tihxavy of Che Cheolocjical ^tmimxy 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of 
 Philip H. Waddell Smith 
 
 BX 6333 .M365 L3 
 Maclaren, Alexander, 1826- 
 
 1910. 
 Last sheaves 
 
pf 
 
 
LAST SHEAVES 
 
LAST SHEAVES 
 
 ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D., Litt. D. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 
 
 150 NASSAU STREET 
 
TO 
 
 THE CHURCH 
 
 AND CONGREGATION OF 
 
 UNION CHAPEL MANCHESTER 
 
 IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 OF THEIR LOVE AND 
 
 TRUST UNBROKEN 
 
 FOR FORTY-FIVE 
 
 YEARS 
 
Prefatory Note 
 
 'T^HE title which I have given to this volume refers 
 -*■ to the fact, more weighty to me than to my 
 readers, that its contents were for the most part 
 preached during the last of my forty-five years' 
 pastorate in Manchester, and are now pubhshed almost 
 simultaneously with my retirement. I shall, I hope, 
 be pardoned and sympathized with, if I express here 
 something of the solemn and pensive emotions with 
 which I send forth this volume. I am well aware of 
 the defects and Hmitations of this as of my other books, 
 but I am deeply thankful to God for any good that He 
 has allowed them to do, and to many unknown friends 
 in many lands who have heartened me by telhng me 
 that I have been able to help them in some measure. 
 I cannot issue this volume without thanking them and 
 asking them to remember me in their prayers. 
 
Contents 
 
 In The Upper Room 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A Soul's Tragedy 1 
 
 "Do Quickly" 13 
 
 The Cross of Glory " 24 
 
 Cannot and Can 35 
 
 Sekkinq Jesus 45 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PASE 
 
 As I HAVE Loved " 56 
 
 Why Cannot I Follow Thee Now " . 
 
 The Collapse of Self-Confidence . . . 78 
 
 The Devout Life Here and Hereafter ... 91 
 
 Righteousness First, Peace Second. 
 
 Two Shepherds and Two Flocks . . . .115 
 
 Death, the Friend 128 
 
 A Fight with Depeession 139 
 
 Thirst and Satisfaction 148 
 
 A Song of Faith . 160 
 
CONTENTS a 
 
 Vi.»S 
 FOBGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION ..... 172 
 
 Saints, Beuevees, Beethben ..... 184 
 
 Prudence and Faith 197 
 
 " Never in Bondage " 207 
 
 What a Good Man is and How He is Made . . 219 
 
 The Original and the Copy — 
 
 I. Imitative Miracles 231 
 
 II. " Conformable to His Death " . . 242 
 
 Without the Camp " 252 
 
 At the Altar 264 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Geeat Hopes a Geeat Duty , . , 275 
 
 Geeat Hopes and a Great Powee ... 287 
 
 The Singers by the Sea 
 
 300 
 
A Soul's Tragedy 
 
 And when Jesus had dipped the sop, He gave it to Judas Iscariot, 
 the son of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into hiui. — 
 John xiii. 26, 27. 
 
 A CASUAL onlooker would have seen nothing 
 in Christ's giving, and Judas' taking, the mois- 
 tened morsel but an ordinary act of courtesy or kind- 
 liness done by a host to his guest. But below the trivial 
 act there was going on a struggle, a momentary hesita- 
 tion, a grim resolution, and a tragedy — the tragedy 
 of a soul. It was all done in a minute. Not a word 
 was spoken ; and yet the moment before, Judas might 
 have abandoned his purpose, — perhaps he half aban- 
 doned it while he stretched out his hand, — but ere he 
 had swallowed the bit of bread, he had pulled himself 
 together, and said once more, " I will ! " With his 
 own hand he slammed to the door, and the reverbera- 
 tion of it soimded hollow in his soul. A man may ruin 
 himself in a moment, and a Httle turn in the direction 
 of a life may influence all that comes after it, however 
 far the line is produced. 
 
 There are two figures, isolated from all the world, 
 
 M.S. 1 1 
 
2 A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 
 
 in the picture of my text — Jesus and Judas ; one 
 radiant with more than mortal whiteness and lustre ; 
 one dark — as we sometimes think, though wrongly — 
 with more than human blackness. They had a common 
 secret that separated them from the others. Judas 
 understood what Christ meant by the sop ; and Christ 
 understood what Judas meant by the look with which 
 he took it. If we go beneath the mere surface of the 
 act, we find lessons very solemn and of universal 
 application, and perhaps we shall best gather and har- 
 vest them if we simply study these two figures, silhouet- 
 ted against the sky : Jesus making the last appeal of 
 patient, wounded love, and Judas steeling himself 
 against it. Let us look at the two. 
 
 I. — Jesus making the Last Appeal of Patient, 
 Wounded Love. 
 
 Remember the sequence of the preceding scene, for 
 it throws light upon the incident with which we are 
 more immediately concerned. Our Lord had been 
 sitting silent, absorbed in thought of the near end. 
 He broke the silence, suddenly, with the pained 
 announcement that the traitor was " one of you." 
 Then came a universal shock of surprise, and each man 
 scrutinised his neighbour with suspicion, and all s ssailed 
 Jesus with the question, " Who is it ? " He answered, 
 and did not answer ; for to the general interrogation 
 He simply replied with what was tantamount to, and 
 no more than. His previous declaration, " one of you." 
 
A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 3 
 
 For all the token given to the twelve was : " he that 
 dippeth with Me in the dish," and according to the 
 habits of Easterns, all the hands went into the dish 
 at one time or other together. So that the answer 
 was no answer, in so far as their curiosity was concerned, 
 but fixed once more their attention on the sad fact 
 that " one of them " was to be the traitor. Then 
 came John's whispered question, which evidently was 
 unknown to the others, with the exception of the 
 prompter of it, Peter. The answer, too, was whispered, 
 for even after Jesus had said : " he to whom I shall 
 give the sop when I have dipped it," none of those 
 sitting at the table suspected why Judas had rushed 
 out of the apartment. Christ did not give the sop 
 in order to satisfy John's curiosity, but He had made 
 up His mind to do it before John's question, and for 
 a far deeper reason than to supply a means of iden- 
 tification. 
 
 What, then, was the meaning of it ? What was 
 the meaning of it in ordinary intercourse ? It meant 
 kindUness and friendliness. It was a token of special 
 regard and interest. It meant a reminder of past 
 famiHarity. It meant all these, when Christ gave the 
 sop into the trembUng hand that received it. He 
 was not indicating Judas for John's benefit ; He was 
 not acting ; but He was giving way to the deep emotions 
 of His heart at the moment, and meaning infinitely 
 more than the common-place act meant in ordinary 
 
4 A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 
 
 hands. For Christ infuses a deeper significance into 
 conventional courtesies. He gave His love when He 
 gave the sop, even to His betrayer, whom He knew as 
 such. If one, therefore, thinks for a moment of Who 
 it was that gave, and how entirely He knew the tortuous 
 treachery of the man to whom He gave it, the conven- 
 tional act towers up into a strange significance and 
 pathetic beauty ; and carries with it not only a glimpse 
 into the heart of Jesus, but, because it does give a 
 gUmpse into His heart, it thereby reveals the heart 
 of God. 
 
 If we try to realize to ourselves what was the human 
 emotion which prompted the Lord's act, we shall 
 read in it, I think, pain and disappointment indeed, 
 that love had been repelled and teaching misunderstood, 
 and that all the blessed familiarities and friendliness 
 of those three years of discipleship had only come to 
 this. But we shall not find one faint, transient flush 
 of anger in His calm cheek, nor one momentarily 
 quickened throb of indignation in His patient heart. 
 Christ pitied, and was not angry. The same tone of 
 compassion for the man that was doing himself so much 
 more harm than he was doing his apparent victim, 
 runs through even the solemn words which He had 
 spoken at a previous time : " Woe unto that man ! 
 Good were it for that man if he had never been born ! " 
 That is a groan of sympathy, far more than a denun- 
 ciation of wrath. 
 
A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 5 
 
 So, dear brethren, believing, as I suppose most of us 
 do, whatever metaphysical explanation of the fact may 
 lie behind it, that in Jesus Christ and His human 
 emotions and acts we have the clearest revelation of 
 the heart, and the authoritative explanation of the 
 acts, of God Himself, may we not see here, in that sop, 
 the token of amity given to the traitor — the great and 
 blessed message that no sin, no transgression against 
 love and gratitude, can turn away from a man the love 
 of God ? Most of us, I suppose, are accustomed to 
 think that " Heaven heads the count of crimes " with 
 that traitorous act. I question that. But though 
 Judas were the worst man that ever lived — if there is 
 a worst — the love of God in Jesus Christ hovered round 
 that man in the moment of his supreme sin. Sin is 
 mighty ; it can do awful things in the way of disturb- 
 ing the relation between man and God. But there is 
 one thing it cannot do ; it cannot make Him who loves 
 us, not because of anything in ourselves, but because 
 of what He is in Himself, cease to love us. The sun- 
 shine falls equally on a dunghill and on a diamond. 
 The great ocean washes over the blackest and the 
 barrenest rock as lovingly as it kisses the smiling strand 
 of fertile lands. The air and the light stream into 
 foetid alleys of the city as willingly as they sweep over 
 the purity of the mountain side. And the love of God 
 is not turned away by transgression, howsoever the 
 manifestation of that love must be modified thereby. 
 
6 A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 
 
 So, then, here is one lesson for us, — Let no sin ever lead 
 us to think that a man is parted from the seeking love 
 of God. 
 
 But then, again, let me remind you that not only 
 was this gift of the sop the token of kindliness and 
 friendship, but that it was a direct appeal, seeking to 
 win Judas back by the manifestation of the Saviour's 
 love to him. Judas was not past the possibility of 
 yet being won. He had been to the High Priest, he 
 had settled his plans, but until the deed was actually 
 done, there was a possibility that it might never be 
 done. And disregarding for the moment all wider ques- 
 tions, we may say that Jesus had only the thought 
 in His heart, " Can I save this man from this great sin ? 
 Let Me try once more." So He appeals to him by that 
 familiar and pathetic act, as if He would say to him, 
 " Have you forgotten all our memories, all the past 
 associations, all the sweet friendlinesses and private 
 communions of these years ? Will you not come back, 
 and give up your mad purpose of betraying Me ? " 
 There, too, brethren, is a revelation for us ; for there, 
 too, we have mirrored forth, set before us in a concrete 
 example of such a nature as that it may seem to be the 
 very superlative of the appealing love of God, the great 
 fact that Jesus Christ never gives up any as hopeless, 
 that there are no outcasts in His view, to whom the 
 moral and quickening influences of His manifested 
 love cannot do any good. There is some spot, He 
 
A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 7 
 
 believes., and He would have us believe, sensitive to 
 good in the most hardened bad ; there is some little 
 cranny, He beheves, and He would have us beheve, 
 in the most close-knit strength of a steeled heart, 
 through which the love-making message of His love 
 may find its way. Therefore, He appealed to the 
 betrayer. Do you say : "He knew it was of no use " ? 
 And is there not some strange apparent contradiction 
 between what we beUeve of God's fore-knowledge and 
 what we know of God's unwearied patience and per- 
 sistence of appeal ? Use or no use, the heart of Jesus 
 forced Him to make this last attempt. He made it, 
 and it failed, so far as Judas was concerned. But the 
 act stands recorded, as one pathetic and permanent proof 
 that that Divine I^over, in Whose humanity we all 
 of us recognize the highest revelation of the heart of 
 God, fulfilled the ideal of Love which His servant after- 
 wards portrayed, in that He " suffered long, and was 
 kind," in that He " hoped all things," even at the 
 moment before the treachery was consummated, and in 
 that when His enemy hungered He gave Him bread, 
 when he was athirst He gave him drink, desiring thereby 
 to heap coals of fire upon his head, that might melt the 
 obstinate ore and cause it to flow forth. He gave the 
 sop, a token of love, and an appeal to Judas to return. 
 And now, dear friends, I have been saying that 
 Christ in this instructive act of patient love revealed 
 the heart of God. Ay ! but He does more ; He reveals 
 
8 A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 
 
 the pattern for us men. It is hard for us not to meet 
 hate with hate and scorn with scorn. It is hard for us 
 to keep the narrow hne that separates legitimate pain 
 and sorrow at an enemy's enmity from non-legitimate 
 enmity and wrath. We are apt to give back to the 
 world, and to men around us, the face with which 
 they look upon us. But Jesus Christ has bid us — 
 and there is no wriggling out of the duty, hard as it may 
 be — to meet enmity with love, and wrong with patient 
 endurance, and to answer the spurt of the fires of 
 hatred with the gush of the extinguishing water of 
 love. That is our duty. We forget it. We break it ; 
 we formulate reasons against it. But for the individual 
 and for the nation Christ's pattern has to be followed, 
 and Christ's principles to be obeyed. We must remem- 
 ber not only that " force is no remedy," but that hatred 
 is no remedy either. An enemy crushed is tenfold an 
 enemy ; an enemy won is a hundredfold a friend. 
 There is the law for us. 
 
 And there is another lesson here. Never despair 
 of any man. Do not drop into the fashionable way 
 of regarding certain classes and certain races as outside 
 the pale and the power of Christ's Gospel. There is no 
 man whom His arm cannot reach ; there is no man, 
 and no class, whom it is not the duty of His servants, 
 to try to reach. 
 
 And there is yet another lesson, and that is, that 
 the only way to win men to love is to show that you 
 
A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 9 
 
 love them. That is the omnipotent way ; that is 
 Christ's way. 
 
 Now, let us turn to the other side, 
 
 II. That Black Figure that stands there, 
 grim and silent, possibly hesitating for a moment, 
 but fixed at last in his determination. 
 
 " When he had taken the sop, Satan entered into 
 him." That was no magic ; it was the certain result 
 of what went on in Judas' heart, when he took the sop. 
 He refused the love that gave it, whilst he took that 
 which the love gave. There we are brought face to 
 face with the mystery and the tragedy of humanity. 
 A man can thwart all the influences that redeeming, 
 seeking love can bring to bear upon him. The flower 
 can shut up its calyx, and keep out all the sunshine. 
 The earth can drink in the rain, and then it gets a bless- 
 ing, or it can fling it off, and then it inherits cursing, 
 and is nigh to be burned. Nobody can explain what 
 everybody knows, and, alas ! is himself an example 
 of — the possibiHty of the tiny, impotent human will, 
 perking itself in the face of God, and saying, " I will 
 not." " How often would I . . . but ye would not." 
 But, if the power is strange, surely the fact that we so 
 commonly exercise it is stranger and sadder still, — 
 that any man should, as so many of us are doing, put 
 away from himself the influences that are being brought 
 to bear upon him, as truly as Christ's seeking love was 
 brought to bear on the traitor. Day by day, by all the 
 
10 A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 
 
 various providences of our lives, by many a voice in 
 our own consciences, by many a strange drawing of 
 which we are conscious and which we resist, and above 
 all by the revelation of Himself in the Word, and — 
 dare I say ? — by this poor presentation of it by my 
 lips, Christ is still seeking to draw us to Himself, And 
 some of us are neglecting, and some of us are resisting 
 and none of us are yielding as we ought to yield. 
 
 For whenever some high thought comes to us, and 
 we put it away ; whenever some nobler conception of 
 duty and life is revealed to us, and we are unfaithful 
 to it ; whenever between two courses of action we 
 choose the baser, and turn away from the nobler, then 
 we are doing what the traitor did when he took the 
 sop. And whenever any of us are brought in contact 
 once more with the message of salvation in Jesus 
 Christ, and dismiss it lightly, or yield to it partially, 
 or forget it when we go out again into the world, then I 
 know not whether of the two is the more guilty, the man 
 who did not know what he was doing when he betrayed 
 the Christ, or the man who, by neglecting His message 
 from heaven, " crucifies the Son of God afresh, and 
 puts Him to an open shame." 
 
 But turn, before I close, to the other thought that 
 lies here. We have seen that in Judas there is an 
 eminent instance of the strange and wicked steehng 
 of the will against the love of God. Mark the conse- 
 quences of that steeling — " Satan entered into him." 
 
A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 11 
 
 \V\iy ? Because he had not let Christ enter into him. 
 Shutting the door against the love of Christ opens the 
 door for the devil. Where Christ is not, Satan is, and 
 " brings seven other spirits, and they enter in and dwell 
 there, and the last of that man is worse than the first." 
 Every appeal to the conscience that is 'put aside makes 
 the next appeal less hkely to succeed. You fire a shell 
 against an earthwork ; that brings down the face of 
 the earthwork and makes debris which guards the core 
 of it against the next shell. A man may be so case- 
 hardened by his own resistance as that conscience 
 cannot drive its lance through the tenacious surface. 
 Every base choice makes subsequent noble choices less 
 likely. Every time that a man is brought into contact 
 with Jesus Christ, and fails to yield full obedience and 
 trust, that man is less likely ever to yield. Something 
 the giving of the sop did. If it did not melt, it hardened. 
 There is no ice so tough, so slippery, as ice which is 
 melted on the surface by the few hours of the winter 
 sun, and then locked again in the bonds of the frost 
 when night falls. Half-melted hearts frozen again are 
 frozen harder than ever. 
 
 We are accustomed to think of Judas as almost 
 outside the pale of sympathy. Dante puts him alone 
 in hell, shunned and loathed even there. But he was no 
 monster, and he became what he was, and did what he 
 did, by yielding to ordinary temptations and ordinary 
 motives. What his motives may have been is a pro- 
 
12 A SOUL'S TRAGEDY 
 
 blem. He was with Jesus Christ, and he was not 
 made better thereby ; therefore he was made worse. 
 He companied with the Teacher and Lover of souls ; 
 and he did not learn the teaching or accept the love, 
 and therefore he hated Him that gave them both. 
 As for his guilt, it is in better hands than ours. As for 
 his fate, we had better imitate the reticence of the 
 Apostle who said : " He went to his own place," the 
 place that he was fit for, wherever that was. As for his 
 growth in sin, let us remember that he reached the 
 goal by a path that we may all take, and that it cul- 
 minated when he did what we may all do, accepted 
 the token of Christ's love, and rejected the love that 
 gave the token. Therefore, " Satan entered into him." 
 " And having received the sop, he went out, and it 
 was night " ; himself carrying a blacker night in his 
 black heart. May we learn the lesson, and accept the 
 love, so that we may be not of the night, or of darkness, 
 but the children of light, and of the day ! 
 
"Do Quickly" 
 
 Then baid Jesus unto him, that thou doest, do quickly. — John 
 
 xui. 
 
 THAT thou doest" — not ''art about to do." 
 For, when the die was cast and the resolution 
 fixed, the deed, so far as its doer's responsibility and 
 its effects on his character were concerned, was already 
 done. When David's desire to build the Temple was 
 negatived, it was said to him, " Forasmuch as it was in 
 thine heart " it was counted as performed. Human law 
 deals with acts. All noble morality and God's law, 
 which is the noblest of all, deals with intentions. So, 
 not merely because he had already been to the priests 
 but because he had fixed in his mind to do it, Judas is 
 regarded by Christ as already in course of doing his base 
 action. The principle holds good in reference to good 
 and to evil purposes. Foiled aspirations after good and 
 thwarted inclinations to evil are both regarded by Him 
 as already done. 
 
 But did not Jesus Christ push Judas over the precipice 
 by this strange command ? No ; he had flung himself 
 
14 " DO QUICKLY " 
 
 over before the command was given. As I tried to show 
 when speaking about the previous part of this verse, 
 when the sop was given he was tottering on the edge ; 
 after he had taken the sop he had gone over. And what 
 Christ says here has no bearing on the decision to do the 
 deed, but simply on the manner in which it was to be 
 done. The command is not " do," but " do quickly." 
 
 But now it seems to me that the point of view from 
 which these words are mainly to be looked at is one 
 which is generally almost ignored. Suppose instead of 
 puzzling ourselves with asking the question how they 
 affected Judas, we ask the question, " What do they 
 say about Jesus ? " To me they seem to be far more 
 instructive and illuminative when considered as being 
 almost an instinctive cry from His heart, and having 
 reference to Himself, than when we look upon them as 
 being an instruction to the betrayer. The two references 
 are both there, and I think that in order to understand 
 all the deep significance of this strange injunction we 
 have to take both into account. My purpose now is to 
 try to embrace both these elements or points of view 
 in our consideration. 
 
 First, then — and, to me, by far the more important — 
 1 cannot but hear in this injunction, 
 
 I. — The Cry of a Human Instinct in the Prospect 
 OF A Great Pain and Sorrow. 
 
 " That thou doest do quickly." Do we not all know 
 that feeling in looking forward to something unwelcome 
 
" DO QUICKLY " 15 
 
 or painful that is impending — " would it were over ? " 
 There are few things that try the firmest nerves more 
 than the long anticipation of the leaden footsteps of the 
 slow hours that bring us some great trial, shock, or loss. 
 The cup of bitterness is less bitter when we can drink 
 it ofi at a gulp ; more bitter when it has to be sipped. 
 Anticipated sorrows make men more impatient than 
 do anticipated joys. And it seems to me that here we 
 have just that strange paradox that we all know so 
 well, of stretching out a hand to bring the thing from 
 which we shrink nearer to us, just because we shrink 
 from it. Does it not make us feel the beatings of a 
 brother's heart if we think that Jesus turned to the be- 
 trayer, and after He had given up trying to influence 
 him, said in effect : " The one kindness you can still 
 show Me is to do your work quickly." He shrank from 
 the Cross, and therefore He desii-ed that it should come 
 swiftly. For He, too, knew the agony of protracted 
 anticipation, and would fain hasten the slow drip, drip 
 drip, of the laggard moments, and bring, and have done 
 with, that which He knew was coming. If we foimd 
 such a saying as this recorded in the biography of any 
 great martyr or hero, we should at once come to the 
 conclusion that he was therein expressing a natural, 
 instinctive feehng. Why should we scruple, except 
 from a misplaced reverence, to say that the same feeling 
 is expressed when the words come from the Hps of 
 Jesus Christ ? His death was unique, but He shows 
 
16 " DO QUICKLY " 
 
 us His brotherhood, not only in the fact, but in the 
 manner, of the death, and in His attitude towards it, 
 when it was yet but an anticipation and a near 
 prospect. 
 
 One is the more inclined to hear that familiar tone in 
 the words of my text, if we remember how something of 
 the same kind of desire to accelerate that from which 
 He shrank is obvious during all the narrative of His last 
 days. Do you remember how He set His face as a flint 
 on His last journey to Jerusalem, with such a tension 
 in His countenance and resolved determination in His 
 swift steps up the rocky road from Jericho, that the 
 disciples were conscious of something unusual and fol- 
 lowed, as the Evangelist says, silently and in amaze- 
 ment ? What was the meaning of our Lord's entire 
 reversal of all His previous policy — if I may use that 
 word — on the occasion of His public entrance into 
 Jerusalem ? What was the meaning of His daily going 
 into the Temple, casting out the money-changers, and 
 pouring out the vials of His hot indignation upon scribes 
 and pharisees and official hypocrites and malefactors ? 
 Did it not all point to this, that He had resolved that the 
 time was come, and that if we cannot say He deliberately 
 accelerated, at all events He did not seek in the smallest 
 degree to retard, the fall of the thunder-bolt ? Nay 
 rather. He deliberately sought the publicity and took up 
 the position of antagonism, which were certain to lead to 
 the Cross. I suppose that He, too, who had travelled all 
 
" DO QUICKLY " 17 
 
 His life— if we believe the New Testament narratives— 
 with that black thing closing the vista ahead, was con- 
 scious, as He drew nearer and nearer to it, that in a 
 strange way it both repelled and attracted Him. And 
 so, if I might so say, He turned to Judas, as a lamb that 
 was being slain might have lifted its innocent eyes to 
 the sacrificer, and said, " Do it quickly ! " Ah ! 
 brethren, that brings Him very near weak hearts. 
 
 Let me say one word, before I go further, about that 
 of which the wish to get it over was a symptom, viz., 
 the shrinking from the Cross. It was perfectly in- 
 stinctive and natural, the recoil of the sensitive, corporeal 
 nature from pain and suffering, which is neither right nor 
 wrong in itself, being natural and involuntary. But 
 there was something more, as we see from the story of 
 the last hours. Most men, however much they are 
 cowards in their lives, die calmly : Jesus Christ did not. 
 The agitation, the horror of great darkness, the recoil 
 and desolation of His whole nature, are neither heroic 
 nor admirable ; nor exphcable, in my poor judgment, 
 except on one hypothesis : " The Lord hath made to 
 meet on Him the iniquity of us all." That burden 
 weighed Him down, and made His death less calm 
 than have been the deaths of thousands whose calmness 
 came from Himself. If we bring in that deeper element, 
 we understand not only the cry of desolation that broke 
 tragically through the silent, dark hours, but we un- 
 derstand the shrinking, and the strange paradox oi feel- 
 
 MS. 2 
 
18 " DO QUICKLY " 
 
 ing which turns the shrinking into its apparent opposite, 
 when He said, " That thou doest, do quickly." 
 
 But if we would probe the whole depth of the re- 
 velation, which is given in this saying, of our Lord's 
 own emotions and thoughts, we have to turn, I think, 
 to another aspect of it. I have spoken of this being the 
 expression of His shrinking from the Cross, but can 
 you not hear in it an expression also of His resolved will 
 to go to the Cross ? That shrinking of which I have been 
 speaking, and which I have called purely human, instinc- 
 tive and involuntary, and perfectly neutral, in so far as 
 any moral quality is concerned — that shrinking, if I may 
 use such a figure, never climbed up from the lower depths 
 of instinctive feeling into the place where the Will sat 
 enthroned. The mist lay in the bottoms ; the summit 
 kept always clear. He shrank, but He never allowed 
 His will to waver. The tempest beat on the windward 
 side of the ship, but the helm was kept firm, and the 
 bow pointed always in the same direction. Jesus Christ 
 was steadfast in His purpose from the beginning to the 
 end. " The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, 
 but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many ; " 
 and so, all His life long, through all those gracious and 
 wonderful ministrations of His, when His heart was open 
 to all distress, and his eye open to all the loveliness of 
 nature, the flowers of the field, and the lilies of the plain, 
 there lay in His heart the fixed purpose to die for men. 
 
 Brethren, why was Jesus Christ thus determined ? 
 
" DO QUICKLY " 19 
 
 What was it that kept the fixed will thus ever pointing 
 in the one direction ? What was it that shut down 
 the shrinking, that coerced the nature which innocently 
 and necessarily recoiled from suffering and pain ? I 
 beUeve it was two things : one, that Jesus Christ's own 
 conception of the significance and place of His death 
 differed altogether in kind from the conception that a 
 martyr, who is willing to die for a cause, and to pay 
 down his life as the price of his faithfulness, might en- 
 tertain. To Jesus Christ, as I read His own sayings, 
 death was not the inevitable consequence of His dis- 
 charging the mission which He was ready to face, but 
 it was, shall I say, the climax of the mission, and that 
 for which He was born. 
 
 And then, still deeper, if you ask me why was He thus 
 rigidly and constantly determined to die ? — I answer 
 it was Love that backed up His will, and kept it from 
 ever wavering. Because He loved us, and gave Him- 
 self for us, therefore, as I have said, He resisted the in- 
 stinctive shrinking from the Cross, and kept Himself 
 steadily determined to endure it, despising the shame. 
 Like some strong spring, always active, behind some 
 object which it presses constantly forward against a 
 cutting knife, so the love of Jesus Christ bore Him on- 
 ward, all through His career, and if I may not say that it 
 drove Him, I may say that it led Him, through all His 
 sufferings unto the last of all. 
 
 It was a universal love, and it was an individualising 
 
20 " DO QUICKLY " 
 
 love. " He loved me," says the apostle, " and gave 
 Himself for me." Each of us has the right — and if we 
 have the right, we are under the obligation — to say the 
 same thing, and to take of that great river of the water 
 of life and love that flows out of the heart of Jesus, and 
 turn it into our own little plot of ground. Because He 
 loved me He went to " the Cross, despising the shame," 
 He subdued the shrinking, and welcomed death. When 
 He hung on the Cross, and when He sits on the Throne, 
 His love embraced and embraces you and me. May 
 we take it, and be at rest ! 
 
 And now turn to 
 
 II. — The Other Aspect of this Strange Com- 
 mandment, 
 
 and think of how it affected the betrayer. There we 
 have the solemn leaving of a man to take his own way. 
 
 I have already said that this is almost a kind of appeal 
 to any lingering pity or kindness that there might be left 
 in Judas. But it is more than that. Christ still keeps 
 His position of authority over the traitor, and when He 
 says to him, " That thou doest, do quickly," it is a word 
 of command, which says : " I am ready. You do not 
 need to plot and contrive. Here are My hands ; put 
 your fetters on them." He assumes what is the charac- 
 teristic of His attitude during His sufferings, that no 
 man has power over Him, but that He is voluntarily 
 surrendering Himself. The soldiers that would take 
 Him fall to the ground, and He might have departed, 
 
" DO QUICKLY " 21 
 
 but He waited, and let them lay hold on Him. It was 
 not Roman nails that fastened Him to the Cross ; it was 
 the " cords of love " that bound Him there. Through- 
 out the whole of His Passion the same characteristics 
 are prominent, and they are plain here. 
 
 But, beyond that, there is another point of view from 
 which the words must be regarded. To Judas this com- 
 mandment was equivalent to saying, " Take your own 
 way," Jesus Christ left him to do what he would. Now 
 brethren, the analogue to that, the thing which corre- 
 sponds to it, in your experience and mine, is a condition 
 to which, more or less completely, we are all exposed, 
 and to which some of us have drawn very near, when we 
 are conscious of no restraints of conscience, when nothing 
 seems to pull us back from evil that we are inclined to do. 
 I do not know that anybody ever comes to absolute and 
 entire insensitiveness of conscience. I hope not. But 
 many of us do come awfully near it, and all of us tend 
 towards it in some directions. For I suppose we all 
 know what it is to have faults, sins, to which we are so 
 disposed and habituated as that there is very little, if 
 any, conscious check or pull-back when we contemplate 
 doing them again. It is an awful solitude into which 
 a man comes then. With our own hands we pull up 
 the buoys, and put out the light-houses, and pitch over- 
 board the compass, and lash the helm, and go to sleep 
 in our bunks — and what happens then ? Why, we 
 are bumping on the black rocks, with half the ship's 
 
22 "DO QUICKLY" 
 
 side torn to shivers, before we know where we are. So 
 let us take care lest, by doing what Judas did, we get 
 into the place where Judas stood, where conscience 
 which is God's voice, and circumstances which are God's 
 hand, shall no longer keep us back, and we shall wipe 
 our mouths and say, " I have done no harm." 
 
 Do not let us forget that the only man that Jesus 
 Christ ever abandoned, if I may use the word, was an 
 Apostle. And how did he come to that fatal position ? 
 As I tried to show you in the preceding sermon — by a 
 very familiar road. He had been with Christ and 
 neglected Him. He had hstened to His teaching and 
 ignored it. He had received the full flame of His love 
 upon his heart, and it had not melted him. So he grew 
 worse and worse until he came to this — " Do it quickly ! " 
 
 But is not that which I have called, perhaps too 
 strongly, abandoning — the letting of a man have his 
 way — is not that a kind of appeal to him, too, and a 
 seeking of him by the only way by which there is a chance 
 of finding him ? We all know that sometimes the best 
 thing that can happen to a man is that he shall drink 
 as he has brewed, that he shall be " filled with the 
 fruit of his own devices," that he shall be obliged to reap 
 as he has sown, that if he will play with fire he shall be 
 allowed to play with it, and find out, when he looks at 
 his own scarred palms, what a fool he has been. God 
 seeks us sometimes by letting us go, that we may learn 
 by consequences that "it is an evil thing," and a 
 
" DO QUICKLY " 23 
 
 " bitter " thing as well, to " forsake the Lord our God." 
 " Do it quickly," and find out how rich you are, with 
 thirty pieces of silver in your pocket, and a betrayed 
 Master on your conscience. I say that was a kind of 
 seeking, and that is the kind of seeking that some of us 
 need, and that some of us get. 
 
 No man is so left as that return is impossible. No man 
 is so left as that he cannot be forgiven. If Judas was 
 lost, he was lost not because he betrayed his Master — 
 for even that crime might have been washed away by 
 the innocent blood which he betrayed — but because, 
 ha\ang betrayed, he despaired. The denier " went out 
 and wept bitterly ; " the betrayer " went out and 
 hanged himself." If he had let remorse become repent- 
 ance, as Peter did, he, too, Hke Peter, might have had 
 a healing message from the risen Lord on the Easter 
 morning. He, too, might have been forgiven and 
 cleansed. 
 
The Cross of Glor 
 
 Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of 
 Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him. If God be glorified in 
 Him, God shall also glorify Him in Himself, and shall straightway 
 glorify HJm. — John xiii. 31-2. 
 
 " TUDAS, having received the sop, went imme- 
 J diately out, and it was night." Surely that is 
 more than a note of time. Into the dark that dark soul 
 went to do his dark work, and the Evangelist would 
 have us note, how fit the time was for the deed. He 
 connects the words of my text with the withdrawal of 
 the betrayer by the significant clause, " therefore, when 
 he was gone out, Jesus said." The presence of the 
 traitor had been a restraint, and when he was gone, 
 the flow of speech was freer, as when some black rock 
 that chokes the channel of a river is lifted out of the 
 bed. Jesus too, knew the oppression of an uncon- 
 genial presence, and was more at ease when it was 
 withdrawn. The traitor's departure led to these great 
 words in another way, too, for by his going out on his 
 errand, the Cross was brought appreciably nearer, and 
 
THE CROSS OF GLORY 25 
 
 in the consciousness that the deed was as good as done, 
 our Lord speaks now as if it were already past. " Now 
 is the Son of Man glorified." That " now " not only- 
 points us to the occasion of His speaking thus, but it 
 also points us to the fact that it was the Cross of which 
 He was speaking. What Judas went out to do was the 
 beginning of Jesus Christ's being glorified. They were 
 strange words at such a time. 
 
 You note, of course, the threefold " glorifying " that 
 is spoken of here, and the ring of triumph that is in the 
 words. They tell us what Christ thought was glory, 
 and they stain all the lustre of our poor, vulgar notions 
 of what it is. They lift a corner of the veil, and show 
 us what it was that drew Him, a not unwilling sacrifice, 
 to the Cross, They ought to melt hearts into reverent 
 love, and to mould fives into strenuous imitation. 
 We take these three instances of " glorifying," which 
 all cluster round that Cross, for our consideration 
 now, 
 
 I. The Cross as Glorifying Christ. 
 
 If we read such words as these in the biography of 
 any martyr or hero of liberty or of truth, and found him 
 welcoming death as the very crown of his life, they 
 would five in men's memories, and be familiar on their 
 lips. But Jesus speaks them, and even those that love 
 Him best do not appreciate their deep significance. Let 
 me try to work it out. 
 
 Now, if we look over this gospel, we find a very 
 
26 THE CROSS OF GLORY 
 
 distinct peculiarity in it, in that the point of view from 
 which it looks at the death of Christ is the opposite 
 of that which most of the New Testament writers take 
 up. To them it is the very lowest point of His humilia- 
 tion ; to this gospel it is the very apex of His elevation. 
 And it was Himself that set the example of so speaking 
 of it. For, if you remember, almost at the beginning 
 of His career, according to the record of this Evangelist, 
 He said to Nicodemus : " Even so must the Son of 
 Man be hfted up." The elevation which was in His 
 mind was not the foot or two above the earth to which 
 the victim upon a cross was raised, but in that insigni- 
 ficant detail of a crucifixion, Jesus saw a symbol of His 
 truly being lifted up, not merely to be conspicuous, 
 like the brazen serpent on the pole, from which He 
 drew the emblem, but to be truly exalted in the very 
 moment of deepest shame. You will remember, too, 
 that in a similar fashion He again used the very same 
 phrase when He said, " I, if I be lifted up " — and only 
 if — " will draw all men unto me." So this Evangelist, 
 catching the spirit of His Lord's words, and echoing 
 their tone, speaks repeatedly of the Son of Man's being 
 glorified as a synonym for the Son of Man's being 
 crucified. I need not quote the instances ; they will 
 recur to your memory. At all events, here is the fact, 
 that to Jesus Christ Himself, looking on His approaching 
 death, that Cross assumed, with swift alternation, two 
 apparently opposite aspects. At one moment, as we 
 
THE CROSS OF GLORY 27 
 
 have seen in former sermons, He shrank from it as dark 
 and grim, and in the next moment, as we see here in 
 this ringing note of victory, He welcomes it as the very 
 chmax of all His career. Like some great pillar ele- 
 vated on a mountain, when the thmider-clouds fill the 
 sky, it stands out grim and dark, and then in a moment 
 the strong wind sweeps them away, and the sunlight 
 smites it, and it shines out white and lustrous. With 
 such swift alternations, and almost a confluence of the 
 two streams of feeling, to Jesus Christ the Cross was 
 dark and the Cross was radiant. The lowest depth 
 of His humiUation was the highest summit of His 
 exaltation, so that not only, as one of the Apostles puts 
 it, " He humbled Himself unto . . . the death of the 
 Cross," and " therefore God hath highly exalted Him," 
 but also " He humbled Himself unto the death of the 
 Cross," and therein, as well as therefore, He is highly 
 exalted. What, then, were the aspects of it as it pre- 
 sented itself to Him, which thus made Him recognize, 
 in its ignominy and in its shame, in its pain and in its 
 desolation, the loftiest point in His whole mission ? 
 
 First, it was the supreme revelation of Himself, and 
 for Him to be known is to be glorified. He had been 
 filtering, as it were, His gracious gentleness. His utter 
 self-surrender. His all-embracing pity, in drops of mercy 
 and love and deeds of brotherhood and tenderness, 
 through all His life ; but what had been dropped was 
 now being poured out in a full flood. Because He 
 
28 THE CROSS OF GLORY 
 
 therein was able to express utter pity, entire self- 
 abandonment, love that shrank from no surrender 
 for the sake of the beloved, therefore to Him the Cross, 
 which thus revealed the infinitude of His tenderness, 
 was His glorifying. One can fancy a mother bending 
 over her child, and shrinking from no pain or suffering, 
 if only the child could by it imderstand the infinite 
 depths of the mother's heart. And so Christ says to 
 Himself : " I die, and then they will understand how I 
 loved them." That was His idea of what glory is, — 
 entire self- surrender, able to express itself to the utter- 
 most in the giving up of life, and so to steal into 
 men's hearts. 
 
 Then, again, the thought that the Cross glorifies 
 Jesus rests upon the fact that Jesus recognized His 
 death as the forth-putting of the mightiest power that 
 He was able to wield. It we take anything but the 
 highest (let me, for simple convenience, use the word 
 — the evangelical) conception of Christ's death, I under- 
 stand not how it could ever appear to Him as being 
 His victory, and the strongest of the weapons that He 
 wielded. Rather, surely, it must have seemed to Him, 
 as it might have seemed to a Socrates or a John Huss, 
 His definitive defeat, and His joining the ranks of the 
 great multitude that had tried to help men and had 
 failed. There is only one notion of what Christ's death 
 was and is, that seems to me to focus, so to speak, 
 with these words of my text. If in it the Lamb of God 
 
THE CROSS OF GLORY 29 
 
 was taking away the sins of the world, then, and only 
 then, as it seems to me, was it the cUmax of His work, 
 and the very brightness of His glory. Mighty were 
 His deeds of healing and of mercy, and mighty, with 
 the might of gentleness, were His words of wisdom 
 and penetrating rebuke. Mighty were the beams of 
 radiance that streamed from His pure character, but 
 mightiest of all are the forces which were brought into 
 operation in humanity by that death which redeemed 
 the world. This Samson slew more of the Philistine 
 foes in His death than in His life ; and at the moment, 
 when, apparently, He was most powerless and manacled, 
 He took the gates of the prison-house on His strong 
 shoulders and bore them away, and set the oppressed 
 free. Christ's death is the store-house of His power. 
 The greatest of all the deeds that He did, He did when 
 He died. 
 
 That death is His glorifying, inasmuch as it is His 
 one means of winning men's hearts. If you take it 
 out of His work, you de-magnetize Jesus, and He has 
 no longer the attractive power which draws all men 
 unto Him. So, because of its being His perfect self- 
 revelation, because of its being His most potent instru- 
 ment, because of its being the secret of His charm to 
 win men's hearts when its significance is rightly appre- 
 hended. He stood looking across the narrow cleft that 
 separated Him from Calvary, and proclaimed : " Now 
 is the Son of Man glorified." 
 
30 THE CROSS OF GLORY 
 
 Let me remind you, in one sentence, that He calls 
 Himself here " the Son of Man." That Name means, 
 whatever else it means, the realized ideal of humanity, 
 and therefore the path that He trod is the path that 
 we have to tread. " Glory " — let us understand what 
 it is, not the vulgar thing that goes strutting about 
 the world, and calls itself by that name. Flaunting 
 sun-flowers and gaudy poppies are not so fair as the 
 violet hiding below the stone, or as the pure white of 
 the lily. If we seek for glory, let us learn that the 
 highest glory is to forget self, and to surrender life for 
 the blessing of others. That is the path by which 
 Christ sought and found it, " leaving us an example 
 that we should follow His steps." 
 
 Now turn to 
 
 II. The Son as Glorifying God. 
 " Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified 
 in Him." Does not that strike you as being the expres- 
 sion of a consciousness of imion with God much more 
 close than anything to which we can aspire ? Does 
 a mart's virtue, however lustrous and radiant it may 
 be, " glorify God," except in a roundabout fashion ? 
 But Jesus Christ here speaks as if His glorification 
 was also, in a direct and immediate way, God's being 
 glorified. Do the words not sound as if a world too 
 wide for the facts, if Jesus was no more than one of 
 ourselves, with no other or closer relation to God than 
 the rest of us hold ? To me I confess they cannot be 
 
THE CROSS OF GLORY 31 
 
 freed from the charge of exaggeration, unless we come 
 to the old faith : " the Word became flesh, and dwelt 
 among us ; and we beheld His glory, the glory as of 
 the only Begotten of the Father." 
 
 But I pass on to fix rather upon this one other thought, 
 that according to our Lord's own conception of what 
 His death meant, the world is to find in it the very 
 chief est, most brilliant outraying of the uncreated 
 light of God. Is not that a tremendous claim for a 
 man to make ? Stars and sun pale their light, all the 
 magnificences and subtleties of creative energy dwindle 
 into comparative insignificance ; even the voice by 
 which God proclaims Himself in the depth of men's 
 hearts is hushed as into silence. For those who 
 seek to attain the truest and the loftiest idea of God, 
 there is but one course to take — to turn away from 
 Creation, with its inconceivable magnitudes and as 
 inconceivable minutenesses, suns and microbes, and from 
 Providence with its perplexities, from the intuitions 
 of our own hearts, and the monitions of our own con- 
 sciences, and to turn to that Cross. A strange embodi- 
 ment of Divine power, or Divine wisdom, but not a 
 strange embodiment of the infinite seeking love of the 
 Father God, is that weak Man, dying there in the dark. 
 As we look, if we are wise, we shall cry out with the 
 prophet, though with a new application of his words : 
 " Lo ! this is our God ; we have waited for Him, and 
 He will save us." God is glorified in Him, for in Him, 
 
32 THE CROSS OF GLORY 
 
 and in His death rightly apprehended, there is a revela- 
 tion of far more than the physical attributes, which 
 are mainly the opposite of human Hmitations, and the 
 transcendence of human conceptions. There is more 
 than merely the attributes which declare purity of 
 moral nature or righteousness of administration — 
 these are the fringes of the brightness, but the central 
 heart of it is the great message of the Cross, God is love. 
 " He commendeth His love towards us, in that while we 
 were yet sinners, Christ died for us." 
 
 And so I come to the last of these three-fold glorify- 
 ings— 
 
 III. The Father as Glorifying the Son. 
 
 " He will glorify Him in Himself, and will straightway 
 glorify Him." I cannot deal adequately with the great, 
 though dim, thoughts which emerge from that utter- 
 ance, but let me just suggest them to you very brieiSiy. 
 " God will glorify Him in Himself ; " — take, for com- 
 mentary another word of Christ's in that great inter- 
 cessory prayer where He prays : " Glorify me with 
 thine own self with the glory which I had with thee 
 before the world was," and again, when in language 
 which singularly blends petition and authority, He 
 asks : " I will that they also whom Thou hast given 
 Me be with me . . . that they may behold My glory, 
 which thou hast given me." Who can add anything to 
 these words ? Our comments would but weaken them, 
 and our speech would sound thin and harsh in contrast 
 
THE CROSS OF GLORY 33 
 
 with their mighty music, as a shepherd's reed is to the 
 deep notes of a great organ. I only venture to put 
 beside them another word from this Gospel : "In the 
 beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, 
 and the Word was God," and I beseech you to ponder 
 on these great sayings. May they help us all to under- 
 stand AVho it was that went to His death, and what it 
 was that His death did ! 
 
 But then, notice further how here we get, in the very 
 language of my text, a wonderful thought added to 
 that of " the glory before the world was." For it is 
 " the Son of Man " that is to be " glorified by the 
 Father," and that means that the Jesus Who dwelt 
 amongst men, our elder Brother, the bearer of our 
 nature, is now " the first Begotten from the dead, and 
 the Prince of all the kings of the earth," and " sitteth 
 at the right hand of God the Father Almighty." What 
 the shekinah-cloud signified when it received into its 
 lustrous folds the ascending Christ, and hid Him from 
 the gaze of His disciples, was just that Man was encom- 
 passed vnih the radiance of God. 
 
 So, brethren, this vision of " the glory that should 
 follow" united with His love and His pity to draw 
 Jesus, with the whole consent of His heart, to the 
 Cross, because through the gloom that wrapped it, 
 He saw the light of the glory beyond. In hke manner, 
 since it is as the Son of man that He is glorified, if 
 we follow Him, if we, too, count our glory to be utter 
 
 M.S. 3 
 
34 THE CROSS OF GLORY 
 
 self-surrender, if we are magnetized by the attraction 
 of His Cross, if we yield to Him as thereby enthroned 
 King of men, if we seek in our daily Hves to glorify Him, 
 and God through Him, then we, too, will be permitted, 
 as is said of one of the Apostles, by our manner of death 
 to glorify God, and we, too, are entitled, not indeed 
 to make the glory that shall follow our supreme motive 
 or impulse to lives of holiness and Christian service, 
 but to encourage ourselves, in the midst of our diffi- 
 culties, and to brace ourselves for any cross that may 
 he before us, by having respect unto the Crown that is 
 beyond the Cross. 
 
 If we take Christ for the glory of our lives, and use 
 our lives for the glory of Christ, then we may humbly 
 believe that the glory which the Father gave to Him, 
 He, according to His own promise, will give to us, 
 and that we shall sit down with Him on His throne, 
 even as He overcame, and is set down with the Father 
 on His throne. 
 
Cannot and Can 
 
 Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek Me : 
 and as I said unto the Jews, whither I go ye cannot come ; so now 
 say to you.— John xiii. 33. 
 
 WE have seen, in previous sermons on the preceding 
 context, how large and black the Cross loomed 
 before Jesus now, and how radiant the glory beyond 
 shone out to Him. But it was only for a moment that 
 either of these two absorbed His thoughts ; and with 
 wonderful self-forgetfulness and self-command, He 
 turned away at once from the consideration of how the 
 near future was to affect Him, to the thought of how it 
 was to affect the handful of helpless disciples who had 
 to be left alone. Impending separation breaks up the 
 fountains of the heart, and we all know the instinct that 
 desires to crowd all the often hidden love into some one 
 last token. So here our Lord addresses His disciples by 
 a name that is never used except this once, " little 
 children," a fond diminutive that not only reveals an 
 unusual depth of tender emotion, but also breathes a 
 
36 CANNOT AND CAN 
 
 pitjdng sense of their defencelessness when they are to 
 be left alone. So might a dying mother look at her 
 little ones. 
 
 But the words that follow, at first sight, are dark 
 with the sense of a final and complete separation. " Ye 
 shall seek Me " — and not only so, but He seems to put 
 back His humble friends into the same place as had been 
 occupied by His bitter foes — " as I said to the Jews, 
 whither I go ye cannot come; so now I say to you." 
 There was something that prevented both classes alike 
 from keeping Him company ; and He had to walk 
 His path both into the darkness and into the glory, 
 alone. 
 
 The words apply in their fulness only to the paren- 
 thesis of time whilst He lay in the grave, and the dis- 
 ciples despairingly thought that all was ended. It 
 was a brief period ; it was a revolutionary moment ; 
 and though it was soon to end, they needed to be guarded 
 against it. But though the words do not apply to the 
 permanent relation between the glorified Christ and us. 
 His disciples, yet partly by similarity, and still more by 
 contrast, they do suggest great Christian thoughts, 
 great Christian blessednesses, and imperative Christian 
 duties. These gather themselves mainly round two 
 contrasts, a transitory " cannot " soon to be changed 
 into a permanent " can " ; and a momentary seeking, 
 soon to be converted into a blessed seeking which finds. 
 I now deal only with the former. 
 
CANNOT AND CAN 37 
 
 We have here a transitory " cannot " soon to be 
 changed into a permanent " can." 
 
 " Whither I go ye cannot come." Does not one hear 
 a tone of personal sorrow in that saying ? Jesus had 
 always hungered for understanding and sympathetic com- 
 panions, and one of His life-long sorrows had been His 
 utter loneliness ; but He had never, all the long time that 
 He had been with them, so put out His hand, feeling for 
 some warm clasp, of a human hand to help Him in His 
 struggle, as He did during the hours terminating with 
 Gethsemane. And perhaps we may venture to say that 
 we hear in this utterance an expression of Christ's sorrow 
 for Himself that He had to tread the dark way, and to 
 pass into the brightness beyond, all alone. He yearned 
 for the impossible human companionship, as well as sor- 
 rowed for the imperfections which made it impossible. 
 
 Why was it that they could not " follow Him now " ? 
 The answer to that question is found in the considera- 
 tion of whither it was that He went. When that bright 
 Shekinah-cloud at the Ascension received Him into its 
 radiant folds, it showed "why they could not follow Him," 
 because it revealed that He went unto the Father, when 
 He left the world. So we are brought face to face with 
 the old, solemn thought that character makes capacity 
 for heaven. " Who shall ascend into the hill of the 
 Lord, or who shall stand in His holy place ? " asked the 
 Psalmist ; and a prophet put the question in a still 
 sharper form, and by the very form of the question 
 
38 CANNOT AND CAN 
 
 suggested a negative answer — " Who among us shall 
 dwell with the devouring fire ; who among us shall dwell 
 with everlasting burnings ? " Who can pass into that 
 Presence, and stand near God, without being, like the 
 maiden in the old legend, shrivelled into ashes by the 
 contact of the celestial fire ? " Holiness " is that 
 " without which no man shall see the Lord." And we, 
 all of us, in the depths of our own hearts, if we rightly 
 understand the voices that ever echo there, must feel 
 that the condition which is, obviously and without any 
 need for arguing it, required for abiding with God, and 
 so going into the glory where Christ is, is a condition 
 which none of us can fulfil. In that respect the imper- 
 fect and immature friends, the little children, the babes 
 who loved and yet knew not Him Whom they loved, 
 and the scowling enemies, were at one. For they had 
 all of them the one human heart, and in that heart the 
 deep-lying alienation and contrariety to God. Therefore 
 Christ alone trod the winepress, and alone " ascended 
 up where He was before." 
 
 But let us remember that this " cannot " was only a 
 transitory cannot. For we must underscore very 
 deeply that word in my text " so now I say to you," 
 and a moment afterwards, when one of the Apostles 
 puts the question : " Why cannot I follow Thee now ? " 
 the answer is : " Thou canst not follow Me now ; but 
 thou shalt follow Me afterwards." The text, too, is 
 succeeded immediately by the wonderful parting con- 
 
CANNOT AND CAN 39 
 
 solations and counsels spoken to the disciples, through 
 all of which there gleams the promise that they Avill be 
 with Him where He is, and behold His glory. Set side 
 by side with these sad words of our Lord in the text, 
 by which He unloosed their clasping hands from Him, 
 and turned His face to His solitary path, the triumphant 
 language in which habitually the rest of the New Testa- 
 ment speaks of the Christian man's relation to Christ. 
 Think of that great passage : " Ye are come unto the 
 city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to God the 
 Judge of all, and to Jesus the Mediator of the new 
 covenant." What has become of the impossibility ? 
 Vanished. Where is the " cannot ? " Turned into a 
 blessed " can " ? And so Apostles have no scruple in 
 saying, " Our citizenship is in Heaven," nor in saying, 
 " We sit together with Him in heavenly places in Christ 
 Jesus." The path that was blocked is open. The 
 incapacity that towered up like a great, black wall has 
 melted away ; and the path into the holiest of all is 
 made patent by the blood of Christ. For in that death 
 there lies the power that sweeps away all the impedi- 
 ments of man's sin, and in that life of the risen, glorified, 
 indweUing Christ there lies the power which cleanses 
 the inmost heart from " all filthiness of flesh and spirit," 
 and makes it possible for our mortal feet to walk on the 
 immortal path, and for us, with all our unworthiness, 
 with all our shrinking, to stand in His presence and not 
 be ashamed or consumed. " Ye cannot come " was 
 
40 CANNOT AND CAN 
 
 true for a few days. " Ye can come " is true for ever ; 
 and for all Christian men. 
 
 But let us not forget that the one attitude of heart 
 and mind, by which a poor, sinful man, who dare not 
 draw near to God, receives into himself the merit and 
 power of the death, and the indwelling power of the life, 
 of Jesus Christ, is personal faith in Jesus Christ. To 
 trust Him is to come to Him, and it is represented in 
 Scripture as conferring an instantaneous fitness for 
 access to God. People pray sometimes that they may 
 be made " meet for the inheritance of the saints in 
 light," and the prayer is, in a sense, wise and true. But 
 they too often forget that the apostle says, in the original 
 connexion of the words which they so quote : " He hath 
 translated us from the tyranny of the darkness, and 
 hath made us meet for the inheritance of the saints in 
 light." That is to say, whenever a poor soul, compassed 
 and laden with its infirmity and sin, turns itself to that 
 Lord Whose Cross conquers sin, and Whose blood 
 infused into our veins — the spirit of whose life granted to 
 us — gives us to partake of His own righteousness, that 
 moment that soul can tread the path that brings into 
 the presence of God, and " has access with confidence 
 by the faith of Him." So, brethren, seeing that thus 
 the incapacity may all be swept away, and that instead 
 of a " cannot," which relegates us to darkness, we may 
 receive a " can " which leads us into the light, let us see 
 to it that this communion, which is possible for all 
 
CANNOT AND CAN 41 
 
 Christian men, is real in our cases, and that we use the 
 access which is given to us, and dwell for ever in, and 
 with, the Lord. 
 
 I have said that the act of faith, by associating a man 
 with Jesus Christ in the power of His death and of His 
 life, makes any who exercise it capable of passing into 
 the presence of God. But I would remind you, too, 
 that to make us more fit for more full and habitual 
 communion is the very purpose for which all the disci- 
 pline of our earthly life, its sorrows and its joys, its 
 tasks and its repose, is exercised upon us — " He for our 
 profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness." 
 Surely, if we habitually took that point of view in refer- 
 ence to our work, in reference to our joys, in reference to 
 our trials, everything would be different. We are being 
 prepared with sedulous love, with patient reiteration of 
 line upon line, precept upon precept, with singularly 
 varied methods but a uniform purpose, by all that 
 meets us in life, to be more capable of treading the 
 eternal path into the eternal light. Is that how we 
 daily think of our own circumstances ? Do we bring 
 that great thought to bear upon all that we, sometimes 
 faithlessly, call mysterious or mm-muringly think of — 
 if we dare not speak our thought — as being cruel and 
 hard ? What does it matter if some precious things 
 be Hfted o£E our shoulders, and out of our hearts, if 
 their being taken away makes it more possible for us to 
 tread with a lighter step the path of peace ? What 
 
42 CANNOT AND CAN 
 
 matters it thougli many things that we would fain keep 
 are withdrawn from us, if by the withdrawal we are sent a 
 little further forward on the road that leads to God ? 
 As George Herbert says, sorrows and joys are like battle- 
 dores that drive a shuttlecock, and they may all " toss 
 us to Thy breast." In faith, however infantile it may 
 be, there is an undeveloped capacity, a germ of fitness, 
 for dwelling with God. But that capacity is meant to 
 be increased, and the little children are meant to be 
 helped to grow up into full-grown men, " the measure 
 of the stature of the fulness of Christ," by all that comes 
 to them here on earth. Do you not think we should 
 understand life better, do you not think it would all be 
 flashed up into new radiance, do you not think we should 
 more seldom stand bewildered at what we choose to call 
 the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, if this were 
 the point of view from which we looked at them all — 
 that they were fitting us for perpetual abiding with our 
 Father God ? 
 
 Nor let us forget that there was a transient " cannot " 
 of another sort. For " flesh and blood cannot inherit 
 the Kingdom of God." So, as life is changed when we 
 think of it as helping us toward Him, death is 
 changed when we think of it as being, if I may so say, 
 the usher in attendance on the Presence-chamber, who 
 draws back the thin curtain that separates us from the 
 Throne, and takes us by the hands and leads us into the 
 Presence. Surely if we habitually thought thus of that 
 
CANNOT AND CAN 43 
 
 otherwise grim chamberlain, we should be willing to put 
 our hands into his, as a little child will, when straying, 
 into the hands of a stranger who says, " Come with 
 me and I will take you home to your father." " As I 
 said unto the Jews ... so now I say to you, whither 
 I go, ye cannot come." 
 
 Let us press on you and on myself the one thought 
 that comes out of all that I have been saying, the blessed 
 possibility, which, because it is a possibility, is an obliga- 
 tion, to use far more than most of us do, the right of 
 access to the King Who is our Father. There are nobles 
 and corporate bodies, who regard it as one of their 
 chief distinctions that they have always the right of 
 entree to the Court of the Sovereign. Every Christian 
 man has that. And in old days, when a baron did not 
 show himself at Court, suspicion naturally arose, and 
 he was in danger of being thought disaffected, if not 
 traitorous. Ah ! if you and I were judged according 
 to that law, what would become of us ? We can go 
 when we like. How seldom we do go ! We can live 
 in the heavens whilst our work lies down here. We 
 prefer the low earth to the lofty sky. " We are come " 
 — ideally, and in the depths of our nature, our aifmities 
 are there — " unto God, the Judge of all, and to Jesus 
 the Mediator of the new covenant." Are we come ? 
 Are we day by day, in all the pettiness of our ordinary 
 lives, when compassed by hard duties, weighed upon by 
 sore distress — still keeping our hearts in Heaven, and 
 
44 CANNOT AND CAN 
 
 our feet familiar with the path that leads us to God ? 
 " Set your affections on things above, where Jesus is, 
 sitting at the right hand of God." For there is no 
 " cannot " for His servants in regard to their access to 
 any place where He is. 
 
Seeking Jesus 
 
 Ye shall seek Me. — John xiii. 33. 
 
 IN the former sermon on this verse I pointed out that 
 it, in its fulness, applies only to the brief period 
 between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, but that, 
 partly by contrast and partly by analogy, it suggests 
 permanent relations between Christ and His disciples. 
 These relations were mainly — as I pointed out then — 
 two : there was that one expressed by the subsequent 
 words of the verse, " Whither I go, ye cannot come " — 
 a brief " cannot," soon to be changed into a permanent 
 " can " ; and there was a second, a brief, sad, and vain 
 seeking, soon to be changed into a seeking which finds. 
 It is to the latter that I wish to turn now. 
 
 " Ye shall seek Me " fell, like the clods on a coffin-hd, 
 with a hollow sound on the hearts of the Apostles. It 
 comes to us as a permission, and a command, and a 
 promise. I do not dwell on that sad seeking, which 
 was so brief but so bitter. We all know what it is to 
 put out an empty hand into the darkness and the void, 
 
 45 
 
46 SEEKING JESUS 
 
 and to grope for a touch which we know, whilst we grope, 
 that we shall not find. And these poor helpless dis- 
 ciples, by their forlorn sense of separation, by their 
 yearning that brought no satisfaction, by their very 
 listless despair, were saying, during these hours of agony 
 into which an eternity of pain was condensed, " Oh ! 
 that He were beside us again ! " 
 
 That sad seeking ended when He came to them, and 
 " then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord." 
 But another kind of seeking began, when the cloud 
 received Him out of their sight ; as joyful as the other 
 was laden with sorrow, as sure to find the object of its 
 quest as the other was certain to be disappointed. What 
 He said in the darkness to them. He says in the light to 
 us : What I say unto you I say unto all. Seek ! So 
 now we have to deal with that joyful search which is 
 sure of finding its object, and is only a little, if at all, 
 less blessed than the finding itself. 
 1. — Every Christian is, by his very name, a seeker 
 after christ. 
 
 There are two kinds of seeking, one like that of a bird 
 whose young have been stolen away, which flutters 
 here and there, because it knows not where that is which 
 it seeks ; another, like the flight of the same bird, when 
 the migrating instinct rises in its little breast, and 
 straight as an arrow it goes, not because it knows not 
 its goal, but because it knows it, yonder where the sun 
 is warm and the sky is blue, and winter is left behind in 
 
SEEKING JESUS 47 
 
 the cold North. " Ye shall seek Me " is the word of 
 promise, which changes the vain search that is ignorant 
 of where the object of its quest is, into a blessed going 
 out of the heart towards that which it knows to be the 
 home of its homelessness. Thus the text brings out 
 the very central blessedness and peculiarity of the 
 Christian life, that it has no uncertainty in its aims, 
 and that, instead of seeking for things which may or 
 may not be found, or if found may or may not prove 
 to be what we dreamt them to be, it seeks for a Person 
 Whom it knows where to find, and of Whom it knows 
 that all its desires will be met in Him. We have, then, 
 on the one side the multifarious, divergent searchings of 
 man ; and on the other side the one quest in which all 
 these others are gathered up, and translated into blessed- 
 ness — the seeking after Jesus Christ. 
 
 Men know that they need, if I may so put it, four 
 things : truth for the understanding, love round which 
 the heart may coil, authority for the will which may 
 direct and restrain, and energy for the practical life. 
 But, apart from the quest after Christ, men for the most 
 part seek these necessary goods in divers objects, and 
 fragmentarily look for the completion of their desires. 
 But fragments will never satisfy a man's soul, and they 
 who have to go to one place for truth, and to another 
 for love, and to another for authority, and to another for 
 energy, are wofully likely never to find what they search 
 for. They are seeking in the Manifold what can be 
 
48 SEEKING JESUS 
 
 found only in the One. It is as if some vessel, full of 
 precious stones, were thrown down before men, and 
 whilst they are racing after the diamonds, they lose the 
 emeralds and the sapphires. But the wise concentrate 
 their seekings on the one Pearl of great price, in Whom 
 is truth for the brain, love for the heart, authority for 
 the will, power for the life, and all summed in that which 
 is more blessed than all, the Person of the Brother Who 
 died for us, the Christ Who lives to fill our hearts for 
 ever. One sun dims all the stars ; and the " one entire 
 and perfect ChrysoHte " beggars and reduces to fragments 
 " all the precious things that thou canst desire." 
 
 To seek Him is the very hall-mark of a Christian, and 
 that seeking comes to be an earnest desire and effort 
 after more conscious communion with Him, and a more 
 entire possession of His imparted life which is righteous- 
 ness and peace and joy and power. According to the 
 Rabbis, the manna tasted to each man what each man 
 most desired. The manifoldness of the one Christ is far 
 more manifold than the manifoldness of the multiplicity 
 of fragmentary and partial aims which foolish men 
 perceive. 
 
 The ways of seeking are very plain. First of all, we 
 seek if, and in proportion as, we do make the effort 
 to occupy our thoughts and minds, not with theological 
 dogmas, but with the hving Christ Himself. Ah ! 
 brethren, it is hard to do, and I daresay a great many of 
 you are thinking that it is far harder for you, in the 
 
SEEKING JESUS 49 
 
 distractions and rush and conflict of business and daily 
 life, than it is for people like me, whom you think of as 
 sitting in a study, with nothing to distract us. I do 
 not know about that ; I fancy it is about equally hard 
 for us all ; but it is possible. I have been in Alpine 
 villages where, at the end of every squalid alley, there 
 towered up a great, pure, silent, white peak. That is 
 what our lives may be : however noisome, crowded, 
 petty the little lane in which we live, tlie Alp is at the 
 end of it there, if we only choose to lift our eyes and 
 look. It is possible that not only " into the sessions of 
 sweet, silent thought," but into the rush and bustle of 
 the workshop or the exchange, there may come, like 
 " some sweet, beguiling melody, so sweet we know not 
 we are listening to it," the thought that changes pettiness 
 into greatness, that makes aU things go smoothly and 
 easily, that is a test and a charm to discover and to 
 destroy temptation, the thought of a present Christ, 
 the Lover of my soul, and the Helper of my hfe. 
 
 Again, we seek Him when, by aspiration and desire, 
 we bring Him— as He is always brought thereby— into 
 our hearts and into our lives. The measure of our 
 desire is the measure of our possession. Wishing is the 
 opening of our hearts, but, alas ! often we wish and desire, 
 and the heart opens and nothing enters. Wishes are 
 like the tentacles of some marine organism waving about 
 in a waste ocean, feeling for the food that it does not 
 find. But if we open our hearts for Him, that is simul- 
 M.s. 4 
 
50 SEEKING JESUS 
 
 taneous with the coming of Him to us. " Ye have not, 
 because ye ask not." Do not forget, dear friends, that 
 desire, if it is genuine, will take a very concrete form 
 and will be prayer. And it is prayer — by which I do 
 not mean the utterance of words without desire, any 
 more than I mean desire without the direct casting of it 
 into the form of supplication — ^it is prayer that brings 
 Christ into any, and it is prayer that will bring Him into 
 every, Ufe. 
 
 Nor let us forget that there is another way of seeking 
 besides these two, of looldng up to Him through, and in 
 the midst of, all the shows and trifles of this low life, 
 and the reaching out of our desires towards Him, as the 
 roots of a tree beneath the soil go straight for the river. 
 That other way is imitation and obedience. It is vain 
 to think of Him, and it is unreal to pretend to desire 
 Him, if we are not seeking Him by treading in the path 
 that He has trod, and which leads to Him. Imitation 
 and obedience — these are the steps by wliich we go 
 straight through all the triviaUties of life into the pres- 
 ence of the Lord Himself. The smallest deflection from 
 the path that leads to Him will carry us away into 
 doleful wastes. The least invisible cloud that steals 
 across the sky will blot out half a hemisphere of stars ; 
 and we seek not Christ unless, thinking of Him, and 
 desiring Him, we also walk in the path in which He has 
 walked, and so come where He is. He Himself has said 
 that if His servant follows Him, where He is, there shall 
 
SEEKING JESUS 61 
 
 also His servant be. These things make up the seeking 
 which ought to mark us all. 
 I note that 
 
 II. — THE CHRISTIAN SEEKER ALWAYS FINDS. 
 
 I pointed out in my last sermon the strange identity 
 of our Lord's words to His humble friends, with those 
 which on another occasion He used to His bitter enemies. 
 He reminds the disciples of that identity in the verse 
 from which my text comes : "As I said to the Jews 
 ... so now I say to you." But there was one thing 
 that He said to the Jews that He did not say to them. 
 To the former He said, " Ye shall seek me, and shall not 
 find me "; and He did not say that — even for the sad 
 hours it was not quite true — He did not say that to His 
 followers, and He does not say it to us. 
 
 If we seek we shall find. There is no disappointment 
 in the Christian life. Anything is possible rather than 
 that a man should desire Christ and not have Him. 
 That has never been the experience of any seeking soul. 
 And so I urge upon you what has already been suggested, 
 that inasmuch as, by reason of His infinite longing to 
 give truth and love and guidance and energy and His 
 whole Self, to all of us, the amount of our possession of 
 the power and life of Jesus Christ depends on ourselves. 
 If you take to the fountain a tiny cup, you will only 
 bring away a tiny cup-full. If you take a great vessel 
 you will bring it away full. As long as the woman in 
 the old story held out her vessel to the miraculous flow 
 
52 SEEKING JESUS 
 
 of the oil, the flow continued. When she had no more 
 vessels to take, the flow stopped. If a man holds a 
 flagon beneath a spigot, with an unsteady hand, half 
 of the precious liquor will be spilt on the ground. Those 
 who fulfil the conditions, of which I have already been 
 spealdng, may make quite sure that according to their 
 faith will it be unto them. And if you, dear friend, have 
 not in your experience the conscious presence of a Christ 
 Who is all that you need, there is no one in heaven or 
 earth or hell to blame for it but only your own self. 
 " I have never said to any of the seed of Jacob, Seek 
 ye My face in vain," and when the Lord said, " Ye 
 shall seek Me," He was implicitly binding Himself to 
 meet the seeking soul, and give Himself to the desiring 
 heart. 
 
 Remember, too, that this seeking, which is always 
 crowned with finding, is the only search in which failure 
 is impossible. There is only one course of life that has 
 no disappointments. We all know how frequently we 
 are foiled in our quests ; we all know how often a prize 
 won is a bitterer disappointment than a prize unattained. 
 Like a jelly-fish in the water, as long as it is there its tenu- 
 ous substance is lovely, expanded, tinged with delicate 
 violets and blues, and its long filaments float in lines of 
 beauty. Lay it on the beach, and it is a shapeless lump, 
 and it poisons and stings. You fish your prize out of the 
 great ocean, and when you have it, does it disappoint, 
 or does it fulfil, the raised expectations of the quest ? 
 
SEEKING JESUS 53 
 
 There is One that does not disappoint. There is one 
 gold mine that comes up to the prospectus. There is 
 one spring that never runs dry. The more deep our 
 Christian experience is, the more we shall take the 
 rapturous exclamation of the Arabian queen to our- 
 selves : " The half was not told us." 
 And so, lastly, I suggest that — 
 
 III. — THE FINDING IMPELS TO FRESH SEEKING. 
 
 The object of the Christian man's quest is Jesus 
 Christ. He is Incarnate Infinitude ; and that cannot 
 be exhausted. The seeker after Jesus Christ is the 
 Christian soul. That soul is the incarnate possibility of 
 indefinite expansion and approximation and assimilation ; 
 and that cannot be exliausted. And so, with a Christ 
 who is infinite, and a seeker whose capacities may be 
 indefinitely expanded, there can be no satiety, there 
 can be no limit, there can be no end to the process. 
 This wine- skin will not burst when the new wine is put 
 into it. Rather like some elastic vessel, as you pour it 
 will fill out and expand. Possession enlarges, and the 
 more of Christ's fulness is poured into a human heart, 
 the more is that heart widened out to receive a greater 
 
 Dear brethren, there is one course of fife, and I believe 
 but one, on which we may all enter with the sure con- 
 fidence that in the nature of things, in the nature of 
 Christ and in the nature of ourselves, there is no end to 
 growth and progress. Think of the freshness and blessed- 
 
54 SEEKING JESUS 
 
 ness and energy that puts into a life. To have an 
 unattained and unattainable object, a goal to which we 
 can never come, but to which we may ever be approxi- 
 mating, seems to me to be the secret of perpetual joy 
 and of perpetual youthfulness. To say, " forgetting 
 the things that are behind, I reach forward unto the 
 things that are before," is a charm and an amulet that 
 repels monotony and weariness, and goes with a man to 
 the very end, and when all other aims and objects have 
 died down into grey ashes, that flame, like the fabled 
 lamp in Virgil's tomb, burns clear in the grave, and 
 lights us to the Eternity beyond. 
 
 For certainly, if there be neither satiety nor limit to 
 Christian progress here, there can be no better and 
 stronger evidence that Christian progress here is but 
 the first " lap " of the race, the first stadium of the course, 
 and that beyond that narrow, dark line that lies across 
 the path, it runs on, rising higher, and will run on for 
 ever. 
 
 " On earth the broken arcs ; in heaven the perfect round." 
 
 Seek for what you are sure to find ; seek for what will 
 never disappoint you ; seek for what will abide with you 
 for ever. The very first word of Christ's recorded in 
 Scripture is a question which He puts to us all : " What 
 seek ye ? " Well for us if, like the two to whom it was 
 originally addressed, we answer, " We are not seeking 
 a What ; we are seeking a Whom. — Master, where 
 
SEEKING JESUS 65 
 
 dwellest Thou 1 " And if we have that answer in our 
 hearts, we shall receive the invitation which they 
 received, " Come and see," — come and seek. '' Ye 
 shall seek Me " is a gracious invitation, an imperative 
 command, and a faithful promise that, if we seek we 
 shall find. " Whoso findeth Him findeth life ; whoso 
 misseth Him "—whatever else he has sought and found 
 — " wrongeth his own soul." 
 
" As I have Loved" 
 
 A new commandment I give unto yon, that ye love one another ; 
 as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall 
 all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another. 
 —John xiii. 34, 35. 
 
 WISHES from dying lips are sacred. They sink 
 deep into memories and mould faithful lives. 
 The sense of impending separation had added an 
 unwonted tenderness to our Lord's address, and He 
 had designated His disciples by the fond name of " little 
 children." The same sense here gives authority to His 
 words, and moulds them into the shape of a command. 
 The disciples had held together because He was in their 
 midst. Will the arch stand when the keystone is 
 struck out ? Will not the spokes fall asunder when 
 the nave of the wheel is taken away ? He would guard 
 them from the disintegrating tendencies that were sure 
 to set in when He was gone ; and He would point them 
 to a solace for His absence, and to a kind of substitute 
 for His presence. For to love the brethren whom they 
 see would be, in some sense, a continuing to love the 
 Christ whom they had ceased to see. And so, immedi- 
 
" AS I HAVE LOVED " 57 
 
 ately after He said : " Whither I go ye cannot come," 
 He goes on to say : " Love one another as I have loved 
 you." 
 
 He called this a " new commandment," though to 
 love one's neighbour as one's self was a famihar common- 
 place amongst the Jews, and had a recognized position 
 in Rabbinical teaching. But His commandment pro- 
 posed a new object of love, it set forth a new measure of 
 love, so greatly different from all that had preceded it as 
 to become almost a new kind of love, and it suggested 
 and supplied a new motive power for love. This com- 
 mandment " could give life " and fulfil itself. Therefore 
 it comes to us as a " new commandment " — even to us — 
 and, unlike the words which preceded it, which we were 
 considering in former sermons, it is wholly and freshly 
 appUcable to-day as in the ages that are passed. I ask 
 you, first, to consider — 
 
 I. — THE NEW SCOPE OF THE NEW COMMANDMENT. 
 
 " Love one another." The newness of the precept is 
 realized, if we think for a moment of the new pheno- 
 menon which obedience to it produced. When the 
 words were spoken, the then-known civiHzed Western 
 world was cleft by great, deep gulfs of separation, like 
 the crevasses in a glacier, by the side of which our 
 racial animosities and class differences are merely 
 superficial cracks on the surface. Language, religion, 
 national animosities, differences of condition, and 
 saddest of all, difference of sex, split the world up into 
 
58 " AS I HAVE LOVED " 
 
 alien fragments. A " stranger " and an " enemy " 
 were expressed in one language, by the same word. The 
 learned and the unlearned, the slave and his master, 
 the barbarian and the Greek, the man and the woman, 
 stood on opposite sides of the gulfs, flinging hostility 
 across. A Jewish peasant wandered up and down for 
 three years in His own little country, which was the 
 very focus of narrowness and separation and hostihty, 
 as the Roman historian felt when he called the Jews the 
 " haters of the human race " ; He gathered a few dis- 
 ciples, and he was crucified by a contemptuous Roman 
 governor, who thought that the life of one fanatical Jew 
 was a little price to pay for popularity with his trouble- 
 some subjects, and in a generation after, the clefts were 
 being bridged, and all over the empire a strange new 
 sense of unity was being breathed, and Barbarian, 
 Scythian, bond and free, male and female, Jew and 
 Greek, learned and ignorant, clasped hands and sat 
 down at one table, and felt themselves all one in Christ 
 Jesus. They were ready to break all other bonds, and 
 to yield to the uniting forces that streamed out from 
 His Cross. There never had been anything like it. No 
 wonder that the world began to babble about sorcery, 
 and conspiracies, and complicity in unnameable vices. 
 It was only that the disciples were obeying the " new 
 commandment," and a new thing had come into the 
 world — a community held together by love and not by 
 geographical accidents or hnguistic affinities, or the iron 
 
" AS I HAVE LOVED " 59 
 
 fetters of the conqueror. You sow the seed in furrows 
 separated by ridges, and the ground is seamed, but 
 when the seed springs the ridges are hidden, no division 
 appears, and as far as the eye can reach, the cornfield 
 stretches, rippling in unbroken waves of gold. The new 
 conunandment made a new thing, and the world won- 
 dered. 
 
 Now then, brethren, do not let us forget that, although 
 it is in some respects a great deal harder to-day than 
 it was then, to obey this commandment, the diverse 
 circumstances in which Christian individuals and 
 Christian communities are this day placed may modify 
 the form of our obedience, but do not in the smallest 
 degree weaken the obligation, for the individual Christian 
 and for the societies of Christians, to follow this com- 
 mandment. The multiplication of numbers, the cessa- 
 tion of the armed hostility of the world, the great 
 varieties in intellectual position in regard to the truths 
 of Christianity, divergencies of culture, and many other 
 things, are separating forces. But our Christianity is 
 worth very little, if it cannot master these separating 
 tendencies, even as in the early days of freshness, the 
 Christianity that sprang in these new converts' minds 
 mastered the far more powerful separating tendencies 
 with which they had to contend. 
 
 Every Christian man is under the obligation to recog- 
 nize his kindred with every other Christian man — his 
 kindred in the deep foundations of his spiritual being, 
 
60 " AS I HAVE LOVED " 
 
 which are far deeper, and ought to be far more operative 
 in drawing together, than the superficial differences of 
 culture or opinion or the Hke, which may part us. The 
 bond that holds Christian men together is their com- 
 mon relation to the one Lord, and that ought to influence 
 their attitude to one another. You say I am talking 
 commonplaces. Yes ; and the condition of Christianity 
 this day is the sad and tragical sign that the common- 
 places need to be talked about, till they are rubbed into 
 the conscience of the Church as they never have been 
 before. 
 
 Do not let us suppose that Christian love is mere 
 sentiment. I shall have to speak a word or two about 
 that presently, but I would fain lift the whole subject, 
 if I can, out of the region of mere unctuous words, and 
 gush of half-feigned emotion, which mean nothing, and 
 would make you feel that it is a very practical com- 
 mandment, gripping us hard, when our Lord says to us, 
 " Love one another." 
 
 I have spoken about the accidental conditions which 
 make obedience to this commandment difl&cult. The 
 real reason which makes the obedience to it difficult is 
 the slackness of our own hold on the centre. In the 
 measure in which we are filled with Jesus Christ, in 
 that measure will that expression of His Spirit and His 
 hfe become natural to us. Every Christian has affinities 
 with every other Christian, in the depths of his being, so 
 as that he is a great deal more like his brother, who is 
 
" AS I HAVE LOVED " 61 
 
 possessor of " like precious faith," however unhke the 
 two may be in outlook, in idiosyncrasy, and culture and 
 in creed, than he is to another man with whom he may 
 have a far closer sympathy in all these matters than he 
 has with the brother in question, but from whom he is 
 parted by this, that the one trusts and loves and obeys 
 Jesus Christ, and the other does not. So, for individual 
 and for churches, the commandment takes this shape — 
 Go down to the depths and you will find that you are 
 closer to the Christian man or community which seems 
 furthest from you, than you are to the non-Christian 
 who seems nearest to you. Therefore, let your love 
 follow your kinship, and your heart recognize the one- 
 ness that knits you together. That is a revolutionary 
 commandment ; what would become of our present 
 organizations of Christianity if it were obeyed ? That 
 is a revolutionary commandment ; what would become 
 of our individual relations to the whole family who, in 
 every place, and in many tongues, and with many creeds, 
 call on Jesus as on their Lord — their Lord and ours ? 
 I leave you to answer the question. Only, I say the 
 commandment has for its first scope all who, in every 
 place, love the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 But there is more than that involved in it. The very 
 same principle which makes this love to one another 
 imperative upon all disciples makes it equally imperative 
 upon every follower of Jesus Christ to embrace in a real 
 afEection all whom Jesus so loved as to die for them. 
 
62 " AS I HAVE LOVED " 
 
 If I am to love a Christian man because he and I love 
 Christ, I am to love everybody, because Christ loves 
 me and everybody, and because He died on the Cross 
 for me and for all men. And so one of the other Apostles, 
 or, at least, the letter which goes by his name, laid hold 
 on the true connexion when, instead of concentrating 
 Christian affection on the Church, and letting the world 
 go to the devil as an alien thing, he said : " Add to your 
 faith," this, that, and the other, and " brotherly kind- 
 ness, and to brotherly kindness, charity." The par- 
 ticular does not exclude the general, it leads to the 
 general. The fire kindled upon the hearth gives warmth 
 to all the chamber. The circles are concentric, and the 
 widest sweep is struck from the same middle point as 
 the narrow. So the new commandment does not cut 
 humanity in two halves, but gathers all diversity into 
 one, and spreads the great reconciling of Christian love 
 over all the antagonisms and oppositions of earth. Let 
 me ask you to notice 
 
 II. — THE EXAMPLE OF THE NEW COMMANDMENT,' 
 
 " As I have loved you." 
 
 That solemn " as " lifts itself up before us, shines far 
 ahead of us, ought to draw us to itself in hope, and not to 
 repel us from itself in despair. " As I have loved " — 
 what a tremendous thing for a man to stand up before 
 his fellows, and say, " Take Me as the perfect Example 
 of perfect love ; and let My example — undimmed by the 
 mists of gathering centuries, and unweakened by the 
 
" AS I HAVE LOVED " 63 
 
 change of condition, and circumstance, fresh as ever 
 after ages have passed, and closely-fitting as ever in all 
 varieties of human character and condition — stand 
 before you ; the ideal that I have realized, and that you 
 will be blessed in the proportion that you seek, though 
 you fail to realize it ! " There is, I venture to believe, 
 only one aspect of Jesus Christ in which such a setting 
 forth of Himself as the perfect Incarnation of perfect 
 love is warrantable ; and that is found in the old belief 
 that His very birth was the result of His love, and that 
 His death was the climax of that love. And if so, we 
 have to turn to Bethlehem, and the whole life, and the 
 Cross at its end, as being the Christ-given example and 
 model for our love to our brethren. 
 
 What do we see there ? I have said that there is too 
 much of mere sickly sentimentality about the ordinary 
 treatment of this great commandment, and that I 
 desired to lift it out of that region into a far nobler, 
 more strenuous, and difficult one. This is what we see 
 in that Ufe and in that death : — First of all — the activity 
 of love — " Let us not love in words, but in deed and in 
 truth." Then we see the self-forgetfulness of love — 
 " Even Christ pleased not Himself." Then we see the 
 self-sacrifice of love — " Greater love hath no man than 
 this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." And 
 in these three points, on which I would fain enlarge if I 
 might, active love, self- oblivious love, self-sacrificing 
 love, you have the pattern set for us all. Christian 
 
64 " AS I HAVE LOVED " 
 
 love is no mere sickly maiden, full of sentimental 
 emotions and honeyed words. She is a strenuous 
 virgin, girt for service, a heroine ready for dangers, 
 and prepared to be a martyr if it be needful. Love's 
 language is sacrifice. " I give Thee myself," is its 
 motto. And that is the pattern that is set before us 
 all — " as I have loved you." 
 
 I have tried to show you how the commandment was 
 new in many particulars, and it is for ever new in this 
 particular, that it is for ever before us, unattained, and 
 drawing faithful hearts to itself, and ever opening out 
 into new heroisms, and, therefore, blessedness, of self- 
 sacrifice, and ever leading us to confess the differences, 
 deep, tragic, sinful, between us and Him Who — we 
 sometimes think too presumptuously — we venture to 
 say is our Lord and Master. 
 
 Did you ever see in some great picture gallery a copyist 
 sitting in front of a Raffaelle, and comparing his poor 
 feeble daub, all out of drawing, and with little of the 
 Divine beauty that the master had breathed over his 
 canvas, even if it preserved the mere mechanical out- 
 line ? That is what you and I should do with our lives : 
 take them and put them down side by side with the 
 original. We shall have to do it some day. Had we 
 better not do it now, and try to bring the copy a little 
 nearer to the masterpiece ; and let that " as I have 
 loved you " shine before us and draw us on to unattain- 
 able heights ? 
 
"AS I HAVE LOVED" 65 
 
 And now, lastly, we have here 
 III. The Motive-power for Obedience to the 
 Commandment. 
 
 And that is as new as all the rest. That " as " ex- 
 presses the manner of the love, but it also expresses the 
 motive and the power. It might be translated into the 
 equivalent " in the fashion in which," or it might be 
 translated into the equivalent " since — " " I have loved 
 you." The original might bear the rendering, " that ye 
 also ma;/ love one another." That is to say, what keeps 
 men from obeying this commandment is the instinctive 
 self-regard which is natural to us all. There are muscles 
 in the body which are so constructed that they close 
 tightly ; and the heart is something like one of these 
 sphincter muscles— it shuts by nature, especially if 
 there has been anything put inside it over which it can 
 shut and keep it all to itself. But there is one thing that 
 dethrones Self, and enthrones the angel Love in a heart, 
 and that is — that into that heart there shall come surging 
 the sense of the great love wherewith " I have loved you." 
 That melts the iceberg, nothing else will. 
 
 That love of Christ to us, received into our hearts, and 
 there producing an answering love to Him, will make us, 
 in the measure in which we live in it and let it rule us, 
 love ever}i;hing and every person that He loves. That 
 love of Jesus Christ, stealing into our hearts and there 
 sweetening the ever-springing " issues of Hfe," will make 
 them flow out in glad obedience to any commandment 
 
 M.S. 5 
 
66 " AS I HAVE LOVED " 
 
 of His. That love of Jesus Christ, received into our 
 hearts, and responded to by our answering love, will 
 work, as love always does, a magical transformation. 
 A great monastic teacher wrote his precious book about 
 " The Imitation of Christ." " Imitation " is a great 
 word. Transformation is a greater. " We all," receiving 
 on the mirror of our loving hearts the love of Jesus 
 Christ, " are changed into the same hkeness." Thus, 
 then, the love, which is our pattern, is also our motive 
 and our power for obedience, and the more we bring 
 ourselves under its influences, the more we shall love all 
 those who are beloved by, and lovers of, Jesus. 
 
 That is the one foundation for a world knit together 
 in the bonds of amity and concord. There have been 
 attempts at brotherhood, and the guillotine has ended 
 what was begun in the name of " fraternity." Men 
 build towers, but there is no cement between the bricks, 
 unless the love of Christ holds them together ; and there- 
 fore Babel after Babel comes down about the ears of its 
 builders. But notwithstanding all that is dark to-day, 
 and though the war-clouds are lowering, and the hearts 
 of men are inflamed with fierce passions, Christ's com- 
 mandment is Christ's promise ; and though the vision 
 tarry, it will surely come. So even to-day Christian 
 men ought to stand for Christ's peace, and for Christ's 
 love. The old commandment which we have had 
 from the beginning, is the new commandment that 
 fits to-day as it fits all the ages. It is a dream, say 
 
" AS I HAVE LOVED " 67 
 
 some. Yes, a dream ; but a morning dream which 
 comes true. Let us do the little we can to make it true, 
 and to bring about the day when the flock of men will 
 gather round the one Shepherd, Who loved them to the 
 death, and Who has bid them and helped them, to " love 
 one another as " — and since — " He has loved them," 
 
" Why Cannot I Follow Thee 
 
 Now" 
 
 Peter said unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now ? I 
 will lay down my life for Thy sake. Jesus answered him, Wilt thou 
 lay down thy life for My sake ? Verily, verily I say unto thee. 
 The cock shall not crow till thou hast denied Me thrice. — John xiii. 
 37, 38. 
 
 PETER'S main characteristics are all in operation 
 here ; his eagerness to be in the front, his habit 
 of blurting out his thoughts and feelings, his passionate 
 love for his Master, and withal his inability to under- 
 stand Him, and his self-confident arrogance. He has 
 broken in upon Christ's solemn words, entirely deaf to 
 their deep meaning, but blindly and blunderingly laying 
 hold of one thought only, that Jesus is departing, and 
 that he is to be left alone. So he asks the question, 
 " Lord ! Whither goest Thou ? " — not so much caring 
 about that, as meaning by his question — " tell me where, 
 and then I will come too ; " pledging himself to follow 
 faithfully, as a dog behind his master, wherever He 
 went. 
 
" WHY CAKNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 69 
 
 Our Lord answered the underlying meaning of the 
 words, repeating with a personal application what He 
 had just before said as a general principle — " Whither 
 I go thou canst not follow Me now, but thou shalt follow 
 Me afterwards." Then followed this noteworthy 
 dialogue. 
 
 The whole significance of the incident is preserved for 
 us in the beautiful legend which tells us how, near the 
 city of Rome, on the Appian Way, as Peter was flying 
 for his life, he met the Lord, and again said to Him : 
 " Lord, whither goest Thou ? " The words of the 
 question, as given in the Vulgate, are the name of the 
 site of the supposed interview, and of the little church 
 which stands on it. The Master answered : " I go to 
 Rome, to be crucified again." The answer smote the 
 heart of the Apostle, and turned the cowardly fugitive 
 into a hero ; and he followed his Lord, and went gladly 
 to his death. For it was that death which had to be 
 accomplished before Peter was able to follow his Lord. 
 
 Now, as to the words before us, I think we shall best 
 gather their significance, and lay it upon our own 
 hearts, if we simply follow the windings of the dialogue. 
 There are three points : the audacious question, the rash 
 vow, and the sad forecast. 
 
 L The Audacious Question. 
 
 As Peter's first question, " Lord, whither goest 
 Thou ? " meant not so much what it said, as " I will 
 follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest ; tell me, that I 
 
70 " WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 
 
 may ; " so the second question, in like manner, is really 
 not so much a question, " Why cannot I follow Thee 
 now ? " as the nearest possible approach to a flat con- 
 tradiction of our Lord. Peter puts his words into the 
 shape of an interrogation ; what he means is," Yes, lean 
 follow Thee ; and in proof thereof, I will lay down my life 
 for Thy sake." The man's persistence, the man's love 
 leading him to lack of reverence, came out in this (as 
 I have ventured to call it) audacious question. Its 
 underlying meaning was a refusal to believe the Master's 
 word. But yet there was in it a nobility of resolution — 
 broken afterwards, but never mind about that — to endure 
 anything rather than to be separate from the Lord. 
 Yet, though it was noble in its motive, but lacking in 
 reverence in its form, there was a deeper error than that 
 in it. Peter did not know what " following " meant, 
 and he had to be taught that first. One of the main 
 reasons why he could not follow was because he did not 
 understand what was involved. It was something 
 more than marching behind his Master, even to a Cross. 
 There was a deeper discipline and a more strenuous effort 
 needed than would have availed for such a kind of fol- 
 lowing. 
 
 Let us look a little onwards into his life. Recall that 
 scene on the morning of the day by the banks of the 
 lake, when he waded through the shallow water, and 
 cast himself, dripping, at his Master's feet, and, having 
 by his threefold confession obliterated his threefold 
 
" WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 71 
 
 denial, was taken back to his Lord's love, and received 
 the permission for which he had hungered, and which he 
 had been told, in the Upper Room could not " now " be 
 given : — " Jesus said to him, Follow thou Me." What a 
 flood of remembrances must then have rushed over the 
 penitent Peter ! how he must have thought to himself, 
 " So soon, so soon is the ' canst not 'changed into a can ! 
 So soon has the ' afterwards ' come to be the present ! " 
 
 And long years after that, when he was an old man, 
 and experience had taught him what followijig meant, 
 he shared his privilege with all the dispersed strangers 
 to whom he wrote, and said to them, with a definite 
 reference to this incident, and to the other after the 
 resurrection, " leaving us an example, that we (not I 
 only, as I used to think, in my exuberant days of ignor- 
 ance) should follow in His steps." 
 
 So, brethren, this blundering, loving, audacious ques- 
 tion suggests to us that to follow Jesus Christ is the 
 supreme direction for all conduct. Men of all creeds, 
 men of no creed, admit that. The 
 
 Loveliness of perfect deeds. 
 Higher than all poetic thought, 
 
 which is set forth in that life constitutes the living law 
 to which all conduct is to be conformed, and will be 
 noble in proportion as it is conformed. 
 
 There is the great blessing, and solemn obligation, 
 and lofty prerogative of Christian morality, that for 
 
72 " WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 
 
 obedience to a precept it substitutes following a person, 
 and instead of saying to men, " Be good," it says to them 
 " Be Christlike." It brings the conception of duty out 
 of the region of abstractions into the region of living 
 realities. For the cold statuesque ideal of perfection it 
 substitutes a living Man, with a heart to love, and a 
 hand to help, us. Thereby the whole aspect of striving 
 after the right is changed ; for the work is made easier, 
 and companionship comes in to aid morality, when Jesus 
 Christ says to us, " Be like Me ; and then you will be 
 good and blessed." Effort will be all but as blessed as 
 attainment, and the sense of pressing hard after Him 
 will be only less restful than the consciousness of having 
 attained. To follow Him is bliss, to reach Him is 
 heaven. 
 
 But in order that this following should be possible, 
 there must be something done that had not been done 
 when Peter asked, " Why cannot I follow Thee now ? " 
 One reason why he could not was, as I said, because he 
 did not know yet what " following " meant, and because 
 he was unfit yet for this assimilation of his character 
 and of his conduct to the likeness of his Lord. And 
 another reason was because the Cross still lay before the 
 Lord, and until that death of infinite love and utter 
 self-sacrifice for others had been accomplished, the 
 pattern was not yet complete, nor the highest ideal of 
 human life realized in life. Therefore the " following " 
 was impossible. Christ must die before He has com- 
 
" WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 73 
 
 pleted the example that we are to follow, and Christ 
 must die before the impulse shall be given to us, which 
 shall make us able to tread, however falteringly and far 
 behind, in His footsteps. 
 
 The essence of His life and of His death lies in the two 
 tilings, entire suppression of personal will in obedience 
 to the will of the Father ; and entire self-sacrifice for the 
 sake of humanity. And however there is — and God 
 forbid that I should ever forget in my preaching that 
 there is — a uniqueness in that sacrifice, in that life, and 
 in that death, which beggars all imitation, and needs 
 and tolerates no repetition whilst the world lasts, still 
 along with this, there is that which is imitable in the 
 life and imitable in the death of the Master. To follow 
 Jesus is to live denying self for God, and to live sacrific- 
 ing self for men. Nothing less than these are included 
 in the solemn words, " leaving us " — even in the act 
 and article of death when He " suffered for us " — " an 
 example that we should follow His steps." 
 
 The word rendered example refers to the head- 
 line which the writing-master gives his pupils to copy, 
 line by line. We all know how clumsy the pothooks 
 and hangers are, how blurred the page with many a 
 blot. And yet there, at the top of it, stands the master's 
 fair writing, and though even the last line on the page 
 will be blotted and blurred, when we turn it over and 
 begin on the new leaf, the copy will be like the original, 
 " and we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He 
 
74 " WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 
 
 is." " Thou shalt follow Me afterwards " is a com- 
 mandment ; blessed be God, it is also a promise. For 
 let us not forget that the " following " ends in an attain- 
 ing ; even as the Lord Himself has said in another con- 
 nexion, when He spake : "If any man serve Me, let 
 him . . . follow Me, and where I am, there shall also 
 My servant be." Of course, if we follow, we shall come 
 to the same place one day. And so the great promise 
 will be fulfilled : " They shall follow the Lamb," in that 
 higher life, " whithersoever He goeth ; " and not as 
 here imperfectly, and far behind, but close beside Him, 
 and keeping step for step, being with Him first, and 
 following Him afterwards. 
 
 But let us remember that with regard to that future 
 following and its completeness, the same present in- 
 capacity applies, as clogs and mars the " following," 
 which is conforming our lives to His. For, as He Him- 
 self has said to us, " I go to prepare a place for you," 
 and until He had passed through death and into His 
 glory, there was no standing-ground for human feet on 
 the golden pavements, and heaven was inaccessible to 
 man until Christ had died. Thus, as aU life is changed 
 when it is looked upon as being a following of Jesus, so 
 death becomes altogether other when it is so regarded. 
 The first martyr outside the city wall, bruised and bat- 
 tered by the cruel stones, remembered his Master's 
 death, and shaped his own to be like it. As Jesus, 
 when He died, had said : " Father, into Thy hands I 
 
" WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 75 
 
 commit My spirit," Stephen, dying, said : " Lord Jesus, 
 receive my spirit." As the Master had given His last 
 breath to the prayer, " Father, forgive them ; they know 
 not what they do," so Stephen shaped his last utterance 
 to a conformity with his Lord's, in which the difference 
 is as significant as the likeness, and said, " Lord, lay not 
 this sin to their charge." And then, as the record 
 beautifully says, amidst all that wild hubbub and cruel 
 assault, " he fell on sleep," as a child on its mother's 
 breast. Death is changed when it becomes the follow- 
 ing of Christ. 
 
 II. We Have Here a Rash Vow. 
 " I will lay down my life for Thy sake." What 
 a strange inversion of parts is here ! " Lay down 
 thy life for My sake " — with Calvary less than four- 
 and-twenty hours off, when Christ laid down His 
 Ufe for Peter's sake. Peter was guilty of an anachron- 
 ism in the words, for the time did not come for the 
 disciple to die for his Lord till after the Lord had 
 died for His disciple. But he was right in feeling, 
 though he felt it only in regard to an external and 
 physical act, that to follow Jesus, it was necessary to 
 be ready to die for Him. And that is the great truth 
 which underlies and half redeems the rashness of this 
 vow, and needs to be laid upon our hearts, if we are ever 
 to be the true followers of the Master. Death for 
 Christ is necessary if we are to follow Him. There is 
 nothing that a man can do deeply and truly, in a manner 
 
76 " WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 
 
 worthy of a Christian, which has not underlying it, 
 either the death of self-will and all the godless nature, 
 or if need be, the actual physical death, which is a much 
 smaller matter. You cannot follow Christ except you 
 die daily. No man has ever yet trodden in His foot- 
 steps except on condition of, moment by moment, 
 slapng self, suppressing self, abjuring self, breaking 
 the connexion of self with the material world, and 
 yielding up himself as a living sacrifice, in a living death, 
 to the Lord of Ufe and death. Do not think that " fol- 
 lowing Christ " is a mere sentimental expression for so 
 much morality as we can conveniently get into our daily 
 life. But remember that here, with all his rashness, 
 with all his ignorance, with all his superficiality, the 
 Apostle has laid hold upon the great permanent, but 
 alas ! much-forgotten, principle that to die is essential 
 to following Jesus. 
 
 This daily dying, which is a far harder thing to do 
 than to go to a cross once, and have done with it — was 
 impossible for Peter then, though he did not know it. 
 His vow was a rash one, because the laying down of 
 Christ's life, for Peter's sake and for ours, had not yet 
 been accomplished. There is the motive-power by 
 which, and by which alone, drawn in gratitude, and 
 melted down from all our selfishness, we, too, in our 
 measure and our turn, are able to yield ourselves, in 
 daily crucifixion of our evil, and daily abnegation of 
 self-trust, and self-pleasing, and self-will, to the Lord 
 
" WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW " 77 
 
 that has died for us. He must lay down His Hfe for 
 our sakes, and we must know that He has done it, and 
 rest upon Him as our great Sacrifice and our atoning 
 Priest, or else we shall never be so loosed from the 
 tyranny of self as to be ready to live by dying, and to 
 die that we may live for His sake. " I go to Rome to 
 be crucified again " were the words which in the old 
 legend braced the fugitive and made a hero of him, 
 and sent him back to be crucified Hke his Lord and to 
 offer up the physical life, as he had long since offered 
 up his self will and his arrogance, to the Lord that had 
 died for him. 
 
 Lord our Father, help us, we beseech Thee, that we 
 may be of the sheep that hear the Shepherd's voice and 
 follow Him. Strengthen our faith in that dear Lord 
 Who has laid down His life for us, that we may daily, 
 by self-denial and self-sacrifice, lay down our lives for 
 Him, and follow Him here, in all the footsteps of His 
 love. 
 
The Collapse of Self-Confidence 
 
 Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for ATy sake ? 
 Verily, verily, I say unto thee. The cock shall not crow, till thou 
 hast denied Me thrice. — John xiii. 38. 
 
 IN the last sermon I partly considered the dialogue 
 of which this is the concluding portion, and found 
 that it consisted of an audacious question : " Why cannot 
 I follow Thee now ? " which really meant a contradic- 
 tion of our Lord ; of a rash vow — " I will lay down my 
 hfe for Thy sake " — and of a sad forecast : " The cock 
 shall not crow till thou has denied Me thrice." I 
 paused in the middle of considering the second of these 
 three stages, the rash vow. I then pointed out that, 
 however ignorant the Apostle was of what " following 
 Christ " meant, he had hit the mark, and stumbled 
 unknowingly upon the very essence of the Christian 
 life, and an eternal truth, when he recognized that, 
 somehow or other, to " follow Christ " meant to die 
 for Him. That is so, and is so always, for there is no 
 following Christ which is not a " dying daily," by self- 
 immolation and detachment from the world, and the 
 
THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 79 
 
 life of sense and self. But this rash vow has to be 
 looked at from a somewhat different point of view, and 
 we have to consider, not only the strangely blended 
 right and wrong, error and deep truth, that lie in its 
 substance, but the strangely blended right and wrong in 
 the state of feeling and thought, on the part of the 
 Apostle, which it represents. And taking up the 
 dropped thread, I first deal with that, and then with 
 the sad forecast which follows. 
 
 So then, looking at these words as being like all our 
 words, even the best of them, strangely mingled of 
 right and wrong, good and evil, I find in them, 
 
 I. A Noble, Sincere, but Transient Emotion 
 AND Impulse. 
 
 " I will lay down my life for Thy sake." He meant 
 it, every word of it ; and he would have done it too, if 
 only a gibbet or cross could have been set up then and 
 there, in the upper room. But unfortunately the 
 moments of elevation and high wrought enthusiasm, 
 and the calls to martyrdom, do not always coincide. 
 In the upper room, with its sacred atmosphere, it was 
 easy to feel, and would have been easy to do, nobly. 
 But it was not so easy, lying drowsily in Gethsemane, 
 in the cold spring night, waiting for the Master's coming 
 out from beneath the trembling shadows of the oUve 
 trees, or huddled up by the fire at the lower end of the 
 hall in the grey morning, when vitality is at its lowest. 
 
 So the sincere, noble utterance was but the expression 
 
80 THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 
 
 of impulse and emotion which Ufted Peter for a moment, 
 and did him good, but which Hkewise, running through 
 him, left him dry, and all the weaker because of the 
 gush of feehng which had foamed itself away in empty 
 words. For, let us never forget that however high, 
 noble, divinely inspired, emotion may be, in its nature 
 it is transient, and is sure to be followed by reaction. 
 Like the winter torrents in some parched land, the more 
 they foam, the more speedily does the bed of them dry 
 up again, and the more they carry down the very soil in 
 which growth and fertility would be possible. A rush 
 of feeling is apt to leave behind hard, insensitive rock. 
 There is a close connexion between a predominantly 
 emotional Christianity and a very imperfect life. Feel- 
 ing is apt to be a substitute for action. Is it not a very 
 remarkable thing that the word " benevolence," which 
 means " kindly feehng," has come to take on the mean- 
 ing rightly belonging to " beneficence," which means 
 " kindly doing ? " The emotional man blinds and 
 hoodwinks himself, by thinking that his quick sensibility 
 and lofty enthusiasm and warmth of emotion are 
 action or as good as action. " Be thou warmed and 
 filled," he says to his brother, and, in a lazy expansion of 
 heart, forgets that he has never lifted a finger to help. 
 God forbid that I should seem to deprecate emotional 
 rehgion or religious emotion. That is the last thing that 
 needs to be done in this generation. If the Churches 
 want one thing more than another, it is that their Chris- 
 
THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 81 
 
 tianity should become far more emotional than it is, and 
 their impulses stronger, swifter, more spontaneous, 
 more over-mastering, and that they should be urged 
 by these, and not merely by the reluctant recognition 
 that such and such a piece of sacrifice or effort is a debt 
 that they are obHged to clear off. Their service will 
 be glad service, only when it is impuJsive service and 
 emotional service. Dear brethren, a Christian man 
 whose Ufe is not influenced by the deepest and most 
 fervid emotion of love to the great Love that died for 
 him, is a monster. " The Lord's fire is in Jerusalem, 
 and His furnace in Zion " — is that a description of the 
 fervour of this Church, or of any Church in Christen- 
 dom ? A furnace ? An ice-house ! Think of some deserted 
 cottage, with the roof fallen in, and in the cold chimney- 
 place a rusty grate with some dead embers in it, and 
 the snow lying upon the top of it — that is a truer 
 description of a great many of our churches than " the 
 Lord's furnace." 
 
 But the lesson to be taken from this incident before 
 us is not the danger of emotion ; it is rather the necessity 
 of emotion, but with two provisos, that it shall be 
 emotion based upon a clear recognition of the great 
 truth that He has laid down His life for me ; and that 
 it shall be emotion harnessed to work, and not wasted in 
 words. The mightier the plunge of the fall, the more 
 electrical energy you can get out of it, and set that to 
 work to drive the wheels of hfe. Do not be afraid of 
 
 M.S. 6 
 
82 THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 
 
 emotion ; you will make little of your Christianity 
 unless you have it. But be sure that it is under the 
 guidance of a clear perception of the truth that evokes 
 it, and that it is all used to turn the wheels of life. 
 " Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that 
 thou shouldest vow and not pay." Better is it that 
 emotion should be reticent and active than that it 
 should be voluble and idle, It is a good servant, but 
 a bad master. A man that trusts to impulse and 
 emotion to further his Christian course, is like a ship in 
 that belt of variable winds that lies near the Equator, 
 where there will be a fine ten-knot breeze for an hour 
 or two, and then a sickly, stagnating calm. Push 
 further south, and get into the steady trades, where 
 the wind blows with equable and persistent force all 
 the year round in the same direction. Convert impulses 
 and emotions into steadfast principle, warmed by 
 emotion and borne on by impulse. 
 
 II. Again, this Rash Vow is an Illustration of 
 A Confidence, also Strangely Blended of Good 
 AND Evil. 
 
 " I will lay down my life for Thy sake." As I have 
 said, Peter meant it. His words are paralleled by other 
 words, in which two of the Lord's disciples answered 
 His solemn question : " Are ye able to drink of the cup 
 that I drink of ? " with the imhesitating answer, " We 
 are able." A great teacher has regarded that saying 
 as one of " the ventures of faith." Perhaps it was. 
 
THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 83 
 
 Perhaps there was as much self-confidence as faith in 
 it. Certainly there was more self-confidence than 
 faith in Peter's answer, and his self-confidence collapsed 
 when the trial came. 
 
 The world and the Church hold entirely antagonistic 
 notions about the value of self-reliance. The world 
 says that it is a condition of power. The Church says 
 that it is the root of weakness. Self-confidence shuts 
 a man out from the help of God, and so shuts him out 
 from the source of power. For if you will think for a 
 moment, you will see that the faith which the New 
 Testament, in conformity with all wise knowledge of 
 one's own self, preaches as the one secret of power, has 
 for its obverse — its other side — difl&dence and self- 
 distrust. No man trusts God as God ought to be 
 trusted, who does not distrust himself as himself ought 
 to be distrusted. To level a mountain is the only way 
 to carry the water across where it stood. You can, by 
 mechanism and locks, take a canal up to the top of a 
 hill, but you cannot take a river up to the top. And 
 the river of God's help flows through the valley and 
 seeks the lowest levels. Faith and self-despair are the 
 upper and the under sides of the same thing, like some 
 cunningly- woven cloth, the one side bearing a different 
 pattern from the other, and yet made of the same yarn, 
 and the same threads passing from the upper to the under 
 sides. So faith and self-distrust are but two names 
 for one composite whole. 
 
84 THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 
 
 I was once shown an old Jewish coin which had 
 on the one side the words " sackcloth and ashes," and 
 on the other side the words " a crown of gold." The 
 coin meant to contrast what Israel had been with what 
 Israel then was. The crown had come first ; the sack- 
 cloth and ashes last. But we may use it for illustrating 
 this point, on which I am now dwelling. Wherever 
 and only where, there are the sackcloth and ashes of self- 
 despair there will be the crown of gold of an answering 
 faith. When thus, as Wesley has it, in his great hymn : 
 " Confident in self-despair," we chng to God, then we 
 can say : " When I am weak then am I strong," 
 " Behold ! we have no might, but our eyes are upon 
 Thee." If Peter had only said, " By Thy help I will 
 lay down my life for Thy sake," his confidence would 
 have been reasonable and blessed self-confidence, because 
 it was confidence in a self inspired by Divine power. 
 
 And so, brethren, whilst utter difiidence is right for us, 
 and is the condition of all our reception of energy ac- 
 cording to our need, the most absolute confidence — a 
 confidence which, to the eye of the man that measures 
 only visible things, will seem sheer insanity — is sobriety 
 for a Christian. The world is perfectly right when it 
 says : " If you believe you can do a thing, you have 
 gone a long way towards doing it." The expectation 
 of success has often the knack of fulfilling itself. But 
 the world does not know our secret, and our secret is 
 that our humble faith brings into the field the reserves 
 
THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 85 
 
 with the Captain of our salvation at their head. There- 
 fore a self-distrusting Christian can say, and say without 
 exaggeration or presumption, " I can do all things in 
 Christ, strengthening me from within." 
 
 The Church's ideals are possibilities, when you bring 
 God into the account, and they look insanity when you 
 do not. Take, for instance. Missions. What an 
 absurdity to talk about a handful of Christian people— 
 for we are only a handful as compared with the whole 
 world— carrying their gospel into every corner of the 
 earth, and finding everywhere a response to it. Yes ; 
 it is absurd ; but, wise Mr. Calculator, counter of heads, 
 you have forgotten God in your estimate of whether it is 
 reasonable or unreasonable. Again, take the Christian 
 ideal of absolute perfection of character. " What 
 nonsense to talk as if any man could ever come to that." 
 Yes !— as if any inan could come to that, I grant you. 
 But if God is with him, the nonsense is to suppose that 
 he will not come to it. Here is a row of cyphers as long 
 as your arm. They mean nothing. Put a 1 at the 
 left-hand end of the row ; and what does it mean then ? 
 So the faith that brings Christ into the life, and into the 
 Church, makes " nobodies" into mighty men— " laughs 
 at impossibilities, and cries. It shall be done." 
 
 Still further, here, in this rash vow, we have an under- 
 estimate of difficulties. There was another incident 
 in the life of the Apostle, a strange replica of this one, 
 into which he pushed himself, just as he did into the 
 
86 THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 
 
 high priest's hall, partly out of curiosity and a wish to 
 be prominent ; partly out of love to his Master, With- 
 out a moment's consideration of the peril into which 
 he was thrusting himself, he sat in the boat, and said, 
 " Bid me come to Thee on the water." He forgot that 
 He was heavy, and that water was not solid, and that 
 the wind was high, and the lake rough, and when he 
 put his foot over the side, and felt the cold waves creep- 
 ing up his knees, his courage ebbed out with his faith, 
 and he began to sink. Then he cried, " Lord ! help 
 me ! " If he had thought for a moment of the reality 
 of the case, he would have sat still in the boat. If he 
 had thought of what would be in his way in following 
 Jesus to death, he would have hesitated to vow. But 
 it is so much easier to resolve heroisms in a quiet corner 
 than to do them when the strain comes. And it is so 
 much easier to do some one great thing that has in it 
 enthusiasm and nobility, and conspicuousness of sacri- 
 fice, especially if it can be got over in a moment, like 
 having one's head off with an axe, than it is to 
 " die daily." Ah, brethren, it is the little difficulties 
 that make the difficulty. You read in the newspapers 
 in the autumn every now and then, of trains, in that 
 wonderful country across the water, being stopped by 
 caterpillars. The Christian train is stopped by an 
 army of caterpillars, far oftener than it is by some 
 solid and towering barrier. Our Christian lives are a 
 great deal likelier to come to failure, because we do not 
 
THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 87 
 
 take into account the multiplied small antagonisms 
 than because we are not ready to face the greater ones. 
 What could you think of a bridge builder, who built 
 a bridge across some mountain torrent and made no 
 allowance for freshets and floods when the ice melted ? 
 His bridge and his piers would be gone the first winter. 
 You remember who it was that said that he went into 
 the Franco-German War " with a light heart," and in 
 seven weeks came Sedan and the dethronement of an 
 emperor, and the surrender of an army. " Blessed is 
 he that feareth always." There is no more fatal error 
 than an under-estimate of our difficulties. 
 
 in. Let Me Say a Word about the Sad Fore- 
 cast Here. 
 
 " Thou shalt deny me thrice." 
 
 We cannot say that poor Peter's fall was at all an 
 anomalous or uncommon thing. He did exactly what 
 a great many of us are doing. He could — and I 
 have no doubt he would — have gone to the death for 
 Jesus Christ ; but he could not stand being laughed at 
 for Him. He would have been ready to meet the exe- 
 cutioner's sharp sword, but the servant-girl's sharp 
 tongue was more than he could bear. And so he denied 
 Jesus, not because he was afraid of his skin — for I do not 
 suppose that the servants had any notion of doing any- 
 thing more than amusing themselves with a few clumsy 
 gibes at his expense — but because he could not bear to 
 be made game of. 
 
88 THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 
 
 Now, dear brethren, I suppose we are all of us more 
 or less movers in circles in which it sometimes is not 
 considered " good form " to show that we are Christian 
 people. You young men in your warehouses, you 
 students at Owen's, where it is a sign of being " fossils," 
 and " behind the times," and " not up to date," to say 
 " I am a Christian," and all of us in our several places 
 have sometimes to gather our courage together, and not 
 be afraid to declare whose we are. No doubt life is a 
 better witness than words, but no doubt also Kfe is not 
 so good a witness as it might be, unless it sometimes has 
 the commentary of words as well. Thus, to confess 
 Christ means two things ; to say sometimes — in the 
 face of a smile of scorn, which is often harder to bear 
 than something much more dangerous — " I am His," 
 and to live Christ, and to say by conduct " I am His." 
 " Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him will I 
 also confess before My Father, and whosoever shall deny 
 Me, him will I also deny." Do not button your coats 
 over your imiform. Do not take the cockade out of 
 your hats when you go amongst " the other side." 
 Live Jesus, and, when advisable, preach Jesus. 
 
 But Peter's fall, which is typical of what we are all 
 tempted to do, has in it a gracious message ; for it pro- 
 claims the possibility of recovery from any depth of 
 descent, and of coming back again from any distance of 
 wandering. Did you ever notice how Peter's fall was 
 burnt in upon his memory, so as that when he began to 
 
THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 89 
 
 preach after Pentecost, the shape that his indictment 
 of his hearers takes is, " Ye denied the Holy One and the 
 Just," and how, long after — if the second Epistle which 
 goes by his name is his — in summing-up the crimes 
 of the heretics whom he is branding, he speaks of their 
 " denying the Lord that bought them." He never forgot 
 his denial, and it remained with him as the expression 
 for all that was wrong in a man's relation to Jesus Christ. 
 And I suppose not only was it burnt in upon his memory, 
 but it burnt out all his self-confidence. It is beautiful 
 to see how, in his letter, he speaks over and over again, 
 of " fear '" as being a wise temper of mind for a Christian. 
 As George Herbert has it, " A sad, wise valour is the true 
 complexion." Thus the man that had been so confident 
 in himself learnt to say " Be ready to give to every 
 man that asketh you a reason for the hope that is in 
 you, with meekness and fear." 
 
 And do you not think that his fall drew him closer 
 to Jesus Christ than ever he had been before, as he learnt 
 more of His pardoning love and mercy ? Was he not 
 nearer the Lord on that morning when the two together, 
 alone, talked after the Resurrection ? Was he not 
 nearer Him when he struggled to his feet from the boat 
 on the Lake, on that morning when he was received 
 back into his office as Christ's Apostle ? Did he ever 
 forget how he had sinned ? Did he ever for- 
 get how Christ had pardoned ? Did he ever forget 
 how Christ loved and would keep him ? Ah, no ! The 
 
90 THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-CONFIDENCE 
 
 rope that is broken is strongest where it is spliced, not 
 because it was broken, but because a cunning hand has 
 strengthened it. We may be the stronger for our sins, 
 not because sin strengthens, for it weakens, but because 
 God restores. It is possible that we may build a fairer 
 structure on the ruins of our old selves. It is possible 
 that we may turn every field of defeat into a field of 
 victory. It is possible that we may 
 
 "Fall to rise; be beaten, to fight better." 
 
 If only we cling to the Lord our Strength, the promise 
 shall be ours — whatever our failures, denials, back- 
 slidings, inconsistencies — " though he fall he shall not be 
 utterly cast down, for the Lord upholdeth him with 
 His hand." 
 
The Devout Life Here and Here- 
 after. 
 
 I have set the Lord always before me ; because He is at my right 
 hand, I shall not be moved ... In Thy presence is fulness of joy ; 
 at Thy right hand there are pleasures foi evermore. — Ps. xvi. 8, 11. 
 
 I HAVE put these two verses together because they 
 present striking parallels in expression, and a close 
 connexion of thought. As to the parallel expressions, 
 notice " before me " in the one verse, and " in Thy 
 presence " in the other. The two phrases, though not 
 identical, are synonymous. There follow another pair 
 of parallels, " my right hand " in the former clause 
 answering to " Thy right hand " in the latter. Then 
 as to the connexion of thought, the former verse describes 
 the devout life as it is lived here on earth, the latter is 
 most naturally and adequately understood as pointing 
 to the devout life as it is perfected in heaven. It is, 
 perhaps, the clearest expression of confidence in im- 
 mortality to be found in the Old Testament, and it is 
 instructive to notice the way by which the Psalmist 
 comes to that confidence. Mv two texts are linked 
 
92 THE DEVOUT LIFE 
 
 together by two intervening verses, which begin with a 
 " therefore." " I shall not be moved ; therefore " — 
 because of my present experience of the Divine pre- 
 sence, and the stability which it brings — " therefore 
 my heart is glad, and . , . my flesh also shall rest in 
 hope that Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol ; 
 neither wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy One to see corrup- 
 tion." That is to say, the Christian experience of com- 
 munion on earth necessarily leads on to the expectation 
 of its own persistence, and makes it ridiculous to suppose 
 that such a purely physical thing as death should have 
 any power over such a bond. You might as well sup- 
 pose that a sword could wound a soul. 
 
 But that is not all that the connexion of these two 
 verses suggests. It implies the correspondence of these 
 two phases of the devout life. Not only is the one 
 the ground for believing in the other, but the one is the 
 germ of the other. 
 
 For the Christian life on earth and in heaven is con- 
 tinuous, and that which is but tendency and thwarted 
 aim and unreached direction here will become fact here- 
 after. " To-morrow shall be as this day, and much 
 more abundant." Continuity and increase lie at the 
 basis of the Christian hope. And if ever we are to have 
 present confidence of immortality, or ever to possess 
 the reality of it in a future life, it must be because we 
 here have set the Lord always before us. If we are ever 
 to be set at His right hand in the heavenly places, it will 
 
HERE AND HEREAFTER 93 
 
 be as the natural ciiliniiiation and termination of our 
 having set Him at our right hands amidst the struggles 
 and strifes of earth. Let us, then, look at these two 
 points, the devout life as it is lived here, and the devout 
 Ufe as it is perfected hereafter. 
 
 I. The Devout Life as it is Lived Here. 
 
 There are three stages of experience marked out in the 
 first of our texts. " I have set the Lord always before 
 me " — that is one ; " He is at ray right hand " — that is 
 another ; " I shall not be moved " — that is the third, 
 the issue of all. Or, to put it into other language, we 
 have here the effort of faith, the presence of God whom 
 the effort brings near ; the steadfastness that the pre- 
 sence of God bestows. 
 
 As to the first, " I have set the Lord always before 
 me " — with a dead lift of effort on my part. We cannot 
 have God constantly in sight unless we blind our eyes 
 to a great deal besides. There are — need I remind you ? 
 — three things that, taken together, build up for us a 
 very thick, triple wall between us and God. There is 
 sense, and all that it reveals to us ; there are duties, 
 necessary, possibly blessed, but actually often dis- 
 turbing and limiting ; and thickest and most opaque of 
 the three screens, there are the sins which dim our 
 capacity, and check our inclination, of realizing the 
 Divine Presence. So we need to set our teeth in the 
 determination that, notwithstanding all the distract- 
 tions of our daily work, and notwithstanding all the 
 
94 THE DEVOUT LIFE 
 
 clamant appeals of sense and the things of sense, and 
 notwithstanding the recoil from God which the con- 
 sciousness of disobedience and alienation through sin 
 makes, so that we do not like to retain Him in our know- 
 ledge, we will " set the Lord always before us," 
 
 That needs that we shall shut out a great deal besides, 
 as a man that tries to see something on the horizon will 
 hold his palm above his eyes to exclude nearer objects 
 and the glare that dazzles. It needs that we shall 
 resolutely concentrate our thoughts upon Him. We 
 have to be ignorant of much if we would know any of 
 the sciences, or of the practical arts, and we have to 
 shear off not less if we would know the best knowledge, 
 and be experts in the highest art of life. As the old 
 mystics used to say, when Saul on the road to Damascus 
 saw nothing, he saw Christ, and you and I, brethren, 
 must learn to turn away our eyes from seeing vanity, 
 if we are ever to see the one solid and permanent reality, 
 which is God. 
 
 There must be, too, a resolute effort to still our hearts. 
 It is not when the sm-face is agitated by winds of passion, 
 or stirred by violent emotions, or ruffled by a multi- 
 tude of tiny catspaws of distractions, that the sun is 
 mirrored in it by day or the stars by night. The lake 
 must be still that reflects the blue. It is the quiet 
 heart that sees God, and is further quieted by the vision. 
 
 There must also be resolute effort to cast out the sins 
 and transgressions that draw a veil over our eyes, and 
 
HERE AND HEREAFTER 95 
 
 bribe us to forget God and ignore Him. " Blessed are 
 the pure in heart ; they shall see God." The tarnished 
 steel mirror, or the glass one with many a flaw in its 
 surface, where the quicksilver has been triturated off 
 by the rubbing of sin, will give but a broken image. 
 
 For all these ends, the suppression of sin, the quieting 
 of heart, the victory over sense, we need that there 
 shall be a very continuous, a very resolute, a very self- 
 mastering effort, or we shall never have God before us. 
 " I loiU walk before the Lord in the land of the living " 
 is a resolution not to be kept without much struggle 
 with our weaker selves. 
 
 Then comes the second stage God is brought near 
 by this effort. " I have set the Lord always before me. 
 He is at my right hand." Now, of course, in Him " we 
 live and move and have our being," and " He is not 
 far from every one of us." But the fact that we all have 
 God nearer to us than we are to ourselves, and that it 
 is impossible for any creature to get away from Him, 
 remaining as it does, certain, our relation to that fact 
 varies according to our reahzation of it. If a man has 
 not Him in all his thoughts, it is the same to that man, 
 in regard to the most important parts of his being, as if 
 infinite distance were between him and God. There 
 may as well be no God, as far as a great many of us are 
 concerned, in the most important matters of our lives, 
 as a God that we never think about. He is not far from 
 " every one of us " ; but we may be very far from Him, 
 
96 THE DEVOUT LIFE 
 
 and we are very far from Him unless, by the effort of 
 which I have been speaking, we set Him before us. 
 
 And what does His being at " my right hand " mean — 
 which being at my right hand is only possible on con- 
 dition of our having honestly, and as far as human 
 weakness will allow, continuously, sought to set Him 
 before us ? What do you mean when you speak of 
 some one being your right hand man ? You mean a 
 companion, an ally, a friend on whom you can absolutely 
 trust, to whom you can turn in every difficulty, to whom 
 you can commit all your most important interests and 
 affairs, quite sure that they will be looked after success- 
 fully. God is your right hand Man, if I may so say, on 
 condition of your having set Him always before you 
 There will be intimacy, close companionship, communi- 
 cation of strength, favour. He is " at my right hand," 
 and what that means may best perhaps be put, in the 
 words of another psalmist and of a prophet : " The 
 Lord is thy shade, at thy right hand : He will keep 
 thee from henceforth, even for evermore," or, as the 
 prophet has it : "I have holden thy right hand, saying 
 unto thee. Fear not, I will help thee." 
 
 And so we come to the last of the three stages in this 
 first part of my text, and that is, the strength that the 
 presence of God brings with it. The Lord is at " my 
 right hand, I shall not be moved." 
 
 The consequence seems a very modest one to draw 
 from so great a premise. The effect is but little, as 
 
HERE AND HEREAFTER 97 
 
 compared with the cause. Is all that we could hope for 
 from a present God that we shall be able to stand stead- 
 fast ? No — not all. But life chastens expectations, 
 and any man who knows his own inward instability and 
 the strong forces that are brought against him, will feel 
 that it is not so small a hope when he dares to say : 
 " I shall not be moved." It is far beyond what any 
 other fact than the fact of God's presence with us can 
 warrant our cherishing. The presumptuous man in one 
 of the psalms speaks thus : " In my prosperity I said, 
 I shall not be moved." But when prosperity fled, self- 
 confidence fled with it, and at length he learnt to say, as 
 he goes on to tell us : " by Thy favour Thou hast made 
 my mountain to stand strong. Thou didst hide Thy 
 face, and I was troubled." Ah ! brethren, think of the 
 instability of our resolutions, think of the fluctuations 
 of our thoughts, think of the surges of our emotions, 
 think of the changes that by subtle degrees pass over us 
 all, so as that the old man's grey hair and bowed form 
 is less unlike to his childish buoyancy and clustering 
 ringlets, than are his senile thoughts and memories 
 to his juvenile expectations. Think of the forces that 
 are brought to bear upon us, the shocks of calamity 
 and sorrow by which we are beaten and battered, the 
 blasts of temptation by which we are sometimes all but 
 overthrown, the floods that come and beat upon our 
 house. If we realize all these, even imperfectly, we 
 shall feel that it is a foolish thing for a man to say : 
 M.S. 7 
 
98 THE DEVOUT LIFE 
 
 Call forth thy powers, my soul, and dare 
 The tumult of unequal war:" 
 
 and that there must be a holdfast outside myself fixed 
 into something stable, to which I can hook my poor 
 cable. If ever I am to stand fast it must be because, 
 like a lame man, though I have not feet that can plant 
 themselves firmly, I have a pair of hands that can, and 
 do, grasp the hand that upholds me. When Thou 
 boldest me up by the right hand of Thy righteousness, 
 I shall be steadfast. 
 
 That steadfastness will come to us by the actual 
 communication of strength, and it will come to us be- 
 cause, in the consciousness of the Divine Presence 
 there lies a charm that takes the glamour out of tempta- 
 tion and the pain out of wounds. He being with us, 
 the dazzling, treacherous brilliancies of earth cease to 
 dazzle and betray. He being with us, sorrow itself 
 and pain, and all the ills that flesh is heir to, have httle 
 power to shake the soul. 
 
 So, brethren, learn the secret of permanence amidst a 
 world of change and temptation. " Stand fast in the 
 Lord, dearly beloved ; " and if you would have your house 
 so firm that when the rain descends and the winds 
 blow against it, it may stand foursquare and not even 
 trembling, see to it that it is founded on the Rock ; and 
 take for your own the vow of the psalmist, " I have set 
 the Lord always before me." Then you will have for 
 your own the blessed consciousness that " the Lord is 
 
HERE AND HEREAFTER 99 
 
 at my right hand," and the blessed experience that 
 followed in his case, " I shall not be moved." 
 
 And now let me turn more briefly to the second of 
 our two texts, which shows us — 
 
 II. The Devout Life, as it is Perfected in 
 Heaven. 
 
 If we set the Lord in our presence here. He will set 
 us in His hereafter. " In Thy presence " in my text 
 is literally " with Thy face," and the thought is sug- 
 gested, about which it does not become us to speak 
 much, that the Christian hope of immortality embraces 
 both a clearer vision of God's face, and a closer proxi- 
 mity to His right hand. 
 
 As to the former, I venture but a word — " Through a 
 glass darkly, then face to face." There may be, there 
 must be, fresh, unspeakable manifestations of the 
 Divine character. There may be, there must be, fresh 
 and at present inconceivable new powers of apprehension. 
 Because when close to the sun, it shows broader and 
 brighter than when seen from the boundaries of the solar 
 system, and because in the new house, not made with 
 hands, there will be probably wide windows where 
 now there are solid walls or loopholes for arrows, 
 " His servants shall see His face " then as they do not 
 now. The sight of God's face is associated with being 
 at God's right hand. Here we set Him at ours for 
 defence, companionship, strength. There He sets us 
 at His, for intimacy and proximity of presence and 
 
100 THE DEVOUT LIFE 
 
 fellowship, for favour and dignity, as they who are 
 honoured by a prince are set at his right hand, in 
 token of approval, or as the sheep in the Judgment are 
 at the right, and the goats at the left. Christian men 
 are God's Benjamins — sons of the right hand. And all 
 of favour and dignity, and closeness of companionship, 
 which the emblem suggests, is but a shadow and faint 
 hint of the realities of the Heavens. 
 
 The issue of that clearer vision and place at the right 
 hand of the Majesty of the heavens is not, as it needed 
 to be here amidst the struggles and changes of Ufe, 
 stability mainly, but, as it is in some measure even here, 
 and will be perfectly hereafter — joy that is full and 
 perpetual. There is no more need for an Ally, for there 
 are no more enemies. There is no more need for 
 strength to overcome, for there is no battle. There is 
 no more need for shield and helmet, for there are no 
 swords to be flashed or arrows to be shot against us ; 
 but there is the need for the festal robe and the triumphal 
 palm. 
 
 That presence which amidst warfare, weakness and 
 mutability, manifested itself in its gift of steadfast- 
 ness, will then, amidst the tranquillity of Heaven, 
 manifest itself in a joy unlike all earthly joy in that 
 it is full, and yet more unlike all earthly joy in that it 
 is perpetual. Here there is ever something lacking in 
 all our gladness, some guest at the table that sulks and 
 will not partake and rejoice, some unlit window in the 
 
HERE AND HEREAFTER 101 
 
 illumination, some limitation in the gladness; yonder 
 joy will be full. " I shall be satisfied when I awake 
 in Thy likeness,"— here, thank God ! we have brooks 
 by the way ; there we shall stoop down and drink from 
 the fountain, the ocean of joy. And the gladness is 
 perpetual, in that, having nothing to do with physical 
 causes or externals, there is no curse of change and no 
 certainty of reaction. Those flowers are unfading, and 
 those joys succeed one another in exhaustless profusion, 
 ever following on each other like the run of the ripples 
 in the tide of some sunlit sea. A poet once said — and 
 he knew it only too well — 
 
 " Pleasures are like poppies spread. 
 
 You grasp the flower, the bloom is shed ; 
 Or like the snowflake on the river, 
 A moment white, then gone for ever." 
 
 All joy here is imperfect and transient. " Even in 
 laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth 
 is heaviness." But if we will set the Lord before our 
 faces here, He will set us before His face there. If we 
 have Him at our right hands here. He will put us at His 
 right hand there. If we have His presence ministering 
 to us strength amidst earth's changes and struggles, 
 His presence \vill minister to us joy, full and perpetual, 
 amid the completeness and tranquillities of the Heavens. 
 The ladder is on earth, its top is hard by the Throne. 
 The Christian experience more than repeats the 
 psalmist's here, and the Christian's brighter hopes are 
 
102 THE DEVOUT LIFE 
 
 at once certified and surpassed by Christ, when He 
 says : " I will come again and receive you to myself, 
 that where I am " — at the right hand of God — " there 
 ye may be also." " These things have I spoken unto 
 you that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy 
 may be full." 
 
Righteousness First, Peace Second 
 
 First being by interpretation King of Righteoasness. and after that 
 also King of Salem, which is King of Peace.— Heb. vii. 2. 
 
 THAT mysterious, shadowy figure of the priest- 
 king Melchizedec has been singularly illuminated 
 and soHdified by recent discovery. You can see now 
 in Berlin and London, letters written fourteen centuries 
 before Christ, by a king of Jerusalem who describes 
 himself almost in the very words which the Old and 
 the New Testaments apply to Melchizedec. He says 
 that he is a royal priest or a priestly king. He says 
 that he derived his royalty neither from father nor 
 mother, nor by genealogical descent ; and he says that 
 he owes it to " the great King "—possibly an equivalent 
 to the " Most High God ; " of whom Melchizedec in 
 Scripture is said to have been a worshipper. The name 
 of the letter writer is not Melchizedec, but the fact that 
 that royalty was not hereditary, like a Pharaoh's, may 
 explain how each monarch bore his own personal 
 appellation, and not one common to successive members 
 of a dynasty. 
 
 And are not the names of King and city significant 
 
104 RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 
 
 — " King of righteousness , . . King of peace ? " It 
 sounds like a yearning, springing up untimely in those 
 dim ages of oppression and strife, for a royalty founded 
 on something better than the sword, and wielded for 
 something higher than personal ambition. Such an 
 ideal at such a date is like a summer day that has wan- 
 dered into a cold March. 
 
 But the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews imposes 
 a meaning not only on the titles, but on their sequence. 
 Of course therein he is letting a sanctified imagination 
 play round a fact, and giving to it a meaning which is 
 not in it. None the less in that emphatic expression 
 " -first King of righteousness, and after that also King 
 of peace," he penetrated very deeply into the heart of 
 Christ's reign and work, and echoed a sentiment that 
 runs all through Scripture. Hearken to one psalmist : 
 " The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and 
 the little hills, by righteousness." Hearken to another : 
 " Righteousness and peace have kissed each other." 
 Hearken to a prophet : " The work of righteousness 
 shall be peace ; and the effect of righteousness, quietness 
 and assurance for ever." Hearken to the most Hebrais- 
 tic of New Testament writers : " The fruit of righteous- 
 ness is sown in peace." Hearken to the central teaching 
 of the most Evangelical, if I may so say, of New Testa- 
 ment writers : " Being justified " — made righteous — 
 " by faith, we have peace with God." So the " first" 
 and the "after that" reveal to us the very depth of 
 
RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 105 
 
 Christ's work, and carry in them not only important 
 teaching as to that, but equally important directions 
 and guides for Christian conduct ; and it is to this 
 aspect of my text, and this only, that I ask your atten- 
 tion now. 
 
 The order which we have here, " first of all King of 
 righteousness, and after that King of peace," is the order 
 which I shall try to illustrate in two ways. First, in 
 reference to Christ's work on the individual soul ; second, 
 in reference to Christ's work on society and communi- 
 ties. 
 
 First, then, here we have laid down the sequence in 
 which 
 
 I. Christ Comes with His Operations and His 
 Gifts to the Soul that Clings to Him. 
 
 First " righteousness . . . after . . , peace." Now 
 I need not do more than in a sentence remind you of the 
 basis upon which the thoughts in the text, and all right 
 understanding of Christ's work on an individual, 
 repose, and that is that without righteousness no man 
 can either be at peace with God or with himself. Not 
 with God — for however shallow experience may talk 
 effusively and gushingly about a God that is all mercy, 
 and who loves and takes to His heart the sinner and 
 the saint ahke ; such a God drapes the universe in dark- 
 ness. And if there are no moral distinctions which 
 determine whether a man is in amity or hostility with 
 God, then " the pillared firmament itself is rottenness, 
 
106 RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 
 
 and earth's base built on stubble." No, no, brethren ; 
 it sounds very tender and kindly ; at bottom it is the 
 cruellest thing that you can say, to say that without 
 righteousness a man can please God. The sun is in the 
 heavens, and whether there be mist and fog down here, 
 or the bluest of summer sides, the sun is above. But 
 its rays coming through the ethereal blue are warmth 
 and blessedness, and its rays cut ofi by the mists are 
 dim, and itself turned into a lurid ball of fire. It cannot 
 be — and thank God that it cannot — that it is all the 
 same to Him whether a man is saint or sinner. 
 
 I do not need to remind you that in like manner 
 righteousness must underlie peace with oneself. For 
 it is true to-day, as it was long generations ago, according 
 to the prophet, that " the wicked is like the troubled 
 sea which cannot rest, whose waters throw up mire and 
 dirt," and, on the other hand, the promise is true still 
 and for ever ; " that thou hadst hearkened unto me, 
 then had thy peace been like a river," because " thy 
 righteousness " is " like the waves of the sea." For ever 
 and ever it stands true that for peace with God, and for 
 a quiet heart, and a nature at harmony with itself, there 
 must be righteousness. 
 
 Well then, Jesus Christ comes to bring to a man 
 the righteousness without which there can be no peace 
 in his Ufe. And that is the meaning of the great word 
 which, having been taken for a shibboleth and " test 
 of a falling or a standing Church," has been far too much 
 
RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 107 
 
 ossified into a mere theological dogma, and has been 
 weakened and misunderstood in the process. Justifica- 
 tion by faith ; that is the battle-cry of Protestant com- 
 munities. And what does it mean ? That I shall be 
 treated as righteous, not being so ? That I shall be 
 forgiven and acquitted ? Yes, thank God ! But is 
 that all that it means, or is it the main thing that it 
 means ? No, thank God ! for the very heart of the 
 Christian doctrine of righteousness is this, that if, and 
 as soon as, a man puts his trembling trust in Jesus Christ 
 as his Saviour, then he receives not merely pardon, which 
 is the uninterrupted flow of the Divine love in spite of 
 his sin, nor a crediting him with a righteousness which 
 does not belong to him, but an imparting to him of that 
 new life, a spark from the central fire of Christ's fife, " the 
 new man which, after God, is created in righteousness 
 and true holiness." Do not suppose that the great 
 message of the Gospel is merely forgiveness. Do not 
 suppose that its blessed gift is only that a man is ac- 
 quitted because Christ has died. All that is true. But 
 there is something more than that which is the basis of 
 that other, and that is that by my faith in Jesus Christ, 
 I am so knit to Him — "He that is joined to the Lord " 
 being " one spirit " — as that there passes into me, by 
 His gift, a hfe which is created after His life, and is in 
 fact cognate and kindred with it. 
 
 No doubt it is a mere germ, no doubt it needs culti- 
 vating, development, carefully guarding against gnawing 
 
108 RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 
 
 insects and blighting frosts. But the seed which is 
 implanted, though it be less than the least of all seeds, 
 has in itself the promise and the potency of triumphant 
 growth, when it will tower above all the poisonous 
 shrubs and undergrowth of the forest, and have the light 
 of heaven resting on its aspiring top. Here is the great 
 blessing and distinctive characteristic of Christian 
 morahty, that it does not say to a man : " First aim 
 after good deeds, and so grow into goodness," but it 
 starts with a gift, and says, " Work from that, and by 
 the power of that. ' I make the tree good,' " says Jesus 
 to us, " do you see to it that the fruit is good." No 
 doubt the vegetable metaphor is inadequate, because the 
 leaf is wooed from out the bud, and " grows green and 
 broad, and takes no care." But that effortless growth 
 is not how righteousness increases in men. The germ 
 is given them, and they have to cultivate it. First, 
 there must be the impartation of righteousness, and 
 then there comes to the man's heart the sweet assur- 
 ance of peace with God, and he has within him " a 
 conscience like a sea at rest, imaginations calm and 
 fair." " First, King of righteousness ; after that, King 
 of peace." 
 
 Now if we keep firm hold of this sequence, a great 
 many of the popular objections to the Gospel, as if it 
 were merely a means of forgiveness and escape, and a 
 system of reconciliation by some kind of forensic ex- 
 pedient, fall away of themselves. And a great many 
 
RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 109 
 
 of the popular blunders that Christian people make 
 fall away too. For there are good folks to whom the 
 great truth that " God is in Christ reconciling the world 
 to Himself, not imputing to them their trespasses," 
 and welcoming them to all the fulness of an overflowing 
 love, has obscured the other truth that there is no 
 peace for a Christian man continuous through his life, 
 unless equally continuous through his life are his eSorts 
 to work out in acts the new nature which he has received. 
 Thus my text, by the order in which it places righteous- 
 ness and peace, not only illuminates the work of Christ 
 upon each individual soul, but comes with a very 
 weighty and clear direction to Christian people as to 
 their course of conduct. Are you looking for comfort ? 
 Is what you want to get out of your religion mainly 
 the assurance that you will not go to Hell ? Is the great 
 blessing that Christ brings to you only the blessing of 
 pardon, which you degrade to mean immunity from 
 punishment ? You are wrong. " First of all, King 
 of righteousness "—let that which is first of all in His 
 crifts be first of all in your efforts too ; and do not seek 
 so much for comfort as for grace to know and to do 
 your duty, and strength to " cast off the unfruitful 
 works of darkness," and to " put on the armour of 
 light." The order which is laid down in my text was 
 laid down with a different application, by our Lord 
 Himself, and ought to be in both forms the motto for 
 all Christian people. " Seek ye first the Kingdom of 
 
110 RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 
 
 (jrod and His righteousness, and all these things " — 
 comfort, sense of reconciliation, assurance of forgive- 
 ness, joyful hope, and the like, as well as needful 
 material good — " shall be added unto you." 
 And now, secondly, my text gives the order of 
 11. Christ's Work in the World, and of His 
 Servant's Work after Him. 
 
 Of course, our Lord's work in the World is simply the 
 aggregate of His work on individual souls. But for the 
 sake of clearness we may consider these two aspects 
 of it somewhat apart. In regard to this second part of 
 my subject, I would begin, as I began in the former 
 section, by reminding you that the only basis on which 
 harmonious relations between men in communities, 
 great or small, can be built, is righteousness, in the 
 narrowest sense of the word, meaning thereby justice, 
 equal dealing as between man and man, without par- 
 tiality or class favouritism. Wherever you get an un- 
 justly-treated section or order of men, there you get 
 the beginnings of war and strife. A social order built 
 upon injustice, just in the measure in which it is so built, 
 is based upon a quicksand which will suck it down, or on 
 a volcano which will blow it to pieces. Injustice is the 
 grit in the machine ; you may oil it as much as you like 
 with philanthropy and benevolence, but until you get the 
 grit out it will not work smoothly. There is no harmony 
 amongst men unless their association is based and 
 bottomed upon righteousness. 
 
RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 111 
 
 Jesus Christ comes into the world to bring peace at 
 the far end, but righteousness at the near end, and 
 therefore strife. The herald angels sang peace upon 
 earth. They were looking to the deepest and ultimate 
 issues of His mission, but when He contemplated its 
 immediate results He had to say, " Suppose ye that I 
 bring peace on earth ? I tell you nay, but rather 
 division." He rode into Jerusalem " the King, meek, 
 and having salvation," throned upon the beast of 
 burden which symbolized peace. But He will come forth 
 in the last fight, as He has been coming forth through 
 all the ages, mounted on the white horse, with the 
 sword girt upon His thigh in behalf of meekness and 
 righteousness and truth. Christ, and Christianity when 
 it keeps close to Christ, is a ferment, not an emolUent. 
 The full and honest appUcation of Christ's teaching and 
 principles to any society on the face of the earth at this 
 day is bound to result in agitation and strife. There is 
 no help for it. When a pure jet of water is discharged 
 into a foul ditch, there will be much uprising of mud. 
 Effervescence will always follow when Christ's principles 
 are appUed to existing institutions. And so it comes to 
 pass that Christian men, in the measure in which they 
 are true to their Master, turn the world upside down. 
 There will follow, of course, the tranquiUity that does 
 follow on righteousness ; but that is far ahead, and there 
 is many a weary mile to be trod, and many a sore 
 struggle to be undertaken, before the kingdoms of this 
 
112 RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 
 
 world become the Kingdom of om- Lord and of His 
 Christ, and strife ends for ever. 
 
 Now, if this be so, then in this necessary characteristic 
 of Christ's operation on the world, viz., disturbance 
 arising from the endeavour to enthrone righteousness 
 where its opposite has ruled — there results very plainly 
 important teaching as to the duties of Christ's servants 
 to take their full share in the fight, to be the Knights 
 of the Holy Ghost, the champions of righteousness. 
 The Church ought to lead in the van of all assaults on 
 hoary wrongs or modern forms of unrighteousness in 
 municipal, political, national life. And it is the dis- 
 grace of the Church that so largely it leaves that contest 
 to be waged by men who jnake no pretence to be 
 Christians. 
 
 There is, unfortunately, a type of Christian thinking 
 and life, of which in many respects one would speak with 
 all sympathy and admiration, which warns the Christian 
 Church against casting itself into this contest, in the 
 alleged interest of a superior spirituality, and a loftier 
 conception of Evangelical truth. I believe, as heartily 
 as any man can — and I venture to appeal, to those who 
 hear me Sunday by Sunday, and from year to year, 
 whether it is not so — that the preaching of Jesus Christ 
 is the cure for all the world's miseries, and the banish- 
 ment of all the world's unrighteousness, but am I to be 
 told that the endeavour to apply the person and the 
 principles of Jesus Christ, in His Hfe and death, to 
 
RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 113 
 
 existing institutions and evils, is not preaching Christ ? 
 I beheve that it is, and that that is one thing that the 
 Church wants to-day, — not less of holding up the Cross 
 and the Sacrifice, but more of pointing to the Cross and 
 the Sacrifice as the cure of all the world's evils, and the 
 pattern for all righteousness. 
 
 It is difiicult to do, it is made difiicult by our own 
 desire to be what the prophet did not think a very 
 reputable position, " at ease in Zion." It is also made 
 difficult by the way in which, as is most natural, the 
 world, meaning thereby Godless, organized society, 
 regards an active Church that desires to bring its prac- 
 tices to the test of Christ's word. Muzzled watchdogs 
 that can neither bark nor bite are much admired by 
 burglars. And a Church that confines itself to theory, 
 to what it calls religion, and leaves the world to go to 
 the devil as it likes., suits both the world and the devil. 
 There was once a Prime Minister of England who came 
 out of church one Sunday morning in a state of towering 
 indignation because the clergyman had spoken about 
 conduct. And that is exactly how the world feels about 
 an intrusive Church that mil push its finger into all 
 social arrangements, and say about each of them, 
 " This must be done as Christ commanded." 
 
 Brethren, would God that all Christian men deserved 
 the name of " troublers of Israel." There was once a 
 prophet to whom the men of his day indignantly said, 
 " sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou be 
 
 M.S. 8 
 
114 RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST, PEACE SECOND 
 
 quiet ? Put up thyself in thy scabbard, rest and be 
 still." And the answer was the only possible one, 
 " How can it be quiet, seeing that the Lord hath ap- 
 pointed it ? " If you and I are Christ's servants, we 
 shall follow the sequence of His operations, and seek to 
 establish righteousness first and then peace. 
 The true Salem is above. 
 
 "My soul, there is a country 
 Afar beyond the stars." 
 
 There " sweet peace sits crowned with smiles." The 
 swords will then be wreathed with laurel, and men 
 " shall learn war no more," for the King has fought the 
 great fight, " and of the increase of His government and 
 peace there shall be no end ... in righteousness and 
 justice, from henceforth even for ever." Let us take 
 Him for " the Lord our righteousness," and we shall 
 blessedly find that "this Man is our peace." 
 Let us take arms in the Holy War which He wages, 
 and we shall have peace in our hearts whilst the 
 fight is sorest. Let us labour to " be found in Him 
 . . . having the righteousness which is of God by faith," 
 and then we shall " be found in Him in peace, without 
 spot, blameless." 
 
Two Shepherds and Two Flocks 
 
 Like sheep they are laid in the grave : Death shall feed on them — 
 Psalm xlix. 14. 
 
 The Lamb which is in the midst of the Throne shall feed them. — 
 Rev. vii. 17. 
 
 THESE two verses have a much closer parallelism 
 in expression than appears in our Authorized 
 Version. If you turn to the Revised Version you will 
 find that it rightly renders the former of my texts, 
 " Death shall be their shepherd," and the latter, " The 
 Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall be their 
 Shepherd." The Old Testament psalmist and the New 
 Testament seer have fallen upon the same image to 
 describe death and the future, but with how different 
 a use ! The one paints a grim picture, all sunless and 
 full of shadow ; the other dips his pencil in brilliant 
 colours, and suffuses his canvas with a glow as of molten 
 sunlight. The difference between the two is partly due 
 to the progress of Revelation and the light cast on 
 life and immortality by Christ through the gospel. 
 But it is much more due to the fact that the two writers 
 have different classes in view. The one is speaking oi 
 
116 TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 
 
 men whose portion is in this life, the other of men who 
 have washed their robes and made them white in the 
 blood of the Lamb. And it is the characters of the per- 
 sons concerned, much more than the degree of enlighten- 
 ment possessed by the writers, that makes the difference 
 between these two pictures. Life and death and the 
 future are what each man makes of them for himself. 
 We shall best deal with these two pictures if we take 
 them separately, and let the gloom of the one enhance 
 the glory of the other. They hang side by side, like a 
 Rembrandt beside a Claude or a Turner, each intensify- 
 ing by contrast the characteristics of the other. So let 
 us look at the two — first, the grim picture drawn by the 
 psalmist ; second, the sunny one drawn by the seer. 
 Now, with regard to the former, 
 
 I. The Grim Picture Drawn by the Psalmist. 
 
 We too often forget that a psalmist is a poet, and 
 misunderstand his spirit by treating his words as matter- 
 of-fact prose. His imagination is at work, and our 
 symphathetic imagination must be at work too, if we 
 would enter into his meaning. Death a shepherd — 
 what a grim and bold inversion of a famiHar metaphor ! 
 If this psalm is, as is probable, of a comparatively late 
 date, then its author was familiar with many sweet and 
 tender strains of early singers, in which the blessed 
 relation between a loving God and an obedient people 
 was set forth under that metaphor. " The Lord is my 
 Shepherd " may have been ringing in his ears when he 
 
TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 117 
 
 said, " Death is their shepherd." He lays hold of the 
 familiar metaphor, and if I may so speak, turns it up- 
 side down, stripping it of all that is beautiful, tender, 
 and gracious, and draping it in all that is harsh and 
 terrible. And the very contrast between the sweet 
 relation which it was originally used to express, and the 
 opposite kind of one which he uses it to set forth, gives 
 its tremendous force to the daring metaphor. 
 
 " Death is their shepherd." Yes, but what manner of 
 shepherd ? Not one that gently leads his flock, but 
 one that stalks behind the huddled sheep, and drives 
 them fiercely, club in hand, on a path on which they 
 would not willingly go. The unwelcome necessity, by 
 which men that have their portion in this world are 
 hounded and herded out of all their sunny pastures 
 and abundant feeding, is the thought that underlies 
 the image. It is accentuated, if we notice that in the 
 former clause, " like sheep they are laid in the grave," 
 the word rendered in the Authorized Version " laid," 
 and in the Revised Version " appointed," is perhaps 
 more properly read by many, " like sheep they are 
 thrust down.'" There you have the picture — the shep- 
 herd stalking behind the helpless creatures, and coercing 
 them on an unwelcome path. 
 
 Now that is the first thought that I suggest, that to 
 one type of man. Death is an unwelcome necessity. 
 It is, indeed, a necessity to us all, but necessities accepted 
 cease to be painful ; and necessities resisted — what do 
 
118 TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 
 
 they become ? Here is a man being swept down a river, 
 the sound of the falls is in his ears, and he grasps at 
 anything on the bank to hold by, but in vain. That is 
 how some of us feel when we face the thought, and will 
 feel more when we front the reality, of that awful 
 " must." " Death shall be their shepherd," and coerce 
 them into darkness. Ask yourself the question, Is 
 the course of my life such as that the end of it cannot 
 but be a grim necessity which I would do anything to 
 avoid ? 
 
 This first text suggests not only a shepherd but a 
 fold : " Like sheep they are thrust down to the grave." 
 Now I am not going to enter upon what would be quite 
 out of place here : a critical discussion of the Old Testa- 
 ment conception of a future life. That conception 
 varies, and is not the same in all parts of the book. But 
 I may, just in a word, say that " the grave " is by no 
 means the adequate rendering of the thought of the 
 psalmist, and that " Hell " is a still more inadequate 
 rendering of it. He does not mean either the place where 
 the body is deposited, or a place where there is punitive 
 retribution for the wicked, but he means a dim region, 
 or, if I might so say, a localized condition, in which all 
 that have passed through this life are gathered, where 
 personality and consciousness continue, but where 
 life is faint, stripped of all that characterizes it here, 
 shadowy, unsubstantial, and where there is inactivity, 
 absolute cessation of all the occupations to which men 
 
TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 119 
 
 were accustomed. But there may be restlessness along 
 with inactivity ; may there not ? And there is no such 
 restlessness as the restlessness of compulsory idleness. 
 That is the main idea that is in the psalmist's mind. 
 He knows little about retribution, he knows still less 
 about transmutation into a glorious likeness to that 
 which is most glorious and divine. But he conceives 
 a great, dim, lonely land, wherein are prisoned and 
 penned all the lives that have been foamed away vainly 
 on earth, and are now settled into a dreary monotony 
 and a restless idleness. As one of the other books of 
 the Old Testament puts it, it is a " land of the shadow 
 of death, without order, and in which the light is as 
 darlmess." 
 
 I know, of course, that all that is but the imperfect 
 presentation of partially apprehended, and partially 
 revealed, and partially revealable truth. But what I 
 desire to fix upon is that one dreary thought of this fold, 
 into which the grim shepherd has driven his flock, and 
 where they lie cribbed and huddled together in utter 
 inactivity. Carry that with you as a true, though 
 incomplete thought. 
 
 Let me remind you, in the next place, with regard 
 to this part of my subject, of the kind of men whom 
 the grim shepherd drives into that grim fold. The 
 psalm tells us that plainly enough. It is speaking of 
 men who have their portion in this life, who " trust in 
 their wealth, and boast themselves in the multitude of 
 
120 TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 
 
 their riclies . . . whose inward thought is that their 
 house shall continue for ever . . . who call their lands 
 after their own names." Of every such man it says : 
 " when he dieth he shall carry nothing away " — none 
 of the possessions, none of the forms of activity which 
 were familiar to him here on earth. He will go into a 
 state where he finds nothing which interests him, and 
 nothing for him to do. 
 
 Must it not be so ? If we let ourselves be absorbed 
 and entangled by the affairs of this life, and permit our 
 whole spirits to be bent in the direction of these transient 
 things, what is to become of us when the things that 
 must pass have passed, and when we come into a 
 region where there are none of them to occupy us any 
 more ? What would some Manchester men do if they 
 were in a condition of life where they could not go on 
 'Change on Tuesdays and Fridays ? What would some 
 of us do if the professions, and forms of mental activity, 
 in which we have been occupied as students and scholars 
 were swept away ? " Whether there be knowledge it 
 shall cease ; whether there be tongues they shall vanish 
 away," and what are you going to do then, you men 
 that have only lived for intellectual pursuits connected 
 with this transient state ? We are going to a world where 
 there are no books, no pens nor ink, no trade, no dress, 
 no fashion, no amusements ; where there is nothing but 
 things in which some of us have no interest, and a God 
 who "is not in all our thoughts." Surely we shall be " fish 
 
TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 121 
 
 out of water " there. Surely we shall feel that we have 
 been banned and banished from everything that we 
 care about. Surely men that boasted themselves in 
 their riches, and in the multitude of their wealth, will 
 be necessarily condemned to inactivity. Life is con- 
 tinuous, and all on one plane. Surely if a man 
 knows that he must some day, and may any day, be 
 summoned to the other side of the world, he would be 
 a wise man if he got his outfit ready, and made some 
 effort to acquire the customs and the arts of the land 
 to which he was going. Surely life here is mainly given 
 to us that we may develop powers which will find their 
 field of exercise yonder, and acquire characters which 
 shall be in conformity with the conditions of that future 
 life. Surely there can be no more tragic folly than the 
 folly of letting myself be so absorbed and entangled 
 by this present world, as that when the transient has 
 passed, I shall feel homeless and desolate, and have 
 nothing that I can do or care about amidst the activities 
 of Eternity. Dear friend, should you feel homeless if 
 you were taken, as you will be taken, into that world ? 
 
 Turn now to 
 
 IL The Sunny Landscape Drawn by the Seer. 
 
 Note the contrast presented by the shepherds. 
 " Death shall be their shepherd." "The Lamb which 
 is in the midst of the throne shall be their shep- 
 herd." I need not occupy your time in trying to show, 
 what has sometimes been doubted, that the radiant 
 
122 TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 
 
 picture of the Apocalyptic Seer is dealing with no- 
 thing in the present, but with the future condition 
 of certain men. I would just remind you that the words 
 in which it is couched are to a large extent a quotation 
 from ancient prophecy, a description of the Divine 
 watchfulness over the pilgrim's return from captivity to 
 the Land of Promise. But the quotation is wonder- 
 fully elevated and spirituaHzed in the New Testament 
 vision ; for instead of reading, as the Original does : 
 " He that hath mercy on them shall lead them," we 
 have here, " the Lamb which is in the midst of the 
 Throne shall be their Shepherd," and instead of their 
 being led merely to " the springs of water," here vv'e 
 read that He " leads them to the fountains of the water 
 of life." 
 
 We have to think, first, of that most striking, most 
 significant and profound modification of the Old Testa- 
 ment words, which presents the Lamb as " the Shep- 
 herd." All Christ's shepherding on earth and in heaven 
 depends, as do all our hopes for heaven and earth, upon 
 the fact of His sacrificial death. It is only because 
 He is the " Lamb that was slain " that He is either the 
 " Lamb in the midst of the Throne," or the Shepherd 
 of the flock. And we must make acquaintance with 
 Him first in the character of " the Lamb of God which 
 taketh away the sin of the world," before we can either 
 follow in His footsteps as our Guide, or be compassed 
 by His protection as our Shepherd. 
 
TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 123 
 
 He is the Lamb, and He is the Shepherd — that suggests 
 not only that the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ is the 
 basis of all His work for us on earth and in Heaven, 
 but the very incongruity of making one, who bears the 
 same nature as the flock to be the Shepherd of the 
 flock, is part of the beauty of the metaphor. It is His 
 Humanity that is our guide. It is His continual Man- 
 hood, all through eternity and its glories, that makes 
 Him the Shepherd of perfected souls. They follow Him 
 because He is one of themselves, and He could not be 
 the Shepherd unless he were the Lamb. 
 
 But then this other Shepherd is not only gracious, 
 sympathetic, kin to us by participation in a common 
 nature, and fit to be our Guide because He has been our 
 Sacrifice and the propitiation of our sins, but He is the 
 Lamb " in the midst of the throne," wielding therefore 
 all Divine power, and standing — not as the rendering in 
 our Bible leads an English reader to suppose, on the 
 Throne, but — in the middle point between it and the 
 ring of worshippers, and so the Communicator to the 
 outer circumference of all the blessings that dwell in 
 the Divine centre. He shall be their Shepherd, not 
 coercing, not driving by violence, but leading to the 
 fountains of the waters of life, gently and graciously. 
 And it is not compulsory energy which he exercises 
 upon us, either on earth or in Heaven, but it is the 
 draAving of a Divine attraction, sweet to put forth and 
 sweet to yield to. 
 
124 TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 
 
 There is still another contrast. Death huddled and 
 herded his reluctant sheep into a fold where they lay 
 inactive but struggling and restless. Christ leads His 
 flock into a pasture. He shall guide them " to the 
 fountains of waters of life." I need not dwell at any 
 length on the blessed particulars of that future, set 
 forth here and in the context. But let me suggest them 
 briefly. There is joyous activity. There is constant 
 progression. He goeth before ; they follow. The per- 
 fection of heaven begins at entrance into it, but it is 
 a perfection which can be perfected, and is being per- 
 fected, through the ages of Eternity, and the picture of 
 the Shepherd in front and the flock behind, is the true 
 conception of all the progress of that future life. " They 
 shall follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth " — a 
 sweet guidance, a glad following, a progressive con- 
 formity ! " In the long years Hker must they grow." 
 
 Further, there is the communication of life more and 
 more abundantly. Therefore there is the satisfaction 
 of all desire, so that " they shall hunger no more, neither 
 thirst any more." The pain of desire ceases because 
 desire is no sooner felt than it is satisfied, the joy of 
 desire continues, because its satisfaction enables us to 
 desire more, and so, appetite and eating, desire and 
 fruition, alternate in ceaseless reciprocity. To us, being 
 every moment capable of more, more will be given ; 
 and " to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more 
 abundant." 
 
TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 125 
 
 There is one point more in regard to that pasture into 
 which the Lamb leads the happy flock, and that is, the 
 cessation of all pains and sorrows. Not only shall they 
 " hunger no more, neither thirst any more " ; but " the 
 sun shall not smite them, nor any heat, and God shall 
 wipe away all tears from their eyes." Here the Shep- 
 herd carried rod and staff, and sometimes had to strike 
 the wandering sheep hard : there these are needed no 
 more. Here He had to move them sometimes out of 
 green pastures, and away from still waters, into valleys 
 of the shadow of death ; but " there," as one of the 
 prophets has it : " they shall lie in a good fold, and in a 
 fat pasture shall they feed." 
 
 But now, we must note, finally, the other kind of 
 men whom this other Shepherd leads into His pastures. 
 " They have washed their robes and made them white 
 in the blood of the Lamb." Aye ! that is it. That is 
 why He can lead them where He does lead them. Strange 
 alchemy which out of two crimsons, the crimson of our 
 sins and the crimson of His blood, makes one white ! 
 But it is so, and the only way by which we can ever be 
 cleansed, either with the initial cleansing of forgiveness, 
 or with the daily cleansing of continual purifying and 
 approximation to the Divine holiness, is by our bringing 
 the foul garment of our stained personality and character 
 into contact with the blood which, " shed for many,"- 
 takes away their sins, and, infused into their veins, 
 cleanses them from all sin. 
 
126 TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 
 
 You have yourselves to bring about that contact. 
 " They have washed their robes," And how did they do 
 it ? By faith in the Sacrifice first, by following the 
 Example next. For it is not merely a forgiveness for 
 the past, but a perfecting, progressive and gradual, for 
 the future, that Hes in that thought of washing their 
 robes and making them white in the blood of the Lamb. 
 
 Dear brethren, Hfe here and life hereafter are con- 
 tinuous. They are homogeneous, on one plane though 
 an ascending one. The differences there are great — 
 I was going to say, and it would be true, that the resem- 
 blances are greater. As we have been, we shall be. If 
 we take Christ for our Shepherd here, and follow 
 Him, though from afar, and with faltering steps, amidst 
 all the struggles and windings and rough ways of life, 
 then and only then, will He be our Shepherd, to go with 
 us through the darkness of death, to make it no reluc- 
 tant expulsion from a place that we would fain continue 
 to be in, but a tranquil and willing following of Him by 
 the road which He has consecrated for ever, and de- 
 prived for ever of its solitude, because Himself has trod 
 it. Those two possibiUties are before each of us. 
 Either of them may be yours. One of them must be. 
 Look on this picture and on this ; and choose — God 
 help you to choose aright — which of the two will describe 
 your experience. Will you have Christ for your Shep- 
 herd, or will you have Death for your shepherd ? The 
 answer to that question lies in the answer to the other — 
 
TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS 127 
 
 have you washed your robes, and made them white in 
 the blood of the Lamb ; and are you following Him ? 
 You can settle the question which lot is to be yours, and 
 only you can settle it. See that you settle it aright, and 
 that you settle it soon. 
 
Death, the Friend 
 
 " All things are yours . . . death." — 1 Cor. iii. 21, 22. 
 
 WHAT Jesus Christ is to a man settles what every- 
 thing else is to Him. Om" relation to Jesus 
 determines our relation to the universe. If we belong 
 to Him, everything belongs to us. If we are His ser- 
 vants, all things are our servants. The household of 
 Jesus, which is the whole Creation, is not divided against 
 itself, and the fellow servants do not beat one another. 
 Two bodies moving in the same direction, and under 
 the impulse of the same force, cannot come into colHsion 
 and since " all things work together," according to the 
 counsel of His will, " all things work together for good " 
 to His lovers. The triumphant words of my text are 
 no piece of empty rhetoric, but the plain result of two 
 facts — Christ's rule and the Christian's submission. 
 " All things are yours, and ye are Christ's." So the 
 stars in their courses fight against those who fight against 
 Him, and if we are at peace with Him we shall " make 
 a league with the beasts of the field, and the stones of 
 
DEATH, THE FRIEND 129 
 
 the field," which otherwise would be hindrances and 
 stumbling-blocks, " shall be at peace with " us. 
 
 The Apostle carries his confidence in the subservience 
 of all things to Christ's servants very far, and the words 
 of my text, in which he dares to suggest that " the 
 Shadow feared of man" is, after all, a veiled friend, 
 are hard to beheve, when we are brought face to face 
 with death, either when we meditate on our own end, 
 or when our hearts are sore and our hands are empty. 
 Then the question comes, and often is asked with tears 
 of blood, is it true that this awful force, which we cannot 
 command, does indeed serve us ? Did it serve those 
 whom it dragged from our sides ; and in serving them, 
 did it serve us ? Paul rings out his " Yes " ; and if we 
 have as firm a hold of Paul's Lord as Paul had, our 
 answer will be the same. Let me, then, deal with this 
 great thought that hes here, of the conversion of the 
 last enemy into a friend, the assurance that we may all 
 have that death is ours, though not in the sense that we 
 can command it, yet in the sense that it ministers to our 
 highest good. 
 
 That thought may be true about ourselves when it 
 comes to our turn to die, and, thank God, has been true 
 about all those that have departed in His faith and fear. 
 Some of you may have seen two very striking engravings 
 by a great, though somewhat unknown artist, repre- 
 senting Death as the Destroyer and Death as the Friend. 
 In the one case he comes into a scene of wild revelry, 
 
 M.S. 9 
 
130 DEATH, THE FRIEND 
 
 and there at his feet lie, stark and stiff, corpses in their 
 gay clothing, and with garlands on their brows, and 
 feasters and musicians are flpng in terror from the 
 cowled Skeleton. In the other he conies into a quiet 
 church belfry, where an aged saint sits with folded arms 
 and closed eyes, and an open Bible by his side, and end- 
 less peace upon the wearied face. The window is flung 
 wide to the sunrise, and on its sill perches a bird that 
 gives forth its morning song. The cowled figure has 
 brought rest to the weary, and the glad dawning of a 
 new hfe to the aged, and is a friend. The two pictures 
 are better than all the poor words that I can say. It 
 depends on the people to whom he comes, whether he 
 comes as a destroyer or as a helper. Of course, for all 
 of us the mere physical facts remain the same, the pangs 
 and the pain, the slow torture of the loosing of the bond, 
 or the sharp agony of its instantaneous rending apart. 
 But we have gone but a very little way into life and its 
 experiences, if we have not learnt that identity of cir- 
 cumstances may cover profound difference of essentials, 
 and that the same experiences may have wholly different 
 messages and meanings to two people who are equally 
 implicated in them. Thus, while the physical fact 
 remains the same for all, the whole bearing of it may 
 so differ that Death to one man will be a Destroyer, 
 while to another it is a Friend. For, if we come to 
 analyse the thoughts of himianity about the last act in 
 human life on earth, what is it that makes the dread 
 
DEATH, THE FRIEND 131 
 
 darkness of death, which all men know, though they so 
 seldom think of it ? 
 
 I suppose, first of all, if we seek to question our feelings, 
 that which makes Death a foe to the ordinary experi- 
 ence is that it is Uke a step off the edge of a precipice in 
 a fog ; a step into a dim condition of which the Imagina- 
 tion can form no conception, because it has no experi- 
 ence, and all Imagination's pictures are painted with 
 pigments drawn from our past. Because it is impossible 
 for a man to have any clear vision of what it is that is 
 coming to meet him, and he cannot tell " in that sleep 
 what dreams may come," he shrinks, as we all shrink, 
 from a step into the vast Inane, the dim Unknown. 
 But the Gospel comes and says, " It is a land of great 
 darkness," but " to the people that sit in darkness a 
 great light hath shined." 
 
 " Our knowledge of that life is small. 
 The eye of faith is dim." 
 
 But faith has an eye, and there is light, and this we can 
 see — One face Whose brightness scatters all the gloom, 
 One Person Who has not ceased to be the Sun of 
 Righteousness with healing in His beams, even in the 
 darkness of the grave. Therefore, one at least of the 
 repellent features which, to the timorous heart, makes 
 Death a foe, is gone, when we know that the known 
 Christ fills the Unknown. 
 
 Then, again, another of the elements, as I suppose. 
 
132 DEATH, THE FRIEND 
 
 which constitute the hostile aspect that Death assumes 
 to most of us, is that it apparently hales us away from 
 all the wholesome activities and occupations of life, 
 and bans us into a state of apparent inaction. The 
 thought that death is rest does sometimes attract the 
 weary or harassed, or they fancy it does, but that is a 
 morbid feeling, and much more common in sentimental 
 epitaphs than among the usual thoughts of men. To 
 most of us there is no joy, but a chill, in the anticipation 
 that all the forms of activity which have so occupied, and 
 often enriched, our lives here, are to be cut ofE at once. 
 " What am I to do if I have no books ? " says the stu- 
 dent. " What am I to do if I have no mill ? " says the 
 spinner. " What am I to do if I have no nursery or 
 kitchen ? " say the women. What are you to do ? 
 There is only one quieting answer to such questions. 
 It tells us that what we are doing here is learning our 
 trade, and that we are to be moved into another work- 
 shop there, to practise it. Nothing can bereave us of 
 the force we made our own, being here ; and " there is 
 nobler work for us to do " when the Master of all the 
 servants stoops from His Throne and says : " Thou 
 hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee 
 ruler over many things ; have thou authority over ten 
 cities." Then the faithfulness of the steward will be 
 exchanged for the authority of the ruler, and the toil 
 of the servant for a share in the joy of the Lord. 
 So another of the elements which make Death an 
 
DEATH, THE FRIEND 133 
 
 enemy is turned into an element which makes it a 
 friend, and instead of the separation from this earthly- 
 body, the organ of our activity and the medium of our 
 connexion with the external Universe, being the con- 
 demnation of the naked spirit to inaction, it is the 
 emancipation of the spirit into greater activity. For 
 nothing drops away at death that does not make a man 
 the richer for its loss, and when the dross is purged from 
 the silver, there remains " a vessel unto honour, fit for 
 the Master's use." This mightier activity is the contri- 
 bution to our blessedness which Death makes to them 
 who use their activities here in Christ's service. 
 
 Then, still further, another of the elements which is 
 converted from being a terror into a joy is that Death, 
 the separator, becomes to Christ's servants Death, the 
 uniter. We all know how that function of death is 
 perhaps the one that makes us shrink from it the most, 
 dread it the most, and sometimes hate it the most. But 
 it will be with us as it was with those that were to be 
 initiated into ancient rehgious rites. BUndfolded, they 
 were led by a hand that grasped theirs but was not seen, 
 through dark, narrow, devious passages, but they were 
 led into a great company in a mighty hall. Seen from 
 this side, the ministry of Death parts a man from 
 dear ones, but, oh ! if we could see round the turn in the 
 corridor, we should see that the solitude is but for a 
 moment, and that the true office of Death is not so much 
 to part from those beloved on earth as to carry to, and 
 
134 DEATH, THE FRIEND 
 
 unite with, Him that is best Beloved in the heavens, 
 and in Him with all His saints. They that are joined 
 to Christ, as they who pass from earth are joined, are 
 thereby joined to all who, in like manner, are knit to 
 Him. Although other dear bonds are loosed by the 
 bony fingers of the Skeleton, his very loosing of them 
 ties more closely the bond that unites us to Jesus, and 
 when the dull ear of the dying has ceased to hear the 
 voices of earth that used to thrill it in their lowest whis- 
 per, I suppose it hears another Voice that says : " When 
 thou passest through the fire I will be with thee, and 
 through the waters they shall not overwhelm thee." 
 Thus the Separator unites, first to Jesus, and then to 
 " the general assembly and Church of the first-born," 
 and leads into the city of the living God, the pilgrims 
 who long have lived, often isolated, in the desert. 
 
 There is a last element in Death which is changed for 
 the Christian, and that is that to men generally, when 
 they think about it, there is an instinctive recoil from 
 Death, because there is an instinctive suspicion that 
 after Death is the Judgment, and that, somehow or 
 other — never mind about the drapery in which the idea 
 may be embodied for our weakness — when a man dies 
 he passes to a state where he will reap the consequences 
 of what he has sown here. But to Christ's servant 
 that last thought is robbed of its sting, and all the poison 
 sucked out of it, for he can say : " He that died for me 
 makes it possible for me to die undreading, and to pass 
 
DEATH, THE FRIEND 135 
 
 thither, knowing that I shall meet aij my Judge Him 
 Whom I have trusted as my Saviour, and so may have 
 boldness before Him in the Day of Judgment." 
 
 Knit these four contrasts together. Death as a step 
 into a dim unknown versus Death as a step into a region 
 lighted by Jesus ; Death as the cessation of activity versus 
 Death as the introduction to nobler opportunities, and 
 the endowment with nobler capacities of service ; Death 
 as the separator and isolator versus Death as uniting to 
 Jesus and all His lovers ; Death as haling us to the 
 judgment-seat of the adversary versus Death as bring- 
 ing us to the tribunal of the Christ ; and I think we can 
 understand how Christians can venture to say, "All 
 things are ours, whether life or death " which leads to a 
 better life. 
 
 And now let me add one word more. All this that 
 I have been saying, and all the blessed strength for 
 ourselves and calming in our sorrows which result there- 
 from, stand or fall with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. 
 There is nothing else that makes these things certain. 
 There are, of course, instincts, peradventures, hopes, 
 fears, doubts. But in this region, and in regard to all 
 this cycle of truths, the same thing applies which applies 
 round the whole horizon of Christian Revelation — if 
 you want not speculations but certainties, you have to 
 go to Jesus Christ for them. There were many men 
 that thoug t there were islands of the sea away beyond 
 the setting sun that dyed the western waves, but Colum- 
 
136 DEATH, THE FRIEND 
 
 bus went and came back again, and brougbt their pro- 
 ducts — and then the thought became a fact. Unless 
 you beheve that Jesus Christ has come back from " the 
 bourne from which no traveller returns," and has come 
 laden with the gifts of " happy isles of Eden " far be- 
 yond the sea, there is no certitude upon which a dying 
 man can lay his head, or by which a bleeding heart can 
 be staunched. But when He draws near, aUve from the 
 dead, and says to us, as He did to the disciples on the 
 evening of the day of Resurrection, " Peace be unto 
 you," and shows us His hands and His side, then we 
 do not only speculate or think a future life possible or 
 probable, or hesitate to deny it, or hope or fear, as the 
 case may be, but we hnow, and we can say : " All things 
 are ours . . . death " amongst others. 
 
 The fact that Jesus Christ has died changes the whole 
 aspect of death to His servant, inasmuch as in that great 
 solitude he has a companion, and in the valley of the 
 shadow of death sees footsteps that tell him of One that 
 went before. Nor need I do more than remind you how 
 the manner of our Lord's death shows that He is Lord 
 not only of the dead but of the Death that makes them 
 dead. For His own tremendous assertion, " I have 
 power to lay down My life, and I have power to take it 
 again," was confirmed by His attitude and His words 
 at the last, as is hinted at by the very expressions with 
 which the Evangelists record the fact of His death : 
 '' He yielded up His spirit," " He gave up the ghost," 
 
DEATH, THE FRIEND 137 
 
 " He breathed out His life." It is confirmed to us by- 
 such words as those remarkable ones of the Apocalypse, 
 which speak of Him as " the Living One," who, by His 
 own will, " became dead." He died because He would, 
 and He would die because He loved you and me. And 
 in dying. He showed Himself to be, not the Victim, but 
 the Conqueror, of the Death to which He submitted. 
 The Jewish King on the fatal field of Gilboa called his 
 sword-bearer, and the servant came, and Saul bade him 
 smite, and when his trembling hand shrank from such 
 an act, the King fell on his sword. The Lord of life 
 and death summoned His servant Death, and he c me 
 obedient, but Jesus died not by Death's stroke, but by 
 his own act. So that Lord of Death, who died because 
 He would, is the Lord who has the keys of death and 
 the grave, and in regard to one servant says, " I will 
 that he tarry till I come," and that man lives through 
 a century, and in regard to another says, " Follow thou 
 Me," and that man dies on a cross. The dying Lord is 
 Lord of Death, and the living Lord is for us all the 
 Prince of Life. 
 
 Brethren, we have to take His yoke upon us by the 
 act of faith which leads to a love that issues in an obedi- 
 ence which will become more and more complete, as we 
 become more fully Christ's. Then death will be ours, 
 for then we shall count that the highest good for us will 
 be fuller union with, a fuller possession of, and a com- 
 pleter conformity to, Jesus Christ our King, and that 
 
138 DEATH, THE FRIEND 
 
 whatever brings us these, even though it brings also 
 pain and sorrow and much from which we shrink, is 
 all on our side. It is possible — may it be so with each 
 of us ! — that for us Death may be, not an enemy that 
 bans us into darkness and inactivity, or hales us to a 
 judgment- seat, but the Angel who wakes us, at whose 
 touch the chains fall off, and who leads us through 
 " the iron gate that opens of its own accord," and brings 
 us into the City. 
 
A Fight with Depression 
 
 Why art thou cast down, O my soul ; and why art thou dis- 
 quited within me ? hope in God ; for I shall yet praise Him Who is 
 the health of my countenance, and my God.— Psalm xMii. 5. 
 
 THESE words occur thrice, at short intervals, in 
 this psahn and in the preceding one. They appear 
 there twice, and here once. Quite obviously the 
 division into two psalms is a mistake, for the whole 
 constitutes one composition. The first part of each of 
 the sections, into which the one original psalm is divided 
 by the repetition of this refrain, is a weary monotone 
 of complaint. The Psalmist is in circumstances of 
 depression and disappointment, and he keeps ringing 
 the changes over and over again upon his sad con- 
 dition. But then he struggles up, as it were, to the 
 height of questioning himself what all this trouble of 
 soul and depression mean, and when he has got the 
 length of questioning his mood instead of passively 
 yielding to it, then he goes further and encourages him- 
 self — " Hope thou in God." 
 
140 A FIGHT WITH DEPRESSION 
 
 But again the wave of trouble rolls in, and sweeps 
 away the flimsy barrier that he had put up. The weary 
 round is gone all over again — the complaint and the 
 enumeration of the sad things that befall him, and the 
 expressions of his despondency. Then once more he 
 lifts his head above water, and catches a glimpse of the 
 light. Again he asks, " Why art thou cast down, my 
 soul ? " But once more the climbing sorrow gets the 
 better of him, and he wails his complaint all over again, 
 and then, for the third time, he rises above it, and re- 
 builds his wall against the flood, and this time the 
 barrier stands, and the flood is finally dammed back. 
 
 Unless we look, therefore, not only at the words them- 
 selves, but at this most instructive and beautiful fact of 
 their recurrence, and at what separates the instances of 
 their recurrence from one another, we miss the chief 
 lesson of this Psalm. We note, 
 
 I. A Dreary Monotony of Complaint. 
 
 We all know the temptation of being overmastered 
 by some calamity or some sad thought. We keep chew- 
 ing the bitter morsel and rolling it under our tongues, 
 so as to suck all the bitterness out of it that we can. 
 Circumstances, no doubt, warranted the Psalmist's 
 despondency, but no circumstances warranted his 
 tramping on and on and on, with weary reiteration, 
 over and over again, in one mill-horse round of com- 
 plaint. Why could he not speak it, and have done 
 with it ? You sometimes see upon the stage of a theatre 
 
A FIGHT WITH DEPRESSION 141 
 
 a procession represented, and the supernumeraries pass 
 across the stage, and go round at the back and come in 
 again at the other side, and so keep up an appearance of 
 numbers far beyond the reality. That is like what we 
 do with our sorrows. A fly has an eye, with I do not 
 know how many facets, which multiply the one thing 
 that it looks at into an enormous number ; and some of 
 us have eyes made on that fashion, or rather, we manu- 
 facture for our eyes spectacles on that plan, by which 
 we look at our griefs or our depressing circumstances, 
 and see them multiplied and nothing but them. " That 
 way madness lies." Absorption in one set of circum- 
 stances, however sad, and however crushing may be their 
 weight, is neither wise, nor grateful, nor godly ; and it 
 saps all the strength out of a man. The sky is never all 
 cloud with us ; it sometimes is in the natural world, but 
 the Christian's sky is never all full of gloom. And if we 
 sinfully, although so naturally, give ourselves up to the 
 monotonous contemplation of one sad set of circum- 
 stances, then we are forgetting that an abyss of blue 
 lies at the back of the cloud, and that, in comparison 
 with the serene and unstained infinitude beyond, the 
 heaviest thunder-laden masses are but thin fihns of pass- 
 ing vapour. The Psalmist sets us an example to be 
 avoided, in his triple repetition of the story of his grief 
 and gloom. They have taken such possession of him 
 that he cannot even vary his words. Twice he repeats, 
 in the first and second sections : " They continually say 
 
142 A FIGHT WITH DEPRESSION 
 
 unto me, Where is thy God ? " and twice he repeats, in 
 the second and third sections : " Why go I mourning 
 because of the oppression of the enemy ? " It was 
 folly to ask this question twice. It was returning sanity 
 thrice to ask : " Why art thou cast down, my soul ? " 
 
 And so we hear the Psalmist advancing to a second 
 stage, and that is, 
 
 II. A Wise Self-Questioning. 
 
 There are a great many of our griefs and moods and 
 sorrows that will not stand that question. Like ghosts, 
 if you speak to them, they vanish. It is enough, in not 
 a few of the lighter and more gnat-like troubles that 
 beset us, to say to ourselves : " What art thou putting 
 thyself into such a fume about ? Why art thou cast 
 down ? " For very many of them, to ask the question 
 shows the impossibility of finding a reasonable answer 
 to it. But even with regard to far more pressing and 
 poignant griefs and burdens, fiery dragons and burning 
 serpents which may sting and poison us, still the ques- 
 tion is one that it is wise for a man to ask. We cannot 
 control our thoughts nor our moods directly, but we 
 can do a great deal to regulate, modify, and diminish 
 those of them that need diminishing, and increase those 
 of them that need to be increased, by looking at the 
 reasons for them. And if a man will do that more 
 habitually and conscientiously than most of us are 
 accustomed to do it, in regard both to passing thoughts 
 and to overpowering moods that threaten to become 
 
A FIGHT WITH DEPRESSION 143 
 
 unwholesomely permanent, he will regain a firmer con- 
 trol of himself— and that is the best wealth that a man 
 can have. 
 
 " He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a 
 city broken down without walls," into which any roving 
 Bedouin can break, and carry away, loot, and work his 
 will. If we do not set a guard at the gates, and question 
 the traveller that wants to come in, what his business 
 is, and what is his right to enter, we shall be invaded by 
 a host of very undesirable guests, and our lives will go 
 all to pieces. Very many men who make failures 
 morally, religiously, or even socially and commercially, 
 do so because they have no command over themselves, 
 and because they have not asked this question of each 
 sly temptation that comes wheedling up to the gate of 
 the soul, with whispering breath and secret suggestions 
 — " What do you want here ? What reason have you 
 for wishing to come in ? " " Why art thou cast down, 
 my soul ? " — question yourselves about your moods, 
 and especially about your sad moods, and you will 
 have gone a long way to make yourselves better and 
 happier people than you have ever been before. 
 Further, we have here 
 
 III. An Effort Twice Foiled and at Last 
 Successful. 
 
 I have said that the Psalmist asks this question three 
 times. Three times, as it were, he clutches hold of the 
 firm stay to which he can cling, and twice is swept away 
 
144 A FIGHT WITH DEPRESSION 
 
 from it ; and the third time he retains his grip. Yes, 
 and that is often the case. In the Cathedral of St. 
 Mark's, Venice, there is a mosaic that represents Christ 
 in Gethsemane. You remember that, like the Psalmist, 
 He prayed three times there, and twice came back, not 
 having received His desire, but the third time He did 
 receive it. The devout artist has presented Him thus : 
 the first time prone on the ground, and the sky all black ; 
 the second time raised a little, and a strip of blue in one 
 corner ; and the third time, kneeling erect, and a beam 
 from heaven, brighter than the radiance of the Paschal 
 moon, striking right down upon Him, and the streng- 
 thening Angel standing beside Him. That was the 
 experience of the Lord, and it may be the experience 
 of the servant. Once I ask, twice I ask, and I do not 
 receive an answer. " For this thing I besought the 
 Lord thrice, that it might depart from me." Thrice 
 the Psalmist climbed, like some poor insect trying to get 
 up a blade of grass. Twice he chmbed and twice 
 fell, but the third time he reached the top and kept 
 there. 
 
 Brethren, do not give up the effort at self-control and 
 victory over circumstances that tempt to despondency 
 or to sadness. Even if you fail this time, still the failure 
 has left some increased capacity for the next attempt, 
 and God helping, the next time will be successful. So, 
 remember the threefold repetition of this self-question- 
 ing and self-encouragement. 
 
A FIGHT WITH DEPRESSION 145 
 
 Lastly, we have 
 
 IV. The Conquering Hope. 
 
 The Psalmist's question to his soul is not answered. 
 To put it was the first struggle to strip ofE the 
 poisoned sackcloth in which he had wrapped himself. 
 But his next word, his command to his soul to hope 
 in God, completes the process of putting off the 
 robe of mourning, and girding himself with gladness. 
 He makes one great leap, as it were, across the black 
 flood that has been ringing him round, and bids his soul : 
 " Hope thou in God : for I shall yet praise Him, Who is 
 the health of my countenance and my God." The one 
 medicine for a disquieted, cast-down soul is hope in God. 
 People say a great deal about the buoyant energy of 
 hope bearing a man up over his troubles. Yes, so it does 
 in some measure, but there is only one case in which 
 there is a real bearing up over the troubles, and that is 
 where the hope is in God. I have heard of men in a 
 shipwreck who fastened the life-buoy round their waists, 
 and it came up round their necks and choked them. 
 There are hopes that Hft men over many a trouble, and 
 yet they are not the right sort, and they may ruin 
 them at last. 
 
 " Hope thou " Yes ; but what am I to hope in ? 
 
 That things will be better to-morrow ? Perhaps. That 
 I shall get over the trouble and be stronger for it ? 
 Possibly. That "the light affliction is but for a 
 moment ? " Well ; some of them are not " but for a 
 
 M.S. 10 
 
146 A FIGHT WITH DEPRESSION 
 
 moment." " Hope thou in God ! " — that is the secret. 
 It is only the sunrise that scatters the mists ; and it is 
 only a hope " in God " that is sure to rise victorious 
 over all conceivable troubles, and at last to turn des- 
 pondency and disquiet into brightness and calmness. 
 That is the one rainbow that lies above the fiercest hell 
 of falhng waters, foaming tortured in the cataract. 
 The waters foam themselves away, " the things that 
 are seen are temporal," but the rainbow is always there, 
 eternal. " Hope in God," and the blacker the cloud, 
 the brighter will be the colouring of the bow that spans 
 it. " Hope in God," and disquiet, and all the other 
 ghosts of the night, vanish as at cockcrow. 
 
 But the hope that is in God must be a hope that is 
 based upon a present possession of Him. " Hope thou 
 in God ; He is the health of my countenance, and my 
 God." It is only if a man has a present experience of 
 the blessings of strong and all-sufficient help that come 
 to him now, and can say, " My God, the health of my 
 countenance," that he has the right, or that he has the 
 inclination or the power, to paint the future with bright- 
 ness. A present experience of God as my very own, 
 and all-sufficient for health and help and for the brighten- 
 ing of my face in all hours of darkness, is the only ground 
 on which I can hope in Him for every future. 
 
 And we shall not attain either to that experience of 
 God as ours, or to the hope that, springing from it, will 
 triumph over all disquieting circumstances, without a 
 
A FIGHT WITH DEPRESSION 147 
 
 dead lift of effort. The Christian hope comes to no man 
 vdthout his definitely endeavouring after it ; and there 
 is a great lack, amongst all Christian people, of realizing 
 that it is as much their duty to cultivate the hope of 
 the Christian, as it is their duty to cultivate any other 
 characteristic of the Christian life. " We desire that 
 every one of you do show the same diligence, in order 
 to the full assurance of hope unto the end." 
 
Thirst and Satisfaction 
 
 My soul thirsteth for Thee . . . My soul shall be satisfied. . . . 
 My soul followeth hard after Thee. — Psalm Ixiii. 1, 5, 8. 
 
 IT is a wise advice which bids us regard rather what 
 is said than who says it, and there are few regions 
 in which the counsel is more salutary than at 
 present in the study of the Old Testament, and especially 
 the Psalms. Their authorship has become a burning 
 question, which is only too apt to shut out far more 
 important things. Whoever poured forth this sweet 
 meditation in the psalm before us, his tender longings 
 for, and his jubilant possession of, God remain the 
 same. It is either the work of a king in exile, or is 
 written by some one who tries to cast himself into the 
 mental attitude of such a person, and to reproduce 
 his longing and his trust. It may be a question of 
 literary interest, but it is of no sort of spiritual or religious 
 importance, whether the author is David or a singer of 
 later date, endeavouring to reproduce his emotions 
 under certain circumstances. 
 
 The three clauses which I have read, and which are so 
 
THIRST AND SATISFACTION 149 
 
 strikingly identical in form, constitute the three pivots 
 round which the psalm revolves, the three bends in 
 the stream of its thought and emotion. " My soul 
 thirsts ; my soul is satisfied ; my soul follows hard 
 after Thee." The three phases of feeling follow one 
 another so swiftly that they are all wrapped up in the 
 brief compass of this little song. Unless they in some 
 degree express our experiences and emotions, there is 
 little likelihood that our lives will be blessed or noble, 
 and we have little right to call ourselves Christians. Let 
 us follow the windings of the stream, and ask ourselves 
 if we can see our own faces in its shining surface. 
 
 I. The Soul that Knows its Own Needs will 
 Thirst After God. 
 
 The psalmist draws the picture of himself as a thirsty 
 man in a waterless land. That may be a literally 
 true reproduction of his condition, if indeed the old idea 
 is correct, that this is a work of David's ; for there 
 is no more appalUng desert than that in which he wan- 
 dered as an exile. It is a land of arid mountains, without 
 a blade of verdure, blazing in their ghastly whiteness 
 under the fierce sunshine, and with gaunt ravines 
 in which there are no pools or streams, and therefore 
 no sweet sound of running waters, no shadow, no songs 
 of birds, but all is hot, dusty, glaring, pitiless ; and 
 men and beasts faint, and loll out their tongues, and die 
 for want of water. And, says the Psalmist, that is 
 life, if due regard be had to the deepest wants of a soul, 
 
150 THIRST AND SATISFACTION 
 
 notwithstanding all the abundant supplies which are 
 spread in such rich and loving luxuriance around us — 
 a long fierce thirst in a waterless land. I need not 
 remind you how true it is that a man is but a bundle 
 of appetites and desires, often tyrannous, often painful, 
 always active. But the misery of it is that he does not 
 know what it is that he wants ; that he thirsts, but does 
 not understand what the thirst means, nor what it is that 
 will slake it. His animal appetites make no mistakes ; 
 he and the beast know that when they are thirsty they 
 have to drink, and when they are hungry they have to 
 eat, and when they are drowsy they have to sleep. 
 But the sure instinct of the animal that teaches it what 
 to choose and what to avoid fails us in the higher 
 reaches ; and we are conscious of a craving, and do not 
 find that the craving reveals to us the source from 
 whence its satisfaction can be derived. Therefore 
 " broken cisterns that can hold no water " are at a 
 premium, and " the fountain of Hving waters " is 
 turned away from, though it could slake so many 
 thirsts. Like ignorant explorers in an enemy's country, 
 we see a stream, and we do not stop to ask whether 
 there is poison in it or not, before we glue our thirsty lips 
 to it. There is a great promise in one of the prophets 
 which puts the misinterpretation of our thirsts, and 
 the mistakes as to the sources from which they can be 
 slaked, into one beautiful metaphor which is obscured 
 in our English version. The prophet Isaiah says. 
 
THIRST AND SATISFACTION 151 
 
 according to our reading, " the parched land shall 
 become a pool." The word which he uses is that 
 almost technical one which describes the phenomenon 
 known only in Eastern lands, or at least known in them 
 in its superlative degree— the mirage, where the dancing 
 currents of ascending air stimulate the likeness of a cool 
 lake, with palm trees round it. And, says he, " the 
 mirage shall become a pool," the romance shall turn 
 into a reality, and the mistakes shall be rectified, and 
 men shall know what it is that they want, and shall 
 get it when they know. Brethren, unless we have 
 Ustened to the teaching from above, unless we have 
 consulted far more wisely and far more profoundly 
 than many of us have ever done, the meaning of our 
 own hearts when they cry out, we, too, shall only be able 
 to take for ours the plaintive cry of one half of this 
 first utterance of the Psalmist, and say, despairingly, 
 "My soul thirsteth." Blessed are they who know 
 where the fountain is, who know the meaning of the 
 highest unrests in their own souls, and can go on with 
 clear and true self-revelation to declare: "My soul 
 thirsteth for God." 
 
 That is religion. There is a great deal more in Chris- 
 tianity than longing, but there is no Christianity worth 
 the name without it. There should be moral stimulus 
 to activity, a pattern for conduct, and so on, in our 
 religion, and if our rehgion is only this longing— well 
 then, it is worth very little ; but it is worth a good deal 
 
152 THIRST AND SATISFACTION 
 
 less, if there is none of this felt need for Grod, and for 
 more of God, in it. 
 
 And so I speak to two classes of my hearers ; and to 
 the first of them I say : dear friends, do not mistake 
 what it is that you need, and see to it that you turn 
 the current of your longings from earth to God ; and 
 to the second of them I say : dear friends, if you have 
 found out that God is your supreme good, see to it that 
 you live in the constant attitude of longing for more of 
 that Good which alone will slake your appetite. 
 
 "The thirst that from the soul doth rise 
 Doth ask a drink Divine," 
 
 for unless we know what it is to be drawn outwards 
 and upwards, in strong aspirations after " something 
 afar from the sphere of our sorrow," I know not why 
 we should call ourselves Christians at all. 
 
 But, dear friends, let us not forget that these higher 
 aspirations after the uncreated and personal good, which 
 is God, have to be cultivated very sedulously and with 
 great persistence throughout all our changing lives, 
 or they will soon die out and leave us. There has to be 
 the clear recognition, habitual to us, of what is our 
 Good. There has to be a continual meditation, if I 
 may so say, upon the all-sufficiency of that Divine 
 Lord and Lover of our souls, and there has to be a 
 vigilant and a continual suppression, and often excision 
 and ejection, of other desires after transient and partial 
 
THIRST AND SATISFACTION 153 
 
 satisfactions. A man who lets all his longings go 
 unchecked and untamed after earthly good has none 
 left towards heaven. If you break up a river into a 
 multitude of channels, and lead off much of it to irrigate 
 many little gardens, there will be no force in its current, 
 its bed will become dry, and it will never reach the 
 great ocean, where it loses its individuaUty, and becomes 
 part of a mightier whole. So, if we fritter away and 
 divide up our desires among all the clamant and partial 
 blessings of earth, then we shall but feebly long for, and 
 feebly longing shall but faintly enjoy, the cool, clear, 
 exhaustless gush from the foimtain of life. " My soul 
 thirsteth for God " — in the measure in which that is 
 true of us, and not one hair's-breadth beyond it, in 
 spite of orthodoxy, and professions, and activities, are we 
 Christian people. 
 
 II. The Soul that Thirsts After God Is 
 Satisfied. 
 
 The psalmist, by the magic might of his desire, 
 changes, as in a sudden transformation scene in a theatre, 
 all the dreariness about him. The one moment it is a 
 dry and barren land where no water is ; the next moment 
 a flash of verdure has come over the yellow sand, and 
 the ghastly silence is broken by the song of merry birds. 
 The one moment he is hungering there in the desert ; 
 the next, he sees spread before him a table in the wilder- 
 ness and liis soul is " satisfied as with marrow and 
 with fatness," and his mouth praises God, Whom he 
 
154 THIRST AND SATISFACTION 
 
 possesses, Who has come unto him swift, immediate, 
 in full response to his cry. Now, all that is but a 
 picturesque way of putting a very plain truth, which 
 we should all be the happier and better if we beheved 
 and hved by, that we can have as much of God as we 
 desire, and that what we have of Him will be enough. 
 
 We can have as much of God as we desire. There 
 is a quest which finds its object with absolute certainty, 
 and which finds its object simultaneously with the 
 quest. And these two things, the certainty and the 
 immediateness with which the thirst of the soul after 
 God passes into a satisfied fruition of the soul in God, 
 are what are taught us in our text ; and what if we 
 comply with the conditions we may have as our own 
 blessed experience. There is one search about which it 
 is true that it never fails to find. The certainty that 
 the soul thirsting after God shall be satisfied 
 with God, results at once from His nearness 
 to us, and His infinite wilHngness to give 
 Himself, which He is only prevented from carrying, 
 into act by our obstinate refusal to open our hearts by 
 desire. It takes all a man's indifference to keep God 
 out of his heart, " for in Him we live, and move, 
 and have our being," and that Divine love, which 
 Christianity teaches us to see on the throne of the 
 universe, is but infinite longing for self-communication. 
 That is the definition of true love always, and they 
 fearfully mistake its essence, and take the lower and 
 
THIRST AND SATISFACTION 155 
 
 spurious forms of it for the higher and nobler, who 
 think of love as being what, alas ! it often is, in our 
 imperfect lives, a fierce desire to have for our very own 
 the thing or person beloved. But that is a second 
 rate kind of love. God's love is an infinite desire to 
 give Himself. If only we open our hearts — and nothing 
 opens them so wide as longing — He will pour in, as 
 surely as the atmosphere streams in through every 
 chink and cranny, as surely as if some great black rock 
 that stands on the margin of the sea is blasted away, the 
 waters will flood over the sands behind it. So unless 
 we keep God out, by not wishing Him in, in He will 
 come. 
 
 As swift as Marconi's wireless message across the 
 Atlantic and its answer ; so immediate is the response 
 from Heaven to the desire from earth. What a contrast 
 that is to all our experiences ! Is there anything 
 else about which we can say, "I am quite sure that 
 if I want it, I shall have it ? " I am quite sure 
 that when I want it, I have it ? Nothing. Earthly 
 goods are like the wells in the desert to which the 
 Bedouins have to go, with empty water-skins, many a 
 day's journey, and it comes to be a fight between the 
 physical endurance of the traveller and the weary 
 distance between him and the spring. Many a man's 
 bones, and many a camel's, lie on the track to the wells, 
 who lay dowTi gasping and black-hpped, and died 
 before they reached them. We all know what it is 
 
156 THIRST AND SATISFACTIOIS 
 
 to have longing desires which have cost us many efforts, 
 and efforts and desires have both been in vain. Is it 
 not blessed to be sure that there is One Whom to long 
 for is immediately to possess ? 
 
 Then there is the other thought here, too, that when 
 we have God we have enough. That is not true about 
 anything else. God forbid that one should depreciate 
 the wise adaptation of the earthly goods to human 
 needs which runs all through every life ; but all that 
 recognized, still we come back to this, that there is 
 nothing here, nothing except God Himself, that will 
 fill all the corners of a human heart. There is always 
 something lacking in all other satisfactions. They address 
 themselves to sides, and angles, and faces of our complex 
 nature; they leave all the others unsatisfied. The 
 table that is spread in the world at which, if I might use 
 so violent a figure, our various longings and capacities 
 seat themselves as guests, always fails to provide for 
 some of them, and whilst some, and those especially of 
 the lower type, are feasting full, there sits by their 
 side another guest, who finds nothing on the table to 
 satisfy his hunger. But if my soul thirsts for God, "my 
 soul shall be satisfied" when I get Him. The prophet 
 Isaiah modifies this figure in the great word of invita- 
 tion which pealed out from him, where he cries : "Ho ! 
 every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters." But 
 that figure is not enough for him. That metaphor, 
 blessed as it is, does not exhaust the facts ; and so he 
 
THIRST AND SATISFACTION 157 
 
 goes on, " yea, come, buy wine " — and that is not 
 enough for him, that does not exhaust the facts. There- 
 fore he adds, " and milk." Water, wine, and milk ; 
 all forms of the draughts that slake the thirsts of human- 
 ity, are found in God himself, and he who has Him needs 
 seek nothing besides. 
 
 Lastly — 
 
 III. The Soul That is Satisfied With God 
 Immediately Renews Its Quest; 
 
 " My soul followeth hard after Thee," The two 
 things come together, longing and fruition. Fruition 
 begets longing, and there is a swift and blessed 
 alternation, or rather co-existence, of the two. 
 Joyful consciousness of possession and eager antici- 
 pation of larger bestowments are blended still 
 more closely, if we adhere to the original meaning 
 of the words of this last clause, than they are in our 
 translation, for the psalm really reads, " My soul cleaveth 
 after Thee." In the word " cleaveth " is expressed 
 adhesion, Hke that of the hmpet to the rock, conscious 
 miion, blessed possession ; and in the other word, " after 
 Thee," is expressed the pressing onwards for more 
 and yet more. But now contrast that with the issue 
 of all other methods of satisfying human appetites, be 
 they lower or be they higher. They result either 
 in satiety or in a tyrannical, diseased increase of appetite 
 faster than the power of satisfying it increases. The 
 man who follows after other good than God, has at the 
 
158 THIRST AND SATISFACTION 
 
 end to say, " I am sick tired of it, and it has lost all 
 power to draw me," or he has to say, " I ravenously 
 long for more of it, and I cannot get any more." " He 
 that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor 
 he that loveth abundance with increase." You have 
 to increase the dose of the narcotic, and as you increase 
 the dose, it loses its power, and the less you can do with- 
 out it, the less it does for you. But to drink into the 
 one God slakes all thirsts, and because He is infinite 
 and our capacity for receiving Him may be indefinitely 
 expanded ; therefore, " Age cannot wither, nor custom 
 stale 'His ' infinite variety" ; but the more we have of 
 God, the more we long for Him, and the more we long 
 for Him, the more we possess Him. 
 
 Brethren, these are the possibilities of the Christian 
 life ; being its possibilities they are our obligations. 
 The psalmist's words may well be turned by us into 
 self-examining interrogations, and we may — God grant 
 that we do — all ask ourselves ; " Do I thus thirst after 
 God ? " " Have I learnt that, notwithstanding all 
 suppHes, this world without Him is a waterless desert ? 
 Have I experienced that whilst I call He answers, and 
 that the water flows in as soon as I open my heart ? And 
 do I know the happy birth of fresh longings out of every 
 fruition, and what it is to go further and further into the 
 blessed land, and into my elastic heart receive more and 
 more of the ever blessed God ? " These three clauses 
 not only set forth the ideal for the Christian hfe here, 
 
THIRST AND SATISFACTION 159 
 
 but they carry in themselves the foreshadowing of the 
 life hereafter. For surely such a merely physical 
 accident as death cannot be supposed to break this 
 golden sequence if it has run through life. Surely 
 this partial and progressive possession of an Infinite 
 Good, by a nature capable of indefinitely increasing 
 appropriation of, and approximation to, it, is the 
 prophecy of its own eternal continuance. So long as the 
 fountain springs, the thirsty lips will drink. God's 
 servants will live till God dies. The Christian life will 
 go on, here and hereafter, till it has reached the limits 
 of its own capacity of expansion, and has exhausted 
 God. " The water that I shall give him shall be in him a 
 well of water, springing up into everlasting life." 
 
A Song of Faith 
 
 He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide 
 under the shadow of the Almighty. — Psalm xci. 1. 
 
 I HAVE read this verse, but I desire to deal, not 
 with it merely, but with the whole of the Psalm, 
 of which it is the introduction. The one theme of it is 
 the security and absolute immunity from mortal ills, 
 which belong to those that dwell in God. That one 
 thought is worked out with wonderful force and variety. 
 The singer is borne aloft on the two wings of devout 
 confidence and poetic imagination, and when these two 
 beat in unison, they lift a man high. If we try to follow 
 him as he soars, perhaps we too, in some measure, may 
 be raised above the cares and sorrows of this low- 
 thoughted earth. 
 
 One preliminary remark I must make, and that is, 
 that throughout the psalm there is a very remarkable 
 alternation of speakers. It begins with, " / will say of 
 the Lord " ; there immediately follows, " He shall de- 
 liver thee " ; and so on. And at the end, the person 
 who had spoken first as " I," and been spoken to as 
 
A SONG OF FAITH 161 
 
 " thou " and " thee," is spoken of by yet another voice, 
 which says, " He has set His love upon me." That re- 
 markable and dramatic alternation of speakers is yet 
 more conspicuous in the original than it appears in our 
 Authorized Version, because, imbedded in the very 
 middle of that second portion, in which " thou " is the 
 prevaiUng word, we have a verse which, as it stands in 
 the Authorized Version, is bewildering, and scarcely 
 intelligible without a great deal of ekeing out — " because 
 thou hast made the Lord, which is my Refuge, even the 
 Most High, thy habitation." We get lost amidst the 
 " mys " and the " thys," but the Revised Version, 
 following the original, clears the matter up, for it reads 
 thus : " Thou, Lord, art my Refuge." There speaks 
 the first voice, coming in again with its " my," and then 
 the second voice once more responds : " Thou hast made 
 the Lord thy habitation, there shall no evil befall thee." 
 So twice we have the solitary profession of personal 
 faith, twice responded to by a stream of great assurances, 
 and these are finally confirmed and enlarged by the voice 
 of God Himself. 
 
 First, then, we have here 
 
 I. The Solitary Voice of Faith. 
 
 The words that I have read as my text, which stand 
 as the introduction to the psalm, are the expression in 
 the most general form of that great truth which it is 
 all intended to enforce and to illustrate. They are 
 chosen with exquisite beauty and fehcity: "He that 
 
 M.S. 11 
 
162 A SONG OF FAITH 
 
 dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High " — ^how- 
 high up that " secret place " must be ! how deep the 
 silence up there ! how pure the air ! How far above 
 the poisonous mists that cling to the low-lying swamps, 
 how far out of the reach of the arrows or shots of the foe- 
 man is he that dwelleth with God by communion, by 
 constancy of desire, by aspiration, and by clear recogni- 
 tion of the Divine goal of all his efforts in the midst of his 
 most strenuous and distracting work, and his most 
 crushing and exhausting sorrows ! "He that dwelleth " 
 thus, " in the secret place of the Most High, shall abide 
 under the shadow of the Almighty " — and since He is 
 Almighty, the long shadow that that great rock casts 
 will shelter him who keeps beneath it from the burning 
 rays of the fiery sunshine, in every " weary land." 
 The plain English of the highly imaginative words is, 
 Let me keep myself in touch with God, and I keep 
 myself master of all things, and secure from the evil 
 that is in evil. 
 
 That is the general truth, but religious commonplaces 
 lose their power by their generality, and in order to give 
 them force we must point them to a personal application. 
 So the Psalmist, encouraged by his contemplation of that 
 broad universal principle, takes it for his own, and 
 brings " I " and " my " into it, and that changes it from 
 a toothless, useless, threadbare commonplace, which a 
 man may have in his creed without its doing him one 
 morsel of good, into a living experience, " / will say 
 
A SONG OF FAITH 163 
 
 of the Lord, He is my Rock and my Fortress ; my God, 
 in Whom / will trust." Do we say that ? Have we 
 translated the universal into the particular ? Has the 
 contemplation of the most wide-stretching truth en- 
 couraged us to grasp it and make it our very own ? To 
 do so gives gloss to the threadbare, freshness to the trite 
 and familiar, beauty and force to the commonplace. 
 And there is no religion which is not the appropriation 
 to my very own self of the great truths that are meant 
 for the world. So much of Niagara as you turn into 
 your own sluice will irrigate your barren fields and slake 
 your thirst, and all the rest, as far as you are concerned, 
 is waste. It is useless to say, however solemnly, and 
 with however entire assent of the understanding, " he 
 that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall 
 abide under the shadow of the Almighty " — unless you 
 take the further step, and in your own needs and sorrows, 
 in your own hours of weakness and of stress when the 
 enemy is coming in like a flood, say " my Fortress, my 
 Strength, my God in Whom / will trust." 
 
 Next we come to 
 
 II. The Great Assurances Which Answer to This 
 Solitary Voice of Faith. 
 
 Whether the psalm was intended to be sung by any 
 kind of alternate responsive choir and solo voice or no, 
 we need not consider ; at all events, it is laid out in that 
 structure which I have already pointed out. So when 
 the single soul has brought itself up, by the effort of its 
 
164 A SONG OF FAITH 
 
 faith, to make God its Refuge and its Fortress, then 
 there come pouring in upon it, as if spoken from with- 
 out, but yet brought near to it and made audible for it 
 by its own personal faith, a whole host of great certain- 
 ties. 
 
 "Surely He shall deUver thee from the snare of the 
 fowler, and from the noisome pestilence." The " fow- 
 ler " is in other places of Scripture taken as a metaphor 
 for death ; and obviously the thing that was chiefly, if 
 not exclusively, in the psalmist's mind here, was the 
 assurance of protection from insidious threatening evils 
 that affected physical hfe. The " pestilence " and the 
 " fowler " stands for these. 
 
 Then there follows a beautiful description of the man- 
 ner and condition of that Divine protection : " He 
 shall cover thee with his feathers." That carries us 
 back to the old word about the eagle stirring up its nest, 
 and bearing its young upon its pinions, and suggests the 
 tenderness that is lodged in the might of that Divine 
 nature ; and how He, the loftiest, knows what it is to 
 have paternal care over them that put their trust in 
 Him. But we must not forget a yet more gracious 
 expansion of the word when, in the course of ages. One 
 caught up the echoes of the old, sweet metaphor, and 
 said: "As a hen gathereth her chickens under her 
 wings," so I would have gathered thee. Christ turned 
 away from the emblem of the fierce bird of prey, and, 
 with lowly love, took up the emblem of the harmless, 
 
A SONG OF FAITH 165 
 
 domestic fowl to express the warmth, the secm-ity, of 
 the relation of the loving servant to the Master-Lord. 
 
 But, further, we have to note that there is here, too, 
 the condition on which the shelter of that strong pinion 
 is ours. " He shall cover thee with His feathers," but 
 not unless " Under His wings shalt thou trust," or, as 
 the word had better be rendered in this connexion, 
 " Under His wings shalt thou flee for refuge." What 
 becomes of the chickens that are straying about the 
 barnyard, when kites are in the sky or the fox lurking 
 behind the wall ? They are snapped up. What be- 
 comes of the Christian man that strays out of the pro- 
 tection of the covering wing, and by self-will, or failure 
 of trust, or practical disobedience, or fixing the heart 
 and desire on earthly things, gets away from his Defence 
 and his Defender ? What becomes of him ? The snare 
 of the fowler is not spread in vain, and he is caught and 
 limed there. If you want to be guarded by Jesus, keep 
 your hearts and minds close to Jesus. Further, the 
 groimd of security is laid, not in our faith, but in his 
 faithfulness. " His truth " — that is to say, to use the 
 old word which expresses the idea much better, " His 
 troth — shall be thy shield and buckler." The ground 
 of our conscious security is laid in His faithfulness to all 
 His promises. 
 
 Now is all this true ? Is it true, as the psalmist goes 
 on to portray under the double figure of battle and pesti- 
 lence, that the man who thus trusts is saved from wide- 
 
166 A SONG OF FAITH 
 
 spread calamities, wMcli may be devastating the lives 
 of a community ? If we look on the sm-face it is not true. 
 Those that " dwell in the secret place of the Most High " 
 will die of an epidemic, cholera, or smallpox, like the men 
 beside them, that have no such abode. Our hearts 
 have often risen in protest against such promises as this 
 of my text, when those that have been " dwelling in the 
 secret place of the most High " have been stealthily 
 snared and swept away from us. But, for all that, 
 brethren, it is true ; it is true. For suppose two men, 
 one a Christian, another not, both of them suffering 
 from the same epidemic, both of them dying from it. 
 Yet the difference between the two is such as that we 
 may confidently say of the one, " He that belie veth 
 shall never die," and of the other that he has died. It 
 is irrelevant to talk about vaccination being a better 
 prophylactic than faith. No doubt this psalmist was 
 thinking mainly of physical life. No doubt, also, you 
 and I have better means of interpreting and understand- 
 ing Providence and its dealings, than he had, and for 
 us the belief that they who " dwell in the secret place of 
 the Most High " are immune from death, is possible 
 and imperative, after a fashion far nobler and better 
 than the psalmist could have dreamed. 
 
 I need point out to you how here, beautifully and 
 picturesquely, the two metaphors of battle and disease 
 are each parted into their two halves, one expressive of 
 open, and the other of secret, assaults — " the pestilence 
 
A SONG OF FAITH 167 
 
 that walketh in darkness " on the one hand, " the des- 
 truction that wasteth at noonday " on the other ; " the 
 terror by night," of nocturnal assaults upon a defence- 
 less camp, on the one hand, and " the arrow that flieth 
 by day," on the other. Only let us take this to heart, 
 that all manner of danger and assaults are included in 
 the promise, and though sense seems to say that the 
 promise is but as gossamer seen by moonlight, a beauti- 
 ful dream with no substance in it ; yet a deeper perception 
 of the reaHty of things tells us that to the hilt it is 
 fulfilled, and that they who dwell in God shall never 
 see death. 
 
 There follows, according to the rendering which I 
 have already given, the glad " Yes " of the solitary soul. 
 " For Thou, Lord, art my Refuge." That utterance 
 of faith is even more condensed than was the former. As 
 we have seen, the initial utterance of trust brought to 
 the psalmist's consciousness the great and glorious 
 promises of which I have been speaking. When they 
 come into his consciousness, then the office of his faith 
 is to grasp them. He has only the cheque, only the 
 draft ; but it is as good to him as buUion. " For," says 
 he — and note that " for " — " Thou, Lord, art my Re- 
 fuge." That is to say, he listens to all the preceding 
 promises, and smiles and says, " Yes, I know it is all 
 true ; because Thou art my Refuge." And when he 
 says that he is thinking both of God's character and of 
 his own faith. Thou art my Refuge in Thyself, and 
 
168 A SONG OF FAITH 
 
 because I have chosen Thee to be so. When there 
 come into our hearts and minds, in sequence to some 
 poor utterances of our faith, perhaps in an hour when 
 our hearts are very sore and our lives very dark, these 
 great assurances of a present God and an immortal life, 
 let us be sure that our faith further rises to grasp, and 
 say Amen to, them, rooting itself in the assurance of 
 what God is, and of what we have chosen Him to be. 
 Samuel Rutherford says that God's promises are like 
 the boughs of a tree bending over a river, for His half- 
 drowned children to lay hold of. Let us see that, when 
 they are suggested to our faith, our faith grasps them. 
 There follows a series of further promises, even 
 greater than those that have preceded. " There shall 
 no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh 
 thy dweUing," or, as it reads in the original " thy tent," 
 suggesting the nomad life. We have two houses ; a 
 vshifting tent, the frail structure of our earthly habita- 
 tion, and a " house not made with hands, eternal in the 
 heavens," which is God Himself. " Because thou hast 
 made the Most High thy habitation there shall no evil 
 . . . come nigh thy dwelling." If thou dwell in God 
 thou dwellest in safety. 
 
 Then there follow other promises which regard the 
 nomad, not as in his tent, but, as on the road ; promises 
 that he shall be kept in all his ways, promises that he 
 shall not only be kept in his ways, but that on angel's 
 hands he shall be lifted buoyant and safe over his diffi- 
 
A SONG OF FAITH 169 
 
 culties, and promises still greater than these, that in 
 his conflict he shall be victor, and " shall tread upon the 
 lion and the adder," There again we have the antithesis 
 of open and secret hostility. In these promises of 
 keeping in the active life, of buoying over difiiculties 
 and of victory over enemies, we have more than the 
 preceding promises of immunity from danger. We are 
 here on the verge of promises as to spiritual necessities 
 and conflicts, and are being assured that " he that dwell- 
 eth in the secret place of the Most High " may continue 
 there, and yet be trudging along the rough road of life ; 
 and that, if we thus combine the inward peace of com- 
 munion, and the effort of active life, we shall " be kept 
 in our ways," and upheld in our ways, and have victory 
 over the lurking foes that would wound our heel, and 
 the open enemies that would rend our life. 
 
 We must remember Old Testament conditions when 
 we read Old Testament promises, and we must apply 
 New Testament interpretations to Old Testament assur- 
 ances. When we read " there shall no evil befall thee," 
 and think of our own harassed, tempest-tossed, often 
 sorrowful lives, and broken, solitary hearts, we must 
 learn that the evil that educates is not evil, and that 
 the chastening of the Father's hand is good ; and that 
 nothing that brings a man nearer to God can be his 
 enemy. The poison is wiped off the arrow, though the 
 arrow may mercifully wound ; and the evil in the evil 
 is all dissipated. 
 
170 A SONG OF FAITH 
 
 Lastly, we have 
 
 III. A Deeper Voice Still. 
 coming in, confirming and enlarging all these promises. 
 
 I can but gather up these final utterances in a few 
 words. God Himself speaks, promising deliverance 
 consequent upon fixed love. " Because he hath set his 
 love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him." He is not 
 going to fail in response to the love of His child's heart. 
 As the word in the original suggests, when a poor man 
 presses himself close up against the Divine breast, as a 
 dog might against his master's limbs, or as one that 
 loves might clasp close to himself the beloved, then 
 God responds to the desire for close contact, and 
 through such contact He brings deliverance. 
 
 Further, that Divine Voice promises elevation con- 
 sequent on acquaintance with the Divine Character. 
 " I will set him on high " — ^high above all the weltering 
 flood of evil, that washes vainly round the base of the 
 clifE — " because he hath known My name." Loving 
 acquaintance with the revealed character of God lifts a 
 man above earth and all its ills. 
 
 Further, there is the promise of Divine companion- 
 ship consequent on sorrows. " I will be with him in 
 trouble." Some of us know what that means, how we 
 never got a glimpse of God until earth was dark, and 
 how when a devastating flood, as it seemed, came sweep- 
 ing over the fair gardens of our lives, we found, when it 
 had gone back, that it had left fertility such as we had 
 
A SONG OF FAITH 171 
 
 never before been capable of. Night brings the dark- 
 ness, and darkness brings the stars. Trouble rightly 
 borne brings God, and any flood that bears Him into 
 my soul, can be only a flood of blessing. 
 
 " With long life will I satisfy him, and show him My 
 salvation." Again I say, bring New Testament inter- 
 pretation to Old Testament promises, for the evolution 
 of God's revelation of His will makes it wise to interpret 
 the imperfect by the complete. " With long life will I 
 satisfy him," through the ages of eternity, and " show 
 him My salvation " in the glories of an immortal 
 Ufe. Brethren, let us keep the conditions. Let 
 us set our love on Him, know His will, call upon 
 Him and listen for His answer, dwell in the secret place 
 of the Most High, and He will fulfil His promises, then 
 no evil shall befall us, but our earthly life will be filled 
 with good, and wiU lead on to the more perfect mani- 
 festations of His saving power through the ages of eter- 
 nity. 
 
Forgiveness and Retribution 
 
 Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thou tookest 
 venegeance of their inventions. — Psalm xcix. 8. 
 
 WHEN the prophet Isaiah saw the great vision 
 which called him to service, he heard from the 
 lips of the seraphim around the Throne the threefold 
 ascription of praise : " Holy ! holy ! holy ! Lord God 
 of hosts." This psalm seems to be an echo of that 
 heavenly chorus, for it is divided into three sections, 
 each of which closes with the refrain, " He is holy," 
 and each of which sets forth some one aspect or out- 
 come of that Divine hoHness. In the first part the 
 holiness of His universal dominion is celebrated ; in 
 the second, the holiness of His revelations and provi- 
 dences to Israel, His inheritance ; in the third, the 
 holiness of His dealings with them that call upon His 
 name, both when He forgives their sins and when He 
 scourges for the sins that He has forgiven. 
 
 Two remarks of an expository character will pre- 
 pare th" way for what I have further to say. The first 
 is that the word "though ' in my text, which holds 
 
FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 173 
 
 together the two statements that it contains, is com- 
 mentary rather than translation. For the original 
 has the simple " and," and the difference between the 
 two renderings is this, that " though " impUes some 
 real or apparent contrariety between forgiveness and 
 taking vengeance, which makes their co-existence 
 remarkable, whereas " and " lays the two things down 
 side by side. The psalmist simply declares that they 
 are both there, and puts in no such fine distinction 
 as is represented by the words " though," or " but," 
 or " yet." To me it seems a great deal more eloquent 
 in its simplicity and reticence that he should say : 
 " Thou forgavest them and tookest vengeance," than 
 that he should say " Thou forgavest them though 
 Thou tookest vengeance." 
 
 Then there is another point to be noted, viz., we 
 must not import into that word " vengeance," when 
 it is applied to Divine actions, the notions which cluster 
 round it when it is applied to ours. For in its general 
 use it means retaliation, inflicted at the bidding of 
 personal enmity or passion. But there are no turbid 
 elements of that sort in God. His retribution is a 
 great deal more analogous to the unimpassioned, im- 
 personal action of public law than it is to the " wild 
 justice of revenge." When we speak of His " ven- 
 geance " we simply mean — unless we have dropped 
 into a degrading superstition — the just recompense 
 of reward which divinely dogs all sin. There is one 
 
174 FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 
 
 saying in Scripture which puts the whole matter in 
 its true light, " Vengeance is Mine ; I will repay," 
 saith the Lord ; the last clause of which interprets the 
 first. So, then, with these elucidations, we may perhaps 
 see a Httle more clearly the sequence of the psalmist's 
 thought here — God's forgiveness ; and, co-existing 
 with that, God's scourging of the sin which He for- 
 gives ; and both His forgiveness and the scourging, 
 the efflux and the manifestation of the Divine holiness. 
 Now just let us look at these thoughts. 
 
 Here we have 
 
 I. The Adoring Contemplation of the Divine 
 Forgiveness. 
 
 I suppose that is almost exclusively a thought due 
 to the historical revelation, through the ages, to Israel, 
 and crowned, as well as deepened, by the culmination 
 and perfecting of the eternal revelation of God in Jesus 
 Christ our Lord. I suppose the conception of a for- 
 giving God is the product of the Old and of the New 
 Testament. But familiar as the word is to us, and 
 although the thing that it means is embodied in the 
 creed of Christendom, " I beheve ... in the for- 
 giveness of sins," I think that a great many of us would 
 be somewhat put to it, if we were called upon to tell 
 definitely and clearly what we mean when we talk 
 about the forgiveness of sins. Many of us, prior to 
 thinking about the matter, would answer " the non- 
 infliction or remission of penalty." And I am far 
 
FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 175 
 
 from denying that that is an element in forgiveness, 
 although it is the lowest and the most external, in 
 both the Old Testament and the New Testament con- 
 ception of it. But we must rise a great deal higher 
 than that. We are entitled, by our Lord's teaching, 
 to parallel God's forgiveness and man's forgiveness ; 
 and so perhaps the best way to understand the perfect 
 type of forgiveness is to look at the imperfect types 
 which we see round us. What, then, do we mean by 
 human forgiveness ? It is seen in multitudes of cases 
 where there is no question at all of penalty. Two 
 men get alienated from one another. One of them 
 does something which the other thinks is a sin against 
 friendship or loyalty, and he who is sinned against 
 says, " I forgive you." That does not mean that he 
 does not inflict a penalty, because there is no penalty 
 in question. Forgiveness is not a matter of conduct, 
 then, primarily, but it is a matter of disposition, of 
 attitude ; or, to put it into a shorter word, it is a matter 
 of the heart, and even on the lower level of the human 
 type, we see that remission of penalty may be a part, 
 sometimes is and sometimes is not, but is always the 
 smallest part of it, and a derivative and secondary 
 result of something that went before. An unconscious 
 recognition of this attitude of mind and heart, as being 
 the essential thing in forgiveness, brings about an 
 instance of the process by which two words that origin- 
 ally mean substantially the same thing come to acquire 
 
176 FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 
 
 each its special shade of meaning. What I refer to 
 is this — when a judicial sentence on a criminal is re- 
 mitted, we never hear any one speak about the criminal 
 being " forgiven." We keep the word " pardon," in 
 our daily conventional intercourse, for slight offences 
 or for the judicial remission of a sentence. The King 
 pardons a criminal ; you never hear about the King 
 " forgiving " a criminal. And that, as I take it, is 
 just because people have been groping after the thought 
 that I am trying to bring out, viz., that the remission 
 of penalty is one thing, and purging the heart of all 
 aUenation and hatred is another ; and that the latter 
 is forgiveness, whilst the former has to be content 
 with being pardon. 
 
 The highest type of forgiveness is the paternal. 
 Every one of us that remembers our childhood, and 
 every one of us who has had children of his own, knows 
 what paternal forgiveness is. It is not when you put 
 away the rod that the little face brightens again and 
 the tears cease to flow, but it is when your face clears, 
 and the child knows that there is no cloud between 
 it and the father, or still more the mother, that for- 
 giveness is realized. The immediate effect of our 
 transgressions is that we, as it were, thereby drop a 
 great, black rock into the stream of the Divine love, 
 and the channel is barred by our action ; and God's 
 forgiveness is when, as was the case in another fashion 
 in the Deluge, the floods rise above the tops of the 
 
FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 177 
 
 highest hills ; and as the good old hymn that has 
 gone out of fashion nowadays, says, over sins: 
 
 "... Like the mountains for their size, 
 The seas of sovereign grace arise. ..." 
 
 When the love of God flows over the black rock, as the 
 incoming tide does over some jagged reef, then, and 
 not merely when the rod is put on the shelf, is for- 
 giveness bestowed and received. 
 
 But, as I have said, the remission of penalty is an 
 element in forgiveness. Some people say : " It is 
 a very dangerous thing, in the interests of Christian 
 truth, to treat that relation of a loving Father as if 
 it expressed all that God is to men." Quite so ; God 
 is King as well as Father. There are analogies, both 
 in paternal and regal government, which help us to 
 understand the Divine dealings with us ; though, of 
 course, in regard to both we must always remember 
 that the analogies are remote and not to be pressed 
 too far. But even in recognizing the fact that an 
 integral part of forgiveness is remission of penalty, 
 we come back, by another path, to the same point, 
 that the essence of forgiveness is the uninterrupted 
 flow of love. Remission of penalty ; — yes, by all 
 means. But then .the question comes, what is the 
 penalty of sin ? And I suppose that the deepest 
 answer to that is, separation from God. But if the 
 true New Testament conception of the penalty of 
 
 M.S. 12 
 
178 FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 
 
 sin is the eternal death which is the result of the rend- 
 ing of a man away from the Som^ce of life, then the 
 remission of the penalty is precisely identical with 
 the uninterrupted flow of the Divine love. The mists 
 of autumnal mornings drape the sky in gloom, and 
 turn the blessed sun itself into a lurid ball of fire. Sweep 
 away the mists, and its rays again pour out beneficence. 
 The man that sins, piles up, as it were, a cloud-bank 
 between himself and God, and forgiveness, which is 
 the remission of the penalty, is the sweeping away 
 of the cloud-bank, and the pouring out of sunshine 
 upon a darkened heart. So, brethren, the essence 
 of forgiveness is that God shall love me all the same, 
 though I sin against Him. 
 
 But now turn, in the next place, to 
 
 II. God's Scourging of the Sin which He 
 Forgives. 
 
 Look, at the instances in our psalm, "Moses and 
 Aaron among His priests. . . . They called upon 
 the Lord and He answered them. Thou wast a God 
 that forgavest them, and Thou tookest vengeance 
 of their doings." Moses dies on Pisgah, Aaron is 
 stripped of his priestly robes by his brother's hand, 
 and left alone amongst the clouds and the eagles, on 
 the solitary summit of the mountain, and yet Moses 
 and Aaron knew themselves forgiven the sins for 
 which they died those lonely deaths. And these are 
 but instances of what is universally true, that the sin 
 
FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 179 
 
 which is pardoned is also " avenged," in the sense of 
 having retribution dealt out to it. 
 
 I need not dwell upon this at any length, but let 
 me just remind you how there are two provinces of 
 human experience in which this is abundantly true : 
 one, that of outward consequences, and another that of 
 inward consequences. Take, for instance, two men, 
 boon companions, who together have wasted their sub- 
 stance in riotous Hving. One of them is converted, 
 as we call it, becomes a Christian, knows himself for- 
 given. The other one is not. Is the one less certain 
 to have a corrugated liver than the other ? Will the 
 disease, the pauperism, the ruined position in life, the 
 loss of reputation, be any different in the cases of the 
 man who is pardoned and of the man who is not ? 
 No, the two will suffer in a similar fashion, and the 
 different attitude that the one has to the Divine love 
 from that which the other has, will not make a hair 
 of difference as to the results that follow. The conse- 
 quences are none the less Divine retribution because 
 they are the result of natural laws, and none the less 
 penal because they are automatically inflicted. 
 
 There is another department in which we see the 
 same law working, and that is the inward consequences. 
 A man does change his attitude to his former sins, 
 when he knows that he is pardoned ; but the results 
 of these sins will follow all the same, whether he is 
 forgiven or not. Memory will be tarnished, habits 
 
180 FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 
 
 will be formed and chain a man, capacities will be 
 forfeited, weaknesses will ensue. The wounds may be 
 healed, but the scars will remain, and when we con- 
 sider how certainly, and, as I said, divinely, such issues 
 dog all manner of transgression, we can understand 
 what the Psalmist meant when, not thinking about 
 a future retribution, but about the present life's ex- 
 periences, he said, " Thou wast a God that forgavest 
 them, and Thou tookest vengeance of their inven- 
 tions." " The sluggard will not plough by reason 
 of the cold, therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have 
 n thing," and that will be his case whether he is for- 
 given, or not forgiven, by the Divine love. 
 
 So, dear friends, do not let us confound the two 
 things which are so widely separated, the flow of the 
 Divine love to us irrespective of our sins, which is 
 the true forgiveness, and the remission of the penalty, 
 the infliction of which may itself be a part of forgive- 
 ness. " Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
 reap," and he will reap it whether he has sown darnel 
 and tares an 1 poisonous seeds, of which he is now 
 ashamed, and for which he has received forgiveness, 
 or whether he has not asked nor received it. 
 
 Only remember that, if we humbly reahze the great 
 fact that God has forgiven us, we can, as they say, 
 " take our punishment " in an altogether different 
 spirit and temper, and it comes to be, not judicial 
 penalty, but paternal chastisement, the token of love, 
 
FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 181 
 
 and of which we can say that " we are judged of the 
 Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world." 
 
 Lastly, my text leads us to think of — 
 
 III. Forgiveness and Scourging as Both Issues 
 OF Holy Love. 
 
 Some people, in their narrow and altogether external 
 view of Christianity, would divide between the two, 
 and say forgiveness comes from God' s love, and scourg- 
 ing comes from His hohness. But this psalm puts the 
 two together, just as we must put together as insepar- 
 able from each other the two conceptions of hohness 
 and of love. Now our modern notions of what is 
 meant by the love of God are a great deal too senti- 
 mental and gushing and limp. Love is degraded 
 unless there be hohness in it. It becomes immoral 
 good nature, much more than anything that deserves 
 the name of love. A God Who is all love, so much 
 so that it makes no difference to Him whether a man 
 is a saint or a sinner, is not a God to be worshipped, 
 and scarcely a God to be admired. He is lower than 
 we, not higher. But His holy love is like a sea of 
 glass mingled with fire ; the love being shot all through, 
 as it were, with streams of flame. 
 
 This holy Love underHes the forgiveness of sins. 
 To forgive may sometimes be profoundly right; it 
 may sometimes be profoundly immoral. A general 
 gaol delivery simply sets the scoundrels free ; a uni- 
 versal amnesty is a failure of justice, and a very doubtful 
 
182 FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 
 
 benefit. But the forgiveness, which is the issue of 
 holy love, is a means to an end, and the end which it 
 has in view is that, drawn by answering love to a par- 
 doning God, we may be drawn from the sins which 
 alienate us from Him. There is no such sure way 
 of making a man forsake his sins as to give him the 
 assurance that God has forgiven them. " Thou shalt 
 be ashamed and confounded, and never open thy 
 mouth any more, because of thy sins, when " — I smite ? 
 no — " I am pacified towards thee for all that thou hast 
 done." " Thou wast a God that forgavest them," 
 and in the very act of forgiveness, didst draw them 
 from their sins. 
 
 That holy love, in like manner, underlies retribution. 
 I have been speaking of that retribution mainly as 
 it is seen by the working of natural law. It is none the 
 less God's act, because it is the operation of the laws 
 which He impressed upon His creation at the begin- 
 ning. You have weaving machines in your mills that 
 whenever a thread breaks, stop dead. Is it the machine 
 or the maker that is to get the credit of that ? God 
 has set us in an order of things wherein, and has given 
 us a nature whereby, automatically, every sin, as it 
 were, stops the loom, and "every transgression and 
 disobedience receives its just recompense of reward." 
 But men sometimes say " that is Nature ; that is not 
 God." God lies at the back of Nature, and works 
 through Nature. Although Nature is not God, God 
 
FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION 183 
 
 is Nature. Therefore, it is " Thou " that " takest 
 vengeance of their inventions." Let us, then, re- 
 member that retribution is a token of love, meant to 
 drive us from our sins, just as forgiveness is meant 
 to draw us from them. Our Psalmist had come the 
 length of putting these two things together, forgive- 
 ness and retribution. We have reached further, and 
 here is the New Testament enlargement and deepen- 
 ing and explanation of the Old Testament thought : 
 " If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to 
 forgive us our sins," and, in the very act, " to cleanse 
 us from all unrighteousness." " If any man sin, we 
 have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the 
 Righteous." 
 
Saints, Believers, Brethren 
 
 . . . The saints and faithful brethren in Christ. — Col. i. 2. 
 
 " 'T^HE disciples were called Christians first in 
 -L Antioch," says the Acts of the Apostles. It 
 was a name given by outsiders, and like most of the 
 instances where a sect, or school, or party is labelled 
 with the name of its fomider, it was given in scorn. It 
 hit, and yet missed, its mark. The early believers were 
 Christians, that is, Christ's men, but they were not 
 merely a group of followers of a man, like many other 
 groups of whom the Empire at that time was full. So 
 they never used that name themselves. It occurs 
 twice only in Scripture, once when King Agrippa was 
 immensely amused at the audacity of Paul in thinking 
 that he would easily make " a Christian " of him ; 
 and once when Peter speaks of " suffering as a Chris- 
 tian," where he is evidently quoting, as it were, the 
 indictment on which the early believers were tried and 
 punished. What did they call themselves then ? 
 
SAINTS. BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 185 
 
 I have chosen this text not for the purpose of speak- 
 ing about it only, but because it gathers together in 
 brief compass the three principal designations by which 
 the early beUevers knew themselves. " Saints " — that 
 tells their relation to God, as well as their character, 
 for it means " consecrated," set apart for Him, and 
 therefore pure; "faithful" — that means "full of 
 faith " and is substantially equivalent to the usual 
 " behevers," which defines their relation to Jesus 
 Christ as the Revealer of God ; " brethren " — that 
 defines their relation and sentiment towards their 
 fellows. These terms go a great deal deeper than the 
 nickname which the wits of Antioch invented. The 
 members of the Church were not content with the 
 vague " Christian," but they called themselves " saints," 
 " behevers," " brethren." One designation does not 
 appear here, which we must take into account for 
 completeness : the earliest of all — disciples. Now, I 
 purpose to bring together these four names, by which 
 the early behevers thought and spoke of themselves, in 
 order to point the lessons as to our position and our 
 duty, which are wrapped up in them. And I may just 
 say that, perhaps, it is no sign of advance that the 
 church, as years rolled on, accepted the world's name 
 for itself, and that people found it easier to call them- 
 selves " Christians " — which did not mean very much 
 — than to call themselves " saints " or " believers." 
 
 Now then, to begin with, 
 
186 SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 
 
 I. They Were " Disciples " First of All 
 The facts as to the use of that name are very plain, 
 and as instructive as they are plain. It is a standing 
 designation in the Gospels, both in the mouths of friends 
 and of outsiders ; it is sometimes, though very sparingly, 
 employed by Jesus Christ Himself. It persists on 
 through the book of the Acts of the Apostles, and then 
 it stops dead, and we never hear it again. 
 
 Now its existence at first, and its entire abandon- 
 ment afterwards, both seem to me to carry very valuable 
 lessons. Let me try to work them out. Of course, 
 " disciple " or " scholar " has for its correlative — as the 
 logicians call it — " teacher." And so we find that as 
 the original adherents of Jesus called themselves 
 " disciples," they addressed Him as " Master," which 
 is the equivalent of " Rabbi." That at once suggests 
 the thought that to themselves, and to the people that 
 saw the origination of the little Christian community, 
 the Lord and His handful of followers seemed just to be 
 like John and his disciples, the Pharisees and their 
 disciples, and many another Rabbi and his knot of 
 admiring adherents. Therefore whilst the name was 
 in one view fitting, it was conspicuously inadequate, 
 and as time went on, and the Church became more 
 conscious of the uniqueness of the bond that knit it to 
 Jesus Christ, it instinctively dropped the name 
 " disciple," and substituted others more intimate and 
 worthy; 
 
SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 187 
 
 But yet it remains permanently true, that Christ's 
 followers are Christ's scholars, and that He is their 
 Rabbi and Teacher. Only the peculiarity, the absolute 
 uniqueness, of His attitude and action as a Teacher 
 lies in two things : one, that His main subject was Him- 
 self, as He_said, " I am the Truth," and consequently 
 His characteristic demand from His scholars was not, 
 as with other teachers, " Accept this, that, or the other 
 doctrine which I propound," but " Believe in Me " ; 
 and the other, that He seldom if ever argues, or draws 
 conclusions from previous premises, that He never 
 speaks as if He Himself had learnt and fought His way 
 to what He is saying, or betrays uncertainty, limitation, 
 or growth in His opinions, and that for all confirmation 
 of His declarations. He appeals only to the light within 
 and to His own authority : " Verily, verily, I say unto 
 you." No wonder that the common people were 
 astonished at His teaching, and felt that there was an 
 authority in it which the wearisome citations of what 
 Rabbi So-and-So had said, altogether lacked. 
 
 That teaching abides still, and, as I beUeve, opens 
 out into, and is our source of, all that we know — in 
 distinction and contrast from, " imagine," " hope," 
 " fear " — of God, and of ourselves, and of the future. 
 It casts the clearest Hght on morals for the individual 
 and on poUtics for the community. Whatever men may 
 say about Christianity being effete, it will not be effete 
 till the world has leamt and absorbed the teaching oi 
 
188 SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 
 
 Jesus Christ; and we are a good long way from that 
 yet! 
 
 If He is thus the Teacher, the perpetual Teacher, 
 and the only Teacher, of mankind in regard to all these 
 high things about God and man and the relation be- 
 tween them, about life and death and the world, and 
 about the practice and conduct of the individual 
 and of the community, then we, if we are His disciples, 
 build houses on the rock, in the degree in which we 
 not only hear but do the things that He commands. 
 For this Teacher is no theoretical handler of abstract 
 propositions, but the authoritative imposer of the law 
 of life, and all His words have a direct bearing upon 
 conduct. Therefore it is vain for us to say : " Lord, 
 Lord, Thou hast taught in our streets and we have 
 accepted Thy teaching." He looks down upon us from 
 the Throne, as He looked upon the disciples in that 
 upper room, and He says to each of us : "If ye know 
 these things, happy are ye if ye do them." 
 
 But the complete disappearance of the name as the 
 development of the Church advanced, brings with it 
 another lesson, and that is, that precious and great as 
 are the gifts which Jesus Christ bestows as a Teacher, 
 and unique as His act and attitude in that respect are, 
 the name either of teacher or of disciple fails altogether 
 to penetrate to the essence of the relation which knits 
 us together. It is not enough for our needs that we 
 shall be taught. The worst man in the world knows a 
 
SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 189 
 
 far nobler morality than the best man practices. And 
 if it were true, as some people superficially say is 
 the case, that evil-doing is the result of ignorance, 
 there would be far less evil-doing in the world than, 
 alas ! there is. It is not for the want of knowing, 
 that we go wrong, as our consciences tell us ; but it 
 is for want of something that can conquer the evil 
 tendencies Avithin, and lift off the burden of a sinful past 
 which weighs on us. As in the carboniferous strata 
 what was pUant vegetation has become heavy mineral, 
 our evil deeds he heavy on our souls. What we need 
 is not to be told what we ought to be, but to be enabled 
 to be it. Electricity can hght the road, and it can drive 
 the car along it ; and that is what we want, a dynamic 
 as weU as an illuminant, something that will make us 
 able to do and to be what conscience has told us we 
 ought to be and do. 
 
 Teacher? Yes. But if only teacher, then He is 
 nothing more than one of a multitude who in all genera- 
 tions have vainly witnessed to sinful men of the better 
 path. There is no reformation for the individual, and 
 little hope for humanity, in a Christ whom you degrade 
 to the level of a Rabbi, or in a Church which has not 
 pressed nearer to Him than to feel itself His disciples. 
 There was a man who came to Jesus by night, and 
 was in the dark about the Jesus to Whom he came, 
 and he said, " We know that Thou art a Teacher come 
 from God." But Jesus did not accept the witness, 
 
190 SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 
 
 though a young teacher fighting for recognition might 
 have been glad to get it from an authoritative member 
 of the Sanhedrim. But He answered, "Except a man 
 be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God." If 
 we need to be born again before we see it, it is not 
 teachers of it that will serve our turn, but One Who 
 takes us by the hand, and translates us out of the 
 tyranny of the darkness into the Kingdom of the Son 
 of God's love. So much, then, for the first of these 
 names and its lessons. 
 
 Now turn to the second — 
 
 II. The Disciples must be Believers. 
 
 That name begins to appear almost immediately 
 after Pentecost, and continues throughout. It comes 
 in two forms, one which is in my text, " the faithful," 
 meaning thereby not the reliable, but the people that 
 are fuU of faith ; the other, meaning the same thing, 
 they who beheve, the " believers." The Church found 
 that " disciple " was not enough. It went deeper ; 
 and, with a true instinct, laid hold of the unique bond 
 which knits men to their Lord and Saviour. That name 
 indicates that Jesus Christ appears to the man who has 
 faith in a new character. He is not any longer the 
 Teacher who is to be listened to, but He is the Object 
 of trust. And that implies the recognition, first, of His 
 Divinity, which alone is strong enough to bear up the 
 weight of millions of souls leaning hard upon it ; and, 
 second, of what He has done and not merely of what 
 
SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 191 
 
 He has said. We accept the Teacher's word ; we trust 
 the Saviour's Cross. And in the measure in which men 
 learned that the centre of the work of the Rabbi Jesus 
 was the death of the Incarnate Son of God, their 
 docility was sublimed into faith. 
 
 That faith is the real bond that knits men to Jesus 
 Christ. We are united to Him, and become recipient 
 of the gifts that He has to bestow, by no sacraments, 
 by no externals, by no reverential admiration of His 
 supreme wisdom and perfect beauty of character, not 
 by assuming the attitude of the disciple, but by flinging 
 our whole selves upon Him, because He is our Saviour. 
 That unites us to Jesus Christ ; nothing else does. 
 Faith is the opening of the heart, by which all His 
 power can be poured into us. It is the grasping of His 
 hand, by which, even though the cold waters be above 
 our knees and be rising to our hearts, we are Ufted above 
 them and they are made a solid pavement for our feet. 
 Faith is the door opened by ourselves, and through 
 which will come all the Glory that dwelt between the 
 cherubim, and will fill the secret place in our hearts. 
 To be the disciple of a Rabbi is something ; to be the 
 " faithful " dependent on the Saviour is to be His indeed. 
 
 And then there is to be remembered, further, that 
 this bond, which is the only vital link between a man 
 and Christ, is therefore the basis of all virtue, of all 
 nobihty, of all beauty of conduct, and that " whatsoever 
 things are lovely and of good report " are its natural 
 
192 SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 
 
 efflorescence and fruit. And so that leads us to the third 
 point — 
 
 III. The Believing Disciple is a " Saint." 
 
 That name does not appear in the Gospels, but it 
 begins to show in the Acts of the Apostles, and it becomes 
 extremely common throughout the Epistles of Paul. 
 He had no hesitation in calling the very imperfect 
 disciples in Corinth by this great name. He was going 
 to rebuke them for some very grave offences, not only 
 against Christian elevation of conduct, but against 
 common pagan morality ; but he began by calling them 
 " saints." 
 
 What is a saint ? First and foremost, a man who has 
 given himself to God, and is consecrated thereby. 
 Whoever has cast himself on Christ, and has taken 
 Christ for his, therein and in the same degree as he is 
 exercising faith, has thus yielded himself to God. If 
 your faith has not led you to such a consecration of 
 will and heart and self, you had better look out and 
 see whether it is faith at all. But then, because faith 
 involves the consecration of a man to God, and con- 
 secration necessarily implies purity, since nothing can 
 be laid on God's altar which is not sanctified thereby, 
 the name of saint comes to imply purity of character. 
 Sanctity is the Christian word which means the very 
 flower and fragrant aroma of what the world calls 
 virtue. 
 
 But sanctity is not emotion. A man may luxuriate 
 
SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 193 
 
 in devout feeling, and sing and praise and pray, and be 
 very far from being a saint ; and there is a great deal of 
 the emotional Christianity of this day which has a 
 strange affinity for the opposite of saintship. Sanctity 
 is not aloofness. " There were saints in Caesar's house- 
 hold " — a very unlikely place ; they were flowers on a 
 dunghill, and perhaps their blossoms were all the 
 brighter because of what they grew on, and which they 
 could transmute from corruption into beauty. So 
 sanctity is no blue ribbon of the Christian profession, 
 to be given to a few select (and mostly ascetic) speci- 
 mens of consecration, but it is the designation of each 
 of us, if we are disciples who are more than disciples, 
 that is, " behevers." And thus, brethren, we have to 
 see to it that, in our own cases, our faith leads to sur- 
 render, and our self-surrender to purity of Ufe and 
 conduct. Faith, if real, brings sanctity ; sanctity, if 
 real, is progressive. Sanctity, though imperfect, may 
 be real. 
 IV. The Believing Saints are " Brethren." 
 That is the name that predominates over all others 
 in the later portions of the New Testament, and it is 
 very natural that it should do so. It reposes upon and 
 impUes the three preceding. Its rapid adoption and 
 universal use express touchingly the wonder of the 
 early Church at its own unity. The then world was 
 rent asunder by deep clefts of misunderstanding, ahena- 
 tion, animosity, racial divisions of Jew and Greek, 
 
 M.S. 13 
 
194 SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 
 
 Parthian, Scythian ; by sexual divisions which flung 
 men and women, who ought to have been linked hand 
 in hand, and imited heart to heart, to opposite sides of a 
 great gulf ; by divisions of culture which made wise 
 men look down on the unlearned, and the unlearned hate 
 the wise men ; by clefts of social position, and mainly 
 that diabolical one of slave and free. All these divisive 
 and disintegrating forces were in active operation. The 
 only thing except Christianity, which produced even a 
 semblance of union, was the iron ring of the Roman 
 power which compressed them all into one indeed, but 
 crushed the life out of them in the process. Into that 
 disintegrating world, full of mutual repulsion, came 
 One Who drew men to Himself and said, " One is your 
 Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren." And to 
 their own astonishment, male and female, Greek and 
 Jew, bond and free, philosopher and fool, found them- 
 selves sitting at the same table as members of one 
 family ; and they looked in each other's eyes and said, 
 " Brother ! " There had never been anything hke it 
 in the world. The name is a memorial of the unifying 
 power of the Christian faith. 
 
 And it is a reminder to us of our own shortcomings. 
 Of course, in the early days, the little band were driven 
 together, as sheep that stray over a pasture in the sun- 
 shine will huddle into a corner in a storm, or when the 
 wolves are threatening. There are many reasons to- 
 day which make less criminal the ahenation from one 
 
SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 195 
 
 another of Christian communities and Christian indi- 
 viduals. I am not going to dwell on the evident signs 
 in this day, for which God be thanked, that Christian 
 men are beginning, more than they once did, to realize 
 their unity in Jesus Christ, and to be content to think 
 less of the things that separate than of the far greater 
 things that unite. But I would lay upon your hearts, 
 as individual parts of that great whole, this, that what- 
 ever may be the differences in culture, outlook, social 
 position, or the like, between two Christian men, they 
 each, the rich man and the poor, the educated man and 
 the unlettered one, the master and the servant, ought 
 to feel that deep down in their true selves they are 
 nearer one another than they are to the men who, 
 differing from them in regard to their faith in Jesus 
 Christ, are Hke them in all these superficial respects. 
 Regulate your conduct by that thought. 
 
 That name, too, speaks to us of the source from which 
 Christian brotherhood has come. We are brethren of 
 each other because we have one Father, even God, and 
 the Fatherhood which makes us brethren is not that 
 which commimicates the common life of humanity, but 
 that which imparts the new life of sonship through 
 Jesus Christ, So the name points to the only way by 
 which the world's dream of a universal brotherhood 
 can ever be fulfilled. If there is to be fraternity there 
 must be fatherhood, and the life which, possessed by 
 each, makes a family of all, is the life which He gives, 
 
196 SAINTS, BELIEVERS, BRETHREN 
 
 who is " the firstborn among many brethren," and 
 who, to them who beheve on Him, gives power to 
 become the sons of God, and the brethren of all the 
 other sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty. 
 
 So, dear friends, take these names, ponder their 
 significance and the duties they impose. Let us make 
 sure that they are true of us. Do not be content with the 
 vague, often unmeaning name of Christian, but fill it 
 with meaning by being a believer on Christ, a saint 
 devoted to God, and a brother of all who. " by like 
 precious faith," have become Sons of God. 
 
Prudence and Faith 
 
 And Amaziah said to the man of God, But what shall we do for 
 the hundred talents which I have given to the army of Israel ? And 
 the man of God answered. The Lord is able to give thee much more 
 than this. — 2 Chron. xxv. 9. 
 
 THE character of this Amaziah, one of the Kings of 
 Judah, is summed up by the chronicler in a 
 damning epigram : " He did that which was right in the 
 sight of the Lord, but not with a perfect heart." He 
 was one of your half-and-half people, or, as Hosea says, 
 " a cake not turned," burnt black on one side, and raw 
 dough on the other. So when he came to the throne, 
 in the buoyancy and insolence of youth, he immediately 
 began to aim at conquests in the neighbouring httle 
 states ; and in order to strengthen himself he hired " a 
 hundred thousand mighty men of valour " out of Israel 
 for a hundred talents of silver. To seek help from 
 Israel was, in a prophet's eyes, equivalent to flinging off 
 help from God. So a man of God comes to him, and 
 warns him that the Lord is not with Israel, and that the 
 alliance is not permissible for him. But, instead of 
 yielding to the prophet's advice, he parries it with this 
 
198 PRUDENCE AND FAITH 
 
 misplaced question, " But what shall we do for the 
 hundred talents that I have given to the army of Israel ? " 
 He does not care to ask whether the counsel that he is 
 getting is right or wrong, or whether what he is intending 
 to do is in conformity with, or opposition to, the will of 
 God, but, passing by all such questions, at once he 
 fastens on the lower consideration of expediency — 
 " What is to become of me if I do as the prophet would 
 have me do ? What a heavy loss one hundred talents 
 will be ! It is too much to sacrifice to a scruple of that 
 sort. It cannot be done." 
 
 A great many of us may take a lesson from this man. 
 There are two things in my text — a misplaced question 
 and a triumphant answer : " What shall we do for the 
 hundred talents ? " ; " The Lord is able to give thee 
 much more than this." Now, remarkably enough, both 
 question and answer may be either very right or very 
 wrong, according as they are taken, and I purpose to 
 look at those two aspects of each. 
 
 I. A Misplaced Question. 
 
 I call it misplaced because Amaziah's fault, and the 
 fault of a great many of us, was, not that he took conse- 
 quences into accoimt, but that he took them into 
 account at the wrong time. The question should have 
 come second, not first. Amaziah's first business should 
 have been to see clearly what was duty ; and then, and 
 not till then, the next business should have been to 
 consider consequences. 
 
PRUDENCE AND FAITH 199 
 
 Consider the right place and way of putting this 
 question. Many of us make shipwTeck of our lives 
 because, with our eyes shut, we determine upon some 
 grand design, and fall under the condemnation of the 
 man that " began to build, and was not able to finish." 
 He drew a great plan of a stately mansion ; and then 
 found that he had neither money in the bank, nor stones 
 in his quarry, to finish it, and so it stood — a ruin. All 
 through our Lord's life He was engaged rather in re- 
 pressing volunteers than in sohciting recruits, and He 
 from time to time poured a douche of cold water upon 
 swiftly effervescing desires to go after Him. When the 
 multitudes followed Him, He turned and said to them, 
 " If you are counting on being My disciples, understand 
 what it means : take up the Cross and follow Me." When 
 an enthusiastic man, who had not looked consequences 
 in the face, came rushing to Him and said : " Lord, I 
 will follow thee whithersoever Thou goest," His answer 
 to him was another pull at the string of the shower 
 bath : " The Son of Man hath not where to lay His 
 head." When the two disciples came to Him and said : 
 " Grant that we may sit, the one on Thy right hand and 
 the other on Thy left, when Thou comest into Thy King- 
 dom," He said : " Are ye able to drink of the cup that 
 I drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I 
 am baptized withal ? " Look the facts in the face 
 before you make your election. Jesus Christ will enhst 
 no man imder false pretences. Recruiting sergeants 
 
200 PRUDENCE AND FAITH 
 
 tell country bumpkins or city louts wonderful stories 
 of what they will get if they take the shilUng and put on 
 the King's uniform ; but Jesus Christ does not recruit 
 His soldiers in that fashion. If a man does not open 
 his eyes to a clear vision of the consequences of his ac- 
 tions, his hfe will go to water in all directions. And 
 there is no region in which such clear insight into what 
 is going to follow upon my determinations and the part 
 that I take, is more necessary than in the Christian life. 
 It is just because in certain types of character, " the 
 word is received with joy," and springs up immediately, 
 that when "the sun is risen with a burning heat," — that 
 is, as Christ explains, when the pinch of difficulty comes 
 — "immediately they fall away," and all their grand 
 resolutions go to nothing. " Lightly come, lightly go." 
 Let us face the facts of what is involved, in the way of 
 sacrifice, surrender, loss, if we determine to be on Christ's 
 side ; and then, when the anticipated difi&culties come, 
 we shall neither be perplexed nor swept away, but be 
 able quietly to say, " I discounted it all beforehand ; I 
 knew it was coming." The storm catches the ship that 
 is carrying full sail and expecting nothing but light and 
 favourable breezes ; while the captain that looked into 
 the weather quarter and saw the black cloud beginning 
 to rise above the horizon, and took in his sails and made 
 his vessel snug and tight, rides out the gale. It is wisdom 
 that becomes a man, to ask this question, if first of all 
 he has asked, " What ought I to do ? " 
 
PRUDENCE AND FAITH 201 
 
 But we have here an instance of a right thing in a 
 wrong place. It was right to ask the question, but 
 wrong to ask it at that point. Amaziah thought nothing 
 about duty. There sprang up in his mind at once the 
 cowardly and ignoble thought : " I cannot afEord to do 
 what is right, because it will cost me a hundred talents," 
 and that was his sin. Consequences may be, must be, 
 faced in anticipation, or a man is a fool. He that allows 
 the clearest perception of disagreeable consequences, 
 such as pain, loss of ease, loss of reputation, loss of 
 money, or any other harmful results that may follow, to 
 frighten him out of the road that he knows he ought to 
 take, is a worse fool still, for he is a coward and recreant 
 to his own conscience. 
 
 We have to look into our own hearts for the most 
 solemn and pressing illustrations of this sin, and I dare- 
 say we all of us can remember clear duties that we have 
 neglected, because we did not like to face what would 
 come from them. A man in business will say, " I cannot 
 afEord to have such a high standard of morality ; I shall 
 be hopelessly run over in the race with my competitors 
 if I do not do as they do." Or he will say, " I durst 
 not take a stand as an out-and-out Christian ; I shall 
 lose connexions, I shall lose position. People will laugh 
 at me. What am I to do for the hundred talents ? " 
 
 But we can find the same thing in Churches. I do not 
 mean to enter upon controversial questions, but as an 
 instance, I may remind you that one great argument 
 
202 PRUDENCE AND FAITH 
 
 that our friends who believe in an EstabHshed Church 
 are always bringing forward, is just a modern form of 
 Amaziah's question, " What shall we do for the hundred 
 talents ? How could the Church be maintained, how 
 could its ministrations be continued, if its State-pro- 
 vided revenues were withdrawn or given up ? " But it 
 is not only Anglicans who put the consideration of the 
 consequences of obedience in the wrong place. All the 
 Churches are but too apt to let their eyes wander from 
 reading the plain precepts of the New Testament to 
 looking for the damaging results to be expected from 
 keeping them. Do we not sometimes hear, as answer 
 to would-be reformers, " We cannot afford to give up 
 this, that, or the other practice ? We should not be 
 able to hold our ground, unless we did so-and-so and 
 so-and-so." 
 
 But not only individuals or Churches are guilty in this 
 matter. The nation takes a leaf out of Amaziah's book, 
 and puts aside many plain duties, for no better reason 
 than that it would cost too much to do them. " What 
 is the use of talking about suppressing the liquor traffic 
 or housing the poor ? Think of the cost." The hundred 
 talents block the way and bribe the national conscience. 
 For instance, the opium traffic ; how is it defended ? 
 Some attempt is made to prove either that we did not 
 force it upon China, or that the talk about the evils of 
 opium is missionary fanaticism, but the sheet-anchor 
 is : " How are we ever to raise the Indian revenue if we 
 
PRUDENCE AND FAITH 203 
 
 give up the traffic ? " That is exactly Amaziah over 
 again, come from the dead, and resurrected in a very 
 ugly shape. 
 
 So national poUcy and Church action, and — what is 
 of far more importance to you and me than either the 
 one or the other — our own personal relation to Jesus 
 Christ and discipleship to Him, have been hampered, 
 and are being hampered, just by that persistent and 
 unworthy attitude of looking at the consequences of 
 doing plain duties, and permitting ourselves to be 
 frightened from the duties because the consequences 
 are unwelcome to us. 
 
 Prudence is all right, but when Prudence takes com- 
 mand and presimies to guide Conscience, then it is all 
 wrong. In some courts of law and in certain cases, 
 the judge has an assessor sitting beside him, an expert 
 about some of the questions that are involved. Con- 
 science is the judge. Prudence the assessor. But if the 
 assessor ventures up on the judgment seat, and begins 
 to give the decisions which it is not its business to give 
 — for its only business is to give advice — then the only 
 thing to do with the assessor is to teU him to hold his 
 tongue and let the judge speak. It is no answer to the 
 prophet's prohibition to say, " But what shall I do for 
 the hundred talents ? " A yet better answer than the 
 prophet gave Amaziah would have been, " Never mind 
 about the hundred talents ; do what is right, and leave 
 the rest to God." However, that was not the answer. 
 
204 PRUDENCE AND FAITH 
 
 II. The Triumphant Answer. 
 
 " The Lord is able to give thee much more than 
 these." Now, this answer, like the question, may be 
 right or wrong, according as it is taken. In what aspect 
 is it wrong ? In what sense is it not true ? I suppose 
 this prophet did not mean more than the imdeniable 
 truth that God was able to give Amaziah more than a 
 hundred talents. He was not thinking of the loftier 
 meanings which we necessarily, as Christian people, at 
 a later stage of Revelation, and with a clearer vision of 
 many things, attach to the words. He simply meant, " you 
 will very likely get more than the one hundred talents 
 that you have lost, if you do what pleases God." He was 
 speaking from the point of view of the Old Testament ; 
 though even in the Old Testament we have instances 
 enough that prosperity did not always attend righteous- 
 ness. In the Old Testament we find the Book of Job, 
 and the Book of Ecclesiastes, and many a psalm, all of 
 which were written in order to grapple with the question, 
 " How is it that God does not give the good man more 
 than the hundred talents that he has lost for the sake 
 of being good ? " It is not true, and it is a dreadful 
 mistake to suggest that it is true, that a man in this 
 world never loses by being a good, honest, consistent 
 Christian. He often does lose a great deal, as far as 
 this world is concerned ; and he has to make up his mind 
 to lose it, and it would be a very poor thing to say to 
 him, " Now, live like a Christian man, and if you are 
 
PRUDENCE AND FAITH 205 
 
 flinging away money or anything else because of your 
 Christianity, you "will get it back." No ; you will not, 
 in a good many cases. Sometimes you will, and some- 
 times you ^vill not. It does not matter whether you do 
 or do not. 
 
 But the sense in which the triumphant answer of the 
 prophet is true is a far higher one. " The Lord is able 
 to give thee much more than this," — what is " more " ? 
 A thousand talents ? No ; the " much more " that 
 Christianity has educated us to understand is meant in 
 the depths of such a promise as this is, first of all, 
 character. Every man that sacrifices anything to con- 
 victions of duty gains more than he loses thereby, be- 
 cause he gains in inward nobleness and strength, to say 
 nothing of the genial warmth of an approving conscience. 
 And whilst that is true in all regions of hfe, it is most 
 especially true in regard to sacrifices made from Chris- 
 tian principle. No matter how disastrous may be the 
 results externally, the inward results of faithfulness are 
 so much greater and sweeter and nobler than all the 
 external evil consequences that may follow, that it is 
 " good pohcy " for a man to beggar himself for Christ's 
 sake, for the sake of the durable riches — which our 
 Lord Himself expounds to be synonymous with right- 
 eousness — which will come thereby. He that wins 
 strength and Christlikeness of character by sacrificing 
 for Christ has won far more than he can ever lose. 
 
 He wins not only character, but a fuller capacity for 
 
206 PRUDENCE AND FAITH 
 
 a fuller possession of Jesus Christ Himself, and that is 
 infinitely more than anything that any man has ever 
 sacrificed for the sake of that dear Lord. Do you 
 remember when it was that there was granted to the 
 Apostle John the vision of the throned Christ, and he 
 felt laid upon him the touch of the vivifying hand from 
 Heaven ? It was " when I was in Patmos for the 
 Word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus." He lost 
 Ephesus ; he gained an open Heaven and a visible 
 Christ. Do you remember who it was that said, " I 
 have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them 
 but dung, that I may win Christ " ? It was a good 
 bargain, Paul ! The balance-sheet showed a heavy 
 balance to your credit. Debit, " all things ; " credit, 
 Christ. " The Lord is able to give thee much more than 
 this." 
 
 Remember the old prophecy : " For brass I will bring 
 gold ; and for iron, silver." The brass and the iron may 
 be worth something, but if we barter them away and 
 get instead gold and silver, we are gainers by the trans- 
 action. Fling out the ballast if you wish the balloon 
 to rise. Let the hundred talents go if you wish to get 
 the " more than this." And Hsten to the New Testa- 
 ment variation of this Old Testament promise, " If thou 
 wilt have treasure in heaven, go and seU aU that thou 
 hast, and follow Me" 
 
" Never in Bondage " 
 
 We . . . were never in bondage to any man. How sayest Thou 
 Ye shall be made free ? — Jows viii. 33. 
 
 "AT EVER in bondage to any man" ? Then what 
 i.^ about Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Sjrria ? Was 
 there not a Roman garrison looking down from 
 the castle into the very Temple comrts where this boastful 
 falsehood was uttered ? It required some hardihood 
 to say, " Never in bondage to any man," in the face of 
 such a history, and such a present. But was it not 
 just an instance of the strange power which we all have 
 and exercise, of ignoring disagreeable facts, and by 
 ingenious manipulation taking the wrinkles out of the 
 photograph ? The Jews were perhaps not misunder- 
 standing Jesus Christ quite so much as these words 
 may suggest. If He had been promising, as they chose 
 to assume, political and external liberty, I fancy they 
 would have risen to the bait a little more eagerly than 
 they did to His words. 
 
 But be that as it may, this strange answer of theirs 
 
208 "NEVER IN BONDAGE" 
 
 suggests that power of ignoring what we do not want to 
 see, not only in the way in which I have suggested, 
 but also in another. For if they had any inkling of 
 what Jesus meant by slavery and freedom, they, by 
 such words as these, put away from themselves the 
 thought that they were, in any deep and inward sense, 
 bondsmen, and that a message of liberty had any 
 apphcation to them. Ah, dear friends, there was a 
 great deal of human nature in these men, who thus put 
 up a screen between them and the penetrating words of 
 our Lord. Were they not doing just what many of us — 
 all of us to some extent — do : ignoring the facts of 
 their own necessities, of their own spiritual condition, 
 denying the plain lessons of experience ? Like them, 
 are not we too often refusing to look in the face the fact 
 that we all, apart from Him, are really in bondage ? 
 Because we do not realize the slavery, are we not 
 indifferent to the offer of freedom ? " We were never in 
 bondage " ; consequently we add, " How sayest Thou, 
 Ye shall be made free ? " So then, my text brings 
 us to think of three things : our bondage, our ignorance 
 of our bondage, our consequent indifference to Christ's 
 offer of liberty. Let me say a word or two about each 
 of these. 
 
 First as to — 
 
 I. Our Bondage. 
 
 Christ follows the vain boast in the text, with the 
 calm, grave, profound explanation of what He meant : 
 
"NEVER IN BONDAGE" 209 
 
 " Whoso committeth sin is the slave of sin." That is 
 true in two ways. By the act of sinning a man shows 
 that he is the slave of an alien power that has captured 
 him ; and in the act of sinning, he rivets the chains 
 and increases the tyranny. He is a slave, or he would 
 not obey sin. He is more than a slave because he has 
 again obeyed it. Now, do not let us run away with 
 the idea that when Jesus speaks of sin and its bondage, 
 He is thinking only, or mainly, of gross outrages and 
 contradictions of the plain law of morality and decency, 
 that He is thinking only of external acts which all 
 men brand as being wrong, or of those which law qualifies 
 as crimes. We have to go far deeper than that, and 
 into a far more inward region of life than that, before 
 we come to apprehend the inwardness and the depth of 
 the Christian conception of what sin is. We have 
 to bring the whole life close up against God, and then 
 to judge its deeds thereby. Therefore, though I know 
 I am speaking to a mass of respectable, law-abiding 
 people, very few of you having any knowledge of the 
 grosser and uglier forms of transgression, and I daresay 
 none of you having any experience of what it is to sin 
 against human law, though I do not charge you — God 
 forbid ! — with vices, and still less with crimes, I bring to 
 each man's conscience a far more searching word than 
 either of these two, when I say, " We all have sinned 
 and come short of the glory of God." This declara- 
 tion of the universahty and reality of the bondage 
 M s. 14 
 
210 "NEVER IN BONDAGE" 
 
 of sin is only the turning into plain words of a fact 
 which is of universal experience, though it may be of 
 a very much less universal consciousness. We may not 
 be aware of the fact, because, as I have to show you, we 
 do not direct our attention to it. But there it is ; 
 and the truth is that every man, however noble his 
 aspirations sometimes, however pure and high his 
 convictions, and however honest in the main may be 
 his attempts to do what is right, when he deals honestly 
 with himself, becomes more or less conscious of just that 
 experience which a great expert in soul analysis and 
 self-examination made : " I find a law " — an influence 
 working upon my heart with the inevitableness and 
 certainty of law — " that when I would do good, evil 
 is present with me." 
 
 We all know that, whether we regard it as we ought 
 or no. We all say Amen to that, when it is forced upon 
 our attention. There is something in us that thwarts 
 aspiration towards good, and inclines to evil. 
 
 "What will but felt the fleshly screen?" 
 
 And it is not only a screen. It not only prevents 
 us from rising as high as we would, but it sinks us so 
 low as to do deeds that something within us recoils 
 from and brands as evil. Jesus teaches us that he who 
 commits sin is the slave of sin ; that is to say, that an 
 alien power has captured and is coercing the wrong-doer. 
 
"NEVER IN BONDAGE" 211 
 
 That teaching does not destroy responsibility, but it 
 kindles hope. A foreign foe, who has invaded the land, 
 may be driven out of the land, and all his slaves set 
 free, if a stronger than he conies against him. Chris- 
 tianity is called gloomy and stern, because it preaches 
 the corruption of man's heart. Is it not a gospel 
 to draw a distinction between the evil that a man does, 
 and the self that a man may be ? Is it not better, 
 more hopeful, more of a true evangel, to say to a man, 
 " Sin dwelleth in you," than to say, " What is called sin 
 is only the necessary action of human nature." To 
 believe that their present condition is not slavery 
 makes men hopeless of ever gaining freedom, and the 
 true gospel of the emancipation of humanity rests on 
 the Christian doctrine of the bondage of sin. 
 
 Let me remind you that freedom consists not in the 
 absence of external constraints, but in the animal in us 
 being governed by the will, for when the flesh is free 
 the man is a slave. And it means that the will should be 
 governed by the conscience ; and it means that the con- 
 science should be governed by God. There are the stages. 
 Men are built in three stories, so to speak. Down at the 
 bottom, and to be kept there, are inclinations, passions, 
 lust, desires, which are all but blind aimings after their 
 appropriate satisfaction, without any question as to 
 whether the satisfaction is right or wrong ; and above 
 that a dominant will that is meant to control, and above 
 that a conscience. That is the pyramid ; and as by 
 
212 "NEVER IN BONDAGE" 
 
 the sunshine on the gilded top of some spire, the shining 
 apex, the conscience, is illumined when the light of 
 God falls upon it. And when a man is built in that 
 fashion, and keeps to that fashion, then, and only then, 
 is he free. 
 
 I need not remind you of how the metaphor of my text 
 receives its most tragical and yet most common illustra- 
 tion and confirmation in the awful fact of the power of 
 any evil thing, once thought or done by a man, to 
 reproduce itself, onwards and ever onwards. It is 
 a far commoner thing for a man never to have done 
 some given evil, never to have got drunk, never to have 
 stolen, or the like, than to have done it only once. I 
 have heard of a mysterious illness, in which at first 
 medical analysis detected with difficulty one single 
 bacterion in a great quantity of blood. But in a few 
 days, so had they multiphed that no drop could be 
 taken anywhere from the veins which was not full of 
 them. That is how men get under the slavery of any 
 evil thing ; and habit becomes stronger than anything 
 except that " strong Son of God, immortal Love," 
 whose Spirit can conquer even it. " Can the Ethiopian 
 change his skin, or the leopard his spots ? Then 
 may ye that are wont to do evil learn to do well." The 
 bondage is real and hard. 
 
 My text suggests to us that strange, sad fact — 
 
 II. Our Ignorance of Our Slavery. 
 
 " We were never in bondage to any man," said the 
 
"NEVER IN BONDAGE" 213 
 
 Jews. We are but too apt to repeat the empty boast, 
 and as they forgot Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar, 
 Antiochus and Caesar, we forget our failures, our faults, 
 our sins. We ignore them. Is not that, too, a plain 
 fact of experience ? A sadly large percentage of men 
 never have really opened their eyes to the undeniable 
 truth that sin has dominion over them. They go along 
 on the surface of things, keeping to the shallows of 
 human life, occupying themselves with their various 
 duties and enjoyments, and they never know, just 
 because they shut their eyes to facts, or rather turn 
 their eyes away from facts — what is their real condition 
 in God's sight. Some of my present hearers are, in 
 regard to this matter, what the old Puritans used to call 
 " Gospel-hardened." They have their hearts and 
 minds, I was going to say water-proofed, by repeated 
 application to them, as I am trying to apply them now, 
 of truths which but add one more film to the layers 
 between their hearts and the Gospel. Because they 
 are so familiar with the words of our message, they all 
 but lose the faculty of bringing its power into contact 
 with themselves. Oh ! if I could overcome that tendency 
 which there is in all regular church and chapel-goers to 
 make themselves comfortable in their corners, and 
 suppose that the man in the pulpit is saying what 
 he ought to say, and that they need not give much heed 
 to his message, because they have heard it all before — 
 if I could once get the sharp point of this great Christian 
 
214 "NEVER IN BONDAGE" 
 
 truth of our slavery under sin, through the manifold 
 layers with which your heart is encrusted, you would 
 find out the weight of a good many things that some 
 of you think very phantasmal and of little consequence. 
 There is nothing about us that is more remarkable 
 and more awful, when you come to think of it, than the 
 power that we have, by not attending to something, of 
 making that something practically non-existent. The 
 great search-lights, that they now have on battleships, 
 will fling a beam of terrible revealing power on one small 
 segment of the vast circle of the sea ; and all the rest, 
 though it may be filled with the enemy's fleet, will 
 be lying in darkness. So just because we cannot get 
 you to think of the facts of your slavery to sin, the facts 
 are non-existent as far as you are concerned. Let me 
 plead with you. Surely ! surely, it is not a thing worthy 
 of a man never to go down into the deep places of your 
 own hearts and see the ugly things that coil and wrestle 
 and swarm and multiply there ! Ezekiel was once 
 led to a place where, through a hole broken in the wall, 
 there was showed him an inner chamber, on the walls 
 of which were painted the hideous idols of the heathen. 
 And there, in the presence of the foul shapes, stood 
 venerable priests and official dignitaries of Israel, with 
 their censers in their hands, and their backs to the 
 oracle of God. There is a chamber hke that in all our 
 hearts ; and it would be a great deal better that we 
 should go down, through the hole in the wall, and see 
 
"NEVER IN BONDAGE" 215 
 
 it, than that we should live, as so many of us do, in 
 this fool's paradise of ignorance of our own sin. It 
 is because we will not attend to the facts that we ignore 
 the facts. The evils that we do, and that we cherish 
 undone in our hearts, are like the wreckers on some 
 stormy coast, that begin operations by taking the 
 tongue out of the bell that hangs on the buoy, and 
 putting out the Hght that beams from the beacon. 
 Sin chokes conscience ; and so the worse a man is, 
 the less he feels himself to be bad ; and while a saint 
 will be tortured with agonies of remorse for some slight 
 peccadillo, a brigand will add a murder or two to his 
 hst, and wipe his mouth and say, " I have done no 
 harm." We are ignorant of our sin because we bribe our 
 consciences, because we drug our consciences, because 
 we will not attend to the facts of our own spiritual 
 being. 
 
 That ignorance of our bondage is characteristic of the 
 tone of mind of this generation. Things have changed 
 in that respect, as in a great many others, since I was a 
 boy. I do not hear now, from people who desire to 
 unite themselves to Jesus Christ, the deep poignai»t 
 penitence and confession of sin that one used 
 to hear. I do not hear the facts of sin, its 
 gravity and universality, preached from pulpits in the 
 way it used to be. I notice in the ordinary, average man 
 a tendency to think more about environment and 
 heredity than about individual responsibility, and on 
 
216 " NEVER IN BONDAGE " 
 
 the whole a very much lowered sense of the depth and 
 the power and the universality of transgression. And 
 that is why, to a large extent, the Christianity of this 
 generation is so shallow a thing as it is. 
 
 That brings me, lastly, to say a word about — 
 
 III. The Consequent Indifference to Christ's 
 Offer of Freedom. 
 
 " How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free ? " Of 
 course, if they had no consciousness of bondage, there 
 was no attraction for them in a promise of freedom. 
 
 That remark opens out two thoughts, on which I 
 do not dwell. First, the ignoring of the fact of sin 
 which is so common amongst us all to-day, makes it 
 impossible to understand Christ and Christianity. 
 Brethren, that great Gospel, and that great Lord who 
 is the subject of the Gospel, have many other aspects 
 than this. But this is the central thought as to it and 
 Him, that it is the emancipation from sin, because He 
 is the Emancipator. " The spirit of the Lord is upon 
 Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach deliverance 
 to the captives." And wherever we find, as we do 
 find, in many quarters to-day, that the central fact of 
 Christianity, the Death for the sin of the world, is 
 deposed from its place, there the life-blood is ebbing out 
 of the Gospel. Historically, the beginning of almost 
 all heresies has been the under-estimate of the fact of 
 sin. As long as you dwell in the shallows of human 
 experience, a shallow Christianity and a shallow Christ 
 
"NEVER IN BONDAGE" 217 
 
 will be enough for you. But when once you get to 
 understand the depths of your own need, and the 
 depths of your brother's need, then nothing less than 
 the Christ that died to solve the problem, insoluble 
 else, of how to emancipate the soul and the world from 
 the tyranny of sin, will be enough for you. Once 
 " the waters of the great deep are broken up," and 
 the floods are out, there is nothing for it but the Ark. 
 It is not enough then to speak of a human Christ ; it 
 is not enough, when a man's conscience has been roused, 
 not to exaggeration, but to clear sight, of what he is — 
 it is not enough then to speak of an example Christ, 
 or of a teaching Christ. Ah ! we want more than that. 
 We want " that which first of all I delivered unto you, 
 how that Jesus Christ died for our sins, according to 
 the Scriptures." 
 
 And, brethren, just as the ignoring of the fact of sin 
 makes the understanding of Christ and His word im- 
 possible, so it makes real reception of Him for ourselves 
 impossible. Many men are brought near to Jesus by 
 other roads ; thank God for it ! There are a thousand 
 ways to the Cross, but it is the Cross that we must 
 clasp, if in any true sense we are to clasp Christ. And 
 there is all the difference betweeen the superficial, 
 partial, and easy-going profession of Christianity which 
 is so common amongst us to-day, and the Hfe and 
 death clutching and cUnging to Him which comes when, 
 and only when, a man feels that the tyrant whom he 
 
218 "NEVER IN BONDAGE" 
 
 served as a slave, is close behind him, and that his only 
 chance of freedom is to hold fast by the horns of the 
 altar of the Sanctuary, and to cleave to the Christ in 
 Whom, and in Whom alone, we are free indeed. 
 
What a Good Man is and How 
 he is Made 
 
 He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost, and of faith. 
 — Acts xi. 24. 
 
 WE know that Luke was a physician, for we are 
 told so in Scripture. There is also a probably 
 baseless tradition that he was a painter. However that 
 may be as regards brushes, he was a painter with his 
 pen, and had a keen eye and a deft hand to portray 
 character. Here, in three swift strokes, we have a 
 Ukeness of Barnabas. But Luke was a physician, too 
 —a surgeon— and my text is a dissection, if I may so 
 say, as well as a portrait. It begins with the surface 
 — " He was a good man " ; and then it cuts a little 
 deeper—" full of the Holy Ghost." That is why " he 
 was a good man." And then it goes deeper still — 
 " and of faith " ; and that is why he was full of the 
 Holy Ghost. One has sometimes seen anatomical 
 models, where one lifts ofi the top piece that represents 
 skin and flesh, and lays bare the deeper-seated organs. 
 Luke's analysis here is somewhat Uke these. It 
 
220 WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 
 
 gives a vertical section, that discloses the strata — not 
 only the grass, and the " light of laughing flowers " on 
 the surface, but the underlying soils which nourish 
 these. All that I wish to do is to stand by and note 
 the uncovering of these three successive layers : "a 
 good man," " full of the Holy Ghost," " full of faith." 
 
 We have — 
 
 I. The Christian Notion of a Good Man. 
 
 Amongst all the noble words that are prostituted by 
 common use, and vulgarized in unthinking lips, there 
 are few that are more prostituted and vulgarized than 
 that great phrase, " a good man." There is no better 
 proof of the general lowness of morality than the ease 
 with which that word is applied. You remember how 
 our Lord once had occasion to rebuke a man who used 
 it, as we so often use it, with no recognition of the awful- 
 ness and the sublimity that lie in it. He said, " Why 
 callest thou Me good ? " not repudiating the character, 
 but rebuking the employment of the word as a mere 
 complimentary appellation. Nowadays it is hung 
 round the neck of the poorest creatures, if they have 
 some touch of geniality or good nature about them, and 
 even sometimes taken down to a lower depth than that. 
 Now, it is very remarkable how very chary the New 
 Testament is in the employment of this name. There 
 are other titles which it prefers — " righteous," " just," 
 " saints," and the like. Seldom does it use the word 
 " good " ; and always as connoting certain qualities, 
 
WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 221 
 
 which will come out if I briefly remind you of the sort 
 of man to whom it is applied here. Barnabas " was a 
 good man," says Luke, and he says so in explanation 
 of the large sympathy and superiority to narrow preju- 
 dice which enabled him to recognize, as soon as he saw 
 it, the working of God's spirit in a strange form in that 
 Gentile congregation that had been gathered together 
 at Antioch. The rest of his life, so far as it is recorded 
 for us in the Acts, is of a piece with this. He began 
 his Christian career by the entire surrender of his posses- 
 sions, so that thereafter, like Paul, he had to work for 
 his living with his hands. Then he was the first of them 
 all to recognize Saul of Tarsus as a true Christian. Then 
 we have him eagerly stretching out his sympatliies to 
 this new Gentile Church in Antioch. Then we have 
 him, wath singular self- suppression and absence of any- 
 thing like envy, going to seek Saul, to bring him into 
 the work which he himself was doing. Then we have 
 his entire consecration to the missionary cause, and 
 association with Paul in his first journey, in the course 
 of which we see his willing acquiescence in the swift 
 growth of influence of the younger man, and his taking 
 the second place without a moment's murmuring or 
 hesitation. And then we have a breakdown, where " the 
 contention was sharp between them," and an eclipse 
 came over Barnabas for many years. 
 
 That is the New Testament notion of a " good man " ; 
 and although I have no desire to dwell at any length 
 
222 WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 
 
 upon this part of my subject, I wish to make one obser- 
 vation, and that is, that the special differentia of this 
 character is, no heroic virtues, but a certain geniality, 
 gentleness, beauty of tenderness, and self-suppression ; 
 and to draw this conclusion, that unless our goodness is 
 beautiful as well as good, it lacks its highest consecra- 
 tion. The wise old Greeks coined a phrase, " beautiful 
 and good," and the two were so buckled together as to 
 constitute but one conception. Now, that is where a 
 great many good people go far wrong. They seem to 
 think that the main thing is that they shall be righteous, 
 just, pure. Yes, so it is ; but unless you take care to 
 make yourself sweet as well as good, and attractive as 
 well as austere, you have yet to learn what is the per- 
 fectest consecration and irradiation of a human charac- 
 ter. " Scarcely for a righteous man will one die " — no, 
 that evokes but little outgoing of sympathy and affec- 
 tion ; " yet peradventure for a good man some would 
 even dare to die." See to it that your goodness is 
 " lovely," as well as " of good report." 
 
 Another thought comes out of this New Testament 
 conception of " a good man," as exemplified in the case 
 of Barnabas, and that is, one does not need to be a 
 faultless monster to be a good man in Heaven's eyes. 
 Barnabas is an instance of very great failure in the case 
 of a very good man. And though it, to a large extent, 
 wrecked his usefulness, and overshadowed him for many 
 a day with disastrous eclipse, yet he fought through it 
 
WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 223 
 
 somehow, and came out again into the light, and the 
 last glimpse of him, years after the time of our text, is 
 when he and Paul have made it all up, and Barnabas has 
 been ashamed of himself, no doubt, and his error is for- 
 gotten and buried. Do you remember who it was that 
 was a man after God's own heart ? The man that 
 committed that great sin in the matter of Bathsheba 
 and Uriah. Superficial people say : " A pretty kind of 
 man after God's own heart — adulterer, murderer, traitor 
 to his companion-in-arms." Yes, he was all these, but, 
 having fallen, he repented, and though he had fallen, 
 struggled to his feet again, and set his face once more 
 towards the goal on which he had so shamefully turned 
 his back ; and so, with tears and a humbled heart and 
 a strengthened will, made even his sin contributory to 
 his goodness. Therefore, brethren, for us to-day it 
 remains as a great and blessed truth that God looks not 
 only on our actions, but on our aspirations, and that 
 the set of a life, the drift of its tendency, is recognized 
 by Him. Although wild gusts of passion may sweep 
 the surface in the opposite direction, and cross-cm'rents 
 may agitate it, yet a great, deep, dominant force is the 
 thing that determines a life. Now, you Christian people, 
 remember that, unless it can be written down of you and 
 me, " a good man," we have no business to call ourselves 
 Christians. 
 
 We come to the second layer, hfting oS the first — 
 " full of the Holy Ghost." 
 
224 WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 
 
 II. Christ's Way of Making a Good Man. 
 
 The characteristic gift and promise of Christianity 
 is a Divine Helper, and help to mould our characters 
 into conformity with the Divine will. Amongst our 
 orthodox churches, we far too frequently put the vital 
 centre of the Christian Revelation, in pardon, or, as it 
 is called, " justification," and God forbid that I should 
 even for a moment seem to diminish the importance of 
 that. But, dear brother, your Christianity will be a 
 most superficial thing, and may easily tend to become 
 a minister of unrighteousness and not of righteousness, 
 unless you keep clearly in view that pardon, " accept- 
 ance in the Beloved," and all the rest of what to many 
 people constitutes the whole Gospel message, is but a 
 means to an end, and that the end is that we should 
 " walk not after the flesh but after the spirit," or, if you 
 want it put into more modern words, not that we should 
 be forgiven men, but that, being forgiven, we should be 
 good men. 
 
 There is another common misapprehension amongst 
 us which is often fostered by the kind of sermons that 
 are preached, and the meditations that are indulged 
 in, on this commemoration day of Pentecost, that the 
 special gifts which are included in the gift of the Holy 
 Spirit are those which are expressed by miracles and 
 tongues on the one hand, or which are expressed by 
 splendid endowments and exceptional intellectual or 
 other gifts, on the other. So people will say that Paul 
 
WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 225 
 
 was inspired, or, in a modified fashion, that others of 
 the great religious geniuses of the ages, Origen, Augus- 
 tine, John Bunyan, were inspired. But my text is a 
 concrete example of the great truth that it becomes all 
 us Christian people to realize far more than we do, viz., 
 that the chosen field in which the Spirit of God operates 
 in the Church is neither that of transient, supernatural 
 gifts, as they are called, nor that of the exceptional 
 endowments of great saints, geniuses, teachers, or 
 organizers, but that of the humble work — humble as 
 our vulgar conceptions think it, but to Him the highest 
 — of moulding and refining quiet, commonplace, ordinary 
 people into the image of Jesus Christ. That is a grander 
 thing than all the more — to the world's eye — magnifi- 
 cent gifts. " Whether there be tongues they shall 
 cease " — be it so. " Whether there be knowledge it 
 shall vanish away" — be it so. But the greater and 
 more permanent gift is bestowed upon any poor soul 
 that wants it, the gift of a Divine Power to mould heavy 
 clay, and to shape it into an image of serene and perfect 
 beauty. It is greater to make saints out of sinners 
 like you or me than it is to make a Paul out of a saint, 
 or to give the power of raising from the dead, or speaking 
 with tongues. The gift which the Gospel brings is first 
 and foremost the gift of the Divine Spirit, whose highest 
 work is to change our earthUness into the likeness of 
 our Lord, and so to make us " free from the law of sin 
 and death." 
 
 M.S. 15 
 
226 WHAT A GOOD MAN 18 
 
 Now, I do not mean to cast any kind of scorn or con- 
 tempt upon the moral excellences of men who are not 
 Christians ; when I say that, taking it in the general, 
 and looking at what constitutes goodness in its deepest 
 aspect, according to which nothing is perfectly good 
 except work done in obedience to, and love towards, 
 God, there is no goodness possible for humanity, but 
 on condition of the reception of its Divine Helper, the 
 Strengthener who comes to stand by our sides, to rein- 
 force in us that which is feeble, to raise and support that 
 which is low, to illumine that which is blind, that we 
 may become what without Him we shall never be in its 
 whole depth and sweep, good men after God's pattern. 
 
 I need only ask you to be honest with yourselves, to 
 set before your consciousness your own inner basenesses 
 and weaknesses, your own wavering resolutions and 
 fragmentary strivings after good ; the foiling of your 
 noblest purposes which you have so often experienced. 
 Do these not make you feel that if there is one thing 
 that would be a gospel to you, it would be to assure you 
 that there is a power not yourself — something more 
 than " a stream of tendency," not yourself, but working 
 in you, which " makes for righteousness " ? Brethren, 
 any man who has ever honestly set himself to mend 
 himself, and to get out of himself the evil spot that is 
 in him, will leap to that promise, and feel, " Ah ! that 
 is what I want," and all facile philosophical objections 
 will be swept away Uke so much thin mist and cloud- 
 
WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 227 
 
 wrack before the north wind, when the great need is 
 felt, which always is felt when a man honestly tries to 
 make himself " a good man." 
 
 But let us note that the possession of that Divine 
 Spirit, which makes men good, is a full possession ; 
 " ftdl of the Spirit." Yes, a scanty gift will do little to 
 make a good man. If a river has been evaporated away 
 by summer heats, so that there is only a thread of water 
 running down the broad, bleached bed of tumbled stones, 
 there will be no scour in that thin thread, to sweep away 
 any of the obstructions and litter that choke the chan- 
 nel, nor will there be any water to spare to fertilize the 
 banks. It needs to be a river brimming from side to 
 side that floats away the filth, and can be led off to irrigate 
 and fertihze the pastures on either bank. A scanty 
 possession of the Divine Spirit will never make a good 
 man. 
 
 There is a possibiUty opened in my text, a possibility 
 for us all, that the whole nature of us, heart, and mind, 
 and will — and however else you may choose to label its 
 several operations — shall be penetrated by this Divine 
 influence. In another metaphor, we are told that the 
 great work of Jesus Christ is to plunge us into the fiery 
 baptism of the Holy Spirit, We are immersed in it ; 
 it dominates and pervades our whole nature. The two 
 emblems mean the same. Here is an empty wine-skin, 
 all hard and cracked ; you pour in the sparkling bene- 
 diction, and as you pour, it swells and smooths itself 
 
228 WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 
 
 out. Into our limp, flaccid, empty spirits there may 
 come the quickening blessing of that outpoured gift, 
 and the vessel may be filled. But that is not all. The 
 wine-skin stretches to its utmost, and if more is poured 
 in, the skin bursts and the wine is spilt. But our vessels 
 are elastic, and the walls of our hearts can widen out, 
 like the tent in the fairy story, according to their contents. 
 Though full, we may be still further filled, and receive 
 more of that of which already we have received as much 
 as the moment's capacity makes possible. Such is 
 the ideal ; what about the reality ? I have spoken of 
 a broad stream, and a trickle of water down the middle 
 of its dry bed. That the Church of Christ should be 
 such as it is to-day, the Spirit of Christ being such as 
 He is to-day and always, is the shame and the scandal 
 of the church, the laughter of the world, the wonder of 
 angels, and the sorrow of Christ. 
 
 And now there is one more word. We have to get 
 down to the bottom layer of all — " full of the Holy 
 Ghost, and of faith." There you come to the secret of 
 the whole. 
 
 III. The Condition of being Filled with the 
 Divine Spirit 
 
 is being full of faith. That is to say, trust Jesus Christ, 
 and in that trust you are united to Him in such real, 
 not forensic or artificial or theological fashion, that his 
 life is communicated to you in the measure of your 
 faith. That is the Gospel. Faith, about which we talk 
 
WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 229 
 
 so much, and often " darken counsel by words without 
 wisdom," seems to me to be simply the outgoing of the 
 spirit, in trust and lowly desire and conscious necessity, 
 to that great Saviour, It is like the inflation of the 
 lung that the life-breath may rush in, and it surely will. 
 Now, dear brethren, if this is the bottom layer, the 
 underlying stratum of the whole section that we have 
 been looking at, and if, beginning with the flowers on 
 the surface, you come down to this at last — then the 
 great practical lesson is that a Christian man or woman 
 is solely responsible for the measure of the Spirit of God 
 which he or she may realize. And that raises a serious 
 question for us all. I have spoken about the contrast 
 between the ideal and the reality. Ah ! Whose fault is 
 that ? Our own ; nobody else's. Not God's. On this 
 Whitsuntide, when people are talking about a Pentecost, 
 the world may well turn to us and say, " There was a 
 rushing mighty wind, but it has gone all calm now. 
 There were tongues of fire ; they have all flickered out. 
 Your gift was a transient gift." And what are we to 
 say ? Why, this — the gift was a perennial gift. It is 
 to-day as really and as fully as it ever was. You Chris- 
 tian people sometimes, when you feel the contrast 
 between the ideal and the reality, the fulness of the 
 possibihty and the emptiness of the realization, pray 
 for a fuller outpouring of the Spirit of God, and a new 
 Pentecost. You do not need to pray for fresh fire ; 
 the fire is burning if you will only let Him baptize you 
 
230 WHAT A GOOD MAN IS 
 
 in it. You do not need to pray for a rushing, mighty 
 wind to sweep away stagnation and malaria ; the wind 
 is blowing, if only you will let it freshen your atmosphere 
 and fill your sails. See that you take what you have, 
 the Spirit in its fulness, lest there should be taken away 
 from you, and from the church to which we belong, 
 that which it seemeth we have. If you forget every- 
 thing else that I have been saying, remember the three 
 strokes of this portrait, and be sure of this, that if ever 
 you are to be rightly called " a good man," it will be 
 because, and only because, you are " full of the Holy 
 Ghost and of faith." 
 
The Original and the Copy — 
 I. Imitative Miracles 
 
 And Peter said unto him, ^neas, Jesus Christ maketh thee 
 whole ; arise, and make thy bed. . . . — Acts ix. 34. 
 
 Peter . . . said, Tabitha, arise. . . . — Acts ix. 40. 
 
 They stoned Stephen . . . and he kneeled down, and cried with 
 a loud voice, " Lord ! lay not this sin to their charge." And when 
 he had said this, he fell asleep. — Acts vii. 60. 
 
 YOU will understand why I have ventured to isolate 
 and connect these three fragments, if you will con- 
 sider that likeness to Jesus is the all-comprehending 
 law of Christian hfe, and that the thought of being hke 
 Christ in death is a pillow on which dying Christians lay 
 quiet heads, and that perfectly to be like Christ is the 
 great hope that fills with radiance the vast, dim future. 
 I have put these texts together, because they have 
 one feature in common — they show us how the first 
 disciples consciously endeavoured to shape their Chris- 
 tian lives and works after the example of their 
 Master, and to mould their deaths so that they should 
 be conformable to His. Thus early had the Chris- 
 tian instinct been developed, that seeks after 
 
232 IMITATIVE MIRACLES 
 
 likeness to Jesus as the all-sufficient aim, and that 
 recognizes Him as giving in Himself the supreme law 
 for life and companionship in death. 
 
 The first two of my texts come from the accounts of 
 two miracles wrought in one journey by the Apostle 
 Peter. In both of them the endeavour to assimilate 
 his action to his Master's is plain. He remembered 
 how a palsied man had been brought to Jesus, and 
 been bid, ' ' Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thy 
 house." The similar sufferer that Peter healed was 
 already in his house, but the Apostle tries to get as 
 near his Lord's fashion of working as he can, and so he 
 says, "Arise; make thy bed." The commandment 
 was not only intended to demonstrate to the bystanders 
 and to confirm to the patient the reality of the cure, 
 but it was a touching token of how the Apostle's 
 memory had gone back, and how he pleased himself by 
 making even a small detail in his work as like Christ's 
 as he could. 
 
 The same intention is equally obvious in the other 
 instance. Peter remembered how our Lord had cleared 
 a death-chamber of noisy, professional wallers, and 
 so he put forth the true mourners from the upper room 
 where Dorcas was lying dead. He remembered the 
 very Aramaic words with which Jesus had raised 
 Jairus' daughter, and which are preserved to us in the 
 Gospel which, in some sense, is supposed to be his ; 
 and again, he pleased himself, in a naive and innocent 
 
IMITATIVE MIRACLES 233 
 
 fashion, by copying their very sound, and for that 
 purpose availed himself of the Jewish, rather than of 
 the Greek, name of the dead woman. Thinking of 
 " Talitha cumi," he said to her," Tabitha cumi " — 
 the change of one letter. There were differences, of 
 course — great differences, as significant as the resem- 
 blances, and I shall have a word or two to say about 
 them presently — but the intentional Hkeness, the con- 
 scious imitation, is unmistakable. So Christ is the 
 example for the life and work of the disciple. 
 
 Then, if we turn to our other text, the very same 
 imitative impulse is at work there, in the solemn 
 moment of death. For Stephen remembers how on 
 the cross his Master had said : " Father, into thy hands 
 I commend My Spirit," and he breathes a prayer 
 in which the differences are as instructive as the resem- 
 blances: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." He re- 
 members how his Model had said ; ' ' Father, for- 
 give them, for they know not what they do," and 
 although there was little ignorance to lighten the crime 
 of the mob that stoned the servant, in comparison with 
 the ignorance that alleviated the guilt of the rulers that 
 crucified the Master, yet the servant says : ' ' Lord, 
 lay not this sin to their charge," and so, shaping his 
 death after the pattern showed him on the Cross, he 
 changes its grisly shape into the soft similitude of 
 quiet slumber, "and when he had said this, he fell 
 asleep." 
 
234 IMITATIVE MIRACLES 
 
 Now with that exposition of my purpose, I have 
 really said nearly all that I wish to say. But we may 
 expand the consideration of the two thoughts sug- 
 gested by these instances, namely, that Hkeness to 
 Christ is the aim of a true disciple in life, and that 
 likeness to Christ is the comfort and victory of a true 
 disciple in death ; and I come now to deal with the 
 former of these, reserving consideration of the latter 
 to another occasion. 
 
 Likeness to Christ, then, is the aim of the true disciple 
 in life and work. 
 
 One great peculiarity of the Christian system is 
 that it entrusts very largely the task of moral per- 
 fection to two things, love and contemplation. We 
 all know how subtly love assimilates, so that two 
 lovers grow more and more like each other, in regard 
 even to small peculiarities of tone and manner and 
 trivial habits. It is not otherwise with regard to the 
 love that is turned to Jesus Christ, We grow hke 
 Him in the direct measure of our love to Him. Simi- 
 larly, contemplation assimilates. " We all, with 
 unveiled face beholding and reflecting the glory of 
 the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to 
 glory." If our thoughts are habitually turned to Christ 
 He will habitually diffuse Himself through our lives, and 
 we shall be growingly fashioned after His hkeness. The 
 eye that gazes on the sun has a tiny sun painted on its 
 orb. The face that turns to the glowing west is rud- 
 
IMITATIVE MIRACLES 235 
 
 died with a reflected brightness. A man is moulded 
 by his company, and if we keep company with Jesus 
 Christ we shall inevitably, though not without efiort, 
 grow Uke him. Love, then, breeds likeness, and con- 
 templation transforms. 
 
 But our texts have a special reference, and point 
 to the way in which, in the work of the Christian life, 
 the pattern of Jesus Christ tended to reproduce itself. 
 Apart altogether from the comparatively unimportant 
 points of mere detail in which that assimilating 
 tendency was working in the instances before us, and 
 which are interesting mainly as showing how strong 
 the feehng was in the Apostle's own mind, let me 
 suggest one or two points. 
 
 The Christian life is to copy Christ's quick compassion. 
 
 If we are living in the love and beholding of Jesus 
 Christ, we shall learn from Him what Peter learned 
 from Him, to cherish a swift sympathy with human 
 miseries of all sorts, that does not wait to be asked 
 in order to do its best to aUeviate. If you will look at 
 these two instances of Peter's miracles, you will see 
 that in neither of the cases is there any sign that 
 he was asked to do what he did. He "found" 
 .tineas ; they did not bring him as they brought the man 
 to Jesus, and nobody said to him " cure this man, we 
 pray you." But, seeing him there, Peter's heart welled 
 up and welled over. The eye that beheld touched a 
 heart that felt, and the heart that felt immediately 
 
236 IMITATIVE MIRACLES 
 
 moved a hand that healed, and he said, " ^Eneas ! Jesus 
 Christ maketh thee whole." He had learnt that 
 sympathy, not only from communion with the Spirit of 
 His Master, but from remembering the many times in 
 which the Master Himself had healed unasked. 
 
 But let us remember that Christ's external, unbesought 
 spontaneous gifts of a heart filled with love and a hand 
 " open as day to melting charity," were but transient and 
 small symbols of that great love which waited not for 
 man's beseeching, nor tarried for men's cries ; but before 
 they called had answered, and whilst they were yet 
 spealdng, had heard. For Christ Himself is the outcome 
 of that unbesought, undesired, unexpected, and too 
 often unbelieved. Divine love which is its own motive, 
 and wells up, not because it is drawn out by any pumps 
 and handles of human petitions, but because, deep down 
 in the hidden abysses, there lies that overflowing fountain 
 which must have a way, and must come to the alleviation 
 of the sorrows, and especially of the sins, of us poor men. 
 They who live near Jesus Christ ought to, and will, have 
 a keener sensitiveness to the world's miseries than any 
 besides. They who thus have caught the Spirit of the 
 Lord that came, not because men asked Him, but because 
 He loved them, will not wait to be impelled by anything 
 but the sight of misery and the possession of power to 
 relieve it. Jesus Christ not only came spontaneously, 
 but He has to " pray us, with much entreaty, to receive 
 the gift," and so His servants, who have caught His 
 
IMITATIVE MIRACLES 237 
 
 spirit, have to learn to press upon men that which they 
 know not that they need, and to carry to the world an 
 undesired and unwelcome, and an often rejected, gift. 
 If we are in loving touch with Jesus Christ, we shall look 
 upon men as He did, and be eager to help them, whether 
 they will accept or whether they will not. But if pro- 
 fessing Christians go through this sad world with httle 
 feeling of its miseries, and little experience of the spon- 
 taneous impulse to lighten them, I would fain know what 
 sign of Christianity their lives present. 
 
 But, again, the disciple is to copy Christ's care for the 
 body as well as the soul. Peter had gone down to Lydda 
 to look after the little church there, and to teach it the 
 truth. He did not say, " Oh ! I do not look after ^neas 
 and dead w^omen ; I am here for a higher and sacreder 
 purpose, to preach Jesus Christ to dead souls," but he 
 recognized that any form of human sorrow, corporeal or 
 spiritual, was equally in his commission — ay, and in his 
 power, to deal with. And so, if we are Christians, we 
 shall not be lop-sided in our sympathies, nor fancy, as 
 some people used to do, (and some of their descendants 
 are alive still), that the Christian Church — or, rather, do 
 not let us shelter ourselves under the vagueness of the 
 collective term " church," but apply the thoughts to 
 ourselves — that the Christian man or woman has little to 
 do with mere physical and external sorrows. Have 
 you and I nothing to do with the drink demon ? Is it no 
 part of the responsibility of citizens who are also Chris- 
 
238 IMITATIVE MIRACLES 
 
 tians to have regard to the conditions of life in the 
 slums ? Have we no commission to help to alter these 
 conditions which make decency — to say nothing of 
 refinement or Christianity — an impossibihty ? We 
 ought, by virtue of living near to Jesus Christ, to be 
 foremost in every work that bears on the bodies and 
 bodily conditions, as well as on the souls, of men. And 
 surely we are not so absurd as to fancy that we can chop 
 the inseparable man — the individual — into two, and 
 whilst his body is living like an animal, that his soul has 
 much chance of being saved. Remember the Apostle- 
 missionary who went down to look after the saints, and 
 found his vocation in a palsied man and a dying woman. 
 
 The disciple is to copy Christ's self- surrender. 
 
 Is my work in any measure, or in any respect, worthy 
 to be said to have been touched with that holy fire of 
 Christ's example which purges all that it touches, and 
 transforms dead rubbish into its own likeness ? When I 
 think that the climax of Christ's work was a Cross, I may 
 well shrink from saying that my love to Him has moulded 
 my work into any resemblance to His. Brethren, the 
 thought is too solemn, and has too sharp a sting for each 
 of us, to be much spoken about. I pray you, take to it 
 your own hearts, and remember that unless our Christian 
 life and our Christian activity are, in some measure, 
 assimilated to our Master's, they have little right to the 
 epithet of Christian. 
 
 I need only say a few words with regard to the diver- 
 
IMITATIVE MIRACLES 239 
 
 gencies, which are as striking as the resemblances, be- 
 tween the servant's work and the Master's. " ^Eneas, 
 Jesus Christ maketh thee whole. Never mind about me, 
 Peter." Jesus Christ never pointed to anyone else, in 
 heaven or on earth, as being the source of the power of 
 which He was merely the channel ; the apostle had to do 
 so. So let us hide ourselves behind our Lord. The prop, 
 that holds up some great trophy to the eyes of the world, 
 is behind the trophy, and hidden by it. The herald is not 
 to blow his own name or praises through his trumpet, 
 but his King's, and is forgotten when the royal progress 
 has come. " He must increase, and I must decrease." 
 Minister, teacher, Christian worker ! do not obtrude 
 yourself in front of your Master. Never mind whether 
 anybody sees you or not, as long as they see Him. It is 
 blessed 
 
 " To fade in the light of the planet we love ; 
 To fade in its light, and to die." 
 
 In Hke manner, when Peter was with Dorcas, " he 
 kneeled down and prayed " before he dared to speak the 
 word of power, and, instead of copying his Master in 
 laying his hand upon her before she came to life, which 
 would have looked, as it did in the Lord's case, as if the 
 hand communicated the vitality, he only put it out to 
 help her like a brother, when the Ufe had come. But yet, 
 with unfaltering confidence, before he had made the 
 experiment, he was so sure of the power that Christ had 
 
240 
 
 IMITATIVE MIRACLES 
 
 given him that he said, " Jesus Christ maheth thee whole." 
 So, brethren, if you expect other people to beheve your 
 word, speak it out as if you beUeved it yourself. For 
 men, who, having Kttle personal experience of Christ's 
 healing power, have but little confidence in announcing 
 it to others, will have the fate of the seven sons of Sceva, 
 on whom the spirit that they tried to exorcise turned, 
 and said, " Jesus we know ; and Paul we know " — the 
 mighty Source of salvation, and the unhesitating, un- 
 faltering proclaimer of it — " but who are ye ? " 
 
 Likeness to Christ is the aim of the true Christian's Ufe 
 and work. You see in shops poor little plaster casts of 
 the great statues that enchant the world ; caricatures 
 they sometimes look like, and they are wrought in a 
 worthless, perishable material. Well, if we cannot do 
 better, let us try to make such a cast of the serene 
 perfectness of Christ's life in our little lives. The 
 original is marble ; our copy is plaster of Paris. All the 
 sharp hnes may be blunted in our attempted reproduc- 
 tion, and the beauty all but gone, and yet there may be 
 a faint hint of Hkeness. People whose aesthetic per- 
 ceptions are but slightly cultivated do not see much 
 difference between Michael Angelo's tremendous statues 
 and the little copies of them that you can buy on the 
 quays at Florence. And some people who cannot look 
 at Jesus Christ, or who will not look at Him, and have 
 not, perhaps, grown up enough to appreciate the Divine 
 perfection of that life, may have their defective power 
 
IMITATIVE MIRACLES 241 
 
 of appreciation stimulated by looking at us, and may 
 be brougbt to say, " If the copy is fair, so much fairer 
 than the average men around us, how fair must the 
 Original be ; and how mighty must be the power which 
 out°of such worthless, cheap material, can fashion that 
 which has a hint of Jesus, though it is so incomplete a hke- 
 ness ! " We are here in the world to make Him appre- 
 hensible, admired, beUeved and trusted, by our brethren. 
 Let us keep near Him in the secret place that our faces 
 may shine with reflected lustre, and then come down 
 into the camp to let our Hght so shine that men may 
 glorify the Uncreated Light at which it was kindled. 
 
 Ifi 
 
The Original and the Copy — 
 II. '' Conformable to His Death " 
 
 And they stoned Stephen calling upon God, and saying, Lord 
 Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled and cried with a loud 
 voice. Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he 
 had said this he fell asleep. — Acts vii. 59, 60. 
 
 THE previous sermon was principally directed to 
 dealing with two of Peter's miracles, the heaUng 
 of the palsied iEneas and the raising of the dead Dorcas, 
 which were evidently modelled after the fashion of 
 our Lord's works. They suggested the thought that 
 the aim of a true Christian in his life and work should 
 be likeness to the Lord. I complete the considerations 
 on which we entered then by my remarks now, which 
 are mainly directed to the death of the first martyr, 
 which is evidently modelled upon Christ's death. He 
 teaches us how to live ; He teaches us how to die. 
 So from the words before us we draw the one thought 
 of what death becomes to a man who is able, by faith 
 and love, to meet it as Jesus Christ met it. It becomes 
 
"CONFORMABLE TO HIS DEATH" 243 
 
 I. A Willing and Trustful Surrender. 
 
 I need not, I suppose, spend time in pointing out 
 the evident traces of a deliberate imitation of the great 
 Example in the last words of the proto-martyr, but 
 the difference between the dying Christ's words and 
 the dying Stephen's are as instructive as the resem- 
 blances, and fling up these into greater prominence. 
 I do not think it is fanciful, from that point of view, 
 to lay stress on the differences in the order of the two 
 prayers. It was at a very early stage of the long agony 
 of the Cross that Jesus Christ prayed that His mur- 
 derers might be forgiven, and it was at the end of the 
 agony that He said : " Into Thy hands I commend 
 my spirit." But Stephen reversed the order, for his 
 first cry was: "Receive my spirit," and his second 
 was: "Lay not this sin to their charge." I think 
 that is a hint that the servant had not attained the 
 sublime patience with which the Lord endured the 
 long agony of the Cross. No wonder if, bruised beneath 
 the cruel, heavy stones, and bleeding from many a 
 jagged wound, he, Uke many another sufferer at 
 the stake or on a bed, cried to the Lord to take him 
 out of his pain. 
 
 Then the other difference which springs to sight on 
 the most superficial reading, is that, while Jesus ad- 
 dressed the Father, Stephen addressed Jesus. No 
 doubt the prayer, " Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," • 
 was the answer of faith to the vision that had been 
 
244 "CONFORMABLE TO HIS DEATH" 
 
 granted of the opened heavens and the Christ sprung 
 to His feet to help His servant. But, however Httle 
 conscious of theological inferences to be deduced from 
 this cry to Jesus Stephen was, the fact that here, in- 
 stinctively and most naturally, at that early stage 
 of the history of the Christian Church, the dying martyr 
 turned to Christ with a prayer does witness to his belief 
 in Christ's divine nature and Lordship over life and 
 death. Strange that a dying man should cry thus 
 for help to a dead man who had not been able to save 
 himself! Inexplicable, as I beheve, on any rational 
 ground, without the admission of the great facts of the 
 Resurrection and Ascension. If Christ were risen 
 indeed, and only if so, it was natural that the martyr 
 should turn to the Crucified, and pray : " Receive my 
 spirit." 
 
 There is another slight, but very real, difference in the 
 two prayers, in that Jesus said, " / commend,^'' laying 
 greatest prominence on His own act of voluntary 
 decease, while the servant said, " Receive," meaning 
 substantially the same thing, but with a difference of 
 perspective, as it were, and giving greater prominence 
 to the Christ-act of reception than to the servant's act 
 of surrender. 
 
 Now, all these differences, which though slight, are 
 instructive, rest on, and are the expression of, the one 
 difference that the one death was the death of the 
 Incarnate Word, and the other was the death of the 
 
"CONFORMABLE TO HIS DEATH" 245 
 
 humble servant, and they hint to us that, however close 
 may be the imitation possible to the best of His fol- 
 lowers, either in life or in death, there will always be 
 something over, which cannot be imitated, and before 
 which we can only adoringly bow and aspire. 
 
 But now turn, briefly, to the resemblances in this prayer. 
 
 I. We see in it, first, A Willing Surrender. 
 
 Ah ! how different a death into which a believing 
 will enters, concurring with a physical necessity and 
 accepting it, and the death in which a man is dragged 
 out of Ufe by an unwelcome compulsion arising from 
 his bodily condition. He is like a man hanging on the 
 edge of a precipice, and convulsively thrusting his 
 nails into the crumbhng rock, and feehng it yielding to 
 his touch. To go out of life because we must, is misery ; 
 to go out of it because our wills accept the necessity 
 is triumph and victory. The one is death indeed, the 
 other is the opening of the spirit to the influx of a 
 larger hfe. Blessed is he who at that last hour goes 
 willingly, because he knows that he goes after his Lord, 
 recognizing that the grave, too, is a " place whither 
 the Forerunner for us is entered," and hears as he passes 
 into the gloom that Jesus lights up : " he that fol- 
 loweth Me shall not walk in the darkness, but " — even 
 there — " shall have the light of life." It is blessed to 
 have Him with us, when the awful isolation of death 
 parts us from all others, and the spot where we stand 
 begins to sink, as did the ground round Korah and his 
 
246 "CONFORMABLE TO HIS DEATH" 
 
 company, and a gap to open which deepens and widens 
 to a gulf, across which the love that is closest can only 
 cast a wistful look. The man that, dying, is made like 
 Jesus can leave earth behind unregretting, and pass 
 into the Obscure unfearing. 
 
 There is another thought suggested by that prayer : 
 " Receive my spirit," namely, that there dawned before 
 Stephen's dying eye the vision of falling, not into a vast 
 dim abyss, but into soft and loving hands outstretched, 
 I spoke of dropping from a precipice. Do you expect 
 to drop down, down, down, not knowing into what, or 
 do you expect that a yard or two below your feet there 
 will be stretched out the hands that were pierced with 
 the nails, and which will receive you when you fall ? 
 It is a blessed thing, dying, to drop into the hands of 
 the loving Christ. 
 
 That prayer, " Receive my spirit," overlooked all 
 the externals of death and change of condition, and 
 was absorbed in the calm hope : " I shall be closer to 
 Him than ever I was before." That is the one thought 
 that enables us to minimize what else stands up gigantic 
 and threatening at the close of every earthly hfe. Much 
 in that future is dim, the faint light is peopled with 
 mysteries ; the very glories that are there are so remote 
 from our experience that they have little power really 
 to attract us. But there is one hope — and only one, as 
 I believe — that makes the awful prospect of immortal 
 hfe a gift and a joy, and that is, that we shall be with 
 
" CONFORIVIABLE TO HIS DEATH" 247 
 
 Christ. He is Heaven, and Heaven is He, Stephen 
 knew very little of what he was to meet beyond this 
 earth, but he knew Whom he was to meet, and that was 
 enough for him. 
 
 The death, moulded on Christ's, is — 
 
 II. A Calm Putting Away of Earthly Passions. 
 
 " Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." He divested 
 his spirit, as it were, of the foul stuff of hatred and 
 vengeance, because he thought of the Master Who had 
 said, " Forgive them, for they know not what they do." 
 I need only repeat, in a sentence, what I have already 
 remarked as to the former prayer, viz., that here we 
 have, in the instinctive, not deliberate, address to Jesus 
 Christ in supphcation, testimony to the early and deep 
 growth of the highest conception of Christ's character 
 in the primitive Church. Mark how he not only speaks 
 to Christ as the Divine hearer of his prayer, but thinks 
 of Christ as the Judge of men. It is Jesus Whom he 
 asks not to " lay this sin to their charge." Is not that 
 prayer a testimony, all the stronger because incidental 
 and in the language of devotion not of theology, that 
 the first Christians learned from Christ that " the 
 Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all 
 judgment to the Son "? That was the faith which went 
 with the first martyr to his death. Let it be the faith 
 which goes with you through your lives. 
 
 Let me remind you of one other point, namely, that 
 this dying prayer of Stephen, whilst it is modelled con- 
 
248 "CONFORMABLE TO HIS DEATH" 
 
 sciously upon Christ's, is as consciously modelled in con- 
 trast to the dying prayer of another martyr. In the 
 Old Testament we read of a certain priest named Zech- 
 ariah, who in the Temple-courts was stoned, like Stephen, 
 by the rulers and the mob. His last words were : " The 
 Lord look upon it, and require it." Probably that 
 remembrance came to Stephen, and he then and there 
 dehberately chose between the austere petition of the 
 prophet who had been trained under the law of retri- 
 bution, and the pitying prayer of the Christ who came 
 to establish the law of mercy and love ; and cried, 
 " Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." In life and in 
 death it is for us to take the example of the Christ, in 
 our attitude to all that are against us or hate us. 
 
 Lastly, we have here brought before us the death that 
 is moulded after Christ's as being 
 
 III. A Calm Slumber. 
 
 " When he had said this, he fell asleep." We need 
 quiet ere we can sleep. This man at one moment had 
 his ears stunned with the fierce yells of the cruel mob, 
 and his body tortured with the sharp, rough stones, and 
 the next moment, how far he was from it all ! What a 
 calm ensued on the wild fury ! "He fell asleep," and 
 they might do what they hked with the corpse, Stephen 
 was at rest. 
 
 Now of course that image of sleep as a euphemism for 
 death is no peculiar property of Christianity, but the 
 ideas that it suggests to the Christian consciousness are 
 
"CONFORMABLE TO HIS DEATH" 249 
 
 the peculiar property of Christianity. Any of you that 
 ever were in the Vatican will remember how you go 
 down corridors with Pagan marbles on that side, and 
 Christian ones on this. Against one wall, in long rows, 
 stand the sad memorials, each of which has the de- 
 spairing ending, " Farewell, farewell, for ever farewell." 
 But on the other side there are carved no goddesses of 
 slumber, or mourning genii, or quenched lamps, or wail- 
 ing words, but sweet emblems of a renewed Hfe, and the 
 ever-recurring, gracious motto : " In hope." To the 
 non-Christian that sleep is eternal ; to the Christian 
 that sleep is as sure of awaking as is the sleep of the body. 
 The one affects the whole man ; the Christian sleep 
 affects only the body and the connexion with the outer 
 world. 
 
 " There is none other thing expressed. 
 But long disquiet merged in rest." 
 
 The Christian sleep of death does not seal the spirit in 
 torpor. Seen from this side, death is sleep ; seen from 
 the other side death is awaking — waking to an intenser 
 hfe than was ever experienced before ; to a keenness of 
 vitaUty compared with which the highest consciousness 
 of existence and effort that we have ever known is but 
 as the stirrings of a sleeper. " The drowsy pipe of half- 
 awakened birds " does not contrast more with the full- 
 throated notes with which they welcome the sun, than 
 does Ufe here at its fullest and keenest with hfe yonder, 
 
250 "CONFORMABLE TO HIS DEATH" 
 
 with which, when we awake in Christ's Hkeness, we shall 
 be satisfied. 
 
 I do not seek to blink the fact that, refine it how you 
 may, and bring to bear Christian motives and principles 
 as you will, the thing continues ugly and repellent. 
 There is a sickly sentimentaUsm that tries to hide the 
 hideousness of death by fine sayings about it — as artifi- 
 cial as the china wreaths of immortelles that one some- 
 times sees on graves. There is a hard materialism that 
 refuses to recognize in death anything more than the 
 natural end of natural processes, and so, in the most 
 accurate sense of the expression, makes a man die the 
 death of a dog. There is a recoiUng dread of death 
 which keeps many a man all his hfe in bondage, whenever 
 he thinks about it. And I admit both that its repulsive 
 features remain, and that, by a merciful provision, most 
 men die quietly. But yet I say a Christian man who 
 makes his hfe Uke Christ's, and his death like His, 
 passing through the same physical experience as other 
 men, does not die when he dies, but fives for ever- 
 more. 
 
 I beseech you, dear brethren, take the anodyne of 
 death, the pledge of immortahty, the hfe and death of 
 Jesus Christ received by faith into our hearts. He that 
 thus can, living, keep near the Master, so as to become 
 like Him, will at the last be " conformable unto His 
 death," and find that its blackness is lit up, even as the 
 shadows on sunlit snow are heavenly blue, not black, 
 
"CONFORMABLE TO HIS DEATH" 251 
 
 and will pass from the imperfect conformities of life, by 
 the way of a death moulded after Christ's pattern, to 
 the perfect union where he shall be for ever with the 
 Lord ; and be " like Him, for he shall see Him as He is." 
 
"Without the Camp" 
 
 Let 113 go forth therefore unto Him without the camp, bearing 
 His reproach. For here have we no continuing citj', but we seek 
 one to come. — Heb. xiii. 13, 14. 
 
 CALVARY was outside Jerusalem. That wholly acci- 
 dental and trivial circumstance is laid hold of in 
 the context, in order to give picturesque force to the 
 main contention and purpose of this Epistle. One of the 
 solemn parts of the ritual of Judaism was the great Day 
 of Atonement, on which the sacrifice that took away the 
 sins of the nation was borne outside the camp, and con- 
 sumed by fire, instead of being partaken of by the 
 priests, as were most of the other sacrifices. Our writer 
 here sees in these two roughly parallel things, not an 
 argument but an imaginative illustration of great truths. 
 Though he does not mean to say that the death on 
 Calvary was intended to be pointed to by the unique 
 arrangement in question, he does mean to say that the 
 coincidence of the two things helps us to grasp two great 
 truths — one, that Jesus Christ really did what that old 
 sacrifice expressed the need for having done, and the 
 
"WITHOUT THE CAMP" 253 
 
 other that, in His death on Calvary, the Jewish nation, 
 as one of the parables has it, " cast Him out of the vine- 
 yard." In the context, he urges this analogy between 
 the two things. 
 
 But a Christ outside the camp beckons His disciples 
 to His side. If any man serve Him, he has to follow 
 Him, and the blessedness, as well as the duty, of the ser- 
 vant on earth, as well as in heaven, is to be where his 
 Master is. So the writer finds here a picturesque way to 
 enforce the great lesson of his treatise, namely, that 
 the Jewish adherent to Christianity must break with 
 Judaism. In the early stages, it was possible to combine 
 faith in Christ and adherence to the Temple and its ritual. 
 But now that by process of time and experience the 
 Church has learnt better Who and what Christ is, that 
 which was in part has to be done away, and the Christian 
 Church is to stand clear of the Jewish synagogue. 
 
 Now it is to be distinctly understood that the words 
 of my text, in the writer's intention, are not a general 
 principle or exhortation, but that they are a special 
 commandment to a certain class under special circum- 
 stances, and when we use them, as I am going to do 
 now, for a wider purpose, we must remember that that 
 wider purpose was by no means in the writer's mind. 
 What he was thinking about was simply the relation 
 between the Jewish Christian and the Jewish com- 
 munity. But if we take them as we may legitimately 
 do — only remembering that we are diverting them from 
 
254 "WITHOUT THE CAMP" 
 
 their original intention — as carrying more general 
 lessons for us, what they seem to teach is that faithful 
 discipleship involves detachment from the world. This 
 commandment, " Let us go forth unto Him without the 
 camp," stands, if you will notice, between two reasons 
 for it, which buttress it up, as it were, on either side. 
 Before it is enunciated, the writer has been pointing, as 
 I have tried to show, to the thought that a Christ 
 without the camp necessarily involves disciples without 
 the camp. And he follows it with another reason, 
 " here we have no continuing city, but we seek that 
 which is to come." Here, then, is a general principle, 
 supported on either side by a great reason. 
 
 Let me first try to set before you 
 
 I. — What this Detachment is Not. 
 
 The Jewish Christian was obliged utterly and out- 
 wardly to break his connexion with Judaism, on the 
 peril, if he did not, of being involved in its ruin, and, 
 as was historically the case with certain Judaising sects, 
 of losing his Christianity altogether. It was a cruel 
 necessity, and no wonder that it needed this long letter 
 to screw the disciples of Hebrew extraction up to the 
 point of making the leap from the sinking ship to the 
 deck of the one that floated. The parallel does not hold 
 with regard to us. The detachment from the world, or 
 the coming out from the camp, to which my text ex- 
 horts, is not the abandonment of our relations with what 
 the Bible calls " the world," and what we call — roughly 
 
"WITHOUT THE CAMP" 255 
 
 meaning the same thing — society. The function of the 
 Christian Church as leaven, involves the necessity of 
 being closely associated, and in contact with, all forms 
 of human hfe, national, civic, domestic, social, com- 
 mercial, intellectual, political. Does my text counsel 
 an opposite course ? " Go forth without the camp," — 
 does that mean — huddle yourself together into a sepa- 
 rate flock, and let the camp go to the devil ? By no 
 means. For the society or world, out of which the 
 Christian is drawn by the attraction of the Cross, like 
 iron fihngs out of a heap by a magnet, is in itself good and 
 God-appointed. It is He " that sets the sohtary in 
 families." It is He that gathers humanity into the 
 bonds of civic and national life. It is He that gives 
 capacities which find their sphere, their education and 
 their increase, in the walks of intellectual or commercial 
 or pohtical life. And He does not build up with one hand 
 and destroy with the other, or set men by His providence 
 in circumstances, out of which He draws them by His 
 grace. By no means. To go apart from humanity is 
 to miss the very purpose for which God has set the 
 Church in the world. For contact with the sick to be 
 healed is requisite for healing, and they arc poor dis- 
 ciples of the " Friend of publicans and sinners " who 
 prefer to consort with Pharisees. " Let both grow 
 together till the harvest " — the roots are intertwined, 
 and it is God that has intertwined them. 
 
 Now, I know that one does not need to insist upon 
 
256 "WITHOUT THE CAMP" 
 
 this principle to the average Christianity of this day, 
 which is only too ready to mingle itself with the world, 
 but one does need to insist that, in so mingling, detach- 
 ment from the world is still to be observed ; and it does 
 need to be taught that Christian men are not lowering 
 the standard of the Christian life, when they fling them- 
 selves frankly and energetically into the various forms 
 of human activity, if and only if, whilst they do so, they 
 still remember and obey the commandment, " Let us go 
 forth unto Him without the camp." The command- 
 ment misinterpreted so as to be absolutely impossible 
 to be obeyed, becomes a snare to people who do not keep 
 it, and yet sometimes feel as if they were to blame, be- 
 cause they do not. And, therefore, I turn in the next 
 place to consider — 
 
 II. What this Detachment Really Is. 
 
 Will you let me put what I have to say into the shape 
 of two or three plain, practical exhortations, not because 
 I wish to assume a position of authority or command, 
 but only in order to give vividness and point to my 
 thoughts ? 
 
 First, then, let us habitually nourish the inner life of 
 Union with Jesus Christ. Notice the words of my text, 
 and see what comes first and what comes second. " Let 
 us go forth unto Him " — that is the main thing. " With- 
 out the camp " is second, and a cons«^quence ; " unto 
 Him," is primary, which is just to say that the highest, 
 widest, noblest, all- comprehensive conception of what 
 
"WITHOUT THE CAMP" 257 
 
 a Christian life is, is that it is union with Jesus Christ, 
 and whatever else it is follows from that. The soul is 
 ever to be looking up through all the shadows and shows, 
 the changes and circumstances, of this fleeting present 
 unto Him, and seeking to be more closely united with 
 Him. Union with Him is Ufe, and separation from Him 
 is death. To be so united is to be a Christian. Never 
 mind about camps or anything else, to begin with. 
 If the heart is joined to Jesus, then all the rest will come 
 right. If it is not, then you may make regulations as 
 many as you hke, and they will only be red tape to 
 entangle your feet in. " Let us go forth unto Him " ; 
 that is the sovereign commandment. And how is that 
 to be done ? How is it to be done but by nourishing 
 habitual consciousness of union with Him and life in 
 Him, by an habitual reference of all our acts to Him ? 
 As the Roman Catholics put it, in their hard, external 
 way, " the practice of the Presence of God " is the key- 
 note to all real, vigorous Christianity. For, brethren, 
 such an habitual fellowship with Jesus Christ is possible 
 for us. Though with many interruptions, no doubt, still 
 ideally it is possible that it shall be continuous and real. 
 It is possible, perfectly possible, that it shall be a great 
 deal more continuous than, alas ! it is with many of us. 
 
 Depend upon it, this nourishing of an inward life of 
 fellowship with Jesus, so that we may say " our lives are 
 hid"— hid, after all vigorous manifestation and con- 
 sistent action—" with Christ in God," will not weaken, 
 
 M.S. 17 
 
258 "WITHOUT THE CAMP" 
 
 but increase, the force with which we act on the things 
 seen and temporal. There is an unwholesome kind of 
 mysticism which withdraws men from the plain duties 
 of every-day life ; and there is a deep, sane, wholesome, 
 and eminently Christian mysticism which enables men 
 to come down with greater force, and to act with more 
 decision, with more energy, with more effect, in all the 
 conunon deeds of life. The greatest mystics have been 
 the hardest workers. Who was it that said, " I live, 
 yet not I, but Christ liveth in me ? " That man had 
 gone far, very far, towards an habitual consciousness of 
 Christ's presence, and it was the same man that saidj 
 " That which cometh upon me daily is the care of all the 
 churches." The greatest mystic of the Middle Ages, 
 the saint that rode by the lake all day long, and was so 
 absorbed in contemplation that he said at night, " Where 
 is the lake ? " was the man that held all the threads of 
 European politics in his hands, and from his cell at 
 Clairvaux guided popes, and flung the nations of the 
 West into a Crusade. John Wesley was one of the 
 hardest workers that the church has ever had, and was 
 one of those who lived most habitually without the 
 camp. Be sure of this, that the more our lives are 
 vrapped in Christ, the more energetic will they be in 
 the world. They tell us that the branches of a spreading 
 tree describe roughly the same circumference in the 
 atmosphere that its roots do underground, and so far 
 as our roots extend in Christ, so far will our branches 
 
"WITHOUT THE CAMP" 259 
 
 spread in the world. " Let us go forth unto Him, 
 ^^^thout the camp." 
 
 Again, let me say, do the same things as other people, 
 but with a difference. The more our so-called civili- 
 zation advances, the more, I was going to say, mechani- 
 cal, or at least largely released from the control of the 
 will and the personal idiosyncrasy, become great parts of 
 our work. The Christian weaver drives her looms very 
 much in the same fashion that the non-Christian girl 
 who is looking after the next set does. The Christian 
 clerk adds up his figures, and writes his letters, very 
 much in the same fashion that the worldly clerk does. 
 The believing doctor visits his patients, and writes out 
 liis prescriptions in the fashion that his neighbour who 
 is not a Christian does. But there is always room for 
 the personal equation — always ! and two lives may be, 
 superficially and roughly, the same, and yet there may 
 be a difference in them impalpable, undefinable, but 
 very obvious and very real and very mighty. The 
 Christian motive is love to Jesus Christ and fellowship 
 with Him, and that motive may be brought to bear 
 upon all life — 
 
 " A servant with this clause 
 Makes drudgery divine." 
 
 He that for Christ's sake does a common thing lifts 
 it out of the fatal region of the commonplace, and makes 
 it great and beautiful. We do not want from all Chris- 
 
260 "WITHOUT THE CAMP" 
 
 tian people specifically Christian service, in the narrow 
 sense which that phrase has acquired, half so much as 
 we want common things done from an uncommon motive ; 
 worldly things done because of the love of Jesus Christ 
 in our hearts. And, depend upon it, just as, from some 
 unseen bank of violets, there come odours in opening 
 spring, so from the unspoken and deeply hidden motive 
 of love to Jesus Christ, there will be a fragrance in our 
 commonest actions which all men will recognize. They 
 tell us that rivers which flow from lakes are so clear that 
 they are tinged throughout with celestial blue, because 
 all the mud that they brought down from their upper 
 reaches has been deposited in the still waters of the lake 
 from which they flow ; and if from the deep tarn of love 
 to Jesus Christ in our hearts the stream of our lives 
 flows out, it will be like the Rhone below Geneva, dis- 
 tinguishable from the muddy waters that run by its 
 side in the same channel. Two people, partners in 
 business, joined in the same work, marching step for step 
 in the same ranks, may yet be entirely distinguishable 
 and truly separate, because, doing the same things, they 
 do them from different motives. 
 
 Let me say, still further, and finally about this matter, 
 that sometimes we shall have to come actually out of 
 the camp. The world as God made it is good ; society 
 is ordained by God. The occupations which men pur- 
 sue are of His appointment, for the most part. But 
 into the thing that was good there have crept all manner 
 
"WITHOUT THE CAMP" 261 
 
 of corruptions and abominations, so that often it will be 
 a Christian duty to come away from all outward con- 
 nexion with that which is incurably corrupt. I know 
 very well that a morality which mainly consists of 
 prohibitions is pedantic and poor. I know very well 
 that a Christianity which interprets such a precept as 
 this of my text simply as meaning abstinence from 
 certain conventionally selected and branded forms of 
 life, occupation, or amusement, is but a very poor affair. 
 But " Thou shalt not " is very often absolutely necessary 
 as a support to " Thou shalt." If you go into an East- 
 ern city, you will find the houses with their fronts to the 
 street, having narrow slits of windows all barred, and a 
 heavy gate, frowning and ugly. But pass within, and 
 there are flower-beds and fountains. The frowning 
 street front is there for the defence of the fountains and 
 the flower-beds within, from the assaults of foes, and 
 speaks of a disturbed state of society, in which no flowers 
 can grow and no fountains can bubble and sparkle, 
 unless a strong barrier is round them. And so " thou 
 shalt not," in a world like this, is needful in order that 
 " thou shalt " shall have fair play. No law can be 
 laid down for other people. Every man must settle 
 this matter of abstinence for himself. Things that 
 you may do, perhaps I may not do ; things that you 
 may not do, I very rightly may. " A liberal Chris- 
 tianity," as the world calls it, is often a very shallow 
 Christianity. "A sour Puritanical severity," as loose- 
 
262 "WITHOUT THE CAMP" 
 
 living men call it, is very often plain, Christian morality 
 An inconsistent Christian may be hailed as " a good 
 fellow," and laughed at behind his back. Samson 
 made sport for the Philistines when he was blind. 
 The uncircumcised do often say of professing Chris- 
 tians, that try to be like them, and to keep step with 
 them, " What do these Hebrews here ? " and God 
 always says to such, " What dost thou here, Elijah ? " 
 
 Lastly — 
 
 III. Why this Detachment is Enfoeced. 
 
 " For here we have no continuing city, but we seek 
 one to come." That translation does not give the full 
 force of the original, for it suggests the idea of a vague 
 uncertainty in the seeking, whereas what the writer 
 means is, not " one to come," but one which is coming. 
 The Christian object of seeking is definite, and it is 
 not merely future, but present and in process of being 
 realized even here and now, and tending to com- 
 pletion. Paul uses the same metaphor of the city in 
 one of his letters, "Your citizenship is in Heaven." 
 He says that to the Philippians. Philippi was a colony, 
 that is to say, it was a bit of Rome put down in a foreign 
 land, with Roman laws, its citizens enrolled upon the 
 registers of the Roman tribes, and not under the juris- 
 diction of the provincial governor. That is what we 
 Christians are, whether we know it or not. We are 
 here in an order to which we outwardly belong, but 
 in the depths of our being we belong to another order 
 
"WITHOUT THE CAMP" 263 
 
 of things altogether. Therefore the essentials of the 
 Christian life may be stated as being the looking for- 
 ward to the city, and the realizing of our affinities 
 with it and not with the things around us. In the 
 measure in which, dear brethren, we realize to what 
 community we belong, will the things here be seen 
 to be fleeting and alien to our deepest selves. " Here 
 we have no continuing city " is not merely the result 
 of the transiency of temporal things, and the brevity 
 of our earthly lives, but it is much rather the result 
 of our vivid reahzation and continual anticipation 
 of, and our affinity with, the other order of things 
 beyond the seas. 
 
 Abraham dwelt in tents, because he " looked for 
 a city," and so it was better for him to stop on the 
 breezy uplands, though the herbage was scant, than 
 to go down with Lot into the vale of Sodom, though 
 it looked hke the garden of the Lord. In like manner, 
 the more intensely we realize that we belong to the 
 city, the more shall we be willing to " go forth without 
 the camp." Let these two thoughts dominate our 
 minds and shape our lives ; our union with Jesus 
 Christ and our citizenship of the heavenly Jerusalem. 
 In the measure in which they do, it will be no sacrifice 
 for us to come out of the transient camp, because we 
 shall thereby go to Him, and come to the City of the 
 Uving God, the heavenly Jerusalem, " which hath 
 the foundations." 
 
I 
 
 At the Altar 
 
 By Him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God con- 
 tinually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to His name. 
 But to do good and to communicate, forget not, for with such sacri- 
 fices God is well pleased. — Hebrews xiii. 15-16. 
 
 WE saw in the preceding sermon, in speaking on 
 the verses preceding these of this text, that 
 Christ " without the camp " calls His followers to His 
 side ; and that detachment from the order of society 
 in which the Christian dwells is part of his absolute 
 duty. But there is another side to the assimilation 
 to Jesus Christ, which is the very essence of the Chris- 
 tian life, and that other side is brought out in the words 
 of this text. They are linked by " therefore " to 
 something that goes before, and that something is 
 a reference to the office of Jesus Christ as the High 
 Priest of His people. Assimilation to Him is to work 
 in that direction too. Detachment from the world 
 does not mean indifference to the miseries, the sins, 
 and the groans of humanity. Since Christ is " without 
 the camp," so must we be. Since Christ has offered 
 
AT THE ALTAR 265 
 
 His " blood, which is the life," so must we offer our- 
 selves. " By Him, therefore, let us offer the sacrifice 
 continually." This writer's conception of religion 
 embraces both the deep secrets of the inner life and 
 the outward life amongst men ; he is not preaching 
 a Christianity of the closet or the cloister, when he 
 demands detachment from the world, but he is preach- 
 ing a Christianity which has indeed its roots in " the 
 secret place of the Most High," but is of the market- 
 place and the streets, and wherever men do congregate. 
 He who moves amongst men dispensing comfort, 
 redressing wrongs, bringing help and good, is worship- 
 ping at the altar, if he is doing these things for Christ's 
 sake, as truly as if he were absorbed in devout con- 
 templation. We have to keep these two things to- 
 gether — detachment from the world, and the priestly 
 office for men. 
 
 Let us then, first, look at this lofty general con- 
 ception of 
 
 I. The True Christian Life as a Life of Priestly 
 Sacrifice. 
 
 Now, I do not need to spend your time in adducing 
 the manifold instances in which this thought is insisted 
 on in the New Testament. I suppose I may take 
 them for granted, but let me remind you of one single 
 instance in which, with a remarkable blending, which 
 is not confusion, of metaphor, one of the ApostoUc 
 writers tries to fill out the conception by accumulating 
 
266 AT THE ALTAR 
 
 all tlie various elements of the Sacrificial Ritual, and 
 declaring that they all find their truest and loftiest 
 embodiment in the Christian Hfe, The Apostle Peter 
 runs together the notions of Temple, Priesthood and 
 Sacrifice, and makes no scruple of applying the fused 
 product of the three to the one fact of the Christian's 
 experience and the Christian's standing, " Ye are a 
 spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual 
 sacrifices." Every Christian man is a habitation of 
 God. Every Christian man is a priest, consecrated 
 to render to God spiritual offerings. In the depths 
 of his own being, by his own act, he is to offer his own 
 self. And unless professing Christian people in some 
 measure approximate, with ever varying degrees of 
 nearness and imperfectly at the best, but still do 
 approximate, and try to approximate, to the realization 
 of these three blended, lofty thoughts, their Chris- 
 tianity is a very poor thing. Ye are the temple of 
 God, and priests of the Most High, and yourselves 
 are the sacrifices that you are to offer. 
 
 Now that whole stream of thought and way of looking 
 at the Christian life is a great deal more than mere 
 rhetorical imagery. It rests upon the fact that all 
 that was expressed, in shadow and in outward symbol, 
 in regard to the deepest truths of men's relation to 
 God, by ritual, is transfigured and fulfilled, receiving 
 its highest and its only real embodiment, in the relations 
 of a believing soul to God and Christ. 
 
AT THE ALTAR 267 
 
 So, then, if we are in any deep and real sense Chris- 
 tian people, we have the priest's quahfication. And 
 what was that ? " Be ye clean that bear the vessels 
 of the Lord." The purity that was aimed at in a 
 merely outward fashion, by elaborate washings and 
 abstinences and restrictions, is to be accomplished 
 in each of us, by our own continuous efforts, making 
 ourselves clear and clean from " all filthiness of flesh 
 and spirit." No man can minister, as every Christian 
 man is bound to do, sacrifices of thankfulness to God 
 and of beneficence to men, unless his hands are clean 
 and his heart pure. And so, dear brethren, this 
 imaginative metaphor which some of you may think 
 mere rhetorical talk, and others of you may be dis- 
 posed to call, as it has been called, " Hebrew old 
 clothes," is a great deal more than either the one or 
 the other. It lays upon every Christian man and woman 
 a very solemn obhgation, which it is impossible to 
 get away from. 
 
 But, again, if we are Christian people, we have the 
 priest's prerogative. And what is that ? To pass 
 behind the curtain and into the sanctuary. You will 
 find, in some old ruined abbeys, a path worn on the 
 hard stones of the pavement, by which the ministers 
 of the altar passed continually into the secret place. 
 Have our feet worn a way into the inmost shrine ? 
 Wliat sort of a priest is he who never, when he can 
 help it, visits the inner chamber where the God dwells ? 
 
268 AT THE ALTAR 
 
 We have the priest's prerogative. Oh ! that we used 
 it more ! 
 
 We have the priest's function. And what is that ? 
 To ofEer sacrifice. I need not spend your time in dis- 
 cussing what is the root-idea of sacrifice. Many different 
 notions may be entertained about that, which are not 
 relevant to my present subject, but a sacrifice is some- 
 thing — generally some precious thing — withdrawn 
 from personal use and dedicated to a god. And if we 
 are Christians, we have it for our eminent duty to live 
 lives which are sacrifices, being thus consecrated, 
 thus referred to Jesus Christ and God, and in which 
 there shall be the element of self-denial and of self- 
 immolation. These three things, reference of all my 
 activities to God, yielding of myself to Him, and slaying 
 of myself, go to make up the conception of sacrifice, 
 without which a Christian profession is still less melodious 
 than sounding brass or tinkling cymbal, A perpetual 
 reference of all my activities to God — that is a hard 
 saying. A perpetual surrender of myself to Him — that 
 is a harder. To take these obstinate wills of ours and 
 bow them, or to take them and hold them in absolute 
 suspense, until He declares His will, and then to close with 
 it, in swift and intimate union, is no easy matter for any 
 of us. And harder than either, and harder than both, 
 and necessary for either and for both, is the last stage 
 in sacrifice, wherein I have to take myself, and with 
 my own hand, " bind the sacrifice with cords to the 
 
AT THE ALTAR 269 
 
 horns of the altar," and with ray own hand lift the 
 knife and smite. Self-annihilation is self-preservation ; 
 and the sacrifice is not complete, till each Christian 
 priest can say : " I live, yet. not I, but Christ liveth 
 in me." 
 
 So, dear brethren, the metaphor of my text is not 
 a pretty flight of fancy, or a piece of poetic rhetorical 
 imagery. And let me say to you Nonconformists who, 
 by virtue of your ecclesiastical position, oppose sacer- 
 dotal pretensions of all sorts, that the Christian truth 
 of the universal priesthood of believers by no means 
 exhausts its power, or its necessary applications, when 
 it smites down the claims of an order in the Christian 
 Church to be priests. It has a grip upon each of us, 
 and is not merely to be used as a protest against sacer- 
 dotal assumptions, but as carrying in it the law for 
 the individual life. 
 
 So much, then, for the general thought that is here ; 
 let me say a word as to — 
 
 II. The Particular Applications of the Thought 
 OF THE Priesthood of Christians in the Text. 
 
 A double form of this general notion of the life of the 
 Christian as a sacrificial life is set forth here. There is 
 the sacrifice of speech and the sacrifice of deeds. A 
 word or two about each of these. 
 
 As to the former, the sacrifice of speech, the words 
 of our text, carefully considered, point to two kinds of it, 
 as is better brought out in the Revised Version's render- 
 
270 AT THE ALTAR 
 
 ing : " By Him, therefore, let us offer the sacrifice of 
 praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of lips which 
 make confession of His name." So there are two kinds 
 of words which are sacrifices, words of praise to God, and 
 words of confession of God to men. 
 
 Now with regard to the former of these — the hard 
 word here is that " continually." It is easy to say " Let 
 us offer the sacrifice of praise," but when you add " con- 
 tinually," and exhort to pray without ceasing, to rejoice 
 evermore, in everything to give thanks, then comes the 
 pinch ; and then comes in the special element of self- 
 surrender and self-denial which makes praise a true 
 sacrifice. Ah ! brethren, there ought to be running 
 through every Christian life, in a continuous stream, the 
 reference in all things to God, the recognition of His hand 
 in all things, and the conviction that all things are 
 working together for our good. But instead of a con- 
 tinuous stream, too often our thankfulness is like rivers 
 in the tropics in dry seasons, the bed dotted with stag- 
 nant pools here and there, and not even a trickle of water 
 to connect them together. Our thankfulness is forth- 
 coming sometimes, if at all, when our present circum- 
 stances are bright and gladsome ; but it fails altogether 
 in the long reaches where there are no such blessings, 
 whereas it ought to be like a broad stream, full from 
 bank to bank, and continuous from its fountains in the 
 hills to its estuary in the ocean. 
 
 But that needs a very continual habit of recognizing 
 
 I 
 
AT THE ALTAR 271 
 
 God's hand in all things that come to us. When we are 
 always conscious of His working, always sensitive to 
 His touch, then, and only then, will there be the con- 
 tinual flow of our praise to Him. As when the wind 
 sweeps through an ^oHan harp, vague wild notes come 
 from its strings, so when the breath of God's mercies 
 touches the chords of our souls, they will vibrate into 
 music, and there will be continual praise, if there is 
 continual recognition of His agency in what befalls us. 
 But along with that recognition there needs to be what 
 is very hard to reach and still harder to maintain, 
 namely, the position in which, hfted above the world 
 and gifted with clearer vision than belongs to sense, we 
 see that all things are ours, if we are Christ's. Then, 
 and only then, will the unremitting voice of this stream 
 of our praise neither be silenced by the frosts of adver- 
 sity, nor by the fierce heats of prosperity which dry it 
 up ; but seeing that " all things work together for 
 good," and seeing that God moves in all things, we shall 
 be able, even when we have to preface each thanks- 
 giving with the recognition of our losses, to say : " The 
 Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord." 
 The sacrifice of praise may be offered, and should be 
 offered, " continually." 
 
 I need not say more than a word about the other aspect 
 of this sacrifice of speech, confession to His name. 
 That is a priestly function which a great many Christian 
 people woefully fail to discharge. I know that it is 
 
272 AT THE ALTAR 
 
 " not good form " to talk about religion. I know that 
 we have conventionalities of reticence about the deepest 
 things of our souls which, in the main, are founded on 
 propriety and common sense. I should be the last man 
 to urge Christian people to push their religion in the 
 faces of men out of season. But making all allow- 
 ances for conventional reticence and insular reserve and 
 personal idiosyncrasies and the like, I do believe that 
 many of us lose a great deal of the strength and blessed- 
 ness of our religion, because we are so dumb about it. 
 If we love Jesus Christ, it will be natural for us to say 
 that we do. And if we never acknowledge whose we 
 are, we shall run a dreadful risk of losing much of the 
 religion which we are so slow, so ashamed, so afraid to 
 confess. If you keep your Christianity hidden in your 
 doubled-up fist, take care that it does not happen to you 
 as to some simple person in a conjuring entertainment, 
 who has a coin put into his palm, and is bid to shut his 
 hand upon it, and when he opens it, the coin is gone. 
 Brethren, if you would believe, speak. " I believe, 
 therefore have I spoken " is true ; and you can turn 
 it round the other way ; "I speak, therefore I have 
 beheved." 
 
 Now, as to the other side of the general notion of 
 sacrifice, the sacrifice of deeds, only a word need be said. 
 " To do good and to communicate forget not." That 
 implies that good, Christian people, who are occupied 
 with the sacrifice of praise and confession, are sometimes 
 
AT THE ALTAR 273 
 
 apt to neglect the other side, the sacrifice of practical 
 beneficence. People that do not care much about our 
 Christianity are very fond of sneering at evangeUstic 
 efforts, and saying : " Oh ! you give tracts, when you 
 ought to be looking after housing and social questions 
 of that sort." Well, the New Testament is quite as 
 contemptuous and as condemnatory of that one-sided 
 kind of Christian sacrifices as any scoffer of them all is. 
 And what it says is that the sacrifice of praise to God 
 is the foundation on which is to be built, and on which 
 alone can be built, to any good purpose, the other sacri- 
 fice of beneficence and of liberality. " The service of 
 men is the worship of God " — that is true, and noble, 
 but only on condition that reference is had in the mind 
 of the server to the God for whose sake he is serving. 
 As the Apostle James puts it, true worship is not merely ^ 
 the " fruit of our Ups," but " to visit the fatherless and 
 widows in their aSliction, and to keep himself unspotted 
 from the world." Morality and beneficence are the 
 garments of religion, the body of which rchgion is the 
 soul; and if you divorce the one from the other, each is 
 one-sided and imperfect. The philanthropy which is 
 not devout is as incomplete, as narrow, as unreliable as 
 is the devotion which is not philanthropical. The two 
 must go together, and neither of them is anything else 
 than a sickly fragment, unless they do go together. 
 
 Now I do not purpose to dwell upon what might, in- 
 deed, more appropriately have been a sermon by itself ; 
 
 M.S. ly 
 
274 AT THE ALTAR 
 
 the emphatic words of this text : ""By Him therefore 
 let us offer." Jesus Christ's great sacrifice has taken 
 away the obstacle which makes it impossible for men to 
 offer acceptable sacrifice. That death, in which the 
 Lamb of God has borne away the sins of the world, makes 
 it possible that, on the footing of His propitiatory sacri- 
 fice, we should offer our sacrifices of thanksgiving. By 
 Him we offer, because He gives to us, through our faith, 
 a share in His own hfe, and that communicated life 
 moulds us into His own Hkeness. Since He is a priest, 
 so are we. Since He is a King, we too reign. Since He 
 is a Son, we through Him receive the adoption of sons. 
 Since He is the Light of the world, we, too, through Him 
 are lights. " By Him therefore let us offer the sacrifice 
 of praise " and of beneficence. If the life of each of us 
 is thus a sacerdotal and sacrificial life, then when it 
 comes to a close, we too shall be able to say " I am ready 
 to be offered," and our death will be a libation, poured 
 out to the God Who through death has delivered us from 
 death, and it will — 
 
 " Thine endless mercies seal. 
 And make the sacrifice complete." 
 
Great Hopes a Great Duty 
 
 The God of peace that brought again from the dead our Lord 
 Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the 
 everlasting covenant. — Heb. xiii. 20. 
 
 A GREAT building needs a deep foundation ; a 
 leaping fountain needs a full spring. A very 
 large and lofty prayer follows the words of my text, 
 and these are the foundations on which it rests, the 
 abundant source from which it soars heavenward. The 
 writer asks for his readers nothing less than a complete, 
 all-round, and thorough-going conformity to the will 
 of God ; and that should be our deepest desire and our 
 conscious aim, that God may see His own image in us, 
 for nothing less can be " well-pleasing in His sight." 
 But does not such a dream of what we may be seem far 
 too audacious, when we peruse the stained volume of 
 our own lives, and remember what we are ? Should we 
 not be content with very much more modest hopes for 
 ourselves, and with a very partial attainment of them ? 
 
276 GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 
 
 Yes, if we look at ourselves ; but to look at ourselves is 
 not the way to pray, or the way to hope, or the way to 
 grow, or the way to dare. The logic of Christian peti- 
 tions and Christian expectations starts with God as the 
 premiss, and thence argues the possibihty of the im- 
 possible. It was because of all this great accumulation 
 of truths, piled up in my text, that the writer found it in 
 his heart to ask such great things for the humble people 
 to whom he was writing, although he well knew that 
 they were far from perfect, and were even in danger of 
 making shipwreck of the faith altogether. My purpose 
 now is to let him lead us along the great array of 
 reasons for his great prayer, that we too may learn to 
 desire and to expect, and to work for nothing short of 
 this aim — the entire purging of ourselves from all evil 
 and sin and the complete assimilation to our Lord. 
 There are three points here : the warrant for our highest 
 expectations in the name of God ; the warrant for our 
 highest expectations in the risen Shepherd ; the war- 
 rant for our highest expectations in the everlasting 
 covenant. 
 
 I. The Warrant for our Highest Expectations 
 IN THE Name of God. 
 
 " The God of peace " — the name comes Hke a bene- 
 diction into our restless lives and distracted hearts, and 
 carries us away up into lofty regions, above the muta- 
 tions of circumstances and the perturbations and agita- 
 tions of our earthly life. No doubt, there may be some 
 
GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 277 
 
 allusion here to the special circumstances of the re- 
 cipients of this letter, for it is clear from the rest of the 
 epistle that they had much need for the peace of God, 
 to calm their agitations in the prospect of the collapse 
 of the venerable system in which they had lived so long. 
 It is obvious also that there were divisions of opinion 
 amongst themselves, so that the invocation of the God 
 of peace may have had a special sanctity and sweetness 
 to them, considering the circumstances in which they 
 were placed. But the designation has a bearing not so 
 much on the condition of these to whom the words are 
 spoken, as upon the substance of the grand prayer that 
 follows it. It is because He is known to us as being 
 " the God of peace " that we may be quite sure that He 
 will " make us perfect in every good work to do His 
 will, working in us that which is well- pleasing in His 
 sight." 
 
 And how does that great name, sweet and strong as it 
 is, bear with it the weight of such an inference as that ? 
 Plainly enough because it speaks, first of all, of that 
 which I may call an immanent characteristic of the 
 Divine nature. He is the tranquil God, dwelling above 
 all disturbance which comes from variableness and all 
 " the shadows cast by turning " ; dwelling above all 
 possibilities of irritation or agitation. And yet that 
 great ocean is not stagnant, but through all its depths 
 flow currents of love, and in all its repose is intensest 
 energy. The highest activity coincides with the supremest 
 
278 GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 
 
 rest. The wheel revolves so swiftly that it stands as if 
 motionless. 
 
 Then, just because of that profound Divine repose, 
 we may expect Him, by His very nature, to impart His 
 own peace to the soul that seeks Him. Of course, it 
 can be but the faintest shadow of that Divine indis- 
 turbance which can ever fall, like a dove's wing, upon 
 our restless lives. But still in the tranquillity of a 
 quiet heart, in the harmonies of a spirit all concentrated 
 on one purpose, in the independence of externals pos- 
 sible to a man who grasps God, in the victory over change 
 which is granted to them who have pierced through the 
 fleeting clouds and have their home in the calm blue 
 beyond, there may be a quiet of heart which does not 
 altogether put to shame that wondrous promise : " My 
 peace I give unto you." It is possible that they " which 
 have believed " should " enter into the rest " of God. 
 
 But if the impartation of some faint but real echo of 
 His own great repose is the delight of the Divine heart, 
 how can it be done ? There is only one way by which a 
 man can be made peaceful, and that is by his being made 
 good. Nothing else secures the true tranquillity of a 
 human spirit without its conformity to the Divine will. 
 It is submission to the Divine commandments and 
 appointments, it is the casting-ofi of self with all its 
 agitations and troubles, that secures our entering into 
 rest. What a man needs for peace is, that his relations 
 with God should be set right, that his own nature should 
 
GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 279 
 
 be drawn into one and harmonized with itself, and that 
 his relations with men should also be rectified. 
 
 For the first of these, we know that it is " the Christ 
 that died," who is the means by which the ahenation and 
 enmity of heart between us and God can be swept away. 
 For the second of them, we know that the only way by 
 which this anarchic commonwealth within can be brought 
 into harmony and order, and its elements prevented 
 from drawing apart from one another, is that the whole 
 man shall be bowed before God in submission to His will. 
 The heart is like some stormy sea, tossed and running 
 mountains high, and there is only one voice that can 
 say to it, " Peace : be still," and that is the voice ol 
 God in Christ. There is only one power that, like the 
 white moon in the nightly sky, can draw the heaped 
 waters round the whole world after itself, and that is 
 the power of Christ in His Cross and Spirit, which brings 
 the disobedient heart into submission, and unites the 
 discordant powers in the liberty of a common service. 
 So, brethren, if we are ever to have quiet hearts, they 
 must come, not from favourable circumstances, nor 
 from anything external. They can only come from 
 the prayer being answered " Unite my heart to fear Thy 
 name," and then our inner lives will no longer be torn 
 by contending passions — conscience pulling this way 
 and desire that ; a great voice saying within, " you 
 ought ! " and an insistent voice answering, " I will not" ; 
 but all within will be at one, and then there will be peace. 
 
280 GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 
 
 " The God of peace sanctify you wholly," says one of the 
 Apostles, bringing out in the expression the same thought, 
 that inasmuch as He Who Himself is supreme repose 
 must be infinitely desirous that we. His children, should 
 share in His rest, He will, as the only way by which that 
 rest can ever be attained, sanctify us wholly. When — 
 and not till, and as soon as — we are thus made holy, 
 are we made at rest. 
 
 Nor let us forget that, on the other hand, the Divine 
 peace, which is "shed abroad in our hearts " by the love 
 of God, does itself largely contribute to perfect the holi- 
 ness of a Christian soul. We read that " the God of 
 peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly," and 
 also that " the peace of God will guard your hearts 
 and minds," and again that the peace of God will sit 
 as umpire in our hearts, detecting evil, judging actions, 
 awarding the prizes. For, indeed, when that peace 
 lies like a summer morning's light upon our quiet hearts, 
 there will be httle in evil that will so attract us as to 
 make us think it worth our while to break the blessed 
 and charmed silence for the sake of any earthly influ- 
 ences or joys. They that dwell in the peace of God 
 have little temptation to buy trouble, remorse perhaps, 
 or agitation, by venturing out into the forbidden ground. 
 So, brethren, the great name of the God of peace is 
 itself a promise, and entitles us to expect the com- 
 pleteness of character which alone brings peace. 
 
 Then, further, we have here 
 
GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 281 
 
 II. The Warrant for our Highest Expectations 
 IN THE Risen Shepherd. 
 
 " The God of peace Who brought again" — or, per- 
 haps, brought up — " from the dead our Lord Jesus, that 
 great Shepherd of the sheep." Now, it is remarkable 
 that this is the only reference in this Epistle to the 
 Hebrews to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The book 
 is full of references to that which pre-supposes the 
 Resurrection, namely, the ascended life of Jesus as the 
 great High Priest within the veil, and the fact that only 
 this once is the act of Resurrection referred to, confirms 
 the idea, that in the New Testament there is no division of 
 thought between the point at which the line begins and 
 the line itself, that the Ascension is but the prolongation 
 of the Resurrection, and the Resurrection is but the be- 
 ginning of the Ascension. But here the act, rather 
 than the state into which it led, is dwelt upon as 
 being more appropriate to the purpose in hand. 
 
 Then we may notice further, that in that phrase, 
 " the great Shepherd of the sheep," there is a quotation 
 from one of the prophets, where the words refer to Moses 
 bringing up the people from the Red Sea. The writer of 
 the Epistle adds to Isaiah's phrase one significant word, 
 and speaks of " that great Shepherd," to remind us of 
 the comparison which he had been running in an earlier 
 part of the letter, between the leader of Israel and Christ. 
 
 So, then, we have here brought before us Jesus Who 
 is risen and ascended, as the great Shepherd of the 
 
282 GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 
 
 sheep. Looking to Him, what are we heartened to 
 beheve are the possibihties and the Divine purposes 
 for each of those that put their trust in him ? Gazing 
 in thought for a moment on that Lord risen from the 
 grave, with the old love in His heart, and the old greet- 
 ings upon His lips, we see there, of course, as everybody 
 knows, the demonstration of the persistence of a human 
 life through death, hke some stream of fresh water 
 holding on its course through a salt and stagnant sea, 
 or plunging underground for a short space, to come up 
 again flashing into the sunshine. But we see more 
 than that. We see the measure of the power, as the 
 Apostle has it, that works in us, " according to the 
 energy of the might of the power which He wrought in 
 Christ, when He raised Him from the dead." As we 
 gaze, we see what may be called a type, but is a great 
 deal more than a type, of the possibilities of the risen 
 life, as it may be lived even here and now, by every 
 poor and humble soul that puts its trust in Him. The 
 Resurrection of Jesus gives us the measure of the power 
 that worketh in us. 
 
 But more than that, the risen Shepherd has risen as 
 Shepherd, for the very purpose of imparting, to every 
 soul that trusts in Him, His own hfe. And unless we 
 grasp that truth, we shall not understand the place of 
 the Resurrection in the Christian scheme, nor the ground 
 on which the loftiest anticipations are not audacious 
 for the poorest soul, and on which anything beneath 
 
GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 283 
 
 the loftiest is, for the poorest, beneath what it might 
 and should aspire to. When the alabaster box was 
 broken, the ointment was poured forth and the house 
 was filled with the odour. The risen Christ imparts 
 His life to His people. And nothing short of their 
 entire perfecting, in all which is within the possibihties 
 of human beauty and nobleness and purity, will be the 
 adequate issue of that great Death and triumphant 
 Resurrection, and of the mighty, quickening power of a 
 new Ufe, which He thereby breathed into the dying 
 world. On His Cross, and from His Tomb, and from 
 His Throne, He has set agoing processes which never 
 can reach their goal — and, blessed be God ! never will 
 stop their beneficent working — until every soul of man, 
 however stained and evil, that puts the humblest trust 
 in Him, and lives after His commandment, is become 
 radiant with beauty, complete in hohness, victorious 
 over self and sin, and is set for evermore at the right 
 hand of God. Every anticipation that falls short of 
 that and all effort that lags behind that anticipation, is an 
 insult to the Christ, and a tramphng under foot of the 
 blood of "the covenant wherewith ye are sanctified." 
 
 So, brother, open your mouth wide, and it will be 
 filled. Expect great things ; beheve that what Jesus 
 Christ came into the world and died to do, what Jesus 
 Christ left the world and lives to carry on, will be done 
 in you, and that you too will be made complete in Him. 
 For the Shepherd leads and the sheep follow — here afar 
 
284 GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 
 
 off, often straying, and getting lost or torn by the 
 brambles, and worried by the wolves. But He leads 
 and they do follow, and the time comes when " they shall 
 follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth," and be close 
 at His heels in all the good pastmres of the mountains of 
 Israel. " We see not yet all things put under Him," 
 but we see Jesus, and that is enough. 
 
 III. The Warrant for our Highest Expectations 
 IN THE Everlasting Covenant. 
 
 Space will not allow of my entering upon the question 
 as to the precise relation of these final words to the rest 
 of the verse, but their relation to the great purpose of 
 the whole verse is plain enough. It has come to be very 
 unfashionable now-a-days to talk about the covenant. 
 People think that it is archaic, technically theological, 
 far away from daily Hfe, and so on and so on. I beheve 
 that Christian people would be a great deal stronger, if 
 there were a more prominent place given in Christian 
 meditations to the great idea that underlies that meta- 
 phor. And it is just this, that God is under obHgations, 
 taken on Him by Himself, to fulfil to a poor, trusting 
 soul the great promises to which that soul has been 
 drawn to cleave. He has, if I might use such a meta- 
 phor, like some monarch given a constitution to His 
 people. He has not left us to grope as to what His 
 mind and purpose may be. Across the infinite ocean 
 of possibilities, He has marked out on the chart, so to 
 speak, the line which He will pursue. We have His 
 
GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 285 
 
 word, and His word is this : " After those days, saith 
 the Lord, I will make a new covenant. I will write my 
 law on their inward parts, I will be their God, and they 
 shall be My people." So the definite, distinct promise, 
 in black and white, so to speak, to every man and 
 woman on the face of the earth, is " Come into the 
 bonds of the covenant, by trusting Me, and you will 
 get all that I have promised." 
 
 And that covenant is, as my text says, sealed by " the 
 blood." Which, being turned into less metaphorical 
 Enghsh, is just this, that God's infinite propension of 
 beneficence towards each of us, and desire to clothe 
 us in garments of radiant purity, are, by Christ's 
 death, guaranteed as extending to, and working their 
 effects on, every soul that trusts Him. What does that 
 death mean if it does not mean that ? Why should He 
 have died on the Cross, unless it were to take away sin ? 
 
 But the blood of the covenant does not mean only 
 the Death by which the covenant is ratified. We shall 
 much misapprehend and narrow New Testament teach- 
 ing, if we suppose that. The " blood is the life." There 
 is further suggested, then, by the expression, that the 
 vital energy, with which Jesus Christ came from the 
 dead as the Shepherd of the sheep, is the power by 
 which God makes us " perfect in every good work to do 
 His will, working in us that which is well-pleasing in 
 His sight." 
 
 So, two practical counsels may close my words. See 
 
286 GREAT HOPES A GREAT DUTY 
 
 that you aspire as high as God's purpose concerning 
 you, and do not be content with anything short of the, 
 at least, incipient and progressive accomphshment in 
 your characters and Uves, of that great prayer. Again, 
 see that you use the forces which, by the Cross and the 
 Resurrection and the Ascension, are set in motion to 
 make that wondrous possibiHty a matter-of-fact reahty 
 for each of us ; and whoever you are, and whatever you 
 have been, be sure of this, that He can lift you from the 
 mud and cleanse you from its stains, and set you at His 
 own right hand in the heavenly places. For the Name, 
 and the risen Shepherd, and the Blood of the everlast- 
 ing covenant, make a threefold cord, not to be quickly 
 broken, and able to bear the weight of the loftiest 
 hopes and firmest confidence that we can hang upon it. 
 
Great Hopes and a Great Power 
 
 The God of peace . . . make you perfect in every good work to 
 do His will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight, 
 through Jesus Christ. — Heb. xiii. 21. 
 
 THIS all-comprehensive petition is preceded by, 
 and based upon, a lofty invocation, which gazes 
 on various aspects of the nature and deahngs of God, 
 and thence draws large desires and expectations. It 
 is because He is " the God of peace," it is because He 
 has " brought again from the dead the great Shepherd 
 of the sheep," it is because He has made a covenant 
 with men, and sealed it with blood, that this writer finds 
 in his heart to open his mouth so wide in such a prayer. 
 The " Name " of God is the true encouragement for 
 petitions and the measure of expectations. There must 
 be some proportion between the cause and the effect. 
 
 Another observation may be made by way of intro- 
 duction, and that is, that we have here brought together, 
 as in perfect harmony, and as being cause and effect, 
 two truths which, grasped separately, and being separ- 
 
288 GREAT HOPES AND A -GREAT POWER 
 
 ated, exaggerated, have split the Christian world. One 
 school has shouted : " God working in you," and has 
 whispered, if it has spoken at all, " to do His will." 
 The other school has divided its shoutings and its whis- 
 perings in precisely opposite fashion. One school of 
 opinion has so gazed upon the Divine operations that 
 it has reduced man to a mere tool in His hands ; the 
 other has been so fascinated by the thought of the free- 
 dom and responsibility of the human agent, that it has 
 practically ignored God. But this writer has taken the 
 two war-cries, and written them both upon his banner. 
 Thus he shakes hands with Paul when he said : " Work 
 out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in 
 you." The Christian life is first of all an inwrought, 
 and then it is an out-working, life. 
 
 We have then, here, 
 
 I. The Great Christian Ideal. 
 
 There are in the text two kinds of workings, and the 
 parallelism between the two would have been more 
 distinctly observable by an English reader if the same 
 word had been employed for both kinds, in our transla- 
 tion, as is the case in the Greek. We should then have 
 read, " to do His will, doing in you that which is well- 
 pleasing in His sight." 
 
 So notice that the external conduct, the doing of His 
 will, comes as consequence and outcome of an inward 
 character which is " pleasing in His sight." Now, it 
 sounds a commonplace that conduct is the outcome of 
 
GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 289 
 
 character, but it is anything but a commonplace if we 
 begin to try to apply it to ourselves. As the fruit to 
 the tree, as the fountain to the stream, so the actions of 
 the Christian man ought to be the direct outcome and 
 issue of his character. But they are not always so; 
 they never are so to the extent that they ought to be. Of 
 course, to a very large extent, everything that a man 
 does is a making visible of his inward self. But then 
 there are large tracts of all our lives which are instinctive, 
 almost purely mechanical, which are done without any 
 conscious reflection at the moment. And the more that 
 these are minimized, the more that the territory of 
 mechanical, instinctive, habitual, unreflective conduct 
 is diminished, and the more that the territory of the 
 self-reveaUng spirit of a man permeating all his work is 
 enlarged, the nearer he approximates to the ideal. 
 When the work is, as it were, the footprint of the person, 
 when what we do is not merely done because it was 
 done at the same hour yesterday, and we have reached 
 the stage of doing it without thinking about it, then we 
 rise higher in the scale. 
 
 But this relation of conduct to character bears with 
 it two very important exhortations. One of them is 
 this : let us see to it that all our actions are brought 
 under the dominion of the inward self ; and the other is, 
 let us see to it again, that all of that inward self is trans- 
 lated into actions and made visible thereby. How 
 many of us keep our religion in our pews along with 
 M.S. 19 
 
290 GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 
 
 our hymn books, or put it away in a drawer on the 
 Sunday night with our Sunday clothes, to lie there until 
 next Sunday comes round ? How much of our creed 
 influences our conduct ? How much of our conduct 
 is shaped by our creed ? How much of the outward 
 life is consciously determined by the inward self, and 
 how much of it is mere dead, instinctive, mechanical, 
 unreflective action ? Brethren, commonplace and in 
 some aspects inevitable as is this relation shadowed 
 in my text, between the inward and the outward, our 
 lives would be transfigured if we grasped and practised 
 these two principles — make of your every thought an 
 action ; let every action be dominated by a thought. 
 
 But then, further, there is here the suggestion of what 
 is necessary in order that the outward life should be 
 good — an inward self, pleasing in His sight. What a 
 lofty, lovely, bold thought that is, that the infinite 
 Divine nature stands in such a relation to us poor crea- 
 tures as that something not unlike the delight that we 
 have in pleasant sights or sweet fragrance is experienced 
 by God ! What a wonderful heightening of that thought 
 it is, that you and I, who know ourselves to be very often 
 disgusting to our own better selves, may yet be made to 
 minister something to the joy of the Lord ! God is 
 Love, and with whatever modifications that word must 
 be applied to Him, this is an inseparable part of all love 
 — to rejoice and delight in the nobleness of the beloved. 
 What a stimulus that should be to all work ! How 
 
GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 291 
 
 (.lifferent it is to say to a man, " Be so-and-so because it 
 will please God " from what it is to say, " Be good be- 
 cause it is your duty," or " because it is the highest 
 ideal of humanity ; " or so on. Bring the personal 
 element into the effort to purge character, and what is 
 else labour and hopeless toil comes to be blessed, as all 
 things are blessed, that are done by love for love's sake, 
 and offered to love. 
 
 " Well-pleasing in His sight " — can it be ? Can one 
 of our black brooks by any alchemy be so purged as 
 that upon its foul, greasy surface the noonday blue shall 
 be reflected, or the nightly stars quiver in points of 
 light ? Yes, as I shall have to show you presently. 
 Here is the Christian ideal, that the black brook that 
 flows out of our hearts may be sweetened, purged, defe- 
 cated, and made crystalline and translucent — " working 
 in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight." 
 
 Then, still further, we have here the ideal of what 
 constitutes a good work. It must be the doing of God's 
 will : that is its distinctive characteristic. The popular 
 usage applies the expression " a good work " to certain 
 conventional forms of charity, almsgiving and the like. 
 The New Testament notion of it is simply this — an act 
 done with reference to God, and in submission to His 
 will; Self-regard, making myself my own master, is 
 the tap-root of all ignoble, base, sinful living. And 
 contrariwise, to refer everything to God and to say in 
 regard to action, as in regard to endurance : " Not my 
 
292 GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 
 
 will but Thine be done," lifts the smallest deed into 
 sublimity, and transfigures the commonest and plainest- 
 featured act, and makes all our lives noble and worship. 
 To do His will is to do good works. 
 
 Now I know, and I am thankful to know, that there 
 are many noble, self-sacrificing, lovely deeds done by 
 men who have no conscious submission of will, in the 
 doing of them, to God. God forbid that I should say 
 that these are " splendid vices." But I do say that 
 they have not reached the highest possible height of 
 goodness, nor are invested with the fairest possibilities 
 of loveliness with which men's actions might be clothed. 
 I remember being in a rainstorm among the hills, in 
 which the sun suddenly shone out, blazing down upon 
 a mountain ash, and making its bright red berries and 
 wet green leaves a wonder and a delight, and then the 
 blackness came over again, and that flaming miracle 
 turned once more into a common tree. The deeds that 
 have the sunshine of God's face striking upon them, 
 because they are done in obedience to His will, blaze up 
 and flame and are glorified. A good work is a work 
 that " does His will." 
 
 Then, lastly, we have it suggested in this ideal that 
 the Christian life ought to be a comprehensive all-round 
 goodness — " in every good work." Do not let us con- 
 fine ourselves to the type of excellence most congruous 
 to our nature, but try to assimilate the graces which 
 are less kindred to our dispositions. Do not let us 
 
GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 293 
 
 narrow ourselves into one groove of virtue, but let us 
 expatiate over all the field. A tree in a thicket has no 
 chance to expand on all sides. Take it out into a field, 
 and let it have ample space to burgeon ; give air a free 
 circle all round it, and let its roots spread outwards as 
 they will, and the sunshine come to it from sunrise to 
 sunset, and you will get a symmetrical, all-round green- 
 ness. That is the kind of grace and virtue that should 
 characterize a Christian. 
 
 Such, then, is the ideal — an outward life the true cast 
 and replica of an inward ; an inward character con- 
 formed to God's, and so " pleasing in His sight ; " deeds 
 done in obedience to Him, and an all-round perfection 
 and excellence. What about the reaUty ? Is such an 
 ideal as unattainable as actual lines and real triangles 
 that possess all the properties of those of Euclid ? My 
 text says it is not unattainable — " make you perfect in 
 every good work in order to do His will ; working in 
 you that which is well-pleasing in His sight." 
 
 So then, we have here, in the second place, 
 
 II. The Great Power Which makes the Ideal 
 A Reality. 
 
 The word here rendered, " make perfect " does not 
 convey the absolute idea of completeness as other words 
 which are similarly translated do ; but it means to 
 equip, or generally to fit for a specific form of service, 
 and it is especially employed in two cases to which I 
 merely point. It is the word which is used when we read 
 
294 GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 
 
 of fishermen by the Lake of Galilee mending their nets ; 
 so it carries the notion of repairing what is broken. 
 It is the word which is used when we read of supplying 
 that which is lacking ; so it carries the notion of bringing 
 additional reinforcements to something that is enfeebled. 
 The power by which the ideal is realized is further stated 
 as being an inward working which is mediated for us 
 through Jesus Christ. 
 
 So then we are brought face to face once more with 
 the great Christian Gospel that, through Jesus Christ, 
 that which is lacking may be supplied, and that which is 
 broken may be made whole, and that all that is needed 
 to equip a man for the service which consists in doing 
 God's will, is laid up in Him for us to receive into our 
 hearts. 
 
 There is a possibility that all the weaknesses which 
 we feel, which disable us from service, and hamper us 
 at our highest, may by degrees be swept away, and that 
 each of us, conscious as we are of imperfection and of 
 something far more tragic than imperfection — absolute 
 contrariety to the Divine will — may yet be brought into 
 that state in which He shall look upon us and see us to 
 be well-pleasing in His sight. Dear brethren, forgiveness 
 is much, and is an essential part of the process by which 
 the broken, slimy net is mended ; but forgiveness is 
 only a means to an end, a preliminary to the great gift, 
 the gift of eternal life, life from Christ, and life like His. 
 This is the Gospel which we have to preach, and surely 
 
GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 295 
 
 it is a gospel, to men conscious of their own short- 
 comings and failures, and surely they who have a Divine 
 Ufe imparted to them, and a Divine Spirit working in 
 them, need never despair of becoming " perfect in every 
 good work to do His will," and developing characters 
 '• well-pleasing in His sight." 
 
 There is the distinction, the blessed distinction and 
 transcendent pre-eminence, of Christianity over every re 
 hgion and every system of moral improvement that the 
 world has ever seen. They tell us what we ought to be ; 
 this makes it possible that we should be it. What is the 
 use of examples. What is the use of laws ? What is the 
 use of telling me my duty ? I know it well enough ; that 
 is not the trouble. The worst man knows a great deal 
 more of what is right than the best man does. What is 
 the good of telling a lame man to get up and walk, and 
 expatiating to him about the loveliness of the road ? 
 What is the use of setting before me a headUne, and 
 saying : " There, write like that," if my hand is shaking, 
 and my pen is bad, and there is no ink in the ink well ? 
 We do not lack moral teaching, we lack moral impulse 
 and power. And because Jesus Christ comes to us, and 
 does not only say, " Run," but lays His hand on the 
 palsied Umbs and from the thrill of His touch there 
 comes strength, therefore is He the Leader Whom to 
 follow is made possible by His gifts, and Whom to reach 
 is life and blessedness and perfection. 
 Lastly, let me gather together — 
 
296 GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 
 
 III. One or Two Practical Thoughts 
 from these considerations. 
 
 The first of them is this. You Christian people 
 ought to have for your aim what is God's purpose ; and 
 His purpose is set forth in that ideal which I have tried 
 faintly to outHne. That is what we are here for, to 
 make it a reality in our own lives. That is what Christ 
 died and lives for. That is what all creeds and forms of 
 worship are for. They are scaffolding to help us to 
 build, but hosts of us never get any further than the 
 scaffolding. That is what all life is intended to produce ; 
 " He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His 
 holiness." It is God's purpose, let it be your aim. 
 
 Again, let us learn the true way by which we can 
 make this aim a reality in our lives. Since the Outward 
 is but the outcome of the Inward, and since the purifying 
 of the Inward is the result of the inflow into it of the life 
 of Jesus Christ, the healing stream, then the main thing 
 that Christian people have to do, in order to grow into 
 perfection, is to keep the communications open, and by 
 desire and prayer and faith to make themselves pene- 
 trable by that Divine influence. The first thing to do 
 is not to labour at conduct, but to see after character, 
 and the first thing to do in regard to healing and strength- 
 ening character is to He open to the heavenly influences 
 and let them flow into our hearts. First be, then do ; 
 and that you may be, let Christ come and make you 
 what He would have vou to be. But on the other hand, 
 
GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 297 
 
 whilst there is first of all to be the receiving of the 
 Divine power, there is next to be the applying of it. 
 They have been building a gigantic dam in Upper Egypt. 
 It is in vain that the waters from the upper lands are 
 piled behind it and stored there, or brought down 
 through all the valley of the Nile, unless each pea- 
 sant leads the water into his own little plot, and 
 carefully directs it round the roots of his own crops. 
 You have the stream, see to it that your garden is 
 watered. 
 
 Then, further, let these considerations bring us in very 
 deep humiUty to the confession of our own deficiencies. 
 We have a Power fit to shake mountains, and in our 
 experience it barely shifts a grain of dust. We have a 
 Power that comes roUing in a great flood, and a mere 
 dribble of it passes into our lives. Men take note of 
 the lives of nominal Christians, and then they turn 
 round to people of my profession and say to us — and 
 they have a right to say, " What is the good of your 
 talking about a great power that will make perfect men ? 
 Look at these people who profess to have the power. 
 Are they any better than we are ? " Not much ; 
 sometimes not so good. What then ? If the sick man 
 does not take the medicine he will not be healed ; but 
 his not being so is not a demonstration that the phy- 
 sician has made a mistake, or that the prescription is of 
 no use ; it is only a demonstration of his own folly. We 
 Christian people are calumniating the power of the 
 
298 GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 
 
 Gospel, because we take so little of Christ's transforming 
 life into our lives. 
 
 But do not let me close in a minor key. This great 
 prayer brings us great hopes. There are forces at work 
 upon all Christian souls which are evidently thwarted 
 and yet as plainly have it in them to produce effects far 
 transcending anything in Christian character and con- 
 duct that we ever see here. What then ? Why this, 
 then — if a vine, planted in cold northern latitudes, can 
 only put forth blossoms that are often shrivelled by 
 frosts before they are set, and never mature under our 
 pale sun, there will be a transplanting to a soil and 
 climate where the abortive bloom shall swell and soften 
 and empurple itself, until it is fit for the table or the 
 winepress of the Lord of the Vineyard. As surely as 
 the crescent moon foretells its own completed silvery 
 round, so surely do the imperfections of the best of us, 
 when taken in connexion with the Divine purpose and 
 the omnipotent forces that are lodged in the death of 
 Jesus and in His life-giving Spirit, predict a state in 
 which all who here humbly trust in Him, and seek to 
 live in obedience to God, shall be perfect in every 
 good work, and wholly and eternally and growingly 
 " pleasing in His sight." The God of Peace " Who 
 brought again from the dead that great Shepherd 
 of the sheep," will bring all His flock where He is, 
 and there they who on earth followed Him afar off 
 with faltering steps and many wanderings, shall 
 
GREAT HOPES AND A GREAT POWER 299 
 
 " follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth," and 
 the children shall all be perfect, as their " Father 
 which is in heaven is perfect." 
 
The Singers by the Sea 
 
 And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire, and them 
 that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and 
 over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of 
 glass, having the harps of God. And they sing the song of Moses 
 the servant of God and the song of the Lamb. — Rev. xv. 2, 3. 
 
 THIS vision owes its form partly to the circumstances 
 of the seer and partly to an Old Testament 
 reference. As to the former, John's exile in Patmos 
 occasions miusually numerous allusions to the sea, in 
 this book of the Revelation. The voice of the glorified 
 Redeemer, for instance, reminds him of the thunder of 
 the waves on the rocky coast. The mysterious Beast 
 rises from its abysses, which might hide so much that 
 was foul and strange. Babylon sinks in ruin, like a mill- 
 stone tossed by an angel's hand into the sea. And when 
 the vision of the new heavens and the new earth dawns, 
 one of its characteristics is, " there shall be no more sea," 
 the emblem of estrangement, of rebellious power, of 
 futile effort. 
 
 Similarly in this vision, the glassy sea shot with fire is 
 soo 
 
THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 301 
 
 but a photograph of what was often seen from John's 
 rocky islet on some still morning when the sunrise " came 
 blushing o'er the sea," or on some evening when the 
 wind dropped, and the flaming west dyed the watery 
 plain with a fading splendour. 
 
 Then, as to the other element which colours the repre- 
 sentation here, we cannot fail to see that there is an 
 allusion to the Song of Miriam, sung on the banks of the 
 Red Sea, when Pharaoh and his host were buried in the 
 mighty waters. There, as here, the singers stand on the 
 safe shore ; there, as here, they hymn a destruction which 
 opened the way to emancipation and joy. The allusion 
 is underlined, as it were, in the declaration that the Song 
 which here is sung is " the Song of Moses and of the 
 Lamb." 
 
 Now, of course, we cannot use highly imaginative 
 representations, like that of my text, as if they were 
 dogmatic statements, and we have to be very careful in 
 deducing any inferences from such figurative language 
 as this. But still, making all allowance for that, we 
 may gather lessons that may be of use to us. We have 
 here brought before us the victorious choir ; their place 
 by the glassy sea, and their triumphant song. 
 
 I. The Victorious Choir. 
 
 The description of these jubilant singers is very 
 striking. " They that had gotten the victory over," or, 
 as the Original is presented in the Revised Version, 
 " they that had come victorious from " — and it would 
 
302 THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 
 
 have been even better to have read out of than from " the 
 beast, and his image and his mark, and the number of 
 his name." They were conquerors who had fought their 
 way out of a certain tyrannical dominion, and had 
 emerged into freedom. Now, I shall not spend time in 
 the discussions which have been very fascinating to 
 many people, and do not seem to me to have been of 
 much use to anybody, as to whether this " Beast " 
 represents a person, and if so whether it is Nero, or 
 whether it is some unknown and still future individual 
 embodiment of certain tendencies. Never mind about 
 that. The important question is, what made the 
 " beast " a beast ? 
 
 Well — bestiality, to begin with ; which, being turned 
 into modern English, is sensuous animalism. Man is 
 poised in the midst, between two orders of being — if 1 
 may use the word " order " in reference to one of them 
 — and he may rise or he may sink. He may go up to 
 the level of Divinity'; he may come down to the level of 
 bestiality. And if he does not do the one, he will do the 
 other. You have only to look round you to-day to 
 see the animal beneath a great deal of the veneer of 
 civilization and refinement in modern society. The 
 unblushing sensuality, or if I may not use that word, I 
 may at least say sensuousness, of many modern ideals in 
 art, in literature, in daily life — what is it but the beast 
 in the man coming to be predominant ? How much 
 that is unblushingly practised, and even defended and 
 
THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 303 
 
 applauded, is really giving a free hand to the Sensuous, 
 which ought never to get a free hand, letting the mutin- 
 eers come up on deck and take command of helm and 
 sextant, flinging the reins on the neck of the steeds, 
 which do noble work when they are well held in, but set 
 the heavens on fire, like Phaethon's team, when they are 
 allowed their way. There are other aspects of what 
 make the Beast a beast. I put them all in two words, 
 God-forgetting selfishness and God-defying opposition 
 of \vill against Christ. If you take the context you will 
 find, amidst a great deal that is very difficult to under- 
 stand, this one thing emphasized, that the Beast and 
 the Lamb divide the world between them, and that 
 whoever is not on the side of the one is on the side of the 
 other. Under which King ? Who is your Lord and 
 Master ? You young people especially, are you going 
 to serve the flesh, or are you going to put your heel on 
 the neck of the brute, and five for the God whom you 
 may bring to dwell within you ? Which are you doing ? 
 The next point is that the dominion of this " Beast," 
 which is shorthand for all the lower and animal ten- 
 dencies, is an established fact, out of which a man has to 
 fight his way. " They have gotten the victory out of 
 the Beast, and the number of his name." There is 
 nothing in this world worth the having and the being, 
 which is not the result of a deadly earnest fight. If 
 you make up your minds, or if without ever having had 
 the courage to make them up, you let yourselves drift 
 
304 THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 
 
 into the position of taking up the line of least resistance 
 and doing what is easiest, then your fate is settled, and 
 down you will go. I do not mean in regard to outward 
 things. You may prosper in them, and win wealth or 
 fame if your aims go in that direction, but in regard to 
 the true aims of life, unless you are prepared to fight, 
 you will be a poor creature whilst you live, and a wreck 
 altogether when you come to die. They " got the victory 
 out of the beast ; " plucked it from the very jaws of the 
 brute ; and that is what we have to do. As the good 
 old-fashioned hymn says : — 
 
 Now we must fight if we would reign ; 
 Increaes our courage, Lord. 
 
 But there is one more thing to note about these vic- 
 torious choristers. How did they get the victory ? 
 There is only one answer to that question — because they 
 joined themselves to the Victor-Lamb, It is a strange 
 paradox that runs through this Book of the" Revelation, 
 that, as I have already suggested, the Lamb is pitted 
 against the Beast ; and with entire destruction of the 
 verisimilitude of the metaphor, the Lamb is made to be 
 a Warrior-Lamb, Who " goes forth " — strange as it 
 sounds — " conquering and to conquer." That covers a 
 deep truth. Christ cures the animaUsm of humanity by 
 His sacrifice on the Cross, and by His meekness and 
 gentleness. And if you are ever to overcome your 
 worse self, and to have any share in that jubilant song 
 
THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 305 
 
 of triumph at the last, I believe in my heart of hearts 
 that the only way by which you can do so is by trusting 
 yourselves to Him Who " teaches our hands to war and 
 our fingers to fight." 
 
 When He said to us, " be of good cheer ; I have 
 overcome the world," He implied that " this is 
 the victory that " — for us — " overcometh the world, 
 even our faith," by which we unite ourselves with 
 Him, participating by derivation in His victorious 
 power, and, therefore, are " more than conquerors 
 through Him that loved us." They have " gotten the 
 victory from the Beast." Let me beseech you to fight 
 under the same Leader and with the same weapons as 
 they did, or the Beast will gain dominion over you. 
 
 And now turn to the second point — 
 
 IL- The Glassy Sea by which the Victors Stood. 
 
 Of course, the allusion to the story in Exodus, and 
 the propriety of the picture, make it necessary that 
 we should suppose that they who stand " on the sea of 
 glass " are not represented as if they had their feet 
 planted on its calm surface, but that " on " here means 
 " above," " by the side of," on the safe shore, with the 
 glassy sea stretching in front of them. Now this sea of 
 glass, by which these victors stood, has appeared already 
 in this book, where it is represented as lying placid and 
 even before the Divine Throne. I suppose that both 
 there and in our text, it represents by a very natural 
 metaphor the aggregate of the Divine dealings and self- 
 
 M.s. 20 
 
306 THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 
 
 manifestations to men ; on whose calm surface, if I may 
 so say, as on a great, shining mirror, the throne of God 
 and He who sits upon it, are in some degree reflected; 
 One of the Psalms has the same idea, in a somewhat 
 different form, when it says, " Thy way, God, is in 
 the sea, and Thy path in the deep waters, and Thy foot- 
 steps are not known." Another Psalm echoes the 
 thought when it says, " Thy judgments are a mighty 
 deep." And one of the Apostles winds up his discussion 
 about the mysteries of the kingdom of God with, " Oh ! 
 the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of 
 God. How unsearchable are His judgments." So I 
 suppose we may consider that it is in accordance with 
 the analogy of Scripture, as well as with the natural 
 propriety of the symboUsm, if we see, in this sea of glass 
 mingled with fire, an emblem of the whole dealings of 
 God with man, through which are ever and anon shot, 
 as it were, fiery streaks, like the scarlet threads in 
 Venetian glass. 
 
 This noble symbol carries with it some great and 
 precious thoughts. That sea is transparent. It is deep, 
 but it is not dark by reason of mud, but by reason of 
 its clear translucent depth ; and when vision fails, it is 
 not because of obscuration there, but of our weak sight. 
 I have seen a like sea, without a speck of mire or dirt 
 and with no weed on its margin, rising and falling on 
 marble cliffs that it had polished into discovery of their 
 golden veins. Such is this " glassy sea," pure and clean. 
 
THE' SINGERS BY THE SEA 307 
 
 " The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous 
 altogether." We know their motives and purposes ; 
 they come from Love, they tend towards man's perfect- 
 ing. And if, at any time, it is difficult to hold fast by 
 that belief as to their origin because of their complexity, 
 or difficult to see how they tend to that issue, still, as 
 does the psalm to which I have already referred, we 
 have to link together the two conceptions : " Thy way is 
 in the sea " and " Thy way is in the sanctuary." 
 
 Again, the sea of glass was calm and stable. To us, 
 tossing upon it, it often looks tempestuous enough. To 
 them, looking down from above, it is smoothed into a 
 watery plain, a glassy mirror. That crystal sea was 
 shot with fire. The judgments of God necessarily are 
 sometimes punitive, retributive, destructive, but they 
 that are in sympathy with the Lamb, and have shaken 
 off the tyranny of the Beast, in the measure in which 
 they have done so, even here and now see in them, and 
 understand, " the loving-kindness of the Lord " even 
 when He smites. 
 And so I come to the last point — 
 in. The Song of this Victorious Choir.- 
 I do not attempt to expound it. I simply wish to 
 draw attention to its central thought. These conquer- 
 ing choristers stand, like Miriam and her maiden band 
 with their timbrels, on the safe shore, and as they look 
 out on the calm waters that have buried Pharaoh and 
 his hosts, they lift up their song of praise, because of 
 
308 THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 
 
 the destructive judgments that have led to liberty. The 
 gist of their song is this, that God's dealings with man — 
 the transparent crystal and the fiery streaks — ahke are 
 the outcome of His righteous love, and alike are intended 
 to lead men to know and worship Him. Even when 
 there come " terrible things in righteousness " to the 
 world, or to us individually, if we are wedded to Jesus 
 Christ they will yield to us here, and far more clearly 
 and continuously hereafter, occasions for thankfulness, 
 for praise, for clear perception of the Divine character, 
 and for more lowly worship at His feet. " When the 
 wicked perish there is shouting," says Proverbs. And 
 when God, as is sometimes the case, comes forth and 
 smites into dust some hoary institution that has been 
 the source of miseries to mankind, then men ought to 
 rejoice, and, in spite of sympathy and compassion, ought 
 to feel that God has done a mighty thing in mercy, 
 though mercy had an envelope of wrath. There is 
 nothing of the weak sentimentality which characterizes 
 some people's theories, in the New Testament concep- 
 tion of God. He is the God of love, but His very love 
 must sometimes nerve His arm to strike, and sharpen 
 His spear to slay. 
 
 Let us remember that that is true about our individual 
 lives. Let us take our place where the choristers stand 
 by the glassy sea, in so far as we can do so here and now. 
 Let us recognize habitually, that even the retributive 
 and destructive and afflictive acts of God come forth 
 
THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 309 
 
 from His righteousness and for our good, and we shall be 
 less astonished when the bitter draught comes to our Ups, 
 and be able to say, even whilst we take it : " The cup 
 which my Father hath given me ; shall I not drink it ? " 
 And afterwards we shall stand like the harpers by the 
 glassy sea, and praise Him for our sorrows, our losses, 
 our pains ; and for all the way by which the Lord our 
 God hath led us. 
 
 So let us acquiesce in present imperfect knowledge, 
 and not be in too great a hurry to pronounce, with our 
 fallible judgment, and our partial information as to a 
 half-finished process, what is in accordance with, and 
 what is contrary to, the Divine nature. Abraham had 
 the boldness to say : " Shall not the Judge of all the 
 earth do right ? " — which did not mean " I will acqui- 
 esce in His acts, though I cannot see their righteousness, 
 because He did them ; " but did mean : " Men have a 
 standard of right and wrong to which they expect that 
 the Divine acts will conform." That is true, no doubt, 
 but it is a principle that has to be very cautiously appHed, 
 for the reasons just stated. We see but a small segment 
 of the circle here, and our judgment of it had best be 
 suspended till we see the perfect round. We shall be 
 most modest and wise if we " judge nothing before the 
 time." But we can confidently accept Christ's promise : 
 " What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know here- 
 after." Since we may hope to join the victorious 
 choristers by the sea of glass, let us not contradict our 
 
310 THE SINGERS BY THE SEA 
 
 future song of praise by our present murmurings and 
 complaints. 
 
 Brethren, this vision shows us, too, the path of victory. 
 Take Jesus Christ for your captain, and in His strength 
 fight, and He will bring you at last to the eternal shore ; 
 and as the unsetting sun rises, it will touch with golden 
 beams the calm ocean, beneath which the oppressors lie 
 buried for ever. If we let the Beast write his name on 
 our foreheads, we shall sink with him in the mighty 
 waters. If we take the Lamb first for our sacrifice, 
 and then for our King, He will break the yoke of bondage 
 from off our necks, and bring us at last to the safe beach, 
 and put a new song into our mouths, of praise to Him 
 Who has gotten us the victory " over the Beast . ; -. 
 and the number of his name." 
 
 Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and Londoa.