IVOV 141911 = BX 5937 .B83 S44 1903 Brooks, Phillips, 1835-1893 Sermons preached in English churches SERMONS SERMONS ^^X OF PfWfcc>- [* l\[0V141911 IPteacJjeD in aBngUsb Cburcbes BY THE Rt. Rev. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D. NEW YORK E. P. BUTTON & CO. 31 West Twenty-Third St. 1903. Copyright, 1883, By E. p. DUTTON & CO. ,TO MANY FRIENDS IN ENGLAND IN REMEMBRANCE OF THEIR CORDIAL WELCOME I INSCRIBE THESE SERMONS CONTENTS. PAGE I. The Pattern in the Mount . . . i " See that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount." — Hebrews viii. 5, II. The Mind's Love for God . . . .22 "Jesus said unto him. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . . with all thy mind." — Matthew xxii. 37. III. The Fire and the Calf . . , .43 "So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire and there came out this calf." — Exodus xxxii. 24. IV. Man's Wonder and God's Knowledge . 65 " Thus saith the Lord of hosts : If it be marvellous in the eyes of the remnant of this people in these days, should it also be marvellous in mine eyes ? saith the Lord of hosts." — Zechariah viii. 6. V. In the Light of God .... 89 " In thy light we shall see light." — Psalm xxxvi. 9. VI. The Sufficient Grace OF God . . .112 "And he said, My grace is sufficient for thee." — 2 Corinthians xii. 9. VII. The Christian City 134 "And there was great joy in that city." — Acts viii. 8. CONTENTS. y\ PAGE •^ VIII. The Greatness OF Faith . . . • iS7 " Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou wilt. " — Matthew xv. 28. IX. <' Why could not we cast him out.?" . 179 " Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out ? " — Matthew xvii. 9. X, Nature and Circumstances . . . 200 " Verily I say unto you. Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist : notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." — MATTHEW xi. II. XI. The Willing Surrender . . . .221 "Think est thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than ■v/ twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?" — Matthew xxvi. 53. xiL Gamaliel 243 " Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people. " — Acts v. 34. a XIII. The Gift and its Return .... 265 ' ' For with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. ' — Matthew vii. 2. XIV. " Your Joy no Man taketh from you " . 288 " And your joy no man taketh from you." — ^JOHN xvi. 22. THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT.* ** See that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount." — Hebrews viii. 5, The elements which make a perfect work are two — a perfect workman, and a perfect pattern. A perfect workman must have perfect faithfulness and perfect skill ; and so, to make any accomplish- ment entirely complete, faithfulness and skill must join in the fulfilment of the perfect plan. It is very much like the casting of some great work in metal. There is skill in the mixing of the elements. Faithfulness is like the pervading heat which keeps the whole mass fluid. But the plan or pattern of the work is like the mould into which the well-mixed and molten metal must be poured, that it may get form and value, and not remain a merely shapeless mass. There are, then, two great reasons why men's * Preached at St. Botolph's Church, Boston, Lincolnshire, Sunday morning, 2d July 1882 ; and at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, London, Sunday morning, 20th May 1883. & B THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. works are failures : one is the lack of the per- sonal qualities of faithfulness and skill in the worker ; the other is the absence of a pattern, or the presence of a wrong pattern, in which the faithfulness and skill take shape. The first kind of failure is common enough. Plenty of people there are who, with most perfect plans of life, are so unfaithful or unskilful that their lives come to nothing. But the second kind of failure also is abundant. The world is full of men who, with great faithfulness and skill are doing little, because the plan, the standard, the pattern of their life is weak or wrong. To them, and of them, let me speak to-day, using for my text these words out of the old Epistle to the Hebrews : " See that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount." The warning had been given to Moses when he was about to make the Tabernacle. The leader of the Jews was full of faithfulness, and all the skill of all the people was at his command He could make what he would ; but never in all the world before had there been such a tabernacle as he was now to build. There was no precedent or accepted rule. And so we read in Exodus that God called him up into a high mountain, and there, in some mysterious way, He gave His servant a description of the Tabernacle which He THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. wanted him to build. He showed it to him in elaborate detail, and when, upon the seventh day, Moses came down from Mount Sinai, the unbuilt Tabernacle was already in existence in his mind, as it had been already before in existence in the mind of God. Not yet had it any material exist- ence ; but its idea was there. It was not visible or tangible. The gold, the silver, and the brass, the blue and purple and scarlet, the fine linen and goats' hair, the rams' skins dyed red, the brilliant lamps and carved cherubs shone as yet in no earthly sunshine ; the fragrance of the spices floated on no earthly air ; the curtains waved in no terrestrial breezes ; the stakes which held the structure had been driven in no field of our com- mon ground ; it was not yet in being as a material fact, a bright, strange apparition, such as by and by moved with the host of the Israelites and filled the tribes of their enemies with wonder. But yet, in a true sense, it was — it had existence, when God had opened the chamber of His will in which the idea of the unbuilt Tabernacle already stood complete, and showed it to His servant. All that afterwards took place, all the slow building of the Tabernacle by the offerings of the people, was but the transference from the region of ideas to the region of realities of that which existed already in the mind of God. THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT, We have only to enlarge the conception which is in this story and to make it general, and we come at once to one of the loftiest and most in- spiring thoughts of human life. As the old Tabernacle, before it was built, existed in the mind of God, so all the unborn things of life, the things which are to make the future, are already living in their perfect ideas in Him, and when the future comes, its task will be to match those divine ideas with their material realities, to translate into the visible and tangible shapes of terrestrial life the facts which already have existence in the per- fect mind. Surely in the very statement of such a thought of life there is something which ennobles and dignifies our living. It takes something of this dreadful extemporaneousness and superficial- ness and incoherence out of our life. The things which come to pass here in the world are not mere volunteer efforts of man's enterprise, not self-contained ventures which are responsible to nothing and to no one but themselves. For each of them there is an idea present already in the thought of God, a pattern of what each in its purest perfection is capable of being. Out of the desire to realise that idea must come the highest inspiration. In the degree to which it has realised that idea must be the standard of judgment of every work of man. To-day begins a baby's life. THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. A child is bom into the world this Sunday morning. What shall we say j.bout that child's unlived life ? No man can tell what it will be. Its lessons are unlearned, its tasks untried, its discoveries unmade, its loves unloved, its growth entirely ungrown, as the little new-born problem lies unsolved on this the first day of its life. Is that all ? Is there nowhere in the universe any picture of what that child's life ought to be, and may be ? Surely there is. If God is that child's Father, then in the Father's mind, in God's mind, there must surely be a picture of what that child with his peculiar faculties and nature may become in the completeness of his life. Years hence, when that baby of to-day has grown to be the man of forty, the real question of his life will be, what ? Not the questions which his fellow- citizens of that remote day will be asking, What reputation has he won ? What money has he earned ? Not even. What learning has he gained ? But, How far has he been able to translate into the visible and tangible realities of a life that idea which was in God's mind on that day in the old year when he was born ? How does the tabernacle which he has built correspond with the pattern which is in the mount ? Ah, somewhere in the universe of God, dear friends — if not among our brethren beside us, i' not by our own hearts — THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. somewhere in the universe, that question is being asked to-day of every one of us who has grown up and left his youth behind him. Moses may, if he will, go on and build a tabernacle to suit himself, and as its self-willed architecture rises, the people may gather around it and call it wonderful, and praise the builder's genius, but God's eye is judging it all the time simply by one standard, simply by its conformity or non-conformity to the pattern which, long before the hewing of the first beam or the weaving of the first curtain, existed in the mount. All this is true not merely of a whole life as a whole, but of each single act or enterprise of life. We have not thought richly or deeply enough about any undertaking unless we have thought of it as an attempt to put into the form of action that which already has existence in the idea of God. You start upon your profession, and your professional career in its perfect conception shines already in God's sight. Already before Him there is the picture of the good physician, the broad-minded merchant, the fair-minded lawyer, the heroic minister, which you may be. You set yourself down to some hard struggle with tempta- tion, and already in the fields of God's knowledge you are walking as possible victor, clothed in white and with the crown of victory upon your THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. head. You build your house, and found your home. It is an attempt to realise the picture of purity, domestic peace, mutual inspiration and mutual comfort, which God sees already. Your friendship which begins to shape itself to-day out of your intercourse with your companion has its pattern in the vast treasury of God's conceptions of what man, with perfect truthfulness and perfect devotion, may be to his brother man. It is not vulgar fate and destiny ; it is not a mere settle ment beforehand by God's foreknowledge of what each man must be and do, so that he cannot escape. The man's will is still free. The man may falsify God's picture of him, he certainly will fall short of it ; but it is the essential truth of the Father comprehending all his children's lives within His own, the infinite nature containing the finite natures in itself and holding in itself their standard. The distinction between ideas and forms is one which all men need to know, which many men so often seem to miss. The idea takes shape in the form, the form expresses the idea. The form, without the idea behind it, is thin and hard The form, continually conscious of its idea, becomes rich, deep, and elastic. He who once gets the sight into that world of ideas which lies unseen behind the world of forms never can lose sight of THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. it again, never can be content with any act of his until he has carried it into that world and matched it with its idea. To the man who is trying to dc just or generous things, but who is perpetually conscious of how imperfect is the justice or the generosity of the things he does, it is a constant incentive and comfort to be sure that somewhere, in God, there is the perfect type and pattern of the thing of which he fails. That certainty at once preserves the loftiness of his standard and saves him from despair. This is the power of ideality, of the unfailing sight of the perfect ideas behind the imperfect form of things. If all that I have said be true, then it would seem as if there ought to be in the world three kinds of men — the men of forms ; the men of limited ideals, or of ideals which are not the highest ; and the men of unlimited ideals, or the highest ideals, which are the ideals of God. And three such kinds of men there are, very distinct and easy of discovery. First, there are the men of forms, the men who, in all their self-questionings about what they ought to do, and in all their judgments about what they have done, never get beyond the purely formal standards which proceed either from the necessity of their conditions or from the accepted precedents of other people. They never get into the regions of ideas at all. THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. How many such men there are ! To them the question of their business life never comes up so high as to mean, " What is the best and loftiest way in which it is possible for this business of mine to be done ?" It never gets higher than to mean, *' How can I best support myself by my business?" or else, "What are the rules and ways of business which are most accepted in the busi- ness world ? " To such men the question of religion never becomes : " What are the intrinsic and eternal relations between the Father God and man the child?" but only, "By what religious observances can a man get into heaven ?" or else, " What is the most current religion of my fellow- men ? " There is no unseen type of things after the pattern of which the seen deed must be shaped. Every deed is single and arbitrary and special, a thing done and to be judged, not by its conformity to some eternal standard of what such a deed ought to be, but simply by its fitness to produce results. Such a man judges a deed like a hatchet, solely by whether it will split wood. The deed no more than the hatchet has any true character, any conformity to or departure from an essential and eternal type. Of course no visions haunt a man like that. He dreams no dreams of finer purity and loftiness which might have given a more subtle and divine success to acts of his which lO THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. L the world calls successful. He lives in a low self-content, and knows no pain or disappointment at his actions unless his act fails of its visible result, or unless other men condemn the method in which he happens to have acted. It would be sad, indeed, to think that there is any man here to-day who has not at least some- times in his life got a glimpse into a richer and fuller and more interesting sort of life than this. There is a second sort of man who does distinctly ask himself whether his deed is what it ought to be. He is not satisfied with asking whether it works its visible result or not, whether other men praise it or not. There is another question still, Does it conform to what he knew before he undertook it that it ought to be ? If it does not, however it may seem successful, however men may praise it, the doer of the deed turns off from it in discontent. If it does, no matter how it seems to fail, no matter how men blame it, he thanks God for it and is glad. Here is a true idealism ; here is a man with an unseen pattern and standard for his work. He lives a loftier, and likewise a more unquiet life. He goes his way with his vision before his eyes. " I know something of what this piece of work ought to have been," he says, " therefore I cannot be satis- fied with it as it is." What is the defect of such THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. II an idealism as that ? It is, that as yet the idea conies only from the man's own self. Therefore, although it lies farther back than the mere form, it does not lie entirely at the back of everything. It is not final ; it shares the incompleteness of the man from whom it springs. It may be born of prejudice and selfishness. It is the source very often of bigotry and uncharitableness and super- stition. These are not seldom the fruits of narrow ideality. The man of no ideas is not a bigot. The man of largest ideas has outgrown bigotry. It is the man who asks for principles, the man who seeks to conform his life to some conception of what life ought to be, but who seeks his pattern no higher and no deeper than his own convictions, it is he who stands in danger of, and very often falls into narrowness and pride and the insolent, uncharitable demand that all men shall shape their lives in the same form as his. Therefore it is that something more is needed, and that only the third man's life is wholly satis- factory. I said that he not merely looked for an idea to which he wanted to conform his life, but he looked for that idea in God. Literally and truly he believes that the life he is to live, the act he is to do, lies now, a true reality, already existent and present, in the mind of God ; and his object, his privilege, i*^ not simply to see how he can live la THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 1. his life in the way which will look best or produce the most brilliant visible result, not simply to see how he can best carry out his own personal idea of what is highest and best, but how he can most truly reproduce on earth that image of this special life or action which is in the perfect mind. This is the way in which he is to make all things ac- cording to the pattern which is in the mount. Does it sound at first as if there were some- thing almost slavish in such a thought as that ? He who thinks so has not begun to apprehend the essential belonging together of the life of God and the life of every man. For man to accept the pattern of his living absolutely from any other being besides God in all the universe would be for him to sacrifice his self and to lose his originality. But for man to find and simply reproduce the picture of his life which is in God is for him not to sacrifice but to find his self For the man is in God. The ideal, the possible perfection of everything that he can do or be, is there in God ; and to be original for any man is not to start aside with headlong recklessness and do what neither brother- man, nor God dreamed of our doing ; but it is to do with filial loyalty the act which, because God is God, a being such as we are ought to do under the circumstances, in the conditions in which we stand. Because no other L THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 13 being ever was or ever will be just the same as you, and because precisely the same conditions never before have been and never will be grouped about any other mortal life as are grouped around yours, therefore for you cO do and be what you, with your own nature in your own circumstances, ought in the judgment of the perfect mind to do and be, that is originality for you. What quiet independence, what healthy humi- lity, what confident hope there must be in this man who thus goes up to God to get the pattern of his living. To-morrow morning to that man there comes a great overwhelming sorrow. Bereave- ment breaks open his house's guarded door, and the unbroken circle is shattered at what seemed its dearest and safest spot. The man looks about and questions himself — What shall he do, what shall he be in this new terrible life, terrible not least because of its awful newness, which has burst upon him ? Where shall he find the pattern for his new necessity ? Of course he may look about and copy the forms with which the world at large greets and denotes its sorrow, the decent dreadful conventionalities of grief He may alter his dress and moderate his walk and tone, and even hide himself from sight, and so give all his pain its proper form. That does not satisfy him. The world acknowledges that he has borne his grief 14 THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. L most properly, but he is not satisfied. Then, behind all that, he may reason it over with him- self, think out what death means, make his philosophy, decide how a man ought to behave in the terrible shipwreck of his hopes. That is a better thing by all means than the other. But this man does something more. The pattern of his new life is not in the world. It is not in him- self. It is in God. He goes up to find it. There is, lying in God's mind, an image of him, this very man, with this very peculiar nature of his, of him bearing this particular sorrow, and trained by it into a peculiar strength, which can belong to no other man in all the world. That image is a reality in God's soul before it becomes a visible thing in the man's soul living on the earth. To get up, then, into God, and find that image of his grieved and sorrowing life, and then come back and shape his life after it patiently and cheerfully, that is the struggle of the Christian idealist in his sorrow, of the man who tries to make all things according to the pattern which is in the mount. Can we not see what quiet independence, what healthy humility, what confident hope there must be in t«cit man's struggle to live out through his sorrow the new life which his sorrow has made possible ? But now it is quite time for us to ask anothei L THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. l$ question. Suppose that all which we have said is true ; suppose that there is such a pattern of the truest life, and of each truest act of every man lying in God's mind, how shall the man know what that pattern is ? We can see into what a mockery our whole truth might be mis- read. " Yes," one might say, " God has in Himself the true idea of you, but what of that ? How will that help you ? You cannot go up into His mind to find it there. You must go on still blundering and guessing, only trembling to know that at the last you will be judged by a standard of which you could never get a sight while you were working at your life. Look up, poor soul, out of the valley and know that on the top of yonder shining mountain lies folded safe the secret of your life, the oracle which would, if you could read it, solve all your mysteries and tell you just exactly how you ought to live. Look up out of the valley and know that it is there ; and then turn back again into the valley, for in the valley is the home where you must live, and you can never read the oracle which you know is there upon the mountain -top." What mockery could there be like that ? How must the poor man bend his head like a beast and go plodding on, refusing to look at, trying to forget, the moun- tain where his secret lay, and where he must not l6 THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. ^. climb ! Is that the fate of man who knows that in God lies the image and the pattern of his life ? It might seem to be, it has very often seemed to be, but it can never really be to any one who really knows and believes in the Incarnation, the life of the God-Man among men. Do you not see ? Is not Christ the mountain up into which the believer goes, and in which he finds the divine idea of himself As a mountain seems to be the meeting-place of earth and heaven, the place where the bending skies meet the aspiring planet, the place where the sunshine and the cloud keep closest company with the granite and the grass : so Christ is the meeting -place of divinity and humanity ; He is at once the condescension of divinity and the exaltation of humanity; and man wanting to know God's idea of man, any man wanting to know God's idea of him, must go up into Christ, and he will find it there. I would not have that sound to you fanciful and vague, for I am sure that there is in that statement the most sure and practical of truths. It was so in the old days of the visible incarna- tion. See how, when Jesus walked on earth, the men and women who were with Him there were always climbing up into the mountain of His life, and seeing there what God's idea of their lives was. A young man, puzzled with matching L THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 17 commandments, weary of wondering which little corner of duty he should make his own, came up to Christ, came up into Christ, and asked, " Lord, which is the great commandment ? " and instantly, as Christ looked at him and answered him, the man saw a new vision of himself, a vision of a life filled with a passionate love of the Holy One, and so he went back determined not to rest until he had attained all holiness. If he came down from Christ a larger man, giving his whole life thenceforth to the attainment of the love of God, and letting all duty do itself out of the abundance of that love, that was the way in which he did all things according to the pattern which had been shewed to him on the mount. Into that mountain of the Lord went up John Boanerges, to see God's idea of him as the man of love ; and fickle-hearted Peter, to see God's idea of him as the steadfast rock ; and trembling Mary Mag- dalene, to know herself beloved and forgiven. Nay, up that mountain went even Judas Iscariot, far enough to catch sight of God's Judas, of the man resisting temptation and loyally faithful to his Lord. Up that mountain went Pontius Pilate, and for a moment we can see flash before his eyes the ideal of himself, the true Roman, the true man, God's Pilate, brave and honest, unscared by shouting Jews or frowning Csesar, standing by C l8 THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. his convictions and protecting his helpless prisoner against His brutal enemies. Every man who came to Jesus saw in Him the image of his own true self, the thing that he might be and ought to be. Hundreds of them were not ready for the sight, and turned and went their way, to be not what they might be, nor what they ought to be, but what they basely chose to be. But none the less the pattern had been shewed to them in the mount. And so it has been ever since. All kinds of men have found their ideals in Jesus. Entering into Him, the timid soul has seen a vision of itself all clothed in bravery, and known in an instant that to be brave and not to be cowardly was its proper life. The missionary toiling in the savage island, and thinking his whole life a failure, has gone apart some night into his hut and climbed up into Christ, and seen with perfect sureness, though with most complete amaze- ment, that God counted his life a great success, and so has gone out once more singing to his glorious work. Martyrs on the night before their agony ; reformers hesitating at their tasks ; scholars wondering whether the long self-denial would be worth their while ; fathers and mothers, teachers and preachers whose work bad grown monotonous and wearisome, all of these going to Christ have found themselves in Him, have seen L THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 19 the nobleness and privilege of their hard lives, and have come out from their communion with Him to live their lives as they had seen those lives in Him, glorious with the perpetual sense of the privilege of duty, and worthy of the best and most faithful work which they could give. Cannot you go to Christ to-day and find the idea of yourself in Him. It is certainly there. In Christ's thought at this moment there is a picture of you which is perfectly distinct and sepa- rate and clear. It is not a vague blurred picture of a good man with all the special colours washed away, with nothing to distinguish it from any other good man in the town. It is a picture of you. It is you with your own temptations con- quered, and your own type of goodness, different from any other man's in all the world, in all the ages, perfectly attained. If you give up your life to serving and loving Christ, one of the blessings of your consecration of yourself to Him, will be, that in Him there will open to you this pattern of yourself. You will see your possible self as He sees it, and then life will have but one purpose and wish for you, which will be that you may realise that idea of yourself which you have seen in Him. This, then, is the great truth of Christ. The treasury of life, yoi r life and mine, the life of THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. every man and every woman, however different they are from one another, they are all in Him, In Him there is the perfectness of every occupa- tion : the perfect trading, the perfect housekeeping, the perfect handicraft, the perfect school teaching, they are all in Him. In Him lay the complete- ness of that incomplete act which you did yester- day. In Him lay the possible holiness of that which you made actual sin. In Him lies the absolute purity and loftiness of that worship which we this morning have stained so with impurity and baseness. To go to Him and get the perfect idea of life, and of every action of life, and then to go forth, and by His strength fulfil it, that is the New Testament conception of a strong suc- cessful life. How simple and how glorious it is ! We are like Moses, then, — only our privilege is so much more than his. We are like a Moses who at any moment, whenever the building of the tabernacle flagged and hesitated, was able to turn and go up into the mountain and look once more the pattern in the face, and come down strong, ambitious for the best, and full of hope. So any moment we may turn from the poor reality to the great ideal of our own lives, which is in Christ, with one earnest question, " Lord, what wouldst Thou have me to be ? " We may pierce through the clouds and reach the sumnjit, and there, see- 1. THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 21 ing His vision of our possibilities, be freed at once from our brethren's tyranny, and from our own content and sluggishness, and set to work with all our might to fulfil God's image of our lives, to be all that He has shown us that it is possible for us to be, to make all thin^. .:i these valley lives ot ours after the pattern shewed to us in the mount II THE MIND'S LOVE FOR GOD.* •* Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . • , with all thy mind." — Matthew xxii. 37. This is only part of a verse. It is a fragment of the injunction in which Christ laid down to His disciples the whole range and compass of the Christian life. In words which must have seemed to each of them, according to his character and mood, either the imposition of a duty or the offer of a privilege which was large enough to cover and fill all their lives, their Lord had said to them, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The two great com« mandments make one duty. Completely carried out in all their parts, they would make life a ^ Preached at St. Mark's Church, Upper Hamilton Terrace, London, Sunday morning, 13th May 1883. II. THE mind's love FOR GOD. 23 Strong and perfect unit. But, as we study them, ^ it is possible to take their unity apart and fix our 1 thoughts upon a single one of the elements of which it is composed. This is what I want to do this morning ; for there is one part of the great com- prehensive statement of duty which, often as we repeat it, I think that many of us seldom pause to consider and have seldom consciously and con- scientiously tried to work out into life. It is that in which Jesus says, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind." Far more familiar is the thought which is included in the other words, " Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and soul." The affections of the emotional nature we think of very often. That the soul, which is the very seat of admiring wonder and of spiritual sympathy, should glow and burn at the sight of the excellence and love of God, we all see and feel how natural that is. But that the mind must love, that the intellectual nature also has its affections which it must give to God ; this, perhaps, seems to us more strange ; certainly it is less familiar. But yet if it is true, we surely want to under- stand it. If there is one part of our nature which we have been in the habit of thinking either had nothing to do with our religion or else could only deal with our religion in the coldest and hardest 24 THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. n. way, but which, indeed, is capable of burning with its own peculiar fire, surely it will be worth our while to study it as carefully as we can. This is why I ask you to think with me this morning, about the Christian loving God with all his mind. In the first place, then, we want to assure our- selves in general that there is such a power as intellectual affection, and that no man completely and worthily loves any noble thing or person unless he loves it with his mind as well as with his heart and soul. That will not, I think, be very hard to see. Take, for instance, your love for some beautiful scene of nature. There is somewhere upon the earth a lordly landscape which you love. When you are absent from it, you remember it with delight and longing. When you step into the sight of it after long absence, your heart thrills and leaps. While you sit quietly gazing day after day upon it, your whole nature rests in peace and satisfaction. Now, what is it in you that loves that loveliness ? Love I take to be the delighted perception of the excellence of things. With what do you delightedly perceive how excellent is all that makes up that land- scape's beauty, the bending sky, the rolling hill, the sparkling lake, the waving harvest, and the brooding mist ? First of all, no doubt, with your senses. It is the seeing eye, the hearing ear, II, THE mind's love FOR GOD. 15 the sense of feeling which in the glowing cheek is soothed or made to tingle, the sense of smell which catches sweet odours from the garden or the hayfield, — it is these that love the landscape first ; you love it first with all your senses. But next to that what comes ? Suppose that the bright scene is radiant with associations, suppose that by that river you have walked with your most helpful friend ; upon that lake you have floated and frolicked when you were a boy ; across that field you have guided the staggering plough ; over that hill you have climbed in days when life was all sunshine and breeze. That part of you which is capable of delightedly per- ceiving these associations as they shine up to you from the glowing scenery, perceives them with delight and takes the landscape into its affection. You love the scene with all your heart. But yet again, suppose a deeper faculty in you perceives the hand of God in all this wondrous beauty; suppose a glad and earnest gratitude springs up in you and goes to meet the meadow and the sky ; suppose that all seems to tell to some deep listening instinct in you that it was all made for you, and made by one who loved you ; suppose that it all stands as a rich symbol of yet richer spiritual benefits of which you are aware ; what then ? Does not another part of you spridg up 26 THE mind's love FOR GOD. II. and pour out its affection, your power of rever- ence and gratefulness ; and so you love the land- scape then with all your soul. Or yet again, if the whole scene appears to tempt you with in- vitations to work : the field calling on you to till it, and the river to bridge it, and the hill to set free the preciousness of gold or silver with which its heart is full and heavy ; to that too you respond with your power of working ; and then you love the scene with all your will, or all your strength. And now, suppose that, beyond all these, another spirit comes out from the landscape to claim another yet unclaimed part of you ; suppose that unsolved problems start out from the earth and from the sky. Glimpses of relationships between things and of qualities in things flit before you, just letting you see enough of them to set your curiosity all astir. The scene which cried before, " Come, admire me," or " Come, work on me," now cries, " Come, study me." What hangs the stars in their places and swings them on their way ; how the earth builds the stately tree out of the petty seed ; how the river feeds the cornfield ; where lie the metals in the mountains — these, and a hundred other questions, leap out from the picture before you and, pressing in, past your senses and your emotions and your practical powers, will not rest till they have found out youf II. THE mind's love FOR GOD. 27 intelligence. They appeal to the mind, and the mind responds to them ; not coldly, as if it had nothing to do but just to find and register their answers but enthusiastically, perceiving with de- light the excellence of the truths at which they point, recognising its appropriate task in their solution, and so loving the nature out of which they spring in its distinctive way. Is not this clear ? Is it not manifestly true that, besides the love of the senses, and the love of the heart, and the love of the soul, and the love of the strength, there is also a love of the mind, without whose entrance into the complete- ness of the loving man's relation to the object of his love his love is not complete ? Think of the patriot's love for his land. Is it complete until the great ideas which lie at the basis of the country's life have appealed to the patriot's in- tellect, and his mind has enthusiastically recog- nised their truth and majesty ? Is your greatest friend contented with your love before you have come to love him with all your mind ? Will any fondness for his person, or association with his habits, or gratitude for his kindness, make up for the absence of intellectual sympathy, for a failure of your understanding to grasp the truths by which he lives ? Everywhere we find our assur- ances that the mind has its affections and en- 28 THE mind's love FOR GOD. II thusiasms, that the intellect is no cold-hearted monster who only thinks and judges, but that it glows with love, not merely perceiving, but de- lighted to perceive, the beauty of the things with which it has to do It would be strange indeed if it were not so ; strange indeed if the noblest part of us were in- capable of the noblest action ; strange indeed if, while our senses could thrill and our hearts leap with affection, the mind must go its way in pure indifference, making its great discoveries with no emotion for the truths which it discovered, and for the men in whom those truths were uttered. But it is not so. The intellect can love. The beine who has intellect does not love perfectly unless his intellect takes part in his loving. We know that God loves man. The first article of all our faith in Him, next to His existence, is that He is no cold passive observer or manager of what goes on upon the earth, but that He loves the world and man in whom the deepest interest of the world resides. But can we think about God's love and not feel ever present as an element in it the working of the infinite mind as well as of the perfect heart ? There is moral approbation, there is the father's tenderness, there is delight in the beauty of a good character. But the love on which we rest, and from which our most mighty II. THE mind's love FOR GOD. 29 inspirations come, is surely not complete until there also is in it the delight of the perfect intellect in the fitness of things, and joy in the adaptaton of part to part, in the perfect sight of all the absolute harmony of laws and forces of which the little stray glimpses which we catch give the world a new sort of dearness in our eyes, and make us glow with enthusiasm as we, with our small judg- ments, speak God's words after Him and call it Good. I know that I appear, as I speak thus, to separate into parts that which does really work as one unit. A being who completely loves some- thing which is completely worthy of his love does not analyse himself with any such analysis as this which we have made. His affection is the affec- tion of the one whole man. But when we force ourselves to analyse, I am sure we come to this, that the mind has its true distinctive power of affection, and that there is not a perfectness of love until that giant of the nature is present glow- ing with delight in truth. No doubt men's minds differ from one another exceedingly in their capacity of affection. As we enter into the society of the great masters of human thought, it is a difference which we feel at once. Some great thinkers seem to deal virith the things of which they think in passionless calmness It 30 THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. IL seems as if they flung the truths they find abroad and cared no more for them, as the machine flings out the nailj it makes. They see::i to be almost like machinery which you can set at work on any material. But always there is another class of students and thinkers whose whole intellectual action is alive and warm. They love the truth they deal with. About such men there always is a charm peculiar to themselves. They evidently have a joy in their own work, and they make other people share their joy. We know such men at once. We are certain that the minds of the great theologians, from Paul to Maurice, loved their truths. We are sure that Shakespeare's intellect had an affection for its wonderful creations. The highest glory of the great students of natural science to-day is in the glowing love of which ^ ;^ their minds are full for Nature and her truths. It ^ a is the necessity of any really creative genius. It ^ ^ is the soul of any true artistic work. Without it ^ !^ the most massive structures of human thought are as dead and heavy as the pyramids. With it the slightest product of man's mind springs into life, and, however slight it be, compels and fascinates attention. I am sure that there is no wise and thoughtful teacher of yo'ing people whose whole experience has not borne witness often to what I am saying. II. THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. 3 1 that the mind has a power of directly loving truth which must be awakened before the learner is leally able to do his best work. You tell your scholar that he must study because his parents wish it, because he ought to be equal to his fellow- scholars, because he will be poor and dishonoured if he is ignorant. These motives are good, but they are only the kindling under the fire. Not until an enthusiasm of your scholar's own intellect begins and he loves the books you offer him with his mind, because of the way they lay hold of his power of knowing them ; not until then has the wood really caught and your fire truly begun to burn. To that end every true teacher must devote himself, and not count his work fairly begun till that is gained. When that is gained ihe scholar is richer by a new power of loving, the power of loving with his intellect, and he goes on through life, carrying in the midst of all the sufferings and disappointments which he meets a fountain of true joy in his own mind which can fill him with peace and happiness when men about him think that he has only dreariness and poverty and pain. But now it is quite time to turn to Christ's commandment. I hope that we shall find that ^hat we have been saying will make it clearer and stronger to us. Christ bids His disciples to love God with all their minds. As we hear His words 3* THE mind's love FOR COD. IL we know that He is speaking for God. Near to God as He is in sympathy, one with God as He is in nature, we are sure that He is able to tell us what God wants of His children. And the glory of this part of His commandment, which we have chosen for our study, seems to me to be in this assurance which it gives us that God, the Father of men, is not satisfied if His children give Him simply gratitude for His mercies or the most loyal obedience to His will ; but that He wants also, as the fulfilment of their love to Him, the enthusiastic use of their intellects, intent to know everything that it is possible for men to know about their Father and His ways. That is what, as I think we have seen, is meant by loving God with the mind. And is there not something sublimely beautiful and touching in this demand of God that the noblest part of His children's nature should come to Him? " Understand me! understand me!" He seems to cry ; " I am not wholly loved by you unless your understanding is reaching out after my truth, and with all your powers of thoughtful- ness and study you are trying to find out all that you can about my nature and my ways." If we rightly interpret God when we seem to hear Him saying such words as these, then there must follow a conviction which certainly ought to bring comfort and incitement at once to many IL THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. 33 souls. It is that it is both man's privilege and duty to reason and think his best about God and the things of God, and that worse than any blunders or mistakes which any man may make in his religious thinking is the abandonment of religious thought altogether, and the consignment of the infinite interests of man to the mere region of feeling and emotion. If you would know how needful that conviction is, you have only to listen to the strange way in which many people, both believers and unbelievers, talk about God and about religion. Hear what is the tone of man^' who call themselves believers. I go to a man who stands holding his Bible clasped with both hands upon his breast. I say to him, " Tell me about that book ! What is it ? Where did it come from ? What is it made up of? How do its parts belong together? What is the ground of its authority ? Why do you love it so ? " And he turns round to me and says, " I will not ask, I will not hear questions like these ! I love this book with all my heart ! It has helped me. It has helped my fathers. When its promises speak to me I am calm. When its cry summons me I am brave. I will obey it and I will not question it. I love it with all my heart and soul and strength." I see another man prostrate at the feet of God 34 THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. He knows that God is standing over him. He feels the shadow of the outstretched hand. He hears a voice which takes his will captive. I say to him, " Tell me about God. Try to explain to me what is His nature. Let me understand in some degree how He comes into communication with men's souls." And the grieved worshipper looks up almost in anger, and cries, " Away with such questions ! You must not understand. You must not try to understand ; you must only listen, and worship, and obey." I see the soul which Christ has helped, the man for whom all the green earth is different be- cause of the Divine feet that trod it once. I say to Him, " Let us see if we can know anything about the Incarnation. What has this coming of God among men in the wonderful life of His Son to do with that sonship of all men to God, which is an everlasting fact ? How did He who came mean to deal with all the remote anticipations of His coming, and cravings after Him, of which the whole religious history of man is full ? What were the wonderful works that fell from His hands, which V j: call miracles?" I ask such questions in the profoundest reverence ; and again the lover of Christ turns off from me and says re- bukingly, " You must not ask ; Christ is above all questions. He bears His own witness to the soul II. THE MIND S LO VE FOR GOD. 35 He helps. The less," even so some will speak of Him, " the less I understand of Him the more I love Him." Yet once again I speak to the saint at His sacrament. I beg of him to let me know what that dear and lofty rite means to him ; what are the perpetual faculties and dispositions of our human nature to which it appeals ; how it is that he expects to receive his Saviour there. And he cries, " Hush ! you must not rationalise. It is a mystery. No man can tell. The reason has no function here." You will not misunderstand me, I am sure. You will not think that I disparage in the least degree the noble power of unreasoning love. The Bible, God, Christ, the Sacraments, the Church ; these great realities cannot exist without finding out men's hearts, and winning them, and giving precious blessings through the adoration and emotion which they evoke. But what I want to say most earnestly is this, that each of the men I have described, with whatever other parts of him- self he loves the object of his affection, does not love it with his mind ; that, therefore, his affection is a crippled thing ; and that if it be possible for him to bring his intelligence to bear upon his faith, t3 see the reasonableness which is at the heart of every truth, to discriminate between the 36 THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. ii. true and the false forms of belief, to recognise how Christian truth is bound up with all the truth of which the world is full, and so to understand in some degree what now already he adores ; he will, without losing in the least his adoration, gain a new delight in a perception of the beauty of his truth upon another side ; his relation to it will be more complete ; it will become more truly his ; and his whole life will more completely feel its power. There are Christians all about us who fear to bring their minds to bear upon their religion lest their hearts should lose their hold upon it. Surely there is something terrible in that. Surely it im- plies a terrible misgiving and distrust about their faith. They fear to think lest they should cease to love. But really it ought to be out of the heart of their thinking power that their deepest love is born. There is a love with most imper- fect knowledge. The highest love which man can ever have for God must still live in the com- pany of a knowledge which is so partial that, looked at against the perfect light, it will appear like darkness. But yet it still is true that the deeper is the knowledge the greater becomes the possibility of love. They always have loved God best, they are loving God best to-day, who gaze upon Him with wide-open eyes ; who, conscious II. THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. 37 of their ignorance and weakness, more conscious of it the more they try to know, yet do try with all the powers He has given them, to understand all that they possibly can of Him and of His ways. I said that the unbeliever as well as the believer needed to recognise, and often failed to recognise, the true place of the mind and thinking powers in religion. Let me tell you what I mean by that. There is a curious way of talking which seems to me to have grown strangely common of late among the men who disbelieve in Christianity. It is patronising, and quietly insulting ; it takes for granted that the Christian's faith has no real rea- son at its heart, nor any trustworthy grounds for thinking itself true. At the same time it grants that there is a certain weak side of human nature, where the reason does not work, where everything depends on sentiment and feeling, where not what is true, but what is beautiful and comforting and reassuring is the soul's demand ; and that side of the nature it gives over to religion. Because that side of the nature is the most prominent part, and indeed sometimes seems to be the whole, of weaker kinds of men and women, it accepts the necessity of religion for these weak people, and does not desire its immediate extinction ; only it must not pretend to be a reasonable thing. Theology must not call itself a science, and Faith must know it is 38 THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. K. a dream. " Yes, be religious if you will," this spirit cries, " only do not imagine that your intel- lect has anything to do with it ! Be religious ; dwell on the beauty of the sacred past ; let your lives walk in the twilight of imaginary cloisters ; picture to yourselves what the world would be if there were a God ; weep over the legendary woes of Jesus ; dream of immortal life ; give yourself up to rapturous emotions, whose source is largely physical ; nay, if you will, be stirred by your dreams to noble and self-sacrificing work — do all this and be made happier. Yes, perhaps be made better — if there are such things as good and bad — by doing it ; only, do not for a moment think that the mind, the reason, has anything to do with it at all. It is pure sentimentality. Religion is a thing of feelings and of fancies altogether." So pityingly, patronisingly, and insultingly talks many an unbeliever. Nay, strange as it may seem, there are some men whose minds are wholly sceptical of Christian truth, who yet allow themselves a sort of religion on the weaker side. They let their emotions be religious, while they keep their minds in the hard clear air of disbelief; the heart may worship, while the brain denies. I will not stop to ask the meaning of this last strange condition, interesting as the study might be made. I only want you all to feel how thoroughly Christianity II. THE mind's love FOR GOD. 39 is bound to reject indignantly this whole treatment of itself. Just think how the great masters ol religion would receive it ! Think of David and his cry — " Thy testimonies are wonderful. I have more understanding than my teachers, for thy testimonies are my study." Think of Paul — 'O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God." Think of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Milton, Edwards, and a hundred more, the men whose minds have found their loftiest inspira- tion in religion, how would they have received this quiet and contemptuous relegation of the most stupendous subjects of human thought to the region of silly sentiment ? They were men who loved the Lord their God with all their minds. The noble relation of their intellects to Him was the supreme satisfaction of their lives. We cannot imagine them for a moment as yielding up that great region of their lives in which their minds delighted in the study and attainment of His truth. There are ignorant saints who come very near to God, and live in the rich sunlight of His love ; but none the less for that is their ignorance a de- traction from their sainthood. There are mystics who, seeing how God outgoes human knowledge, choose to assume that Gcd is not a subject of human knowledge at all ; tiiat His works are dis- 40 THE MINDS LOVE FOR GOD. IL tinct in kind from any of which we know, prompted by other motives, and proceeding upon principles entirely unintelligible to our reason. Such mystics may mount to sublime heights of unreasoning con- templation, but there is an incompleteness in their love ; because they rob one part of their nature of all share in their approach to God. Their first assumption is not true ; their starting-point is wrong. God's ways are not as our ways. More vast, infinitely more vast in size than ours, they stretch beyond us, as the ocean stretches beyond the little pool of water which it has left, separated from and yet united to itself, behind the extended arm of the outreaching shore. But yet, because we are made in the image of God, His ways aie of the same kind as ours, and we may know very much about them as you may know much about the ocean from the study of the waters of the bay, and from the sight of how the tides sweep into it and out again. There is no principle involved in the Atonement of Christ that is not included in its essence in the most sacred relations between man and man. The Bible opens new beauties and depths to any man who studies its history, its geography, its language, with the same intelligence with which men study other books. The Church is an institution built o" men, and a knowledge of human nature throws perpetual light upon its II. THE MI\d'S love FOR GOD. 41 character and its hopes. Everywhere, to think that divine truth Hes beyond or away from the intelligence of man, is at once to make divine truth unreal and unpractical, and to condemn the human intelligence to dealing not with the highest, but only with the lower themes. I have pled with you to-day for the use of your intellects in matters of religion. By them you must discriminate between the false and the true. You have no other faculty with which to do that necessary work. You cannot know that one idea is necessarily true because it seems to help you, nor that another idea is false because it wounds and seems to hinder you. Your mind is your faculty for judging what is true ; and only by the use of your thoughtful intellect, too, can you pre- serve your faith in the attacks which come against it on every side. However it may have been in other days, however it may seem to be to-day, in the days which are to come — the days in which the younger people who hear me now will live — there will be ever-increasing demand for thought- ful saints ; for men and women, earnest, lofty, spiritual, but also full of intelligence, knowing the meaning and the reasons of the things which they believe, and not content to worship the God to whom they owe everything with less than their whole nature. 42 THE mind's love FOR GOD. I appeal to you, young Christian people, to be ready for that coming time, with all its high de* mands. I appeal to you upon the highest grounds. Love God with all your mind, because your mind, like all the rest of you, belongs to Him, and it is not right that you should give Him only a part to whom belongs the whole. When the procession of your powers goes up joyfully singing to worship in the temple, do not leave the noblest of them all behind to cook the dinner and to tend the house. Give your intelligence to God. Know all that you can know about Him. In spite of all disap- pointment and weakness, insist on seeing all that you can see now through the glass darkly, so that hereafter you may be ready when the time for seeing face to face shall come ! May God stir some of us to-day to such ambi- tion, to the consecration of our minds to Him ! III. THE FIRE AND THE CALF.* •* So they gave it me : then I cast it into the fire and there came out this calf." — Exodus xxxii. 24. In the story from which these words are taken we see Moses go up into the mountain to hold communion with God, While he is gone the Israelites begin to murmur and complain. They want other gods, gods of their own. Aaron, the brother of Moses, was their priest. He yielded to the people, and when they brought him their golden earrings he made out of them a golden calf for them to worship. When Moses came down from the mountain he found the people deep in their idolatry. He was indignant. First he destroyed the idol, " He burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it." Then he turned to Aaron. " What did ^ Preached at Christ Church, Lancaster Gate, London, Sunday morning, 27th May 1883. 44 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. Ill this people unto thee," he said, " that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them ? " And Aaron meanly answered, " Let not the anger of my lord wax hot : thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief. For they said unto me. Make us gods, which shall go before us. . . . And I said unto them. Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me : then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf." That was his mean reply. The real story of what actually happened had been written earlier in the chapter. When the people brought Aaron their golden earrings " he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf : and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." That was what really happened, and this is the descrip- tion which Aaron gave of it to Moses : " So they gave it me : then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf." Aaron was frightened at what he had done. He was afraid of the act itself, and he was afraid of what Moses would say about it. Like all timid men, he trembled before the storm which he had raised. And so he tried to persuade Moses, and perhaps in some degree even to per- suade himself, that it was not he that had done iiL THE FIRE AND THE CALF. 45 this thing. He lays the blame upon the furnace. "The fire did it," he declares. He will not blankly face his sin, and yet he will not tell a lie in words. He tells what is literally true. He had cast the earrings into the fire, and this call had come out. But he leaves out the one im- portant point, his own personal agency in it all ; the fact that he had moulded the earrings into the calf's shape, and that he had taken it out and set it on its pedestal for the people to adore. He tells it so that it shall all look automatic. It is a curious, ingenious, but transparent lie. Let us look at Aaron's speech a little while this morning, and see what it represents. For it does represent something. There never was a speech more true to one disposition of our human nature. We are all ready to lay the blame upon the furnaces. " The fire did it," we are all of us ready enough to say. Here is a man all gross and sensual, a man still young who has already lost the freshness and the glory and the purity of youth. He is profane ; he is cruel ; he is licentious ; all his brightness has grown lurid ; all his wit is ribaldry. You know the man. As far as a man can be, he is a brute. Suppose you question that man about his life. You expect him to be ashamed, to be repentant. There is Dot a sign of anything like that ! He says, " I 46 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. TO. am the victim of circumstances. What a corrupt, Hcentious, profane age this is in which we live ! When I was in college I got into a bad set. When I went into business I was surrounded by bad influences. When I grew rich, men flattered me. When I grew poor, men bullied me. The world has made me what I am, this fiery, passionate, wicked world. I had in my hands the gold of my boyhood which God gave me. Then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf." And so the poor wronged miser- able creature looks into your face with his bleared eyes and asks your pity. Another man is not a profligate, but is a miser, or a mere business machine. " What can you ask of me," he says, " this is a mercantile community. The business man who does not attend to his business goes to the wall. I am what this intense commercial life has made me. I put my life in there, and it came out this." And then he gazes fondly at his golden calf, and his knees bend under him with the old long habit of worshipping it, and he loves it still, even while he abuses and disowns it. And so with the woman of society. " The fire made me this," she says of her frivolity and pride. And so of the politician and his selfishness and par- tisanship. " I put my principles into the furnace, and this came out." And so of the bigot and III. THE FIRE AND THE CALF. 47 his bigotry, the one-sided conservative with his stubborn resistance to all progress, the one-sided radical with his ruthless iconoclasm. So of all partial and fanatical men. " The furnace made us," they are ready to declare. " These times compel us to be this. In better times we might have been better, broader men ; but now, behold. God put us into the fire, and we came out this." It is what one is perpetually hearing about dis- belief. " The times have made me sceptical. How is it possible for a man to live in days like these and yet believe in God and Jesus and the Resurrection. You ask me how I, who was brought up in the faith and in the Church, became a disbeliever. Oh, you remember that I lived five years here," or " three years there." " You know I have been very much thrown with this set or with that. You know the temper of our town. I cast myself into the fire, and I came out this." One is all ready to understand, my friends, how the true soul, struggling for truth, seems often to be worsted in the struggle. One is ready to have tolerance, respect, and hope for any mac who, reaching after God, ts awed by God's immensity and his own littleness, and falls back crushed and doubtful. His is a doubt which is born in the secret chambers of his own per- sonal conscientiousness. It is independent of hia v/ 48 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. IIL circumstances and surroundings. The soul which has truly come to a personal doubt finds it hard to conceive of any ages of most implicit faith in which it could have lived in which that doubt would not have been in it. It faces its doubt in a solitude where there is none but it and God. All that one understands, and the more he understands it the more unintelligible does it seem to him, that any earnest soul can really lay its doubt upon the age, the set, or the society it lives in. No ; our age, our society is what, with this figure taken out of the old story of Exodus, we have been calling it. It is the furnace. Its fire can set and fix and fasten what the man puts into it. But, properly speaking, it can create no character. It can make no truly faithful soul a doubter. It never did. It never can. Remember that the subtlety and attractive- ness of this excuse, this plausible attributing of power to inanimate things and exterior conditions to create what only man can make, extends not only to the results which we see coming forth in ourselves ; it covers also the fortunes of those for whom we are responsible. The father says of his profligate son whom he has never done one wise or vigorous thing to make a noble and pure- minded man : " I cannot tell how it has come. It has not been my fault. I P»-:t him into the III.1 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. 49 world and this came out" The father whose faith has been mean and selfish says the same of his boy who is a sceptic. Everywhere there is this cowardly casting ofif of responsibilities upon the dead circumstances around us. It is a very hard treatment of the poor, dumb, helpless world which cannot answer to defend itself It takes us as we give ourselves to it. It is our minister fulfilling our commissions for us upon our own souls. If we say to it, " Make us noble," it does make us noble. If we say to it, " Make us mean," it does make us mean. And then we take the nobility and say, " Behold, how noble I have ..^ made myself" And we take the meanness and say, " See how mean the world has made me." You see, I am sure, how perpetual a thing the temper of Aaron is, how his excuse is heard every- where and always. I need not multiply illustra- tions. But now, if all the world is full of it, the v next question is, What does it mean ? Is it mere pure deception, or is there also delusion, self- deception in it ? Take Aaron's case. Was he simply telling a lie to Moses and trying to hide the truth from his brother whom he dreaded, when he said, " I cast the earrings into the fire, and this calf came out " ? Or was he in some dim degree, in some half-conscious way, deceiving him- self? Was he allowing himself to attribute some E 50 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. [ill. power to the furnace in the making of the caJf ? Perhaps as we read the verse above in which it is so distinctly said that Aaron fashioned the idol with a graving tool, any such supposition seems incredible. But yet I cannot but think that some degree, however dim, of such self-deception was in Aaron's heart. The fire was mysterious. He was a priest. Who could say that some strange creative power had not been at work there in the heart of the furnace which had done for him what he seemed to do for himself There was a human heart under that ancient ephod, and it is hard to think that Aaron did not succeed in bringing himself to be somewhat imposed upon by his own words, and hiding his responsibility in the heart of the hot furnace. But however it may have been with Aaron, there can be no doubt that in almost all cases this is so. Very rarely indeed does a man excuse himself to other men and yet remain absolutely unexcused in his own eyes. When Pilate stands washing the responsibility of Christ's murder from his hands before the people, was he not feeling himself as if his hands grew cleaner while he washed ? When Shake- speare paints Macbeth with the guilty ambition which was to be his ruin first rising in his heart, you remember how he makes him hide his new- IxDrn purpose to be king even from himself, and rii.] THE FIRE AND THE CALF. 51 pretend that he believes that he is willing to accept the kingdom only if it shall come to him out of the working of things, for which he is not responsible, without an effort of his own. '* If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir." That was the first stage of the growing crime which finally was murder. Often it takes this form. Often the very way to help ourselves most to a result which we have set before our- selves is just to put ourselves into a current which is sweeping on that way, and then lie still and let the current do the rest ; and in all such cases it is so easy to ignore or to forget the first step, which was that we chose that current for our resting- place, and so to say that it is only the drift of the current which is to blame for the dreary shore on which at last our lives are cast up by the stream. Suppose you are to-day a scornful man, a man case-hardened in conceit and full of disbelief in anything generous or supernatural, destitute of all enthusiasm, contemptuous, supercilious. You say the time you live in has made you so. You point to one large tendency in the community which always sets that way. You parade the specimens of enthusiastic people whom you have known who have been fanatical and sillv You tell me what 52 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. [in your favourite journal has been saying in your ears every week for years. You bid me catch the tone of the brightest people whom you live among, and then you turn to me and say, " How could one live in such an atmosphere and not grow cynical ? Behold, my times have made me what I am." What 'does that mean ? Are you merely J trying to hide from me, or are you also hiding from yourself, the certain fact that you have chosen that special current to launch your boat upon, that you have given your whole attention to certain kinds of facts and shut your eyes to certain others, that you have constantly valued the brightness which went to the depreciation of humanity and despised the urgency with which a healthier, spirit has argued for the good in man and for his ever- lasting hope ? Is it not evident that you yourself have been able to half forget all this, and so when the stream on which you launched your boat at last drives it upon the beach to which it has been flowing all the time, there is a certain lurking genuineness in the innocent surprise with which you look around upon the desolate shore on which you land, and say to yourself, " How unhappy I am that I should have fallen upon these evil days, in which it is impossible that a man should genuinely respect or love his fellowmen " ? For there are currents flowing always in alJ ni.] THE FIRE AND THE CALF. 53 bad directions. There is a perpetual river flowing towards sensuality and vice. There is a river flow- ing perpetually towards hypocrisy and religious pretence. There is a river always running towards scepticism and infidelity. And when you once have given yourself up to either of these rivers, then there is quite enough in the continual pres- sure, in that great movement like a fate beneath your keel, to make you lose the sense and remem- brance that it is by your own will that you are there, and only think of the resistless flow of the river which is always in your eyes and ears. This is the mysterious, bewildering mixture of the con- sciousness of guilt and the consciousness of misery in all our sin. We live in a perpetual confusion of self-pity and self-blame. We go up to the scaffolds where we are to suffer, half like culprits crawling to the gallows and half like martyrs proudly striding to their stakes. When we think of what sort of reception is to meet us in the other world as the sum and judgment of the life we have been living here, we find ourselves ready, according to the moment's mood, either for the bitterest denunciation, as of souls who have lived in deliberate sin ; or for tender petting and refresh- ment, as of souls who have been buffeted anjd knocked about by all the storms of time, and for whom now there ought to be soft beds in eternity. 54 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. [ni. The confusion of men's minds about the judg- ments of the eternal world is only the echo of their confusion about the responsibilities of the life which they are living now. Suppose there is a man here this morning who committed a fraud in business yesterday. He did it in a hurry. He did not stop to think about it then. But now, here, in this quiet church, with everything calm and peaceful round him, with the words of prayer which have taken God for granted sinking into his ears, he has been thinking it over. How does it look to him ? Is he not certainly sitting in the mixture of self-pity and self-reproach of which I spoke ? He did the sin, and he is sorry as a sinner. The sin did itself, and he is sorry as a victim. Nay, perhaps in the next pew to him, or perhaps in the same pew, or perhaps in the saiie body, there is sitting a man who means to do a fraud to-morrow. In him too is there not the same confusion ? One moment he looks it right in the face and says, " To-morrow night I shall despise myself" The next moment he is quietly thinking that the sin will do itself and give him all its advantage, and he need not interfere " If chance will make me cheat, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir." Both thoughts are in his mind, and if he has III.] THE FIRE AND THE CALF. 55 listened to our service, it is likely enough that he has found something in it — something even in the words of the Bible — for each thought to feed upon. I own this freely, and yet I do believe, and I call you to bear me witness, that such self-decep- tion almost never is absolutely complete. We feel its incompleteness the moment that any one else attempts to excuse us with the same excuse with which we have excused ourselves. Suppose that some one of the Israelites who stood by had spoken up in Aaron's behalf and said to Moses, * Oh, he did not do it. It was not his act. He only cast the gold into the fire, and there came out this calf" Must not Aaron as he listened have felt the wretchedness of such a telling of the story, and been ashamed, and even cried out and claimed his responsibility and his sin ? Very often it is good for us to imagine some one say- ing aloud in our behalf what we are silently saying to ourselves in self-apology. We see its thinness when another hand holds it up against the sun, and we stand off and look at it. If I might turn again to Shakespeare and his wonderful treasury of human character, there is a scene in Hamlet which exactly illustrates what I mean. The king has determined that Hamlet must die, and is just sending him off upon the voyage from which he ^ 56 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. (llL means that he is never to return. And the king has fully explained the act to his ovvn conscience, and accepted the crime as a necessity. And then he meets the courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guilden- stern, who are to have the execution of the base commission. And they, like courtiers, try to repeat to the king the arguments with which he has convinced himself One says — " Most holy and religious fear it is To keep those many many bodies safe That live and feed upon your majesty." And the other takes up the strain and says — " The single and peculiar life is bound. With all the strength and armour of the mind. To keep itself from 'noyance ; but much more That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest The lives of many." They are the king's own arguments. With them he has persuaded his own soul to tolerate the murder. But when they come to him from these other lips, he will none of them. He cuts them short. He cannot hear from others what he has said over and over to himself " Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy voyage," So he cries out and interrupts them. Let the deed be done, but let not these echoes of his self- excuse parade before him the way in which he is trifling with his own soul. III.] THE FIRE AND THE CALF, 5f So it is always. I think of the mysterious judgment-day, and sometimes it appears to me as if our souls would need no more than merely that voices outside ourselves should utter in our ears the very self-same pleas and apologies with which we, here upon the earth, have extenuated our own wickedness. They of themselves, heard in the open air of eternity, would let us see how weak they were, and so we should be judged. Is not that partly the reason why we hate the scene of some old sin ? The room in which we did it seems to ring for ever with the sophistries by which we persuaded ourselves that it was right, and will not let us live in comfortable delusion. Our life there is an anticipated judgment-day. I doubt not that this tendency to self-deception and apology with reference to the sins which they commit differs exceedingly with different men. Men differ, perhaps, nowhere else more than in their disposition to face the acts of their lives and to recognise their own personal part in and re- sponsibility for the things they do. Look, for in- stance, at this Aaron and his brother Moses. The two men are characterised and illustrated by their two sins. The sin of Aaron was a denial or con- cealment of his own personal agency. " I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf" The sin of Moses, you remember, was just the opposite. 58 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. [in. As he stood with his thirsty people in front of the rock in Horeb, he intruded his personal agency where it had no right. " Hear now, ye rebels ; must we fetch you water out of this rock ? " To be sure, in the case of Moses it was a good act of mercy to which he put in his claim, while in Aaron's case it was a wicked act whose responsi- bility he desired to avoid. And men are always ready to claim the good deeds in which they have the smallest share, even when they try to disown the sins which are entirely their own. But still the actions seem to mark the men. Moses is the franker, manlier, braver man. In Aaron the priest there is something in that over- subtle, artificial, complicated character, that power of becoming morally confused even in the midst of pious feeling, that lack of simplicity, and of the disposition to look things frankly in the eye ; in a word, that vague and defective sense of person- ality and its responsibilities which has often in the history of religion made the very name of priestcraft a reproach. Moses is the prophet. His distinct mission is the utterance of truth. He is always simple ; never more simple than when he is most profound ; never more sure of the fun- damental principles of right and wrong, of honesty and truth, than when he is deepest in the mystery of God ; never more conscious of himself and his III.] THE FIRE AND THE CALF. 59 responsibilities than when he is most conscious of God and His power. And this brings me to my last point, which I must not longer delay to reach. If the world is thus full of the Aaron spirit, of the disposition to throw the blame of wrong-doing upon other things and other people, to represent to others, and to our own souls, that our sins do themselves, what is the real spiritual source of such a tendency, and where are we to look to find its cure ? I have just intimated what seems to me to be its source. It is a vague and defective sense of per- sonality. Anything which makes less clear to a man the fact that he, standing here on his few ""x inches of the earth, is a distinct separate being, t^ in whom is lodged a unit of life, with his own soul, his own character, his own chances, his own responsibilities, distinct and separate from any other man's in all the world ; anything that makes all that less clear demoralises a man, and opens the door to endless self-excuses. And you know, surely, how many tendencies there are to- day which are doing just that for men. Every man's personality, his clear sense of himself, seems to be standing to-day where almost all the live forces of the time are making their attacks upon it. It is like a tree in the open field from which every bird carries away some fruit. The enlargement of 6o THE FIRE AND THE CALF. [lit our knovt ledge of the world, the growing tend- ency of men to work in large companies, the increased despotism of social life, the interesting studies of hereditation, the externality of a large part of our action, the rush and competition for the prizes which represent the most material sort of success, the spread of knowledge by which at once all men are seen to know much, and, at the same time, no man is seen to know everything ; all these causes enfeeble the sense of personality. The very prominence of the truth of a universal humanity, in which our philanthropy justly glories, obscures the clearness of the individual human life. Once it was hard to conceive of man, be- cause the personalities of men were so distinct Once people found it hard, as the old saying was, to see the forest for the trees. Now it is just the opposite. To hundreds of people it is almost im- possible to see the trees for the forest Man is so clear that men become obscure. As the Laureate of the century sings of the time which he so A^ell knows : " The individual withers and the race is more and more." These are the special causes^ working in our time, of that which has its general causes in our human nature working everywhere and always. And if this is the trouble, where, then, is the help? If this is the disease, where is the cure? ril.] THE FIRE AND THE CALF. 6l I cannot look for it anywhere short of that great assertion of the human personah'ty which is made when a man personally enters into the power of Jesus Christ. Think of it ! Here is some Aaron of our modern life trying to cover up some sin which he has done. The fact of the sin is clear enough. There is no possibility of concealing that. It stands out wholly undisputed. It is not by denying that the thing was done but by be- clouding the fact that he did it with his own hands, with his own will ; thus it is that the man would cover up his sin. He has been nothing but an agent, nothing but a victim ; so he assures his fellowmen, so he assures himself And now sup- pose that while he is doing that, the great change comes to that man by which he is made a disciple and servant of Jesus Christ. It becomes known to him as a <:ertain fact that God loves him indi- vidually, and is educating him with a separate personal education which is all his own. The clear individuality of Jesus stands distinctly out ^ and says to him, "Follow me!" Jesus stops in front of where he is working just as evidently, with just as manifest intention of calling him as that with which He stopped in front of the booth where Matthew was sitting collecting taxes, and says, " Follow me." He is called separately, and separately he does give himself to Christ. Remem- 62 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. [iii. ber all that is essential to a Christian faith. You cannot blur it all into indistinctness and generality. In the true light of the redeeming Incarnation, every man in the multitude stands out as every blade of grass on the hillside stands distinct from every other when the sun has risen. In this sense, as in many another, this is the true light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world. The Bible calls it a new birth, and in that name too there are many meanings. And among other meanings in it must there not be this — the separateness and personality of every soul in Christ ? Birth is the moment of distinctness. The ^ meanest child in the poorest hovel in the city, who by and by is to be lost in the great whirlpool of human life, here at the outset where his being comes, a new fact, into the crowded world, is felt in his distinctness, has his own personal tending, excites his own personal emotion. When he is born and when he dies, but perhaps most of all when he is born, the commonest, most common- place and undistinguished of mankind asserts the fact of privilege of his separateness. And so when the possession of the soul by Christ is called the " New Birth," one of the meanings of that name is this, that then there is a reassertion of personality, and the soul which had lost itself in the slavery of rii.] THE FIRE AND THE CALF. ' 63 the multitude finds itself again in the obedience of Christ And now what will be the attitude of this man.; with his newly-awakened selfhood, towards that sin which he has been telling himself that his hands did, but that he did not do ? May we not almost say that he will need that sin for his self- identification ? Who is he ? A being whom Christ has forgiven, and then in virtue of that forgiveness made His servant. All his new life dates from and begins with his sin. He cannot afford to find his consciousness of himself only in the noble parts of his life, which it makes him proud and happy to remember. There is not enough of that to make for him a complete and continuous personality. It will have great gaps if he disowns the wicked demonstrations of his self- hood and says, " It was not I," wherever he has done wrong. No ! Out of his sin, out of the bad, base, cowardly acts which are truly his, out of the weak and wretched passages of his life which it makes him ashamed to remember, but which he forces himself to recollect and own, out of these he gathers the consciousness of a self all astray with self-will which he then brings to Christ and offers in submission and obedience to His perfect will. You try to tell some soul rejoicing in the Lord's salvation that the sins over whose forgive- 64 THE FIRE AND THE CALF. [lit ness by its Lord it is gratefully rejoicing, were not truly its ; and see what strange thing comes. The soul seems to draw back from your assurance as if, if it were true, it would be robbed of all its surest confidence and brightest hope. You meant to comfort the poor penitent, and he looks into your face as if you were striking him a blow. And you can see what such a strange sight means. It is not that the poor creature loves those sins or is glad that he did them, or dreams for an instant of ever doing them again. It is only that through those sins, which are all the real experience he has had, he has found himself, and finding himself has found his Saviour and the new life. So the only hope for any of us is in a perfectly honest manliness to claim our sins. " I did it, I did it," let me say of all my wickedness. Let me refuse to listen for one moment to any voice which would make my sins less mine. It is the only honest and the only hopeful way, the only way to know and be ourselves. When we have done that, then we are ready for the Gospel, ready for all that Christ wants to shew us that we may become, and for all the powerful grace by which He wants to make us be it perfectly. MAN'S WONDER AND GOD'S KNOWLEDGE.* •• Thus saith the Lord of hosts : If it be marvellous in the eyes of tha remnant of this people in these days, should it also be marvel- lous in mine eyes? saith the Lord of hosts." — Zechariah yiii. 6. This is a very wonderful age in which we h've. So men are constantly in the habit of saying to each other. So, no doubt, men have always said about their ages. There can hardly ever have been a time which to the men who lived in it did not seem full of emphatic and remarkable differ- ences which distinguished it from all other times, and made it very wonderful and strange. But there is a second sense in which the familiar words might be used, in which no doubt they would peculiarly describe our time. It is a wonderful age not merely in the number of strange unpre- cedented things which are happening in it, the * Preached in Westminster Abbey, Sunday evening, 27th May 1883. F 66 man's wonder AND GOD'S KNOWLEDGE, [iv. strange unprecedented character that belongs to it as a whjle, but also in the prominence of wonder as an element in the view which it takes of itsel£ It is a wonderful age, because it is an age full of wonder. It does not seem as if there ever can have been a time which so stood off and looked at itself, as it were ; a time in which so mmy men lived under the continual sense of the strangeness of their own circumstances ; a time when it entered as such a large element into the formation of the character of a century that that century considered itself to be exceptional and new, unexplained by the centuries which have preceded it, and quite vague as to the results that must follow it in the centuries to come. You will see at once how important such an element must be in the char- acter of any age which possesses it if you remember what it is in an individual. A child who thinks himself singular and different from other children grows up under the power of that thought more than of any other that is in his mind. The kind of effect which it will have on him will depend upon the essential nature he possesses. It will differ very greatly in different children. It will make one child timid and another bold, but always it will be the most effective of all the child's thoughts. And so the age which is always saying to itself, How strange I am ! how new ! how IV.] MAN*S WONDER AND i7i d's KNOWLEDGE. 67 different from all the ages which have gone before ! how bewildering! how surprising!" will carry in that pervading wonder the quality which will in- fluence the characters of the men who live in it more than any other. No doubt according to their different natures the influence is always vari- ous. One man's wonder is delight, and another man's is consternation. One man, the more he wonders, is inspired with hope ; another man sees in the mystery about him nothing but fear. To one man the wonderfulness of his age, its wonderful inventions, wonderful thoughts, wonderful audacity, wonderful mastery of the earth, wonderful types of human character, is a constantly elevating, refining, mellowing power ; to another it is a perpetual paralysis. Some men are made great and brought to their very best ; other men are ruined by it. But whatever be the kind of its effect, it is an element in the life and growth of every man, this wonder at the age he lives in, at the world, at men, and at himself; this wonder which every- where pervades our own wonderful age. And what is the reason that this sense of the wonderfulness of life, this sense of strangeness and mystery everywhere, has such different effects upon different men, brings one man peace and another tumult, brings hope to one and despair to another? No doubt the reason lies deep in the essential 68 man's wonder AND GOD's KNOWLEDGE, [iv. differences that there are between our natures, and cannot wholly be stated. But one cause of the difference, and not the least one, lies here, in the difference of our ideas as to whether there is any being who knows what we are every hour reminded that we do not know, any being in whose eyes this which is strange to us is not strange or bewildering, but perfectly natural and orderly and clear. Two men alike are in the spirit of their time ; they both are men of wonder ; they both confess their ignorance ; they both stand marvel- ling at the quick changes which are flashing all around them, and at the dim mysterious infinity into which the simplest things around them stretch away and where their sight is lost. So far they are alike. But now to one of those men it has been shown, flashed from some sudden lightning which has blazed out of the cloud, or dawning slowly to him out of the very substance of the cloud itself, out of something in the very bosom of the mystery which met the mystery in his own heart and spoke to it in some way ; it has been shown to one of them that there is a Mind which knows what he is so hopelessly powerless to know ; there is a God to whom this strange be- wilderment is not strange. Somewhere there is an eye which looks on all this and feels no wonder, because it looks it through and through and sees IV.] man's wonder and god's knowledge. 69 its first principles and final causes clear as day- light. The other man knows nothing of all this. To him the wonder that his own mind feels runs everywhere. The world is a great snarl and mystery not merely to him but to every intelligence which he conceives of He is like a sailor on a ship that has no captain. Not merely he does not know where the ship is going ; nobody knows ; at least nobody knows whom he knows. Is it not clear how vast the difference must be ? To the one man the darkness is all palpitating with light, the light of a knowledge behind it, the light of God, in whom is no darkness at all. This man's very ignorance becomes the element in him to which God manifests Himself. Through that low and dark door he enters the great high vaulted world of faith. His wonder is the atmo- sphere through which the sun shines on him. The other man carries his wonder as the earth would carry a cloud if there were no sun, first to shine through it and then to promise that it shall ultimately scatter. It cannot help crushing him when m his doubt he knows of no intelligence to which that which is dark to him is bright. He is all helpless in the present, and the future has no promise of escape. Oh, my dear friends, we are too ready to think that God is surprised with this endless surprise and strangeness which come to TO man's wonder and god's knowledge, [nr. us in life. Our only hope of strength and peace lies in knowing that there is one whom nothing disappoints and nothing amazes. He was not disappointed when the good man died ; he was not amazed when thought took such and such a sudden turn and such or such a heresy broke out. Unless we are sure of that our disappointment or amazement must overwhelm us. Wonder is so thoroughly a part of ourselves, and such a con- stant experience, that we can hardly leave out wonder from our thought of any nature, but we know that from the completest nature it must be left out, and some sublime peace of omniscience, totally unknown to us, must come in in its place to make the perfect joy of God. It is high time to turn to our text. Zechariah, speaking to the Jews in their captivity, has been foretelling the restoration of Jerusalem. Some day the great dear sacred city is to shine again upon its holy mountain. It is to be splendid with prosperity and sweet with peace. All the signs of contentment and comfort shall be seen there. " There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof" And then, as if he turned and saw incredulity upon the faces of the IV.] man's wonder and god's knowledge. 71 poor prisoners in Babylon, he cries, " Thus saith the Lord of hosts, If it be marvellous in the eyes of the remnant of this people, shall it also be mar- vellous in my eyes ? saith the Lord of hosts." I do not want to preach about the special promise which Zechariah brought, but you see how in the strong remonstrance with which he meets their incredulity there is the substance of all that I have thus far been saying, " It is all strange to you," God by His prophet says to the captives. " Does that prove that it is strange to me ? You wonder and cannot believe. Do you think I do not see deeper than you do ? There are things which to you are strange which to me are wholly natural. You must not limit my knowledge by your won- der, for if you do how can I give you that richer knowledge which I want to give you through the higher medium of faith ? " I do not want to dwell upon the special story, but only to catch its general idea and see what it means for us. Where we are ignorant, God is wise ; where we stand blindly in the dark, He is in the light ; where we wonder, He calmly knows. " God knows," we sometimes say in a light and flippant tone when some one asks us a question that is too hard for us. " What will become of us in these hard times ? " one poor man says to another, and the answer is, " God kn dws." " Where 72 man's wonder and god's knowledge, [iv. is our country drifting ? " ponder two patriots, and they turn away from one another's ignor- ance with no other light to give each other but just, " Well, God knows." If the words have any true reality they ought to bring the same sort of comfort which Zechariah was trying to give to the captive Hebrews when he said, " If it be marvel- lous in your eyes, shall it also be marvellous in my eyes ? saith the Lord of hosts." When we ask what that comfort is, I think we find it really comprehended under two words. The first is safety, the second is enlargement These words describe two needs of every man's life, and these two needs both find their supply in the assurance that what are wonders and mysteries to us are wholly clear to God, within whose life our life is held. Let me speak of the two in order. I. Remember, then, where so much of the sense of danger, the sense of unsafety, in life comes from. It is not from the things that we see and have known all along, it is from the half- seen forms which hover just upon the borders of reality and unreality — things which evidently are something, but of which we cannot perfectly make out just what they are. At sea, it is not the ship whose shape you perfectly discern, and all whose movements you can follow ; it is the ship that hovers like a dim ghost in the fog, moved by an IV,] man's wonder and god's knowledge. 73 unseen hand — evidently there, but vague and mysterious ; that is the ship of which you fear lest any moment it may strike you. And so (for I am thinking specially about the dangers that beset faith, the dangers of which every thought- ful man or woman is aware in these strange days of ours), it is not the ideas that have been proved as truths and which have taken their places as distinctly-seen parts of human knowledge, it is not those that in these days are making men tremble for their own or for the world's religious faith. Indeed, nothing is more wonderful than to see how, just as soon as any idea has received demonstration, religious faith has always found a place for it, perhaps with some modification of some of the statements which she had made about herself before, but always with a cordial welcome which took the new proved truth into her struc- ture and made it even a buttress or pillar of her strength. It is not these, not the clear-seen and certain truths, which frighten men for the stability of faith. It is the ghostly speculations, the vaguely - outlined suggestions which hover in the misty lights of dim hypothesis. It is the forms which peer out of the just-opened, not yet explored chambers of new sciences. It is the visions which are painted in the glowing words of the poets among the scientists of what their 74 MAN S WONDER AND GOD's KNOWLEDGE, [iv. sciences have not yet done, but what they dream that they may do some day, — these are the thinjjs which make the dim uneasy sense of danger which besets the minds of Christian behevers. Unknown, before unguessed intimacies of connection between the body and the soul of man ; and, correspond- ing to this, before unguessed relationships between the higher and the lower orders of created life ; these are examples of the suggested truths which make men fear for faith. I cannot say how such suggestions may strike other men, but to me the case seems to be this. In the first place, the ultimate result of every deeper insight into the orderliness of nature, however for a time it may seem to stop the inquirer's inquiry short at the fact of order, as if that were a final thing, must be to make more certain the existence of an orderer, to make mankind more sure of God. And if I only can keep sure of Him, then, since His very essence is omniscience, no revelation with regard to His great world can startle or bewilder me, or give me for one moment any thought of danger. Behind all my conceptions and all other men's conceptions of what things are and how they came to be, there always must lie the true fact about things, about what they are and how they came to be. That fact, again, must correspond exactly with the knowledge of the fact which rv.] man's wonder and god's knowledge. 7s is in the supreme intelligence of Him who knows all things exactly and completely. If my con- ception of the fact, however it was reached, differs to-day from His knowledge of the fact, danger must lie in the persistence of that difference, ami not in its being set right. Ignorance is always dangerous, knowledge never is. If any so-called discovery which men are teaching me to-day is really true, God has known it all along. How- ever marvellous it is to me, it is not marvellous to Him. He knew it when He made the mind of man with its capacity of faith and of religion. And now, when He sees you and me trembling for fear lest such or such a theory may gather so much evidence that we cannot reject it, but will have to own it to be true, it seems to be that I can almost feel His presence bending over us and hear Him say, " My children, if it be true, do you not want to believe it ? I have known it all along. By coming to the truth you come to me, who have held the truth in my bosom — nay, by whom the truth is true. Do not be frightened. I cannot be taken by surprise. If it be marvellous in the eyes of the remnant of this people, should it also be marvellous in my eyes." When a man has once heard that voice of God, then there seems to him only one safe, prudent, cautious thing to do, which is to look and listen everywhere for well -proved truth, however new 76 man's wonder AND GOD's KNOWLEDGE, [iv, and unexpected, and to take it with a cordial welcome wherever it is found. I would not have you think, my friends, that I am thinking only of the things about which scholars and theologians are puzzling their minds. To all of you there come new discoveries even in the most common things. You find that some opinion which ycu have thought all wrong has in it some precious elements of truth. You find that some man whom you thought a poor fool, or a base deceiver, is really noble, generous, self-sacri- ficing, wise. You find that some Church which you despised as irregular, or condemned with still bitterer contempt as vulgar and unrefined, is really doing sterling work for God and man. You find that the plan for your soul's education, which you have laid out and taken for granted, is going to prove impossible. Tell me, will it not help you to accept the new knowledge cordially ? — will it not let you escape from your prejudice, and see, not merely that it is safe for you to accept the new knowledge, but also that it is totally unsafe to re- fuse to accept it, if ycj can remember that God has known it all along, and therefore that, in letting go your prejudice and cordially stepping forth into the new light, you are coming nearer to Him ? He who values truth only as the way to God, he who counts his opinions valueless except as they IV. 1 man's wonder and god's knowledge. 77 agree with the infallible judgments of God, and so bring him who holds them into the sympathy of God and keeps him there, he is the man for whom all life is safe, and whose quiet faith faces the changing thoughts and fortunes of the world without a fear. 2. And then, to pass on to our second point, such a man also is free, I have been speaking of this already, for our two points are not so distinct from one another as they seemed. The safety of life and the enlargement or freedom of life must go together. No man is safe who is not free. No man is free who is not safe. But let us turn our thoughts now to this point of the enlargement of a man's life who always feels behind and around his own ignorance the perfect knowledge of God. Our efforts, our action — indeed our whole life of thought and will — is limited by that which we count possible. Only a dreamer busies his brain and wastes his time on that which he believes to be for ever impossible, by its very nature, for any being to do. But it is evident enough that the concep- tion of what is possible enlarges and widens as the quality of being becomes higher ; and so the loftier being is able freely to attempt things which the lower being is shut out from if he lives only in the contemplation of his own powers, and does not look beyond himself A great man comes and stands, like Moses, before a nation of slaves, and jS MAN^S WONDER AND GOD's KNOWLEDGE, [iv. says, ** I will lead you out of your bondage." " It is impossible," comes the answer back from each crushed and broken spirit. Another great man stands on the beach of the uncrossed ocean and says, " I will sail across it, and find land upon the other side." Again the answer rises from a whole unenterprising world, " It is impossible." Another great man says, " The Church is all cor- rupt ; her sins must be defied, and she must be reformed ! " Another cries out at the thought of a nation growing up in ignorance, and says, " Each child must go to school." To all of them the mass of men answer, " Impossible ! " And the reply which the great, bold men make by their lives, if not by their lips, is always the same — " To you it may be impossible, but it is not to me ; if it be marvellous in your eyes, should it also be in mine ? " And soon the slaves are marching out of their bondage with songs, and the ship is sailing westward through the unknown seas, and the re- formation has begun, and the school-houses are blossoming all over the land. Do you not see the freedom to attempt which belongs to the larger vision ? And do you not see also that this free- dom to attempt is something which cannot be con- fined to the great men who see the visions first? When once a great deed has proclaimed the possi- bility, a hundred little ships put out from shore ; a IV.] HAN S WONDER AND GOD'S KNOWLEDGE. 79 hundred little arms are raised to strike the giant wrong. And do you not see, most of all, that if He who sits at the centre of everything, and sees the visions of the universe with the perfect clear- ness of its Maker — if God can really speak and say, *' It seems impossible to you, but it is not im- possible ; it is marvellous in your eyes, but not in mine " — if He can say that of any task which is overwhelming men with its immensity, that word of His must set free the little strength of all of us to strike our little blows, must enlarge our lives, and send them out to bolder ventures with earnest- ness and hope. This seems to me to be what Jesus was always doing. Do you remember how often He said to His disciples such words as " Marvel not at this," or, " With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible " ? He was opening new regions fbi men's hope and action by surrounding their ignorance with the knowledge of His Father. To how many a poor soul, then, and in the ages since, who had dared say no more than, " I will try to earn my dinner, because I know that power is in me," Jesus has spoken and said, " Nay, but you must try to be good, strong, useful, unselfish ; you must try to save your soul, because the God whose child you are, the God whom I show to you, knows that that power is in you" ? 8o MAN S WONDER AND GODS KNOWLEDGE, [iv. There is no end to the illustrations of this idea. Let me select two or three, and speak of them very briefly. Suppose a man has dared to do what men, good and religious men, are always doing : he has tied the fortunes of faith and religion to some special statement of doctrine or some special organisation of religious life. A man has dared to say that some one of the temporary means of faith is essential to the existence of faith upon the earth. No matter what it is. One man says. An infallible Church ; another man says. This theory of inspiration ; another man says. Subscriptions and assuring oaths ; another man says, The Bible in the public schools ; another man says, A loyal belief in everlasting punishment — every man has his test and condition. "Without this," he says, " faith is impossible." Oh, my dear friends, it seems to me sometimes as if, through all these ages of Christendom, God had been trying to teach the Christian world to enlarge its notion of the possibilities of faith by the perpetual revelation of His own. It seems to me to-day that God must be teaching us all that faith, the essential relation of the human soul to His soul, the deep rest of the child's life on the Father's life ; faith, the recep- tion by man of the Word of God, which comes to him in voices as manifold as is the nature of God Himself ; that faith, a thing so deep, essential, and IV.] man's wonder and god's knowledge. 8 1 eternal, is not to be conditioned on the permanence of any one of the temporary forms in which it may be clothed. If the future is like the past, men will come to disbelieve many things which they believe now, and yet they will keep faith in God ; men will come to believe many things which they disbelieve now, and yet they will keep faith in God. The earnest believer says, " I do not see how that can be ; it is too strange ;" out God answers him out of all history — " If it is marvel- lous in your eyes, must it also be marvellous in mine ? " Only he who consents to enlarge his own conception of the possibilities of faith with God's can calmly watch the everlasting growth of revelation, see the old open into the new, and yet know that the truth of Christ is the truth of eter- nity, and that when the soul of God claimed the soul of man in the Incarnation, it took possession of it for ever ; and so Christian faith can never die. There have been no nobler servants of God and of humanity than they whose special mission it has been to teach this truth to men. You will forgive me if, standing here to-night, I pause one instant as I pass to name with reverence and love him who, for ever associated with these venerable walls, must 'Jso stand for ever in the minds of those who «new his life and work as the brave, 82 man's wonder and god's knowledge, [iv. enthusiastic, devoted apostle of the freedom of faith, the freedom of the faithful man who feelc for ever jehind his own ignorance the certainty of God. To discriminate between the eternal sub- stance of Christianity and its tempoi iry forms, to bid men see how often forms had perished and the substance still survived, to make men know the danger of imperfect and false tests of faith, to encourage them to be not merely resigned but glad as they beheld the one faith ever casting its old forms away, and by its undying vitality creating for itself new — this was the noble work which Dean Stanley did for multitudes of grateful souls all over Christendom. He led countless hearts out of the surprise and fear of their own day into the unsur- prised and fearless peace of faith in God. Thus it was that he opened wide the great gates of the Divine Life, and made the way more clear for the children to their Father. Turn, then, to another illustration. What great light our truth throws upon the prospects of a deepened spiritual life for Christendom. If we look around upon the Christian world in the midst of which we live, the sight seems sometimes very strange. It seems as if religious men had come deliberately to the conviction that only a very moderate degree of consecration, of enthusi- asn: of nissionary zeal, of seeking after holiness IV.] man's wonder and god's knowledge, hi were possible in our condition. The Church is secular. The Christian snatches a few moments for his prayer, and then he drowns the whole long day in business. The " religious public " lives not like a leaven in the great community ; rather it is like a bit of ornamental decoration stuck on the outside of the great solid loaf Men have forgotten how to lift up their voices in the assemblies of their fellow-men and tell what God has done for them, or to cry out to Him with eager prayer. Enthusiasm about the most in- finite and exalting things in all the universe has well-nigh gone. You know the picture just as well as I. The Church knows it. The world knows it. What has the Church to say about it ? In one tone or another she and her members are saying on every side of us that if this lukewarm, unenthusiastic, slipshod piety, which is so common, is not the best that we could desire, it is the best which in the present state of things, and for the large majority of men, is possible. "Just think," so seems to me to run the question of our self- excuse — " Just think what this age is, so rational, so business-like ; just think what England is, what America is, so self-respectful, so reasonable, so self-contained ; just think what we are, so prudent, so self-conscious, so unemotional. Can you conceive of us all afire as some commoner 84 man's wonder AND GOD^S KNOWLEDGE, [iv souls in ruder ages have been with the love of God ? Can you imagine us praying aloud ? Can you think of these streets of ours, or even of these churches of ours, ringing with the psalms of men who have forgotten whether other men are listening or not while they pour out the pent- up emotion of redeemed and grateful souls. Is it conceivable that with divine impatience this prudent people should come crowding like some passionate converts of old in other lands begging for the chance to give their riches for the con- version of the world to Christ ? " Is not this what we hear from the silent lips of our repressed and moderate Christianity, my friends ? To put it plainly, is there not a quiet assumption pressing down upon all of us, that in England and America in the nineteenth century Christ's ideal of Chris- tian life is not a possibility? Oh, the great dread- ful weight of that assumption ! How our hearts and our hopes and our love and our joy are all crowded down and crushed beneath its weight ! How it haunts the prayers we pray, the psalms we sing, the sermons we preach, the poor attempts at self-sacrificing help of fellow -man which W6 make ! What can lift off the heavy load ? No- thing but a going forth out of our own narrow idea of our possibility into God's great idea, into Christ's great idea. What a refreshment and free- IV.] man's wonder and god's knowledge. 85 dom there comes when we go out there and know that not one of our assumptions has a moment's tolerance in the mind of our Great Master. He sees these modern towns of ours as truly able to be cities of God as was Jerusalem upon Mount Zion. He sees our life as capable of being filled with eager, ardent, self-sacrificing, self- forgetful piety as the life of any poetic people in any romantic age. Different, of course, our piety must be. A city of God unlike any other city where He has been enthroned, as every city in His realm must be unlike every other, but thoroughly His ; not our own, but bought with a price, and living cnly for Him who bought us, so the Lord and Saviour of us all sees this hard modern life of ours. Not till we see it with His eyes shall we cast off the weight which lies upon us, and by our consecrated lives help the religion of our time and of our land to be what He, our Lord and Saviour, sees it capable of being. The greatest of all applications of our truth, however, is to the personal life. There most of all a man needs the enlargement which comes of always feeling the infinite knowledge of God encompassing his ignorance. How easily with our self-distrust and spiritual laziness we shut down iron curtains about ourselves and limit our own possibilities. And this is truest in religious 86 man's wonder AND GOD'S KNOWLEDGE, [iv. things. There are hundreds of people in this house now hearing me who have, "^ith more or less deliberateness, said to themselves that, how- ever it might be with other men, they never could be enthusiastic Christians. You have looked at yourself. You have seen how quick your per- ceptions are for the things of this world, how slow they are for the things that are unseen and everlasting. You have watched your own joy in self-reliance. You have seen what a proud man you are. You have observed the strange- ness with which everything like an invitation to abandonment, to enthusiasm, to generous self- devotion comes to you ; and you have said, " I never can be a Christian. I never can give up self-reliance, and in repentance pnd obedience and trust ask Christ to save me. I never can make another's will and not my will the law of my life. I never can call all men my brothers because they are Christ's. I cannot picture myself to myself upon my knees." Oh, what multitudes of men have said all that about themselves, and by and by, when Christ had claimed them and they were wholly His, have looked back and seen that it was the old life and not the new life which was strange; that the real wonder was how, with the privilege of prayer, they ever could have lived on prayerless for so many days r nd years ! It would be terrible IV,] man's wonder and god's knowledge. 87 if, while you think and talk thus of yourself, God were not all the time seeing your larger possibili- ties. You cannot picture yourself to yourself upon your knees ! When you say that, I seem to hear His voice replying to you : " If it be mar- vellous in your eyes, should it be also marvellous in mine ? I know you better than you know yourself. You say you have not the power of religion, but I put it into you, and it is there, I never made a man without it ; and oh, my child, I made you. Among all my children capable of humility, capable of faith and tenderness and the sublime strength which comes out of gratitude to a Redeemer for redemption — among all my children capable of these, I did not make you like a stone. I can picture you praying, and when I see that picture I see your true self." It is the father crying out to the prodigal that his place is still kept for him at home. The moment that you believe God and let Him tell you what the true possibilities of your nature are, that moment you are free, and, believing on His word that you can be a Christian, the Christian life opens before you and your feet go in to its peace and strength. It will not do for any one of us to make up his mind that he cannot be any good and noble thing until first he has asked himself what God thinks of him, whether it is as impossible in God's 88 man's wonder AND GOD'S KNOWLEDGE, (nr, sight as it is in His. The moment a man asks that question the walls break down, the curtains are swept back. A broader hope, a larger treat- ment of ourselves begin. We dare to pray, not merely, " Lord, make me that which I know I ought to be," but, " Lord, make me that which Thou madest me for — that which Thou seest to be possible for me — and let me gladly take what- ever larger possibility Thou shalt reveal." That prayer may we all have grace and faith enough to pray. V. IN THE LIGHT OF GOD.» •*In thy light we shall see light." — Psalm xxxvi. 9. The picture in the mind of him who wrote this psalm is very clear. Men are looking for light. With that insatiable passion which belongs to their humanity, they are running hither and thither seeking to know. And he who writes is in true sympathy with their search. To him too light seems the most precious thing on earth. Know- ledge appears to him the treasure which is most worth possessing. But it seem ; to him that there is something which needs to be suggested to these searchers after light. They appear to him to be questioning this thing and '.hat thing, as if the secret of its being, its power to be understood and comprehended, the light 'A^ith which it ought to shine, were something v/hich it carried in itself. He sees things differe'.itly. To him everything is > Preached in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, Snodsf voming, 3d June 1883. 90 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v comprehensible and capable of being understood only as it exists within the great enfolding pre- sence of God. To him it is only in their relations to the perfect nature that all other natures can become intelligible. He does not question the flower for its colour, or the mountain for its majestic form, or the river for its sparkling move- ment, as if each of them by its own action could clothe itself with light and shine out of the dark- ness, a clear and independent spot of glory. He looks up and waits and prays for sunrise. He expects the element in which alone the mountain and the flower and the river can display them- selves. When the sun shall have risen and the sunlight shall be bathing everything, then every- thing shall glow with its own radiance ; then he. can study everything and understand it in its true element. Until that element is formed around all things, there is darkness everywhere. Is not this his meaning as he stands in the midst of the light-seekers and looks up to God and cries, as if in commentary on their eager searchings, " In thy light we shall see light." The truth which these words thus include is one which we are constantly meeting, and which finds its illustrations everywhere. It is the truth that only within the elements where they belong, only as they are held inside the atmo.sphe'e of v.] IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. 91 larger natures to which they bear essential and sacred relationships, can the finest and truest natures of many things be understood. See what are a few of the familiar illustrations of this truth. Have you not each of you some friend who, diill and dry by himself, becomes fresh and sparkling in the presence and under the influence of some other friend ? That other friend is his element. When you are going to meet your dull companion you go and sec!: out first his elemental friend, and say to him, " Come with me, for I can- not know or understand this man except when you are there. In your light I shall see his light." So the man toiling at his business has for his element the love for wife and child who live at home, and whom he loves. Looked at apart from them his life is dreary, and each act of his daily toil is dull and heavy as a stone. Looked at in the light of his love for them, every detail of his dusty energy glows like a star. Or to take a wholly different illustration : a purpose of study, a great conception of what study is for, a true valuing of truth either for its Dwn pure worth or for its noble uses, is the ele- ment within which the drudgery of learning, which otherwise would be all dark and dreary, shines with illuminations which make us its willing slaves. So the prevailing moods and tempers of oui 92 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v. lives hold within themselves the specific actions of our lives, and give them their significance and worth. So every pubh'c deed, every turn of public policy, every action of our public men, exists within the enfolding atmosphere of the genius of our nation, and is to be appreciated and discriminated, is to be distinguished from the quite different thing which such an act or policy would be in Turkey or in France, only by an understanding of the national genius or nature within which it takes place. So the general's character and skill make up the element within which the soldier's bravery and labour live. Only by knowing the general's plan of the campaign can you tell what the soldier's hard work means. So the accepted doctrine, if it be really and spiritually accepted, gives colour to the acts which it inspires. Faith is the element of works. So what we think of man decrees what we shall think of men. The illustrations would be end- less. Everywhere there is this enfoldment of the little by the great. Everywhere it is in the light of the elemental life that the life which lives within it and is its special utterance can be under- stood. Everywhere the act in its true element grows live and buoyant as the log grows buoyant in the water where it swims. Do there not occur at once two earnest and V.) IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. 93 important warnings here, which we may well notice as we pass ? If this be true, then ycu and I have no right to judge any life until we have called upon the element in which it lives to come and shed its light upon it. Not by itself, but as part of some great purpose, as the utterance of some intention, as the expression of some general char- acter, so we must estimate and value every act, and all the active part of any fellow-creature's life. And for ourselves, in our own lives, surely it is good that we should be conscious of and value the larger regions within which our specific actions are comprised, and from which they get their meaning. To be aware of purposes and allegiances which bind us, which make our lives great units, which hold us to the universe of things, thus to feel the pressure and the inspiration of our element about us, this surely is the secret of the best success and happiness of life. I have dwelt thus long upon these first defini- tions, because it seemed to me as if in them there were the key to the experience of David, which he utters in my text, and of which I wish to speak to you this morning. He saw the world all full of seekers after light ; he was a seeker after light himself. What he had discovered, and what he wanted to tell men, was, that the first step in a hopeful search after light mu.st be for a man to 94 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v. put himself into the element of light, which was God. The first thing for any man to do who wanted knowledge was to put himself under God. to make himself God's man ; because both he who wanted to know and that which he wanted to know had God for their true element, and were their best and did their best only as they lived in Him. If David's discovery was true, it was a great discovery ; it was a discovery which could never lose its value. It is just as precious for the students of this knowledge-seeking age, for the students assembling in our universities to-day, as it was for him back in the infancy of science, among the crude fantastic schools of old Jerusalem. But I beg you to think, also, what a noble and inspiring thought it gives us also about God ! Too often have the minds both of religious and of irreligious men conceived of God as the great hinderer of human knowledge. Even those men who thought they honoured Him supremely have talked about Him £LS if He loved the darkness ; they have dwelt upon mystery as if it were something which God treasured, and which His children were to treasure for itself, as if they did not wish it cleared up and made light. They have imagined Him almost standing guard over whole regions of know- ledge and forbidding them to the impatient intel* y.l IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. 95 lect of man. That is not the idea of David ; that is not the idea of the Bible anywhere. Against all the folly of the Church, and all the ignorance of unbelief which declares that God is darkness, stands up the protest of John, who cries, "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all ; " and the glowing ascription of the light-loving David, who declares, " In thy light, O Lord, we shall see light." I have talked of light as if it were identical with knowledge ; and yet I am sure that the words make somewhat different impressions on you, and you will understand that they are not entirely identical. At any rate, you will understand that light means knowledge only when knowledge is most largely and deeply conceived. There is a knowledge which is not light but darkness, just as there is a lustre on the surface of the ocean which keeps you from seeing down into the ocean's depths. There is a superficial knowledge of the things to which men give their study — of nature, of history, of literature, of man — which, while it is wonderfully accurate in the facts which it recites, does not help to reveal, but glosses over and shuts away from our intelligence the depths and the essential glories of the things to which those facts relate. To such a sort of knowledge all laborious and minute study is always liable ; but such a sort of knowledge is not light but darkness. When 96 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v. David says, then, and when we say after him, that it is only in God's light that any man can see light, he does not mean, we do not mean, to say that the accumulation of facts and the thorough study of the surfaces of things may not go on in the most godless atmosphere and under the most blas- phemous of students. What he does mean to say, and what the experience of man has borne its con- stant testimony to, is this, that the profoundest knowledge, the appreciation of the real meaning and radiancy of things — that this, which alone is really light, comes to man only within the light of God. I want to remind you of three or four facts concerning human knowledge which seem to me to give their confirmation to the doctrine of the old Hebrew singer's song. I. First of all stands the constant sense of the essential unity of knowledge. Men study many things. Each man finds for a time contentment in his special science in the mastery of his peculiar facts ; but as each man goes deeper into the know- ledge of the chosen subject of his study, he becomes aware of how impossible it is for him to know that subject well, unless he knows far more than that The student of the history of man finds that this wonderful theatre of the earth, upon whose surface the long drama of human history has been played, demands that it too must be understood before 7.] IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. 07 the fortunes of the man whose life has been lived upon its stage can be properly valued. The study of the human body and the human mind are in- complete, each of them without the other. Each branch of natural science is twisted and twined in with all the rest. The most transcendent art has the roots of its methods in the human frame, and in the material of the earth itself Everywhere this is the issue of man's study as he goes on farther and wider in any department ; the convic- tion that no art or knowledge stands alone, that each is bound up in a whole with all the rest, and that to study any art or any branch of knowledge in entire independence of all others, is to come not to light but to darkness — to misconceptions of the true nature of things, and of the best conduct of life. All truth makes one great whole ; and no student of truth rightly masters his own special study unless he at least constantly remembers that it is only one part of the vast unity of knowledge, one strain in the universal music, one ray in the complete and perfect light 2. A second fact with regard to human know- ledge is its need of inspiration and elevation from some pure and s;?iritual purpose. It is a fact which is assured bj- all the testimony of man's ex- perience of study, that, not upon the lower grounds of economy and the usefulness of knowledge to H 98 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v. man's physical and social wants, but by some sense of a preciousness inherent in itse f, of a fitness between it and the nature of man, of a glory in seeking it and a delight in finding it for its own pure sake, that only so have all the great revela- tions of truth come to mankind. The lower motives come in, no doubt, to lend their aid. The student finds a pleasure in the thought that his discovery, if he can accomplish it, will make him and his brethren safer and more comfortable in their daily life ; but the most patient search and the most enthusiastic seizure of knowledge does not come from those motives alone. The know- ledge which is sought as light must be sought with an enthusiasm which gets its fire from the pure value of the knowledge for its own pure sake. If among the young men who in our various colleges are pursuing their higher education there are any who are destined genuinely to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge, and to be recognised as light- givers by their fellow-men, this we are sure of con- cerning them, that they are among those who know something of the true passion of knowledge ; they are of those to whom the opening doors of study bring exaltation and enthusiasm and delight ; for it is only to such that light is given, and so it :s only such that can give light to their fellow-men. 3. I think that another characteristic of the V.) IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. 99 best search after wisdom is the way in which it awakens the sense of obedience. I will not attempt to explain its meaning, but no man who thinks carefully and wisely will fancy that he has ade quately explained it when he has attributed to mere superstition that sense which is always reap- pearing in the thought of man, that the knowledge which is highest in its nature and which it is most necessary for man to have, always comes to man by revelation, and can be attained only by the learning man's obedience to the revealing power. Very vaguely, very impersonally often, this idea has been conceived and stated. Sometimes it has seemed to mean no more than that man, in order to understand Nature, must be in sympathy with her and watch her ways instead of forcing her action into his ways. At other times it has taken sharp, crude, intense shapes like those which it has assumed when man, abandoning all use of his own powers, has seemed to think that there was nothing for him to do but to stand listening before a smoky oracle, or to peer into the entrails of slain birds in order to know the truth. But still, however vaguely or however crudely it has shown itself, the fact is very certain that man, when he has been moved most earnestly to seek for truth, has always thought of himself and talked of himself as of one who must be obedient to something, somebody, some lOO IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v. power who held the truth which he desired, and who either would give it or could give it only to the obedient heart. In other words, all of man's loftiest search for knowledge has always seemed to be aware, not merely of two parties to the great transaction, but also of a third — not merely of a knowledge to be sought and of a man to win it, but also of a knowledge-giver, who was to stand between the treasure and the needy human life, and give to the obedient humanity the boon it sought. 4. Closely allied to this fact is the other one which yet remains to be mentioned with regard to the search of man after knowledge, which is the constant tendency which it has always shown to connect itself with moral character. It is easy enough to say that the whole affair of knowledge- seeking is a question of the intellect — easy enough to say that a clever libertine or a bright drunkard can learn and teach the facts of science or of his- tory as perfectl)'' as if his life were pure and sober ; but yet the fact is clear that mankind in all ages has tended to believe that moral purity and up- rightness were genuine and necessary elements in the most perfect insight even into the problems of the world's construction or of the history of man, — that, at any rate, however mere facts might be learned by any acute and patient observer, the v.] IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. lol meanings of those facts, the soul and inner sub- stance of the things they studied, could only come to men who loved the right and tried to do it, and kept their hearts pure, unselfish, and serene with truth. All the old initiations to the mysteries of knowledge bore witness to this instinct. The man to whom the deepest known secrets of things were to be opened to-morrow must be purified to-night by lustrations that should signify his inner bap- tism. I do not ask now what was the philosophy which, more or less consciously, underlay this demand. I cannot doubt that it was some sort or assertion of the essential and inviolable unity of our human life, some sort of protest against the separation of the intellectual and moral life in man, as if such a separation made us two men and not one. What I want now to notice is merely the fact, the abundantly witnessed fact, that man in all times has had this feeling about the highest and completest knowledge, that one of its neces- sary conditions was morality, that only the pure in heart could see the fullest light. See, then, what we have reached. These fou conditions belong everywhere and always to the true light -seeker — the sense of the unity of knowledge, the perception of the preciousness and glory of k lowledge for its own pure sake, the con- sciousness of discipleship and loyalty, and the 102 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v, persuasion of the need of moral fitness for the highest insight. In various proportions, in all degrees of clearness or of cloudiness, these are the convictions which have always filled the minds and inspired the souls of the seekers after light all through the world, all through the ages. The Hindu dreamer waiting for his vision, the young Jew at the footstool of his rabbi, the Greek listening for his oracle, the monk over his manu- script, the modern investigator of Nature and her wondrousness, the college student in his class- room — is it not true that all of them are men of light and not of darkness just in proportion as they keep alive and precious these profound per- suasions, the unity of truth, the preciousness and dignity of truth, the need of obedience, and the sacred worth of purity. To him who lives in all of these persuasions, holding them all not merely as proved propositions, but as making together the element in which all his thought and study lives ; to him everything grows luminous and opens its heart, and in the light of these, his four convictions, he sees the light of all the things with which he deals. And what then ? Is there no one conception in which these four convictions all unite, and in whose embrace they become not scattered discoveries or results of various experience, but parts of one V.J IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. 103 complete idea which needs and which harmonises them all. If it be true that in the thought of God most simply and broadly apprehended in the thought, that is, of a great, strong, loving Father, who knows all truth, and loves all men, and feeds men with truth as a father feeds his children with bread, making them with each new food fit for a richer food which He has still to give them — these four conceptions find their meeting -place ; if as the young light-seeker goes with these four con- victions working together in his soul they almost necessarily seek one another and unite into what is at first the dream, and by and by becomes the faith of a personal presence, lofty, divine, loving, and wise ; if this is true, have we not reached as the re- sult of all this long analysis something like that which David puts with such majestic simplicity in his glowing verse. The combination of these con- sciousnesses makes, almost of necessity, the con- sciousness of God. As they are necessary to the search for light, so is the God in whom they meet the true inspirer and helper of the eternal search. You see how great the doctrine is. It is no low and unintelligible and incredible pretension, claim- ing that only to the holders of certain special d-Ctrines can the truths of science or of history be made known. It is the lofty assertion of the divinest necessity of the human soul, that only 104 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v. under the care and guidance of the God in whom abide the unity and preciousness of truth, and whose pure-hearted disciple and obedient servant man, the searcher for Hght, can be, — in and under Him alone can the great fulness of truth be known or understood. I have tried thus to analyse the causes which underlie the necessity of man for God in the search after the truest knowledge with regard to the earth he lives in, or the history of man, or his own na- ture. But, after all, in every such necessity there is much that entirely eludes analysis, and is recog- nisable only by the consciousness. It is in what we must always recur to as the filial conscious- ness, the sense of childhood, that man's perception of God always takes its clearest shapes. And when I try to describe to myself this thought of David about man's seeing all light in the light of God, no picture like the picture of a true and docile childhood seems to me to express it. A child in his father's house learns everything within the intelligence and character of his father, who has provided all things there, and is perpetually throwing light upon their proper use. Everything has its own qualities, but those qualities are made distinct and vivid to the child by their relation to the master of the house. Not purely in themselves but in his father's use of them and in their relation- 7.1 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD, SOS ship to him does the child come to know the tools of the workshop, the furniture of the parlour, and all the apparatus of domestic life. So, I believe it is with the child's knowledge of the larger house, the world-house, of which God is the Father, The young clerk in the counting-house, the young sailor on the seas, the young student at his books, the young mechanic at his bench, each of them finds the things which make his world shine forth with new clearness and with new glory, if he dares to think of himself as God's child, and of these things with which he has to do as the furniture of his Father's house and the means for the doing of his Father's will. No channel of direct investiga- tion is closed up. Still the dictionary must be questioned for the language, and the market studied for the laws of trade, and the rock in- quired of by the hammer and the microscope, and the sky and winds and ocean scanned with watch- ful eye ; but over and around and through and through the whole process of inquiry, giving it dignity, hopefulness, dearness, and meaning, is thrown the pervading consciousness that it is always the child inquiring of the Father's things, and with the Father's watchfulness and care and love behind him. Look at the life of Jesus Christ and you will see exactly what I mean. He knew the streets io6 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v. of Jerusalem and the lanes of Galilee and the his- tory of His mysterious Hebrew people, and the hearts of the lilies and the souls of men ; but He knew them all differently from the way in which the Hebrew scribes and scholars knew them. Tc Him they were all full of light. There is no other description of His knowledge that can tell its special and peculiar character like that. It was all full of light. And the other peculiarity of it was just as clear. It was full also of God. He knew everything as God's child in God's house. The history of the prophets and the heart of the lily both meant something about His Father These two peculiarities belonged together. The world was full of light to Him because it was full of God. It was God's light in which He saw the deeper light in everything. Just think of this, just think of how, this being true of Jesus, the more He saw of all the world, the more His Father's light must have become real to him, and then consider if there is not here the key to that difficult question, which perplexes us all, the question of how we can keep from out- growing our religion as we grow up from child- hood into manhood, and the world grows more complicated around us. The child is full of reverent and happy faith. God is to him every- where. He pra\'s as naturally as ^e talks. He v.] IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. 107 worships as spontaneously as he sings. But by and by he is a child no longer. The silver gates are open and the whole world lies beyond. The elaborate manifold delightful life of manhood takes him in. A thousand things to know, a thousand things to do invite him. The simplicity of life is broken into most bewildering multiplicity. Then is the time when the boy's faith almost always halts and is puzzled, when very often it falters and falls. What can preserve it ? What can carry it safely through that first perplexing acquaintance with the immensity and variety of life and art and science, and bring it out a broader and a stronger faith beyond ? Nothing, surely, except a demonstration by his faith of its capa- city to comprehend and make its own all this bewilderingly various life. Let the boy just coming to be a man discern that the God in whom he has believed in his small boyish way is the real element by which, in which stars shine, states grow, and all the complicated life of men goes on, and must he not then grasp his faith anew as he goes on to greater things and the larger relation- ships which are awaiting him ? Let the growing youth, as he passes through the door into the new world, see the candle which he carries, and which he is just about to throw away because he thinks its work is done with the lighting of his io8 IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [v nursery where he is to Hve no longer, gradually open and expand until it seems to be the sun which lightens everything, and without which nothing can be bright or beautiful, and then must he not grasp his candle the tighter as the fascinat- ing richness of the world begins to display itself before him ? There is no other hope. No man carries his robe with him through the river unless he believes that he shall need to wear it on the other side. No man really preserves his religion simply from the memory of how it used to help him. It must help him now. No man keeps his boy's faith unless it opens new greatness to him as he grows older, and shows him how his full- grown manhood, like his earliest childhood, cannot do without it. Picture Jesus of Nazareth set down in Rome with all the flashing splendour of imperial power all around him ; or in Athens, with the wisdom of the philosophers on every side. Would the young Jew have cast his faith away ? Too real for him the visions that had come to him in Nazareth ! Too real for him the glory of His Father, which had filled His Father's house I He would have laid fresh hold upon that truth and love which he had never so needed until now. He would have stood undazzled in the Roman glory, unpuzzled in the Grecian wisdom, because v.J IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. log he would have known that in his heart he carried the light by which they should give light to him. It would have been like David calmly saying in the presence of the terrors of Goliath, " The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine." There are men whose faith thus goes with them and becomes the power of inspiration for every- thing they do. Everything else shines with the light and works with the strength of their religion. I hope that many of you have read the interesting book which gives an account of the Personal Life of David Livingstone. It is a noble record of a noble history. But the great beauty of his life as it comes out there is in the centralness of his religion. Two of the greatest interests of the human mind and soul were always with him — science and philanthropy. He opened the desert and traced the mysterious rivers, and watched the wanderings of the stars. He trampled out the slave trade in whole regions of its worst brutality; but, at the heart of them, the man's science and philanthropy both got their light from his religion. He was first, last, and always and above all things the Christian and the Christian Missionary, carry- ing the glorious Gospel of the grace of God to the most miserably benighted of His children. He no IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. [t. refuses to be called the mere scientist or the mere philanthropist. In the light of God he sees light, and he makes light in the mystery and sin of the Dark Continent. Therefore his fame has among the scientists and the philanthropists its own peculiar beauty. The knowledge of God lies behind everything, behind all knowledge, all skill, all life. That is the sum of the whole matter. The knowledge of God ! And then there comes the great truth, which all religions have dimly felt, but which Christianity has made the very watchword of its life, the truth that it is only by the soul that God is really known ; only by the experiences of the soul, only by penitence for sin, only by patient struggle after holiness, only by trust, by hope, by love does God make himself known to man. So may he give us all the grace to know Him more and more. There is an evidence of religion which may be written down in books and learned from books, and when it once is learned it is all mastered. That evidence is good ; but there is another evidence of religion which is never mastered and exhausted. It grows and deepens for ever and for ever. As the man becomes more pure, more penitent, more sensitive to the least touch of sin, more passionately eager to be good, so does he grow for ever more and more sure of v.] IN THE LIGHT OF GOD. Ill God. And to him, thus growing ever surer of God, the world he Hves in becomes clothed with an ever diviner light, and the pursuit of truth becomes more and more full for ever of enthu- siasm and of hope. Of heaven it is written that " the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the light thereof." I should be glad, indeed, if anything we have thought to-day could make us see that this part of heaven at least may be begun below ; that not merely the earth we live in but our own especial life — our work, our study, our profession, our daily toil — may live already in the light of God, and become earnest and dear and sacred because of the depth and richness of our love and conse- cration to Him and to His Son, who shows Him to us I VI THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD.* "And he said, My grace is sufEcient for thee." — 2 Cor. xii. 9. These words were spoken to St. Paul but not to him alone. They came to St. Paul out of a mysteri- ous vision. They have come to many and many a Christian out of the experiences of his daily life, which, as he looked at them in the light of God, have seemed to him to be more mysterious and impressive than any vision which could be set before the most astonished eyes. They have come as the total result of life, its spiritual issue and result, to thoughtful men who, tired and dis- satisfied in the details of living, have asked them- selves and asked God for some great comprehen- sive meaning of it all. To such men there has come down from God his explanation : " My grace is sufficient for thee." The meaning of life, of its happinesses and its sorrows, of its successes ' Preached at St. Mark's Church, Kenningtoo, Londoo, Sunday evening, 3d June 1883. VI.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. 1 13 and its disappointments, is this, that man must be fastened close to God and Hve by the divine life not his own, by the divine life made his own through the close binding of the two together by faith and love. I want to speak to you about this great Christian conception of human life to-night. And first of all, I want to ask you to remember what a need thea^e is for any true life that it should have some general conception of itself within which all its special activities should move along and do their work. What the skin is to the human body, holding all the parts of the inner machinery compactly to their work ; what the simple constitution is to a highly-elaborated state, enveloping all its functions with a few great first principles which none of those functions must violate or transcend, — such to the manifold actions of a man is some great simple conception of what life is and what it means, surrounding all details, giving them unity, simplicity, effectiveness. The degree in which the life, living in its details, is immediately and con- sciously aware of its enveloping conception may vary very much indeed. Some of the lives around which it is folded most compactly, to which it is giving the noblest unity and effect, are almost un- aware of it, and would have to stop and re-collect their consciousness before they could give you a I 114 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [vi. clear statement of what was their enveloping idea of life. Often in children, often in the most child- like people, the conception is doing its wr.rk, holding the life together, even when it is most entirely unrecognised. The degree of conscious- ness may vary, but more and more the worth, the dignity, the beauty, the usefulness of human lives seem to depend on the existence of some sur- rounding purpose or idea which makes each life a unit and a force. Here is a man all quavering and scintillating and palpitating with brightness : every act he does, every word he says, shines with genius ; but every act, every word, shines separate and alone ; each is a single, separate point of electricity, shining the more brilliantly just because of its isolation. Here is another man of far less brilliancy, but of a clear and ever- present sense of what life means ; his electricity does not sparkle at brilliant points, but it lives unseen and powerful through everything he does and is, like the electric presence which pervades a healthy human body. My friends, is it not wonderful how strongly we come to feel, how per- fectly clear in us in course of time grows the conviction, that to the second man, not to the nrst, the world must look for good and constant power. Is it not wonderful with what ever- increasing certainty of instinct we ourselves, as life grows Yl.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD, 1 15 more serious and full of exigency, turn away from the first man and turn to the second in our need ? I have wanted to speak thus of the need of some great comprehensive conception of life, before I came to the special conception of it which is in the words which God spoke to St. Paul. " My grace is sufficient for thee," He declared. That man's life is to have abundant supply for all it needs, to be rich enough, safe enough, strong enough, and yet that all this abundance is not to come by or in itself, but is to be its portion, because the human life itself is part and parcel of the divine life, held closely and constantly upon the bosom of the life of God, — that is the great conception of humanity and its condition which these deep words involve. See how they must exclude these two ideas which are for ever hauntinsr human souls, — the first, that there is no sufficiency for man ; the second, that man carries his sufficiency within himself How these two ideas rule together, dividing among themselves the hearts of men. The timid, tired, hopeless, discouraged men go about saying, " Human life a predestined failure : full of wants for which there is no supply, of questions for which there is no answer. So, whoever made him, wherever he has come from, here o: the disappointing earth there is this ever- lastingly disappointed man." And then, among ii6 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [vi. such men, close by their side, the brave self-con- fident, self-trustful men go about saying, " Man ought to be satisfied ; man must be satisfied ; nay; man is satisfied in himself. Let him but put forth all his powers and he shall supply all his own needs and answer all his own questions." And then, among these everlasting wailings and boastings, in the midst of this mingled self-pity and self-conceit, the voice of God comes down declaring, " Nay, both are wrong : you must be satisfied, but you must be satisfied in me ; you must have sufficiency, but my grace must be sufficient for you." I think, then, that you can see how in these words thus understood, in a conception of life like this there are two propositions which meet directly and directly contradict the two tendencies of human thought with which we are most familiar in these days of ours. You see what these two tendencies are. They are very familiar ; they meet us everywhere ; they are here in our Sunday evening church. One tendency is to despair of satisfaction ; the other tendency is to discover satisfaction in man alone. As I go through the crowds which fill our crowded century I hear these two voices on every side of me. One voice says, " Alas, alas ! we want to know, but there is no voice to speak to us and to enlighten our VI.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. \\^ ignorance. We want to love, but every object of love on which we let our affection fasten fails us. We want to work, but there are no instruments md no materials fine enough to give embodiment to these dreams that are in us. Life is hopelessly- insufficient for man." And then out of the same crowd the other voice cries out, " Hurrah, hurrah ! man is sufficient for himself! See how he is find- ing the answers to his questions everywhere ; and when his questions prove unanswerable, see how he is continually finding out that his question is a delusion, that such a being as he is ought not to want to ask such questions, that there are no answers to such questions, at least none that it is conceivably possible or really desirable for him to know ! " Were ever such despair of man and such triumph in man met before as are met now in these days of ours ? Tell me, are not these really the two things that men are saying over to them- selves about the problem of existence ? Is not the question of mankind's life, as we hear its ordi- nary statements, apparently settling down to this, whether it will be possible for man to live with a permanent conviction either that there is in the world about him no true correspondent and answer to the deeper parts of his nature, or else that his nature and the world have in themselves all that his deepest needs require ? Ii8 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [vi. Remember, this is not a question merely of the time at large and its philosophies ; it is not a problem which one sees rising like a dark cloud as he looks abroad over the puzzled schoolrooms and the busy workshops of his fellow-men. It is a problem which meets us all whenever our own personal life is deeply stirred. A great change comes in your life, something that rends your whole being down to the bottom as an earthquake opens the rock ; your life is torn to its very depths ; you can no longer live satisfied with the mere pleasant sight of the green grass and flowers which grow upon the surface ; you must look down and see what there is in at the heart of things. And then — oh, my dear friends, do not full many of you know it ? — to the human heart all torn, distressed, bewildered, there comes first of all this problem. What shall I do ? Shall I make up my mind that there is no rest, no peace, no sufficient object for my trust — that my demand for them is an impertinence ? or shall I make my- self my own sufficient strength, and find my rest and peace and trust in cultivating and admiring my own life ? To such an alternative what can we say ? To the first side of it I think that there can be no doubt what muat be said. Man cannot rest in the settled conviction of insufficiency. There is a VI.] TEE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD, llj deep and everlasting and true conviction in man that he has no power or need in his nature for which there is not a correspondent and supply somewhere possibly within his reach. The powei of adoring love, of which man is distinctly con- scious, brings him assurance that there is a being worthy of such love. The power and need to trust implicitly will not be answered that there is no strength so strong that man may give to it implicit trust. The everlasting questions will everlastingly demand their answers and believe in the possibility of finding them till they are found. This is to me conclusive. I can conceive of man's dressing up almost any insufficient thing in the pretence of sufficiency and making believe to him- self that he is satisfied ; but that he should finally and absolutely come to the conclusion that he must content him in everlasting discontent, and cease to ask and cease to struggle out of pure despair, that is something which nothing that I have ever read or seen or felt of human nature gives me the power to believe. And what, then, is the chance of the other side of the alternative, that man shall find humanity as he discerns it in himself and in his fellow-men sufficient for his powers and needs ? There is only one thing which everlastingly makes that impos- sible, and that is the strange fact to which all the I20 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. (vi. history of man bears witness, that man, though himself finite, demands infinity to deal with and to rest upon ; he claims to have relations with the infinite. That fact is borne testimony to by ail the ages ; that fact is the perpetual witness of the consciousness in man's heart that he is the child of God. The child may be reminded every moment of his limitations and his youth, and yet he always mounts up to claim the largeness of his father's life for himself. And so man, the more you make him feel his finiteness, so much the more obstinately will he insist on his right to a potential possession of the infinite. The perpetual witness to this truth is one of the most interesting facts in human history. You never can rule lines around one region in the realm of knowledge and say to man, " Know that. That is the limit of what you possibly can know." The very demand is a challenge. He will rub out your lines ; he will break down your walls ; and, with what perhaps seems pure wilfulness, but what is really a convic- tion that there is no knowledge in the universe from which he is essentially and eternally shut out, he will choose the very things which you have told him he can never know to exercise his knowing faculty upon. What truly enthusiastically human man will tolerate the drawing of any line, how- ever far away, outside of which he shall be bound ri.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. 121 to believe that human enterprise shall never go? Who will let any limit mark for him the certain boundary beyond which no yet more wonderful Invention shall be devised, and no yet more beauti- ful miracle of art flower out of the rich ground of man's exhaustless fancy ? What man ever truly loves and sets a limit, consciously and absolutely, to the loveliness of that which he is loving ? The love that defines the limits of its idol's loveliness is not entire love ; pure love lives in its power of idealising, and loves the infinite in the finite type to which it gives its homage. So everywhere there comes the testimony of this endless reach of man after the infinite, and of his inability to rest upon anything less. Who that with the best human ambition is seeking after character can fix himself a goal and say, " That is as pure, as good, as true as it is possible for me, a man, to be ?" Who does not, must not see the distance stretching far away, past anything that even his imagination can de- fine ? There comes no real content to the seeker after goodness until, behind all the patterns which hold themselves up to him with pride and boasting in their practicalness, at last he hears the voice of the sublime impracticable standard far out be- yond them all calling to him, " Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." Then the finitL has heard the voice of the infinite to which 122 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [vx it belongs, to which it always will respond, and straightway it settles down to its endless journey and goes on content. These are the views of human life which seem to me to show that it is absolutely impossible that man should finally reconcile himself either to de- spair or to self-satisfaction. It is in views like these that I find my assurance in such days of doubt about the nature and the destiny of man as these through which we are passing now. It seems to me to be absolutely certain that if there is in man a real essential belonging with God, if in a true and indestructible sense he is God's child, then the reaching of the child's soul after the Father's soul, of the human soul after the divine soul, must be a perpetual fact ; it never can be stopped. Agnosticism, Nescience, Pessimism, Secularism must be all temporary phenomena ; none of them can be the settled and perma- nent condition of the human soul if man is the child of God. If he is not, if there is no divine relationship in him, then one is ready to accept whatever comes ; for who cares whether a beast that is but a beast dreams that he is an angel or with a bitter wisdom knows his beasthood. Super- stition or despair will matter little in a man who has no God. No ! I cannot picture man with a God quieting, stupefying his restless filial heart so VI.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. 123 that no throb or leap of it, no sudden access of fih'al consciousness shall ever take him by surprise as he lives in the perpetual presence of his Father's works and love. Some sudden turn of the world- child around some unexpected corner of the won- drous house will thrill the soul with its profoundest consciousness. If man is God's child, then man cannot permanently be atheistic. This poor man or that may be an atheist, perhaps ; this child or that may disown or deny his father ; but the world- child, man, to him the sense that he was not made for insufficiency and the sense that he is not sufficient for himself, these two together will always bring him back from his darkest and re- motest wanderings, and set him where he will hear the voice which alone can completely and finally satisfy him saying, " My grace is sufficient for thee." And now, if this is where the soul of man must rest, we want to turn and see most seriously what is the rest which man's soul will find here ; what will it practically, actually be for a man when the secret and power of his life is that he is resting on the sufficiency of the grace of God ? We may say various things about it ; and the first and simplest and most important of them all is this, that the grace of God, on which a man relies, must be a perpetual element in which his life abides, and not 124 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD, [vi. an occasional assistant and supernumerary called in at special emergencies when it is needed. You see the difference. I say to one man, " Who is your sufficiency ? On whom do you rely for help ?" and his reply is, " God." Very confidently and earnestly comes his reply. " God," he declares. But when he answers " God," somehow it sounds to me exactly as if he thought that God was a man in the next house, or, if you please, the captain of a garrison in the castle on the hill — some one, some thing, which was at hand, and at his call when it was wanted. I say to another man, " What is your sufficiency ? Whom do you trust in ?" and he answers, "God ;" and then it sounds to me as if the sunlight talked about the sun, as if the stream talked of the spring that fed it, as if the blood talked of the heart that gave it life and movement, as if the plant talked of the ground which it was rooted in, as if the mountain talked of the gravita- tion that lived in every particle of it and held it in its everlasting seat ; nay, shall we not say what is the simplest and the truest thing ? as if the child talked of his father whose life lived in every act of his protected life — in whom (what wondrous depth there is in those deej words !), " in whom he lived and moved and had his being." Do you not see the difference ? Take special instances. Here is our bewilderment about truth : VI.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. 125 God, who knows everything, is our sufficiency in our own insufficiency, we say. But how ? One doubter, when his hard question comes, says with a ready confidence, " I will go and ask God," and carries off his problem to the Bible, to the closet, as if he went to consult an oracle, and as if, when he had asked and got, or failed to get, an answer, he would leave the oracle off in the wood and come back to the town again, and live his worldly life there on his own resources until another question too hard for his poor wisdom should come up. I do not say that that is wholly bad ; but surely there is something better. Another doubter meets his puzzling question ; and the utterance of his sense of God's sufficiency is simply, " God krjows the explanation and the answer. I do not know that God will tell me what the answer is. Perhaps He will, perhaps He will not ; but He knows." The knowledge that is in the father — so close and constant and real is the identity of life between the two — the knowledge that is in the father is the child's knowledge, even though the child does not know the special things which the father knows. Not merely there is an open road from the child's ignorance to the father's wisdom ; the child's ignorance lies close bosomed upon the father's wisdom, beats and throbs with its pulses, and lives with its life. 126 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [vi. And so it is with regard to activity and effi- ciency as well as with regard to knowledge. One man says, " Here is a great work *o be done ; God will give me the strength to dc it ; " and so when it is done it looks to him most like, and he is most apt to call it, his work. Another man says, " Here is this work to be done ; God shall do it, and if He will use me for any part of it, here I am. I shall rejoice as the tool rejoices in the artist's hand." When that work is finished, the workman looks with wonder at his own achieve- ment, and cries, " What hath God wrought ! " Everywhere there is this difference. One sufferer cries, "Lord, make me strong;" another sufferer cries, " Lord, let me rest upon thy strength." Do you say they come to the same thing ? Yes, if the doing of the task, the bearing of the pain, is everything. Yes, if the only object is that the ship may not founder and the back may not break ; but if, beyond this, there is hope and purpose that the man who does the task or bears the load shall himself become Godlike in his doing or his suffer- ing, then no mere deposit of the strength of God can do the work — only the ever-open union of his life with God's, which makes the two lives really one, so that the power that is in God is not made the man's by being transferred from God's to him, but is his because it is God's. VI. J THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. I27 Always there are these two kinds of men. The picture that was seen ages ago in the valley of ElaK and which is written in the second book of Samuel, is always finding its repetition in the world. David and Goliath are perpetual : proud, self-reliant, self-sufficient strength, the big hard muscles, the tremendous bulk, the gigantic armour of the Philistine on the one side ; and on the other the slight, weak Judean youth, with nothing but a sling and stone, with his memories of struggles in which he has had no strength but the strength of God, and has conquered, with no boast, nothing but a prayer upon his lips. These two figures, I say, are everywhere ; they are confronting each other in every valley of Elah all over the world : the power of confident strength and the power of weakness reliant upon God. Goliath may thank his gods for his great muscles ; it is a strength that has been handed over to him by them ; but it is a strength which has been so completely handed over to him that he now thinks of it, boasts of it, uses it as his. David's strength lies back of hhn in God, and only flows down from God through him as his hand needs it for the twisting of the sling that is to hurl the stone. Oh, how the multitude stand waiting round every valley of Elah where any David and Goliath meet ! how the Philistines shout for the battle as 128 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. \\x. they see their champion step forth ! how the Israel- ites tremble and their hearts sink when they see how weak their shepherd - boy looks ! how the Philistines turn and flee when their giant falls ! how the Israelites first gaze astonished and then surround him with shoutings as David comes back with the head of the Philistine in his hands ! and yet how the same scene is repeated over and ovei again for ever : the arrogance of the Philistines and the timidity of the Israelites wherever anew power confident in self meets weakness reliant upon God, in any broad field or obscure corner of the world. It is sad to see even Christian men and times fall into the old delusion. The Christian Church — so reads its history to me — seems to have been far too often asking of God that He should put His power and His wisdom into her, and make it hers ; far too seldom that He should draw her life so close to His that His wisdom and power, kept still in Himself, should be hers because it is His. The demand for an infallible Church, for a com- prehensive and final statement of all that it is possible for man to know about God, for an au- thoritative oracle of religious truth — a demand which haunts not merely the hills of Rome, but even the broad open Protestant pastures of our own communion — the fictions of priestly authority VI.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. 129 for forgiving sin, for putting grace into sacraments, — what are all these but the everlasting craving for a deposit of truth and power instead of a vital union by love and obedience with Him in whom truth and power eternally reside — the everlasting wish to be a reservoir instead of a river? The Church of Christ to-day upon the earth, neither in her individual members nor in any aggregation of her ignorance to make wisdom in any conceivable council or synod, knows the absolute truth with regard, let us say, to the future destiny of men who in this life live wickedly and die rebels against God. Does it seem to you as if it were a dread- ful thing that Christ's Church should be in ignor- ance about such an important thing as that ? Not if you really know how near Christ's Church is to the heart of Christ ; not if you understand that she is joined to Him as part of His own life, so that His knowledge of what are the awful secrets of the future is enough for her, and she may be content with His assurance that, He being what she knows Him to be, it must be a terrible thing, and a thing whose consequences cannot die speedily or easily, for any soul to grieve His heart, which is infinite love, or to disobey His will, which is eter- nal righteousness. Our Lord's disciples asked Him to promise them that they should sit on thrones, and He turned them away and said, " Ye know not K I30 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [vi. what ye ask," But they asked Him to teach them to pray, and instantly His teaching came : " After this manner pray ye : Thy kingdom come ; thy will be done. Give us this day our daily bread." He would do nothing that should enthrone their lives in what might for a moment seem to be self- sufficient power ; He would do everything that should fasten their life to His Father's life, with the continual pressure of continual need. Oh, that the Church and the Christian might have learned from the old story of the Lord's treatment of those first disciples what kind of prayers He always loves to have them pray, and what kind He will always answer. I find in all the life of Jesus the perfect illus- tration and elucidation of all I have been saying, of all that I want you to remember and take with you as the fruit of having listened to me this evening. Jesus never treated His life as if it were a temporary deposit of the divine life on the earth, cut off and independent of its source ; he always treated it as if it lived by its association with the Father's life, on which it rested. " Of that day and hour knoweth not the Son, but the Father," He did not hesitate to say ; and the Father's knowledge was enough for Him. " Now, O Father, glorify thou me," He cried. I dare not try to unravel the whole mystery, to adjust tha VI.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. 131 whole theology ; but this I cannot doubt as 1 read these infinite pages which are ever new, that Jesus was always full of the child-consciousness ; lie always kept his life open that the Father's life might flow through it. When he lay prostrate, tired out, broken down on the mountain or in the garden, it was not that He might re-collect His shattered strength and be Himself; it was that in the silence and the struggle the clogged com- munication might be broken clear, and God flow freely into Him again. " Not my will but thy will, O my Father ; " that was the triumph of the garden. " My God, my God, why hast thou for- saken me?" that was the agony of the cross. What Jesus wanted for Himself He wants for you and me who are His disciples. Not self- completeness. When He calls us to be His, He sees no day, even on to the end of eternity, in which, having trained our characters and deve- loped our strength, he shall send us out as you dismiss in the morning from your door the traveller whom you have kept all night, and fed and strengthened and rescued from fatigue, and filled with self-respect. No such day is to come for ever. An everlasting childhood ! A perpetual dependence ! That is our calling. And with that calling in our minds how much that seemed mysterious grows plain to us. If He is moving 132 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [VL our life up close to His, henceforth to be a part of His, so that motive, truth, standards, hopes everything which is in Him shall freely flow from Him to us, what wonder is it if, in order that that union may be most complete, He has to break down the walls that we have built around our- selves, which would be separations between Him and us. The going down of the walls between our house and our friend's house would be music to us, for it would be making the two houses one. The going down of the walls between our life and our Lord's life, though it consisted of the failure of our dearest theories and the dis- appointment of our dearest plans, that too would be music to us if through the breach we saw the hope that henceforth our life was to be one with His life, and all His was to be ours too. And how clear, with this truth before us, would appear the duty that we had to do, the help that we had to give to any brother's soul for which we cared. Not to make him believe our doctrine ; but to bring him to our God. Not to answer all his hard questions ; but to put him where he could see that the answer to them all is in God. Not to make him my convert, my disciple ; but to persuade him to let Christ make him God's child. Oh, my dear friends, if that were what we were seeking concerning one another, friend seek- VI.] THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. 133 ing it for friend, father and mother seeking it for children ; if that were what we were seeking, there would be richer harvests for the Lord ! Through all eternity that grace of God, that sufficient grace, shall flow into the open hearts of God's redeemed, making them strong and brave for all the vast works which they shall have to do for Him and for His kingdom. It seems as if it would be enough for this life, as if this life would be well spent, if, as the result of all of it, by many lessons, many trials, many failures, the soul whose strength is in entire dependence simply learned and carried, perfectly learned, with it across the river the lesson that the soul of man cannot live except in resting on the soul of God, and per- petually gathering into it supplies of His sufficient grace. That lesson may we learn in any way in which Christ sees good to teach it to us. THE CHRISTIAN CITY.^ "And there was great joy in that city." — Acts viii. 81 The city was Samaria, and the great joy was the fruit of the first preaching of Christ there. The disciples had been scattered by persecution from Jerusalem ; and one of them, Philip, had come down to the city which the Jews despised, and there he had told the people the truth which the Jews re- jected. All around him was the misery and sin of a great city. He offered them Christ. He told them of Him who had come to relieve misery and forgive sin. As a symbol of the new life which he told them of, he touched some of their sick people, and their health came back to them : many that were taken with palsies and that were lame were healed ; into many a house where there had been only darkness he brought light. The brightness ran along the streets. Not merely 1 Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, on the morning of Hospital Sunday, loth June 1SS3, VII.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 135 a few scattered souls caught the new inspiration ; it seemed to fill the air and flow through all the life of the whole town. And there was great joy in that city I There is something clear and peculiar in this joy of a whole city over the new faith. We can all feel it when a thought or an emotion which has lingered in a few minds starts up and takes possession of a whole community. It is as when a quiver of flame which has lurked about one bit of wood at last gets real possession of the heap of fuel, and the whole fireplace is in a blaze. There came a time when Christianity, which had lived in scattered congregations and in the hearts of devout believers, at last seized on the prepared mind of the Roman Empire, and all Europe was full of Christianity. So it is something new, it is a phenomenon possessing its own interest and de- manding its own study, when beyond Christian souls you have a Christian city — a whole com- munity inspired with the feelings and acting under the motives of Christianity. It may or may not embody itself in laws or institutions ; it may or may not be recognised in terms in the constitution or charter ; that is of little con- sequence. But a city as well as an individual is capable of a Christian experience and character It is more than an aggregate oi the experience 136 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [vii of the souls within it, as a chemical compound has qualities which did not appear in either of its constituents ; it is a real new being with qualities and powers of its own. I should like to speak this morning of the Christian city, the city filled with the joy and legenerated by the power of Christ. The subject falls in with the purpose to which this morning is devoted : the hospital collection, the contribu- tion of this whole Christian city to the sick and needy, a municipal act of Christian charity. That purpose implies a Christian city. No heathen city ever did such an act. It is the utterance in a broad and simple way of that true Christianity which, in spite of all the heathenism that is still among us, is yet the power of our corporate life, and runs in the veins of our community. Christianity is primarily a personal force, and only secondarily does it deal with bodies of men, whether with churches or with states. That is a critically important truth. The souls of men must be converted ; and out of those converted souls the Christian Church or the Christian State must grow. It is fatal to Christianity to try to reverse that truth. To begin by making the structure of a Church or a State, and expect so to create personal character, is as if you began to build a forest from the top, making a wilderness VII.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 137 of leaves and branches, and so expecting to strike do\^-nward into trunks and roots. This is the error of all merely ecclesiastical and political Christianity. But none the less is it true that when the right beginning has been rightly made, when souls have believed in Christ, and then a great multitude of personal believers, who have been fused together by the fire of their common faith, present before the world the unity of a Christian Church or a Christian nation, that new unity is a real unit, a genuine being with its own character and power. I am not sure how intelligible this is. I am not sure that it is possible to state it so that it shall be clear to every mind. It needs some fami- liarity with the idea, some power of abstraction, perhaps something of a poetic power, to realise the true existence of a Church or a city as a being with its own capacities and responsibilities ; but when it is once apprehended it is very real — it is no figure of speech. We see the Church possessed as a whole of qualities which she must gather, of course, from her parts, but which we can find in no one of her parts. She is more permanent, more wis^, more trustworthy than the wisest and most trustworthy of the men who compose her member- ship. The city is a being dearer to us than any of the citizens who compose it. Many a man goes 138 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [viL out to war and gives his life gladly for his country who would not have dreamed of giving it for any countryman. There are indeed some men who seem to be incapable of any such thought vvho never can get beyond the individual. But the extent to which these ideas of what we may call the corporate personalities, such as the Church, the State, the City, have prevailed, and the depth to which they have influenced the feeling and action of mankind is a testimony that they are not imagin- ary but real. The Bible is full of them. The Old Testament deals with bodies of men supremely : Israel is more than any Israelite ; Jerusalem is realer and dearer than any Jew. The New Tes- tament reverts to the individual, who, as we said, must always be primarily conspicuous in Chris- tianity ; but it too advances towards its larger personality, and leaves the strong figure of the Christian Church and the brilliant architecture of the New Jerusalem burning upon its latest pages. But leaving these general thoughts, let us come to our subject. What is a Christian city ? Is such a thing possible ? Is anything more to be expected than that here and there throughout a cit) men and women should be Christians, believing Chris- tian truths, living Christian lives, and looking for- ward to ineffable rewards beyond the skies ? Can we conceive of Christianity so pervading the life rn.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 139 of a community that not merely the souls shall be Christian, but the city shall be Christian, distinctly different in its corporate life and action from a heathen city which knows nothing about Christ ? Christianity, then, or the change of man's life by Christ, has three different aspects in which it appears — three ways in which it makes its power known. It appears either as Truth, as Righteous- ness, or as Love. Every soul which is really re- deemed by Christ will enter into new beliefs, higher v/ays of action, and deeper affections towards fellow -men. Belief, behaviour, and benevolence, these are the fields in which Christ works. By a change in these He changes the whole man. In every Christian Christianity will show its triple power. Each man made Christ's man will believe more truth and do more righteousness and over- run more with love than when he was his own selfish servant. There will be difference in different Christians. In one belief will be most prominent, in another integrity, in another benevolence, as the fruit of his conversion ; but in all three will still be present a truer faith, a purer righteousness, and 31 more bounteous charity. Now take these one by one, and ask if a city is not capable of them as well as an individual. Again I say, as I reminded you before, that they must exist primarily in individuals ; all .spiritual HO THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [vii. character must reside ultimately in single souls ; but still I think that it is manifestly true that an aggregate of individuals may possess in its own peculiar way the spiritual character which the indi- vidual possesses, and a city, like a man, have and exhibit Christian faith and Christian righteousness and Christian love. I. Look first at Faith, Perhaps this seems the hardest to establish. There was a time perhaps, we say, when cities had their beliefs. There was a time when no man could live comfortably in Rome without believing like the Pope, or in Geneva without believing like Calvin, or in England or New England without believing like the king or like the magistrates. Then it might seem perhaps as if each city had its faith ; then every proclama- tion was based upon a creed. But see hojv that is altered now. A thousand different beliefs fight freely in our streets, and it is almost true that no man is the less a citizen for anything that he be- lieves or disbelieves. When these old times come back thj»n you may have a believing city, a city with a creed ; but not till then ; and these old times are never coming back. But this is surely some- what shallow. This implies that the only exhibition of a faith must be in formal statement. It ignores for the city what we more and more accept for the individual, that the best sign that a man believes VII.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. I4I anything is not his repetition of its formulas, but his impregnation with its spirit. It may have grown impossible, at least for the present, that cities should write confessions of faith in their charters, or even make the simplest acknowledg- ment of the most fundamental truths in the head- ings of their statutes or in the inscriptions on their coins ; but if it is possible — nay, if it is necessary — that the prevalence through all a city's life of a belief in God and Christ and the Holy Spirit should testify of itself by the creation of certain spiritual qualities in that city, recognisable in all its ways of living and government, then have we not the pos- sibility of a believing city even without a written creed or a formal proclamation. Just look at this city where you live. This is a Christian city — a believing city. And why ? how do we know it ? It is not because an occasional document is solem- nised with the name of God. It is not because a few verses of the Bible are read each morning in your public schools. It is because that spirit which has never been in the world save as the fruit of Christian faith prevails in and pervades your govern- ment and social life, the spirit of responsibility, of trust in man, and of hopefulness. These are the spiritual results of Christian believing : they are not found in heathenism. When Christianity enters into heathenism the new faith of a converted country 142 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [viL is testified to by a pervading sense of responsibility, a more confident and cordial trust in man, and an expectant hopeful enterprise, which together make up that spirit of vigilant and serious liberty which belongs to the best civilisation and under ^vhich you live. This is the Christian faith of your com- munity, showing in all your public actions. It has not come by accident. It has entered into you through the long belief of your fathers which you yourselves still keep in spite of all your scepticisms and disputes, the belief in a humanity, created by God, redeemed by Jesus Christ, inspired and pointed on to indefinite futures by a Holy Spirit. If we doubt this, if we doubt whether a city can have and show a Christian faith, we have only to ask ourselves what would be the consequence if a heathen belief were prevalent everywhere among us. We have some men who disbelieve intensely and bitterly in every Christian doctrine. They disbelieve in God, in immortality, in anything like spiritual influence. They believe in no re- demption of humanity opening the prospects of eternal life. To them man is an animal, God is a fiction, immortality is a dream. The spirit of these men we know : it is hopeless, cynical, despairing. If they are naturally sensual, they plunge into de- bauchery ; if they are naturally refined and fastidi- ous, they stand aside and sneer at or superciliously VII.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 143 pity the eager work and exuberant feeling of other men. Such men we know. Now fancy such men's faith made common ; fancy their disbehef spread like a pestilence through all the blood of your city. What would be the result ? Would it be merely that souls would be blighted and cursed ? Would not the city grow weak ? Would not public con- fidence be smitten to the ground and enterprise be paralysed ? Would any generous work be done ? Could either popular government or an extended system of business credit still survive, since both are based on that trust of man in man which is at the bottom a Christian sentiment ? Would you not have killed enterprise when you had taken hope- fulness away, and given the deathblow to public purity when you had destroyed responsibility ? No, the city has its Christian faith. It believes in and is influenced by its belief in the great Christian truths. Its belief is far from perfect : it is all stained and broken with scepticism. That disbelief to which many of our educated men have brought themselves creeps down in ignorant and half-unconscious ways, and saps the strength out of the belief of the uneducated masses. But still the Christian faith is the true faith of our cities. It is vastly more strong than many of you who spend your life in a little circle of people wi'Lh the affectation of doubts upon them are ready 144 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [vii. to believe. Every now and then comes a revival Such scenes as we have witnessed in England and America are surely the most explicable, the most intelligible sights that it is possible to imagine. •' What does it mean ?" we say ; " when all seemed quiet, and men seemed settling placidly down into unbelief and indifference, all of a sudden this great outbreak ? People crowding by tens of thousands to hear some homely preacher, the city shaken with the storm of hymns, thousands confessing their sins and crying out for pardon ?" Is it not clear enough what it means ? Here many of the men to whom the people most looked up have been sending down to the uplooking people the barren gospel of their scepticism. They have taught them that there is no God whom they can know ; they have bidden them not dream of immortality. These teachings have sunk into the people's heart ; they have gone down there heavy and cold. But by and by they have pressed too terribly upon the spiritual consciousness ; the sense of God, the certainty of immortality, has risen in rebellion ; the great reaction comes ,' the wronged affections reassert themselves. ** A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up anc answer 'd ' I have felt"* VII.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 145 One must rejoice in such a healthy outburst. To complain of its extravagances or faults of taste is as if you complained of the tempest which cleared your city of the cholera because it shook your win- dows and stripped the leaves off your trees. It is then possible for a city to have a Christian faith. The methods by which it may be perpetu- ated and kept pure are open to endless discussion. No doubt the city in which a Christian faith is liveliest stands the most in danger of ecclesiasti- cism on the one hand, and of dogmatic quarrelsome- ness on the other ; but about this one fact we are most clear, that a city may believe, and as a city may be blessed by its belief. It seems to open an appeal to any generous and public -spirited young man, to which he surely ought to listen. Not only for your own soul and its interests you ought to seek the truth, and not be satisfied till you believe something with a clear and certain faith. For the community in which you live, because these streams of public and social life which run so shallow need to be deepened with eternal inter- ests, because your faith in God will help to make God a true inspiration to the city's life ; therefore, in addition to all the motives that belong to you alone, therefore you ought not to be satisfied without believing. Seek for the truth and find it. Not for yourself alone, but for the men about you L 146 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [viL for the city that you love. Remember the simple old parable in the book of Ecclesiastes : " There was a little city, and few men within it ; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it : now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength." And wisdom in the Old Testa- ment means what faith means in the New. 2. The second aspect under which Christianity presents itself is Righteousness. A man who is a Christian holds certain truth, and then he does certain goodness ; there is a new moral character in his activities. We pass on to the question of this righteousness. Is it too something that can belong to this gathering of men which we call a city, or must it be confined wholly to individuals? In this aspect can there be such a thing as a Christian city ? The answer is not difficult. Cer- tainly every city has a moral character distinguish- able from, however it may be made up of, the individual character of its inhabitants. This is seen in two ways. First, in the official acts which it must do, the acts of justice or injustice, of deceit or candour by which it appears as a person acting in its official unity among its sister cities. Bu: even more its moral character appears in its capacity of influence, in the moral atmosphere which per- VII.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 147 vades it, and which exercises pov^r on all who come within it. You send a child to live in some village of the South Sea Islands, some heathen brutal community where vice is in the very atmo- sphere, and he is certainly contaminated. What is it that contaminates him ? Not this man's or that man's example, but the whole character of the city where he lives. The brutality is every- where, in all its laws, its customs, its standards, its traditions. It is not merely in this or that cannibal group who hold their frightful revel in its streets ; the streets themselves are steeped in it ; the very houses reek with viciousness. You send him back to live in old Pompeii, where the abominations which modern times have uncovered and made the subject of cool archaeological study were live things, the true expression of the heathen city's spirit, the outward and visible signs of her inward and spiritual grace. As he enters in you see his soul wither and grow spotted with corrup- tion. It is a bad city, and its badness taints him. We know what we mean when we say that it is a bad city ; it is not the badness of one man or another of which we are thinking ; the city is a real true being in our thought — lustful and scorn- ful and godless. Then bring your boy and put him here in Christian London. It is not only this or that Christian whom he meets. It is a 148 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [vii. Christian goodness everywhere : in the just dealing of the streets, in the serene peace of the homes, in the accepted responsibilities and obligations of friends and neighbours, in the universal liberty, in the absence of cruelty, in the purity and decency, in the solemn laws and the courteous ceremonies, — everywhere there is the testimony of a city where- in dwelleth righteousness. So true is the character in the city itself that you might clear the streets of London of all their present population and pour into their places the inhabitants of the South Sea Island town or of old dissolute Pompeii, and though of course before long the new population would be too strong for the old city and give it their charac- ter, yet for a time the character of even the inani- mate city, of the stone and brick, would assert its strength, and the wild savages and classic sen- sualists would be unconsciously refined or sobered as they went among the houses where years of Christian purity and uprightness had left their influence. What is it that has made the differ- ence ? It must be Christianity ; it can be nothing else. It is Christ in the city — the Christ who has been here so many years. And when we think how imperfectly Christ has been welcomed and adopted here — how only to the outside of our life He has penetrated, then there opens before ua a glorious vision of what the city might be in which VII.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 149 He should be totally received, where He should be wholly King. We dwell on the iniquity of city life in modern times. Indeed there is enough of it. But it is not the riotous and boastful wickedness of heathen times. Men have at least seen clearly enough the Christian standard, the Christ, to be ashamed of what they are not willing to renounce, and hide in secret chambers the villainies which used to flaunt upon the public walls. It is one stage in every conversion of the converted city as of the converted man. The next stage is to cast away the wickedness of which one has become ashamed. Of cities in the first stage there are instances everywhere through Christendom. Of the second stage — of the city totally possessed by Christ and so casting all wickedness away, there is as yet no specimen upon the earth, only the glowing picture of the apocalyptic city, the New Jerusalem, of which Christ is the Sun and Light, and into which there can enter nothing that de- fileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination nor maketh a lie ; a city so full to the very gates of righteousness that it casts out sin as light casts out darkness. That sounds very visionary and far tiway ; but consider that to bring about that city so different from your London you need only vastly more of the same power that has made ISO THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [vit your London so different from Pompeii. The Christian city is not all a dream. Already we have a city which has enough of Christ in it feeMy to turn away from its gates some vices which once came freely in to the old cities. Very far off, but still in the same direction, we can see the city sc completely filled with Christ that no sin can come in, nothing that defileth, neither whatsoever work- eth abomination nor maketh a lie. There is, then, such a thing as a city Christian in point of righteousness. That old Jewish con- ception of a holy city is not all a dream. Purity and truth may belong to a city as well as to a man. Again we come to a lofty ground of appeal. If you are pure and true, you who are privileged to make part of a great city, remember — oh, remem- ber ! — that your righteousness is not for yourself alone, nor for the few whom you immediately touch ; it is for your city. I am speaking to busi- ness men, who, if they will be really Christians, may help to put a more Christian character into business life. I am speaking to women of society, who, if they will be really Christians, may make the social character of the town more Christ-like, more true, serious, lofty, pure and intelligent — less sordid, sensual, and ignorant. I am speaking to young men, on whom it rests to develop or to destroy for their city the character that theif Til.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 151 fathers gave her. If you fail, you Christian men and women, what chance is there for the city ? Not for yourselves alone, not for your happiness alone, here or hereafter, but for the city of which you are proud ; for her character, which will be- come the character of thousands who are gathered into her, who shall be born in her hereafter, is there not a new motive to be earnest and pure Christian men and women in the love of God, in the service of Christ, by the power of the Holy Ghost ? 3. There are only a few moments left me in which to dwell upon the third development of Christianity, which is in Charity. Truth, righteous- ness, and love, we said ; faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is charity. When a man becomes a Christian, he believes right, and then he does right ; and then he tries to help his fellow- men. That is the old highway of grace, trodden by the multitudes of Christian feet for ages. And now again the question comes, can a city too have Christian charity ? Can it do good as the issue and utterance of its Christian character ? The Christian character of charity is very apt to elude us. If a Christian man gives alms to a pour friend, it is laid down to impulse ; and if a Christian city provides for its ov/n sick and needy and homeless, it is laid down to economy. In either case the connection of the charitable act 152 THk CHRISTIAN CITY. (Vll. with Christian faith is lost. But this is very shallow. You say it is all impulse when you give your money to the poor ; but what is the impulse ? Is there no Christianity in it ? Is it uniform ? Is your impulse the same as the savage's ? Has Christianity done nothing to keep down the other impulse to harm, and to strengthen this impulse to help your brethren ? And so you say the city's charity is all economy ; her hospitals are merely expedients for saving so much available human life. But, tell me, who taught her this economy ? who told the city that a human life was worth the saving ? If the hospital has nothing to do with Christianity, but is a mere expedient of organisa- tion, how is it that the most highly organised among un-Christian nations have had but the merest rudiments of hospitals ? No ! The charity of a city is a distinct testimony to one thing which has been wrought into the convictions of that city. That one thing is — the value of a man ; and that conviction has come out of the Christian faith. The city may not know where it has come from, as very few of us trace our deepest convictions to their source ; but they have none the less sprung out of that gospel which has proclaimed for eighteen hundred years that man is the child of God the Father, that he has been redeemed by God the Son, and that his body is the temple of the Holy VII.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 153 Ghost. A poor neglected creature drops in the crowded street ; a horse strikes him, and the heavy waggon crushes him as he Hes ; or in the blazing summer sun he is smitten to the ground insensible. Instantly the city — not this pitying man or that, but the pitying city — stoops and gathers him up tenderly, and carries him to the hospital, which it has built. It lays him on the bed which it has spread for him ; it summons the best skill to set the broken bone or soothe the fever ; it watches by his sleep, feeds him with dainties, finds out the potent medicines, cares for him tenderly until he goes out strong, or until the weary frame finds rest in death. Is there no Christ there ? Is not this a Christian charity? Is there no connection be- tween that strange devotion, so impersonal yet so instinct with all the love of personality and the truth which is in the city's heart and soul, that that poor man, in virtue of his humanity, is the child of God, the fellow-heir with Christ of heaven. Once there was a city which, when Christ came to it, hated and scorned Him ; it seized Him brutally, dragged Him before the judgment-seat, and cry- ing " Crucify Him ! crucify Him ! " would not be satisfied till it had nailed Him on the cross and seen Him die in agony. To-day here is a city which, if Christ came to it in person, would go out and welcome Him, would call Him Lord and iS4 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [viL Master, and hang upon His words and glory in the privilege of giving Him its best. In that first city there was no hospital : the poor sick man dropped and perished ; the children's lives vanished, and no man even counted them ; the wretched leper was cast out to die among the tombs. In this new city the hospitals stand thick for every kind of misery : the poor fall sick, and the city's great hand is under them. Is there no connection be- tween the rejection of Christ and the rejection of His poor ; between the acceptance of Christ and the reception of His suffering brethren ? Has not the Christian city a right to hear the Saviour's words as if He spoke to her : " Inasmuch as thou hast done it to the least of these my brethren, thou hast done it unto Me"? I know the perfunctory and heartless treatment with which occasionally the methods of our public charity disown the spirit to which it owes its birth ; but that is rare, and still the fact of the Christian city's Christian charity remains. Who doubts that if the city were tenfold more Christian than she is, if Christian truth and Christian righteous- ness were tenfold more the inspiration and law of her life, the hospitals would be multiplied and en- riched till it should be an impossibility for any sick man to be left unhelped. Deepen the city's Chris- tianity and the city's charity must deepen and vn.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 155 widen too. If we could imagine any poor, sick, weak man, still sick and weak, in the midst of the overrunning health of immortality, finding his way into the heavenly city of which we spoke, and sinking lame and exhausted on the pavement of the New Jerusalem, only think how the faith and righteousness of the celestial community must leap into charity, and the poor sufferer be borne to the banks of the river of the water of life, and tended in the softest chambers of the holy city, where God Himself shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and where there shall be no more pain. Truth, righteousness, and charity — I beg you, fellow-Christians, who are also citizens of London, to think of your goodly city as a being capable of all of these. Never fall into any low way of counting her a mere mass of houses or a mere machine of trade. Honour her and love her, and try to make her more and more worthy of your honour and your love by faithful, upright, chari- table lives, which shall contribute to her truth and righteousness and love. You know why I have spoken thus to-day. To-day your Christianity and charity clasp hands, and the mother knows and claims her child. Not by a mere appeal to feeling, but by asserting the reality and responsibility of a Christian city, I have tried to make you ready for the solemn and beauti- 156 THE CHRISTIAN CITY, [viL ful act of Hospital Sunday. The sick and suffer- ing are all around us ; their cries are in our ears. They are the children of our Father, the brethren of our brethren. To-day your Christian city owns their claim. We forget our differences, and try to do the duty in which we are all one. If you will do it as you can, there shall be great joy in this city ; not only because many a poor sufferer will be relieved, but because you shall have borne wit- ness that Christ is verily among you — that this is indeed a city of tl'e living God. VIIl THE GREATNESS OF FAITH ' Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou wilt" — Matt. xv. 28. These are evidently the words of one who is yielding, one who, after some reluctance, is giving way. If we knew nothing about their connection, if we merely heard them by themselves, we should seem to see a closed hand opening and letting go something which it had been holding fast. And such reluctance, as we well know, is of many kinds. One man withholds that which he might bestow because he wants to make his gift seem more valuable ; another because he wants to bind the receiver more closely to himself; another be- cause he thinks that what he has to give has not yet been sufficiently deserved or earned ; another because he thinks it will not be used in the best way. When these considerations have been over- * Preached at St. Michael's Church, Chester Square, London, Sunday afternoon, loth June 1883. 158 THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. [viii. come, then the closed hand opens, and the gift is given. You remember the story from which the words are taken. Jesus has travelled outside of the regions of the Jews, and there has come to him a Canaanitish woman askiiig Him to cure her poor afflicted daughter. He has hesitated and remon- strated, but at last she overcomes Him uith her urgency, and He yields to her, saying, " O woman, great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou wilt." It would be possible to give reasons, which no doubt would be true ones, for Christ's reluct- ance. Each one of those which I suggested might apply ; but I cannot but think that the truest and simplest way to look at this beautiful story, which I wish to study with you this afternoon, is to con- sider it as a record of the spiritual necessities of Jesus. The idea which seems to me to be in it is this, that Jesus gave the woman what she wanted just as soon as it was possible for Him to give it ; and that, just as soon as it was possible for Him to give it, in some true sense He had to give it, it was impossible for Him to refuse it any longer. He was not holding it, as it were, behind His back, watching her face to see when was the best moment to give it to her. He was telling her of a genuine impossibility when He said, " I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the hous^ vin.] THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. 159 of Israel." He could not give her what she wanted then ; but when by her belief in Him she had crossed the line and become spiritually one of His people, then the impossibility was removed, and we may even say, I think, that He could not help helping her. All through the record of mercies and the miracles of Jesus there runs a certain subtle tone which puzzles us. He who is so powerful and mer- ciful gives us still a strange impression of holding His mercy and power under some strange conditions which limit and restrict their use. He who is so free is evidently bound by chains too fine for us to see. I need not remind you that there were some villages where He could do no mighty works be- cause there He found no faith. "Whatsoever ye ask believing ye shall receive," He says, as if there were some other condition besides His own great love which must decide whether any special prayer should find its answer. When the needy men and women come to Him we find ourselves watchincr to see which of them He will relieve, and we are sure as we watch that it is not any mere whim of His which will decide ; there is some law which binds Him with necessity. Surely everybody who has read the Gospel at all sympathetically has felt this. I seem to hear, as I read, the sound of a great sea of might and mercy shut in behind necessities A i6o THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. [vill. which it cannot disobey ; I seem to hear it clamour- ing to escape and give itself away along long stretches of the wall which shuts it in ; and then I seem to see it bursting forth rejoicingly where some great gate is flung wide open and it may go forth unhindered to its work of blessing. So seems to me the story of the power and love of Jesus held fast under the conditions of the faith of men. Christ is too truly man like us, and we are too truly man like Christ, for us not to have seen in our actions glimpses of the same necessity under which He acted. We too act for our fellow-men under the perpetual conditions of their faith. Who of us that has ever tried to help his brethren has not come to places where he can use both of those words of Jesus, where he can say sometimes, " I can do no work here because of this unbelief," and sometimes, " Great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou wilt." Some regions there are in which it seems as if every power of use and help- fulness that we ever possessed were gone, or at least for the time were walled up and buried ; other regions there are where, almost without our will, the best that is in us leaps to the gate and hurries out to help some need which has summoned it with a peculiar desire and capacity of being helped. The subject of the verse, then, and that of which I wish to speak this afternoon is " The Power of \ VIII.] THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. i6j Faith over Jesus." We are always talking as if the highest natures and beings were the least sub- ject to law. A great many good people seem to talk as if the world would be more splendid, clothed with a completer dignity, if it were not all bound by necessities which it cannot escape, if every stai moved in the sky and every flower opened in the garden, not because it must, but because, by some extemporaneous whim, it chose to. And so men look to those whom they call their superiors, and think that their superiority and privilege consists in their escape from law. The labourer plods to his work early in the morning dusk and sees the rich man's curtains still undrawn, and says, " Oh, if I were only rich like him, and could do as I pleased." The boy takes his task at school, and dreams as he does it of the days when school shall be over and nobody shall any longer set him tasks. As we go on we find we are all wrong. The higher the nature the more imperative has %^ grown the law. The rich man lying in his bed envies the labourer's easy whistle under his window. The merchant calls the schoolboy free. He who must do only what a few of his fellow-men, who are his special masters, can order him in formal commandment, and can enforce by stated penalties, has no conception of the perfect servantship of that life which has all men for its masters, and mu.st ^ i62 THE GREATNESS OF FAITH, [niL obey any one of them, no matter who he be, who speaks to it with that entire openness and power to be helped which we call faith. I beg you to observe how definite and clear an idea there is here of the way in which Christ gives His mercies to mankind. Evidently there is some inequality in the distribution of them. Any man can see that. Men have always seen it Christ makes some men good and brave and holy ; other men He seems to leave untouched. Some men He saves ; other men He seems to leave unsaved. Men have always seen that, and they have always tried to explain it. They have tried the explana- tion of election, and they have tried the explana- tion of desert. They have said, " Christ chooses to save these and chooses to leave those unsaved." That explanation has not satisfied men ; it has seemed too much to leave out man. Then they have said, " These men have deserved to be saved, and those men have not deserved it." That ex- planation also has seemed insufficient. It has seemed too much to leave out Christ, or to bring Him in only a sort of bookkeeper and paymaster of the moral world. But still this other explanation remains. Christ saves all whom He can save, all J.. who are savable. Doing all that He can first to make men wiling to receive Him, He then at last is in the power of their willingness. This viii.] THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. 163 surely is an intelligible idea of Christ and of the way in which He treats mankind ; this certainly lets us understand both of those words of His, which are but specimens of many other words that He said : " The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost," and " To as many as received Him gave He power to become the sons of God." It will be good for us first to see, what I have already hinted, how widely prevalent the principle is which comes to its consummati n in the giving of Himself by Christ to men. Everywhere faith, or the capacity of receiving, has a power to claim and command the thing which it needs. Nature would furnish us many an exhibition of the principle. You plant a healthy seed into the ground. The seed's health consists simply in this, that it has the power of true relations to the soil you plant it in. And how these spring-days bear us witness that the soil acknowledges this power : no sooner does it feel the seed than it replies ; it unlocks all its treasures of force ; the little hungry black kernel is its master. " O seed, great is thy faith," the ground seems to say ; " be it unto thee even as th u wilt ;" and so the miracle of growth begins. Or a human mind comes to an idea. What shall it be ? Let us say the idea of cause and purpose running through and filling all creatiDn. Clothe that idea in your imagination with consciousness ; l64 THE GREA TNESS OF FAITH. [viii, let it know what truth it carries in its heart ; think of it as pondering to whom it shall deliver up that truth. There cannot any longer be a doubt when it has once found the mind that really sym- pathetically believes in it. It fills that mind with inspiration ; it sends its force all through its action. Other minds touch it, and it gives them nothing. The man who in the most entire sympathy believes in the idea lives by it ; all his movements become lofty, calm, fruitful with its influence. And so still more about a man. Why, it becomes a common- place of all social life which is in the least thought- ful and observant, that no man gets anything out of a fellow-man unless in some degree, in some way, he believes in him. Here is a man whose life is full of business : his face, his hand, his name are everywhere ; there is no movement in the community in which he does not take a part ; there is no cause in which his aid is not invoked. What is that man to you, a fellow-citizen of his, before whose eyes he is for ever standing out in some new manifestation of his energy ? Does not ev^erything depend upon whether you personally believe in him ? Suppose that you do not ; sup- pose that all his tireless activity has only succeeded in impressing you with the conviction that he is a selfish, superficial busybody ; suppose that, seeing how different his ways of working are from yours, VIII.] THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. 165 or finding yourself at variance with him about something concerning which you feel perfectly sure that you are right, you have come to believe that he is insincere ; suppose that some blunder of his has seemed to you to show such essential rotten- ness that you cannot trust anything about him ? What then ? That man's good, whatever good there may be in him, is shut up from you com- pletely. He can do nothing for you ; you can get nothing out of him. Some lessons, some sugges- tions from his life you may collect, but they will be to you only what they would have been if you had read them in a book or a newspaper. The man himself — not what he knows and says, but what he is — the man himself is as closely and tightly locked away from you as are the treasures in the bank's vaults from the poor vagrant who sleeps at night on the bank steps or paces up and down its sidewalk. This is the reason why a disbelieving life be comes a barren life. You know how very common it has grown for men to think it a sign of wisdom and profound experience to distrust their fellow- men. The reason why one dreads to see a temper such as that increase is that the nature which dis- trusts gets nothing from the men in whom it dis- believes. One of the reasons why youth is the growing and accumulating period of life, the period l66 THE GREA TNESS OF FAITH. [viii. in which harvests of truth and hope and charactef are gathered in, is that youth naturally and instinct- ively believes. By and by the man grows up, and then, distrusting his fellow -men, he walks over their hidden riches as the ignorant traveller walks over an unopened mine. Oh, my dear friends, young men and old, try to respect and trust just as far as you can the men with whom you most profoundly disagree, for so only can you get from them the peculiar riches which they have to give you. A staunch and settled Conserva' ive, who is never going to be anything but a Conservative, if he respects the ability and honesty of some stout Radical, keeps open a channel through which something of what value there possibly may be in the Radical's Radicalism may flow into him. The Radical who honours a Conservative gets some- thing of what value there may possibly be in his Conservatism. The more men you honour the more cisterns you have to draw from. Men of other parties, other Churches, other trades than your own, must acknowledge the demand which your faith makes on them, and give you whatever each of them may have worth the giving. And if we stand not upon the side of the receiver but upon the side of the giver, the same truth is full of force. You want to give your intelligence, "our thought, your wisdom, such as it is, to the VIII.] THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. 167 little circle in which God has set you to live. It is not conceit that prompts you ; it is a real desire to be useful. How necessary it is that at the very outset you should know our truth — that it is only to faith that such gifts can be given. Men and women are standing everywhere, all over the world, urging their advice and experience upon other people who do not believe in them. These other people have nothing against them ; they do not hate them or despise them ; but they have no faith in them. Faith is a positive thing, not merely negative. Not to disbelieve in a man is something very different from, very far short of, believing in him. Such men trying to enlighten and help other men who have no faith in them are like suns without atmospheres. No matter how bright they shine, the world which they want to enlighten gets no light from them. You must build the atmosphere before you can send down the light You must win men's faith before you can do anything to make them wise or happy. Therefore it is that the mere amount of a man's intellectual power or the mere degree of truth in a man's doctrine is never a complete test or assur- ance of the power he will have over other men, A crazy chatterer or a blatant infidel will make the whole world listen and fill men with his folly if he can only make men believe in him ; while 1 68 THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. [vili. Wisdom herself may cry aloud in the chief place of concourse and no man hear, and the whole crowd go away as foolish as it came. If you really want to help your fellow-men, you must not merely have in you what would do them good if they should take it from you, but you must be such a man that they can take it from you. The snow must melt upon the mountain and come down in a spring torrent, before its richness can make the valley rich. And yet in every age there are cold, hard, unsympathetic wise men standing up aloof, like snow-banks on the hill-tops, conscious of the locked-up fertility in them, and wondering that their wisdom does not save the world. I think that in such thoughts as these there comes out more clearly than any deliberate defini- tion can embody it what is meant by faith. The best things in this world can be defined only by a description of their result. No man can tell me what the sunlight is except by what it does. The essence of life is utterly inexplicable ; the action of life all men can see. And so of faith Faith as I have talked of it to you to-day is such a relation of one being to another higher being as opens the higher being's nature to the lower, and makes a ready gift of the higher to the lower possible. " Ah, then," says the dogmatist, " I see that I was right. Faith is a proper understanding, VIII.] THE GREA TNESS OF FAITH. 169 a true idea, a correct creed. You must have that before the being higher than yourself can give him- self to you." And then the sentimentalist cries, " No, I was right ; faith must be feeling. Love and trust your superior, and he can help you." And yet another man, the moralist, says, " Was not I right ? Is not faith simply obedience ? Do your master's will, and he will put his nature into you." And as they all speak, anybody who has really got hold of the great truth sees how partial they all are, sees that faith is something greater than they each describe it, sees that it must include and must outgo them all : for I may know all the facts about a man, and yet his nature stand shut tight against me ; and I may love and trust a man so foolishly and superficially and sillily, that he can do nothing for me ; and I may follow a man's footsteps, and be in no more real communion with him than his dog. Sometimes all these unite, and something else, indefinable but absolutely recognisable, is added to them — some- thing which comes in as additional to everything that can be defined in the substance of a friend- ship — and then, and not till then, the gates are opened and the lower nature becomes wise with the wisdom, strong with the strength, of the higher, lives by its life, judges with its judgment, knows with its knowledge. The power of that union, I7