrigue, and for money, and for the world. 
 He had never thought of death, and his last 
 words, just before he sank into the lethargy 
 which terminated many crimes, were these : 
 " Happy wert thou, Abbot Arsenius, to have 
 had this hour constantly before thine eyes." 
 Let the thought of death, so certain to come 
 soon, so uncertain when, lead you to think of 
 the long-suffering of God. Lean on Him. 
 Lean on the love of your Saviour. Think of 
 the value of your soul for which He was nailed 
 to the cross ; and if you fling yourself now, ere 
 it be too late, on His compassion, you will 
 soon learn to regard death not as a terror but 
 as a friend, knowing that " the souls of the right- 
 eous are in the hand of the Lord, and there 
 shall no torment touch them." My friends, if 
 the love of God lead you to repentance, then 
 for you the great work of life is done. " Let 
 the wicked forsake his way, and the unrigh- 
 teous man his thoughts, and turn unto Me and 
 I will have mercy upon him, saith the Lord." 
 Only remember that even trust in God is but 
 presumption, if we are making His love a cloak 
 for iniquity ; and that trust in Christ is itself 
 utterly vain while we are living in glaring 
 opposition to His will. If ye love Me " 
 said Christ, "keep My commandments." If 
 you do despite unto the Spirit of Grace, if you 
 
2 T4 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIEE. 
 
 crucify to yourselves the Son of God afresh, and 
 put Him to an open shame — while you are still 
 doing so, can you still claim His promises as 
 yours ? Was His sacrifice a plenary indulgence, 
 a free permission to commit all uncleanness with 
 greediness ? Love Christ by doing the will of 
 God : seek Him ; surrender to Him your 
 worldly desires and ambitions ; slay for His sake 
 your evil passions ; be sincere in your charity, 
 in your truthfulness, in your holiness ; live 
 above the base conventional standard of the 
 world, and then all the banded powers of Hell 
 shall be reduced to impotence before you. 
 And do not deceive yourself. Perhaps you 
 profess to belong to the so-called religious world } 
 That will not save you. It is as full of envy, 
 malice, falsehood, hatred, as the secular world, 
 only they take more specious forms. Do you 
 fear God } Do you, in deed and truth, love your 
 fellow-men } Are you keeping God's com- 
 mandments } Then you are safe through Christ. 
 Then, but only then. I am amazed at the 
 levity with which men who are violating every 
 commandment of God, often, in the very name 
 of religion, boldly say, " The blood of Jesus 
 Christ, His Son, cleanseth from all sin." My 
 friends, there is no such text. How } you will 
 say. Have we not heard it quoted a thousand 
 times t No such text ? And you will eagerly 
 turn to your Bibles to refute me. Well, turn to 
 
DEATH-BED REPENTANCE, 215 
 
 your Bibles, and read : " If we say that we 
 have fellowship with Him, and walk in the 
 darkness, we lie and do not the truth ; b?it if we 
 walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have 
 felloivship one tvith another, and the blood of 
 Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth from all sin." Ah 
 that is the text — the other is not a text ; it is a 
 fragment. It would be just as senseless to tell 
 you positively *'Ye shall die in your sins," 
 leaving out the conditions " Except ye believe," 
 as it is senseless to say, "The blood of Jesus 
 Christ cleanseth from all sin," leaving out the 
 condition, "If we walk in the light, if we love 
 one another." That is as little a universal 
 promise, as the other is a universal threat. 
 The one is a threat, the other is a promise, 
 dependent on conditions, the avoidance and the 
 fulfilment of which are ot an importance abso- 
 lutely infinite in our human lives. 
 
 4. This, then, I would say in conclusion : See 
 all things, not in the blinding and deceitful 
 glare of the world's noon, but as they will 
 seem when the shadows of life are closing in. 
 At evening the sun seems to loom large on the 
 horizon, while the landscape gradually fades 
 from view ; and then the sunset reveals the 
 infinitude of space crowded with unnumbered 
 worlds, and the firmament glows with living 
 sapphires. Even so, let the presence of God 
 loom large upon the narrow horizon of your 
 
2l6 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 life, and the firmament of your souls glow with 
 the living sapphires of holy thoughts. You 
 may never have a death-bed ; but imagine your- 
 self on a death-bed now. If you were, indeed, 
 stretched on the bed from which you should 
 arise no more, how would all your little in- 
 trigues, all your little frivolities, all your vices, 
 and spites, and enmities, and hatreds, and 
 worldly schemes seem to you then } Would 
 they not shrivel into insignificance } Would 
 they not seem to you small, poverty-stricken, 
 base, as well as evil } What alchemy has 
 death to transmute these into things of eternal 
 value } Two children are sent into the fields 
 to glean among the reapers. The one comes 
 home laden with the ripe golden ears, happy 
 with the results of toil and the sense of duty 
 done ; the other has played, and idled, and 
 chased butterflies, all through the long summer 
 day, and comes back, sick and shamed and 
 fretful and afraid, with nothing in its hand but 
 a few acrid, flaccid, poisonous, withered poppies 
 faded from scarlet into lurid blackness, which 
 have poisoned its blood and stained its hands, 
 and are only fit to fling away as hateful, not 
 only valueless but vile. Which child will your 
 life resemble } I am speaking to some of the 
 young. " Rejoice, oh, young man in thy youth, 
 and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy 
 youth." I believe the advice was given seriously 
 
DEATH- BED REPENTANCE. 217 
 
 not cynically, and in a world " wrapped round 
 with sweet air, and full of sunshine, and abound- 
 ing with knowledge," if you keep innocence you 
 will find much happiness. Only remember " ; 
 remember that the vernal hues of life's sun- 
 shine gleam on the solemn and awful back- 
 ground of the eternal realities. Ah, try how 
 to look at the world and its allurements as 
 they will seem in the last hour ; to look at 
 unlawful pleasure as it shall then seem, not only 
 a disappointing, but a depraving and an en- 
 venomed thing ; to look at the small aims of 
 ambition as they shall seem when they have 
 dwindled into their true paltriness. '* Set your 
 affections on things above, not on things on the 
 earth, for the things which are seen are temporal, 
 but the things which are not seen are eternal." 
 
XV. 
 
 ®t tbc Jnner IReverence of a /iDan for 
 bis own person* 
 
 ** Reverence my sanctuary, I am the Lord." — Lev. xix. 30. 
 
 ftJgJMlHE application which I shall give to 
 these words is absolutely different 
 sii f gM from that in which they were first 
 used, and yet it is absolutely scriptural. I 
 have preached on them once before to point 
 their primary lesson, which is reverence for the 
 consecrated places in which we worship God ; 
 but, in our dispensation, while the primary 
 lesson is emphasized, it is also strengthened by 
 the yet deeper secondary lesson, that the 
 spiritual habitation of the true God is the heart 
 of the Christian man, and that His Holy Spirit 
 loveth "before all temples the upright heart 
 and pure." " Know ye not that your bodies are 
 temples of the Holy Ghost, who dwelleth in 
 you, except ye\ be reprobates " We reverence 
 God's holiest sanctuary when we reverence our- 
 selves. 
 
OF INNER REVERENCE, 
 
 219 
 
 2. It is now many years ago since I first read, 
 while yet a youth, a passage which influenced 
 me very deeply, and which I have always re- 
 garded as one of the noblest passages in English 
 literature. It is " On the Inner Reverence of a 
 Man for his own Person," and occurs in " The 
 Reason of Church Government," one of the 
 prose works of our mighty Puritan poet, John 
 Milton. 
 
 It is as follows : — " And if the love of God, as 
 a fire sent from Heaven to be ever kept alive 
 upon the altar of our hearts, be the first principle 
 of all godly and virtuous actions in men, this 
 pious and just honouring of ourselves is the 
 second, and may be thought as the fountain- 
 head whence every laudable and worthy enter- 
 prise issues forth ; and, although I have given it 
 the name of a Hquid thing, yet it is not incon- 
 tinent to bind itself, as humid things are, but 
 hath in it a most restraining and powerful 
 abstinence to start back, and globe itself up- 
 ward from the mixture of any ungenerous and 
 unbeseeming motion, or any soil wherewith it 
 may peril to stain itself Something I confess 
 it is to be ashamed of evil-doing in the presence 
 of any ; and to reverence the opinion and coun- 
 tenance of a good man rather than a bad, fearing 
 most in his sight to offend, goes so far as almost 
 to be virtuous ; yet this is but stiil the fear of 
 infamy, and many such, when they find them- 
 
220 
 
 EVERY DA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 selves alone, saving their reputation, will com- 
 pound with other samples, and come to a close 
 treaty with their dearer vices. But he that 
 holds himself in reverence and due esteem, both 
 for the dignity of God's image upon him, and 
 for the price of his redemption, which he thinks 
 is visibly marked upon his forehead, thinks 
 himself both a fit person to do the noblest and 
 godliest deeds, and much better worth than to 
 deject and defile, with such a debasement and 
 pollution as sin is, himself, so highly ransomed 
 and ennobled to a new friendship and fiUal 
 relation with God. Nor can he fear so much 
 the offence and reproach of others as he dreads 
 and would blush at the reflexion of his own 
 severe and modest eye upon himself, if it should 
 see him doing or imagining that which is sinful, 
 though in the deepest secrecy." In that passage, 
 my friends, and in the truths on which it is 
 based, I see the inmost secret of a noble life. 
 
 3. Oh, if all men and women, in early youth 
 especially, could but draw in the full rich meaning 
 of this thought, and make it their own, what 
 a safeguard might it be to themx ! Myriads have 
 hung round their necks what they thought to be 
 the relics of saints, or fragments of the true 
 cross, just as the Mohammedan wears scraps of 
 the Qur'^n, and the Jew puts texts into his 
 phylacteries. Useless and superstitious are all 
 such prophylactics ; but the youth or the 
 
OF INNER REVERENCE. 
 
 221 
 
 maiden, who has taken into the soul some en- 
 nobling truth, has an amulet which is better 
 than any ornament of grace, and shall enable 
 them to walk unscathed amid the fire of many 
 a fierce temptation. Such an amulet would I 
 fain hang around their necks to-day. Last 
 Sunday I held up before you a great principle 
 of action towards others, and asked you to gaze 
 with me upon its lustre — the jewel of Honour 
 all men ; " to-day I would ask you to accept 
 another and no less precious amulet — the jewel 
 of Self-respect. 
 
 4. If you consider, you will find that there is 
 scarcely a sin which does not concentrate into 
 itself the venom of many sins. In every sin 
 there is a triple taint : it is sinfulness against God, 
 wdiose law it violates ; against our neighbour, 
 whom it inevitably injures ; against ourselves, 
 whom it destroys. But the reason why every 
 sin is thus a threefold cord of iniquity is because 
 the Tabernacle of God is with men ; so that, in 
 every act of sin, we sin against Him by defiling 
 His Temple ; against ourselves, by desecrating 
 the inner sanctity of His Being ; against others, 
 because they too are His living sanctuaries. 
 When the great American orator, Daniel 
 Webster, ^vas asked what thought impressed 
 him most by its sublimity, he answered, " The 
 thought of my immediate accountability to 
 God." But it is a form of this thought yet more 
 
EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 impressive to feel that God is with us and in 
 us ; that every sin against ourselves, that every 
 sin against our brother-man, is also a sin com- 
 mitted in His very presence-chamber, and there- 
 fore also a sin committed against Him. In this 
 point of view every sin becomes a sacrilege 
 within the very veil of the Holy of Holies, which 
 is the sanctuary of our inner being. 
 
 5. Among the many aspects in which sin may 
 be regarded, I know none more solemnly pre- 
 servative than this. Sin should be hateful to us, 
 should be impossible to us ; we should, if our 
 hearts were but right with God, shrink from it 
 as a degradation. How can I do this great 
 wickedness^ and sin against God ?" asked the 
 pure and lovely youth, who stands on the page 
 of Scripture as the eternal type of youth's 
 victory over the deadly glamour of sensual 
 temptation. " How can I ? " Oh, that every 
 youth would ask the same ! How can I so sink 
 as to sin against God, even my God ? How can 
 I sin against myself, against the majesty of my 
 own convictions, against the dignity of my own 
 nature, against the sacredness of my own life, 
 against God's great and holy angels of Reason 
 and Conscience, who hold me by the hand ? In 
 sinning against myself, I sin not against a mere 
 handful of dust, a mere creature of clay, but 
 against everything which is majestic, eternal, 
 and divine j against light, against the Holy 
 
OF INNER REVERENCE. 
 
 223 
 
 Spirit, against the Lord Jesus my Saviour, 
 against the eternal Lord of all my life. The 
 Hebrew boy could say it, who knew nothing 
 of the Incarnation and the Resurrection ; how 
 much more ought we to say it — we to whom 
 God has spoken in His Son, and has revealed 
 the secret of the ages — that mystery "where 
 God in man is one with man in God ? " 
 6. A living poet has said — 
 
 Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
 These three alone lead life to sovran power. 
 
 It is most true. Self-reverence depends upon 
 self-knowledge, and leads to self-control, and 
 these are the elements of true greatness. Let 
 us sweep aside the world^s estimate of greatness. 
 The puppetries'of wealth and rank, the pretentious 
 dignities of a little brief authority have no place 
 here. Our smart apparel, our small pomposities, 
 our little lordships — at one touch of Death's 
 finger how do they shrivel and vanish into a 
 nothing less than nothing ; only the inherent 
 grandeur of the bare soul remains, and a pauper's 
 may be far grander than a king's. The world 
 has deified mere insects, just as Egypt worshipped 
 beetles and crocodiles. It has put the diadem 
 on brows that should have had the branding-iron, 
 and thrown the purple over shoulders that 
 deserved the whip. The world bows to Dives, 
 and Nero, and Caiaphas ; but true humanity 
 
224 
 
 EVERY DA y CHRIST LAN LIFE. 
 
 knows them not, and true praise spurns them. 
 Measure life by the measure of a man, that is of 
 an angel, and you will find that the divinest 
 souls have been swayed, more than all, by the 
 inner reverence for their own personality; by the 
 awful sanctity of their own being ; by the honour 
 they have felt, not for their own poor gifts or 
 acquisitions, but for themselves as in Christ, as 
 being partakers of the Divine in the essential 
 nature which God gave them ; as being a little 
 lower than the angels, and as souls for which 
 Christ died. 
 
 7. Now I might proceed to tell you cate- 
 gorically that this inner reverence of a man for 
 his own person produces this or that quality. 
 But — though I may be wrong — it seems to me 
 that such truths may sometimes come more 
 clearly home to you in the concrete than in the 
 abstract. Our Lord, when he spoke to the 
 multitudes in parables, was thus throwing 
 abstract truth into the concrete ; was embody- 
 ing it in tales ; was illustrating it by the lives of 
 men. One at least of His parables — that of the 
 pounds — was merely a leaf from the life and 
 adventures of King Herod Archelaus ; and it 
 was the same probably with others of them. 
 To the Son of Man, and to Him alone, was it 
 given to enshrine multitudes of eternal truths in a 
 few brief touches to move men's hearts for ever. 
 But, though we cannot invent parables, we too 
 
OF INNER REVERENCE, 
 
 may tear leaves from God's great books of bio- 
 graphy and history, and get help from them to 
 learn the lessons of our Master, Christ. And I 
 would thus show this morning how this high 
 reverence for our own being lifts men above 
 temptation — how the absence of it, or unfaithful- 
 ness to it, plunges them in vice and shame. 
 
 8. For instance, self-reverence results in the 
 preservation of innocence, of perfect childlike 
 innocence in men — " the heart of childhood taken 
 up and glorified into the powers of manhood," 
 " the young lamb's heart amid the full-grown 
 flocks." This is one of the loveliest, if not 
 always the most instructive, forms of human 
 character. Let me give you some instances of 
 men in whose pure lives reigned this lovely self- 
 respect. You all know the "soft, silent, pathetic 
 pictures" of Fra Angelico; the angel faces which 
 he saw in his visions ; the heavenly scenes which 
 he reproduced in colours bathed in the sunlight 
 of peace, delicate and radiant as the hues of 
 heaven. That dewy freshness could only come 
 from inmost purity of heart in one who walked 
 with God ; who in his sweet humble cell heard 
 the melodies of angels, who caught glimpses of 
 their waving robes under the olive trees of 
 Fesole, and who in the splendours of sunset 
 saw their rushing wings. "^There have been 
 painters — alas! not a few of them — who could 
 
 * See Ruskin's "Modern Painters," ii. 132, and passim. 
 
 P 
 
236 
 
 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 paint nothing good; but only blood, and vice, 
 and horror, and the guzzlings of the tavern. 
 This painter could not paint evil. Set him to 
 paint devils, or cruel men, or low scenes, or base 
 faces — his hand drops and fails ; such evil was 
 not in him. The serpent had not slunk into his 
 Eden, nor the croucher at the door bounded 
 into his monastic cell. He would never paint 
 for money — what was money to a poor monk 
 who lived in heaven ? He would not accept the 
 Archbishopric of Florence — what were Arch- 
 bishoprics to one who saw God's face ? We had 
 such another painter in our English William 
 Blake, with his childlike innocent soul, and the 
 indefinable purity and sweetness of his designs 
 and of his songs. He was very poor — but what 
 was poverty to one who in the dawn saw an 
 innumerable host of angels praising God, and 
 whose pure abode was full of heaven } We had 
 yet another such a man in the poet Wordsworth. 
 In that sweet lowly cottage among its trees by 
 Rydal Lake, he envied no title, and no palace, 
 and no riches: was it not a truer and loftier 
 happiness to commune with the sights and sounds 
 of Nature in perfect peace, careless of personal 
 talk, believing in mankind, ''far from the madding 
 crowd's ignoble strife ? " And this it was which 
 enabled him to be indifferent to the ignorant 
 brutalities of base criticism, secure in the blessed 
 conviction that his works would co-operate with. 
 
OF INNER REVERENCE. 
 
 227 
 
 every beneficent influence in human life, and 
 that he "had added sunlight to daylight by 
 making the happy happier." Such lives are free 
 from the taint of vice and baseness ; the trail of 
 the serpent is not over them ; they pour silent 
 contempt on ambition and on gold. 
 
 9. Again, this self-reverence, even when it has 
 failed to produce an absolute innocence, may 
 yet lead to the repentance of intense conviction. 
 If it have not kept a soul from lying for a 
 moment among the dust and potsherds of a 
 sensuous life, it can yet uplift it from them, and 
 give it the wings of a dove, which is covered 
 with silver wings, and its feathers like gold. So 
 it was with Dante. Probably no man ever lived 
 who felt a haughtier estimate of the grandeur of 
 his own individuality. The true symbol of him 
 is his own crest — a wing on an azure field. I 
 think of him walking through his later life, like 
 his own angel in the Inferno," utterly disdainful 
 of all vileness and foulness, waving away from 
 his face the gross air of the poisonous marsh. 
 With what brief marvellous touches does he 
 show his scorn for the littlenesses and basenesses 
 in which many so habitually live. Inthe" Inferno" 
 he represents himself as lingering, for one 
 moment, to listen to the coarse quarrel and 
 mutual abuse of two lost souls ; but when Virgil 
 says to him, rebukingly, "A moment more and 
 I shall be displeased at thee," he feels over- 
 
 P 2 
 
228 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 whelmed with shame at the mere momentary 
 littleness which made him take interest in such 
 vulgarities. Alas ! we have sunk far below 
 Dante ; and such vulgarities are to many men 
 in these days as the breath of their nostrils. It 
 was this scorn of meanness, this stateliness of 
 soul, this fastidious refusal to dwell on the record 
 of things foul and personal, which made Dante 
 a " soul awful, if this world has ever held an awful 
 soul." Can you imagine Dante poring over the 
 miserable details of a matrimonial disgrace t or 
 mistaking for history the ribaldries of personal 
 dispute } or taking part in the unbridled exhi- 
 bitions of vulgar animosity t He was as incapable 
 of a coarse statesmanship as of a base prurience. 
 He breathed a more empyreal atmosphere, and 
 
 Darker are the abodes 
 Of Kings, tho' his be poor, 
 While fancies like the gods* 
 Pass thro' the door ! 
 
 Oh ! compare him with the poets who, instead 
 of this inspiring sense of the supreme realities, 
 have been content to pander to thevilest passions. 
 Even great poets have flung unhallowed incense 
 upon the vestal flames of genius, and some of 
 them, like Chaucer and Burns, have had to weep 
 bitter, burning, ineffectual tears of remorse as 
 they called to mind that it would remain their 
 curse for ever to have pandered to corruption, 
 and increased thereby the degradation of man- 
 
OF INNER REVERENCE. 229 
 
 kind. Dante teaches us, as few have taught 
 us, that even in distress, and failure, and ruin, 
 a man may still be conscious that he was made 
 in God's image, after His likeness. 
 
 10. I will take but one more illustration of 
 self-respect as the basis of moral nobleness — that 
 of him who wrote the grand words with which I 
 introduced this sermon. We have seen that it 
 is the amulet of innocence ; we have seen that it 
 is the crown of moral renovation ; it is also the 
 column of an unconquerable fortitude. Milton, 
 like Dante, was a man from whom all the brave, 
 and the pure and good may learn — a character 
 of virginal purity and angelic strength, who, 
 sitting, like Marius, amid the ruins of his life, 
 could even there overawe his raging foes. I 
 rejoice greatly that he was closely connected 
 with this church. His best-loved wife and infant 
 child lie buried here ; his name is recorded on 
 our marriage register. St. Margaret's stands 
 very near the home of his later years, and here 
 he must have sometimes worshipped with Crom- 
 well, and Vane, and Hampden. I rejoice that 
 the well-counselled munificence of one of the 
 generous and public-spirited sons of America — 
 my friend, Mr. George Childs, of Philadelphia — 
 is about to give us a splendid window in this 
 church to his memory. For he is a model of manly 
 dignity; and (as has well been said) **his elevation 
 is connected with his pureness, since pureness 
 
230 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 and kindness are the two signal virtues, the two 
 mighty wings of Christianity, with which it win- 
 nowed and renewed, and still winnows and renews, 
 theworld ." It was from this noble chastity that came 
 the "glow and mighty eloquence" of his writings ; 
 that something of indescribably heroic and mag- 
 nificent which always overflows from him, which 
 enabled him, as it were, *'to wrap us in a fold of 
 his robe, and to carry us away with him to the 
 eternal region where is his home." It was from 
 this self-reverence that comes his supreme note 
 of distinction and gravity, his constancy and 
 perseverance, his contempt of everything mean 
 and sordid, his indifference to celebrity, the 
 grandeur of a poverty and a misfortune to which 
 kings might have bowed in reverence, " the 
 energy kept in its high and spacious armoury until 
 the signal of action sounded." These are above 
 the comprehension of petty minds ; they are 
 above the comprehension, as they are above the 
 gaze, of noisy drummers in their caps and 
 tassels ; ^' but they teach the true glory of self- 
 respect to those who to the weeds and brambles 
 of the wilderness prefer the palms and cedars of 
 Paradise. I cannot speak further of him now 
 than to say that, if Shakespeare surpassed him, 
 as he surpassed all men in his myriad-minded 
 and oceanic genius, yet Milton was the purer, 
 and the rarer, and the nobler in his stainless 
 manhood. Read the sonnets of Shakespeare, 
 
OF INNER REVERENCE. 
 
 and then read the sonnets of Milton. Every 
 sonnet of Milton is an organ note of lofty music 
 of which some might seem worthy to be chanted 
 amid the swinging censers of the seraphim ; but 
 in reading the sonnets of Shakespeare, rich and 
 tender as they are, we sometimes fear lest haply 
 the place whereon we are standing should be 
 unholy ground. If it were Milton's intellectual 
 limitation, was it not a;so his heroic grandeur, 
 that he could not have reproduced a Falstaff, 
 and that for that " foul grey-haired iniquity " 
 he would have had no other words than those of 
 Henry V. : 
 
 I know thee not, oid man : fall to thy prayers ; 
 How ill white hairs become a fool and jester I 
 I have long dreamed of such a kind of man, 
 So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane; 
 But being awake T do despise my dream. 
 
 Once again, I do not apologize for bringing 
 before you such names, such examples. They 
 are just as sacred^ just as instructive, as the 
 names of Joseph and Daniel ; for are they not 
 children of that Kingdom of Heaven, the least 
 of whose children, Christ said, is, in privileges, 
 greater than the greatest of the old dispensation t 
 The youth of this day, so given to self-indul- 
 gence and to frivolity; the middle classes of this 
 day, so immersed in the dusty whirl of greedy 
 and struggling competitions ; the society of this 
 
232 EVER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 day, too often a pleonasm of vanity and empti- 
 ness, needs such examples of pure aims and 
 noble lives. 
 
 " Thou shalt reverence my sanctuary." Augus- 
 tine gives the inmost meaning of the exhorta- 
 tion, when he says " Dost wish to worship in a 
 temple ? Worship in thyself ; but first be thou a 
 temple of the Lord." That is what these our 
 loftier brothers did, and what they were. But 
 to end, my friends, you know that it is not 
 Dante or Milton, or any saint, who can in any 
 way otherwise than by silent far-off example 
 help or raise us. It cost more to redeem our 
 souls, so that they must let that alone for ever. 
 We gaze at them sometimes, just as sometimes 
 we gaze at the reflexion of the stars in the 
 water, or the refraction of the sunbeams through 
 the evening clouds. But the source of all 
 earthly life is the sun ; and the source of all 
 spiritual life is the Sun of righteousness, risen 
 upon us with healing in His wings. If we look 
 at even the noblest men it is but to see how 
 they reflected some one ray of His glory. If 
 they learnt that high respect for themselves — 
 that inward reverence for their own persons — 
 it was because they had learnt that He was 
 with them and in them ; that He dwelt with 
 them and walked in them ; that His awful yet 
 gentle eye was on all their actions ; that they 
 could enter no darkness of secrecy so deep as 
 
OF INNER REVERENCE. 
 
 233 
 
 should hide them from the Hght of His Holy 
 Spirit in their hearts. They estimated the 
 grandeur of their human nature — the duty of 
 respecting it in themselves and in others — from 
 the triple fact that He took our nature upon 
 Him ; that He valued it at a price so awful as 
 to die for it ; that He has enthroned it in the 
 Godhead for ever at the right hand of the 
 Majesty on High. That, and not the questions 
 which fill the minds of Christians with mutual 
 bitterness — that, the triple faith in the Incar- 
 nate, the Crucified, the Risen Christ — is the 
 Alpha and the Omega of all Christianity which 
 is in the least degree worth the name. It is the 
 secure foundation for the two rules, " Reverence 
 thyself," " Honour all men," of which the first is 
 the basis of all personal dignity, and the second 
 of all wise and holy conduct towards our brother- 
 man. 
 
XVL 
 
 fDonour all /lDen» 
 
 "Honour all men." — i Peter, ii. 17. 
 
 N the brief sermon of a Communion 
 Sunday I cannot hope to bring before 
 you the depth and many-sided signifi- 
 cance of this casual utterance of two words in 
 the Epistle for to-day. Scripture has multitudes 
 of such gems. I can but hold up this to you 
 for a few moments^ though I despair of showing 
 you its full depth of lustre. 
 
 I. I hold that no rule could be put into 
 human language which is of more value than 
 this in guiding the method of our dealings with 
 our brother-men. It points to that principle 
 which our Lord said was the Law and the 
 Prophets — was in other words the summary of 
 Scripture — namely, " Whatsoever ye would that 
 men should do unto you, even so do unto them." 
 Those who go to Christ, and not to custom for 
 their view of that which is essential in religion, 
 know the infinitesimal value of profession and 
 
HONOUR ALL MEN. 
 
 235 
 
 ceremonies, beside the great law of love to our 
 neighbour. A great deal that calls itself 
 religion ; that mixes itself up with religion ; 
 that regards itself as the championship and 
 mainstay of religion, is of high value in its own 
 estimation ; only it knows nothing of fairness 
 or kindness, only it tramples habitually on the 
 law of love. And then you may gild crosses 
 upon its altars, and weave symbolic figures upon 
 its ephods, and enthrone it in all the pomposity 
 of usurpation over the conscience and the rights 
 of man ; nevertheless, it is then of no more 
 worth than the small dust of the balance. Not 
 so with the new commandment, the royal law of 
 Christ. That law rests not on the crumbling 
 basis of varying ordinances, nor on the tottering 
 foundation of disputable traditions, but on the 
 foundation of broad eternal truths, on the foun- 
 dation of Christ Himself. For we cannot under- 
 stand either why or how we should honour all 
 men unless we know what this meaneth, " The 
 Word became flesh." 
 
 2. " Honour all men." There is a strange 
 universality about the precept. All but the 
 brutish understand the duty of giving honour 
 where honour is due; all but the vile honour 
 those whose lives are beautiful with the beauty 
 of holiness and noble with the nobleness of 
 God. But are we to honour the mean, the base, 
 the despicable, the depraved 1 Ay ! there, my 
 
236 
 
 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 friends, lies the deepest meaning of the rule : 
 their dishonour, their depravity, their baseness 
 we honour not ; but we honour the majesty of 
 their nature even in its fall. As Michael Angelo 
 sees in the rough block of marble the winged 
 angel struggling to be free ; as Flaxman, walking 
 in the slums, sees the beauties and possibilities 
 of the ''human face divine" even under the dirt 
 and squalor of the gutter-child, even so with 
 pity and reverence the true Christian sees even in 
 the lowest the marred work of Him who breathed 
 into man's nostrils the breath of life. In the most 
 fallen of the children of men he still honours 
 the immortality which seemed so priceless to 
 the Lord of Glory, that, for the sake of it, He 
 descended step by step to the lowest round of 
 the infinite abyss, died for it upon the Cross, 
 united it with the Godhead for ever, and took 
 it up to the right hand of the Majesty on High. 
 
 3. ''Honour all men." Alas! as life goes on, 
 it is more and more our temptation to honour 
 no man. I appeal to every one of you who has 
 mingled much with the world, whether all your 
 faith in human nature has not often seemed to 
 be shaken to its foundations. How large a part 
 is played in the world by unfairness and 
 intrig ie ! By what hollow idols of the cave, the 
 foruni, and the theatre the opinions of men are 
 ruled 1 how, in all but the few noblest souls, we 
 detect, behind the pompous sanctuaries of pro- 
 
HONOUR ALL MEN. 
 
 237 
 
 fession and the assembly rooms of conventional 
 morality, the little hidden chambers of mean- 
 ness, where all the baser work of life is done in 
 secret ! How rare is absolute truthfulness ! How 
 subtle the taint of selfishness ! How venomous 
 the claw with which the sick beast of envy 
 strikes ! And I would ask every student of his- 
 tory among you whether he, too, has not shud- 
 dered at the blood-stained and lust-polluted 
 annals of mankind, with their innumerable tales 
 of misery and death. 
 
 4. Nor can we be surprised, our human nature 
 being what it is, if even good and great men 
 have succumbed at times to the fatal temptation 
 of despairing of humanity. Such has often been 
 the judgment of practical men of the world, 
 whom experience has confirmed in disbelief of 
 goodness. " Every man has his price," said Sir 
 Robert Walpole, Prime Minister of England 
 for more than twenty years. It is not true, but 
 he had seen enough of evil to make him think 
 it true. "There is something not wholly dis- 
 pleasing to us in the misfortunes of our best 
 friends," said La Rochefoucauld. It is not 
 true, but he had seen enough to justify 
 the odious imputation. 01 -kKuoviq KaKoi — " Most 
 men are bad : " there is the summary of the 
 Greek philosopher, who deliberately left it as 
 the maxim of his wisdom. It is not true, we 
 hope, but there is a dreadful amount of evidence 
 
238 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 to be urged for it. And many others have 
 spoken similarly. There is the conclusion of 
 depravity — a Nero, a Heliogabalus avowing 
 their distinct conviction that not one man is 
 pure. There is the scorn of Cynicism — Diogenes 
 searching Athens for a man, and beating away 
 those who came to him as not men but 
 appetites. Even in Scripture, there is the 
 Psalmist saying, in his haste, that " all men are 
 liars/' There is the heartrending cry of the 
 Prophet, that, in all Jerusalem, he cannot find 
 one who is righteous. There is the gloomy 
 pessimism and repellent misogyny of Eccle- 
 siastes, that though in a thousand he might 
 find one good man, he had not found one good 
 woman. These sweeping generalizations are 
 not true, some of them are hideously false ; yet 
 they do correspond to a large series of pheno- 
 mena, and, if we have no faith to redress the 
 balance, man becomes indeed a thing of 
 naught. Miserable they, and not without fault 
 themselves, who have met with nothing whereby 
 to correct such experiences ; and yet there is so 
 much superficial evidence for them, that more 
 than one of the noblest of our race has died 
 with the bitter declaration that men were not 
 worth their immense self-sacrifice. Take the 
 case of Roger Bacon, one of the finest of human 
 intellects. The greatest man by far of the 
 thirteenth century, his genius anticipated the 
 
HONOUR ALL MEN. 
 
 239 
 
 discoveries of 500 years. What was his reward ? 
 It was the reward of Isaiah, and all the greatest 
 prophets of mankind ; the reward of Huss, and 
 all the greatest reformers ; the reward of Galileo, 
 and all the greatest men of science ; the reward 
 of Origen, and all the greatest saints, to whom, 
 like Athanasius, the world and the professing 
 Church left "no friend but God and death, 
 the one a defender of his innocency, the other 
 a finisher of all his troubles." What shall 
 I say } It was that reward which mankind, led 
 by its Priests and Pharisees, gave to the Son of 
 Man, and which mankind, led by its Priests and 
 Pharisees, has always given during their Hfetime 
 to its greatest and its best. Roger Bacon had the 
 deep misfortune to be surrounded all his life 
 long by monks and priests, who took for infalli- 
 bility their own narrow ignorance, and for 
 religion their own deplorable superstition ; and 
 who, by giving to his toils the sole recompense 
 of torture, persecution, and imprisonment, 
 quenched in misery and tears the light which 
 God had kindled, and forced a man, as much 
 greater than themselves as Chimborazo is 
 above an ant-hill, to die with the despairing 
 utterance that men were not worth striving for. 
 Heaven's great are constantly slandered by 
 earth's little. The world sends its chosen jury 
 into the witness box, and, while rogues get on 
 exceedingly well with them, what chance have 
 
240 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 Christian and Faithful? ''The man is a 
 heretic," says Mr. Blindman. "Away with 
 such a fellow," says Mr. Nogood. "Ay," said 
 Mr. Malice, " for I hate the very looks of him." 
 Then said Mr. Lovelust, '' I never could endure 
 him." "Nor I," said j\Ir. Liveloose, **for he 
 would always be condemning my way." " Hang 
 him, hang him!" said Mr. Ready. "A sorry 
 scrub," said Mr. Highniind. ''My heart riseth 
 against him," said Mr. Enmity. " He is a 
 rogue," said Mr. Liar. Then said Mr. Implaca- 
 ble, " Let us forthwith bring him in guilty of 
 death." And all these sad and bitter ex- 
 periences are summed up in the De profiuidis of 
 our greatest English intellect, shocked at man's 
 perversions amid God's holy order : "Tired with 
 all these for restful death I cry." 
 
 5. And yet, my friends, in spite of this weight 
 of authority and evidence, it would be fatal to 
 us ; fatal to the hope by which we are saved, 
 and which is as a vernal breeze amid poisonous 
 fogs ; fatal to the glad enthusiasm which leaps 
 up like a fountain amid the briny waves and 
 corrupted currents of the world ; fatal to the 
 spring and elasticity of all regenerative efforts 
 for mankind, if we should come to despise or 
 despair of either ourselves or our brother man. 
 In spite of all these facts and this evidence we 
 would say with a living writer : " I trust in the 
 nobleness of human nature, in the majesty of 
 
nONOUR ALL MEK. 
 
 241 
 
 its faculties, in the fulness of its mei'cy, in the 
 joy of its love." The Roman Senate never did 
 a nobler act, than when, after the stupendous 
 defeat of Cannae, they went out to meet and 
 thank the defeated general, because he had not 
 despaired of the Republic. Even so should all 
 humanity thank the humble martyrs, the 
 obscure benefactors, the unfamous faithful, who, 
 amid toil and obloquy, defrauded of justice, 
 hopeless of reward, deluged with ingratitude, 
 have yet believed in the redeemableness of their 
 brother men. They teach us to look to 
 humanity in its ideal, not in its degradation ; 
 in its angelhood, not in its pollution. Even in 
 the vilest they see, as Christian saw, the living 
 soul. They judge of manhood by its saints and 
 heroes, not at all by its " men-slugs and human 
 serpentry." Surely we too have seen, and not 
 so rarely, the light of pure love on human 
 faces, the bloom of modesty, the glow of 
 sympathy. If I want to know what a rose is, 
 I do not judge it by some withering and 
 cankered specimen, with the aphides crawling 
 over its decay, and the worm gnawing at its 
 root ; and, if I want to see what man is, I do 
 not judge him by the pale and blighted victim 
 of his ow^n basest appetites, I do not look for 
 him in the squalid youths who loaf and smoke 
 at the doors of the ginshop. I as little judge 
 of men by the liar and the debauchee, as of 
 
 Q 
 
242 
 
 EVER YD A Y CHRIS 7^1 AN LIFE. 
 
 women by the slattern or the harlot. Ah God ! 
 what could we think of humanity if we had no 
 specimens but these to judge by ? No ! but I 
 judge of men and women in the ideal of what 
 they might be ; in the pure and good, when I 
 see them walking in the light of the Lord ; — yes, 
 and we may judge them by all that is purest 
 and best in our own hearts, if so be that there is 
 aught in them of good or pure. 
 
 6. "Honour all men!" Has it never struck 
 you how marvellous is the fact that words so 
 noble, so far-reaching, should be quite casually 
 uttered by this poor Jew — this Galilean fisher- 
 man — unlearned, ignorant, new from his fishing- 
 boat, and with his clothes all wringing wet," and 
 writing only to handfuls of slaves and artisans ? 
 Strange that, in the most incidental way, he 
 should utter a rule which shows deeper wisdom 
 than that of the greatest philosophers and the 
 keenest nations of the world ! Look at the 
 brilliant Greeks : they despised all the rest of 
 the world but themselves as natural barbarians. 
 Look at the Romans: it was regarded as a piece 
 of exceptional nobleness when Seneca pleaded 
 that slaves after all were men like ourselves. 
 Look at the Jews : they scornfully repudiated 
 the whole Gentile world. Look at the classes 
 which were regarded as most religious and en- 
 lightened : the Priests and Pharisees, thinking 
 that all salvation lay in their rituals and phylac- 
 
HONOUR ALL MEN. 
 
 243 
 
 teries, said, " This multitude, that knoweth not 
 the law, are accursed." Look at Voltaire and 
 his fellow Encyclopaedists, talking of the many 
 as the canaille," and describing them as a 
 mixture of bears and apes. But here is the 
 poor Galilean peasant — nobler than the haughti- 
 est votaries of all these religions and all these 
 philosophies — who, in words of lofty teaching, 
 rebukes them all, puts them all to the blush, 
 and, scourged as he had been, and hated, and 
 buffeted, doomed to die at last by some hideous 
 death — so far from swerving in disgust or in 
 despair from his great divine ideal — yet says, 
 with magnificent conviction, of the race against 
 which his whole life was a struggle — of the race 
 whose rulers were a Herod, a Nero, a Caiaphas 
 — and among whom he had seen a Judas and a 
 Simon Magus — Honour all men ! " 
 
 7. Honour all men !" Had that rule been 
 followed, what a different world should we have 
 seen in the past ! Every great crime of govern- 
 ments and of nations has been a crime against 
 the inherent rights of the human race. Slaver\% 
 with its corruptions and cruelties ; despotism, 
 trampling on helpless populations ; priestcraft, 
 usurping man's indefeasible privilege of imme- 
 diate access to God ; inquisitors, fettering the 
 inherent and eternal freedom of human souls ; 
 conquerors, leading myriads of human beings 
 to be slaughtered at their will — have but com- 
 
 o 2 
 
EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 mitted these crimes because they honoured, 
 not men, but only their own boundless pride and 
 brutal selfishness. Ah ! how different had 
 history been if Pharisees, and Priests, and Kings 
 had recognized that " mankind has a nobler 
 destiny than to be made the footstool of a few 
 families;" that ''we are one great brotherhood 
 with one great object, the free development of 
 our spiritual nature;" that "mankind has but 
 one single aim, mankind itself ; and that aim 
 but one single instrument, mankind again." 
 And if St. Peter's rule were followed now, how 
 different a world should we see in the present! 
 Do we never break it ? Do we not see it broken 
 every day and in every manner t Walk into 
 some shameful thoroughfare at night, and in 
 those pale diseased faces under the gaslight, in 
 that awful heartbroken multitude of the fallen — 
 estimate the deadliness of the crime of those 
 who sin against God's image and destroy His 
 living temples ! In lowering the humanity of 
 others, and their own, to the level of their own 
 vilest appetites, do they not sin most grievously 
 against the majestic sacredness of that nature 
 for which Christ died } Look at the drunkard 
 in his degradation — so inexpressibly foolish in 
 one phase of his self-destruction, in another 
 so inexpressibly brutal. Look again at the 
 bitterness of controversy, both political and 
 religious, which sticks at no falsity in the one 
 
HO X OUR ALL MEN. 
 
 ^45 
 
 base desire to injure an opponent. What right 
 have men who know the holy dignity of man- 
 hood to disgrace it by using such weapons ? 
 This sort of invective may have its charm for 
 base readers and base writers, but I would say 
 of it, 
 
 He had never kindly heart, 
 
 Nor ever cared to better his own kind, 
 
 Who first wrote satire w4th no pity in it. 
 
 Men pity those who are subject to it. I rather 
 pity those who are guilty of it. Let me give 
 you an instance. This age has seen no man 
 more courageously upright than Abraham Lin- 
 coln, the martyred President of America, who 
 saved that mighty nation from its worst stain 
 of slavery. Yet he was assailed so savagely 
 by the blind and brutal malice of partisans, 
 that, after reading one of the shameful attacks 
 upon him, he is recorded to have said — 
 Well, Abraham Lincoln, are you a man, or 
 are you a dog " Could men stab each other 
 thus blindly and furiously in the dark, if they 
 had admitted into their minds the least glimpse 
 of those high truths which filled the soul of 
 St. Peter, when he wrote to those poor and 
 humble Christians — hated and persecuted as 
 they were — " Honour all men " t 
 
 8. I have no time to enter further on this high 
 rule, which, as it precludes some of the deadliest 
 crimes against humanity, so binds us to some of 
 
246 
 
 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 our loveliest duties. The spirit of the rule 
 might help us to renounce alike great sins and 
 little vices. Only, in conclusion, let me beg you 
 not merely to hear this rule, but to study it ; 
 not only to walk away with trivial criticisms of 
 a sermon, but to walk away with deeper desire 
 to be true to a divine law of life. 
 
 " Honour all men !" — their inherent dignity, 
 the infinite possibilities of their nature, their 
 freedom of conscience, the awful price of their 
 redemption, their immediate accountability to 
 God. While this honour leads us to deep 
 reverence for all human goodness, let it inspire 
 us also with such hope and compassion, as shall 
 feel none to be too low, too fallen for our 
 pity or our help. " Honour all men " — and we 
 cannot then be guilty of the contempt which is 
 the ill-humour of egotism ; the ill-manners which 
 spring from selfishness ; the offensive patronage 
 which is a mark of vanity ; the churlishness 
 which comes of savagery and pride. I know 
 men — men of high distinction — whose manners 
 could only be described as surly and churlish. 
 One might call them able men ; but no one, 
 without gross flattery, could call them gentle- 
 men. For they know nothing whatever of 
 gentle deeds. And this true honour for man's 
 nature would affect not our action only butr^ur 
 speech. It will save us from all those thousands 
 of forms of sin against Christ's new command- 
 
II ox OUR ALL MEN. 
 
 247 
 
 ment, against God's eternal law of love, by 
 virtue of which still, as in the past, 
 
 Man is to man the sorest surest ill. 
 
 We can learn all this best by looking at 
 Christ. Let us see humanity in Him, and it 
 will be indeed transfigured with heavenly lustre. 
 We can learn the lesson best at His table — for 
 the Lord's Supper is a Communion, a Holy 
 Communion, a Communion with these and with 
 one another in Him ; and if we meet there, in 
 true and humble brotherhood, we may carry 
 thence such lessons as shall make our lives 
 nobler, sweeter, more according to the measure 
 of a man, by breathing into all our dealings with 
 one another that love, joy, peace, long-suffering, 
 gentleness, goodness, which are the fruits of the 
 Spirit, and against which there is no law. 
 
XVII. 
 
 Counsels to tbe BefeateD. 
 
 " Be not deceived ; God is not mocked." — Gal, vi. 7. 
 " Fear not." — Luke ii. 10. 
 
 E have been dwelling for the last two 
 Sundays on the subject of effort 
 against sin — the struggle with the 
 lion-monsters of wickedness, both in the world 
 and in our own hearts. But there are many 
 whose temptation it has become to say, It is 
 useless to talk to me of effort ; effort for me is 
 vain. I have been fighting against sin all my 
 life, and it has all been to no purpose. In spite 
 of the best that I could do, I am a defeated 
 man. If ever there was a time in innocent 
 childhood, in bright youth, when I might have 
 strangled the lion of temptation, that day is past 
 for me. Now I am ''tied and bound with the 
 chain of my sins.^'' Now you might as well bid 
 the worm throw off the rock which is crushing 
 it, as bid me throw off my burden. Sin has 
 become a part of myself; a law of my being. 
 
COUNSELS TO THE DEFEATED. 249 
 
 The voice of conscience, which once spoke to 
 me in thunder has died into a far off echo ; and 
 the voice of sin, once but a low soft seductive 
 whisper, now tyrannously promulgates, now in- 
 delibly writes upon my heart, the fatal deca- 
 logue of passion. If he who breaks one com- 
 mandment is guilty of all, then to me, as to 
 Israel of old, the law of holiness, written with 
 the finger of God, lies shattered in a thousand 
 fragments, like those granite tables which Moses 
 dashed down on the mountain rock. 
 
 The common experience of life shows how sad 
 is the prevalence of such moral despair. Under 
 the spell of sin, benumbed by its torpedo-touch, 
 men who began as Christians, end as fatalists. 
 Their secret I will not," becomes an imaginary 
 " I cannot." Because they have not won the 
 battle of life against evil tempers, against wicked 
 habits, against unholy thoughts, they lie stricken, 
 helpless, unstruggling, like the impotent man 
 by the Pool of Bethesda ; and year after year, 
 they make no effort more. And since they 
 have made up their minds that whenever the 
 temptation returns they shall fall into the same 
 sin — since they are sinking lower and lower, and 
 know that they are so sinking, doing wrong and 
 hating themselves forit^ and yet doing it — the very 
 powers of evil, as though secure of their ruined 
 and wasted lives, are content to let them alone. 
 The hour to torment the victim has not yet 
 
250 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 come. The angels of our life turn from us 
 with weeping eyes, and exclaim, " Ephraim is 
 turned to idols, let him alone ! " 
 
 1. Now this common state of mind is a state 
 of the extremest peril, and is sure, sooner or 
 later, to become, by inevitable laws, a state of 
 the extremest misery. If then there be any — 
 as surely there are — in this condition here 
 present, will they not naturally cry, "What 
 message, what hope, what help, have you for 
 us?" 
 
 2. My friends, the chief duty of the ministers 
 of God is, that they should help their brethren 
 to the best of their fallible knowledge and 
 feeble power. When there is a spirit of repent- 
 ance ; w^hen men truly seek the means of grace ; 
 when they have ceased to be insolent and defiant 
 in sin ; when they do intend — were it but ever 
 so faintly — to lead a new life — then 
 
 Our commission is to heal, not harm ; 
 We come not to condemn, but reconcile ; 
 We come not to compel, but call again ; 
 We come not to destroy, but edify ; 
 Nor yet to question things already done ; 
 These are forgiven ; matters of the past ; 
 And range with jetsam, and with offal, thrown 
 Into the blind sea of forgetfulness. 
 
 But yet, in trying to carry out this com- 
 mission, we must have an awful care not to 
 say unto you smooth things, or prophesy 
 deceits — not to go beyond what is commanded 
 
COUNSELS TO THE DE EE A TED. 251 
 
 US, to say either less or more. And though I 
 do most humbly and most earnestly desire this 
 day to help all those whose state is in any way 
 such as I have described, there is more than one 
 existing anodyne which I cannot and dare not 
 use. 
 
 i. It need hardly be said, for instance, that I 
 cannot adopt the views of the materialist^ and 
 tell you that you only appear to be but are not 
 in reality responsible. Knowing well all that 
 may be urged for the notion that we have only 
 the semblance of free will ; that the issues of 
 our actions are in reality predetermined for us 
 by heredity, by habit, by involuntary training? 
 by the strength or weakness of surrounding in- 
 fluences: that our very thoughts are but ph}-sical 
 changes in the grey substance of the brain ; that 
 we are elected beforehand by inevitable decrees 
 to eternal grace or infinite reprobation ; I sweep 
 all such notions aside, and with equal indigna- 
 tion, whether they call themselves orthodoxy 
 or atheism. If we are not free, then sin is no 
 sin, and virtue is no virtue, and all life is an 
 illusion, and all religion is a lie. If the doctrine 
 of predestined reprobation be true, if material- 
 ism be true, if sin needs no excuse because it 
 is due to automatic actions for which we are as 
 little responsible as for the twitches produced 
 by galvanism in some dead organism, or if sin 
 be the result of irreversible decrees whereby we 
 
252 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 were born into the world for a prearranged 
 damnation — if sin be thus, on the one hand, 
 a mere theologic fiction, or, on the other, a 
 diaboHcal compulsion, then there is no more to 
 be said, save that life itself becomes of necessity 
 one huge misery and lie. 
 
 But on these points I need do no more than 
 appeal to your own conscience and to your 
 own experience. You knoiv that you are free; 
 you know that you once could, and that even 
 now you can, eschew the evil and choose the 
 good. On these heads it can hardly be neces- 
 sary to say, at least to this congregation, " Be 
 not deceived." 
 
 ii. But it is I think far more probable that 
 many of us may be deceiving ourselves with 
 half efforts, with sham efforts, with efforts which 
 we have ourselves secretly predetermined to 
 failure, and that we are taking those half 
 efforts for real efforts, and hoping that we shall 
 persuade our God to so regard them. And 
 if so I must say here very solemnly, " Be 
 not deceived." I cannot agree with what has 
 been written by a deeply religious poet, who, 
 after describing just such a life of constant 
 failure, of habitual sin, as that to which we 
 have been alluding, adds 
 
 The man, who, though his fights be all defeats, 
 Still fights, 
 Enters at last 
 
 The heavenly Jerusalem's rejoicing street?, 
 
COUNSELS TO THE V EE): A TED. 253 
 
 With glory more, and more triumphant rites, 
 Than always-conquering Joshua, wlien his blast 
 'J'he frighted walls of Jericho down-cast ; 
 And lo I the glad sui-prise 
 Of joy beyond surmise 
 
 More than of common saints for ever in his eyes. 
 
 It is indeed true that in our struggles against 
 the powers of evil in the outer world, a good 
 man may again and again seem to be defeated. 
 He may die on the scaffold or at the stake ; he 
 may be hounded into the grave with the execra- 
 tion of his wicked, ignorant, or hypocritical con- 
 temporaries ; his very dust, like that of Wychff, 
 may be exhumed and scattered to the winds. 
 But in the struggle with sin zuitJnn us — in the 
 contest with our own personal temptations — our 
 fights, if they be fights, cannot all be defeats. He 
 that committeth sin is the servant of sin \ There 
 can be no communion of Christ with Belial, or 
 participation of the Temple of God with idols. 
 It is not enough when you have been guilty of 
 a sin merely to wet it with a tear and breathe 
 upon it with a sigh," and then go and do the 
 same again. Unless a man has at least so far 
 conquered sin that sin has ceased to have the 
 dominion over him ; until his reason and his con- 
 science, not his pride or his lusts, have the upper 
 hand in the governance of his life, he cannot 
 be saved. A man who is wholly mastered by, 
 who is entirely helpless against the perpetual 
 recurrence of a besetting sin, is in a state of 
 
2 54 E VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 sin ; and " be not deceived," a state of sin is not 
 and cannot be the same thing as a state of grace. 
 
 iii. Nor, again, can I adopt as a ground of 
 comfort the views of a late learned theologian, 
 who has laid vast stress on the possibilities of a 
 death-bed forgiveness. ''Take," says Dr. Pusey, 
 *' the worst case that can be imagined, a soul 
 dying immediately upon the commission of 
 some deadly sin. Take the case of one falling 
 in a duel; but repenting for the love of God after 
 he had been mortally wounded ; or of one who 
 committed suicide and repented when the means 
 employed began to work their effect ; " and then 
 he mentions a still stranger and stronger case, 
 which I dare not even repeat. No one, he 
 continues, " can say that Ahab did not repent 
 v/hen * stayed up in his chariot till even ; ' or 
 Absalom, when hanging between heaven and 
 earth ; or the disobedient prophet, ere the lion 
 met him ; or Herod, after being stricken with 
 worms ; or Ananias, as he fell under Peter's 
 words ; or the Anti-christ Antiochus ; or crimi- 
 nals on the scaffold. '' What God does for the 
 soul," he says, ''when the eye is turned up in 
 death and shrouded, the frame stiffened, every 
 limb motionless, every power of expression gone, 
 is one of the secrets of the divine compassion." 
 Certainly it is, and I am not likely to argue 
 against any suggestion which leans to the side 
 of mercy, of love, of hope. 
 
COUNSELS TO THE DEFEATED. 255 
 
 Let it be for others, not for me, to refute teaching 
 as to what takes place in the moment which Dr. 
 Pusey called *'the almost-sacrament of death." 
 And yet I should not be honest if I did not say 
 that such teaching seems in more ways than one 
 to go beyond the case of the dying thief upon 
 tiie cross, the one and sole instance of repentance 
 in the hour of death which Scripture records. 
 But if any of you rely on this hope, or this 
 chance, or this possibility, as an excuse for sin ; 
 if any of you secretly are saying to yourselves, 
 " I will go on sinning now, I will repent before 
 or when I die," I would say to you^ briefly 
 but most solemnly, " Be not deceived ; God is 
 not mocked." When you wickedly think thus, 
 you are mocking, you are insulting, you are 
 defying God. You are, as it were, insolently 
 bidding Him to wait your leisure ; you are 
 bidding Him to be content with the bitter lees 
 of life after you have drained to the dregs what 
 should have been its bright libation ; to be 
 content with the shrivelled and withered leaves, 
 when you have cherished a canker in the worth- 
 less flowers. 
 
 If you rely on a death-bed repentance, you 
 lean, I am convinced, upon a bruised and broken 
 reed which will break beneath you, and run into 
 your hand. I have seen death-beds, and I know 
 that he who thinks he can make sure of a death- 
 bed repentance, or even that mere semblance of 
 
-S6 
 
 iLVERVDAV CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 a death-bed repentance which we may call such, 
 is hanging his whole weight upon the thread of 
 a gossamer over a deep and dark abyss. 
 
 iv. Nor, again, can I give you any hope in a 
 distinction which some have drawn between the 
 desires of the flesh and of the mind. The words 
 of our Lord, "The spirit indeed is willing, but 
 the flesh is v/eak," are meant for a solemn warn- 
 ing, but are used as a specious excuse. If any 
 of you think that you may disintegrate your 
 own individuality, and profess to be a saint in 
 aspiration while you are a libertine in life, I can 
 only warn you against drugging your conscience 
 with the opiate of this fatal hypocrisy. Let us 
 make every allowance for the awful effects of 
 habit long indulged till it has become a second 
 nature, habit which to the eye of man it may 
 seem to be as impossible to change as for the 
 Ethiopian to change his skin or the leopard his 
 spots. Let us admit that, many times, sin, long 
 after it has ceased to wear even the ghastliest 
 semblance of pleasure, assumes the hideous guise 
 of penal necessity. But if there be any solace 
 for the agony of such thoughts, it rests, not in 
 minimizing the guilt of habitual sins, but in 
 the very depth of pity which they awaken in us, 
 and in the conviction that our love and our pity 
 and our sympathy can be but as a drop of the 
 ocean compared with the infinite compassion of 
 Him who became man to die for us. We leave 
 
COUNSELS TO THE DEFEATED. 257 
 
 all the victims of sin which has passed into 
 punishment, yea, we leave our own selves wholly 
 and solely to the mercy of the Merciful. But 
 we cannot and dare not say that a man can be 
 so wholly two men in one, that with one part of 
 his being he is dishonest or unclean and with 
 the other upright and pure. Indeed, I think 
 that such a view would tend to foster some of 
 the most perilous forms of subtle self-deception, 
 — that, for instance, which, having begun with 
 horror at sin, ends with indifference about it ; — 
 that which, having begun with "only this once/' 
 ends with " Tush ! Thou, God, carest not for it ; " 
 — that whereby a man takes himself, not for what 
 he is, but for what he once meant to be, as 
 though a drunkard he reeled out of a public-house 
 should point to a faded piece of blue ribbon in 
 proof of his character as a sober and temperate 
 person. We are what we are in the concentration 
 and sum total of our actions, and we shall be 
 judged always, not by the one faithless minute 
 or the many faithless protestations, but by the 
 long course and tendency of life. 
 
 3. Against all such wilful delusions St. Paul 
 utters his solemn Be not deceived. God is 
 not mocked." The word for " mocked " implies 
 the most unseemly and insulting gesture. And 
 God is mocked when we pretend to be His while 
 we cut our being in twain and give half to Satan, 
 and when we craw nigh unto Him with our lips 
 
 R 
 
358 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 while our heart is far from Him. When we are 
 externally scrupulous, and inwardly filled with 
 willing corruption ; when we at once fast and 
 smite with the fist of wickedness ; when we say, 
 " I go, sir," yet go not ; when we try to combine 
 the vile pleasure of sin with the perfect allegiance 
 which God requires ; when we sa}', " Lord, Lord," 
 and do evil continually ; what judgment have we 
 any right to expect hut " Thou hypocrite ! " — 
 what doom but "Depart from me, I never knev/ 
 you ! " 
 
 4. But though we cannot comfort you either 
 by telling you that you are winning the victory, 
 when, in fact, you are always defeated ; nor by 
 bidding you rely on death-bed agonies and hopes ; 
 nor by saying that you may serve sin with your 
 body provided only that you serve righteousness 
 with your spirit — have we, then, no hope, no 
 counsel, no consolation for you ? Do we address 
 you in those utterly misinterpreted words of 
 metaphor and irony, He that is unjust, let him 
 be unjust still ; and he which is filthy, let him 
 be filthy still ? " Not so, my brethren ! But, 
 instead of lulling your souls to sleep by perilous 
 opiates, we call to you as you lie on the obHvious 
 pool of acquiescence — 
 
 Awake I arise ! or be for ever fallen I 
 
 i. For, first of all, if you really are fighting, 
 be sure your fights will not all be defeats. If 
 
COUNSELS TO THE DEFEATED. 259 
 
 they are, they are not real fights. Wiien you 
 are really fighting, it is because you desire to 
 save your life from ruin, your soul from shipwreck. 
 You will then watch over every day, because you 
 feel how rapidly the dazzling wheels of the days 
 are rolling you death wards ; you will watch over 
 every acr, because you wid see in every act a 
 grain in the sand-multitude of influences, which 
 alone can form a barrier against the turbid waves 
 of your temptations. Before any of us fancy 
 that, though fighting, we are always defeated 
 by sin, let us ask whether it is the one dear 
 absorbing wish of our souls to stand approved 
 with God and not with men, and to be pure with 
 God and our own pure souls ? Let us not be 
 deceived on the very threshold — deceived even 
 as to the reaLty of our intentions ; for the heart 
 is deceitful above all things, and desperately 
 wicked. 
 
 ii. Then again, if we would know whether we 
 are truly resisting sin, let us see whether we 
 really fly from its approaches. Do you turn 
 from it when you see it creeping up to you far 
 off in the darkened thought or stealing upon 
 you down the avenues of the senses } Do you 
 draw your sword and stand firm when you see 
 it glaring on you from the thicket ready for its 
 crushing spring ? When your temptation arises 
 from evil companions, do you leave them and 
 seek only the pure and good ? When it springs 
 
 R 3 
 
26o E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 from evil books, do you burn them, or fling 
 them away, with as much remorse and horror as 
 those who burnt their bad books at Ephesus 
 and at Florence ? Above all, do we — remem- 
 bering that we are not alone — that God sees us, 
 that God is with us — do we always, in the hour 
 of temptation, take refuge in prayer, calling as 
 passionately on God to save and help us as 
 sailors call on Him from the sinking vessel in 
 the raging storm ? Be sure that he who doeth 
 these things shall never greatly fall. 
 
 iii. Once again — test your sincerity by the 
 manner in which you control or resist your evil 
 thoughts. Do you suffer your thoughts to 
 tamper with evil, to dally with wrongdoing ? If 
 so you are not sincere. If you willingly sin in 
 thought ; if you are base and guilty there ; the 
 guilt and baseness will, sooner or later, break 
 into the outlets of word and deed. From 
 thought to wish, from wish to purpose, from 
 purpose to word, from word to act, from act to 
 habit ; from delight in the imagination to con- 
 sent in the will ; from consent in the will to 
 guilt in the deed ; from guilty deed to repeated 
 transgression — such is the genesis of sin ; such 
 the swift slope of the descent towards Avernus ! 
 He who in his thoughts parleys with sin, delib- 
 erates with it, indulges it, is guilty of it already 
 in his heart ; and when out of the heart proceed 
 evil thoughts," tliere burst forth also the black 
 
COUNSELS TO THE DEFEATED. 261 
 
 stream of murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, 
 malice, and all those other things of which Jesus 
 spake. The tyrant Nero tried to degrade some 
 of the great Roman nobles to as low a level as 
 his own, by making them appear as actors in 
 the arena on the stage. To disobey was death. 
 Florus was bidden thus to appear, and, doubting 
 whether to obey, consulted the virtuous and reso- 
 lute Agrippinus. " Go, by all means,'' answered 
 Agrippinus. "Well, but,''"' repHed Florus with 
 astonishment, "you yourself refused to obey.'"' 
 "Yes," answered Agrippinus, "because I did not 
 deliberate about it." The categorical imperative, 
 the naked, absolute, prohibition of duty must 
 be implicitly, unquestionably, instantly obeyed. 
 To deliberate about it is to be a secret traitor ; 
 and the line which separates the secret traitor 
 from the open rebel is thin as the spider's web. 
 
 iv. Then take another test — do you put off re- 
 sistance, put off obedience, for even a little time ? 
 " The man who procrastinates," as says the 
 ancient poet, "wrestles ever with ruin." If you 
 suffer yourself willingly to be worsted now, you 
 will be so worsted again and again, until at last 
 you blunt the sense of wrongdoing, suppress 
 the blushing mutiny of conscience, and sink so 
 low as to defend your own guiltiness. Do not 
 think that you can put off with impunit}', or till 
 the end. There is an awful truth_, if there be 
 much quaintness, in the language of onewho said : 
 
262 
 
 EVERYDA Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 My lord, Heaven is not to be won by short 
 hard work at the last, as some of us take a 
 degree at the university after much irregularity 
 and negligence. ... I have known many old 
 playfellows of the devil spring up suddenly 
 from their death-beds and strike at him treach- 
 erously; while he, without returning the cuff, 
 only laughed and made grimaces in the corner 
 of the room." 
 
 V. And, lastly, lest any be discouraged, let me 
 say that to promise you the certain ultimate 
 victory is not the same thing as saying that 
 you will never fall. By reason of the frailty of 
 our mortal nature we cannot always stand up- 
 right ; but if we be true fighters, when we fall 
 we shall not lie in the mire, but instantly — 
 shamed into greater watchfulness — we shall 
 make more sure of the next victory ; and each 
 victory will lead to others, until our enemy is 
 utterly routed. Do you determine, for instance, 
 to conquer anger Number, then, the days in 
 which you have not been in a rage ; I used to 
 be angry every day, now it is only every third or 
 fourth day. But if you should pass even thirty 
 days without a relapse, and should restrain 
 yourself under many provocations, then sing a 
 Te Deiivi unto God. For then the habit, which 
 is being loosened, will soon be eradicated, 
 and you will be an Olympic victor, not over 
 miserable boxers and athletes, but over the dead- 
 
COUNSELS TO THE DEFEATED. 263 
 
 liest enemies of your soul. Even the heathen 
 Epictetus teaches us this truth; how then should 
 a Christian fail to see it ? Never despair : 
 because God is God ; because God is Love ; 
 because Christ died ; because He is most of all 
 the helper of those who feel themselves to be 
 helpless ; because His will is your sanctifica- 
 tion — if you struggle, and watch, and pray, you 
 shall never fall. You, even you, though you may 
 not have kept, shall thus recover your inno- 
 cence, and doing the thing that is right shall 
 find peace at the last. 
 
XVIII. 
 
 TLbc Setv^ices of tbe Desptseb. 
 
 "One of His disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, saith 
 unto Him, There is a lad here, who hath five barley loaves, and 
 two small fishes : but what are they among so many? " — John 
 vi. 8. 
 
 OU are all familiar with the passage 
 from which this verse is taken. The 
 multitudes flocked to Christ because 
 they heard from Him the words of life. He 
 flung to the winds the scrupulosities and tradi- 
 tionalism of a Church which was dying of res- 
 pectability, of conventionality, of conscious and 
 unconscious hypocrisy, and the people heard 
 Him gladly because He spake with authority, 
 and not as the Scribes. They were in a desert 
 place, for He was under a ban of excommunica- 
 tion ; they had come to Him from far, and 
 listened long, not knowing when they should 
 hear again the words of life. He pitied their 
 hunger, their thirst, their weariness and His 
 disciples had nothing to suggest but that they 
 should be sent home, till — with a glimmering of 
 
THE SERVICES OF THE DESPISED. 265 
 
 faith — St. Andrew pointed out that the lad who 
 attended them had five barley loaves and two 
 small fishes ; " but," he added, half despairingly, 
 " what are they among so many ? " The answer 
 of Jesus was instantaneous. " Make the men sit 
 down." Very humble, as well as fearfully scanty, 
 was the sole apparent provision. Barley bread 
 was so coarse that even the hardy Roman 
 soldiers were only required to eat it by way of 
 punishment, and fish was the commonest and 
 cheapest kind of food. But so Jesus lived, and 
 His apostles, and those among whom they 
 taught. He was poor among the poorest. Not 
 for Him was the purple and tr^e feast of Dives. 
 He did not come to pamper the luxury or allure 
 the appetencies of idle men. Barley loaves and 
 only two small fishes I — but it was enough for 
 the Lord of all ; and with that scant, poor food, 
 blessed and multiplied, He fed the hungry, and 
 refreshed the weary_, and spread a table in the 
 wilderness, and made them sit on the green 
 grass in the sunset, and gave them that which, 
 to their hunger, was sweet as manna, and sent 
 them rejoicing on their way. 
 
 2. We are in the wilderness, the day is far 
 spent, the night is at hand, on every side of us 
 are the hungry, and the thirsty, and the weary ; 
 we feel ourselves utterly helpless to help these 
 helpless ; we have not two hundred pennyworth 
 of bread for them, and "even that, if we had it. 
 
266 E VER YDA Y CHRISTIAN LIEE. 
 
 would be insufficient that every one of them 
 might take a little. Yes ! but have we tried to 
 use the poor and scant store which we have ? 
 Have we, like that lad, offered our barley loaves 
 for Christ to bless? If not, can we expect that 
 they should be used ? Still less can we expect 
 that they should be multiplied ! 
 
 3. The lesson I would draw from the scene is, 
 on the one hand, the lesson of Christ's own 
 gospel to poor, humble^ ill-endowed, ungifted 
 persons, and at the same time the encourage- 
 ment, the blessing, the multiplication which He 
 gives to little things. These ought not, I think, 
 to be fantastic or meaningless lessons for us. 
 For the immense majority of us are neither great 
 nor rich, nor noble, but just such humble, un- 
 known persons ; and very few among us have 
 more than little gifts to offer — little, I mean, 
 not with reference to God's infinitude, to which 
 it would be no gift at all if cedared Lebanon 
 were a flaming altar, and we could offer on it 
 the cattle of a thousand hills — but little, I mean, 
 even in comparison with what many of our 
 brother- men can give. 
 
 It is a blessed thing to offer some consolation 
 to the despondent and the disappointed, to the 
 afflicted and bereaved. To-day, in Christ's 
 name, I would give glad encouragement to the 
 lowly, to the unimportant, to the insign'ficant, 
 to the commonplace, to the great mass of ordi- 
 
THE SERVICES OF THE DESPISED. 267 
 
 nar>', every-day men and women in struggling 
 positions, of very moderate capacities, with- 
 out any genius, quite unlearned, never heard of 
 perhaps half a mile from home. Yes ! I would 
 speak to the masses, the millions, the undis- 
 tinguished multitude to which the bulk of my 
 readers must belong; to such as Christ fed with 
 barley loaves in that desert place; to such as 
 He addressed on the Mountain of Beatitudes ; 
 to such as those among whom He lived all His 
 life long — in the carpenter's shop at provincial 
 Nazareth, in the fisher's boat upon the inland 
 sea. 
 
 4. My friends, for all these, for you and me, 
 for the world in general, there is either no 
 gospel or it is Christ's. If His gospel be not 
 true, there is no gospel at all to offer you ; 
 neither for us, in the darkness and in the desert, 
 is there voice or any to answer, nor is there any 
 
 honour to God from those whom men oppress, 
 glory from God to those wiiom men despise." 
 For the world, in spite of its hypocritical pre- 
 tensions, cioes despise as well as hate all that is 
 not of it. The world of wealth, the world of 
 power, the world of brute violence, the world of 
 sceptical intellect, is inflated with its own arro- 
 gant self-importance. It is at once insolent and 
 crin£s:in2: ; it flatters and it sneers. It shouts 
 for the popular, it hisses the defeated ; it crowns 
 the victor, it tramples on the fallen. Pride is 
 
268 E VER YD A V CHRISTIA N LIFE. 
 
 the very badge of the world, the flesh, and the 
 devil. The haughty beauty in her jewels curls 
 her lip at the plain, neglected girl ; the proud 
 aristocrat is ironically patronizing or openly 
 contumelious to all below his own caste ; the 
 conceitedly clever man will revel in his power 
 to humihate and to wound the man of inferior 
 capacity. Unless a man has God's grace in his 
 heart, then, when he pushes himself an inch 
 higher than his fellows, he looks down on them 
 superciliously from his paltry altitude. Yes, 
 and thousands of times the worst man, the 
 meaner man, the falser man will despise his 
 superior in worth and goodness from the whole 
 height of his own inferiority. 
 
 " This multitude that knoweth not the law, 
 is accursed," says the religious world. "These 
 persons are not in society," sneers the fashion- 
 able world. " Mankind is composed of one 
 thousand million persons, mostly fools," sneers 
 the intellectual world. ^^They are the vulgar, 
 the unwashed, ciphers, mere nobodies ; let them 
 know their place," says the vanity of rank and 
 riches. And all these forms of pride are pitiless 
 and selfish, and He who was Lord of all declared 
 Himself utterly against them. He hath put 
 down the mighty from their seat, and hath 
 exalted the humble and the mjek." Ah, my 
 brethren, be sure of this, that sc^^rn of anything 
 but vile and depraved wickedness is devilish, 
 
THE SERVICES OF THE DESPISED. 269 
 
 though there is nothing which the world more 
 admires. See how Christ, in every word and 
 action, set His face against it. Was Galilee 
 despised ? Then Galilee should be His country. 
 Was Nazareth a byword ? Then Nazareth 
 should be His home. Did the pupils of the 
 Rabbis look down on the untaught as mere dust 
 beneath their feet } Then Christ would not be 
 a pupil in their schools. Had the rich ''grown 
 insolent in fooling " Then the manger should 
 be His cradle, the cross His bed of death. Did 
 they that wore soft clothing live in kings' houses } 
 Then He would be a wanderer, and not have 
 where to lay His head. Were women in the 
 East a sad, downtrodden sisterhood, so that 
 when they approached him the Pharisee drew in 
 his floating robes } Then, to the astonishment 
 even of His disciples, He would talk to a woman 
 at the noonday well. Were children neglected } 
 Then, hallowing all infancy, He would take 
 them in His arms, lay His hands on them, and 
 bless them. Were lepers shunned like the 
 pestilence Then, despite all Levitic ritualism, 
 He would touch the leper into health. Did man 
 trample with pitiless execration on the afflicted 
 and the fallen ? Then, unreproved, the woman 
 with the issue should grasp the tassel of His 
 robe ; unreproved the harlot should wash His 
 feet with her tears, and wipe them with the hairs 
 of her head ; and to the pardoned adulteress, as 
 
270 K VER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 she sobbed in the Temple, a dishevelled heap of 
 shame and misery, He would utter, in the 
 accents of tender mercy^ Woman, where are 
 those thine accusers ? Hath no man con- 
 demned thee ? Neither do I condemn thee. 
 Go and sin no more/' 
 
 5. Thus did Christ brand pride, and that cruel 
 indifference to the feehngs of others which is the 
 twin-sister of pride, with " the stigma of His 
 indelible abhorrence." Surely, my friends, if we 
 miss the lesson which, by His words and His 
 life, Christ would thus teach us, we must be 
 bUnd indeed. It is not only the lesson of love, 
 it is not even the lesson that He loved as man 
 had never loved before ; but it is that He loved 
 those whom none had ever loved before. He 
 made His grave with the wicked. He pardoned 
 even on the cross the dying malefactor. He 
 took His example of virtue from the hated, 
 heretical Samaritan. He came to the sick, not 
 to the whole ; to the sinners, not to those who 
 thought themselves righteous ; to the lost sheep 
 of the house of Israel. Amongst the diseased, 
 amongst the unlovely, amongst the despised, 
 amongst the powerless, amongst those whom all 
 classes united to insult and hate. He took His 
 place. 
 
 He stopped beside. He pitied. He saved, He 
 tended the robbed and wounded wayfarer whom 
 the Priest passed with indifferent step, at whom 
 
THE SERVICES OE THE DESPISED. 271 
 
 the Levite gazed with unpitying stare. He was 
 *'the friend of publicans and sinners." What 
 can I say more than that ? Everywhere and 
 ahvays He saw what the world never sees — the 
 soul of goodness in things evil. The way of the 
 world is the very opposite. Like the flesh-flies 
 w^hich settle on a sore and the foul creatures that 
 ever buzz where they can find or make corrup- 
 tion, the world's children ahvays fix on any spot 
 of weakness in the strong — of unworthiness in 
 the noble. They know nothing of the sun 
 except its spots. If they cannot find spots, even 
 with the strongest telescope of their malice, they 
 will lyingly invent them, hating that anything 
 should shine amid their evil and self-chosen 
 darkness. Does a good man commit one fault ? 
 They do their best to make him known for ever 
 by nothing but that fault. Does a great poet 
 write one bad line ? They will make that line 
 better known than all his golden words. In a 
 good book is there a trivial error ? They seize 
 on it with avidity to deny all merit to the book. 
 Now see the difference between the world and 
 Christ. I must tell the legendary tale again, 
 though I have told it before. By the wayside, 
 in the dust, under the blinding glare, lay a dead 
 dog ; a thing which in the East is a proverb of 
 the extremest vileness. Round it, with the aim- 
 less delight in degradation and decay, gathered 
 a group of the lazy, worthless idlers of an 
 
272 
 
 EVERYDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 Eastern village, staring at it with looks of loath- 
 ing, pointing to it with disgustful scorn, uttering 
 about it every word of execration and of con- 
 tempt, with silly laughter. Then suddenly there 
 was a silence among them, for they saw Jesus 
 approaching, and some of them stepped a little 
 aside, and gazed and wondered. And the 
 Master came up to the heartless loiterers, and 
 looked for a moment at the carcase of the poor 
 dead creature which God had made, as it lay 
 in the dust under the blistering glare ; and He 
 was silent. And then, amid the silence, He 
 said "Its teeth are as white as pearls;" and 
 so he passed on. Where all were jeering and 
 execrating. He would utter the one word of 
 pity ; where all had eyes for nothing but what 
 was disgusting. He would see nothing but the 
 one redeeming touch. 
 
 Oh, world, such is thy Saviour ; and oh, world, 
 such art thou ! 
 
 6. I know not, my friends, whether you care 
 for this truth — the acceptance by Christ of those 
 who morally, or intellectually, or spiritually, no 
 less than physically, are the blind, the halt, the 
 maimed, even the lepers of our poor humanity. 
 I only know that I care for it immensely. It is 
 to me of the utmost comfort. In all limitations 
 of power, in all sense of weakness, in all the 
 despair of failure, in all tauntings about defi- 
 ciency, in all consciousness of numberless imper- 
 
THE SERVICES OF THE DESPISED. 273 
 
 fections, — whenever I have to meet the proud 
 man's scorn, and the base man's sneer, I think of 
 Him, I turn to Him who took His place among 
 the humble, among the insignificant, among the 
 defeated ; to Him who loved mankind in spite 
 of all its sins and all its shame ; who honoured 
 man, not for the honours which were without 
 him, not for the gifts of Providence, or for the 
 accidents of favour, or the little brief authority 
 of place, but for this only and simply, because 
 he was man, and because he was miserable, and 
 because he needed help. 
 
 7. And as the love of Christ for small unglfted, 
 humble, faithful persons is a transcendent com- 
 fort, no less comfort is the acceptance by Christ 
 of little things, the pity of Christ for evil things, 
 the tenderness of Christ for things despised. He 
 instantly made use of the poor lad's five barley 
 loaves and two small fishes. His symbols for 
 the kingdom of God were the handful of leaven 
 which the woman took and hid in three measures 
 of meal, and the grain of mustard seed, which is 
 the smallest of all seeds. 
 
 He is sitting in the Temple; the rich are 
 ostentatiously casting into the treasury their 
 splendid gifts ; the poor widow comes, and, in 
 frightened shame, casts in her smallest of all 
 coins, her least of possible offerings, the two 
 mites, which make one farthing ; and Christ 
 joyously declares that, because she was so poor, 
 
 S 
 
274 EVERY DA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 she had cast in more than they all. The thrones 
 are set ; the Great Assize is opened ; the dead, 
 small and great, stand before the throne, and lo ! 
 they are judged, not about Levitical observances 
 or theological orthodoxy, but about little deeds 
 of kindness, by Him who said that if one should 
 but give in His name a cup of cold water to one 
 of His disciples he should not lose of his reward. 
 At a flower festival, not long ago, among choice 
 fruits and exotic flowers, one little shrinking 
 child laid on the altar step her tiny offering — it 
 was but a single daisy. The little one had 
 nothing else to give ; and with even such an 
 offering, given with a single and a simple heart, 
 Christ I think would have been well pleased. 
 
 8. Are not the resultant lessons plain ? By 
 far the most of us have not ten talents to offer 
 for Christ^s use, nor even five talents ; we have 
 at the best but one talent, and perhaps not even 
 that. Well, the world despises us for our poverty 
 of intellect, our dearth of gifts ; but God thinks 
 nothing of it. When the Master comes He will 
 not ask how great or how small were our endow- 
 ments and capabilities, but only how we have 
 used them. If we have not neglected our one 
 poor talent, or even fraction of a talent, we, no 
 less than the most richly gifted, shall be thrilled 
 with the words, " Well done, good and faithful 
 servant ! " which will atone for ever for all 
 afflictions. He who has but one talent makes 
 
THE SERVICES OF THE DESPISED. :275 
 
 sometimes ten, and he who has the ten some- 
 times makes them worse than one, usincf them 
 not for God's service and man's good, but only 
 to inflate his own pride, and to God's dishonour 
 and man's destruction. 
 
 At Westminster we are surrounded by the 
 memorials of kings, and poets, and heroes — the 
 successful and the mighty, and famous men ; 
 and, perhaps, we are discouraged, thinking, with 
 a sigh, that we can never be as these. Nay, but 
 they should rather encourage us, as they encou- 
 raged the poor bookseller's boy, who one day, 
 just a hundred years ago, sat down by that north 
 door weary with his load of books, and burst into 
 bitter tears at his prospect of a dreary, toiling 
 life.* But as he gazed at the statues of men 
 who had fought bravely the battle of life he took 
 heart of courage, and went his way, and after 
 many struggles, became, in our Indian Empire, 
 a great benefactor of mankind. But they should 
 encourage us in quite another and surer way 
 even while we recognize that we can never be as 
 the least of these. For the least of us may be 
 as much greater than many of these, as goodness 
 is a greater, better, and more eternal thing than 
 any earthly greatness. We cannot be hke yon 
 great orator, Chatham, who swayed the heart of 
 his nation like the heart of one man. We can 
 never be as yon great musician, Handel, whose 
 
 * The Rev. Dr. Maishman. 
 
 S 2 
 
276 
 
 EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 strains still lift our souls heavenwards on the 
 golden wings of music. We can never be as 
 yonder immortal poets, who, in a world so little 
 and so mean, have given us nobler loves and 
 nobler hopes. Well, be it so ; but, on the other 
 hand, we can be as good as any poet, or musi- 
 cian, or cunning artificer, or eloquent orator that 
 ever was, in that which is best and greatest, and 
 most dear in God's sight — in that, indeed, which 
 is alone of any eternal significance ; and many 
 of these whose statues rise around us would lay 
 aside their wreath of fame for the simple good- 
 ness which is possible to the very least among 
 us all. 
 
 9. Yea, the last may be first, and the first 
 last. Was it not so with those whom Christ 
 chose and loved ? Peter, what was he but a 
 poor Galilean fisherman ? Andrew, what was 
 he but Simon Peter's brother ? Simon, once 
 a hot-headed zealot ; Matthew, once a scorned 
 and hated publican. Every one of them dull 
 and ordinary men, as the world thought ; un- 
 learned and ignorant, only noticed at all because 
 they had been with Jesus. 
 
 So was it with nearly all those early Christians 
 who renewed and evangelized the world. Not 
 many rich, not many noble, not many mighty 
 were called. They were for the most part slaves 
 and artisans, and feeble folk. Look even at 
 their writings. The Christian apologists had 
 
THE SERVICES OF THE DESPISED. 277 
 
 none of the keen, flashing intellect or powerful 
 ability of men like Lucian or Celsus, who wrote 
 against them ; nor any of the haughty compres- 
 sion or suppressed fire of Romans like Tacitus 
 and Juvenal, who scornfully thought that their 
 doctrines could be held by no sane man. How, 
 then, did they "so get the start of the majestic 
 world ? " these lowest of the low ? — these hedgers 
 and ditchers ? — these wretches who worshipped 
 in the catacomb and died in the amphitheatre ? 
 — these sarmentitii and semaxii, as they were 
 called from the stakes to which they were tied 
 and the fagots with which they were consumed ? 
 The answer is easy. It was by innocence ; it 
 was by virtue ; it was by goodness. Intellect 
 disowned them ; scorn spat on them ; malignity 
 searched them with candles ; " power trampled 
 them into the dust. Yet these foolish things of 
 the world confounded the wise, and by the irre- 
 sistible weakness of holy lives these men with 
 nothing but barley loaves built up a better, 
 stronger, purer world, while — 
 
 Rome, whom mighty kingdoms curtsied to, 
 Like a forlorn and desperate castaway, 
 Did shameful execution on herself. 
 
 10. Why, then, should any one of us sorrow 
 for, or be ashamed of, his earthly insignificance, 
 or care how much the world despises him ? 
 Ours, as much as any man's, may be the most 
 
278 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 inconceivable of all blessings — the peace of God 
 here which passeth all understanding, and here- 
 after a blessedness which eye hath not seen nor 
 ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart 
 of man to conceive. But be we high or low, rich 
 or poor, clever or stupid, for which God cares 
 nothing, it is equally possible for the humblest of 
 us all to do our duty. It is true that we have but 
 our five coarse barley loaves and two small fishes. 
 In themselves they are useless. Well, then, let 
 us give them to Christ. He can multiply them. 
 He can make them more than enough to feed 
 the five thousand. 
 
 A cup of cold water ? Well, will the world 
 ever forget the cup of cold water which David 
 would not drink, but poured upon the earth, 
 because his men had risked their lives to fetch 
 it him ? or the cup of cold water which Sir 
 Philip Sydney, athirst and dying, gave to the 
 worse-wounded soldier, who eyed it eagerly on 
 the field of Zutphen 1 A grain of mustard-seed.'' 
 Well, when Count Zinzendorf was a boy at 
 school he founded among his companions a little 
 guild, of which the badge was a gold ring, and 
 he called it " The Order of the Grain of Mustard- 
 seed,'^ and thereafter the seedling grew into the 
 great tree of the Moravian brotherhood, whose 
 boughs were a blessing to the world. The 
 widow's mite t Well, when they laughed at 
 St. Theresa because she wanted to build a great 
 
THE SERVICES OF THE DESTISED. -jc) 
 
 orpiianage and had only three ducat.s to begin 
 with, she answered, " With three ducats Theresa 
 can do nothing, but with God and her three 
 ducats there is nothing which Theresa cannot 
 do." 
 
 II. Do not let us imagine, then, that we are 
 too poor, too stupid, too ignorant, too obscurely 
 situated, to do any real good in the world 
 wherein God has placed us. Christ loves the 
 humble and accepts the little. Is there a 
 greater work in the present day than education } 
 Would you have thought that the chiefest im- 
 pulse to that work whereon we now annually 
 spend so many millions of taxation was given 
 by the poor illiterate Plymouth cobbler, John 
 Pounds ? Has there been a nobler work of 
 mercy in modern days than the purification of 
 prisons ? Yet that was done by one whom a 
 modern writer sneeringly patronises as a dull, 
 good man — John Howard. Is there a grander 
 and nobler enterprise than missions ? \\>11, 
 the missions of England to India were started 
 by a humble, itinerant shoemaker, W. Carey. 
 These men brought to Christ their humble 
 efforts, their barley loaves, and in His hands 
 and under His blessing they multiplied ex- 
 ceedingly. We can never hope, you say, to 
 lead to such vast results. So they thought. 
 Do you imagine that they ever dreamt of 
 what would is.~ue from their little efforts ? But 
 
28o E VER YDA V CHRIS TIAN LIFE. 
 
 besides, the results are nothing-, the work every- 
 thing ; nothing the gift, everything the willing 
 heart. But have you ever tried? If you bring 
 no gift, how can God use it ? The lad must 
 bring his barley loaves before the five thousand 
 can be fed. Have you ever attempted to do as 
 he did ? Have you, even in the smallest 
 measure, or with the least desire, tried to follow 
 John Wesley^s golden advice ? — 
 
 Do all the good you can, 
 Py all the means you can, 
 In all the ways you can, 
 In all the places you can, 
 At all the times you can, 
 To all the people you can, 
 As long as ever you can. 
 
 Or, if you have not attained to that rule, ask 
 your own consciences, not conventionally, but 
 honestly and searchingly, not as before a self- 
 deceiving soul, but as before God, whether you 
 have done, or are doing, apart from a mere 
 selfish or domestic routine, any good at all, at 
 any time at all, to any human being whatever } 
 Take but one instance — kind words. A kind 
 word of praise, of sympathy, of encouragement ; 
 it would not cost you much, yet how often does 
 pride, or envy, or indifference prevent you from 
 speaking it } The cup of cold water, the barley 
 loaves, the two farthings, how often are we too 
 mean and too self-absorbed to give even these I 
 
THE SERVICES OF THE DESPISED. 281 
 
 And are we not to give them because we cannot 
 endow hospitals, or build cathedrals, or write 
 epics ? Ah ! if we be in the least sincere, in 
 the least earnest, let us be encouraged. The 
 little gifts of our poverty, the small services of 
 our insignificance, the barley loaves of the 
 Galilean boy on the desert plain, the one talent 
 of poor dull persons like ourselves, are despised 
 by the world, but they are dear to, but they are 
 accepted of, but they will be infinitely rewarded 
 by Him who, though the conies are a feeble 
 folk, gives them their homes in the rocks ; with- 
 out whom no sparrow falls ; who numbers the 
 very hairs of our heads ; who builds the vast 
 continents by the toil of the coral insect, and by 
 His grains of sand stays the raging of the sea. 
 
XIX. 
 
 Ube /n>arl^s of tbe Xorb Jesus. 
 
 "From liencefoith let no man trouble me: for I bear in my 
 body ihe marks of the Lord Jesus." — Gal. vi. 17. 
 
 HE word which is rendered ''marks" is 
 in the original " st?gj?mfa,'' or " brands." 
 In the popular usage of the Roniish 
 Church it has come to mean the five wounds 
 of the crucifixion on the hands, feet, and 
 side of Christ. In the thirteenth century, 
 the wealthiest and most ambitious epoch of 
 the Church's history, when the mighty Inno- 
 cent III. sat on the Papal throne, there lived 
 a pre-eminently holy servant of God named 
 Francesco Bernardone, generally known as 
 St. Francis of Assisi. Through the illuminated 
 mist of admiring records which gathered 
 around his name, we can still discern the 
 figure of one who, with all the sweetness of a 
 pure and simple nature, and all the passion 
 of an ardent and noble heart — believing what 
 he professed^ and living up to what he believed 
 
THE M.IRA'S OF THE LORD JESUS. 283 
 
 — had given his whole life to God. Among 
 other legends of his favour with God and man, 
 we are especially struck b}- one beautiful and 
 marvellous stor}-. In his closing years, at a 
 solemn moment of his life, he had retired to 
 IMonte Alverno, a wild and desolate hill near 
 the source of the Tiber ; and there, at Easter- 
 tide, among the sombre groves, with prayer 
 and with penitence, in anguish and in ecstasy, 
 amid the gloomy hush of noonday and the 
 solemn sounds of night, he had absorbed his 
 whole soul in thoughts of his Saviour Christ. 
 In those hours he dwelt upon the death and 
 passion of the Lord Jesus as only one who was 
 a Southron and a mystic could imagine it, 
 with a heart aflame with gratitude and love. 
 And as he fed upon these pathetic, these 
 ennobling thoughts, the power of imagination 
 was so intensified that the boundaries of the 
 spiritual and the unseen in some way melted 
 into those of the material and the visible ; 
 heavenly visions floated around him, glittering 
 faces seemed to brighten the noonday, strange 
 voices rang through the midnight woods ; until 
 at last, in the awful crisis of his rapture and 
 his agony, he saw, or thought he saw, a seraph 
 before him with six wings — "with twain he 
 covered his face, and with twain he covered 
 his feet, and with twain he did fly — and in 
 the midst of the many-coloured radiance a 
 
284 E VER YDA V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 figure of indescribable beauty with arms out- 
 stretched upon the cross. And while he gazed 
 in overwhelming trance upon the solemn and 
 splendid vision, there seemed to occur to him 
 on that lonely hill a silent transfiguration of 
 his human soul. Gradually, he knew not how, 
 there appeared, or seemed to appear, in his 
 own hands and feet the marks of nails, and in 
 his side the broad wound as of a lance ; and, 
 when he came to himself, when the ecstasy 
 was over, when the aching glory ceased to 
 overshadow him, he found that he bore on his 
 body, whether unconsciously self-inflicted, or 
 in whatever other way they came, the stigmata, 
 the marks, the five wounds of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 2. Into the evidences of this story, into the 
 psychology of it, into its possible connexion 
 with morbid and dimly understood phenomena, 
 I shall not enter. St. Francis was very far 
 from showing, or boasting of these marks, these 
 stigmata, of the Lord Jesus. The deepest 
 feelings of religion grow, like the lily of the 
 valley, in shadowy and lonely places. To any 
 one who knows, even afar off, the sensitive 
 delicacy of the shrinking soul, and the impos- 
 sibility which it feels of revealing, or even 
 expressing, its deepest experiences, it will not 
 seem strange that he concealed to the utmost 
 this dread visitation^ whatever it may have 
 
THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 285 
 
 been. He would have shuddered at tlie thought 
 of vulgarizing it, he kept it, to the very utmost 
 of his power, as a holy and awful secret between 
 himself and God. Even those intimate friends 
 who knew and loved him, and who, within three 
 years of his death, narrate the story, dwell but 
 little on the wonder. How was this } Partly 
 because in those ages such events were thought 
 far less extraordinary than now they would be ; 
 but chiefly because the life, the character, the 
 example of Francis^ as the founder of their 
 great monastic order, seemed to the mediaeval 
 church a thing more admirable than any 
 miracle. On the wild hills and plains of Umbria, 
 Francis, according to his lights, according to 
 the views of his day, showing himself absolutely 
 faithful to the best he knew, tried to reproduce 
 the life of Jesus in Galilee. There were in 
 the character, in the heart, if not upon the 
 hands and feet, of Francis of Assisi, marks 
 more miraculous, stigmata more indisputable, 
 traces of direct communion with God, and 
 intimate connexion with his Saviour Christ, 
 far more authentic — the toils, the sufferings, 
 the voluntary poverty, the stainless chastity, 
 the entire obedience, the active service, the 
 intense self-denial, of one of the saintliest and 
 loveliest souls of all those who, since He died 
 upon the cross, have walked in the steps of their 
 Saviour Christ. 
 
285 EVER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 3. Now the marks, the stigmata of Christ, 
 by which I mean the veritable, the spiritual 
 stigmata which should be visible on the life of 
 every Christian, are twofold : the marks of self- 
 denial meekly borne in His service ; the marks 
 of victory over temptation won by His redeeming 
 love. Those are the stigmata referred to in 
 this text ; they were marks borne by one who 
 was incomparably greater in intellectual power 
 than the humble enthusiast of Italy — even the 
 Apostle of the Gentiles. This letter of his to 
 the churches of Galatia was written amid a 
 storm of deep feeling, and the agitation of the 
 writer is shown in the tumult of the style. 
 Those rude converts, for whom Paul had toiled 
 so long and whom he loved so tenderly, 
 abandoning his teaching, slighting his authority, 
 had succumbed to the malignant fascination 
 of other teachers. Wounded in his tendere5?t 
 sensibilities by their ingratitude, he once more 
 sketched for them, in burning outline, the 
 truths which he had taught, and then concludes 
 his epistle with a few words of affection. " See," 
 he says, "the large straggling letters in which 
 my infirmity has forced me to write to you." 
 Suffering from weak eyesight, perhaps the 
 result of the vision which had outdazzled the 
 noonday sun on the road to Damascus, he v/as 
 generally obliged to ask the help of an amanu- 
 ensis. " But see," he says, " to you alone of my 
 
THE MARIAS OF THE LORD jESUS. 2S7 
 
 converts I have, with m}' own hand, toih"uliy 
 scrawled this intense and sorrowful epistle. 
 You have driven me to the distasteful task of 
 exposing false pretensions. You have driven 
 me to the painful duty of self-defence and 
 apparent boasting. Let it be enough, my 
 children. I long for peace ; I am suffering ; I 
 am oppressed ; I am not far from the Great 
 White Throne. From henceforth let no man 
 trouble me : for I bear in my body the marks of 
 the Lord Jesus.'' 
 
 4. It is evident that St. Paul, like Francis of 
 Assisi on ]\lonte Alverno, had recently passed 
 through some terrible and heart-shaking crisis 
 of a career pre-eminent in overwhelming trials. 
 To be insulted and hated ; to be treated as a 
 person at once dangerous and untrue ; to be 
 misrepresented by every party in the church 
 alike ; to be set forth, as in some great amphi- 
 theatre of suffering, a spectacle to angels and 
 to men ; this alas ! amid the contempt of 
 Gentiles and the rage of Jews, was a normal 
 condition of his life. To him too, as to all the 
 true saints of God, came all his life long the 
 beatitude of malediction. But at this period 
 there had been some special agony. He wrote 
 to the Corinthians that he was in jeopardy 
 every hour ; he was dying daily ; he has fought 
 with beasts at Ephesus ; he was carrying about 
 in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus. What 
 
2S8 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 was it ? Was it some fresh paroxysm of the 
 thorn in the flesh ? some recent agony from the 
 bruises of Roman rods, or the lash of Jewish 
 thongs ? some fracture from the stoning at 
 Lystra ? some weakness from the triple ship- 
 wrecks ? some trace of the burning of Sirius 
 or the fury of Euraquilo ? Whatever it was, 
 this new pang in the monotony of misery, this 
 fresh martyr-wound in the martyr-life, how 
 does St. Paul bear it ? Poor sufferer, with his 
 passionate heart, his humiliated presence, his 
 trembling susceptibility, his stammering speech 
 — so far from murmuring at it, he accepts, he 
 even glories in it as the seal of his embassy and 
 credential of his Apostolate, a stigma of his 
 Lord. By that indisputable sign Christ is his 
 conqueror, his captain, his master ; he is 
 Christ's prisoner. His slave. His soldier now ! 
 A slave in Rome or Ephesus might blush to 
 be called s/igniatias — the branded chattel of an 
 earthly owner ; but Paul is proud of a service 
 which is perfect freedom ; and in his next 
 epistle he calls himself for the first time, ^ovXoq 
 Ir/croi) y^piarov, a slave of Jesus Christ. From 
 henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear — 
 /3a(Tra^w — I bear like a trophy, branded upon 
 my body, the marks of the Lord Jesus ! " 
 
 5. My brethren, let us humbly admit that 
 many of St. Paul's expressions which have 
 passed into the current phraseology of Christian 
 
THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 289 
 
 life — to "die daily," to "be crucified with Christ," 
 to " carry about the dying," to " bear the marks" 
 of the Lord Jesus — often as they are repeated, 
 have become on our lips grievously conven- 
 tional. In the case of all but a very few, do 
 we not feel that they have a false ring about 
 them ? On the cross itself, which once caused 
 a shudder in the hearts of men, the world has 
 laid its chilly and vulgarizing touch. It has 
 been degraded from a thrilling symbol into a 
 pretty ornament. On the forehead of every 
 one of us in infancy the cross was signed. 
 Alas ! how much of the meaning of that cross, 
 except in the way of involuntary trials, of 
 deserved punishments, does that symbol repre- 
 sent to us ? How much in the way of penitence, 
 in the way of devotion, in the way of self- 
 denial } How much have we shown of the 
 sensibility of innocence, the enthusiasm of un- 
 selfishness', the passion of self-sacrifice ? How 
 often have we illustrated the noble desire to be 
 poor, and to descend ? How often have we 
 displayed the glorious readiness to spend and 
 to be spent in other causes than that of self .'^ 
 How many of us can say with the Apostles, 
 " Lo ! we have forsaken all and followed 
 Thee " Ought the Christian life to be so 
 easily harmonized as we harmonize it with 
 luxury, with eager worldliness, with murmuring 
 ambition, with greed, with malice, with lack of 
 
 T 
 
290 E VER YD A V CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 
 
 charity, with love of self ? Ought the Christian 
 warfare to be, as it so often is, Httle more than 
 a comfortable profession of languid virtues ; 
 a thin veneer of conventional respectabilities ; a 
 hypocritical semblance of dead, or at least of 
 inoperative, of ineffectual, of passively received 
 beliefs ? Death, judgment, eternity — how many 
 of us live with these habitually in view ? To 
 eat, and drink, and sleep, to accumulate, to 
 laugh, to die, with no thought of a besetting 
 God, with no shame for our unworthiness, no 
 bitter penitence for sin, no serious effort for 
 amendment, no thrill of gratitude to Christ, no 
 solemn looking forth to heaven : — does this 
 describe the life of any of us ? and if it does — 
 oh, is this the life on which has fallen the 
 shadow of the cross ? 
 
 6. Ah, my friends, how very different our 
 lives, our aims, our interests would look if, 
 for one single hour, we could see them as we 
 shall see them when, a few years hence, we lie 
 on the bed of death ! Which shall we think 
 most of then ? our successes, our accumulations, 
 the bitter things we have written, the sharp 
 things we have said, or any good deed, were 
 it ever so humble, which by God's grace, we 
 haply may have tried to do ? " O God, deal 
 not with us after our sins, neither reward us 
 according to our iniquities ! " Oh, recognize us 
 for Thine own, even if it be but as the last 
 
THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 291 
 
 and lowest of Thine own. Oh, say not to us, 
 " Ye have said, Lord, Lord ; ye have prophesied 
 in My name, but I never knew you. Ye have 
 professed to love Me, but ye have not kept My 
 commandments. Ye have not done the things 
 which I said." Ah ! Lord it is true. " We 
 have left undone those things which we ought 
 to have done, and done those things which we 
 ought not to have done." Saints we are not, 
 heroic we are not, not even magnanimous ; 
 scarcely even dare we claim the humblest 
 meaning of the Avord Christian, still less that 
 we are the sons of God. Yet something — 
 something not quite despicable, not wholly 
 ignoble, by Thy grace we may have been, or 
 yet may be. No branch of palm, no crown of 
 amaranth, no chariot of fire for us ; but oh, 
 write upon us Thy new name, and renew upon 
 our foreheads Thy half-obliterated baptismal 
 cross ! 
 
 But, my friends, if we indeed desire this 
 there is one indispensable condition. There 
 cannot be on the same brow the marks of the 
 Lord Jesus, and the stigmata of Satan's serf- 
 dom ; not on the same forehead the Cross of 
 Christ, and the brand of Cain. If on the fore- 
 heads of God's saints we read, written in the 
 hieroglyphics of Heaven, the name of the 
 Almighty, so do v/e not see the stigmata of 
 Satan on many a darkened countenance, in 
 
 T 2 
 
292 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 many a deeply-troubled glance ? " Think not," 
 says the young Angel in the " Paradise Lost," to 
 the fallen spirit whom he had failed to recog- 
 nize, because his old Archangelic lustre was 
 now visibly impaired — 
 
 " Think not, revolted spirit, thy shape the same 
 Or undiminished brightness, to be known 
 As when thou stood'st in heaven, upright and pure, 
 That glory, then, when thou no more wast good 
 Departed from thee, and thou resemblest now 
 Thy sin, and place of doom, obscure and foul." 
 
 So spake the cherub, and his grave rebuke, 
 Severe in youthful beauty, added grace 
 Invincible ; abashed the Devil stood 
 And felt how awful goodness is, and Virtue 
 In her o\to shape how lovely ; — saw and pined 
 His loss, but mostly to find here observed 
 His lustre visibly impaired. 
 
 It is the case with all sin that it mars those 
 mortal bodies which are the temples of the 
 Holy Ghost. Intemperance, envy, discontent, 
 impurity do brand the souls of men, each with 
 its own several mark, as bond slaves of the 
 powers of evil. And most of all is this the 
 case with all willing, with all habitual sins. And 
 think not that the marks of Satan can be 
 always, can be effectually concealed. Con- 
 cealed they cannot be from the all-seeing eye 
 of God ; concealed they may be for a time from 
 the eyes of men, but even that not certainly, 
 and rarely all the life long. " Hark in your ear," 
 
THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 293 
 
 says the strange character in a work of genius, 
 " when the Black Man has put his mark upon 
 any one, and seest him so shy of acknowledging 
 the bond, he has an awkward way of producing 
 their sign-manual, and making them confess 
 even before the eyes of men that they have 
 secretly belonged to him." When, in the great 
 poem of the Middle iVges, Dante leaves the mirk 
 of the abyss, and struggles upward to the 
 mountain of Purgatory, he has to pass up the 
 steps of sincerity, of contrition, and of self- 
 sacrifice to the diamond threshold of forgiveness, 
 and as he enters the narrow wicket gate the 
 Angel of Repentance marks the letter P (for 
 peccatum, sin) seven times upon his forehead, 
 one letter for each one of the seven deadly sins, 
 and he cannot enter Paradise till each one of 
 those fatal letters has been brushed away. 
 
 But whether there be on the sinner any 
 external signs of his sin or not, each man has 
 his own character ; that which, as the very 
 word implies, is engraved upon him — the image 
 which God sees upon the coin — the super- 
 scription which God reads upon the soul. Oh, 
 my brethren, let us strive with all our energy 
 that, upon the souls of every one of us, we may 
 bear the marks of the Lord Jesus, visible to 
 His tenderness, however faint to the eye of man. 
 He will rejoice to decipher were it but the 
 dimmest traces of His likeness, be they never 
 
294 
 
 EVER YD A V CHRIST/AN LIFE. 
 
 so marred and blurred. But every day we 
 may make them more and more distinct. 
 Wherever there is any form of self-conquest, 
 sternly achieved, for conscience sake — there is 
 one of the marks of Jesus. Is there one here, 
 who, being naturally proud, has schooled him- 
 self to the sweet virtue of humility in love of 
 Christ ? Is there one here, who having been 
 prone to passion and sarcasm, has yet tutored 
 his lips to gentleness and his heart to calm ? 
 Is there one who, being of a jealous and envious 
 spirit, has grown to rejoice honestly at the 
 success, not only of his rivals, but even of his 
 inferiors } Is there one who, being full of 
 earthly ambition, has learnt of Him who refused 
 all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
 them, that there is no noble ambition save that 
 of eminently serving God ? Is there one who, 
 having been indolent and self-indulgent, has 
 learnt " the dignity of work, the innocence of 
 work, the holiness of work, the happiness of 
 work," for God and man Is there one, the 
 fountain of whose life has been polluted by evil 
 thoughts and evil words and evil deeds, but 
 who, by earnest prayer for the grace of God, 
 and noble effort to mortify within him every 
 corrupting passion, has striven to purify himself 
 even as God is pure, and so once more to see 
 the face of His Father, unobscured by the rank 
 mists which reek upwards from the sin-polluted 
 
THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 295 
 
 heart ? — then there — even if there have been 
 no bitter sorrow, no rending conflict — there, 
 even upon that soul, are marks — marks, how- 
 ever faint, of the Lord Jesus. And this is not 
 beyond the strength of any one of us — not 
 even of the most fallen. He who received 
 publicans and sinners, and ate with them ; He 
 who touched the leper and made him clean ; 
 He who cast seven devils out of the soul of the 
 Magdalene ; He who suffered the woman who 
 was a sinner to wash His feet with her tears, 
 and wipe them with the hairs of her head ; 
 He who even .to the miserable, dishevelled, 
 shamed adulteress, said, as she lay sobbing 
 upon the Temple floor amid her tangled hair, 
 Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin 
 no more " — He, most surely, will receive us. 
 Does He not again and again invite us ? Does 
 He not say, " I was not sent but unto the lost 
 sheep of the House of Israel " ? Did He not 
 cry, " Come unto Me all ye that are weary and 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest " ? "It 
 is the helpless who feel themselves helpless 
 whom God specially invites to come to Him, 
 and to whom He offers all the riches of His 
 salvation ; not forgiveness only — forgiveness 
 would be worth little if it left us under the 
 power of our early passions — not forgiveness 
 only, but strength ; that strength that enables 
 us to conquer sin." Know ye not that " the 
 
296 
 
 EVER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 Son of Man hath power even on earth to 
 forgive sins " ? 
 
 In this faith — in this quietness of humble 
 but perfect confidence — let us come to God in 
 Christ, and let us say, " Faint are Thy marks 
 which we bear upon us. Punishment we have 
 deserved ; we deny it not. But oh ! we will try 
 to do our duty, try to leave the world a little 
 better than we found it. Accept, O Lord, such 
 imperfect service as Thou didst inspire, for the 
 sake of the one perfect self-sacrifice which 
 Thou didst fulfil. Pardon our sins out of 
 Thine own boundless pity. Read Thy marks 
 upon us, or if they be obliterated, do Thou of 
 Thy mercy renew them ; and may our names 
 be found written in Thy Book of Life, even 
 though we stand lowest and last upon its list ! " 
 
 Oh ! with all the energies of an immortal 
 life, let us strive that ere we die we too 
 may bear on our souls at least tJiese marks of 
 the Lord Jesus — bear them at least in virtues 
 won, in faults corrected, in sins repented of 
 All sins committed leave their own scar on 
 earth, even after the wound is healed ; but 
 when, after prayer and penitence, sins have 
 been forgiven through the atoning blood of 
 Christ, then the very scars they leave are — as 
 Bossuet said of the wounds of the immortal 
 Conde — Proofs of the protection of heaven." 
 If we can take with us no saintly self- 
 
THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 297 
 
 denials, no noble services, no rich spiritual gifts, 
 when we stand before the judgment-seat of 
 Christ, let us at least take the traces of wounds 
 which His grace has closed : proofs of recovery; 
 scars touched into healing by His hand of love. 
 It was for this — it was for the forgiveness of 
 sins — that Christ died and rose again, and ever 
 liveth to make intercession for us ; and these, 
 even these, shall be marks of the Lord Jesus in 
 such as we. 
 
XX. 
 
 U\K TLvxxc (3lot^ of HDumatiitP, 
 
 A CHRISTMAS MORNING SERMON. 
 
 "The Word was made flesh."— John i. 14. 
 
 N this morning there can be but one 
 subject for us, the birth of Christ. Of 
 that birth there are two aspects. It is 
 an event in time ; it is a revelation of eternity. 
 It is a fact of history ; it is a doctrine of 
 religion. As an event it is more stupendous 
 than any in history ; as a revelation it is more 
 blessed than any in Scripture. 
 
 It is a fact pathetic beyond description ; a 
 faith rich in illimitable blessedness. 
 
 I. What is the fact? The lessons of to-day 
 bring it home to us in manifold aspects. A 
 Roman emperor had decreed that the Jews 
 should enrol themselves. In obedience to that 
 decree a poor carpenter of Nazareth, of the fallen 
 line of David, made his way to Bethlehem, with 
 Mary, his betrothed wife, then travailing with a 
 divine birth. Through the darkness of that 
 
THE TRUE GLORY OF HUMANITY. 299 
 
 wintry night they toiled up the hill of Bethlehem' 
 and since there was no room for them at the inn, 
 she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped 
 him in swaddling-clothes, and laid him in a 
 manger. All was silent in the world of nature; 
 all was indifferent in the world of man. No 
 eclipse or earthquake, no cataclysm or confla- 
 gration heralded the greatest birth of Time. 
 Herod recked not of it in his neighbouring 
 palace, nor Augustus at Rome, nor Caiaphas in 
 Jerusalem, nor Priests nor Pharisees amid their 
 minutiae of outward service. Only the angels 
 could not contain their joy; only to the poor 
 shepherds the heavens burst to disclose their 
 light, and, for one moment, through the midnight 
 the glory flashed and the melody brimmed 
 over the crystal firmament. I have stood in 
 that cave of Bethlehem and seen the silver star 
 let into the marble floor where, under an ever- 
 * burning lamp, runs the inscription, " Hie e 
 Virgine Maria Christus natus est (Here of the 
 Virgin Mary Christ was born). He who stands 
 there stands at the watershed of human history. 
 It is from thence that the streams of all the past 
 flow into their dark backwards ; from thence 
 the rivers of the future stream down rejoicing 
 to meet the eternal light. 
 
 2. The Nativity, that is the fact. The Ix- 
 CARXATIOX, that is the doctrine and the mystery. 
 The birth of a little babe in the stable of the 
 
300 E I 'ER YD A Y CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 humble inn, there is the event. The Word became 
 flesh; 
 
 The Lord of Time and all the worlds 
 Came to us once a naked new-born child ; — 
 
 that little babe laid in the manger, He is the 
 King of Kings — there is the mystery. To you 
 I need not stop to prove it ; to you it is self- 
 attested ; you know it ; you believe it ; many 
 of you, I trust, have learnt the truth of it by 
 blessed experience ; you have the witness in 
 yourselves. 
 
 3. God became man. Is not that cause 
 enough for Christmas gladness, for a joy as of 
 the angels, for a joy ten times more glad and 
 living than we can ever feel ? He took not on 
 Him the nature of angels, yet the angels thrilled 
 with tumults of joy at the thoughts of millions 
 of sinners who would repent. What would our 
 joy be if, with their larger other eyes, we could 
 see all that was signified by the birth of Christ ? 
 The mystery, indeed, we cannot fathom. Of 
 that we say^ 'T will seek to believe rather than to 
 reason ; to adore rather than to explain ; to give 
 thanks rather than to penetrate ; to love rather 
 than to know ; to humble myself rather than to 
 speak." But believing it — and oh, that we may 
 strive to believe it^ not with orthodox assent, 
 but with personal realization ! — which of the 
 thousand lessons which it involves shall we try 
 to take to our hearts to-day ? 
 
THE TRUE GLORY OF HUMANITY. 301 
 
 4. Through the fact, through the mystery' 
 through all the life and teaching of our Lord 
 there is one lesson, which, if we could but grasp 
 it, would be a lifelong source of strength, of 
 purity, of ennobling peace. On that lesson I 
 will speak my few words to-day. It is the 
 grandeur of that human nature which God has 
 given us ; the sacredness, the majesty, the lofty 
 privileges, the immeasurable possibilities of man. 
 
 5. It is a revelation altogether new. Look 
 at man in the light of Nature. We look up- 
 wards, and, seeing the galaxies of stars, the 
 myriads of planets and moons and suns and 
 systems, our nothingness is burnt into us and we 
 are tempted to think of ourselves as infinitesimal 
 atoms, the creatures of a passing moment, the 
 prey of blind forces in the blinding whirl of 
 chance. 
 
 We look downwards, and seeing the earth 
 wrinkled with her innumerable graves, dead 
 species, dead genera, dead generations, dead 
 epochs, a universe of death " — the very dust 
 of the world made of the decay of unnumbered 
 organisms — we are tempted to believe that 
 nothing remains for us but dust to dust, that 
 the grave is the universal end, and the worm the 
 universal conqueror. 
 
 We look around, and seeing the vanity and 
 vileness of mankind, seeing races wholly given up 
 to various idolatries, seeing that the dark places 
 
302 
 
 EVERYDA y CHRISTIAN LIFE, 
 
 of the earth are the habitations of cruelty, seeing 
 man savage and man civilized alike abandoning 
 himself to passions of dishonour, and given over 
 to the lowest instincts we arc tempted to despise 
 our being. We turn to communities nominally 
 Christian, and we see them tainted by greed, 
 given over to lies, besotted by drink, the bond- 
 slaves of base and brutal appetites. We turn 
 to biography, and it is chiefly a record of 
 human sorrows ; to history, and it tells of ages 
 of crime and error ; to the poets, and their songs 
 are full of sadness and despondency. 
 
 And when we dwell on all this, and look each 
 at the plague of our own hearts, we blush for 
 ourselves, we blush for our race, we say that, 
 " however we brazen it out, we men are a little 
 breed." It is such thoughts that drive men into 
 the devil's gospel of despair and materialism ; it 
 is from the exclusive contemplation of man 
 in his lowest nature that many are led to say 
 so wearily that life is not worth living ; that it 
 is — 
 
 A life of nothings, nothing worth 
 From that first nothing at our birth 
 To that last nathing under earth. 
 
 6. Now turn from the shadow, face the sun ! 
 Turn away your eyes from the phenomena of 
 evil and ruin, and look at the manger-cradle of 
 Bethlehem. Look at man in the light of the 
 Incarnation, and see how all is changed ! The 
 
THE TRUE GLORY OF HUMANITY. 303 
 
 Jesus, who is Christ the Lord, was the perfect 
 man, the representative man, man in the image 
 of God, God as a man with men ; God not 
 merely reveahng Himself to man, not merely 
 uniting himself to man, but God becoming man. 
 We do not judge of the tree from the blighted 
 trunk, the cankered leaves, the bitter roots — 
 but from its glory of foliage, of blossom, and 
 of fruit. We do not estimate the ship from the 
 miserable wreck which the rocks have gored, and 
 the waves shattered, and the winds flung in scorn 
 upon the shore — but from the gallant barque, 
 when, with streaming flag and bellying sails, 
 she walks the waters like a thing of life." Even 
 so we must take our estimate of man, not from 
 the churl and the villain, not from the liar and 
 the scoundrel, not from the selfish miser and the 
 staggeringdrunkard, not from the indolence of the 
 slothful and the wretchedness of the depraved ; 
 not from the harlot and the felon, and those 
 yet more guilty, who made them what they are 
 — but from the pure, the good, the spiritually- 
 minded. These alone are true men and true 
 women ; the others are but the blight of men 
 and women, the wrecks of what once w^ere, or 
 what once should have been, those gracious 
 things. In the light from Bethlehem's cradle we 
 see man not as he too often is, but as he may 
 be, as we trust that he yet will be. We see his 
 darkness di.spelled by a divine light, his nature 
 
304 E VER YD A V CHRISTLAN LIFE. 
 
 transfigured with an illumination not of earth. 
 St. Anselm wrote a famous book with the title, 
 "Cur Deus Homo?" ("Why did God become 
 Man ?") And one answer at least to that 
 question is to teach us that " we are greater 
 than we know." God became man that man 
 might become as God; that he might be a little 
 higher than the angels, instead of a little lower 
 than the brutes. 
 
 And in the light of this truth we escape from 
 that snare of the devil which would lead us to 
 despise our human nature. We say, " I trust 
 in the nobleness of human nature, in the majesty 
 of its faculties, in the fulness of its mercy, in the 
 joy of its love." 
 
 7. And, ah ! my friends, do not regard this 
 as a mere vague trust, a mere abstract specula- 
 tion. It is a belief which may affect every day 
 of our lives, in the twofold blessedness of duty 
 and of love. It affects our estimate of ourselves ; 
 affects our conduct to others. There is not one 
 degradation of our personal being which does 
 not spring from lack of self-reverence, — of 
 reverence for ourselves as those whom Christ 
 has redeemed, to whom He has given a right to 
 be children of God. The Incarnation teaches 
 us that our part is in Christ, our bodies His 
 temple, our nature His image, our hearts His 
 shrine. He that takes a mean estimate of his 
 own being, he who regards himself as akin only 
 
THE TRUE GLORY OF HUMANITY. 303 
 
 to the beasts that perish, and destined to no 
 higher end than they, will live as they do. He 
 who looks on himself as immortal, as a child of 
 God, as partaker of the nature which Christ wore 
 and Christ redeemed, he will hold himself ev^er 
 more and more bounden to aim at a noble and 
 godly life. 
 
 Thus, then, the Incarnation, rightly appre- 
 hended, becomes the basis of all noble concep- 
 tions of our human life. 
 
 In the light of the Son of God becoming flesh, 
 we dare not degrade or disesteem ourselves. We 
 see how base an apostasy it is to abnegate the 
 divine prerogative of our being. The birth of 
 Christ becomes to us the pledge of immortality, 
 the inspiration of glad, unerring, life-long duty 
 to ourselves. And no less does it bring home 
 to us the new commandment of love to our 
 brethren. It becomes the main reason why we 
 .should love one another. If men were indeed 
 what Satan makes them, and makes us try to 
 believe that they solely are — hopelessly de- 
 graded, unimaginably vile ; if human life be 
 nothing at the best but the shadow of a passing 
 and miserable dream, I know not how we could 
 love one another. We could only turn with 
 loathing from all the vice and canker, the mortal 
 corruption, the manifold baseness of many 
 lives. How is all transfigured, how is the 
 poorest wretch earth ever bore transfigured.. 
 
 u 
 
3o6 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 when we remember that for these Christ became 
 man, for these He died ! Shall we, ourselves so 
 weak, so imperfect, so stained with evil, shall we 
 dare to despise these whom Christ so loved that 
 for them — yea, for these blind and impotent 
 men, these publicans and sinners, these ragged 
 prodigals of humanity still voluntarily linger- 
 ing among their husks and swine — for these, 
 even for these, He, so pure, so perfect, took our 
 nature upon Him, and went, step by step, down 
 all that infinite descent ? Despise them ? Ah ! 
 the revealing light of the God-man shows too 
 much darkness in ourselves to leave any possi- 
 bility for pride. We take our own seats among 
 the lepers on the Temple steps; prostrate with 
 them we stretch blind hands of faith and prayer 
 to God. "We are all equally guilty, we are all 
 equally redeemed." Standing beside the cradle 
 of the Lord all humanity becomes precious, be- 
 comes immortal. It becomes to us a sacred 
 and blessed duty to pity the afflicted, to feed the 
 hungry, to clothe the naked, to comfort the sick, 
 to bring home the wanderers, to undo the heavy 
 burden and let the oppressed go free. If even 
 Christian men saw this duty they would not live 
 as so many of them do. But if we have learnt 
 the lesson of Christmas, the lesson of Bethlehem, 
 let us live to counteract the works of the devil ; 
 let it be the one aim of our lives to love and 
 not to hate ; to help, not to hinder ; to succour 
 
THE TRUE GLORY OE HUMANITY. 307 
 
 them that are tempted, not to add to and 
 multiply their temptations ; to make men better, 
 not worse ; to make life a little happier, not 
 more deeply miserable ; to speak kindly words, 
 not all words that may do hurt ; to console and 
 to encourage, not to blister and envenom weak 
 and suffering souls; to live for others, not for our- 
 selves ; to look each of us not on his own thing-s, 
 but on the things of others ; to think noble 
 thoughts of man as well as of God ; to be kind 
 to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one 
 another, even as God in Christ has forgiven us. 
 
 My friends, let this central lesson suffice for 
 us to-day. Is it not high enough ? Is it not 
 pure enough ? Is it so easy to remember always 
 the sacredness, the hopes, of a nature which at 
 this time Christ took upon Him, when He was 
 born of a pure Virgin ? Is it so easy to respect, 
 to reverence, to control ourselves ? Is it so 
 easy and so common to bear with, to help, to 
 love, to forgive our fellow-men ? Ah ! if for 
 the coming year we would but translate these 
 truths into action, and live our life in the light 
 of them, then no cynic's sneer, no base man's 
 selfishness should ever dim for us the spiritual 
 radiancy of Christmas joy. To us, as we go 
 about our humble daily duties, to us, as to the 
 shepherds in the chilly darkness, there would 
 come from the open heaven flashes of angel 
 light, bursts of angel minstrelsy ; upon the 
 
3o8 E VER YD A V CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 listening air there would rest the burden of that 
 angel carol, " Glory to God in the highest, on 
 earth peace, goodwill towards men,'" till earth 
 itself, and these dim, guilty cities, and our poor, 
 perplexed, distracted, dying, mortal life should 
 be glorified with a light of God ; while 
 
 To prouder folly we should show 
 Earth by divine light made divine. 
 
 Oh, may it be God's blessing to each of us to 
 enjoy a Christmas, to enjoy a New Year, happy 
 with this happiness of heaven, happy with the 
 primal truth of an ennobled nature ; rich in the 
 humble charities that heal and bless ; trans- 
 figured in the light which streams from the 
 manger-cradle, the light of redemption, the light 
 of duty, the light of life ! God grant to you and 
 me and all of us thus to enter here into the joy 
 of our Lord, until at last we be made partakers 
 of His everlasting felicity in the tearless life 
 beyond the grave. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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