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FEOM THINGS 
 
 TO GOD 
 
 BY 
 
 DAVID H. GREER, D. D. 
 
 Bector of St. Bartholomew's Church,' New York 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 2 AND 3 Bible House 
 
Copyright, 1893, 
 
 by 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER. 
 
 THE CAXTON PRESS 
 NEW YORK. 
 
PEEFAOE. 
 
 The sermons in tliis volume were preached 
 witliout notes. They were taken down in short- 
 hand at the time of their delivery, and are 
 printed as they were reported. Their style, there- 
 fore, is that of spoken and not written dis- 
 course, and does not so easily lend itself to 
 print. Any attempt to change it, however, 
 would have involved not only a difl&cult but an 
 almost impossible task. Neither would it have 
 been desirable. The chief effectiveness of a ser- 
 mon is after all the personality of the speaker, 
 and while it is difficult to import this into the 
 i:)rinted page, it can be done more fully by 
 preserving than by trying to change the original 
 form of utterance. As sermons therefore and 
 not essays these discourses are printed, and it 
 only remains to be said that the purpose of the 
 author in publishing them is precisely the same 
 
iv PREFACE. 
 
 as that wliich lie had in preaching them : to try- 
 to make men see that even the commonest life 
 has in it something divine, and to help them a 
 little in the midst of their daily affairs to 
 pass from "Things to God." 
 
OOIS'TENTS. 
 
 FAQB 
 
 From Things to God, 1 
 
 The PERsoNAii Dominion of Christ, .... 14 
 
 What is Truth — A Study in Method, . . . . 26 
 
 The Ladder op Life, 39 
 
 Faith and Machinert, 53 
 
 The Coming of the Kingdom op God, .... 69 
 
 The Christian and the Theatre, 82 
 
 Hiding from God, 98 
 
 Mastership, 113 
 
 Walking with God To-dat, 123 
 
 The Moral Conflict ; and its Significance, . . 137 
 
 Building the Temple of God, 151 
 
 Preferring Our Own Way to God's, .... 164 
 
 The True Vision and the False Seer, . . . 176 
 
 Sm, AND ITS Deliverer, 190 
 
 Conscience, 204 
 
 Going on Journeys to Find Christ, .... 215 
 
 The Man and the Priest, 226 
 
 Visions, 338 
 
 Christ Greater than Oxm Thought of Him, . . 253 
 
 The Gospel of the Resurrection, ..... 265 
 
 V 
 
PROM THINGS TO GOD. 
 
 PROM THINGS TO GOD. 
 
 Therefore let no man glory in men : for all things are yours ; 
 "Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, 
 or things present, or tilings to come ; all are yours ; and ye are 
 Christ's : and Christ is God's. — 1 Corinthians iii. 31-33. 
 
 The Corinthian Church, to which these words 
 were addressed, was split up, as you know, into 
 parties and consumed with jealousies. St. Paul 
 undertakes to correct this state of tilings, not by 
 discussing and adjusting the relative claims and 
 merits of the different parties and saying where- 
 in each was right and wherein each was wrong, 
 but by giving to the members of all of them such 
 a conception of themselves, so large and so sub- 
 lime, that in the light of its apprehension their 
 little, narrow, partisan spirit, with its little can- 
 kering jealousies, would fade and cease to be. 
 "You do not belong to parties," he says; "to 
 partisan schools and opinions, to partisan leaders 
 and teachers, you do not belong to them ; they 
 belong to you, and all their thoughts and utter- 
 
2 FROM THINGS TO GOD. 
 
 ances, all their gifts and powers, all their things 
 are yours. Yes," he goes on to say, his mind 
 having once started in that direction, "all other 
 things are yours, of the world, of life, of death, 
 things present, things to come — all are yours, and 
 ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." From 
 things, to man, to Christ, to God — that is St. 
 Paul's conception of the ascending order of the 
 universe and of man's position in it ; let us take 
 his thought this morning, and try to read it 
 after him. 
 
 "All things are yours." When St. Paul said 
 that to the men of his time it was a prophecy. 
 To-day it is fast becoming a prophecy fulfilled, 
 and we see now as then they did not see, or 
 did not see as clearly as we see now, how true it 
 is that the earth and all things in it are indeed 
 the property of and do belong to man. They 
 belong to him, as we are seeing now, in the first 
 place by a right of ancestral relationship, by a 
 kind of blood afiinity, or kindred link and tie. 
 For whether he be regarded as having come out 
 of the earth by a process of special creation or a 
 process of gradual growth, he is in either case 
 the product of the earth, and all the varied 
 faculties of all the living forms which the earth 
 itself contains, are seen and reflected in him. 
 
FEOM THINGS TO GOD. 3 
 
 *' Hints and previsions of which faculties 
 Are strewn confusedly everywhere about 
 The inferior natures, all lead up higher : 
 All shape out dimly the superior race, 
 And man appears at last, 
 The consummation of this scheme of being ; 
 The completion of this sphere of life 
 Whose attributes had here and there been scattered 
 O'er the visible world before. 
 Dim fragments meant 
 To be united in some wondrous whole, 
 Imperfect qualities throughout creation. 
 Suggesting some one creature yet to make, 
 Some point where all these scattered rays should meet 
 
 convergent 
 In the faculties of man." 
 
 And we are seeing to-day how true it is, as St. 
 Paul himself so long ago declared, that man is 
 indeed the heir of all the things and all the 
 forms which all the earth contains ; that by the 
 right of pedigree, by the right of ancestry, by 
 the right of descent and lineage, they do belong 
 to him, they do belong to us. 
 
 And they belong to us, too, by possession as 
 well as by inheritance ; or they are coming so 
 to belong to us. 
 
 " Canst thou perceive the breadth of the 
 earth ? " exclaimed the patriarch Job, as though 
 he were stating some hopeless and impos- 
 sible task, and lo, we have almost spanned 
 the skies. "Canst thou send out the light- 
 
4 FROM THINGS TO GOD. 
 
 nings ? " lie says again, " that they should go and 
 be thy servants, and say to thee, Here we are." 
 That is precisely what we have done. And we 
 have bent the bow of Arcturus, and the sweet 
 influence of the Pleiades we have succeeded in 
 binding down to our practical purposes in life, as 
 on all the waters around the globe we sail. And 
 the way of the wind we know, and the path of 
 the cloud, and the secret springs of the seas, and 
 the place where light dwelleth we do in a 
 measure know, and nearly all the forces of 
 nature we have gathered up into our strong right 
 hand, and are using at our will. And as the 
 heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time 
 all things are ours to-day, of the world of life, 
 of death. Yes, even of death — and the treas- 
 ures of gold and silver which those who have pre- 
 ceded us have fought and died to accumulate, 
 and the wisdom and the knowledge and the 
 experience and the apprehensions of truth which 
 they have fought and died to obtain, and the 
 battles for civil liberty, for personal freedom in 
 thought, speech, action, which they have fought 
 and died to win ; yes the things of death are 
 ours as well as the things of life. They have 
 made us rich and great and strong, and will 
 hereafter make us more so, for not only are 
 
FROM THINGS TO GOD. 5 
 
 things present ours, but the things to come will 
 be ours, and will give their glory and abundance 
 to us and minister to our wealth. 
 
 Well, then, as much as that of the apostle's 
 declaration when he says, "All things are 
 yours," we are able to-day to read ; as far as that 
 in the movement and course of his ascending 
 thought we are able to follow him. 
 
 But more than that he says, and higher than 
 that he climbs ; can we go on and read the rest of 
 the sentence after him ? Can we we go on and 
 climb the rest of the way with him? "All 
 things are yours, and ye" — oh, wonderful thought 
 and helpful; great, uplifting, inspiring — "and 
 ye with all your things, with all your things, 
 are Christ's." From them, to us, to Him, — from 
 things, to man, to Christ. 
 
 We are talking about property right to-day ; 
 that is the length of the tenure line and that 
 is where, in Jesus Christ, all property right 
 is lodged. We own and we are owned. Look- 
 ing down we are masters ; looking up we are 
 servants, and as all things belong to us, so do 
 we with all our things belong to Jesus Christ. 
 Now, observe, he does not say that we ought to 
 belong to Christ or that we ought to be Christ's. 
 "You are Christ's," he says. Whether we 
 
6 FROM THINGS TO GOD. 
 
 know it or not, whether we confess it or not, 
 our acknowledgment of it does not make it any 
 more true ; our failure to acknowledge it does 
 not make it any less true. No matter what 
 we do, no matter where we are, in the Church 
 or out of it, baptized or unbaptized, confirmed or 
 unconfirmed, the fact remains : we are Christ's, 
 and we cannot change that fact. We may 
 refuse to recognize it ; we may try to live as 
 though it were not so, and we may succeed in 
 living as though it were not so ; but what we 
 think or do or fail to do about a thing does not 
 make the thing different from what the thing is, 
 and according to St. Paul the thing here is this : 
 we are Christ's — his property, he owns us, we 
 are his. 
 
 What do we call it when we take away a 
 man's property, when we hold it back in our 
 keeping and won't let him have it ? We have a 
 word for it, we call it robbery. And that, 
 just that, I think, St. Paul teaches and the 
 whole Bible teaches, is what a person does 
 when he refuses to let Jesus Christ take posses- 
 sion of him. He is robbing Jesus Christ, he is 
 taking away his property from him or holding 
 it back and depriving him of his own. It is 
 just because, it seems to me, this is not more 
 
FROM THINGS TO GOD. 7 
 
 clearly and generally understood and recognized, 
 tliat there is a hesitancy on the part of so 
 many people to make a public confession, 
 acknowledgment, of Jesus Christ, to come into 
 and join, as it is called, and unite with the Chris- 
 tian Church. They seem to think that in doing 
 so, by that step, by that act, by that public con- 
 fession, they are becoming Jesus Christ's, and 
 thus and then and there making themselves 
 belong to and the property of Jesus Christ. And 
 they shrink a little from the responsibility of 
 that belonging to Jesus Christ and what it 
 imposes and involves, and lest thereafter they 
 should not be able to live consistently with it 
 and so invite some censure and bring reproach 
 upon him. But they are Christ's now, his 
 property now, they belong to him now. Is it 
 not a censurable, reproachful, and inconsistent 
 thing to refuse to say that they are ? It is some- 
 thing even to make an acknowledgment of a just 
 debt ; it is usually the first step toward the pay- 
 ment of it, and certainly it is not worse but 
 better to try to pay and fail, than not to try to 
 pay it or even to make an acknowledgment of it. 
 Think about that, some of you. 
 
 But let us go on and consider what this belong- 
 ing to Jesus Christ really is, what it means to us, 
 
8 FEOM THINGS TO GOD. 
 
 and what it is that it does for us when we once 
 come to realize and to be conscious of it. 
 
 Climbing up through the scale of being only to 
 ourselves, and going no higher than that, and 
 looking no higher than that, we do not really 
 know ourselves nor see the meaning of things. 
 Like some little child at school who does not 
 and cannot understand, or understands but dimly 
 the deep, far-reaching reason and necessity of 
 his tasks, and would like if he could to escape 
 them ; we cannot appreciate, we cannot perceive 
 and grasp the deep, far-reaching reason or 
 disciplinary necessity that lies concealed in our 
 tasks. Or like some soldier in battle, who in 
 the thick of the smoke of the conflict is not able 
 to recognize clearly and to discriminate between 
 the different forms which he sees advancing to- 
 ward him, and thinks that his friends are ene- 
 mies, and his enemies friends ; looking at things 
 as we are wrestling with them, we will surely 
 make the same mistake, and think that those 
 which are really happening to us for our good are 
 happening for our hurt, or that those which are 
 happening for our hurt are happening for our 
 good. 
 
 Yes, simply looking at things from the point 
 of view of ourselves, how can we understand 
 
FROM THINGS TO GOD. 9 
 
 tliem ; how can we put a right and true appraise- 
 ment on them ? How could the little seed or 
 the life that is latent in it understand the things 
 that liai^pen to it — the decayings, the perishings, 
 the destructions, the crumblings away, in its 
 deep, dark, prison house, unless it could look 
 on and see that larger, greater, more abundant 
 life ; that life of the beautiful flower, that life 
 of the golden grain, that life of the ripened fruit 
 to which it belongs, and which all its happenings 
 are for ? 
 
 How could the life of the world in winter see 
 and understand the things that are happening 
 to-day — the cold, the frost, the ice-morsels, and 
 the shrouds of snow around it — unless it could 
 look on beyond its immediate self to the rich and 
 radiant life of the summer's bloom and splendor, 
 with which it is connected, to which it is moving 
 on, in which it is fulfilled, and which, through 
 all these wintry things and all these dark and 
 cloudy things, it is getting ready to come. 
 
 Ah, how can you and I understand the things 
 that are happening now to us — the dark, the cold, 
 the wintry things, as well as the bright, the joy- 
 ous, and the summer things — unless we can send 
 our vision up to some great height beyond us, to 
 some great life above us, toward which they are 
 
10 FROM THINGS TO GOD. 
 
 all determining, toward wliicli they trend and 
 go, and see in that the object which all these 
 things are for. From things, to man, to Christ. 
 From them, to ns, to Him ! and looking at them 
 from there, we begin to know them a little and 
 only then do we know them. Seeing in him the 
 life to which they are committed, to which they 
 all belong, we put new values on them and see 
 new meanings in them. Those sorrows and joys, 
 those tasks and treasures, which come from 
 the world and are given to us by life, and those 
 experiences that come from bereavement and 
 which have been taught us by death, they are 
 ours, yes — but that is not all — and we are Christ's. 
 Seeing that and knowing that, we then know how 
 to regard them ; we then know what they are 
 meant to do — not to make U3 a little bit richer or 
 more prosperous than our fellows, and stoj)ping 
 and ending there, not to make us poor, or poorer, 
 not to make us comfortable or uncomfortable, 
 not to make us light of heart, not to make us 
 sad. Their aim is far beyond all that, and like 
 St. Paul they seem to say, and looking at them 
 from the point of view of the life of Christ, we 
 seem to hear them say, ' ' Whether we are bright 
 or dark to you now, whether things of life or 
 things of death, forgetting what has been already 
 
FROM THINGS TO GOD. H 
 
 accomplished in you, this one thing we do and 
 we were meant to do, to press you on, to drive 
 you on, to bring you nearer to Jesus Christ, to 
 lift you np more and more through sunshine 
 and cloud, through poverty and wealth, through 
 all things — to lift you up to the high and emi- 
 nent place to which you really belong." 
 
 Then we begin to understand them a little, 
 we begin to see some light. Then we begin 
 to understand ourselves a little — those deep 
 and fervent longings which in our hearts at 
 times we do so strongly feel ; those dumb yearn- 
 ings, prayings, passionate aspirations, earnest 
 searchings after something, we know not what 
 exactly — we understand them a little. We see 
 the meaning of them, those tremblings and quiver- 
 ings of the soul, as though it were on the margin 
 of some deep and mystic joy, as though the 
 breath of some infinite life had touched it : 
 feelings, aspirations which we cannot voice, and 
 which we call on music and song, and heaven 
 and earth, and beauty and religion, and united 
 prayer and worship and praise, to help us 
 to express. It seems to me that what it all 
 means is this, that there is something higher in 
 the scale of being than that point to which as 
 yet we have been able to come, that to something 
 
13 FROM THINGS TO GOD. 
 
 greater, better, more, we do in fact belong; "ye 
 are Christ's " it means, and Christ's mighty spirit 
 is stirring in our hearts. It is his life we feel, his 
 voice we hear, seeming to say, as he is so are we, 
 or so at least we will be. And the little buried 
 seed will ripen into the rich golden grain, and 
 the wintry earth will burst and break and laugh 
 at last in the summer's beauty and bloom ; and 
 the hopes and the aspirations which the winter's 
 frost and snow cannot kill in us but only seem 
 to intensify, will be fulfilled in Christ. 
 
 That is the message, men and women, it seems 
 to me which the Christian gospel brings to us. 
 It shows us what that is to which we really be- 
 long ; it says to us, "You do not belong to a 
 life that is poor and weak, and worldly and 
 selfish ; you do not belong to sin and pride and 
 jealousy and strife ; oh, see the great and 
 wonderful life which the gospel story proclaims; 
 the life that has conquered sin, the life that 
 many of us believe has conquered death ; the life 
 that has moved so luminously across earth's 
 darkened sky, that has given such cheer and 
 courage to darkened hearts and homes — that is 
 the life to which you really belong. 
 
 " Ye are Christ's," ye are Christ's, is its ringing 
 cry ; and — Christ is God's. For nowhere in the 
 
FROM THINGS TO GOD. 13 
 
 universe, on its loftiest eminence, on its highest 
 ground, is there anything more divine than that 
 life of Christ. Trying to live that life, and day 
 after day to make it ours, not in name merely 
 but in fact, we more and more realize that 
 we are moving on and on, we know not where 
 exactly, but toward what is most divine in the 
 universe. We are not going down to loss and 
 waste, but going up to permanency and gain ; 
 not going down to defeat, but going up to 
 victory ; not going down to death, but going 
 up to life : and more and more we feel that 
 the trend of all creation is toward the very 
 highest, is toward the very best — from things to 
 man, to Christ, to God ; who 
 
 "Dwells in all 
 From life's minute beginnings, up at last 
 Toman . , . 
 
 And, man produced, all has its end thus far 
 But in completed man begins anew 
 A tendency to God." 
 
THE PERSOISrAL DOMINION OF CHRIST. 
 
 Jesv^ Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever. — 
 Hebrews xiii. 8. 
 
 Eighteen hundred years ago St. Paul wrote 
 to the Corinthian Christians "the fashion of this 
 world passeth away," and all human history is 
 an illustration of and a commentary upon the 
 truth of his words. Change and decay are the 
 order of human life, and things which are aj^par- 
 ently immovable are not able to stand '"gainst 
 the tooth of time and razure of oblivion." 
 There are certain periods, however, in the his- 
 tory of mankind, when the changes in society 
 are exceptionally rapid and radical. Such a 
 period was the fourth century of the Christian 
 era, was the century of the Schoolmen, was the 
 century of the Crusaders, was the century of the 
 Reformation, and such a period seems to be this 
 nineteenth century also, which has witnessed 
 both more numerous and rapid if not more radi- 
 cal changes, in certain directions at least, than 
 any other period of equal duration in the whole 
 previous history of mankind . 
 
 14 
 
THE PERSONAL DOMINION OF CHRIST. 15 
 
 Naturally, therefore, at such a time as this, 
 when so many and great changes are taking 
 place in society, in the Church and in the State, 
 when no change seems to surprise us any more, 
 and we are only surprised if after the lapse of a 
 little while no great change occurs — naturally, 
 I say, at such a time as this we are disposed to 
 inquire what is there that will not change ; to 
 which Ave can, in the midst of things that are 
 passing away, with a feeling of security cling, 
 and upon which we may with a proper con- 
 fidence rest. It is in resx3onse to this line of 
 inquiry that I will ask you this morning to con- 
 sider, first, the fact itself, and then the signifi- 
 cance of it, that, despite all the changes that 
 have taken place in the past, that are taking 
 place in the present, or that will take place in 
 the future, Jesus Christ has been, is, and in my 
 judgment always will be, yesterday, to-day, and 
 forever, the one abiding factor in the ever chang- 
 ing economy of our human life. I do not mean 
 to say, of course, that the speculative beliefs of 
 man concerning Jesus Christ have been subject 
 to no variation, or that there have been no changes 
 in what is commonly called the world of reli- 
 gious opinion, for in the face of facts that are 
 patent to every intelligent observer, how could I 
 
16 THE PERSONAL DOMINION OF CHRIST. 
 
 or anyone truthfully say that? Bufc what I 
 mean is this : 
 
 The personal dominion of Christ over the 
 hearts and consciences, over the lives of men, by 
 all the changes that have taken place, has not 
 been in the slightest measure disturbed, but has, 
 on the contrary, strengthened and increased, and 
 has widened more and more "with the process 
 of the suns." This, I maintain, is a histori- 
 cal fact. We do not need to i)rove it ; it is 
 before our eyes ; we can see it ; in our immediate 
 audience, we can hear its voice ; and with our 
 hands we can touch and handle and come into 
 contact with it. 
 
 The first disciples of Jesus had to walk by 
 faith in him. His claim to a perpetual dominion 
 they had to take on trust, for he had not yet been 
 lifted up in the sight of the world. His attract- 
 ive power had not been widely felt ; it had not 
 yet been proved. But to-day, it is not so neces- 
 sary to walk by faith in Christ. And with the 
 manifestations of his power throughout all civili- 
 zation and around us on every hand, pervading 
 our best political institutions, permeating our 
 best social economy, leavening our literature, 
 glorifying our art, inspiring our philanthroiDies, 
 influencing more or less the whole broad move- 
 
THE PEESOl^AL DOMINION OF CHRIST. 17 
 
 ment of our modern conduct, and emanating 
 from a character which, even after the lapse of 
 nearly nineteen centuries, is still regarded as 
 the ideal life of the world, to-day we can walk 
 by sight ; and the personal dominion of Jesus 
 Christ, unexhausted by time, unweakened by 
 social changes, unimpaired by political revo- 
 lutions or ecclesiastical perversions, is before our 
 eyes as an unimpeachable fact. 
 
 But then, it may be said, this after all is not 
 an exceptional fact, for there are other religions 
 in the world besides the Christian religion, older, 
 some of them, and having more disciples. And 
 that is true, but the influence exerted by those 
 other religions is not the personal influence of 
 their founders. They would, in fact, survive 
 without their founders. 
 
 Take away Mahomet, and Islam still remains; 
 take away Buddha, and the "light of Asia," 
 such as it is, still shines ; take away Zoroaster, 
 and the fire still burns with unabated brightness 
 on the Persian altar and hilltop ; take away Con- 
 fucius, and the primitive religion of the Celestial 
 Empire is in no way impaired ; but take away 
 Jesus Christ, and Christianity is gone. His name 
 is stamped on every page of the New Testament 
 writings and on every chapter of ecclesiastical 
 
18 THE PEESONAL DOMINION OF CHRIST. 
 
 history ; it is found in every creed, in every 
 liturgy, in every form of worship ; for Christi- 
 anity, in its essential and distinctive character, 
 is simply Jesus Christ and the influence which he 
 exerts. And so, from the very outset, wherever 
 the great tidal wave of the Christian religion 
 swept in its propagandist path among the peoples 
 of the earth, from the shores of Palestine, across 
 the waters of the Mediterranean, through the 
 mountains of Asia Minor, along the banks of the 
 Danube and the Tiber, to the far-off coasts of 
 the British Isles, it is the form of the personal 
 Christ that is always seen on the topmost crest 
 of the wave, commanding attention, provoking 
 thought, eliciting homage and love. While, 
 therefore, there are other religions in the world, 
 of venerable age and with numerous disciples, it 
 is none the less true, as Mr. Lecky remarks, 
 that "it was reserved for the Christian religion 
 to j)resent to the world an ideal character, which 
 through all the changes of eighteen hundred 
 years has filled the hearts of men with an im- 
 passioned love, which has shown itself to be 
 capable of acting on all ages, nations, tempera- 
 ments, and conditions, and which has exerted so 
 deep an influence that it may be truly said that 
 the simple record of three short years of active 
 
THE PERSONAL DOMINION OF CHRIST. 19 
 
 life lias done more to regenerate and soften man- 
 kind than all the disquisitions of philosophers 
 and than all the exhortations of moralists." 
 
 Let us now go a step farther, and consider the 
 significance of this fact. Seeing what Jesus 
 Christ has been and done in history we can also 
 see what he is. For if it be true, and I am not 
 aware that it is disputed, that the power of Jesus 
 Christ has sliown itself to be different from and 
 greater than that of all great men combined, it 
 must be other than human ; it must be divine. 
 If time, the great destroyer that weakens the in- 
 fluence of everyone else, has not in the least im- 
 paired it, it must have i^roceeded from an eternal 
 source. Without any finite limitation to it, as 
 far as we can perceive, in its range of action, it 
 must have proceeded from an infinite source. 
 Overcoming all obstacles, and obstacles, too, 
 which others have found insurmountable, it 
 must have proceeded from something like an 
 omniiDotent source. Without a sufficient and 
 adequate cause or explanation in human nature, 
 as we know human nature, it must have pro- 
 ceeded from an absolute source. Free from 
 every evil taint and making exclusively for 
 righteousness, it must have i^roceeded from a 
 perfect source. Perfect, absolute, omnipotent, 
 
20 THE PEESONAL DOMINION OF CHEIST. 
 
 infinite, and eternal ; these the positive philoso- 
 pher tells are unthinkable terms, conveying no 
 definite meaning to us and which we have no 
 right to employ. And so perhaps in the abstract, 
 and up in the air, they are unthinkable terms. 
 But looking at the power of Jesus Christ on 
 the earth, at what he has been and done and is 
 doing in human affairs, and comparing that 
 power with all others that have energized in his- 
 tory, we can truly say, using in part the lan- 
 guage of an English theologian, that while in 
 themselves, indeed, these are unthinkable terms, 
 yet so far as we can enter at all into the compre- 
 hension of them, we see them in Jesus Christ. 
 And for us at least, and as far as we are con- 
 cerned, "the Absolute was born at Bethlehem, 
 the Perfect died on Calvary, the Omnipotent 
 rose at Easter, the Infinite ascended from 
 Bethany, and the Eternal came down at Pen- 
 tecost." 
 
 Thus do we reach the conviction, not by the 
 subtle processes of metaphysical analysis, nor by 
 the delicate balancings of textual and critical 
 study, for which the great majority of us are 
 not qualified, but by observation — by looking at 
 facts ; by the positive method of historical re- 
 view and comparison, that among all the sons of 
 
THE PEESONAL DOMINION OF CHRIST. 21 
 
 men there is none like unto tlie Son of Man. 
 And the conviction, tlie reasonable conviction, is 
 forced upon us that Jesus Christ, wielding a 
 sceptre invincible and divine, is on the throne 
 in this world, King of kings, Lord^f lords, God 
 manifest in flesh. Here, then, is the fact, and 
 here is the significance of it : The Kingdom of 
 Jesus Christ is a perpetual kingdom, it does not 
 pass away, and the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
 Let me now direct your attention to some 
 lessons which the fact teaches, and first this: 
 In the fact of the perpetuity of the Kingdom of 
 Jesus Christ in this world we find the true unity 
 of the past and the principle of continuity 
 in history. When the French savant, by one 
 of those lucky guesses, as we are wont to call 
 them, but which are rather the inspirations of 
 genius, hit upon the character in the Rosetta 
 stone which answered to the royal name, he was 
 enabled, you remember, by that clew to trace 
 out the whole hieroglyphic puzzle. In like 
 manner, when amid the strifes and antagonisms 
 and conflicting interests of the past, we once suc- 
 ceed in finding the royal name of Christ, the 
 veil is taken away, the confusion is confusion no 
 
22 THE PERSONAL DOMINION OF CHEIST. 
 
 longer ; it resolves itself into order. We see 
 that all the changes which have taken place, 
 that all the dire calamities which have been 
 experienced or victories which have been won, 
 that all the defeats and losses and overthrows 
 which have been encountered, have had the 
 effect ultimately to bring out more fully in the 
 hearts of men and in the social economy of the 
 world the power of Jesus Christ, to make it 
 more widely, more profoundly felt, to establish 
 more securely his influence and kingdom on the 
 earth, and that all things have been moving to 
 this end. And this a^jplies not only to Christian 
 history, but to history prior to the Christian era. 
 Here is the explanation of the wonderful story 
 of the Jewish nation, of the Greek, the Roman, 
 the Egyptian nation, of all the nations of antiq- 
 uity, which by their national struggles and 
 developments were preparing the way for the 
 coming of that Kingdom of the Son of Man 
 which came in Jesus Christ, and which, through 
 all the overturnings that mark the course of the 
 past from the earliest time to the latest, has been 
 more and more conspicuously appearing in the 
 world. 
 
 In the perpetuity of the Kingdom of Jesus 
 Christ we find the true unity of the past ; we 
 
THE PERSONAL DOMINION OF CUEIST. 23 
 
 also find in it tlie true hope for the future. 
 The age in which we are living has witnessed 
 many changes, material and mental, and the 
 coming ages will doubtless witness many more ; 
 but the result will be to enlarge and deepen the 
 dominion of Jesus Christ. The world will 
 become not worse than it is, but better. Not 
 in the way, perhaps, of direct and continuous 
 advance, but through ups and downs, like the 
 course of one who is climbing a precijoitous range 
 of mountains, occasionally going down into little 
 ravines, stumbling, falling, losing his way, and 
 making turns every now and then which tempo- 
 rarily reverse his i)atli, and yet all the while 
 steadily and slowly pressing on toward the dis- 
 tant mountain-top, which by and by he reaches, 
 gradually will Jesus Christ gather all human life 
 about him. All forms of human pursuit will 
 acknowledge him, all dej^artments of human 
 knowledge will pay their tribute to him, all the 
 aspirations of the human heart, in art, in letters, 
 in music, in philosophy, in science, in commerce, 
 will reach their consummation in him, and even 
 the voice crying in the wilderness, uncertain 
 where to find him, and which can only say, " per- 
 form the immediate duty and be content with 
 the wages which it gives you," will exclaim at 
 
24 THE PEESONAL DOMINION OF CHEIST. 
 
 last with peace and joy, "Beliold the Lamb of 
 God," and " Crown him Lord of all." 
 
 Finally, in the perpetuity of the Kingdom of 
 Jesus Christ we find not only the true unity of 
 the past and the true hoioe of the future, but 
 also what is the true duty of the present hour. 
 And comprehensively stated, what is that but 
 to make all human society, at home, abroad, 
 everywhere ; to make all human society in all 
 the depth and breadth and intricacy of its com- 
 plex relationship, feel and respond to the 
 supremacy of Jesus Christ? It is indeed a large 
 and formidable task, requiring prudence and 
 wisdom and good judgment and common sense, 
 as well as enthusiasm and zeal. It is a task 
 requiring all kinds of gifts — scholarship, wealth, 
 knowledge of affairs, administrative ability, 
 power to influence others — and well might we be 
 appalled at the jDroportions of it, if we did not 
 remember these two things : First, that the Chris- 
 tina Church already jDossesses these gifts. In 
 her membership are to be found to-day the great 
 majority of the ablest, wisest, strongest men and 
 noblest women of Christendom, who have proved 
 themselves to be such, and who can accomplish 
 almost any task to which they earnestly apply 
 themselves ; and second, that in fighting for 
 
THE PERSONAL DOMINION OF CHRIST. 25 
 
 him wlio claimed tlie homage of all men, and 
 who for eighteen hundred years has been mak- 
 ing good the claim, we are fighting, not on the 
 losing, but on the winning side ! And therefore 
 we go into the battle with the inspiration that is 
 born of that conviction. With this inspiration, 
 and these qualifications, let us have the con- 
 sciousness that we are co-workers with God in 
 the fulfillment of that purpose which runs 
 throughout all human history, which has been 
 unfolding itself throughout all the ages, and 
 which will receive its consummation when all 
 nations, kindreds, tribes, and tongues shall be 
 gathered around the throne of Christ and his 
 dominion shall be established over all. 
 
 Here, then, in the midst of things that are 
 passing away, is the one abiding factor in hu- 
 man life, to which we can with a feeling of secu- 
 rity cling, and upon which we may with a per- 
 fect confidence rest. For despite all the changes 
 that have taken place in the past, that are tak- 
 ing place in the present, or that will take place 
 in the future, stands, and will forever stand, the 
 Kingdom of Jesus Christ. 
 
WHAT IS TRUTH— A STUDY IN METHOD. 
 
 Pilate saith unto him. What is truth ? — St. John xviii. 38. 
 
 That question of Pilate's has not ceased to be 
 asked ; it is asked now more than it was then, 
 with more persistency, by more people, concern- 
 ing more things. The intellectual inquisitive- 
 ness is greater to-day and the field of inquiry 
 bigger — so much bigger indeed that it would be 
 a presumptuous and hopeless task to undertake 
 to traverse it. I need scarcely say that the pur- 
 pose I have in view is not so wide and scattering 
 as that, and without attempting to answer the 
 Roman Governor's question, I simply want to 
 indicate the path on which, in my judgment, a 
 person must move in order to reach an answer. 
 My aim is not to show what truth is, but the 
 way in which to find it, and the study to which 
 I invite you this morning is a study in method. 
 
 What is truth ? First, I remark, truth exists. 
 That may seem to some of us like a superfluous 
 kind of statement, like saying the earth exists ; 
 of course it does. And yet there are a good 
 many people who apparently do not believe that 
 
 26 
 
WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IN METHOD. 27 
 
 truth exists, a?id wlio ask that question of 
 Pilate's, not with the expectation of receiving 
 an answer to it, but as he seems to have asked it 
 — in the strong and deep conviction that it does 
 not have any answer — a vain, empty, and useless 
 question which it is hardly worth while to ask, 
 or which, if it is asked, is simply asked to show 
 how hopeless it is to ask it. 
 
 There are a good many such people, I say. 
 They may not be here in this church this morn- 
 ing, or they may be, for they sometimes go to 
 church, but they are here numerously enough in 
 New York City. We often meet and talk with 
 them, and from their conversation — sometimes 
 from their silence — they make the impression 
 upon us, not so much that they are hostile to 
 religion, or even indifferent to it, but that after 
 thinking and studying and inquiring more or less 
 about it, [they have finally reached the conclu- 
 sion that the religious problem, interesting as it 
 is, important as it is, is a problem that cannot be 
 solved. This I say is the conclusion they seem 
 to have reached, that apart from what they can 
 learn by a mathematical process or by what is 
 called a physical or scientific process, there is 
 nothing that can be called truth, and that in the 
 attempt to find it there is no success to be had. 
 
28 WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IN METHOD. 
 
 Their state of mind is fairly well represented by 
 the old Persian poet, who has recently been 
 translated and brought to light because his 
 words are so expressive of the state of mind of 
 many people to-day : 
 
 Myself when young' did eag-erly frequent 
 Doctor and sage, and heard great argument 
 About it and about, but e'ermore came out 
 By the same door that in I went. 
 
 With them the seed of wisdom did I sow, 
 
 And with mine own hands wrought to make it grow ; 
 
 And tliis was all the harvest that I reaped — 
 
 I came like water and like wind I go. 
 
 There was a door to which I found no key, 
 There was a veil through which I could not see, 
 Some little talk awhile of thee and me — 
 And then no more of me and thee. 
 
 Are we not sometimes tempted, my friends, to 
 have just a little of that feeling ourselves ? When 
 we think of all the voices, so numerous, so differ- 
 ent, so conflicting, so bewildering, that are sound- 
 ing around us to-day ; the different religious 
 bodies, the different sects and parties, the differ- 
 ent schools of thought and the different leaders 
 in them, are we not inclined to have that feeling 
 ourselves? And when we think of tlie Protes- 
 tant and the Romanist, and the Anglican and 
 the Dissenter, and the old conservative critic and 
 
WHAT IS TRUTH- -A STUDY IN METHOD. 29 
 
 tlie new progressive critic, and the different in- 
 terpretations which they put upon the Bible, 
 and the different things which they see in it, and 
 the different doctrines which they find, each of 
 them claiming so stoutly that he alone is right 
 and all the others wrong — are we not sometimes 
 tempted to feel as the Roman Governor did, 
 and to say with him so hopelessly, so despair- 
 ingly, "What is truth?" Is it not after all 
 but the shadow of each man's self, his prejudice, 
 his preference, his temperament — a vain, tran- 
 sient, fugitive thing that has no permanence in it, 
 and that what is regarded by one man or one set 
 of men as true to-day is rejected and denied by 
 the next 1 and truth, what is it ? Is it indeed at 
 all? 
 
 Now, that was the state of mind of Pontius 
 Pilate's age, to which in the judgment hall he 
 simply gave expression, and that too, is the state 
 of mind, to some extent at least, of the age in 
 which we live, and into which, at times, we are so 
 apt to be drawn. And yet, when we come to 
 consider and examine it a little more closely, we 
 find that it is not only an undesirable state 
 of mind, but a logically inconsistent and self- 
 contradictory state of mind, and that we 
 cannot get away from the conviction of the 
 
30 WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IN METHOD. 
 
 reality and the existence of fixed and abso- 
 lute truth. Suppose, for instance, a person 
 declares there is no such thing as truth. Does 
 he not at the same time and with the same 
 breath declare that there is ? For that at least is 
 true, or that he thinks is true, that there is no 
 such thing as truth, and so in denying it he 
 affirms it and contradicts himself. 
 
 Suppose he says, again, there is no such thing 
 as error. Then that is true that there is no such 
 thing as error, and to deny it is an error, and 
 therefore there is such a thing as error.* 
 
 Suppose he says again, yes, there is such a 
 thing as truth, but then it is unascertainable — 
 we can never discover or find it out or know any- 
 thing about it. Is not that also an inconsistent 
 statement ? Suj)pose you tell me, for instance, 
 that there is something there back of that chan- 
 cel window, but that you do not and cannot 
 know anything about it. Then how do you 
 know it is there ? Must you not know some- 
 thing of what it is — not much, perhaps, but a 
 little : that it makes a noise back there or casts 
 a shadow — before you can say tliat it is ? Is it 
 not equally contradictory for a person to say 
 there is such a thing as truth, but we do not and 
 
 * See " Philosophy of Religion," by Professor Royce. 
 
WHAT IS TKUTH~A STUDY IN METHOD. 31 
 
 cannot know anything about it? Then how does 
 lie know that there is such a thing ? Must he not 
 have some little knowledge of what it is — not much 
 perhaps, but a little — in order to say that it is ? 
 
 Now, this may seem to some of you like an in- 
 genious and subtle and hair-splitting play upon 
 words, and perhaps not very practical. But it is 
 not a play ui)on words, and it serves to show with 
 what invincible persistency of conviction we do 
 believe and cannot help believing in the positive 
 reality of truth, and that when by some sophis- 
 tical process we try to get away from that con- 
 viction, we only go round in a circle and come 
 back to it again. We cannot get away from it. 
 And my apology for engaging you with this little 
 bit of metaphysics, if an apology be needed, is 
 the hope to make it evident that the state of mind 
 more or less prevalent in our time, which de- 
 clares or seems to declare that what we call 
 truth is after all but a matter of opinion, a 
 notional, fugitive, transient thing that has no 
 permanence in it, is not a reasonable state of 
 mind, but logically inconsistent and self -contra- 
 dictory ; that we cannot get away from the con- 
 viction, even when we seem to, that somewhere 
 in the universe there is to be found an absolute, 
 fixed standard of truth. 
 
32 WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IN METHOD. 
 
 Well, how can we find it ? This part of the sub- 
 ject is not so metaphysical ; how can we find it ? 
 To what doctor or teacher or book or scholar 
 or sect or party shall we go ? Our Roman 
 Catholic friend has an answer ready for us and 
 says, Listen to the voice of the Pope, for he is 
 infallible and speaks with an infallible A^oice. 
 But how are we to find out that he is infallible ? 
 Simply because he says so ? Surely not, and we 
 shall need some other infallible voice to tell us 
 that he is infallible. 
 
 Our Presbyterian friend says, Listen to the 
 voice of Calvin. But there seems to be some dif- 
 ference of opinion among our Presbyterian 
 friends, which may become serious, as to what 
 the voice of Calvin is. 
 
 Our Episcopal friend says. Listen to the voice 
 of the Church. But what voice of the Church ? 
 For it is not always perfectly clear to every per- 
 son what the voice of the Church is, or where 
 we find it expressed. 
 
 Now, all these voices and utterances are good 
 enough in their way. Each of them perhaps 
 teaches some little measure of truth and reveals 
 some aspect of it. Yet from the very nature of 
 the case it is only a partial aspect. No man, no 
 body of men, no age, no school of thought, is 
 
WHAT IS TRUTH— A STUDY IN METHOD. 33 
 
 able to reflect it fiillj^, but can only see a frag- 
 ment of what is right and true. Its observation 
 is limited to its point of view, and when its point 
 of view is changed its observation is changed. 
 You remember Matthew Arnold's words : 
 
 The outspread world to span 
 
 A cord the gods first slung, 
 And then the soul of man 
 I There like a mirror hung ; 
 And bade the winds through space 
 
 Impel the gusty toy. 
 Hither and thither spins 
 
 The wind-borne mirroring soul, 
 A thousand glimpses wins 
 
 But never sees the whole ; 
 Looks once, drives elsewhere, 
 And leaves its last employ. 
 
 Now if we could only reach some point of view, 
 or if someone could come and take us up to 
 a lofty height where we could with our vision 
 sweep the whole of the scene; where we could 
 look at things, not through the medium of one 
 particular time or one particular age, — as they 
 are apt by it to be dwarfed or unduly enlarged and 
 emphasized and seen out of right proportion and 
 relation to other things, — but through the me- 
 dium of all the times, — the fourth, the sixteenth, 
 the nineteenth, the twentieth century and away 
 beyond, then I think we would be in a position 
 to see them as they are. Or if we could look at 
 
34 WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IN METHOD, 
 
 tliem with the mind of one who, though born 
 in a particular age, however remote, is yet felt 
 to be the contemporary and companion of all 
 the ages, and who seems to speak to and see and 
 live among them all — then it seems to me we 
 would have discovered the true method by which 
 to search for truth, the point of view from which 
 to look, the path on which to move in order to 
 see and find it, and then more and more we 
 would continue to find it. 
 
 Now, is not that precisely the mind of Jesus 
 Christ ? Is not that the point of view and the 
 method of Jesus Christ? It has been pointed 
 out as a remarkable thing in Shakspere that 
 although he lived at a period when there was so 
 much of local interest transpiring in England, 
 both in the Church and State, — the great 
 throes and struggles of the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion, great political intrigues and wars at home 
 and abroad, — there is yet so little of it reflected 
 in his writings. His characters are simply men 
 and women ; not men and women with the dress 
 and the fashion and the gait and the manner 
 of that particular time, but men and women 
 always. It is the great cardinal passions of the 
 universal human nature — its hates, its loves, its 
 rivalries, its jealousies — of which he treats and 
 
WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IK METHOD. 35 
 
 speaks ; lience he speaks to all the ages, and men 
 and women everywhere find in him a voice. 
 
 Pre-eminently was this true of one far greater 
 than Shakspere. Living among a people whose 
 minds were much disturbed by great burning 
 questions of the day — questions concerning the 
 policy to be pursued abroad, or to be pursued at 
 home ; questions concerning deliverance from the 
 oppressive power of Csesar and the payment of 
 taxes to him ; questions concerning the rites and 
 ceremonies of the temple and the traditions of 
 the elders ; questions concerning parties and 
 their relative merits and claims, the Sadducees 
 and the Pharisees and the Essenes — questions 
 about which all Israel at the time was deeply 
 and engrossingly concerned, and yet he does not 
 speak of them ; he has little or nothing to say 
 about them. He rises above them all, calling 
 himself, not son of David or son of Abraham, 
 but simply Son of Man. He seems to see and 
 touch and feel the great universal human life, 
 as it throbs in every people and beats in every 
 age, and the voice with which he speaks is a 
 voice for sons of men. He gathers his disciples 
 about him and in the quietest, simplest way tells 
 them what to expect when he has gone away, 
 and what will happen to them. He says that 
 
36 WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IN METHOD. 
 
 though the earth itself should be dissolved and 
 the heavens rolled up like a scroll, his word will 
 still endure. He does not seem to be living and 
 walking so much in Galilee and Judea, as on the 
 great highway of the ages, and he looks forward 
 to the time when they shall come, not a few 
 peasants and fishermen and some Galilean 
 women, but from the east, west, north, south, 
 and sit at his feet and learn of him as in some 
 great kingdom of God. 
 
 When upon one occasion the Emperor Jus- 
 tinian was about to surrender to the clamor- 
 ous claims and the harsh and violent demands 
 of the mob, his wife Theodora is rejDresented 
 to have said to him that it was better to 
 meet and go down to death as the avowed 
 ruler of all, than purchase life for a little while 
 by yielding to the unworthy exactions of the 
 unrighteous few, and empire, she tells him, 
 "is the best winding-sheet." Empire, universal 
 empire, throughout all the world, throughout all 
 the ages, is the winding-sheet of Jesus Christ. 
 Victorious in the wilderness, victorious in Geth- 
 semane, before that worldly-minded Governor in 
 the judgment hall, victorious on the Cross, be- 
 cause his eye looked not upon the unworthy 
 demands of the immediate occasion, but upon 
 
WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IN METHOD. 37 
 
 the everlasting years, upon all future times, and 
 wrapped around liim in the winding-sheet of 
 empire does he die. 
 
 Here, then, is the point of view from which 
 to look for truth : the point of view of Jesus 
 Christ, of him whose vision seemed to compre- 
 hend in its vast far-reacliing scope their questions 
 then and ours — the things, the thoughts, the 
 questions of men in all the ages ; in whom not 
 the light of a particular time or a particular 
 land, but the light of the world apf)ears ; whose 
 voice is not the voice of truth as seen in part, but 
 as seen in its wholeness — the voice of truth itself. 
 
 Here is the point of view — the point of view of 
 Christ — at which we must try to put ourselves, 
 in order to see what is right and true. And not 
 with the mind of the fourth century, not with 
 the mind of the sixteenth century, not with the 
 mind of the nineteenth century, but with the 
 universal mind of Christ that covers all the cen- 
 turies, must we try to solve the questions, the 
 vexed and vexing questions which are with such 
 great urgency pressing upon us now. Then and 
 then alone, men and women, will we more 
 and more see and know how we ought to think 
 to-day and what we ought to do. Then let us 
 take our great modern life, with all its great. 
 
38 WHAT IS TRUTH — A STUDY IN METHOD. 
 
 fierce, burning questions and contentions, and 
 let us go with it back to Jesus Christ, to look at 
 it from his high, great, comprehensive point of 
 view, to learn of him what is right and true. 
 
 Yes, let us take our questions, our hard 
 personal questions — questions concerning duty 
 which we cannot solve for ourselves ; questions 
 concerning the world, the loss, the pain, the suf- 
 fering of the world ; questions concerning life ; 
 questions concerning death ; questions concern- 
 ing the life through which we are passing now 
 and the other life beyond toward which we are 
 moving on, let us take them all and study them 
 in the light of the mind of Christ and in that 
 light let us try to find an answer to them. 
 
 Oh, great, wonderful, universal Christ, whose 
 voice has spoken to the sons of men in all ages, 
 whose light has illumined, whose spirit has 
 guided, whose i^resence has blessed and sus- 
 tained them in the midst of perplexities, doubts, 
 fears, bewilderments, to whom else can we go? 
 We would rather run the risk of being mistaken 
 with thee than right with anyone else. But 
 thou wilt guide us right, wilt teach us how to 
 act, to think, to live, to die — to die in hope — and 
 wilt show us more and more of the glory and the 
 brieihtness of the truth as it is in thee. 
 
THE LADDER OF LIFE. 
 
 And Jacob went out from Beer-sheha, and went toward Ilaran. 
 And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, be- 
 cause the sun was set . . . and he dreamed. — Genesis xxviii. 10, 
 11, 13. 
 
 Heee is a picture — quite a commonplace one — 
 of a young man starting out in life. The scenes 
 of tlie past are closed ; the future lies before him, 
 unattempted and uncertain, and the only thing 
 that his father can do for him now is to say to 
 him as he does, as every father would say, at 
 such a time, " God Almighty bless thee, my son, 
 and make thee good and prosperous." With 
 this Invocation as his only heritage, he enters 
 upon his career, and goes forth into the world to 
 measure himself with, and to find his place 
 among, strangers. This is his situation when we 
 overtake him in the text. He has journeyed, it 
 seems, a whole day from the parental roof, and 
 now as the day is closing and the "glimmering 
 landscape fades upon the sight," and the twi- 
 light gathers and the darkness deepens, he lies 
 down to rest, this solitary traveler upon life's 
 great pathway, with the earth for a bed and the 
 
 39 
 
40 THE LADDER OF LIFE. 
 
 stones for a pillow and the skies above for a 
 covering. 
 
 And yet, rough and rugged as is his couch that 
 night, his sleep is sweet and peaceful ; and he 
 dreams of a luminous ladder stretching from 
 earth to heaven, of many angels of God ascend- 
 ing and descending upon it, and of a comfort- 
 ing voice of God speaking to him and saying, 
 " Behold, I am with thee and will keep thee in 
 all places, whithersoever thou goest." Now, in 
 this dream of Jacob at Bethel, although the 
 place is so remote and the time so long ago, we 
 have, I think, a picture of Christian life, — indeed 
 of all true human life, which, when true, is 
 Christian, — standing on the earth, planted firmly 
 there in the midst of human affairs, duties, inter- 
 ests, pleasures, yet receiving inspiration, guid- 
 ance, comfort, help from a life above the earth, 
 and resting like a ladder on this world and the 
 next. 
 
 Let us look at this picture for a little while 
 and see what it has to teach and suggest. The 
 Christian life, like all life in this world, rests on 
 a physical basis, for human nature consists of 
 body as well as soul, and "what shall we eat?" is 
 a question, not of so high an order, but just as 
 urgent at times, as " what shall we do to be 
 
THE LADDER OF LIFE. 41 
 
 saved?" It is, therefore, a question which a 
 Christian man, like every man, must ask, and like 
 every man must somehow manage to answer, for 
 no matter how devout and pious and spiritually 
 minded and intellectual a person may be, he 
 cannot subsist on a diet of pure thought and 
 emotion. The keenest logic, the most delicate 
 sentiment, the most brilliant reasoning, wait 
 upon appetite. The poet, the artist, the states- 
 man, the man of affairs, the philosopher, the 
 philanthropist, the reformer, are conditioned in 
 their loftiest flights of imagination, in their 
 noblest self-sacrifices for a suffering humanity, 
 by the inexorable mandate of a recurring physi'cal 
 hunger. Christian life, therefore, must stand on 
 a physical basis, it must rest on the earth. 
 Christian people must engage in the great world 
 struggle for bread, for physical food and sub- 
 sistence, participating in worldly affairs, and 
 thus doing their part to develop the physical 
 wealth of the world, bringing more and more its 
 hidden treasure out and making this world in a 
 physical sense a more comfortable place to live 
 in. 
 
 There is, I know, a danger to the Christian 
 life in this, of which I will presently speak, and 
 yet, great as the danger is in living in the world, 
 
42 THE LADDER OF LIFE. 
 
 there is a greater danger in trying to live outside 
 of it. It is only by coming into toucli and con- 
 tact with the real, active, busy, manifold life of 
 the w^orld that the Christian life can maintain its 
 purity of heart. That may seem like a strange 
 statement to some of you ; nevertheless it is true, 
 and experience has i)roved it true. Christian 
 men and women have at times tried the experi- 
 ment of living outside of the world, but their ef- 
 forts have not been successful. They have been, 
 on the contrary, very disastrous and bad, and by 
 their well-intentioned but most unwise endeavor 
 to climb up into the heavens by a ladder which, 
 like Mahomet's coffin, was susp>ended in the air, 
 one end of which did not rest and stand upon the 
 ground, they have ultimately fallen, ladder and 
 all, into the mud and mire of the ditch. And 
 the scandalous story of the monastic orders — 
 the monasteries, the convents, the abbeys, and 
 the other religious houses in England at the 
 time of the Reformation, where the plainest 
 principles of purity and morality were wantonly 
 disregarded and violated, and even the common 
 decencies of conduct had ceased to be observed, 
 and which perhai^s more than anything else gave 
 rise to the Reformation — should be sufficient, I 
 think, to teach this lesson to us. And no matter 
 
THE LADDER OF LIFE. 43 
 
 liow great the apparent gain may be or praise- 
 worthy the motive, or good for a time the re- 
 sult, the sure and final outcome of ignoring the 
 physical basis of the Christian life, the natural 
 human worldly basis, of trying to withdraw it 
 from its true and proper environment in the com- 
 mon life of the world, is not to make it more 
 spiritual, but to make it more corrupt, not better 
 indeed than the worldly life, but something 
 very much worse. 
 
 I remark again that it is only by coming into 
 touch and contact with the great life of the 
 world that the Christian life can j^reserve its 
 sanity ; not only the excellencies of its moral 
 character and the purity of its heart, but the ex- 
 cellencies of its intellectual character and the 
 purity of its head. And when Christian people 
 look upon the Christian life as a little j)atli, not 
 leading into and across the great face of the 
 world, but leading outside of and apart from it, 
 they are apt to become unbalanced in judgment, 
 wanting in common sense, in practical wisdom 
 and knowledge, and in their effort to save their 
 souls they sometimes lose their minds; or, if they 
 do not lose them wholly, they lose them a little 
 and in part. We have seen it in the past, we 
 see it also to-day : men and women whose Chris- 
 
44 THE LADDER OF LIFE. 
 
 tian life, although so earnest, so zealous, so sin- 
 cere, yet seems to be up in the air, not standing 
 on the ground nor resting on the common mother 
 earth, beautiful perhaps as a theory, but flighty, 
 queer, eccentric, full of extravaganzas and senti- 
 mentalisms, and which when brought down to 
 the common, practical, hard, every-day life of 
 the world does not work. 
 
 This leads me to say again that it is only by 
 coming into touch and contact with the great 
 and real and busy life of the world that the 
 Christian life can exert to the utmost its in- 
 fluence in the world. A story is told, I remem- 
 ber, of an old philosopher, that he would become 
 at times so absorbed in deep meditations con- 
 cerning the mysterious nature of God and the 
 human soul that he would stand almost motion- 
 less for a period of twelve hours or more in the 
 hot and open sun, with bare, blistered, swollen, 
 bleeding feet, so full of beautiful thoughts con- 
 cerning immortality and the life to come that he 
 forgot to put his shoes on. 
 
 My friends, if this Christian life of ours is to 
 be a real i)Ower and influence in the world, if, as 
 Jesus Christ meant, it is to touch and shape and 
 control the workl, if it is to be something more 
 than a beautiful bit of idealism; then, instead of 
 
THE LADDER OF LIFE. 46 
 
 standing by itself motionless and fixed in some 
 sweet and beautiful place apart from the world, 
 it must put on its shoes and go forth into the 
 world, must come into contact with it, must 
 learn how to move on all the great world 
 thoroughfares of toil and traffic and pursuit, 
 engagement, amusement, and pleasure. 
 
 How is the great political life of the world to 
 be Christianized and redeemed if Christian peo- 
 ple do not take a part in politics ? How is the 
 municipal life of New York City to be brought 
 more fully under Christian influence, — and I 
 presume it will be admitted by all parties, by 
 persons of all political complexions, that there 
 is room for improvement, — if when election day 
 comes so many Christian people, instead of go- 
 ing to the polls, run off to Tuxedo or some 
 other place in the country and go hunting and 
 fishing ? 
 
 How is the great amusement life of the world 
 to be purified and redeemed from its debasing 
 and corrupting tendencies if Christian people, 
 the best of them, do not participate with discrim- 
 inating engagement in it? How is the great 
 business life of the world to be redeemed from its 
 hard avarice, from its selfish greed, unless there 
 are many Christian people there who show by 
 
46 THE LADDER OF LIFE. 
 
 conduct and example that while they too love 
 gold they love God more than gold ? 
 
 How is any great dej)artnient of the world's 
 great life to be Christianized and redeemed except 
 as we understand it and know it and come into 
 contact with it, and in that way try to help it ? 
 
 Yes, for the maintenance of its purity, for the 
 preservation of its sanity, for the exertion of its 
 best and most effective influences, the Christian 
 life must stand on a physical basis, must rest on 
 the earth, on all the earth ; must come into rela- 
 tion, must keep itself in touch with this real, 
 great, busy life of the world. 
 
 Bat now, without elaborating this any more, 
 let me go on to speak of the other side of the 
 subject. I have said that there is a danger to 
 the Christian in trying to separate himself from 
 the world. There is also a danger in living in 
 the world. Jesus Christ in clear and vigorous 
 language has j)ointed out that danger. "How 
 hard it is," he says, "for one who trusts in 
 riches to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is 
 easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye 
 than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of 
 heaven." Strong language, strong language ; let 
 us not skip it when we read the gospel story. 
 Let us try to find out what it means, for of this 
 
THE LADDER OF LIFE. 47 
 
 We may be sure, that the sayings of Christ are 
 true; not true because he says them, but that he 
 says them because they are true. 
 
 What then is the kingdom of heaven to which 
 he here refers ? Not, as I understand it, a king- 
 dom of heaven beyond the grave and in some 
 other world, but a kingdom of heaven here, on 
 the earth, which those who trust in riches are 
 liable to miss and not enter. And why? Be- 
 cause they are apt to trust too much in riches, to 
 make them their heaven, their only heaven ; and 
 to want no other heaven and by and by to think 
 there is no other. In trying hard to minister to 
 their i)hysical needs, their physical wants and 
 requirements, duties, pleasures, interests, and 
 gratifications of appetite, they are apt to over- 
 look and ignore their higher ends and greater, to 
 forget indeed that they have any higher ends, 
 and after a while to cease altogether — the soul 
 lost, dead — to cease altogether to feel them. 
 They look out on life, and all they see or care 
 to see or try to see is money ; and the stars in 
 the firmament over their heads are simply stars 
 of gold. "Oh, come and shine upon us," they 
 say,— the poor as well as the rich, for the man 
 who is trying hard to be rich is virtually in the 
 same case with the man who is rich, — "ye stars 
 
48 THE LADDER OF LIFE. 
 
 of golden light; come slied your beams npoii our 
 hearts, come make us hapjDy and glad, come 
 more and more, ye golden stars, be our God, 
 our religion, our heaven on earth." Now, when 
 that is the heaven which men so engrossingly look 
 for, they find it hard to see and enter an}^ other. 
 
 And yet, says Jesus Christ, there is another 
 and a better heaven on earth. Ah, my friends, 
 are we not beginning to-day to find it out a little, 
 that this materialistic life, however comely and 
 fair, which moves and finds its being and its 
 gratifications in the physical senses, is breaking 
 down under its own weight and is not giving 
 to men the happiness that they had expected 
 from it ? Are we not beginning to find, I mean 
 the people at large, that the physical treasures 
 of life are not the only treasures nor the great- 
 est ; that there are treasures in the mind, treas- 
 ures in the heart, treasures in the soul, which if 
 diligently sought may be abundantly had, and 
 which if missed, leave us poor indeed ? 
 
 There is a kingdom of mind culture. Long- 
 ago it was said by a wise man that a Tamer- 
 lane standing at the gate of Damascus, pano- 
 plied in armor and with glittering battle-ax 
 upon his shoulder, is a less important factor in 
 the history of the world than the little boy play- 
 
THE LADDER OF LIFE. 49 
 
 ing at nine-pins in tlie streets of Metz, whose 
 movable types were destined to move the world. 
 Yes, and they have moved it and illuminated 
 and glorified it. They have given new treasures 
 to it, liberated new forces in it, and spread a new 
 heaven of letters and learning over it. The 
 kingdom of intellectual culture — how hard it is 
 for a man whose thoughts are engrossingly fixed 
 upon mere material treasures to enter that king- 
 dom of heaven ! how much he will lack if he does 
 not ! And he is beginning to-day to feel the lack. 
 
 There is a kingdom of heart culture, pure, 
 sweet, of great reward, to be found more partic- 
 ularly in the sheltered and secluded life of 
 the home. How hard it is for a busy man of 
 affairs to-day to enter that kingdom ! how much 
 he will lack if he does not ! And he is beginning 
 to-day to feel that lack, and to say to himself as 
 he sees how this mad and maddening search of 
 the modern world for gold, this fierce and 
 feverish rush, is making the sweet, quiet, old- 
 fashioned home-life impossible any more, is break- 
 ing it up, and turning it out-of-doors into the 
 street, " I wonder after all if it pays." 
 
 There is a heaven of soul culture, of spiritual 
 grace and beauty, of spiritual strength and 
 refinement and delicacy of spiritual perception, 
 
50 THE LADDER OF LIFE. 
 
 to which new vistas open, new hopes arise, new 
 faiths appear, new glories are made to shine, 
 brighter than the pride of life, sweeter than the 
 lust of the flesh, and of a more enduring bril- 
 liancy than all the material splendors revealed 
 to the natural eye. There is a heaven in the soul 
 here, the assurance of a heaven for the soul here- 
 after; a heaven of trust and confidence in, and 
 a heaven of peace with, God ; how hard it is for 
 the man engrossed in material pursuits to enter 
 that kingdom of heaven ! How much he will 
 lack if he does not enter it ! And he is beginning 
 to-day, it seems to me, to feel that lack a little, 
 beginning to say to himself, " Whatever may be 
 said against particular doctrines or theories or the 
 utterances of the churches, they do stand for and 
 point to something good and true," without which, 
 despite everything else he has done, or acquired 
 or may acquire, he will miss the thing he so much 
 wants and has been trying so hard to find. 
 
 Now let me sum what has been said. The true 
 and proper attitude of Christian life, of all life, 
 all human life, what is it ? Standing on the 
 earth, dwelling on the earth, taking part in, 
 moving about here and there in the great world- 
 struggle for treasures, for pleasures ? Yes, it is 
 that, and for the sake of ourselves, as well as for 
 
THE LADDER OF LIFE. 61 
 
 the sake of the world, let us not try to get out of 
 it, nor make the great mistake and repeat the 
 historic blunder of supposing that, in order to be 
 good Christians and to grow in the Christian life, 
 we must somehow manage to extricate and with- 
 draw ourselves from this common secular life. 
 No ; it is in the midst of this common life of the 
 world that the Christian life is to grow, the 
 Christian character to flourish, and the Christian 
 influences to be exerted. The ladder must rest 
 on the earth. 
 
 And yet there are many and great temptations 
 and snares and dangers in this worldly life, nor 
 can it give the thing we need to make ourselves 
 complete. Treasures there are, and j)leasures 
 and hopes and inspirations and high transfig- 
 uring faiths, not born of man, but of God ; a 
 heaven of joy and peace which, in the race for 
 riches, no matter how fast or successfully we 
 run, we are not able to reach. The Christian 
 life must stand upon the earth, in the midst of 
 earthly affairs, interests, duties, ambitions, pleas- 
 ures, and yet must somehow find a pathway clear 
 and open to things above the earth, to joys that do 
 not perish, to hopes that do not die, to faiths that 
 do not fail, to riches that do not rust, to great 
 and eternal realities lying beyond the world. 
 
52 THE LADDER OF LIFE. 
 
 It is difficult, I know, to live in this way without 
 serving God and Mammon both, which Christ 
 says we cannot do ; it is difficult to live in this 
 world and yet at the same time to enter and live 
 in some other world. To escape the difficulty 
 some have become "gainless lovers of God," 
 others have become "godless lovers of gain." 
 Neither course is right. We must stand on the 
 earth, and yet must touch and enter a heaven 
 above the eartli. And to be enabled to do it suc- 
 cessfully we must follow closely the guidance of 
 One who has said of himself, "No man cometh 
 down from heaven but the Son of Man which is 
 in heaven," whose life did rest like a ladder on 
 this world and the next, and along which the 
 angels are seen ascending and descending as 
 upon the Son of Man. 
 
 That is the Christian life, standing on the 
 earth, going here and there, from business to 
 society, from the club room to the counting 
 room and the drawing room, moving across the 
 earth, sailing across the waters, going here 
 and there, engaging in this and that, and yet 
 ever hearing the comforting, guiding, inspiring 
 voice of the great All-Father God, "I am with 
 thee, and will keep thee in all places whitherso- 
 ever thou goest." 
 
FAITH AND MACHINERY. 
 
 And the Lord said mito Mm, What is that in thine hand? And 
 he said, A rod. — Exodus iv. 2. 
 
 These words are associated with one of the 
 most remarkable and noteworthy events in the 
 history of mankind, namely, the deliverance of 
 the children of Israel from their house of bond- 
 age in Egypt. The Lord appeared unto Moses 
 as he kept the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, 
 in the mountain of Horeb, and said, " Come 
 now, therefore, and I will send thee unto 
 Pharaoh that thou mayest bring the children of 
 Israel forth"; and Moses said unto God, "Who 
 am I that I should go unto Pharaoh, or that I 
 should bring the children of Israel forth?" 
 "How shall I do it?" he seems to ask, "and 
 what shall I do it with ? What weapons shall I 
 employ ? where shall I find the equipment suffi- 
 cient for such an arduous task ? I have no 
 sword ; no army. I am not a soldier ; I am 
 only a shepherd, and when I go and tell them 
 that thou hast sent me, they will not believe me 
 or hearken unto my voice." And the Lord said 
 
 53 
 
54 FAITH AND MACHHSTERY. 
 
 unto Moses, "What is that in thine hand?" 
 and Moses said, "A rod." That was enough — 
 the only weapon required, the staff with which 
 he kept the sheep in the wilderness, the thing 
 he had already in his possession, and all that 
 was needed was to use it with faith in God. 
 
 I have selected this incident as my text this 
 morning for the purpose of trying to show you 
 what kind of equipment God requires for doing 
 his work in the world ; my subject is, " Faith in 
 God in its relation to faith in machinery," using 
 the word "machinery," as denoting all kinds 
 of tools, mental, moral, and social, as well as 
 mechanical. 
 
 It is not uncommon to hear people say what 
 good things they would like to do and indeed 
 would do if only they had the means to do them 
 with ; if, for instance, they were rich, or richer, 
 had more social influence, occupied more promi- 
 nent places among their fellow-men, or were in 
 some way differently circumstanced and situated 
 from what they actually are. This or that is 
 good, they admit, is very good and important, 
 a thing that ought to be done, a change that 
 ought to made, a great deliverance that ought 
 to be wrought, or a great reformation that 
 ought to be effected; but they themselves, they 
 
FAITH AND MACHINERY. 56 
 
 say, are not fitted for it; they have not the 
 means, the weapons, the tools, to work with, the 
 wisdom, the learning, the strength — are not the 
 persons to do it. 
 
 Well, that may be true. Diiierent persons 
 have, of course, different qualifications, different 
 opportunities, and different talents, and some 
 persons can work at a given task much more 
 effectively than others. And yet, while that is 
 true, is it not also true — a truth which in the 
 Bible is especially taught — that what men have 
 or are, no matter how poor and weak and inade- 
 quate it seems to be, can, when used with faith 
 in God, accomplish more than they think ? Is 
 not that the very thing, the principle, which the 
 Bible is meant to illustrate ? which makes the 
 Bible so different — or one of the things which 
 make the Bible so different from all other 
 books; which has made the religion of the Bible 
 such a unique phenomenon in the history of 
 mankind ? What you need, it has said to men, 
 with a voice different from all other voices, to do 
 great work for God in the world, — and this 
 makes it a voice for all people, — is not some 
 greater instrument than what you have already, 
 some greater gift of genius, some greater natural 
 endowment or circumstantial equipment, — do 
 
56 FAITH AND MACHINERY. 
 
 not wait for that. What you have is enough, — the 
 shepherd rod of a Moses, the trumpet horn of a 
 Joshua, the scarlet thread of a Rahab, the ham- 
 mer and nail of a Jael, the sling and stone of a 
 David, the barley loaves and fishes of the lad in 
 the gospel story, the one little talent which you 
 possess of wisdom, skill, experience, sympathy, 
 beauty, power. Do not despise and neglect it 
 because it is poor and weak, or wrap it up and 
 bury it and be afraid to exert it, but with faith 
 in God, go use it, looking to and trusting in God 
 to multiply and bless it. You cannot tell 
 beforehand what he may do with it, what great 
 results he can accomplish by it ; therefore take 
 it and go; that shepherd's rod, that sling and 
 stone, the one little talent which you possess, 
 the thing you have in hand, with faith in God, 
 go use it. 
 
 This, I say, is the lesson which the Bible 
 especially teaches, the principle which it illus- 
 trates, the great truth for which the Bible 
 especially stands, that what men need to do 
 great work for God is not great machinery, is 
 not great tools and instruments, is not great 
 natural power, or circumstantial equipment — or 
 not primarily that, but first of all and most of all 
 faith in God; faith in what he has given, which 
 
FAITH AND MACHINERY. 57 
 
 means faith in liim who gave it. If it be great, 
 so much the better, of course ; but if little, the 
 rod and staff, the sling and stone — go use it, and 
 God will make it effective and strong. See how 
 it was in the days of the early Church. What 
 was it tliat made it so powerful ? What was the 
 equipment of the men who were so active in it, 
 and whose activity planted it, even before that 
 age, that generation, had passed, all over the 
 face of the civilized earth. They did not have 
 much learning, as we count learning in our time, 
 and certainly not much money, no great facili- 
 ties for getting about, no printed books nor 
 Bibles, — not as we have them now, — and no 
 Bible Societies, no Missionary Boards and 
 Women's Auxiliaries and charitable organiza- 
 tions and Christian schools and colleges, no 
 churches, no cathedrals, nothing much — but 
 faith in God. The power to work miracles ? Yes, 
 so it seems, to a very limited extent, and for a 
 very limited time, and with a very limited result 
 accomplished by it. But read the story as you 
 find it in the New Testament books and the 
 other literature of the time, and see if it be not 
 true that the power which they exerted was, not 
 chiefly the power of miracles, or the power of 
 great machinery, weapons, tools, instruments. 
 
58 FAITH AND MACHINERY. 
 
 but the power of a faith in God that vitalized 
 the talent, equipment, which they had. And 
 yet what a mighty work they wrought, what 
 a great deliverance they effected ; how they 
 changed the face of the earth, and turned it up- 
 side down! 
 
 Then look at the Church at the present time. 
 With a scholarship never so ripe, with a mem- 
 bership never so numerous, with a treasury 
 never so full, with a social organization never 
 so widely ramified, with a machinery never 
 so ample, with ways and means and tools and 
 instruments never so great and many; and yet, 
 despite all these excellent tools and this great 
 machinery, what little progress is made to-day 
 by the Church in delivering the children of God 
 from their houses of bondage all over the face of 
 the earth ! Why ? Because, it seems to me, that 
 we to-day have too much faith in machinery. 
 We are making an idol of it, and putting our 
 trust in it instead of God. Is there some great 
 work to be done, or it may be some little work ? 
 Some social need to be supplied or some dis- 
 tress relieved ? Instead of casting ourselves on 
 God and strengthening ourselves in him, or 
 trying to find some man of God to do it, with 
 that personal courage, force, daring, which faith 
 
FAITH AND MACHINERY. 59 
 
 in God gives — Go to, we say ; let us get to- 
 getlier and form a new society, with constitution 
 and by-laws and officers, and let us appoint 
 committees and subcommittees ; let us make 
 some new machinery with ropes and pulleys, 
 and wheels within wheels, so admirably adjusted 
 and fitted to one another that they will almost 
 go automatically. And so we have more social 
 mechanism, more social apparatus, and another 
 society is added to the hundred thousand 
 societies already in existence in Christendom, 
 and we stand off and point with satisfaction to 
 them, or rather we are buried beneath them, 
 with personal life, liberty, force, almost crushed 
 and broken, and we have just enough strength 
 left to look up and say, "These be thy gods, 
 O Israel." 
 
 Well, of course we must have our social 
 machinery; we must have our benevolent and re- 
 ligious societies and organizations, though some 
 of them, I think, might well be spared and dis- 
 pensed with ; and yet, however important and 
 necessary they may be in doing the work of 
 God, there is one thing more important, and 
 that is a living faith in God. That is the equip- 
 ment which first of all he requires, and which, 
 when we have it, will make our present resources. 
 
60 FAITH AND MACIIHSrEIlT. 
 
 ways and means and instruments, sufficient for 
 and equal to the performance of our tasks. 
 And this, it seems to me, is the message of God 
 to his people here and now, as to that man in 
 Horeb who was to be the leader of his people 
 then: "Go bring my children forth," all over 
 the face of the earth ; wherever you hear their 
 cry of distress and see their need for help, go 
 bring my children forth from their houses of 
 bondage to-day, lift them up to manhood, make 
 them free, give them hope and liberty in Jesus 
 Christ. You need no new machinery, no other 
 than what you have. The tools, the instru- 
 ments, the weapons, which you already possess 
 — "What is that in thine hand?" go, take it, 
 use it, and bring my children forth from their 
 houses of bondage. 
 
 'Now, having treated the subject in this general 
 way, let me make for a few moments a special 
 application of it, and speak of one house of 
 bondage in particular here in New York City, to 
 which I referred last Sunday, namely, the tene- 
 ment house. That it is a house of bondage, 
 moral and si)iritual, I tried then to show you ; 
 and what a large space it occupies in our popu- 
 lation and how many people are in it ! Down 
 in Crosby Street, for instance, there is a tene- 
 
FAITH AND MACHINERY, 61 
 
 ment house which has 191 adults and 91 chil- 
 dren living in it, and in the house immediately- 
 adjoining there were found by actual count 89 
 children, making a total of 180 children in two 
 contiguous houses. Now, how is it possible in 
 the midst of such an environment — but I cannot 
 go into that matter again, I tried to cover the 
 ground last Sunday. I stated the problem a 
 week ago, but did not try to solve it, nor am I 
 going to attempt anything so ambitious now. 
 The point I wish to make is simply this, that 
 while the tenement house is here in our midst, 
 and here to stay, I think, though not, I hope, to 
 stay precisely as it is, the Christian peojDle of 
 New York can, with the resources which they 
 already possess, if only they have enough faith 
 in God to use them, do much to redeem the 
 life in that house of bondage. How ? The 
 lack of a practical helpfulness proceeds often- 
 times, not from the lack of benevolence but 
 from the lack of information, and there is 
 many a man in New York City at present who 
 goes on his way week after week, upon his 
 beaten path, his business course, his round of 
 social, professional duties and engagements, 
 largely indifferent to the poor and doing but 
 little to help them, not because his heart is hard 
 
62 FAITH AND MACHINERY. 
 
 and lie cannot feel for the poor and would not 
 be willing to help them, but simply because he 
 does not see and know them, where and what 
 they are, or how they live and exist. 
 
 A few years since a little pamphlet, called 
 "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," was pub- 
 lished, of which you have all heard and which 
 some of you doubtless have read, in which the 
 author portrayed from personal observation the 
 sad conditions of life in a London tenement 
 house. This, I remember, is one illustration 
 he gives : 
 
 Down in the cellar two families live. In a lit- 
 tle room, near by, are a father and mother and 
 six children, two of whom are ill with scarlet 
 fever. In still another room is a woman in an 
 advanced stage of consumjDtion, with a drunken 
 husband and five children, one of whom has just 
 gone out to gather some sticks to boil five pota- 
 toes that will constitute the family meal for the 
 day. In still another room is a poor woman 
 dying with the dropsy, scarcely able to breathe, 
 yet sitting behind a washtub upon a broken 
 chair, trying as best she can to keep things clean 
 and tidy. And so, throughout the house from 
 cellar to garret, are men, women, and children, 
 huddled and crowded together, enduring the cold. 
 
FAITH AND MACHINEEY. G3 
 
 or the hunger, or the excessive heat, sharing tlu' 
 same burdens and sorrows, without hope (lor 
 there is no hope among such people), and 
 waiting, without a single ray of comfort till 
 God should close their staring eyes with the 
 merciful film of death. It was not a romance or 
 a novel ; it was a picture from real life, and there 
 were other pictures like it. And the result of it 
 Avas that Christian men and women in London, 
 who had not known or realized the misery which 
 existed at their very doors, were moved to go 
 and visit the poor and see and learn about them 
 for themselves. And as a result of that personal 
 knowledge again, more has been done since, in 
 the last few years, to mitigate the hard con- 
 ditions of the outcast poor in London than all 
 that had been done during many years before. 
 They saw it, they knew it, and then they 
 helped it. 
 
 Well, there are places in New York City, 
 Christian friends, almost, if not altogether, as 
 sad and dreary as that. Would you be of ser- 
 vice to the people living in them ? " What is 
 that in thine hand?" The power to go and 
 see them. It is not far, thirty minutes will 
 take you there, to look upon them with your 
 own eyes — not somebody's else ; to come into 
 
64 FAITH AND MACHINEEY. 
 
 contact and touch with them, and if you do you 
 will have no rest and peace ; you will lie awake 
 at nights, until you find some Avay to serve and 
 help them. 
 
 Bat perhaps you will not go. That is another 
 matter, I am only saying what you can do if 
 you will. "What is that in thine hand?" 
 Take it and use it with faith in God, with the 
 courage that faith in God gives ; with faith in 
 God, go use it, and some good result will follow. 
 
 But then you may say. Is not that after all 
 impracticable ? Circumstanced and situated as 
 we are we cannot go among the poor, the very 
 worst and lowest poor, and if we did we would 
 not know what to do or say to them. Possibly 
 so. Yery likely. The pastor of an English 
 parish, who employed a number of theological 
 students to visit among the poor, was asked upon 
 one occasion what was the result of the experi- 
 ment, and how it worked ? " Well," he replied 
 with some hesitation, "it was good for the stu- 
 dents." Certainly it is not every person who 
 has the talent, shall I call it ? the gift, the tact, 
 to work among the poor, even if he had the time, 
 and his circumstances permitted. But it is not 
 of personal work among them that I am speak- 
 ing now, but personal knowledge of them, and 
 
FAITH AND MACHINERY. 66 
 
 that I am sure the Christian Church must have or 
 all its machinery will amount to nothing. All 
 it does without that knowledge will be a waste, 
 a reckless waste, of time and money. That per- 
 sonal knowledge the Christian Church must 
 somehow acquire in order to accomplish much 
 or do much practical good among them. That 
 personal knowledge — why, you know how it is, 
 business men — that personal knowledge like 
 nothing else will show what ought to be done ; 
 will awaken interest, will excite sympathy, will 
 create a large generosity, will touch the heart, 
 will enlighten the mind, inform the intelligence, 
 strengthen the will, and find at last way or ways 
 to do some wise and practical work. 
 
 When some case of appealing distress is 
 brought to your personal notice and you look 
 upon it with your own eyes, and see its pain and 
 anguish, and hear its cry for help, and feel it in 
 your heart ; is there a man, a Christian man or 
 woman anywhere, who would not do what he 
 could to help and assist it? That cry comes 
 up from children of God, children of God, made 
 in his image, from the houses of bondage in New 
 York City to-day. O God, let us not be so 
 wrapped up in our affluence and prosperity thnt 
 we fail to hear it. Make us hear that cry, that 
 
66 FAITH AND MACHINERY. 
 
 pleading, bitter cry ; it has reason to be bitter at 
 times, for it seems as though it were forsaken by 
 heaven and earth and no man pitied or cared — 
 make us hear that cry, and then we will try to 
 help it and will know what ought to be done. 
 
 Yes, my friends, when the two halves of New 
 York City, each of which is now living in igno- 
 rance, or comparative ignorance, of the other, are 
 somehow brought more closely together, then 
 neither half will continue to live precisely as it 
 is living. 
 
 We want to solve this problem, we want to help 
 the degraded poor, but we know not what to do, 
 we say. " What is that in thine hand?" The 
 power to obtain a personal knowledge of the situ- 
 ation. Let us go and use it with faith in God and 
 much good will follow. We will re-enforce with 
 a large and glad and willing generosity the ef- 
 forts of those who are working among the poor, 
 or who by personal residence among them, like 
 the settlement of young college women down- 
 town, are trying by their culture and their refine- 
 ment to create (which is one of the great difficul- 
 ties) a better aspiration in the poor themselves. 
 We will try to provide public parks r.nd play- 
 grounds for the children. We will do what we 
 can to prevent fifty little children from being 
 
FAITH AND MACHINERY. 67 
 
 OTOwded into one room in a public sclioolliouse 
 which was intended only for twenty or at most 
 twenty-five. We will be willing that the poor 
 should have such refining influences as come 
 from museums and art galleries, such wholesome 
 recreation as is to be obtained from cheap public 
 amusements, or such healthful benefit as is to 
 be had from summer excursions and outings. 
 We will see to it that the downtown churches, 
 working in the thick of the battle, shall not be 
 deserted without first providing endowment for 
 them and seeing that they have equipment suf- 
 ficient for their task. We will know just what 
 part of the social machinery is cumbersome and 
 vain and wasteful and ought not to be helped, 
 and what part is doing practical service and 
 ought to be assisted. 
 
 Yes, after all, there is much that can be done, 
 even with such resources as we already possess. 
 Let us not say. Oh, this great problem ! it is so 
 hard to solve. Let us not say there is nothing 
 we can do, until we do what we can. There is 
 enough power in this one congregation to redeem 
 the whole tenement house life of 'New York City, 
 and to us, as to Moses long ago, the word of God 
 comes, "Go bring my children forth," from 
 their houses of bondage to-day. 
 
68 FAITH AND MACHINERY. 
 
 It is a vast undertaking, you say. How shall 
 we do it, or who are we, O God, to bring thy 
 children forth? And again he says, "What 
 is that in thine hand ? " Go take it and use 
 it ; with faith in God, go use it. 
 
THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven. 
 
 In commenting recently npon that wonderful 
 prayer which Jesus taught his disciples and 
 which they have taught us, I called your atten- 
 tion to the truth contained in the two opening 
 sentences ; namely, the hiding of the Christian's 
 power, our Father in the heavens, and the mani- 
 festation of that power, in Christian worship on 
 earth. 
 
 Worship, however, is not its only manifesta- 
 tion. There is an impulse in it toward work, 
 and I desire to speak to you this morning about 
 that additional impulse created by the conscious- 
 ness of the all-embracing Fatherhood, and which 
 is so succinctly expressed in the language of the 
 text. Or, putting it in topical form, I will ask 
 you to consider the coming of the kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 The kingdom of God — what is it ? The phrase 
 was not original with Jesus. He found it, when 
 he came, current among the people, upon their 
 lips, their byword, the thing they everywhere 
 
70 THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 talked about, as people to-day talk about money 
 and business and trade and the fashions. It col- 
 ored their thought and pervaded their speech ; 
 it was their life, their religion ; and a prayer 
 that did not include a petition for the coming of 
 the kingdom of God was not, we are told, re- 
 garded as a X3rayer at all. While, however, the 
 phrase was not original with Jesus, he put a new 
 meaning into it, and made it something quite 
 different from what it had been before. To the 
 Jew the kingdom of God was nothing more nor 
 less than the kingdom of the Jew, whose coming 
 would be for him, would minister to his national 
 pride, would establish him upon the earth — his 
 thoughts, his opinions, his supremacy as a Jew. 
 Now, Jesus meant by the j)hrase something very 
 much more. To him the kingdom of God was, 
 as its name implies, not the kingdom of man at 
 all, whether Jew or Gentile, but the kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 And here, let me observe before proceeding 
 further with the exx^lanation of the phrase, is a 
 wholesome caution for us. Like the Jew in the 
 time of Christ, we also profess to be interested, 
 and 1 presume are, to some extent at least, in 
 the coming of the kingdom of God. We pray 
 for it, we work for it — a little — and we give our 
 
THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 71 
 
 money for it ; and yet, after all, it may not be 
 tlie kingdom of God for which we work and 
 pray, but the kingdom of ourselves, our 
 thoughts, our opinions, our theological doc- 
 trines, our ecclesiastical polities. The Church- 
 man wants it to come — yes, very much ; but he 
 wants it to come along the line of the Prayer 
 Book and the apostolic succession, and to have 
 these three orders of the ministry in it : bishops, 
 priests, and deacons. 
 
 The Romanist wants it to come, and to express 
 itself through the medium of papal infallibility, 
 and unless he can see it coming in that way he 
 does not see it coming in the world at all. 
 
 The Methodist, the Presbyterian, the Baptist 
 — they also have their thoroughfares, their well- 
 constructed roads, along which they want the 
 kingdom of God to come. 
 
 Now, some of these ways may be right, may 
 be much better than others, and I do not mean 
 at all to imply that because a person is a zealous 
 Romanist or a devoted Churchman or an uncom- 
 j)romising Presbyterian he is not unselfishly and 
 sincerely interested in the coming of the king- 
 dom of God in the larger sense. He may be ; 
 and yet it is well to remember that nothing is 
 more common, more easy, than self-deception. 
 
72 THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 and tliat religious zeal, as Carlyle tells us in liis 
 essay on Voltaire, is often but a little love of 
 truth associated with a great love of making 
 proselytes. So it was with the Jew, so it has 
 been with Christians since, so it may be with 
 us. How shall we ascertain whether it is or not ? 
 There is one infallible test. Does our religion, 
 whatever we call it, separate us or have a 
 tendency to separate us from our fellow-men 
 and to make us, in a measure, unsympathetic 
 with them? If it does, then we may be sure, 
 however sound our faith, however true our 
 creed, however great our zeal, that it is not God 
 we are trying to exalt, but ourselves in the name 
 of God. 
 
 For think a moment. God stands for Father- 
 hood, and Fatherhood stands for love — a great, 
 strong, protecting, inextinguishable love. Love 
 does not divide ; it unites ; it draws people 
 together ; it is a bond of union than which there 
 is none more intimate, more sacred, or of more 
 enduring character ; stronger than death, 
 mightier than the grave, waters cannot quench, 
 floods cannot drown, flames cannot consume it. 
 And if our religion does not have the efl'ect to 
 touch and quicken the heart with that deepest, 
 purest, and most expansive of passions, and to 
 
THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD, 73 
 
 send us out in sympathy strong and great toward 
 our fellow-men of every shade and grade, of every 
 name and creed, call it what we please — Protes- 
 tant, Romanist— it is not the religion of Christ. 
 
 The religion of Christ, my friends, is, after all, 
 a misnomer, Christ had no religion, in the com- 
 mon and ordinary sense of the term ; and 
 established no religion. The word religion is 
 never mentioned by him. Christianity is not in 
 its highest and sublimest sense a religion, and it 
 would clear our minds of many perplexities and 
 much confusion of thought if we ceased to re- 
 gard it as such. Jesus Christ simply introduced, 
 or tried to introduce, a new kingdom into the 
 world. There were other kingdoms then, as 
 there are now, in existence — the kingdom of the 
 Jew, the Roman, the Barbarian, the Greek ; 
 Christ would introduce another which should 
 include them all, binding together the subjects 
 of many into the sweet fellowship and sympathy 
 of one — namely, a kingdom of love. He calls 
 it the kingdom of God on earth, for God is love. 
 He calls it the kingdom of heaven on earth, for 
 heaven is love. He calls it the kingdom of 
 truth on earth, for truth in its deepest and 
 purest analysis, and wherever found in the uni- 
 verse, in this world or in others, in the rocks or 
 
74 THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 in the stars or in the microcosmic dei^ths of the 
 human heart and soul, is but the expression of 
 the great All-Father's love. 
 
 That, my Presbyterian friend, is what all your 
 profound theology should mean. That, my 
 Episcopal friend, is what all your beautiful 
 Church polity and Apostolic order should mean. 
 That, my Romanist friend, is what all the vast 
 and complicated machinery of your admirable 
 hierarchical system should mean. If it does 
 mean that ; if, like nothing else, it makes your 
 heart burn and glow with that great embracing, 
 transfiguring passion of love — love for God and 
 man — then for you it is right and good : stand by 
 it and hold it fast. 
 
 If, upon the other hand, it has the effect to 
 alienate you from your fellow-men, from those 
 who do not hold your views, who do not share 
 your theological or ecclesiastical opinions, then, 
 no matter how great your zeal, you may be sure, 
 that like the Jew in the time of Christ, you are 
 self-deceived — it is your own kingdom you seek, 
 and not the kingdom of God. 
 
 And now, having tried to explain what I think 
 Jesus meant by the phrase, let me go on for a 
 little while to speak of the coming of the king- 
 dom of God. 
 
THE COMING OF THE KIIfGDUM OF GOD. 75 
 
 Jesus Christ introduced it into the world, but 
 he did not establish it, and his life went out in 
 failure, or seemed at least to do so, and the pur- 
 pose that inspired him was not a successful pur- 
 pose. And yet full well he knew that it must 
 at last prevail, and that, lifted up from the 
 earth in the sight of the world as the pure 
 expression of perfect love, he would and must 
 draw all men to himself. Has he not, in fact, 
 been doing so more and more? Look back 
 over the Christian ages. What is it that we 
 see? Strife and contention and bigotry, per- 
 secution and warfare and bloodshed, on the part 
 of those who bear the Christian name ! Yes, all 
 that we see and deplore, and we will not try to 
 cover it up and excuse it ; and yet, despite all 
 that and beneath all that, there is something else 
 that we see. That man is but a poor and prej- 
 udiced reader of history who cannot and does 
 not see it, who does not see the advancing 
 triumph, slowly, but step by step, of a kingdom 
 of love on the earth, which, like the mighty 
 ocean tide, held in check for a time and appar- 
 ently overcome by the storm, in obedience, never- 
 theless to an attracting i^ower that is greater and 
 more than the storm, goes rolling steadily on, 
 with the flotsam and jetsam of many a wreck, to 
 
76 THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 be sure, yet rising higher and higher and con- 
 quering more and more. 
 
 Hatred and strife we see. Yes, for human 
 nature is passionate and weak, and cannot be all 
 at once and easily controlled ; but love we also 
 see, like sunlight shining through the clouds or 
 painting its beautiful bow of promise in the 
 arching heavens above them. Bigotry, yes, but 
 benevolence. Resentment, yes, but forgiveness. 
 The infliction of wrong, yes, but the patient en- 
 durance of wrong. And homes are blessed and 
 men and women in them, and hospitals are 
 established, and slaves are liberated, and the 
 weak and the poor are assisted, and the suffering 
 are relieved, and works of mercy abound. Yes, 
 despite all else, it is the coming of the kingdom 
 of God, the kingdom of love, that we see, and 
 which Jesus Christ declares will ultimately hush 
 the storms of life, will ultimately still the 
 tempests and prevail over all. 
 
 Why? Simply because it is the kingdom of 
 love, whose law, whose spirit, whose method, 
 whose motive power is love. Love — what fear 
 can dismay it, what obstacle can stop it? 
 Love — it is the omnipotence of the universe 
 liberated and set free in the heart of man. 
 Love — it is the great alchemist, by which the 
 
THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 77 
 
 hardest task becomes the sweetest joy. The 
 Christian pulpit speaks at times, and delivers its 
 message to us, tries to make us see what our 
 duty is toward our fellow-men. But duty is a 
 harsh and ugly word, and while we listen and 
 assent, perhaps, and confess that it is our duty, 
 it does not move us much, and, if it be pressed 
 too hard, we are irritated and vexed. 
 
 But Jesus Christ speaks and says: "I do 
 not want your duty ; I simply want you to 
 see, as I see, the sublime vision, rolling across 
 the heavens and sweeping across the earth, of 
 the great Father's love. Then I know you 
 will try, you cannot help trying, to build 
 his kingdom up." 
 
 Love — it is the great despoiler that takes 
 away our money, then gives it back again in 
 more precious and indestructible form, " There 
 was an old man who had an abundance of gold, 
 and the sound of the gold was pleasant to his 
 ears, and his eyes delighted in its brightness. 
 By day he thought of gold, and his dreams were 
 of gold by night, and his hands were full of gold, 
 and he rejoiced in the multitude of his chests. 
 But he was faint with hunger and his trembling 
 limbs shivered beneath his rags, and there came 
 a little child to the old man and said, ' Father, 
 
78 THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 father, I have found a secret ; we are rich ; we 
 shall not be poor and miserable any more : gold 
 will buy all things.' And the old man was 
 wroth and said, ' Would you take from me my 
 gold?' " 
 
 Like the man of the parable, we of this age 
 have been surrounding ourselves with our pre- 
 cious material treasures which, although when 
 we get them we often find so disappointing, so 
 powerless to feed the hungry soul and warm 
 the shivering heart, we nevertheless so dearly 
 prize and carefully hoard and guard ; and when 
 the little Christ child comes and tells his secret 
 to us and says, "Give them away, give them 
 away, and then they are yours forever," we 
 become wroth and angry, and say to him in 
 reply, "Would you take away our gold?" 
 
 Yet, my friends, is it not a true message ? In 
 our little limited experience have we not found 
 it so ? It is only when Love, the great despoiler, 
 comes and takes away our money that we really 
 have it, and that our hearts and souls are warmed 
 and nourished by it. We lay it by and hold it 
 fast and will not let it go, and Love comes and 
 opens the door, and all the treasures fly forth, 
 not only in blessing to others but in blessing 
 to ourselves. Father, mother, husband, wife, 
 
THE COMIISTG OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 79 
 
 child, friend — someone who stands for love — has 
 some need, some want, can be made happy by 
 us, and w^e take our dear and precious money, 
 our beautiful alabaster box, the sweetest, 
 dearest thing we have, and pour it freely out. 
 Then we receive it back again an hundredfold in 
 deepest, sweetest, purest joy into our hearts. 
 
 ISTow, that is the power, that alone is the 
 power — and that is enough — which Jesus Christ 
 reveals, which he brings to bear on the human 
 heart. This is the weapon which he puts into 
 our hand to fight with. Without it we can ac- 
 complish but little. Service is a hardship, duty 
 is a joyless task, and the work of the Christian 
 Church in this world, despite all its admirable 
 machinery, will halt and stumble and falter and 
 drag and not be done. But the kingdom of love 
 appears, the bright and beautiful vision which 
 Jesus Christ reveals in the heavens around us we 
 see. Its glory touches the heart, opens it wide, 
 wider, and awakens a new, strong, and consum- 
 ing passion within us. Have we power of speech 
 and song? This one thing we do — " Thy king- 
 dom come, Thy kingdom come" — and we press 
 on toward the mark. Have we talent, scholar- 
 ship, learning, health, strength, position in life, 
 the strong and manifold power that lies poten- 
 
80 THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 tial in money — " Thy kingdom come" is onr 
 prayer, our great consuming desire. O God of 
 love, our Father, take us and use us more and 
 more, and make thy kingdom come ! 
 
 Or we have been laid aside and there is noth- 
 ing we can do ; some heavy burden of sorrow 
 is ours, we are crippled or broken by sickness or 
 by age, or are circumscribed by a contracted 
 sphere from which we cannot escape — tlien, O 
 God, thy will be done ! Teach us how to be 
 patient in our little narrow place, to suffer and 
 to wait. 
 
 My friends, as I read the Gospel story and try 
 to understand it, that is what our Lord Jesus 
 Christ came into the world for ; not to establish 
 another among the innumerable religions — call 
 it that if you please, and for convenience' sake ; 
 but there is a better word : to establish a new 
 kingdom on the earth, namely, a kingdom of 
 love, whose doctrine is love, whose x^olity is 
 love, whose motive power is love, whose king is 
 the King of love, and who puts into our hands, 
 not the flag of sect or church or partisan 
 theology but the great banner of love, and bids 
 us go into all the world and conquer in that 
 name. 
 
 Have we seen that vision which Jesus saw 
 
THE COMING OF THE KITSTGDOM OF GOD. 81 
 
 sweeping through the heavens, and which he 
 declared would ultimately prevail over all the 
 earth ? Then we have seen the sublimest thing 
 which this universe contains ; we have seen the 
 vision of Gfod ; we have learned the highest 
 lesson which God himself can teach, " that life, 
 Avith all it yields of joy and woe and hope and 
 fear, is just the chance of the prize of winning 
 love." 
 
 Then, when we can truly say, " Our Father in 
 the heavens," we can also say, "Hallowed be 
 thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done 
 on earth as in the skies." 
 
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATRE. 
 
 Be not overcome of evil, hut overcome evil with good. — Romans 
 xii. 21. 
 
 I SAID to you a few Sundays since, on tlie 
 feast of tlie Epiphany, tliat the truth wliich we 
 commemorate at the Epiphany season is this : 
 that Jesus Christ is the moral and spiritual light 
 of the world. Last Sunday I tried to show you 
 that he is a light not for a part, but for the 
 whole of the world. And I desire to-day to 
 bring out and emphasize another side or aspect 
 of this same thought, and to direct your atten- 
 tion to the fact that Jesus Christ is the light of 
 the whole world — not simply in the sense that 
 his Gospel is intended for all nations, but in the 
 additional sense that it is equally intended for 
 all the parts of any particular nation. I wish 
 to show you that it is diffusive as well as expan- 
 sive ; that here in the society of Christendom as 
 well as in the society beyond the borders of 
 Christendom, there is an aggressive work to be 
 done, and that it is our duty, as the disciples of 
 Jesus Christ, to try to overcome the evil im- 
 
 82 
 
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATRE. 83 
 
 mediately about us — the liugering elements of 
 pagan life in our midst — with the positive and 
 aggressive good of the Christian religion. 
 
 The subject in other words which I propose to 
 consider is this : the relation between the Chris- 
 tian believer and the unchristianized features of 
 the society in which he is placed. I propose to 
 consider it first, in a general way, and then with 
 reference to that particular feature of our 
 modern society spoken of or known as the 
 theatre. 
 
 Christian people are sometimes much per- 
 plexed to know what course to pursue, with 
 reference to certain customs and institutions 
 which have come to be a part of the existing 
 social regime, and which, although not essen- 
 tially sinful, are yet so often productive of sinful 
 results and excesses. I do not know anything 
 more difScult and embarrassing to the conscien- 
 tious Christian, who wants to perform all his 
 duties in a Christian manner, and to carry his 
 Christianity out into all the relations of life, 
 than questions of just this sort. They are ques- 
 tions, too, which are constantly arising, and 
 which no one of us is able to escape. " Shall I 
 do this, or shall I not do it ? Intrinsically, 
 perhaps, there is nothing wrong in it, and it 
 
84 THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATEE. 
 
 might be so done and conducted as to be fruitful 
 of good ; and yet I know that it is in fact the 
 occasion at times, if not to me, to others at least, 
 of very serious harm. What then is my duty 
 about it, and how shall I act in regard to it ?" 
 
 Now if everything that is bad in this world 
 had no good mixed up with it, but were alto- 
 gether and irredeemably and unmistakably bad, 
 and were so marked and labeled, it would not 
 be hard to discover at least on what path we 
 should walk ; and although we would still be 
 tempted at times to yield to what is wrong, it 
 would be a temptation addressed directly to the 
 lower, baser, and the more ignoble part of our 
 nature. We would know it as such, and the 
 consciousness of that fact would have the effect 
 to weaken the temptation and to deprive it of 
 much of its power. But with reference to the 
 great majority of things in which from day to 
 day we are called upon to engage, that is not the 
 case. They are not altogether bad, nor altogether 
 good. Their character is mixed and composite. 
 Some persons do them innocently. Others do 
 them wickedly. Looking at them from one point 
 of view we see how proper they are. Looking at 
 them from the opposite point of view we see how 
 hurtful they are. And hence it is that we find 
 
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATRE. 85 
 
 among men, and among good men too, sucli con- 
 flicting judgments concerning tliem — liiirtful, 
 harmless ; wielded, innocent ; right, wrong ; 
 good, bad. Which of these testimonies shall we 
 accept ? Which verdict shall we believe ? It is 
 the old story over again of the two sides of the 
 shield. They are both hurtful and harmless ; 
 they are both wicked and innocent ; they are 
 both good and bad ; and each of these verdicts, 
 if we are candid and fair, and are not hopelessly 
 committed to some prepossession and prejudice 
 upon the subject, we soon discover and are ready 
 to admit to be true. This, however, as I have 
 already said, instead of being the end of the 
 perplexity, is but the beginning of it ; and the 
 question is still on our hands : What course shall 
 we, as a Christian people, pursue with reference 
 to all those matters of a mixed and composite 
 character which we find to be a part of the exist- 
 ing social economy, and in which we, from time 
 to time, as members of that economy, are called 
 upon to engage ? 
 
 Now in reply to this question there are three 
 possible answers— three possible policies to be 
 pursued. There is first the policy of indiffer- 
 ence. "Things are what they are. We fourd 
 them here when we came. We did not originate, 
 
86 THE CHRISTIAN AT^D THE THEATRE. 
 
 are not responsible for them ; nor is it likely 
 that we can change them much. Let us be care- 
 ful, therefore, to be pure and upright in our 
 personal and domestic relations, and as for these 
 great and urgent social matters, manners, insti- 
 tutions, and customs about us, let us just drift 
 with the tide." That is the policy of indiffer- 
 ence into which some Christians so easily drop. 
 
 Second, there is the policy of abstinence. 
 There is so much that is damaging to the moral 
 and spiritual nature in these social pursuits, they 
 have the effect in so many instances to harden 
 the heart and the conscience, to enhance the at- 
 tractions of vice, and undermine the foundations 
 of virtue and pure and virtuous living, men are 
 so often broken, crippled, ruined for life in their 
 character by them, that in spite of the possibili- 
 ties which they contain for good when they are 
 properly done, it is best on the whole to have 
 nothing to do with them. We do not expect by 
 this policy, of course, to be able to destroy them. 
 We do not think that we will stop them. They 
 will still go on, as a part, as a big, vehement, and 
 attractive part, of the social life of the world, 
 while we are keeping our own skirts clean, by a 
 complete avoidance of them, and "laying up 
 treasure in heaven." This is the policy of 
 
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATEE. 87 
 
 abstinence, the Puritanic policy, as it is some- 
 times called. 
 
 There is yet another course, and that is the 
 policy of conscientious and discriminating par- 
 ticipation in them — the policy which looks up- 
 on the Christian religion as essentially militant 
 and aggressive, and believes that it is the duty 
 therefore of all Christ's disciples, not simply to 
 try to get rid of and escape the evil themselves, 
 but in the name of their Master to buckle on the 
 armor, and go forward and fight, and beat back 
 the evil, to dislodge it from its stronghold, to 
 drive it out of its territory, and to conquer and 
 overcome it with an aggressive good. This, I 
 need scarcely tell you, is the hardest course of all. 
 It requires more courage and strength, makes a 
 man more watchful, puts him more on his guard ; 
 just as it requires more courage to engage with 
 an actual enemy upon the field of battle than to 
 run away from the battle or to go through the tac- 
 tics of a military drill in an armory. And yet, 
 hard as it is, nothing less than this, I think, is 
 the scope of the Christian duty, and by the pur- 
 suance of no other course can we hope to perform 
 it. This world and every lawful factor in it be- 
 long to Jesus Christ. It is cur duty, therefore, 
 as his disciples, not simjDly to be satisfied with a 
 
88 THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATRE. 
 
 personal avoidance of evil, but to go forward and 
 meet it, and though it be through wounds, and 
 fatal wounds to some, to overcome it with good. 
 
 And now, having made these general remarks 
 upon the subject, which are capable of endless 
 applications, and which you can make for your- 
 selves, I desire to give you this morning a spe- 
 cific illustration of them. 
 
 Ought Christian people to go to the theatre ? 
 That they do go, many of them, I am well aware. 
 And yet there is a feeling upon their part, more 
 or less active and strong, that there is some- 
 thing in the going that is just a little inconsistent 
 with the Christian character. And this feeling 
 shows itself in the fact that while the members 
 of the congregation go, they do not think it just 
 the thing to have the minister go — at least some 
 of them do not. And if you ask them why, they 
 will tell you, in all probability, that he, by 
 reason of his position in the community and in 
 the Church, should be more careful about his ex- 
 ample. An answer which of course condemns their 
 own conduct, and which is but admitting, as any 
 fair and logical mind can see, that going to the 
 theatre is not quite right. For if it is quite right, 
 why should anybody be careful about his ex- 
 ample ? If it is not quite right, it is wrong, and 
 
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATRE. 89 
 
 tliey are doing a wrong thing in going ; and they 
 should be sufSciently logical to see it, and suffi- 
 ciently straightforward to acknowledge it. Ah, 
 no, my friends, let us not be willing to drop into 
 such shallow special pleading and casuistry, such 
 "playing of fast and loose " with conscience ; let 
 us try for a few moments to look at this practical 
 subject in a truer, broader, and more rational 
 way. 
 
 What is the theatre? what is its history? 
 how has it come to be here ? I need not tell you 
 that it is an old institution ; that every nation 
 has had it ; that it has been a part of every 
 civilization. Some friends of the drama have 
 traced it back to the time of Moses. This, 
 of course, is an uncertain jDedigree. And yet 
 fragments of a Hebrew play have come down to 
 us, founded upon a great and notable event in 
 their history — the Exodus of the children of 
 Israel from the land of Egypt. The thing which 
 strikes us most, however, in connection with the 
 rise of the drama is this : that although we do 
 not know precisely when it began, yet in every 
 instance where it does appear for the first time 
 in history, it is associated with religion. This 
 was the case in Greece. This was the case in 
 western continental Europe. This was the case 
 
90 THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATRE. 
 
 in England. The drama, in fact, as another has 
 told us, was the chief school of morals and 
 religion in those primitive times — and to an 
 unlettered people, who had no books to read, 
 and who could not have read them if they had. 
 
 By means of histrionic representation the 
 stories of the Grecian mj^thology and of the Bibli- 
 cal record and literature were made to appear in 
 graphic and appealing form, and were imprinted 
 deeply, strongly, and ineradicably upon the 
 popular heart. Gregory, the Archbishop of 
 Constantinople, was himself a playwright of no 
 mean quality, and hoped, as Mr. Ricliard Grant 
 White tells us, to banish the pagan drama from 
 the Greek stage and substitute plays founded 
 upon subjects taken from the Hebrew or the 
 Christian Scriptures. 
 
 The first plays that were performed in Eng- 
 land were the so-called "Miracle Plays," long 
 lists of which have descended to our time, 
 containing the names of many, and from which 
 we can form some notion of what they were like. 
 There was a play called "The Creation," 
 another representing "The Fall of Man," "The 
 Death of Abel," "The Flood of Noah," "The 
 Procession of the Prophets," "The Birth of 
 Christ," "The Adoration of the Shepherds," 
 
THE CimiSTIAN AND TJIE THEATRE. 91 
 
 "The Flight of Josej^h and Mary into Egypt," 
 "The Skinghter of the Innocents," " The Adora- 
 tion and the Offering of the Magi," "The 
 Baptism of Christ," "The Temptation of 
 Christ," "The Betrayal of Christ," "The Death, 
 the Burial, and the Resurrection of Christ," and 
 almost every other notable incident in the history 
 of our Lord. 
 
 The first performers in these plays were clergy- 
 men. The first theatres were Christian churches. 
 From the churches, after a while, they passed 
 into the yards of churches. Then they got upon 
 wheels and were moved about from place to 
 place in the country. A distinct and special 
 class of professional actors was created. Suit- 
 able and permanent buildings were erected. 
 Other scenes began to be represented besides 
 the stories of Scrix^ture. Forms of virtue and 
 vice were introduced on the stage, and the 
 "Miracle Plays" were merged in time into the 
 " Moral Plays." Thus gradually was the theatre 
 brought down into the real, human life of the 
 immediate time. Satire came, and wit and 
 humor and merriment and laughter and comedy 
 made their appearance, to lash with their ridicule 
 the forms of vice, and to enforce the lessons of 
 virtue and morality. 
 
92 THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATRE. 
 
 But human life is deeper and something more 
 than a laugh. It has its storms of passion, its 
 blighted hopes and ambitions, its wrecked and 
 ruined affections, its sin, its heart-breaking sor- 
 row, its deep, bitter remorse ; and tragedy fol- 
 lowed in the wake of comedy, until all human 
 life was touched wdth histrionic portraiture. 
 The drama became both a literature and an 
 art — breaking forth into rich, magnificent, and 
 beautiful bloom in the Elizabethan age — and has 
 been ever since a deeply rooted and corporate 
 part of the Anglo-Saxon civilization. 
 
 Such, in brief, in too brief compass, is the 
 history of the rise and progress of the drama. 
 Reviewing that history, looking back thought- 
 fully over it, we cannot fail to notice and to be 
 impressed with the fact that the drama is not 
 simply a superficial attachment to our social 
 economy ; that it did not come by a process of 
 statutory enactment ; that it is not the product of 
 any particular age. Like the British constitution 
 itself it has gradually grown out of the habits, 
 the customs, the manners, the institutions, the 
 morals, the virtues and vices, and the very life 
 of the people. Therefore, like the British con- 
 stitution, like the common law, it has come to 
 stay, and to be an organic and integral part of 
 
THE CHRISTIAlSr AND THE THEATRE. 93 
 
 the Anglo-Saxon civilization. And if this be 
 true, that it has come to stay, that it is a perma- 
 nent and abiding factor of our civilization, what 
 is the duty of Christian people toward it ? 
 
 That there is much evil, much that is low, 
 coarse, base, and disgusting in the drama of the 
 present time no good man Avill question. But 
 remember, my friends, that this social world of 
 ours, with all of its abiding forces and factors, 
 belongs to Jesus Christ. Evil has no right in 
 it. It is an intruder here. The world belongs 
 to Christ. And it is our duty, therefore, as the 
 representatives of Christ, not simply to avoid 
 and escape the evil ourselves — ^by running away 
 from the field of battle and taking refuge in 
 flight — but to go forward, and fight, and con- 
 quer the evil, and overcome it with good. 
 
 But how, practically, may this purifying work 
 be performed ? I answer, first, by exercising a 
 high conscientiousness in the matter. Every- 
 thing that touches and deals with the human 
 passions — like music, like oratory, like poetry, 
 like art, like the drama — may be and has been 
 abused. . But instead of denouncing these 
 things, let us distinguish carefully, with an un- 
 compromising conscientiousness, between the 
 legitimate use and the unlawful abuse, giving 
 
94 THE CHEISTIAN AND THE THEATEE. 
 
 our support and sanction to the one and our 
 strongest condemnation to [the other. This, I 
 know, is a difficult course to pursue. But it is a 
 difficulty we cannot avoid. It meets us all the 
 way through life, in every sphere and relation in 
 which we are called to act. Difficult as it is, 
 therefore, let us try to perform here the same dis- 
 criminating task that we are called upon to j)er- 
 form everywhere else. And instead of resorting 
 to the miserable subterfuge of drawing a line 
 between the pew and the 23ulx)it — one section of 
 the Christian Church going to the theatre care- 
 lessly, thoughtlessly, as fancy moves and oppor- 
 tunity offers, the other section of the Christian 
 Church never going at all, because it should be 
 more careful about its example, and "It is not 
 quite right" — let us, as Christian men and 
 women, learn to distinguish constantly, care- 
 fully, conscientiously, between the right and the 
 wrong, between the good and the bad. This will 
 not completely reform the drama to-day, nor 
 to-morrow, nor the day after. But it will have 
 the effect to reform it in the end. 
 
 The second method I would suggest is akin 
 to the first, although of slower action and of 
 more gradual efficacy, and that is : the cul- 
 tivation of a purity and refinement of moral 
 
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE TIIKATRE. 95 
 
 sentiment, a strength and vigor of intellectual 
 culture, that cannot be contented with, and will 
 not condescend to anything that is vulgar and 
 cheap in quality or coarse and unworthy in 
 its intellectual tone. " The social civilization of 
 a people," says the Earl of Lytton, " is always and 
 infallibly indicated by the intellectual character 
 of its popular amusements ; and of such amuse- 
 ments the stage is by far the most important." 
 And if our modern stage be not of a very high 
 character it must be because the culture of our 
 modern society is not of a very high order. 
 
 Our one and great ambition up to the present 
 time — I speak of the people at large — our one and 
 great ambition up to the present time has simply 
 been to make and to amass more money. For 
 this we have striven and toiled, so engrossed 
 with the desperate passion, so wasted and worn 
 with the task, that we have left ourselves but 
 little leisure for the growth and the development 
 of the other x>arts of our nature. We have had 
 no time for intellectual culture. We have had 
 no time for literary pursuits. We have had no 
 time for scholarly growth and study. We have 
 had no time for anything, except with feverish 
 haste, and waste of the nervous energy, to try to 
 make more money. And then, when the need of 
 
96 THE CHRISTIAN AND THE THEATRE. 
 
 recreation lias come, we liave just dropped for a 
 few hours into and taken up with anything that 
 happened to be at hand. 
 
 As the nation gets okler, as it becomes more 
 highly developed, as the people grow in moral 
 and intellectual stature, their popular amuse- 
 ments will correspondingly grow and become 
 of a better character. The drama will then be- 
 come again what it has been in the past, to use 
 again the language of the Earl of Lytton, "not 
 the resort and the amusement simply of the vi- 
 cious and the vulgar, but the great and effective 
 instrument by means of which the lofty ideals, 
 the heroic types of human life, the great and 
 strong movements of the human soul, will be 
 plainly and prominently depicted before the re- 
 sponsive and educated imagination of the peo- 
 ple." In the meanwhile, let us try by the cul- 
 tivation of a pure moral sentiment, and a high 
 intellectual standard, to do our part, gradually, 
 slowly, indirectly it is true, yet none the less 
 effectively, towards making the drama what it 
 ought to be. 
 
 Now, if anybody should infer from what has 
 been said this morning that I desire to give more 
 laxity and license to the Cliristian life, it will cer- 
 tainly not be the impression which I have sought 
 
THE CHKISTIAlSr AND THE THEATRE. 97 
 
 to produce. My aim lias been to show you, 
 rather, that the Christian life is not simply the 
 singing of hymns and the saying of prayers on 
 Sunday, but that it is coterminous with the life 
 of all society; that its duty is not exhausted 
 simply by a j^ersonal avoidance of evil, but that 
 it has a militant and an aggressive work to per- 
 form, and that into every sphere, every relation 
 of the social economy, its aim should be to push 
 and drive out, and to keep on pushing and driv- 
 ing out, the evil, until at last it has overcome it 
 with good. 
 
HIDING FROM GOD. 
 
 And Adam and Ms wife hid themselves from the presence of the 
 Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord called 
 unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou f — Genesis iii, 8, 9. 
 
 In commenting upon these words there are 
 two remarks which I wish to make by way of 
 introduction. The first is this, that human life 
 in the Bible, although in its superficial accidents 
 of time, place, circumstance, and other conven- 
 tional adjuncts it differs more or less from 
 human life to-day, is nevertheless in its funda- 
 mental tendencies and dispositions the same. 
 The second remark is that the relation of God 
 to human life in the Bible, while in some respects 
 as there described it appears and is unique, is 
 chiefly so in appearance, and is virtually like 
 the relation which he is sustaining to it at the 
 present time. 
 
 My purpose is to illustrate this morning in a 
 particular way these two general propositions — 
 to show you that now, as formerly, as ever, men 
 are wont to hide themselves from God among the 
 trees of the garden where he has placed them ; 
 
 98 
 
HIDING FEOM GOD. 99 
 
 and second, that in their hiding from him, his 
 searching, quickening voice is heard, saying to 
 each from time to time, " Where art thou ? " 
 
 First, consider the hiding. Looking at the 
 matter theoretically — apart, that is, from what 
 experience and observation teach — one would 
 naturally suppose that the thought of the great, 
 good God, who has made this world and put 
 men in it to enjoy it, would be a welcome 
 thought, and that in their enjoyment of it, or in 
 wandering through and among the trees and eat- 
 ing the fruit of the garden, they would be moved 
 instinctively with gratitude toward the Giver, 
 and would find it a pleasant thing to keep him 
 in their minds. Such, however, is not the way 
 in which men act or in which they feel toward 
 God. On the contrary, they try to forget him, 
 to put him out of their minds, or to think of him 
 only when by reason of some calamity, sickness, 
 or other disaster, or by the approach of death, 
 perhaps, they are compelled to think of him. 
 Their notion seems to be that God is only for 
 emergencies, like that of the good hostess, Mrs. 
 Quickley, in Shakspere's "Henry Y.," when 
 describing the death of Falstaff: "So he cried 
 out and said, God, God, God, three or four 
 times. Now I to comfort him bid him that he 
 
100 HIDING FEOM GOD. 
 
 should not tliink of God. I lioj)ed there was no 
 need yet to trouble himself about that." 
 
 Her idea was that if, as she hoped and 
 believed, or at least would have Falstail believe, 
 he was not going to die, it was quite unnecessary 
 and premature to turn his mind toward God and 
 religion ; bad as the case seemed, it was not as 
 bad as that, she hoped, that he had to think 
 about God. 
 
 So it is with many persons now — who think of 
 God and religion only when they can think of 
 nothing else, when their hold on this world has 
 been loosened a little, and they are about to take 
 a journey into some other world of which they 
 have had no experience, and about which in 
 consequence they have some apprehension, as one 
 always has when facing the unknown. Then, 
 like Falstaff, they cast themselves on God and 
 cry out for his help, and send perhaps for his 
 minister to come and administer the sacrament 
 and show them how to die and cross the border- 
 line into the world beyond. As long, however, 
 as death and disaster seem remote, they] are 
 immersed in this world ; God is forgotten by 
 them — or at least they try to forget him — among 
 the beautiful trees of the garden in the midst of 
 which he has placed them ; and why ? 
 
HIDING FKOM GOD. 101 
 
 Ah, men and women, how true to human 
 nature, in every age, from the beginning till 
 now, is this wonderful Bible of ours. 
 
 Why? For the same reason that Adam and 
 Eve did in the old Genesis story ; they have eaten 
 of the fruit of the tree of which God commanded 
 tlioy should not eat. They have done and are 
 doing still what, as they know very well, despite 
 all their attempts at self- justification, they ought 
 not to do. They have an evil conscience, 
 the sense of guilt is upon them, they are not 
 living right, and they know it — yes, they know 
 it — and the thought of God troubles them, 
 makes them afraid. They try to get away from 
 it, to cover it up, to crowd it out, to forget it, 
 and so instead of wandering through the garden 
 with God, they wander through it without him, 
 or try at least to do so ; and what is the result? 
 They are not at peace, as many of you are not, 
 and are trying to find a peace in the garden itself, 
 which the garden itself, however big and beauti- 
 ful, does not and cannot give. 
 
 Is not that true, my friends ? Look and see. 
 See how hard men are trying to find peace to- 
 day, and how great the garden is, how exten- 
 sive, how diversified, how full of bloom and 
 beauty in which they are trying to find it. 
 
102 HIDING FROM GOD. 
 
 Our political economists are telling us — and 
 we are listening witli complacency to their 
 words — how exceptionally great and prosper- 
 ous the nineteenth century is, in productive 
 plant and machinery, in mineral resources, in 
 agricultural fruitage, in commercial exchanges, 
 in mechanical skill, in facility of inter- 
 course, in rapidity of communication, rail- 
 road, telegraph, telephone — our whole industrial 
 system, how great, how prosperous it is. It is 
 true. Never was a century like it. The world 
 of human interest, the garden in which men 
 toiled and digged in former days, was compara- 
 tively little and barren. To-day it is wealthy 
 and fruitful, and cultivated, and easy to get 
 about in ! So that if people do not like, or for 
 any reason get tired of, one place — Bar Harbor, 
 or Lenox, or Newport, or the Pacific coast, or 
 Europe, or Paris, or Constantinoi^le — they can 
 easily go to another. Or, if they do not go in 
 person, they can, in the flash of a moment, send 
 their messages there, and the ends of the world 
 are brought into communion with them. And 
 the products of the earth, of all the earth, gath- 
 ered in every clime and country, are made to go 
 by car and boat, by wheel and keel, across the 
 land and water, in all directions, by them. 
 
HIDING FROM GOD. 103 
 
 Never was tlie garden so big, nor were the trees 
 in it so beautiful and fruitful, nor men so suc- 
 cessful in gathering the fruit of the trees. 
 
 Yet, instead of finding peace in it, that is 
 about the only thing which they are not finding, 
 and which they seem to be getting farther and 
 farther away from. Peace ! why, the word is a 
 satire on our civilization. Never was there a 
 time when there was so little of it in the hearts 
 of men, of all estates and classes, the rich man 
 and the poor, the idle man and the busy, the 
 professional man and the mechanic, the toiler, 
 the thinker, the bread-winner of every class of 
 either sex, successful or unsuccessful, as there is 
 to-day. It is not a military age ; militarism, 
 we are told, is past, and in the sense that fight- 
 ing on the field of battle is not so frequent as 
 formerly, — though the standing armies are big- 
 ger, — nor so much resorted to in the adjustment 
 of difficulties, the statement perhaps is true. 
 Militarism is past, yet none the less it is an age 
 of warfare — bitter, relentless, perpetual, univer- 
 sal, and the demon of unrest is at its heart. 
 
 Look at the great host of the workmen, as by 
 courtesy they call themselves, the men, that is, 
 engaged in manual labor, the demos, the people, 
 the mass, moving on, dissatisfied, toward some- 
 
104 HIDING FROM GOD. 
 
 tiling — they know not what, and cannot formu- 
 late — but something, nevertheless, which they 
 think they ought to have, and which in one way 
 or another, by fair means or foul, they are deter- 
 mined to get ! Is there peace there, in that part 
 of the garden ? 
 
 Look at the great captains of industry — the 
 men who have been successful, who have gath- 
 ered the spoils, and are rich ! Their one feverish 
 ambition, inflaming them more and more, and 
 which like the rod of Moses is devouring every- 
 thing else, is to find new fields of conquest and 
 to gather further spoils. Is there peace there? 
 Why, it is difficult to say in which of the two 
 classes of the nineteenth century industrial life, 
 the top or the bottom, the rich or the poor, there 
 is the greater unrest. 
 
 Leaving the dust of toil and the vulgar noise 
 of the street, look at some of the cultivated spots 
 in the garden. Look at the so-called fashionable 
 world, which, despite its kaleidoscopic brilliancy 
 of movement and conventional activity, has so 
 little natural charm and originality in it — which 
 lack of originality I presume Goethe had in 
 mind when he satirically described good society 
 as "that condition of life which furnishes no 
 material for poetry," and which led Mr. Adding- 
 
iiidt:n-g from god. 105 
 
 ton Symonds to say, "How liardly sliall they 
 that wear evening clothes and ball dresses enter 
 the kingdom of art," — Is peace dullness: is it 
 the synonym for inanity ? 
 
 Look at the political world, where the feeling 
 "I am as good as you and better" is the active 
 and turbulent force ; where wisdom is determined 
 not by weighing heads but by counting them, no 
 matter how little is in them ; in which the ver- 
 dict of yesterday is sure to be changed to-mor- 
 row because there are more heads and perhaps 
 as ignorant coming u^d to be counted, as if the 
 pacification of human society were to be found in 
 popular elections and 'plebiscites: — Is peace 
 there ? 
 
 Or still again look at the philosophical world, 
 at the leaders and captains of " modern thought," 
 who, in studying the phenomena of the universe, 
 the heavens with their telescope, and the earth 
 with their geological hammer, and human life 
 upon it with their materialistic analysis, find so 
 often nothing but matter and force, no spirit, no 
 God — oh, my friends, with the burdens of life 
 ux)on us and the miseries of life around us and 
 the sharp cries of distress and pain from so many 
 quarters coming into our ears, and a strange 
 dark journey awaiting us : Is there peace there ? 
 
106 HIDING FKOM GOD. 
 
 So if we sliould go throughout the whole 
 garden of modern life, the conclusion would be 
 more vividly imi^ressed upon us that while men 
 are finding in it almost everything else to-day, 
 they are not finding jjeace. Why ? Because it is 
 not there. No, men and women, it is not there. 
 Peace does not come from without ; it comes 
 from within ; from communion with a life which 
 does not change — which is the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and forever. It comes from God, from 
 the consciousness on the part of men that they 
 belong to and are the children of God ; that 
 despite their sin, their disobedience, their un- 
 worthiness, He who made the garden and put 
 them in the midst is their friend, and holds them 
 fast and loves them with a strong, eternal love. 
 That gives peace, and that alone gives it. And 
 so we come to the other side of that old human 
 story, in the garden of Eden, that the great God 
 of the universe, who knows better than we where- 
 in our peace consists, is forever searching for us 
 in our hiding from him, and saying to each from 
 time to time, as to Adam and Eve, ' ' Where art 
 thou?" 
 
 In how many different ways do Ave hear his 
 voice ! Adam and Eve heard it in the Genesis 
 story, and we also hear it. 
 
HIDING EKOM GOD. 107 
 
 We hear it at times in the very quiet and 
 stilhiess of the garden — when wandering in the 
 summer, as some of us have been recently doing, 
 along the ocean beach, or through the quiet 
 w^ood, or under the evening sky — far away from 
 the haunts of men and the clatter and the noise 
 of the city ; a longing deep and pure is awak- 
 ened in us that we know not how to express. 
 Yes, we hear it then, and a sweet quickening 
 influence as from some more beautiful world be- 
 yond the earth and fairer than the firmament 
 over it seems to come and touch our hearts, and 
 "thus give us note that through the place we see 
 a place is signified we never saw," but to which 
 nevertheless we belong. We are lifted up in- 
 stinctively to the thought and feel the presence 
 of God and seem to hear his voice. 
 
 Or we hear it at other times, not in the silence, 
 but in the disturbing and affrighting noises of 
 the garden — the fierce strife of the tempest, the 
 mighty roar of the winds, the tumult of the war 
 of the elements, when the trees are swept by the 
 wind, and the bolts of the lightning fall "as if 
 God's messenger, through the close wood-screen, 
 plunged and replunged his weapon, at a venture, 
 feeling for guilty thee and me ; then breaks the 
 thunder like a whole sea overhead." The search- 
 
108 HIDING FROM OOD. 
 
 ing God has found us. Trembling in our hiding- 
 place, which is a hiding-place no longer, we seem 
 to hear his voice saying to ns, "Oh, man, oh, 
 woman, where art thou?" 
 
 Or we hear it, not in the world without, but in 
 the world within ; in our affectional nature ; in 
 our human love, which when purest and best 
 always seems to have a touch of the Infinite in 
 it, as though it were God himself whom we were 
 trying to reach ; or as though it were his voice 
 speaking through the broken accents of our poor 
 earthly affections and saying, "Give me thy 
 heart!" 
 
 Or in our moral nature we hear it, in those 
 admonitions of conscience from which we cannot 
 escape, though we try, and which, notwithstand- 
 ing our efforts, still have dominion over us ; or 
 when through that strange and subtle law of asso- 
 ciation — the sight of a place or a person, the 
 sudden and unexpected happening of an event, 
 a word, a sound, a fragrance, the breath of a 
 flower, the note of a bird — the old past life comes 
 rolling back ; and the memory of some forgotten 
 sin, some base betrayal of manhood, some 
 cowardly desertion of principle, some guilty in- 
 dulgence, revives. Then it is that we seem to be 
 lifted up with fear and trembling to the thought 
 
HIDING FROM GOD. 109 
 
 of a Holy God, and to hear his voice, saying, 
 " whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
 reap." 
 
 We hear it again, when we have learned from 
 experience that a life of self-indulgence does not 
 give the satisfaction which we thought it would. 
 We hear it when we meet with reverses and the 
 blight has come into our garden, and the bitter- 
 ness of death is upon us. We hear it in that 
 sadness, that strange, dreamy sadness, which 
 seems to be associated with success in this world 
 even more than with failure ; or when, with the 
 consciousness of our moral defects and blemishes, 
 our insincere, tortuous, selfish, disingenuous con- 
 duct, we are suddenly brought face to face with 
 some pure and noble character, some brave and 
 generous action, and wish that we might have 
 done or might have been like that. In all these 
 different ways does the thought of God break in 
 upon us in our hiding from him, and we are made 
 to hear his voice saying, "Oh, soul of man, soul 
 of man, where art thou ? " 
 
 But sweeter and more appealing than all is 
 the voice of God speaking to us in the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ. Hearing his voice in the world 
 without or in the world within, the sound of it 
 makes us afraid. We know that we are not 
 
110 HIDING FROM GOD. 
 
 clean and pure. We have broken liis laws, and 
 sinned, and eaten time and again of the fruit of 
 the forbidden tree ; and although we cannot 
 escape him, we would do so if we could. But 
 hearing his voice in Jesus Christ saying to us, 
 " I love you, I forgive you ; no matter what you 
 have been and done, or what you have failed to 
 do, I love you with a love which nothing can 
 change and from which nothing can sever — 
 neither life with all its risks, nor death with all 
 its uncertainties, nor angels, nor principalities, 
 nor powers ; nor things present nor things to 
 come — from which nothing can sever": that 
 gives peace. It gave it once to a man of the 
 first century, troubled and tried on every hand, 
 and who felt himself to be the chief of sinners, 
 and it can give it now to a man of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 May you and I, my friends, hear that voice of 
 God ! The garden in which we are living is big 
 and beautiful and fruitful. Let us get out of it 
 all that we can ; let us try to make it bigger and 
 more fruitful ; but let us not try — for we cannot 
 do it — to hide ourselves from God in it, or to find 
 in the garden itself a peace which the garden 
 itself, however big and beautiful, does not and 
 cannot give. We have tried the worldly method ; 
 
HIDING FROM GOD. Ill 
 
 let US go back and try the old method of the 
 Gospel of Jesns Christ, and in all our seeking, 
 let us seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and in 
 all our wandering through the garden let us 
 wander through it with God, 
 
MASTERSHIP. 
 
 The Master is come. — St. John xi. 28. 
 
 There is in tliis world a genuine mastersliij) 
 whicli everybody respects and gladly acknowl- 
 edges. There is also a spurious and counterfeit 
 mastership, a false simulation of the real, which 
 secures no lasting homage and fails to accomplish 
 the purpose at whicli it aims. This morning I 
 shall try to point out the difference, in my judg- 
 ment, between them, or, more xwecisely and par- 
 ticularly, shall address myself to the considera- 
 tion of the question. How do our masters come ? 
 What are the conditions of their coming, and the 
 marks of their suj)remacy ? 
 
 First, I observe, the master comes by birth. 
 God sends him. The God who has made men's 
 faces to differ so that no two of them are alike, 
 however closely twinned, has also endowed their 
 natures with diverse germs of power, which cir- 
 cumstances may strengthen or awaken, but can- 
 not create. The greatness or the small ness of 
 every person in mental and moral stature and in 
 the scope of his personal influence, is decided for 
 him at the outset as strictly as it is decided for a 
 
 113 
 
MASTEESHIP. 113 
 
 fruit, to use Mr. John Ruskin's simile, whether 
 it shall be an aj)ricot or a pear. 
 
 The subsequent influence of external surround- 
 ings will determine whether the growing apricot 
 shall fall as a shriveled green bead, blighted by 
 the breath of the fatal east wind, and contradict- 
 ing its early i^romise, or whether it shall expand 
 into a tender joy and beauty, exhaling a per- 
 fume delicately rich and clad in the sweet bright- 
 ness of a golden velvet vesture. But the apricot, 
 whether shriveled or ripened, is only and always 
 an ax^ricot, and the pear and the acorn and the 
 pine cone, and their counterparts among men 
 and women. 
 
 That people, therefore, differ from one another 
 is not so much due, as in this age of extravagant 
 faith in the power of environment we are apt to 
 think, to the manifold character of their circum- 
 stances as to the manifold wisdom of God. 'No 
 one can exercise a masterly j)rerogative and 
 power in this world except he has first received 
 it as a birth endowment from God. 
 
 Nor does it matter much where or in what 
 place he is born, — the crowded metropolis, the 
 isolated farmhouse, the inland town, the city by 
 the sea, a stable, a manger, a cattle trough, — the 
 great thing is he is born, and if circumstances 
 
114 MASTERSHIP. 
 
 give the oiDportunity and the other conditions are 
 realized, of which I will presently speak, he will 
 in due time be heard from. 
 
 That is the first condition — the master comes 
 by birth, God sends him. 
 
 The second is by baptism, and when I say by 
 baptism, I use the word as it is used in connec- 
 tion with Jesus Christ, which signified in his 
 case not the acquiring of new power, but the 
 awakening of his human consciousness to power 
 already possessed. When, therefore, I say that 
 baptism is the second condition of mastership, I 
 mean the coming to the consciousness of what 
 one is and has, and of what he can do with it. 
 Otherwise, although he may have it, he will 
 have it as though he had it not. 
 
 You remember the story which Thackeray tells 
 in his "Vanity Fair," of the great, strong, stal- 
 wart fellow, who is cuffed and kicked and tor- 
 mented and shamefully treated by every boy in 
 the school, and does not dare to resent it. Upon 
 one occasion, however, driven to bay and exas- 
 perated beyond all endurance, he turns and faces 
 his foe and fights and, to his own surprise and 
 that of everybody else, conquers. From that 
 day on, having been baptized or born again into 
 the consciousness of the strength he possessed, 
 
MASTERSHIP. 115 
 
 the coward is a hero, the chain jjion oi the school, 
 a soldier in the army, an officer in the regiment, 
 a veteran in the service. He finds his true career 
 in this world, and moves with distinction in it, 
 only when he has first found and taken posses- 
 sion of himself. 
 
 The incident is fiction and yet it is real life. 
 Are there not many like him whose faculties, after 
 slumbering in undisturbed repose, have sud- 
 denly been awakened by some new need or 
 emergency, some new responsibility, some public 
 calamity perhaps, like the breaking out of a war ; 
 and who except for that would never have known 
 what they were and what they could do, and 
 never would have done it ? Except for that they 
 would have remained unknown to themselves 
 and the world — clerks in little village stores, like 
 the one in Illinois ; teachers more or less ob- 
 scure in military academies, like the one ia 
 Louisiana ; lieutenants in the army, occupying 
 obscure military posts, like the one in Oregon or 
 Texas, or quiet country gentlemen living upon 
 their farms, like the one which is now the shrine 
 of the American peojDle, on the banks of the 
 Potomac, in Fairfax County, Virginia. * 
 
 * This sermon was preached on the 22d of February, and the 
 references here are to Generals Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and 
 Washington. 
 
116 MASTERSHIP. 
 
 The occasion did not make these men. God 
 made them, for the same occasion confronted 
 others also, but the occasion came and awakened 
 them and made them see and feel and take pos- 
 session of themselves — revealed them to them- 
 selves, and they then revealed themselves to the 
 world. As it is in affairs, so is it also in letters. 
 The Trojan war did not make a Homer, but it 
 awakened him, made him see who and what he 
 was, as he had never seen before, and then the 
 world in the immortal Iliad saw ! 
 
 The exile from Florence did not make a Dante, 
 but it made him conscious as nothing else before 
 had done of the genius hidden within him, which 
 conscious possession of his genius enabled him to 
 produce that Divine Comedy "that startled 
 Europe from her somnambulism of a thousand 
 years." 
 
 The Bedford Jail did not make a John Bunyan, 
 but it made him see and know as he had never 
 known before who John Bunyan was, and, 
 coming thus to the consciousness of his deeper, 
 stronger self, he produced the wonderful story 
 which has cheered and comforted so many Chris- 
 tian hearts in their pilgrim progress toward the 
 Celestial land. 
 
 Yes, in letters as in affairs, in every line of 
 
MASTERSHIP. 117 
 
 conduct, in every department of thought, it is 
 not from the men who have power merely, but 
 from the men who know they have it, that the 
 greatest achievements have come. By some fact 
 or incident they have been made to perceive 
 it, to know it, to feel it, to use it. Their con- 
 fidence in what they could do has given them 
 courage to do it, or at least to attemjpt it. They 
 were not intimidated as other men by its perils 
 and risks. They have crossed the trackless 
 waters, explored the unknown continents, led 
 the way into a darkest Africa or out of a darkest 
 England, and their faith in themselves has given 
 to others faith. 
 
 It is true that often, very often, men have been 
 mistaken, have had altogether too much confi- 
 dence in themselves, and so have egregiously 
 failed. But is it not equally true, on the other 
 hand, that men have often failed to do what they 
 might have done because they have not had 
 enough confidence in themselves ? They have 
 never done much good in the world simply 
 because they never knew how much good they 
 could do. They have not perceived or realized 
 the power that God has given them. They are 
 not up to themselves and the measure of their 
 opportunity, like a man who has made a fortune 
 
118 MASTERSHIP. 
 
 but does not know how to use it, and does not 
 see the great and potential blessing in it. 
 
 These then, it seems to me, are the conditions 
 of mastership : First, the possession in fact of 
 some born gift or a capacity ; and second its 
 possession in consciousness. The person must be 
 born with power, and then born again, or bap- 
 tized, and awakened into the knowledge of that 
 power. 
 
 But this is not all. For after a person has 
 found himself, who he is and what he can do, he 
 must then sink, lose, obliterate himself in some 
 great work or cause that takes him outside of 
 himself, and this is the third condition — burial, 
 or death. 
 
 Some great cause must come, some great duty 
 appear, which touches and kindles his heart 
 and lifts him out of himself ; which more than 
 himself he loves ; and to which with a consuming 
 passion he must devote himself. There is no 
 personal mastership or greatness in this world, 
 nor ever will be, without it. Some great and 
 strong enthusiasm must come and take pos- 
 session of the force, the talent, the genius, 
 that has been awakened in him — patriotism, 
 truth, righteousness, the welfare of his country, 
 the good of his fellow-men, or the spread of the 
 
MASTERSHIP. 119 
 
 Christian Gospel, and the establishment on the 
 earth of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, 
 
 Then he may be strong and know it, and yet 
 know it all the while as though he knew it no-t 
 — no vanity, not the slightest, no arrogance in 
 his knowledge. With St. Paul he may honestly 
 feel how far short he comes and how unworthy 
 he is, because, like St. Paul, he is not measuring 
 himself with other men in this world — that were 
 a petty and contemptible task — but with the 
 great work, the great cause or calling which is 
 forever before him beckoning him on and on, to 
 which with genuine consecration he has given and 
 devoted himself, in which he has buried himself. 
 
 And yet he is not buried or does not stay 
 buried, for from that grave he rises with the 
 glory and greatness of the cause itself shining 
 forever upon him. He becomes identified with 
 it ; he seems to be to his fellow-men the incarna- 
 tion of it, and thereafter, when they think of 
 it, they always think of him who has embodied 
 it to them, and all the ideal virtues which it 
 represents are a halo around his brow, and all 
 the great blessings for which it forever stands 
 are a chrism upon his head. 
 
 The measure of their love for it is their love 
 for him, and the enthusiasm which it inspires is 
 
120 MASTEESHIP. 
 
 kindled by his name. This is the king's high- 
 way, on which the greatest of the earth have 
 walked. The history of the world is simply the 
 history of their influence and of what they have 
 done. Other men and women have seemed to 
 take some part in it and have taken some part in 
 it, but it was these masters, these great ones, 
 who insi^ired them, lifted them up, sent them on, 
 and helped them to do their work. 
 
 " A cork float danced upon the tide we saw 
 This morning, blending briglit with briny dews. 
 There was no disengaging soaked from sound, 
 Earth product from the sister element ; 
 But when we turn the tide will turn, I think, 
 And bare on beach will lie exposed the buoy. 
 A very proper time to try with foot and rule, 
 And even finger, which was buoying wave, 
 Which merely buoyant substance ; power to lift 
 And power to be sent skywax'd." 
 
 Like that of the little cork float is the power 
 of the many, the power to be lifted, to be taught, 
 to be guided, to be sent. The i^ower of the few is 
 to lift the multitude and to send them skyward. 
 
 "How quickly and readily," says Emerson, 
 "do we enter into their labors and take posses- 
 sion of them." "Every ship that comes to 
 America got its chart from Columbus ; every 
 novel is a debtor to Homer ; every carpenter 
 who shaves with a foreplane borrows the genius 
 
MASTERSHIP. 121 
 
 of some forgotten inventor ; life is girt all round 
 with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of 
 men who have perished to add their point of 
 light to our sky." 
 
 This, then, is the way the masters come. First 
 by birth endowment. God sends them. Then 
 the bai^tismal awakening and consciousness of 
 themselves. Then the effacement, burial of 
 themselves in their consecration to some great 
 calling of God. Birth, Baptism, Burial. 
 
 The American people have recently been 
 reminded of some great names, ^ which sug- 
 gest the conditions of a masterly character to 
 which I have referred. God gave them power, 
 rare power ; the occasion came and awakened it, 
 and then — it is no rhetorical exaggeration to 
 say — with a rare sacrifice they merged and buried 
 themselves in their country's cause, and the 
 glory of this nation hereafter among the nations 
 of the world will be their glory, too. 
 
 I have in my mind this morning one pre-emi- 
 nent Master — the master of us all — who, by his 
 influence in this world, has proved himself to be 
 such. The story of his wonderful birth is not 
 incredible to me. It seems to fit and be con- 
 gruous with his still more wonderful character. 
 
 * Generals Grant and Sherman. 
 
122 MASTEESHIP. 
 
 The story of his wonderful baptism — the 
 heavens opening and a voice giving divine com- 
 mission to him as the eternal Son of the Father — 
 is not strange to me, and if I had been standing 
 then on the banks of the Jordan, knowing what 
 I now know of the wonderful power of Jesus 
 Christ, I vv^ould have expected to hear such a 
 voice. 
 
 The story of his wonderful death — his meek 
 and quiet submission, although, as he says, and 
 I believe, he miglit have summoned legions of 
 angels to his defense ; the mocking, the scourg- 
 ing, the crown of thorns, the cry from the 
 Cross, "It is finished," the darkness over the 
 land, the veil of the temple rent in twain — it is 
 what I would expect, it is the kind of death 
 that I would expect one so supremely great to 
 die, who had come to give himself for the world, 
 and who, in consequence, has been ever since the 
 world's Master. 
 
 Yes, the Master is come, and calleth for thee. 
 Do you hear ? Will you heed ? Like the 
 member of the Bethany household, to whom 
 the words were first addressed, will you arise 
 quickly and go to him ? 
 
WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 
 
 And Enoch walked with God, and he was not : far Ood took 
 him. — Genesis v. 24. 
 
 This verse appears in the earliest extant 
 genealogical table. It is called the book of the 
 generations or descendants of Adam. A very- 
 great longevity is attributed to these descend- 
 ants ; each of them is stated to have lived many 
 hundreds of years — one of them nearly a thou- 
 sand. That they actually did live as long as 
 that, some of you might find it a little hard to be- 
 lieve. Nor is it, in my Judgment, important that 
 you should believe it. It would not do you any 
 good nor help you if you did ; and yet the Bible 
 is meant to helji you. How does it help you 
 here, and what is the lesson taught ? If you will 
 read the chai^ter you will find that it is a record 
 of many very long lives — Jared, and Setli, and 
 Enos, and others — which, although so long, 
 ended at last in death ; and of one relatively 
 very much shorter life, Enoch's, scarcely more 
 than one-third as long, which did not end in 
 death. And this is the reason given: "Enoch 
 
 123 
 
124 WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 
 
 walked with God" ; and this is the lesson 
 taught, that the life which walks on earth with 
 God, although in comparison with others it may 
 seem to be much shorter, does in fact outlive 
 them all, and is longer, for that is life, indeed, 
 a life that has no death in it, a life that does 
 not die. It is of that deathless life that walks 
 on earth with God that I desire this morning to 
 si^eak. 
 
 Walking with God : the phrase to-day has an 
 obsolete sound, and the thing itself seems 
 strange ; and as we hear it spoken our minds go 
 back to the past, and we think of apostles and 
 proj)hets and martyrs and the old-time saints and 
 hermits and recluses and anchorites, when the 
 world was not so big, and its affairs were not so 
 numerous, and its interests were not so absorb- 
 ing. Then indeed it was i)ossible for men to go 
 off somewhere by themselves and search and 
 study the Scriptures, and read their books of 
 devotion, and watch and pray and meditate all 
 day long and reflect on things eternal. Then 
 indeed it was possible for men to walk with God, 
 and they did walk with God, and if we had 
 been living then, we too might have walked with 
 God. 
 
 But we are living now, and the situation is 
 
WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 125 
 
 different, is altogether different ; and liere in 
 New York City, for instance, with all its push 
 and rush and drive, and all its social demands 
 and all its business exactions, its numerous 
 affairs and cares, that have to be constantly 
 looked after, and which, if not constantly looked 
 after, will surely go wrong and astray, and per- 
 haps get hurt and wreclied, and we too get hurt 
 and wrecked— here in our New York City life, 
 how can we walk with God ? Is it not simply 
 out of the question ? Say our prayers all day ? 
 Why, we have scarcely time to say our prayers 
 hurriedly and j)erfunctorily for a few moments 
 in the morning before we rush down-town upon 
 the rapidest transit that we can find, and throw 
 ourselves again into the maelstrom there. 
 
 Now this may all be wrong, unwise, unhealthy, 
 undesirable ; we may wish that it were not so ; 
 but it is so, and how are we going to change it ? 
 Well, we cannot change it ; and if we are to 
 walk with God to-day, we must learn to do so 
 under those conditions which the life of to-day 
 imposes, for we cannot get out of the present 
 and we cannot reproduce the past. And not by 
 trying to go apart from temporal duties and 
 things, — that is impossible, — but while dwelling 
 in them, we must manage somehow to be quick- 
 
126 WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 
 
 ened and helped and guided and gladdened by 
 tilings that are eternal. 
 
 And so we may be, and not by going apart, 
 but here and now where we are, in the very 
 thick of affairs, with all their crowding and pres- 
 sure, with all their racket and noise — we may 
 hear the voice of God, and find and feel and have 
 him, and walk in communion with him. How? 
 
 A good many people seem to have the notion, 
 and I susiDect some of you have, that in order to 
 get where God is they must do so by making a 
 journey of some sort, by a process of locomotion, 
 by going to somewhere else than where they are 
 at present. "God is not here," they say; 
 "God is there, or there; or, if he is here, he is 
 not so much here as he is there" ; not so much 
 down-town in the office of the lawyer or the 
 banker, or the counting room of the merchant, 
 or the floor of the Stock Exchange, as he is up- 
 town in one of the churches on Sunday. 
 
 And as long as they feel that way, of course 
 they do not try very hard — perhaps do not try 
 at all — to find him in the office, or the shop, or 
 the bank, or the counting room, or on the floor 
 of the Stock Exchange ; for what is the use of 
 trying to find him when he is not there, or is not 
 much there ? There is no use ; and as a result 
 
WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 127 
 
 of this localizing of God and going on journeys 
 to meet liim, there has come to be a localizing, or 
 what I may call a provincializing, of religion, as 
 though it were something that did not appeal to 
 the real life of the world, but something to be 
 done and practiced outside of it, or more par- 
 ticularly outside of it, at particular times and 
 seasons, when we get sick or when we are in dis- 
 tress or trouble, or when we think that we are 
 going to die — a local thing, a sectional thing, a 
 provincial thing, to be taken up and used when 
 the occasion comes, and then laid down and care- 
 fully put aside until the occasion comes back 
 again. 
 
 And looking at religion in this provincial way, 
 men speak of it with a provincial speech ; as 
 when we hear them say, and we not infrequently 
 do : " Business is business, and religion is 
 religion ; they belong to different spheres, have 
 different rules of conduct and different standards 
 of judgment, and they must not be confounded ; 
 for business is business, and religion is religion." 
 Well, the man who talks that way may know 
 something of what business is, but he has not the 
 faintest conception of what religion is. For 
 religion does not mean to walk without God on 
 the world's great noisy throughfares six days 
 
128 WALKII^G WITH GOD TO-DAY. 
 
 out of seven, and tlien for a few hours on the 
 seventh to walk with God. 
 
 No ; what religion tells us is this : that God is 
 everywhere, equally everywhere ; just as much 
 in the office, the bank, the store, the shop, the 
 counting room, the drawing room, the ballroom ; 
 just as much on the floor of the Stock Exchange 
 as he is in St. Bartholomew's Church or in any 
 other church. And why ? Because you are 
 there, and where you are, God is ; the place in 
 which you dwell is consecrated by you, or by 
 the God who is in you. It is helpful, indeed, 
 most helpful, to turn aside at times to some 
 particular place — the closet of prayer, the 
 church — and there to think about God ; and 
 the place or the building devoted to that is a 
 sacred place and a consecrated building ; but 
 you must be careful not to consider it conse- 
 crated in such manner that when you go away 
 from it you go away from God. 
 
 No, no. God goes where you go ; where you 
 journey, he journeys ; where you walk, he 
 walks; where you are, he is; "in thyself is 
 God," is the teaching of the Christian Scrip- 
 tures — " Say not in thine heart, who shall ascend 
 into the heavens to bring him down from above ; 
 who shall descend into the deep to bring him up 
 
WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 129 
 
 from beneath ; in tliy mouth, in thy speech, in 
 thy heart, in thyself is God." Keep your heart 
 pure, keep your thought pure, keep your speech 
 pure ; when you go to the jjublic banquet, when 
 you go to the private dinner, when you linger 
 around the table after the ladies have witli- 
 drawn, and engage in friendly and fandliar talk 
 and tell your stories there, keep your thought 
 ]oure, keep your speech pure, let no unclean 
 communication, suggestion, or insinuation come 
 out of your mouth. There is the place to walk 
 with God, not here ; there at the dinner table is 
 the place to walk with God, and that is the way 
 to do it. 
 
 Or when you have withdrawn, you women, 
 and are talking about your friends and gossix)ing 
 about your neighbors, and are tempted to tell 
 little scandalous stories about them, refrain and 
 chasten your tongue, have a care to your speech, 
 put charity into your heart ; that is the place 
 and way for you to walk with God. 
 
 And so throughout all life, my friends, 
 throughout the whole range of conduct ; as you 
 meet one another in trade, in society, in manag- 
 ing your affairs, ordering your households, 
 projecting your plans, making your big busi- 
 ness deals, and trying to enlarge the scope of 
 
130 WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 
 
 your calling and to make it a more profitable 
 and a more fruitful tiling — but I need not 
 specify ; everywhere there is a voice divine with- 
 in you ; you can hear it if you will — be true to 
 it and let it speak. There is a light divine within 
 you — be true to it and let it shine. There is a life 
 divine within you — be true to it and let it win, 
 though you lose something else, however dear, 
 that you want to have and keep. That is 
 religion, that is to walk with God. 
 
 Did you think it was something else, some- 
 thing different from that ? that it was a raptur- 
 ous, beatific, ecstatic sort of thing, possible for 
 people who lived in the olden time when the 
 world was not so big, and possible for some 
 people now perhaps, who, like clergymen and 
 others, are supposed to live a little apart from 
 the real life of the world — but, situated as you 
 are, hardly possible for you without making a 
 radical change in your circumstances which you 
 are not able to make ? No, no. The path on 
 which to walk with God is just that plain, prac- 
 tical, prosaic, commonplace path on which you 
 are walking every day. And walking there with 
 purity, with truth, Avith honor, with high char- 
 acter, you are walking with God just as much 
 as any apostle or jorophet or martyr ever did, 
 
WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 131 
 
 or any Scriptural hero or any traditioHal 
 saint. 
 
 I look forward to the last great day, and it 
 seems to me I can see one coming up to the gates 
 of the beautiful city. It is not an angel or a 
 seraph with shining robe and a crown on his 
 head and a golden harp in his hand, making 
 sweet and rapturous music as he passes along. 
 It is not a saint out of the calendar, with a halo 
 around his brow, who looks as though he had 
 just come out of the oratory after long prayers 
 and fastings and vigils. It is the image and 
 form of a man, who looks as though he had just 
 come out of the shop or the ofRce or the counting 
 room at the end of the task of the day — and the 
 dust of toil is on his clothes, and the marks of 
 work are on his hands, and the lines of care are 
 on his face ; but he seems to hold up his head as 
 though he had not wronged or defrauded or 
 slandered his neighbor, and there is a look in his 
 eye which seems to say: "I have been square 
 and honest and true with my fellow-men" ; and 
 I ask. Who is this man, and why is he here? 
 and I seem to hear a voice which says : " Lift up 
 your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye 
 everlasting doors, and let him come in and enter, 
 for this man has walked with God." 
 
132 WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 
 
 Yes, that is to walk with God. It is just to 
 cast ourselves upon God and to try to be loyal 
 and true, wherever we are, to the light divine 
 within us, to the life divine within us, and to let 
 it win and shine. Hard ? Oh, yes ; it is very 
 hard, and sometimes costs us very much ; but all 
 high living is hard, and it is just as feasible and 
 jDossible to-day as it ever was in the past. 
 
 Now, let me say, as briefly as possible, just 
 two or three things about this life that walks 
 on earth with God. 
 
 And, first, it witnesses to its own reality, and 
 proves itself by itself and needs no other proof. 
 How do we know that the physical life is a 
 reality ? Because we are living the physical life, 
 because we are iDhysically alive. How do we 
 know that the mental life is a reality ? Because 
 we are living somewhat the mental life, because 
 we are mentally alive. 
 
 There may be somewhere in the universe some 
 other form of life than the one which we are liv- 
 ing, but if there is we do not and cannot know it, 
 and if we should hear it spoken of and described, 
 it would be but a name or a word, mystic, nebu- 
 lous, without any meaning. There may be in the 
 universe somewhere such a thing as angelic life, 
 angel life, but we do not know what it is and 
 
WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 133 
 
 cannot know what it is. Wliy ? Because we are 
 not angelically alive, we are not angels ; and if we 
 are to know that the angel life is real, it can only 
 be by having the angel life living in ourselves. 
 That is the way to know, and tlie best, if not the 
 only, way to know that the God life is real. 
 The man who does not live it much is the man 
 who does not believe in it much. It is to him 
 but a name ; God is to him b^^t a name, full of 
 sound, and perhaps fury, but signifying nothing. 
 But to the man who does live it, who tries in the 
 midst of common work and task, business 
 engagements and social fellowships and private 
 conversations, to be obedient and true to what is 
 purest, noblest, and best within him — not best 
 at the moment, it may be, but ideally best — 
 to him God is very real, and the life of God 
 in the soul is real, and he believes it because 
 he lives it, and he needs no proof to confirm it, 
 no argument to make it sure ; it witnesses to its 
 own reality. It witnesses also to its deathless 
 reality. " If a man die, shall he live again ?" 
 
 Thousands of years ago that question was 
 asked, and who since, by argument or by demon- 
 stration, has answered it, or who has come back 
 from beyond the grave to give the answer to it ? 
 And yet for you and for me that is fast becom- 
 
134 WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY„ 
 
 ing the greatest and tlie intensest of all ques- 
 tions, wliicli, as we see our friends go awaj^ and 
 realize that we ourselves will presently have to 
 follow, breaks forth at times into a bitter cry 
 that almost breaks the heart. Yet where is the 
 answer found? Science says, It is not in me. 
 Scholarship says, It is not in me. Philosophy 
 says, It is not in me ; I may suggest an answer, 
 may make it seem most probable that human life 
 goes on and is not conquered by death, but con- 
 quers and overcomes it; but fully, clearly, 
 assuredly the answer is not in me. 
 
 But why look to philosophy, why summon 
 scholarship to help ? In ourselves is the an- 
 swer. Living or trying to live day after day, 
 hour after hour, in obedience to what is jiurest 
 and best and divinest within us, the assurance 
 strengthens, grows, till it becomes more certain 
 than any fact in history, than any truth in phi- 
 losophy, than any law of nature, as certain as 
 ourselves, that it is an indestructible life ; that, 
 whether long or short, God has it, holds it, keeps 
 it, and that it can no more die than God himself 
 can die. 
 
 Then it is no longer hard, but easy, to believe 
 in the declarations of the Bible and the testimony 
 of Jesus Christ, for the testimony of Christ is 
 
WALKING WITH GOD TO-DAY. 135 
 
 confirmed in us. Then our human existence 
 here, this rapidly flowing current, seems not like 
 a dark river of death rushing out and exhausting 
 itself in loss, but like a river of life, coming as 
 from under the throne of God, deep and wide 
 and broad, going down out of sight for a little 
 while and buried in the earth, but appearing, 
 rising again as a purified stream, and flowing on 
 and on with larger scope and volume upon the 
 other side. Then do the apparent inequities and 
 perplexities and strangenesses of human life seem 
 more clear, and in the midst of trial and loss and 
 sacrifice we will cast ourselves upon the God 
 within us and wait for some diviner light, some 
 diviner life to come. To some, as we see things, 
 it seems to come too soon. And we can ill afford 
 to lose them. 
 
 We can think of such a one this morning,* for 
 he did help us ; he helped us very much, and we 
 would have kept him with us ; but in the prime 
 of his manhood, in the very joy and flush and 
 vigor of his work, one morning he was not ; he 
 walked with God, and God took him, and God 
 has him. He had him here, and he has him 
 there, and keeps him and holds him there ; for it 
 would put us to permanent moral and intellectual 
 
 * Preached the Sunday after the death of Phillips Brooks. 
 
136 WALKING WITPI GOD TO-DAY. 
 
 confusion to believe that sncli a life can go out. 
 God keeps him there in the fullness of his death- 
 less personality, and as a quickening and living 
 influence he also keeps him here to help us, while 
 we linger behind, to walk on earth with God 
 
THE MORAL CONFLICT ; AND ITS 
 SIGNIFICANCE. 
 
 There was war in heaven. — Rev. xii. 7. 
 
 These words, as I understand tbem, do not re- 
 fer to the future — their reference is to the pres- 
 ent. The war of which they speak is a war 
 liere and now, and the heaven of which they 
 speak is a heaven here and now. For what is 
 heaven in the Bible use of the term ? Not pri- 
 marily a place, but a state or condition of being ; 
 or, if it be a place, it is a place where God is sup- 
 posed to live and dwell, and God may live in us 
 here and does live in us here. He lives in us 
 here and now, however, not fully and continu- 
 ously, as we hope he will hereafter, but partially 
 and imperfectly, with fitful gleams and flashes. 
 His life in us now is associated with struggle ; it 
 involves effort and fight. There is war in it, and 
 yet just so far as his life is in us it is heaven, and 
 the declaration of the text I take to mean that 
 the effort or fight which we make here and now 
 to keep and assert the life of God within us, or 
 to keep and assert it in the world at large, is 
 
 137 
 
138 THE MOEAL CONFLICT. 
 
 lieaven's fight, God's fight, God's war. Let us 
 make that thought our theme. 
 
 And first let us note the fact, commonplace 
 enough, that all the moral and spiritual progress, 
 and all the mental progress, which men have 
 reached in this world, they have reached through 
 warfare, and that conflict always has been and is 
 now the condition, the inexorable condition of 
 growth. Man, I suppose, might have been made 
 to grow in wisdom and in goodness without con- 
 flict, or he might have been made in these 
 respects full-grown at the outset — wholly wise 
 and wholly good, and we wonder sometimes why 
 he was not, but he was not, and he has had to 
 struggle and to fight every inch of his way. 
 Browning, you remember, describes his status 
 thus : 
 
 Lower than God who knows all and can all ; 
 
 Higher than beasts which know and can so far 
 
 As each beast's limit, perfect to an end, 
 
 Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more ; 
 
 While man knows partly but conceives besides, 
 
 Creeps ever on from fancy to the fact. 
 
 And in this striving, this converting air, 
 
 Into a solid he may grasp and use, 
 
 Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone — 
 
 Not God's, not the beasts' ; he is , they are. 
 
 Man partly is, and wholly, hopes to be. 
 
 That is not only fine poetry, it is hard fact, as 
 
THE MOIIAL CONFLICT. 139 
 
 you and I have found out, and however else or 
 otherwise we might have been made and placed, 
 we have been in reality so made and placed and 
 circumstanced in this world that conflict is the 
 condition, the inexorable condition, of growth. 
 
 But why engage in the conflict? why, when it 
 is so hard, should we make this efilort to grow in 
 moral and spiritual stature, to make ourselves 
 good and better, to make others good and better, 
 to make the world and ourselves stronger, purer, 
 wiser, freer from the moral entanglements and 
 the moral enslavements of sin ? Why, I say, 
 when it is so hard, should we make the effort to 
 grow, and without abatement keep on making 
 the effort ? If we could only reach that desirable 
 consummation, that fullness of moral stature, by 
 making a little effort and doing a little work and 
 giving a little thought and time and attention to 
 it, by a word or a wish or a resolve ; then I pre- 
 sume we would all be ready enough to attempt 
 it. But the effort it requires is hard, and the 
 work it imposes is hard, and the task it pre- 
 scribes is long and slow and militant — a struggle, 
 a fight, a conflict ; and this continuous con- 
 flict, this perpetual fighting to make ourselves 
 good and better, and to make others good and 
 better, becomes wearisome and we get tired of it ; 
 
140 THE MORAL CONFLICT. 
 
 and why should not you and I just make up our 
 mind to accept the world as it is and to accept 
 ourselves as we are ? We are j^retty good, fairly 
 good, respectably good ; we might be worse ; 
 and the world after all is not so bad ; it too 
 mi§lit be worse, and this continuous struggling, 
 striving, fighting — why should we not stoj") it ? 
 
 Well, I will tell you why, and why, when we 
 once vividly realize what it is and what it sig- 
 nifies, we do not want to stop it. It is God's 
 fight ; and by that I do not mean that it is the 
 fight that God has commanded us to fight and in 
 that sense his fight — no, not that. Neither do I 
 mean that in some providential way or ways, by 
 various providential methods or means, he is 
 fighting for us, fighting on our side, and in this 
 manner helping us — no, not that, though that 
 too may be true. What I mean is this, that God 
 is fighting in us, not for us merely, but in us ; 
 that every moral progress which we make in this 
 world is God's progress ; that every moral vic- 
 tory which we win in this world is God's vic- 
 tory ; that when, for instance, for some immedi- 
 ate advantage and gain, or for some momentary 
 relief or easement in an embarrassing situation, 
 we are tempted to tell a lie, or to act a lie, as 
 you and I are tempted every day, we yet resist 
 
THE MORAL CONFLICT. 141 
 
 the temptation and do not lie, it is the God in 
 ns that does not lie — it is God's victory in ns. 
 When we are tempted to say a harsh and sting- 
 ing word, to utter some unkind and uncharitable 
 speech, with a little bit of venom and spiteful- 
 ness in it, in regard to some neighbor or friend, 
 we resist the temptation and do not do it, 
 it is the God in us that does not do it — it is 
 God's victory in us. 
 
 So throughout the whole range of moral 
 action, work, behavior, character, conduct, the 
 holding of our tongues, the keeping of our tem- 
 pers, the curbing of our passions — patience, 
 purity, courage, self-denial, self-restraint — bear- 
 ing with patience and fortitude the burdens we 
 have to bear, performing with diligence and 
 rectitude the duties we have to perform, it is 
 something more than patience, courage, purity, 
 duty attempted and done — the name for it all is 
 God, the life, the glory, the victory, the manifes- 
 tation of God. 
 
 In the heaven ux3 there or out yonder, or 
 somewhere in the universe, in which you and I 
 hope some day to dwell, God is revealed fully — 
 knows all, can all. There is no moral growth, 
 no moral progress in him. But here he is being 
 revealed and being revealed through us, and the 
 
142 THE MORAL COT^FLICT. 
 
 moral growth and progress which we make in 
 this world, and the moral and sjiiritual stature 
 which is reached by us in this world, is the 
 moral and spiritual stature which is reached by 
 God in this world. 
 
 Is not that what the doctrine of the incar- 
 nation teaches or ought to teach, not simply 
 that in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ is 
 God, but that in flesli and hlood is God ; in him 
 fully, without moral limit, without moral ob- 
 scuration, and yet in us too, in flesh and blood, 
 in all flesh and blood — that that indeed is the 
 treasure which these bodies hold — God, which 
 day after day we may look and search for and 
 dig and delve and toil for, and in these bodies 
 find. 
 
 N'ow as long as we do not know that that is 
 the treasure which these bodies hold, that that is 
 what the moral life which we have Avithin us 
 means, that that is what it is, we are like a man 
 who possesses but possesses ignorantly a valu- 
 able piece of land. There is gold in it but he 
 does not know that there is gold in it, or does 
 not know gold when he sees it. He knows it 
 when he sees it refined and purified and assayed 
 and separated from the baser metals with which 
 it is associated, but he does not know it in the 
 
THE MORAL CONFLICT. 143 
 
 quartz or in the sand, and he thinks that what is 
 really gold is simply muddy rock or yellow dust 
 and dirt ; and why should he spend his time 
 and strength in digging up this yellow dirt and 
 dust ? But an expert comes and tells him that 
 that yellow dirt is gold, of the finest sort and 
 quality, that the land he owns is full of it, that 
 it is a treasure-mine and that he may be very 
 rich. Then how he goes to work, and with 
 what zeal and industry and patient endurance he 
 works ! And the labor which was so hard and 
 difficult before, if not indeed so useless, engages 
 all his energy now and becomes a labor of love. 
 
 So, my friends, do we go on from day to day 
 with feeble, scattering purpose, with halting, 
 broken aim, digging, delving, toiling away at 
 the moral life within us ; but it is a long and 
 hard task, and we get tired and discouraged, and 
 seem so often to accomplish nothing, and it 
 hardly seems worth while. But Jesus Christ 
 comes and shows us what it is — that moral life 
 within us ; shows us what it means ; that that 
 moral life which we have within us is God — the 
 God who made and governs the worlds ; that 
 that is the treasure, greatest, richest, sacredest, 
 treasure, of the universe, God, which these 
 bodies hold. At present it is mingled with other 
 
144 THE MOEAL CONFLICT. 
 
 properties there, with baser tilings and qual- 
 ities, as the gold is mingled with the dirt or 
 embedded in the qnartz. And yet the treasure 
 is there, and in everything we do, in every word 
 we utter, in every emotion or passion that sways 
 the soul, in all speech, action, work, behavior, 
 we may, if we try, find it ; and seeing and 
 knowing what it is we are encouraged to try. 
 
 The task is still hard, and we have to struggle 
 and fight, and so often to fight alone with no one 
 else to see, in our little secret obscurities, in our 
 little secret dwelling-places, with no one else to 
 know how hard it is, no one else to help and 
 cheer us on and apx)laud us. Yet we see now 
 and know what that treasure is which we are 
 fighting for ; and the evil desire ungranted and 
 the evil word unspoken and the self-indulgence 
 restrained and the passionate speech suppressed 
 and the lust of the flesh denied, the cause good 
 and right, that seems so hopeless, helped — it is 
 God ; it is the gold, men and Avomen, sejmrated 
 from, purified, refined, coming out of the dirt, or 
 out of the hard and rocky quartz, and making us 
 very rich. That is the treasure which we have 
 within us. Let us see and call it that. Then we 
 shall know what our conduct means, and what 
 our conduct is. Then we ishall know what it is 
 
THE MOEAL CONFLICT. 145 
 
 we are doing or what we are failing to do ; 
 that when we give expression to the moral life 
 within us we are giving expression to the God 
 within us ; that when we reveal and body 
 forth that moral life in our flesh and blood, that 
 when in doubt and darkness and perplexity we 
 yet believe and trust in and cast ourselves uj)on 
 that moral life within us, we are believing and 
 trusting in and casting ourselves on God ; that 
 when we disregard it, and are careless and 
 heedless about it, when we think it of little 
 worth, when we neglect it and throw it away, 
 we are thinking God of little worth, we are 
 throwing away the greatest treasure which this 
 universe can give us, and has given us — we are 
 throwing God away. 
 
 Yes, let us so understand it. That effort we 
 make to have the moral life appear is the effort 
 we make to have God, the King in his beauty, 
 appear in our flesh and blood, or rather it is God 
 in us, fighting to make himself appear. 
 
 And now, for two or three minutes, let us 
 look at the subject in a somewhat different light. 
 We have looked at it chiefly so far with reference 
 to ourselves ; let us look at it now with reference 
 to the world at large. For not only in us Chris- 
 tian people here this morning is God's war going 
 
146 THE MOEAL COT^FLICT. 
 
 on, but everywhere, all over the world, God's war 
 is going on. For everywhere, all over the world, 
 we see the moral life, not very much, it may be, 
 not very strong in some, and yet we see it in all, 
 no matter how degraded, sunken, fallen, low, 
 some moral life we see, and we see it fighting in 
 all. For there is no man, however bad, who does 
 not try sometimes to be good and to do right. 
 And that moral life which we everywhere see is 
 God's life, and that moral fight which is every- 
 where going on is God's fight. Everywhere, all 
 over the earth, God's war is going on. 
 
 Then when you and I engage in that war and 
 conflict, what is it that we do ? We are not 
 simply responding to the appeal of man — we are 
 responding rather to the appeal of God in man. 
 The man perhaps does not make any ajopeal, 
 does not ask our assistance, does not want our 
 assistance, does not send a message to ns and 
 say in so many words, Come over here and help 
 me ; but God is saying in the man, Come and 
 help me. And the less the man himself appeals, 
 the more does God in the man appeal and ask 
 our help. We seem to hear his voice speaking 
 to us and saying. The passions of this man are 
 so fierce and strong, his ignorances and his weak- 
 nesses are so many and great, that I am shut 
 
THE MORAL CONFLICT. 147 
 
 Tip as in a prison, and cannot get out and appear 
 and take possession of liim ; come help me to 
 open wide and break in sunder these prison 
 doors, and be no longer enslaved but to become 
 victorious in him. 
 
 To try to help those who are trying to help 
 themselves — that is not only an easy but a wel- 
 come and pleasant task. We love to help those 
 who are trying to help themselves. But ah, 
 that poor creature in whom God is so fast 
 imprisoned, that vagabond, that tramp, that 
 fraud, that unworthy fellow, in whom the moral 
 resolutions are so weak and the animal passions 
 so strong, whether we find him at some Rescue 
 Mission — a poor forlorn creature who wanders 
 shivering in out of the cold to get a little warmth 
 and cheer and see what he can work us for, or 
 whether we find him as a cruel savage among 
 the red men of Western America, or the black 
 men of Central Africa, that is the man whom 
 you and I are to help. Yes, that is the man we 
 must help, and just because the moral life is so 
 weak so feeble in him, and we seem to hear the 
 voice of Grod in the man, saying with strong and 
 urgent appeal, I am so fast imprisoned heie that 
 I cannot get out ; come and help me. It is the 
 Gfod in him appealing to the God in us. 
 
148 THE MORAL CONFLICT. 
 
 But tlien I know what you will say — I have 
 heard men say it a hundred times : After all it is 
 such discouraging work, it is such a dishearten- 
 ing task. We do try to make such jDersons 
 better, and for a little while we seem to accom- 
 plish something, we seem to touch or kindle some 
 little spark or flame of the moral life within 
 them, but it goes out and does not stay kindled, 
 and they are sober and true and honest and i3ure 
 for twenty-four hours ; then they fall back and 
 go astray again. It is not always so, although 
 very often it is, but what then ? why, for twenty- 
 four hours God has won a victory in this world. 
 Isn't that something? Isn't it much? And 
 who knows what inspirations those twenty-four 
 hours have produced, that may linger on and on 
 and echo in that soul, and at last perhaps reclaim 
 and bring it back again. 
 
 Cannot you remember, some of you older men 
 and women, what a thrill of exultation went 
 through your hearts when the news came from 
 the seat of war in Virginia or Tennessee that a 
 victory had been won. You knew and the 
 soldiers knew that the war was not over, but it 
 was a victory if only for a day, if only for 
 twenty-four hours, and then the soldiers went at 
 it again and fought for another victory. 
 
THE MORAL CONFLICT. 149 
 
 So in that moral life, that moral fight 
 which is going on in the world — here in New 
 York City and there in distant China, in 
 darkest, remotest Central Africa, it is some- 
 thing, it is much, if only for a day, for 
 twenty-four hours, God wins a victory ; and 
 then we will go at it again and fight for 
 another victory. 
 
 And we will not be discouraged if sometimes 
 we are defeated, for it is God fighting in us— the 
 God in us helping the God in them to fight. It 
 is God's fight, it is God's war, and God will win 
 in the end. As St. John from his vision- place 
 looked down upon this earth, at the righteous- 
 ness which was there, at the goodness whidi was 
 there, at the moral life, the life of God, which 
 was there, he saw that in that heaven there was 
 war and would be war. But he also saw as in a vi- 
 sion that that war would end in peace and victory. 
 And he heard a loud voice in heaven saying, 
 "Now is come salvation and strength and the 
 kingdom of our God and the power of his Christ. 
 Rejoice, O heavens, and ye that dwell therein." 
 Who of us can tell what that heaven will be, 
 where there is no war, that ultimate triumph and 
 issue of the moral life within us ? but, surely, 
 men and women, something very wonderful and 
 
150 THE MORAL CONFLICT. 
 
 very great it must be. Let us cast ourselves now 
 on this moral life that is fighting and struggling 
 in us, let us cast ourselves on the God in us ; 
 then some day we shall know what that heaven is 
 in which there is no war. 
 
BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 
 
 Now I liave prepared with all my miglitfor the house of God the 
 gold for tilings to be made of gold, and the silver for things of silver, 
 and the brass for things of brass, the iron for things of iron, and 
 wood for things of wood ; onyx stones, and stones to be set, glisten- 
 ing stones, and of divers colors, and all manner of precious stones, 
 and marble stones in abundance. — 1 Chronicles xxix. 2. 
 
 These words were spoken by David tlie King, 
 and refer to the building of tlie temple, a struc- 
 ture whose completion he would not live to see, 
 and yet he knew that it ought to, and would in 
 time be built— God in some way had assured him 
 of it. In the light of that knowledge there- 
 fore, that assured and confident hope, he devoted 
 himself to accumulating the material which the 
 building of the temple would need, which would 
 in some way enter into its process of erection — the 
 gold for the things to be made of gold, the silver 
 for the things to be made of silver, the marble 
 for the things to be made of marble, the wood, 
 the iron, the stone for the various things and 
 uses to be made of them. That, he felt, was his 
 work in the world and the task he had to per- 
 form, and to that task he addressed himself with 
 a very commendable zeal. But was it only his ; 
 
 151 
 
152 BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 
 
 is it not also ours ? I am very strongly of the 
 opinion that something like it is ; and because I 
 think so I will ask you this morning to think 
 about it. 
 
 First, let us consider what that temple stood 
 for, or what it was to stand for and what it was 
 meant to be. In an architectural sense it was 
 meant to be, and when finished it was, a very 
 imposing structure, and perhajDS no architectural 
 pile, or at least no sacred pile, erected since, has 
 surpassed it, unless it be the one which when this 
 was destroyed was built in its place. And none in 
 all probability will ever be erected — no mosque, 
 no basilica, no cathedral, not even the cathedral 
 of St. John the Divine — of more imposing char- 
 acter, of more beautiful and attractive appear- 
 ance. And standing on some neighboring 
 height, as the Mount of Olives, for instance, 
 when the sun arose and cast his chrism of glory 
 over it — its spacious courts and corridors, its 
 broad expanse of roof, covered with burnished 
 pikes, it looked, as one enthusiastic writer has 
 described it, like "a mountain of snow fretted 
 with golden pinnacles," or as illuminated with 
 tongues of fire. It certainly was architecturally 
 a very magnificent structure, of which the 
 patriotic Jew might well indeed be proud. 
 
BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 153 
 
 And yet it was not this, its physical beauty 
 and splendor, that made it so dear to his heart. 
 That temple was to him and to all the Jewish 
 people the dwelling-place of God — of the God 
 who had been with them when they were in the 
 desert ; who had brought them forth from Egypt 
 and led them at last in safety into the promised 
 land ; the God who had fought their battles, and 
 won their victories for them, and who had been 
 from the very beginning in all their history. 
 This was to be his dwelling-place, his palace on 
 the earth, his seat, his throne, from which he 
 would give his orders and issue his decrees, and 
 mold and shape the national life and try to 
 make it more and more the embodiment of 
 himself. 
 
 This was what that temple meant and signified 
 to David and to all the Jewish people. And 
 they who helped to build it were not helping 
 merely to put ui^ in their midst a vast monu- 
 mental pile, whose noble and admirable form 
 would appeal so effectively and so pleasingly to 
 their civic and national pride — they felt that 
 they were helping to build on earth a home for 
 God, and that all tlie offerings which they made 
 were offerings made to God. 
 
 And what those people in that old time tried 
 
154 BUILDING TJIE TEMPLE OF GOD. 
 
 to do in their way, you and I and all of us 
 should try to do in ours. Their task should still 
 be ours, their ambition ours, and the purpose 
 that touched and quickened their hearts and set 
 their souls on fire, should also touch and quicken 
 us and set our hearts ablaze. And that temple 
 which we are building or trying to build — what 
 is it? Not primarily an ecclesiastical or a 
 religious structure in the technical sense of the 
 term, as it was in the case of the Jews ; our 
 task is not simply to cover the land and the 
 face of the earth with chapels and churches 
 and cathedrals, — that of course is important, 
 — but the task we have to do is something far 
 greater than that. We are not merely to build 
 houses of worship for God. We are to build 
 factories, and warehouses, and produce ex- 
 changes, and railroads, and shops, and banks, 
 for God. Or rather we are to see and feel that 
 these and the activities which they represent, 
 our industrial works and employments in con- 
 nection with them, our social and professional 
 engagements, our buying and selling of goods, 
 our practicing of medicine, our arguing of cases 
 in court, our going out to j)arties and balls and 
 evening receptions, our meeting together in club- 
 houses — to see and to feel that the whole of our 
 
BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 155 
 
 complex and growing civilization, our diver- 
 sified social life with all its varied equipment, is 
 not our temple merely — to contribute to our 
 comfort and to minister to our iDride : but some- 
 thing very much more. We should recognize 
 the fact that our manifold civilization is chietiy 
 the temple of God — that the purpose of God 
 is in it, that the purpose of God pervades it, 
 that it is indeed or ought to be the growing 
 temi)le of God, and that it is our task or ought 
 to be, to try to make it such and to contribute, 
 each in his way, some needed material for it — 
 the gold for the things to be made of gold, the 
 silver for the things of silver, the marble, the 
 wood, the iron, and the stone for the things to be 
 made of them. But what does that mean ? you 
 ask, and in simpler and plainer speech what are 
 these things of wood and iron and stone and 
 silver and gold which we are to contribute to 
 this great tem^ole of God ? Let us see. 
 
 Here we are this morning, representing differ- 
 ent kinds of employments, different trades and 
 professions, and w^e are j)laced in different 
 spheres. Some of us are in professional life — 
 students, artists, physicians, lawyers, and clergy- 
 men. Some of us, on the other hand, are in com- 
 mercial life — bankers, brokers, manufacturers, 
 
156 BXJILDIlSrG THE TEMPLE OF GOD, 
 
 and merchants. Noav in connection with all 
 these different forms of activity there are dif- 
 ferent duties to be done, and different obstacles 
 to be met, and therefore, in and through them 
 all, different kinds of temptation to encounter. 
 Theoretically and in the abstract these temp- 
 tations may be the same, but j)ractically and 
 in the concrete they are not the same. They 
 move along different lines, they approach us 
 from different quarters, they charge and assault 
 us at different points of attack. They do not 
 come to me in the same manner precisely in 
 which they come to you, or to put it the other 
 way, they do not come to you in the same 
 manner in which they come to me. But they do 
 come to both of us. Yours may be of the finer, 
 mine of the baser sort ; yours i)erhaps of the 
 spirit, mine perhaps of the flesh, and the moral 
 exhibit made by you in overcoming yours, and 
 the moral exhibit made by me in overcoming 
 mine, may be as gold and silver to wood and iron 
 and stone. 
 
 So too with the responsibilities that come to us. 
 Those which are met and carried by you are 
 not the same as those which are met and carried 
 by me. Yours may be far greater and of much 
 more importance than mine ; and the greatness 
 
BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 157 
 
 and the value of yours with reference to the 
 value of mine may be as the value of gold to 
 the value of wood and stone. And yet, what- 
 ever their value, and however they present them- 
 selves, they come to all of us. In our different 
 ways and places you and I have to meet them 
 and bear them, and to work them out and dis- 
 charge them. And not by doing w^hat others are 
 doing or what they have to do, but by doing 
 what we have to do — that is the thing — by 
 doing what we have to do, and by doing it faith- 
 fully and well, or trying so to do it, we con- 
 tribute something — not much, it may be, but 
 something — not as of gold and silver, but as of 
 wood and iron and stone, toward that great 
 temple of God which is going up on the earth, 
 toward making this world his house, his home, 
 the palace in which he dwells. 
 
 And not only is it our varied personal influ- 
 ence, of different temptations conquered, and 
 different duties done, and different responsi- 
 bilities discharged — not only is it our varied 
 personal influence which we contribute to the 
 temple of God, although in the task of making 
 this world his dwelling-place that is a most help- 
 ful contribution, but there is something more. 
 These different places and spheres yield different 
 
158 BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 
 
 material results of different worths and values, 
 as of gold and silver and wood and iron and 
 stone. And yet, whatever their worths, they are 
 not chiefly ours, but first and chiefly God's. 
 And never, I am convinced — not only because 
 Jesus Christ has said so, but because experience 
 has proved it so — will we hold them right, will 
 we use them right, and never will we fully enjoy 
 them until we learn to hold and use them, not 
 as treasures chiefly which we have gathered for 
 ourselves, but as the material which God has 
 variously distributed and apportioned out and 
 placed in our possession, that we may make 
 contribution of it in some appropriate way, in 
 some needed way, toward the building up more 
 and more of his temple on the earth. 
 
 That, it seems to me, is what you and I are 
 here for. That is why we are placed in differ- 
 ent stations and spheres, with different duties 
 and opportunities and temptations and responsi- 
 bilities ; that each of us may contribute some 
 kind of material, yet all of it needed, the wood 
 as well as the gold, toward that great temple 
 of God, toward making human life on earth, 
 and all human life on earth, the dwelling-place 
 of God. 
 
 We ask ourselves sometimes — who has not 
 
BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. li)9 
 
 asked himself ? — as we look into the deep myste- 
 ries of the skies, Are the other worlds inhabited ? 
 Those suns and ]3lanets innumerable that across 
 the plains of heaven, " we know not whence, we 
 know not whither, in long, continuous procession 
 stray" — are they too jpeopled with intelligent 
 beings ? Possibly they are ; it has always seemed 
 to me that probably they are, and that those 
 who inhabit them are not living without God, 
 but in subjection to him — that there in the 
 heavens about us the temple of God is com- 
 plete. But here is a world, which in its moral 
 and spiritual life, its aims, its purposes, its 
 practical everyday ambitions, seems to have 
 wandered away from God, and is not yet his 
 dwelling-place, as it ought to be, and as perhaps 
 the worlds about us are. Does it mean this, 
 does it have any reference to this, when our Lord 
 is spoken of as the shepherd leaving the ninety- 
 and-nine and going to seek the one that is lost 
 and gone astray ? Is there a reference here to 
 our world in its relation to the other worlds ? 
 
 But whether or not it be true that this is the 
 only one of all the worlds about us where the 
 temple of God is not yet completely built, cer- 
 tainly we cannot be wrong in thinking that if 
 God has a x)urpose about this world at all, it is 
 
160 BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 
 
 to make it liis dwelling- jDlace, and tliat it is our 
 joy and should also be our task to help to make 
 it such. That, it seems to me, is what you and 
 I are here for. That, it seems to me, should be 
 our life in this world. And what largeness 
 does it give to our conception of life, our trade, 
 our business, our calling, our profession, what- 
 ever it may be, to look at it in this manner ; and 
 how little, how petty, how narrow does it 
 become — the biggest work and the biggest busi- 
 ness — if we do not so regard it ! 
 
 We try to make it bigger by spreading it out 
 more, with more to do and manage and attend to 
 and look after and think about, with more 
 activities and things in it, but alas ! we only 
 succeed so often in making it, not bigger and 
 larger, but only more wearisome and fussy. The 
 difference between one person and another in a 
 little business or a big business seems to me 
 oftentimes to be just this : that while one of 
 them does a few little things the other does a 
 good many little things. One of them writes 
 three letters a day and the other writes thirty, 
 but after all it is only letter- writing. One of 
 them goes to two committee-meetings and the 
 other goes to eight, but yet after all it is only 
 a committee-meeting. One woman goes to five 
 
BUILDING THE TEMPLE OP GOD. 161 
 
 afternoon recei^tions and another rushes breath- 
 lessly and hurriedly about and tries to go to 
 fifteen, and yet it is only an afternoon reception, 
 pleasurable enough, enjoyable enough, yet not 
 in itself the biggest and sublimest kind of occu- 
 pation. 
 
 But ah, my friends, put God into it ; try to 
 feel that the work you are doing in the world — 
 the letter-writing and the comnnttee-meeting 
 and the visiting and the receiving — is the work 
 which God himself has given you to do. Then 
 everything is big and sublime — the letter-writing 
 and the committee-meeting and the social visit- 
 ing ; and you have the consciousness that you 
 are contributing some needed material to that 
 great temple of God which is going up in this 
 world, that you are helping him to build it. 
 
 It gives a greater enlargement to life : it also 
 gives it a greater value. Don't we often have 
 the feeling, the sad and depressing feeling, that 
 in spite of all our efforts to make ourselves of 
 some kind of importance we are after all but of 
 little worth and value to the world, and that it 
 would go on just as well without us ? And so 
 from the world's point of view it 'would, and if 
 we are living only for what the world can do for 
 us or what it will think about us or what it is 
 
162 BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 
 
 thinking about us now, we are flattering our- 
 selves with a vain and delusive hope. For the 
 world is far too busy to-day to think very much 
 about us, and will be hereafter too busy to think 
 very long about us. And the people will hurry 
 down-town in the morning and back again in the 
 evening and the streets will be noisy and crowded 
 just the same as now — how strange it seems ! — 
 and someone else will be in our place and we will 
 have vanished and gone. 
 
 No, no. No one else can take our place now 
 or hereafter. In the thought of the world, in 
 the business of the world, yes — but not in the 
 business of God. Commissioned by him, sent by 
 him to do some special work which no one else 
 can do, to contribute some special thing which no 
 one else can contribute, yet all of it needed — the 
 wood, the iron, the stone, as the silver and the 
 gold, we are building the temple of God, and 
 helping more and more to make the earth his 
 home. 
 
 Enlargement, value, and unity will it give to 
 human life, to all our rent and torn and divided 
 human life, when each man learns to take it 
 and receive it and live it as from God. Some 
 will work in one way and some will work in 
 another, some as in wood and iron and stone, 
 
BUILDING THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 163 
 
 and some as in silver and gold. But tliey will not 
 be jealous of one another or figlit and strike and 
 pull down and interfere with one another. Hand 
 in hand and together they will fly toward the east 
 and gather the spoil of the west, for they will 
 all be workers, each in his place, for God, as sent 
 and commissioned by him to try to build his 
 temple up and make this world his dwelling- 
 place. Not in our time will that temple be built 
 completely, but it will be built some day, and we 
 can help to build it. And not only so, but if 
 the angels in heaven can somehow see and rejoice 
 over penitent sinners here, may not we perhaps 
 somewhere in the universe, we know not where, 
 but somewhere, see the structure finished which 
 we have helped to build, and mingle our voices 
 with the shoutings of those who cry, Grace, 
 grace unto it, when the headstone shall be 
 brought forth at last and the world in which we 
 are living now shall have become the temple 
 of God I 
 
PREFERRING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD'S. 
 
 And AbraJmm said unto God, that Ishmael might live before 
 thee ! — Geistesis xvii. 18, 
 
 Somehow, we know not how nor is it very 
 important to know, the Lord appeared unto 
 Abraham, and said that he would make him the 
 father of many nations. That was both a wel- 
 come and a credible announcement, for it is 
 always pleasant to be told, nor is it so hard to 
 believe, that one's posterity may become distin- 
 guished and great. But there was another part 
 of the announcement which was not so welcome 
 nor so credible, and that was the declaration 
 that the numerous descendants promised him 
 would not come from Ishmael, who was then his 
 only child and quite a well-grown lad, but 
 through another son who was not then born. 
 That was the part of the announcement which 
 he could not receive and credit, or not for a 
 while at least, and as the story tells us, he fell 
 on his face and laughed an incredulous langh 
 and said in his heart. Shall a child be born unto 
 him who is one hundred years old ? And Abra- 
 
 164 
 
PREFEREING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD'S. 165 
 
 ham said unto God, O that Ishmael miglit live 
 before tliee, and tliat lie, the son I have, might 
 be indeed my heir, and that through him thy 
 word, thy promise might be fulfilled ! Here we 
 have our subject — the disx^osition of the human 
 heart, now as then and always, not to ignore God 
 altogether, but to try to substitute for the way 
 of God some other way of its own, which, if not 
 better, seems at least more practical and more 
 easy. 
 
 Let us look at that for a little while. First 
 let us look at it in connection with religion. 
 We sometimes hear it said and sometimes per- 
 haps say it ourselves, that there is a great reli- 
 gious indifference to-day, that a great many 
 people are not interested in religion, that they 
 do not care about it, and do not very much 
 or very often think about it. That, in my 
 judgment, is a great mistake. People do think 
 about religion, they cannot help thinking about 
 it, they cannot keep it out of their thoughts, and 
 as life goes on and experience deepens and 
 ramifies, they ask religious questions concern- 
 ing themselves and others — their friends, their 
 neighbors, their children, those they have loved 
 and lost. Where are they? Where have they 
 gone ? What has become of them ? Why were 
 
166 PREFEERING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD's. 
 
 they taken away? Will we ever see them again, 
 and when, and how, and under what conditions? 
 
 People ask these questions, and these are 
 religious questions. 
 
 Or looking out on the world and lifting up 
 their eyes to the starry heavens above them, or 
 turning in their gaze and seeing and feeling the 
 majesty of the moral law within them, they find 
 themselves asking questions concerning God as 
 the Author of the starry heavens above and the 
 Source of the moral law within — who he is, what 
 he is ; if you please, whether he is at all. Such 
 questions people do ask and must ask, and these 
 are religious questions. So that if peo^^le think 
 at all, they must think about religion, they must 
 at times move in thought along religious lines. 
 No ; people are not uninterested in religion to- 
 day — it is the one great theme above all others in 
 which they are interested, as they always have 
 been in the past and will be in the future. It is 
 not so much a tendency toward religious indif- 
 ference which we see upon the part of people at 
 present — religion as a permanent factor in the 
 thought of the world will always take care of 
 itself — but a tendency rather to substitute for 
 the way of Grod in religion some other lower, 
 cheaper, easier way of their own. 
 
PEEFERRING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD's. 167 
 
 The thing, for instance, at which religion 
 chiefly aims is conduct, not toward the forming 
 of creed, but toward the forming of character ; 
 not toward the j)utting of thoughts and theories 
 into the mind, but toward the putting of j^urities 
 and charities into the heart, and cleanness into 
 the speech, and nobleness into the purjiose, and 
 self-denial and truthfulness and virtue and holi- 
 ness into the soul, and righteousness into the 
 life. That is the thing at which religion aims, 
 or at which chiefly the Christian religion aims. 
 
 But that is hard and the other thing is not 
 hard, or is not at least as hard. It is not nearly 
 as hard to be orthodox as it is to be good. It 
 is not nearly as hard to fight for a theory as 
 it is to embody a principle. It is not as hard 
 to hold a right and true opinion as it is to 
 be true and to do right. And therefore we try 
 to take the way that is not so hard, and in that 
 manner to satisfy the religious instinct in us. 
 And instead of offering up and presenting our- 
 selves unto God, we offer our creeds to God, our 
 orthodoxy, our churchmanship, our soundness 
 in the faith. We offer our creeds to God as a 
 substitute for ourselves. That is so often our 
 way of trying to become religious — our easy, 
 cheap, more appealing way, our Ishmael, which 
 
168 PEEFERKING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD's. 
 
 we try to substitute for the harder way of God, 
 and like Abraham, as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, 
 quoting the words of the text, we seem to say 
 in our hearts, Oh, see our churchmanship, our 
 orthodoxy, our zeal for the faith — let Ishmael 
 live before Thee ! 
 
 That is the tendency we see and which in our 
 hearts we feel ; not a tendency tovt^ard religious 
 indifference, — people are not indifferent to relig- 
 ion, they cannot be, — but a tendency rather to 
 substitute creed for character, theory for prac- 
 tice, dogma and doctrine for conduct and life, 
 and for that hard way of God in religion to put 
 this easier and more api^ealing way of their own. 
 
 There are other manifestations of this tend- 
 ency in connection with religion. Religion, for 
 instance, is a personal thing ; it spealvs to you 
 and to me with a Thou-art-the-man directness, 
 and its voice is heard in Jesus Christ, saying. 
 Take up thy cross, and come thou and follow me. 
 We recognize the reasonableness and the noble- 
 ness and the rightness of that command, and yet 
 how we try to evade it, we men particularly. 
 We say that religion is good, that Christianity is 
 good, that we ought to support and encourage it 
 and try to establish and maintain on the earth 
 the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Therefore — what % 
 
PREFERRING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD's. 1G9 
 
 We will ourselves become members of that 
 kingdom ? We will ourselves try to obey and 
 follow Jesus Christ ? No, no. But we will take 
 a pew in Church, where the service is attractive 
 and the music good, and we will go there, or we 
 will at least make provision to have our families 
 go. We will send our children to Sunday school, 
 and when they are old enough and sufficiently 
 instructed we shall be pleased to have them pre- 
 sented for confirmation, and, as we call it, to 
 become members of the Church. That is our 
 cheaper, easier way of paying our tribute to 
 Jesus Christ ; that is our vicarious way of honor- 
 ing Jesus Christ ; that is our way of saying. Let 
 Ishmael live before thee ! 
 
 But, my friends, that is not what God re- 
 quires, that is not the thing he demands ; not 
 simply that we should try to make our children 
 follow Jesus Christ — that of course, but some- 
 thing else and more ; that we ourselves should 
 follow Jesus Christ. It is not a vicarious alle- 
 giance that he wants, but a personal allegi- 
 ance, a personal obedience, a personal disciple- 
 ship, and nothing that we offer in the way of 
 tribute to him, no, not even the offering of Jesus 
 Christ dying for our sins on the Cross, can take 
 the place of that. 
 
170 PEEFERRING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD's. 
 
 Let US go on and look at the subject for a 
 few moments, not in connection with religion 
 only, but in some of its ot'her aspects. God is 
 teaching and training human life to-day not by 
 means of religion only, in the technical sense of 
 the term, but by a process which, for want of a 
 more convenient and better word, we may call 
 a spiritual process. By this I mean that he is 
 creating good desires and good resolves within 
 as, awakening aspirations toward something bet- 
 ter and more than what at present we are ; 
 giving us heavenly visions, putting ideals before 
 us, which we feel to be so admirable, and which, 
 if we only could, we would like so much to obey, 
 and in accordance with which, if we only could, 
 we would like so much to live. Surely we ought 
 to know what that means. 
 
 There is no man, I think, however low and 
 clownish, who does not have at times some bright 
 ideals in life, which more or less inspire him, 
 and which if he only could he would be so glad 
 to reach. And why is it — not that he does not 
 reach them — but that so often he does not try ? 
 Because he knows that he is weak and wayward 
 and capricious and full of strong passions which 
 he cannot control, and which so often lead him 
 astray ? Yes, sometimes it is that, but some- 
 
PEEFEEEING OUE OWN" WAY TO GOD's. 171 
 
 times there is another reason. Althougli he 
 believes that his ideal is good and true, and that 
 he ought to try to reach it, he also believes that 
 situated and circumstanced as he is in this world 
 it is not practical to try. It is good, but it will 
 not go ; it is true, but it will not work ; it is 
 right, but it cannot be done ; and when despite 
 all this you urge him still to try he does not 
 heed you much, and like Abraham, perhaps he 
 laughs an incredulous laugh and says in his 
 heart. What an unpractical man you are ! 
 
 Ah, my friends, it is the way of all of us, too 
 much, I fear, too much. We have our lofty 
 principles, our high and generous aims, — life 
 would not be worth anything without them, — 
 and we love to think about them and dream 
 about them and dwell upon them, and to say to 
 ourselves, how good, how admirable they are ! 
 and that if we could, we would like so much to 
 practice them. And ];)erhaps in the shelter and 
 seclusion of our own home we do practice them 
 a little and then, then, oh, God forgive us, we go 
 out among men and into the midst of affairs 
 and we temj)orize and compromise and sacrifice. 
 The high ideals are laid aside, principle becomes 
 expediency, and a worldly policy our guide. 
 And so again we substitute this easy, cheaper, 
 
172 PREFEERING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD'S. 
 
 lower — or as we love to call it, tins practical — 
 way of our own for the harder way of God. 
 
 Yes, it is the harder way ; and it is apt to 
 become still harder as we get older, and as the 
 years increase the ideals melt away ; and we 
 often come to regard them as sentimental dreams ; 
 and we laugh when we think that once, when we 
 did not know what life is, when we did not know 
 what the world is, what business is, what society 
 is, we used to dream those dreams. But now we 
 know, we are practical men, and we dream them 
 no more. 
 
 In one of the popular tales of Servia there is 
 a story told of a young man who came to the 
 goddess Fate and asked what was the right and 
 noble way to live, for he wanted to live that way, 
 he wanted an ideal in life. 
 
 "I will tell thee," said the goddess ; "go and 
 find and adopt some life that is weaker and 
 poorer than thine, and live henceforth for it, 
 and all thou makest give to it and call it not 
 thine own ; then shalt thou be truly rich." 
 
 And the young man did as the goddess said, 
 and his wealth increased and he prospered, but he 
 had his ideal through it all and he was a happy 
 man. But at last one day he was tired of 
 this, and like Abraham he laughed when he 
 
rREFEREII^G OUR OWN WAY TO GOD's. 173 
 
 thoiiglit of what the goddess had said and of how 
 foolish he had been, and tlien he said to himself, 
 " Why, all these treasures are mine, for I indeed 
 have earned them. Fields and flocks and houses, 
 they all belong to me ; henceforth I will keep 
 them and use them for myself." He prospered 
 and became successful and then he lost his ideal, 
 and became a practical man, which so often 
 means a hard, covetous, worldly-minded man. 
 
 I wonder if that is not the story of some of us. 
 We had high aims at first in life. Can we not 
 remember them, and how we used to dream of 
 the many good things we would do, the benevo- 
 lent, the philanthropic and humanitarian work ; 
 and if money came and we prospered we 
 would use that money for others, or a good deal 
 of it at least ? We would not simply enrich 
 ourselves, but would try to enrich the world and 
 make it better and gladder. We thought of the 
 good we would do and we did it — for a while, 
 and we were true to our aims. But after a while 
 as we prospered and made money and became 
 successful, our high ideals and aims seemed to 
 go away, and we came to regard them as senti- 
 mental and doctrinaire and foolish, and we laugh 
 now as we think how foolish we used to be, 
 and like the young man in the fable we have 
 
174 PREFERRING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD's. 
 
 learned to take a different view of our money, 
 a closer, more worldly view, or, as we love 
 to flatter our hearts by saying, a more practical 
 view. And again for that hard way of God we 
 substitute this cheap and more appealing way 
 of our own, and the early generous impulse 
 becomes a covetous passion. 
 
 Yes, it is hard to keep tlie high ideals before 
 us, and to walk in the way of God. It is the 
 danger, subtle and strong, which confronts our 
 spiritual life and which we have to fight. The 
 tendency to substitute for the way of God the 
 easy way of our own ; that is our subject. It 
 needs a word more to make it complete. 
 
 We have seen God's way of training the world 
 by a religious process ; we have seen his way of 
 training the world by a spiritual process ; he also 
 trains the world by a providential process, and 
 neither is that way ours. We ask for strength 
 and he sends us weakness ; we ask for health — 
 for health to be able to do our work — and he 
 sends us sickness ; we set our heart on some dear 
 thing that we want to do, on some dear life that 
 we want to keep, and he takes it away. In 
 many a home this morning, as you and I sit here, 
 a cloud is gathering, and a fear, a horrible 
 fear, is coming, and a strong and earnest cry 
 
PREFERRING OUR OWN WAY TO GOD's. 175 
 
 is going up and saying, Oh, my God, do not take 
 him away, let liim live, let him live before thee 
 and before me ! And God does not seem to hear 
 or seem to heed that cry. Oh, no, my friends, 
 it cannot be that, it cannot be that ; that indeed 
 would be too hard to bear. I believe it to be 
 this, on every hand I learn it, from every side 
 I see it : we have one way, God has another way, 
 and God's way is not onrs. In a Avay of his own 
 he is training us and leading us on and on to 
 something better and more than we could find 
 for ourselves. Though he defeats our purposes 
 he does not defeat us ; and all our hopes and 
 dreams, and all the bright ideals toward which 
 we now aspire will be at last in his way and not 
 in ours fulfilled. 
 
THE TRUE VISION AND THE 
 FALSE SEER. 
 
 I shall see Mm, but not now : I shall behold him, but not nigh: 
 there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out oj 
 Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the chil- 
 dren of Sheth. — NtTMBEKS xsiv. 17. 
 
 These words were spoken by the prox)het 
 Balaam. It will perhaps enable ns to under- 
 stand them better if we try to recall briefly the 
 circumstances of their utterance. With that 
 faith in the power of incantation which is a 
 characteristic of semi-barbarous j)eople, Balak 
 the king of Moab had asked the jDrophet to come 
 and curse the children of Israel, that so, he says, 
 *' I may prevail against them and drive them out 
 of the land." The prophet, however, after laying 
 the matter before the Lord, had refused to obey 
 tlie summons and had said that he would not go. 
 Whereupon the king sent another deputation 
 to him, saying, "Let nothing, I pray thee, hinder 
 thee from coming, for I will promote thee to very 
 great honor and do whatsoever thou dost desire. 
 Come, therefore, I pray thee, and curse this 
 people for me." But again tha prophet refused 
 
 176 
 
THE TiiUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 177 
 
 and said to tlie servants of the king, " If Balak 
 would give me his house full of silver and gold I 
 cannot go beyond the word of the Lord." And 
 yet, notwithstanding this very noble sentiment, 
 and despite his previous refusals, he did at 
 last go. 
 
 The story of the Book of Numbers does not 
 tell us in so many words that he was induced to 
 go by the tempting offer of the king's bribe, but 
 in the New Testament references to the story 
 it is indicated very clearly tliat that was the 
 reason. At all events, after saying so stoutly 
 that he ought not to go and that he would 
 not go, he went, and was conducted by the king 
 to some commanding height where he could 
 see all the people of Israel spread out in their 
 prosperity on the plains below. And standing 
 there, as the poet Keble has portrayed him, on 
 the top of the rocks of Zophim, his wild hair 
 streaming in the Eastern breeze, his tranced yet 
 open gaze fixed on the desert haze. 
 
 As one who deep in heaven some airy pageant sees, 
 
 he utters the words of the text, and looks for- 
 ward to the time, not in his day but later, when 
 " a Star shall come out of Jacob and a Sceptre 
 shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the 
 corners of Moab and destroy all the children of 
 
178 TnE TKUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 
 
 Slietli." The prophecy indeed was a true one, 
 but as we have observed the man himself who 
 uttered it was not a true man ; and this suggests 
 the subject to which I ask your attention— the 
 true vision and the false seer of it. 
 
 The first thing I wish to say in considering the 
 subject is this : that God gives to all men true 
 and helpful visions, which, if they were obedient 
 thereto, would have the effect in a measure to 
 ennoble and transfigure their lives. I say he 
 gives them to all — not only to us in Christendom 
 but to those outside of Christendom, who live 
 in what is called the heathen or pagan world. 
 Balaam was a prophet in the pagan world ; he 
 did not live in Israel, but beyond the borders of 
 Israel, and yet notwithstanding the fact that he 
 dwelt in the pagan world his prophecy was a 
 good one and his vision right and true. Have 
 there been no other prophets in the pagan world, 
 are there none such there to-day, to whom God 
 has given some vision of what is right, some 
 vision of what is good, some vision of himself ? 
 Are all the religious systems and practices and 
 beliefs which at present we find there, the work 
 of imposture and fraud, the embodiment only of 
 evil, and wholly corrupt and false ? Some people 
 seem to think so, and if what they think be true. 
 
THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEEK. 179 
 
 it is not only one of the saddest trutlis wliicli tlie 
 human mind can bring itself to contemplate, but 
 also one of the most difficult to reconcile with omi 
 faith in the goodness of God. Think of it : that 
 to all these men and women, the great majority of 
 the human race, in all these numerous countries 
 for all these thousands of years, God has sent no 
 message, has spoken no quickening word, has 
 given no helpful vision, has left them alone and 
 forsaken them as though he cared not for them ; 
 I cannot and do not believe it. 
 
 I believe, on the contrary, that they are his 
 children too ; that he has been mindful of them 
 as he has been mindful of us ; that he has sent to 
 them a vision as he has sent to us a vision ; that 
 he has given to them a religion as he has given to 
 us a religion ; and that while their forms of relig- 
 ion are mingled with much that is foolish, false, 
 idolatrous, wrong, there is also much that is 
 true, and good, and noble, in them. To that 
 extent they have been, to that extent they are, 
 the word, the voice, the religion — yes, the relig- 
 ion, of God, giving some true knowledge and 
 some true vision of him. Their knowledge of 
 God is not so large as ours nor their vision of 
 him so bright ; theirs is the light of the lamp, 
 theirs is the light of the candle, ours is the light 
 
180 THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 
 
 of the sun — a richer, larger, fuller, more abun- 
 dant light. 
 
 Yet let us not be too quick to boast, let us 
 not be too complacent. And this brings me to 
 the next thing that I want to say in the treat- 
 ment of the subject, that while the vision itself 
 may be large and bright, the seers of it may be 
 false ; or that while the vision itself may be 
 little and poor, the seers of it may be true. Do 
 you want an illustration of this ? You have not 
 far to go. 
 
 I refer you to a correspondence that has re- 
 cently been going on between two great nations, 
 one called a Pagan and the other a Christian 
 nation, one of them China and the other the 
 United States. Read that correspondence, and 
 except for the proper names employed, you 
 would surely receive the impression that China 
 was the Christian country and the United States 
 the Pagan. In the one case, the case of China, 
 you would see an a^Dpeal to conscience, the 
 honor of i)lighted faith, the sanction of sacred 
 treaty. In the other case, the case of the United 
 States, you would see not only an utter disre- 
 gard and setting aside of treaty, but the follow- 
 ing of it up with a law so barbarous, so inliuman, 
 that it should bring the blush to the cheek of 
 
THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 181 
 
 Avneiicaii manhood and make it tingle with 
 shame. 
 
 Look at the two countries, China and the 
 United States, and these two things you ob- 
 serve : first, looking at China, a little knowledge 
 of right, a little vision of God, and the seers of 
 the vision true : second, looking at the United 
 States, a larger knowledge of right, a larger 
 vision of God, and the seers of the vision false. 
 
 With what kind of consistency, with what 
 kind of sincerity or hopefulness of good re- 
 sult, can we go to the people of China or any 
 other land, to give them in their twilight our 
 more abundant light, our brighter and better 
 vision, when we ourselves are false to the vision 
 which we see ? 
 
 But you may tell me that that is the way 
 of political life, and what in political life we 
 must always expect to find. Possibly so ; per- 
 haps it is too much to expect the average politi- 
 cian to be true to the heavenly vision. Then let 
 us leave political life and look at some other life. 
 
 Sometime ago a stockbroking case was brought 
 before the highest Court of England for settle- 
 ment. A member of the Stock Exchange was 
 put upon the witness stand and examined. In 
 the course of his examination he declared that 
 
182 THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 
 
 it was considered to be quite a legitimate prin- 
 ciple in business for a person who holds a 
 worthless stock and know^s it to be worthless, to 
 sell it out to someone else, if he can, who does 
 not know it be worthless. The Lord Chief Jus- 
 tice of England, in commenting on the testi- 
 mony, made this terse remark, that if what the 
 witness said was true, then the Stock Exchange 
 of England had apparently failed to master the 
 simplest elementary principles of common hon- 
 esty. But it may not have been true, — I hope it 
 was not, — and what the witness said may not have 
 fairly reflected the ordinary methods of proceed- 
 ing in practical business affairs. I am not an 
 expert in such matters, and you know better 
 than I. But w^liat I do say is this, that not 
 only in your world, but in mine, and in the world 
 of all of us to-day, there are apt to be two morali- 
 ties, two standards of moral obedience, one for 
 use in private, the other for use in public ; one 
 for use at home, the other for use on the street ; 
 one for use in the personal or in the domestic 
 life, the other for use in the professional or in 
 the business life. What I do say is this, that 
 the high ideal principle in which at heart we 
 believe is apt to be compromised a little and 
 brought down to what we call practical expe- 
 
THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 183 
 
 diency. For you, for me, for all of us, it is 
 hard to be true to our visions, our bright ideal 
 visions, and, which although we practice and 
 embody them so little, we value and esteem 
 so much. We all have those visions, God sends 
 tliem at times to all of us, none of us are with- 
 out tliem, and how fair they are ; how good, how 
 beautiful do they appear ! 
 
 Standing like the prophet Balaam upon some 
 mountain-top, a glorious outlook comes, a heav- 
 enly vision dawns, a sceptre of power appears 
 nobler and better than the power which at 
 present we try to exert. Or in our vast horizon 
 field some star of dominion rises — a dominion 
 larger and more and brighter than silver and gold, 
 a moral and spiritual dominion, a moral and 
 spiritual ambition ; and as we look, we dream of 
 all the good things which we hope some day to 
 do — yes, some day, but not to-day ; we shall do 
 them, but not now ; we shall behold them, but not 
 nigh. For alas, as we stand on our mountain- 
 top dreaming of the good things which we hope 
 to do, the world is standing with us as Balak 
 stood with Balaam, or the voices and the bribes 
 of the world are sounding in our heart — its 
 promises of very great honor, its offers of silver 
 and gold. And the good things of which we 
 
184 THE TRUE VISION^ AND THE FALSE SEEE. 
 
 dream and which we hope to do, we shall do 
 them, but not now ; we shall behold them, but 
 not nigh ; and the glorious outlook vanishes and 
 the heavenly vision fades, and coming down 
 from our mountain-top and mingling with the 
 world, the dreams of the good things pass and 
 go and the dreams of avarice stay. 
 
 Ah, men and women, you who are hoping 
 to do some good things in the future, now 
 is the time to do them, now while you have 
 the liberty, now while you have the wish, 
 now while you see and know what the vision is ; 
 now is the time to be true to it and the time to 
 obey the vision ! For the vision when it comes 
 again, if it does come, may not be so bright, 
 and the wish to obey may not be so strong. 
 A good impulse resisted is always in a measure 
 weakened, and the voice with which it speaks, 
 unheeded becomes unlieard, and like an echo 
 fainter and fainter grows, till in the distance 
 it dies away. How often has it happened that 
 a man in his earlier life, before his moral vision 
 became blurred and broken, has thought of some 
 noble work which he would like so much to 
 perform, of some beneficent cause which he 
 would like so much to help, to which indeed he 
 would like to give his influence, his time, his 
 
THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 185 
 
 money, himself. And he says to hiniself, I will 
 give it, or he says to himself, I will do it, but 
 not now — some day in the future I will do it, 
 and hereafter I will give it. And he is always 
 never quite ready, and the hereafter is always 
 hereafter, and the vision goes and the impulse 
 goes, and the man goes, and the money — 
 which when he had it was the promise and the 
 potency of so many useful beneficences — goes, 
 and in spite of all his careful testamentary 
 planning and codiciling, he can never be quite 
 sure how and where it goes. 
 
 Whatever the many good things that may be 
 said of such a person Avhen he is gone, the com- 
 prehensive epitaph that best describes his life 
 and what it was on earth, seems to me to be 
 this : A true vision, and a disobedient seer of it. 
 
 So it was with Balaam ; so it has been with 
 many another man. 
 
 But let us go to the story for another lesson. 
 First, when the message came from the king he 
 would not and did not go ; and the second time 
 when the message came, he w^ould not and did 
 not go. But it is very evident that in the mean- 
 while he has been thinking about it a good deal, 
 and the protest with which he declines the second 
 time is altogether too vigorous, is altogether too 
 
186 THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 
 
 strong. " If Balak would give nie liis liouse full 
 of silver and gold I cannot and would not go." 
 The prophet protests too much, the vehemence 
 of his protest indicates a weakening in his moral 
 purpose. It is the language of one who is begin- 
 ning to be dazzled by, and to yield to tempta- 
 tion. And we would know now, even if we did 
 not have the rest of the story to tell us, that 
 the bargain in his soul has been already closed, 
 that Balak' s gold has bought him, and that he 
 would go — as he did. 
 
 Does it not have a parallel in human life to- 
 day ? A man has a vision of right, the noblest 
 rigli t and the best. The spirit of God has touclied 
 and quickened and illumined his heart, and he 
 takes his stand on principle, on high and honor- 
 able principle, and whatever may be the conse- 
 quence, whatever may be the loss, he will main- 
 tain that stand. Then some day, some crucial 
 day, some critical day in his life the great temj)- 
 tation comes to him, as it comes to every man, 
 and like Balak to Balaam it seems to say, "I 
 will promote thee to very great honor, I will 
 give thee thy heart's desire, if thou wilt do this 
 thing." " No, I will not listen to it, I will not 
 listen," he says ; and yet he does listen, just 
 listen — that is all — but still he is very firm— at 
 
THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEEK. 187 
 
 least he imagines he is, and he says in his lirm- 
 ness, "No, I cannot iDossibly do it; if Bahik or 
 anyone else would give me his house full of 
 silver and gold I could not think of doing it for 
 a moment. Could IT' He is weakening a little. 
 "There can be no harm, however, in just thinking 
 about it ; just thinking about it, and of all the 
 good things that would come to me, if I were 
 willing to do it, as of course I am not willing" ; 
 and he goes on just thinking about it. He is 
 beginning to yield a little. And the rest of his 
 story, is it not told in the Book of Numbers and 
 in that 24th chapter thereof, from which I have 
 taken my text ? And the lesson of the story is 
 this, when we see what is good, what is right, let 
 us do it at once ; when we see clearly what is 
 wrong, what is bad, let us not think about it. 
 
 And one lesson more. We have our bright 
 ideal visions, not only of life in this world but 
 of life in some other world — the world where 
 there is no strife, no sin, no sorrow, no death. 
 We have these bright and beautiful visions, and 
 we enjoy them. We love to hear them preached 
 about, and we love to sing about them — of the 
 " Green Hill far away," "the Beautiful Home 
 beyond," of the "Land of pure delight where 
 saints immortal reign," of the "Sweet and 
 
188 THE TRUE VISION ATSTD THE FALSE SEER. 
 
 blessed Country, the home of God's elect, the 
 Sweet and blessed Country, that eager hearts 
 expect." 
 
 Yes, we have these dreams, these visions, and 
 we enjoy them ; and as they come and float 
 before and touch and quicken our hearts and 
 stir and move our souls, and we think of that 
 lieavenly world and wonder what it will be, like 
 Balaam we say or sigh, "Let me die the death 
 of the righteous, let my last end be like his." 
 
 Ah, if we would die the death of the righteous 
 v.'^e must live the life of the righteous. We go 
 into another as we go through this, and the oflBce 
 of religion is not simply to teach us how to enjoy 
 the heavenly vision, but to teach us how to be 
 obedient and true to the heavenly vision. Then 
 indeed will the joy be a joy that does not go ; 
 then indeed will the light be a light that does not 
 fade, Sundays, Mondays, all the days it will 
 sing and shine, becoming brighter and brighter 
 through all the days on earth, till the vision of 
 hope and faith merges and blends at last into 
 the fuller vision of sight. 
 
 The whole subject, may I say in conclusion, it 
 seems to '"me has special application to young 
 men. The visions of early life as a rule are high 
 and bright and pure. Every young person who is 
 
THE TRUE VISION AND THE FALSE SEER. 189 
 
 worth anything, or who will ever amount to 
 anything, has such visions. He may not care to 
 talk about them to his elders or his companions, 
 but nevertheless, if he is worth anything, he has 
 them, and in his soul he dreams them. Well, 
 my friends, go on dreaming those dreams. 
 Whatever your line in life may be, political life, 
 business life, social life, go on dreaming those 
 dreams. Let not the world rob you of them, for 
 those dreams of the soul are the visions of God, 
 and the man who has them is clothed with the 
 power of God, is insj)ired by the spirit of God, 
 becomes more and more the incarnation of God, 
 and is to his generation, the age in which he 
 lives, the revelation of God. 
 
SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 
 
 And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me. Fear not ; 
 I am the first and the last: 1 am he that liveth and was dead; and 
 have the keys of hell. — Revelation i. 17, 18. 
 
 The Book of Revelation is hard and to a great 
 extent unintelligible reading. Its sublime utter- 
 ances shine out upon the pages of the Bible like 
 the stars in the midnight sky. There the stars 
 are, as everyone can see, and doubtless they are 
 there for a wise and good purpose, but what that 
 purpose is we have not yet managed fully to 
 ascertain. There are some things about the 
 stars, however, not many, but a few, which we do 
 understand, and there are some things about the 
 Book of Revelation which seem to be tolerably 
 clear. It is a book which describes, like Dante's 
 Inferno, with weird speech and eccentric simile, 
 the sufferings caused by sin, its moral and 
 spiritual deaths, its blighting plagues and judg- 
 ments. And these are so api)alling even to con- 
 template, that, to give the writer courage to 
 enter upon the task of narration, he is made to 
 see in vision the form and to hear the voice of 
 
 190 
 
SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 191 
 
 One who has conquered all things, even death 
 and the grave, who can and does deliver froni 
 the prison-house of sin and has the keys of hell. 
 Let me ask you to-day to think with me a little 
 while about this pervading purpose of the 
 Apocalypse of St. John, which, when trans- 
 lated into our common speech, is to make us see 
 what sin is and how in Jesus Christ we are 
 delivered from it. 
 
 First, the effect of sin. There is, I think, no 
 greater ethical distinction between the present 
 and the past than the different estimates j)laced 
 in the two periods of time upon the significance 
 of sin. To-day we are a little disposed to make 
 light of it, to condone it, to find in various ways 
 palliation for it, to regard it not so much as 
 a moral evil for which the offender is himself 
 responsible, but rather as a misfortune of which 
 he is the victim, perhaps the innocent and help- 
 less victim. We regard him as the product of 
 heredity, or the creature of environment, or the 
 embodiment simply of some wild, eccentric 
 tendency in our social life, which, in the gradual 
 development of our social life from chaos into 
 cosmos, has not yet been orbed into order, has 
 not found as yet its true and proper place. And 
 so for various reasons we have come to have in 
 
192 SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 
 
 our modern life not that vivid sense of sin, its 
 hideousness, its shamefulness, its misery, its 
 guiltiness, which the people of other and earlier 
 ages had, and which, as we read their literature 
 and study their story, we find to be one of the 
 prominent and characteristic features of it. 
 
 Look at the classical writings of the old 
 Greeks, for example. See how through them 
 all this tragic thread of suffering for moral evil 
 runs. The doom of the man who sins, how sure 
 it is, how inexorable ! even when, as in the case 
 of an ffidipus, he does not know that he has com- 
 mitted a sin, or as in the case of an Orestes, 
 whom the avenging furies pursue to madness, 
 despite the mitigating circumstances of the sin. 
 Consciously or unconsciously the sin has been 
 committed, the moral wrong been done, and 
 the penalty must be paid, satisfaction given, and 
 expiation had. This is the thought that runs 
 through all the poetry of the Greeks, which has 
 made it so sublime, and given such greatness to 
 it ; not the delicacy of its artistic feeling 
 merely, not the fineness of its aesthetic percep- 
 tion merely, not simply the loftiness and the ele- 
 gance of its intellectual tone, but the dark 
 shadow of sin that is on it, the sense of sin that 
 pervades it, the cry of the human soul in its 
 
SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 193 
 
 wrestling with sin, in its tragic endeavor to 
 escape the expiation which cannot be escaped, 
 and which the commission of sin imposes and 
 requires. 
 
 As with the noblest literature of the old pagan 
 past, so has it been with the noblest poetry of 
 the Christian past. I have said that the 
 Apocalypse of St, John is like the Inferno of 
 Dante. And what is the Inferno of Dante, that 
 greatest of epic poems ? What has made it so 
 great ? Why has it touched so profoundly and 
 had such a powerful hold on the heart and life of 
 the world ? The genius of Dante ; yes, but some- 
 thing more ; the genius of Dante trying to tell in 
 the weird and fantastic language of the theology 
 of the day the story of man as a sinner, showing 
 how awful is sin, what depths of hell are in it, 
 how sure and great is the suffering to which its 
 commission leads. And hence it was that the 
 voice of the old Florentine singer awakened 
 all Europe, aroused it from its lethargy, and 
 appealed so strongly to it. 
 
 And as with the poem of Dante, so with that 
 other great Christian poem which is only second 
 to Dante — the poem of Milton, which is not 
 simply the story of sin in human life, but the 
 story of sin in the universe : not simply the epic 
 
194 SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 
 
 of man as a sinner, but of larger compass, 
 of wider scope — the epic of sin itself. This is 
 its greatness, its sublimity, not its dignified 
 movements and stately measures merely, its 
 similes, its allegories, its fine poetic creations, 
 but the deep, awful, tragic sense of sin which is 
 in the poet's soul, and which he has imparted to 
 his song. 
 
 So, if time permitted and this were not a 
 sermon which I am trying to preach, with a 
 practical purpose in view, many other instances 
 might be cited, from the literature of the past — 
 from the " Ethics," of a Seneca, and the writings 
 of an Aurelius, and the "Faust" of a Goethe, 
 and the "Macbeth" of a ShaksjDere, and even 
 so recent a past as the " Manfred" of a Byron — 
 all of them going to show how different is the 
 sense of sin in our modern life and literature, 
 and how much less is the significance which we 
 attribute to it. It does not seem to be such a 
 large and active factor in our modern thought, 
 does not seem to enter so strongly into the con- 
 sciousness of the modern world, and even if we 
 had in our modern society the genius of the old 
 Greek tragedian, or of the Florentine singer, we 
 would not have and could not have their poems 
 and their songs. Some other theme would 
 
SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 195 
 
 inspire them, some other topic touch and itwaken 
 the genius in them, for the sense of sin in the 
 modern world would not be sufficiently strong 
 and active to evoke it. And yet in that book, to 
 which the modern world, despite its enlighten- 
 ment, still looks for its highest instruction in 
 all matters affecting its spiritual destiny ; with 
 what severest language, graphic, startling terms 
 of speech is human sin described ! And the 
 burden of all its literature, its epic, its psal- 
 mody, its history, the burden of its story is 
 this, that sin is death, is hell, and that 
 righteousness only is life. That is the refrain 
 that we hear throughout the New Testament 
 story also, not only in the Apocalypse of St. 
 John, and in the Epistles of St. Paul, but in the 
 gracious utterances of Jesus Christ himself, 
 who, while speaking to men with a love that had 
 never been witnessed in the history of the world 
 before and has never been since, has neverthe- 
 less depicted as no one else has done the misery 
 and the awfulness of sin. 
 
 And so important did it seem to Jesus Christ 
 that men should be delivered from the power of 
 sin, that almost everything else was of little 
 consequence in comxDarison with it. It is 
 not necessary, he seemed to say to men, that 
 
196 SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 
 
 you sliould live a few years more or less, 
 that you should have fine houses and com- 
 fortable clothes, that you should have more 
 worldly goods and possessions. These things 
 are important and valuable ; get them if you 
 can ; but they are not necessary. There is 
 only one necessity — seek first the kingdom of 
 God. It is better to enter into the kingdom 
 of God, halt, maimed, blind, than having all 
 your bodily members — two hands, two feet, two 
 eyes — to be cast into hell fire. What is a man 
 profited if he gain the whole world and then lose 
 himself, his soul, his life ? How we like to skip 
 these words in the gospel story as we read it ; 
 and yefc the words are there, coming from the 
 lips of the gentle and gracious Christ, who went 
 from place to place, from synagogue to seashore, 
 from desert plain to mountain-toj), saying to the 
 wondering crowds, that followed him every- 
 where, "Go and sin no more. Go and sin no 
 more." And when he saw that they did not 
 heed his words, but went rushing madly on to 
 their own destruction and doom, he felt in his 
 sympathetic soul siich a sense of the misery of 
 their sin that his whole frame shook with agony 
 till the blood burst out of the pores. 
 
 Ah, my friends, desjDite the fact that the mod- 
 
SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 197 
 
 ern world is disposed to make light of sin, and 
 condone it, and to say foolish things about it, that 
 teaching of Jesus Christ is true and experience 
 has proved it true ; not merely that sin will here- 
 after issue in a moral state and condition which 
 Jesus Christ and the Bible describe as hell — that 
 of course is something which we cannot now ex- 
 perience — but that sin itself here and now is hell, 
 and that the man who sins is in hell. He may 
 not know it, and he may enjoy it. But, to use 
 the simile of another, is corruption any the 
 less corruption because the worm loves it ? Is 
 hell any the less hell because we take pleasure 
 in it ? But the jjleasure does not last; and sooner 
 or later we find that sin indeed is a scourge, 
 an anguish, a pain, a remorse, a scorpion sting, a 
 ser23ent coil, a scourging fire, and that Jesus 
 Christ has not too strongly described it. Yes, toe 
 find it — for I am not speaking of the sins of the 
 Jews in the time of Jesus Christ, nor am I speak- 
 ing of the sins of the men down at the Rescue 
 Mission, but of your sins and mine, — ah, we have 
 them, — which sooner or later force us to cry with 
 the sinner of long ago, " Oh, wretched man that 
 I am, who shall deliver me from this body of sin 
 and hell? " Who? Jesus Christ: the hell of 
 sin has a door, and Christ holds the key. 
 
198 SIN, AND ITS DELIVBEEK. 
 
 This brings me to the purpose which I have 
 had in view from the outset. I have said that the 
 Apocalypse of St. John is like the "Inferno" of 
 Dante. There is yet another point of compari- 
 son. Every part of the "Divine Comedy," as 
 some of you perhaps remember, ends with the 
 word " stars " ; for these, as one of his critics has 
 said, are the blessed abodes of peace to which the 
 heart of the poet is forever aspiring, and which 
 send their beams of hope down to the darkest 
 dungeons which he is describing, and give the 
 promise of deliverance to those imprisoned 
 there. So does St. John in his still more won- 
 derful poem, in setting forth so strongly the suf- 
 ferings caused by sin, give us the vision of one 
 who has the keys of hell, who can unlock the door 
 here, there, anywhere, in this world or the next, 
 and set the prisoners free. Surely just that is 
 what Jesus Christ has done in the past. Let 
 men call him what they please — man, or God, or 
 both — he has opened the prison door and set the 
 prisoners free. 
 
 How has he done it? Why, in the same 
 way precisely — that you do it, or can do it. 
 Someone has done you a wrong, cherishes in 
 his heart a feeling of hatred against you. How 
 can you overcome that feeling and get it out of 
 
SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 199 
 
 his heart ? Punish, crush, scourge, denounce, 
 hate him in return, and while by the manifesta- 
 tion of your superior strength you may prevent 
 him from doing any further injury to you, yet in 
 his heart he will hate you more and more, and 
 be glad of a chance to hurt you. But go and to 
 the uttermost, with nothing reserved, forgive 
 him, make him through your love for him love 
 you in return, and the hatred — there is none ; 
 we look for it, and it is gone, it has vanished 
 like smoke, and the man who has sinned against 
 you sins against you no more. 
 
 Oh, you say, that is too hard, you cannot do it. 
 No, perhaps not, but Jesus Christ can and does, 
 and makes men feel that the God whom he 
 reveals, no matter how great the sin, how dark, 
 how awful, even though it be the piercing and 
 the wounding and the killing of the Son of Man 
 himself — that the God whom he reveals is a 
 God who forgives to the uttermost, and loves, 
 and loves, and forever loves. That is the 
 secret of Jesus Christ, by which he has as 
 with a key unlocked the doors of the prison 
 house and set the jirisoners free. He has sim- 
 ply brought to bear upon the hearts of men 
 in the past — perhaps you and I do not know 
 much about it, perhaps we have not felt it— this 
 
200 SIN, AND ITS DELIVEKER. 
 
 great and strong power, this almighty power ; 
 yes, almighty power of love. And touched and 
 moved and quickened by it, by the power of one 
 who loves them and whom they love in return, 
 they have risen above and conquered their sins, 
 and the prisoners have been set free. 
 
 What Jesus Christ has done in the past he can 
 do to-day. Are we under the dominion — not per- 
 haps of gross, licentious sins which the world 
 denounces, and which for fear of the denouncing 
 we avoid, but are we under the dominion of a 
 pride, an envy, a jealousy, some hurtful passion, 
 some worldly and self-seeking ambition, from 
 which we cannot escape ? Are there frailties and 
 infirmities and impurities in our life, our thought, 
 our speech, our conduct, our character which w^e 
 have been trying for years, but trying in vain, 
 to conquer ? Is there a vision of right, of duty, of 
 a higher and better life, of a kingdom of heaven 
 before us, which we are not able to enter, but 
 from which, defeated, foiled, baffled, we are for- 
 ever falling back into a life so low, so sordid, 
 so unsatisfactory that it makes us feel at times 
 as though it were hell itself? It is hell; and 
 as long as we are under the dominion of sin we 
 are in hell. 
 
 But let us go and learn upon the authority of 
 
SIN, AND ITS DELIVEliKK. 201 
 
 Jesus Christ — what better authority can we 
 have? — that the great and mighty power which 
 is working so mysteriously in the universe about 
 us, and "still weaving its eternal secret visible 
 and invisible around our lives," is not the power 
 of law, accident, fate, caprice, but the power of 
 an infinite love. And then the fire of love will 
 extinguish the fire of hell and the heart will be 
 touched and purified with a new and nobler 
 passion, and the prison doors will be opened and 
 we, the prisoners, will be free. 
 
 Is there someone here this morning, whose 
 conscience smarts with the sense of some great 
 sin he has done, some great wrong committed, 
 the memory of which burns at times like a fire, 
 and which makes him feel that he is unworthy 
 to-day to come and kneel at this chancel rail ? 
 Oh, my friend, remember that it is the God of 
 Jesus Christ to whom you come ; the God of him 
 who, when men spat in his face and mocked him 
 and pierced his side and broke his heart, said with 
 inextinguishable love, "Father, forgive them"; 
 and he did forgive, and he does forgive, and he 
 is forgiving you. Let the old memory trouble 
 you no longer. Come with bended form and 
 bowed knee and heart to receive the assurance 
 of his love — then go and sin no more. 
 
202 SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 
 
 What Jesus Christ has done in the past and 
 what he does to-day, I for one believe he will 
 hereafter do. Wherever men sin, there is hell, 
 whether it be in New York City or in some other 
 city ; whether it be in this world or in some other 
 world. Wherever men cease from sin, in this 
 world or some other world, they are delivered 
 from hell. And Jesus Christ has revealed the 
 power which can make men cease from sin, and 
 will, I believe, at last make all men cease from 
 sin. He holds the keys of hell here, there, 
 everywhere ; and I for a moment do not doubt 
 that he will unlock the doors of all hells and 
 set the prisoners free. 
 
 You may remind me that Jesus Christ has 
 said that it is an everlasting fire, a fire that is 
 not quenched. Yes, so it is. Does it follow 
 that because the fire burns forever somebody is 
 in it forever ? As long as the creatures of God 
 are free — which will be, I presume, forever — they 
 will be free to sin, and with this everlasting 
 possibility of sin in the universe, there will be 
 an everlasting fire in it, ready to break out and 
 burn in the hearts of those who choose to sin. 
 But the perfect love of God can make men cease 
 from sin, and will, I believe, finally make all men 
 cease from sin, and choose not to sin, to sin no 
 
SIN, AND ITS DELIVERER. 203 
 
 more, and the everlasting prison house will 
 have no prisoners in it. Love, love at last will 
 conquer all and conquer everywhere. 
 
 I began my sermon by instituting a compar- 
 ison between the Apocalypse and the " Divine 
 Comedy": let me so close it. It was a Yirgil, 
 you remember, the man of letters, the scholar, 
 who conducted a Dante through the mis- 
 eries of the "Inferno" and the " Purgato- 
 rio " and enabled him to look upon them. 
 But the man of letters can go no farther. It 
 was a Beatrice^ the symbol of pure and per- 
 fect love, who led him through the gates 
 and among the circles of Paradise. Learning, 
 knowledge, high scholarship, culture, are good, 
 but they have not the adequate power to 
 redeem from sin — they simply show us sin. 
 Love alone can redeem from sin. Jesus Christ 
 is love, his gospel stands for love ; a love that will 
 at last burst the bars of every prison house in the 
 universe and set the prisoners free. He holds 
 in his right hand the keys of hell, and he will 
 unlock the door. 
 
CONSCIENCE. 
 
 And Jamb was left alone; and there wrestled a man with Mm, 
 until the breaking of the day. — Genesis xxxii. 24. 
 
 These words belong to a very eventful incident 
 in the career of Jacob ; let ns see what it was. 
 Twenty years before the date of it he had sinned 
 against and defrauded his brother Esau of his 
 birthright ; and now, after the lapse of so long a 
 time, he is returning rich and prosperous to his 
 native land with the expectation of meeting that 
 defrauded brother. And while in his solitude 
 upon the margin of the brook Jabbok — for he 
 had sent all his companions on — he is meditat- 
 ing with some apprehension upon the possible 
 results of that interview, he seems to become 
 aware, as the twilight gathers and deepens and 
 the darkness settles upon him, of the presence 
 of some antagonist both mysterious and power- 
 ful, whose grappling form he can feel but is not 
 able to see, and whose name he does not know. 
 It is a long and desperate encounter, lasting 
 throughout the night. Finally, however, his an- 
 tagonist prevails against him, and by throwing 
 
 ao4 
 
CONSCIENCE. 205 
 
 his body out of joint gets the victory over him, 
 not, however, with the usual result of making 
 him weaker by the defeat, but greater and 
 more — by conquering he blesses him and by 
 subduing him makes him strong. Then when 
 the struggle is over and the night is gone and 
 the day breaks, Jacob perceives that the per- 
 son who has been wrestling with him is not 
 human, but divine ; and he calls the place 
 Peniel, "for I have seen God face to face, and 
 my life is preserved." 
 
 It is a curious story and perhaps in part 
 legendary, but no matter. It is both human 
 and true, and I want to show you this morning 
 how true and human it is. 
 
 " Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled a 
 man with him." You remember the incident 
 related of one of the celebrated court preachers 
 of France in the last century, that when on one 
 occasion he was expounding in the royal pres- 
 ence the seventh chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to 
 the Romans, in which the writer so graphically 
 describes his conflict with himself, as though it 
 were a conflict between two men within him, 
 "The good that I would I do not, and the evil 
 that I would not, that I do," he was suddenly 
 interrupted in the midst of his discourse by 
 
206 COT^SCIETiTCE. 
 
 the king exclaiming, " I know those two men — 
 I know them." 
 
 Yes, and so we do, intimately. How often 
 does it seem as though our human life were not 
 one, but two ; as though in addition to the per- 
 sonality in us which is visible and which through 
 speech and conduct shows itself to the world, 
 there were some other second personality in us 
 which is invisible, and which the world does not 
 see, cannot see, which we ourselves cannot see, 
 which nevertheless we feel, and feel at times so 
 vividly as wrestling with us, fighting against us, 
 trying so hard to defeat and get the victory over 
 us ? What is it ? Conscience ? The moral sense ? 
 Yes, but what is conscience ? It is ourselves 
 fighting with, struggling against, pleading with 
 ourselves — ourselves trying to vanquish and 
 overcome ourselves, as though, I say, we were 
 two selves, or there were two selves within us, 
 contending with one another, listening to one 
 another, carrying on a dialogue and talking to 
 one another. One self speaks to the other self, 
 and the other self replies. One self says, "I 
 want to," and the other self says, "I must 
 not." One self says, "I will," and the other self 
 says, "I cannot"; and so the debate goes on and 
 the controversy and the conflict as between two 
 
CONSCIENCE. 207 
 
 selves within us. Conscience? Yes, it is con- 
 science, but again I ask, what is conscience ? 
 Books almost innumerable have been written 
 by men to tell us what conscience is. The 
 scientist has tried to dissect it, and the moralist 
 to explain it, and the philosopher to define it, 
 and the poet and the dramatist with suitable 
 speech and action, have tried so hard to portray 
 it upon the theatre boards and to make it live 
 and move and cry, and embody itself before us. 
 In what ponderous volumes of Scotch and Ger- 
 man metaphysic and mediaeval casuistry and 
 Greek and Roman tragedy have the attempts 
 been made to describe it and to show us in what 
 it consists ! And yet nowhere, it seems to me, 
 do we find a better description of it, or a descrip- 
 tion half so good, as in that old story of Jacob 
 which the book of Genesis gives, and which St. 
 Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, describing 
 his conflict with himself, seems to have had 
 in mind. 
 
 After a score of years — it is a long time in a 
 man's career — -Jacob is returning to the scene 
 of his old forgotten sin, and it all comes back 
 and revives, and seems to rise out of its grave 
 again, and Jacob is alone with his sin. Every- 
 thing else has left him, faded, vanished, gone — 
 
208 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 not merely his friends and companions and 
 the consciousness of them, but the conscious- 
 ness of his greatness, the consciousness of his 
 wealth, the consciousness of the high and 
 eminent degree of prosperity to which he had 
 attained ; it has all faded and gone and Jacob 
 is alone with his sin. And there wrestles with 
 him throughout the night — not conscience does 
 he call it ; it seems like something alive, like 
 something personal, like the wrestling with him 
 of a man, and lie seems to hear it speak to him 
 as with a personal voice, and he seems to feel 
 it touch him, and lay its hand upon him and 
 press its body against him as with personal 
 pressure and touch. And then when the 
 struggle is over and the night has gone and 
 the day breaks, he is made to see and know 
 that it was something personal ; that it was in 
 truth the personal God who had been wrestling 
 with him. And that is conscience ; that is what 
 conscience is, and why so often it seems at times 
 like some other part of ourself. It is some other 
 part of ourself — it is the Grod part of ourself, it 
 is God wrestling with us. That is the name for 
 it, and nowhere else in all literature, I think, in 
 Byron or Shakspere or Dante, as in that old 
 story of Jacob, is it so clearly, so vividly 
 
coNSciEisrcE. 209 
 
 shown — like a picture — to be the wrestling with 
 us of God. 
 
 And that wrestling of God with men still goes 
 on in the world. There are times indeed when 
 they do not seem to feel it very much, as Jacob 
 did not — long times, covering perhaps a period 
 of many years. Like Jacob they are busy with 
 worldly affairs and interests and ambitions 
 and asj^irations, with trying to become rich and 
 prosperous and to get on in the world ; and that 
 wrestling with them of God, except for an occa- 
 sional twinge or wrench, they do not feel it 
 much. 
 
 But there are other times, and they are sure 
 to come, when they do feel it, when through 
 the suggestive happening of some unexpected 
 incident, the suggestive association of some old 
 place or scene — a sight, a sound, a memory, 
 an anniversary, or when through the working 
 in them of some deep, mysterious force, which 
 they are not able to explain, there is borne 
 in upon their souls the consciousness of sin or 
 of sinfulness — the overwhelming consciousness 
 of it, and it seems so absorbingly real. They 
 had not thought much about it before, they had 
 not minded it much, and moving from day to 
 day among their fellow-men and comparing 
 
210 CONSCIE^N^CE. 
 
 tlisraselves with tliem, it had seemed to be 
 enough that they were no worse than they. But 
 now they are not conscious of their fellow- 
 men — they are conscious of sin, and that con- 
 sciousness of sin or of sinfulness, their own per- 
 sonal sinfulness, as in the case of Jacob, has the 
 effect to efface the consciousness of everything 
 else. Everything else disappears and seems to 
 drop out of sight and they are alone with sin, 
 their sin ; and God seems to come and grapple 
 and wrestle with them, and will not let them go. 
 Ah, yes, that old story of Jacob in the book of 
 Genesis, how true it is, how human, how old and 
 yet how new ! God still wrestles with man. I 
 should not be surprised if he were wrestling with 
 some of you. And it seems like a part of your- 
 self, doesn't it? struggling with yourself. And 
 it is a part of yourself — it is the God part of your- 
 self, pleading with, struggling with, trying to 
 get the victory over the other part of yourself. 
 And some day I think you will see it, that that 
 old story of Jacob in the book of Genesis is your 
 story too ; that that wrestling with you of con- 
 science, that wrestling with you of duty, in the 
 voice which says, I ought to, the voice that says. 
 It is right, though perhaps in this bewildering 
 night time when things are so confused you do 
 
CONSCIENCE. 211 
 
 not see it clearly, 3^011 will hereafter see, when 
 the night has gone and the day breaks, has been 
 the wrestling with you of God. 
 
 But let me go on to the concluding part of the 
 story and call your attention to that other mys- 
 terious way, through circumstance as well as 
 through conscience, or through circumstance 
 re-enforcing conscience, in which God wrestles 
 with us and tries to bring us at last into submis- 
 sion to him. 
 
 "Jacob was left alone and there wrestled a 
 man with him." So at the time it seemed. 
 "And when he perceived that he prevailed not 
 against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh, 
 and Jacob's thigh was out of joint." Is not that 
 too a modern as well as an ancient story ? For 
 no matter how men may interpret the fact, the 
 fact itself is obvious enough, is at times sad and 
 painful enough, that some great mysterious force 
 is working in, upon, and through our human 
 life, dissolving its ties and relationships and 
 severing and breaking its dearest bonds and its 
 most sacred unions, and throwing it out of joint. 
 There are hospitals in our cities and scattered 
 over the land, which a generous humanity has 
 provided for broken and wounded bodies — 
 bodies which have been broken by disease 
 
212 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 or which accident has thrown out of joint. But 
 ah, where are the hospitals that can hold and 
 shelter the hearts that have been broken and 
 wounded and crippled and thrown out of 
 joint ! All over the city, all over the land, 
 all over the earth we find them ; hearts, 
 homes, lives which in some way, by a living 
 trouble, by a dead trouble, by a loss, by a 
 disappointment, by a failure, by a want, by a 
 withholding pressure, by a disturbing touch, 
 have been wrenched away from what was best, 
 brightest, dearest in life, and crippled and 
 thrown out of joint. 
 
 The fact, I say, is obvious enough, so obvious, so 
 commonplace that it calls for no comment, but it 
 cannot be ignored. And what, my friends, is the 
 explanation and the meaning of it all ? Is there no 
 explanation at all ? Must we just go on stolidly, 
 stoically, and at times a little bit cynically, doing 
 the best we know and getting the best we can, 
 and not doing or getting much except a little 
 more embittered, and a little more hardened, 
 as the journey of life proceeds ? Or may it not 
 mean — looking at it in the light of Jesus 
 Christ, does it not mean — this: that all life 
 on earth, no matter how circumstanced and 
 related, is out of joint until it is joined to the 
 
CONSCIENCE. 213 
 
 living God, and tliat through these many dis- 
 placements, dislodgments, discomfitures, he is 
 trying to bring it, to bind it more closely to 
 himself, to develop more and more what is 
 godlike in it ? 
 
 And whatever loss does that, no matter how 
 sharp and painful and irreparable it may appear 
 at the time, will prove in the end, when the 
 struggle is over and the night is gone and the 
 day breaks, to have been our best, greatest, and 
 most enduring gain. 
 
 Yes, the story of Jacob is our story too, and 
 God through conscience and through circum- 
 stance wrestles with human life and will not let 
 it go — not to hurt and weaken and make it less, 
 but to make it greater and more — by conquering 
 it to bless it, by subduing it to make it strong. 
 At last the conflict of Jacob was over, as our 
 conflict will be over. He said "Let me go, for 
 the day breaketh," Was it Jacob or was it God 
 who said it ? It was the God in him who said 
 it ; the God part of himself, wrestling with and 
 conquering the other part of himself, the same 
 God who works and wrestles now in us ; the same 
 divine, imperishable God life, which will some 
 day say to this earthly house and tabernacle, 
 " My work in you is done, my wrestling with 
 
214 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 you is over, let me go, let me go, for the day 
 breaketli — the day of cloudless beauty, the day 
 where there is no night, the day in which 
 til ere is no conflict, and no loss ; its morning 
 liglit has come at last — let me go, for the day 
 breaketh." 
 
GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CHRIST. 
 
 In these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch. — 
 Acts xi. 27. 
 
 HiSTOEY repeats itself, and the history of the 
 Christian Church is no exception to the rule. I 
 want to try to show you this morning that the 
 way in which at the outset it was made to grow, 
 the path in which it moved, is the path in which 
 it has always moved, in which it is moving now ; 
 that in the words of the text we have that path 
 described, "from Jerusalem unto Antioch." 
 
 First let me try to show you what I mean by 
 the terms, or what, as I understand it, is the 
 significance of the phrase. Jerusalem was the 
 place where the religion of Jesus Christ began, 
 and its earliest disciples were Jews, nor did they 
 suppose that in accepting it they became for 
 a moment anything else than Jews. They 
 accepted it because they were Jews, because 
 it was the fulfillment of their Jewish hopes and 
 beliefs. And therefore we find that after they 
 liad accepted it, they still retained for a con- 
 siderable time their Jewish rites, symbols, sacri- 
 
216 GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CHRIST. 
 
 fices, ceremonies, such as worshiping in the 
 synagogue, the observance of the seventh day, 
 the practice of circumcision ; and as Dr. Mathe- 
 son observes in his monograph on St. Paul, they 
 had no more thought of separating themselves 
 from that old Jewish Church than John Wesley 
 had of separating himself from the Church of 
 England. And singularly enough, he adds, the 
 name by which they were called was just that 
 name of "Methodists," or as it is translated in 
 the Book of the Acts " Men of the Way," which 
 means the same thing. They were, in other 
 words, simply a sect or party, not outside of 
 but in the Jewish Church ; very active but also 
 very Jewish ; and who continued to look upon 
 that religion of Jesus as something which was 
 meant particularly if not exclusively for them. 
 
 The time came, however, when they dis- 
 covered that that religion of Jesus was some- 
 thing larger and more than they had supposed 
 it to be, and it happened in this manner : 
 
 Some of their number, it seems, went upon a 
 journey ; from Jerusalem to Antioch, the capital 
 of Syria, which was not far from Jerusalem 
 measured geographically, but socially and polit- 
 ically it was far, very far, and very different 
 from Jerusalem. And yet to their great surprise 
 
GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CHRIST. 217 
 
 tliey found that the people of Antioch, although 
 they were not Jews, were just as ready to 
 respond to that religion of Jesus as they them- 
 selves had been. Then they began to perceive 
 that that religion of Jesus was not only the ful- 
 fillment of the hopes entertained by them but of 
 the hopes entertained by others ; that it was the 
 fulfillment of all humanity's hopes ; that it 
 somehow seemed to touch and quicken and find 
 interpretation in the experience of all mankind, 
 in the universal experience ; and that the more 
 it came into contact with the universal experi- 
 ence, the higher and deeper and more did the 
 religion of Jesus become. New meanings 
 dawned within it, new beauties flashed across it, 
 new vistas opened before it, new powers issued 
 from it — the higher and deeper and more did 
 the religion of Jesus appear. And it is a signifi- 
 cant circumstance that those who hitherto had 
 been confining that religion to the Jewish race 
 and people, preaching the Word to none save 
 Jews only, and who were simply a sect or party 
 in the Jewish Church, came now into something 
 like a just and true conception of what that 
 religion was, of what it was meant to be, and 
 were called Christians first at Antioch. 
 
 That is what I mean by the phrase "from 
 
218 GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CHRIST. 
 
 Jerusalem toAntiocli" — the path in which the 
 religion of Jesus at the outset moved, the path 
 in which ever since it has continued to move. 
 
 Look at your own personal experience of that 
 religion. Is not your conception of it to-day 
 something larger and more than when you first 
 accepted it? than when by confirmation— or if 
 not brought up in the Ex3iscopal Church, in 
 some other manner — you determined to make 
 it the rule by v/hich you would try to live. You 
 thought that you understood it fairly well. 
 You had your little questions to ask, and it 
 answered them ; yon had your little difficulties 
 to remove and explain, and it explained them. 
 Your kiio vledge of it then, as far as it went, 
 was good and true and you did right to act upon 
 it. And yet, as you now look back, what a 
 limited knowledge it was and how much greater 
 now does the scope of religion appear ! How 
 much more is in it than then you thought was in 
 it ; how much more in the Bible ; how much 
 more in Christ ; how much more in the life 
 that tries to follow Christ, and how, like some 
 unfolding panoramic vision, has it been dis- 
 closing new forms of beauty to you and 
 causing you to perceive new thoughts, new 
 meanings in it ! And how has it come to pass 
 
GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CHRIST. 219 
 
 that the Christ whom you see to-day, while all 
 that he was when first you aiDpreheiided him, is 
 also so much more ? Because you have gone 
 on journeys from Jerusalems to Antiochs, not 
 physical journeys, but mental and moral jour- 
 neys ; you have traveled further in conduct and 
 wandered farther in thought and met with new 
 temptations, hardshi]3s, cares, triumphs — not 
 new indeed to those who had traveled that path 
 before, yet which at tlie time you started seemed 
 so strange and new to you. 
 
 Yes, you have gone on journeys, God sent you 
 upon them, and from some old Jerusalem home, 
 so dear and sacred to you, some easy and pleas- 
 ant place in which you had been living and in 
 which you wanted to live, like those early dis- 
 ciples you have been driven away. Some new 
 and foreign Antioch, so different from the old 
 Jerusalem, has become your dwelling place, and 
 there, after a while in that strange and new 
 experience, like those early disciples again, you 
 have learned to see new things in Christ, and to 
 find new treasures in him. He has taught you 
 something at Antioch, something about himself, 
 something larger and more, which as you dwelt 
 at Jerusalem he was not able to teach you, or 
 rather which, while dwelling there, you were not 
 
220 GOING OlSr JOURNEYS TO FIND CIIKIST. 
 
 able to learn. But now you have learned it, and 
 it cannot be eradicated, and no man can take it 
 from you ; and altliougli indeed at the outset 
 you received the name of Christ and resolved to 
 follow him and did follow him, yet now you 
 feel so strongly that you scarcely knew him 
 then, and that you deserved to be called a Chris- 
 tian first, not at Jerusalem, but at Antioch. 
 You know now what Christianity means, as then 
 you did not know ; you have gone through its 
 struggles and you have come out into its peace ; 
 you have gone through the darkness which it 
 sometimes sends, and you have come out into its 
 light ; you have fought its battles, and you have 
 won its victories ; you know what it is now, and 
 no man can take it from you. 
 
 This is the way, it seems to me, in which we 
 learn of Christ : by going forth on journeys to 
 different fields of adventure, to different phases 
 of experience, into the bright days and the dark 
 days, the long days and the lonely days, into all 
 the days, each one of which to some extent is a 
 new and different day ; and thus, by looking at 
 Christ from different points of view, we have 
 come to know him better and more. 
 
 Ah, my friends, I love to think — I do think — 
 that that is what the journey of life is for, from 
 
GOING ON JOURlSrEYS TO FIND CIIPJST. 221 
 
 cliildliood to youth, to middle age, to old age, 
 that strange and mysterious journey which you 
 and I are taking, with so many strange and 
 mysterious happenings in it which we cannot 
 explain or prevent — that that is what it is for. 
 I love to think, and I do think that that is why 
 God has sent us upon it ; not to avoid all the 
 rough things, nor to meet with only smooth ; 
 not to gather fortunes and successes and to 
 have a good time and prosper ; but that by 
 going from Jerusalems to Antiochs, from old 
 experiences to new, from one way of living to 
 another, from the mountain-top to the valley, or 
 out on the open plains, we may find new treas- 
 ures in Christ ; so that when the journey of life 
 is over we may in some real and true sense 
 deserve to be called Christians. 
 
 Now, having looked at the matter in connec- 
 tion with our personal experience, let us look at 
 it for a little while in connection with the Chris- 
 tian Church at large. The Christian Church to- 
 day must not dwell at Jerusalem. Let me show 
 you what I mean. There are some persons who 
 seem to think that the Christian religion as such 
 should have nothing whatever to do witli politics, 
 with great political questions, with great eco- 
 nomic questions, scientific, social, financial, eom- 
 
222 GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CHRIST. 
 
 merciiil questions — questions so strongly agitating 
 the life of the modern world and stirring it down 
 to its depths. They think and teach that the 
 Christian religion should have nothing to do 
 with these things, but that shutting itself up in 
 some narrow sphere and circle of its own, sing- 
 ing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, and 
 dwelling at Jerusalem and saving men's souls 
 for heaven — it should have nothing to do with 
 the real life of the world. 
 
 Ah, no ; the Christian religion must not dwell 
 at Jerusalem, or not exclusively there. It must 
 go forth into the great, busy life of the world, 
 not to discuss political questions and to tell men 
 how they should vote ; not to discuss economic 
 or commercial questions and so become a par- 
 tisan and a disputant in the controversies of 
 modern life. 'No, no, not that, not that, but 
 something else and better. Its aim should be to 
 try to make men understand that the Christian 
 religion is wider than some would make it 
 appear ; that it includes within its scope Antioch 
 as well as Jerusalem, business, trade, poli- 
 tics ; that the field of religion is the world, 
 and that every word which a man speaks on 
 any subject, no matter where he speaks it, or 
 on what subject he speaks it, is a religious worfl, 
 
GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CIIlilST. 223 
 
 is a Christian word, and that he is to that extent 
 a religions man, a Christian man, there at 
 Antioch. This is what I mean when I say tliat 
 the Christian Church should go into the life of 
 the world ; not simply to take religion there, but 
 like those early disciples when they went down 
 from Jerusalem to Antioch, to find religion there, 
 in all the moral efforts and struggles and as^nra- 
 tions of the world. It should recognize and teach 
 that all the moral qualities — purity, patience, 
 truthfulness, gentleness, charity, kindness, honor, 
 honesty, unselfishness — are religious qualities, 
 are Christian qualities, and that the men and 
 women who exhibit them in the common life of 
 the world are religious men and women, are 
 Christian men and women. 
 
 Oh, let the Christian Church to-day go and 
 gather up all these people for Jesus Christ ! Let 
 it go and say to the student who is trying to 
 find what is true, to the busy man of affairs who 
 is trying to do what is right, who in the midst of 
 temptations and weaknesses is trying to be pure 
 and strong, " My brother, you belong to Christ, 
 You may not think as we do, but still you belong 
 to Christ, and the moral and spiritual work 
 which you are trying to do is the work which the 
 spirit of Jesus Christ is trying to do within you." 
 
224 GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CHRIST. 
 
 Yes, let the Christian Church go and claim all 
 virtue, all truth, all goodness, for Jesus Christ. 
 Let it go and teach that goodness is not two but 
 one, that as far as it goes it is Christian goodness, 
 that it belongs to Christ, and thus gradually let 
 it gather up the whole moral life of the world 
 into Jesus Christ. We often hear it said that 
 the great need at present is the unity of the 
 Christian Church. But it seems to me that 
 there is a greater need than that ; not the unity 
 of the Christian Church merely, but the unity 
 of life ; not prophets merely who can walk 
 about Zion and build up the walls of Jerusalem, 
 but prophets who can go from Jerusalem to 
 Antioch, who can say to the people there, " The 
 Christ we preach and bring is no stranger to you: 
 he is the Christ within you, and while it is his 
 story we tell, it is your story too. ' ' Then, it seems 
 to me, will we as a Christian Church have a larger 
 and nobler conception of what Christianity is ; we 
 will understand our Christian doctrines better, 
 and how to hold them better in right and true 
 proportion, for we have gone on journeys with 
 them and ascertained from experience their prac- 
 tical worth and value. We will understand 
 better what the Christian religion is, for we have 
 gone on a journey with it, and have found that 
 
GOING ON JOURNEYS TO FIND CHRIST. 225 
 
 it is not only tlie fulfillment of our hopes, but the 
 fulfillment of all of humanity's hopes. We will 
 understand better what Jesus Christ is, for we 
 have gone on a journey with him and found that 
 he is not only the light that lightens us, but the 
 true light, the universal light, the light that 
 lightens every man that cometh into the world. 
 
THE MAN AND THE PRIEST. 
 
 Amaziah said unto Amos, thou seer, go flee thee away into the 
 land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there ; 
 
 But prophesy not again any more at Beth-el j for it is the king's 
 chapel, and it is the king's court. 
 
 Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet, 
 neitJier was I a prophet's son ; but 1 was an herdman and a gatherer 
 of sycamore fruit ; 
 
 And the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and tlie Lord said 
 unto me, Oo, prophesy unto my people Israel. — Amos vii. 12-15. 
 
 The more one studies the Bible, not through 
 the gloss of tradition, but through the medium 
 of personal experience, the more is he impressed 
 with its wonderf ulness and truth. It not only- 
 reveals Grod so admirably, it reveals us so fully, 
 the deep and strong passions which are work- 
 ing in us good, bad, and mixed ; the subtle tend- 
 encies in us toward subterfuge and sham and 
 self-deception, or the nobler and worthier quali- 
 ties which at times we exhibit. It opens us up 
 and portrays us, as Coleridge says — it finds us, 
 brings us out from our hiding places, and makes 
 us see ourselves. 
 
 I want to call your attention at present to that 
 little view of ourselves which like a mirror the 
 
 226 
 
THE MAN AND THE PRIEST. 227 
 
 words of the text disclose, to sliow you tliat tlie 
 two persons mentioned in the text may be found 
 if we look for them, under different names in 
 human life to-day. Who were they ? Let us see. 
 Amaziah was a priest ; Amos was a man ; an 
 inspired man, to be sure, and in that sense a 
 prophet, but he was not a prophet by profession, 
 did not belong to one of the regularly appointed 
 schools of the prophets, had not received his 
 training and his commission there. And that, to 
 the priest, was reason enough for refusing to 
 recognize him. He had no rank and title, no offi- 
 cial standing, and the man, the mere man, to the 
 priest was obnoxious, was regarded by him as 
 presumptuous, and he plainly told him so, and 
 said, " Go back to Judah, where you belong, 
 you mere man, herdsman, shepherd of Tekoa, 
 gatherer of sycamore fruits — go back to Judah 
 where you belong, and do not come here into 
 Israel meddling with our affairs, entering into 
 the very palace of my master, whose court chap- 
 lain I am, and speaking words against him." 
 And like another distinguished statesman-priest 
 of a later day, he drew the magic circle of 
 his office, not around himself, but around the 
 throne, and said, " Tliis is the king's court, this 
 is the king's sanctuary; go, oh, thou seer, into 
 
228 THE MAN" AND THE PEIEST. 
 
 the land of Judali, and there eat bread and 
 prophesy, but proj)hesy not here at Bethel in 
 Israel any more." 
 
 Amos did not go, but continued to eat his 
 bread and prophesy in Israel, but with his sub- 
 sequent ministry there I am not at present con- 
 cerned. I simj)ly wish you to observe that these 
 two persons represent two different types of char- 
 acter, two different kinds of influence, or rather 
 two different kinds of human tendency, which 
 are not only seen in Israel but throughout all 
 human life, and which now as then are so often 
 seen in conflict. The first is the tendency toward 
 what may be designated as oflficialism — toward 
 the love of name and rank and title and station 
 in the Church, in the state, in society generally. 
 It is a very strong tendency ; and it works more 
 or less in all of us. Even here in America where 
 feudalistic rank has been repudiated and feud- 
 alistic nomenclature discarded, and where our 
 ways and methods are supposed to be of a more 
 popular character ; where a man is supposed to 
 be measured and judged by the standard of 
 personal worth, even here we feel it. For it is 
 not simply a tendency inherent in the old feudal- 
 istic regime; it is a tendency inherent and assert- 
 ive in human nature — this tendency, I mean, to 
 
THE MAN AND THE PIHEST. 229 
 
 defer not so much to the influence of wliat people 
 are as the influence of where they are and the 
 positions which they occupy and the names by 
 which they are called. 
 
 Yes, we have repudiated feudalism in America, 
 but we have not repudiated human nature, and 
 human nature is strong. It is stronger than 
 governmental institutions and legislative de- 
 crees and enactments. It will assert itself ; 
 and with a strange and curious kind of contra- 
 dictoriness it will sometimes assert itself more 
 fully and emphatically when the attempt is 
 made to rei)ress it. Now as of old, the prohib- 
 ited thing is the thing desired ; what is denied 
 in one way is sought after in another. So it is in 
 America. I sometimes think there is no country 
 on the face of the earth where men love rank and 
 title more than they do in America. They say 
 that they do not, but their conduct is so often 
 at variance with their speech. 
 
 Look, for instance, at the profuse conferring 
 of honorary degrees in America by our schools 
 and colleges and institutions of learning, and 
 some of them, too, not of a very high order. 
 And why is it ? It must be because the people 
 of America love, not the rare learning, not 
 the high scholarship, which the degrees repre- 
 
230 THE MAN AND THE PRIEST. 
 
 sent, or ought to represent, but simply the mere 
 degrees, terms, titles, names, and the poor and 
 empty honor which they confer. And how poor 
 and empty it is, and how little does it mean ! 
 In the Church of England if a man receives 
 the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity it 
 means as a rule that he has done something to 
 deserve it. In America, however, it does not al- 
 ways mean that he has done something to deserve 
 it ; it simply means so often that he has come to be 
 about forty years old. But it is not only in the 
 ecclesiastical world that we see it ; we see it in 
 the social and political world. What a glamour 
 there is in mere office to an American ! What a 
 race of office-seekers we are fast becoming ! And 
 why ? Not always because we are so anxious to 
 perform, and think we are so capable of perform- 
 ing, the duties appertaining to the office ; not 
 always either because of the direct and indirect 
 pecuniary emoluments which the office gives and 
 controls, for the same or greater emoluments 
 might be found as easily in other spheres of con- 
 duct ; but because the office itself flatters so 
 sweetly, so delicately, the instinct for name and 
 title in us, and gives a kind of social rank and 
 standing to us, not otherwise in America so easily 
 to be had. We do not have that kind of great- 
 
THE MAN AND THE PIIIEST. 231 
 
 ness thrust upon us by our ancestors in America. 
 We are not born into it, or with it, or not so 
 much at least as in other and older and more 
 feudalistic countries. Nevertheless we are very 
 human in America, and this tendency toward 
 what I call officialism is a very human tendency. 
 
 'Now I am not deprecating all this ; still less 
 am I denouncing it ; I am not saying that it is all 
 bad and wrong ; I am only saying how prevalent 
 it is even here and now, and in our time and 
 country, as in the time of the priest Amaziah. 
 This tendency of deference toward mere rank 
 and title, how strongly we feel it, how eagerly 
 we covet it, how imj)eriously we try to use it at 
 times, and how, like the old j)riest at Bethel, we 
 draw the circle with it, and say to those who 
 have it not, "Begone ; you are not of us ! " 
 
 It may, I say, be innocent enough, it may do 
 no harm either to us or to others, if we properly 
 guard and fend it ; if it does not make us ignore 
 those deeper and sacreder ties which bind us 
 all together ; if it does not make us forget that 
 while we may desire legitimately enough to be 
 priests, high priests in society, in the Church, 
 in that accredited liierarchical rank which has 
 always existed in the social, political, and 
 ecclesiastical world, and always will exist, our 
 
232 THE MAN AND THE PRIEST. 
 
 first and proper aim slioulcl not be to be j)riests, 
 but to be men ; that a liigli manhood is always 
 more— immeasurably, incomparably more — than 
 the highest kind of priesthood. 
 
 And here is the other tendency which we 
 find in human life, and which Amos represents. 
 The instinct for rank, and ofiice, may be a very 
 human instinct, but the other is also human ; 
 and there is no greater word that can be spoken 
 of any man or of any w^oman than that he has 
 done some manly or she some womanly thing. 
 All the commendatory adjectives of the language 
 are included in that term, and ^ve feel that there 
 is no higher attainment which we can reach in 
 this world than simply to have deserved it. And 
 how the admiration goes freely and spontaneously 
 forth toward one who has deserved it ; who, like 
 the young son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, wdien 
 Saul would place his armor on him, has put it all 
 aside, and shaking himself free and lifting him- 
 self up to the full stature of his manhood, with- 
 out the sword of the state, without the weapon of 
 the Church, without social sanction and commis- 
 sion, but with simple, manly courage as his 
 only equipment, has gone and faced and dis- 
 comfited and conquered some formidable Philis- 
 tine foe. 
 
THE MAN AND THE PrJIvST, 233 
 
 The story of human life has many such in- 
 stances in it, nor are they wanting to-day. 
 Every now and then we encounter them, and to 
 our surprise where we least expect to find them. 
 We read about them in the newspapers, or some- 
 one tells us about them, we see them, we hear of 
 them — some sweet, courageous, womanly act, 
 some strong and manly deed, some going into 
 danger and peril, some running of risk for 
 others. "What if I do die?" said Sister 
 Dora, when her friends told lier not to go down 
 into the infected ward of the hospital to min- 
 ister to the patients there, "what if I do die? 
 Death is not bad ; it only ha^jpens once and it is 
 sure to happen once ; and these poor creatures 
 need me." When we hear of such things as 
 these, how admirable do they seem, and how 
 much worthier and nobler does this other tend- 
 ency which we find in human life aj^pear ! 
 
 Now, it is just this human tendency, it is 
 just this human instinct to which the gospel of 
 Jesus Christ appeals, which it seeks more and 
 more to awaken and strengthen in us. Have 
 I forgotten that this is Advent Sunday and 
 that I ought to be speaking this morning 
 about that great and memorable event, which 
 at the time of its hajDpening, now nearly two 
 
234 THE MAN AND THE PUIEST, 
 
 thousand years ago, seemed to be of such little 
 moment, but which has actually proved itself to 
 be the turning point, the point of a new and 
 radical departure in the history of mankind ? 
 No, I have not forgotten it, and I am speaking 
 about it, for what did Jesus Christ come into the 
 world to do ? Many things indeed, and the pur- 
 pose of his advent may be described in many 
 ways, and all of them may be true. He came to 
 die for us, to redeem us, to save us from our 
 sins, to guide and help and comfort us, to 
 establish on earth the kingdom of God and 
 to make us members of it. And yet it seems 
 to me it may be all summed up in this : that 
 he came to touch and liberate and consummate 
 the deepest and the truest humanity in us, 
 came to build up manhood, came to make us 
 men. To save our souls ? Yes. To make us 
 Christians ? Yes. But we save our souls and 
 become Christians not by becoming anything 
 else or less or more than human, but by becom- 
 ing human, up to the highest pitch and reach of 
 human stature and attainment. The qualities 
 which he develops are most human qualities. 
 The strengths which he creates, the virtues which 
 he produces, are human strengths and virtues, 
 and the greatness to which he would lead us on, 
 
THE MAN AND THE PRIEST. 235 
 
 and the glory with which he would crown us, is, 
 after all, but the glory to which with deepest, 
 truest instinct our human hearts aspire. 
 
 And how does he do it? Our way, as we 
 have seen, is very often to say to a man, If you 
 want to be good and great, go to the priest ; 
 let him make you good, let him make you 
 great — not to the priest in the ecclesiastical 
 world perhaps, but in the political or the social 
 world ; go to some high priest who holds the 
 keys of entrance into that coveted world, who 
 can open the door and admit you and give you 
 name and rank and opportunity there. Or we 
 say, go and try to be a priest, to occupy place and 
 position, where you can yourself dispense and 
 distribute privileges, and where by reason of your 
 titular rank and standing you can have power 
 and exert influence and receive homage, and in 
 that manner gratify the human instinct in you. 
 
 No, says Jesus Christ, go to God, directly 
 from where you are, and let his spirit inspire 
 you. You build up barriers, he seemed to say 
 to the men of his day, between yourselves and 
 God. You have your outer and your inner 
 courts, and your holy of holies, into which only 
 the priest may occasionally venture to go ; and 
 you have kept yourselves at a distance from 
 
236 THE MAN AND THE PRIEST. 
 
 God, or you have thought that he was distant 
 and far away from you. But it is not true, he 
 says ; there are no barriers between you and God, 
 and you and greatness, and you and manhood. 
 He is around you, near you, in you, in every one 
 of you — the publican, the Magdalen, the outcast, 
 the sinner, even the little child — let the spirit of 
 God inspire you. Let it grow and blossom in 
 you and bring forth fruit within you ; let it 
 touch the manhood in you and make it greater 
 and more — not more than human, but more 
 human, and having more human power, because 
 it is a manhood that rests and builds upon and 
 is inspired by the spirit of God. 
 
 That, my friends, it seems to me, comprehen- 
 sively stated, was the purpose of the advent, of 
 the coming of Jesus Christ — not primarily to 
 make and send forth priests of one kind and 
 another, but to make and to send forth men, 
 and to make them great and strong. And his 
 method was to teach that men are great and 
 strong only when they are imbued with the 
 spirit of God, when they receive their inspiration 
 not from below but from above, and when they 
 hear in their hearts that voice of God which all 
 might hear if they would. 
 
 That is the power, the power of an inspired 
 
THE MAN AND THE PRIEST. 237 
 
 manliood wliicli was needed then, wliich is 
 needed now, wliich is always needed in doing 
 the work of the world. We speak of the old 
 prophets as having been inspired. So they 
 were, so they were ; it was that that made them 
 prophets ; but "would God that all the Lord's 
 people were prophets"; that they too might be 
 inspired, to see large things, to do large works, 
 to outline great opportunities, and to carry out 
 the good impulses that the Spirit of God 
 awakens. For what is a proj)het but an in- 
 spired man? and God, the living God, has not 
 ceased to insx)ire men, and his spirit is in the 
 world to-day as it was in the world of old ! 
 
 May that spirit come and insj)ire you and me ! 
 May it touch, help, guide, strengthen us in our 
 weakness, give us light in our darkness, and 
 hope in the cloudy day ! May it come and 
 breathe like sweet music over the many chords 
 of our varied human experience, and so sing 
 and waft us on to that consummation of a high 
 and true manhood, to wliich our hearts aspire, 
 and which alone will last when everything else 
 is gone ; singing and wafting us on to that haven 
 where we would be, where character is the rule, 
 character is the standard, character draws the 
 circle, and where the man is more than the priest ! 
 
VISIONS. 
 
 Where tTiere is no vision, tJie people perish. — Proverbs xxix. 18. 
 
 You must have noticed in reading the Bible 
 how much there is in it about "visions," and 
 how often it is taught, by implication at least, if 
 not by direct statement, that men are dependent 
 upon visions. Tlie words of the text therefore 
 are but the positive assertion of what the whole 
 Bible seems to teach : that every human life, in 
 order to fulfill itself and be successful in the 
 best and highest sense, must have some bright, 
 ennobling vision before it, and that "where 
 there is no vision the people perish." 
 
 My subject this morning is this : "The great- 
 est benefactor of the human race is the man who 
 gives the noblest visions to it." 
 
 And first, let me speak of the world's indebt- 
 edness to its visionaries. I know that the word 
 "visionary" has fallen into bad rex)ute, that it 
 is often used as a term of rejproach, and that 
 we frequently say of a person who is wanting in 
 practical Judgment, in common sense, that he is 
 a "visionary." And yet, although some per- 
 
VISIONS. 239 
 
 sons have false, foolish, and unattainable vi- 
 sions, it should not be forgotten that there is 
 another sense in which to be a "visionary" is a 
 mark of jDower. Other things being equal, that 
 man will be the best equi^^ped in this world, 
 will have the greatest strength, will exhibit the 
 finest courage, will do the noblest and most 
 enduring work, will be the greatest man, to 
 whom the best and brightest visions come. The 
 men who have reached the higher forms of 
 knowledge, and have given to the world the 
 most ennobling truths, are men to whom the 
 power of seeing visions was given. For knowl- 
 edge, in its higher forms, is not reached by logic 
 or demonstration. These are mental processes 
 that can carry us up only to a certain point, and 
 if we knew only what we could demonstrate by 
 a mathematical theorem, or prove by a logical 
 syllogism, the field of our knowledge would be 
 a very contracted one. 
 
 But as a matter of fact it is not so contracted. 
 The men to whom the noblest and purest 
 thoughts have come, by whom the largest and 
 most enlarging i^rinciples have been appre- 
 hended, and into whose minds the deepest 
 secrets of the universe have been whispered are 
 men who have gone beyond the limits of the 
 
240 VISIONS. 
 
 logical method, or of their own practical expe- 
 rience, or of the practical exj^erience of the 
 world at large, and to whom, as to the prophets 
 of old, the power of "seeing visions " was given. 
 Professor Tyndall has published an interesting 
 little essay on what he calls "The Scientific Use 
 of the Imagination," the aim of which is to show 
 how necessary the imagination is, even in the 
 study of the physical nniverse. While the 
 reason, he tells us, by itself and apart from the 
 imagination, can make but little headway, the 
 reason in connection with the imagination is 
 the mightiest agent in the discovery of physi- 
 cal truth. It was by his imagination, operating 
 upon the simj^le phenomenon which he observed, 
 that Newton was led to unravel the mechanism 
 of the heavens. It was by his imagination that 
 the eye of Galileo, looking through his tele- 
 scope, saw an infinite space peopled with an 
 infinite number of worlds like our own. It was 
 by his imagination, operating upon the facts 
 published by Mai thus in his "Essay on Popu- 
 lation," that there was suggested to the mind 
 of Charles Darwin that principle of "natural 
 selection" which he seemed to see, as in a 
 vision, running through all life, extending 
 through all nature, and gr'^^n^- the clew to* the 
 
VISIONS. 241 
 
 endless diversities of animals and of plants. 
 But what is all that but another, more conven- 
 tional, and not perhaps so accurate a way of 
 saying that these were men to whom something 
 of the old prophetic power of " seeing visions " 
 was given, in whom, in the best sense of the 
 word, there was something of the visionary — 
 who by their visions were lifted up into larger 
 life, and by their visions have lifted the world 
 after them. 
 
 If, then, it be true that the man who is want- 
 ing in common sense, and is following after 
 foolish and unattainable visions, and whom we 
 designate as a visionary, is not fit for the duties 
 of this world, it is equally true, I believe it is 
 more true, that that man is not fit for the du- 
 ties of this world, its highest achievement, its 
 noblest work, the discovery of its greatest 
 truths, the daily carrying out of its highest and 
 noblest principles, to whom no visions come. 
 In the midst of error he sees no vision of truth. 
 In the midst of wrong he sees no vision of 
 right. In the midst of confusion he sees no 
 vision of order. In the midst of sin and sor- 
 row he sees no vision of holiness and peace. He 
 cannot look, poor little man, beyond what has 
 been already done, or what has been already 
 
242 VISIONS. 
 
 attained, either by himself or the world at large, 
 to something better still to come, something 
 brighter and more beautiful yet to make its 
 appearance upon this earth, and his life, in 
 consequence, has no high and strong and gener- 
 ous inspiration to it. Such a man is not fit for 
 the duties of this world. His life becomes more 
 and more insipid, dreary, weary, and common- 
 place as the years go by. He has no courage to 
 sustain him when the dark hour comes. He has 
 nothing to gladden his daily, monotonous routine 
 and make it joyous and bright, nothing to keej) 
 him "forging ahead," with an indomitable will, 
 with an invincible courage, in the face of dis- 
 aster and difficulty, and ambition flags, hope 
 droops, love weakens, faith departs, and enthu- 
 siasm dies. I say that such a man is not fit for 
 the duties of this world ; the best possibilities of 
 his existence he can never realize ; and truly, as 
 the wise man has said, " where there is no vision 
 the peo^^le perish." 
 
 I cannot imagine anyone, then, to whom we 
 owe a greater debt, who can be of greater assist- 
 ance to us than the man who in the midst of 
 this hard, practical, sorrowing, sinning, work- 
 a-day world, can give us the bright vision 
 of some other world. I cannot imagine any- 
 
VISIONS. 243 
 
 one who can help us more than the man who 
 in the midst of the trite and commonplace 
 truths upon which we have been feeding until 
 we have taken all the nourishment out of 
 them, can come to us with the quickening and 
 inspiring vision of some larger truth, or who in 
 the midst of the darkness and the dreariness, 
 at times, of our human life, can keep the bright, 
 unfading vision before us of some higher and 
 more ennobling life. Such a man will always be 
 the greatest of our benefactors. The world has 
 always needed such a man. It needs such a 
 man to-day. 
 
 Now, in my office of Christian preacher, I 
 have no words of disx)aragement for those men 
 who by other than religious processes, in the 
 usual construction of that term, have given 
 so muck brightness, so much enlargement to 
 the scope of human life : poets, philosophers, 
 artists, statesmen, astronomers, scientists, politi- 
 cal economists — the great and gifted men in all 
 lines of human pursuit and endeavor, through 
 whom some comfort and beauty and light 
 and wisdom have come into human life, and to 
 whom the I30wer of seeing visions was given. 
 These men, too, are our benefactors. Every 
 man is our benefactor who by any means, to any 
 
244 VISIONS. 
 
 extent, can part tlie clouds above us and let 
 some new glory in upon human life. But 
 among all such benefactors, and easily chief 
 i^mong them stands, and will forever stand, 
 Jesus of Nazareth. Let us look for a few 
 moments at some of the bright and enduring 
 visions which he has given us. 
 
 He has given us the noblest vision of right- 
 eousness — not righteousness for a particular time 
 or place, but righteousness for everywhere, for 
 always and for all, and which we feel instinct- 
 ively to be the righteousness of God. Is it 
 not so? 
 
 "To the great majority of persons," said the 
 late Cardinal Newman, "who look out upon this 
 world, all that they find there meets their 
 mind's eye very much as a landscape addresses 
 itself for the first time to a person who has just 
 gained his bodily vision. It is all confusion ; 
 one thing is as far off as another ; there is no 
 law, no order, no harmony, no perspective in 
 it," 
 
 Now and then, however, he might have added, 
 persons have appeared on this earthly plane 
 who have been able to see running through all 
 this tangled mass of apparent disorder the great 
 pervading, binding lines of everlasting law. 
 
VISIONS. 245 
 
 Wliat some men have done in tliis respect 
 for jurisprudence, what some have done in this 
 respect for astronomy and for science, tov^^ering 
 far above these splendid and ever memorable 
 tasks is the w^ork done for righteousness by 
 Jesus of Nazareth. He took hold of the vast 
 tangled mass of casuistry and Pharisaic tra- 
 dition, which had become so deeply rooted in the 
 popular mind of his day : he touched it and it 
 shriveled, its meretricious beauty faded, and from 
 the ashes he picked up a few pearls of great 
 price that were worth preserving, and put them 
 upon his own brow to shine there forever. 
 From all the testimony of the past, laying aside 
 and rejecting what was not according to eternal 
 right, he brought out, not only for that day, 
 but for this day, for every day, till the last day 
 comes, great flashing principles, high as heaven, 
 deep as hades, simple as a little child, on which 
 he made all the law and all the prophets 
 to rest. From the massive and cumbersome 
 conventionalism of religious customs and social 
 traditions and precepts of the elders, he 
 brought out those principles of a true righteous- 
 ness, which lie to-day and will continue to lie 
 at the base of all our benches of justice, all our 
 social relations, all our national development 
 
246 VISIONS. 
 
 and prosperity, all our domestic purity, all oui 
 individual nobleness, which the world never dis- 
 putes, never dreams of disputing, however much 
 it may be tempted practically to disobey them, 
 and to which it is forever making its solemn 
 appeal, and carrying up its great case in equity, 
 as into its ultimate court, as into the court of God. 
 
 But not only has Jesas of Nazareth given us 
 the purest vision of righteousness, he has also 
 given us the noblest and most appealing vision 
 of love. Is not that the meaning of his Cross 
 and passion ? The agony in the Garden, the 
 great drops of bloody sweat, the scourging, the 
 mocking, the Crucifixion itself, the darkness over 
 the land, the great heart-breaking cry sounding 
 out through the darkness — why does it touch our 
 hearts so much? Why has it so profoundly 
 touched the heart of the world? Why has it 
 alwaj^s been such a power and is it such a power 
 to-day, that the strongest and stoutest manhood 
 has been bowed in submission as a little child be- 
 fore it ; that the weakest and timidest womanhood 
 has been emboldened by it ; that the Magdalene 
 has been purified; that the drunkard has 
 been reformed, and the mourner comforted ? 
 
 Oh, who is gifted enough, whose voice is sweet 
 enough to tell the story of the triumph of the 
 
VISIONS. 247 
 
 cross of Christ thronghout all the ages ? Sweeter 
 than the music of the sweetest singer of the 
 world, stronger than the eloquence of the most 
 gifted orator, more than all the dogmatic teach- 
 ing of the churches, the philosophies of the 
 schools, the laws and statutes of the strongest 
 state, has been the conquering, strengthening, 
 healing, peace-impartinig power of the cross of 
 Christ. And why % Because it is the manifesta- 
 tion somehow — explain it as men may — of the 
 love of the eternal God, and has always been 
 felt to be so. 
 
 Again, Jesus Christ gives us not only the 
 noblest vision of God, his righteousness and his 
 love, but also the noblest and most helpful 
 vision of ourselves. He does not come telling 
 us what weak, miserable, wretched creatures we 
 are. We know it, and the knowledge does not 
 help us any. He simply allows us, in himself, 
 a more glorious vision of human life, and as we 
 look upon that more glorious vision of human 
 life, its glory passes a little into us. We do in 
 some measure forsake our sins. Their dominion 
 over us is in some measure broken, not because 
 we are looking at our sins and seeing how ugly 
 and how degrading they are, but because we are 
 looking at the vision of Christ and seeing how 
 
248 VISIONS. 
 
 glorious lie was, in whom there was no sin. We 
 do in some measure learn to be brave and patient 
 under the provocations and the annoyances and 
 the burdens and trials of life, not because we are 
 trying to be brave and patient under them, — we 
 have tried over and over again and have not suc- 
 ceeded, — but because we are looking at that 
 brave and patient One, who, in the midst of 
 trials, discouragements, desertions, denials such 
 as no man ever experienced, has yet exhibited a 
 grandeur and a glory of character in connection 
 with them such as no one else has ever dis- 
 played. We have in some measure parted with 
 the fear and dread of death, not because our 
 physical dissolution is any the less revolting 
 to us when we come to think about it ; not 
 because the grave and the tomb are any the less 
 loathsome to us ; not because to leave behind 
 those we love is any the less distressing to us, but 
 because in looking back over the history of the 
 past we see the bright vision of a victory over 
 death, and take to our hearts the hope that 
 death is but the birth-throe into a more abun- 
 dant life. And so as we look at that vision its 
 glory passes into and transfigures us. 
 
 Yes, and more than that, for not only does it 
 transfigure us, but it somehow seems to trans- 
 
VISIONS. 249 
 
 figure all the people about us ; and back of the 
 mask of the sinner and behind the veil of his 
 wretch jdness and his sin, looking through the 
 vision of Christ, we can see the glory of God. 
 All human life has a new significance for us. 
 We read its story over again. We see new 
 meaning, new promise in it. In no case must it 
 be despised. In no case must we despair of it. 
 Jesus Christ has taught us the transcendent 
 value and greatness of human life, even in its 
 feeblest and most degraded forms. Therefore 
 we must care for it, love it, shelter it, do 
 the best things for it, hope the best things 
 from it. And so, in the light of the vision 
 of Christ, moving along the dark pathway 
 of the centuries, the churches have come, and 
 the hospitals have come, and the nurseries have 
 come, and the homes for the poor, sick, aged, 
 crippled, and infirm, and even for the little chil- 
 dren, have come — who, except for that vision of 
 Christ and for what it has moved men to do, 
 would have been left alone and would have 
 perished long ago. 
 
 Then from this vision of God, his righteous- 
 ness and his love, and from this vision of man 
 and the glory latent in him, there comes the 
 brightest vision of the future of human life on 
 
250 VISIONS. 
 
 the eartli. Sometimes as we look out on human 
 life and see the moral disorders that are prev- 
 alent there, we think in our hearts that the 
 world at large is making but little i:>rogress in 
 truth and goodness — XDerhaj^s no progress at 
 all. It seems to be going backward and i)eri- 
 lous times are at hand. This is a view of 
 human life that one is apt to take as he gets 
 older, and his thoughts concerning the future are 
 not so roseate in his later as in his earlier days ; 
 The " Locksley Hall" of the poet's younger 
 manhood, so full of promise and cheery hope for 
 the future, is not the "Locksley Hall" of the 
 poet's age — with so much sadness and so much 
 bitterness and so much misgiving in it. But in 
 the light of the vision of Christ there is no room 
 for misgiving. The earlier poem is the truer ; 
 and in response to the cry that goes up, " Watch- 
 man, what of the night?" we can always say, 
 "Behold! the morning cometh." Seeing that, 
 we can go on into the future with unfaltering 
 courage and in spite of everything, with an 
 undismayed hope. We preach whether men hear 
 or whether men forbear, because we know the 
 time is coming when the kingdoms of this world 
 will become the kingdom of the Son of Man ; all 
 nations will belong to it, all peoples will be part 
 
VISIONS. 251 
 
 of it, all languages will be lieard in it. "Ilis 
 dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall 
 not pass away." But except for that vision 
 of Christ, we cannot preach, we cannot work, we 
 cannot give, we have no heart for anything, and 
 our thoughts for the future perish. 
 
 May God keep that vision before us as a pillar 
 of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and 
 when the darkness comes and doubts gather and 
 bewilderments multiply, like the disciples on 
 Tabor, may we lift up our eyes and see no man 
 save "Jesus only." 
 
CHRIST GREATER THAN OUR THOUGHT 
 OF HIM. 
 
 But we trusted that it liad been Tie which should have redeemed 
 Israel. — St. Luke, xxiv. 21. 
 
 It is the third day after the crucifixion of 
 Christ, and the hopes of his disciples have been 
 cast down and their hearts much depressed by 
 the sad event. They had been in a measure 
 prepared for it, it is true, and yet after all 
 they were not prepared. They thought, appar- 
 ently, that at the last moment and when the 
 crisis came, instead of quietly submitting to his 
 enemies he would in some remarkable way 
 assert himself and escape and get the victory 
 over them. In this, however, they had been dis- 
 appointed. His views concerning his work, its 
 nature, its method, its scope, were different from 
 theirs ; and while they were looking for him to 
 appear through the avoidance of death as the 
 Redeemer of Israel, he was preparing himself to 
 become, by yielding to death, the Redeemer of 
 the world. 
 
CHRIST GREATER THAN OUR THOUGHT. 2.03 
 
 And this suggests my topic, that from the 
 beginning of Christian history God has been 
 giving to men a concex)tion of Jesus Christ 
 which was greater and more than they had 
 thought him to be. Let us give our attention 
 for a little while to the consideration of it. It is 
 a fact as indisputable as it is unique that, since 
 Jesus Christ appeared in history, the thoughts 
 of men everywhere have been directed toward 
 him. All their aspirations have sooner or later 
 touched him, and all their inquiries of what- 
 ever sort, moral and intellectual, have found 
 their climax in him. It was but natural, there- 
 fore, that they should try to express, and in some 
 formal way, what they thought of him, who was 
 always somehow coming into their thought ; and 
 however much some persons to-day may be 
 averse to creeds, may de^Drecate their existence 
 — it was simply inevitable that they should ap- 
 pear, as in fact they have appeared in Chris- 
 tendom from the outset. 
 
 It is also a fact that none of these creeds have 
 been final, though men often thought that they 
 were and put them forth as such. But another 
 age has come with another line of inquiry run- 
 ning into and merging itself in another and richer 
 conception of Jesus Christ, and another creed has 
 
254 CHRIST GPwEATEE THAIST OUR THOUGHT. 
 
 appeared. The Apostolic symbol, or the Apos- 
 tles' creed, as we call it, however it came to be, 
 and which was at first quite enough, was by and 
 by developed into the Nicene Creed, as that again 
 was revised and supplemented "and made some- 
 what larger than it was in its primitive form. 
 And so the work went on, the earlier creed was 
 developed into and swallowed up in the later, 
 receiving new and further interpretation from it. 
 For a long time, I know, this process of l^creed- 
 development stopped, but then it was a time 
 when nearly all original thinking and investiga- 
 tion had stopped. During the Middle Ages — 
 the Dark Ages, as we sometimes call them — the 
 Church was almost at a standstill, or was simply 
 going round in its beaten path, threshing its old 
 straw over and over again and finding its moral 
 and spiritual food in its old conventional phrases, 
 that had become conventional husks. 
 
 When, however, at the time of the Renaissance, 
 Greece crossed the Alps and came into Western 
 Europe, a new activity came, new and strange 
 questions were started in men's minds, new forces 
 were liberated in society, new hopes, new aspira- 
 tions dawned, and a new horizon appeared. Then 
 it was, when the minds of men began to move and 
 work again, and to ask new questions and to i^ro- 
 
CHRIST GREATER THAN OUR THOUGHT. 255 
 
 ceed in new directions, that new doctrinal state- 
 ments concerning Jesus Christ and his truth 
 began to appear again. And it is a simple fact 
 of history that, during the short j)eriod of thirty 
 years, at the close of tlie Reformation, more 
 than twenty dogmatic Confessions of Faith were 
 added to the three great creeds which had here- 
 tofore sufficed for the whole of the Christian 
 world. And these creeds were put forth by men 
 who did not doubt the old ones, but who said to 
 themselves and said wisely, " The old ones need 
 further finish and statement to make them com- 
 prehensive and coordinate with the new and 
 additional facts, forces, thoughts, which the new 
 situation reveals." 
 
 And Avhat was the result ? Can any man fail 
 to see it, except him whose eyes are so blinded 
 by prejudice that he cannot see any fact which 
 makes against him, be it ever so clear ? What 
 was the result of all this theological and ecclesi- 
 astical ferment and discussion and controversy 
 at the time of the Reformation '? Christian faith 
 was not destroyed or hurt or weakened by it, but 
 strengthened rather, and helped. Jesus Christ 
 became not less to men, but more than ever 
 before ; doing more for them, a^Dpealing more to 
 them, quickening their zeal, deepening their love, 
 
253 CHRIST GKEATER THAN OUR THOUGHT. 
 
 expanding their vision of him — a richer, larger, 
 dearer Christ than men had thought him to be. 
 
 Thus, in looking back with a necessarily short 
 review over the history of Christendom, we find, 
 I say, this fact : that no one period in it has 
 given full and final statement concerning God 
 in Jesus Christ and the truth of God which he 
 revealed : but that from the outset, from the time 
 when he was looked upon by his first disciples 
 as the Redeemer of Israel only, he has been 
 coming to men as something larger and more 
 than the scope of their thought concerning him. 
 
 Well, men and women, shall we learn and profit 
 by this lesson of history — we who are living at 
 a time like that of the Renaissance ; when new 
 forces have been liberated in society, when new 
 facts have been disclosed by physical science, 
 when new and strange processes of thinking are 
 moving and working in men's minds ; shall we 
 profit by this lesson of^iistory ? Or must we 
 feel, as some do, that this "modern thought," as 
 it is termed, is hostile to Jesus Christ and the 
 truth he embodied and taught, and that, there- 
 fore, it is our duty to fight against and resist it ? 
 It seems to me that this, while zealous, would be 
 most unwise. 
 
 Old Ludovico Vives, Thomas Carlyle tells us, 
 
CHRIST GREATER THAN OUR THOUGHT. 267 
 
 relates tlie story of a countryman wlio fell afoul 
 Ills barnyard beast and slew it because, forsooth, it 
 had drunk up the moon ; but it was not the moon 
 which the beast had drunk up, but simply the 
 reflection of the moon in the countryman's own 
 poor water pail. This beast of "modern thought," 
 as some persons would characterize it, has not 
 destroyed Jesus Christ, is not undermining his 
 power over the heart and mind of the world, 
 though sometimes, perhaps, it appears to do so, 
 as did, I presume, the countryman's beast the 
 moon ; it is simply destroying some little piece, 
 or part, some little imperfect fragment, of our 
 reflection of Christ. 
 
 Has it not been so in our own past career ? 
 Have there not been some changes in our concep- 
 tion of Christ, and of the truth of God which he 
 taught and revealed ? I submit it to you, do you 
 hold precisely, and in all particulars, the faith 
 that you learned in your childhood ? Have you 
 made no progress in your interpretation of it ; 
 going down to its deeper depths, rising uj) and 
 scaling its higher heights, and giving wider scope 
 and horizon to it ? Then you have done no 
 thinking, and have been like the Church in the 
 Middle Ages — at a standstill. But that, I am 
 sure, has not been the case. How often have I 
 
258 CHRIST GREATER THAN OUR THOUGHT. 
 
 lieard men say : " We were brouglit up to believe 
 thus and so," and then they have tokl me stories 
 of what their teachers taught them, or their 
 fathers, good Christian men, made them do ; of 
 how tlieir minister preached and of the sermons 
 they used to hear, and how at times they were 
 frightened by them and kept awake at nights. 
 I am sure tliat must have been the case with 
 many in this congregation. 
 
 Well, would yon go back to them now ? Can 
 you go back to them now ? If you did, you would 
 find that they are not there ; that the old teach- 
 ers and preachers have themselves changed, and 
 that even the most conservative man has modified 
 to some extent — I should say, has grown in his 
 apprehension of the truth of God revealed in 
 Jesns Christ. And if it has been so, why should 
 it not be so again? Why should it not be so 
 now ? Is there any man prepared to say : "My 
 conception of Christ is perfect and entire, my 
 thought reflects him wholly, my creed reveals 
 him fully ; I know all that can be said about 
 him, and no one to-day or to-morrow can tell me 
 anything more" ? 
 
 And if he cannot say so, why should he not 
 listen to what to-day or to-morrow men may have 
 to tell him ? It may be something new, some- 
 
CHRIST GREATEE THAK OUR THOUGHT. 259 
 
 tiling strange and different from what he lias 
 held before ; it may modify and change a little 
 his previous way of thinking. But suppose it 
 does. You remember the story that Lecky tells, 
 in one of his books, of the prisoner into 
 whose cell the light came through a little 
 crack in the wall, and who remonstrated bit- 
 terly against the destruction of the wall be- 
 cause it would destroy the crack through which 
 the daylight came. Possibly some of us have 
 been looking at this wonderful Jesus Christ, 
 more wonderful than the richest and best thought, 
 through little cracks in the wall erected by 
 prejudice and j)repossession and denominational 
 zeal, and if it be the effect of what we call 
 "modern thought" to destroy the wall, the 
 ultimate result will be to make Jesus Christ, the 
 heart of history, the hope of the ages, the light 
 of the world, not something less, but something 
 greater and more. 
 
 And that I wish to make the burden of my 
 sermon to-day. I do not wish anyone to go 
 away this morning and say : "The preacher was 
 in sympathy with modern destructive criticism, 
 with all those who are trying to hurt or weaken 
 Christian faith." Ah, no ! If that were the 
 case, I would not only preach no sermon to-day, 
 
260 CHRIST GREATER THAN OUR THOUGHT. 
 
 but I would preach no sermon ever, and my 
 mouth would be closed. But my aim is just the 
 opposite of that ; my purpose is to make you feel, 
 as I do so strongly, that Jesus Christ is not less, 
 but more, than what we as yet have apprehended 
 him to be ; that he will become, through all this 
 ferment of modern discussion and criticism and 
 controversy a larger, richer, dearer Christ, and a 
 greater Redeemer and a more precious Saviour 
 to us. 
 
 No one, it seems to me, who has learned to 
 look at the present in the light of the past, 
 through the medium of an historic judgment, can 
 doubt that for a moment. Such an one does not 
 stand simply on the shifting sands of to-day, 
 but on the rock that is under to-day, and believ- 
 ing in the living God of history, and in his living 
 Christ, he stands securely there. The tempests 
 rage, the winds sweep and blow, the floods lift 
 up their waves — some little piece or fragment 
 that has obscured our outlook of this wonderful 
 Christ may be carried away ; it matters not, I 
 care not, for Christ is more and more, and will 
 become, more and more, the Helper, the Friend, 
 the Redeemer, the Saviour of mankind. 
 
 Do we not see some little sign in evidence of it 
 already ? Is there not coming to people to-day 
 
CHRIST GREATER THAW OUR THOUGHT. 261 
 
 that larger conception of Christ which is born of 
 personal loyalty and love ? What is the mean- 
 ing of that impatience with doctrinal preaching 
 which you and others express ? 
 
 What is the significance of the fact that the 
 preachers to-day do not and cannot make the 
 doctrines so prominent in preaching ? What 
 does it mean? Not that the old doctrines are 
 not good and at times helpful, of great service to 
 us and must be presented and taught, but that 
 love for Jesus Christ and loyalty to Jesus Christ 
 is something better and more. This, therefore, 
 above all else is what the Church to-day is trying 
 to iDromote : to make the great constituency of 
 its membership, the men and women who are 
 gathered in our congregations and the children 
 in our families and our Sunday schools, lovers 
 of Jesus Christ, the great, strong, and mighty 
 lover of human souls. Then with this love for 
 Christ in their hearts, the creeds will be no 
 obstacle and difficulty in their way. They will 
 look back over the creeds of Christendom, and 
 will be glad and rejoice that men in the past 
 have said such wonderful things about him ; will 
 feel that it has not been too strong, that it has 
 not been too much — oh, how can too much ever 
 be said of One whom more than life we love ! — • 
 
262 CHEIST GEEATER THAN OUR THOUGHT, 
 
 that it has not been enough, that it might have 
 been much more. Creeds and doctrines will not 
 become abstract propositions to them, to be dis- 
 cussed with controversial temper. They will go 
 to the heart of the creeds, will see that they are 
 but a testimony all too feeble of that personal 
 love and loyalty to Christ which they themselves 
 possess. Yes, this larger Christ is coming to 
 men to-day, and the world is beginning to see 
 that however good and true and valuable the 
 creeds may be, the Christ who touches the heart, 
 to whom the heart responds, who makes it aflame 
 with personal love and loyalty to himself, is 
 greater and better than they. 
 
 Is it not also being borne in upon the con- 
 sciousness of the Christian Church to-day that 
 Jesus Christ is not simply the Redeemer of 
 Israel, a choice and favored few, but that he is 
 the Redeemer of the world and the whole world ? 
 Is it not beginning more and more to appear that 
 the Christ of the rich and cultivated man is the 
 Christ of the illiterate and the poor ; that the 
 Christ of the capitalist and the millionaire is the 
 Christ of the laboring man and the pauper, of 
 the white man and the black, of the copper- 
 colored Mongolian and the red-faced Indian 
 savage? Is it not becoming evident that the 
 
CHRIST GREATER THAN OUR THOUGHT. 2G3 
 
 Christ of those who come from pleasant and 
 comfortable homes along our avenues to our 
 Episcopal churches is the Christ of those wlio 
 have no homes, who are wandering homeless 
 through our streets, or crowded into our tene- 
 ment houses and finding shelter there — the 
 Christ, not of the few, but the Redeemer of all ? 
 
 Sometimes we have thought, or some of us 
 have thought, that Christ indeed was to be the 
 Redeemer of America ; that the Christian reli- 
 gion was especially adapted to us but not fitted 
 exactly for other nations. But China is opening 
 her doors to-day, Japan is opening her doors, 
 the fields of India are white for the harvest, and 
 the Christ who is the Redeemer of the American 
 nation, we are more and more being driven to 
 see is the Redeemer of the world. 
 
 And finally, should not this very day with, its 
 sweet and holy associations and inspirations give 
 us this larger conception of Christ ? For I have 
 not forgotten that this is All Saints' Day — the 
 day of all the tribes and kindreds and nations 
 and tongues, as we heard just now in the Epistle. 
 The saints of all the ages, of all the lands, of all 
 the faiths we commemorate to-day ; the saints 
 of our household, and the saints of all the 
 households ; of the men and women everywhere 
 
264 CHRIST GREATER THAN OUR THOUGHT. 
 
 for whom Christ lived and died, and who lived 
 and died for him ; upon whom, as his true and 
 faithful witnesses, he has set his seal, and whom 
 now, their warfare over and their victory won, in 
 some bright and happy world he has gathered 
 around himself. By the inspiration of this fes- 
 tival day we are made to see that the Redeemer 
 of our little Israel is the Redeemer of the world. 
 This is the refrain which I have wanted you 
 to hear running through the sermon to-day, to 
 make you feel that Jesus Christ throughout all 
 the ages has been becoming more and more to 
 the world. May he become more and more to us, 
 unfolding to our hearts, as the years go quickly 
 by, a larger and richer vision of his own eternal 
 self! 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 Remeniber that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, according 
 to my gospel.— 2 Timothy ii. 8. 
 
 The gospel of the Resurrection which we 
 commemorate to-day was in an especial sense 
 the gospel preached by St. Paul, from which 
 he gathered his courage, his inspiration, his 
 hope, his brightest dreams for the future, and 
 to which, in all his writings, he gave the promi- 
 nent place. With the preaching of that gospel 
 he began his ministry and closed it, "I 
 delivered unto you first of all," he writes in 
 his earliest letter to the Corinthian Church, 
 "that which I also received, how that Jesus 
 Christ died for our sins and that he rose again." 
 And when, as Paul the aged, he is about to pass 
 away from the scene of his earthly warfare, in 
 writing to his son, Timothy, in the faith, he 
 gives the parting message as though it were the 
 thing which above all else he would have him 
 bear in mind: "Remember — remember that 
 Jesus Christ was raised from the dead," 
 
 That, I say, was the special message preached 
 
266 THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 by St. Paul, wliicli lie called his gospel, because 
 he preached it so often, and which this Easter 
 Day is preaching now to the world. It would 
 be enough, perhaps, to let the day itself 
 preach, and testify to the joy it inspires, and to 
 which, by blooming flower and brilliant color 
 and jubilant strains of music, we are trying to 
 give expression — to let the day itself preach, 
 and testify, by the joy it inspires, to the reality 
 of the fact and faith which it represents, thus 
 assuring our hearts that that which makes us all 
 so glad this Easter day certainly must be true. 
 
 But with the hope of confirming your faith in 
 it, let me try this morning to say a few things 
 about it, and first this : 
 
 The gospel of the Resurrection is not a new 
 gospel ; it is the natural outgrowth from the 
 Good Friday gospel. During the past week we 
 have been studying that gospel, and trying to 
 learn and take to heart the lesson which it 
 teaches, of the infinite love of God. That is the 
 Good Friday gospel — the gospel of the Cross ; 
 and a glorious gospel it is, in which, as we saw 
 last Sunday, St. Paul so much rejoiced. 
 
 See what follows from it. The tendency of 
 love, the desire of love, is to give the best 
 it can — to give its very life, its very selfj 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. 267 
 
 and tlie greater the love, tlie stronger is the 
 tendency and the greater the desire. We go to 
 one who is dear to us, and say, "Let me do 
 something for you. Are you in trouble ? Let 
 me help you to bear it. Are you in want ? Let 
 me supi^ly it. Do you stand in need of a friend 
 at this particular juncture, to serve you in your 
 distress? Let me be that friend," and how 
 grieved, how disax)pointed we are when we find 
 that we cannot be of any assistance to him. 
 That, I say, is the law, is the nature of love ; 
 nothing is too high, too costly for it, no sacrifice 
 too great ; it delights, it revels in sacrifice, and 
 is forever trying to give its joy, its substance, 
 its life, to those who call it forth. 
 
 Men and women, is it not so ? If, then, the 
 love of God be anything like our own, it must 
 have that same inclination in it, and be spon- 
 taneously actuated by that same desire. But 
 the love of God, while like our own, is very 
 much greater than ours. It is an eternal love. 
 'No amount of human sin, so Good Friday 
 taught us, can overcome and destroy it. It 
 meets it at its worst, its highest point of develop- 
 ment, feels its full malignity, suffers all it can 
 do, all the pain it can inflict, the insult which it 
 can offer, mockery, scourging, shame, yet gets 
 
268 THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 the victory over it. Waters cannot qnencli it ; 
 waves cannot drown it ; flames cannot consume 
 it. It is an eternal, an inexhaustible love, and 
 therefore must — it is a necessity — be forever 
 trying to give its own eternal life to men. 
 
 So we see how the gospel of the Resurrection 
 seems to spring by a natural outgrowth from the 
 gospel of Good Friday, and Easter is written 
 upon the Cross. 
 
 Again, it is the instinct, — those of you who 
 know what love is know that it is so, — it is the 
 instinct, it is the nature of one who loves to 
 keep forever near him the persons whom he 
 loves. "Father, I will that those whom thou 
 hast given me be with me where I am." That is 
 the voice, not only of the love of Jesus Christ ; 
 it is the voice of all love. That is the way in 
 which it always speaks. Can you not under- 
 stand it? Has it not often so spoken in your 
 hearts? Is it not so speaking in the hearts of 
 men and women to-day all over the face of the 
 earth? It is the burden of the prayer that is 
 going up from the bedside where love is kneel- 
 ing down and saying in behalf of those who are 
 lying there and upon whom the shadow of death 
 is falling, "I will that those whom thou hast 
 given me be with me where I am." 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION, 269 
 
 Tliat is wliat love is always trying to do ; to 
 gather tliose around itself upon whom it is 
 bestowed, and to keep tliem there, and whose 
 utterance to this effect we are made to hear 
 wherever love prevails ; in the circle of friend- 
 ship, in the family life, in the household re- 
 unions on the anniversary days — "that those 
 whom thou hast given me be with me where I 
 am." At the baj^tismal font, where the parent 
 tries to fold his child more closely to his heart, 
 to bring it more intimately into that Christian 
 faith where he himself is standing ; at the mar- 
 riage altar, where the holy union is formed which 
 only an act of God or an act of treachery can 
 break ; at the open grave, where love is stronger 
 than death, where it cannot help protesting, as 
 against an unnatural thing, at the severance 
 which death has made ; yes, everywhere, on 
 every occasion, where love lights up and warms 
 the heart, this is the voice we hear : "That those 
 whom thou hast given me be with me where I 
 am." 
 
 Again I say, men and women, that if the love 
 of God be anything like our own, if it be love at 
 all in any legitimate sense of the term, it must 
 feel as we do, and have the same desire (or it is 
 not love) to keep the life that it loves forever 
 
270 THE GOSPEL OF THE- KESUKRECTION. 
 
 near it and to hold it fast. It was in the con- 
 fident assurance of that eternal love, because he 
 felt it more than we, and saw more deeply into 
 its own essential nature, that Jesus Christ 
 declared, "My sheep hear my voice and they 
 shall never perish ; nothing shall pluck them 
 out of my father's hand, who loves them, and he 
 will keep them near himself and hold them 
 fast." 
 
 So again I say the Resurrection gospel comes 
 out of the Good Friday gospel, and Easter is 
 written on the Cross. 
 
 Our survival of death, therefore, resolves itself 
 simply into a question of God's ability. We 
 know that he does desire to keep us fast, and 
 not to let us perish, because he loves us. That 
 is the nature of love, the one thing in ethics of 
 which we can be sure, as of a demonstration ; 
 that is the nature of love. 
 
 God does desire to keep us and to hold us fast 
 and not to let us perish. The question is. Can 
 he do it ? and when it comes to that "can he do 
 it ?" — the God, whose power is so great that we 
 can trace no boundary around it, can set no limit 
 to it, and of which we are forced to say that it is 
 an immeasurable powder — when that becomes the 
 question, it is no longer a question. Yes, and 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. 271 
 
 more tlian tliat ; it resolves itself simply into a 
 question of God's existence. For every instinct 
 of the human heart, apart from the teaching of 
 religion, tells us that God is supremely good. 
 There can be no other God than a good God, 
 and what is goodness but love ? and it is this 
 belief of man in infinite goodness or love, com- 
 bined with infinite power, which has inspired his 
 heart with the inextinguishable hope of an im- 
 mortal life, and which the Resurrection of Jesus 
 Christ confirms. 
 
 It is not necessary, therefore, that we should 
 go to-day into questions of historical evi- 
 dence to prove the Resurrection of Jesus Christ 
 from the dead, although such evidence exists and 
 abounds. There is first the undoubted fact that 
 immediately after the crushing disappointment 
 of the Crucifixion, some events did occur which 
 suddenly gave a joyful animation and a wide 
 expansion to the whole Christian Church. Then 
 we have the testimony of all the disciples that 
 that event was nothing less than the Resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus Christ from the dead, and then 
 again, there is no other competing theory upon 
 the subject that has stood the test of critical 
 examination or that is worthy of a moment's 
 consideration. 
 
272 THE GOSPEL OF THE RESUREECTION. 
 
 But these are questions wliich all persons are 
 not qualified to entertain and to debate ; neither 
 is it necessary. Believe in the eternal love of 
 God, and the Eesurrection of Jesus Christ from 
 the dead, instead of seeming to you an improba- 
 ble thing, with many presumptions against it,, 
 will be in the line of what you are led to expect. 
 
 With that inward temper and predisposition 
 toward it, the evidences which have come down 
 will be full and ample, and more than sufficient 
 for you. Without that inward temper and pre- 
 disjposition toward it, no amount of historical 
 evidence would convince you, even though one 
 should rise from the dead this Easter Day before 
 your very eyes. You would say that he was 
 simply awakened from a trance, or that there 
 was some illusion in it. 
 
 " People as a rule do not believe a thing," 
 says Professor Mozley, "on the strength of 
 external evidence alone." There must be some 
 sympathy, some kindred feeling for it, or they 
 cannot come into the persuasion or even api3reci- 
 ation of it. If Columbus had not had in him 
 the spirit of discovery, to use Dr. Mozley' s illus- 
 tration, he would never have seen the evidences 
 which he did see in behalf of a western hemi- 
 sphere lying beyond tho hitherto trackless 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE EESURRECTION. 273 
 
 waters, could never have rightly interpreted the 
 different scattered facts which threw some light 
 upon it, and which bore in upon his mind the 
 conviction that the continent was there. And it 
 is only when we have that spirit of eternal love 
 in our hearts which we have been commemorating 
 during the past week that we can appreciate at 
 their full worth and value the historical evi- 
 dences that have come down to us in behalf of 
 the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 
 and believe that eternal love has given eternal life. 
 And now, having tried to show you that the 
 gospel of the Resurrection comes out of the 
 Good Friday gospel, let me proceed as briefly as 
 I can to speak of the blessedness of that gospel, 
 and of the glory which it throws around this 
 mortal span of our earthly life. I am not dis- 
 posed to depreciate the importance and blessed- 
 ness of this earthly life. I certainly do not 
 think that our time here should be spent in the 
 absorbing contemplation of the hereafter, and 
 that all the pleasures of existence in this world 
 should be surrendered by us as though they 
 were of no account. They are of much account. 
 It is a glorious world. Can a man open his eyes 
 in it this bright Easter morning and not believe 
 it ? God made it. 
 
274 THE GOSPEL OF THE UESUREECTION. 
 
 It is a glorious thing simply to be alive, to feel 
 strength and vigor bounding through our frames, 
 to grow in heart and mind, and enrich ourselves 
 with affection, to see new forms of beauty, to 
 catch new visions of right, to come into contact 
 more and more with truth, to rejoice in the 
 splendid conquests over his earthly environment 
 which the spirit of man has effected, to behold 
 from year to year, almost from day to day, a 
 better knowledge, a higher wisdom, a fuller 
 light, streaming in upon him and giving thereby 
 a wider horizon to him. 
 
 It is a glorious thing just to be alive. But, 
 ah ! how much more glorious it is when we know 
 that the life in which we rejoice will go on and 
 not die ; that when this house of clay, beau- 
 tifully and wonderfully made, yet this house 
 of clay shall have |been taken down ; when it 
 shall have become too fragile and weather-beaten 
 by the storms of earth to hold us any more, 
 we shall not be cast out to perish, but shall sim- 
 ply move on into some better and roomier house 
 which the eternal love that holds us fast has 
 provided for us. It is sweet and good to live, 
 but how much sweeter and better when we know 
 that what we call death will be merely a letting 
 go of that which we can no longer hold, a casting 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE KESURKECTION. 275 
 
 off of that which can no longer serve us, a going 
 out from that which is but a prison door, and 
 when everything that is mortal about us will 
 be swallowed up in the more abundant life. 
 
 What a much more glorious thing is that, and 
 what glory does it give to our earthly life ! 
 
 Again, while it would still be our duty, even 
 if there Avere no prospect of another world, to 
 live a high and noble life, — no man can question 
 that, — to do justly, to love mercy, to live purely, 
 to meet with a brave and resolute front the 
 difficulties of our lot, and to take an earnest and 
 active part in all humanitarian and educational 
 work ; how much more efficiently will we perform 
 that duty in the light of the Easter hope ? While 
 it would still be our duty to put our shoulder 
 to the chariot wheel of human progress when 
 it drags heavily, to do all in our power for the 
 advancement and enlightenment of our fellow- 
 men and to make both ourselves and the world 
 as pure and bright and fair as we possibly 
 could, yet how much more bravely will we 
 enter upon that duty, and how much more 
 efficiently will we X)erform it, when the broad 
 bright arch of an eternal life is stretched over 
 our heads and light from heaven shines upon 
 our path ! 
 
276 THE GOSPEL OF THE UESURRECTION". 
 
 It is the duty of the mariner to carry his ves- 
 sel across the waters. His duty is on the ship, 
 and he must not let it go without him. He 
 must keep it balanced and trimmed, and stand 
 at the post of dangei ; must protect the varied 
 interests which have been committed to him, and 
 at the cost of his life, must try to conduct them 
 in safety to the haven where they would be. His 
 duty is on the ship. But, ah ! how much more 
 efficiently will he perform his duty, how much 
 stouter his heart, how much higher his courage, 
 how much greater the confidence which he pos- 
 sesses in himself and which he inspires in others, 
 how much more intelligent his commands, when 
 from time to time he can look at the heavens 
 above him and find from the lights that are 
 shining there the path upon the watery waste 
 in which the vessel should move, and in which 
 through storm and wind and wave, he is trying 
 to guide and keep it ! 
 
 So does the glad gospel of this Easter Day, and 
 the bright vision which it gives of an eternal life, 
 put new courage, new strength, new intelligence 
 into our task. Can any man doubt it ? Does it 
 not take the efforts which we make in this world 
 in behalf of our fellow-men, transfigure them 
 with its brightness, ennoble them with its far- 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. 277 
 
 reaching outlook, and throw a new glory around 
 them? 
 
 And yet again, what a great and glorious thing 
 is human love ! How empty, how sad, Iioav dark 
 the world without it ! It is the light that shines 
 upon lis to guide us on our way and illumine the 
 clouds about us ; our shelter from the stormy 
 blast, our refuge and our home. It sweetens 
 the bitterest cup, it eases the heaviest burden, it 
 lightens the darkest day. It gives to the heart 
 in which it dwells a joy like heaven itself, and 
 although it also gives at times sorrow as deep 
 and strong as the joy was high and great, it is 
 still the best and sweetest and dearest thing 
 on earth. But how much sweeter and better 
 does it become when we know that the grave 
 is not its prison house, that death is not its 
 destroyer, that it is ours not only here and now, 
 but ours forever, and that somewhere, somehow, 
 sometime, w^e shall find what we have lost ! 
 
 Life, duty, love — these are glorious words, 
 none higher in human speech. But how much 
 more glorious do they become when they are 
 given back and interpreted to us in the light 
 of that eternal hope which this Easter Day 
 inspires ! How much more glorious, how much 
 more clear, does everything become ! In the 
 
278 THE GOSPEL OF THE KESURRECTION. 
 
 light of that hope we can understand our- 
 selves as we cannot without it — as no man can 
 without it. Those deep and earnest longings 
 which spring up in the heart only so often to be 
 defeated and crushed, those yearnings and aspira- 
 tions which seem to come from some eternal 
 source, and to which we try to give utterance 
 by art and beauty and song, but which we 
 cannot fully in any of these ways express ; it is 
 only in the light of that eternal hope which 
 this Easter Day inspires that we can interpret 
 ourselves to ourselves and know what we really 
 mean, and what we really are. 
 
 Then fill the churches with flowers, and let the 
 arches ring with the carols of children's praise, 
 and the most triumphant peals of music which 
 the genius of man has insi:>ired; let everything 
 that is beautiful and cheerful and bright be 
 called upon to express the joy that is in our 
 hearts to-day. Oh, earth, earth, earth! hear 
 the word of the Lord upon this Easter Day. In 
 all your duties and tasks, your joys, your sor- 
 rows, your ambitions, oh, men and women! 
 remember, remember, that "Jesus Christ was 
 raised from the dead," and that eternal love — it 
 must be so— has given eternal life. 
 
i 
 
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