LIBRARY 
 Theological Seminary, 
 
 PRINCETON, N J. 
 
 Case BX 5133 .S68 A32 1877 
 
 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 
 s,n V 1815-1881. 
 Booh Addresses and sermons 
 
r 
 
Digitized by 
 
 the Internet Archive 
 
 
 
 in 2015 
 
 
 
 https://archive.org/details/addressessermonsOOstan_0 
 
ADDRESSES and SERMONS 
 
ADDRESSES and SERMONS 
 
 DELIVERED AT ST. ANDREW'S 
 
 1872, 1875 AND 1877 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, D.D. 
 
 DEAN OF WESTMINSTER 
 
 LONDON 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 1877 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
LONDON : PRINTED BY 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 These Addresses and Sermons are con- 
 nected chiefly by the circumstances under 
 which they were delivered. But it is pos- 
 sible that the choice of subjects suggested 
 by the common interests of two insti- 
 tutions at once so similar and so dif- 
 ferent as the Church of England and the 
 Church of Scotland may give them an 
 interest beyond any local and passing 
 occasions. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 The Study of Greatness . . i 
 
 The Hopes of Theology . . • • 55 
 
 Succession of Spiritual Life . .107 
 
 Principles of Christianity . . . 127 
 
 The Two Great Commandments i 55 
 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OK ST ANDREW'S 
 On March 31, 1875 
 
THEOLOGIGA 
 
 THE 
 
 STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 WHEN, twenty years ago, I first explored the 
 historic scenes of St. Andrew's, under the 
 guidance of the distinguished Principal of St. 
 Mary's College, I well remember how he 
 brought me into this ancient Library, and 
 pointed out the inscription over our heads — 
 Aiev apiaTsv-uv 1 — and told the story, familiar, we The 
 
 . •■ Homeric 
 
 may be sure, to each successive generation of motto of 
 this place — how Lord Campbell, when a student draw's 
 of St. Andrew's, was fired by its winged words, Llbrai> ' 
 with the early ambition of winning in the race 
 of life the first post in his profession, which 
 he ultimately achieved by becoming Lord High 
 Chancellor of England. 
 
 1 Aiiv apuTTtvetv, kb.\ tmdpoxov CjU/^erai &\Ku>u. Iliad, vi. 
 208. 
 
2 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 No doubt the Homeric line, if literally ren- 
 dered, as by its most recent translator — 
 
 To aim at highest honours, and surpass 
 My comrades all — 
 
 contains the ordinary principle of hard-headed 
 emulation and nothing more. But it is one of 
 the many instances in which the spirit of a 
 great poet, and, we may add, of a great lan- 
 guage, breathes a far wider sense than the dry 
 letter of a verbal translation can give. 
 
 In this impression of the whole passage I 
 am confirmed by an interesting anecdote which 
 I have been told of another Scotsman, more 
 eminent than Lord Campbell. You will re- 
 member that pathetic epoch in the closing years 
 of Walter Scott — which has been so well de- 
 scribed by my dear friend Principal Shairp — 
 when, on the eve of quitting his native air for 
 Italy, he received at Abbotsford the renowned 
 poet of the English Lakes, who was to immor- 
 talise those days in the finest piece of his noble 
 lyrical trilogy — 'Yarrow Revisited.' On that 
 occasion William Wordsworth brought with him 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 a youthful kinsman 1 — then quite unconscious 
 of his future close connexion with Scotland and 
 St. Andrew's, — who, with all the ardour of an 
 Oxford scholar, attempted to draw from his 
 illustrious host the expression of an opinion 
 regarding a new translation of Homer (that of 
 Sotheby), which had just appeared. The old 
 bard listened with his usual gracious conde- 
 scension to the accomplished young Oxonian, 
 and replied, ' Pope's " Iliad " is good enough for 
 me. I am no Grecian, but I cannot conceive 
 anything better than Pope's rendering of the 
 advice given to Glaucus.' And then he repeated, 
 with all the fervour of one who grasped, both in 
 text and context, the full meaning at once of 
 the ancient and the modern poet : — 
 
 To stand the first in worth as in command ; 
 To add new honours to my native land ; 
 Before my eyes my mighty sires to place, 
 And emulate the glories of our race. 
 
 That is the meaning which I propose to 
 read in or beneath the motto of this Library. 
 
 1 Charles Wordsworth, nephew of the Poet, and now 
 Bishop of St. Andrew's. 
 
 B 2 
 
4 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 Not merely the advantage of a hot competition 
 for the prizes of fortune, but the advantage, 
 especially in education, of admiring and ap- 
 preciating that which transcends the ordinary 
 course of life — that which is intended in the 
 The Study Apostolic precept by the word which we 
 
 of Great- 
 ness, imperfectly render ' honest ' — oaa as/iva — 
 
 ' whatsoever things are grand, majestic, awful, 
 venerable.' In all ages, but not least in this 
 age of an equality which, together with its 
 noble, has also its ignoble aspect — of a medio- 
 crity which, no doubt, has its golden but also 
 its leaden side, it is the function alike of teach- 
 ers and taught to have their minds fixed not 
 only on what is useful, sound, wise, and good, 
 but on what is great, in institutions, in men, in 
 books, in ideas, and in actions. 
 
 Great as- I. We are familiar with the inspiring force 
 sociations. ■ , . . , , 
 
 inherent in the consciousness of belonging to a 
 
 great country or a great family. No doubt the 
 
 smallest country, the humblest birth, can be 
 
 transfigured by the character of those who 
 
 adorn them. But the reverse is also true — 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 that the least and humblest of individuals can 
 be transfigured by the grandeur of the asso- 
 ciations which he inherits. And if perchance 
 the strength of the individual character and of 
 the position which is occupied coincide, a com- 
 bination is produced which at once comes up 
 to the ideal described by Homer. In the case 
 of national grandeur, I need hardly recall to 
 Scotsmen the force which the best traditions 
 of the Scottish people breathed into characters, 
 like those of the Cameronian regiment, 'who 
 ' prayed as they fought, and fought as they 
 ' prayed ; who might be slain, never conquered ; 
 ' ready wherever their duty or their religion 
 ' called them, with undaunted spirit and with 
 ' great vivacity of mind, to encounter hardships, 
 ' attempt great enterprises, despise dangers, and 
 ' bravely rush to death or victory ; ' or again, 
 like those of the settlers in Darien, whom 
 Wesley found ' in sobriety, industry, frugality, 
 ' patience, in sincerity and openness of behaviour, 
 ' in justice, and mercy of all kinds, not content 
 ' with exemplary kindness and friendship to one 
 
6 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 ' another, but extending it to the utmost of their 
 ' ability to every stranger that tame within their 
 ' gates.' 1 Or, for the similar effects of ancestral 
 greatness, if I turn southwards, let it be to an 
 example familiar to many in this place. Had 
 it been the fortune of this University to have 
 selected my rival, if I may so call him, for the 
 honourable office which I hold, and had any 
 of you in consequence wandered as far as his 
 princely domain in Hertfordshire, you would 
 have there seen how truly the inheritor of the 
 famous name of Cecil and of the historic halls 
 of Hatfield has learned to ' emulate the glories 
 of his race' and fill worthily a place in itself 
 great. This same transforming influence, which 
 we thus acknowledge with regard to a great 
 country and a great family, we ought also to 
 foster in regard to institutions. How often 
 is an individual inspired with new motives, 
 new powers, a new nature, by some high office 
 which calls forth faculties of which those around 
 him and he himself were ignorant ! How 
 
 1 Lectures on the Church of Scotland, pp. 82, 136. 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 7 
 
 closely are both the stability and the progress Great 
 of our nation involved in the continuance of the 
 complex elements of a constitution which once 
 lost could not be restored, and which in other 
 countries has been impatiently cast away. It 
 is this which gives to such institutions at once 
 their conservative and their regenerative force 
 — conservative, because they act as the bul- 
 wark, the framework of the commonwealth — 
 regenerative because they contain within them- 
 selves sources of fresh life, which it would be 
 vain to seek elsewhere. The due appreciation 
 of this double aspect combines what is best in 
 both parties in the State. It is the glory of 
 education to inspire, on the one hand, a reve- 
 rential resolve to hand on national heirlooms 
 unimpaired to the coming age. The duty to 
 posterity, on which one 1 of the most eminent 
 of my predecessors in this office so forcibly 
 dwelt in his place in Parliament, combines 
 with the love of antiquity to cherish all 'the 
 links of natural piety ' which bind the past to 
 the future. But the very same appreciation 
 1 Mr. John Stuart Mill. 
 
8 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 of greatness ought, on the other hand, to issue 
 in the desire of correcting, enlarging, and com- 
 pleting that which only by such constant de- 
 velopment can maintain its inherent strength. 
 Well did the lamented Arthur Helps insist, in 
 each province or department of the body poli- 
 tic, on the value of those whom he would not 
 call by the aspiring name of ' reformers,' but 
 by the more modest, though equally effica- 
 cious, name of 'improvers.' And the same 
 result is equally brought out by observing how 
 mean and paltry is the reverse policy. Equally 
 removed from wise statesmanship, lofty pa- 
 triotism, and true philosophy is the base con- 
 tent which lives in the presence of a great in- 
 stitution and is, on the one side, so little moved 
 by it as to sit with folded hands, caring nothing 
 for its fame or its usefulness— or, on the other 
 side, acquiesces in its disappearance, its destruc- 
 tion, not from the heroic frenzy of the religious 
 Reformers of the sixteenth, or of the philoso- 
 phic enthusiasts of the eighteenth century, hop- 
 ing to build something grander on its ruins, but 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 9 
 
 for the mere sake of destruction, or worse still, 
 for the sake of raising a war-cry, or rallying a 
 broken party, or regaining a lost place, or meet- 
 ing the supposed exigencies of the passing hour, 
 whether in Church or State, whether in educa- 
 tion or politics. 
 
 Thus much we feel instinctively on the large 
 scale of history. But we feel it also when 
 exemplified in more familiar instances. And 
 here I may be excused if for a few moments 
 I fix your attention on the elements of great- 
 ness in the most obvious example — our own 
 University of St. Andrew's. 
 
 I have said that it is an obvious example ; The great- 
 ness of St. 
 
 but in fact it is the more impressive because Andrew's, 
 in some respects it is not obvious. The Uni- 
 versity of St. Andrew's is not — as some measure 
 greatness — a great University. It is indeed the 
 smallest of all, in numbers, in influence, and in 
 wealth. But in some of the elements of real 
 grandeur it stands the first of the Universities 
 of Scotland amongst the first of the historic 
 localities of Great Britain. Look at its natural 
 
io THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 features, which, unlike those of the English Uni- 
 versities, contained from the very beginning the 
 germ of its subsequent fortunes. It is the east- 
 ern Land's End of Scotland, the counterpart of 
 the romantic seat of the ancient British Primacy, 
 the Western sanctuary of the Welsh St. David. 
 Figure it to yourselves as it may be traced in 
 its earlier nomenclature, when Magus Moor was 
 still a wild morass, when its promontory was still 
 the ' Muck Ross ' — the ' headland ' of the fierce 
 ' wild boar ' whose gigantic tusks were long 
 hung over the altar of the cathedral. Look at 
 the encircling rocks, the sandy beach, where 
 the founders of your early civilisation stood at 
 bay against the warriors who, hardly less fierce 
 than the boars and wolves, came pouring down 
 from the inland hills. Explore the caverns of 
 the beetling cliffs, into which, according to the 
 fine old legend, the bones of St. Andrew, first 
 called of the Apostles, came drifting, without 
 oar or sail, from the shores of Achaia, the type 
 of the silent process by which Christian piety 
 and Grecian culture were to penetrate at last 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. n 
 
 into these rugged coasts and illuminate these 
 northern skies. In the rude outline of the 
 chapel of Our Lady of the Rock we trace the 
 last stand which the old Culdee worship, with- 
 out development, without order, made in its 
 latest struggle against the giant after-growth of 
 mediaeval civilisation which overshadowed and 
 overwhelmed it. In that group of antique 
 edifices, the Sanctuary or Cell of the Royal 
 Mount (Kil-ry-Mont), unrivalled in the British 
 Islands, save on the Rock of Cashel, thus con- 
 centrating in one focus on this extremity of Fife 
 the successive stages of Northern ecclesiastical 
 polity, we see the shifting of the pole of the re- 
 ligious and national life of the Scottish king- 
 dom from the archipelago of the Celtic West 
 to the shores of the Norse and German Ocean ; 
 transferring the stone of Fate from Dunstaff- 
 nage to the mound of Destiny at Scone ; divert- 
 ing the regal sepulchres from the wild graveyard 
 of Iona to the Royal Abbey of Dunfermline ; 
 transforming the wandering mission of the Irish 
 outlaw Columba into the settled hierarchy of 
 
i2 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 the Anglo-Norman Church of Margaret and 
 David. Then comes that thrilling scene which 
 the victorious Scotsman must ever recall with 
 pride, and which even the vanquished English- 
 man must regard with admiration, when Robert 
 Bruce came, with all the nobles of a restored 
 and emancipated Scotland, to the consecration 
 of the great Cathedral as the trophy and memo- 
 rial of the triumph of Bannockburn, in which 
 the patron saint of Scotland was supposed to 
 have borne so conspicuous a part. Out of that 
 union of ecclesiastical and patriotic splendour it 
 came to pass that the Cross of St. Andrew, 
 which after all the storms of nature and of man 
 still remains sculptured on your mouldering 
 walls, passed into the Royal banner of Scotland. 
 In like manner the Primacy of St. Andrew's, 
 at last bursting the yoke which had hitherto 
 placed the Church of Scotland under the foreign 
 dominion of the aspiring Prelates of Canter- 
 bury or York, became itself a pledge and 
 badge of the independence of the nation. And 
 then by that instinct, ineradicable alike in the 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 13 
 
 darkest and the most enlightened ages, of the 
 natural union between religion and science, 
 between liberty and learning, there sprang up 
 under the shadow of the Metropolitan Cathe- 
 dral, in the freed church of the freed kingdom 
 of Scotland, the earliest of Scottish Univer- 
 sities. Well might the clergy of Scotland and 
 the citizens of St. Andrew's celebrate with 
 boisterous mirth of pipe and dance the day on 
 which Henry Ogilvy brought from Spain the 
 Papal Bull which was to establish the first 
 native home of Scottish education. The pe- 
 culiar prerogative of the Roman see, which in 
 that period could alone confer this privilege, has 
 now lost its vigour in every part of Christen- 
 dom, Catholic and Protestant alike. The Pope 
 who granted the Bull has fallen under the 
 anathema of his own Church, and his place 
 knows him no more. But the University which 
 Benedict XIII. founded still lived on — and be- 
 came henceforth the centre of a new life amidst 
 the schisms of a divided Papacy and the decay 
 of a falling hierarchy. 
 
i 4 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 Nowhere 'in the whole of Europe was the 
 battle between the spirit of the past and the 
 spirit of the future fought out in closer quar- 
 ters, or with more terrible tenacity, than when 
 the new learning entrenched itself as in a for- 
 tress in the College of St. Leonard, and the 
 old learning in that of St. Salvator ; when the 
 Cardinal in his pride of place looked down 
 on the suffering Reformer beneath — when stern 
 fanaticism struck those successive blows which 
 slew one Primate in his seagirt castle, and 
 the other, long afterwards, on the lonely moor. 
 Nowhere did the rulers of a University play 
 so mighty a part in the history of their 
 country as Buchanan, and Melville, and Ru- 
 therford, who, from their chairs as Principals 
 and Rectors, framed the new polity of Scot- 
 land. Nowhere, out of Wittenberg, did Aca- 
 demic students receive more heart-stirring 
 counsel than those whom in his old age Knox 
 drew to his side, and told them in language 
 as much needed now as then, 'to use their 
 ' time well — to know God and His work in 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. .5 
 
 ' their country — to stand by the good cause, 
 ' and to follow the good examples and good 
 ' instructions of their masters.' 
 
 I need not follow your history downwards 
 to our own time. It is enough to have in- 
 dicated thus briefly how various and how con- 
 tinuous has been the course of the religious 
 and intellectual life of Scotland in this corner 
 of the kingdom, from St. Rule, the anchorite, 
 in his wave-beaten cavern, to Chalmers and 
 Ferrier, Brewster and Forbes, teaching the 
 latest results of theological and philosophical 
 research. Other sacred and historic localities 
 of your country have been long ago deserted 
 by the stream of events. The White House 
 of Ninian lies a stranded relic on the shores 
 of Galloway. For nearly a thousand years the 
 holy island of Iona has ceased to be 'the 
 ' luminary of the Caledonian regions.' But this 
 Temple, as of another Minerva, planted as 
 on another storm-vexed Cape of Sunium— this 
 secluded sanctuary of ancient wisdom — with 
 the foamfiakes of the Northern Ocean driving 
 
1 6 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 through its streets, with the skeleton of its 
 antique magnificence lifting up its gaunt arms 
 into the sky — still carries on the tradition of 
 its first beginnings. Two voices sound through 
 it — 'One is of the sea, one of the cathedral' 
 — ' each a mighty voice ;' two inner corre- 
 sponding voices also, which, in any institution 
 that has endured and deserves to endure, 
 must be heard in unison — the voice of a potent 
 past, and the voice of an invigorating future. 
 It is the boast on the gravestone of old John 
 Wynram, who lies buried in the grass-grown 
 cemetery of St. Leonard's, that through all 
 the storms of the Reformation, ' conversis 
 ' rebus,' ' under the ruins of a world turned 
 ' upside down,' he had remained the sub-prior 
 of St. Andrew's. That same boast may still, 
 in a nobler and wider sense than those words 
 were used of that stubborn or pliant ecclesi- 
 astic, belong to the local genius of St. Andrew's, 
 that through all the manifold changes of the 
 Scottish Church— Culdee, Catholic, Protestant, 
 Episcopalian, Presbyterian — its spiritual iden- 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 17 
 
 tity has never been altogether broken, its 
 historical grandeur never wholly forfeited. 
 
 Doubtless this inheritance imposes on St. 
 Andrew's, as on all ancient establishments, a 
 corresponding duty. Doubtless, as in old days 
 at Oxford, the colleges were exhorted to rein- 
 force their resources by seeking out intellectual 
 alliances ' even in Greece or Italy beyond the 
 ' Po,' so it is the policy and privilege of St. 
 Andrew's to welcome every new growth of 
 knowledge or power, even though it comes from 
 beyond the waters of the Tay, or of the Tweed. 
 Doubtless numbers and wealth and activity, no 
 less than splendid memories, are elements of 
 academic grandeur, and the swarming multitudes 
 of a vast city are in a certain sense, as has been 
 truly said, ' great as with the sublimity of sea 
 ' or of mountains.' Yet still the greatness of the 
 greatest commercial cities is variable, transitory, 
 and, if lost, to be regained elsewhere ; but the 
 inspiring atmosphere of a long academic past is 
 a national treasure which cannot be abandoned 
 and recalled at will. The hoary hairs of an 
 C 
 
8 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 institution which reaches back for centuries are 
 a crown of glory, which, amidst whatever in- 
 firmities, gives it at least one form of that pre- 
 eminence — that exaltation above its fellows — 
 which the Homeric verse describes. 
 
 Forgive me if I have dwelt too long on 
 this example of a majestic and venerable 
 foundation, in consideration of my grateful 
 sense, not only of the honour you have done 
 me in electing me as its Rector, but also of the 
 delightful hours and days passed amidst its 
 solemn ruins, and the roar of its winds and 
 waves, and the stores of its ancient learning, 
 and the genial converse of its living inmates. 
 Forgive me, also, if I venture to say how it 
 would be altogether without excuse if, among 
 those who dwell amidst such influences, the taste 
 for the poetic and historic aspects of human 
 thought — above all for the poetry and the 
 history of your own romantic country — should 
 languish and pine ; if I urge that in such 
 touching and refining appeals, as are here sup- 
 plied, to the tragedy and the epic of human 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 19 
 
 life, is to be found the natural counterpoise to 
 
 the hardening struggles and fierce competitions 
 
 of this stirring and striving generation. 
 
 II. I turn from the effect of greatness as Great 
 
 men. 
 
 embodied in institutions to greatness as em- 
 bodied in men, in ideas, in books. No one 
 can question the importance to the education 
 of young men, or, indeed, of any men, to have 
 seen with their eyes the example, to have re- 
 ceived into their souls the influence, of characters 
 or intellects that ' stand the first in worth as 
 ' in command.' To have known, to have been 
 guided by any such, is indeed one of the most 
 precious of human opportunities ; to have, for 
 once in our lives, been penetrated by the awe, 
 the thrill, the delight of sitting at the feet of 
 one whom we instinctively felt to be a great 
 man, in the historical sense of the word, is 
 amongst the rare experiences which we feel, 
 not the less, but the more keenly from the 
 attrition of the ordinary conflicts of humanity. 
 We know instinctively the characteristics of such 
 pre-eminence. Wherever we recognise, singly 
 
 C 2 
 
20 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 or combined, largeness of mind, or strength of 
 character, or firmness of will, or fire of genius, or 
 devoted loyalty, there is a born leader. 1 Such 
 an one we ought to be prepared to hear even 
 before he begins to speak. It is for the most 
 part not he, but we, who are to blame if we 
 fail to understand him. Whenever such a 
 superior intelligence approves, either in teacher 
 or scholar, we have our reward, though all 
 meaner minds turn away from us. ' I looked 
 ' around my audience,' said the old Grecian 
 orator, ' and they had dwindled away — one 
 ' only remained. But that one was Plato, and 
 ' this was enough for me.' The heroes of man- 
 kind are the mountains, the highlands of the 
 moral world. They diversify its monotony, 
 they furnish the watershed of its history, as 
 certainly as the Grampians, or the Alps, or 
 the Andes which tower over the lowlands and 
 fertilise the plains and divide the basins of 
 the world of nature. They are the ' full- 
 ' welling fountain-heads of change,' as well as 
 
 1 Bishop Temple, Rugby Sermons, ' Great Men,' pp. 66-77. 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 21 
 
 the serene heights of repose. To be blind to 
 this superiority, to be indifferent to these emi- 
 nences, to think only of their defects or their 
 angularities, is as depressing to the intellectual 
 sense of beauty and worth as was that strange 
 unconsciousness of physical grandeur which, 
 in the last century, caused Oliver Goldsmith 
 to prefer the continuous plain of Holland to 
 the hills and rocks of which he complained as 
 intercepting by their deformities the view of 
 the unfortunate traveller in Scotland. To ap- 
 preciate the glories of Shakspeare, or Newton, 
 or Luther, or Wellington, to discriminate 
 between the nobler materials of such natures 
 as these, and the poorer stuff of which common 
 mortals are composed, is as bracing to the 
 moral and intellectual nerves as the newly- 
 awakened enjoyment of Ben Nevis or of Mont 
 Blanc is to the opening minds and active limbs 
 of our latest born generation. 
 
 It falls to the lot only of a few to have an 
 actual experience of living historical greatness. 
 But it is the delight of a well-stored University 
 
22 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 or library, that it brings us into direct inter- 
 course with the great characters of the past ; and 
 it is a most useful corrective to confront the 
 subtle speculations of our own brains with the 
 great books which permit us to hold communion 
 with the mighty dead, even more closely than 
 had we been their contemporaries. ' Surely,' 
 once exclaimed Sir John Herschel, ' if the worst 
 ' of men were snatched into Paradise for only 
 ' half-an-hour, he would come back the better 
 ' for it.' Surely, we should also be the better, 
 if, like Thomas the Rhymer, we were snatched 
 away, — as we are in the brighter moments of 
 our intellectual pursuits, — into the fairyland of 
 the poets of old, or, like Dante in his vision, 
 into those Elysian Fields, where we behold ' the 
 ' Kings of those who know.' When we converse 
 with those 'who saw life steadily and saw it 
 ' whole,' we rise insensibly above ourselves, and 
 ' prop our souls in these bad times ' with an un- 
 failing support. ''The study of the most famous 
 authors, even in minute detail — even line by 
 line and word by word — is amongst the most 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 23 
 
 nourishing of intellectual repasts. The attempt 
 to clothe the dry bones of philosophic theories 
 with the flesh and blood which they wore in 
 other days is the best mode of understanding 
 both the difference and the likeness of ancient 
 and of modern times. Remember the preg- 
 nant saying of Goethe — ' There are many 
 ' echoes in the world but few voices '■ — and let 
 it be your constant effort to distinguish the 
 voices from the echoes, and to respond accord- 
 ingly. Insist on reading the great books, on 
 marking the great events of the world. Then 
 the little books may be left to take care of 
 themselves ; and the trivial incidents of passing 
 politics and diplomacy may perish with the 
 using. Bear in mind that in every branch of 
 knowledge, scientific, or literary, or artistic, the 
 first question to be asked is, Who is it that in 
 that branch stands confessedly at the head ? 
 What is its chief oracle ? Who is the ruling 
 genius, head and shoulders above the rest ? 
 It is the master-works of the respective de- 
 partments of study which are as it were the 
 
24 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 Canonical, the Symbolical books of science 
 and literature, established beyond appeal by 
 their own intrinsic merits, and by the universal 
 acceptance of mankind. 
 
 Great Above all, endeavour to grasp the distinc- 
 
 kleas. 
 
 tion between the great primary ideas and the 
 small secondary ideas which jostle each other 
 in the turmoil of thought. Remember that 
 those ideas which reach far and wide, and 
 which can be expressed in terms plain, intel- 
 ligible, persuasive, to all educated men, claim 
 at once a superiority above the technicalities 
 of controversial or professional circles. We do 
 not say that this largeness of thought and of 
 language is a necessary test of truth. It may 
 be that fine philosophic or poetic inspirations 
 have come into the world wrapt in the swad- 
 dling-clothes of an enigma or in the obscure 
 corners of a sect. No doubt there is a racy 
 flavour inherent in the words and in the ideas 
 of each particular country ; there are local 
 institutions which cannot be transplanted to 
 other regions without perishing. But, as a 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 25 
 
 general rule, it is one of the best safeguards 
 against narrow, impracticable, fantastic doc- 
 trines to test them by contrast and comparison 
 with the lofty thoughts which belong to the 
 literature of all times and all countries. There 
 is much in the insularities of England and 
 of Anglicanism which we do well to keep, 
 though we can never expect our neighbours in 
 France or Germany, or even in Scotland, to 
 accept them. There are many Scotticisms of 
 dialect, of humour, and of argument, which 
 (reversing the saying of Sydney Smith) it 
 would require a surgical operation to get into 
 the head of an Englishman. But in order for 
 our ideas to claim the character of universal 
 principles and to demand universal acceptance, 
 they must have a universal significance and a 
 universal application ; and therefore when we 
 hear it maintained that there are doctrines 
 which cannot be appreciated outside our own 
 communion or nation, which are incomprehen- 
 sible to the unintelligent or unregenerate natures 
 which have their habitation, north or south of 
 
26 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 the Tweed, as the case may be, we relinquish for 
 such doctrines all hope of permanent triumph. 
 Be sure that ideas which can only be expressed 
 in the local slang or the dogmatic cant, of a 
 province, or a party, or a school, or a sect, 
 are ideas, perhaps of the second and third, 
 but certainly not of the first, order of truth. 
 Be sure that if they refuse to be conveyed 
 except in one single form of expression, that 
 single form of expression stands self-condemned, 
 as well as the ideas which it represents. Be 
 sure that the language of world-wide literature 
 is the only fitting garb for those eternal and 
 primary principles of which the Grecian poet 
 has said in words which one of your own 
 Professors has well rendered, that 'they have 
 ' their foundation on high — all-embracing like 
 ' their parent Heaven— neither did mortal infir- 
 ' mity preside over their birth, nor shall forget- 
 ' fulness ever lay them to sleep. There is in 
 ' them a great divinity that grows not old.' 1 
 
 1 CEdipus Tyrannus, 865. (See Professor Campbell's 
 edition, p. 186.) 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 27 
 III. There is one special sphere to which Great 
 
 teachers of 
 
 in this University, where so large a proportion theology, 
 of the students are destined for the sacred 
 ministry of the Church, these remarks are 
 specially applicable. Nowhere in education 
 is the contemplation of greatness more fruitful 
 of profitable lessons, more useful as a safeguard 
 against popular errors, than in theology. It 
 has been one of the main causes of the barren- 
 ness of Christian theology, as compared with 
 the richness of the Christian religion, that the 
 intellectual oracles of the Church have been 
 too often looked for, not in those who, by 
 God's peculiar grace, have been fitted ' to stand 
 ' the first in worth as in command,' but in those 
 who, by imperfect culture or meagre endow- 
 ments, are entitled only to a very inferior place 
 in the school of divine philosophy. Never was 
 there sounder advice given to theological stu- 
 dents than by one whose eminence, both as a 
 theologian and as a man, enabled him to speak 
 with a weight which time has only increased : — 
 ' I would ask the theological student never to 
 
28 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 ' lay aside the greatest works of human genius, 
 ' of whatever age or country. They are not so 
 ' numerous as to overwhelm him ; and whatever 
 ' be his particular studies, some of them, whether 
 ' philosophers, poets, or historians, should always 
 ' be on his table and daily in his hand, till his 
 ' mind, catching a portion of their excellence, 
 ' is able to work with tenfold power on whatever 
 ' subjects he may submit to it. And if for those 
 ' great instructors he be content to leave un- 
 ' opened many of the volumes which are now 
 ' thought so essential to theological learning, let 
 ' him not be afraid of the results of the exchange. 
 ' Always supposing as the foundation a constant, 
 ' critical, and devout study of the Scriptures 
 ' themselves, and the use of those philological 
 ' and antiquarian works which are essential, and 
 ' alone essential, to the understanding of them, 
 ' he will find that in the comparison of human 
 ' works, both spiritually and intellectually, the 
 ' works of the greatest minds will be most useful 
 ' to him — that he may be well content to be 
 ' ignorant even of Bull and Pearson, if he is thus 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 29 
 
 ' enabled to become more intimately familiar 
 ' with Bacon and Aristotle.' 1 
 
 And when Arnold, speaking to English 
 students, drew this contrast between the pro- 
 fessed theologians of his own Church and the 
 universal teachers of all Churches, he would 
 not have refused to Scottish students in their 
 lighter hours to vary the somewhat arid and 
 thorny discussions in which at times the theo- 
 logy of Scotland has been absorbed by recur- 
 rence to those perennial springs of instruction 
 which, on another occasion, 2 I ventured to 
 place in the first ranks of Scottish theology 
 — the wise humour, the sagacious penetration, 
 the tender pathos of Robert Burns ; the far- 
 seeing toleration, the profound reverence, the 
 critical insight into the various shades of re- 
 ligious thought and feeling, the moderation 
 which ' turns to scorn the falsehood of ex- 
 ' tremes,' the lofty sense of Christian honour, 
 purity, and justice, that breathes through every 
 
 1 Arnold's Sermons, vol. iii., Preface, p. xxiii. I would 
 commend the study of the whole Essay. 
 
 2 Lectures on the Church of Scotland, 162-165. 
 
3 o THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 volume of the romances of Walter Scott. You 
 will not suppose that in thus commending the 
 great works of secular genius I forget that 
 neither in the secular nor the ecclesiastical 
 sphere is mental power a guarantee for moral 
 strength. I fully grant that Bacon may have 
 been — though his latest biographer doubts it 
 — not only ' the wisest and brightest,' but 
 ' the meanest of mankind ; ' or that Burns, by 
 his miserable weakness, was, as none knew 
 better than himself, a beacon of melancholy 
 warning, no less than of blazing light, to the 
 youth of Scotland. You will not misunder- 
 stand me as if in the Christian minister, or in- 
 deed in the Christian man, it were well to exalt 
 the intellectual above the spiritual and moral 
 sphere. That has a grandeur of its own, on 
 which, were this the time or place to speak, 
 it would be easy to enlarge. Samuel Ru- 
 therford, who proudly said on his deathbed 
 that ' in a few days more he should be where 
 ' few kings and great folk come,' and whose 
 bones sanctify with a new consecration the 
 
I 
 
 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 31 
 
 Cathedral churchyard where he lies amongst 
 you — Thomas Erskine, of Linlathen, who rests 
 on the opposite promontory within sight of 
 your towers, and with whom even a brief 
 converse was for the moment to have one's 
 conversation in heaven — these are memories 
 of another kind, and strains of a higher mood, 
 on which I cannot now more than touch. 
 You will perceive that what I am urging is 
 the necessity, the duty, the privilege of re- 
 serving our intellectual submission and vene- 
 ration for the greater and not the lesser lights 
 that God has placed in the intellectual firma- 
 ment. 
 
 This and this only is the solution of the 
 much-vexed question of authority. We are 
 told, and truly told, that authority is needed 
 for the guidance of the human spirit, for 
 the mass of mankind that require not to 
 lead, but to be led. But what authority ? 
 Is it the official authority of Popes, Councils, 
 Bishops, Presbyters, Presbyteries ?— is it the 
 prescriptive authority of Fathers, or Refor- 
 
32 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 mers, or authors of Confessions and Catechisms, 
 and long chains of authorised commentators ? 
 These all, no doubt, claim a certain deference 
 according to their legal or historical weight. 
 But the true, reasonable, and sufficient alle- 
 giance of the mind and intellect is due only 
 to those far higher authorities which the world 
 acknowledges without dispute, because their 
 potent word carries its own conviction with 
 it — because their 'vision and faculty divine' 
 has seen what none others have seen — because 
 their keen penetration and deep research have 
 explored what none others have explored. 
 Even in that Church which proclaims most 
 loudly the theory of submission to official 
 authority, that theory is often abandoned in 
 practice almost as completely as if it had never 
 been asserted. Not only has it of late been 
 put forward by a famous divine of the Roman 
 Church that the authority of the Pope must 
 be controlled by the verifying faculty of con- 
 science and private judgment, but in the long 
 course of its eventful history it is not the 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 33 
 
 Bishops of Rome that have been the real 
 oracles even of the Latin Church. In the 
 whole range of the Papal succession there 
 is not one who can find a place amongst 
 the luminaries of all time, or to whom, how- 
 ever powerful in maintaining the privileges 
 of his order, we can ascribe the solution of 
 any of the wider and deeper problems which 
 have occupied the attention of mankind. The 
 guiding spirits of the early and of the middle 
 ages were theologians of obscure sees, or 
 students with no ecclesiastical rank'; not an 
 Innocent, or a Gregory, or a Pius, but Au- 
 gustine, the pastor of a small African diocese, 
 and Jerome, a secluded scholar in Palestine, 
 and Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican professor 
 of Naples, and Thomas a Kempis, an un- 
 known canon in an almost unknown town of 
 Germany. In the School of Theology, as re- 
 presented in the frescoes of the Vatican, there 
 is no single prelate or doctor whose voice 
 reaches from pole to pole with anything like 
 the same universal power as that of the great 
 
34 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 lay poet of the ' Divine Comedy,' whom Ra- 
 phael by a touch of genius as sagacious as it 
 was bold has there introduced amongst them. 
 It is indeed true that the high offices of Church 
 and State may help to moderate the passions 
 of their occupants, and to fill even ordinary 
 men with a force beyond themselves. But still 
 the voice which touches the heart and con- 
 science of men with a persuasive and con- 
 straining authority is not that which speaks 
 ex cathedra, but that which speaks from the far 
 higher inspiration of personal gifts, of an heaven- 
 sent grace or wisdom. We are not left in 
 ignorance or uncertainty where to seek for such 
 utterances. The concurrent voice of the civi- 
 lised world has for the most part already pointed 
 them out and accepted them. Securus judicat 
 orbis terrarum. 
 
 Greatness And this same principle of natural selection 
 of the 
 
 Bible. applies to the Bible itself. We yield to its 
 authority not only because it is the most 
 sacred of all sacred oracles, but because it 
 is the greatest of all great books. In no dog- 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 35 
 
 matic Confession, Greek, Roman, or Protestant, 
 are these ' incomparable excellences ' of the 
 Bible so clearly set forth as in the Confession of 
 the Faith of the Scottish Church. 1 Amongst 
 the arguments ' whereby the Holy Scripture 
 ' doth abundantly evidence itself to be the 
 ' word of God are the heavenliness of the 
 ' matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the ma- 
 ' jesty of the style, the consent of all the 
 ' parts, the scope of the whole.' You will 
 observe that these arguments all turn, not on 
 the decrees of Council, Pope, or Fathers, nor 
 yet on external signs of authority, but on the 
 intrinsic evidence of moral and intellectual 
 greatness ; and amongst them one conspicuous 
 and pervasive element is that ' majesty of style ' 
 which gives to the leading passages of the 
 Bible a perpetuity and bloom of youth when 
 so many of the inferior products of humanity 
 have grown old and vanished away, v It is 
 because the study of the Scriptures cultivates 
 in the popular mind this sense of true dignity 
 
 1 Confession of Faith, i. 5. 
 
36 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 and grace, this ' holy hope and high humility,' 
 that even from a purely mental point of view 
 it is so invaluable an instrument in popular 
 education. Where this sense exists or is 
 formed, there the mind overlooks and is proof 
 against those grotesque extravagances, those 
 debasing trivialities of form and speech, which 
 have often disfigured the most zealous faith. 
 •^The majesty of the Bible will touch hearts 
 which even its holiness cannot move, and will 
 awe minds which no argument can convince. 
 The early chapters of Genesis contain many 
 things at which the man of science may 
 stumble ; but none will question their unap- 
 proachable sublimity. The Book of Isaiah 
 may furnish endless matter for the critic; but 
 the more fastidious he is, the more freely will 
 he acknowledge its magnificence of thought 
 and diction. The authorship of the Four 
 Gospels may be defended, attacked, and ana- 
 lysed interminably ; but the whole world bows 
 down before the grandeur of the Eight Beati- 
 tudes, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son, 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 37 
 
 and the Farewell Discourses, and the story 
 of Gethsemane and Calvary. 
 
 Such an appreciation of the magnitude of 
 the Bible will be alike instructive, both in 
 comparison with other books and in compar- 
 ing the differing parts of its own contents. 
 We shall thus learn to treat calmly its relation 
 to the gifted or venerated authors of other 
 times, because we shall rest assured that what- 
 ever is truly great in them may be welcomed by 
 us as part of the same Divine Truth which has 
 appeared in a similar, albeit a loftier, form in 
 the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. We shall 
 thus appreciate the importance of that doctrine 
 of proportion 1 which is as necessary in sacred as 
 it is in secular studies, and shall feel that one of 
 the main duties of those scribes who have to 
 ' bring out of the treasure-house things new and 
 ' old,' great and small, is to have an eye exer- 
 cised to discern between truths which are ac- 
 cidental, secondary, and temporary, and truths 
 which are essential, primary, and eternal. We 
 1 See Address II. p. 77. 
 
3 8 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 shall thus distinguish statements which belong 
 to the passing argument and external imagery 
 of the sacred writer, from statements which are, 
 as our forefathers used to say (though it may be 
 with a somewhat different meaning), ' the sum 
 ' and substance of saving doctrine.' We shall 
 welcome without fear the keenest dissection and 
 freest handling of the form, construction, and 
 derivation of the letter, whether of the Scripture 
 or of Confessions of Faith, if we are convinced 
 that the true 'supernatural' is the inner spiritual 
 life, which remains after criticism has done its 
 best and its worst, and of which foes and friends 
 may alike confess that 
 
 We do it wrong, being so majestical, 
 To offer it the show of violence — 
 For it is, as the air, invulnerable, 
 And our vain blows malicious mockery. 
 
 Great IV. It will not be thought unsuitable if 
 
 actions. 
 
 from this wide survey and from these high 
 subjects I come round again to yourselves, 
 and speak of one more kind of greatness — 
 the greatness of individual actions. Great in- 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 39 
 
 stitutions are not ours to make ; great men 
 are rare ; great ideas are borne in upon us we 
 know not how or whence. But great deeds 
 are within the reach of all, and it should 
 be a never-ceasing aim of genuine education 
 to encourage the admiration and appreciation, 
 not merely of actions that are good and wise, 
 but of actions high-minded, large-minded, which 
 embrace a sphere not narrow but wide, not 
 mean but lofty, actions magnificent in quality, 
 in purpose, and in effect. 
 
 Such are those instances of unselfish muni- 
 ficence which were the redeeming features of 
 the violence and the ignorance of the Middle 
 Ages. Henry Wardlaw and James Kennedy 
 were not above their age in character or genius. 
 But the public spirit, the thought for pos- 
 terity, which they showed in the foundation 
 of this University and its earliest colleges, 
 were above themselves. Such again are those 
 displays of unshaken conviction witnessed on 
 this classic ground of the first martyrdoms of 
 the Scottish Reformation. Patrick Hamilton 
 
4 o THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 and George Wishart were not above their 
 contemporaries in learning or in wisdom, but 
 when Hamilton died in front of St. Salvator's 
 College, and Wishart under the walls of 
 Beaton's Palace, their deeds also were above 
 their characters. ' The dead which they slew 
 ' in their deaths were more than the dead which 
 ' they had slain in their lives.' Such acts of 
 splendid generosity, and of heroic sacrifice for 
 conscience' sake, have not been unknown to 
 modern Scotland. But still, in the face of the 
 increasing temptation to contract munificence 
 to the narrow limits of our own party or 
 neighbourhood or family, or to ally the Pilgrim 
 Faithful with the false companions Byends and 
 Facing Bothways, it is well to look back to 
 those shining lights of the heroic times. And 
 without speaking of such wider and more 
 visible manifestations of what in old English 
 was styled the spirit ' exceedingly magnifical,' 
 is it not possible that some group of college 
 friends in this University may bind themselves 
 together by a resolution like to that of a 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 41 
 
 circle of German students in the University 
 of Gottingen, who in the year 18 14, 'on a 
 ' certain cheerful evening, made a vow to each 
 ' other, that they would effect something great 
 'in their lives'? All of them did more or 
 less fulfil that early vow, and one of that 
 circle, in whose biography the incident is 
 recorded, 1 was Bunsen, that marvellous ex- 
 ample, in our times, of what an eager and 
 resolute student could achieve. 
 
 None can foretell for himself or for others 
 what great possibilities may be wrapt up in 
 his future years. When Andrew Melville was 
 a student in this college, John Douglas, who 
 was Rector of the University, used to take 
 the puny orphan youth between his knees, 
 question him on his studies, and say, ' My 
 ' silly fatherless and motherless boy, it's ill to 
 witt what God may make of thee yet.' 2 I do 
 not presume on the same familiarity ; but I 
 venture to say to the youngest, humblest 
 
 1 Bunseu's Life, vol. i. p. 46. 
 M'Crie's Melville, i. p. 13. 
 
42 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 student here present—' It is hard to know 
 ' what God will make of thee yet.' 
 
 And let us remember that this greatness 
 of action depends on two other kinds of great- I 
 ness — on our appreciation of the greatness of 
 the manner of doing what is good, and our 
 appreciation of the greatness of the occasion 
 when it can be done. 
 Greatness The ' grand style,' the ' great manner ' — 
 
 of manner. 
 
 that is within our grasp, however distant it 
 may seem. It has been well said by an emi- 
 nent French writer, that the true calling of 
 a Christian is not to do extraordinary things, 
 but to do ordinary things in an extraordi- 
 nary way. The most trivial tasks can be 
 accomplished in a noble, gentle, regal spirit, 
 which overrides and puts aside all petty, 
 paltry feelings, and which elevates all little 
 things. Whatever is affected, whatever is 
 ostentatious, whatever is taken up from mere 
 fashion, or party cry, that is small, vulgar, 
 contemptible. Whatever springs from our own 
 independent thought, whatever is modest, ge- 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 43 
 
 nuine, and transparent, whatever is deliberately 
 pursued because it tends towards a grand 
 result — that is noble, commanding, great. 
 When one of your most illustrious scholars, 
 George Buchanan, in his latter days was visited 
 by that ' motherless, fatherless boy ' whom I 
 just now named, he was found teaching his 
 serving-lad the alphabet. And when Melville 
 wondered that he was engaged in so humble 
 a work — ' Better this,' said the old Preceptor 
 of Princes, ' better this than stealing sheep, 
 ' or sitting idle, which is as ill.' When they 
 asked him to alter some detail in his History 
 about the burial of David Rizzio that might 
 offend the King, he asked, ' Tell me, man, if 
 ' I have told the truth ? ' ' Yes, sir, I think so.' 
 ' Then I will bide his feud [anger] and all 
 ' his kin's. Pray, pray God for me, and He 
 ' will direct me.' These were very homely 
 matters, but the spirit in which they were 
 touched was no less than imperial. 
 
 There is also the greatness of occasion. Greatness 
 
 T of occa- 
 
 lt sometimes happens that we can best illus- sk>n. 
 
44 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 trate the grandeur of an opportunity to be 
 sought by our regret for an opportunity that 
 is lost. One such we will give from the history 
 of this place. Of all the names in ancient 
 Scottish ecclesiastical history, there is none 
 which has a more tragic interest than that of 
 the young Alexander Stuart who was raised to 
 the Archbishopric of St. Andrew's at the early 
 age of eighteen by his father King James IV. 
 He was the pupil of Erasmus, and that great 
 man has left on record his profound admira- 
 tion of the Scottish youth, who had been his 
 companion and scholar in the stately old 
 Italian city of Siena. Tall, dignified, grace- 
 ful, with no blemish except the shortness of 
 sight which he shared in common with many 
 modern students — of gentle manners, playful 
 humour, but keen as. a hound in pursuit of 
 knowledge, in history, theology, law, above all 
 in the new Greek learning — an accomplished 
 musician, a delightful talker, high-spirited and 
 high-minded without haughtiness, religious 
 without a particle of superstition — born to 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 45 
 
 command, yet born also to conciliate 1 — such 
 according to Erasmus was the future Primate 
 of Scotland. Already the University of St. 
 Andrew's had felt the stimulus of his youthful 
 energy ; already the enlightened spirits of the 
 North were beginning to breathe freely in the 
 atmosphere in which he had himself been 
 nourished. Had that young student of St. 
 Andrew's (for so, although Archbishop, we may 
 still call him) — had he lived to fulfil this 
 wonderful promise — had he, with these rare 
 gifts and rare opportunities, been spared to 
 meet the impending crisis of the coming 
 generation, instead of the worldly, intriguing, 
 and profligate Beaton — had he been here en- 
 throned in this venerable see, with the spirit 
 of our own Colet in a higher post, the aspira- 
 tions of our own More without his difficulties, 
 ready to prepare the way for the first shock 
 of the Reformation — what a chance for the 
 ancient Church of this country ! what an oc- 
 casion of combining the best parts of the old 
 
 1 Erasmus, Opp. ii. p. 554. (Adagia : Spartam nactus es, &c ) 
 
4 6 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 with the best parts of the new ! what a call, if 
 indeed its doom had not been already fixed, 
 to purify that corrupt Episcopacy ! what a 
 hope, if moderation in those times had been 
 possible, of restraining the violence of the 
 iconoclast reaction ! But alas ! he was slain 
 by his father's side on the field of Flodden. 
 Of all ' the flowers of the forest that were ' there 
 ' wede away,' surely none was more lovely, 
 more precious than this young Marcellus of 
 the Scottish Church. If he fell under the 
 memorable charge of my namesake on that 
 fatal day, may he accept thus late the lament 
 which a kinsman of his foe would fain pour 
 over his untimely bier. 
 
 But the opportunity which was opening 
 before Alexander Stuart is not unlike that 
 which is still open to us — and the spirit which 
 would have guided his course is the same as 
 that which for us is still no less indispensable. 
 He was, as I have said, the pupil of Erasmus, 
 who alone of his age combined what was then 
 a world-wide knowledge with an insight into 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 47 
 
 those ideas of Christian truth which, as I have 
 before said, are alone destined to be permanent. 
 What there was in Knox and Buchanan and 
 Andrew Melville, which belonged to their own 
 peculiar time and circumstances — the fury of 
 their indignation, the technical form of their 
 creed, the narrowness of their party spirit — 
 has passed away. That which we seek to re- 
 kindle from their ashes is the spark which they 
 derived from the higher spirits of their time, 
 whose language and whose aspirations are even 
 more suited to us than to them. Erasmus and 
 those who hold with him that the vital, inex- 
 haustible element of Christianity is its moral 
 and spiritual, as distinct from its formal or its 
 emotional side, are called to the front, with an 
 audience more willing to hear than Erasmus 
 found. The penetration of new ideas into the 
 whole fabric of belief and of social life — the 
 insensible formation of a wider theology which 
 shall embrace and vivify the forms of the past 
 — the changes, whether for good or evil, which 
 have lately been effected in the constitution 
 
48 THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 of the Church of Scotland — the changes which 
 may possibly be impending over this ancient 
 University itself — all give a zest, a stimulus, 
 alike to the general and the particular career 
 of those whom I address, of which the new and 
 surpassing interest ought to compensate for the 
 many perplexities and discouragements which 
 such changes bring. The line of light which 
 has been traced by a familiar hand 1 in this 
 place through the succession of blameless and 
 lofty spirits who, from Hooker to Butler, kept 
 alive the 'rational theology' of England, indi- 
 cates the pathway along which the faith, yes, 
 and the philosophy, of Christendom must walk 
 if it is to produce fruits worthy of the future. 
 Is it too much to ask for the spirit and method 
 of Erasmus, combined with the energy of 
 Luther and Knox, with the repose of Fenelon 
 and Leighton ? Is it impossible that the en- 
 thusiasm which has hitherto been reserved for 
 the coarser and narrower channels of scholastic 
 doctrine may be turned into the broader, 
 
 1 Principal Tulloch's Rational Theology. 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 49 
 
 vaster currents of a more Catholic, and, there- 
 fore, a more Evangelical faith than our prede- 
 cessors have known ? It may be hoped that 
 if there have been times, when (to use well- 
 known words), ' our nerves were irritated by 
 ' trifles,' there shall also be times when ' great 
 f events ' and great thoughts ' shall make us 
 ' calm.' I would not unduly exaggerate the 
 prospects of success or underrate the fears of 
 failure in the attempt to attain a higher and 
 more spiritual theology, a more patriotic and 
 generous policy. The circumstances around 
 us may often seem dismal, small, ignoble ; 
 the dwarfing, levelling, disturbing effect of 
 partisanship and false popularity may ' seem 
 almost irresistible. The ' rocks ahead ' which 
 Cassandra foresees are too visible amongst the 
 breakers not to fill the stoutest hearts with 
 alarm. Even thus, those who contend for long 
 years in vain may reflect that the greatness of 
 the end for which they strive is worth the bit- 
 terness of the disappointment — 
 E 
 
So THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 
 
 Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni. 
 
 Tis better to have fought and lost 
 Than never to have fought at all. 
 
 But surely in the peculiar crisis of our age the 
 game is still in our hands. We see clearly the 
 enterprise before us. And when in that enter- 
 prise we consider how a few additional grains 
 of charity would make all the difference — from 
 how many mistakes we should be saved, by 
 the simplest elements of common sense and 
 self-control — how much our heat would gain 
 by how slight an accession of light, how doubly 
 the value of our light would be enhanced by 
 how slight an infusion of heat, by how slight 
 an addition of sweetness — what molehills of 
 prejudice which a breath of truth might over- 
 turn, have been erected into what mountains 
 of difficulty — what a fund of conciliation lies 
 wrapped up in all larger views of science, of 
 literature, and of the Bible — what noble paths 
 of practice remain to be explored, unknown 
 to former generations — then we may well turn 
 to those other fine lines of the same Roman 
 
THE STUDY OF GREATNESS. 51 
 
 poet, and take as our watchword, not the 
 despairing words of the vanquished Cato, but 
 the exulting words of the victorious Csesar : — 
 
 Spe trepido : haud unquam vidi tarn magna daturos 
 Tam prope me Superos : camporum limite parvo 
 Absumus a votis. 
 
 Or if I may venture to present them in an 
 English paraphrase — 
 
 J tremble not with terror, but with hope, 
 
 As the great day reveals its coming scope ; 
 
 Never in earlier days, our hearts to cheer, 
 
 Have such bright gifts of Heaven been brought so near, 
 
 Nor ever has been kept the aspiring soul 
 
 By space so narrow from so grand a goal. 
 
ADDRESS 
 
 TO THE STUDENTS OF ST. ANDREW'S 
 On March 16, 1877 
 
55 
 
 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 On the occasion of my former address at St. 
 Andrew's, the Principal of St. Mary's College 
 asked me to speak a few words to the theo- 
 logical students under his charge. It was not 
 within my power to comply with his request 
 at that moment. But now that the time draws 
 near to take farewell of an office which I have 
 valued so highly, I have thought that I might 
 properly touch on some subject which, though 
 of general interest, had special reference to 
 Theology. When I spoke to you before, I ap- 
 pealed to the motto which is written over this 
 ancient hall, and dwelling on the inspiring force 
 of the contemplation of GREATNESS in all its 
 forms, I endeavoured to show how bright was 
 the sunshine which such a thought throws on all 
 your present duties and studies. That bright- 
 
S 6 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 ness I would still wish to maintain, though 
 within a more definite range, and in a humbler 
 and graver tone, more suited to the altered 
 circumstances both of him who speaks and of 
 you who listen. 
 
 The topic which I propose to take is one 
 at which I slightly hinted on my former visit, 
 and which was suggested to me afresh by the 
 instructive address delivered, in the course of 
 the late winter, to the students of Aberdeen 
 by an eminent statesman — one of the foremost 
 of our time. He, speaking with the fulness of 
 his varied experience, and with the strength 
 of true humility and moderation, chose as his 
 
 The Rocks theme, ' The Rocks Ahead,' in the political 
 
 ahead. 
 
 and social world, indicated some years ago by 
 a distinguished publicist. But besides the poli- 
 tical and the economical rocks, there was a 
 third rock, which the prophet of ill had pointed 
 
 The Theo- out, the religious or theological rock — namely, 
 
 logical 
 
 Rock the danger arising to religion from the ap- 
 ahead. . ... , , . 
 
 parently increasing divergence between the in- 
 telligence and the faith of our time. It is this 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 57 
 
 topic — touched for a moment by Mr. Forster ; 
 handled more fully, but still in a rapid survey, 
 by an accomplished countryman of your own, 
 Mr. Grant Duff, at Edinburgh — on which I 
 propose to insist more at length on the present 
 occasion. You know the story of the Inchcape 
 Rock, almost within sight of these shores ; how 
 for many years it was the terror of mariners 
 until an enterprising Abbot of Aberbrothock 
 ventured to fasten a bell upon the sunken reef. 
 Will you permit the successor of the Abbots 
 of Westminster, after the fashion of the Douglas 
 of your own Scottish history, to attempt to 
 ' bell this rock ' ? The waves of controversy and 
 alarm will still doubtless dash over it ; but, 
 perchance, if my advice contains any truth, you 
 will catch from time to time henceforth, amidst 
 the roar of the billows, faint chimes of a more 
 cheering music ; and even if some rash rover 
 shall tear off the signal of warning and en- 
 couragement, yet the rude shifts of the Abbot 
 may suggest to some wiser and more scientific 
 inventor to build on the rock a lighthouse which 
 
58 THE HOPES OE THEOLOGY. 
 
 will more effectually defy the storm, and more 
 extensively illuminate the darkness of the time 
 to come. I propose, then, to speak to you of 
 the grounds of hope for the religion and theo- 
 logy of the future. 
 
 I do not deny that the forebodings of Mr. 
 Greg have some foundation. It was one of the 
 last anxious aspirations of Dean Milman, 1 that 
 some means might be found to avert the wide 
 and widening breach which he seemed to see 
 between the thought and the religion of Eng- 
 land. There has been an increasing suspicion 
 which threatens more and more to embitter 
 the fiercer factions of the ecclesiastical and the 
 scientific world — each rejoicing 'to push the 
 statements of its rival to the extremest conse- 
 quences, and to place on them the worst pos- 
 sible construction. There have arisen new 
 questions, which ancient theology has for the 
 most part not even considered. There is an 
 impetuosity on both sides, which to the sober 
 sense of the preceding century was unknown, 
 
 1 History of the Jews, 3rd edition, vol. i. p. xxxiv. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 59 
 
 and which insists on the precipitation of con- 
 flicts, once cautiously avoided or quietly sur- 
 mounted. There are also indications that we 
 are passing through one of those periods of 
 partial eclipse which from time to time retard 
 the healthy progress of mankind. In the place 
 of the abundant harvest of statesmanlike and 
 poetic genius with which the nineteenth century 
 opened, there have sprung up too often the 
 lean and puny stalks blighted with the east 
 wind. Of this wasting, withering influence 
 modern theology has had its full share. Super- 
 stitions which seemed to have died away have 
 returned with redoubled force ; fantastic ideas 
 of divine and human things, which the calm 
 judgment of the last century, the Heaven- 
 inspired insight of the dawn of this, would 
 have scattered like the dreams of fever, seem 
 to reign supreme in large sections of the reli- 
 gious world. And this calamity has overtaken 
 us in the presence of the vast, perhaps dispro- 
 portionate, advance of scientific knowledge, 
 which feels most keenly and presses most 
 
60 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 heavily the weaknesses of a credulous or cere- 
 monial form of belief. It is, no doubt, con- 
 ceivable that these dreadful forms and 'fiery 
 ' faces ' might portend for England the same 
 overthrow of faith that has overtaken other 
 countries. If such a separation were indeed 
 universally impending between the religion of 
 the coming age and the progress of knowledge, 
 between the permanent interests of the Chris- 
 tian Churches and the interests of the European 
 States, then there would be a cause for alarm 
 more serious than any of the commonplace 
 topics suggested by the panics of religious 
 journals or the assaults of enraged critics. The 
 fates would then indeed have declared against 
 us — 
 
 Non me tua fervida terrent 
 Dicta, ferox; sed Di terrent et Jupiter hostis. 
 
 But let us hope better things. Behind these 
 outward manifestations of danger, there is a 
 higher Christianity, which neither assailants nor 
 defenders have fully exhausted. We cannot 
 believe that the inexorable hour has struck. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 6 
 
 There is good ground for hoping that the diffi- 
 culties of religion, national religion, Christian 
 religion, are but the results of passing maladies, 
 either in its professed friends or supposed foes. 
 We may fairly say, with the first Napoleon — 
 ' We have perhaps gone a little too fast ; but 
 ' we have reason on our side, and when one 
 ' has reason on one's side, one should have the 
 ' courage to run some risks.' The Evening 
 star, according to the fine image of the poet, 
 which is the accompaniment of the setting day, 
 may be one and the same with the Morning 
 star, the harbinger of sunrise. 
 
 It is a large inquiry. I can but touch on a 
 few salient points. 
 
 I. First, there is the essentially progressive Progres- 
 sive 
 
 element in religion itself. Lord Macaulay, in element in 
 his celebrated essay on Ranke's ' History of Rellglon ' 
 ' the Popes,' maintains, with all the exuberance 
 of logic and rhetoric, the difference between 
 theology and all other sciences is in this re- 
 spect, that what it was in the days of the 
 patriarch Job, such it must be in the nineteenth 
 
62 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 century, and to the end of time. No doubt 
 in religion, as in all great subjects of hu- 
 man thought, there is a permanent and un- 
 changing element ; but in everything which 
 relates to its form, in much which relates to 
 its substance, the paradox of our great his- 
 torian is as contrary to fact as it would be 
 crushing to our aspirations if it were true. In 
 the practice of theological controversy, it has 
 been too much the custom to make the most of 
 differences and the least of agreements. But 
 in the theological study of the past, it has 
 been too much the custom to see only the 
 agreements and not the differences. Look in 
 the face the fact that the belief of each succes- 
 sive epoch of Christendom has varied enor- 
 mously from the belief of its predecessors. 
 The variations of the Catholic Church, both 
 past and present, have been almost, if not 
 quite, as deep and wide as the variations of 
 Protestantism ; and these variations, whilst 
 they show that each form of theology is but 
 an approximation to the truth, and not the 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 63 
 
 whole truth itself, contain the surest indica- 
 tion of vitality in the whole body of religious 
 faith. The conceptions of the relations of man 
 to man, and, still more, of man to God, have 
 been incontestably altered with the growth of 
 centuries. Not to speak of the total extinction 
 of ancient polytheism, and confining ourselves 
 within the limits of the Christian Church, it is 
 one of the most consolatory fruits of theological 
 study to observe the disappearance of whole 
 continents of useless controversies which once 
 distracted the world. What has become of the 
 belief, once absolutely universal in Christen- 
 dom, that, unless by some altogether excep- 
 tional intervention, no human being could be 
 saved who had not passed through the waters 
 of baptism ; that even innocent children, if not 
 immersed in the font, were doomed to endless 
 perdition ? Or where are the interminable ques- 
 tions respecting the doctrine of predestination 
 or the mode of justification which occupied the 
 middle of the sixteenth century in Protestant 
 Churches ? Into what limbo has passed the 
 
64 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 terrible conflict between the Burghers and the 
 Anti-Burghers amongst the now United Presby- 
 terians ? What do we now hear of the doctrine 
 of the Double Procession, or of the Light on 
 Mount Tabor, which in the ninth century and 
 in the fifteenth filled the mind of Eastern 
 Christendom ? These questions for the time 
 occupied, in these several Churches, the whole 
 horizon of theological thought. They are dead 
 and buried ; and for us, standing on their graves, 
 it is idle to say that theology has not changed. 
 It has changed. Religion has survived those 
 changes ; and this is the historical pledge that 
 it may, that it will, survive a thousand more. 
 
 Even the mere removal of what may be 
 called dead matter out of the path of living 
 progress is of itself a positive gain. But the 
 signs of the capability of future improvement 
 in Religion are more direct than this. No 
 doubt theologians have themselves to thank 
 for the rigid, immutable character which has 
 been ascribed by philosophers to their beliefs. 
 The Jesuit maxim, Sint ut sunt, aut non sint, 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 65 
 
 has been too often accepted in all Churches 
 for any of the Churches to complain if they 
 have been taken at their word. But already, 
 as far back as the Reformation, there were 
 indications of a deeper insight — exceptional 
 and quaint, but so expressive as to vindicate 
 for Christianity, even then, the widest range 
 which future discoveries may open before it. 
 In the first Confession of John Knox, the 
 Reformers had perceived what had been so 
 long concealed from the eyes of the Schoolmen 
 and the Fathers — that the most positive expres- 
 sions, even of their own convictions, were not 
 guaranteed from imperfection or mutability ; 
 and the entreaty with which that Confession is 
 prefaced, contains at once a fine example of 
 true Christian humility and the stimulus to the 
 noblest Christian ambition — ' We conjure you 
 ' if any man will note in this our Confession any 
 ' article or sentence repugnant to God's Holy 
 ' Word, that it would please him of his gentle- 
 ' ness, and for Christian charity's sake, to ad- 
 ' monish us of the same in writing ; and we, 
 F 
 
66 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 ' upon our honour and fidelity, do promise him 
 ' satisfaction from the Holy Scriptures, or due 
 ' reformation of that which he shall prove to be 
 ' amiss.' And perhaps even more striking is 
 the like expression in the well-known address 
 of the first pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, 
 before embarking on the great enterprise which 
 was to issue in the foundation of new churches 
 and new commonwealths beyond the Atlantic 
 — ' I am verily persuaded that the Lord has 
 ' more truth yet to come for us — yet to break 
 ' forth out of His Holy Word. The Lutherans 
 ' cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther 
 ' saw. The Calvinists stick fast where they 
 ' were left by that great man of God, who yet 
 ' saw not all things. Though they were burning 
 ' and shining lights, yet they penetrated not 
 ' into the whole counsel of God, but were as 
 ' willing to embrace further light as that which 
 ' they first received. I beseech you to remember 
 ' that it is an article of your Church's covenant, 
 ' that you be ready to receive whatever truth 
 ' shall be made known to you from the written 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 6; 
 
 'Word of God.' 'Noble words,' says the elo- 
 quent historian 1 of the Dutch Republic ; 
 ' words to bear fruit, after centuries shall go 
 ' by.' They are, indeed, the charter of the 
 future glories of Protestant, and perhaps of 
 Roman Christianity. Well did Archbishop 
 Whately, on the eve of a change in the con- 
 stitution of the Church of England, exclaim :— 
 ' I will not believe that the Reformers locked 
 ' the door, and threw away the key for ever.' 
 It is in the light of this progressive historical 
 development that the confessions and liturgies, 
 the doctrines and usages, of former times 
 find their proper place. All of them, taken 
 as the final expressions of absolute truth, are 
 misleading. All of them, even the most im- 
 perfect, may be taken as the various phases 
 and steps of a Church and a faith whose 
 glory it is to be perpetually advancing towards 
 perfection. 
 
 II. When we examine in detail the mate- 
 rials of Christian theology, they give abundant 
 
 1 Motley, Life of Barnevddt, ii. 295. 
 
68 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 Analysis confirmation of this general truth. Theology 
 of the 
 
 original has gained, and may gain immensely, by the 
 docu- 
 ments, process which has produced so vast a change in 
 
 all other branches of knowledge — the process of 
 diving below the surface and discovering the 
 original foundations. How much has been 
 effected for archaeology by the excavations of 
 Pompeii, of Nineveh, of Rome, of Troy, of My- 
 cenae ! How much for history, by the explora- 
 tion of the archives of Simancas, of the Register 
 House of Edinburgh ! How much for science, 
 by the crucible of chemistry, by the spade and 
 hatchet of the geologist, by the plummet of the 
 Ckalletigcr ! To this general law theology 
 furnishes no exception. Every deep religious 
 system has in it more than appeared at the 
 time to its votaries, far more than has appeared 
 in later times to its adversaries. Even in the 
 ancient religions of Greece and Rome, it is 
 surprising to observe how vast a power of 
 expansion and edification was latent in forms of 
 which the influence might long ago seem to 
 have died out. The glory of the Homeric 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 69 
 
 poems, the solemnity of Sophocles and yEschy- 
 lus, the beauty of the Apollo Belvidere, have, 
 as it were, risen from their graves after the lapse 
 of centuries, and occupy a larger space in the 
 modern mind than they have done at any time 
 since their first creation. Even in the case of 
 Mohammedanism the Koran has, within the last 
 century, been awakened from a slumber of ages, 
 and has been discovered to contain maxims 
 which Christendom might cultivate with advan- 
 tage, but which, in all the long centuries of 
 ignorance, were hopelessly forgotten both by 
 friends and foes. A great religion is not dead 
 because it is not immediately comprehended, 
 or because it is subsequently perverted, if only 
 its primitive elements contain, along with the 
 seeds of decay and transformation, the seeds 
 of living truth. Especially is this the case in 
 Christianity, which is not only (like Moham- 
 medanism) the religion of a sacred book, but 
 the religion of a sacred literature and a sacred 
 life. 
 
 Putting aside for the moment all question 
 
7o THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 of the divine authority of the Hebrew and 
 Christian Scriptures, and of the dogmatic sys- 
 tems built upon them, it is certain that their 
 original force and grace is far more keenly 
 appreciated now than it was when they were 
 overlaid with fanciful allegories and scholastic 
 perversions. The spirit of the time, the ' Zeit- 
 ' Geist,' as Matthew Arnold says, ' has turned the 
 ' rays of his lantern ' full upon them, and in 'the 
 ' fierce light ' that now beats upon their struc- 
 ture, if some parts have faded away, if the 
 relation of the several parts to each other has 
 been greatly altered, yet there can be no ques- 
 tion that by its influence, which has penetrated 
 more or less through all modern theology, the 
 meaning, and, with the meaning, the grandeur 
 and the beauty, of the Sacred Volume has been 
 brought out with a fulness which was unknown 
 to Hume and Voltaire, because it had been 
 equally unknown to Augustine and Aquinas. 
 Whole systems of false doctrine or false practice, 
 whole fabrics of barbarous phraseology, have re- 
 ceived their death-blow as the Ithuriel of modern 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 71 
 
 criticism has transfixed with his spear here a 
 spurious text, there an untenable interpretation, 
 here a wrong translation, there a mistaken 
 punctuation. 
 
 Or again, with regard to our increased 
 knowledge of the dates and authorship of par- 
 ticular books, much, no doubt, remains obscure ; 
 but this partial ignorance is as the fulness of 
 knowledge compared with the total blank which 
 prevailed in the Church for a thousand years or 
 more. All the instruction, inward and outward, 
 which we have acquired from our discovery of 
 the successive dates, and therewith of the suc- 
 cessive phases, of St. Paul's Epistles, was lost 
 almost until the beginning of this century, but 
 has now become the starting-point of fresh 
 inquiry and fresh delight in every historical or 
 theological treatise. The disentanglement of 
 the various authorship of the Psalter, the Penta- 
 teuch, and the Book of Isaiah from the artificial 
 monotony in which, regardless of times and cir- 
 cumstances, a blind tradition had involved them, 
 gives a significance to the several portions of 
 
72 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 the respective books which no one who has once 
 grasped it will ever willingly abandon. The 
 Parables, as has been of late well described, 
 have by their very nature an immortality of ap- 
 plication which could never have been perceived 
 had they been always, as they were in many in- 
 stances at the time of their first deliver)-, shut 
 up within the gross, carnal, matter-of-fact inter- 
 pretation of those who said, ' How can this man 
 ' give us his flesh to eat ? ' or ' It is because we 
 ' have taken no bread.' In short, when it was 
 perceived, in the noble language of Burke, 1 that 
 the Bible was not a dead code, or collection of 
 rigid dogmas, but ' an infinite variety of a most 
 ' venerable and most multifarious literature,' 
 from that moment it became as impossible in 
 the nature of things that the educated portion 
 of mankind should ever cease to take an interest 
 in the Old and New Testament, as it would be 
 that they should cease to take an interest in 
 Homer, or Shakspeare, or Dante, or Scott. The 
 Sacred Books, which were once regarded as the 
 
 1 Burke's Works, x. 21, Speech on Acts of Uniformity. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 73 
 
 stars were regarded by ancient astronomers, 
 spangles set in the sky, or floating masses of 
 nebulous light, or a galaxy of milky spots, 
 have now been resolved by the telescope of 
 scholarship into their component parts. Lord 
 Macaulay would not have denied that astro- 
 nomy has undergone a total revolution through 
 Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton — a revolution 
 which has immensely extended its grandeur 
 and its usefulness. Erasmus, Lowth, Herder, 
 and Ewald have effected for Biblical know- 
 ledge a revolution no less complete and no 
 less beneficent. There has been, as it were, a 
 triple chain of singular, one may almost say, 
 providential, coincidences. The same critical 
 investigation which has opened our eyes to the 
 beauty and the wisdom of the sacred records 
 has, by revealing to us the large infusion of the 
 poetic element, enabled us to distinguish be- 
 tween the temporary and the essential, between 
 the parabolical and the historical : and thus, at 
 the moment when science and ethnology are 
 pointing out difficulties, which on a literal and 
 
74 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 mechanical view of the Biblical records are 
 insuperable, a door of escape has been opened 
 by the disclosure of a higher aspect of the 
 Scriptures, which would be equally true and 
 valuable were there no scientific difficulty in 
 existence. Except in the lowest and most bar- 
 barous classes of society the invectives and the 
 scoffs of the last century have ceased. They 
 have been extinguished, not by the fires of the 
 Inquisition or the anathemas of Convocations or 
 General Assemblies, but by the steady growth 
 of the same reverential, rational appreciation of 
 the successive stages in the revelation of great 
 truths, as has shut the mouths of the defamers 
 of Milton and covered with shame the despisers 
 of Shakespeare. 
 
 III. Leaving the grounds of hope furnished 
 to us by the original documents of our faith, let 
 us turn to those which are supplied from the 
 study of its doctrines and institutions. And 
 here I will name two bridges, as it were, by 
 which the passage to a brighter prospect may 
 be effected. One is the increasing consciousness 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 75 
 
 of the importance of definition. It was said by a Increased 
 
 sense of 
 
 well-known Oxford theologian of the last gene- the im- 
 portance 
 
 ration that 'without definition controversy is of defini- 
 tion. 
 
 either hopeless or useless.' He has not, in his 
 subsequent career, applied this maxim, as we 
 might fairly have expected from his subtle intel- 
 lect, to the clearing away of obstructions and fri- 
 volities. But the maxim is true, not only in the 
 negative sense in which he pronounced it, but in 
 the more important sense of the pacifying and 
 enlightening tendency necessarily implied in all 
 attempts to arrive at the clear meaning of the 
 words employed. It was a sagacious remark 
 which I heard not long ago, from a Scottish 
 minister on the shores of Argyleshire, that 
 the vehemence of theological controversy has 
 been chiefly in proportion to the emptiness of the 
 phrases used. So long as an expression is 
 employed merely as a party watchword, with- 
 out inquiring what it means, it acts like a 
 magical spell : it excites a senseless enthusiasm ; 
 it spreads like an infectious malady; it terrifies 
 the weak ; it acts as a stimulant to the vacant 
 
7 6 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 brain. But the moment that we attempt to trace 
 its origin, to discover in what other words it can 
 be expressed, the enthusiasm cools, the panic 
 subsides, the contagion ceases to be catching, 
 the dram ceases to intoxicate, the cloud dis- 
 perses, and the clear sky appears. This preg- 
 nant reflection might be aptly illustrated by 
 examples in the history of the Scottish churches. 
 But I will confine myself to two instances drawn 
 from other countries. One is that of which 
 I have before spoken, the doctrine of the 
 Double Procession, which was sufficient to tear 
 asunder the Eastern and Western Churches ; 
 to give the chief practical occasion for the 
 terrible anathemas of the Athanasian Creed ; 
 to precipitate the fall of the Empire of Con- 
 stantinople ; and therefore to sow the original 
 seed of the present formidable Eastern Ques- 
 tion. This controversy has in later days, with 
 very few exceptions, fallen into entire obscu- 
 rity. But in those cases where it has occu- 
 pied the attention of modern theologians, its 
 sting has been taken out by the process, simple 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 77 
 
 as it would seem, but to which resort had 
 never been had before, of inducing the comba- 
 tants to express their conflicting opinions by- 
 other phrases than those which had been the 
 basis of the original antagonism. This, and 
 this only, is the permanent interest which at- 
 tached to a recent Conference at Bonn, between 
 certain theologians of the Greek, Latin, and 
 English churches. What was then done with 
 much satisfaction, at least to those who were 
 immediately concerned, might be applied with 
 still more advantage to many other like phrases 
 which have acted as mischievous a part in the 
 disintegration and disunion of Christendom. 
 Another instance shall be given from a church 
 nearer home. In the Gorham controversy, 
 which in 1850 threatened to rend the Church of 
 England from its summit to its base, and which 
 produced the widest theological panic of any 
 within our time, the whole question hinged on 
 the word ' regeneration ; ' and yet, as Bishop 
 Thirlwall showed in one of those Charges which 
 I would recommend to all theological students, 
 
78 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 of whatever church, who wish to see the value 
 of severe discrimination and judicial serenity on 
 the successive controversies of our time, it never 
 occurred to the disputants that there was an 
 ambiguity in the word itself — it never occurred 
 to them to define or explain what either of 
 them intended to express by it. 1 What is there 
 said with withering irony concerning the word 
 ' regeneration ' is true of the larger number of 
 theological phrases by which truth has been 
 veiled and charity stifled. Differences and 
 difficulties will remain. But the clamour, the 
 turmoil, the fierceness of the fight is concern- 
 ing words, is what the Apostle denounced as 
 ' a battle of words.' 2 Explain these — define 
 these — the party collapses, the bitterness ex- 
 hales, the fear is cast out. 
 
 Another ground of hope is the growing 
 sense of the doctrine of proportion. It is a 
 doctrine which has dawned slowly and pain- 
 fully on the theological mind of Christendom. 
 
 1 Bishop Thirlwall's Charges^ i. 156. 
 
 2 I Tim. vi. 4. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 79 
 
 ' In God's matters,' said Samuel Rutherford, Increased 
 
 sense of 
 
 ' there is not, as in grammar, the positive and the doc- 
 trine of 
 
 ' comparative degrees ; there is not a true, a Propor- 
 
 tion. 
 
 ' more true, and a most true. ' Every pin of the 
 ' tabernacle,' said Ebenezer Erskine, in his amaze- 
 ment at the indifference which Whitfield dis- 
 played towards the Solemn League and Cove- 
 nant, ' is precious.' 1 What Rutherford and 
 Erskine thus tersely and quaintly expressed is 
 but the assumption on which has rested the 
 vast basis of the Rabbinical theology of Juda- 
 ism, and the Scholastic Theology, whether of 
 Catholic or Protestant Churches. But to the 
 better spirits of Christendom there has now pene- 
 trated the conviction that these maxims are not 
 only not sound, but are unsound to the very core. 
 ' There is a true, a more true, and a most true.' 
 ' Every pin of the tabernacle is not equally 
 ' precious.' Richard Hooker and Richard Bax 
 ter had already begun to perceive that religion 
 was no exception to the truth, expressed by a 
 yet greater genius than either, in the magni- 
 
 1 Lectures on the Church of Scotland, p. 78. 
 
8o THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 ficent lines of ' Troilus and Cressida,' which 
 tells us how essential it is in all things to 
 
 Observe degree, priority, and place, 
 Insistence, course, proportion, season, form, 
 Office, and custom, in all line of order. 
 
 This, if not the ultimate, at any rate is the 
 proximate solution of some of the difficulties 
 w hich have threatened, or which still threaten, 
 the peace of Churches and the growth of Re- 
 ligion. 
 
 Question Take the vexed question of Church govern- 
 
 of Church 
 
 govern- ment. The main source of the gall which once 
 ment. 
 
 poisoned, and still in some measure poisons, the 
 relations between Episcopal and Presbyterian 
 Churches, was not the position that one or other 
 form was to be found in the Bible or in anti- 
 quity, or was more conformable to common- 
 sense and order. These are comparatively in- 
 nocent and unexciting propositions. The dis- 
 tracting thought lay in the conviction that one 
 or other was absolutely perfect, and was alone 
 essential to the Christian religion. It is for the 
 rectification of this misplaced exclusiveness that 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 8 
 
 we owe a deep debt of gratitude to such men as 
 Hooker in England, and Leighton in Scotland. 
 There is much to be said for Presbyterianism ; 
 there is much to be said for Episcopacy. But 
 there is much more to be said for the secondary, 
 temporary, accidental character of both, when 
 compared with the general principles to which 
 they each minister ; and in the light of these 
 principles we shall view more justly and calmly 
 the real merits and demerits both of bishops 
 and of presbyters, than is possible for those 
 who, like your Scottish or my English ancestors, 
 upheld the constitution of either Church as in 
 all times and under all circumstances irrevocably 
 indispensable. What is true with regard to 
 those two leading distinctions is still more ap- 
 plicable to all debates on Patronage, Ecclesias- 
 tical Courts, Vestments, Postures. There is a 
 difference, there is, if we choose so to express 
 it, a right and a wrong, in each case. The 
 appointment by a multitude may be preferable 
 to the appointment by a single individual ; the 
 appointment by a responsible layman may be 
 G 
 
82 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 preferable to the appointment by a synod ; a 
 black gown may, in certain circumstances, be 
 superior to a white one, or a white one to a red 
 one. But far more important than any of these 
 positions is the persuasion that, at most, all of 
 these things, the nomination, the jurisdiction, 
 the dress, the attitude of ministers, are but 
 means towards an end — very distant means 
 towards a very distant end. And in measure 
 as we appreciate this due subordination, scan- 
 dals will diminish, and the Church of the future 
 will leap forward on its course, bounding like a 
 ship that has thrown over its super-charge of 
 cargo, or quelled an intestine mutiny. 
 Question Or take a yet graver question — the mode 
 evidence of regarding those physical wonders which are 
 racks. called miracles. There is no doubt an increas- 
 ing difficulty on this subject — a difficulty en- 
 hanced by the incredulity which now besets the 
 educated sections of mankind, and by the cre- 
 dulity which has taken hold with a fresh tenacity 
 on the half-educated. It is a question on which 
 neither science nor religion, I venture to think, 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 83 
 
 has yet spoken the last word. It is a complex 
 problem, imperatively demanding that careful 
 definition of which I spoke before, and the calm 
 survey of the extraordinary incidents not only 
 of Biblical but of ecclesiastical history, whether 
 Catholic or Protestant. On the true aspects of 
 such physical portents as have been connected 
 with the history of religion, there is much to 
 be argued. But on these arguments I do not 
 enter. The point on which I would desire to 
 fix your attention is this : that whatever view 
 we take of these 'signs and wonders,' their 
 relative proportion as grounds of evidence has 
 altogether changed. There is a well known say- 
 ing, like other proverbial maxims 1 of Christian 
 life, erroneously ascribed to St. Augustine — 'We 
 ' believe the miracles for the sake of the Gospels, 
 
 1 It fell to my lot two years ago to track out the story of 
 another famous axiom, which was really due to Rupertus Mel- 
 denius, an obscure German divine of the 17th century, but 
 in like manner, falsely ascribed to Augustine ; ' In necessariis 
 unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas.' See 'Address 
 on Richard Baxter,' in Macmillan's Magazine, July, 1876. 
 The saying concerning miracles is sometimes quoted as Augus- 
 tine's, but on inquiry I find that there is no ground for ascrib- 
 ing it to him. The nearest approach to it is the passage from 
 g 2 
 
84 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 ' not the Gospels for the sake of the miracles.' 
 Fill your minds with this principle, view it in 
 all its consequences, observe how many maxims 
 both of the Bible and of philosophy conform 
 to it, and you will find yourselves in a position 
 which will enable you to treat with equanimity 
 half the perplexities of this subject. However 
 valuable the record of extraordinary manifes- 
 tations may be in other respects, however im- 
 pressively they may be used to convey the 
 truths of which they are confessedly but the 
 
 the treatise Dc Vnitate Ecclesia, c. 19, to which Archbishop 
 Trench refers in his work on the Miracles. ' Quaecumque talia 
 [i.e. the Donatist Miracles] in Catholica [Ecclesia] hunt, ideo 
 sunt approbata, quia in Catholica hunt ; non ideo manifestatur 
 Catholica, quia hxc in ea fiunt.' This, however, is a very in- 
 adequate statement of the principle, if indeed it be not merely the 
 polemical and untenable assertion that miracles are vitiated by 
 heresy — the exact opposite of our Lord's words, Mark ix. 38. 
 
 The substance of the sentiment, however, has been repeatedly 
 expressed by writers, who, if less famous than Augustine, have 
 penetrated far more profoundly into the root of the question. Not 
 to mention Coleridge, Arnold, and Milman, it may suffice to quote 
 from the work of Archbishop Trench to which reference has just 
 been made. '"Miracles," says Fuller, "are the swaddling 
 clothes of the infant Church ; " and, we may add, not the gar- 
 ments of the full-grown.' (Trench on the Miracles, 51.) ' It 
 may be more truly said, that we believe the miracles for Christ's 
 sake, than Christ for the miracles' sake.' (Ibid. 103.) 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 85 
 
 symbols, they have, in the eyes of the very 
 men whom we most desire to convince, become 
 stumbling-blocks and not supports. External 
 evidence has with most reflecting minds re- 
 ceded to the background, internal evidence has 
 come to the front. Let us learn by experience 
 to use with moderation arguments which, at 
 least for the present, have lost their force. Let 
 us acknowledge that there are greater miracles, 
 more convincing miracles, than those which ap- 
 peal only to our sense of astonishment. ' The 
 ' greatest of miracles,' as a venerable statesman 
 has observed, is the character of Christ. The 
 world was converted, in the first instance, not by 
 appeals to physical, but to moral prodigies. Let 
 us recognise that the preternatural is not the 
 supernatural, and that, whether the preter- 
 natural is present or absent, the true super- 
 natural may and will remain unshaken. 
 
 IV. And what is the true supernatural ? The moral 
 What are those essentials in religion which have of Christi- 
 been the purifying salt of Christianity hitherto, a "' ty ' 
 and will be its illuminating light hereafter ; 
 
86 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 which, raising us above our natural state, point 
 to a destiny above this material world, this 
 commonplace existence ? The great advance 
 which, on the whole, theology has made in 
 these latter centuries, and which it may be 
 expected still more to make in the coming 
 centuries is this, that the essentially super- 
 natural elements of religion are recognised to 
 be those which are moral and spiritual. These 
 are its chief recommendations to the reason of 
 mankind. Without them, it would have long 
 ago perished. So far as it has lost sight of 
 these, it has dwindled and faded. With these, 
 it may overcome the world. Other 1 opportu- 
 nities will occur in which I shall hope to draw 
 out at length both the means by which these 
 spiritual elements of Christianity maybe carried 
 on from generation to generation, and also the 
 characteristics which distinguish them from like 
 elements in inferior religions. It is enough to 
 have indicated that in the supremacy of these, 
 
 1 In the two sermons preached in the College Church and 
 in the Parish Church of St. Andrew's on the following Sunday, 
 March 1 8. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY, 87 
 
 and in their supremacy alone, lies the hope of 
 the future. To love whatever is truly loveable, 
 to detest whatever is truly detestable, to believe 
 that the glory and divinity of goodness is in- 
 destructible, and that there has been, is, and 
 will be a constant enlargement and elevation 
 of our conceptions of it — this is a basis of 
 Religion, a starting-point which enables us, 
 not only to preserve the best parts of the 
 sacred records and of Christian worship and 
 practice, but to secure a guarantee at once for 
 the perpetuity and for the growth of Religion 
 itself. 
 
 Observe also that in proportion to our in- 
 sistence on the moral greatness of Christianity 
 as its chief evidence and chief essence, there 
 accrues an external weight of authority denied 
 to the lower and narrower, but granted to the 
 higher and wider, views of religion. When we 
 look over the long annals of ecclesiastical history, 
 we shall often find that it is not within the close 
 range of the so-called orthodox, but from the 
 outlying camp of the so-called heretic or infidel, 
 
88 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 that the champions of the true faith have come. 
 Not from the logic of Calvin, or the rhetoric of 
 Bossuet, but from the great scholars and philoso- 
 phers at the close of the last century and the be- 
 ginning of this, have been drawn the best por- 
 traitures of Christianity and its Founder. A 
 clearer glimpse into the nature of the Deity 
 was granted to Spinoza, 1 the excommunicated 
 Jew of Amsterdam, than to the combined forces 
 of Episcopacy and Presbytery in the Synod of 
 Dordrecht. When we cast our eyes over the 
 volumes which, perhaps, of all others, give us 
 at once the brightest prospect of the progress of 
 humanity, and the saddest retrospect of the 
 mistakes of theology — Mr. Lecky's Histories of 
 
 1 This statement would be justified by a comparison of the 
 best sayings of Spinoza with the best sayings of the Synod of 
 Dort. The former are still read with admiration and instruc- 
 tion, even by those who widely differ from Spinoza's general 
 teaching. The latter are but little known, even to those who 
 most firmly agree with the theories propounded by the Synod. 
 
 It may also be well to record, over against the anathemas 
 which have been levelled at his name, the epithet by which his 
 humbler acquaintances called him immediately after his death, 
 ' The blessed Spinoza,' and the description given of him by 
 Schleiermacher, ' He was a man full of religion and of the Holy 
 Ghost.' 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 89 
 
 ' European Morals' and of ' Rationalism' — when 
 we read there of the eradication of deeply rooted 
 beliefs which, under the guidance of ecclesias- 
 tics and ecclesiastical rulers, were supposed to 
 be essential to the existence of religion — witch- 
 craft, persecution, intolerance, prohibition of 
 commercial intercourse — if for one moment our 
 faith is staggered by seeing that these beneficent 
 changes were brought about by States in de- 
 fiance of Churches, by philosophers in defiance 
 of divines, it is revived when we perceive that 
 the end towards which those various agencies 
 worked is the same as that desired by the best 
 men in all the departments of human life ; that 
 what Mr. Lecky calls 'the secularisation of 
 ' politics ' is in fact the Christianisation of theo- 
 logy. That view of man, of the universe, and 
 of God which by a recent able writer is called 
 ' Natural Religion ' 1 is in fact Christianity in 
 its larger and wider aspect. The hope of 
 immortality, which beyond any other belief of 
 
 1 See a series of most instructive articles in Afacmillari s 
 Magazine, on 'Natural Religion,' between February, 1875, ar >d 
 April, 1877. 
 
9 o THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 man carries us out of the world of sense, was 
 eagerly defended by Voltaire and Rousseau, 
 no less than by Butler and Paley. The serious 
 view of duty, the admiration of the heroic and 
 the generous and the just, the belief in the 
 transcendent value of the spiritual and the 
 unseen, are cherished possessions of the philo- 
 sophers of our generation, no less than of the 
 missionaries and saints of the generation that 
 is past. The Goliath of the nineteenth century, 
 as was once well observed by a Professor 1 of 
 your own, is not on the opposite side of the 
 valley ; he is in our midst ; he is on our side : 
 he is not to be slain by sling and stone, but he 
 is — if we did but know it — our friend, our ally, 
 our champion. If there is a constantly increas- 
 ing tendency, as Mr. Lecky says, 2 ' to identify 
 the Bible and conscience,' this is in other words, 
 as he himself well states the case, a tendency 
 to place Christianity in a position ' in which we 
 ' have the strongest evidence of the triumph of 
 
 1 Professor Campbell. 
 
 2 History of Rationalism, i. 384, ii. 247, 385. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 'the conceptions of its Founder,' a position in 
 which by the nature of the case the doubters 
 will be constantly diminishing and the intelli- 
 gent believers constantly increasing. 
 
 It is indeed a hope not only for the solu- 
 tion, but for the pacific solution of our theolo- 
 gical problems, that in this, more than in any 
 previous age, in our country more than in most 
 countries, the critical and the conservative ele- 
 ments overlap, intertwine, and shade off" into 
 each other — 'Ionians and Dorians on both sides.' 
 The intelligent High Churchman, the moderate 
 Free Churchman, melts almost imperceptibly 
 into the inquiring scholar. The generous Puri- 
 tan or Nonconformist is more than one-third a 
 Latitudinarian, perhaps even half a Churchman. 
 Few philosophers have so entirely parted with 
 the natural feelings of the human heart, or the 
 natural aspirations of the human mind, as to be 
 indifferent to the sane or insane direction of so 
 mighty an instrument for good or evil as the 
 religious instinct of mankind. And thus the 
 basis of a reasonable theology, even if shaken 
 
92 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 for the moment by the frenzy of partisans, has 
 intrinsically become wider and more solid. 
 The lines drawn by sects and parties do not 
 correspond with the deeper lines of human 
 nature and of history. In ' a chart of religious 
 ' thought,' drawn out not long since by a dis- 
 tinguished theological statesman, there was 
 amongst the various schools enumerated, one 
 which was only noticed to be immediately dis- 
 missed. Yet this tendency of constant inquiry, 
 of indifference to the forms compared with the 
 substance of religion, is the very one which, 
 happily running across all the others, contains 
 within itself the backbone of Christian life, 
 the lamp of Christian thought. We often 
 hear of the reconciliation of theology and 
 science. The phrase is well intended, and has 
 been used as the title of an excellent book. 
 But it does not exactly describe the case. 
 What we need is the recognition that so far 
 as they meet, Theology and Science are one 
 and indivisible. Whatever enlarges our ideas 
 of nature enlarges our ideas of God. What- 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 93 
 
 ever gives us a deeper insight into the nature 
 of the Author of the universe gives us a deeper 
 insight into the secrets of the universe itself. 
 Whatever is bad theology is also bad science ; 
 whatever is good science is also good theology. 
 In like manner, we hear of the reconciliation 
 of religion and morality. The answer is the 
 same ; they are one and indivisible. What- 
 ever 'tends to elevate the intelligence, the 
 purity, the generosity of mankind, is high reli- 
 gion ; whatever debases the mind, or corrupts 
 the heart, or hardens the conscience, under what- 
 ever pretext, however specious, is low religion, 
 is infidelity of the worst sort. There are, ac- 
 cording to the old Greek proverb, many who 
 have borne the thyrsus, and yet not been 
 inspired prophets. There are many also who 
 have been inspired prophets without wearing 
 the prophetic mantle, or bearing the mystic 
 wand ; and these, whether statesmen, philo- 
 sophers, poets, have been amongst the friends, 
 conscious or unconscious, of the religion of the 
 future ; they are citizens, whether registered or 
 
94 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 unregistered, in the Jerusalem which is above, 
 and which is free. 
 Hopes of V. And now, with all this cloud of witnesses, 
 
 the Church 
 
 of Scot- what is our duty in this interval of waiting, of 
 
 land. 
 
 transition ? What is our duty ? and what is 
 yours, O students of St. Andrew's, O future 
 pastors of the famous Church of Scotland, O 
 rising generation of that strong Scottish nation 
 which in former times was the firmest bulwark 
 of a national, Protestant, reasonable Christi- 
 anity ? You, no doubt, in this secluded corner 
 of our island, feel the breath of the spirit of the 
 age. How are you to avoid being carried 
 about with every gust of its fitful doctrine ? 
 How are you to gather into your sails the 
 bounding breeze of its invincible strength ? 
 There is nothing to make you despair of your 
 Church. It may have to pass through many 
 transformations ; but a Church which has not 
 only stood the rude shocks of so many seces- 
 sions and disruptions, but continues to gather 
 into its ranks the most liberal tendencies of the 
 nation, is too great an institution to be sacri- 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 95 
 
 ficed to the exigencies of party, if only it be 
 true to that fine maxim of Archbishop Leigh- 
 ton's, of leaving to others ' to preach up the 
 times,' and claiming for itself 'to preach up 
 eternity.' The principle of a national Estab- 
 lishment, which Chalmers vindicated in the 
 interests of Christian philanthropy, has in these 
 latter days more and more commended itself 
 in the interests of Christian liberty. The en- 
 larging, elevating influence infused into a reli- 
 gious institution by its contact, however slight, 
 with so magnificent an ordinance as the British 
 commonwealth ; the value of resting a religious 
 union not on some special doctrine or institu- 
 tion, but on the highest welfare of the whole 
 community ; — these principles are not less, but 
 more appreciated now than they were in a less 
 civilised age. It is the growing conviction of all 
 thoughtful men that there is no ground in the 
 nature of things or in the precepts of the Chris- 
 tian religion for the sharp division which divines 
 used to draw between the spiritual and the 
 secular, for the curious fancy which represented 
 
9 6 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 all which belonged to ecclesiastical matters as 
 holy, all which belonged to the state as worldly. 
 In proportion as those larger and loftier hopes 
 of religion, of which I have been speaking, 
 penetrate into all the communions of this 
 country, the provincial and retrograde distinc- 
 tions which have been stereotyped amongst us 
 will fade away ; and the policy of wisely and 
 boldly improving our institutions, instead of 
 blindly destroying or blindly preserving them, 
 will regain the hold which as late as the first 
 half of this century it retained on the intelli- 
 gence and conscience of the nation. 
 
 There is perhaps a danger which threatens 
 the Church of Scotland, in common with all 
 the Churches of Christendom — the apprehen- 
 sion which we sometimes hear expressed, that 
 the more gifted and cultivated minds of the 
 coming generation shrink from the noble mis- 
 sion, because of the supposed restraints of the 
 clerical profession. Far more dismal than any 
 secession of Old Lights or New Lights would 
 be the secession of the vigorous intellects and 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 97 
 
 nobler natures which of old time made the 
 Scottish Church, though poor in wealth, rich 
 in the best gifts of God. But it is precisely 
 this tendency which it is in your own power 
 to cure or to prevent. The attractions of the 
 Christian ministry, the opportunities which it 
 offers of untried usefulness, are not less but 
 greater, in proportion as the questions of reli- 
 gion involve a larger and deeper sweep of ideas 
 than when they ran within the four corners of 
 the Confession of Faith. Nor is there any 
 reason in the constitution of your Church, or 
 in the prospects of your country, why that 
 Confession should be an obstacle to the ex- 
 panding forms of religious life amongst you. 
 I am not here to criticise or disparage a 
 venerable document, which, born under my 
 own roof at Westminster, alone of all such 
 confessions for a short time represented the 
 whole national faith of Great Britain. If it has 
 some defects or exaggerations, from which the 
 English Thirty-nine Articles are free, on the 
 other hand it has soared to higher heights and 
 H 
 
98 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 struck down to deeper depths. Each views 
 theology from a limited experience and 
 through the colour of the atmosphere, political, 
 philosophical and military, in which the framers 
 of each were moving. To compare the failings 
 and the excellences of the two Confessions, and 
 to illustrate from them the condition of our 
 respective Churches, would be, if this were the 
 time or place, a highly interesting and instructive 
 task. Still even the Confession of the West- 
 minster Assembly is not the essential,- is not 
 the best characteristic of the Church of Scot- 
 land, any more than the Thirty-nine Articles 
 are the essential or the best characteristic of 
 the Church of England. Nor are the present 
 forms of adhesion to it more sacred than the 
 ancient forms of adhesion to the English stan- 
 dards, which a few years ago, by the timely 
 intervention of the Imperial Legislature, were 
 largely modified, 1 and might at any moment, 
 without any loss to the Church or the State, be 
 altogether abolished. 
 
 1 See Essays on Church and State, 212. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 These, however, are merely passing and ex- 
 ternal difficulties, to be surmounted by patriotic 
 policy, by mutual forbearance, by courageous 
 perseverance. And neither for us nor for you 
 are any such restrictions worth a single gifted 
 intellect or a single devout life that they may 
 exclude. But neither in the retention nor in 
 the abolition of these local impediments is the 
 main interest of the ministry of the Church of 
 Scotland in the times that are coming. Con- 
 fession or no Confession, subscription or no 
 subscription, Established Church or Free or 
 United Presbyterian, there is other and worthier 
 work for you to accomplish. There are, on 
 the one hand, the moral evils which you 
 have to combat, the rough manners, the in- 
 temperate habits of large numbers of your 
 fellow-citizens. There are, on- the other hand, 
 the high and pure traditions of former times 
 which you have to maintain ; the appropria- 
 tion of whatever pastoral activity or keen 
 intellectual ardour may be seen in other com- 
 munions. There arc those words and works 
 
too THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 of greatness to which I referred in my earlier 
 address, and the actual examples which you 
 have or have had before you in your own 
 generation. In these there is more than enough 
 to occupy and exalt yourselves and others, 
 and to show that the Church of Scotland is 
 still able, and is still proud, to hold its head 
 among the Churches of Christendom. It is 
 for you to welcome with a just pride its 
 acknowledged glories. Place before yourselves 
 the noble thoughts which have been enkindled, 
 not by Germans, not by Anglicans, but by 
 your own pastors and teachers. Remember 
 how one 1 has taught you, in language never 
 surpassed, the connection of religion with 
 common life, and the claims of the one univer- 
 sal religion to acceptance by the very reason 
 of its universality ; how another 2 has shown 
 you the high value of theology, viewed in its 
 long historical aspect, and the yet higher 
 grandeur of religion ; how 3 another has taught 
 
 1 Principal Caird. 2 Principal Tulloch. 
 
 3 Salvation Here and Hereafter, by the Rev. John Service, 
 Minister of Inch. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 101 
 
 you that, however great is the Church militant 
 or the Church dogmatic, there is yet a greater 
 Church, the Church beneficent ; how one 1 has 
 endeavoured to represent to you the relation 
 of religion to culture, another 2 of religion to 
 philosophy, and 3 another of religion to ritual ; 
 how the still small whispers of spiritual life, 
 though no longer 4 heard from the farther shore 
 of the Tay or of the Clyde, still make them- 
 selves felt by those whose ears are attuned to 
 their heavenly harmonies ; how many an elo- 
 quent voice is yet heard from the pulpit of 
 ancient abbey or populous city or mountain 
 village; how inspiring is the example 5 of the 
 venerable teacher whom the Church of Scot- 
 land sent out to India some forty years ago, and 
 who still bears the greatest name of living Indian 
 missionaries ; how invigorating and stimulating 
 
 1 Principal Shairp. 
 
 2 Professor Knight. 
 
 3 Pastoral Counsels, by the late Rev. John Robertson ; Re- 
 forms in the Church of Scotland, by the late Robert Lee, D.D. 
 
 4 The late John McLeod Campbell, and the late Thomas 
 Erskine. 
 
 5 Rev. Alexander Duff, D.D. 
 
io2 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 is the memory of the foremost Scottish minister 
 of our age, 1 who, though gone, yet still seems 
 to live again amongst us in his own flesh and 
 blood, and whose commanding voice still ex- 
 horts us, as with his dying words, to be ' broad 
 ' with the breadth of the charity of Almighty 
 ' God, and narrow with the narrowness of His 
 ' righteousness.' I might enlarge the roll — I 
 might go back to the worthies of earlier days — 
 to Carstairs, 2 whose memory was recalled of 
 late by a descendant worthy of himself — to 
 the great literary leaders of the Church in the 
 last century — to Chalmers and Irving. In our 
 own time, I might speak of your most famous 
 living countryman, who, though winding up the 
 threads of his long and honourable life at Chel- 
 sea, has never disdained the traditions of the 
 Scottish Church and nation, still warms at the 
 recollection of his native Annandale, still is fired 
 with poetic ardour when he speaks of the glories 
 of St. Andrew's." 
 
 1 Life of Norman McLeod, by the Rev. Donald McLeod. 
 
 2 Life of Carstairs, by the Rev. Dr. Story. 
 
THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 103 
 
 But it is enough. There are words which 
 often come into my mind when I look at an as- 
 semblage like this — words spoken by a gifted 
 poet, endeared to some among us, and who 
 loved your country well — a cry, desponding 
 perhaps, yet also cheering, wrung from him by 
 the dislocations and confusions of his time, 
 which is also ours, when he looked out on the 
 contending forces of the age — 
 
 O that the armies indeed were arrayed ! O joy of the 
 onset ! 
 
 Sound, thou trumpet of God ; come forth, great cause, 
 to array us ; 
 
 King and Leader appear; thy soldiers sorrowing seek 
 thee. 1 
 
 We may already hear the distant notes of that 
 trumpet ; we may catch, however faintly, the 
 coming of that cause. The kings and leaders 
 surely will appear at last, if their soldiers will 
 but follow them on to victory. 
 
 It was once said in mournful complaint of 
 the highest ecclesiastic in Christendom, 'For the 
 ' sake of gaining to-day, he has thrown away to- 
 
 ' dough's Bothie, ix. 
 
04 THE HOPES OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 ' morrow for ever.' Be our policy the reverse of 
 this : be it ours to fasten our thoughts, not on 
 the passions and parties of the brief to-day, but 
 on the hopes of the long to-morrow. The day, 
 the year, may perchance belong to the destruc- 
 tives, the cynics, and the partisans. But the 
 morrow, the coming century, belongs to the ca- 
 tholic, comprehensive, discriminating, all-embra- 
 cing Christianity, which has the promise, not 
 perhaps of this present time, but of the times 
 which are yet to be. 
 
 O fortes, pejoraque passi 
 
 Mecum saepe viri — 
 
 Cras ingens iterabimus sequor. 
 
 Come, my friends — 
 Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with 
 me .... 
 
 Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 1 
 
 Tennyson's Ulysses. 
 
SERMON 
 
 PREACHED AT ST ANDREW'S 
 
 IN THE CHAPEL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE OF 
 ST SALVADOR AND ST LEONARD 
 
 On March 18, 1877 
 
 2 Kings ii. 13. 
 
 He took up the mantle of Elijah. 
 
 2 Timothy ii. 2. 
 
 And the things thou hast heard of me among many wit- 
 nesses,, the same commit to faithful men who shall be 
 able to teach others also. 
 
io7 
 
 SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL 
 LIFE. 
 
 How can we carry on to the future the electric 
 spark of moral, intellectual, and spiritual life, 
 which is the essence of true religion ? — how 
 shall Elisha catch the mantle of Elijah ? — what 
 shall be the succession by which the torch of 
 truth and power of goodness will be handed 
 on from generation to generation ? This is a 
 question which has received many answers. It 
 is a question which concerns us all. It is a 
 question not unsuited to a place like this, where 
 generation succeeds generation with so much 
 rapidity, and where the atmosphere breathes 
 a perpetual sense of coming and going, of 
 receiving, keeping and handing on in trust to 
 those who shall come after us. 
 
 I. There is first the succession — least im- Outward 
 portant, perhaps, of all, yet not to be altogether SUCLessl01 
 
o8 SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 despised — what may be called the outer or 
 mechanical succession, at which, in default of 
 things higher, men have often grasped. There 
 has been, for example, a succession of the relics 
 or the remains of those who have gone before us. 
 Thus it has happened that whole populations 
 sometimes migrated to hang round the shrine 
 of some famous saint, as at Hebron, where a 
 new town was gathered round the tombs of 
 the Jewish Patriarchs, or in England round 
 the supposed sepulchre of St. Alban, or where 
 as in Scotland a whole parish moved to the 
 gallows of Peden, or as in the churchyard of 
 St. Andrew's Cathedral a celebrated Highland 
 preacher — Duncan Mathieson — passed a whole 
 night on the grave of Samuel Rutherford to re- 
 kindle his spiritual ardour. The tomb of the 
 good Bishop Kennedy within these walls, the 
 scene of the first Protestant martyrdom in front 
 of this church, ought to give to the building a 
 savour of life and light. We all cling to the 
 graves of our dear departed. We know that the 
 inmost life of those who have gone before us is 
 
SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 109 
 
 not there, yet it is a near approach to what wc 
 knew of them on earth — ' Even in their ashes 
 ' live their wonted fires.' The bones of Elisha 
 still seem to be instinct with the immortality 
 of the prophet. Then, again, there have been 
 churches in which by these same inanimate 
 remains the ordinations of the teachers and 
 the pastors have been carried on. From Iona 
 the succession of Columba's clergy was believed 
 to have been continued by the transmission 
 of his dead bones. In Armenia the succes- 
 sion of the Patriarchs was and perhaps is still 
 conveyed by the skeleton hand of the first 
 missionary to Armenia. Or, again, sometimes it 
 has been by the clothes of the departed prede- 
 cessors, as though the figure of Elijah's mantle 
 has been transformed into a prosaic fact. Thus 
 the Jewish Pontificate in the last centuries of 
 its existence was perpetuated by the trans- 
 ference of the official dress from High Priest 
 to High Priest. Or, again, it has been by the 
 touch of the hands of Bishops or Presbyters, 
 as in the Episcopal cr Presbyterian Churches 
 
no SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 of Protestant Christendom ; or by the waving 
 of the hands, as in Roman Christendom ; or 
 by the breathing over the heads, as in the 
 Coptic Church. Or again, there have been the 
 edifices in which sacred or venerable institu- 
 tions have been enshrined, and which have 
 protected the institutions themselves from de- 
 struction, and moulded by a kind of external 
 pressure their original shape and tendency. 
 The palaces of the Legislature and the Ca- 
 thedrals in England, the Colleges in England 
 and Scotland, have each in their several ways 
 at once perpetuated and guided the move- 
 ments of the political, the religious, the acade- 
 mical life which has run its course within the 
 grooves laid down in the exterior form of 
 the several buildings. All these outer forms 
 have been used to maintain the identity of the 
 spiritual community with the past. But deeply 
 cherished as most of them are, no reflecting 
 person will deceive himself into believing that 
 they are the chief vehicles of moral grace. 
 They are its symbols, - they are its witnesses, 
 
SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE, in 
 
 they represent to us in external figures the 
 
 continuity of the Church or of the nation ; 
 
 but they are not the very grace itself. They 
 
 may all of them exist, and yet the true spiritual 
 
 unity may be altogether broken. No doubt, 
 
 Even the lifeless stone is dear 
 
 For thought of Him who once lay here. 
 
 But He himself has risen, and His presence 
 must be continued in nobler and more endur- 
 ing channels. 
 
 II. Let us go then a step farther. There is Thesuc- 
 
 • cession of 
 
 the succession of office. A man succeeds to office. 
 
 some post of high responsibility; he succeeds, 
 perhaps, by election or nomination, perhaps by 
 hereditary descent ; but the office, however con- 
 ferred, is itself an assistance towards continu- 
 ing the moral strength of former times. If we 
 feel ourselves seated in the same place, sur- 
 rounded by the very circumstances, filled by 
 the very associations, encompassed by the very 
 atmosphere, which inspired our forerunners in 
 earlier days, it is then no mere form or life- 
 less shape which stirs the mind. It is not 
 
ii2 SUCCESS/OX OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 necessary in these cases that the successor 
 should have been named or consecrated by the 
 predecessor, or that the successor should have 
 passed through precisely the same process in 
 arriving at his place, or that the locality in 
 which he exists should be the same. But the 
 sovereign who inherits the throne of forty 
 generations of princes, the prelate who fills the 
 same office that a hundred prelates have occu- 
 pied before him, the minister who bears on his 
 shoulders the same responsibilities that rested 
 on the shoulders of Walpole, or Pitt, or 
 Canning, or Peel ; the teacher who teaches 
 with the same authority as that which has 
 directed the studies of a school or university 
 for centuries, or who succeeds to the traditions 
 of a celebrated College or University, the 
 home and haunt of men famous in Church 
 and State ; the descendant of an ancient or 
 illustrious family who knows what a burden of 
 glory or of shame must have fallen upon him 
 — all these give a vitality, a courage, and a 
 wisdom to those who are in the midst of such 
 
SUCCESS/OX Of SPIRITUAL LIFE. 113 
 
 influences, and who thus, by the very labours 
 which they have to discharge, may become 
 insensibly transformed into a unity with their 
 high office, fortified by the weight of then- 
 duties, elevated by a sense of their vast inherit- 
 ance. This is a true succession of moral life 
 wherever it bears its proper fruits. The links 
 may sometimes be fragile, but the chain itself 
 is unbroken, and each particular link may take 
 its place as an indissoluble part of the whole. 
 There is a gtnius loci, a spirit of the race and 
 place which hangs about us and which subdues 
 us we know not how. There are trophies of 
 Miltiades in every battlefield of academic or 
 national struggles of which the sight or the re- 
 ~e~brir:e f:r ever :: —ever.: the y:_r_g 
 
 Themistccles from sleeping. In this way the 
 truth and the mere}- of God are handed on from 
 generation to generation. 
 
 IIL Yet stall even this identity- is not com- Swnsm 
 plete. The man may fall below his office, the rfldeas " 
 son may be unworthy of his father, the suc- 
 cessor may fail to appreciate the predecessor. 
 I 
 
ii4 SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 From the most venerable institution or locality 
 it may often be that the 'parting genius is 
 ' with sighing sent.' All these associations are 
 mighty steps towards our identification with 
 the good and great of former days, but they 
 do not constitute the identification itself. We 
 come, therefore, to the further and essential 
 question — What is it of which these outward 
 shapes and forms are symbols, what is it of 
 which the high offices and the ancient tradi- 
 tions of State, or Church, or College, are the 
 living frameworks ? It is the communication 
 of the like ideas, of the like qualities, of the 
 same graces ; it is the fact that the wise and 
 great and good of former times, as Nehemiah 
 prayed for himself, are ' remembered for good ' 
 — that is, commemorated, imitated, followed, 
 intellec- Let me first give a few instances of such 
 
 tual suc- 
 cession, direct succession in the intellectual world where, 
 
 perhaps, it can be more clearly, though not 
 more incontrovertibly, traced than in the moral 
 world. Look at the thinkers, the philoso- 
 phers, the theologians. What was said of the 
 
SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 115 
 
 spiritual connection between the first critical 
 student of the Hebrew Scriptures, Nicholas 
 Lira, and the great Reformer Luther has been 
 exemplified again and again — Si Lira 11011 can- 
 tasset, Lutherus non saltasset. ' If Lira had not 
 ' played, Luther had not danced.' It was the 
 echo of Augustine that in like manner awakened 
 Calvin ; it is the fire of Faraday that still burns 
 in Tyndall. Or, looking at the succession of 
 our poets, how often have they been the intel- 
 lectual parents of their successors ! Before 
 Cowley was twelve years old the great poem 
 of Spenser, 'The Fairy Queen,' he tells us, 
 ' filled his head with such chimes and verses as 
 ■ have never ceased ringing there.' The dead, 
 old, nameless author of the ballad of ' Chevy 
 ' Chase ' stirred the soul of Sir Philip Sydney, 
 ' as with the sound of a trumpet.' There is a 
 well-known story that when Walter Scott was 
 young, once — and once only — he met Robert 
 Burns. Burns was standing before a picture of 
 a soldier perishing in the winter, and under the 
 picture were written sympathetic lines, which 
 1 2 
 
n 6 SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 the gifted poet read aloud with such emotion 
 that the tears rolled down his cheeks ; and 
 when he finished he asked, ' Who can tell me 
 ' the author of these lines ? ' It was an obscure 
 English author, and the only person in the 
 company who knew was a little lame boy, who 
 whispered it to his neighbour. When Burns 
 saw at once the modesty and the intelligence 
 of the child he laid his hand on his head, and, 
 in his quaint, provincial phrase, said, ' You 
 ' will be a man before your mother.' 1 That 
 little lame boy was the greatest genius of the 
 Scottish nation. Who can say how much of 
 his inspiration may have been kindled by 
 that one electrifying contact with the kindred 
 fire of his glorious countryman ? Or take 
 another case. Cobbett, the homely but power- 
 ful orator, was eleven years old, a poor gar- 
 dener's lad, when he bought for threepence 
 Swift's 'Tale of a Tub.' On the shady side 
 of a haystack he sat down to read it. ' I 
 
 1 The incident is mentioned in Scott's autobiography 
 (Lockhart's Life), but without the precise words used by Burns. 
 These I heard some years ago at Fingask Castle. 
 
SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 117 
 
 ' read it,' he says, ' without any thought of 
 ' supper or bed. It produced what I have 
 '■ always considered a sort of birth of my in- 
 ' tellect.' That was a true affinity of mind 
 with mind. Surely we may each of us call to 
 mind some book which we have read, some lec- 
 ture which we have heard, which has left upon 
 our minds the indelible impression which 
 opened a door which has never been closed, 
 which gave us a stimulus which we have never 
 lost. Cherish all such remembrances. They 
 are the signs to us that the crumbs of the bread 
 of life have fallen upon us. They are land- 
 marks in our upward journey over the Hill of 
 Difficulty towards the House Beautiful. 
 
 But if this be so with the gifts of intellect, Moral sue 
 
 cession. 
 
 how much more may it be with the far more 
 universal, far more accessible, far more commu- 
 nicable gifts of the moral being. On Shake- 
 speare or on Plato an ordinary man may gaze 
 with awe, yet often not be raised one inch nearer 
 the stupendous genius which he admires. But 
 when we see the moral heroes, the saints, the 
 
n8 SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 martyrs, the generous, the humane, the self- 
 denying, the gentle, and the just, the attraction 
 is more than this. It is almost impossible even 
 to look at them steadily without deriving some 
 strength, some encouragement, some rebuke, 
 some elevation from their very presence. To 
 remember them at all is to remember them for 
 good. It was in good, in being good, and in 
 doing good that their chief energy, their chief 
 existence was spent on earth ; and it is therefore 
 in good, in being good, and in doing good that 
 the chief continuance of their presence is carried 
 on still. ' Shall not we follow ? ' was the excla- 
 mation of Augustine as he read an account of 
 the early martyrs. It is almost the inevitable 
 exclamation of every human being whose soul 
 has any spiritual life within it when he thinks of 
 the good or great that by seeing or by report he 
 has ever encountered. It was the mere sight of 
 the apostolic face of John Wesley that awakened 
 in the philanthropic Howard the burning desire 
 to reform the prisons of Europe. It is recorded 
 of an English statesman of the last century, 
 
SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 119 
 
 Lord Shelburne, how deep an impression was 
 made upon him by his visit to the gifted and 
 saintly Frenchman Malesherbes. ' I have seen, 
 he said, ' what I had previously considered could 
 not possibly exist, a man absolutely free from 
 fear and hope alike, yet full of life and warmth. 
 Nothing in the world can disturb his repose. 
 He lacks nothing himself, but he interests himself 
 actively in everything good. I have never been 
 so profoundly struck by anything in the course 
 of my travels ; and I feel sure that if ever I ac- 
 complish anything great in what remains of my 
 life, I shall do so encouraged by my recollection 
 of Mons. de Malesherbes.' And even without 
 seeing good men or knowing them personally, 
 the mere thinking or reading of them is suffi- 
 cient to fill the heart. When the missionary 
 Henry Martyn went to India, the study in which 
 he found most profit during his long voyage 
 was the lives of the ancient saints. ' I love,' 
 he says, ' to converse, as it were, with those holy 
 bishops and martyrs with whom, I hope, through 
 grace, to spend a happy eternity. The example 
 
120 SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 of the Christian saints in the early ages has 
 been a source of sweet reflection to me. No 
 uninspired sentence has affected me so much as 
 that of the historians of those times — that to 
 believe, to suffer, and to love, was the primitive 
 taste.' We may follow such characters perhaps 
 at a great distance, as at a great distance Elisha 
 followed Elijah to the end. Our career or cir- 
 cumstances may be quite different from others, 
 as the career of the quiet, mild, beneficent 
 Elisha was different from the wandering, fierce, 
 heroic Elijah ; but still we can follow, still it is 
 possible that the spirit of Elijah may rest upon 
 Elisha. That practice, which was adopted by 
 a good man of the last generation, may be 
 imitated by all of us. Whenever he conferred 
 a benefit on anyone he charged the recipient of 
 his kindness to regard it as a loan, which he 
 was to repay by doing a like kindness to some 
 one else, which is a true keeping and putting 
 out to usury the trust committed to us. That 
 is the true communication of apostolic gifts. 
 Yet more, the good thoughts, the good 
 
SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 121 
 
 deeds, the good memories of those who have 
 been the salt and the light of the earth do not 
 perish with their departure — they live on still ; 
 and those who have wrought them live in them. 
 The weary traveller in the south of Spain, who, 
 after passing many an arid plain and many a 
 bare hill, finds himself at nightfall under the 
 heights of Granada, will hear plashing and rip- 
 pling under the shade of the spreading trees and 
 along the side of the dusty road the grateful 
 murmur of running waters, of streamlets whose 
 sweet music mingles with his dreams as he 
 sleeps, and meets his ear as the first pleasant 
 voice in the stillness of the early dawn. What 
 is it ? It is the sound of the irrigating rivulets 
 called into existence by the Moorish occupants 
 of Granada five centuries ago, which amidst all 
 the changes of race and religion have never 
 ceased to flow. Their empire has fallen, their 
 creed has been suppressed by fire and sword, 
 their nation has been driven from the shores of 
 Spain, and their palaces crumble into ruins ; 
 but this trace of their beneficent civilisation still 
 
122 SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 continues, and in this continuity that which was 
 good and wise and generous in that gifted but 
 unhappy race still lives on to cheer and to 
 refresh their enemies and their conquerors. Even 
 so it is with the good deeds of those who have 
 gone before us. Whatever there has been of 
 grateful consideration, of kindly hospitality,of far- 
 reaching generosity, of gracious charity, of high- 
 minded justice, of unselfish devotion, of saintly 
 devotion, these still feed the stream of moral 
 fertilisation, which will run on when their place 
 knows them no more, when even their names 
 have perished. In a place of education, where 
 the social atmosphere is composed, so to speak, 
 of so many convergent traditions and influ- 
 ences from various quarters, how much, how 
 very much may be effected by the presence 
 of a single strong, pure, high-minded, and 
 energetic character ? How surely a young man 
 who knows and does what is right will compel 
 others almost against their will, and almost 
 without his consciousness, to know and to do it 
 also. The persons disappear, but the good tra- 
 
SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 123 
 
 dition remains, their good works do follow them, 
 either their own good words and works which 
 outlive themselves, or those which they have 
 inspired in their successors and survivors. The 
 visions of a noble character, the glimpse of a 
 new kind of virtue does not perish. A thing of 
 goodness, like a thing of beauty, ' is a joy for 
 ' ever.' To admire what is admirable, to adore 
 what is adorable, to follow what is noble, to 
 remember any such examples that have crossed 
 our earthly pilgrimage, that have brightened 
 its darkness and cheered its dulness — this keeps 
 alive before us the ideal of human nature and 
 the essence of the Divine nature. The per- 
 petuation of these graces is the true apostolic 
 succession, is the true identity of the life of man 
 and God, is the true continuity of the Christian 
 Church, is the true communion of saints. 
 
SERMON 
 
 PREACHED IN THE TOWN CHURCH OF ST ANDREW'S 
 On March 18, 1877 
 
 Job xxviii. 7, 8 
 
 There is a path . . . which the vulture's eye hath not 
 seen 
 
 The lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion 
 passed by it 
 
£27 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 There are occasions when it is well to look 
 beyond the things which, being seen, are tem- 
 poral, to the things which, not being seen, are 
 eternal ; when, as in the language of the Psalm- 
 ist, we ask to ' hide ourselves in the tabernacle,' 
 to be ' set upon a rock that is higher than we 
 from the strife of tongues,' or when, as in the 
 words of the Book of Job, we seek for a path 
 which hath not been seen by the keen eye of 
 the vulture of controversy, nor trodden down 
 by the lion's whelp of fierce partisanship. 
 
 There is a vast and complex structure of The 
 
 spiritual 
 
 doctrines and institutions which have been the principles 
 
 of Chris- 
 product of Christendom, or which have been tianity. 
 
 absorbed into Christendom ; there is a vast 
 
 collection of facts which lie at the root of 
 
 Christianity, or which have sprung up all along 
 
128 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 its course. To examine them in detail, to 
 compare doctrine with doctrine, and institution 
 with institution, and fact with fact, would be a 
 very interesting and instructive task, and would 
 perhaps lead to the same result as that at which 
 we are endeavouring to arrive. But what I 
 now propose is something different. We would 
 endeavour to penetrate, if possible, behind the 
 outward doctrines, ordinances, behind the long 
 history of Christendom, and to ask what are 
 the inward principles which give them perma- 
 nent value ; what are the essential supernatural 
 elements of Christianity which are above the 
 assaults of criticism, above the turmoil of the 
 world, because above the level of our ordinary 
 carnal, earthly nature. If we can arrive, in 
 ever so rough and imperfect a measure, at 
 those fundamental principles, we shall be in a 
 better position to understand what it is that 
 gives a peculiar glory to our common faith. 
 
 We will attempt, then, to answer this ques- 
 tion as briefly and as plainly as we can. Let 
 us only observe, before entering on the question, 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 129 
 
 that there are many principles in Christianity 
 which it shares with other religions, and which, 
 therefore, we cannot truly enumerate among 
 its direct results. The Unity of God, for 
 example, which is one of the most important 
 of all religious truths, was known to the Jewish 
 people long before the Christian era. It then 
 assumed a new force and life, but it was from 
 Abraham, or, at least, from Moses, that we first 
 received it. Again, the immortality of the soul 
 is a truth which the Psalmists in their highest 
 moods had reached, which the Egyptian Priests 
 and the Grecian Philosophers had accepted. 
 He who was the Light of the World turned, 
 indeed, the full rays of His lamp upon it, and 
 revealed, as we shall see, its inner meaning ; 
 but the truth had already entered into the heart 
 of man, and He illuminated and explained, 
 rather than expressly discovered it. 
 
 But there are some principles which were 
 so little known, or which existed in such feeble 
 rudiments, before Christianity, that practically 
 they were not known at all. Let us, in plain 
 K 
 
130 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 words, try to state what they are. Some of 
 them, through the influence of Christianity, 
 have become so familiar to us that we shall, 
 perhaps, be startled to hear them named as 
 amongst its peculiar products. Some are even 
 now so strange, so little recognised, that it may 
 be almost difficult for us to acknowledge that 
 they are Christian at all. 
 The I. There is the principle of the universal 
 
 character benevolence of the Supreme Ruler of the uni- 
 verse, which is expressed in the words ' Father,' 
 ' Our Father,' the belief that the relation of 
 the Supreme Mind to man is that of a father. 
 No doubt the word in relation to the Deity 
 was known before, both in Jewish and heathen 
 times ; but it was not manifest — it was not 
 brought to the front of religion as it was by 
 Christianity. In the Old Testament it is 
 used at most six times ; but in the New 
 Testament it is used as often as three hun- 
 dred times. It is the mode in which the 
 Supreme Ruler is almost uniformly addressed 
 throughout the Gospels. It is the name by 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 131 
 
 which He is called in the one form of devo- 
 tion furnished in the New Testament — the 
 Lord's Prayer, or, as it is called in Latin, the 
 Pater Nostcr. It expresses the belief that, as 
 in the case of a father and his children, so 
 in the Divine government of the world there 
 is much which we cannot understand. In this 
 obscurity we must humbly acquiesce. It ex- 
 presses also that the main direction and pur- 
 pose of this government is for our good. In 
 this hope is our consolation. 
 
 II. It is a corresponding truth that there The uni- 
 , . , _ . , versality < 
 
 is not only a universal Deity, but a common Religion, 
 humanity ; in other words, there is something 
 in every race of men which attracts the Divine 
 good-will towards them. In the old heathen 
 religions each country had its own deity, each 
 deity had its own country — gods of Troy, gods 
 of Greece, gods of Rome ; and in the Jewish 
 religion, God for a long time and in many 
 aspects was regarded only as the God of the 
 people of Israel. But with Christianity all 
 this was changed. The truth of the univer- 
 k 2 
 
132 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 sality of God's care for man, and of the uni- 
 versality of a capacity for true religion in 
 man, was known in some degree to some of 
 the Jewish prophets ; and it was expressed in 
 one striking sentence by Alexander the Great, 
 when he said, ' God is the common father 
 'of all men, especially of the best men.' 
 But it was only placed in the forefront of 
 religious doctrine when Christianity was re- 
 vealed. Read the description of the judg- 
 ment in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew, 
 and also the second chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Romans. Read the twice, thrice repeated funda- 
 mental truth — the dogma, if we choose to call it 
 so — pervading the whole of the New Testament, 
 ' Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, 
 4 but he that doeth the will of my Father ' — 
 and 'In every nation 'he that feareth God and 
 ' doeth righteousness is accepted of God,' — and 
 ' He that doeth righteousness is righteous.' It 
 was the principle not of absolute equality or 
 uniformity amongst the various races and cha- 
 racters of men, but of the equality of the 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 133 
 
 Divine regard to human virtue in all these 
 various characters and races. The supreme ob- 
 ject of our worship was henceforth known as 
 the God, not of Judaism only, not of Christianity 
 only, but of all good men, and, as far as there 
 is any goodness in them, of all men through- 
 out the world. 
 
 III. Running parallel with this is the prin- Identi- 
 fication c 
 
 ciple that in the Christian dispensation morality Religion 
 
 and Mo- 
 is religion and religion morality, or (if we prefer rality. 
 
 so to express it) that religion is the sanctifica- 
 tion of morality, and morality is the action of 
 religion. This had no doubt been foreshadowed 
 by the warnings of the Jewish prophets, and 
 by the aspirations of Grecian philosophers and 
 poets, but it was through the teaching of Chris- 
 tianity that it first assumed paramount import- 
 ance. However much in the various churches 
 correct opinion, or correct ceremonial, or deco- 
 ration of churches, or veneration of priesthoods, 
 or ecclesiastical independence, have taken the 
 place of morality, and however enormous the 
 crimes which have been perpetrated in the name 
 
134 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 of religion, still the better and wiser spirits in 
 every age of Christendom have recognised the 
 fact that the original principles of our faith 
 teach exactly the reverse. Read the descrip- 
 tion in the Beatitudes of those that are truly 
 happy. Read the Two great commandments, 
 in which our Founder said that the whole of 
 His religion consisted. Read the thirteenth 
 chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, 
 in which St. Paul declared that, compared with 
 Charity or Philanthropy, all perceptions of theo- 
 retical truth, all manifestations of devotional 
 zeal, are as nothing. We thus see how in each 
 of these original conceptions of Christianity, the 
 moral elements of religion outweigh all others. 
 We sometimes hear it said, that in this or 
 that school, or in this or that system, morality 
 may be taught, but not religion ; or that un- 
 less religion is taught, it is useless to teach 
 morality. There are, no doubt, elements in 
 religion that are not necessarily contained in 
 morality. But in the highest point of view 
 the distinction fades away as we touch it. In 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 135 
 
 Paganism this might have been so. But in 
 Christianity, morality is itself the innermost 
 part of religion, is its very Holy of Holies. 
 
 IV. It is the goodness thus made most The moral 
 
 character 
 
 essential in the religious man, and in man of the 
 
 Divinity. 
 
 altogether, which gives us the best conception 
 of God. This principle no doubt existed in 
 some degree in heathen religion, and to a large 
 degree in the Jewish. But in the religion of 
 Greece and Rome the perception of the moral 
 perfection of the Divinity was liable to constant 
 obscuration. The Homeric gods, as a general 
 rule, were not better, but worse, than the Ho- 
 meric heroes. The description of the Eternal 
 in the Old Testament, again, was often too far 
 removed from human thought to be represented 
 to us in the form of human goodness. But the 
 Christian idea of God was nothing else than 
 the perfection of virtue and wisdom. There 
 are not many definitions of the Supreme Being 
 in the New Testament, but they are mostly 
 of this kind, 'God is love; God is light ;' and 
 when to this we add that the Founder of our 
 
36 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 The 
 special 
 virtues of 
 Chris- 
 tianity, 
 Charity, 
 Furity, 
 Truthful- 
 ness, 
 
 Humility. 
 
 religion is set before us, not only as an ex- 
 ample of humanity, but as the representation 
 and personification of Divinity, this truth con- 
 cerning the moral nature of the Divine essence 
 attains a vividness and power which has never 
 been reached in any other faith. In all the 
 various theories concerning the nature of Christ, 
 if not equally, at any rate in a predominant 
 and impressive form, the chief aspect in which 
 He is set before us is as a mirror in which 
 we see the perfection of the Deity. The more 
 human the representation of His virtues, the 
 more we feel the divine character of the 
 mission entrusted to Him. The more attractive 
 and persuasive to all our moral convictions, so 
 much the more we feel that He has disclosed to 
 us the secret of the Invisible and Eternal mind. 
 
 V. But it is not enough that there should 
 be this general identification of morality with 
 religion, or this identification of perfect human 
 goodness with the Divine nature. We have to 
 ask what are the special points of goodness on 
 which Christianity lays the chief stress. The 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 137 
 
 chief virtues of Greek morality were fortitude, 
 wisdom, self-control, and justice ; of the an- 
 cient Roman religion, patriotism, and imperial 
 courage ; of the Hebrew religion, resignation, 
 reverence, and faith. All these several virtues 
 have their places in Christianity ; but there are 
 other moral gifts which shine with the most 
 transcendent glory in the New Testament. The 
 main characteristics of the Founder of our reli- 
 gion and of His disciples are kindness, universal 
 kindness and beneficence, to which is given the 
 new name of grace, love, or charity : purity 
 in word and deed, to which is given the new 
 name of holiness, or consecration to God ; 
 absolute sincerity, of which the very word Truth 
 became a synonym of the Founder's life — ■ 
 humility and lowliness for which neither Greek 
 nor Latin had any adequate expression — these 
 were the principles which, in the Epistles, were 
 deemed to be essentially Christian, and which 
 in the Gospels were called divine. 
 
 VI. There is the method by which these self- 
 qualities, whether in God or man, were to be Saaif 
 
38 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 propagated and extended in the world. One 
 is the process which regards the individual him- 
 self — it is self-abnegation ; that is, the constant 
 sacrifice of the lower part of his nature to the 
 highest and best. In every one of us there is 
 this higher and this lower nature. It is for the 
 disciples of our Master to endeavour to find 
 out, what is the better part, what is the one 
 thing needful, and to be assured that for this 
 a transformation, a transfiguration, a regene- 
 ration, of the soul is necessary. It is, in other 
 words, the constant renunciation of that which 
 is behind, the perpetual reaching forward to 
 that which is before, the noble ambition 
 which is satisfied with nothing less than the 
 highest ideal. This sense of the need of an 
 endless moral renovation and progress, this dis- 
 satisfaction with the littleness and meanness of 
 things earthly and commonplace, and striving 
 after things above us — this is what is called 
 in the New Testament by many names, all 
 meaning the same thing : ' Conversion,' ' Re- 
 ' pentance,' ' the Second Birth,' ' the Cross,' 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 139 
 
 ' the Grave,' ' the Resurrection,' ' the New Life,' 
 a ' Spiritual Mind.' Of this heathen moralists 
 speak but little ; even the Jewish psalmists and 
 prophets only in their loftiest flights. But of 
 this the New Testament is full. It is the for- 
 giveness of sins, of which the most consummate 
 picture is given in the story of the Prodigal 
 Son. It is described with a peculiar metaphor 
 in the Epistles by the word ' edification,' which 
 means the building up of one storey above an- 
 other in the moral fabric of the soul. It is the 
 imagery of the new heaven and the new earth 
 which fills the visions of the Apocalypse. 
 
 VII. This leads us to the mode of looking There- 
 at our fellow men, and the judgment we are superficial 
 to pronounce upon them. It may be called l^nts. 
 the method, the judgment of surprises. The 
 principle of the New Testament is that the 
 characters of those of whom we should least 
 expect a great future are those in whom we 
 shall sometimes most surely find it. The 
 irregular and despised publican often comes 
 before the correct Pharisee, the generous pro- 
 
140 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 digal before the complacent elder brother, the 
 repentant Magdalene before the supercilious 
 host, the outcast heathen and heretical Samari- 
 tan before the orthodox Jew — the first last and 
 the last first. On this widely ramifying expe- 
 rience, which cuts across the grain of so many 
 commonplace prejudices, both of the ancient 
 and modern world, is built up the whole idea of 
 the Friend of sinners, the Shepherd of the lost 
 sheep, the Leader of the Christian chivalry, the 
 champion of the weak, the defender of the 
 oppressed, the refuge of the helpless. In it is 
 contained, so to speak, the romance, the poetry 
 of the Gospel. This it is which makes it 
 especially a Gospel to the poor even more than 
 the rich, the Gospel to the Gentile even more 
 than to the Jew, the Gospel to little children 
 even more than to theologians, the Gospel, 
 one may sometimes say, to the heathen and 
 misbeliever even more than to the Christian. 
 This is not the way of other religions ; this 
 has often not been the way of the Christian 
 religion ; but it was in the beginning, and may 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 141 
 
 yet, in the end, be the way of the religion of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 VIII. This leads us to yet another kindred The iden- 
 tification 
 
 principle. It is that which is held" with such of things 
 
 secular 
 
 tenacity by a gifted person lately withdrawn and things 
 
 sacred. 
 
 from amongst us — Charles Kingsley — the doc- 
 trine, namely, that the whole world is God's 
 world, and not the devil's. There were mo- 
 ments when this was taught both by Hebrew 
 and by Greek, but it was reserved for Christi- 
 anity to set it forth in its most commanding and 
 persuasive form. Alone of the founders of re- 
 ligions, our Founder was no hermit, no ascetic, 
 no isolated visionary, no armed soldier. He 
 lived a social happy life with the sons and 
 daughters of men, eating and drinking, delight- 
 ing in the merry faces of little children, con- 
 sidering the lilies of the field and the birds of 
 the air, making no distinction — except for the 
 sake of tender scruples — between Christian and 
 heathen, between the world and the Church. 
 And as He was in His life so were His first 
 followers in their teaching. Of all created 
 
i 4 2 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 things which God had cleansed there was not 
 one that St. Peter was allowed to call common 
 or unclean. Amongst all the institutions of 
 the earth, there is none which St. Paul regards 
 with so much reverential awe as the laws of the 
 heathen Roman empire. Amongst all the pre- 
 dictions of St. John, none is more majestic than 
 that which declares that the kingdoms of this 
 world shall become the kingdoms of the Lord 
 and of His Christ. The identification of things 
 secular with things sacred, the refusal to acknow- 
 ledge anything as supremely sacred except what 
 is good, or essentially profane except what is 
 sinful — this is the wide-reaching principle of the 
 Gospel which strikes at the root of a thousand 
 superstitions, and is the fruitful source of a 
 thousand truths. It carries with it the hope of 
 the final triumph of good over evil. It carries 
 with it the germ of all modern philosophy, 
 modern art, and statesmanship. This is the 
 element which liberates, redeems, and purifies 
 both the Church and the world. 
 
 IX. Along with this there is the principle 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 143 
 
 that the darkest and dreariest side of human The moral 
 life has also a glorious and divine aspect, sorrow. 
 Sorrow, suffering, pain, and death — all those 
 evils of which the existence and the very 
 thought shake the faith, and try the patience, 
 and overcloud the serenity even of the best, 
 and which in the Jewish and in Pagan religions 
 were for the most part regarded as curses and 
 penalties, as signs of wrath, as works of the 
 Evil Spirit — all these are intended by the 
 Christian Religion to be so transfigured as to 
 appear, if not as blessings, yet, at least, as the 
 channels of blessings, if not as direct gifts of 
 Divine Love yet as opportunities for working 
 out the purposes of that Divine Love to the 
 human race. The rude manger of Bethlehem, 
 the reproaches of Nazareth, the hardships of 
 Capernaum, the tears of Bethany, the Cross of 
 Calvary, are so many expressions of what 
 Goethe called ' the Divine depth of sorrow,' out 
 of which, as out of all sorrow and pain, is to be 
 wrought the improvement, the redemption, the 
 regeneration, the purification of. mankind. Con- 
 
i44 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 trast the Prometheus of ^Eschylus, contrast the 
 riddle of the Book of Job with the unhesitating, 
 unswerving determination of the Gospel story, 
 to glorify humiliation, bereavement, and grief. 
 This is the peculiarity of Christianity which was 
 but seen afar off by Hebrew prophet or Grecian 
 seer, but which, even in the worst corruptions 
 of Christian faith, has retained its hold on the 
 human spirit. Even were there no Christian 
 memorial left in St. Andrew's but that solitary 
 stone fragment in the court of St. Mary's Col- 
 lege, which contains the rude likeness of the 
 pierced Hands, and pierced Feet, and pierced 
 Heart, we might reconstruct from it one of the 
 most peculiar and supernatural elements of the 
 Christian religion. 
 The X. This leads us to the principle that the 
 
 spiritual . .... 
 
 character religious life in the soul is spiritual, that it 
 of Re- A ' .. /j 
 
 ligion. depends not on material, or formal, or tech- 
 nical questions of any kind, but on its con- 
 nection with the invisible spirit of man and 
 with the invisible spirit of God. Hence the 
 definition that ' God is Spirit,' and that His 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 145 
 
 true worship is in the spirit. Hence the con- 
 stant use of parables in our Saviour's teaching, 
 that we might always be taught to turn from 
 the letter to the spirit, to remember that the 
 spirit, even in sacred writings, is greater than 
 the letter. Hence the absence of any form 
 of ritual or any form of government pre- 
 scribed in the New Testament. Hence the 
 direction of prayer not to physical, but to 
 moral, aims. Hence the persistent command 
 to look from the outward to the inward, from 
 the outside to the inside, from the act to the 
 motive, from external and particular words and 
 deeds to the character as a whole, from the 
 things which are seen to the things which are 
 unseen, from the material and the local to the 
 Eternal which belongs to all time and all space. 
 The arts and courtesies of life have their own 
 value ; but that value is as nothing com- 
 pared with a high, honourable, upright course 
 of life. The splendour or the simplicity of 
 worship, the excellence of music, or the beauty 
 of architecture, have their own attraction for 
 L 
 
i 4 6 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 the truly spiritual mind. But compared with 
 duty — compared with forbearance, humility, 
 and truth — they have in the judgment of 
 the Supreme Mind very slight attraction in- 
 deed. Hence, again, the new light thrown 
 by Christianity, as we said at the outset, on 
 the doctrine of immortality, the new solution 
 of the perplexing difficulties concerning a 
 future state ; it is the principle that it rests 
 on the spiritual communion with the Eter- 
 nal. The silence concerning all details, com- 
 bined with the clearness of general conviction 
 which pervades the New Testament on the 
 divine persistence of the spirit after death, is 
 the crowning consolation that we have won 
 from the Evangelic and Apostolic account 
 of the Resurrection and of Heaven. 
 
 These, then, are the ten chief inward prin- 
 ciples which lie behind all the facts, institu- 
 tions, and history of Christianity, which would 
 not, so far as we know, have struck root in 
 the world at all but for the coming of Chris- 
 tianity, and which, wherever they are found 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 147 
 
 bearing fruit, constitute a Christian, whatever 
 be the outward profession ; which, wherever 
 they are not found, cause a failure, a falling 
 short of the privileges and the consolations of 
 Christianity. These ten principles let us, for 
 the sake of clearness, briefly repeat. They are 
 — Firstly, the universal benevolence of God as 
 our Father ; secondly, the universal capacity for 
 religion in mankind as His children ; thirdly, 
 the identification of religion with morality ; 
 fourthly, the identification of moral goodness 
 with the Divine nature ; fifthly, the supreme 
 importance of charity, purity, truth, and hu- 
 mility ; sixthly, the necessity and the possibility 
 of continued progress, both in the individual 
 and in the race ; seventhly, the reversal of the 
 superficial judgments of the world ; eighthly, 
 the identification of things secular and things 
 sacred ; ninthly, the divinity of sorrow and suf- 
 fering ; and, tenthly, the spiritual character of 
 true religion, both in worship and in doctrine. 
 
 There are three observations which I have 
 to make on the enumeration of these prin- 
 l 2 
 
148 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Compati- ciples before I conclude. First, the enforcement 
 
 bility of 
 
 these of these principles does not necessarily super- 
 principles • , i 
 
 with the sede or conflict with the various doctrines or 
 
 various ... ... . 
 
 forms institutions which any of us, in our several 
 of Chris- •■«..« 
 tianity. sects or churches, may have learnt in child- 
 hood, manhood, or old age. What we ought 
 to understand is that these principles lie 
 behind and above the more technical and out- 
 ward manifestations of religion. Turn them, 
 if we like, into other phrases. Clothe them, 
 if we will, in more ordinary forms of speech. 
 The words here used to express them are per- 
 haps not better — perhaps are worse — than those 
 which others may choose for themselves. But 
 at any rate, they may serve as touch-stones to 
 enable us to know whether we have grasped 
 the vital substance of faith which we all believe 
 that we have in common, or whether we are 
 merely repeating words by rote, and content- 
 ing ourselves with the husks and shells — with 
 the beggarly elements of Judaism and heathen- 
 ism. Somewhere or other, in our conceptions 
 of Christianity, we must find room for these 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 149 
 
 fundamental principles ; or else we shall have 
 missed some of the main purposes for which 
 Christianity was given to us. 
 
 Secondly, to some of us the thought that 
 these ten principles, or something like these ten 
 principles, are amongst the chief products of our 
 religion, may perchance give us a new ground 
 
 for the hope that is in us — a pledge that the The 
 
 pledges 
 
 Christian religion is not dead or dying, but is of the 
 
 perpetuit 
 
 still instinct with immortal life. No doubt the of Chris-' 
 human intellect and the human conscience do y 
 themselves occasionally suffer relapses. The sup- 
 ply of lofty souls and great intelligences may 
 sometimes dwindle, peak, and pine. And with 
 that decay those principles which we have enu- 
 merated may for a time decay also. But there 
 is an inextinguishable source of life in the very 
 width and depth of their nature, and in the con- 
 viction that, even if they should for a time be 
 forced out of and beyond the Christian pale, they 
 will strike root elsewhere, and that as they were 
 the Alpha, the beginning, of the education of 
 Christendom, so also they will be the Omega, 
 
150 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 its end. They form, indeed, the tissue of our 
 common Christianity, of the best heritage of 
 the human race ; and this common Christianity, 
 so viewed, has been proved by experience to 
 be, at least, as definite, precise, and intel- 
 ligible as any of the special forms in which 
 it has been clothed, for it is the Christi- 
 anity of little children, and of the very poor ; 
 it is the Christianity of the greatest philo- 
 sophers ; it is the Christianity of states and 
 statesmen. 
 
 Personal There is, finally, this supreme stimulus to 
 
 influence 
 
 the our hope ; that all these principles incontestably 
 
 strength 
 
 of these made their way, not by being enunciated as dry 
 
 principles. 
 
 and formal statements, nor by outward autho- 
 rity, nor by the sword of conquerors, but by 
 being personified, exemplified, made flesh and 
 blood in Him who was manifested on earth 
 chiefly in these very things. As it was this 
 living personal interest which gave them their 
 first chance, so it is that which has ever since 
 maintained their universal capability of appli- 
 cation. It is difficult to express this aspect 
 
PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 151 
 
 of the subject better than in those fine lines of 
 the Poet Laureate in his ' In Memoriam ' : — 
 
 We yield all blessings to the name 
 
 Of Him who made them current coin ; 
 
 Where Truth in closest words shall fail, 
 
 Yet Truth, embodied in a tale, 
 Shall enter in at lowly doors. 
 And so the Word had breath, and unwrought 
 
 With human hands, the creed of creeds, 
 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
 More strong than all poetic thought. 
 
 Yes ; and the poet might have added — 
 ' more strong than all philosophic or theologic 
 ' thought.' And this is the crowning peculiarity 
 of the religion of Christ — namely, its attesta- 
 tion of the value, the widely-extended influ- 
 ence of character, of personal interest. Not by 
 outward acts, or institutions, or signs of power, 
 but by being what He was has the history of 
 Jesus Christ retained its hold on mankind. Not 
 by power or riches or ability, but by being 
 what wc, each of us, by God's grace, may be, 
 shall we carry out this work. Look at the 
 effect of any one single human soul, filled with 
 any one of the principles which we have de- 
 
iS2 PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 scribed — rilled with truthfulness, graciousness, 
 or perception of the true wants and needs of 
 this or that time or nation. Think of the 
 effect on the world if, in even a few instances, 
 some such man or woman were planted in 
 any neighbourhood, in any nation, in any 
 Church. Christianity is what it is by the fact 
 that there was once lived upon earth a sacred 
 and divine Life — sacred and divine because it 
 was supremely, superhumanly, and transcen- 
 dently good ; because it was above the limi- 
 tations of time, country, and party ; because 
 it revealed to mankind the fullest insight into 
 the heart of the Eternal and Supreme ; and 
 Christianity shall be what it may yet become, 
 in proportion as that Life, or anything like 
 it, is lived over again, in the personal example 
 and influence of any human soul that aspires 
 towards the Perfect Ideal which is represented 
 not in the name, but in the power, not in the 
 letter, but in the spirit, of Jesus Christ. 
 
SERMON 
 
 PREACHED IN THE TOWN CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW'S 
 On August 25, 1872 
 Being the Tercentenary of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew 
 
 Sr. Luke x. 27. 
 
 Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
 with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, q,nd with 
 all thy mind ; and thy neighbour as thyself 
 
'55 
 
 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 There are doubtless many not only here but 
 in many lands and churches elsewhere who will 
 be reminded that yesterday, to-day, and to- 
 morrow form the anniversary of a dreadful 
 crime which, exactly 300 years ago, darkened 
 the face of Christendom. The Feast of St. 
 Bartholomew is one of those days of which the 
 recollection is confined to the calendar of no 
 single Church ; but it is not as the day of the 
 holy and blameless apostle, but as a 'day of 
 ' trouble and distress, as a day of darkness and 
 ' gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness,' 
 bearing with it the heavy burden of the cruel 
 Massacre 1 in which, in these and the following 
 
 1 For the most careful and exact analysis of the amount of 
 blame and complicity shared by the different European nations 
 and by the various branches of the Roman Catholic Church in 
 the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, see a well-known article — 
 ascribed to a distinguished member of that Church — in the North 
 British Review of October 1869, pp. 31-70. 
 
156 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 The Mas- days of August, in the year 1572, thousands 
 
 sacre of 
 
 St. Bar- of French Protestants perished by the hands 
 tholomew. 
 
 of their fellow-countrymen. There are many 
 reflections which this tercentenary might fitly 
 recall to thoughtful men. We might regard 
 it as a solemn warning against too great 
 confidence in our own opinions — a striking 
 proof of the acknowledged fallibility and failure 
 of one who was then, and who is by many 
 still believed to be, the chief pastor of Europe, 
 who, if not before, immediately on hearing of it, 
 expressly approved that dreadful crime. The 
 medals which were struck in its honour, the 
 pictures which still hang on the walls of the 
 Vatican Palace, delineating its horrors as 
 amongst the glories of the Papacy, are now 
 disowned with shame and remorse by many 
 members of the Roman Church itself. Or we 
 might look back to it with thankfulness, as the 
 extremest point to which the tide of intolerance, 
 under the name of religion, has reached ; and 
 we might bless Almighty God that, although 
 with many ebbs and flows, those bitter waters 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 157 
 
 have since that time (at least in their most vio- 
 lent form) been receding from the land which 
 they then covered. Humanity and justice have, 
 in this instance, triumphed over fanaticism and 
 passion. 
 
 But there is a general reflection of a more The sin 
 
 of into- 
 
 practical kind. The Massacre of St. Bartholo- krance. 
 mew represents a sin which, though its darkest 
 shadow rests on the Church of Rome and on 
 the monarchy of France, has yet overcast 
 Churches and kingdoms very far removed from 
 Rome and from Paris. In England the name 
 of itself recalls the mournful day on which 
 2,000 Nonconformists were, by the hardness of 
 our forefathers, on St. Bartholomew's Day in 
 1662, estranged from the Church of England. 
 And here in St. Andrew's it is impossible not 
 to remember how deep and bloody are the 
 stains which have been left by the like spirit of 
 religious hatred in the precincts, now so peace- 
 ful and tranquil, of this ancient city. First, the 
 murder of the earliest Protestant martyrs in Scot- 
 land — Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart ; 
 
i 5 8 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 then the savage vengeance on the Archbishop 
 Cardinal Prelate who pronounced their doom ; 
 then the succession of Covenanters who, at least 
 with the alleged sanction of another Archbishop 
 of St, Andrew's, were doomed to torture, death, 
 or exile ; then the ruthless murder of that same 
 Archbishop on Magus Moor, commemorated 
 within this church ; then the strange fate of 
 those on that same spot who, whether con- 
 demned as murderers or venerated as martyrs, 
 were alike the victims of the same fierce and 
 reckless zeal. And although the most hateful 
 forms of religious intolerance have ceased, yet 
 no one who looks round on the dissensions and 
 the suspicions with which Christians still regard 
 each other can feel sure that we are altogether 
 free from its contagion. On this day, therefore, 
 the Church of Christ, whether Roman or Protest- 
 ant, whether Episcopalian or Presbyterian, may 
 well veil its head under a sense of common guilt, 
 and, as on a day of deep humiliation, ask by what 
 blessed influences we, in these later days, have 
 been raised in this respect above our fathers, 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 159 
 
 and how for the future the first symptoms of 
 this malignant tendency may be counteracted. 
 
 There are many and various answers which Primary 
 
 truths the 
 
 may be given to this question. I propose to remedy 
 
 to into- 
 
 take one which is suggested by the chapter lerance. 
 just read from 1 the Gospel of St. Luke. In 
 a well-known discourse by a . famous divine 
 dear to the Church of Scotland, dear to the 
 city of St. Andrew's, it was once urged that 
 the best mode of extirpating sin was by what 
 he well called 'the expulsive power of a new 
 affection.' So it is in regard to that mixed 
 atmosphere of sin and folly from which has 
 sprung the fierce fanaticism of former or of 
 present times. That is best dispelled by the 
 expulsive power of a new truth, or rather, let 
 us say, by the expulsive force of one of those 
 old, very old truths which belong to the ori- 
 ginal essence of Christianity, but which have 
 often been thrust aside by secondary and in- 
 ferior doctrines that have sprung up beside 
 them. If we look over the persecutions which 
 
 1 The Gospel for the 13th Sunday after Trinity. 
 
i6o THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 have in former times devastated Churches 
 and kingdoms, we shall find that all, or almost 
 all, have been carried on in defence of doc- 
 trines which the Bible, or which the calmer 
 judgment of a later time, pronounced to be 
 secondary — few, very few, in defence of those 
 greater doctrines which the Bible and the judg- 
 ment of the wisest men of all ages have acknow- 
 ledged to be primary and fundamental. It is 
 therefore, as the best antidote, as the best so- 
 lution of those stormy strifes out of which 
 arose the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and 
 the blood-stained recollections of our own or 
 other Churches, that I venture to fix your atten- 
 tion on the two great commandments which our 
 Saviour Himself declared to be the sum and 
 substance of saving doctrine. If we have these 
 in their full meaning rooted in our minds, then 
 we shall be best secured from all danger of in- 
 tolerance on the one hand, and of indifference 
 on the other. The truth of truths involved in 
 them will most effectually drive out the master- 
 falsehood, of which the Massacre of St. Bar- 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 161 
 
 tholomew was the outward expression. The 
 righteous zeal which should be felt for them 
 will most powerfully counteract the unrighteous 
 zeal which Christendom this day deplores. 
 
 In order to understand these two great com- The two 
 mandments fully, let us examine, first, What command- 
 was the occasion of their delivery ? secondly, ments ' 
 What do they contain ? and thirdly, What is 
 their relation to the other parts of the Christian 
 dispensation ? 
 
 I. First, then, the manner and occasion of 
 their delivery. 
 
 1. They were delivered, as we read in the The oc- 
 
 _ . casion of 
 
 Gospels, twice over. Once in answer to the their de- 
 question, 'Which is the great commandment hvery ' 
 ' of the law ? ' So we read in St. Matthew and 
 St. Mark. 1 And at another time in answer to 
 the question, ' What shall I do to inherit eternal 
 ' life ? ' So we read in the text from St. Luke. 2 
 The scribe, according to St. Mark, asks, ' Which 
 ' is the great commandment ? ' There are hun- 
 
 1 Matthew xxii. 36 ; Mark xii. 28. 
 2 Luke x. 26. 
 
 M 
 
62 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 dreds of commandments, there are hundreds of 
 duties, there are hundreds of precepts and state- 
 ments and doctrines in the Bible. Which of 
 these is the most important ? Our Saviour did 
 not disdain to answer this question. He did 
 not think it an answer to send away that scribe 
 with the reply that all of these are equally 
 important — that there is no difference between 
 essential and unessential. He confirmed the 
 plain truth of common sense, that there is 
 a distinction even in sacred things ; that we 
 must even in these select ; that there is a good, 
 a better, and a best. That is what we learn 
 from the first occasion when these command- 
 ments were given. It is our Blessed Lord's 
 sanction of the principle of selection, of discri- 
 mination, of rightly ' dividing the Word of 
 ' Truth.' And the second occasion is no less 
 interesting. The lawyer in St. Luke asked, 
 ' What shall I do to inherit eternal life ? ' He 
 knew well what he was about He did not ask, 
 ' What am I to think ?' or ' What am I to say ? ' 
 or ' What am I to feel ? ' but ' What am I to 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 163 
 
 ' do ? ' He knew something of the great doctrine 
 everywhere proclaimed in the Bible, ' He that 
 ' doeth righteousness is righteous.' He was 
 only perplexed by wishing to know how he 
 should do what was right. This principle, too, 
 our Lord recognises. He sanctions the prin- 
 ciple that to do is the great thing. He 
 wishes to show what are the conditions of 
 inheriting eternal life. 'This do, and thou shalt 
 ' live.' 
 
 2. And whence did He draw his answer, The form 
 and in what form did He put it? This is delivery, 
 expressed somewhat differently on the two 
 occasions, but they both come to the same 
 point. To the lawyer in St. Luke's Gospel 
 the answer came not out of His own divine 
 lips, but out of the lips of the questioner. He 
 said to him, ' What is written in the law ? 
 ' How readest thou ? ' 1 In the case of the scribe 
 in St. Mark's Gospel, although it is our Lord 
 who there gives the commandments, yet there 
 also they are immediately ratified, and, as it 
 1 Luke x. 27. 
 
1 64 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 were, adopted as something familiar by the 
 scribe himself. 'Well, Master, thou hast said 
 ' the truth.' 1 In each case, therefore, our Lord 
 did that which is the true characteristic of every 
 wise teacher ; not so much to put knowledge 
 and wisdom into His disciples, as to draw out 
 of their hearts and minds whatever knowledge 
 and wisdom was in them. Every one in every 
 congregation has some kind of knowledge and 
 consciousness of higher things. Far better that 
 we should be made to find out that for our- 
 selves, to teach it to ourselves, rather than that 
 any one should bring it to us ; or if any one 
 does bring it to us, far better that, like the 
 scribe, we should recognise the truth of it in 
 ourselves, because of its convincing our own 
 judgment and conscience, than merely take it in 
 blind submission on the authority of some one 
 else. ' Well, Master, thou hast said the truth.' 
 This might have almost seemed a presumptuous 
 mode of addressing our Divine Teacher ; but it 
 was a mode of address which He himself ap- 
 
 1 Mark xii. 32, 33. 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 165 
 
 proved. ' Thou art not far,' He said, ' from the 
 'kingdom of God.' Thus, and thus only, does 
 truth become part of ourselves. Unless we 
 meet our teacher half-way, he can teach us 
 almost nothing. God only helps those who 
 help themselves ; Christ only saves those who 
 wish to be saved ; wisdom comes only to those 
 who 'cry after knowledge' and 'lift up their 
 ' voices for understanding.' 
 
 3. And, further, let us notice that even these The origin 
 two great commandments were not on these com h mand°- 
 occasions invented for the first time by our ment: " 
 Divine Lawgiver. He found them, as it were, 
 pre-existing. He found each of them in the 
 ancient Law, where they might have been 
 found by those who chose to look for them, and 
 where, in fact, they were found by those two 
 scribes. What an example, also, is this of 
 God's mode of teaching ! Sometimes we may 
 be alarmed at hearing that this or that precept 
 and doctrine of the Gospel may be, or has been, 
 expressed outside of the pale of Christendom 
 — that the heathen poets and philosophers, or 
 
1 66 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 perhaps the Jewish Talmud, contained before 
 Christ came some of the words and precepts of 
 the Gospel. Some there are who foolishly 
 think that in this way the Gospel may be 
 proved to be false ; others there are who no 
 less foolishly refuse to be told the fact, lest they 
 should be tempted to think so too. But here, 
 as everywhere, it is the truth itself, not the 
 particular source from whence it comes, that 
 claims our allegiance. It is divine, it is Chris- 
 tian, it is evangelical, because it is true. The 
 wind of the Divine Spirit bloweth where it 
 listeth. Thou canst not tell, thou needst not 
 ask, whence it cometh or whither it goeth. The 
 main thing is to hear the sound thereof, to see 
 its effects, to feel its freshening breath, and to 
 be moved by its stirring influences. Here, as 
 elsewhere in His teaching, what our Lord did 
 was to bring forth truth out of the vast treasure- 
 house of things new and old — to divide the 
 eternal from the temporal— to breathe new 
 life and new spirit into old institutions and old 
 words— to stamp and seal with His own divine 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 167 
 
 impress the true metal and coin, and so give it 
 currency and circulation throughout the world. 
 These two great commandments had lain for 
 ages — one buried in the Book of Deuteronomy, 
 the other in the Book of Leviticus — amongst 
 hundreds of other precepts, some excellent, 
 some insignificant, some entirely superseded. 
 They had also, it may be, as in the minds of 
 these two scribes, been lying dormant — known 
 perhaps in this or that school, taught by this 
 or that teacher, but lost in obscurity, apart from 
 each other, overwhelmed by narrow interpre- 
 tations. It was the magic of His divine word 
 that called them into life, that brought together 
 each to its proper mate, and wrote them on the 
 hearts and the spirits of mankind for ever. 
 ' Well, Master, thou hast said the truth.' 
 Thou hast said what was, or what might have 
 been, known before, but thou hast said it well 
 — so well that it seems as if we now heard it 
 for the first time. 
 
 I have thus dwelt on the mode of intro- 
 ducing these two commandments, because we 
 
1 68 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 have here the best illustration of the method 
 of Revelation ; the best condemnation of that 
 barbarian exclusiveness and ignorance which 
 lies at the root of all persecution, and which 
 it is the direct object of Christian civilisation 
 to counteract and to regenerate. 
 
 Their con- II. We now pass to the contents of these 
 
 tents. 
 
 two commandments. I will endeavour briefly 
 to unfold their meaning word by word. 
 
 supreme affection is to rule our whole being — 
 one, and one supreme. Whatsoever there may 
 be of love and admiration kindled by all the 
 various objects worthy of our earthly interest 
 is gathered up in that great passion of the 
 human soul which is called the Love of God. 
 Any one who wishes to trace that passion to 
 its source in human nature, and to see how 
 
 The love reasonable it is — how natural an expansion, if 
 
 of God. 
 
 one may so say, of our best affections— should 
 read the discourse preached by one of the few 
 preachers of Christendom who has been at 
 
 The first 
 command- 
 ment. 
 
 I. The first commandment thus begins : 
 ' Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.' One 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 169 
 
 once a philosopher and theologian — Bishop 
 Butler's Sermon on the Love of God. To feel 
 that there is one Being supremely just and wise, 
 through whom all the trials of this mortal life 
 can be turned to our good ; whose judgment 
 is not in the least degree affected by the 
 struggles of party or the respect of persons, 
 or the honour, or praise, or fashion of the 
 world ; who sees things not as they seem to 
 be, but as they really are : to reverence this 
 Supreme Perfection because it is the perfection 
 of all that is noble, generous, beautiful, wise, 
 and just, in what we know among ourselves ; 
 to be content with nothing short of this in our 
 ideal, our image of God ; to feel that in grow- 
 ing like this ideal is our best happiness ; that 
 in entirely resigning ourselves to His justice and 
 mercy is perfect peace — this, or something like 
 to this— this, and nothing less than this — is to 
 love the Lord our God. 
 
 And what is meant by the other part of this The mode 
 
 of loving 
 
 first commandment? — 'Thou shalt love Him God. 
 •with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
 
170 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 ' with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.' 
 It means that in whatever measure we have 
 attained to the love of God — that is, to the love 
 of the Highest Goodness and Truth — we must 
 carry out this not only into one part of our 
 nature, but into all. It has been the chief 
 source of all corruptions of religion, that those 
 who have been religious have often brought to 
 it but one element, but one single part of 
 their nature. A strong religious imagination, 
 a strong religious affection, may often be seen 
 side by side with a mind left altogether weak 
 and uncultivated. A strong logical belief may 
 be seen unsoftened by the genial influence of 
 a loving heart and a heaven-aspiring soul. A 
 strong will and a powerful fancy may be seen 
 side by side with a reckless disregard of pru- 
 dence and of common sense. Every one of 
 these forms is but the half or the quarter of 
 religion. But God cannot be divided. He is 
 One God, not many. He must be served by 
 all our nature, not by parts of it. The intellect 
 must seek truth with undivided, fearless zeal ; 
 
THE TWO GR EA T COMMANDMENTS. 1 7 1 
 
 else we do not serve God with our whole mind 
 and understanding. The bodily powers must 
 be guarded and saved for the healthy discharge 
 of all that Providence requires of us in our 
 passage through life ; else we do not serve 
 Him with our whole strength. The affections 
 must be kept fresh and pure ; else we do not 
 serve Him with our whole heart. The con- 
 science must not have stained itself with secret 
 sins, unworthy transactions, and false pretences, 
 else we do not serve Him with our whole soul. 
 There was an old barbarian chief who, when 
 he was baptized, kept his right arm out of the 
 water, that he might still work his deeds of 
 blood. That is the likeness of the imperfect 
 religion of many Christians. That is what they 
 did who, of old, as on this day, in their zeal 
 for religion, broke their plighted faith, did 
 despite to their natural affections, disregarded 
 the laws of kinship and country, and honour 
 and mercy. It is this shutting up of religion 
 into one corner of our being which is the cause 
 why many good men are not better, why 
 
1 7 2 THE TWO GEE A T COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 many religious men have been so unwise, why 
 the world seems often more charitable than the 
 Church, why many a saint has been untruth- 
 ful, why many a faithful believer has been 
 selfish or cruel, why many an earnest seeker 
 after truth has been irreverent and undevout, 
 why many a generous temper has been 
 coupled with self-indulgence and coarseness. 
 The true religion of Jesus Christ our Saviour is 
 that which penetrates, and which receives, all 
 the warmth of the heart, and all the elevation 
 of the soul, and all the energies of the under- 
 standing, and all the strength of the will. 
 The 2. And now, what is the second great corn- 
 
 command- mandment ? ' It is like to the first.' It is the 
 ment ' chief mode of fulfilling the first. 'Thou shalt 
 ' love thy neighbour as thyself.' Here, again, 
 there are two points which bring out its full 
 force. 
 
 The First, what is the measure of the love we 
 
 measure ."«■»..« r i . 
 
 of love to owe to others ? It is the measure of what we 
 
 think is owing to ourselves. ' Love him as 
 
 ' thyself.' Observe, if I may use such a word, 
 
THE TWO GEE A T COMMANDMENTS. 1 7 3 
 
 the equity of this divine rule. It makes us the 
 judge of what we ought to do. It imposes 
 upon us no duty that we have not already 
 acknowledged for ourselves. Every one of us 
 knows how painful it is to be called by malicious 
 names, to have his character undermined by 
 false insinuations, to be overreached in a bar- 
 gain, to be neglected by those who rise in life, 
 to be thrust on one side by those who have 
 stronger wills and stouter hearts. Every one 
 knows also the pleasure of receiving a kind 
 look, a warm greeting, a hand held out to help 
 in distress, a difficulty solved, a higher hope 
 revealed for this world or the next. By that 
 pain and by that pleasure let us judge what 
 we should do to others. This is the root of all 
 Christian charity, of all Christian forgiveness, of 
 all Christian justice, of all Christian toleration. 
 Had this command sunk deep into the heart of 
 Christendom, how many a foolish quarrel might 
 have been averted, how many a needless war 
 might have been arrested, and (to apply it to the 
 anniversary of this day) how impossible would 
 
1 74 THE TWO GEE A T COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 have been most of the bloody persecutions which 
 have been the shame of the Christian Churches ! 
 
 The object And, secondly, observe the object towards 
 
 of our 
 
 love. which this love is to extend — ' Thy neighbour.' 
 
 Here, again, there is, so to speak, a common 
 sense and equity — what has been well called 
 ' the sweet reasonableness,' — of Christ our 
 Saviour. It is not an indiscriminate command 
 to love, to show kindness to everybody and to 
 all mankind. That, in its literal sense, would 
 be impossible. But it is to love 'our neighbour.' 
 And what is meant by our neighbour we cannot 
 doubt, because of the interpretation which our 
 Lord has put upon it in this very chapter. It 
 is every one with whom we are brought into 
 contact. First of all, he is literally our neigh- 
 bour who is next to us in our own family and 
 household — husband to wife, wife to husband, 
 parent to child, brother to sister, master to ser- 
 vant, servant to master. Then, it is he who is 
 close to us, in our own neighbourhood, in our 
 own town, in our own parish, in our own street. 
 With these all true charity begins. To love 
 
THE TWO GREA T COMMANDMENTS. 1 7 5 
 
 and to be kind to these is the very beginning 
 of all true religion. But besides these, as our 
 Lord teaches, it is every one who is thrown 
 across our path by the changes and chances of 
 life — he or she, whosoever it be, whom we have 
 any means of helping — the unfortunate sufferer 
 whom we may meet in travelling, the deserted 
 friend whom no one else cares to look after. 
 And, whether of those more distant or those 
 nearer neighbours, our Lord gives us yet that 
 further explanation in the Parable of the Good 
 Samaritan — namely, that in asking 'who is our 
 ' neighbour,' we must put aside all questions of 
 race, country, or even religion. Whoever it be 
 that we have an opportunity of helping, there 
 is our neighbour, however much we may have 
 been divided from him by other matters — 
 whether, like the man that fell among thieves, 
 he is a Jew, and you are a Samaritan, or he a 
 Samaritan and you a Jew, he a Presbyterian 
 and you an Episcopalian, he a Nonconformist 
 and you a Churchman, he a Roman Catholic 
 and you a Protestant, he of one race and you 
 
176 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 of another, he of one creed and you of another, 
 he of one party and you of another — he, who- 
 soever he be, if he is in difficulty and needs your 
 aid, and you are able to aid him — he deserves 
 and demands all the same justice and compas- 
 sion that you would gladly render to him if 
 he were of the same party, of the same Church, 
 of the same country, of the same opinions as 
 yourself. Nay, further, as the Parable implies, 
 he may be your neighbour in a yet closer sense. 
 He, like the good Samaritan, though belonging 
 to another Church and creed, may yet have vir- 
 tues which we have not, and which in our own 
 Church and circle we do not find. These virtues 
 are what our Lord's commandment calls upon 
 us to recognise, and, by recognising, tears to 
 pieces the very groundwork and framework 
 of the old anathemas and persecutions for dif- 
 ferent opinions, because it shows that there is 
 in the sight of God something deeper than 
 opinion, even as blood is thicker than water, 
 and as goodness is better than orthodoxy, 
 and as charity is greater than faith. If there 
 
THE TWO GEE A T COMMANDMENTS. i 7 7 
 
 be any doctrine or dogma in the Christian 
 religion on which our Lord lays special stress, 
 it is the doctrine and dogma contained in the 
 Parable of the Good Samaritan. How vast a 
 difference would have been made in the whole 
 face and history of Christendom had the catho- 
 lic, the evangelical truth expressed in this 
 Parable taken its proper place — we may almost 
 say, had it been recognised at all in the creeds 
 and confessions, not to speak of the practice, of 
 Christian Churches ! Whenever this shall be, 
 and in proportion as this has been received, there 
 will indeed be, and there has been, the expulsive 
 force of a very new and of a very strong affec- 
 tion, of a very old and of a very fundamental 
 truth, which would teach us often and often that 
 he whom we have regarded as our worst enemy 
 is really the true Christian's next-door neigh- 
 bour. 
 
 III. And now, thirdly, What is the relation import- 
 of these two commandments to the other parts the^wo 
 of religion and of human life ? Our Saviour mems™ 
 Himself has told us that these are the greatest 
 N 
 
178 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 of all. He has told us that on these the rest 
 of God's revelation depends. ' On these hang 
 ' all the Law and the Prophets.' He tells us 
 that by keeping these two commandments we 
 inherit the greatest of all gifts. ' This do, and 
 ' thou shalt live.' It is hardly possible to imagine 
 stronger expressions than these. It was once 
 said — and we can hardly be surprised at the 
 saying — by an eminent statesman of another 
 country, who had become dissatisfied with many 
 existing forms of belief, 'When any Church 
 'shall inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualifica- 
 ' tion for membership, these two great command- 
 ' ments of our Saviour, that Church will I join at 
 ' once with all my heart and with all my soul.' 
 That hope, that wish, as thus expressed, is 
 doubtless exaggerated. In our complex state 
 of society, it seems out of the question that so 
 simple and sublime a confession of faith should 
 ever become practicable. But, nevertheless, it 
 is clear that what was intended in that saying 
 is true. Whenever any Church in truth and 
 in spirit puts forward these two commandments 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 179 
 
 as that which is of supreme importance, as that 
 in comparison with which all else is unimport- 
 ant, as that to which all else tends, for the 
 sake of which all else is done — any Church 
 so believing and so acting, any Christian so 
 believing and so acting, takes at once the first 
 place amongst Churches and .the first place 
 amongst Christians, because such Churches 
 and such Christians would most fully have 
 embraced the mind and the intention of our 
 Divine Founder. Doubtless, as I have said, 
 we are perplexed when we think, on the one 
 hand, of this truth in all its grand simplicity, 
 and when we think, on the other hand, of 
 the immense system of institutions, beliefs, 
 and forms which exist, and, so far as we 
 can foresee, must always continue to exist, 
 in every Church and every State of Chris- 
 tendom. It was observed by Coleridge that 
 when a man is told that religion and morality 
 are summed up in the two great commandments, 
 he is ready to say, like one who first beholds 
 
i8o THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 the sea, ' Is this the mighty ocean — is this all ? ' 
 Yes, it is all ; but what an all ? We know 
 well at St. Andrew's what is the view of the 
 ocean. We look out from these shores on that 
 vacant expanse, with its boundless horizon, with 
 its everlasting succession of ebb and tide, and 
 we might perhaps ask, What is this barren sea 
 to us ? How vague, how indefinite, how broad, 
 how monotonous ! Yet look closer. It is the 
 scene on which sunlight and moonlight, cloud 
 and shadow, storm and calm, are for ever play- 
 ing. It has been the chosen field for the enter- 
 prise, for the faith, for the charity of mankind. 
 It is the highway for the union of nations and 
 the enlargement of Churches. It is the bulwark 
 of freedom, and the home of mighty fleets, and 
 the nurse of swarming cities. And so these 
 two commandments. They seem at first sight 
 vacant, vague, and indefinite ; but let us trust 
 ourselves to them, let us launch out upon them, 
 let us explore their innermost recesses, let us 
 sound their depths, and we shall find that they 
 call forth all the arts and appliances of Christian 
 
THE TWO GEE A T COMMANDMENTS. 1 8 1 
 
 life ; that they will carry us round the world 
 and beyond it. 
 
 ' To love the Lord our God with all our 
 ' heart, with all our mind, with all our soul, and 
 ' with all our strength.' — What new spheres of 
 thought and activity ought this to open to us, 
 when thoroughly studied ! It is in proportion 
 as the Bible teaches us the true perfections of 
 God that it becomes to us the Book of God ; it 
 is in proportion as the Gospel discloses to us 
 those perfections in the most endearing and the 
 most intelligible forms that it becomes to us the 
 revelation of God in Christ ; it is in proportion 
 as our hearts and consciences are filled from the 
 Fountain of all goodness that we are able to 
 enter into the true essence of God, who being 
 Spirit can only be worshipped in spirit and in 
 truth. It is, or it ought to be, for the sake of 
 these great commandments that we value and 
 strive to improve the sanctifying and elevating 
 influences of Christian worship, Christian civili- 
 sation, Christian friendship, Christian homes, 
 and Christian education. It is for the sake 
 
1 82 THE TWO GEE A T COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 of better understanding what God is, and how 
 He wishes us to serve Him, that we value 
 those indications of His Will which He has 
 left us in the sure footsteps of science, in the 
 manifold workings of history, of art, and of 
 poetry, and of all the various gifts and graces 
 which He has bestowed on earth and on man. 
 ' Let no man,' says Lord Bacon — ' let no man 
 ' out of weak conceit of sobriety or ill-applied 
 ' moderation think or maintain that a man can 
 ' search too far, or be too well supplied, in the 
 ' Book of God's Word or the Book of God's 
 ' works.' That is one result of the endeavour 
 to love God with all our understanding and 
 with all our soul. 
 
 And, again, ' to love our neighbour as our- 
 ' selves.' What a world of Christian duty is here 
 disclosed ! -How eagerly, for the sake of better 
 serving our neighbours, should we welcome any 
 one who will tell us what is the best and safest 
 mode of administering charity, the best mode of 
 education, the best method of suppressing in- 
 temperance and vice. How eagerly should we 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 183 
 
 cultivate the opportunities which God has given 
 us, not for keeping men apart, but for bringing 
 them together ; how anxiously we should desire 
 to understand the character of neighbouring 
 nations, neighbouring Churches, neighbouring 
 friends, so as to avoid giving them needless 
 offence — so as to bring out their best points and 
 repress their worst, making our own knowledge 
 of our own imperfections and faults the measure 
 of the forbearance which we should exercise to 
 others. How eagerly should we rejoice in every 
 increase of the instruments that Christianity 
 and civilisation employ for the advancement 
 and progress of mankind. These are some of 
 the means of loving our neighbour as ourselves. 
 
 And, finally, as at the beginning, so at the 
 end of this discourse, let us observe that whilst 
 al! those other appliances of Christian life are 
 useful and necessary for carrying out these two 
 great commandments, yet still the fact, of which 
 we are never to lose sight, is that these two 
 commandments are the end, and all other 
 things, however sacred and great, are the 
 
i8 4 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 means. We need not disparage any of those 
 methods of keeping the commandments. Only 
 let us remember that on the keeping of these 
 two commandments, on this only, and on this 
 sufficiently, if our Lord's words be true, depend 
 the Law and the Prophets in the Old Testa- 
 ment, and Eternal Life in the New. We see 
 that other commandments and other ordinances 
 ' come to an end,' but these two are ' exceeding 
 ' broad ' — they have no end beyond themselves. 
 They avoid details, even the details of the Ten 
 Commandments. They contain only the largest 
 and the most general principles ; they leave 
 the details to us. They lay down the direc- 
 tion, the motive, and the end of action. They 
 appeal not to the sense of fear, or even of duty, 
 but of affection. Duty is a hard task, but there 
 is one word, as the heathen poet says, which 
 makes all things easy — and that is ' Love' 
 There are many other passages both in the Old 
 and New Testament which, though expressed 
 in different words, have the same meaning. It 
 is these passages, these doctrines, which hold 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 185 
 
 the first place in the Christian dispensation. 
 They are the governing principles of the Bible 
 and of the Church. They are the key-notes of 
 Revelation. Other passages, other truths, have 
 their use, their significance, their beauty. But 
 we cannot be mistaken in regarding these two 
 commandments and their like as the chief of 
 all. Such truths are the parts of the Christian 
 revelation on which the wisest and best Chris- 
 tians of all ages have laid the most stress — on 
 which the clamorous and contentious and vio- 
 lent Christians have laid the least stress. And 
 thus it has come to pass that, on the one hand, 
 in the long history of the past, they are un- 
 stained, or almost unstained, by any unholy 
 associations of blood, or fraud, or party spirit. 
 In behalf of these two commandments no 
 Massacre of St. Bartholomew has been set on 
 foot, no Archbishops and no Covenanters have 
 been slaughtered. But, on the other hand, in 
 the future, they, and the like truths, whether in 
 the Gospels or the Epistles, demand, and may 
 absorb, all the zeal and the enthusiasm that 
 O 
 
1 86 THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 ever were evoked by Catholic League or Pro- 
 testant Covenant ; and whenever that true zeal 
 and enthusiasm are felt, then, as the fire of 
 charcoal or the flames of sulphur wax pale 
 and die out before the full light of the noon- 
 day sun, so the fire of ancient religious ani- 
 mosities and the anathemas of old theological 
 odium will wax pale and die out in the light 
 of the great Christian duties and the great 
 Christian truths of the love of God and the 
 love of man. 
 
 May I conclude by quoting a quaint poem 
 — of which it is doubtful whether it was writ- 
 ten by one of the earliest Deans of West- 
 minster or by one of the earliest Scottish 
 Reformers 1 — which expresses with singular 
 felicity and clear discrimination the true pro- 
 portion between profession and practice, be- 
 
 1 'The Wedderburnes and their Work,' by Professor 
 Mitchell, of St. Andrew's. I have been informed by the Professor 
 that it is doubtful whether the poem in question was originally 
 written by Wedderburne, who was one of the Scottish exiles at 
 Frankfort, or by Cox, Dean of Westminster in the reign of 
 Edward VI. and afterwards Bishop of Ely. 
 
THE TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS. 187 
 
 tween doctrine and character, between good 
 
 words and good works ? — 
 
 ' Say well ' from ' do well ' differs in letter j 
 ' Say well ' is good, but ' do well ' is better. 
 ' Say well ' says godly, and helps to please, 
 But ' do well ' lives godly, and gives the world ease. 
 ' Say well ' in danger of death is cold, 
 ' Do well ' is harness'd, and wondrous bold. 
 ' Say well ' to silence sometimes is bound, 
 But ' do well ' is free in every stound. 1 
 ' Say well ' has friends, some here some there, 
 But ' do well ' is welcome everywhere. 
 By ' say well ' many a one to God's Word cleaves, 
 But for lack of ' do well ' it quickly leaves. 
 If ' say well ' and ' do well ' were joined in one frame. 
 Then all were done, all were won, and gotten were the 
 game. 
 
 1 Stound = stunde = hour. 
 
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