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 PRmCETON, N. J. % '^'*' 
 
 BX 7233 .B76 H5 1883 
 \ , Brown, James Baldwin, 1820- 
 ■ll 1884. 
 5/,.//......" The higher life: its 
 
 .^reality, experience , „and — 
 
THE HIGHER LIFE 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF ANNIHILATION IN THE 
 LIGHT OF THE GOSPEL OF LOVE. 
 
 Five Discourses. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 
 price Q.s. 6d. 
 
 " From nothing that we have seen or heard of Mr. Baldwin Brown's 
 have we received such an impression of intellectual and moral 
 power as from the second, third, and fourth of these discourses." — 
 Nonconformist. 
 
 " The special object of Mr. Baldwin Brown's lectures is to confute 
 a school which preaches in one form or another that Christ offered 
 immortality only to those who believed in Him and obtained new 
 life in Him, and that for all others is reserved the fate of an annihi- 
 lation which is as much due to the operation of natural laws as is 
 the annihilation of the lower animals. "^Spectator. 
 
 London : Kegan P.\ul, Trench, & Co., i. Paternoster Sq. 
 
THE HIGHER LIFE 
 
 ITS REALITY, EXPERIENCE, AND DESTINY 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 
 JAMES BALDWIN ^BROWN, B.A. 
 
 MINISTER OF BRIXTON INDEPENDENT CHURCH 
 AUTHOR OF 'the HOME LIFE' 'FIRST PRINCIPLES OF ECCLESIASTICAL TRITH 
 
 ' Nor must we, as some advise us, being but men, think only of 
 tlie things of men, being transient, of transient things; but as far as 
 in us lies we must live the immortal life '—Aristotle 
 
 For our citizenship is in the heavens' — Paul 
 
 SIXTH EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., i, Paternoster Square 
 
 1887 
 
\The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved?^ 
 
TO 
 
 MY DEAR DAUGHTER 
 
 MY LOVING AND DEVOTED HELPER 
 IN MY MINISTRY 
 
 I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK 
 
 ON 
 
 THE HIGHER LIFE 
 
 J. B. B. 
 
X 
 
 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 I SEND FORTH this book on The Higher Life, in the 
 hope that it may help some, especially among the 
 young, to hold fast their faith in the great facts and 
 truths, which alone seem to me to make this life of 
 ours worth living at all. The elder Mill, as we learn 
 from the autobiography of his distinguished son, re- 
 jected " all that is called religious belief." It does 
 not surprise one to learn further, that " he thought 
 human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness 
 of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by." 
 I fear that there is a large class of cultivated men 
 and women among us who are falling into the same 
 unbelief, and into the sadness which is its inevitable 
 fruit. If what I have written should afford any help 
 to such against this pressure of the times, the labour 
 which it has cost will be amply repaid. 
 
 The sermons, as will be seen, do not form any- 
 thing like a consecutive argument. Each has a com- 
 pleteness of its own, and a definite theme ; yet they 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 form a course of connected thought on the subject 
 of The Higher Life, its reaUty, its experience, and 
 its destiny. 
 
 In the earher chapters I have glanced at some of 
 the recent speculations of science, in which solutions 
 have been offered of the mysterious problems of 
 Creation, which theologians, as a rule, have fiercely 
 assailed. It seems to me that if we consider them 
 patiently, and let development " have its perfect 
 work," they may open to us a larger vision of the 
 way of God in the creation and the government of 
 His world. The chapters which follow deal mainly 
 with the higher Christian experience, and the spirit 
 which Christianity seeks to quicken and to nourish 
 in men. God forbid that the Church should ever be 
 unmindful of the larre blessing- which intellectual 
 culture and political activity bring in their train. 
 There are periods in which this side of human de- 
 velopment needs to be vigorously pushed forward. 
 But in these days it seems well able to care for 
 itself; while the side of man's nature and activity 
 to which the Cross appeals, is in danger of being 
 slighted, and thrust out of the field. But none 
 the less is it the salt of the world's life in all ages, 
 and will be, while the world endures. In treat- 
 ing of this portion of my subject, I have dropped 
 for the most part, all reference to current controver- 
 sies ; while in the closing chapters I have brought 
 
Pi^eface. ix 
 
 back the thread of my thoughts, to the questions 
 which are in such eager debate among us, once 
 more. 
 
 Each sermon, as I have said, has a certain com- 
 pleteness of its own ; and, as a book Hke this is 
 mostly read in sections, I have not been over studi- 
 ous to avoid the presentation of central ideas again 
 and again, from different points of view, and often 
 with the same illustrations from Scripture. I have 
 used in quotation the authorized version, except where 
 my argument rendered a more accurate translation 
 needful ; and throughout the book I have kept steadily 
 in view, the difficulties, burdens, and needs of those 
 who are hardly pressed by the battle, or sharply 
 exercised by the discipline, of life. 
 
 J. Baldwin Brown. 
 
 Kent Villa, Brixton Hill: 
 March, 1874. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 FAGB 
 
 I. WHAT IS MAN? i 
 
 " What is ManV Ps. viii. 4. 
 
 II. THE UNIVERSAL TRAVAIL 25 
 
 " We know that the whole Creation groaneth and travaileth in 
 pain together until now. " Rom. viii. 22. 
 
 III. THE ATHEISTIC LIFE 49 
 
 " Having no hope, and without God in the world." Eph. ii. 12. 
 
 IV. THE MEANING OF REDEMPTION .... 70 
 
 ' ' / have called you friends. " John xv. 1 5. 
 
 V. THE PAIN OF PROGRESS 92 
 
 ^^ Thy heart shall fear and be enlarged." Is. Ix. 5. 
 
 VL THE LORD IS MY LIGHT AND MY SALVATION . 114 
 
 '■'■ The Lord is 7ny light and 7ny salvation, whom shall I fear? 
 The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall / be afraid ? " 
 Ps. xxvii. I. 
 
 VII, GOD'S GREAT WORLD ... . . 131 
 
 " ILe brought me forth also into a large place." 2. Sam. xxii. 20. 
 
xii Contents. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 VIII. THE PILGRIMS 150 
 
 ' ' For they that say such things, declare plainly that they seek a 
 country.'''' Heb. xi. 14. 
 
 IX. THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS . . .169 
 
 " And ye beca?}ie followers of us, and of the Lord, having received 
 the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost.'''' 
 I. Thes. i. 6. 
 
 X. THE TWO SORROWS 185 
 
 ^^ For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for 
 well doing t/ian for evil doing." i Pet. iii. 17. 
 
 XL THE SACRED DARKNESS 205 
 
 ' ' Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the 
 voice of His servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no 
 light ? Let him trust in the name af the Lord, and stay upon 
 his God." Is. 1. 10. 
 
 XII. THE SACRED JOY 227 
 
 '■^ As the sufferings of Christ aboicnd in us, so our consolation 
 also aboundeth by Christ.''^ 2 Cor. i. 5. 
 
 XIII. THE GARDEN BY THE CROSS . . . .248 
 
 '■'■Now in the place where He was crucified there was a 
 ." John xix. 41. 
 
 XIV. OH, THAT I HAD WINGS LIKE A DOVE . . 266 
 
 " Oh, that L had zvings like a dove! for then would L fly away 
 and be at rest." Ps. Iv. 6. 
 
 XV. FAINT, YET PURSUING 288 
 
 ^^ Faint, yet pursuing them." Judg. viii. 4. 
 
Contents. 
 
 Xlll 
 
 XVI. THE VICTORY OF LIFE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ^' I am He that liveih and was dead ; and, behold, I am alive 
 for ever mover Rev. i. 18. 
 
 XVII. THE KEYS OF HELL AND OF DEATH . .321 
 " /ivien : and have the keys of hell and of death.'''' Rev. i. 18. 
 
 XVIIL THE RESURRECTION OF MAN . . . .338 
 
 " But nozu is Chnst risen f-om the dead, and become the first- 
 fruits of them that slept. For siitce by man came death, 
 by man came also the resurrection of the dead." i Cor. xv. 
 20, 21. 
 
 XIX. THE DESTINY OF THE CREATURE . . .364 
 
 " The creature itself also shall be delivered f-om the bondage of 
 co7'iiiption into the glorious liberty of the children of^God." 
 Rom. viii. 21, 
 
 XX. THE DESTINY OF MAN 387 
 
 '* What is man that Thou art mindful of him ? and tlie Ton 
 of man that Thou visiles t him\?" Ps. viii. 4. 
 
•I )i iB83 \ 
 
 THE HIGHER LIFE, 
 
 I. 
 
 WHAT IS MAN? 
 
 The Scripture sets man before us as a beinyf 
 whom his Maker cares to redeem at quite infinite 
 cost. This affords to us the one true measure 
 of the quahty of our nature, and assigns its place 
 in the scale of the Creation : it is Heaven's own 
 answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, 
 What is man ? The Bible, happily for us, is not 
 a book of definitions. It offers little that can be 
 regarded as a scientific elucidation of the dark 
 problems of Being, human or Divine. I ts concern 
 is supremely with man "in relation;" as bound in 
 duty to the Creation around him, to his fellow men 
 and to God. The chief part of it is history, and it 
 is the history of Redemption. From the first act of 
 the Divine drama in the hour of man's transgression, 
 to the vision of the purified and perfected Creation 
 which is unveiled in the Apocalypse, it treats of the 
 world as the theatre of Redemption, and of man as 
 a being born to be redeemed. 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 Whatever man may be in his interior structure 
 end constitution, by whatever stages of development 
 he may have attained to his present goodly stature 
 and power, thus much is clear about him to the 
 loving students of Scripture ; he is a being whose 
 redemption, whose salvation from the pit into v/hich 
 moral evil steadily settles and buries itself from the 
 light, is held on high to be worth the agony anc 
 bloody sweat, the cross and passion, the precious 
 death and burial, the glorious resurrection and as- 
 cension, of his Redeemer, Christ. 
 
 This is the central thought of this series of dis- 
 courses on the higher life, and the travail through 
 which it is born. Some of them are more sp^:ula- 
 tive ; some of them are directly practical in tone ; 
 but I seek to develope through the whole of them 
 the ground of my belief, that the redemption which 
 is by Christ Jesus is the one key to all that man is 
 and to all that man endures. I hold that the existence 
 of such a world as this, and such a creature as man 
 has come to be through sin, would be a burning 
 stain on the government of the righteous Ruler of 
 the universe, but for the end to which it is working 
 through Redemption ; while in the light which the 
 gospel of God's love and mercy casts upon the world, 
 life, with all its pain, becomes a holy and blessed 
 culture, binding man to God in a fellowship of in- 
 terest and spirit, which is destined to furnish the 
 highest developments of being through eternity. 
 
 I can see no light about man, about his capacities, 
 his experiences, and the possibilities of his life, except 
 
What is Man f 
 
 when I regard him as a being born to be redeemed. 
 I can see no Hght about Hfe, its broken promises, its 
 poor fulfilments, its frustrated hopes, its ideal always 
 far up in the height, except when I regard it as a 
 redeeming process, which earth commences in pain 
 and travail, but which heaven will complete in glorious 
 joy. This is why I believe the Bible. It is a light 
 shining for me in a dark place ; it lights up man, it 
 lights up life, it lights up God. And the light seems 
 to be of heaven. All thingrs within and all things 
 around, when I look at them in the lieht of the love 
 of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, rcoolve 
 themselves into an order, which, obscure as is much 
 of its method, and sad as is much of its aspect, I 
 joyfully recognise as Divine. It commends itself as 
 "of God" to the purest and justest judgment which 
 I can frame of Divine things ; while it lays the basis 
 of an intelligent hope for myself and for the world 
 which justifies patience and sanctifies pain. There- 
 fore, I believe. 
 
 Rob me of this faith, give me such a world to live 
 in as some of our wise ones are doing their best to 
 make for us, and the only question of supreme 
 interest would be, which is the quickest and the 
 easiest way out of it into the everlasting night ? 
 
 There are certain views as to the nature of man, 
 as to his place in the Creation, and the way in which 
 it becomes him to look at his life, which are kept 
 very prominently before the eye of the intellectual 
 world in our day by able thinkers, who state them 
 with great force, and with an earnestness of con- 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 viction and contention, for which there seems to be 
 little room in the pale of their narrow and cold phi- 
 losophy. 
 
 The grounds on which we base our view of 
 man, of his relations and his destiny, are to them 
 simply non-existent, or at least non-apparent, and 
 not capable of being made to appear. God, Revela- 
 tion, Redemption, to them belong to the world of 
 dreams. Man is to their apprehension the last and 
 completest product of that organising principle or force 
 which somehow — that is all that they can say about 
 it at present — has introduced itself into the inorganic 
 matter of the world, and behold it lives ! it becomes 
 plastic at once to the inward pressure of the vital 
 principle, and reveals a capacity for the assumption 
 of an inconceivable variety of organic forms. These 
 shape themselves, we are instructed, under the stress 
 of constant pressure, collision, and struggle for exist- 
 ence ; in which the strongest, or rather the fittest, 
 the best adapted to the external conditions prevailing 
 around, survives and perpetuates itself. Thus there 
 rises in the Creation an ascending series of specific 
 forms, order rising out of and resting upon order, 
 each more complex in structure and manifold in 
 function than that on which it rests, until passing 
 through countless stashes of evolution, the series 
 emerges and completes itself in man. 
 
 Man, according to this view of Nature, is simply 
 the most complex, the most capable, and the most 
 largely developed of the creatures. But all the hu- 
 man faculties and qualities, judgments, emotions, 
 
What is Alan f 
 
 passions and volitions, are held to be but the highest 
 functions of kindred qualities and capacities which 
 are found in the lower stages of Creation. This 
 school can find no sufficient evidence of a breach of 
 continuity in the chain of evolution, from the lowest 
 organism which manifests vital functions — some are 
 bolder yet, and include the inorganic — to the genius 
 that created Hamlet, or read the secret order of the 
 stars. 
 
 Reason and will, the distinctive human endow- 
 ments in the popular judgment of all ages, are, 
 in this scheme, but the highest function of that finest 
 form of matter which enters into the composition of 
 the human structure ; '' ohne PJwsphor, kein Gedanke^' 
 without phosphorus, no thought : volition being 
 equally the evolution of that battery of material ele- 
 ments in man's bodily organisation, on which the 
 unseen currents are ever playing ; motion having its 
 key in the chemical constituents of his nature ; all 
 that he is, all that he does, all that he can become, 
 being as surely settled by the arrangements of 
 the particles of his frame and their relation to the 
 currents of force around him, as are settled, on the 
 same basis and with the same certainty, the track of 
 a storm or the path of a star. 
 
 For such a being, if this be the true account of 
 man's nature, Redemption can have no meaning, for 
 there is absolutely nothing to redeem. His every 
 act and every state is under the calm resistless rule 
 of that law which maintains all the "sequences" of 
 the Creation ; to make man other than he is and must 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 be, would be to break up the whole order of the 
 world. 
 
 I am very far from connecting what Is called the 
 theory of evolution as a means of accounting for the 
 infinite variety and yet the perfect order of the de- 
 velopments of life, with a materialistic or atheistic 
 philosophy. The two have unhappily been closely 
 associated, and mainly, I think, from two causes. 
 The first is the eagerness with which thinkers of the 
 atheistic school have seized upon it, and sought to 
 claim it as their own ; the second, and I think the 
 main cause of this evil association, has been the im- 
 provident and, indeed, insane dread of the theologians. 
 They have to thank themselves if this attractive 
 theory is supposed popularly to favour their oppo- 
 nents. How much of the atheism of this age, and 
 of every age, is generated by the antagonism and de- 
 nunciation of the Church, is a question which, while 
 it fills one with shame, is not unsuggestive of hope. 
 When the Church grows less fearful, more faithful 
 and more far-sighted, we may believe that atheism 
 will disappear from the world. 
 
 But there is no necessary, or even I venture to 
 think, natural antipathy between evolution and a 
 sound Christian philosophy. Conservative thinkers 
 are beginning to acknowledge that this law of evolu- 
 tion plays a very distinguished part in the ordering 
 of the majestic procession of life. At the same time, 
 the gap between man and the lower animals is, in the 
 judgment of accomplished students of nature, yet un- 
 bridged, and is not even in process of being bridged 
 
What is Man ? 
 
 Nothing' is established which destroys the belief that 
 man's body reveals the direct, original touch of a 
 creative hand, I do not presume to offer a decisive 
 judgment on a point which it needs very deep and 
 accurate scientific knowledge even to appreciate. 
 Whether the views which have been stated with such 
 learning and force by Mr. Wallace are right, or those 
 which follow the direction of Mr. Darwin's book on 
 the " Descent of Man," I do not attempt to decide. 
 I can only say, that, as far as I am able to judge, 
 Mr. Darwin's case seems very far from proved. 
 
 But it can hardly be denied that the course of 
 modern scientific thought and discovery seems to be 
 in the main following the track which Mr. Darwin has 
 opened. It may find its limit speedily, and science 
 may uphold the received theological ideas. But it 
 is, at any rate, quite possible that we may have to 
 accept it as a settled truth, that the human form has 
 been developed, by a process of natural evolution (not 
 natural selection, that could only have been one of 
 the principles at work), out of the highest types of 
 form in the animal creation, and that man began his 
 career in this world in a condition but a very little 
 raised above the brutes. It is not proved ; I have 
 no idea that it can be proved ; but if it should be 
 proved, it may open to us a new and very wonderful 
 vision of the way of God in the creation and the 
 ruling of the world. 
 
 There is a stage In which the human embryo 
 cannot be distinguished from the embryos of the 
 lower orders of the Creation ; there Is a stage at 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 which, by some process which utterly evades us, it 
 becomes distinctively human ; and there is a further 
 stage in the development of the infant, in which 
 the higher qualities of our nature unfold themselves 
 in their full spiritual form, and are dealt with as the 
 ruling powers in the house of life. It is possible 
 that this may prove to be an image on a small scale 
 of the travail of the Creation ; there may be a work- 
 ing through all the stages of creature development 
 up to the human, and a point — it has never been dis- 
 covered as yet, nor has anything near to it — at which 
 this creature which has shaped itself through the 
 inward and outward pressure to the likeness of the 
 human, becomes distinctly Man. 
 
 There is really nothing to startle or to frighten 
 us in this doctrine of a law of evolution, of which 
 natural selection will be one of the factors, and but 
 one, which are at work. The doctrine will accord 
 with an intelligent Christian theory of life. It is 
 evolution by chance medley, as It were, which seems 
 so absolutely incredible, things chancing to settle them- 
 selves by Internecine struggle Into this wonderful 
 cosmos. An intelligible theory of evolution seems 
 to demand a forecasting Intelligence behind it. We 
 seem to be brought face to face with a far-seeing 
 mind and a far-reaching will, when we catch the first 
 sign of an outward and upward pressure in the 
 primal matter of the Creation, which, through In- 
 numerable ascending stages, was to issue forth at 
 last in the human race. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the Idea, were we 
 
What is Man f g 
 
 bound to accept it, would give a grievous shock to our 
 popular theological notions. We should have to 
 re-read the third, as we have had to re-read the first 
 chapter of the book of Genesis. We have come to 
 find in the one an ideal picture of the Creation, the 
 essential tiuth of the matter to the eye of a spirit, 
 seeking a principle of order, of cosmos, and seeking 
 the means of connecting that order with God. The 
 first chapter of Genesis means more and not less 
 to us than it meant a generation ago, before the light 
 of science was brought fairly to bear upon it. Just 
 so, if this new idea can be established, shall we find 
 in the third chapter an ideal portrait of man in his 
 spiritual and Divine relations, a revelation of the 
 meaning of life and of the principle of moral develop- 
 ment, to the full understanding of which he is meant 
 to grow ; a picture painted by God's own hand to 
 light the path of man's pilgrimage, to sustain his soul 
 in that higher region of spiritual freedom to which 
 he has found entrance, and to explain to him, as his 
 Maker only could explain to him, the profoundest 
 mysteries of his life. But there is nothing incon- 
 sistent with the fundamental truths of Christianity 
 in this or in any intelligent theory of the way in 
 which man's physical system was developed out of 
 the dust, and made capable of the reception and 
 manifestation of that reasonable soul which relates 
 him with a loftier sphere. Being found in form as a 
 man, he belongs to the world of spiritual intelligence 
 and activity ; the qualities which foreshadow reason 
 and will, which he shares with the animal creation, 
 
lO The Higher Life. 
 
 become absorbed in the superior powers ; and the 
 spiritual facts which find a continually clearer fore- 
 cast through the ascending types of the Creation, as 
 the organs are growingly perfected of which a spirit 
 alone can make full use, Reason, Will, and Moral 
 responsibility, rule thenceforth supreme over his life. 
 There is a kindred theory of moral development, 
 which might fairly be called the theory of moral 
 evolution, which resolves into an inheritance of the 
 accumulated experience of the race as regards the 
 utility of actions, those moral judgments and habits 
 which we are wont to regard as the siens of the 
 presence in man of a spiritual nature, having know- 
 ledge of good and evil ; by the possession of which 
 he is distinguished absolutely from the lower spheres 
 of the Creation, and related to the spheres above 
 him and to God. Just as we are assured by physio- 
 logists of this school, and they have evidently much 
 truth on their side, that the instinct of animals is but 
 accumulated and transmitted experience, which has 
 shaped itself into a habit of action, useful to the 
 creature for its protection, or for the fulfilment of 
 the functions of its life ; so we are told that in the 
 matter of man's moral judgments and emotions, " the 
 experiences of utility, organised and consolidated 
 through all past generations of the human race, have 
 been producing corresponding nervous modifications, 
 which by continued transmissions of accumulation, 
 have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition, 
 active emotions responding to right and wrong 
 conduct, which have no apparent basis in the indi- 
 
What is Man? ii 
 
 vidua] experiences of utility." These moral intuitions 
 an intelligent and conscious being comes to regard 
 as having a sanction in the constitution of things 
 outside him, and in the nature and will of an 
 Almighty Being above him ; their only real sanction 
 being their utility, their adaptation to the preserva- 
 tion and the welfare of society. But it is acknow- 
 ledged that at length man comes, and ought to come, 
 to lose sight of this relation of utility, that is, of that 
 which is regarded as the ultimate test to which the con- 
 ceptions of " ought " and " ought not " must be referred ; 
 and to regard duty, even when its higher sanction is 
 denied, as having the right to claim from him the 
 sacrifice of pleasure, utility, and even life, at need.^ 
 
 Among the gravest of the objections to this system 
 is the breach of continuity which arises when a con- 
 ception so large, reaching to such heights and depths 
 as duty, first appears ; just as in the theory of 
 physical evolution, there is a break in the line some- 
 where, when the creature first steps upon the stage 
 of life who is endowed with the distinguishing attri- 
 butes of man. A morality like this of the utilitarian, 
 which has constantly to forget its origin, which has 
 studiously to refrain from reference to that utility by 
 
 ^ This is not stating the matter at all too strongly. Mr. Mill, in a 
 noble passage, declares that if he must go to hell for refusing to worship 
 a being whom he cannot call good, " to hell he will go." It is very 
 difficult to extract from Mr. Mill's works any clear statement of his 
 view of the ultimate basis of morals. It is probable that no small 
 part of his influence on his generation is due to the fact that he 
 seemed to claim ever and anon a higher sanction for the right than 
 his system appeared to allow. In other words, his belief was greater 
 than his creed. 
 
12 The Higher Life. 
 
 which during all its earlier stages it grew ; which has 
 to train itself to substitute foT It some higher con- 
 ception, more in accord with what we regard as the 
 spiritual nature of man, had better, one would think, 
 be referred at once to that spiritual nature whose 
 movements it simulates so admirably, and to that 
 God to whom it strives by natural effort to lift Its 
 ideas. 
 
 But again I say, suppose that this could be the right 
 theory ; suppose that brutes and men through an 
 almost endless series of stages of development, could 
 have gradually formed those instinctive habits of 
 action, rising at length into what looks like moral 
 choice, which secure on the whole a course favourable 
 to the best Interests of the race or the community, 
 regarded on a large and, we should say, a provident 
 scale — what then ? It is clear that the whole course 
 of things in this world, its constitution and the cur- 
 rents of force which act upon It, must have been so 
 ordered as to press the action of animated beings, 
 with great limitation of their own private pleasure, 
 into a mould which secures in a large form, such as 
 we might imagine only a most wise and provident 
 Ruler could forecast, the greatest good of the whole. 
 
 Thus we find a belnof who inherits all this accumu- 
 lated experience in the form of emotions and pro- 
 pulsions, in whom there is present too a faculty 
 which can reflect upon it, can examine it, can see how 
 and why certain actions secure this general good, and 
 certain others hinder it. In this being, further, a 
 consciousness has somehow dawned that there is a 
 
What is Man? 13 
 
 yet higher sanction for this action than utility, that 
 the utility is of so very high and subtile a kind, that 
 it demands a Divine foresight to forecast it ; that he 
 is under the law as a being with the endowment of 
 freedom to the God who made and who rules both 
 him and the world ; a God who demands the exercise 
 of this wise judgment which is so good for all as mat- 
 ter of duty to Himself, while He continually educates 
 and purifies that judgment, and draws it forth to 
 larger and nobler ministries to the general good. 
 
 What shall we say to these things, even on the 
 poor and thin hypothesis of the evolutionists ? What, 
 but that the creature thus trained and shaped by 
 the obscure influences of the material sphere, was 
 born at last, when his development so far was com- 
 plete, into a world in which his developed nature 
 found a response to its new-born cravings, support 
 for its new-found convictions, the explanation and 
 the justification of those loftier and more unselfish 
 modes of action, to which some inward pressure 
 had compelled it, and a home wherein its longings 
 for the good, the true, and the unchanging might 
 be at rest. It seems to me that on this theory of the 
 physical and moral development of man, as clearly 
 as on ours, the whole process presupposes, demands 
 the existence of a world of spirit, of moral freedom, of 
 responsibility, of knowledge of and relation to God ; 
 a world which is ready to receive as its citizen the 
 creature thus developed up to the pitch of its life ; 
 unless, indeed, this marvellous vital instinct, to put 
 it no higher, which guided development with such 
 
14 The Higher Life. 
 
 grand success through its myriad stages, ends it at 
 last in illusion, with bitter fruit of misery and despair. 
 
 As matter of fact, we find beings, who have gra- 
 dually, whether as the result of pure evolution or 
 otherwise, left their proneness, their front towards 
 the dust, and who lift their heads on high, and seem 
 to be looking beyond the world. In accord with 
 this physical habit and gesture, we find that the idea 
 has not only dawned upon them, but possessed them, 
 that there is a world invisible to sense around and 
 beyond this visible sphere, with which, rather than 
 with the creature, their true relations and destinies 
 are intertwined. It is a world which lays heavy 
 demands of duty upon them, while it stimulates them 
 to noble and fertile activity. It has inspired all the 
 brightest, most glorious, most blessed passages in 
 the history of the race ; it has made, as we shall 
 see, the grandest and most heroic human spirits its 
 pilgrims, and has sent martyrs by myriads to the 
 rack and to the stake, that they might keep unsullied 
 their loyalty to its King. Are we to be told as we 
 rise to meet the messengers of this spiritual world 
 with joy, and to listen to its Gospel, Ah ! here you 
 are enterinor into a world of dreams ? 
 
 Dreams ! Why the whole system of the uni- 
 verse, according to these theorists, has been so 
 shaped, or has so shaped itself, as to press develop- 
 ment up to the type of the human. And man is 
 moved by the same pressure — for if the supernatural 
 be .denied,<the reason of it all must lie within the 
 physical organisation — to entertain and to cherish 
 
What is Man? 15 
 
 those views of his obHgations to his fellow men 
 around him, and as he thinks to God, which led 
 Christ to Calvary to die for humanity in unutterable 
 anguish and shame. The same idea made Paul a 
 debtor to men of every clime and grade, to spend 
 his life in preaching to them the Gospel, and has 
 inspired all the movements in heathendom and 
 Christendom which have given shape and impulse 
 to the progress of the world. And it is this, just 
 this, which has demanded and constrained the toil 
 and the travail of the very noblest human spirits, 
 which, you say, belongs to an unreal world, and is 
 but the projection of man's own shadow, and the 
 shadow of his life, on the curtain of the unknown 
 around him, forming there some dim lines which he 
 thinks are the track of duty, and an awful image 
 which he mistakes for God. Is then the very sad- 
 dest school of Oriental philosophy right after all ? 
 Is the end of all creature development Maya, illu- 
 sion ? Does the creature at his very highest point 
 of elevation find himself lifted into a world of mock- 
 ing and misleading dreams ? 
 
 Would to God, we should be tempted in that 
 case to cry passionately, that this wonderful develop- 
 ment had been ended by some shattering stroke, 
 before it touched the edge of this world of illusions, 
 from whose dread region the Creator has mercifully 
 withheld the brutes ! If this were the truth, then the 
 whole system of things which has pressed on to this 
 issue from the first, an issue the germ of which must 
 have been hidden in the first monad that became 
 
i6 The Higher Life. 
 
 quick with life, this universal system, I say, would be 
 a horrible abortion ; and Creation, if there be a God, 
 must be, as the Orientals teach us, the disease or the 
 sick-dream of the Supreme. 
 
 No ! to me it is supremely wonderful, and most 
 manifestly of God, that just when a being appears 
 in the procession of life whose port and gesture 
 manifestly difference him from the brutes — who is 
 conscious of the awfulness of that " I " which describes 
 the personality of a spirit — who finds himself laden 
 with a burden which no one can share with him, of 
 a duty which no one can fulfil for him, and a destiny 
 which he must create and face for himself — to whom 
 the word " I ought " has sacred meaning, seems to 
 represent the thought of a mind above him, and to 
 appeal to him with the authority of God — who is 
 awake to the realities of a life which demands from 
 him constant self-control, and no small measure of 
 self-denial and self-sacrifice, binding him to his fellow 
 men by obligations which may demand from him, 
 not through blind instinct, but with that full intelli- 
 gence which looks before and after, the gift of his 
 very life — I say it is very wonderful and very beauti- 
 ful, that just in this crisis in the history of Creation, 
 there is unveiled the existence of an unseen spiritual 
 world. In that world the thoughts that haunt man 
 find realities on which they can rest, and to which 
 they can cling ; out of that world a revelation comes 
 to him which explains and justifies his ideas of duty, 
 which purifies and elevates his moral judgments, and 
 strencthens his resolution in the direction in which 
 
What is Man f 1 7 
 
 he is conscious that the true path of his progress 
 Hes, while it opens to him the vision of an eternal 
 state, where all the pain to which it subjects him shall 
 bear blessed harvest, and where all the sacrifice which 
 it demands of him shall draw him close to the bosom 
 of his God for ever. 
 
 I seem to see here, in this order of the world — 
 man raised up, no matter how, in the dignity and 
 responsibility of a free spiritual being, on the one 
 hand, and a revelation meeting him on the other, 
 which deals with him as a free spiritual agent, and 
 trains him for a life of immortal liberty and joy— a 
 sign, a wonderful and glorious sign, of the presence 
 of the Father of spirits among the children whom 
 He has formed to know and to delight in Him ; and 
 I am full sure that the book which thus takes up 
 and carries on man's culture for eternity, is the Word 
 of God. 
 
 It is hard to speak without bitterness of the shal- 
 low and vain philosophy, which asks us to believe 
 that all the phenomena which appear in the proces- 
 sion of life, up to the point where man comes forth, 
 dowered with an irresistible yearning for immortality, 
 and with an irrepressible sense of the reality of the 
 world of spiritual being, are solid realities, standing 
 all the tests which the scientific intellect has the rieht 
 to propose ; while everything which seems to satisfy 
 these cravings, every promise which seems to nourish 
 these beliefs and hopes, is a false light, hung out to 
 lure him to everlasting wreck. For me it would be 
 " the last thing but ' one," could I .believe that the 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 only being in the universe, who is systematically 
 bewildered, befooled, and bemocked, is its master- 
 piece — Man. 
 
 On the contrary, our whole observation of life, of 
 man's nature, constitution, obligations, and possible 
 destinies, presses on us the idea which the Scripture 
 presents to us, that man is a being born into this 
 world to be redeemed ; and who, weak and poor as 
 he is without God, is yet, because of what he can 
 grow to in God, worth redeeming at infinite cost. 
 Man is found here with a nature, which, if it has free 
 course as a nature, if no quickening come to it from 
 on high, if no new heart — for which in some shape or 
 other, all peoples in all ages are sighing — be given 
 to it, must inevitably be a curse to him. How the 
 nature comes to be what it is, is not the question. 
 The evolutionists have their theory, the orthodox 
 theologians have theirs. But if Adam be invoked 
 to account for man's moral condition, it is manifest 
 that the Author of life, and the Ruler of the world, 
 accepts the responsibility of the perpetuation of the 
 present fallen estate of our race. Man, by no act of his 
 own, by the action of laws which God ordained and 
 which God upholds, is born into this world with a nature 
 which, unless it be renewed by Him who first created 
 it, must bury itself in the darkness of death for ever. 
 This is the doctrine of Christian theology ; it is also 
 the doctrine of universal experience. Dark and sad 
 as it is if you close your ear to the gospel of Re- 
 demption, it is terribly evidenced by the fact, that 
 all heathen thought tends in the long run, inevitably 
 
What is Man? iq 
 
 to nihilism ; or at best regards the utter loss of all con- 
 sciousness of personal existence as the only exodus 
 from the ills and the burdens of life : while it is sus- 
 tained by the parallel fact, that among cultivated 
 peoples, when the sense of the reality of the spiritual 
 world has been weakened by wanton prosperity or vi • 
 cious indulgence, and all hope concerning the soul 
 and God has died clown in human hearts, suicide has 
 been the refuge to which man has fled most eagerly, 
 life has been the burden which he has most joyfully 
 cast away. 
 
 Nor can we fail to note that, even on the theory 
 of those who hold that a bestial savage condition 
 is the earliest estate of our race,^ as man emerges 
 
 ^ There is no subject, perhaps, on which there is more unsound 
 dogmatism (always excepting theology) than on the original estate of 
 our race. It would be idle to deny that an immense body of evidence 
 of great seeming weight has been put forth by those who hold that we 
 can trace man back to a condition but a little higher than a brute. 
 But nothing is more easily misunderstood and misinterpreted than the 
 signs of the savage condition. As with childhood, it needs a special 
 and large experience to comprehend all its bearings ; and looked at 
 simply from the scientific point of view, there is a very strong body 
 of evidence on the other side. Mr. St. George Mivart in his " Genesis 
 of Species " has some very interesting and able remarks on the subject. 
 Readers of Mr. Wallace's book on the Malay Archipelago will remem- 
 ber his testimony as to the morale of some savage peoples among whom 
 he dwelt so long. But the following passage from Sir H. Maine's 
 "Village Communities" is worthy of special attention, inasmuch as 
 his opportunities of observation were peculiarly ample, and his insight 
 is indisputable: — "It has been strongly contended of late, that by 
 investigation of the practices and ideas of existing savage races, at 
 least two earlier stages of human society disclose themselves through 
 which it passes before organising itself in family groups. In two 
 separate volumes, each of them remarkably ingenious and interesting, 
 Sir J. Lubbock and Mr. McLennan conceive themselves to have shown 
 
 C 2 
 
20 The Highej' Life. 
 
 from the life of the savage, he acquires ideas, habits, 
 emotions and propensities to action, which seek 
 increasingly to sustain themselves by clasping the 
 objects of the spiritual world. The savage in his 
 lowest condition sends his wife into the field while he 
 takes his ease until hunger or passion moves him to 
 the excitement of the chase or of war. As man 
 becomes developed, that is, as we see in him with 
 growing clearness what Is meant by man. not only 
 does he feel after a world of spiritual being around 
 him and above him, and a Father of his spirit to 
 w^hom he can commit the destinies of his life, but he 
 becomes conscious of burdens, of obligations, of 
 
 that the first steps of mankind towards civilisation were taken from a 
 condition in wliich assemblages of men followed practices which are 
 not found to occur universally even in animal nature. Many of the 
 phenomena of barbarism adverted to by these writers are found 
 in India. The usages appealed to are the usages of certain tribes or 
 races, sometimes called aboriginal, which have been driven into the 
 inaccessible recesses of the widely-extending mountain country in the 
 North-east of India by the double pressure of Indian or Chinese civi- 
 lisation, or which took refuge in the hilly re;;ions of Central and 
 Southern India from the conquest of Brahminical invaders, whether or 
 not of Indian descent. Many of these wild tribes have now for many 
 years been under English observation, and have, indeed, been ad- 
 ministered by British officers. The evidence, therefore, of their 
 usages and ideas which may be forthcoming, is very superior to the 
 slippery testimony concerning savages which is gathered from 
 
 travellers' tales Much which I have personally heard in 
 
 India bears out the caution which I gave as to the reserve with which 
 all speculations on the antiquity of human usage should be received. 
 Practices represented as of universal antiquity, and universally cha- 
 racteristic of the origin of mankind, have been described to me as 
 having been for the first time resorted to in our own days through 
 the mere pressure of external circumstances or of novel temptations." 
 P. i6. 
 
What is Man? 21 
 
 duties, which strain every nerve and fibre of his 
 nature, and which he can bear joyfully only on con- 
 dition of full citizenship of that spiritual and eternal 
 world. 
 
 To take a strong but decisive instance, whatever 
 we may be disposed to think of Christ and Christianity-, 
 one thing is patent, that the life of Christ is not only 
 the most pathetic, but the purest, the noblest, the 
 most fruitful chapter of human history. It had been 
 simply impossible for Christ to have lived the life 
 that He lived, and to have died the death that He 
 died, unless from His inmost soul He could have 
 said, " Alone, yet not alone, for the Father is with 
 Me.'* The enthusiasm of humanity will carry a man 
 far ; but the Cross and Passion can only explain 
 themselves by the word, " My meat is to do the will 
 of Him that sent me, and to finish His 7i orkT 
 
 Redemption means the presence of the Father 
 with the world. " God is in Christ, reconciling the 
 world unto Hi?nself" is the marrow of the Gospel. 
 Man, in his creature nature, has to do with the. 
 Creator and the Ruler of the world system around 
 him ; as he realises the possession of that spiritual 
 nature which has been embreathed into the physical, 
 and which makes him, on the summit of the mere 
 creature development, the first born of a new and 
 higher order of life. Redemption takes him out of 
 the sphere of the natural — which is no longer strong 
 enough, rich enough, deep enough, to nourish him, 
 which must become a grave to the spirit which seeks 
 to live by it — and plants him in the sphere of the 
 
22 The Higher Life, 
 
 Divine love. " Hozubeit that zuas not first luhich 
 is spiritual, but that zuhich is natural, and afterwai'd 
 that zuhich is spiritual!' " The first man, Adam, 
 was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a 
 quickening spirit!' " As in Adam all die, even so in 
 Christ shall all be made alive!' 
 
 This life of man, when he is conscious of the full 
 burden of his obligation, and is drawn forth in devo- 
 tion to the hicrher aims and objects, is so solemn 
 a thing, it costs so much, and it carries in its bosom 
 such tremendous issues- — as all will understand who 
 know the full meaning of " I " — that it seems to 
 appeal importunately to God for His living sympathy 
 and fellowship, and for the help of His strengthening 
 and quickening hand. As men rise higher in culture 
 and moral nobility they become more j)ainfully and 
 sometimes miserably conscious of this burden. It 
 was Paul of Tarsus who called himself the " chiefi 
 ofi sinners!' and who cried, " O miserable mait that 
 I am, who shall deliver me firom the body of this 
 death ? " So heavy is the responsibility of moral 
 judgment and action, with the issues which grow out 
 of it, that we may well believe that God would not 
 have laid the burden on any human spirit, but for 
 the purpose and the promise that He Himself would 
 take part in our nature, and would make all its 
 solemn and profound experiences the means of draw- 
 ing His child through Redemption into perfect 
 fellowship with Himself. A world like this, a life 
 like ours, if nothing is to grow out of them when the 
 burden is laid down and the groaning is stilled, 
 
What is Man ? 23 
 
 would be a weltering chaos of wrong and wretched- 
 ness. But if there is a Hand above us which has 
 hold of us and is lifting us, unveiling to us the vision 
 of a boundless future, then we can understand how 
 all life's strain and agony may be the noblest culture 
 of our freedom ; enlarging us, enriching us, and 
 preparing us for the unknown, unknowable develop- 
 ments of eternity. 
 
 At the root of the whole, of the whole higher 
 life of man, in which, however he may have come to 
 it, we at any rate find him established, and which 
 lays such heavy burdens on his spirit, lies the gospel 
 of Redemption, the gospel of " the love of God which 
 is ill Christ Jcsils our Lord!' You, my readers, 
 live in and move about the world as men and women 
 who were born into the world to be redeemed. The 
 Cross of Redemption is signed upon your brow ; the 
 blood of Redemption is on the lintel of your house 
 of life. And yet, how many of you are drawling and 
 slouching through the world, trying to make life a 
 pastime, dreary enough in any case ; to empty it of 
 all its deeper meanings ; or it may be to turn it into a 
 hotbed of corruption, spreading the taint of a pesti- 
 lence around you wherever you move. And there 
 is the Lord who died for you, on high, watching it 
 all ; marking the waste and wreck of the being whom 
 He redeemed unto Himself at such awful cost ; sad- 
 dening at the sight of the woe and the wrong, with 
 which you are helping to fill the world which He 
 gave His soul to save. Oh, men, men ! why wiU 
 you reject the counsel of your Saviour to your ruin ? 
 
24 The Higher Life. 
 
 Why will you count yourselves unworthy of the 
 place in His eternal kingdom, which His boundless 
 love and mercy have prepared ? Why will you shut 
 your hard, cold hearts against this blessed message 
 of the Gospel, " Unto you jirst',' and now, " God, 
 having raised np His Son fesiis, hath sent Him to 
 bless you, in tiuming away every ojie of yoii fi^om His 
 iniquities " f 
 
25 
 
 II. 
 
 THE UNIVERSAL TRAVAIL. 
 
 " For ive Jcnow that the whole creation groaneth and travailcth in 
 pain together tnitil now." — Rom. viii. 22. 
 
 We know ! Else what mean our tragedies ? What 
 mean those ancient shadows of the Fates ? Nature 
 is truly, not what is, but what is becoming, what is 
 coming to be, what is about being born. And all 
 birth is by travail. The creation groans as it gives 
 birth to its heir ; to-day groans as it gives birth to to- 
 morrow ; the old generation groans as it gives birth 
 to the new ; earth groans as it gives birth to the 
 kingdom of heaven. 
 
 Man shares the groaning. His " state of nature " 
 is a state of travail. He too is here that he may be 
 born to something greater. To abide in a state of 
 nature, is to refuse the benign and fruitful anguish 
 which issues in Redemption ; it is to become will- 
 ingly the abortion of this terrestrial sphere. And this 
 is to judge oneself unworthy of everlasting life, and 
 to choose the death which is eternal. 
 
 Paul seizes firmly, and utters in one large 
 sentence, the meaning of this tragedy, which, if the 
 end of it be here, is played out under the eye of 
 Heaven. The tears that have channelled, through 
 
2 6 The Higher Life. 
 
 all these ages, the worn cheek of humanity, the 
 groans that have burdened the air, the blood that 
 has stained every great pathway that man has trod, 
 are the human form of this universal eroanino". 
 From man it comes laden with a deeper sadness than 
 can burden the voice of the Creation; for man knows 
 what he was born for, and what he has missed, when 
 he is dull to the voice that calls him to be redeemed. 
 Surely it is one of the most fundamental truths of a 
 sound philosophy of life which is uttered in these pro- 
 found and pregnant words. 
 
 To all seers, among all peoples, in all ages, this 
 truth has unveiled itself. They seemed to catch the 
 voice of a groaning, and they give it utterance in their 
 tragedies, their sad epics, their litanies and psalms 
 of life. The deep sadness of the Homeric poems 
 is plain to every thoughtful student ; it has been 
 indicated eloquently by a master of Homeric lore. 
 Tragedies, or comedies sadder than tragedies, are 
 the masterpieces of the golden age of Athenian 
 literary art. The interest of Greek philosophy 
 centres round a prison cell, where an old man lies 
 numb and cold ; cheering his friends with the hope 
 of the welcome which awaits him " in some happy 
 state of the blessed," while the poison steals up to his 
 heart. The wisest seer of Nature in Republican 
 Rome, fairly weary of Jupiter and Juno and all the 
 rout of Olympus, as the groundwork of the order of 
 Creation, thought that a wild concourse and shock of 
 atoms, by some dull chance shaping themselves into 
 an order, might be the key to the mystery of life. 
 
The Universal Travail. 27 
 
 He uttered his thought on the development of 
 Nature in a poem of wonderful power and splendour ; 
 but he left life sadder than he found it ; to him there 
 was little to live for in such a world. 
 
 The next era of human development was founded 
 on the Cross, which has since guided the destinies 
 of Christendom ; and must guide them still, through 
 new depths of pain, to the issue in which the travail 
 of man and of Nature shall ultimately fruit. 
 
 In the sagas of Northern Europe, the bright god 
 of life dies at last under the stroke of a cruel and inex- 
 orable destiny, and the twilight of the gods settles over 
 all. To Goethe, in our modern world. Nature seemed 
 "like a dumb captive, sighing to be delivered." Art 
 with him was the minister of her redemption. Art 
 in all ages, did she understand her mission, has, like 
 her loftier sister, a message to the captive, and 
 should be the eao^er handmaid of cur hio-her life. 
 And is not the struggle for existence the one key to 
 the order and progress of life, in the judgment of the 
 keenest student of the living creation who has pro- 
 phesied to our times } The struggle for existence ! 
 Are there not times when man asks himself madly — 
 Is there anything else, anything higher, at the root of 
 such order or disorder as reigns in the human world ? 
 
 The struggle begins very low down indeed in the 
 scale of the Creation. The very molecules of matter 
 are in ceaseless clash and conflict, dashing against 
 each other with swift flight and fierce momentum, 
 in the air around us and in the blood within us. 
 Everywhere there is storm and stress, pressure, 
 
28 The Higher Life. 
 
 conflict, defeat and victory ; while everywhere an 
 order, a progress, slowly evolve themselves out of it 
 all. Professor Maxwell, of Cambridge, read at the 
 Bradford meeting of the British Association, a dis- 
 course on molecules, in which he gives us a startling 
 vision of the storm of motion which is raging 
 round us in the world. 
 
 " If we wish to form a mental representation of 
 what is going on among the molecules in calm air, 
 we cannot do better than observe a swarm of bees, 
 where every individual bee is flying furiously, first in 
 one direction and then in another, while the swarm, 
 as a whole, either remains at rest, or sails slowly 
 through the air." 
 
 He tells us that invisible molecules in countless 
 throngs are in rapid motion all round us, jostling 
 with each other, fighting hard to keep their course, 
 but hindered by kindred molecules that are fighting 
 too ; the whole resulting in a certain balance and 
 equilibrium, in the midst of which, as in the centre 
 of a cyclone of whirling atoms, we can move and 
 work. 
 
 '* We have now to conceive the molecules of the air 
 in this hall flying about in all directions, at a rate of 
 about seventeen miles in a minute. If all these 
 molecules were flying in the same direction, they 
 would constitute a wind blowing at the rate of 
 seventeen miles a minute, and the only wind which 
 approaches this velocity is that which proceeds from 
 the mouth of a cannon. How, then, are you and I 
 able to stand here ? Only because the molecules 
 
The Universal Travail. 29 
 
 happen to be flying in different directions, so that 
 those which strike against our backs enable us to 
 support the storm which is beating against our faces. 
 Indeed, if this molecular bombardment were to cease, 
 even for an instant, our veins would swell, our breath 
 would leave us, and we should, literally, expire. 
 
 " But it is not only against us or against the walls 
 of the hall that the molecules are striking. Consider 
 the immense numbers of them, and the fact that 
 they are flying in every possible direction, and you 
 will see that they cannot avoid striking each other. 
 Every time that two molecules come into collision 
 the paths of both are changed, and they go off in 
 new directions. Thus each molecule is continually 
 getting its course altered, so that in spite of its great 
 velocity it may be a long time before it reaches any 
 great distance from the point at which it set out." 
 . ..." I have calculated the number of collisions 
 which each (molecule) must undergo in a second. 
 They are given in the table, and are reckoned by 
 thousands of millions. No wonder that the travellinof 
 power of the swiftest molecule is but small, when its 
 course is completely changed thousands of millions 
 of times in a second."^ 
 
 Thus the struggle begins very low down in the 
 scale of the creation ;^ it seems to be a necessity 
 
 ^ Discourse on Molecules, pp. 5, 6, 7. 
 
 '^ It is wonderful, too, how low down in the scale we find the first 
 rudiments of love. In a passage on Electrolysis, Professor Maxwell 
 says, " Here is an electric current passing through acidulated water, 
 and causing oxygen to appjar at one electrode, and hydrogen to the 
 other. In the space between, the water is perfectly calm, and yet two 
 
30 The Higher Life. 
 
 imbedded in the very constitution of the world. As 
 we pass up through the successive stages of the 
 organisation, the struggle becomes more intense, the 
 waste and wreck more dire. Each particle of rock 
 has as hard a fight for its place as the molecules of 
 air or water. It too is pressed and crushed by its 
 fellows ; by its strength and toughness it shoulders 
 its way to the place which it is bound to occupy in 
 the scheme of " the all." 
 
 See how the great mountains have writhed in 
 their agony ; solid sheets of rock are there crumpled 
 like paper, and masses of stone that have been 
 tossed like leaves before the drift. Enter the gates 
 of the hills and pass up to their wilder altitudes ; 
 trees are there, lonely, scattered, fighting sternly 
 with rock and avalanche this battle of existence ; 
 great pine forests torn and maimed and splintered, 
 shrouded with the wasting lichen as with grave 
 clothes, but still holding on grimly to life. A flower 
 
 opposite currents of oxygen and of hydrogen must be passing through 
 it. The physical theory of this process has been studied by Clausius, 
 who has given reasons for asserting that in ordinary water the molecules 
 are not only moving, but every now and then striking each other with 
 such violence that the oxygen and hydrogen of the molecules part 
 company, and dance about through the crowd, seeking partners which 
 have become dissociated in the same way. In ordinary water these 
 exchanges produce, on the whole, no observable effect, but no sooner 
 does the electromotive force begin to act, than it exerts its guiding in- 
 fluence on the unattached molecules, and bends the course of each 
 towards its proper electrode, till the moment when, meeting with an 
 unappropriated molecule of the opposite kind, it enters again into a 
 more or less permanent union with it, till it is again dissociated by 
 another shock. Electrolysis, therefore, is a kind of diffusion assisted 
 by electromotive force." — Maxwell, " On Molecules," p. 8. 
 
The Universal Travail. 
 
 is there lifting- its pendulous delicate bell, pallid 
 with its struggle, through a gap in a ghastly snow- 
 drift ; the fairest forms, the rarest hues gleam out 
 on heights and edges, where every moment is a 
 battle with death. Nature grows more stern and 
 savage daily, unless she is fought by man's intelligent 
 strength, and mastered. The seeds of lovely and 
 goodly things in all her regions perish by myriads, 
 for one that blooms and fruits. It is the molecule 
 struggle repeated under higher and m.ore visible 
 conditions. How rare is a crystal developed in 
 freedom, its figure perfect, its substance pure ! Few 
 work themselves out to fair completeness, unmaimed 
 by the assaults and shocks which they endure. As 
 rare is a perfect frond or flower. And yet the gleam 
 of beauty lies bright upon it all, prophetic of the glory 
 in which all the groaning shall issue at last. 
 
 As we ascend into the higher reg^ion of the animate 
 creation, the struggle becomes apparently more dire 
 and destructive still. In one sense it is a terrible 
 picture which the author of " The Origin of Species " 
 paints of the development of Nature. The race is 
 to the swift and the spoil to the strong everywhere ; 
 weakness crushed out of existence, strength standinof 
 on the wrecks of shattered organisms, pluming its 
 crest and passing on to new conflicts, until in turn it 
 too meets with the stronger, and goes down with all 
 its pride and beauty to the dust. To those who 
 have an ear only for the groaning, there is enough 
 to fill it, and to feed that horror of Nature with 
 all its pain and waste, into which heathen peoples 
 
l^he Higher Life. 
 
 settle at last. They see that for one living thing 
 that survives and brings forth a progeny, myriads 
 perish, the prey of the stronger creatures that hunt 
 them with eager persistence, and live upon their life. 
 They see that each organism has its parasite that 
 preys on it inwardly, and its natural foe that is born 
 to pursue it. They think that were the veil lifted 
 and the vision of life in all its ranks and orders laid 
 bare, we should see through this whole world- 
 system, perhaps through other worlds, clouds of living 
 creatures of delicate workmanship and exquisite hue 
 flying in quivering terror before fierce pursuers, who 
 in turn have a fiercer in their tracks to seize them 
 when their prey is gorged. They point to whole 
 species which Nature seems to protect by clever arti- 
 fice from extinction. There are fish whose markinQ^s 
 simulate the sand in which they hide themselves 
 from their pursuers. There are insects which put 
 on the forms of rare and delicate flowers ; and some 
 that take a loathsome or fetid likeness, and are hardly 
 saved. Everywhere terror, struggle and destruc- 
 tion ; the animate molecules clashing with deadlier 
 purpose and direr ruin than the inanimate, the lower 
 strata of Creation furnishing the grandest hecatombs, 
 while the upward procession of life treads on their 
 dust. 
 
 There is strife enough and pain enough all round 
 us in the Creation to justify this picture, but that the 
 terror is wanting. This ceaseless clash and struggle 
 is the method by which the Creator wills that 
 stronger, purer, nobler forms of things shall constantly 
 
The Universal Travail. 
 
 be brought forth. But the terror and anguish are 
 largely in our imagination. There plays everywhere 
 through the Creation, the light of a glad and victori- 
 ous life. Even the prey of the " young lions, which 
 seek their meat from God," seems emancipated from 
 the terror ; ^ the pain is of the moment, while life on 
 the whole is good to them and glad. Still, the groan- 
 ing and travailing is carried up through the animal 
 creation, with an energy which would be terrible, but 
 for the order and progress which visibly spring from 
 it, and the fairer forms that emerge from what other- 
 wise we mi^ht sieh over as wreck. 
 
 But the groaning becomes articulate, and is bur- 
 dened with anguish, when we rise into the human 
 world. How long, O Lord, how long ? is the cry which 
 generation by generation is wrung out of the pain of 
 the noblest and most faithful hearts. Sad as may seem 
 the aspect of the struggle which everywhere attends 
 the evolution of nobler forms in the lower Creation, 
 we must use a darker word to describe the cost of 
 human development ; the stains that redden the track 
 of civilisation, the masses of victims who lie crushed 
 to bloody clay under the chariot wheels of progress, 
 the holocaust which is offered on the shrine of every 
 improvement, the anguish that writes its record on 
 the faces of the myriads, who, too weak for life's 
 struggle, fall out of the ranks of the advancing army, 
 stagger awhile painfully in the rear, and then drop 
 in heart-broken despair. There is something in the 
 
 ^ The carnivorous animals, as Dr. Livingstone found, seem to 
 exercise a kind of fascination on their prey. 
 
 D 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 " vision of the human " which explains the groan, 
 " Eh man, it's a sair sight ! " which broke from the 
 lips of him who, of all our teachers, has the keenest 
 eye for the sad side of life and of Nature, when he 
 was bidden to look up at the bright stars and 
 rejoice. 
 
 When we read of the heroic achievements of the 
 past, our eye flashed and our blood fires. We have 
 no thought for the hearts that were aching and break- 
 ing for the heroes ; the homes left desolate, the 
 schemes of life on which much precious treasure had 
 been spent, broken up, and wrecked. We mark with 
 profound interest the great steps of human progress, 
 Nebuchadnezzar's golden empire, Medo- Persian do- 
 minion, Alexander's splendid conquests, and the 
 revolution of revolutions which seated the Caesars on 
 the world's imperial throne. Millions of human lives 
 were spilt like water in working out each of these 
 schemes of dominion. Cities burnt, provinces wasted, 
 wide fertile regions made over to lasting desolation, 
 plague and famine, and unutterable horrors of human 
 cruelty, make in all ages the march of humanity sad- 
 der than a batde-field strewn with slaughter. Our 
 eye follows the jubilant host to its triumph ; but it is 
 well sometimes to look round and survey the wreck. 
 Caius Julius C£esar brought that country which has 
 been one of the morning stars of progress for ages, 
 within the field of civilisation and ultimately of the 
 Gospel. It cost the lives of at least a million of men, 
 and the heart-broken anguish of how many millions 
 more! Read the history of the tremendous wars 
 
The Universal Travail. 
 
 by which the Reformation finally upheld Itself against 
 Rome. Legions of cruel fiends in human form went 
 storming and burning through the fairest fields of 
 Europe, and wasted what the toil and the thrift of 
 two centuries have not been able to repair. There 
 are tales to be told of those wars, the storm of Mag- 
 deburg, and the like, which make the blood run cold, 
 and the very marrow shiver in the bones. 
 
 And now, in this nineteenth century of Christian 
 culture, with the full sunlight of the Gospel shining, 
 as we please ourselves by dreaming, on the world, 
 the greatest step of human development which 
 marks our era, has cost, perhaps, the bloodiest and 
 most tremendous battles which are recorded in 
 history. The largest hosts which Caesar or Charle- 
 magne could have put into the field, would have been 
 swept like straws before the armies whose " blood 
 and iron " have built up and cemented the edifice of 
 German unity before our eyes. It is a terrible sign of 
 the measure in which the struggle for life rules 
 still in the domain of human history. Kings, states- 
 men, parliaments, poets, had tried to build the edifice 
 peacefully, in vain. The wisest words, the most 
 ardent aspirations, the most strenuous endeavours of 
 peaceful thinkers and workers, had been spent fruit- 
 lessly on the enterprise. The man of "blood and of 
 iron " took it in hand, and it was done at once. But 
 who has summed up the cost ? And there seemed 
 to be some dire necessity for it. Neither men nor 
 things would wait till nobler agencies could build up 
 a fairer structure than can be built by wan This 
 
 D 2 
 
J 
 
 6 The Higher Life. 
 
 thing, for which milhons of earnest hearts were 
 pining, seems to have been possible only at this 
 crisis, through all this agony and blood, 
 
 I will not speak of the triumphs of civilisation 
 on its distant borders ; the withering of whole tribes 
 and nations before the vices of the leaders of the 
 culture and progress of mankind. Nor will we boast 
 of the glories of peaceful industry ; so gentle, they 
 tell us, so holy, so benign. We might come across 
 ranks and classes whose bread fails, who are set face 
 to face with starvation, as every step is gained in the 
 art of manufacture. There are millions in Europe and 
 America whose eyes are dim, whose cheek is sunk, 
 whose fineers are worn to the bone, whose heart is 
 strained to breaking, that our magnificent commerce 
 may spread its benign ministries over the world. 
 
 And is it all to be like this, and for ever ? Struggle, 
 struggle, struggle, everywhere ; men, animals, mole- 
 cules of matter, hustling in perpetual shock ; moans 
 filling the air ; maimed, crushed, shattered things and 
 creatures laid everywhere as the foundation on which 
 the survivors build the edifice — if this be all, we 
 dare not call it the temple — of life. Great God ! the 
 soul sickens, shudders at the vision ; the heart stays 
 its beat under such burdens of pain and death. 
 
 And yet, one of the very cleverest books which 
 has been written recently, and by one of the ablest 
 men of our time, seems to take it for granted that 
 things will be in the future very much as they have 
 been in the past ; that selfishness, on the whole, will 
 remain the mainspring of human action, and that 
 
The Univei^sal Travail. 
 
 religion will be found necessary mainly as a police 
 system, to drive men by the terrors of judgment 
 to keep their selfishness within moderately decent 
 bounds. The book means that this is a hard world, 
 with a hard God to rule it. Thino-s are so arranged 
 by the Creator that the strong ones shoulder their 
 way on in the world, while weak ones are shouldered 
 to the wall or trampled to the dust. The struggle 
 for life meets us everywhere, and is always likely to 
 meet us. The race is to the swift and the spoil to 
 the strong, in the human as in the lower spheres of 
 the Creation. Liberty is a snare, equality is a lie, 
 fraternity is a dream, in this scheme of life. The 
 only sensible plan of a society will be organised on 
 the basis of this selfish struggle for existence ; and, 
 as th(", writer holds that Christianity is largely based 
 on the doctrine of hell, no hope can be gathered 
 from it for the future of Creation, or the reign of 
 more blessed relations in fairer worlds than this. 
 
 To me, I confess, this book^ presents about the 
 dreariest view of life which I have ever looked upon. 
 I turn with relief from this Christian writer to the 
 sentence of Comte which he holds up to scorn. He 
 at any rate has a vision of a fairer scheme of human 
 relationships, and says, " The great problem is, to 
 raise social feeling by artificial effort to the position 
 which in the natural condition is held by selfish feel- 
 ing." If the Comtists would give up their " artificial 
 effort " as in its very nature unfruitful, and have faith 
 
 '"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." By James Fitz James Stephen, Q.C 
 Smith, Elder & Co. 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 in the profoundly natural effort of the Creator and 
 Redeemer of the world to bind and to hold men to 
 gether in love, I should be with them on this point 
 entirely. As also with Mr. Frederic Harrison, who, 
 with his usual eloquence and force, pourtrays what, 
 but for the disavowal of Christianity, might be a 
 Christian prophecy of the future : " A religion of 
 action, a religion of social duty, devotion to an in- 
 telligible and sensible head, a real sense of incor- 
 poration with a living and controlling force, the deli- 
 berate effort to serve an immortal humanity, — this, 
 and this alone, can absorb the musings and the 
 cravings of the spiritual man." ^ 
 
 But to return to this groaning and travail of 
 Creation. It is essential that we should understand 
 that the groans are groans of travail. They are birth- 
 pangs, these throes of the Creation ; and this truth, 
 if we can look forward as well as backward, if we 
 can grasp what is being born out of the travail of 
 the human, casts a glorious lustre over it all. The 
 groaning is distinctly in travail. Out of all the 
 struggle and visible wreck which we have glanced 
 at, purer, nobler, more beautiful things and beings 
 are continually being born. We have but to com- 
 pare the huge saurian monsters which once wal- 
 lowed in the marshes of nascent Europe, with the 
 finer, compacter creatures which now roam its forests 
 and crop its pastures, to measure the enormous 
 advance which has been gained. Out of this tremen- 
 dous and destructive struggle for existence, man 
 
 ^ '' Fortnightly Review," Nov. 1872, p. 529. 
 
The Univei'sal Travail. 39 
 
 somehow, somewhere emerges ; and with man a host 
 of nobler forms of flowers, fruits, and creatures ; 
 while the grosser flora and fauna of the earlier eras 
 rot into coal, or petrify into rock, to bear up the 
 structure, and to minister to the life of the human 
 world. 
 
 Here, then, is distinctly travail. Things struggle 
 on and struggle up into finer and compacter forms. 
 As Creation grows towards man, prophetic images of 
 human intelligence and will appear. Images only, 
 but prophetic. They are the form which the spirit 
 in man will quicken with life. At last, when man 
 emerges and stands at the head of the creatures, we 
 might well believe that the groaning is ended ; that 
 the being in birth of whom the whole mundane 
 system of things had been travailing, has at length 
 come forth into the living world. " Man is in little 
 all the sphere ;" the whole structure of the Creation 
 finds its key in the human organisation. Rudiments 
 of things which struggle dimly into shape and use 
 through all the lower stages of development, take 
 their perfect form and fulfil their complete function 
 in man ; while, as if to connect man by the closest 
 links with the whole chain of orofanic forms, oro-ans 
 and lineaments which find their use in the lower 
 spheres through which the creature has slowly 
 struggled, but which superior organs supersede for 
 the uses of the human, shrink back to rudimental 
 proportions ; they are mere hints of what has been, 
 but they are still found in the physical structure of 
 our race. 
 
40 The Higher Life. 
 
 And this Is certainly one of the very strongest 
 points in the argument of the evolutionists ; unless we 
 are to believe the Creator made of set purpose in the 
 human organisation these traces of the inferior types ; 
 as it has been gravely contended that when the world 
 was created, fossil carnivora were created in it with 
 the prey between their teeth, evidently with the pur- 
 pose of bewildering the philosophers. Here, then, 
 in the human form, we might be tempted to believe 
 that the struesrle terminates ; the series of organic 
 forms is at length complete. Travailing Nature may 
 surely sing over the Adam of the Creation, " Unto 
 us a child is born, unto us a son is given," and settle 
 herself to her well-earned rest. 
 
 Alas ! when man appears upon the scene a sadder 
 groaning is heard, a sharper travailing is seen. The 
 struggle prolongs itself with fiercer passion. But 
 there is an onward and upward pressure through the 
 ages. Man developes continually new ideas and 
 aspirations. The effort is always to rise. We watch 
 man in travail, like Nature, through all his genera- 
 tions ; there is something still struggling to the birth, 
 something which, through all the pain and strain of 
 life, is about being born. 
 
 As man, where he becomes visible through the 
 mists of the past, commences his career of develop- 
 ment, we find in him a vision of a serene and holy 
 order of life, in which the dire confusion of the struggle 
 shall be ended, and heart shall be knit to heart, and 
 hand to hand in fellowship and love. Man dreams 
 this dream ; he passionately clings to It. Far from 
 
The Universal Travail. 41 
 
 accepting the struggle as the uhimate condition of his 
 existence, all which seems highest within him, the fruit 
 of the noblest effort and the completest culture of his 
 being, earnestly protests against it. A faculty is born 
 within him which can survey the strife of the Crea- 
 tion. He considers it, reflects upon it, judges it, and 
 the idea shapes itself within him that he is born to 
 end it ; that he has been lifted to the edge of a 
 higher order, that there is that within him which is 
 in relation with that higher order ; and that in him 
 and in that which is to grow out of him, the travail- 
 ing Creation is to see " the beginning of peace." 
 
 He sees the strife within him and around him ; 
 he knows that the selfish struggle for existence pro- 
 longs itself into his world. But he has a vision 
 which haunts him in all countries and in all ages ; it 
 possesses his wisest and holiest seers, it floats before 
 the mind even of his godless philosophers ; it is the 
 vision of an order in which a holier principle, fertile in 
 peace and benediction, shall assume the supremacy 
 in his house of life, and shall organise his relations 
 on a basis of sympathy, ministry and love. He 
 looks to it to tame that spirit of strife which, in the 
 human sphere, assumes the aspect of a demon ; while 
 it gathers up all the fruits of the travail, and 
 makes that liberty, equality, and fraternity, in the 
 heavenly sense of them — lies or dreams as, we are 
 justly told, they must be, so long as the law of 
 struo-ale is reiijninof — the blessed realities of that 
 state up to which humanity is pressing, where bonds 
 of law are replaced by bands of love. 
 
42 The Higher Life. 
 
 This is distinctly the human vision and aspiration. 
 There is nothing so universal, nothing so deep- 
 seated in humanity as this. Men have prayed for it, 
 fought for it, suffered for it, died for it; age after age. 
 And the progress of society is literally measured by 
 its realisation. We say that humanity advances just 
 as it works up to this condition ; and the fact that 
 the progress is so dim and slow, that the struggle 
 prolongs itself through the ages, and that selfishness 
 reigns and riots in the world, is the chronic agony of 
 human society. Not over the first Adam, who was 
 born for the struggle, but over the second Adam, the 
 child of the travail, who was born for the peace, the 
 music of the heavenly anthem floats : " Unto us a 
 Child is born, 2into ns a Son is given, and the govern- 
 ment shall be upon His shoiclder. And His 7ianie 
 shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty 
 God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. 
 Of the increase of His governmejtt and of peace there 
 shall be no end, ttpon the throne of His father David, 
 and upon His kingdom, to order it and establish it, 
 with judgment a7id with justice, from henceforth and 
 even for everi" 
 
 Here then is, not the groaning, but the travail of 
 the human. The creature form touches its highest 
 in man. Something enters into that form which 
 comes from and looks to a higher than the creature 
 region. A new order of ideas, aims, hopes pos- 
 sesses man the creature, of which all that he shares 
 with the Creation is not continent, which it groans 
 and strives to bring forth into a higher sphere. 
 
TJie Universal Travail. 43 
 
 What is it that stands next in the order of develop- 
 ment ? To what shall man, standing on the summit 
 of the creature level, strive and aspire ? What has to 
 be born out of this more grievous travail of the intel- 
 lectual and spiritual part in the human ? What but 
 Christ's " Kingdom of Heaven" ? 
 
 The intellectual and spiritual part ! What is this ? 
 To those who look at the struggle only, there is 
 something sad, profoundly sad, in the aspect of Crea- 
 tion. But there is gladness beside the sadness. As 
 Creation approaches the human type, as creatures 
 grow more sensitive, we see something dawning in 
 the animal nature which in man puts on the perfect 
 form of pity, sympathy, and love. Mothers of wild 
 cubs will deny themselves, suffer, and even die for 
 their offspring ; animals will help and soothe each 
 other in pain ; mates will cleave to each other with 
 fond fidelity, and in some rare instances pity for 
 weakness begins to appear. 
 
 Now all which looks towards sympathy and ten- 
 derness would seem to be a weak point in the Crea- 
 tion, on the materialistic theory. All that helps a 
 weak thing to hold its life against a strong thing, 
 would really, on this scheme, be marring the order 
 of the universe and prolonging a useless conflict, 
 adding a fresh note of sadness thereby to the uni- 
 versal moan. But in man these sentiments of pity, 
 tenderness, cherishing ministry, yearning, redeeming 
 love, pass to the front rank, and come to be counted 
 the best things, the most helpful things, to the true 
 development of the human world. And everywhere 
 
44 The Higher Life. 
 
 these sentiments and principles seek to root them- 
 selves in the world of spirit, in the sphere of moral 
 freedom, of duty, immortality, and God. They are 
 strong and victorious in man just as they connect 
 themselves with the world which we call spiritual, 
 with God, with the ministering angels, and with the 
 recompenses of eternity. 
 
 And these are the blessed things, the healing 
 things, the saving things of society. This weltering 
 chaos of struggle, as it sometimes seems, is very 
 terrible to contemplate ; but while it is development 
 in the mere creature sphere, it is destruction in the 
 human, unless it be tamed and ruled by the higher 
 law. Awful is the struggle of selfish passion, and the 
 waste and wreck which everywhere attend it. But 
 heaven sees too, white troops of helping, healing, 
 saving ministers, mingling in the conflict, repairing 
 the waste, and restoring the wreck. Agony there is 
 enough everywhere, but love with its benign touch is 
 moving amid the anguish, and life looks up and smiles 
 and hopes. Where mere strength is let loose on earth 
 to work its imperious will, where the strong hand, 
 knowing no law but its own pleasure, is master in 
 society, man languishes and perishes, and all the 
 ofathered treasures of the as^es are scattered in the 
 dust. Where the healing, helping, saving ministries 
 are strong, where the weak have a stay, where the 
 poor have a shield, where the gentle have honour, 
 and the good have power, all that man thinks most 
 precious in society, grows and flourishes ; life blooms 
 with beauty, or glows with rich and golden fruit. 
 
The Universal Travail. 45 
 
 And everywhere and always the spring of all that 
 heals and saves has been fed from heaven. It is 
 true of heathendom as well as of Christendom. Marco 
 Polo was filled with amazement at the vast and ad- 
 mirably organised system of poor-relief which he 
 found in the Chinese cities. He learnt at Cambulu, 
 that "the Tartars before they were converted to the 
 religion of the idolaters (that is of Buddha), never 
 practised almsgiving. Indeed, when any poor man 
 begged of them, they would say to him, Go, with 
 God's curse, for if He loves you as He loves me. He 
 would have provided for you. But the sages of the 
 idolaters told the great Kaan, that it was a good work 
 to provide for the poor, and that his idols would be 
 greatly pleased if he did so. And since then he has 
 taken to do for the poor as much as you have 
 heard." •'• 
 
 That was a grand answer, too, which Demonax 
 suggested to the Athenians, when there was a ques- 
 tion of their establishing gladiatorial games, " You 
 must throw down the altar to pity first." But it was 
 an altar to pity, an acknowledgment of a power 
 which belonged to a celestial sphere ; and it was a 
 spiritual teacher who taught Cublay Kaan the lesson?, 
 of charity. It is spiritual influence which has quick- 
 ened and upheld the graces by which society lives 
 and grows, from the days of Adam until now. 
 
 The Jewish nation was a compact and strong 
 society, after the model which our liberal philosophers 
 chiefly honour. It was a nation of freemen, of free- 
 
 * See Colonel Yule's edition of Marco Polo's travels. Vol. I. 398. 
 
46 The Higher Life. 
 
 holders, in which the tyranny of the strong was re- 
 strained, and the rights of the weak were upheld by 
 admirable institutions ; where the poor and broken, 
 instead of being crushed, by wise helps were lifted 
 and restored. The law of that people was God's 
 commandment, and the example which He set them 
 to imitate was Himself. And thence, out of the 
 heart of the nation which was nursed on Revelation, 
 have come those holy and blessed visions which have 
 lit the path of toiling and suffering generations with 
 the lustre of heaven. All that man holds best and 
 happiest, all that most works for the healing and 
 saving of mankind, finds utterance in the words of 
 Hebrew Prophets and Psalmists ; who promise, who 
 prophesy, the reign of a King of righteousness and 
 peace over a regenerate restored Creation ; a new 
 heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteous- 
 ness for evermore. 
 
 Development ! Yes, we believe in development. 
 We only ask our philosophers to help us to complete 
 it. First the natural, then the spiritual, is the 
 Divine order. Here is the fruit of the groaning 
 and travailing of Nature. The creature at its 
 highest, by a last and crowning effort, brings forth the 
 human form ; man at his highest, by the supreme 
 act of travail, in God and through God, brings forth 
 the new man, who is destined to reign with God in 
 heaven and through eternity. Yes we believe in 
 development, we rest in it, for we believe in the in- 
 telligence that originated and that guides it, and 
 assures and will secure its fruits. We dare not stay 
 
The Universal T^'avaiL 47 
 
 on this creature level. We dare not say, here the 
 Creation ends its travail, in the sighing and groaning 
 of man the captive, bound and barred In his prison 
 house for ever. We catch the voice, we grasp the 
 hand that seems to seek us from a higher sphere. 
 We yield ourselves joyfully to the force that draws 
 us upward, and we. gain new and larger thoughts 
 of the future developments of Being as we rise. 
 We trace the outlines of that Redemptive plan 
 which is transmuting tears into joys, pangs into 
 glories, the din of battle into the victor's triumph, 
 this groaning and travailing into a redeemed and 
 restored Creation, this vile body into the trans- 
 figured body of the resurrection, and the wilderness 
 of earth into the kingdom of heaven. " This cor- 
 rzLptible shall piU on incomtptioii, and this mortal 
 shall pnt on immortality T 
 
 I could far rather believe that this solid earth is 
 but vanishing vapour, the procession of creature 
 forms a shifting illusion, and man with all his 
 achievements and attainments a puppet shadow on 
 the wall, than I could imagine for an instant that the 
 world of spirit to the edge of which the development 
 of the creature presses, and into which in man it 
 seems to rise, the world in which humanity seeks 
 with passionate eagerness to root itself, and from 
 which it draws the vital nourishment of its life, is 
 the one unreality of our experience. It is the 
 sphere into which all the noblest human thinkers and 
 workers have constantly lifted themselves, and from 
 which all the inspiration which has made our seers 
 
48 The Higher Life. 
 
 and prophets has flowed down ; it has furnished age 
 after age the forces by which man has fought the 
 battle against selfishness, violence and lust ; in it all 
 the springs are found which have purified, healed, 
 and saved society ; and I say again, I could more 
 easily believe that all things that I look upon, and 
 myself among them, are ghastly spectres, whirling in 
 a mad dance of death, than that this only, of all 
 the things that seem to be, belongs to your " world 
 of dreams." 
 
49 
 
 III. 
 
 THE ATHEISTIC LIFE. 
 ^* Having no hope, and ivithout Cod in the woj-ldr — Eph. ii. 12. 
 
 The value of human life in any generation may be 
 measured, on the whole, by its faith in God. Life 
 grows cheap as sense grows masterful, and as faith, 
 and the hope that is born from faith, expire. It 
 may help us to understand the sphere of being to 
 which man truly belongs, and in which alone he can 
 complete his life, to note that a sensual age, instead 
 of clinging- to life more fondly for the sake of its 
 pleasures, comes to curse it as a dire endowment, 
 and to escape from it joyfully even into the everlast- 
 ing night. Life had become next to worthless in 
 the estimation of the ablest men in the Roman 
 Empire, in the age in which the apostles relaid the 
 foundations of human society in man's si3iritual rela- 
 tions to his fellow man, to the unseen world, and to 
 God. So long as man was regarded as the centre of 
 his sphere, man's life became impoverished genera- 
 tion by generation, until in the age of the Advent 
 human life seems to have touched its nadir, its mini- 
 mum of value to the man and to mankind. 
 
50 The Higher Life. 
 
 The Emperor Tiberius was probably one of the 
 ablest men who has ever occupied a throne. His 
 state papers, if we may use the term, some of which 
 are preserved to us, are singularly luminous and 
 masterly. Yet it was the Emperor Tiberius, the 
 world's undisputed master, who wrote to the Senate 
 these terrible ^vords : " May all the gods and god- 
 desses, if there be any, damn me worse than I am 
 damned already, if I know what to write to you." 
 Seneca, whose intuitions of spiritual truth have sug- 
 gested to theologians the baseless idea that he must 
 have become acquainted with the teaching of the 
 Apostle Paul, if ever he grows enthusiastic, grows 
 enthusiastic upon suicide. Epictetus, individually a 
 far nobler man, utters, in the most intense passage 
 of his writings, a bitter wail over the impossibility of 
 finding a man who was trying, with even a decent 
 measure of success, to live after the pattern which, in 
 his judgment, could alone make life worth the living 
 at all. 
 
 In an earlier generation Lucretius, quite the deepest 
 thinker and the loftiest genius among all the Roman 
 poets, wrote a poem of marvellous beauty and power, 
 in which he proved that the whole mythology of 
 Rome lay about as near as old wives' fables to the 
 heart of the mystery of the Creation. He did much, 
 perhaps more than any other man, to shatter the 
 ancient belief about the origin and the government 
 of the world, which still stood between many a sad 
 heathen heart and the hopeless exclamation, " What 
 is truth ?" He developed the idea that a fortuitous 
 
The Atheistic Life. 5 1 
 
 concourse of atoms was the key to the order of the 
 Creation. 
 
 Namque ita multimodis multis primordia rerum 
 
 Ex intinito jam tempore percita plagis, 
 
 Ponderibusque suis consuerunt concita ferri, 
 
 Omnimodisque coire, atque omnia pertentare, 
 
 Quaecunque inter se possint congressa creare, 
 
 Ut non sit mirum si in taleis disposituras 
 
 Deciderunt quoque, et in taleis venere meatus 
 
 Qualibus hasc rerum genitur nunc summa novando. — B. v. i88. 
 
 He gave a picture of the inner order of the Creation 
 which left no room for man as a moral and immortal 
 being, which made responsibility a superstition, and 
 immortality a dream ; and then with all his splendid 
 faculty and promise, in the very prime of his man- 
 hood, at the age of forty-four, he killed himself out 
 of such a world ! 
 
 " Gallio cared for none of these things^ Gallic 
 was one of the most perfectly accomplished, admirable, 
 loveable men, if Seneca may be trusted, in the whole 
 Roman Empire. A complete and graceful scholar, 
 a masterly administrator, a friend whom his friends 
 held in the highest honour and love, he zvas every- 
 thing and he had everything which could dignify and 
 embellish life, except that which Paul was and had. 
 But for this he had no care. The deep thoughts 
 about God, about life, about man's nature and destiny, 
 with which Paul was charged, he would regard as a 
 poor and base superstition. The mission which was 
 burning in Paul's great heart, and which made him 
 a debtor to the whole world to preach to it the 
 Gospel, was a thing quite outside the sphere of his 
 
 E 2 
 
52 The Higher Life. 
 
 thoughts. He cared to cuhivate his faculties, to 
 enjoy philosophical discussion with his friends, to 
 repress wrong and wicked lewdness in the region 
 over which he ruled with a touch of lofty Roman 
 scorn ; but for the truth, the power, the life, with 
 which that Jew was charged whom he drave with the 
 rest from before his judgment-seat, he had no re- 
 cognition ; he was blind to it all as was Pilate to 
 Christ ; and Gallio too finished his brilliant career 
 by suicide. 
 
 Now these men whom I have mentioned were 
 among the very foremost men in the world in 
 their times. They were the ablest, the wisest, 
 the most distinguished ; the men in whom we might 
 most fairly hope to see the spirit of the times re- 
 flected, and by whose way of living and thinking about 
 life, we might gain the best insight into the thoughts 
 of the undistinsfuished mass who leave no definite 
 record of themselves in history. And their witness 
 is a profoundly sad one, and true as it is sad ; for 
 every when and every where the student of history 
 notes that life grows sad in Itself and worthless to 
 men, just in the measure in which it seems to them 
 that they have only this world to live for, and no- 
 thing to do in it but to speculate and to enjoy. An 
 atheistic age inevitably comes in the end to make 
 light of life. 
 
 And I note a very clear tendency to cheapen life, 
 to make light of it, and of the sanction by which its 
 sacred treasure is guarded, in the atheistic literature 
 of our times. There are hints, and something more 
 
The Atheistic Life. 53 
 
 than hints, that suicide may be regarded as an open 
 question, and that life may be mercifully shortened 
 to avoid inevitable pain, in periodicals conducted and 
 written by some of the ablest intellectual men of the 
 day. Now, one of the most marked of the earlier 
 fruits which Christianity bore to the world, was the 
 bound that it set to the age of suicide and infanticide. 
 The age of the first Caesars was emphatically the age 
 of the suicides. Tacitus tells us of a man who simply 
 killed himself in indignation that he had been born ! 
 Even the easy, complacent Horace, the pet poet of 
 the Augustan Court, could only say of his times : — 
 
 Damnosa quid non imminuit dies ? 
 ^tas parentum, pejor avis, tulit 
 Nos nequiores, mox daturos 
 Progeniem vitiosiorem. 
 
 It was a time when a favourite topic of dis- 
 cussion was the easiest means of escaping into the 
 valley of the shadow of death, whatever that might 
 be, as better in any case for a man, than such a world 
 as this. To this propensity, I may almost say, 
 passion for suicide, Christianity set a bound at once. 
 I do not mean to say that it had not a hard battle 
 with it ; but it shewed at once, within the wide circle 
 of its converts, its victorious power. There was evi- 
 dently ample power there, the power of faith and 
 hope, to master it.^ And the glow of the hope which 
 Christianity had kindled, spread far beyond its pale, 
 
 ^ It is curious enough that Christianity had before long to deal with 
 a tendency to suicide within the Church, in the form of voluntary 
 martyrdom ; which was suicide through excess of hope. 
 
j4 The Higher Life. 
 
 and infected with a loftier and more trustful spirit 
 the tone of heathen thinking- and living in the great 
 world around. It was not very perceptible at first ; 
 but I think that no careful student of the history 
 of those times can fail to note a certain set of the 
 current of heathen thought and aspiration, in the 
 direction in which Christianity was destined to guide 
 mankind, dating from the close of the age which heard 
 the preaching of the Apostles, and witnessed the 
 foundation of the Christian Church. 
 
 Indeed, it seems as if the minds of the wisest 
 and most far-sighted men in heathendom were led 
 on to utter just that cry which Christianity was 
 destined to answer, and to formulate the desire which 
 it was sent into the world to meet. When Seneca 
 says in utter hopelessness of his own age, " There is 
 no one strong enough of himself to lift himself up, 
 some one must stretch out a hand to him," does it 
 not seem to say, that the world was waiting for the 
 word, " The Lord hath visited his people;''' " The 
 Son of vian is come to save that which was lost i*' 
 ''Look unto Him and be ye saved, all ye ends of the 
 earth " f 
 
 When Epictetus cried with such passionate 
 earnestness, " Shew me some one person formed ac- 
 cording to the principles he professes. Shew me one 
 who is sick, and happy ; in danger, and happy ; dying, 
 and happy; exiled, and happy; disgraced, and happy. 
 Shew him to me, for by heaven I long to see a Stoic 
 Let any of you shew me a human soul de- 
 siring to be in unity with God ; not to accuse either 
 
The Atheisiic Life. 55 
 
 God or man ; not to be angry ; not to be envious ; not 
 to be jealous ; in a word, desiring from a man to 
 become God," is it not as though there had been born 
 within him, an intense unconscious longing to stand 
 face to face with such a man as the Apostle, who could 
 write these words, and live them, and teach others to 
 live them too ? — " But in all things appj^oving ourselves 
 as the ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictio7is, 
 in necessities, in distresses, iii stripes, in imprisonments, 
 in tnmnlts, in labours, in watchings, in fastings ; by 
 purencss, by knowledge, by long-suffering, by kindness^ 
 by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned, by the word of 
 truth, by the power of God, by the armour of righteous- 
 ness on the right hand and on the left, by honour and 
 disJwnour, by evil report and good report ; as deceivers, 
 and yet true ; as tmknown, and yet well-known ; as 
 dying, and behold we live ; as chastened, and not killed ; 
 as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing ; as poor, yet 
 making many rich ; as having nothing, and yet possess- 
 ing all things A 7td what agreement hath t/te 
 
 temple of God with idols ? For ye are the temple of 
 the living God ; as God hath said, I will dwell hi 
 them, and walk in them ; and I will be their God, 
 and they shall be my people. Wherefo7''e come out 
 from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, 
 and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive 
 you, and will be a Father tcnto you, and ye shall be 
 my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty !' — 
 11. Cor. vi. 4 — 10, 16 — 18. 
 
 What would Epictetus have given to commune 
 with the man, who, advancing to scenes of struggle 
 
56 The Higher Life. 
 
 and anguish, at the vision of which even the pure and 
 noble Stoic might have stood appalled, could ring 
 out a joyful welcome to it all : " None of these things 
 move vie, neither count I my life dear tinto myself, if 
 I might finish my coiLrse with joy, and the ministry 
 zvhich I have received of the Lord festis, to testify the 
 gospel of the grace of God " / 
 
 To me there seems to be nothing so wonderful 
 in the apostolic age, as the way in which the ablest 
 thinkers and the noblest men in heathendom, 
 were led to pine for the very deliverance which Chris- 
 tianity was already beginning to accomplish. It is 
 as though the confession were wrung from them, by 
 their earnest but vain endeavours, " We would aim at 
 the ends which these Christians are aiming at, we 
 would do the things which these Christians do, but 
 the very root of the power to do them seems to be 
 dead in us, and in the world." ^ 
 
 Christianity saved human society by lending new 
 worth and sacredness to life. Life became inexpres- 
 sibly precious to men who believed, and who knew 
 that they had a right to believe, that out of the pain 
 and travail of the present, a future of glorious liberty, 
 power and joy was being born. And when I speak 
 of life, I use the word in its larger sense, and not of 
 this mortal life only ; that they were only too ready 
 to lay down because of the far more exceeding and 
 
 ^ A very full and able discussion of this great subject will be found 
 in " The Light of the World," by Professor Wilkins, of Owens Col- 
 lege, Manchester (Macmillan), to whom I feel indebted for many 
 valuable suggestions. 
 
The Atheistic Life. 57 
 
 eternal weight of glory which this light and momen- 
 tary affliction would bear as its fruit. Their existence, 
 instead of becoming a bitter curse to them, as it was 
 to Tiberius on the world's imperial throne, was a pos- 
 session of priceless worth. Christ laid a consecrating 
 hand upon it; He claimed it as His own, and it 
 became a sacred thing from that hour ; sacred for 
 its uses of service to this world, to which the example 
 of Christ irresistibly drew them ; and sacred as a 
 sacrifice to be freely, joyfully offered, when claimed 
 for the service of a higher world. 
 
 I shall have more to say of this in the next discourse. 
 I simply note now, as matter of history, that Chris- 
 tianity at once made life an inestimably precious endow- 
 ment, branding suicide as a shameful treason, as well as 
 a wanton waste ; while, on the other hand, it called 
 forth martyrs by myriads, men not ready only, but 
 eager to pour out life like water, if they might 
 bear witness to that which alone made it worth while to 
 live. This new sense of the sacredness of life, arose 
 from the idea which Christianity implanted, that it was 
 a trust from the Highest; to be used bravely, nobly, 
 at His commandment, and at His commandment at 
 any moment to be bravely, joyfully laid down. 
 
 I have dwelt thus largely on the state of thought 
 and of life in the heathen world at the time of the 
 Advent, because I believe that it affords us a valuable 
 clue to some of the deeper tendencies and experiences 
 of our own times. We are endeavouring to look at 
 life in the light of modern Atheistic ideas. And I 
 use the word modern in this connection advisedly. 
 
58 The Higher Life. 
 
 It is not the Atheism of the end of the last century 
 which I am asking you to consider ; but that which 
 meets us in the Hterature and in the hfe of our own 
 generation. It has a special character of its own, 
 and a special affinity, I think, with that of the age of 
 the Advent of which I have spoken already some- 
 what at large. The Atheism of our day differs in 
 many very important features from that of a hundred 
 years ago, which culminated in the wildest excesses of 
 the French Revolution. In that there was a bitter, 
 malignant hatred of Christianity, a fierce fury against 
 it, from which we are now happily delivered. Why ? 
 What was its spring ? I do not hesitate to express 
 my belief that this bitter, furious hate was due almost, 
 if not quite, entirely to the practical Atheism of the 
 Christian Church. Just as through the vices, the 
 self-seeking, and the spiritual pride of the chosen 
 race, " the name of God was blasphemed among the 
 Gentiles," so in the dark days of which we are 
 speaking, a Christless Church caused the name of 
 Christ to be blasphemed in the world which it was 
 set to teach and to save. 
 
 Picture to yourself the state of the French Church 
 about the middle of the eighteenth century, read any 
 chapter out of its history, and add a chapter out of the 
 history of the " most Christian '' Government which 
 it supported, sanctioned and applauded, and then 
 wonder if you can that men betook themselves in 
 despair to the old Paganism, and thought that 
 " Demoiselle Candeille " might be better worth wor- 
 shipping, as goddess of Reason, than the God who 
 
The Atheistic Life. 59 
 
 was pourtrayed to them by the idols, and the harpy 
 prelates and priesthood of the Gallican Church. 
 
 Read, too, any honest pourtrayal of the character 
 and habits of the average Anglican parson of that same 
 period, study the temper and morals of our Episco- 
 pate, at which Gibbon delighted, not without justice, to 
 sneer; see theshameless traffic, political and mercenary, 
 in the care of souls, which was understood on all hands 
 to be a mainspring of action in a Church which was 
 set to teach that covetousness is idolatry ; consider, 
 too, the kind of Government in England with which 
 the Church was inextricably associated, and to which 
 the toast "Church and King" gave a kind of bibulous 
 consecration ; estimate its relation to freedom of 
 thought, freedom of worship, and to the wrongs and 
 the miseries of the poor ; remember, too, how Church 
 and Government stood together in defence of bigotry, 
 worldliness, cruel oppression, shameful wrong, and 
 all that works impoverishment and misery among a 
 people ; and again wonder, if you can, that some of 
 the most passionate and aspiring idealists of the day 
 were driven into wild atheistic ravines against a 
 Gospel, whose quality seemed to be certified to them 
 by such an organ as this. 
 
 A man like Shelley, driven half mad by the 
 wrong, the falsehood, the hate, the misery, which he 
 saw around him, was goaded into glorying in the 
 name of Atheist ; while his soul was full of profound 
 homage for the ideas of truth, liberty, and charity, 
 which the Gospel came to establish and to magnify, 
 but which all around him that called itself Christian 
 
6o The Higher Life. 
 
 seemed to him to deny. But these men had their 
 Bibles, it may be said, and should have judged 
 Christianity more justly. So too, Marcus Aurelius 
 had the lives of the Christians before him, and ought 
 to have found out that a power from God was at work 
 in his Roman world. But, practically, it is hard for 
 men to take a fair view of that which lies out of the 
 track of their current beliefs, experiences, and sym- 
 pathies ; and whenever the visible life of the Church 
 seems to dishonour the truths on which it is founded, 
 it is very hard for the Book which would teach men 
 nobler Christian lessons, to establish and to maintain 
 a hold on their hearts. 
 
 There was the stir and the glow of a true 
 Christian life in the sects outside the pale of the 
 Establishment in that generation, but they were 
 about as far removed from the observation and 
 sympathy of the unbelieving school of which I am 
 speaking, as was that obscure Jewish sect, said to be 
 "hostile to the human race," from the intelligent, 
 sympathetic contemplation of the philosophic master 
 of the Roman world. We shall never understand 
 the Atheism of a century ago, nor its Deism, until 
 we can measure how far the writings of a man like 
 Rousseau, for instance, restored to the common world 
 of his time some precious elements of that truth 
 with which Christianity had dowered it, but which 
 had been turned into base merchandise, and been 
 thereby made hateful to men, by a lying, tyrannous, 
 and grasping Church. 
 
 The Atheism of these days and the Deism 
 
The Atheistic Life. 6 1 
 
 — you will wonder at my grouping them together, 
 but there is no pure Atheism long possible for 
 man ; the Atheist is but the Deist searching for 
 his god — differ from that which I have been 
 describing by a whole earth, if not by a whole 
 heaven. They are morally at the opposite pole. 
 The one was strong in hate and defiance, the other is 
 serene and suave in ignorance. " I hate such a God 
 as you present to me," was the cry of old. " I really 
 know nothing about it, and can find out nothing," 
 is the bland utterance now. The old infidel stormed 
 and screamed ; the modern one shrugs his shoulders 
 and goes on with his work. He has no quarrel with 
 the Christians if they will let him alone ; he simply 
 tells them that their ideas are incapable of the kind 
 of verification which alone satisfies him of the reality 
 of phenomena, and enables him to deal with them as 
 matters with which his life has practically to do. 
 The Christian facts may be true, he says, or they 
 may not be true, he has no means of settling the 
 question ; nor, he evidently thinks, would it make 
 much difference in the sphere of thought and interest 
 to which he cares to confine himself, if he had. 
 There is a great deal of unbelief in our times which 
 is just of this complexion ; I think that it is altogether 
 the most formidable phase of unbelief with which we 
 have to deal. It is something like the " caring for 
 none of these things "^ to which I have already 
 
 ^ I have, of course, given a wider reference to this phrase than 
 apphes to the actual matter then in hand As concerns the riot, Galho 
 
62 The Higher Life. 
 
 adverted, and whose influence on society I have 
 already traced. Society has become very weary ot 
 our dry, hard, theological gospel ; as in the days 
 before the French Revolution it had become very 
 weary of the venal gospel of the priests. 
 
 Men see plainly enough that the order of the 
 universe is a thing much too complex and pro- 
 found, to be covered by the narrow dogmatic 
 schemes which we think that we draw from the 
 Scriptures of Truth. They say that the discovery 
 of the secret of the Creation is a thing entirely of 
 observation and inference ; and they regard our 
 Scriptural cosmogonies and views of Creation gener- 
 ally, as so many idols of the mind which must be 
 cleared out of the track of truth. There is a hardness, 
 a narrowness, a selfishness, they think, nor are they 
 far wrong, in the popular theology of our day, which 
 runs counter to all the best ideas and tendencies of 
 society ; and so they cast us out of their synagogues 
 of science, and treat that world from which we say 
 that our inspiration comes to us, as a world of dreams. 
 
 Will, moral freedom, responsibility, immortality, 
 heaven, and God, find no room in their philosophy. 
 No room, I say, for its domain is rigidly restrained 
 to the temporal and the expedient ; while man, if he 
 is to find freedom of action and development for the 
 spiritual part of him, must come forth into a larger 
 
 was probably quite right in having nothing to do with it, especially as 
 he saw, with that keen eye of his, that the beating had fallen on quite 
 the right man. Had Paul been beaten, perhaps he might have stirred 
 himself to care. 
 
The Atheistic Life. 63 
 
 world. But as for them, they beheve in no " spiri- 
 tual part." Thought is but the product of phosphorus 
 in certain combinations ; and choice — the free play 
 of the will by which we elect blessing or cursing, 
 life or death, the service of God or the service of 
 the devil — is but the shock of that battery of ma- 
 terial force which we carry about in our physical 
 organisation ; it is but one of the inevitable sequences 
 of Creation, and carries with it no more burden of 
 responsibility than the path of a bullet or the bolt of 
 a storm. We are but atoms, we are told, among 
 kindred atoms ; we dance our day like the motes in 
 the sunbeam, giving out hues and influences accord- 
 ing to our nature ; then, like all other atoms, we 
 enter into fresh combinations, and renew, in other 
 forms v/hich look like persons, what looks like the 
 play of a free individual life. But there is nothing 
 in it but seeming ; and nothing can grow out of it 
 but the repetition of the ceaseless inevitable round. 
 Verily a Dance of Death ! 
 
 And then the question arises — it will soon become 
 the question of questions with this generation — what 
 is the worth of such a life ? We are assured that there 
 is no moral personality, no moral responsibility. But 
 this sense of rnoral responsibility, the responsibility 
 of man as a person to the Ruler and the Judge of the 
 personal beings whom He made to serve Him and 
 to fulfil His will, is the root of the chronic agony 
 of mankind. From the most ignorant heathen to 
 the most instructed Christian, from Judas Iscariot to 
 Saul of Tarsus, it haunts, it distracts, it maddens 
 
64 The Higher Life. 
 
 men, until Christ has laid the spectre. There is no 
 explaining it away ; there is no getting rid of it. It 
 is at the root of all the religions ; it is the subject 
 matter of all the philosophies ; it sits as a spectre at 
 all our banquets ; it looks out on us through the sad 
 eyes of death. 
 
 But you say, it is a spectre ; it has no substance 
 out of man's imagination. Be it so. But what is 
 the worth of a spectre-haunted, spectre-hunted life ? 
 Can one conceive anything more wretched than 
 a life which is the sport of shadows ; in which crea- 
 tures of a day cannot enjoy the day, because they 
 are kept in terror by evil and frightful dreams. But 
 let them philosophise, you say : let them steadily 
 look at these shadows, and see how vaporous they 
 are. Let them dismiss these haunting thoughts, 
 and ofive themselves to noble, unselfish endeavours 
 to help and to bless mankind. Why ? The work 
 of the teacher and the saviour is hard work, and for 
 the most part very thankless. Who, what, is to sus- 
 tain men under the strain of self-sacrifice, and to 
 teach them to find the end of their being in the uni- 
 versal good ? A man like Saul of Tarsus may find 
 such a life come natural to him ; it may be as much 
 a matter of course to such an one to care for others, 
 as it is to most men to care for themselves. But 
 then what made Saul of Tarsus such a man ; what 
 sustained him in the lofty region to which he 
 climbed ? What called him, what strengthened him, 
 to live the life of an apostle ? What but the sense 
 of the reality of this invisible world, and its supreme 
 
The Atheistic Life. 65 
 
 claims ? What but the knowledge that his destiny 
 and the destiny of the race which he served "entered 
 into that which is within the veil " and had to do 
 with God and the spiritual w^orld through eternity ? 
 
 Philosophy does not travail in birth of apostles. 
 " Philosophy," says Voltaire, " was never made for 
 the people ; the canaille of to-day resembles in 
 everything the canaille of the last four thousand 
 years. We have never cared to enlighten cobblers 
 and maid-servants. That is the work of apostles." 
 And this is the secret mind of Philosophy in all 
 ages, as it would not, I think, be difficult to prove. 
 I fmd something in the same key, in the Autobio- 
 graphy of Mr. Mill, the model intellectualist, rather 
 than philosopher, of our times. He says, in his 
 Autobiography, " A person of high intellect should 
 never go into unintellectual society, unless he can 
 enter it as an apostle, yet he is the only person with 
 high objects who can ever enter it at all." No ; the 
 power to originate and to sustain a life of lofty and 
 noble self-devotion to the ignorant and the wretched, 
 flows down from higher springs. And if that fails, 
 what remains ? I need not tell you that it is the 
 fashion of our modern atheistic philosophy to smile at 
 this self-devotion. " Altruism" is the barbarous name 
 which they have invented for it ; with some subtilty, 
 I think, for if you can get a noble principle or power 
 labelled as an " ism," it is the first step towards 
 laying it on a shelf for the study of the antiquarian 
 philosopher. It is hinted now that in our eff^orts to 
 help the weak and to save the lost, we are interfering 
 
 F 
 
66 The Higher Life. 
 
 with the operation of a benign natural law which 
 dooms them to speedy extinction, and are trying in 
 vain to mend the hard, inexorable order of the world. 
 
 And who has not noted the vein of deep sadness 
 which runs through the literature of the school, and 
 finds fullest expression in the masterpieces of art with 
 which our most accomplished and powerful novelist 
 from time to time adorns and enriches our literature ? 
 Their philosophical writings, too, are very clever, 
 very thoughtful, very learned, very just, after a 
 fashion, but very cold, very hopeless, very lifeless. 
 There is no glow about them, no fire. There is 
 nothing to kindle a spark of enthusiasm, nothing 
 that can stir itself to praise. Life must be lived, 
 and the best must be made of it for ourselves and for 
 others, is the loftiest thought to which the teachers 
 of this school seem to be able to climb. And there 
 is a dark tendency already very manifest, to make 
 light of the sanctions by which the sacredness of 
 life is guarded. The putting of the old and the 
 sick whose case seems hopeless quietly out of the 
 way, is already, as I have pointed out, openly advo- 
 cated as a duty. I referred, too, to significant indi- 
 cations that it will not be long before we find suicide 
 justified as a refuge from suffering, or magnified as 
 it was of old as man's ultimate and victorious argu- 
 ment against a tyrannous Fate. " This is as a rule 
 the course of man's life," says Schopenhauer, " that 
 befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death." 
 
 Schopenhauer is one of the leading prophets of the 
 school, perhaps the al)lest, and his influence is very 
 
The Atheistic Life. 67 
 
 powerful and wide-spread on the cultivated youth of 
 Europe ; and this is his view of life. It is but a step 
 from this to argue that the sooner we dance into the 
 arms of death the better. Nor does the philosopher 
 at all shrink from the conclusion. What else does this 
 terrible passage mean ? — " The history of every life 
 is but a history of suffering ; the course of life is 
 generally but a series of greater or of less misfor- 
 tunes. The true sense of the monologue in Hamlet 
 may be thus summed up. Our condition is so 
 wretched that utter annihilation would be decidedly 
 preferable." .... " The oft lamented shortness of life 
 may perhaps be its best attribute." . . . . " Life may 
 be represented as a constant deceiver in things both 
 great and small. If it makes promises, it never 
 keeps them, except to show how undesirable is that 
 which was desired. First the hope, then the thing 
 hoped for disappoints us. Life gives only to take 
 away. The charm of distance shows us a paradise, 
 which vanishes like an optical delusion, if we allow 
 ourselves to approach it." . . . . " The general struc- 
 ture of life would rather produce the conviction that 
 nothing is worth our efforts, our energies, and our 
 struggles ; that all possessions are vanity, the world 
 a bankrupt in all quarters, and life a business which 
 does not pay its expenses." . . . . " The existence of 
 the world is a matter not of rejoicing, but of grief ; 
 its annihilation would be preferable to its existence ; 
 it is fundamentally something which ought not to 
 exist. Human life, far from wearing the aspect of a 
 gift, has every appearance of an incurred debt, the 
 
 F 2 
 
68 The Higher Life. 
 
 payment of which is exacted in the form of the' 
 urgent necessities, the tormenting desires, the un- 
 ceasing want which hfe involves. The whole period 
 of life is generally consumed in the liquidation of 
 this debt, and yet it is only the Interest which can be 
 thus paid off. The payment of the capital is effected 
 by death." ^ It would be hard to uphold the sin of 
 suicide against such a " vision of life." 
 
 This is the ultimate estimate of life as weighed 
 in the Atheist's balances. This is life in the light 
 of modern Atheistic ideas. Is it noble ? Is it 
 beautiful ? Is it joyful ? Is it not terrible, horrible, 
 maddening, to think that the blind force of things, 
 which there is absolutely nothing in or above the 
 universe to arrest or to guide, should be able to make 
 and keep alive such a world as is pictured here ? 
 To me, if all that I see around me, and all that I 
 feel within me, were the all of my life ; were I com- 
 pelled to regard Redemption as a mere mirage in 
 life's desert, God as a shadow, and the blessed and 
 glorious future, to which His book has taught me 
 that all things tend, the delirious dream of a fevered 
 heart ; I would curse the day on which I was born as 
 bitterly as Job did, and maintain as strenuously as 
 Seneca — after the fashion of that brilliant French- 
 man who repeated, at Washington, the traditions of 
 imperial Rome — man's indefeasible right to kill him- 
 self out of such a world. 
 
 And some of you say sometimes, often I daresay, 
 
 ^ Quoted by Canon Liddon, in his very able and interesting work, 
 "Some Elements of Religion" (Rivingtons), p. 132. 
 
The Atheistic Life. 6g 
 
 " I am tired of life, I am sick and weary of it all ; would 
 God I were at rest ! " Why ? When has this heart- 
 sickness overtaken you ? When has life seemed so 
 poor and worthless ? When has your soul thus 
 preyed upon itself, filled your face with restless sad- 
 ness, and sapped your health in its very springs ? 
 Was it in the seasons when faith was strong, when 
 the vision of the unseen realities was keen, when 
 the light of God was on your tabernacle of life ? 
 Was it when your soul was armed and paraded for 
 duty in God's service, and your noblest powers were 
 drawn forth and strained in work for Christ and for 
 mankind ? Nay ! I see your form then, it is erect 
 and eager ; I see your eye, it flashes with ardour ; I 
 hear your voice, it rings with exultation ; I catch the 
 heart-beats, they are full and musical, and they throb 
 with the energy of victorious life. No ; no faintness 
 then, no heart-sickness, no life weariness then ; but 
 abounding strength, abounding joy, abounding hope. 
 There is but one thing, friends, which makes life 
 worth having, worth living, and that makes it simply 
 of priceless worth ; it was expressed in one brief 
 phrase by the lips of the dying Wesley : " The best 
 of all is, God is with us." 
 
70 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE MEANING OF REDEMPTION. 
 
 ** Henceforth I call you not servants; .... but I have called you 
 friejids." — John xv. 15. 
 
 Man the friend of God — acquainted with His mind, 
 sympathetic with His purposes, devoted with the pas- 
 sionate ardour which love inspires to the fulfilment of 
 His will, and destined to dwell in His home and to 
 share in all the unfolding joy and glory of His king- 
 dom through eternity — is the idea of humanity which 
 the Bible unveils. I cling to it because it alone 
 seems to me to explain the scale of man's nature, it 
 alone gives the clue to the meaning of his deepest 
 experiences, and it alone justifies the tremendous 
 discipline which he is called to endure. 
 
 Against this, set the image of man according to 
 the Agnostics ; the school whose lofty tone assures us 
 that they regard themselves as the intellectual tutors 
 of our times. Man, the highest evolution as yet of 
 that blind force which has wrought, has pressed out 
 from within, the successive orders of the inanimate 
 and the animate creation ; a mere product of the 
 Creation, as absolutely as the crystal in the rock or 
 the lichen on the wall ; sharing with the creatures 
 beneath him, though in a more developed form, all 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. 
 
 the organs and faculties with which he is fearfully 
 and wonderfully endowed ; born, like them, of the 
 dust, and destined, when he has fretted his little 
 day, to settle, like them, into the dust again. 
 
 He is on safe ground, they say, and within the 
 true compass of his powers, when he deals with the 
 visible things around him, and the impression which 
 they make on the nerve substance within what he 
 thinks is himself — though what "he" means, or what 
 right or power that which is conscious, not of the 
 moment's impression even, but of the impression of 
 the past moment, has to call itself a man, is a problem 
 to which this philosophy apparently offers no satis- 
 factory solution — but when he conceives of himself 
 as having freedom of choice, and as being under 
 moral obligation to the God who made him to choose 
 the good and to hate the evil ; when he talks about 
 an immortal spirit, sin, redemption, judgment, and 
 eternal life, he loses himself in a world of dreams. 
 
 Choose ye the picture of your nature, the vision 
 of your destiny which seems to you most consonant 
 with the experiences of which you are conscious, and 
 the struggles and sufferings which you have to en- 
 dure. But as for me, let me hear the voice out of 
 the unseen and eternal world meeting my spirit in 
 its lonely toil and battle: "■Henceforth I call 
 ycu not servants ; for the servant knoweth not what 
 his lord doeth ; but I have called you friends, for all 
 things which I have heard of the Father I have made 
 known nnto youi' 
 
 If we are shadows and pursue shadows when we 
 
*]2 The Higher Life. 
 
 aim at the fulfilment of a Father's will, or yield to the 
 constraints of a Saviour's love ; if all that lifts us 
 above the brutes in origin and destiny be an 
 iridescent bubble of the imagination ; then I say 
 with the common-sense philosopher who has last 
 undertaken to enlighten us, " It is a hard God, a hard 
 life, and a hard world." The strong coarse natures 
 may be able to live in it with decent composure and 
 even comfort ; but Heaven pity, it does not pretend 
 to help, the weak, the tender, the gentle, the souls 
 that are touched to the finest issues ; life for them 
 must be one long sharp agony, and death their best, 
 their only friend. 
 
 I have spoken of man as a being born to be 
 redeemed. This seems to me to be the testimony of 
 Scripture concerning him when traced to its central 
 idea. How he came to be what he is as a creature, 
 is one question ; what God means by him as he is, 
 and what God intends to do with him, is another. 
 He is here as a spiritual being consciously under a 
 law. The Scripture tells us that he has suffered a 
 fall, that he has lost an estate of purity and blessed- 
 ness in which he was created. The school of 
 thought which is now to the front tells us that he 
 has suffered a rise ; that he has probably grown out 
 of an animal into a man. I say suffered a rise, for 
 the suffering is in any case indisputable. Whether 
 he has risen or whether he has fallen, it is as clear 
 that he is born to sorrow as that the sparks fly 
 upward. 
 
 This fact, with his ceaseless moaning over a lost 
 
The Mea7iing of Redemption. 73 
 
 estate, and his utter dissatisfaction with his present 
 condition, can be comprehended perfectly on the 
 Scriptural theory of his nature and destiny ; but it 
 seems utterly incomprehensible on any scheme of 
 philosophy which connects his whole nature with 
 the dust. Being-, as he is, a man, he is meant for 
 Redemption. The whole system of things con- 
 templates this hig-her evolution of humanity ; the fall 
 enters into the fundamental scheme of the Divine 
 government ; earth is made to be the theatre of the 
 discipline whereby the fallen is to be restored. The 
 whole Creation travails in birth of redeemed 
 humanity, and this groaning and travailing of all 
 things is but the beginning of that deeper and more 
 mysterious pain, by which man the sinner is to be 
 redeemed from the bondage of corruption, to abide 
 with God as a friend, a son, in fairer homes than this, 
 eternally. 
 
 Man is, as we have seen, a being born to be re- 
 deemed. We may well believe, nay, I may even say 
 that we are bound to believe, that a merciful and 
 righteous God would long ere this have terminated this 
 dread experiment of freedom, and would have swept 
 by another and yet more merciful deluge man's sin and 
 misery together from the world, but for the Redemp- 
 tion in which it is the Divine purpose that all this 
 sin and wretchedness shall fruit. Mr. Stephen says 
 that if he were asked ** if God were good," that is, 
 " disposed to promote the happiness of mankind 
 absolutely," he should answer, " No." ^ And if this 
 
 ^ " Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," p. 310. 
 
74 The Higher Life. 
 
 world be all that he can take account of, I entirely 
 agree with him. It is in Redemption that we learn 
 that God is Love. The continued existence of the 
 world, to those who believe in the loving and merci- 
 ful Ruler, means that it is being redeemed. 
 
 What is it to be redeemed ? This question must 
 be fully considered before the purpose which I have 
 in view in writing the present book can be in any 
 measure fulfilled. The Scripture is, in the main, the 
 history of a Redemption. The life, the death, and 
 the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, are the core of 
 the whole book. To this all the lines in the Old 
 Testament converge ; from this all the lines radiate 
 in the New Testament and in human history. The 
 history of Christendom is but the Apocalypse " writ 
 large." Of the purpose of that Redemptive work it is 
 written, — " BiU when the fulness of the time was 
 come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, 
 made under the law, to redeein them that were tinder 
 the law, that they might receive the adoption of 
 sons." The Lord means precisely the same when 
 He calls His disciples friends. Till then servants ; 
 through the fulness of Redemption, friends, " Nozu 
 tJie heir" says the apostle, speaking of the estate of 
 a servant, * ' so long as he is a child, differeth nothing 
 from a servant, thotigh he be Lord of all!' He dii- 
 fereth in nothing but in the fact that he is the heir, 
 and is being trained to reign. This makes the dif- 
 ference, as the apostle elsewhere fully recognises, at 
 root essential. There is no breach of continuity in 
 the dispensations. It is ah Redemption, the giving 
 to men power to become the sons of God. 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. 75 
 
 Sons, friends, the words are equally expressive. 
 Moral sympathy, moral likeness, identity of interest 
 and hope with God, are implied in either term. 
 To rise to this is to be redeemed. This world is 
 either the scene and the instrument of this resurrec- 
 tion, or it is the Valley of Hinnom of the universe, ' 
 foul with all its wreck. Life must be regarded in the 
 light of all that is to grow out of it. Seeds of things 
 are planted here, foundations are laid, perhaps only 
 ground is cleared. There is eternity to work out the 
 results. If we look simply to what we can see and 
 measure, we should say that Redemption seems to be 
 a greater failure even than the experiment of freedom, 
 so far from anything which we may dare to call 
 " salvation," is the condition of the great mass of 
 mankind. But " blessed are they who see not, and 
 yet believe ; " who believe that the travail of the 
 Redeemer's spirit is precious in the sight of the 
 Father, and that He shall see of the fruit of that 
 travail, and be satisfied in the Redemption of a 
 world. 
 
 But who is this Being to whose fellowship we are 
 called ; what is that Nature, that Mind, that Will, 
 conformity with which is Redemption ? Miss Night- 
 ingale complains that so few of our theologians tell 
 us what God is, what His character is like. " Is it 
 not the most important and at the same time the 
 most neglected point in theology, to determine what 
 God is — what His character is like ? " " Reams of 
 sermons are written on every point but this. And 
 yet this is the foundation of all How can 
 
76 The Higher Life. 
 
 man give his best unless he knows, unless you will 
 try and find out for yourselves and for him, what is 
 God's plan for him in this world, and in the next, 
 why there are such sufferings in this world, who is 
 this God who has put him here, and put him here to 
 suffer so much ?" — Eraser s Magazine, May 1873. 
 
 The complaint is most just. To know God, to 
 whom the Redemption which is by Christ Jesus seeks 
 to conform us, is eternal life. And yet how little 
 we endeavour to search out the secret of God, to 
 know what it is in God, to be in communion with 
 which is Redemption ; what is that mind with which 
 we are to be in sympathy, what is that plan of life 
 which we are to adopt as our course of duty, what is 
 that purpose which we are to devote ourselves to 
 fulfil. 
 
 The Scripture tells us in one pregnant sentence, 
 " God is love." And it unveils to us the nature, 
 the meaning and the measure of love. " Herein is 
 love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, 
 and sent His So)i the propitiation for our sins!' 
 " And hereby zue have knowledge of love, that He 
 laid down His life for tisT " He spared not His 
 ow7t Son, but freely delivered Him up for us all ; " and 
 those who know the nature of love, will understand 
 that in delivering up the Son He delivered up Him- 
 self. The nature of God is love. The love mani- 
 fests itself by sacrifice. It is by a sacrifice of awful, 
 of infinite pain and effort, that the nature of God is 
 manifested to the world. To grow like that nature 
 is to be redeemed. Because of the awful pain of that 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. yy 
 
 sacrifice which was accomplished on Calvary, the 
 symbols of which are still worn on high — which means 
 that it abides still as the power by which the world 
 is being ruled to Its redemption — Christianity has 
 been called " The worship of sorrow." But that is 
 a partial view of it. It is really the worship of love, 
 of life. To the life of spirits, to the life of that world 
 to which we are being born, for which we are being 
 redeemed, sacrifice is bliss. The pain of it is the 
 thing of time, and of the accident of transgression. 
 It is because we are so weak, and poor, and sick, 
 that we feel this life which is like God's a pain and 
 a strain. As we grow under this discipline, as we 
 become redeemed, we shall find it the natural habit 
 of our spirits ; we can gather from what, in rare mo- 
 ments, we now find in it of joy, and even of rapture, 
 that one day it will be our bliss. 
 
 We shall learn then how the most blessed One, 
 in manifesting the life of God in a world so jangled 
 and discordant as this, became of necessity the Man 
 of Sorrows ; and how there was a joy in the heart of 
 that pain which was borne for others, was borne for 
 man, which mounted to rapture when He realised 
 all the fruit of blessing which the travail of His soul 
 would bear in eternity. The sorrow is not the essen- 
 tial thing in Christianity ; that is the accident of 
 time. The essential thing is the Love ; that abides 
 a fountain of blessingf for ever.^ 
 
 * This subject is treated with great fulness, and with singular 
 beauty and power, in the " Mystery of Pain," by Mr, Hinton. 
 
78 The Higher Life. 
 
 And this seems to be the point where the ascetics 
 go so drearily astray. They think that the sorrow 
 is the essential matter, the germ of the glory, and they 
 afflict themselves wilfully with new measures of pain. 
 It is the life of love, which cannot but manifest itself 
 by sorrow here, which is the Christian life ; the sor- 
 row is only beautiful, healing, redeeming, when it 
 •comes through and grows out of the manifestation of 
 love in a world eaten up by the selfishness of sin. 
 Those w^ho seek sorrow as being in itself in a Chris- 
 tian sense a good, are seeking what is really an evil 
 thing. They miss all elevating and purifying influ- 
 ences, and bury themselves in confusion and ulti- 
 mately in despair. But the life of God, to the fellow- 
 ship of which man is to be redeemed, is the life of a 
 Saviour ; One who lives only to help, to heal, to 
 save ; One whose joy is in giving, whose bliss is in 
 drawing the world through His great sacrifice to 
 Himself. The men who have lived most fully in 
 the light of God's countenance, the men after His 
 own heart, the men on whom the world has set its 
 mark as its Psalmists, Prophets, and Apostles, and 
 whose memory it will never let die, were, as I hope to 
 make plain in succeeding discourses, the men who in 
 their time lived most purely this life of sacrifice, 
 and who found the joy and glory of their being in 
 service to mankind. 
 
 Self-sacrifice is now but a cheap virtue, in the 
 judgment of some of the most influential thinkers of 
 our day. The worldly wise laugh at it ; the keen 
 politicians, with their ruthless common-sense and 
 
The. Meaning of Redemption. 7^ 
 
 common-place, leave it quite out of the account. But 
 it is wonderful to consider how we are all standing, 
 and working, and denying the divine beauty and 
 grandeur of sacrifice, on ground which has been 
 cleared and levelled for us by men and women who 
 wrought entirely in the spirit of sacrifice ; who had 
 caught the infection of the great Example, and who 
 believed, in their heart of hearts, and lived out 
 their belief, that " it is more blessed to give than to 
 receive." Ah ! it had been a dreary world — nay, 
 would it by this time have been a world at all } — but 
 for such self-denying, self-sacrificing, Christ-like work. 
 It is easy to say, as is said constantly now, that 
 "self-love is the fountain from which the wider forms 
 of human affection flow, and on which philanthropy 
 itself is based ; " that if men deny themselves, or 
 sacrifice themselves for mankind, it is because it 
 pleases them to do it, and therefore it is but self-love 
 which moves their action, after all. Be it so. The 
 problem of society on which its salvation hangs, is 
 how to discover or to create the men and the women 
 whose self-love will take this benign and holy form, 
 who please the^nselves by serving and saving their 
 fellow men. There are two selves ; the lower which 
 isolates a man, and makes him, if he obeys its man- 
 date, a centre to himself ; and this is the self-love, or 
 rather it is the love of this self, which distracts, dis- 
 rupts, and destroys society. And there are those 
 who find " themselves " in the higher part, which is 
 born of God and which obeys His attractions ; it be- 
 comes their second and higher nature to fulfil the 
 
8o The Higher Life. 
 
 mandate and to enter into the joy of Him who gave 
 Himself for mankind. They learn to love to do it 
 in their measure ; it fills them with such peace and 
 such joy as the self-centred can never dream of, far 
 less taste. You may say, if you will, that they please 
 themselves in doing it ; but you dare not call it 
 selfishness ; you feel instinctively that it belongs to 
 an altogether higher sphere, to the sphere in which, 
 as Epictetus says, man is " seeking to enter into 
 fellowship with God." 
 
 And this is the key to what is said in Scripture 
 about God making His own glory the end of His 
 action. His glory is His love. To give His love 
 full play in radiating blessing around, in cherishing 
 the weak, in comforting the sad, in saving the lost, 
 is His glory. It is His nature, He cannot but do 
 it ; but it is the joy, the life of the universe that it 
 is His nature, and that He is ever seeking through 
 Redemption to plant that nature in mankind. I say 
 that the problem of society is how to multiply such 
 natures, if a holy and benign order is ever to rise 
 out of this chaos, if ever the world is to be saved. 
 And where shall we seek them ? What can create 
 and multiply such friends of God ? I answer, Christ, 
 and Christ alone. This is the Redemption which is by 
 Christ Jesus ; not an arrangement which simply 
 assures a personal salvation, which is mostly con- 
 ceived of in these days as an immunity from penalty 
 and pain, but that quickening of the life of love 
 which makes men seek their joy in serving, in 
 blessing, in saving, through eternity. 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. 8 1 
 
 And it is through sorrow that this Redemption is 
 carried on and perfected. It Hes at the root of all 
 the most grievous pain that torments mankind. 
 What may be called the pangs of nature are but 
 slight and fugitive, compared with that anguish of 
 man's spirit which grows out of his spiritual impulses 
 and sympathies, which is connected with his duties 
 and relationships, and involves, in some shape or 
 other, sacrifice of himself. He may obey the im- 
 pulses, and pain will attend and consecrate the sacri- 
 fice, but he will win the blessing ; he will find a joy 
 in the duty done, the gift given, the sacrifice offered, 
 such as springs from no other fountain, and in which 
 he is truly tasting the joy of God. He may refuse 
 the duty or the sacrifice, as we are refusing them 
 every day, and pain of another order, the pain which 
 hath torment, will grow out of and punish the refusal. 
 A man may live studiously to himself, in his home, 
 in his business, in his kingdom, and may have the 
 art and the power to make others minister to him. 
 He is simply sowing the dragon's teeth which will 
 spring up as armed men to smite him. But this 
 ordinance of pain also is healing, not destroying ; it 
 is unto life and not unto death. Though there is 
 intense bitterness in it, it is a bitterness which is 
 doctrinal ; it is God's warning to, God's compulsion 
 on, men to choose the nobler life of duty and self- 
 denial, in which, though there may be pain, though 
 there tnust be pain in a world out of tune with the 
 Divine idea, the pain is a fountain of pure and 
 everlasting joy. We fear, like the disciples, entering 
 
 Q 
 
82 The Higher Life. 
 
 into the cloud ; in the heart of the cloud was Christ 
 in His glory. We shrink from the pain in which, in 
 our present condition of sickness and disorder, all 
 holy and godly effort must involve us ; in the heart 
 of the pain, if we have courage and faith to face it, 
 there is the very joy of God. 
 
 We need only to look faithfully, with open face, 
 now that the sunlight is shining upon them, at the 
 dark, sad passages of our lives, to see how God was 
 busy about us, by them and in them, developing 
 the nobler part of our nature, that which draws us 
 to the life of love ; and rebuking, chastising, and 
 perhaps crushing the baser part which draws us to 
 the life of self, and to the sorrow which hath torment 
 in which it issues at last. And in the very suffering 
 a thousand tender and beautiful efforts and ministries 
 were drawn forth around us, opening a new spring 
 of the purer joy in the hearts that offered them ; 
 tending to the rebuke, the humbling of the pride and 
 self-seeking which distracts and weakens, and to the 
 increase of the love which heals and saves. 
 
 We are not always conscious of the redemption 
 which pain is working ; nor know we the ways in which 
 it is preparing the soul to listen to the word which 
 wall surely reach it, " Rise up and live." And this 
 unfolds to us the difference, which is profound and 
 vital, between the Stoic and the Christian philosophy 
 of life. Both agree that man is born to trouble, 
 and that life must be a long, stern battle with pain. 
 The Stoic tries to isolate himself, to detach himself 
 inwardly even from the body, and from its sur- 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. Zt^ 
 
 roundincrs, and to inure himself to believe that the 
 pain which touches these does not truly touch the 
 man. Epictetus puts this view with singular sharp- 
 ness ; " If a raven happens to croak unluckily, let not 
 the appearance hurry you away with it, but imme- 
 diately make this distinction to yourself, and say, 
 ' None of these things is portended to me, but 
 either to my paltry body, or property, or children, or 
 wife, but to me all portents are lucky if I will.' " 
 
 The Christian, on the other hand, is taught not 
 to detach but to relate himself. The whole genius 
 of the Bible, and of the teaching and influence of 
 Christ, is distinctly against the ascetics, who re- 
 produce in Christendom, with other and deeper 
 principles of action than the Stoics dreamed of, the 
 ideas of the Stoic School. Many motives conspired 
 to draw men to the "religious life " in the "ages 
 of faith." Some were attracted to it as to a quiet 
 nook of peace and of silence, in the midst of a world 
 full of cursing and bitterness, of violence and blood. 
 Some were tempted to what they took for a closer 
 imitation of Christ — imitating the outward con- 
 ditions of his life. Some by a passion for pain as 
 a means of purification ; and some by the Stoic idea 
 that it is the part of a wise man to curtail to the 
 utmost the surroundings and the external necessities 
 of his life. But Christianity seeks distinctly to 
 multiply and to strengthen the bonds of association, 
 to develope man's dependence on his fellows, and 
 thereby to feed, a Stoic would say, the sources of 
 human pain. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 The Higher Life. 
 
 Christ teaches us to cultivate the tenderest human 
 affections, and to widen to the very utmost the circle 
 of our sympathies and loves. ** Who is weak and I 
 am not weak ? Who is offended and I btirn not f " 
 said the man who held himself forth as an example 
 whereby men might the more closely follow their 
 Lord. Christianit}^ far from corrugating us, far 
 from hardening and reducing our surface, expands 
 it immensely, and makes us sensitive to pain at 
 every pore. Christ was actually touched to tears 
 by the sight of a sorrow which He knew that He 
 could turn, and which He meant to turn, to exulting 
 joy. And why is this ? It \s from pain that the 
 Stoic seeks to save himself; it is throitgh pain that 
 Christ seeks to guide His friends to the springs of 
 joy that lie within and beyond. Was not Marcus 
 Aurelius on the track of this deep truth when he 
 wrote the words, " Accept every thing that happens, 
 even if it seem disagreeable, because it tends to this 
 — the health of the universe " ? 
 
 The more intensely we feel, the more this re- 
 deeming force finds in our nature to work upon, the 
 more the God who is Love can breathe by His spirit 
 through the whole organ of that nature, and draw 
 forth from it music in tune with the songs of Heaven. 
 God would not have us harden ourselves to any 
 affection, deny ourselves to any claim, or hide our- 
 selves from any sorrow. He has no will that we 
 should suffer; His will is that we should be blessed. 
 And therefore He will have us " deny ourselves " and 
 " bear our brother's burdens," and " look upon the 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. 
 
 things of others " with the same tender consideration 
 that we bestow upon our own. And all the pain 
 which comes to us through the service which we 
 render, the sacrifice which we offer, the loves which 
 we cherish, He knows will be a true fountain of 
 benediction ; which, troubled and turbid as it must 
 be through life's confusions for the moment,, will flow 
 bright and clear through eternity. 
 
 And what is meant by the redemption of the 
 world ? Simply the spreading through it of this life 
 of love ; love to God, love to man for the dear love 
 of God The worldly wise, the economists, the 
 believers in that which they can see and measure, 
 and in that alone, smile at this notion or laugh it to 
 scorn. Mr. Stephen, from whom I have already 
 quoted passages from which I utterly dissent, says 
 plainly — indeed there is no sort of want of the most 
 utter plain-speaking in his book — " The great mass 
 of mankind are and always will be, to a greater or 
 less extent, the avowed enemies of considerable 
 sections of their fellow-creatures ; at all events for 
 certain purposes and up to a certain point . . . 
 The question is this : Are the interests of all man- 
 kind identical ? Are we all brothers ? Are we even 
 fiftieth cousins ? " p. 286. 
 
 Now I do not simply say that a passionate yearn- 
 ing for brotherly relations between men and nations 
 has been developed by Christianity, though the fact 
 is unquestionable. Brotherhood was near to the heart 
 of all the great movements of human society during 
 the formative agfes of Christendom. It was the idea 
 
86 The Higher Life. 
 
 which sustained the Holy Roman Empire ; it pos- 
 sessed and animated the Monastic Orders ; it was 
 steadfastly witnessed to by the strongest institution 
 which has ever established itself on earth — the Holy 
 Roman Church. But I do not insist here on this 
 aspect of the subject. I say that it is the dominant 
 idea of our era, and it furnishes the one hope that 
 some great step towards the social salvation of 
 humanity is about to be gained. When I speak of 
 it as the dominant idea, I mean not so much that it is 
 the idea which has visibly mastered, and is visibly 
 reigning in the popular sphere, as that it is the idea 
 which has the strongest hold upon the master-minds 
 of our era, is behind all its most powerful and pro- 
 gressive movements, and is winning its way to recog- 
 nition as the power which will one day make a holy 
 and benign order in our chaotic and distracted 
 society. 
 
 The passionate ardour with which the Christian 
 lover of his fellow men asserts it, on the one hand ; 
 the enthusiasm with which men like Mr. Mill and 
 Mr. Harrison, and those from whom they differ as 
 widely as from us, — the ranting democratic leaders, 
 — preach it on the other, is profoundly significant 
 and full of promise. All round society there is a 
 ring of influence which draws it to the recognition 
 of the life of love, that love which " seeketh not her 
 own," as the one power which can heal the breaches 
 and repair the waste in the shattered social order 
 of our world. And it is the conservator of human 
 society at this moment. There are passions every- 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. 87 
 
 where in full force which are straining and rending 
 the fabric, and would speedily shatter it to fragments, 
 but that it is bound together by stronger loves. We 
 talk much, and most justly, of the terrible selfishness, 
 the brutal doggedness and fierceness with which men 
 are fighting for their own interests, and carrying up 
 the dread struggle for life, which rules through the 
 Creation, into the human sphere. But we forget the 
 myriad charities — I mean by that, the words, the 
 looks, the deeds of which love is the inspiration 
 — which underneath all this outward and visible 
 struggle are weaving the bonds which hold homes 
 and States together, and which constitute families, 
 tribes, and nations, instead of mere herds of men. 
 
 There is a man, for instance, who is cold, stern, 
 pitiless, in business, prompt to seize every advan- 
 tage, and to act out to the full the maxim " every 
 man for himself." But he has a sick wife, let us 
 say, at home, or a family of orphans which his dead 
 brother left to his care, or children of his own, 
 on whom he lavishes the tenderest solicitude, and 
 for. whose culture and welfare he is content to toil, 
 and would be content to die. And thus he is 
 building on the one hand by love, while on the 
 other, by hard selfishness, he destroys. There is a 
 poor woman who earns her bread hardly, and has to 
 fight and wrestle for her beggarly share. She has a 
 sharp tongue, a wild temper, and seeks solace now 
 and then in a drop of drink, or in ugly words. But 
 there is a poorer next door, sick and helpless. And 
 she will take her last loaf, her last pinch of tea, and 
 
88 The Higher Life. 
 
 share it with the poor sufferer ; she will watch by hef 
 sick-bed night long, and then will go off, more cheer- 
 fully than you from your soft couches, to her round 
 of toil. There is a rude, rough lot of reckless fellows, 
 a curse to their neighbours, a curse to themselves. 
 Their country gets hold of them, dresses them, drills 
 them, and sends them off to fight her battles. It is 
 poor pay that she gives them, and hard fare. But 
 there they will stand, cool and confident, the long 
 day through, to be shot at ; and when shot down, — 
 bleeding, shattered, tortured — they will shout " Hurrah 
 for old England ! " with dying lips, and feel a glow 
 about their hearts, as they drop and die for the dear 
 country that bred them and nursed them to man- 
 hood, which Dives there might envy, wallowing in 
 his purple and gold. 
 
 Ah ! the world is full of noble heroisms and gentle 
 charities, which already hold it together by their 
 bands of strength and tenderness, with a force of 
 cohesion which, blessed be God, all the pressure of 
 selfish greed and passion is powerless to destroy. And 
 what is wanted for the salvation of society but that 
 this life of love shall spread its healing, purifying, 
 compacting ministry through all its spheres ? As 
 men rise higher they find growing joy in these minis- 
 tries ; the pain of such effort and sacrifice is to them 
 sweeter than the most vivid self-seeking pleasure. 
 When the great world is lifted to the same level to 
 which God from heaven has drawn, and is ever draw- 
 ing, His friends ; when men, the wide world through, 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. 89 
 
 live as brethren in one Father's home, the world of 
 human society will be saved. 
 
 This is the power which has abolished slavery in 
 Christendom. It is often said that the Old Testa- 
 ment sanctioned slavery. It tolerated it for the time, 
 c refully mitigating its harshness, while it was plant- 
 ing the principle which would strike it to the heart. 
 Thou shalt not enslave thy brother, was the stern 
 command. As the idea of brotherhood widened its 
 scope, slavery narrowed its area. When men came 
 to understand that all men are brethren in Christ 
 Jesus, slavery was doomed. It was by the sword ot 
 that old Jewish commandment, wielded by men who 
 believed in the brotherhood, that slavery was killed. 
 
 This, then, is the power which is to heal and to 
 save man in his societies and in his world. Is it 
 not transcendently wonderful and beautiful, that it 
 is to this life of love that God is redeeming mankind 
 by the sacrifice of Himself? It is this life of holy, 
 self-denying ministry which He came down to live 
 among us, to reveal to us as the Eternal Life, wherein 
 is the perfect and perennial bliss. The philosophers 
 see in all ages that love is the power which helps 
 and heals, and God has kindled by the breath of His 
 own great love the fire of this holy life on all the 
 sacred altars of the world. His redemptive work 
 brought it down from the sphere of ideas to be a 
 living, practical power. Through Christ it entered 
 the congress of the forces which are moulding and 
 moving society, and at once by divine right it took 
 
90 The Higher Life. 
 
 the command of the whole. " Hereby know we love, 
 because He hath laid down His life for tts, and we 
 ought to lay down our lives for the brethren^ The 
 heart of the whole mystery is here. We have but 
 to lift our lives, and to help to lift mankind, to the 
 level of this sympathy, and the problem of society 
 is in process of solution ; the world as a world is 
 being saved. 
 
 The struggle for life which rules in the lower 
 spheres of the Creation becomes transformed, trans- 
 figured, when it enters the human ; it is thenceforth 
 through God's redeeming touch a struggle to com- 
 fort, to cherish, and to bless. Man, lifting up his 
 head as he emerges from the material order of Crea- 
 tion, and becomes consciously a spirit, with a spirit's 
 burden of duties and destinies, is met by God with 
 a Gospel which unveils to him the deepest mystery 
 of spiritual being, which teaches him how to grow 
 rich by giving, strong by serving, wise by teaching, 
 blessed by blessing ; while it opens for him a field 
 for the expansion of his being, and for the develop- 
 ment of his relations with God and with his fellows, 
 which will remain boundless through eternity. 
 
 To unfold the mystery of the Divine life, this 
 life of love, Redemption was essential. Therefore I 
 say that man is a being born to be redeemed, and 
 that Redemption is presupposed in the whole struc- 
 ture and constitution of our world. And this vision 
 of humanity at rest at last in the arms of love, they 
 tell me, is a dream, a fable baseless as the legend of 
 
The Meaning of Redemption. 91 
 
 Utopia. Well, I confess that I recognise that Utopia 
 joyfully as "the city which hath foundations," the 
 ** fatherland " of my spirit, which has the deepest 
 instincts and the most passionate longings of uni- 
 versal humanity for its witness, the whole develop- 
 ment of history for its harbinger, the Bible for its 
 prophet, God for its founder, and Christ for its 
 king. 
 
92 
 
 V. 
 
 THE PAIN OF PROGRESS. 
 
 " Thy heart shall fear, and be enlarged." — Is. Ix. 5. 
 
 Enlargemestt of heart is the true description of that 
 higher progress to which it is ever the aim of God 
 to lead us ; the text pictures the process, and unfolds 
 to us both the pain and the joy. I think that the 
 lang'i:age of the prophet is intended to present to 
 our mind's eye that nameless dread, that inward 
 shrinking and shuddering, with which the forecast 
 shadows of great crises affect us as we approach 
 them, and through which lies our passage to a larger 
 freedom, a larger power, and a larger joy. Enlarge- 
 ment of heart means truly, the acquisition of a larger 
 faculty for the reception of the thoughts and the 
 plans of God ; a new sense of the spiritual breadth 
 and fulness of the world into which we are brought 
 forth by Redemption, and a stirring of the faculty 
 within us to grasp and to wield the powers and pre- 
 rogatives of this loftier sphere. " My soul clcaveth 
 tmto the dust, quickest thoti me according to thy word',' 
 is really a prayer for enlargement of heart. Let new 
 vital floods permeate and purify the dust-choked 
 channels of my being, and bring a wider breadth of 
 
The Pain of Progress. 93 
 
 faculty within me to unfold itself to the kindling of 
 the Divine love. The love is always around us ; 
 the sunlight of God is always shining ; it is just a 
 question of how much we display to it which it may 
 purify and quicken, or how much we shut up within 
 the hard, cold crust of our selfishness, and mix, not 
 with sunlight or sun-warmth, but with dust. It is 
 the self-infolding — the shutting ourselves up in our 
 own little beggarly world, fearing to live at large, 
 and to obey the Divine behests, having a single eye 
 to our own narrowest interests, and no eye for the 
 things not seen and eternal — which makes the dust 
 the congenial field of such dull activity as the self- 
 centred can manifest. And it is the self-unfolding, 
 the throwing wide the gates of the soul that the 
 God of love may enter and claim us as His friends, 
 and use us as His ministers in working out His 
 great plans of blessing, which the text describes as 
 enlargement — an enlargement of life, out of which is 
 to grow a fuller benediction to mankind. 
 
 I often think, paradox as it may seem, that it is 
 a sign of the lofty spiritual destiny of our race, that 
 man instinctively cleaves to the past, and shrinks 
 from the future. He is always for returning on the 
 old, well-trodden path to the Paradise of his memory; 
 it is but the loftier and more highly cultured spirits 
 that stretch forward to the heaven of their aspirations 
 and hopes. I have already spoken of this constant 
 back-look of humanity ; this bemoaning of a past 
 which, in the form in which memory cherishes it, can 
 never be restored. It is characteristic of all heathen 
 
94 T^'^^ Higher Life. 
 
 peoples who have expressed their mind in a Htera- 
 ture ; always there is the golden past in bright 
 contrast to the dark present and darker future ; or 
 if there is some golden gleam in the far distance, it 
 is always the " Saturnian reign restored." It may 
 be said that this is simply the memory of the joy, the 
 carelessness, the vivid delight in beauty, which is the 
 endowment of childhood, recalled by the way-worn 
 pilgrim of the wilderness, and translated into a 
 " Paradise lost " for mankind. If this were a sufficient 
 account of the matter, it would still surely be most 
 significant and prophetic. Is life nothing but dis- 
 enchantment ? Is ddsilhisionni the epitaph of our 
 race ? The golden glow of the past fondly traced 
 as it lingers on the ridges of the desert, as the way 
 grows sterner, and the pastures barer daily, imist 
 mean that there will be one day a brighter glow in 
 the future ; unless, indeed, a mocking demon has had 
 power to arrange all the order of life and of the 
 world. 
 
 It is very wonderful how all the great things 
 which have largely influenced the world, have grown 
 from small, narrow, hard, but intensely vital begin- 
 nings, and have grown by enlargement of heart. 
 Indeed, all seeds are small, hard, and dry until the 
 genial moisture touches them, and it is with enlarge- 
 ment that the process of growth begins. Let us 
 look for a moment, from this point of view, at the 
 greatest of all institutions, the Church. To me the 
 Divine Hand is as patent as the sunlight, in the 
 whole order of human development under the in- 
 
TJie Pain of Progress. 95 
 
 fluence of Revelation. If it be a chance coincidence 
 that the kingdom which the Lord Jesus founded, 
 — which has been the formative influence on the 
 strongest and most cultivated peoples, nursing their 
 infancy, training their youth, arming their manhood, 
 and guiding their steps in the destined path — was 
 prophesied ages before in the literature, and still 
 more notably in the life, of the Jewish people, who 
 believed themselves through eighteen centuries or- 
 dained to give birth to such a Deliverer, who sang 
 of the Advent, prayed for it, waited, watched, and 
 suffered for it, with a tenacity of belief which stands 
 entirely by itself in human history ; I say, if this be 
 a chance coincidence, reasoning in any high sense 
 seems to become impossible ; we can but in that 
 case, after the dreary Positive fashion, watch and 
 register sequences, things that precede and things 
 that follow, resigning all hope of discovering behind 
 or beneath them the reason of their relation, which 
 might give us an understanding of their meanings, 
 and a forecasting of their results. " Looking before 
 and after" would no longer be descriptive of the 
 Godlike faculty within us ; it would in that case be 
 altogether a brute-like faculty, seeing only that which 
 is around it in the dust. 
 
 There is a clear orderly progress, in the develop- 
 ment of a Divine idea, and in the effect of a Divine 
 influence on man, from the day when Abraham 
 "crossed the river" until now. The Church is the 
 depository of this sacred counsel, this redeeming 
 purpose, which, as we have seen, underlies all man's 
 
96 The Higher Life. 
 
 history ; and again and again and again the heart of 
 the Church has been enlarged in seasons of sore 
 strain and dread, to take in those wider ideas of its 
 vocation, its mission from God and for God, for 
 which, in the order of Providence, " the fulness of 
 the time " was come. The Church now stands, as she 
 has stood for ages, as the one absolute and authori- 
 tative witness for that brotherhood of humanity after 
 which, as the true basis of a perfect human society, 
 the philosophers and the political idealists have long 
 been feeling- ; as well as for that law of love which alone 
 can bind the bands of human society tightly enough 
 to resist the constant disruptive pressure of man's 
 selfishness and lust. The Church bore witness to 
 these fundamental principles of human development, 
 having revealed their bases in Christ ; she clung to 
 them, strove for them, suffered for them, in ages 
 when rivalry and martial frenzy were ruling passions 
 in society, when the sceptre of authority, genera- 
 tion after generation, yielded itself to the grasp of 
 the strongest, and when the rain that fell on the 
 fields of human industry and toil was constantly the 
 red rain of blood. 
 
 And yet the Church was cradled and nursed 
 in a narrow nook of the world, and quite out of 
 the visible fellowship of the race which it was 
 set ultimately to save. For ages the community 
 which bore this priceless gift for mankind in its 
 bosom, was distinguished by its isolation, its narrow, 
 secluded field of activity, its shrinking from national 
 intercourse and alliances, and by an attitude towards 
 
The Pain of Progj'ess. 97 
 
 the great world which at last raised against it almost 
 universally the charge of " enmity to the human 
 race." It will not do to say that this was just the 
 natural temperament of the Jewish people ; that 
 they cherished a churlish indifference to everything 
 outside their narrow national pale ; and that the large 
 expansive ideas which Christianity made current came 
 not at all from Judaism, but from the outside world 
 as the result of the general progress of mankind. 
 
 The promise or prophecy which Christianity fulfils 
 was lodged in the heart of the elect nation from the 
 very moment of its birth. When Abraham "crossed 
 the river," and founded in his patriarchal tent a 
 spiritual community which has expanded, without 
 break or pause, during four thousand years, until it 
 now overspreads the world, the announcement of 
 the purpose of his calling was made : " Now the 
 Lord had said unto A dram, Get thee out of thy 
 country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father s 
 hoiLse, unto a land that I will shew thee : and I zaill 
 make of thee a great nation, and I zuill bless thee 
 and make thy name great ; and thou shall be a bless- 
 ing : and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse 
 him that ciirseth thee; and in thee shall all the 
 families of the earth be blessed!' — Gen. xii. 1-3. 
 
 The leading teachers and rulers of the com- 
 munity, under Jacob's tent curtains, in the wilderness 
 tabernacle, and on David's throne, grasped this 
 promise and purpose, cherished it, and handed it 
 down with new scope and emphasis to their heirs. 
 Nor would it be difficult to shew tliat it was the 
 
 H 
 
98 The Higher Life. 
 
 tenacity with which they clung to this mission of 
 their nation, which made them, through their narrow 
 and selfish reading of it, a race of jealous, exclusive, 
 and boastful spiritual aristocrats, who earned for 
 themselves, as aristocracies of all sorts rarely fail in 
 the end to earn for themselves, the hatred of man- 
 kind. With this great idea and hope concerning 
 the Ruler and Redeemer of men in charge, they 
 thought more of their own dignity as its trustees, 
 than of the world for the sake of which it was en- 
 trusted to them ; and they held themselves and their 
 gospel jealously aloof from the nations. Their heart 
 had to be enlarged at successive crises of the great 
 world's history, by terrible shattering strokes on that 
 crust of pride in which they had encased themselves. 
 They had to learn, through great pain and fear, to 
 take wider and nobler views of their mission, and to 
 fulfil the very purpose of their calling in benediction 
 to mankind. 
 
 I might trace through the whole course of Jewish 
 history how this enlargement of idea and influence 
 always came through shocks, sufferings, and mighty 
 dread ; but I will simply indicate two great eras in 
 which the method and the results are very conspi- 
 cuous, and which will serve as a key to all the rest. 
 The time came when, in the purpose of Providence, 
 these Jews, who had been trained in a narrow school 
 and in almost entire isolation from the nations, were 
 to be scattered abroad through the whole area of 
 civilisation ; carrying their knowledge of God, their 
 Revelation, their habit of recognition of the Divine 
 
The Pam of Progress. 99 
 
 will, and of prayer as to a Father and Friend, among 
 the Gentile peoples ; setting up their Sabbath and 
 their synagogue in every chief city of Asia and of 
 Europe, and thus forming a nucleus of spiritual in- 
 fluence in every quarter, in which and by which 
 Christianity might bring its power to bear freely on 
 mankind. 
 
 They were to be planted out for the world's good 
 among the nations, fulfilling their appointed task. 
 But how and when did this enlargement begin ? 
 Through the terrible pressure, the dismay and dread, 
 of the captivity. They passed through an awful 
 agony as a people, in their long struggle and their 
 final overthrow. Jerusalem was laid in heaps, amid 
 such scenes of misery as hardly find a parallel in 
 history, while " the wind bound them up in her 
 wings " and bore them to a distant land, where they 
 were compelled by the hard yoke of bondage to 
 enter into those relations with surrounding peoples, 
 which marks the opening of a new era in the spiritual 
 history of mankind. How terrible the anguish was, 
 how dark the dread by which and through which 
 they were enlarged, their own oracles full sadly shew. 
 Hear the agonised tones of their lamentation : " Oh 
 that my head were waters, and inijie eyes a fountain 
 of tears, that I might weep day and night for the 
 slain of the daughter of my people!'' — Jer. ix. i. 
 " Aly doiuels, my bozvels ! I am pained at my veiy 
 heart ; my heart maketh a noise in me: I cannot 
 hold my peace, because thou hast heard, oh my soul, the 
 
 sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Destruction 
 
 H 2 
 
lOO The Higher Life. 
 
 lipon destruction is cried: for the whole land is spoiled: 
 sziddenly are my tents spoiled, and my curtains in a 
 moment. Hozv long shall I see the staiidard, and 
 hear the sound of the trtimpet ? For my people is 
 foolish, they have not known 7ne ; they are sottish 
 children, and they have none tinder standing : they are 
 wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knozvledge. 
 I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form and 
 void ; and the heavens, and they had no light. I 
 beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all 
 the hills moved lightly. I beheld, and, lo, there was no 
 man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. I beheld, 
 and., lo, the fruitful place was a wildeiniess, aiid all 
 the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of 
 the Lord, and by his fierce anger!' — Jer. Iv. 19-26. 
 
 It was thus that the work was done ; and Juda- 
 ism from that time forth began to mix itself with 
 humanity, and to help in the direct preparation of the 
 world for the Advent of her Lord. 
 
 Aees rolled on, and the fulness of the time came 
 when the great enlargement of the heart of the 
 Church and of the world was to be accomplished. 
 Those who had been trained to believe in the brother- 
 hood of a little national community, and to recognise 
 the duties which sprang from it, were to enlarge their 
 hearts to become witnesses of the brotherhood of 
 humanity, and of the law of love as the one vital 
 bond of souls, of homes, and of States. It was 
 throuo-h the strain and the ang:uish of another more 
 dire, more utter national overthrow, through the 
 crushing of the crust of their self-centred ideas and 
 
The Pain of Progress. loi 
 
 habits under the iron heel of Rome, through such 
 dread and horror as the Saviour calls unparalleled, 
 and speaks of as the end of the world, that the 
 Jewish was to be enlarged into the Christian Church. 
 Read the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel ac- 
 cording to St. Matthew if you want to understand 
 what that enlarofement cost. 
 
 The history of Christendom is precisely in the 
 same key. The tendency of companies and com- 
 munities entrusted with large gifts for men, is to 
 grow self-enfolded, to limit the field of blessing to 
 the pale which they have fenced round them, and to 
 claim as the property of an election what is the heri- 
 tage of mankind. And the work of God in all ages 
 is to tear up this " pale," rending its stakes into 
 faggots for the burning, and to stir the nobler and 
 more generous souls among His servants to preach a 
 larger gospel to a larger world. And always it is 
 through fear and anguish that the enlargement pro- 
 gresses ; and it is mostly in the midst of tremendous 
 external shocks and convulsions, and under the 
 pressure of events whose logic is too strong to be 
 gainsaid, that the chosen few find the courage to 
 take the onward step. They tremble as they take 
 it, while the many watch, shuddering, the throes 
 through which a new age of larger liberty, of wider 
 vision, of holier relationship of souls, classes, com- 
 munities, and nations is being born. It is thus that 
 all great things grow. Even the Son of Man came 
 " not to send peace upon earth, but a sword." 
 
 There is just one secular thing, and but one, 
 
102 The Higher Life. 
 
 which in its world-wide bearings and blessings, offers 
 some faint image in the secular sphere of the bene- 
 diction with which in every sphere the Church is 
 laden. I refer to the Roman Law, which enters so 
 largely into the code of every State in Christendom, 
 and contains the essential principles of just and 
 righteous law for man in all countries, and under all 
 conditions throughout the world. It began in a very 
 hard, narrow, and separatist doctrine. It enlarged 
 its heart through ages of storm and strife, by throes 
 and with anxious fears such as I may not stay here 
 to dwell upon. Just as the Church was born in 
 Abraham's patriarchal tent, the Roman Law was 
 born of the rule of a stern, hard, patriarchal auto- 
 crat in his home. But it expanded through succes- 
 sive shocks, and under the pressure of imperative 
 necessities, until that which was at first a singularly 
 narrow and rigid code, but intensely real, honest, 
 and vital — having its root in the most central of 
 human relations, the patria potestas — grew to the 
 largeness of the system which can give righteous 
 judgments to mankind. This golden sentence of 
 Ulpian, for instance, " Jitstitia est coiistans et perpe- 
 tua voluntas jus smim cuique tribueitdo" contains a 
 catholic doctrine of justice ; it is the truth of the 
 matter everywhere round the wide world. 
 
 But I am specially anxious that you should see 
 clearly that this growth in the Church itself, and in 
 its relation to society, is strictly an expansion. It is 
 not the putting of new wine into old bottles ; it is 
 not the introduction ab extra into an old and narrow 
 
The Pain of Pi^ogress. 103 
 
 system of new and universal ideas. All that Chris- 
 tianity has been to the world, and has done for the 
 world, lay latent and germinant within the patri- 
 archal household in Abraham's tents, when he walked 
 with God on the wolds of Canaan, and " became heir 
 of the righteousness which is by faith." He is dis- 
 tinctly, from the spiritual point of view, the father of 
 many nations ; he is the father of the whole company 
 of the faithful till the end of time. Nor would it be 
 difficult to show that the legislation of God for the 
 Jewish people, the doctrine of brotherhood which 
 was therein proclaimed, and the duties which were 
 therein enforced, is that which, expanding age by 
 age the circuit of its influence, has grown into the 
 system of human duties which is recognised in 
 Christendom, has abolished slavery, and has main- 
 tained against the strong hand and the hard heart 
 "the cause of the afflicted, and the right of, the 
 poor." 
 
 One hears with a good deal of amazement of the 
 abolition of Judaism. The " ism " of it no doubt 
 died, as it deserved to die, but it died hard, it was so 
 intensely compact and strong. Judaism has been 
 abolished by making its history the sacred literature 
 of every nation in Christendom, which is now being 
 translated into every human language, that it may 
 become the sacred literature of mankind. Abraham, 
 Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah, are at this 
 moment the most familiar names on human lips. 
 The Jewish Psalms, in which is expressed the very 
 spirit of the national life, have furnished the bridal 
 
T04 The Higher Life. 
 
 hymns, the battle songs, the pilgrim marches, the 
 penitential prayers, and the public praises of every 
 nation in Christendom, since Christendom was born. 
 It is a sentence from the Jewish Psalm book, which 
 we have written over the portico of the chief temple 
 of the world's industry and commerce, the London 
 Exchansfe. These Psalms have rolled throusfh the 
 din of every great European battle-field, they have 
 pealed through the scream of the storm in every 
 ocean highway of the earth. Drake's sailors sang 
 them when they clove the virgin waves of the Pacific, 
 Frobisher's when they dashed against the barriers of 
 the Arctic ice and night. They floated over the 
 waters on that day of days when England held her 
 Protestant freedom against Pope and Spaniard, and 
 won the naval supremacy of the world. They 
 crossed the ocean with the "May-Flower" pilgrims; 
 ihey were sung round Cromwell's camp fires, and his 
 Ironsides charged to their music ; while they have 
 filled the peaceful homes of England and of Christen- 
 dom with the voice of supplication and the breath of 
 praise. In palace halls, by happy hearths, in squalid 
 rooms, in pauper wards, in prison cells, in crowded 
 sanctuaries, in lonely wildernesses, everywhere these 
 Jews have uttered our moan of contrition and our 
 song of triumph, our tearful complaints and our 
 wrestling, conquering prayer. Yes, Judaism has 
 been abolished, but with a glorious abolition. That 
 which was the precious treasure of a feeble and isolated 
 nation, God has abolished by making it the most 
 cherished and priceless heirloom of our race. It was 
 
The Pain of Progress. 105 
 
 by enlargement, and not by revolution, that Christi- 
 anity established its influence in our world. 
 
 Very interesting, too, would it be to trace how a 
 kindred, I should rather say a parallel, course of en- 
 largement has gone on in secular society. While 
 God has been enlarging His Church, to comprehend 
 better the meaning and the scope of His Gospel of 
 love on the one hand. He has been enlarging, on the 
 other, man's heart to receive and to rejoice in it. 
 The world was prepared in a wonderful way, and by 
 tremendous shocks and convulsions, for those preach- 
 ers of the universal Gospel, and those founders of 
 that universal kingdom, which is destined to gather 
 under one sceptre and to bind in one bond of love, 
 the scattered tribes of our race, whom the overthrow 
 of Jerusalem scattered through the earth. 
 
 And looking at it only from the secular side, it is 
 most notable, that the periods of man's greatest en- 
 largement, when intellect and spirit have broken out 
 of the old bounds, and have occupied a new world, 
 have been ages of convulsion and revolution, of cease- 
 less conflict and awful dread. The Homeric poems 
 were the fruit of a great era of struggle, whose special 
 features we but dimly trace, while its broad character 
 is written plainly enough in history. The life of the 
 Greek cities, like the life of the Italian cities through- 
 out the conflict of the Papal and Imperial powers for 
 the mastery and the government of Christendom, 
 was one ceaseless crisis. We may use the same 
 term to describe the life of our own country during 
 her long battle with Catholic Europe, under Eliza- 
 
io6 The Higher Life. 
 
 beth ; and yet out of these eras of constant pres- 
 sure, intense suffering and dread, the world's master- 
 pieces of art, hterature, and heroic achievement were 
 born. 
 
 "Yes!" some will be ready to answer, "this is 
 just the struggle for life which lies at the root of the 
 development of the Creation, working up through 
 the human sphere. Conflict and suffering are the 
 conditions of progress. Where the strain is sharpest 
 the faculties are on full stretch, and there the wisest 
 words, the noblest actions, the most perfect works 
 may be expected to appear ; there you will find the 
 brightest out-flashings of genius, and the masterpieces 
 of the creative intellect of mankind. But it is only 
 the struggle for life repeating itself under higher 
 forms ; it is all battle and blood, always battle and 
 blood, and will be to the end." And there is but one 
 end for those who believe this, but one issue which 
 bounds their sio^ht ; the old Stoic vision of the con- 
 flagration which shall sweep at last all beings and all 
 things, gods, men, and creatures, into the blackness 
 of an everlasting night ! 
 
 But I have endeavoured to show how the vision 
 of a fairer order has never been wanting to mankind ; 
 an order of which not strength but sacrifice shall be 
 the centre ; in which brotherhood shall supplant the 
 unnatural relations of which self is the foundation, 
 and peace shall drive the demon of discord from the 
 earth. Man has never been without such visions to 
 light his sad, dark path. When the path has been 
 darkest, these visions have always been brightest ; it 
 is in the seasons of strain and dread that the fairest 
 
The Paul of Progress. lo^ 
 
 pictures of this higher order of things have been 
 pourtrayed. There is a vigorous protest in our 
 nature, which will not be silenced, against this con- 
 fusion, this ceaseless jarring of interests and struggle 
 of forces, as the prime factors of human develop- 
 ment. Man knows in his heart of hearts, and he 
 says it in all ages by the lips of his poets and 
 prophets, and in every age with increasing clearness, 
 that while this condition is shared with those lower 
 orders of the Creation with which the material part 
 of him is so closely related, he is to leave it beneath 
 him as he emerges into that higher region for which 
 he was created, and to which he has been redeemed 
 by God. 
 
 If life is mainly a mere struggle of force, it is to ^ 
 man's shame, and he knows it. It is his cleaving to 
 the dust that makes it so. God by Redemption has 
 brought a new and holy world of thought and ac- 
 tivity within the range of his spiritual powers ; a 
 world whose service is ministry, whose life is love. 
 The problem of the life of man as a member of a 
 society, a brother of a race, is how to substitute for 
 the struggle of force which rules the progress of the 
 Creation, that bond and law of love of which Christ's 
 life was the perfect revelation, and which rules, the 
 Scripture tells us, in the kingdom of the blessed 
 ones who are gathered on high. There is travail 
 everywhere through all the spheres of Creation ; and 
 man's life, standing as it does on the summit level of 
 mere creature development, travails in birth with a 
 Kingdom of Heaven; a kingdom with a new com- 
 mandment — Love one another. 
 
To8 The Higher Life. 
 
 We have seen how those who have led the vital 
 development of humanity, and its apostles whose mis- 
 sion is among the masses of its poor, have believed 
 in this Kingdom with unwavering faith, and served it 
 with passionate devotion. Paul when he laid himself 
 on the altar of sacrifice to spend and to be spent 
 for mankind — the most blessed man upon earth, with 
 all his cares and pains, in doing it — had solved for 
 himself life's hardest problem, and indicated the form 
 of its solution to his fellow-men. You may say if 
 you will, that all this is sheer fancy ; that " men are 
 to a large extent natural enemies ; " that the strug- 
 gle for life is the one key to the development of 
 man as well as of nature, and will be so while 
 either man or nature endures ; and that this is the 
 only " practical " view, and the only solution of the 
 mystery in which " practical " people can rest. 
 
 Practical ! Tell me, ye who worship the practical, 
 and who see no loftier forms of things beyond it, had 
 you been living in the day when Christ stood to answer 
 before Pilate, and spoke strange words about truth, 
 would you not have been bound to consider it, as 
 Pilate did, the merest dreaming that ever crossed the 
 imagination of an enthusiast ? And yet it proved 
 itself practical enough to remake the world. And 
 see you not, that through the whole of society, except 
 in that mid-level region which prosperous common 
 sense and common place have made all their own, 
 there is a deep and passionate dissatisfaction with 
 the selfish basis and constitution of things, which the 
 infidel communist, and the Christian lover and servant 
 
The Pain of Progress. 109 
 
 of his race, equally share ? The conviction has firm 
 hold on men all round the social sphere, that man 
 alone of all the creatures, is called to live after a loftier 
 pattern, to bear his brother's burdens, and to seek his 
 brother's good, with an earnest sincerity which is 
 caught, little as some may know it, from that God 
 who call us His friends, whose plans and hopes it is 
 the joy and glory of our being to share. 
 
 Impossible, you say, men are selfish, they are 
 born selfish, and will be selfish to the close. I be- 
 lieve, on the contrary, that a fire of zeal and of love is 
 kindling in the great heart of Christian society, which 
 will burn up your "impossibles" as grass shrinks 
 before flame when it roars through the forest. I be- 
 lieve that the lone ofroaninof and travail of man's life 
 is ending, and that the heart of Christendom is being 
 enlarged, through pain and fear and pressure, as of 
 old, to take in a wider thought and a more blessed 
 hope of God's kingdom ; though the perfect fulfil- 
 ment of the hope may still be far, far away. 
 
 I said, that it seems to me a sign of the lofty 
 destiny of our race, that man unconsciously, or half con- 
 sciously, clings to the past and shrinks from the future. 
 The statement may seem like a paradox, and the 
 fact, if It be a fact, may appear to tell quite the other 
 way. I will explain what I mean. I think, too, that 
 it vlll explain much of the strife and pain which at- 
 tend the development of the life of society. What-* 
 man shrinks from is just the strain. It is the great- 
 ness of his destiny which oppresses him, and some- 
 times appals. The child Is careless of the future as 
 
I lo The Higher Life. 
 
 of the present. The experienced know the meaning 
 of the burden of Hfe. It was his vision of the mag- 
 nitude of his work, and of the load which it would 
 lay upon him, which made Moses tremble as he 
 touched it ; not otherwise was it with Peter and with 
 Paul. And further, all the great stages of growth 
 are through sickness, in all the levels of the creation. 
 The eagle moulting is sad and puling as the dove. 
 
 There is always an inward disturbance and sickness 
 as the great crises of life approach us. Who is suffi- 
 cient for these things ? is the cry of the weak, sad 
 heart, as it measures the greatness of its vocation and 
 feels the trembling and fluttering within. I believe 
 that this has more to do with the offence of the Cross 
 than many of us dream. It is not vanity, or indiffer- 
 ence, or sensuality, which hinders in so many the 
 welcome of the heart to the Gospel of the Kingdom ; 
 but the dread of the lofty life to which it calls them, the 
 heavy burden, the cross which it means to lay upon 
 them, the sharp pain through which all its joy and glory 
 are to be won. You know now your bearings, as it 
 were ; how much life demands of you, and how much 
 you are willing, and think you are able to pay. 
 " But," you say to yourself, " if I launch out from my 
 quiet cove, into this vast unknown sea of being, 
 whose only shore is God, who can tell what ex- 
 perience may await me, what dangers may assail me, 
 through what storms I may have to urge my way ? " 
 Thy heart shall fear and be enlarged, if thou hast 
 faith to hold on ; it shall still fear, but be wasted and 
 shrivelled, if thou hast the folly to fly. Onward, up- 
 
The Pain of Progress. 1 1 1 
 
 ward ; there lies the path of Hfe and of benediction. 
 Backward, downward ; there He the blackness and 
 the foulness of the pit. 
 
 And it seems to me that there is a great sick- 
 ness, the sickness of fear and the sense of an ap- 
 proaching travail, stealing now through the heart of 
 society. The world is sick at heart, because the 
 time of its change, of its breaking out into a new 
 and higher mode of thinking and living has come. I 
 think that men are very, very weary of the shock of 
 interests and of the clash of arms, and are quite sure 
 that such a world and such a life as they see every- 
 where around, have the stain of the dust upon them, 
 and not the light of heaven. They are very hopeless 
 of any lofty progress under the inspiration of the 
 ideas which have framed the institutions and have 
 guided the development of modern society ; or 
 rather, for the real forces lie deeper, which have been 
 shouted as the battle-cries of the parties who think 
 that they have charge of the progress of the world. 
 There seems to be a great sadness in the heart of 
 the chief spiritual and intellectual leaders of our day. 
 There seem to be multitudes in all the social spheres 
 saying to themselves, the world has been groaning 
 and travailing for ages, and is this the birth that is 
 to gladden humanity? Is this the salvation that cost 
 such infinite sacrifice ? Is this the fruit which is to 
 satisfy the heart of Christ ? Mr. Browning's Pope is 
 not the only man in these days who is asking, " Is this 
 thino- that we see salvation ? " 
 
 And there seems, tao, to be a fearful foreboding 
 
1 1 2 The Higher Life. 
 
 that a time of trial, of searching and purifying is at 
 hand ; that great organic changes are in progress ; 
 that the time has come when the demon of self 
 which has torn and convulsed society must at least 
 be cast down from his supremacy, while Love, hea- 
 venly Love, must have freer access and larger room 
 to help, to heal, and to save. 
 
 This is the ereat enlaro-ement of heart and of 
 thought of which all others are but harbinofers : the 
 opening of the spirit of man and of the spirit of 
 society to receive in its fulness the Gospel of the 
 Kingdom ; to rise by faith to fellowship with the pur- 
 poses and the hopes of God ; to believe in the tran- 
 scendent power of that love which redeemed, to rule 
 and to bless mankind. Things looked at in one 
 way, from one side, seem sadly bare of promise ; 
 looked at from another, they are vivid with hope. 
 Nothing is more wonderful in history than the swift- 
 ness and the thoroughness with which great moral 
 changes accomplish themselves, when the time of 
 fear and strain, which is the time of enlargement, 
 has come. Old things, which seemed to be strong 
 as the everlasting hills, break up and vanish. Society 
 organises itself to-day on what was yesterday an 
 " impossible ; " and men wonder at their faithless fears. 
 We may be on the eve of such a revolution now. 
 " The times are out of joint," the world's heart is 
 sick and sad. The timorous and faithless, and those 
 that love this dreary twilight, may live to see the 
 whole system of things, which to them seems perma- 
 
The Pain of Progress. 113 
 
 nent as the frame of the Creation, break up around 
 them ; while they and the world are lifted through 
 the wreck by a force which they have no heart to 
 believe in, and no gauge to measurCj to levels that 
 are nearer heaven 
 
114 The Higher Life. 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE LORD IS MY LIGHT AND MY SALVATION. 
 
 " The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The 
 Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid^ — 
 Ps. xxvii. 
 
 I THINK that this is the Psalm of Psalms. All the 
 elements of vital force with which these Psalms are 
 charged, are here in their highest power. When it 
 was written, or why it was written, we know not. 
 But we know that David, when he wrote it, must 
 have been lifted into the sphere of the purest and 
 most intense experience of which the human spirit 
 can be the subject ; and yet — and this is the mystery 
 of the Psalms, and the secret of their spiritual power — 
 it is a region into which the aspiration of the poorest, 
 the weakest, the most burdened human heart can 
 follow him, nor is it closed against the most trem- 
 bling human step. Reading these words, or rather 
 singing them, — for they were made to be our songs 
 in this house of our pilgrimage, — we seem to be borne 
 up, as the Prophet says, " on eagle's wings " into this 
 upper firmament, which David calls the pavilion, 
 the tabernacle of the Most High. We catch the glow 
 of the Psalmist's inspiration ; his joy in God enters 
 into us, and stirs a kindred passion. " The Lord is 
 
The Lord is my Light and my Salvation. 1 1 5 
 
 my light and my salvation," we, too, find ourselves 
 singing, " The Lord is the strength of my life, of 
 whom shall I be afraid ? " A poor, stammering, 
 trembling mortal, the creature of a day, crushed be- 
 fore the moth, who thought himself yesterday but as 
 a worm or as a beast before God, is caught up as he 
 hears the Psalmist sino-ino^ in the height. Something 
 within expands and glows as he soars : he feels that 
 he, too, can bear part in this blessed music ; that this 
 God is his God as well as David's ; that he also is 
 the child of Christ and of the resurrection, a free 
 citizen of the eternal celestial world. 
 
 If they are our best and most blessed helpers ^ 
 who lift us into a world which lies beyond and above ' 
 the round of our common tasks, and the dusty paths 
 along which we daily plod, who give to us a new 
 sense of things unseen, open for us new springs of 
 faith and hope, and teach us to "count them blessed 
 which endure," what shall we say of these Psalmists, 
 who, through thousands of years, have furnished an 
 unfailing fountain of strength and inspiration to some 
 of the strongest, the noblest, and the most aspiring 
 children of our race ? These Psalms are like the 
 cells of a battery of vital force, which generate the 
 current that is always permeating the tissues and the 
 nerves of Christian society — conductor of a throbbing, 
 thrilling, exuberant, victorious life. The life is not 
 in them ; they are as the cells which store and trans- 
 mit it. To open one of David's Psalms when we 
 are sad and weary, overpressed in life's battle, or 
 overworn by its pain, is like touching a stream of 
 
 I 2 
 
1 1 6 The Higher Life. 
 
 magnetic force ; it bathes all the being with its soft, 
 tender, yet stimulating and energising flood. The 
 strain is relaxed, the pain is soothed, the nerveless 
 arm is braced again, the fainting heart grows strong 
 and glad ; something has entered into us from a 
 Divine fountain, which makes us sharers of the 
 strength, the joy, and the hope of God. 
 
 I have spoken of exuberant, victorious life. Who 
 does not catch in this Psalm the note of exultation ? 
 It is the word of a man who, at the moment at any 
 rate, felt that his joy was over-abounding. " More 
 than conqueror," is the cry that rings through these 
 triumphant words. He felt that there was with him, 
 within him, a strength which all the malignant forces 
 in the universe were powerless to cope with — and to 
 an oriental the malign element in nature always 
 seems fearfully strong ; he knew that his foot was 
 firm on the everlasting rock, against which the gates 
 of hell must rage in vain. 
 
 The man who wrote this Psalm was no novice 
 in the school of discipline. The cry of a soul in 
 anguish was to him no unfamiliar utterance. " Deep 
 calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy watersp02its ; 
 all Thy waves and Thy billozvs are gone over me^' 
 had often broken from his lips. But from the rock 
 to which his God had lifted him, he could watch 
 the great sweeping billows shatter themselves in 
 foam and perish, while he sang, ''And now shall 
 mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round 
 about me, thei^efore will I offer in His tabernacle 
 sacrifices of joy, I will sing., yea I will sing praises 
 
1 he Lord is my Light and my Salvation. 1 1 7 
 
 imto the Lord!' There breathes through this 
 Psalm just that sense of the over-mastering power, 
 the over-abounding fulness of God's grace and love, 
 which rings out in the exulting language of St. Paul, 
 " The law entered that the offence might abound. Bnt 
 where sin abounded, grace did much more abound ; that 
 as sin hath reigned unto death, even so should grace 
 reign, thi'ough righteousness, unto eternal life, through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord!' 
 
 I have said that in these Psalms, and in this 
 most especially, David enters into the very loftiest 
 region of experience which can be reached by a 
 human spirit. He climbs to heights beyond which 
 man cannot pass ; he becomes partaker of the strength, 
 and enters into the joy of God. But it is the pecu- 
 liar glory of the Bible, that these heights do not seem 
 to place men like David beyond the sympathy of the 
 poorest and the weakest of their human brethren. 
 There is nothing, here or anywhere, in the Bible which 
 cuts off the humblest and the feeblest human soul 
 from the very noblest and loftiest of our race, in their 
 most exalted moments of vision and of joy. High 
 as these men may soar, the world of the common 
 daily life of the great mass of mankind is not cut off 
 from them. They are not by themselves in a 
 heavenly region, while the great world beneath them 
 grovels, according to its nature, in the dust. 
 
 Men like Moses, Isaiah, David, Paul, and 
 John, draw men to them, and with them, as they 
 rise. They speak of heavenly things, they behold 
 the heavenly vision, they pass within the shrine 
 
1 1 S The Higher Life. 
 
 where they gaze on the splendour of the Uncreated 
 Light, and see with open face the unveiled glory of 
 the Lord. But the most lowly and undisciplined 
 human intellect finds their thouo^hts within the ranee 
 of its comprehension, and their vision not altogether 
 beyond its sight. Lofty as are the themes with 
 which this Psalm is conversant, profound as is the 
 human experience which it unveils, it has yet been 
 the pilgrim-song through ages of multitudes of the 
 poorest, the lowliest, the most oppressed and down- 
 trodden of our race. From how many a house of 
 bondage, from how many a prison cell, from how 
 many a den of human suffering and toil, from how 
 many a hospital ward, from how many a pauper's 
 death-bed, from how many a rack of torment or 
 blazing pile has the song gone up to heaven, " The 
 Lord is my light and my salvation, whoni shall I 
 fear ? The Lord is the strength of my life, of zv horn 
 shall I be afraid ? " 
 
 And this is the distinguishing glory of Chris- 
 tianity, that its poor have the Gospel preached unto 
 them, and are as much within reach of the under- 
 standing of its mysteries, as much within the clasp 
 of the arms of its love, as the wisest, the noblest, 
 the most instructed of mankind. The bread which 
 nourished its Prophets, Psalmists, and Evangelists, 
 is "the bread of God which cometh down from 
 heaven," and it is freely offered as the gift of God's 
 grace and love to the poorest and hungriest prodigal 
 who tramps the wilderness, or gathers husks from 
 the troughs of swine. It is the bread of the Father's 
 
The Lord is 7ny Light and my Salvation. 119 
 
 house for each and for all of them, for all are children 
 of the great human family which the Father seeks to 
 reclaim and to restore. It is the bread which is their 
 primal and natural nourishment, the hunger for which 
 never quite dies down in the most self-abandoned 
 outcast's heart. 
 
 The Bible has no esoteric and exoteric doctrine. 
 It has no higher truth which can only be appre- 
 ciated by an elect and cultivated circle, while its 
 lower and poorer truths satisfy the herd of the 
 great uninstructed mass of mankind. There are no 
 Scribes in the scheme of the kingdom which was 
 developed by the Master, though the Christian 
 Church is full of them. In all these later ages they 
 have been the worst enemies of the kingdom ; they 
 have hidden the key of knowledge, which is the 
 Name of the Father, and thus have shut out the 
 poor. But the genius of Christianity is against them. 
 Perhaps what seem the most formidable and menac- 
 ing signs of these times to our timorous apprehension, 
 are really, at bottom, but the throes of the truth as it 
 is in Jesus, as it struggles to cast them out. 
 
 But this is what all heathen religions in the end 
 inevitably develope — even where, like Brahminism, 
 they do not start with it — an inner truth for the 
 doctors, the discerning, meditative disciples, and an 
 outer truth which is good enough for the great mass 
 of the poor. The wise, the scribe, the disputer of 
 this world are sure to take possession of the truth 
 which is embodied in a heathen religious system, as 
 they have taken possession of Christianity ; and they 
 
1 20 The Higher Life. 
 
 are sure to keep possession, while in Christianity 
 there is a force which casts them out. It is only- 
 God's word from God's own lips, which is nigh, 
 equally, to all the children of our race ; so large, so 
 broad that the most eagle-eyed intelligence can find 
 no bound to it ; so simple, so vital, so like homely 
 daily bread that the wayfaring man, though a fool, 
 can possess himself of all its treasures, can grow 
 '■'wise unto salvation'" by it, ''and rich tmto life 
 eternair 
 
 It is of the very essence of Christian truth that it 
 should be so. He who gave it, who came to bear 
 witness to it, though the first-born of every creature, 
 the brightness of the Father's glory and the express 
 image of His substance, God of God, Light of light, 
 was the friend and familiar comrade of publicans and 
 sinners. " The comnton people heard Him gladly!' 
 The multitude thronged His steps and hung upon 
 His. words. ''Never man spake like this Man'' they 
 cried, because He told them of heavenly things, 
 things which might strain a seraph's intelligence, in 
 such a fashion that the poorest might apprehend 
 them ; because they felt themselves drawn by the 
 teaching into the fellowship of God's perfect and 
 everlasting truth. Indeed, it was the wise ones who 
 understood Him least : " I thank Thee, O Father, 
 Lord of Heaven and earth, because thotc hast hid these 
 things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed 
 them unto babes!' The Lord stands apart from all 
 other teachers in having nothing to reserve for an 
 inner select circle of disciples. There is no inner, no 
 
The Lord is my Light and my Salvation. 121 
 
 outer, there is no nearer, no farther, with God. 
 " The IVord is nigh thee, in thy month and in thy 
 heart',' is God's message to every human soul. 
 
 In holy and beautiful harmony with the Lord's 
 word, is the word of His Psalmists and Prophets. 
 It is not the rich man's word or the poor man's 
 word, the wise man's word or the ignorant man's 
 word, the holy man's word or the sinful man's 
 word ; it is for man and to man, every when and 
 everywhere. In all possible states and in all possible 
 conditions it finds and lays hold upon man ; it raises, 
 redeems and saves him. We talk sadly about the 
 wide diversities, the sundered, alienated classes of 
 society : the upper ten thousand in their luxury and 
 splendour, the lower ten million in their squalor and 
 rags. From one point of view it is profoundly sad ; 
 it is a burning stain on our Christian civilisation. 
 But from another, a higher and truer point of view, 
 the differences dwindle and vanish. High and low, 
 rich and poor, scholar and fool, prince and beggar, 
 touch their highest, and touch the same height, when 
 the music of a Psalm breathes from their lips, or 
 when the word of a Prophet stirs and kindles their 
 spirits. It needs the culture of a scholar to search 
 out the hidden wisdom of the philosopher's gospel ; 
 it needs the special training of a priest to deal with 
 the mysteries of a ceremonial faith : from the igno- 
 rant herd the one is hopelessly hidden, from the un- 
 clean, unsanctified mass the other. But I fancy that 
 priest and laic, scholar and fool, prince and peasant 
 stand all together, simply level, in that one grand, 
 
12 2 The Higher L ife. 
 
 divine, eternal equality which is possible for man, 
 when they sing with the Psalmist : " The Lord is my 
 Shephei^d, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie 
 down in green pastm^es : He leadcth me beside the still 
 waters. He restoreth my soul ; he leadeth me in the 
 paths of righteousness for His names sake. Vea, 
 though I walk through the valley of the shadow of 
 death, I will fear no evil : for Thotc art ivith me ; 
 Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. Thou pre- 
 pares t a table before me in the presence of mine 
 enemies: Tho7i anointest my head with oil ; my cip 
 runneth over. Surely goodness and meixy shall follow 
 me all the days of 7ny life ; and I will dwell in the 
 House of the Lord for ever!' 
 
 " The Lord is my light." It is just light which 
 fills the Scripture, while the world without the Bible 
 is, as the Bible says, " a dark place." The Scrip- 
 ture reveals man in the sunlight ; in the sphere of 
 joy, of vigour, of fruit. The world and life are dark 
 indeed, without God. Dark is just the w^ord which 
 describes it. Let us consider for a moment how 
 darkness works. Sow a seed and shut it up in a 
 dark cellar : the darkness does not absolutely kill 
 it. The germ starts, the blade, the stem, perhaps 
 the bud ; but they are weak, pale, contorted ; there 
 is no strength, no beauty, no fertility. It is but the 
 ghost of the plant that you see there, yet still it 
 is the ghost, the pale image of the perfect organism. 
 But when the bud strives to bloom and fruit you see 
 that its vital power is exhausted : it droops, drops, 
 and lies dishevelled and fainting in the dust. If you 
 
The Lord is my Light and my Salvation. 1 23 
 
 want form, if you want colour, if you want to see the 
 red blood glowing, if you want beauty, vigour, fruit, 
 you must have sunlight. Not light simply, the light 
 diffused in the atmosphere, but sunlight, hot, flashing 
 from the fountain ; it is this that quickens germs, it 
 is this that ripens fruits. 
 
 And the aspect, the bearing, the tone of these 
 Psalmists, is that of men who lived in the sunliorht ; 
 who had their vigour full in the springs, and all their 
 faculty awake and abroad. They were men in whom, 
 the life was vivid ; the blood boundingf in the veins, 
 the light flashing in the eye, the step elastic and 
 joyous, with onward, upward pressure. They were 
 men who saw their way through all the dangers and 
 difficulties which environed them ; who saw the home 
 above all the obscurations and perturbations of this 
 earthly sphere ; who had no doubt about the present, 
 no dread about the future, because God was with 
 them, because the Hand that ruled all things was 
 manifestly and for ever on their side. I think that 
 it is this sense of sunlight upon our path, and on our 
 hearts, which in these days we chiefly miss. This 
 earth is becoming a dark place, I fear, to a great mul- 
 titude ; for the sense of a living Presence in the 
 Creation, and around man's daily paths and tasks, 
 which was as sunlight to the Psalmist, seems to be 
 fadino^ out of the world. 
 
 There is something unspeakably dreary to me, in 
 the aspect of the world which some of our wise ones 
 would make for us ; a world from which one day 
 they will be in an agony to escape. It is a world of 
 
124 The Higher Life. 
 
 dull, dead necessity ; all things in it, and man among 
 the things, moved by a blind, impassive force, which 
 works, how no man knows, and to what end no man 
 knows. It rules with the same calm, unconscious 
 might, the clouds that float through the heavens, the 
 straw that swirls before the breeze, the sweep of a 
 comet, the transit of a planet, the path of a storm, 
 and the surge of a tide. We but meet it again, we 
 are told, in a higher stage, in the intuitions of a philo- 
 sopher's brain, in the decisions of an apostle's will, 
 in the " Here stand I " of a martyr's conscience, and 
 in the yearnings and claspings of a tender, sympa- 
 thetic heart. 
 
 It is all settled firmly and finally, they tell us, in 
 the very frame-work of our constitution, what we 
 shall will and what we shall do ; while what we take 
 for the play of our freedom, is but the fluttering of 
 the needle ere it settles to the pole. And it is all 
 fixed equally, we are assured, for the world. Purity, 
 heroism, a man's purpose, a woman's tenderness, a 
 child's trust, a nation's loyalty, a church's charity, are 
 all, at bottom, mere mechanical movements of the 
 great world-system around and within us ; in which 
 our lives are but the spindles that twist the threads. 
 And then, when the little force that sets us in motion 
 and keeps us in motion is expended, we are so much 
 dead, waste matter, which Nature dissolves, that she 
 may work it up in new forms for some other use. 
 Freedom, responsibility, resurrection, immortality, a 
 Kingdom of Heaven — it is all the dream of a vagrant 
 imagination. Eat, drink, sleep, toil, suffer, perish, 
 
The Lord is my Light and my Salvation. 125 
 
 sums up, according to their philosophy, the destiny of 
 mankind. A dark world, I say, profoundly dark, 
 profoundly sad ; ^ a world in which the buds of pro- 
 mise drop fruitless from the boughs, and man has 
 nothing left in the end but to make his moan over 
 the decree that dooms him to life. 
 
 It is no answer to say that many of the men ot 
 our time who have lost the hope of immortality, are 
 among the wisest, best, and most high-minded among 
 us. We are living still, thank God, in the sunlight 
 of Christianity, and they drink in influences which 
 strengthen, purify and cheer at every pore. They 
 cannot, as yet, do what they will, get rid of their 
 Christianity. But try to forecast the character of 
 the world which these presumptuous seers — seers, 
 not of God, but of Nature — would make for us in 
 the end, if they could work their will ; feel how dread 
 it is, how chill, how empty of duty, of service, of 
 sacrifice, of devotion, of all that kindles joy and 
 quickens hope; and then turn and listen to the hymn, 
 ^'The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall 
 I fear ? Tlie Lord is the strength of my life, of 
 whom shall L be afraid ? " 
 
 It is like coming out of a dark, damp cavern into 
 the sunlight ; it is like exchanging the contact of 
 
 1 Can anything be sadder than the closing sentences of Mr. John 
 Morley's beautiful and appreciative notice of the late John Stuart Mill, 
 in the " Fortnightly Review " for June 1873 ? — " Alas ! the sorrowful day 
 which ever dogs our delight followed very quickly. The nightingale 
 that he longed for fills the darkness with music : but not for the ear ot 
 the dead master ; he rests in the deeper darkness wherein is unbroken 
 silence." 
 
126 The Higher Life. 
 
 obscene, loathsome forms for the song of birds, the 
 breath of flowers, the hum of joyous hfe, and all the 
 noonday splendour of the world. If you want the 
 light on your lives, if you want to be glad and strong, 
 if you want deliverance from the terrors that haunt 
 the darkness, if you want a firm footing, a clear path, 
 a steady progress, the light brightening as you press 
 on, if you want health, if you want life, come out into 
 the sunlight of the gospel. " Yet the Lord zvill com- 
 mand His loving kindness in the day time, and in the 
 night His song shall be with me and my prayer to the 
 God of my life .... Why art thotc cast down, O 
 my S021I, and why art thon. disqideted within me ? 
 Hope thou in God, for L shall yet praise Him, who is 
 the health of my countenance, and my God^ 
 
 " The Lord is the strength of my life." 
 Substantially this is the same doctrine which 
 Christ delivers : " / am the true vine, and my Father 
 is the hiLsbandman. Every bi^anch in Me that beareth 
 not fruit He taketh away ; and every branch that 
 beareth fruit, He purgeth it, that it may bring foj^th 
 more fruit. . . . As the branch cannot bear fndt of 
 itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, 
 except ye abide in Me. I am the vine, ye are the 
 branches : he that abidcth in Me, and L in him, the 
 same bringeth forth much fruit ; for without Me 
 ye can do nothing!' John xv. 1-5. The strength 
 of my life. The stem that bears it, the root out 
 of which its vital juices spring ; that which makes 
 it part of a living organism, whose ground, whose 
 form, whose life is in God. 
 
The Lord is my Light and my Salvation. 127 
 
 Its ground, the solid foundation on which it rests, 
 is God. The joy of David in God is really a joy pro- 
 phetic of the age of the Incarnation. It was God 
 manifest to him, not yet in the flesh, but by human 
 speech, human guidance, human care, human love, 
 whom he knew, and in whom he rejoiced ; the Being 
 who in the Man Christ Jesus "became flesh," and is 
 evermore present with mankind. The strength of 
 our life as its sure, firm, and enduring foundation is 
 this Gospel of " God manifest in the flesh." If this 
 be a dream, if we have " followed cunningly devised 
 fables" in believing it, then our life is rootless and 
 fruitless as a herb in the sands of the desert. But if 
 this be a reality, the life of the man who believes is 
 as a house built on a rock ; or rather " like a ti^ee 
 planted by the rivers of water, that hHngeth forth 
 his fridt in his season. His leaf also shall not 
 wither, and whatsoever lie doeth shall prosper!' The 
 life of Christ, the death of Christ, the resurrec- 
 tion and reign of Christ, are the source to us of per- 
 petual renewing. If death overshadow us, if fear 
 distract, if sorrow distress, the Lord, if we turn to 
 contemplate His cross and passion, and to search 
 the mighty mystery of His love, puts heart of 
 strength into us. Believing, we can " coniit them 
 blessed which endurer He is the strength of as- 
 surance, of firm standing ground, of victorious force. 
 " This is the victory that ove7xometh the world, even 
 your faith!' 
 
 And He is the strength of growth, of vital 
 progress. Humanity, in a high sense, began to grow, 
 
1 28 The Higher Life. 
 
 to make living and lasting progress, when the Gospel 
 of the Incarnation was first proclaimed in the world. 
 And the people who before the Incarnation were 
 most clearly in the line of progress, were the people 
 whose life and all whose national institutions were 
 prophets of the Incarnation ; who but for the coming 
 Emmanuel had absolutely no place or function in 
 the scheme of human history. Cut off from living 
 communion with Christ, the higher life of men and 
 of peoples grows faint and feeble, its fruit poor and 
 rare ; at length all fertility dies out of the trunk 
 that bore it ; it becomes dry and withered, meet fuel 
 for the final flame. 
 
 It is just the cutting off the life of the Christian 
 world from Christ, who quickens it and feeds all its 
 springs, which seems to me to be the most deadly 
 danger of our times, A resolute attempt is being made 
 by the school of philosophers which is strongest for the 
 moment among us, to root Christianity henceforth in 
 man, and not in God. The Christian graces, it is 
 allowed, are very noble and very beautiful ; self-denial, 
 self-devotion (within limits), charity, purity, integrity, 
 are all excellent and commendable. But suppose 
 that we treat them henceforth as entirely flowers and 
 fruits of the human stem ; suppose that we cultivate 
 humanity and leave divinity alone ; we shall be 
 surprised, we are told, to see how grandly they will 
 grow. 
 
 It is just the intensity of my conviction that 
 we shall find, and soon, that they will not grow cut 
 off from Christ, but will wither like cut flowers, 
 
The Lord is my Light dnd my Salvation. 129 
 
 and will leave us all grey and bare, which makes rae 
 cling so tenaciously to the truth which breathes its 
 music through this Psalm. Man was made for Di- 
 vine communion. Christ is the root which bears 
 man's regenerate, celestial life. Cut the communica- 
 tions of the soul with the spiritual world, or let them 
 wither and snap, and then through the trailing ten- 
 drils the very lite-blood of the spirit will drain away. 
 Cast off fear, that fear which makes us men restrain 
 prayer before God, turn from Christ as your great 
 exemplar, close the eye to His beauty, harden the 
 heart to His love — it is the suicide of the spirit. 
 The current of life is choked at the fountains, the 
 light is quenched in the everlasting night. 
 
 But " The Lord is my life and 7ny salvation, whom 
 shall I fear ? The Lord is the strejigth of my life, of 
 whom shall I be afraid f " He is the strength of the 
 life, for we live in Him. " Jesus said 2into Martha^ 
 I am the reszirrection and the life ; he that believeth 
 in Me, thotigh he were dead, yet shall he live ; and 
 whosoever liveth and believeth i7i Me shall never die." 
 " Onr life is hid with CJirist in God, and when 
 Christ who is onr life shall appear, we also shall ap- 
 pear with Him in glory. ^' " Therefore my heart is 
 glad, and my glory rejoiceth ; my flesh also shall rest 
 in hope!' Why should a living man complain ? 
 What on earth or in hell shall he fear, when, after 
 all is torn from him, he has life, an eternal future, 
 and God ? Here is strength to endure ; here is 
 strength to overcome. The endurance may be hard ; 
 the discipline may be long, and terribly sharp and 
 
 K 
 
130 The Higher L ife. 
 
 stern. But life abides through it, life grows by it ; 
 life has royal prerogatives and compels its tributes. 
 They will but enrich and adorn the child of discipline, 
 the heir of promise, when he passes up to sing the 
 song with new exultation, where there streams all 
 round him, and glows within him, the sunlight of the 
 celestial and eternal world. "■VVaitoii the Loi'd, then, 
 and be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine 
 heart; wait I say on the Lord!' " When my father 
 and my mother forsake me" when all earthly helps 
 must fall from me, " then the Lord will take me tip." 
 Even into the valley of the shadow of death, I can 
 pass with a song, " O death, where is thy sting ? O 
 grave, where is thy victory ? The sting of death is sin, 
 the strength of sin is the law ; but thanks be to God 
 who giveth tis the victory, through our Lord Jesus 
 Christ!' 
 
 " The Lord is my light and my salvation, 
 
 WHOM SHALL I FEAR ? ThE LoRD IS THE STRENGTH 
 OF MY LIFE, OF WHOM SHALL I BE AFRAID ? " 
 
I^I 
 
 VII. 
 
 GOD'S GREAT WORLD. 
 
 "iVd' brought me forth also into a laj-ge place" — II. Sam. xxii. 20. 
 
 A SOUL in anguish is a soul in straits, in narrows ; in 
 a place too small for it, in which it strains and 
 writhes and beats against the bars, in vain. That is 
 anguish — the prison bars tight about us, while we 
 pant for freedom, light and joy. Man is a large 
 being, and he needs a wide world to live in. Sin 
 shuts him up in a small world ; a prison-house, and 
 iron-barred. It is a grand, free outline which God 
 sketched at the first of a human beine. So erand, so 
 free, that there is but one hitherto who has been able 
 to fill it up to its full form — Himself. 
 
 David was a man of this royal proportion. Such 
 men need the universe and eternity to live out their 
 lives. If the all of David was the little span of his mor- 
 tal life, and the square inches of his kingdom, his life is 
 one of the saddest sights that the sun ever shone upon. 
 A glorious wealth of faculty, trained under the strain 
 of terrible trials and sufferings, and trained for the 
 dust. The lives of such men are the grandest argu- 
 ments for immortality. If a malignant demon be not 
 the Lord and Master of the universe, such a life as 
 
 K 2 
 
132 The Higher L ife. 
 
 David's must one day be brought out into a larger 
 world than this. 
 
 David as a youth had roamed on the mountains. 
 He had fed his flocks on the wolds of Canaan. He 
 had lain many a night under the canopy of the solemn 
 Syrian sky, burning with stars. He had lived, too, 
 the life of an outlaw in the mountain fastnesses. He 
 had made his lair, like a hunted beast, in their murky 
 caves. He had watched the gates of the hills when 
 the dawn began to flush the pallid sky ; he had seen 
 from some lofty crag the sunlight flash in one glorious 
 moment over a slumbering world, I picture him 
 shut up night-long in some close rocky cavern 
 with his bandit troop around him : men of rude lips 
 and rude life,^ vexing the weary hours with their 
 coarse oaths and jests. The air foul, stifling ; the 
 moral atmosphere of the outlaws' den fouler and 
 more stifling still, 
 
 I think that I see him stealing out in the first 
 cool gleam of the morning, faint, sad, weary — 
 shut up with such comrades to such a life. But 
 the fresh breath of the morning" wind stirs his Ian- 
 guid pulses ; the blood bounds through his throbbing 
 veins. He treads the well-known path to some 
 rugged peak which shoots up into the calm, clear 
 air above him. As he climbs he sees the mists 
 seething in the valleys beneath. The horizon around 
 him widens, Peak beyond peak in the dim distance 
 begins to blush under the kiss of the coming sun. 
 
 ^ I. Sam, xxii. 1-2. 
 
God's G^'eat World. 133 
 
 A glorious sense of freedom possesses him. A bap- 
 tism of power descends. His soul expands widi his 
 horizon. Life seems larger ; its trials dwindle ; its 
 powers and destinies grow. As he rises above the 
 mists and shadows in which his lair is buried, and 
 climbs to the clear summit, the sun kindles a cold, 
 dead world to vivid and glorious life. He sweeps 
 his flashing glance over the broad landscape. The 
 mists retire their routed masses from the plains be- 
 neath him ; the broad, soft uplands, and now the 
 valleys are unveiled. The blue ocean gleams softly 
 in the distance, and melts into the violet mist which 
 encompasses all. 
 
 He realises with a kind of rapture how wide 
 the world is, how glorious. He knows that there 
 is something yet larger, more glorious, stirring 
 within. We can imagine the shepherd poet as he 
 grasped all this, as he drank in new strength and 
 courage, new joy and hope, from the vision of 
 the infinite wealth and splendour of the world, 
 bursting into strains of lofty exultation, and pouring 
 forth his most splendid and joyous psalms. With 
 what intense passionate fervour would he bless 
 the name of the Lord, his shepherd, his friend, the 
 man of his counsel, the guide of his pilgrimage, who 
 had led him up to that mountain summit to unveil to 
 him the glorious vision, and to kindle within him 
 a glad hope of the future of his being, when he 
 should emerge at last from a darker night on to a 
 loftier summit, lit by the glow of a brighter dawning, 
 and sweep the horizon of a wider world. " T/ierc/ore 
 
1 34 1^^^ Higher Life. 
 
 my heart is glada7id my glory rejoiceth; my flesh also 
 shall rest in hope. For Thott wilt not leave my sotil 
 in hell, neither wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy One to 
 sec co7^ruption. Thou wilt shoiu me the path of life ; 
 in Thy presence is fitness of joy ; at Thy right hand 
 three are pleasiires for evermore!' 
 
 " Thou hast brought me out into a large place!' 
 The first thought which I offer in illustration of the 
 sentiment of the text is this : 
 
 I. Sin bruigs the soul into straits, into narrows ; 
 sooner or later, anguish, the intolerable sense of 
 straitness, is its inevitable result. It was no mere 
 joy over landscape breadth and beauty which drew 
 this burst of praise from David's lips, but rather the 
 free world of grace and love into which he had been 
 led forth by the Lord. The /r^;;/2V^ of sin is always 
 freedom, the experience is always bonds, the prison- 
 house, the rack. To our first parents the tempter 
 cunningly opened the vision of liberty ; a larger life 
 he would offer to them, a larger world. He knew 
 the imperial pretensions and powers of the being 
 with whom he was dealing. He knew that mere 
 pleasure would have but poor attractions for him, un- 
 less it also fired his imagination with visions of larger, 
 freer, bolder life. The fascination of transgression to 
 the young lies mainly in this direction. The round 
 of quiet duty seems to them narrow and poor. Out- 
 side there are broad, gay, seductive regions, woo- 
 ing the young prodigal's steps. It is long years be- 
 fore the sinner, searching, pining for the substance 
 of his vision, finds that the promise was a mere 
 
God's Great World. 135 
 
 mirage of the desert, luring" with its cool proffer the 
 thirsty pilgrim to his grave. The prodigal saw a 
 brilliant world there beyond deserts and oceans. As 
 he journeyed thither, with all his wealth about him, 
 his path was spanned by a radiant bow of hope. It 
 was long years, perhaps, before he found the devil's 
 promise fulfilled in rags, in husks, and the sties of 
 swine. 
 
 But the first temptation is the key to all tempta- 
 tion. ''Now the serpent zvas more subtle than any 
 beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And 
 he said luito the woman, Yea, hath God said, ye shall 
 not eat of every tree of the garden f And the woman 
 said tmto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the 
 trees of the garden, bnt of the fridt of the tree which 
 is in the midst of the garden God hath said, ye shall 
 7iot eat of it, lest ye die. And the serpe7it said unto 
 the womaii, Ye shall not surely die ; for God doth 
 know that in the day ye eat thereof your eyes shall be 
 opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and 
 eviiy Whether this be the revealed history of the 
 outward pilgrimage of humanity or not, it is at any 
 rate the revealed history of the inner moral develop- 
 ment of mankind. God only could have furnished 
 this key to the inner life of His child. " Go to," was 
 the suggestion ; " spurn these narrow bounds to 
 which this cautious, selfish Creator would confine 
 you : you were made for a wider theatre ; explore 
 your world ; be master in your own house of life." 
 
 So the temptation ran. ''■And zuhen the ivotnan. 
 saw that the ti-ee was good for food, and that it was 
 
136 The Higher Life. 
 
 pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one 
 wise, she took of the fr2iit thereof and did eat ; and 
 gave also to her htLsband with her, and he did eat!' 
 It was the vision of wisdom and freedom which en- 
 chanted them, which enchants us all, when the blood 
 is hot, and the tempter is near. The sentence came, 
 " Because thozc hast hearkened tuito the voice of thy 
 wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I com- 
 manded thee, saying, Thou shall not eat of it ; cursed 
 is the ground for thy sake ; i7i sorrow shall thou eat 
 of it all the days of thy life ; thorns also and thistles 
 shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shall eat the 
 herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shall thou 
 eat bread, until thou return unto the ground ; for out 
 of it wast tho7c taken ; for dust thott art, and unto 
 dust shall thou return^ The sentence disenchanted 
 them. For them, at any rate, the spell was destroyed 
 for ever. 
 
 But the prodigal's folly repeats itself in every age 
 and in every life. Man must buy his own experi- 
 ence, and in the hardest market. No brother can 
 buy vital knowledge for his brother ; no mother for 
 her child. The experience of anguish is inevitable. 
 The broad, free way is the path of the command- 
 ment. The man who transgresses passes at once 
 into straits. They narrow as he advances. At 
 length they close on him and crush him, and cast 
 him out a wreck to meet the destinies of eternity. 
 
 I say that all sin inevitably narrows, cripples, and 
 destroys the freedom and energy of the human 
 powers. You may judge of it for yourselves. Look 
 
God's Great World. 137 
 
 round you on the men who are Hving evil lives, con- 
 temptuous alike of God and of His laws. How does 
 it tell upon them ? Watch them through the years. 
 Do they become larger, freer, more joyful, more 
 hopeful men ? Does the service set a stamp on 
 their brow which is their seal of honour ? Do men 
 love them, trust them, work for them, pray for them ? 
 Does life's outer gate, as they draw near to it, wear 
 to them more visibly the splendour of the portals of 
 heaven ? You know them, — some of them, — the 
 devil's most zealous, most loyal servants. And you 
 have watched them grow more selfish, more lustful, 
 more wretched, year by year. You know the mark 
 which their master puts upon their countenances ; 
 you know little of the weariness, the disgust, the 
 loathing of life, which he puts within their hearts. 
 You know something of the misery of their present, 
 you can forecast somewhat of the horror of their 
 future. Measure by their life and lot the worth of 
 the devil's promise, to lead you out " into a larger 
 place." 
 
 And this process is inevitable. For sin dulls 
 the edge of faculty, and rots the very fibres of aspira- 
 tion and of hope. There is not a faculty of man's 
 being which the devil has power to train by his 
 service ; there is not a noble desire or hope which he 
 has the means of drawing forth and of directing to its 
 end. Even to that desire of freedom which lends 
 the chief fascination to transgression, he has nothing 
 to offer but dreary, deadly, damning captivity. Man's 
 powers, made to range in the free, broad universe of 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 eternal things, bending themselves on objects which 
 perish in the using, get weak, tremulous, crippled, 
 and are stricken at last with a paralysis which is the 
 beginning of death. Young men, if you want to 
 dull the use of every faculty, to dim the clearness of 
 every perception, to foul every spring from which a 
 living joy can flow, make your own world, the world 
 of your own schemes and ambitions, your own 
 vanities and lusts, and live in it. But if you want 
 expansion, exhilaration, inspiration, life, come out 
 into the large free world of the truth, the righteous- 
 ness, and the love of God. 
 
 But not only does the love of evil destroy faculty, 
 and rob a man inch by inch of the beautiful and 
 joyous world in which he was born to live, and 
 whereby he was meant to educate his powers, but it 
 tells on the man himself; it weakens and finally de- 
 stroys the very spring of his life. God's sunlight, 
 the living light of God's countenance, is just as 
 essential to the true nourishment of a man's inner 
 life, to his full manly growth, as the light of the 
 sun of this world is to flowers. The man who by 
 his self-willed folly, his vanity, avarice, or lust, draws 
 a veil between his life and God, who has no care to 
 know God, no power to commune with God, no joy 
 in the love of God, dooms himself to an inward 
 wasting and pining, a manifest and conscious decay. 
 His life is poisoned in the spring ; joy is quenched, 
 hope is dead. A great famine arises in that world 
 for which he has exchanged his Father's broad 
 dominions. What is there to live for .-^ is the ques- 
 
God's Great World. 139 
 
 tioii which strikes ever more loudly on the tym- 
 panum of the inner ear ; and if I die, what then ? 
 '"'A certain fearful looking for of judgment!' The 
 soul in straits, writhing in its anguish as they grow 
 straiter daily ; moaning the moan of the hopeless, to 
 whom life brings no solace, nor death. 
 
 I suppose that the most horrible doom which can 
 be imagined is that which a weird poet has pictured. 
 A man shut up in a room which defies utterly his 
 efforts to escape from it, from which he sees that 
 escape is absolutely hopeless, and which is so con- 
 structed by cunning mechanism that it narrows daily 
 its dimensions by hardly perceptible degrees. Sides, 
 roof, floor, by hair-breadths, but with awful cer- 
 tainty, approach each other, and close on the poor 
 tortured wretch within. He sees his prison contract- 
 ing, he knows that it must crush him, but he has time 
 to realise and brood over the whole terrors of his 
 doom, and to moan and madden as the bars tighten 
 with horrible deliberation, and pound him into a 
 mass of bloody clay. One dares not dwell on it, it 
 is too terrible. It is the picture which the watchers 
 on high daily look upon, — souls in anguish, in the 
 tightening bars of the prison-house of sin. 
 
 But, " Thou hast drozight me out into a large place!' 
 
 11. Redemption, God's mercy in Christ, brings us 
 out into a large, free world. 
 
 It is difficult, no doubt, to trace the precise allu- 
 sion here. Is David contrasting the straits of the 
 exile with the power and freedom of the king ? Or 
 the narrow, murky caves where the hunted outlaw 
 
140 The Higher Life. 
 
 had his lair, with the broad, free mountains where he 
 wandered when the danger had passed by ? Or does 
 he compare the sense of Hberty and joy which pos- 
 sessed him, when he had heard the word of the 
 Divine forgiveness, with the strain and the anguish 
 which he had known when he had been groaning 
 under the conviction of shameful as well as guilty 
 sin ? We cannot tell ; the sentiment is true through 
 the whole scale, and most certainly truest of the 
 last. 
 
 It describes the whole contrast of the ways of sin 
 and the ways of God ; the sin-born sorrows, and the 
 heaven-born joys of life. To hear the word of the 
 Divine forgiveness, to feel the light of the Divine 
 smile, to run in the way of the Divine command- 
 ment, to take up the Christian cross with all the 
 sorrows and burdens that it lays upon us, and all the 
 joys and glories that bud from it, is like being 
 brought out of a prison into a large, free, and glori- 
 ous world. There is a sense of liberty, of young 
 strength, of immortal life in the soul that has seen 
 Jesus, which is like coming out of the close, murky 
 valley into the free air of the mountain, with a 
 broad land lying gleaming beneath, and beyond, the 
 blue, boundless sea. It is just a hint, no more, of 
 God's large provision for our being with all its appe- 
 tites and powers. 
 
 That we may understand this better, let us con- 
 sider more fully. 
 
 I. The largeness of the world which God has 
 built to be our home. 
 
God's Great World. 141 
 
 2. The largeness of the commandment which 
 God has given us in His Son. 
 
 3. The largeness of the future which God has 
 opened to us in eternity. 
 
 1. The largeness of the world which God has 
 built to be our home. 
 
 " The works of the Lord are great, sought 02c t of 
 all them that have pleastcre therein.'' 
 
 With what intense delight did David describe 
 them. And none of those who take no pleasure in 
 God can find the delight, which God intended man 
 to take in the contemplation of His world. There 
 is something in the vastness of Creation, in the stern 
 and awful certainty of its law, which has a tendency 
 to oppress mankind. The heathen peoples were 
 distinctly conscious of it. The modern man of 
 science, measuring and mapping the spaces of the 
 universe, and cataloguing the infinite variety of its 
 forms, seems to me to manifest the same experience. 
 The grand and stately march which he . is ever be- 
 holding, oppresses him. He is prone to become a 
 fatalist, and to give up all the higher and diviner 
 aims of life. One of our very ablest men of science has 
 publicly declared that if any one would wind him up 
 as a watch, and so arrange it that he might always 
 go right and never go wrong, he should regard it as 
 an unspeakable gain. That is, in other words, he 
 pines to lay down his freedom — a pining which he 
 shares with the Hindoo. 
 
 David felt nothing of this. The beauty, the mag- 
 nitude, the splendour of the universe filled him with 
 
142 The Higher Life. 
 
 gladness. I suppose because he felt so vividly that, 
 vast as it was, it was a king-dom which his Father 
 ruled, and of which he was the heir. Surely there is 
 something inspiring in this boundlessness of Creation, 
 in the new fields of beauty and wonder which every- 
 where open upon us, and will open upon us through 
 eternity. But it is a fountain of joy of which the 
 pure-hearted only can drink in its fulness. Sin 
 simply destroys the faculty by which it is God's pur- 
 pose that we should take in all the delight of His 
 universe, while our being endures. 
 
 There is no limit to the field in which our 
 trained faculties are to expatiate, no bottom to 
 the spring from which they are to drink perennial 
 draughts of joy. ''Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
 neither have entered into the heart of man, the things 
 zvhich God hath prepared for them that love Him" 
 If the dry tree, the marred Creation, be so glorious, 
 what shall be the splendour of the new Creation, 
 purged from every stain of evil, and flashing back 
 from its clear mirror the radiance of the face of God .'* 
 And God is training us to behold it. He asks us 
 to love and to trust. He schools us to delight in 
 His ways, that we may tread at length those shining 
 pathways, may read the thoughts of which the new 
 heaven and the new earth will be the unveiling, and 
 master all that may be meant by the ineffable vision, 
 when " the creature itself also shall be delivered from 
 the bondage of corruption, into the glorious liberty of 
 the sons of God." 
 
 We ought not t© be swallowed up with over-much 
 
God's Great World. 143 
 
 sorrow, with such a world as this around us, which 
 is but the vestibule of that which shall then burst 
 upon our sight. Many of our sorrows, no doubt, 
 touch us too deeply for such consolations. But how 
 much of the fret and the strain of life would pass 
 from us, if we gat ourselves up more often to some 
 Pisgah summit, and measured the largeness and the 
 glorious beauty of our world. 
 
 2. The largeness of the commandment which 
 God has given us in His Son. 
 
 " The grace of God, which bringcth salvation, hath 
 appeared tmto all men, teaching us that, denying ilu- 
 godliness and worldly Insts, we should live soberly, 
 righteously, and godly, in this present world. Looking 
 for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of 
 the great God, and onr Saviour yesus Christ.'' 
 
 By " the commandment " I mean the whole of 
 God's self-manifestation to man. "■ I have seeji an 
 end of all perfection, but Thy commandment is exceeding 
 broadl' We have in Christ a truth whose ultimate 
 depth we can never explore, Man has a boundless 
 capacity. He was made to seek, to hunger for the 
 infinite truth, the infinite good, the infinite love. In 
 Christ this Infinite is revealed. Man's word man 
 can measure. He can gauge it, and mark it with 
 the stamp of his praise or censure, but here is a 
 Word which gauges, which searches, and which cen- 
 sures him. 
 
 Oh ! what blessed rest settles on the spirit when 
 it has got from Christ its lesson of duty. A word 
 from the lip, a lesson from the life of Christ comes 
 
144 ^^^ Higher Life. 
 
 to the weary, halting, doubting soul, like the touch 
 of the angel to imprisoned Peter. The bars break, 
 the chains drop, the captive walks forth free. And 
 as he walks he sings, " Thy statutes are my songs 
 in the house of my pilgrimage!' Men sing when 
 they are sound in strength, and love their work. 
 And those whom God brings forth have found a sure 
 guide, a clear light, a straight track through all life's 
 snares and pitfalls, a track which runs broad and firm 
 through death, and is lost only in the pathways 
 of heaven. " Oh, how I love thy laiv I it is my medi- 
 tation all the day." .... "■ How siveet are thy words 
 unto my taste, yea, sweeter than honey to my motUh. 
 Through Thy precepts I get understandhig ; therefore 
 I hate every false way." 
 
 But there is something that man needs from God 
 yet more than guidance. He wants a large forgiveness, 
 a large love. ''Blessed be God who hath not turned 
 away my prayer, 7ior His mercy from me!' The 
 fifty-first Psalm opens some of the deeper depths of 
 David's experience. It speaks of the large home of 
 love and joy into which God brings out the forgiven 
 and justified soul. The one thing which is deadly 
 to a human spirit, is God's frown. The one thing 
 which is quickening, is God's smile. The man who 
 knows the joys of God's salvation, the blessedness of 
 him " whose iniq^iity is forgiven, whose sin is covered," 
 seems to find all things possible. There is literally 
 no bound to his aspiration and hope. " Beloved, now 
 ai^e we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear 
 what we shall be ; but we know that when He shall 
 
God's Great Wo7'ld. 145 
 
 appear, we shall be like Him, for zve shall see him as 
 he is" Like a bird escaped from the snare, he soars 
 and carols. Like a captive fresh from his dungeon, 
 he strains with almost mad deliofht his recovered 
 powers.^ Being justified by faith he has peace with 
 God — the perfect peace. It is a free, large, bound- 
 less forgiveness, an infinite, an everlasting love. Sin 
 is not pardoned only, it is abolished. Where sin 
 abounded, grace " overabounds." Where sin reigned 
 unto death, there grace reigns through righteousness, 
 unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 Everywhere exuberance ; exuberant power, exu- 
 berant compassion, exuberant love. " O the depth 
 of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of 
 God, hozu zmsearchable are His jitdgments, and His 
 ways past f tiding out." ''All things are yours; 
 whether Paul or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or 
 life, or death, or things present or things to come ; all 
 are yours ; and ye are ChiHsfs ; and Christ is God's^ 
 " Thou hast brought me out into a large placer 
 3. The large future which God has opened to us 
 in eternity. 
 
 There are sorrows which, as I have said, touch 
 us too deeply for Nature's consolations. But there 
 are none which are beyond the solace of the Divine 
 commandment. There is no trouble known to man, 
 there was none known to Christ, whose springs of 
 consolation are not in the Divine word. For one 
 moment it seemed that man miofht know an anoruish 
 
 * The excesses of fanaticism, in the early ages especially, are largely 
 connected with this joy of deliverance. 
 
 L 
 
146 The Higher Life. 
 
 beyond the reach of even heavenly solaces. But the 
 answer came, the help, before the cry had reached 
 heaven's gate. ''Father, into Thy hands I commend 
 My spijdt^' revealed the depth of the Saviour's trust, 
 the perfectness of His rest in God. The music of 
 His coronation anthem broke upon His ear, as He 
 passed to the justifications and the compensations of 
 eternity. 
 
 David had a vision of this. ''Deep calleth unto 
 deep at the noise of Thy waterspouts, all Thy waves 
 and Thy billows have gone over me!' " Why art 
 thou cast down, O my soul ? And why art thou dis- 
 qtiieted within me? Hope thou in God ; for I shall 
 yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance, 
 and my God!' Asaph had a vision of it. " / C7ded 
 unto God with my voice, and 7m to the Lord I made 
 supplication. . . 1 7^emem,bered God, and was troubled ; 
 I complained, and my spirit was overwhelmed. Will 
 the Lord cast off for ever ? Will He be favourable no 
 viore ? Is His mercy clean gone for ever ? Doth 
 His promise fail for evermore ? Hath God fo7^gotten 
 to be gracious ? Hath He in anger shiit up His 
 tender mercies ? And I said, This is my infirmity, 
 but I ivill remember the years of the right hand of 
 the Most High. Nevertheless, I am continzially 
 witfi Thee, Thy right hand tcpholdeth me. Thou 
 shall guide me with Thy counsel, and afterward 
 receive me to glory. Whom have I in Heaven but 
 Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside 
 Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the 
 strength of heart, and my portion for ever!' Paul 
 
God's Great World. 147 
 
 had a vision of it. " Oiir light ajjliction, which is 
 but for a moment, worketh for tts a farniore exceeding 
 and eternal weight of glory ; while we look, not at the 
 things which are seen, but at the things which are not 
 seen ; for the things zvhich are seen are temporal, but 
 the things which are not seen are eternal!' 
 
 Man, as I have said, is a being of royal propor- 
 tions. It needs eternity to work out fairly the pro- 
 blem of his life God surveys that horizon ; get 
 thee up into the mountain, stricken one, and survey it 
 too. There are those who rebel against this appeal 
 to eternity. We ought to see here and now, they 
 say, the meaning of all that we are called upon 
 to endure. But as matter of fact, life does not ex- 
 plain itself, and never has explained itself, within 
 the limits of the present. The men who persist in 
 making it explain itself within these bounds, if they 
 are in earnest about it, grow morose or go mad ; or 
 if they are weak of heart, they give up the hope, and 
 settle down quietly to a life like the brute's. 
 
 But God will be satisfied with no less than eter 
 
 nity, to work out his plan, for you, for me, and for 
 
 mankind. " Wherefore gird np the loins of your mind ; 
 
 be sober and hope to the end, Jor the grace that is to 
 
 be brought nnto yoiL by the revelation of Jesus Chi'istP 
 
 Give up the effort to make your life explain itself 
 
 here. Let no darkness, however drear, terrify you. 
 
 Let no temptation, however fierce, amaze you. Let 
 
 no cup of bitterness, however intense, wring one 
 
 moan from your lips. What is a moment's gloom 
 
 to the eternal sunlight ? A moment's pressure to the 
 
 L 2 
 
148 r he Higher Life. 
 
 eternal triumph ? A drop of bitterness to the great 
 ocean of everlasting joy ? 
 
 Bessed be God that He has a world so large 
 into which to bring forth His pilgrims of the wilder- 
 ness, sore pressed by the burdens and strained by 
 the travail of life — a world where " our sicn shall no 
 more go down, nor our moon withdraw itself, where 
 the Lord shall be our everlasting light, and the days 
 of our motLrning shall be ended!' There we shall be 
 ashamed of the very memory of our sighing, as we 
 gaze on the glory which the sorrows of this life have 
 revealed. 
 
 Nor need we wait till then for the solace. There 
 have been those here who could " count them 
 blessed which endure." This world has Pisgahs, 
 whence a clear eye may survey the length and 
 the breadth of the promised land ; and where 
 we may long for death, that our feet may press 
 that blessed shore. These words are the true 
 hymn of the pilgrim. The whole course of our lives, 
 if Christ be our Captain, " the Captain and the 
 finisher of our faith," is the fulfilment of the promise 
 suggested by the text. In Christ, God is ever 
 seeking us, to bring us forth from the narrows, the 
 straits, in which we have entangled ourselves by sin, 
 and from which no power in the universe but that 
 of His grace can deliver us, into the broad world of 
 " His salvation." 
 
 But the narrowest passage still lies before us, the 
 sharpest strait, the keenest anguish, when we stand 
 face to face with grisly Death. " BiU though / walk 
 
God's Great World. 149 
 
 through the valley of the shadow of death, I zvill fear 
 no evil, for Thou art with Die, Thy rod and Thy staff 
 they comfort me!' It is but a moment's passage, 
 through a sharp anguish, to a world where the sun- 
 hght is eternal. 
 
 I once came back to the daylight after long 
 wandering in subterranean caves. While I live I 
 can never forget the vision. Words cannot paint 
 the splendour of colour which seemed to blaze on 
 the bare rock under whose arch I issued forth, as 
 the sunlight caught the mosses and lichens, or shot 
 a shaft of glory into depths of shade. The sun was 
 shining there as it had been shining for ages. It 
 was no other sunlight than had life-long gladdened 
 my sight. But it seemed to me as if at that moment 
 the veil of Creation had been lifted ; as if for the first 
 time I had seen Lioht. Once ao;ain, I thought, I 
 shall see that revelation. Light, to which even this 
 blaze of splendour is but murky vapour, will one day 
 burst upon my sight, when I emerge from the straits, 
 the anguish of my night of travail, and in my flesh, 
 in the eternal sunlight, I shall see God. 
 " Thou hast brought me out into a large place." 
 
 ^^(^<^^lS)^ 
 
1 50 The Higher Life. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE PILGRIMS. 
 
 " For they that say such things, declare plainly that they seek a 
 country.^'' — Heb. xi. 14. 
 
 Literally a fatherland. The writer means that 
 here we suffer, toil, and hope, in exile ; the Father's 
 home, the kingdom of our perfect and eternal 
 citizenship, is beyond. Thus, too, St. Paul ; " At 
 home in the body, exiled from the Lord." And who 
 that aims at the higher life is at rest and satisfied, 
 in the inmost heart of him, with anything which he 
 can see, or hope for, or dream of as possible, in such 
 a world as this ? It is a strange, sad life, which 
 asks the heaviest sacrifices of its noblest children, 
 and inflicts on them the keenest pain. There would 
 be no key to it — no possible means of understanding 
 such a history of sacrifice and suffering as this 
 chapter records, and which every faithful soul through 
 all the Christian ages repeats — if God Himself had 
 not come down to live it, that He might make it visibly 
 the vestibule of an eternal life ; wherein all that 
 is dark will be revealed, all that is wrong will be 
 righted, and the sufferers for righteousness' sake will 
 be justified and glorified for ever. 
 
The Pilg7'i7?is. 151 
 
 I confess that this is the very core of my 
 theology ; that is, of such notions of the nature, 
 methods and purposes of God, as I have been able 
 to work out from my experience of life, and my study 
 of His word. It would all be dark to me, utterly, 
 hopelessly dark, if I did not believe that the travail 
 of life and of the Creation is, not watched and pitied 
 only, but shared to its uttermost depths of pain, by 
 the Lord. 
 
 There are those, no doubt, who find life very 
 pleasant, and their course very prosperous, and very 
 satisfying to all the desires and cravings which are 
 as yet awakened within their being. But they have 
 not yet begun to live. They are out of the concoi'd 
 of all the great ones of the world through all the 
 ages ; and if they rest there they must look down- 
 ward and not upward for the true comrades of their 
 spirits ; they will find their true kindred in the end, 
 not among the saints or the angels, but among the 
 brutes. 
 
 But most of us, I imagine, if we were to utter the 
 deepest judgment of our spirits, would say, I would 
 not live alway, at least such a life and in such a 
 world. If I must live for ever, my God ! let it not 
 be under this burden, with this fleshly clog, amid 
 these wailings and moanings, this sadness, this con- 
 flict, this sin ! Let me not drag on this double, 
 discordant nature, the hand on the gate of heaven, 
 the foot on the threshold of hell ; every moment 
 a care, a strain, a terror — for " if the righteous 
 scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and 
 
1 5 2 The Higher Life. 
 
 the sinner appear ? " and with which shall I stand ? 
 No, if I am to live, if this burden of existence under 
 such stern conditions is one which I may not lay 
 down, let me live under simpler, purer, more home- 
 like conditions, in a world which shall meet in- 
 stead of mocking the deepest needs and yearning's 
 of my spirit, which shall help instead of marring the 
 fair unfolding of my powers ; in which my heart shall 
 not be wrung by the sadness around me, nor torn by 
 the strife within ; and in which I may be able to 
 believe with calm confidence that I am the child of a 
 benign and blessed Creator, and that He made me 
 and means me to be blest. 
 
 I suppose that these, or something like these, are 
 the terms which we should be disposed to lay down, 
 if we could make a treaty with heaven as to the 
 conditions of our existence ; or if the question were 
 submitted to us, whether we would elect to live on 
 or to be struck out of the book of the living for ever. 
 We should be disposed to demand some such con- 
 ditions as these for a life which is never to die. 
 Well, the Gospel means and the Bible declares, that 
 the God who made us has laid down these condi- 
 tions for us. This is the life, yea, fairer than this, 
 fairer than anything of which our finite faculties can 
 at present dream, which He who laid this burden 
 of existence upon us has ordained, and for which, 
 with wise, firm, fatherly foresight. He is training us 
 in His Son. 
 
 There would be no honest possibility of escape 
 from the conclusion, either that a malign spirit 
 
The Pilgrims. 153 
 
 has made and rules this sad, sufferinor world, or 
 that opposing spirits of equal power are struggling 
 for the possession of the world and of the soul, 
 if the Bible had not revealed this life distinctly 
 as an education. Like all education, it is inevi- 
 tably full of toil, and care, and pain ; but these 
 have their explanation, their only but ample expla- 
 nation, in the life of which this is but the vestibule ; 
 where they are who have fought the battle and borne 
 the strain before us, and whence their voices flow 
 down, as peace streams down on the soft, calm even- 
 ing air, 
 
 Mortal, they softly say. 
 
 Peace to thy heart. 
 We too, yes, mortal, 
 
 Have been as thou art. 
 Hope-lifted, doubt-depressed, 
 
 Seeing in part ; 
 Tried, troubled, tempted, 
 
 Sustained as thou art. 
 
 Or in words of sublimer and more far-reaching- 
 strain, " These all died in faith^ not having received 
 the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were 
 pers2iaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed 
 that they were stj'angers and pilgrims on the earth. 
 For they that say szich things declajx plainly that 
 they seek a country. And truly if they had beeit 
 mindful of that country from whence they came out, 
 they might have had opportunity to have retu-rned, 
 But now they desire a better country, that is an 
 heavenly ; zvherefore God is not ashamed to be called 
 their God, for he hath prepared for them a city: . 
 
154 1^^^ Higher Life. 
 
 . . And tJiese all, having received a good report 
 through faith, received not the promise ; God having 
 prepared some better thing for us, that they without 
 7is should not be made perfect!' 
 
 Let us consider, in developing the meaning of 
 this passage, 
 
 I. The universal experience of the great spiritual 
 leaders of our race ; the men who have left their 
 mark, not so much on the outer history, as on the 
 inner beliefs, the thoughts, feelings, desires, imagina- 
 tions, and aspirations of mankind. These are the 
 •• real fathers of history. And how much we know of 
 them. Some divine instinct seems to have moved 
 them to reveal the deepest secrets of their lives. 
 The men who have been the mightiest builders of 
 the outer structure of society, the conquerors, the 
 founders of empires and of dynasties, we seem 
 to know but outwardly. Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, 
 Alexander, Caesar ; how little we know of their 
 inner lives. Caesar has left to us a biography well 
 nigh as ample in bulk as the confessions of St. 
 Auofustine, But from one end of his o^reat work to 
 the other, there is hardly a word which unveils to us 
 the secrets of his inner life. It is all about the 
 outer world in which he was a master workman, 
 perhaps, the world's master workman ; but he has 
 left no mark on the spiritual development of man- 
 kind, and he has left not a hint about the method 
 of his own. 
 
 But Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, Augustine, 
 Alfred, Bernard, Dante, Luther, Cromwell, how 
 
The Pilgrims. 155 
 
 much we know of them, how largely the secret 
 history of their being is laid bare ! We seem 
 to pass into the sanctuary of those toiling, suffer- 
 ing, struggling, aspiring spirits, and to hear their 
 wailings and their paeans of victory. As we listen 
 their life passes into us, and becomes God's quicken- 
 ing breath to stir the feeble pulses, and kindle the 
 languid aspirations of our own. 
 
 Is there no higher hand manifest here ? Is it 
 by chance that we have this full record of the inner 
 lives of the great ones who have lived most deeply 
 and purely from within, and whose lives bear most 
 directly on that which concerns the spiritual quicken- 
 ing and development of mankind ? And their 
 experience is uniform. It is all set in the same key. 
 It is all charged with deep dissatisfaction with the 
 present condition and order of things, regarded 
 otherwise than as the school discipline of the spirit ; 
 and with intense faith in and lono-ing- for a world in 
 which the beliefs that are crossed and the hopes that 
 are crushed by the sin, the wrong, the pain which 
 fill this earth vv'ith wailing, shall be justified and 
 crowned ; a world which the ever blessed God shall 
 not be ashamed to own as His creation, and in which 
 He shall see, not the tears, but the joy and the glory 
 of His sons. 
 
 At the head of this great line, the men of faith 
 (and the men of faith have been the fathers of the 
 ages), stand the patriarchs, whose lives in their mere 
 outer form were symbolic for all time. I have 
 spoken of the men of faith as the true fathers of 
 
156 The Higher Life. 
 
 human development. Who are the men who have 
 influenced most mightily the beliefs, aspirations, and 
 efforts by which, in all ages, human society truly 
 grows ? He had a deep insight into the secrets of 
 man's heart and of the heart of society, who said, 
 I care not who makes laws for men, if you will let 
 me make their songs. The feelings, the thoughts, 
 the sentiments, the interests, the hopes, the fears, 
 the pleasures, of the daily lives of men, in the larger 
 sense, make history. The political master work- 
 men construct the theatre, but the form and pressure 
 of that humanity which is to play its part upon the 
 stage, are determined from within. 
 
 And who are the men who stimulate and mould 
 most mightily this inward development ? Surely 
 the great believers ; the master thinkers, prophets, 
 poets, whose faith is their strongest and grandest 
 power. Moses and Paul stand above Cyrus and 
 Csesar as true fathers of human development ; 
 though Caesar's be " the greatest secular name in 
 history." And what is the key-note of such lives ? 
 It was no specially devout student of this chapter 
 of the Hebrews, who said of the poets what is 
 true of the whole order. 
 
 They learn in suffering what they teach in song. 
 
 Patriarchs, prophets, apostles, preachers, fathers of 
 the Church, their life is one. They found all things 
 here "jangled," "out of tune and harsh;" while the 
 principle of order which they saw working could 
 only complete its mission in heaven and eternity. 
 
The Pilgrims. 157 
 
 *• Perhaps," said Plato of that perfect RepubHc of 
 which he dreamed, " some image of it remaineth for 
 us in tlie heavens." And so too these great ones of 
 old declared plainly " that they sought a country." 
 "■And now they desire a better country, that is mi 
 heavenly. Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called 
 their God, for He hath prepared for them a city.'' 
 
 I have said that the lives of the patriarchs were 
 symbolic. They were types which set forth what 
 God meant to be the character of all faithful lives, 
 all lives which strive to rise to sympathy with Him, 
 to the end of time. And they were literally and 
 palpably " strangers and pilgrims on the earthr 
 The lords, by the very firmest of all titles, of the land 
 of promise, they held in actual possession not a grain 
 of its dust— yes, some grains ; the graves where they 
 buried their dead : ''And Abi^aham stood ?p from 
 before his dead and spake 7into the sons of Heth, 
 saying, I am a stranger and a sojourner with you ; 
 give me a possession of a burying place witli you, that I 
 may bury my dead out of my sight. .... And after 
 thi^, Abi'-aham biLried Sarah his wife in the cave of 
 the field of Machpelah, before Manire ; the same is 
 Hebron in the land of Canaan. A nd the field, and 
 the cave that is therein, zvere made sure unto Abraham, 
 for a possession of a burying place, oy the sons of 
 Heth." Pilgrims even in their own land, the land of 
 promise, dwelling apart in their tents on the mountain 
 pastures, mixing themselves up but slightly with its 
 interests, rarely entering the congress of its social 
 and political life. Their only direct association with 
 
T 58 The Higher Life. 
 
 it a profoundly sad one, the graves of their dead ; 
 yet profoundly significant, it pointed to a more 
 wealthy and glorious land of promise, where the 
 dead live again, and the lost are restored. 
 
 And this prophecy of the life of faith, history has 
 amply fulfilled. The faithful ones in all ages have 
 been and must be the pilgrims, " confessing that 
 they are strangers and sojourners on the earth." 
 Their faith lays hold on a divine idea of life and of 
 human progress. Looking round them, the con- 
 fession is wrung from them, " this is not divine ; I 
 see here an enemy's work : the divine things here 
 — and there are divine things here in rich abundance, 
 it is not the devil's world — are the thino-s that are 
 budding, not the things which bloom and fruit. 
 They are the things that are swelling with the 
 promise of a future far-off summer, not the things 
 which the sun of this world quickens to rapid and 
 brilliant maturity, parent of as rapid and foul decay." 
 " Oiw life is hid with CJirist in God!' " We ai'-e 
 buried with Him^ 
 
 The higher that we rise in the contemplation 
 of humanity, and observe the men who are most 
 closely enshrined in the homage and love of their 
 fellows, the more plainly do we meet with lives 
 whose meaning and end this world cannot explain 
 to us. Such lives, if this world were all, would 
 present to us that type of character and conduct to 
 which some profound instinct compels our homage, 
 as a miserable abortion ; we see in them promise 
 broken, purpose frustrated, hope destroyed, with a 
 
The Pilgrims. 159 
 
 thoroughness, a ruthlessness, which might kindle 
 grim joy among the fiends of hell. I can conceive 
 of nothing sadder for heaven, more joyful for hell, 
 than the lives of earth's noblest pilgrims, if the true 
 Canaan, of which God spake to their spirits, were here 
 upon this earth. The pleasures, possessions, and 
 crowns of this world they have not striven for. Its 
 prizes they have not cared to grasp. They have 
 asked of earth only a standing ground, that they 
 might do steadily, constantly, their God-appointed 
 tasks. 
 
 Room to stand upon, was all that the patriarchs 
 asked of the earthly Canaan. It is all that the 
 faithful ones in all ages look for and care to receive. 
 And the end of it cannot be here. " God is not 
 ashamed to be called their God, for He hath pre- 
 pared for them a city!' Were there no home, no 
 fatherland, where this great faculty can bloom and 
 fruit, where this lofty hope can burst in joyful and 
 blest fruition, it would all be shameful together ; the 
 universe would be one vast field of desolation, and 
 the Being who made and who rules it would be 
 either a fool or a fiend. But God is not ashamed to 
 be called our God. ^^ Here we have no contimiins' 
 city, we seek one to come ;" " A city which hath 
 foundations, eternal in the heavens, whose builder and 
 maker is God!' 
 
 II. Let us consider the confession out of which 
 this condition springs. " They confessed that they 
 were strangers and pilgrims on the earth!' 
 
 That is, they do not find here the elements of a 
 
i6o The Higher Life. 
 
 home, a final condition of life and relationship in 
 which they can rest, and work to the full strain of 
 their power. Always there is the image of a more 
 perfect life, and a more perfect world, beyond. 
 
 Why ? Why cannot they find rest in such homes 
 as this world can offer to them ? Why cannot they 
 be content with such work as it proposes for the 
 exercise and discipline of their powers ? Is not the 
 earth bright enough ? Are not fields and flowers, 
 and clouds and stars, fair enough to satisfy the 
 keenest passion for beauty ? Is not love rich 
 enough ? Are not homes blessed enough ? Does not 
 life offer a field large enough for the free play of our 
 energies ? Is not the world full, if we will seek them, 
 of springs of interest and joy ? 
 
 It is through no blindness to the beautiful in 
 Nature, the lofty in thought, the blessed in love, 
 that the men and women of faith " say such things," 
 have been saying them for ages, are saying them 
 still. Perhaps such see far more that is good and 
 beautiful here, and thank God for it more profoundly, 
 than many more easy and self-satisfied men. But 
 they say that things and beings here are made 
 upon a scale which the life of a larger world alone 
 can justify. They say that rich as the world is 
 in beauty, and life in interest, there is no room 
 here to work out life's profoundest problems, no 
 time here to reap life's richest harvests, no sphere 
 here in which to realise life's purest and loftiest 
 dreams. They say that the- beauty which delights, 
 the pleasure which gladdens, create a thirst, a heart- 
 
The PilgiHms. 1 6 r 
 
 ache for beauty more perfect, for pleasure more 
 intense and pure. They say that as man rises in 
 knowledge, in culture, in fineness of perception and 
 desire, he feels himself more and more out of tune 
 with this earthly system, which constantly crosses what 
 is best in him with disappointment, and stings what 
 is noblest with pain. 
 
 Man is so organised that things, persons, memo- 
 ries, hopes, may become to him as part of his very 
 being. And he knows it. God has given to him 
 "discourse of reason," "looking before and after," 
 and he knows that that which is other than himself 
 may become part of his life. And yet he is power- 
 less to assure the possession of it from moment to 
 moment, while his one certainty is that he must lose 
 it soon. God has made him thus, to love intensely, 
 to clasp tightly what is dearer to him than dear life, 
 and God gives to him no right to control it, no 
 power to refuse it to disease, and pain, and death. 
 
 Made infinitely more sensitive than the brutes, and 
 more dependent on all around him, he is as much at 
 the mercy of the accidents of the Creation, and may 
 at any moment, and in a moment, see " all his plea- 
 sant things laid waste." The more tender his nature, 
 the more keen his sympathy, the more quick his 
 apprehension, the more intense his passion, the more 
 does pain — hopeless, desperate pain if this be all — 
 dog his steps. As he rises higher in his develop- 
 ment, the more varied, manifold, and imperative 
 as are the needs and relations of his life, the more 
 do they seem to be part of a larger scheme than 
 
 M 
 
1 6 2 The Higher L ife. 
 
 this earth has room for, and the more does hfe seem 
 full of buddings of power and promise which never 
 bloom in this world, far less fruit. 
 
 We start in life with great hopes, with conscious 
 stirrings of great powers. But what is life, if we are 
 shut up to the present, but a constant discovery of 
 limits, nay, a constant narrowing of limits, until we 
 move consciously in a very narrow and disenchanted 
 world ? Do we see this blighting of promise, this 
 frustrating of hope, anywhere else in the Creation ? 
 or is it man only, to whom it is a source of keen 
 agony, who has to lift this cup of sadness to his lips ? 
 Shall we not rather say that God kindles the ima- 
 gination, paints the vision, in life's young spring, and 
 then leads His pilgrim forth into the hard, bare wil- 
 derness, where visions vanish under the blinding 
 glare on the level lines of sand ; that there He 
 trains the soul's muscles by stern, sharp exercise, 
 and then shews to the veteran pilgrim his vision 
 once more, beautified and glorified, when the wander- 
 ings are ended, and there gleam in the dim distance 
 the blue mountains of the Fatherland ? If life has 
 no sphere beyond in which it may work out its pos- 
 sibilities at large, man's life is the saddest thing in 
 the vast Creation, and the Being who made it and 
 who blighted its promise, is an Almighty tyrant, 
 and not a God. 
 
 But this is after all the mere surface of the mat- 
 ter. Powers undeveloped, faculties crippled, hopes 
 blighted, promise cut back to the quick, these, with 
 a being like man, capable of suffering so keenly, 
 
The Pilgrims. 1 6 
 
 J 
 
 capable of living so joyously, so blessedly, are strong 
 arguments for immortality. But there are deeper 
 reasons than these. 
 
 What should we think of a god who should make 
 a world full of cripples, and watch them calmly as 
 they crawl and writhe through life ? Yet thus it 
 is with all of us, if this be all. There is a deadly 
 poison in the blood. It infects every child of Adam. 
 " There is nojte that doeth righteotcsness, no not oiie." 
 '' All have sinned, and tome short of the glory of Godi" 
 It is the testimony of human consciousness, as 
 well as of the Divine word. And the poison is in 
 our blood by no act or volition of our own. There 
 is a dread mystery behind the doctrine of original 
 sin. We are born to sin and to suffer. Orthodox 
 theologians insist with bland satisfaction, that if a 
 man be damned eternally he has himself to thank 
 for it. He was warned, the way of safety was 
 pointed out to him, he would not escape. It pleases 
 them to forget the tremendous pressure which is 
 against man from the beginning ; how by no act oi 
 his own he brings a lustful nature with him into a 
 sinful world, to live a Hfe on whose conduct hang 
 the issues of eternal pain or eternal bliss. Unless 
 we may give a larger range and a longer day to the 
 ministries of God's grace and mercy than our theo- 
 logy finds room for, then it is an awful thing to 
 live a human life in a world which was made and is 
 ruled by the Christian's God. 
 
 And the noblest of men are the most intensely 
 conscious of the working of this deadly virus. " (D 
 
 M 2 
 
J 64 The Highei" Life. 
 
 miserable man that I am''' cried the foremost man of 
 his time, " who shall deliver me from the body of this 
 death f " Such men confess that they are strangers 
 and sojourners, because they — made as they are, be- 
 Heving' as they cannot help beHeving, aspiring as 
 they cannot help aspiring — can never rest, can 
 never find a home, in a world of which the devil 
 seems to share the dominion, and in which every 
 good and beautiful thing that it holds is stained 
 somewhere with the slime of sin. 
 
 No ! God did not mean us to go crippled and 
 numbed for ever, or to wear out a miserable shred of 
 existence, moaning and wrestling with tremendous 
 evils, and then perish and leave them reigning still. 
 What sort of god were he who should cause genera- 
 tions to be born to sin and to suffer, haunted by 
 thoughts and hopes of righteousness, and let them find 
 at last in dying, that while the sin is a dread reality 
 the righteousness is a dream ? But " God is not 
 ashamed to be called our God, for he hath pre 
 pared for us a city." This life of ours would be the 
 burning shame of the great universe, if there were no 
 city of habitation, for which it is the high school of 
 discipline, and where its dread problems will find 
 blessed solution, prepared for us on high. 
 
 And look at the world. Is it a world in which 
 spirits that " trail the clouds of glory as they come, 
 from God, who is their home," should try to find a 
 rest ? Do not our eyes fill with tears as we see the 
 sweat of its agony, and hear the moans of its pain ? 
 Read the visions of the prophets ; study the dreams 
 
The Pilgrims. 165 
 
 of the poets, and then turn and look on Hfe. Be 
 bold. Lift the veil. See the selfishness, the folly, 
 the malice, the hate, the envy, the lust, the tyranny, 
 which make fair regions of this world a very hell to 
 the eyes of the angels — a hell of discord and pain. 
 
 What sort of a world is it in which you, busy men 
 of the world, do your business day by day ? How 
 much that is heaven-like comes across you ? How 
 much baseness, cowardice and greed, that sicken the 
 very soul within you .'* But the world is mend- 
 ing, you say. Yes, it is mending ; it must be mend- 
 ing, else Christ were dead in vain. And it seems to 
 me that they must be blind to the most explicit tes- 
 timony of history, who do not see that it is mending 
 mainly through the operation of that spirit of thought, 
 and care, and ministry for others, which the patriarchs 
 were taught to cherish in their lonely life in Canaan, 
 — they knew that they were to be blessings as well 
 as to be blessed, — and which Christianity has made 
 the law of life for human society. And yet when 
 one sees the beggary, the luxury, the wantonness, 
 the selfishness, the misery, that abound still even in 
 Christendom, the cry, " How long, O Lord, how long?" 
 breaks from our writhing lips. Prophets prophesy, 
 and God promises, a world in which righteousness 
 shall reign, peace shall flourish, truth shall shine like 
 sunlight, and love shall weave its holy and blessed 
 bands around every heart. Look round and see the 
 world which sin has given us in its stead. 
 
 I have said that sin has made this earth hell-like. 
 But in reality that is just what it is not. If it had 
 
1 66 The Higher Life. 
 
 been hell-like, man would have made it into hell 
 long ago. No ! Heaven has a hold upon it, a firm 
 and blessed hold. The world is full of heroisms, 
 too ; silent, noble heroisms. Sufferings and sacrifices 
 demanded and consecrated by love, irradiate the 
 poorest dens, and hallow the coarsest and most un- 
 cultured hearts. It is a strange weltering confusion. 
 Highest heaven, deepest hell are represented here, 
 and here they fight out their battles. But is this 
 Babel of confusion the end which the God of order, 
 of beauty, of life, has wrought for through these in- 
 finite ages ? Has the whole Creation been groaning 
 and travailing in pain, since the morning stars sang 
 together over the young world, and is this that we 
 see around us, and which saddens us even with our 
 dull hearts, is this the birth that is to gladden God ? 
 No ! " Our Father, which art in heaven, hal- 
 lowed BE thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy 
 will be done on earth as it is done in heaven ! " 
 And it will be done, as the outcome of all this 
 travail of man and of Nature, in the new heaven 
 and the new earth wherein dwelleth riofhteousness. 
 This leads me to say some words in brief on — 
 HI. The state in which we are told that this ex- 
 perience is to issue at last. "He hath prepared for 
 us a city," a place of citizenship, a fatherland, a home, 
 on high. 
 
 I shall have more to say on this subject in the 
 closing portion of this volume ; here it will be enough 
 to affirm that a fundamental proposition of Revela- 
 tion is surely this, that life is the training school of 
 
The Pilgrims. 167 
 
 the Kingdom, that earth is the vestibule of heaven. 
 There was a Man on earth once who had suffered as 
 no other man has ever suffered. Scarred more 
 deeply than all other men by the thorns and the 
 spjars of life ; wasted by toil, consumed by zeal, 
 bowed down by burdens of shame and pain, He died 
 the saddest death that man has ever died ; and then 
 He rose from the dead and reappeared in a radiant, 
 triumphant form, master of all the forces of the uni- 
 verse, throned on the great high throne of the Crea- 
 tion, to reveal what, to such a life as His, is the 
 function and ministry of death. 
 
 The risen, blessed, and glorified Christ, with the 
 marks of the Cross and Passion still on Him — the 
 harvest of life's experience, the fruit of all its pain 
 and travail, gathered and garnered for ever — is the 
 Apocalypse. The central image of the book is the 
 key to all its visions. ''And I beheld, and, lo, in 
 the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and 
 in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had 
 beenslainr I have heard the Apocalypse spoken of 
 as the natural history of moral principles. It paints 
 the struggles and triumphs of the Love that died on 
 Calvary, to redeem the world. 
 
 And you must pass with the seer within the veil, 
 you must gaze, as through the Apocalypse it is given 
 you to gaze, on the radiant throng who surround the 
 throne, you must hear the rustling of the palms which 
 their victories have won for them, and catch the 
 jubilant notes of the hymn which they learned on 
 earth with sobs and tears ; you must see the holy 
 
1 68 The Higher Life. 
 
 city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of 
 heaven ; you must watch, not the birth, but the bridal 
 of Creation, when the bride, the Lamb's wife — that is, 
 man, tear-stained, toil-worn man, you, me, if we have 
 learnt the pilgrim hymn — purified and perfected by 
 life's tremendous discipline, shall join with Christ in 
 the fruitful marriage of eternity ; and then you will 
 understand, as an Apocalypse only can give you to 
 understand, why God is not ashamed to be called 
 your God, and what manner of city He hath pre- 
 pared for your habitation there. 
 
 The life of the risen Christ is the key to it all ; 
 and the vision of the world where " they ivho came 
 through great tribulation, who washed their robes 
 and made them white in the blood of the Lamb',' 
 " are before the throne of God, ajid serve Him day and 
 night in His temple." " Beloved, now are we the sons 
 of God." Be it ours to live the life of sons, " Blame- 
 less and harmless, without rebuke, in the midst of a 
 crooked and perverse generation ; among whom " be it 
 ours to " shine as lights in the world, holding forth the 
 word of life!'' " Alow is our citizenship in heaven!' 
 The home, the fatherland, is not far away. At any 
 moment on the wings of faith we may rise into its 
 serene, unclouded regions, refresh ourselves with a 
 vision of its order, and stir our pulses with the breath 
 of its song. And thence also " we look for the 
 Saviotcr, the Lo7'd Jesus Christ ; who shall change 
 mr vile body, that it 7nay be fashioned like tmto His 
 glorious body, according to the working whereby He is 
 able even to subdue all things 2C?ito Himself" 
 
169 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. 
 
 " And ye became followers of us, a7id of the Lord ; having received the 
 word ill much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost." — I. Thess. i. 6. 
 
 " Man can do without happiness, and instead 
 thereof find blessedness," writes the foremost man 
 of genius and the sternest moraHst of our times, I 
 suppose that he means to describe something of the 
 nature of the experience of these Thessalonian Chris- 
 tians, and probably he would acknowledge that the 
 greatest human teacher of the lesson was the man 
 who wrote these words. Paul's life as an apostle, 
 preached this sermon as no moralist could preach it ; 
 and Paul's life was but a faint echo of a greater life, 
 in which the. idea was wrought out with divine com- 
 pleteness — the Man of Sorrows, and yet the most 
 blessed Being in the universe, " God over all, blessed 
 for evermore^ 
 
 If a man cannot understand how far blessedness 
 transcends and is independent of mere happiness, 
 and how "many afflictions" may be perfectly con- 
 sonant with much joy of the Holy Ghost, the joy 
 that man shares with Christ, he may be a Christian 
 by courtesy, but he knows little of Christian expe- 
 rience. Many a heathen has looked more deeply than 
 
1 7o The Higher Life. 
 
 such an one into the mystery of godhness, and has 
 fuller fellowship with the mind of the Lord. This 
 is the orreat Christian idea of a fruitful human ex- 
 perience : ''Much affliction., with joy of the Holy 
 Ghost" 
 
 The calling of a son of God confers no immunity 
 from sorrow ; but it opens beneath and through the 
 sorrow, a spring of over-mastering, and to such a man 
 as Paul, transporting joy. It is a great mistake to 
 suppose that Paul's views of a Christian experience 
 can be summarised in the terms, present pain, future 
 joy. Paul while he lived, worn and burdened as he 
 was, was the most blessed man living in the world 
 who has left to us any record of his life ; he was the 
 man into the fellowship of whose spirit It would have 
 been most worth your while and mine to enter ; the 
 man whose life-work was the noblest, the most faith- 
 ful, the most glorious, which was done on the earth 
 in his day ; while it has left altogether the deepest 
 mark on the higher culture and progress of our race. 
 
 The Csesars, where are they ? The world has re- 
 ceived the legacy which they handed down and has 
 forgotten them ; their names have passed into the 
 custody of the scholars. They have left the strongest 
 traces upon the world they ruled ; their mark is 
 stamped where it never can be effaced. The Roman 
 empire is the matrix of European civilisation ; but 
 for the great majority of us moderns, as men, the 
 Csesars are little more than shades. But Paul is 
 living among us as vivid and masterly as ever. His 
 word at this moment is worth more to us, and can do 
 
The Noble A rmy of Martyrs. 171 
 
 more for us, than all the rescripts of the masters of 
 Imperial Rome. And why ? For the same reason 
 which makes his Master's word more profoundly a 
 word of life to us. He pleased not himself; he ful- 
 filled a Divine commission ; he followed Christ in 
 the regeneration, " with much affliction and joy of 
 the Holy Ghost." It is the man who can bring some 
 regenerating power to bear on his age, who is shrined 
 most lovingly in the homage and reverence of 
 mankind. 
 
 It is the secret of the noblest power, the purest 
 blessedness, and the most vivid hope — following 
 Christ in the regeneration ; that is, in the work of 
 building up and restoring on earth what sin has 
 destroyed. You may rush hither and thither in 
 search of the true good of your being, and you may 
 hew out many a goodly cistern to yourself. It is 
 all vanity of vanities, till you have found and 
 follow Him. Paul lives still so vividly in the 
 midst of our modern world, because Christ, whom 
 he followed and whose chosen organ he became, 
 still lives, an abiding presence in our midst. 
 
 It was Christ in Paul who lived that life, and who 
 left that record. The men, however mighty for the 
 time they might be, who drew their inspirations from 
 the ideas and ambitions of the hour, have vanished; 
 or at best they have left but fossil skeletons of their 
 lives for the curious to study ; while these men, who 
 followed Christ, in whom Christ was living, by whom 
 Christ was speaking, are still amongst us, because 
 Christ is amongst us ; and they are to this day, though 
 
1/2 The Higher Life. 
 
 after the flesh the world knows them no more, His 
 chief organs of influence on mankind. Three hun- 
 dred years ago Paul shook Christendom, as mightily 
 as he shook heathenism and Judaism in his day ; 
 and perhaps the day has yet to dawn when the 
 living influence of St. John will be fully felt in our 
 world. 
 
 I. Followers of us, and of the Lord. 
 
 " Brethren., be ye followers of me, even as I also 
 am of Christy "Brethren, be ye followers together of 
 me ; and i7iark them which walk so as ye have tis for 
 an ensamphr 
 
 There ic something startling, and, indeed, it 
 seems almost awful, in such words as these. A man 
 of like passions with ourselves, dares to propose 
 himself as a mark for imitation to men and women 
 who were seeking to be followers of Incarnate God. 
 But Paul does not shrink from it — ''followers of ns, 
 and of the Lord'' — and his life course amply sus- 
 tains his words. But who dares to echo them now — 
 who would not shudder at the thought of setting 
 himself forth as a model of Christian perfectness, an 
 image of Christ, by which, being close at hand, to dim 
 eyes the original might become the better known ? 
 
 And yet the world is not without its Christ-like 
 ones in any age ; men and women who seem, not 
 to be baptized only, but penetrated and possessed, by 
 the spirit of the Lord Jesus. Their lives are as out 
 of tune as was His, with the ideas, the habits, the 
 aims, of the busy world around them ; while in tune, 
 as was His, with the life of the unseen throng 
 
The Noble Ar^ny of Martyrs. 173 
 
 who ''do the Father s commandments, and hearken to 
 the voice of His word',' here and on high. But there 
 is nothing, on the whole, more wonderful in the 
 world's spiritual history, perhaps, too, in the spiritual 
 history of all worlds, than the measure in which it 
 has been given to men and women like ourselves, 
 with no special opportunities and advantages which 
 are not also within our reach, to be and to live like 
 the incarnate Son of God. The Lord does not 
 shine on high in unapproachable isolation, like the 
 sun in the firmament. As the first among peers, 
 the elder brother among brethren, a bright particular 
 star amid a cluster of constellations. He leads the 
 marches of the great human host, with which He 
 has cast in His lot and mixed up His life for ever. 
 This likeness of living men to Christ is a sermon of 
 hope to all of us, and it opens a great vision of 
 what educated and perfected humanity shall be in 
 Heaven. 
 
 But where are the points of likeness ? Whence 
 did Paul derive his right to say to the churches. 
 Ye became followers of us, and of the Lord ? 
 Out of such Christian experience as he here records, 
 '' I live, yet not /, but Christ liveth in me, and the life 
 zvhich I nozu live in the flesh, I live by the faith of 
 the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself 
 for me-" and out of such passages of his history as 
 the twelfth chapter of the Second Epistle to the 
 Corinthians chronicles : " Therefore I take pleasure 
 in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in perse- 
 actiojis., in distresses, for CJirist's sake ; for when I 
 
1 74 The Higher Life. 
 
 am weak, then am I strong.'' " And I will very 
 gladly spend and be spent for you ; though the more 
 abundantly I love you, the less I be loved!' The 
 speciality of the hkeness hes in this power of self- 
 sacrifice ; the power to lose all selfish thought and 
 consideration in tender care for his brethren and for 
 mankind. 
 
 It may seem a strange truth to this age of keen, 
 intense competition, when the commercial idea rules 
 so absolutely that nations are chary of moving in 
 any cause, however righteous, except their own 
 interests, in the narrowest sense, are very plainly 
 involved. But it is well worth one's while to take 
 note of the fact that these men, whose lives have 
 been so noble, rich, and fruitful, who in a great 
 sense are living still among us, whose presence the 
 world with righteous instinct w^ill not suffer to 
 vanish, had absolutely no thought of any interest 
 but Christ's, and were ready at any moment to lay 
 down their lives on the altar of sacrifice, if by death, 
 they too, like their Master, might win a blessing for 
 mankind. 
 
 We are not likely, any of us, to become altogether 
 as Paul, even by the most intense study and admira- 
 tion of his character, but we may follow him as he 
 followed Christ ; and it may help us to live a little 
 less selfishly, and to be more bold and large in our 
 ministry to our fellow men, to see where such a life 
 as his was rooted, and what was the secret of the 
 mighty power which he, and such as he, have wielded 
 over men. " It is to have no self-will, to be absolutely 
 open to the will of God. 
 
"^ke Noble Ainny of Alaj^lyrs. 175 
 
 It is a hard saying — no self-will ; about which 
 some will be ready to ask, " what on earth does it 
 mean ? Are we to have no will of our own, no 
 thouLjht and care for ourselves and those belonQ-ins* 
 to us ? " God forbid ! Paul had a very mighty will 
 of his own, and had to express it and to bring it to 
 bear, again and again, in defiance of the whole secular 
 and religious world of his time. But he had puri- 
 fied the current of that will by deep inspirations of 
 the heavenly air which a man breathes in prayer, 
 and in meditation on the word and the ways of God, 
 
 It was his own will, and yet not his own ; it 
 had been refined and moulded into harmony with a 
 higher will ; he willed what was also the will of 
 God. " / live, yet not /, but Chi'ist liveth in me." 
 He had laid his spirit bare to the stream of Divine in- 
 fluence ; and just as the blood gets purified from its 
 carbonic dross as the vital air breathes throusfh it in 
 the lungs, so the will of Paul — those desires, aims, 
 hopes, loves, which are the springs of action — was 
 purged of the acrid leaven of self by wrestling, 
 conquering prayer ; the prayer that God would 
 search him to the most hidden depths of thought 
 and will, and purify him, and would use him as an 
 instrument for the fulfilment of His own holy and 
 blessed purposes, making the instrument keen and 
 strong, no matter how fierce might be the furnace 
 fires; the prayer, above all, that God would strengthen 
 him to follow his Master in the path of self-denial 
 and self-sacrifice, and teach him to find the true 
 delight and glory of his spirit in spending himself in 
 the service of mankind, like God. 
 
176 TJic Higher Life. 
 
 Do not think, I pray you, that a man must adopt 
 formally the calling of an apostle or an evangelist, to 
 enter into the fellowship of such a life as this. There 
 have been very daring and successful soldiers, very 
 able and masterly statesmen, very prudent and pros- 
 perous merchants, the deepest thought of whose 
 hearts has been, " I am not my own, I am bought 
 with a price, and I. am bound therefore to glorify 
 God with my body and with my spirit, which are 
 His." Hard as it may seem, it is the beginning of 
 peace to say it, and to try to live it. You may 
 have your own way, and rule as absolute lord 
 in your own little kingdom ; other wills may feel 
 themselves compelled to bow to your will, and you 
 may exult in the sense of your power to sway them 
 at your pleasure ; but you will find yourself in the 
 end miserably heart-sick and weary of your own 
 way, when you have got it. While, on the other 
 hand, you may give up your own will, deny yourself, 
 and make it your steady purpose and effort to care for 
 the welfare of others, to bear their burdens, to lighten 
 their cares, and to minister to their joys — which is 
 none the less beautiful and heavenly because philo- 
 sophers call it by a fantastic name in these days — 
 and a glow of heavenly peace and joy will pass into 
 your spirit in the effort, and will abide there as a 
 foretaste of the joy that you will share with God, 
 with Christ, and with the great assembly and church 
 of the Firstborn, in heaven. 
 
 " Followers of us, and of the Lord," said Paul, 
 because he followed Christ so boldly, so utterly ; 
 
The Noble A rniy of Martyrs. 177 
 
 because none of the things which the men of this 
 world strive for could lay their chain upon his spirit, 
 neither did he count his life dear unto himself, if he 
 might finish his course with joy, and the ministry 
 which he had received of the Lord Jesus to testify 
 the Gospel of the grace of God. The likeness to 
 Christ lay expressly in the power of self-sacrifice ; 
 in the large, loving, ministering heart which could 
 renounce its dearest, yea, even its eternal hope, if 
 men might but be blessed. And this is to grasp 
 perfectly the difference between blessedness and 
 happiness which the text expounds to us, and to the 
 consideration of which in fuller detail we will now 
 proceed. 
 
 II. They entered into this fellowship by receiving 
 the word " with much affliction, and joy of the Holy 
 Ghost." 
 
 Confession, or profession as we call it, is in these 
 days cheap work : so cheap that it is difficult to find 
 any true gauge of its reality. Then it was dear 
 work, and at any moment might cost dear life. It is 
 not good to be out of fellowship with the struggles 
 and sufferings which have won for us prosperity and 
 peace. How many a stout citizen in past ages has 
 stained his own hearth-stone with his life-blood, that 
 you may sit with your dear ones around yours, no 
 man daring to make you afraid. An age which feels 
 no fellowship of spirit with the martyrs is not a noble 
 age, is not a blessed age, however the elements of 
 material prosperity may abound. Christian brethren, 
 ask yourselves what you have in common with the 
 
 N 
 
lyS The Higher Life. 
 
 noble army of martyrs, in your peaceful, happy homes, 
 with your ample resources, with your wide circle of 
 friends and kindred, and your prosperous, life to 
 which your religion just adds an ornament of grace 
 and a crown. Remember the men who won the in- 
 heritance for you ; consider at what cost they won it, 
 and at what cost they kept it ; and understand how 
 receiving the word with much affliction, may be one 
 very constant condition of the purest joy of the 
 Holy Ghost. 
 
 We learn from the narrative in the 17th chapter 
 of the Acts of the Apostles, that Paul had troubled 
 work at Thessalonica. " The yezvs who believed not, 
 moved with envy, took ttnto them certain lezvd fellows 
 of the baser sort'' and stirred up a persecution against 
 him. They expelled him from Thessalonica, and 
 not content with that, followed him with their per- 
 secutions to Berea. We gather from the epistle that 
 the persecution was prolonged, and that the Thes- 
 salonian Christians had literally to take their lives in 
 their hands, when they professed themselves the 
 disciples of the Lord Jesus. 
 
 We read about this calmly, and as almost matter 
 of course. But strain your imagination to realise 
 these "afflictions." Feel the cords tio-htenino- round 
 
 o o 
 
 your limbs, and the blood beginning to start under 
 the strain ; see the glaring eye of the African lion 
 blazing on his victim, and his savage jaws opening 
 to champ his prey ; hear the hiss of the red-hot 
 iron, or the swing of the executioner's axe ; and 
 then bethink vou in the last dread moment, of a 
 
The Noble Army of Martyrs. 179 
 
 gentle wife, a brave boy, a tender girl, whom you 
 are leaving helpless in the hard world, obnoxious 
 to the same doom. Does it seem to you, as you 
 realise it, that you could lift your head, and 
 utter the name of Christ with your last breath with 
 passionate devotion ? Yes ? Then you can under- 
 stand how martyrs taste, as none perhaps but martyrs 
 can taste, " the joy of the Holy Ghosts But which of 
 us is brave enough ? Whose faith is strong enough ? 
 Wonder not that the joy of the Holy Ghost seems 
 well-nigh to have died out of our churches, and that 
 to the world's keen eye our religious life looks cold 
 and gloomy as night. 
 
 A second source of the " much affliction " of the 
 Thessalonian Church, was the utter rupture of all the 
 bonds of kindred, friendship, and social relation, and 
 the loss of the means of earning even a modicum of 
 bread. It is evident from the second epistle that 
 there was deep poverty in the Church, and an un- 
 usual number of utterly dependent members. Many 
 of them, we may be sure, sank at once from a position 
 of affluence to penury and distress, and were in 
 danger of literally starving, and of seeing those 
 dearest to them starve, because they could not bring 
 their lips to deny a Name which they were bent on 
 magnifying — because Christ had laid on them the 
 obligation to confess Him, whatever might be the 
 cost. They had to break up their homes, to separate 
 themselves from friends and kindred, to betake 
 themselves, many of them, to menial occupations, to 
 forego all the prizes which they had been trained 
 
 N 2 
 
I So The Highej" Life. 
 
 to strive for, and to make themselves objects of 
 universal distrust and scorn. They received the 
 word with much affliction, as England received it at 
 the Reformation, and continued to receive it through 
 the Revolution ; as Hindoos, Chinese, Africans and 
 South Sea Islanders receive it to this day. 
 
 " And others zuere tor tinned, not accepting deliver- 
 ancel' is a record which might be written of any age 
 of the Jewish or Christian Church. Christ, who 
 died for the world, has ever in the world men and 
 women not a few who are ready to die for Him, to 
 endure any extremity of torture rather than deny 
 that they love Him, or silence even for a moment 
 the murmur of His name upon their lips. Christ's 
 great love for man has kindled man's great love for 
 Christ, which is the joy and glory of the world of 
 spirit. The history of earth's martyrs — and all re- 
 ligions can boast them — is the noblest epic of this 
 world ; the history of Christ's martyrs is perhaps the 
 noblest epic of heaven. 
 
 And this which I have described is independent 
 altogether of the sorrow which springs out of the 
 stern struggle against world and flesh and devil, to 
 which a disciple of Christ devotes himself; the 
 bitterness of which is expressed from his constant 
 failures, his sense of the disloyalty of his own 
 heart to the Saviour, his beggarly propensity to 
 run after the gauds and prizes of the moment, and 
 to let the things not seen and eternal go. In 
 the great fight of afflictions — fight against the 
 world, fight against the ruling powers — no fight so 
 
The Noble Army of Martyrs. 1 8 1 
 
 hard, so long, so stern as this. They received the 
 word with much affliction ; they pkinged into a sea 
 of troubles when they gave themselves to the Lord ; 
 and they knew, as none but those who can face 
 that sea of trouble can know, " the peace which 
 passeth understanding," and " the joy which is un- 
 speakable and full of glory," 
 
 That we may understand this better, let us 
 notice — 
 
 I. That the purest joys of a man's life are 
 strangely independent of his surroundings. What 
 he has in the way of pleasures and possessions is 
 literally nothing in the account ; what he ?V, and 
 what he has in the inward treasure-house, is all in 
 all. Take the simplest and most familiar illus- 
 tration, into which all can enter. If two persons 
 love each other with passionate devotion, to be near 
 each other, even in penury and toil, is pure bliss ; to 
 be separate, even in wealth and splendour, is pure 
 misery. Those who truly love would far rather 
 have the fellowship of toil and struggle, than the 
 separate inheritance of all that this earth could yield 
 of possessions and delights. 
 
 Once, at any rate, it seemed so to you, my 
 reader; and those were not your worst days. The 
 fellowship of kindred souls is the purest joy that 
 is known to mortals. The dinner of herbs where 
 love is, is not simply better than the stalled ox 
 with strife : there is absolutely no comparison. It 
 is not that the one is a higher pleasure than the 
 other. The one is pure joy ; the other, except to 
 
1 8 2 The Higliei'- L ife. 
 
 the basest natures, Is pure pain. In truth, man 
 cares nothing about his surroundings when his soul 
 is glad within him, and can sing through its conflicts 
 and toils ; they vanish utterly, as the night fogs at 
 the kiss of the sun. 
 
 2. This will help us a little way, and in a wholly 
 right direction, to understand " the joy of the Holy 
 Ghost!' It is the joy of the man who has found the 
 true Lover and Lord of his being, whom he can serve 
 with perfect loyalty, love with passionate devotion, 
 and obey v/ith supreme delight. It is the joy of the 
 lonely widowed soul which has discovered its kindred ; 
 of a sick man who feels within himself that the spring 
 of his life is healed, that his vigour and vital energy 
 are restored. The earth does not gladden more 
 when the morning sun flashes his light on her bosom, 
 than does the soul rejoice when the light of the 
 heavenly sun first touches it, and it passes out of 
 darkness into warm, bright day. Circumstances are 
 nothing. " I have found Him whom my soul loveth," 
 is the cry ; and nothing can kill, nothing can even 
 dash, the joy which that consciousness quickens 
 within. 
 
 Man can glory in infirmities, in distresses, in 
 necessities, in persecutions, if they but bring him 
 more fully into the sphere of Christ's fellowship and 
 love. These men were so filled with the joy of 
 God's salvation, that I question not that it was a 
 matter of glorying with them if they were called to 
 suffer, that they might show how much they loved, 
 and how much they were beloved. This explains 
 
The Noble Army of Martyrs. 
 
 the constant language of the apostles about glorying 
 in tribulation, and counting it all joy if they were 
 called to suffer for Christ. Their joy was so exuber- 
 ant that they were ready at any moment to put it to 
 the test of the keenest pain. All love delights in 
 sacrifices, yea in sufferings, for its object. Suffering 
 ceases to be pain if love consecrates it ; it becomes a 
 holy and blessed offering, and it tends ever to the 
 increase of love. 
 
 And let the careless reader understand, that the 
 choice in life is mainly between suffering with joy of 
 the Holy Ghost, and suffering without it. Do not 
 let the devil cheat you into the belief that the choice 
 is between an easy, merry, careless, pleasant life- 
 course, and the struggles and sorrows of the Christian, 
 lightened and sweetened by the joy of the Holy 
 Ghost. Life is no merry march, or holiday j)astime 
 for any of us ; but the true agony of life must be 
 with those who are without God and without hope 
 in the world. God sets no such choice before us as 
 the pleasures of sin and the pains of godliness. The 
 choice, as I have in the next discourse set forth more 
 at large, is simply between the sorrows of sin and 
 the sorrows of Redemption ; the one embittered by 
 the frown, the other illumined by the smile of God, 
 
 There is sorrow with a curse in the heart of it, and 
 sorrow with a blessing ; sorrow with the devil for a 
 comforter, and sorrow wath God for a friend ; sorrow 
 with the fiends for comrades, sorrow with Christ as 
 the elder brother of the spirit ; sorrow with hell at 
 the end of it, and sorrow with heaven. Here is 
 
rS4 
 
 The Higher Life. 
 
 your choice, the only choice which the Lord leaves 
 you. Choose at once, for the sorrow comes hastening 
 on. Escape is blankly impossible, but you may 
 meet it with a smile of welcome, with a song of 
 triumph. Fiercely as the storm may beat, this 
 anchor at any rate will hold. " It is a faithful say- 
 ing that if zve die with Him we shall live with Him ; " 
 "if we suffer, we shall reign." How faithful, they 
 know full well " ivho received the word with mjicJi 
 affliction and with joy of the Holy Ghost" and have 
 passed up to the recompenses of eternity. 
 
 
i85 
 
 X. 
 
 THE TWO SORROWS. 
 
 " For it is better, if the will of Cod be so, that ye suffer for well- 
 doing than for evil-doing.''^— \. Peter iii. 17. 
 
 Much of this first epistle of Peter is occupied with 
 the consolation of sufferers — the suffering sons of 
 God. It was written to Hebrew Christians ; Peter 
 himself being a Hebrew of intense national sympathies 
 and of marked national character. The suffering 
 sons of God involved an idea which was not a little 
 perplexing to one who had been trained in the 
 Hebrew school. " Let the wicked suffer, let the 
 saints be happy," was the formula which came most 
 readily to Hebrew lips. It expressed the notion 
 of the right order of things which ran through 
 all the national literature, and it was deeply ingrained 
 in the popular heart. A far truer and nobler 
 philosophy of life is to be found, by those who will 
 search for it, in the Hebrew writings ; but the first 
 Psalm contains the pith of the ideas which were 
 popular in the Hebrew, as in some other and more 
 modern, religious philosophy. 
 
 Peter was a man of the people, and his ideas 
 ranged naturally with the populai views of his 
 
I S6 The Higher L ife. 
 
 time. Paul too was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, but 
 he Jiad been trained in a hi^rher and more thouQfhtful 
 school. Perhaps it is not too much to say, that 
 there was something in the nature of Saul of Tarsus, 
 which enabled him to look more deeply into the 
 mystery of sorrow, than could the strong, rough 
 fisherman of Galilee — a man by nature of simple 
 ideas, simple habits, and simple hopes. Paul's 
 nature was much more complex and profound. 
 The acute thinker, the accomplished scholar, the 
 intensely sensitive and sympathetic man, he had in 
 him an instinct which prepared him for a life of toil, 
 sacrifice and suffering, in ministry to his fellows. 
 Under no conditions could life have gone with him 
 simply and easily ; his was a nature to fathom to 
 its very depths the mystery of the Passion and the 
 Cross. 
 
 Into the mind of Peter these ideas would seem 
 to have wrought themselves but slowly. He took 
 upon himself to rebuke the Master, when first He 
 unveiled the Cross before his sight. " Then Peter 
 took Him, and began to rehike Him, sayhig, Be it 
 far from Thee, Lord; this shall not be tmto Thee. 
 But He turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind 
 Me, Satan : thou art an offence tmto Me." 
 
 The need of the sufferino^ continued to be veiled 
 from him. He it was who would take the sword to 
 spare his Master the agony by which a whole world 
 was to be saved. " That be far from Thee, Lord," he 
 was saying again, when he drew the sword to smite 
 the captors of Jesus; and we may be sure that his 
 
The Two Sorrows. 187 
 
 voice was not the least loud among those who 
 uttered the lamentation, " We trtisted that it had 
 been He which should have redee^ned Israel, and this 
 is the tJiird day since these things were doner The 
 prophesied resurrection seems quite to have passed 
 away from his thoughts. The women's words 
 were to the apostles " but idle tales, and they 
 believed them not." He had much to learn about 
 the meaning of Calvary. " O fools, and slow of 
 heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken ; 
 ought not Christ to have snffe7^ed these things, and to 
 enter into His glory f " 
 
 Peter, beyond all men, profited by the baptism 
 of the day of Pentecost. He stands forth a new 
 man from that hour. It was as though a veil had 
 been lifted from around his spirit, and the light of 
 the truth which throuoh the Lord's words had been 
 dimly struggling into his mind, had flashed on him 
 in all its brightness. From that moment the Lord's 
 counsel was quite clear to him. As plainly, as 
 grandly, as Paul, he deals in this epistle with the 
 mystery of sorrow ; and he connects, as clearly as 
 Paul, the sufferings of the saints with the sufferings 
 of their Lord : the disciple suffering with the 
 Master ; the limb sharing the experience of the Head. 
 The suffering sons of God ! "// is better, if it 
 be the will of God, that ye stiffer for zvell doing than 
 for evil doing!' " Whcrefo7^e let thcvi that staffer 
 according to the will of God, conzniit the keeping of 
 their souls to Him hi well doing, as unto a faith- 
 ful Creator r Perhaps the true children of God, 
 
1 8 8 The Higher L ife. 
 
 the faithful, the Israehtes indeed, felt, not unnaturally, 
 that when their Messiah should appear, he would 
 release them from the cloud of sorrow and bring 
 them out into the serene daylight of peace and joy. 
 Who should be happy in this universe, if not the 
 pure-hearted, the gentle, the loving, the patient, the 
 believing ! Must there not be some flaw in the 
 constitution of the Kino-dom of God, if such are left 
 to be a prey to sorrow, wounds, and death ? " For 
 thy sake zve are killed all the day long, we are 
 accottnted as sheep for the slaughter,'' describes but 
 a poor heritage for sons. 
 
 Doubtless they thought that when the King- 
 dom of Heaven should come, their long night of 
 agony would be ended, and that the dawn of the 
 day of triumph would be in the sky. One hardly 
 knows which would be sadder, their heart or their 
 Master's, when He announced that He had not 
 come to send peace upon the earth, but a sword. 
 It is stern work to meet an enemy's weapon ; 
 but it is infinitely sadder to trouble the convic- 
 tions and to blight the hopes of a friend. This 
 sadness in its fullest measure fell to the lot of 
 our Lord. He knew that his friends were looking 
 for rest, comfort, and honour; He knew that the 
 heritaoe which He would leave to them would be 
 exile, distress, and shame. " In the world ye shall 
 have tribulation^' was all that He could say to 
 them about the present ; and a sharper pang must 
 have shot through His heart than through theirs, as 
 the sorrowful words dropped from His lips. 
 
The Tivo Sorrows. 189 
 
 They accepted the lot bravely. " That be far 
 from Thee, Lord," " That be far from us," was the 
 natural cry of their spirits. "It is a Kingdom of 
 Heaven ; the children of the Kingdom cannot be 
 doomed to such a lot as this ! " But when the lot 
 mastered them, when they found that the Lord 
 meant in sober sadness that they must go cross- 
 bearing through life, they accepted it heartily. Their 
 teachers even stirred them up to accept it joyfully, 
 as a full communion of experience with Christ. 
 This is the whole tenour of Peter's epistle. " Beloved, 
 think it not strange concerning the Jieiy trial which 
 is to try you, as though some strange thing happened 
 unto you ; but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers 
 of Christ's sufferings ; that when His glory shall be 
 revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy. If 
 ye be reproached for the name of Christ happy are 
 ye ; for the spirit of glory and of God restcth upoji 
 you : on their part He is evil spoken of btit on your 
 part He is glojHfied!' — I. Pet. iv. 12-14. 
 
 It is a constant theme in the writings of Paul, 
 who in handling this subject grows " very bold," as he 
 says of Esaias, and prays, " TJiat I may know Him, 
 and the pozuer of His restirrection, and the fellowship 
 of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His 
 death ; if by any means I might attain tcnto the re- 
 surrection of the dead." — Phil, iii, lo-ii. Let us 
 consider, 
 
 I. The suffering of the children of God which is 
 according to the Divine will. Let us look a little into 
 its springs. There are three which I specially note : 
 
1 90 The Higher L ife. 
 
 1. The struofSfle against the current of the world 
 without them. 
 
 2. The struoforle asfainst the world within them. 
 
 3. The burden of their ministry to mankind. 
 
 I. The struofofle agfainst the current of an un- 
 godly world. 
 
 We talk about this in these days, they in theirs 
 had to do it. The world's current is in some sort 
 with us, with our beliefs, our endeavours, our aims. 
 Christian ideas have wrought themselves, in a mea- 
 sure which is easily under-estimated, into the texture 
 of the life of modern society. The world can do 
 very well with a moderate measure of unselfishness 
 and unworldliness ; though Paul would still be 
 counted as a madman were he in the midst of it, 
 and the Lord would be cast out of its camp again. 
 Such thorough devotion to the heavenly life, such 
 utter contempt of the world's current maxims and 
 prizes, would be as darkly distrusted now as it ever 
 was. The men of the loftiest strain find their lot a 
 lonely one still, but none the less are they the leaven 
 of society. Yet belief in the facts and ideas of 
 Christianity, is according to the course of the world 
 among us ; and a certain amount of self-denial, of 
 attention to religious duties, and care for others, is 
 accounted decent and respectable. 
 
 Easy, prosperous Christians, whose leading idea is 
 to make themselves safe for eternity, had better be 
 quiet about their burdens and sufferings ; the world 
 only laughs at them. But if a man zuill live godly in 
 Christ Jesus, if he willXook. into his Master's experi- 
 
The Two Sorrows. 191 
 
 ence, and try to understand what God means by life ; 
 if he ivill bear witness, by a holy conversation, that 
 the works of the world are evil ; if he believes in his 
 soul that the only life is the love of God, that it is not 
 worth while to win a fortune or a throne, if a shadow 
 were to steal between the soul and the light of God's 
 countenance in winning it, that all the world cannot 
 harm a man if he stands where God has placed him, 
 and is about His work; if he holds the following. of 
 the Lamb here to be the one condition of following 
 Him there ; then life will be one long, stern struggle. 
 Daily he will have to arm his soul for a battle, and 
 his most familiar scenes and associates will furnish 
 both the field and the foes. His life will seem to 
 them a mystery, a dire mistake. Many will smile 
 and sneer, vote him faint-hearted, and jostle him 
 aside as they press on to the prize. He will have 
 constantly to rein in his powers from a race in which 
 he might win if he cared to contend. Living apart 
 from the world in spirit, above the world, he must 
 pay the penalty of many a heart-ache, many an hour 
 of sharp anguish, many a moan in the ear of heaven, 
 which the Father understands. How long, O Lord, 
 how long! Unloose me, and let me free ! 
 
 2. The struggle against the world within, which 
 it is harder still to endure. 
 
 There was one who had endured at the hand of 
 the world, because of his unflinching fidelity to Christ, 
 all that is here set forth, " Of the Jeivs Jive times 
 received I forty stripes, save one. Thrice was I beaten 
 with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered ship- 
 
1 9 2 The Higher L ife. 
 
 wreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep ; in 
 journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of 
 robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils 
 by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the 
 wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false 
 brethren ; in weariness and painf illness, in watchings 
 often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold 
 and nakedness!' — II. Cor. xi. 24-27. But I think 
 that he opened a deeper depth of sorrow when he 
 wrote the words, — " I therefore so run, not as 2Uicer- 
 tainly ; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air ; but 
 I keep lender my body, and bring it into subjection, 
 lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, 
 I myself should be a castaway T — I. Cor, ix. 26-7. 
 
 There are no true disciples of Christ who would 
 not thankfully endure any amount of outward pres- 
 sure, if they might but be free from the inward strain. 
 It is there, on the neck of the unruly powers and 
 passions, that the yoke chiefly galls. " Without, 
 fightings," " within, fears," and the fears by far the 
 worst. " Unite my heart to fear Thy 7iame," and I 
 can bear all the rest. But deliver me from my- 
 self, — this vain, shallow, passionate, lustful, envious, 
 hateful self, and then let the world do what it 
 will ! Are there any true children of the Kingdom, 
 true soldiers of the Cross, who would not readily 
 yield themselves into the hand of malignant power 
 to work its will upon them, if the fountain of bitter 
 waters might but be healed for ever within ? 
 
 Here is the great struggle of the Christian life. 
 "■Mortify, thei'ef ore, your members which are upon the 
 
The Two Sorrows. 193 
 
 earth, fornication, uncleanncss, inordinate affection, evil 
 concupiscence, and covetous7iess, which is idolatry . . . 
 But now ye also ptit off all these ; anger, wrath, 
 malice, blasphemy, evil conwiunication out of your 
 motUh. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have 
 p2it off the old man and his deeds, and have put on 
 the new man. . . And above all these put on charity, 
 which is the bond of perfect nessT — Col. iii. 5-14. 
 All the rest were easy work. But day after day this 
 battle has to be renewed. Old enemies, again and 
 again beaten, again and again rise up in full force 
 and renew the struggle. We think perhaps that we 
 have won a great victory, and slain some passion or 
 lust which had been tormenting us, for ever. The 
 soul faints and sickens to find it rising again in full 
 strength at the very next occurrence of temptation, 
 and to see that the old round of conflict and self- 
 crucifixion has to be retrod. It is not only the 
 beaten combatant in life's battle who is tempted to 
 cry, " O miserable man that I am, who shall deliver 
 me from the body of this death f " The victory is so 
 costly that it wrung from Paul the same moan, 
 checked ere it rose to heaven by the joyful out- 
 burst, " / thank my God, through Jesus Christ my 
 Lord" 
 
 3. The burden of their ministry to mankind. 
 We have read the history of Paul's outward troubles 
 and strue^les. Consider the siofnificance of what 
 follows : " Beside those things that a7'-e without, that 
 which Cometh iipon me daily, the care of all the 
 churches. W ho is weak, and I am not weak f Who 
 
 o 
 
194 The Higher Life. 
 
 is offended, and I burn not?'' And again, ''For 
 tho2igh I be free from all men, yet have I made myself 
 the servant of all, that I might gain the more. And 
 2into the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain 
 the fezvs ; to them that are under the law, as tijider 
 the lazu, that I might gain them that are linder the 
 law; to them that are without law, as without 
 I a I J (being not zuithout law to God, but tinder the lazv 
 to Christ), t J lat I might gain them that are without 
 law!' — I. Cor. ix. 19-22. 
 
 The man who gives himself to be the world's 
 servant and minister for the Lord's sake, opens his 
 heart to a cloud of cares and sorrows, from which he 
 might, if he pleased, keep far away. It is hard, 
 stern work, this caring for the world. It is the sphere 
 of activity in which he may enter most profoundly 
 into the Master's experience, and feel something of 
 the weight of the Intercessor's, the Mediator's burden, 
 which well-nigh crushed His heart. If it does not 
 crush us, it is because the chief weight is upon the 
 Master still. Moses felt it when he interceded for the 
 people, and staked his life, and more than his life, on 
 his intercession. ''And Moses returned unto the Lord 
 and said. Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and 
 have made them gods of gold ; yet now, if Thou zvilt 
 fo?^give their sin ; and if not, blot me, / pray Thee, 
 out of Thy book zuhich Thou hast written" — Ex. 
 xxxii. 31-2. And Paul, "/ say the truth in Christ, 
 I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the 
 Holy Ghost, that / have great heaviness a7id continued 
 sorrow in my heart. For L could wish that myself 
 
The Two Sorrozvs. 195 
 
 ivere acctcrscd from Christ for my brethren, my kins- 
 men accoi'dhig to the flesh!' — Rom. ix. 1-3. 
 
 There are those hving- now who are simply 
 spending life in their daily ministry, and are serving 
 their fellow-men at the cost of all else that man holds 
 dear. And who is worthy of the name of a disciple 
 who refuses this ministry to man .? It was for this 
 purely that the Master came. " The Son of Man 
 came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
 give His life as a ransom for many!' ''As My 
 Father hath sent Me into the world!' He said to His 
 disciples, " even so send I you!' It is the Christian 
 life. " Ye are not your own; for ye are bought with 
 a pi'-ice. Wherefore glorify God in yotcr body and in 
 your spirit, which are His!' 
 
 But the burden sometimes presses crushingly. 
 The hardness, the unthankfulness, the impenitence 
 of men, will bring bitter tears from loving and un- 
 selfish hearts. The work, too, will often seem quite 
 hopeless. " Master, we have toiled all the night, and 
 have catight nothing!' will constantly be our com- 
 plaint. "It is all useless ; the righteous perish ; I 
 am left alone," we cry like Elijah, and then fling 
 down sword and shield in the wilderness, praying 
 that death may come swiftly and release us from the 
 burden and the pain. Suffering according to the will 
 of God! There is no release from it. It lies enfolded 
 in the conditions of our life as Christians. We can- 
 not refuse it if we would ; we dare not if we mio-ht. 
 
 Here is one side of the picture — certain suffering 
 in the Christian life. Is this the only side ? Is all 
 
 o 2 
 
196 The Higher Life. 
 
 the sharpest suffering endured by the children ? Are 
 they the only afflicted and burdened of the world ? 
 It would be a strange world if it were so ; a strange 
 Kingdom of Heaven. The rebels alone happy, the 
 children always in tears ! It was not a very deep view 
 of life which Asaph presented : " / zuas envious at the 
 foolish, when I sazv the pi^ospe7^ity of the zuicked. For 
 there are no bands in their death, and their strength 
 is firm. They are not in trouble as othennen, neither 
 
 are they plagued like other men Their eyes 
 
 stand 07it with fatness, they have more than heart can 
 zvishr — Ps. Ixxiii. 3-7. Or Job : " Wherefo7'e do the 
 wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? 
 Their seed is established in their sight with them , 
 and their offspring before their eyes. Their hoiises 
 are safe from fear, neither is the 7^od of God 7po?t 
 them. Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their 
 cow calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth 
 their little ones like a flock, and their children dance. 
 
 They spend their days in zuealth, and in a 
 
 moment go down to the grave. Therefore they say 
 unto God, Depart from iis, for we desire not the 
 knowledge of Thy ways!' — Job. xxi. 7-14. 
 
 There is another side to the account, to which 
 we will now turn — 
 
 II. The suffering evil-doers. 
 
 I. We have seen what comes of swimming against 
 the current ; the struggles and shocks to which a man 
 dooms himself, when he sets his face fairly against 
 the evil which is in the world, resolved, by God's 
 strength, to stem it, and to live after a pattern shown 
 
The Tzuo Sorrows. igj 
 
 to him from a higher sphere. Let those who do not 
 like the prospect set their faces with the world, swim 
 with the current, and care chiefly for worldly success, 
 and see how it fares with them. I am not uttering 
 words carelessly, or for the mere sake of effect, when 
 I say, that I suppose that the unhappiest men 
 upon this earth, on the whole, are its princes, its 
 nobles, and its millionaires. There is nothing which 
 so palls as the pomp of high station, nothing which so 
 wearies the soul as the monotony of success. Dives 
 had his good things here, and Lazarus his evil 
 things. But even here, Dives was the cursed man, 
 with all his pomp, Lazarus the blessed man, with all 
 his rags and wounds. 
 
 " Sinners may escape the rod," we sing sometimes 
 thoughtlessly. Do you find that they escape it .-* 
 Does this sum up your observation of their lives ? 
 How many wretched sinners, men and women, 
 whose life is a burden and a curse to them, are to be 
 found wherever a human company is congregated ? 
 How many in the poor bare cottages, poor and bare 
 through drink and lust, which lie all round our happy 
 homes ? How many in our great banking houses, 
 our palaces of commerce, our squares and parks 
 where the rich of this world chiefly dwell ? The 
 jostle, the strain, in swimming with the current, is 
 just as hard as in swimming against it ; nay, harder, 
 for of all the strains that a man has to bear, the 
 most exhausting, the most agonizing, is that which 
 he has to endure when his heart is set with its whole 
 energy and passion on a purely worldly success. 
 
198 The Higher Life. 
 
 You may be inclined to doubt it. Ask lunatic- 
 asylum keepers what light they can throw upon it ; 
 or read the memoirs of those familiar with the secret 
 history of courts. But let a man win the eminence on 
 which he has set his heart, and which has become his 
 one aim in life ; his miseries but begin. Who has not 
 heard some selfish schemer, who has struggled on to 
 a grand position, begin to groan at once over the care 
 and distress which it brings ? Paralysis too is none 
 the more endurable for gilding ; and a wrangling 
 family can make the finest house a hell. I know a 
 young man who, by a sudden stroke, made a splendid 
 fortune, and the dread of dying in a poor-house is 
 beginning already to cast its dreary shadow over his 
 life. Sinners escape the rod ! I think that the devil 
 takes care that they shall feel it to the quick, and it 
 is not oil that he rubs into the wounds. If it is pain 
 that you shrink from, take not the devil's yoke upon 
 you ; you will not find rest with him. 
 
 2. It is stern work, no doubt, to stem the current 
 of an unholy nature, to tame rebellious passions, and 
 to compel them to own a master's hand. It is a long, 
 hard struggle, this conflict with passion, and it ends 
 only in death. Well, if you shrink from the 
 prospect, indulge the passion, give it full swing, and 
 see how it will be then. " Rejoice, O young man, in 
 thy yotithr Take thy fill, eat, drink, and be merry ; 
 the reckoning is at hand. Is there any horror like 
 that of a worn-out profligate's premature old age ? 
 The dull eye, the trembling limbs, the confused 
 brain, the stammering tongue, the brand " beware " 
 
The Two Sorrows. 199 
 
 set upon his brow, the soul setthng clown the while 
 into a darkness that may be felt. Or in other forms, 
 let selfish, jealous passions have full sway. Do not 
 fight them, do not master them ; let them alone until 
 they have mastered you. Is there any small hell 
 upon earth more complete than the home that they 
 will make for you ? Set it down in your scheme 
 of life that you are not to deny yourself for wife, 
 for children, for kindred ; that it is their place 
 rather to deny themselves for you ; and how much 
 joy or profit will your daily intercourse with them 
 yield .-^ How far will their love solace your toils, 
 lighten your burdens, and welcome you home when 
 weary to the sweetest rest ? 
 
 It is a hard battle, no doubt, to which in God's 
 name I call you, the battle against passion, lust, and 
 self. But there is one thing harder, infinitely harder, 
 to which the devil is calling you — indulgence. Loose 
 the rein, and your course will be a swift and stormy 
 one to the nether darkness and the pit. 
 
 3. The burden of ministry. " Well," says the 
 self-centred, worldly-hearted man, " at any rate I 
 can escape that. If I live to myself, I can at least 
 avoid that sea of care." Yes, you can avoid that. 
 It is a field of experience from which a man can 
 keep himself, if he will. It is the purely voluntar) 
 suffering, the will must go with it, and it is most 
 completely according to the will of God. You can 
 escape it if you please ; you cannot be forced into it 
 against your own will ; and you can take a wretched 
 heartache with you through life, for want of some 
 noble and ennobling work. 
 
200 The Higher Life. 
 
 I have said that probably the unhappiest men in 
 the world are to be found among its wealthiest. And 
 the reason lies here. It is not simply that riches and 
 honours bring cares, breed strifes, and gender satiety. 
 It is that it is so hard for rich men not to trust in 
 uncertain riches ; and hearts trusting in this world's 
 wealth, cannot help aching for a better trust and a 
 nobler treasure. They cannot help aching, I say. 
 You can help giving ; you can help ministering ; you 
 can help devoting yourself to the good of others ; 
 but you cannot help the heartache which a life of 
 selfishness brings. The heart aches for that which it 
 was made to possess and to enjoy. It is God's law 
 of life. No man shall rest save in that which God 
 ordained to satisfy him. And the sharpest of all 
 pains, the most intolerable of all pressures, is that of 
 a heart pining for its true God-given work. 
 
 And now in the light of these principles let us, 
 III. Consider the affirmation of the text. What 
 we have before us in life is clearly the choice of the 
 kind of suffering which we will endure. Escape we 
 cannot. " Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly 
 7ipwai^d!' Suffer man must, with a nature like his, 
 in a world like this. Let the worldly-hearted take 
 notice of the essential condition of man's life in this 
 world. There are the two sorrows — the sorrow of 
 the righteous, the sorrow of the unrighteous ; the 
 sorrow of the self-centred, the sorrow of the self- 
 sacrificing ; the sorrow of the self-controlled, the 
 sorrow of the profligate ; the sorrow of the world, 
 the sorrow of the Kingdom ; the sorrow of Christ, the 
 
The Two Sorj^ows. 201 
 
 sorrow of the fiends. There they He, the two 
 burdens. Your choice is between them. Lift one 
 you must, bear one you shall. God grants no 
 immunity to you or to any other man. Choose ; the 
 choice is before you, and now ; and consider, as you 
 weig"h them in the balance, that — 
 
 1. The one inspires, the other emasculates the 
 spirit. 
 
 2. The one has pure joy in the heart of it, the 
 other pure agony. 
 
 3. The one ends in glory, the other in shame 
 ;md the everlasting night. 
 
 1. The one inspires, the other emasculates the 
 spirit. 
 
 The sorrows and struggles that come to a man in 
 fulfilling the will of God, are like strong exercise on 
 the mountains. They make him strain and pant, 
 but they make him glow ; they brace, purify, and 
 exalt his power. Deep down in his inmost soul he 
 knows that suffering thus he is doing the thing for 
 which God made him, and that all his powers have 
 found their work. He knows that in this battle the 
 everlasting strength is on his side. He knows that 
 however hardly he may be pressed, however sharp 
 may be his moan, there is One watching with surC; 
 Almighty hand who will never suffer him to be lost. 
 
 And he is at one with himself. His heart says, 
 It is well. And a man can bear anything if he be 
 but heart-whole ; if there be peace and unity within. 
 I see the suffering sinner slinking along the world's 
 pathways, unable to look up, unwilling to look round, 
 
202 The Highej'- Life. 
 
 afraid to look within ; no Hand beneath him in the 
 struggle, no Presence beside him in the storm. He 
 has no vision of a future to animate and inspire him ; 
 he spends his strength daily and for nought ; the 
 inner man becoming weaker, sadder, wearier, more 
 heart-sick of it all ; until, but for the dread of some- 
 thing after death, he would be ready for the suicide's 
 plunge into the dark river, and the haunted rest of 
 an unhallowed grave. Suffer according to the will 
 of God, and drink in fresh inspiration daily. Suffer 
 according to the will of the flesh, and watch the daily 
 weakening of your noblest powers, the withering of 
 your fairest hopes, the darkening of your brightest 
 visions, as your soul settles down into the night. 
 
 2. The one has pure joy in the heart of It, the 
 other pure agony. 
 
 Strange as it may seem, the hour of a spiritual 
 man's sharpest suffering is often the hour of his 
 sublimest joy. Why ? Because the Lord is with 
 him, drawing the weary form to His bosom, resting 
 the aching head on His heart. Songs in the night ! 
 The night of sorrow bright with song! It is not 
 only the sense of the Divine strength which inspires 
 the sufferer ; it is the sense of the Divine love 
 that makes him blest. We can bear anything when 
 a loving heart is beating beside us. And shall we 
 faint " under the light affliction " when the very 
 heart of love is gathering us to its embrace ? Nay, 
 " Most gladly therefore will we take pleasure in in- 
 firmities, ill reproaches, in necessities, in persecutio?is, 
 in distresses, for Christ's sake, for when we are weak 
 
The Two Sorrows. 203 
 
 then are we sU^oiig!' The sufferer knows that he is 
 growing into the love of his Father, his Saviour ; and 
 is tasting the water of a hving fountain, which will 
 be welling up through eternity. 
 
 In the heart of the sinful sufferer there is the 
 germ of pure agony. It is hopeless suffering, and 
 that is the anguish of the fiends. There is nothing 
 to make it tolerable. " My punishment is greater 
 than I can bear," said the first flagrant sinner. It is 
 the character of all unhallowed suffering ; it must 
 break down the strongest strength, it must wear out 
 the most resolute will at last. Suffering without 
 hope ! It is the anguish of the pit. And your 
 suffering in sin, loving it and cleaving to it, is of this 
 essence. The sharper it becomes the more dire the 
 agony, the darker, the more horrible the despair. 
 
 3. The one has its end in glory, the other in 
 shame and everlasting contempt. 
 
 Men are willing to suffer for a crown, to struggle 
 for a prize. What would life be without its future ? 
 No matter what burden you may bear, what moan 
 you may mutter, if " this light affliction, which is but 
 for a moment^' is working for you '' a far more ex- 
 ceeding and eternal weight of gloiy!' It will matter 
 little when God lifts up your head with honour, in the 
 day of the manifestation of His sons. Nay, it will 
 matter much. " Ye are they which contimied ivith 
 Me in my temptation, and I appoint 7m to yoti a 
 khigdomr These sufferings will be the theme of the 
 most blessed communion, the seeds of the purest 
 joys, the most radiant glories of eternity. These, 
 
204 The Higher Life. 
 
 who have suffered according to the will of God, shall 
 awake to everlasting life, and those, who have suf- 
 fered according to the will of the flesh, shall awake 
 to shame and everlasting contempt. 
 
 Fellow sinner, fellow sufferer ! We are the heirs 
 of the same bitter inheritance of sorrow through ?in. 
 Will you have God's light upon it, God's love in it ; 
 or the devil's darkness, the devil's curse ? Suffer you 
 must. Escape you cannot. But, oh ! see to it, see 
 to it, that when your hour of anguish comes upon 
 you, you have God and Christ upon your side. 
 
205 
 
 XI. 
 
 THE SACRED DARKNESS. 
 
 " py/io is among you that feai'cth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of His 
 servant, that ivalkcth in darkness and hath no light ? Let him 
 trust in the name of the Lord, and stay npon his God." — Is. 1. lo. 
 
 Is it by chance, think you, that the prophecies of 
 Isaiah are laden with such a burden of sympathy 
 with the sufferings of Messiah, and with such dark 
 foreshadowings of the agony and bloody sweat, the 
 cross and passion, the death and burial, in which, to 
 the eye of sense, that mission of love would end ? 
 Of all the sacred writers, it is Isaiah who paints the 
 most pathetic pictures of the Man of Sorrows, and 
 of the Life of Sorrows. The thorn crown and the 
 bloody spear, though the mist of ages intervened, 
 were not hidden from his sight. There were mo- 
 ments when there crossed his vision a splendid 
 heroic form, the form of a conquering king, crush- 
 ing his foes beneath the wheels of his triumphal 
 chariot, as he thundered on amid universal accla- 
 mation to the empire of the world. But there 
 lingered before his sight the form of another 
 King, with the stain of tears upon His cheek, and 
 the drops of bloody sweat upon His brow. He was 
 pallid, worn with watching, weak with hunger, 
 
2o6 The Higher Life. 
 
 emaciated by a life of conflict and pain. He was 
 crowned, but the thorns of His crown pierced Him ; 
 He was robed, but in the mocking purple with which 
 He had been invested by His insolent guard. There 
 were throngs of His subjects round Him, but they 
 cried out, Away with Him, away with Him ; and 
 they dragged Him at length through a brutal, jeering 
 rabble to enthrone Him on a cross. The Kine whom 
 Isaiah saw was '^ despised and rejected of men, a jjian 
 of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and they hid 
 as it were their faces from Him, He ivas despised, and 
 they esteemed Him not!' 
 
 And the prophet paints it all as one who saw, 
 and whose soul was filled with shame, with aneuish, 
 and with unutterable pity, at the spectacle. The 
 men who lived with Messiah and who beheld His 
 passion, have not left to us such pathetic records as 
 these. This greatest and most far-seeing of those 
 who " spake beforehand of the siiffeiHngs of Christ, 
 and the glory that should follozv I' dwells with peculiar 
 tenderness on His lonely and forsaken lot, on the 
 cup of human anguish of which His soul alone knew 
 all the bitterness, and of that desert path, the whole 
 gloom and horror of which He alone explored. Was 
 is by chance, I say, that this royal prophetic spirit 
 was led to fathom these depths of Messiah's sor- 
 row, and to strike thus early the sad key-note of His 
 history ? Or had he himself tasted this cup of bitter- 
 ness ? Had he himself, in his finite human measure, 
 been " despised and rejected of men ; a man of sor- 
 rows and acquainted vith grief" ? 
 
The Sacred Darkness. 207 
 
 Ah ! it is the sorrowful who alone can comprehend 
 the sufferers. It is those who have passed through 
 the high school of discipline, who alone know the 
 meaning and can gauge the measure of human grief. 
 Isaiah knew beforehand the fellowship of his Master's 
 sufferings ; he was led by the same Hand through 
 the same depths. He had passed through that 
 which fitted him for vivid sympathy with One, who 
 after a life of Divine ministry was left to agonize on 
 the Cross alone. He was of that elect band of whom 
 the Saviour spake — they are the peerage of earth and 
 of heaven — who can drink of the cup which Messiah 
 drank of, and can endure the baptism with which 
 He was baptized. And in painting, with a touch 
 whose pathetic tenderness remains unrivalled still, 
 that mystery of sorrow — the sorrow of sorrows of 
 earth's history, and of heaven's — he was but painting 
 out, as the Spirit taught him, the outlines of a tragedy, 
 which he knew to be all too possible by the witness 
 of his own sad heart. 
 
 He was an old man, a very old man, when he 
 wrote this grand Evangelic poem, which opens with 
 the blessed commission, the true beo^innino^ of the 
 Gospel, " Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your 
 God. Speak ye comfortably to y eriisalem, and cry 
 unto Jicr, that Iter warfare is accomplished, that her 
 iniquity is pardoned, for she hath received of the 
 Lord's hand double for all her sins. Hark ! A 
 voice crying in the wilderness. Prepare ye the way of 
 the Lord, make straight in the desert a highzvay for 
 our God." He was drawing near to the end, and it 
 
2o8 The Higher Life. 
 
 was destined to be a bloody end, of a long and Illus- 
 trious career, as the first statesman as well as the 
 first prophet of his time. Isaiah's statesmanship, as 
 revealed in his prophecies, is a mine of political wis- 
 dom which has yet to be fully explored. 
 
 I am not, of course, unacquainted with the very 
 strong body of criticism, which would connect this 
 latter portion of the book of the prophecies of Isaiah 
 with a much later writer, living in the midst of the 
 events on which these prophecies mainly bear. It has 
 always seemed to me utterly impossible, to explain 
 away the grand prophetic element in the book by any 
 such hypothesis ; nor has any argument which I have 
 met with appeared to me conclusive, or anything like 
 conclusive, against the received ideas. I think, too, 
 that the moLt recent criticism, as is constantly the 
 case after a period of sceptical frenzy, seems to be 
 setting in the direction of the old opinion once more. 
 
 I take this book then to be Isaiah's work, and 
 the work of an extreme old age. He had lived to 
 " serve his own generation according to the will of 
 God." Paul was not more intensely, more passion- 
 ately devoted to his ministry, than was Isaiah to the 
 service of the profligate and degenerate age and people 
 amonof whom God had cast his lot. There can be 
 little doubt, I imagine, that he had been the main- 
 spring of the reformation which has made the name 
 of Hezekiah illustrious in history. The hope which 
 he had nursed in his heart, and which his splendid 
 imaginative faculty had enabled him to pourtray, in 
 colours which remain still the most vivid pictures of 
 
The Sacred Darkness. 209 
 
 a golden age of peace and blessedness in the world's 
 literature, was realized for a moment, and then faded 
 from Jewish history for ever. 
 
 Hezekiah, to whom he had been the stay and 
 the staff, both in his reformation, and in the for- 
 midable political difficulties of his reign, died, and 
 the impious Manasseh occupied his room. The 
 people who had suffered rather than wrought the 
 reformation, when Manasseh gave the word, swiftly 
 cast off the yoke which it had laid upon their pas- 
 sions, and rushed to such daring excesses both of 
 idolatry and profligacy, as cast even the reign 
 of Ahab over Israel into the shade. The twenty- 
 first chapter of the second book of Kings records 
 the shameful history. Every possible act of apos- 
 tacy which the chosen people could commit, they 
 indulged in with eagerness. And to sum up all, it is 
 said that Manasseh " seduced them to do more evil 
 than did the nations whom the Lord destroyed befo7^e' 
 the children of Israel!' Of those nations it is said 
 the land " spued out its inhabitants',' because of their 
 horrible vices ; and this explains the ruthlessness of 
 the warfare of the Israelites in their invasion of 
 Canaan, as the picture of the people under Manasseh 
 which is here painted, explains the ultimate horrors 
 of the captivity.^ 
 
 Isaiah watched the reaction ; he was at this time 
 some fourscore years old. And he watched it with 
 worn and weary heart. He saw the torrent of im- 
 
 ^ Compare Lev. xviii. 24-30. 
 P 
 
2 1 o The Higher Life. 
 
 piety sweeping away every wreck of that which he 
 had once hailed as a glorious and lasting revival in 
 the Jewish State and Church. It seemed as though 
 the doom of the people were already sealed, as if the 
 hope of their regeneration were for ever dead. No ! 
 not for ever. The old prophet rebuked his faithless 
 lieart. Not for ever. God lived, and the word of 
 God. ''All flesh is grass, and all I he goodliuess 
 thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass wither- 
 eth, the flower fadeth, bitt the word of o?ir God shall 
 stand for ever. O Zion, that bringest good tidings, 
 get thou up into the high inoimtain; O fernsaleni, 
 that dringest good tidings, lift np thy voice luith 
 strength. Lift it up, be not afraid, say unto the 
 cities of fndah, behold your Godi' 
 
 The great hope, with which the word of the 
 Lord had been laden since the first days of man's 
 transgression, could not die. So the old seer betook 
 himself to vision. All around him was black as 
 Erebus. But in the far future there was a golden 
 gleam on which he fixed his sight. It widened 
 as he gazed, and all the glory of the Kingdom 
 of Heaven was unveiled. It was there before his 
 sight, as it had been from the beginning before 
 the sight of God. As real as the scenes of impiety, 
 impurity, and blood which filled him with horror, 
 was this golden, glorious future for Israel and for 
 the world. And then he wrote the vision ; his 
 last legacy to his people before he was " sawn asun- 
 der " by the fiendish barbarity of the king. 
 
 He wrote out at large this most magnificent of 
 
The Sacred Darkness, 2 1 1 
 
 visions, this chain of prophecies of the glory and 
 blessedness of Messiah's reign, which for splendour 
 both of imagination and diction is probably un- 
 matched in any literature ; and he left it to God to 
 guard it, and to fulfil its promise in His time. 
 " Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that 
 no man we7it thro2igh thee, I will make thee an eternal 
 excellency, the joy of many generations. . . . Violence 
 shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor de- 
 struction within thy borders ; biU thotc shall call thy 
 walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise. The sun 
 shall be no more thy light by day, neither for bi^ight- 
 ness shall the moon give light 7nito thee, but the Lord 
 shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God 
 thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down, neither 
 shall thy moon withdraw itself, for the Lord shall 
 be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourn- 
 ing shall be ended!' 
 
 The man who could see that through the miseries 
 and horrors of Manasseh's reign, had found, as far 
 as man may find, the key to " the sufferings of 
 Christ and the glory that should follow ; " and he 
 had won nobly the right to be heard, in speaking 
 to all who are called like Christ to pass through 
 great darkness, in doing the Father's will, and in 
 finishing His work. " Who is ai7wngyou that feaj-cth 
 the Lord, that obcyeth the voice of His servant, that 
 walketh in darkness, and hath no light? Let him 
 trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God!' 
 
 Let us study the character of those who are 
 visited with the experience described in the text. 
 
 p 2 
 
2 I 2 The Higher Life. 
 
 Two features stand prominently forth ; the pious 
 mind, the godly, Christ-like life. 
 
 I. The pious mind. " Who is among you that 
 feareth the Loi^d f " 
 
 It is the most constant description of piety in the 
 Old Testament. The fear of the Lord was the sign 
 of the godly character, and the strength of the godly 
 life. It describes, under the conditions of the elder 
 dispensation, the spirit and the attitude of the man 
 to whom the mind and the will of God were not only 
 substantial, but supreme realities in the conduct of 
 his life, — the man who set the Lord always before 
 him, and who knew, in his secret soul, that the 
 one great concern of life was to stand right with 
 Him. 
 
 God was a very living presence with the Jewish 
 people. He had not begun to fade into an abstrac- 
 tion, under the manipulations of the Scribes and 
 priests. He had been seen, at least the blinding 
 splendour which veiled His presence had been seen, 
 by their fathers, and His voice, the voice of His law 
 amid mighty thunderings, had been heard. His arm 
 had been visibly bared, and again and again it had 
 wrought wonders both of judgment and of salvation 
 in their midst. They remembered all the great and 
 terrible works which He had done before their eyes, 
 the redemption which He had wrought for His 
 servants, and the destruction which He had dealt to 
 their foes. Thus God became a very living presence 
 in the midst of them ; One whose " well done" carried 
 with it the support of an Omnipotent hand, while 
 
The Sacred Darkness. 213 
 
 behind His frown waited hell and death. And the 
 fear of the Lord grew to be a very vivid and mighty 
 principle of action in Israel, on which men were not 
 afraid to stake possessions, fame, and life, for time 
 and for eternity. 
 
 Nor is the Old Testament fear inconsistent in 
 any wise with the love, of which we read so much in 
 the words of Christ and of His apostles. ''Perfect 
 love casteth 021-t fear" it is said. Truer word could 
 not be spoken. But love casteth out fear by absorb- 
 ing it into itself. Slavish fear it destroys utterly, 
 but holy fear it adopts and cherishes. The perfect 
 filial love is a love which has this holy fear in the 
 heart of it ; it is more fearful of wounding the 
 Father's love, and grieving the Father's heart, than 
 of anything else in this wide universe. The loving 
 fear, the fearful love, is the divine passion in " the 
 children of the Highest" — deep reverence, trembling 
 awe, perfect, tender, trustful love. 
 
 The men described in our text are the lovers of 
 God rather than of the world ; men to whom it 
 is matter of daily anxious concern to please Him, 
 who have Him in all their thoughts, who take their 
 daily mercies from His hand with the light of His 
 love upon them, who sweeten their daily toils and 
 struggles by the thought of His sympathy and care. 
 To them the wealth of the universe would be literally 
 no compensation for His frown ; for them a world in 
 arms could bring no shadow over the sunlight of His 
 smile. They make Him " Ike Alan of their co7insell 
 their " Chiefest among ten thoiisandl' their portion, 
 
14 The Higher Life. 
 
 their shield, their strength, and their exceeding 
 great reward. " Who is amo7ig you that feareth the 
 Lord?" 
 
 2. He will manifest his fear by a godly, Christ- 
 like life. 
 
 " That heareth the voice of His servajit!' 
 I think that in this passage, by " the servant of 
 the Lord," Isaiah means the Messiah. It is the 
 term which He constantly employs to designate 
 Him. In chapter xlii. i, the words, '' Behold My 
 servant whom I nphold, Mine elect in whom My soul 
 delighteth,'^ can refer to no other. And again in 
 Hi. 1 3, the words, " Behold My servant shall deal 
 prudently ; he shall be exalted and extolled, and be 
 very high^' introduce that matchless picture of Mes- 
 siah's sufferings and spiritual triumph, on which in 
 the introduction to this discourse I have dwelt at 
 large. And I think that there is a very rich sugges- 
 tion here. The men who obey Messiah's voice are 
 the men who can sympathise with Messiah's mission. 
 "/ call you not servants, but friends!' They seek 
 to make their lives, within their limits, the images of 
 His life in the world. It is very significant that 
 "fearing the Lord," and "obeying the voice of His 
 servant," are here spoken of as synonymous. This 
 means that he who has an eye for God will also have 
 an eye for Christ. He who feareth the Father 
 obeyeth also the Son, and recognises Him at once as 
 the " Sent of God." Two beautiful instances of this 
 are recorded by St. Luke ii, 25-38, Simeon knew 
 the infant in a moment, and sang his Nunc diniittis. 
 
The Sacred Darkness. 215 
 
 And Anna the prophetess, entering the temple, burst 
 forth into praise. 
 
 These are the ChristHke men and women who 
 are spoken of in the text, the men who obey the 
 voice of Christ's mission, to whom He saith in all 
 ages, " As My Father hath sent Me into the zuorld, 
 even so send I yon'' They are not afraid of self- 
 denial and sacrifice ; they do not shudder at the 
 cross, which has been consecrated for them by the 
 Lord. They believe in self-denying, self-sacrificing 
 ministry ; they are able to live, not for themselves, 
 but for mankind. They are able to urge on their 
 self-denying course, as Isaiah did, through a host of 
 oppositions, and at peril of possessions, position, and 
 even of life. They feel it to be a natural thing, a 
 thing to be expected, and for which they are bound 
 to be prepared, that the better they serve the world 
 the less they should be appreciated by it, the more 
 they should be a mark for the slings of its hate 
 and the shafts of its scorn. They are sure that the 
 better they serve their Heavenly Master, the more 
 thoroughly they must be content to let the prizes of 
 this world go. No man can hear Messiah's voice in 
 the inner chamber of his spirit, without entering into 
 Messiah's ministry toman. And no man can enter into 
 that ministry without taking all things which he had 
 held as gain, and counting them " but loss for Christ;" 
 without taking the cross and bearing it patiently, 
 until at life's outer gate the angels lift it, and present 
 the cross-bearer to be crowned. " The Lord God 
 hath opened mine ear, and I was not rebellious, neither 
 
2 1 6 The Higher Life. 
 
 turned away back. I gave my back to the smiters, 
 and my cheek to them that plucked off the hair. 1 
 hid not my face fro7n shame and spitting. For the 
 Lord God will help 77ze, therefoj^e I shall not be con- 
 fou7tded : therefore have / set my face like a flint, and 
 L know that I shall not be ashamed. He is near that 
 justifieth me!' — Isaiah 1. 5-8. 
 
 This was the key-note of Messiah's mission. 
 What man is there among you that heareth it, and is 
 prepared to tune his Hfe to this Divine pitch ? 
 Which of you feels this to be the heavenly life, the 
 truly beautiful and glorious life ? " / am criLcified 
 with Christ : nevertheless I live ; yet not /, but Christ 
 liveth in me : and the life which I now live in the 
 flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved 
 me, and gave Himself for me." Which of you en 
 compassed by perils, and with death in sight, would 
 cry, ''None of these things move me, 7ieither coimt I 
 m-y life dear U7tto 7nyself, so that 1 77iight flnish 7ny 
 cou7^se with Joy, a7id the ministry which I have re- 
 ceived of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the 
 grace of God y " Who is a7no7ig you that fca7'eth the 
 Lord, that obeyeth the voice of His servant, that 
 walketh i7i darkness a7id Iiath 710 li^ht ? Let him 
 trust in the name of the Lo7^d, a7id stay upo7i his 
 God." 
 
 II. The condition of experience described in the 
 text. 
 
 " Who walketh i7i dark7iess, a7id hath 710 lights 
 
 The first question which occurs is, What has such 
 an one to do with darkness ? With God's smile 
 
The Sacred Darkness. 217 
 
 shining as sunlight above, whence and how this 
 gloom ? The path of such a man as we have pictured 
 must, one would say, be bathed in sunshine. Can 
 there be darkness when God, the living God, is in 
 presence v.-ith a human soul ? This is but part of a 
 greater question. How could the well-beloved Son, 
 He in whom the Father was ever well pleased, grow 
 up before Him ''as a root out of a dry groitnd, 
 witJwtit form or comelinessl' and with no beauty that 
 man, beholding Him, should desire Him ? His 
 splendour, fresh from heaven, should surely dazzle 
 every eye, and his beauty enchain every heart ! 
 
 And how could He who even unto death, a death 
 of lingering torture and shame, did the Father's will 
 and finished the Father's work, pass through a horror 
 of great darkness in the very crisis of His obedience, 
 when He bowed His head and said, " It is finished," 
 with lips stiffening in death ? " My God, My God, 
 zvJiy hast ThotL forsaken Me?'' was an exceeding 
 bitter cry from the lips of One, who had come to that 
 hour of agony that He might do the will of the 
 Father and glorify His name ; whom not even that 
 horror of darkness could tempt to cast the cup, the 
 dregs of which were yet undrained, from His hand. 
 There was darkness over the whole land — that we 
 can well understand ; but whence this infinitely 
 denser gloom which overshadowed Incarnate God ? 
 
 I am not about to attempt to answer this ques- 
 tion directly. My concern here is rather with those 
 who are like-minded with Christ, and who pass 
 ( through the same darkness. The consideration of 
 
2 1 8 The Higher L ife. 
 
 their case may cast some light for us on His. But 
 at any rate I am anxious that you should see that 
 the darkness of such is no isolated experience ; it is 
 part of the fellowship of the sufferings of the Lord. 
 
 Let there be no confusion between this darkness, 
 and the gloom in which a man buries himself by 
 conscious and wilful sin I do not mean to say, that 
 it is not as dense, or as hard to bear. It may seem 
 denser and harder to bear. But the two things 
 belong to quite separate worlds ; as distinct as are 
 the sorrow with which one mourns a friend, and 
 that with which one bewails a sin. And this is where 
 Job's friends went so dismally, so shamefully astray. 
 They saw him walking in darkness and having no 
 light, and they concluded that the shadow of some 
 ereat secret transsfression had fallen over his soul. 
 They were wrong, utterly wrong. The shadow of 
 a great folly, so gross as to be a sin, was rapidly 
 falling over theirs. The darkness of which Isaiah 
 writes is at any rate not the misery which springs 
 out of the consciousness of flagrant transgression. 
 It is not the outward and visible sign of sin hidden 
 and cherished in the heart. These are God's 
 children, obeying the voice of His Christ, who pass 
 through it. We must search elsewhere for its 
 springs. 
 
 I. The plainest and most palpable source of it, is 
 
 the seeminof frustration of our holiest and most 
 
 unselfish purposes, a dreary want of success in what 
 
 seems to us our best and most Christ-like work. 
 
 We can hardly shake ourselves free from this 
 
The Sacred Darkness. 2 1 9 
 
 judgment of success. The right thing must succeed, 
 we say. We reiterate it to ourselves with emphasis 
 and earnestness, and we demand of God that it shall 
 succeed. And we are right. The right thing must 
 succeed, and we have a right to demand of God that 
 it shall succeed. And if we can wait and see " the 
 end of the Lord," we shall see the success. But 
 here our faith fails. Verily we " have need of 
 patience." Of how much sad miscarriage in life is 
 impatience the root ! But our cry is, " Now, Lord, 
 all is ready ; the work is faithfully done ; now crown 
 it with success." And God seems inexorable to our 
 prayers. He wants two things to succeed, the work 
 in the world, and the work of patience in us. And 
 He will not measure His day by ours. Then the 
 shadow begins to fall. In proportion to the strength 
 of the strain, and the vividness of the hope, is the 
 coldness, the darkness, the drearihood of the night 
 in which it all seems to be lost. 
 
 Isaiah had staked all on that Reformation. He 
 had wrought at it with passionate ardour. He saw 
 it grow to beauty and grandeur under his hand. 
 Then it perished, and not even a wreck was saved. 
 "Is it all a mockery "^ " the faithful are tempted to 
 cry. " Are these godly principles, these heavenly 
 hopes, but a dream that lures us to our ruin ? Is it 
 the Lord or a mocking fiend who rules the disorder 
 of this lower world } Or am I all wrong ? Am I, 
 pretending to be a servant of the Lord, and to obt y 
 the voice of His Christ, but a self-seeking, self- 
 centred hypocrite ? Have I dared to put my hand 
 
220 The Higher Life. 
 
 to an ark too pure for my unhallowed touch ? Has 
 the work failed because God will not have the help 
 of such as I am ? " Then a horror of great darkness 
 falls over the spirit. It despairs of itself, its own 
 salvation, the world, the Church ; dense darkness has 
 covered it all, and the gloom is broken by no gleam 
 of light. 
 
 2. We may be passing through very heavy 
 pressures of affliction ; and, missing the comfort, the 
 hope, which we think God should bring to us, we 
 cry that we are forsaken ; perhaps we are cheated 
 into believing that all which was brightest in our past 
 was a delusion or a lie. We are prone to lay down, 
 unconsciously, methods for God. We frame to our- 
 selves a notion of how He ought to help us, and 
 when. But " His ways are not as our ways, neither 
 are His thoughts as our thoughts ;" and He makes 
 uis feel it. It is a part of our education which is 
 most essential, and in the process of the discipline we 
 seem sometimes buried in gfloom. We see others 
 hopeful even under crushing calamities. We hear 
 songs in the night, but we cannot stir ourselves to 
 sing. " There must be something wrong," we say, 
 " or we should not be left to struggle thus, without a 
 vision of the Divine Deliverer ; we should not be 
 left to suffer thus, without the presence of the 
 Divine Comforter. No ! it is all a delusion ; the 
 Lord deals not thus with those whom He recognises 
 as His children. I have been cheating myself with 
 a hope which God refuses to justify. Let me shrink 
 back into the darkness, it is the element which most 
 
The Sacred Darkness. i'2\ 
 
 suits me. God neglects me, has forgotten me ; let 
 me wither In silence and die." 
 
 Much of the sense of darkness in times of ereat 
 strain and sorrow, is due to the morbid condition of 
 mind and body which is generated at such seasons. 
 The mind is overwhelmed ; the nerves are over- 
 strained. They ache for rest and find none. They 
 search for the Father's bosom on which to cast their 
 weariness, and He seems to be hidden. It is the eye 
 which is dim and misses the signs of His presence. 
 It is the ear that is dull and fails to catch the whis- 
 pers of His sympathy and love. And so we make 
 our faithless moan, " ' My way is hid from the Lord, 
 -my judgment is passed over from my God ; ' and this 
 is the very moment when I most need Him, when 
 the vision of His face and the touch of His hand 
 alone can save me from despair ! " 
 
 3. But the main source of the darkness which some- 
 times buries the most pious and faithful under its 
 pall, is the shadow of their own sinful nature, which 
 at moments it seems to them hopeless even for God 
 to attempt to redeem. Was it not the weight of the 
 world's sin, realised at that moment in its full horror, 
 which drew the cry " My God, My God, why hast 
 Thou forsaken Me?'' from Divine lips? Just in 
 the measure in which we realise the grandeur of 
 the vocation, and the glory of the destiny, to which 
 we are called in Christ, will be the conviction in 
 moments of depression that it is too grand, too 
 glorious, to be ours. " Ah, Lord God," is the moan 
 of our spirits, " I am undone. Sin is too deep- 
 
2 22 The Higher LiJ^e. 
 
 rooted, too tyrannous, even for Thy grace. How 
 poor, how beggarly, is my faith, my love, my hope. 
 ' I am a worm, and no man! Were there a spark of 
 the true Divine life in me, it would be shining now 
 with a visible lustre. Were I Thine, Thou wouldst 
 turn my darkness into day." 
 
 Those who have entertained a high and strong 
 assurance concerning their calling to salvation, are 
 often visited with seasons of darkness, peculiarly 
 dense and drear. It is as though the living soul had 
 become a cold corpse, no pulse of love, no glow of 
 hope, no flash of joy, no breath of prayer. All dark, 
 dark — the darkness and coldness of the dead. It 
 comes from mysterious, unfathomable springs, this 
 rayless darkness of an intense believer. But the 
 springs are fed by the great chaotic sea of evil that 
 surges up from black depths in the Creation ; and 
 which sometimes, in the world and in us, seems to 
 defy the power of even the re-creating breath of the 
 Spirit of the Lord. 
 
 III. The text tells us of the believer's trust and 
 stay. 
 
 " Zion saith, The Lord hath for sake7i me, and my 
 Lord hath foi'gotten me," The Lord saith, " Can a 
 woman forsake her sucking child, that she shoidd not 
 have compassion on the son of her womb ? Yea they 
 may forget, yet will not L forget thee" Hast thou 
 not known, hast thou not heard, the Name of the God 
 of Jacob ; what He is, what He has promised, what 
 He can do ? Cling to that Name ; though it be with 
 the wild, agonizing grasp of desperation, still cling. 
 
The Sacred Darkness. 223 
 
 However restless, however joyless, however hopeless 
 your spirit, rebuke " your infirmity," and consider the 
 Name of the Most High. Stay yourselves on Him. 
 That is, hold to your duty, the duty next to your 
 hand, in the strength of God. What you know to 
 be right, though you see no light upon it, cleave to. 
 Blind men even can feel their way. Dark as it may 
 be, there will always be waymarks in the path of 
 duty, which you may feel for, and keep the road. 
 Say to your murmuring soul, " I can do without 
 peace, I can do without joy, I can do without hope, 
 for a time ; but I cannot do without duty. I cannot 
 cast away sword and shield, and fly. I cannot 
 turn craven or sluggard. Fight I will, while my arm 
 can strike a blow ; and till my right hand forgets its 
 cunning, I will work. That I know to be my voca- 
 tion. The devil shall not tempt or frighten me from 
 it. And for the peace, the joy, the hope, the light, 
 that shall be as God wills, in time." 
 
 That is the true wisdom for one who is in dark- 
 ness, to keep firm in the broad highway and await 
 the inevitable dawn. Night is not the inevitable 
 thing ; " there shall be no night there." The dawn 
 is inevitable, for God lives, and God is light. What 
 if He is breaking your idols, your cherished plans, 
 your much loved work, which may be filling the 
 place which He only can occupy to the full in your 
 heart ? What if He is forging your character by 
 strong hammer strokes of discipline ; welding your 
 patience, bracing your courage, nerving your hope, 
 kindling your love ? Trust in the Name of the Lord 
 
2 24 The Higher Life. 
 
 through it all, stay yourselves on your God, and 
 wait. 
 
 You know how they pass the finest clay through 
 the hottest fires ; the clay which is able to take the 
 softest impression, and to receive the most delicate 
 hues. Again and again they heat it ; in each furnace 
 it loses some grossness, and becomes at length pure 
 and fine and rare. Do souls of men want no anneal- 
 ing ; can they spare the purging fire ? I think that 
 sometimes, when the grossness has all but vanished, 
 and the purity is all but perfect, God passes them 
 once more through a hotter furnace, that they may 
 gain the last touch of Divine completeness, and may 
 bear the finished lines and hues of those who, like 
 their Master, being perfected by sufferings, have won 
 the place beside Him on His throne. This may be 
 the last great darkness that shall oppress you, the 
 season of the final discipline. I think that I have 
 known such cases. The eminent in holiness and 
 fidelity to duty, passing through a season of profound 
 depression, when the clouds were on the eve of 
 rolling away for ever. When the Master cried out 
 of His hour of darkness, ''My God, My God, why 
 hast thoiL fo7^saken Me? " the prelude of His corona- 
 tion anthem was already hymned on high ! 
 
 And further, let him that walketh in darkness 
 and hath no light, trust in the name of the Lord, and 
 stay himself on his God, because " light is sozvn for 
 the righteous, and gladness for the 2ipright in heai^tr 
 It is sozvn. That means that darkness — night, storm, 
 and winter, are between the seed sowing and the 
 
The Saci'ed Darkiiess. 225 
 
 harvest. Nevertheless the harvest comes. Be not 
 weary in well doing- ; never mind what it may cost, 
 never mind how dull and dreary it may seem. It is 
 right, it is God's will, cleave to it. These are seeds 
 of light that you are sowing ; if God lives to fulfil His 
 purpose, they must fruit one day in glory They 
 must. All earth, all heaven, all hell cannot stay it, 
 or rob the faithful sower of his harvest. Darkness 
 must be transitory, day must be eternal. Darkness 
 is of earth and time, clay is of heaven and eternity. 
 God is light, and light must chase the gloom in 
 which a loyal soul may be for the moment buried ; 
 unless the devil is the eternal lord and master of 
 the universe, and the fiends are to sine over the 
 wreck of the Creation a " Chaos restored." 
 
 Times and seasons are and must be in God's 
 hand. When the night shall end, when the light 
 shall shine, rests absolutely and inscrutably with Him. 
 But it does rest. That the night shall end, that the 
 day shall shine, is as absolutely sure as that He is 
 Lord and Ruler of the world. We have no rieht to 
 question His providence if the night be long, and the 
 gleam of dawn in the sky be dim and far. We can 
 leave our times in the hand of Hini, who hath given 
 to us His well-beloved Son, as the pledge of His 
 faithfulness, as the proof of His love. But if we are 
 to believe that the darkness in which a believing- soul 
 may be plunged, can prolong itself through eternity, 
 we should have the right to say that God is a fiction, 
 and the Bible is a lie. Brethren, it cannot be. It 
 is a long, long night, the night of earth's history, 
 
 Q 
 
226 
 
 The Highe}'- Life. 
 
 but at evening time there shall be light, for beyond 
 the night there is God, and God is light. Long as 
 your struggle may be, dark as your night, keen as 
 your pain, the dawn of the everlasting day will break 
 around your head with unclouded splendour ; and 
 that darkness, which now threatens to engulf your 
 being, will but illustrate and intensify the radiance of 
 eternity. 
 
227 
 
 Xif. 
 
 THE SACRED JOY. 
 
 *' As the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also 
 abotmdeth by Christ." — II. Cor. i. 5. 
 
 These words fathom a depth of human experience 
 which can only be touched by those, who seek in 
 the hfe of Christ the key to the mystery of pain. 
 There is a suffering which is common to man, which 
 is the heritage of the race of Adam ; and for man 
 there is, in respect of such suffering, consolation in 
 God. There is a sufferinof which belono-s to life 
 under its highest conditions in this world, which is 
 known in its fullest measure to the purest and loftiest 
 natures — God's priests and kings. The kings who 
 live delicately, who wear soft raiment, and are the 
 regulating wheels in the machine of State, wear 
 golden diadems. The kings whose toil of brain fore- 
 casts, and whose toil of spirit clears the way for 
 human progress, whose work lies far in advance 
 of the great host which struggles on in their tracks, 
 and who in the course of generations get recog- 
 nised as the master-spirits, wear mostly the crown of 
 thorns. 
 
 There are men who work purely from an inward 
 necessity. They must speak the word and do the 
 
 Q2 ■ 
 
2 28 The Higher Life. 
 
 work to which some inward pressure moves them. 
 Fame, wealth, power, all the ends for which the 
 mass of the workmen are striving, kindle them not. 
 Whether men will hear, or whether men will forbear, 
 whether men will applaud their work, or whether 
 men will ban it, whether a throne or a prison awaits 
 them, they must say and do what they have been 
 set to say and do ; their springs are within and on 
 high. The outward world for them adds nothing to 
 the impulse, while it steals nothing from the sanc- 
 tions, of duty. They seem to sit on high, above the 
 din and the dust of to-day's battle — " in heavenly 
 places," the apostle calls it — so calmly, so steadily, 
 so far above the reach of earth's perturbations, do 
 they accomplish their work. That work may lie 
 in the midst of the throngf of the world's activities ; 
 they may be princes, statesmen, captains, inven- 
 tors, philanthropists ; but their springs of thought 
 and action flow down from distant celestial fountains, 
 and are strong and constant as the river of God. 
 The world rarely comprehends them till they have 
 passed up from it — the greatest of them hardly till 
 they have been dead for generations ; till it has 
 struggled on to the standing ground which they won 
 for it, and left to it as their legacy. Then in the 
 mists which settle over the past, the forms of the 
 great leaders loom grand and colossal, and they, 
 being dead, receive almost worship as demigods, 
 who, living, knew but rare moments of happy and 
 honoured rest. The lives of such men are full of a 
 sufferinof which the mere man of this world never 
 
The Sacred Joy. 229 
 
 tastes ; full, too, of a Divine glory and joy which are 
 equally beyond his range. 
 
 The life of our own great Alfred, for instance, was 
 a life of ceaseless effort and intense endurance. He 
 was a martyr life-long to an agonising disease, and 
 yet he measured out his day and his night through 
 the years of a stormy reign with minute exactitude, 
 so as to be able to devote the whole of it, with the 
 severest completeness, to the service of man in the 
 fear of God, Could one see his likeness, one would 
 expect to find it seamed all over with the lines, not 
 of thought only, but of constant, intense, and often 
 agonizing effort ; as they may be seen on the brow 
 of Dante, another of the great suffering friends of 
 mankind. It is not easy in these days to enter 
 believingly into the experience of such men, wdio 
 belong mostly to the formative ages of history ; 
 though he w4io ivill live godly in Christ Jesus, 
 in any age, may know something of the fellowship 
 both of their sufferings and of their joys, and be able 
 to understand the strength of the self-renouncin 
 purpose which made them find their life in the\ 
 work for men. 
 
 And it was work which brought mostly no pay, 
 no honour, but rather shame, anguish of soul, and 
 peril of death. Could they have been content to be 
 selfish, and to live like the world around them, power 
 and w^ealth would have been easily within their reach. 
 But because they must needs work for the world, 
 and live for the world, they must needs also suffer 
 for the world. In proportion to the'keenness of their 
 
230 The Higher Life. 
 
 sympathies, the strength of their love, — and these are 
 always the keenest and strongest in such natures, — 
 was the pain and the sorrow which every day they 
 were called upon to endure. You, who live much 
 out of yourselves can understand something of their 
 experience. You whom a large paternal heart binds 
 tenderly to your children, whom a friendly heart 
 binds tightly to your friends ; you, who are called 
 daily to self-denying offices of duty and sympathy, 
 and who sorrow more over the pains and woes 
 of others than over your own ; you know well how 
 the most cherished things on earth are springs 
 of sorrow as well as of blessing, how each fresh love 
 is a fresh duty, and each fresh duty a fresh pain. 
 
 It is no question at all of external losses and be- 
 reavements. It is no question of Internal anguish 
 through consciousness of guilty sin. It Is a pain 
 which belongs to the spirit when the spirit is at its 
 ^ highest ; a pain the reason of which we must ask, not 
 of man, but of God. This world can neither explain 
 such lives, nor justify such endurance. Festus, the 
 able man of the world, must always esteem such a 
 man as the Apostle a madman. The foremost man 
 of all the world in his day, a man of whose empire 
 over the minds of men Caesar's empire was but a 
 shadow, lived, while Caesar played with the world's 
 sceptre, as he thus describes : ''For I think that 
 God hath set forth tts the apostles last, as it were ap- 
 pointed to death : for we are made a spectacle unto the 
 world, and to angels, and to men. We are fools for 
 Christ's sake, but ye are wise in Christ ; we ai^e weak, 
 
The Sacred yoy. 231 
 
 but ye are strong ; ye a7'e Jioiwiwable, but we are 
 despised. Even unto this preserit Jiour we both hunger, 
 and thirst, and ai^e naked, and are buffeted, and have 
 no certain dwelling -p lace ; and labour, working with 
 our own hands ; being reviled, we bless; being perse- 
 ctcted, we suffer it ; being defamed, we intreat : we are 
 made as the Jilt h of the world, and are tJie offscoiudng 
 of all tJiiiigs unto this day." — I. Cor. iv. 9-13. 
 
 Who can explain it ? Who can justify it ? 
 Who can show that it is the way of the blessed life 
 and of the eternal glory ? He only who, ''being in 
 the for^n of God, tlwught it not robbery to be eqital 
 with God ; but made Himself of no reputation, and 
 took upon Him the form, of a servant, and was made in 
 the likeness of men . and being found in fashion as a 
 man. He humbled Himself, and became obeduuit unto 
 death, even the death of the cross. Wherefoi-e God 
 also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a- name 
 which is above every name : that at the name of fesus 
 every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things 
 in earth, and things under the earth ; and that every 
 tong2te should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to 
 the glory of God the Father!' — Phil. ii. 6-11. 
 ''Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery 
 trial zohich is to try you, as tho2igh some strange thing 
 happened imto you : but rejoice, inasnmch as ye ai^e 
 partakers of Christ's sufferings ; that, when His glory 
 shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding 
 joy. If ye be reproached for the 7iame of Christ, happy 
 are ye ; for the spiidt of glory and of God resteth tcpon 
 you : on their part He is evil spoken of, but on your 
 
232 The Higher L ife. 
 
 part He is glorified. But let none of you suffer as a 
 murderer, or as a thief, or as an evil-doer, or as a 
 busybody in other men s ^natters. Yet if any man 
 suffer as a Christian, let him 7iot be ashamed, but let 
 him gloj^ify God on this behalf r — I. Peter iv. 12-16. 
 
 I think that these considerations will fairly intro- 
 duce us to that inner experience ofsuffering to which 
 Paul here directs our thoughts, and which contains 
 within itself the spring of perfect and eternal joy. 
 " Blessed be God, eve7i the Father of otir Lord Jesus 
 Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all com- 
 fort ; who comforteth lis in all our tribulation, that 
 we may be able to comfort them which are in any 
 trouble, by the comfort wherewith zve ourselves are 
 comforted of God. For as the stfferings of Christ 
 abound in us, so our consolation also abozindeth by 
 Christy — II. Cor. i. 3-5. 
 
 And let us first understand that the suffering of 
 which the Apostle speaks is not accidental, it is a 
 suffering^ which is according^ to the will of God. 
 These men of whom I have spoken have been among 
 the world's divinest men : the men in whom the in- 
 stinct of humanity has recognised most of a divine 
 spirit ; while Paul, in whom the outline of this life 
 was most completely filled up, stands plainly manifest 
 to every eye in the forefront of history. And God, 
 strange as it may seem, seeks to multiply such men, 
 not to diminish their number ; to fill up, not to dis- 
 band the noble army of sufferers for mankind. We 
 are distinctly called to the fellowship of Christ's 
 sufferings. " Knozv ye not, that so many of us as were 
 
The Sacred yoy. 233 
 
 baptised into Jesus Christ were baptised into His 
 death ? Therefore we are buried with Him by bap- 
 tism into death ; that like as Christ was i^aised up 
 from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we 
 also shotdd walk in newness of life. For if we have 
 been planted together in the likejiess of His deaths we 
 shad be also in the likeness of His resurrection : 
 knowing this that 02ir old man is crucified zvith Him, 
 that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth 
 we shozild not serve sifi." — Rom. vi. 3-6, 
 
 The mission of Christ was to call all men into 
 this inner sanctuary of spiritual life, the sanctuary of 
 sorrow ; and to fill the world with men and women 
 who have mastered the divine art — the art of suffer- 
 ing for the good of others, and for the glory of God, 
 which is the good of all. It is the diviner form of 
 human life which we are now studying : the form to 
 which it becomes us all to pray that in Christ we may 
 be conformed. 
 
 Let us consider the nature of the suffering which 
 is to be regarded as a sharing of the suffering of the 
 Lord. 
 
 I have said that it is distincdy to the fellowship 
 of Christ's sufferings that we are called by the 
 Gospel. He suffered for us, that we might suffer 
 with Him, a suffering which should be not unto death 
 but unto life. The popular evangelical theology 
 expresses it thus : He suffered to spare us suffering, 
 He bore the penalty for us, He endured for us the 
 sharpness of death, that we might evade the penalty 
 and escape the pain. That He suffered for us in a 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 way of which no Independent suffering of our own, in 
 the strength of our own will, could have supplied the 
 place ; that He won for us by suffering for us a 
 standing as justified souls before God, and a place in 
 the school of spiritual culture which no art or effort 
 of our own could have won, is most surely and deeply 
 true. That the full effect of His suffering on our 
 behalf, in our stead, can only be realised by those 
 who can suffer with Him, is another and deeper 
 truth which will be clear to the most earnest students 
 of the Word of God, We are to suffer under the sense 
 of sin in a spirit kindred with His own hatred of it, 
 and sorrow over it. We are to " die unto sin." We 
 are to be crucified with Him as to the old man of 
 sin, that we may live unto Him, and to God through 
 Him, in the newness of His risen life. Our entering 
 into the spirit of His death is the condition of our 
 entering into the spirit of His life. Our entering 
 into His suffering is the condition of our entering 
 into His glory. We must watch, weeping, by the 
 cross, if we would sit reigning on the throne. The 
 fellowship of His sufferings is to be among the chief 
 experiences of our Christian calling ; to be understood 
 in its fulness at last when the struggle is over, when 
 we cast our crowns before His feet, and enter into 
 His joy for ever. 
 
 I. Among the chief elements of this sorrow, surely 
 we must reckon the spectacle of the misery of man- 
 kind. Even on His throne it was a constant burden 
 on His heart. On earth He wept as He beheld it. 
 He, the Almighty One, on whom the Everlasting 
 
The Sacred yoy. 235 
 
 Father had laid the help of the world because He 
 was " mighty to save" wept bitter tears as He moved 
 among the signs of the worlds misery and woe. 
 And the Christian, like Christ, is bound to consider it, 
 to feel the pressure of the burden of It, and to make 
 it a charge on his soul to lighten it, and to open 
 springs of consolation in this desert of death. Ah ! 
 my friends, what sad, sad sights do the walls conceal 
 from us as we walk along our streets ! Take one 
 that I know, and that could be multiplied by millions. 
 There Is a brute in a human form, drunk as no brute 
 ever was, who has just reeled home from the gin 
 palace. The door of his house shuts upon him, and 
 there he is lord. His poor, tolling, patient, God- 
 fearing wife is beaten, kicked, and almost killed. 
 His children run shrieking into corners to bury 
 themselves from the sight of a father, and from the 
 touch of his murderous hand. The wages which 
 should have bought them their Sunday's dinner have 
 been squandered to work them all this misery ; and 
 you may hear the poor mother, if you listen, crying 
 out to God for pity on her little ones, for help 
 against the beast or fiend whom the laws have made 
 the absolute tyrant in her home. 
 
 It is but one of the manifold forms of human 
 misery which abound, but I think it one of the very 
 saddest. And think you that Christ does not see 
 this and pity It profoundly ? It filled His heart with 
 a pain which brought Him to the world to help It ; 
 and His soul still travails. His spirit still strives and 
 Is grieved, when broken human hearts cry out ol 
 
236 llie Higher Life. 
 
 such deep misery to Him. There are wider aspects 
 of the sorrow, the anguish, of Christian society, in 
 which pauperism, vice, woe, seem to have planted 
 themselves so deeply that no husbandry of ours can 
 uproot them ; but these I must pass by. The anguish 
 is there, multiform, many voiced, and the burden of 
 it presses on the Saviour's heart. He expects us to 
 share it, that we may help Him to heal it. There 
 will be but cold welcome in Heaven for the man 
 whose heart has not often groaned over the miseries 
 of the human world. The love of Christ is a foun- 
 tain of deep and tender sympathy for humanity. 
 These are also our brethren. 
 
 2. The deadly nature of evil. 
 
 We cannot cheat ourselves into the belief that 
 it does not much matter ; that sin is a taint in the 
 blood which will work itself out in time. We cannot 
 repeat the soothing formulary, God is good, and as 
 He is omnipotent He will make it all right for all at 
 last. We have looked at sin in the licrht of the 
 sacrifice of Calvary. By that cross we have learnt 
 how terrible it seems to the eye of God ; how deadly 
 it must be in the heart of man. Those who have 
 followed the Lamb by that bloody road to Golgotha, 
 hear His dread words ringing in their ears, as they 
 realise the guilt of mankind, " If these things be 
 done in the green tree, what shall be done in the diyf 
 A profounder interest is awakened in all that con- 
 cerns the higher welfare of mankind, when we 
 measure all that it has cost. Those dearest to us 
 press on our hearts with a yet heavier burden ; we 
 
The Sacred yoy. 237 
 
 know what dread questions are awaiting their 
 decision, that there is a word spoken which will be 
 a savour of life unto life or of death unto death to 
 their souls. 
 
 The truth which Christ has revealed to us, shews 
 life and man in an aspect unspeakably solemn. 
 *' Knozving therefore the terror of the Lord'' — having" 
 the fear of God, and of all that God has made known, 
 before us — '' zue persuade men!' We take the burden 
 on our spirits, for we know what sin is, and whither 
 it is driving souls ; and woe is unto us if we fail to 
 make the witness clear. God sends us, as He sent 
 His Son, to bear witness to the world, to convince it 
 of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment ; and if the 
 witness of the Spirit in us be not full and clear, if we 
 are found false witnesses of God, the blood of souls 
 will He require at the faithless watchman's hand. 
 
 3. The resistance of the will of the flesh to the 
 best efforts and influences ; its determination to 
 reject the things that will heal and save. It was 
 this that made the Master the Man of Sorrows. 
 This was the bitterness of His grief over doomed 
 Jerusalem. " O f eriisaleiji, f er^isalem, thou that 
 killest the prophets, ajid stonest them zvhich are sent 
 unto thee, hozv often zvoidd I have gathered thy 
 children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens 
 under her zvings, and ye zvould not!' ..." If thou 
 hadst knozvn, even thou, at least in this thy day, the 
 things zvhich belong unto thy peace I But now they 
 are hid from thine eyes!' 
 
 To see a man perish within reach of rescue, to 
 
238 The Higher Life. 
 
 see a shipwrecked sailor clashed in pieces on the 
 rocks, where, had there been but a brave heart and a 
 strong arm, he might have been saved, is one of the 
 most piteous of spectacles. Imagine the spectacle 
 which the world is presenting to the eye of Christ 
 each moment — this moment, while the thought passes 
 through your brain. " Ye will nol come iinto Me that 
 ye might have life'' \s His sad, pathetic complaint of 
 mankind. He knows that He can give life to the 
 seekers, to those who open their hearts to His claim, 
 and to the tractive force of His love. And yet for 
 want of a call, a cry, a movement of the heart 
 towards Him, He sees Death making havoc of His 
 world. He calls. He pleads, He promises, and He 
 knows that it is in the very tenderness of love ; and 
 He sees the men to whom He offers life and glory 
 scout and shun Him, as though He offered shame 
 and death. His love is cast back scornfully ; His 
 blood, shed in mercy, that blood which stays the 
 sword which is sweeping above the world, is trampled 
 carelessly under foot ; the devil gathers willing troops 
 to follow him to anguish and ruin, while Christ 
 finds but here one and there one who will follow the 
 Captain of Salvation to eternal glory. "■ Wei^e there 
 not ten cleansed, and where are the nine f " is the 
 question which is always wrung from the sad lips of 
 Charity. 
 
 Oh ! shame beyond the bitterest thought 
 
 That evil spirit ever framed : 
 That men should know what Jesus wrought. 
 
 Yet feel their haughty hearts untamed. 
 
The Sacred yoy. 239 
 
 And the disciple of Christ, the minister, as each 
 one of us is bound to be, of His grace and truth, 
 has the burden pressing ever upon him, as he 
 fulfils his ministry in a scornful and gainsaying 
 world. 
 
 We preachers know that we are setting before 
 our fellow men " life and blessing ;" that if they will 
 hear the word, while they go forth to battle and disci- 
 pline, stern both of them and searching, they go forth 
 to a joy unspeakable, a life diviner than the life of the 
 seraphim, and a final glory of which the Lord gives 
 the measure in the words, " Father, I will that they 
 also zvhoni Thou hast given Me be with Me zuhere I 
 am; that they may behold My glory, which thoit hast 
 given Me : for thotc lovedst Me before the foundation 
 of the worldr And yet we know there are multi- 
 tudes who will not have it ; who hear the words, as 
 of old, but who do them not ; who talk idly when 
 the day is ended, of the service or the sermon, and 
 then, on the morrow, get up to toil and moil, or per- 
 haps to trifle through the week, with hardly a higher 
 aim than have the beasts that perish. And some will 
 do worse, will gamble, and drink, and cheat, and 
 wanton, and make their homes wretched and their 
 business a snare to souls, and do more harm and 
 wrong in one short week than a lifetime can repair. 
 
 And is not all this dull, dead weight of the world 
 and the flesh on the aspirations and purposes of 
 the human spirit, a heavy sorrow to every Christ- 
 like nature, as it is a burden to Christ up there on 
 His glorious throne ? " Turn ye, turn ye,'' we cry 
 
240 The Higher Life. 
 
 with the prophet, "/^?^ wJiy will ye die., O Jwuse of 
 Israelf" Oh that thou wouldst know, at least in this 
 thy day, the things that make for thy peace, before 
 they are hidden from thine eyes ! 
 
 4. There is the future eternal destiny. I dare 
 not dogmatise about this, so much is wisely hidden. 
 But the Lord spake of an '' ozcter darkness" ''a worm 
 that dieth not',' " a fire that is not qne?iched'' Some 
 terrible meaning there must be in it. Will one 
 whom I love, one in my home, one among my 
 company of friends and comrades, doom himself to 
 explore it ? It is a dread subject. Shall there be 
 everlasting wailing in the universe, a region of 
 anguish over which the horror of great darkness 
 shall brood eternally ? The soul shudders at the 
 contemplation. But agony there must be so long as 
 there is sin. And the thought of the shame and 
 the agony which sinners doom themselves to endure, 
 pressed as a constant burden on the heart of Christ 
 throughout His ministry. It was this that drove 
 Paul forth into barbarous lands, if he might but save 
 souls from death, and hide the multitude of sins, 
 and the misery which sin brings forth to darken and 
 to sadden, not earth only, but the celestial spheres. 
 
 The fellowship of the Redeemer's tears is no un- 
 known experience to the disciple. This also he 
 must know, if he would become partaker of the 
 sufferings of his Lord. " Bict blessed be God, even 
 the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of 
 mercies, and the God of all comfort ; who comforteth 
 us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to 
 
The Sacred yoy. 241 
 
 comfort them which are in any trouble, by the 
 comfort wherewith we otcr selves are comforted of 
 God. For as the szifferijigs of Christ abound in us, 
 so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ." There 
 lie hidden in the pain the springs of the joy. 
 
 Let us enquire how ''our consolation also abound- 
 eth by Christ!' 
 
 If we are called to share the suffering", we are 
 called also to share the consolation, we are called 
 into the fellowship of the Lord's joy and of His 
 hope. There was a "joy set before Him," for the 
 sake of which " He endured the cross, and despised 
 the shame." He knew the strength of truth. He 
 knew the tractive force of love. He knew that His 
 suffering for man gave Him a power over man 
 which all hearts must respond to. As the darkness 
 of the last agony deepened around Him, He saw 
 beyond it the vision which drew from Him the 
 words, '' And I, if I be lifted ttp from the earth, will 
 draw all men unto Me." He had a joy set before 
 Him ; the joy of a sure redemption of humanity ; the 
 joy of the eternal victories of His grace and of His 
 love. That joy, while we lift the burden, we are called 
 to share ; and so "as the sufferings of Christ abound 
 in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christy 
 
 And these are some of the elements of the joy. 
 
 I. The God of all power and might has taken 
 up the burden, and wills the redemption of the 
 world. 
 
 God has come forth in Christ to undertake in 
 person the recovery of our race. Every word, every 
 
 R 
 
242 The Higher Life. 
 
 effort of man, though it may appear to fall to the 
 ground unheeded and unfruitful, has His will to 
 prosper it. In working for man, in suffering for 
 man, we have this assurance at any rate to sustain 
 us — God is with us. Blessed be God for that assur- 
 ance! It is our sure refuge from a despondency 
 which, but for that, would easily deepen into despair. 
 We see constantly the will of man counterworking 
 the will of God. We see Mammon or Moloch on 
 the throne of the world, and Christ thrust out. But 
 it cannot be for ever ; nay, it is but seeming now. 
 There are things behind the veil of the visible, which 
 we do not see, and which are already winning for 
 Christ the empire over men. 
 
 Power, even almighty power, is powerless in 
 moral conflicts. But He who is the Father of all 
 spirits, must have a hold on them which we do 
 not discover, must have echoes in their hearts to 
 His name which we cannot catch — and He is with 
 us. His eye ranges over the ages and he fore- 
 sees a blessed consummation. The day is before 
 Him, to whom eternity is present, when " God shall 
 be all and in all." Christ is the God-man, '• God 
 manifest in the flesh." With all the vantage strength 
 of His Godhead, He is working at this problem of 
 man's salvation. And the necessities of things, the 
 moral laws, the spiritual currents, are working together 
 for His success. 
 
 The Saviour sustained His human heart when 
 the burden pressed too heavily, by the thought, " / 
 a7id My Father are one!' " But Jesus aiiswered 
 
The Sacred yoy. 243 
 
 them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. 
 Therefore the Jews sottght the more to kill Him, be- 
 cause He not only had bi^oken the Sabbath, but said 
 also that God was His Father, making Himself equal 
 with God. Then answered fesus and said 7into 
 them. Verily, veiHly, I say tmto you, the Son can do 
 7iothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do : 
 for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the 
 Son likczvisc. For the Father loveth the Son, and 
 sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth : and He 
 will shoiv Him greater works than these, that ye may 
 marvel. For as the Father raiscth up the dead, and 
 quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom 
 He will. For the Father J2tdgeth no man, but hath 
 committed all judgment tcnto the Son ; that all men 
 should honour the Son, even as they honour the 
 Father^ — John v. 17-23. 
 
 And we, when we feel unspeakably saddened by 
 this burden of human misery and wrong, rest on the 
 thought, " God is in Christ reconciling the world 
 unto Himself." And it is as a rock beneath our feet. 
 We dare to rejoice with a solemn joy, even in front of 
 the world's wrongs and delusions, because God is in 
 the midst of it. Where, how, we know not always. 
 The visible church sometimes gives us but dim indi- 
 cations of where and how He is working. But we 
 know in Christ that He is in our midst; that this is 
 His elected work ; that He has staked the glory of 
 His Kingdom and the blessedness of His home on 
 the issue of the grand experiment of freedom ; and 
 
-44 The Higher Life. 
 
 therefore, " as the stifferijtgs of Christ aboimd in us, 
 even so also oitr consolation aboundeth by Christy 
 
 2. There is a joy in the fulfilment of a self-deny- 
 ing, self-sacrificing ministry which is more like 
 heavenly rapture than any other experience which, in 
 this world, is within our reach. We have already, as 
 the counterpoise of the sorrow, what can only truly 
 be described as the joy of God. In deep sadness 
 must much of the work be done. The world's purest 
 and noblest spirits, in all ages, have been half-mad- 
 dened by the sin and misery around them. Our two 
 foremost men of genius at this moment are prophesy- 
 ing against us more or less fiercely or wildly, and are 
 thrown utterly out of tune with their times by the 
 sight of woes and wrongs and lies which are a deep 
 disgrace to Christian civilisation, and which they say 
 that Christian civilisation is making no adequate, 
 resolute effort to cure. Alas ! 
 
 The Son of God, in doing good, 
 
 Was fain to look to Heaven and sigh ; 
 
 Nor can the heirs of sinful blood 
 Seek joy unmixed in charity. 
 
 But heavy as are its burdens, rich and great already 
 are its rewards. 
 
 Man was made for this ministry. He was made 
 in the image of God that he might be able to fulfil it. 
 It is the healthy exercise and discipline of the soul. 
 It makes the vital blood course merrily along its 
 channels. Unselfish work, inspired by the love of 
 Christ, is the soul's gymnastic culture. It lifts us too 
 up into breezy mountain altitudes : we breathe a 
 
The Sacred Joy. 245 
 
 lighter atmosphere, we bask in a brighter sun. And 
 the fruit is blessed. To sow the seed of the Kingdom 
 in good and honest hearts ; to hear brave, strong 
 workmen in the Kingdom of God say, " I am. what 
 I am on earth through you," is the purest joy of a 
 lifetime. Evil is fearfully contagious, but good is, 
 blessedly, more contagious still. One good life ob- 
 literates the traces of many evil ones, and '"' charity 
 covercth the intiltitude of sins." 
 
 To believe this, and to watch the work growing 
 under his hand, is the joy of the Christian work- 
 man, of which neither man nor devil can rob him. 
 No man who has heard it, would change the bless- 
 ing of the poor and of him that is ready to perish, 
 for the wealth of Croesus ; no man who has known 
 it, would part with the joy of being an instrument 
 of healing and culture to toiling, suffering, strug- 
 gling human spirits, to be crowned and throned 
 among this world's kings. The Lord had the 
 empire, ''all the kingdoins of the luoidd and all 
 the glory of them^ laid at His feet. But for the joy 
 that was set before Him He calmly put it aside. 
 " Get thee hence, Satan, it is written thou shall worship 
 the Lord thy God, aiid Him only shall thoic serve.'" 
 That joy it is given to us to share with Him ; it is the 
 purest and deepest human joy, and so, ''as the suffer- 
 ings of Christ abound in tis, so our consolation also 
 aboundeth by Christ^ 
 
 And we know, about the whole of our ministry, 
 and the suffering which in sympathy with Christ 
 we willingly endure, that "he which goeth forth 
 
246 The Higher Life. 
 
 and weepeih, bearing precious seed, shall dozibtless 
 come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with 
 himy We know that God is with us, and so may fore- 
 cast the future. But Christ has forecast it for us, 
 and our hope is built upon His word. He bears with 
 evil painfully, and imposes on us the pain of bearing 
 with it, because before His work is ended He will 
 transmute it to good. Where now is wailing, shall 
 be shouts of rejoicing ; where now is wrong, in the 
 end righteousness shall spring. Where now the 
 footstep of the destroyer is planted, black and barren, 
 on the wilderness which once was Eden, mercy and 
 peace shall bloom in the footsteps of the Redeemer. 
 The tree of knowledge, which has borne such bitter 
 fruits of misery, shall be a tree of life by the everlast- 
 ing river, and the leaves of the tree shall be for the 
 healing of the nations. ''For as the rain coineth 
 down, ajid the snow, foin heaven, and returneth not 
 thither, but zvatereth the earth, and maketh it bring 
 forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and 
 bread to the eater; so shall My word be that goeth 
 forth out of My motdh : it shall not return unto Me 
 void ; but it shall accomplish that which I please, a7td 
 it shall prosper in the thi?ig zvhereto I sent it. For 
 ye shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace : 
 the motm tains and the hills shall break forth before 
 you into singing, and all the trees of the feld shall 
 clap their hmids. Instead of the thorn shall come tip 
 the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the 
 myrtle tree : and it shall be to the Lord for a name, 
 for an everlasting sign that shall not be ctit off." 
 — Tsaiah Iv. lo-i^ 
 
The Sacred Joy. 247 
 
 Bear then, and forbear. Pity, cherish, love ; 
 yearn, as a mother yearns over her prodigal first-born, 
 over the world which is loving and seeking destruc- 
 tion : your sorrow is not unto death, but unto life. 
 Christ assures it. " He shall see of the travail of 
 His soul, and shall be satisfied!' It shall be yours 
 too to drink deeply of that cup of rapture. " Where 
 sin abounded o-yace shall overabozind. Where sin 
 hath 7'eigned unto death, there shall grace reign 
 throzigh righteousness tmto eternal life, through 
 fcstis Christ our Lord!' Christ is the surety of the 
 everlasting triumph, and therefore " as the sufferings 
 of Christ abound in us, so also our consolation 
 aboundeth by Christ!' 
 
248 The Higher Life. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE GARDEN BY THE CROSS. 
 
 •* Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden.^'' — 
 John xix. 41. 
 
 And it was spring, the splendid oriental spring. The 
 flowers breathed their sweetest fragrance around the 
 cross where their Lord was bowing beneath the 
 load of His great agony, and was passing, God-for- 
 saken, as man thought, and as for one dread moment 
 it seemed even to Himself, into the valley of the 
 shadow of death. There is something startling in 
 the association — the Cross, the Garden ; the one, the 
 very symbol of shame and suffering, the most awful 
 witness of the destructive power of the sin which has 
 laid waste the world ; the other, the brightest of the 
 relics of Eden which the compassion of the Father 
 has saved out of the wreck. The form, the hue, 
 and the breath of flowers, is the purest fragment of 
 the pristine beauty which survives to us. They 
 bloom as fair, as fresh, each spring, as when the dew 
 of the Maker's benediction lay like a mantling glory 
 upon Eden ; though perhaps it is just this dewy 
 splendour, the first bloom of the beauty of Creation, 
 which sin has brushed off from the world. We know 
 
The Gardcji by the Cross. 249 
 
 what fruit is -u'hen the bloom is off it. Colour, form, 
 fragrance, are all there ; but something is lost which 
 can ill be expressed — its glory, the last touch of per- 
 fection, the glow and the signature of life. It is like 
 the glow of health in a human countenance ; it adds 
 to it a special inexpressible charm. I think that it 
 must have been radiant in David when he sang to 
 his soul, "Hope tJioti in God, for I shall yet pi-aist 
 Him, who is the health of my countenance and my 
 God!' 
 
 And so the pristine glow has faded from the 
 Creation ; or is it that a film ha 5 passed before our 
 sight ? At any rate, Eden is lost to us ; and it is 
 only in moments of imaginative rapture that we can 
 restore the broken image of what has been in the 
 past; while through the Apocalypse we gain some 
 realising vision of all that God has in store for us, in 
 what will be something higher than a Paradise re- 
 gained. But flowers help us to comprehend it, better 
 perhaps than anything which is left to us in this 
 path of our pilgrimage. Nothing more brings home 
 to us the boundless beauty, power, and love which 
 are in Him, who made one fair world for us which we 
 have deflowered, and who is making by His redeem- 
 ing love another whose perfection shall be transcen- 
 dent and eternal. The blush of spring, the glow of 
 summer, the ruddy gold of autumn, are shed forth 
 by the Creator in pure joy of creation. And where 
 no eye but His, and perhaps the angels', sees them, 
 where no human heart is gladdened by them, there 
 He has scattered them in the wildest luxuriance.. 
 
250 The Higher Life. 
 
 Pure joy in beauty is manifestly a passion which 
 is cherished on higfh. 
 
 Have you ever laid your face close to the herb- 
 age of a breezy down in summer, and peered into 
 the world of wonderful beauty which the grasses, the 
 mosses, and the lichens unveil. Nothing so fills one 
 with the sense of the boundless benignity of the 
 Being from whom we receive, and in whom we enjoy 
 all the good of the present, while we trust to Him 
 the future, as the lavish beauty with which He has 
 clothed the Creation. And nothing in the mere crea- 
 ture region seems to me so fall of promise of what 
 that future will be, when, in the new heaven and the 
 new earth, the lost harmony between man and Nature 
 is restored. God keeps the flowers bright and fragrant 
 around us as a memory and as a prophecy ; a hint 
 of what we have lost as mere creatures by the reign 
 of sin, and an earnest of what the reign of Christ will 
 one day restore. The beauty of the life which man 
 lost by transgression, still survives in the flowers 
 which he crushes beneath his footsteps. It was the 
 Master, for whom the world had nothing but a cross, 
 who said, " Consider the lilies of the field, how they 
 grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I 
 say tmto yon- that even Solomon in all his glory was 
 710 1 arrayed like one of these!' 
 
 Now in the place where He was crucified there 
 was a garden. The place of a skull was embosomed 
 in beauty ; a smile as of heaven played over its ghastly 
 aspect. Flowers bloomed sweetly around the sad- 
 dest path which was ever trodden by human foot- 
 
The Garden by the Cross. 251 
 
 steps ; and they gleamed pale and fair in the moon- 
 light which shone on the sepulchre, where men had 
 laid their Lord. 
 
 We have here presented to us in the very closest 
 association, and yet in the sharpest contrast, the dark- 
 est act of the tragedy of life, and the fairest, gayest, 
 gladdest vision which the eye of man can look upon 
 in his world. We will consider the contrast in de- 
 tail and some of the suggestions of interest which it 
 affords. 
 
 I. The darkest act of the tragedy of life. "7;^ 
 ike place where He was crucified." I speak of the 
 tragedy of life. That crucifixion does not stand 
 alone. It is but the culmination of all that good has 
 suffered at the hands of evil, patience at the hands of 
 force, truth at the hands of the father of lies, from 
 the first days of the Creation until now. There is a 
 profound sense in which the Lord was the Man of 
 Sorrows. He stands on a lonely height of pre-emi- 
 nence, as the chief sufferer of the human race. 
 None could drink His cup to the dregs ; none could 
 fathom to the depth at which He knew it, the 
 mystery of pain. But He was also the head of a 
 great brotherhood of sorrow. Alone as the Man of 
 Sorrows in one sense, in another. He M^as " the first- 
 born among many brethren." A great cloud of un- 
 seen witnesses was around Him when He suffered, 
 who had all drunk the same cup of life's bitterness, 
 and trod the same dark path to heaven. 
 
 Read the catalogue of their names and heroic deeds 
 in the epistle to the Hebrews. These are all from the 
 
252 The Higher L ife. 
 
 history of the chosen people ; but each Gentile nation 
 has its elect of sorrow, whom it honours with its 
 reverence and cherishes with its love. The Lord's 
 martyrdom was but that of the chief martyr. There 
 had never been an age before, there has never been 
 an age since, in which the men whom God hath 
 sent into the world to serve and to save it, have not 
 been pierced with its shafts and crowned with its 
 thorns. Very terrible is the history of all the agony 
 which sin has inflicted on its victims ; the sighing 
 and the groaning of souls in anguish which rise ever 
 from this earth into the ear of God. But the chief 
 sufferers of the world after all are its saviours. If 
 their history were fairly written, it might wring tears 
 of sympathetic anguish from the angels in the homes 
 of the blessed. 
 
 It is a dark tragedy which is played out here, and 
 the end of it is inevitably a death. Sin has entered 
 into the world, and death by sin ; and death reigns 
 over all. Life in its highest forms is a daily dying ; 
 the noblest men are most conscious of it, and most 
 cheerfully accept the condition at the hand of God. 
 And death bounds at last and completes the history. 
 Such is man's life, such necessities are impressed on 
 all earthly things by the reign of sin. The inevitable 
 end of such a life as the Lord's, in such a world as 
 this, was the Crucifixion. Evil was but acting out 
 the ends at which it had aimed through all the ages 
 of man's history, in slaying the Prince of Life, and 
 burying Him in the darkness of the tomb. It was 
 no casual or isolated outburst of the malignity of 
 
The Garden by the Cross. 253 
 
 evil. Every witness for God through all the ages, 
 had been called to face in his measure the same 
 suffering, and to bend under the burden of the same 
 cross. 
 
 But there was something far deeper and more 
 solemn than the mere human suffering of the heir of 
 a sinful race, in this passion of the Lord. It was 
 the darkest act in the tragedy of life ; the darkest, 
 we may well believe, that the universe can ever 
 know. It was emphatically the hour of the Prince 
 of Darkness, but it was his last hour. His victory 
 broke his power, and broke it for ever. That tragic 
 element which will give the tone to the noblest lives 
 while this sinful world endures, through Christ be- 
 comes but the prelude of a great drama, which will end 
 at last in glorious joy. But for the moment the 
 darkness was utter ; love. Divine love, love that 
 smiled at pain, and wounds, and death, if it might 
 but win the redemption of the beloved, was seized in 
 the very home which it entered on its mission of 
 mercy, was wounded in the house of its friends, was 
 bound, scourged, and dragged by the very brethren 
 to whom it clung with such tenacious tenderness, to 
 a cross of anguish and of shame. 
 
 The nature of sin was never fully known in 
 the universe till that hour ; the hour in which it 
 seized and slew the Lord. Are there words in 
 human literature of such profound pathos, as those 
 in which the inspired prophet of Calvary paints 
 the scene ? The Man of Sorrows so stricken and 
 bowed, so marred by pain, by vigils, by hunger, 
 
254 1^^^^ Higher L ife. 
 
 by temptations, and by tears, that men shrank from 
 Him, as from one ''smitten of God and afflicted!' 
 But " He was wotmdcd for our trangressions, He 
 was h'tiised for our iniquities^ Alone, He wrestled 
 with the burden of His anguish in Gethsemane ; 
 alone. He stood before His judges and tormen- 
 tors, His dearest and most familiar friends flying 
 from His side; one of them, the most trusted, pro- 
 testing with oaths and curses, " I know not the 
 man." Alone He trod the path to Cg.lvary, and 
 fell prostrate beneath the burden of His cross ; 
 while the men for whom He bore it all, and would 
 bear the horror of the final darkness which was be- 
 ginning to draw its shadow around His spirit, raged 
 before the cross with fiendish exultation, and pierced 
 His dying ear with the stings of their malice and the 
 shafts of their scorn. It was Satan's triumphal 
 hour. It was the Saturnalia of hell and of death. 
 
 He was alone. " Yet not alone, for the Father 
 was with Him." '' Father, I have glo^dficd Thee on 
 the earth, I have finished the zvork whicJi Thou gavest 
 Me to do!' And not alone, blessed be God, in 
 another sense ; not wholly out of the pale of human 
 sympathy and love. Daughters of Jerusalem were 
 there, weeping and lamenting. The anguish of a 
 bursting heart was too palpable for a woman's 
 eye to miss it. The fairest flowers which sin has 
 spared in the human fields, are a woman's vivid 
 sympathy and fearless compassion. And these, 
 blessed be God, were not wholly absent. They 
 added a higher beauty and fragrance to the flowers, 
 
The Garden by the Cross. .'>55 
 
 which bloomed around the tear-stained footsteps of 
 the Lord. 
 
 But, as we have said, there was a yet more awful 
 significance in that scene, than any which could grow 
 out of the intensity of the human suffering which it 
 revealed. It was the hour of the Prince of Darkness 
 in a double sense. It was not only the hour in 
 which he could wreak his malignant will on the chief 
 of human sufferers ; it was the hour in which the 
 Father gave full expression to His mind about 
 transgression ; in which He declared the intensity 
 with which He hated it ; and revealed the ruin which 
 it must inevitably work on every being who sub- 
 mitted to it, and the death which was its necessary 
 doom. 
 
 God was declaring by that cross, for all time 
 and for all eternity, the deadly, damning nature of 
 transgression. He was giving to all beings the 
 measure of His abhorrence of it, by the anguish, the 
 darkness, the horror of spirit, through which the Son of 
 His eternal love must pass, if He would take on Him- 
 self Its burden, that He might bear it away, and destroy 
 it out of the living universe for ever. There is a 
 mystery here which we shall never fathom ; it is 
 unsearchable as life, as God — God's well-beloved 
 Son passing through God-forsaken darkness, taking 
 on Himself all the burden of human transgression, 
 and by one awful act of atonement bearing it away 
 forever. ''And He, bearing His cross, went forth 
 unto a place called the place of a skull, where they 
 crucified Him, and two other with Him, on either 
 
256 The Higher Life. 
 
 side one, and Jesus hi the midst. . . . Now from the 
 sixth hour there was daj^kness over all the lajtd until 
 the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus 
 cried with a loud voice, saying, My God, My God, 
 why hast ThoiL forsaken Me ? Jesus, when He had 
 cried again with a loud voice, said, It is finished, and 
 He bowed His head and gave up the ghost.'' — Matt, 
 xxvli. and John xix. 
 
 It was the darkest act of the tragedy of Hfe. 
 
 But in the place where He was crucified there 
 was a garden. 
 
 It is a starthng contrast, the last act of that awful 
 tragedy; the garden smiling and shining all round, 
 in all the beauty, splendour and gladness of the 
 spring. There is a beautiful suggestion here which 
 one loves to dwell upon. It is but a sentiment ; but 
 if we dispense with sentiment, how much of the 
 delicate charm of Nature and the rarest joy of life 
 would be lost. One loves to dwell upon the thought 
 that Golgotha was a garden, and that earth's fairest, 
 brightest, gentlest nurslings were there, mingling 
 their smile and their balm with the trampling of 
 furious footsteps and the cursings of malignant foes. 
 
 Very dear to Him through His lonely life-course, 
 were the flowers which bloomed around His feet 
 as He trod His daily path of pain, and the herbage 
 of the mountain slope where He wrestled night-long 
 for strength to endure. None of the beauty of the 
 world which He had called into being, was hidden 
 from His eye as He passed along its pathways. 
 The word of the lilies, the birds, the cornfields, the 
 
The Garden by the Cross. 257 
 
 blue sea waves, the morning flush, the evening glow, 
 entered freely into His ear, and soothed and sustained 
 His heart. In truth, it is mainly to Him that we owe 
 our vision of the glory of Nature. For the men of 
 old time there was a veil over it all. The Lord, by 
 His advent, lifted the veil from two worlds. 
 
 It is an old question, and one of deep and 
 curious interest, how far the modern intense de- 
 light in the beauty of Nature was shared by the 
 ancients, and how far it is the gift of the advent of 
 the Lord of Nature to His world. I believe that the 
 advent of Christ has placed the whole sphere of 
 Nature in a new and closer relation to man. Man, 
 knowing through Christ the God of Nature, knowing 
 the mind of Him who created and who rules it, has 
 an altogether new and higher interest in the observa- 
 tion of the world. 
 
 It is said that the ancients, and heathen peoples 
 generally, had but feeble perception of natural beauty. 
 But this must by no means be stated too absolutely. 
 It is true that Julius Csesar gives us no hint that his 
 eye had rested with delight on the beauty of those 
 Alpine summits, which men will now traverse half 
 the globe to look upon. But, here and there, some 
 exquisite passages occur in classical literature, which 
 reveal a delicate and cultured observation. And 
 yet it is hardly for its own sake that the beauty of 
 Nature is delighted in, even by the most imagina- 
 tive writers of the ancient schools. The Hindoos 
 probably come nearest to the moderns, in the large, 
 joyous apprehension of the glories of their Indian 
 
 s 
 
The Highei'' Life. 
 
 home, which their hterature discloses. But always 
 there is the strong tinge of melancholy, crossing and 
 dashing the delight, in the heathen heart. 
 
 The Christian observation of Nature is set in a 
 new and quite higher key. Through Christ, Christian 
 peoples have a delight in their world, which before 
 Christ was hardly known to. the elect spirits of our 
 race. Always of old the terror overshadowed the 
 joy. There was an awful, unfathomable mystery 
 there, which marred all pure enjoyment. Men 
 trembled, helpless, before the mass and the force of 
 the elements around them, in the sweep of whose 
 vast circuits they were too fearful to admire and to 
 love. 
 
 The Jews had much of the Christian enjoy- 
 ment of natural beauty, and for the same reason. 
 They knew the mind and heart of the King. Moses 
 touches the true key-note in the words : " The 
 Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land 
 of brooks of water, of foiuitains and depths, that 
 spring out of valleys and hills ; a land of zv heat, and 
 barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pomegranates ; a 
 land of oil olive and honey ; a land luherein thotc shalt 
 eat bread withotU scarceness, thou shalt not lack any- 
 thing in it, a land whose stones are iron and out of 
 zvhose hills thou may est dig brass. . . . A land which 
 the Lord thy God careth for : the eyes of the Lord 
 thy God are always upon it, from the begiiuiing of 
 the year even tmto the end of the year!' — Deut. viii. 
 7-9, xi. 12. 
 
 David's psalms complete the chord. 
 
The Garden by the Cross. 259 
 
 But the grand stimulus to observation and dis- 
 covery, to that spirit of which Mr. Ruskin's " Modern 
 Painters" is the most eloquent and brilliant expres- 
 sion, and which lately sent some of our ablest men 
 of science half round the world, to catch a sieht of the 
 sun low down on the horizon in eclipse, is the sense 
 that it is the Lord's handiwork which is around us, 
 full charged with the communications of His mind 
 as is His written word. At any rate, the infancy of 
 modern science was nursed by Christianity, and to 
 Christianity it will offer the tributes of its matured 
 experience at last. A Comtist may smile at this as 
 a weak superstition. He may regard the theological 
 stage of the development of science as synonymous 
 with the infantine, and treat it as one of the childish 
 things from which science has parted for ever. We 
 think that he forgets all of which the circle is the 
 symbol. If it commenced with religion it will com- 
 plete a circuit, and return, with matured intelligence 
 and wider range of vision, to religion once more. 
 
 Men will one day see that it is the Father's 
 counsel which they are searching out when they 
 fathom the depths of Creation ; it is the benignity of a 
 Father's smile that they are taking in when they bask 
 in the sunlight, when they watch the shadows play in 
 the upper air upon the snow-peaks, or catch at even 
 the last rosy kiss of the daylight, as it falls down the 
 mountain slopes on a wearied world. The Lord has 
 given to us the rightful possession of all this by His 
 Incarnation. It was right that the flowers should 
 bloom their bravest around Calvary. It is the Lord 
 
 s 2 
 
26o The Higher Life. 
 
 who feeds continually the springs of that joy which 
 they breathe through the world. 
 
 But still the contrast stands out sharply ; we will 
 try to gather some of its suggestions. 
 
 I. Consider the impassive serenity of Nature, 
 through all the struggle and anguish of life. There 
 are times when this serenity becomes dreadful, and 
 maddens men. Is there no pity there, they ask, 
 for the throes that are rending us ? Is all hard 
 and impassive throughout the universe ? Do the 
 stars everywhere rise and set so calmly over the 
 storm and the agony of life } It seems to us terrible 
 that Nature should hold her accustomed order, that 
 flowers should bloom, and stars should shine, and 
 moonlight should flood the air, when the Lord who 
 made, who rules the universe, was dying in the form 
 of a servant the death of a slave. We should have 
 watched for the signs of the universal groaning and 
 rending of Creation, in sympathy with the groans and 
 death pangs of its Lord. We should have expected the 
 whole framework of Nature to shiver into fragments, 
 and to strew the wreck as a pall upon His sepulchre. 
 No ! in the place where He was crucified there was a 
 garden. The flowers never lifted their heads more 
 gaily In the sun than on the morning of the crucifixion, 
 the moon never shed a brighter flood of lustre than 
 that which streamed over His grave. 
 
 And It is ever thus. It Is part of the deep 
 mystery of Nature and of life. A mother who has 
 watched night long the death struggles of her dar- 
 ling, who in the morning has gone home, looks 
 
The Garden by the Cross. 261 
 
 bitter reproach at the sun rising so cahnly on her 
 agony. The east flushes into rosy splendour, the 
 birds carol their gayest strains, the air is musical with 
 the hum of life, while her heart is breaking, and the 
 night has settled over her inner world. Nature is 
 pitiless. She quickens not a pulse in sympathy with 
 our passion, she hushes not a song in pity for our 
 pain. We may come forth to a new life, we may 
 go down to dark death, she cares not. We may 
 blow thousands of earth's best and bravest into 
 fragments in the storm of battle ; she buries them 
 calmly, and next year she reaps her richest harvests 
 from their graves. 
 
 And men madden under this indifference. Is it; 
 they ask themselves wildly, the mask of the in- 
 difference of God ? The pagan sees behind it a 
 malignant demon, mocking at his pain and pouring 
 contempt upon his life. Sympathy man pines for. 
 He can bear extremities, if sustained by sympathy 
 and love ; but Nature knows no sympathy. Our 
 sadness, our gladness, stir not a pulse, claim not a 
 sigh. She attends our gay occasions with flowers 
 and festal music ; she breathes the same music, and 
 scatters the same flowers over our graves. 
 
 2. Let us thank God that it is so. 
 
 The garden blooms on, the Cross has vanished, 
 while the tradition of it has become the most sacred 
 and blessed possession of mankind. The sun shone 
 as calmly on the morrow as on the morning of the 
 crucifixion. The quiet business of Nature goes on, 
 unhasting, unresting ; it is untroubled by the tramp 
 
262 The Higher Life. 
 
 of armies, by the overthrow or reconstruction of the 
 greatest empires of the world. And God be praised 
 for it. Pain and storm, strife and anguish, birth and 
 death, are for time ; order, beauty, hfe, are for eter- 
 nity. The sun shines gaily on the morrow of our 
 anguish, and we writhe under it ; but the sun shines 
 on, and we come to delight in it, and we bless the 
 constancy which brings it forth morning by morning 
 exulting out of its chamber, to prophesy to us of the 
 world where the sunlight is eternal. 
 
 And Nature is right. She will not bewail our 
 calamities, as though they were irreparable. She 
 smiles and sings as she reweaves for us the threads 
 of our broken purposes, or heals the bleeding tendrils 
 of our hearts. There is infinite solace in Christ for 
 the most burdened sufferers. " Our light ajfliction, 
 'bjhich is bid for a moment, worketh for us afar more 
 exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not 
 at the things which are seen, but at the things which are 
 not seen, for the thi?igs which are seen are temporal, 
 but the things which are not seen are eternal!' Why 
 should Nature weep and moan, and stay her benign 
 and beautiful process, when she knows that the 
 stroke which we think is crushing us, is a benedic- 
 tion, and that we have but to stretch forth the hand 
 of faith to grasp the earnest of eternal glory ? 
 
 Nature is so constant because God is so con- 
 stant; so constant in His purpose to transm.ute our 
 suffering into glory, our moans into songs. There 
 is boundless hope for us and for mankind, in all that 
 He has laid up for us in Christ. " Eye hath not seen, 
 
The Garden by the C^^oss. 263 
 
 nor ear heard, iieither have entered into the heart of 
 man, the thino-i. which God hath prepared for them 
 that tove Him!' And of this the sunhght and the 
 garden, and the calm procession of the seasons, 
 are His witnesses. He suffers them not to be 
 moved by our changes, for He is not moved ; nor 
 are we moved, if we have faith, from Him. He 
 sees the end to which they all are working ; the 
 far off harvest of tears and pain which they assure. 
 He saw through the gloom which gathered around 
 Calvary, the brightening morning of the Resurrec- 
 tion. The burst of heavenly music, to His ear, was 
 already cleaving the darkness of the tomb, and peal- 
 ing around the triumphal train, that attended the 
 victim of Calvary to the throne which awaited Him 
 on high ; " Thy throne, O God, is for ever and 
 ever, a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of 
 Thy kingdom. Thott hast loved righteotcsness, and- 
 hated iniquity, therefore God, even Thy God, hath 
 anointed Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy 
 fellows!' 
 
 3. Consider of how much that garden around 
 the Cross was symbolic, in relation to man and to 
 the Lord. 
 
 " He was delivered into the hands of men!' Alas ! 
 that this should mean, He was delivered to wounds 
 and to death ! The first crime was one with the 
 last crime — fratricide, the shedding a brother's blood. 
 His brethren they were who had been raging around 
 Him, filling the air with their mad outcries, and 
 dragging the Prince of Life to the cross and to the 
 
264 The Higher Life. 
 
 tomb. But around, above, all was calm, nay trium- 
 phant. There were worlds on worlds, sphere beyond 
 sphere, which held on their way more surely as the 
 hour of His final triumph drew near. The plains of 
 heaven were o-lowinof in a more vivid sunliofht, the 
 harps of heaven were swept to a more exulting strain 
 The great ones of the past put on their glorious 
 forms, and pressed through the veil to greet Him. 
 The very dead beneath the sods in which the cross 
 was planted, stirred as His footsteps pressed them, 
 and bursting from their tombs prepared to join the 
 train which He would lead up on High. 
 
 There was joy, an awful joy, through the universe 
 when that cross was uplifted. All beings in all worlds 
 won something through the prophecy, ''And I, if I be 
 lifted lip from the earthy will draw all meji tmto Me!' 
 Should the flowers then droop and exhale corruption, 
 when all beings in all worlds were struggling into a 
 new and more glorious life ? No ! " hi the place 
 where He ivas crucified there was a garden!' And it 
 spread forth all its brightness, and shed forth all its 
 fragrance, as the Lord passed on to the cross, which 
 was His pathway to His throne. And it blooms 
 still, and will bloom on till the death day of Creation. 
 Then the tree of life will be seen, planted by the 
 everlasting river. Its leaves shall be for the healing 
 of the r.ations, and flowers shall gleam and fruits 
 shall glow with unfading splendour, in those bright 
 homes which Christ hath won for us, where ''■they 
 shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, the 
 SU71 shall not light on thcm^ nor any heat. But the 
 
The Garden by the Ct^oss. 265 
 
 Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed 
 them. He shall lead them to living fountains of 
 waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their 
 eyes!' 
 
 The homes which Christ hath won for us ! Around 
 the Cross there was a garden, by the Cross the garden 
 was saved. The death of Christ was the life of all 
 things. Order, beauty, hope, joy, life, were all saved 
 by that cross from ruin, saved for the new heaven 
 and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness 
 for evermore. Saved by the Cross. " God forbid 
 that I should glory, save in the ci^oss of my Lord 
 fesns Christ, by whom the zuorld is crucified unto 
 me, and I tmto the zuorld." Does the tongue 
 stammer as you try to repeat the confession ? 
 Do the lips tremble ^ Does the heart shrink ? Are 
 you passing with averted eye by Calvary ? Stay, 
 stay ! by the way you are treading lies the gate of 
 death. No Cross, no crown, no throne, no radiant 
 home among the redeemed in the new Creation. No 
 Cross, no Christ, no God, no hope, no life, for man or 
 for the world. Bend then before the Cross the willing 
 captive of mercy. Learn the lesson of self-renuncia- 
 tion. Take up thy cross and follow, patient, the 
 Master's footsteps, and then wait, wait, wait, until 
 He shall lift thee to a bliss and a splendour which 
 shall eclipse thy most daring dreams ! 
 
266 The Hi'^hcr Life. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 OH! THAT I HAD WINGS LIKE A DOVE! 
 
 ' Oh, i/int I had tuvii^s like a dove / for then would I fly away and be 
 at rest. Lo ! then would I watider far off, and remain iti the 
 wilderness. I would hasten jjty escape from the windy storm and 
 tempest."—??.. Iv. 6-8. 
 
 How many captive souls have breathed forth this 
 e<clamation in their anguish ; how many weary 
 pilgrims of life, with aching limbs and bleeding feet ! 
 But, alas ! the wings await us only when we have 
 fought out our battle, and have trodden the path to the 
 edge of the dark river. Two only of our race, we are 
 told, have been lifted, in one bright moment, out of the 
 very midst of the pain and the strain of life into 
 serene celestial regions, where " the wicked cease 
 from troubling and the weary are at rest" — in another 
 sense than that which was present to the mind of Job, 
 when he uttered that terrible malediction on life. 
 So when we have made our moan we must grasp 
 our pilgrim staff again, and face the danger and 
 roughness of the way. The wings, to bear us to 
 the homes we dream of, where the light is for ever 
 shining, whence the tears are for ever banished, 
 where the soul gathers around it its elect kindred 
 with no dread of chancre or death, we shall find, if 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 267 
 
 we are patient, in time. These words of David 
 are a genuine outburst of human sorrow and aspira- 
 tion. It is the language which again, and again, 
 and again, is wrung from the heart of earth's purest 
 and noblest men. 
 
 It seems strange to those who have not looked 
 into the mystery of God's ways, that souls should be 
 so restless and full of a nameless and agonizing 
 longing, in a world so rich and beautiful, and 
 which Heaven meant to be so blessed. No small 
 part of the mystery of human sadness is the fact, 
 which all the inner history of life forces upon us, 
 that the sense of it seems to be strongest in the 
 wisest and loftiest spirits of our race. In truth it is 
 part of the heritage of our freedom. Life might be 
 less sad, certainly it would be less rich and less 
 hopeful, if it were less free. 
 
 Freedom is the richest, the grandest, the gravest, 
 but in some stages of development it is the saddest, 
 of all endowments. The truth holds in the political 
 and social as well as in the spiritual sphere. The 
 well-fed and kindly mastered slave has, perhaps, an 
 easy, indolent, reckless enjoyment of the moment, 
 such as the anxious, toiling, careworn child of freedom 
 rarely knows. The rich humour, the childish glee, of 
 the negro races, has lived on through all the bitter 
 experiences of their bondage. We might hazard a 
 guess that few of the eager, acute, energetic whites 
 in America can laugh such a laugh, and sing such 
 a song, as their once careless and jovial slaves. 
 Their enfranchisement may take the ring out of 
 
2 68 The Higher L ife. 
 
 their laughter and the fun out of their nature, 
 while it brings in nobler and more fruitful things. 
 
 All enslaved classes and races have had a bitter 
 experience to undergo, in the first stages of their 
 newly-won freedom. Part of the difficulty of en- 
 franchisement, for which due allowance has not 
 always been made, lies in the unwillingness of serfs 
 to be free. The fact that the serfs on the estates 
 of the Church were, on the whole, the last to be 
 enfranchised, means, not that the Church was a 
 hard landlord, but a kindly one. The men were 
 kindly treated, well cared for, under easy masters, 
 and they were in no great hurry to face the burdens 
 and the responsibilities of liberty. Those who have 
 regarded with intelligent eye the process of en- 
 franchisement of serfs in Russia, note much bitter 
 discontent and trouble as among the first-fruits of a 
 measure which was inevitable, and is in harmony 
 with the principles which, under Christ's auspices, 
 guide the development of the modern world. 
 
 The last wreck of feudalism is now disappearing 
 from our habits and institutions in England. The 
 formation of Unions of agricultural labourers, and 
 the necessity under which farmers and landlords 
 find themselves laid, to recognise them and to treat 
 with them, brings home to the one class hitherto be- 
 yond their reach, the ideas and the forces which have 
 reconstructed the social relations of men from the 
 very foundations, in every other region of the national 
 life. The gloomy prophecies of trouble to the agri- 
 cultural interest and to the country generally, which 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 269 
 
 are freely indulged in by the class who have kept, 
 through a great part of rural England, their day 
 labourers in a condition which has brought shame and 
 sorrow on the whole community, will have but little 
 terror for those who believe that what is so simply 
 right must, in the end, work for good to all parties 
 concerned in it. 
 
 But it is well that the friends and supporters of 
 this movement of the peasantry should remind them, 
 that in taking this great step of progress as a class, 
 in lifting themselves to a higher level, they are lifting 
 themselves also into the region of new responsibilities 
 and cares. They will have that which is amply worth 
 the effort, in every manly judgment ; but they will 
 have, like all of us, to pay for the progress which they 
 win. Something they will miss which belonged to 
 the old life, as they stretch on to the new ; and if 
 their thought is that increase of comfort and hap- 
 piness will be the immediate fruit of their movement, 
 it is possible that they may find its first-fruits increase 
 of pain. 
 
 For a serf, and those near to the condition of a 
 serf, there is mostly some one who is responsible, 
 who is bound to care that, they are fed, clothed, and 
 nursed. Enfranchise them, and they must learn to 
 care for themselves ; and they are not the mass who, 
 in such a condition, care enough for the higher joys 
 and hopes of freedom, to face cheerfully the burden 
 of daily anxiety and pain that they may win it. The 
 slave's heart is content, on the whole, with bondage, 
 and the spectacle of the strain and the struggle 
 
2 yo The Higher Life. 
 
 through which the free have to rise to the full pos- 
 session and use of their freedom, does not greatly 
 tempt those whose nature is servile to desire deliver- 
 ance from the yoke. 
 
 The truth is, that the freeman is the man who has 
 the couiage to suffer, who has a native aptitude for 
 bearing burdens, and who holds conflict included in 
 his idea of life. And God has made us free. He 
 has forced our freedom upon us. We are made, 
 whether we will or no, responsible for our actions, 
 for our development, for our bare nourishment. The 
 decisions of our will carry with them, whether we 
 choose or no, issues which live on through eternity. 
 The burden is laid upon us, and those who best 
 measure it — who best understand what it is to be a 
 man, with such a body as ours, in such a world as 
 this, with such a world as that looking down upon 
 us, and sealing life with its awful everlasting issues — 
 feel most deeply its pressure ; a pressure under which, 
 "Who is sufficient for these things ?" must often burst 
 from the noblest and most faithful lips. 
 
 We are beset behind and before, and on either 
 hand, by responsibilities and destinies. We are bound 
 with iron bonds of law, till faith transmutes them into 
 bands of love. We are free, within wide limits, to 
 do what we will. We may rob, cheat, murder, if we 
 please. But there our freedom ends. Laws strong 
 as adamant, fixed as the throne of God, take posses- 
 sion of us and our doings. The doer of good is 
 blessed, the doer of evil is cursed, beyond the power 
 of earth or of heaven to gainsay. 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 271 
 
 The freeman, too, has a great load of care resting 
 upon him, of which the interest of others is the 
 burden. Those dear to him are cast upon him. He 
 has, in a httle sphere, to be to them as God. And 
 the necessary hmitation of his power to bless them, 
 the miscarriage to which all his purest efforts and 
 wisest aims are subject, the way in which his dearest 
 plans and hopes are ever in peril of shipwreck, over- 
 press the pilgrim, and wring this moan from him as 
 he struggles on his way. 
 
 And then, the end ! Who assures it ? Who tells 
 him with authority, that he, with his poor faint heart, 
 his futile will, his struggling lusts, his vain aspira- 
 tions, his broken hopes, his ideal always far up above 
 him on the height, and seeming farther as he climbs, 
 can one day be strong and glorious as the angels, 
 pure, beautiful, blessed, and complete ? Ah ! all free- 
 dom has its pains and dangers, but of all freedom the 
 grandest, the saddest for the moment, is our great 
 human freedom, freedom to be a man in this vast, 
 awful, unhomelike world. 
 
 And there are the birds, the beasts, the flowers, 
 all round us, gay and careless, happy, joyous as we 
 were in our merry spring-time ; sporting in the sun- 
 light while the sun is shining, then nestling in soft 
 coverts, sleeping a dreamless sleep, till the new day 
 calls them to new gifts and joys. " Consider the 
 lilies of the field how they groiv , they toil not, neither 
 do they spin!' " Consider the birds of the air, they 
 neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns',' but 
 verily they are fed. There is something exqui- 
 
272 The Higher Life. 
 
 sitely tantalising, to over-strained men and women, 
 in this careless ease of the Creation, happy in the 
 moment, with no thought of the morrow ; no fears, 
 no burdens, no regrets. 
 
 It seems to us like the dream which our inspired 
 dreamers have dreamed for us of the islands of the 
 blessed, where the hard conditions which wring us so 
 sharply are abolished, where skies are radiant, where 
 earth is lavish, where beautiful forms are teeming, and 
 unlovely things are far away. Why cannot we be as 
 careless as that sky-lark, bathing his glowing breast 
 in the flush of the morning's splendour, and pouring 
 out his gladness in maddening strains, up there at 
 the gate of day .-* Think you not that many a poor 
 wretch, waking from uneasy slumbers, with that numb- 
 ing sense of misery which reminds us that something 
 is impending which, when full consciousness returns, 
 will become a burden too heavy to be borne, has 
 listened to the skylark's matin song with a passionate 
 envy, and cried. Oh ! that I too had wings like a bird, 
 for then would I fly away and be at rest ! 
 
 There is something in the clearness, the serenity, 
 the purity of the summer air which is symbolic' of 
 the careless rest of the Creation. We watch the bee 
 buzzing from flower to flower, burying himself in the 
 powdery sweetness till he is loaded with his treasure, 
 and then he rises and swims on the shining air until 
 he is lost in the blue distance, floating, humming, in 
 a world which is all sunlight, dewy fragrance, and 
 luscious sweets. And man has that within him 
 which pines for kindred serene delights. " Man is 
 
Oh ! that I had Wmgs like a Dove ! 273 
 
 in little all the sphere." The birds and the bees are 
 in his nature, as well as the angels. His soul has 
 a bird-like longing for flight, a bee-like thirst for 
 the honey of Creation. Gladly would he lay down 
 his burden, forget his tasks, and wander in the shin- 
 ing summer air, happy and careless as an insect, free 
 of the burden which grows out of liberty — out of life, 
 immortality, and God. 
 
 This rest of Nature, this ceaseless, serene circuit 
 of her life, this joy in mere existence, this happy 
 ignorance of to-morrow and oblivion of yesterday, 
 have a strange fascination for careworn, toil-weary men 
 and women in all ages. It is like the attraction of 
 the clear sea depths in Goethe's exquisite ballad. 
 It has been the inspiration of the world's softest, 
 sweetest poetry, and it breathes a tone of tender 
 music through its noblest and most inspiring hymns. 
 Who can watch the evening clouds sleeping languidly 
 in the golden glory of the sunset, their delicate forms, 
 their opalescent hues, soft islets in the great sea of 
 clear, unfathomable splendour, without breathing for 
 a moment a passionate prayer, as he looks on that 
 world, and then turns to look on this, " Oh ! that I 
 had wings like a dove',' to bear me to those serene, 
 untroubled kingdoms ? Oh ! that I could bathe my 
 fevered brow in that coolness, and still my throbbing 
 heart in that atmosphere of exquisite and infinite rest ' 
 
 But there is more than this, far more, in this 
 prayer of the Psalmist. There is something far 
 deeper than the sense of a syren power in Nature. 
 David was not dreaming then of that mysterious 
 
 T 
 
2 74 '^^^<^ Higher Life. 
 
 spell, which draws the life-weary pilgrim from his 
 path, the storm-tossed sailor from his course, th(i 
 student from his tasks, the workman from his toils, 
 the woman from her household cares and benignant 
 ministries, the warrior from his camps, the states- 
 man from his imperial cares, to lie on flowery shores 
 in the summer sun, fanned by the breezes that have 
 swept the foam crests from the purple sea, and 
 dream, to the music of syren voices, his dream of 
 rest. There are few who have battled hard to 
 make life noble and fruitful, who have not in some 
 moments of luxurious softness mused with the lotos- 
 eaters. 
 
 They sat them down upon the yellow sand, 
 Between the sun and moon upon the shore ; 
 
 And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, 
 Of child, and wife, and slave ; but evermore 
 
 Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar. 
 Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. 
 
 Then some one said, " We will return no mere ; " 
 And all at once they sang, " Our island home 
 Is far beyond the wave ; we will no longer roam." 
 
 Why are we weighed upon with heaviness, 
 And utterly consumed with sharp distress. 
 While all things else have rest from weariness ? 
 All things have rest : why should we toil alone, 
 
 We only toil, who are the first of things, 
 And make perpetual moan, 
 Still from one sorrow to another thrown : 
 
 Nor ever fold our wings, 
 
 And cease from wanderings 
 Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm ; 
 
 Nor hearken what the inner spirit sings, 
 " There is no joy but calm ! " 
 
 Why should we only toil ; the roof and crown of things .'' 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 275 
 
 We have had enough of action, and of motion we, 
 
 RoU'd to starboard, roU'd to larboard, when the surge was seething 
 
 free, 
 Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. 
 Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, 
 In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined 
 On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. 
 
 Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 
 Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar ; 
 Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. 
 
 But David was not thinking of sunny islands 
 and syren voices, which the mariner lashed to the 
 mast maddens to hear as he drifts by. No, far 
 loftier thoughts occupied him, far nobler, manlier 
 cares. These words express the momentary life- 
 weariness of a man, the whole aim and effort of 
 whose life had been to rise to fellowship with God. 
 It was not a sweet intoxication of the senses which 
 stole over him, and breathed forth this touching 
 plaint. It was wrung from him by the sternest 
 realities of life, by brave struggles to fulfil his 
 kingly duty, in spite of the oppositions and malig- 
 nities of the enemies of his throne and of God's, 
 of the desertion of false friends, and the calumnies 
 of those to whom he had laid bare the innermost 
 secrets of his heart. 
 
 There was a great dead-weight of ignorance, 
 brutality, stupidity, which had to be lifted, before 
 he could even bes^in to make such order in his 
 realm, as the man after God's own heart must 
 passionately desire to establish ; and there were 
 
 moments when the weight pressed with crushing 
 
 T 2 
 
276 The Higher Life. 
 
 force. It was the patriot, the king, the seer, the 
 prophet, the man whose life was laid on the altar 
 of ministry to mankind — through whose soul there 
 breathed a strain of sympathy with Him who made 
 it His meat and His drink to do the will of Him 
 that sent Him, and to finish His work — who found 
 the burden of life, for a moment, too heavy, the 
 strain too long, and sighed, " 6> / that I had wings 
 like a dove, for then would I fly away and be at rest!' 
 
 There are many forms of high and noble work, 
 which in moments of strain and weariness might 
 wrino- this moan even from the most faithful and 
 courageous lips. For it is a truth, a profound truth, 
 that God constantly associates a high capacity for 
 service with a keen sensibility to suffering, and 
 nurses on bread of affliction and water of affliction, 
 mingled with such joys as the angels taste, the men 
 and the women whom He is training for high service, 
 in the general assembly and church of the First- 
 born which is gathering there. We will regard this 
 sentence from various points of view ; and in sur- 
 veying them some of the deepest springs of human 
 sadness will be disclosed. 
 
 I. It IS the cry of the faithful soul overpressed 
 by temptation. 
 
 Overpressed, I say. Behind all the temptation 
 there is the assurance, " There is no temptation hath 
 taken yotc, diet stich as is common to 7nan ; but God 
 is faithful who will not staffer you to be tempted above 
 that ye are able, but will with the temptation also 
 make a way of escape that ye may be able to bear it," 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 275 
 
 But it is hard to recall it when the pressure is sore ; 
 when the soul, self-distrustful, self-condemning, has to 
 face the deadliest form of temptation — the temptation 
 to think that faith is a dream of a fevered imagina- 
 tion ; that spiritual truth is a kind of spectre of the 
 Brocken, the shadow of our own thought on the mists 
 that envelope us ; and that Christ is the arch-spectre, 
 the magnified image of self. 
 
 The dreadest of all temptations, is that which-^ 
 shakes our grasp of the Hand which alone canl 
 strengthen and save. And it is always in the 
 background of life. So beset are we by tempters, 
 that we are ready sometimes to say, A cunning 
 devil rather than a merciful Father, must have 
 ordered these conditions of my life. We are so 
 organised that we cannot but be beset. It is 
 not an accident, it is an inevitable condition of 
 such a nature as ours, in such a world as this. 
 Tempters around, tempters within ; tempters lying 
 hid in every thing of beauty we look upon — yea in 
 every touch of sympathy, every joy of love. Is 
 there one moment, life-long, when we are free 
 from them ? Why, they beset us even in our 
 dreams. It makes life one long, hard, weary 
 struggle ; and we may never hope for release from 
 it but in death. 
 
 It was an aged man, a veteran soldier of 
 Christ, who said, " So run /, not as uncertai7ily, 
 so fight /, not as one that beatdh the air ; but I 
 keep tinder my body and bring it into subjection, 
 lest that by any means, when I have preached the 
 
278 The Higher Life. 
 
 Gospel to others I myself should be a castaway" We 
 lincl constantly that the scenes and the interests 
 from which we have had the keenest expectations 
 of pleasure, have turned into temptations ; even our 
 purest and holiest offices, our most self-sacrificing 
 efforts, have led us into the gravest moral perils, 
 from which we have with difficulty escaped. Faith- 
 ful, high-minded men and women, with profound 
 faith in man's great call and destiny, have yet been 
 so overborne, so crushed down by the sense ot 
 the omnipresence of the tempter, that they have 
 fled in wild fear from home, friends, and country, 
 from every occupation and every delight, to bury 
 themselves in the recesses of gloomy forests or 
 savage wildernesses ; they have cut themselves oft 
 from all human fellowship, treated man as a foe and 
 woman as a fiend, to find in the end the lonely 
 desert as thronged by tempters as the crowded city, 
 and their own hearts as seductive as the softest 
 syren that ever wooed the careless mariner to wreck. 
 And think you that this spirit, which through the 
 whole Middle Age drove men and women in throngs 
 into the desert, that they might escape from this dread 
 world of temptation, is dead in human hearts ? Is 
 life easier than of old ? Is the burden lighter ? Is 
 the tempter chained ? Myriads of myriads of weary 
 combatants, worn out by the battle, are revolving 
 the question still, which made in old time monks 
 and nuns ; the sadder perhaps in that they see that 
 there is no way out by that path from the ceaseless 
 strife. " Oh that I had iviiigs like a dove! Then 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 2 79 
 
 would I fly away and be at rest ; then would I wander 
 far off, and remain in the wilderness " ; there I might 
 at least unarm for the moment ; I might He ungirt 
 by the cool waters under the rustling palms of some 
 Elim, till summoned by the stern behest to face new 
 perils and new toils. 
 
 II. It is the sigh of the heart, weary of the strain 
 of spiritual aspiration and effort. 
 
 There is rest, surely, from the dread of tempta- 
 tion and the pressure of the burden, in Him who 
 said, " Cast thy burden on the Lord, and He shall 
 sustain thee!' " He shall never sztffer the righteous 
 to be moved'' It is profoundly true, it is the one 
 secret of rest. But those who have felt the strain 
 of high spiritual endeavour, know that there is 
 nothing at times so exhaustino; to the mere natural 
 strength of mind and heart, as the effort to rise into 
 a serener region, and to hide all our tears and cares 
 in the bosom of the Infinite tenderness and love. 
 
 It may be that you have felt the pain so keenly 
 that you have fairly abandoned the effort. Your foot 
 no longer presses the threshold of that higher world, 
 where it was once frequent and familiar. You have 
 begun to think that these higher things are somewhat 
 shadowy and dreamlike. Perhaps you are settling 
 down on substantial comforts, as, on the whole, the 
 most satisfying, or at any rate the least troublesome, 
 good of life. And yet once you had " open vision." 
 The hope of realizing your aspirations one day, was as 
 the daily bread of your spirit. Now you have fallen 
 back again into sensual slumber, beaten, not by the 
 
28o The Higher Life. 
 
 temptations, the cares, the toils, of hfe, but by the 
 pain of spiritual effort ; the aching of the wings that 
 beat the air of the upper heaven. 
 
 But those who have not been conquered by the 
 pain, and who are minded at whatever cost to 
 endure, know moments, and many, when they sigh 
 wearily for a life that demands less effort, for a Pisgah 
 which it costs less pain to climb. We pine for a state 
 in which the quickening flood shall flow round us as 
 the sunlight, in which we shall inhale new life at 
 every inspiration ; where the pain and the strain 
 would be to stoop and not to soar. " Oh that I had 
 wings like a dove!''' There must be some world 
 where purity, honesty, truth, righteousness, and 
 charity are native ; where it costs no pain to 
 cherish them ; where the heavenly life finds the 
 bread of its nourishment ever ready to its hand ; 
 where the light of the face of God chases all dark 
 shadows, and fills the celestial air with the glow 
 which is the breath of life. There is such a world, 
 and one day death will bear me to it. But " oh that 
 I had wings like a dove" that I might visit it, if but 
 for a moment, and bathe my strained and weary 
 soul in its seas of rest ! 
 
 III. It is the cry of a man who is forced to be 
 spectator of a dread conflict. 
 
 There is war on earth and in heaven, and there is 
 something appalling in the shock of forces, of which 
 man is the centre. When the soul tries to measure 
 it, it faints under the effort. The prophets are not 
 the only men who, when they had vision of it, fell 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 281 
 
 down and were as dead men. I have already told 
 the story of the most prophetic man whom we have 
 among us, who when he was bidden by a light, gay, 
 optimist philosopher to look up at the stars, found 
 it " a sair sight." You smile, perhaps, at the conceit, 
 and can afford to smile. Life has not unveiled to 
 you yet its deeper mysteries ; nothing, as yet, seems 
 too hard for your young strength, too high for the 
 clasp of your daring and vigorous hand. 
 
 The range of this conflict and its issues escape 
 you ; for the present you are amply content to 
 live on in this goodly world, where there is 
 beauty enough to gladden you, and where you can 
 shut your eyes on all that saddens. But whole 
 peoples, and the millions, the hundreds of millions 
 of the disciples of the Oriental religions, agree with 
 our sad philosopher — it is a sair, sair sight. The 
 whole universe is full of the cries of battle ; groans 
 of wounded and dying burden the air. The con- 
 flict is fought out with desperate vehemence. Is 
 there any nook in the worlds within our ken where 
 evil and good are not in death-wrestle ; where the 
 advantage won by the good to-day is not balanced, as 
 far as we can see, by the gain of the evil to-morrow ; 
 and where free beings are not driven to take part in 
 the conflict, and to add their share to the stress and 
 the strain of the universal life ? 
 
 The whole Creation is groaning and travailing, 
 and who knows what is being born } Who can look 
 on with composure to endless battle, endless misery, 
 waste, and sin? And yet where is the sign of the end 
 
282 The Higher L ife 
 
 of it, here or anywhere ? Who has not asked himself 
 madly, in moments when the eye of faith has been 
 dim, and Christ has seemed far away, which is 
 the conquering power ? Where is the beginning of 
 the victory ? ''Oh that I had wings like a dove /" I 
 would fly beyond the dust and the din, the moans, 
 the wounds, the tears. There must be some realm 
 in this fair universe which the destroyer's foot has 
 never trampled ; where the flowers bloom fair and 
 fear no spoiler's hand. " O that I had wings like a 
 dove,'' and I would forth and find it, and turn my 
 back for ever on this fierce battle-field, where men, 
 angels, devils, are wrestling, writhing, in desperate 
 conflict, where Heaven and hell are agonizing for 
 the prize of an immortal soul. 
 
 IV. But man is not only a spectator of the 
 conflict. He is bound to be the servant of the 
 Divine Kingdom, and in sympathy with the Lord 
 of the Kingdom to bear all the burden of it on his 
 heart. " Oh that my head luei^e zuaters^' cried one 
 such, " and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might 
 weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of 
 my people. Oh ! that I had in the wilderness a 
 lodgingplace of wayfaring men, that I might leave 
 my people, and ^0 from them . . . they bend their 
 tong2ies like their bows, for lies, but they ai^e not valiant 
 for the trtith tipon the earth, for they proceed from 
 evil to evil, and they know not Me, saith the Lordr 
 
 " Who hath believed our report^' cried another, 
 " and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been re- 
 vealed? For He shall grow up before Him as a, 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 283 
 
 tender plant, and as a root otd of a dry ground ; He 
 hath no form nor comeliness, and when lue shall see 
 Him there is no beauty that we shotcld desire Himi" 
 Such cries were wrunor from God's most faithful 
 
 O 
 
 servants, when they saw the force of the flood of 
 iniquity which was sweeping against the Kingdom, 
 and failed for the moment to see the Spirit of the Lord 
 lifting up the standard against it. Just as God seems 
 to suffer temptations to multiply. He suffers to accu- 
 mulate difficulties of faith. Man must be made upon 
 a very deep and far-reaching plan, wi-th a large, a 
 boundless future ; for very high moral qualities are 
 needed to solve successfully his problem of life. Is 
 there one earnest servant of God in any generation, 
 who has not bemoaned, almost hopelessly, the over- 
 mastering flood of evil which sweeps through the 
 world ? It is like the toil of Sisyphus, or of the 
 daughters of Danaiis, this effort of the Christian life 
 to help and to bless mankind. " Oh that I might 
 now die /" one of the bravest of God's workmen cried. 
 "/, eve7i /, alojie am left." The battle is a lost battle, 
 evil masters the good ; let me die and escape the 
 shame. " Oh that I had zuings like a dove f' that I 
 might be loosed from this weary task, and cease to 
 be bound to think and to care for thankless, sense- 
 less men. 
 
 But who can help thought and care when he 
 sees sin reigning unto death everywhere around 
 him, and men burying themselves in base, sensual, 
 soul-destroying pleasures, reckless of God, of judo-- 
 ment, and of eternity } Here, in the very centre of 
 
284 The Higher Life. 
 
 Christian civilisation, vice riots, selfishness reigns ; 
 the poor live by millions in such squalor that the life 
 of the veriest savage hardly shows darker, while 
 crime organises its armies, and pitches its permanent 
 camp defiantly in our midst. Who can help caring 
 when he sees this abounding misery, and humanity, 
 as he thinks in his sadder moods, sinking deeper 
 and deeper into the pit ? And yet there is a terrible 
 temptation to indifference, through the magnitude 
 and complexity of the problem, the impossibility of 
 reaching the root of the evil, and the obduracy and 
 gracelessness of those on whom we have spent the 
 most earnest and constant toil. We will give it up, 
 we cry. We will, give up caring, give up giving, 
 give up helping ; more harm than good seems to 
 grow out of our efforts ; we will fold our hands and 
 let it go as it may. Nay, had Christ folded His 
 hands and let it go — how then ? Up ! faint heart, 
 the Lord has need of thee ; that King's government 
 at any rate must be carried on. 
 
 V. We believe in progress ; we believe in the 
 golden pictures of the prophets ; we believe in the 
 reign of the Lord Jesus over all hearts, in all worlds. 
 Yes, we believe ; yet there are moments when the 
 heart faints at the vision of all the storm and strife, 
 the tears and the blood, beyond which lies the fulfil- 
 ment of our hope and the Lord's. We believe with 
 the poet in — 
 
 The God who ever lives and loves, 
 
 One God, one law, one element, 
 
 And one far off Divine event, 
 To which the whole Creation moves. 
 
Oh ! that I had Wings like a Dove ! 285 
 
 But eyes grow weary with expectation. " Where 
 is the promise of His coming f " " Why do His chariot 
 wheels so long delay f' We may well urge the ques- 
 tion as we survey the present and forecast the future 
 — the stormy ocean, rock-bound, wreck-strewn, which 
 lies between humanity and the haven of rest. The 
 soul shudders at the seas of blood and anguish 
 through which seems to lie the onward path. God 
 leads men on, God leads us on. But through what 
 struggle, loss, and wreck ! " Some on boards, some 
 on broken pieces of the ship, they all escaped safe to 
 landr Is it to be thus with life, thus with humanity ? 
 we cry in our despondent, faithless moods. Revolu- 
 tion after revolution ; war after war ; each bloodier 
 and more destructive than the former ; while peace- 
 ful arts and industries seem to find their highest 
 function in gorging the eagles of slaughter. 
 
 What is the master-stroke of our vaunted and 
 glorious science ? Is it not the perfecting of the art 
 of mowing down in the fields of battle whole armies 
 of men ? The instruments of slaughter in their cruel, 
 delicate beauty, make us shiver at the thought that 
 they are men, brother men, husbands, brothers, fathers, 
 centres of tender thought and passion, who are to be 
 mown down by that iron hail. Is not the uppermost 
 thought in Europe at this moment armament ; pre- 
 parations for war, on a scale which will cast the 
 desolations of "the scourge of God" into the shade ? 
 And is not the strongest hope of the philanthropist 
 built on the fact, that war is becoming so fearfully 
 costly that it must starve itself before long. Pity is 
 
286 The Higher Life. 
 
 nothing, charity is nothing, Christ is nothing. No. 
 wars must go on until money fails. Great God, is it 
 ever to be thus ? Is this Thy law of progress ; or 
 does the devil triumph still in a world which Thy 
 tears and Thy blood have redeemed ? " Oh that 
 I had wings like a dove" that I might soar beyond 
 the smoke of the battle, the wail of the wounded, 
 the shriek of the dying, as they lie beneath 
 these mighty chariot wheels that go crushing on. 
 Oh ! for a vision of the realms where the skies are 
 stainless, where the fields are fed by the dews of 
 heaven, and not by this bloody rain ; where pro- 
 gress is as the growth of flowers, exhaling fragrance, 
 filling the air with the music of its motion and the 
 murmur of its joy. 
 
 " Oh that I had zvings like a dove !" Is there no 
 answer to the cry, in that wonderful picture which 
 heralded the advent of the Comforter to the world ? 
 " Now when all the people were baptized, it came to 
 pass that Jesns also being baptized, and pi^aying, the 
 heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in 
 a bodily shape, like a dove 2ipon Him, and a voice came 
 from heaven, which said. Thou art My beloved Son ; 
 in Thee I am zuell pleased!' — Luke iii. 21, 22. A 
 dove-like, brooding glory descended, not to bear us 
 away to some far-off wilderness, but to bring to us 
 here, in the strain and the stress of the conflict, the 
 softness, the sweetness, the serenity of the sphere to 
 which we long to soar. That was God's answer to 
 the cry. " The comfort of the Holy Ghost!' 
 
 To comfort a man, is to make him strong by stand- 
 
Oh ! that I had lVi7tgs like a Dove ! 2Sy 
 
 ing by him. This is our strength to bear, to hope — 
 the Lord is with us. All that we can see may be dark 
 enough and sad enough ; the Holy Ghost would lift 
 us to share the hope and the joy of Christ. We must 
 climb, we must soar on the wings of faith, and com- 
 mand the horizon of a wider world. There is light 
 all round, light above. As we rise we see that the 
 darkness is of the earth, of the moment, the daylight 
 is eternal. We must stand with Christ. ''For the 
 joy set before Him, He endured the cross, and despised 
 the shamed In the strength of that joy He bears the 
 burden of the world, He upbears it with strong, con- 
 quering, redeeming hand. He sees gleams of light 
 upon it which are hidden from our feeble vision ; He 
 sees an end beyond it, whose glorious beauty fills the 
 whole sphere with splendour and joy. If we share 
 the sadness of Christ, we must share His gladness ; 
 and believe that every day, every moment. Calvary 
 is bearing, not here only, but in the universe, im- 
 measurably blessed and glorious fruit. 
 
 Here is our stay, here is our inspiration, when we 
 long for wings to bear us to the realms where rest is 
 untroubled, and the sunlight is eternal. God stand- 
 ing by us, " God with tis^' here in the strain and the 
 darkness ; lifting the burden of the care for our own 
 future and the world's, which else would crush us, and 
 laying it on His own Almighty heart. 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 XV. 
 
 FAINT, YET PURSUING. 
 ^' Faint, yet p2irs7nng them " — Judges viii. 4. 
 
 The wars of which so much of the Old Testament 
 history is a record, are charged with moral difficulties 
 to the Christian apologist who holds himself bound 
 to maintain that the captains and seers of Israel 
 always interpreted rightly the Divine commandments, 
 and had the explicit warrant of Jehovah for every 
 terrible deed of blood which the narrative declares 
 that they were bidden to do. They furnish a ready 
 and ample storehouse of objection to the unbeliever, 
 who professes to recoil from the records of slaughter 
 and devastation which stain the sacred page ; while 
 many a pious student of the Bible, touched by the 
 soft spirit of our modern civilisation, shudders a little 
 as he hurries by these dark passages of his sacred 
 books. That there are dark passages, some of them 
 very dark, may be freely confessed ; but perhaps, 
 some shades of the darkness are specially due to the 
 tone of our somewhat sickly and effeminate times. 
 To men who lived in more stormy ages, the difficul- 
 ties which oppress us hardly presented themselves. 
 It is remarkable that the generation of Englishmen 
 
Faint, yet Pur stiing. 2 89 
 
 which made the noblest and purest attempt to order 
 the Hfe of a State after the Divine commandment, 
 which is recorded in the world's history, found some- 
 thing in these old books which was in tune with their 
 endeavours and aspirations ; something which I think 
 that we, with our modern shivering at the sight of 
 blood, mostly miss. 
 
 But these wars of Israel seem to me on the whole, 
 to offer the grandest witness which I find in history, 
 that the " God of heaven " is not as a rule on the 
 side of the " big battalions " ; that in fact there is no 
 rule about it as regards bigness, God being always 
 and everywhere on the side of integrity, purity, 
 righteousness, and truth. This assurance has been 
 borne in upon men in all ages by many an impressive 
 lesson. The big battalions at Thermopylae and 
 Marathon, at Granson, Morat, and the great Armada 
 fight, were shattered against the rock of superior 
 moral manhood, the freeman's resolution to defend 
 all that makes a freeman's life worth the living, or, 
 losing it, to die. But this seems to me to be the one 
 constant, emphatic testimony of Jewish military his- 
 tory, from the day when Abraham with his three 
 hundred chased the Mesopotamian kings, to the last 
 triumph of the nation under the glorious conduct of 
 Judas Maccabseus. 
 
 It was freedom, truth, patriotism, and the love 
 of God, which constantly shattered the big battalions 
 in those wars. The race was not to the swift, 
 nor the spoil to the strong. Again and again the 
 armies of the powerful states around them, broke 
 
 u 
 
290 The Higher Life. 
 
 against the rock of Jewish heroism, and were 
 scattered hke foam. It was but a httle place, that 
 land of promise ; and yet, so long as their faith was 
 firm, that small but disciplined and gallant nation 
 held their mountain citadel secure against every foe. 
 The great Nile plain on the one hand, the great 
 Mesopotamian plain on the other, nnrsed vast herds 
 of men, who suffered themselves to be driven like 
 herds, at the will of the despots who claimed the right 
 to lord it over the world. The brute mass and force 
 of these huge empires hung like a perpetual menace 
 around Jerusalem. But the Jews sang their glorious 
 Psalms, which must have rolled grandly through the 
 field of battle, and while they believed in them they 
 held their freedom against the world. The whole 
 history of their wars, alike of their victories and their 
 reverses, seems to me charged with the assertion, 
 that it is in the might of God's hand, and in the 
 purpose of God's heart, to make the masters of the 
 biof battalions understand, that there is that which 
 in the long run conquers more surely and reigns 
 more mightily than brute mass and force — -Righteous- 
 ness and Truth. 
 
 I am not saying that the discernment of this in 
 the providential conduct of human affairs, is at all 
 times easy ; nor dare we say that the method of the 
 Divine hand, is at all times square with our measures 
 of righteousness and truth. " God's ways are not as 
 our ways, and God's thoughts are not as our 
 thoughts." They proceed upon deeper and truer in- 
 sight, and aim, by far-reaching methods, at far-off 
 
Faint, yet Pursumg. 291 
 
 results. To comprehend God's ways we must simply 
 know all things, and command the horizon of eter- 
 nity. 
 
 It is just impossible for us to interpret, with 
 even plausible truth, all the ways of God in the guid- 
 ance ad government of men, by any rules which we 
 can formulate. " Clouds and darkness are round 
 about Himr The entire key to His plans is not 
 entrusted to us. As we know Him more perfectly we 
 understand better His dispensations. But enough 
 shines out, not from His word only, but from history, 
 patent to every believing eye, to. justify our confi- 
 dence that ''justice and jiidgment ai'e the habitation 
 of His thj'07ie." There is a stream of things without 
 question, outside of us, "not ourselves," which "makes 
 for righteousness," and which sustains and bears on- 
 ward right-doers. These Jews, when their eye was 
 clear and their faith was firm, struck in with its cur- 
 rent, and it bore them again and again, in spite of 
 enormous disparities of force, to victory. The 
 apostle of the light and sweetness of intellectual cul- 
 ture, knows nothing more about this stream or ten- 
 dency than that it is " not ourselves." We think 
 that we have ample warrant for believing, that it is 
 the pressure of the hand of the living God. 
 
 And I am free to confess, that it seems specially 
 hard to discern the working of this law in the days 
 in which we live, and under the conditions of our 
 modern life. The tendency of our times is to vast 
 aggregations, and to high organisation in all the de- 
 partments of public life. All things run naturally 
 
 u 2 
 
292 The Higher Life. 
 
 into the monster form, and the complaint is universal 
 that the free play of the individual life is oppressed 
 and hampered. Trades, professions, communities, 
 nations, are organised after the fashion of a highly- 
 disciplined army, in which one thought, one purpose, 
 commands and sways the whole. American political 
 life might be considered fairly to be the highest de- 
 velopment of liberty as we moderns understand it ; but 
 in reality, the action of political parties in the United 
 States, is about the most mechanical movement of 
 men to be met with in our world. A few wire-pullers 
 have absolute power to control the whole. 
 
 And the vast empires which are formed or are 
 forming around us, the great masses of men which 
 statesmen can place in the field, the elaborately scien- 
 tific character of modern warfare, and the fell sweep 
 of the arms of precision which are now employed, seem 
 more than ever to throw the power into the hands 
 of those who wield the largest military force, whose 
 armies are the most highly trained, and whose weapons 
 kill at the longest range. War is becoming as scientific 
 as a game of chess ; and science professes to exclude 
 moral elements from her calculations, except as they 
 take shape in material force. Right and wrong have 
 no common measures with the figures of her arith- 
 metic. The power which has the largest area to 
 draw from, arms and skill being equal, will infallibly, 
 according to her prophets, win the day. 
 
 For myself, I confess to a certain sadness in 
 watching this tendency to agglomeration and to 
 elaborate organisation everywhere. But I should 
 
Fai7it, yet Pursuing. 293 
 
 be much sadder about it, if I did not also see every- 
 where strong tendencies to disruption. There is a 
 rising spirit in the masseS; the advancing spirit I 
 think, the spirit which will be master soon, which 
 regards jealously the tendency to form great unities, 
 and believes that smaller areas are more favour- 
 able to a high social development, and to the fair 
 unfolding of man's nobler life. There is a spirit 
 abroad which seems little disposed to rest, until these 
 vast aggregations are resolved into their constituent 
 elements, whereby, in compacter and more limited 
 communities, the individual man may find freer play 
 and larger room. 
 
 It is well worthy of our remembrance in these 
 days, that most of the noblest human works, the true 
 heir-looms of humanity, have come forth from free, 
 limited and compact communities, such as the Jewish 
 tribes, the Greek and Italian cities, and the England 
 of Elizabeth. Perhaps the way in which the "power 
 which makes for riohteousness " is working in our 
 day, may be by the disintegration of these vast struc- 
 tures which man builds so proudly, and on which 
 they write Babel — confusion — on high ; whereby 
 there may grow more ''oom and freedom for the un- 
 folding of man's spiritual life. There is manifestly 
 something in the universe, blessed be God, which 
 counterworks this tendency to excessive mechanical 
 organisation in society : something which will not 
 suffer man to make himself over wholly to the laws 
 which rule so absolutely in one sphere of his life ; 
 which breaks up his organisation, which throws out 
 
294 ^-^^^ Higher Life. 
 
 of gear his machinery, and reveals to him, often with 
 terrible emphasis, that man, as well as God, is a 
 spirit, and that in the spiritual only, in that which 
 affords free play to individual will and purpose, can 
 man work and rest. 
 
 It was the simplicity and freedom of the life of 
 this little Jewish community — which was kept small 
 by set purpose, the disruption of the nation being 
 ultimately from God (II. Chron. xi. 4) — which made 
 its history so rich in instruction to the world. It 
 is a mine of political truth, which we have yet fully 
 to explore. The stage of Jewish history is occupied 
 to a large extent by typical men ; men who loom 
 grandly in the early twilight of civilisation as the 
 heads of the great human orders — the classes into 
 which humanity naturally distributes itself, whose 
 struggles and concerts have made all the stir and 
 progress of society. They seem to sit there, like 
 Jabal in his tent-door on Giotto's glorious tower in 
 Florence, looking out over yet untrodden ages of the 
 pilgrimage of our race. These men, who are fur- 
 nishing us with a text, are doctrinal for all time. 
 ''Faint, yet purstiing^' describes for all ages the atti- 
 tude and the action of all the bravest, noblest, most 
 heroic, most victorious soldiers and workmen of the 
 world. 
 
 Remember how these men came to be there. 
 
 Gideon was the typical man among them, the 
 eminent ma,n ; but they were all cast in the same 
 mould. Like Gideon's brethren were they, " Each 
 one resembled the children of a king!' Gideon was a 
 
Faint, yet Pursuing. 295 
 
 man who believed profoundly in the vocation and in 
 the destiny of his race. As he saw it groaning and 
 writhing in its iron bondage, his heart was torn by 
 distracting doubt of the goodness and the righteous- 
 ness of the Divine ways. When the angel appeared 
 to him, the first question which rose to his lips was, 
 " Oh, my Lord, if the Loj^d be zvith -us, why then is 
 all this befallen ns, and where be all His miracles 
 which our fathers told usoff His doubt was to 
 be solved by duty. It is a noble and effectual 
 method — try it, my friend, and light will soon be 
 shining on your path. The sword of the Lord 
 and of Gideon was put into his hands, and as his 
 grip on it tightened, a great hope began to swell 
 and surge in his weary despairing heart. A large 
 host gathered at his summons ; but this was to be 
 the Lord's victory ; visibly a deliverance dropped 
 from heaven. So the Lord would have him try the 
 people — their temper, their purpose, their devotion 
 to their patriotic work. 
 
 He led them, hot and panting, to the edge of 
 a cool stream. Nine thousand seven hundred of 
 his ten thousand men, flung themselves on their 
 knees, and drank deep draughts till their thirst was 
 quenched. Three hundred men alone were of finer 
 temper, and had no knee for the satisfactions of 
 sense at a moment like that. They could eat and 
 drink like the rest when there was no higher work 
 on hand — I dare say more heartily, such heroes have 
 mostly strong appetites — but then, with those wasted 
 fields and violated homes behind them, with tlie host 
 
296 The Higher Life. 
 
 of Midian lying in the valley, a prey delivered into 
 their hands, and with the trumpet of God ringing in 
 their ears, they had no time, no heart, for kneeling. 
 A drop lapped from the hand sufficed for the moment; 
 and then, " Up and on ; the sword of the Lord and of 
 Gideon is bare." Do you wonder that the kneelers 
 were sent back in shame to finish their draught at 
 their leisure ? Do you wonder at the word from 
 heaven, " By the three hundred men that lapped 
 will I save you"? Do you wonder that "faint, yet 
 pursuing," was written of them, when their long 
 day's work was nobly done ? 
 
 And now what is all this to us ? How do these 
 dim, old world records touch our lives ? 
 
 I. Know, brethren beloved, your election of God. 
 
 Gideon was not more directly called to high 
 service in God's kingdom than are you. At the root 
 of all true success in life — I mean by that, the fulfil- 
 ment of the high ends for the sake of which life was 
 given, and in which alone it can rejoice — lies the con- 
 viction, I am called of God to live ; I am called of 
 God to " take arms against the sea " of evils and of 
 troubles which is surging around me, to make head 
 against it, and to compel it to bear me upward and 
 onward in my heavenward way. 
 
 I daresay that you may be sighing sadly enough, 
 like Gideon, Oh ! my Lord, if the Lord be with me, 
 why have all these things befallen me ? Why have 
 T fallen into bondage ; why am I dragged hither and 
 thither by passions which I cannot master ; why am I 
 plunged into the pit by lusts which I cannot tame .^ 
 
Faint, yd Ptir suing. 297 
 
 I, a called soldier and servant of Christ ! Why, I seem 
 to be the sport of every tempter ; I seem to fall easily 
 in with the drift of every current ; the things that I 
 would not, I do, constantly ; one half of my life is 
 spent in feeble indecisive struggling-, one half in 
 bitter, but impotent, regrets ! Why is the nature so 
 strong ; why is the world so seductive ; why is the 
 beauty of the flesh so fair ; why are the gauds of earth 
 so glittering ; why is my weak, vain, easily bedazzled 
 heart, so ready to fall down on its knees to drink of 
 the river, that glides and gurgles so sweetly at my 
 feet ? Why is the tempter so close and God so far ? 
 Why is not the strength more suflScient for these 
 things, the battle easier for God's soldier, the victory 
 more near and sure ? 
 
 Oh ! my Lord, if the Lord be with me, why 
 all this ? And, for answer, the sword of the Lord 
 is put into your hands. " Wherefore take unto you 
 the zvhole armour of God, that ye may be able to 
 withstand in the evil day, and having do7ie all, to 
 stand. Stand, therefore, having your loins girt about 
 ivith truth, and having on the breastplate of righteous- 
 ness ; and your feet shod zvith the preparation of the 
 gospel of peace ; above all, taking the shield of faith, 
 wherewith ye shall be able to qiiench all the fiery darts 
 of the wicked; and take the helmet of salvation, and 
 the szvord of the Spirit, which is the Woj'd of God'' — 
 Eph. vi. 13-17. 
 
 But first you must understand that you are a 
 called soldier. " / hiow thee by najne, and thou hast 
 found grace in my sight." Lay hold on that and be 
 
298 The Highei'- Life. 
 
 strong : yea, be strong. Ah ! you say., how may I 
 dare to reahse It — 
 
 I, a child of vain aspirings, 
 
 Futile will, and broken faith, 
 Fierce regrets and frenzied strivings, 
 
 Pressed by peril, pain, and death? 
 
 I seem but as a mote dancing in the sunbeam, 
 moved, Hke my fellow motes, by unseen currents ; 
 there is so little of purpose, of resolution, of will, in 
 any high sense, in my life. I am but an undistin- 
 guished unit in the vast human aggregate ; nothing 
 depends on me in life's great battle ; it matters little 
 where and how I stand ; it matters less where and 
 how I fall ! 
 
 One thing you must believe, or the despair will be 
 master. God so loved me, that He gave His only 
 begotten Son that /, through Him, might not perish 
 but have everlasting life. This is the fundamental 
 fact of your being, this is the Gospel of God to your 
 soul. Believe this, lay hold on it, grapple your soul 
 to it; and then, like Gideon, "take unto you the 
 whole armour of God," and fight. Fight under the 
 inspiration of Gideon's history. Your victory, too, 
 is to be a victory of faith. It is to be God's victory, 
 VioX.for you simply, but in you and by you. Believe 
 that there is a force within and behind you, bearing 
 you up and bearing you on with resistless pressure, 
 and making your final conquest as sure as the sweep 
 of the tide or the path of a star. Let the touch of 
 the sword-hilt as you arm for the battle, stir your 
 
Faint, yet Pursuing. 299 
 
 courage to attempt great enterprises. Soldiers are 
 as their captain. They will follow where he leads, 
 and attempt whatever his voice assures them can be 
 done. World, flesh, and devil will go down before 
 you, if you catch the inspiration of your great Cap- 
 tain's triumph. " Be of good cheei%' He cries, " / have 
 overcome the worlds ''This is the victory that ovcr- 
 cometh the world., even yo2ir faiths 
 
 II. "Faint, yet pursuing," describes the frequent 
 attitude and experience of the Christian combatant, 
 even in the most faithful soldiers of the Cross. In a 
 world whose Redeemer became the Man of Sorrows, 
 it is not given, to even His bravest followers, to pass 
 with assured and joyous step to victory. Faint, for 
 " without are fightings and within are fearsi' for the 
 best of us. And the feeling never quite vanishes, 
 even when faith is strongest and boldest, that we 
 are terribly over-matched. '' If the righteous scarcely 
 be saved,'' finds a sad expositor sometimes in the ex- 
 perience of the most righteous life. 
 
 There is an easily besetting notion which ensnares 
 most of us, and sets us from the first fundamentally 
 wrong, in our estimate of what we are to expect in 
 the Christian life. We have an idea that the Divine 
 light shining on things ought to dissipate all shadows, 
 and reveal to us all which pertains to life and godli- 
 ness, free from disfiguring mist and from confusion, 
 so clear that we can understand them at a glance. 
 We have a vague notion that the Divine strength 
 entering into a man, ought to make all things 
 easy to him ; all endurance, all achievement, all 
 
300 The Higher L ife. 
 
 victory. With God's strength within us, what can 
 resist us or rob us of success ? And then, when the 
 darkness falls round us perhaps more densely, when 
 new and perhaps graver perplexities afflict us, when 
 we find our strength fail at the critical moment, and 
 again, and again, and again we are worsted by the 
 tempter, we are prone to interpret it as a sign that 
 we are deluding ourselves about our vocation, that 
 our evidences have mocked us, and that we are still 
 the slaves of our dreaded and well-nigh almighty 
 foe. 
 
 But it is strange that in all the other departments 
 of life we are always prepared to believe, that what 
 is worth most will be likely to cost most ; that a high 
 aim implies a long endurance ; that great achieve- 
 ments are the fruit of great patience ; that strain 
 and pain, and weariness, are inevitable, if we would 
 make the highest use of our powers. We find it 
 in no wise wonderful if the great ones of the world, 
 the men and women who have created the most 
 precious heirlooms of our race, were oft-times faint, 
 weary, and ready to die under the stress of their 
 mighty travail. Did Dante never fainl, and fall as 
 dead, ere he had wrought his glorious work to such 
 divine completeness ; or Shakespeare as he travailed 
 in birth of Hamlet, or Bacon when he was creating 
 a new organ of knowledge, or Newton when he spelt 
 out the thoughts of God in the structure of Creation, 
 or Alfred when he bore, like Moses, the burden 
 of the destiny of his nation, or Turner when 
 he unveiled the splendour which lies hidden from 
 
Faint, yet Pursuing. 30T 
 
 common eyes, behind the famihar costume of the 
 world ? 
 
 It would not startle us to find that such men 
 were often faint, and weary even unto death of 
 the travail of their spirits ; ready to cry with Elijah, 
 Let me now die ; the work is too great for me ; I 
 am at the end of my power, unbind me, good 
 Master, and let me go free ! But in matters to 
 which all this is but as ancillary as culture is to 
 life, we are prone to take the first shock, the first 
 strain, the first feeling that we have touched the 
 limit of our power, as the sign that the Lord has 
 forsaken us, if, indeed. He ever stood with us; and 
 that ^^ Let 11s eat and drink, for to-inorroiu we die',' 
 expresses about the loftiest law of life which we may 
 ever hope to fulfil. 
 
 But do thou, therefore, prepare thyself to endure 
 hardness, good soldier of Jesus Christ. The strain 
 of the powers is an essential part of God's education 
 of the spirit. The inner weakness of which it be- 
 comes conscious, and the higher strength which 
 comes into it in the strain, are the most precious 
 of all your experiences. This is the experience 
 which will bear the richest fruit through eternity. 
 Faint we must be. There is always the sense that 
 the enterprise is too great for us, the race too hard, 
 the battle too stern and long. And it is too great, 
 too hard, too long, and God means us to feel it, 
 that we may rise to the true strength and dignity 
 of our manhood, by wedding our weakness and 
 emptiness to the Divine strength and fulness, and 
 
302 The Higher Life. 
 
 may thus be " filled with all the fulness of God " 
 through eternity. 
 
 Do not be afraid then of the faintness, if only 
 the will to pursue endures. It must come, in such 
 a nature as yours, in such a world as this. The 
 flesh so lusty, the world so gay, the broad path 
 so easy, so bright with the hue and the breath of 
 flowers ; intellect so bent on clouding the vision of 
 the spirit and confusing its intuitions, the heavenly 
 voices so hard to catch, lying prophets so many, 
 faithful prophets so few. Who can help fainting when 
 he measures all this, and measures himself against it ; 
 forgetful, as we are all forgetful in our poorest mo- 
 ments, that we have to set against it, not ourselves, 
 but God ? Take the faintness then as an inevitable 
 consequence of the race and the battle under the 
 present conditions of your being ; be it your one 
 concern to pursue. 
 
 Faint, yet pursuing. What is the state of mind, 
 or rather the condition of spirit, which is here un- 
 veiled to us ? It is the state of a man who has em- 
 braced a calling, who has set himself to a course, 
 from which there can be no withdrawal. His choice 
 is absolute and final. Here stand I, I can do no 
 other, God help me ! If I must die, I must die here ! 
 It is the attitude of a man who finds that his whole 
 being is bound up with his aim and purpose ; that to 
 forsake it, is simply to forsake his life. Those men 
 with Gideon must work deliverance from Midian. 
 Life, if that failed, would become intolerable, so they 
 must fight on until they won the day or died. 
 
Faint, yet Pnrstnn^. 303 
 
 And the Christian is the man who miist find 
 deliverance from evil, from the elements of his own 
 nature, and the elements of the world, which debase 
 and destroy the spiritual part of him, and would make 
 life in the end a thing dreary and terrible, even for the 
 brutes. He must find the way out of the present pain, 
 distress and anguish, through the higher gate which 
 leads out to the sunlio^ht, not throuoh the lower gate 
 which leads out to the pit. How many of my readers 
 are trying this way out from life's travail, with sullen 
 fierce pertinacity. But you know whither it leads. 
 The gloom, the stench of the pit sometimes envelope 
 you ; nay, there have been moments when its flames 
 have flashed out, hot and scorching, across your face. 
 Beware lest the faintness end in a swoon, from which 
 you will awaken there ! 
 
 But there are those close by you, in your home, 
 in your office, in your daily tasks, who are as faint 
 as you, who are full of the sense of the sadness of life 
 to the high-souled and earnest, the strain of the task 
 to those who count it blessed to endure, who fainting, 
 cry, ''Lord, I believe, but help Tkoii mine tinbeliefr This 
 hope I cannot resign, this purpose I cannot forsake, 
 this struggle to rise out of my dead self to higher 
 things, I cannot abandon. I am weak, faint, weary, 
 sometimes I feel as if I were clying, but if I die, I 
 will die here. Here at Thy feet ; here by Thy 
 cross ; here where every pain is purifying, where 
 suffering is salvation, here, Lord, give me strength to 
 keep, and to look on, to look up, if strength fails me 
 to pursue. " Faint, yet pursuing" to the last. 
 
304 The Higher Life. 
 
 Yes ! and the hour comes of a yet more deadly 
 faintness, when heart and flesh shah fail, and all, to 
 the dim, tearful, wasted eyes, shall seem vanishing 
 in the awful silence and darkness of death. I sup- 
 pose that moments will come when all will seem to 
 be vanishing". God, Christ, heaven, the harvest of 
 the pain of life, all vanishing in the darkness that 
 settles around the parting soul. But then the instinct, 
 the habit which we have trained by noble and con- 
 stant effort, of holding on though faint, of pursuing 
 though weary and ready to die, shall assert its 
 mastery. Through even the faintness of death the 
 soul shall hold on to its purpose, pursue its prize, 
 stretch forth and clasp its Christ. ** Faint, yet pur- 
 suing," shall be the last word that is said of it, as, 
 when the deathly pallor steals over the war-worn 
 face, the eye flashes once more, the cheek kindles, 
 the head is lifted, and the stiffening lips ring out a 
 triumphant strain : 
 
 Faint as I am I take the prey, 
 
 Hell, earth, and sin with ease overcome ; 
 
 I leap for joy, pursue my way, 
 And as a bounding hart fly home, 
 
 Through all eternity to prove 
 
 Thy nature and Thy name is love. 
 
305 
 
 XVI. 
 
 THE VICTORY OF LIFE. 
 
 'Wavi He which liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for 
 evermore." — Rev. i. i8. 
 
 The Apocalypse completes and crowns the Revela- 
 tion of God. It is not one of the weakest of the 
 arguments for the authority of this book, that with- 
 out It the fabric of Scripture would be manifestly un- 
 finished. I speak advisedly of the fabric of Scrip- 
 ture. To some it may appear to be a collection of 
 scattered Divine utterances, spoken by the lips of all 
 sorts of men, under all sorts of circumstances, and at 
 all sorts of times ; gathered up at random into one 
 book, to be a repertory of doctrine, consolation, Guid- 
 ance and warning, for all sorts of men in all ao-es of 
 the world. And regarded from this point of'view 
 Its manifoldness-the infinitely varied experiences of 
 which It IS the utterance and to which it addresses 
 itself-renders the Bible a very marvellous book. In 
 Its breadth of human sympathy, its interest for man 
 under all conditions, in all countries, in all ao-es it 
 stands forth as incomparably the foremost bo^ok'in 
 the world. 
 
 But to me, I confess, the most conspicuous as well 
 
3o6 The Higher Life. 
 
 as the grandest feature of the Book is its unity. It 
 is the thought of one Mind which is uttering itself 
 through manifold free and independent organs ; and 
 the unity of that Mind is manifest; through all the 
 rich varieties of modulation the one key-note is never 
 lost. The Divine plan of the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 the Kingdom of a redeemed humanity, which it 
 needed a higher than a human imagination to con- 
 ceive, rules the whole revelation. From the first 
 chapter of the Book of Genesis, which records what 
 was done ''in the beginning',' to the last chapter of 
 the Apocalypse, which pictures what shall be done in 
 the end, this idea of the Divine Kingdom is manifestly 
 before the mind, not of the writers, but of Him by 
 whom the writers were moved. They comprehend 
 it with more or less of clearness, though at the best 
 but partially. It was much if they had a clear un- 
 derstanding of that part of the plan, the execution of 
 which was trusted to their hands. But I cannot 
 read any book of the Bible, without seeming to see 
 the image of an idea hovering, spirit-like, behind the 
 particular scope and purpose of the book, whether 
 it be History, Prophecy, Psalm, Gospel, Epistle, or 
 Apocalypse. And it is this "idea" which accounts 
 for all the deepest things shadowed forth, rather than 
 contained, in the words of the individual writer, the 
 whole range of which he could but dimly discern ; 
 while it links on each part to the whole, which, com- 
 plex as it is, is perhaps the completest unity to be 
 met with in the higher literature of the world. 
 
 It is not mere fancy which attributes something 
 
The Victory of Life. 307 
 
 like inspiration to the poet. The world's chief 
 singers have in some sort enquired dih'gently, what 
 the spirit which was working within them did signify ; 
 there seemed to be some higher power acting upon 
 them, and they felt reverently that there was more 
 in their words than they could fully master, which 
 the growing experience of the ages would reveal to 
 mankind. And so these great ones who wrote our 
 Bible, knew that there was more in the words 
 which the Spirit within them moved them to utter, 
 than they could grasp with their understandings ; a 
 ti?cught, a plan of God, which in its wholeness 
 eternity only can disclose. No complete plan of the 
 Divine operation in Redemption, could have been 
 before the minds of the various writers of the Bible, 
 even the most masterly, such as Moses, Isaiah, St. 
 John and St. Paul. And yet the Bible as a whole 
 reveals a complete plan, and is the way-book of the 
 pilgrimage of the great human host — of man, fallen in 
 Adam and dead, quickened in Christ and raised — 
 from the Eden of his infancy to the Heaven of his 
 matured, disciplined and victorious powers. 
 
 Of that plan it is impossible, to me at least, to 
 doubt, that this book of the Apocalypse is an essen- 
 tial feature. It is like the brow of the human 
 form, circled with the crown. The central picture 
 is crowned humanity ; the exile of Eden, through 
 Redemption, the crowned comrade of the Eternal 
 King. It seems to me as if the Scripture could not 
 fitly close its oracle without an Apocalypse. Remem- 
 ber, it began from heaven. ''In the beginning',^ 
 
 X 2 
 
3o8 The Higher Life. 
 
 from heaven was dropped the first golden Hnk 
 of the chain of history. The Scripture would not 
 have been complete unless the last link also had been 
 visibly taken up into heaven. From heaven and to 
 heaven is the way of humanity, through the depths 
 of pain and of death. That could have been no way- 
 book of our pilgrimage which left us in those depths, 
 even with a promise of deliverance. Man must .5ee 
 into heaven, and catch the vision there of his glori- 
 fied estate, or the darkness of his house of bondage 
 would bury his hope for ever. 
 
 Without the Apocalypse, and that realising hold 
 of the thing^s of the eternal state which it offers to the 
 redeemed, man's comfort and joy of the Scripture 
 would have been as imperfect, as Redemption would 
 have been without the resurrection of the Lord. 
 What the ascension of the risen Saviour is to Re- 
 demption, the Apocalypse is to the Scripture. It 
 lifts it into the world of the resurrection, where 
 the risen Man reigns for ever. It unveils to us 
 the wonders and glories of the state which has 
 sorrow, sin, and death behind it, instead of before 
 it. We hear the hymns, we join in the praises, 
 we see the very forms of those who have emerged 
 for ever from this chaos of confusion, of darkness, 
 and of sorrow, in which we are struggling ; and in 
 which it seems to us, when the eye of faith grows 
 dim, that our hope and the hope of humanity must 
 be lost. But we see them there, in their shining jubi- 
 lant ranks, around Him who "■ liveth and was dead, 
 and behold He is alive for evermore^ and hath the 
 keys of Hell and of Deal hi' and hope is saved. 
 
The Victory of Life. 309 
 
 The Apocalypse unveils to us the life of those 
 who have crossed the river, and have set their con- 
 quering feet upon the eternal shore. There is no 
 promise so full of consolation, there is no prophecy 
 so inspiring to hope, as this vision of the life of the 
 blessed ones who can sing, " Worthy is the Lamb 
 that zvas slain!' " Blessing, and honour, and g'lo7y, 
 and power, be unto Him that sitteth on the throne, 
 and to the Lamb for ever and ever!' It is the life 
 which they are living there which we look upon, and 
 the light of it falls with a solemn, mysterious lustre 
 on the dark sea across which we urge our way. The 
 waves which plash and moan around us are crested 
 with an unearthly brightness. The wail of our 
 struggle is crossed and lifted into a hymn by a strain 
 of glorious triumphant music, which falls on the 
 trembling air from the height of the upper world. 
 The light which shines, and the music which sings 
 through the Apocalypse, are the very glow of the 
 heavenly joy, and the inspiration of the heavenly 
 hope. While the central figure of the whole, the 
 Being around whom the lustre glows, the music 
 tloats, and the blessed ones throng, is " the Lamb 
 that was slain!' whose word, whose self affirmation, 
 is the sentence of our text, " / am He that liveth and 
 was dead, and behold / am alive for evermore. Amen, 
 and have the keys of Hell and of Death!' 
 
 I. The broad assertion of the text is, the victory 
 of life. 
 
 The living One, He by whom and in whom all 
 things live, has died, and is alive again, and liveth for 
 
3 1 o The Higher L ife. 
 
 evermore, Death and Hell lying conquered at His feet. 
 In other words, Life and Death, that which quickens 
 in the universe and that which destroys, have met, 
 shut up to the decisive conflict, and Life has proved 
 itself the stronger. Death seemed to win the triumph 
 for the moment ; Life won the victory for eternity. 
 It is the assertion of the eternally superior power of 
 the Life. Henceforth and for ever lifjht is stronger 
 than darkness, truth than lies, God than sin. And 
 the assurance rests visibly — to the eye of faith — on 
 an actual and decisive trial. It is not the region of 
 ideas, but of fact, which is here disclosed. It is not 
 an imagined, expected, promised, or prophesied, but 
 an actual and palpable victory, to the end that " we 
 might have strong consolation, and a good hope 
 through grace." It is in truth the turning-point in 
 the history of man, and in the destiny of the universe. 
 When Death and Life wrestled in the God- Man, and 
 Life trod Death in the dust, the problem which had 
 hung- like a menacinof shadow over the destinies of 
 all living things, and had buried the world till that 
 hour in a darkness which might be felt, was solved 
 for ever. Death, the insulting spoiler, was stripped 
 of his spoils and slain. 
 
 And who, but for Christ, would dare to prophesy 
 that victory ? Who, looking into his own heart, his 
 own life, the experience of humanity, or the condition 
 of the world, would venture to affirm that Life was 
 the stronger, and that the dark shadow on the uni- 
 verse was waning before the kindling day. " Sijt 
 reigneth imto deathl' is the wail of humanity, is the 
 
The Victory of Life. 311 
 
 wail of life. Our forefathers believed that the night 
 was the stronger power ; the womb out of which all 
 things were born, and to which all things would 
 return. Life seemed to them to be a hopeless failure. 
 Loss, pain, regret, fear, anguish, these seemed to 
 them to be the leading threads in the woof of a human 
 experience. Sickness, decay, death, to them seemed 
 to round the whole. States seemed to be hopelessly 
 prone to corruption, rulers to tyranny, children to 
 perverseness, friends to treachery, riches to flight, 
 honour to stain. The battle seemed to them doomed 
 from the first to issue in the triumph of the dark 
 powers ; against whom with stern resolution they 
 struggled, and whose yoke they wrestled hard to 
 shake off, but with no hope of ultimate victory. 
 
 The Prometheus, the Laocoon, the Hamlet — and 
 Hamlet is profoundly Teutonic, and expressive of the 
 native genius of our race — present to us the picture 
 of human destiny, if we turn away from the Gospel 
 with its Apocalypse. Man struggling heroically, but 
 struggling hopelessly. The eagle of the almighty 
 tyrant preying upon his vitals ; the serpents of fate 
 coiling tighter and tighter about his limbs ; the native 
 hue of resolution sicklied o'er by the pale cast of 
 thought ; " I dare not" waiting ever on " I would" ; 
 the face of the heroic combatant set in stern defiance, 
 but settling slowly into utter, agonising despair. 
 
 Life seems very terrible to all the nobler peoples 
 who are unblessed by an Apocalypse ; and are there 
 not seasons when even the revelation of life and im- 
 mortality fails to dissipate its terror for us ? Know 
 
1 2 The Higher Life. 
 
 you no moments when a feeling of blank despair 
 about yourself, about your dear ones, about your 
 people, about the world, settles darkly over the 
 spirit ? " Progress ! " you say ; " I see little sign of 
 it. I remember my bright youth ; would to God 
 that I could now recover the freshness, the purity, 
 the hope, the spring, the sense of an unseen sympathy, 
 which then lit my life and made it a joyous thing to 
 be ! And where is the dignity, the purity, the lofti- 
 ness, of the life of the men of old time, the time of great 
 struggles and great achievements, of heroes, apostles, 
 confessors, mart3^rs, and saints ? What has the world 
 to show in place of the ancient heroism ? Express 
 trains, electric telegraphs, and calicoes at sixpence a 
 yard, go but a little way towards making life noble 
 and beautiful ; and a progress of which these are the 
 chief exponents, may quite possibly be a progress 
 towards a nearer fellowship with the brutes." 
 
 Progress is a noble word, a beautiful word. But 
 it is wonderful how some of the purest and keenest 
 searchers for the signs of it, are driven well-nigh mad 
 in all ages, and notably in our own, in their endeavours 
 to discover them. Trace the tone of sadness which 
 breathes through St. Paul's later epistles, and through 
 the writings of St, John. It may help us to under- 
 stand better the undertone of something like despair, 
 which lends such pathetic power to the writings of 
 men like Mr. Carlyle and Mr, Ruskin in our day. 
 Paul the aged compared what the Church had 
 grown to, with the heavenly beauty of the life of that 
 little company at Jerusalem ; it was like the wilder- 
 
The Victory of Life. 31, 
 
 ness to Eden. Progress ! The first thing which the 
 Church did was to fall. Read St. Paul's letters to 
 Timothy, and St. John's letters to the Churches, and 
 see what the Church had progressed to, I believe 
 that the progress would just have driven them mad, 
 as it has so many noble thinkers and workers, but 
 for the clear vision of Him " wJto livetJi and was 
 dead, and is alive J or evermore!' 
 
 Faith saved those noble hearts from utter wreck. 
 They could see little that gladdened them in the 
 present, or cheered them in the future, but by faith 
 they shared the vision of Christ and foresaw His 
 final and glorious victory. They understood by faith 
 that God had not wasted such priceless treasure, or 
 staked the future of His kingdom on an experiment, 
 which the devil with all his arts would be able tc 
 frustrate. They knew that the victory of Christ was 
 prophetic, and that every enemy of His benign and 
 glorious reign must lie, one day, where death lay, 
 prostrate beneath the Redeemer's feet. And their 
 hope through Christ was unconquerable. May ours 
 be as victorious ! Against all the despondency, the 
 despair, into which the reign of sin in us, in our 
 friends, in our country, and in the world, may plunge 
 us, let us set up the standard of Him who " was 
 dead and is alive again, and zvJio liveth for evermore!' 
 
 Let us consider — 
 
 1 1. The special form which this assertion assumes 
 It met, and was intended to meet, two grievous forms 
 of error, which in the apostolic age were threatening 
 the truth from quite opposite sides. If they were 
 
14 The Higher Life. 
 
 simply errors of the early Church, we might leave 
 them there among the lumber of the past ; but they 
 run through the whole course of Christian history, 
 and rise up in full vigour to affront us at the present 
 day. The Death, the Life ; one or the other, men 
 think, must be unreal. He was simply man if He 
 died ; The Life could not die. If He was the Life, 
 the essential Eternal Life, His death could have been 
 but a phantom, a mere drama of suffering, full of 
 pathetic power to the spectators, but still with no 
 reality behind. The great biography must be, they 
 thought, either the life of a human martyr, or a drama 
 of sorrow and of death enacted by a God. But 
 John felt that the whole power of the Gospel narra- 
 tive lay in its solid reality. To him the things which 
 he recorded concerning Christ, were just the clearest 
 and most substantial facts in the history of the world ; 
 while men were in fearful peril of substituting for 
 them their theories of Divine things. 
 
 How far are we from the heart of this danger now ? 
 John saw the apostacy looming in the distance, for 
 apostacy it is, from fact to fancy, from life to theory 
 about life, from Christ to the " Idea of the Divine." 
 He knew that the time was at hand when the Church 
 would be rent by questions of idle or dark philoso- 
 phies ; while the living man Christ Jesus would appear 
 dimly and yet more dimly through the haze. And 
 I believe that he wrote the Apocalypse, that he might 
 keep before the eye of the world the form of a living 
 Saviour, the Man who once lived on earth and died, 
 and who was living, to die no more, in heaven. The 
 
The Victory of Life. 315 
 
 solid fact of the Gospel, is the substance of the reve- 
 lation of the Apocalypse. The form of the living 
 Christ, carrying on the work of this world, is the first 
 figure that we meet with in the opening chapter ; and 
 the word "of His living lips prolongs its echo to the 
 close. The real life, the real death, the real victory 
 of life through death — this is the Apocalypse. The 
 intense reality of the struggle of the power of life 
 with the principle and power of death, in the ex- 
 perience of the man Christ Jesus ; the final effort of 
 the power of death to slay the Prince of Life and to 
 hold Him dead ; and the absolute and eternal over- 
 throw of all that, sprung from sin, was making waste 
 the world — these are the great realities which are 
 here unveiled. 
 
 To those who were persuaded that the resur- 
 rection was a myth — and we can see how deeply even 
 in St. Paul's days this heresy had tainted the Church 
 — the Apocalypse presents the familiar form in the 
 glory of the resurrection. " The Lamb that was 
 slain" appears, wearing the signs of the Cross and 
 Passion, in the midst of the Throne, before which 
 the heads of all created orders, throueh all the 
 spheres, bent low in prostrate adoration. To those 
 who believed that this glorious and blessed Being 
 had only played at dying, it unveils the mystery 
 of Calvary ; it reveals the Cross and Passion and 
 the precious blood, as the theme of the most intense 
 meditation to celestial spirits, the subject-matter of 
 their most blest communion, and the burden of their 
 most exulting and universal songs. It is as though 
 
3 1 6 The Higher Life. 
 
 the beloved disciple had said, the fact of Calvary 
 shall never be buried under man's theories of Re- 
 demption ; the life of the God-Man in heaven shall 
 be unveiled, and shall become part of the life of the 
 race which He has redeemed. Death shall be no 
 barrier, no veil. The world behind the veil shall 
 become as tangibly, visibly real as the world of our 
 daily tasks. The risen God-Man shall dwell among 
 His brethren, shall meet them in their daily paths, 
 and mix with them in their daily toils. He who 
 liveth and was dead, and is alive for evermore, shall 
 appear in their midst; He shall join Himself to them, 
 as once to the two who journeyed to Emmaus. He 
 shall walk with them, talk with them, strive with 
 them, suffer with them, rejoice with them ; and shall 
 make them understand that His interest and hope 
 and theirs are for ever one. 
 
 Musing thus, his heart was open to the full tide of 
 inspiration. The Apocalypse took shape and grew 
 to completeness under his hands. 
 
 ''He that liveth!' The Author and the Giver 
 of life, He in whom all that lives lives, all that 
 moves moves, all that is has its being, in human form 
 mastered the experience of death. What was the 
 problem which the fatal exercise of freedom proposed 
 for Divine solution ? It was this. Shall the life of 
 God perish in all beings whom He has made free ? 
 Shall all in the universe that has power to separate 
 itself from His life, die ? Shall His reign be perfect 
 only over dumb, dead matter ? Shall the stars, the 
 storms, the dews, the flowers, the lights, the shadows, 
 
The Victory of Life. 317 
 
 alone obey His will ? Shall He rule supreme in the 
 world of matter, while living hearts, and wills, and 
 voices defy Him, and break away from His sphere ? 
 Shall the morning smile of Creation flash up from 
 the dewy spray and the gleaming meadow, while 
 rvery eye that has in it the speculation of an intelli- 
 i^^ent spirit turns from Him, and every voice which 
 utters the decisions of a free will declares. Depart 
 from me, I desire not the knowledge of Thy ways ? 
 
 This was the aim of evil. Death is the separa- 
 tion of that which lives in God from the Life that is 
 in God. And evil aims at the separation of the 
 whole sphere of free intelligence from God, and the 
 reign of Death over all that was made in the likeness 
 of (jod in this world. Nor did the aim appear hope- 
 less. The freeborn sons had yielded to the tempter. 
 Through all the sphere of intelligent being sin 
 wrought mightily unto Death. Very terrible was the 
 aspect of the great world before the face of Him who 
 had made it so blessed. Wrong, misery, cursing, 
 everywhere. The earth full of violence, and the ear 
 of Heaven vexed with the moans of pain or the 
 frantic outbursts of despair. 
 
 And He who was the Life entered into the 
 very heart of it. He did not look down upon it, 
 He entered into it; and where the darkness was 
 densest, where the pain was sharpest, where the 
 despair was most dire, the Life entered to try to 
 the last conclusion the question. Shall the reigning 
 power in this universe, eternally, be Life or Death ? Is 
 there power in God to conquer that death which is 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 desolating His dominion? Is there a way of restoring 
 free beings, whom evil has taught to hate Him, to the 
 sphere of His love? And the answer is here : ''Foras- 
 much then as the children are partakers of flesh and 
 blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same, 
 that through death He might destroy him that had the 
 poiver of death, that is the devil ; and deliver them who 
 through fear of death wei^e all their lifetime subject to 
 
 bondage For this purpose was the Son of God 
 
 manifested that he might destroy the works of the 
 Devil." He was manifested by Death and by Life, 
 Life bowing itself to Death, Life rising out of Death 
 and triumphing over Death for ever. 
 
 Our fathers were right in their thought about the 
 night. They were right in their dream of the twi- 
 light of the gods, but they failed to see the morning 
 that was beyond it. The living One was to die. The 
 Author and Giver of life was to pass under the do- 
 minion of death. For the moment deep darkness 
 settled over all. There was darkness over the whole 
 land, perhaps over other worlds than this. The Prince 
 of Life slain on Calvary ; the Prince of Darkness 
 master of the hour ; Hell triumphant, Heaven 
 defeated, its King captive, condemned, and slain. 
 And thus the Son of God destroyed the works of 
 the Devil. The victim was the conqueror. Life, 
 bursting from the prison of Death, rent in sunder 
 its bars for ever. He proclaimed the eternal victory 
 of Life, and drew the captives of Death with Him, 
 redeemed, to His celestial sphere. Destroying Death 
 by dying. He destroyed the centre and core of its 
 
The Victory of Life. 319 
 
 power. The weakest, mist unarmed and submissive 
 of beings, delivered Himself into the hand of the 
 destroyer. The Life which was in Him was the one 
 power which He did not part with. The shattering 
 of the prison-house of death by that simple power, 
 began that triumphant work of Redemption which 
 has placed Death and Hell as conquered captives 
 at His feet, and has raised their victims to sit by 
 Him on His eternal throne. 
 
 And He liveth for evermore, and evermore must 
 conquer. The future of the universe is the future of 
 Life ; sin and death are scattered as dark shadows be- 
 fore the waxing day. It is life's glorious, everlasting 
 triumph. " I am He which liveth and was dead, and 
 behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of 
 Hell and of Deathr Let not your heart be troubled ; 
 ye believe in God, believe also in Him. Believe in 
 the Life. Believe in the victory of Calvary. Believe 
 in the King who has led captivity captive, and has 
 given the gift of Redemption to the world. Death 
 shall not have dominion over you. He who was 
 dead is alive, and liveth for evermore, to conquer 
 death in you, in the world, in the great universe, and 
 to subdue finally all things unto Himself. Hard as 
 it may be to hope, heavy as may be the pressure of 
 evil on you and on the world, the worst pressure has 
 been met and broken. The Lord has overcome the 
 world. Masterful as the world may seem, its strength 
 is broken, it can have the mastery no more. Every 
 age the triumph of Life extends its train ; the circle of 
 light widens ; the Kingdom of Heaven grows. It may 
 
320 The Higher Life. 
 
 be hard to trace it amid the confusions of time ; we 
 see it through the Apocalypse amid the serenities of 
 eternity. 
 
 We, too, can stand by the seer and see "^ 7iew 
 heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and 
 the first earth were passed away, and thei^e was no 
 more sea. And I, John, saw the holy City, New 
 y erusaleni, coming down from God, out of heaven, 
 prepaj^ed as a bride adorned for her husband. And I 
 heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold the 
 tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell 
 with them, and they shall be His people, and God 
 Himself shall be zuith them, and be their God. And 
 God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ; and 
 there shall be no moi^e death, neither soi^row, nor cry- 
 ing, neither shall there be any morepaiii, for the former 
 thhigs are passed away." "': Round us, too, the strain 
 of that mighty music floats, "/ hea?^d as it were the 
 voice of a great multitiide, and as the voice of many 
 waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, 
 saying, Alleluia, for the Lord God omnipotent 
 reigneth. Let tis be glad and rejoice, and give honour 
 to Him ; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, 
 and His wife hath made herself ready. And to 
 her it zuas granted that she should be arrayed in 
 fine linen, clean and white ; for the fine linen is the 
 righteousness of saints. And He said unto me. Write, 
 Blessed are they which are called to the marriage 
 supper of the Lamb!' Yea, blessed are they, for they 
 rest from their travail, and their works follow them 
 to the sphere of Light and Life on high. 
 
;2i 
 
 XVII. 
 
 THE KEYS OF HELL AND OF DEATH. 
 
 " And have the keys of Hell and of Death." — Rev. i. i8. 
 
 This verse announces and celebrates, as we have 
 seen, the triumph of Life ; Death's dominion shat- 
 tered by the Resurrection, the crown stripped from 
 his brow, his throne prostrate in the dust. The 
 word of the Gospel is not " man shall rise," but 
 "man has risen." The dead is alive again, and 
 liveth for evermore. The triumph of Life is com- 
 plete ; the ages but swell its train. Life has entered 
 the realm of death, has bowed to its yoke and burst 
 it for ever. The great problem of the universe is 
 solved. It is settled now and settled for ever, that 
 the future is to be the realm of Life, and that Death 
 is doomed to die. Till that act of Resurrection Death 
 triumphed. Human and angelic worlds trembled at 
 his aspect, and shuddered under his pall. Freedom, 
 that glorious divine thing, without which the reign of 
 God in His universe had been but half divine, had 
 simply filled the prison-house : angels, men, led in 
 dark captivity ; Death reigning in insolent triumph 
 over all. Very terrible to the eye of Him who 
 made all so beautiful, so blessed, was the aspect of 
 
 Y 
 
322 77^1^ Higher Life. 
 
 the world. Not one child of the race whom He 
 made in His likeness, to be kings of this wealthy and 
 splendid Creation, true to His allegiance ! '' All gone 
 aslray ;" " all become filthy ;" " none doing righteous- 
 ness, no not oner 
 
 One deluge had swept over the earth and 
 cleansed its pollution ; and a new founder of the 
 race stepped forth into a new world. Again Death 
 won the easy mastery. Again every free-born child 
 of man, as his first act of freedom, refused the Lord 
 of life, and chose the lord of death to be his king. 
 And the tyranny became terrible, the darkness utter. 
 To the eye of the understanding, perhaps to the eye 
 of dark watchers behind the veil, the dream of our 
 Norse forefathers seemed to be slowly fulfilling itself: 
 the twilight of the gods, the bright friends and 
 helpers of man, seemed to be deepening into the 
 eternal night. A shaft of glorious light flashed 
 throuofh that nio-ht at the Resurrection, and streams 
 of living splendour have been flowing down, from 
 that hour of Life's triumph until now. Death was 
 conquered, destroyed, in the very shrine of his 
 power ! The living one " became dead," with a pur- 
 pose and for an end. He became dead, He "accom- 
 plished" a decease at Jerusalem ; the Life by its in- 
 herent might raised Him up again, and lifted Him 
 to a throne at the right hand of God. Life rising 
 out of death, spoiled the realm of Death for ever. 
 The prison is rent, the bars are broken, the veil is 
 parted. Henceforth Death can reign over none, but 
 those who will to die. 
 
The Keys of Hell and of Death. 323 
 
 The world of Jesus and the Resurrection is 
 now the true homeland of man's spirit. " Ye then, 
 risen with Christ, seek the things which are above, 
 where ChiHst sitteth at the right hand of God!' The 
 Life of Christ, which is in you by faith, is that Life 
 over which Death was powerless, and is powerless 
 for ever. That Life which is its fountain is per- 
 petually triumphing over Death, and showing openly 
 the spoils. It is a triumph which He has won for, 
 and will complete in, you. Believe in the victory 
 and win it. " This is the victory that overcometh the 
 world, even your faith ;" — your faith in Him who has 
 overcome. Doubt the power of the Life, and Death 
 becomes your tyrant. Cry, " Lord, I believe^' and 
 Death becomes the shadow of a shade. This is the 
 grand lesson of the Apocalypse. It is not the pro- 
 mise, the prophecy, but the vision of the triumph 
 which it unveils. The Lord of Life assertine His 
 mastery over Hell and Death, and leading on the 
 triumphal progress ; till in the new Jerusalem sorrow, 
 sighing, sin, and death shall be memories of vanished 
 things to the living universe for ever and for ever. 
 
 I. There is the deepest meaning in the word, 
 " I became dead," which conveys the exact force of 
 the original. 
 
 It implies the act of a will, an effort made, a 
 work done, for an end. There was no abstract 
 necessity that the blessed One should become the 
 Man of Sorrows ; that the living One should taste 
 the bitterness of death. The necessity lay, not in 
 the Creator's duty to the creature, but in the Father's 
 
 y 2 
 
324 The Higha^ Life. 
 
 love to the child. We can conceive of the Lord of 
 Life and of Licrht abiding- serene in the celestial 
 spheres, blessed in His own blessedness, and leaving 
 a sinful world to stagger on in its blindness, and to 
 bury itself at last in the gloom of the everlasting- 
 night. We can conceive that the doom of Sodom, 
 of Pompeii, might have overtaken the whole world 
 which lay in the wicked one ; and that one stern and 
 righteous stroke of judgment might have ended the 
 dark experiment of freedom for ever. 
 
 But a Father's heart had to be satisfied, while a 
 righteous government had to be upheld. Hence, a 
 new, and we may call it a divine necessity, arose, 
 whose root lies in that which the moral instinct of 
 man recognises as most godlike in God. "// became 
 Him of zulwm are all things and by whom are all 
 things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the 
 Captain of their salvation peifect through suffer ing.'' 
 And thus the living One " became dead." " It pleased 
 the Father that in Him shoiild all fulness dwell!' He 
 was first-born of life, it pleased the Father that He 
 should become the firstborn of death, that in all things 
 He might have the pre-eminence. First in honour, first 
 in power, first in glory, the Lord's elect one, the First- 
 born, He should be first too in strain, in sorrow, in 
 wounds and in death. No being in the universe 
 should be doomed to pass through an experience 
 which the Lord of the universe shrank from sharing ; 
 or be compelled to drink a cup of bitterness, of which 
 the most Blessed had not already drained the dregs. 
 
 You observe that I use the words doomed and 
 
The Keys of Hell aiid of Death. 325 
 
 compelled. Much of our suffering here is inevitable. 
 We are born into a world of sin and of sufferino-. 
 The condition of our. life is struggle, and sharp pain 
 cannot in anywise be escaped. God does not ask 
 the consent of our will to such a life as that to which 
 we are born. He breathes the breath of life into 
 our nostrils according to His will, and at His 
 pleasure He reclaims it. But much of our experi- 
 ence of sorrow is our own work ; much of our misery 
 we make for ourselves, by our conscious, lustful, 
 guilty sin. This we must bear alone. There is no 
 necessity for this experience. The anguish of re- 
 morse, the horror of despair, are not the things which 
 it became Him to know, when He would become 
 perfect as the Captain of salvation through suffering. 
 
 And yet there is an awful, and to us unfathomable 
 sense in which, through the intensity of His sympathy 
 with the race which He came to redeem, nay, rather 
 through the perfectness of His participation of their 
 life, the sinless One did know it. A moment of 
 dreadful God forsaken darkness passed over His 
 spirit, and the knowledge entered into Him of what 
 a soul accursed from God might endure. But in all 
 the common human experience the Son of Man was 
 to win His pre-eminence by suffering. ''Himself 
 took 02ir infirmities, and bare oilt sicknesses^' that all 
 fulness, fulness of knowledge, of sympathy, of power 
 to help and to save, might dwell in Him, and flow 
 forth to all our need. 
 
 And He "became dead." It was part of that 
 plan. " Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I 
 
326 The Higher L ife. 
 
 lay dowji My life that I might take it again. No 
 man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself . 
 1 have power to lay it down, and I have power to take 
 it again. This commandment have I received of My 
 Father!' He entered of His own free will, with no 
 armament but Life, the realm of Death, and by living, 
 demonstrated Death to be powerless. In the might 
 of the Life He arose triumphant, Death and Hell led 
 captive in His train ; and now He holds the keys of 
 their prison-house and bears off all their spoils. Age 
 by age the great company of the ransomed, an ever 
 widening train, comes home with songs ; " Unto Him 
 that hath loved us, and washed 2is from our sins in 
 His ow7t blood, and hath made 20s kings and priests 
 unto God; to Him be glory and dominion for ever and 
 ever. Amen!' 
 
 \\. ''Amen; and have the keys of Hell and of 
 Death!' 
 
 Hell —Hades, the invisible world to which death 
 is the portal — all that has to do with death, and the 
 beyond. 
 
 The word " keys " of course signifies mastery. To 
 give over the key of a house, is to give possession of 
 the house. To hold the keys of a prison, is to hold 
 the destiny of the captives who are bound in its 
 chains. The word expresses absolute mastery ; the 
 power of a Lord to do with things what He will. 
 
 The commentators on this passage seem to dwell 
 mainly on the idea of release : power to unbind, to 
 throw open the prison doors, and to let the captives 
 o;o free. It is no doubt a very important feature in 
 
The Keys of Hell and of Death. 327 
 
 the suggestions of the text; power to loose, to ran'^om, 
 to save. But I doubt much whether it is the chief 
 suggestion. Power of entrance seems to be quite as 
 important a feature of the matter as power of exit ; 
 so also power of discipline, power of control, power 
 of ordering and ruling — everything in fact which a 
 complete mastery involves. The Lord has won, not 
 a victory only, but a supremacy. He has not only 
 conquered Death, He has made him subject, and 
 uses him now with royal right as the instrument of 
 His benignant will. 
 
 In illustrating this point let me ask you to con- 
 sider : — 
 
 I. The Lord's entrance into the realm of Death 
 and Hell, as the first act of mastery, whereby He has 
 absolutely subjected them to Himself. 
 
 I think that David had a clear vision of what 
 is implied in the power of the keys, when he sang, 
 " Yea, though I walk throtLgh the valley of the shadozu 
 of death, I ivill fear no evil; for Thou art zoith me. 
 Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. Siirely 
 goodness and mercy shall folloiv me all the days of 
 my life, and I zuill dzvell in the honse of the Lord for 
 ever!' The Lord's entrance there lit up the darkness 
 of Hades, and turned the prison-house into a home. 
 He entered, and all heaven entered with Him. It 
 was just the conquest for men of this dark domain, 
 and its annexation to the kingdom of God in our 
 world. Death and Hades had become terrible 
 through transgression. Sin had created a realm into 
 which the sunlight had no entrance, whose very 
 
328 The Higher Life. 
 
 existence, as it were, was a defiance of God. The 
 Lord entered it and reclaimed its allegiance. He 
 said, " There shall be no part of the universe 
 whence light, and life, and love are by right ex- 
 cluded. I bear them with Me into the shadow of 
 death ; the shadow lifts, vanishes ; it is all in the 
 sunlight and for evermore." I see how far this 
 principle reaches. How far did Christ's heart-clasp 
 reach when he said, as the supreme moment of 
 anguish drew near, " And I if I be lifted zip from 
 the em'th will draw all men unto Me!' 
 
 God has entered the darkness. He who is " God 
 of God, Light of Light, very God of very God," has 
 entered it to die ; to pass within the veil is but to 
 follow Him. To them of old time, in their darker 
 moments when vision was clouded, it seemed like 
 being parted from Him. " God is here in the sun- 
 light. This is the living world which God frequents ; 
 here I am near to Him ; I shall lose Him if I pass 
 into the shades." The ancients found it hard to 
 shake off the impression that the shadow of death 
 was the shadow of evil. Life to them was the 
 continent of light, while all round a great ocean of 
 darkness spread, which was the domain of the grisly 
 king. 
 
 This imagination tinctures all their writings. 
 They shrank from death because they dreaded the 
 dark power, into whose domain they believed that it 
 would usher them. Hezekiah's lamentation is the 
 strongest expression of this dread which we meet 
 with in Scripture ; indeed, I know not anything in 
 
The Keys of Hell and of Death. 329 
 
 literature so steeped in this sadness, unless it be 
 some of the Hindoo hymns. '' I said in the ctttting 
 off of my days I shall go to the gates of the grave : I 
 am deprived of the residue of my years. I said, I 
 shall not see the Lord, even the Lord, in the land of 
 the living ; L shall behold man no m.ore with the in- 
 habitants of the world!' " Mine age is departed, and 
 is removed from me as a sh'^phei^d s tent ; L have cni 
 off like a zveaver my life ; He will cnt me off with 
 pining sickness : from day even nnto night wilt Thou 
 make an end of me. L reckoned till morning that, as 
 a lion, so will He break all my bones : from day even 
 to night zuilt Thou make an end of me. Like a cra7ie, 
 or a szvallow, so did L chatter ; L did mourn as a dove : 
 mine eyes fail with looking tipwards : O Lord, L am 
 of^pressed ; undertake for me. What shall L say ? 
 He hath both spoken 7cnto me, and Himself hath done 
 it ; L shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of 
 my soul." — Isaiah xxxviii. 10-15. 
 
 Even David in his gloomier moments was touched 
 with it. ''Lord, make me to knozv mine end, and the 
 7neasure of my days, what it is ; that / may know how 
 frail L am. Behold Thou hast made my days as an 
 handbreadth, and mine age is as nothing before Thee : 
 verily 7nan at his best estate is altogether vanity. . . . 
 0, spare me, that / fjiay recover strength before L go 
 hence and be no more!'' — Psalms xxxix. 4, 5, 13. The 
 book of Ecclesiastes too is deeply tinctured with this 
 gloomy view of the unseen world. Indeed, it seems 
 gloomy all round to the writer of that book. " Vanitas 
 vanitatum ; omnia vanitas," is the epitaph of that 
 
The Higher Life. 
 
 preacher, on life and on hope. But David surely, of 
 all the Old Testament seers, had the clearest vision of 
 the truth. There are passages of literally triumphant 
 exultation, which burst from him when he is consider- 
 ing the mercies of his God, the faithfulness of his 
 almighty, eternal Friend. " BtU God shall redeem 
 my soul from the power of the grave, for He shall 
 redeem me!' ''As for me I shall behold Thy face in 
 7'ighteoitsness^ I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with 
 Thy likeness!' " The^^efore my Jieart is glad, and my 
 glory rejoiceth ; fity fiesh also shall rest in hope. For 
 Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt Thou 
 suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt 
 show me the path of life ; in Thy presence is fubiess 
 of joy, at Thy right hand there are pleasures for 
 evermorer 
 
 Of this, the Lord's entrance to that realm is the 
 prophecy, nay, the earnest. He entered because we 
 must enter ; and where man must go, the God-Man 
 passes at the head of the race. He entered that we 
 might enter boldly, and assure ourselves that where- 
 ever the God- Man goes on before us, there is for us 
 not a prison-house but a home. 
 
 It is impossible for us to imagine the immense 
 revolution in man's notions about death, which sprang 
 from the death of his Divine Lord. He brought the 
 whole realm, by one act, out of darkness into day- 
 light. Men could entertain no terror of that which 
 had no terror for Him. The fact that he "became 
 dead," consecrated death as a temple, and the grave 
 as its shrine. The sense of a beloved presence is 
 
The Keys of Hell a7id of Death. 331 
 
 always and everywhere the dissipation of dread. 
 There is nothing terrible to those who feel them- 
 selves clasped in the arms of love. 
 
 Realise the passionate devotion of the first dis- 
 ciples to their Saviour — a passion which found the 
 rack as a bed of roses if they might but glorify Him 
 by defying its pain ; and then imagine the victory over 
 death which the vision of that beloved form passing 
 through its portals won for them. Dread it ! they pined 
 for it, they strained towards it, that they might more 
 swiftly join their ascended Christ ; and the glow of 
 their hope passed forth into the world. There was a 
 vague sense that a great crisis had come, that a great 
 though unseen revolution had been accomplished, 
 winning new truth, freedom, and power for men, in 
 those who had hardly heard of the message of the 
 Gospel. The joy, the triumph of the apostolic 
 Church was infectious. The moment that the Lord 
 had entered the gate of Death as a master, a new 
 sense of power as against Death and Hell, lodged 
 itself in the world's sad heart. 
 
 2. Having the keys implies control, the power of 
 discipline. He who has the keys has the control of 
 the inmates, to rule and to train them at his will. 
 
 Granted that it is a prison-house, that this is the 
 point of view from which the men of old time were 
 fain to regard it, how much of its external character 
 still remains ! Have we quite shaken off its terror ? 
 Could lue smile, would our eye light up with a flash 
 of triumph, if we felt at this moment Death's cold 
 barb above our hearts ? The flesh, and something: 
 
S3- T^^^ Higher L ife. 
 
 more than the flesh, shudders in the pn;sence of the 
 angel, though we know his angeHc mission. Death 
 is too deeply related to our sin, and Hell is too dread 
 a reality to conscious guilt, for us easily to shake 
 off their spells. 
 
 Just as that passionate love, that abounding 
 joy in a complete redemption, which marked the 
 apostolic age, dies down, the terror of death 
 returns on us again. And in any wise death re- 
 mains. Christ hath abolished death, says the apostle 
 in his absolute way — the apostle, or some apostolic 
 man who was the mouthpiece of his thoughts. And 
 to him death was abolished, " Willing rather to be 
 exiled fro7n the body, and to be at home with the 
 Lord" To faith, wherever it is pure and strong, 
 death is abolished. I heard of one of God's holy 
 ones the other day who had lost one greatly revered 
 and beloved. " Do not wonder if I am not able to 
 grieve," she said, " I feel so near." Death abolished. 
 " Life and immoj'tality bro2ight to light by the 
 Gospel" 
 
 But faith is not always strong. The two worlds 
 do not always seem so near. Death as a physical 
 experience, death as a moral experience, remains 
 still a shadow over our house of life. The Lord who 
 has the key, retains it, not as a terror to torment but 
 as a means of discipline. All the associations and 
 influences of death, once so fearful. He retains, and 
 He wields them with a loving hand for the culture 
 and education of our souls. As a place of torment 
 it is for ever abolished. " The sting of death is siii!'' 
 
The Keys of Hell and of Death. 
 
 When He '' ptit away sin by the sacrifice of Himself'' 
 He swallowed up death in victory. Guilt is at the 
 root of that gnawing anguish which makes Hades 
 into Hell, and — save for those who will have it, who 
 will have death rather than life, cursing rather than 
 blessing, hell rather than heaven — the pains of hell 
 are loosed from humanity for ever. 
 
 When the Lord revealed a reconciled Father, He 
 banished the imagination of tin eternal torture chamber 
 from the world. Men have restored it, and wielded it 
 with tremendous power, to the profit of the priest and 
 to the detriment of the Gospel. There must be dark 
 horrors in the future for the haters of their own souls, 
 for the lovers of the gates of death ; but the end 
 must be correction, and not vengeance, if the keys of 
 Death and Hell are in the hand of Him who died to 
 save. 
 
 The Gospel, which proclaims forgiveness to the 
 sinner, restoration to the prodigal child, scatters 
 the shadow which hangs about the future. No fear- 
 ful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, can 
 torment a soul which has looked into the face of God 
 in Christ, and has read the meaning which is there. 
 ^'O Death, zu here is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy 
 victory ? " The Lord has the key of the prison, in 
 which the self-tormented and despairing victims of 
 evil lie groaning. He has unbarred it, and sent them 
 forth from chains and darkness to heaven's elad sun- 
 light, and to the freedom of the sons whom the Son 
 makes free indeed. " -If when we were enemies, we 
 were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, 
 
334 '^^^^ Higher Life. 
 
 much more being reconciled we shall be saved by His 
 lifer 
 
 And further, all that is dark and sad about Death 
 and Hades, the Lord holds under the control of His 
 loving hand. It becomes an instrument for the nurture 
 and training of our spirits ; it lends even a solemn 
 consecration to this earthly life, as it lets fall upon it 
 the lustre of the heavenly world. The keys are in His 
 hand. That implies the control of all the influences 
 which Death and Hades can wield over our spirits. 
 In other words, it is His influence. The natural 
 shuddering at death, takes its place among the be- 
 nicfn influences which are educating us. The lone 
 pain and struggle in dying which we watch with pro- 
 found sadness, has a loving meaning and ministry to 
 the dear one who suffers it. It is adding the last 
 touch to the training ; it is perfecting the patience ; it 
 is laying up holy memories which will make the soul 
 richer and gladder in eternity. 
 
 I am often called to see, how the higher graces 
 of the nature get trained to a beautiful perfection by 
 the suffering of death. Never forget that the mind 
 which moved the Lord to become obedient unto 
 death, that the Father's house might again be filled 
 with the sons, brought all the powers of the world 
 to come under His hand. It changed Death from 
 a terror to an angel, and Hades from a realm of 
 pallid shivering ghosts to a sunlit home. We can 
 gaze now on the dreaded form with unruffled 
 serenity. We can pass by the terrible gates with 
 a song ; for we know that " neither death, nor 
 
The Keys of Hell and of Death . 335 
 
 life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor poivers, nor 
 things present, nor things to come, 7ior height, nor 
 depth, nor any other creatttre, shall be able to separate 
 Its from the love of God, ivhich is in Christ J estis otir 
 Lord!' 
 
 3. He holds the keys of deliverance — the exit, 
 the way out, the way through death to heaven. 
 
 The key of the entrance, as we have seen, is in 
 His hand. He has entered the shadow of death and 
 dispelled the darkness. He holds, too, the key of 
 its influence. What power it has over human spirits 
 is now His power. He uses it as an instrument of 
 loving discipline, and trains us by it for the world 
 where death shall be no more for ever. But the 
 grand theme of the Apocalypse, is the world behind 
 the veil which He has lifted, and whose life, whose 
 constant interests, fears, cares, hopes, and joys, it 
 reveals. He holds the key as the Lord of the Re- 
 surrection. Death is the access, not to a realm of 
 shadow, but to a glorious, transfigured world. In 
 truth it is the synonym of emancipation. 
 
 Life is death and death is life, to him who 
 believes. " Ye are dead, and your life is hid zvith 
 Christ in God',' is the witness of St. Paul. This life, 
 to those who have seen with the eye of faith the 
 risen Lord, who believe in His Apocalypse of 
 heaven, becomes a daily dying, and death the 
 birth-throe of the true, immortal life. This is the 
 world of shadow, it is death which hides from 
 us the sunlight. On this side the river, the 
 wilderness ; there, the peaceful and blessed homes 
 
33 5 The Higher Life. 
 
 whose sunlight is the unveiled face of God. The 
 struggle of the quickened spirit with the flesh which 
 cumbers it, and with the world which holds it to the 
 dust, is the daily dying, which death completes and 
 resurrection crowns. He who holds the keys, has 
 opened the farther as well as the nearer side of the 
 prison-house. He has left it but a passage, flooded 
 with the light of the celestial world. 
 
 We can little appreciate what this Apocalypse of 
 the world of the Resurrection has done for mankind 
 — the vision of the slain victim of Calvary, risen, and 
 reigning on the throne. I believe that nothing so 
 helped the Church, and through the Church the 
 world, to grasp the truth of the Resurrection, and ah 
 that has sprung from it, as these wondrous visions. 
 We, too, like the three on the mount of transfigura- 
 tion, are ''■eye-witnesses of His majesty T And we 
 know, by the surest sense, that we did not follow 
 cunningly devised fables, when we believed in the 
 risen Jesus, and learned that death was but an inner 
 gate of heaven. The unseen, even though peopled 
 by shapes of terror, has always exercised a strange 
 fascination on mankind. There has been no rest 
 for man in this straitly bounded life. There has 
 been an impulse and a yearning towards the 
 mystery. 
 
 The desire of the moth for the star ; 
 
 Of the day for the morrow ; 
 The worship of something afar 
 
 From the sphere of our sorrow. 
 
 Man knows by sure instinct that the secret of his 
 
The Keys of Hell mid of Death. 337 
 
 being, the key to his Hfe, is there. The Gospel 
 has made that yearning intense. Death has grown 
 beautiful as a bride to earth's elect spirits. It is 
 the way out into the free universe, the great con- 
 gress of the first-born ; the way to liberty, bliss, 
 glory. 
 
 To die in Christ, believing in the life, rejoicing in 
 the life, and in its inevitable triumph ; hating the sin 
 which is the anguish of death, and the terror of hell ; 
 praying "more light, more life," with dying lips; 
 cleaving, with the strong prevailing grasp of a man 
 who knows that if he loosens his hold he dies, to the 
 Hand which has rent the prison-house, and has 
 brought the captives forth, — to die thus is to enter 
 into life. A moment's spasm, a choking sob, and 
 then the free, broad universe for ever. The shadow 
 of death behind us ; pain, weakness, anguish — the 
 straitness of a soul too large for its frame, its work, 
 and its world — become but half forgotten memories, 
 lost at length in the joy which is fed for ever from 
 the fountain of His life, " who was dead, and behold 
 He is alive for evermore, and hath the keys of Hell 
 and of Deathr 
 
33^ The Higher L ife. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF MAN. 
 
 " Btit now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the Jirsf-friilts oj 
 them that slept. For since by matt came death, by man came 
 also the resurrection of the dead." — I. Cor. xv. 20-21. 
 
 For man, death has a significance unknown in all the 
 inferior regions of the Creation. The creatures play 
 under its shadow ; man alone shrinks and shudders. 
 Death Is an unknown factor in the careless life of the 
 Creation ; it is a ruling factor, perhaps the ruling 
 factor in the natural life of man. There is little need 
 to hand the skeleton round at our banquets : it 
 haunts the secret chamber of every heart. It 
 closes every vista ; it rounds every pleasure ; it 
 casts a chilling shadow over life's sunniest passages ; 
 it lends a passionate sadness to passionate love. All 
 the philosophies have spent their strength in trying 
 to rob it of its terror, and to banish it to the back- 
 ground ; in vain, it evades them, and plants itself in 
 the foreground of every life. 
 
 Man, standing on the summit level of Creation, oc- 
 cupying the highest stage of development to which the 
 creature has attained, finds himself consciously face to 
 face with a new and tei-rible experience, which strikes 
 a ofreat shudderinsf dread into his heart of hearts. 
 
The ResiLvrection of Man. 
 
 Eve, when she hung over the blood-flecked brow of 
 Abel, might well have prayed for the merciful stroke 
 of annihilation, had she forecast all the bitter an- 
 guish of which death was destined to be the foun- 
 tain, and let slip the promise of the overthrow of 
 death, by Him who should be at once the seed of the 
 woman and her Lord. 
 
 With new power, there comes to man in the 
 unfolding of his life a new terror, and the terror 
 seems to be the master. As matter ©f fact, man 
 finds that life is not worth the living without 
 the hope of immortality. From the shadow, which 
 for the thoughtful, the cultured, the loving, that is 
 for those in whom the higher development is most 
 conspicuous, death casts over life, there is absolutely 
 no escape. Omnes eodem cogimur ; and to the 
 natural man the way is dark and sad. We are made 
 more dependent in a sense, we are more finely 
 strung, more capable of tender devotion and clinging 
 love, than the creatures ; and we live and love under 
 the shadow of the fear that at any moment, in a 
 moment, all our dearest treasures may be scattered, 
 and all our pleasant things laid waste. 
 
 That God-like faculty in man, as we cannot but 
 call it, which looks before and after, which peers into 
 the future, and must peer, finds everywhere the 
 shadow of death stretched round its horizon, bafBincr 
 its penetration, and mocking its efforts to search out 
 the unknown. Is the shadow impenetrable .-^ Is 
 there nothing beyond ? In that case the summit of 
 creature development is simply a summit of agony ; 
 
 Z 2 
 
;40 The Higher Life. 
 
 the creature attains to the height of its perfection 
 only to recoil before a grisly shape of terror, and to 
 upbraid the force, be it what it may, which has made 
 the universe the theatre of this dark tragedy — on 
 which may the curtain of the everlasting night fall 
 soon! 
 
 The Scripture says, that the Father, who has 
 led and watched over the development of the 
 creature, places man, the glory of the Creation, before 
 this awful mystery, and makes him know all its 
 awfulness, that he may stir up faith to deliver him 
 from the terror, and to open to him through the 
 darkness the vision of a larger, freer, more glorious 
 life. Accept this revelation and the shadow 
 vanishes ; life lies warm and radiant in the full light 
 of the eternal sun. But if death be the bound round- 
 ing man's little life, and ending the development of 
 his being for ever, the universe would become simply 
 an Aceldama ; the blood-drops that bead, not the 
 Redeemer's brow only, but the brow of the Creation, 
 are wasted : it is not a Redemption which they pro- 
 phesy, but a dark struggle against a ruthless Fate. 
 
 And man, in any case, cannot but struggle and 
 agonise for victory over the terror, A mother, as 
 she watches the death pallor steal up over the face 
 of her darling, but yesterday so gay and glad, cannot 
 but moan and madden, if she has no vision to lighten 
 her spirit, as she sees her one priceless treasure 
 rifled, and the very casket that held it a mass of rot- 
 tenness that she must bury out of her sight. And 
 each generation sees, with a heart-ache which lies 
 
The Restun'cdion of Man. 34 j 
 
 near the root of the sadness of the world, genius full 
 of passionate energy, and charged with glorious gifts 
 for men, struck down in its young prime ; parents 
 with households hanging on their efforts, bread, and 
 things more precious even than bread, depending on 
 their constant toil, dropping in a moment and be- 
 queathing to the nurslings of their tenderest care a 
 hard struggle to the end of their days ; lovers, whose 
 very life is in each other, sundered at a stroke by the 
 ruthless destroyer, and one torn heart left widowed, 
 to drag its burden through lonely, weary, hopeless 
 years ; statesmen, on whose skill and knowledge the 
 conduct of their country through a perilous crisis is 
 hanging, with the destinies of unborn millions in 
 charge, dropping at the helm in the supreme moment 
 of danger, and leaving the vessel so richly freighted 
 all adrift. 
 
 These are the shocks by which death keeps 
 its hold on our anxieties and terrors, and con- 
 quers a place in the human imagination, and a 
 space on the theatre of life, altogether dispropor- 
 tioned to the scale of our existence ; unless it be the 
 passage to a larger, more perfect, more blessed stage 
 of development, where the anomalies of this lower 
 sphere will find their solution, its broken promises 
 their fulfilment, its blighted hopes their fruition, in 
 the " Fatherland" which we seek, and which awaits 
 us on high. Then we can understand perfectly, why 
 the God who made us, and who means to bless us, 
 should so compel our imagination to haunt this 
 gloomy threshold ; and should rule life so largely 
 
34 2 The Higher Life. 
 
 through the shadow which He dissipates for the 
 creatures, while He keeps it sternly before the sight 
 of mankind. But otherwise black night is settling 
 over all. 
 
 And this " fear of death " is but part of a yet 
 deeper experience of humanity, which belongs to 
 man alone of all the creatures, and marks him out as 
 a being whose nature has relation with a higher 
 sphere. There is in man a consciousness of inborn 
 corruption which fills him, when he comes to under- 
 stand the conditions of his life, with a terror of him- 
 self This sense of corruption is closely connected 
 with his constitution as an embodied spirit; so closely 
 indeed that heathen peoples, unguided and unsus- 
 tained by Revelation, find themselves constantly 
 pressed to the conclusion, that this material body Is 
 the origin and seat of the evil which corrupts and 
 destroys the man. 
 
 We find then this condition of things established 
 in the sphere of man's experience. This body, so 
 fearfully and wonderfully made, that It Is manifestly 
 the masterpiece of the Creation, is so open on all 
 sides to solicitations and temptations, the yielding 
 to which consciously defiles and degrades man's 
 nature, that he is constantly, in all countries. In 
 all ages, and under all possible varieties of culture, 
 driven to hate this incomparable organ of his spirit, 
 to curse it as the source of his misery,^ to torment and 
 
 1 Persius, certainly one of the purest and loftiest of the Roman 
 writers, has this phrase, " This accursed flesh." 
 
The Resttrrection cf Man. 343 
 
 to macerate it, and systematically to reduce its strength 
 and to wear out its life, as the only means of deliver- 
 ance within his reach from otherwise intolerable ills. 
 There is nothing darker and sadder in the history 
 of humanity, than the pain and wasting which this 
 glorious structure has had to endure, at the hands 
 of the zealots of the spiritual ; the contempt and 
 shame which have fallen on this wondrous mas- 
 terpiece of the Creator ; and the fierceness with 
 which men have cursed their very existence because 
 of it, and have branded it as the devil's own instru- 
 ment for the defilement and the torment of man- 
 kind. 
 
 Here is a new and remarkable experience, which 
 is altogether peculiar to man. And if death be the 
 final term of the individual existence, it is as terrible 
 as it is strange. The body of man, as we have 
 already insisted, must be regarded as the very highest 
 possible form of organisation ; it is the form in which 
 all the strivings and tentative efforts which make up 
 the history of the creature, find their perfect attain- 
 ment ; and in which the fruit of the universal groaning 
 and travailing appears. Consider what endless stages 
 of development through unknown eras, have been 
 suffered by the creature with sore strain and pain — 
 for the pain is everywhere conspicuous, however it 
 may be compensated by the grandeur of the result — 
 till on the last and highest stage, by a supreme effort 
 as it w^ere, the human form emerges, and stands visi- 
 bly at the head of the whole. It contains embedded 
 in its structure clear traces of all the stag^es throuu:h 
 
344 1^^^^ Higher Life. 
 
 which, by long and agonising^ process, it has been 
 perfected ; it furnishes, we are assured by deep 
 thinkers and students of Nature, the key to the whole 
 order of the material Creation in its organisation, and 
 " is in little all the sphere " ; and yet we find it 
 tenanted by a spirit — by something, at any rate, within 
 it, which takes cognisance of it as an instrument, and 
 claims and uses the power to handle it at will — which 
 finds it a terrible source of corruption, of agencies 
 and influences which tend to the degradation and 
 desolation of life. 
 
 The man finds himself bound, in pursuing the 
 ends which have now come within the range of 
 his sight as a man, to resist its impulses, to refuse 
 indulgence to its importunate cravings, and to rule 
 its passions with an iron hand. But he finds in 
 the end, after long struggle, that the body is his 
 master. Failing miserably in his effort to tame and 
 to rule it, as man striving in his own strength alone 
 must fail, he is driven in the end to give free rein to 
 sensual desire, rushing thereby headlong to destruc- 
 tion ; or if he be of the nobler sort, to turn on it with 
 blind fury and beat it into inanition, moaning the 
 while, " O viiserable Tuan that I am, who shall deliver 
 me from the body of this death ? " 
 
 Now if this be the end of things, if this be the 
 outcome of the development of the creature, con- 
 fusion is the name of the order of the universe, and 
 
 ^ I use this word in the sense which indicates the measure of the 
 struggle and effort, rather than of the pain. 
 
The Resurrection of Man. 345 
 
 it reigns supreme in the highest product of Creation 
 — the man who seems made to rule it as its king. 
 
 And all the deepest instincts of man's nature, and 
 his noblest philosophies, tell him about the " temple 
 of his body." He is sure that so goodly a tabernacle 
 was meant to be a temple, on whose altar sacred in- 
 cense should be ever burning; that the body was made 
 and designated to be the handmaid of the spirit, the 
 pure and perfect organ of its expression, the holy 
 and beautiful shrine of its life. It was the Lord who 
 spake of the temple of his body. The temple is 
 originally the portion of space cut off by the rod ot 
 the augur for observation, that is for sacred use. 
 And though, in this particular form, the word and the 
 thing are of Roman or rather of Etruscan origin, 
 while our Lord's language and conception belonged 
 to oriental life, yet in every language the word which 
 represents a temple suggests the same idea — some- 
 thing cut off, walled round, or otherwise set apart as 
 reserved for religious uses. This term represents 
 man's highest idea of the relation of spirit and body ; 
 and this alone fulfils the promise of Creation, and 
 presents the body as the supreme type of form, and 
 the instrument of life's noblest and most perfect 
 work. 
 
 Yet everywhere in the present, instead of the 
 concord, dark signs of discord and struggle appear. 
 All the higher men, those in whom we may fairly 
 look to discover the meaning and purpose of the 
 human, reveal themselves in history as struggling 
 hard to master and to rule the body, and to unite 
 
34^ The Higher Life. 
 
 the powers, bodily and spiritual, into one harmonious 
 choir of faculties, the oro-an of the utterance and the 
 activity of the life. But none realize, though they 
 may touch the concord, while all groan over the dis- 
 cord, which awaits yet the harmonising hand. Paul 
 was an old man, and a veteran in this war when he 
 wrote, "/ tJierefore so run, not as ttncertainly ; so 
 fight /, not as one that beateth the ai?\ But I keep 
 under my body, and bring it into subjection ; lest that 
 by any means, when I have pi^-eached to othei'S, I 
 myself should be a castaway'' — I. Cor. ix. 26, 27. 
 He was near the end and not the beginning of a long 
 and glorious career, but the perfect concord escaped 
 him still. To me it is imperative to believe — since I 
 cannot accept chaos as the home-land of my being, 
 and the great Anarch as my God — that the discord 
 here, over which the highest and completest men still 
 groan, is but the first step of the development of 
 a concord, which shall fulfil the promise and give 
 fruit to the travail of Creation — a concord whose 
 priest and minister is Death. 
 
 In man, too, we see in its full development the 
 faculty of accumulating and digesting experience. 
 That which in the animal passes into the organisation 
 and becomes capable of physical transmission, in 
 man is gathered up consciously by the reason, and 
 becomes a light for the guidance of his individual 
 life. Man observes, considers, compares, and con- 
 cludes, by means of the material furnished by his 
 daily doings and sufferings ; and he is able to build 
 firmh' on the results of past experiences the edifice 
 
The Resurrection oj Man. 347 
 
 of the future, whereby, through clear stages of pro- 
 gress, Hfe advances to the fulfihiient of its idea. 
 Each generation builds on the ground which the last 
 cast up, and made firm above the level of its prede- 
 cessor ; and there is a similar process in every life. 
 
 It is with very sore toil and pain that man harvests 
 and garners this experience. " Experience," says 
 Mr. Carlyle with grim humour, " is the best master, 
 but asks terribly high wages." The store which is 
 garnered is the true measure of his wealth ; and of 
 his worth — for in this region wealth is worth, and 
 the " good " man is really the rich one — to himself, 
 to the world, and to the Lord. It is this faculty 
 which makes him a being capable of civilisation^ and 
 progress ; and it seems to open to him a boundless 
 field of development, if he may but win the mastery 
 of death. The experience, too, grows richer and 
 weightier, and the worth of the man richer and 
 weightier with it, as age furrows his brow and palsies 
 his physical powers. Just when his glorious faculty 
 is in fullest form, when his wisdom is most mature, 
 and his moral strength most developed, that physical 
 structure, which is the base of his operation and the 
 organ of his influence, wastes and withers away. 
 There is an outer man decaying, and an inner man 
 of wisdom and strength renewed day by day. 
 
 ^ There are curious facts which seem to indicate what might be 
 called a dull kind of civilisation in the animal sphere. The ants, for 
 instance, have got to the slaveholding stage, we are told by those 
 familiar with their habits. But can anyone permit himself to believe 
 that some day they will rise to the higher level, and pass an act of 
 emancipation ? 
 
34^ The Higher Life. 
 
 It may be said that flesh and spirit just decay 
 together, and that second childhood and fatuity are 
 the destiny of the man in his wholeness. But how 
 constantly do we see after a season of apparent fatuity, 
 the spirit in a moment flashing forth, not in the full 
 splendour of its power only, but with a new splendour, 
 which seems caught from a sphere into whose field it 
 is passing ! What is the meaning of the impression 
 which we meet with among all peoples, that the soul 
 of man grows prophetic as it nears the physical 
 boundary of life ? It implies anything rather than a 
 belief that body and soul are crumbling together into 
 dust ; and it all points to the conclusion, that these 
 divergent tendencies of the component elements of 
 man's nature, prophesy convergence and concordance 
 *n another sphere. 
 
 We see, or rather we appear to see, waste enough 
 in the Creation, and wreck enough. That is, we see 
 what would be waste and wreck, but that the material 
 is straightway wrought up to higher use. But if 
 this life be all, what awful waste and wreck are 
 here ! Powers trained, acquisitions gathered, with 
 almost infinite pain and toil, losing their organ of 
 utterance and influence, just when they become of 
 supreme worth to mankind. It may be answered, 
 perhaps, that the power and wisdom pass into the 
 hearts of disciples, and so carry on their mission of 
 guiding and blessing our race. Ah ! how little of 
 every great nature is able to reveal itself; how 
 small a part of every great life is able to give itself 
 to mankind ! " It is expedient for you that I go 
 
The Resurrection of Man. 349 
 
 away" said the greatest. " / have many things to 
 say to yo2i, dnt ye cannot bear them 7ioiv." They 
 heard those things, we hear them and Hve by 
 them, from the world of the Resurrection. The risen 
 Saviour unveiled the meaning of His life of ministry 
 to man. And there is always an interior wealth in 
 every great and greatly disciplined nature, which is 
 the most precious treasure in this universe. And it 
 is this, I am told, the harvest of toils and struggles 
 which might touch the sympathies of the angels, that 
 Death grasps and scatters in the dust. 
 
 This form of man's development, the inner 
 growth, the outer decay, is God's great prophecy 
 of resurrection. The powers thus trained and per- 
 fected, find their trained and perfected organ in the 
 body of the resurrection in the eternal world. It 
 death is but transformation, we can comprehend 
 perfectly the weakness and faintness of the outer, 
 while the inner man grows rich and strong. The 
 very pain and weakness are the last perfecting 
 touches of the discipline, and have the directest re- 
 lation to the great future of which death is the 
 harbinger. But if the death ends the development. 
 
 Forsake all hope, all ye who enter here, 
 
 is the sentence which must be written over the gate 
 of this life, and not over the gate of hell. 
 
 I confess, that I attach less importance than seems 
 to be generally attached to the argument, which is so 
 constantly urged in proof of the immortality of man's 
 spirit, that the inequalities here are too dire and 
 the wrongs too largely unredressed, to consist with 
 
350 The Higher Life. 
 
 the rule of a perfectly wise and righteous Lord of 
 the Creation, unless the balance Is to be adjusted 
 and the wrongs righted, on high. I suspect that 
 even here the balance hangs much more evenly than 
 most of us dream. " Happiness of an approving 
 conscience!" says Herr Teufelsdrockh In a sardonic 
 mood ; " did not Saul of Tarsus confess himself the 
 chief of sinners, while Nero of Rome, jocund in 
 spirit, spent much of his time in fiddling ?" No 
 doubt there was not much room for what goes bv 
 the name of happiness in the life of the Apostle 
 Paul. But understand that it was well with Paul, 
 and ill with Nero, through the whole piece. The 
 God who searches the hearts, ordains and sees a 
 fairer distribution of moral awards In this life than 
 our dull apprehension can discover ; and those who 
 choose to stand with the Pauls, and not with the 
 Neros, even here have their reward. 
 
 But the measure in which the blessedness of these 
 nobler spirits, mixed Itself with ideas and Influences 
 which belong to the sphere of the spiritual and eternal, 
 the measure in which they fortified themselves by its 
 strength and inspired themselves by its hopes, is a 
 mighty argument for Immortality. It is not that 
 they looked to the eternal future to compensate 
 them for present pains and denials ; but that with- 
 out the atmosphere of that eternal state they could 
 not live. Life meant more to men like Moses and 
 Paul than a claim for compensation. They were 
 both willing to be " blotted out of the book of life," 
 if the great ends which Christ had taught them to 
 
The Resurrection of Man. 351 
 
 pursue might be the better gained. But the at- 
 mosphere of that world was as needful to their 
 spirits, as the air of this world to their blood. 
 They proved its existence by living in it. Nero 
 lived in his own world and made miserable ship- 
 wreck. Paul lived and lives in the world of the 
 Resurrection. 
 
 More full of force is the argument from the un- 
 timely loss of beings of the richest endowment, and 
 the largest capacity of service to mankind. The \y 
 brilliant dawnings that are clouded before noon, the 
 splendid promise that is constantly spoilt and wasted 
 before our eyes, the hopes that are born but for 
 frustration, the purposes that are formed but to 
 perish, would lend a profound pathetic sadness to 
 the life of Nature's masterpiece, but for our faith 
 that the God of Nature guards these buds of 
 promise through death's winter, and plants them 
 where they will bloom in the sunlight of a celestial 
 spring, and bear rich fruit unto life eternal. 
 
 Nor must we pass from this part of the subject 
 without a glance at the opposite end of the scale. To 
 me the thought would be tormenting, could I believe 
 that the ^reat mass of the struororlino- and sufferine 
 poor have no heritage but death. To a terribly 
 large proportion of them life is a stern, ceaseless 
 struggle, carried on in dens, and under conditions, 
 to which cultured households would shrink from 
 exposing their brutes. May God keep me from 
 ever opening my heart to the dark philosophy, 
 which would teach me that they are destined to 
 
352 The Higher Life, 
 
 be swept out in throngs to destruction, without 
 having had the faintest chance of discovering, what 
 might grow to them by the fair unfolding and culture 
 of their powers ! 
 
 Thus much, and it is but a hint of what might be 
 said, on the antecedent likelihood of resurrection. It 
 lies in the path, in the just and therefore inevitable 
 order, of development. The next thing to this life of 
 man, the thing with which it travails, which must be 
 born out of all its strain and groaning, is the life of 
 the risen man, in the state which the Scripture de- 
 scribes as eternal. 
 
 But we rise into another sphere, a sphere blessed 
 be God, of clear certainty and full assurance, when 
 we read out, " But 7iowis Christ risen from the dead, 
 and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For 
 since by man came death, by man came also the resur- 
 rection of the dead. For as hi Adam all die, even so 
 in Christ shall all be made alive!' — I. Cor. xv. 20-2. 
 " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jestis 
 Christ, zuhich according to His abundant mercy hath 
 begotten us again 2into a lively hope by the restirrection 
 of fesus Christ from the dead!' — I. Peter i. 3. The 
 gospel of the Resurrection is, Man has risen, not, 
 Man must rise. A man — no, the Man, the Being in 
 human form, in whom the nature and the destiny of 
 man are revealed with a divine completeness — has 
 died on earth after the manner of mortals, and has 
 visibly resumed His human form under higher and 
 more spiritual conditions ; has maintained for a time 
 His human intercourse with His disciples and friends 
 
IJie Resu7'7'ection of Man. 353 
 
 and has borne that human form, visibly, beyond the 
 material boundaries of our world. 
 
 This is the clear, explicit, and constant testimony 
 of Scripture ; on this the preaching of the apostles 
 rested : this was the power by which, in the language 
 of their enemies, they overturned the world. And 
 this is the miracle of miracles. It establishes at once 
 the claim of Christianity to be considered a super- 
 natural revelation. As a keen sceptic said, we have 
 only to prove the Resurrection, it carries all the rest. 
 While at the same time, it fixes the true home of 
 man's spirit, the sphere of the full unfolding of his 
 powers, and of his perfect and final development, in 
 the spiritual and eternal world. 
 
 The evidence of the Resurrection as a historical 
 fact, is thus calmly and clearly summarized by the 
 apostle : " For I delivered unto yon Jirst of all that 
 wJiich I also received, how that Christ died for our 
 sins according to the Scriptures ; and that He was 
 buried, and that He rose again the third day accord- 
 ing to the Scriptures ; and that He was seen of Cephas, 
 then of the twelve: after that He was seen of above 
 five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater 
 part reinain zmto this prese7it, but some are fallen 
 asleep. After that He was seen of fames ; then of 
 all the apostles. And last of all He was seen of me 
 also, as of one born out of due time. For I am the 
 least of the apostles, that ain not meet to be called an 
 apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. But 
 by the grace of God I am what I am ; and His grace 
 which luas bestowed on 7ne was not in vain ; but I 
 
 A A 
 
;54 "^^^^ Higher Life, 
 
 laboured more abundantly than they all ; yet not /, 
 biU the grace of God which was with me. Therefore 
 whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye be- 
 lieved." — I. Cor. XV. 3-11. 
 
 I am not about to argue the question of the 
 sufficiency of this evidence. There are treatises 
 devoted to it, in which what may be said on both 
 sides is amply set forth. But there is one point 
 on which I will dwell for a moment, as it seems 
 not to have its full force assigned to it, in many 
 of the arguments on the Resurrection which I 
 have read. One would think that the reappearance 
 of the man Christ Jesus in our world after His un- 
 questionable death on the cross, was one of those 
 simple, definite facts, which admitted of the clearest 
 verification in the days when it is said to have oc- 
 curred. It was a matter about which there was little 
 room for hallucination. The evidence must be simple, 
 and direct, one way or the other. But it is averred 
 that there was ample room for deception and mysti- 
 fication. The disciples would gladly catch, we are 
 told, at the notion of a resurrection which the apostles 
 propounded, and would become their unconscious 
 accomplices in palming the deception or delusion on 
 the world. 
 
 From this point of view the statement of Paul 
 that the risen Lord appeared to five hundred 
 brethren at once, published during the lifetime of 
 most of them, is peculiarly valuable. Still it is said 
 that we have the testimony of devoted or interested 
 witnesses only. The Sanhedrim must have taken 
 
The Resurrection of Man. 355 
 
 some means to satisfy themselves of the truth or 
 falsehood of the story; had we the results of those 
 enquiries and the views of the enemies of the Gospel, 
 at the time when the event was recent and the facts 
 could be fairly tested, it would make the evidence 
 more complete. Is not this exactly what we have 
 furnished to us, substantially though not formally, by 
 the evidence of Paul ? He was certainly at Jerusalem 
 while the Church was in its infancy, and when the 
 whole country was ringing with the tale. He was 
 neither an interested nor a devoted adherent of the 
 risen Saviour, but a most determined enemy of the 
 doctrine. He was a man of the highest considera- 
 tion and influence^ in the ranks of the persecutors of 
 the infant Church. He was endowed, too, with the 
 keenest intelligence and the clearest insight, and 
 would be likely for his own purposes to make the 
 fullest enquiries as to the truth of the fact that was 
 alleged. 
 
 Everything that the Pharisees knew about 
 it, he knew ; everything that could be said against 
 it by Jewish Rulers, he would be perfectly familiar 
 with. In his disputations — surely he was among 
 those of Cilicia who disputed with Stephen — he 
 would carefully furnish himself with every argument, 
 which could tell against a sect which he hated and 
 was determined to destroy ; and yet he was the man 
 who devoted his whole being to the proclamation of 
 
 ^ It seems clear that the apostle continued to be regarded and 
 treated as a person of position and influence, by the Roman officials 
 and others, throughout his career. 
 
 A A 2 
 
3 5 6 The Higher L ife. 
 
 this doctrine, and who more than any other man, or 
 all other men, in his generation, made it triumphant 
 in the world. We have in the adhesion of Saul of 
 Tarsus, the testimony of the most instructed and 
 acute opponent of the truth, that it could not be gain- 
 said. 
 
 The point is this. After his conversion, when 
 his furious blinding prejudice had been conquered, 
 and he had accepted with his whole heart the truth 
 of the narrative, nothing that he had become ac- 
 quainted with during his Pharisaic frenzy against the 
 Gospel, seems to have troubled his mind for a moment. 
 He knew the whole case of the Pharisees, but in his 
 judgment it was worthless ; there was nothing in it 
 which seemed to him to demand a formal confutation ; 
 his whole strength was thrown into the correction 
 of misapprehensions and the confutation of heresies 
 on the subject, which began to reveal themselves 
 within the bosom of the Church. The evidence of 
 Paul, which his belief furnishes, Is from this point of 
 view worth that of a host. 
 
 And the " ermine-robed great world " added its 
 Amen. The truth spread from lip to lip, from house 
 to house, from city to city, from land to land, like 
 flame. Men opened their hearts everywhere to the 
 preachers of the Resurrection. It established itself 
 rapidly as the central truth in the belief of the most 
 acute and cultivated peoples ; it reached down to the 
 roots of their life and renewed it ; it remade their 
 views of life, of death, of things beyond death, and 
 in a word, of all things. It has borne the wear of 
 
The Resurrection of Man. 357 
 
 the thinking, the suffering, the working, of sixty 
 generations ; it has led the progress of the great 
 world's civilisation ; it lies near to the heart of all 
 that is purest, strongest, and noblest in Christendom, 
 and it is now rapidly spreading through the earth. 
 
 " Yes ! " it may be said, " men were only too glad 
 to believe it ; the doctrine was too fascinating to fail 
 to win its way. Men easily believe what accords 
 with their aspirations and hopes." But that is just 
 what we find from history that men do not so easily 
 believe. There is a touchstone of truth in the hu- 
 man spirit, which in the long run and on a large scale 
 may be relied on. Men would very gladly believe 
 in the teaching which makes light of sin. But they 
 have never been able to believe in it. What agony, 
 what waste of sacrificial tears and blood, might have 
 been spared, if men could but have believed the 
 easy doctrine that sin is a soft infirmity of the blood, 
 not to be too sternly visited, or a necessary factor of 
 progress out of which experience grows. There 
 have been plenty to preach these doctrines ; but 
 pleasant as it would be to man to get rid honestly of 
 this torment of conscience, in no age, in no country, 
 have men been able to bind this gospel to their 
 hearts. What man has believed so eagerly and held 
 so firmly, with all the light of cultivated intelligence 
 and a high social development shining around it, is 
 the truth. 
 
 I hold that, looking simply at the history of the 
 apostolic age, it is absolutely certain that some such 
 fact as the Resurrection must at that time have planted 
 
15^ TJie Higher Life. 
 
 itself in the world. There was that entire transfor- 
 mation of man's beliefs, that solidification of the dim 
 vaporous imaginations of the heathen mind about the 
 spiritual, that firm, practical grasp of the realities of 
 the world behind the veil, transferring the centre of 
 gravity of man's life and of the life of society fron- 
 the visible to the invisible sphere, which the fact of 
 the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus explains, and that 
 fact alone. " But now is Christ risen front the dead, 
 and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For 
 since by man came death, by ma7i came also the resur- 
 rection of the dead!' 
 
 And what is the doctrine ? 
 
 The image of the butterfly, of which so much is 
 made as suggestive of the Resurrection, is valuable 
 chiefly for its vividness and beauty. Far deeper and 
 truer is the image of the seed, which the apostle 
 developes with great fulness in this wonderful 
 passage, which we read out by our new-made 
 graves, where we realize as we read it our victory 
 over death. The Scripture teaches us, that in this 
 mortal body there is the germ of a purer and 
 more perfect spiritual body ; in which the spirit 
 clothes itself and stands up in a world of spiritual 
 beings and things, when this weary, wasted, worn- 
 out form is laid aside in death. 
 
 Just as man has now a body which perfectly equips 
 him for intercourse with men and with things in this 
 material sphere, so it is the purpose of his Creator, 
 when his discipline here is ended, to clothe him in a 
 body which will fit him for a more perfect intercourse, 
 
The Resurrection of Man. 359 
 
 with the beings and the objects of the world which 
 lies behind the veil of death. And the germ of this 
 spiritual body lies buried in this material frame ; 
 death disengages it to fulfil its destiny. The question 
 presses on everyone who meditates on the mystery 
 of life and immortality, " How are the dead 7'aiscd 
 up, and with what body do they come ? " The apostle 
 answers : just as the seed cast into the soil, corrupting, 
 rises again and clothes itself afresh after a more per- 
 fect and splendid fashion, so ''this corrtiptible shall 
 put on incorruption, and this mortal shall put on 
 immortality!' 
 
 But when does the sowing take place, and when 
 the resurrection ? On this point it seems to me that 
 there has been much popular misunderstanding of the 
 apostle's words. What is the mystery of germina- 
 tion ? The seed which we cast into the ground, is 
 really but the envelope or the body of the tiny germ 
 which will grow into the tree. The seed is a mass 
 of matter, which, decaying in the moisture of the 
 ground, furnishes nutriment to the germ, feeds it, 
 and cherishes it, until it can throw out its root- 
 fibres, and seek an independent nourishment for 
 itself. But what is sown is a livine thine, not a 
 dead thing. Sow a husk, a dead case, and you 
 may watch for ever for resurrection in vain. 
 
 And now where is the analogy ? The germ of the 
 spiritual body is sown, surely, in the material body 
 in birth and not at death. The seed which is sown 
 containing the germ is entirely a living thing. It is 
 in this material body — while it is a living body, grow- 
 
360 The Higher Life. 
 
 ing and then decaying, for " We die daily " — that the 
 germ of the spiritual body is planted. The decay of 
 the outer man, like the dissolution of the albuminous 
 matter in the seed, is really the nourishment of the 
 spiritual germ, through all the experiences with which 
 it is associated. That germ lies hidden in the flesh 
 of our mortality through what we call life : what we 
 call death completes the process ; the mere husk or 
 shell within which the spiritual body was forming, is 
 put off with painful struggle and buried away with 
 the dead leaves of autumn ; while God giveth the 
 emancipated spirit a body ''as it hath pleased Him^' 
 wherewith to stand up in, and to maintain its rela- 
 tions with the beings and the objects of, the celestial 
 sphere. 
 
 It is important to observe that in treating of these 
 deep subjects, the sacred writers, as indeed was inevi- 
 table, offer but a partial revelation. There are things 
 which it is not lawful, not possible, for man to utter 
 in the life of that world of spirit ; and the things 
 which are uttered have a vagueness and dimness, 
 which remind us that the conditions of that life are 
 beyond the grasp of our understandings. We know 
 but in part, and can prophesy but in part ; and we 
 must be content to find in our knowledge, incon- 
 sistences, difficulties, and apparent contradictions, 
 which we can only harmonise when we see face to 
 face, and know even as also we are known. We can 
 catch and hold firmly some clues which will guide 
 us to a sound knowledge ; but the whole truth which 
 will unite the fragments .which we discover, and har- 
 
The Restirrection of Man. 361 
 
 monlse the scattered notes that reach us, for the 
 present, escapes us. We see but images of things, 
 dimly and brokenly, as in a mirror far from perfect, 
 but they are images of things, the perfect forms of 
 which we shall behold with God. 
 
 The apostle knows nothing of disembodied 
 spirits, bloodless, bodiless ghosts, such as the heathen 
 dreamed of as flitting through the shades. ''For we 
 know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were 
 dissolved, we have in the heavens a building froin God, 
 a house not made with hands, eternal. For in this 
 we groan, longing to put on over this our dwelling- 
 place front heaven; seeing that we shall really be 
 found clothed, not naked. For zve that are in this 
 tabernacle do groan, being burdened ; because we wozdd 
 not be unclothed but clothed upon, that otir mortal part 
 may be swallowed 2ip by life." II. Cor. v. 1-4. The 
 soul in dying drops this shell, this husk of the 
 body that is to be, and which is done with for 
 ever, and is clothed upon with a form which gives 
 to it freedom of range through the spiritual sphere. 
 
 Gleams of the glory of that celestial body have 
 been seen in moments of rapture. Moses and Elias 
 appeared all radiant beside their Lord on the Mount 
 of Transfiguration ; and the Lamb that was slain was 
 seen, — a glorious form, wearing still the marks of 
 His human passion, — on the central throne, by the 
 seer of the Apocalypse. And here lies the certainty 
 and the clearness of the Scripture revelation. It 
 hides much about that world and the form of its life 
 which cannot be spoken ; but it reveals in the clear 
 
362 The Higher Life. 
 
 sunlight the form of the risen and reigning Christ, as 
 the key to all the mysteries of the spiritual sphere. 
 And there are moments, too, when some gleam of 
 this beautiful and radiant form shines out through 
 the eyes and on the lips of the dying. I think that 
 I have seen it at the last moment — this corruptible 
 putting on incorruption, this mortal putting on im- 
 mortality. 
 
 But the Scriptures speak of a day of resurrection 
 still in the far future. They prophesy a further and 
 final transformation — development still — when the 
 great experiment of freedom shall be ended, and 
 Redemption shall have gathered in all its fruits. 
 The worlds as well as man, all created things in all 
 their spheres, shall burst from their bondage of coi 
 ruption, and put on the brightness of their final glory. 
 Then man too shall experience his last transfigura- 
 tion, shall reap the harvest of his discipline, and shall 
 take the place in the great scheme of the living 
 universe which is ordained to him through eternity. 
 
 And thus death is abolished. Death, the dark 
 fact of the old Creation, in the order of man's deve- 
 lopment, becomes the womb of his birth into the 
 new. The terror is abolished by that which lies 
 behind it. Death has vanished, and in the place of 
 Death stands Christ. The dark, sad, inevitable ex- 
 perience, which made the life of heathendom one long 
 moan, through Christ becomes a benign and blessed 
 minister. Instead of rounding the whole series of 
 creature development in anguish and terror, it carries 
 it up and out into a larger, freer, and more glorious 
 
The Resurrection of Man. 363 
 
 world. And thus the order of Creation ascends ; It 
 tends ever heavenward to the Creator ; issuing from 
 God it completes its vast circuit of development, and 
 returns redeemed and glorified — born into the like- 
 ness of Him whom it has learned to know as the 
 Father — to rest in the bosom of His love for ever and 
 for ever. " O the depth both of the riches of the wisdom 
 and hiowledge of God ! How unsearchable ai^e His 
 judgments, and His ways past finding out ! For luho 
 hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been 
 His counsellor ? Or who hath first given to Him, 
 and it shall be recoi7ipe7ised unto him again ? For of 
 Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things, 
 towhombeglory for ever. Amen^ Romans xi. 33-36. 
 
364 The Higher Life. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 THE DESTINY OF THE CREATURE. 
 
 " The creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of 
 corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." — 
 Rom. viii. 21. 
 
 The redemption of man carries in its train the re- 
 demption of Nature. There is the picture set before 
 us in the book of Genesis, of something hke the fall 
 of Nature, when man by transgression fell. Eden 
 vanished, earth became a wilderness, man became a 
 pilgrim, his life became a march through the hungry, 
 wasteful desert, while his Paradise regained lay await- 
 ing him beyond the river of death. This is the poetic 
 picture of the Scripture ; and the study of the condi- 
 tions of the life of man and of the Creation, sustains 
 the idea which lies behind it, that the sphere which 
 surrounds man, the whole world system which serves 
 as the theatre of his life, is set, so to speak, to the 
 pitch of his spiritual nature. As he has fallen into 
 captivity to evil, it is in bondage to corruption ; as he 
 rises through Redemption to regain his lost inherit- 
 ance, the Creation too is in process of being redeemed. 
 This means, broadly, that the system of things 
 around man is so ordered, as to be always in tune 
 with his moral condition and necessities. He is here a 
 
The Destiny of the Creature. 365 
 
 struggling and suffering creature ; the whole Creation 
 groaneth and travaileth in sympathy. Like man it 
 is subject to vanity, it is full of discord, battle, and 
 suffering, not that it may seem the more homelike 
 to man, the transgressor, but that it may help the 
 process by which he is being saved. The day will 
 come when man's redemption shall be complete ; 
 when every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall 
 confess that Jesus Christ is Lord ; when peace shall 
 reign through righteousness in the wide human com- 
 monwealth, and sorrow and sighing shall be banished 
 for ever from the experience of our race. And then 
 shall man find himself face to face with a new, a 
 fairer, a more blessed Creation ; a new heaven and a 
 new earth shall be the theatre for "the manifestation 
 of the sons of God." 
 
 When Eden vanished, a veil was dropped in some 
 way over the splendour of Creation. Earth seemed 
 hard and bare ; its Marahs abundant, its Elims few. 
 Perhaps the veil was truly dropped before man's 
 spirit ; the eye that had stooped to lust after vanity 
 became dimmed by its degradation. It had lost the 
 power to behold with open face the glory of its world. 
 The splendour is here all round us as of old, but the 
 eye is weak and dim. There are moments when the 
 beauty seems to flash out on us with Eden-like radi- 
 ance, prophetic of the vision which shall one day 
 burst upon us when death has couched our sight. 
 Some vision, too, seems granted to the child, before 
 wilful sin has dropped the veil over Nature. The 
 poet, who carries the child's eye and heart into man- 
 
366 The Higher Life. 
 
 hood, gathers for us into a focus the rays of the 
 pristine splendour, which are still struggling amidst 
 the gloom of our world. 
 
 But there are those to whom these records of 
 Eden, to us full of the profoundest significance, are 
 but a shadowy history. Still the same truth would 
 look out upon us through the idea, that the whole 
 system of things which forms the Creation with which 
 man is in contact, was created as it is, and was or- 
 dained to develope itself with sore struggle as it does, 
 with a view to the moral discipline and education of 
 mankind. We have heard the cry of the groaning, 
 we have watched the patient travail of the creature. 
 The records of development through all its stages 
 are records of conflict, struggle for existence, strife 
 for mastery. From the molecules of matter clashing 
 and battlinsf around us with furious vehemence, 
 up through all the ascending stages to the material 
 civilisation of man, there are tears enough, there is 
 blood enough, to tempt us to cry, when we see only 
 part of the plan, It is a sad, sad history ; the race 
 is to the swift, and the spoil is to the strong every- 
 where ; the chief virtue of things is to endure. 
 But the Scripture tells us that all this is set in the 
 key of man's sinful life. It is as man is. It has 
 been made thus, because man is a being, born into 
 this world to fall and to be redeemed. 
 
 Is this view of the relation of man to Nature, and 
 of Nature to man, just the resurrection in a modern 
 dress of the ancient error which made this earth 
 the centre of the universe, round whose circle were 
 
The Destiny of the Creatiu^e. 367 
 
 ranged in orderly procession the galaxies of stars ? 
 The discovery of the universe which we owe to the 
 human intellect through the methods of science, has 
 dwarfed utterly man's apparent stature in comparison 
 with the world. In the presence of the masses and 
 the forces which surround us, the words of the 
 Psalmist, " When I consider the heavens, the work of 
 Thy fingers ; the moon and the stars which Tho2t hast 
 ordained ; what is man that Thou art mindful of 
 him f and the son of man that Thou visitest him ? " 
 oppress us with an appalling sense of our insignifi- 
 cance in the scale of the Creation ; while this earth 
 of ours seems but as a mote, an atom, floating undis- 
 tinguished in the boundless ocean of space. 
 
 The tendency of much of our modern scientific dis- 
 covery, is undoubtedly to the depreciation of man, in 
 comparison with the creatures and the worlds which 
 surround him. A leading, I will not say the leading 
 school, rather laughs at the notion that he can be a 
 centre to anything ; and his higher endowments, 
 reason, will, and an immortal spirit, are decried or 
 denied, as giving him altogether too large a figure 
 in relation to his surroundings, his origin and his 
 destiny. 
 
 But the Scripture seems to give to us the true 
 measure of the magnitude of our nature, and of the 
 place which we are intended to fill in the scheme of 
 the universe ; whereby we are enabled to bear up 
 against the slights of sciolists, and to maintain our 
 laith that the true centre of the vast system of things 
 aiound us, is Man. The Psalmist recognises the fact 
 
368 The Higher Life. 
 
 of man's glorious pre-eminence, though he finds it 
 hard to account for it in the presence of all these im- 
 mense and countless worlds. " ThoiL hast made hi7it 
 a little lower than the angels, Thoit hast crowned him 
 with glory and honour ; " why, how — when we con- 
 sider what man is, and survey all that is around and 
 above him — who can tell ? 
 
 The clear, explicit answer of Heaven to the ques- 
 tion is the Incarnation. Whatever man may be, 
 however the consciousness of his infirmity and sin 
 may humble him to the dust, however his pain and 
 helplessness may tempt him to cry, "■ I am a zuorm, 
 and no man" or to moan in his sinful folly, ''lamas 
 a beast before Thee," man has been created on a scale 
 and with a capacity which makes his nature not only 
 a possible, but the meet shrine for the inhabitation 
 and manifestation of God. " Man is a fretful, rest- 
 less atom in the Creation," say the scorners, " about 
 as important as a grain of sand is to a mountain in 
 comparison with the All." Be it so, according to 
 the magnitudes which your micrometers can measure. 
 Heaven's mag^nitudes have other estimations, and 
 God Himself has given to us His measure of the 
 magnitude of man. To us mass is impressive ; it is 
 nothing to the eye of Heaven, nay, less than nothing, 
 if we may judge by the revelations of the microscope^ 
 The Creator seems to have lavished on organisms 
 which through millenniums no intelligent human eye 
 has had strength to gaze upon, and which a curious 
 art alone enables us to discover, glories of form and 
 colour which rival, if they do not eclipse, the marvels 
 of all these resplendent worlds. 
 
The Destiny of the Creature. 369 
 
 The world has vast desert spaces that its few 
 oases may be luxuriant ; countless shoals of creatures 
 are born and perish that a few may be the better 
 prepared for the service of mankind. The order of 
 God seems to be pyramidal : broad, vast bases of 
 undistinguished creatures, that the contracting stages 
 as they ascend may show finer and compacter types 
 of organisation, and that on the summit, a mere speck 
 in comparison with the quantity of the structure, but 
 a masterpiece in comparison with its quality, man 
 may lift up his face to heaven and to God. We are 
 mass-driven and mass-tormented in these days. 
 Quality is a thing which we seem to have lost the 
 means of finely testing ; quantity fills the field. It 
 is the magnitude of operations and of occurrences 
 which gives to them their value to this generation. 
 Christ, with His little tattered troop of disciples 
 round Him, would have impressed us only when He 
 was thronged. 
 
 And science, dealing with the awful masses and 
 forces of the universe, presses us with one hand 
 in the same direction. A thing so impalpable and 
 intangible as a Will, a power to choose the right 
 and to refuse the wrong, seems but a weak and 
 shadowy matter compared with the momentum with 
 which these planets are sweeping through space. 
 " Son of man," she seems in one mood to say scorn- 
 fully, " thou art but as a fly on the axle of the 
 Creation ; it moves thee and thy small affairs in its 
 vast revolutions, as careless of thy individual life and 
 of its destinies, as of the dust which it scatters as it 
 
 B B 
 
;70 The Higher Life. 
 
 flashes through space." But on the other hand 
 science is continually brought more closely face to 
 face with a force, an intangible, impalpable power, 
 which is behind the phenomena of Creation, a 
 spiritual presence which eludes her grasp and defies 
 her analysis, an entity with which Will has close cor- 
 relations, and which a very able scientific thinker 
 says that we had better call Will through all the scale. 
 Still there is a strong tendency in much of the in- 
 fluential thought of our times, to make man of but 
 small account in the scheme of the Creation ; and so 
 we carry our appeal from man's understanding, 
 groping in the darkness, to the witness of Scripture, 
 and the judgment of God. 
 
 There is a real need in these days that we should 
 once more take our stand on the Incarnation. " God 
 is in Christ." The Word, who was " with God," 
 who " was God," " became flesh and dwelt among us." 
 The Gospel reveals " Emmanuel," " God with us," 
 not with the angels. Narrow and poor as our nature 
 may seem since we have contracted and defiled it by 
 sin, God could dwell in and become man, as He 
 could not dwell in or become an angel. Neither 
 cherub nor seraph can become like man, continent of 
 God. " To which of the angels said He at any time, 
 TJiou art my son, this day have I begotten thee f" To 
 which of the angels could it possibly be said ? "He 
 counteth His angels as winds, and His ministers as 
 flames of fire," is the description of their nature, and 
 of their rank in the Creation. But man, weak, selfish, 
 sensual as his nature has become by transgression, 
 
The Destiny of the Creature. 3 7 1 
 
 has thus much at any rate of his pristine dignity left 
 to him among all the orders of the creatures, that he 
 has power to become through Redemption as the 
 son of God. We plant ourselves on solid fact, as 
 well as the materialistic philosophers. We claim for 
 man this position of dignity and power in relation to 
 the Creation, because God was in Christ ; because 
 He " took not 07i Him the jiatiire of angels, but the 
 seed of Abraham" because through grace man may 
 " become partaker of the Divine nature, escaping the 
 corricption that is i^i the world through lust!' 
 
 It is on the Incarnation then that we rest — as 
 restoring in a still higher form, truly in a transcen- 
 dent form, the original estate of man in the universe, 
 as the being made in the image of God, in His like- 
 ness — as we sustain the affirmation of the Scripture, 
 that man's nature and condition contain the key to 
 the constitution and the condition of his world. Man 
 is as his circumstance is, say an influential school of 
 thinkers, and they support their views by a wonder- 
 ful parade of one-sided facts gathered with singular 
 diligence and care. " Given," they say, " the conditions 
 of life, the climate, the scenery, the food, the physical 
 influences, and we can construct the race and forecast 
 its history ;" just as a great physiologist from a bit of 
 bone will construct the form of an undiscovered bird, 
 which one day will be found and prove that he was 
 right. 
 
 Nature is as man is, is the answer of Scripture. 
 Man is a fallen being, fallen through the abuse of 
 his freedom into sin and into straits, and the whole 
 
 B B 2 
 
1 7 2 The Higher L ife. 
 
 system of things around him has been constructed 
 with a view to his being redeemed. " For the 
 earnest expectation of the creatzire waiteth for the 
 manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature 
 was 7nade subject to va^iity, not willingly, but by reason 
 of Hint who hath sitbjectcd the same in hope ; because 
 the creatiu^e itself also shall be delivered from the 
 bondage of corrtiption into the gloriotis liberty of the 
 children of God. For we know that the zvhole ci'ea- 
 tion groaneth and travailcth in pain together until now. 
 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the 
 first-fruits of the spirit, even we oitrselves groan 
 within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, 
 the redemption of our body. For we are saved by 
 hope : hut hope that is seen, is not hope : for what a 
 man seeth, why doth he yet hope for f But if we 
 hope for that we see not, then do we with patience 
 wait for it. Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our 
 infirmities : for we know not what we should pray 
 for as we 07ight : bttt the Spirit itself maketh inter- 
 cession for us with groanings which camiot be uttered. 
 And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the 
 mind of the Spirit, becaiise He maketh intercession for 
 the saints according to the will of God. And we know 
 that all thiiigs work together for good to them that 
 love God, to them who are the called according to His 
 purpose!' — Romans viii. 19-28. 
 
 We have seen that the Scripture narrative of the 
 fall presents to us, as parallel with the degradation of 
 humanity, something like a fall in the condition of 
 the world. Eden vanished, and Nature became the 
 
The Destiny of the Creature. "^^o^ 
 
 hard, stern nurse and monitress of man. Whether 
 you say that a flood swept over the early home of 
 our race, and destroyed the beauty and splendour of 
 the pristine paradise ; or whether you say that it was 
 man who suffered the eclipse, that a film fell before 
 his sin-darkened sight, so that though the splendours 
 were around him the power to behold and to enjoy 
 them was dead, or at any rate numb ; or whether you 
 take a wider view, and say that the whole structure 
 of the world and the whole order of its develop- 
 ment were so arranged from the first, as to make it 
 a severe training school for our wanton and prodigal 
 race, the result in any case remains, that this earth is 
 no Paradise for men, but a wilderness, a place of 
 pilgrimage, a school of training, but in no sense a 
 home or a rest. 
 
 That sentence on man which unveils, as God only 
 could unveil, the full conditions of his life as a con- 
 scious and guilty transgressor, is a sentence on the 
 earth as well as on man. " Cursed is the ground for 
 thy sake',' must surely mean, not as a curse to thee, 
 but for thy chastisement, with a view to thy culture, 
 thy training to obedience and faith. ''And unto 
 Adam He said, because thou hast hearkened unto 
 the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of 
 which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat 
 of it : cursed is the ground for thy sake ; in sorrow 
 shalt tho2i eat of it all the days of thy life : thorns 
 also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee ; aiid thou 
 shalt eat the herb of the field : in the sweat of thy 
 face shalt thoic eat breads till thou return ujito the 
 
174 The Higher Life. 
 
 ground ; for out of it wast thoti taken; for dust thou 
 art, and 2cnto dust shalt thou return^ — Genesis iii. 
 
 17-19- 
 
 I am not insisting on the historical truth of this 
 picture, but on the spiritual truth which lies behind 
 it. It manifestly implies a distinct adaptation of the 
 physical conditions of the world of which man became 
 the citizen, to the unfolding of his moral and spiritual 
 nature under the influence of that Redemptive work, 
 the first prophecy of which was, in the very sentence, 
 given to the world. It is evident that earth was 
 intended to be to man through the whole range of 
 his history, what on a minor scale the wilderness be- 
 came to the Israelites — the place of "wanderings" 
 and of hard, sad straits ; with memories of fairer 
 and easier conditions of life behind it, and visions of 
 a Canaan of transcendent beauty and richness beyond. 
 We are justified in regarding that wilderness ex- 
 perience of the chosen race, as the key to the actual 
 condition of man the transgressor in this wilderness 
 world. God has caused this history to be written for 
 our learning. The children of the patriarchs were 
 manifestly set forth as the microcosm, in which we 
 may most profitably study the macrocosm, human 
 society. It is on this principle alone that we can 
 understand the large place which the children of 
 Israel fill in the scheme of Revelation. They 
 stand for all mankind. And we see them under a 
 bright light as it were, with the veils off, that we 
 may study to the best advantage the methods of 
 God in the education of our race. 
 
The Destmy of the Creahire, 375 
 
 The wilderness into which they were led forth 
 for their training, was literally "the pastures." Not 
 the hard, bare, thirsty, stony tract which we under- 
 stand by desert, but pastures — wide, sweeping plains 
 of moderately luxuriant verdure, with low rolling 
 hills breaking the monotonous outline, cut by rich, 
 deep valleys at intervals, well wooded and watered ; ^ 
 while mountain gorges of glorious beauty, of sublime 
 form and brilliant colour, penetrated everywhere the 
 great chains, whose grand and soaring summits, stood 
 sentinel around.^ The wilderness was hard and bare, 
 no doubt, compared with the lavish, wanton luxu- 
 riance of Egypt on the one hand, and the goodly and 
 gracious fertility of Canaan on the other. But on 
 the whole, it was a good place to dwell in for a while, 
 a noble training school for a nation, as their gallant 
 and disciplined bearing when they went up to claim 
 their Canaan revealed;^ while here and there was 
 an Elim with its springs and palms, where the tired 
 wanderer might rest awhile, and dream his dream of 
 a brighter world. 
 
 Not otherwise is earth to all of us, not otherwise 
 is life. This earth has broad, bare tracts of savage 
 desert, hateful both to beast and to man, with rich, 
 sunny, luxuriant regions scattered around the wilder- 
 
 ^ They have since been denuded ; the region is much more like a 
 true desert now. 
 
 "^ In striking contrast to the long level lines of rock which flanked 
 the valley of the Nile. 
 
 ^ We see what the wilderness training had done for that people, in 
 such passages as Joshua i., and indeed in the whole history which that 
 book records. 
 
376 The Higher Life. 
 
 ness borders, which are the settled homes of our race. 
 But in the physical order of our earth the wilderness 
 is truly a part, and an essential part, of the fruitful field, 
 and it ministers in wondrous ways to its fertility. The 
 most terrible deserts have noble functions to fulfil 
 when we regard earth as the theatre of history. The 
 great Sahara helps — it is but help, other and yet 
 stronger influences are at work — to lift the line of 
 perpetual ground-frost round the North Cape of 
 Europe, while it runs into quite low latitudes on 
 the coasts of Labrador and Kamtchatka. It is the 
 Arabian desert mainly which makes Syria the garden 
 of the East ; while the great Australian desert lends 
 to South-eastern Asia one of the softest and richest 
 climates in the world. 
 
 But it is impossible to shut out the fact that on 
 earth desert is predominant. We speak of India 
 and China as teeming hives of human population. 
 The great Asiatic desert would swallow both of them, 
 and be desert still. Look at the vast spaces in Asia, 
 America, Australia, Africa, and even in Europe, where 
 human population is sparse, or altogether wanting, 
 and compare their spaces with those of the fertile 
 nooks that teem with men. 
 
 And God has so ordered it, that the habitable 
 regions which afford the fairest facilities to human 
 intercourse — and intercourse means development and 
 civilisation — shall lie in climates which impose the 
 more rigorous conditions, and demand hardy industry 
 trom their inhabitants. The infancy of civilisation 
 was nursed around the soft Mediterranean shores, 
 
The Destiny of the Creature. 377 
 
 where sunny seas and frequent ports tempted timid 
 sailors to the voyages which scattered the seeds of 
 civiHsation abroad. But the north-westward move- 
 ment of the head-quarters of the civihsing forces, 
 into the reasons of which I cannot in this place enter, 
 has gradually transferred the centre of the world's 
 industrial and political activity to hardier regions, and 
 has given the sceptre to the races who have to toil 
 hardest to win from Nature the nourishment of their 
 life. 
 
 Work is demanded of man by the very struc- 
 ture of his dwelling-place. " If a man will not work, 
 so neither shall he eat," is written as plainly in the 
 book of nature as in the Bible. But work deepens 
 into toil among the nobler peoples, and new visions 
 of toil are opened to us as man subdues and occu- 
 pies the waste places of his world. The Elims which 
 gem the earth, the watered gardens such as Lot 
 saw, which might recall fair Paradise, but woo man to 
 wantonness. We constantly see them transformed 
 by his transgression into the truly desert places of 
 Nature. We can see, as we survey them, how Eden 
 was lost to the transgressor. Some of earth's fairest, 
 brightest regions he has made foul and pestilential 
 wastes by sin. 
 
 Creation has been made subject to vanity ; insta- 
 bility, decay, death, seem to the mere natural man to 
 rule it. It is as though it presented to him every- 
 where the sad counterpart to the sadness of his heart. 
 Heathen peoples, who have never learned the reason 
 of this subjection to vanity, nor caught the ray of 
 
378 The, Higher Life. 
 
 hope which shines on it from the Word of God, in- 
 evitably in the end come to find Nature a terror ; and 
 as I have more than once pointed out in its various 
 aspects and bearings, their development is crushed 
 through wide regions by the hardness, the sternness, 
 and the sadness of the world. Famines, earthquakes, 
 tornadoes, volcanic and oceanic floods, in the end 
 poison for them the fragrance of roses, smirch the 
 enamelled mantle of Creation, and dim the lustrous 
 beauty of the stars. The wilderness becomes a holy 
 and beautiful vestibule to those who have grasped 
 the promise, and clasped the hope ; who know that 
 the main thing which they ought to pray for here is 
 strength to toil and to endure ; and who welcome all 
 its benign but purging discipline, because they see in 
 the far distance the gleam of the light of the glorious 
 Canaan in which their toil and pain is to bear blessed 
 fruit. But to men left alone with Nature, the element 
 of terror becomes preponderant. They hear the voice 
 of her groaning, and faint before the vision of the 
 burden and the anguish of the universal life. 
 
 There is something which appals us when we 
 fairly try to realise it, in the suffering of the dumb 
 creation under human tyranny. One shudders to 
 think what agony, in the very homes of earth's most 
 polished and developed peoples, the brute creation is 
 doomed daily to endure. It is a sad, sad history — 
 man's dealing with the creatures whom God has de- 
 livered bound and helpless into his hand. And then 
 there is the perpetual wasting, or rather, for there is 
 110 waste, what looks like the constant degradation 
 
The Destiny of the Creature. 379 
 
 of the structure. Imperceptibly but surely the gran- 
 deur and beauty of the forms of Nature are being 
 worn down, and a dull monotony seems to be the 
 only ultimate result. Evolution, by the constant and 
 familiar action of the forces which are always at work 
 uround us, is the modern key to the physical history 
 of Creation, excluding crises, convulsions, and catas- 
 trophes. But as matter of fact, the forces which are 
 at work are silently effacing the salient features of 
 this earth of ours, and must reduce it in time to a 
 formlessness strangely suggestive of the second child- 
 hood, through which that which is mortal in man 
 returns to the dust. 
 
 No doubt there are eruptions, elevations, up- 
 heavals, some of them volcanic, some of them, as in 
 Scandinavia, Greenland, and South America, secular. 
 But we see nothing at work which can supply a 
 qualitative compensation for the waste. The land 
 gains on the sea, if the sea gains on the land. 
 The quantities may be fairly balanced, but the land- 
 gain is fertile mud, the land-loss is cliff, and rock, 
 and all that makes the picturesque beauty of our 
 dwelling-place. And man sees that there is no 
 stamp of permanence on anything that is around 
 him ; that Nature grows old and decays like himself. 
 The two are made in concert, one key-note tunes 
 them both. Together with man. Nature has, not made 
 herself subject, but been made subject to vanity by 
 a higher Will ; together with man. Nature shall one 
 day be redeemed. 
 
 Just as there seem to lie in the background of 
 
;8o The Higher Life. 
 
 man's thought, vague memories of a state of holier 
 and happier relation with his fellows, of an earlier 
 estate of purity, happiness, and peace, so he seems to 
 be haunted by images of a fairer and brighter world. 
 All that he looks upon in the world around him in its 
 bravest dress moves him more to tears than to songs. 
 It is like the new splendour of the second temple, 
 which made the old men weep when they recalled 
 the glory that was gone for ever. Something fairer, 
 of more perfect form, of more lustrous hue, rises up 
 behind all our visions of the beauty which God has 
 spread round us here. In his Art man strives to 
 pourtray it. Art is said to hold the mirror to Nature, 
 and to reflect her likeness. What Nature ? The 
 Nature that is stained and flawed and subjected to 
 vanity, or Nature redeemed, transfigured, glorified ? 
 Man's highest Art, as we see in the last works of 
 great masters, loses itself in the impossible. But the 
 things which are impossible with man are possible 
 with God, as shall be seen one day, in a Creation 
 restored. 
 
 We traced in a former discourse the groaning and 
 the travail of all things — the struggle for life filling 
 the sphere of the Creation with its battle-cry ; and we 
 saw how this struggle prolonged itself with dire result 
 in human history. But we saw too that man has a 
 vision of a fairer order, of which, not strength, but 
 love shall be the centre. As he rises higher in his 
 spiritual development, the strength which strives for 
 mastery is deposed from its supremacy, and the love 
 is exalted which helps, and heals, and saves. And 
 
The Destiny of the Creature. 381 
 
 this holier principle is to rule, he believes, through 
 the vast Creation. The Lord, who is Love, proposes 
 to Himself, as the object of His sacrifice, the sub- 
 duing- all things in all worlds into His peace. Man 
 cannot be at rest in a discordant and distracted 
 Creation. That principle which makes blessed and 
 holy order in the sphere of the human, he longs to 
 see working through all the spheres. The world 
 which has fallen to the key of his humiliation and 
 travail, he yearns to see raised again to the level of" 
 his redeemed and purified nature. He looks with 
 inexpressible longing to see sorrow and sighing 
 banished from the Creation, as it shall be, the 
 Scripture tells us, when sin is banished from his 
 life. 
 
 In the last discourse I considered the principle of 
 embodiment. Man is an embodied spirit. The true 
 germ of a human body is a human soul. The soul 
 contains within itself the principle of its investiture- 
 Like the seed, when the outer envelope perishes it 
 takes to itself a new form and clothes itself afresh. 
 The Bible knows nothing about a state of disem- 
 bodied spirits ; no half-lit, shadowy, shivering world, 
 haunted by pale, regretful forms, is the vision which 
 it presents to us of what lies behind the veil of death. 
 " Not unclothed, but clothed upon," in one bright 
 moment ; absent from this body, at home, embodied, 
 with the Lord. The soul having completed the course 
 ordained to it in this scene of its discipline, finds itself 
 clothed upon with a form which exactly fits its moral 
 development, which marks out its condition and 
 
382 The Higher L ife. 
 
 stature, and enables it to enter into full relations with 
 the beings and the things that stir its interest and 
 make the charm of its life. 
 
 This principle of embodiment, which connects the 
 body directly with the spiritual principle, with the 
 moral mind which makes the man, has its terrible as 
 well as its gracious aspects. There are men living, 
 and this book may come into the hands of such, who 
 are sedulously, however unconsciously, preparing 
 themselves to put on at death the body of a beast. 
 You doubt it ? Why, look at them ; you may see it 
 already forming within. Watch them ; they grow more 
 gross, more prone, literally more brute-like, year by 
 year. What is that but the soul moulding from within 
 the body that is, and shaping here and now the body 
 that is to rise out of its wreck. 
 
 This lends an awful significance to the elections 
 of our freedom. We are making, by our daily 
 habits of thought and action, the limbs and organs 
 which are to stand up in death in the eternal world. 
 We may be fitting ourselves to wear at once a form 
 radiant and exulting, strong to roam in freedom 
 through the celestial spaces, and to take in all the 
 bright impressions of the worlds which are hidden 
 from us by the veil of death. Or we may be fitting 
 ourselves to put on a form obscene and loathsome, 
 meet to herd with all the base rout of the Creation, 
 and to crawl in the dust of that loftier sphere. Men, 
 women, understand that you are making now the 
 body of the future ; you are making that which 
 is to be the blessed organ and helpmeet, or the tor- 
 
The Destiny of the Creat^u^e. 383 
 
 .nent and curse, of the spirit in eternity. Live like 
 a beast, and you may see in faces that you sometimes 
 meet and shudder to look upon, the likeness to 
 which you are growing. Live like Christ, and the 
 form which He bore through the gate of death is the 
 image of the glorious tabernacle which awaits you, 
 when the death-swoon for the moment is over, and 
 " in your flesh " you shall see God. 
 
 And as is the body of the resurrection so is the 
 world. As the Bible knows nothing of a disembodied, 
 so also it knows nothing of a homeless spirit. How 
 much of the purest joy of life springs from our con- 
 tact and relation with the Creation which surrounds 
 us. The Creation animate and inanimate. Why 
 should we believe that one single source of delight 
 and culture which is open to us here shall be closed 
 by death, if death means resurrection .'^ We know 
 nothing about the immortality of animals. I see no 
 reason for believing it. The personality of the indi- 
 vidual is wanting, and it is that which survives the 
 shock of death, and stands up in life in higher worlds. 
 But though the individual may perish, the type mav 
 be immortal. And the end of all this groaning and 
 travailing of the animal Creation, to watch which 
 here sometimes fills us with sadness, may be the sur- 
 vival of the nobler forms and those most related to 
 the human, to attend us as the outer fringe of our 
 humanity, in the world which lies, for us, beyond the 
 river of death. 
 
 And as the Creation has shared our fall, the 
 Scripture assures us it shall share our resurrection. 
 
384 The Higher Lift.. 
 
 We know not where the Immortal are, what splen- 
 dour their eyes are already beholding, what power is 
 throbbing in the pulses of their twice-born life. Some 
 suppose that they are still around us ; that here is the 
 new earth and the new heaven which has already re- 
 ceived them to its home and to its rest. This earth 
 may be the home of two humanities ; the humanity 
 which is being, and the humanity which has been, 
 redeemed. I know not. Sometimes one feels that 
 the blessed ones are not far away ; that their forms 
 still tread unseen the pathways of the world, seeing, 
 knowing, wonders and splendours which at times 
 flash out on us, but in the main are hidden from 
 our sinful sight. But here or there God has worlds 
 into which to bring forth the children of the resur- 
 rection, in which Nature shall bask in a light, and 
 shine with a splendour, of which here we see faint 
 images only in our dreams. 
 
 But this we know. The lost peace, the lost 
 purity, the lost glory of the Creation, shall one day be 
 restored to us. " This corruptible shall put on incor- 
 ruption, this mortal creature shall put on immortality." 
 Highly as the faculties of the body and the spirit 
 may be developed, keen as may be their perceptions, 
 intense as may be the delight which they are capable 
 of taking in the sights, the sounds, and the myriad 
 suggestions of an external world, there will always 
 be around us a Creation that is attuned to the key- 
 note of our spirits — capable of yielding to the child 
 of the resurrection the purest satisfactions, while it 
 draws him ever upward to the uncreated fountain of 
 
The Destiny of the Creature. -^'^' 
 
 o^ 
 
 life and benediction, and is the minister which leads" 
 him to, not the syren that tempts him from, God. 
 There are worlds awaiting our purified and perfected 
 nature, where all that jars in this corruptible Creation 
 shall be for ever silenced, where the moaning shall 
 be hushed, the struggle shall be ended, and the 
 peace of God, which is the peace of love, shall be 
 established and shall rule for evermore. 
 
 And this is the inheritance which some of you 
 are selling for a beast's Indulgences ; drinking, gam- 
 bling, rioting, or dawdling through a round of vapid 
 amusements, and despising the citizenship of all these 
 worlds. As the man Is, so will be the character of 
 the Creation that surrounds him. The universe has 
 worlds where the most glorious human faculty, per- 
 fected by life's tremendous discipline, shall see face 
 to face the things which God hath prepared, at once 
 to satisfy its most passionate longings, and to educate 
 Its power for yet higher developments in store. But 
 remember, the universe has, too, lairs for beasts, and 
 sties for swine. " Behold then, ye despisers, and 
 wonder." Wonder at the work which the Lord will 
 do, at the world which He will bring forth from all 
 the wreck and waste of this sin-stricken Creation, and 
 tremble lest the home of your being should be found 
 at last, not in the heights of that blessed celestial 
 sphere, but In Its dust. 
 
 " Awake, awake, thou that steepest, and arise front 
 the dead, and Christ shall give thee life ; " life that 
 shall lift up thy head, a risen man, In a world of such 
 glory as eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, 
 
 c c 
 
386 The Higher Life. 
 
 imagination hath not conceived of here — when the 
 kiss of death hath sealed thy immortaHty. That Hfe 
 shall still expand and discipline thy regenerate 
 powers, drawing them forth to their full perfection 
 in the last, the great resurrection day. Then the 
 day of the manifestation of the sons of God, and of 
 the whole fruit of life's travail, shall be fully come ; 
 the creature shall be delivered from the bondage of 
 corruption into the glorious liberty of the children ; 
 and then for man, for nature, " the S2m shall no viore 
 go down nor the moon withdraw herself ; bttt the 
 Lord shall be their everlasting lights and the days of 
 their mourning shall be ended." 
 
38; 
 
 XX. 
 
 THE DESTINY OF MAN. 
 
 " When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers ; the moon 
 and the stars, which Thou hast ordained ; what is man, that Thou 
 art mindfnl of hifn ? and the son of man, that Thou visitest 
 him f" — Ps. viii. 3-4. 
 
 This question is pressed upon us with continually 
 increasing force, by the rapidly widening knowledge 
 of the universe which the human intellect is master- 
 ing, by the innumerable worlds which the telescope 
 unveils to us, the secrets of whose constitution the 
 spectroscope enables us in some measure to explore. 
 The heavens which shed their lustre on the Psalmist 
 in the clear Syrian sky, contained at most a few 
 thousand stars, none of which, nay, not even the 
 most glorious of luminaries itself, had he any reason 
 to consider comparable in mass and in importance 
 with our world. Earth to him was the centre of 
 all things, and the lord of earth was man. And 
 yet, so vast and deep were the spaces over which 
 his speculation ranged, so radiant were the orbs 
 which glittered in his sky, that man seemed to 
 shrink into miserable insignificance by comparison, 
 and it was hard to believe that he could be worth 
 the notice and the care of the Creator, in the midst 
 of all these lustrous worlds. 
 
 c c 2 
 
388 The Higher Lip. 
 
 But now the earth itself is as puny and insignifi- 
 cant in comparison with the universe, as man seemed 
 to be to David when weighed against the stars. 
 Man is not a shghter, weaker being, physically, in 
 comparison with the mass of the earth which is his 
 dwelling-place, than is the earth itself, when 
 compared with the vast spaces in which it seems 
 to float as a mote might float in a sunbeam, and 
 with the masses and the motions of these innu- 
 merable worlds. The stars which are visible to 
 the naked eye, are the mere outlying sentinels of 
 the numberless hosts which the telescope unveils. 
 The small patch of sky which a great telescope 
 commands as its field of view, is supposed to contain 
 at least as many stars which are invisible to the 
 naked eye, as the whole vault of heaven exhibits 
 to the unaided sight. 
 
 Each new power which is added to the telescope, 
 brings into view myriads of new worlds. And far 
 as the armed eye can penetrate, even to stars from 
 which the light, travelling as it does nearly 200,000 
 miles in a second of time, would be tens or even 
 hundreds of years in reaching us, no bound or hint 
 of a bound to the universe appears. We have not 
 the faintest reason for supposing that those specks 
 of light whose rays tell us, not what they are, or 
 even that they are, at this moment, but what they 
 were hundreds, possibly thousands of years ago, are 
 any nearer than we are to the outer bound of the 
 Creation. The infinitely small and the infinitely 
 great are hardly to be regarded as hyperbolical 
 
The Destiny of Man. 389 
 
 terms. Where existence begins no microscope has 
 discovered. Where it ends no telescope has ex- 
 plored. 
 
 Sirius, the most lustrous star in our heavens, has 
 been found, by perhaps the most brilliant scientific 
 observation of our times, to be receding from our 
 earth at the rate of some fifteen miles in every 
 second ; and yet the distance is so vast, that this 
 rate of recession during, say, two thousand years, 
 would make no difference in its apparent magnitude 
 and brilliancy : it must have appeared to the ancients 
 precisely as it appears to us now. I think that this 
 o-ives one the most awful impression of the vastness 
 of the spaces and magnitudes with which we are 
 dealing ; it makes this earth of ours but a dust-speck 
 whirling in the infinite vortex. Does not Dante 
 Rossetti speak of its " spinning like an angry midge " ? 
 And it wrings from us, as the brain faints under these 
 measures and numbers, the cry which George 
 Herbert interprets : 
 
 Oh, rack me not to such a vast extent ; 
 
 Those distances belong to Thee : 
 The world's too little for Thy tent, 
 
 A grave too big for me. 
 
 " When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy 
 fingers, the moon and the stars which Tho7C hast 
 ordained ; what is man, that Thotc art mindful of 
 him ? and the son of man, that Thoic visitest him f " 
 
 The only answer to the question, and the ample 
 answer, is the Incarnation. Be man what he may 
 
390 The Higher Life. 
 
 in point of mass and force, compared with the thi^igs 
 which surround him, God has been mindful of him, 
 God has visited him ; God has made man's nature 
 His shrine, His organ of manifestation, as He has 
 not manifested Himself, and cannot manifest Himself 
 by all these worlds. The Incarnation enables us t( 
 lift up our heads in the face of the overwhelming 
 spaces, masses, and forces which surround us, and to 
 believe that a human spirit, dowered with the know- 
 ledge of good and of evil, is more to God, is more 
 precious and more prolific of all that God regards as 
 the end of Creation, than the whole universe of 
 mere material worlds. 
 
 But if man may thus, strong in the knowledge of 
 the Incarnation, which alone gives him a firm grasp 
 of his spiritual nature and its relations, lift up his 
 head before the material mass of the Creation, how- 
 ever vast, however boundless it may seem, and may 
 wear his crown in the presence of suns, and moons, 
 and constellations, what shall we say of him in rela- 
 tion to the beings by whom this universe may be 
 peopled, and who may be teeming in all these innu- 
 merable spheres ? What becomes of man, of his 
 interests, his election, his redemption, if these worlds 
 are all peopled by intelligent beings like man, if each 
 of these suns which shine in the midnight sky has a 
 troop of satellite planets round him, all like our earth, 
 the abode of intelligent life, needing from God the 
 same care, the same nurture, the same love ? Does 
 it not weaken the ground of our assurance, that this 
 little mote in the universe has been the scene of such 
 
The Destiny of Man. 391 
 
 transcendent transactions, when we measure what 
 we might call its claim on God in the scale of millions 
 of inhabited worlds.^ 
 
 This is no new question. As my readers well 
 know, it has been keenly debated, and has been 
 within our times the subject of fierce intellectual 
 controversy, the echoes of which have hardly yet 
 died away. The author of a book called " The 
 Plurality of Worlds " asked boldly, what reason have 
 we for supposing- that these worlds are inhabited ? 
 and answered, following in the track of Mediaeval 
 Christian thinkers, that the weight of such evidence 
 as w^e can obtain is rather against the opinion that 
 they are inhabited than in its favour. This bold de- 
 liverance called forth a storm of opposition. Works 
 were written in abundance to confute the presump- 
 tuous philosopher, the most popular of which, if not 
 the most convincing, was Sir David Brewster's 
 " More Worlds than One." It is a controversy which 
 of course it is quite impossible to settle. But it cer- 
 tainly seems a great step towards the negative con- 
 clusion, that the only orb which we can survey, or 
 hope to survey, with tolerable accuracy, and on which 
 signs of anything like human habitation might with 
 due pains be discovered, appears to be a wreck ; 
 more like the crater of a vast, extinct volcano, than 
 an orderly, beautiful, habitable world. 
 
 It is a matter on which we must be content with 
 
 ^ Twenty millions has been given as a rough estimate of the 
 number of stars within the range of telescopic sight. 
 
392 The Highe}" Life. 
 
 such evidence as we can get, and the condition of the 
 moon seems to give no hint of its habitation or habit- 
 abihty by beings organised upon a type so high as 
 man. Further, the physical conditions of the various 
 planets of our solar system, to say the least, look in the 
 same direction. I am not attempting to play the 
 astronomer. I have not the least right to offer an 
 independent opinion on such matters. And theo- 
 logical astronomy, and science generally, I imagine, 
 is rather apt to provoke a smile from the masters of 
 the scientific schools. I only note the result which 
 seems to be now very generally accepted, that the 
 physical conditions of life in the planets, however 
 much they may vary, are such, that beings of a high 
 order, according to our human notions, could not 
 dwell in them, or find in them a fit theatre for the 
 development of any high form of life. 
 
 According to our human notions ! Yes, it may 
 be answered, but what are those notions worth ? It 
 is natural that men should think that their own 
 organisation is the normal rule for the Creation, and 
 that their own is the highest form of life. To the 
 negro, Adam must be black, and the devil must be 
 white ; and so we see all things through the medium 
 of our own prejudgments, and think ourselves and 
 our world, being children of vanity, the centre of all 
 the spheres. But it is only the fly on the wheel, after 
 all, we are told, crying, See how we move. Science, 
 we are instructed, rebukes this vain imagination, by 
 revealing to us infinite varieties of types of organisa- 
 tions, and innumerable worlds. And so it is set 
 
The Destiny of Man. 393 
 
 down to the credit of our intolerable vanity if we 
 suppose that creatures, living under such vastly dif- 
 ferent conditions from our own, as manifestly obtain 
 in the planets, must belong to a quite inferior grade 
 of life. The only satisfactory answer to this question 
 must rest on the revelation which has been made to 
 us, as to the essential nature and constitution of man. 
 '■'And God said, Let tcs make man in Our image, 
 after Our likeness. So God created man in His own 
 image ; in the image of God created He him, male and 
 female created He themr 
 
 Nor does this truth rest alone on a sentence in a 
 venerable document which is difficult of interpreta- 
 tion, and the value of which as evidence of the primal 
 condition of man is in dispute. It is sustained and 
 emphasised by the Incarnation ; while the truth of the 
 Incarnation is sustained by the fact that it alone 
 affords the key to the mystery of man's constitution 
 and life. " Wherefore seeing the childi'en zvere par- 
 takers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise 
 took part of the same!' ''To as m,any as 7'eceived Him 
 to the^n gave He power to become the sons of God." 
 We see, then, that according to the statement of 
 Revelation, and the witness of history, man sustains 
 an altogether peculiar and lofty relation to his 
 Creator. Made in the image of God, he is capable 
 of receiving Him into his nature, nay, he was so 
 made that He might so receive Him, and become 
 partaker himself of a Divine nature through Re- 
 demption ; he is capable, further, of being transformed 
 into the glorious image of God his Redeemer, and of 
 
;94 ^'^'^ Higher Life. 
 
 dwelling as a son in the bosom of His love through 
 eternity. 
 
 This is the solid truth of man's being as de- 
 clared in the Scripture, and that it is the truth is 
 witnessed, as we have seen, by the whole character 
 of his life's experience, and his manifest destiny. We 
 have, then, solid ground to go upon in assuming that 
 the human is the supreme type of form, and that the 
 highest purpose of God in the Creation is wrought 
 out through the life of our race. And if we see that 
 the conditions of life in worlds of which we can ob- 
 tain some knowledge, are utterly unsuitable for any 
 being in anywise like man, we have some strong 
 ground to rest upon in the conclusion that, in our sys- 
 tem, this earth is the only world which is the theatre 
 of any high developments of life. 
 
 But how far will this conclusion carry us ? Our 
 system ! It sounds very vast, very grand. Nep- 
 tune, the outermost planet of our system, is nearly 
 3,000,000,000 miles from the sun.^ But this vast 
 space is but as an handbreadth, compared with the 
 spaces with which we have to deal in the great uni- 
 verse. Dare we carry our speculation further, and 
 believe that these innumerable worlds, where there 
 may be, perhaps we may say must be, splendours of 
 light and colour such as we can but faintly dream of 
 here, are tenantless ? Dare we imagine that from 
 
 ^ I use round numbers, and specify numbers as little as possible. 
 It would be easy of course to parade wondrous strings of numbers, but 
 the kind of effect which they produce is worth very little, and is of very 
 small account in such an argument as this. 
 
The Destiny of Man. 
 
 all this glorious choir of shining worlds no breath of 
 intelligent praise goes up into the ear of the Creator ; 
 that save here, in this little far-off nook of the 
 Creation, the voice of worship and prayer is dumb ? 
 There is something in our instincts that shrinks 
 from, may I not say shudders at, the conclusion. We 
 imagine instinctively, and cannot but imagine, that 
 this whole universe was made to be the theatre of a 
 lofty, intelligent, and religious life. And the instinct 
 has the testimony of Scripture to sustain it, and 
 must be in the track of a blessed and glorious truth. 
 " The creature itself also shall be delivered from the 
 bondage of coj^ruption, into the glorious liberty of the 
 children of God!' 
 
 But why should we not believe that the creation 
 of man, was the first step towards the peopling of 
 the universe with beings of this lofty spiritual order ; 
 and that the working out of the higher stages of the 
 Divine plan begins now, and in our world ? It is 
 quite possible to conceive that man is the commence- 
 ment of that higher, that spiritual order, with which, 
 as we have seen, the whole Creation has been travail- 
 ing in birth ; and that man is destined, in ways which 
 are hidden from our scrutiny, to take high part in the 
 developments of life in all these worlds. And why 
 should we not believe it ? There must be beeinnine 
 somewhere, why not now and here ? 
 
 But is it possible to believe that this vast universe 
 is, so to speak, in the first stage of development, and 
 that as regards all the higher interest which man's life 
 lends to earth's history, the Creation is at present a 
 
39^ The Higher Life. 
 
 waste ? Again we must look to the little that we can 
 see and know, to help us in our vague guesses at the 
 truth about the unseen and unknown. Let us take 
 this earth of ours as an instance of the Divine method 
 in the Creation. Man, however long he has been a 
 denizen of this earth, is at any rate a recent denizen. 
 As the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas^ are the 
 youngest G>f the mountains ; man is the youngest, 
 while he is beyond comparison the noblest, creature 
 in his world. We have no measure of the number 
 of millions of years, during which this earth was a 
 waste as regards the higher developments of life — 
 when it was the habitation of monstrous, obscene 
 forms which haunted its marshes, or of the still 
 earlier and more rudimental creatures that wrought 
 in its primaeval waters, building up the rock on 
 which the solid structure that bears us is founded, 
 before the continents were uplifted and the higher 
 life of our globe was born. 
 
 Sir W, Thompson and others seem to think it 
 possible to fix some limit, beyond which even the 
 most rudimental forms of life could not exist. A 
 layman like myself is bound to listen with great 
 respect to the judgments of such masters ; but still 
 even the reader unlearned in the lore of science can 
 see that the calculation rests on such vague data, and 
 
 ^ Just as in the development of the chick in the ^gg, the last thing to 
 be formed is the vertebral column, which binds all the scattered limbs 
 and organs into a unity ; so, regarding the earth as in some sort ver- 
 tebrate in type, the spinal column which holds it all together, and gives 
 it a characteristic form, was the last to appear. 
 
The Destiny of Man. 397 
 
 assumes such a uniformity of operation — which seems 
 at the least highly uncertain when the conditions are 
 so different from those which now obtain — that any 
 conclusions founded upon it must be regarded as very 
 far from established ; especially as scientific men of 
 equal eminence dispute the validity of the whole 
 argument. But granting that limit, at no matter 
 how many hundreds of millions of years, beyond 
 that limit, there is the unmeasurable period during 
 which the heated vaporous mass was cooling, and 
 settling, and taking shape as a world — as perhaps 
 Saturn is settling now. 
 
 Here then is man, a being of a few thousands, 
 or granting the longer limit which some demand, 
 tens of thousands of years, at the utmost ; and here 
 is the earth, as many hundreds of millions, multi- 
 plied probably by hundreds still, preparing to be his 
 dwelling-place, and to furnish, to the being made in 
 the image of God, the theatre for the development 
 of a spiritual life. The Being who made the world 
 must be a Being of an infinite patience. Verily the 
 day of the Lord is a long day. He waits and works 
 through countless stages of preparation, for high re- 
 sults. The highest products of development are 
 always late of birth, and in number limited. Estimate 
 the mass of common undistinguished humanity, and 
 compare it with the elect few, in whom we are taught 
 to believe that He begins to see of the travail of His 
 soul and to be satisfied. Again, how many of us 
 men and women of the commoner clay, form the base 
 and the lower stages of the pyramid of the human, 
 
39^ The Higher Life. 
 
 on the summit of which rise up the lofty few, whose 
 dower is " the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the 
 love of love " ? 
 
 The history of this earth, which lay waste, or 
 rather, let us say, fallow, during unmeasurable eras, 
 slowly developing the theatre of man's brief life, 
 is just parallel to the history of the great universe, 
 if, as is possible, and as we have ventured to suppose, 
 we are commencing here on earth that higher order 
 of spiritual existence, which is destined through the 
 ages to fill all worlds with the voice of worship and 
 the song of praise. We see the beginnings of this 
 higher order upon earth. Time was, and not so long 
 ago, when man was not. Spiritual life, the life of a 
 being dowered with moral freedom, appeared as a 
 new thing in this earth ; why not in the great uni- 
 verse, which like the earth through all those eras of 
 eras may still be waiting for its lord ? 
 
 There seems to be no reason then in the nature 
 or in the analogies of things, why we should not 
 accept the conclusion which has been already sug- 
 gested. But the vital question after all is, why we 
 should. And our answer to it will depend very 
 largely, on the view which we may take of the rela- 
 tion of Redemption to the higher developments oJ 
 life. Redemption is the means of the full unveiling 
 of the Divine nature. Never, until a being capable 
 of Redemption, and because of his high capacity for 
 the reception of the life of God worth redeeming at 
 infinite cost, had sinned and suffered, was it known, 
 could it be known, that God is Love. ''Herein is 
 
The Destmy of Man. 399 
 
 love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and 
 sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins^ 
 
 This manifestation of the Divine nature becomes 
 the basis of a new, a loftier, a more fruitful relation 
 between the Creator and the creature man, than 
 could be conceived of apart from Christ's redemptive 
 work. The redeemed man, like the Prodigal brought 
 home, knows the Father more perfectly, and is more 
 perfectly known of the Father, than any creature in. 
 the mere condition of nature can either know, or be 
 known and loved. All the vast and various experi- 
 ence which springs out of the knowledge of evil, 
 and the knowledge of the Love which redeems from 
 evil, enriches the sphere of man's life unspeakably. 
 God sustains to man as his Redeemer, and man 
 sustains to God, a unique relation, in which all the 
 fulness of Godhead is manifested on the one hand, 
 and man is filled with all the fulness of God on the 
 other. 
 
 The full development of a free and finite moral 
 being, seems to demand such an experience as man 
 has passed through as a sinner ; saved, restored, by 
 the all-suffering, all-sacrificing Divine love. This 
 earth of ours has been the theatre of a transaction, 
 and has been the scene of an experience, of infinite 
 significance, such as must stand alone in the history 
 of Creation. Suppose that these worlds are inhabited 
 by beings created after the same type as man, beings 
 who have sinned and suffered as man, are we to 
 suppose an almost infinite series of Incarnations } 
 Surely there is profound meaning in the word " once 
 
4.00 The Higher Life. 
 
 offered^' " now 07ice in the end of the world hath He 
 appeared, to put away sin by the sacidfice of Himself !' 
 
 There is something in this thought of an end- 
 less repetition of redemptive sacrifices from which 
 the mind instinctively shrinks, and which the whole 
 revelation of the unknown things of God in Scripture 
 seems to deny. We are beset by this difficulty. If 
 these myriads of worlds are teeming with inhabitants 
 of a lofty type of development, all needing the same 
 Divine care and love, how can we understand the 
 selection of this little earth of ours to be the scene of 
 such transcendent manifestations of God ? It seems 
 to add a heavy difficulty to a Christian's belief, if he 
 is compelled to look upon these galaxies of stars as 
 the homes of beings of kindred nature and experi- 
 ence with himself, and who have precisely the same 
 claims on the Creator, and the same need. 
 
 The difficulty has been met by doubting the need. 
 It is said that man may quite probably be the only 
 transgressor in the universe ; the only being needing 
 this special provision for his rescue from the ruin of 
 a fall. Then comes in the question which I have 
 already glanced at. Dare we regard Redemption as 
 a special provision ; a scheme devised by love to meet 
 what mio'ht be reo-arded as an accidental defect in a 
 universal plan — one world only out of so many 
 myriads falling into sin and straits ? I feel no hesi- 
 tation about the answer. Redemption must be, as I 
 have said, the means of the very loftiest develop- 
 ment of which a finite being is capable. It establishes 
 at once between God and its subjects a bond, closer 
 
The Destiny of Man. 401 
 
 stronger, dearer, than can possibly exist out of its 
 pale. It must then in the nature of things lie near 
 to the heart of God's plan of universal government ; 
 it must be the key to the spiritual order in all the 
 worlds. 
 
 The only fair way out of the difficulty seems to 
 me to lie in the idea, that we men stand on the 
 threshold of the higher, the spiritual development of 
 life in this universe ; that till now the vast Creation 
 has been groaning and travailing in pain together ; 
 slowly wrestling itself so to speak out of chaos into 
 cosmos, slowly taking shape and dress to fit it to be 
 the theatre of the higher unfoldings of life. And now 
 in the end of the world of physical groaning and 
 travail, man appears. His form is the highest pro- 
 duct of the energy which has shaped the creature, 
 while there is breathed into him a spirit which relates 
 him directly to God, and to the spiritual sphere. 
 With us begins a new development of being ; in man 
 a spiritual order appears ; an order destined to fill the 
 universe, and to outlast eternity. And here, on the 
 very threshold of this higher order, the key to its 
 constitution, the instrument of its progress, at once 
 the law and the inspiration of its life, lies a great act 
 of sacrifice ; the sacrifice of the only-begotten Son of 
 God, that man, and all that is to grow out of man for 
 the universe and through eternity, might be saved. 
 
 To me there is something transcendently beauti- 
 ful and glorious in the thought, that the whole destined 
 development of spiritual life in the universe rests on 
 the atoning sacrifice of incarnate God ; and that this 
 
 D D 
 
402 The Higher Life. 
 
 revelation of God's righteousness and of His redeem- 
 ing love and mercy, is the foundation-stone of a 
 temple wide as the vast Creation, and lasting as the 
 throne of its King. That spiritual order which is to 
 rise in the universe as the crown of the natural order, 
 rests on the incarnation, the sacrifice, and the reign of 
 the eternal Word. The very first step up into that 
 higher life which God has opened to the creature in 
 humanity, is through the gate of sacrifice, which, full 
 of pain as it is and must be here through the weak- 
 ness and sickness of our nature, in the higher stages 
 of our growth will be the law of the perfect and 
 blessed life, because love will be its inspiration, and 
 love will be its reward. 
 
 And this is what is meant by the vision of the 
 Apocalypse ; the Lamb that was slain in the midst 
 of the throne, the great high throne of the Creation. 
 The love that suffered and triumphed on Calvary, is 
 to be the ruling spirit henceforth through all the 
 spheres of that new Creation, which is destined to 
 grow out of human travail and anguish. Man, and 
 all that is to come through man, is to learn by the 
 Redemption that was wrought on Calvary, to know 
 the mystery and to live the life of the Divine love, 
 in the blest communions of eternity. 
 
 It was the end of a world when the Redeemer 
 suffered ; the end of the old world of the corruptible 
 creature ; the beginning of a new world of which the 
 God-Man Is the founder, and in which the redeemed 
 man, renewed in a yet diviner fashion after the image 
 of Him. that created him, is to lead forth the ever- 
 
The Destiny of Man. 403 
 
 lasting processions of life. You will not fail to note 
 how through the whole of the New Testament, and 
 most fully in the Apocalypse, the future of the uni- 
 verse is connected with the fruits of the redemption 
 of our race. Sciolists may see in this only the vanity 
 of the human, bent on reducing all things on earth 
 and in heaven to its measure. But the mystery of 
 Incarnation seems to instruct us, that God has laid in 
 our nature the deep foundation of that spiritual order, 
 which is to reign ultimately in all these worlds, and 
 in all that is to grow out of them, through eternity. 
 
 I have spoken much, and have asked you to think 
 much, of Redemption. But what lover of mankind is 
 there who does not bear with him a constant sadness, 
 through the thought of the feeble hold that Redemp- 
 tion has upon the world ? There seems to be a sad 
 unreality about it all, when we speak of the large 
 scale on which man is created, and the lofty possi- 
 bilities of his life. And where are the men who are 
 exemplifying it, who reveal in their lives the true 
 scale of their being, and are trying, as the Stoic 
 says, " to hold fellowship with God " ? They seem 
 to be scattered here and there like the bright par- 
 ticular stars in the galaxy ; but the great multitude 
 around, as far as man's eye can search, care for none 
 of these things, and make light of these mysteries ; 
 while to the mass of mankind Redemption is an 
 unknown word. 
 
 Now I hold that the one deadly, damning sin 
 under the Gospel dispensation, is the refusal to be 
 redeemed. Whatever original sin may be, it is done 
 
 D D 2 
 
404 The Higher Life. 
 
 away by the atonement ; what man is and does by 
 nature is no barrier between the soul and the holy 
 and riofhteous God. Throug^h the offering of the 
 Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world, 
 God declares His reconciliation to man. '' God was 
 in Christ, reconciling the world tmto Himself, not im- 
 puting their trespasses unto them." There is now one 
 deadly sin, the spiritual sin, refusing to be reconciled 
 to God. But the great mass of mankind have never 
 heard even the whisper of His Gospel ; men, like us, 
 of the same stuff, the same quality, the same capacity 
 to be saved. 
 
 Scientific theorists may class the savage as closer 
 in type to the ape than to the man. Those who have 
 lived among them know better. They have seen the 
 gleam of the human spirit in the eye, they have heard 
 the human heart-beat ; they know that these are 
 brethren, dear as themselves to Christ, and capable 
 as themselves of tasting the joys of salvation, and of 
 beholding the glories of the Father's Kingdom in 
 eternity. " Go ye otit into all the world, and pi^each 
 the gospel to eve^y creaturey The idea that it is in 
 the purpose of the merciful God who was capable of 
 the sacrifice of Calvary, to doom the great mass of the 
 ignorant heathen to eternal torment, for not believing 
 on Him whose name even they have never heard, is 
 too terrible for any man to advocate publicly in these 
 days ; unless he wishes the Gospel which he preaches 
 to wither under the execration of mankind. With 
 the age of feudalism, the wrecks of which are 
 rapidly vanishing, the possibility of man's believing 
 
The Destiny of Man. 405 
 
 in such a gospel has passed away for ever. But the 
 heathen pass out in countless throngs into the world 
 behind the veil, ignorant of this transcendent fact in 
 the history of the universe, which God has laid as 
 the basis of all the higher developments of life, and 
 in which, as men, they might claim a right to hope to 
 share. What if the doom on them as they pass out 
 into the great universe, is to be taught the Gospel, 
 and to learn the mystery of Redemption in other 
 worlds ? 
 
 The great aim of the whole culture of men upon 
 this earth, of that great drama of action and of 
 suffering which we name civilisation, seems to be, 
 to develope to a very high pitch of knowledge and 
 of power an elect company, who stand out from the 
 mass around them as the apostles, the teachers, and 
 the leaders of their times. The highly civilised races 
 are but an election, as it were, compared with the 
 great human family ; and in the elect races the 
 trained lovers of truth, of righteousness, of God, 
 are but a little band, the sharp apex of the pyramid 
 of life. And yet consider what has been spent to 
 train them ; the awful, the infinite cost by which their 
 Lord has made them capable of being His helpers 
 in blessing and saving, all which He yearns to gather 
 to Himself. The full sphere of this glorious minister- 
 ing faculty, of the mind and the spirit which has 
 caught its inspiration from the sacrifice of the Lord 
 Jesus, cannot lie within the bounds of our mortal 
 sight. What if God is training His chosen ones to 
 be His helpers. His teachers, apostles, saviours, in 
 
4o6 The Higher Life. 
 
 other spheres ? The words of the Master to those 
 who had " followed Him in the regeneration," seem 
 to open to them in the future some such mission as 
 this. 
 
 One's heart bleeds, one's soul faints, to think ot 
 the innumerable multitude, who, not in heathendom., 
 but here in the heart of Christendom itself, pass life's 
 outer gate without one fair hearing of the message 
 of the Gospel. There must be — simple, absolute 
 justice demands it — some tremendous distinctions in 
 the dealings of the Judge of the whole earth, who 
 is also the Redeemer of all mankind, with the souls 
 that pass before His face for judgment. There are 
 ''few stripes'' for some, the Master declares, ''many 
 stripes " for others — for me, for you, if with Christ 
 before us, we turn away and will not have Him to 
 be our king. What if the trained servants of the 
 Kingdom here, those who have learned to find their 
 joy in blessing, healing, helping, saving, like Christ, 
 shall find the field of their work widening, as they 
 rise throuofh the mist of death, and are free of the 
 great universe for ever ? What if there are worlds 
 waiting for their ministry, where their trained Christ- 
 like faculty may be drawn forth to larger effort, nobler 
 aim, deeper and more blessed sacrifice ; till they pass 
 at last, their ministry ended, into the inner circle and 
 nearest to the throne. 
 
 I know that there is a dread shadow in the back- 
 ground, which we must look at before we can pass 
 from the contemplation of the destiny of our race. 
 
The Destiny of Man. 407 
 
 There is the vision of the abyss, where lost souls, the 
 souls that will not be redeemed, are said to writhe in 
 intolerable anguish ; the smoke of whose torment 
 ascendeth for ever, and blots the brightness of the 
 universe through eternity. Eternal sin, eternal 
 suffering, eternal moaning of souls in anguish, 
 eternal blackness of darkness and horror of death ! 
 And the merciful Christ looking down upon it all ; 
 the Redeemer who wept over the first touch of the 
 agony, and shed His blood in unutterable pain and 
 shame that it might be spared ! To a Father's eye, 
 one must think, that cloud which buries the moaning 
 and the writhing of the children, would poison the 
 very bliss of heaven. And yet what fiat can hinder 
 it, while a soul lives that refuses to be reconciled to 
 God? 
 
 It is a vision of horror which makes men shudder, 
 and from which in these days, when the benigner 
 aspects and conditions of power are in the ascendant, 
 there is desperate struggle to escape. Some formu- 
 late the theory of the annihilation of the hopelessly 
 impenitent, and hold, that after they have suffered 
 awhile the awful penalty of their transgression, a 
 merciful stroke will dash their sin and their moan- 
 ing out of the living universe for ever. It seems to 
 me a miserable extrication from a tremendous diffi- 
 culty. It makes life on a fearful scale an abortive 
 experiment ; it robs suffering of its holiest ministries; 
 it degrades our nature from its essential dignity ; it 
 makes light of the mystery of the Incarnation ; it 
 
4o8 The Higher Life. 
 
 presents God as a vindictive tormenter of souls, and 
 it runs counter to what seem to be the deepest and 
 most far-reaching passages of the Divine word. 
 
 Others formulate a theory of universal Redemp- 
 tion ; through struggles, anguish and terror, all will 
 be drawn to the Father, all will be brought home at 
 last. In this direction lie, I freely confess, all my 
 beliefs and sympathies, but I can see no way to 
 formulate the theory. It seems to me to deny the 
 inalienable power and prerogative of freedom ; nor 
 can I construct a harmony of passages to support it 
 from the word of God. What force of Divine love 
 may be brought to bear before the experiment of 
 freedom has final issue, I know not. What power 
 may lie yet in anguish, to break down the rebel will, 
 and to lay the bruised and humbled captive of mercy 
 at the Saviour's feet, no mortal can explore. But I 
 seem to see the gleam of a great hope in the dis- 
 tance. I cannot understand it ; I cannot reconcile 
 this and that, and make complete my little theory 
 of the ways of the unsearchable and eternal God. 
 There lies a meaning in these glorious words deeper 
 than I can fathom, and for which there is no room 
 that I can see in any of our theologies : " By Him 
 to reconcile all things tmto Himself ; through Him, 
 whether the things on the earth, or the things in the 
 heavensr — Col. i. 20. ''Having made known to tis 
 the mystery of His will, according to His good 
 pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that iit the 
 dispe7isation of the fulness of times He might gather 
 up in one all things in the Christ, the things in the 
 
The Destmy of Man. 
 
 409 
 
 heavens, and the things on the earth, in Him!' — Eph. 
 i., 9. 10. And in that yet profounder and more 
 prophetic word of Incarnate God — the vision which 
 He saw on high as He entered the cloud of the last 
 agony, and which nerved Him to endure — with which 
 I gladly close the words which I have endeavoured 
 to speak on the destiny of man : " And I, if I be 
 
 IJFTED UP FROM THE EARTH, WILL DRAW ALL MEN 
 UNTO Me." 
 
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