OF 
 
 JOSEPH FORT NEWT 
 
•*v 
 
THE SWORD OF 
 THE SPIRIT 
 
 BRITAIN AND AMERICA 
 IN THE GREAT WAR 
 
 BY 
 
 JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, Litt.D., D.D. 
 
 Minister of The City Temple 
 
 •;\-' 
 
 ^^^.^f OF Pfl/.V^ 
 
 NEW YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
Copyright, 1918, 
 By George H. Doran Company 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
TO 
 
 THE OFFICERS, MEMBERS AND FRIENDS 
 
 OF THE CITY TEMPLE 
 
 IN GRATITUDE FOR LOVE ABOUNDING 
 
 AND LOYALTY UNWAVERING, 
 
 • I INSCRIBE THIS VOLUME 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2009 with funding from 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/swordofspiritbOOnewt 
 
PRELUDE 
 
 IF the City Temple has been an international shrine 
 almost from the beginning of its history, it is 
 doubly so to-day, not alone from the fact that its 
 present Minister is an American citizen, but still 
 more because of the reunion of English speaking 
 peoples drawn together by a common peril and a 
 common ideal. The call of an American preacher 
 to so famous a pulpit was itself an overture of friend- 
 ship of good-will, and was so understood by men of 
 all creeds in America; and in obedience to that spirit 
 the Minister himself has been led to conceive of 
 his responsibility in a two-fold aspect — as a Christian 
 Ambassador and an Interpreter of one nation to 
 another. But since these two great people are really 
 one, having a common genius and a common historic 
 inheritance, these two offices are also one, since we 
 can best understand each other in the Christian at- 
 mosphere, which is the spirit of fraternity. 
 
 First, then, and chiefly, the present ministry would 
 fain be an ambassadorship of Christian faith and 
 [fellowship, an apostolate of the Gospel of the Eternal 
 Christ, keeping the continuity of faith while seeking 
 to interpret it in the terms of to-day, for the needs of 
 to-day, alike in personal realization and social ap- 
 plication: never forgetting that a personal experience 
 of things immortal is the permanent fountain of 
 
viii PRELUDE 
 
 creative Christian service and fruitful social enter- 
 prise. Second, and hardly less important, it would 
 promote fellowship, sympathetic understanding and 
 intelligent appreciation between two peoples who 
 have drifted apart less through difference of ideals 
 than through divergent development, in the convic- 
 tion that upon their co-operation the future freedom 
 and peace of the world, if not the very existence of 
 civilization, manifestly depend; and in the further 
 conviction that unless Christian principles are to be 
 the ruling principles between nations hereafter, we 
 can have no security and no civilization upon which 
 we can rely. 
 
 There are those who say — as Mr. Galsworthy 
 seems to say in his play "Foundations" — that the 
 world after the war will be the same world that it 
 was before, only worse, reaction frorn sublime self- 
 sacrifice leading to sordid scramble for advantage. 
 Surely that cannot be true. The war will end in 
 time ; but not so the thoughts it has awakened. Nor 
 will the lessons learned at such terrible cost be for- 
 gotten in a day, albeit all the insight and sagacity we 
 can command will be needed to direct the forces 
 now engaged in destruction to the building of a better 
 world-order. When London was burned in the 
 Great Fire, Christopher Wren brought forward a 
 plan for a new city with wide streets all converging 
 toward a central shrine of common worship, which 
 is to-day at once his monument and his memorial. 
 The plan was accepted by the city authorities, but 
 it could not be worked out because every householder 
 
PRELUDE ix 
 
 insisted that his house should stand exactly where 
 it stood before and be the same size. Once again 
 a great fire has swept over the City of Man, and it 
 will be a vast blunder to attempt to rebuild a social 
 order which had in it the possibility of the present 
 disaster. Time out of mind we have been trying to 
 build a Christian civilization on an unchristian 
 foundation : it cannot be done. As Lord Grey puts 
 it, either we "must learn or perish" ; either we must 
 find a way to abolish war or live under the threat 
 and menace of wars still more frightful, until at last 
 there will be "a famished race of men looting in 
 search of non-existent food amidst the smouldering 
 ruins of civilization."^ 
 
 Even now epoch-making ideas, hitherto held to be 
 iridescent dreams, are stinging the human mind like 
 spray flung from the boundless deep, challenging us 
 to adventure : A World Made Safe for Democracy, 
 A People's Pact, A League of Nations, A United 
 Christianity. These, with the ideals of Labour, 
 which are at once passionate and prophetic, are ex- 
 pressive of a will for a more redemptive spiritual 
 unity of mankind. Is Christianity dying, as Mr. 
 Arnold Bennett and others tell us it is, almost as if 
 that were a pleasing fact? Of course it is dying: 
 that is its genius, which they do not understand: to 
 die like its Master and rise again, radiant and re- 
 born. Evermore it must die to its outworn forms 
 of creed and rite, and rise to a new vision of the 
 Truth: must die to its narrow sectarianism, and 
 
 »"In the Fourth Year," by H. G. Wells. 
 
X PRELUDE 
 
 rise as "the Beloved Community." What are these 
 new watchwords, so urgent with prophecy, but the 
 rediscovery that the life of man is fundamentally 
 spiritual and that brotherliness is the law of life, 
 foretelling a day when nothing will be taken for 
 Christianity but the religion of love of God and Love 
 of Man; that the knell of the letter of Christianity 
 has been struck, and that we must now inaugurate 
 and enthrone its spirit ! 
 
 At the onset of the world-war an English essayist 
 said, in surprise, "The immoralists meant what they 
 said," and so did the Christian moralists — only, alas, 
 only a few believed either testimony save in a vague, 
 indolent way. Then came the awakening! Now 
 thoughtful men of every persuasion see that the 
 realities are as Jesus said they were long, long ago, 
 and that His principles are as universal, as immut- 
 able, as inescapable, in the end, as the laws of physics. 
 Even a wayfaring man must see that if we had acted 
 out in our lives the Christianity we profess to believe 
 in our hearts, this inconceivable tragedy could not 
 have happened. By the same token, "we are realiz- 
 ing as we never realized before that the Christianiz- 
 ing of men, of all men, in their relations, is not so 
 much a matter of interest to the Church as a matter 
 of life or death for the world." ^ It is astonishing, 
 as a novelist has said, how we have come through 
 blood and fire and tears to find how sound a meaning 
 attached to the familiar phrases of the Christian 
 faith. At last, after ages of tragedy, we come back 
 
 1 "Jesus and Life," by J. F, MacFadyn. 
 
PRELUDE xi 
 
 with bleeding feet to learn that in the Mind of 
 Jesus — so deep, so pure, so sane, so lovely — the 
 Voice of the Universe found clear, sweet, authentic 
 expression, and that there is no security until we 
 obey His words. 
 
 What practical program lies to our hand, offering 
 an opportunity for service and a promise of fruitful 
 results? For one thing, our Christianity must realise 
 and affirm its essential character as an International 
 fellowship, as over against the false, sectional, class 
 Internationals which have usurped its right. By 
 this is meant not an organic union of Churches all 
 at once, but their co-operation in behalf of a better 
 mood, a finer insight, and the habit of thinking in 
 terms of one Humanity and one Christianity. No 
 doubt some form of catholic Christian union will 
 come in time — It already exists, and needs only to be 
 discovered — and it may come more quickly than we 
 anticipate. But It cannot be hastened. If It Is arti- 
 ficial, it will be superficial. It must come spiritually 
 and spontaneously, in answer to a great yearning of 
 the Christian heart for a wider fellowship and a 
 deeper experience of the Truth. Else It will be a 
 union not of the Church, but of the Churchyard. 
 Nor will it come by erasing all historical loyalties in 
 one indistinguishable blur. Its secret lies deeper — 
 in the spirit of things. But meantime, and while that 
 union Is on the way to fulfilment, the finest, clearest, 
 wisest Christian vision must be brought to bear upon 
 the social and world-war that has to be built on the 
 ruins of war. 
 
xii PRELUDE 
 
 What matters is a new spirit; in each nation men 
 must make themselves felt and heard, who will say 
 openly that there is no way out of this hell of mad- 
 ness unless we resolve to give up the old evil spirit 
 that rules the intercourse of nations, and from the 
 bottom of our hearts learn to love and think out a 
 new world. From thousands of sanctuaries in many 
 lands, week by week, year by year, witness has been 
 borne on behalf of the Christian principles and ideals. 
 Individually we have not been unfaithful to the vis- 
 ion, but the lack of a united voice, bearing fruit in a 
 united eloquence, has been our weakness. What we 
 need is to weave these many tones into a mighty 
 World-voice, that shall utter the Christian insight 
 and witness for the leadership of mankind in its task 
 of reconstruction. And that voice should make it- 
 self heard, with all emphasis and appeal, equally 
 against Militarism, Mammonism, and Anarchy, in 
 behalf of Rightness as the truest Common-sense, in- 
 sisting that the business of the world must be done 
 in the open, and that straightforward dealing as be- 
 tween nation and nation in the spirit of brotherliness 
 is the only way to realise equity and peace. 
 
 For example, If there is to be such a thing as a 
 League of Nations and If it is to be anything more 
 than a paper league, it must begin with a league be- 
 tween English-speaking nations. If we, who have 
 one language, one religion, one historic tradition, 
 and one Ideal of civilization, cannot be brought to- 
 gether Into such a league of friendship, then it is idle 
 to talk about a League of Nations following the war. 
 
PRELUDE xiii 
 
 It would be only an affair of diplomatic dicker, pow- 
 erless against the promptings of self-interest and the 
 competitions of commerce. In order, then, to help 
 bring about a real League of English-spealcing Na- 
 tions, and as a basis and nucleus for such a league, 
 we need a League of Churches, or at least their co- 
 operation In a ministry of Interpretation and fellow- 
 ship. Isolation is at an end. The self-sufHcient na- 
 tion is a thing of the past. The old Declarations of 
 Independence but give place to Declarations of Inter- 
 dependence, In the spirit of mutual regard and In 
 the knowledge that the common welfare of the race 
 Is the concern of all alike. Surely here is an oppor- 
 tunity unparalleled for the Christian Gospel, If the 
 Church is clear-sighted enough to see it and sagacious 
 enough to improve It, linking two peoples for the 
 service of all.^* 
 
 For, consider the problems that face us. One 
 thing is clear : the future of the world Is democratic, 
 and nothing can stop It. Tokens could not be plainer, 
 and farseeing religious leaders, who divine the curve 
 of destiny, will seek to leaven the future now in the 
 
 * More specifically and in detail, it may be suggested: (i) 
 As we in America must study English history to learn the roots 
 of our own history and the origin of our institutions, so English 
 schools ought to study American history to learn some of the 
 fruits of their own history and genius. (2) Suppose it should 
 be arranged that in every pulpit in both lands one or more 
 sermons should be preached each year expressing the growing 
 desire for a closer co-operation, if not alliance, between the two 
 peoples . . . would that not do much toward making it a reality? 
 (3) In his remarkable book, "The Invisible Alliance," Francis 
 Grierson said, long before the war, "The forthcoming American 
 understanding will include the religious element, working with 
 the social and political — English and American preachers will 
 exchange pulpits." 
 
xiv PRELUDE 
 
 making with the spirit of the Gospel. The spokes- 
 man of the New World has said that we are fighting 
 this war to make the world safe for democracy; but 
 there remains the more difficult task of making 
 democracy safe for the world. Democracy as such 
 is no panacea. Left to itself, without discipline, 
 without spiritual vision, it may become a plague. 
 If democracy is inevitable, we must evangelize the 
 inevitable — as Wesley, by his magnificent and cease- 
 less evangel, saved the England of his day from the 
 red revolution, by capturing for Christ the men who 
 else had fomented strife; and if this is not done the 
 inevitable will come off without it, with what result 
 none can foresee. But our evangelism, to be effec- 
 tive to-day, must not simply appeal to the individual, 
 but.must have as well a social emphasis and passion; 
 and by the same sign, its methods must be such as 
 are usable to-day, and its message uttered in terms 
 that can be understood by the men of to-day. Issues 
 of such pith and moment dwarf into nothingness the 
 things that divided the sects In other days, and they 
 call us to launch out into enterprises the like of which 
 we have not dreamed before, much less attempted. 
 Manifestly we stand at the end of an era "con- 
 demned to something great." The high, Ineffable will 
 by which the world is ruled works by evolution, but 
 also by revolution. As the grand divisions of geo- 
 logical history had their beginnings in stupendous 
 upheavals, so the great epochs In our human world 
 have their origin in overturnlngs. Such an epoch 
 is even now upon us, dividing the story of Man into 
 
PRELUDE XV 
 
 before and after. Over the doors of our age an 
 unseen Hand is writing, in letters of fire, that word 
 which is the law of God and the hope of man. 
 "Behold, I make all things new." Progress is by 
 Divine authority, by Divine necessity; God is the 
 great innovator. 
 
 I looked; aside the mist-cloud rolled, 
 The Waster seemed the Builder, too; 
 
 Upspringing from the ruined Old, 
 I saw the New. 
 
 Evolution is not automatic. History dates from 
 the Eternal intention; it is the story of the deeds of 
 God done in time. Here is the supreme sanction 
 of human enterprise and expectation, the ultimate 
 pledge of progress, and the inspiration of creative 
 endeavour. Force, Fear, Faith, these three; but 
 the greatest of these is the Faith that lays hold of 
 the mighty will of God and reshapes the world after 
 the pattern of the Ideal seen on the Mount. Ever- 
 more, as a wise teacher has said, the race must be- 
 come partner in the moral enterprise, fellow-worker 
 with the Eternal at His ethical task, if its heart of 
 rhythm and soul of fire are to stand fully revealed. 
 
 Whatever betide, God lives, the human soul is un- 
 conquerable, goodness and beauty are in the world, 
 and the living Presence which men call Christ. They 
 are here in our human hearts. We feel them as 
 power; we know them as love. Their touch upon 
 us makes us idealists, altruists, optimists, and we 
 dream. What though our dream be delayed in ful- 
 
xvi PRELUDE 
 
 filment, It does but emphasise our obligation to put 
 forth a more heroic effort in behalf of a finer issue 
 of character and a nobler social order. The fact is 
 undeniable. Mankind began low, and has been 
 climbing higher through untold ages of pain, pushed 
 upward by compulsions he could not escape, pulled 
 upward by influences he could not resist. The ascent 
 is inevitable, and not even the tragedy of world-war 
 can stay it, much less stop it, because God is behind 
 it, within it, above, and beyond It. 
 
 Surely the profound and underguiding thought of 
 our time Is the sense of the Divine Indwelling, of the 
 everywhereness of God, and of the growth of the 
 Spiritual Life as the key to the history of the world 
 and of the meaning of life. No other explanation 
 really explains the uprising passion and desire of 
 humanity, and its outreaching after the Ideal; it is 
 the Life of God seeking new incarnation in the 
 struggle of the race toward the Light. Such is "the 
 Increasing purpose" running through the ages, re- 
 vealing Itself In the aspirations and Institutions of 
 man. While one may not In a few moments trace in 
 detail the ramifications and outworkings of this in- 
 sight, we can at least follow some of its tendencies. 
 Much is yet uncertain, but It seems certain that the 
 future will be shaped by three forces : The Spirit of 
 Science, the Democratic Principle, and the Christian 
 Evangel : and these three must learn to work together 
 as partners an^ friends. 
 
 Who Is the Angel of the New Day, its dawn now 
 red with sacrifice, but dimly radiant with the promise 
 
PRELUDE xvii 
 
 of a better time to be? Who is it that holds out the 
 only hope of a world made wiser by its folly and 
 nobler by its suffering? Who is it that has haunted 
 our hearts during these bitter days, His keen sword 
 felt in our sharp questionings, His ineffable touch 
 softening our sorrow. His presence made manifest 
 in the new crucifixion of humanity? It is the Eternal 
 Christ — the outcast Christ, so long despised and re- 
 jected of men, His face marred more than the face 
 of any man amidst the horror of the strife — not the 
 Christ of our subtle creeds, but the Comrade of men 
 and women; no wraith of a far-off faith and a time 
 long gone, but a Companion who "sorrows with in- 
 domitable eyes," yet still hoping all things, believing 
 all things, even while enduring all things. He it is 
 whom humanity will yet crown without a thorn — His 
 spirit our salvation. His love the hope of the soul, 
 and His laws the only basis of a world-order wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness and peace. 
 
 Joseph Fort Newton. 
 City Temple, London. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Prelude vii 
 
 The Continuity of Faith 23 
 
 England and America 34 
 
 The Religion of Lincoln 45 
 
 Holding the World Together 56 
 
 The Interpreter 67 
 
 Our Father 78 
 
 Divine Guidance in Human Affairs .... 88 
 
 Providence 98 
 
 The Ministry of Sorrow 108 
 
 The God of Comfort 117 
 
 The Mystery of Pain 127 
 
 The Compassion of Christ 136 
 
 The Sword of the Saints 145 
 
 The Intercessor 155 
 
 The Shadow Christ 163 
 
 The Eternal Communion 172 
 
 The Unbound Christ 182 
 
 Two OR Three and Jesus 191 
 
 The Mother of Jesus 200 
 
 The Little Sanctuaries 211 
 
 The Victory of the Cross 221 
 
 The Eternal Values •. 230 
 
 xiz 
 
THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 THE CONTINUITY OF FAITH 
 
 "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for 
 ever." — Heb. xiii. 8. 
 
 FORTY-FIVE years ago— May 19, 1873— the 
 cornerstone of the City Temple was laid; 
 exactly one year later the Temple was opened; a year 
 ago the present ministry began. Thus, by an inter- 
 esting coincidence, we have a triple anniversary, and 
 it seems well to observe it, because the past is a 
 storehouse of inspiration for the present. Nowhere 
 is the Bible nearer to the need of the human heart 
 than in its frequent and wise appeal to the ways of 
 God in other days; so that, in their perplexity, men 
 may have the wisdom and prophecy of history. Our 
 fathers were once as we are, active, aspiring, baffled, 
 and deeply troubled; but they endured and overcame 
 by the grace of God, as we may do by a like faith and 
 fidelity — such is the message of the Voice from Be- 
 hind. 
 
 Surely it is an arresting coincidence that this day 
 of beginnings in our history should fall on the great 
 Day of Beginnings In the history of the Church — the 
 Festival of the Gift of the Spirit. The day of Pen- 
 
 23 
 
24 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 tecost, if we may not say that it was the birthday of 
 the Church, was at least its awakening, its trans- 
 figurationy its enduement, not with a doctrine, but 
 with a dynamic. And nothing do we need to-day so 
 urgently, so supremely. Power we have of many 
 kinds, power of numbers, of wealth, of culture, but 
 the pressing, aching need of the Church is for power 
 of another kind, and a higher — the Power of the 
 Holy Spirit. What we need is a profounder sense 
 of the forces available by faith and prayer and unity, 
 a new visitation of the Cleanser, the Teacher, the 
 Comforter who takes the things of Christ and shows 
 them to us anew. Nothing can save the Church and 
 make it equal alike to the contradictions of war and 
 the problems of peace but the Spirit which created it, 
 and which has led it through the ages. 
 
 The Church was not born yesterday; it will not die 
 to-morrow. Once, so runs a parable, a man came to 
 a great city full of palaces of freestone and marble, 
 vying with one another in their splendour. But in 
 the heart of the city there stood an old House, ill 
 put together, full of cracks, and apparently of no 
 use. He wondered at it. It had no stays, no props, 
 and he wondered how it kept standing. When, after 
 a hundred years, he came to that city again the pal- 
 aces had vanished, and other edifices of equal splen- 
 dour and after a new style had risen in their places. 
 But lo ! the old House was still there, unchanged, as 
 if the tooth of time which breaks everything else had 
 broken itself on that. Again, after a hundred years 
 it was so. The old House was still the same, while 
 
THE CONTINUITY OF FAITH 25 
 
 all around was new. Out of the palaces came many 
 sick people, and the streets were full of the weary and 
 heavy-laden wandering about, whom no physician 
 helped. But whosoever went into the old House that 
 seemed, like them, itself to need a physician, came 
 out sound and glad. Then he entered the House, 
 and there he beheld One who laid his hand upon the 
 sick and weary, and they were made well. Such is 
 the Church of Christ, the House of the Eternal in 
 the bright city of man — and it will not fail. 
 
 What is the Holy Spirit, by which the Church has 
 been kept alive for nearly twenty centuries, but the 
 living presence of Christ, who is the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and for ever? The Church is not an institu- 
 tion — it is a communion. It is an eternal fellowship, 
 on earth and in heaven, of all those of every age and 
 every land, who love Christ and seek to live in His 
 Spirit. It is the union in Christ of all who have found 
 Him to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life — "the 
 portrait of the unseen God" — and their voices answer 
 one another across the ages, antiphonally, singing His 
 praise alone. Of that vast chorus the City Temple 
 is but a tiny choir, but in all its history, from the 
 earliest time to this day, it has struck that mighty 
 music. Its ministers have had each his own insight, 
 accent, and emphasis, but not one of them has failed 
 to strike that redeeming melody — not one. For 
 proof of this tradition of faith let us go back to 
 1873, back to the foundation in the days of Thomas 
 Goodwin, in 1640. On his death-bed that noble 
 preacher — the favourite preacher of Cromwell, and 
 
26 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 perhaps the greatest pulpit expositor of St. Paul — 
 left this testimony, as his friends prayed that all the 
 comfort he had given to others might return to his 
 own heart in his mortal hour: — 
 
 " 'All these died in faith.' I could not have imagined 
 that I should ever have had such a measure of faith in this 
 hour; no, I could never have imagined it. My bow abides 
 in strength. Is Christ divided? No, I have the whole of 
 His righteousness; I am found in Him, not in my own 
 righteousness. . . . Christ cannot love me better than He 
 doth; I think I cannot love Christ better than I do; I am 
 swallowed up in God. I shall be ever with the Lord!" ^ 
 
 There, in that far yesterday, the founder of this 
 church, dying, put his trust in the Christ who is with 
 us to-day; and this unity and continuity of faith we 
 need to realise for our inspiration and solace. It is 
 a great tradition, and more than a tradition; it is an 
 abiding reality, a living force, a growing revelation, 
 a tie that unites the centuries, joining a mighty host in 
 a Divine fellowship — like the cord by which pilgrims 
 in the Alps are tied together, so that If one slip and 
 fall all may hold him up. "Our fathers were under 
 a cloud," fighting for civil and religious liberty, as we 
 are under a pall struggling for the liberty of the 
 world; and what supported them will sustain us. 
 What a reinforcement such a historic fellowship is, 
 what an Inspiration to those who walk alone in far 
 places — linking the loneliest soul with a vast com- 
 munion of the lovers of Jesus I Times change, and 
 
 ^Memoir of Good<win, by his son. Works, vol. ii. 
 
THE CONTINUITY OF FAITH 27 
 
 earthly things pass away, but It fortifies the soul to 
 know that the Christ In whom Goodwin found com- 
 fort and joy In 1678 remains to redeem and bless us 
 in this far-off age. 
 
 There is such a thing as "an Instinct for Christ," 
 about which Goodwin wrote so eloquently in his day, 
 by which the Church has been led both in its life 
 and in its thought.^ Carlyle was not far wrong when 
 he said that If Arlus had won, Christianity would 
 have dwindled to a legend. No doubt; but what 
 Goodwin had in mind was not so much the instinct 
 which has protected the Christian faith from fatal 
 fallacy, but that turning of the soul to Christ in Its 
 bitter need of cleansing or of comfort, "as a deer, 
 when It is struck by a dart, runs to the herb called 
 dictamnus." For, to say no more, the revelation of 
 God in Christ is' the greatest fact In human history, 
 at once the hope of our healing and the master light 
 of all our seeing; so- great a fact that the discovery 
 of a new hemisphere, or of a new constellation out 
 on the edge of the sky, pales beside It. Ages, em- 
 pires, and civllisatipns may pass away, but the vision 
 of God In the mind of Jesus remains the pledge of our 
 faith, the prophecy of our hope, and the ultimate 
 rebuke of all the doubt and despair to which we may 
 be tempted. 
 
 Forms of faith are not essential ; the substance is, 
 "And now abldeth faith," wrote the Apostle in his 
 hymn of the Eternity of love ; but the same hand also 
 described how the Spirit of God leads us "from faith 
 
 * Works of Goodiuin, vol. viii., part III., book 4. 
 
28 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 to faith." Both texts are true; a living faith abides 
 and grows — abides, indeed, because it grows, unfolds, 
 expands, taking all the myriad forms that life and 
 power take. Yet it is ever the same in its essence, 
 in its central insight and attachment. Never was 
 this truth set forth more picturesquely than by Jo- 
 seph Parker in his striking sermon on "Faith, Self- 
 enlarging," in which he shows that faith must of 
 necessity grow, by its own inner logic, and that it is 
 only real when it does grow. His text was the words 
 of the Master : "Had ye believed in Moses ye would 
 have believed in Me"; inevitably so, by force of 
 spiritual logic. That is, if a man really believes, if 
 he has a living faith, he will recognise that faith in 
 new forms. Hear these vivid sentences from the 
 sermon : — 
 
 "Every man supplies the true test of his own faith. Faith 
 always modernises itself, brings itself up to date, catches the 
 last vision, and the last phase of the Divine movement. Faith 
 is not final; faith is a beginning, a dawn, a spring with in- 
 finite summers in its soul. A man does not believe his own 
 creed until he is prepared to add to it. Be progressive, 
 therefore, and do not imagine that the statement of the 
 creed is final. The spirit of faith longs for more worlds 
 to conquer. Lord, increase our faith ; give us vision after 
 vision of Thy loveliness and majesty." ^ 
 
 In the Letters of James Smetham — and a fruitful 
 and wise book it is — there is a noble page telling 
 how each man, each type of mind, finds in* Christ 
 
 * The City Temple Pulpit, vol. i. 
 
THE CONTINUITY OF FAITH 29 
 
 what It most needs, the woman over the wash-tub 
 equally with the philosopher In his closet. He "never 
 expects you to be other than yourself, and He puts In 
 abeyance toward you all but what is like you." What 
 Is true of the individual Is no less true of a genera- 
 tion. Ages differ; one is rational, another mystical, 
 and still another scientific, by its ruling impulse and 
 mood. No matter; the same Christ ministers to each 
 age In Its need, revealing Himself In and through Its 
 Intensest yearning, its reigning desire. "He ap- 
 peared unto them in another form" is a text of which 
 the whole of Christian history Is an exegesis. Thus, 
 the faith of an age is the fruit of the freest possible 
 use of all those powers by which men obtain truth. 
 Its central point of deepest belief going out with 
 equal radius-length In all directions. It makes no 
 difference that the vision of Christ comes In a variety 
 of ways and takes many forms, if only It grows and 
 abides. 
 
 The editor of the Works of Goodwin warns us not 
 to expect to find any "broad theology" in his pages, 
 and the warning was well meant. What Goodwin 
 lacked in breadth he gained In depth, a dimension we 
 may lose In our eagerness to be broad, which may 
 be only another name for shallowness. The perfect 
 faith, like the City of God, Is four-square, and "the 
 length, and breadth and height were equal." The 
 true measure of faith is found In the words of the 
 Psalmist: "Thou hast set my feet In a large room," 
 and "deep calleth unto deep." Our faith must go 
 deep Into the heart and high Into the sky, and be as 
 
30 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 lofty as It is broad; as high as the hopes of God for 
 man, and broad enough to embrace the broadest, 
 deepest, highest Soul of all the ages. So, then, if 
 neither the dogmas nor the forms of worship of our 
 ancestors satisfy us to-day, it does not mean that we 
 have lost faith. No; men are free and broad, not 
 because they believe less than others, but because they 
 believe more — not more things, so much as more 
 deeply, more hopefully, more nobly, with a sunnier 
 and stronger confidence in the ways of God. 
 
 "Where is thy God, my soul? 
 Is He within thy heart; 
 Or Ruler of a distant realm 
 In which thou hast no part? 
 
 "Where is thy God, my soul? 
 Confined to Scripture's page; 
 Or does His Spirit check and guide 
 The spirit of each age?" 
 
 While the City Temple is a part of the universal 
 Christian fellowship, it has none the less an atmos- 
 phere, if not an emphasis, of its own. It was so at 
 the beginning; it is so now. Always it has been the 
 home, not only of freedom in the things of faith, but 
 also of a comprehensive and catholic spirit. Our 
 fathers were firm in their faith, ready to fight for it, 
 suffer for it, and, if need were, to die for it; but they 
 never imagined that their form of faith was final. 
 Much less did they seek to impose it upon others, 
 save by suasion and the arts of appeal of which they 
 were masters. The great men of 1 65 8 — Owen, Nye, 
 
THE CONTINUITY OF FAITH 31 
 
 Goodwin, Caryl, and the rest — knew that creeds may 
 become a fetter and an injury. Their Declaration, 
 as they were careful to make plain, while setting forth 
 their own convictions, was "not to be made use of as 
 an imposition upon any." Force, they held, destroys 
 a confession of faith by turning it into "an exaction 
 or imposition of faith," and that, as they knew, de- 
 stroys real fellowship. With which agreed the in- 
 sight of the saintly and scholarly Richard Baxter, 
 who, from his home in "The Saint's Everlasting 
 Rest," must rejoice at the movements now going on 
 among us, slowly fulfilling his prophetic vision of "the 
 True Catholick Church." ^ 
 
 Not only does the City Temple stand, as it has al- 
 ways stood, for freedom of faith — not freedom from 
 faith, for that way lies the saddest form of slavery — 
 but it is the home of a forward-looking faith. Rob- 
 inson exhorted his heroic flock, at parting from them, 
 not to come to a period in religion, but to expect new 
 light to break forth from the word of God. New 
 light has, indeed, broken forth, not only from the 
 written word, but also from the unwritten word of 
 God; light so revealing as to the universe and the 
 life of man that the men who lived before 1850, 
 to say nothing of Goodwin and the men of his time, 
 seem almost as remote from us as the ancients. In 
 1859 Darwin put forth his thesis, destined to alter 
 our outlook and ways of thinking; ten years later 
 Huxley coined the word Agnosticism, as describing 
 
 * Baxter's Collected Works, Orme's Edition, especially sermons 
 on "The True Catholick" and on "Catholic Unity." 
 
32 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 the attitude of the educated mind. Few realise what 
 battles of faith have been fought and how profound 
 has been the change of attitude and emphasis, since 
 the corner-stone of the City Temple was laid. Nor 
 do you need to be reminded how picturesquely, how 
 effectively, Joseph Parker dealt with these issues, one 
 after another, in this pulpit, now in wooing tones of 
 appeal, now in thunderous rebuke. 
 
 Yet, in it all, through it all, there was a living faith 
 in the Christ who is the same yesterday, to-day and 
 forever. Happily both religion and science are less 
 dogmatic, not because they have less faith, but just 
 because they have more, science having become more 
 refined and religion more reasonable. The lawless 
 universe of a whimsical God is gone for ever, and 
 with it many an unworthy notion which made the 
 Father of humanity less divine than His sons. To- 
 day a universe in which the Holy Spirit is immanent, 
 pervaded with the Divine order, and reaching out 
 loveward, is the possession of every thinker. Nor 
 has all the wit of man found anything so adequate to 
 the deep needs of the human soul, alike in its sin, 
 its sorrow, and its seeking after satisfying truth, as 
 the Christ whose name lingered on the lips of Good- 
 win as he went to sleep long ago. If that be true, if 
 Christ alone, apprehended anew in every age, does 
 meet the needs of the heart and mind, no one need 
 fear for the future. Of course, no one can predict 
 what forms faith may take in the far future, but we 
 may be sure as to what its essence, its substance, 
 will be. 
 
THE CONTINUITY OF FAITH 33 
 
 Such confidence we may justly derive from the con- 
 tinuity of faith through the centuries, and, truly, we 
 need that confidence to-day, standing, as we are, with 
 trembling expectation on the threshold of a future 
 none can foresee. Only one thing is clear — many 
 things will be other and better than they have been, 
 for the world cannot pass through such a whirlwind 
 and fire without testing both the substance and the 
 forms of its faith. A chapter in the history of faith 
 which has lasted for many years has come to an 
 end, and a fresh chapter, with an accent of its own, 
 has begun. Already a few lines of it are legible, and 
 we see that what is eternal in the religious life of man 
 is beginning to appear in a new setting. Now, as of 
 old, amid the overturning of history and the storms 
 of human fate, our little systems rise and pass away, 
 but the Eternal* Christ lives, and we need not fear 
 to follow the ways of the Spirit. 
 
 "The letter fails, the systems fall, 
 And every symbol wanes; 
 The Spirit overbrooding all, 
 Eternal Love remains." 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA 
 
 "Then said Jonathan unto David, Whatsoever thy soul 
 desireth, I will even do it for thee." — i Sam. xx. 4. 
 
 YESTERDAY the Lord Mayor of London 
 marked with stately and appropriate observ- 
 ance the first anniversary of the entrance of America 
 into the world-war. It was a memorable occasion, 
 and no one who attended that historic function will 
 ever forget its spirit of comradeship, its intense but 
 quiet thoughtfulness, its resolute confidence, and its 
 wide outlook and interpretation. Thinkers from 
 both sides of the sea read the meaning of the day in 
 its larger aspects and in its bearing on the future 
 course of world events. Looking before and after, 
 they agreed that no event in this vast tragedy is of 
 profounder significance or more full of promise of 
 blessing for the days that lie ahead. 
 
 Surely it is not inappropriate for us to remember 
 that day in the City Temple, whose pulpit is itself 
 a symbol of that which the day means — the soli- 
 darity of the English-speaking race. And it is alto- 
 gether fitting and proper that we should do so on the 
 day of prayer, because the issues involved in this war 
 are not merely political, nor even social, but moral, 
 spiritual, religious. As about the walls of Troy 
 Homer saw two battles raging, one on the earth be- 
 
 34 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA 35 
 
 tween Greeks and Trojans, and another in the view- 
 less air between gods and goddesses, just so those 
 who have eyes to see discern in the grim horror of 
 this war, above it, through it, behind it, a contest of 
 spiritual forces. It is not a mere scramble, not a 
 brawl in the dark, but a clash of ideals, a conflict 
 of influences that can never be at peace while God 
 is God and man is man. 
 
 Think it all through, and at bottom, the war is 
 religious. If our enemies are right, our religion is 
 wrong, our faith a fiction, our philosophy false — 
 yes, justice is a dream, and righteousness a delusion. 
 Then might is right, the battle is to the strongest 
 and the race to the swiftest, and the more ruthless 
 and unscrupulous we are the better. By the same 
 token, if our religion is right, if God is a reality, and 
 the order of the world is moral, our enemies are 
 wrong! The very stars in their courses are against 
 them, and their seeming triumph can be only tem- 
 porary. Thus, if we read this event aright, we shall 
 make note of it less as a celebration than as a con- 
 secration, a sacrament — in the old and true meaning 
 of the word — ^that is, an oath of allegiance, a high 
 vow to a holy cause, renewing our pledge to strive 
 unto death if need be for the security and sanctity of 
 the world. 
 
 Such was the mood, the spirit, the faith with which 
 America entered the war — reluctantly, it may be, but 
 deliberately, in obedience to the obligations of right- 
 eousness and in the service of an ideal. Slowly, sol- 
 emnly, with deep searching of heart, she dedicated 
 
S6 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 her power, her manhood, her resources, her all to the 
 principle — a dream, if you choose to call it such — 
 and not even the malignant ingenuity of our common 
 enemy has so far been able to discover or invent a 
 selfish or sordid motive for her act. There were 
 historic reasons for her hesitation; but once she saw 
 that the fundamental laws and liberties of humanity 
 were in peril, everything gave way — prejudice, policy, 
 pride, predilection, everything — and however long 
 the war may be, however horrible, no one can now 
 doubt that the advent of America in the grand Al- 
 liance of free peoples turned the balance, decided the 
 issue, and sealed the doom of the most ambitious, 
 barbarous, lawless autocracy that has defamed the 
 history of the modern world. 
 
 Those who look below the surface of the present 
 war discern three ideals struggling for mastery of 
 the world. First, the ideal symbolised by Prussia, 
 the doctrine of power, ruthless in action and un- 
 scrupulous in negotiation — power not only of the 
 sword, but of a highly trained and specialised knowl- 
 edge. Second, the ideal of Bolshevism, the doctrine 
 of class war, equally ruthless, based on force, and 
 ending in anarchy and red revolution. Third, the 
 principle of the Commonwealth, the doctrine of "the 
 application to the field of government and social pol- 
 icy of the law of human brotherhood, of the duty of 
 man to his neighbour, near and far." There is no 
 need to say what the choice of our common race is 
 between these conflicting ideals. Already we have 
 made it, and we mean to stand to it. If either of 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA 37 
 
 the first two ideals should prevail, it needs no prophet 
 to foretell that there would be neither songs nor 
 dreams nor any joyous and free things any more, but 
 only slavery to lawless and merciless power. There- 
 fore, for the sake of an opportunity to grow the 
 wings of the spirit, we must resist to the uttermost 
 the Blonde Beast that would put an end to all the 
 high hopes of our race in its struggle to be free. 
 What though we fall and die in such a struggle, if 
 our cause wins there will be songs again, and our 
 sons will reahse some of the beauty of the dreams 
 we all have dreamed. Perhaps, by our sacrifice, the 
 tie will be strengthened by which humanity will be 
 so drawn together, and so consecrated, that war 
 itself shall cease to be, following Him who came to 
 give His life a ransom for many, and, losing it, found 
 it. For surety there is something of His spirit in 
 the heroic sacrifice of humanity for an ideal, in the 
 willingness of men to lay down their lives for others 
 and for a future their dying eyes will not see. 
 
 Now, consider. The entrance of America into the 
 war was also her entrance into the world, the aboli- 
 tion of her historic policy of isolation, the linking 
 of the Old World and the New, bringing to the 
 council chamber of the future the new-world outlook, 
 insight, and point of view. What this will mean no 
 one can foresee in detail, save that both the Old 
 World and the New will be different, drawn closer 
 together with such an interchange of ideas and such 
 an infusion of spiritual influences as no prophet can 
 forecast. Not simply the map of the world, but 
 
S8 JHE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 the spiritual geography of the race will be altered, in 
 ways beyond our anticipation; but chiefly, perhaps, in 
 the growth and ripening of a world-consciousness, a 
 sense of the common interest and obligation of hu- 
 manity. We shall think differently, feel differently, 
 and nothing human will be remote or alien to us. 
 Larger obligations will command us; deeper sym- 
 pathies will stir us; national bigotry will give way 
 before intelligent understanding; and our local loyal- 
 ties will be lifted, without being erased, into a wider 
 human fellowship. 
 
 Truly, it is nothing else than the turning of a new 
 page of history, the opening of a new chapter in the 
 social, political, intellectual, and spiritual life of man- 
 kind. As the Crusades of olden time unified Europe 
 and from feudalism evolved nationahsm, so this, the 
 greatest humanitarian crusade in history, will unify 
 the world, and from a narrow nationalism evoke an 
 international mind, conscience, fellowship, co-opera- 
 tion. Not all at once, not without difficulty, but 
 slowly, surely, inevitably racial rancours, national 
 animosities, and sectarian pettiness will yield to the 
 pressure of world-obligation and community of in- 
 terest, and men will think in terms of one humanity 
 and one Christianity. At any rate, the world will 
 be smaller than heretofore, and the injury of one 
 will be more keenly felt as the hurt of all, because 
 by a common peril and a common sacrifice we have 
 been made more aware of our kinship and obligation. 
 
 Naturally in this drawing together of the world in 
 a new sense of need and sympathy and common un- 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA 39 
 
 dertaking, we first discover those nearest to us in 
 neighbourhood, in blood, in language, and ideals; and 
 so when America entered the war her nearest neigh- 
 bour was her motherland. Not for a moment do we 
 forget our other Allies^ — least of all France, who 
 aided us in other days, and whose dauntless valour 
 and heroic sacrifice make it an honour to stand by her 
 side — yet it is none the less true that the outstanding 
 aspect of this event is that it proclaims the solidarity 
 of the English-speaking peoples. It is like a dream 
 come true, the answer to the call set to impassioned 
 music by Lord Tennyson in 1852, in a poem entitled 
 "Hands All Round," which he revised in 1882, when 
 Queen Victoria escaped death, and, oddly enough, in 
 its final form two thrilling stanzas were omitted. Let 
 me revive one of them to-day because it is so timely: 
 
 "Gigantic daughter of the West, 
 
 Drink we to thee across the flood; 
 We know thee most, we love thee best — 
 
 For art not thou of British blood? 
 Should War's mad blast again be blown, 
 
 Permit not thou the tyrant Powers 
 To fight thy mother here alone, 
 
 But let thy broadsides roar with ours, 
 Hands all round! 
 God the tyrant's cause confound! 
 To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends, 
 And the great name of England, round and round." 
 
 While the Motherland was not fighting alone, she 
 was fighting for her life, and what a revolution has 
 
40 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 been wrought in our thinking and feeling! To-day 
 the debates that divided us in times agone seem like 
 the vague, half-remembered dreams of some previous 
 state of existence. They are erased and forgotten. 
 In the clearer light of time all see that in the war 
 of the Revolution it was America that was fighting 
 for the old British principle, and that it was never 
 a war between the two peoples. Instead, it was the 
 blunder of a German king and a stupid minister over 
 the protest of men like Pitt and Burke, and England 
 ought to have been defeated — if for no other reason, 
 because she hired so many Germans and sent them to 
 fight us. No matter; an empire so vast and with 
 interests so diverse would have been top-heavy and 
 unwieldy. But the real empire of a common culture, 
 a common political idea, and a common spiritual 
 inheritance remains, far more important, as it is more 
 imperishable, than any political entity. 
 
 Of our second war the least said the better for 
 both sides. No Englishman, no American, can look 
 back upon the miserable muddle-headedness which led 
 to the war of 1812 without a blush of shame and 
 regret. The only good thing about It was the peace 
 with which it ended, whereby the principle of arbi- 
 tration was brought for the first time into our history, 
 and it has kept us at peace for more than a hundred 
 years.^ Meanwhile, on the longest frontier in the 
 world the guns kept rusting until at last they van- 
 ished, and if there are now two flags there is but 
 
 M Short History of Anglo-American Relations, by H. S, 
 Perrie. 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA 41 
 
 one civilisation; and so It will always be. How 
 ancient all this history Is, how remote from the spirit 
 and mood of the hour, and If we recall It to-day It Is 
 the better to see how far we have journeyed and how 
 close we have been brought together. No man of us 
 but feels that the future of freedom Is more secure 
 now that these two peoples are actually united in 
 arms, as they have always been one in arts, aims, 
 and Ideals. Some of us recall the words of Emerson, 
 spoken In Manchester in 1847, seeing them fulfilled 
 before our eyes: — 
 
 "This aged England, with the possessions, honours, and 
 trophies, and also the infirmities of a thousand years gath- 
 ering around her, irretrievably committed as she now is to 
 many old customs which cannot be suddenly changed, pressed 
 upon by the transitions of trade and new and all incal- 
 culable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing popu- 
 lations — I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well re- 
 membering that she has seen dark days before ; indeed, with 
 a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy 
 day, and that in storm of battle and calamity she has a se- 
 cret vigour and a pulse like a cannon. I see her in her old 
 age, not decrepit, but young, and still daring to believe in 
 her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I say. 
 All hail ! mother of nations, mother of heroes, with strength 
 still equal to the time; still wise to entertain and swift to 
 execute the policy which the mind and heart of mankind re- 
 quire in the present hour." 
 
 Mother of nations, indeed; mother of heroes, of 
 poets, of prophets, and of saints; but mother of 
 free and enlightened parliaments also, uniting the 
 
42 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 aristocratic ideal with the democratic aspiration; love 
 of liberty with reverence for law; sturdy, strong, 
 enduring; nobly independent; with a genius for justice 
 and a spirit of sportsmanship — fair play an article 
 of her religion; a generous enemy, a faithful ally; a 
 land of wealth and worth and worship, where men 
 measure themselves against men for the mastery of 
 the fruits of the earth and the trophies of thought 
 under laws which all make and obey; the greatest 
 empire the world has known, now in life and death 
 grapple for the existence of the civilisation which it 
 did so much to create and extend. And now the 
 daughterland stands by her side, joining hands to de- 
 fend the common historic tradition, the old high 
 inheritance of liberty and of law. 
 
 "I think that all your years led up to this, and all your lives. 
 
 I think it was for this that, worlds ago, you came to great- 
 ness. 
 
 Your every man, of all your times, was born and lived and 
 died to have his part in the great march of things that 
 led to this. 
 
 It was for this you gathered lands and kept the seas. 
 
 Fires on the Druid altars burned for this, and strange ships 
 learned your harbours. 
 
 For this you broke new roads and kept old faiths. 
 
 I think your winds have always told of this. 
 
 I think for this that all your rains were tears and all your 
 sunsets banners." 
 
 If only you could know the admiration with which 
 we saw Britain make her great decision in 1914, 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA 43 
 
 casting cost to the winds on behalf of the civilisation 
 of Europe in an hour of destiny! For some of us 
 those three years were years of agony; but we never 
 ceased to pay homage to our hearts in the heroic 
 unselfishness of Britain, her scorn of base dishonour, 
 her regard for the laws of nations, her grim tenacity, 
 her almost superhuman endurance, and her unpre- 
 cedented sacrifice. To-day we of the New World re- 
 new our vow that while there is breath in our bodies 
 and blood in our veins, those dead — those innumer- 
 able and heroic dead — shall not have died in vain, 
 and that liberty, justice, and mercy shall not perish 
 from the earth I To this we have pledged our power 
 and our sacred honour, and if we were slow in start- 
 ing we shall not turn back nor turn aside until the 
 world is fit for free men to live in, whatever the cost 
 may be. 
 
 Our differences are superficial; our unities funda- 
 mental. In the tragedy of the trenches, on the grey 
 solitudes of the sea, in the halls of a thousand hos- 
 pitals, in blessed ministries of healing and of com- 
 fort, in the consecration of a common sacrifice of 
 our best, we shall know each other even as we are 
 known, heart to heart. United in freedom, in faith, 
 in friendship, each loyal to the old, high ideal of our 
 race, we shall together fulfil the mighty task which 
 the God of History has committed into our hands, 
 the keeping of the future freedom and peace of the 
 world — ^not by conquest, but by co-operation, not by 
 war, but by law. 
 
44 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Two Empires by the sea, 
 Two peoples great and free, 
 
 One anthem raise. 
 One race of ancient fame. 
 One tongue, one faith, we claim 
 One God whose glorious name 
 
 |We love and praise. 
 
THE RELIGION OF LINCOLN 
 
 "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
 and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy 
 neighbour as thyself." — Mark xii. 30, 31. 
 
 MY talk, to-day is in response to many requests, 
 and I trust it is not altogether inappropriate 
 in view of the celebration of the birthday of Lincoln 
 during the week. He is the supreme figure, so far, 
 in the history of the New World, its great prophetic 
 character, and a discussion of the place of religion in 
 his life may serve a double purpose. It will show 
 us a mind of the first order grappling with the old 
 eternal issues of life and faith, and it ought to give 
 more than one sidelight on the spirit and growth 
 of the land whose genius he embodied. For, when 
 all is said, it is in the character of our great men 
 that our holiest traditions and ideals are enshrined; 
 and the spirit of Lincoln is the spirit of America. 
 
 . There was never a truer word than that of Carlyle 
 when he said that the religion of a man is the chief 
 fact concerning him. By religion he meant, as he 
 went on to explain, not the creed to which he sub- 
 scribes or otherwise gives his assent; not that neces- 
 sarily, often not that at all — since we see men of all 
 degrees of worth and worthlessness signing all man- 
 ner of creeds. This is not what he calls religion, this 
 
 45 
 
46 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 assertion, which may come from the outworks of a 
 man, if even so deep as that. No; by religion he 
 meant that which a man practically believes, lays to 
 heart — often enough without asserting it to himself 
 — and acts upon, and therefore knows, concerning 
 this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny in 
 it. That is in all cases the primary thing in him, 
 and creatively determines all the rest; that is his 
 religion. If you know that about a man you know 
 what he is and what he will do. 
 
 What is true of a man is equally true of a people 
 or a nation. Some of you recall the noble words of 
 Emerson in the closing lines of his chapter on Re- 
 ligion in his English Traits. The religion of Eng- 
 land, is it in the Established Church? he asks. No. 
 It is in the sects? No. Where then does it dwell? 
 Ask, first, where electricity or motion or thought 
 dwell. They do not dwell or stay at all. No more 
 can you put your finger upon the elusive thing called 
 religion, which is the life of God in the soul of man, 
 taking all the forms that life and duty take. And 
 then follow the words: "Yet, if religion be the 
 doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of all 
 evil, that divine secret has existed in England from 
 the days of Alfred to those of Florence Nightingale, 
 and in thousands who have no fame. 
 
 So, then, it is for this primary thing, this "divine 
 secret" in Lincoln, that we are seeking; the faith and 
 principle on which he acted, and which gave form 
 and colour to his character. Where is it to be found ! 
 Not in his use of Bible imagery — though the cadences 
 
THE RELIGION OF LINCOLN 47 
 
 of the Great Book echoed in his eloquence — nor yet 
 in his words of good-will to the men of this or that 
 sect; but in the fibre of his soul, the qualities of his 
 mind, and most of all in the open book of his life. 
 He belonged to no Church, he signed no creed — and 
 he has told us the reason why. Yet he was pro- 
 foundly religious, and his faith was so much a part 
 of his very being that one must analyse the man to 
 discover it. His mind was so moral, and his morality 
 so intelligent, as Phillips Brooks said, that they can- 
 not be set the one over against the other. Had he 
 been a complex man it would be easy to solve the 
 riddle. Instead, he was a great and simple man, and 
 like all simple men there was a certain mystery about 
 him — a mystery too simple, perhaps, to be found 
 out. 
 
 Was Lincoln a- Christian? The question has been 
 much debated, but the answer depends on what we 
 mean by a Christian. If by a Christian we mean 
 one who holds to certain dogmas about Christ — 
 the manner of His birth, the nature of His person, 
 and the works He wrought, as set forth in the creeds 
 of the Church — then Lincoln was not a Christian. 
 He was a deist, if not a fatalist, in his thought, and 
 did not attain to faith in the theology of the Church 
 — such is the simple fact, and by that test he was not 
 a Christian. But if by a Christian we mean one who 
 honours Christ and follows Him as the Teacher of 
 truth and the Way-shower of life; one who is just, 
 true, merciful, a man who loves his fellow men and 
 seeks to serve them in the spirit of Christ — then Lin- 
 
48 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 coin was a Christian. If to have the spirit of Christ 
 is to be a Christian, then, surely, if ever of any one, 
 we may say of Lincoln that he was a Christian — a 
 "Christ in miniature," as Tolstoy called him. It is a 
 part of the surprise and grandeur of his life that, 
 with his early scepticism and his growing cosmic 
 piety, he should be accounted one of the most Christ- 
 like men of his age. 
 
 Now it takes a long time to make a Lincoln, and 
 he was still growing when he died. Indeed, the great- 
 est thing about him was his capacity for growth. So 
 that what may be said of his religious attitude in one 
 period of his life would not describe him now.^ He 
 was a young man, and this unsettlement of faith was 
 such as often comes to young men who think; but 
 Lincoln was not a man to stop with a mere denial 
 of the faith of other men. No great and deep soul 
 can live on negations alone. In the midst of this 
 uncertainty his sweetheart, Annie Rutledge, died, 
 plunging him into abysmal sorrow. Thereafter, to 
 the end, her image lived in his dreams, wrapped in 
 the sweet and awful sadness of the grave. Then fol- 
 lowed disappointment, defeat, baffled ambition, and 
 hard struggle with the hard facts of life. Despite 
 
 * The story, so long accepted, that Lincoln as a youth wrote 
 an essay attacking the religion of Jesus, which one of his 
 friends burned, lest it injure his political prospects, is untrue. 
 The document burned was not a theological essay, but a love- 
 letter. For the facts see a book which it was my honour to 
 edit two years ago, entitled Personal Recollections of Lincoln, by 
 H. B. Rankin. 
 
THE RELIGION OF LINCOLN 49 
 
 it all, or, rather, because of It, Lincoln grew in 
 strength of mind and depth of heart. 
 
 After years of meditation, he came to a faith of his 
 own — a kind of sublime moral fatalism, in which 
 right and truth will win as surely as suns rise and set. 
 This faith fed his soul and was the hidden spring 
 of his strength, his valour, and his unbending firm- 
 ness. It was the secret of his character, of his pa- 
 tience, of his prophetic insight, and of his melting 
 pity. Holding to the moral order of the world, he 
 knew that truth will prevail whatever may be the pos- 
 ture of the hour. Men may delay it, but they can 
 in nowise stay its slow, Inevitable advance. Upon 
 this faith he built his life — a faith in which there 
 was no accident, no miracle, and, in his earlier years, 
 little profit in prayer — and, though wind and flood 
 beat upon it with fury, he could not be moved. In 
 his moods of melancholy, which were many and black 
 — the shadow, perhaps, of some pre-natal gloom in 
 the soul of his mother — he threw himself upon this 
 confidence and found rest; not so much in formal 
 prayer — though, in later years, that became first a 
 necessity, then a habit — as a quiet, inner trust. 
 
 No doubt, to many of my hearers, as to myself, 
 such a faith seems far below what we have a right to 
 hold. But if you would understand why Lincoln 
 found no other — until, perhaps, towards the end — 
 you must know the quality of his mind. He had a 
 profound and penetrating intellect, but it was a prac- 
 tical mind, more contemplative than speculative, and 
 it took nothing for granted. Of the skyey genius of 
 
50 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Plato and Emerson he had none. Emerson he could 
 not understand. For him the sunlit upland where our 
 Yankee Plato walked was an unknown world. No, 
 Lincoln, by virtue equally of his temperament and his 
 intellect, lived in a dim, dun-coloured world, under a 
 sky as grey as a tired face. He was a logician, albeit 
 subdued, at times, by a wondering, meditative pen- 
 siveness of soul. His mind was slow, cautious, ultra- 
 conservative, and such a mind sees life for less than 
 it is. Still, it deals with facts as they are, not with 
 theories, and is content to take one step at a time. 
 Naturally, to such a man faith is difficult, and many 
 things which seem clear to others are dim to him. 
 One finds this type of mind most often among men 
 of action. A thinker may take wings, but a man 
 who does things must walk on the earth, sometimes in 
 the midst of thorns. Lincoln thought from the 
 ground up, thought as if no one had ever thought 
 before him. Often his thinking carried him to the 
 border of that awful darkness, that obscurity beyond 
 knowledge which encompasses on all sides our little 
 ghmmering field of knowledge. Then it might be 
 seen how he held aloof, how certain he was not to 
 abandon the ground of facts, how little he was 
 tempted to invade the Unknown. Always he fell 
 back, trusting the reality of the moral law and the 
 Will greater than himself, whose way he sought to 
 know. For such a mind, when it comes to the edge 
 of thought, three avenues are open — agnosticism, 
 superstition, and faith; and while Lincoln was 
 
THE RELIGION OF LINCOLN 61 
 
 tempted by the first two, he was wise enough to go 
 forward led by a dim, great Hand. 
 
 Perhaps the humour of Lincoln has been exagger- 
 ated out of all proportion to the rest of his faculties 
 — because of its sweetness and its exceeding aptness. 
 Nevertheless, it was a part of his religion, as it must 
 be of all religion that is sane. Even in the Hfe of 
 Jesus there trickles a rivulet of sweet, dehcate, rip- 
 pling humour. It was a part of His divine sanity, 
 and some of His words cannot be interpreted without 
 seeing between the lines a smile. Humour is a sense 
 of distance, of proportions, of limits, of values, and 
 properly to recognise values is not to be fooled or 
 frightened in this valley of illusions. Some sects 
 would vanish from the earth if their adherents had 
 the saving sense of humour. Some dogmas are too 
 funny to be true. As Cicero said of atheism, it is as 
 if the Iliad of Homer had just happened as the result 
 of tossing the Greek alphabet into the air. Pan- 
 theism, also, is open to similar attack. It tells us 
 that all things are divine — which is, to say the least, 
 a large remark — but when we come to meditate on 
 divine oysters and crabs, it begins to be absurd. 
 Humour pricks the bubble and it explodes — for 
 humour, at its best, is of the very essence of right 
 reason. 
 
 But that is not all. For all his fine poise of reason 
 and his wise humour, Lincoln, like all other mortals, 
 was at bottom a mystic — that is, one who felt that 
 the Unseen has secrets which are known only to 
 minds fine enough and pure enough to see and hear 
 
52 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 them. His humour kept everything in its place — 
 including himself. It taught him humility, and kept 
 him from being too implacably wise concerning things 
 whereof no man knoweth. None the less, there was 
 a window in his mind open towards the Unseen, and 
 through it came influences and intimations not justi- 
 fied by his relentless logic — influences softening his 
 fatalism and teaching him things by sight and sense 
 unknown, and giving his spirit a nameless grace. 
 For example, one has only to study his dreams to see 
 something of this mystery. He set little store by 
 such premonitions; he even distrusted them; yet, as 
 a fact, at times of danger and disaster he was warned. 
 Some time before his death he saw himself stretched 
 upon his bier, and heard the sobs of the mourners. 
 
 It was this seer-like quality of soul, so to name it, 
 hinted to us in his dreams and forefeelings, that more 
 and more swayed Lincoln toward the end, softening 
 all that was hard within him and hardening all that 
 was soft. For the spiritual drama of his life — like 
 that of Thackeray — was the struggle to free himself 
 from the clutch of fatalism. At last, after a bitter 
 fight, he won his liberty — and he won it through 
 prayer. In early life, as has been said, he felt that 
 he was In the grasp of Iron law, and the awful Su- 
 preme Power seemed deaf to human pleadings. But 
 in the terrible days of Civil War, when the weight 
 of a nation rested upon his soul, when foes were vic- 
 torious and friends unstable — then he was driven to 
 his knees, as he said, because he had nowhere else 
 to go. And there he learned, not in theory, but as 
 
THE RELIGION OF LINCOLN 53 
 
 a fact, that God is not deaf, but that He does actually 
 hear and help those who seek Him with honest hearts. 
 Words of faith in God, of belief in the power of 
 prayer, more and more found their way into his let- 
 ters, his speeches, and even into his State papers. 
 Few men have ever felt more deeply the helplessness 
 of man both as to strength and wisdom, and the help- 
 fulness of God in both. Often his words moved with 
 the very rhythm and cadence of the Bible music — 
 for the Bible was his constant companion in those dif- 
 ficult years — and it is thus that they still walk up and 
 down in the hearts of men. No man of state in his 
 land ever made so profound a religious impression 
 and appeal as Lincoln did in his last years. Amidst 
 the wild hell of war he pleaded for mercy and the 
 love that forgives, and the very soul of the man 
 shone in his face which none who saw it can forget. 
 
 Carpenter, the artist who painted his portrait in 
 the White House, asked him about his religion, and 
 Lincoln replied: "I have never joined any church, 
 but when any church will inscribe over its altar, as 
 its sole qualification for membership, the words of the 
 Saviour, *Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
 thy heart and with all thy soul, and thy neighbour as 
 thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and 
 all my soul." All churches inscribe these words over 
 their altars, but they inscribe so many other things 
 that the gem is lost in the setting — and, alas, the 
 other things are too often regarded as equally im- 
 portant. Lincoln asked that all else be erased save 
 love of God and love of man — and some day the 
 
64 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Church will be wise enough to do it. When she does 
 so she will be following her Master, and men like 
 Lincoln will not be kept out by dogmas and rites 
 which they cannot honestly accept. 
 
 Nothing more noble than the character of Lincoln 
 has ever been seen in the New World. The nearer 
 one comes to him, the more one knows about him, 
 the more stainless and just he seems to be. All 
 men now know that the saving of the Union — with- 
 out slavery if possible, with slavery if necessary — 
 was the one overmastering passion of his life, and 
 that whoever else might lose heart, let go of faith, 
 or sink into self-seeking, that would Lincoln never! 
 Here, in the elemental qualities of the man — his 
 courage, his honour, his loyalty to the ideal, his melt- 
 ing pity and his delicate justice, his scorn of coward- 
 ice, his instinctive championship of the weak; here 
 the faith on which he acted is unveiled as it could 
 never be in any list of dogmas. His life, like the 
 life of the Master, was founded upon love — and the 
 justice born of love. That love made him suffer, 
 as love always does, and in the fiery furnace of that 
 suffering he was purified, exalted, and taught the 
 truth of all truths the greatest — that God is love. 
 
 No man ever had a loftier conception of the 
 sanctity of law, of the sacramental meaning of the 
 State, than Lincoln had. His oath of office was a 
 vow of consecration. As meditative as Marcus 
 Aurelius and as blithe as Mark Twain, as simple as 
 i^sop yet as subtle as an Oriental, a calm, grave, 
 strong man, formidable and sad, he stood in the 
 
THE RELIGION OF LINCOLN 55 
 
 White House a high priest of Humanity, an awe- 
 struck ministrant in the temple of God performing 
 the rites of liberty, justice, and pity — presiding over 
 an offering of blood and fire and tears! He was a 
 man of God, plain, homely, kindly, who knew that 
 humanity is deeply wounded somewhere and tried to 
 heal it — and of his fame there will be no end. 
 
HOLDING THE WORLD TOGETHER 
 
 "He is before all things, and by Him all things hold 
 together." — Col, i. 17. 
 
 THE epistle to the Church at Colosse may not 
 inaptly be called the gospel of the Cosmic 
 Christ. It Is a profound and wonderful letter, the 
 purpose of which is to show that Christ, so far from 
 being unrelated to the universe, is the clue, if not the 
 key, to any satisfying interpretation of it. Written 
 in a time of world decay, when the Roman Empire 
 was reeling to its ruin, it proclaims Christ as the 
 Divine life which not only created all things, but 
 which holds the world together. Not as a proposi- 
 tion of philosophy does St. Paul state this truth, but 
 as a vision born of a vivid fellowship with things 
 immortal; and it will mean much to us who live in a 
 beshattered world if we can lay hold of it and rest 
 upon it. Here is a faith equal to any calamity, and 
 we need Its breadth and grasp and light to-day, if only 
 to keep ourselves from going to pieces in the shock 
 and tragedy of world-war. 
 
 What Is the basis of this far-reaching, all-trans- 
 figuring faith? Happily it Is not far to seek If we 
 have a heart for high adventure, and may be briefly 
 stated. One thing man, in his sanity, dare not think 
 — that the low, the vile, the cynical, the selfish have 
 
 56 
 
HOLDING THE WORLD TOGETHER 57 
 
 read the meaning of life aright, and that the lofty, 
 the pure, the heroic and true-hearted have read it 
 amiss. This, even in the folly which is our only wis- 
 dom, we dare not think; that way madness lies. St. 
 Paul not only avoided this ultimate madness, but he 
 dared to read the meaning of life and the world 
 prophetically, that is through what is highest in it, 
 which is the one sure path to the highest Truth. 
 What is the highest fact of which man has any 
 knowledge? Surely there is no one to deny that 
 Jesus is the strongest, whitest, sweetest soul the earth 
 has known, and that His life is the sovereign fact of 
 the world. Hence the insight of St. Paul, and the 
 daring of his faith which found in the life of Jesus 
 a revelation of the eternal purpose of the world, 
 the secret of its cohesive power, and the prophecy of 
 its creative ideal. 
 
 Now, consider the validity of this vision as over 
 against all materialisms, pessimisms, cynicisms, and 
 scepticisms. In such a universe as materialism de- 
 scribes, the life of Jesus, His character, His spirit, 
 would be not simply an absurdity, but an impossi- 
 bility. There would be nothing to inspire it, nothing 
 to sustain it, nothing to uphold and justify it. In- 
 deed, it would be an effect without a cause, a stream 
 without a spring, a melody without a motif. There- 
 fore, for St. Paul, the very fact that the universe 
 produced, or even permitted such a life, was the 
 refutation of every philosophy of despair. What 
 wonder then that the fact that out of the darkness 
 such a Face could rise and shine, became the master- 
 
58 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 light of all his seeing and the inspiration of his 
 unconquerable assurance. With St. Paul the mean- 
 ing of this fact was no thin theory, but an actual 
 reality, victoriously tested in his own life of storm 
 and stress, of struggle and triumph. The vision of 
 God in Christ unified his nature; it held his life to- 
 gether, giving him strength in weakness, fortitude in 
 trial, and victory in defeat — and thus it became his 
 Gospel. 
 
 Here is the one adequate faith, if only we can 
 realise it for ourselves; the only faith equal to the 
 incredible tragedy in which we are groping our way, 
 stumbling in the dark. How much we need this 
 insight, as a thread of light to guide us through the 
 bewildering confusion of to-day, no one need be 
 told. Suddenly, by a terrible blow of world calamity, 
 our little theories, policies, and expediencies have 
 been brushed aside, and we are confronted by the fact 
 that the forces in which we had trusted to hold the 
 world together are impotent to do so. As some one 
 has said, the hoops of humanity have been broken, 
 and the barrel is collapsed. Slowly, tie after tie has 
 given way until little seems left save the law of the 
 jungle, brute Force on one side and wild Revolution 
 on the other — to such ferocious cave-men issue have 
 events led us. Think back a moment, and you will 
 see how frail those ties were, like ropes of sand, and 
 why certain clever dogmas, so talkative four years 
 ago, are now silent and forgotten. What were some 
 of the ties in which we had been trusting to hold the 
 world together? 
 
HOLDING THE WORLD TOGETHER 59 
 
 Let us see a little. On Mars' Hill the Apostle 
 said that God has made of one blood all nations of 
 men to dwell on the face of the earth, and has deter- 
 mined the bounds of their habitation; and that is lit- 
 erally true, shocking as it may be to our aristocratic 
 vanity. Go back twenty generations, and you will 
 discover that you have more than a hundred thousand 
 ancestors; go back fifty generations, and you will find 
 more than five million foresires. There is not in 
 Western Europe a neolithic relic that Is not a family 
 relic of every one of us. The blood in our veins has 
 handled it. Truly we are all akin, and our blood 
 is mixed beyond tracing, but ties of flesh and blood 
 cannot hold the world together, much less bring in 
 the kingdom of heaven. From the military trenches 
 abroad to the economic trenches at home, from the 
 clash of classes to the divorce courts — the Haves 
 warring against the Have-nots, and the riot of lusts, 
 passions, envies, hates, and greeds — the world seems 
 a discordant, struggling mass with nothing to hold it 
 together. So much so, that the idea of any real unity 
 and amity often seems like a dream 
 
 Fit to take lodgings in a head 
 That's to be let unfurnished. 
 
 Many had come to think that what we call civilisa- 
 tion had brought mankind to a point of moral re- 
 finement, to a degree of reciprocity, where it would 
 no longer resort to brute force to advance its interests 
 or settle its disputes. How vain this hope was the 
 awful facts make plain. Others thought that the vie- 
 
60 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 torles of science, to say nothing of the triumphs of 
 social organisation, had made such a world-shaking 
 war as that now raging Impossible. But science, so 
 far from uniting mankind, has placed new instruments 
 of destruction in the hands of men, making the 
 slaughter more hellish than ever before. In the same 
 way. Education, in which so many trusted, has failed 
 to hold humanity together. Indeed, the nations now 
 locked in a death-grapple on the field of conflict are 
 the most cultivated and refined nations of the modern 
 world. The English people, whose culture is so 
 broad-based, so finely poised and humane; the 
 French, so keen of intellect, so quick and intuitive of 
 insight; the great, patient, brooding mind of Ger- 
 many, so rich in science and music; the genius of 
 Italy, so fertile in shapes of beauty; the new, uprising 
 culture of America, so full of promise — these are the 
 nations now struggling on bloody fields in a fury of 
 war. We do not chide, we only grieve, the while we 
 lay to heart the fact that education may train men, 
 but, unless In the future it is to be something dif- 
 ferent, it cannot bind them together. 
 
 Commerce has shown Itself powerless to hold men 
 and nations together. Times without number we 
 were told that the war we were all fearing would 
 never come, because the unseen empire of finance 
 would not let It be. Norman Angell argued this 
 thesis brilliantly, bringing forward a mass of facts 
 to prove that war never pays because Its advantages, 
 even to the victors, are illusory; and the present war 
 has not disproved his argument. Yet the present war 
 
HOLDING THE WORLD TOGETHER 61 
 
 Is a fact, and we now know that nations will fight 
 regardless of cost, just because some things are price- 
 less; and that some nations will deliberately go to war 
 to defend or extend their trade. No ; the jealousies 
 of commerce are no guarantee against war, and an- 
 other theory goes glimmering in face of the reality. 
 Business does not make men brothers; It makes them 
 rivals. Since we cannot rely upon ties of trade to 
 unite humanity, we must turn to other and higher 
 forces, if perchance we may find an Influence strong 
 enough to bind the race together. 
 
 Socialism, with its vague humanitarian mysticism 
 and its fine rhetoric of a cosmopolitan philosophy, 
 collapsed like a house of cards In a storm. The 
 Church failed, having lost the power to uplift and 
 guide the nations, to draw men together, and to 
 base human life on love of man for his fellows. 
 Indeed, the Church itself is spht into countless sects, 
 more schismatic than any state ; It cannot hold itself 
 together. Just now it is yearning for union, and 
 some are busy with dicker and compromise looking 
 to that end — but to little avail. Often Its planning 
 and dickering in the effort to find a basis of union 
 resembles a horse-trade. Last autumn I heard a 
 sceptic denouncing the Church on Boston Common, 
 and a vast crowd applauded his eloquence. He used 
 bitter words, most of which were terribly true, but 
 he amazed me by arguing that it Is absurd to say that 
 the Jews crucified Jesus, because no set of men would 
 be so stupid as to crucify one so lovable and so holy! 
 Thus do men confess Him In whom our hope hes, 
 
62 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 judging life by His standards, and denouncing the 
 Church because it is so unlike Him; because it does 
 not act as He acted, whose life was one of love and 
 service, of pity and good-will. 
 
 Manifestly this much is clear: our race cannot be 
 held together by outward pressure, but must find its 
 centre of amity in some inward spiritual life. Here, 
 then, is our clue, and if we are to find the ultimate 
 unity underlying all the diversities and strifes of 
 humanity, we must seek it, not in the welter of lower 
 interests, but in the Divine life which haunts us while 
 it indwells us. Far above the red fields of war, 
 down below the din of the wrangling street, higher 
 than all sects, deeper than all dogmas, there is a life 
 of the Spirit common to all mankind — ^potential in 
 all, realised by a few — and by as much as our poor, 
 sad race is led and lifted into that life of invincible 
 goodwill, it will attain to enduring unity and peace. 
 God is the sky embracing all spirits, and the solidarity 
 of mankind can be realised, as Tolstoy said, only as 
 we discover our true kinship in fellowship with Him. 
 If this seems vague at first, we have only to ponder it 
 in face of the facts about us, and within us, to learn 
 that, after all, it is the supremely practical reality. 
 
 There are influences in the world, of which the 
 Cross is the changeless symbol, mightier than armies, 
 vaster in their sweep, and more irresistible than the 
 ruffian forces that destroy. There are things that 
 cannot be shaken, though empires fall and cultures 
 crumble; and at last, if not by wisdom, then by 
 tragedy, mankind will learn where lie the holy foun- 
 
HOLDING THE WORLD TOGETHER 63 
 
 dations upon which It may build its habitations of 
 comradeship, its palace of justice, and its temple of 
 vision and adoration. Thinking men see now more 
 clearly than ever before that if the Spirit of Jesus, 
 His truth, His laws, are not the leading principles of 
 society, thexe is no civilisation to be relied upon. 
 For, whatever theories men may hold as to the nature 
 of Christ, they agree that the Divine Spirit of Him 
 is our only hope. Without the spirit of His life all 
 our plans go awry, all our hopes are doomed to de- 
 feat, all our dreams will fade. The Divine unites, 
 the devilish divides; and only as men yield their 
 hearts to the Spirit of Jesus are they drawn together 
 into a union of those who love in the service of those 
 who need. 
 
 No doubt such talk seems dreamy and far-off at a 
 time when force rules and little can be heard save 
 the thunder of great guns ; but that is because we do 
 not believe the faith we profess. Nevertheless, the 
 hell in which we live is opening our eyes to many 
 things obscure and neglected hitherto. Four years 
 ago the Sermon on the Mount may have seemed 
 quixotic; but to-day it reads like the Magna Charta 
 of civihsation. Even yet there are those who ridi- 
 cule Ruskin as one who wrote a political economy 
 for the angels — the implication being, it would seem, 
 that what we need is a political economy for devils. 
 Verily, verily, we have our reward! Ruskin was 
 indeed an angel-minded man, and for that very rea- 
 son he has much to say to us to-day, the more so 
 because we are more willing to listen to his golden 
 
64? THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 voice. Hear now these words that have in them the 
 fire of the prophet: 
 
 "The form which the infidelity of England, especially, 
 — albeit he might have said the same of America, if not 
 worse — "has taken, is one hitherto unheard of in human 
 history. No nation ever before declared boldly, by print 
 and word of mouth, that its religion was good for show, but 
 'would not work.' Over and over again it has happened 
 that nations have denied their gods, but they denied them 
 bravely. . . . But we English have put the matter in an 
 entirely new light. 'There is a Supreme Ruler,' we say, 
 'no question of it, only He cannot rule. His orders won't 
 work. He will be quite satisfied with euphonious and re- 
 spectful repetition of them. Execution would be too dan- 
 gerous under existing circumstances, which He certainly 
 never contemplated.' I had no conception of the absolute 
 darkness which has covered the national mind in this respect 
 until I began to come into collision with persons engaged 
 in the study of economical and political questions. The en- 
 tire naivete and undisturbed imbecility with which I found 
 them declare that the laws of the Devil were the only prac- 
 tical ones and the laws of God were merely a form of po- 
 etical language passed all that I had ever before heard or 
 read of mortal infidelity. I knew the fool had often said 
 in his heart there is no God, but to hear him say clearly 
 out with his lips, 'There is a foolish God,' was something 
 which my art studies had not prepared me for." 
 
 Yes, it is practical atheism — that is what it actually 
 amounts to when we see it for what it is. When we 
 really dare to believe our own religion, and not 
 merely profess and sing about it — that is, when we 
 
HOLDING THE WORLD TOGETHER 65 
 
 lay it to heart and act upon it — our problems will be 
 solved. All of which, as you must feel, has a very 
 personal meaning for each of us, lest our little lives 
 go to pieces. Let a man look into his own heart 
 clearly, honestly, unflinchingly, and he will find the 
 cause and the remedy for the woes of the world. 
 What promotes discord in our own hearts is writ 
 large in the strife of humanity. By the same token, 
 if we seek that which holds own own life together we 
 have found the secret, for society is only two or 
 more or many people like ourselves trying to live 
 together in the world at the same time. What do we 
 find when we look within, seeking the deepest fact 
 hidden in this strange human heart? 
 
 There we discover a law of love, and the immut- 
 able duty of obedience to that law as the only way 
 to the blessed life. Such joy as we know on this 
 earth, as each of us can testify, comes of obedience 
 to that sovereignty whose authority we cannot doubt 
 and whose appeal we cannot hush. Not one of us 
 but has learned that selfish living is an agonising, 
 fragmentary life, fretful, futile, weary, utterly miser- 
 able. Not one of us but knows this as we know that 
 fire burns. Therefore, the day of all days, the great, 
 great day of the feast of life, is when we yield our- 
 selves to the sway of a power, a passion, or a Person 
 who reconciles and adjudicates among our warring 
 motives, and shifts the centre of life from self to 
 God. Then we discover that Christ is actually the 
 redeemer of man, in whose spirit we find both con- 
 centration of self and escape from self — in a word, 
 
66 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 salvation. This is what the old-time evangelists 
 meant when they called us to "come to Christ," and 
 they were right — only we may state it in other terms. 
 Let a man dare to trust and obey what he Icnows 
 to be highest, truest, and most loyal, let him follow 
 it faithfully and without fear, and he will actually 
 come to Christ. Not only so, but Christ will come to 
 him, and he will become aware of a fellowship dearer 
 than life itself, and know the company of a Friend 
 whose rebuke is more to be prized than the smile of 
 the world. Nothing is more simple, more natural, 
 or nearer the heart to do. No matter what blunders 
 we may have made, how far we have fallen, or what 
 a load of misery we may be staggering under the way 
 is always open into this true life, this real life, and 
 that way is the Christ-way. Living in this wild and 
 desperate age, when so many ties are torn apart and 
 so many hearts broken, let us give ourselves to Him 
 of whom the Apostle said: "In whom we have re- 
 demption, even the forgiveness of sins; who is the 
 image of the invisible God: for by Him were all 
 things created that are in heaven, and that are in 
 the earth, visible and invisible, whether they be 
 thrones, or dominions, or powers; all things were 
 made by Him, and for Him; and He is before all 
 things, and by Him all things hold together." 
 
THE INTERPRETER 
 
 "Which being interpreted." — Matt. i. 23. 
 
 SOME of US who are no longer young, can recall 
 a time when It was deemed a sin a read a novel, 
 on the ground that a story that Is not a fact must be 
 a falsehood. An exception was made, however, in 
 the case of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, because It 
 was a religious book, and that took the curse off. 
 Sir Walter Scott would seem to be the next one ad- 
 mitted to this exemption. To one who grew up in 
 the sweet air of piety, when the adventures of the 
 soul were the topics of fireside talk, that great alle- 
 gory was a book of absorbing charm; alike for Its 
 Saxon style and for its drama of the inner life. Alas, 
 it Is almost unintelligible in our day. Owing to our 
 reticence in regard to the deep things of the soul, a 
 boy of to-day finds that story unreal and remote. 
 
 Who can forget the day when Christian, on his 
 way from the City of Destruction, came to the house 
 of the Interpreter. On being admitted, he was led 
 from room to room, and saw things strange and hard 
 to understand. First a room where was a picture of 
 one whom he did not know, then a room so dusty 
 that he was well-nigh choked when it was swept, and 
 another room where he saw two lads. Patience and 
 Passion. The unquenchable fire fed by a hidden 
 
 67 
 
68 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 oil, the fight at the gate of the Palace Beautiful^ 
 the man In the Cage of Despair — who can forget such 
 chambers of imagery and the interpretation thereof? 
 Truly it was a great dream, and one knows not which 
 to admire most, its insight or its art. It painted the 
 story of the eternal adventure of the soul, its starts, 
 its stops, its bafflements, its besetments, as it pursues 
 its heroic and shadow-haunted way. 
 
 After all, what is this strange world in which we 
 live but a house of wonder? and happy is he who 
 finds the great Interpreter. Each year, each period 
 of life, is a room full of mystery, and we need some 
 one to explain what we see but cannot understand. 
 If Time is a great teacher, as evermore the present 
 interprets the past to the future, his process is slow 
 and often painful. Our parents, our teachers, are so 
 many interpreters, yet much remains hidden. As 
 Carlyle would say, it is like reading a "hieroglyphical 
 and prophetic book the lexicon of which lies in eter- 
 nity." As Salnte Beuve said. It makes little difference 
 whether one opens at page 120, which is the integral 
 calculus, or page 85, which is hearing the band play 
 In the garden. Always we have to turn back and 
 recover the context, and even then we can read only 
 here a line and there a stanza. Yet some things are 
 clear, and by the aid of the great Interpreters we can 
 make our way towards home. 
 
 Back across the years comes the memory of a great 
 teacher, beloved In England as well as In America, 
 who discoursed so eloquently on "the will to inter- 
 pret" as the secret of knowledge. He was not satis- 
 
THE INTERPRETER 69 
 
 fied with the old dual process of concept and precept 
 — conception being a banknote, a promise to pay, 
 which is cashed on perception. No, "man is a being 
 that interprets," he said, and the process of knowl- 
 edge is triadic, always involving a third element. A 
 concept may be a "leading" toward the truth, as 
 James would say, and a precept may disclose a fact, 
 a law, a principle. But if we are to know meanings, 
 values, especially any ideal values, we must survey 
 from above and interpret. Thus, as Josiah Royce 
 held, knowledge, like life, may be a colloquy or a 
 prayer, but it is essentially social, and to know at all 
 is to know socially. Humanity is a community of 
 interpretation; we look at nature through the eyes of 
 a social world. Moreover, in the simplest knowl- 
 edge, did we but realise it, another Mind enters as an 
 integral part, as on the way to Emmaus the pilgrims 
 were joined by One who interpreted to them the 
 meaning of words long dim. So much for the insight 
 of Royce, as he expounded his gospel of "The Be- 
 loved Community," in which we are joined in a fel- 
 lowship of the truth. 
 
 Another favourite figure with Royce was that we 
 are like travellers crossing a boundary into an alien 
 country, and must have a care about the value of our 
 money. On one side of the line our coins and notes 
 are valid, on the other it is different. There another 
 language is spoken, and there another system of val- 
 ues obtains. Just so, during recent years the mind of 
 man has passed a boundary into another world of 
 thought and outlook — a vast country hardly dreamed 
 
70 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 of before — and we need the aid of the Interpreter. 
 We walk to-day where no path is, where strange 
 and terrible shapes confront us. If the allegory of 
 Bunyan seems far off and unreal to men to-day, the 
 fact is but a token of the change which has passed 
 over the world. The dream is still true : it is the old 
 eternal Dream of Humanity, which all the mighty 
 seers have interpreted, each in his own tongue. But 
 it must be interpreted in the terms of to-day. Here 
 is the mission of the Church. It must be a Com- 
 munity of Interpretation, and its pulpit the place 
 where a seer-like soul answers the unasked questions 
 of the human heart. Twenty years ago John Bur- 
 roughs wrote : 
 
 "The religious sceptics to-day are a very large class, and 
 they are among the most hopeful, intelligent, patriotic, and 
 upright of our citizens. Let us see: probably four-fifths of 
 the literary men of this country and Great Britain ; a large 
 proportion of journalists and editors ; half the lawyers ; more 
 than half the doctors; a large per cent, of the teachers, and 
 a larger per cent, of the business men. They find the creeds 
 in which they were nurtured no longer credible." 
 
 No longer intelligible, he might have added with 
 equal truth; and if that was true twenty years ago, 
 it is twenty times truer to-day. Time was when the 
 task of the Church was to win bad men; now its task 
 is to retain the good ones. Once the Church sup- 
 ported men, upheld the weary and sorrow-bound; 
 now men are besought to support the Church. Why 
 is this so ? Who are the men who hold aloof from 
 
THE INTERPRETER 71 
 
 the Church? Not simply the low and evil-minded, 
 but many of the lofty of soul, the upright of char- 
 acter, who have the future in their hearts, and whose 
 service to humanity puts many a Churchman to 
 shame. Lincoln was of this class in his day, and Bur- 
 roughs names the late Goldwin Smith as an example 
 in our day. They are not irreligious. If not devo- 
 tional, they are truly devoted. If they make no pro- 
 fession, they are most fruitful in performance. Men 
 of science, men of letters, men of affairs, men aglow 
 with social idealism and effort stand apart from the 
 Church. They seem not to need it, not to be helped 
 by it. When asked why, they say that casting their 
 lot with the Church implies the acceptance of dogmas 
 in which they cannot honestly believe. Perhaps it is 
 true, and one re.spects their attitude; but one also 
 recalls the words of Drummond: 
 
 "There are earnest and gifted lives to-day whose lips at 
 least will not name the name of Christ. I speak of them 
 with respect ; their shoe-latchets many of us are not worthy 
 to unloose. But, because the creed of the neighbouring mis- 
 sion hall is a travesty of religion, they refuse to acknow^ledge 
 the power of the living Christ. Oh, the narrowness of such 
 breadth !" 
 
 What, then, shall we do? Throw the historic 
 dogmas of the Church out the window and over the 
 wall, and devote ourselves to the gospel of "sweet- 
 ness and light" ? Such a method has often been tried, 
 and as often failed. No mere confection of rose- 
 water sentiment and intellectual beauty will satisfy 
 
72 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 the deep cravings of our nature and the needs that 
 gnaw at our hearts. Something profounder is needed 
 if it is to reach the human soul and heal the infinite 
 pain that throbs in it for ever. From a religion 
 of sweetness and light men will turn, in their dire 
 perplexities, to the crassest superstition, to the crudest 
 dogma, accepting wonders which the intellect rejects 
 for the solace which the intellect cannot give. No, 
 it is all a matter of interpretation. Dogma, said 
 Phillips Brooks, is "Truth packed for transporta- 
 tion," and it is of little use along the way. It must 
 be unpacked and the living insight that gave it birth 
 and made it worth packing brought into the light. 
 No dogma was invented. Every doctrine of the 
 Church was an effort to utter and interpret a deep 
 and vital reality of experience. Its terms may be 
 obsolete, but the truth remains, and our duty is to 
 find the truth it was trying to tell and interpret that 
 truth to-day. 
 
 Once on a time it was thought that men must get 
 religion, as if it were a prize to be captured. Now 
 we see that men have religion, and that it needs to 
 be discovered, developed, and interpreted. Religion 
 is not a rare exotic, a talisman, to be sought far and 
 near. It is nigh to man, even to his heart, as he 
 himself will discover when that chamber of half-light 
 and mystery is interpreted to him. This haunting 
 hope, this dumb aspiration of the race finds voice 
 in the great prophets, and that is the secret of their 
 power over their fellows. They reveal men to them- 
 selves, make clear what is vague in their minds, and 
 
THE INTERPRETER 73 
 
 "Utter their stammering prayer; they are interpreters. 
 Every religious movement shows that the leader and 
 the led are swept along by the same tide, and that 
 the one speaks for the many as well as to them, 
 uttering the wish, the want that wells up in every 
 heart, but which so few can express. Never were 
 such voices needed more than to-day. Men are as 
 religious as ever they were in days agone, but the 
 old forms do not utter it, much less interpret it. 
 Who does not feel this need in his own heart and 
 the pathos of it in others? 
 
 We worship in the afterglow of the festival of 
 Pentecost. The contrast must have been in many 
 minds between the Tower of Babel, with its con- 
 fusion of voices, its babbling, its heaven-storming as- 
 piration; and Pentecost, with its one voice speaking 
 the everlasting truth so that each man heard it in his 
 own tongue. Brought together. Babel and Pentecost 
 are a parable of our day. For a century and longer 
 we have been trying to build to the heavens a mighty 
 tower — the civilisation of which we boasted in loud- 
 sounding words, achievement after achievement of 
 science, in which we gloried. Suddenly there was a 
 confusion of tongues, and a shadow fell over it all, 
 and such unintelligible babblings as we have to-day! 
 When the Church becomes of one mind in one place 
 and of one accord, like the disciples of old, who met 
 together in the upper room, the confusion of Babel 
 will be answered by the eternal harmony spoken by 
 tongues of flame and power and light. 
 
 How often, in these dark days, when one picks up 
 
74 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 a book there is a note in which the publisher tells 
 us that the author "was killed in action on the West- 
 ern Front" on such a day and date. With infinite 
 regret we read such a note in the last edition of 
 A Student in Arms, by Donald Hankey, one of the 
 rarest books that has grown on the red field of the 
 war. Early in his ministry Hankey saw that the 
 Church does not understand men, and that men do 
 not understand the Church. An impalpable, if not 
 impassable, barrier seemed to divide the two, which 
 Hankey set himself to penetrate. For that purpose 
 he laid aside his books and went among men, living 
 with them in the dim and hum and litter of their 
 labour, the better to know the lives they live, that 
 so he might tell them of "The Lord of all Good 
 Life"; a book in which he portrayed the failure of 
 the Church and the power of Christ. Love of coun- 
 try, love of men, led him to the front as a soldier 
 in the ranks, and his last book was made up of essays 
 written in the trenches, which for directness of in- 
 sight and vividness of style have very few like them. 
 
 Every one of those essays is significant, but the 
 most pertinent to my purpose is the one entitled "The 
 Religion of the Inarticulate," having to do with the 
 work of the chaplains in the army. Hankey found 
 the chaplains chiding the men because they did not 
 say their prayers, did not come to Communion, and 
 for not being afraid to die without making their 
 peace with God. Yet there were the men ready any 
 moment to pay "the full measure of devotion" for an 
 ideal, a principle; ready to make the final sacrifice 
 
THE INTERPRETER 75 
 
 that justice, mercy, and liberty should not perish 
 from the earth. The chaplains saw nothing relig- 
 ious in that readiness to die for the right. Nor did 
 the men. They had deep-seated beliefs in goodness, 
 in right, in justice, in service, but they did not connect 
 these beliefs with religion, much less with the rites 
 to which the chaplains asked them to conform. They 
 thought that religion was something else — believing 
 in the Bible and setting up to be better than their 
 neighbours, and by believing in the Bible they meant 
 ^'believing that Jonah was swallowed by the whale." 
 Surely, said Hankey, this is nothing short of tragedy; 
 and he was right. 
 
 What is the remedy for this tragic misunderstand- 
 ing, this failure to connect unselfishness, charity, gen- 
 erosity, and courage with religion? Again, it is a 
 matter of interpretation. Long ago Tertullian said 
 that "the human soul is naturally Christian," and 
 that "no man can understand Christianity and reject 
 it." While this may not be the whole truth, it has 
 much in it that is eternally true. If, therefore, men 
 reject Christianity, ignore it, or do not even recog- 
 nise its presence, it is because it has not been inter- 
 preted to them aright. Else they would not think 
 of it as something remote from actual life, artificial 
 and unreal; would not identify it with the formalism 
 and smug self-righteousness which Jesus spent His 
 life in trying to destroy. One reason for this failure 
 of interpretation, as Hankey saw, is that ministers 
 know so little of men, live hke "a third race" apart 
 from the thick of things, and so cannot interpret men 
 
76 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 to themselves and link the Christ-life of humanity 
 with the life of Christ. Hampered by forms, blinded 
 by dogmas, fettered by customs, they are unable to 
 come close to the men whom they seek, sincerely and 
 earnestly, to help. The author adds these words: 
 
 "It is certainly arguable that we educated Christians are 
 in our own way almost as inarticulate as the uneducated 
 whom we always want to instruct. In the hour of danger 
 and wounds and death many a man has realised with a shock 
 that the articles of his creed about which he was most con- 
 tentious mattered very, very little, and that he had some- 
 what overlooked the articles that proved to be vital. If the 
 working man's religion is often v^holly inarticulate, the real 
 religion of the educated man is often quite wrongly ar- 
 ticulated." 
 
 Evermore our humanity, like Pharoah, is visited 
 by a mighty dream of things eternal, and is troubled 
 by it. Soothsayers and wise men read its meaning 
 according to their interest or ignorance, guessing 
 at its omens. The need is for the Interpreter, and 
 the One who has most clearly and truly set forth 
 the meaning of our dream is Christ. With what 
 sure insight and revealing sympathy He shows us 
 that His gospel is the explanation and the justifica- 
 tion and the triumph of all that we do now believe 
 in, hope for, and long to be. He begins by making 
 our religion articulate in words so simple, so living, 
 so vivid that our own souls seem to speak to us in 
 His tones, the while we marvel at the wonder and 
 surprise of His truth. Like some old ineffable 
 
THE INTERPRETER 77 
 
 melody, His words seem to know what Is in our 
 hearts, the way we have come, and whither we seek 
 to go. What joy is like having some one who knows 
 us, understands us, loves us, redeems us. Truly His 
 name shall be called Emmanuel, which, being inter- 
 preted, is God with us, God within us. 
 
OUR FATHER 
 
 "After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father who 
 art in heaven." — Matt. vi. 9. 
 
 NEVER upon this earth have human ears heard 
 words more moving than the opening line of 
 the prayer which the Master taught us to pray. No 
 more pathetic cry has ever ascended from the 
 shadowed earth to the shadowless heavens. Alas! 
 our familiarity with the words hides from us their 
 fathomless depth, their immeasurable height, their 
 infinite sweep of meaning and promise. Sky-Father 
 was almost the first name which man gave to the 
 vast Power upon which he felt himself dependent, 
 and even Jesus could not find a deeper, sweeter, truer 
 name. If you would feel the force of that name 
 and how far its echoes reach, go out some night under 
 a clear sky of stars, and, looking up into that depth, 
 repeat the words, "Our Father who art in Heaven!" 
 Some one has said that there are three stages in 
 the growth and unfolding of a human soul. The 
 first is when it wakes up from that strange "sleep 
 and forgetting" which men call birth, and looks with 
 the wide and startled eyes of infancy upon the big, 
 buzzing world about it. The next stage is when the 
 soul becomes conscious of itself as a distinct person, 
 separate from others, with a life and duties of its 
 
 78 
 
OUR FATHER 79 
 
 own. The third stage is when it becomes aware of 
 God as the One with whom it really has to do in the 
 adventure of life. But we may add a fourth stage, 
 equally important as marking an epoch in the history 
 of the soul: and that is when it passes, slowly or 
 with sunburst joy, from the idea of God as a Power, 
 a Ruler, to the sense of God as Father! Surely that 
 is the supreme moment in the history of any soul, 
 its real birthday, the date of a new life. Happy is 
 the man who has advanced from the partialism of a 
 Sovereign to the universal saving grace of a Father 
 — then is he free indeed! 
 
 Ruskin was right when he said that the world is 
 an orphanage so long as men do not know God 
 their Father, and all wisdom and knowledge are 
 mere bewildered darkness if they do not teach us to 
 love Him. All religion, all philosophy, are enshrined 
 in that one word. Father, in which the most in- 
 effable truths are blended with old and simple and 
 lovable things. The use which Jesus made of the 
 deep and sweet word Father, unveils the secret of 
 His life, His faith. His serenity. His incredible 
 courage, and His undefeatable hope. With what 
 unerring insight He took the ideas of causation, 
 intelligence, force, righteousness, and the other frag- 
 ments which men had found, and touched them with 
 the light and glory and tenderness of His vision 
 of God the Father ! Everywhere He saw the pres- 
 ence of God who clothes the grass, weaves robes 
 for the lily, and stretches out His hand when the 
 sparrow falls. Indeed, the life of Jesus, His words 
 
80 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 and works, seemed to have one deep passion, one 
 ruling purpose, and that was to reveal God the 
 Father as the sovereign reality and the solution of 
 all the problems of life and death. 
 
 No one knew better than Jesus how full our human 
 life is of intellectual and moral difficulties set as we 
 are to follow the good in a world often rough and 
 always baffling. He saw clearly. He felt keenly, and 
 He knew that the secret lies in laying hold of a truth 
 great enough to include little truths and half-truths, 
 lifting them into harmony. As in the Iliad of Homer 
 -all is confused and confusing, until we find the reason 
 for those marching armies, so life is bewildering until 
 we find the Master Key; and Jesus found it in God 
 the Father. Men came to Him with every kind of 
 question, idle questions, curious questions, old mooted 
 questions, and also those bitter, poignant questions 
 which shake the heart and break it. Not often did He 
 answer the questions put to Him, but instead He 
 sought to put into the hearts of men the key to all 
 questions: "Our Father." God is near, God knows, 
 God helps — such was His key to all the riddles of 
 mortal life and immortal destiny. Here, for once, 
 common sense of a most uncommon kind found its 
 fruition in a faith as simple as the trust of a little 
 child. 
 
 What was the basis of this faith? From what 
 root did it grow? Here, again, Jesus was so simple 
 that He was wise, and so wise that He was simple. 
 He found the key to His high faith, not in the sky 
 above, but in the heart of man, in the creative, self- 
 
OUR FATHER 81 
 
 giving, unwearying, death-defying father-mother 
 heart. His fundamental insight was that the high- 
 est and holiest in man reveals what is more real in 
 God, and since love is the noblest thing in man, it is 
 also the noblest thing in God. Every truth, every 
 duty, every joy, every hope of His gospel rests 
 upon the sure foundation of this kinship of man and 
 God, and is thus a truth that can be tested by each of 
 us in his own life. His secret is thus so simple that 
 men have overlooked it, and so near by that they have 
 stepped over it. From the perversions of sense and 
 the pollutions of sin Jesus appealed to the highest 
 within us, telling us to obey it, trust it, follow it. He 
 dared to make trial of this high and simple secret, 
 and it is, therefore, that He is our Leader, our Re- 
 deemer. 
 
 What plummet is long enough to fathom the 
 father-mother heart? When William Black, the 
 novelist, was about to sail from New York to Eng- 
 land a man rushed on board with a basket of flowers 
 in his hand. He came up to Black and told him how, 
 on his last voyage, his little girl had died and had 
 been buried at sea. He asked the novelist if he 
 would be so kind as to take the flowers and scatter 
 them upon the waves when he passed over a certain 
 latitude. Of course Black promised to do so, and 
 very early one morning, when it was still dark, he 
 stood on deck under the morning stars and cast the 
 faded flowers upon the vast and wandering grave 
 of a little girl. That was fatherhood reaching forth 
 after the loved and lost in the darkness. The first 
 
82 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 child of James Martineau died in infancy and was 
 buried in the French cemetery in Dublin. Years 
 went by, and all save the father and mother forgot 
 that the little one had ever lived. Other years passed, 
 and the mother died, leaving the father to walk 
 alone. At the age of eighty-seven he attended the 
 tercentenary of the Dublin University, and one day 
 the lonely old man stole away from a brilliant func- 
 tion to stand once more beside the grave of his first- 
 born. No other living soul recalled that little face 
 long since fallen into dust, but the father did not 
 forget. 
 
 Such is the deep and tender reality In the heart 
 of man upon which Jesus rested His faith, finding 
 in it a revelation of God. Hence His words remind- 
 ing us that if we, being evil and imperfect, know 
 how to love our litle ones, "how much more will 
 your Father in heaven!" Truly there is something 
 awful in the simplicity of His insight, as there is 
 something ineffable in its disclosure. Nor is this love 
 that unveils God a soft, yielding sentiment in which 
 evil evaporates and law melts away. Far from it. 
 It has its sterner aspect, its terrible austerity. Sin 
 is never seen for what it really is until we see that it 
 is not a rebellion against a ruler, but a blow at the 
 face of a Father! It is the vision of the love of God 
 that deepens sin, while giving the only hope of re- 
 demption from it. Even the harshness of love has in 
 it a touch of yearning pity. Patmore has a little poem 
 in which he tells how a father punished his little son 
 and put him to bed, "his mother, who was patient. 
 
OUR FATHER 83 
 
 being dead." Sore of heart himself, he went to see 
 the child, and found him asleep with his toys beside 
 him to comfort him. 
 
 "So when that night I prayed 
 To God, I wept, and said: 
 Ah! when at last we lie with tranced breath, 
 Not vexing Thee in death, 
 And Thou rememberest of what toys 
 We made our joys, 
 How weakly understood 
 Thy great commanded good — 
 Then, Fatherly not less 
 
 Than I, whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, 
 Thou'lt leave Thy wrath and say, 
 I will be sorry for their childishness." 
 
 How can we h'old this high and tender faith In the 
 love of God the Father in such a world as this to- 
 day? Often it seems like an exquisite dream spun 
 on the loom of some kind heart, but too frail and 
 fair to stand in face of a world at war when woes 
 are so many. Pain, poverty, disease, cruelty, death, 
 and a holocaust of hate desolate the earth. What be- 
 fore was accidental and occasional seems to have be- 
 come normal and universal. How can the faith of 
 Jesus live in a world so full of griefs and graves? 
 Such is the question that pierces many a heart to-day, 
 adding another pain to the agony of the hour. How 
 keen must be the anguish of those who have lost those 
 they loved and also their faith in a God of Love! 
 Sorrow does not always soften. Often it makes men 
 
84 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 hard and bitter of heart, secreting an acid that dis- 
 solves the pearl of great price. Many thoughtful 
 people are in danger of this ultimate inner disaster, 
 but they must not rashly let go of the highest faith. 
 Now consider. If ever any faith was tested by 
 hard facts it was the faith of Jesus in the love of 
 God. He drank the cup of desolation, draining it to 
 its dregs. When we think of the countless young 
 lives cut off in their prime, let us not forget that 
 Jesus died at the age of a little over thirty. 
 
 "He was young 
 Who for my sake in silence hung 
 Upon the Cross with passion wrung." 
 
 And such a muddy death! No woe that has be- 
 fallen any one in this war has surpassed that dark 
 cross outside the city gate. Think of the forces 
 that brought about that tragedy! Religious hypoc- 
 risy, political cunning, and brutal force united to 
 defame and destroy the noblest and loftiest being 
 that has walked the earth. Yet that lonely Sufferer 
 dying in the dark, despised and desecrated, did not 
 lose faith in God the Father. From the Cross comes 
 the final rebuke of all our doubt, all our despair: 
 "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit!" 
 Surely a faith so tested may be trusted unto the utter- 
 most in storm and calm, In life and death. 
 
 When we think of that Sufferer outside the city 
 gate, and the words of prayer upon His lips, the text 
 comes to us with a new meaning: "After this man- 
 ner pray ye: Our Father." Only so can we pray 
 
OUR FATHER 85 
 
 at all. Prayer to a Destiny, prayer to a Hierarchy 
 of Laws, prayer to an impersonal Force or Fate, is 
 impossible. It is the word Father that opens a foun- 
 tain of prayer in our hearts, solving the mystery of 
 prayer, explaining its philosophy, and justifying its 
 practice. Then we know that our cry of need is no 
 empty wail blown across a wintry sky, unheard and 
 unheeded! No, there is One who hears, and if His 
 will Is often other than our own, It Is better so. 
 Prayer Is as natural as the homing Instinct of a bird, 
 and faith in God the Father makes it free, joyous, 
 and uplifting. Those who walk the way of prayer 
 know that life Is from above downward, as the poet 
 had learned who wrote those lovely lines whose In- 
 sight Is so deep and sure : — 
 
 "Let me no more my comfort draw 
 From my frail hold of Thee; 
 In this alone rejoice with awe, 
 Thy mighty grasp of me." 
 
 What a heavy load of loneliness faith in God the 
 Father lifts from the human heart! It is appalling 
 when we remember that, however rich we may be 
 in friendships, and despite our most Intimate and 
 tender fellowships, we live alone, think alone, suffer 
 alone, and die alone. Not even the nearest heart 
 knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh. But 
 when we hear the words "Our Father," our loneliness 
 is broken, and we know that we are "never less alone 
 than when alone." What a relief, what a joy to 
 
86 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 know that, if we open the door, the One who loves 
 us best will enter in and dwell with us, pervade us, 
 possess us. No wonder Thomas Erskine, of Lin- 
 lathen, used to ask those he met in the way, "My 
 brother ! my sister ! do you know the Father ?" How 
 much we need to know Him, and the secret of His 
 inner fellowship, in the hour of affliction, else we 
 may sink under the sense that we are slaves of Fate, 
 or whim, tossed to and fro without reason. One 
 can bear much — anything, perhaps — if he knows that 
 his sorrow is not mere ruthlessness, a blind fury walk- 
 ing with aimless feet. The cup may be bitter, but we 
 know it is not poison when we take it as a sacrament 
 from the hand of our Father. 
 
 On the evening on which he died, Chalmers was 
 walking in his garden, when his daughter heard him 
 repeat again and again to himself the words, "My 
 Father, my Heavenly Father." In the morning he 
 had vanished. Think it all through from end to end, 
 and you will see that the real basis of hope of a 
 future life is in God the Father! In this faith Jesus 
 lived and died, and, dying, conquered death! How 
 many have followed in His train, triumphant by His 
 grace as they took their flight to His Father and our 
 Father. Over the homes of our living, over the graves 
 of our dead — ^now, alas ! so many and so new — ^let 
 us hold by the faith of the prayer the Master taught 
 us. In face of the dark questions that tantalise or 
 terrify us, let us be loyal to it. There is no higher 
 faith, and it must be wise to trust the highest and 
 
OUR FATHER 87 
 
 give ourselves to it. At last, when we leave this 
 earthly scene and take our way along the hidden path, 
 let us go bravely with the great and simple words on 
 our lips, "Our Father who art in Heaven." 
 
DIVINE GUIDANCE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 
 
 "I will guide thee with mine eye." — Psalm xxxii. 8. 
 
 "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." — 
 
 Matt. x. 30. 
 
 13ERHAPS not one of you ever saw a copy of the 
 •*■ most interesting journal in my country, a paper 
 full of fairy stories, of weird things that never come 
 to pass, and other forms of highly imaginative writ- 
 ing. Of course I mean the Record of Congress, the 
 best journal of fiction in the land. In one issue it was 
 related how, in the embarrassment of an early ses- 
 sion, of which the worthy chaplain had not been 
 advised, the Speaker called the House to order with 
 this amazing announcement: "The clerk will please 
 read the journal. We will proceed without Divine 
 guidance," No protest was offered, no word was 
 uttered, and all seemed willing to proceed without 
 that guiding wisdom which cometh down from 
 above. 
 
 After all how is the wisest Solon of them all to 
 know when he has guidance from above in any of the 
 sessions? Because he cannot escape it. There are 
 many men, no doubt, who would be glad to proceed 
 without it, if only they could; for this matter of 
 Divine guidance, as the wise old Bible suggests, is 
 not without terror to evil-doers. Nevertheless, it is 
 inescapable. Evermore the good and bad alike are 
 
 88 
 
DIVINE GUIDANCE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 89 
 
 guided to their inevitable end — Judas to his own 
 place, and Jesus to His throne of mercy. Other 
 things may be doubtful, but there are none to deny 
 this fundamental fact. From the first man has felt 
 that he was led by an Eternal Power, whose mighty 
 hand he could neither resist nor escape — Something 
 which he has called Fate, Force, Chance, Destiny, 
 God. No matter how it is named, every man knows 
 that without it he could not live out a day. So, then, 
 the real question is not as to the fact of divine guid- 
 ance, but as to its nature and the character of Him 
 in whose great hand we stand. Let us discuss this 
 matter together briefly, bringing to it such insight 
 as we have, albeit unable to do more than touch the 
 hem of such a theme in the appointed time. 
 
 Now, consider, God is the final reality; beyond 
 Him human thdught cannot go, short of Him it can- 
 not rest in peace. Thought about Him is thought in 
 its longest reach, as experience of Him is the deepest 
 need of humanity and its highest joy. It follows, 
 as a consequence, that a change in our conception of 
 God means a profound change in all our thinking 
 about life, its meaning, its method, and its goal. Such 
 a change is now passing over the mind of man, sur- 
 passing all the more superficial and astonishing 
 changes of this time of upheaval. Not for nought 
 have men been talking of a Vital Urge, a Finite God, 
 and other like forshadowings, as in other days they 
 were wont to talk of an Eternal Energy from which 
 all things proceed, and a Stream of Tendency making 
 for righteousness. Men to-day are seeking not 
 
90 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 simply a Sovereign who reigns in majesty, but a Sym- 
 pathy which no vague Energy, no mere Stream of 
 Tendency can give. They cry out for a God who not 
 only reigns afar, but for a God who helps to bear the 
 burden and shares in some real way the struggle and 
 agony of the world. A God who is above all and 
 merely a looker-on they find it hard to believe in, and 
 harder still to love. 
 
 Of course, every such passionate aspiration may 
 take crude and fumbling forms, but it is bringing 
 men to see that God is somehow with them in the 
 trial and bloody sweat of life. More and more they 
 think of Him as ruling the world, not from without 
 as the potter shapes the clay, but from within as a 
 flower unfolds^ — the universe being the form in 
 which the Divine reason and will are made visible. 
 The old deism, with its ongoing world and an 
 absentee Deity who made occasional inroads into 
 the world to reveal Himself, is dead. By the same 
 token, the growing sense of the divine indwelling 
 renders many dogmas obsolete and many debates 
 useless — as, for example, the debate about miracles. 
 The commonest event, even the fall of a leaf, is as 
 divine in its causation as any miracle could be, since 
 in both alike the presence of God is manifest. The 
 fact that God is in nature does not mean that He is 
 here and there working wonders, but that the whole 
 cosmic order depends every instant upon His will 
 and power, and that we live in the presence of His 
 living Will, which worketh hitherto and worketh 
 evermore. 
 
DIVINE GUIDANCE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 91 
 
 For ages our humanity, like the boy in the story 
 of "The Great Stone Face," watched the face of 
 nature, not knowing whether her smile was one of 
 pity or of indifferent scorn. She presented two 
 aspects — loveliness and severity. Amidst scenes 
 of peace and beauty, when skies were soft and winds 
 were kind, it was easy to believe that she was friendly. 
 Even in the night, with its awful depth of stars, that 
 faith was awake. But nature had other moods, when 
 storms ran riot and the foundations of the deeps were 
 broken up, outbursts of power when men were swept 
 away like insects. Then it was that fear came upon 
 man, and his faith wavered. The Lisbon earthquake 
 was followed by an epidemic of atheism, unsettling 
 the faith of the boy Goethe. Doubt of nature haunted 
 the last century like an evil dream, and Stuart Mill 
 concluded that 'either God is not strong enough to 
 prevent its cruelty or not good enough to care. Even 
 Tennyson was tormented by a vision of nature "red 
 in tooth and claw," so careful of a type, so careless 
 of a single life. To-day it seems a far cry back to 
 such a mood, a memory of which lingers in the stories 
 and poems of Thomas Hardy. 
 
 Happily, a deeper Insight has brought us to a 
 serener confidence in the beneficent and wise order 
 of the world, as may be seen In such an essay as that 
 of John Burroughs on "The Arrival of the Fit." 
 At first glance, he tells us, nature may seem to be 
 ruled by a law of disorder — collisions In the heavens 
 above, waste on the earth below — ^but that is only 
 seeming. There is something more than hit-and-miss 
 
92 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 in nature, some guiding genius, else the course of 
 evolution would never have arrived at man. Forests 
 get themselves planted by winds and currents, but oak 
 and elm and pine each finds its place with a certain 
 fitness and system. Despite seeming waste, order and 
 plan appear, and myriad forms of beauty, showing a 
 spiritual intelligence. Often God seems to play His 
 right hand against His left, but what one loses the 
 other gains, and so nothing is lost. Man thinks that 
 nature is stern, yet all the while she is his teacher, all 
 his inventions being imitations of her devices, all his 
 arts efforts to reproduce her beauty. Besides, we are 
 here in a world good to be in, whose method we are 
 hardly prepared to judge, because we cannot grasp a 
 plan so vast. 
 
 Look down the highway of history along which 
 our race has straggled, coming it knows not whence, 
 going it knows not whither. Carlyle wondered how 
 a race so dull that its eyes seem made of horn man- 
 aged to stumble forward. Left to himself, man sits 
 down and sings praises to the past, overcome by a 
 strange inertia, not totally depraved, but totally lazy. 
 If there has been progress from the beginning, as no 
 one denies, it has come from a thought behind and 
 above humanity; by Divine direction, not by human 
 intention. That is to say, it has come in spite of man, 
 or else by man acting in ignorance of the great design 
 and the ultimate end. Any faithful account of history 
 bears witness to the fact of Divine guidance in human 
 affairs, so much so that its records, so long a bible of 
 pessimism, have become scrolls of hope. Often, to 
 
DIVINE GUIDANCE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 93 
 
 be sure, the fact of Divine guidance is hidden in the 
 details of the story, but it is unveiled in the larger 
 scene and the longer result. Not otherwise can we 
 explain the progress of things from unreasoning 
 elements, the turning of revolution into evolution, 
 and the bringing to pass of that of which man never 
 dreamed. 
 
 At last, we Americans, as Lord Bryce has said, 
 hold by this fact with a faith that is akin to fatalism; 
 no doubt going too far, as when he reminds us that 
 "the belief in the rights of the majority lies very 
 near to the belief that the majority is right." 
 Whereas the voice of the people is not always, not 
 often, the voice of God. For God is not with the 
 many, unless the many are with Him, and they are 
 sometimes far from Him. Again and again history 
 has shown one man to have been right and a whole 
 nation wrong. Divine guidance does not always 
 come in the shout of the multitude, any more than 
 in the thunder at Mount Horeb, but nearly always 
 in the still small voice heard by a few lofty and 
 valiant souls called prophets. Always it is the lonely 
 seer who climbs the Mount of Vision, and returns to 
 point the masses to the better way. Yet so heedless 
 is humanity that it has become a refrain of history 
 that the prophets are stoned and rejected, and, later, 
 monuments are built in their honour. Still it is the 
 prophet, not the historian, not the scholar, who Is our 
 best interpreter and guide, and in the end we must 
 follow him, whether we will or no. 
 
 Buckle once thought that there might be a 
 
94 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 science of history; that, if we could know all the 
 facts of the present, we could predict the future 
 accurately. But Froude, Fiske, and Smith took 
 issue with him, showing that we can no more tell 
 what a day will bring forth than we can foretell 
 the shape the clouds will take at sunset to-morrow. 
 A spirit plays over the scene, an incalculable element 
 enters, and all our predictions go awry. Gibbon felt 
 that he had lived to see the end of war, but if he 
 had lived out the span of his days he would have seen 
 Europe at the feet of Napoleon. The man of action 
 more keenly than any other, perhaps, feels both the 
 fact and the mystery of Divine guidance. A thinker 
 can retrace his steps to where he went astray, but 
 when a thing is done it cannot be undone. A man of 
 action must decide quickly amid the stress of events, 
 and as often as not when he has done what seems 
 wisest and best, his plans are all upset. No wonder 
 so many leaders, from Caesar to Lincoln and Glad- 
 stone, have been fatalists — ^that is, men of iron faith 
 — nothing certain to them but an unseen Hand put 
 forth from the darkness, moving the figures on the 
 board. 
 
 Nor is there any such Divine guidance in human 
 affairs as prevents a temporary triumph of might 
 over right, of evil over good. Surely Jesus was the 
 strongest, whitest, sweetest soul this earth has 
 known, and yet that radiant Being, who was so gentle, 
 patient and heroic, whose heart was so deep that the 
 streams of slander poured Into it without echo, whose 
 charity was so large that It folded like a mantle all 
 
DIVINE GUIDANCE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 95 
 
 who wore our human shape, who talked of all men 
 as His brothers and of all women as if He dreamed 
 of His mother; this being, who sought to do good, 
 and only good, always, everywhere to everybody, was 
 falsely accused, betrayed by friends, crowned with 
 thorns, and crucified between two thieves. Never 
 was the history of brutahty and wrong more com- 
 plete, more crushing. And yet, not by man, but in 
 spite of man, somehow, out of it came unspeakable 
 good, as out of the new crucifixion of humanity to-day 
 will issue untold good in times to be. It must be, 
 then, that God guides our race by slowly incarnating 
 Himself in it — that is, by educating humanity; that 
 He is in history guiding it by slowly enthroning His 
 spirit in the minds of the men who make history. If 
 that be so, then His kingdom can come no faster than 
 the Divine is en'shrined in the soul of the race. 
 
 Also, if many must fail that a few may succeed 
 a little, if myriads must fall that their sons may be 
 free, what of those who die? What of the multi- 
 tudes who are ground under the heel of tyranny, 
 suffering, praying, fighting for the freedom of those 
 who are to come after them ! Are they lost and cast 
 aside, as so much rubbish in the void? If so, history 
 is a tragedy of unrelieved horror, a nightmare so 
 terrible as to make life intolerable. No ; over against 
 this dismal dogma rises the religious vision of the 
 world, the faith that nothing walks with aimless feet, 
 and that not one life shall be destroyed, that the babe 
 who died in India five thousand years ago did not fall 
 as an autumn leaf to rot and be lost, but lives to 
 
96 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 fulfil its ideal — yea, that the wise love of God is equal 
 to the waywardness, the wilfulness and the pathos 
 of man, and will at last lead every wandering human 
 soul to Himself! As George Macdonald said, "Un- 
 less the hairs of your head are all numbered, there is 
 no God," for what to you and me is the large truth 
 of Divine guidance if there be no guiding hand in 
 our little lives? 
 
 Indeed, the one truth implies and includes the 
 other, and who can look over the years agone and 
 not see, like the man who wrote the Experiences 
 of a Roving Philosopher , little touches of a Hand 
 that shaped his course — like that little stray dog that 
 crept into the arms of Jacob Riis when he had gone 
 down to the river to drown himself, and drew him 
 back to a life of usefulness and honour. Biography 
 is full of such incidents, telling how a letter, a hand- 
 shake, the glimpse of a face, have made men over 
 and altered their careers. Nothing is more wonder- 
 ful in the retrospect than the fact that, despite our 
 mistakes and the shadows that covered us, another 
 Presence has been in our lives, and that the final re- 
 sult is in wiser hands than ours. It must be that the 
 great sermon of Horace Bushnell is true — that 
 "Every man's life is a plan of God," that there is 
 something unique, particular, and precious in each 
 soul; some work for me to do which no one else can 
 do — my path being pointed out by my aptitudes and 
 limitations; and that my business is to find my place, 
 do my work, and trust the great God. As Stevenson 
 said: 
 
DIVINE GUIDANCE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 97 
 
 "If I, from my spyhole, looking with purblind eyes upon 
 the least part of a fraction of the universe, yet perceive in 
 my ow^n life's destiny some broken evidences of a plan and 
 some signals of an overruling goodness, shall I then be so 
 mad as to complain that all cannot be deciphered?" 
 
 To realise that everything noble and to be desired, 
 by pledge of our Divine inheritance, will be ours at 
 last, if not in the tiny arc of to-day, then in the 
 larger cycle of time when we are ready and worthy 
 to receive it, surely this is a truth to bring peace 
 and courage and hope ! Divine guidance ! This is 
 it, and who would not rejoice that by the decree of 
 Heaven we really cannot proceed without it? It 
 makes life, even my little life, more worth while, and 
 redeems me from the awful sense of insignificance; 
 yea, it makes us fellow-workers with the Eternal, 
 servants of His truth, helpers of His will, the while 
 it begets in us the faith that He will guide us home. 
 
 "From Thee, great God, we spring, 
 To Thee we tend. 
 Path, motive, guide, original 
 And eternal end." 
 
PROVIDENCE 
 
 "There shall not an hair of your head perish." — 
 Luke xxi. 13. 
 
 NO truth is more precious, alike for strength In 
 life and hope in death, than the truth of the 
 Providence of God. It Is the great roof over our 
 human world, without which we are left shelterless 
 and exposed. Next in importance to the fact that 
 God exists Is the faith that He cares for men. When 
 that faith grows dim life loses most of Its high mean- 
 ing, and men seem like motes that float in the evening 
 sunlight doomed to die in the dark. Even when our 
 faith in the divine care is bright we are often enough 
 baffled, but to-day that faith is terribly tried, and 
 men everywhere are troubled by grave questionings. 
 Never was there so much calamity, and not a few, 
 giving way to an impulsive lUogic, have lost faith 
 in the divine care of men. 
 
 When days are overcast we must not chide one 
 another, but surely It Is unwise to let go of a high 
 faith when it is so sorely needed. Least of all should 
 we give up trust in Providence until we have inquired 
 Into its purpose, its nature, and its method. Much 
 of our confusion may come of our not having thought 
 things through, and we may be misreading the will 
 of the Eternal and His way of dealing with us. Of 
 
 98 
 
PROVIDENCE 99 
 
 course, not a little will remain hidden when we have 
 thought as far as our minds can go. Inevitably so, 
 because no man can grasp the full meaning of his 
 own life, much less the vast plan of which it is a part. 
 But it is not all dark, and a little calm thinking will 
 let at least a ray of light through the shadow. Let 
 us discuss this matter reverently, but with the utmost 
 frankness, evading no real difficulty, seeking to know 
 the will of Him in whose great hand we stand. 
 
 Faith in Providence means that God is our Pro- 
 vider, our Protector, and our Preserver. As to the 
 first of these, there has never been any doubt. Thus 
 much we believe if we believe in God at all, Greek 
 and Roman writers were eloquent in their praise of 
 the wise and bountiful provision for the welfare of 
 the human race, but beyond that fact their faith did 
 not go. When they tried to go further, misgiving 
 began. They seemed to think the Supreme Being too 
 great to be concerned with the details of the life of 
 man : whereas in the teaching of Jesus He is too great 
 not to do it. Hence the pathetic refrain in classic 
 lore, "The Gods do not care." In one form or an- 
 other this Idea of divine indifference pursued the 
 classic mind like a Nemesis, casting a long shadow 
 over it. Nor has that shadow entirely vanished yet, 
 despite the modern vision of the universal reign of 
 law and the increasing sense of the divine indwelling. 
 Let a great disaster befall humanity, such as that 
 which now beshadows us, and that white-faced fear 
 grips many a heart with an icy grasp, and almost 
 freezes faith. 
 
100 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Time out of mind it has been so. Almost from 
 the beginning man has been puzzled by the apparent 
 indifference of God to human affairs, and His seem- 
 ing silence to the cry of the race. Job, sorely smitten 
 and afflicted, wished that he might find God and 
 argue the matter; and Isaiah, looking up from his 
 page, said, "Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thy- 
 self." Even Jesus on the Cross felt, for one bitter 
 moment, that He was forsaken of God. Of this 
 hiding of God there is no doubt, but the real prob- 
 lem is to interpret the meaning of it. Manifestly, 
 if we are to find any clue to the arrangement of life, 
 we must first ask: What is the purpose of the life 
 of man? What is the Eternal Will trying to do with 
 us here upon the earth? Then the second question 
 follows naturally: Is the arrangement of life as we 
 know it adapted to the fulfilment of that purpose? 
 After that there remains but one other question, and 
 that is, how can we work with God toward the real- 
 isation of the divine ideal and end of our mortal 
 life? 
 
 What, then, is the purpose of human life? Man 
 thinks he was made for happiness, by which he 
 usually means health, wealth, home, kin, friends and 
 other things of a sort similar. But happiness cannot 
 be the chief end of life, as is shown by the fact that 
 those who make it their first quest do not find it. 
 What if the true end of life be something else, some- 
 thing higher, fairer, more worth while, to which all 
 these things are incidental; an ideal in which happi- 
 ness itself is a means, not an end? What if man was. 
 
PROVIDENCE 101 
 
 made to be a moral creator in a world of his own — 
 what then? As a matter of fact, does not this de- 
 scribe more truly than any other term what every man 
 knows his relation to life to be? If so, do we not 
 have to revise some of our hasty judgments as to 
 the plan of human life in general, and of our own lot 
 in particular? Our life here, so far as we can divine 
 its purpose, is a process of divine education, meant 
 to fulfil all the powers of our nature — that is, to 
 awaken and develop the soul. How do we know 
 that this is the purpose of our life? Because it is 
 the only basis upon which life is intelligible, the only 
 view of it which gives it dignity, worth, and mean- 
 ing. 
 
 If such be the purpose of life, surely we can begin 
 to see that its arrangement is admirably adapted 
 to the fulfilment of that purpose. What is the ar- 
 rangement? Let me illustrate by telling you of the 
 George Junior Republic, in which a man of my coun- 
 try found a solution of a hard social problem. He 
 set out to help the boys who are too often left to run 
 wild and uncared for in our great cities, especially 
 recalcitrant boys who defy the law. His plan was to 
 gather them together into a little community of their 
 own, where, under wise rules, they might rule them- 
 selves, and the tiny city took its name from its foun- 
 der. There they made their own laws, instituted 
 their own courts, elected their own officers, and in 
 this way learned citizenship by the practice of it, 
 their wise friend living with them the while. After 
 this manner, boys who had no sense of law or re- 
 
102 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 sponslbility were made into noble and useful men. 
 Something like that seems to be the plan of this big 
 Junior Kingdom which we call the world. Man 
 seems to have been given dominion over a tiny king- 
 dom within the Kingdom of God, a province, so to 
 speak, within the divine providence in which to de- 
 velop his life and work out his destiny. 
 
 Under the wise restrictions of universal laws the 
 Divine Father allows man to have a real influence 
 and power in the making of his own world, and pre- 
 fers to rule men in and through men themselves. 
 Hence the apparent withdrawal of God, in which 
 lies the pathos, the terror, and the glory of human 
 life. God is never far away — "in Him we live and 
 move and have our being" — but things are so or- 
 dered that man makes his own world; wisely if he 
 works in harmony with the law of God, unwisely 
 and tragically if he works in contempt of it. At 
 bottom the only question is, whether it is wise and 
 worth while for man to have so large a share in 
 determining his own life? To answer that question 
 we should have to know "the far-off divine event 
 to which the whole creation moves," and the ulti- 
 mate end in view. That we do not know; but God 
 knows it, and He thinks the end justifies the risk and 
 peril and tragedy of the process. Even we can see 
 that such a plan recognises the reality and worth of 
 the human world, and provides man with a discipline 
 such as he could not get in any other way. Not only 
 so, but it evokes and develops qualities not other- 
 wise to be developed, and makes for the attainment 
 
PROVIDENCE 103 
 
 of a character which would else be impossible. 
 
 Here is the answer, in part at least, to the many 
 dark questions which rise up out of this theme. Why, 
 with a good and wise God, is not our world perfect; 
 why weakness and disease, wrong and suffering, when 
 with such powers abroad in the universe there might 
 have been only happiness? Why has a state of so- 
 ciety been allowed in which the rich rob the poor, and 
 measureless misery and woe prevail? Why the long 
 story of man, saturated with blood and blistered with 
 tears ? Why should Love ever be crucified by cruelty 
 and hate? Why do the innocent suffer with the 
 guilty, and sometimes suffer when the guilty osten- 
 sibly escape? Why should truth be on the scaffold 
 and wrong on the throne? Why the infinite horror 
 of war, desolating, defiling, devouring the race in 
 an orgy of blood and lust and ruin? That is to ask, 
 why does not God do everything for man, leaving 
 him to live at ease with nothing to evoke what is 
 heroic and godlike in him? Would that be a better 
 state than the one in which we find ourselves? Why 
 should man be cured by miracle of his ills when, 
 by learning to cure himself, he finds not only health 
 but the laws of health? 
 
 Surely freedom, with all the risk of using it wrong- 
 ly, is better than to be puppet slaves with no real life 
 of our own. If it be the divine intent to grow pure, 
 patient, heroic human souls, in which His own image 
 shall be revealed, it is possible only in a world of 
 hardship and struggle. When once we lay hold of 
 this fact, the sense of divine guidance in our outward 
 
104 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 life will grow as we realise this providence of the 
 inward life. This does not mean that God is less 
 near, or that prayer is less real and precious; but it 
 does help us to see why, when we ask God to do for 
 us what He meant we should do for ourselves. He 
 is silent. Suppose that by some portent in the sky the 
 war should be stopped to-morrow, what then? No 
 problem would be solved, no dispute settled, no am- 
 bition changed, no hatred softened. The roots of 
 war would not be touched. Horrible as it is, it is 
 better that it go to the end that man himself may 
 learn not only its horror, but its folly and crime. 
 God will not do what man can and ought to do. 
 Man can prevail against iniquity. Man can over- 
 throw injustice. Therefore, man must, and in doing 
 it he becomes not only more just himself, but he 
 learns that justice is the ceaseless concern of God. 
 Thus God works for man in and through man and 
 seldom, if at all, in any other way. If mankind is 
 raised to better and nobler things, if evils are 
 abolished, it is always through high and faithful hu- 
 man effort. By as much as righteousness is incar- 
 nated in human character and activity, by so much 
 does it triumph upon the earth — and no more. Truth 
 asks for human voices to utter its message, justice 
 needs human hands to work its bidding — sweet 
 voices and clean hands to join the streets of the city 
 of man to the streets of the City of God. The di- 
 vine does not invade the human world for conquest. 
 He is here, moving us with inspirations, exalting us 
 with dreams, alluring us with visions, and stirring 
 
PROVIDENCE 105 
 
 us with mighty hopes; but He does not Intrude, 
 except at times to overrule huge blunders and save 
 man from destroying himself. Such seems to be the 
 method of Divine Providence, and it throws a re- 
 vealing light over the long tragic story of man. 
 
 Looking backward, one sees no lack of divine 
 providence, but an amazing display of the most 
 stupid, thick-witted human improvidence. What 
 shortsightedness, what waste, what an enormous 
 range of woeful experience, what immeasurable 
 suffering; and the guilty party was man, not God. 
 Visitors to Naples tell us that vineyards are growing 
 far up the slopes of Vesuvius well within the danger 
 zone. This, too, notwithstanding the tragedies of 
 successive generations, and the ruins of buried cities 
 nearby. Nor are those peasants the only incredibly 
 stupid men now -upon earth. The neglect of sanita- 
 tion, the annual harvest of infant mortality, the 
 crowding of masses into the slums to rot, the insanity 
 of war, the spread of loathsome diseases which pol- 
 lute human love and blight its offspring — these, and 
 a thousand other ills, spawn of selfishness and stupid- 
 ity, belong under the same head. Surely man will yet 
 learn wisdom from the failures of the past, and not 
 go on repeating them on a vaster scale. But he Is 
 still a gambler, thinking that by some chance or 
 magic he can escape the results of his folly. 
 
 Therefore, for the defeat of Ignorance, and all the 
 woes that issue from It, we look to God as He works 
 through man. By the same token, we must be His 
 fellow-workers if our life Is to have epic worth and 
 
106 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 meaning. Your life and mine may seem to signify 
 little in so large a world, but we can be, each to the 
 extent of his ability and all with equal fidelity, labour- 
 ers together with the Eternal. Our life, though it be 
 a day soon done, can help to make all other days 
 better, and add its breath to the making of an atmos- 
 phere in which injustice cannot live. Also, when hu- 
 man providence has done its utmost, we must rely 
 at last upon a providence wiser than our wisest and 
 tenderest wisdom. Life was meant to be heroic. 
 We are in jeopardy every hour, and must daily face 
 the final bereavement which waits for every man. 
 When we have put forth all our foresight and skill, 
 our light shines but a little way, and we must trust 
 Him in whose wise, protecting care we live and die. 
 Faith is the last, as it is the first, necessity of mortal 
 life. But is there no higher word for us to take with 
 us as we go to the duty and danger of the morrow? 
 Indeed, yes ; and for this we turn to Him who taught 
 us that God cares for each one of us, despite our care- 
 lessness. The faith of Jesus rested, first, upon what 
 God is, and, second, upon what man Is, revealing the 
 love of God which cares for a son made in His like- 
 ness. Holding this faith, in every age devout men 
 have felt themselves In the hand of a living, personal, 
 particular providence. No one can prove such a 
 faith to another. It is to be argued about. It is a 
 great and blessed experience open to all, and happy 
 are those who win it in the midst of the yekrs. No 
 one has put this matter better than Browning In his 
 Christmas Eve: 
 
PROVIDENCE 107 
 
 "I can but testify 
 God's care for me — no more, can I — 
 It is but for myself I know ; 
 
 No mere mote's breath but teems immense 
 With witnessings of providence: 
 
 Have I been sure, this Christmas-Eve, 
 
 God's own hand did the rainbow weave, 
 
 Whereby the truth from heaven slid 
 
 Into my soul? I cannot bid 
 
 The world admit He stooped to heal 
 
 My soul; as if in thunder-peal, 
 
 Where one heard noise and one saw flame, 
 
 I only knew He named my name." 
 
THE MINISTRY OF SORROW 
 
 "So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even 
 my wife died." — Ezekiel xxiv. i8. 
 
 ALMOST no facts of a personal kind are to be 
 found in the writings of the great Hebrew 
 prophets. Only here and there a hint is dropped 
 that each had his own home, and that behind the 
 majesty of his public ministry flowed a little stream 
 of private affection. Once or twice the curtain is 
 lifted for a moment, and we have a ghmpse of the 
 home of the prophet, his wife, his child. The two 
 children of Isaiah, with their gotesque names, is an 
 example; the tragedy in the home of Hosea is an- 
 other. Always it is for the same reason that the 
 fleeting glance at the prophet in his human relations 
 is granted us. That is to say, when his personal 
 experience serves his purpose as a symbol or a par- 
 able of his public message. 
 
 Who does not feel his heart ache as he reads the 
 poignant story of the bitter bereavement of Ezekiel? 
 Though so many dim centuries have flowed past, it 
 moves us still: the anguish of a lifetime told in the 
 studied reticence of a few words. It is doubly sad 
 when we remember that there was never a lonelier 
 soul than Ezekiel, who was doomed to live in an 
 alien land, and to deliver a message to which there 
 
 1 08 
 
THE MINISTRY OF SORROW 109 
 
 was no response. Only one consolation was left him. 
 At the end of a day of fruitless exhortation he was 
 assured of a welcome at home, and "the desire of his 
 eyes" was at his side. Vague is the figure of his 
 wife, but this we know, she was greatly loved. 
 
 Suddenly the blow fell. Whether by some dark 
 plague, or by mysterious failure of life, with but brief 
 warning, he was left utterly alone. The agony of 
 parting, shared or unshared, scarred for ever his 
 memory of that day, and as the night fell he was left 
 desolate. 
 
 Yet his public duty could not be foregone. As if 
 to mock his grief, he was forbidden the poor re- 
 sources for the alleviation of his sorrow. He had to 
 appear next morning as if nothing had happened, 
 as if he did not care, as if that black day was like 
 any other day. Never was the hand of God laid 
 heavier upon the heart of a man. But somehow 
 strength was given him for that day, and if he 
 suffered as a man he triumphed as a prophet. At 
 last his fellow exiles, startled out of their impene- 
 trable indifference, were no longer dull of ear and 
 intractable in argument. They became inquirers, 
 and the message of God could be delivered. The 
 unutterable sorrow which shut Ezekiel into lifelong 
 solitude, and made the joy of the hearthstone but a 
 memory, had not been in vain. Surely it is worth 
 while to recall this tragedy, when tidings of sorrow 
 come every morning to more than two thousand 
 homes in this land alone. Private griefs are the price 
 
110 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 of the awakening of a nation and the liberty of the 
 world, and God thinks it worth while. 
 
 Sorrow is more spiritual than pain, more exalting 
 and more revealing — albeit the two are often inter- 
 woven in the web of our lives. While we cannot 
 fathom all the mystery of sorrow, so far from being 
 a cloud over reason, it illumines it, and may become 
 a source of insight. This at least is true: whatever 
 is higher than happiness is revealed to us only by 
 the loss of happiness, and that which is highest of all 
 finds little place in us until we have walked the sor- 
 rowful way. An old mystic said, speaking out of his 
 deep and tender wisdom, "Were there anything 
 nobler than sorrow, God would have redeemed us 
 by it." Among the qualities which sorrow should 
 foster in us let me name three — chief of which is 
 Courage. Mark Rutherford was right when he 
 said that courage is the root of every virtue, one 
 of the greatest possible qualities of character. Who 
 has purged himself of fear can look straight into the 
 face of life and walk with soul erect and untroubled. 
 Louise Wilcox, in her little essay on "The Road to 
 Joy," which she is wise enough to know leads through 
 sorrow, writes these golden words : 
 
 "When you come to think of it, courage is the one virtue 
 never to be spared. Gentleness may be swallowed up in 
 righteous indignation, pity in justice; truth may be set to 
 one side by tenderness or tact. Only courage is unalterable, 
 and stands by us and never betrays us. The body may 
 sicken, but the indomitable spirit rides the storm. The 
 brave soul may blunder, but never irretrievably ; or if, worn 
 
THE MINISTRY OF SORROW 111 
 
 out, he must fall at last, he falls alone. Only the weakling 
 drags others down in his ruin. Courage steadies the hand 
 and clears the brain. It changes the odds. The brave soul 
 has three chances to one. Once we have learned the trick, 
 it is easy to be brave. Live one minute at a time. Surely 
 you can stand a minute. If you give up, it is because you 
 cannot bear the years, next month, not because you cannot 
 stand the moment now. It may all change in a moment. It 
 is so the brave man lives. Courage, after all, is but an ad- 
 junct of simplicity of mind, singleness of purpose." 
 
 What most of us are seeking is security, if not for 
 ourselves, at least for those whom we love more 
 than we love our own lives. But security is just 
 the one thing a human being cannot have. Indeed, 
 it is the damnation of him who gets it. It disinte- 
 grates a man. Why it is so is hard to know, but 
 it is so. What we need is not security, but a mastery 
 over life, and only courage can give it to us. Each 
 of us should take every reasonable precaution, but 
 we must never forget that life is the great adven- 
 ture. Not love, not marriage, not business — they are 
 only chapters in the book. The great thing is to take 
 the road fearlessly, to have courage, to live out our 
 life at its best. Mastery! It comes only with the 
 knowledge of our power to endure; no one is safe 
 until he can stand everything that can happen to him. 
 Courage is security, and there is no other kind. It 
 is not sorrow, but the fear of it, that unnerves us. 
 When a man has felt the worst life can inflict, he is 
 free. There is nothing then for him to fear, and he 
 can be a helper of his trembling fellow mortals. 
 
112 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 But to courage he must add that sweet healing 
 grace of sympathy, without which no one can really 
 help his fellows. From his sorrow Ezekiel learned 
 sympathy, and when he was sent to the captives by 
 the river Chebar, and found them hanging their 
 harps on the willows, unable to sing the songs of the 
 Lord in a strange land, he knew how to take his 
 place dumbly by their side: "I sat where they sat." 
 Surely that is the perfection of sympathy, to be able 
 to sit where another sits, to see from his point of 
 view, and to suffer with him in the silence of a sor- 
 row too great for words. The bitter bereavement 
 of the prophet prepared him for a ministry of 
 sympathy, than which there is no service more 
 needed in a world scarred by griefs and graves. The 
 instance of John Bright is familiar. Bereaved of his 
 young wife, he received a visit of condolence from 
 Cobden. What words of sympathy Cobden may have 
 uttered we do not know, but after a time he looked 
 up and said: "Bright, there are thousands and thou- 
 sands of homes in England at this moment where 
 wives and mothers and children are dying of hunger. 
 Now, when the first paroxysm of your grief is passed, 
 I would advise you to come with me, and we will 
 never stop until the Corn Laws are repealed." And 
 so it came about; he thought of others and bore his 
 grief, and his sympathy lent wings to his words. 
 
 Often Ibsen seems to lose his wings and gives us 
 only a sociological clinic, but when he wrote Little 
 Eyolf his insight was deep and revealing. It is the 
 drama of the tragical awakening of two intensely 
 
THE MINISTRY OF SORROW 113 
 
 self-centred beings to the moral responsibilities of 
 life. As usual in an Ibsen play, the drama has be- 
 gun before the curtain rises. Alfred Allmers has 
 been writing a great book, but he concludes that the 
 best of a man goes into his thinking, and that what 
 he puts on paper is of little worth. His wife, whose 
 Intense absorption in him is partly sensual and wholly 
 selfish, is jealous of their little boy, whose coming 
 was unwelcomed and unwanted. Little Eyolf is a 
 cripple, whose infirmity may be traced to the sin of 
 his parents, and who is unloved save by the warm 
 heart of his aunt. A frightful catastrophe falls and 
 the boy is drowned, but not before the awakening of 
 his father had begun. 
 
 "Can you conceive the meaning of a thing like this 
 that has been done to Rita and me?" groans the 
 father. "The meaning, I say, for, after all, there 
 must be a meaning in it. Life, existence, destiny, 
 cannot be utterly meaningless." 
 
 Soon dim meanings begin to glimmer through 
 their woe, though at first they can only see that "sor- 
 row makes us wicked and hateful." They begin to 
 wonder whether the dead boy had been anything 
 more to them than a "little stranger boy," whether 
 he had not meant more to the gentle aunt who had 
 taken him to her heart the moment he became a 
 cripple; whether they had not gone on demanding 
 more of life and of each other, and giving nothing. 
 There follows a scene which, for reproaches, accu- 
 sations, and pitiless self-torture, has hardly another 
 to surpass it. Blind, bitter, and hateful, they grope 
 
114 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 their way slowly to the word Retribution, and they 
 begin to see that life means giving, not getting. Sen- 
 sualism and selfishness begin to give way; sorrow 
 ceases to mean only deprivation, and they know that 
 their boy was not born, nor did he die in vain. The 
 sun sinks beneath the waters of the fiord, and a cry- 
 ing comes to them from the village of fisher folk on 
 the beach below their villa — the crying of children 
 neglected and abused. The mother-heart of Rita 
 opens wide, and she vows to take into her desolate 
 home those little ones whose homes are desolate. 
 
 "I will take them to my heart in our little Eyolf's 
 place. There is an empty place within me and I 
 must try to fill it with something — with something 
 like love." 
 
 It all moves slowly, tenderly, softly to a climax 
 so exquisite that the pathos of it makes the heart 
 ache. It is very solemn, very beautiful, very won- 
 derful. The red sun sinks into the sea. The white 
 moonlight envelops husband and wife as they look 
 out from the terrace of the villa upon the waters 
 beneath which their boy sleeps. They have found 
 peace, "a Sabbath peace," the wife calls it, in the 
 only way that mortals can ever find it; that is, by 
 being lifted, through sorrow, into a wider sympathy 
 and service. Such is the law of the world as read 
 by all who walk the shadowy way with courage and 
 faith. It is not tears, nor yet the clenched hand and 
 compressed lips and the grim, tense silence that speak 
 of a grief bravely borne and triumphed over. No, 
 it is when from a secretly aching heart there is sent 
 
THE MINISTRY OF SORROW 115 
 
 the Impulse to stretch out a heartening hand to an- 
 other, and when words of sympathy flow from the 
 lips that might have been written with their own 
 grief — It Is then that the victory Is won. 
 
 If taken aright, sorrow has a deep religious mis- 
 sion; It gives us the power of insight, which adds a 
 new dimension to life, unveiling what else would be 
 dim. So all seers agree, from the far time when 
 the teachers of India said that before the eyes can see 
 clearly, they must be washed with tears; and before 
 the voice can speak the highest truth. It must have 
 lost its power to wound. That this Is true, the life of 
 the prophet Hosea — the Whittier of Hebrew poetry 
 — ^bears witness. All through his prophecy we can 
 trace the tragedy of his broken home, the Infidelity 
 of his wife, and how his renewed trust In women was 
 shattered — how his love was wounded to death, but 
 still lived on In pity. There is no other explanation 
 adequate of his amazing Insight into the thwarted 
 tenderness of God for His people. When rightly 
 read, the story that seems too shocking Is the unveil- 
 ing of sorely tried love, both In man and In God. 
 The cost of revelation Is laid bare before our eyes. 
 Of many a page of the Bible It may be said, If the 
 love of God Inspired it, the sorrow of man was. 
 needed before It could be written down. 
 
 Courage, Sympathy, Insight; power to endure, a 
 heart to feel, and eyes to see — if sorrow can give us 
 these things, It has a benign and redeeming ministry 
 to the soul. Not all win such trophies from their 
 sorrow, but it is possible for all to do so. Fire burns 
 
116 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 wood, it hardens clay, it softens steel. One man is 
 ruined by a great sorrow, another is redeemed; it 
 depends on how we meet it, and in what spirit. 
 Weak yielding is as fatal as bitter rebellion, but if 
 we meet our sorrow as George Matheson met his, 
 there will be granted us a sense of "the love that will 
 not let us go," and a new fellowship with Him who, 
 being made perfect through suffering, became our 
 Leader and our Saviour. 
 
THE GOD OF COMFORT 
 
 "The Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; 
 who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be 
 able to comfort them which are in any trouble." — 2 COR. 
 i- 3. 4- 
 
 SOME one has said that the deep difference be- 
 tween men is their capacity for sympathy, and 
 that the future is with those who have most of it. If 
 that be so, surely St. Paul must be reckoned as one 
 of the greatest of men, because his heart was a foun- 
 tain of sympathy always overflowing. There was 
 something haunting in the pity of the man, some- 
 thing healing in his tenderness, and the older he 
 grew the richer it became. In nothing was he more 
 like his Master, whose he was, and whom he served, 
 and to reproduce whose life was his sacred ambition. 
 Hence the words of this text, which touch the heart 
 and melt it, turning its sorrow into song. 
 
 If taken out of their context, one would hardly 
 guess that these words were written to a Church 
 perplexed, divided, torn by scandal, and threatened 
 with disaster, many of whose members had critic- 
 ised the Apostle cruelly. Even so, instead of taking 
 his critics to task, he strikes the note of comfort 
 and compassion, as he would do if he were speaking 
 to the Church of to-day, so sorely tried, so bafiled 
 
 117 
 
118 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 and confused. Too many hard words have been 
 aimed at the Church. Criticism is too easy; any- 
 body can indulge in it. Whatever may be said of 
 the shortcomings of the Church, and no doubt they 
 are many, it has not failed in its attitude of com- 
 passion towards the world-tragedy. And just now 
 its ministry lies there, or nowhere. What we need 
 is the triumphant faith of St. Paul, the song of one 
 who had found a medicine for all ills, a solace for all 
 sorrows, in the God of Comfort. 
 
 Here is a vision of God, the compassionate and 
 merciful Comforter of humanity; and what a field 
 there is for His benign activity to-day ! Never was 
 the world so full of tragedy, horror, and atrocity. 
 The nations are wrapped In shadow and all life is 
 darkened. The earth is stained with blood. Cal- 
 amities sweep whole continents. Every household, 
 every heart is pierced and suffering. Strong men 
 go about the streets lonely, bewildered, yearning, 
 wounded. The world is bereaved. There are thou- 
 sands of dying children, and mothers who want to 
 die. Death, disaster, and famine are comrades. 
 Our human march Is a requiem, and the sounds that 
 fill the earth are the sounds of battle and mourning. 
 At such a time, and In such a world, we must turn 
 to Him who can comfort us, so that we may be able 
 to comfort others. Across the ages, like the tones of 
 an evening bell, come the words of the Prophet to 
 the pulpit of to-day: "Comfort ye, comfort ye. My 
 people, salth your God!" What is comfort? Truly 
 it is more than ease, more than consolation, 
 
THE GOD OF COMFORT 119 
 
 more than those Influences which succour distress, 
 soothe suffering, and alleviate grief. It is not 
 simply a stoic resignation which submits, but the 
 strength to bear and triumph. Unfortunately the 
 finer, firmer meaning of the word has been well- 
 nigh lost in the idea of consoling. To comfort, in 
 the true sense, is to make another strong with our 
 strength; to share our strength with him, because at 
 the moment he has less than he needs and we have 
 more than the occasion requires. Turning his 
 thoughts away from his sorrow, reminding him that 
 he is not alone in his grief, and recalling the memory 
 of happy days agone or the hope of better days to be 
 — surely that is a benign ministry. But we must re- 
 turn to the deeper meaning of comfort at a time when 
 It is so much needed, if so that we may learn to give 
 somewhat of ourselves to those smitten and afllicted. 
 The derivation of the word is eloquent : It means that 
 which we take alongside to support and sustain us 
 — just as the word "tribulation" in the text means 
 that which rubs, irritates, and makes the heart sore. 
 An English essayist once said that if he could be 
 reborn and live on earth again, he thought he should 
 like to be a tug-boat. Of course, a tug-boat is very 
 small, and its labour Is confined to the harbour, but 
 It can answer a signal for aid, and tow a great ship 
 out of trouble Into safety — coming alongside In time 
 of need. To-day men are signalling for aid, silently, 
 pathetically — longing for Something or Some one 
 to come alongside and help. Now, God is ever 
 
120 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 alongside each of us, closer than we realise, and, as a 
 fact, we depend upon Him more than we are aware. 
 
 "And thus by day and night unconsciously 
 The heart lives by that faith the lips deny, 
 God knoweth why." 
 
 Yes, unconsciously; for It Is not so much that men 
 deny God, but that they do not realise how much they 
 trust Him In whom they live and move. There is in 
 humanity a great unconfessed faith, to interpret 
 which Is a large part of the ministry of a teacher of 
 religion. Every man has a mystic sense of God — 
 dim, perhaps, but none the less real because dim — 
 by which he is sustained in the often strange medley 
 of his experience. All about us to-day we see folk 
 who talk nothing of religion, and yet they display a 
 sublime and heroic faith which neither they nor we 
 can explain. Even those of us who fancy that we 
 are religious often attribute to Time, and not to 
 God, the benign influence by which a great sorrow 
 is healed and at last changed into something rich and 
 revealing. In answer to the question of a young 
 clergyman as to her religious belief, Lizzie Case re- 
 plied that it was the inherited faith of her fathers — 
 the Friends. Whereupon the young zealot said that 
 she was an unbeliever and would be lost. "Never!" 
 she cried. "If there were no true God to trust I 
 should still believe in the gods of the woods and 
 the streams. In fact, I believe in everything — in 
 God, nature, man — ^there is no unbelief!" And yet 
 
THE GOD OF COMFORT 121 
 
 she it was who wrote the lines, one stanza of which 
 has just been quoted : 
 
 "There is no unbeh'ef! 
 Who plants a seed beneath the sod, 
 And waits to see it push away the clod, 
 Trusts he in God. 
 
 There is no unbelief! 
 Whoever looks on when dear eyelids close, 
 And dares to live when life has only woes, 
 
 God's comfort knows." 
 
 Thus God comforts us in myriad ways beyond our 
 tracing, even when we are unaware of His presence, 
 as these lovely lines tell us. To be more specific. 
 He comforts us, first of all, by the fact that He is. 
 Often we are not able to follow His footsteps; but 
 the fact that He exists, that His Hand is on the 
 helm, that His will is working through seeming chaos 
 — such a faith gives us strength to live. To a child 
 wakened in the night and frightened by the dark- 
 ness, the voice of its father in the next room is a com- 
 fort — just to know that he is there is enough. Just 
 so, to know that God is there is the comfort and 
 solace of mankind in the night of time : which may 
 be the meaning of the mysteriously august and haunt- 
 ing name of God in the earlier books of the Bible, 
 where He is called the great *T AM." Herein lies 
 the bitter tragedy of atheism — there is no one there, 
 and man is left to wander in a labyrinth homeless 
 and alone. Surely there is no keener pain than a 
 
U2 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 loss of the sense of the reality of God, doubly so for 
 a refined and sensitive nature, as witness the words 
 of Nietzsche lamenting the loss of his right to pray 
 — words which move like the overture of a great 
 symphony of despair: 
 
 "Never more wilt thou pray, never more worship, never 
 more repose in boundless trust — thou renouncest the priv- 
 ilege of standing before an ultimate wisdom, an ultimate 
 mercy, an ultimate power, and unharnessing thy thoughts — 
 thou hast no constant watcher and friend for thy seven 
 solitudes — thou livest without gazing upon a mountain that 
 hath snow on its head and fire at its heart — there is now 
 no redeemer for thee, no one to promise a better life — there 
 is no more reason in that which happens, no love in that 
 which shall happen to thee — thy heart hast now no resting- 
 place, where it needeth only to find, not to seek — thou re- 
 fusest any ultimate peace, thou desirest the eternal recur- 
 rence of war and peace — man, of thy self-denial, wilt thou 
 deny thyself all this ? Whence wilt thou gain the strength ?" 
 
 Few have had the courage thus to face the raw 
 horror that lies at the end of the logic of denial, and 
 the bereavement which it brings. Against this ulti- 
 mate woe rises the fact of God, and because God is 
 there, even when we cannot feel the touch of His 
 great hand, we know that purity is not a delusion, 
 that justice is not a fiction, and that hope is not a 
 dream. Can we know anything beyond the bare fact 
 that there is a Power not ourselves which shapes our 
 ends, rough-hew them how we will? Manifestly! 
 Next to the fact that God lives is the faith that He 
 
THE GOD OF COMFORT 123 
 
 cares for us, and that all suffering com^s finally to 
 be endured by Him — the deep truth over which 
 Dora Greenwell was wont to ponder. How can we 
 know the sympathy of God, and that in all our 
 afflictions He Is afflicted? The flowers do not tell us 
 this truth. They are as happy at a funeral as on a 
 bridal altar. They do not know, they do not care. 
 Nor do the birds tell It to us, although If It were 
 not so it Is hard to know why the birds sing. They 
 were singing that day when I witnessed an unfor- 
 gettable scene In Flanders — the burial of two hun- 
 dred men at once ! They did not know, they did not 
 care. How can we know that there Is one who 
 knows, who cares, who feels for us and with us In our 
 woe? 
 
 Sometime you must go out of your way. It you 
 have not alreac^y done so, and study the memorial 
 to sweet Margaret MacDonald In Lincoln's Inn 
 Fields. She Is seated with her arms outstretched, 
 her robes so falling over her arms as to suggest a 
 brooding mother-bird, and underneath the hovering 
 wings little children nestle and play. Whence comes 
 the brooding, hallowing love embodied In the life 
 of that lovely woman, whose Image recalls the atti- 
 tude of the Master as He wept over the city of the 
 people of his fathers ? That Is to ask. What Is the 
 source of this stream of pity which softens and 
 sweetens the world, seeking to melt the hardness of 
 Its winter Into the joy of summer? Is man an exotic 
 upon the earth? Or is he a child of nature and a 
 little brother of the stars? What wells up in his 
 
124 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 heart must be In the heart of nature, else she could 
 not give It to her son. Thus when we seek the 
 source of the love that hallows human life we find 
 its fountain in the compassionate heart of God, 
 whence It came and to which It returns, whose love 
 is the final solace of the world. Here Is the basis of 
 the faith that God Is more than Power, more than 
 Mind, and that there is, and must be, a heart of 
 tenderness behind the seeming hardness of life and 
 death. 
 
 Hence the words of the Master as He sat at table 
 with His friends in the Upper Room, in which the 
 very soul of His religion is revealed: "Ye believe 
 In God, believe also in Me" — that is, believe that 
 God Is like Him, in Him, revealing Himself In and 
 through Him. What more do we need to know for 
 our strengthening and fortifying, for our support 
 and upholding, even in the direst woe that can befall 
 us? If we can be sure of God in Christ, there Is 
 nothing that we cannot bear! With St. Paul this 
 assurance was no mere theory, nor yet a vision, but 
 a verity attested by those Inward reahsatlons that 
 belong to the life of faith and service. Here lay 
 the secret of his triumphant and rejoicing discovery 
 of the reality, the richness, the radiance of God 
 the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, 
 by whose grace he was sustained in his private sor- 
 rows and in his heroic and dedicated ministry. 
 Hence, also, his Insight Into the purpose and uses 
 of comfort, "That we may be able to comfort them 
 
THE GOD OF COMFORT 125 
 
 which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith 
 we ourselves are comforted of God." 
 
 Sympathy, one feels, was not a ruling native trait 
 with St. Paul, as it is with those who hear always 
 "the great stream of human tears falling through 
 the shadows of the world." It was a grace learned 
 in the school of Christ, and made perfect through 
 suffering. Perhaps he found this secret the more 
 surely just because he did not seek it selfishly and 
 for his own sorrow alone. Nor should we. How- 
 ever deeply wounded we may be, however sorely we 
 feel the need of healing for our own hurt and heart- 
 ache, if we are to find comfort in any satisfying 
 measure it must be by ministering the comfort of 
 God to others. Here is the finest of all arts, asking 
 for all that a man has of tact, of tenderness, of 
 skill, and of fortitude, so difficult is it to know what 
 to say and how to say it. All words seem metallic, 
 futile, and worthless, yet we must not be silent; much 
 less forget those little tokens which help to break 
 the awful stillness which death makes when it passes 
 by. Any little token — a gift of flowers, a hand- 
 clasp, a tender, strong word — is like the answer to 
 a signal of distress, and God, from whom it comes, 
 sends it through you to His needy child. 
 
 Who that lives to-day does not long for a finer 
 art of sympathy, some exquisite skill and power 
 whereby to lift wounded souls into the consecrating 
 comfort of God! There is not a pulpit in this land 
 that does not yearn for such a power, seeking it by 
 prayer and tears, beseeching an outpouring of the 
 
126 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Spirit of the Comforter equal to "the Pentecost of 
 Calamity" which has descended upon us. Oh! let 
 us seek the God of all Comfort who, imaged as a 
 Dove, broods over our sorrowing humanity, that so 
 we may be able to comfort those who are smitten and 
 afflicted in a world at war. 
 
 Like the dew, Thy peace distil; 
 Guide, subdue our wayward will, 
 Things of Christ unfolding still. 
 
 Comforter Divine. 
 Gentle, awful, holy Guest, 
 Make Thy temple in each breast ; 
 There Thy presence be confessed. 
 
 Comforter Divine. 
 With us, for us, intercede. 
 And with voiceless groanings plead 
 Our unutterable need, 
 
 Comforter Divine. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 
 
 "Neither shall there be any more pain." — Rev. xxi. 4. 
 
 SURELY there is not upon this earth a book 
 more compassionate, and therefore none more 
 truly wise, than our great old Bible. It knows the 
 life of man, how beset it is with ills, and through 
 all its pages there breathes a sweet-toned pity that 
 is not only haunting but healing. And of all its 
 prophecies, not one touches us more deeply than this 
 vision of a time when sorrow and suffering shall 
 cease. It is uttered in a few simple words, but they 
 are among the most beautiful and appealing ever 
 written. Indeed, it is the only definite and distinct 
 prophecy in the Bible of the final end of pain. There 
 is nothing else so strong, so clear, and it is good to 
 know that the book which feels the pain of Hfe so 
 keenly sees to the end of it. 
 
 Such an assurance is sorely needed in this world at 
 all times, but peculiarly so just now when the whole 
 earth is one vast hospital, and the fact of pain is so 
 much with us. Of course, the problem of pain is 
 new only in its magnitude and intensity. Time out 
 of mind our suffering humanity has asked, of the 
 surrounding mystery. Why? The contemplation of 
 this question produced Buddhism, one of the three 
 world-religions. Greek drama is full of it. It is the 
 
 127 
 
128 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 thesis of the book, of Job, the one great poetic drama 
 of the Hebrews. Its most perfect expression, per- 
 haps, is in the line of the Psalmist: "I cried unto 
 Thee, O Lord, and unto the Lord I made supplica- 
 tion. What profit is there in my blood?" What a 
 question in the light of the far-flung battle line ! To- 
 day men are acutely aware of the presence of pain, 
 and they are troubled by it as never before. 
 
 Indeed, this was true before the awful apocalypse 
 of war which has heightened everything and evoked 
 all the old issues anew. Along about the middle of 
 the last century the world seemed to wake up to the 
 fact of suffering, and the horror of it. Of a sudden 
 Darwin put forth a thesis which staggered alike the 
 intellect and heart of the race. It was an appalling 
 revelation of pain, of untold ages of blood and terror 
 through which creation had already passed, with a 
 new sense of the place of suffering in the order of 
 life. The whole of nature, from a dewdrop to a 
 star, was seen to be a battlefield. Huxley declared 
 that he could imagine no sadder story than the his- 
 tory of sentient life upon the earth. War seemed 
 to be the law of the world, and suffering its life. 
 Tennyson summed up the feeling in his phrase, "Na- 
 ture red in tooth and claw." What this disclosure 
 meant as a shock to faith we of this age can hardly 
 realise. Happily, a deeper knowledge of nature has 
 brought us to a better mood, but the shadow is still 
 with us. 
 
 Tender hearts there have been in all times, but it 
 seems agreed that the man of to-day is more highly 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 129 
 
 organised, and therefore more sensitive to pain, than 
 were the men of former times. When one reads the 
 story of the Middle Ages, to go no further back, 
 one is amazed equally by the brutality and the cal- 
 lousness of men. When a feudal magnate was sus- 
 pected of treason to his overlord, all his servants 
 were seized and tortured to death in order to extract 
 evidence of his guilt. If, after the last shriek had 
 died away, no evidence was forthcoming, he was con- 
 gratulated by his peers. No one seemed to think 
 of the poor wretches who had died in agony. King 
 James I. presided over a case of torture for witch- 
 craft the details of which are too horrible for de- 
 scription, many of which were suggested by the king 
 himself. Imagine the king who reigns to-day being 
 able or willing to witness such a scene, much less 
 enjoy it! Marie Twain doubted his ability to see 
 even a vivisector vivisected, because his own feelings 
 would not allow him to get all the joy out of it which 
 he felt he was entitled to. 
 
 Naturally, then, owing to the increased sensitive- 
 ness of the race, the problem of pain in relation to 
 religious faith has assumed larger proportions in our 
 day. It was not so with our foreslres. In all their 
 elaborate debates they seldom mention, much less 
 discuss, the question. Sin vexed their thinking not 
 less than their living, but it did not often occur to 
 them to question the goodness of God because of the 
 sufferings of the world, whereas with us it is almost 
 the first thing we think of. Much of the scepticism 
 of the last century had its sources in the mystery of 
 
130 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 pain pressing upon sensitive hearts. One example 
 out of many is the terrible indictment of the cruelty 
 
 -4* of nature by John Stuart Mill, which is a classic. 
 Perhaps it is here, in a deep and sensitive heart, 
 that we must look for the secret of what has been 
 called, albeit not very wisely, the pessimism of 
 
 — Thomas Hardy. However that may be, to-day in 
 many a heart there is the fear that our highest faiths 
 are too good to be true In presence of the vast woe 
 of life. 
 
 What has Science to say about the problem of 
 pain? For one thing, and a very wise thing, it 
 warns us not to read our own sensitive feelings back 
 into the lower forms of life, as that only exaggerates 
 a mystery which is large enough without being mag- 
 nified; also. It reminds us that nature does not waste 
 her methods; whatever she may do with her ma- 
 terials, and therefore that pain has a purpose and a 
 service in the order of things. Indeed, It has a 
 definite and benign purpose as a signal of distress 
 telling us that something Is wrong, and must be set 
 right. Without it the race would have perished long 
 ago. Sooner or later every "v^ng step, every false 
 road, ends in pain and is revi^rfed by pain. So that 
 pain, instead of being a w^iwon torture, is a wise 
 monitor, and even if the sMritual urge was strong 
 enough In man to Iilipel h^^ upward, he would still 
 need liability to pain to teach him the right way. 
 Nor is that all. Science i'nslsts that susceptibility 
 to pain Is never developed beyond the point where 
 it is needed, and when it has served its end it ceases. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 131 
 
 Such teaching Is worth keeping In mind and thinking 
 about. 
 
 If sensitiveness to pain Is never developed where it 
 Is not needed, It must be that the Increased sensi- 
 tiveness to It In our age Is needed for the nurture 
 of qualities not otherwise to be acquired. Surely 
 this Is a ray of light; and also, since pain ceases 
 when it has done its work, we have a hint of why It 
 still exists and a prophecy of the time when It will 
 be no more. Pain is useful as a protection, as a pun- 
 ishment for past folly, as a spur to new effort, and as 
 a warning against future error. So far — and It Is 
 not very far — the way is clear; but when we think 
 of the seemingly needless tortures of the Innocent, 
 and the apparently gratuitously agonising forms of 
 pain, we are oppressed. There remains a mystery 
 into which we catinot fully enter, as Benson taught us 
 in "The Angel of Pain," a study In symbolism 
 shadowing forth many things. Merival in that story 
 is a hermit who left London to live with nature, and 
 the longer he lived with nature, and the longer he 
 lived in the wild the more he became aware of mys- 
 teries he could not solve. Faint and far off he hears 
 the pipes of Pan placing the Hymn of All Things, 
 and he knows that n(^'mortal can behold Pan without 
 dying of panic. Stljr, he dreams that Pan will come 
 to him, revealing in a blinding flash of joy how pain 
 and death, which are everywhere, are a part of the 
 divine perfection. Whether this was what he learned 
 or not, nobody knows ; for his friend, hearing a ter- 
 rible cry in the, night, ran to him and found him dead 
 
132 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 — whether of too much joy or too much sorrow, no 
 one knew. 
 
 Nevertheless, we are not left without light, and 
 it may be doubted if any one has written of "The 
 Mystery of Pain" with more insight and wisdom 
 than James Hinton, an English physician born in 
 Reading well-nigh a hundred years ago. The man 
 himself is of interest, not only for his service as a 
 man of science but for the seerlike quality of his 
 mind. He was a medical mystic. Those who knew 
 him intimately write of him with unusual rever- 
 ence, as of a man in whom there was a haunting 
 loveliness not often seen. His essay in study of Pain 
 is rather hard to read, but it is rewarding. Its mes- 
 sage to the sufferer may be stated briefly: "My 
 thought was that all which we feel as painful is really 
 giving something that our fellows are better for, 
 even though we cannot trace it." There are many 
 facts to show that suffering has a value beyond the 
 sufferer, as when a mother suffers for her child, a 
 martyr for his faith, a hero for his country; and 
 these facts, he holds, justify a like faith in instances 
 where no such value can be traced. Much depends, 
 of course, on the way in which we bear pain, whether 
 selfishly or not, since we have within us the power 
 to transfigure it if we will. That is to say. Pain, 
 plus unselfishness, equals joy. Hinton does not ex- 
 plain all the mystery of pain — no mortal can — ^but he 
 does make It more bearable by showing how it may 
 be turned into good for ourselves and for others. 
 
 Some of us may have known much of pain, but 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 133 
 
 most of us are standing outside the problem, talking 
 about it, fearful of it, sometimes whining about it. 
 When we appeal from our own sensitiveness to the 
 lives of the great sufferers, wonderful is the answer 
 that comes back. Oddly enough, the great sufferers 
 have been, for the most part, the great believers. 
 With them pain is a fact in favour of faith. They 
 find a secret, unguessed joy at the heart of pain, 
 which, as George Eliot said, "we can only tell from 
 pain by its being what we should choose before every- 
 thing." Such is the testimony of a host of heroic 
 souls. Stevenson was one; Elizabeth Browning was 
 another, and she never regretted having learned in 
 suffering what she taught in song. Anguish instructed 
 her in joy, and solitude in the value of society. The 
 great sufferers do not deny pain — still less seek it — 
 but they master 'it, making it serve for the enrichment 
 of the soul; and therein they are wise. For progress 
 is not going to abolish suffering; it is inherent in the 
 discord between sense and soul, dream and deed. 
 Therefore if it falls to our lot let us face it and 
 vanquish it, finding in it something sacrificial both 
 for ourselves and for the world. 
 
 No one ever stated the ministry of pain more 
 vividly than did that mysterious Era Ugo Bassi, who 
 appeared in the streets of Rome in the early years of 
 the last century. He was master of a strange elo- 
 quence which stirred men deeply. When he spoke 
 of courage men followed him straight into the 
 cholera hospitals and stayed there until the plague 
 was ended. All that remains of his life is a frag- 
 
134 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 ment of sermon in a hospital to those smitten with 
 mortal ill. Fra Ugo took for his text, "I am the 
 vine, and ye are the branches." He showed how the 
 vine does not grow as it wills, but is tied to a stake 
 like a martyr. When it begins to feel the sweetness 
 of life, then comes the husbandman with his pruning- 
 hook, leaving it bleeding and sore. At last comes the 
 vintage, and out of its suffering and striving red rivu- 
 lets of wine flow to bless and to refresh. Then the 
 preacher turned to the long rows of hospital beds on 
 either side, and asked, "Do I need to draw the lesson 
 of this life?" Manifestly not, since it is as plain as 
 day, and attested by the facts in every field of life, 
 that "whoso suffers most hath most to give." The 
 Roman Church, with its deep insight into the saying 
 of St. Paul, "I fill up that which is behind in the 
 afflictions of Christ," discovers in pain a power which 
 in the extent of its working can be but dimly guessed 
 at; a mighty power of expiation ever joining itself 
 to the one Atonement — inseparable, indeed, from 
 that Atonement, which has given value to all suffer- 
 ing so that not even a moth is "shrlvell'd In a fruit- 
 less fire." Lacordaire, in words that do not at once 
 reveal their awful depth of meaning, speaks of the 
 mute and many sufferers of earth as being "the ob- 
 scure victims of the Cross which has saved them." 
 Deeper than that we cannot go Into the mystery 
 of pain. The revelation of our religion was made 
 through it. When we look upon the Cross we know 
 for a brief time that the turbid ebb and flow of 
 human misery is not meaningless. There is One who 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 135 
 
 knows, One who feels, One who suffers with us in our 
 pain; and of this faith was born the vision of the 
 Christian seer on the isle that is called Patmos: 
 "And God Himself shall wipe away all tears from 
 their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither 
 sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more 
 pain; for the former things are passed away." 
 
THE COMPASSION OF CHRIST 
 
 "And Jesus saw much people, and was moved with com- 
 passion toward them." — Mark vi. 34. 
 
 NOTHING Is more Interesting than a crowd. 
 It attracts us, not from curiosity alone, but 
 because we love the company of our kind and the joy 
 that comes of sharing our feelings with our fellows. 
 Often I go out Into a London street just to watch 
 the endless flow of people, and people, and people. 
 I know none of them, yet I know them all, for are 
 they not my kith and kin, with hopes and fears and 
 faiths like, my own? I am won by some and re- 
 pelled by others for what their faces seem to tell 
 me of their Inward selves — faces that are like 
 glimpses of a landscape In the mist, suggesting hid- 
 den vales and hills. And there they are, all trying 
 to go somewhere, to do somewhat, to escape from 
 something or other, or seeking that which Is to be 
 found In this world in no satisfying quantity or qual- 
 ity. If at all. 
 
 No matter how carelessly or indifferently or 
 humorously one enters a crowd. If he be a thoughtful 
 man, he will soon be watching It broodingly. There 
 are faces that tell a tale of evil or suffering, cheeks 
 scarred by sorrow or sin, betraying the deep-lying 
 pathos of life which perhaps the sufferers have come 
 
 136 
 
THE COMPASSION OF CHRIST 137 
 
 out into the crowded place to forget. Thus a crowd 
 touches us, doubly so for me at least, when I see it by 
 a seaside, against the grey background of old ocean 
 that whispers, or thunders, or shdes and slithers, 
 or tumbles and crashes on the beach. The multi- 
 tude will pass and vanish, but the grey sea stays, and 
 will swallow them all back whence they came. Now 
 it is ferocious, now felinely friendly, yet we need not 
 be afraid of it, because it is of kin to us, restless 
 as our souls are restless. 
 
 Thoughts such as these help us to interpret the 
 text and the Gospel of Mark, from which it is laken, 
 not inaptly called the Gospel of the Multitude. To 
 read this book, the briefest and boldest of the four 
 Gospels, is to look out over vast crowds of men and 
 women, to hear the tramp, tramp of thousands of 
 feet and the corlfused murmur of myriads of voices. 
 Now a crowd affects people differently; some are 
 amused by it, some disgusted, some entertained, some 
 wearied, some harassed — but the writer of this Gos- 
 pel tells us how Jesus felt toward a crowd. The 
 words have all the marks of an eyewitness who had 
 watched the Master when He was surrounded by a 
 throng, and found His face more fascinating than 
 the multitude, seeing it touched and lighted by an 
 all-pitying, ineffable, yearning gentleness; and he 
 never forgot that expression. If only some artist 
 could have painted that face when He was deeply 
 touched by the presence of a multitude, it would 
 help us to know how an Eternal Love looks upon 
 our pilgrim human race. 
 
138 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Jesus looked upon a crowd, not with indifference, 
 not with contempt, not with mere curiosity, but with 
 an exquisite and moving compassion. He saw the 
 joys of men and women, their follies, their ways and 
 habits, as His parables reveal; but His deepest con- 
 cern must have been to discern the work of God in 
 their hearts — a work always going on, always im- 
 portant, as various as the infinite varieties of man, 
 as urgent as their need, as continuing as the return 
 of night and day. We talk of the crowd, but there 
 are no indistinguishable masses of men in the thought 
 of God. He sees you and me, every man, woman 
 and little child, as an individual pupil In His school 
 of life. What we can only guess at as we look into 
 the faces, not of strangers only, but of the members 
 of our own household. He knows down to the bot- 
 tom of the soul. There are no strangers to the heart 
 of God, no outcasts to His mercy, save such as would 
 make themselves castaways if they could — lost to 
 themselves, but not lost to Him. Perhaps we make 
 a mistake when we lump together the ways of God 
 with men under one vast word. Providence, when we 
 should use a more personal word, as Jesus did, con- 
 fident that He loves each one with a love founded 
 on a knowledge that embraces all that live. 
 
 Now, compassion lies at the root of all noble re- 
 ligion, the pity of God for man and of man for man. 
 The chapters of the Koran, all of them, begin with 
 the words: "In the name of God, the compassion- 
 ate, the merciful." The noble religion of Buddha 
 numbers five hundred million votaries, and pity is the 
 
THE COMPASSION OF CHRIST 139 
 
 keynote of it all — pity for man bound to the Wheel 
 of Life, distracted by desire, restless, unhappy. So 
 the compassion of Christ, so profound, so haunting, 
 so healing, showed that He stood in the sublime 
 tradition of those who feel for man and seek to lead 
 him, as Good Shepherds, thither where He seeks 
 to go. More than sympathy, more than pity, com- 
 passion enters into the very soul of humanity, feels 
 what it feels, knows its yearnings, its perplexities, 
 even the agony of its sin, and understands while it 
 blesses; understands not only the facts but the causes. 
 It is love at its highest, its deepest, its purest, as 
 Balzac has shown in The Alchemist. 
 
 There is, however, a deep difference between Jesus 
 and Buddha. If Buddha pitied men because they 
 live, tormented by the fever of desires that can 
 never be realised — and vain when realised — Jesus 
 was moved with compassion because they do not 
 really live. Life to Jesus was so wonderful beyond 
 words, so deep, so full of divine meanings, and 
 withal so close at hand, that He pitied the blindness 
 that did not see it and the sin that defiled it. The 
 people thronged about Him with their hungry hearts, 
 their bewildered minds, their despairing hopes of this 
 world and that to come, their sorrows, their weari- 
 ness, their life-sapping diseases, and His heart went 
 out in a tide of pity. He saw them wandering, for- 
 lorn, in a world full of the love and truth of God, 
 harassed by fears of life, fear of death, fear of God, 
 fear of the unexplained mystery of the future, and 
 it touched Him to tears. Da Vinci has shown us a 
 
140 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Christ too much burdened by His own tragedy; but 
 when the perfect artist has come, he will portray a 
 sympathising Christ, a ministering Christ — a face 
 with the finest lines of sensibility and eyes of fathom- 
 less, unutterable pity. 
 
 With us, alas, pity is so helpless, but not so the 
 compassion of Christ. It is creative. Deeper than 
 sin, deeper than its deadening power. He saw some- 
 thing divine in every man, something struggling up- 
 wards seeking the sunlight; and that precious thing 
 He sought to reach — willing to forgive anything if 
 only He could touch it to new life and hope. So He 
 sees us still, sees that in the sinner of which the sinner 
 is unconscious, or only vaguely aware; sees us as 
 heirs of a life which is not yet ours — dreams of us 
 as we are to be, imputes to us a beauty not yet our 
 own. And thus, by His compassion. He creates 
 within us a new spirit which blooms in new desires 
 and aims and endeavours, and works out our salva- 
 tion with us, both to will and to do. Down to the 
 lowest depths His compassion goes, feeling the 
 misery of sin even when the sinner does not feel it, 
 knowing how it came to be, through some defect of 
 will, some heat of passion, some desire perverted by 
 self-will, some dulness of soul; knows it all and 
 makes it His cross until we are redeemed from it. 
 
 Surely such compassion is a revelation of God, 
 whose mercy endureth for ever. There is a famous 
 painting by a Flemish artist, Leomprels, entitled 
 "Humanity and Destiny," in which we are shown the 
 human multitudes with hands uplifted — some 
 
THE COMPASSION OF CHRIST 141 
 
 knotted with toil, some bejewelled, some emaciated 
 with ill-health, old hands blue-veined and trembling, 
 hands young and strong, some uplifted in prayer, 
 same waving red flags, lovers' hands clasped, moth- 
 ers lifting the chubby hands of children, seeking 
 blessings. And when we look up to where the hands 
 are reaching we see a benign face in the sky, from 
 which radiates the light that warms and blesses. It 
 is the face of God the Father of men, whose com- 
 passion never faileth. Humanity now, humanity for 
 ever, is in the keeping of One most truly revealed in 
 Him who went about doing good, laying His hand 
 upon us in sickness, His fingers upon our eyes, breath- 
 ing His blessing upon us, taking us by the hand as 
 we sink, entering our homes, coohng our fever, teach- 
 ing, chiding, enfolding, upholding, inviting, encour- 
 aging, drawing, controlling, commanding. So that 
 when we think of God and wonder what He Is, it 
 always comes back to our thinking of Jesus infinitely 
 enlarged in every way. 
 
 Of course, this is no new Gospel in the City Tem- 
 ple. The founder and first minister of this church 
 was a noble preacher of the Compassion of Christ, 
 as his venerable expounder has recalled to our minds 
 in a fruitful and rewarding book.^ He was deeply 
 moved by the Greek word used by St. Paul to de- 
 scribe Christ, the Great High Priest, and rendered 
 "who can have compassion," finding in it the foun- 
 dations on which this Temple rests. In exegesis of 
 that Greek word, he said, preaching to the City 
 
 ' The spiritual Life, by Alexander Whyte. 
 
142 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Temple congregation in 1640, preaching in his 
 searching and deep-probing manner: 
 
 "This Greek word is exceedingly emphatical. It means 
 much more than the English rendering 'who can have com- 
 passion,' means. For when this great Greek word of the 
 Apostle is rightly rendered and rightly laid to heart, it re- 
 veals to us that Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, not only 
 has a great compassion in His heart, but that He has a spe- 
 cial and a particular compassion measured out according to 
 every individual man's measure of need, according to every 
 individual man's specialty, and particularity, and singularity, 
 and secrecy of need. ... I need my great High Priest to 
 have not only all the abilities and all the attributes and all 
 the great qualifications that you need in Him, but, over and 
 above all that, I, Thomas Goodwin, your minister, need Him 
 always urgently and, indeed, sometimes absolutely agonis- 
 ingly, for certain special and secret and altogether individual 
 needs of my own; needs of my own that no other mortal 
 man knows anything about, nor would believe even if I con- 
 fessed them to him; needs of my own that are so excep- 
 tionally and so exclusively my own that no other man be- 
 fore me, or now around me, or coming after me, will ever 
 have needs exactly like them. It is absolutely inconceivable 
 to me that any other man, past, present, or to come, could 
 ever have just that combination and just that concentration 
 and just that incidence of sin and sorrow that I have, to- 
 gether with all the temporal and spiritual intricacies of all 
 kinds, of which both my heart and my life are brimful. No 
 other man in all this sinful and sorrowful city of London 
 has just my crosses and cups and thorns in the flesh. Not 
 one man of you all." 
 
THE COMPASSION OF CHRIST 143 
 
 So Goodwin spoke, in his great home-coming way, 
 in the long ago ; and his words come back to us across 
 the years, telling what every minister of the City 
 Temple must have felt. But the compassion of 
 Christ is equal to all our temporal needs, all our im- 
 mortal longings, all that we can think or feel or suf- 
 fer, if we, like our first minister, "believe that it is 
 so." Not one of us but feels that we have needs as 
 unique and individual as his, separating us from all 
 others; but the love of God in Christ can find its way 
 into our lonely isolation, and heal us. There was a 
 woman in a George Eliot story who was unhappy 
 when dying, not because she was dying, but because 
 she feared her husband would not find the key to 
 the blue closet upstairs. Every one of us has a Blue 
 Closet in his heart. No one knows what is hidden 
 there, and we take the key with us when we go away. 
 But God knows, and the compassion of Christ can 
 reach even to that lonely corner of the heart and 
 cleanse it, driving out the grey shadows that linger 
 there. O my soul remember! 
 
 Pity is the quality which most deeply touches man, 
 because it the most resembles God. How wonderful 
 is the pity of Shakespeare, a pity that reaches beyond 
 man and touches nature! It fills with its flood of 
 light the whole expanse of his works, and is perhaps 
 what makes them so living and healing. Even the 
 characters that least deserve It receive it without 
 stint, because it Is the very spirit of his genius. At 
 last all rancour is obliterated, all sin forgiven. The 
 last word which hovers over the final chord of his 
 
144 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 symphony is that of the luminous Spirit of the Air, 
 with which Ariel inspires Prospero: 
 
 The rare action is 
 In virtue than in vengeance. 
 
 Here is the token of true greatness of soul. As 
 Emerson said of Lincoln, "his heart was as great as 
 the world, but there was no room in it for the mem- 
 ory of a wrong." Such words make real to us the 
 magnanimity and compassion of Jesus, which 
 reached its highest glory in that sublimest of all pray- 
 ers which embraced His enemies; "Father, forgive 
 them; for they know not what they do." 
 
 Even so, because we are followers of the compas- 
 sionate Christ we must be compassionate one toward 
 another, even toward our enemies in their madness 
 and shame. Whatever may be our theology, or our 
 lack of it, unless we have the spirit of Christ we 
 are none of His. God help us ! He knows what un- 
 utterable things we have suffered and what feelings 
 are in our hearts! He knows that we are human, 
 and if we cannot all at once forgive, much less for- 
 get, He will grant us the compassion to which we 
 are unable to attain, and teach us how to win love 
 out of hate and good out of infinite pain. Time will 
 help to heal, for the longer one lives in this world 
 the more does love and pity increase and attachment 
 to party or opinion decrease. Yet, in the long last, 
 both friend and foe alike will be drawn together and 
 healed by the spirit of Him who, when He saw the 
 multitude, was moved with compassion. 
 
THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 
 
 "The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." — 
 
 Eph. vi. 17. 
 
 "It came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel 
 
 prevailed." — ^Ex. xvii. 11. 
 
 THERE is no doubt that we are now at a grave 
 and critical issue of world affairs/ and every 
 man among us must be subdued and thoughtful. 
 Whatever his faith or unfaith, it is hard to imagine 
 any man with heart unbowed. It is one of those 
 times which sometimes befall when men stand so near 
 the veil of the Unseen that they can almost hear the 
 beating of an Infinite Heart. The magnitude of 
 the issues involved, the awful sacrifice required, the 
 agony of suspense as the battle sways to and fro, 
 send us to our knees. There is no need to tell men 
 to pray ; they simply have to pray, else their hearts 
 will break from sheer weight of sorrow and anxiety. 
 The call to prayer comes not half so imperatively 
 from the pulpit as from the human heart itself, torn 
 by the anguish and stress of tragedy. Such a time is 
 a great moral revelation, when little things are swept 
 aside and the real voice of humanity is heard. These 
 
 * Preached during the great enemy oflFensive in April 1918, 
 an ordeal no one will ever forget. London was tongue-tied; 
 men looked on one another and understood. It revealed at 
 once the heroic quality of a great race and the practical value 
 of the power of prayer to fortify and sustain. 
 
 145 
 
146 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 are days when we must gather up our final reasons 
 for holding on in the battle of life, when for com- 
 fort, for courage, and for endurance we need the 
 succour and support of the Eternal. 
 
 Nay, more. The hour has come when we must not 
 only pray, but must be prepared to make the sac- 
 rifices and take the ventures of faith which real 
 prayer involves. It is no time for panic, but for 
 quiet and profound prayer, both personal and cor- 
 porate, the fruit of which is effort-producing faith 
 and a more adequate insight into the will of God. 
 The question is not whether God is on our side, but 
 whether, as Lincoln said in a dark hour, we are 
 worthy to be on His side; whether we are fit instru- 
 ments for the service of His purpose. Moses on 
 the Mount, and Aaron and Hur upholding his hands 
 of supplication while the battle ebbed and flowed 
 in the valley beneath, is the picture that comes back 
 to mind. What influence prayer may have upon the 
 course and issue of events no one knows; but the 
 experience of Lincoln just before and during the 
 battle of Gettysburg, upon which the fate of a nation 
 hung, must not be forgotten. As far removed from 
 the stories of answered prayer to which we often 
 listen as from the crude rationalism that denies them, 
 it fills one with awe. 
 
 This at least is true: only the mighty grace of 
 God is equal to an hour like this, when the faith 
 of men is tried as if by fire. By the same token, it 
 ought to be a time of great discoveries of the reality 
 and adequacy of the Grace of God and the funda- 
 
THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 147 
 
 mental assurances of our faith. A shadow of mys- 
 tery and awe is upon us. To-day, in the presence 
 of an unparalleled ordeal, we have an opportunity 
 to make trial of those forces of the spirit which we 
 have not enough considered; and if it evokes in us a 
 new sense alike of the power of prayer and of the 
 hitherto unguessed resources of the soul, it will not 
 have been in vain. Unless something fair and fine 
 is won from it, enriching the times to be, surely we 
 have not met it in the right way. For, to go no fur- 
 ther, there are forces at our command, if we are 
 willing and worthy to use them, which will turn 
 tragedy into triumph, making us victors over doubt 
 and dismay and masters of whatever may befall us 
 in the fluctuating fortunes of war. Unimagined dis- 
 closures await us if we actually give ourselves up to 
 the Divine Spirit to learn what He would have us be, 
 knowing that the secret of being Divinely led is the 
 willingness to follow and obey. 
 
 When we look below the surface, the real question 
 is not. Why should men pray, but why do they pray? 
 All men do pray, because it is a necessity of their 
 nature, an instinct of the soul, like the homing in- 
 stinct of a bird. Here at our disposal is a mighty 
 force, a law of^the life of man, the meaning and uses 
 of which we have hardly begun to discover — the 
 power of prayer. It is what Francis Thompson 
 called "the sword of the saints"; but just as a sword 
 is made of metal dug from the earth, melted, tem- 
 pered and polished, so this instinct of prayer must 
 be interpreted by spiritual intelligence, trained, puri- 
 
148 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 fied, and applied to the uses of life and character. 
 Men will not long continue in prayer unless they have 
 a vivid sense of its value and relevancy; and for that 
 reason we must not talk of prayer as if it were made 
 up of pious hopes and good wishes, forgetting the 
 law of its nature and the discipline of its use. 
 
 To-day my design is to pass over briefly the sim- 
 pler forms of prayer, that so we may climb up the 
 ladder toward that highest form of fellowship with 
 the Eternal Will, which is alone equal to this awful 
 time. What are the benefits of prayer? Chiefly 
 two, according to the usual report, the first being 
 the reflex influence upon the man who prays. As 
 Meredith said, "Who rises from prayer a better 
 man, his prayer is answered," and it is a fact that 
 the man who truly prays does rise a better man. 
 Prayer does quiet the spirit, clarify the mind, and 
 purify the heart. It does exalt and sustain us, evok- 
 ing hitherto unguessed resources of the soul, not only 
 resting us from fret and fear, but reinforcing us 
 when we are faint and weary. So much even the 
 psychologist admits; but prayer is able to do this 
 because we believe it to be something more than a 
 musing with ourselves, more than communion with 
 our higher self. Indeed no one would pray very 
 long if he did not think that it is more than a mere 
 psychological exercise, for it is our higher self which 
 most needs to be fortified. 
 
 That is to say, prayer in its deeper aspect and as- 
 piration is communion with Another not ourselves 
 in whose fellowship the soul is renewed and fortified 
 
THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 149 
 
 and exalted. For the Christian at least it is com- 
 munion, not with a world-force, but with a world- 
 Father; and as we know what it is to hold fellow- 
 ship with good men and women, to breathe their 
 aspirations, to learn to love what they love, so we 
 can think what it means to commune with God, to 
 yield ourselves to His desires, and to love what He 
 loves. Prayer may take as many forms as men have 
 moods — petition, confession, adoration, or "a wish 
 directed heavenward," as Phillips Brooks used to 
 call it — but no Christian prays simply to tell God 
 what he wants, but because he knows that God 
 knoweth what things he has need of better than he 
 knows himself. He prays for the joy, and some- 
 times the pain, of pouring out his heart to the Father 
 of all. His prayer is not so much for gifts as for 
 communion with the Giver of all Good, desire of His 
 blessing, petition for His presence, and submission 
 to His will. 
 
 But it is with prayer in another dimension that 
 we have now to do — prayer in its dynamic aspect. 
 The will of God is complete, active, inevitable, but 
 prayer is much more than mere submission to it. 
 Indeed, it is possible to pray, "Not my will, but 
 Thine, be done," and miss the high meaning and 
 opportunity of the words; as if we asked God to 
 put our will aside and let His will be done in spite 
 of us. No, no; He does not ask such dumb, abject 
 submission. What He asks is that we make room 
 in our hearts and lives for His will to act, yielding 
 ourselves to its pressure, its passage, its movement. 
 
150 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Of course, this means identifying our affections and 
 purposes with His high ends, even when those ends 
 cut straight across all our wishes, as they sometimes 
 do. Sometimes; but not always. Once we have 
 learned to give free way to the divine will, no longer 
 obstructing it, so that it may enter, possess, and use 
 us, there is no conflict. Then we discover the great- 
 est of all truths; that the will of God and the high- 
 est good of man are one and eternally inseparable, 
 and that spiritual advance and conquest can come 
 only when men dedicate themselves to spiritual 
 values. 
 
 Submission does not describe such an attitude and 
 achievement. When we pray after this manner we 
 do more than submit to the will of God; we ener- 
 getically lift ourselves up to identify our lives with 
 it, gathering up all the forces of our being and 
 pouring them into its mighty stream. It is God 
 Himself, in us, who inspires such a prayer, not only 
 revealing His will in us, but evoking such trust in 
 him and such mastery of ourselves that all our 
 powers are at His service, and our lives become a 
 part of His plan. The secret of availing prayer is 
 that of having oneself so centrally held that in that 
 high moment one does actually, and with concen- 
 trated conscious effort, will the will of God, in which 
 is our peace. It is a moment of intense spiritual 
 sensibility in which the direction of the pressure of 
 the Divine purpose in us is vividly realised, and loy- 
 ally obeyed. Thereafter the practice of life, in spite 
 of its falterings and waywardness, is to the end that 
 
THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 151 
 
 we may live more nearly as we pray, laying hold of 
 what is already our own, asking that we may be able, 
 willing, and worthy to receive it. 
 
 Alas ! few of us attain to this supreme and victor- 
 ious life of prayer. One reads the life of Santa 
 Theresa with a kind of awed fear, so eager, so dar- 
 ing, so profound was her quest and cultivation of 
 the art of prayer. Like St. Francis, she prayed 
 until her life became a prayer, and therefore a 
 power, in which her rippling humour, her fine 
 sagacity, and her tireless industry became the tools 
 of God for the doing of His work. Such a height 
 Is attained only by a great surrender to the will of 
 God, and a firmer loyalty to it, a quicker response, 
 a fuller courage, a richer desire than we have won. 
 It means a sustained endeavour, a prolonged aspira- 
 tion and a gradual and growing insight. But we are 
 weak; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is frail. Ever 
 more we try a little and fail much, striving for the 
 heights, but slipping back to the lower levels. But 
 we must not give up until we learn the great lan- 
 guage, until we catch the high accent, if only it be 
 here a word and there a tone. Again, and yet again, 
 we must come back to the altar and renew the dis- 
 ciplined motive, learning to give ourselves away a 
 little more ungrudgingly to the blessed will. Hence 
 the hour of prayer with its holy Intimacies by which 
 heart may draw to heart, and love answer to love. 
 
 If we are to wield the Sword of the Saints — the 
 sword with which Greatheart tramped the world 
 defending the right and protecting the weak — we 
 
152 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 must first fashion it, and then learn how to use it. 
 Yet what amateurs we are, half afraid of the weapon 
 given us to fight the foes that besiege the soul and 
 menace it! Even the best of us can do little more 
 than to ask God to forgive the poverty, the petti- 
 ness, the folly of our prayers, and to listen not to 
 our petitions, but to the dumb cry of our needs. 
 Often we pray earnestly for what is already our own, 
 neglected and unappropriated, not knowing that 
 there must be not only the will to pray, but the will 
 to receive and the willingness to listen for the an- 
 swer. Often we pray for that which we must win 
 ourselves, and then labour endlessly for that which 
 can come to us only in prayer. There is no need to 
 say that we frequently pray for that which can never 
 be ours and would be our ruin if we had it. The 
 disciples of Jesus were often foolish and faithless, 
 but they were wise when they asked their Master, 
 "Lord, teach us how to pray." 
 
 It is the testimony of the masters of the spiritual 
 life that prayer. In its higher reaches, is not only 
 something to be learned, but that it is a high and 
 austere art. We who are beginners must begin at 
 the beginning, and the first thing is actually to pray. 
 The wish to pray is not enough; we must have "the 
 wish that prays." Since prayer is the focal point 
 of the soul, it is by the act of prayer — and the atti- 
 tude of the body, even — that the soul commits itself 
 to the highest. Things are hazy and uncertain, until 
 reduced to words. The mind, thronged with a mul- 
 titude of conflicting thoughts and desires, or waver- 
 
THE SWORD OF THE SAINTS 153 
 
 ing between opposite decisions, is clarified by actual 
 prayer, and selects one motive, one plan. Instantly 
 the fog clears, and the thing uttered, the fact or 
 principle, stands out in relief. 
 
 "Certain thoughts are prayers," said Hugo; but 
 when we pray we pledge ourselves to them, and a 
 vague thought becomes a star to light our path. God 
 is seeking to guide us, but only to one who prays 
 can He make Himself vivid, not merely as an idea 
 in the mind, but as a living reality and Friend. 
 
 Prayer is not only "the practice of the presence 
 of God"; it is the realisation of His presence. For 
 that reason, it must be regular, "putting habit on 
 the side of the highest life," as Gladstone advised his 
 children. The human spirit is as mutable as the 
 sea, rising and falling at the touch of vagrant moods 
 which are difficult to control. "Why art thou cast 
 down, O my soul?" cried the Psalmist in his dialogue 
 with his fitful, restless soul. Such moods come we 
 know not whence, but they will have less power 
 over us if they have set against them the habit of 
 quiet prayer in which, by lifting a spiritual curtain, 
 we can enter into a House of Quiet, leaving fret and 
 worry and fear behind. Thus our weakness becomes 
 strength, our words deeds. There is a very real 
 sense in which we can truly "pray without ceasing," 
 a habit of the heart by which we may live for God, 
 in God, to God every moment of the day, making 
 the thought of Him a constant and holy attitude 
 of the mind; and thus be armoured against many 
 ills. Fenelon is a wise teacher here : 
 
154 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 "Accustom yourself gradually to let your mental prayers 
 spread over all your daily external occupations. Speak, act, 
 work quietly, as though you were praying, as, indeed, you 
 ought to be. Do everything without excitement, simply in 
 the spirit of grace. So soon as you perceive natural activity 
 gliding in, recall yourself quietly into the presence of God. 
 Hearken to what the leadings of grace prompt. You will 
 find yourself infinitely more quiet, your words will be fewer 
 and more effectual, and while doing less, what you do will 
 be more profitable." 
 
 By such methods the Saints realised inwardly a 
 divine life Inexhaustible In Its fulness, Indomitable in 
 Its power, by which they were able, not to alter things 
 after their desires, but to become doers of the will 
 of God. The Sword of the Spirit Is the Word of 
 God, says the Apostle. Not simply the Bible, but 
 all that endless dialogue between God and the soul, 
 whereby man learns what life is, what It means, and 
 how to use It for the highest ends. For man does 
 not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro- 
 ceedeth out of the mouth of God; and prayer Is not 
 simply asking, but receiving, realising, achieving. 
 No matter what the facts may be, if, deep down In 
 our hearts, we utter the word Father, the way is 
 clearer and the victory Is won. 
 
 Then into His hand went mine. 
 
 And into my heart came He. 
 And I walked in a light divine 
 
 The path I had feared to see. 
 
THE INTERCESSORS 
 
 "If Thou wilt forgive their sin — ; and if not, blot me, I 
 pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written." 
 
 Ex. xxxii. 32. 
 
 "The supplication of a righteous man availeth much." 
 
 — James v. 16. 
 
 "He ever liveth to make intercession." — Heb. vii. 25 
 
 AFTER more than three years of war we are 
 bidden to keep this the first Sunday in the 
 New Year as a day of solemn intercession to Al- 
 mighty God. It is wise, it is altogether fitting that 
 we should do so. Prayer is always timely, and never 
 more so than in this dark time when we need strength 
 for the thing that is to do, insight to lead us along a 
 dim path, and comfort to sustain us under our crush- 
 ing sorrows. We are sorely stricken, and, like Lin- 
 coln in his day of trial, we are driven to our knees 
 because we have nowhere else to go. It is a day not 
 only for honesty of thought, but for the frankest 
 kind of speech, man to man, and the final candour of 
 hearts laid bare. 
 
 Many humiliations are teaching us humility, yet 
 much of the old arrogance, the old vanity, the old 
 vainglory remains to distort the public temper. 
 There will be further chastenings of spirit, further 
 sorrows, further losses, alas, and surely they must 
 bring us down from our towering pride, from our 
 complacent self-righteousness, to the very feet of 
 
 ^Day of National Intercession, 6th January 1918. 
 155 
 
156 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 God the Father. To-day we are not Englishmen, 
 not Americans, but human beings seeking to know 
 the will of God and how to do it. There will be 
 other days for dealing with men; to-day we must 
 deal with God. Not the God of England, not the 
 God of America, but the Father of humanity who 
 hath made of one blood all nations and tribes,, whose 
 will is the law of the universe : a God so great that 
 we in the City Temple, and our brethren in the 
 Abbey, are like children playing with the toys of 
 religion. Yet hath He put it into our hearts to 
 pray, and if we seek Him with earnest minds He 
 will show us His way. 
 
 It Is a fact that the heartfelt prayer of a righteous 
 man avalleth much — how much we do not know, nor 
 can we trace Its Influence. It goes too fast, too far, 
 for us to follow. Only God could write the history 
 of the prayer of a little child at eventide. To 
 attempt to fathom the meaning of intercessory 
 prayer would be to plunge beyond our depth into 
 the profoundest mysteries of life and faith, and 
 this is not the day for that adventure. It is the 
 prayer of a righteous man that avalleth — but, alas, 
 we are not righteous men, much less a righteous na- 
 tion. England is not righteous. America I know 
 is not righteous. Our cause Is righteous, but we are 
 not. We are fighting for justice, but we are not just. 
 It would be easy to bring in a bill of particulars, but 
 It Is not needed. Our conscience indicts and convicts 
 us before God, and our social order confirms the in- 
 dictment. 
 
THE INTERCESSOR 157 
 
 But enough: on this day we do not criticise one 
 another, but all confess our sins, beseeching the 
 cleansing mercy of God, that so our common prayer 
 may be pure and true. 
 
 Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ? 
 He that hath clean hands and a pure heart. 
 
 Therefore our first prayer must be for that purity 
 of heart which brings the vision of God, that our 
 desires, purified of littleness, disinfected of selfish- 
 ness, may be one with the desire of God. So, and 
 only so, shall we have not only the will to pray — 
 which is much more than a mere wish — but also the 
 will to receive the answer of God and do it, whatever 
 that answer may be. A Day of Prayer for a nation 
 is idle make-believe unless that people, single-minded 
 and faithful, is 'willing to do the will of God. To- 
 day a nation- — or at least an Inner circle of inter- 
 cessors in its name — rededicates, consecrates, gives 
 itself anew Into the hands of God, to be used as His 
 instrument for the fulfilment of His purpose. If this 
 is to be a real Day of Prayer, and not a mere form, 
 we must think of what we are doing. 
 
 Think what intercessory prayer means, and ask 
 yourself if we — if you — are equal to it. Prayer is 
 not simply the uprising passion and desire of man: 
 it is the spirit of God rising up in man in longings 
 and cries which cannot be uttered, liberating the 
 resources of the human personality for the uses of 
 the divine will and work. The eternal purpose is 
 wrought out upon earth, but not without human 
 
158 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 co-operation; "we are God's fellow-workers." To- 
 day, If our prayer is sincere, the surrendered will of 
 a nation will be added to the sum of forces In the 
 hand of God, working with Him for His kingdom. 
 Are we willing to have it so? When the Master 
 asked His disciples if they they were able to be bap- 
 tised with the baptism He was baptised with, they 
 said, glibly enough, "We are able" — little knowing 
 what they meant. "It Is the very nature of faith 
 that It commits us to more than we are aware of at 
 the time" ; It involves us in the play of forces vaster 
 than we know, and lays tasks upon us we did not pro- 
 pose to ourselves. Are we able to do and bear and 
 be what we ask to-day at this altar, committing our- 
 selves with that daring which is more than wisdom, 
 to the ways of God? If the will of God be some- 
 thing different from our will, what then ? If it means 
 that we must endure further suffering, further loss 
 and tragedy, are we willing to say, like the Master, 
 "Not my will, but Thine be done"? If so, England 
 will be a different land to-morrow from what it is 
 to-day. 
 
 Prayer not only discovers God in new and un- 
 dreamed-of ways, opening the heart to the control of 
 the Divine Spirit in a manner beyond our imagining, 
 It also discovers us to ourselves and to one another. 
 A traveller crossing the Atlantic came to the Azores, 
 and tells how he felt the isolation of those tiny 
 Islands in the wide expanse of waters. They seemed 
 lonely, bereft of all kinship or connection with the 
 great continents or with other islands of the sea. 
 
THE INTERCESSOR 159 
 
 But he paused to think, and knew that they were not 
 isolated. They are but the tips of high mountains 
 whose bases reach down to the bed of the ocean. 
 Through this common base they are united to one 
 another; and then, along the ocean bed, they are 
 joined to all continents and islands everywhere. This 
 is a parable of human life. Often, in this human 
 ocean called London, we may seem lonely, but, like 
 the Azores, we are joined with all men everywhere 
 in the depth of our nature; and prayer is a discovery 
 of the Life that binds us one to another. It reveals 
 a community of life and need, and along the ties that 
 unite us influences, messages, and power go to and 
 fro. 
 
 Here is a realm of mystery, not explorable, but 
 we may say that it is like the scale of registers in a 
 wireless telegraph instrument. When we send a mes- 
 sage in one register, all instruments set for that reg- 
 ister receive it, if the power be strong enough. Just 
 so, there is a common human register, if we can find 
 it, which joins us with all men, and more surely, it 
 may be, with those we love, so that in ways beyond 
 our tracing we can send and receive help, hope, 
 power. Who can tell what prayers, as units of 
 energy, or as forces of love, may become in a world 
 where all things lead out into mystery, and nothing 
 is so unknown as the human personality. The ques- 
 tion of natural law does not enter, since prayer is it- 
 self a law whose working we do not know and do not 
 need to know in order to use it. Jesus did not 
 argue about prayer — He prayed. Amid the mys- 
 
160 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 terlous forces at work upon us and within us, since 
 they are of God, we may be sure not only, as Mere- 
 dith said, that "who rises from prayer a better man, 
 his prayer is answered," but also that other men are 
 better too. When the earth record is read in the 
 light of eternal values, who knows what a testimony 
 it will be to the power of sincere, heartfelt prayer ! 
 
 Thus prayer not only links us with men every- 
 where, but takes us out of ourselves, as it did Moses 
 when he pleaded for his people in their sin. When 
 the law-giver came down from the Mount of Vision 
 bearing the Tables of the Law, he found the people 
 dancing about a Golden Calf. Life always becomes 
 a feverish, fanatical dance when it loses the vision 
 of the Eternal — as it did in England before the war, 
 and in America where we worshipped the horrible 
 gods of sport and speed and splendour. Turning 
 from the scene, the law-giver went again into the 
 Mount of Vision, now become a Mount of Interces- 
 sion, and offered one of the profoundest, sublimest 
 prayers in history: "If Thou wilt forgive their 
 sin — ; and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy 
 book which Thou hast written." If his people were 
 to die, he wanted to die with them — aye, even to die 
 in their stead — and have his name erased from the 
 memory of God. Such a prayer compelled an an- 
 swer, for that it united itself with the love and will 
 of God, invoking His own nature in its behalf. If 
 only we had the love, the heroism, the faith to rise 
 to such a height, what wonders might not be wrought 
 in this land, and in all lands, on the morrow! 
 
THE INTERCESSOR 161 
 
 Not yet have we guessed, much less tested, the 
 incredible power that lies in prayer. Let us dare 
 to make trial of it to-day, and all the days, if per- 
 chance we may learn more of its mystery and its 
 uses, like Forbes Robinson — not the actor of similar 
 name — albeit he, too, is a man of sincere and simple 
 faith, and a noble Christian gentleman — but a young 
 saint of the English Church. He was so radiant, so 
 happy, so wise, as we come to know him in his Let- 
 ters to His Friends, that the very thought of him 
 is like a footfall, always light, of one untimely gone 
 away. He was an apostle in intercession, and prayer 
 was his very life. He discovered men by praying 
 for them, finding in each one something unique, 
 peculiar, and precious, not to be found anywhere 
 else. Life, to him, was love, and love lived in 
 prayer, and prayer was a perpetual discovery of both 
 God and man. He learned that prayer abolishes 
 hate, and that if we pray for a man we cannot have 
 any feeling of ill-will, and that he will come to know 
 the fact. He believed — he knew — that he could in 
 this way bring to bear upon men an influence more 
 effective than any word of direct teaching or advice. 
 To-day there are Cambridge men whose eyes fill with 
 a soft mist of memory and reverence at the very 
 mention of his name. 
 
 What wonder that on a day like this, when our 
 hearts are so deeply stirred, we cannot keep our 
 thoughts from going afar, following those who have 
 gone behind the veil. It is human, and God meant 
 it to be so. My friend, if on this day your heart 
 
162 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 asks you to offer a prayer for one who has vanished 
 — do It. No matter what the theologians say. The 
 human heart divinely touched Is the best theologian. 
 God win hear and understand, and what Is in accord 
 with His holy will, which Is wider than we know, will 
 be done. This Is a matter about which to be reverent 
 and reticent; but at least we can commend those 
 whom we have "loved and lost awhile" to His Fath- 
 erly love, even as we commend ourselves, our na- 
 tion, and our cause to which so many whom we miss 
 have paid "the last full measure of devotion." Be- 
 yond this we may not go, leaving the things our poor 
 stammering tongues cannot utter to Him "who ever 
 liveth to make Intercession," In whose name we offer 
 our prayer and dedicate our lives. 
 
THE SHADOW CHRIST 
 
 "The word of the Lord came unto me, saying: 'Jeremiah, 
 what seest thou?' And I said, 'I see a rod of an almond 
 tree.'" — Jer. i. ii. 
 
 OFTEN it has been noted of late that the minds 
 of men are turning back to the great prophets 
 for light and leading in these difficult days. Some, 
 to be sure, find in their pages amazing forecastings 
 of the end of-the world, but the deeper mind of the 
 day turns to them for a deeper reason. They, too, 
 struggled for faith in terrible days, in the midst of 
 baffling perplexities, in the presence of unaccountable 
 tragedies, and it is thus that no teachers have more 
 to tell us than those voices that speak to us out of 
 the old Hebrew centuries. For comfort and com- 
 mand, for moral insight and spiritual intuition, those 
 mighty seers are still the masters and deliverers of 
 mankind. 
 
 There are classic men as there are classic books. 
 The classic man is one who, speaking to his own age, 
 strikes a note so deep, and true, and haunting that 
 it sounds for ever; and such a man is the great 
 prophet. Isaiah and Savonarola may deal with civic 
 affairs, St. Paul and Luther with the freedom of the 
 soul, Ezekiel and Augustine with the outward altar, 
 St. John and Bunyan with the passion for perfection. 
 
 163 
 
164 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 But underneath all diversities of gift and testimony 
 they bear witness for the Eternal, uniting the two 
 tokens of a god-illumined man. They turn the hearts 
 of the fathers to their sons, and the hearts of the 
 sons to their fathers; that is, they dispose the old 
 to moral forwardness, to reverence for the new, and 
 the young to spiritual wisdom, to reverence for the 
 age-long values of the past. All who truly speak in 
 the name of God, and as for His will, unite a pro- 
 found piety with an unconquerable hope. 
 
 No other race can show a nobler dynasty of moral 
 genius than the Hebrew ; and in their long, troubled, 
 revealing history there is no figure more heroic, 
 none at once more tragic and triumphant than Jere- 
 miah. Unfortunately a shallow wit has misread his 
 life, making him appear as a lachrymose weakling, 
 tender and tearful, and so he is portrayed. He was 
 indeed a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, 
 but he was no more a "weeping prophet" because 
 he may have written the Lamentations that bear his 
 name than Tennyson was a weeping poet because he 
 wrote "In Memoriam," or Milton because he wrote 
 "Lycidas." If his head was a fountain of tears there 
 was reason for it, because he was doomed to the sad- 
 dest fate that may befall a great, true-hearted, clear- 
 minded man — the fate, that is, of living in an age of 
 decay, ruin, and disaster, seeing it all, warning his 
 people against it, but powerless to stay or avert it. 
 History knows no darker tragedy, and therefore no 
 figure grander, more lonely, more pathetic than the 
 Suffering Servant of God. 
 
THE SHADOW CHRIST 165 
 
 All spiritual experience is mysterious, but with the 
 prophet-soul the mystery deepens because his nature 
 is more open to the Unseen — as we may see in the 
 call of Jeremiah. In Palestine the almond-tree puts 
 forth its buds early, and is the first tree to prophesy 
 the coming of spring — the Hebrews called it the 
 Watchful Tree. One day, stirred in spirit, the young 
 Jeremiah walked in the fields, drinking in the early 
 beauty of the Flowers of Watchfulness, and there 
 flashed into his mind the thought of God as the Great 
 Watcher. In a mood dross-drained and holy, wake- 
 fulness to natural beauty lifted him into the presence 
 of One who never sleeps nor slumbers, and the 
 prophet plighted his faith in a vision that never 
 faded amid all the dark confusions of his life. 
 Times came when the inequalities of life, the welfare 
 of the wicked, and the downfall of his nation, forced 
 upon him keen questions; but if his life was wintry, 
 like the watchful tree he kept always the prophecy 
 of spring. 
 
 Loyalty, a wise teacher has told us, is the approach 
 to faith, and he might have added that it is also the 
 fulfilment of faith, its vindication and triumph. Of 
 this truth there was never a finer example than Jere- 
 miah, of whose life we have fuller knowledge than 
 we have of any other great prophet, owing to the 
 love and fidelity of Baruch. No other prophet had 
 so devoted a biographer, and the order, or disorder, 
 of his book lets us see, not only the outward events 
 of his career, but its inward struggle, taking us be- 
 hind the veil and showing us the heart of the Saint. 
 
166 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 It Is made up of reminiscences, of Boswell-like re- 
 ports of private talks, as well as of sermons and pro- 
 nouncements. The record tells us little of the early 
 days, having been written after the prophet had been 
 twenty years in his ministry, and his message had 
 been vindicated. That is to say, Jeremiah lived be- 
 fore he wrote, and we have here the spiritual strug- 
 gle and achievement of his life. We see him as his 
 neighbours knew him, gentle, refined, sympathetic, 
 hungering for fellowship, responsive alike to natural 
 beauty and spiritual suggestion, yet intense like fire, 
 strong like a hammer — at once a white flame and an 
 iron column. 
 
 Here is the inner story of a man who lived in an 
 earth-shaking, world-transforming age like our own, 
 in a period of upheaval when human things were 
 "never at one stay." What Belgium and Serbia 
 endure to-day his land suffered then, in the clash of 
 empires amid whose conflicts it was crushed. He 
 saw his people slaughtered and carried away into 
 captivity; he saw the sacred city burned. Held by 
 ties of care and religion and the promptings of a 
 great soul, he pleaded, suffered, and endured to the 
 bitter end, his genius shining like a star in the gath- 
 ering clouds. An ardent patriot, he was summoned 
 to Interpret the purpose of God In the downfall of 
 his nation, like the saint of Serbia in our day ^ — only, 
 he himself suffered death at the hands of his people 
 In the final disaster. What this meant as a feat of 
 human courage and divine grace, as a victory of 
 
 * The Agony of the Church, by Nicholai Velirairovic. 
 
THE SHADOW CHRIST 167 
 
 faith and fortitude, is told us in a spiritual diary 
 written day by day in his heart as he wrought and 
 wondered, doubted, suffered, and dared. 
 
 Truly he was a man of like passions with our- 
 selves, as all the great ones are, albeit endowed with 
 the sorrowful and great gift of prophecy, responsive 
 to God as an aeolian harp to the wind, and eager to 
 discover and obey His will. He saw clearly the 
 hardships, the persecutions, the ostracism, and the 
 defeats that awaited him, as they await every great 
 and sane soul in a day of insanity. He was keenly 
 aware of qualities in himself that hindered rather 
 than helped his work, the questioning that weakened 
 action, the hunger for a fellowship denied, the feel- 
 ing of helplessness in the presence of his task. Yet 
 he walked a straight course through a long, danger- 
 ous career, kepf his faith in God, and his nervous, 
 inquiring spirit brought him to grips with a question 
 never faced before, and made him one of those sons 
 of the Spirit -whose influence never dies. Walking a 
 hard and lonely way, he came upon truths unguessed 
 by those whose path is smoother and whose heart is 
 less torn by dpubt and grief. 
 
 Like the men of to-day, Jeremiah faced the mys- 
 tery of arrogant, organised wickedness and the seem- 
 ing victory of might over right. He saw it clearly 
 and without evasion. He did not solve it. No man 
 can. Such mysteries have no solution on earth ; but, 
 when they seem about to block all further advance, 
 God shows, now in one way, now in another, that life 
 is still livable and faith still triumphant. This was 
 
168 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 the only answer Jeremiah received. It was no 
 solution; but it was a way out. Faith saved the 
 situation, even if it did not solve the problem.^ But 
 not without bitter struggle, misgivings, and agony, 
 which wrung from him cries that echo to this day. 
 Only a man who was very sure of God could speak 
 the words in the opening of the 12th chapter, and 
 again in the 20th chapter, two of the most impres- 
 sive pages in the history of the soul, revealing the 
 depth of his pain and the daring of his faith. He 
 rested at last, as we well may rest, upon the fact 
 that his work was not his own, but God's, and found 
 in that fact his sole and sufficient support for a hard- 
 fought life. 
 
 What wonder that this tormented man made dis- 
 coveries of the power and possibilities of prayer, 
 such as no one had made before? none before him 
 had so clearly passed beyond petition into that 
 larger, deeper field of fellowship with God. Jere- 
 miah asked little; he prayed much. He was the 
 father of that truer, profounder prayer which does 
 not ask for things, but for God; not for gifts, but 
 for the Giver. It was this mastery of the uses of 
 prayer that made him so clear-sighted a leader, who 
 did not mistake a reformation for a regeneration, 
 or the form for the reality. It was prayer that 
 enabled him to achieve the most difficult task that 
 falls to the lot of man, namely, that of enlarging 
 and deepening the conception of God, which gave 
 a new date to the history of faith. Prayer lifted him 
 
 * The Prophet of the Spirit, by L. B. Longaon, 
 
THE SHADOW CHRIST 169 
 
 above book-religion, above ritual-religion, into that 
 eternal communion where men know the living word 
 from the lips of the living God. Out of sorrow, out 
 of ruin, out of defeat he rose victorious and became 
 a prophet of the Eternal Religion. As we may read 
 in words which are perhaps the summit of Old Testa- 
 ment vision: 
 
 "This is the covenant that I will make with the House 
 of Israel after those days, saith the Lord : I will put my law 
 in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and I 
 will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they 
 shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every 
 man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord'; for they shall 
 know Me, from the least unto the greatest of them, saith 
 the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will re- 
 member their sin no more." 
 
 Such words belong to all ages, all races, all 
 tongues, all faiths. They outrun the senses and the 
 deductions of the intellect; they are spiritual intui- 
 tions in which the human soul stands face to face 
 with the Eternal, and deep calleth unto deep. 
 "Enough that he saw it once; we shall see It by and 
 by." Here is the New Covenant to the fulfilment of 
 which Jesus gave His life, and it is therefore that 
 Jeremiah is so often associated with Him. Indeed, 
 the parallel is very striking between their lives, even 
 in outward fortune and fate. Both predicted the fall 
 of the Temple; both aroused the hatred of the 
 priests; both were put to death by the people they 
 tried to save. The words "Led as a lamb to the 
 
170 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 slaughter" are used of both. Both taught the for- 
 giving love of God, and both uttered words which 
 are a part of the life of faith for ever. That is to 
 say, Jeremiah, lifted by his sorrow into the shadow 
 of a mighty, redeeming love, became, so to speak, 
 "the almost Christ, the Christ of the night — a 
 Shadow Christ." 
 
 And so, instead of taking you back into a far time, 
 my aim has been to bring a much-suffering, victorious 
 soul of times agone into the glare of the tragedy in 
 which we live, that so you may see to what revela- 
 tions we may be led by obedience to the heavenly 
 vision and the power of prayer. What though the 
 vision come in the bud of an Almond Tree, or in 
 some other form, faithfulness to it is the secret, and 
 prayer the unfailing strength to attain. What Job 
 lived through in a drama, Jeremiah lived through in 
 a human life like our own, and in days like our own. 
 What helps us most is not what some one tells us, but 
 the footprints of one who walked the dark way be- 
 fore us, saw what we see, felt what we feel, and did 
 not let go of faith. To-day, when so many are 
 trying to live, yet letting go of the things that make 
 life worth living, no voice in the Bible, save the voice 
 of Jesus, has more to tell us than Jeremiah. 
 
 It may be that the Second Isaiah, in the wonder- 
 ful 53rd chapter, saw from afar, prophetically, the 
 slowly coming Christ, since "thoughts beyond their 
 thoughts to those high bards were given." However 
 that may be, historically it would seem that Jere- 
 miah was the inspiration of that sublime and haunt- 
 
THE SHADOW CHRIST 171 
 
 ing vision of the Suffering Servant of God, despised 
 and rejected of men, scourged, imprisoned, and put 
 to death. Just so, we who walk in these strange, 
 dark days, must bear about in our hearts, yea, even 
 in our bodies, the marks of the Lord Jesus, that we 
 may show forth the sacrifice of Christ till He come — 
 each in his own way, and in his own degree, a 
 Shadow Christ. 
 
 Most sincerely 
 
 Let me follow where Thou leadest, 
 
 Let me, bleeding where Thou bleedest 
 
 Die, if dying I may give 
 
 Life to one who asks to live, 
 
 And more nearly, 
 
 Living thus, resemble Thee. 
 
THE ETERNAL COMMUNION 
 
 "Before Abraham was, I am." — John viii. 58. 
 
 HERE are words so strange that they not only 
 startle our attention, but wellnigh confound 
 us. A young teacher, not yet fifty years old, calmly 
 tells his hearers that he lived before the days of 
 Abraham. Not only so, but He speaks as if He 
 were in some way exempt from the conditions of 
 time, using the present tense; "Before Abraham was, 
 I am." Obviously here is something quite unlike the 
 ordinary paradox such as all mystical teachers em- 
 ploy, and must employ. Either these words have no 
 meaning at all, or they have something very deep 
 and true and wonderful to tell us. One does not 
 wonder that the men who heard such words were 
 puzzled, and we can hardly blame them for search- 
 ing for stones to throw at the Speaker. 
 
 Truly, this is a tantahsing text. With the dogmas 
 founded upon it dealing with the life of Christ before 
 His advent in the flesh, we have not now to do. 
 They are alike dark and difficult, if not doubtful. 
 So far as His own words were reported, Jesus Him- 
 self spoke of these things only in hints and para- 
 doxes, in words cryptic and dim ; and where He was 
 so reserved it ill becomes others to be talkative. 
 About the most ordinary person there is a deep mys- 
 
 172 
 
THE ETERNAL COMMUNION 173 
 
 tery, while above the spiritually great brood clouds 
 and darkness which none can penetrate. If we can- 
 not fathom our own nature, there is little hope that 
 we can measure One who was the most majestic and 
 appealing of all the masters and deliverers of life 
 that ever came forth "out of the bosom of human- 
 ity." No, our interest to-day is rather in the tense 
 of the text, as bespeaking a kingdom in which all 
 seekers and lovers of God live in an Eternal Present. 
 Every seer, every prophet, every great idealist 
 who has shed his light upon the darkness of this 
 world, has borne witness to the reality of such a 
 kingdom. With one accord, from Buddha, Socrates, 
 and Aurelius, to Jesus and His Apostles, through a 
 long array of saints, mystics, and poets, down to 
 the Ruskins, Emersons, and Tagores of our own 
 day, they prophesy of a realm in which the great 
 ideals of Love, Justice, Truth, Service, Beauty have 
 security and significance. To me it is the most elo- 
 quent and touching fact in human history that in 
 every age men have sought citizenship in a kingdom 
 where a thousand years are as a day, seeking to bring 
 the power of eternal ideals to bear upon the ordinary 
 life of mortals, and to send through that ordinary life 
 the glory of the Eternal — as the sun shoots its trans- 
 figuring light through a great dull cloud. And when 
 men speak of that kingdom of the ideal, time van- 
 ishes and they find themselves living in an Eternal 
 Communion, as witness the words of a young poet 
 of England, Charles Sorley, killed in France in igi ? : 
 
174. THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 He had a yearning for the strength 
 
 That comes of unity: 
 The union of one soul at length 
 
 With its twin soul to lie; 
 To be a part of one great strength 
 
 That moves and cannot die. 
 
 If we turn to the Bible we find that it is the su- 
 preme Book of the Eternal Communion, not only in 
 its whole outlook and emphasis, but in certain mov- 
 ing passages in which we see the spirit of man bridg- 
 ing vast gulfs of time and meeting the living God and 
 its fellows in the events and voices of the past. For 
 example, the prophet Hosea recalls the story of 
 Jacob's midnight wrestling with the angel, and adds : 
 "Yea, he had power over the angel and prevailed, 
 and wept and made supplication unto him; he found 
 him; he found him in Bethel, and there he spake 
 with us." Thus while speaking of that great and 
 mysterious experience, the prophet suddenly felt that 
 he himself had been there, and that what God signi- 
 fied to the patriarch He signified to him also. There 
 are similar examples in the Psalms, as, for instance : 
 "They went through the flood on foot; and there 
 did we rejoice in Him." Many ages separated the 
 Psalmist from that scene, but those ages fall away, 
 and he is in fellowship with his forefathers in their 
 Divine deliverance. Still another striking example 
 is the 132nd Psalm, in which the remote is brought 
 near in the sudden discovery of the timeless. Not 
 only in the rapt and lofty lines of poets and seers 
 
THE ETERNAL COMMUNION 175 
 
 do we find this peculiarity of the Bible, but in the 
 calm prose of history as well.^ 
 
 Surely here is a reality which, if it can be made 
 real to our hearts, will mean much for our strength, 
 our comfort and our hope. Everyday life gives us 
 many a hint of it. When we listen to great music, 
 or noble eloquence, time is forgotten and we taste 
 the joy of knowing, if only for an hour, what the 
 timeless life is. Emerson reminds us that there is 
 one mind common to all men, whereby we live in 
 the same world of truth with Plato and Aristotle. 
 What is true to-day was true when the great Greeks 
 taught in Athens, and it will be true ages hence. In 
 hterature there is a zone of song in which, if a man 
 step, his words echo for ages. In the same way, 
 those who, by loyalty to the ideal, attain to the final 
 beauty of sacrificial character, never die. They be- 
 long to all lands, all races, all ages. Their names 
 are a part of the sacred legend of the world. Such 
 hints help us, it may be, but they fail of making the 
 Eternal Communion real, vivid, and satisfying to 
 our minds and heart. Let me go a step further and 
 see if it cannot be brought home to us. 
 
 Terrible as the war is, unspeakably terrible, it 
 has brought us many beautiful things, and none more 
 lovely than the letters written by our men to the folks 
 at home. Volumes of these letters have been pub- 
 lished, and in almost every collection there is almost 
 invariably one that stands out from the rest as par- 
 ticularly significant and moving. Such a letter is not 
 
 •Hosea xii. 4; Psalm Ixvi. 6; Joshua vi. 1-3- 
 
176 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 always a conscious last word, but something written 
 in a more solemn and perhaps dimly prescient mo- 
 ment. These letters are nearly always to mothers, 
 as we may read in the Letters of Arthur George 
 Heath, with a memoir by Gilbert Murray. It is to 
 the mothers the men turn when death hovers, not so 
 much to seek comfort, apparently, as to give it. A 
 precious collection of these letters to mothers could 
 be made, and it would surely include the following 
 letter written by Arthur Heath to his mother a few 
 months before he was killed in France on his twenty- 
 eighth birthday. At the hour of parting it is into the 
 sense of the Eternal Fellowship that he seeks to lift 
 her heart and faith: 
 
 "We make the division between life and death as if it 
 were one of dates — being born at one date and dying some 
 years after. But just as we sleep half our lives, so when 
 we awake, too, we know that often we are only half alive. 
 Life, in fact, is a quality, not a quantity, and there are cer- 
 tain moments of real life whose value seems so great that 
 to measure them by the clock, and find them to have lasted 
 so many hours or minutes, just, appears trivial and meaning- 
 less. Their power, indeed, is such that you cannot tell how 
 long they last, for they can colour all the rest of our lives, 
 and remain a source of strength and joy that you know not 
 to be exhausted, even though you cannot trace exactly how 
 it works. The first time I ever heard Brahms's Requiem 
 remains with me as an instance of what I mean. Afterwards 
 you do not look back on such events as mere past things 
 whose position in time can be localised ; you still feel as liv- 
 ing the power that first awoke in them. Now if such mo- 
 
THE ETERNAL COMMUNION 177 
 
 ments could be preserved, and the rest strained off, none of 
 us could wish for anything better. And just as these mo- 
 ments of joy or elevation may fill our ovv^n lives, so, too, they 
 may be prolonged in the experience of our friends, and, ex- 
 ercising their power in those lives, may know a continual 
 resurrection. ... If what I have written seems unreal to 
 you and fantastic, at least there is one thing with which you'll 
 agree. The will to serve is in both of us, and you approve 
 of what I am doing. Now that is just one of the true and 
 vital things that must not be, and is not, exhausted by the 
 moment at which it is felt or expressed. My resolution can 
 live on in yours, even if I am taken, and, in your refusal 
 to regret what we know to have been a right decision, it 
 can prove itself undefeated by death." 
 
 Thus, a young man, about to die, seeks to com- 
 fort his mother by pointing her to the very same 
 truth to which I. am trying to lead your hearts. For 
 the most part his letters are radiantly happy, like 
 the man who would be a philosopher, but cheerful- 
 ness would always be breaking in. Of course, he 
 does not use the phrases of religion, albeit the truth 
 is the same. If one wishes it clothed in the language 
 of the altar he can do no better than turn to that 
 golden little book which to Luther was second only 
 to the Bible in which he found, in his hour of darkest 
 tribulation, "a certain truth" — the truth indeed which 
 made his what he was: ^ If you wish to trace this 
 certain truth — not esoteric at all, but translucently 
 lovely and richly human — you will find it in the open- 
 ing paragraphs of Luther's treatise. The Freedom 
 
 * Theologica Germanica. 
 
178 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 of a Christian Man. The little book to which I refer 
 is, of course, a book of mysticism, and it has come 
 down to us dateless and authorless; fittingly so, be- 
 cause it is an eternal book. It may well have been 
 the meditations of some deep-hearted woman — some 
 clear-visioned Monica — in a cloister or by a hearth, 
 researching the deep things of God in a circle of 
 Quaker-like friends. Or it may have been the 
 reverie of some obscure saint whom the angel of re- 
 nunciation had set upon the pinnacle of the minster to 
 peer into the lore of Eternity, or from the holy 
 heights of humility to ponder the piteous supplication 
 of the human heart. It is a simple book, telling us 
 once more of the ancient, incessant need of purifica- 
 tion, the futility of evasions, and the divine harmony 
 won by prayer, discipline and service. As we may 
 read : 
 
 "I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own 
 hand is to a man. As soon as a man turneth himself in 
 spirit and with his whole heart and mind entereth into the 
 nature of God, which is above all time, all that he ever 
 lost is restored in a moment. And if a man were to do 
 this a thousand times in each day, each time a real and fresh 
 union would take place. And in this sweet and divine act 
 standeth the truest and fullest union that may be in this 
 present time. For he that hath attained thereto asketh noth- 
 ing further, for he hath found the kingdom of heaven and 
 eternal life on earth." 
 
 After this manner a wise teacher of the heart 
 seeks to show us how near the divinest things are 
 
THE ETERNAL COMMUNION 179 
 
 to us, what the eternal life is, and how we may live 
 it here in the midst of these tangled days. God is 
 here; eternity is now. When we live for divine 
 things we enter into the life of God In whom live 
 the spirits of those who have left us. No matter 
 where we are — on the battlefield, on the sea, at 
 home or far away, in the city or in the field — as often 
 as we turn our minds and hearts to Him we partake 
 of this Eternal Communion. Again let me draw my 
 example from the war, which has made so many real 
 things seem unreal, and so many unreal things most 
 real, rewarding, and redeeming. Some of you may 
 have seen a tiny book of verse called The Heavenly 
 Tavern, which the following lines make worth pos- 
 sessing, if it held no others : 
 
 "Here, in the No-man's land and in the dark, 
 By evil chance hard hit, dying alone 
 I lie, and the pain shifts from limb to limb. 
 Pain o' the body, durable enough. ... 
 But now that pain merges itself at last 
 In one great longing for some human voice 
 'Mid this inhuman din of warfare loud; 
 Some human voice, symbol of lasting bond 
 That joins me close to every human soul 
 And drives this loneliness away from me. . . . 
 Now through the darkness and the pain a Voice — 
 *Ye are My Body closely joined to Me 
 And to each other ; and in yonder world 
 Banished be loneliness and dreadful fear 
 Of solitude. Feed on My presence now.' 
 And at the word I stretch my wounded hand, 
 
180 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Unthinkingly, it seems, and there beneath 
 
 My finger feel the three short blades of grass. . . . 
 
 May this Thy Body be and this Thy Blood. . . , 
 
 There on my tongue my sacrament lies safe. 
 
 So, God, Thy Presence comes; and though I die, 
 
 I do not die alone. Rushingly comes 
 
 The sound of myriad voices in mine ear 
 
 Like falling water; and my place awaits 
 
 Me there. So as I chew the blades of grass 
 
 I know that all is well, and my small soul 
 
 Goes, 'companied with many greater souls. 
 
 To where, as at some heavenly tavern fair, 
 
 I greet my friends. . . . 
 
 I thank Thee for Thy blades of grass, 
 
 My Eucharist to me in loneliness." 
 
 Even so, across the strange deeps and distances 
 of death, he is united in the Eternal Communion 
 of all the brave and true-hearted, and finds fellow- 
 ship. The experience here realised by the poet is 
 far more real than the din and thunder of battle. 
 It is what Jesus meant by the Eternal Life, which 
 does not begin at death, but here and now — as the 
 sky begins at the top of the ground. Indeed, if 
 we follow His way, what men call death will be 
 seen in its true light — a cloud-shadow wandering 
 across our human valley. Jesus lived by "the power 
 of an endless life," the eternal contemporary of 
 all souls that love God and serve His name, talking 
 with Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Vision. Out 
 of that eternal realm He spoke in the text, "Before 
 Abraham was, I am." Into that world where we are 
 
THE ETERNAL COMMUNION 181 
 
 free from the tyranny of time He seeks to lead us, 
 adding a new dimension to our lives which are so 
 brief at their longest, so broken at their best. Oh, 
 let us lay hold of Eternal Life in Him, and we shall 
 know of a truth that our little lives are 
 
 A part of one great strength 
 That moves and cannot die. 
 
THE UNBOUND CHRIST 
 
 "The time is at hand."— Rev. i. 3. 
 
 IN his recent book, The Divine Aspect of History, 
 Mr. Mozley has this striking and suggestive re- 
 mark: "With the death of Jesus our earthly life for 
 the first time struck root in the fields of eternity." 
 Not for the first time, surely, but more deeply, more 
 clearly, and therefore more fruitfully. Something 
 Jesus had which the prophets only sought and fore- 
 told; a seed which He implanted, or evoked, which 
 has grown a richer harvest since He lived, and be- 
 cause He still lives. Of this new divine life, strik- 
 ing deeper root in the fields of time, the Book of 
 Revelation is an interpretation, an unfolding: it is 
 a Fifth Gospel — the Gospel of the Eternal Christ. 
 
 It is a Christian Apocalypse — that is, an attempt 
 to expound, or body forth in symbols the meaning 
 and final issues of the revelation of Jesus Christ. Its 
 primary purpose is not so much to predict as to 
 interpret. Like the Hebrew prophets, the writer is 
 thinking most of the present needs of those for whom 
 he writes, who were living in the cloudy sunset of 
 an epoch. But, in interpreting the spiritual signi- 
 ficance of his own age, he furnished the Church with 
 the key to unlock the secrets of every age; for the 
 spiritual forces behind all ages are the same. 
 
 182 
 
THE UNBOUND CHRIST 18S 
 
 Throughout the book human history Is regarded 
 from the standpoint of the eternal world, as if the 
 writer were standing outside the time-order looking 
 down upon the pageant. History is seen to be a 
 contest between spiritual forces, of which the earth 
 is the battle-ground: and if evil often seems to be 
 stronger, it is doomed to defeat in the end. 
 
 There is a certain order in the book, but it is not 
 chronological. Its visions overlap and blend, like 
 the dissolving views of a cinema, and are less a series 
 of events than a series of pictures, often strange and 
 terrible, but sometimes lovely and grand, of the di- 
 vine judgment working itself out in history. The in- 
 dications of time in the book are not to be taken liter- 
 ally; they are a part of its symbolism. No attempt 
 is made to foretell the length of the Christian dispen- 
 sation; all the writer can see is that the conflict be- 
 tween the Church and the world will go on, and be- 
 come more intense as the end draws near — but the 
 victory of spiritual forces is sure. Three things 
 stand out distinctly, and should be kept in mind: 
 
 First, that God is working out His purpose in all 
 history, even In the darkest times of perplexity and 
 evil. World-empires may defy Him for a moment, 
 but their triumph is a brief prelude to disaster. 
 
 Second, the goal of human history is the final 
 triumph of Christ: a victory to be achieved, as the 
 writer sees it, not so much by the gradual improve- 
 ment of society as by the intervention of God. If 
 there is a law of growth and unfolding, there is also 
 a Law of Catastrophe. 
 
184 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Third, the Church must never on any account, 
 no matter what the temptation, compromise with 
 the evil spirit of the world, lest by purchasing such 
 favour she betray her Master. 
 
 Such Is the ordinary outline of the spirit and pur- 
 pose of the book, but some of us are not satisfied 
 with it. Unfortunately, as matters now stand, not 
 a few who try to read the book find it to be anything 
 but a Book of Revelation. They go to it expecting 
 a disclosure, as the title Indicates, and come away 
 confused. They discover good counsel, some be- 
 jewelled passages, and stanzas of haunting beauty 
 and comfort, but they feel that there has been no 
 actual revelation. The imagery is alien, the pictures 
 seem more fanciful than real; and In looking through 
 Its strange art gallery they find more to bewilder than 
 to enlighten. Some one said that the book, if it did 
 not find him crazy, left him so. Luther declined to 
 expound It. So did Calvin, and it had been better if 
 certain others had followed their example. Alas I 
 this golden book has fallen into the hands of the 
 puzzle-maker and the prophecy-monger, to whom it 
 Is a divine almanac, and whose exegesis is as Ingenu- 
 ous as it is absurd. It has been used as a kind of 
 cryptogram to prove when the world is coming to an 
 end, as if that were startling information. Of course, 
 the world Is always coming to an end, and always be- 
 ginning again, and so it will be till the end be ended. 
 One recalls the remark of Emerson to one of these 
 apostles, who told him that the world was about to be 
 
THE UNBOUND CHRIST 185 
 
 burned up: "Never mind, never mind; we can get 
 along without it." 
 
 The question of the authorship of the Apocalypse 
 need not detain us. If it was not written by St. 
 John the Divine, it was the work of some master 
 mind who interpreted his faith and vision in the 
 early time, as Browning did in our own day in "The 
 Death in the Desert." Pursued by the foes of his 
 faith, St. John took refuge in a cave in the desert, 
 where his mortal hour came upon him. As the end 
 approached, in rapt prophetic vision he foresaw, with 
 his bright dying eyes, all the subtle attacks on the 
 faith of Jesus, and disarmed them — as Tennyson in 
 "In Memoriam" forfeit and fought out in advance 
 the spiritual battles of the next sixty years. The 
 teaching of David Strauss, at whose touch all things 
 turned to allegory; the unctuous and persuasive doubt 
 of Renan, in which one hears always an echo of 
 irony; these, and the ruder forms of denial, the dying 
 seer predicted and refuted. Let men deny what 
 dogmas they will, let them tear the Gospel record to 
 tatters, they do not so much as touch the basis of 
 faith as Browning states it in that poem; and he is 
 true to the faith and vision of St. John. 
 
 Let us assume, then, that the Apocalypse was writ- 
 ten either by St. John or by his inspiration, and see 
 if we can find the key to its interpretation. St. John 
 was the only one of the Apostles who died a natural 
 death; all the others suffered martyrdom in one form 
 or another — ^but the Beloved Disciple lived to the 
 great age of ninety, his gospel summed up in the say- 
 
186 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 ing, "Little children, love one another." When he 
 was very old and bowed with sorrow he was banished 
 to the Isle of Patmos and made to work in the 
 quarries. But that was not the worst hardship that 
 befell him. Darkness seemed to settle over the 
 world, and at Patmos the message came that Peter 
 and Andrew had been put to death, and that the little 
 Church which he had planted at Ephesus had been 
 broken up by persecution. Other groups of disciples 
 had been driven by the wind and scattered. Every- 
 thing seemed lost. Besides the holy city of Jerusalem 
 had been captured and destroyed, and with the fall 
 of the Temple the world seemed to be falling to 
 pieces. 
 
 Such was the setting of the Apocalypse, with Its 
 many windows of vision opening, not Into the Past, 
 not Into the Future, but into the hidden, eternal Pres- 
 ent; and the aged Apostle was shown that the Church 
 does not depend on Peter, Paul, Andrew, or John, 
 but upon the eternal Christ, who Is alive for ever 
 more. It Is a vision vouchsafe to a soldier of right- 
 eousness, an apostle of love, sustaining his faith and 
 fortifying his spirit. No matter how we may Inter- 
 pret it, glibly as the psychologist too often does, or 
 reverently and profoundly as Maurice did, surely 
 it Is proof of two things — first, the power of the seer 
 to go beyond the historian, to rise above the storms 
 and disasters of history and read their meaning from 
 above downward; and second, the all-conquering, all- 
 transfiguring power of Christian faith, and its far- 
 shining Insight which sees the final victory of Christ. 
 
THE UNBOUND CHRIST 187 
 
 Here Is the message of the Book of Vision to us to- 
 day, living as we are in a time of world-crisis and up- 
 heaval like that in which it was written, and we need 
 to recover that message — or, better still, that faith 
 ■ — for our comfort and courage. In recent years 
 there has been a strong tendency to go back to the 
 Christ of long ago; but what we need in the con- 
 fusions of our day is a sense of the Living Christ. 
 It Is not a question as to the coming of Christ, but 
 that He is here, that we need to grasp. 
 
 Truly, the Apocalypse is a fifth Gospel, and the 
 faith and spirit of this Gospel Is essential to an un- 
 derstanding of the other four Gospels. Matthew, 
 Mark, Luke, and John show us, from different 
 angles, the Christ of Palestine, lovely, winning, 
 heroic, tormented, but at last triumphant — paint- 
 ing the picture with Incomparable art upon a simple 
 canvas. But in the fifth Gospel we are shown the 
 Living and Eternal Christ upon a background of 
 clashing armies, shouting hosts, and burning cities, 
 as If the seer-like artist had dipped his brush in 
 earthquake and eclipse, and the shadows of the bot- 
 tomless pit, using crags and mountains, clouds and 
 seas, to supplement his art. Here is the Christ, not 
 only of the four Gospels, but of the four corners of 
 the earth; the "Christ of the militant kingdom and 
 the kingdom of peace; the Christ of war and pesti- 
 lence and disaster, as well as of holiness and of 
 blessedness. It is the Christ of Christian history, 
 not the glorified Christ, or the ascended Christ, but 
 
188 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 the Christ of to-day." ^ Here His movements are 
 not along the stony paths of Judea, but in vast ranges 
 of mind, in long stretches of time, in stupendous over- 
 turnings of history. 
 
 It is a portrayal, a foreshadowing, an interpreta- 
 tion of Christ Unbound, released and set free to 
 mingle in the life of the world in whose contests 
 and tragedies the will of God is being wrought out. 
 There is much to remind us of Prometheus Unbound, 
 by Shelley, one using the background of Greek re- 
 ligion and the other the scenery of Jewish apoca- 
 lypse with its fantastic imagery, much of which, no 
 doubt, was designed to heighten the colouring of the 
 great picture. Indeed, the parallelism between the 
 Crucified One and Prometheus nailed to the cliff is 
 very striking, and one feels that Shelley was richly 
 indebted to the Apocalypse, and that his poem is 
 more Christian than Greek. There is no need to say 
 that the Apocalypse is not only truer, but pro- 
 founder, as it is more august and awful in its imagery. 
 Also, its imagery is entirely in keeping with the sub- 
 limity of the vision, the writer having exhausted 
 heaven and earth, almost, in his effort to set forth 
 "that unfinished life which shapes the world." 
 
 Never was there such a chamber of imagery, if 
 once we grasp the key to it. Death and hell, light- 
 nings and thunders, hail and fire mingle with blood, 
 darkened suns, stars cast like unripe figs, the sky 
 rolled up like a scroll, mountains uprooted, the pit 
 
 ^ The Unexplored Self, by G. R. Montgomery. Chapter VII., 
 to which this sermon is indebted. 
 
THE UNBOUND CHRIST 189 
 
 of the abyss opened, plagues, the sickle of diseases, 
 horrors by day and horrors by night, metals gleam- 
 ing in a furnace, a sea of glass clear as crystal, the 
 whiteness of snow, many radiant jewels, the tree of 
 life, seven-headed, ten-horned beasts, agonies unutter- 
 able, diadems of victory, the throne of God, judg- 
 ment, voices like the sound of many waters of heaven- 
 ly hosts, choruses, hallelujahs — how strange it all 
 is to our eyes and ears, and how confusing at first! 
 Yet, when we see the central Figure of the scene, now 
 a King, now a Child, and always a Lamb slain in 
 eternal sacrifice, one feels that it might have been 
 written yesterday. Surely no book of the Bible has 
 more to say to us to-day than the solemn Book of 
 Vision, shutting up its scenes, as Milton said, be- 
 tween the stillness of heavenly silence and the echoes 
 of Divine symphonies. 
 
 If the Apocalypse closes the Bible, it opens the 
 book of the world, translating "Christ into the 
 vocabulary of the larger efforts, the race problems, 
 the social achievements" of history. It is the only 
 fitting close of the Bible, being a vision neither of 
 things past nor of future things, but of the eternal 
 present. The Babylon of the book is neither Rome 
 nor the city of the Euphrates. It is any centre of re- 
 bellion light. It is London. It is Paris. It is New 
 York. The beast with seven heads and ten horns 
 is not Caesar alone. It is the unscrupulous Man of 
 Power in every age, in every land. He may be a 
 monarch, a millionaire, or a demagogue. The Christ 
 whose presence is the glory of the book is the im- 
 
190 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 manent Christ, in whom the human and the Divine 
 blend — mighty, but merciful, His word sharper than 
 a two-edged sword, yet redeeming, His face as the 
 sun shining in splendour, His voice like music. Some- 
 times He is riding a red horse, sometimes a black, 
 horse, and at last the white horse of conquest — victor 
 over all that is untrue, unclean, and unjust by "that 
 strange power called weakness." 
 
 Such, in outline is the fifth Gospel, and we need 
 to read it to-day in the flash and glare and thunder 
 of world-tragedy, that so we may learn to see in 
 Mammonism, Materialism, and Militarism the old 
 enemies of the Christ, and in the immeasurable sacri- 
 fice of our race an unveiling of that spirit, that prin- 
 ciple, in which lies our hope and healing. If we take 
 this Book of Vision to heart, it will teach us to see 
 the Eternal Christ moving amid the shadows and 
 horrors of our time. His truth the only hope of our 
 humanity to-day, to-morrow, and for ever. Even 
 so, come, Lord Jesus! 
 
TWO OR THREE AND JESUS 
 
 "Where two or three are gathered together in My name, 
 there am I in the midst of them." — Matt, xviii. 20. 
 
 SURELY no promise in the Bible is more pre- 
 cious than that contained in this text, and none 
 has been more often fulfilled. How many 'memories 
 it brings back to me from across the years ! Out on 
 the prairies of the Far West there were not many of 
 us when the neighbourhood assembled, as its custom 
 was, for the weekly service of prayer. Some of them 
 had to ride for miles to be present, but they seldom 
 failed. Then some old saint would offer prayer, in 
 which he rarely forgot to give thanks for the promise 
 of the Master that where two or three were gathered 
 together in His name there He would be in their 
 midst. And that promise was fulfilled, as we all felt 
 when we turned our steps homeward refreshed and 
 exalted, having learned once more that "in fellow- 
 ship religion has its founts," 
 
 Forgive me for recalling another memory which 
 clings to this text. In the front yard of our home 
 there stood a great old tree, under which some who 
 are fallen asleep were wont to sit on Sabbath after- 
 noons and talk of the things of the soul. Nearly 
 always they had their Bibles open in their laps, and 
 sometimes they would argue a point of doctrine, 
 
 191 
 
192 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 More often, however, their talk was of the inner life 
 and its revealings and the things they had learned in 
 the school of Christ. Some of their interpretations 
 of Scripture texts, especially of the Parables and 
 Prophecies, were no doubt fantastic. As examples 
 of exegesis they would hardly pass muster among 
 scholars, but as overflowings of the poetry of faith 
 they had a rich beauty. How good it was for a lad 
 to listen to that talk under the old tree, and to-day 
 he is willing to forgive all errors of that humble 
 exegesis in gratitude for a home of faith — as he for- 
 gives all the allegories of the Fathers of the Church. 
 It recalls a page in Grace Abounding, in which Bun- 
 yan tells of a day he could never forget: 
 
 "Upon a day the good providence of God called me to 
 Bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets 
 of that town I came where there were three or four poor 
 women sitting at a door in the sun, talking about the things 
 of God. Being now willing to hear their discourse, I drew 
 near to hear what they said, for I was now a brisk talker 
 in matters of religion. But they were far beyond me. Their 
 talk was about a new birth, the work of God in their 
 hearts. They talked how God had visited their souls with 
 His love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and prom- 
 ises they were refreshed, comforted, and supported. And 
 methought they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture 
 language, and with such an appearance of grace in all they 
 said, that they were to me as if they had found a new world 
 — as if they were people who dwelt alone." 
 
 How beautiful, yet how far away it all seems — 
 almost as remote as my mother and her friends under 
 
TWO OR THREE AND JESUS 193 
 
 the old tree five thousand miles away. Why do we 
 not have such talk, in our day? Why are we so 
 reticent, so uncommunicative, so shy in respect of the 
 inner life of faith? Is it because we have nothing 
 to talk about, because we have no "dealing" in these 
 matters, as Silas Marner would say? Or is it due 
 to an unsettlement of faith which makes us less cer- 
 tain, and therefore less talkative, than our fathers 
 were ? True, the art of conversation has suffered sad 
 decline since Johnson, Burke, and Boswell held high 
 discourse in London town. Is that the reason for 
 our dumbness? Perhaps, in part; but on other sub- 
 jects we find our tongues and use them with some 
 skill. Whatever the reason may be, some of us miss 
 such talk as that under the old tree whose leaves still 
 rustle in my memory. Indeed, the religious loneli- 
 ness of our time is appalling. Never were human 
 bodies so jostled in street and mart; never were hu- 
 man souls so strangely alone. 
 
 At first thought the idea of comradeship in the 
 life of the spirit may seem like a contradiction. 
 That life is so inward, so individual, so separate, so 
 shut within the privacy of the soul, that we shrink 
 from trying to share it. Even St. Bernard was wont 
 to advise every one to have these words written in 
 large letters over his room : "My secret to myself." 
 Yet no one ever poured out the riches of his inner 
 life in a more prodigal profusion than did St. Ber- 
 nard, in whose sermons on the Love of God we may 
 read one of the highest romances in the history of 
 faith. While each one may have his unspoken secret, 
 
194 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 it is also true that no one knows the ways of the Spirit 
 in his own soul who knows only his own soul. The 
 highest fruits of the life of the spirit ripen in fellow- 
 ship, and he misses this fruition who keeps his ex- 
 perience in separateness from his fellows. Lack of 
 tact, to be sure, is fatal in any field. Men resent any 
 effort to intrude upon the privacy of the soul. "The 
 soul of our brother is a dark forest," says a Russian 
 proverb, and we must respect its veiled and shadowy 
 mystery. Still, there is no excuse for our strange 
 shyness in speaking of the truths that make us men. 
 Surely, as between utter aloofness and an intru- 
 sive familiarity, we can find a happy mean of gra- 
 cious, genial, spiritual fellowship; frank, open, and 
 forthright in our talk of the things of faith. Imagine 
 a company of friends assembled in a spirit befitting 
 such an adventure, each one telling what he actually 
 believes, not what he thinks he ought to believe, or 
 is expected to believe. The result would be startling 
 at first, but it would make for mutual understanding 
 and regard. Why cannot groups of kindred souls 
 gather, no one trying to convert another, none taking 
 toward the others any superior attitude, and talk of 
 what is in their hearts, like my dear old friends under 
 the tree? We do this in other concerns, why not do 
 it in the name of the highest interests of life? My 
 point, as you will see, is far-reaching in its possibili- 
 ties, the while it points to a grave defect in our 
 modern religious life. In our impatience to be doing 
 everything at once and by wholesale we have for- 
 
TWO OR THREE AND JESUS 195 
 
 gotten a very important factor in the progress of 
 faith and the teaching of truth. 
 
 First the man, then the group, then the multitude 
 — that is the order of advance, whether the truth to 
 be taught be one of art, of politics, or of religion. 
 Take such a group as gathered at Alfoxden, when 
 William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived in daily 
 fellowship with Coleridge. Who can doubt that 
 where those two or three were gathered in happy 
 comradeship the spirit of poetry was present in 
 power? No one can read the Journal of Dorothy 
 and doubt that she had a part, and no small part, 
 in the Lyrical Ballads. Not only are two heads 
 better than one; they are better than two. Out 
 of their union there comes, somehow, a something 
 larger and wiser and deeper than either of them 
 possesses alone. • That little band of Pre-Raphaelite 
 artists in England, led by Rossetti and Ruskin, were 
 wont to meet often to admire, criticise, and help each 
 other. After a time the public began to see some- 
 thing common in their work, a new kind of beauty. 
 When attacked, they stood together, and left an 
 unfading mark on English art. Darwin, Huxley, 
 and a few friends wrought out the idea of evolution 
 in science, and then fought it out in the forum; as 
 Socrates, long before, gave his thought to a band of 
 young Greeks, and through them to the world. In 
 my own country Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and their 
 cluster of friends were called *'a mutual admiration 
 society," because they knew the uses and value of the 
 group. 
 
196 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Always it is so. If a man has a vision of truth 
 he draws a few kindred spirits into the circle of its 
 radiance, and they test his insight while sharing 
 it. They supplement his limitations, and in that way 
 he discovers the meaning of his own discovery. 
 Intimate fellowship is needed if men are to think 
 things through, and intimate fellowship is limited. 
 High truth cannot be mastered except by those bound 
 together by a bond too close to admit the many. 
 Within that circle, with all the give-and-take of 
 friends, there need be no reserve, no fear of misun- 
 derstanding, no dread of extravagance. There a 
 man may paint with a bold brush and be understood; 
 he may use the language of exaggeration which is 
 often the best exegesis of thought; he is not bound to 
 go back at every turn to first principles — they are as- 
 sumed. At last, after a truth has been thought out 
 and tested, there comes a time when they are ready 
 to publish it to the world and, if need be, to fight 
 for it. Always it is first a man of vision, then a 
 group made ready for service, and then the heroic 
 journey in spreading the truth. 
 
 Of course, you have outrun me to my real point, 
 but it must be emphasised none the less. About the 
 Hebrew prophets there gathered little bands of men 
 "who feared God and spake often one to another," 
 and they kept the light aglow in dark times. Only 
 a little band followed Jesus up and down the stony 
 paths of Judea, and after His death waited to be 
 endued with power from on high — yet what wonders 
 they wrought! Elect young spirits, drawn together 
 
TWO OR THREE AND JESUS 197 
 
 by the faith and genius of St. Paul took up his work 
 and carried it on when his head fell from the block. 
 All down the ages it has been so, from St. Paul to 
 St. Francis and his shining company, "fragrant with 
 a wondrous aspect." Recall the five students 
 gathered about Wesley in behalf of a method of 
 spiritual culture, and who came to be known as 
 Methodists. Think of the group in the common 
 room at Oriel about the shy and winsome figure of 
 Newman — how they put new life into a decaying 
 Church and helped to stem the tide of crass material- 
 ism. They were centres of light, those groups of 
 thinking, praying, seeking men adown the years, and 
 their fellowship liberated influences to which we can 
 set no limit. 
 
 Two or three and Jesus — that has been the secret 
 of power since the Church began her morning march 
 in the world, and so it must be to-day. Indeed, my 
 thoughts to-day were brought to mind by a visit 
 to an old shrine of the freedom of faith, the Pilgrim 
 Church, in Southwark. There, in 1616, as often 
 before, a little shattered band observed a day of 
 fasting and prayer, asking for light and leading. 
 Towards the close of the solemnity each renewed 
 his confession of faith in Christ, and then, standing 
 together, they joined hands and covenanted with 
 God and one another to walk in His ways as He had 
 already revealed, or should further make them 
 known. And so, amid desolations caused by fire, 
 plague, and persecution, the Church stood, holding 
 a principle which, if it was ever true, is true for ever. 
 
198 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Strong In their weakness, fortified by prayer, they 
 could not be subdued. What better can we do In 
 this dark day when the world Is shaken with strife 
 and "the sons before their fathers die," than to join 
 hands and hearts In a new covenant of love, loyalty, 
 and prayer! To-day, If we gather In His name, the 
 Christ who led the Pilgrim Fathers will lead their 
 sons Into a new day of faith. 
 
 Many have come to feel that the crisis of to-day 
 is so dire that It can only be met by a divinely 
 awakened religious life, similar to the great move- 
 ments of the past, whereby again and again abuses 
 were swept away, and the Church renewed. Not 
 a few think that such an awakening is imminent, 
 and that one of its features will be that great social 
 ideals will be realised under religious influences, 
 bringing a better social order and a deeper life of 
 faith. ^ One thing is clear: if there is to be such an 
 awakening, it will be felt first by those who are 
 waiting for it, praying for it, and are ready to re- 
 ceive it. Therefore, if we would win from this war 
 the victory we most need, we must seek aid beyond 
 the power of man to give. Like the pilgrims on the 
 way to Emmaus, we walk a twilight path, reasoning 
 together, disappointed and sad. The things that 
 have happened fill us with dismay, and we need an 
 Interpreter. Luther used to apply this text to inter- 
 preters and translators of the Bible, who, he said, 
 should not work alone, like St. Jerome, but in com- 
 pany. Even so must we work and pray and wait In 
 
 * The Neiv Spiritual Impulse, by L. Swetenham. 
 
TWO OR THREE AND JESUS 199 
 
 company if we would interpret the teaching of events. 
 Many dark problems lie ahead of us demanding to be 
 solved. Many points of view will be needed, many 
 true hearts, but most of all the calm, sure vision that 
 comes of fellowship with One who sees it all with 
 other and clearer eyes than ours. 
 
 For all these reasons we need to recover the idea 
 and uses of the group; especially does the Church 
 need to do so. What can be done by mass meetings 
 will continue to be done; but we need the quiet, 
 praying, seeking group, where a few meet together. 
 Men go to a great assembly, not to discover truth, 
 but to proclaim it. For the sake of the multitude 
 we must leave it for a time and seek the power that 
 comes of closer, more intimate fellowship. In every 
 church there are a few who have the true spirit. Let 
 these kindred souls find each other, form groups to 
 think things through, to pray things through, in 
 His name, and the promise will be fulfilled. Oh, it 
 is blessedly true that where two or three gather in 
 His name, in His spirit, the living Christ is there as 
 truly as when He walked with men in days of old. 
 
 Faith hath still its Olivet, 
 And love its Galilee. 
 
THE MOTHER OF JESUS 
 
 "But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in 
 her heart." — Luke ii. 19. 
 
 NOW the festival of the birth of Jesus might 
 also be named the festival of the Motherhood 
 of Mary — the festival, indeed, of all motherhood. 
 There was Mary, as well as her Child, in that pic- 
 ture which Art loves so well and about which Music 
 has woven so many melodies. Gentle, chaste, clothed 
 in sweet modesty, happy in the glow of a new won- 
 der, yet pensive withal and brooding — how unlike 
 Diana with her wiles and Venus with her empty 
 arms! No single scene has done more to touch the 
 human heart to tenderness, to disinfect it of evil, lift- 
 ing us into the curve and mystery of beauty, and 
 teaching us to think of the home and the family 
 as under the shadow of God. Whatever makes 
 for purity, pity, and piety is needed in this hard 
 world, if only to rebuke the rude cynicism which 
 befouls the fountains of life and degrades what is 
 most divine in human nature. 
 
 How delicately reticent, how exquisitely reverent 
 is the Gospel record of the Mother of Jesus! Half 
 hidden by a veil of prayers and hymns, visions, and 
 visitations— a mere touch here and there — she is 
 obscured from us, somewhat, and we do not see her 
 
 209 
 
THE MOTHER OF JESUS 201 
 
 distinctly. No doubt this is why some have exalted 
 her beyond measure, and others have neglected her 
 without reason. When we look closely at the narra- 
 tive, putting together the scattered hints and 
 glimpses of Mary, there is no figure in the company 
 grouped about the Master more lovely, more heroic, 
 more pathetic that His Mother. But we must not 
 think that her life was all one clear vision that left 
 no room for doubt, no place for struggle and mis- 
 giving. Far from it. That is to rob her life of 
 reality, making it a mere piece of play-acting bereft 
 of all adventure of faith. What is clear to us from 
 the record was dim to her as she walked her untried 
 and difficult path, leading she knew not whither. 
 The narrative as we have it was her interpretation 
 of her experience, not a prophetic scroll laid before 
 her as she moved through the years. She lived by 
 faith, and that was the pathos and the glory of her 
 life. 
 
 At first we see her as a gentle peasant girl, albeit 
 of noble heredity, modest and sweet, pious; pray- 
 ing, no doubt, as many a Hebrew girl prayed, that 
 she might be the mother of the Messiah — her mind 
 steeped In the poetry of her people, her soul attuned 
 to the haunting echoes of prophecy. Then we see 
 her as the wife of a carpenter; and when her Child 
 was born in a manger she knew, as Hannah knew, 
 that He was an answer to prayer — knew, what every 
 spiritually minded mother knows, that there Is some- 
 thing divine behind the birth of a child. Her moth- 
 erly instinct, her poetic Insight put to shame the cynl- 
 
202 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 cal atheism which sees no heavenly mystery in the 
 sacrament of birth. After the morning glow came 
 the light of common day, and we see Mary the 
 Mother of Jesus, and also of James, and Joses, and 
 Judas, and Simon, and the sisters; a dutiful wife, a 
 wise mother — a sort-tried, often doubting, but finally 
 believing woman. Blessed among women was she, 
 lovely when she bent over the cradle, and unutterably 
 pathetic when she stood by the dark Cross outside 
 the city gate. 
 
 Few are the glimpses given us of the eighteen 
 silent years of boyhood, but they are enough to 
 show us that Jesus was a mystery to His mother, as 
 he must be to every one else. Of course, this ex- 
 perience comes in some degree to all mothers, all 
 parents. Our children are ours, and yet not ours. 
 They are their own and must go their way in the 
 world. Frequently this makes for understanding, 
 all the more so when the mystery of genius is present 
 — as we may read in that strange, sad book entitled 
 Father and Son, by Edmund Gosse. Did the mother 
 of Shakespeare understand the wondrous boy grow- 
 ing up in her home? Did the mother of Dante 
 know that she held in her arms a lonely pilgrim of 
 eternity? How could they? From the outset, Mary 
 knew there was something mysterious about her Son, 
 something which made a certain distance between 
 them — something which soon or late was sure to lead 
 Him His own way, which might be far from her 
 way. Often He must have seemed like a little 
 stranger in her home, aloof even when she caressed 
 
THE MOTHER OF JESUS 203 
 
 Him most fondly, having ideas she did not grasp, 
 chambers in His nature she did not enter, and inti- 
 macies she could ijot share. 
 
 How strikingly this is shown In that scene In the 
 Temple when the lost lad — lost to His parents, but 
 not to Himself — was found talking with the doctors 
 of the law. The Temple was apparently the last 
 place they thought to look for Him, which shows 
 how little they knew One who was born to religion 
 as to the love of His mother. His reply to their 
 rebuke had in it all the pathos of His life: "Know 
 ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" 
 They had misread His temper and the tendency of 
 His nature, and there are few hardships harder than 
 to be misunderstood by those near and dear to us. 
 It puts a great loneliness round about us. Yet the 
 service of Mary^ to her Son was ineffably rich and 
 beautiful, the more so because He was her first-born 
 into whose life the tender tide of her mother-heart 
 poured. The tie between a mother and her eldest 
 son is unique, particular, and precious — doubly so 
 if she is left a widow, as Mary seems to have been, 
 if we may trust tradition. Such a fellowship is deep 
 and unutterable, and it leaves something fine In the 
 soul of the son, blending the strength of man with 
 the mercy of woman — and the two together bring 
 us near to God. 
 
 Yet no one can read the Gospel story without 
 seeing that there was an estrangement between Jesus 
 and His mother, the nature of which It Is not easy 
 to make out. It was, perhaps, an Inevitable part 
 
204 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 of the tragedy of His life. Jesus, we may be sure, 
 was remiss in no duty to His mother, but his nature 
 was beyond hers and His work called Him afar. If 
 Joseph died when Jesus was a lad, the entire sup- 
 port of the home fell upon Him until His brothers 
 were old enough to take His place. Perhaps, for 
 this reason, the beginning of His public ministry was 
 delayed until He was thirty years of age. When 
 that time came the rift was felt, and it widened with 
 the years. After His temptation He returned to 
 Nazareth and was nearly mobbed by His neighbours, 
 and never visited the village again — so far as we 
 have record. Even His family seem to have been 
 against Him. There is deep pathos in the line, "The 
 Son of Man hath not where to lay His head." As if 
 He had been driven away from His own home! 
 More than once He repeated the old proverb that "a 
 prophet is not without honour save in his own coun- 
 try," but He went further and added, "and among 
 his own kin, and In his own house!" What tragedy 
 Is here ! Nor is this the worst of It. There Is yet 
 another scene more heart-breaking still — a scene too 
 sad to have been Invented, and which we might have 
 been spared but for the veracity of the record. 
 
 There was a day, of which St. Mark tells, when 
 the multitude pressed upon Jesus to such an extent 
 that He had not even time to eat, and His family, 
 hearing of this, went out to lay hold of Him; for 
 they said, "He Is beside Himself." They thought 
 Him Insane, and His mother was among them ! How 
 could misunderstanding go further, how could 
 
THE MOTHER OF JESUS 205 
 
 pathos be more poignant ! Hence His words setting 
 forth the higher fellowship: "Whosover shall do 
 the will of God, the same is my brother and sister 
 and mother!" Faith brings the furthest near, and 
 lack of it leaves the nearest far off. What was pass- 
 ing in the soul of Mary in those days of struggle 
 and torture no words may ever hope to tell. Some- 
 one has said that the first Gospel of Christ was that 
 written in the heart of His mother, but it took a 
 long time to write it. Its pages were blotted with 
 tears and blurred with misgivings. When the news 
 came of sick folk healed, of the blind restored to 
 sight, of the dead raised, she *'kept these things, 
 pondering them in her heart." But when rumours 
 came of plots, derision, winebibbing, gluttony, blas- 
 phemy, and threats of death — how hard it was to 
 keep faith with, the visions and voices of other days. 
 Like most women, Mary was a conformist, and 
 the public opinion of Nazareth was dear to her 
 heart. Why could not her Son soften His words? 
 Why denounce the rulers of the Church? So long 
 as His teaching was mere words, it was not so 
 dangerous. But He insisted in acting it out, much 
 to the scandal of His family. He actually set forth 
 a faith and a way of living that upset the stability 
 of society, treating outcasts and even harlots with 
 kindness. He was not respectable — not for a day 
 of His life I If men of high position sought to talk 
 with Him, they did so by stealth by night, as Nic- 
 odemus did. All of which troubled the woman- 
 heart of Mary. Let us not chide her, lest we condemn 
 
206 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 ourselves. Are we quite willing to follow the logic 
 of Christianity? Are we brave enough to obey the 
 Gospel, in every page of which the seeds of social 
 revolution are slumbering? Have we not said that 
 Tolstoy and others of his kind were a little absurd 
 in taking the words of Jesus so seriously? What 
 Woolman called "the evil custom of the world" 
 makes men trim the truth down to fit the lower ends 
 of compromise and comfort. Not so Jesus. He was 
 tempted to do so in His battle in the wilderness, but 
 spurned all bribes of easy victory and temporary 
 success, and became the Redeemer of humanity — the 
 Redeemer of His Mother! 
 
 Mother and Son — each walked a lonely way, often 
 far apart, but their paths drew together toward the 
 end. Then it was that the sword pierced her heart, 
 as it had been foretold. She was in the Holy City 
 when the shadow fell, haunting the outskirts of the 
 angry throngs which clamoured for His life. She 
 saw Him standing crowned with thorns, condemned. 
 With painful steps and slow she followed Him to 
 Calvary, groping her way in the twilight of tragedy 
 — as so many English mothers are doing to-day. Of 
 all the figures that stood at the foot of the Cross, 
 she was the most forlorn and forsaken. For the 
 politician the Sufferer was a dangerous agitator, for 
 the priest a fanatic, for the Disciples their beloved 
 teacher; but for Mary — He was her Son! Yet even 
 on the Cross Jesus did not forget His mother, and 
 made provision for her care, asking the beloved 
 Disciple to take her to his home. No one else saw 
 
THE MOTHER OF JESUS 207 
 
 the Cross as Mary saw it. The brief, broken, bitter 
 words put into her mouth in the drama of "The ter- 
 rible Meek" help us to feel her profound, unspeak- 
 able grief. If the Cross was the depth of her sorrow, 
 who else received the first Easter news with so wild 
 a leap of heart? Amid rumours and reports, fleet- 
 ing glimpses and whispers of His voice, what must 
 have been the quivering eagerness of her heart I 
 At last, at last she understood. Was ever any story 
 stranger — how, at the end, the Mother of Jesus be- 
 came a member of His Church, humbly trustful of 
 His spirit, sweetly obedient to His truth — her Son, 
 her Saviour! 
 
 With right do we honour the Mother of Jesus, 
 linking her in poetry and song with One who was 
 her Saviour and ours. The early Church called her 
 Theotokos, Mother of God, because through her a 
 new hope and joy had come into the hard old world. 
 But she was saved, not because she was the Mother 
 of the Saviour, but because, like all others, she 
 found her way at last to faith in His spirit and His 
 truth. Salvation is moral, not magical. As we can- 
 not attribute the spiritual supremacy of Jesus to a 
 physical fact, no more can we think that Mary was 
 redeemed by her motherhood. If any might boast 
 after the flesh, she more ! But those who enter the 
 Kingdom are born not of the flesh, nor of the will 
 of man, but of the will of God. Mary, like others, 
 came to victory by the faith that worketh by love, 
 by the obedience that makes us free, and the love 
 that lifts us into the eternal fellowship. If only we 
 
208 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 had record of the First Gospel, as it was written in 
 her heart, what a testimony it would be, what a 
 revelation of the love of God unveiled in the love 
 of a mother. 
 
 How long Mary lived we do not know. St. Luke 
 knew her, and tradition has it that he painted a 
 picture of her in later years. From no one else 
 could he have heard the story of the Nativity which 
 he set down in his gospel. It is her interpretation 
 of her experience, seen in the light thrown back by 
 the life of Jesus upon His cradle and her mother- 
 hood — and some of us hold that her insight was 
 true- What is the value of that record? For doc- 
 trine, little. But for the truth that is deeper than 
 dogma, as deep as the home and family, as deep as 
 the heart of motherhood, it means more than men 
 have ever dreamed. Once we take it to heart, it will 
 rebuke the false shame with which we veil the beauty 
 of birth and the sacrament of conception. It will 
 cleanse our lips of the rude jest, and exalt our 
 minds with a sense of the sanctity of life, purify- 
 ing society at its source. Surely this is what the 
 story is trying to tell us, and it could not be told 
 in a better way, with more artless art, with more 
 haunting suggestion, with more ineffable beauty. 
 
 Never was that purifying truth more needed than 
 to-day when there is so much to belie it. In nothing 
 has the war been more horrible than in its crimes 
 against motherhood, dragging all the sanctities of 
 life down in blood and lust and shame. How ap- 
 palling — indeed, how ghastly — is the contrast be- 
 
THE MOTHER OF JESUS 209 
 
 tween the beauty of the Christmas vision and the 
 facts of the world round about us! What wonder 
 that it makes us pensive on a day dedicated to joy! 
 One of our poets has written some piercing lines 
 entitled Trench Thoughts, Christmas, 1916,^ in 
 which he tells us what the lads are thinking about, 
 with a bitter touch of realism: 
 
 "Not of the shepherds old, 
 
 Watching their flocks by night, 
 But Father, and Kate with a light, 
 Seeing the cows is right. 
 
 "Not of the Angel song; 
 
 Peace unto men of Goodwill; 
 Only my brother Bill 
 Dead, and he done no ill! 
 
 "Not of the Heavenly host, 
 
 Bringing tidings of great joy; 
 But my Mother's homely employ, 
 And her prayer, *My boy, my boy !' " 
 
 Dark as the present is, overcast with sorrow, yet 
 must we fight the good fight, keeping the faith of 
 this high, prophetic day. Our struggle is for the 
 very truths that make us men, for the sanctity of 
 Mother and Child, and for all the holy things that 
 sanctify our human life. We dare not let them go. 
 When the vision of the Ideal fades, life loses its 
 meaning, men become animals — and we are lost. 
 
 ' Worh-a-Day Warriors, by Joseph Lee. 
 
210 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Now as of old our hope lies In the re-birth of the 
 Divine in humanity, as in the motherhood of Mary; 
 the incarnation of that living and holy Truth to 
 which simple shepherds and learned magi ahke pay 
 homage. On this day the prayer of Christina 
 Rossetti should be our own, that each heart may be 
 a manger for His birth, and Love become a Child 
 on earth once more. 
 
 "It was not that I cared for Thee — 
 But Thou didst set Thy heart upon me, 
 Even me, 
 Thy little one. 
 
 Therefore it was sweet for Thee 
 To leave Thy majesty and Throne, 
 
 And grow like me, 
 
 A little one." 
 
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES 
 
 "Thus saith the Lord God, Although I have scattered them 
 among the countries, yet will I be to them as a little sanc- 
 tuary in the countries where they shall come." — Ezek. xi. i6. 
 
 SUPPOSE the City Temple should be destroyed 
 to-morrow — as, indeed, it may be any day — 
 how many hearts would be bereaved by such a calam- 
 ity? For many thousands the very stones of this 
 grey old building are sacred — and London would be 
 lonely without it. Their minds would be thronged 
 with thoughts of days agone, with memories of the 
 multitudes who have worshipped here, with echoes 
 of the sweet voices which have made the Gospel 
 eloquent in so many keys and tones and variations 
 of emphasis, of insight, and of temperament. Some- 
 times it seems to me that all those who have knelt 
 here have left something of their spirit in this place 
 in return for what they receive; and so through the 
 years there has been created a tradition of faith, an 
 atmosphere of free and reverent and forward-look- 
 ing fellowship. For that reason, even if this build- 
 ing were destroyed, the City Temple would not cease 
 to be, because its image and influence would live in 
 countless minds — each a little sanctuary bearing its 
 likeness. 
 
 After this manner we may realise in some degree 
 
212 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 the feelings of the people of old to whom this text 
 was spoken. But only in part, because no building 
 in England, not even the Abbey or St. Paul's, can 
 have the same place in the life of this great people 
 which the Temple on Mount Moriah had in the 
 Hebrew theocracy. Our historic shrines are noble 
 and holy — one stately and beautiful, the other mas- 
 sive and impressive — but, if Rome is the eternal city, 
 Jerusalem is the city of the eternal, and its Temple 
 outtops all others. In a unique sense the temples 
 where Isaiah prophesied and Jesus taught were the 
 centre both of the religious faith and the national life 
 of a race which had a genius for religion, as the 
 Greeks had a genius for art. There the light of 
 God shone in the Sheklnah. There He was revealed 
 in His unity. His righteousness. His spirituality, His 
 awful majesty, and His unutterable love. There He 
 told His will, forgave sins, and bestowed blessing. 
 From that central sanctuary His light and His truth 
 went forth, hallowing the life of a race and making 
 its daily labour a ritual. 
 
 No wonder there was bitter grief when the Temple 
 was destroyed, and all but a ragged remnant of the 
 race led away Into a alien land to endure the lone- 
 liness of exile and the indignity of captivity. It is 
 true that God is equally present everywhere, but 
 that does not mean that sacredness is spread Indis- 
 criminately over the earth. Nor can we find God 
 everywhere until we have first learned to find Him 
 more vividly, more blessedly somewhere. In a place 
 made holy by His realised presence. Surely there 
 
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES 213 
 
 is no spot where God is nearer or more real than in 
 a temple built by our fathers, hallowed by their 
 prayers, its steps worn by their vanished feet, and 
 where we can pray in the language that answers to 
 the throb of our hearts. What it means to be denied 
 this privilege, to have the temple demolished and the 
 altar desecrated, is shown us in the sad fate of 
 France to-day, where our friends suffer the same 
 tragedy which the people of Israel suffered long ago. 
 Hence the deep appeal of the text, which is as true 
 to-day as when it was uttered, in which God promises 
 that about every forlorn exile a little sanctuary shall 
 be built, impalpable and invisible, shielding faith 
 and sheltering the holy things that make it worth our 
 time to live. 
 
 Truly he is a strange man who does not love the 
 little sanctuary, the wayside shrine, like that at which 
 the Merciful Knight bowed after he had forgiven 
 his enemy. Italy is rich in such shrines; and so is 
 England, as we may learn anew from a book entitled 
 The Priest of the Ideal, half a story and half a ser- 
 mon, in which Stephen Graham writes of the old 
 holy places of this island with so much insight and 
 feeling. Indeed, one chapter of the story is actually 
 a sermon on the Sanctuary, suggested by the old 
 knocker on the door of the cathedral at Durham, at 
 which the fleeing criminal entered — sweat on the 
 brow, dust on the feet, fear in the eyes — to find 
 refuge in days of old. It is a noble sermon, too, as 
 Is so often true in our fiction, where we find some of 
 the best preaching of the day and some of the worst. 
 
214 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 A sanctuary, he tells us, may be the House of God, 
 Christ Himself, a woman's love, the beauty of na- 
 ture, the closet of prayer, or "even a beautiful poem 
 like 'Innisfree.' " It is any place, anything, in which 
 we find shelter from the hardness of the secular spirit 
 in the sanctity of the realised presence of God. No 
 man of us but needs the great cathedral, but we also 
 need the little sanctuary, if only to bring the light of 
 the altar nearer to our daily task, and so erase the 
 atheism which severs life into the secular and the 
 sacred. 
 
 Even so there is much in our life to-day by which 
 we may be led to understand the necessity for the 
 little sanctuary and its ministry to man. Every 
 soul has Its cathedral hours, its profound and central 
 insight, and it is the fine art of the religious life to 
 carry the light of those hours of vision into the 
 home, the shop, the study, the social circle, making 
 these little sanctuaries of the Most High. My coun- 
 trymen are wont to say that wherever there is an 
 American there is a little America, a tiny bit of the 
 homeland, a little shrine where the national ideal 
 lives and glows. In the same way, wherever the lads 
 of England go over the earth, in whatever "far-flung 
 battle-line" they fight and fall, there is a little Eng- 
 land; and their graves become little sanctuaries of 
 the spirit, the faith, the civilisation they fought to 
 defend. As we may read in the thrilling words of 
 Rupert Brooke, whose grave is now, alas ! a little 
 sanctuary in a far land, where in days to be men will 
 bow their heads in reverence : 
 
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES 215 
 
 "If I should die, think only this of me: 
 
 That there's some corner of a foreign field 
 That is for ever England. There shall be 
 
 In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
 A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 
 
 Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 
 A body of England's, breathing English air, 
 
 Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. 
 
 And think, this heart, all evil shed away, 
 
 A pulse in the eternal mind, no less 
 
 Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given ; 
 
 Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; 
 
 And laughter learnt of friends; and gentleness, 
 
 In hearts at peace, under an English heaven." 
 
 Surely what is true of our patriotism should be 
 equally true of our religion so that wherever a Chris- 
 tian goes there ought to be a little sanctuary of the 
 faith and spirit of Jesus. Here is a matter of vital 
 importance, into which we cannot go in detail now, 
 except to emphasise one or two aspects of It. First 
 of all, and always, we must keep the integrity of the 
 mind a little sanctuary holy and Inviolate, If our 
 religion is not to wither under the blight of unreality 
 and Insincerity; and doubly so at a time when the 
 Temple of Doctrine Is so shaken, If not actually shat- 
 tered. The Impression Is widespread that the 
 Church In general, and the clergy In particular, hold 
 by a faith officially and conventionally which Is often 
 very unlike what they really subscribe to In their own 
 minds. That is to say, we are accused of believing 
 
216 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 one thing as ministers and perhaps something else, 
 something less certain and satisfying, as men. How 
 far this may be true only God knows; but the sus- 
 picion of it is doing endless injury to the cause of re- 
 ligion. No man must lecture another upon this topic ; 
 each must search his own soul, lest he fall into that 
 hell which is the doom of those who lose what Dante 
 calls "the good of the mind." 
 
 Only those souls on earth who struggle to liberate 
 themselves can attain this good of the mind and 
 hear "the voice the stars had when they sang to- 
 gether." If once they win it, they know, as Dante 
 knew, as Saul of Tarsus learned when smitten blind 
 by the knowledge that they must use it to liberate 
 others. To refuse to meet that responsibility is 
 "the greatest renunciation," and if the most en- 
 lightened man born makes that refusal he is no 
 longer enlightened. An example In point is Thomas 
 Cranmer, who knew more than has ever been 
 learned in any inferno — a man who made the great 
 refusal, and only escaped from everlasting cheap- 
 ness through a great expiation. Threatened with the 
 loss of dignity, if not with degradation and 
 death, he says that he signed with his own hand 
 things "contrary to the truth." ^ But before he died 
 at Oxford, in 1556, he learned how to make atone- 
 ment, and as the flames of the martyr-fire were ris- 
 ing about him he said in his last speech, as Strype 
 reports it: "And forasmuch as my hand offended in 
 writing things contrary to my heart, therefore my 
 
 * The Memorials of Thomas Cranmer, by John Strype, 1693. 
 
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES 217 
 
 hand shall be punished." So saying, he held his hand 
 steadily In the fire, as no man could have done unless 
 he had recovered "the good of the mind." 
 
 Such a temptation besets all men, and few there 
 be who do not In some degree yield to It, especially 
 men In public life. The President, said Emerson, 
 pays dearly for his White House, just because he 
 must often dicker and deal and compromise to win 
 it. No figure is more forlorn than the man who 
 has let the light of vision fade from his heart by 
 inner apostasy to the truth. When a man sells his 
 spul for place or power or wealth his genius becomes 
 mere cunning, and no moral camouflage can conceal 
 it. It is a peril to which, In some way, every mortal 
 is exposed, and no one is safe unless he keeps his 
 heart a little sanctuary of the Ideals that make us men. 
 Just now, Indeed, we who fight for liberty are sorely 
 tempted, by "sacrificing to the Gods that smote us," 
 to win the conflict outwardly, only to lose it Inwardly. 
 If we lower the ideal, a war which began as a human- 
 itarian crusade will become a brutal brawl in the 
 dark. Surely that would be the saddest of all de- 
 feats. "Expediency is man's wisdom; doing right 
 is God's." Therefore it behoves each of us to keep 
 the altar-fire aglow, renewing our vows on our knees, 
 lest we be untrue to God and betray those who died 
 "for the new order of the ages." Never did the old 
 wise words have a more urgent and tragic meaning, 
 "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of It are 
 the issues of life." 
 
 In the Revised Version the text has a slightly 
 
218 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 different rendering: "I will be unto thee a sanct- 
 uary for a little"; and it is full of sweet and rich 
 suggestion. Here the prophet speaks across the ages 
 to all who walk alone in far places, all who are 
 kept away from the sanctuary of common prayer 
 by illness, and who feel so keenly their deprivation. 
 God Himself becomes their sanctuary, and what 
 they lose of the fellowship of social prayer is made 
 up to them by the joy of His communion. Also, 
 when we leave the dear sanctuary of our youth, to 
 which we are bound by so many ties of love, memory, 
 and tradition, and go to a new home or a strange 
 land, this text speaks with appealing tenderness and 
 comfort. It tells us of One who can go with those 
 who go and stay with those who stay, and be every- 
 where blessed; One in whose love there is no distance 
 and no darkness. In the same ineffable way, when 
 those whom we love vanish from us "for a little," 
 and our days and nights become a litany of desola- 
 tion, God makes a little sanctuary round about us, 
 coming softly into the stillness which death makes 
 when it passes by. He it is who renews that heroic 
 and holy hope that when the night is gone and the 
 morning faces smile, we shall meet those whom we 
 "have loved long since and lost awhile." 
 
 There is yet a further hint which we may wisely 
 lay to heart in this day of upheaval, when the forms 
 of faith, both social and religious, seem to be falling 
 to pieces, leaving us shelterless. Even the wisest 
 man cannot tell what the hidden future may hold, 
 but all of us have the feeling that It will be some- 
 
THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES 219 
 
 thing very different from the past. It may be that 
 as the people of old attained to a more spiritual 
 religion after the Temple was destroyed and its 
 ritual withdrawn, so we of to-day, by the very shat- 
 tering of our forms of faith, may win a higher, 
 deeper, more divinely real experience of things im- 
 mortal. Indeed, it will be so to our salvation, if each 
 of us keeps his own heart a little sanctuary of the 
 faith and spirit of Jesus, waiting for the coming of 
 the Spirit who shall endue us with light and power; 
 as did that soldier who sees with clearer light enow, 
 and who left these haunting lines : 
 
 "I have a temple I do not 
 Visit, a heart I have forgot, 
 A self that I have never met, 
 A secret .shrine — and yet, and yet. 
 
 This sanctuary of my soul 
 Unwitting I keep white and whole, 
 Unlatched and lit, if Thou should care 
 To enter or to tarry there. 
 
 With parted lips and outstretched hands 
 And listening ears Thy servant stands; 
 Call Thou early, call Thou late, 
 To Thy great service dedicate." ^ 
 
 At last, when our poor body, which is a temple 
 of the Holy Spirit, is dissolved in the mysterious 
 chemistry of death, and we must leave this earthly 
 
 ^ Expectans Expectavi, by Charles Sorley. 
 
220 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 life "for a little," we have assurance doubly sure in 
 Him whom we follow that God the Father, out of 
 whose love and wisdom we were born, will be our 
 sanctuary from the vanishings of Time — God the 
 home of the soul here and hereafter, "from always 
 to for ever." 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE CROSS » 
 
 "Father, into Thy hands I comnoiend My spirit." — 
 Luke xxiii. 46. 
 
 ON this day, and In a world at war, the Cross of 
 Christ is a reality; it is the heart of the world 
 laid bare. It is no isolated fact in history, much less 
 a remote horror set on a far sky-line, but a shadow 
 near to each of us, vivid in its urgency, heavy in its 
 pressure upon us. To-day we do not think of Jesus 
 as a lonely Sufferer, for it seems to us, somehow, 
 that we were with Him there on that dark Cross 
 outside the city -gate, and that He is with us here. 
 Time and distance vanish, and we are lifted unto 
 a vision of an eternal sacrifice, we sharers of His 
 victory then, He a partaker of our struggle now. 
 Such is our solidarity of suffering, and the heavy 
 weight upon our hearts, that we have a dim, faint 
 sense, to the measure of our power, of the burden 
 he bore. 
 
 Four years of blood and agony have given us a 
 deeper, clearer insight, purifying our eyes of dust 
 by a flood of bitter tears. To-day we read the stately 
 stanzas of the 53rd Chapter of Isaiah with a new 
 vision, a new wonder; and the Figure that moves 
 through those lines — gentle, heroic, silent, haunting, 
 
 *Good Friday, 1918. 
 221 
 
222 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 despised and rejected of men, smitten of God and 
 afflicted — seems a living Presence by our side, looking 
 at us with all-pitying eyes, touching us with hands 
 of healing. Truly He is the Suffering Servant of 
 God, revealing the redeeming truth that, as there is 
 a law of the survival of the fittest, so there is a law 
 of the sacrifice of the best. 
 
 To-day is this truth fulfilled before our eyes, and 
 we realise as never before that not only the death 
 of Jesus, but His life, was one long atonement, just 
 because His love made Him one with humanity in 
 its sin, its woe, and its destiny. Therefore, a cup 
 of cold water given to a fellow man helps Him, 
 and an injury to one of these little ones hurts Him ! 
 Surely He is "the Lamb slain from the foundation 
 of the world," and, in His dying, death is van- 
 quished: 
 
 "And all through life I see a Cross 
 
 Where sons of men yield up their breath. 
 There is no gain except by loss, 
 There is no life except by death." 
 
 What a scene was that in which the words of the 
 text had their setting, as the ordeal of agony ended, 
 and the evening closed in. Never did the dying sun 
 look down upon a scene more ghastly, not alone in 
 its physical horror, but in its moral atrocity. Kind- 
 ness crucified by cruelty. Love put to death by brutal- 
 ity. Justice defamed by cunning, malignant bigotry — 
 tragedy can go no further ! Outwardly the Cross was 
 an utter defeat; inwardly it was the ultimate victory. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE CROSS 223 
 
 Whether these last words were a parting wrench of 
 pain, a prayer of relief at the mercy of death, or a 
 cry of joy that He had endured to the end, we know 
 not. Perhaps they were all these in one, telling us 
 that He had triumphed, not only over physical tor- 
 ture and moral outrage, but over those dark foes we 
 know not nor can name which assail the soul in its 
 extremity : 
 
 "Friend, it is over now, 
 The passion, the sweat, the pains, 
 Only the truth remains." ^ 
 
 As men live so they die, death being an apoca- 
 lypse of life, revealing its faith, its passion, and its 
 ruling vision. If one has lived the sceptical life, 
 critical, questioning, doubting, he will say with 
 Hobbes: "I am 'going to take a leap in the dark; 
 I commit my body to the worms and my spirit to the 
 great Perhaps." If he has been a seeker after light, 
 searching for it in high places and low, in far places 
 and near by, he will say with Goethe, "More light, 
 more light!" If he has lived as Wesley lived, dedi- 
 cated to God and His service, and to man and his 
 redemption, he will come to his end with the assur- 
 ance : "The best of all is, God is with us." If he has 
 lived the life of a jester, as Rabelais did, he will 
 say: "Let down the curtain; the farce is played out." 
 What determines the course of the life of a man 
 decides his attitude in death; and so it was with the 
 
 ' Good Friday, by John Masefield. 
 
224 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Great Life. The last words of Jesus were a quota- 
 tion from the Psalms, the book of the poetry and 
 piety of the people of His fathers, in which so many 
 had found succour before Him and so many have 
 found solace since. 
 
 What tender, trustful, triumphant words they 
 were, breathing a prayer of peace after the storm: 
 *'Into Thy hands I commit my spirit." Some one 
 has pointed out that this was the bedside prayer 
 which every Hebrew mother taught her child as 
 the evening shadows fell — like the little prayers we 
 learned long ago, and have taught to our children; 
 and so the first faith of Jesus was the last, as be- 
 fitted One to whom the child-heart was the finest 
 flower and essence of religion. Nothing is easier 
 than to keep our first faith when the sky is sunny 
 overhead and the path smooth before us. But when 
 shadows fall, and storms beat upon us, it is different. 
 The ministry of Jesus in Galilee was like a summer; 
 but in Judea He met icy hostility, cold Indifference, 
 trickery among His enemies and treachery among 
 His friends, "and it was winter." Yet through all 
 trial, all temptation, all tragedy, up to the last bitter 
 hour, He kept the highest and sweetest faith. Thus 
 the evensong which His mother had taught Him long 
 ago lingered last upon His lips, as He entered "the 
 kep, vast, speechlessness of death." 
 
 Only, to this simple prayer — which to the Psalm- 
 ist was a prjiyer not for death, but for life and its 
 peril — Jesus added the one great, deep, tender word 
 which summed up His life. His faith, His vision; 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE CROSS 225 
 
 Father! Never has any word fallen from mortal 
 lips having such meaning as the word Father on the 
 lips of Jesus in the black agony of His death, amid 
 the railing, revilings, and mocking of His enemies! 
 God eternal, God paternal — in that faith Jesus lived, 
 in that faith He died, testing it to the uttermost. 
 Father! That was His own word, His key to life, 
 His first truth and His last; it was His religion. In 
 youth He was eager to be about His "Father's busi- 
 ness," and He filled His swift and gentle years with 
 that labour, ere the night cometh when no man can 
 work. He lived to do the will of His Father. It 
 was His meat, His milk. His labour. His rest, His 
 exceeding great joy." Other work, other wish, He 
 had none, and in that wise and holy Will He found 
 a peace which the world can neither give nor take 
 away. Father! not Fate, not force; that was the 
 word He taught us in the brief, universal prayer — 
 and if you go to the traditional site of that prayer 
 you will find a tiny marble chapel, and on its walls 
 in all the languages that have learned its wisdom, 
 the words: "Our Father." God all-powerful, God 
 all-loving, by that faith Jesus was strengthened in 
 life and sustained in death. While the Father was 
 with Him all was well. When for one brief, bitter 
 moment He felt Himself forsaken of His father, the 
 world turned black. But it was only for a moment; 
 the shadow passed, and the God whom He had 
 served in life became His solace in death. It is the 
 glory of our Leader that He faced the blackest mys- 
 tery in this dark world and found the brightest faith. 
 
226 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 bringing life and immortality to light by His faith- 
 fulness in life, His fortitude in death, and His faith 
 in God the Father. If by His grace we would win a 
 like victory on our little cross, it must be by trusting 
 the Father whom He trusted unto the uttermost, 
 and by resting in the love in which He rested. 
 
 What Jesus saw behind the heavy drapery of 
 death He did not tell us, except that the Father 
 is there. For Him that was enough. The vast and 
 tender Power which cared for Him here He trusted 
 hereafter and for ever. He was utterly confident, 
 but in nowise curious, willing to wait the will of the 
 Father into whose soft, fascinating shadow He went 
 without fear. Here is a vision of death ;:l;::t if 'tself 
 victory, for that it disentangles it from dread, dis- 
 infects it of terror, and makes it holy and beautiful. 
 "Into Thy hands" — that is the Highest faith, as it 
 is the truest wisdom; and we need not fear to fall 
 into those Father-hands whose fingers formed our 
 very being, even as they piled up the mountains and 
 set the stars in their orbits. No, we do jiot sink into 
 disease, decay, and destruction, but into ^he hands of 
 Him who made us for Himself, and He will keep 
 that which we commit to His care. By the same token, 
 let us trust into those hands the keeping of our dear, 
 pitiful, august dead, of whom we think so often and 
 with such unutterable longing. They are His. He 
 made them. He loves them, and He will do for them 
 more than we can ask or think or dream. 
 
 Ever more it is "dust unto dust, and the spirit 
 unto God who gave it," saith the Preacher of Des- 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE CROSS 227 
 
 pair. But Jesus did not think of His body, nor did 
 He fear them that kill the body; He thought only 
 of His spirit, in prayer commending it to the Father 
 of Spirit. "My spirit" — how lovely, how heroic, 
 how lofty and pure it was, all-forgiving and all-en- 
 during, the glory and sanctity of the world ! What 
 is spirit if it be not light and flame and beauty? 
 More subtle than ether, more swift than thought, it 
 is life at its highest, its finest, its holiest — that within 
 us akin to God. It is the delicate and elusive essence 
 of being, its bloom, its grace, its glory, that in us of 
 the true and everlasting; that which touches dull 
 matter and transfigures it into shapes lovely and 
 haunting. God is spirit ! Even so, dying, Jesus sur- 
 rendered His spirit to the Universal Spirit, as a 
 spark ascending seeks the sun, giving back in a last 
 renunciation the precious thing God had given to 
 Him. 
 
 Such was the victory of the Cross, and as we watch 
 we do not ask for a justification for things happening 
 so. Instead, somehow, in a way beyond words, we 
 are not only subdued, but exalted and purified by 
 it. For we are left with the impression that the 
 heroic Victim, though in one sense and outwardly 
 He failed, was yet in another and truer sense su- 
 perior to the world in which He appeared; was in 
 some way, which we do not seek to define, untouched 
 by the tragedy, and was rather set free from life 
 than deprived of it. Now this impression, this in- 
 sight, really implies that the world of tragedy, of 
 
228 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 sorrow, of sin is no final reality, but only a part of 
 reality taken for a whole, and, when so taken, untrue. 
 It means that if we could see the whole, and the 
 tragic facts in their place in it, we should find them, 
 not abolished, indeed, but transmuted, transfigured, 
 explained, justified — find, that is, that suffering and 
 death count for little, and greatness of soul for 
 everything. Here, of a truth, is the faith that looks 
 through the shadow of death and sees into the life 
 of things. 
 
 All high wisdom, all heroic faith comes at last 
 to this : victory over life, over death, over self, over 
 sin is won by surrender to the loving will of Him 
 whose we are and who made us for Himself. The 
 dying prayer of Jesus only breathed out the spirit, 
 the habit, the joy of His life. What He did on the 
 Cross He had been doing all His days, offering Him- 
 self to His Father to serve or to suffer, to do or to 
 bear; and in death He made a last offering. It Is 
 this that makes the Cross not simply a martyrdom, 
 but a revelation of a Wisdom deeper than we can 
 imagine, and of a love that is the keeper of unknown 
 redemptions. Nor should we ever have known this 
 truth in its height and depth and wonder but for 
 "that strange Man on the Cross" outside the city 
 gate, who by His surrender became our Saviour and 
 by His suffering became our Healer. Even now we 
 cannot truly know it until we take up our cross and 
 follow Him, living the surrendered life, giving our 
 utmost to the highest. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE CROSS 229 
 
 "O Cross that liftest up my head, 
 
 I dare not ask to fly from thee, 
 I lay in dust, life's glory dead. 
 And from the ground there blossoms red 
 
 Life that shall endless be." 
 
THE ETERNAL VALUES 
 
 "Why seek ye the living among the dead ? He is not here ; 
 He is risen." — Luke xxiv. 5, 6. 
 
 NO hour on earth is more bleak, more bitter, 
 than when we go back from a new grave in 
 which we have buried the fellowship of years. It 
 did not need Lowell to tell us what it means in those 
 poignant lines, "After the Burial." When the tie 
 has been broken, and before we have had time to 
 re-knit our faith, there falls upon us an utter and 
 unutterable desolation. Death seems to divide Di- 
 vinity with God. Such was the shadow which 
 haunted that little band when they returned early 
 in the morning to the tomb of Jesus, bringing spices 
 to care for His body. Hope was dead, only love 
 remained, and it clung to a Form familiar and holy 
 which they had seen mutilated in death. 
 
 They found an empty tomb and shining figures 
 sitting where the body of Jesus had lain. As Augus- 
 tine said, that which was the place for worms had 
 become a place for angels. But their report was 
 held to be an idle tale. Let us not forget that the 
 disciples were the first doubters of the Easter story, 
 and had to be won to faith. If you were told that 
 one whom you had laid in the grave had been seen 
 alive again, what would you do? Whatever wild 
 
 230 
 
THE ETERNAL VALUES 231 
 
 wish might leap in your heart, not one of you but 
 would first make sure that it was true. The dis- 
 ciples of Jesus were men and women with minds like 
 our own. No more than we did they wish to mistake 
 fancy for fact, shadow for substance. Surely only a 
 fact could have won the faith of those who looked 
 upon the ghastly scene of the Cross. As to the de- 
 tails of the Easter fact, that is a matter of testimony 
 and record, but the fact itself has furnished its own 
 proof age-long and triumphant. 
 
 Before we proceed further, let us ask what was 
 the nature of the Easter fact which turned sorrow 
 into song and changed a band of dejected disciples 
 into flaming heralds of a new, victorious hope? 
 Surely the life of Jesus, and still more His death 
 and resurrection, is the supreme demonstration, to 
 which there is n'o parallel, of the power of spirit; 
 of that for which science has no term, and the secret 
 of which it cannot know. Here is a fact, a force, 
 an influence in perfect harmony with physical forces, 
 but not of them, and only faintly do they symbolise 
 it. True, we have tokens of the power of spirit 
 everywhere, but the profound and special meaning 
 of the life of Jesus is its revelation of spiritual power 
 acting directly, not only upon inanimate matter, but 
 upon man himself, effecting vital changes in his faith, 
 his thought, his character, and even in his physical 
 life. In the history of that Life it is seen restoring 
 discordant minds to harmony, withered bodies to 
 soundness, the sick to health, the blind to §ight, and 
 the recently dead to life. 
 
232 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Once we see that Jesus was the greatest, the most 
 original, the most creative, the most dynamic of 
 spiritual personalities, the facts recorded of Him 
 are not only intelligible, but luminous. What men 
 call miracles are but the graceful gestures of such 
 a Being, bearing witness to the divinity of Spirit as 
 creator, repairer, and master of matter. In such a 
 history the story of the Resurrection may seem won- 
 derful — as, indeed, it is — but, none the less, as nat- 
 ural as the blooming of a flower or the shining of a 
 star, since even outside that history we can see no 
 limit to the power of spirit. Jesus did not create 
 faith in immortality: the path of early history is 
 marked by the monuments of forgotten peoples, who 
 left nothing but proofs of their faith in a future life. 
 Jesus revealed Eternal Life. What was before a 
 guess, or at best a hope. He revealed to be a fact 
 by the power of spirit, a power that gives immortal- 
 ity its true character and shows it to be an ever 
 more and more abundant life. Once for all, vic- 
 toriously, by the power of an endless life, He re- 
 vealed 
 
 That life is ever lord of death, 
 And love can never lose its own. 
 
 But there is another question with which we must 
 deal, if we would know the basis of belief in a future 
 life. Admit that it is an instinct, an intuition, an in- 
 spiration, alive from the earliest time and active in 
 every land, what is its basis? At bottom it is a ques- 
 tion of eternal values. If life is worthless, so is im- 
 
THE ETERNAL VALUES 233 
 
 mortality. If life has any excuse for being, if it has 
 meaning, worth, value, actual or prophetic, it is a 
 question of conserving those values. Here is the 
 root of faith in the future life. Our healthy sense 
 of the worth of life, and our instinctive clinging to 
 it despite its sorrows, is the first intimation of that 
 faith. All that man has achieved of intellectual 
 power, moral worth and spiritual beauty is a justi- 
 fication of that faith. By the same token, the ex- 
 perience which realises those values confirms that 
 faith and makes it victorious. Such is my thesis to- 
 day, and it brings the whole question very close to 
 each of us in a practical way. 
 
 Faith is the affirmation that life has value. It 
 is not sight, but insight. It makes the venture and 
 affirms that life is real, sane, worth while, and that 
 things are not what they seem. It is "anticipated 
 attainment." That is to say, it asserts that life has 
 eternal meanings, and lives as if those meanings 
 were present realities. As Coleridge said, it bids 
 eternal truth be present fact. That which to knowl- 
 edge is but a Word to Faith has become Flesh. 
 Knowledge is patient; faith is prophetic. If knowl- 
 edge is slow, the feet of faith are swift. It runs for- 
 ward into the future, takes possession of ideals, and 
 makes them immediate and commanding. It is the 
 substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things 
 lot seen, and the power that makes dreams come true. 
 Human brotherhood is a noble dream — but men 
 have to be made brothers, and how long it takes 
 
234 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 history tells. But to faith they are brothers now, 
 drawn together into the unity and fellowship of a 
 common worship. Knowledge follows after faith, 
 slowly fulfilling its prophecies of things to be. What 
 a picture science paints! 
 
 Whirling fire-mist cools and condenses into the 
 earth; life appears, swimming in fish, growing in 
 plants, and at last walking erect in man. Mind and 
 character appear in thinkers, saints, seers. Moses 
 prefers service to ease, Socrates chooses the high 
 paths of truth and justice, David sings songs that 
 haunt us still, Jesus dies for humanity. On a thou- 
 sand altars humanity offers the final sacrifice for the 
 sake of truth, liberty, righteousness. Through what 
 travail, age-long and full of agony, nature toiled and 
 aspired to these flowers of moral worth and beauty. 
 By what vast struggles, sublime in their sacrificial 
 heroism, has the moral life been achieved and pre- 
 served. Has it value, or is nature only blowing 
 bubbles? Is it worth the cost, or did the Eternal 
 when He took dust and made man simply play with 
 it? Finally, the earth cools, its heat and light gone, 
 and darkness falls again. Is all moral value erased 
 as the last man dies in a world of graves, forgotten 
 as a thing futile and foolish? Faith says no! 
 
 All human values were heightened by the life of 
 Jesus. He brought life, as well as immortality, to 
 light, bringing out its colour and its splendour. No 
 fact, no fellowship but was touched by Him to finer 
 issues. The home, the family, the life of woman 
 and child, of slave and saint were exalted and glori- 
 
THE ETERNAL VALUES 235 
 
 fied by His gospel. In Greek drama a child was 
 only a piece of stage setting. Humanity crucified 
 Him on a Cross, but even the Cross became a symbol 
 of sanctity. The hard old world was made larger, 
 sweeter, richer, for ever because His great soul 
 passed through it. The old, high instincts of the 
 soul of man, burning dimly in the dark, became 
 beacons of hope and expectation. Even a wayside 
 flower is a teacher of wise and good and beautiful 
 truth, since Jesus lived. More than an inspiration, 
 He was a revelation : He made all good things bet- 
 ter, all evil things more ugly, every sanctity more 
 sacred, and every hope more radiant. His death 
 evoked light from darkness, sweetness from bitter- 
 ness — like an alabaster box of precious ointment 
 broken to anoint a hard, ungrateful world. Jesus did 
 not argue for immortality, He unveiled the value of 
 life. By His faithfulness He confirmed the faith 
 of humanity. 
 
 Rehgion is the realisation of the value of life. 
 And this is especially true of the religion of Jesus, 
 albeit He never used the word Religion, so far as 
 we have record, but always the word Life instead 
 — as if to say that religion and life are one or neither 
 is of any worth. His gospel is a disclosure of the 
 deepest reality of God through the highest nature 
 of man. In Him our humanity found its Revealer, 
 its Vindicator, its incomparable Teacher and Re- 
 deemer. Celsus, an early enemy of His faith, said 
 truly that "The root of Christianity is its excessive 
 valuation of the human soul, and the absurd idea 
 
236 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 that God takes an interest in man." Exactly; as 
 Emerson said, "Jesus alone in history estimated the 
 greatness of man," his divine origin and destiny, 
 and the vast possibilities of his nature. In the Gospel 
 of Jesus men are sons of God here, now, always, 
 and, if sons, heirs of all that is and is to be. Often 
 men are wayward sons, sometimes wicked sons. Yet 
 they are sons of God nevertheless, and to realise that 
 fact and live accordingly is religion. 
 
 Jesus came, He said, that men might have life, 
 and have it abundantly — life rich, radiant, over- 
 flowing, triumphant. Manifestly, if we are immortal 
 at all we are immortal here and now. Knowledge 
 of that truth, not as a theory but as a reality, sets 
 us free from fear of death and the tyranny of time. 
 It is to realise the Eternal life. Not mere duration, 
 but a sense of the depth of life, its worth, its beauty, 
 its splendour. What Jesus calls Eternal Life, is life 
 in which man overcomes death by discovering his 
 citizenship in the Divine society. He asks man to 
 take his stand among the eternal things, and thus 
 commit himself to aims and enterprises which exceed 
 the short span of mortal days. The immortality in 
 which he believes will thus become a reality. Life 
 so lived will reveal its own eternal quality and proph- 
 ecy. Faith is fidelity to our finest instincts; the 
 fellowship of the eternal life is its fruition. As St. 
 Augustine put it, summing up the truth in one flash- 
 ing line : "Join thyself to the Eternal God, and thou 
 shalt be eternal." 
 
 Since this is so, surely the whole question of im- 
 
THE ETERNAL VALUES 237 
 
 mortality is a question of the conservation of the 
 values of life. First Affirmation, then Realisation, 
 and finally a treasuring up of the ineffable wealth 
 of moral and spiritual worth. What are the su- 
 preme values of life? Not in what we possess, not 
 what we know, not even what we do, but what we 
 are. They are personal qualities. The noblest thing 
 earth has to show the stars is a pure, refined, valiant 
 personality. The ideal and goal of the universe, 
 so far as we can know its purpose, is the growth of 
 heroic human souls. St. Paul saw in the groans and 
 travail cries of nature the birth-throes of the sons of 
 God, and his vision is verified by the science of to- 
 day. What is evolution but a tracing of the age- 
 long story of the struggle of nature upward out of 
 mud to mind, out of matter to spirit. Out of savag- 
 ery to saintliness? They ask too much who ask us to 
 think that these treasures, so high and hard-won, are 
 cast at last as rubbish to the void. How then are 
 they preserved in face of death? 
 
 There are those who say that personal immor- 
 tality is not needed to conserve the values of life. 
 Only God is eternal, and such values as our little 
 lives have, return to Him, absorbed in His life, as 
 a candle fades into the sunlight, as a dew-drop slips 
 into the sea. No moral worth is ever lost. Such an 
 idea seems very lofty and profound, but the poet 
 who wrote the lines : 
 
 The forces that were Christ 
 Have taken new forms and fled, 
 
238 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 wrote words without meaning. It is impossible for 
 two reasons. First, they are personal forces, and 
 if personality ends in death they end too. The 
 notion of love as a quality of God, of which Jesus 
 was a fleeting form, and the value of which He, 
 dying on the Cross, surrendered, is absurd. Second, 
 such qualities are not entities to be abstracted from 
 persons and absorbed by another. They cannot be 
 transferred. The goodness of Jesus was His own, 
 woven with the fibre of His being, and can never be 
 taken from Him. Moreover, it makes God a moral 
 monstrosity, an infinite vampire, crushing the souls 
 of men for their sweetness and casting them away. 
 Besides, love, justice, mercy are social qualities and 
 exist only in social fellowship. If they melt into 
 God we have at last a vision of a God just, but just 
 to no one, loving no one but Himself, His throne a 
 universal cemetery! 
 
 No, if the bells are tolling a march to everlasting 
 death in which Jesus and Judas sleep together, all 
 moral value erased in dust, let us face the fact, and 
 not attempt to muffle their tones with seductive 
 phrases. Stately, grave and noble were the lines of 
 George Eliot, who, when she lost faith in personal 
 immortality, prayed that she might join the Choir 
 Invisible 
 
 Of those immortal dead who live again, 
 In minds made better by their presence, 
 
 but they tell us very little. Our influence and ex- 
 ample may impress our fellows for good or ill, be- 
 
THE ETERNAL VALUES 239 
 
 coming a part of the body of law by which the race 
 is ruled. But what is the nature of that influence? 
 It is not that our spirit passes into them, but that 
 it evokes in them like qualities of their own. What 
 though Sappho sing divinely and her song go 
 sobbing down the years, if she be choked in dust? 
 Wherefore the lives of saints and martyrs, if it be 
 only that in a dim far time a few men shall be utterly 
 good and wise? Then what? At last the earth 
 will grow cold, the race will vanish, and the Choir 
 Invisible will no longer be the gladness of the world! 
 Death will reign and every moral value vanish I 
 
 What of it? some one will ask, seeking a last 
 refuge from "the malice of obliterated life." Is not 
 virtue its own reward, its own sweetness and satis- 
 faction? Is not morality worth while, even if pity 
 be the root of it? Assuredly; but what is the reward 
 of virtue if it be not the glory and the opportunity 
 of more virtue, the glory, as Tennyson sang, of going 
 on and still to be, that we may be better. Else it 
 were better if the earth had remained like the moon, 
 "a mass of slag, idle and without a tenant." No, 
 no; think it all through and you will see that per- 
 sonal immortality is the only imaginable way of con- 
 serving the precious values of love, mercy, justice, 
 character — values which the universe toiled through 
 long eras to achieve, and which humanity has aspired 
 so long to realise. "Why seek ye the living among 
 the dead?" Over the grave made yesterday, not less 
 than over the tomb of Him who brought life and 
 immortality to light, and whose life was a victory 
 
240 THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 over death so that it revealed to what fine issues the 
 soul ascends, it may be said, "He is not here; He is 
 risen." 
 
 What is excellent, 
 As God lives, is permanent; 
 Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain 
 Heart's love will meet them again. 
 
THE ETERNAL VALUES S41 
 
 Holy Father, into Thy hands we commend the spirits of 
 our brothers who gave their lives for their homes and as a 
 ransom for the liberties of mankind. Accept them in the 
 name of Him who poured out His life on the Cross for all 
 humanity. Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord, and let 
 Thy light shine upon them for ever more. Subdue us with 
 a sense of the awe and tenderness of the Unseen into which 
 they have entered, and may the nobility of their sacrifice 
 exalt and purify us for Thy service. In the name of Jesus, 
 Amen. 
 
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