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THE 
 
 Hem of His Garment. 
 
 SPIRITUAL LESSONS FROM THE 
 LIFE OF OUR LORD. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. FRANK SEWALL. 
 
 if it were but the hem of His garment." — St. Mark vi. 56. 
 
 
 /3X£&J* 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
 
 LONDON: 16 SOUTHAMPTON ST., COVENT GARDEN. 
 
 1876. 
 
 7> 
 
 

 S> 
 
 
 t* 
 
 M 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE PILLOW OF STONES. 
 
 DIVINE ALLEGORIES IN THEIR SPIRITUAL MEANING. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1875, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
 
 C j. b.lippi m f coTT & -c ot S 
 
 V er^-^ ^r 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 TO 
 
 MY FATHER AND MOTHER, 
 
 With Filial Love and Devotion. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. — The Hem of His Garment; or, How to Begin the 
 
 Religious Life 7 
 
 II. — The Generation of Jesus Christ; or, God's De- 
 scent to Man. A Meditation for New Year's 
 Day 31 
 
 III. — The Sword in Mary's Soul; or, The Divine Judg- 
 ments in the Church . . . . .48 
 
 IV. — The Mother of Jesus at Cana ; or, Humility and 
 Obedience the Receptacles of the Lord's Re- 
 generating Grace 65 
 
 V. — Then that which is worse ; or, Spiritual Drunk- 
 enness .86 
 
 VI. — The Girded Servant; or, The Subordination of 
 
 the Sensual 101 
 
 VII. — The Blind restored to Sight; or, The True 
 
 Character of Christian Evidence . . .120 
 
 VIII. — The Return Home; or, Individual Responsibil- 
 ity before God 137 
 
 IX. — The Word of Life; or, How the Lord commu- 
 nicates Spiritual Life to Man . . . .153 
 
 (5) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 X. — Not the Righteous, but Sinners called ; or, 
 The Church not an Assembly of perfected 
 Men and Women 175 
 
 XI. — The Stranger at the Door; A Meditation for 
 
 Christmas-Time .194 
 
 XII. — The Unknown Hour; or, How rightly to Pre- 
 pare to Die 207 
 
I. 
 
 ®fte Pern ni Ufa <$at mnrt ; of, front to §egin the 
 lieligion^ gift. 
 
 If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole. — St. Matt, 
 
 ix. 21. 
 
 THE Divine narrative from which these 
 words are taken forms in itself an epitome 
 of the whole gospel. It presents, in its little 
 cluster of vividly-portrayed events, an allegory 
 of our blessed Lord's whole life and mission in 
 this world. For as our Lord, by birth, made his 
 dwelling in our corrupt and sinful nature, and 
 during his life was constantly administering his 
 saving Word, by teaching, by example, and by 
 his own spiritual combats with the inner king- 
 dom of Satan ; and as He, in death, became our 
 complete Redemption and Resurrection into 
 
 (7) 
 
8 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 everlasting life; so, here, does the narrative in 
 its beginning find the Saviour sitting at meat 
 in the house of publicans and sinners; thence 
 He goes forth, on his saving mission, to call 
 the dead to life, being summoned by a ruler of 
 the synagogue, whose daughter lies even now 
 dead ; and on his way, by the ministry of his 
 Word, of that virtue which goeth out of Him, 
 He heals a poor woman,- who, coming behind 
 Him, touches the hem of his garment, believing 
 that thus she shall be made whole. 
 
 This incident is eminently illustrative of the 
 saving power of the Lord as the Word, — that 
 is, the Divine Truth; and it affords at the same 
 time a most needful and practical example of 
 that humility and faith which must go together 
 in the mind of any person who will share this 
 salvation. 
 
 The woman which was diseased with an 
 issue of blood twelve years, who had suffered 
 many things of many physicians, and had spent 
 all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. g 
 
 rather grew worse, stands, in so far, as the type 
 of our corrupt and degraded humanity, of our 
 spiritual uncleanness and disease, which is be- 
 yond the help of mere human skill and effort ; 
 but, in her saying within herself, "If I but touch 
 his garment, I shall be whole," and her coming 
 behind the Lord, amidst the throng that pressed 
 about Him, and silently, but in faith, touching 
 only the hem of his garment, she becomes 
 the illustrious and ever-memorable pattern of 
 true Christian humility and of saving faith. 
 "Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath 
 made thee whole ;" here is the whole gospel 
 of salvation preached in a single sentence to 
 this healed woman, the type of our redeemed 
 humanity. " Daughter," — it is the Father of all 
 who speaks: come dowm from heaven to save, — 
 "be of good comfort," — it is the good tidings of 
 salvation that He brings, — "thy faith hath made 
 thee whole ;" this salvation is in such a faith as, 
 overcoming all obstacles, shame, the fear of the 
 multitude, the pressure of the throng, brings 
 
 A* 
 
IO THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 the believing one to the Lord Himself, and im- 
 pels him to perform in lowliness of heart the 
 humblest and most external duties in the fear 
 of the Lord, and in a trust in his mercy and 
 saving power. But it is manifest that the prac- 
 tical import of this simple and comprehensive 
 lesson all turns upon the significance of that 
 act of the woman's faith, by which the Saviour 
 perceived that virtue had gone out of Him, and 
 by which the woman was made whole of her 
 disease. For no one will question but that this 
 diseased woman is the representative of our 
 natural and unregenerate will, and that in her 
 miraculous cure is typified the regeneration of 
 man through the operation of the Holy Spirit. 
 But the practical and all-important part of the 
 lesson here afforded is, By what means does 
 the Holy Spirit thus exert or put forth in us its 
 healing, saving power? what have we on our 
 part to do ? how are we to do this ? and how 
 will this make us whole ? 
 
 We see at a glance that the means of this 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LITE. II 
 
 Divine operation, of this going forth of the 
 healing virtue, was the woman's deliberate, 
 voluntary, humble, trustful act. The Lord did 
 not come to her specially, calling her by name, 
 raising her, assuring her. At most He was 
 passing by where she was. He was in the 
 world, He was going then on his mission of 
 mercy, of giving life to the dead. The woman 
 beholds Him, believes that He not only can 
 save her, but will save her. She comes to 
 Him ; she passes forward through the crowd ; 
 she allows neither shame nor fear, nor any 
 impediment, to stand in her way ; she is will- 
 ing on her part to struggle hard for the attain- 
 ment of her end ; but, as regards the Saviour, 
 she does not importune Him with her cries, 
 nor even her presence ; she will not stay his 
 feet a moment ; she asks not a glance of com- 
 passion from his eye, a word of comfort from 
 his mouth ; she knows that He is Love itself, 
 ever merciful and ever strong to save ; the 
 effort is to be on her part, not on his ; she will 
 
12 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; 0R y 
 
 not throw herself in his way, — she will not 
 even utter a prayer in his outward ear ; she will 
 implore Him only in the silent desire of her 
 heart ; she will cry to Him in her earnest but 
 unuttered faith ; she will come behind Him, 
 saying to herself, " if I may but touch his 
 garment, I shall be made whole." She does 
 so : she touches but the hem of his robe, — 
 the fringe or tassel of that garment whose 
 pattern is given in the ancient Levitical law, — 
 and immediately the fountain of her blood is 
 dried up ; she feels in her body that her plague 
 is healed. 'Tis then the Saviour turns and 
 looks upon her that has done this thing ; 'tis 
 then she falls trembling before Him, and in 
 heartfelt acknowledgment of his mercy tells 
 Him all the truth. And now she hears from 
 his lips those comforting and gracious words : 
 " Daughter, be of good comfort ; thy faith hath 
 made thee whole. Go in peace." Her faith 
 has been the means of her cure ; but it was 
 faith in act: and that act was none other than 
 
HO IV TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIEE. 13 
 
 comincr and touching the hem of the Lord's 
 garment. 
 
 Upon this act, then, — touching the hem of 
 the Lord's garment, — hangs the whole signifi- 
 cance of this event. That it is an act of great 
 spiritual import, whose efficacy lies deeper 
 than in the mere outward transaction, and is 
 grounded on some interior truth which the act 
 itself only typifies, is what every one must 
 admit who believes that this narrative is 
 written for our edification in spiritual things ; 
 since it would be otherwise not only wholly 
 meaningless to us, — inasmuch as we can see 
 no rational connection between touching a 
 garment and healing a plague, but, more- 
 over, since it presents to us a means of cure 
 which it is utterly impossible for us now to 
 enjoy in a literal manner. And that it was 
 no mere accident or single occurrence of the 
 kind, grounded only in the momentary conceit 
 of the woman, follows from the statement in 
 another place, that " they sent out t7tto all the 
 
1 4 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 country round about and brought unto Him all 
 that were diseased, and besought Him that they 
 might only touch the hem of his garment ; and 
 as many as touched were made perfectly whole!' 
 What, then, is the spiritual act typified by 
 touching the hem of the Lord's garment ? We 
 know, in the first place, how the Lord came 
 into the world ; namely, as the Word made 
 flesh. He is the Divine Truth, made present 
 to mankind, to enlighten, to guide, to heal, to 
 sanctify. He is the vehicle by which the Di- 
 vine Love descends to earth to regenerate and 
 raise from death our fallen race. The Father, 
 the infinite and eternal Love and Life, dwells in 
 Him ; and through Him, as the Truth, this Love 
 goes forth in wondrous deeds of mercy and 
 power, overcoming evil of every kind, "healing 
 all manner of sickness and disease among the 
 people. " Our Lord, as the Incarnate Word, 
 becomes thus the clothing of the Divine Love, 
 its garment, its form, and visible body. And 
 everything our Lord did must, in its spiritual 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIEE. I 5 
 
 significance, point to some operation of the 
 Divine Truth as revealed to man. Whatever is 
 exterior to the Lord, and appertaining to Him, 
 as, in this instance, his garment, must, there- 
 fore, refer to this Divine Truth or Word in its 
 more external aspect. We may regard the 
 Lord's garment, therefore, as typifying natural 
 or literal truth, — that kind of truth which clothes 
 and contains within itself a wisdom which is 
 spiritual and concealed from our sight. It is 
 the letter of the Bible, which clothes and con- 
 tains within itself a spiritual meaning ; or it is 
 the more external moral duties and religious 
 acts of life, as, likewise, the vessel and the cover- 
 ing of corresponding spiritual duties and acts. 
 But the hem of the garment is that which is 
 at the bottom and end of all. It may be under- 
 stood as the tassel at the corner or the fringe 
 all around the border, which, while it is the 
 outermost part of all, is yet that which com- 
 pletes the form and the beauty of the garment. 
 It represents, therefore, that kind of truth 
 
1 6 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 which is most external, most natural, which be- 
 longs to the sensuous plane of the mind, and 
 is connected with our outward experience and 
 conduct in this material world. 
 
 That the hem of the garment is made so 
 conspicuous in the precious narrative and 
 teachings of the gospels is for no other reason 
 than because this low, sensuous plane of our 
 life is itself so prominent a thing, and one so 
 directly in need of the saving precept and 
 healing power of the Divine Word. The hem 
 of the garment is even more conspicuous in 
 the instructions of the Levitical law. We read 
 of the priest's garment, that " they made upon 
 the hems of the robe pomegranates of blue, and 
 purple, and scarlet, and twined linen. And 
 they 7nade bells of pure gold, and put the bells be- 
 tween the pomegranates upon the hem of the robe, 
 round about between the pomegranates ; a bell and 
 a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate, round 
 about the hem of the robe to minister in ; as 
 the Lord commanded Moses!' — Ex. xxxix. 24. 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. 1 7 
 
 And in another place, " The Lord spake unto 
 Moses, saying, Speak tmto the children of Israel, 
 and bid them that they make them fringes in the 
 borders of their garments throughout their gen- 
 erations, and that they put upon the fringe of the 
 borders a ribband of blue : and it shall be unto 
 you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and 
 remember all the commandments of the Lord, and 
 do them!' — Num. xv. 38. Into what impor- 
 tance is this otherwise trifling and insignificant 
 matter, the hem or fringe of a garment, thus 
 elevated in the Divine Word ! And yet it is 
 indicated with beautiful simplicity in both these 
 passages just quoted what the spiritual signifi- 
 cance of this fringe or border is ; for of the one 
 it is said it shall be so made for the robe to 
 minister in, — that is, the proper symbol of the 
 Divine Truth as revealed and dispensed to 
 man ; and of the other, that it shall remind 
 them of the commandments of the Lord, that 
 they are to be obeyed. Seeing this intimate con- 
 nection between the hem of the garment to 
 
 2* 
 
1 3 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 the ministration of the Divine Truth and its 
 observance, we shall now no longer wonder at 
 seeing the hem of the Lord's garment being 
 that medium by which his saving power goes 
 forth. We can begin to understand at least 
 how it was, and how it still is, spiritually a fact 
 that "as many as touched the hem of his gar- 
 ment were made perfectly whole/' 
 
 It is said of our Lord, that as soon as the 
 woman touched the hem of his garment He 
 perceived that virtue was gone out of Him. 
 And this leads us to a hasty glance at that 
 sublime and far-reaching topic, — the saving 
 power of God as exerted by means of his 
 incarnation in our human flesh and nature. 
 The Lord descended, as we have already 
 seen, as the Divine Truth, not separate from 
 the Divine Love, but to make way for the 
 Divine Love to descend into the hearts of 
 men. The Father was in Him and did the 
 works that He did. " God was in Christ re- 
 conciling the world unto Himself." This He 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. 19 
 
 did by overcoming error with truth, and evil 
 with good ; by lifting the chains of hell from 
 the degraded and perishing souls of men, and 
 opening their eyes to heavenly prospects, and 
 implanting pure and heavenly motives in their 
 hearts. Why — the question always has arisen, 
 and will frequently arise from the natural 
 reason — why could not God do this in heaven 
 without coming into this world and assuming 
 the very flesh, and entering into the life itself 
 of us mortals, with all its corrupt tendencies, 
 its temptations to sin, its sufferings, even the 
 most painful ? The answer is, that between 
 the high realm of heaven and the souls of 
 men on earth a thick cloud of wickedness, yea, 
 a host of evil spirits, had stretched itself out, and 
 hell, like a great shadow of death, brooded over 
 the entire race of man. Through such a cor- 
 rupt and malignant atmosphere of evil the 
 rays of the heavenly sun — the saving influ- 
 ences of the Divine Love — could no longer 
 come down to men. The Prince of darkness 
 
20 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; 0R y 
 
 and sin reigned over all the world. Then the 
 Lord in his own omnipotence, Himself came a 
 Light into the world, that whosoever should 
 come to the light might be saved. Dispersing 
 all these corrupted mediums, He became in his 
 revealed Truth Himself the one great medium 
 of the Divine Love and life to the souls of men ; 
 He put to flight these legions of the enemy; He 
 scattered the darkness in which men had been 
 groping ; He opened again the clear depths 
 of heaven, and in Him the sun of righteous- 
 ness arose with healing in his wings. That 
 nothing might stand between Him and our 
 humanity, in its lowest, most sensuous, most 
 external state, He Himself entered into this 
 very humanity of ours, fallen, corrupt, ready 
 to perish : yea, the hem of his garment swept 
 indeed the very 4 ust °f the earth we tread. 
 He brought his saving light and grace not 
 only into the lowest social condition of our 
 human life, but also into its extreme spiritual 
 prostration, being tempted in every way that 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. 21 
 
 mortal man is tempted, and yet overcoming 
 with his Divine power all temptation, and thus 
 conquering for us liberty and the hope of 
 salvation. It was to reach man in this world 
 that God Himself came into the world; it was 
 to rescue man in his carnal, earthly estate that 
 He put on this carnal, earthly nature, and in it 
 fought against our common foes ; it was to 
 heal, to succor, to save man in his most de- 
 graded and lifeless condition, that He clothed 
 Himself with our own degraded and perishing 
 humanity. Into this, even to its lowest and 
 most sensuous extremes, He brought his Di- 
 vine life and power. His own humanity be- 
 came glorified and Divine throughout, so that 
 He could say of his own glorified, risen body, 
 " Behold my hands and my feet." This de- 
 scent of the Lord with all the power of his 
 Divinity, to heal and to save, into the very 
 lowest plane of our human life and nature, 
 and the operation of his power through this 
 assumed humanity, as a medium, is what is 
 
THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 illustrated by the healing" virtue that went 
 forth from Him when the hem of his garment 
 was touched. For, as then the mere corporeal 
 touch was sufficient to the imparting- of an in- 
 fluence healing- to physical disease, so now can 
 man be spiritually healed by the Divine grace 
 immediately imparted to him from the Lord's 
 Divine Humanity. " Touch me and see : for a 
 spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me 
 have." It is by touching the glorified, natural 
 degree of the Divine Humanity that we are 
 saved ! And we come into contact with the 
 Lord by observing in humility and in faith 
 the least and the most external of the Lord's 
 commandments. 
 
 This may seem at first thought an easier 
 way, if anything, oi being spiritually made 
 whole, than was that simple act by which the 
 woman was physically healed. But let us 
 look at the subject practically and see if it in- 
 deed be so. Not that it is desirable to make 
 the religious life appear more arduous than it 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. 23 
 
 is, but that, be it easy or not, we come at the 
 facts and practical reality of it. 
 
 Now, first of all, two things are demanded 
 of us, — faith and action. That is, that we no 
 longer look to human physicians, to any human 
 evidence or power, as such, for the cure of 
 our spiritual disease, but to look humbly, 
 prayerfully, and confidently to the Lord for 
 the succor we need, and then make an earn- 
 est, determined effort to do that which, on 
 our part, is needful as a medium of his work- 
 ing in us. Now this is itself just that which 
 the natural mind is unwilling and finds it hard 
 to do. It cannot readily convince itself that 
 its own selfish and worldly motives and ends 
 are not those which will conduce to real hap- 
 piness. It goes on consulting year after year 
 these human physicians, its love of wealth, of 
 power, of distinction, of good reports, of the 
 favor of men and their flatteries, — happy, in- 
 deed, if, like the woman of the text, it spends 
 all it has, tries its every art and endeavor, 
 
24 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 only to find itself at last nothing helped and 
 only growing worse. 
 
 Then, looking above, to the Divine mercy 
 and power for aid, it must begin to act, to do 
 something with persevering effort ; and what 
 shall this be? It must be an opening of 
 our hearts to the healing influence of the 
 Lord by reforming our outward, conscious, 
 voluntary conduct. We must touch the hem 
 of the Divine garment of truth by beginning 
 to obey the Divine commandments in our daily 
 conduct. We must bring our actual life into 
 contact with the Divine truth as applicable to 
 it. We must apply the Ten Commandments 
 to the reforming of the conduct of our own 
 minds and bodies ; for this external sense of 
 the Commandments is the hem of the Lord's 
 garment; it is the border that shapes, holds in, 
 and gives strength to all the inner and spir- 
 itual truth we can receive. The hem is, as we 
 have said, the Divine truth in the sensuous or 
 most external degree; but this means, of course, 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE, 25 
 
 that aspect of the Divine truth that is appli- 
 cable to the external conduct of our lives to 
 whatever degree of spiritual advancement we 
 have attained. For spiritual truth always be- 
 comes external and natural in our voluntary 
 conduct and acts. We touch the hem of the 
 Lord's robe when we think of and obey his 
 Word in the little common duties of every 
 day, when we correct ourselves in little faults 
 and faithfully perform little duties. 
 
 Take, then, the Divine precepts of the Deca- 
 logue, and touch the hem of each holy truth. 
 First: we must worship no idols. Wherein, 
 then, in our conduct are we practicing idol- 
 atry ? If we do not, with the pagans, wor- 
 ship images of stone or brass, it does not fol- 
 low that this commandment has no literal force 
 with us ; for its hem, its external application, is 
 just there where it strikes our actual conduct. 
 If we are not worshiping brazen images, nor 
 sun, nor moon, what, then, are we worshiping 
 in our acts ? Are we not worshiping, as a 
 b 3 
 
26 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 God wealth, fashion, fame ; or some pet scheme 
 and creation of our own minds; or some 
 human idol whose favor we regard before that 
 of God, in whose devotion we forget all the 
 duties and obligations of religion ? And take 
 the second : Thou shall not blaspheme. Are 
 we given to open blasphemy, to using profane 
 language, to making light of holy names and 
 things ? Then begin at once to stop this prac- 
 tice : touch this garment on its hem, and vir- 
 tue will go forth from the Lord into the soul 
 to make us love and reverence his name and 
 Word. Third : Keep holy the Sabbath. Are you 
 a Sabbath-breaker, doing your own sensual 
 and worldly pleasure, and thinking your own 
 thoughts on the Lord's day, and neglecting 
 the holy ordinances of his Church, omitting to 
 pray to Him, to lift your mind to heavenly 
 things, to read his Word, to go to church, and 
 humbly, reverently, worship Him in word of 
 mouth and on your bended knee ? Then be- 
 gin here to reform, and be assured that the 
 
HO IV TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. 2J 
 
 Lord will help you, and give you new strength 
 and life, in ways and in measure that you 
 knew not of. And so with the others. Are 
 you lacking in honor to your earthly parents, 
 in obedience to the authorities set over you 
 in spiritual and temporal things, in reverence 
 and grateful love for the Church as your spir- 
 itual mother, and to God as your Father in 
 heaven ? Are you a murderer ? if not in 
 bloody act, then in revengeful feelings, in 
 hatred and ill will, which we know, if unre- 
 strained by outward laws and penalties, would 
 soon run into the act itself? Are you an adul- 
 terer? if not actually, still, in your mental con- 
 duct, in your unclean thoughts and desires ? 
 Are you a liar, a slanderer of your neighbor, 
 a bearer of false testimony, a deceiver, dis- 
 honest in your dealings with your fellow-man? 
 Are you envious and covetous, dissatisfied with 
 your own lot, and complaining that your neigh- 
 bors enjoy what you do not ? 
 
 These are precepts which, no one can deny, 
 
28 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT; OR, 
 
 do strike at the actual, every-day conduct of 
 us all. They are no abstractions ; no vague, 
 shapeless, unclothed ideals of truth or religion ; 
 they are the visible, tangible garment of right- 
 eousness which the Saviour wore, and wore for 
 us to touch, and, indeed, for us to touch upon 
 the hem! By bringing our life into contact 
 and conformity with these plain, literal truths, 
 we open a way by which the saving grace of 
 God can descend into our inner lives and re- 
 generate us. And without this actual shun- 
 ning of our natural evils of life as sins, — that is, 
 out of faith in the Lord and in obedience to 
 Him, — we cannot receive inwardly any spirit- 
 ual help, any substantial religious life, with its 
 real joys and everlasting blessings. Without 
 this external obedience, this religion in our 
 daily life, — its words, its motives, and its acts, — 
 all that vague and fanciful notion within us 
 which we call spiritual religion, which, with a 
 vast array of truths never put to practice, and 
 of good things which the heart, if the truth be 
 
HOW TO BEGIN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. 29 
 
 spoken, has never had the least desire for, 
 floats about in the imagination and shows itself 
 in fine and learned or pious discourse, — all 
 this is but a garment without a hem, ragged 
 and shapeless, and liable to be torn into tatters 
 by the first catch of strong temptation with 
 which it comes in contact. 
 
 What we all need in the midst of the pre- 
 tentious and ambitious life of this world is true 
 humility, and faith in the great power and value 
 of patient effort in doing these external but 
 actual and practical duties of religion. It would 
 be a fine thing to be reformed at once, — to be 
 made in an instant all spiritual, without know- 
 ing temptations any more, nor needing the 
 outward constraints of religious obligation ! 
 So exclaims that same vain mind that wonders 
 why Almighty God came down from heaven, 
 put on our miserable humanity, suffered, and 
 died, in order to redeem man from Satan's 
 power. But let us be thankful that God did 
 so come down, that man might even touch his 
 
 3* 
 
30 THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT. 
 
 robe and be healed ; that his Word is so plainly 
 revealed to us, and his religious precepts are 
 so practically and so closely applied to our 
 present condition and needs that all we have to 
 do is to lay hold of them in humility and in faith, 
 and thereby come into spiritual conjunction with 
 the Glorious Body of our Lord Himself, and 
 feel the healing and life-renewing power of his 
 Divine Presence. What good comfort is there, 
 indeed, in the truth that if w r e begin to put 
 away a single evil forbidden in one of the Ten 
 Commandments, and because God forbids, in 
 place of that evil God puts a desire for the 
 opposite virtue into the heart; that thus we 
 cannot touch the hem of the Lord's garment, 
 be it ever so secretly, so silently, but that virtue 
 from the Lord will actually go forth into our 
 souls; but that He will turn and look upon us, 
 — will know him who has done this thine : and 
 will then not let us depart till He have given 
 us his blessing, " Go in peace !" 
 
II. 
 
 ©he (fttmntion of f e£tts fflhttet; #v, (&o&'g S^tcnt ta 
 Pan. ^ Peditatiou to itew %$m f $ §ag. 
 
 77z<? ^#/£ <?/* ^ generation of Jesus Christ, the son of 
 David, the son of Abraham. — St. Matt. L i. 
 
 SUCH is the opening verse of the New 
 Testament of our Lord and Saviour 
 Jesus Christ. As the heading, or title, of what 
 is to follow, it calls to mind the name of the 
 first book of the Old Testament, — the Book 
 of Genesis, — for in the Greek tongue the 
 words are precisely similar, and were the 
 translation of the words in both cases uniform 
 we should read, The Book of the Genesis of 
 Jesus Christ; or, on the other hand, we should 
 call the first book of Moses, the Book of the 
 Generations. Indeed, in the second chapter 
 of this book, where the history of the creation 
 
 3 1 
 
32 THE GENERATION OF JESUS CHRIST; OR, 
 
 is briefly summed up, we read, " These are the 
 generations of the heavens and of the earth 
 when they were created, in the day that the 
 Lord God made the earth and the heavens. " 
 
 Thus are our minds called by the very 
 opening words of our Lord's gospel to the 
 contemplation of the Eternal God, of Him 
 who is the Alpha and the Omega, the Begin- 
 ning and the End, the First and the Last, the 
 Son of David, the Son of Abraham ! We 
 strive in vain to follow in thought these 
 words, leading far, far back into the dim 
 realms of antiquity. The book of the genesis 
 of Jesus Christ ! We pause in silent adora- 
 tion before the Infinite and the Eternal, to 
 whom a thousand years are but as yesterday 
 when it is past, and as a watch in the night. 
 We seem to hear, borne along through ages 
 and ages, the heavenly voice, "In the Begin- 
 ning was the Word, and the Word was with 
 God, and the Word was God" ! 
 
 The history of the going forth of our Lord's 
 
GOD'S DESCENT TO MAN. 33 
 
 Humanity, which is contained in this book of 
 the generation of Jesus Christ, will not be an 
 unfitting theme for the Christian's contempla- 
 tion at the beginning of the new year, when 
 once more the returning sun calls to our 
 minds the dawn of a new creation, a new birth, 
 or regeneration of all things living, and while 
 the remembrance is yet fresh in the mind, of 
 the birth in this world of the same Lord and 
 Saviour, the only True God and Eternal Life. 
 In this Divine and solemn doctrine, couched 
 in the mysterious symbol of a human gene- 
 alogy, and revealed from heaven by the Lord 
 alone, may we not greet with understanding, 
 and with joy of heart, the light of a new 
 heaven and a new earth, — the everlasting light 
 which, as the glory of God, shineth in his Holy 
 Jerusalem ! 
 
 "The Book of the Genesis, or Generation 
 of Jesus Christ/' — that this cannot have refer- 
 ence to a physical birth is evident from the 
 passage already quoted from Genesis, wherein 
 
34 THE GENERA TION OF JESUS CHRIST; OR, 
 
 mention is made of the generations of the 
 heavens and the earth, and also from the fact 
 that our Lord's genealogy is not human, but 
 Divine, as is expressly declared in the words 
 which the Angel Gabriel spoke to Mary, say- 
 ing, "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, 
 and the power of the Highest shall overshadow 
 thee; therefore, also, that holy thing which shall 
 be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." 
 If, then, it be not a physical or natural gen- 
 eration here referred to, it must, unless this 
 chapter is wholly meaningless, be a spiritual 
 generation. And here we have abundantly 
 confirmed the Church's doctrine of the spirit- 
 ual sense of the word. For it is alone accord- 
 ing to this spiritual sense contained in the 
 literal sense that the letter of this passage of 
 the Word can in any wise be understood; since 
 not only the declaration in the first verse, that 
 Jesus Christ is the son of David, is in direct con- 
 tradiction, when literally understood, to those 
 passages which declare Him to be the Son of 
 
GOD'S DESCENT TO MAN 35 
 
 God, but there are also many other difficulties, 
 particularly the omission of many names in the 
 genealogical ladder, in which the student of the 
 mere letter is unavoidably involved. And it 
 may be remarked here, that if any portion of 
 the whole Word of God is to be chosen as a 
 standard or example of its historical accuracy, 
 and as a criterion whereby to determine the 
 nature of its contents, surely all will agree that 
 none other can more entirely serve this end 
 than the very words which describe the gen- 
 esis, origin, or birth of our Lord Jesus Christ ; 
 namely, the first chapter of Matthew. Here 
 the records of the Old Testament are summed 
 up into a brief opening passage of the New. 
 The line of family names, reaching back to 
 the time of Abraham, is here recorded, with 
 certain omissions, as the Book of the Generation 
 of Jesus Christ. And yet Jesus Christ was 
 the son of no man, but was conceived by the 
 Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary be- 
 fore yet Joseph her husband knew her. Surely 
 
36 THE GENERATION OF JESUS CHRIST; OR, 
 
 the connection between the history of the Old 
 Testament and that of the New must lie deeper 
 than in the mere letter. For if we hold to the 
 letter alone, we have no more reason for call- 
 ing Jesus Christ the son of David, of the seed 
 of Abraham, than had the disbelieving Jews of 
 his time for calling Him the son of Joseph, the 
 carpenter of Nazareth. Naturally speaking, 
 our Lord is not David's son ; for both naturally 
 and spiritually He is the Son of God, and here- 
 in He differs from all others born of woman, — 
 herein lies his Eternal and Adorable Divinity. 
 But spiritually speaking, He is the son of 
 David and of Abraham. Here, too, is to be ob- 
 served the sublime and holy coincidence of the 
 Divine and human, the spiritual and the literal, 
 presented to us in the arrangement of God's 
 Word. Throughout the whole Word, with 
 rare, and perhaps this only exception, the literal 
 sense stands apart from and independent, as it 
 were, of the spiritual sense, and may be view r ed 
 and studied in its own purely external char- 
 
GOD'S DESCENT TO MAN 37 
 
 acter. And this is because of the three dis- 
 crete degrees of all order and creation, — the 
 celestial, the spiritual, and the natural. 
 
 Generally speaking, not only in the works of 
 God's natural creation, but also in the literal 
 or natural sense of his Word, we see but the 
 lowest degree without recognizing in it any- 
 thing of the higher and interior degrees. But 
 when our Lord came into the world to assume 
 our humanity, to clothe Himself with our flesh, 
 and thus to bring down into the lowest degree 
 of man his own Divine Essence, and to reveal 
 Himself to the world as Immanuel, God with 
 us, these higher and internal degrees could no 
 longer remain wholly concealed, even from 
 man. Being brought forth and revealed by 
 the Lord in the natural or literal plane, they 
 must break forth in their own light and splen- 
 dor upon the world, and remain before men 
 evermore the imperishable monuments of the 
 Incarnate Word. Now, just such a breaking 
 forth or revelation of the internal or spiritual 
 
 4 
 
38 THE GENERATION OF JESUS CHRIST; OR, 
 
 degree in the literal or natural is displayed in 
 this opening verse of the Lord's new Gospel, 
 which proclaims the central and crowning event 
 of all history, — the Birth of Jesus Christ. For 
 here, if the Divine Word is seen and recognized 
 at all, it must be in its spiritual, and not in its 
 natural sense. The whole matter of the accept- 
 ance of the Bible as the Book of truth rests, we 
 may say, on this point. If it is to be interpreted 
 only according to its letter, then is it not true, 
 but contradictory and meaningless ; if it be the 
 true book, and Divine in its origin, it must be 
 understood and interpreted according to an 
 internal and spiritual sense. Up to this time, 
 throughout all the history of the Old Covenant, 
 the literal or merely representative sense could 
 be understood and believed in its own charac- 
 ter. The history of the creation, the Ten Com- 
 mandments, the warnings and promises of the 
 prophets, could all be received, blindly, per- 
 haps, and not very intelligently, but still as 
 generally consistent and harmonious, even in 
 
GOD'S DESCENT TO MAN 39 
 
 their literal sense alone. But this was at an 
 end when the new Gospel came, and the nat- 
 ural degree of truth no longer served to hide 
 entirely the degrees within it, but rather to 
 reveal the Highest, even the Divine, so that 
 " all flesh should see the Salvation of God!" 
 The story of Abraham and his descendants, 
 even to Joseph, might have been understood 
 in the natural sense alone, without any knowl- 
 edge of the spiritual reference to the Lord 
 contained therein, Not so when our Lord 
 Himself was born of Mary, while she yet knew 
 not a man, and was called the Son of God. 
 Then we could no longer say with literal truth 
 that Jesus Christ is Joseph's son, nor David's 
 son, nor Abraham's. Then the natural veil is 
 lifted, and our eyes fall upon the Holy of Holies 
 within, and behold there our transfigured Lord, 
 his garments white as the light, his face shining 
 as the sun ! And out of the cloud a voice 
 cometh, saying, " This is my beloved Son ; hear 
 ye Him I" 
 
*40 THE GENERATION OF JESUS CHRIST; OR, 
 
 The miracles which our Lord performed 
 may also be regarded as the manifestation of 
 the higher degrees in the lowest degree of 
 nature. The marvelous healing of the sick, 
 turning water into wine, multiplying a thou- 
 sand-fold the few loaves of bread, and raising 
 the dead to life, what are these works but 
 the manifest presence of certain spiritual and 
 celestial powers in the natural world, conse- 
 quent upon our Lord's assuming the human- 
 ity and living as a man upon our earth? 
 
 Having thus seen how that the manifesta- 
 tion of God to the world, or of the Divinity in 
 the Humanity, necessitates, at the same time, a 
 recognition of the Scriptures as true in a higher 
 and Diviner sense than that of merely literal 
 history, let us now consider for a moment what 
 are spiritual generations, and what is the spir- 
 itual genealogy here recorded. What spiritual 
 generation is we already know from the Word 
 itself. To be born again is to be born of the 
 Spirit. A new birth is a spiritual birth, as our 
 
GOD'S DESCENT TO MAN 4 1 
 
 Lord Himself teacheth us. " Except a man be 
 born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter 
 the kingdom of God. That which is born of the 
 flesh is flesh ; that which is born of the Spirit 
 is spirit. >, A spiritual birth must be a pro- 
 duction of those things which are spiritual ; 
 and these may be summed up as constituting 
 the voluntary and the intellectual parts of the 
 mind. The generations recorded in the Word 
 all have the spiritual significance of the pro- 
 duction of some new state of goodness, in the 
 will, and of truth, in the intellect, or of their 
 opposites. And the " book of the generations 
 of Jesus Christ ,, can mean, therefore, only the 
 " Divine Word, treating, throughout, of the 
 spiritual productions of faith and love derived 
 from the Lord." Of these spiritual produc- 
 tions we are afforded, in the Arcana Ccelestia 
 of Swedenborg, numerous examples, in the 
 explanation there given of the internal sense 
 of the Book of Genesis. 
 
 We know that Abraham represents the 
 
 4* 
 
42 THE GENERA T10N OF JESUS CHRIST; OR, 
 
 Lord's Celestial, or Divine Essence ; that by 
 Isaac's birth is represented the production of 
 the Divine Rational plane in the Lord's mind 
 when He assumed the humanity ; and the 
 birth of Jacob, Isaac's son, we know to signify 
 the production of the Divine Natural plane, 
 through the rational or spiritual, and from the 
 inmost essential Divinity. Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob represent the three Degrees of the 
 Lord's Nature, — the celestial, the spiritual, the 
 natural. And it is said, in Matthew, that Jesus 
 Christ is the son of David, the son of Abra- 
 ham, because Abraham represents that essen- 
 tial Divinity which alone is the Father of our 
 Lord, and because David, like Isaac, repre- 
 sents the spiritual degree, which is next to the 
 celestial, and the medium between the celestial 
 and the natural degree ; which natural degree 
 our Lord Himself represents in his assumed 
 humanity, and as the Son of man. In this 
 short verse, then, we have summed up the 
 entire contents of the following sixteen verses, 
 
GOB'S DESCENT TO MAN. 43 
 
 or the names of the descendants of Abraham, 
 down to Joseph, the husband of Mary ; not to 
 say of the entire Word itself. 
 
 For in a certain sense we may regard the 
 Word as treating only of the production of 
 these three degrees of faith and charity in the 
 natural, spiritual, and celestial mind, repre- 
 sented by Jesus Christ, David, and Abraham. 
 Thus, the first verse seems to only have its 
 lesson repeated in the fifteen verses which fol- 
 low it. But there is this important difference 
 in the two genealogies, — the first, beginning 
 with Jesus Christ, ends with Abraham ; the 
 other, beginning with Abraham, ends with Jo- 
 seph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born 
 Jesus, who is called Christ. Here we have the 
 ascending and the descending series. In the 
 one account, the descent of the celestial into 
 the natural ; and in the other, the progression 
 from the natural degree up to the celestial, — 
 thus fulfilling the words of our Lord Himself, 
 " No man hath ascended into heaven but He thai 
 
44 THE GENERA TION OF JESUS CHRIST; OR, 
 
 came down from heaven, even the Son of man, 
 which is in heaven" "And as Moses lifted up 
 the serpent in the wilderness, even so must 
 the Son of man" (or He that came down from 
 heaven) "be lifted up." Such is likewise the 
 meaning of that mystic vision which Jacob saw 
 in his dream, of a ladder reaching up to heaven, 
 on which angels were ascending and descend- 
 ing. Thus, in truth, does the Divine Truth 
 descend into our minds from the Divine Love, 
 through the spiritual into the natural plane, 
 that there, taking on the forms of knowledge 
 and sense, and being engrafted into our mere 
 earthly life, it may glorify and transform them 
 into its own spiritual beauty, and thus lead them 
 up the shining ladder to heaven once more. 
 
 But we should bear in mind that the long 
 list of names contained in the fifteen verses 
 which follow the verse quoted are not without 
 their holy meaning, — a meaning which, doubt- 
 less, the angels of heaven comprehend, how- 
 ever feebly we may do so. All names in the 
 
GOD'S DESCENT TO MAN 45 
 
 Scriptures mean spiritual qualities or attri- 
 butes. We have seen what is the spiritual 
 significance of Abraham, of David or Isaac, 
 and of Jacob,- — namely, that they represent in 
 the Lord the three planes of his mind into 
 which the Divinity of the Father descended in 
 assuming our human nature. But of all the 
 names which remain, representing all the pos- 
 sible qualities and variations of spiritual states 
 of which our nature is capable, and which were 
 passed through by the Lord in the process of 
 glorifying his Humanity, of all these we can 
 know and understand but little. Let us, then, 
 read the concluding verse of this book of the 
 generation of Jesus Christ; "So all the gen- 
 erations from Abraham to David are fourteen 
 generations ; and from David until the carrying 
 away into Babylon are fourteen generations ; 
 and from the carrying away into Babylon unto 
 Christ are fourteen generations. ,, Herein is 
 contained a wonderful lesson in spiritual things 
 which we can but glance at here. It is a history 
 
46 THE GENERATION OF JESUS CHRIST; OR, 
 
 of a decline, a degeneracy, or fall of man from a 
 celestial into a natural state of life ; through 
 which decline the Lord, in his redeeming love, 
 follows after the wandering soul, — goes out and 
 seeks the lost sheep ! The whole genealogy is 
 divided into three periods of fourteen genera- 
 tions each. The number fourteen, being seven 
 added to itself, signifies the holiness of the union 
 of goodness and truth, in their descent into 
 the degree of the Lord's mind, represented by 
 the succeeding generations. There being three 
 of such holy and perfect periods, signifies that 
 the series is complete, that the progression is 
 accomplished through all the three degrees of 
 our Lord's nature, and thus that the Lord's 
 Divinity is fully incarnated in, and united to, 
 his Humanity. The first or celestial degree in- 
 cludes the fourteen generations from Abraham 
 to David. It is from David the King, represent- 
 ing the Lord as to his Divine Truth, that the 
 spiritual period commences, and this ends with 
 the carrying away into Babylon, — that is, the 
 
GO US DESCENT TO MAN. 47 
 
 destruction of the spiritual mind through the 
 love of dominion. Then, in the natural and 
 selfish will, begins the lowest period, which ends 
 with Mary, — the humble virgin of Nazareth, — 
 of whom was born Christ, — the Redeemer and 
 Saviour of fallen and sinful man ! But, with 
 this descending scale, we must close our study 
 of the sacred record. The glorious ascent 
 heavenward is described in all that follows 
 in the gospels. Let this be the Christian's 
 guide and companion henceforth. Let him 
 begin with the new year a new spiritual gene- 
 alogy which shall record his constant regen- 
 eration of the Holy Spirit of God : and so let 
 him bring down into the lowest and most ex- 
 ternal plane of his life the heavenly truths which 
 the Divine Love begets in his mind, that, like 
 the Son of man, he may be lifted up, and at- 
 tain at last to the blessed land which God hath 
 promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, 
 and to their seed forever. 
 
in the ®tottttrtt. 
 
 K?#, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, that 
 the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed. — St. Luke 
 
 THESE words were spoken to Mary, the 
 mother of the Lord, by the aged Simeon, 
 a just and devout man, who had waited for 
 consolation in Israel. It had been revealed to 
 him by the Holy Ghost that ere his death he 
 should behold the Lord's Christ. And so it 
 came true, that he was led by the Holy Spirit 
 to go into the temple at Jerusalem at the 
 same time that Joseph and Mary brought in 
 the child Jesus to do for Him after the custom 
 of the law. The requisite forty days had 
 elapsed since the birth of her child, and Mary 
 4 8 
 
THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL, 49 
 
 had come to present Him to the Lord, and also 
 to offer the humble sacrifice of a pair of turtle- 
 doves, or two young pigeons. It is not un- 
 likely that there were many worshipers there, 
 going and coming in the temple, and few would 
 notice this humble company, — the poor man 
 and woman bringing in their little infant, up 
 from the rural town of Bethlehem. And we 
 can easily believe that Joseph and Mary mar- 
 veled, indeed, when they saw this aged man, 
 Simeon, come forward and take their Child up 
 in his arms* and bless God, and say, " Lord, 
 now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace : 
 for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which 
 Thou hast prepared before the face of all 
 people ; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the 
 glory of thy people Israel !" And then the 
 old man turns and blesses them, and says to 
 Mary, " Behold, this Child is set for the fall 
 and rising again of many in Israel ; and for a 
 sign which shall be spoken against ; yea, a 
 sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, 
 c 5 
 
9 
 
 50 THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL; OR, 
 
 that the thoughts of many hearts may be re- 
 vealed /" 
 
 Words strange and wonderful, — to Mary 
 that heard them then, to all in Christian lands 
 who have for hundreds of years heard them 
 repeated, and feel that here was the Holy 
 Ghost speaking and prophesying of things 
 deeper than for the wisdom of man to search 
 out or to foresee ! 
 
 " Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own 
 soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts 
 may be revealed. " 
 
 Simeon spake not from himself, but from 
 the Divine Light which shone in his mind by 
 the mercy of that God who had rewarded his 
 patient and faithful waiting by revealing to 
 him at last the Anointed, — the Messiah that 
 was come to save the world. Whether Sim- 
 eon himself knew all the deep meaning of 
 those solemn words spoken to Mary at that 
 time, it is not needful to inquire. They were 
 uttered in a state of Divine illumination ; they 
 
DIVINE JUDGMENTS IN THE CHURCH. 5 I 
 
 contain a prophecy of Divine Truth concern- 
 ing our Incarnate Lord, and not the foreseeing 
 of any man. And the prophecy has been ful- 
 filled, and is being fulfilled wherever the In- 
 carnate Word, the Lord's Christ, has been 
 proclaimed; wherever before the eyes of a lost 
 and dying world has been lifted up that " sign 
 which shall be spoken against !" 
 
 I have seen, as probably have many of my 
 readers, certain pious pictures representing 
 the Virgin Mary with her heart transfixed 
 with daggers,— intended to embody the literal 
 idea of Simeon's prophecy, and to represent 
 to us the sorrows which she, as the mother of 
 the Lord, endured in beholding the suffering, 
 and, at last, the crucifixion of our Saviour. It 
 was natural that men, seeing only the letter of 
 God's Word, should thus interpret and contem- 
 plate this prophecy. But such is not the idea 
 which is here presented to the spiritual under- 
 standing of the Church. Here is a prophecy 
 far deeper and wider than of any mere per- 
 
52 THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL; OR, 
 
 sonal or temporary significance. The words 
 spoken by the Holy Ghost, through Simeon, 
 were not spoken to Mary as a single individual, 
 but as representing the Mary of all the ages to 
 come, the Church as to her affection of truth 
 and goodness, wherein she conceives the Word 
 of God and bears a man-child, — a child born 
 of water and of the Spirit for the salvation of 
 the world. Mary is the Church of the Lord 
 upon earth. Her sorrows, her trials, are the 
 sorrows and trials of the Church, both in gen- 
 eral and in each particular soul. And the 
 daggers which pierce her soul are those which, 
 from that day to this, and never more than at 
 this day, have pierced, and are piercing, the 
 inner spiritual being of the Church, to the end 
 that the thoughts of many hearts may be re- 
 vealed and the judgment of the Lord be 
 executed in the earth. 
 
 It is said that Simeon " blessed them, and 
 said unto Mary his mother, 'this child is set for 
 the fall and rising again of many in Israel. '" 
 
DIVINE JUDGMENTS IN THE CHURCH. S3 
 
 Few have known or duly reflected on die fact 
 that when God came to save die world by 
 being born a man on our earth, He came as 
 die Word, — that is, as the Truth. Many speak 
 and treat of the Lord's coming much as if 
 nothing w r ere said in the gospels as to how He 
 came or what He came for ; all their thoughts 
 seem to be centred on the death He died, and 
 their only question to be what He died for, — as 
 if this were or could be anything apart from the 
 same Divine purpose which had ordered his 
 birth and his life in this world, with all his Di- 
 vine teachings and miraculous deeds of mercy. 
 It is true that Christ our Lord died to save 
 sinners, but just as true that He was born and 
 lived here on earth to save sinners. And the 
 Word tells us how and why He was thus born 
 and lived and died, and sets forth the true 
 " mystery of godliness" and the true " plan of 
 salvation" in far other language than that which 
 men have invented in their perplexed and often 
 misleading doctrines. 
 
 5* 
 
54 THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL; OR, 
 
 It was the Word — that is, the Divine Truth 
 — which took on our humanity, to purify and 
 glorify it, and make it, in the person of Jesus 
 Christ, a Divine Humanity, in which the in- 
 dwelling Divinity — the eternal Jehovah — might 
 be brought forth to view, and might reach 
 down to men in their lowest estates, and 
 through which Divine Humanity man might 
 have visible and conscious access to the one 
 only living and true God. The Word, or the 
 Divine Truth, is the sanctuary or holy structure 
 of the mind which must be prepared before the 
 Lord in his Divine Love — which is the Father 
 Himself — can come in. The Word, the Divine 
 Truth, is also the light of the world. It is the 
 true, the saving light to men's souls, because 
 in this Word was Life, — i.e. the eternal Deity, 
 the Source of all Life and Being, — mid this Life 
 is the light of men. For all light comes from 
 heat, and the Divine Truth, Wisdom, or Word, 
 is but the shining of this Divine Love — the all- 
 creating Warmth — itself. This Divine Fire of 
 
DIVINE JUDGMENTS IN THE CHURCH. 55 
 
 the eternal Father's Love is the inmost Esse 
 of all Being, from which alone everything ce- 
 lestial, spiritual, natural, and material has been 
 created and made. 
 
 The Word, conceived in Mary by the Holy 
 Ghost, — that is, by the Divine Proceeding or 
 Operation, — and born into our world a man- 
 child, has a Father and a mother, — a Father, 
 after his Divine nature ; a mother, after his 
 human nature. The Father of the Lord is 
 none other than his own Divinity, which is his 
 inward soul, — the indivisible, eternal, omnipres- 
 ent, omniscient God. The mother of the Lord 
 is Mary ; she is called his mother by the evan- 
 gelists throughout their gospels, but not by our 
 Lord Himself ! Yea, she is a mother, not of 
 Him as Divine, but of that part of Him which 
 was human, and which He temporarily put on 
 at his birth into the world, as a man puts on 
 his armor when he goes out to war. The con- 
 flict over, the armor is put off, the weapons laid 
 aside. Our Lord's glorification accomplished, 
 
56 THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL; OR, 
 
 — his Humanity made truly Divine and united, 
 like body to soul, to the eternal Divinity of the 
 Father dwelling in Him, — He puts off all the 
 merely infirm, the mortal, human, all that He 
 had derived from the human mother Mary, and 
 He is no more, in any sense, the son of Mary. 
 He is wholly Divine, the God and Lord of 
 all angels and men, the God whom Mary in 
 heaven worships with all her fellow -beings 
 there ; beside whom there is no God, no Sav- 
 iour, and out of whom there is neither Light 
 nor Life for the soul of any creature. 
 
 And the Mary of all ages is, as I have said, 
 the Church, or that state of the human mind, 
 as to its affection of truth and goodness, which, 
 moved and animated by the Holy Spirit of the 
 Lord, receives his Word into the ground of a 
 good and honest heart, and bringeth forth its 
 fruit in patience. The Word of God comes 
 down not again in the Divine Person of God 
 made visible, but in a spiritual and invisible 
 manner, and seeks to be made flesh in the 
 
DIVINE JUDGMENTS IN THE CHURCH $7 
 
 hearts and the lives of men, and through them 
 to be the salvation of the world. Yea, the 
 Lord Himself, in his Divine Humanity, is ever 
 seeking entrance to the souls of men, that He 
 may pour his saving Life and his unspeakable 
 blessings down in a great stream of mercy and 
 love upon our race and the earth which He 
 has given for our abode. But He comes to 
 us now, as He even came in times past, as the 
 Word, — the Truth. It is by water and the 
 Spirit that we may be born anew as sons of 
 God, and the water is the truth of faith, and 
 the Spirit is the Life from God which flows 
 down into our every effort to live according to 
 the truth of our faith. 
 
 Blessed were Mary and Joseph, because they 
 represented the Church, which has received 
 the Word of God and clothed it with a living 
 form, a visible body, in the deeds of a righteous 
 and merciful life. Blessed is every man, woman, 
 and child to whom the Word of God, or even 
 a single Truth thereof, has come as a Saviour 
 c* 
 
58 THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL; OR, 
 
 descended from heaven seeking a bodv or 
 lowest form of activity in the deeds of his or 
 her earthly life. But not to bless and give 
 thanks only does Simeon speak. The prophetic 
 voice of the Holy Spirit has its words of warn- 
 ing — of solemn admonition as well — to utter 
 to the Mary of all the ages at the joyful mo- 
 ment of the Incarnation of the Divine Word. 
 The Word of God, God's own Truth, set up 
 in the face of human desire and human thought, 
 — this is for a sign to be spoken against ! Nat- 
 ural selfishness and the reason of the carnal 
 sense will not readily abandon their thrones 
 for this heavenly King. The angels may sing 
 joy to the world, glory in heaven, peace on 
 earth ; but He who is come to save the world, 
 to be the Word of God acting Himself out in 
 the life of our flesh, He knows that He is not 
 come, first of all, to bring peace, but a sword. 
 First the combat, then the victory, and the 
 long- enduring reign of peace and heavenly 
 joy. First to drive out error and sin ; first to 
 
DIVINE JUDGMENTS IN THE CHURCH. 59 
 
 fight with corruptions of heart and mind ; to 
 root out old habits of evil desire, evil thought, 
 evil speech, and evil act ; to put down Satan, 
 with all his filthy and hateful brood, under our 
 feet; and then, to let us taste the sweet and 
 heavenly delights of peace and righteousness. 
 This is the warfare which God's truth, revealed 
 to the world in Jesus Christ, w T as to wage in 
 the hearts of men for ages to come; the war- 
 fare of truth with error, of the holy lessons 
 of faith and commandments of religion with 
 all the opposing prejudices, persuasions, ex- 
 cuses, and reasonings which the love of evil 
 could beget out of its own infernal bosom. 
 And as all those to whom the truth of God's 
 Word comes constitute the Church of the 
 Lord in an external sense, and as these are 
 they who are to be brought into temptation- 
 combats by the Incarnate Word, — therefore it 
 is said to Mary, " Yea, a sword shall pierce 
 through thy own soul also, that the thoughts 
 of many hearts may be revealed." Mary is 
 
60 THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL; OR, 
 
 the Church of the Lord on earth ; the sword 
 that pierces her soul is the Truth of God's 
 Word, which searches the inmost spiritual life 
 of the Church, revealing the thoughts of every 
 heart, whether it be for God or against God, 
 and thus executing the Divine judgments upon 
 earth. So does God's Word come into our 
 souls not to bring peace, but a sword. Yea, it 
 is the sword that pierces our own soul through. 
 For there is nothing in the life of him to whom 
 the Word of God has found even the smallest 
 entrance which this keen and searching blade 
 will not pierce through. The light is there ; 
 the creatures of darkness may not flee away ; 
 they must stand still and bear the scrutiny of 
 this awful Searcher of the hearts and reins ! 
 
 Such is the Divine method of judging and 
 of saving a fallen world. It is by the Word 
 or the Truth coming into the heart of man, 
 cutting him through like a dagger, to the in- 
 most consciousness, revealing his thoughts 
 and his desires and aims, whether they be 
 
DIVINE JUDGMENTS IN THE CHURCH. 6 1 
 
 eood or evil, and enabling him in freedom to 
 accept or reject his salvation, in either admit- 
 ting the Divine Truth to reign in him as his 
 true Lord and King, or closing the heart 
 against it in the voluntary and deliberate com- 
 mission of sin. 
 
 And that a man may know his sins, the 
 Light breaks in upon him, revealing the 
 thoughts of his heart. How can a man know 
 what is wrong except by knowing what is 
 right ? and how can he know that a thing is 
 right except he know that it is commanded by 
 that God who alone is Good and True, and 
 who governs from perfect Love and Wisdom ? 
 The Word of God brings to man this light ; 
 and when his thoughts stand revealed in this 
 light, then is the Sword piercing through his 
 soul, and God Himself is come to judge the 
 earth in him ! 
 
 How long and how mysteriously have men 
 talked of the Judgment to come, and of 
 the great day when the hearts of all shall be 
 
 6 
 
62 THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL; OR, 
 
 opened in the sight of God and the angels ! 
 But will they not learn that the Judgment-day 
 is come ; that it is here, now, wherever his 
 Word is preached and read and thought of 
 by man ? When a Truth of the Word enters 
 a man's thoughts in the moment of decision 
 between a right and a wrong act, then are the 
 thoughts of his heart revealed before God. 
 Whenever a man discovers his sins committed, 
 and, bewailing his weakness, and yet hoping 
 in the Lord, he resolves henceforth to more 
 carefully resist the evil which is his besetting 
 sin, then is the child Jesus set for that mail s 
 fall and rising again! When our sinful desires 
 rebel against that which our faith teaches, 
 and the Word of God becomes offensive and 
 its counsels obnoxious to us, then is revealed 
 to our eyes that sign which shall be spoken 
 against. And when, in reflecting on the life 
 we lead, we feel conscious of the long conflict 
 between right and wrong ; between the heav- 
 enly and the earthly motives at work in our 
 
DIVINE JUDGMENTS IN THE CHURCH. 63 
 
 souls ; when we trace the operation of the 
 Lord's Holy Spirit, striving through his Word 
 and the Church to lift our life to heavenly aims ; 
 and when we behold, on the other hand, 
 the cunning and soft seductions whereby, 
 through the avenues of the world and its pleas- 
 ures, the powers of evil are drawing us away 
 to number us with their own ; — then, and in 
 the oft-repeated crisis of doubt, of struggle, 
 of spiritual combat, the sword pierces, through 
 our own souls also, that the thoughts of our 
 hearts may be revealed ! 
 
 So does the woman Mary, her heart pierced 
 with a sword, still stand before us, the true 
 image of the Lord's Church upon earth in 
 her time of temptation, of combat, and of 
 Divine judgment ! 
 
 We neither may, nor should w 7 e hope to 
 escape that sword which will cleave our life in 
 two, showing what in us belongs to God and 
 what to the devil. But we should ever pray 
 that we may have strength given us from the 
 
64 THE SWORD IN MARY'S SOUL, 
 
 Lord, when we know what is from Him, to 
 hold fast to it, that He in whose sight all the 
 thoughts of our hearts are constantly re- 
 vealed may see some principle of his Blessed 
 Word taking form in our actual life, and be- 
 coming every new day and every new year 
 more really, more truly, more powerfully to us 
 a Word of Salvation and of Eternal Life. 
 
<b\\t Pother of gtm» at ©ana; or, §towilttg m& 
 (Dbz&kim the &tttftxtUt of th* f£M& f # gjUflnuf- 
 ating ftrAt*« 
 
 ^;^ //^ *///>*/ dtay //z<?/r ^/^j a marriage in Cana of Gal- 
 ilee ; and the mother of Jesus was there. — St. John ii. i. 
 
 THE history of our Lord's first miracle is 
 well known wherever the Holy Gospel has 
 been preached. The water changed to wine 
 has for ages been in the minds of Christians 
 a sublime but mysterious symbol of the glory 
 of our Saviour's Divinity as first manifested 
 forth to man. But there are other lessons af- 
 forded in this sacred narrative for the Church's 
 edification than that of the simple act alone of 
 changing the water into wine. For those who 
 search the Scriptures to find therein eternal 
 life it is not the miracle only that will be full 
 
 6* 65 
 
66 THE MOTHER OF JESUS AT CANA; OR, 
 
 of Divine instruction : every recorded incident 
 and circumstance attending the miracle equally 
 testifies of the Lord. Thus, while we may 
 know for a fact that our Saviour wrought 
 somewhere and at some time and amid cer- 
 tain company a great miracle, yet we shall 
 see comparatively little of the great signifi- 
 cance of that miracle, of its deep Divine in- 
 tent, except we consider as well that it was in 
 Can a of Galilee that it was done ; that it was on 
 the third day, at a marriage-feast, and that the 
 mother of Jesus was there. That this is the 
 case is because the Holy Bible is Divinely in- 
 spired, and thus everywhere full of spiritual 
 meaning and instruction. Strictly speaking, 
 nothing in the whole world of events occurs 
 by chance, but the Divine Providence rules 
 and controls all things, from the minutest to 
 the most extraordinary. How manifestly must 
 this be the case in regard to every act of our 
 Saviour's life upon earth, which was through- 
 out only the acting forth of the Divine Wis- 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 6 
 
 dom in word and work ! and how inevitably 
 so in that one authentic and Divinely-in- 
 spired history of his Life presented to us in 
 the Holy Gospel ! Not a feature, then, of this 
 narrative of the miracle at Cana is without its 
 heavenly meaning and Divine teaching. 
 
 How many subjects are here presented for 
 our thoughtful study ! How many lessons 
 may the Church learn from year to year, from 
 age to age, yea, to all eternity, in contemplat- 
 ing this first act of the Lord wherein He mani- 
 fested forth his Divine glory to men ! We may 
 have often studied the narrative ourselves, or 
 heard it expounded in one part or another; 
 we may remember now more than one holy 
 lesson it has revealed to us in times past ; we 
 may recall to mind what the miracle itself is in 
 spiritual reality, — namely, the giving oi internal 
 in place of external truth, the establishment of 
 the spiritual Church with those who were in a 
 natural state of obedience and outward charity. 
 We may remember why there was set six 
 
68 THE MOTHER OE JESUS AT CANA; OR, 
 
 water-pots of stone, — namely, because they 
 represent the six periods, or work-days, as it 
 were, of our purification from sin by obedience 
 to the laws of morality. Why, too, these ves- 
 sels of stone must be filled with water, because 
 we must obey these laws out of regard to their 
 Divine authority, — that is, as filled w T ith the 
 Divine Truth, and not as coming from man's 
 wisdom and prudence. We may then see, 
 once more, why this is indeed the first miracle 
 which our Saviour wrought before men, and 
 why the disciples believed in Him there, — 
 namely, because the first step by which a man 
 can acquire any real faith in the Lord, or per- 
 ceive in any degree the glory of his Divine 
 Love and Wisdom, is his obeying externally 
 from religious motives the laws of pious and 
 moral living. This faithful obedience will 
 assuredly result in an internal knowledge and 
 love of the truth for its own sake, and thus 
 religion will become a thing of the heart and of 
 the life. And the Divine Truth thus received 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 69 
 
 into the affections of the will is what is meant 
 by the Divine Glory manifested forth to the 
 believing disciple. 
 
 From so many fruitful topics of reflection let 
 us now turn back to the beginning of the nar- 
 rative and be content to dwell for the present 
 on the simple statement there made, that the 
 mother of Jesus was present at the wedding. 
 
 Knowing that in general it is the birth of 
 an inward, spiritual religion that is described by 
 the entire narrative, a proper understanding of 
 this initiatory statement will enable us to see 
 more clearly what is that condition in which 
 we must all be in order to have the same 
 miracle spiritually wrought in us. Cana, in 
 Galilee of the Gentiles, is the abode of those in 
 all ages and lands who are in little knowledge 
 of spiritual truth and religion, but who are in 
 the endeavor to live in some measure, at least, 
 according to their knowledge of their duty, and 
 from motives of obedience to a Divine Being and 
 of charity towards their fellow-men. The mar- 
 
70 THE MOTHER OF JESUS AT CAN A ; OR, 
 
 riage at Cana is none other than that heavenly 
 union between the Lord and the Church as it 
 exists among these simple-minded, sincere, and 
 well-disposed persons. It is the establishment 
 among such willing, obedient hearts, who pos- 
 sess but little knowledge of spiritual and 
 Divine things, it may be, but who, nevertheless, 
 from their affection for whatever appears to 
 them as truth, receive gladly the truth itself 
 when presented to them ; it is the establish- 
 ment, among this kind of men, of a true and 
 spiritual Church, — a true internal bond be- 
 tween God and their lives, — that is repre- 
 sentatively set forth in the marriage at Cana 
 of Galilee. And, as we read, " the mother of 
 Jesus was there." 
 
 Now, it was to act no unimportant part in 
 this event that the mother of our Lord was 
 present ; and yet no other mark of distinction 
 or honor is paid her than that she is specially 
 mentioned as being among the wedding-guests. 
 Behold, on the other hand, how humble, how 
 
HUMILITY AXD OBEDIENCE. 7 1 
 
 retiring, how reverently obedient is that be- 
 havior which she manifests before her ador- 
 able Lord ! Hers is the homely duty to say to 
 the Master, as the wine failed, "They have no 
 wine;" to hear in meekness his reply, " Woman, 
 what have I to do with thee ? mine hour is not 
 yet come ;" and in the spirit of unquestioning 
 obedience to place the servants of the house- 
 hold at the Saviour's command, saying to them, 
 "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.' , 
 
 Who can fail to perceive in this portrayal of 
 conduct what qualities of Christian character 
 are specially figured forth in Mary, the mother 
 of Jesus, at the marriage in Cana? In the first 
 place, as a woman, she is a type of all affec- 
 tion for what is good, and as a mother, she 
 represents the Church as existing with those 
 in whom this affection is alive, but who, as 
 Galileans, are in ignorance of spiritual and Di- 
 vine things. Secondly, we recognize in her 
 the pattern of quiet, patient, implicit obedience, 
 the surrender of not only the selfish will and 
 
72 THE MOTHER OF JESUS AT CAN A ; OR, 
 
 power, but of the private judgment also, to the 
 Lord. For in her conduct we see no petulant 
 asking of a miracle, but the mere confession 
 of a want ; we see no complaining that the 
 Divine assistance is delayed, but simply the 
 careful preparation, that everything may be 
 in order and readiness when it shall be the 
 Lord's good pleasure to act, and that every 
 intention on the Lord's part shall meet with 
 ready and cheerful obedience in those who 
 served Him. Obedience and humility! How 
 do these lowly but heavenly virtues shine forth 
 in the conduct of the mother of Jesus as here 
 portrayed ! 
 
 Let us dwell for a moment on that answer 
 which the Lord made to her, and the part 
 which she took on hearing it. When she says 
 they have no wine, the Lord replies, "Woman, 
 what have I to do with thee ? mine hour is not 
 yet come." These are strange and seemingly 
 harsh words. He does not even call her 
 " mother," but u woman" ! Why is such an 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 73 
 
 answer given to her simple remark that they 
 have no wine ? Now, we well know that ab- 
 rupt and harsh as these, our Saviour's, words 
 may sound to the ear, they do yet imply 
 nothing of like nature in Him who spoke 
 them. His own infinite love and more than 
 human wisdom prompted these words. Like 
 the similar words spoken to Mary and Joseph 
 when they found Him in the Temple discours- 
 ing with the Doctors, " How is it that ye sought 
 me ?" these must also be regarded as the ut- 
 terances of the Divine Truth in its own char- 
 acter ; as elevated out of the plane of merely 
 local and personal relations and considerations. 
 These words, " Woman, what have I to do with 
 thee? mine hour is not yet come/' cannot, 
 therefore, be understood at all when viewed 
 in their merely literal or natural sense. We 
 must penetrate into the region of pure spirit- 
 ual truth if we would arrive at their real 
 meaning. Thus, the Saviour calls her not 
 mother, for He is speaking in his Divine char- 
 d 7 
 
74 THE MOTHER OE JESUS AT CANA ; OR, 
 
 acter, in that Divine Humanity which owed 
 nothing to her, but was wholly the Son of 
 God. He calls her "woman/' because He 
 addresses her as the type of all affection for 
 what is good and holy ; but He says to her, 
 " What have I to do with thee ? mine hour is 
 not yet come," — meaning that that spiritual 
 wine, which is the interior truth of genuine 
 religious faith, cannot be given by Him, imme- 
 diately, even to those of good and pious affec- 
 tions, but only in the degree that they put 
 away their evils, according to the truths of ex- 
 ternal righteousness which they already pos- 
 sess. " His hour is not yet come," because 
 the six water-pots of stone set for the purifi- 
 cation of the Jews are not yet filled with water. 
 The outer man is not yet purified : the desire 
 for a good life has not yet put to use all those 
 plain, practical precepts of external religion 
 which even the Gentiles of Galilee do in some 
 form possess. In no other wise could the re- 
 quest for wine be answered. Spiritual truth 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 75 
 
 could not be given except through natural 
 external truth already known and put to use. 
 The wine could not be created immediately, 
 but the water must first be brought and the 
 vessels filled, and then the wine would not be 
 wanting. To be patient, to rely on the Lord, to 
 wait his good time, — -this is the practical teach- 
 ing of the words addressed to Mary. And 
 what does she do ? She saith to the servants, 
 " Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it," — that 
 is, she places all her powers at his command, 
 and, for the time, seeks no other means of 
 supplying her needs but simply to obey. She 
 asks no further question, — it is sufficient to 
 know that the hour is not yet come, and she 
 sets herself about the plain duty of the present 
 to patiently obey what He shall command, and 
 to await his holy pleasure. 
 
 With this view of her conduct before our 
 eyes, we shall surely now the better perceive 
 the deep significance of these few words at the 
 beginning of the narrative, "And the mother 
 
76 THE MOTHER OF JESUS AT CANA ; OR, 
 
 of Jesus was there/' For the holy example 
 of her behavior and its many goodly lessons 
 form an essential part of the Divine instruction 
 afforded by the miracle throughout. As re- 
 marked above, it is not all to know simply 
 that water was changed to wine ; we must 
 know, as well, where the miracle was performed, 
 and in whose presence. So now we see that 
 interior and spiritual religion, signified by the 
 wine, cannot be given to us all immediately, 
 nor without regard to the present condition of 
 our hearts and lives. We see that this Divine 
 work — the redemption of man, his regenera- 
 tion out of natural into spiritual life — must be 
 wrought in that state of his mind typified by 
 the marriage-feast at Cana of Galilee, and that 
 essential to this w T ork is the presence of those 
 holy qualities here represented by the " mother 
 of Jesus. " 
 
 But where is the spiritual Galilee of the 
 Gentiles ? It is, as said above, wherever in the 
 wide world there is a mind whose thoughts and 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 77 
 
 whose affections are mainly set upon natural 
 and worldly objects. It is not the abode of 
 the wicked and irreligious exclusively, but 
 rather of all who have not risen out of the 
 obscurities and the delusions of the natural 
 and earthly life into the true and everlasting 
 light of spiritual knowledge and religious faith. 
 Now, the marriage at Cana of Galilee is the 
 sealing of a sacred covenant between the souls 
 of men in this state and their Creator. It is 
 establishing the Church as the kingdom of the 
 Lord in the hearts of these as yet natural- 
 minded men. It matters not whether it be in 
 heathen, in Christian, or in Jewish lands, the 
 real Galilee is everywhere the same region of 
 spiritual darkness, — the state of the unregen- 
 erate man. It is here that the first miracle must 
 be wrought, that the first step must be taken 
 in the religious life. It is idle to think that 
 only in some lofty realm of spiritual illumina- 
 tion and enthusiasm man can set. out on the 
 path that will lead up to heaven. There is no 
 
 7* 
 
THE MOTHER OF JESUS AT CANA; OR, 
 
 other place to start from than the actual situa- 
 tion we are in ! The sick man does not wait 
 until he is whole and then send for his physi- 
 cian. It is the People that sat in darkness that 
 have seen a great light, and they that sat in the 
 valley of the shadow of death, upon them hath 
 the light shiiicd. And the Church, or the Lord's 
 marriage-covenant, finds its initiament not 
 necessarily in their knowledge of true doctrine 
 or their perception of spiritual and Divine 
 things in their true character, but rather in 
 their willingness to live according to the prin- 
 ciples of their religion, whatever it be, and to 
 put to practice whatever they take to be the 
 truth. In a word, it rests primarily on the 
 affection of good. In this sense the Jews were 
 themselves Gentiles when viewed in relation 
 to Christianity; for, though they had no knowl- 
 edge of a spiritual church or religion, still, they 
 held in reverence the letter of the law 7 , and 
 many of them obeyed it from religious motives. 
 So is the Gentile, or Galilean Church at this 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 79 
 
 day established with all who, in whatever 
 Christian sect, even though their minds are 
 still darkened with falses of doctrine, do yet 
 reverence a Divine Being and from religious 
 motives strive to live according to their faith. 
 And in this Galilean Church there is to be 
 done the Divine work of giving light for dark- 
 ness, a true religious faith and love, with all 
 their substantial and enduring joys, for the 
 outer shell of ceremonious observance, of self- 
 imposed discipline, of a rigid and often irk- 
 some obedience to the external rules of piety 
 and morality. And how shall this work be 
 done ? What is to elevate this great multi- 
 tude of souls, hardly capable of an intelligent 
 thought about God, heaven, hell, the spiritual 
 world, the influence of these upon man's soul ; 
 who know still less about the interior struc- 
 ture of their own being, of the way in which 
 evil habits grow and become strong, or of that 
 in which they can be cast off and good ones 
 implanted in their stead; who perceive nothing 
 
8o THE MOTHER OF JESUS AT CANA ; OR, 
 
 of the connection of one evil with another, and 
 know not the consequence of sinful acts apart 
 from the temporal punishment which they 
 incur at men's, hands ? — what shall elevate 
 these souls into the light of true religion and 
 a reasonable faith ? What shall teach them a 
 knowledge of themselves and reveal to them 
 the glory of their Lord ? How shall they ever 
 make known their wants to God, knowing 
 them not themselves ? Who shall say to the 
 Lord, " They have no wine," and in patience, 
 self-possession, and heavenly trust dispose 
 all things so that they may best accom- 
 plish the Lord's bidding? Surely here is the 
 needful office of that humility and obedience 
 which is so clearly typified by the mother of 
 Jesus at the marriage in Cana. The desire to 
 live a good life, accompanied with a habit of 
 obedience and humility, a readiness to do what 
 our religion requires, and to leave our future 
 states and their needs in the hands of Provi- 
 dence, — such is a sure road of progress in the 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 8 I 
 
 life of true religion. No one even in Gentile 
 darkness is without sufficient light to guide 
 him at least one step forward. There are the 
 Ten Commandments, the true law of holiness, 
 which the most external and natural mind can 
 at least in outward conduct obey ; there is the 
 Church with her holy instructions, her Divine 
 ordinances, the very avenues of heavenly grace 
 and light into the souls of men ; there are the 
 outward forms of worship, of piety, of charity, 
 of self-discipline ; — all these, the externals of 
 religion, are within reach of the most natural- 
 minded, the most spiritually-ignorant of men. 
 And now if there be the true desire to lead 
 a holy life, a genuine affection for what is good, 
 and a willingness to shun the evils of the 
 natural and selfish life as they appear, let the 
 example of Mary, the mother of Jesus, be not 
 forgotten. Rest content with the obedient 
 pursuance of these plain, practical, external 
 duties, and neither murmur nor rebel if the 
 Lord's time is long in coming! See that in 
 
82 THE MOTHER OF JESUS AT CANA ; OR, 
 
 this low, natural plane of our life, where all our 
 religion must make its beginning, we have 
 really put everything in orderly subjection to 
 the Lord ! Have we practically learned to 
 trust in the Lord as our heavenly Father, to 
 reverence Him in our conversation, to pray to 
 Him in words, to kneel down before Him ? 
 Have we accepted his Holy Word as our 
 spiritual counsel and guide ? Have we dis- 
 ciplined oyr unruly and rebellious natural will 
 into the habit of a regular and pious observ- 
 ance of the holy services of the Church ? Have 
 we grown yet to that measure of Christian 
 courage that we dare in word, gesture, and 
 act to confess Christ before men ? 
 
 Then have we followed that good example. 
 The^servants are ready to do the Lord's will ; 
 the stone vessels set for our purification, these 
 acts of external obedience, are filled to the 
 brim ; and the water is ready to be made wine. 
 
 But how many are ready to call that an idle 
 and vain show of religion -which consists in 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 83 
 
 outward, self-compelled obedience rather than 
 in the voluntary and spontaneous expression 
 of the heart's desire ! How many are too 
 willing to regard with a kind of contempt a 
 pious and reverential behavior toward the 
 things of the Church, saying that righteous- 
 ness and piety must be cultivated rather in 
 the heart than in outward gesture, and that 
 these external acts are but a poor substitute 
 for a truly reformed and spiritual life ! But is 
 not this like complaining that the Saviour does 
 not furnish wine at once, instead of ordering 
 water to be brought and the six stone vessels 
 filled to the brim ? Not so did the mother of 
 Jesus ; but turned rather to the servants and 
 said, " Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it." 
 It is true, indeed, that the externals of re- 
 ligion, morality, piety, and good works, are 
 far different from that substantial, heaven- 
 descended life of the soul, — true faith and true 
 charity. But they are different only as lower 
 and higher planes of the same life of holi- 
 
84 THE MOTHER OF JESUS AT CANA ; OR, 
 
 ness. Nor are the former cast aside as vain 
 and worthless by those who have arrived at 
 a more interior and spiritual enjoyment of 
 religion. On the contrary, they are filled 
 through and through with all the zeal and 
 earnestness of the souPs new life. For we 
 do not read that the water with which these 
 six vessels were filled was ever poured out, 
 as no longer of use. That very water was 
 itself made wine, and out of these same ves- 
 sels was the precious draught made and borne 
 to the governor of the feast ! 
 
 So may it be with all who are not ashamed 
 to openly acknowledge the Lord before man, 
 to worship Him with the lips, and to make his 
 Holy Word the rule of their conversation in 
 the world ; who, while they make no preten- 
 sion to great spirituality of mind nor clamor 
 contentiously for the wine of spiritual truth, 
 do yet, with humility and sincerity, strive to 
 bring their natural and carnal man into some 
 degree of orderly subjection to the holy stat- 
 
HUMILITY AND OBEDIENCE. 85 
 
 utes and commandments of the Lord. And 
 when we have faithfully and obediently done 
 our part, the Lord in his own hour will do his. 
 He will reward our obedience with those holy 
 affections whose delight is in the law of the 
 Lord ; He will make our religion no longer 
 self-imposed restraint, but a willing marriage- 
 covenant between our souls and heaven ; and 
 will call us, admitted into the freedom of a 
 genuine spiritual faith, no longer servants, but 
 friends. 
 
©hat tlmt whkh te mxst; m* t j&piritual Qtmtonmgfr 
 
 Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine ; and 
 when men have well drimk, the it that which is worse : 
 but thou hast kept the good wine until now. — St. John ii. 10. 
 
 T3UT afterward, that which is worse!" 
 JD Stern law of retribution for every indul- 
 gence which, beginning in what is innocent and 
 good, because allied to a good and healthful 
 purpose, more and more leads to the indul- 
 gence for its own sake, and so, perverted from 
 its rightful end, becomes itself an evil, fitting 
 a man ever more and more for, afterward, 
 that which is worse ! 
 
 The holy use and significance of wine as the 
 symbol of the Divine Truth derived from our 
 Lord's Divine Good, consequently, as the in- 
 terior spiritual truth which nourishes the life 
 86 
 
THEN THAT WHICH IS WORSE. 87 
 
 of the Church, this is the main subject of the 
 miracle at Cana. But the misuse or the per- 
 version of wine, — the abuse and profanation of 
 God's precious gifts to man, — whether physical 
 or spiritual, are also pointed out in the above 
 words. 
 
 " When men have well drunk, then that which 
 is worse." The governor of that marriage- 
 feast in Galilee, when he has tasted the water 
 that by the Divine miracle was made wine, 
 calls the bridegroom to him, as if supposing 
 that the wine was of his furnishing, and courte- 
 ously praises him for its excellent quality, 
 saying, " Every man at the beginning doth set 
 forth good wine ; and when men have well 
 drunk, then that which is worse : but thou hast 
 kept the good wine until now." 
 
 It would seem that the marriage-supper was 
 at an end, the feasting and rejoicing coming to 
 its close, and that the " good wine" was offered 
 as a more choice and excellent viand where- 
 with to crown the feast. Such, indeed, is it to 
 
88 THEN THAT WHICH IS WORSE; OR, 
 
 all who shall come to that marriage-supper of 
 the Lamb, — that spiritual communion with the 
 Lord which constitutes the blessedness of the 
 regenerate life. 
 
 After the supper, the cup ; after the mar- 
 riage, the offering of the good wine, — made 
 so by the Lord's own Divine gift and opera- 
 tion, but through our humble obedience and 
 our co-operation as the only means. For the 
 water, which must first be brought, is the 
 natural truth, which appeals and applies to 
 our natural outward life and its duties here, 
 where we must begin our reformation. The 
 wine is the same external truth and external 
 religion turned by the inflowing of God's Holy 
 Spirit into interior and spiritual truth, in the 
 degree that we have applied our knowledge 
 of truth to the good of life, and thus filled all 
 the holy vessels set for our purification with our 
 obedience in shunning evil as sin. And this ap- 
 plying our knowledge of truth to the good of 
 life ; this uniting of our faith with charity, — this 
 
SPIRITUAL DRUNKENNESS. 89 
 
 is the heavenly marriage which takes place in 
 the soul of the regenerate, and which makes 
 man, born on earth into hereditary evil and 
 suffering, to be like unto the angels and the 
 children of the resurrection. For him the good 
 wine is kept till the last. 
 
 When we say this takes place in the religious 
 life of a man, we mean that it is what takes 
 place in the Church. For the Church is in 
 man. It consists of whatever union there is, 
 in a man, of the faith of his understanding, 
 with the good affections of his will. And so 
 to crown this heavenly union of the two great 
 principles which make up all spiritual, heav- 
 enly life, — at which blessed union the Lord, 
 our Saviour and Regenerator, Jesus Christ, is 
 always spiritually present, — the cup of wine is 
 offered at the last. For this is the appropri- 
 ation from the Lord Himself, the heavenly 
 Bridegroom, of the fullness of all spiritual nour- 
 ishment and benediction, — the water turned to 
 wine, — the "good wine," " kept until now" ! 
 
 8* 
 
90 THEN THA T WHICH IS WORSE; OR, 
 
 Different is it with those who receive the 
 gifts of God only to pervert, misuse, and pro- 
 fane them, and this whether it be in natural 
 goods or in spiritual goods. The wine which 
 is here mentioned has chiefly a reference to 
 truth, conjoined to the good of life ; but the 
 principle holds true of any endowment of our 
 nature whereby our Creator has made us ca- 
 pable of attaining to an immortal and angelic 
 life. All natural gifts, or faculties and propen- 
 sities, were, as they came from our Creator's 
 designing hand, good, orderly, and healthful, 
 Behold, He looked upon everything that He 
 had made, and it was very good ! So is there 
 nothing belonging to our natural life which 
 was not, in the purpose of its Divine Maker, 
 good, holy, pure, and healthful. So at the be- 
 ginning did our heavenly Father set forth that 
 which was good for us to use and enjoy. 
 Every appetite of the body, every organ and 
 every sense, and so likewise every emotion 
 and passion of the will, every thought, desire, 
 
SPIRITUAL DRUNKENNESS. 9 1 
 
 and impulse of the mind, every longing after 
 intellectual exercise and acquisition, — all these 
 were adapted to the precious and delightful 
 good to which they were intended to minister. 
 Now, when any of these natural appetites, 
 passions, or faculties, whether bodily or men- 
 tal, is separated from its original and divinely- 
 appointed use, and is indulged for its own sake, 
 without regard to its proper use, there begins 
 that which is akin to drunkenness, and the per- 
 son so doing begins his miserable downward 
 way of preparing himself ever more and more 
 for "afterwards that which is worse" : "When 
 men have drunken, then that which is worse. " 
 Yes, this is the fearful and wretched result of 
 every indulgence of natural appetite or desire 
 or taste or passion without a view to some 
 worthy use and benefit. Drunkenness itself 
 illustrates most forcibly the rule. It is not the 
 drinking or the eating of this or that that con- 
 demns a man. But when a man cultivates a 
 taste for intoxicating drinks from merely a 
 
92 THEN THAT WHICH IS WORSE; OR, 
 
 bodily appetite, and goes on, subjecting his 
 mind, and his body itself, at length, to the wild 
 control of this single lust, then, when he drinks, 
 it is to no use, either bodily or mental, but solely 
 to the abuse and the degradation of his whole 
 nature. The appetite, separated from its own 
 orderly purpose, becomes itself the avenue of 
 a thousand evils. Disease of mind and body, 
 and misery to himself and others about him, 
 follow on to make up "that which is worse," — 
 the sequel to his having ceased to be contented 
 with the "good wine set forth at the first." 
 The great law of use is that which determines 
 all right or wrong indulgence ; and use means 
 the applying of everything, in bodily appetites 
 or mental tastes and faculties, to its ozvn good ; 
 and that alone is its good which makes this ap- 
 petite or faculty serve the soul in its high and 
 immortal purposes. The question with every 
 man should be, For what are the appetites 
 which I indulge, or the habits of the life I lead, 
 preparing me ? For that which is better, or 
 
SPIRITUAL DRUNKENNESS. 93 
 
 that which is worse ? There comes for all of 
 us a great afterwards, — a long " hereafter ;" 
 and for this, whether we know it or think of it 
 or not, we are preparing in every minutia of 
 our daily life and habits. Oh, miserable " after- 
 wards" to those who have used this life only 
 to become " well drunken," to pamper and 
 feed the body and put into the rein of its lusts 
 the whole guiding and ruling of the life here ! 
 Miserable hereafter to those who come into 
 the future world with body and soul diseased, 
 corrupted, spoiled for any healthy, orderly, 
 angelic life, and fitted only, having offended in 
 all their members, to have both body and soul 
 cast into hell! 
 
 There is a spiritual drunkenness as well as 
 a physical ; and the one is like the other in 
 its causes, and only w r orse in its consequences. 
 The Bible speaks very frequently of this spir- 
 itual drunkenness when describing the Church 
 in its decline, as " drunk with the wine of for- 
 nication," as being " drunken, but not with 
 
94 THEN THA T WHICH IS WORSE; OR, 
 
 wine." This drunkenness is likewise an abuse 
 of that which is first set forth to the soul as 
 "good wine." The good wine is the truth 
 which God gives us united to the good of life ; 
 but when we separate truth from its good, 
 then the heavenly marriage-bond is broken, 
 and we drink the wine of fornication. Truth 
 separated from good, in our first learning its Di- 
 vine lessons, may lead us ever nearer to good, 
 and become at length like water changed to 
 wine when the marriage of faith and charity, or 
 good and truth, takes place in the life we lead. 
 But truth once conjoined to good and after- 
 wards torn asunder from its holy spouse in 
 the heart and used for the selfish purposes of 
 human pride, glory, or gain, invariably turns 
 and corrupts itself into falsity ; it becomes 
 like soured and noxious and debasing drinks, 
 — grateful only to a disordered appetite,— no 
 longer serving, but only injuring, the soul that 
 seeks it. 
 
 When we thus speak of truth and good 
 
SPIRITUAL DRUNKENNESS. 95 
 
 being separated in the Church in a man's soul, it 
 seems like talking of abstractions ; but it is not 
 so. Sad to-day is the spectacle of unhappy, 
 diseased, shattered minds, which, not content 
 with taking the holy truths of the Lord re- 
 vealed to his Church in the Word, and espe- 
 cially in the heavenly doctrines of the spiritual 
 sense, as simply the means of living a life of 
 real usefulness and holiness, have sought 
 rather to investigate and reason about them 
 from the plane of merely natural sense and 
 science, and to build out of them some monu- 
 ment which may glorify their own natural 
 pride, or in some way distinguish themselves 
 and gain for them the favor, the applause, and 
 the rewards of men. God gave his Word and 
 all his truth for the salvation of souls. This 
 is its good, — its use. All trifling, speculating, 
 theorizing, yea, all reasoning, about Divine 
 truths, which does not look to this end, and in 
 humility and worship labor to this good, is but 
 being well drunken ; it is but perverting and 
 
96 THEN THAT WHICH IS WORSE; OR, 
 
 abusing the good wine, so that men are made 
 worse and not better for their acquaintance 
 with the precious gifts of the Lord. 
 
 Our reason may be likened to the thirst of 
 the body. For we love to reason, to acquire 
 a knowledge of things, and think over the 
 knowledge and compare and analyze and dis- 
 cuss and pass judgment. In many this reason- 
 ing faculty becomes cultivated to a kind of 
 passion ; and here is where the danger comes 
 in of drinking overmuch, — of loving to reason 
 for the mere sake of reasoning and disputing, 
 and not at all with a view to a calm, peaceful 
 security and confidence of soul, such as those 
 alone enjoy whose " hearts are fixed, trusting in 
 the Lord." For reason, like the bodily appetite, 
 may be abused, in being indulged in from mere 
 natural impulse or taste rather than with a 
 view to a spiritual use, whether it be to the 
 individual or to society. Reason that looks 
 to the acquiring of Divine truth for the pur- 
 pose of the soul's salvation, or to the uniting 
 
SPIRITUAL DRUNKENNESS. 97 
 
 this truth with the life, first by driving out 
 the evils it reveals and condemns, then by 
 doing the good it teaches, all such reason 
 is good and healthy. But it begins by look- 
 ing- to the Lord in desire, if not in conscious 
 act, for the light in which it shall exercise 
 itself. In other words, this true and healthy 
 reason begins by seeking truth, not inventing it. 
 Far different is it with the reason that shuns 
 all truth of Revelation because this implies a 
 Divine government and authority to which 
 obedience is a duty, and leaves no room for 
 tampering and parleying. Such a reason is 
 of the body and of the world only ; it feeds 
 on the ideas which come to it through its bod- 
 ily senses ; it never looks within ; the voice of 
 the soul, the whisper of conscience, the mo- 
 tives of God's Holy Spirit, the Holy Word of 
 God, which encompassed with its great cloud 
 of witnesses comes down from its celestial 
 spheres to be a pillar of cloud and fire to lead 
 us to heaven ; all this is signed away by this 
 
98 THEN THAT WHICH IS WORSE; OR, 
 
 carnal, reasoning appetite, as belonging to re- 
 ligion, the outward superstition of a puerile, 
 by-gone age, while with busy fingers, out of 
 the clay of earth, it moulds to itself its own 
 sensual god, and then asks man's senses if 
 it be not the better god to worship and the 
 more rational and positive authority to obey. 
 Such is the perverted use of the reason, and 
 the corruption of the good wine of the Divine 
 Truth revealed to us from our Father and 
 King and Saviour in heaven. Such a sepa- 
 ration of truth from the practical uses of the 
 good life is what may be termed Spiritual 
 Drunkenness. Those who use the truths of 
 Revelation and of the Church only to magnify 
 themselves, or to exalt themselves above the 
 Divine Giver, these are the drunken ones who, 
 no longer receptive of the good wine, become 
 fit only for, afterwards, that which is worse. 
 
 Note what Swedenborg says on this subject 
 (Gen. ch. ix., verse 21), where he speaks of 
 the Drunkenness of Noah : 
 
SPIRITUAL DRUNKENNESS. 99 
 
 44 They are called drunkards, in die Word, 
 who believe nothing but what they compre- 
 hend, and for this purpose inquire into the 
 mysteries of faith ; and because this is do'ne by 
 means of sensual, or scientific, or philosophical 
 things, according to the quality of the man, he 
 cannot do otherwise than sink into errors. 
 The thought of man is merely terrestrial, cor- 
 poreal, and material, because it is from terres- 
 trial, corporeal, and material things which are 
 continually cleaving thereto, and in which the 
 ideas of his thoughts are founded and termi- 
 nated. Wherefore to think and reason from 
 these things concerning things Divine is to 
 bring oneself into errors and perversions, and 
 it is as impossible for a man thence to obtain 
 faith as for a camel to go through the eye 
 of a needle ! The error and insanity which 
 result from this practice are called in the 
 Word drunkenness ; yea, souls or spirits in 
 the other life who argue about the truths of 
 faith, and against them even come to resemble 
 
IOO THEN THAT WHICH IS WORSE. 
 
 drunkards and behave in like manner." — Ar- 
 cana Coelestia, 1072. 
 
 The Lord, the Father of us all, the Husband 
 and Bridegroom of his Church, offers to us all. 
 the good wine, — the Divine Truths of his own 
 Divine good : He, for none else than He can 
 offer it ; and in his own Word and Revealed 
 Doctrine, for in the Word only, which was 
 with God in the Beginning, and was and ever 
 is God, is God made flesh to dwell among 
 us ! In these holy and saving truths of our 
 Divine Religion does the Lord and Saviour 
 tender to men the cup of salvation, — the " good 
 wine kept until now !" May our taking and 
 drinking it be not to our condemnation ! 
 
"VI. 
 
 She (BixAtA ^cxvmt; ox f the ^ubonUnatimt tsi the 
 
 Gira thyself, and serve ??ie, till I have eaten and drunken. 
 — St. Luke xvii. 8. 
 
 IT is good for a man to be sometimes plainly 
 spoken to. Whatever damage is incurred 
 to delicate sensibility, to private opinion, to 
 ease, convenience, and even the conventional 
 forms of civility and kindness, the sacrifice is 
 often more than counterbalanced by the rare 
 service of plain speech. To such an extent 
 has the art of feigning become the art of being 
 courteous and polite, that mankind, not only 
 in costume but in deportment as well, are 
 clothed after one pattern, which as little cor- 
 responds to the various individual characters 
 hidden beneath as the gorgeous robes which 
 
 9* ioi 
 
102 THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 the stage-player wears at evening resemble 
 the plain garb in which he eats his breakfast 
 in the morning. 
 
 The shell which thus hides and protects 
 the actual internal qualities of men it is im- 
 portant, sometimes, to break through. The 
 external and artificial manner is an admirable 
 railway, by which to make swift journeys over 
 the ups and downs of a worldly career ; but he 
 who would make true friends, learn the beau- 
 ties and the defects of the wayside scene, and 
 whose object is not so much to get to the 
 journey's end as to gather up rich treasures 
 along the route, he must take a slower con- 
 veyance, and subject himself to accidents and 
 delays. He must be willing. at times to drop 
 his own mask, and he must demand it of his 
 friends that they drop theirs. Plain speech is 
 what does this needful work. 
 
 If such be the case among men, how much 
 more truly is it so with each man and his own 
 soul! For the mannerism which prevails in 
 
THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SENSUAL. 1 03 
 
 and fashions the intercourse of men in the world 
 is hardly more affected, artificial, and decep- 
 tive than that which we all wear in our own 
 private estimation, — that is to say, which our 
 external or natural man puts on in face of the 
 internal man, and of Him who gives to the inter- 
 nal man the spirit of judgment and understand- 
 ing. For most men are as punctilious in their 
 gentle courtesies toward themselves as toward 
 their neighbor ; and many a person holds, it is 
 to be feared, in much greater abhorrence a 
 breach of etiquette between his inner and his 
 outer man than any committed in social circles. 
 The conscience is at best an intruder, and if 
 always masked, will die for want of liberty and 
 exercise ; and the body, in its easy, well-to-do 
 repose, must take warning when no longer that 
 inner voice speaks plain words and fearlessly. 
 What a sad and dreary world would this be 
 were the conventionalities of polite and fashion- 
 able intercourse all that we could enjoy in 
 friend and neighbor! So dreary, so miserable, 
 
104 THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 is the life of him who wears ever before his 
 
 m 
 
 own conscience, his better, purer nature, the 
 deceitful mask of a perverted, world-serving 
 reason, and who, in his own eyes, arrays his 
 actual vices and defects with the fair garments 
 of innocence and beauty ! 
 
 So is it a good thing for a man to be plainly 
 spoken to, and for him to use plain words with 
 himself. He corrects his mistakes more easily, 
 sees more clearly his errors and short-comings, 
 forms truer ideas, and knows better what to 
 expect of the world around him, when he is 
 not afraid to lay bare his own actual character 
 before the searching eye of his conscience. 
 
 Such plain words are those we have quoted 
 above, "Gird thyself, and serve me, till I have 
 eaten and drunken." They are words of 
 authority and command, — the words of a 
 master to his servant. 
 
 " Which of you," saith our Lord, to his dis- 
 ciples, " having a servant plowing or feeding 
 cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is 
 
THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SENSUAL. 105 
 
 come from the field, Go and sit down to meat ? 
 And will not rather say unto him, Make ready 
 wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and 
 serve me, till I have eaten and drunken ; and 
 afterward thou shalt eat and drink? Doth he 
 thank that servant because he did the things 
 that were commanded him ? I trow not. So 
 likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those 
 things which are commanded you, say, We are 
 unprofitable servants: we have done that which 
 was our duty to do." 
 
 Here is a plain picture of religious duty 
 profitable for all to contemplate, but chiefly so 
 for those who would relieve the life of religion 
 in this world from all burdensome obligations 
 and restraints, and who would really make it 
 to be one with our easy and careless pursuit 
 of the world's pleasures and goods, only wear- 
 ing Sunday garments, and putting on sober and 
 pious looks now and then, like as we see some 
 persons affected at hearing solemn music. 
 They cannot help being affected by it, but at 
 
106 THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 the same time they have to admit that they do 
 not like it. 
 
 The language here represented as being 
 used by the human master to his servant be- 
 longs even more properly to the one Divine 
 Master of us all. For that the relation between 
 master and servant refers to that of the Lord 
 and his disciples is evident from the following 
 verse, where the disciples are taught to say, 
 " We are unprofitable servants." It is the 
 Lord, then, that addresses to us this stern and 
 commanding language, "Gird thyself, and serve 
 me, until I have eaten and drunken." But it 
 is the Lord speaking through our interior and 
 better nature, and addressing the lower carnal 
 man with its various affections and thoughts. 
 For the Lord is not a visible master whom we 
 can wait upon with natural food and drink, but 
 is rather the Holy Spirit, the Divine Truth 
 dwelling within our hearts, and demanding our 
 ready obedience and devoted service. It is, 
 therefore, the spiritual man born of God, and 
 
THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SENSUAL. 107 
 
 speaking with the wisdom and authority of 
 God's Word of Truth, that thus commands the 
 natural man to be girded and to serve. 
 
 This servant — the natural or carnal man, as 
 subordinate to the spiritual man, — that is, as 
 subordinate to the Lord, for it is only from the 
 Lord that the spiritual man has either power or 
 authority — is represented in the parable as a 
 plower of the field, or a feeder of cattle. That 
 is what our natures are when viewed with ref- 
 erence to interior qualities and operations. We 
 are either plowers of the field or feeders of 
 cattle or both at once. This is the natural 
 constitution of our minds. The field which 
 our Lord speaks of, we already know from his 
 Word, is the world where his seed, the Divine 
 Truth, is sown. The field is the mind of man, 
 as destined to receive this seed. It is, there- 
 fore, the intellect or understanding, for it is 
 here that man receives the truth ; the plower 
 of the field is he that cultivates this faculty of 
 the mind, — that makes it ready for the recep- 
 
108 THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 tion of the seed ; he who becomes learned and 
 skilled in all sorts of intellectual pursuits, and 
 thus capable of becoming truly wise when he 
 shall have access to the Divine Word, the 
 source of all Truth. And the feeder of cattle 
 is evidently he who cultivates rather the affec- 
 tions, in whose nature the emotional and vol- 
 untary is more prominent than the intellectual 
 part. For cattle, when referred to in the Holy 
 Scriptures, are representatives of the natural 
 affections. By the servant, therefore, who is 
 a plowman, or a feeder of cattle, we have repre- 
 sented to us the natural man, with his various 
 mental possessions and capacities, both intel- 
 lectual and voluntary. 
 
 This servant is represented as coming in 
 from the field, and these words bring a familiar 
 picture before the mind's eye. We naturally 
 think of the close of a long day of toil, and of 
 the refreshing repast and grateful repose that 
 evening promises. The plowman leaves his 
 furrows, the herdsman drives his charge into 
 
THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SENSUAL. 1 09 
 
 the fold for the night, and the faithful laborers 
 come home to report to their master of their 
 work, to receive his approval, and to prepare 
 for another day's task. Now, this coming in 
 from the field represents to us that state of a 
 man's life when with diligence and zeal he has 
 enriched his mind with many knowledges, and 
 has developed within him many good natural 
 affections; he has become, shall we say, learned, 
 — a wise observer, a skillful reasoner, an able 
 critic, a man of general and thorough mental 
 culture? Or, on the other hand, he may have 
 cultivated within him the most attractive and 
 genial traits of heart ; he may be generous in 
 will and deed, magnanimous, courageous, a 
 man who can love deeply and truly, and who 
 cannot fail to be loved by others. Such may 
 that servant be who comes in from his day of 
 faithful labor in the field. He is still altogether 
 a natural — that is, an unregenerate — man. 
 These fine mental traits and abilities are in- 
 herited, or he has acquired them with great 
 
 TO 
 
HO THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 diligence for purely natural, that is, for selfish 
 and worldly, ends. The servant coming from 
 the field, — a noble and imposing sight ! So 
 comes the youthful student from his success- 
 fully-ended college course ; so comes the hero, 
 laurel-crowned, from the long and bravely- 
 fought campaign ; so comes the merchant, rich 
 with the gains of many anxious years, and 
 ready to enter upon a life of quiet and leisure; 
 so comes every one, man and woman, of what- 
 ever calling or standing, who, having completed 
 some course of arduous discipline, labor, and 
 general self- development, thinks to himself, 
 now, in the pleasant evening-time, to reap the 
 reward, to enjoy the sweet rest, to pursue 
 during the remainder of life those pleasures 
 and gratifications which all these rare and la- 
 boriously-acquired faculties seem to promise. 
 The mind shall now delight in its learning ; all 
 the wealth of the world of letters lies at its 
 feet; it shall taste the rarest viands, and re- 
 joice in its well-earned and proud estate. And 
 
THE SUBORDINA TION OF THE SENSUAL. 1 1 1 
 
 the heart — has not this, too, learned the rare 
 pleasure of loving and being loved ? Has it 
 not, too, learned the art of making others 
 happy by words or deeds of kindness, and 
 learned, better still, the art of making itself 
 happy by the exercise of those qualities which 
 men love to reward with admiration and praise? 
 So the servant comes in from the field. Wea- 
 ried with his labors, he is ready to be waited 
 on and tenderly treated. Thus, having acquired 
 all these natural good gifts, the man without 
 religion wants to be made happy in their en- 
 joyment. He expects that, somehow, the 
 world will make itself obliged to serve him ; 
 that true and satisfying pleasure is now at his 
 command ; that his own mental ability and his 
 qualities of heart will insure him, in spite of 
 any moral conditions or more interior and hid- 
 den considerations, that lifelong feast of good 
 things which he would have crown his labori- 
 ous day with its calm, long-lingering hours of 
 evening repose. 
 
112 THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 But when the servant thus comes in from 
 the field, what is the reception that awaits him ? 
 " Will his master," saith our Lord, "say to him, 
 Go and sit down to meat ? Will he not rather 
 say to him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, 
 and gird thyself, and serve me, until I have 
 eaten and drunken : and afterward thou shalt 
 eat and drink !" 
 
 " Gird thyself, and serve me !" this is the 
 plain speech of the master to the servant. So 
 must our spiritual man address that lower na- 
 ture, enriched by all the goods which earthly 
 toil and culture can afford. It is a plain, hard 
 word ; but he that does not use it is not longer 
 a true master of himself; no longer represents 
 in his spiritual part the Master in heaven, in 
 whose name he should rule. It is hard to say 
 to that mind and heart so richly endowed with 
 natural gifts, — with fine talents, with great 
 worldly knowledge, with noble and winning 
 affections, — " Gird thyself, and serve me !" It 
 is hard to place that proud and self-satisfied 
 
THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SENSUAL. 1 1 3 
 
 outer man, which has come from the field with 
 the sweat of toil and the laurel of this world's 
 fame on the brow, in the rank of a servant, 
 and make it do the bidding of the still, small 
 voice within. 
 
 " Gird thyself ; and serve me !" Is this, then, 
 the reward of all this labor ? Is it for this that 
 we have become learned ; that our intellects 
 have become so proudly fashioned ; that our 
 hearts are gifted with such admirable traits ; 
 that we have arrived at that stage of mental 
 and moral culture that we can challenge the 
 world's esteem and love, — is it for this only 
 that we must gird ourselves for new labor, and 
 humbly serve that inner, spiritual man, and 
 prize its secret, silent approbation more than all 
 the plaudits and flattery of the admiring world ? 
 Are we then, — with all our rare talents and 
 lovable traits of character, — nothing after all 
 but a plower of the field and a feeder of 
 cattle ? With all that we can do in acquiring 
 natural knowledge and cultivating the natural 
 
 IO* 
 
114 THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 affections, have we no real rest, no true de- 
 light in store for us, until we have girded our- 
 selves anew and serve with humility that stern 
 and unrelenting master, — the spiritual man 
 within us ? 
 
 Such is indeed the case. With all that na- 
 ture can do in enriching and beautifying mind 
 and heart, thou art but a plower of the field 
 and a feeder of cattle ! Such is the plain 
 speech of the gospel. " Gird thyself, and serve 
 me," must be the word of every true Christian 
 to that external and carnal nature which he 
 bears about with him and which the world has 
 done so much to enrich and adorn. It is the 
 command of religion to nature, of the spirit to 
 the flesh, of God to his creatures, — " Gird thy- 
 self, and serve me !" Do not think to sit down 
 and eat of thy natural earnings while yet the 
 spirit within remains unfed. Presume not to 
 count on the true enjoyment of any natural 
 gift or w r orldly treasure until first it has been 
 consecrated to the service of God ; until first 
 
THE SUBORDIXA TION OF THE SENSUAL. I I 5 
 
 it has been applied in some way to the nourish- 
 ment of the soul's higher life within ; until it 
 has first served the spiritual man as its mas- 
 ter. It is for this higher life, this truer and 
 more lasting enjoyment, that all these out- 
 ward gifts and capacities are given to man. 
 "Thou madest him/' saith the Psalmist, " to have 
 dominion over the works of thy hands ; thou 
 hast put all things tinder his feet ; all sheep 
 and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the 
 fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, and what- 
 soever passeth through the paths of the seas!'' 
 Not only is all nature made to serve man's 
 bodily wants and pleasure, but even this body, 
 and all its capacities for delights and for noble 
 and beautiful deeds, was made and given to 
 serve the soul. In the soul, in the spiritual 
 man, the Lord Himself makes his dwelling- 
 place, and there by his Holy Spirit rules, the 
 one blessed Master and King of all worlds. 
 It is his voice that says to this whole wide and 
 glorious realm of nature, " Gird thyself, and 
 
Il6 THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 serve me !" It is the voice of his Divine 
 Word speaking in our consciences that quells 
 the proud pretensions and hopes of the flesh 
 with the stern command, " Gird thyself, and 
 serve me !" 
 
 And what is it for the carnal or natural man 
 to gird himself and serve the spirit ? It is to 
 compel himself to obey the laws of holy and 
 righteous living. It is to put the strong girdle 
 of true principles, of firm resolution, and un- 
 yielding discipline about all the unruly and 
 loose-going thoughts, desires, and purposes of 
 the heart. It is to bring the flesh into subor- 
 dination to the spirit, and to make every natural 
 gift and acquirement subservient to a religious, 
 that is, a charitable, useful, and holy life. 
 Until this is done there is no true rest, no real 
 enjoyment of all this world's goods ; until the 
 lower nature is first brought into order and 
 subjection to the spirit within ; until its every 
 faculty and possession has been offered as a 
 holy sacrifice upon God's table, and the purpose 
 
THE SUBORDINA TION OF THE SENSUAL. 1 17 
 
 of life has been made first of all to serve Him, 
 as the true and lawful Master, and to give Him 
 the merit and praise for all that we may ac- 
 quire or achieve of goodness and wisdom; until 
 this is done, we need hope for no evening rest 
 in the peaceful household where God's true 
 servants dwell ; we need count on no place at 
 that blessed table where the Lord feeds, with 
 the bread of heaven, those that hunger after 
 righteousness. We may return to our furrows 
 and our herds unrefreshed, while those ser- 
 vants who were willing first to serve their 
 Master, afterwards sit down themselves and 
 enjoy, in heavenly contentment, their eternal 
 reward. 
 
 There seems to be in our day no more 
 favorite theme with popular writers than the 
 excellence of nature and of man's natural gifts. 
 Upon these are lavished a thousand terms of 
 delight and admiration, while the interior and 
 invisible world of the spirit, — that is, of those 
 holy and Divine things which inhabit a plane 
 
I IS THE GIRDED SERVANT; OR, 
 
 wholly above and distinct from that of all 
 natural thought and feeling, — -this spiritual part 
 of man is treated with indifference, and often 
 with an ill-concealed contempt. The servant 
 has become indeed higher than his lord. It is 
 an offense to polite ears to hint that the man 
 whom all the world admires for his great learn- 
 ing and splendid intellectual talents, when he 
 hath said in his heart, " There is no God," is a 
 fool ! It seems rude to gentle natures to de- 
 clare that the large-hearted, generous, easy- 
 going man who has so many friends, so few 
 cares, who makes light of occasional vices, and 
 jests about religion, and yet is so kind, so 
 gentle, so courteous, so popular, in a word, to 
 say that he is spiritually but a feeder of cattle, 
 that his whole life is devoted to purely selfish 
 and sensual pursuits; yea, that he is, to use 
 the Psalmist's phrase, " But as a beast before 
 God !" 
 
 Let, then, him who has the courage to pro- 
 fess before the world the name of Christian, 
 
THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SENSUAL. 1 1 9 
 
 that he is a follower, a servant, a soldier of 
 Christ the Lord ; let him also have courage to 
 say to his proud and merely natural man, 
 " Gird thyself, and serve me." Let him regard 
 with just disdain those courtiers of the flesh, 
 those flatterers of nature's unsanctified gifts, 
 those lauders of human greatness and virtue. 
 Let him, in the consciousness of the true worth 
 and dignity of his spiritual man, repel the ad- 
 vances of this lower nature, puffed up by the 
 world's flatteries, with the significant word, 
 " After me !" 
 
 And let him recognize his own spiritual mas- 
 tery as only the stewardship to a higher Lord, 
 even Christ, that as he orders the flesh into 
 subservience to the spirit, so may he in both 
 spirit and flesh serve God faithfully, and be 
 admitted at length to that blessed feast at 
 which all the servants of God shall sit down in 
 the kingdom of heaven. 
 
VII. 
 WU llittift xtgtmA to ^igltt; ox t tfte t&xwt (ttfaxxiwttx 
 
 One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see. 
 St. John ix. 25. 
 
 EVERY revelation of spiritual truth is a 
 new light sent into the world from Him 
 who in heaven shines as a Sun before the eyes 
 of the angels. 
 
 The Truth, verily, shines in our minds ; it is 
 our sunlight there ; and ignorance and denial 
 of the Truth is dimness and darkness in the 
 soul. Now, as a man cannot see when in 
 utter darkness, so is a man mentally blind 
 when in ignorance, or in a state of denying 
 the Truth, since then no spiritual light, which is 
 Truth, enters into the understanding, the un- 
 derstanding being to the mind what the eye is 
 to the body. 
 
 120 
 
THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT. 121 
 
 We see, therefore, what is meant by our 
 Lord's miraculous curing of the blind. That 
 the external cures are a parable or symbol of 
 what our Saviour was at the same time and is 
 ever doing for us inwardly, by the influence 
 of his Holy Spirit and his Word, need o'nly be 
 stated to be clearly seen. Every one under- 
 stands that by the blind are meant not only 
 those who cannot see the things of nature 
 around them, but also those who cannot see 
 other things as real and substantial. They 
 who cannot see that there is a God ; that He 
 is our Lord Jesus Christ; that his Holy Word 
 is inspired throughout, being full of heavenly 
 meaning and Divine power ; that the Church 
 is holy, and to be loved and revered; that to 
 do right is better than to do wrong ; that to 
 lose our selfish, unholy life is really to gain the 
 life everlasting; that the real man is not the 
 fleshly body, but the soul and its spiritual 
 body, which lives in these earthly bodies now, 
 but which will one day cast aside this earthly 
 
 F II 
 
122 THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT; OR, 
 
 body and live thenceforth in the spiritual 
 world in its own immortal strength and sub- 
 stance ; that the spiritual world is as real as 
 this, and is unseen by us only so long as we 
 are clothed with a body of earthly matter; that 
 the spiritual world is inhabited forever by those 
 who have left this world, some of whom are 
 happy in heaven, others of whom are unhappy 
 in hell ; they who cannot see these and similar 
 things, who do not understand them, are those 
 who, in the Scriptures, are called blind. These 
 facts are all plainly visible to the mind of a 
 believing man, and yet invisible to him who is 
 mentally blind, — that is, to whom the light of 
 these revealed truths has never come, or who, 
 if the light has come, has rejected it. 
 
 It matters not when and where our blessed 
 Lord and Light once performed the outward 
 miracle of restoring sight to the blind ; we 
 know that He did it, and we know that He de- 
 sired that men should in all times believe Him 
 to be able to do it, and should look to Him 
 
CHAR A CTER OF CHRISTIAN E VIDENCE. 1 2 3 
 
 alone as the giver of sight and of all natural 
 and spiritual blessings. He could at this day 
 cure the eyes of all the blind, and He would 
 do it, we may be assured, if, in his all-seeing 
 Providence and Wisdom, men would thereby 
 be permanently the better off. But the Lord 
 has permitted physical blindness for some mer- 
 ciful end, and with many, nay, with all, we may 
 safely say the end is that they may be able 
 better to see spiritual things and be filled with 
 greater spiritual light. And this is undoubt- 
 edly the greater blessing of the two. For, 
 pleasant as it is and desirable to all to see the 
 things of this world, the faces of friends, the 
 beautiful scenes of nature and the way to pur- 
 sue our natural industry, still, this sight lasts 
 but a few years at most, and then all natural 
 vision fades from the eye and the body lies 
 cold and useless in the grave. And suppose, 
 now, the soul of him who has enjoyed his nat- 
 ural eyesight in this world, and has seen all the 
 beautiful things this world can display, goes 
 
124 THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT; OR, 
 
 forth in his spiritual body into the eternal 
 world beyond the grave, and there finds that 
 he is blind ; that the fair scenes of heaven, of 
 angelic society, the beautiful Paradise of which 
 he had often read, that these are all darkness 
 to him, that his eyes are forever closed to that 
 which those blessed spirits see who have in this 
 world been careful, while they had the light of 
 Divine Truth, to walk in it, lest darkness should 
 come upon them ! It surely were better to be 
 physically blind for a few years here, if this shall 
 in any way secure to us the bright and endless 
 vision of the immortal world ; and, since the 
 providence of God looks always to eternal ends, 
 physical blindness must, in this providence, be 
 permitted with a view to the eternal good and 
 happiness of him who is thus afflicted. 
 
 The same rule holds good in regard to all 
 other bodily diseases which our Lord, although 
 He might miraculously cure them this day if 
 He would, still permits us to bear for the sake 
 of the inward cure and final immortal health 
 
CHARACTER OF CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE. 1 25 
 
 of our souls. For He is ever spiritually heal- 
 ing our sicknesses and illuminating our blind- 
 ness ; and this by every possible means, since 
 by making whole in his own truth and love 
 He makes us to be angels, and to be capable 
 of enjoying to eternity the happiness of heaven. 
 This is what He would have us all enjoy ; for 
 this He would cure now in every one of us all 
 sorts of blindness and sickness and infirmity 
 of soul, and He will do this for us if we do not 
 oppose ourselves to his Divine and most mer- 
 ciful efforts. 
 
 There are two kinds of spiritual blindness, 
 just as there are two kinds of physical blind- 
 ness. There are some men spiritually blind 
 from their birth, and others who have been 
 made blind. Now, those who are blind from 
 their birth — and it is this class that is repre- 
 sented by him whom the Lord healed — are 
 those who are blind from ignorance of spiritual 
 truth. They have never learned about spirit- 
 ual things and the spiritual life, and are there- 
 
 11* 
 
126 THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT; OR, 
 
 fore blind. Their blindness is not the result 
 of any actual sin of their own, but of their 
 birth and circumstances in the world. But it is 
 otherwise with those who have once seen the 
 light of Truth, and afterward, by closing their 
 minds to it, by denying or violating the Truth 
 in their conduct, have actually made them- 
 selves blind. These are not only blind but 
 guilty at the same time. Their blindness is 
 the result of their evil living and evil dbing. 
 It is a true adage that "none are so blind as 
 those who will not see," and with all of us very 
 much at all times depends on our own will as 
 to whether we will see certain things presented 
 to our minds or not. Even many honest 
 doubters, so called, are, probably, at the best, 
 but indifferent doers of the Word of God ; 
 and we have Divine authority for believing 
 that even in obtaining spiritual sight, — which is 
 a faith in the things of revealed religion, — 
 where there is a will there is a way ; and 
 what this way is our Lord shows us when He 
 
CHARACTER OF CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE. I 27 
 
 says, To him that knocketh it shall be opened ; 
 He that asketh shall receive : yea, he that 
 doeth the works shall know of the doctrine 
 whether it be true. And to the man that was 
 born blind and came to have his sight given 
 him, the Lord, having first anointed his eyes 
 with clay, said, Go wash in the pool of Siloam. 
 And the spiritual meaning of this process 
 of restoring sight is this : " The clay made of 
 spittle on the ground" is reformation of life by 
 truth learned in the literal sense of the Word. 
 The ground is the Church where the Word of 
 God is taught. The clay is the willing heart, 
 ready to be formed by the influence of the Holy 
 Spirit; and the clay applied to the eye is the 
 understanding illumined by the Truth of the 
 Divine Word when man is in this willing and 
 affirmative state. And when one has thus 
 learned and applied to his life's conduct these 
 plain Divine truths then he is being spiritually 
 washed in the pool of Siloam, for this pool 
 signifies also the precepts of the literal Scrip- 
 
128 THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT; OR, 
 
 tures, and to be washed in it means to be 
 cleansed from evils and falsities. 
 
 The process of giving sight to the blind, 
 when described in the symbolic language of 
 this miracle, seems a brief and very extraor- 
 dinary one. And yet it is the same process 
 that is quietly and invisibly going on now, day 
 after day, week after week, year after year, in 
 the minds of innumerable men and women on 
 this earth. For we are all blind from our 
 birth as to all the things relating to the spiritual 
 world and the spiritual life, and only from the 
 Word and its doctrines taught us in the Chris- 
 tian Church do we derive that which gives light 
 to our understanding and enables us to see 
 anything beyond the natural life. Without 
 the Revealed Word we should know nothing 
 of God, of heaven and hell, — there would 
 be no church and no religiefh. Without the 
 Word of God we would have no pool wherein 
 to wash our souls from the impurities of evil 
 affections and of false and blinding thoughts. 
 
CHARACTER OF CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE. 1 29 
 
 But as a man grows up under the influences 
 of Christian education and makes progress in 
 a truly religious life, he finds that his spiritual 
 sight is wonderfully opened. What once 
 seemed to him dark and mysterious now 
 stands out clear and well defined in the liijht 
 of Truth. Spiritual things put on a form more 
 and more real and tangible; the spiritual world 
 becomes a real world to look forward to ; spir- 
 itual motives become strong enough to assert 
 themselves over against what is merely natural 
 and animal. He realizes that Religion is 
 something more than a mere name and form ; 
 that the life of the Church is more than 
 mere ceremony or mere intellectual parti- 
 sanship. In a word, the eye of the inner, the 
 heavenly man, blind from its birth, is enabled 
 to see ! 
 
 Who has wrought this wondrous change, 
 and how has it been wrought ? What answer 
 can be given other than that of the man who 
 was cured? that He that is called Jesus has 
 
 F* 
 
130 THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT; OR, 
 
 anointed his eyes and said, Go wash in the pool 
 of Siloam ; and that he went out and washed 
 and received sight. In other words, what 
 account can be given of this change in man 
 from being merely natural and selfish to being 
 in some degree regenerate, than that having 
 learned in his earliest life that Jesus Christ is 
 God, and that whatever He has commanded 
 us in the Holy Bible is to be obeyed, and what- 
 ever He has forbidden is to be shunned, this 
 man has made this Divine Word the rule and 
 standard by which to determine all questions 
 of right and wrong, all things of faith and 
 conscience? It is grown to be so habitual as 
 hardly to be thought of as any self-imposed 
 law or discipline. The instructions from the 
 Word received at church and elsewhere form 
 a part of his mental sustenance, and give 
 continued renewal of spiritual purpose and 
 strength. What is wrong is easily detected ; 
 evils in his life become more and more dis- 
 tinctly seen to be evils, and more and more 
 
CHARACTER OF CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE. 131 
 
 hateful to his purer mind. The fallacies of 
 natural sense and reason discover themselves 
 one by one, and the whole old fabric of foolish 
 doubts and vain questionings totters and falls 
 before the strong, steady rays of the Divine 
 Truth. 
 
 Unseen and unfelt the hand of the Lord has 
 passed over the eye of his soul, and left there 
 the precious ointment. Unawares he has gone 
 and washed in the pool of Siloam, and is come 
 again, seeing. 
 
 This is what the Christian religion is doing 
 for all who are willing to pursue this plain, 
 even way of faithfully doing so much of the 
 Divine Truth as is revealed to their knowl- 
 edge. Such is the power of the Word of God 
 sincerely believed and faithfully practiced in 
 our daily life. Its power is a secret, hidden 
 one; behind the simple literal precept which 
 we, in a trying moment, faithfully recall and 
 endeavor to perform, we see not what angel- 
 hosts are enrao-ed } n our behalf. But such is 
 
132 THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT; OR, 
 
 the communication between heaven and earth 
 by means of the Word in its literal sense, that 
 every effort on the part of man to obey this 
 Word must be accompanied by spiritual power 
 from above, which is in its origin none other 
 than Divine, — a power which is not that of the 
 whole heaven of angels only, but which is the 
 power of Almighty God. 
 
 And what is here especially to be observed 
 is the secret manner in which this power works 
 in us, curing our minds of their blindness, and 
 so enabling us to see what we could not see 
 before. 
 
 We are taught that the Holy Spirit exerts 
 its power in the inmost part of our souls. How 
 it operates there is unknown to us; it is un- 
 known to the angels ; it is known only to the 
 Lord. We see its effects in the life of a regen- 
 erate man ; the process itself is hidden from all 
 human knowledge. Like the man before us, 
 we can- tell what we have done on our part ; 
 but how this has effected the result we know 
 
CHARACTER OF CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE. 133 
 
 not. To the question, How opened He thine 
 eyes? the man replied, That the Lord anointed 
 him, and that he went to the pool and washed, 
 and came seeing. He could not tell how clay 
 from the ground put upon the eyes, and how 
 washing in the pool, gave him sight, nor could 
 we explain it, nor can any human wisdom. 
 And so it is with us. We know that our Lord 
 Jesus Christ has given us his Word, and told 
 us to obey it ; we know that in obeying this 
 Holy Word of God we come to have a different 
 mind from what we had before ; we come to 
 see and believe spiritual things of which, be- 
 fore, we were ignorant. How our external 
 conduct, how our resisting of temptations, has 
 brought this new heavenly light to our minds 
 we cannot tell. We have in some degree 
 cleansed our life of evil, and a new and better 
 life has been born within us. We have gone, 
 in obedience to the Divine command, to the 
 great pool of Siloam, even the Word of God, 
 and there have washed, and have come seeing! 
 
 12 
 
134 THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT; OR, 
 
 This is all we know, and all the account we 
 can give of the process. 
 
 And this much we do know. We see men 
 made better, made nobler and spiritually wiser 
 by leading a religious life according to the 
 commandments given in the Word of God. Let 
 unbelievers, let all those who make other 
 schemes for the world's enlightenment and re- 
 formation, boast as they may ; let them deny 
 God's Word and church and religion ; yea, let 
 them slander it if they will; let them profane 
 the holy name of our Lord ; let them call our 
 Christian religion an idle superstition ; let them 
 declare the Holy Bible to be a fiction and a 
 fable ; we can only reply with the man whose 
 sight was given him, " One thing I know, that, 
 whereas I was blind, now I see !" 
 
 The infinite wisdom of God is beyond our 
 searching out. It is enough to know what it 
 actually effects in our lives. The Christian life 
 bears its own evidence, for him who has begun 
 to live it, of its Divine Origin and Source. In 
 
CHARA CTER OF CHRISTIAN E VIBENCE. 1 3 5 
 
 looking for the true God and Messiah, and for 
 a saving religion, we need regard only the tes- 
 timony to which our Lord referred John when 
 he sent inquiries if it were He that should 
 come, or should he look for another, namely, 
 the testimony of that which we do see and 
 hear, "The blind receive their sight." 
 
 Let him who has faithfully tried to keep 
 God's Word in his daily life ; to leave off evil 
 practices; to shun all unkindness, injustice, im- 
 purity, and lying, in his daily intercourse with 
 his neighbor and in the secret thoughts and 
 intentions of the heart ; who has been careful 
 to think and speak of God and his Word and 
 all Divine things reverently ; who has read the 
 Bible in the intention of making it the rule of 
 his life ; who has made it a point to keep holy 
 the Sabbath-day, and to use every means at 
 his command to spend it religiously, and in a 
 way most profitable to his soul ; who has been 
 willing in all things to sacrifice worldly for 
 spiritual motives, and the things of the body 
 
136 THE BLIND RESTORED TO SIGHT. 
 
 for the things of the spirit, — let such an one 
 look back over the past years of his life, and 
 see out of what darkness he has come ! Let 
 him reflect on the many things that once 
 seemed right and harmless, and that now re- 
 veal the deadly poison that lay in them ! Let 
 him compare his aims and his motives of life 
 with those which once impelled him, — and he 
 will know by his own living experience that 
 whereas he was once blind, now he sees. And 
 he will not long remain ignorant of the Power 
 which has wrought this mysterious change in 
 him. He will know it to be a Divine power, 
 clothed in a Divine Word, and exerted through 
 a true and Divine religion ; and in Jesus Christ, 
 who is Himself the Word incarnate and the 
 Head and Author of that religion, he will re- 
 cognize with joy his true and only God and 
 Lord, in whom dwelleth bodily all the fullness 
 of the Deity, who is both God and Man, the 
 first and the last, who is and who was and 
 who is to come, the Almighty. 
 
(The Qttutn glome; or, fmlmduat $e£i>ott.$»bUH}) ftefore 
 
 And every man went unto his own house, — St. John vii. 53. 
 
 WHEN our Lord was on earth few people 
 there were who knew Him and received 
 Him in his true Divine character, as God man- 
 ifest in the flesh and descended to earth for the 
 salvation of the human race. 
 
 There were frequent questionings and dis- 
 putings about Him, his origin, his mission, and 
 his teachings. Some thought Him to be a 
 prophet sent of God ; some thought Him to 
 be the Messiah, the Anointed One, come to 
 deliver the people of God. Others disputed 
 this, because they supposed that He had come 
 from Galilee, and the Scriptures declare that 
 the Messiah must come from Bethlehem ; not 
 
 12* 137 
 
138 THE RETURN HOME; OR, 
 
 knowing that in Bethlehem Jesus had indeed 
 been born. And so " there was a division 
 among the people because of Him, and some 
 would have taken Him, but no man laid hands 
 on Him." And on one occasion, when the 
 chief priests were contending that Jesus, hav- 
 ing come from Galilee, could be no true prophet, 
 and ought to be given up to the law, while the 
 officers, on the other hand, declared that the 
 law could judge no man until it had at least 
 heard him,- — the dispute being ended, we read 
 that " every man went unto his own house." 
 
 A little statement, seemingly very common- 
 place and unimportant. Yes ! " And every 
 man went unto his own house." 
 
 Is not this true to-day of those who hear of 
 the Lord Jesus, who witness the various opin- 
 ions and doctrines held by man concerning 
 Him ? who hear his own holy Words as they 
 have come down to us in the gospel, and who 
 must in their own minds decide whether they 
 will henceforth be followers of the Lord Jesus, 
 
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. 1 39 
 
 or join with those who persecute and deny Him ? 
 " And every man went unto his own house." 
 
 Neither then, nor now, does the Lord com- 
 pel any man to believe in Him and worship 
 Him. We are all in freedom as to what we 
 will think and do concerning Him who was 
 born in humility in our flesh to become the 
 Saviour of the world. Once three disciples, 
 Peter, James, and John, saw the Lord trans- 
 figured in his Divine Glory ; they saw T Him as 
 He appears in heaven ; as the angels there 
 see Him; his face shining as the sun, his gar- 
 ment white as the light. It was God, and not 
 man they saw there, and they hid their faces 
 before the splendor of that august and holy 
 Presence ! But not so did these men see the 
 Lord, who disputed about Him, and questioned 
 -whether to follow Him or deliver Him up to 
 the law. The Lord might have summoned 
 about Him legions of angels to protect Him 
 from their violence or to awe them with his 
 Divine Majesty. But He had no interest in 
 
140 THE RETURN HOME; OR, 
 
 having men to follow Him and worship Him 
 as Divine, except as they did so willingly, from 
 the heart. Gladly, indeed, would He have men 
 give up all and follow Him ; but they could 
 only of their own will give up their selfish 
 lusts, their earthly idols. The Lord would not 
 take anything from them by violence. The 
 Lord would have a man to compel himself; 
 the Lord does not compel. And to compel 
 one's self is an act of the highest freedom. It 
 is an act of the will ; it is a deciding which we 
 will follow and obey, the Lord or the devil. 
 
 This is a decision which no one else makes 
 for us ; each one of us must make this decision 
 for himself, and in his own heart. The will of 
 man, the affections, and the persuasions of his 
 heart, is his spiritual house. It is the house in 
 which he abides as to his motives, his purposes, 
 his desires, in the conduct of his daily life. 
 Here in this spiritual house of the will every 
 man decides whether or not Jesus is his God 
 and Saviour. He has heard what the Church 
 
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. 141 
 
 says of Him, what the high-priest and the 
 Pharisees dispute concerning Him, and now 
 it is for him to decide, not from any outward 
 compulsion, from no temporary excitement of 
 the feelings, from no sudden fears, from no 
 terrifying threats, but in the still privacy of 
 his own heart, in the turning of his own affec- 
 tions to the Lord or to the world, toward 
 heaven or toward hell, and in the formation 
 of a permanent principle of life, good or evil, 
 he is to decide whether he is for or against the 
 Lord. It is a question that concerns himself 
 and not another. It is a question which he and 
 no other can decide. It is a question of his 
 own inward life, — of that inner heart which 
 God sees and reads, but w r hich men know 
 little of. It is a question of what is most inti- 
 mate, most private, most real, most essentially 
 his own. 
 
 " Am I a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ ?" 
 
 Books, learning, disputes, reasonings, 
 
 preachings are by. The man is returned into 
 
142 THE RETURN HOME ; OR, 
 
 his own heart, his soul's house. What witness 
 does his life there, as known to none but him- 
 self and God, bear concerning his acknowl- 
 edgment or rejection of Jesus the Saviour, 
 the True God and Eternal Life ? 
 
 " And every man went unto his own house. ,, 
 When we have been in church and heard 
 the Lord's Word read and have been in- 
 structed from his holy doctrine concerning 
 our religious duties, our duties to God and to 
 our neighbor, then it is as true of us spirit- 
 ually as literally, that " every man goes unto 
 his own house." We go to our homes one 
 one way, another another, each to his own 
 peculiar station, place, calling, and circum- 
 stances in life. No one person's home is just 
 like that of another. Our homes are the 
 nearest things to our hearts, and, as a general 
 rule, they best portray our hearts. The out- 
 ward visible home corresponds to the inward 
 invisible home of the will. Not that the things 
 themselves which a man has about him, the 
 
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. 1 43 
 
 creations of his wealth, the work of the archi- 
 tect or the upholsterer, always bespeak the 
 heart, the kind of home within. Many a gor- 
 geous, most beautiful, and cheerful palace 
 shelters a man or woman whose soul's house 
 is gloomier than a dungeon and foul with the 
 damps of caverns ; and as truly are there 
 beneath humble roofs and amid plain walls 
 many fair and heavenly mansions growing 
 up in loving, Christian souls, bright with the 
 sunshine of heaven, and adorned as with all 
 beautiful and precious stones. In the spiritual 
 world, indeed, in heaven and in hell, a man's 
 house is always the picture of his heart and 
 his inward life ; for there the ruling love of a 
 man shapes the outer world into conformity 
 with itself. Here on earth it is not wholly so, 
 although the principle holds true here, in some 
 degree. For it is an accepted maxim that four 
 walls do not make a home. That is, a man's 
 home, or his " own house," consists not in the 
 natural things he may chance to have accu- 
 
144 THE RETURN HOME; OR, 
 
 mulated about him, the rich in abundance, the 
 poor in scanty supply, but rather in the gen- 
 eral sphere, the order, the sentiment, the kind 
 of principle, in a word, that pervades everything 
 in the house, that makes everything to be in 
 some way expressive of the inward character 
 and disposition of the inmates. How different 
 does the same house look when another occu- 
 pant has moved into it ! We carry our homes 
 with us; for we have the real soul's house, the 
 spiritual house, w r ithin us, and this is what 
 shapes to itself somehow the house we inhabit 
 and makes it to become home to us. Now, 
 what I would say is, that when, after the 
 church service is over, we go " every man to his 
 own house/' we do really go to our own homes 
 spiritually as well as literally. For in going- 
 back into the house we inhabit, into the family, 
 into all the domestic and social relations which 
 belong to us there, we go back into our or- 
 dinary inward state of life ; we put on, so to 
 speak, our every-day clothes; we are ourselves, 
 
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. 1 45 
 
 thinking, speaking, and willing in freedom, 
 out of the spontaneous impulses of the heart. 
 The holy state of worship which the external 
 rites of the Church has brought upon us is 
 now removed ; we enter into our ordinary 
 familiar moods and ways. And here are we 
 to put to use what we have heard and learned 
 in church concerning the Lord and our spir- 
 itual duties. Here if anywhere are we to de- 
 termine whether or not we will lead the Chris- 
 tian life ; whether we will try to put to practice 
 the holy lessons we have learned, and so to 
 take up our cross and follow the Lord in the 
 regeneration. 
 
 It is the reverse of this in the judgments 
 mostly sought for in the world. Men are more 
 concerned about the opinion which is formed 
 from their life out-of-doors than about what 
 men think of their ways of living in the privacy 
 of their homes and families. Respectability, not 
 to say honesty, purity, and gentle manners, are 
 often cultivated with great care for the opin- 
 
146 THE RETURN HOME; OR, 
 
 ion of men in public and social life, and quite 
 forgotten when men have returned to their own 
 homes. This, indeed, should not be so, and 
 that it is so shows how artificial and false our 
 life is when shaped after the common worldly 
 pattern. We need a higher standard to live by 
 than " the way that other people do." God gives 
 us the higher, better pattern in his Holy Word. 
 It is here that we are taught to make clean the 
 inside as well as the outside of the platter, and 
 to act always in the holy fear of Him who seeth 
 in secret. 
 
 Here it is most commonly about a man's 
 public life and conduct, — his manners on the 
 street, or in the office, or in the public worship 
 or in the social assembly, — that we hear opinions 
 expressed, " Such an one is a gentleman ; is so 
 generous; so pure in spirit and thought, so con- 
 siderate, so truthful, so unselfish !" Would the 
 judgment be always the same were the door 
 opened into that man's own house ? Is it there 
 under his own roof, and with those who are his 
 
IXDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. 147 
 
 neighbors in the nearest and most important 
 sense, that the man is just, true, gentle, and 
 kind ? 
 
 In the other world to which we are going 
 this will, I say, all be reversed. Then it will 
 be asked not alone what a man has spoken on 
 the house-tops, but what he has whispered in 
 the ear and in closets ; not what a man's pub- 
 lic life, but what a man's private life, has been ; 
 not what he did or said in the company of the 
 man whose good opinion he courted, but what 
 he did when he had " returned to his own house." 
 
 Unless, when we so have returned each one 
 unto his own house, we there remember what we 
 have heard, unless we try to practice the laws 
 of heavenly life there amid the common duties 
 and trials which make up our real week-day 
 life, we are far from being the followers of the 
 Lord. We are like those of whom the Lord 
 says, " This people honor me with their lips 
 but their hearts are far from me." Ah, what a 
 solemn thought it is, that God has so ordained 
 
148 THE RETURN HOME; OR, 
 
 the way of our regeneration that every man, 
 on hearing the Word of Life, " shall go unto 
 his own house !" that with every man lies the 
 responsibility of saving or destroying his soul, 
 and that this issue lies in the man's own private 
 life, the life of his soul's home, the life of his 
 ruling affections and principles of conduct ! It 
 is not enough that we be pious and zealous 
 Christians in the house of God. The question 
 is, What are we when " every man has gone 
 unto his own house" ? Is it possible that the 
 soul is made fit for heaven at once because 
 smitten with the terrors of hell as depicted by a 
 zealous preacher, or warmed by the momentary 
 enthusiasm of a multitude ? Shall we think that 
 the sensuous excitement produced by eloquent 
 oratory or music, or any ecstasy of the mind 
 under the influence of fear or persuasion or 
 personal magnetism, is really a changing of 
 the heart ? the making over of the old life with 
 its familiar besetting sins into a pure, heavenly, 
 saintly life in an instant of time ? 
 
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY, 149 
 
 Ah ! how is it when, after such a season of 
 strained emotion and unnatural excitement, 
 "every man has gone unto his own house"? 
 How is it when the self-deluded convert, who 
 shouted aloud the tidings of his salvation in the 
 ears of the multitude the night before, wakes 
 up in the morning to find himself no more in 
 the "house of prayer," but in the house of his 
 own old lusts and passions, his old w r orldly 
 loves, his selfish, earthly aims ; when he finds 
 his heart and its affections the same as before, 
 the same old temptations returning to him with 
 renewed force, the same cunning plea of the 
 devil in his ear, the same voice of flattery and 
 sinful pleasure and unholy gain whispering to 
 him from the world ? Then, indeed, he knows 
 that " every man has returned unto his own 
 house." 
 
 Happy if, discovering his delusion, and seeing 
 then the awful distinction between a temporary 
 pious emotion and the religion of everyday- 
 life, — the difference between acknowledging 
 
 13* 
 
150 THE RETURN HOME; OR, 
 
 the Lord and shouting his praises in the con- 
 gregation and inwardly worshiping and obeying 
 Him at home in his soul's own house, — happy 
 if he be not discouraged! Happy if the evil 
 spirit, seeking rest and finding none, return not 
 into him with sevenfold power, and make the 
 last state of that man to be worse than the first ! 
 
 We would not hinder any sincere effort or 
 means of rousing men to a sense of the perils 
 of an evil, ungodly life, — of lifting their thoughts 
 to heaven and to God ; but we would that men 
 were taught that the test of conversion is not 
 in the momentary, transient emotions of the 
 hour of prayer, but in the state of life which is 
 entered upon when " every man has gone unto 
 his own house." 
 
 Some there are — alas, too many ! — who hear 
 sermons in church, and then go carrying its 
 application, not every man to his own house, 
 but to the house of his neighbor, — hearing for 
 others, not themselves, and letting the stern 
 judgments of the truth fall on the evils they 
 
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. 151 
 
 detect in others, rather than on the foes of 
 their own household. Let every man, when the 
 Lord has given him light, carry that light with 
 him unto his own house; to cast thus the beam 
 out of his own eye before he seeketh to cast 
 the mote out of his brother's eye. 
 
 There draweth near to all of us the day and 
 the hour when the Lord shall call us away from 
 these temporary homes of earth and the nat- 
 ural body, and when in the resurrection and 
 the judgment every man shall go unto his own 
 house. Here in the world we have heard the 
 Word of God ; we have learned of the Lord 
 our Saviour; we have been taught those Di- 
 vine commandments which are the way of 
 eternal life. Here it is in our power, by prayer, 
 by looking to the Lord, by shunning our evils 
 as sins, by faithfully fulfilling our duties, to ac- 
 quire, through the Lord's ever-present help, a 
 regenerated will, a heart impelled by heavenly 
 motives and fit for the enjoyment of heavenly 
 delights. Such a regenerated will is the soul's 
 
152 THE RETURN HOME. 
 
 home, which the good man carries with him 
 into the other world ; it is his mansion not 
 made with hands, eternal in the heavens. In 
 our Father's house, which is in heaven, are 
 many such mansions ; and may it be our en- 
 deavor here to be building for ourselves, by 
 the practice of a holy Christian life, such spir- 
 itual homes ! that it may be into these heavenly 
 mansions that we may, by the Divine mercy, 
 enter, in that day when " every man shall go 
 unto his own house/' 
 
13:. 
 
 (the %VoxA of pfe; nv f §tow t\\t %ox& nnmmuriate 
 £pi*ittt«t gift to |ttan. 
 
 7>^ words that I speak* unto you, they are spirit, and they 
 are life. — St. John vi. 63. 
 
 OUR Lord, in speaking to his disciples about 
 the bread of heaven, says, " Verily, I say 
 unto you, He that believeth on me hath ever- 
 lasting life. I am that bread of life. Your 
 fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and 
 are dead. This is the bread which cometh 
 down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, 
 and not die. I am the living bread which came 
 down from heaven : if any man eat of this 
 bread, he shall live forever: and the bread 
 that I will give is my flesh, which I will give 
 for the life of the world.'' 
 
 g* 153 
 
154 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 Here our Lord most plainly tells us that 
 there is such a thing as heavenly bread,' — 
 nourishment given to the souls of men, — which 
 shall be to them eternal life, in like manner 
 as food given to the body sustains the natural 
 life. He says, moreover, that He Himself 
 is that bread, that He is that bread of life, come 
 down from heaven to give "Himself to men for 
 the life of the world ; and, finally, to declare 
 this truth in its most forcible and unmistakable 
 form, He says, " The bread that I will give is 
 my flesh, which I will give for the life of the 
 world." " For my flesh is meat indeed, and 
 my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my 
 flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, 
 and I in him. He hath eternal life, and I will 
 raise him up at the last day." 
 
 It is not surprising, then, that the Jews who 
 heard our Lord say this, understanding his 
 words only in a natural sense, exclaimed, in 
 wonder, " How can this man give us his flesh 
 to eat?" Nor even that the disciples, when 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. 1 55 
 
 they had heard this, said, " This is an hard 
 saying; who can hear it?" 
 
 Yes, it is an hard saying, if the Lord's words 
 are like human words, having only a finite 
 natural meaning. But not such are the words 
 which God speaks. And Jesus, when He knew 
 that his hearers were disturbed by this saying, 
 — too hard for them to comprehend, — explains 
 Himself in these simple and memorable 
 words : " It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the 
 flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak 
 unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. ,, 
 
 It is not, then, of natural flesh and blood 
 that He has been speaking. Natural flesh or 
 bodily food does not give life to the soul. 
 The bread of heaven, the flesh and blood of 
 the Lord Jesus, must be something spiritual if 
 it is to quicken, to give eternal life, soul-life, to 
 men. It must be the flesh and the blood of his 
 Divine, and not of his natural, earthly body 
 that Ke is speaking when He says, " He that 
 eateth me, he shall live by me !" 
 
156 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 The flesh of the Lord's Divine Body is the 
 Good of his Divine Love : the blood of his 
 Divine Body is the Truth of his Divine Wis- 
 dom, — -Good and Truth from the Lord re- 
 ceived into the soul are eternal life in man. 
 The man who lives by the Lord, in receiving 
 and appropriating in his soul and in his spirit- 
 ual life the heavenly bread of Divine Good 
 and Divine Truth, he has in him even now the 
 everlasting life, and in this life he shall be 
 raised up at the last day. This is what it is 
 to dwell in the Lord and to have the Lord 
 dwell in us. For this is conjunction of our 
 life with the Lord. This bread of heaven — 
 the good of love communicated to our affec- 
 tions, the good of wisdom communicated to 
 our understanding from the Lord's Divine 
 Humanity — this is the Spirit that quickeneth, 
 that giveth immortal life. 
 
 But how does the Lord actually give us this 
 spiritual food from Himself? How did He give 
 it then ? How does He give it now ? 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. 1 57 
 
 The words above quoted answer our ques- 
 tion. The Lord has said that men receive 
 their soul's life from Him; and He has said that 
 this life is not got by eating natural food, such 
 as the " fathers did eat in the wilderness and 
 are dead/' but that it is got by the Spirit ; for 
 the Spirit and not natural flesh is what gives life. 
 And now He tells us how He gives us this Spirit 
 and Life : "The words that I have spoken unto 
 you, they are Spirit and they are Life." 
 
 The Lord's w r ords themselves Spirit and 
 Life ! Here, then, is where men shall feed 
 their souls ; here is where men shall eat and 
 drink spiritually of the Divine Body of the 
 Lord. Here in the Word of God, in the 
 words which the Lord speaks to men, which 
 words are verily Spirit and Life, — here men 
 shall verily find, and are enabled to take into 
 their actual daily life, the Divine Good of Love, 
 which is the Lord's flesh, and the Divine Truth 
 of Wisdom, which is the Lord's blood. Here 
 in the Holy Scriptures is the bread of heaven, 
 
 14 
 
158 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 the flesh and blood of the Lord's Divine Hu- 
 manity given from heaven, yea, from God Him- 
 self, for the life of the whole world. He that, 
 from the Word of God, eateth of this bread, 
 shall live forever, and God will raise him up at 
 the last day. For the Divine Good imparted 
 to men through the written Word of God is 
 meat indeed, and the Divine Truth here im- 
 parted to men is drink indeed. Directly from 
 this Word, from reading, loving, and obeying 
 it themselves, or indirectly through the teach- 
 ing and influence of others, all men to-day 
 have whatever they have of spiritual life. 
 
 For the Word is God's revelation of Him- 
 self to men ; through the Word God gives 
 Himself to men ; and in the Word men must 
 eat and drink of the only food that can impart 
 eternal life to the soul. By the Word we 
 mean that Word which God has given us in 
 the Holy Scriptures ; we mean the Word not 
 only in its language, but in its institutions, its 
 ordinances, and especially in the holy Sacra- 
 
77/ /■; Word of life. 159 
 
 ments. The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper 
 is the Word enacted, — uttered in actions, and 
 not in speech or thoughts merely. So in Bap- 
 tism, and in all the ordinances of Christian 
 worship, which are enactments of the Word, or 
 the literal Word carried into act. These are 
 still the Word, and as such have the Spirit and 
 the Life of the Word in them. When we read 
 in the Scriptures the Lord's Prayer, we receive 
 the Word in our thoughts ; when we pray in 
 these words, the Word becomes more than a 
 thought in our minds, — it becomes a form, an 
 act. When we read of the Lord's institution 
 of the Holy Supper, the Word is then in any 
 mind a thought. When we actually go forward 
 and present ourselves at the Lord's table and 
 take the bread and the wine bodily, and thus do 
 this holy rite of worship in remembrance of 
 Him, and not merely read of it and think of it, 
 the Word of God is thereby uttered or ex- 
 pressed in the most powerful manner possible. 
 But, besides uttering or enacting the Word, 
 
160 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 translating it from speech to actions, as is done 
 in all that may be comprehended under the 
 term of preaching the gospel, which term in- 
 cludes all the external ordinances of worship, — 
 besides thus declaring the Word of God, we 
 are also commanded by the Lord to do it. 
 11 Blessed are they who hear the Word of God 
 and do it." The doing the Word is something 
 quite different from performing its Divine or- 
 dinances. When we keep the; Divine Com- 
 mandments in our daily life, we do the Word 
 of God, — we make it a principle of our life. 
 The Word thus becomes a thing of life with 
 us, not a momentary ceremony or act of ex- 
 ternal worship. Doing God's Word in the 
 daily life is actual religion ; performing the 
 ordinances of Divine worship as instituted in 
 the Word is the means to this religion. Read- 
 ing the Word is not doing it, and yet we must 
 read the Word in order to do it. And the holy 
 Sacraments, preaching, and other Divine ordi- 
 nances to be practiced by men, are reading 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. l6l 
 
 the Word in actions, rather than in silent con- 
 templation of the printed page. But, never- 
 theless, the Sacraments and all the rites of 
 worship which instruct, influence, and help men 
 in leading the religious life, these remain just 
 as truly the Word of the Lord, since they are 
 founded or instituted in the Word, and as 
 such they are likewise the means of spiritual 
 nourishment to the soul, for they are Spirit and 
 they are Life. And from the Word in its writ- 
 ten volume, or in the enactment of its sacred 
 rites of worship, comes directly or indirectly 
 all the spiritual sustenance which men in this 
 world receive, and by which they can be re- 
 generated and brought into the heavenly life. 
 
 There are indeed many people in Christian 
 lands who do not see the Word of God nor 
 hear it from year's end to year's end, who yet 
 live under its sanctifying influences as felt in 
 the moral and religious sense of society about 
 them. It may be only in the sound of the 
 church-bell, or the sight of the church-spire, 
 
 14* 
 
1 62 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 or the simple outline of the cross surmount- 
 ing a church-gate or pinnacle, or the sacred 
 picture on the wall or in the window, or the 
 sight of a child praying, or the voice of a 
 street-preacher, or the taking of an oath on 
 the Holy Bible in the civil court; who can tell 
 all the thousand voices by which the Word of 
 God in a Christian land speaks to men in all 
 conditions of life, and awakens in their minds 
 that " thought of God" which is the first thing 
 that opens heaven to their souls ? 
 
 The Words of the Lord are Spirit and Life. 
 Like the atmosphere which we cannot see, but 
 which is full of mighty agencies for producing 
 physical effects, so the Word of God in its 
 spiritual outgoings in a Christian community 
 pervades everything, — it influences opinion, 
 feeling, behavior, — and makes itself felt by 
 those who rarely or never think definitely of 
 its existence. So little do men know of the 
 Spirit of God's Word, whence it cometh and 
 whither it goeth, that learned men, living in 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. 1 63 
 
 the light of Divine Truth, write treatises on 
 immortality, God, the soul, and spiritual life, — 
 about which they would know nothing at all 
 except for a primitive Revelation from God, — 
 and yet declare that the light is all their own, 
 human light, that of merely human reason 
 and intelligence, and that whatever of God is 
 known at all has been found out by their rea- 
 sonings, and not by Divine communication ! 
 Spiritual Light and Life all comes from God 
 alone to men, just as all natural light and life 
 comes from the sun of our universe, and it is 
 the Word of God which is Truth Divine, or 
 God Himself in the Word which gives spiritual 
 light to the world. God is the Light of the 
 world. And the Spirit of life goes out from 
 his Word, like light from the sun, through the 
 social and moral atmosphere of society. But 
 for this there would be no such thing among- 
 men as a sense of justice, of mercy, of right, 
 of duty, of conscience, of faith, or the hope of 
 immortality. 
 
1 64 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 Again, there are whole nations, the heathen 
 nations, as they are called, who have not the 
 written Word, and who yet have religion, who 
 worship a Deity, who have a Divine law of 
 right and wrong. Whence do they have these 
 ideas of the Divine, the good, and the true ? 
 From themselves, — their own thinking out? 
 From their perverted religion of mythology 
 and idolatry ? No ! So far as they have a 
 single ray of Divine Truth, so far as they have 
 the Truth at all, they have it from the Word of 
 God. And how do these heathen nations have 
 the light of the Word ? How can they, too, 
 live by its Spirit and its Life, and so inherit 
 the life eternal ? They have the Spirit and 
 Life of the Word in two ways. 
 
 First, outwardly ; by tradition, which has 
 preserved in their religions something of the 
 primitive Word or revelation which God made 
 to man in his Golden Age of innocence, sym- 
 bolically described by the Garden of Eden, 
 and referred to in the sacred traditions of all 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. 1 65 
 
 nations that have a literature and a history, — 
 that holy celestial Church on earth wherein God 
 " talked with man." The Truth then given to 
 mankind has still been preserved, in broken 
 fragments, it may be, but still in some measure, 
 even among the heathen, the idolatrous. It is 
 from this gleam of light from the primitive 
 Word that they know that there is a Deity, and 
 that there is a law of right and wrong. They 
 have also, some of them, the light of the Word 
 through their fellowship with those Christian 
 nations which have the written Word, through 
 their outward commercial relations, and their 
 knowledge of the world's history. 
 
 But there is, secondly, an inward way by 
 which the Spirit and Life of the Word of God 
 reaches and quickens these heathen nations. 
 It is through the spiritual communion of earth 
 with heaven, of human beings here with good 
 spirits and angels there. The Word which 
 we have here on earth in the letter exists with 
 the angels in heaven in Spirit and in Life, and 
 
1 66 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 its spiritual meat and drink is given every- 
 where to the souls of men by the ministries of 
 angels, and by direct inflowing from the Lord, 
 the Divine Word Himself, according to the 
 various capacities of men to receive it and live 
 by it. The Spirit of the Word of God is like 
 the sunshine, which embraces the whole earth 
 in its warm, life-giving rays. As Divine Life 
 flows down and becomes our natural life 
 through the visible sun of our universe, so the 
 Divine Word flows spiritually down to en- 
 lighten the whole world through our visible 
 and literal written Bible. As the whole body 
 lives from the blood sent pulsating to every 
 minutest fibre from the central heart and lungs, 
 so the whole race of man on earth lives spirit- 
 ually from the Spirit and Life emanating from 
 the Lord's written Word on earth, and from 
 the Church where it is known, received, and 
 applied to the life. We may not, indeed, un- 
 derstand how this is accomplished, but it is 
 enough to know that it is God's wisdom and 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. 1 67 
 
 God's love that accomplishes it, and " his ways 
 are past finding out." The Words that God 
 has spoken to us are Spirit and Life, — they are 
 the soul's meat and drink. Spirit and Life are 
 not confined to space or subject to material, 
 visible agencies. We hear their sound of 
 the Spirit in our written Word, but we know 
 not whence it cometh or whither it goeth. The 
 Spirit and Life of the Word are as wide and 
 as infinite as God. " Their sound is gone out 
 into all the earth, and their words to the end of 
 the world ! There is no speech nor language 
 where their voice is not heard '/" 
 
 There is one Word, one life-giving Spirit, 
 one Saviour, one God, for all the earth, all 
 people, all worlds. To us this life-giving Spirit 
 is given clothed in the literal sense of our Holy 
 Scriptures. It resides in it as the soul in the 
 body of man. But even with man his soul's 
 influence and life may extend where his body 
 is not, — through miles of space, through ages 
 of years ! How much more with the Divine, 
 
1 68 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 Infinite Spirit of Truth, which, while it is re- 
 vealed in the body of our written Word, yet 
 pervades all the heavens and the spiritual 
 world everywhere, and gives to every man the 
 spiritual sustenance his soul needs ! The 
 heathen nations, then, have the Word of God 
 outwardly by remains of revealed Truth from 
 the primitive Word handed down in their 
 sacred traditions, and inwardly by the all- 
 pervading, all-illuming Spirit of God, the sole 
 Light and Life of man. 
 
 But are there those in this day who, when 
 told that the Words of God are verily Spirit 
 and Life, and, therefore, that men must eat and 
 drink of the Divine Good and Truth given to 
 us men in the written volume of the Holy 
 Bible if they will have eternal life, — are there 
 those who will exclaim, with the Jews of old, 
 " How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" 
 How can this printed book give immortal food 
 to the souls of men? and who murmur with 
 the disciples that " this is an hard saying" ? 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. 1 69 
 
 Then it is because they know and believe not 
 the Divinity of this Son of man. They know 
 not that the Bible is Divine, that it is full of 
 Divine Life, that it is the great medium by 
 which heaven and earth, man and the Lord, 
 may come into spiritual union, and by which 
 the Lord may give us the flesh of his own 
 Divine Humanity to eat. They think the Holy 
 Bible is like any other book, merely a human 
 composition, containing nothing deeper than 
 what we see on the surface of the letter, con- 
 taining only human, finite ideas and narrations 
 that relate to the earth and natural visible 
 things. Like the Jews, who regarded Jesus 
 as only human like themselves, they exclaim, 
 "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" 
 But if they knew that it is not man but God 
 that dwells in the written Word, — God the 
 Life-Giver, God the mighty Redeemer, God 
 who, by his Word, created the heavens and 
 the earth, and who now, by his Word, creates 
 anew or regenerates the soul of man, — would 
 h 15 
 
170 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 they then doubt that these spoken Words of 
 God are verily Spirit and Life, and that in 
 them the soul finds its meat and drink unto 
 life everlasting? 
 
 God dwells in the Word which He has given 
 to us men in human language, just as He 
 dwells in the visible natural creation He has 
 made. Trees and flowers, and sun and stars, 
 are not God ; they live only from Him, and 
 are sustained every moment only by his in- 
 flowing Spirit. " Thou sendest forth thy SpiiHt; 
 they are created, and thou renew est t lie face of the 
 whole earth!' So the Bible, as a volume of 
 paper and print, is not God; but the Truth, the 
 Spirit that is in it, its meaning, its moral and 
 spiritual power in the mind of man, this is Di- 
 vine, this is God ; for this is the Word that is 
 ever with God and is God. The words that we 
 utter are to our ears but sound, vibrations of 
 air ; but to the mind they are more than matter: 
 they are thought, thus spirit, and in this sense 
 ourselves. So in the higher Divine sense, God 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. I/I 
 
 through his Words, spoken not to our out- 
 ward hearing, but to our hearts, gives to us 
 of his infinite Spirit and Life. In his Word 
 He gives us of his flesh to eat. Should we 
 not indeed feed upon it with our souls, and 
 be thankful ? 
 
 We are very apt to fall short of the truth 
 in thinking- of the Word of God that it is 
 " Spirit and Life," because it has an internal 
 meaning" or spiritual sense ! This is, indeed, 
 true, but not the whole truth. The Word of 
 God not only means, when rightly interpreted, 
 spiritual things, but it is Spirit and Life ! It 
 is Spirit and Life to every one who devoutly 
 and affectionately reads it with a view to living 
 by it, whether he knows anything of the spirit- 
 ual sense or not. For by the Word, read 
 affectionately by man, the Lord and the angels 
 come into close union with him and with the 
 Church on earth ; and when the Lord is near 
 his Life-Giving Spirit is near, and flows in 
 hidden ways into the secret chambers of the 
 
\J2 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 soul, and springs up there in fountains of 
 everlasting life. 
 
 " The Words that I have spoken unto you, 
 are spirit and are life." "The Bread of God 
 is He that cometh down from heaven to give 
 life unto the world. I am that Bread of Life." 
 
 So closely does our Lord connect in his 
 teaching his own gifts of love and truth with 
 the gift of the Word which He has spoken. 
 He is the Bread of Life. His spoken words 
 are Life. To his Word, then, we must come 
 for our Bread of Life, for our soul's meat and 
 drink. 
 
 Let Christians remember this as a truth 
 most deserving of constant application in their 
 daily life. If we are seeking spiritual life, let 
 us seek it there where God gives us the Bread 
 of heaven, — the soul's true food, — namely, in 
 his spoken and written Word. Let us find 
 our soul's daily meat and drink in the devout 
 reading every day of some poi tion, even 
 though it be but a few verses, of this sacred 
 
THE WORD OF LIFE. 1 73 
 
 volume. Think not of the quantity to be read, 
 nor be anxious in selecting what to read ! 
 Think only of yourself, as needing in your soul 
 the Bread of Life, and of God, as present in 
 his Holy Word, ready to give to every one 
 that asketh. Little by little, as the body grows, 
 the spirit fed on heavenly food will grow like- 
 wise. We may not see the immediate good, 
 any great spiritual change in us on our com- 
 mencing thus religiously to read the Word of 
 God. But the Spirit of God worketh in secret 
 and in silence. If we have gone to God's 
 Word seeking Life, it will be given us, — given 
 us in such measure as our understanding can 
 admit its Truth and as our will can admit its 
 Good. There may be purgings and cleansings 
 necessary to remove the falsities of the evil 
 heart, and, close to the sinful dispositions, the 
 selfish desires of the natural life, the Word of 
 God may seem to fall cold, hard, and lifeless. 
 Be not deceived nor discouraged by this out- 
 ward appearance. Imitate not the folly of 
 
 15* 
 
174 THE WORD OF LIFE. 
 
 those who first deny that the Scriptures are 
 Divine, and then complain that they derive no 
 Divine light and comfort from their study ; 
 who ask only serpents and stones, and then 
 grumble because they have not fish and bread 
 given them ! See that your heart still desires 
 the Bread of heaven, and seeks it from the 
 Lord in his Word. To the son that asketh a 
 fish the heavenly Father will not give a serpent, 
 nor a stone to him that asketh Bread. 
 
5£- 
 
 £tot the ^iJnhtcou^ Irut gitmm railed; ot f t\\t (Ehttvch 
 not ixn gt^embttj of pevfectext |Ucn m& Women. 
 
 I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. — 
 
 St. Luke v. 32. 
 
 IT is recorded in the Holy Gospel that our 
 Lord once gave a great supper in his own 
 house, and there were many present who had 
 followed Him from the wayside and throughout 
 the country where He had been journeying ; 
 there were doubtless the fishermen whom He 
 had called from their nets, and many a one 
 from the great multitude who had resorted 
 unto Him at the seaside, and of those, too, 
 most likely, who surrounded his house at Ca- 
 pernaum in such numbers that they could not 
 bring a certain man sick of the palsy to Him 
 by the door, but were obliged to lift*up the 
 
 i75 
 
176 NOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 bed over the people's heads and lower it 
 down through the roof; and Levi we know 
 was there, whom He had just called from the 
 receipt of custom, and, not unlikely, many a 
 poor man and woman who had been blind and 
 now saw, or lame and now walked, or covered 
 with the loathsome leprosy and was now 
 clean and whole again ; and all these, we can 
 imagine, with mingled feelings of wonder and 
 joy stood by at that feast and had some little 
 consciousness within them of the real character 
 of Him who was in their midst. For there 
 were many there, says the account as we read 
 it in St. Mark's Gospel, and publicans and sin- 
 ners, and they sat with Jesus and his disciples. 
 
 Thus, " in his own house," our Lord did sit 
 at meat with publicans and sinners, and they 
 were many, and they followed Him. 
 
 There is more meaning, more stirring pa- 
 thos, in this little verse than in all the eulogies 
 on the Divine Compassion ever uttered by 
 human" lips. With our finite vision, our poor 
 
BUT SINNERS CALLED. 1 77 
 
 natural notions, we can derive but little Hgfht 
 from this sublime passage wherein is portrayed, 
 like a picture of the heavens and earth in 
 the retina of the eye, the entire story of our 
 Lord's Incarnation and Glorification. But this 
 little ray of light comes to us from the spir- 
 itual glory that burns beneath the letter, — that 
 the house in which our Lord dwells means the 
 doctrine which He believed and taught ; and 
 this doctrine is,' "Love one another as I have 
 loved you ;" and all who received this doctrine 
 and fed their souls upon it did really sit at 
 meat with Him in his house : and such were 
 his followers. Now, the righteous scribes and 
 Pharisees stood without or walked by, doubt- 
 less, avoiding all contact with such vulgar com- 
 pany, and while pretending a kind of respect 
 for the Lord, inquired of his disciples about 
 this supper : " How is it that He eateth and 
 drinketh with publicans and sinners ?" 
 
 O Pharisee, keep your clean robes intact ! 
 Venture not too near this plebeian throng ! 
 
178 NOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 Leave the humble house where the poor, the 
 lame, halt, blind, and leprous, only lately made 
 to know the common joys of life, — where the 
 abandoned outcast, the homeless, the hopeless 
 but of yesterday now sit at the feet of their 
 healer, their consoler, and ask not for lordlier 
 or more stately company than this poor motley 
 crowd, with Jesus in its midst! Go up to your 
 own high places, Pharisee and publican, and 
 think upon this new word which the Master 
 sends to you in answer to your inquiry, " I 
 came not to call the righteous, but sinners to 
 repentance" ! 
 
 And so let these words come home to Chris- 
 tian hearts, and with so much of their Divine 
 meaning as we shall be enabled to discover, 
 remembering- that in the sight of God no man 
 living is justified ; and taking care lest, vainly 
 numbering ourselves among the righteous, 
 we become deaf to that call to repentance 
 which it was for publicans and sinners alone to 
 hear. 
 
BUT SINNERS CALLED. 179 
 
 That was, indeed, a new word in those times, 
 " to call sinners to repentance." For the right- 
 eous every promise had been made, every offer 
 held out, every hope encouraged ; but to call 
 the sinner to repentance, this had not belonged 
 to the religious system of the Jews. And who 
 were these righteous? They were the Pharisees 
 and scribes, — those scrupulous observers of 
 the law ; those men well versed in the religious 
 books, to whom every minute rite and cere- 
 mony of the Jewish ritual was familiar ; those 
 who made long prayers and wore sad coun- 
 tenances and looked for the worldly prosperity, 
 the earthly re-establishment, of the Israelitish 
 kingdom. The heaven of the Pharisee, or, 
 rather, his conception of the kingdom of God 
 on earth, was not broad ; a petty community 
 of strict ritualists, externally supporting the 
 ancient observances of the Jewish Church, this 
 would suffice for the Messiah of the nations ; 
 the poor, the humble, the ignorant, and the 
 Gentiles, they were of little account in the 
 
180 NOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 Pharisee's reckoning. And yet, behold Jesus, 
 the Messiah, sitting at meat with publicans and 
 sinners ! 
 
 The publicans were a low and hated class of 
 the people, whose occupation was collecting the 
 taxes under their Roman masters ; and the 
 sinners, they were, doubtless, very much the 
 same class of beings as those persons nowa- 
 days who are spoken of by that name. At least, 
 the term did not include the Pharisee and the 
 scribe ; no more in our day does the name 
 sinner often fall upon the pious out-door Chris- 
 tian of respectable position. But, however this 
 may be, we know simply that while that "right- 
 eous" Pharisee walked by in scorn, our Lord 
 did sit at meat in his own house with publicans 
 and sinners. 
 
 Now, there w r as a deep and solemn meaning 
 in that reply of his to the Pharisee's inquiry, 
 " How is it that thy master eateth and drinketh 
 with publicans and sinners ?" " I am not come," 
 is the Divine response, " to call the righteous, 
 
BUT SINNERS CALLED. 181 
 
 but sinners to repentance." It is evident 
 enough that the Pharisee was not, indeed, 
 righteous ; but that lie is called so here because 
 he seemed so to himself. If there had been 
 true righteousness in the Jewish Church, as 
 represented by this its ruling class, then the 
 end of that Church had not come, it had 
 not been necessary for Christ, the Messiah, to 
 come at that time to save the world. But the 
 fact was far otherwise. The race of mankind 
 was perishing in evil, because the Church was 
 dead. All men were alike sinners ; all were 
 alike swept down under the tyrannous rule 
 of the prince of this world. 
 
 " None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth 
 for truth ; they trust in vanity and speak lies. 
 
 /'Judgment is turned away backward; jus- 
 tice standeth afar off; for truth is fallen in the 
 street, and equity cannot enter." 
 
 So describes the prophet the state of the 
 
 Church at that day, when the clean and dainty 
 
 Pharisee was to ask of the Saviour of. the 
 
 16 
 
1 82 NOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 world, "How is it that he eateth with publicans 
 and sinners?" Thus, we see that when our 
 Lord spoke of the righteous whom He came 
 not to call, although He referred to the self- 
 righteous Pharisee, yet He by no means would 
 teach that Pharisee, or those like him, that 
 he was not alike in need of repentance. 
 No ; the truth is, the Pharisee was not called 
 by the Saviour to repentance, simply because 
 he would not hear ; the wall of his vain 
 conceit, his foolishly-imagined righteousness, 
 which consisted, as he believed, in external 
 observance, while the heart was corrupt with 
 evil within, this kept every cry of warning, 
 every call to repentance, from his ear. When 
 he went to the temple to pray, he could 
 not fall down, smite upon his breast, and 
 say, "God be merciful to me a sinner;" but 
 rather he thanked God that he was not as 
 other men are, and set forth a fair account of 
 his fasting twice in the week, of his giving 
 tithes of all that he possessed, and so on 
 
BUT SINNERS CALLED. 1 83 
 
 through the roll of his virtues. Such men 
 have their reward, saith our Saviour, when 
 speaking of their external religion ; but what 
 a poor, petty, shallow reward is that, — the glory 
 of men, a proud name in the world, and the 
 tyrant of self in the heart, with all his lusts 
 and deceits, to rule and reign there forever 
 and forever ! 
 
 Now, how is it with those poor publicans 
 and sinners' who sat at meat in the Lord's 
 house with Him and were his followers ? 
 These were even the class whom Jesus Christ 
 came into the world to call to repentance ; not 
 that they needed repentance more, not that 
 they needed it less, than other men who bore 
 fairer titles, but because being known, de- 
 nounced, shunned as publicans and sinners, 
 they were willing to appear, or were obliged 
 to appear, to the world what they were, and 
 thus really appeared to themselves in the true 
 light of their own wretchedness. For the 
 opinion of the world, and especially its evil 
 
1 84 NOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 opinion, is often a mirror in which we may see 
 reflected a much truer picture of ourselves 
 than we are wont to find when looking at our 
 hearts through the medium of our own opinion 
 only. These publicans were doubtless well 
 represented by that one of their number who, 
 when he went up to pray, dared not look up 
 to God; so vile and degraded a being he really 
 felt himself to be, he could only smite upon 
 his breast, and cry out, " God be merciful to 
 me a sinner !" And the others of that motley 
 assembly, they had been afflicted with many 
 troubles, were a poor troop of vagabonds, but 
 they had found a man who spoke not as the 
 scribes, but with authority, who healed their 
 diseases as well as blessed them ; who taught 
 them how to pray to their Father in heaven ; 
 who told them what was forgiveness, what was 
 mutual love, what was the treasure worth 
 seeking after, and how they could become 
 children of God and come into his kingdom. 
 Now, these poor people were not better than 
 
BUT SINNERS CALLED. 1 85 
 
 others in their hearts and lives, perhaps, but 
 they were willing to hear, to be instructed, to 
 be commanded by the Living Incarnate Word 
 of God in their midst ; and listening to Him 
 and receiving into their minds his instruction, 
 they were indeed his followers, although the 
 journey of the cross, their life of regene- 
 ration, had hardly begun. But such did our 
 blessed Lord call to repentance, for such had 
 ears to hear, and the call fell not upon them 
 unheeded. 
 
 And what does it mean when Christ saith 
 to men to-day, as He did to them of old, " I 
 came not to call the righteous, but sinners to 
 repentance/' Shall we imagine that before Him 
 there are righteous men and others who are 
 sinful men, and that the righteous are saved in 
 any case and only the sinners need to repent? 
 That is the falsity of a dead Church, a Church 
 that has ceased to be the presence of God as 
 the Divine Truth on earth. There is none 
 good but one, that is God. Before God there 
 
 16* 
 
1 86 NOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 are no men more or less righteous of them- 
 selves than others. He beholds the hearts of 
 men only as they are more or less open to and 
 ready to receive true righteousness from Him. 
 The true and living Church of God must speak 
 to men in the very words of its Divine Master, 
 whose messenger, indeed, is the Church : " I 
 am not come to call the righteous, but sinners 
 to repentance.'' Let no man too readily class 
 himself with the righteous ; so far as he does 
 he stops his ear against that call to repentance 
 which all need alike to hear. He only who 
 feels that he is a sinner can repent. Of what 
 can that man repent who thinks there is no- 
 thing but righteousness in him ? No ; first we 
 must become in our own eyes publicans and 
 sinners ; then we shall hear the Lord's call to 
 repentance, and happily, by God's grace, come 
 and sit at meat with Him in his own house ! 
 All men are not indeed alike sinful ; some are 
 more righteous men than others ; but these 
 are not so of themselves, but of God. The 
 
B UT SINNERS CA LL ED. 1 8 7 
 
 righteousness that is in them is God's right- 
 eousness, and they, only, need not repentance 
 who, while they know that their evils are held 
 in check, and the good things of heaven given 
 into their hearts, yet remember that these good 
 things belong to God and not to themselves, 
 and that it is only by the Divine power that 
 their evils are held in subjection and do not 
 rouse themselves again and overcome them. 
 So far as a man regards himself as separated 
 from, or not dependent upon God, he must be- 
 hold in himself a sinner : surely a sinner who 
 may be called to repentance, and come to the 
 Lord's house to sit at meat with Him, if he 
 feels, together with his sins, a sorrow for it 
 and a desire to be united to the Lord, rather 
 than to continue in this dreary absence of a 
 wicked heart ; but doubly a sinner and deaf to 
 the Saviour's call if so be he thinks whatever 
 of righteousness is in him to be his own, and 
 thus turns the light that is in him into dark- 
 ness ; thanking God that he is not as other 
 
1 88 NOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 men, and thinking to himself what reward his 
 righteousness is meriting. This man is rob- 
 bing God : surely his righteousness is as filthy 
 rags ; the publicans and harlots go into the 
 kingdom of God before him. 
 
 There is no greater danger to those who are 
 members of religious organizations than this : 
 that having united themselves externally to the 
 Church and taken the name of church-member, 
 they unthinkingly class themselves among the 
 righteous, and believe henceforward that the 
 call of the Lord to repentance is addressed 
 only to those sinners who are without the 
 Church. There is no more fatal and unjust 
 distinction in the world than a distinction thus 
 drawn, — namely, that the Church is for the 
 righteous, for those who have no need of re- 
 pentance, and that those outside the Church 
 are the sinners who need to repent. The 
 error is as fatal to the one class as to the 
 other. Those in the Church are liable to the 
 awful mistake and sin of thinking their salva- 
 
BUT SINNERS CALLED. 1 89 
 
 tion is accomplished, that their faith alone, their 
 acceptance of doctrine, their subscribing to 
 articles of belief, — that this places them among 
 the righteous ; and those without, feeling, yea, 
 having it impressed upon them that the Church 
 is not for sinners, but for the righteous only, 
 conclude that they have no place there. The 
 Messiah is not for them, but for the clean 
 Pharisee ; they dare not lift their eyes unto 
 heaven, but can only smite upon their breasts in 
 their wretchedness and implore God's mercy 
 on them ; while they in the Church, they can 
 stand up and thank God that they are such 
 righteous, just, and pious men. 
 
 Let us have done with this false and ruinous 
 distinction. What is the church militant, the 
 Church on earth, but the messenger of that 
 same Lord and Saviour who sat at meat with 
 publicans and sinners ? Whom else does the 
 Church call to repentance but sinners ? With 
 whom else has the church to do but with 
 sinners ? As for the righteous, if there are 
 
190 NOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 those within the Church who believe that their 
 faith in Church doctrine alone is righteousness, 
 they are like the Pharisees, straining at a gnat 
 and swallowing a camel. They are so much 
 death in the living body of the Church. 
 
 Like the Saviour of old, does the Church 
 now come to all classes alike. And if the self- 
 righteous are offended in it, because it com- 
 mands repentance and actual endeavor to 
 subjugate the evils within, and thus to become 
 fit vessels of God's righteousness, still, the 
 Church is not ashamed to call under its own 
 roof the publicans and sinners. Did Christ 
 say to the multitude, u Not yet, good people ; 
 wait awhile ; when you have become clean and 
 learned, like the Pharisees and the scribes, 
 then you may come in and eat with me and 
 learn of my doctrine" ? Such was not the Sa- 
 viour's word to the poor outcast dregs of the 
 people; but hear rather what He did say: 
 "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy 
 laden, and I will give you rest ; take my yoke 
 
BUT SINNERS CALLED. 191 
 
 upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and 
 lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest to your 
 souls !" 
 
 Shall the Church in our day assume the char- 
 acter of a closed fold, wherein only the right- 
 eous — the regenerate — sit at meat with the 
 Lord ? Shall it not rather be that same house 
 of the Lord, — his own house, whose door was 
 open to all, however low and sinful and frowned 
 upon and despised, who yet, if simply they 
 desire to be followers of Him, may come in 
 and sit at the Lord's table with his disciples, 
 feeling their sinfulness, and not their worthi- 
 ness ; conscious of their unsightliness in God's 
 sight, and not of their fair looks ? Feeling their 
 sinfulness, I say ! and no man can feel his sin- 
 fulness whose soul has not once been pierced 
 through with the awful probe of God's Word, 
 revealing to him, at least, one sin out of the 
 host that are there ! Shall the Church say, 
 "Wait until you are better; wait until you 
 know the doctrines of our faith thoroughly; 
 
192 KOT THE RIGHTEOUS, 
 
 wait until you can thank God that you are not 
 as other men are, and then come into the Tem- 
 ple" ? Or shall it simply ask, as did its Divine 
 Master of those who wished to be healed of 
 the very sins and evils in which they find them- 
 selves immersed, " Wilt thou be made whole ? 
 If so, follow me, immediately, just as you are, 
 leaving your nets, or your seat at the receipt 
 of custom, or whatever your occupation be ! 
 Come into this the Lord's own house ! Come, 
 burdened with your evils and all your spiritual 
 infirmities ! Come as you are, but come wish- 
 ing to be what you are not ! Come wishing to 
 be healed, to be cleansed, to be made better ! 
 Come and learn of the true way to health and 
 peace under the Lord's roof, not standing with- 
 out. Here, in this open house, whenever you 
 will come earnestly desiring to follow Him, 
 you may sit at meat with Jesus and his disci- 
 ples ! The truths of God's Word are open to 
 you, — the plain, simple doctrines of the Church 
 teaching the way of repentance and regener- 
 
BUT SINNERS CALLED. 1 93 
 
 ation ; this is the house into which you are to 
 enter as sinners and publicans ; and here, by 
 actually learning to love and to rule your every- 
 day life by these truths and instructions, you 
 do verily sit at meat with your Lord" ? 
 
 *7 
 
<ttxc £trattflc* at the §wt; n PriUtatiott for Christ- 
 
 I was a stranger, and ye took ??ie in. — St. Matt. xxv. 35. 
 
 THESE are the words spoken by our Lord 
 to the righteous in the day of judgment. 
 
 And the righteous answer, saying, "When 
 saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in ?" 
 
 And the King replies, " Inasmuch as ye have 
 done it unto one of the teast of these my 
 brethren, ye have done it unto me." 
 
 At this season, when the Christian world is 
 celebrating the nativity of our Saviour, our 
 thoughts are directed to our Lord Jesus Christ 
 at that time when He came literally and per- 
 sonally a stranger into this our natural world. 
 
 Verily, in that day He Avas a stranger. Did 
 the world receive Him ? " He was in the 
 194 
 
THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR. 195 
 
 world, and the world was made by Him, and 
 the world knew Him not. He came unto his 
 own, and his own received Him not." 
 
 The stranger-child, born of a humble woman 
 from far-off Galilee, — did the people of that 
 Judean town take Him in to the shelter of 
 their houses ? 
 
 No ! Mary, the Virgin - mother, wrapped 
 Him "in swaddling-clothes, and laid Him in a 
 manger, because there was no room for them 
 in the inn." 
 
 A stranger, indeed, in the world was Christ 
 the Messiah. Long-expected, heralded by the 
 prophets of centuries ; yet, at his coming, un- 
 recognized, unknown, — the world's doors shut 
 against Him ! 
 
 Yet it has not been ever so. Even in those 
 days there were some hearts ready to receive 
 Him. Some simple shepherds from the fields 
 came with joy to behold, lying in an humb> - 
 manger, the child who was to be the Saviour,— 
 Christ the Lord. And the wise men of the 
 
196 THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR; 
 
 East hastened to fall down before Him and 
 offer Him their gifts and their worship ; and 
 some aged and devout souls, who had waited 
 in faith for the consolation of Israel, blessed 
 God when they saw the child Jesus, and ut- 
 tered, in pious gratitude, " Lord, now lettest 
 thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine 
 eyes have seen thy salvation. " 
 
 And there were the disciples and the apos- 
 tles and the faithful women who followed our 
 Lord in the world, who loved to receive Him 
 into their humble homes, and to hear his 
 words and to minister to his wants. 
 
 But these are not all who, when the Lord 
 was a stranger, have taken Him in. 
 
 No ; to the great company of the righteous 
 ones who in the day of judgment stand at the 
 King's right hand, the Lord says, " I was a 
 stranger, and ye took me in." 
 
 And these righteous ones were not alone 
 those who had lived on earth in our Saviour's 
 times, but were those gathered out of every 
 
A MEDITATION FOR CHRISTMAS-TIME. 197 
 
 nation and age and country, who, in extending 
 this act of mercy to the least of their brethren, 
 had done it unto the Lord. 
 
 There is a way, then, of receiving the Lord 
 who comes to us as a stranger other than the 
 literal housing of Him as a man in the natural 
 world. He represents Himself to us, indeed, 
 in his Word as ever, even now, standing at the 
 door and knocking, waiting for us to take Him 
 in. And if any man open the door, He says, 
 " I will come in unto Him, and sup with Him, 
 and He with me." 
 
 The Lord Jesus is in heaven, whither He 
 ascended after his resurrection ; and yet He is 
 close to us here on earth. He who made the 
 world and is the sole God and Lord of heaven 
 and earth is yet to-day in the world, and the 
 world knows Him not. " There standeth one 
 among us whom we know not," — now as in 
 the days of John the Baptist. He it is who 
 alone baptizeth our hearts with his Holy Spirit 
 of Truth and with the fire of Divine Love. 
 
 17* 
 
198 THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR; 
 
 And because we know Him not, because we 
 think of God as dwelling afar off in heaven 
 and not near to us on earth, because we know 
 not of his Divine Humanity, which embraces 
 all men and is near to all, therefore is this 
 present Christ a stranger to us. We look up to 
 God Avhen we offer our prayers to " Our Father 
 who art in the heavens/' — we do not see 
 Him in doing the common deeds of our daily 
 life ; and yet if we are leading the life of re- 
 generation, the Lord is as near us in our every- 
 day working as in our formal prayers at stated 
 times. It is right for us to think of our Lord 
 as in heaven enthroned in glory and surrounded 
 with everything of beauty and majesty which 
 our feeble finite minds can conceive of. It is 
 not a reproach to the righteous that they ask 
 the King in ignorance, " When saw we Thee a 
 stranger, and took Thee in ?" The Lord does 
 not prize their ministry less because it was 
 done unto Him unawares. They worshiped 
 and prayed to the Lord in heaven as far above 
 
A MEDITATION FOR CHRISTMAS- TIME. 1 99 
 
 and beyond die sphere of their earthly business, 
 while yet in the fear of God and out of love 
 to Him they tried to live faithfully and well 
 with their fellow-men. It was for the Lord 
 Jesus — the Infinite, the Omnipresent, the All- 
 seeing — to behold the inward character of their 
 deeds, and to know that they were done verily 
 unto Himself when done unto the least of his 
 brethren on earth. The Stranger is one whom 
 we know not. If we knew Him, He would be 
 no stranger. It is so with every one to-day in 
 his immediate personal relation with the Lord 
 Jesus. He is the stranger at the door. It is 
 for us to open unto Him, or to keep the door 
 closed. If we take this Stranger in, we shall 
 not behold in Him at once the Lord in his 
 heavenly glory and Divine majesty. We shall 
 not see anything Divine in Him, nor shall we 
 see any beauty that we should desire Him. 
 He shall have, it may well be, " neither form 
 nor comeliness'' in our sight. But we shall see 
 something human ; the something that lies at 
 
200 THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR; 
 
 the roots of our human life ; something on 
 which the very heavens rest ; something that 
 shall make us sensible one day, if not of the 
 Divinity, then of the Divine Humanity, of the 
 Infinite One, and which will make plain to us 
 what the apostle means when he calls the 
 Church the Body of Christ. 
 
 Thus the Lord, the Infinite Divine One, 
 comes to us now a stranger, disguised under 
 the cloak of our common humanity, that we 
 may in freedom, without compulsion, learn to 
 love and to serve Him in learning to love and 
 serve our fellow-man. He comes in the form 
 of the common practical precepts of the Di- 
 vine Word, — the laws of charitable and right- 
 eous living, — man with his fellow-man, here 
 on earth. No duty so commonplace or mean 
 in the eyes of men ; no impulse to good ; no 
 gentle act or expression of affection or pity or 
 compassion ; no word of forgiveness and re- 
 conciliation ; no withholding from an evil or 
 blasphemous word, or from an uncharitable 
 
A MEDITATION FOR CHRISTMAS-TIME. 201 
 
 opinion or utterance ; no little wayside word, 
 or deed of encouragement, or help, or conso- 
 lation ; nay, finally, no trustful and prayerful 
 act of resignation, wherein we accept cheerfully 
 from God the lowly, toilsome way of patient 
 endurance which He has laid before our feet; 
 — but, in so doing, the Lord Jesus has come 
 to us a stranger, and we have taken Him in. 
 So does the Lord desire to be taken into our 
 hearts, freely, willingly, w^e opening the door 
 not in awe and fear, but gladly and warmly, as 
 to receive an humble guest who has no claim 
 on us but that of the brotherhood of all in the 
 love of God ! 
 
 That there is something peculiarly sacred in 
 the rites of hospitality has been acknowledged 
 for ages in the usages of almost all the known 
 nations of the earth. To have eaten at one's 
 table, to have been sheltered under his roof, 
 has been regarded as a sort of solemn pledge 
 of peace and mutual protection. Whence this 
 sacredness of hospitality, or the receiving of 
 i* 
 
202 THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR; 
 
 strangers, had its origin it is not important 
 here to in-quire ; but no one can fail to see that 
 to a Christian mind there must be a deep re- 
 ligious significance attaching to it. Our Lord 
 has said that whosoever so befriends or takes 
 in the stranger renders this service of mercy 
 to Himself. In the literal statement there is 
 doubtless meant only this, that in acting char- 
 itably and mercifully to all our fellow-men, be- 
 cause they are brethren of the Lord, — that is, 
 the objects of his love, and of our love, so far 
 as we love the Lord, — we are really doing 
 God's will ; we are reciprocating God's love 
 and kindness to us, we are serving the Lord in 
 the way most pleasing to Him. This duty is 
 specially required of us toward strangers, be- 
 cause it calls into activity an unselfish regard 
 for all men as brethren ; it calls for a spirit of 
 universal kindness, confidence, and charity 
 toward our neighbor. The stranger is not one 
 to whom we do good expecting good in return ; 
 we do not befriend him because of his dignity, 
 
A MEDITATION FOR CHRISTMAS-TIME. 203 
 
 or wealth, or power, or anything that can 
 reflect a benefit on us. We take him in 
 simply as a fellow-man, as one whom God has 
 made and whom God loves, and whom God 
 would have us love and treat with kindness if 
 we love Him truly. Surely, in the befriending 
 of strangers there is something sacred, some- 
 thing that appeals to the noblest sentiment of 
 humanity, something into which heaven and the 
 love of God flows down with mighty power. 
 But above the natural duties of hospitality 
 (which word may always recall to us this its 
 sacred association when we remember its de- 
 rivation from hospeSy meaning the stranger) 
 there is the spiritual act of hospitality, or re- 
 ceiving as a stranger one of the least of the 
 Lord's brethren. The Lord's brethren are 
 in the widest sense our neighbor, and this 
 means all to whom we can do good. The 
 neighbor, the brethren whom we are to serve 
 and love, is therefore the good in our neigh- 
 bor, or in any person or thing for which we 
 
204 THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR; 
 
 can act. When we seek the good of our 
 neighbor, personally ; when we seek the good 
 of the Church, or of the country, then are we 
 truly serving the Lord and loving Him. For 
 the Lord is present in his own goodness, and 
 there is no one good but God, — that is, all 
 goodness is from Him. Spiritual hospitality, 
 then, or the spiritually taking in of the stran- 
 ger, consists in our befriending and helping, 
 and unselfishlv devoting ourselves to that 
 which is good ; not simply to that which we 
 like or prefer, or consider good in our natu- 
 ral hearts, — for these things are no strangers, 
 but our old intimates, — but to the good which 
 comes from heaven, which is contained in 
 every precept of our religion, which may be 
 sought out and kindly fostered by us in our 
 fellow-man, and which comes to us, a stranger, 
 and is the Lord Himself in his Divine Hu- 
 manity coming to us in the humble guise of 
 our earthly duties toward ourselves and one 
 another. It is the Lord's heavenly good that 
 
A MEDITATION FOR CHRISTMAS-TIME. 205 
 
 lies concealed in every act of true piety, char- 
 ity, and resistance of evil. And this heavenly 
 o-ood is the brother whom we are to take in 
 
 o 
 
 to our hearts as a stranger. And if we do so, 
 we shall learn in the clay of judgment that we 
 have been loving and serving the Lord Him- 
 self, who is the Only Good, and the source of 
 all goodness. 
 
 To take into our houses the brethren, yea, 
 to receive the Lord Himself when a stranger, is, 
 then, to receive his good into our hearts and 
 lives. This his goodness comes, as I have 
 said, always as a stranger, for it is that which 
 our natural heart at first neither knows nor 
 loves. He is no old friend, no powerful bene- 
 factor, no acquaintance seemingly profitable to 
 cultivate with anything worldly in view. No ! 
 the unselfish motive, the desire to do our 
 simple duty in the sight of God, the resolution 
 to deny self, the exercise of the heavenly virtues 
 of patience and forgiveness, the willingness to 
 cease from some evil thing in our life, — this 
 
 18 
 
206 THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR. 
 
 comes not at first with the familiar smile of a 
 friend to be greeted and ushered in with joy. 
 No ! As a stranger do these heavenly motives 
 of goodness come down and stand knocking 
 at our hearts' doors. Who will take them in ? 
 Ah ! who will open the door to this Divine 
 Guest, — the Stranger to the sinful household 
 He has come to save, — the Lord of heaven 
 present in the garb of earthly humility ? Who 
 will open to Him, that He may come in and 
 sup with us and we with Him ? 
 
 " O how shall I receive thee, 
 
 How greet thee, Lord, aright ! 
 All nations long to see thee, 
 My hope, my heart's delight ! 
 
 "O, kindle, Lord, most holy, 
 The lamp within my breast, 
 To do, in spirit lowly, 
 
 All that may please thee best." 
 
(The Wnfeuotnt $ouv; 0V t §tow rijjhtttj to Uwpw t0 
 
 Lest coming suddenly He find you sleeping — St. Mark xiii. 36. 
 
 THERE is one central moment of our ex- 
 istence to which all our life in this world 
 tends, and from which takes its beginning our 
 endless life in the world to come. This is the 
 hour of death,- — that hour when we shall for 
 ever lay aside this mortal body and go forth 
 in our substantial spiritual body to inhabit for 
 evermore the spiritual world. This change of 
 abode from the material to the spiritual world 
 is the greatest outward change that can befall 
 us, for it involves a change of everything out- 
 side of ourselves ; and all that remains un- 
 changed, in that event, is that which is within 
 ourselves. This is, indeed, not changed by the 
 
 207 
 
208 THE UNKNOWN HOUR; OR, 
 
 event *of death, really, although even in this, 
 the inward self, there will be an apparent 
 change ; for in death we shall come more truly 
 to know the character and the life that is within 
 us than we have known it while living in this 
 world. 
 
 But great as is this event of death, and won- 
 derful as is the change of abode and all exter- 
 nal circumstance wrought by it, there is another 
 fact connected with it which is of far more im- 
 mediate and urgent importance. For although 
 the event of death does not itself produce a 
 change in us, yet it does so change our out- 
 ward condition that what we are at the hour 
 of dying, that we must ever remain as to the 
 essential and distinguishing character of our 
 life. Here on earth it is otherwise. Here, 
 from being evil, our lives may be made good ; 
 but not so when we come into the other world. 
 For through all the changes we undergo in 
 this life, our character is forming itself into 
 either a heavenly or an infernal image; we are, 
 
HOW RIGHTLY TO PREPARE TO DIE. 2(X) 
 
 in the unseen depths of the inner life, either 
 growing to be an angel or a devil ; and, after 
 we die, the character thus formed is not again 
 changed. 
 
 This event, which calls us out of this world 
 into the spiritual world, is, therefore, followed 
 very shortly by another event, which is the de- 
 termination of what character we are, whether 
 good or evil, heavenly or infernal, and the al- 
 lotment to us of an eternal abode in heaven or 
 in hell. This event is called the Judgment, and 
 it is for ev£ry soul that passes into the other 
 world that last judgment of which we are 
 warned in the Holy Word. 
 
 The judgment, as we read about it in the 
 gospels, is always accompanied by the Coming 
 of the Lord as the Son of Man, or as the 
 Word of God. The Lord is described as com- 
 ing in the glory of the Father, with all the 
 holy angels ; as coming in the clouds of 
 heaven with power and great glory ; and also, 
 in another place, as coming forth from the 
 
 18* 
 
2 1 THE UNKNO WN HO UR ; OR, 
 
 opened heavens, riding upon a White Horse, in 
 righteousness to judge and make war. These 
 expressions are all symbolic, like those other 
 parables of the kingdom of heaven which 
 our Lord spake, and they describe both the 
 general judgment which is executed in the 
 spiritual world when a Church or Divine disr 
 pensation is at an end, and the Lord comes, 
 in his Divine Truth, to restore it anew ; and, 
 also, the particular judgment which the soul 
 of every one undergoes when his natural life 
 is ended and he enters the spiritual world and 
 into the more immediate presence of God. 
 
 But when the soul is judged after death, it 
 does not suffer any sudden and startling 
 change ; it is not called at once into a state 
 entirely new and strange either of unhappiness 
 or of bliss ; neither does the Divine Judge re- 
 gard the soul with anger, nor determine its 
 future lot in any other wise than the soul has 
 already determined it for itself. But this de- 
 cision shall now be made known ; this real 
 
HOW RIGHTLY TO PREPARE TO DIE. 211 
 
 character of the soul shall now be revealed; 
 that which was here concealed and misrepre- 
 sented is there brought into the light. For 
 there is nothing covered in our present life 
 which shall not be then revealed, nor anything 
 hid that shall not then be known ; and that 
 which here has been spoken in darkness shall 
 be heard in the light ; and that which w 7 e have 
 uttered in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed 
 upon the house-tops. 
 
 The judgment, therefore, consists essentially 
 in a true revelation of the inner and actual 
 character of man ; and as this can be discerned 
 only by the eye of the All-seeing, therefore it 
 is said that God is the judge ; and as it is dis- 
 cerned only in the light of the Divine Truth 
 itself, — for in this light alone can all that is 
 good and true be distinguished from what is 
 evil and false, — therefore it is said by our 
 Lord, "The Words that I have spoken unto 
 you, the same shall judge you in the last day." 
 Therefore, again, when the Lord is represented 
 
212 THE UNKNOWN HOUR; OR, 
 
 in the Revelation as coming" in righteousness 
 to judge and make war, his name is there 
 called the Word of God. Thus we shall be 
 truly judged according to our deeds, and in 
 the presence and sight of God ; and that which 
 shall judge us and determine truly and finally 
 our real character and our fitness for associa- 
 tion with angels in heaven or with the evil 
 spirits in hell is the Divine Truth itself, called 
 in the Bible the Word, and also the Son of 
 Man. 
 
 " Lest coming suddenly He find you sleep- 
 ing." We understand now what is here meant 
 by the Lord's coming-, — that it refers to our 
 own coming into his presence when death shall 
 admit us into the spiritual world, and when our 
 characters shall be plainly disclosed in the 
 light of the Divine Truth. The Lord is always 
 present with every one of us, and He sees 
 and knows constantly what goes on within us 
 as well as without us. But to us, because un- 
 seen, He seems far away ; and because of the 
 
HOW RIGHTLY TO PREPARE TO DIE. 213 
 
 darkness of our minds and the deceitful ap- 
 pearances which surround us in this world, we 
 cannot truly know ourselves ; nor so long as 
 we remain in this world is our character en- 
 tirely fixed. When death calls us into the 
 spiritual world, then we come into the light of 
 God's holy presence ; outward appearances 
 and delusions and all hypocrisies are cast off. 
 We know ourselves then as we have not 
 known or felt before, to be in the presence of 
 the all-seeing God and Judge. Therefore this 
 solemn moment is described in the Bible as 
 the coming of the Lord. 
 
 And now, two important points of the Di- 
 vine instruction concerning this event are to 
 be noted. One is, that the Lord shall come 
 suddenly, — that is, unawares; and, secondly, 
 the solemn warning that, when He comes, we 
 be not found sleeping. In other words, the 
 practical truth urged upon us here is, that, 
 although we are ignorant of the hour of our 
 death, yet we should always be prepared for it. 
 
2 1 4 THE UNKNO WN HO UR ; O R t 
 
 The event of death and the coming of the 
 Lord here referred to are identical, when the 
 meaning of these words is applied to us indi- 
 vidually, and not collectively. And the sudden 
 coming of the Lord refers to our ignorance of 
 the hour when we shall be called away: " For 
 the Son of Man cometh at the hour when ye 
 think not" ; and the word suddenly here means 
 also unawares. It refers to our ignorance, not 
 only of the time of our death, but of the real 
 condition of our souls ; for by hour is spirit- 
 ually meant the state or condition in which we 
 are. 
 
 The Lord commands us, therefore, to be 
 always watching for Him, and yet suffers us not 
 to know when He shall come. He requires 
 of us always to be prepared to be called at 
 death into his presence to the judgment, and 
 yet has made it impossible for us to know 
 whether we have a longer or a shorter time to 
 live ; whether we shall be called to our ac- 
 count in a few hours, on the morrow, or after 
 
] fO\V RIGHTLY TO PREPARE TO DIE. 215 
 
 many years. Likewise, we know not the exact 
 state of our own souls, so great and so inces- 
 sant is the conflict in us between opposing 
 motives and principles ; we know not, indeed, 
 whether ours be the spiritual state called the 
 evening or the morning or the early dawn. 
 All we know is that our Lord is our master, 
 who has intrusted in this earthly life to every 
 man his work, and seemingly gone away ; and 
 that at an hour we know not He will return ; 
 and that He has commanded the porter to 
 watch for his coming, lest, coming suddenly, 
 He find us sleeping. 
 
 It is plain that if we knew, each one of us, 
 the hour in which w^ould end our earthly life, 
 we would not be constantly on the watch, but 
 would, very likely, consider our allotted period 
 of earthly life as our own to use in the way 
 that should please us best, while we would de- 
 fer all preparation for the life to come until the 
 last hour, vainly imagining that it would not 
 then be too late. It would be in every way a 
 
2l6 THE UNKNOWN HOUR; OR, 
 
 disadvantage were we to know beforehand 
 when we are to die. The sure knowledge of 
 our early death would deprive our life here of 
 all enterprise and healthy interest in the world 
 around us ; while the same knowledge of a long 
 life would, as I have said, take away many a 
 preventive to sinful indulgence which the fear 
 of death now affords, and imperil our future 
 welfare by allowing us to foster too exclusively 
 our w T orldly and carnal affections. Moreover, if 
 we knew that hour, we should all be governed 
 more or less by fear and by hope of reward 
 merely, and thus a constraint would be put 
 upon our freedom, and this life on earth would 
 not answer its appointed end, — namely, of de- 
 veloping our characters while we are in free- 
 dom to choose between good and evil. 
 
 But, although the hour of our death is thus 
 hidden from us, we are none the less warned 
 of its sure approach, and commanded to watch, 
 lest, coming suddenly, the Master find us sleep- 
 ing. The difference between the watchful state 
 
 o 
 
HOW RIGHTLY TO PREPARE TO DIE. 217 
 
 and the sleeping state is the difference between 
 the natural and the spiritual life. To be watch- 
 ful does not mean merely to be thinking of 
 death, and whether it will come to-day or to- 
 morrow. Nothing is more hurtful to our 
 mental health than a morbid dwelling on the 
 thought of death ; and that we might not make 
 this a fixed, definite object of our contempla- 
 tion would seem to be one cause why, in the 
 Divine Providence, it is so carefully concealed 
 from our knowledge until it is close at hand. 
 The Lord wishes that w r e shall think of Him, 
 labor for Him, and struggle manfully against 
 our evils just when we are in our fullest vigor 
 and best health. " Remember thy Creator in 
 the days of thy youth" is the wise precept of 
 the ancient sage. It is then we are in our 
 fullest freedom, and no craven fear drives us 
 reluctant to repentance, but we walk joyfully 
 and bravely in the path of the Lord's com- 
 mandments, not only seeking the kingdom of 
 heaven of our own choice, but seeking it here 
 k 19 
 
2l8 THE UNKNOWN HOUR; OR, 
 
 on earth as far as a holy and useful life will 
 enable us to know its blessedness. But if to 
 be watchful is not to be always thinking of 
 death, what is it? The Lord says that the 
 master gave to every man his work, and com- 
 manded the porter to watch. Now, the porter 
 is not to watch idly for the return of the master 
 only, but to watch well the household left in his 
 charge and all the precious goods. So we are 
 to watch over those things committed to us, 
 and see that we keep our soul's household 
 holy and clean and fit to be presented before 
 the Lord when He shall come. The servants 
 of the household are the knowledges of good- 
 ness and truth which the Lord gives to all who 
 learn of Him in his Word, and the watchful 
 porter and guard is our capacity to perceive 
 these holy and true things and to preserve 
 them from injury. But the evil things which 
 tempt us from within, and which surround us 
 in this outer world, these are what will surely 
 destroy all those sacred treasures committed 
 
HOW RIGHTLY TO PREPARE TO J) IE. 219 
 
 to our care if we are not ever on the alert; 
 the lusts of worldly and selfish affection, and 
 all the fallacies and falsities of a carnal reason, 
 — these, like the moth and rust, will corrupt 
 the goodness and truth which the Lord has 
 committed to our care, and, like the thief, will 
 surely break through and steal. It is against 
 these that we are to watch, and watch without 
 ceasing. We are to be ever on our guard 
 against every affection, thought, motive, or de- 
 sire which will do violence to one of the holy 
 and heavenly knowledges of truth which the 
 Lord has put into our minds. We are thus 
 ever to be awake ; to keep our minds open to 
 heavenly light ; to never suffer our spirits to 
 become heavy and sluggish, through the weak- 
 ness of the flesh, and our discernment to be 
 dull and slow to distinguish the right from the 
 wrong, the pure from the impure, the just from 
 the unjust, the holy from the profane. 
 
 The life merely natural, or merely of the 
 bodily senses and their evidences, is a sleep ; 
 
220 THE UNKNOWN HOUR; OR, 
 
 for in it we neither know anything of our spir- 
 itual nature nor of the spiritual world in which 
 wq live ; we know nothing of the life to come ; 
 we know no life other than that of the body. 
 And, further, we are, in the merely natural 
 life, wholly idle and dormant as to our spirits ; 
 we are cultivating no spiritual knowledges or 
 motives ; we are forming no heavenly affec- 
 tions ; we are not even so far awake as to see 
 our own gross evils and errors, and we are 
 too sluggish and burdened with mere earthly 
 and corporeal concerns to lift a hand against 
 them should we ever by some stray gleam of 
 light recognize these foul invaders in their true 
 characters. Such is the condition of those 
 who are found sleeping when the Lord comes. 
 The hereditary evils of their nature have 
 taken strong hold on them as on all ; and 
 they, indifferent to all the warnings of God's 
 Word, have given themselves up to the 
 slumber of sensual ease and of uncontrolled 
 self-love, until their minds have become wholly 
 
HOW RIGHTLY TO PREPARE TO DIE. 221 
 
 despoiled of the holy truths of faith, and 
 germs of heavenly affections once planted 
 there, and in darkness and desolation these 
 await the Master's coming. 
 
 Let us be ever on the watch ; not against 
 death, for that shall truly come as a good 
 angel sent direct from the merciful Lord to 
 lead us to our eternal home, but against all 
 those evil invaders who in many wiles and 
 snares are constantly surrounding our habita- 
 tion and laying wait for our souls. Aware of 
 the frailty of our hearts, of our constant need of 
 the Divine aid and guidance, let not our souls 
 give over their watch for a moment, but be 
 ever awake, walking in the light, and praying 
 that we enter not into temptation. So the 
 Lord, though He come suddenly, shall yet not 
 find us sleeping, and we, having done each one 
 his work, shall be ready to enter into our rest 
 and our reward. 
 
 The practical result of our meditation on 
 the subject before us is, that we are left in 
 
 19* 
 
222 THE UNKNOWN HOUR; OR, 
 
 ignorance of the hour of our death in order 
 that we may the better p7'epare for it and for 
 the judgment that accompanies it. Our prep- 
 aration consists not in dwelling anxiously on 
 the event itself, since that is in every sense a 
 blessing, and we know that it will come just at 
 that time when it is best for us to die ; but our 
 true preparation is in being ever awake and 
 on the watch against the deadening influence 
 of carnal and earthly things upon our souls, 
 since there is no more cunning and no dearer 
 pursuit for evil spirits than to be lulling our 
 souls into that indifference and forgetful- 
 ness regarding the holy things of faith and 
 religion, that will at length strip us of all our 
 defenders and leave us forever the slaves of 
 their sinful enticements. And the way to 
 wake and watch is, to keep ever in mind the 
 truths of the Divine Word, and to order our 
 daily lives in accordance therewith. This it 
 is to have our loins girded and our lights 
 burning, and to be like servants who wait for 
 
HO IV RIGHTLY TO PREPARE TO DIE. 223 
 
 their true and everlasting Lord. Blessed are 
 those servants whom the Lord, when He cometJi, 
 shall find watching ; and if He shall come in 
 the second watch or come in the third watch 
 and find them so, blessed are those servants ! 
 
 THE END. 
 

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