in the (&tninty Class -Pf?^3n Book_ JbWs Copyright^? COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. By the Same Author BACK TO BETHELEM Price, $1 .00 net ; postage, 1 cents CHRYSOSTOM: THE ORATOR Price, $1 .00 net ; postage, 8 cents MIDSUMMER NIGHTS WITH THE GREAT DREAMER Midsummer Nights With the Great Dreamer A Pilgrim's Progress in the Twentieth Century BY JOHN HESTON WILLEY NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM "l^OS 4*p LIBRARY of CONGRESS j Two Copies R MOV 23 1908 j _ Copi'nsnt entry j CLASS PL. XXc, Ho. Copyright, 1908, by EATON & MAINS The Author acknowledges the courtesy of the Century Company in permitting the use of illustration, in modified form, from the Rhead edition of Pilgrim's Progress for cover design. THE CALENDAR NIGHT THE FIRST The Start — Facing the Light I NIGHT THE SECOND The Wicket Gate — Burning the Bridges 19 NIGHT THE THIRD At the Cross — Stripping for the Fight 35 NIGHT THE FOURTH The House Beautiful — Going into Commission.. 51 NIGHT THE FIFTH The First Battle 71 NIGHT THE SIXTH Vanity Fair— Fighting on Low Levels 87 NIGHT THE SEVENTH Doubting Castle — Fighting on High Levels 109 NIGHT THE EIGHTH The Delectable Mountains — Rest and Refresh- ment 131 NIGHT THE NINTH En Passant — The Man who Knows Everything and The Man who Knows Nothing 149 NIGHT THE TENTH All Hail ! and Welcome 169 JUST A WORD These chapters are the summary of a series of ad- dresses delivered in midsummer to a Sunday evening audience. II They are not intended to explain or to simplify the work done by the great Dreamer. No one feels called upon to clarify the water of the Pacific at Santa Cata- lina, or the April skies over Sorrento. Carrying coals to Newcastle, or pepper to Hindustan, can never be made a profitable trade. Ill They are not sermonettes since their author is not en- tirely ready to be called a preacherette ; and the literary monstrosity and homiletical freak known as a sermonette requires a preacherette as its perpetrator and explana- tion. They are not lectures ; the pulpit from which they were spoken is not a platform. They are not essays. The essay has a subject only, while these chapters have an object as well. What they are may better be judged in the reading, perhaps — if that seem worth while. IV According to the veracious and versatile Gulliver, the climenole at Laputa was a servant whose business it was to awaken the interest of his master in some im- portant matter that was being overlooked, or to call to mind some vital subject that was being forgotten. This book is willing to wear the livery of that servant, x JUST A WORD V Did not Ned Bratts come bouncing into Bedford As- size one " daft Midsummer's Day " to beg the special favor of being hanged at once to save his soul ? He had been reading Bunyan, or at any rate Browning had. He had received The Pilgrim's Progress from the blind child of the author (sic again Browning). Hear the sweating publican and Tabby his wife as they interpel- late the honorable Judges : "The Book, sirs — take and read! You have my history in a nutshell, — ay, indeed! It must off, my burden ! See, — slack straps and into pit, Roll, reach the bottom, rest, rot there — a plague on it ! For a mountain's sure to fall and bury Bedford Town, 'Destruction' — that's the name, and fire shall burn it down! O, 'scape the wrath in time ! Time's now, if not too late. How can I pilgrimage up to the wicket gate?" And how successfully they pleaded, judge ye, when the puzzled Justice, " mopping brow and cheek," thunders to the lachrymose crowd, "Stop tears, or I'll indite All weeping Bedfordshire for turning Bunyanite !" There is a touch of Hogarth in the roaring poem, and there is also a large tribute to the Baptist tinker who dreamed his dream in Bedford Jail, in that this dream made so profound an impression upon the subtle mind of Robert Browning. VI The present trend is toward individualism. Biogra- phy is teaching by example as never before since the days of Plutarch. Fiction is building itself about per- sonality. Even Natural History deals with the particu- JUST A WORD xi lar instead of the universal, the individual instead of the species. Baloo the sleepy brown bear, Wahb the com- placent grizzly, Krag the Kootenay ram, are making this generation " rich with the spoils of nature " as stately tome and multi-volumed cyclopedia never could have done. Bunyan's Christian, like Goldsmith's village preacher, may perhaps not only allure to brighter worlds, but also lead the way. VII The Rev. Joseph Cook once said, "What is new is not true, and what is true is not new." This is a nat- ural blunder of the habitual phrase-maker. The Pil- grim's Progress is true and it is new. It is damp from the press. A real truth is always current. Those whom the gods love, no longer die young; they live young always. The hero of the dream has kept pace with the centuries. His eye is not dim, his natural force is not abated. He is still on the march. We catch a glimpse of his sturdy figure as he passes the window of our breakfast room. We make no apology, therefore, for a resurrection. We have profaned no cemetery and violated no hie jacet. We met the good man on the King's highway and invited him into the pulpit. Whether or not he is at home there remains to be seen. NIGHT THE FIRST THE START -FACING THE LIGHT The Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people. — Macaulay. The second greatest book in the English language. — Newell D wight Hillis. I know of no book, the Bible being excepted as above all comparison, which, according to my judgment and experience, I could so safely recommend as teaching and embracing the whole saving truth, according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as The Pilgrim's Progress. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge. NIGHT THE FIRST The Start — Facing the Light HE Bible, Foxe's Book of Mar- tyrs, and Bedford Jail are re- sponsible for the world's master- piece in religious literature. Given these three, together with a powerful untrained mind, and an ardent un- balanced temperament, and The Pilgrim's Progress is the result. What John Bunyan in- tended when he set out to write the book he did not himself know. When at the first I took my pen in hand Thus for to write, I did not understand That I at all should make a little book In such a mode; nay, I had undertook To make another ; which, when almost done, Before I was aware, I this begun. What he did produce changed the thinking of his age, and has exercised an irresistible charm in all succeeding ages. The method was not a new one. Spenser had delighted the gay court of Queen Elizabeth with the splendors of his Faerie Queene, its superb feast and its twelve adventurous 3 4 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS knights; but Bunyan knew nothing of the Faerie Queene. As early as the fourteenth century a work had appeared in French repre- senting human life as a pilgrimage; but Bunyan most probably never heard of this work. Our allegory came fresh and bubbling from his heart. To the great scandal of many of his Puritan associates, to be sure : "It was a vain story, a mere romance about giants and lions and goblins and warriors, sometimes fighting with monsters, and sometimes regaled by fair ladies in stately palaces." But it took the world by storm. It has be- come a part of our literary thinking; not to know it is to be uneducated. Its characters are real men and women. The Pilgrim himself is alive. We may meet him any day. Hopeful, and Faithful, and Ignorance, and Mercy, and Great Heart, and Giant Despair are old ac- quaintances. They are historical. We know how they looked and just what they will say when they begin to talk. These are the men and women among whom we are to walk for a few weeks, and may they reveal to us the dangers of the path, the secrets of a larger success, and the way that leads to the Celestial City! When introduced to our hero he has a book in his hand, and when he reads in this book he weeps and trembles. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 5 AS I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a Book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the Book, and read therein ; and, as he read, he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, "What shall I do?" Of course, we do not need to be told that this Book is the Bible. We are, however, hardly ready for the results that follow from its read- ing. The popular ideas on the subject prepare us to expect something different. Almost everybody goes to the Bible for comfort. Whatever be the life a man is leading, however careless of God, however indifferent to truth, when emergency comes he expects the Bible to stay him. This is the strong tower into which he may run and be safe. Here, he is per- suaded, are the wells of salvation from which water is always to be drawn with joy. But the Bible is not always a cooling summer drink ; it is not always a sedative. It is some- 6 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS times a drastic tonic. It is sometimes, indeed, the surgeon's knife, quick and powerful, and sharper than a two-edged sword. It does not always meet us with the hand-shake of a friend. Sometimes it is the grip of an officer, fierce and peremptory, and' it means that we have been breaking the law. The Book has failed if sometimes it does not cut the ground from un- der our feet and make us feel that we are slip- ping into the abyss. "Is not my word like as a fire ? saith the Lord ; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces ?" And the fear awakened by reading the Bible is just as real now as in the days of Bunyan. The ground of this fear is somewhat changed and its manifestations different, but the emo- tion itself is still a phase of religious experience. Our fathers were afraid of God. They bor- rowed many of their conceptions of Deity from paganism. They thought him capable of un- speakable cruelty. They accused him of the crime of torturing little children in hell fire, and tried to believe it was right because he did it. They read all this in the Bible. We still read terrible things in the Book, but they are truths about ourselves and our possi- bilities, and not vicious deeds of Israel's Je- hovah or revengeful paroxysms of a ruthless Judge. We understand better than ever the WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 7 path of soul evolution laid down in the New Testament. We see in its pages the awful depth to which the soul can go. We realize that a man can send himself to a darker hell than any conceived by our Puritan forbears and supposed to have been invented by God. Ulrici suggests that our actions and our thoughts are building the spiritual body which we shall at some future day occupy. This tre- mendous idea we are finding in our Bible. And the ground of the modern Pilgrim's fear is the possibility that his building will be of wood, hay, and stubble ; his course will be a reversion to type, and his future a sinking into infinite depths of spiritual stagnation and atrophy, to which there comes no to-morrow and from which there can be no return. This man whose fortune we are to follow had a burden upon his back. He had just dis- covered that burden, and he cries out to his family, "I am undone by reason of this burden that lieth upon me." And yet he had carried it all his life. It was his sin, and sin is no more real when we are conscious of it than when we do not dream of its existence. The sick man who knows that he is sick may not be any worse than the man who is sick and who does not know it. Better have the eyes open. Better know the truth. If there is a rock in 8 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS the channel, better locate it and steer the ship clear of it. It is the ocean derelict, the drift- ing hulk that refuses to be charted; it is this which baffles the skill of the pilot. If there is a broken rail ahead, let us learn it at once and stop the train. If there is lightning lurking in the clouds over Sodom, better take the angels into the house overnight and hear from their lips the dark chapter of to-morrow's doom. If there is sin in the soul, better have some one point it out to us. The prayer of the psalmist, "Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults," is a good, wholesome prayer. There is a vast undiscovered country within, far-lying and obscure, and in these re- mote and untraveled provinces may lurk many a lawbreaker, many a foe to God and light. It is at the bottom of the awful canyon we find the mighty Colorado rushing toward the sea. It is far down in the dark soil that we must look for the roots of the tree. And our sins so often lurk in the shadows, crouch in the far depths, and we ourselves may not dream of their existence. Below the surface streams shallow and light Of what we say we feel ; below the stream As light of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current strong, obscure, and deep The central stream of what we feel indeed. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 9 Thus we meet our hero, clothed in rags, with his face set away from his home, and thus he encounters one named Evangelist, who hears his story. I SAW also that he looked this way and that way, as if he would run; yet he stood still, because, as I perceived, he could not tell which way to go. I looked then, and saw a man named Evangelist coming to him, who asked, "Wherefore dost thou cry?" He answered, "Sir, I perceive, by the Book in my hand, that I am condemned to die, and after that to come to judgment; and I find that I am not willing to do the first, nor able to do the second." Then said Evangelist, "Why not willing to die ; since this life is attended with so many evils?" The man answered, "Be- cause I fear that this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and I shall fall into Tophet. And, sir, if I be not fit to go to prison, I am not fit to go to judgment, and from thence to execu- tion ; and the thoughts of these things make me cry." Then said Evangelist, "If this be thy condition, why standest thou still?" He answered, "Because I know not whither to go." Then he gave him a parchment roll, io MIDSUMMER NIGHTS and there was written within, "Flee from the wrath to come." The man, therefore, read it, and, look- ing upon Evangelist very carefully, said, "Whither must I fly?" Then said Evan- gelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, "Do you see yonder wicket gate?" The man said, "No." Then said the other, "Do you see yonder shining light?" He said, "I think I do." Then said Evangelist, "Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told the3 what thou shalt do." So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Note that the pilgrim could not see the wicket gate. He was not even positively sure that he could see the light which indicated the locality of the gate. What now ! Shall he say, "Thank you, my friend; I do not take things on trust. The gate may be there as you say, but I would rather see it before I start" ? This would not be psychologically possible. Such a mental attitude would have made what the crit- ics call an unnatural situation. Men who are stirred by deep emotions do not stop to argue ; do not split metaphysical hairs or weigh proba- bilities. Quibbles and sophistries and the bal- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER n ancing of evidence may do for the debating so- ciety, or the theological seminary ; but we want the fireman when the house is on fire, and the pilot when the ship is running down upon the rocks, and a real God when the soul is in con- scious sin. God has no trouble with a man who realizes how little he can do for himself. So long as we think we can save ourselves we are apt to be a little exacting. We want to make our own terms. We stipulate to march out of our aban- doned defenses with all the honors of war. We want the wicket gate in full sight when we start and a cleared, open track all the way to the gate. There are so many conditions we are ready to make before the iron enters the soul ; so many genteel devices, so many dilettante alternatives. The Church of the Heavenly Rest just around the corner is headquarters for this ad referendum faith. The Society for Ethical Culture is good neutral ground on which to treat with the spiritual powers that be. But, brother, when the sense of sin gets hold of you — as pray that it will some day — when all your life seems to have been a desolate failure, then you will make any sacrifice, will take any path, will flee to any gate, seen or unseen. And so the pilgrim starts and an adventure meets him at the very beginning. MIDSUMMER NIGHTS NOW, I saw in my dream that just as they had ended this talk they drew near to a very miry slough, that was in the midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire. Then said Pliable, "Ah ! neighbor Chris- tian, where are you now?" "Truly," said Christian, "I do not know." At this Pliable began to be offended, and angrily said to his fellow, "Is this the happiness you have told me all this while of? If we have such ill speed at our first setting out, what may we expect betwixt this and our journey's end? May I get out again with my life, you shall possess the brave country alone for me." And with that he gave a desperate struggle or two, and got out of the mire on that side of the slough which was next to his own house. So away he went, and Christian saw him no more. There are two of them now, it seems. The unsaved man seeking salvation has begun to try to save other men. Pliable came persuading WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 13 him to return and has himself been persuaded to go on the same journey. Before our hero knows Christ he has become a preacher of Christ; seeking the light, he has inspired an- other to become also a seeker of the light. A recent book by a celebrated writer on so- cial questions sneers amiably at John Bunyan and his dream. The allegory, we are told, is not modern. Christian was a poor, selfish creature who wanted to be saved and was ready to sacrifice everything and everybody to obtain that salvation. He started out alone to find good. He was manifestly and ingloriously less than the Frisian king who, when told by the bishop that his ancestors were probably in hell, answered, "Then I want none of your reli- gion. I am going to stand by the family." The Philippian jailer, when the earthquake came, smitten with conviction, getting a sudden glimpse of God, cries out, "What shall I do to be saved ?" Ah, he does not know any better ; he thinks his own salvation is the prime need of the universe. He imagines that all the majesty and miracle of that notable night, the shuddering earth, the tottering walls, the grind- ing doors, were just to save his cheap little soul. Saul of Tarsus, broad-brained, clear-visioned, stricken to the earth before the blaze of the Eternal, gets a glimpse of a larger situation and 14 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS problem. He cries out in the hunger of his soul, not "What shall I do to be saved?" but "What wilt thou have me to do ?" Not for self, not to purchase peace of mind, not that he may find a smooth path for his feet ; but to the honor of Him whom he had been dishonoring and for the sake of the world he had been despising. "Wherefore," says our social critic, "Chris- tian should have remained in the City of De- struction, and made of it a city of Good. In- stead of seeking to escape he should have striven to convert. He was running away from the Augean stables, he was shifting the world back to the shoulders of Atlas." Surely it is not given unto all men to under- stand visions. Our shoemaker who knows his last is taking exception to other portions of Apelles's picture. Poor old Dreamer, how his poet soul would groan could he know how his dream is unrhymed and unreasoned by our modern Gradgrinds ! The City of Destruction represents not the world, but a spiritual con- dition, and had Christian remained within its walls our fable would have died a-borning. Out from this city did he go with his face set toward the morning, nor did he go alone. So our Bunyan is thoroughly modern on this page of his book. The criticism noted is nar- row and unjust. Christian lays the matter be- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 15 fore his family at the very outset. In the sec- ond part of the book, his wife calls to mind how she did harden her heart against his loving per- suasions. And now, before the burden has been taken from his back, or the tears wiped from his eyes, he has begun to strive with his neighbors. Christian and Pliable walking side by side prove the fellowship of the faith ; prove that the first impulse of the saved is salvation ; prove that the new law of social service was recognized in Bedford Jail long years before the twentieth century had given it a name and hailed it as the exponent of a religious epoch. Together they stumble in the Slough of De- spond. This is a famous quagmire. It lies across the way to every great undertaking. Colum- bus waded through it for ten years as he wan- dered up and down Europe looking for a ship with which to sail the Western seas. Wash- ington slept in its frozen slime at Valley Forge. Many and many a young man or young woman longing for an education has found the Slough of Despond on the way to the college campus, and has stumbled into it more than once before the college course has been finished. It repre- sents here the doubts and fears that assail the seeking heart ; it is the reaction from hope, the backward swing of the pendulum, the fierce insidious undertow that crouches at the base of 16 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS the highest breakers and drags treacherously toward the sea depths. If you will listen to the two travelers you will notice that they were talking about heaven. Crowns of glory were flashing before their imagination. Seraphim and cherubim were standing in dazzling ranks about them ; golden harps were filling their confused souls with the ravishing harmonies of eternity. They were transported, bewildered, hypnotized, and Pli- able said eagerly, "Glad I am to hear of these things, my good companion ; come, let us mend our pace." And down they went into the bog, and the stifling ooze and mire put an end to their ecstasies. Better had they been minding their steps. Field glasses and telescopes and meridian circles, by which we note far-off horizons, are all right when the going is clear ; but it is good policy to watch the path just ahead when the way leads through the marsh. There is a time for heaven and there is a time for earth ; a time for toil and a time for triumph. The Lord of the vineyard paid full wages to the laborers who went in late because they made no con- ditions but left it all to his justice. God likes to be trusted to do what is right ; and the case of our unfortunate travelers shows how unto- ward may be the fate of those who count over WITH THE GREAT DREAMER i 7 their wages before they have taken up their tools. Moreover, it illustrates yet more fully the advantage of thorough conviction. Pliable floundered back to the starting place, while Christian pushed his way to the further side. Pliable had never felt himself to be a sinner, never had bowed under the weight of the bur- den, never had wept over the awful sentence of doom in the Book. It was a summer day's ramble to him. He had joined this enterprise because it seemed a proper thing to do, and had started to heaven because he could go in good company. "He that hath slight thoughts of sin never had great thoughts of God," said one of the Church fathers in his dusky cell at Bethlehem. And it might be said that no one can have great thoughts of God without having also an overwhelming sense of the sinfulness of sin, and that no one can acceptably come to God who minifies and palliates sin. Even if we grant, with the new way of thinking, that "Christian consciousness is un- dergoing a change"; that "the supreme ques- tion is not 'Am I saved ?' but 'What am I good for?' " that "the Christian world needs a new sense of guilt," this does not alter the con- ditions. It may change the emphasis but it does not weaken it. Let it be a new sense of 18 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS guilt or an old sense of guilt so that it be a clear sense of guilt. Let it be individual or communal, personal or social, so it drive the soul to God in helpless prayer. Then shall we have revivals. Then will our converts live and not need to be fed on the skim-milk of church socials, and looked after every day by a kindergarten committee whose business it is to see that the milk agrees with them and to keep them supplied with soothing syrup. Then will the sloughs in the path be but unpleasant incidents. "Only a little cloud," as the lion-hearted Athanasius said after forty years of conflict with the Roman emperors, twenty years of which had been spent in exile — "only a little cloud," as once more by the edict of Valens he went into the desert and sat himself down in his father's tomb. NIGHT THE SECOND THE WICKET GATE — BURNING THE BRIDGES I stood outside the gate, A poor, wayfaring child; Within my heart there beat A tempest loud and wild. "Mercy!" I loudly cried, "O give me rest from sin !' "I will," a voice replied; And Mercy let me in. In Mercy's guise I knew The Saviour long abused, Who often sought my heart, And wept when I refused. O, what a blest return For ignorance and sin! I stood outside the gate, And Jesus let me in. NIGHT THE SECOND The Wicket Gate — Burning the Bridges ISESSrJE accompany our hero tonight 3$3 jj through the second stage of his 1 journey. In the meantime he has met with sundry and various adventures. These are, how- ever, in the shadow and our camera does not reach them. We hasten to meet him at the Wicket Gate. This is the place of self-com- mittal. He has crossed the bridge, it must be burned behind him. He has beached his ships, they must now be broken up. On one side of this Gate is Today, on the other side is To- morrow. SO in process of time Christian got up to the gate. Now, over the gate there was written, "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." He knocked, therefore, more than once or twice, saying, "May I now enter here ? Will he within Open to sorry me, though I have been An undeserving rebel ? Then shall I Not fail to sing his lasting praise on high." At last there came a grave person to the gate, named Good-will, who asked who 21 22 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS was there, and whence he came, and what he would have. Chr. Here is a poor burdened sinner. I come from the City of Destruction, but am going to Mount Zion, that I may be deliv- ered from the wrath to come. I would therefore, sir, since I am informed that by this gate is the way thither, know if you are willing to let me in. Notice how transparently honest the man is. He attempts no concealment. He takes the risk of candor. Everything depends upon passing this gate, yet he makes no effort to con- ciliate the gate-keeper. He does not know but that his confession will shut the gate in his face, yet the confession is made. There is a time when the soul must speak out, when the burdened heart must unburden itself. Upon this necessity of our nature the Romish con- fessional is built and has exercised its tre- mendous power for centuries. That men and women have been benefited by this institution cannot for a moment be doubted. But there is a manifest weakness and incompleteness about it as it usually obtains. You go to Washing- ton to lay an important matter before the Presi- dent and you are not satisfied to see his secre- tary only. That which means life or death to you must be taken straight to headquarters. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 23 Yet there are thousands who talk with the priest who might talk with Jesus Christ; who kneel in the confessional and speak to a man when in their closets they might whisper in the ears of God. Nor did Christian take refuge in the short- comings of others. The porter gave him an excellent opportunity to do this. "Alas, poor man!" he said of Pliable, "is the celestial glory of so little esteem with him that he counteth it not worth running the hazards of a few difficul- ties to obtain it?" What a splendid opening this was ! Why, to be sure, he was better than Pliable. He had not thought of that before. What a miserable creature Pliable was, after all ! Just let attention be fixed upon him and kept there, and perhaps his own rags now so emphatically in evidence will be forgotten, and that wretched burden will be unseen. But we are dealing with a real man, and a real man never hides behind the failures of other men; never imagines that he will be rated solid if he can show that somebody else is selling short; never excuses himself for not belonging to the Church because "there are hypocrites in the Church." Hypocrites in the Church, do you say? Yes, I confess that is true. But that is a very small segment of the truth. Phillips Brooks was also in the Church, and Cookman, 24 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS and John Howard the friend of prisoners, and David Livingstone the savior of Africa, and Stephen, who died praying for his murderers, and John the Beloved — and Jesus of Nazareth. The cracks in the foundation of our neigh- bor's house will not help ours to stand. The frost that blights our neighbor's orchard will not make our fruit crop larger, especially if our trees grow just over the hedge from his. When the volcano pours its deluge of fire down the peaceful slopes, and buries great cities un- der the ashes, it will not save our home, if we have builded there, to know that other homes are clustered along the same hillsides and are exposed to the same dangers. The hypocrisy of others does not excuse our neglect. More- over, it is a pitiful, unmanly thing to insult the dying Jesus day after day by reminding him that there are many who are called after his name who do not seem to be much benefited by his sufferings and death. And so Christian makes no apology for him- self. He does not seek to palliate his offenses. With Othello, he says, "Speak of me as I am ; nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice." He puts the blame exactly where it belongs. He does not say that he has had no chance to do better; that his parents were too strict, or they were to easy; that his environ- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 25 ment has been unfortunate; that he has been beguiled by business associates or surprised by temptations which he did not understand. If he had lived in this century and had read Ibsen or Maarten Maartens, he would have learned there that all his evils were inherited. Rosmer never laughed because his family never laughed. The "Lady of the Sea" is to go mad because her mother was mad, and so must Ken- neth Gray. Indeed, the last-named was actu- ally mad until it was shown that madness was not a family trait. Wallace or John Fiske or Haeckel would have told him that he had been living too long in the City of Destruction; that environment had bound the burden upon his shoulders and planted the evil in his heart. According to Haeckel the freedom of the will is a pure dog- ma based on delusion. Every act of the will is as absolutely determined by the organization of the individual, and as dependent on the mo- mentary condition of his environment, as every other activity. The freedom of God even is attacked. Schopenhauer calls God a Blind Will. Hartmann calls him the Sublimated Consciousness. Matthew Arnold speaks of the Eternal Not-Ourselves, and Spencer of the Unascertained Something. A modern writer declares that if all this be true, then it is as log- 26 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS ical to exhort a man to change his creed as to grow six feet high. It is as unreasonable to blame him for being a rogue as it would be to blame him for having red hair. What a wild sea of flying scud and bleak sky lines we are driven upon when we trip the anchor of Free Will ! It is the hopeless pagan- ism of the City of Dreadful Night. The world rolls round forever like a mill ; It grinds out death and life and good and ill ; It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will. Man might know one thing were his sight less dim: That it whirls not to suit his petty whim; That it is quite indifferent to him. Nay, doth it use him harshly, as he saith? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath; Then grinds him back into eternal death. How is this any better than the crass fatalism of Omar the tentmaker, the voice out of twelfth-century pantheism, the fetich of twen- tieth-century dilettanteism ? We are no other than a moving row Of Magic shadow-shapes that come and go Round with this Sun-illumined Lantern, held In midnight by the Master of the show. Impatient pieces of the game he plays Upon this checkerboard of nights and days; Hither and thither, moves and checks and slays, And one by one back in the closet lays. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER ^ But the Dreamer in Bedford Jail had a healthy mind on this subject. His Pilgrim is, and has been, his own master. If there is any blame he alone will bear it. How many Eves there are handy when we essay Adam's un- manly trick of dodging responsibility! We can burn Rome without any care or compunc- tion, as there are always Christians enough to bear the blame. But why should our pilgrim seek to excuse himself? Why should we? If the physician is skillful enough to heal us, let us tell him all the symptoms. If God can save, then let him save us just as we are. There's a wideness in God's mercy- Like the wideness of the sea. And on that sea of mercy we float as a little ship floats on the Atlantic. Plenty of sea room, and the waters are deep, and the breezes that blow are fresh from the fields of glory, and the beat and throb of the sunny waves is the beat and throb of God's great heart that is full of compassion for our helplessness. O, the little birds sang East, And the little birds sang West, And I smiled to think God's greatness Flowed around our incompleteness, Round our restlessness his rest, 28 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS There is power in Christ. He can save to the uttermost. The dying sinner crucified with Jesus made but one prayer and all his sins were washed away in the blood that trickled down from the pierced brow, and he fell asleep on the cross to wake up in paradise. So let us be honest with God and be ready to take the con- sequences of our honesty. The state governor visited the penitentiary one day for the pur- pose of setting free some one prisoner. He passed from cell to cell investigating the sev- eral cases. One man was found who was sent there (according to his own story) through the prejudices of the judge. Another had an enemy who had made a false accusation. An- other had been deceived by his business part- ner and so was the innocent accessory to wrong. At last one man was found who had no excuse to make. He had nothing to say. He had done wrong and deserved all the pun- ishment he was receiving. "Strike off this man's chains," said the governor. "Send him out of here and let him go. He is the only criminal in the place and will ruin the charac- ter of every man inside the walls." "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to for- give us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Just as manifest is the honesty of God. Be- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 29 fore Christian goes another step he must know the character of his going. Before he commits himself he must understand the meaning and the consequences of such committal. GOOD-WILL. We make no objections against any, notwithstanding all that they have done before they came hither. They are "in no wise cast out," and therefore, good Christian, come a little way with me, and I will teach thee about the way thou must go. Look before thee ; dost thou see this narrow way? That is the way thou must go; it was cast up by the patriarchs, prophets, Christ, and his apostles ; and it is as straight as a rule can make it. This is the way thou must go. "But," said Christian, "are there no turn- ings or windings, by which a stranger may lose his way?" Good-will. Yes, there are many ways butt down upon this, and they are crooked and wide. But thus thou mayest distinguish the right from the wrong, the right only being straight and narrow. Of course, we know that the word "strait" in the gospel narrative means narrow, but let us allow Bunyan his own interpretation. It is a straight path. The Christian must be a straight man. "Let thine eyes look right on, 30 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Turn not to the right hand nor to the left." There is no room for a crooked transaction in the way of eternal life. Are you selling goods ? Then say what you know about those goods and take the chances with your customer. Are you working for a salary? It may be under the eight-hour system or the ten-hour system, but your employer is paying you for sixty min- utes in each one of those hours ; be sure that he gets the worth of his money. Are you in a position to affect the reputation of some man or woman by word or sign? Then this way, which is marked out by rule, is passable only by those who keep their lips by rule, even the Golden Rule, which demands that we "do unto others as we would have them do unto us." I have known some roads so crooked that you would be facing every point of the compass in a few minutes' walk. The man who visited Boston for the first time came back to the hotel out of breath, declaring that the streets were so tangled that he had met himself coming around a sharp corner several times. The road to heaven is better engineered. It lieth beau- tifully mathematically straight between its be- ginning and its end. He whose face is toward evil is standing still, or he is going away from the light. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 31 Moreover, it is so much easier to go straight. Crooked lines are complicated lines. Yonder in New York at Union Square is the "dead man's curve." As the Broadway car swings into that curve the conductor always calls out, "Hold hard !" There is jolt and jar that does not come on the straight track. Railroad companies will pay thousands of dollars, build bridges and tunnel mountains, just to straighten out a few miles of the roadway. One train on the New York Central and one on the Pennsylvania make the distance to Chi- cago in eighteen hours — an average of fifty-six miles an hour — outstripping the Sud Express in France at fifty miles, the Flying Scots- man at fifty and seven tenths, and the Cale- donian at fifty and one tenth. There is one stretch on the Central as straight as an arrow where the Empire State Express has made one hundred and twelve miles an hour — swifter than the wind, smoother than the summer stream. It is the curve that costs; the awful tempestuous swing of the whizzing train on the crooked track that grinds the rails and strains the machinery. Look back into your life. How little trouble you have made for yourself or for others when on the spiritual air line! How little you have done to be ashamed of when going straight! 32 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS The remorse, the stingings of conscience, the awful torture of self-condemnation — all these have come through side excursions. You would like to go back and live over some of your life ? How often have we longed for that privilege! But it is not the straight places that fill us with these regrets and longings, or that we would like to change. Has an audit- ing officer been appointed to examine your books? You have no shadow of fear about those pages where two and two make four, and where one hundred cents are counted to the dol- lar. Since the days of Euclid and of John Bunyan and of Jesus, the straight line has been regarded as "the shortest distance between two points." This is the only sure road to wealth ; it is not wise to attempt to go across lots. "Get-rich- quick" roads are unengineered roads and are not always passable. Insolvency or the peni- tentiary lies that way. Are you planning for a good time in this world ? Keep to the straight path. There are plenty of flowers in this path, and fewer ditches and quagmires. In my first years in the ministry, when I was just begin- ning to preach, I had occasion to speak from the words used by Ezekiel in reference to the mysterious living creatures seen in his vision down by the river Chebar — "And they went WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 33 every one straight forward." These words were applied to the Christian life, and the fol- lowing analysis was made : i. They went every one; that is, there was not an idler among them. 2. They went every one straight; that is, they knew the path, and kept it. 3. They went every one straight forward; that is, it is in the things which are ahead that we are to find a realization of our ideals. Whatever improvement may be made homi- letically, the philosophy of the above is beyond impeachment. Keep straight and you will keep safe. Keep straight forward and you will walk into the light. And so God dealt squarely with the man and the man dealt squarely with God; and so the wicket gate was passed, and so our story goes bravely on to the cross which stands on the summit of the hill just ahead, and which we shall reach when next we meet again. NIGHT THE THIRD AT THE CROSS -STRIPPING FOR THE FIGHT Backward look across the ages and the beacon mo- ments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by. Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, — Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. — Lowell, "The Present Crisis." NIGHT THE THIRD At the Cross — Stripping for the Fight HE affairs of our Pilgrim are approaching a crisis. He set out with a very indefinite purpose. His heart was heavy, his con- science was restless, his life was a torment. He wanted to get away from himself. He was filled with the fever of es- cape. It was not so much what might be ahead as what was really behind. Starting for the Gate which led away from the past, which indeed might mark the limit of the past, he fell into the Slough. Even the future then had its threats. He passed the Gate, but he found not even here the hoped-for divorce from self and sin and yesterday. He was still himself. He bore with sinking shoul- ders the fatal burden. The House of the In- terpreter lay along the way with its chambers of imagery. Here are glimpses of a new world and of larger things — a world, indeed, between the City of Destruction and the City of Re- ward : a life to live that is vibrant with to-day, that is in the present tense ; unsombered by the 37 38 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS land of woe whence he had come, and unhaloed by the land of glory whither he was going ; and which was in itself just as important as either. He must live to-day though he die and enter the gates of the city to-morrow. He must now become a citizen of this world between worlds. It had its own battles, hence he must get ready for fighting. It imposed its own burdens, hence he must get rid of the one he is carrying. THEN I saw in my dream that Chris- tian asked him further if he could not help him off with his burden that was upon his back; for as yet he had not got rid thereof, nor could he by any means get it off without help. He told him, "As to thy burden, be content to bear it, until thou comest to the place of deliverance; for there it will fall from thy back of itself." Now, I saw in my dream that the high- way up which Christian was to go was fenced on either side with a wall and that wall was called Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back. He ran on thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending; and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below, in the WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 39 bottom, a sepulcher. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulcher, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said, with a merry heart, "He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death." Thus the burden fell of its own accord. Do you know what that burden is? Ask the psalmist, and he says, "Mine iniquities are gone over mine head : as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me." Ask Tiberius, the foul and bloody emperor hiding in the island of Capri and writing the Roman Senate that the gods and goddesses could not in the future de- stroy him worse than he daily felt himself perishing. Ask Lady Macbeth, who hounds her husband to the murder of the King and who afterward walks the hall at midnight fast asleep, wild-eyed, haggard, feverishly trying to wash her hands, and muttering, "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him I" Christian had tried to remove the burden. He had heard of a Mr. Legality and had set 4 o MIDSUMMER NIGHTS out to find him. He would ease his conscience by conforming to moral law. He had learned of a Mr. Civility who might help him. The courtesies and gallantries and urbanities of so- cial life might relieve the self-torment. But the burden was there and the portentous eternal question was, "What shall I do?" Burden-bearers of this age and congrega- tion, there is nothing for you to do. It is all done. You are but to accept Jesus the Doer and Saviour. The ark rests yonder in the valley, and the fountains of the great deep are broken up, and the floods are coming. There is safety only in the ark. The cross stands out upon the hilltops, and the burden is heavy and hopeless and ruinous. Look only to the cross. The Saviour of men died upon it. He died to re- move that very burden. He brought unthink- able power to the task. He grappled with the problem in the might of an infinite capacity. Accept this and the heart grows light, all sense of ill departs, and the burden topples into the abysses. It is a question of surrender. This is the su- preme meaning of the cross. The centuries of ecclesiasticism and of pedantic definition have lumbered the religious world with theories of the atonement. Each theological handicrafts- man has laid down his ground plan and pre- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 41 pared his blue prints and demanded that the world build according to his lines. And it has meant death to deviate. But the cross means self-surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-burial. "Wiliest thou to be made whole?" contains the kernel of the gospel. When the human is ready to abdicate, the divine is ready to be enthroned. The easy yoke and the light burden are subject to our choice, and when we choose these we lose all others. God's servants need know no other master. Whatever the books may say, we have solved the problem of the atonement, when the soul is at one with God. The burden fell suddenly. There was a mo- ment when life was dark and the world was midnight. The next moment the sun was shin- ing and the birds were singing and it was broad day. This does not come to all, because all have not the same temperament, and all do not feel as Christian felt. The wise men of the schools have diverse ways of accounting for sudden conversions. For that there are such no one can deny. Saint Paul's experience proves this, and so scientists call his conversion "a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex." S. W. Hadley testifies that in a moment he "felt the glorious bright- ness of the noonday sun" shine into his heart. David Brainerd said, "While walking in a 42 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS grove unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul." These are unde- niable facts. They must be acknowledged and classified if not explained. It is, we are told, the sudden relaxation of the will, the reaction from the high nervous strain and the rush of feeling that follows such relaxation. "We drop down, give up, and don't care any longer," says Professor William James, of Harvard. "Let one do all in one's power and one's nerv- ous system will do the rest," declares Professor Starbuck, of California. "The passing of the soul," according to Carlyle, "from the everlast- ing No to the everlasting Yes through the cen- ter of Indifference." But whatever be the psychology of the change, the change comes, and it comes sud- denly where there has been the conviction of sin and the full resting of the soul upon Jesus Christ as Saviour from sin. This brings us back to the question of con- viction. Very few realize the sinfulness of sin as did John Bunyan. He felt with a vividness that we scarcely understand that the "heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." It was not a matter of creed, but of conviction. He did not learn this in the cate- chism from smiling and beribboned Sunday school teachers, or smug and complacent WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 43 priests. He learned it in the night watches when he walked the fields, or amid the blue glare of the fierce lightning when to his fevered brain the God of the storm was abroad. He whose youthful follies and indiscretions have been smiled at and extenuated by his biog- raphers says: "I was the very ringleader in vice and ungodliness." When we have more overwhelming convic- tion of sin we will have more instantaneous conversions from sin. When there are more who are ready to say to God in an agony of self-accusation, "Thou hast laid me in the low- est pit, thy wrath lieth hard upon me," then there will be more to shout in the triumph of deliverance, "He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay ; and he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God." Let yourself down into the deep shadows, spare not, palliate not, apologize not, and the hand of God will bring you up and the kindling dawn will be glorious upon the moun- tains. Carry the crushing burden for a few days and it will suddenly be taken off. Sit down in the seventh chapter of Romans with Paul, who cried out in a passion of soul weari- ness and pain, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" and by and by you will be led into the 44 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS eighth chapter on some Damascus Plain, amid the shining that will be above the brightness of the noonday sun. The burden was completely removed. Do you know Christian had no more burden as long as he lived? He walked untrammeled. He fought free-handed. His sins were gone. This is the glory of the Christian faith. Under its wing we go care-free and light. Is that too much to impose upon God, to ex- pect from God ? "The government shall be up- on his shoulders" ; surely our little burdens will not disturb him. "He measureth the waters in the hollow of his hand." There they are, the storming Atlantic, the vast unmapped, myste- rious Pacific, the seas that lash the coral strands of India, or that glitter in the icy sheen of the Northern Lights. In the hollow of his hand ! In the hollow of his hand ! "He weigheth the mountains in scales, and the hills in a bal- ance" — the Alps, and the Andes, and the awful lonely Himalayas, the cloud-walking Titans of the mystic East. And shall we fear lest we dis- tress and overburden him with our little daily cares ? And the burden rolled down the hillside until it came to the mouth of the sepulcher, where it fell in, and it was seen no more. So many of the world burdens have gone down into sepul- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 45 chers. The Crusades swept from Europe to- ward Palestine; and the marshes of Hungary, and the waves of the Mediterranean, and the sword of Saladin destroyed the thousands, and into their graves went down with them the feudalism and tyrannies of the past. The Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century is one of the most awful pages of history. The people were slaughtered, the cities were laid in ashes, and central Europe became a vast ceme- tery. But in that cemetery were buried the political pretensions of the Papacy, and so the world was made free to worship God in its own chosen way. At Gettysburg and Fort Donelson and Cold Harbor were laid away thousands of the boys in blue and the boys in gray, and a hundred thousand hearts were broken when the smoke of battle cleared away ; but at the same time and in the same grave were laid away the rusty chains and bloody whips of American slavery, and never more shall the flag of the stripes and the stars wave over a man who can be sold on the auction block by his fellow man. It is a ghastly, ter- rific sight — these death-throes of evil, these in- furiate paroxysms of the race; but civilization has come that way, and civilization is worth all it has cost. And so the burden went out of sight. How 46 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS vivid is the Bible language in which is de- scribed the removal of sin ! Hear it : "I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions." Can you find the clouds after the thunder has ceased and the leaves are shaking the remnants of the shower from their glistening coats and the storm has swept down the horizon ? "He will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea." Ah, how far down is that? Just north of Saint Thomas the lead sinks four miles before it touches bottom. The sailor who looks up at the volcanic mass of Sunday Island, hiding its head in the clouds, knows that sheer down from the foot of this rock the sea drops nearly six miles to its bottom : an awful plunge into awful depths where the loftiest mountain on the earth could be buried and not a trace be left! There are places where the bottom has not yet been reached ; vast abysses beyond the measurement of man. Tradition has it that an entire continent once slipped down into the sea gloom and left only a few islands to mark its burial place. The navies of the world, the mighty ships that "thunderstrike the walls of rock-built cities" — these move upon the surface during their little day and then go down to the unlighted depths. It is all dark and weird and uncanny in these still and awful deeps, and there our repented sins are to be buried. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 47 "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our trespasses from us." Do you suppose the writer of these words had any conception of their vastness and majesty ? Per- haps with him "from east to west" meant from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean — perhaps from star to star as he saw the stars with the naked eye from the hilltops of Judea. He did not know what the ten-year-old boy knows now, that the nearest fixed stars are mighty suns so far away that their blaze is dwindled to a spark. He did not know that there are hundreds of millions of suns greater than ours, and that beyond this universe, the edges of which are so remote that thought is staggered as we try to conceive it — beyond this is a vast empty space, the desert that engulfs creation; and then beyond this void may be other uni- verses far more splendid than this of which we form a part. Suppose a mighty angel should take us in his arms and bear us away on a voyage of dis- covery; suppose that every beat of his wings swept him three thousand miles along, and that these wing strokes were made at the rate of two every second. The hero of Jules Verne journeyed round the world in eighty days. Miss Nellie Bly made the trip in seventy-two days. We would make the dis- 4 8 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS tance in four seconds. Now let the angel lift his gigantic pinions and start outward. Past the sun in four hours ! In five days, having sighted Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, we would have reached sturdy old Neptune pacing up and down his lonely beat on the border land of our system. Now take a long breath and hold hard, for, though the little earth has long since faded out of sight, the journey is but just be- gun. Like the ocean liner that has just passed down New York harbor and has left Sandy Hook on the right and Rockaway Beach on the left, the great sea is before us. Yonder twin- kling through vague distance is the nearest fixed star, and a hundred years will have gone, in spite of our tremendous speed, before we have reached it. And still ahead, and far over illim- itable spaces, are other stars and towering con- stellations and stupendous systems. Yea, after a thousand years have passed in which with our heavenly guide we have flashed on unceasingly, all about us afar and anear will blaze these mighty suns, for there is no end and there is no beginning to the universe of God. Out there in the bleak shadows of remoteness the sins we have forsaken are lost. They have no more dominion over us. They will never more find us ; they cannot reach our world ; they are gone and gone forever. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 4 9 THEN he stood still a while to look and wonder; for it was very sur- prising to him that the sight of the cross should thus ease him of his burden. He looked therefore, and looked again, even till the springs that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks. Now as he stood looking and weeping, behold three Shining Ones came to him and sa- luted him with "Peace be to thee." So the first said to him, "Thy sins be forgiven thee" ; the second stripped him of his rags, and clothed him "with change of raiment" ; the third also set a mark on his forehead and gave him a roll with a seal upon it, which he bade him look on as he ran, and that he should give it in at the Celestial Gate. Over in Manhattan there is a curbstone on one of the streets, and every year on a certain day a woman comes and kneels at this stone and renews her vows to God. One night years ago she was found there by a city missionary. There she gave her heart to God and by a miracle of grace was gloriously saved. There she found the cross. This is her Mecca — the dearest spot on earth to her, the place where the burden fell away and all her sins were forgiven. Have you such a memory as this? Have you found the cross — a place where you may go 50 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS and say, "Here God for Christ's sake took away- all the sin out of my life" ? If so, you are safe ; you are ready to live the real life, you are ready to live the life that prepares for life. O sacred hour ! O hallowed spot ! Where love divine first found me ; Wherever falls my distant lot, My heart will linger round thee. And when from earth I rise to soar Up to my home in heaven, Down will I cast my eyes once more Where I was first forgiven. NIGHT THE FOURTH THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL — GOING INTO COMMISSION One army of the living God, To his command we bow ; Part of his host have crossed the flood, And part are crossing now. E'en now by faith we join our hands With those that went before ; And greet the blood-besprinkled bands On the eternal shore. NIGHT THE FOURTH The House Beautiful — Going into Commission E spend this evening in the House Beautiful. This place of rest and refreshment stood hard by the way and was reached at the end of a long and trying day. "It was built by the Lord of the hill for the re- lief and security of pilgrims." According to our scheme this house represents the Church. Christian has entered the wicket gate, has given himself to the service of God, has rejoiced in the pardon of sin at the cross; now the next thing in order is the communion of saints, the union with others in the word of life. The path which passes the cross leads straight to the Church. There is no other way so sure and so safe. Faithful, a com- panion whom Christian found later on, did not stop here ; did not unite with the Church. But he always held a subordinate position. When- ever heroic deeds were to be done he waited for Christian to do them. And he died early, as if Bunyan was not willing to trust him long in a 53 54 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS Christian life which was not associated with the Church. Let us go with our good friend as he leaves the cross and journeys toward the Church. Other men have passed this way. Perhaps there is some one here who is in this stage of the journey — beyond the cross, but not in the Church ; saved, but not among the saved ; a dis- ciple of Jesus, but coming to him by night — using God, but of no public use to God ; a mem- ber of the church general, but uncounted among the sacramental hosts who have elected to rep- resent God on the earth. At the bottom of the hill on which stands the cross he finds three men asleep, Simple, Sloth, and Presumption. With the restlessness born of eager enthusiasm and an ever-present sense of danger, he wakens them and urges them forward. Simple replies to his urging, in substance, "Why should I go on? Why join the Church ? It is just as safe outside. I see no danger." There are some dangers which may not be seen. Many a good ship has gone down be- cause the pilot did not see the rock that crouched beneath the waves and waited to de- stroy. A long and dangerous illness came to me once from drinking a glass of water. It was clear and cold and refreshing. I could see WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 55 no peril there ; but typhoid germs lurked in its crystal depths, and death sat there with them, and only by an awful struggle was his relent- less ambushed power broken. Bunyan wishes to teach that there is danger outside the Church and only simple souls are satisfied be- cause they do not see it. Sloth rubs his blinking eyes and growls, "Yet a little more sleep." He represents those who regard church membership as of too much trouble; church services too wearying; church obligations too exacting; who prefer a Sunday of idleness to a Sunday of worship; who are too indolent to make an effort, too selfish to make any sacrifice. The third man is Presumption, and he says, "Every tub must stand on its own bottom." He is the man who is just as good as the church member. For a man may think he is a great sinner and too bad to join the Church, or the pendulum may swing to the other extreme and he may think he is a great saint, and therefore too good. But, to return to our self-complacent slum- berer, there never yet was made a tub that could stand on its own bottom alone. There must be something for the bottom to stand on. The old pre-astronomic theory of elephant and tortoise and rocks as a good resting place for 56 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS the earth is not good cosmography; it is not good theology. There must be something be- low the lowest. Foundations come first. There is no real independence. Never yet lived the man who could live unto himself. No traveler sets out alone and at random to cross the desert. He goes with the caravan and keeps to the ancient path. No steamship cap- tain ever attempts to navigate the Atlantic on his own responsibility. He must have a license from the proper authorities and he uses a certi- fied chart and compass. No sane tourist ever dares to scale the Alps alone. He must have his guide and in many instances must be tied by ropes to his guide. The last great truth taught by the eighteenth century was the independence of man. It came reeking with the smoke of a hundred battle- fields and red with the blood of nations. Its watchword was, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." It was but putting into political economy the axiom of the ancient book that God, that is, the Eternal Nature of things, is no 1 respecter of persons. While Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, a paper which shaped the thinking of the political world, and in which this sentiment is formulated, Adam Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, a WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 57 book which shaped the policy of the business world for a hundred years. The same ideas are here expressed, that what each man wants is liberty and equality. Only this and he can then take care of himself. But this is not enough. France had learned the lesson better because France had attended a fiercer school. On her public buildings and on her fountains and on her great seal she has stamped another word. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" is the mystic triumvirate of the later dispensation, and not the least of these is Fraternity. And as the last great truth learned by the eighteenth century was the independence of man, so the last great truth learned by the nineteenth century was the interdependence of man. This immense revelation is as old as Saint Paul's letter to the Romans; for to the puissant rulers of the world empire this radical reformer wrote, "We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak." I am glad we have the Church. It means safety and it means power. I am of but little consequence myself, but if I can unite with nine hundred and ninety-nine others when I speak or when I vote, my voice or my vote will have in it the impact of a thousand men. The Church would have been swept from the earth centuries ago, humanly speaking, if it had not 58 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS been organized. Martin Luther's Reformation would have been buried in the grave with him in the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg if there had not sprung up a party in the heart of Germany to perpetuate his teachings. John Wesley would be known, perhaps, as a dangerous her- etic branded and bridled by the English Estab- lishment had not a body of men banded them- selves together and given being to an inde- pendent Church. Three millions of slaves would have died with their fetters on, and their poor emaciated bodies would have been huddled into shallow holes in the corner of Southern cotton fields, or sunk in the slimy lagoons of Southern swamps, if the freedom-loving sentiments of Beecher and Phillips and Lincoln had not been solidified into a great political party and then hurled at the heart of the monster whose wings darkened one half our national domain. The fouler vam- pire of intemperance, prowling night and day along our streets and crouching on the thresh- old of every home, will never be strangled until men and women combine in some distinct polit- ical upheaval and take for their motto the his- toric war cry, "Live or die, sink or swim, sur- vive or perish, the saloon must go !" Get into the ranks, brother. It may not be true that God is always on the side of the larg- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 59 est battalions, but the larger the battalion, the better the terms it can make with the enemy. Join the Church, for your coming will add that much weight to this great steam hammer that is grinding to powder the evil things, and the unjust things, and the degrading things with which the world is cursed. We have fallen upon evil times. The Presi- dent of the United States feels justified in charging great business corporations with actual and shameless robbery. The Beef Trust, according to accredited witnesses, has been poisoning the people by wholesale. The coal barons and the railroads that are in the deal have fixed the minimum price of coal for the next ten years; the maximum price will de- pend, we are told, upon what the public will stand. These are the things the people are talking about. If these charges are true, then there is need of a strong hand to correct such evils. If they are not true, then there is needed an imperative voice to quiet the tumult and to rebuke the slander. Moreover, nations do not live by bread alone any more than does a man. They live on ideals, on great incontrovertible truths, on lofty aspirations. It is an accepted principle of his- tory that no nation in which a single element has gained the mastery can long prosper. This 6o MIDSUMMER NIGHTS is the characteristic of the ancient civilizations. In the civilization of India, of Egypt, of Rome, one element overshadows all others — of reli- gion, of militarism, of monarchism, for in- stance. Contrast with these examples the cor- related forces of English life — the Church, the nobility, and the throne — or the active prin- ciples of the German Zeitgeist. In this latter the rigid military discipline, the philosophy of Kant and Schiller and Fichte, and even the more thoughtful phases of Socialism, all work- ing together, have produced a sure and steady growth that has given Germany an assured place among the world powers. Look now at the American life. Our fathers had much to do when they came to these shores. The gown of the scholar, the pen of the scribe, were laid aside for ax and saw. This was the pioneer spirit, but the days of pioneering are past. It was the stimulant, and there is always danger that the stimulant for the weak man will forge a habit for the strong man and the last case be worse than the first. The quick heart throbs of our young and lusty national life have produced fever; and there are not wanting symptoms that the fever is becoming chronic. One of the standing menaces to our future is the mercantile spirit, the crass mate- rialism born in the early days of our republic, WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 61 the money-making Philistine that would blind the shorn Samsons of art and literature and religion and set them grinding at his mill. The Church which has a mission to the times is a Church for the times: not the rich man's Church nor yet the poor man's Church; but the serene, gentle-voiced mother of all where there is weakness or where there is error, and the impartial star-browed goddess of justice where there is wrong. AND he lifted up his eyes, and behold there was a very stately palace be- fore him, the name of which was Beautiful; and it stood just by the high- way side. So I saw in my dream that he made haste and went forward, that if possible he might get lodging there. Now, before he had gone far, he entered into a very narrow passage, which was about a fur- long off the porter's lodge; and, looking very narrowly before him as he went, he espied two lions in the way. Now, thought he, I see the dangers that Mistrust and Tim- orous were driven back by. (The lions were chained, but he saw not the chains.) Then he was afraid, and thought also him- self to go back after them, for he thought nothing but death was before him. But the porter at the lodge, whose name is 62 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS Watchful, perceiving that Christian made a halt as if he would go back, cried unto him, saying, "Is thy strength so small? Fear not the lions, for they are chained, and are placed there for trial of faith where it is, and for discovery of those that had none. Keep in the midst of the path, and no hurt shall come unto thee." Then I saw that he went on, trembling for fear of the lions ; but taking good heed to the directions of the porter, he heard them roar, but they did him no harm. Then he clapped his hands, and went on till he came and stood before the gate where the porter was. Then said Chris- tian to the porter, "Sir, what house is this? And may I lodge here to-night?" The porter answered, "This house was built by the Lord of the hill, and he built it for the relief and security of pilgrims." There were in this house certain keen-witted damsels whose business it was to talk to stran- gers and to get at the facts in the case. For they had tramps even in those days. There is such a thing as entertaining an angel unawares who may not be a good angel. Ever since the days of the Wooden Horse and of Pandora people have been a little careful what and whom they admit within the gates to stay overnight. A moderate amount of heresy-hunting, espe- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 63 daily before the heretic has been naturalized, is not bad politics. And so these ladies come to talk with Christian and to take his measure. The first was Discretion, grave and beautiful but shrewd. Whence did he come, whither was he going? What had he seen, and what was his name? The custom of asking a new con- vert to speak is an old custom apparently. And when he finished speaking the tears were in her eyes. Ah, the brain might be keen and search- ing, but the heart was tender. And tender and loving and sympathetic is the Church, even when it is asking questions and testing the fitness of a candidate. No amount of repented sin, no degree of ignorance, no poverty of purse, need keep a man out of the Church if he really wants to come in — if he come not to mend but to be mended ; not as a critic of creed or disseminator of perverse doc- trines; not as a poacher looking for game in well-kept preserves, nor a Captain Dalgetty expecting "a consideration"; but as a humble teachable sinner, saved and seeking to save. Our traveler was sinful and poor and ragged and ignorant, but, "Come in, thou blessed of the Lord," the good woman exclaims when she finds him in earnest ; and, bowing his head rev- erently and respectfully, he enters the door. Other conversations there were with other 64 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS charming maidens, by which, in being reminded of the deliverance of the past, his faith was strengthened for the future; and by which he was caused to see that wherein once his whole motive had been to get the reward of righteous living, now his desire was to "see Him alive that did hang dead on the cross." All this I commend to your reading. We are concerned with his visit to the ar- mory and an examination of the weapons that in the hands of faithful men had changed the history of the world. THE next day they took him and had him into the armory, where they showed him all manner of furni- ture, which their Lord had provided for pilgrims, as sword, shield, helmet, breast- plate, all-prayer, and shoes that would not wear out. And there was here enough of this to harness out as many men for the service of their Lord as there be stars in the heaven for multitude. They also showed him some of the en- gines with which some of his servants had done wonderful things. They showed him Moses's rod; the hammer and nail with which Jael slew Sisera; the pitchers, trumpets, and lamp, too, with which Gideon put to flight the armies of Midian. Then they showed him also the ox's goad WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 65 wherewith Shamgar slew six hundred men. They showed him also the jawbone with which Samson did such mighty feats. They showed him, moreover, the sling and stone with which David slew Goliath of Gath; and the sword, also, with which their Lord will kill the Man of Sin, in the day that he shall rise up to the prey. They showed him, besides, many excellent things, with which Christian was much delighted. This done, they went to their rest again. All this is the property of the Church. It was for the sake of the Church of God, just breaking away from Egypt, that the rod of Moses wrought wonders on the Nile, and brought an appalling darkness, and divided asunder the Red Sea for the safe passage of the chosen people. The pebble that smote the Giant of Gath in the forehead was sent to re- buke this blatant defiant enemy of the Church established at Shiloh and Gibeah and Ramah. The suggestion of the Book is that all this artillery is still kept in the Church. I do not mean to say that the broken pitchers and the lamps of Gideon are still preserved in some dark closet of our building. The dishes we keep in many of our church kitchens are often ancient and battered enough to be treasured as historic and musty relics, but they are dis- 66 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS tinctly modern. What is meant is that the same divine power that wrought at midnight in the Valley of Jezreel when Midian fled before the shout, "The sword of the Lord and of Gideon," is still manifest in the operations of the Church. We may not have David's sling, but we have his songs, and many a giant of doubt and dis- may has gone down before them. The rod of Moses was not more potent than the rules of Moses, written on tables of stone, published to the world, and molding civilization. The "I am that I am" was not more certainly the God of Israel than he is the God of the modern reli- gious dispensation. Elijah and Isaiah and Ezra received orders from the same source and help from the same hand that directs and sus- tains our leaders to-day. It is a good thing to belong to the Church. It was a good thing to be an Israelite in the day that the hailstones fell upon all Egypt save the dwellings of the Hebrew slaves, and in the night that God's destroying angel passed through the land. But it is better to belong to "the general assembly and church of the first- born who are enrolled in heaven." Our High Priest hath obtained a more excellent ministry. He is the Mediator of "a better covenant, which was established upon better promises." We are working with God. We are part of WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 67 God's plan. We are taking up the work where Jesus left it and carrying it forward under his orders. We are of those for whom he made his wonderful prayer as he stood in the shadow of the cross and said, "I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil." Will you not come into the House Beautiful ? It was here that Christian found his armor. Here they "harnessed him from head to foot with what was of proof, lest perhaps he should meet with assaults in the way." Here he re- ceived the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. The Bible is the gift of the Church, as well as a gift to the Church. There would be no Bible if there had been no Church, as the Church made the Bible and then has pre- served it through the ages. Here he received the helmet of salvation. What would the world know of salvation if the Church had not preached it from its pulpits and illustrated it in its activities. Here was given the shield of faith, and how long would faith last in the world if the Church should die and all its operations cease? Christian is to need this armor soon. Just ahead lurks a formidable and relentless enemy. He will be lost without his sword and shield. And so will you. You will not be twenty-four 68 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS hours older before you will be attacked. Are you ready? A well-known bishop once said that when he was a boy he started on a long journey. His mother was a quiet woman and said but little when deeply stirred, and so somehow he was not quite satisfied with the farewell. As he walked down the street the thought came that he might never see her again, and he went back to ask for her blessing. She was on her knees. He knelt by her side, and as he knelt there she laid her hands on his head and said, "God bless you, my boy, and bring you safe home when your work is done." Before he returned the mother passed away. In her death hour she asked for paper to write a letter to her boy. She tried to write a stanza of her favorite hymn, E'en down to old age all my people shall prove My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love. She wrote only, "E'en down to old age." There the tired hand failed and the pen dropped, and the loving mother went home. "I have that letter yet," said the beautiful- souled bishop, "a tiny strip of faded yellow paper, and no money on earth could buy it." The Church is to us as a message from our mother and our father ; it is our heritage from • . . __- - - :.:taftrt.a,wrjffin;iuciji.ri n. : iP) uumi M < i M:* m Lmm* im WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 6 9 the past. The God of the Church is the God of the family and the God of every human heart. Here is the House Beautiful. If you really want to please God and stand with his people here and rejoice with the loved ones redeemed, "Come in, thou blessed of my Father," and take a place among us in his name. NIGHT THE FIFTH THE FIRST BATTLE They only who reconquer day by day The inch of ground they camped on overnight Have right of foothold on this crowded earth. -~-Edith Wharton. "Vesalius in Zante. NIGHT THE FIFTH The First Battle mmmm /I ROM the House Beautiful the *tfP 1 path leads down into the Valley of Humiliation. It is a strange route to heaven, a strange se- quel to the rapt experiences of the past few days. But it is the highest breaker that has the strongest undertow; it is the day after the feast that the headache comes. A re- action will follow even religious excitement. We cannot keep holiday all the time. So down into the dusky valley he goes where the great enemy awaits ; and the battle of his life is on. BUT now in this Valley of Humiliation poor Christian was hard put to it; for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him ; his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back or to stand his ground. But he considered again that he had no armor for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him the greater advan- 73 > — ._— . 74 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS tage with ease to pierce him with his darts. Therefore he resolved to venture and stand his ground; "for," thought he, "had I no more in mine eye than the saving of my life, it would be the best way to stand." So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now, the monster was hideous to behold: he was clothed with scales, like a fish (and they are his pride), he had wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, and out of his belly came fire and smoke, and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion. When he was come up to Christian, he beheld him with a disdainful countenance, and thus began to question with him: — Let us note quickly that Christian has no armor for his back. What a shock this dis- covery must have given him ! Perhaps he had never thought of it before. Whether he wished it or not he must stand his ground ; retreat was disarmament, and disarmament was defeat. A good soldier needs no armor for his back. His enemies are all and always in front. Safety lies in going ahead. The danger that is behind will overtake us only if we stop ; the danger that is in front may not last long enough for us to reach it. Nine tenths of the troubles that make the hair prematurely gray never come. There are chained lions all along the WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 75 way, and we see the lions long before we see the chains. The courage symbolized by the armor for the breast so often wins by showing us the emptiness of our fears. We not only break our idols but we conquer many of our enemies by going to see them. Distance some- times magnifies terror as well as lends enchant- ment. The things that threatened me Ne'er looked but on my back; when they shall see The face of Caesar, they are vanished. Moreover, there are no arrangements for defeat in God's plans. When he sends the millions of Israel out of Egypt he closes up the Red Sea behind them so that they cannot get back if they would. When he sends forth the disciples from Jerusalem to evangelize the world he tears up the very site of the old city with a Roman plow, and gives another name to the new city built on the ruins — a name it wears for a hundred years. Sherman cut himself loose from Atlanta and started for the sea, two hundred and fifty miles away. Hood was be- hind him with a formidable army, but he kept his eyes front and in less than thirty days he came in sight of the blue Atlantic. With fifty thousand men he had passed through the heart of the Confederacy. A defeat would have 76 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS been ruin, as he had no base of supplies and no possible hope of reinforcements. But he did not intend to be defeated. There is no armor for the back in our Chris- tian warfare. There is no provision for a retrograde movement. We are to be "stead- fast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as we know that our labor is not in vain in the Lord." Before the fiend attacks he argues. Before he puts on the pressure he tries the power of persuasion. The syllogism first, and then the sword. He is too astute to use violence unless it is unavoidable. He can manage the most of us without any friction and without showing his hand. If he had tried harsh measures with you, perhaps you would have resisted and repu- diated him. But he talks and you stop to listen. The first claim he makes is that Christian is his subject : A POL. Whence come you? and whither are you bound? Chr. I am come from the City of Destruction, which is the place of all evil, and am going to the City of Zion. Apol. By this I perceive thou art one of my subjects, for all that country is mine; and I am the prince and god of it. How is WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 77 it, then, that thou hast run away from thy king? Were it not that I hope thou mayest do me more service, I would strike thee now at one blow to the ground. Chr. I was born indeed in your do- minions, but your service was hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on, "for the wages of sin is death"; there- fore, when I was come to years, I did as other considerate persons do, look out, if perhaps I might mend myself. Apol. There is no prince that will thus lightly lose his subjects, neither will I as yet lose thee. But since thou complainest of thy service and wages, be content to go back: what our country will afford I do here promise to give thee. He lets it all out here. I venture to say he had never made that claim before. Most prob- ably he had told Christian that he was all right — a great deal better than some who made a larger profession. Apollyon does not stamp his trademark where it may be seen, on all his goods. A man may belong to him for years without knowing it ; at any rate, without hav- ing that knowledge unpleasantly forced upon him. He is a most agreeable silent partner and never seems to interfere in the conduct of the business. But the truth will come after a 78 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS while. Vice will show itself in the face in due time. Who cuts himself loose from the bal- loon in midair must strike somewhere. Dr. Jekyll is master of himself and master of Mr. Hyde for a season; then Mr. Hyde becomes master. The volcanic fires may burn down deep in the heart of the mountain for centuries, and the vines be green and the olive orchards be laden with fruit along the sunny slopes. But the water is slowly trickling down toward the subterranean furnace, and some awful day the earth will be shaken and the cities be swept into death. "In vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird." It is a very foolish bird that slips his head into a visible noose. Even if he is trapped he does not at once discover it. But the time comes when the deadly meshes will stand revealed. There is a quaint old story of the Middle Ages which tells how once upon a time a church member died at a ball. Along came Satan and was soon flying away with the bewildered soul. Saint Peter espied him and started in pursuit. "Hold on," said the watchful guardian of the gate; "just pass him over to me, if you please. He was a Christian. He is my property." "Maybe he was," growled Satan, "but you keep your hands off ; I found him on my prem- ises and down he goes." This story is five WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 79 hundred years old, and is not, as you might sus- pect, a sly invention of Methodism. The next argument of Apollyon is that Chris- tian is not sure of himself : A POL. Thou hast already been un- faithful in thy service to him; and how dost thou think to receive wages of him? Chr. Wherein, O Apollyon, have I been unfaithful to him? Apol. Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast almost choked in the Gulf of Despond ; thou didst attempt wrong ways to be rid of thy burden, whereas thou shouldest have stayed till thy Prince had taken it off; thou didst sinfully sleep and lose thy choice thing; thou wast also almost persuaded to go back at the sight of the lions ; and when thou talkest of thy journey, and of what thou hast heard and seen, thou art inwardly desirous of vain glory in all that thou sayest or doest. Aha, how long since Apollyon turned friend to pilgrims ? This is the kindest thing he could do. Nothing better can happen to us than to be told our shortcomings occasionally. A man wants a good friend to tell him what he can do, and he wants pretty often a good enemy to tell him what he has done that ought to have been 8o MIDSUMMER NIGHTS left undone, and what he has left undone that he ought to have done. A healthy, honest, calculating, observing, unmuzzled, businesslike enemy is sometimes the best friend we can have. All hail to our enemies ! Long may they live and keep their rods in pickle ! If they tell the truth about us, send them a vote of thanks, and get the most out of it. If they tell what is not the truth, then remember they are only saying what they would like us to do, and hinting at the way they would make it hot for us if we should do it; and always bear this in mind, that a wise man may make a mistake once, but it is the fool who makes the same mistake a second time. Apollyon's third argument is a reflection upon God : "•"CONSIDER what thou art like to meet \^ with in the way that thou goest. Thou knowest that, for the most part, God's servants come to an ill end, be- cause they are trangressors against me and my ways. How many of them have been put to shameful deaths ! And, besides, thou countest his service better than mine; whereas, he never came yet from the place where he is, to deliver any that served him out of their hands : but, as for me, how many times, as all the world very well knows, have I delivered, either by power WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 81 or fraud, those that have faithfully served me, from him and his, though taken by them ! And so I will deliver thee." God's servants come to an evil end ; God does not seem to trouble himself about human af- fairs ; God's world seems to be a bad place for Christians. This is the time-worn tale. This is the voice out of the ages ; the specter of evil that stalks across the plains of human thought ; the nightmare that sat in the ash-heaps with Job and made him curse with cracked and festering lips the day on which he was born; the ghastly, querulous pessimism that whis- pered treason even in the heart of the buoyant shepherd psalmist, and snarled, "Who will show us any good ?" When shall we ever understand the mystery of suffering and hard luck? When shall we ever realize that God does not promise his chil- dren sugarplums, or railroad stock, or good digestion? To be sure, the Bible promises de- liverance from the fowler's snare and from the noisome pestilence. "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night ; nor for the arrow that flieth by day ; nor for the pestilence that walk- eth in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. It shall not come nigh thee." But the Bible moves on spiritual levels, 82 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS and it handles the material objects and facts as symbols only. If the psalmist meant in the lit- eral, natural sense that no plague should come nigh the dwelling of the righteous, then he had forgotten his own experience ; or he had filed an exception in his own case ; or he was ready to confess that he was not righteous. The spiritual nature can never be success- fully invaded from without. The kingdom of heaven within us can only be shaken by inward foes. This is the meaning of it all. Grisly plague and haggard pestilence can never climb to the seat of the soul. In its far ranges, cloud- belted and aloof, the human spirit sits serene. The soul, secured in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. Paul knelt blindfolded upon the grass that skirted the Ostian Road, and the keen sword of the executioner smote his faithful head from his shoulders. But if you could have inter- preted the spirit of that weapon as it whistled on its dread mission you might have heard it say, "It is all right, Paul. I am here to take your poor life only. I cannot come nigh your soul." John Huss, the martyr teacher and preacher of Bohemia, stood in the midst of the flame singing praises to God, and the fire whis- pered as it crept upward about his suffering WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 83 body, "Receive me, thou glorious servant of God. I am thy best friend. I shall do thee no harm, but am sent, like Elijah's chariot of old, to bear thee into the eternities." "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you," said Jesus to his terror-stricken dis- ciples, cowering in the shadow of an unknown and imminent evil. Peace, did he say? — this man who had not where to lay his head ; who was hounded by plotting enemies; who knew when he uttered these words that in less than twenty-four hours spikes of iron would be driven through his hands and a howling mob would be watching his death throes. Ah, the dwelling-place of his kingly serenity was too deep down to be reached by the cruel nails, or disturbed by the fierce cries of his foes. This may be your refuge in the day of shak- ing and of great distress. Five hundred feet down beneath the ocean waves there are no waves. The great waters abide in an unbroken and an eternal calm. The scream of the storm- bird, the hiss of the vengeful winds through the broken rigging, the crunch and grind of rend- ing timbers, the growl of sullen, ruthless break- ers — all this is unheard and unknown in the depths. Rudyard Kipling, in the remarkably pene- trative way that has made him famous, sings : 84 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar — Down to the dark, the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are. There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep, On the great gray level plains of ooze, where the shell- burred cables creep. Here in the womb of the world — here on the tie-ribs of earth, Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat- Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth — For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet. "In the day of trouble he shall keep me se- cretly in his pavilion : in the covert of his tab- ernacle shall he hide me." Dwell deep ! Penetrate even to the secret of his presence ; hide even in the inner room of his tent, and then shall no changes of season or place make any change in your mind. Dwell deep! God promises to keep that which you have committed unto him, the interests of your soul ; and if that be safe it matters little what else may go. Dwell deep ! for better than the dawn-lighted heathen Cato may we realize the force of the words that have been put into his mouth by Addison, and addressed to his soul : WITH THE GREAT DREAMER The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years ; But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the war of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds. 85 THEN Apollyon broke out into a grievous rage, saying, "I am an enemy to this Prince; I hate his person, his laws, and people; I am come out on purpose to withstand thee." Chr. Apollyon, beware what you do; for I am in the King's highway, the way of holiness; therefore take heed to yourself. Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, "I am void of fear in this matter ; prepare thyself to die ; for I swear by my infernal den, that thou shalt go no further; here will I spill thy soul." And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast; but Christian had a shield in his hand, with which he caught it, and so prevented the danger of that. Then did Christian draw, for he saw it was time to bestir him; and Apollyon as fast made at him, throwing darts as thick as hail; by the which, notwithstanding all that Christian could do to avoid it, Apollyon wounded him in his head, his hand, and his foot. This made Christian give a little back; Apollyon therefore fol- MIDSUMMER NIGHTS lowed his work amain, and Christian again took courage, and resisted as manfully as he could. This sore combat lasted for above half a day, even till Christian was almost quite spent; for you must know that Christian, by reason of his wounds, must needs grow weaker and weaker. Then Apollyon, espying his opportunity, began to gather up close to Christian, and, wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall; and with that Christian's sword flew out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, "I am sure of thee now." And with that he had almost pressed him to death, so that Christian began to despair of life; but, as God would have it, while Apollyon was fetching of his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this good man, Christian nimbly stretched out his hand for his sword, and caught it, saying, "Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall I shall rise," and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back, as one that had received his mortal wound. Christian, perceiving that, made at him again, saying, "Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us." And with that Apollyon spread forth his dragon's wings, and sped him away, that Christian for a season saw him no more. NIGHT THE SIXTH VANITY FAIR — FIGHTING ON LOW LEVELS Quantus est in rebus inane. — Persius. NIGHT THE SIXTH Vanity Fair — Fighting on Low Levels HERE are two of them now. After passing the dark valley of trial Christian climbed a hill that had been thrown up so that pil- grims might see about them. From the summit he saw another traveler in the way, whose name was Faithful. Christianity is not all valley, and no man is lonesome when on the hilltop. Elijah was as brave as a lion and as blithe as the springtime when on Mount Carmel busy with the affairs of God and in sharp collision with Baal. He did not trouble himself about his apparent isola- tion. He rather gloried in it. "I only re- main a prophet of the Lord ; but Baal's proph- ets are four hundred and fifty." Sublime in his splendid courage, he asked no special terms, no time allowance. It was one and God against the world. A day's retreat into the desert, the shade of the juniper tree, and a little neglect of duty, and he sat down and wished he might die. If you have the blues, if things seem going go MIDSUMMER NIGHTS to the bad, if the church seems to be a failure and the world waxing evil, get up on a spiritual hilltop somewhere. Go to prayer meeting and start a lively hymn. Say a hearty "Amen" to the prayer somebody is making, or the testi- mony somebody is giving. Never mind the temporary consternation that may follow such innovation. It does no harm sometimes to shock a prayer meeting out of its prim and Ciceronian order. Smash precedent somehow. Get out of the ruts if you must break a wheel. Get on a high place if you must leave the road. And then in the sudden spiritual perturbation, as the service seeks to find new adjustments and to reach new levels, your eyes will be opened and you will see all about you scores of faithful souls going the same way you are going, and filled with the presence of God. And so together they reach the town of Vanity and enter Vanity Fair. NOW, as Christian went on his way, he came to a little ascent, which was cast up on purpose that pil- grims might see before them. Up there, therefore, Christian went, and, looking forward, he saw Faithful before him, upon his journey. Then said Christian aloud, "Ho, ho, so-ho! stay, and I will be your companion!" At that, Faithful looked be- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 91 hind; to whom Christian cried again, "Stay, stay, till I come up to you." But Faithful answered, "No, I am upon my life, and the avenger of blood is behind me." At this, Christian was somewhat moved, and putting to all his strength, he quickly got up with Faithful. Then I saw in my dream they went very lovingly on together, and had sweet dis- course of all things that had happened to them in their pilgrimage. Then I saw in my dream that, when they were got out of the wilderness, they pres- ently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long; it bear- eth the name of Vanity Fair because the town where it is kept is lighter than van- ity, and also because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity. As is the saying of the wise, "All that cometh is vanity." This fair is no new-erected business, but a thing of ancient standings I will show you the original of it. Almost five thousand years agone, there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these two honest persons are ; and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions, perceiving by the path 92 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS that the pilgrims made that their way to the city lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a fair, a fair wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long. Therefore at this fair are all such merchan- dise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, king- doms, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, as wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. And, moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind. This is, as we are told, no new institution. It means in a certain sense the world we live in, with its pleasures and profits and prides ; and it has been here a long time. It was in evidence in the days of the young Moses. Pharaoh said to him, "Here are ease and comfort and power ; palaces of marble and feasts of measureless splendor ; princely robes, servants that study to please, and soldiers that hasten to obey. It is all yours if you will stay." And God said, "Yonder is the desert, hot and dry and cheer- less, a sandy waste. Yonder is a thankless, critical, ignorant people; an awful responsi- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 93 bility. Which shall it be?" And Moses chose the desert and suspicion and responsibility and God. It was here in the days of Paul. He was a rising young lawyer, petted, trusted, honored, with splendid prospects. Yet he chose perils of water, perils of robbers, perils of his own countrymen, perils in the wilderness, watch- ings, fastings, and cold ; and in the midst of it all he was ready to say, "None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto my- self, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God." It is the same old condition of which Hafiz, the fourteenth-century poet of Persia, wrote : The world is a bride in splendid array ; Who weds her, as dowry his soul must pay. But what do we mean by "the world" ? The word is on our lips a thousand times. It is one of the stock phrases of the preacher and re- vivalist — a sort of fee-faw-fum by which youth- ful and adventurous spirits are warned away from unexplored domains and uncanonized de- lights ; a working partner of a most disreputable firm, the other members of which are the flesh and the devil. 94 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS Perhaps our ideas are a little confused. Per- haps the world to which we are not to be con- formed, the world which "lieth in the evil one," is not exactly the world of M creator's projec- tion or of Ridpath's history. Most certainly the word in its objectionable and objurgatory sense does not mean riches. Rich men are not all, and not always, worldly men. Nicodemus was immensely wealthy, yet he humbly took down the body of Jesus from the cross and lov- ingly buried it in the sepulcher of another rich man, who also was a believer. Lady Hunting- don was a scion of one of the oldest families in England, was mistress of splendid estates, and she was at the same time a devout servant of God. A few years ago the possessor of millions, a very master of finance, came to his death. In his last moments he asked his friends to sing, and there, amid the laces and drapery and costly furnishings of that magnificent death chamber, they sang by his own request : Come, ye sinners, poor and needy, Weak and wounded, sick and sore ; Jesus ready stands to save you, Full of pity, love, and power. The world, as condemned in the gospel, does not mean, therefore, the wealth of the world. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 95 The love of money may be the root of all evil, but the right use of money is the means of much good. Jesus required but one man to sell all that he had and give to the poor, and probably would not have required it of him if he had been willing to make the surrender. The world does not mean public affairs, the cares of state, the activities of politics. Joseph and Daniel were famous officials intimately concerned in public life ; Dante and Savonarola were insistent, irrepressible politicians; Glad- stone and McKinley helped to shape the policy of powerful nations; yet all these were godly and devout men. The Christian may be a poli- tician, however difficult it may be for the poli- tician to be a Christian. The creed which claims that there is no room for the moral law in politics is the creed of the spoilsman, but all public men are not spoilsmen. Jack Sheppard sometimes turns political economist, even goes to Congress; then we may expect the rule of the highway to be introduced into our legisla- tive halls. The world does not mean the pleasures of life. To come out from the world does not mean that we are to live a narrow, ironclad, morbid existence, denying ourselves the luxury of a smile or the privilege of a pleasure party. Henry Martyn was one of the noblest of the 96 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS men who have given themselves in sacrifice to the cause of missions. As he passed out of sight of Europe on his way to India he said, "Farewell, perishing world ! To me to live is Christ." Yet he claimed that music and paint- ing and poetry never had such charms as when he had entered into communion with God. The saintly Richard Cecil used to sit in the pulpit and look through the hymn book for the Scrip- ture lesson, and aimlessly turn the pages of the Bible looking for the hymn, when the organist was playing certain favorite selections, so en- tranced was he with the music. One of the best men I ever knew said that he could get shouting happy over a good brass band. The joy of heaven does not drive out the joys of earth. The best religion in town may come and live with a man who has great muscles and a mighty laugh, and who has good reason to feel three times a day like a giant refreshed, as three times a day he takes a giant's refresh- ment. To be sure, there is a brand of worldliness that may become sinful by causing the other man to sin through excess of disgust; that may awaken such contempt as to cultivate in our hearts the unhealthy pharisaism which thanks God that we are not as other men — and women. Perhaps, however, God will WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 97 deal leniently with such extremely natural Pharisaism. At a social function in Washington one of the leaders in fashion carried a short cane. In forty-eight hours short canes were going at panic prices in the nation's capital, and every woman who made any pretension to social prominence was carrying one. A pink shirt worn at a fashionable reception by an English exquisite set all Pittsburg agog, and pink shirts blossomed out in every direction at the next gathering of the elect like a peach orchard in April. The company of rich Americans who dined on a gondola in the courtyard of the Savoy Hotel, London, water tinted blue having been turned into the courtyard of the hotel, the hotel staff being guised in appropriate fancy cos- tumes — this party of guests, we are told, was not a kindergarten out on a picnic, but a com- pany of grave, grown-up men and women. Americans have not a monopoly of cap and bells, however, since a party of South African millionaires sat down to a shirt and belt dinner under a tent in a London hotel dining room. The Newport woman who gave a dinner party to her pet monkey was not necessarily a sinner above all that dwelt in this city by the sea. She was only a little more of a clown than the rest. 98 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS The Duchess of Cleveland had a baboon for a page. In the home of Baroness Dudley tea was served by a baboon dressed in gold bro- cade. The Countess of Dorchester was attended when driving out by three African monkeys in full livery. But, "Cui bono ?" If the taste of these dear ladies runs in this direction who will say them nay ? It may be but a slight re- version to type, a harking back to beginnings, a scratching of the aristocracy which reveals the simian ancestry, a new and picturesque ex- ample of atavism. These are phases of worldliness, but not nec- essarily examples of wickedness. Such things reveal a pathetic lack of head, but not always an obliquity of heart. It merely makes us wonder what fashionable mummery Puck had been attending when he cried out, "What fools these mortals be !" But what, then, does "the world" mean ? It means whatever draws the heart away from Christ; whatever makes you less a Christian; whatever takes the time which ought to be given to God ; whatever lowers the tone of the religious life or deadens the spiritual instinct. That is "the world" in the Bible sense. That is Vanity Fair, and its gauds are about us and the sound of its sackbut and psaltery mingles with our prayers. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 99 THIS fair, therefore, is an ancient thing, of long standing, and a very great fair. Now, these pilgrims, as I said, must needs go through this fair. Well, so they did: but, behold! even as they entered into the fair, all the people in the fair were moved, and the town itself, as it were, in a hubbub about them ; and that for several reasons: for — First, the pilgrims were clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment of any that traded in that fair. The people, therefore, of the fair made a great gazing upon them: some said they were fools, some they were bedlams, and some they were outlandish men. Our friends, you will note, attracted atten- tion by their garments. I have not much to say on this subject. No Church has a right to decide what manner of clothing a man or a woman shall wear. A few general rules against sinful extravagance and silly ostenta- tion — this is all that can be done. Even Peter dealt very cautiously with this subject, suggest- ing that the adorning of women be not of gold or of putting on of apparel, but in a meek and quiet spirit. Peter, we know, had a wife and family, and his noncommittal attitude was born ioo MIDSUMMER NIGHTS of experience. A Church cannot afford to go into the millinery business, either for its priests or its people. We are to take no thought, saying, "Wherewithal shall we be clothed ?" The world is growing wiser in the matter of clothes; a very distinct revolution is at work, and life is simpler and the tailor is losing caste. According to Carlyle, "The first purpose of clothes was not warmth or decency, but orna- ment. Miserable indeed was the condition of the aboriginal savage, glaring fiercely from un- der his fleece of hair, which, with the beard, reached down to the loins and hung around him like a matted cloak. Warmth he found in the chase, or amid dried leaves in his hollow tree, in his bark shed, or natural grotto, but for decoration he must make clothes. Nay, among wild people we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes." Hear again the grim dyspeptic old philos- opher : "A dandy is a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in wearing clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and per- son is heroically consecrated to this one object — the wearing of clothes wisely and well." The race of dandies is dying out. The era of clothes as ornament is past. The Church may spare its f ulminations ; other forces are at WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 101 work. The slashed doublet and Elizabethan ruff and shoe tip fastened to the belt are gone. They take up too much room in the office and in the trolley car. Men, and in many cases women nowadays, dress for comfort and not for show. Even the army is being revolution- ized ; the pomp and pageantry of war becomes very tame in olive drab. The famous Cold- stream Guards and the Black Watch, that had been wont to dazzle the eyes with their gor- geousness, marched to the relief of Kimberley in khaki. The Darghai Gordons took even the red feathers out of their caps, and painted the barrels of their Lee-Metfords and their coat buttons a dirty gray. How are the mighty fallen, and to what un- speakable depths of achromatism has sunk the thin red firing line! The field of glory is a hopeless monochrome. If I were to give you a rule for your ward- robe — which, however, I do not intend to do, as I know how useless it would be — it would be exactly the reverse of the rules suggested by the text. For the first time we have found Bunyan out of date. The Christian should at- tract no attention ; he should not be noticeable either in aping a foolish fashion or in striving to violate all fashion. Even the Quakers are making terms with the dress customs of the 102 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS day. George Fox traveled the land in leather breeches, and took off his hat to neither king nor peasant. For two centuries the sartorial creed of his followers was : Dress not to please, nor imitate the nice, Be like good Friends and follow their advice. The rich man gayly clothed is now in hell, And dogges did eat attired Jezebel. But in these later times the dress of this sect is no longer ordained to be an outward sign of an inward grace. They are beginning to dress like people. Even the white book muslin ker- chief of the Shaker woman is disappearing be- fore silk and colors, and the hair of the men is losing its bangs. Some one asked Dr. Johnson what he thought of the dress of a certain lady. "She was dressed in exquisite taste," he an- swered. "I know that because I do not re- member a single tint nor pattern of her garments." SECONDLY, and as they wondered at their apparel, so they did like- wise at their speech; for few could understand what they said : they naturally spoke the language of Canaan, but they that kept the fair were the men of this world; so that, from one end of the fair to the other, they seemed barbarians each to the other. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 103 They attracted attention by their speech. Why, to be sure. You may know a Christian by what he says. His language is the language of Canaan. A letter lies before me from a friend in which the writer, after traveling through Europe with its polyglot confusion, is felicitating himself upon reaching England and breathing "the atmosphere of our native tongue." The idea is so vivid that it is worth the sacrifice of rhetorical figure. The language of Canaan makes its own atmosphere. He who speaks it always has something to say, and what he says has hope and faith and the spirit of prayer in it. He does not sit dumb, recreant, languid, soulless, when the honor of Christ is at stake, or the saving power of the cross is in question. The Christian is also known by what he does not say. He does not say unclean things. Foul and filthy lips are the outward signs of a foul and filthy heart. They are the yellow flag of quarantine that indicates a loathsome, per- haps a contagious, disease within. The Chris- tian does not say bitter things. He does not slander and backbite. He does not "fawn on men, and hug them hard, and after scandal them." Ah, the miserable men and women who profess to be Christians, yet whose souls are cesspools of reeking slush; whose breath 104 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS is malaria; who are ready to defile the good name and character of others with their own internal rottenness. May the great Father for- give them, for so often they know not what they do. The pilgrims attracted attention by their at- titude toward the wares on sale. THIRDLY, but that which did not a little amuse the merchandisers was, that these pilgrims set very light by all their wares. They cared not so much as to look upon them ; and if they called upon them to buy, they would put their fingers to their ears, and cry, "Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity." Vanity Fair would soon go out of business if all were like these two travelers. Demand cre- ates supply. Markets are made by the buyer as well as by the seller. Necessity is the mother of Commerce, and is the architect whose plans have revolutionized the modern city. Study the sky line of New York city and you can see her finger marks. As the city grew in population space was found to be at a premium. Business had crowded down to the water on three sides. Room must be had, and there was no room in any direction except up- ward. Then came the towering buildings that WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 105 outclimb the steeples and permit the landholder, who is supposed to own straight up to the stars, to utilize some of his aerial holdings. As long as there are women who are willing to pay ten cents car fare and climb over each other at the counter to buy fifty cents' worth of goods for forty-nine cents, there will be "bargain days." And on these days men must swing by the car straps — and moralize. As long as there are Sunday readers there will be Sunday newspapers. It is not the publisher, but the public, that is responsible for this arch Sabbath-breaker of our modern life. The Daily Mail of London started a Sunday edition some time ago. The Daily Telegraph followed suit, and religious London woke up and said things and did things. A healthy boycott is sometimes one of the noblest works of man. In a very short time the first-named paper said editorially, "The Sunday Mail is dead, and we bury it without regret." The Sunday edition was stopped in order to save the week-day edi- tion. In six days the Telegraph also sur- rendered. Public opinion which condemned, and Christian men and women who refused to buy the offending papers, had won the victory. The present supply of time-serving, bribe- taking politicians would go back to their plows and back offices and saloons if Christian men io6 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS would do their duty. Whenever an evil exists and threatens damage and ruin, stealing our money, curtailing our rights, destroying souls, it is here because we as a people are willing that it should stay. For whenever the Christian people of America say all together that a thing must be or must not be, there is not power enough on the continent to alter the verdict. We have what we want. We need have only what we want. Whatever we have is here because we accept it with so much tranquility that our indifference is a virtual demand. And as a result of all this antithesis on the part of the two strangers, this clash with con- vention, this hostility to the vox populi, Faith- ful is brought to trial, found guilty of dissen- sion, and executed. These antagonisms are always present. The carnal mind is enmity against God, and the mercurial multitude has always had a cross and a stake for dissenters. Cyprian refused to sacrifice to the gods of the people, Savonarola the popular idol crossed the popular will, our Dreamer himself disdained to "beguile the time," and Vanity Fair ap- pointed its partial courts and executed its pre- determinate sentence. The dispute may not be so sharp, the issue may not be so absolute, the sequel may not be so tragic, but the spirit of the world is not the spirit of Christ, and who WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 107 goes with one hand in hand must be divorced from the other. THEY therefore brought Faithful out, to do with him according to their law; and first they scourged him, then they buffeted him, then they lanced his flesh with knives ; after that they stoned him with stones, then pricked him with their swords; and, last of all, they burned him to ashes at the stake. Thus came Faithful to his end. Now, I saw that there stood behind the multitude a chariot and a couple of horses, waiting for Faithful, who (so soon as his adversaries had dispatched him) was taken up into it, and straightway was carried up through the clouds, with sound of trumpet, the nearest way to the Celestial Gate. But as for Christian, he had some re- spite, and was remanded back to prison. So he there remained for a space; but He that overrules all things, having the power of their rage in his own hand, so wrought it about that Christian for that time escaped them, and went his way. Now, I saw in my dream that Christian went not forth alone; for there was one whose name was Hopeful (being made so by the beholding of Christian and Faith- ful in their words and behavior, in their 108 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS sufferings at the fair), who joined himself unto him, and, entering into a brotherly covenant, told him that he would be his companion. Thus, one died to bear testi- mony to the truth, and another rises out of his ashes to be a companion with Chris- tian in his pilgrimage. NIGHT THE SEVENTH DOUBTING CASTLE -FIGHTING ON HIGH LEVELS There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. He fought his doubts and gathered strength, He would not make his judgment blind, He faced the specters of the mind And laid them ; thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own, And Power was with him in the night Which makes the darkness and the light, And dwells not in the light alone. — Tennyson. NIGHT THE SEVENTH Doubting Castle — Fighting on High Levels | HERE are two important consid- erations for this evening: first, how Christian got into Doubting Castle ; and, second, how he got out. If these can be settled we will have spent the hour to some good purpose. For, learning how this man fell into the trap may be to us a caution, and learning how he escaped may prove a guide. There are two travelers again. When Faithful died at Vanity Fair his splendid hero- ism so wrought upon a citizen of that town named Hopeful that he joined his fortunes with Christian. NOW, I beheld in my dream that they had not journeyed far, but the river and the way for a time parted; at which they were not a little sorry, yet they durst not go out of the way. Now the way from the river was rough, and their feet tender, by reason of their travels ; "so the souls of the pilgrims were much MIDSUMMER NIGHTS discouraged because of the way." Where- fore, still as they went on they wished for a better way. Now, a little before them, there was on the left hand of the road a meadow, and a stile to go over into it; and that meadow is called By-path Meadow. Then said Christian to his fellow, "If this meadow lieth along our wayside, let's go over into it." Then he went to the stile to see, and behold, a path lay along by the way on the other side of the fence. "It is according to my wish," said Christian. "Here is the easiest going; come, good Hopeful, and let us go over." Hope. But how if this path should lead us out of the way? "That's not like," said the other. "Look, doth it not go along by the way side?" So Hopeful, being persuaded by his fel- low, went after him over the stile. When they were gone over, and were got into the path, they found it very easy for their feet ; and withal they, looking before them, es- pied a man walking as they did (and his name was Vain-confidence) ; so they called after him, and asked him whither that way led. He said, "To the Celestial Gate." "Look," said Christian, "did not I tell you so? By this you may see we are right." So they followed, and he went before them. But, behold, the night came on, and it grew WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 113 very dark; so that they that were behind lost the sight of him that went before. And now it began to rain, and thunder, and lighten in a very dreadful manner, and the water rose amain. They adventured to go back, but it was so dark, and the flood was so high, that in their going back they had like to have been drowned nine or ten times. Neither could they, with all the skill they had, get again to the stile that night. Wherefore, at last, lighting under a little shelter, they sat down there until the day brake; but, being weary, they fell asleep. Now, there was, not far from the place where they lay, a castle, called Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant De- spair; and it was in his grounds they now were sleeping. Wherefore he, getting up in the morning early, and walking up and down in his fields, caught Christian and Hopeful asleep in his grounds. Then, with a grim and surly voice, he bid them awake, and asked them whence they were, and what they did on his grounds. They told him they were pilgrims, and that they had lost their way. Then said the giant, "You have this night trespassed on me, by trampling in and lying on my grounds, and therefore you must go along with me." So they were forced to go, because he was H4 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS stronger than they. They also had but lit- tle to say, for they knew themselves in a fault. The giant, therefore, drove them be- fore him, and put them into his castle, into a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking to the spirits of these two men. Here, then, they lay from Wednesday morning till Saturday night, without one bit of bread, or drop of drink, or light, or any to ask how they did. They were, therefore, here in evil case, and were far from friends and acquaintance. Now, in this place Christian had double sorrow, because it was through his unadvised counsel that they were brought into this distress. First, then, they got into Doubting Castle while looking for an easy way. For some miles they had walked by the side of a river, amid lily-decked meadows and under the shade of fruit-laden trees. Suddenly the road turned out of the happy valley and their feet were bruised by the rocks. How easily we are spoiled ! How ready we are to take life's good as our natural right, and to resent any change for the worse ! God's beneficent providence, in- stead of making us humbly grateful, so often makes us exacting, and we are ready to fret if the pleasant way does not last. Yet Christian had been warned of difficul- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 115 ties. He had been told that he would not be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease. God had been honest with him, as he has been honest with all of us, and he had taken the road for better or worse. It is Sunday-school-book theology which teaches that there is good and only good for the good, and bad and only bad for the bad. It is only in religious tracts of the limp and lackadaisical sort that the consid- erate employer never has a strike, and is sent for to bring the calumet of peace to other fac- tories ; or the conscientious workman saves the works from destruction and afterward marries his employer's daughter. Even a church may be struck by lightning; even the Bible in the soldier's breast-pocket does not always stop the bullet ; even the missionary needs passports and consuls and sometimes warships to protect him while he preaches. Virtue is indeed its own re- ward ; and it is so often its only reward. The life of the Christian is not an easy life. It would be worthless if it were. Real life is never a summer day's ramble. God never trifles with a man or woman by taking all the hills out of the landscape and all the stones out of the path. The books that faithfully portray life are not the pleasant stories for hammock reading, the Airy Fairy Lilians, the Trilbys, the Daisy Millers of my lady's boudoir. n6 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS They are the books in which Jean Valjean travails in agony and grows a soul, or Dr. Faustus plunges into the vortex of dissipation and goes downward with Mephistopheles. To be sure, this moody scholar is rescued eventu- ally — not by a soul struggle, however, but by a theological tenet, which reversion and rescue take place in the second part of the book. But the reading world has stamped the seal of its disapproval upon such bathos; who reads the second part of Faust ? Shakespeare sends Ophelia to her death in the "weeping brook," and strangles Desde- mona. Sophocles dooms Jocasta to the noose of the suicide and CEdipus to the brooch pins of his unhappy mother, that "smote his eyeballs to the root." Flaubert follows Madame Bo- vary with cold, keen impersonal detail as she passes from coquetry to sin, and from sin to jaded satiety, and from satiety to suicide; a harrowing progression, but a great book be- cause a book of real life. And even Dickens with all his optimism introduces no fortunate reprieve, in his Tale of Two Cities ; allows no sudden change of mood on the part of the wild mob that howled about the guillotine, but holds his relentless grip until the head of Sydney Carton drops into the bloody basket. Life is real, life is earnest, life is bluff and stern. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 117 The hand that rounded Peter's dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome Wrought in a sad sincerity. If we want an easy life, then, let us drift down with the tide and get nowhere, and find no companionship save the gnats that hum in the lazy sunshine, and the dead fish that float in the stream. Do we object to the alarm clocks and time registers of these strenuous days? Then let us go out and live with the cattle that lie with half-shut eyes in the mead- ows, or with the pigs that contentedly wallow in the mire. Be an oyster and you will have no care about to-morrow's engagements, or concern about next year's rent. But be a man and you must fight for standing place in the world, and a mental grasp of the arts .and wars and discoveries of this fast and furious age. Christianity is not a system of laissez faire, not a Castle of Indolence. "Who are those which are arrayed in white robes?" asked the elder of Saint John, as he looked out upon the countless multitudes of all nations and tongues that praised God before the throne; and the answer was, "These are they which came out of great tribulation." Standing in the Hall of Fame yonder on the banks of the Hudson, I ask, "Who are these whose names appear here as the pride of a great people?" And the an- 1 n8 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS swer is the same : "These are they which came up through great tribulation of patient toil and painful sacrifice and fierce mental travail." "What is that?" I ask as the splendid starry banner of the republic breaks upon the breeze. Ah, this glorious ensign came up through much tribulation of battle smoke and patriots' blood, and awful shadowy years of home-burning and heart-breaking, to represent as it does to- day law and right and safety and civilization. There is no easy road to honor and the highest good ; there are no palace car accommodations on the route to the largest success. It is up- grade, and upgrades test the machinery and strain the heart. The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight; But they while their companions slept Were toiling upward in the night. Christian led the way toward the Castle of Despair. Naturally, because Christian was the brains of the enterprise. He possessed to a high degree the power of initiative. He was sure to get into Doubting Castle at some time in his life. It takes brains to be an honest skeptic. Whoever thinks, will sometimes doubt. I do not refer to the silly chattering human cuckoo who sits in other men's nests WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 119 and cackles other men's opinions. But there is a grade of mind that demands proof, and God does not always see fit to furnish proof — mathe- matical minds that are accustomed to dealing with hard and tangible verities, facts that may be measured and labeled and filed; and in the gray matter of such brains the Castle of the Giant is often builded. "What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know here- after," is the challenge of Jesus; but there are some who are not content to wait, they de- mand immediate knowledge. They carry their scales and pocket compass into spiritual lati- tudes ; they know that two and two are always four, and that no supernatural jugglery can make it five. A Man once walked upon the Sea of Galilee. So reads the ancient record. Now, we know that no man can walk across the East River. It would solve the most serious problem in Brooklyn's future and bring a boom in the real estate market if it could be done. And yet there are times when it is pos- sible — that is, if the ice be not broken. The Egyptian fellah driving his buffalo to drink in the lower Nile would be as greatly puzzled if he should hear that the East River can be walked upon in winter as we are to hear that the Gali- lean Sea was once trodden with safety by r20 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS human feet. God does not stop to explain either phenomenon. We have learned to un- derstand one, perhaps some day we shall under- stand both. Lazarus came forth one eventful day from the grave in which his body had been buried. So reads the old chronicle. Marvelous, unpar- alleled event! Yet all last winter there hung in the sunshine in my study window a little gray bag picked off a twig by the roadside, and every day I looked to see a winged and beauti- ful fairy come out of it. If you will tell me how God can open that chrysalis in which lies an inert worm and bring out of it a butterfly, I will undertake to tell you how the stone was rolled back on Easter morning and the exultant angels came to welcome their risen Lord. We do not now attempt to prove the exist- ence of God by miracles. They are not so effective as "accrediting agencies" as they were in the days of our theological apprenticeship. To be sure, they will always be signs to those who need them. But we now claim the pos- sibility, the probability, of miracles from the fact of God. We say with Reuss, "If in the acts of Jesus there was nothing surpassing everyday experience, his history would be all the more incomprehensible"; or with Mar- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 121 tineau, "Wherever God's hand is, there is miracle. It is simply indevoutness which imag- ines that only where miracle is can there be the real hand of God." We do not say that once the waters of the Red Sea were split asunder that a fugitive peo- ple might pass into the desert; once the stub- born walls of a great city fell down at the blast of rams' horns at the lips of stranger priests; once over five thousand hungry men were fed with a few loaves and fishes; therefore, the Being who did all this must be God. We say, "God is. He is here. He is God. If he need a miracle he can perform it, for he 'hath spoken once; twice have I heard this; that power be- longeth unto God.' " Believe this, my brother, and lean not to thine own understanding, but trust in the Lord with all thine heart; for the path of restless questioning leads so often to the Castle of Giant Despair. The man who has never been face to face with doubt is gifted with rare simplicity, or has never been very far from home. He has not stood much by the world's great highways. Much of our uncertainty — the fertile source of doubt — may be removed by demonstration. That which was a mystery to the fathers may be a domestic utility to the children. We are invading more and more the domain of the 122 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS supernatural. We are pitching our tents each night on the skirmish line of the morning. Still there are some questions that cannot be answered, some doubts that cannot be dis- pelled, some specters that will not down. It is well to remember that God does not promise to make everything plain. He does not guarantee to be always the kind of deity we may expect him to be, nor to adjust the world to our preconceptions. He is not under con- tract to carry out any program we may arrange for him. Here is a man who blames God be- cause he has no employment and there is no bread in the family. His God is a masterwork- man whose business it is to keep his men em- ployed. Here is a mother whose child is taken away in spite of her earnest prayers, and at once God is impeached. What God? Her God, or rather God as she apprehends him, who is to be held responsible for the accidents of the nursery and the habitual violation of physical law. There are people who think it is God's busi- ness to keep things straight in this world. To them he is no better than a convenient ubiq- uitous chief of police who must look to it that murders are not committed, and injus- tice is pilloried, and saloons are not opened on Sunday. So, when disorders arise, of course WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 123 God is derelict and must submit to an investiga- tion of his fidelity and his methods. We make the mistake of applying our time measurement to eternal areas. We seek to weigh the mountains in the grocer's scales. We do not allow for perspective. When Donatello finished the statue of Saint Mark it was in- spected by the linen workers of Florence who had ordered it constructed. They said it was out of proportion, that it was awkward in shape and lacked fidelity to life, and demanded that it be remodeled. The artist promised to make the work satisfactory. The statue was at that time in the studio. When next the linen workers came it had been lifted to the niche in front of the Or San Michele, for which it had been prepared. The worthy critics were en- tirely satisfied, and congratulated themselves upon their artistic taste. The figure had not been touched with the chisel. We make the same blunders in our judg- ments of God. We get him out of proper per- spective. We persist in bringing him down to sea level. He is so much larger than the meas- ure of man's mind. The limitless circle of his purpose sweeps in scarce perceptible curve above and beyond our mathematics and econo- mies. He does not forget the sparrows upon the housetops, but the stars that look down up- 124 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS on the sparrow's nest are God's stars. He is holding the world for righteousness. His plans strike their roots down deep into two eternities. He steps from mountain peak to mountain peak in his progress toward the end of the path. We must come out into the open air. We must get our souls into a large place. We must walk all around God before we can judge him. When we thus know him in all the magnitude of his plans, and in all the tenderness of his mercy, then we shall not fear the mysteries of life and providence, for back of it all will be a loving God. And so they got into Doubting Castle, and a naughty place it was. Second : Let us watch the process by which they got out. You must remember that Chris- tian's companion was Hopeful. If I must go on some dark day to this dismal cell, may he be my companion in bonds! Giant Despair was brutal and strong, but he had fits on sunny days. Hopeful noticed this and said, "Some day we will give him the slip when he is down." It is never quite so bad but there is a fighting chance left. It does not always rain, and even when it does, "behind the clouds is the sun still shining." So long as we locate the golden age in the future, so long will we remain young, so long will we be unconquerable. And Hopeful WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 125 saved Christian from the sin of suicide, kept him in good mental condition, and thus was he prepared to take advantage of the first opportunity to escape. But there was another little matter that must be taken into account. Giant Despair was mar- ried. There was a woman in the case. It is well to find out about a man's wife before you go far with him. In nine cases out of ten it is the wind blowing from that quarter which de- cides how fast you will sail, and what port you will enter. A man must get his wife's consent to be respectable and to be respected. There is many a great man standing proud and self- confident on a monument, looking serenely out upon an admiring world, who ought to step down and let his wife get up in his place. The world would never have heard of him if he had remained a bachelor. And there is many a man whose wife has been his evil star. The wife of Giant Despair was named Diffi- dence, and in subtlety and relentless treachery she was worse than her husband. And this woman stands forever at the gate of Doubting Castle and lets the multitude in: Diffidence which keeps thousands of earnest Christians from lives of usefulness, deprives them of the joy of service, pushes them back from places they can fill and ought to fill, and dooms them 126 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS to fruitless inactivity and spiritual pauperism; Diffidence, correctly named Self-consciousness, which comes of thinking about ourselves all the time, and conceiving that other people have no better employment; Diffidence which is only a subtle pride that finds its expression in the famous couplet : O wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as ithers see us; and needs some such shock as came to the other poet who says : I wished one day with Burns some power'd gie The gift by means of which myself I'd see, As to the watching world I seemed to be. And as it chanced some fairy came my way And granted me the wish I'd made that day ; And, oh! it filled my soul with blank dismay. For as I looked, ah, how my pride did fall, — Aghast I staggered back against the wall : The world had not a thought of me at all. Do you know what was the fate of this woman ? Turn to the second book of the vol- ume and you will learn that she was killed by old Mr. Honest. Sturdy old soul, kindly and modest, blushing like a boy when praised, he came from the town of Stupidity, and he knew nothing else to do, so he cut the truculent WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 127 giantess down with a blow when she joined her husband in his attack upon the later pilgrims. "I say to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think ; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith" ; and with that faith, the powers and responsi- bilities that attend upon it. If the truth were known, our friends in the prison yonder have not prayed from Wednes- day morning to Saturday night. This is their dire and bewildering confession. But on Sat- urday night they begin to pray. Now look out for miracles. The power which moves the hand which moves the world has been turned on. The earth which stopped still in the dark and midnight has begun to revolve again, and the mountain tops will soon be radiant with the morning. Then, while they prayed, Chris- tian found a key in his pocket called Promise, and said he in glad excitement, "What a fool am I ! this key will open any lock in Doubting Castle." The key of Promise ! He had it all the time. It is part of the inalienable posses- sions of every life traveler. The key of Promise will unlock any door. Shut up, are you, in the bitter cell of sin, foul and festering and deadly; despairing because you cannot heal yourself? This Promise will 128 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS open the door: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Shut up in the cell of awful providences, with black walls and darkened windows that look out upon a cemetery ; despairing because the best things of life are gone? This Promise will open the door and let the sunshine in: "The Lord will not cast off forever : but though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men." Shut up in the cell of helplessness; seeing the hard things of life; wondering if God be true and kind and if there be any good worth living for ? These words will steady the soul and let us out into the green pastures of his favor: "Fear thou not ; for I am with thee : be not dis- mayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness." Use the Key; try the Book; prove the Promises. And this is how they came out of the castle. ^ X T*ELL, on Saturday, about mid- YY night, they began to pray, and continued in prayer till almost break of day. Now, a little before it was day, good WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 129 Christian, as one half amazed, brake out in this passionate speech: "What a fool," quoth he, "am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at lib- erty! I have a key in my bosom, called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle." Then said Hopeful, "That is good news; good brother, pluck it out of thy bosom, and try." Then Christian pulled it out of his bosom, and began to try at the dungeon door, whose bolt, as he turned the key, gave back, and the door flew open with ease, and Christian and Hopeful both came out. Then he went to the outward door that leads into the castle yard, and, with his key, opened that door also. After, he went to the iron gate, for that must be opened too; but that lock went desper- ately hard, yet the key did open it. Then they thrust open the gate to make their escape with speed, but that gate, as it opened, made such a creaking that it waked Giant Despair, who, hastily rising to pur- sue his prisoners, felt his limbs to fail, for his fits took him again, so that he could by no means go after them. Then they went on, and came to the King's highway, and so were safe, because they were out of his jurisdiction. NIGHT THE EIGHTH THE DELECTABLE MOUNTAINS— REST AND REFRESHMENT And the mirage shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water: in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.— Isaiah. NIGHT THE EIGHTH The Delectable Mountains — Rest and Refreshment |ANITY FAIR represents the pleasures of the world. The Delectable Mountains represent the pleasures of the Christian. One is in the town, stone-paved, brick-walled, noisy; the others are under the wide skies where the winds blow and the eagles nest. Man-made, God-made; crowded with earth smells and labyrinthed with sewers, or looking toward the stars and nursing the young rivers that are by and by to fertilize the plains — so stand contrasted the good of the lower life and the good of the higher life. THEY went then till they came to the Delectable Mountains, which mountains belong to the Lord of that hill of which we have spoken before; so they went up to the mountains, to be- hold the gardens and orchards, the vine- yards and fountains of water; where also they drank and washed themselves, and did freely eat of the vineyards. Now, there 133 134 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS were on the tops of these mountains shep- herds feeding their flocks, and they stood by the highway side. The pilgrims there- fore went to them, and leaning upon their staves (as is common with weary pil- grims, when they stand to talk with any by the way), they asked, "Whose Delectable Mountains are these? And whose be the sheep that feed upon them?" Shep. These mountains are Immanuel's Land, and they are within sight of his city ; and the sheep also are his, and he laid down his life for them. Chr. Is this the way to the Celestial City? Shep. You are just in your way. Chr. How far is it thither? Shep. Too far for any but those that shall get thither indeed. Chr. Is the way safe or dangerous? Shep. Safe for those for whom it is to be safe; "but the transgressors shall fall therein." Chr. Is there, in this place, any relief for pilgrims that are weary and faint in the way? Shep. The Lord of these mountains hath given us a charge not to be "forgetful to entertain strangers," therefore the good of the place is before you. I saw also in my dream that, when the WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 135 shepherds perceived that they were way- faring men, they also put questions to them (to which they made answer as in other places), as, "Whence came you?" and, "How got you into the way?" and, "By what means have you so persevered therein? for but few of them that begin to come hither do show their face on these mountains." But when the shepherds heard their answers, being pleased there- with, they looked very lovingly upon them, and said, "Welcome to the Delectable Mountains." The mountains are Immanuel's Land. They are part of the scheme. God wants his children to be happy. Delect- able Mountains stand along the path of holiness all the way to the end. The road to heaven lies through the best parts of the earth. If there be no heaven the Christian has gotten the most out of this world. If when he come down to the end he shall discover that he has been mistaken, that death ends all, that he has already had all there is, and if he were asked what he would do should he with his present knowledge be permitted to live over again, he would answer, "I would come by the same path, for it is the path of peace." Other men have been disturbed by every rumor. His trust has 136 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS been in a power that never falters, and in an infinite love that never fails. Other lives have been cursed by vile passions, inflamed by un- holy ambitions, and enslaved by evil habits. In quietness and confidence has been his strength. Preparing himself for the future he has been in the best possible condition to enjoy the pres- ent; looking for heaven he has discovered the earth. There is nothing that belongs to God but he wants us to have it and to get the best use of it. Nothing of this world is too good for the chil- dren of the King. All that he asks is that we forget ourselves in the general good. Then may we gather flowers from every garden and fruits from every field; and verily the earth shall be ours and the fullness thereof. There are so many of us who are ready to serve God, yet who do not delight in him ; will- ing to take refuge in Christianity as a strong tower in danger, but not able to look on it as a pleasure resort. The religion of Jesus is represented as a guide to lead the soul to heaven, but many there are who do not seem to expect that it will enter heaven with us, that even heaven would be cheerless without it, that indeed its business is to start a branch office of heaven here on earth. The Christian faith is so often made unat- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 137 tractive to the young by our teaching 1 . With doleful melancholy and with portentous empha- sis we tell them that death is coming and that Christianity is the best preparation for death, until they begin to conceive that this is the only purpose of Christianity. The Church becomes an undertaker's establishment, whose only busi- ness it is to get everybody ready for his own funeral. They are told that they must not be- come Christians too early ; they must wait until they can realize the awful seriousness of the step and be ready to surrender all the bright things of life. God is represented as a harsh, stern, irascible personage who spends the most of his time at the keyhole, or sending thunderstorms upon disobedient children, or making thin places in the ice if they venture out to skate on Sunday. The God of the average nursery is often a Being whom the children would be afraid to meet in the dark. He frowns but he does not smile, and his temper is shockingly uncertain. Then, how has the Bible been taught ? Many of our children know more about Ananias and Sapphira and their untimely end than about Lydia, the good woman of Thessalonica who took the disciples home with her to dinner and kept them at her house for a week. I once heard some one ask a prominent lee- 138 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS turer what novels our boys and girls might read with safety. He promptly answered, "Any novels except those in a Sunday school library." But a better day has dawned for the Sunday school library. Some of us can remem- ber when the Sunday school books were som- ber-backed and cheerless ; where all the wicked boys died of bird-nesting — the only healthful amusement in the book — and the good boys died of pale and underfed piety — and a very dangerous disease it is when it takes a serious turn — with turtledoves mourning in the wil- lows and a bundle of musty tracts lying on the window sill. We have made the service of God unattract- ive to many by our example. The stale old question as to whether Christianity is a failure or not cannot yet be answered, as real Chris- tianity has not yet been fully tried. It has never yet had a fair chance in the world. There are two chapters of the Bible that represent en- tirely different phases of Christian life — the seventh and eighth chapters of Romans. The seventh chapter represents Paul in the storm of conviction and uncertainty. "I am carnal," he cries, "sold under sin." "The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." "O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 139 death?" The whole chapter is a seething whirl- pool of unrest and soul-torture. The eighth chapter is the breaking of the day, the uprising of the sun. It is separated from the seventh by the breadth of an eternity. It begins, "There is therefore now no con- demnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." It declares, "Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear ; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father." It ventures to say, "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God." It swells to a mighty Hallelujah Chorus at its close as the exultant apostle shouts, "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princi- palities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." So many Christians are content to abide in the seventh chapter ! This seems to represent their highest spiritual ambition. If they ever get into the eighth chapter they go there on a sort of picnic or field day, on Sunday or at the prayer meeting, but they usually go meekly back into the seventh chapter for workaday life. 140 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS A man stood with his little son on Mount Washington. Pointing northward toward the ice fields of Canada, and southward toward the sunny lands that lie under the tropic sun, and eastward where the Atlantic beats its musical measure along its iron coast, and westward over the prairies and forests and farms that stretch toward the Pacific, he said, as he swept his hand around the horizon, "My son, God's love is as big as all that." "Then, father," an- swered the boy, with shining face, "we are right in the middle of it !" Right in the middle of it, always in the middle of it, and no changes of season or place need make any change in our mind. In these Delectable Mountains there are flocks of sheep and shepherds, and the names of the shepherds suggest how the pleasures of the Christian are to be chosen. For instance, the name of the first shepherd is Knowledge. This is a good beginning. Here is a stanch old shepherd whose head is clear and whose hands are steady. He who binds His soul to knowledge steals the key of heaven. In his pursuit of pleasure the Christian is not left to his unassisted personal judgment. To be sure, this must be exercised, but that is not WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 141 enough. "There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, yet the end of that way is death." Mistakes have been made when judgment was wide-awake. Awful catastrophes have come even when as far as could be seen the very best was being done. Alexius, the young emperor of Constantinople, alarmed by an attack upon his palace, fled by a secret stairway which he supposed would lead to safety. It was a mis- take in judgment from lack of knowledge. The staircase led to a prison where he was stripped and strangled. Andree swung himself free to drift by balloon across the arctic circle, and the great mysterious North swallowed him up and kept silent. Human judgment is lord of many lands, but it is not overlord. The name of this first shepherd is not Con- science. Somehow this would-be keeper of the fold does not appear on the mountains. He is not trusted among the Master's flocks. Indeed, the sheep would go astray if he were shepherd. Life will be very irregular and capricious if what is popularly called Conscience be the only guide. It is not to be trusted ; it takes bribes ; it has no settled policy ; it laughs at consistency. What it cannot prevent, it will after a while forget to condemn. It is a parrot that may be taught any language; a weathervane that will turn with any wind ; a dog that will follow any 142 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS master ; a Vicar of Bray that will espouse any creed. Paul draws a very sharp distinction between conscience that is enlightened and one that is unenlightened in his treatment of meat offered to idols, and suggests that a weak conscience may be a very uncomfortable thing to be at large in a community. It has power to disturb and distress a whole neighborhood, and set a whole church in an uproar. Lurking in the shadow of one man's heart it may deprive an- other of that which would be perfectly innocent. No man, then, can submit entirely to his con- science until it has been at school. It is not proof that the way is right when conscience seems at home there. It is not always true that a pleasure is safe because conscience acts as doorkeeper. The word itself means "to know with," and there must be a knowledge of the divine law in order that its dicta may be safe and reliable. The second shepherd is Experience: the experience of others, let us say. No ship is safe without compass and chart. Both are needed. Each supplements the other. The compass shows the direction to port; the chart indicates the dangers by the way. One is Knowledge, the other is Experience. Leif Ericson had neither chart nor compass when WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 143 with his five and thirty companions he sailed southeast from Greenland, stumbled upon a vast continent, then blundered along its coast from the slaty cliffs of Labrador to the grape- vines of Martha's Vineyard. And nothing came of his adventure. Columbus had compass but no proper chart when he steered away from Spain seeking the nothern end of Japan, and reached the West India Islands — a blunder which our seamen can scarcely understand. The chart is made by men who have passed this way before. It is a contribution from the past to the present; old age bestowing its wis- dom upon youth without at the same time trans- ferring its decay. We are to "give earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip." We are to sit humbly at the feet of those "long traveled in the ways of men." With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding. It is so much pleasanter to learn by the mistakes of others than by our own. What other men have done and have learned and have suffered is written upon the path ahead and we may read it as we run. What we have done and have learned is behind our back, and only the mem- ory of all this can help us in our life to-day. One is the headlight of the train, and it shows us whether the track is clear or not. The other 144 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS is the sternlight of the ship, and it may make the white wake of the swift vessel brilliant and beautiful, but we are not going that way. Why go through all the quagmires to learn how muddy they are when we may study the gar- ments of others who have waded there ? Why begin where our fathers began, when we may just as easily begin where they left off? And so we have for our guidance the expe- rience of others. The Discipline of the Church, the Confessions and Creeds are the crystalliza- tion of experience ; the wisdom of the wise put up in convenient forms for the benefit of the ignorant. Our fathers may not have known any more than we do, but they have been this way before. If they say that the theater is mis- leading, that the dance is dangerous, and that games of chance are questionable, it is not guesswork. They are speaking that which they know. It is the result of their observa- tion; perhaps in some cases, let us admit, the testimony of their own experience. So, if we do not obey all this as law, it is profitable to listen to it as counsel. The old shepherd Expe- rience has been on the mountains a long while, and, generally speaking, he is a pretty safe guide. The third shepherd is Watchful. This name suggests our part in the scheme. By WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 145 watchfulness we may analyze and appraise the experience of others; we may also utilize our own observation. We must subject the pleas- ures of life to a strict inquisition, for poison comes to us in the honeyed cells of pleasure, and death as an angel of light. Does your heart go out to some delicious pleasure in which you in- dulge ? Call in the keen-eyed shepherd Watch- ful. Does the indulgence make you careless of the Church, or of the Bible, or of God ? Does it attract attention and cause comment ? Do not go to a place which needs your presence to make it respectable. It is too great a strain upon you and will break you down. You may be able to sweeten such a place or pastime for a while, but you will soon need something to sweeten you. Watch, therefore, the effect of any indulgence upon yourself. Turn on the light. Give caution the benefit of the doubt. If there is any question as to the result, you had better let it alone. Better cut off the arm and enter into life maimed than with both arms go the downgrade of spiritual carelessness. Better go a little slower in time than to limp through eternity. The name of the fourth shepherd is Sincere. Much discussion has been held to settle the derivation of the word. Some claim it is from the Greek and means "with the heart" ; others 146 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS derive it from sine cera, which means "without wax," and explain it with Cicero as referring it to honey clarified and free from impurities. Others yet claim it was used in reference to a piece of statuary which has been made of a perfect block of marble in which there are no flaws to be concealed by wax. The word means to be what we seem. It is that style of living which does not change when company comes. It never poses in the limelight nor plays to the galleries. It never studies the evening paper to learn what the world has said about us through the day, nor the morning paper to learn what will be the popular thing to do next. It is that being true to oneself in which is the promise and pledge that we will not be false to any man. Miles Standish sends John Alden to propose marriage to Priscilla in the name of his supe- rior. The poor fellow blunders in the message. It is not to be wondered at. His loyalty is pledged to Standish, but his love is given to the maiden and his message is a burlesque. At their next meeting the keen-witted damsel looks into his conscious, bewildered face and says: "Let us, then, be what we are, and speak what we think, and in all things Keep ourselves loyal to truth." WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 147 To be sure, sincerity is not all that is neces- sary. There have been sincere pagans. Many a sincere mother has tossed her baby girl into the Ganges. Saul of Tarsus in all sincerity started for Damascus to strangle the young Christianity there. Sincerity, therefore, does not give us all the light we need. But it is the best possible condition in which to receive light. A sincere man will find what he is looking for. He that willeth to do the will of the Father shall know of the doctrine. We shall some day catch a glimpse of the city towers if we ask the way to Zion with our faces thitherward. The camera will find a star unseen by the eye and undiscovered by the most powerful telescope. It looks straight into the spaces and keeps on looking until the star appears. A duty done will stand out clear and distinct before us if we keep looking for it. A danger cannot remain concealed from the sincere soul. And thus are the preserves of Christian pleasure guarded and kept: 1. A clear Knowledge of God's will. 2. A humble reverence for the mature Expe- rience of those whose "silver hairs will pur- chase us a good opinion." 3. A keen, intelligent, relentless Watchful- ness of our own life. 4. A perfect Sincerity. 148 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS With these we may walk the Delectable Mountains and fear no slipping of the foot along the steep precipices; yea, we may tread even the far places of life, the paths that wind through the territories of darkness, for "the evil beasts will cease out of the land, and we shall dwell safely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods." NIGHT THE NINTH EN PASSANT— THE MAN WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING AND THE MAN WHO KNOWS NOTHING Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the delegates from Pennsylvania, was so much distressed at the diffi- culties which arose and the prospect of failure that he proposed that the Convention, as all human means of obtaining agreement seemed to be useless, should open its meeting with prayer. — James Bryce, on the Conven- tion which drafted the Constitution of the United States. NIGHT THE NINTH En Passant — The Man Who Knows Everything and The Man Who Knows Nothing |E have not the time to interview all the strangers met by our pil- grims on the way. There was no lack of adventure. It was apparently a well-traveled coun- try through which they passed. All the Chris- tian graces, and many others that were neither Christian nor graces, seemed to be out for an airing. Nor can we stop to analyze the con- versations held with these various passers-by. They all talked by the book. Whenever our good author wished to elucidate an abstruse doctrine, or to illustrate an abstract truth, or to beguile the tedium of the way, he started some one talking. "From grave to gay, from lively to severe," they ranged the wide fields of con- versation. It must, however, be confessed that the con- versations reported are more like the Dialogues of Plato or the questions and answers of a civil service examination than the easy interchange 151 152 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS of thought that serves to shorten time and dis- tance with the ordinary traveler. We have chosen two of the many wayfarers with whom we are to become better acquainted : The Man Who Knows Everything and The Man Who Knows Nothing. The first is named Ignorance, a brisk lad whom they met soon after leaving the Delect- able Mountains. AND I slept, and dreamed again, and saw the same two pilgrims going down the mountains along the high- way toward the city. Now, a little below these mountains, on the left hand, lieth the country of Conceit; from which coun- try there comes, into the way in which the pilgrims walked, a little crooked lane. Here, therefore, they met with a very brisk lad, that came out of that country; and his name was Ignorance. So Christian asked him from what parts he came, and whither he was going. Ignor. Sir, I was born in the country that lieth off there, a little on the left hand, and I am going to the Celestial City. Chr. But how do you think to get in at the gate? for you may find some diffi- culty there. "As other good people do," said Igno- rance. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 153 Chr. But what have you to show at that gate, that may cause that the gate should be opened to you? Ignor. I know my Lord's will, and I have been a good liver; I pay every man his own ; I pray, fast, pay tithes, and give alms, and have left my country for whither I am going. Chr. But thou earnest not in at the wicket gate that is at the head of this way ; thou earnest in hither through that same crooked lane, and therefore I fear, how- ever thou mayest think of thyself, when the reckoning day shall come, thou wilt have laid to thy charge that thou art a thief and a robber, instead of getting admittance into the city. Ignor. Gentlemen, ye be utter strangers to me ; I know you not. Be content to fol- low the religion of your country, and I will follow the religion of mine. I hope all will be well. And as for the gate that you talk of, all the world knows that that is a great way off of our country. I cannot think that any man in all our parts doth so much as know the way to it; nor need they matter whether they do or no, since we have, as you see, a fine, pleasant green lane, that comes down from our country, the next way into the way. You will notice that this sprightly young gen- 154 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS tleman is from the country of Conceit. This is just the place to look for him. That is why we call him "The Man who Knows Every- thing." The observant author of the Book of Proverbs had met him, and said of him, "Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit; there is more hope of a fool than of him." There is an old Arab saying that man is four : The man who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool — shun him. The man who knows not and knows he knows not, he is simple — teach him. The man who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep — waken him. The man who knows and knows that he knows, he is wise — follow him. Forevermore the name of Braddock will be ingloriously linked with our colonial history. He had forty years' experience in European warfare, and the rank of major-general, but because he was not willing to concede that there might be something he needed to learn he threw away a splendid army and his own life in the wilderness. James II told his Parliament that they had no more right to question him than to question the Almighty ; and he died in exile. Really great men are modest. Their ideals are so much larger than their attainments, what they would be is so far beyond what they are, WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 155 that they find no place for boasting. It takes such a very small puddle to make an ocean for a minnow, and as he moves him back and forth in his little pool of muddy water he says, "What a great stir I am making in the world!" "Sketches, only sketches," said Sir Joshua Rey- nolds impatiently, when some one spoke in exu- berant praise of his masterpieces. Yet you and I have seen some astonishing drawings of an impossible castle by the side of an inconceivable lake, splashed all over with ghastly moonshine and scrawled with pea-green ivy, and the board- ing school miss who perpetrated this chromatic monstrosity is fully expecting it to be hung in the first row of the Royal Academy. But ignorance is no crime. Let us thank God that it is not. So many of his people are ignorant, but not with the kind of ignorance that is peculiar to the country of Conceit. God has a great patience with those who do not know. This poor lad, with all his self-asser- tion and presumption, went to the very gates of the Celestial City, and all the way along there were opportunities for his instruction and his help. The priest of ancient Israel was com- manded to make special atonement for the soul that sinned in ignorance. The God whom the Athenians ignorantly worshiped sent his serv- ant Paul to declare his true nature. And this 156 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS same Paul, after branding himself as a blas- phemer and a persecutor, pathetically adds, "but I obtained mercy, because I did it igno- rantly in unbelief." Jesus came into the world because the world was ignorant. It is only when this ignorance is the offspring or the mother of conceit; when it refuses to realize itself; when it rejects and repudiates instruc- tion — only then it becomes a crime. It is our business to know, and to help others to know. Lord Bacon said years ago that knowledge is power. So it is : power to send the iron ships plowing the green seas, power to plant steepled cities, to build mighty empires. Knowledge is power — and so is ignorance. One builds, the other breaks; one makes, the other mars. It was ignorance that destroyed the Alexandrian library and the records of the ancient Mexicans, these latter because the big- oted priests of Cortez feared the contamination of the pagan manuscripts, records that would be of value passing all estimate to-day. It was ignorance that locked the prison door upon Galileo, whose lofty spirit walked the uncharted skies, and handicapped the ardent Columbus, who had caught in his dreams a vision of new worlds. It was ignorance that made an outlaw of William Lloyd Garrison and broke the print- ing press of Elijah Parish Lovejoy. Igno- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 157 ranee has blocked the wheels of progress, stifled the spirit of invention, stained its hand in the blood of martyrs, and strangled the highest and noblest aspirations of the soul. God wants us to know. He has a place on the ramparts of Christianity for the mightiest intellect that ever swung the battle-ax in the struggle between right and wrong. The more thoroughly the intellect is trained the more readily it accepts the fundamental facts of God and the Bible and the Christian religion. It is a tremendous mistake, one that dies hard but one that has got to die, that ignorance is the mother of devotion. Men of brains are men of God. It is the tyro who objects; the shallow drinker at the Pierian spring who is intoxicated ; the sophomore who can give the professor varied and valuable in- formation; the raw recruit who chafes at the discipline of the camp. The great brain recognizes limitations and grapples the relentless inference. It says with John Stuart Mill, "It is of no use to claim that Christ is not historical. Who among his disciples was capable of inventing his sayings or of imagining his life and character?" It says : Suppose Moses did not write the Penta- teuch, and David did not write the Psalms, and Daniel did not write the Prophecy — what then ? 158 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS These books are here; they are matchless pro- ductions ; they blaze as stars of the first magni- tude in the literary sky ; they open for us a new moral world; somebody must be responsible for them, and what difference does it make who it is? Shakespeare may never have ex- isted, and the grave in the old church at Strat- ford may be empty, but we have Macbeth and Hamlet and King Lear, and if there were no Shakespeare, then the man who pretended to be Shakespeare and wrote in his name and de- ceived the world is greater than the Shakes- peare in whom we believe. If there be no Jesus and no cross and no real story of his life, then a dream, a figment of the imagination, a delusion of the brain has, ac- cording to the claim of Lecky, done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the philosophers and moralists that ever lived. The trained intellect sees the absurdity of this and bows with uncovered head before the Christ. It is our business to know. The times of ignorance God winked at, but now commandeth man everywhere to repent. This is now the condemnation — if condemnation there be — that light has come into the world and men love darkness rather than light. Light is all about us. The latest word from astronomy is that WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 159 space may not be all dark. That it is dark has been the teaching of the years. How graphic have been the word-pictures : the earth plung- ing through the blackness of night; the light beams from the sun speeding through the chaos of darkness to break in beauty and gleam upon the resisting atmosphere. But other theories are coming. Light has been found, we are told, where erstwhile darkness was supreme. Primeval night is being driven beyond the bounds of space. This sable-vested queen is robbed of her first estate. Since God is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity. We are finding light everywhere even as we are finding God everywhere. He who is igno- rant of truth now is willfully, deliberately ignorant, and such ignorance is sin. The Bible, the great hymns of the Church, the religious services, the whispers within of the willing Spirit of God — all these minister to our edifica- tion, help to make us wise unto salvation, and we neglect them at our peril. The second man to be introduced is named Atheist. An ugly word is this, but Bunyan does not mince matters. His language is Ar- cadian ; his spades are spades. 160 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS NOW, after a while they perceived, afar off, one coming softly and alone, all along the highway, to meet them. Then said Christian to his fellow, "Yonder is a man with his back to- ward Zion, and he is coming to meet us." Hope. I see him; let us take heed to ourselves now, lest he should prove a flat- terer also. So he drew nearer and nearer, and at last came up unto them. His name was Atheist, and he asked them whither they were going. Chr. We are going to Mount Zion. Then Atheist fell into a very great laughter. Chr. What is the meaning of your laughter? Atheist. I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are, to take upon you so te- dious a journey, and you are like to have nothing but your travel for your pains. Chr. Why, man, do you think we shall not be received? Atheist. Received! There is no such place as you dream of in all this world. Chr. But there is in the world to come. Atheist. When I was at home in mine own country, I heard as you now affirm; and from that hearing went out to see, and have been seeking this city this twenty WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 161 years, but find no more of it than I did the first day I set out. Chr. We have both heard and believe that there is such a place to be found. Atheist. Had not I, when at home, be- lieved, I had not come thus far to seek ; but finding none (and yet I should, had there been such a place to be found, for I have gone to seek it further than you), I am go- ing back again, and will seek to refresh myself with the things I then cast away for hopes of that which, I now see, is not. We call him The Man who Knows Nothing. In these days his name would be Agnostic. But in John Bunyan's time this classical term had not been invented ; at any rate, it had not been transferred from the Unknown God to the un- knowing philosopher ; nor had it become fash- ionable to advertise one's lack of knowledge. The author of our book antedated Kant by a century, and Kant was the unconscious father of modern agnostics. He was followed by Mr. Mill, who holds that "Whatever relates to God is a matter of inference" ; and by Mr. Spencer, who declares that "Any conception of God is literally unthinkable." Then, later, Grant Al- len sums it all up by saying that Deity is an "evolved and abstract conception of the human mind." l62 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS Well, I suppose that settles it. If God, as a Person, is unthinkable to such splendid intel- lects as these ; if he exist as an abstract propo- sition only, analogous to such ideas as space or time or the Tropic of Cancer, then it is not worth while for the rest of us to try to think him out! Serious loss is this for some. The world has been a hard place, the struggle has been desper- ate, sorrows have been bitter. The one thing that has comforted has been the thought of a personal God as Friend and Companion. We have looked for his hand when the way has been dark. But there is not much help in an "abstract conception." It has no place to stand on. It has no local habitation or name. We do not know where it lives. We can never be sure that it is in any way concerned about us. The fact is that many of us do not know what "an evolved and abstract conception of the mind" means anyhow. And so this modern theory, this theory that nothing can be known about God, makes life unspeakably lonely. Great God ! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 163 And to add to our sense of loss, those who take God away are flippant and careless over our loss. This man Atheist is introduced with a great laugh upon his lips: "I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are, to take upon you so tedious a journey, and you are like to have nothing but your travel for your pains." History often repeats itself; and allegory sometimes becomes history. A celebrated lec- ture was given up and down the land some years ago, and it was full of mirth. To be sure, it was in answer to the profoundest question that ever stirred human hearts, "What must I do to be saved ?" To be sure, the lecturer him- self acknowledged that "for thousands of years the world has been asking this question." To be sure, this question comes to us heavy with the atmosphere of the Philippian prison and somber with the dusky shadows of the midnight earthquake. Yet, according to the newspaper reports of this lecture, the answer to the ques- tion was in such temper that the audience again and again broke out into uproarious laughter. We want men to be serious when dealing with serious things. An incident is related of Mr. Cleveland which greatly increases our re- spect for him. One day when he was Presi- dent of the United States he entered his office in Washington and found a friend in his chair. 164 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS In the spirit of sport this friend greeted Mr. Cleveland as if the latter were an applicant for office. There was laughter for a while, and then Mr. Cleveland walked over to a window and gazed out upon the city. His friend crossed over and found him with tears in his eyes. "It is well enough," he said, "to play President, but the reality is awfully serious. On that desk are several applications for the pardon of men who are condemned to death, and I have got to settle their fate. This takes all levity out of the heart." The pilot who tells you in the wild of the stormy night that he does not know the chan- nel, that he is unable to guide the poor ship to safety, and then laughs about it, is not the man to be trusted with the helm again. The doctor, standing over your curly-headed boy when the breath is growing faint and the eyes are grow- ing dim, who tells you that he is ignorant of the disease and helpless to avert the disaster, and who laughs merrily at your dismay, will not be called in the next extremity, will not perhaps be allowed to stay in the house long enough to finish his unseemly mirth. If God is to be taken away, then in heaven's name let us be serious about it, for it is an awfully serious matter. If the sweetest hope of the human heart, the hope that keeps it WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 165 from breaking, the hope of a hereafter and a reunion, is to be smitten in the face and buried out of sight, then let us put ashes on our head and sing a requiem, for it is the world's funeral. The lips that laughed and made the world to laugh over the loss of hope and the eclipse of heaven are stilled forever now, and may God deal mercifully with the man who was so ready to answer heartaches with a wit- ticism and the hungry cry of the soul with "the laughter of fools" ! But our friend of the allegory goes further than mere negation. He does not know, and that settles it. What he does not know is not knowable. What he does not know does not exist. I once passed a fisherman on the Saint Lawrence who had been at work all the morn- ing but without success. He had fished and fished and had taken nothing. Now he said promptly and emphatically, "There are no fish in the river"; and the great river rolled on from the Lakes to the sea and was not dis- turbed, and the countless fish sported in the swift dark waters without knowing that they had been outlawed. I once knew a surgeon who searched the brain with his instruments of steel and his microscope, and said, "There is no soul, for I have looked for it and have not found it here" ; 166 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS and the soul went on dreaming its mighty dreams and building empires. I once knew an astronomer who wandered from star to star along the hither edges of creation, and when he stepped down from the telescope he said, "There is no God; I have looked for his face along the Milky Way and have searched the starry systems for his footsteps, and behold he is not here." And the heavens went right on declaring the glory of God, and the firma- ment went right on showing his handiwork. But Hopeful met the doubter's doubt when he said : "What ! no Mount Zion ? Did we not see from the Delectable Mountains the gate of the city?" There is no answer to expe- rience. There is no argument with the man who says, "I know whom I have believed." There is no use reasoning with the man who says, "Whereas once I was blind, now I see." What we have felt and seen With confidence we tell ; And publish to the sons of men The signs infallible. Let me tell you a story. It is not in the Bible. It is not in the Talmud nor the Tar- gum nor the Mishna nor in any of the To- sephta; you may not find it even in the Lives of the Saints or the Vitae Patrum Eremitico- rum. And what you cannot find there is very WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 167 rare indeed. But it contains a truth and you may take it along with the other oddities of this ancient Dream. Once upon a time a com- mittee was appointed by the scribes and Phari- sees to wait upon Lazarus in his Bethany home and to prove to him that he had not been raised from the dead; that such a miracle was un- thinkable and would be subversive of the laws of nature. There was no doubt that he had died — this could be proved by competent wit- nesses and was a reasonable hypothesis ; but as a resurrection under the circumstances was im- possible, the fact was that he was still dead. Now, it was contrary to law and to custom for a dead man to be walking the streets or min- gling with his living neighbors. A tremendous mistake had been made. He was the victim of a gigantic delusion and he owed it to him- self and to coming generations to correct the error by going back and having himself buried over again. It is said that Mary was greatly exercised by these arguments, their cogency, their conclusiveness, and she went over and laid her hand on her brother's shoulder. It is said that Lazarus could not for a moment think just how to answer this wise committee ; and it is further said that Martha arose quietly and with dignity and showed the committee the door. NIGHT THE TENTH ALL HAIL! AND WELCOME ; What if some morning, when the stars were paling, And the dawn whitened, and the east was clear, Strange peace and rest fell on me from the presence Of a benignant Spirit standing near : And I should tell him as he stood beside me, "This is our Earth — most friendly Earth, and fair, Daily its sea and shore through sun and shadow Faithful it turns, robed in its azure air : "There is blest living here, loving and serving, And quest of truth, and serene friendships dear ; But stay not, Spirit ! Earth has one destroyer — His name is Death; flee, lest he find thee here!" And what if then, while the still morning brightened, And freshened in the elm the summer's breath, Should gravely smile on me the gentle angel, And take my hand and say, "My name is Death." — Edward Rowland Sill. NIGHT THE TENTH All Hail! and Welcome E enter upon this last evening with more or less of regret. We are about to lose an old friend. For some weeks we have fol- lowed his adventures, shared his joys, and sympathized with his fears. He leaves us to-night. This is indeed nothing less than his funeral service. But why need it be sad ? The Bible never goes into mourning be- cause of death. It never hangs crape on the door. Its men and women fall asleep, or are gathered to their fathers, or God takes them. They do not die in the dreary, desolate, hope- less sense suggested by the drawn blinds and hushed voices of the typical funeral. "When I am dead, sing a psalm," whispered Susanna Wesley to her children who stood about her couch. We may be sure it was not the Nine- tieth Psalm with its dirge of human hopes, nor the Fifty-first Psalm with its bitter wail over human weakness ; but something with the sun- rise of morning gilding it, and the hallelujah of victory vibrating through it, for death in this case meant deliverance. 171 172 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS NOW, I saw in my dream that by this time the pilgrims were got over the Enchanted Ground; and enter- ing into the country of Beulah, whose air was very sweet and pleasant, the way lying directly through it, they solaced them- selves there for a season. Yea, here they heard continually the singing of birds, and saw every day the flowers appear in the earth, and heard the voice of the turtle in the land. In this country the sun shineth night and day; wherefore this was beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and also out of the reach of Giant Despair, neither could they from this place so much as see Doubting Castle. Here they were within sight of the city they were going to, also here met them some of the inhabitants thereof; for in this land the Shining Ones commonly walked, because it was upon the borders of heaven. In this land, also, the contract between the bride and the bride- groom was renewed; yea, here, "As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so did their God rejoice over them." Here they had no want of corn and wine; for in this place they met with abundance of what they had sought for in all their pilgrimage. Here they heard voices from out of the city, loud voices, saying, "Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 173 cometh; behold, his reward is with him!" Here all the inhabitants of the country- called them, "The holy people, The re- deemed of the Lord, Sought out," etc. Beulah means married. Here there is the sweetest concord between the soul and the Saviour. God has joined together and no man has power to put asunder. Here the sincere follower of Christ can never be alone. The Divine Spirit, mightier than an archangel, gen- tler than our mother's voice, is vividly present to those who walk in Beulah. Nor need we wait this experience until the end of the path. Beulah land is sometimes en- tered long before we reach the river's brink. It often lieth hard by the wicket gate. It is the kingdom of Assurance, the favored land whose constitution is the eighth chapter of Romans, whose statute law is the "law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus." He who walks with Jesus will sooner or later be freed of all evil com- panionship. Looking unto Christ we are changed; living with Christ we are trans- formed; abiding in Christ we are made like him. The Saviour comes and walks with me, And sweet communion here have we; He gently leads me by the hand, For this is heaven's borderland. 174 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS As our pilgrims move toward the Celestial City, which is already in sight and blazing with a glory that dazzles them, they come upon a river deep and dark which they learn must be crossed. The river is there. Flesh and blood cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, and we are scheduled through to the kingdom. This mortal must put on immortality, and death alone can make the transformation. "And they were stunned and began to de- spair in their minds." The fear of death is the old fear that has shadowed the world for a thousand ages. It has held the race in bond- age. It has tempered the rejoicings in the birthchamber and sat as a skeleton at all our feasts. Claudio in "Measure for Measure" was but a little intensifying the voice of the human when he said : "The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death." Yet it is not the same to all. The dream shows that "the river to some has its flowings, and what ebbings it has had while others have gone over. It has been in a manner dry for some, while it has overflowed its banks for others." There are some who daily walk with WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 175 God but who tremble with horror unspeakable at the thought of death. Yet they are loyal and God loves them and they are his accepted children. There are others in whom the con- sciousness of the divine presence has wrought a perfect deliverance; who look forward to death as tranquilly as the tired laborer looks to the coming of the night, when he shall lie down to sleep and pleasant dreams. Payson in his last days claimed to be a "happy inhabitant of the land of Beulah." The River of Death was but an insignificant rill which could be crossed at a single step. Bishop Haven came down to the last and said, "I am sweeping into the light, and there is no river here." Mr. Moody stood on the border line and said, "No pain! no valley! I am in the gates. I have seen the children." The end may be dark or light, fearful with a great fear or exultant with a great hope, but the promise is to all, "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee." Death has just as certainly a mission as life or prayer or faith. It is under orders. It is one of the servants of the King. With the advance of science and the broadening of faith we are ceasing to look upon it as a curse ; the mark of the divine disapproval ; the grisly exe- 176 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS cutioner of God's awful retributive judgment. We are learning that these bodies were not in- tended to be permanent. They are for our use during a single stage of the tremendous evolu- tion through which we are passing. The earth does not exist for itself. With its wide prairies and fecund valleys it exists for the sake of the vegetation that roots itself in the soil. Plant life looks toward animal life as its reason and justification, and the animal still looks forward to man and the higher phases of his being. Professor Agassiz taught that as the Old Testament points toward the cross, so all creation points toward man, from the first embryonic life that quivered in the slimy ooze of prehistoric oceans through the myriad forms that throng the animate world; all are but foreshadowings and prophecies of humanity. "First that which is natural, afterward that which is spiritual." There is no halting any- where along the upward path. There is a change of cars at each apparent terminus, but no change of direction. We are superbly equipped for the world that now is, but we must make new adjustments for the world that is to come. The body cannot be taken with us beyond the present stage of the journey. There will be no solid path along which it may tread WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 177 as we move on in our stately destiny and to- ward our splendid destination. The body will bide with its brother the clod, and the imper- ishable soul will appropriate imperishable ma- terial out of which to build its everlasting habi- tation. There must be, then, a divorce between the soul and the body. There must be a moving-out season and the hanging of the crane in a more suitable abode. This change we call death. It cannot be called the penalty of sin. It would be, in some form, if there had been no sin. It was, before the first sin had been committed. It is a postu- late arising from the relation between the flesh and the spirit. It is the deliverer of the soul from the bondage of the dust. It is the climax of life, the transition, the apotheosis. Yet we are told that death did not always exist. There was a time when life was so simple and unambitious that there was no de- sire for improvement. Cell generated cell without a struggle or a break. Then there came new ambitions and enlarged horizons. Life was no longer satisfied to reproduce itself merely. There came aspirations to do larger things. Then the old cells broke down and died that new and more abundant life might come. So death was born. Out of the desire for growth it came, and the old was willing to 178 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS go down, if thereby the new might walk over the broken wrecks to grander possibilities. And death comes always bringing a blessing in its hands. Without it the whole economy of nature must be changed. According to the claims of Charles Darwin, animals increase at so high a rate that unless death interpose the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even the elephant, the slowest breeder of all known animals, if left alone would soon possess the land. At the end of seven hundred and fifty years nineteen million elephants would be descended from a single pair. The Department of Agriculture is re- sponsible for the statement that, if undisturbed, the family of a single pair of English sparrows in ten years would number 275,716,983,698. On this, I presume, were based the calcula- tions of Bishop Randolph S. Foster. He gives ponderous and appalling figures to show that if there were no death, and this little creature should keep on producing its kind for two hun- dred years, at the end of that time the earth would be buried in mountain ranges of spar- rows covering every inch of the globe from pole to pole. A thousand years of man with- out death would leave no standing room on the planet, according to the Origin of Species. Na- ture must keep death at her right hand or move WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 179 into a larger house. Like the philosopher Thomas Malthus, she realizes that the only way to improve society is to restrain population; that, everything else being equal, hungry mouths would soon outnumber corn-sheaves, and demand outstrip supply. Death is one of the agencies of civilization. Civilization grows great and luminous by the uplift of successive generations. Each age with its ideals and its splendid representatives does its work, then moves on to give place to the next. If there were no death the past would fetter the present. Worn-out theories, mildewed shibboleths, outgrown prejudices, would dominate the new thought of the day. Old tyrannies in the saddle would ride down incipient reforms. The creeds of our fathers would be our jailers. The funeral lamps from the tombs of the old prophets would "light the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day." Suppose Richard III or Nero could have lived a thousand years and held authority to the end ! What an awful blight it would have been upon the race! But death came and the world breathed easier. Death sweeps away the old generation, and the new men who come into the kingdom bring with them all the lessons learned in the past, and new faith and new en- thusiasm to meet the new occasions and the i8o MIDSUMMER NIGHTS new duties. Sometimes we are staggered by the appalling loss when some great leader falls. But the reins are taken up by a younger hand and the world moves steadily on. Moses look- ing back for the last time upon the tents of Israel sees the hosts preparing to march under the leadership of Joshua. The mantle of Elijah when wrapped together in the hand of Elisha opens the Jordan. One may decrease but the other must increase; the day wanes only toward the new day's dawning. Death brings the same enlargement to indi- viduals. It breaks down barriers and widens horizons. I remember reading when a boy an article picturing the close of the first day in Eden — the going down of the sun, the slow darkening of the skies, the hush of the birds, the restless uneasiness of the beasts at the un- canny gloom; and how an awful sense of un- certainty and loss came to the man and woman — the impression that the end was coming so soon after the beginning; the helplessness and dread as the light faded and the darkness fell. Then one by one the stars appeared, silent, alert, self-confident, friendly; and when the skies were crowded with the flaming hosts, then Adam realized that his loss had been splendid gain. Instead of one sun there were a thou- sand ; a canopy blazing with beauty that would WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 181 not have been discovered if the sun had not set ; a heaven all aglow, unseen and unsuspected until the earth became dark. Joseph Blanco White has emphasized this thought in one of the most beautiful sonnets in the language: Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus with the host of heaven came, And lo ! creation widened in man's view. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O sun! or who could find, Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed, That to such endless orbs thou mad'st us blind ! Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife? If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life? May not this be the mission of death — to darken the day so that the night may shine ? to fling a curtain over the glimmering light of the life that now is, in order that the radiance and effulgence of the life that is to come may stand revealed ? And after death — what? Only the Book can answer this question with authority. Everything else is guesswork or inference. The Bible teaches very distinctly the dual nature of man; that we are body and soul, 182 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS really body and soul and spirit. It very em- phatically shows that the body will some day go to pieces and that the soul will be released. In graphic pictures it represents the coming of death, the loosing of the silver cord, the break- ing of the golden bowl, and "then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Whether that spirit shall go back to God as the rivers run down to the sea and are swal- lowed up in the sea, or whether it goes back to dwell with him as a living, thinking, intelligent entity, is not stated here. The Bible teaches eternal life, that is, life in eternity. It blazes with the glorious theme. It sounds all the deeps of vivid poetry and all the breadths of mighty prose in the elaboration of this great thought. "The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life." "I give unto my sheep eternal life." "Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life." It speaks as definitely of the future as of the present, of eternity as of time. Paul refers to death and its experience as if he were planning another pilgrimage to Jerusalem or another preaching tour through Asia Minor. It rises to the very climax of rapture and en- thusiasm as it attempts to describe that house not made with hands, the house of the re- WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 183 deemed. The gates are of pearl and the foundations of precious stones, and the streets are of virgin gold and the waters clear as crys- tal flowing through smiling valleys. But does the Bible anywhere declare that immortality is the natural attribute of the human soul ? Plato gives us the phrase "immortal soul." It is not found in the Bible. This theory goes back to the ancient Egyptians, and it came into the early Church through the fathers and now is held by many as a necessary creed of the Church. Argument after argument has been pressed by the mightiest thinkers to prove that the soul is in itself immortal ; that nothing can destroy it ; that in its very nature it must endure as long as God shall endure ; and yet so plainly does the Book say that "God only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can ap- proach unto." Does not the Bible speak of immortality as a result to be reached, an object to be gained, not a condition in which we are born? God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life — so runs the beautiful record — and man be- came a living soul. And now, that he might be an ever-living soul, God planted the tree of life within the garden. But later God doomed the man to die, and then was he kept away 184 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS from the tree that perhaps would have made his living soul an immortal soul. Mighty fact is this, or immense allegory that stands for awful truth, unreachable save in terms of childlike simplicity that all the world can un- derstand. Immortality seems to be held by the Bible as a condition to be sought. Paul speaks of two classes of persons: those who are con- tentious and do not obey the truth, and those who by patient continuance in welldoing seek after glory, honor, and immortality. To these latter God will render eternal life. This is the Book, and it is not safe to go beyond the Book. To be sure, there are apparently powerful arguments for natural immortality : in the mar- velous grip of the brain, the mighty sweep of the intellect, holding dominion as it does over all the great forces of the natural world; and in our moral nature, which recognizes the power of right and turns away from the wrong. But these arguments may prove too much. There is very little good we possess which is not possessed in some degree by the dog or the elephant. The difference between the highest grade of beast and the lowest grade of man is not always in the man's favor. There are some horses that seem to have a clearer sense of right and wrong than some men. It is not safe WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 185 to say, "I think, therefore I am immortal," un- less we are ready to include in our immortality the crow that can count thirty, or that can dis- tinguish an umbrella from a shotgun; or the fox which throws the hounds off the scent by wading a stream, and then sits and laughs at their discomfiture. But there is immortality. The souls that go out on the great mysterious sea of the future under the guidance of the Divine Pilot shall sail there forever under unclouded skies and amid spice-laden breezes. The Bible offers it under certain conditions, and Science has not a word to say in contradiction. On the con- trary, the tendency of present-day thinking is to look for something of this. Evolution is one of the master words of the age. And by evolu- tion I mean not a theory as to the origin of the world, but an explanation of its order ; not a substitute for God, but a special method adopted by God in managing the universe. In- deed, it does seem as if God is more mightily, more magisterially present in evolution than in any other world-plan. The great principle of evolution is more life : the original germ becoming Monera, then Polyzoa, then through all the gradations up to man — each change made by the constant up- ward pressure of life reaching out into wider i86 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS fields and into higher elevations. This process has attained its highest reach on earth and in time; why not put one more step to the stair- case and so scale the heavens? why not put one more pier to the bridge and so connect with the shores of eternity ? Immortality lies along the path of evolution : the lower orders of crea- tion struggling toward the higher, the forms that are prone straightening up and standing erect, the fish-eaters and root-diggers develop- ing into Isaiahs and Isaac Newtons and Glad- stones. This is the teaching of modern science. Who shall now say to this stupendous march of event and of elaboration, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no further"? They tell us that wheels have started; dare they tell us the wheels have stopped ? They have watched the process of growth until the original germ has become a man. Now let us keep our eyes on the dial, for by the same reasoning man will become an angel. Here, then, is the testimony of Science, the young but mighty sister of Revealed Truth; a glorious preacher of the resurrection and im- mortality; and thus does Science offer to the man whose face is toward the hills that which has been offered the lower orders, a future and a growth. The servant of God has eternity in his soul. WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 187 His feet are on the upgrade, and the top of the mountain along whose slope he climbs is out of sight in the far-off blue. He feels springing within him already a strength that shall never tire and a life that shall never cease. In a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea. And on that sea we shall launch our ships by and by. Some weeks ago I crossed the ferry to Man- hattan in a thick fog. A gray curtain shut off the shores, and objects could not be seen halfway across the boat. Sounds were muffled and all the world was still. It was as if we were drifting through space millions of miles from any life. Suddenly from the ferry slip which we were cautiously approaching came the sound of a bell. How weird it sounded, how eerie it seemed, breaking out of the pall of mist and through the mysterious silence! And I said to myself, "Ah, the city is there, and there is the landing place and solid ground and friends." And so as we drift through the years of life, slowly, painfully pushing ahead, dark-shadowed, danger-beset, alone, there comes to us occasionally out of the great be- yond a voice, or the fragment of a song, or the i88 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS sound of the harbor bell, and we grip the helm with steadier hand and catch our breath for new endeavor, for the landing place is just ahead, and all will be well. Then all hail, Death! the Revealer of se- crets; the Consoler of griefs; the unfaltering Guide to lead us into yet untrodden fields ; the Prophet of a new dispensation; the mightiest ministering Angel of the King of kings, with brow of light and pinions of mercy. And may we be ready for thy coming, for thy face is said to be like unto the face of the Son of man. THEY then addressed themselves to the water; and entering, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said, "I sink in deep waters ; the billows go over my head, all his waves go over me ! Selah." Then said the other, "Be of good cheer, my brother; I feel the bottom, and it is good." Christian, therefore, presently found ground to stand upon ; and so it fol- lowed that the rest of the river was but shallow. Thus they got over. Now, upon the bank of the river, on the other side, they saw the two Shining Men again, who there waited for them. Wherefore, being come out of the river, they saluted them, WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 189 saying, "We are ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation." Thus they went along toward the gate. Now, you must note that the city stood upon a mighty hill, but the pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them up by the arms; also, they had left their mortal gar- ments behind them in the river, for though they went in with them, they came out without them. They therefore went up here with much agility and speed, though the foundation upon which the city was framed was higher than the clouds. They therefore went up through the regions of the air, sweetly talking as they went, being comforted, because they safely got over the river, and had such glorious companions to attend them. Now, while they were thus drawing to- ward the gate, behold, a company of the heavenly host came out to meet them; to whom it was said, by the other two Shin- ing Ones, "These are the men that have loved our Lord when they were in the world, and that have left all for his holy name; and he hath sent us to fetch them, and we have brought them thus far on their desired journey, that they may go in and look their Redeemer in the face with 190 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS joy." Then the heavenly host gave a great shout, saying, "Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb." Now, I saw in my dream that these two men went in at the gate; and lo! as they entered, they were transfigured, and they had raiment put on them that shone like gold. There was also that met them with harps and crowns, and gave them to them — the harps to praise withal, and the crowns in token of honor. Then I heard in my dream that all the bells in the city rang again for joy, and that it was said unto them, "Enter ye into the joy of your Lord." I also heard the men themselves, that they sang with a loud voice, saying, "Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, forever and ever." So I awoke, and, behold, it was a dream. INDEX Addison, 84 Agassiz, 176 Agnostic, 161 Alden, John, 146 Alexandrian Library, 156 Allen, Grant, 161 Alexius, Death of, 141 Alps, 56 Andree, 141 Apollyon, 73 Armor, Christian, 67 Arnold, Matthew, 25 Assurance, 173 Athanasius, Exile of, 18 Athenians, 155 Atheist, 1 59 Atlanta, 75 Church, The, S3, 57, 63 Claudio, 174 Cleveland, Duchess of, 98 Cleveland, Grover, 163 Coldstream Guards, 101 Coleridge, 2 Colorado, Canyon of, 8 Columbus, 15, 143 Conceit, Country of, 154 Confession, Romish, 22 Conscience Unreliable, 141 Conversion, Nature of, 40 Cook, Joseph, xi Corporations, The, 59 Cortez, 156 Crusades, The, 45 Cyprian, Martyrdom of, 106 Bacon, Lord, 156 Daniel, 95 Beecher, H. W., 58 Dante a Politician, 95 Beulah, Land of, 173 Darwin, Charles, 178 Bible, The, 5, 65, 81, 119, David, 65 128, 137, 171, 182, 183 Death, a friend of man, 178 Boston, Streets of, 30 Birth of, 177 Braddock, Defeat of, 154 River of, 175 Brainerd, Conversion of, 41 Declaration of Independ- Bratts, Ned, Brooks, Phillips, 23 Browning, x Caesar, 75 Canaan, Language of, 103 Candor, Advantage of, 27 Carlyle, Thomas, on Con- version, 42 on Clothes, 100 Carton, Sydney, Death of, Dorchester, Countess of, 116 Doubting Castle, 113 Cato, 84 Doubts, no, 118 Cecil, Richard, 96 Dreadful Night, City of, 26 191 ence, 56 Defeat, 75 Delectable Mountains, 133 Dickens, Charles, 116 Diffidence, wife of Giant Despair, 125 or Self-consciousness, 126 Discretion, 63 Donatello, 123 192 INDEX East River, 119 Elijah on Carmel, 89 Enemy, Value of an, 79 Ericson, Leif, 142 Ethical Culture, 11 Euclid, 32 Evangelist, 9 Evolution, 185 Experience, 142 Ezekiel, 32 Faithful, 89 Fame, Hall of, 117 Faustus, Dr., 116 Fear in Religion, 6 Flaubert's Madame Bovary, 116 Florence, 123 Foster, Bishop, and Death, 178 Fox, George, 102 France, Revolution in, 57 Galileo, 156 Ganges, 147 Garrison, William Lloyd, Germany, Civilization of, 60 Gettysburg, Battle of, 45 Gideon, 65 Gladstone, William E., 95 God, Freedom of, 25 Honesty of, 28 Misconception of, 122, 137 Goldsmith, Oliver, xi Good- will, 21 Guilt, Sense of, 7, 17 Gulliver's Travels, ix Hadley, Conversion of, 41 Haeckel, 25 Hafiz, The World, 93 Hartmann, 25 Haven, Bishop, Death of, 175 Hillis, Newell Dwight, 2 Honest, Mr., 126 Hopeful, hi House Beautiful, The, 53 Humiliation, Valley of, 73 Huntingdon, Lady, 94 Huss, John, Death of, 82 Ibsen, Henrik, view of heredity, 25 Ignorance, 152 Immortal Soul, Plato's con- ception of, 183 Immortality, Natural, 183 Conditional, 184 India, Civilization of, 60 Interpreter, House of, 37 Jailer, The Philippian, 13 James II, 154 James, Professor, on Con- version, 42 Jefferson, Thomas, 56 Jekyll, Dr., and Mr. Hyde, 78 Jerome, 17 Job, 81 Johnson, Dr., 102 Kant, father of agnosti- cism, 161 Khayyam, Omar, 26 Kipling, Rudyard, 83 Knowledge, 140 Laputa, Island of, ix Lazarus, 120, 167 Lecky, 158 Levity, Unseasonable, 164 Library, Alexandrian, 156 Sunday school, 138 Life, Eternal, 182 Light, Universal^ 158 Lowell, "The Crisis," 36 Luther, Martin, 58 Lydia, 137 INDEX i93 Maartens, Maarten, on he- redity, 25 Macaulay, 2 Macbeth, Lady, 39 Malthus, Thomas, 179 Martineau, conception of miracles, 121 Martyn, Henry, 95 McKinley, William, 95 Mephistopheles, 116 Milky Way, 166 Mill, John Stuart, 157, 161 Miller, Daisy, 115 Millinery, Church, 100 Miracles, Place of, 121 Monera, 185 Moody, Death of, 175 Moses, Choice of, 92 Neptune, Planet, 48 Nero, 179 Newspapers, Sunday, in England, 105 Newton, Sir Isaac, 186 New York, Sky line of, 104 Night, The First, 180 Oceans, 44 Depth of, 46 (Edipus, 116 Ostian Road, 82 Othello, 24 Pandora, 62 Paul, 82, 93 Payson, Last days of, 175 Pentateuch, Author of, 157 Persius, 88 Peter and ornament, 99 Pharaoh, 92 Plato, Dialogues, 151 on Immortality, 183 Pliable, 12 Plutarch's Lives, x Prayer, 127 Presumption, 55 Promise, 127 Puritan objections to Pil- grim's Progress, 4 Quakers, Garb of, 102 Reuss, 120 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 155 Richard III, 179 Ridpath, 94 Romans, eighth chapter, 138, 139 Rome, Burning of, 27 Rule, Golden, 30 Saint Lawrence River, 165 Saul of Tarsus, Conversion of, 13, 4i Savonarola, 95, 106 Schopenhauer, 25 Sermonettes, ix Shakespeare, 116, 158 Sherman at Atlanta, 75 Sill, Edward Rowland, 170 Simple, 54 Sin, Conviction of, 8, 42 Sincere, 145 Slavery, American, 45, 58 Sloth, 54 Slough of Despond, 15 Smith, Adam, 56 Social Problems, 14 Socialism, 60 Sodom, 8 Sophocles, 116 Sorrento, ix Spencer, Herbert, 161 Spenser, Faerie Queene, 3 Standish, Miles, 146 Starbuck, Professor, on Conversion, 42 Tables of Stone, 66 Tennyson, no Theology, Sunday school, US Thirty Years' War, 45 194 Tiberius on Capri, 39 Triton, 162 INDEX Ulrici and the body, 7 Universe, Breadth of, 47 Valjean, Jean, 116 Valley Forge, 15 Vanity Fair, 90 Verne, Jules, 47 '56 Death Washington, Mount, 140 Watchful, 144 "Wealth of Nations, spiritual Wesley, John, 58 Wesley, Susanna, of, 171 Wharton, Edith, 72 White, Joseph Blanco, 181 World, The, its meaning, 93, 94 Worldliness, 97 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 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