'JlO 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 Presented by 
 
 ne.rbe.r-h A Mam 6 Q-'itbone. 
 
 BX 7233 .H47 1892 
 
 Herron, George Davis, 1862 
 
 1925. 
 A plea for the gospel 
 
BOOKS BY GEORGE D. HERRON. 
 
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 tbe Christian State. 
 
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 " Dr. Herron thinks and speaks as one who is under 
 the compulsion of heavenly visions and voices. He is 
 haunted by his subject. He does not argue, nor specu- 
 late, nor balance a number of conflicting theories, nor 
 guide his readers to a mild and inconclusive issue of 
 alternatives. like a true projihet of God, he sees, he 
 declares, he warns, he denounces, lie appeals." — Rev. 
 Charles A. Berry, D.D., Wolverhampton, England. 
 
A 
 
 Plea for the Gospel, 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE D.'^HERRON, 
 
 NEW YORK: 46 East Fourtkentfi St. 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 BOSTON: 100 Purchase Street. 
 
Copyright, 1892, 
 By T. Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 C. J. Peters & Son, 
 
 Type-setters and Electrotypers, 
 
 145 High Street, Boston. 
 
I DEDICATE THIS PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL TO 
 MY WIFE, 
 
 JHarg lE&crtait l^crron, 
 
 WHO HAS BEEN TO ME A LIVING CONSCIENCE. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 These four sermons were prepared to preach 
 to preachers, "The Peril of the Church " and 
 " The Opportunity of the Church " were deliv- 
 ered before clerical unions in western cities. 
 "The Reality of Faith" and "The Faith 
 that Overcometh the World " were preached 
 before state ecclesiastical associations. Frag- 
 ments of these sermons have been widely 
 published and discussed, and many calls have 
 been made for their publication in this per- 
 manent form. This call has been emphasized 
 by the interest awakened by the publication of 
 four sermons, a year ago, under the title of 
 " The Larger Christ." 
 
 The burden of that book is the burden of 
 this. The revelation of the sovereign love of 
 Christ as the law of all human life is the 
 thought which lies at the heart of each dis- 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 course, accounting for whatever repetition of 
 expression, or exaggeration of emphasis, the 
 critic may find. The assertion of the cross as 
 the eternal principle of all divine and human 
 action, not simply the accident of sin, seems 
 to me the imperative of the hour. This one 
 thing I do. I can find no other work. Every- 
 thing I touch resolves itself into the message 
 of the cross. So I accept this message as my 
 intellectual and moral portion, rejoicing in the 
 larger and more comprehensive word which 
 other voices will speak. 
 
 These sermons are not put forth as dogma, 
 but as life, fragmentary, indeed, but yet life. 
 May the living Christ bless them as food to 
 some hungry souls in this day of human need 
 and divine opportunity ! 
 
 G. D. H. 
 
 First Congregational Church. 
 Burlington, Io., June, 1892. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. PAGB 
 
 Unconsecrated Service the Peril of the Church i 
 
 II. 
 
 The Opportunity of the Church 33 
 
 III. 
 The Reality of Faith 57 
 
 IV. 
 The P^aith that overcometh the World ... 85 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE THE PERIL OF 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
The essential of Philistinism is self-satisfaction, — the belief 
 that one has the best there is, and that he has all he needs. 
 This is a faith held by many excellent people, who are, never- 
 theless, enemies of the light, of progress, and, in a way, of 
 truth, who, above all, fail to achieve the highest and noblest 
 aims. For the mood of progress is the mood of discontent, of 
 feeling that one is not what he ought to be, that one has not 
 the best to be had, and that of the excellent things which he 
 does possess he does not possess enough. The satisfied man is 
 always an inferior man. The superior man is always dissatis- 
 fied; his goals and his achievements are before him. No mat- 
 ter what they may have been in the past, nor how greatly the 
 world may have honored them, his real life always lies in ad- 
 vance. The passion for perfection is the sign of the noblest 
 kind of character and mind, and it is this passion which breeds 
 what has been called ** divine discontent." It is not restless- 
 ness nor rebellion, but the feeling that one must always be 
 doing and being better. This is the feeling of the great artists; 
 no achievement satisfies. There is always the intense desire to 
 do something still better; and it is this desire and the steady 
 realization of it, rather than any recognition or reward, which 
 gives life its zest and its interest. — Hamilton W, Mabie. 
 
 We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack 
 measure, harmony, and grace. Christianity, in breaking man 
 up into outer and inner, the world into earth and heaven, hell 
 and paradise, has decomposed the human unity, in order, it is 
 true, to reconstruct it more profoundly and more truly. But 
 Christianity has not yet digested this powerful leaven. She 
 has not yet conquered the true humanity; she is still living 
 under the antinomy of sin and grace, of here below and there 
 above. She has not penetrated into the whole heart of Jesus. 
 She is still in the narthex of penitence; she is not reconciled, 
 and even the churches still wear the livery of service, and have 
 none of the joy of the daughters of God baptized of the Holy 
 Spirit. — Aniiel^s Journal, 
 
A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 I. 
 
 UNCONSECRATED SERVICE THE 
 PERIL OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 And it came to pass on the way at the lodging place, that 
 the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. — Ex. iv. 24. 
 
 It is a strange incident in the life of Moses 
 that is thus briefly and obscurely stated. From 
 the beginning of his career Moses had been 
 driven about with the sense of a divine compul- 
 sion, his life taken from his own disposal, his 
 ways and times other than his own choosing. 
 Early called to be the deliverer of the Hebrew 
 people from their Egyptian bondage, he had 
 been driven from his task, into an exile of forty 
 years, at his first attempt to fulfil his mission. 
 After the long waiting, — doubtless through 
 alternating periods of hope and despair, — God 
 saw that the man was sufficiently humbled by 
 3 
 
4 A FLEA FOR THE GOSPEL, 
 
 failure and purified by suffering to begin his 
 work. By the time the cup of Israel's affliction 
 was full, the years of divine discipline had added 
 to the natural strength of Moses* character 
 something of the wisdom and the patience of 
 the power of God. So, while one day tending 
 the flocks of his Midianite father-in-law, God 
 spoke to him from the burning bush, bidding 
 him go down into Egypt and lead forth the 
 chosen people to their promised land. After 
 some halting and arguing with God, Moses 
 took his family and started for Egypt, accord- 
 ing to the divine command. Yet, on the way, 
 while hastening along the path in which God 
 himself had set the leader's feet, God met him 
 and sought to kill him. This is the simple and 
 inspired way of saying that something hap- 
 pened to Moses, something came into or upon 
 his life, that threatened to destroy it, and defeat 
 his divinely directed plans for delivering Israel. 
 And what else could this arrested journey, this 
 mortal struggle for life and faith and wisdom, 
 — what else could it be than the overpowering 
 and consecrating presence of the Lord ? Hold 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 5 
 
 on, Moses; wait a little ; think awhile ; under- 
 stand yourself ; look at me. Either you must 
 make a complete and trustful surrender of your- 
 self to me, so that I may work in you, and you 
 may work with me, unhindered by any self-will 
 or unbelief, or you must get out of my way. It 
 is better you should die than that you should 
 take up my work with unconsecrated hands. 
 To this end have I brought this upon you, for 
 this reason have I permitted this thing to come 
 into your life, that I may render you self-help- 
 less, leaving you no choice but death or irrevo- 
 cable self-surrender. Choose now, Moses, with 
 a choice that shall be eternal. 
 
 It may be the Lord appeared to Moses just 
 as he appears to all of us, in those great epochal 
 moments when we lie very low under his hum- 
 bling hand, terribly conscious that nowhere in 
 the universe is there sustaining strength save 
 in the healing touch of his infinite life ; no- 
 where any hope save in the reviving breath of 
 his infinite mercy. If we would receive him, 
 the Lord would meet us in every disappoint- 
 ment and affliction, calling us to a sincerer 
 
6 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 self-examination, helping us to a purer and 
 completer consecration ; he would make every 
 sorrow the sanctuary in which we should enter 
 into a closer fellowship with his life. It is true, 
 we ought to see opportunities for a deeper and 
 more unbroken intimacy with God in our joys, 
 as well as perils and griefs ; but we see the 
 heavens best in the night. 
 
 It costs God much to make a man ; it costs a 
 man to have God make him. Out of the low- 
 est depths of self-abasement God lifts men to 
 the greatest heights. Every man called to do a 
 great work has been baffled in his efforts until 
 the reins of his purposes were delivered into 
 the hand mightier than his own; or he has been 
 kept humble by relentless memories of sin, and 
 baptized with sorrows that would consume his 
 life if he abode not in the secret place of the 
 Most High ; or he has been led under the des- 
 potism of passions that would become demoniac 
 if not hallowed upon the altar of a perfect sacri- 
 fice. From the poverty and bondage of a self- 
 life, into the unsearchable riches and infinite 
 freedom of the divine life, there is a vast wilder- 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 7 
 
 ness of experience, tracked only by paths of 
 fearless faith ; and few there be that find them. 
 Those who find their way from the old life into 
 the new have left behind them wasted years, 
 and the wrecks of wicked hopes that once 
 seemed divine. It seems as though human 
 self-will compels God to lose immense quanti- 
 ties of the strongest and purest lives, in order 
 to save some precious fragments to invest with 
 an altogether divine quality. Again and again, 
 at the point of death, are the messengers of 
 God delivered from the peril of unconsecrated 
 service ere they are allowed to proceed upon 
 their redemptive errands. 
 
 Yet God counts no price too great to pay for 
 a man. The human character that is eternal 
 has been wrought out by the suffering of God. 
 By the sorrow of his heart has God chiselled 
 out his image in the soul of man. By the blood 
 of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
 world are we cleansed from the sins of time. 
 But God reckons not the cost ; he spared not 
 his Son ; he quenches not his sufferings. And 
 without stint God lavishes suffering upon every 
 
8 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 son, who thereby learns obedience. It is worth 
 God's while. There is no sight so sublime, no 
 beauty so enthralling, no influence so subtle in 
 operation and measureless in results, no power 
 so resistless, as that of a human life wholly 
 consecrated to God. The most splendid and 
 authoritative institutions of men are toys com- 
 pared to the pure-hearted child of God who has 
 seen the divine meanings of things, and yielded 
 all his powers to the absolute sway of the eter- 
 nal realities. He who is great enough to put 
 the kingdoms of the world and all their glory 
 behind him, rather than forfeit one tittle of his 
 birthright as a son of God ; who falters not in 
 the face of the darkest mysteries of life, and 
 drinks deep of its sorrows that he may have 
 fellowship with God; who dares be led from 
 day to day by his divine instincts, without 
 anxiety for the morrow ; whose comxmunion 
 with God is so close and unbroken that prayer 
 is his soul's atmosphere ; whose religious knowl- 
 edge is not the traditions of men, but the word 
 of God in his inmost being ; who speaks what 
 he hears God speak, and does the works he 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. g 
 
 sees God doing; — such a man, soever humble 
 though he be, is the real maker of civilizations, 
 the divine reformer of nations, the eternal 
 worker of righteousness. God has provided 
 and man has discovered no greater force to 
 work out the redemption of the race than that 
 of the wholly unselfish life that seeketh not its 
 own. It is not with institutions and formulas, 
 so much as with men, that God unfolds his own 
 life in the development of humanity — men in 
 whom he can have his loving and righteous 
 way ; men with a faith as insuppressible as 
 light ; men who are incarnations of his draw- 
 ing sacrificial love. 
 
 To those who value what they can see and 
 own more than what is unseen and eternal this 
 does not always seem to be true. Such as 
 regard the social respectabilities above Christli- 
 ness of life may delight to honor the selfish 
 man who accepts the church's creeds and ob- 
 serves the commercial moralities. The church 
 may invite to high places men of renowned 
 integrity and conspicuous philanthropy, who 
 long since have exchanged the hand of brother- 
 
10 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 hood with which God created them for the 
 polished hand and steely grasp of covetousness. 
 Yet all service not rendered in the divine and 
 living Christ-way is but the service of death. 
 It is the unconsecrated service which is the 
 peril and infidelity of the church. 
 
 The church may appear to be growing in 
 aggressiveness and influence in other than the 
 meek and lowly ways of Christ, without being 
 rejected by the proud, and acquainted with the 
 grief of the stricken and oppressed ; without 
 being smitten with the sorrows, and wounded 
 with the transgressions of the straying sheep ; 
 without pouring out its soul unto death in 
 manifesting the saving love of God for a lost 
 world. But when the church is holding con- 
 ventions and congratulating itself on its prog- 
 ress, it may be changing into a sepulchre of 
 death, full of the bones of religious bigotry and 
 the corruption of social pride. It may be 
 conquering the world in its fancy, while in 
 reality it is being conquered by the world. It 
 may have become so servile in its deference to 
 the customs of a pagan society and an atheistic 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. II 
 
 market, so blind and bitter in its defence of 
 dead forms of religious truth, as to be as inca- 
 pable of seeing its actual condition as death is 
 incapable of seeing life. The world may have 
 flattered and bribed it into the surrender of 
 the power to discern its own spiritual degrada- 
 tion, its moral emaciation, its sad departure 
 from the spirit and life of its Lord. 
 
 The Jewish church had reached this state 
 when the Son of God appealed to it for the 
 recognition of his messianic authority. There 
 were saintly men and women in the temple and 
 synagogues, praying for the redemption, and 
 waiting for the consolation, of Israel. The 
 temple and its services had been the object of 
 God's particular care through long and weary 
 centuries. Often had God visited and cor- 
 rected his people Israel. They were the 
 treasurers of the oracles of God. But God 
 cares for the sacredest institutions no more 
 than they are his instruments for making men. 
 When they begin to exist for themselves more 
 than for their mission, then God destroys them. 
 The Son of man found the Jewish church so 
 
12 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 hopelessly fixed in its own rather than God's way 
 of salvation, that its destruction was essential to 
 the redemption of the world. Instead of being, 
 as its rulers thought, indispensable to the 
 kingdom of God, it confronted the kingdom's 
 coming with unyielding resistance. The Phari- 
 sees and scribes, many of them men of pro- 
 found religious culture and eminent piety, were 
 the only utterly abhorrent and apparently in- 
 curable souls that Jesus met in his ministry. 
 It was a case of consecration or death that 
 confronted the Jews; and they chose death, 
 not knowing the day of their visitation, wilfully 
 blind to their eternal opportunity. The peril 
 of unconsecrated service plunged Christendom 
 into the blood and anguish of the Reformation, 
 when the eyes of Savonarola and Wickliffe, 
 Luther and Zwingli, were open to see, and 
 their mouths open to hail, the coming of Christ 
 in a diviner order of history. On the pages of 
 Catholic records were lustrous deeds, and the 
 names of devoted martyrs who loved not their 
 lives unto death. Before the heroic purity and 
 passionate consecration of Bernard of Clairvaux 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 13 
 
 and Francis of Assissi, and the self-sacrifice of 
 a great multitude whom no man can number, 
 we may well be dumb at the wonder of their 
 lives and the shame of our own poor zeal and 
 faith ; when we can match their loyalty to 
 Christ, then we may have a right to point out 
 their superstition and folly. But the church, 
 withal, was in God's way. As an institution it 
 had come to exist for its own sake, making 
 religion the disgust of intelligence, the suspi- 
 cion of moral honesty, and the protection of 
 blackest crimes. It had juggled with righteous- 
 ness, and distorted the truth, until the world 
 was well-nigh ceasing to believe in the reality 
 of righteousness or the existence of truth. 
 Better the church should have been swept from 
 the face of the earth than have remained con- 
 secrated to selfish ends! Those who came out 
 from the church were its saviours. The birth 
 of Protestantism was the salvation of Catholi- 
 cism. Only by some measure of consecration, 
 somewhere within itself, could the church uni- 
 versal escape dissolution. Unconsecrated ser- 
 vice always carries in it the germs of the 
 servant's death. 
 
14 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 But the Reformation did not restore the 
 gospel. It did not liberate it from the tyranny 
 of Roman legalism, or clear it of the fungus 
 of Greek philosophy. Few pulpits have any 
 intelligent conception of what Christianity really 
 is ; that which the mass of Protestant preachers 
 proclaim is not the gospel. Christ came into 
 the world not so much to found a religion, as to 
 reveal the religion hidden beneath all the debris 
 of discarded beliefs and abandoned forms of 
 worship. He taught that religion was pure 
 and simple life ; life with God, life free from all 
 fear of nature or distrust of God, life rich with 
 the fulness of human fellowships. It was life 
 as sweet and joyous and unaffected in its rela- 
 tion to God, as that of the little child to the 
 loving parent ; a life of whole-hearted surrender 
 to Christ's way of living, Christ's way of think- 
 ing, Christ's way of working ; a life of personal 
 and direct contact with God in Christ, without 
 the intervention of rituals, priests, or creeds ; a 
 life that could joyously endure the loss of all 
 worldly favors and material possessions for the 
 sake of realizing its divine childhood, and bring- 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 15 
 
 ing others into the knowledge and glory of that 
 childhood. To give men this sonship, Christ 
 came, himself the resurrection of the divine 
 life in man — which is religion — from the ruins 
 of ages of distrust, idolatry, and disobedience. 
 He rescued this divine life of fellowship with 
 God and brotherhood with man from the do- 
 minion of selfishness, wounded and bleeding, 
 corrupt and deformed, as the life was, and 
 healed it with the balm of infinite mercy, and 
 gave it back to man. The gospel was God's 
 good news that the divinely human life could 
 be lived ; that whereas in times past ceremonies 
 and systems had been necessary because of the 
 blindness of human unbelief and the darkness 
 of human understanding, the time was now 
 come when men, through Christ, could have 
 immediate access unto the Father. Christ, in 
 his loving life and sacrificial death, revealed the 
 forgiveness and mercy, the gracious power of 
 the Father's love. After the cross, men could 
 have no excuse for doubting the love of God ; 
 after the ascension of Christ and his return in 
 the Spirit there was no excuse for abiding in 
 
1 6 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 unrighteousness. God was no Jupiter or Cassar. 
 He made no exactions concerning the past. 
 His love needed no bribing. His vengeance 
 was satisfied with man's repentance. It was 
 the prodigal who had gone away from the 
 Father, not the Father away from, the prodigal. 
 The blood of Calvary was the witness and 
 pledge of God's unchanging friendship for man. 
 Then Christ revealed to men how they might 
 be the children of their Father, sons of God, by 
 being like him. This is the meaning of the 
 Sermon on the Mount. God is good ; God is 
 forgiving unto the uttermost ; God loves those 
 who hate him, blesses those who curse, bestows 
 his favors on the false and unjust, suffers in be- 
 half of those whose sins are an abomination in 
 his eyes. Therefore, be like God and you will 
 be his children. Follow me ; live as I live ; be 
 as I am ; trust your lives to my leadership ; do 
 the works you see me do ; eat my bread, drink 
 my drink ; make my righteousness yours ; be 
 natural like the lily, like the little child ; be 
 spiritual, living as I live, in the light of an 
 immediate vision of God. This way of living 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. \*J 
 
 is not hard ; this burden of love for my broth- 
 ers is not grievous ; this yoke of my Father's 
 will is easy ; I walk in no darkness. Follow 
 me ; then you will walk in the light in which I 
 walk ; you will have the cross to bear I bear, 
 and my mission of redemption through sacrifice 
 will be yours ; but you will have the peace 
 that makes me strong, the joy that overflows 
 my life, and the love for men by which I glorify 
 my Father in their eyes. 
 
 This was the gospel. This was the faith 
 that was delivered to the apostles. It was the 
 good news of forgiveness ; the joyful tidings 
 that the world was redeemed ; the gift of a 
 power to work righteousness ; the revelation 
 of God as the Father of man, and of man as 
 the child of the Father. Every vestige of a 
 veil between man and God was torn away ; no 
 conditions, no opinions, were put between 
 them, save repentance and faith. They were 
 not asked to believe anything about God ex- 
 cept that he was good and forgiving, and would 
 give them his own power to be good and for- 
 giving, if they would repent of their sins, and 
 
1 8 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 take up the Christ-life of obedient faith. In 
 the joy of this simple gospel of redemption the 
 apostles went forth, empowered with triumph- 
 ant righteousness, on jubilant feet of peace, to 
 conquer the world for God. The like of their 
 glorious faith and mighty works had never 
 been seen before, and has rarely been seen 
 since. Christ had overcome the world. It 
 was not the devil's world, but God's world. 
 
 Soon Christianity came in contact with 
 Greek philosophy. The gospel was too simple 
 for the Greeks ; they would adopt it on a philo- 
 sophic basis. I do not believe, with Dr. Edwin 
 Hatch, that the Sermon on the Mount is the 
 centre of Christianity, or that conduct is its 
 basis. Christianity is a life, a divine incarna- 
 tion. Christianity is the life of God in man, 
 revealed in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the 
 cross its basic principle. But I do believe, with 
 Dr. Hatch, that the Greeks changed Christi- 
 anity from a message of righteousness into a 
 theology. They shifted the seat of religious 
 judgment from character to opinion, exalting 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 19 
 
 dogma above life. They grafted into the gos- 
 pel a philosophic Trinity of which the apos- 
 tles had never heard. Then Christianity grap- 
 pled with civil Romanism, and the empire was 
 finally converted into a great ecclesiastical 
 structure, and Christianity became a despotic 
 government, instead of simple life with God. 
 God's fatherhood became a Caesarhood. Christ 
 the Redeemer and elder brother of men be- 
 came a successful pleader at the bar of an 
 infinite judge, in a court of abstract and unreal 
 justice; a judge who had nothing to do with 
 the reality of love. Instead of being received 
 as a revelation of God, Christ has since been 
 presented as a protection from God. 
 
 Divine and great, beyond all reckoning, was 
 the work of the reformers. But there remains 
 a greater work to be done. There has been 
 a reformation : the work that remains is a 
 restoration of Christianity ; an emancipation 
 of the gospel from baneful bondage to the 
 Greeks, who have fettered its freedom and 
 bruised its life through all the centuries of 
 its progress ; a deliverance of Christianity from 
 
20 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 the Romans, who have corrupted our very laiv 
 guage with their unvital legalism of thought ; 
 whose law, Hegel says, makes a definition of 
 humanity impossible. 
 
 The time has come when the church must be 
 started upon a new career — a career that will 
 give back Christianity to Christendom, and re- 
 store the faith of the apostles to a waiting and 
 expectant world. From the prison-house of 
 churchly selfishness, from the bonds of dog- 
 matic theology, the gospel must be set free, 
 or there will arise a new Protestantism. In 
 the problems of our day Christ comes to call 
 the church to a more comprehensive mission. 
 Except the church be born again, and a heart of 
 flesh take the place of its heart of pride, it can- 
 not see the kingdom of God, which is pressing 
 in upon it from the future. To this work God 
 now calls the church to consecrate, yea, per- 
 haps to sacrifice, its freshest thought, its most 
 passionate devotion, its bravest hearts, its 
 strongest lives, that the unsearchable riches 
 of Christ may be poured afresh upon an impov- 
 erished world, and all men be made to see what 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 21 
 
 is the dispensation of the mystery which from 
 all ages hath been hid in God, waiting for the 
 manifestation of his Son and the preparation of 
 the earth for a regenerated society, a heavenly 
 civilization. To this end must these be dedi- 
 cated, or the church will perish like the temple, 
 or be rent like Rome. The Spirit calls upon 
 the church to furnish prophetic souls who will 
 feel the anger of the infinite love against the 
 covetousness which has betrayed Christ to be 
 crucified at the hands of mammon. There is a 
 divine inconsistency that drives the prophets of 
 larger truth beyond the realm of logic and 
 opinion into the sphere of infinite liberty, 
 where the Spirit utters through them the 
 thoughts of God: — these the church needs, 
 for these the churchless multitudes wait, to 
 lead them through the trial hour that is com- 
 ing upon the whole earth. The church must 
 raise up men who will obey the Spirit's voice, 
 or it must get out of God's way. For what 
 cares God for churches, if they obstruct the 
 march of the divine purposes.? 
 
 Do not think I would detract any honor from 
 
22 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 the innumerable company of saints and mar- 
 tyrs, scholars and missionaries, who by their he- 
 roic lives of service have gathered the glory of 
 God about our Protestant Christianity, and have 
 made the race rich with their sacrifices. These 
 cannot be too highly honored. But we truly 
 honor the brave and good who have been faith- 
 ful in the great crises of the past, and broken 
 the old bonds, and pioneered the race's way 
 into larger futures, by being ourselves true and 
 fearless in welcoming the new life and meeting 
 the fateful crises of our day of opportunity. 
 We never dishonor the truth and faith of the 
 past so much as when we try to make them the 
 defence of our own stupidity and cowardice. 
 
 We know, when we consider the matter intel- 
 ligently and honestly, that Christianity is not 
 fulfilling its mission of establishing the right- 
 eousness of God, as it is defined in the 
 Sermon on the Mount and revealed in the 
 incarnation and by the cross, as the basis of 
 human society. The world is conquering the 
 church, at this moment, as truly as the church 
 is conquering the world. The church itself 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 23 
 
 would regard the attempt to realize the pro- 
 phetic and apostolic vision of a new earth 
 as not only hopeless lunacy, but a danger- 
 ous and disreputable movement towards the 
 disruption of society. There is nothing 
 which the vested interests of conservative 
 Protestantism resent so much as the king- 
 dom of God, which is the brotherhood of 
 man. The world knows the church is failing ; 
 that it has become a secular more than a Chris- 
 tian institution. The divine common-sense of 
 man discerns a difference between the Christi- 
 anity of Christ and the Christianity of the 
 modern church which cannot be reconciled. 
 The world of doubt believes that the gospel, if 
 emancipated from philosophy and actually prac- 
 tised, would cure all the ills and solve all the 
 problems of society. There is more vital faith 
 in much of the scepticism and heresy of our 
 day than in a great deal of what we call ortho- 
 doxy. There is more hunger for righteousness 
 in the unrest that is slowly gathering into 
 mighty storms on the horizon of human hope 
 than in the self-satisfaction and religious com- 
 
24 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 placency of the church. The children of dark- 
 ness are seeing the signs of the times more 
 clearly than the children of light. Again is 
 God hiding his mighty purposes from the wise 
 and prudent, and revealing them unto babes. 
 We need to ask ourselves earnestly whether 
 the Son of man, if he should suddenly come 
 into our churches, would find among us the 
 faith that overcometh the world. 
 
 We point to our costly and beautiful temples 
 of worship, to the crosses crowning the village 
 hill-tops, and the crosses the church spires lift 
 above the city's smoke and strife. We count 
 our great missionary benefactions, and hold 
 mammoth religious conventions. We are per- 
 fecting and unifying our great ecclesiastical 
 organizations, and forming new societies, and 
 appointing countless committees. We have re- 
 vised creeds, and progressive theologies, and 
 renowned preachers. But all the while the 
 church is getting farther and farther away from 
 the lost sheep it was sent to save. The covet- 
 ousness that fattens on the flesh of toiling boys 
 and girls ; the greed that wrecks the hopes and 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 2$ 
 
 fortunes of less cunning rivals ; the fashion 
 whose fatuous arrogance fans the flame of judg- 
 ment that is kindling in the skies ; the luxury 
 that is content to enjoy, while men with dark 
 thoughts beg for work, and hopeless women 
 slave in sweaters* dens, and the life withers out 
 of starved babes ; — all these smile and bow 
 and pray in the church, while the great sad, sus- 
 picious world impatiently waits to see whether 
 God be living or dead. This is not Christianity. 
 This is not according to the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ. Much of what we call Christianity is 
 no less than an aristocratic and shameless pau- 
 perism, thriving on the wealth of sacrifice in- 
 herited from the past ; resting in high-priced 
 pews and fashionable residences ; cunningly 
 squeezing a luxurious living out of humanity, and 
 superciliously labelling as charity the appeals 
 made to serve the humanity that supports it. It 
 is the victorious forces of time the church wor- 
 ships — prudence, thrift, respectability, reputa- 
 tion, culture — while it is practically infidel 
 to the Christian gospel. We hear wise men, 
 indeed, "preaching up truth and preaching 
 
26 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 down error" from the pulpit ; but it is nearly 
 always theological error, while a refined brutal- 
 ity practises, under the church's protection, a 
 conscienceless and defiant atheism. Religious 
 papers deplore the influence of money in poli- 
 tics , but seem innocent of the fact that money 
 has no less influence, if not more, in securing 
 certains kinds of ecclesiastical prominence, in 
 obtaining positions of trust in religious corpora- 
 tions, than in securing seats in our national 
 legislature. Our social system, even where it is 
 churchly, is not Christian, but respectable pagan- 
 ism, galvanized with Christianity. The church 
 does not dream of practising the gospel ; rather, 
 it has practically abandoned the gospel as the 
 law of life, putting opinion and money in its 
 place, rearing the throne of mammon in the 
 place of the changeless cross of the slain Christ, 
 taking to itself the attitude of the scribes and 
 Pharisees, instead of following the Son of God 
 with the divine sorrow which alone can cleanse 
 the race of sin. Unconsecrated men, who lie 
 and rob and destroy, who outrage all humanities 
 and gorge themselves with blood-red gold, may 
 
UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 2/ 
 
 yet pass for men of integrity and conspicuous 
 Christian philanthropy, whose self-satisfaction 
 it seems cruel and unjust to disturb with the 
 social impoliteness of the Sermon on the Mount. 
 The church as an institution is saying, *' Lord, 
 Lord ; " but its leaders are not doing, nor have 
 they any faith in the practicability of doing, the 
 things the Lord tells them. And I sadly fear 
 it to be true, — would God that I might be 
 wrong! — that the most unmoving obstacle 
 which the coming Christ confronts in the re- 
 demption of human society, is the raw unbelief 
 in righteousness, the nice and delicate yet no 
 less blind and hateful infidelity to the gospel, 
 which permeates our conservative Christianity, 
 making the church the antagonist of the right- 
 eousness of Christ. For that church which 
 worships Christ, and yet rejects his way of liv- 
 ing, is the Judas Iscariot of moden Christendom. 
 The church must have a new career. There 
 must be a resurrection of the gospel. An 
 emancipated gospel is the hope of human soci- 
 ety. For this the world prays and waits. To 
 deliver the gospel from the weight of heathen 
 
28 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 theology, which has well-nigh smothered its 
 life ; to wrest Christianity from the distorting 
 grasp of human selfishness ; to preach the gos- 
 pel in its divine simplicity and regal authority ; 
 to Christianize the church which bears Christ's 
 name, — this is the work which calls all the 
 sons of God who are ready to make themselves 
 of no reputation in the eyes of the Pharisees, 
 and be despised and rejected by the self-indul- 
 gent worshippers of mammon. The self-willed 
 infidelity, the incurable unbelief, which an apos- 
 tolic faith must scourge from the church, before 
 the Son of man can lead it forth in the victory 
 of righteousness which shall bring in the thou- 
 sand years of peace, is that faith which tries to 
 be a substitute for life. The church which, un- 
 der the cover of dogma, disbelieves in the power 
 of Christ to lead us out of actual selfishness ; 
 which believes that men can be saved from sin 
 by holding certain opinions about God, without 
 ceasing from sin ; which impugns the honesty 
 of God by assuming that he never intended us to 
 do as his eternal Son tells us ; which presumes 
 that God would promulgate a divine gospel 
 
UNCONSECKATED SERVICE. 29 
 
 which is unnatural law, and which man cannot 
 practise ; which puts forth Christ's righteous- 
 ness as something to take the place of our own, 
 so that we can go on enjoying the world's com- 
 forts, and gaining its profits according to its 
 covetous customs; — not by such a church will 
 God convert the race, God will never permit 
 a church which does not itself believe the gos- 
 pel, or pretend to obey it, to carry the gospel to 
 every creature. Nor will the divine intelli- 
 gence of humanity receive a theology that 
 teaches a salvation from sin without ceasing 
 from sin ; for, however needful and progressive 
 such a theology may once have been, it has 
 done its work ; and, in the increasing light of 
 the grace that shines from the face of the heal- 
 ing Christ, is naught but an unholy supersti- 
 tion. No revision of creeds, no holding of con- 
 ventions, no flaunting of banners, no missionary 
 enthusiasm, can evade the supreme and epochal 
 issue which now confronts the church, in this 
 the beginning of the most revolutionary period 
 of Christian history. The question the church 
 must answer, the question which converges all 
 
30 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 gone and coming historic crises, carrying in 
 itself the solution of all human problems, is 
 this: Is the gospel practicable? does God mean 
 it ? is redemption a reality ? has Christ over- 
 come the world ? is the Christ who is in us 
 greater than the devil of selfishness without 
 us ? Until the church — I trust not at the 
 point of death — enters upon a searching self- 
 examination, and decides whether it really be- 
 lieves in this gospel, whether it accepts or 
 rejects it, the conversion of the world to Chris- 
 tianity is the very vanity of our moral imbecil- 
 ity. If the church tries to evade this supreme 
 moment of its history, persisting in preaching 
 the gospel of theology instead of the living 
 Christ ; if it revels in the glory of the past, and 
 rejoices in its heritage in the present, without 
 presenting itself as a living and unblemished 
 sacrifice unto God ; if it continues to hide from 
 the world, in the interests of social selfishness 
 and dogmatic theology, what Christianity really 
 is ; if it persists in a wordy loyalty to its creeds, 
 and infidelity to the Sermon on the Mount ; 
 then God will meet it upon the way upon which 
 
UNCONSECKATED SERVICE. 3 1 
 
 he sent it, in its palaces of vain worship, and 
 leave not one stone of its goodly temples upon 
 another. 
 
 I have said all this, my brothers, because I 
 am an optimist ; because I believe in the divine 
 life in man ; because I see that the kingdom of 
 heaven is at hand. If I were a pessimist I 
 should glorify what is, rather than herald the 
 better that is to be. The world is redeemed. Our 
 Redeemer lives, and his Spirit reigns, and there 
 is no more excuse for our abiding in unright- 
 eousness. This is God's world, and the laws of 
 God are more practicable than the laws of the 
 devil. This was the faith of the apostles. It 
 is the faith which the Spirit of God has wrung 
 from the agony of apostolic souls since the rapt 
 John saw the Christ of judgment moving in the 
 progress of the ages towards their divine con- 
 sumation in the new earth of righteousness, rest- 
 ing in the eternal Sabbath of God, communistic 
 with the ensphering love of the new heaven. 
 
 To the work of restoring Christianity to 
 Christendom, of giving back the gospel unto 
 men, the coming Christ now calls us. To the 
 
32 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 measure that we put reputation and happiness, 
 position and possessions, affections and all 
 sacred interests, upon the altar of a perfect 
 sacrifice, taking willingly for our portion what- 
 ever lot he assigns us, believing in the right- 
 eousness of our cause and the rectitude of our 
 course, loving not our lives unto death, to that 
 measure will the joy that was set before him 
 be our joy, and his glory our throne. And he 
 will keep us in the hour of trial that is to come 
 quickly upon the whole world, and write upon 
 us his own name, and the name of the new 
 Jerusalem which cometh down out of heaven 
 from God. 
 
II. 
 
 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 
 
The disastrous results of a diffusion of Christianity at the 
 cost of its intensity is very apparent to those of us who are 
 greatly interested in the social problems of the present moment. 
 ... It is quite beyond all question that, according to the inten- 
 tion of Christ, the Christian church should at all times represent 
 a body living not only by a certain rule of faith, but also by a 
 certain moral law, which puts the sternest restraints on the 
 spirit of competition, on the acquisition of wealth, on selfish 
 aggrandizement ; which bids every man, in the simplest sense, 
 love his neighbor as himself; which enjoins the bearing of one 
 another's burdens, as the only fulfilling of the law of Christ. 
 It is difficult to imagine that a New-Testament Christian could 
 have doubted that he had to carry his religion into all the 
 affairs of life, or could have been in the least surprised if his 
 religion involved his being poorer than one of his non-Christian 
 neighbors who was not bound by the obligations of the church. 
 How is it then that we have reached a condition of things 
 when men cannot only utter, as multitudes of men always have 
 done, the maxims of worldliness and selfishness, but utter these 
 maxims without any sense that, by simply giving expression to 
 them, they are repudiating Christianity, as far as words go, 
 quite as really as if they were denying the Christian creed, or 
 as if in the old days of persecution they had offered incense 
 to the divinity of the Roman emperor ? . . . — Prmcipal 
 Charles Gore. 
 
 Have we learnt it yet — this eternal message of love, this 
 good tidings of spiritual freedom, this character of heavenly 
 privileges, this birthright of spiritual blessing ? Nay, rather 
 have not we and our fathers so obscured it by the blinding 
 veil of our dogmatisms, ritualisms, and sabbatisms, that a weary 
 world is crying out to us to-day, " Restore to us the Christian- 
 ity of Christ ".!' May God give strength and volume to the 
 voice of that righteous, that agonized demand, until we, the 
 teachers, pressed onward by the spirit within and the urgency 
 without, shall trample underfoot the galling tradition of the 
 elders and speak at length with the accents of Christ's simple 
 love. ... — Bishop Moor house. 
 34 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 Behold, I have set before thee a door opened, which none 
 can shut. — Rev. iii. 8. 
 
 The more I read the Revelation of John, the 
 more I receive it as the message of a great soul 
 whose vision of God had been clarified by deep 
 sufferings. The book was written while John 
 was an exile on the isle of Patmos, during one 
 of the early and bloody persecutions by which 
 Rome sought, as a matter of political safety 
 rather than of religious concern, to extinguish 
 the Christian faith. However despicable the 
 religion of Christ to their pride, the Romans 
 clearly saw that the practice of its principles, 
 if wide-spread, could not but eventually destroy 
 the foundations of force and fraud on which 
 imperialism rested. The whole Revelation 
 reflects the lights and shadows of the sad and 
 mighty days through which the church was 
 passing, persecuted by merciless enemies with- 
 35 
 
36 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 out, imperilled by betrayers of the truth within. 
 A world of heroic experiences is mirrored in 
 the apostle's designation of himself and some 
 of his fellow-Christians as brothers and par- 
 takers in the tribulations and patience of Jesus. 
 He seems to have spent the time of his exile in 
 the closest communion with God, straining the 
 eyes of his faith to see what might be the inten- 
 tions of God concerning his people. It may be 
 that the nature of John's banishment was such 
 that he had no refuge from pain of body and 
 grief of mind save in making prayer his occupa- 
 tion. It was while communing in the heart of 
 the Father, caught up in the eternally onward 
 sweep of the Divine Spirit, that John found 
 himself in company with the light-ensphered 
 Christ of judgment, going forth in the unrest- 
 ing power of an all-loving righteousness to 
 conquer all things visible and invisible by his 
 resistless strength. With a voice like that of 
 many waters, the Son of man bade him write 
 all he saw and heard, giving him a distinct mes- 
 sage for each of the seven churches which had 
 been within the sphere of his authority. And 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 37 
 
 with the reception of these messages the vision 
 of John widened to take in the historical pro- 
 cesses by which the kingdoms of the world were 
 finally to be converted into the kingdom of 
 Christ. 
 
 The message of Jesus to the church at Phila- 
 delphia was one of loving commendation and 
 appreciative sympathy. The Philadelphian 
 Christians were warned of the hour of trial 
 which was about to shake and change the 
 whole inhabited earth, and test the courage 
 and quality of Christian believers. The new 
 Jerusalem, by which was meant a divinely just 
 and righteous civilization, was descending out 
 of heaven from God ; and the ransomed ages 
 would read in the records of God that these 
 obscure, despised, and persecuted Christians 
 were the builders of the indestructible founda- 
 tions of righteousness and truth upon which 
 Christ was rearing, through the crisis of his- 
 tory, the heavenly social structure which is the 
 theme and prophecy of the supremely mystical 
 yet intensely practical Revelation. Thus 
 Christ set before the faithful Philadelphians, 
 
38 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL, 
 
 who were trusting in the divine strength to fill 
 up the measure of their weakness, an open 
 door of the largest usefulness, through which 
 they might enter the life and work of God. 
 And none could shut it ; no earthly power nor 
 false friends ; neither persecutions nor death. 
 
 The door of life swings always open, inviting 
 every soul to larger usefulness, to a closer 
 union with the thought and work of God. The 
 immanent Christ is forever calling us to be 
 j better workmen of the tabernacle of love in 
 which God is to dwell with men and make 
 them his people. The divine voice that bids 
 us come up higher is never silent. No human 
 weakness can close Christ's door. No earthly 
 power can move the hand that openeth and 
 shutteth. No adverse circumstances can di- 
 minish the fruitfulness of human consecration. 
 Nothing can happen to a soul, a church, or a 
 nation, that Christ would not make an open 
 door of consecration to greater living and 
 diviner usefulness. The door of opportunity 
 is always open. Unbelief may refuse to enter. 
 But none can shut the door which Christ opens. 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 39 
 
 If man believed in the divine authority of 
 Christ as Christ believed in the divine life in 
 man, the redemption of the world would soon 
 be manifested as a fact which none could deny, 
 or would wish to deny. And the new earth of 
 righteousness and peace would push out the old 
 earth of injustice and strife with the speed of 
 God's desire. Christ was the supreme idealist. 
 He saw in all men the offspring of God. His 
 gospel proceeds upon the assumption of the 
 divinity of our humanity. We are made of the 
 stuff that constitutes God. Hence our Lord 
 knew no limit to the possibilities of human 
 character, because he knew no limit to the 
 gracious power of God which was working in 
 man and causing man to work out his salvation 
 in divine being and doing. The call of Christ 
 is the awakening of the soul to its divine ances- 
 try, which sin has obscured and dishonored. It 
 is the quickening of the divine energies which 
 sleep beneath man's moral sloth and corruption. 
 It is a resurrection from a self-entombment 
 into the glory of a divine childhood. It is a 
 call to quit ourselves as men that God through 
 
40 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 US may manifest himself as God. Christ called 
 men to reveal and realize God in the world 
 through a divinely human sonship. He sent 
 men to show forth, as he had done, the human- 
 ity of God in the divinity of their manhood. 
 He uplifted men with a vision of the divine 
 ideal of human life which was within the reach 
 and realization of their faith. He saw men en- 
 larging according to the greatness of their think- 
 ing. He measured character by aspiration. He 
 appealed to man's undeveloped spiritual hero- 
 ism ; not to what was slavish, or fearful, or 
 selfish, or ease-loving. The cross was in every 
 path of spiritual growth and achievement which 
 Christ pointed out. Every door of opportunity 
 which he opened was a door of sacrifice. 
 
 Before the church of our day the Christ of 
 judgment, the ruler of the kings of earth, with a 
 countenance as the sun shining in his strength, 
 opens wide the effectual door of the church's 
 supreme opportunity. With a voice like the 
 voice of many waters, gathering into itself the 
 questions of the centuries, he is calling for a 
 regenerated Christianity to enter and claim the 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 4 1 
 
 earth and its fulness as God's. The Christian- 
 izing of industry, the gospelizing of commerce, 
 the moral enforcement of the Sermon on the 
 Mount, the proclamation of the cross as the 
 basic principle of society, is the work that is 
 now before the church. The opportunity of 
 the church is the brotherhood of man. Buying 
 and selling, work and wages, must be converted 
 into divine sacraments of human fellowship. 
 The fate of Christianity itself is at stake in 
 meeting the problems of society and finance. 
 If the church does not take up these responsi- 
 bilities, and set itself about righting the wrongs 
 that are making the few rich and the many 
 poor, putting strife between classes, making 
 enemies of men who should be brothers, the 
 church will fail in the greatest opportunity the 
 Lord Christ has put in its hands ; and he will 
 make a new church. Until the church takes 
 hold of these problems in the spirit and power 
 of the gospel — and that only is sufficient to 
 solve these questions — insisting that men can 
 and must obey the gospel, then in multiplying 
 our churches we are making ropes of sand ; 
 
42 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL, 
 
 doing work that shall have to be done over 
 again in purer and braver days. It is essential 
 atheism, it is to worship a powerless God and 
 believe in a dead Christ, to presume that our 
 industrial system, with its poverty and wealth, 
 its war. and want, its inequality of distribution, 
 can endure. The pulpit must teach that it is 
 the business of the employer to so conduct his 
 affairs that the fatherhood of God and brother- 
 hood of man shall be facts in his establishment. 
 If Christianity has any authority, and I believe 
 it has all authority, it must produce men who 
 will as truly trade and work for righteousness* 
 sake as the pulpit is supposed to preach for 
 righteousness' sake. And why does it seem to 
 Christian men unreasonable that a human being 
 should toil, invent, and do business, for the good 
 of others than himself } Why cannot a man 
 work as faithfully and wisely for benefits which 
 his fellow-men are to enjoy as for his own self- 
 ish profit and enjoyment } Why does it seem 
 strange to the twentieth century of Christian 
 history that a man should be stimulated to far 
 higher endeavors, to more untiring efforts, to 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 43 
 
 build up industry for the benefit of society 
 rather than his own selfish benefit ? Why in 
 the name of reason and righteousness, in the 
 name of the suffering Christ, cannot a man be 
 as fertile and energetic in doing business for 
 righteousness' sake as in doing business for 
 his own sake ? 
 
 The answer to these questions, the remedy 
 for social inequality, cannot be found in what 
 we understand by modern benevolence. The 
 gifts of money to endow colleges and replenish 
 missionary funds from the hands of extortionate 
 wealth are a simple evasion of the whole social 
 problem, and a trifling with God. Instead of 
 making the future hopeful, such philanthropy is 
 the most hopeless feature in the social propsect. 
 Gifts to universities and libraries and hospitals 
 on the part of covetousness and bribery and 
 greed are disgusting to the soul of God. The 
 flattering of such givers as these by the church 
 not only abominably falsifies the gospel of 
 Christ, but makes the lost sheep of the house 
 of Israel the suspicious enemies of the church 
 Christ sent to be their friend. Never ought the 
 
44 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 church to feel such utter shame as when behold- 
 ing its leaders scheming to get gifts of money 
 made possible only by entire infidelity to the 
 gospel of righteousness. The jubilees which 
 the church holds in honor of the so-called bene- 
 factions of stock-gamblers and railroad-wreckers, 
 of trust monopolists and oppressors of the poor, 
 are but a ridiculous and ill-disguised religious 
 hookwinkery. Christ did not send his church 
 into the world to get the money of mammon, 
 but to defend the oppressed, denounce wicked- 
 ness, establish justice, and work righteousness. 
 Christ did not receive Zaccheus, the rich pub- 
 lican, because he made an offering of money, 
 but because he repented of his sins and re- 
 stored fourfold his wrongly exacted gains. The 
 church not only betrays Christ, who was the 
 most terrible of all prophets in his condemna- 
 tion of extortion and covetousness, but, in the 
 long run, materially as well as morally loses by 
 its shameful cowardice. If there is any truth 
 in the gospel worth living for, or worth dying 
 for, it is the truth that men are their brothers' 
 keepers. If the gospel is true and authoritative, 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 45 
 
 it is the most imperative duty of the church to 
 lift up an unceasing complaint against our 
 social and financial evils, against progress by 
 the ruin and impoverishment of society, against 
 the under-payment of wages, against the present 
 interpretation of the law of supply and demand, 
 until these shall be relegated to the museum of 
 history, to take their place with the tomahawk 
 and scalping-knife, the pirate ship and inquisi- 
 tion rack. 
 
 Christianity came into the world as a fellow- 
 ship, a brotherhood. Christ came not as a 
 theologian ; nor were the apostles theologians. 
 Christ's doctrines were not theological, but so- 
 cial. Christ was the revelation of a life — the 
 life of God in fellowship with the life of man ; the 
 life of man in fellowship with the life of God. 
 That God is our Father, and all men brothers 
 and his children, was the substance of Christ's 
 teaching. The realization of this apostolic 
 Christianity carries in itself the future of 
 human history, and is the solution of all the 
 problems of society. 
 
 Many run to and fro with panaceas, which 
 
46 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 they think will adjust the inequalities of soci- 
 ety and hush the cries of discontent. While 
 many of the proposals are wise and needful, 
 springing from pure desires to help the world 
 to a better condition, yet no political legislation 
 has power, or ever can have power, to make 
 men unselfish. Until men dedicate themselves 
 to lives of unselfishness, and live to do good to 
 all their brothers, and are ready to be as fertile 
 and persevering in labors which are to benefit 
 society as a whole rather than themselves as 
 individuals, injustice and inequality will be ban- 
 ished in one form only to return in some form 
 more seductive and cruel. Until the eternal 
 law of love is written on human hearts, and 
 giving rather than getting inspires the energies 
 of men, and serving rather than being served 
 is received as the joy of life, the best of state 
 legislation is helpless to effect social justice and 
 industrial peace. So long as men are foolish 
 enough to have more faith in the efficacy of law 
 than in the practicability of love, the blood of 
 Abel will continue to cry from the ground. 
 The brand of Cain will rest upon society so long 
 
THE OrrORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 4/ 
 
 as self-interest is assumed as the social and eco- 
 nomic motive. Until the peace of God has 
 fixed the faith of the world on Jesus Christ as 
 the goal of history, and the solvent of all human 
 ills, clasping the hands of men about the cross 
 of Christ — the sign of self-renunciation — as 
 the only law which can establish permanent 
 order and perfect peace, mutual trust and ever- 
 lasting brotherhood, there will be dissatisfac- 
 tion and sorrow, injustice and cruelty, despoiling 
 the garden of the Lord. Were it not that Jesus 
 had walked the soil of the earth, re-dedicating it 
 to God, living his divine life amidst the most 
 unfavorable surroundings, I should dwell in 
 absolute hopelessness. But because that life 
 was lived and that death was died, revealing 
 God's attitude towards man, and showing what 
 the life of man may be when it values character 
 above all material things, and believes in love 
 more than food and raiment, I hope all things 
 and believe all things for man. I look for a 
 brotherhood of divine love upon the earth, be- 
 cause Christ is our elder brother, and we shall 
 be like him. 
 
48 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 And it is brotherhood, fellowship, which man 
 wants. Brotherhood men will have. The soli- 
 darity of the race is impressing itself on the 
 world as the stupendous human fact. Men are 
 feeling about for oneness with each other, as 
 well as for oneness with God. There is a divine 
 impulse, gathering in force with the increase 
 of human sympathy and understanding, which 
 is bearing men on to a larger fellowship with 
 one another. There is a feeling abroad in the 
 world that rivalry and distrust, competition and 
 covetousness, are not the natural, but the un- 
 unnatural, conditions of human society. Men 
 were made to stand together. Social separa- 
 tion is disruption, profanity, damnation, and 
 death. Without brotherhood men cannot en- 
 dure life, nor its conflicts. Anything that 
 keeps men apart is the work of an enemy to 
 our humanity. The stratification of society is 
 a device of the devil, the slanderer of God, and 
 tempter of man. Social separation, the isola- 
 tion of the privileged from the unprivileged 
 classes, the withdrawal of life from fellowship 
 with life for material and selfish reasons, is 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 49 
 
 moral anarchy and outrage ; it is the most god- 
 less and wicked of all infidelity, asserting that 
 human life consists in the abundance of the 
 things which it hath, that the immortal life 
 which God has breathed into man is cheaper 
 than the fashion of his clothes, or worthy of 
 less consideration than the etiquette of his 
 manners. Selfishness as the law of society is 
 hell on earth. The social theory that we are 
 privileged to choose our neighbors is a rending 
 of the body of God by the violence of selfish- 
 ness ; a profanation of God's holy temple, which 
 man is ; a condition which will not always be 
 endured. There is no more deadly assumption 
 ever made than the one that money gives any 
 man the right to be unmindful of the interests 
 and needs and feelings of his brother-men. It 
 is the separation of the educated from the igno- 
 rant, the rich from the poor, that makes money 
 a root of social evil. All social caste, however 
 ancient and proud, is pagan and evil, hateful 
 and profane. The place of the strong is among 
 the weak, bearing their burdens, enduring the 
 pain and shame of their weakness. The place 
 
50 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 of the cultured is among the rude and ignorant, 
 lifting them up, teaching them knowledge and 
 goodness and truth. The place of the rich is 
 in living side by side with the poor, not in iso- 
 lating themselves on separate streets, and not 
 in holding themselves aloof from the company 
 of the poor. The place of those who have is 
 with those who have not, treating them with 
 respect and honor and love that is due unto the 
 children of God. When thou makest a dinner, 
 or a party, call not merely thy rich and con- 
 genial friends, who can reward thee with pleas- 
 ure and return invitations, but invite the poor 
 and ignorant, and even the vicious. This is 
 the gospel of the Son of God, who dwelt among 
 us in our moral rags and poverty, and gave unto 
 us all the glory and wealth of his infinite life. 
 The mere fact that society would regard Christ's 
 social instructions as preposterous, if expected 
 to actually obey them, shows how little our so- 
 called Christian society really knows of Christi- 
 anity, and how much is yet to be done before 
 we have a society that shall be Christian in 
 reality. 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 5 1 
 
 Brotherhood men will have. The movement 
 of the world is in this direction. And it will 
 be a fellowship of truth or a fellowship of sin ; 
 a fellowship of love or a fellowship of hate 
 and rapine ; a fellowship of atheism or of the 
 church of Christ. In some form or other men 
 will come together, and life will entwine about 
 life, soul will wrap itself about soul, heart will 
 fasten itself to heart, and men will stand to- 
 gether in some great social upheaval and recon- 
 struction. And I believe that in the lead of 
 the social conflict will be found the Son of man, 
 bringing forth a divine social order and estab- 
 lishing a brotherhood of love, showing men that 
 the strength of life is in sacrifice, the joy of life 
 in loving, the enthusiasm of life in serving. 
 
 The open door of opportunity which Christ 
 sets before us each to enter is this coming 
 brotherhood of man. To make the love of 
 Christ the foundation of commerce and culture, 
 to make the practice and spread of Christ's 
 quality of love the business of life, is the work 
 to which we are called. Before every human 
 enterprise, before every joy and sorrow, at the 
 
52 THE PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 first hour and the eleventh, the Son of man 
 sets this clear, strong, eternal motive — a mo- 
 tive that will give a changeless meaning to 
 all human endeavor, making the years a prog- 
 ress to a divine end, linking deed with deed, 
 connecting thought with thought. That men 
 may learn to love and trust one another as the 
 common and redeemed children of the same 
 Father is the reason for the earth's standing 
 through all its storm of sin and shame. It is 
 the purpose with which God began the life of 
 man, and the hope which has sustained man 
 1:hrough all the weary ages of his pilgrimage. 
 It is the vision which Christ followed through 
 the wilderness, into Gethsemane, across Cal- 
 vary, into the clouds. It is the one thing cer- 
 tain in which a man may invest his life and 
 be sure of an eternal return. It is the enter- 
 prise in which the living and working Christ 
 would have us be his fellow-workmen. Our 
 stores and factories, our knowledge and culture, 
 our schools and feasts, are opportunities to 
 obey and enforce the commandment to love one 
 another in the life-giving and self-renounced 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 53 
 
 way in which Jesus loved his disciples. The 
 joy of dying that others might live, the glory 
 of living without self-concern, the enthusiasm 
 of feeding his life away to his hungry brothers, 
 — this was the joy that was set before Christ, 
 and is the quenchless joy before us set. To 
 get men to love one another, and thus get the 
 will of God done on earth as it is in heaven, is 
 our mission as truly as it was the mission of 
 Jesus. We can each take this mission as our 
 life-motive — the motive which abides in the 
 heart of God — and keep this motive as the 
 seed of life through all joy and sorrow, success 
 and disappointment, failure and victory. Upon 
 the altar of this infinite purpose we may each 
 dedicate ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and 
 acceptable unto God. 
 
 Docs this seem a dream } Well, until men 
 believe in the authority of this dream, and 
 proceed to make it the substantial basis of 
 society, the earth will find no rest from woe 
 and war and want. There is salvation from 
 unrest and strife, inequality and injustice, only 
 in simple obedience to Christ's law of love. 
 
54 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 However much we may do to procure larger 
 justice through purer laws, until we clasp hands 
 about the cross and agree to take that cross as 
 the law of life, we spend our strength for that 
 which is not eternal bread, and waste our moral 
 resources in playing with the urgent opportuni- 
 ties of Christendom. 
 
 The discord and sorrow of sin is the witness 
 that sin is not man's natural condition. Moral 
 weakness is not man's normal state. Evil is an 
 intruder, and has no right in the life of man, 
 nor in God's world. Selfishness is an unnatural 
 outrage upon our humanity. The laws of the 
 devil are not more practicable than the laws of 
 God, neither in the closet nor in the market. 
 Communion with God is man's only natural 
 condition ; it is the only use to which time and 
 property can be rightly put. Man is an aimless 
 and wandering prodigal outside of the secret 
 place of the Most High. Humanity at its 
 worst, through all its inexplicable sorrows, along 
 the darkest labyrinths of its sad pilgrimage, has 
 never lost sight of this goal of an endless, sin- 
 less, deathless day of peace, in which the pres- 
 
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 55 
 
 ence of God would be the life and light of the 
 world. The race has never been without some 
 eyes pure enough to see a new earth. All 
 prophecy and revelation, the purest statesman- 
 ship and best political wisdom, the noblest 
 philosophy and most undefiled religion, have 
 all had this vision of a new earth wherein dwell- 
 eth righteousness as their inspiration. 
 
 The day of God will come, and the heart of 
 the earth will ache no more, and the riven side 
 of the race will cease to flow, and the spirit of 
 Jesus will be the omnipotent bond of human 
 brotherhood, and children will be born into an 
 atmosphere of prayer, and sin and death be a 
 dream of a night, and the pain of the groaning 
 creation be changed to an anthem of praise, when 
 the disciples of Christ come to so believe in 
 the reality of his redemption that they dedicate 
 all they are and have to the righteousness of 
 his kingdom. The creation groans and travails 
 in pain, waiting only for the children of men 
 to stand forth and show themselves the sons 
 of God. 
 
 The day of God will come ; and there will be 
 
56 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 night no more. Humanity moves upward ; and 
 the heavens lower bend, age by age, folding 
 the earth closer in the heart of the Father. 
 And heaven and earth, under the hand of the 
 risen Christ, who holds the key to human his- 
 tory, will be attuned in one eternal harmony of 
 love. This is the pledge of the cross, and the 
 power of the resurrection. It is the coming 
 kingdom of our Father, which he will receive 
 from the hand of his conquering Christ. And 
 whether we be absent or present, we may work 
 with our Lord in this kingdom which cannot 
 be shaken. Wherefore, let us be steadfast, 
 unmovable, always abounding in the work of 
 the Lord, inasmuch as we know that our labor 
 is not in vain. 
 
III. 
 
 THE REALITY OF FAITH. 
 
In England, as elsewhere, the ecclesiastical body still 
 seemed imposing from the memories of its past, its immense 
 wealth, its tradition of statesmanship, its long association 
 with the intellectual and religious aspirations of men, its hold 
 on social life. But its real power was small. Its moral in- 
 ertness, its lack of spiritual enthusiasm, gave it less and less 
 hold on the religious minds of the day. Its energies, indeed, 
 seemed absorbed in a mere clinging to existence. ... Its 
 most fatal effect was to rob the priesthood of moral power. 
 Taunted with a love of wealth, with a lower standard of life 
 than that of the ploughman and weaver who gathered to read 
 the Bible by night, dreading in themselves any burst of 
 emotion or enthusiasm as a possible prelude to heresy, the 
 clergy ceased to be the moral leaders of the nation. — John 
 Richai'd Green, on the religions condition of England in the 
 fifteenth century. 
 
 It may be that too much time has been spent upon specu- 
 lations about Christianity, whether true or false, and that that 
 which is essential consists not of speculations, but of facts, 
 and not in technical accuracy on questions of metaphysics, 
 but in the attitude of mind in which we regard them. It would 
 be a cold world in which no sun shone until the inhabitants 
 thereof had arrived at a true chemical analysis of sunlight. 
 And it may be that the knowledge and thought of our time, 
 which is drawing us away from the speculative elements in 
 religion to that conception of it which builds it upon the char- 
 acter and not upon the intellect, is drawing us thereby to that 
 conception of it which the life of Christ was intended to set 
 forth, and which will yet regenerate the world. — Dr. Edwin 
 Hatch. 
 
 Never was there a time, in the history of the world, when 
 moral heroes were more needed. The world waits for such. 
 The providence of God has commanded science to labor and 
 prepare the way for such. For them she is laying her iron 
 tracks and stretching her wires, and bridging the oceans. 
 But where are they? Who shall breathe into our civil and 
 political relations the breath of a higher life.? — Dr. Mark 
 Hopkins. 
 
 58 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 
 
 And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him 
 for righteousness. — RoM. iv. 3. 
 
 The students of antiquities, reading for us 
 the records of the past on broken bricks and 
 crumbling monuments, say that the times we 
 used to call the dawn of history were, in fact, 
 the noontide of a splendid material develop- 
 ment and a vast civilization. Historic science 
 finds no time when the peopled earth has 
 not supported organized institutions, and been 
 crowned by majestic temples. Back of Abra- 
 ham's time history recedes in the fall and rise 
 of empires ; in the decay and growth of reli- 
 gions ; in the westward movements of races. 
 In the day that God called Abraham the early 
 Chaldean nations had already taken on some 
 of the magnificence which, centuries hence, 
 was to make the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar 
 the very exaggeration of Oriental genius and 
 59 
 
6o A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 power. Ur, from whence Abraham went forth 
 obedient to the divine command to found a 
 new nation, was a strong-walled city of astrono- 
 mers and poets, politics and trades, soldiers 
 and libraries, theatres and temples. 
 
 But this ancient civilization was a beautiful 
 and gigantic body without a soul. It knew 
 much of force, but little of law ; something of 
 beauty, but nearly nothing of morals. It cele- 
 brated the vilest sins as religious rites. It was 
 built upon faith in the seen, in ignorance of the 
 unseen realities. And the Chaldeans, making 
 the mistake which has been fatal to the perma- 
 nence of all civilizations, believed in their lux- 
 ury and material prosperity as progress. They 
 were immensely satisfied with themselves, and 
 proud of their achievements. Some of their 
 expressions of self-approbation, which the schol- 
 ars have translated for us, are striking in their 
 likeness to the typical American Fourth of July 
 oration, though made from three to four thou- 
 sand years ago. Blind and fallen human nature, 
 tempted from God by the serpent of covetous- 
 ness, has always spent its strength and skill on 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 6 1 
 
 the husks and clothes of life, while the sub- 
 stance dissolved in glorious corruption. Civili- 
 zations have always been shorn of their strength 
 in the lap of luxury, their decay shrouded in 
 material grandeur. Wealth is progress only 
 when it is a communion with God and a bond 
 of brotherhood between men. The spirit of 
 wealth has never dominated a civilization and 
 dictated its laws, save to its ultimate destruction. 
 Amidst the might and luxury of the primitive 
 Chaldean world lived a man who had kept him- 
 self free from its sensuous idolatry, and pure 
 enough to see one of God's beckoning stars of 
 promise ; so he decided to cast in his lot with 
 God. Abraham could not have been unac- 
 quainted with the material grandeur of this 
 Oriental civilization ; but he was not corrupted 
 by its grossness, nor dazzled by its splendor. 
 He began to have fitful dreams of a new and 
 better order of things upon the earth. He 
 could not believe that God was any the better 
 satisfied with falsehood and cruelty, lust and 
 luxury, because they were housed in huge pal- 
 aces and clothed in silk and gold. As he 
 
62 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 brooded over the magnificent wretchedness of 
 his times, and watched God's star of promise 
 shining from the future, there was borne in 
 upon him a strong impulse to move out into 
 the world in the hope of establishing a nation 
 that would be the seed of a new earth. That 
 impulse bade him get away from the corrupt 
 civilization wherein he dwelt, into a westward 
 land which he had never seen, and there raise 
 up unto his God a new people. He accepted 
 that impulse as the voice of God. He gave 
 into his divine instincts implicit obedience. He 
 believed God, and it was reckoned unto him 
 for righteousness. And through all the lonely 
 and eventful years that followed, as he pilgrim- 
 aged to and fro across the promised land, he 
 followed the voice that spake in the secret 
 places of his soul. When God promised him a 
 son in his old age, he believed God in this as in 
 everything else, and it was reckoned unto him 
 for righteousness. And when we consider 
 Abraham's times, their social and religious con- 
 dition, it is no wonder he comes down to us as 
 the most illustrious ancient hero of faith. 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH, 63 
 
 What, now, is the faith that moves prophetic 
 souls out of the beaten walks of life, and up 
 the higher walks, where a reluctant race slowly 
 follows them ? What is the nature of the faith 
 which makes for righteousness ? What is the 
 essence, the reality, of faith ? What is it, in 
 our times, that makes one man's belief in God 
 a religious pleasantry and social propriety, and 
 another man's faith a creative force in society ? 
 
 Faith does not consist in holding correct 
 opinions of God. Dr. Martineau truly says 
 that "nothing so marks the degradation of 
 modern Christianity as the notion that faith is 
 only opinion." A man may hold the most 
 proper opinions of God, he may believe in every 
 letter of the most orthodox confession of faith, 
 and be a graceful infidel in all his thought, an 
 atheist in all his practices. Probably all that 
 Abraham knew of God was that he stood for 
 righteousness against unrighteousness ; but to 
 that knowledge Abraham surrendered himself, 
 with all that he possessed. God cares nothing 
 for a man's opinions of himself, or his attri- 
 butes, when the man's moral aspirations reach 
 
64 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 not beyond a respectable social and financial 
 standing on earth, and a comfortable mansion 
 in heaven. Opinion is not faith. 
 
 Nor is faith a substitute for righteousness. 
 The conception of faith as something God ac- 
 cepts in the place of holiness is a Protestant 
 superstition as unscriptural and immoral as any 
 superstition of middle-age Catholicism. The 
 assumption that men can lead selfish and covet- 
 ous lives, and then reach heaven by believing 
 the right things about God, needs to be elimi- 
 nated from the religious thought of the church 
 of our day as surely as the sale of indulgences 
 from the church of Luther's day. The church 
 will never take up its divinely appointed task 
 cf righting the wrong things of this world until 
 it comes to thoroughly understand that Christ 
 came not to save men in their sins, but to give 
 them power to cease from all ungodliness. 
 There is no salvation from sin other than the 
 abandonment of sin, neither in this world nor 
 the world to come. Opinions of God are no 
 magic to change character at death. He that 
 is unrighteous before death will be unrighteous 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 65 
 
 still ; he that is unjust will still be unjust ; the 
 selfish man will still be selfish. A man is not 
 justified by faith unless faith has made him just. 
 He may have the greatest respect for God, 
 be extremely polite in his treatment of God, 
 attentive to all divine ordinances, thinking he 
 doeth God service as a protector of faith, and 
 yet be destitute of all knowledge of the reality 
 of faith, barren of any moral conception of 
 what it means to believe God. 
 
 Faith is that response of the will of man 
 which unites it to the will of God. Faith is 
 that step, whether one or many, which conjoins 
 the life of a man with the life of God. Faith 
 is that action which surrenders all one's inter- 
 ests to the getting of God's will done upon the 
 earth as it is done in heaven. Faith is unre- 
 served co-operation, partnership, friendship with 
 God, so that God possesses the life, working 
 with it and through it ; so that the man of faith 
 is not his own man, but God's man. The man 
 of faith is not blinded by the self-satisfaction of 
 society ; not deceived by material progress ; 
 neither bewildered by the babble of admiring 
 
66 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 voices, nor borne down beneath defeat. It is 
 the very essence of faith to listen only to the 
 voice of God, and learn what God wants done 
 and is doing in the believer's day and genera- 
 tion, inquiring not for immediate results, con- 
 scious that only righteousness is progressive 
 and profitable in the everlasting summing-up of ♦• 
 things. He who believes God asks himself if 
 God be satisfied with the state of things in his 
 age ; in his country or city ; in his church or 
 his own heart. Listening eagerly to the voice 
 that speaks in the secret place of his con- 
 science, he peers into the future for stars of 
 promise, and obeys the inspirations of hope 
 borne in upon him in the solitude of prayer. 
 Then, having seen what God is doing in the 
 opportunities and questions of his day, he gives 
 himself with utter self-abandon to working the 
 work of God. He knows that God can will 
 nothing but the best ; so he tolerates nothing 
 in himself but the highest ideals of duty and 
 character. He doubts not that the righteous 
 will of God must ultimately prevail, and joy- 
 ously endures temporal losses for righteousness* 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 67 
 
 sake. If he must lose the comfort and civiliza- 
 tion of Ur of Chaldea, he fears not that God 
 will provide something better than Ur for him- 
 self and his children. So he casts in his lot 
 with God, without asking to know what that 
 lot may be. 
 
 Hence the man of faith does not ask what is 
 the safe course for him to take. He who seeks 
 to do no more than what is considered safe, 
 even in a religious way, is destitute of the 
 power of faith. He may, in a sense, be a good 
 man, beautiful in many attributes of character ; 
 but he is not among those who put to flight the 
 armies of aliens, and quench the fires of wicked- 
 ness, and work the constructive righteousness 
 of God into the fabrics of history. No man 
 has faith to succeed in any cause who is not 
 ready to face worldly failure, and endure the 
 defeat of his cause ; willing even to find him- 
 self mistaken, if he may thereby get at the 
 heart of the eternal realities. 
 
 He .may be a man imperfect, not so fair to 
 look upon as the man at his side who walks by 
 calculation and sight, but yet a man whose be- 
 
68 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 lief in God allows him to make no terms with 
 his imperfections. He sees great gaps between 
 his faith and his practice, and is agonized with 
 the shame of his weakness. Torn with vain 
 climbing ; sick with baffled effort ; gaining a 
 little here, and there backward swept by sudden 
 passion ; mangled upon the rocks of pride, from 
 which gush no healing springs of sympathy ; 
 the soul of faith yet presses on, undismayed by 
 failure, fearing no foes. He has more faith in 
 the power of God than in the impotence of his 
 own weakness. He has given himself into the 
 keeping of the will of God, and knows that 
 goodness alone will endure in his life at last, if 
 he let God keep him. 
 
 Thus it is not by faith in his own poor power 
 that the lonely prophet of faith moves out from 
 the trodden paths of life and thought, from the 
 midst of a conceited civilization, in a self-satis- 
 fied age without a spiritual vision ; but by faith 
 in the omnipotent reign of the redeeming Lord 
 God. Not because he feels himself better than 
 others — he may know himself as the chief of 
 sinners — does the man of faith throw down 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 69 
 
 the gauntlet of challenge before the time-hon- 
 ored walls of sin, and bid their jeering hosts a 
 joyous defiance ; but because he feels the grasp 
 of the Almighty hand upon his life, and hears 
 the commanding whisper of the eternal Word 
 in his soul. An overmastering consciousness 
 of God, swallowing up the sense of weakness 
 and all self-consciousness, makes his belief 
 forceful amidst the forceless and unvital reli- 
 gious conventionalism that sits in self-appointed 
 judgment on his words and work. God is with 
 him, working with his hands, walking on his 
 feet, pouring infinite thoughts into his brain, 
 speaking with his mouth, loving with his heart, 
 possessing and empowering all his faculties, 
 directing all his energies. It is this tremen- 
 dous conviction that he is working with God, 
 that God has moved in and pitched his tent in 
 his soul, that makes a man's belief count for 
 righteousness. It is this that enables God to 
 stake the eternal interests of his kingdom on 
 the faith of some poor and sinful human soul. 
 It is this that lifts hands of faith to reach 
 across the ages and make the moral wealth of 
 
70 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 the future the inheritance of the present. This 
 it is that makes wise saints of illiterate sinners, 
 while cultured religionists stand dumb and 
 ashamed. This it is that calls forth praises 
 from the mouths of babes in knowledge, while 
 its masters stare in unsympathetic wonderment. 
 By this faith the weak things of the world bring 
 low the things that are strong, and the blunder- 
 ing enthusiast does the mighty work of God, 
 while prudent conservatism declares him a 
 destroyer of religion. The consciousness of 
 God is the power of faith, and surrender to 
 God is its essence. Faith is the source of all 
 righteousness, and righteousness alone can be 
 its fruit. For nothing but righteousness can 
 faith be reckoned to any soul. Faith is itself 
 the absolute righteousness. Men are as great 
 and righteous in the eternal course of things 
 as their faith. Righteousness is wrought in 
 the world by men whose lives are one con- 
 densed belief in God. 
 
 Abraham believed God ; and his faith is bear- 
 ing fruit in earth-wide and eternal harvests of 
 righteousness, filling the earth with the knowl- 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 7 1 
 
 edge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. 
 Moses believed God ; and his belief is yet fash- 
 ioning human institutions after the mind of 
 God. Elijah believed God; and in the secret 
 of Elijah's praying-places God formed new 
 epochs of history. David believed God ; and 
 the Spirit breathed into his sinful soul celestial 
 songs of deathless hopes. Daniel believed 
 God ; and by the hand of the captive Jew God 
 started the earth upon a new career. Paul be- 
 lieved God; and watch him as he goes from 
 nation to nation, striding the earth like the 
 moral colossus that he is ; before his advance 
 the work of armies is undone, walls of partition 
 crumble between man and man, gates of brass 
 swing open, thrones topple, and a new Europe 
 leaps from the ruins Rome has wrought of a 
 race's liberties. John believed God ; and down 
 into his self-emptied soul was poured the fulness 
 of God's mind, so that he writes the words of 
 God to centuries far distant, and writes as never 
 the pen of man has written. Calvin, the timid 
 scholar, believed God; and God made him the 
 bulwark of freedom against which the wrath of 
 
72 A FLEA FOR THE GOSFEL. 
 
 unrighteousness and the judgments of hypoc- 
 risy could not prevail. Cromwell believed God ; 
 and look at him, a pious and wrathful English 
 farmer, muttering against tyranny and popery, 
 brooding over his Bible while sin revels in 
 church and rules the state. While he prays 
 and grumbles, somehow God's omnipotence gets 
 down inside of that farmer, and when he girds 
 on his sword for his dreadful work, the earth 
 quakes beneath his tread, and hell is helpless to 
 stop him ; he makes the Anglo-Saxon with his 
 Bible the master of the world. Edwards, the 
 metaphysician and poet, believed God ; and the 
 awakened church put on new garments of life 
 that now shine into the uttermost islands of the 
 sea. And what shall I say more .•* Time would 
 fail me to tell of Luther and Wesley ; of Eng- 
 land's Alfred and America's Lincoln ; of a great 
 multitude whom only God had noted, who 
 through great tribulation, through sorrow and 
 shedding of blood, have by faith wrought right- 
 eousness, subdued kingdoms, obtained promises, 
 out of weakness been made strong. Great hosts 
 of unnamed witnesses, of whom the world was 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 73 
 
 not worthy, adjure us to run with patience the 
 race of faith that is set before us, looking unto 
 Jesus, the author and perfecterof our faith, who 
 for the joy of doing the will of God and serving 
 his brethren endured the cross of self-renunci- 
 ation, despised the shame of worldly failure, 
 and now sits on the right hand of our Father's 
 glory. 
 
 There has been no day in Christian history 
 which offered the opportunity for heroism of 
 faith that Christ sets before our day and church. 
 In no age of redemption has our Christ called 
 so urgently for men who believe God. We live 
 in a time of unbelief ; not unbelief in the 
 existence of God ; not unbelief in the fact 
 of religion; but unbelief in the practicability 
 of righteousness. Theology presumes that 
 righteousness cannot be actualized upon the 
 earth. The church does not believe that men 
 can do as the Lord Jesus tells them. The so- 
 ciety that calls itself Christian believes in 
 neither the wisdom nor the authority of the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount. The notion that God will 
 accept opinion in the place of obedience is the 
 
74 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 strong delusion that is leading Christendom into 
 living a stupendous lie. Unbelief in righteous- 
 ness is the most vicious unbelief in God. To 
 suppose that God can be satisfied with less than 
 his own goodness in humanity is to suppose God 
 less than perfectly good himself. To proceed 
 with human life on the presumption that the gos- 
 pel of God commands us to be and do what is 
 impossible is the most fatal infidelity the church 
 has ever had to meet ; and it meets it within its 
 own precincts. The cherishing of low ideals of 
 duty and character is the very substance of 
 unbelief. There is no atheism so frightful in 
 its consequences to the age, so troublesome to 
 the throne of God, so anarchical an element in 
 the universe, as the conclusion that Christliness 
 of character is inconsistent with the manage- 
 ment of the earthly affairs of man. It would 
 be better in the sight of God that every creed 
 should become a scandal, and every house of 
 worship a heap of ruins, than that men should 
 accept selfishness as the law of human activi- 
 ties. For God is able to enter doors of faith, 
 to fill the innermost recesses of our being, and 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 75 
 
 master the minutest details of our activities, 
 and glorify himself in all we think and do. It 
 is because unbelief closes these doors of faith 
 that the earth has waited so long and sadly for 
 God to dwell with man in unbroken communion, 
 making the race his untroubled people. It can 
 be through naught but unbelief that the church 
 of Christ shall fail to lead the sons of men into 
 the promised land of brotherhood, now beckon- 
 ing the church to a new career and undreamed- 
 of triumph. 
 
 We are in the early beginnings of a recon- 
 structive epoch. The light of a great day of 
 God is breaking upon the hill-tops of faith, and 
 streaking the social horizon, and piercing the 
 gloom of want which sits long and heavy upon 
 the valleys of toil. There is a feeling abroad 
 in the world, daily deepening into an impatient 
 conviction, that Christ is pressing upon a reluc- 
 tant church the key of love that can unlock the 
 problems of society. The prophetic hearts of 
 our age, broken with a great hope for man 
 which could find no response in rationalistic 
 orthodoxy, are turning anew to the living 
 
76 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 Christ of the Gospels, and are rejoicing in 
 the healing touch of his sympathy. The race 
 is grasping a thought of redemption which 
 means righteousness and peace, justice and 
 brotherhood, and the bearing of the burdens 
 of the weak by the strong. Without the 
 temple wait the multitudes, eager to crown 
 the slain Christ whom the scribes and Phari- 
 sees may again cast out, and follow him even 
 unto death in the victory of faith that over- 
 cometh the world. 
 
 When I meet the sin of the world in its most 
 woful forms ; when I marvel at our blind and 
 growing faith in money as the solvent of 
 earth's ills ; when I speak to the deaf ears of 
 religious pride, and behold a nation mistaking 
 steam whistles and opera houses for progress, 
 and towering temples of trade and palaces of 
 domestic luxury for national prosperity ; when 
 I see the smiling indifference of the fashionable 
 few who cluster about the splendid churches, 
 while the great unloved peoples, daily growing 
 in numbers and poverty and vice, are asking 
 fateful questions about right and wrong which 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. yy 
 
 the church does not answer ; when I see the 
 Almighty hand gathering lightnings of destruc- 
 tion in the heavens to let loose upon the strong- 
 holds of mammon ; — then a strong agony cries 
 out in my soul for men who believe God. Be 
 they soever poor and ignorant, sinful and ob- 
 scure, let me clasp hands, O God, with men who 
 discern the signs of the times ; men who see 
 thy beckoning stars of promise, who hear some- 
 thing of what thou art saying to this material- 
 loving age, who rejoice to cast in their lot with 
 thee, sharing in the sorrow and glory of fulfill- 
 ing thy righteousness ! Up and down the world 
 of strife and work the Christ of judgment is 
 moving, appealing for hearts that do believe 
 that the will of God may yet be done on earth 
 as it is done in heaven. He calls for men who 
 are willing to endure the loss of money and 
 fling reputation to the winds, that they may 
 work with God for the creation of a Christian 
 society and a heavenly civilization. 
 
 The straightening-out of the social ills of the 
 world could be speedily accomplished, if men 
 who profess the gospel would take the mission 
 
^S A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 of establishing the market on a gospel foundation 
 as a serious and practicable mission. It is a 
 sheer want of faith that keeps this sublime work 
 from being done in the name of the Lord Jesus. 
 If the Christian business men of our day, who 
 know the gospel and know the commands of our 
 Lord, would take it as the purpose of their lives 
 to make all their business relations a revelation 
 of the practicability of the gospel, dealing with 
 their fellow-men according to the gospel rule of 
 doing to others as if they themselves were the 
 others ; if they would take hold of this great 
 determination to Christianize the business of 
 the world, and make brothers of men, with the 
 equally strong determination never to let go, 
 come what may; — then they could work the 
 greatest reform, they could bring in the divinest 
 era, ever known to history. If there were a 
 thousand souls ready to fling themselves, like 
 Abraham, upon the tides of their divinest 
 instincts, without asking to see whither they 
 would bear them, and follow Christ in the deep 
 and wide sense of the apostles, there would be 
 3uch a heaving-up of this world as would lift the 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 79 
 
 loftiest ranges of its life into the skies ; and 
 the warrior angels of Christ would descend to 
 join the climbing saints in battle for the ever- 
 lasting triumph of righteousness. 
 
 I understand that, looking at the matter of 
 absolute self-dedication to the work of God in 
 one way, there seems little encouragement to 
 inspire the single life. Every social and religi- 
 ous convulsion that has destroyed the old and 
 brought forth a new earth has crushed and 
 buried the prophets of the better day. The 
 world has always mocked the faces which 
 brightest shone with new revelations of truth, 
 and pierced the hands that came to it laden 
 with God's new gifts of life. Idle seems the 
 dream of social righteousness to so large a part 
 of those who name Christ as their Redeemer, 
 while with cynical indifference the bloody feet 
 of covetousness tramp on their way of woe. 
 The amazing moral ignorance of the rich 
 sickens us with the sad intellectual ignorance 
 of the poor. Hypocrisy and injustice and des- 
 potism seem to die only for a resurrection in 
 some finer and more deceptive form. By none 
 
So A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 is the actual kingdom of Christ more bitterly 
 antagonized than the zealous religious classes, 
 while, — 
 
 " Still on the highroad, 'neath the noon-day sun. 
 The fires of hate are lit for those who dare 
 Follow their Lord along the untrodden way." 
 
 Of small power seems a single life of self-denial 
 amidst the wide and desolate wastes of selfish- 
 ness. What can a few souls, confronting a 
 great infidel church supremely anxious to keep 
 on good terms with the world and conserve the 
 traditions of the elders, — what can they do to 
 give the gospel back to men ? And the doubt 
 is intensified by the delay that hopes for some 
 organization to arise to do the work which only 
 consecrated hearts and loving hands and sacri- 
 ficial lives can do. The Roman trust in com- 
 prehensive organization and Anglo-Saxon faith 
 in the opinion of majorities have obscured from 
 the eyes of our American Christianity the 
 majestic simplicity of the gospel methods of 
 our Lord. 
 
 The kingdom has always come through the 
 
THE REALITY OF FAITH. 8 1 
 
 faith of the consecrated few. Great institutions 
 and organizations have nearly always come to 
 plant themselves squarely across the march of 
 the divine purposes. By the consecration of 
 single souls, and small groups of souls, has 
 righteousness been increasing with the ages. 
 By the few listening spirits have God's great 
 thoughts been spoken ; and the few obedient 
 lives have wrought the heavenly doing of his 
 will in the earth's epochal hours. The race 
 has entered its holier eras of wider freedom and 
 purer justice at the heels of humble and patient 
 souls whom it scoffed while it followed. It is 
 the majesty of simple goodness in single char- 
 acters that reveals God in converting and con- 
 quering power to the world. By no other 
 organization than the fellowship which each 
 man finds while walking the path of obedience 
 to the will of God can the world be altogether 
 overcome, and the dream of world-wide brother- 
 hood become an eternal fact. " If the sino;le 
 man," says Emerson, speaking according to the 
 gospel, "plant himself indomitably upon his 
 divine instincts, and there abide, the huge world 
 will come round to him." 
 
82 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 We none of us need wait, in this day of 
 human need and divine judgment, for company 
 and organization. We need no program of 
 action save the words of our Lord, sending us, 
 as he was sent by the Father, to please not our- 
 selves, but give our lives as bread and meat to 
 a hungry world. There is no thinking, no esti- 
 mating, here, what the most infirm and fettered 
 of us each may be and do for God and man if 
 we but make of ourselves living sacrifices in 
 his service, to be conformed to Christ and not 
 the opinions and customs of time. We may 
 each, acting with the apostolic faith in the 
 power of love and truth, pentecosted with the 
 apostolic enthusiasm for righteousness, send 
 out divine influences that will submerge vast 
 intrenchments of evil and bear the race far 
 Godward in their sweep. If we but put faith 
 in the noiseless voice that speaks in the deeps 
 of our being, rather than the lifeless artificiali- 
 ties of society and the hard selfishness of the 
 market, we may translate the divinest ideals of 
 life and conduct into common-place realities. 
 If we trust the lierht within us more than the 
 
THE RKALITY OF FAITH. 83 
 
 darkness without us, our holiest dreams may 
 become the most substantial facts of our ex- 
 perience. The Christ who calls us to enter 
 and share his life and work with God is him- 
 self the power by which we overcome the evil 
 of the world, and face the scorn of its bruising 
 customs. Arise, let us go hence to cast our 
 crowns at the feet of the sovereign Christ and 
 share in the toil and tribulation, the patience 
 and triumph, of his coming kingdom. And he 
 will write upon us his own name, and make us 
 pillars in the earth-enclosing temple of love, 
 which is the new Jerusalem coming down out 
 of heaven from God. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH 
 THE WORLD. 
 
It has been sometimes said of late years that Christianity 
 has resigned the leadership of the world, and that the friends 
 of humanity must now step in to act as a natural Providence 
 and conduct the affairs of the race. There is some truth in 
 the complaint, whatever we may think of the proposed remedy. 
 For there has been at all times a tendency among Christians 
 to abandon the claim of universal sovereignty which was at 
 first made in the name of the Lord. The claim may be made 
 in words, but left in a purely ideal state ; and when no attempt 
 has been made to give it a practical application, it is in effect 
 abandoned. A Christianity which embraces a part of human 
 life, while it adjourns its fuller claim to the world beyond the 
 grave, is certainly not the religion of One who says, "All 
 power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." — Canon Fre- 
 mantle. 
 
 Religion does not permeate life. The Church is one of the 
 great institutions of the country, and gets its own place. But 
 it is a thing apart from the common life, which goes on beside 
 it. Business, politics, literature, amusements, are only faintly 
 colored by it. Yet the mission of Christianity is not to occupy 
 a respectable place apart, but to leaven life through and through. 
 — Dr. Jatnes Stalker. 
 
 In fact, the godless lover of gain, and the gainless lover of 
 God are fanatics both, taking hold of the opposite ends of the 
 same falsehood. And the truth which suffices to rebuke them 
 both is this : that the kingdom of God is not a business, set up 
 in rivalry with worldly business; but a divine law regulating, 
 and a divine temper pervading, the pursuits of worldly busi- 
 ness. — Dr. fames Martineaii. 
 
 There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our 
 senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external re- 
 sources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many 
 modes of tasting and adoring God. We must learn to detach 
 ourselves from all that is capable of being lost; to bind our- 
 selves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to 
 enjoy the rest as a loan. — AmieVs Journal. 
 
 86 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH 
 THE WORLD. 
 
 Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth 
 that Jesus is the Son of God? — i John v. 5. 
 
 It was not by reliance on any visible support 
 the apostles went forth to claim the world for 
 Christ. They could count upon no earthly re- 
 sources. The institutions of man were against 
 them. They were opposed by governments, 
 schools of learning, and established religions. 
 Nothing seemed more foolish and hopeless to 
 the world than the assertion of the kingship of 
 Christ, who left his disciples without an inch 
 of worldly standing-ground, without a thread of 
 earthly dependence to which they could cling. 
 They had no temples of worship ; no philosophy, 
 or system of theology ; no literature, save some 
 of the books of the Old Testament. They 
 were without social position or political influ- 
 ence, without wealth or the friendship of 
 87 
 
88 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 wealth. The kingdoms of the world and their 
 glory, which had once filled so large a place in 
 the ambitions of the apostles, were a vanished 
 dream when Peter and John began to proclaim 
 the crucified Christ as the living king of heaven 
 and earth. There was never such a congestion 
 of human helplessness as the hundred and 
 twenty men and women who met in that upper 
 chamber at Jerusalem, to wait for the reception 
 of the unseen power that was to make their 
 deeds mighty and their words convincing. 
 
 Nor was it by faith in superior intellectual 
 gifts the disciples did their work. Christ left 
 no educated ministry, according to our interpre- 
 tation of education. Peter and John were un- 
 lettered fishermen. And the epistles of Paul 
 show a sublime unconsciousness of the great 
 theological problems which have occupied the 
 scholars of the church. Humanity, and not 
 theology, was the apostolic burden. The 
 change of the centre of Christian thought 
 from the sphere of righteousness to the sphere 
 of metaphysics, coming after the apostles' time, 
 was a corruption of Christianity ; a compro- 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVEKCOMETH 89 
 
 mise of the gospel with the sceptical philosophy 
 of a pagan world. The fixing of the attention 
 of Christendom upon opinion rather than upon 
 character, the occupation of the Christian intel- 
 lect with definitions rather than with righteous- 
 ness, levelled the Christian ministry to the 
 authority of the scribes of traditionalism, whom 
 Christ rebuked with unqualified severity. The 
 putting of theology in the place of life as the 
 object of Christian concern was a victory for 
 the devil, and an utter perversion of the mind 
 of the gospel. The early Christian churches 
 were composed, in the main, of the poor and 
 ignorant. The epistles of the New Testament 
 were written, the greatest of them, to bond- 
 servants. Paul, one of the most accomplished 
 men of all times, speaks with intense distrust 
 of the intellectual graces which were so highly 
 prized in his day, and are so strangely and 
 sadly over-valued in ours. The great apostle 
 felt keenly the degradation of being taken for 
 a mere religious orator. He saw that the cen- 
 tres of culture were seats of refined and shame- 
 less vice. John, too, saw the moral stupidity 
 
90 A FLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 of even the best philosophy. All the apostles 
 fought with the beasts of theological selfish- 
 ness, and bore the stripes of religious big- 
 otry. They knew the uselessness of contending 
 against the blindness and meanness of the pro- 
 fessional religionist, who enthrones the idol of 
 his system in the place of the living God. At 
 one time and another, the apostles also dealt 
 with that moral drivelling which characterizes 
 all mere intellectual culture. Not by the wis- 
 dom of the world, religious or philosophical, 
 any more than by the world's institutions, did 
 they expect to win the world to their king. 
 They were no cultivated religious gentlemen, 
 reading the literature of the day and writing 
 proper religious essays in well-appointed studies. 
 Neither by faith in their own righteousness 
 were they victorious in their labors. They 
 knew they had been childish and selfish, fickle 
 and false. They saw themselves as sinners, 
 along with all mankind. They felt in fellow- 
 ship with the most wretched and fallen. They 
 regarded themselves as miracles of mercy. 
 Continued self - acquaintance only increased 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVER COMETH 9 1 
 
 their self-abasement, and their wonder at the 
 gracious love that saved them. Not because 
 they thought themselves better than other men 
 were they enabled and encouraged to go as 
 ambassadors of righteousness and truth to the 
 nations. Better than any of us, I fear, they 
 felt the waste and weakness of sin. Through 
 great sinning and great suffering they learned 
 the lessons of redemption. 
 
 The faith by which the apostles overcame 
 the world was in their acceptance of the abso- 
 lute authority of Jesus Christ over all human 
 life. In the faith that God had revealed him- 
 self in Christ as a deliverer from every form 
 of sin they toiled in the divine might of a 
 redeemed manhood. By faith in Christ as the 
 manifested power and revealed wisdom of God 
 they cut loose from bondage to the past, and 
 swung clear of dependence on visible supports 
 and earthly resources. To them God was 
 no condescending Christlcss infinity, but a 
 heavenly Father who had shown forth his 
 entire character and spoken his whole word 
 in Christ. In the light and joy of this revela- 
 
92 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 tion they suffered and worked with Christ as 
 the conqueror of all things visible and invisible. 
 They were the devoted subjects of a king 
 who was making a new earth in which he 
 would reign in righteousness. The race was 
 redeemed ; sin had no more right to dominion 
 over men ; since the revelation of God in 
 Christ there was no more excuse for abiding 
 in unrighteousness. Christ had overcome the 
 world ; to him the nations belonged ; his 
 Spirit was subjecting them unto God ; he was 
 the ruler of the kings of earth — the apostles 
 were the proclaimers of this fact. To the 
 apostles redemption was a reality. There was 
 in the coming of Christ an influx of moral 
 power sufficient to deliver the world from all 
 wickedness, making covetousness and selfish- 
 ness, lust and strife, unnecessary. In the faith 
 that Christ who had been slain was living and 
 reigning, that he was surely conquering the 
 world for the Father who had given it into his 
 hands, the apostles were bold and tireless in 
 announcing the fact that the world was re- 
 deemed from the power, not the consequences, 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVERCOME TH. 93 
 
 of sin. They believed they were fighting the 
 good fight of a victorious Christ, and that 
 henceforth human history would be the realiza- 
 tion of the fruits of his redemption in the es- 
 tablishment of his everlasting kingdom. Under 
 the kingship of the Christ of all grace and 
 truth, righteousness was no longer an experi- 
 ment ; human life was a triumph, and not a 
 defeat ; right and wrong were not problems ; 
 the world was redeemed with a complete re- 
 demption ; only unbelief could regard any sin, 
 personal or social, as irremovable. 
 
 It was thus impossible for the apostles to 
 sustain any other relation to the right than 
 that of triumphantly asserting it in the name of 
 their king ; or hold any other relation to the 
 wrong than that of smiting it by the same 
 authority. They were not engaged in any 
 doubtful struggle. They could conceive of no 
 possibility of defeat. They were the followers 
 of one before whom nothing could stand. They 
 never considered that the issue of their labors 
 and sorrows, their prayers and faith, could be 
 less than the subjection of all human life to the 
 
94 ^ PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 rule of Christ. From the day his Spirit armed 
 them for service they maintained an unchanging 
 attitude of triumph. An unbroken strain of 
 victory is borne along from apostle to apostle 
 through the writings of the New Testament. 
 They attacked the world as men who were 
 victors from the outset. In the faith that the 
 uplifting of Christ was the mortal blow to the 
 dominion of Satan ; that the resurrection of 
 Christ revealed death as a gain and not a loss ; 
 that the coming of the Spirit was the spreading 
 forth of the power of Christ to gather all 
 kingdoms and governments, all families and 
 societies, all knowledge and commerce, under 
 the eternal sovereignty of love ; — in this faith 
 they toiled and endured as seeing the invisible 
 Christ already on the throne of universal do- 
 minion. In this faith they rejoiced in persecu- 
 tions, and lifted voices of thanksgiving from 
 prison-walls and martyr-fires. They received 
 the blows of the Lord's enemies in the faith 
 that every blow weakened the power of evil 
 and hastened the world's deliverance. They 
 believed that the truth which the world re- 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVERCOME TH. 95 
 
 jected in them as falsehood would be welcomed 
 by ages to come as a precious inheritance. 
 They suffered the loss of all things that coming 
 generations might be enriched by faith's sacri- 
 fices. They were blinded by no blasphemous 
 separation of the world into secular and spirit- 
 ual spheres ; fettered by no restrictions of the 
 power of Christ's redemptive grace or the 
 authority of his sovereign love. They had 
 not betrayed Christ to philosophers by aban- 
 doning the gospel for systems of theology ; 
 nor exchanged the weapons of faith and love 
 for the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 
 They dared not think of any evil under the 
 sun as other than a defeated alien, a retreating 
 enemy. Faith in Christ as immanent and 
 sovereign in all human affairs, not faith in any 
 power in themselves, not faith in the favors or 
 resources of the world, was the might by which 
 the apostles worked out the salvation of a 
 redeemed race. By no other quality of faith 
 can the church overcome the world. 
 
 Sometimes I ask myself whether the Son of 
 man, as he comes in the crises and opportuni- 
 
96 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 ties of our age, finds faith in the church — the 
 faith that overcometh the world ; the faith that 
 Christ has redeemed the world. The question 
 cannot be answered by the number of Bibles 
 printed and read ; for no faith is vital and con- 
 quering that depends mainly for its knowledge 
 of God on written records. As Andrew Mur- 
 ray says, " There may be a study and knowledge 
 of the word in which there is but little real 
 fellowship with the living God." Our Father is 
 a God of the living as well as of the dead. He 
 is not dumb nor speechless, save to unbelief. 
 Inspiration is quenchless, revelation continuous. 
 Nor can the quality and quantity of faith be 
 measured by the number and beauty of our 
 churches. God dwelleth not alone in temples 
 made with hands. There cometh in Christ one 
 greater than our temples of material splendor, 
 which are monuments to human pride quite as 
 much as to a living faith. We all know, if we 
 are candid, that some magnificent temples of 
 worship are built to shut out rather than gather 
 in the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Social 
 caste has, in too many instances, more to do 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVEKCOMETH 97 
 
 with the erection of palaces of worship than 
 faith in Christ. And God cares not for 
 churches which have not in them the mind 
 which was in Christ Jesus. There is a wide 
 distinction to be made between religious re- 
 spectability and the love for humanity which 
 is the spirit and power of the gospel. Christ 
 does not measure a church's faith by the beauty 
 of its adornments, nor the ecclesiastical promi- 
 nence of its preacher, but by the attitude of 
 the church towards a world of sin and need. 
 By love alone can a church vindicate its right 
 to bear the name of the crucified Christ. By 
 this shall all men know that ye are my disci- 
 ples, if ye have love one to another. Is the 
 church doing the same work that Christ did, its 
 members making themselves of no reputation, 
 and going about doing good in the power of the 
 Holy Spirit } A church has faith only to the 
 degree that the church is Christ to its commu- 
 nity. Neither do our creeds evidence the reality 
 of our belief. Opinions about Christ, orthodox 
 or unorthodox, are not faith in Christ. Not 
 in these does the Son of man look for faith. 
 
98 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 They are no part of the gospel, and are totally 
 foreign to the spirit of the apostles. No one 
 would have resented them more vehemently 
 than Paul. The cataloguing of God's attributes 
 as the symbol of Christian faith is a triumph of 
 heathen philosophy. Orthodox symbols are 
 often the refuge of the most substantial athe- 
 ism, the most godless covetousness, and impu- 
 dent infidelity. And Christianity must be 
 lifted out of the realm of metaphysics and put 
 down again in the realm of morals. The seat 
 of religious judgment must shift from opinion 
 to character. For while the church has busied 
 itself with definitions, throwing itself into 
 panics over supposed intellectual errors, fla- 
 grant moral errors and infidel practices have 
 grown up under the protection of the most 
 pretentious orthodoxy. While distracting itself 
 over the unknown program of moral procedure 
 in another world, the church has practically 
 abandoned the ethics of the Sermon on the 
 Mount, which is God's program of moral pro- 
 cedure in this. Nor yet the mere number of 
 religious industries, or benevolent activities, 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVEK COMETH. 99 
 
 or charitable endowments, which we record, 
 can in themselves prove our faith. They may 
 be objects of faith and worship rather than the 
 living God. There is a measureless amount of 
 religious activity and churchliness which is not 
 Christian, and has no vital relation to the gos- 
 pel. " This is the work of God, that ye believe 
 on him whom he hath sent." There is also a 
 vast deal of modern benevolence, flattering 
 indeed to a world-won church, which is noth- 
 ing less than a hard-hearted apology for cruelty, 
 extortion, and robbery. 
 
 Our Christian faith can be measured only by 
 the quality of our self-surrender. No faith is 
 vital which does not supply itself with virtue. 
 That faith is a fiction which does not fruit in 
 self-sacrifice and righteousness. We believe 
 in Christ just to the measure we give ourselves 
 up to him, walking in his way of life, guided by 
 his truth, obeying his law of love, going about 
 doing good in the spirit and power of his holi- 
 ness. It is the faith that leaves one no more 
 his own man, but Christ's man ; the faith that 
 puts no conditions in the surrender of self to 
 
lOO A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 the mastership of Christ ; the faith that counts 
 temporal losses as eternal gains, that it may 
 know Christ and live his life ; the faith that 
 rests not upon the friendship of the world, nor 
 upon any formula of truth, but on Christ as 
 the power and wisdom of God ; the faith that 
 conforms the life to Christ, and not to the 
 fashions of social selfishness ; the faith that 
 nails the whole being in grateful self-surrender 
 on the cross of the slain Christ. Faith never 
 reaches far beyond self-renunciation. And the 
 moment we are self-surrendered to Christ, with 
 all the passions of life attached to him as the 
 supreme object of affection and sacrifice, and 
 the supreme joy of aspiration, that moment we 
 enter the freedom, and share in the life, and 
 work with the strength of God. Life is hence- 
 forth a victory. We then work with our eyes 
 on Christ, looking not at self, working most and 
 best when all thoughts of success and failure 
 are absorbed in the faith that Christ has re- 
 deemed the world. The soul that is bound to 
 Christ by this faith works on, faithful alike in 
 victory and defeat, knowing that he whose 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH. lOI 
 
 world this is conquers with failure as well as 
 success. It broods not over its own weakness, 
 nor faints at the sorrow of baffled effort ; nor 
 does its energy fail in the presence of strong 
 and confident evils. Through Christ, in Christ, 
 with Christ, it overcomes the world. The 
 Christ-possessed soul walks the world of storms 
 serene and omnipotent, tossed not about upon 
 the waves of opinion, nor distracted by the 
 babble of voices. It has cast its anchor in the 
 secret place of the Most High, the harbor of 
 eternal hope where Jesus is, and abides without 
 fear till the clouds of time shall break from the 
 face of God. 
 
 Christ is all that God can make of man. In 
 him is the righteousness of God which is the 
 search of history. In him is the complete mani- 
 festation of God's love and power in humanity. 
 By faith in him is the race to be made whole. 
 Not in barren ethical abstractions, which have 
 no ground in reality ; not in theological formu- 
 las, which are the unbelief of logic ; but in per- 
 sonal devotion to Jesus Christ is the purifying 
 power of the world, and the secret of man's 
 
102 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 moral development. In the hand of Jesus is 
 the key to human history. Faith in him as the 
 destiny of man and the revelation of the Father 
 is the hope that shall make us perfect as our 
 Father in heaven is perfect. The race will ad- 
 vance in righteousness, and enter its eternal 
 rest from strife, as fast and fully as it accepts 
 Christ as ruler. Nothing greater than Christ, 
 neither in institutions nor in doctrines, can 
 man think for personal guidance or social law. 
 When the earth yields allegiance to the law of 
 love in Christ it will be Eden-clad again. The 
 spirit of Christ must be the spirit of commerce, 
 of politics, of society. The complete reforma- 
 tion of the world, the reconstruction of society, 
 the saving of the Christless multitudes, will 
 come through the acceptance of the mastership 
 of Jesus on the part of the church that bears 
 his name. There are no social problems in fact. 
 They exist only in the imagination of unbelief. 
 Every problem of your life and mine, every 
 problem of government and finance, every prob- 
 lem of capital and labor, will find quick and 
 simple solution when men who call Christ their 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVER COMETH I03 
 
 Lord are willing to obey his commands. There 
 is not a single question, individual or universal, 
 that cannot find its final and philosophic answer 
 through belief in Jesus as the Son of God and 
 king of men. We have but one thing to do to 
 right the wrongs of the world ; and that is, to 
 submit ourselves, in every sphere of life, to the 
 authority of Christ, and exalt him as the King 
 whose right it is to reign in every domain of 
 human activity. By enslavement to Christ is 
 the race to be made free. He is the righteous- 
 ness for which the world sorrows and waits. 
 He is God's spoken word concerning right and 
 wrong. He is the truth for which wise fools 
 search in vain ; the truth which God is raising 
 in a new resurrection from beneath the debris 
 of centuries of conflict. When all human life 
 comes to be lived out under the authority of 
 Jesus, it will then be rightly lived. Through 
 union with Christ in God will all the ills of the 
 divine body of humanity be healed. Through 
 the lifting up of the Son of man with our own 
 pierced hands of faith will the race be drawn 
 into the nightless light of the throne of love, 
 
104 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 All the power of God unto salvation is in Christ, 
 who has overcome the world and redeemed it 
 unto God, seeing that his divine power hath 
 granted unto us all things that pertain unto life 
 and godliness. 
 
 The problems of our times are demanding of 
 the church a larger and more apostolic concep- 
 tion of redemption. The hungry millions with- 
 out the church, stretching forth worn hands of 
 hope, are beseeching us to know if good be 
 stronger than evil, and love mightier than 
 greed. There is a feeling moving in the world, 
 deepening into a terrible suspicion, that Christ 
 is not fairly represented by his church; that 
 we have been regarding Christ as a Saviour in 
 our sins instead of from our sins. Too long 
 have we been limiting the power of the Son 
 of God in the interests of churchly selfish- 
 ness and dogmatic theology. The social ques- 
 tions of the day are the notes of God's 
 trumpet calling the church to a new career. 
 The church must answer the call, and manifest 
 Christianity to the world as a divinely human 
 brotherhood, or bring upon itself some terrible 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH. 105 
 
 judgment that will level its temples to the dust, 
 and make its creeds a derision. It must form 
 a larger estimate of the riches that God has 
 treasured in Christ, waiting to lavish them 
 upon a recipient world. 
 
 The world has long heard from theology that 
 it is condemned. The divine fact which needs 
 to be uttered with prophetic emphasis upon the 
 earth in our day is the reality of redemption. 
 Society must be told that there has been given 
 unto men in Christ a power great enough to 
 deliver them from the law of selfishness. Re- 
 demption is a fact, and not an imputation or a 
 fiction. The cleansing powers of the blood of 
 Christ are moral and actual. We have no 
 excuse for abiding in unrighteousness. Covet- 
 ousness is atheism ; the supremacy of the law 
 of self-interest is infidelity ; social caste is pro- 
 fanity. God forbid that we should continue in 
 these sins any longer, blaspheming God with 
 the delusion that grace may abound through 
 our unrighteousness ; for thereby we trample 
 under foot the precious blood of Christ, and 
 neglect to our peril his great salvation. And 
 
lo6 A PLEA POR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 how can the church escape if it neglects to 
 work out the salvation of Jesus in a regenerated 
 society ? 
 
 I speak not, my brethren, in the interests of 
 any theology, old or new. I speak in the name 
 of the living Christ, for the sake of the church 
 which bears his name, and for the sake of a 
 travailing earth that waits for us to stand forth 
 and show ourselves to be indeed the sons of 
 God. I feel that we need to free ourselves 
 from all fear of men, and all bondage to human 
 traditionalism, that we may get very low at the 
 feet of the suffering Christ, and ask him to 
 show us what his gospel really is, and what its 
 message is to our day and generation. It is 
 time that judgment begin at the house of God. 
 To be the messengers of judgment will cost us 
 much. But we can afford the cost, if we may 
 do our part towards starting the church upon a 
 career which will restore Christianity to Chris- 
 tendom, and give back the gospel to men. May 
 the Spirit of all holiness and power fill us with 
 that divine discontent which will not let us rest 
 in the pride and injustice of the present order 
 
THE FAITH THAT OVERCOME TH. 10/ 
 
 of things, but move us into the future as bearers 
 of the reproach of Christ, and seekers of that 
 coming city of God, whose wall of peace shall 
 enclose the nations and shut out all darkness 
 forever. 
 
 In the flashes of divine judgment that rift 
 the clouds which darkly gather on the horizon 
 of the church, beyond the idolatry of a mam- 
 mon-serving age, through the smoke of speed- 
 ing conflicts, out of the ashes of dreadful ruins, 
 I see a scourged and purified church returning 
 to the faith of the apostles, its torn and trampled 
 robes stripped of worldly adornments and new- 
 washed in the blood of the slain Lamb. It 
 may be a church of the remnant, desolate and 
 crippled, but a church repentant and triumphant 
 through faith in the Son of God as the ruler of 
 the kings of earth. In that ransomed church, 
 delivered from the kingdoms of the world and 
 their glory, no throne of mammon shall stand 
 beside the cross of the crucified Christ. It will 
 bear the cross about in loving hearts, bleeding 
 with the love of God for fallen men, and lean 
 no more upon fashion and wealth. It will point 
 
I08 A FLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 
 
 no more to wordy symbols and material mag- 
 nificence as the witnesses of its faith, but to 
 lives of Christly righteousness. It will be led 
 by brave souls who will bring their all to the 
 feet of Christ, in the faith that his cross of 
 self-renunciation is the only practicable law 
 of human society. And though the world 
 may mock them as fools, they will overcome 
 through the blood of the Lamb, loving not 
 their lives unto death, and lead the race through 
 the gates of the new Jerusalem, which is a 
 righteous civilization coming down out of 
 heaven from God, linking all human life in an 
 everlasting fellowship of love. Then children 
 shall be no more the accidents of lust, but the 
 offspring of prayer, and every human occupa- 
 tion shall be a communion with God, and the 
 strong shall bear the burdens of the weak, and 
 there shall not be any more pain, and the king- 
 dom of our God shall have come with power. 
 
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