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DISCOURSES 
 
 |T||t LIBRARY 
 OF CONGRESS 
 
 JWASHINOTON 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 
 EDWARD H HALL 
 
 Pastor of the First Parish Cambridge Massachusetts 
 
 . 
 
 v£> VVASH^ 
 
 
 ^77^ y 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 George H Ellis 141 Franklin Street 
 
 i893 
 
is** 
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 
 By Geo. H. Ellis 
 1893 
 
 060. H. ELLIS, PRINTER, 141 FRANKLIN ST., BOSTON. 
 
TO THE 
 
 jftrst parts!) in Cambridge 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 ELEVEN YEARS OF UNINTERRUPTED FELLOWSHIP 
 
 THIS VOLUME IS 
 
 AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 
 
 1893 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 This volume is published by a committee of the friends 
 and parishioners of Mr. Hall. To their request for leave 
 to print a selection from his sermons, heretofore refused, 
 he at last consented a few months ago, on his departure 
 for Europe, when retiring from the ministry. 
 
 The committee are well assured that these pages win 
 be precious to many a reader ; for they reveal the high 
 qualities of character, thought, and feeling, which en- 
 deared Mr. Hall to his people in an ever-increasing 
 measure of gratitude, confidence, affection, and deep 
 respect. 
 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts, October, 1893. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Supernatural i 
 
 II. Not to be Ministered unto 14 
 
 III. Worth of the Present Hour 26 
 
 IV. Strength in Weakness 38 
 
 V. Our Dead 51 
 
 VI. Personal Influence 65 
 
 VII. Memorials of Jesus ......... j8 
 
 VIII. Earthly and Heavenly 92 
 
 IX. An Indignity to our Citizen Soldiers . 106 
 
 X. The Divine Humanity 122 
 
 XI. Authority . 135 
 
 XII. Peace 148 
 
 XIII. The Dream and the Reality 161 
 
 XIV. Inheritances 174 
 
 XV. Justice to the Laborer 187 
 
 XVI. Immortality . 200 
 
 XVII. The Place of Jesus in the World's Re- 
 ligious History 213 
 
 XVIII. Farewell Discourse 226 
 
I. 
 
 THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 " As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher 
 than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." — Isa. lv. 9. 
 
 I find a certain perplexity in beginning my dis- 
 course this morning. I can find no text at hand 
 exactly suited to my theme. I wish to speak of 
 the supernatural, but I look through the Bible in 
 vain to find that word. Neither Old Testament 
 nor New contains it. They seem to know noth- 
 ing of the supernatural. Or shall we say that 
 they know of nothing but the supernatural, and 
 have no more occasion to speak of it than we at 
 noon-day to call attention to the sunlight? In 
 any case, the omission is a significant one, and 
 carries us back to a time when the great problems 
 of the present hour had no existence for the popu- 
 lar mind, if even for philosophic speculation, when 
 the vast sphere of secondary causes which now 
 presses in between the soul and its thought of 
 God was wholly unknown, and when the discus- 
 sion which I bring before you to-day of the differ- 
 ence between the natural and the supernatural 
 would have seemed utterly gratuitous and irrele- 
 vant. For us, however, these two words do exist: 
 
2 DISCOURSES 
 
 they play a definite part in our daily speech, and it 
 becomes necessary for us now and then to ask our- 
 selves what ideas we must attach to them. Natural 
 and supernatural, — for what do these terms stand? 
 
 Nature faces us on every hand; not perfectly 
 understood, her laws but recently and partially dis- 
 covered, not yet, perhaps, what she will by and by 
 become, — a process rather than a result, — yet so 
 consistent a system of causes and effects, embrac- 
 ing in one scheme the phenomena of earth, air, 
 and skies, that we do not hesitate to call her by 
 name, and to live in constant recognition of her 
 laws. Nature, to use a definition which all would 
 accept, is the realm of discovered facts and laws. 
 
 But Nature does not seem to cover everything. 
 On every hand she borders upon a region whose 
 facts we have not discovered and whose laws we 
 do not understand. Beyond the known is the 
 sphere of the unknown. Nature seems to us at 
 times but a petty province, bounded on all sides 
 by vast spaces, unexplored and trackless. We 
 touch this unknown world at every point, not in 
 spiritual matters only by any means, but in ma- 
 terial as well. The chemist finds it when, after 
 any analysis, he asks himself how any one of the 
 elements he has employed performs its results, not 
 what it can do, but how it does it. The botanist 
 finds it the moment he inquires what power within 
 the acorn it is which makes it produce an oak, and 
 not an elm or pine. The astronomer finds it when 
 he asks wherein the force which we call gravita- 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL 3 
 
 tion resides, not what its laws are, but what in 
 itself it is. The evolutionist finds it when he 
 tries to span the gulf which thus far separates dead 
 substance from living, or matter from mind. 
 
 Even apart from spiritual laws, therefore, or 
 the hidden ways of the soul, and without the aid 
 of moralist or theologian or philosopher, we should 
 discover, and do hourly discover, this outlying, 
 all-encircling sphere, which no line of ours meas- 
 ures, which no analysis of ours can resolve, which 
 no known laws control, which no imagination pene- 
 trates. This we are taught to call the realm of 
 the supernatural. Below nature (if we may so 
 speak), it is the abode of those impalpable forces 
 by which all things live; around nature, it consti- 
 tutes that unconquered province which grows only 
 larger with all our encroachments upon it; above 
 nature (as its name exactly indicates), it opens 
 that holier sphere of being to which the soul's 
 unsatisfied instincts imperiously point, which is 
 to us as real and abiding as life itself, and which 
 we reverently term divine. And this thought of 
 a higher sphere it is, let me add, this idea of a 
 holiness, beauty, and truth as yet unreached, this 
 faith in things unknown and infinite, which lends 
 to life its surpassing mystery, and fills the soul, 
 under all disheartenments, with invincible strength. 
 Very different would our earthly existence be if, 
 outside our daily barterings and traffickings, did 
 not lie this region of the unknown, the region of 
 infinite possibilities. 
 
4 DISCOURSES 
 
 Natural and supernatural, — no names could per- 
 haps be better; certainly there are none other at 
 hand to indicate the two realms which I have en- 
 deavored to distinguish, and which you understand 
 better than any words of mine can describe them. 
 Yet the very attempt at definition proves at once, 
 as you have felt all along, how poor the terms are 
 at best, and how vague is our notion of what we are 
 trying to express. The sharper your attempted 
 distinctions here, the more inadequate your terms 
 become, and the more superficial your knowledge 
 proves itself. The more intently you gaze upon 
 the supposed boundary line of which I have spoken, 
 the more dim and uncertain it grows; and, if we 
 try to fix it positively and finally, the brain fairly 
 grows giddy before the task is begun. A sharp 
 line of demarcation separates the ocean from the 
 land, the mountain peak from the sky, or the 
 moon's disk from the heavens behind it; but to 
 determine just where Nature ends and the supernat- 
 ural begins is like tracing the edge of the summer 
 cloud or separating tint from tint in the sunset 
 sky. Try to draw such a line, I beg you, and tell 
 me how far you can follow it, and just where it 
 carries you. It changes, you will find, as rapidly 
 as the summer cloud. Where it lies to-day it has 
 never lain before. Where would Nature's boun- 
 dary line have run a century ago? Would it have 
 included, for instance, the transmission of mes- 
 sages across the seas, the hourly converse of 
 Europe and America, the spoken message from city 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL 5 
 
 to city? Would Nature have acknowledged as her 
 own the necromancer who soothes your agonizing 
 pain at a touch and blots whole hours out of your 
 existence, or would she have left him to the com- 
 pany of wizards and enchanters? Or, go two or 
 three centuries farther back, what would she have 
 done with the astronomer who anticipated the hour 
 and moment of the sun's eclipse and boldly fore- 
 told the appearance of a new planet, the eye which 
 read in the buried rock the age of the universe, the 
 hand which stereotyped for you, in an instant, the 
 living features of your friend, or the letter of many 
 thousand words carried beneath the bird's wing 
 into the beleaguered city? We know on which 
 side of the line stood the gods of Troy, lending 
 their clumsy aid of monstrous serpent or wooden 
 horse to the encompassed Trojans; where would 
 have stood the workers of these vaster miracles for 
 the besieged Parisians of to-day? Or, go still fur- 
 ther back, if you will, century by century, it is ever 
 the same. Nature dwindles as you go. Faster and 
 faster its boundary recedes and its circle lessens, 
 till, as you look, Nature vanishes wholly from your 
 sight and the supernatural is everywhere. Yes, 
 there was a time, indeed, in Greece and Rome, in 
 Egypt and Judaea, when Nature was unknown, and 
 when powers of another sphere, intervening every- 
 where, caused the grass to grow and the rain to 
 fall, the sun to rise and the disease to abate, the 
 lightning to flash in anger and the bow to span the 
 heavens with its arch of peace, caused the waters 
 
6 DISCOURSES 
 
 to gush from the solid rock, and the waves of the 
 mighty sea to recede before the steps of the retreat- 
 ing host. 
 
 Or try, if you choose, to trace Nature's line as 
 it runs to-day, and tell me how far you can follow 
 it or through exactly what regions it carries you. 
 Does it separate visible things from invisible? 
 Where, then, will you place the force which bursts 
 the seed or stirs the sap with the returning warmth 
 of spring? It is not visible, is it therefore su- 
 pernatural? Does it separate purely human acts 
 from divine, — in other words, acts which we can 
 explain from those which we cannot? But from 
 what spaces, pray, do I call these thoughts to me, 
 wise or foolish as they may be, or by what power 
 send the brain's message to the hand as I write? 
 Does it separate will from law, spontaneous from 
 involuntary action? Where, then, shall we assign 
 our passions or our habits, affection or memory or 
 remorse? Does it separate matter from mind or 
 body from spirit? Why, then, does the blood 
 bound in your veins as you see an unjust or cruel 
 deed, or why does the brain give way under the 
 intensity of thought? Some theologians of the day 
 would fain class all these mental processes as su- 
 pernatural, from sheer necessity of drawing the 
 traditional line somewhere. Shall we rule them 
 all out of Nature's territory, and retain within it 
 only what is paltry and common? 
 
 No: the task, as it seems to me, is hopeless. 
 This is a line which cannot be drawn, try as long 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL 7 
 
 and hard as you will. Following no divisions 
 which human thought can trace, running never be- 
 tween, but always through, separating nowhere, but 
 penetrating everywhere, cutting asunder what seems 
 one flesh and blood, and bringing together what 
 seems world-wide apart, it eludes and mocks me, 
 until in very despair I give up the pursuit forever. 
 
 But why give it up entirely, you ask, simply be- 
 cause you cannot trace it throughout? Certain 
 moments in the world's history there have as- 
 suredly been when its presence could be distinctly 
 seen, certain events, about eighteen hundred years 
 ago, which will give us all the knowledge of the 
 supernatural we can ask. Why not turn to them, 
 and find your definitions there? 
 
 True, we find there a very sacred story, which no 
 one has succeeded yet in wholly interpreting. The 
 birth of a new religion, the entrance into the world 
 of an ideally holy life, — what could be called 
 supernatural, if not this? No one anticipated or 
 predicted the birth of Christianity, nor has any his- 
 torian ever yet revealed to us the exact causes 
 which produced it. What was there, indeed, in 
 the Jewish or pagan life of the early Roman Em- 
 pire, its formalities, its frivolity, its sensualism, 
 what in its art, its religion, or its philosophy, 
 which could of itself have produced a Jesus of 
 Nazareth? Ah! but the moment you ask this ques- 
 tion you must ask many another. What was there 
 in the atmosphere of the fourteenth century or fif- 
 teenth, what was there in the morals or the religion 
 
8 DISCOURSES 
 
 of the Medicis or the Borgias, what was there in 
 that profoundly unspiritual age, among frivolous 
 and dissolute courts, when Christianity, at its low- 
 est ebb, was turning back to Paganism for the in- 
 spiration it had lost, which could have produced 
 the choicest fruits of religious art which the world 
 has ever seen? What was there in the land of 
 Queen Elizabeth, in the times of a Leicester or a 
 Bacon, what in the literature of England or of the 
 world down to the sixteenth century, to have pro- 
 duced a Shakspere? Inexplicable, indeed! but who 
 can explain these things? Who has ever foretold 
 the coming of genius, or, when it had once arrived, 
 has shown whence or how it came? I do not mean 
 that the cases are the same. It is not the question 
 whether the one matches the other, or whether the 
 artist or poet is as great a wonder as the apostle or 
 the saint. The only question is whether the one 
 can be traced any more easily than the other to its 
 natural source, whether genius can be shown any 
 more readily than sainthood to be the normal 
 flowering of humanity. And if it cannot, where 
 is the line which separates the natural from the 
 supernatural ? 
 
 But what do you mean, you may here ask. If 
 even that sacred story, holiest and most beautiful 
 to us in all the past, has nothing in it which dis- 
 tinguishes it definitely from other events of the 
 world's history, then all difference disappears be- 
 tween natural and supernatural, does it not, and 
 they become one and the same? Is that what you 
 would say? 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL 9 
 
 Exactly. You anticipate my thought, and have 
 reached already my conclusion. I say that the 
 distinction between natural and supernatural is 
 purely artificial and fictitious. I say that the 
 terms create a difference which cannot be proved 
 to exist, and introduce a confusion into the uni- 
 verse which is wholly needless. I hold that, 
 whether it be true or not that such a difference 
 exists, no such distinction has ever been found; 
 and, until it is found, it is wholly superfluous to 
 assume its existence. I say that, as I look around 
 me, I see Nature everywhere and I see God every- 
 where. Nay, I find everything full of Nature and 
 everything full of God; and, until I am compelled 
 by evidence that is insurmountable, I see no rea- 
 son to parcel off any scraps of Nature's boundless 
 territory and declare that there God is not. I hold 
 that these two terms were invented not to denote 
 any actual knowledge, but solely to cover our 
 ignorance; and that, when we say, Up to this point 
 Nature goes, and beyond lies the supernatural, we 
 mean only, Up to this point we have discovered 
 God's laws, and beyond it we have not. Here is 
 the known, there is the unknown. If we must 
 keep these words at all, Nature herself is supernat- 
 ural, and the supernatural is another name for 
 Nature. Nature is full of miracles to overflowing, 
 yet are all these miracles her own. "Enter," said 
 the old philosopher, "for here, too, are gods! " 
 
 And I say, furthermore, that this doctrine which 
 I am urging is one of the plainest doctrines of 
 
10 DISCOURSES 
 
 Christianity herself, and that the whole of Chris- 
 tendom in its nobler moods avows this faith, only 
 that, the moment it has confessed it, it proceeds 
 forthwith, as though startled at its temerity, to 
 modify and disown it. I say that there is not a 
 Christian church to-day which has not in the most 
 explicit terms acknowledged all that is here 
 claimed; acknowledged that "there is one God, 
 who is above all and through all and in all " ; and 
 that, when it proceeds further and declares God 
 present in certain souls and by implication absent 
 from others, peculiarly present in certain times 
 and places and by implication less present in 
 others, or when it speaks of "the miracles" of 
 eighteen hundred years ago, as if there were no 
 miracles beside, it is false to its own higher 
 thought and repudiates its own ideal. 
 
 "Natural and supernatural," indeed! You can- 
 not make this distinction without banishing God 
 from some part of his universe and pronouncing 
 something undivine. "Miracles of the past," in- 
 deed ! but what shall we say of these miracles of 
 the present? Men choose to ignore them, I am 
 aware; to make little of them, that they may make 
 much of something else. I am content to make 
 much of these. "Put off thy shoes from off thy 
 feet: the place whereon thou standest is holy 
 ground." Uncover thy head. Wouldst thou be- 
 hold a miracle? Here it is. Look at this tiny 
 being which has just found its way into the world. 
 Whence came it, and where slumbers now the mind 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL II 
 
 which by and by is to shine through these vacant 
 eyes and kindle its whole being into intelligence 
 and life? Look at that motionless form. Where 
 now is the soul that a moment ago was there? Is 
 it gone? And, if so, when and whither? But a 
 few hours ago you were yourself wrapped in uncon- 
 sciousness : what roused you from your oblivion or 
 brought back your lost intelligence? Birth, death, 
 sleep, — not the whole universe nor the whole past, 
 not Judaea nor Galilee, ever witnessed a miracle 
 greater than these. But surely they differ, you 
 say : these come every day, the others only once in 
 the centuries. They differ? Yes, no doubt; as 
 the comet differs from the planet, as the aurora 
 differs from the moonlight, as the meteor flashing 
 across the September sky differs from gentle Sirius 
 shining serenely through the winter night. Why 
 strive to put God as far as possible away ? Why so 
 eager to prove that he is less near you or less 
 mighty now than he was many centuries ago? Is 
 life so very holy that you can afford to explain 
 away the tokens of a diviner Presence? 
 
 Natural or supernatural. Use whichever name 
 you choose. It matters little, for words are but 
 words. It is the same universe viewed from the 
 one side or the other, the same shield seen from 
 behind or from before. But do not fancy that the 
 two names mean different things. Do not persuade 
 yourself that the boundary which divides these two 
 provinces is real. It is imaginary, and it changes 
 with every hour. Look backward, as we have seen, 
 
12 DISCOURSES 
 
 and the bounds of Nature shrivel from age to age, 
 till Nature vanishes wholly from your sight, and 
 the supernatural takes its place. Look forward, 
 and the supernatural recedes, while Nature widens. 
 Nature widens from day to day, invading constantly 
 the realm of the supernatural, and winning province 
 after province from its grasp. What yesterday was 
 unexplored to-day is freely visited, what yesterday 
 was a mystery to-day is understood, what yesterday 
 was impossible to-day we quietly achieve. Swiftly 
 and uninterruptedly the boundary of the natural 
 advances, the boundary of the supernatural re- 
 treats. 
 
 "Then God is vanishing from his universe," 
 men complain. Ah, no! they know not what they 
 say. God is revealing himself more and more. 
 For his commonest, acts, as we see them, are fuller 
 of miracles than were the special providences of 
 the past. Not the supernatural is less, but Nature 
 is greater than we thought. The earth to-day is 
 more wonderful than were the heavens once, the 
 laws of to-day more marvellous than the miracles 
 of yesterday. The skies which Moses adored and 
 whose stars Abraham counted were a baby's toy 
 compared with those which the telescope will 
 sweep to-night, and whose remotest systems the 
 astronomer's curious eye is searching this very 
 hour. Nature is greater than we have thought. 
 To measure her is to measure the whole thought of 
 God. Unknown and unmeasured as yet are the 
 powers which Nature carries in her bosom, and the 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL 1 3 
 
 generations still to come are to witness her endless 
 triumphs. The future belongs to her. 
 
 "To Nature nothing is impossible," is the word 
 of one of the foremost living disciples of science, 
 upon whose head therefore rest most of those re- 
 proaches which science seems called upon in every 
 age to meet. No truer word has been spoken in 
 our generation. "To Nature nothing is impos- 
 sible." God's established laws are sufficient for 
 all his works, and adequate to all his purposes. 
 The system of the universe is complete in itself, 
 and needs no addition to its machinery and no re- 
 enforcement of its powers. Nature asks us, if we 
 would honor God, not to find out something holier 
 than herself, but to find out that she is holy. It is 
 Nature that is holy. It is Nature that is divine. 
 It is Nature, if you choose, that is supernatural. 
 The natural and the supernatural are one. 
 
 1871. 
 
II. 
 
 NOT TO BE MINISTERED UNTO. 
 
 "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minis- 
 ter." — Matt. xx. 28. 
 
 Yes, every word, every act, was a ministry, as 
 the story of that life is here told us. Every tone 
 of his voice seems to have lightened some sorrow- 
 ing heart or freed some imprisoned soul from its 
 fetters. His very presence carried benediction 
 with it. His life was a continued ministry. And 
 it was such by its own necessity. Not as though 
 he chose it should be so, as though he debated with 
 himself whether he would serve his fellow-men or 
 not, go forth to meet persecution and contumely or 
 lead a quiet and peaceful life, speak the truth that 
 was in him or withhold it; but simply because 
 there was that in him which must needs find 
 expression, because feelings so deep and tender 
 must assert themselves, because sympathies so 
 broad and generous cannot confine themselves 
 within the heart, because the great power of bless- 
 ing or capacity of action is its own incentive to 
 beneficence or action. Such, I say, is the divine 
 necessity laid upon every great soul. It comes 
 into the world to minister. It has powers within 
 
NOT TO BE MINISTERED UNTO 1 5 
 
 it which force it to action. It is too loving to be 
 waited upon. It is too conscious of strength to 
 ask for strength. It sees too plainly what it may 
 contribute to the world, to make itself a burden on 
 the world. 
 
 It would be pleasant and instructive enough to 
 trace the illustration of this truth simply in the 
 life here before us; but let us turn first for a 
 moment to find its meaning elsewhere, to see how 
 far in other lives the same truth holds good. All 
 life, it is true, is a mutual giving and receiving; 
 and the highest can be helped, in a certain sense, 
 by the lowest. If all ministered, there would be 
 none to be ministered to. Yet is it not true that 
 we all come into the world, not simply to be min- 
 istered to, but to minister? not to borrow strength 
 only, but in turn to give it? not primarily that the 
 world may contribute to our being, but to contrib- 
 ute something ourselves to the world? As a mat- 
 ter of simple self-respect, we must take this view 
 of life. For what can be more degrading than the 
 constant sense of obligation? What belittles the 
 soul more than to be perpetually reminded of its 
 dependence? For the sake of our own self-respect, 
 we must feel that we are not living wholly on the 
 world's charity, but are contributing somehow to its 
 wealth. 
 
 This, I think, would be the first feeling of every 
 right-minded man. Yet it is singular how easily 
 this natural instinct of honorable pride can be 
 lulled into silence. Before we know it we are 
 
l6 DISCOURSES 
 
 receiving, not giving, favors; are beggars, indeed, 
 from door to door, basket on arm and piteous 
 entreaty on the face, beseeching place or patronage, 
 a good word or a flattering testimonial, or are sup- 
 plicants at least for the cold crumbs from the 
 tables of others' enjoyment to eke out the pleasures 
 of a languid and irresolute life. Let charity come 
 to us as charity, and we scornfully reject it. Let 
 friends or relatives offer openly to support us, toss 
 us their outworn garments, or send us the cold 
 remnants of their feasts, and none so proud as we. 
 Yet it seems to me I see all around me recipients 
 of favors just as beggarly, dependants on a charity 
 quite as degrading, who yet betray no compunc- 
 tion, and on whose cheek is no blush. There is 
 great power in names. A little alms may make 
 a beggar, great alms a king. 
 
 Here is one, for instance, living in great wealth. 
 Laborers toil to house him luxuriously and clothe 
 and feed him sumptuously, servants are waiting 
 hourly upon his bidding, the world in a thousand 
 ways attends upon his pleasure. There is no harm 
 in this, if he has earned it all, if it comes to him 
 as the equivalent of toil or of merit. But (in such 
 a case as I have in mind) I do not find that it has. 
 I can see no labor of which this wealth is the re- 
 muneration. I can see no mercantile skill or 
 sagacity of which this is the just reward. I only 
 hear of certain advantages, scorned by others, 
 which he has not hesitated to use, of certain oppor- 
 tunities, unnoticed by the eye of integrity, which 
 
NOT TO BE MINISTERED UNTO \*J 
 
 his crafty soul has seen. I only hear of fortunes 
 suddenly lost when his was won, and of poverty 
 growing poorer when he became rich. Well-earned 
 wealth adds to others' wealth, but he has built up 
 his estate upon others' ruin. And yet, unprofit- 
 able servant as he is, "reaping where he has not 
 sown, and gathering where he has not strewed," 
 emptying calmly others' treasures into his own 
 coffers, and feeling in the pockets of the poor for 
 every unused pittance he can find, he shows no 
 shame as you meet him, and seems quite uncon- 
 scious that he is living at the world's expense. 
 
 Or here, again, is one whose wealth, by toil or 
 by inheritance, is his own, and his by right. And 
 yet his by what right? We will not dispute now 
 the existing laws for the acquisition or distribution 
 of property, which are, on the whole, as just to one 
 as to another. Let us only ask whether property 
 in the things of this world, in a universe which we 
 did not create and do not own, does not always 
 carry with it a corresponding obligation, — an obli- 
 gation at least to the society whose institutions and 
 laws have alone given property any abiding exist- 
 ence. The universe is for man. He who by su- 
 perior skill or foresight or industry has secured a 
 portion for himself, however large, cannot justly 
 be dislodged; but he who fences off that portion 
 for his own personal and selfish gratification exclu- 
 sively, making no contribution to the comfort or 
 happiness or well-being of society, and recognizing 
 no claims from society or humanity, is abusing his 
 
l8 DISCOURSES 
 
 privilege, not using it. His life can never be 
 noble or just who is content to receive everything 
 and give nothing; to be always helped by the 
 world, never to help; to accept position and 
 wealth from society, yet recognize no debt to society. 
 Or here is still another and more pitiable case. 
 Here is one in a position of large emolument or 
 official dignity, — one who always holds such posi- 
 tion, and who passes from post to post, from call- 
 ing to calling, from office to office, at will. Some 
 of the best gifts of state or nation stand invariably 
 at his command. Yet I can see no service ren- 
 dered of which this is the due compensation. I can 
 discover no mental capacity, no moral qualities, no 
 genius, no experience, no industry, of which this 
 is the fair reward. Indeed, he does not claim this. 
 He gets his position for the asking, and is con- 
 tent. It comes to him through favor, through 
 partisan or friendly influence, through intrigue, 
 through kindly regard for his necessities. It 
 comes to him, as you notice, not for his desert, but 
 for his want of desert ; not to reward his manhood, 
 but to reward his lack of manhood. It comes to 
 him not because he was willing to work, but be- 
 cause he was willing to beg, not because he was 
 able to live upon his talents, but because he was 
 willing to live on charity. The world knows no 
 such mendicancy as this, no such sycophancy of 
 soul as that of the professional supplicant for place 
 or honor, no such dogging of others' footsteps, no 
 such echoing of others' sentiments, no such obse- 
 
NOT TO BE MINISTERED UNTO 19 
 
 quious joy in others' smiles. The whole soul be- 
 comes intent upon perfecting its own shame, upon 
 making itself absolutely dependent upon the favors 
 of the world, upon making its mendicancy com- 
 plete. Such instances, I say, we can see on every 
 hand. Yet I look in vain from one to the other for 
 any flush of wounded pride, of nettled vanity, of 
 offended dignity. I feel sure that they must see, 
 as the world sees, how the greatness of their posi- 
 tion only makes the more conspicuous their own 
 littleness. I think, as I meet these men, that I 
 must guard my words and check my glance, must 
 tread daintily, of course, over such dangerous 
 ground, and clothe my speech in delicate and 
 euphemistic phrase. But no: the precaution is 
 needless. I find no wincing at any touch, no 
 shrinking from the plainest speech. This beggary 
 is perfect in its art. Hat in hand, asking alms at 
 every gate, it has learned to know no blush, and to 
 be proof against mortification or reproach. 
 
 So easy is it for us to become beggars without 
 knowing it. So easy is it for names to blind 
 us. So hard is it to understand that the only per- 
 fect independence is to give as well as to receive, 
 to give up to one's full capacity of giving, and so 
 keep the balance of obligation, if possible, on the 
 other side. 
 
 But it is not pride alone that bids us minister 
 rather than be ministered to; it is our own per- 
 sonal good as well. Neither mind nor heart ma- 
 tures, however fine its training or abundant its 
 
20 DISCOURSES 
 
 resources, if it simply appropriates to itself, giving 
 nothing out. Its strength and power come as it 
 begins to react upon the world. Self-culture, how- 
 ever noble an aim, is never the noblest. Good for 
 our earlier years, it must be replaced in later life 
 by some great purpose beyond, — the love of truth 
 for its own sake, the desire for power, or the pure 
 longing to serve humanity. Between the life spent 
 in such intellectual pursuits as will simply gratify 
 the tastes, stimulate the mind, or kill time, and 
 the life spent in some actual service to society, is 
 all the distance detween the dilettante and the 
 man. The advantage of great qualities of mind or 
 heart lies not half so much in what they directly 
 bring to us as in the larger strength and capacity 
 which we gain through their exercise. The more 
 keenly we learn to realize others' wants and de- 
 sires, as though they were our own, the wider the 
 sympathies by which we act, the further away from 
 ourselves our affections are turned, so much the 
 larger and more vigorous does the soul become. 
 The morbid nature, as you sometimes encounter it, 
 at home only with its own griefs, or dwelling solely 
 in its own past, or in love with its own fastidious- 
 ness, or finding nothing beautiful save in its own 
 tastes and nothing great or good save in its own 
 ideals, or pursuing any thoughts which circle 
 round and round the little centre of self, becomes 
 the sure abode of weakness and discontent. Its 
 egotism can end only in insufferable weariness and 
 intellectual death. 
 
NOT TO BE MINISTERED UNTO 21 
 
 But why dwell upon this point? It needs no 
 argument nor any fine appeals to our unselfishness 
 to convince us of this simple truth; that the soul 
 finds its life only in action, in going forth out of 
 itself. By a gracious Providence every sincere 
 exertion of human power carries some blessing 
 with it. Only let us not be selfish, and we must 
 needs be generous. Let us live freely and in 
 fullest measure the life that is in us, and we bless 
 others while we bless ourselves. We come into 
 the world to minister, to grow strong by doing, 
 to grow wise by working out life's actual prob- 
 lems, to grow loving by tender deeds, to grow rich 
 by generous giving. 
 
 But, to understand the full meaning of this truth, 
 we must look of course to the world's more gifted 
 souls, who really have more to give than they can 
 well receive from others. For the most part, the 
 world shows but poor appreciation of its moral or 
 spiritual leaders. It is not content to leave them 
 to themselves. If it recognizes them at all, it 
 must needs become their advocates and interpreters, 
 point out their beauty, explain their possible mean- 
 ings, and adjust their words or thoughts to its own 
 preconceptions. It is anxious lest they be under- 
 estimated or overestimated, lest they be too much 
 neglected or too much adored. It forgets that the 
 great soul must of necessity be its own interpreter, 
 and that all it asks of the world is to be taken at 
 its exact worth. 
 
 How seldom it is that the great thinker or poet 
 
22 DISCOURSES 
 
 or philosopher owes aught to the fidelity or devo- 
 tion of his followers, however zealous they may 
 be. How seldom can they learn the secret of his 
 thought, or add to the simple weight of his word or 
 acts. They are apt to busy themselves in his ser- 
 vice, they take his fame into their hands, they call 
 upon the world to admire him, they glory in their 
 appreciation of his worth. But their friendship 
 cannot help him any more than their enmity could 
 harm him. Their discipleship is their gain, if at 
 all, not his. Let them serve him for the sake of 
 serving, for the fine truth he utters, or the helpful 
 influence he imparts, and all is well. Let them 
 think to aid him or fancy his reputation is in their 
 keeping, and they only work their own folly. 
 They cannot make him great. He owes them no 
 thanks, though he gives them thanks; for his 
 slightest word outweighs all their praises, and his 
 simplest thought goes where their applause can 
 never follow. I speak only of the truly great and 
 truly good. They form a class by themselves 
 which no pretender ever enters. Sham greatness, 
 pasteboard heroes, we have in every age, never 
 more, perhaps, than now. To their own genera- 
 tion they are apt to be greater than the-truly great. 
 They, indeed, can be ministered to. It is the 
 homage paid them which makes them what they 
 are. Their fame is created by their disciples. 
 Without a following they were nothing. But the 
 crowd collects around them, faces are fixed intently 
 on them, their every movement is watched and 
 
NOT TO BE MINISTERED UNTO 23 
 
 every word echoed, admiring thousands hang upon 
 their voice, daily columns recount their exploits 
 and lend glowing colors to their rhetoric; and, 
 behold, they are great. Our hero is made, — born 
 to-day, to die to-morrow. But the true hero never 
 dies. You need feel no anxiety for his fame or his 
 success. You need gather no crowds about him 
 nor challenge the world to marvel at his grandeur. 
 With your aid or without it, he is equally great. 
 You may help his repute or hinder it; he remains 
 immortal. 
 
 And this brings us back once more to the point 
 from which we started, — to find in the life of 
 whom those words were first spoken the finest illus- 
 tration of their truth. "The Son of Man came not 
 to be ministered unto, but to minister." He would 
 not be ministered to. He saw too many souls 
 about him to be aided, too many sorrows to be 
 comforted, too many doubts to be answered, too 
 much spiritual darkness to be illumined, for him to 
 wait for others' ministering. To see such needs 
 was to long to supply them. To feel within him 
 the power to serve was to put forth that power. 
 To know the truth for which other souls were wait- 
 ing was to utter it. To minister was the divine 
 necessity of his being. It was his soul's great pre- 
 rogative, which could not be put aside. Who can 
 tell how great a joy may have been his, as he saw 
 from day to day the fruits of his ministering, — the 
 saddened brow grow bright as he passed, the woe- 
 burdened heart made joyous, the trammelled con- 
 
24 DISCOURSES 
 
 science set free, the selfish thought touched to 
 higher sympathies, the narrow nature brought into 
 larger relations to humanity, the cynic or distrust- 
 ful soul convinced of life's great realities? 
 
 Yes, the life of Jesus was beautiful and note- 
 worthy indeed. We shrink even from eulogy, as 
 with all sacred things, lest our very praises should 
 belittle it. Yet what does it owe (whatever it may 
 have accomplished for the world) to any word ever 
 spoken in its behalf or any deed ever done in its 
 defence? Its service to humanity was great; yet 
 what tribute from men has ever exalted Christ's 
 real mission to his fellows, or added a feather's 
 weight to his divineness? 
 
 While he lived, men tried to serve him. Tender 
 hands ministered lovingly to his wants, warning 
 voices pleaded with him when he spoke of his com- 
 ing death, one sword, at least, leaped from its scab- 
 bard, as the hostile band drew near. But they 
 could not aid him, save as sympathy always aids. 
 Their gentlest solicitude could lend to his life no 
 such beauty as lay in the very self-sacrifice from 
 which they would fain shield him: their stoutest 
 defence could add no such dignity to his career 
 as was brought by the cross. 
 
 After his death again, and down to this very 
 hour, men have striven to minister to the Son of 
 Man. They have sought to enhance his glory and 
 heighten his dignity. Out of their littleness, for- 
 sooth, they would make him great. Others have 
 undervalued him; they must restore his lost maj- 
 
NOT TO BE MINISTERED UNTO 25 
 
 esty. His honor is at stake; they must fly to his 
 defence, and he will be safe. Thus they have 
 protected, exalted, deified, the Son of Man. They 
 have made themselves his patrons, his champions, 
 his interpreters. They have robed him in honor, 
 they have loaded him with titles, they have 
 crowned him, they have enthroned him. 
 
 Unaffected by all this anxious care, and su- 
 premely above all human patronage, asking no 
 defence, safer for no protection, stronger or prouder 
 for no homage, and lordlier for no titles, this 
 spiritual leader has held his place from age to 
 age, strong by his own strength alone, and divine 
 simply through his own soul's divineness. Once 
 for all he has lived his life and spoken his word, 
 and naught which the world can add can ennoble 
 the one or enhance the other. 
 
 The homage which men pay to Jesus is beauti- 
 ful and honorable; but that homage must be for- 
 ever vain, so long as it seeks to honor him by its 
 service or has any end in view but grateful recog- 
 nition of holiness and truth. And why? Because 
 the higher nature must always serve the lower. 
 Because the Son of Man came into the world, "not 
 to be ministered unto, but to minister." 
 
 1870. 
 
III. 
 
 WORTH OF THE PRESENT HOUR. 
 
 "He hath made everything beautiful in his time." — Eccl. iii. n. 
 
 Among the many changes which time is ever 
 bringing, one thing seems to remain always the 
 same. Generation succeeds to generation, and race 
 to race. Religion follows religion, and thought 
 follows thought. The world seems hardly the 
 same world as in earlier ages, its holiness and 
 beauty but things of the past, its heroes and 
 saints departed. But sorrow is unchanged. Grief 
 touches the heart to-day as keenly as ever before, 
 and brings us into fellowship with all the past. 
 We know that tears were never more bitter than 
 now, nor loneliness ever more desolate, nor more 
 precious lives ever taken away than have been 
 snatched from our side. 
 
 But how is this, I ask; for it is not of grief 
 that I would speak, but of what this grief implies. 
 Does it not imply that life itself, with all that be- 
 longs to it, is something very precious? But do 
 we find it so? Even though we have ceased to 
 regard it as a vale of tears, do we not treat its days 
 and hours while we have them as of very slight 
 
WORTH OF THE PRESENT HOUR 2/ 
 
 account? Shall we mourn any soul's departure 
 from a world so ignoble? Do not our daily habits, 
 I ask, mock this sorrow, and give it the lie? 
 These very lives whose loss we so bitterly lament, 
 of what have they been made up but of so many 
 days and hours, so many affections and feelings, so 
 many deeds and words? What value have we at- 
 tached to these things? What value do we attach 
 to them now? Day follows day, and we seek not 
 to delay it. Our homes glow with affection, but 
 we deem them of slight worth or find in them 
 more burden than joy. Opportunities, duties, 
 await us, but only to oppress us. They are a 
 weariness and a sorrow. We sigh for the day to 
 close. Its value lies for too many of us in the 
 repose which it brings. We prize chiefly its 
 hours of sleep. Our homes get from us the 
 refuse of the day and the refuse of ourselves. 
 Friendship comes in for the tattered remnants 
 of hours worn out in a baser service. Thought 
 receives the drowsy moments which traffic does 
 not claim. Even pleasure, with many of us, 
 snatches its hours by stealth, and waits wistfully 
 its turn when the worn system has lost alike its 
 power to toil and its power to enjoy. What right 
 have we, then, to this intensity of grief? Are we 
 not gilding life as it vanishes with a glory not 
 really its own, fancying a passion which the soul 
 has never felt? 
 
 Ah, no ! The soul is not wont to counterfeit 
 emotion. These hours of passion betray its actual 
 
28 DISCOURSES 
 
 self. These are true, though all else be false. It 
 is these single moments of deep feeling which give 
 our daily thoughts the lie. Yes, these earthly 
 things are, indeed, all that they seem to us as we 
 lose them. Life is, indeed, precious. The hours 
 are weighty beyond compare. These souls are holy 
 as heaven itself. These ties are sacred, are 
 mightier than those which bind star to star. The 
 mistake was not to-day when we wept at our friend's 
 loss, but yesterday, when the gift was ours and we 
 spurned it; not that the affections seem now so 
 priceless, but that they once seemed so cheap and 
 so common. Let these tears tell their story, tell 
 us of great realities which we rarely fathom, tell us 
 of friendships known to us only in their going, of 
 joys lost because we could not trust them, of com- 
 panion souls pure beyond our utmost thought of 
 purity, of hours bright with a light beyond our 
 common seeing. 
 
 Indeed, I believe there is a truth here which we 
 need to apply most literally and in a way which 
 seldom occurs to us. If grief to-day is as great as 
 ever, then the cause of grief must be as deep as 
 ever. If friendships and companionships lost are 
 as heart-rending as in the holiest past, then friend- 
 ships and companionships, when present, are as 
 sacred as in the holiest past. If souls departing 
 leave us as desolate, then the souls still with us 
 carry with them just as much of heaven; then no 
 beauty has passed from earth, no glory from the 
 skies, no sanctity from duty, no divineness from 
 
 
WORTH OF THE PRESENT HOUR 2Q 
 
 the soul; then God is just as near to man, draws 
 just as close to us in our hours of solitude, speaks 
 as directly to us in our hours of spiritual emotion; 
 then the difference between age and age is not that 
 God is at certain times nearer than at others, but 
 that the soul is not always sensitive to his ap- 
 proaches, not that God sometimes breaks the long 
 silence and speaks, but that the ear is not always 
 open to his ever-uttered word; not so much that 
 some hours are weightier than others with divine 
 intent as that the soul is not always present which 
 can fathom the passing hour. 
 
 In a word, the one art which man has never 
 learned is to take present things at their actual 
 worth. At best, he knows how to glory in what 
 has been and look forward to what is to be. His 
 to-days are never precious, only his yesterdays and 
 to-morrows. "Beautiful the thought," he says, 
 "that God once dwelt upon the earth and talked 
 face to face with man." "Precious the hope," he 
 says, "and lovely the dream that heaven awaits the 
 faithful and the true." Yes, the past is glorious; 
 the future will be heavenly; but alas for the poor 
 present! Yet of what has the past been made or is 
 the future to consist but of days and hours just like 
 these? And, if we know them not now, how shall 
 we know them in the future? Though their holi- 
 ness be possibly far greater, yet, if we cannot dis- 
 cern the lesser beauty, how shall we recognize the 
 greater? The future, when it comes, must still be 
 the present ; and the test must be then, as now, 
 
30 DISCOURSES 
 
 Have we learned to prize the moment as it passes? 
 Can we enter into present joys? Can we feel a 
 present purity and grandeur? We cannot suffi- 
 ciently consider that the essence of eternity lies 
 in each moment of eternity. Moment for moment, 
 they are all the same. The same quality clings to 
 each. Eternity has no hours that are not sacred, 
 no holiness that is not all holy, no beauty that is 
 not- all beautiful, no attribute that is not eternal. 
 "Write it on your heart," says Emerson so finely, 
 "that every day is the best day of the year. No 
 man has learned anything rightly until he knows 
 that every day is doomsday." 
 
 I fear that for this false feeling of which I speak 
 our religion, in its common utterances, is more to 
 blame than we like to confess. It spends so much 
 time in illumining the past. It guards those 
 sacred shores and sacred seas and sacred mountains 
 with so jealous a care. I do not say with so great 
 a care or with so grateful a care; I say with so 
 jealous a care. It is not content that they are 
 holy; they must be alone holy. It is not con- 
 tent that souls were then divine; they must be 
 alone divine. Forgetting, do we not, that holiness 
 then can be learned only through holiness now, and 
 that, if the divineness of those souls, or of any 
 souls, is to receive our homage, it can only be be- 
 cause we have learned to pay homage to the truth 
 and excellence which we see around us here. 
 
 Equally at fault is that religion when it thrusts 
 the soul's destiny into the future, and makes these 
 
WORTH OF THE PRESENT HOUR 3 1 
 
 years but a hard season of toiling and tarrying, till 
 the time of reward and sorrow comes. But mean- 
 time, when it comes, where will be the soul's 
 power of meeting it? Shall we not find that we 
 have squandered in waiting and hoping the precious 
 strength that should have gone into the recognition 
 of present joys? God does not thus wait to be 
 holy and beneficent and beautiful. For my own 
 part, I have never yet found the soul, be it as 
 intent and devout as it might, which has succeeded 
 in exhausting the wealth which a single hour has 
 brought, in penetrating the full meaning of a single 
 hour, in doing its full work, in seeing its perfect 
 loveliness, in learning its inmost secret. I have 
 never found that this life was too long to do this 
 life's duty or worship this life's sanctity. Men are 
 taught to set against the hardships and rebuffs of 
 this state of being the unpurchased joys of another. 
 I should count them richer and happier, could they 
 turn to account but half the living joys which they 
 pass by with dulness or with disdain. Men ask 
 anxiously whether in the future they shall still 
 recognize those whom they have loved on earth. 
 Fond hearts, let them learn to recognize their 
 friends on earth, and there will be then some possi- 
 bility that they will recognize their friends in 
 heaven. Do not deceive yourselves. It is the 
 power in the soul that tells. The question is not, 
 Shall we have something to revere, but Shall we 
 know how to revere? not, Will there be by and by 
 something to love, but Shall we know how to love? 
 
32 DISCOURSES 
 
 The lovely things and the holy never fail; but 
 where is the heart to find them? Learn to revere, 
 not to cavil, learn to love, not to distrust, and you 
 are safe for time and for eternity. Do not forget; 
 the great reality is here and now. Eternity can 
 be learned only as it passes, not by waiting, but by 
 seeing, not if distant, but if present, not because 
 the future is full of it, but because the present is 
 full of it to the core. Says Emerson again, as only 
 he can say: "This miracle is hurled into every 
 beggar's hands. The blue sky is a covering for 
 a market and for the cherubim and seraphim. 
 Nature could no further go. Could our happiest 
 dream come to pass in solid fact, could a power 
 open our eyes to behold 'millions of spiritual creat- 
 ures walk the earth,' I believe I should find that 
 mid-plain on which they moved floored beneath 
 and arched above with the same web of blue depth 
 which weaves itself over me now as I trudge the 
 street on my affairs." 
 
 This would seem a simple truth which I am 
 urging. And so it certainly is. The point is to 
 see things as they really are, that is all. If it is 
 beauty which is before us, to see beauty and know 
 that it is beautiful; if purity, to see purity and 
 recognize it as such; if holiness, to see holiness; 
 if moral greatness, to see greatness; if truth, to 
 see truth and adore it. What I claim is that 
 beauty is always present, and goodness and sweet- 
 ness and harmony, in far greater measure at least 
 than we ever appreciate, awaiting only the sense to 
 
WORTH OF THE PRESENT HOUR 33 
 
 discern them. What I claim is that every day has 
 hours in it of possible manliness and nobleness, of 
 possible honesty and joy, if only the heart be ready 
 to see its opportunity and act. What is lacking 
 is the power to see things as they are. Things are 
 lovely; they look plain. Things are rare; they 
 look common. We have seen them often before. 
 The act has momentous consequences; it looks 
 insignificant. We may perform it as we choose. 
 The hour involves great issues; it seems trifling. 
 We may spend it as carelessly as we wish. What 
 is lacking, then, I repeat, is the power to see into 
 the real nature of all these things, and understand 
 their very worth. 
 
 But because this is a simple thought, do not 
 think it is a slight or easy task. The world has 
 not found it so. The fault of which I speak is a 
 common one, running through all passages of man's 
 experiences. Wherever man has stood face to face 
 with God's universe, whether physical, moral, or 
 spiritual, he has seen anything and everything but 
 what was really there. He has seen what he 
 thought to see, what he longed to see, what he 
 feared to see, what he hoped to see, what he was 
 told to see, what he was resolved to see, what he 
 supposed that others saw, never, or rarely, the very 
 thing that was there, and that alone. How long it 
 was before the artist learned to see the forms which 
 he wished to paint! Before he saw them, I say. 
 The hand learned to trace the line as soon as the 
 eye learned to see it, but the eye did not see it. 
 
34 DISCOURSES 
 
 You have seen often the little boy's first attempt 
 with pencil or pen. He draws upon his slate his 
 father's house or his uncle's ship, and is sure he 
 has seen just such houses on the street and just 
 such ships upon the sea. Somewhat like these are 
 the earliest remains that have come down to us of 
 human art, — rude, uncouth figures, with expression- 
 less eyes and features, set in landscapes without 
 grace or proportion or perspective. Yet once these 
 were thought beautiful and true, and wondering 
 thousands found in those trees and that grass the 
 portraiture of nature herself and in those gaunt 
 faces of saints and apostles the light of an illu- 
 mined soul. Art labored through many stages be- 
 fore the first tree was drawn or the first blade of 
 grass was painted as it grows; and art labored 
 through many stages more before men learned to 
 detect the false from the true, the traditional from 
 the real, or to prefer nature's trees and grasses to 
 the painter's conventional presentment of them. In 
 other words, art waited long before the artist 
 learned to see c In very fact, the world is waiting 
 still for the artist to learn to see and to teach 
 others to see, — to see in nature just what is there, 
 and only what is there, to find in every stone and 
 fern their very form and coloring, and to show 
 them upon the canvas as ten times more beautiful 
 than any ideal stone or fern that was ever drawn. 
 And how patiently nature herself is waiting, — not 
 for the trained artist's eye or hand to trace her 
 hidden beauties, but for you and me to see what 
 
WORTH OF THE PRESENT HOUR 35 
 
 she is daily spreading before our eyes, the splendor 
 of earth and air and sky which surrounds our daily 
 steps, how patiently she is waiting for leaf and 
 moss and stone and cloud and hill and sea no 
 longer to be passed scornfully by or trodden heed- 
 lessly under foot, but to be seen and known and 
 loved as the miracles they are, that I need not tell 
 you. 
 
 And what is true of nature's beauties is true of 
 all things else with which man has had to deal. 
 What he sees first, strangely enough, is the distant, 
 the impossible, the unreal. What he sees last is 
 the near, the present, the real. From imagination 
 to fact, from idea to reality, from what is not there 
 to what is, from fancied wonders to actual wonders 
 which surpass all fancy, behold the inevitable path. 
 Not only have nature's beauties faced man from the 
 beginning, but so have nature's forces and nature's 
 laws, Lightnings nave flashed, and planets have 
 circled, and winds have blown, and suns have risen 
 and set, and tides have flowed, and water has turned 
 to ice, and soil and air have fed the growing tree 
 since man first lived upon the earth. But how 
 long before he saw these things ! And how many 
 grotesque and impossible things which are not 
 there did he see — how many fish swallowing the 
 moon, and tortoises supporting the earth, and pranc- 
 ing steeds and chariot drawing the sun, and crystal 
 spheres embedding the planets, and brazen firma- 
 ment encircling the stars — before his eye discerned 
 the real forms and movements that had been always 
 
36 DISCOURSES 
 
 passing before it! The science of physical things 
 (science as we call it) has progressed just so fast 
 as the eye has learned to see, not its own fancies, 
 but nature's facts. 
 
 The difficulty, then, is great. The problem is a 
 universal one. The passing hour glides by un- 
 valued, daily life remains paltry and mean, lovely 
 souls live and die unnoticed, or die revealing for 
 the first time in their very departure their loveli- 
 ness, lifelong friendships are unfruitful, and daily 
 companionship is barren, generous spirits are unap- 
 preciated, and tender consciences are taunted and 
 mocked, holy lives are deemed irreligious, and the 
 prophet of new thought is persecuted, Messiahs are 
 crucified, and the higher truth is scorned and 
 denied, for the very same reason that the blade of 
 grass is trampled by a thousand feet before the one 
 passer-by discovers its beauty, or the over-arching 
 heavens are gazed upon for centuries before the eye 
 knows that it is peering into fathomless depths. 
 
 Take this thought home to your hearts, good 
 friends, that the saint'liest souls that have ever 
 lived have never outworn the sanctity of a single 
 day, that the wisest souls that have ever lived have 
 never exhausted the meaning of a single hour, that 
 the busiest lives ever spent have never fully used 
 the opportunities close at hand. Do not be di- 
 verted from this one thought. Life's greatest 
 realities are here and now; and yet because here 
 in your hands, before your eyes, remember that 
 they are not therefore easier, but harder to value 
 
WORTH OF THE PRESENT HOUR 37 
 
 and realize. From time immemorial it has been 
 easy to dream and hard to act, easy to plan and 
 hard to execute, easy to imagine and hard to 
 realize, easy to put the heavens above the clouds, 
 hard to strive for a heaven on earth, easy to 
 postpone salvation to the future, hard to accomplish 
 it in the present, easy to people another world with 
 saints and harps and halos and crowns, hard to dis- 
 cern the harmony and possible holiness of this. 
 
 I may seem to have wandered from the theme 
 with which I began, but I have not. I spoke then 
 of the strange contrast between our lives, each with 
 each, that seem for the most part so sterile and 
 unlovely, and our passionate grief when for any 
 choice spirit that life is ended. Incongruous, in- 
 deed ; yet it is not the grief which is at fault, but 
 the life. The intensity of our sorrow uncovers for 
 us the realities of our life, the richness of the hours 
 which pass uncounted, the joy of the intercourse 
 which so often goes unheeded. It cannot harm us 
 to be reminded at times how great are the depths 
 beneath us on whose surface we are content to live, 
 how divinely beautiful the hours which we cast 
 away, how far beyond our brightest dreams of 
 future bliss is the joy which, could we but have 
 known it, but just now was ours. Perchance in 
 time this will help us to prize the passing hour. 
 Perhaps it will teach us to use the blessings that 
 are actually ours. Perhaps it will show us, behind 
 the changing face of these fleeting hours, the 
 changeless features of eternity. 
 
 1872. 
 
IV. 
 
 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 
 
 " When I am weak, then am I strong." — 2 Cor. xii. 10. 
 
 As we look around in the world to-day, what a 
 mighty being seems man. Nothing so bold that he 
 does not undertake it, no task so gigantic that he 
 does not achieve it. He crosses continents as 
 though they were but states, and oceans as though 
 they were but streams. He tunnels mountains; 
 he speaks across the seas; he flies towards the 
 stars. He annihilates space; he extinguishes 
 time; he turns darkness into light; he makes 
 the sunbeam audible and music visible. To man 
 nothing is impossible. 
 
 But it is not of these extraordinary feats that I 
 would speak to-day. Let us look at some of his 
 commoner exploits. Here, as we pass through the 
 streets, we see him turning a wheel, and a mon- 
 strous block of stone, ten times his own weight, 
 rises high into the air, and drops into the exact 
 place prepared for it. There he opens a hydrant, 
 and a mass of water six or twenty miles away 
 begins to move its huge volume towards him. 
 There again he fires a few grains of powder, and a 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS 39 
 
 heavy iron ball flies through the air, and buries 
 itself in a bank or pierces a thick iron plate five 
 miles away. 
 
 These are all familiar exploits. They have 
 ceased even to seem strange to us; nor do I bring 
 them up to-day to excite any new wonder in your 
 breasts or to produce from them any rhetorical 
 effects, but only that we may see wherein this 
 power over nature lies. To understand the use I 
 would make of them, let us take any single case 
 and examine it more closely. Here is the most 
 familiar perhaps of all. You are accustomed every 
 day to bring water into your houses from some 
 miles away. The mere action of your thumb and 
 finger alone is needed, and gallons or, if you 
 choose, hogsheads of water rise from the street to 
 your highest chamber. But to lift a hogshead of 
 water twenty or thirty feet, great force is needed. 
 Who provides that force? Not you certainly with 
 your thumb and finger; not the engineer who built 
 the dam or pump, or by whose calculations the 
 gateways and pipes have been placed and the pas- 
 sage for the water prepared. With the united 
 muscular force of twenty thousand workmen he 
 could not lift the mass of water which in every 
 large city rises daily to the tops of the highest 
 buildings. Where, then, is the force that does 
 this work? The force, as you know, is in the 
 water itself, in its own weight. It is simply the 
 water seeking its level, to use the popular phrase. 
 All that man has done in the premises is to avail 
 
40 DISCOURSES 
 
 himself of one of nature's simplest laws, and make 
 it serve his purposes. He has done everything 
 except provide the power which is to act. 
 
 And what more has he done in any of the grand 
 achievements which I have mentioned? What 
 strength of his is it that raises the block of granite 
 or starts the locomotive or sends the cannon-ball 
 to its mark? Puny atom that he is, let but a cord 
 snap or a flaw show itself in the iron, and he is 
 crushed into a lifeless mass. Let him forget for a 
 single moment the character of the material or the 
 forces he is handling, and his life pays the forfeit. 
 
 It is not man, then, that is strong here, it is 
 nature. Nature is mighty, and full of resistless 
 power. Man is powerless in these matters except 
 as he puts himself in connection with nature, 
 learns her laws, and avails himself of her secrets. 
 At best, he is but the channel through which 
 nature's forces act. At best, he but knows how to 
 turn her strength to account, and make it appear as 
 if it were his own. Most accomplished of magi- 
 cians, he dazzles us with brilliant feats, splendid 
 tricks of brain or hand, while all the time it is a 
 power behind himself and invisible to the spectator 
 which is accomplishing the results. 
 
 It is not man that is strong, it is nature. I do 
 not say this in disparagement. I am only trying 
 to define his position. Indeed, what could be 
 more admirable or more wonderful? Weak him- 
 self, a tiny speck upon the earth's surface, let him 
 but put himself in the right relations with the uni- 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS 41 
 
 verse in which God has placed him, and all her 
 colossal strength is his. Whatever end he seeks, 
 he has but to set the right instrumentalities in 
 play, and the very powers of heaven come down to 
 serve him. Unknown forces stand always ready 
 to do man's bidding. Let him but summon them 
 to his side, and they lend infinite cunning to his 
 hand, resistless strength to his arm, telescopic 
 vision to his eye, miraculous hearing to his ear, 
 lightning speed to his feet. 
 
 Again is the case wholly different when we con- 
 sider those powers which are purely personal, such, 
 for instance, as our intellectual faculties. Man 
 is a being of thought, of reason, of imagination. 
 Think of the marvellous deeds he sometimes per- 
 forms. Think of the effort of memory by which 
 a young girl repeats word for word in the morning 
 a long discourse which she has heard the night 
 before; of the force of imagination which could 
 call a Hamlet or a Sistine Madonna into being; of 
 the speculative processes which could produce the 
 " Principia." Nay, to come down to familiar things, 
 think even of the common feats which your mind 
 or mine is performing every day, the memories, the 
 reasonings, the speculations, the insights, all un- 
 conscious often, through whose aid we lead our 
 daily lives. Who can explain any of these things? 
 Who can tell whence this power comes or how it 
 acts? Is it any conscious effort of your own or 
 simple act of will by which you recall the events 
 or visions of twenty years ago or by which they 
 
42 DISCOURSES 
 
 once photographed themselves upon your mind? 
 In your highest mental tasks are you not availing 
 yourselves of certain psychological laws, certain 
 apparently automatic habits of association or per- 
 ception or deduction, without whose aid you would 
 be powerless? In your thoughts have you not the 
 entire thinking activities of the race behind you? 
 Not forgetting for a moment the vast differences 
 between mind and mind or attempting to explain 
 these mysteries, yet how, after all, could this great 
 superiority of one over another be attained save 
 through a greater facility in employing nature's 
 laws of thought, a longer established adjustment, if 
 you will (whether by inheritance or otherwise), of 
 the mind to the ways of true thinking? What 
 power has the boldest thinker to evoke the thoughts 
 he wishes out of nothingness? What power has 
 the strongest mind to build itself up on principles 
 of its own, in defiance of these inscrutable but all- 
 comprehensive laws ? Who governs his thoughts in 
 the same sense in which the steersman guides the 
 ship? What imaginative nature masters its imagi- 
 nation, and is not rather mastered by it? As 
 Michael Angelo was wont to declare that the 
 marble statue he was carving was no work of his 
 own, but only a form complete from the first and 
 concealed within the stone, waiting simply to be 
 released by his chisel from the covering that veiled 
 it, why cannot man's best thoughts be described 
 as pre-existent ideas, released, at slight effort of 
 his own, from the great universe of truth? We 
 
 i 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS 43 
 
 need not disparage man or mind; only let us 
 admire this marvellous provision by which what- 
 ever is rarest or profoundest in the realm of thought 
 stands ready to visit him who knows how to call it 
 to his aid. 
 
 Whether it is mind or matter that is in question 
 then, we find ourselves part of the universe in 
 which we live; not an unconscious fragment of the 
 greater whole, but an intelligent centre, gathering 
 to itself and using as it will the mighty currents of 
 being which are in ceaseless action around it. Try 
 to isolate yourself from the world and trust to your 
 own individual forces, and you are miserably weak. 
 Place yourself in harmony with your surroundings 
 and in intelligent contact with their life, and noth- 
 ing is impossible. Strength untold, wisdom un- 
 measured, joy incalculable, lend themselves to your 
 service. 
 
 It is somewhat in this way that I like to under- 
 stand the striking words which I have chosen as 
 my text. Like many another before and since, 
 Paul had been called upon to face evils and calami- 
 ties which seemed far beyond his own power to 
 meet; yet the power had come to him, and the evil 
 was surmounted. "In stripes above measure" (to 
 give his own pathetic catalogue of his trials), " in 
 prisons frequent, in death oft. Of the Jews five 
 times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice 
 was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice 
 I suffered shipwreck, a day and a night I have been 
 in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of 
 
44 DISCOURSES 
 
 waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own 
 countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in 
 the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in 
 the sea, in perils among false brethren ; in weari- 
 ness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger 
 and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and naked- 
 ness." Yet out of weakness had come strength; 
 and, in the joy of that newly discovered power, he 
 rejoiced in the very sorrows which had revealed it. 
 "Therefore I take pleasure," he says, "in infirmi- 
 ties, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecution, 
 in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am 
 weak, then I am strong." 
 
 The experience of which Paul here speaks, if I 
 understand it aright, seems to be this. Great evils 
 visit every one of us at times, which, as they 
 approach, seem ready to overwhelm us. We feel 
 no strength in ourselves to encounter them. Sor- 
 row threatens which shows no hope of possible joy 
 beyond, bereavement which must needs leave the 
 soul forever desolate, a darkness through which no 
 gieam of light or happiness can ever penetrate. 
 Yet the hour comes, and the trial is met. Nay, 
 the trial is not only met and surmounted, but out of 
 it comes a degree of fortitude and of endurance of 
 which we had not dreamed. The bereavement falls 
 upon us, and instead of the blank desolation we 
 had foreseen come rich resources of sympathy and 
 companionship hitherto unknown. The sorrow 
 settles down upon our heart, and yet out of it come 
 actual joys of which till then the soul was simply 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS 45 
 
 incapable. I am not speaking here rhetorically 
 nor conventionally. I am speaking of the actual 
 experiences, as I believe, of human souls, of souls 
 not too shallow to feel profoundly, and therefore 
 forgetting their sorrows at once, but of souls ear- 
 nest enough to discover deeper sources of comfort 
 and joy. Tears have flowed like rain, to be lighted 
 again by smiles of holy joy; and that, not because 
 the tears came from the surface of the heart, and 
 so passed soon away, but because the heart had won 
 for itself meantime a larger capacity of feeling 
 and emotion. The closest ties of affection have 
 been rudely sundered, yet new and unexpected 
 interests have sprung up in the very midst of the 
 desolation, not because the old affection lacked 
 tenderness or loyalty, but because the heart had 
 acquired a larger power of love. In no single case 
 of sorrow, perhaps, even though the bitterness be 
 greater than was anticipated, do we find ourselves 
 as powerless as we thought. 
 
 Nor is the explanation of this hard to find, so far 
 as we can ever explain these spiritual experiences. 
 As you looked forward to the coming sorrow, you 
 thought only of your own power or your existing 
 resources in meeting it. You measured yourself 
 against it, and you were indeed powerless. You 
 looked into your own heart, and there were no 
 reserves of fortitude and endurance equal to so vast 
 a strain. But the hour came, and behold strength 
 flowed in upon you from unknown sources. You 
 opened your bereft soul to the skies, cried out in 
 
46 DISCOURSES 
 
 your sorrow, and behold the heavens bowed them- 
 selves and came down to your side. Xo human 
 strength awaited you in that supreme hour. It was 
 a divine strength. You were not alone. You had 
 the entire heavens above you and the whole uni- 
 verse behind you, intent upon re-enforcing your 
 weakness and filling the waste solitudes with new 
 forms of life. You were drawing from infinite 
 sources. Weak yourself, you had but to unclose 
 your heart to the entrance of heavenly powers, and 
 they came thronging in to make your breast their 
 abode. In your weakness, you for the first time 
 discovered your strength. At the end of your own 
 devices, you looked around you and above you to 
 find exhaustless resources, from which you were to 
 draw at will. Crushed to the dust, you looked up 
 to see holy spirits of love and comfort and peace 
 condescending to your low estate, and stooping to 
 set you upon your feet, and whisper to you that 
 you were resting on an eternal rock. 
 
 In a word, if I can read these ways aright, when 
 the moment of weakness and despair comes, you 
 find that the conditions of endurance of peace and 
 of trust are not determined for you alone, or part of 
 your individual being, or holding their sway within 
 your single breast. They are universal laws. It 
 is not your will which created them, nor your neces- 
 sities which will exhaust them. The strength, the 
 comfort, the joy, which you seek, are not powers 
 which come and go in your petty life. They are 
 forces of the moral universe, moving: in vaster cur- 
 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS 47 
 
 rents, sweeping onward ever in ceaseless motion, 
 passing by the souls that seek them not, but enter- 
 ing in wherever they are summoned, to bring their 
 heavenly messages of peace and love. This, I say, 
 is the strength which is born out of weakness. It 
 is the sudden recognition, borne in upon us as we 
 come to the end of our own strength, of the larger 
 life of which these little lives of ours are a part. 
 It is the consciousness, into which some great crisis 
 startles us, that our own being is but a point in the 
 spiritual universe, through which a mightier life 
 than ours forever ebbs and flows. Imagine your- 
 self, if you can, cut off in your hour of sorrow from 
 the entire world, and actually thrown upon your 
 own resources, imagine all companionship and sym- 
 pathy and all consciousness of other lives withdrawn 
 from you, imagine the entire play of thought and 
 feeling which passes from heart to heart to cease, 
 imagine no star in the heavens even to hint to you 
 of other lives than yours, and no power beyond the 
 stars to speak to you of eternal things, and you can 
 form some idea of that larger life of which I speak 
 as surrounding and engulfing our own, and of that 
 more abiding strength on which in our moments of 
 great need, if we would stand at all, we must con- 
 sent to lean. Evidently, this strength which sus- 
 tains us, if we be sustained, is not wholly from 
 within. It is the play of universal forces, includ- 
 ing all our individual forces in their sweep and 
 adding their eternal strength to ours. Yes, the 
 whole universe is mine. I turn to it in hours of 
 
48 DISCOURSES 
 
 weariness; and its majesty and beauty sweep in 
 upon me like a flood, and fill my being full. I 
 turn to it in hours of weakness and discontent, 
 drink at its fountains of exhaustless energy, and 
 am strong. I turn to it in disquiet or inward 
 strife; and, in the eternal calm of its forests and 
 its seas, I find myself at rest. 
 
 You will see, I think, the point towards which 
 this thought is leading us. Fortunately, it is not 
 for us to draw the exact line which separates our 
 own lives from the vaster life about us. Many 
 strive, indeed, to draw that line, and tell us pre- 
 cisely how much is human and how much divine. 
 Let me urge upon you the better thought, which 
 seeks no such distinction, but is content to know 
 that both are in some sense one. Religion has no 
 higher task than to persuade us that these lives of 
 ours are, indeed, part of the eternal spirit ; that it is 
 in God that we " live and move and have our being." 
 There is no graver peril than that we shall accus- 
 tom ourselves to look upon our daily acts in their 
 immediate bearings alone, and follow them only to 
 their instant consequences. There is nothing more 
 needful than to learn to see in these hourly rela- 
 tions of friend with friend the play of abiding 
 affection, in these common transactions of man 
 with man the reign of absolute justice, in this 
 daily service of duty, joy, and sorrow the experi- 
 ences of eternal souls. That which distinguishes 
 the noble life from the petty, the earnest from the 
 trivial, the religious from the irreligious, is this 
 
STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS 49 
 
 feeling that none of life's concerns are paltry or 
 common, but that our duties, our studies, our com- 
 panionships, our domestic ties, our conversation, 
 and our traffic all have in them a deeper meaning 
 and a more lasting importance than appears. The 
 central thought of our religious faith, at once its 
 most practical and its most spiritual, is this : that 
 our lives are but part of the eternal life of God. 
 
 Therefore it is that I have tried to lead you 
 on from trivial beginnings to this highest point of 
 faith. If we would produce any great mechanical 
 result, we have (as we have seen) but to arrange 
 our machinery, and we know that all the forces 
 of heat, of electricity, or of gravitation, will press 
 forward to do the work. It is not our own strength 
 to which we look. It is to elemental powers, 
 mightier far than we, yet ready always to serve us, 
 and which never yet were known to fail. And so 
 in these moral and spiritual lives which we are 
 leading. Weak ourselves, we are strong in the 
 elemental powers of justice, purity, holiness, love, — 
 powers which wait simply our bidding, and which 
 have never yet been known to fail. In no extrem- 
 ity of evil, of disappointment, of suffering, of sor- 
 row, can we be alone; for the Father is with us. 
 We cannot be alone; for the God of justice, the 
 God of goodness and of love, is at our side. Open 
 your hearts towards purity, and the very purity of 
 heaven will enter into your soul, and dwell there. 
 Open your soul towards integrity, desire it, invite 
 it, and you will find yourself armed at every point, 
 
50 DISCOURSES 
 
 and eternal truth itself fighting all your battles 
 against falsehood and fraud. And, finally, in your 
 hours of doubt and grief, open your soul towards 
 the higher peace, let the deep experiences you 
 have won and the bitter suffering you have endured 
 do for you their perfect work; and behold out of 
 the very weakness of your soul, out of its bereave- 
 ment and desolation, will come heavenly compan- 
 ionships and a divine and enduring strength. 
 
 1878. 
 
V. 
 OUR DEAD. 
 
 " Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead." — Matt. viii. 22. 
 
 This is almost the only instance where the words 
 of Jesus sound harsh or ungracious, or where he 
 seems to forget even for a moment the feelings of 
 others. One of his disciples, it seems, had ex- 
 pressed a willingness to follow his Master, and 
 share his trials with him, provided only he might 
 first go and bury his father. "But Jesus said unto 
 him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead." 
 So the passage exactly reads. Must we infer, then, 
 that he wished to chide his follower's grief or make 
 light of it? Are we to infer that high concerns, 
 like those in which Jesus was engaged, lead to the 
 suppression of the heart's natural emotions? Does 
 devotion to duty or truth forbid the indulgence of 
 the affections, and leave no time to tarry at a 
 friend's grave or pay a parting tribute to his mem- 
 ory? Is the higher life so absorbing that it be- 
 grudges us these few brief moments, brief enough 
 at best, of privacy and silence while grief is fresh? 
 Must we seal the tomb, or leave others to seal it, 
 then go our way hastily, as though no tomb were 
 there? 
 
52 DISCOURSES 
 
 Harsh words, as I have said, if this be indeed 
 the meaning of our text; yet is there not something 
 in them not wholly unfamiliar in our own experi- 
 ences? Does not the world seem to us cold and 
 heartless at times, as it hurries past our sorrows 
 and goes its way quite unconcerned? Does not life 
 often seem cruelly impatient, stopping for a single 
 moment to pay its homage to some lofty soul which 
 had but just now seemed absolutely essential to its 
 welfare, then hastily closing up its ranks and press- 
 ing forward as though nothing important had 
 occurred? We speak to-day of certain vacant 
 places which never can be filled; yet do we not 
 know that the world will adjust itself at once to 
 its new conditions, and go on undisturbed? What 
 life so important that the world really needs, or 
 acknowledges at least that it needs, it? Have we 
 not at times reproached ourselves for accepting 
 our new position so readily, suffering the grave 
 to close in so quickly upon our sorrows, and life to 
 reassert its claims, and duty and sordid care to 
 intrude themselves so soon upon our rare and sacred 
 hours? And may not this busy modern life grow 
 ever more exacting, till it grants the affections no 
 quiet moments, and leaves us no single hour to 
 hold counsel with the past or ask questions of the 
 future ? 
 
 But let us return for a moment to our text. Pos- 
 sibly we do not have these words of Jesus exactly 
 in their original connection. Some circumstance 
 there may have been which, if we could recover it, 
 
OUR DEAD 53 
 
 would soften their apparent harshness. Among 
 many conjectures on this point, it has been sug- 
 gested that in uttering this rebuke he had in mind 
 the exaggerated and artificial demonstrations of 
 grief then prevailing. The funeral ceremonials of 
 those days, according to all descriptions, were pro- 
 longed, elaborate, and turbulent. Hired mourners, 
 women rending their garments and tearing their 
 hair, loud shouts and songs, heightened by noisy 
 instruments, were perhaps the accompaniments of 
 sorrow which Jesus wished to condemn. In the 
 very next chapter of this Gospel he is described as 
 summoned to a ruler's house whose daughter lay 
 dead, and are told that, "when he came into the 
 ruler's house and saw the minstrels and the people 
 making a noise, he said unto them, Give place." 
 If it was at this ostentation and extravagance of 
 grief, mimicked under some form or other in all 
 later ages, that his words were aimed, they assume 
 a different tone, indeed. Grief needs no artifice 
 or excess, he would say, to heighten its emotions. 
 Give simple utterance to the heart's natural feel- 
 ing, and go your way. "Follow me" where duties 
 are grave and life presses upon us its unceasing 
 cares. The world will not pause while you 
 abandon yourself to your grief. It cannot. It 
 calls you back in urgent tones, not to forget your 
 loss, but to be chastened and strengthened by it, 
 not to bury it forever in the past, but to cherish it 
 as a living incentive and power for good. It is 
 the glory of the past, not to dim or overshadow 
 
54 DISCOURSES 
 
 the present, but to lend to it fresh courage and a 
 new and higher grace. The past is of worth only 
 as it lives again in to-day. "Let the dead bury 
 their dead." 
 
 And is not this, on the whole, the direction in 
 which the world is to-day tending? The world is 
 older than it was; and the growing experience of 
 ages shows itself, does it not, in a greater self- 
 mastery in the presence of calamity and a larger 
 comprehension of the scheme of things, in which 
 death, pathetic as are its lessons, is but a passing 
 incident. With the world's advancing culture 
 comes less and less of demonstration, greater re- 
 straint, a greater simplicity, and greater readiness 
 to take calmly up again life's interrupted duties. 
 The funeral ceremonials of a generation ago or the 
 passionate ebullitions of certain races to-day would 
 be to us intolerable, a mere burlesque and counter- 
 feit of sorrow. If there is danger of running to the 
 other extreme in our modern self-suppression, it is, 
 on the whole, a healthy, as well as an inevitable, 
 change. It means not only that, as the world's 
 manhood approaches, we are learning to control our 
 emotions, nor merely that the intellect is getting 
 the mastery over the heart ; it means also that with 
 the expansion of knowledge and thought, with our 
 deeper insight into the eternal order of things, 
 and our power of sending the imagination backward 
 and forward into realms unvisited by it before, 
 comes a juster apprehension of the proportion and 
 significance of these passing trials. They mean 
 
OUR DEAD 55 
 
 more, and yet not so much, bring a profounder 
 experience, yet shape themselves more easily and 
 quietly in accordance with the supreme intent. 
 To-day falls more willingly into its appointed 
 place, and to-morrow is readier for its tasks. It 
 is not that the heart loses its sensitiveness or the 
 soul its tenderness or its capacity of grief, which 
 would be progress backward, indeed. It is rather 
 that life becomes to us ever greater and mightier 
 than death, and duty a grander term than sadness 
 or loss. The world asserts a larger claim than 
 ever before, but a claim which it easily makes 
 good. Its work is ampler, its needs are more 
 imperative, its scheme and purpose are diviner. 
 
 How the ancient writers loved to depict the 
 nothingness of human life, and the slight mark 
 which all men leave behind them when they are 
 gone! "All those things are passed away like a 
 shadow, and as a post that hasted by and as a ship 
 that passeth over the waves of the water, which 
 when it is gone by the trace thereof cannot be 
 found, neither the pathway of the keel in the 
 waves, or as, when a bird has flown through the 
 air, there is no token of her way to be found, but 
 the light air being beaten by the stroke of her 
 wings and parted by the violent noise and motion 
 of them is passed through, and therein afterwards 
 no sign where she went is to be found, or like as, 
 when an arrow is shot at a mark, it parteth the air, 
 which immediately cometh together again, so that 
 a man cannot know where it went through, even so 
 
56 DISCOURSES 
 
 we in like manner, as soon as we were born, began 
 to draw to our end, and had no sign of virtue to 
 show. The hope of the ungodly is like the dust 
 that is blown away with the wind, like a thin froth 
 that is driven away by the storm, and passeth away 
 as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a 
 day." 
 
 Our modern poets, as they recur to this theme, 
 show a still finer and more discriminating touch: — 
 
 " Then, when I have descended, and die stone 
 
 Above the stairway has been set, 
 The tears of those who reckoned me their own 
 
 A little space will wet 
 The grass ; but soon all saddened days 
 Count up to comforted and busy years : 
 
 All living men must go their ways 
 And leave their dead behind. The tideless light 
 Of sun and moon and stars, silence of night 
 And noise of day, and whirling of the great 
 
 Round world itself, yea, 
 All things which are and are not work to lay 
 
 The dead away." 
 
 And what does this mean? Not certainly that 
 the great and good are to be forgotten as soon as 
 they die. Not that our own loved ones are to pass 
 at once from our thoughts, as though they had 
 never been. It means only that the world is 
 greater than any who have dwelt in it and life itself 
 larger than any single souls that have lived in it. 
 It means that our seasons of sorrow are sacred 
 hours of reconsecration, not hours of nerveless 
 despair. It means that the hurrying ranks of those 
 
OUR DEAD 57 
 
 who really work and live cannot pause at the graves 
 of the fallen for idle grief, but catch up their 
 lives at once into their own, and press forward for 
 the higher and larger tasks which those lives have 
 made possible. Our best homage is paid, not in 
 clamorous reiteration of our loss, but in calm 
 recognition of what the departed have been or have 
 accomplished. What each generation asks of the 
 next is to prove the value of its work already done 
 by carrying it forward without delay, if need be 
 in wider and loftier ways. Even though, as we 
 sometimes feel, the best nobleness and vigor of 
 the race, the dignity of its manhood, and the 
 splendor of its thought are already beneath the 
 sod, none the less do the departed call upon us 
 to take what places are ours, and fill them well, 
 even though theirs are to stand forever empty. 
 
 I am sorry to bring such a tone of sadness into 
 this first hour of our gathering here, — hour of glad 
 greetings and friendly reunion, as it should be, 
 after many weeks of separation. But, alas! my 
 pen refuses to take up any other theme. There 
 are too many vacant places here, too many lonely 
 homes and aching hearts among us, for us to think 
 now of aught besides the desolation which these 
 ruthless hours have wrought. 
 
 Seasons there are when nature seems to have 
 grown suddenly pitiless, when she seems intent 
 upon crowding into the shortest space the utmost 
 possible amount of suffering and loss, as if to re- 
 mind us how helplessly these poor lives of ours lie 
 
58 DISCOURSES 
 
 in her grasp; seasons when at once the tenderest 
 and most loved, the strongest and most helpful, the 
 wisest and most needed, are snatched abruptly 
 away, and the world left to go on as it may with- 
 out them; seasons when one good name after an- 
 other is struck rudely into the dust, as though 
 human honor were a thing of naught, and when 
 quiet villages are shaken to their foundations, as 
 though innocence and helplessness were worthy of 
 no protection and no thought. Such scenes have 
 followed each other without pause within the few 
 brief hours since last we met together here, — fair 
 summer hours made apparently for recreation and 
 repose, hours when we have sought for ourselves 
 the calm seclusion of the mountain, the ocean, and 
 the lake, but hours when every mail brought tid- 
 ings of disaster and the daily paper became a daily 
 journal of disgrace and woe. In all these losses 
 we, alas! have shared; all save one. For us, hap- 
 pily, there have been no tidings of disgrace, no 
 losses whose distress must be mingled with that 
 saddest of all sorrows, the sense of shame. For us 
 death leaves behind no memories on which we can- 
 not dwell with gladness and pride, however keen 
 and bitter be our sense of loss. 
 
 Ah, yes! The future looks dark and deserted; 
 for the nation to-day, as well as we, is weeping 
 over its losses. Yet the world is large, as we have 
 seen, and its scheme is vast, vaster than any of 
 the souls which it contains. The world will not 
 confess that any of its children, even its greatest, 
 
OUR DEAD 59 
 
 are essential to its needs, or that its resources are 
 ever quite exhausted. If one place is left vacant, 
 it has a hundred others waiting to be filled. The 
 great of one generation but make the path of the 
 next, if not more splendid, yet richer in meaning 
 and fuller of possibilities. They come, not to 
 exhaust the world's excellence or leave it barren, 
 but to set more and higher tasks for those who 
 remain. This very sense of irreparableness which 
 attends their loss is the best proof that their work 
 is done, that their companions have caught the pur- 
 pose of their lives, and that their spirit has entered 
 into the hearts of men, not again to disappear. 
 Next to rivalling a noble life is to appreciate and 
 honor it. The void it leaves is an incentive to 
 other forms of excellence. One type of virtue, 
 though never exactly reproduced, makes another 
 more possible. Our politics can never sink to 
 quite the depths to which they might have fallen 
 but for those stainless knights who have fought to 
 the death, against such hopeless odds, to protect 
 our country's honor. Their names will not die. 
 They will stand through all time for political pu- 
 rity and integrity. Their places will not be filled, 
 — no man's place is ever filled a second time; but 
 they will have made other places necessary for 
 other souls to fill. 
 
 Take one striking and well-known illustration of 
 the power of a noble life, though itself cut off pre- 
 maturely, to perpetuate itself in other careers. 
 Less than a dozen years ago a young Oxford stu- 
 
60 DISCOURSES 
 
 dent, seized with a passionate desire to elevate 
 the suffering classes, and believing that more of 
 humanity as well as more of justice could be 
 infused into the problems of social science, set 
 himself to bringing face to face the sore wants and 
 wrongs of the poor and the educated intelligence 
 which had been so long standing at a distance and 
 striving to relieve them. Snatched away by an 
 early death, while his practical schemes were but 
 just formulated, his place has never been exactly 
 filled, nor do we know precisely what his lofty and 
 unsparing enthusiasm might have done for suffering 
 humanity; yet others sprang forward at once, in 
 affectionate homage to his memory, to initiate the 
 experiment to which his short life had been so 
 unselfishly given. Though Toynbee himself died, 
 yet his spirit has passed into the wide-spread Toyn- 
 bee movement; and his name stands, both in Eng- 
 land and in America, for that effort to break 
 through the barriers of class, and find one's way 
 into the actual needs and feelings of others, which 
 has created some of the sweetest and most effectual 
 forms of modern charity. The world has honored 
 him beyond any of its monarchs, whom it has borne 
 to their graves with stately ceremonial and for whom 
 it has draped itself for months in the habiliments of 
 woe. What prouder immortality could he himself 
 have asked, what finer proof that his life had done 
 its work, what sweeter reward at the hands of his 
 fellow-men? And what better homage can the dead 
 ever ask of us than to find their way into our actual 
 
OUR DEAD 6l 
 
 lives, to chasten our thoughts, to strengthen our 
 courage, to ennoble our aims ? Not that they would 
 have us hurry back from their graves into the bust- 
 ling world, which, ere the last word is spoken, is 
 clamoring for our return. In the midst of busiest 
 cares, it cannot harm us if our minds be haunted 
 for a time by memories of those who have just laid 
 their work aside. Nothing so wholesome or in- 
 vigorating, if the true sentiment be there, as to keep 
 the departed still in mind. Never, indeed, do we 
 see our friends so clearly or understand them so 
 fully or value them so fitly as when they are just 
 withdrawn from our sight, when their lives have 
 assumed already a completed instead of a fragmen- 
 tary form, yet before the actual facts have faded or 
 imagination has taken the place of memory. And 
 yet, when all is said, their memory is more honored 
 in its silent effect upon our thoughts and acts than 
 in any passing demonstration of our sorrow; and 
 the value of their lives lies in just that quality 
 which, in spite of ourselves, persists, and will not 
 die. 
 
 So life hastens on, and closes all its gaps as soon 
 as they are made. The generations pass, but the 
 world survives. Men perish, but man remains; 
 and no single life, with any potency of purpose in 
 it, is ever thrown away or comes to nought. In 
 our conscious thought or our unconscious habits or 
 moods, the spirit which has vanished from our 
 sight lives on, and knows no death. "Go on," our 
 text says to us, "and do the work unfalteringly 
 
62 DISCOURSES 
 
 which those vanished lives have enabled you to do." 
 "Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead." 
 
 One other thought our text has for us before we 
 leave it. It bids us lay aside, in the grave of the 
 departed, all protests, all feeling that the course of 
 events has been grievously turned aside to our harm, 
 and might have been other than it was. Once for 
 all, "Let the dead bury their dead." What these 
 words tell us is that there are no accidents in our 
 earthly lives, that what to human eye is chance to 
 the divine intent is the working of eternal laws. 
 Neither our own lives nor the lives of those most 
 dependent on us are put wholly in our hands. 
 Numberless the possibilities of peril which lie on 
 every hand, not one of them to be anticipated by 
 us, not one unknown to the infinite wisdom and 
 love. Without accepting the old doctrine of fate, 
 we may believe that these events all take their 
 place in the eternal plans, and could not be other 
 than they are. We do our best, as it seems at the 
 moment; the rest is for other hands than ours, 
 and for hands that never err. Were we to try to 
 avert or escape all danger, life would be spent 
 wholly in striving not to die; and, when all was 
 done, the peril would spring up where least we ex- 
 pected it. Happy parties of travellers circumnavi- 
 gate the globe, and come gayly home, out of count- 
 less dangers of forest, glacier, and ocean, to find 
 some dear friend thrown from his horse or crushed 
 upon the road within sight of his doors. Young 
 men have returned from our war unwounded out of 
 
OUR DEAD 63 
 
 twenty battles to find a brother or sister killed by 
 some false step on their very threshold. Foolish 
 and brainless adventurers have within these few 
 weeks floated safely through the rapids of Niagara, 
 over which no soul had passed before alive, while 
 quiet dwellers beneath their own roofs have heard 
 the solid walls of their houses crumbling in sudden 
 ruin around them. 
 
 But these are no accidents. The pitiless earth- 
 quake which has just overwhelmed one of our fairest 
 cities, sparing neither white nor black, strong man 
 nor helpless child, lay wrapped, centuries on cen- 
 turies ago, in the first glowing mass out of which 
 our globe was shaped, all prepared to do its de- 
 vastating work this very hour. Nor is it different, 
 we may be sure, with any so-called fatality whereby 
 any single soul, in this disastrous summer, has been 
 summoned into another life. Let not the genuine 
 grief such a bereavement has brought or your utter 
 sense of loss be imbittered by any needless regrets 
 or self-accusings. 
 
 An unkind summer, indeed, — beautiful, radiant, 
 health-giving to the outer eye, but hiding beneath 
 its fair surface what unknown and unguessed terrors! 
 Yet this is not the last of all the years. As the 
 turf will surely grow green again over the rents and 
 scars of our Southern soil, and as nature, after her 
 wont, will deck her ruins with her rarest and loveli- 
 est foliage, so will these scars left on many loving 
 hearts, bare now to the eye and sensitive to every 
 touch, clothe themselves erelong, we may be sure, 
 
64 DISCOURSES 
 
 with fresh verdure and beauty. Marvellous the 
 soul's power, like nature's, to outlive its sorrows, 
 and deck its own ruins with tenderer charms, — not 
 by forgetting the past, not by burying its dead in 
 oblivion, but by taking them to its heart of hearts, 
 and being borne on with them to higher and larger 
 life. 
 
 1886. 
 
VI. 
 
 PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 
 
 " I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." — 
 Matt. xv. 24. 
 
 It is hard at first to believe that these words, 
 spoken as they were by Jesus himself, mean exactly 
 what they say, that he thought himself sent only to 
 the Jews. It is hard for us, indeed, to understand at 
 all this Jewish idea, that Jehovah's favors were for 
 the house of Israel only. And yet was it so strange, 
 then? Did not every race in olden time which had 
 any vivid idea of divine providence at all feel sure 
 that it was the special object of God's love and 
 care? It may be that this was the only form in 
 which the notion of a divine providence could 
 possibly have shaped itself at first. It was the 
 necessary first step. Even in these days, when a 
 great war arises or some important political issue is 
 joined, is not each nation or party quite convinced 
 that its special cause is God's cause, and will 
 prevail ? Whether in affairs of Church or of State, 
 are we not all very confident that God is on our 
 side, not the other? 
 
 It is not altogether strange, then, that the Jews 
 
66 DISCOURSES 
 
 should have considered themselves the one holy peo- 
 ple, or that Jesus, in entering upon his ministry, 
 should have felt himself sent, as he here declares, to 
 his own people alone. Such might well be his feel- 
 ing, inheriting as he did all the traditions of his 
 people, until the question arose in some practical 
 form. In the incident before us it so arises for the 
 first time, and nothing in the entire Scriptures is 
 more interesting than to watch the effect upon him 
 of this new experience. For the first time in his 
 life, so far as we know, he stood on heathen soil, and 
 was addressed by those of another race. " Behold 
 a woman of Canaan came, . . . and cried unto him, 
 Have mercy upon me, O Lord : my daughter is griev- 
 ously vexed with a devil." For a moment he was 
 silent; and then strange enough, no doubt, to his 
 own ears sounded the answer which, in obedience 
 to all the traditions of the past, he at first felt com- 
 pelled to make to her, "I am not sent but unto the 
 lost sheep of the house of Israel." "It is not meet 
 to take the children's bread and to cast it to dogs." 
 How stern and narrow all this sounded in the pres- 
 ence of such suffering and such faith ! The pathetic 
 pleading of this Canaanite woman was more than he 
 could bear. "Truth, Lord; yet the dogs eat of the 
 crumbs which fall from their master's table." To 
 hear such an appeal was to yield to it. He found 
 that he was sent to this heathen mother, so long as 
 she had sorrows which he could heal. " O woman," 
 he said, " great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as 
 thou wilt." 
 
PERSONAL INFLUENCE 6/ 
 
 His mission, then, was larger than he thought. It 
 was not Jewish wounds he was to heal ; it was any 
 wounds, whether of Jew or Gentile. It was not 
 Jewish ears that his truth was to reach; it was any 
 ears which cared or longed to hear. Christianity 
 could not remain a Jewish faith, though it tried (for 
 this same experience which had befallen the Master 
 himself was soon to be repeated in the history of 
 the little church). Limiting themselves at first 
 to Jerusalem and the temple alone, the disciples 
 soon found that they must address a larger audience. 
 Their work was grander than they dreamed. Un- 
 circumcised as well as circumcised, Greek as well 
 as Jew, claimed part in the new gospel ; and their 
 claims could not be refused. It cost a struggle, 
 indeed, but a struggle to which there could be but 
 one issue; and before the first generation had de- 
 parted these words of Paul were heard, " Here is 
 neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, 
 neither male nor female; for ye are all one in 
 Christ Jesus." 
 
 The point I am trying to make clear by this pref- 
 ace is this; that the truth is always larger than he 
 who holds it, and, once uttered, enters immediately 
 upon a course and mission of its own. To-day no 
 less than in its earlier hours, it is well for us to 
 remember, Christianity is not to be limited or de- 
 fined by those who claim it as their own. It will 
 define itself, and fix its own limits. It is not for 
 you or me to determine who come within its bounds 
 and who do not. The future will decide that ques- 
 
68 DISCOURSES 
 
 tion, not the present. Christianity is not sent to 
 the house of Israel only, not to Rome or England 
 or America alone, nor to this church or that. It 
 will go whithersoever it can, do whatsoever it 
 chooses, admit to its ranks and cover with its name 
 whomsoever it will, whether its present followers 
 approve or not. The "Open Sesame" once spoken, 
 there is no enchanter living who knows how to 
 charm back the truth thus let loose upon the world. 
 If you cannot trust Christianity to take its own 
 course, make its own new departures, choose its own 
 followers, and determine without your assistance 
 who belong to it and who do not, you are no true 
 Christians. 
 
 In how many other ways than in religion does 
 this same principle assert itself! Let there be 
 a new discovery or invention which can benefit 
 mankind, and how rapidly it finds its way from the 
 study or workshop of the originator into the various 
 channels of human activity and trade and the most 
 distant parts of the earth! Let any great thought 
 be uttered, and how soon it breaks through every 
 barrier of language, and translates itself into the 
 speech of every land! The poet of one country, if 
 poet indeed he is, becomes in time the poet of 
 every country. It is interesting to-day to note how 
 literatures like the Russian, absolutely foreign in 
 soil and atmosphere from ours, and once thought 
 wholly alien in spirit, are now made to add their 
 wealth of thought, of imagery, of moral incentive 
 or social suggestion, to ours. So it is with those 
 
PERSONAL INFLUENCE 69 
 
 older messages which have come to us lately in 
 such popular form after many centuries from India 
 and Persia. There is some question in each of 
 the cases which I have in mind ("The Light of 
 Asia" or " Omar Khayyam") whether we are receiv- 
 ing the primitive Eastern philosophy or simply 
 a nineteenth-century modernization of it; but, 
 whether it be the exact original or not, it is East- 
 ern truth touching the Western mind to very beau- 
 tiful and often noble utterance, and putting the 
 far-off past in fine spiritual communion with to-day. 
 Whatever message of divine truth those literatures 
 contained was sent not to Persia or India alone, but 
 to all lands and all ages. It was not for one 
 country, but for man. It might slumber for cen- 
 turies, as it did, in undecipherable manuscripts; 
 but, let the time come when man's growing avidity 
 for knowledge and facilities for research call for 
 it, and its hiding-place will be discovered, and 
 it will be brought to light. 
 
 And now, once having become familiar with 
 this thought, let us follow it in another direction, 
 where it more immediately concerns us. Let us 
 see how it applies not only to the word which the 
 poet or prophet speaks, but to the word which you 
 or I speak, or to our very thoughts or deeds. It is 
 not for us to prescribe the course or determine the 
 influence of anything we do or say. When once 
 given to the world, these things cease to be ours, 
 or to be wholly within our control. For, good or 
 bad, they belong to the world, and must take their 
 
JO DISCOURSES 
 
 course and do their work there. If they are good, 
 they diffuse themselves by the divine law by which 
 the human heart claims whatever is holy or beauti- 
 ful, from whatever source, as its own; if bad (for 
 there is this side to the picture, too), by the equally 
 irreversible law whereby the weak or evil mind 
 catches whatever is foul or iniquitous as its own. 
 It is not only the nobler sentiments from the past 
 which have survived, we have to remember, but 
 the ignobler as well; not the pure and elevating 
 literature of Greece and Rome alone, but the un- 
 clean and lascivious, too. It is not only the best 
 fiction of Russia and Germany and France that is 
 flooding our shores to-day, it is also the unwhole- 
 some and sensational and foul. We cannot help 
 it. No sage criticism can prevent it. No duties 
 or custom-house regulations can bar its entrance 
 to our libraries, our theatres, or our homes. The 
 bold suggestion, the unlicensed thought, the sensual 
 or prurient conception, finds minds enough waiting 
 for it in every land; and, where it finds the waiting 
 mind, there it surely goes. It makes little differ- 
 ence whether the French novelist or play-writer 
 of the baser sort means to corrupt American youth 
 or not, whether he has them in mind, or, as is more 
 likely, knows little and cares less for their exist- 
 ence. He corrupts them none the less, and is the 
 unconscious cause in many cases of their downfall. 
 And so with every base thought or word that falls 
 from our lips and every unholy deed that we com- 
 mit. It finds its way, by paths that we know 
 
PERSONAL INFLUENCE 7 1 
 
 little of, straight to the hearts which are awaiting 
 it. Whether we mean to corrupt others by our 
 vice or not, we corrupt them. Even though we 
 determine that our acts are for ourselves alone, 
 they are not for ourselves alone, but for whomso- 
 ever they happen to reach. 
 
 All this, as you have already discovered, is but 
 another way of stating the familiar and homely fact 
 of the importance of personal influence. Yes, that 
 is all that I am trying to say. I am reminding you 
 that every life acts in greater or less degree upon 
 the other lives around it, and in ways which we 
 cannot anticipate or determine. I am reminding 
 you that you cannot live for yourself alone if you 
 try, or if, with the best purposes in the world, you 
 elect to do so. The word once spoken, the deed 
 once done, is no longer yours. It belongs to the 
 world's life for whatever effects it may work in 
 other souls. 
 
 If you are a parent, it is not the special word or 
 act which you intend shall influence your children's 
 lives which alone is felt by them or is felt by them 
 most. It is perhaps the very word or act by which 
 you least wish to be remembered. If you are 
 simply a friend, it is not what you do for example's 
 sake alone which tells upon your companions. It 
 is any deed of yours, best or worst, which happens 
 to find others in a sensitive mood. 
 
 It is the more important to dwell upon this point 
 because so much is to be said and so good an argu- 
 ment can be entered on the opposite side. To be 
 
*]2 DISCOURSES 
 
 thinking forever of the effect of our conduct upon 
 others, it is often urged with some reason, makes 
 us artificial and self-conscious. It robs life of its 
 naturalness and delight. If we have certain facul- 
 ties given us, it was of course intended that we 
 should use them, and use them without over-critical 
 analysis or examination of their far-off results. In 
 any case, why make ourselves accountable for 
 others' weakness, when we have enough of our own 
 to remember? Let each secure for himself the best 
 development he can without regard to others, and 
 the result will be far better than if we were weigh- 
 ing all possible distant contingencies with every 
 act which we perform, or, in fact, thinking of them 
 at all. 
 
 If this happens to be our way of thinking, it is 
 worth our while to notice two or three colossal ex- 
 amples of this principle, in which we can see its 
 working on a grand scale. Two such historic in- 
 stances occur to us at once, — men as unlike each 
 other as possible in all other respects, but who 
 happened to agree entirely in this. It was Napo- 
 leon's open avowal that he did not consider himself 
 subject to the same moral laws as his fellows or 
 bound to consider their prejudices; while with his 
 great German contemporary, Goethe, though there 
 is nowhere the same explicit assertion, there is 
 yet the tacit assumption throughout that the 
 world's ideas of right and wrong are not for him, 
 neither is it for the world to pass judgment or 
 criticism upon him. One is actually thrown off his 
 
 
PERSONAL INFLUENCE 73 
 
 guard as he reads Goethe's writings, especially his 
 narrative of his own life, by the absence of all ex- 
 planations or apologies and the serene irrecognition 
 of the world's opinion or the reader's possible esti- 
 mate of any of the incidents or situations, as 
 though here were a life which created its own moral 
 atmosphere and established its own standards. I 
 would not of course imply that Goethe was leading 
 a grossly immoral life, especially as judged by the 
 standard of the times, but only that he seemed to 
 live without the slightest reference to others than 
 himself, and as though raised above the common 
 necessities of humanity. Splendid results there 
 certainly were in both these two cases, potent in- 
 fluences upon the generation and posterity; nor 
 would either of them have cared in the least, I 
 suppose, had he been told that he must accept with 
 all others the workings of universal moral laws. 
 None the less, however, is this true. The more 
 conspicuous their position, the more had others to 
 do with their deeds and thoughts. And, with all 
 the glory they achieved and all the mighty intel- 
 lectual influence that one, at least, is still exert- 
 ing over the human mind, the world is morally 
 weaker to-day for their stupendous selfishness. 
 
 Come down now from these exalted instances to 
 your own life and mine, and the case is exactly the 
 same. You have the same right that Napoleon or 
 Goethe had to ignore serenely the standards or 
 prejudices of the world, and live for yourselves 
 alone, if you can. The only trouble is that you can- 
 
74 DISCOURSES 
 
 not any more than they. We will not argue whether 
 it would not be better on the whole if you could, 
 — better for yourselves and for the world as well. 
 As well argue that it would be better, if shut up in 
 a room with others, for each to breathe his own at- 
 mosphere, and so not contaminate or be contam- 
 inated by the air which others breathe. The air 
 which one breathes all must breathe. We dwell in 
 the same atmosphere, and cannot parcel it off if we 
 will. So we dwell in the same moral atmosphere, 
 and cannot parcel that off if we will, nor determine 
 for ourselves whether we will or will not pollute 
 the air which others are to inhale. Argue as you 
 will about doing this or that for its own sake ex- 
 clusively and not at all for example's sake, you 
 cannot stamp any act with a private mark, de- 
 claring it good for yourself only, and not to be 
 regarded by your companions or children. Our 
 relations are too intimate, our lives too closely in- 
 terwoven, for any act to stand wholly by itself. It 
 is perfectly true that the purpose of setting a good 
 example is not the noblest motive from which one 
 can act. It is quite true that to be virtuous solely 
 for example's sake would be a sad piece of hypoc- 
 risy, besides proving the absence of any very pos- 
 itive moral convictions. You certainly are not 
 called upon to appear better than you are, or to 
 pretend scruples which you do not feel, or to pose 
 as stern moralists in cases where you are actually 
 indifferent; but, when you claim to dismiss the 
 force of example wholly from your thoughts, and 
 
 I 
 
PERSONAL INFLUENCE 75 
 
 to act as though it did not exist, the case is quite 
 different. To declare it non-existent does not 
 make it so. It does exist whether you choose or 
 not, and is one of the most significant facts of 
 your daily life. To disregard it (though often 
 done upon apparently high grounds, as we have 
 seen) is really for the most part a piece of pure 
 selfishness. We do not care to rob ourselves of an 
 enjoyment which we know will not hurt us simply 
 because it may hurt some one else. We forget 
 that every one whom we can help has a claim upon 
 our help. We forget that, if others are morally 
 weaker than we, that very weakness constitutes a 
 claim upon our strength. We forget that any 
 happiness is dearly bought, if it can be had only by 
 putting "a stumbling-block or an occasion to fall 
 in our brother's way." 
 
 I have said that the power of example, far from 
 being unimportant, is one of the most significant 
 facts of our daily lives. Who of us, at some period 
 of our career, have not known some friend whose 
 accidental word or act had more weight with us 
 than any possible argument or advice from any 
 quarter? How often does it happen, as we look 
 back upon the past, that the strongest moral impulse 
 we can remember came from some single chance 
 deed, which fired our passions or stirred our ambi- 
 tion or touched our generous instincts! Ask your- 
 self what nobleness means, or how you know there 
 is such a thing, and you will find that you have 
 learned it not from books, but from lives, not from 
 
76 DISCOURSES 
 
 definitions, but from seeing noble deeds. So sen- 
 sitively organized are we, so imitative through a 
 portion of our lives, so quickly responsive through 
 all our earlier years to whatever appeals to our 
 finer sentiment, as well as our baser, that the lives 
 of others are affecting ours all the time. What a 
 man is tells not upon himself slone, but upon his 
 friends, his neighbors, his generation. 
 
 What he is (to take the one step that remains) 
 tells also upon his posterity. It is something for 
 us to remember that our words or acts are no part 
 of ourselves alone, but are part, for evil or good, 
 for happiness or misery, of all the lives around us. 
 It is far more to remember that they are part also 
 of those which are to come after us. This is a fact 
 which we are only beginning to realize. We have 
 always known in a general way that certain types of 
 countenance perpetuate themselves for generations, 
 that certain gestures or tones or movements pass 
 down indefinitely from father to child, that certain 
 traits of character, pleasing or offensive, distinguish 
 particular families as long as they exist, that cer- 
 tain mental or moral habits characterize special 
 localities or races or nations; but we are just be- 
 ginning to understand what this means or what an 
 added responsibility it lays upon us. It means that 
 the type of countenance, the gesture, the habit, the 
 voice, is not accidental or superficial. It is the 
 inner life of years long gone by, betraying itself 
 in living souls to-day. It means that our little 
 acts of self-indulgence, our unclean thoughts, our 
 
PERSONAL INFLUENCE *]>] 
 
 sensual gratifications, our false or tricky or ungen- 
 erous habits, have a long life; that, when we have 
 done with them, they have but just begun their 
 career; that they are to add to the perils and multi- 
 ply the struggles of many an innocent soul after we 
 are gone, — many a soul longing, perhaps, for the 
 good, and marvelling why these foul and villanous 
 propensities force themselves so persistently upon 
 its endeavors. Think of this, and yet feel, if you 
 can, that our lives are wholly our own, that we are 
 responsible only to ourselves, or that, if we are 
 willing to reap the fruit of our own conduct, all is 
 well. Think of this, and see if it does not add 
 new meaning to the idea of personal responsibility, 
 and give fresh incentive to your efforts for self- 
 control. 
 
 Such, at least, is the thought which I would leave 
 with you to-day. Possibly you find no need of 
 other incentive to good action than the love of 
 virtue or the hatred of wrong; but, if these motives 
 ever fail, it may well help you in your struggles to 
 remember the many lives which one single deed 
 may reach and the far-off influences to which it is 
 sure to lead. 
 
 1889. 
 
VII. 
 MEMORIALS OF JESUS. 
 
 "These are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, 
 the Son of God." — John xx. 31. 
 
 From one point of view it seems a singular fate 
 which has befallen the greatest of earthly lives, — 
 that its memory should have been preserved by 
 such scanty records. Lives infinitely less impor- 
 tant to the world, some of them such as mankind 
 would have been glad to have forgotten entirely, 
 come down to us from the same period, or earlier, 
 in the utmost fulness of detail, so that we know how 
 the men themselves looked and spoke and dressed. 
 The emperors, statesmen, generals, poets, traitors, 
 of the time we can reproduce to the imagination 
 to-day almost as they walked the streets of Rome 
 or Athens. But this great religious Teacher, 
 every feature of whose living personality would be 
 infinitely precious to us, stands among his contem- 
 poraries a dim and shadowy form. There is not 
 one of us here who has not tried at times to give 
 some vividness or lifelikeness to his conception of 
 Jesus of Nazareth, only to give up the effort in the 
 end as well-nigh impracticable. The records of his 
 life, interesting and precious as they are, do not 
 
MEMORIALS OF JESUS 79 
 
 supply the material which we need. We cannot be 
 wholly surprised at this. That an obscure peasant 
 of Galilee (as he appeared at first) should not have 
 the incidents of his childhood and youth as fully 
 noted and preserved as an emperor or orator of 
 Rome, whose importance was recognized during 
 his life or from his birth, needs no explanation, of 
 course. What seems strange and hard to us is 
 that, even after his death, when the real signifi- 
 cance of his career began to be seen and the name 
 of Jesus of Nazareth was upon every lip, still no 
 attempt was made for so many years to preserve 
 the fast disappearing memories of his personal his- 
 tory. Yet why should they be preserved, as things 
 then looked? Why perpetuate the paltry human 
 experiences of one who was so soon to appear as 
 the great lord and ruler of the whole earth? Nay, 
 why reproduce the past at all, or any of its records, 
 however momentous, so long as all existing empires 
 were to perish with the coming of the new kingdom 
 of the Messiah, and the heavens and earth them- 
 selves to pass away and give place to the new 
 heavens and the new earth? Such was the expec- 
 tation which filled all minds for a generation after 
 the Master's death, and such its unfortunate and 
 irrevocable results. Bewildered and paralyzed by 
 this splendid dream of the future, they let the pre- 
 cious hours and moments slip by; one after an- 
 other of those who had seen Jesus in the flesh passed 
 from the scene, leaving no written memorials be- 
 hind; scoffers arose, saying, "Where is the prom- 
 
8o DISCOURSES 
 
 ise of his coming? for, since the fathers fell 
 asleep, all things continue as they were from the 
 beginning of the creation,"; until, at last, when a 
 younger generation appeared, clamoring for some 
 knowledge of their great Leader, the golden oppor- 
 tunity had passed forever, and only such vague and 
 scattered reminiscences as could be gathered at sec- 
 ond hand from those who had heard their fathers 
 or grandfathers narrate them remained to tell the 
 story of those sacred years in Galilee. 
 
 But it is not worth our while to deplore these 
 facts, nor is it at all for that purpose that I allude 
 to them now. On the contrary, recognizing at the 
 outset the necessary inadequacy of the gospel rec- 
 ords (which, under the circumstances, could hardly 
 have been more complete than they are), I wish to 
 point out certain features of peculiar value which 
 we are a little likely to forget. 
 
 Take any historical character. Once grant that 
 there are no adequate biographies of him, and the 
 next best thing, I think we should all agree, would 
 be to catch from as many points of view as possible 
 the impression which he made upon his contempo- 
 raries. Among the meagre memorials of Jesus it 
 is an indescribable advantage to us that we have 
 these personal impressions coming to us from sev- 
 eral different sources, — impressions, it must be 
 confessed, not so much of his personality as of his 
 work, yet none the less of very definite and positive 
 value. Let us consider the more important of 
 these this morning. 
 
MEMORIALS OF JESUS 8 1 
 
 First, of course, we have the Gospels them- 
 selves, or, rather, the first three Gospels, which 
 give us whatever remains of the bare incidents of 
 his career. Without discussing for the present 
 the difference between these Gospels and the 
 Fourth, it is enough to say that the writings of 
 Matthew, Mark, and Luke have in marked degree 
 the character of simple chronicles of the ministry 
 of Jesus, with no comments and but slight personal 
 coloring on the part of the writers themselves. In 
 this simplicity and impersonality lies their pecul- 
 iar value. To be sure, there are little indications 
 showing that one evangelist is more familiar with 
 the Hebrew Scriptures than the others, or is a 
 little more strictly Jewish in his feelings, or 
 handles his materials with more or less literary 
 skill; but this serves only to give greater piq- 
 uancy to the narratives without affecting their sim- 
 plicity. Nowhere does the writer force himself 
 upon the reader's notice, or betray his own feeling 
 or opinion. Nowhere are we aware of his pres- 
 ence, or called upon by him to wonder or admire, 
 or prevented in any way from forming our own im- 
 pressions from the events or words. Matthew, 
 Mark, and Luke are mere names to us. They are 
 the accidental compilers of facts which they have 
 been fortunate enough to have saved from oblivion, 
 and which they leave us to judge for ourselves. 
 They do not even attempt to fill up, by their im- 
 agination, the strange gaps in their narrative, 
 which they must have deplored as much as we, — 
 
82 DISCOURSES 
 
 the whole period of Jesus' childhood, the incidents 
 of his home life, or his relations with parents or 
 brothers or sisters, his education, or the beginnings 
 of those solemn thoughts or high resolves which 
 bore him forward finally to his ministry and death. 
 They do not attempt to purge their narratives of 
 inconsistencies or contradictions, or place in fairer 
 light the misconceptions or want of appreciation of 
 the disciples, or to conceal the struggles, the temp- 
 tations, or the mental agonies of Jesus himself. 
 All is honest, unaffected, and impartial. These 
 Gospels give us, so far as they go, as clear a picture 
 as we could ask of the Christianity of Christ him- 
 self, the Christianity of the earliest hours, before 
 it had undergone any of the modifications or trans- 
 formations which began so soon to pervert its 
 primitive simplicity. Indeed, so perfect is this 
 truthfulness, so completely do these narratives be- 
 long to the age in which they were written, that 
 the modern reader, breathing as he does the atmos- 
 phere of modern times, is apt to lose their real 
 significance. He interprets their language through 
 his own inbred convictions and beliefs. He un- 
 derstands the kingdom of God or the coming of the 
 Son of Man, he understands heaven and hell, res- 
 urrection and the grave, the present and the future, 
 as those words would mean if spoken to-day instead 
 of eighteen centuries ago. In a word, even those 
 who have loudest praise for the historical veracity 
 of the Gospels rarely credit them with being the 
 perfect mirror of the ideas, the habits, the expecta- 
 
MEMORIALS OF JESUS 83 
 
 tions, the beliefs of the times which they really are. 
 It would be the best possible practice in the art of 
 historical research or the cultivation of the true 
 historical sense to try to read the pages of Matthew, 
 Mark, or Luke just as Matthew, Mark, or Luke 
 meant that they should be read, and without forcing 
 into their language at any point the religious con- 
 ceptions of to-day. It is safe to say that not one 
 reader of the Bible out of a hundred even attempts 
 this thing, while not one out of a thousand succeeds 
 in the attempt. These Gospels carry a precious 
 message; but it is a message whose artlessness, 
 whose sincerity, whose rare and beautiful fidelity, 
 few of us have even begun to appreciate. Let me 
 recommend to you all, if you would get for your- 
 selves a fresh interest in the Christian Scriptures 
 and come to a new understanding of them, to 
 undertake this task. 
 
 But the first three Gospels do not give us our 
 whole knowledge of Jesus. There are other books 
 in the New Testament besides, very different in 
 character from these, and which many, on this ac- 
 count, are inclined to disparage. To get the primi- 
 tive gospel, many say, we must go to Matthew, 
 Mark, and Luke. They, and they alone, give the 
 very words of Jesus and his very acts; they alone 
 therefore are of any real value in interpreting 
 Christianity. Why not content ourselves with the 
 Gospels alone? It cannot be denied that there 
 is much reason for this attitude. It is a natural 
 enough reaction from the indiscriminate sanctity 
 
84 DISCOURSES 
 
 once ascribed to all the Scripture books alike or to 
 the thoroughly unhistorical habit among theologians 
 of every age to make Jesus responsible for the theo- 
 logical doctrines of Paul and others who followed 
 him. The fact that whatever dogmas are to be 
 found in the Xew Testament are in the Epistles, 
 not in the Gospels, cannot be too strongly em- 
 phasized. At the same time the fact that the 
 Epistles are not the Gospels does not prove that 
 they have no historical value. Because Paul is not 
 Jesus, it does not follow that he cannot help us in 
 understanding primitive Christianity. On the con- 
 trary, he has a place and function of his own, none 
 the less important for being wholly peculiar. It 
 is to the testimony of Paul that we look next. 
 
 I have spoken of the great value of the first 
 Gospels as simple chronicles of events, with no pur- 
 pose on the writer's part beyond the mere statement 
 of the facts. Such chronicles are always invaluable. 
 They form the basis of all trustworthy history. 
 Fortunate the historian who can put his hand upon 
 contemporary documents of the times he would de- 
 scribe. The more childish they are, the more un- 
 learned, the less deliberation or thought they show, 
 or purpose of any kind beyond the mere telling of 
 the story, the more valuable, in a certain sense, 
 they become. At the same time these simple 
 chronicles are not the only valuable form of 
 history. More thoughtful or elaborate documents 
 are also valuable. Besides, the mere eye-witness 
 of events, who describes them to his children or 
 
MEMORIALS OF JESUS 85 
 
 friends, telling his story with more or less vivacity 
 and accuracy and dramatic power, are often a few 
 intelligent observers, who are interested not only 
 in the events themselves, but also in their character 
 or meaning. They look behind the deed or word 
 to the motive or purpose which it shows. They 
 detect at once its moral or spiritual importance, 
 and see something of the consequences to which it 
 is likely to lead. They have previous notions or 
 opinions of their own which these events agree 
 with or oppose. The more of such observing or 
 analyzing power they have, or the stronger their 
 preconceived ideas, the less value will their re- 
 ports have, of course, as pure chronicles (in which 
 we wish to see nothing of the reporter himself), 
 but the more value will they have as analyses or 
 interpretations of the events. There is a differ- 
 ence which we all recognize between mere chroni- 
 cles and what may be called philosophical history. 
 Both of them are valuable. If we want to know 
 our own early colonial history, we are interested in 
 reading the actual diaries or letters of Bradford or 
 Winthrop, and feel that nothing tells the story 
 more perfectly than these; but, unless we have a 
 peculiar historical faculty ourselves, we shall be 
 glad to have some Palfrey or Bancroft study these 
 materials carefully for us, arrange them, bring the 
 events into proper relations with each other, and 
 point out to us their historical significance. 
 
 Paul can hardly be called a philosophical his- 
 torian, as he did not claim to be a historian at all; 
 
86 DISCOURSES 
 
 but he gives us the events of the times in what 
 seems to him their moral and religious significance. 
 Some of his writings, of course, count among origi- 
 nal Christian documents of highest genuineness 
 and value. His letters are indeed the earliest 
 documents that we have, much earlier than the Gos- 
 pels, and give us invaluable pictures of the thoughts 
 and manners of the apostolic age; but, in general, 
 it is to be said of Paul that he shows us early 
 Christianity as it looked to the Jewish theologian. 
 He was the first of the followers of Jesus to bring 
 with him any theological knowledge or systematic 
 habits of thought. To him the whole history of 
 Jewish religion and all the rabbinical speculations 
 upon it were thoroughly familiar. On being con- 
 verted to Christianity, he saw at once what others 
 had not discovered, the broader bearing of the new 
 thought. He found in Jesus a fulfilment of his own 
 most lofty dreams and the carrying out of all that 
 was sublimest in the visions and hopes of the Jew- 
 ish faith. 
 
 It was not the personal Jesus, as he walked 
 among the villages of Galilee, and as the three 
 evangelists depicted him, that he cared for; it was 
 the crucified and risen Christ. In Paul's writ- 
 ings is hardly a single allusion to the incidents 
 of Jesus' life, the eloquence of his words, or the 
 divine beauty of his character; but the pages are 
 full of the glory of the Christ. In the writings of 
 Paul we see Jesus not in his human dignity, but in 
 his celestial majesty, not as he looked to the fisher- 
 
MEMORIALS OF JESUS 8? 
 
 men or tax-gatherers of Galilee, but as he looked to 
 one bred in the scholastic atmosphere of Jerusalem, 
 and alive to the historical significance of the truth 
 which Jesus taught. The wider import of that 
 truth, the freedom from the Mosaic yoke which it 
 portended, the something more than Judaism which 
 breathed through it, — all this which had been lost 
 upon the Galilean disciples found quick response 
 in Paul's humaner sympathies. That he gave to 
 Jesus' simple teaching a strangely dogmatic form 
 cannot be denied, yet even in that system we see as 
 nowhere else a recognition on Paul's part of the 
 mighty moral impulse which Jesus had introduced 
 into the world. That he exalted Jesus of Nazareth 
 (who to the immediate disciples was a purely human 
 leader) into a very mystic and incomprehensible re- 
 lation with Deity must also be confessed; yet in 
 that very exaltation in which Christ appears as the 
 "image of God," "the first-born of every creature," 
 "one in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the God- 
 head bodily," purely ideal as it seems to us, we yet 
 catch glimpses of the spiritual majesty of Jesus as 
 it revealed itself to this great apostle. 
 
 But there are still other books in the New Testa- 
 ment besides the Epistles of Paul and other points 
 of view than his. In Paul's writings we find, as 
 we have seen, a deep theological or intellectual ap- 
 prehension of Jesus' work, which is quite foreign 
 to the first three Gospels, yet without which our 
 knowledge of Jesus would be inadequate. But 
 different from the purely intellectual apprehension 
 
88 DISCOURSES 
 
 of a character, and often far deeper, is what may be 
 called the poetic apprehension, the imaginative in- 
 sight which penetrates to all the finer and subtler 
 qualities of heart and soul. Poetry and religion 
 go always hand in hand: to know a religious nature 
 thoroughly, we must be able to see it somewhat as 
 it reveals itself to poetic sympathies. Fortunately 
 this element is not wholly lacking either in the 
 New Testament. Though there is, properly speak- 
 ing, no poetic treatise in the New Testament like 
 the Psalms or Prophets of the Old, yet in the 
 Fourth Gospel (known to us as the Gospel of John), 
 we find a delineation of the Christ which could 
 come only from a profoundly imaginative mind. 
 Many think that to call a Scripture writing imagi- 
 native is equivalent to calling it fictitious or decep- 
 tive. Yet the imagination is a legitimate faculty, 
 and as much in place in sacred matters as in secu- 
 lar. For the true interpretation of a nature like 
 that of Jesus some imaginative insight is absolutely 
 needed. We may well be grateful, therefore, that 
 this is supplied us so amply and so frankly in the 
 Fourth Gospel. Here is a writer who cannot be 
 content to follow the literal and prosaic incidents 
 of Christ's career; he must unfold at every point 
 their spiritual and ideal import. Indeed, the in- 
 cidents themselves are of secondary importance to 
 him. He uses or omits at will. No signs of 
 human weakness or struggle, no inward conflicts or 
 agonies, no forty days' temptation at the opening 
 ministry, and no Garden of Gethsemane with its 
 
MEMORIALS OF JESUS 89 
 
 prayers and tears at its close, are to be found in 
 the Fourth Gospel. From beginning to end, ac- 
 cording to this Gospel, Jesus walks through his 
 earthly paths, not as a man among men, but as a 
 being of another sphere. All splendor of lan- 
 guage, all the more imaginative conceptions of con- 
 temporary religious philosophy, are called into 
 service to portray the grandeur of this Son of God, 
 who becomes on these pages the "Word made 
 flesh," the "Light which lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world." Not that the actual facts 
 of that Galilean life were wilfully ignored or dis- 
 torted or its truths falsified, but they were all 
 idealized; beautifully idealized, poetically ideal- 
 ized, so idealized as to disclose to us many hidden 
 spiritual realities, but still placing before the 
 reader an ideal Jesus in place of the real. Were 
 this the only account of Jesus that the Christian 
 world possessed, it would be anything but a faithful 
 representation of the actual life; but, taken as it 
 stands, in connection with the more literal records 
 in the other Gospels, it brings a spiritual beauty 
 and truth to light which we could ill afford to lose. 
 In a certain university town with which you are 
 all familiar, before one of its noblest halls, stands 
 a charming bronze statue bearing upon its base the 
 name of the founder of the college. The fine and 
 delicate figure and the scholarly, intellectual feat- 
 ures seem an altogether worthy representation of 
 the man whose generous gift, two centuries and a 
 half ago, gave birth to so princely an institution of 
 
90 DISCOURSES 
 
 learning. It is not the actual John Harvard, but 
 it is a beautiful and fitting nineteenth-century con- 
 ception of him. Suppose now that five hundred 
 years more have passed, and let us ask what value 
 this statue of John Harvard, in case it survives the 
 storms and frosts of five hundred winters, will then 
 have for the student or visitor at Harvard Univer- 
 sity. I can imagine him, when the whole story is 
 told, treating the statue with infinite scorn, as a 
 deliberate imposture and fraud, and as substituting 
 for the actual founder of the college the sculptor's 
 visionary notion of him. But I can imagine him 
 also saying, Though this is not John Harvard him- 
 self, and does not claim to be, yet it is the artistic 
 ideal of him as it presented itself to a sympathetic 
 soul five centuries nearer to the man himself than 
 we to-day, and it helps us just so much to realize 
 the loftiness and beauty of his life. 
 
 Such, as it seems to me, is the relation in which 
 the Fourth Gospel, though somewhat nearer to the 
 original life which it portrays, and drawing from 
 much larger materials than in the case of the statue, 
 stands to the actual Jesus. It shows us not the 
 man himself, but an ideal conception of him; yet 
 an ideal created by one so much closer to Jesus 
 than we are, and qualified by his spiritual gifts to 
 penetrate so deeply into the life he was studying, 
 that we are all infinitely the gainers by it. 
 
 In fine, to bring this discourse to a close, the 
 character of Jesus was not one to be comprehended 
 at a glance: it was manifold and complex. Not 
 
MEMORIALS OF JESUS 91 
 
 the mere chronicler alone, though he reported never 
 so exactly the facts which he observed, not the 
 theologian alone, though he comprehended abso- 
 lutely the religious significance of Jesus' words, 
 not the poet alone, or the philosopher, though he 
 saw marvels of beauty in that life hidden from 
 every other eye, can portray for us the actual Jesus. 
 We need them all, — the chronicler, the theologian, 
 the poet. Only when they have all given us their 
 report, only when the outer man as he lived and 
 spoke is sketched by the one, and the inner man as 
 he felt and thought by the other, does the real 
 Jesus of Christian history stand fully revealed. 
 
VIII. 
 EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY. 
 
 " If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall 
 ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" — John iii. 12. 
 
 Let me repeat this text ; for I am sure that, if 
 I can convey to you the meaning it has to me, you 
 will find it of the greatest help in your religious 
 thought. " If I have told you earthly things, and 
 ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you 
 of heavenly things " ? In other words, our belief 
 in heavenly things must follow, not precede, our 
 belief in earthly things. First earthly thought, 
 knowledge, faith, then heavenly. From the lower 
 we must proceed to the higher, from the known to 
 the unknown. Let me try to show you, in as 
 simple words as I can, the conclusions to which, 
 as it seems to me, this thought leads us. 
 
 First, it corrects certain misapprehensions which 
 are wont to make religious ideas unnecessarily ob- 
 scure and difficult to us. We are apt to think that, 
 because religious truths are so all-important and 
 sacred, therefore there must be some peculiar occult 
 method by which we can reach a knowledge of 
 them. As spiritual beings, we argue, we must 
 necessarily have some direct, innate perception of 
 
EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY 93 
 
 spiritual realities. Earthly affairs are one thing, 
 according to this idea, heavenly things quite an- 
 other. The laws of nature can be learned by 
 habits of observation, mathematical formulas by in- 
 tellectual processes; but the being of God and the 
 moral law have nothing to do with the senses, or 
 even the intellect, but, if they are discerned at 
 all, must be spiritually and intuitively discerned. 
 Hence, on the one hand, the arrogance of those who 
 claim an absolute knowledge of heavenly affairs; 
 on the other, the pains and struggles of pious souls 
 yearning for a clearer knowledge of God, and re- 
 proaching themselves or their teachers because 
 they cannot attain it. To all such needless mis- 
 conceptions these words come as a grateful correc- 
 tive. "First the earthly, then the heavenly." 
 Learn the truths that are close about you, if you 
 would know those that are far away. Heavenly 
 things constitute no distinct sphere apart from all 
 else, to be entered only through special insight or 
 by processes peculiar to themselves; they are re- 
 lated to earthly truths, and are to be approached 
 by the same paths. Knowledge of God may be in- 
 finitely higher than knowledge of man ; but it is to 
 be won, if at all, in the same way. There is no 
 other. Being men, we must know humanly. Liv- 
 ing on the earth, earthly realities must first fill our 
 souls; and through them alone can we attain to 
 higher realities. Be content with this, for needs 
 you must. The other world, when at last you enter 
 it, will still be this world; the future, when once 
 
94 DISCOURSES 
 
 you have reached it, will be the present. And, 
 when that time comes, if you have not believed in 
 earthly realities, how can you believe in the higher 
 and diviner heavenly realities? If you ever expect 
 to get any positive religious convictions or to ad- 
 vance to greater faith, be content to begin here 
 with the earth in which you live. If you hope to 
 grasp any abstract truths (religious or other), you 
 must begin with the concrete. If you wish for 
 ideas, you must begin with facts. Learn to com- 
 prehend and appreciate the relations amid which 
 you live, the duties, affections, and problems of 
 daily life, and you will find yourselves, by that 
 very process, coming into the knowledge of the 
 divine. 
 
 And this suggests the second help which our text 
 renders us. It rescues the term " earthly " from 
 the discredit which is so apt to attach to it. It 
 places earthly and heavenly things side by side, as 
 sharers in the same dignity, or, at least, steps 
 toward the same end. It is strange how long old 
 errors, even when superannuated, still cling to our 
 modern thought. The ancient notion of the corrup- 
 tion of the flesh taints our religious ideas, however 
 unconsciously, to-day. Old theologians declared 
 every impulse and motion of the senses to be evil, 
 and only evil continually. Old philosophers re- 
 garded the Supreme Deity as too exalted to have 
 had any share himself in creating the world, and 
 conceived of an attendant spirit, or Logos, who 
 took upon himself that debasing work. The human 
 
EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY 95 
 
 mind to-day echoes these primeval ideas. It cannot 
 bear to have earthly and heavenly things conjoined. 
 It shudders to hear matter and spirit mentioned in 
 the same breath. It resents the idea that the mind 
 or soul can in any sense be dependent upon the 
 body in which for the hour it condescends to dwell. 
 It decries the notion that the imperial faculties 
 which ennoble man can have any essential connec- 
 tion with the instincts or passions of the brute 
 animals at our side. It repels as an outrage the 
 suggestion that the terror of savage tribes, centuries 
 ago, at the earthquake or the eclipse, or the adjust- 
 ment of the savage or the animal to his surround- 
 ings, can stand in the remotest relation with the 
 august instincts of religion or the supreme sancti- 
 ties of conscience. Our text shows us the folly of 
 such an attitude. There can be no true progress, 
 as it reminds us, till all these unworthy distinctions 
 are swept away, till we confess that whatever God 
 creates, whether body or spirit, matter or mind, is 
 holy, till we feel that, if God is indeed everywhere, 
 he is in the dust of the earth or the lowest forms of 
 sentient life, as well as in the loftiest thoughts or 
 impulses of man, and that it is no derogation to 
 what is most spiritual to ally it closely with what 
 is most material. If you would see the dignity of 
 the heavenly, you must begin by discerning the 
 dignity of the earthly. 
 
 Again, our text reminds us that we can live in 
 but one world at once. Whatever other heavenly 
 spheres there may be, and however sublime the life 
 
g6 DISCOURSES 
 
 or duties of those spheres, we are for the present 
 here, not there, and belong to the world in which 
 we are placed. For the time we belong to it abso- 
 lutely. To attempt a twofold allegiance is to be 
 disloyal to that which God has assigned us. To 
 attempt to lead two lives in one is to lead neither 
 faithfully or well. To dwell upon earth as if we 
 were here only upon sufferance, and as though our 
 duties all the time lay elsewhere, is to spoil a good 
 earthly life, to make a poor heavenly one. Far 
 better to attempt that which there is some possi- 
 bility of our doing well. Far better to take this 
 life seriously, and honor it with our best endeavors. 
 The best we can do is not too good for it. The 
 utmost endeavor we can consecrate to it will not 
 more than fulfil its actual duties. The utmost 
 thought, conscience, wisdom, we can bring to its 
 service will not exhaust nor completely fathom its 
 moral significance. Be of the world, in highest 
 sense, while in it, and you will find mind, heart, 
 soul, taxed to their fullest power, and still much 
 left unseen and unknown and undone. O child of 
 earth, why fight against your fate? Why renounce 
 your parentage? Why bear your head aloft as 
 though the dust out of which you were born were 
 too base for you to tread upon, or the life into 
 which you are summoned too mean and scanty for 
 your lofty faculties to consecrate themselves to? 
 Why scorn the ties which bind you, and wait for 
 some far-off realms and far-away future to engage 
 your reverence, your love, or your faith ? 
 
EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY 97 
 
 It often seems to me passing strange that we 
 should work ourselves into such impatience over 
 limitations of our knowledge, which mean simply 
 that we are living here, not elsewhere, that we 
 belong not to another world, but to this. Why 
 should we be ashamed or angered at this admis- 
 sion? Why expect to be inhabitants of one world 
 and have perfect knowledge of another? Why com- 
 plain that we do not see that world? It only means 
 that we do see or can see this. Why strain your 
 eyes to catch visions in the clouds when there are 
 abundant forms and figures within their sight, but 
 not yet fully discerned on the earth? 
 
 Does this mean then, you ask, that there is no 
 knowledge of heavenly things for us while on earth? 
 that eternal and absolute truths are to us as though 
 they did not exist? that God, heaven, immortality, 
 are to be treated as phantoms or as mere possibili- 
 ties, while earthly things are alone to be considered 
 real? It means, I reply, that we are to accept 
 such knowledge of heavenly realities as is vouch- 
 safed to us or is possible to us, and not ask for 
 more. It means, as I understand the matter, that 
 we need expect to know nothing of these heavenly 
 things except as they are related to ourselves. Our 
 knowledge of them is not absolute, but relative. 
 Just so far as God has dealings with man, just so 
 far and no farther can we get for ourselves any 
 knowledge of him or his ways. All beyond is 
 pure conjecture. What comes within the ken of 
 our mortal vision, what enters within the compass 
 
98 DISCOURSES 
 
 of our earthly experiences or the experience of 
 those before us, is ours to know, and that alone. 
 Absolute knowledge is the pretence of priests, the 
 haughty claim of a hierarchy, the chimera of fa- 
 natics. Heavenly realities reveal themselves to us 
 only by virtue of translating themselves into terms 
 of human experience. It is through the medium 
 of the earthly that we discern the heavenly. 
 
 But what is the earthly? is our next question. 
 Where does the line run that separates the earthly 
 from the heavenly? Between visible and invisible 
 things, does it not thus limit us to tangible reali- 
 ties. By no means. These affections which bind 
 us to each other, these pangs of grief, these throbs 
 of expectation, these memories of the past and 
 hopes of the future, are as genuine a part of our 
 earthly lives as our bodily appetites, as the food 
 which we eat or the money we earn. Love, hatred, 
 revenge, ambition, envy, generosity, duty, loyalty, 
 trust, are as substantial earthly verities as the air 
 we breathe or the ground on which we walk. Who 
 will deny it? Was man an earthly being forty 
 centuries ago, when he simply ate and fought and 
 slept and lived in caves, and no longer earthly now, 
 when he flies to the stars in his search for truth, 
 when he covers every land with hospitals and 
 churches, and writes the centuries over with noble 
 and consecrated deeds? Has he ceased now to be 
 man and become a god? Has he not, on the con- 
 trary, found room for all these grandeurs, and a 
 thousand others besides, within the bounds of a 
 
EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY 
 
 99 
 
 purely earthly life? Away, then, with your notion 
 that the sensual only is earthly, and the spiritual 
 heavenly! Away with your imputation that man 
 is any less man for becoming, as compared with 
 his former self, a very angel of beneficence and 
 of wisdom ! He is not less man, but more. This 
 splendor of heroism is his higher manhood. This 
 ardor of self-consecration, this passion for useful- 
 ness, this enthusiasm of humanity, is his deeper 
 and more perfect self. It is not man becoming 
 God: it is man becoming man. The better he 
 grows, the sublimer his aspirations, the purer his 
 thoughts, the cleaner his life, the more spiritual 
 his motives and acts, the more truly is he man. 
 The more our bodies, our muscles, our sinews, our 
 arms and eyes and feet, lend themselves to deeds 
 of prowess or errands of mercy or lives of self- 
 sacrifice, the more perfectly do they achieve the 
 purposes of their creation. These are the earthly 
 things which open to us the heavenly. If ye be- 
 lieve not the one, how will ye believe the other? 
 
 But what is the difference then, you will ask 
 next, between this view of divine truth and any 
 other? If the earthly life of which you speak so 
 much, and to which you would bind us, is a 
 spiritual life, how does it differ, after all, from 
 the heavenly life to which religion ordinarily 
 points us? 
 
 It is a difference, primarily, of method, of the 
 way of approaching the truth. It is a question of 
 beginning at the right end. The ordinary method 
 
100 DISCOURSES 
 
 is like first studying the heavens and forming our 
 conclusions about them by the eyes, and then forti- 
 fying our opinions with the telescope: like forming 
 a priori conceptions of the vegetable world by the 
 way it looks or the way we think it ought to be, 
 and then proceeding to examine flowers with the 
 microscope. It is like any other method of thought 
 which places theory before fact. The great trouble 
 in our religious thinking, as we have already seen, 
 is that we are so impatient with the position in 
 which we are placed. We are not content to regard 
 ourselves creatures of the earth, looking at things 
 from an earthly standpoint. We are like the old 
 churchmen, who insisted that Galileo could teach 
 them nothing about the heavens. They knew all 
 about that already, and would not listen to the 
 purely earthly facts which Galileo's telescope dis- 
 closed. Galileo, on the other hand, clung to his 
 facts. Very petty and belittling facts they seemed, 
 it must be confessed, relegating the earth to a most 
 subordinate place in the universe: but, after all, 
 which way has taught us most of heaven? Galileo 
 preferred to look from the earth upward, the 
 ecclesiastics to look from the heavens downward. 
 Unfortunately, as they happened to stand upon the 
 earth instead of the skies, the ecclesiastical vision, 
 with all its splendor, proved but a brilliant delu- 
 sion, which, had it been persisted in, would have 
 brought the astronomical calculations of all suc- 
 ceeding centuries into confusion. Galileo was 
 right. The earth did move, though all the a priori 
 
EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY 101 
 
 conceptions of all the ages were against it. He 
 planted his telescope upon the earth, and so his 
 eyes were able to scan the heavens. We, too, 
 stand upon the earth. Unfortunate though it be, 
 we are certainly here, and from here we must 
 start. We must climb our ladder from the bottom, 
 not the top. We must hold fast to our solid facts, 
 and not despise them. We must prefer our facts 
 to all the dreams of cloudland. We must honor 
 facts, — honor them with that reverence which 
 belongs to everything which comes from God, 
 with that searching examination into their mean- 
 ing which befits those things which carry in them 
 nature's mighty secrets. Then we shall find that 
 the little facts of our daily existence are of im- 
 mense significance and marvellous grandeur. They 
 will carry us as deep as we choose to explore and 
 lift us as high as we care to soar. They will give 
 employment to all our moral and spiritual facul- 
 ties, to all the yearnings and aspirations, the hopes 
 and trusts, of our souls. 
 
 Another difference between this method and 
 those usually followed is that it rids us of all 
 pretences of false knowledge, with their baneful 
 effects. Those who hold up to their fellows splen- 
 did visions of heavenly truth or enchant them with 
 beautiful social ideals, drawn wholly from their 
 inner consciousness, but announced with all the cer- 
 tainty of absolute knowledge, seldom remember the 
 sad day of reckoning which they are preparing for 
 their victims. They think only of the great hopes 
 
102 DISCOURSES 
 
 they are inspiring and the momentary comfort they 
 are imparting, not of the false expectations they are 
 awakening, only to be shattered or mocked. Place 
 before the suffering classes, in the tenderness of 
 your compassion for them, ravishing pictures of an 
 ideal social order, declaim vaguely against the 
 heartlessness and cupidity of our existing arrange- 
 ments, and set over against them the vision of an 
 absolute justice, drawn, not from the world as it is, 
 but from the world as you think it should be, and 
 the hour must inevitably come when the unreality 
 of this dreamland and the bitter reality of the world 
 as it is will goad them to a more utter despair or 
 a more furious and relentless protest against the 
 world than ever. Place before the worshipper or 
 the mourner or the seeker after spiritual verities 
 sublime assurances of heavenly comfort, positive 
 assertions of the joys which await them in another 
 world, unfaltering prophecies of God's special 
 providence over them, declare authoritatively that 
 what you think ought to be must be, and what you 
 believe God should do he will do, and you have 
 filled to-day with peace and resignation. But how 
 will it be to-morrow, when life's sorrows prove real 
 and your prophecies prove unreal, when the earth 
 is very near, and the heavens which you have 
 sketched prove but the fabric of your pious imagina- 
 tion, when the world, with its grinding necessities 
 or its persistent doubts and questionings, is in- 
 tensely present, and your splendid theories but a 
 shallow dream? Your path is wrong. You must 
 
EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY 103 
 
 seek your ideal in the real. You must seek your 
 reign of absolute justice and right, not by proving 
 the world's worthlessness, but by recognizing its 
 worth, not in the injustice of the present order, 
 but in its justice, not in the selfishness and de- 
 pravity of the average man, but in his essential 
 generosity. 
 
 You who inveigh with all your soul against the 
 injustice of the present social order, how do you 
 know that it is unjust? How do you know that 
 this hot pursuit of wealth, this enrichment of the 
 few and impoverishment of the many, this heartless 
 greed of the strong and pitiful crushing out or 
 trampling under foot of the weak (granting it all), 
 how do you know that it is not according to the 
 eternal order of justice and right? Only because 
 in your breast and a hundred breasts at your side, 
 inherited from a far-off ancestry, and growing ever 
 stronger in the human heart since civilization 
 began, is this ineradicable sentiment of justice. 
 Your very invective against the injustice of society 
 testifies to the existence of what you deny. When 
 you declare these abuses of wealth and power un- 
 just, you know that the world is on your side. 
 That gives your charge its weight. It is the world 
 pronouncing them unjust, not you, — the world 
 which you despise, and teach others to despise and 
 mistrust. Teach them, rather, to trust it. Show 
 them that injustice and wrong are the surface feat- 
 ures of society, justice and generosity and right its 
 essential qualities, else society would not be. 
 
104 DISCOURSES 
 
 Show them that this fact, as it is the sole explana- 
 tion of the past, is also the only hope of the future. 
 Show them that, if injustice really reigns to-day 
 and society is radically wrong, then their beauteous 
 pictures of social regeneration must remain forever 
 in the clouds. Show them that nothing comes of 
 nothing; that man's regeneration must spring not 
 out of what is not, but out of what is: not out of 
 the absence of justice and love, but out of their 
 presence. Show them that we can promise a better 
 future, not because the present is irreparably bad, 
 but precisely because in the present lie germs of 
 tenderness and brotherly feeling and sympathy, out 
 of which the future is to be born. If they will not 
 believe these earthly things, if they will not be- 
 lieve in man's essential unselfishness and love, how 
 will they believe in your ideal reign of right, where 
 man must needs be the actor still? It is our faith 
 in the present which gives us our faith in the 
 future, it is the earthly trust which leads us to the 
 heavenly, it is human goodness and purity out of 
 which we form our conception of the divine. It is 
 this earthly life of ours in which all these great 
 sanctities lie. 
 
 But where, then, if this earthly life, not the 
 heavenly, is the supreme reality for us, is the realm 
 of religious faith? Faith? What is faith, if not 
 this very recognition of invisible realities, whether 
 present or distant? Faith has no need to travel to 
 far-off realms for its objects, so long as it finds such 
 abundant occupation here, to discover beneath the 
 
EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY 105 
 
 surface of humanity man's hidden and finer nature, 
 to discern beneath the bluster and self-seeking, 
 which seem to be carrying everything before them, 
 the silent processes of justice and right which are 
 the real forces of society yesterday, to-day, and 
 forever. Faith is the recognition of these silent 
 forces wherever and whenever they are. 
 
 Or, again, what room is there for God, it may 
 be asked, if our thoughts are to centre in the pres- 
 ent life? God? Where is God, if not in the midst 
 of our present life? If God is anywhere, he is 
 here; if in any world, he is in this. Wherever you 
 see goodness or holiness, there you come upon his 
 tracks. Where better can you learn to recognize 
 him than close at hand? If you see him not here, 
 how can you see him in regions far away? If 
 earthly things reveal him not, how will heavenly? 
 
 First the earthly, then the heavenly. Such is 
 the divine path. God does not ask both at once. 
 Our present life is earthly: he asks of us only to 
 make of it all that an earthly life can be, and to 
 draw from it all the truths that an earthly life can 
 reveal. But he does ask that. He asks us to do 
 all this life's duties, to find out all its sanctities, 
 to see in it all that is purest and best. He asks us 
 to believe in it, that so we may believe in all that 
 is holiest and divinest. 
 
 1890. 
 
IX. 
 
 AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZEN 
 SOLDIERS. 
 
 A SERMON FOR MEMORIAL SUNDAY. 
 
 "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his 
 life for his friends." — John xv. 13. 
 
 The memorial services which we have just been 
 witnessing have a peculiar beauty of their own. 
 They are in many respects the most interesting of 
 our anniversaries. They bring back to us the hours 
 of the country's peril and of its new birth. They 
 commemorate deeds of bravery and devotion which 
 it is our joy and pride to recall. They break in 
 upon our busy and calculating lives with inspiring 
 memories of heroism and self-sacrifice. Long may 
 the day keep its dignity and its charm ! 
 
 But it will not, unless we guard it jealously. 
 Even such hours, we must remember, may lose 
 their sanctity, and the glowing eulogies we utter 
 become an empty and hollow mockery. Let me 
 confess at once that this danger seems to me very 
 near. Let me confess that I feel a certain sense of 
 depression even now, when I witness or take part 
 
AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZ2N SOLDIERS 107 
 
 in these observances, and that the honors which we 
 thus pay to our departed heroes seem to me to 
 contrast most painfully with the lack of honor 
 paid them during the remainder of the year. 
 
 Let me explain; for the subject, unwelcome as it 
 is, deserves the serious attention of all those who 
 think our late war was worth the fighting or the 
 cause for which we battled worth the sacrifice of 
 such costly blood. My younger hearers will hardly 
 know at first what I mean, and my older listeners 
 may regret to have their tender memories disturbed 
 by such unusual criticism; but, if there ever was 
 a time when a word of frank remonstrance was de- 
 manded, it is now. If we do not wish the ideals to 
 which we have clung so long to be rudely shattered 
 and the conflict of a quarter of a century ago to be 
 robbed of its grandeur and made to appear like an 
 unseemly scramble for spoils, it behooves us to 
 pause in our present career. 
 
 When the war was over, the soldier naturally 
 became the object of the nation's gratitude. No 
 kindness, no distinction, no generosity, was too 
 great to bestow upon him. No care was too tender, 
 no provision too lavish, for those whom the war 
 left maimed or disabled or for the widows or or- 
 phans who were cast destitute upon the world. 
 The nation adopted them all as her children. 
 Hospitals arose, soldiers' homes sprang up, aid 
 societies appeared on every hand, pension laws were 
 eagerly enacted to cover every case of suffering or 
 need. With characteristic munificence, we may 
 
108 DISCOURSES 
 
 even say with characteristic prodigality, provisions 
 were made for the soldier and his family such as 
 no nation had ever dreamed of before. While the 
 compensation of both private soldiers and officers 
 during the war, in direct pay, bounties, and rations, 
 had been upon a scale of liberality unknown before 
 in the military annals of the world, the legislation 
 in their behalf since the war ended has been of the 
 most thoughtful, considerate, and unstinted kind. 
 Before ten years had passed, every possible injury 
 or disease incurred in the service of the country 
 seemed to be reached by the most generously 
 worded provisions, while innumerable private bills 
 had been passed from time to time to cover special 
 cases of misfortune or want. To give single in- 
 stances of the tender oversight which the nation 
 was extending to those who had suffered in her 
 behalf, the pension of the soldier who had died 
 from wound or disease was given from the first 
 to his widow, child, or dependent mother, or 
 orphan sister (till sixteen). Three years after the 
 war $2 a month was added for each child under 
 sixteen. The amount for soldiers who had lost 
 both hands was raised by three successive acts from 
 $2$ (1864) to $31 (1872), from $31 to $50 (1874), 
 from $50 to $72 (1878). Had our pension legisla- 
 tion stopped abruptly ten years ago, the families of 
 all who had suffered in the war, from the lowest 
 private to the highest general, would be drawing 
 from the public treasury to-day an income which 
 would leave no just claim ungratified, and which, 
 
AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZEN SOLDIERS IOQ 
 
 in any other country but America, would be con- 
 sidered princely. 
 
 It is true that such debts as the nation owes to 
 its defenders cannot be measured in dollars and 
 cents, and from this point of view any payments 
 from the Treasury might be considered small; but 
 it is also true that it cheapens the sentiment of 
 patriotism to suggest that such debts can have a 
 money value, or that the dollars received are in- 
 tended as a full requital of the services rendered. 
 Had this been the conception of the citizen's duty 
 twenty-five or thirty years ago, few youths would 
 have left their homes for the battlefield, and there 
 would have been few graves, day before yesterday, 
 for our veterans to strew with flowers. Since wars 
 began, the soldier has sought his highest reward 
 in his own deeds of daring and self-sacrifice and 
 in his country's admiration and gratitude. A sad 
 comment on our republic would it be that, when 
 her hour of peril came, her defenders, for the first 
 time in the world's history, had calculated the cost 
 of their sacrifices before throwing themselves into 
 the struggle or had presented their bill of expenses 
 when the struggle was over. Fortunately for us, 
 they did no such thing. As with all brave men 
 who had gone before them, the victory of the cause 
 for which they fought was their sufficient recom- 
 pense; and the provisions for their welfare which 
 the nation added afterward were accepted with 
 dignity and gratitude. Ten years ago the nation's 
 generosity was fully appreciated; and, if there 
 
110 DISCOURSES 
 
 were any murmurs of discontent, it was not from 
 the soldiers themselves. Nor, I think, could the 
 world at large, or even the most devoted friend of 
 the soldier, charge the nation with parsimony, 
 when told that up to 1879, out °f considerably less 
 than three million soldiers, 398,294 pensions had 
 been already granted, and nearly $400,000,000 dis- 
 bursed. 
 
 But, unfortunately, it was not the soldiers alone 
 who thought themselves concerned in the matter. 
 The making out of so many thousand claims and 
 the expenditure of so many millions of dollars 
 proved so lucrative a business, and the possibility 
 of extending these claims in various directions 
 proved so strong a temptation, that a great and 
 thriving trade sprang up, based upon the soldier's 
 needs. Plenty of honest men there were, no doubt, 
 among these pension agents; but outside this lesser 
 circle was formed a far larger ring, whose sole 
 thought was to awaken discontent among the re- 
 cipients of pensions, and bring to bear upon Con- 
 gress a pressure, apparently from the people them- 
 selves, for an increase of the nation's liberal 
 gratuities. The country was flooded with circulars 
 and appeals, military societies were led on step by 
 step to countenance these friendly efforts in their 
 behalf, public sentiment was quietly and success- 
 fully played upon to sympathize with the soldier's 
 sufferings and to forget that anything had yet been 
 done to relieve him, politicians were reminded of 
 the rich party capital to be secured by coming 
 
AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZEN SOLDIERS III 
 
 forward as the soldiers' friends, until an entirely 
 new era of pension legislation, unknown to the 
 period of the war itself, began. 
 
 I should weary you to no purpose if I attempted 
 to show the various steps of this scandalous process ; 
 but two instances will be enough to prove how de- 
 moralizing its influence has been, both upon our 
 national character and upon our national politics. 
 
 In 1879, fourteen years after the war, a bill was 
 introduced into Congress providing for what was 
 innocently called the "arrears of pensions." When 
 pensions were first granted, it was naturally and 
 properly provided that payment should begin when 
 the application was made, unless made within a 
 year, when payment was to date back to the time 
 of discharge from the service. In two subsequent 
 bills this time was generously extended, first to 
 three years, then, in 1868, to five, it being con- 
 sidered that five years was ample time for any gen- 
 uine claimant to discover his wounds or disability 
 and present his claims. 
 
 By the year 1879, however, this had been found 
 to be a great wrong. No matter how late the 
 soldier might be in applying for a pension, no 
 matter though for fourteen years he had not re- 
 garded himself a fit subject for the nation's charity, 
 or though for still another year he should keep off 
 her list of beneficiaries, whenever he should secure 
 a pension, he should receive not the pension only, 
 but back payments from the moment of discharge 
 from the service. This applied equally to pensions 
 
112 DISCOURSES 
 
 already granted. The passage of this bill was one 
 of the most humiliating incidents of our political 
 history, and marked, as nothing else could have 
 done, the decline of public sentiment since the 
 close of the war. I am not giving my own opinion 
 alone. Three or four years before a far less ob- 
 jectionable bill (Equalization of Bounties Bill) 
 had been vetoed by President Grant as needlessly 
 extravagant, as wholly uncalled for, as offering the 
 most dangerous inducements to fraud, as not de- 
 manded by the soldiers themselves, and as not 
 likely, if passed, to benefit them so much as the 
 over-zealous agents who were the real authors of 
 the movement. In 1879 tne same arguments were 
 offered against the Bill for Arrears of Pensions, 
 the Secretary of the Treasury gave warning that it 
 would cost $150,000,000, no whisper of a demand 
 came from those who were supposed to need it ; but 
 it was pushed through almost without debate, and 
 with the slightest possible precautions against fraud. 
 Instead of $150,000,000, it cost the nation $500,- 
 000,000. 
 
 The second instance is facing us to-day. The 
 Act of 1879 nas produced its anticipated results, 
 and more. The recipients of that magnificent 
 plunder — the agents, I mean, not the soldiers — 
 have shown themselves keener and keener for spoils 
 so easily won. Hardly a session of Congress, hardly 
 a month of any session, has passed without some 
 new pension bill. The safeguards once thought 
 necessary to protect the soldiers' good name and 
 
AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZEN SOLDIERS II3 
 
 save the Treasury from actual fraud have been grad- 
 ually relaxed, so that certain classes of deserters 
 (1882) have been granted pensions with the rest. 
 The annual appropriation has risen from $12,000,- 
 000 in 1866 and $59,000,000 in 1886 to more than 
 $100,000,000 in 1890. We find ourselves in the 
 extraordinary and even grotesque position to-day 
 of paying in pensions to our former soldiers more 
 than any European nation pays for its standing 
 army; and yet at this moment two bills are passing 
 back and forth between the United States Senate 
 and House which, if adopted, will add 200,000 or 
 380,000 new names to the pension roll, and increase 
 the annual expenditure by $40,000,000 to $80,000,- 
 000, or, if certain pending amendments are adopted, 
 by $470,000,000. 
 
 What are these schemes which demand such an 
 unparalleled outlay, and which, if carried through, 
 will make all previous gifts to the soldiers seem 
 parsimonious and pitiful? What new necessities 
 have suddenly been discovered which the keen eye 
 of all previous statesmanship had overlooked? 
 Two, it seems, which these two bills, one in the 
 Senate, the other in the House, are kindly calcu- 
 lated to meet. In the first place, it has been found 
 that, besides those soldiers who were wounded or 
 disabled in actual service, are many who came back 
 to their homes strong and able-bodied, but who 
 have broken down since (then, or been unsuccess- 
 ful in their affairs, or for some cause find them- 
 selves poorly off in the world, and so are told to 
 
114 DISCOURSES 
 
 look to their country to support them. Up to 
 this time, in every land and among all nations, 
 the soldier has been held to have no claim except 
 for disabilities incurred in or resulting from actual 
 service (at least until overtaken by extreme old 
 age). Now, however, this is regarded an unpar- 
 donable evasion of national responsibilities; and 
 a measure is proposed whereby all who served three 
 months in the War of the Rebellion, whether at 
 the front at the post of exposure or not, and who 
 have since, from any cause except vicious habits, 
 become incapacitated for labor, and yet are depen- 
 dent upon their daily labor, whether already re- 
 ceiving pensions or not, shall receive twelve dol- 
 lars a month for life. If such soldier has died or 
 shall die, leaving dependent parents, they shall 
 receive the same benefaction. Startling as this 
 proposition is, and notwithstanding the same or 
 a similar bill was vetoed three years ago, under 
 a previous administration, as turning the pension 
 roll from a roll of honor into a monstrous charity 
 list, it has nevertheless (March 31, 1890) passed 
 the present Senate with hardly a word in opposi- 
 tion, and but twelve votes against it. 
 
 But, however extraordinary this removal of all 
 distinction between heroic and non-heroic may 
 seem, it becomes altogether innocent when com- 
 pared with the sister measure which has already 
 passed the United States House of Representatives. 
 So open-handed has the nation been in its dealings, 
 and so enormously has the number of its beneficia- 
 
AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZEN SOLDIERS II5 
 
 ries increased from year to year, that it has begun 
 to seem to many quite invidious to make any dis- 
 tinction at all. Why discriminate between the 
 men who had the good fortune to receive wounds 
 in the nation's service and those who had the bad 
 fortune to come out without a scratch? Why 
 withhold the nation's bounty so jealously from any 
 who (whether for three years or for thirty days) 
 figured in the national uniform? Why not treat all 
 alike? Such, at least, seems to be the view of our 
 legislators, as the bill to which I have alluded 
 sweeps away at a stroke all cumbersome restric- 
 tions, and enacts that any man who served in either 
 army or navy, and has reached the age of sixty, 
 shall receive eight dollars a month until his death. 
 This ends, so far, the sorry tale. The two Houses 
 are in conference as to which of the measures will 
 please the soldiers most; but, as thus far no back- 
 ward step has been taken, and neither House and 
 neither political party dares to seem less complai- 
 sant than the other, it is more than probable that 
 they will extricate themselves from the perplexity 
 by combining the two bills and retaining the most 
 exorbitant provisions of each. Such, at least, 
 seems to be the expectation of those who are in 
 position to know, while the addition to our annual 
 expenditures called for by such a compromise 
 measure is variously estimated, from $50,000,000 
 to $150,000,000 or $200,000,000. In a word, if 
 this deed is consummated, when this Congress ad- 
 journs, we shall have pledged ourselves to a pen- 
 
Il6 DISCOURSES 
 
 sion appropriation of at least $150,000,000 a year; 
 while, out of the 2,800,000 men who served in the 
 war, it is estimated that about 950,000, or one 
 out of every three, will become recipients of the 
 nation's charity. 
 
 And this measure, let me add, to make my state- 
 ment complete, this measure which is now on the 
 eve of consummation, this measure which increases 
 threefold the sum ten years ago thought a lavish 
 appropriation for the country's defenders, this 
 measure which removes the distinction between 
 brave men and cowards, and offers a splendid pre- 
 mium on pauperism, this measure which throws a 
 dark cloud over the period of our national struggle 
 and makes its fine patriotism seem but a greedy 
 rush for booty, is about to become a law without a 
 single effort to defeat it, and with hardly a voice 
 lifted against it. A silence like that which fell 
 upon the North fifty years ago, whenever the en- 
 croachments of slavery were in question, falls upon 
 the whole country to-day, whenever the subject of 
 pensions arises. In the face of this monstrous 
 wrong, this growing corruption, this blow at all 
 that was purest and noblest in the only great war 
 which our nation has undertaken, not a single 
 public man of prominence (with one or two excep- 
 tions) utters a protest, neither party dares to record 
 itself in opposition, the press is almost silent, 
 while the pulpit passes it by for the most part as 
 outside its sphere. So far as public utterances are 
 concerned, the younger generation might grow up 
 
AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZEN SOLDIERS II7 
 
 in absolute ignorance that as gross an indignity had 
 been put upon our departed heroes and as corrupt- 
 ing an influence introduced into our political life 
 as the history of our country records. 
 
 For this is not a mere question of figures or of 
 dollars which I have brought to your attention this 
 morning. The question is not whether our Treas- 
 ury can bear this stupendous and increasing drain : 
 it is whether our national character can bear this 
 constant assault upon its integrity and purity. 
 Consider it first in the mere light of its extrava- 
 gance. If extravagance in private affairs is one of 
 the crying evils of the day, what shall we say of 
 this gross extravagance in public affairs? If we 
 have no right to waste our own property, how much 
 worse is it when we waste the property of others? 
 What harder blow could be struck at simplicity of 
 living, or at the homely virtues of contentment and 
 economy, than this reckless fashion of dissipating 
 the public funds? One of the most significant feat- 
 ures of the legislation of which I have been speak- 
 ing is the free and easy way in which its advocates 
 learn to speak of the expenditure of millions, and 
 the growing audacity with which they allude to the 
 cost of their schemes of plunder. Their ideas ex- 
 pand with their opportunities. At first $10,000,- 
 000 seemed to them a mighty sum to spend upon 
 pensions; but now a United States Senator, in ad- 
 vocating an amendment to the Dependent Bill, 
 remarks, with entire indifference, that he "thought 
 it very likely that the cost would reach $600,000,- 
 
Il8 DISCOURSES 
 
 ooo, and it might reach a billion." "It is time to 
 call a halt," he added, "on such low and selfish 
 considerations as are raised against the payment of 
 that debt." 
 
 But turn from the legislators to the soldiers 
 whom this legislation is supposed to serve. One 
 of the saddest spectacles which we have had to wit- 
 ness is the changed attitude and tone of the veterans 
 of the war as these pension projects have advanced. 
 At first they had nothing to do with the schemes, 
 and made no demands whatever. At first, indeed, 
 they had to be sought out and urged to accept the 
 public bounty. Between the first year of the war 
 and the third (the first pension law being enacted 
 in 1862) the number of applicants for State or na- 
 tional aid actually diminished. In 1865 the num- 
 ber was reported as "exceedingly small," — far 
 smaller than public expectation or the actual prep- 
 arations warranted. But, from the moment of the 
 enactment of the wholesale law for the payment of 
 arrears in 1879, this dignified and self-respecting 
 deportment was changed. Instead of expressing 
 gratitude to the country for its unparalleled munifi- 
 cence, they began to urge claims for greater aid. 
 Instead of waiting for others to extol their merits, 
 they began to speak themselves of the debt the coun- 
 try owed them, and to allude threateningly to "the 
 soldier vote." One step led to another, each more 
 brazen and insolent than the last. Three years ago 
 a committee of Congress was coolly told by a repre- 
 sentative of the Grand Army of the Republic, " If 
 
AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZEN SOLDIERS 1 19 
 
 you do not pass this bill [the Disability Bill] 
 soon, you will have to pass a universal pension 
 bill." At the National Encampment of the Grand 
 Army in 1888 it was "resolved" (by a vote of 356 
 to 22), "That this Encampment favors the presenta- 
 tion of a bill to Congress which will give to every 
 soldier, sailor, and marine who served in the army 
 or navy of the United States between April, 1861, 
 and July, 1865, for the period of sixty days or 
 more, a service pension of $8 per month, and to all 
 who served a period exceeding eight hundred days 
 an additional amount of one cent per day for each 
 day's service exceeding that period." But within 
 the last week the climax of this sort of effrontery 
 seems to have been reached in a resolution passed 
 by a Western encampment of the same order, to 
 this effect: "We now demand of the Congress of 
 the United States &per diem service pension [i.e., 
 for every man in the service] pure and simple." 
 Who could recognize under this guise the old ideal 
 of the nation's patriotic citizen-soldier? And who 
 can wonder, when these things are said and done, 
 that the youth of the present generation are losing 
 something of the admiration in which hitherto our 
 citizen-soldiers have been held? 
 
 It is this last aspect of the case on which I wish 
 especially to dwell. Those of us who know what 
 the soldiers of the late war really were, and what 
 their survivors for the most part still are, cannot 
 bear to see their good repute so sadly endangered 
 or to have them judged by their least honorable rep- 
 
120 DISCOURSES 
 
 resentatives. Yet what else is to be hoped for if 
 this downward path is to be continued? And what 
 is to be expected of any class of citizens who find 
 themselves, good and bad, idle and industrious 
 alike, invited to look to the public bounty for their 
 support? We are all trying in a small way to 
 lessen the number of paupers in the country and 
 teach the dependent classes the inestimable lesson 
 of self-respect and self-dependence. But what will 
 our labors be worth with a class of paupers in every 
 community whom our efforts cannot reach? The 
 united endeavors of all the wisest philanthropists 
 in all our cities to substitute self-support for 
 beggary will be like sweeping back the waves of 
 the ocean, so long as the nation itself is feeding a 
 horde of hungry mendicants at the public table. 
 In the name of the soldiers as a class and of the 
 community as a whole, let us protest against this 
 mediaeval policy. 
 
 I am sorry to have devoted this summer Sunday 
 to such a lament; yet it has seemed to me an un- 
 avoidable duty, however remote the topic may 
 be from our usual themes. Modern reformers, 
 when they interfere with the working of public 
 affairs, are apt to be called pessimistic. But, if 
 this is pessimism, it is the pessimism of simple 
 facts, only half stated, which I have suffered, so far 
 as possible, to speak for themselves. The pulpit is 
 often charged with being vague and general in its 
 denunciations, and dealing with sin in the abstract 
 rather than with particular offences. I bring before 
 
AN INDIGNITY TO OUR CITIZEN SOLDIERS 121 
 
 you this morning a very specific iniquity, and am 
 much disappointed if I have not succeeded in de- 
 scribing it in the most definite terms which the 
 English language affords. I am anxious to leave 
 upon you the impression that the entire pension 
 legislation of the last ten years is the most disrepu- 
 table business in which an honorable nation could 
 possibly engage, that it carries in itself all the ele- 
 ments of corruption, hypocrisy, and demoralization, 
 that it is not called for by patriotism, by charity, 
 or by statesmanship, that it is a burlesque upon 
 statesmanship, that it is a libel upon charity, and 
 that it strikes the most cruel blow at patriotism 
 which that noble sentiment ever received. So far 
 as its further encroachments are concerned, we 
 seem for the moment to be powerless; yet this 
 makes it all the more important that the present 
 inexplicable apathy should somehow be shaken, so 
 that the beautiful anniversary which has just passed 
 may resume once more its ancient charm, and we 
 may be able to enter again, as tenderly as twenty- 
 five years ago, into the pathos of the words, 
 "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man 
 lay down his life for his friends." 
 
 1890. 
 
X. 
 
 THE DIVINE HUMANITY. 
 
 A SERMON FOR CHRISTMAS. 
 "Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am ? " — Matt. xvi. 13. 
 
 The day we have just celebrated in our homes 
 and to which we devote our thoughts this morning 
 suggests to me an interesting analogy. I find my- 
 self thinking of our own earthly lives, and the story 
 that many a one could tell if asked in middle life 
 what had been the chief agency in making him 
 what he was. To show more clearly what is in my 
 mind, let us suppose such a man, for whom every- 
 thing has been done in childhood and youth to 
 form his character and mind, who has enjoyed the 
 best education which school or college could give, 
 who has felt the highest religious influences which 
 the Church can offer, and has been accustomed 
 from his earliest days to habits of worship and 
 prayer, yet who, if you asked him to what single 
 influence he owed most among all these varied 
 helps, should say, the personal influence, the daily 
 walk, the hourly companionship of father or mother. 
 Through all else that had come between, or had 
 
THE DIVINE HUMANITY 1 23 
 
 been superadded as the years passed on, he could 
 go back to the power over him of that one human 
 life. Such cases, as you all know, are not un- 
 common. I have not gone far for my analogy, yet 
 I find in this familiar fact the starting-point which 
 I need for my Christmas discourse. 
 
 I would liken the Christian world, in its career 
 of eighteen centuries, to this young life. Chris- 
 tendom has had much to aid it from the beginning. 
 Sacred traditions from the past gathered around 
 its cradle, holy names were breathed in its ears, 
 heavenly images were held before its eyes, solemn 
 confessions fell from its lips. Churches sprang up, 
 with splendid ceremonial, to kindle its reverence 
 and awe and feed the spirit of devotion; spiritual 
 guides appeared, claiming to keep unbroken the 
 succession of Christ and the apostles; mystic creeds 
 were elaborated, to keep alive and intensify men's 
 faith. The presence of God was assured to them, 
 and the entrance of Christ into their hearts made 
 real, by daily rites. You know the whole story 
 better than I can tell it, and you know that no such 
 gigantic or imposing ceremonial has ever been 
 devised since the world began as that which was 
 constructed to support and sustain the faith of 
 Christendom. Yet I would remind you to-day that 
 the one reality behind these stupendous forms, 
 the only fact which explains their existence or 
 which has made them possible, is an obscure human 
 life, with its purely human antecedents and conse- 
 quences, which was spent eighteen hundred years 
 
124 DISCOURSES 
 
 ago in Galilee. The Church has surrounded these 
 hours with splendid observances, — some of them 
 beautiful and grand, — and it uses many stately 
 epithets to emphasize its praise; but the one thing 
 which demands our gratitude to-day is the birth 
 into the world of a pure and holy soul. On that 
 thought and its mighty significance we cannot too 
 profoundly dwell, — the power of a human soul. 
 
 Yes, you say, the human element no doubt is 
 there; but so also are these stately forms and holy 
 traditions, with the sanctity of ages breathing 
 through them and glorifying them. Why thrust 
 them aside in honor of the bare fact of a human 
 birth, such as takes place any day or hour of the 
 Christian year? Only because all these grand ob- 
 servances followed, not preceded, that bare fact, 
 and grew palpably out of it; and to give them 
 alone our thought is to reverse the divine order and 
 deny one of the sublimest facts of history. It is 
 the human which is in danger of being thrust aside, 
 — the divineness of the human spirit which suffers 
 loss, and which we are called upon to restore to its 
 supreme place in the world's regard. Splendid 
 indeed is the religious faith, magnificent the eccle- 
 siastical structure, which has based itself on that 
 life in distant Judaea; how grand, then, beyond 
 the power of words, must have been the spiritual 
 power to call all this into being and enshrine it 
 so deeply in human affections and faith ! Pure and 
 gracious, indeed, the life, and rare the personality, 
 which could give birth in later] generations to such 
 
THE DIVINE HUMANITY 1 25 
 
 sublime ideals, which could make men dream of 
 a divine spirit descending from heaven to dwell 
 among them, which could so entrance their imagi- 
 nations that they believed God himself to have in- 
 carnated himself in human form ! Gracious, in- 
 deed, the influence which could lead them to call 
 him Lord and Master, and convince them that his 
 appearance in the world had solved forever the 
 problem of human guilt and wrong, and offered, 
 once for all, a sacrifice which made all other 
 atonement and penitence superfluous ! Marvellous, 
 in a word, the traditions and the beliefs which 
 controlled men's lives for ages; all the more 
 marvellous, then, the earthly facts and incidents, 
 so far as we can decipher them, which gave 
 those traditions birth! Honor to whom honor is 
 due. Let not the wondrous effects be mistaken 
 for the cause, or the luxuriant outgrowth hide from 
 your eyes the primitive and simple source. 
 
 But, surely, we hear it said, something more than 
 a human soul was necessary to produce such momen- 
 tous results. How explain the Church and its his- 
 toric career, how explain Christianity or Christen- 
 dom, on these purely human grounds? But how 
 explain the father's or mother's influence over the 
 son? Ask the son how or when or why this power 
 acted upon his soul, or what it was, or wherein its 
 mighty influence lay, and what will he tell you? 
 Will he say to you, How could that power have 
 been exerted on my growing nature, how could 
 those wayward passions of mine have been con- 
 
126 DISCOURSES 
 
 trolled, those fierce animal appetites and propensi- 
 ties been tamed, those pure aspirations have taken 
 the place of my grosser instincts, unless some 
 greater than human agency had intervened? In- 
 deed, no! If there is anything human, it is the 
 mother's tenderness and love, it is the father's 
 high example or strong guidance towards manli- 
 ness and truth. It is human; yet what miracles of 
 purity and integrity does it work! To deny it is 
 to deny one of the grandest and sweetest facts of 
 our earthly lives, is to defame the affection and 
 care which have encircled us all in their protect- 
 ing arms. Call it divine, if you prefer; but, then, 
 you have no further use at all for the word "human," 
 and it may as well be struck at once from our 
 vocabulary. Is not life's lesson rather, and the 
 lessons of these pure souls, to show the beauty and 
 power of human influence, to deepen our admira- 
 tion and reverence for it, and bid us look to it for 
 the holiest possibilities? Honor to whom honor 
 is due. In these earthly struggles of ours let us 
 pay unstinted homage to the human influences 
 which have played about our childhood and youth, 
 never taking visible form, perhaps, yet unutter- 
 ably helpful and real. In those early struggles of 
 Christendom, whose memories call for our gratitude 
 to-day, let us pay unstinted and unreluctant hom- 
 age to the exalted human career which gave form 
 and vitality to those fair Christian ideals. While 
 many, as they look back to those far-off days, are 
 led to argue, because such wonderful ends have been 
 
THE DIVINE HUMANITY 127 
 
 achieved, therefore human agencies could not have 
 produced them, I would rather argue, because those 
 results have been achieved by apparently human 
 agencies, therefore human agencies could produce 
 them. This is the very lesson they have to teach; 
 this is the very recognition they are claiming from 
 us. Among the many influences evidently at work 
 at the birth of Christianity, the one thing not to 
 be forgotten is the human insight, devotion, spirit- 
 uality, faith, which lay behind them all. Among 
 the many devices which the Christian Church has 
 invented to enhance the dignity of its founder and 
 glorify his memory, the one thing not to be forgot- 
 ten is the founder, the man himself. 
 
 But let us pay heed to-day, you say, to all which 
 has contributed to sanctify these hours, and lend 
 them grace and beauty. Let us not forget the sub- 
 lime ideal of the "Word made flesh" which fills 
 many souls to-day, or the poetic traditions which 
 have gathered about this hour and have given it 
 such charm to the Christian imagination. What 
 would Christmas be, after all, without the virgin 
 birth and the angel song, without the star in the east 
 or the wise men with their frankincense and myrrh, 
 without the "shepherds in the field by night" 
 and the glory of the Lord which "shone round about 
 them" ? Yes, the traditions and the poetry of the 
 hour are part of its infinite charm; but what would 
 become of it all had there not been a living soul 
 pure and holy enough to have created the poetry 
 and the traditions? Poetry is one of the sacred 
 
128 DISCOURSES 
 
 joys of life, but poetry does not spring out of 
 nothing. Imagination, grand and creative force 
 though it be. must have the material on which it 
 is to work. The imagination, in its boldest flights, 
 has never yet transcended human limits or used 
 other than earthly material. Infinitely varied the 
 combinations it can make with its simple facts or 
 the hidden meanings it can find in them, but the 
 facts must first be there. Grand, indeed, are many 
 of those old-time visions of the Christ, but grander 
 yet the man Jesus whose life could have inspired 
 them. Beautiful these Christmas traditions, more 
 beautiful still the birth around which they have so 
 lovingly entwined themselves. We miss the mean- 
 ing of the hour unless it teaches us the power of 
 a holy life to inspire poetry and create in other 
 souls lofty ideals. Far away from the realities of 
 that Galilean life should we be, did we not under- 
 stand its secret of playing age after age upon all 
 the multiform emotions, sentiments, fancies, long- 
 ings, hopes, of the souls which have turned to it 
 for guidance and inspiration. 
 
 Nor, if it has had that power, are we to discredit, 
 of course, the visions or imaginings which it has 
 produced. Many a great truth does poetry reveal to 
 the human mind. Poetry and falsehood are by no 
 means synonymous terms : rather does poetry often 
 lead us on to the hidden meaning, the spiritual 
 sense, the deeper truth, which the bare fact con- 
 ceals. In many a mediaeval creed, in many a 
 patristic hymn, on many a fourteenth or fifteenth 
 
THE DIVINE HUMANITY 1 29 
 
 century canvas, is there some great truth seeking 
 figurative or symbolic utterance. In many of these 
 Christmas traditions lies unquestionably a fine 
 thought, which finds in poetry its fittest speech. 
 As poetry they are beautiful, as carrying in them- 
 selves poetic truth they are precious ; but as sub- 
 stituting' themselves for the historic facts which 
 inspired them, still more as disowning or dis- 
 crediting those facts, they become altogether offen- 
 sive and false. Lovely is that bit of landscape 
 which hangs upon your walls. How exquisitely 
 the painter has caught the spirit of those frowning 
 skies, or those graceful meadow undulations, or 
 those stern and ragged cliffs! Only an artist 
 could have caught nature's mood as she produced 
 the sweetness or the severity of that scene; only 
 an artist would have known what features to transfer 
 to his canvas, that we, too, might enter into nat- 
 ure's finer thoughts. Yet the artist does not claim 
 to have hung upon your wall a reproduction of Nat- 
 ure herself, for that would be to vulgarize both 
 nature and art. He has given you his meditation 
 upon nature's theme, nature being forever the 
 source of his inspiration. You know nature better 
 and love her more for this poetic interpretation of 
 her meaning; but nature remains nature still, a 
 theme which no artist's thought has ever fully read 
 and no artist's imagination has ever transcended. 
 So is it with these ancient traditions which have 
 entwined themselves about the birth of Christ. 
 They are the poet's meditation upon that unique 
 
130 . DISCOURSES 
 
 theme, helping us, perhaps, to enter the better 
 into its deeper meaning or beauty, emphasizing for 
 us its rarer features, yet remaining poetry still. 
 In its poetry are its beauty and its truth. Turn it 
 into fact, and you vulgarize both the poetry and 
 the fact. It is the poet's interpretation of one of 
 humanity's sublimest hours; but humanity re- 
 mains humanity still, a theme which no poet's 
 thought has ever fully read and which no poet's 
 imagination has ever yet transcended. In that 
 hour a human soul came to life. Amplify, enrich, 
 symbolize, enhance, that fact as you will, the su- 
 preme fact still remains the birth itself. 
 
 Yet how much better, it will be claimed by 
 many, even though it were possible to reduce the 
 events of these hours to simple human incidents, 
 to call in the divine to our aid. Surely there is a 
 divine element in all human events. How much 
 better to emphasize, as all Christendom is doing, 
 the divine side of the birth of Christ than to insist 
 upon its literal, earthly character! As a mere 
 matter of association or a question of words, is it 
 not better to take such exceptional events as these 
 out of their common relations, and exhibit them 
 in their more sacred character? They are really 
 divine, if anything is divine. Why not call them 
 so, and remove them as far as possible from all 
 natural laws? Is it not better, by the same 
 reasoning, I reply, even though the parental influ- 
 ence which has made us what we are be wholly 
 human, to call it divine? Would it not give it 
 
THE DIVINE HUMANITY 131 
 
 higher significance and worth? This power of 
 father or mother over the child is really inexpli- 
 cable, is really divine, if anything is divine. Why 
 not call it so? Why not minimize in our own 
 memories of the past the personal influence of the 
 living parent, and attribute it all directly to God? 
 Why not persuade the youth to thrust aside the 
 literal thought of his mother's loving care or his 
 father's strong guidance, and recall only supernat- 
 ural strength and help? Is it not, on the contrary, 
 far better for the youth (for this question can have 
 but one answer) to appreciate to the full the 
 human foresight, devotion, and self-sacrifice amid 
 which he lives? Is there any sublimer fact in 
 heaven or on earth than this very influence of soul 
 upon soul or life upon life, — this power of affec- 
 tion, of purity, of uprightness, of gentleness, of 
 constancy, to break down the mightiest strongholds 
 of evil in the breast and win invisible victories for 
 virtue? Here is a positive and indisputable fact. 
 Do we help matters by getting as far from it as 
 possible and disguising it in vague and symbolic 
 terms, or is it better for the simple fact to be 
 stated in the simplest and most explicit words? 
 Do we help matters by trying to get away from the 
 obvious meaning of any of these human and earthly 
 truths, or these purely natural laws, by which our 
 earthly lives are encompassed? Do we gain any- 
 thing by obscuring or belittling any of God's 
 eternal facts? If the parental influence upon the 
 child is the mightiest agency (apart from its own 
 
132 DISCOURSES 
 
 intelligence and will, I mean) by which its early- 
 life is shaped, then say exactly that, and find out 
 all it means. If it be an historic fact that about 
 eighteen hundred and ninety years ago a man- 
 child came into the earth who, by virtue of 
 his purely human birth and human life, was to 
 lift many nations into a higher spiritual life and 
 thought, then say exactly that, and learn all that it 
 means. Take it at its full worth. Do not try to 
 better it by your poor devices or to substitute for 
 the homely reality some fine creation of poetry or 
 romance. Do not fear that divine providence has 
 made a mistake which it is incumbent upon you to 
 rectify, and do not fear that that providence will de- 
 termine upon any course which will not bear a clear 
 and honest statement. If this particular thing is 
 so, then it is a stupendous fact which it behooves us 
 all to weigh well and understand as best we can. 
 Human nature is entitled to the credit of all its 
 high achievements. If among its possibilities is 
 that of giving birth to so exalted a nature and be- 
 stowing upon the world a religion which, with all 
 its shortcomings, has controlled the civilization 
 of eighteen centuries, let us rejoice to recognize 
 this inspiring fact. So much nearer are we to a 
 true estimate of our common humanity, so much 
 profounder a sense have we of what that saying 
 means, — a human soul is born into the world. A 
 human soul! What a divine creation is that! 
 What infinite possibilities, it seems, lie wrapped 
 in it ! To what lofty heights of faith can it climb, 
 
THE DIVINE HUMANITY 1 33 
 
 to what generous hopes can it lend itself, to what 
 large service of its fellows can it devote its powers, 
 through how many centuries can it prolong its in- 
 fluences, to what high resolves can it enkindle the 
 human breast, what splendid visions can it catch 
 of unseen and unattained realities, what inspiring 
 utterance can it give to its holier thoughts and 
 trusts, what noble record of itself can it leave 
 upon the page of history for all generations to 
 read, and by which age after age shall be stirred! 
 Give glad welcome to these Christmas hours. I 
 am not sure that there is any church in Christen- 
 dom which has so great a right to this anniversary 
 as we. What meaning has a birthday if there was 
 no real birth? What matters it that we fix the 
 day and month and year, if all that happened then, 
 or seemed to happen, was pure illusion, and the 
 human form that was assumed was a mere cloak for 
 the divine? To us that birth was real. To us 
 that life was genuine throughout. For us, then, 
 this Christmas hour has immense significance. It 
 marks the entrance into the world of a great soul : 
 it tells of the advent of a holy and beautiful life, 
 under whose influences men's thoughts were turned 
 to higher things and men's faith in eternal realities 
 made strong. If marvellous results have flowed 
 from that life, it only proves, not that supernatural 
 agencies must have been called in, but with how 
 much mightier powers the human soul is endowed 
 than we commonly believe. It only chides us for 
 our little faith. To him who showed such un- 
 
134 DISCOURSES 
 
 faltering trust in the soul's higher faculties, and 
 who rebukes us to-day, as he rebuked his disciples 
 of old, for our feebler faith, we gladly consecrate 
 this hour. It is a joy to recall such a life. It is a 
 privilege to offer it the tribute of our gratitude. 
 
 1 891. 
 
XI. 
 AUTHORITY. 
 
 " He taught them as one having authority, and not as the 
 scribes." — Matt. vii. 29. 
 
 If there is any one thing more surprising than 
 the rapid changes going on in the religious world 
 to-day, it is the power which the ancient beliefs 
 and the ancient churches still retain over those who 
 cling to them. In the face of disproofs and against 
 the entire spirit and tendencies of modern thought, 
 the old faith still shows amazing force. In fact, it 
 is very noticeable how small a part actual argument 
 or reasoning seems to play in men's religious 
 progress. One of our living historians long ago 
 pointed out this fact, and illustrated it with great 
 eloquence and force, claiming it as a universal law. 
 "Every great change of belief," Mr. Lecky says 
 (speaking of the growth of rationalism in Europe), 
 "has been preceded by a great change in the intel- 
 lectual condition of Europe, the success of any opin- 
 ion depending much less upon the force of its ar- 
 guments or upon the ability of its advocates than 
 upon the predisposition of society to receive it, that 
 predisposition resulting from the intellectual type 
 of the age. Thus, long before the Reformation, 
 
I36 DISCOURSES 
 
 the tendencies of the Reformation were manifest. 
 Luther and Calvin only represented the prevailing 
 wants, and embodied them in a definite form. A 
 change of speculative opinions does not imply an 
 increase of the data upon which those opinions rest, 
 but a change in the habits of mind and thought 
 which they reflect. Definite arguments are the 
 symptoms and pretexts, but seldom the causes of 
 the change. Their chief merit is to accelerate the 
 crisis. As a rule, civilization makes opinions that 
 are opposed to it simply obsolete. They perish by 
 indifference, not by controversy. They are rele- 
 gated to the dim twilight land that surrounds every 
 living faith, — the land not of death, but of the 
 shadow of death, the land of the unrealized and the 
 inoperative." This seems to me a remarkably true 
 picture of what is going on about us to-day. Great 
 changes are in the air; but they are brought about, 
 not by convincing any one of the inadequacy of his 
 creed, so much as through certain general tendencies 
 of thought and methods of inquiry which, for the 
 most part, have produced their effect before the in- 
 dividual knows that anything has happened. Mean- 
 time, however, for those who do not yet feel the 
 currents of intellectual life, or who are distressed by 
 the confusion and unrest of the times, the old faiths 
 hold out strange attractions. Among the churches 
 of Christendom those which offer the most positive 
 beliefs and speak with most authoritative voice are 
 unquestionably, for the hour, the strongest. Ro- 
 manism itself, despite the enormous losses it has 
 
AUTHORITY 1 37 
 
 sustained in our generation, astonishes us from time 
 to time by a display of influence (as in Germany a 
 few years ago, and in republican France to-day) 
 which makes us wonder whether the power of priest- 
 craft will ever die out in the world. In our Prot- 
 estant churches, too, such a revival of priestly 
 influence shows itself now and then, such a renewal 
 of the priestly tone, and such a devotion to priestly 
 rites that the same question arises there. Is not 
 the priest more potent still than prophet or thinker? 
 Without questioning for a moment the final outcome 
 of modern inquiry or the final triumph of the larger 
 truth, we cannot help paying heed at times to this 
 strange phenomenon, the extraordinary mastery 
 which still inheres in priestly authority. 
 
 How shall we explain it? Very simply, I think. 
 The human soul, as a rule, does crave authority. 
 It asks to be led. Throw it back upon its own 
 judgment or its own intuitions or its own faith, and 
 it does not thank you. Promise it unfettered spirit- 
 ual or intellectual freedom, and it scorns your offer. 
 It does not wish to be cast upon its own resources 
 or to be left alone with its own thoughts. It pre- 
 fers to lean upon others rather than to stand by 
 itself. In the perplexities of moral struggle and 
 the conflict of spiritual problems there are few who 
 can trust their own judgment: there are many who 
 long for guidance and example. In the world's 
 affairs there is always room for the masterful nat- 
 ure, sure of its opinions and accustomed to lead ; 
 in religious matters, where one is naturally still 
 
I38 DISCOURSES 
 
 more distrustful of himself, where the problems are 
 so weighty, and the consequences of error seem so 
 momentous, there is still ampler room. People 
 tire of pondering over obscure themes. To many- 
 all intellectual processes are difficult and unfamiliar. 
 To almost every earnest soul the time comes per- 
 haps, when argument is so wearisome and the sense 
 of responsibility so overwhelming that the longing 
 for guidance, the desire for a strong voice or hand 
 or an imperious will, becomes irresistible. To 
 souls in such moods of self-surrender, to souls 
 fatigued by the very persistency of modern inquiry 
 or deafened by the clamor of modern debate, the 
 church which can speak with most authoritative 
 tone appeals naturally with greatest force. The 
 more despotic it is, the more welcome it is. The 
 more tyrannous its behests or oppressive its exac- 
 tions, the greater its success. No wonder, then, 
 that the Church renounces none of its pretensions 
 at the bidding of modern thought. It has nothing 
 to do with argument. It makes no account of 
 reason. It simply finds souls waiting to be led, 
 and offers to lead them. It finds the religious 
 world still craving authority, and supplies that au- 
 thority. It claims a divine sanction. It claims 
 to bring heavenly wisdom, heavenly mandates, 
 heavenly support, to fainting human hearts. So 
 we have the contrast nowadays of the most un- 
 bridled intellectual freedom and scepticism over 
 against the most devout self-effacement and piety. 
 In other lands the contrast is far more conspicuous 
 
AUTHORITY 1 39 
 
 than here. In the older countries of Europe almost 
 every community, and among certain classes almost 
 every family, is leading two lives side by side, — a 
 life of intellectual freedom, in which religious be- 
 liefs are ignored, and a life of religious and even 
 monastic devotion, in which modern thought is 
 ignored. One world for the fathers, another world 
 for the mothers and children. 
 
 And why, if human nature is so constituted and 
 if religious truth is so momentous, is not this 
 priestly religion the best? Why is it not a benefit 
 to the world that priestcraft should prevail? If the 
 soul needs spiritual authority, one would say, then, 
 the more of it, the better. And so, indeed, it might 
 be but for two considerations. First, it is to be 
 remembered that, while genuine authority helps 
 the soul's spiritual life, spurious authority does the 
 soul infinite harm. Had the Christian Church been 
 actually invested with divine functions or with in- 
 fallible knowledge, its priestly tone might have been 
 altogether beneficent; but, once that claim being 
 found to have no historic foundation, the louder its 
 pretensions, the greater the world's disappointment 
 and its growing contempt of all authority. When 
 we speak of the thousands who find in the shelter 
 of the infallible Church a glad refuge from the 
 world's troubles and doubts, we must not forget the 
 other thousands or tens of thousands who have found 
 their trust mocked, and have been driven under the 
 same influences into absolute scepticism and de- 
 spair. The priestly Church is responsible to-day 
 
140 DISCOURSES 
 
 for every soul thus forced into denial or doubt 
 through pretensions of authority which could not be 
 maintained before reason or fact; for the deceived, 
 betrayed, beguiled multitudes who, having trusted 
 supremely in what has proved false or rotten, can 
 trust no more in anything. And every church 
 to-day, liberal or non-liberal, is responsible for 
 every pretension which it makes and cannot sub- 
 stantiate, for ever}' hope which it arouses and can- 
 not answer, for every craving for rest which it has 
 encouraged only to mock and disenchant. It is 
 true, the world loves for the moment to be beguiled 
 and fooled. It seems even to court imposture. It 
 is more than ready to listen to fair promises, and 
 to believe in them again and again after the veil 
 has been rudely torn from its eyes. The ^larger 
 the promises and the more positive the tone, the 
 readier is the religious nature to yield up its faith. 
 Yet this cannot go on forever; and, when the hour 
 of disenchantment finally comes, the more unques- 
 tioning has been the trust, the more abject must 
 needs be the despondency and despair. The relig- 
 ious doubt of the day is not wholly owing to the 
 difficulty of religious problems, nor to the preva- 
 lence of philosophic or scientific habits of thought : 
 it is owing equally to broken promises and disap- 
 pointed faith. 
 
 Again, the evil done by a false assumption of au- 
 thority is not merely that it deceives those who 
 trust in it, but that it blinds them to the real 
 sources of spiritual authority. This is the second 
 
AUTHORITY I4I 
 
 point I would make. The great wrong to the world 
 which priestcraft has done and is still doing is in 
 turning men's thoughts away from the one real 
 spiritual authority, the truth itself, — an authority 
 which the world needs to feel more and more. The 
 effect upon the world of being so constantly misled 
 in its search after truth, and in having put its trust 
 in so many false guides, is to make it feel that 
 there is no authority at all, no spiritual realities, 
 no religious verities anywhere. What remains, is 
 constantly asked, when all that the world once be- 
 lieved in has been disproved? What remains, when 
 the old idea of the Scriptures, of the Church, of 
 Christ, of God himself, is so rapidly passing away? 
 Nothing remains, is the reply of the ancient Church. 
 Everything remains, is our reply, — everything that 
 was ever there. God remains, Jesus remains, the 
 Church of worshipping souls remains, the Bible 
 itself, with its wealth of spiritual beauty and relig- 
 ious aspiration and incentive to lofty thought, still 
 remains as rich and full and precious as ever. The 
 only trouble is that the world has never been taught 
 to look at these things themselves, but only at sub- 
 stitutes for them. It does not know what they are; 
 it does not know their hidden power or their su- 
 preme authority for the soul that searches them. 
 They are their own authority, and the soul that 
 trusts in them finds that it is resting indeed on an 
 eternal rock. 
 
 It may sound somewhat mystic to speak of the 
 truth as its own authority; but take special cases, 
 
142 DISCOURSES 
 
 and see how practical a fact this is. Take the 
 Scriptures, for instance. So long as the Bible was 
 regarded as an infallible word in the hands of an 
 infallible priesthood, the real meaning of the Bible 
 never dawned upon the Christian world. It was 
 considered a mass of conventional and dry precepts, 
 which it was proper to hold sacred, but to read or 
 study which, if permitted at all, was the sheerest 
 task-work. Certain texts were committed to mem- 
 ory, certain consoling words were taken fondly to 
 heart, certain imprecatory verses were hurled at 
 the worldly-minded or the undevout; but of the 
 Bible as a whole, the story it told, the poetry it 
 contained, the place it held in the world's relig- 
 ious life, no one dreamed. At last the time came 
 when, under the searching light of modern investi- 
 gation, the fiction of its infallibility was once for 
 all exploded. The claims of supernatural authority 
 so long made for it were proved absolutely unten- 
 able. Then the Bible lost its authority, you say; 
 the Bible was itself lost. On the contrary, the 
 Bible was found; its authority, its meaning for the 
 human soul, its message to the world, was dis- 
 covered. Beneath its dry, uninviting letter was 
 found a marvellous chapter of human experience. 
 The world's literature was enriched by a series of 
 chronicles, legends, poems, dramas, philosophies, 
 treatises, hymns, songs, apocalyptic visions, un- 
 guessed till then. The world's religious history 
 was enriched by a picture of spiritual development, 
 running through centuries of time, passing through 
 
AUTHORITY 143 
 
 phase after phase of spiritual experience, advancing 
 from the crudest beliefs and the grossest types of 
 idolatry to nobler conceptions of Deity and the 
 most exalted conceptions of worship. The world's 
 moral history was enriched by a picture of human 
 development, passing from the most primitive 
 notions of right to the loftiest visions of duty 
 and the sublimest ideal of self-sacrifice. Until the 
 false notion of infallibility was cast aside, and the 
 Bible was allowed to speak for itself, all this was 
 hid from the Christian world. Fiction was sub- 
 stituted for fact, the pretence for the reality, a 
 mock authority for the supreme authority of the 
 truth. Now a charm is added to those Jewish and 
 Christian centuries unknown before, a depth and 
 genuineness to the world's religious life unimag- 
 ined till now. Such is one result of removing the 
 priestly assumptions which stood between the soul 
 and God's eternal truth. 
 
 Now look at another. For many centuries not 
 only the Scriptures themselves, but all the inci- 
 dents of Jewish and Christian history, were wrapped 
 in a haze of unreality. They were withdrawn from 
 the circle of historic events and treated as an ex- 
 ceptional and preternatural passage of earthly ex- 
 perience, whose sanctity was supposed to rest, not 
 in itself, but in its peculiar heavenly credentials. 
 It was holy, not in being what it seemed, but in 
 being what it did not seem. At last the persistent 
 march of intellectual research, challenging these 
 claims to supernatural sanctity, found them base- 
 
144 DISCOURSES 
 
 less. Then, if its sacred garb was gone, Chris- 
 tianity was gone, was it not? Not at all. Chris- 
 tianity was found. Its veils and coverings, its 
 cloaks and disguises, being removed, the thing 
 itself for the first time was seen. And behold, 
 the divineness which had been thought to attach to 
 its coverings proved to belong to the thing itself. 
 The virtue of Christianity was found to lie not in 
 the halo which had surrounded it, but in the thing 
 which the halo surrounded. Not the miraculous 
 origin or divine attestation of Christianity, but 
 Christianity, was the sacred thing. Its secret lay 
 not in its being outside humanity, but in being 
 within it and part of it. Its triumphs had been 
 won, not through higher gifts added to it, but 
 through its own truth and might. It was sufficient 
 to itself. Its victories were the victories of man's 
 holier nature and higher faith : they were victories 
 of the human soul. Through its presence in the 
 world humanity had been itself enriched, and had 
 discovered its own hidden possibilities. In place 
 of the fiction had been established a fact, and the 
 fact was sublimer than the fiction. Christianity 
 as an event in human history, as showing the com- 
 manding influence of a holy soul, as revealing the 
 resistless power of purity, virtue, and faith, and 
 as showing how near man may come to God, speaks 
 with a tone of authority with which none of the 
 priestly or abnormal substitutes for Christianity 
 could compare. Truth, after all, is its own au- 
 thority. 
 
AUTHORITY I45 
 
 What hold has Christianity upon the world 
 to-day? It has not conquered the world, and is 
 not conquering it. Heathen nations are not lis- 
 tening to it, or are listening but reluctantly. Cor- 
 ruption and vice have not disappeared before it, 
 even where its power is greatest. It surely is not 
 evincing any supernatural capacity to triumph over 
 wickedness and wrong. Take intemperance, for in- 
 stance : what preternatural or magic power does the 
 Christian Church show to extinguish or diminish 
 this curse? Take war, take unchastity, take mer- 
 cantile dishonesty or political corruption. These 
 are all as flagrant iniquities as those which per- 
 vaded the Greek and Roman world when Christian- 
 ity appeared, and which it was regarded a special 
 proof of Divine Power in Christianity to have 
 overcome. The Christian Church, if it carried 
 supernatural powers in its hand (and, whatever 
 powers it possessed in the past, it possesses unques- 
 tionably to-day), could destroy them in an hour; yet 
 it does not do it. What single problem of modern 
 civilization has Christianity shown itself preternat- 
 urally endowed to meet? The gulf between rich 
 and poor yawns as threateningly as in the time of 
 the Roman Empire. Intemperance is almost as un- 
 conquerable and defiant a foe as it was twenty cen- 
 turies ago. The curse of slavery was thrown off 
 our land only after a bloody and demoralizing strug- 
 gle whose degrading results we are just beginning 
 to realize. Where is the miraculous power of 
 Christianity when these evils are to be grappled 
 
I46 DISCOURSES 
 
 with? "Miraculous power," I say; for that it has 
 power over these evils, and is gradually conquering 
 them, or helping to conquer them, through the 
 silent forces of purity and integrity, not one of us 
 would for a moment deny. This is the point I 
 would enforce, — that the hold which Christianity 
 has to-day upon the world is a natural hold, and its 
 victories over evil, when it wins them, natural vic- 
 tories. While we do not expect any miracles from 
 it, we expect it to win its way in the world, to 
 purify Christendom, and put down injustice and 
 falsehood and selfishness and vice, just according to 
 the moral vigor and righteous zeal which it shows. 
 So much and no more. Its victories will be gained, 
 not by waiting for legions of invisible spirits to 
 swoop down upon its foes, but by displaying the 
 unconquerable might of justice, purity, and truth. 
 Therein lies its entire authority to-day: therein, 
 we have no right to question (if Christianity is the 
 same yesterday, to-day, and forever), lay its entire 
 authority in the past. 
 
 I have made little use as yet of my text; yet it 
 seems to me a fitting word with which to close this 
 discourse, — " He taught them as one having author- 
 ity, and not as the scribes." The scribes repeated 
 the phrases which they had learned or the traditions 
 they had inherited; Jesus spoke out of the fulness 
 of his own deep feeling and thought. No wonder 
 "the people were astonished at his doctrines." 
 They were not accustomed to words aflame with 
 such intensity of personal faith. They were not 
 
AUTHORITY 147 
 
 used to being told, "Ye have heard it said by those 
 of old times, . . . An eye for an eye, and a tooth 
 for a tooth; but / say unto you, Resist not evil." 
 They were not used to such a glow of first-hand con- 
 viction. His words carried weight because they 
 were so fresh from the heart, and because of the 
 truth that was in them. They carry weight to-day, 
 and speak with authority, in so far as the human 
 soul finds in them the message of truth which it 
 needs. 
 
 1892. 
 
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 .:::;■ :::^:::iz it ::?. ?_z:z 7 ::::? .:- 
 
 :: : :.: ::r 1: 
 t : : : ~ : .5 5 : z - 5 i 
 
 1 : _ 7 : : ;: t ;. : 
 t.i:... 
 
 
PEACE 149 
 
 questionably establish an era of peace, yet it would 
 not be easy to show that this subject was in any 
 way prominent in the early hours of Christianity, 
 or was then considered especially important. 
 Indeed, it is doubtful if, in any remote period of 
 Christian history, this question became con- 
 spicuous. Without claiming much familiarity 
 with the literature of those first centuries, I doubt 
 if peace was ever put forward as a leading theme, 
 as though the so Is of men were yearning for its 
 advent, or their minds filled with the joyous ex- 
 pectation of it. Certainly, history did not justify 
 any such expectation, even if it were held ; nor did 
 the growth of the Christian Church by any means 
 prove synonymous with peace and good will among 
 the nations. On the contrary, with the progress of 
 the Church arose some of the bloodiest and most 
 pitiless wars which human history records. The 
 feuds, the strifes, the persecutions, the slaughters 
 of innocents, the martyrdoms for opinions' sake, 
 which attended the advance of Romanism, consti- 
 tute a gory chapter which one seldom cares to open. 
 For sixteen or seventeen hundred years Christian- 
 ity could show little claim to being the gospel 
 of peace. And how is it with the nineteenth cen- 
 tury? What protest is there among Christian 
 nations to-day against the brute methods of war- 
 fare? What reliance is shown upon the silent 
 forces of civilization or of character? If these 
 forces are held supreme, why so many wars and 
 rumors of wars, why such reckless provocations of 
 
150 DISCOURSES 
 
 the war-spirit, even in peaceful and industrious 
 republics? What victories can be heralded to-day 
 for the Prince of Peace ? 
 
 It would not be strange, though it is perhaps 
 rather an idle speculation, if the tradition of Chris- 
 tianity as a gospel of peace were found to rest 
 mainly, if not entirely, upon this very vision of 
 olden time, this beautiful Hebrew prophecy, which 
 I have quoted, and which passed in due time into a 
 triumphant strain of Christmas song. Or, perhaps, 
 it was Milton, author of so many other Christian 
 traditions, to whose splendid stanzas, more than 
 to any other source, we owe this, the fairest and 
 sweetest of all our Christian dreams : — 
 
 " No war or battle's sound was heard the world around, 
 
 But peaceful was the night wherein the Prince of Light 
 His reign of peace upon the earth began." 
 
 Still, when all is said, the ideal is there; and 
 there it insists upon remaining. This is one of 
 the dreams which the human soul (or the Christian 
 soul, if you will) has not suffered to grow dim; 
 and in its persistency, in this irresistible charm 
 it has had for the minds of men, lies a mightier 
 argument for the coming reign of peace, and for 
 the infinite blessings it will bestow, than any 
 words could offer. Side by side with the actual 
 Christianity is this ideal or possible Christianity, 
 forever challenging us by its supreme beauty, for- 
 ever shaming us by its silent irony. When is 
 
PEACE 151 
 
 that promised hour to come? it forces us to ask; 
 when are so-called Christian nations to cease their 
 jealousies, their bravadoes, their insolent taunts, 
 and show the first shadow of reliance upon the 
 reconciling forces of reason, justice, and amity? 
 For my own part, it seems to me that one ele- 
 ment in this difficult problem is becoming more 
 and more plain, and is sufficient justification for 
 bringing forward this old and time-worn theme 
 anew. I have a feeling that the question of peace 
 has been kept hitherto too exclusively in the 
 region of pure sentiment, that it has been handled 
 too much as an abstract problem, a theme for 
 pulpits and peace societies rather than for the 
 every-day life of men. When we have loudly pro- 
 claimed Christianity a religion of peace, when we 
 have inveighed against wars, and especially against 
 standing armies, when we have held international 
 peace congresses, and petitioned legislatures or 
 parliaments in behalf of international arbitration, 
 we persuade ourselves complacently that our duty 
 is done, even though all the time the incentives to 
 war, the provocations to war, the creation of the 
 conditions of war, go on quite as actively as before. 
 We talk of arbitration: we act as though arbitra- 
 tion had never been heard of. We call for peace- 
 ful settlements of our flimsy quarrels in one breath : 
 we appeal to the lowest and most brutal popular 
 instincts in the next. Peace is an abstraction, an 
 irridescent dream, a splendid strain of Christmas 
 music, in no sense a real and present obligation. 
 
152 DISCOURSES 
 
 This view of peace as a purely sentimental no- 
 tion was first called to my notice at the time of 
 our Civil War. Up to that hour the sentimental 
 considerations in favor of peace and the abstract 
 arguments in its behalf prevailed throughout our 
 New England communities without a question or 
 the shadow of a doubt. War was wicked: that 
 was the beginning and end of the matter. War 
 was an impossible contingency in this Western 
 land, no more to be thought of or provided for than 
 another geological upheaval of the American con- 
 tinent. But one bright April morning we found 
 ourselves faced with the question of preserving our 
 national integrity, faced with the opportunity of 
 crushing out with a mighty blow the curse of 
 slavery; and, behold! in a second all the familiar 
 pleas for peace vanished into thin air. No single 
 trace of them was to be found. Ministers who had 
 preached peace from the hour of their ordination, 
 Quakers who had allowed no such word as war in 
 their vocabulary, poets who had sung sweet praises 
 of forgiveness and brotherly love till poetry seemed 
 to know no other melody, all united without demur 
 in summoning the nation to arms. Forthwith all 
 the old arguments for peace, if brought forward or 
 remembered at all, began to sound tame and das- 
 tardly. They seemed like pleas for safety, or 
 wailings over suffering or death, while the country 
 had discovered something sublimer than bodily 
 safety, something more to be dreaded than death. 
 In this tremendous reaction and in the new epoch 
 
PEACE I : 3 
 
 thus introduced, the thought of peace seemed 
 driven once for all into the background. Having 
 rested on wholly sentimental considerations, it 
 found no basis for itself under the stern logic of 
 facts. Peace had been discredited as an impostor: 
 it must be dismissed thenceforth as an unattainable 
 ideal. 
 
 Turn now to our own times. I will not say that 
 the nation has given itself over, since the Union 
 armies were lisbanded, to warlike impulses. On 
 the contrary, the outward signs of strife passri 
 from sight with unexampled rapidity; and those 
 who had had most to do with the conflict were 
 foremost in denouncing the horrors of war and 
 hailing the return of peace. But, " ith all this 
 apparent fervor, is not the question still kept in 
 the region of sentiment rather than of homely and 
 every-day reality? Does it not consist of vocifera- 
 tion and protest rather than of action? Does it 
 not consist in summoning our neighbors tc rive 
 up their mighty armies rather than in refraining 
 from dee:" 5 :: - words of provocation; in calling upon 
 others to be peaceful rather than in trying to be so 
 ourselves ? 
 
 To bring this matter home, ask yourselves, for 
 a moment, what has chiefly endangered the p e 
 of the world during the last six months? I 
 "the peace ;: the world"; for :: disturb the rela- 
 tions of any twc States in these iays is to imp< 
 the relations :: the whole. What has endangered 
 the peace of the world during the last six mo:;: 
 
154 DISCOURSES 
 
 Not the standing armies of Europe, enormous 
 though they are; not the dynastic jealousies of 
 European States, not the personal ambition of 
 European monarchs, not the desire for new territory 
 or the thirst for national aggrandizement on the 
 part of European empires. It has been the attitude 
 of a certain North American republic in provoking 
 and keeping alive petty quarrels, in nursing insig- 
 nificant disputes, in fanning the flames of national 
 hostility and pride, in fomenting diplomatic dis- 
 trusts, in sacrificing to home and party interests the 
 friendship, first of a petty South American State, 
 whose grievances the faintest instinct of magna- 
 nimity would have forgiven and forgotten in an 
 hour, then of one of the oldest of European nations, 
 to whom it was bound by every tie of common in- 
 terest and inherited regard. Peace among nations, 
 as among individuals, means not frothy and high- 
 sounding declarations of good purpose : it means 
 gentleness and kindliness of demeanor; it means 
 generous judgments, mutual courtesy, absence of 
 needless innuendo or affront, refraining from the 
 unspoken aggravation or insult which cuts deeper 
 than any overt act of hostility. Peace among 
 nations, as among individuals, is always imper- 
 illed where bluster and bravado are substituted 
 for dignity and good manners. While these 
 matters are fresh, and the dangers of war (no 
 thanks to us) are for the time blown over, it is 
 well for us to see how very real and practical the 
 obligations of peace are; nor is there any reason to 
 
PEACE 155 
 
 refrain from alluding to the matter on party grounds, 
 inasmuch as each party unfortunately shows itself 
 actuated by the same impulses when the danger of 
 war arises, and feels itself bound to follow servilely 
 the same partisan policy. It is well for us to con- 
 sider that the kind of thing which we have been 
 witnessing with such profound mortification in 
 these recent negotiations is likely to take place 
 whenever our own government comes into conflict 
 with others, or any great problems of international 
 interest come before us for solution. The claims 
 of judicial fairness, the requirements of interna- 
 tional courtesy, the rules of diplomatic etiquette, 
 the obligations of good breeding, the name we are 
 to win among the nations of the earth, are all to 
 be forgotten under the imperious necessity of 
 pandering to popular prejudices and winning party 
 votes. How far can this be carried? it is interest- 
 ing to ask. How long will the world suffer the 
 presence of any single State, however powerful, 
 which deliberately subordinates all questions of 
 general concern to the exigencies of domestic 
 policy? And what destructive instrument could 
 civilization possibly invent more dangerous to the 
 world's peace than this very disposition on the part 
 of any one nation to make capital for itself out of 
 all public questions? What is the peace of the 
 world worth in the presence of these ignoble ne- 
 cessities? 
 
 Evidently, peace is no mere matter of sentiment, 
 to be disposed of in a few splendid generalities. 
 
156 DISCOURSES 
 
 To picture to ourselves the dove soaring over all 
 lands, and enchanting men's souls by its gentle- 
 ness and beauty, to talk of the lion lying down 
 with the lamb, or sing of the time when "they 
 shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their 
 spears into pruning-hooks, when nation shall no 
 longer lift up sword against nation, neither shall 
 they learn war any more," — to hold up these high 
 ideals, which we know human nature cannot possi- 
 bly attain, is not all that is required of us. What 
 we need is ideals which human nature can attain. 
 What we need is the actual avoidance of those 
 things which make for war. This trifling with a 
 great principle, this cool indifference to all other 
 consequences, so long as our private interests are 
 served, this airy balancing upon the brink of war, as 
 though war was a very trivial affair, and as though 
 the crushing out of a weaker people or the mutual 
 crippling of two powerful ones were quite the 
 proper way of disposing of a paltry grievance, 
 ought to be stamped as the gross offence which it 
 is. What is the use of our Christian principles, 
 what is the meaning of our boasted Christian civil- 
 ization, if a chance affront from a sister province, 
 rent by internal feuds and struggling apparently 
 for greater liberty, or if the protection of a lucra- 
 tive industry, can only be settled by angry words, 
 and the hasty fitting out of havoc-spreading navies? 
 If the danger was purely fictitious, then the situa- 
 tion was ludicrous ; if it was real, then it was an 
 iniquitous playing with bloody instruments, which 
 
PEACE 157 
 
 should be used only as the last dread resort. 
 What is the good in being strong, if it does not 
 enable us to be forbearing or magnanimous toward 
 the weak? What good in a giant's strength, if we 
 must needs use it with the tyranny and malignity 
 of a giant ? If war is a bad thing, then this brag- 
 gart policy, which may at any moment end in war, 
 is a flagrant wrong to humanity. And war is a 
 bad thing. War is one of the direst calamities to 
 which civilization can be subjected. Even we 
 who know so little of its woes, and to whom when 
 it came, a generation ago, it came to arouse certain 
 noble sentiments which had long been sleeping, 
 and to stir us to the service of a holy cause, are 
 feeling more and more its corrupting and insidious 
 effects. Even to us it has bequeathed a mourn- 
 ful legacy of extravagance and crime. Its horrors 
 cannot be exaggerated. It has no place in modern 
 civilization. It should be held by all intelligent 
 or right-minded nations as the last resort, to be 
 appealed to only when other arguments and recon- 
 ciliations are exhausted, not as an easy mode of 
 vengeance, to be vented upon the slightest oppor- 
 tunity. 
 
 Peace, then, means something. It means some- 
 thing more than fine sentiment or sonorous gen- 
 eralities. It means the readiness to abide by the 
 decisions of reason and common sense, instead of 
 brute force. It means a disposition to avoid 
 unnecessary causes of hostility. It means mutual 
 courtesy. It means firm insistence upon one's 
 
158 DISCOURSES 
 
 own rights, but the recognition at the same time 
 of others' rights, and straightforward readiness to 
 respect them. Ten times more effective in the 
 cause of peace than all the courts of arbitration 
 which we can ever call together would be the spec- 
 tacle of a great nation refusing, in its consciousness 
 of strength, to be irritated by petty grievances, 
 turning a deaf ear to the howlings of popular 
 prejudice, and asking at the hand of sister nations, 
 not sharp advantages, but only justice and right. 
 Without this disposition, arbitration is neutralized 
 and made ridiculous and inoperative at the start. 
 With it, it becomes the virtual rooting out of 
 war. 
 
 I would not seem to argue that for a nation 
 like ours there can be no justifiable cause of war, 
 or that we should announce to the world that we 
 shall never resort to that extremity. This would 
 be falling into the very error against which I 
 have been discoursing. It is these impracticable 
 demands in behalf of peace, these fantastic claims 
 upon human nature, this making of peace a vi- 
 sionary and sentimental conception rather than a 
 practical and attainable affair, that I have been 
 denouncing. The question for us to-day is not 
 whether we will engage in a Quixotic campaign 
 against war in the abstract, or in behalf of an im- 
 possibly amiable and forgiving public policy; it is 
 whether we, as a nation, will refrain from certain 
 very needlessly offensive and aggressive acts, and 
 do certain very obviously temperate and considerate 
 
PEACE 
 
 159 
 
 ones. When the hour for real resistance comes, 
 the blow for justice or truth will be none the less 
 effectively struck because we have suffered no slight 
 cause to disturb us, and none but the grossest 
 offence to awaken our wrath. In point of fact, 
 there is no great nation in existence to-day which 
 has fewer temptations to war or less right to talk 
 about it or think of it than we. Our neighbors on 
 this continent are not strong enough to give us a 
 moment's anxiety; the nations across the seas are 
 too far away, and too much engrossed in their own 
 concerns to willingly disturb us. There is no 
 reason why this nation should not be the perpetual 
 home of peace, and thereby further the cause of 
 peace among all the nations of the earth, — a nobler 
 function, certainly, than that of browbeating our 
 neighbors and becoming the mischief-maker of a 
 continent. The peace of the world is advanced 
 whenever any single nation follows scrupulously 
 the arts of peace, and proves it possible to save 
 itself all the burdens and the demoralizations of 
 war. It is not "beating our swords into plough- 
 shares and our spears into pruning-hooks " that is 
 asked of us ; it is merely keeping out of quarrels, 
 and trusting to justice and generosity rather than 
 to craft for securing our rights. 
 
 Is this asking too much? If it is, then we may 
 well dismiss those old-time prophecies and fine- 
 sounding phrases as romantic illusions. If it is 
 not, then it is time, indeed, that some one nation 
 of modern times initiated the reform ; and, if any, 
 
l60 DISCOURSES 
 
 why not we ? What less can the world demand of 
 us in our safe seclusion beyond the seas? 
 
 Let us by all means be true to this claim. Let 
 it not be our fault if the prediction of the old 
 Jewish prophet fail longer of its fulfilment, or if 
 Christianity be not at last faithful to its promise, 
 and bring about "peace on earth, good will toward 
 men." 
 
 1892. 
 
XIII. 
 THE DREAM AND THE REALITY. 
 
 AN EASTER SERMON. 
 
 " Why seek ye the living among the dead ? He is not here, but is 
 risen." — Luke xxiv. 5, 6. 
 
 One of the most interesting results of recent 
 Bible study is in bringing the incidents of this 
 momentous period of early Christian history into 
 their true relation and perspective. What was 
 before a somewhat confused mass of impressions 
 and traditions is made now, simply by a proper 
 chronological arrangement, to show the successive 
 stages by which the belief of the early Church in 
 the Resurrection was formed. 
 
 The witnesses of those hours are, as you know, 
 first Paul, whose writings are by far the oldest 
 which remain, and reflect therefore the earliest 
 beliefs; then the four Gospels, which reflect the 
 ideas and traditions of a generation or two later. 
 Let us follow the accounts, then, in this order. 
 
 Paul's belief in the resurrection of Jesus was of 
 the most positive kind, and underlies the whole 
 structure of his Christian faith. "If Christ be not 
 risen," he declares, "then is our preaching vain, 
 
l62 DISCOURSES 
 
 and your faith is also vain." And the evidence on 
 which this belief rests, he tells us, too, without 
 reserve. "Christ was seen," he says, "of Cephas, 
 then of the twelve : after that of above five hundred 
 brethren at once; . . . after that he was seen of 
 James; then of all the apostles. And last of all 
 he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due 
 time." That Paul himself actually saw the risen 
 Jesus face to face no one understands him here to 
 say, as there is no reason to suppose that he was in 
 Jerusalem or Galilee at that time, or was acquainted 
 with the new gospel and its disciples till some 
 time afterward. If this is so, then he must refer 
 here, of course, not to the bodily sight of Jesus, but 
 to some visionary appearance of the Lord long after 
 the crucifixion; as he says, "as to one born out of 
 due time." The common opinion is, I think, that 
 Paul has in mind here his vision at Damascus, 
 where, according to the narrative in Acts, "there 
 suddenly shined round about him a light from 
 heaven; and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice 
 saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou 
 me? I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." Either 
 this or some similar visionary appearance it must 
 have been on which Paul bases his belief in the 
 risen Lord. And whatever was true of his own 
 experience must have been true, also, of those of the 
 other witnesses whom he cites; as the words which 
 he uses to describe them are exactly the same, and 
 because, if the evidence in those cases were of a 
 more material or tangible kind than in his own, he 
 
THE DREAM AND THE REALITY 1 63 
 
 would naturally have brought it forward to con- 
 vince the Corinthians, whose doubts he was en- 
 deavoring in this passage to overcome. If asked 
 how the mere appearance of Jesus in a vision could 
 have impressed Paul so profoundly and convinced 
 him that Christ had risen from the dead, we must 
 remember that Paul attached the utmost importance 
 to these abnormal experiences, and refers to them 
 more than once as the sources of his highest revela- 
 tions. "I will come to visions and revelations of 
 the Lord," he says to the Corinthians on another 
 occasion. "I knew a man in Christ above fourteen 
 years ago (whether in the body or out of the body 
 I cannot tell: God knoweth); such an one caught 
 up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man 
 (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot 
 tell : God knoweth); how that he was caught up into 
 paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is 
 not lawful for a man to utter." Evidently, these 
 trances, coming in hours of nervous excitement or 
 great spiritual exaltation, were to him, living as he 
 did in days when all nervous phenomena were 
 counted demonic, and all visions tokens of divine 
 visitation, more convincing than any words from 
 human lips could possibly be. It was through 
 them, indeed, that he gained, as he said, his whole 
 knowledge of the gospel, disclaiming any instruc- 
 tion on this point from the older disciples, and 
 refusing, with much spirit, to acknowledge any 
 superiority on their part because they had "seen 
 the Lord," and he had not. "I certify to you, 
 
164 DISCOURSES 
 
 brethren," he says to the Galatians, "that the gos- 
 pel which was preached of me is not after man. 
 For I neither received it of man, neither was I 
 taught it, but by revelation of Jesus Christ." We 
 must remember, too, that the idea of death then 
 prevailing among the Jews was wholly different 
 from ours, and that all who were laid to rest in the 
 grave were supposed to remain in the lower regions 
 till summoned to appear before the Lord for judg- 
 ment. From the grave no one could appear on 
 earth. For Jesus, therefore, to appear, in vision- 
 ary form, as a spiritual apparition, was proof that 
 he had escaped the grave. He had suffered no 
 death at all, but was already in heavenly regions, 
 at the right hand of God, waiting to reappear and 
 establish his kingdom, and disclosing himself to 
 his chosen ones from time to time to arouse or 
 strengthen their faith. Singular as this idea 
 seems to us, and irreconcilable as it is with our 
 more modern conceptions of the universe and of 
 heaven, we can see what mighty hold it had upon 
 Paul, and also to what a purely spiritual appear- 
 ance of the risen Jesus, objectively real to him 
 who saw it, but in no sense bodily existent, it 
 points. So far as we can judge, this was the only 
 idea which those who lived in the first generation 
 after Jesus' death could have attached to the term 
 "resurrection." 
 
 But months and years passed on; the eager hopes 
 and confident expectations of the Messiah's reap- 
 pearance were slowly and reluctantly surrendered, 
 
THE DREAM AND THE REALITY 1 65 
 
 and the desire arose to collect and preserve the 
 records of that earthly career which they had sup- 
 posed till then was to be merely the brief anticipa- 
 tion of a more splendid and enduring reign. 
 Among the records thus collected, the accounts 
 of the death and resurrection of Jesus assumed a 
 wholly different form from that which we have 
 found in the Epistles of Paul. Instead of that 
 vision of the Lord, we hear now of a bodily reap- 
 pearance and of strange physical phenomena, which 
 grow in significance and in detail as we pass from 
 the original Mark to the later Gospels. We read 
 of an angel descending from heaven and rolling 
 back the stone from the sepulchre; we read of the 
 disciples hastening to the place to find the grave 
 deserted; we read of the appearance of the risen 
 Lord among his disciples, and of his walking with 
 them by the way, and "expounding to them the 
 Scriptures;" we read of his coming among his 
 disciples, and saying, "Behold my hands and feet, 
 that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit 
 hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have;" we 
 read of his bidding Thomas thrust his hand into 
 his side, into the "print of the nails," and of his 
 eating with them "a piece of broiled fish, and of 
 an honeycomb." 
 
 I bring these incidents before you now, you will 
 understand, not merely to discuss their historical 
 accuracy, but also as revealing an exceedingly inter- 
 esting chapter of the spiritual life of that time, as 
 well as of the growth of beliefs, which would 
 
1 66 DISCOURSES 
 
 otherwise be quite hidden. That Jesus could not 
 really have died was a matter of course to the early 
 disciples, else he could not have been the Messiah 
 they had supposed him. But the proofs of this 
 fact are, as we have seen, at first purely spiritual. 
 They see him in their dreams; they hear his voice 
 in moments of high religious excitement; they are 
 crushed to the earth by his stern rebuke, as he bids 
 them cease persecuting him, and shows them how 
 hard it is "to kick against the pricks." Whole 
 multitudes are infected with the excitement, and 
 as on the day of Pentecost "hear a sound from 
 heaven as of a rushing wind, which filled the house 
 where they were sitting. And there appeared unto 
 them cloven tongues, like as of fire," palpable 
 tokens to them all that he on whom their thoughts 
 were set had been present in the midst of them. 
 As time passed on, this belief grew in intensity 
 and in circumstance. The vague visionary appear- 
 ance took on a more material and literal form; 
 evidence was gathered on every hand of bodily 
 manifestations to one and another and another; the 
 one day of his stay upon earth, as at first recorded, 
 was extended by degrees to forty, and finally to the 
 other incidents of this stay was added that, "while 
 they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received 
 him out of their sight." So completely had this 
 thought possessed them, so manifold were the sup- 
 posed proofs which it could finally marshal in its 
 behalf, so absolutely filled and controlled were 
 these first generations of Christians with the belief 
 in their risen Lord. 
 
THE DREAM AND THE REALITY l6j 
 
 And, as in all such phenomena, the interesting 
 thing to us is not so much the special form of the 
 belief as the belief itself. What a hold must Jesus 
 have gained upon his followers, how must the force 
 of his personality have impressed them, how must 
 the moral and spiritual quality of his life have 
 asserted itself, to have surmounted thus the igno- 
 miny of his crucifixion and the tremendous revulsion 
 in all their expectations and ideas caused by his 
 death! Place yourselves for a moment among the 
 scattered disciples, as they come together after the 
 horrors of the crucifixion, which they had not ven- 
 tured to witness; remember how confidently they 
 had just before been beseeching him to give them 
 seats "at the right hand and the left in his king- 
 dom " ; think what to them, therefore, the crucifix- 
 ion must have meant; realize, if you can, their 
 emotions as he, to whom they had given their entire 
 confidence and whom they had followed implicitly 
 month after month, had thus shattered all their 
 trusts in an hour; consider what a hopeless future 
 lay before his disciples; consider, in a word, all 
 that is implied in the pathetic words which came 
 from two of the disciples on the day after the cruci- 
 fixion, — "We trusted that it had been he who 
 should have redeemed Israel," — and you will un- 
 derstand the mighty crisis of that hour. You will 
 see what their love for him and their faith in him 
 must have been to have led them, although he had 
 apparently died, to believe that he was still alive, 
 and would somehow come again to carry on his 
 
168 DISCOURSES 
 
 interrupted work. Fortunately for the world, their 
 faith prevailed, defeat was turned into victory, and 
 life triumphed over death. Jesus lived on in the 
 truths he had spoken and the deeds he had done, 
 though in so different a way than they had thought. 
 And this is the second point which our subject 
 suggests, — in how much higher a way than they 
 imagined, or could possibly understand, the hopes 
 of that hour were fulfilled. It has been often said 
 of certain modern inventions, especially the uses 
 of steam for locomotion, that, if the expectation of 
 the inventors had been simply answered, the result 
 would have been little better than a failure. It is 
 only because the triumphs of steam have so infi- 
 nitely transcended all possible prophecies of their 
 originators, the opportunities of travel having so 
 vastly increased the habit of travel, that the world 
 has been so vastly the gainer. It is something of 
 the same kind that occurs to one as he recalls the 
 pathetic faith and trusts of those early Christian 
 hours. Had those expectations, and nothing more, 
 been fulfilled, where would have been the world's 
 religious faith to-day? Had the resurrection 
 proved to mean simply, as was then thought, the 
 escape of the Messiah from the grave to establish 
 his kingdom on earth; if the heavenly kingdom 
 meant, as the Book of Revelation represents it, 
 simply a thousand years' triumph of the true be- 
 lievers over their foes, while "whosoever was not 
 found written in the book of life was cast into the 
 lake of fire"; if immortality meant simply, as 
 
THE DREAM AND THE REALITY 169 
 
 Paul's Epistles intimate, that "they that are 
 Christ's " should pass unharmed through the grave, 
 and put on an incorruptible body, — our rejoicings 
 to-day would certainly be very different from what 
 they are. It is because those expectations have 
 been so much more than fulfilled, it is because 
 those dreams have been so much more than real- 
 ized, it is because the words "life," "eternity," 
 "heaven," "immortality," bear to our minds so 
 much richer a meaning than could then be possibly 
 conceived, that these Easter hours strike for us 
 a note of such lofty triumph. Those faiths are 
 grand, not in what they then promised, but in what 
 they have since become. Compare the Jesus rising 
 from the sepulchre to seat himself upon a throne, 
 the utmost limit of whose sway was to be a petty 
 thousand years, with the actual Jesus, who has 
 entered into the hearts of countless generations, 
 and who has identified his name with the civiliza- 
 tion of eighteen centuries; compare the life of 
 those distant days with the life of to-day, so com- 
 plex in its aims, so manifold in its opportunities, 
 so vast in its sympathies, its aspirations, and its 
 hopes; compare the universe of Jewish thought, 
 "the heavens and earth kept reserved unto fire 
 against the day of judgment and perdition of un- 
 godly men," reserved unto the day of the Lord, 
 which was to "come as a thief in the night; in the 
 which the heavens shall pass away with a great 
 noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent 
 heat, the earth also and the works that are therein 
 
170 DISCOURSES 
 
 shall be burned up," with the universe which sci- 
 ence has revealed to us to-day; compare the "new 
 heaven and the new earth " of the apocalyptic 
 dream, "the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming 
 down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride 
 adorned for her husband," the city which "lieth 
 four square, whose length was as great as its 
 breadth," and which "measured with the reed 
 twelve thousand furlongs," with the dreams of 
 heaven which fill the souls of earnest men or 
 women to-day, — and it will be clear that our cause 
 of rejoicing now is, not that the beliefs of those 
 early days proved literally true, but rather that 
 they have led on to truths incomparably greater, in 
 which the original faith has been submerged and 
 has disappeared. 
 
 Christianity, too, — one cannot but think what 
 a slight affair that would have been, had it simply 
 accomplished the purposes or fulfilled the career 
 which those first disciples had marked out for it. 
 What conception could they possibly have formed 
 of the regions it was to conquer, the centuries it 
 was to survive, the new thoughts it was to arouse, 
 the doctrines it was to develop, the imaginations 
 it was to stir, the sects it was to create, the start- 
 ling truths it was to promulgate, the arts and phi- 
 losophies and sciences and philanthropies it was to 
 bestow upon the world? Christianity is what it is 
 to-day, not because it has answered the dreams of 
 its founders, but because it has so infinitely tran- 
 scended them, because it had moral forces at its 
 
THE DREAM AND THE REALITY 171 
 
 command of which they did not dream, because it 
 carried in its bosom unspoken truths which only 
 the world's growing spiritual needs could bring to 
 utterance. It is pathetic, when we think of the 
 message which Christianity has to deliver to the 
 world, to read the addresses with which the first 
 Christian preachers commended their faith or the 
 claims which they made in its behalf. How little 
 Peter and James and John and Paul, if we are to 
 judge from their discourses in the Book of Acts, 
 could have guessed of the truth committed to their 
 hands, or of the consequences which were to flow 
 from that gentle and holy life! Not so much that 
 their vision was at fault as that the divine achieve- 
 ment always so far outruns the human expectation. 
 Is not the same thing eminently true of immor- 
 tality itself, which is sometimes made to rest so 
 exclusively upon the events and beliefs of those 
 far-off days? Is it because those things have 
 proved true, or because things of infinitely higher 
 moment have since proved true, that we trust 
 to-day in immortality? Give us simply the facts 
 and beliefs of that first generation, and where 
 should we be? Since those hours Christ has 
 gained many mightier victories over death than 
 any then recorded, the stones have been rolled 
 from many another sepulchre of ignorance and 
 despair, the spiritual forces of humanity have won 
 many a notable triumph unheard of then; and it is 
 on these added proofs of the soul's power, these 
 tokens of an immortal quality in Christianity, in 
 
172 . DISCOURSES 
 
 truth, in human goodness and heroism and faith, 
 that the real hope of immortality now rests. Noth- 
 ing could express better this contrast of which I 
 speak than the comparison between the words in 
 vogue for the same thought then and now. Their 
 word was "resurrection": ours is "immortality." 
 Half a dozen times, perhaps, in the Epistles, do 
 we find the term "immortality"; elsewhere, 
 through Epistles and Gospels alike, we hear 
 only of the "resurrection." Their thoughts dwelt 
 mainly on the mere rising from the grave, and the 
 ''body with which they came," ours upon the 
 larger life upon which the soul enters; theirs 
 upon a future state which had its epochs and its 
 limits, ours upon a life which is to be eternal ; 
 theirs upon a single, sublime instance of victory 
 over death, ours upon certain essential qualities of 
 soul too pure or fine for death to reach. It is not 
 too much to say that all which makes the thought 
 of immortality precious to us to-day, or the assur- 
 ance of it strong, has come through the deepening 
 spiritual consciousness of these later Christian 
 centuries. 
 
 And, if this has been true in the past, why may 
 it not be true in the future as well, and our fairest 
 dreams of immortality to-day prove but a faint 
 prophecy of the divine reality? The many years 
 which have gone by since those Scripture narra- 
 tives were written have brought no positive cer- 
 tainty with them. The questions which were 
 asked then are asked still, and a thousand others 
 
THE DREAM AND THE REALITY 1 73 
 
 which no one thought then of are waiting yet for 
 their answer. The doubts which perplexed the 
 Corinthians in Paul's time perplex many souls 
 to-day, and many a doubt more searching and dar- 
 ing and agonizing than had ever beset the Corinth- 
 ian or Athenian mind. Each generation, while it 
 has a firmer hold, on the whole, upon moral cer- 
 tainties, and a deeper faith in spiritual realities, 
 yet peers into the future with the same hopeless 
 and baffled gaze. What is to be said, then, to 
 these questioners, or what promise are we justified 
 in holding out, when so many promises have been 
 mocked? This, at least the best message which 
 these hours bring, and the best, after all, that they 
 could possibly bring, — that, if the future life is 
 not exactly what we dream, it is only because it is 
 to be something nobler and better; that, if our 
 dreams are not to be fulfilled, it is only because 
 the reality so far outstrips our utmost thought. If 
 the life eternal offers problems which our wisdom 
 cannot solve, it is because "eye hath not seen, nor 
 ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of 
 man, the things which God hath prepared for them 
 that love him." 
 
 1892. 
 
XIV. 
 INHERITANCES. 
 
 " By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin : and so 
 death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." — Rom. v. 12. 
 
 This old doctrine that the sins of the fathers are 
 visited upon their children has had a long and 
 strange life. Beginning with the Jewish idea of 
 a God who "visits the iniquity of the fathers upon 
 the children unto the third and fourth generation of 
 them that hate him," it reappeared in Christian 
 theology in the doctrine of the imputation of 
 Adam's sin, which has held its place undisturbed 
 till the present day. And now, just as the world 
 seems to have outgrown at last this cruel belief, 
 and is beginning to realize that each individual is 
 responsible for his own offences alone, spring up 
 the new scientific notions of to-day, to give the 
 old belief a new lease of life. If, indeed, these 
 family types of character, as of face, persist from 
 generation to generation; if we inherit our instincts 
 and passions from a remote past; if our ancestors 
 of ages back live in us to-day, determining our 
 impulses, controlling our tastes, governing our de- 
 sires, — how much better off are we, after all, than 
 under the old Calvinistic dogmas? In this order 
 
INHERITANCES 1 75 
 
 of things, what becomes of divine justice or of per- 
 sonal responsibility? Who and what am I, if these 
 affections and propensities which I call my own are 
 simply what remains of a thousand other lives spent 
 before me, with which I had nothing to do? What 
 moral obligation can rest upon such a being as 
 that ? Or what idea can he have of God ? 
 
 If these are questions which you ever find your- 
 selves asking (as some certainly do), let me sug- 
 gest first that, taken at its worst, this modern 
 conception is somewhat better than that which it 
 superseded. There is some gain, assuredly, in 
 seeing the management of the universe transferred 
 from the hands of an arbitrary monarch, who gov- 
 erned simply for his own pleasure and glory, to the 
 keeping of natural laws, which, however rigid and 
 stern they may seem, are absolutely impartial, and 
 which we can all study and understand. As be- 
 tween the implacable Deity of an earlier faith, 
 demanding the satisfaction of his own rights at no 
 matter what cost of human suffering, and this uni- 
 verse of law in which the human race, with ages at 
 its disposal, is working out its own salvation (even 
 though this were all), it is certainly not difficult 
 to choose. 
 
 But, to view the question more fairly, we must 
 try for a moment to take in the wider field of 
 human destiny which now opens before us. Once, 
 as you know, a few thousand years were supposed to 
 cover the entire past of man's existence upon the 
 earth. The whole drama of human destiny lay be- 
 
176 DISCOURSES 
 
 tween the leaves of a single book, and almost 
 within the experiences of a single nation. The 
 question of divine justice meant God's dealings with 
 a people whom he had just called into being, as it 
 were, and whose final exit from the scene might 
 occur at any moment. Quite different from this, it 
 must be acknowledged, is the present picture of 
 man's earthly life. As he emerges upon the field of 
 history, centuries back, he is not beginning, he 
 is already midway in his career. Behind him are 
 countless ages of growth, none the less real because 
 unrecorded. The shell-heaps and gravel deposits 
 of our own continent reveal the continuous exist- 
 ence of man in North America for at least one 
 hundred and fifty thousand years, while in the 
 eastern hemisphere he is supposed to have ap- 
 peared much earlier still. We have grown quite 
 accustomed to these mighty stretches of time as 
 geological facts; but have we ever duly considered 
 their bearing upon man's moral and social develop- 
 ment? Have we considered what it means that 
 fifteen hundred centuries were needed to bring man 
 even into the barbaric condition in which the 
 world's earliest records find him? One of the 
 most striking results of modern investigation has 
 been to trace out certain successive stages of cult- 
 ure through which man must have passed before 
 becoming in any sense a civilized being. From 
 the time when he existed upon fruit and nuts up 
 to the time of his earliest and crudest written 
 records, great changes had occurred, and grand 
 
INHERITANCES 1 77 
 
 phases of development had succeeded each other. 
 Leaving behind him the epoch when fish was his 
 choicest food and the bow and arrow his mightiest 
 weapon, he had entered upon a long and brilliant 
 career, marked by the manufacture of pottery, the 
 domestication of various animals, and the smelting 
 of iron for his tools. He had ceased to be a sav- 
 age, he had become a barbarian; the period of the 
 barbarian being as far removed from that of the 
 savage as our modern epoch of steam and electric- 
 ity from the times of the crusades or of feudalism. 
 Now go back, for a moment, seventy-five thou- 
 sand or one hundred thousand years, to the time 
 when man first cooked his food in clay vessels or 
 domesticated animals for his service and collected 
 flocks or herds. What does this signify? It 
 means, of course, that he had had time to become 
 tired of his fruit and nuts, and to learn to shoot 
 game and catch fish and cook them with fire, many 
 centuries, perhaps, being required for each of these 
 upward steps toward civilization. But does it not 
 mean something morally and socially also? Does 
 it not mean the gradual acquisition of private 
 property and gradual formation of what might be 
 called family life? Does it not mean, at least, the 
 birth of those tender affections, the beginning of 
 those sacred ties, the consciousness of those pecul- 
 iar responsibilities and confidences and obligations 
 which centre in the thought of home? And does 
 not this, little though it be, signify a great deal 
 when compared with the savage existence behind 
 
I78 DISCOURSES 
 
 him? Was it not worth those untold ages of sav- 
 agery simply to have secured so much ? The race 
 had not yet entered upon its career of civilization, 
 but this beginning had been made. 
 
 Now, I am not asking vou, in this survev of 
 the past, to leave our religious themes, simply to 
 dabble in science: I am only trying to secure the 
 background against which, and only against which, 
 as it seems to me, we can understand God's deal- 
 ings with us to-day. I am only asking you to 
 remember how long it took for man to become 
 what we find him when history begins. Those 
 prehistoric centuries must be accounted for. 
 There they are. What was man doing all that 
 time? for empty centuries, vacant ages, are unsup- 
 posable. Man was learning, it seems, to make his 
 fire and cook his food, to string his bow and bake 
 his clay, to irrigate his fields and turn animals into 
 companions and slaves, to fashion his iron ore and 
 scratch his name upon the rocks. He was learning,; 
 also, — was he not? — to gather his children and 
 herds around him, to learn the primitive laws of 
 mine and thine, to feel the dawning sentiments of 
 loyalty and honor, to form some notion of Deity, 
 to catch some distant glimpses, it may be, of purity 
 and gentleness and truth. A splendid basis, after 
 all, on which after-centuries are to build! 
 
 And from this glance at the past come to my 
 mind two important reflections. First comes the 
 thought of the littleness of our historic period as 
 compared with the entire time during which man 
 
INHERITANCES 1 79 
 
 has been on earth. What are these petty two thou- 
 sand, four thousand, six thousand years of recorded 
 time, as against the thousand centuries since man 
 first became conscious of his difference from the 
 brutes, and entered upon that fashioning of mind 
 and heart and soul in which he is still so busily 
 employed to-day? How much mightier and diviner 
 a scheme is here than our fathers had ever dreamed, 
 — a scheme which needs not years, but ages, for 
 its fulfilment, a scheme which involves not the 
 establishment of a single chosen race or a single 
 chosen religion, not the achievement of your per- 
 sonal happiness or mine, or the vindication of our 
 personal rights, but nothing less than the unfolding 
 of human character, the creation of soul, the devel- 
 opment of man! 
 
 Man, I say (for this is my second thought), not 
 men, — man, an abstraction, as we commonly view 
 it, a shadow, yet here the supreme reality. What 
 possibility for any such scheme of the ages as this, 
 if there had been only one individual upon the 
 stage at once, each dying always as soon as his suc- 
 cessor was born? What possibility for these high 
 ends to be achieved save through the companion- 
 ship of man with man, and the succession of gener- 
 ation after generation; save through the mutual 
 play of affection, the mutual conflicts of rights and 
 needs, the mutual exchange of thought and emo- 
 tion, the mutual exercise of support and defence, 
 of self-assertion and surrender, of stimulus and 
 rivalry, which only a multitude affords? Plainly, 
 
180 DISCOURSES 
 
 what is needed for all these nobler ends of exist- 
 ence is not the individual alone: it is the race, — 
 many individuals, many families, many tribes, 
 many nations, many faiths. Plainly, the purpose 
 of history, the outcome of the centuries, the di- 
 vine intent of creation, can be rightly read only 
 as individual men are lost in the larger thought of 
 man. Nor does this lessen the worth of the indi- 
 vidual; for it is in individual men that the race 
 from time to time culminates, and from individual 
 lives that the masses of humanity are all the time 
 taking their inspiration and their fresh start into 
 new eras of growth. Nor does it involve the sacri- 
 fice of the individual to the race. Rather, it means 
 — and it does mean this — that the individual finds 
 himself out only in his relations with the race; 
 that he comes to his full consciousness only as part 
 of a greater whole, only as one among many breth- 
 ren. For a divine scheme, nothing less than an 
 entire race will suffice. Little are these lives of 
 ours, if we claim them for ourselves alone, if we 
 are not willing to lend them to the higher service, 
 the full completeness of the race. 
 
 We are here on earth, then, not for our own 
 sake, but for humanity's sake, not for these brief 
 lives of an hour, but for this life of ages. And 
 this life of the ages, this continuity of the race, to 
 take a step further, is possible on one condition 
 only, — that the laws of yesterday shall be the laws 
 of to-day, that cause and effect shall be bound to 
 each other through all the ages by a necessity 
 
INHERITANCES l8l 
 
 which knows no variableness, neither shadow of 
 turning. It is the fashion to decry the idea of 
 absolute and unchanging law, as if incompatible 
 with the idea of a divine government of the uni- 
 verse, and as converting men into machines. Yet 
 what higher conception of the Divine can we form, 
 after all, than lies in this very idea of a wisdom 
 and love so absolute as to need no change and 
 admit of no improvement through time or eternity, 
 or what higher thought of man than this very 
 thought of a being relying upon eternal and irre- 
 versible laws to aid him in every step of his 
 growth? How else, indeed, could humanity have 
 reached the point where it stands to-day, or could 
 those ages of prehistoric life have achieved their 
 results, or could they have any story to tell? We 
 chafe and fret against this stern necessity, and 
 resent the thought that every deed is bound to its 
 inevitable, far-reaching consequence. We cannot 
 escape this thraldom, we exclaim. We are slaves; 
 we are servants of necessity. But suppose that 
 our fathers could have escaped this thraldom, and 
 had done so; suppose that this narrower idea of 
 divine justice had prevailed, and the consequences 
 of men's acts had been set aside at every call for 
 mercy, — where, then, would be our boasted civiliza- 
 tion, our progress in goodness or purity or truth ? 
 When would our savage ancestor have learned the 
 uses of fire or of the bow or of iron, had nature's 
 laws held for to-day alone, to be broken to-morrow? 
 How could the chieftain have learned the virtue of 
 
1 82 DISCOURSES 
 
 temperance and self-control, the father the beauty 
 of tenderness and fidelity, or society the value of 
 purity and constancy and truth, had not man's 
 obedience to these laws led always to strength and 
 power, disobedience always to weakness and inward 
 decay? Where else than in this inevitable, piti- 
 less linking of cause with effect, all the world 
 over and all the ages through, could we find the 
 thread which connects this growing civilization; 
 could we find the continuity of the race, the unity 
 in all this multiplicity? 
 
 We stand here face to face with one of life's 
 sternest problems. As a rule, we feel only its 
 hardness and what we deem its injustice. All 
 around us we see the victims of others' weakness 
 or thoughtlessness or iniquity. "The fathers have 
 eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set 
 on edge." The fathers have violated the laws of 
 health, and the children are victims of disease. 
 The fathers have squandered their estate, and the 
 children are struggling with poverty and hunger. 
 The father or grandfather has indulged his appetite 
 for drink, and the son or grandson has had to fight 
 for his life against a mysterious and consuming 
 thirst. The father has become the creature of 
 violence or lust, and the child struggles wearily 
 and almost vainly for honesty or purity. You shud- 
 der at the pitilessness and inevitableness of these 
 cruel laws. But you forget that there are two 
 sides to the picture. Evil lasts from generation 
 to generation; but does not good as well? Were 
 
INHERITANCES 1 83 
 
 it not for his ancestors, this youth would not have 
 been the slave of his passions; but of what pure 
 or generous instinct, in that case, would he have 
 been the possessor? But for them evil would not 
 be so fatally easy; but would unselfish or upright 
 deeds have been even possible? What years of 
 self-control, what generations of struggle, what 
 ages of conflict and defeat and victory, lie behind 
 every fine instinct or noble aspiration of his heart? 
 Is it the ancestor in him that makes vice and gross- 
 ness so attractive to him? But what is it that 
 opens his soul to beauty, and makes him so sensi- 
 tive to nature or to art? From what centuries of 
 culture, what generations of training for eye or ear, 
 what lifetimes of loving servitude to beauty, is he 
 drawing, when he stands rapt before the artist's 
 handiwork, or as a strain of music thrills him to 
 the soul? His ancestor lives in him? Yes, fort- 
 unately for him. Else little enough of manhood 
 were there, little enough of love of beauty or 
 truth, little enough of the spiritual momentum by 
 which alone wrong and evil can be swept away, 
 little enough of the accumulating force of virtue 
 before which sin hides itself and disappears. 
 Would you have the good, and escape all the evil? 
 claim all the blessings of this law, and elude all its 
 hardships? Could you, if you would? Are they 
 not one and the same? Are they not the working 
 out of the same eternal law? Are they not marks 
 of the same divine justice, — a justice somewhat 
 larger and more just than your little dream, a jus- 
 
1 84 DISCOURSES 
 
 tice which is displaying itself on a larger stage, 
 a justice which needs not to be balanced by mercy, 
 but which is itself mercy? What, to our thought, 
 are two, in this diviner scheme become one. 
 
 But what is left of the individual, after all, in 
 this grand process of the ages? What becomes of 
 you or me ? What remains of our personality, still 
 more of our moral responsibility? Are we anything 
 but atoms in this immensity, with no duty but to 
 recognize ourselves as part of a greater whole? 
 
 Well, let us see. Has it been so in the past? 
 Was Paul, who wrote the words which I am 
 using, a mere atom? or Plato? or Alexander? or 
 Luther? or Newton? Does not the world feel 
 their lives to-day in its every fibre? Have you 
 known a single earnest soul, in these times or 
 in the past, of which this was not in a measure 
 true ? What sources of courage and inspiration do 
 single lives become! what reservoirs of power, 
 what leaders of the race into larger activities! 
 The divine scheme works itself out through human 
 actors. The first man to draw a bow, to build a 
 hut, to sail the ocean, to sing his song, — to what 
 grand results did he open the way! And, as for 
 great souls, so for small. No deed without its 
 result, no thought or act, no struggle or endeavor, 
 without its effect. You cannot get away from 
 that; and in that lies the moral of the whole. The 
 only trouble is that the order of things is larger 
 than you think. You work out your little scheme 
 of justice, of which your personal life is the centre, 
 
INHERITANCES 1 85 
 
 and your threescore years and ten the entire period; 
 and, only when it is caught up into a mightier plan, 
 with more comprehensive laws and remoter conse- 
 quences, does it appear in its true proportions. The 
 danger is not that you will think too much of your 
 personal responsibility, but that you will think too 
 little, that you will not realize the train of conse- 
 quences which each act or word will set in motion, 
 or the varied influences which every life must 
 exert upon those about it. We think of these in- 
 exorable laws as holding us in their grasp rather 
 than as the means whereby we may act upon others. 
 In point of fact, they help us at every turn. This 
 thraldom which binds us to the consequences of 
 our fathers' deeds is the very thing which enables 
 us to make other lives brighter or happier or better. 
 It sends our little effort forth on errands of wide 
 beneficence. It takes the generous thought or 
 friendly word which otherwise would die in its own 
 performance, and makes it a living messenger of 
 love and good will. As members of the race, as 
 enchained by these necessities of mutual influence, 
 we cannot live for ourselves alone if we would. 
 By the powers which inhere in every earnest per- 
 sonality, and by the mysterious laws of heredity 
 which make the father live again in the son, our 
 own lives are multiplied and perpetuated, and the 
 means are offered us of acting upon the world by 
 a thousand channels not of our own making or 
 choosing. 
 
 So, when all is said, the one question for each of 
 
1 86 DISCOURSES 
 
 us to answer is, Do you think the race exists for 
 you, or that you exist for the race? Have the ages 
 come and gone, these laws been established, and 
 these divine purposes put in play, for your conven- 
 ience and pleasure; or are you here that this great 
 scheme of things may be a little more perfect, and 
 some lives a little better or happier, for your pres- 
 ence? If the latter, then many pains and sorrows 
 which would otherwise be insufferable, find their 
 explanation in the larger good to which they lead, 
 or of which they are the conditions. If the latter, 
 if we live for the world, not the world for us, then 
 we need not look far for our opportunities. They 
 lie about us on every hand. No good deed, however 
 obscure, no honest word, however unskilled, no 
 battle with wrong, however unobserved, but has its 
 beneficent consequences, and leaves the world bet- 
 ter than it found it. If evil propagates itself by 
 ways of which we do not dream, so does good as 
 well. If nothing can measure the foul results of a 
 single unclean act, so nothing can measure the 
 gracious consequences of a single act of parity or 
 of a single noble life. If our text tells us, in 
 accordance with the old belief, that "by one man 
 sin entered into the world, and death by sin," it 
 adds at once, "As by one man's disobedience many 
 were made sinners, so by the obedience of one 
 shall many be made righteous." 
 
 1892. 
 
XV. 
 JUSTICE TO THE LABORER. 
 
 " Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and 
 needy." — Psalm lxxxii. 3. 
 
 What is it that gives to this Harvest Sunday its 
 beauty? It is not merely that autumn is here, 
 with its golden and russet hues; it is not these 
 harvest fruits alone, garnered to-day in our sanct- 
 uary, and arrayed before us so enchantingly. It 
 is the testimony which these things give, and 
 others like them, to loving hearts and serving 
 hands. It is the care and devotion to which they 
 point, and the time and thought and willing spend- 
 ing of one's self of which they speak. It is the 
 evidence thus afforded year by year that our mod- 
 ern rush for wealth and absorption in busy cares 
 do not extinguish wholly the spirit of brotherhood, 
 but that the poor and fatherless, the criminal and 
 suffering, never had better or tenderer friends than 
 in this money-loving age. 
 
 One watches these matters with a certain appre- 
 hensiveness nowadays; so conscious are we of the 
 self-seeking and unheroic tendencies of the hour, 
 so aware of the disposition, among old and young 
 alike, to think of comfort rather than effort or self- 
 
I 88 DISCOURSES 
 
 denial, so eager therefore to detect the slightest 
 infusion into our lives of the old-time spirit of 
 consecration. We can comfort ourselves, in a 
 measure, it is true, by the large and lavish benevo- 
 lence which characterizes the times, by the colos- 
 sal giving that goes with colossal gains, the 
 princely munificence that so often accompanies 
 princely fortunes. But, after all, we want a little 
 more assurance of the genuine passion for human- 
 ity, the giving of one's self as well as one's pos- 
 sessions, which is the real essence of charity. 
 
 Each age has its mission and its methods. 
 Ours, I think, so far as the domain of charity is 
 concerned, is plain. It is the mission of organiza- 
 tion. It is the duty of gathering up and formulat- 
 ing the experiences of the past, and so giving clear 
 direction to the vague and formless sentiment 
 which has hitherto governed the race in its humane 
 activities. "Other men have labored: we have 
 entered into their labors." Others have conse- 
 crated themselves in a thousand fields of loving 
 beneficence: we have learned, through their suc- 
 cesses and their failures, how best to attain the 
 highest ends of charity. It is an age of systems 
 and machinery, of practical capacity and executive 
 skill: our duty is to utilize these for the largest as 
 well as the smallest purposes, and make them serve 
 the nobler ends of humanity no less than the baser 
 ends of personal gain. And it is our part to do 
 this in no half-hearted and apologetic way, but in 
 a whole-hearted and aggressive way; not as though 
 
JUSTICE TO THE LABORER 1 89 
 
 it were only the best we can do, though infinitely 
 below what other generations have done, but as 
 though it were, if rightly apprehended, the best 
 that any generation can do. There is a common 
 feeling, not wholly to be wondered at, that, as 
 systems advance, sentiment decays. Especially is 
 it felt that the scientific temper of the age is bound 
 to kill out the enthusiasm and spontaneity which 
 in older times were the source of all great results. 
 Yet this is by no means so sure. Indeed, there 
 are indications of quite the opposite kind. Poetry 
 did not die out when the poetic instinct, the most 
 delicate of all, became fettered by the established 
 laws of verse; else poetry would belong only to 
 the infancy or childhood of the race. Art did not 
 die out, though some modern critics would have us 
 think so, with the entrance of scientific knowledge 
 and technical perfection. On the contrary, in 
 both these cases, it has proved that, the better the 
 instrument with which genius was able to work, 
 the more scope and freedom did genius enjoy and 
 the more absolute the abandon with which it could 
 lend itself to its inspirations. There are some 
 who, from the completeness of outward form, infer 
 at once the absence of true creative power, and will 
 acknowledge no artistic excellence except when it 
 is combined with crudeness and imperfection of 
 method. Yet, if the history of man's progress in 
 the arts proves anything, it proves, as it seems to 
 me, that, when creative genius has the best scien- 
 tific methods at its command, or the most highly 
 
I9O DISCOURSES 
 
 developed language in which to express its thoughts, 
 then it produces the finest fruits. And so I believe 
 it is with the sentiment of humanity, which, like 
 the poetic instinct, is one of the most delicate and 
 sensitive of qualities. So far from being necessa- 
 rily quenched by the perfection of its machinery, it 
 may well get the more scope and freedom thereby, 
 work with the more assurance, and throw itself 
 with the more self-abandonment into its labors. 
 Its enthusiasm will naturally grow with the con- 
 sciousness that its every effort tells for all that it 
 is worth. Nothing is more delightful than to visit 
 the gatherings of any of our charitable organiza- 
 tions at this season, and note the character of the 
 workers, the fine order of intelligence which shows 
 itself in their faces, combined with a fervor, an 
 intensity, a freshness and spontaneity, which no 
 earlier schools of beneficence could have surpassed. 
 If excellence of method and perfection of machin- 
 ery have deadened their enthusiasm, they certainly 
 have not found it out themselves; nor would the 
 observer be struck by it. The pity is that they 
 are almost all of one sex and one or two profes- 
 sions, though even in this respect there are strik- 
 ing exceptions to the rule. The needs of suffering 
 humanity, heard above all the tumult and noises of 
 the time, are certainly calling an ever-increasing 
 army of toilers into the field. We cannot but trust 
 that the spirit of self-sacrifice will prove strong 
 enough in the human heart to survive all the en- 
 croachments of a purely commercial age. 
 
JUSTICE TO THE LABORER 19! 
 
 But the little we have of this spirit of consecra- 
 tion only makes us cry out for more. This harvest 
 season, with its lavish displays of nature's wealth, 
 has a lesson for us all, and bids us ask ourselves 
 whether we are doing our part in distributing about 
 us the blessings we have received. Especially 
 does it ask us whether, in our charitable efforts, 
 we are governed by a regard for the highest inter- 
 ests of those whom we wish to help. The age, as 
 I have said, has its own methods and function, — to 
 give to the spirit of charity a greater directness 
 and efficacy than ever before, and make it serve the 
 real needs of humanity. No one can look back 
 into the past, and recall the mediaeval type of char- 
 ity which prevailed for centuries, and feel that 
 poverty or ignorance got its rights, or that men's 
 real interests were studied, in the encouragement 
 then given to pauperism and dependence. The 
 poor were kept poor, and made to feel that their 
 natural situation was that of being helped and fed. 
 They learned to think of themselves as a special 
 class whom society was bound to support. We 
 have done much of late to counteract this feeling 
 on the part of the working classes, and with a large 
 measure of success. The question is whether there 
 is not much still to be done in the same direction. 
 With all our recognition of the evils of pauperism 
 and of the importance of teaching the poor and de- 
 pendent to help themselves, do we not still encour- 
 age them at times to feel, if not that they are to 
 be helped and fed, that they constitute a peculiar 
 
I92 DISCOURSES 
 
 class in society which society is bound to propiti- 
 ate and maintain? In our zeal for their welfare, 
 are we always ready to remind them that with their 
 larger rights go corresponding duties? As it is 
 this aspect of the question which interests me most, 
 and seems to me of most practical importance, I 
 ask your serious attention to it this morning. The 
 text which I have chosen shows the direction which 
 I would give to our thoughts, "Do justice to the 
 poor and needy." "Justice " may be a less entic- 
 ing word than "mercy," "sympathy," or "ten- 
 derness " ; yet I cannot but feel that, rightly 
 understood, it carries them all within itself, and 
 is at least the needed message of the hour. What 
 I would urge is that the highest favor any one can 
 ask of the world is simple and perfect justice. 
 
 For one, I must confess that the abuses which 
 have stirred me most profoundly of late have not 
 been the sufferings and privations of the poor, but 
 the false ideas of their rights aroused among them 
 by the mistaken zeal of their friends, — not the 
 indifference of society toward the outcast and 
 oppressed, but the encouragement which society 
 has given them to feel that in every struggle in 
 which they are engaged they are always in the right 
 and others always in the wrong. What has made 
 my blood boil oftenest of late has been the insolent 
 assumption on the part of the laborer, prompted by 
 ill-advised friends, that all the social troubles 
 which arise are the fault of the moneyed classes, 
 intent always upon gain, and ready always to grind 
 
JUSTICE TO THE LABORER I93 
 
 the poor to the earth. I have noticed that any 
 degree of violence on the laborer's part is condoned 
 or apologized for; while, if the employer uses the 
 slightest force in the defence of his property or his 
 rights, the vials of the whole community's wrath 
 are poured upon his head. I have noticed that, if 
 the managers of important concerns or superintend- 
 ents of large industries surrender to every demand 
 of labor and pocket every affront, they are loudly 
 applauded; while, if they stand firmly for their 
 simple rights, they are savagely denounced. The 
 only thing which is praised in dealing with social 
 troubles is weakness and cowardice: the only thing 
 which is blamed is spirit and courage. The mil- 
 itia, the police, the law, are considered excellent 
 institutions so long as they keep wholly in the 
 background or wink at disturbances of the peace : 
 they are an intolerable despotism the moment they 
 are called in to enforce order and obedience. 
 There are organized bodies of laborers at this very 
 moment claiming for themselves the right to drive 
 all other workmen from their occupation, and de- 
 claiming against the State militia and the police as 
 their natural foes, simply because public sentiment 
 has abetted them in this belief, and made it impos- 
 sible for them to discriminate between out and out 
 tyranny on the part of government and the neces- 
 sary maintenance of safety and peace. 
 
 Now, with all possible allowance for the advan- 
 tages which the well-to-do have over the poor, and 
 which capital has over labor, and all possible 
 
194 DISCOURSES 
 
 respect for organized labor and the good it has 
 already accomplished and is still capable of accom- 
 plishing, it is plain that this condition of things is 
 intolerable. It is as great a wrong to one side as 
 to the other. Say what we will of the need of mut- 
 ual understanding and mutual forbearance, cowar- 
 dice and subserviency can never be heroic traits. 
 The state of society which makes the cultivation of 
 these traits necessary and requires one class to 
 fawn upon another is a bad state of society. It 
 makes no difference whether the poor fawn upon 
 the rich or the rich upon the poor: it is equally an 
 evil. In the true order of society there will be no 
 fawning anywhere; no terrified laborers toiling on 
 starvation wages lest they lose their places, no 
 frightened employers on their knees before their 
 workmen lest they block the wheels of trade and 
 make costly machinery useless. A community 
 which breeds these ignoble traits in any of its 
 ranks is hopelessly rotten, and does not deserve to 
 prosper, even if prosperity were possible on such 
 humiliating terms. The hope of every community, 
 whether in ancient or in modern times, lies in the 
 resoluteness and courage of its citizens. The State 
 is no stronger than the members of whom it is 
 composed. If they are weak and time-serving, and 
 ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of peace 
 and safety, or in order to escape pecuniary loss, the 
 State is itself weak. If they are brave and strong 
 and contemptuous of any loss, so their honor and 
 self-respect are preserved, the State is vigorous and 
 
JUSTICE TO THE LABORER I95 
 
 able to insure blessings in the end to all its citi- 
 zens. In the modern State no class has interests 
 apart from the rest or in antagonism to them. The 
 good of one class is the good of all, nor can any 
 one really flourish at the expense of another. 
 
 Now these are the principles (truisms though 
 they seem to us) which we are bound in these days 
 to enforce. If we have any duty to the laborer, it 
 is this. In old time there might have been some 
 reason for keeping the lower classes ignorant of 
 the world, and conscious only of their dependence 
 on those above them. To-day the part of true 
 kindness is to make them understand the real situa- 
 tion, to show them that, whatever philanthropy or 
 an enlightened public sympathy may do for them, 
 neither the laws of trade nor the laws of society 
 can be set aside in their behalf, and that prosperity 
 will come to them, not by being treated as a privi- 
 leged class, with many favors to receive and no 
 duties to perform, but by being placed on a simple 
 equality with all others, sharing in the opportuni- 
 ties which others enjoy, and amenable to the same 
 discipline and subject to the same obligations with 
 all their fellows. In this land there can be no 
 privileged class, either of capitalists or of laborers. 
 It is impossible for society to hold together in 
 these modern times on any other basis than this, 
 the equal rights and duties of all; and it is idle 
 for any class to expect advancement on any other 
 terms. In other words, to return to the thought of 
 our text, the best which any class or any individual 
 can ask is simple justice. 
 
I96 DISCOURSES 
 
 Nothing is ever settled till it is settled right. 
 For this reason, if for no other, it would be our 
 duty to disabuse the laboring world of the extrava- 
 gant and distorted ideas of their relations to society 
 which they have thus far been encouraged to form. 
 No temporary arrangement between capital and 
 labor which is extorted from either side by terror- 
 ism, or which rests upon anything but the funda- 
 mental rights of both parties, can be of any real 
 avail: the momentary triumph will be gained only 
 at the cost of greater evils in the future. All the 
 compromises or arbitrations whereby a present diffi- 
 culty is palliated or escaped are only a postpone- 
 ment to the future of what had much better be 
 determined to-day. The future will rise up in 
 judgment against all our provisional agreements 
 and condemn them, unless they are in a line with 
 eternal justice and right. Good temper and a con- 
 ciliatory spirit are very excellent things; but they 
 cannot change the laws of right or the laws of nat- 
 ure or the laws of trade, and they make a great 
 mistake when they pretend that they can. Not 
 philanthropy itself is above these laws; and the 
 best philanthropy is that which recognizes them, 
 however stern they seem, and works out its ends 
 through them, and not against them. Let us trust 
 that the days have passed by when political science 
 could be contemptuously dismissed as the "dismal 
 science," and that the time has come when we can 
 accept its conclusions intelligently, not as man- 
 made conditions or a strait-jacket into which human 
 
JUSTICE TO THE LABORER K)J 
 
 beings are to be forced, but as simply the estab- 
 lished methods, created by the same Power which 
 formed our souls, whereby man's outward welfare 
 can be best and most surely attained. It is true of 
 these, as of all social laws, that it is the poor and 
 unfortunate who suffer most when they are broken, 
 and are most helped in the long run by their im- 
 partial enforcement. The point at which the lover 
 of his race should aim is to treat the suffering 
 classes not as classes, but as men; to secure for 
 them not peculiar privileges, but the common 
 rights of humanity. Less than this can never sat- 
 isfy them, and ought not to : more than this they 
 cannot hope to receive. 
 
 I am the more urgent upon this point because 
 there is one flagrant wrong demanding our attention 
 just now for which we have all made ourselves virt- 
 ually responsible. I have long felt that, if I were 
 to lead any crusade to-day, I should make myself 
 the champion of unorganized labor. I have no 
 quarrel with organized labor in itself, and do not 
 question the good it can do or the important future 
 it has before it; but I cannot forget that, while 
 organized labor has the eye and ear of the commu- 
 nity, and receives all the sympathy and help of our 
 law-makers, there is a vaster body of laborers, more 
 needy than these, and far more friendless, whom 
 their privileged brethren treat only with disdain, 
 and toward whom the world at large seems abso- 
 lutely indifferent. As they have no political 
 power and can pledge no votes, they are left to 
 
I98 DISCOURSES 
 
 shift for themselves. I cannot forget that, with 
 these millions of destitute workmen in our borders, 
 whose only crime is that they are willing to work 
 for the best wages they can receive, the interest 
 and sympathy of the community are reserved for 
 their organized and more aristocratic brothers. I 
 cannot forget that, whenever the problem of labor 
 is discussed, it is organized labor alone that comes 
 into account, and that, whenever laws in behalf of 
 labor are enacted, or privileges granted, it is 
 organized labor only that reaps the benefit. The 
 thousands who have power to compel it receive our 
 attention: the millions who have no prestige, and 
 can urge no claims but their needs, receive none. 
 Nor can any one wonder at the effect of this strange 
 favoritism upon its recipients, or the growing inso- 
 lence and tyranny with which they employ the 
 power which the community thus confers upon 
 them. What American heart, unless dulled by 
 long submission to such outrages, can help throb- 
 bing with indignation when for four months an 
 entire American community is held in terror, and 
 hundreds of industrious workmen subjected to vio- 
 lence and peril of their lives, solely because the 
 privileged class of laborers do not choose to have 
 any competitors in the field. Surely, it was not 
 for this that the American republic came into exist- 
 ence or American freedom was fought for and won. 
 In our broad territories there is room enough for 
 all; and the man who will not trust to his own 
 merits, but seeks his advancement by robbing his 
 
JUSTICE TO THE LABORER I99 
 
 brother of his chance, deserves no toleration what- 
 ever. The shame of it is not so much that such a 
 thing as I have just described can happen, as that 
 it can happen and no protest be heard. The evil 
 of this ignoble tyranny is that it works such degra- 
 dation in the community which submits to it, and 
 postpones so long the final triumph of humanity. 
 For the day of humanity comes when there are no 
 tyrants and no oppressed, but when equal justice is 
 done to all. 
 
 Here, at least, is the ideal which summons us all 
 to-day. The easy path of charity is to give alms 
 at your door, and get rid of suffering with a pleas- 
 ant smile; the hard way is to follow the beggar to 
 his home, make him scorn his beggary, and feel 
 the stir of an awakening manhood. The easy way 
 of meeting these social problems is to humor the 
 discontented in all their real or fancied wrongs, 
 and bid them look to society to right their griev- 
 ances at a stroke; the hard but manly way is to 
 show the tenderest sympathy for our brothers' 
 needs, but to lead them at the same time to trust 
 to the absolute laws of justice and right as more 
 potent for good than any sympathy or tenderness 
 that we can offer. 
 
 1892. 
 
XVI. 
 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 A SERMON FOR EASTER. 
 
 " He that findeth his life shall lose it ; and he that loseth it for 
 my sake shall find it." — Matt. x. 39. 
 
 This special Sunday brings with it a question 
 of its own: what influence Christianity has had 
 upon the world's belief in immortality. No ques- 
 tion could interest us more. We speak somewhat 
 vaguely about the " Christian doctrine of the future 
 life," and the important part which Christianity 
 has had in establishing this belief; we cannot be 
 better occupied this morning, I think, than in 
 attempting to give our thoughts upon this theme a 
 more definite form. In what sense, then, has Chris- 
 tianity borne evidence to immortality? 
 
 Turning first to the Scriptures themselves, to 
 discover, if we can, just when and where this 
 belief began, we come at once upon a singular fact. 
 In the time of Jesus we find that the idea of the 
 future and the resurrection was by no means a new 
 one, but was already a point of controversy between 
 different Jewish sects. "The Sadducees," we are 
 told in the Book of Acts, "say that there is no 
 
IMMORTALITY 201 
 
 resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but the 
 Pharisees confess both." Here, then, are two im- 
 portant parties in the Jewish church, who, long 
 before Christianity appeared, had been disputing 
 upon the question of the resurrection, one of them 
 believing it fully, the other disbelieving. Evi- 
 dently, then, the doctrine of the resurrection can- 
 not have been peculiar to Christianity. But, if the 
 New Testament does not teach it as a new doctrine, 
 still less does the Old, which is wholly silent upon 
 the subject. Indeed, the Old Testament can hardly 
 be said to be silent, as, wherever it alludes to the 
 condition of the departed at all, it seems to repre- 
 sent it as a condition of absolute unconsciousness 
 and oblivion, from which there is no revival. "In 
 death there is no remembrance of thee," says one 
 of the Psalms : " in the grave who shall give thee 
 thanks?" "There is no work nor device nor 
 knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither thou 
 goest," says Ecclesiastes. "There is hope of a 
 tree, if it be cut down," says Job, "that it will 
 sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof 
 will not cease. . . . But man dieth, and wasteth 
 away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is 
 he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood 
 decay eth and drieth up, so man lieth down and 
 riseth not: till the heavens be no more [i.e., for- 
 evermore], they shall not awake, nor be raised out 
 of their sleep." "That which befalleth the sons 
 of men," says Ecclesiastes, "befalleth the beasts; 
 even one thing befalleth them : as the one dieth, 
 
202 DISCOURSES 
 
 so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; 
 so that a man hath no pre-eminence over a beast. 
 . . . All go unto one place; all are of the dust, 
 and all turn to dust again." 
 
 The idea of the future life is absent then from 
 the Old Testament, yet has long been held, by one 
 party at least, when the New Testament is written. 
 How explain this perplexing fact? Ought we not 
 to find it as a new doctrine in the one or the 
 other, on the common assumption that this great 
 truth comes to us as a definite revelation? We 
 find our answer to this question by turning to the 
 so-called apocryphal books, which appeared in the 
 last two centuries before Christ, yet never were 
 adopted among the canonical Scriptures. In them 
 are such unequivocal and striking assertions of im- 
 mortality as this, "For God created man to be im- 
 mortal, and made him to be an image of his own 
 eternity," which prove that some minds at least, 
 during this interval between the Old Testament 
 and the New, without any special revelation, had 
 begun to hold serious and lofty hopes regarding 
 the future life. When we ask ourselves further 
 how it was that so important a belief could have 
 sprung up independent of the Scriptures, we re- 
 member at once that before these later books were 
 written the Jews had been torn from their own 
 soil and brought into intercourse for many years 
 with other nations. During the Captivity, for 
 instance, they had come under Persian rule; and 
 the Persian religion at this time contained some 
 
IMMORTALITY 203 
 
 very striking and to the Jews novel ideas as to 
 the spiritual world and the angelic beings who 
 inhabited it, coupled with conceptions of a future 
 life, which the more thoughtful jews could hardly 
 have helped remembering. After the Captivity, 
 too, in Alexandria and elsewhere, Greek philoso- 
 phy, with its profound speculations concerning 
 the eternal life, became more or less familiar to 
 Jewish scholars, and naturally enough wrought 
 many changes in their ideas and their faith. 
 In fact, the moment we give up the expectation 
 of finding the idea of immortality as a distinct 
 part of either Jewish or Christian revelation, 
 and look for it simply in its natural place and 
 time among human conceptions and in the history 
 of human thought, the case becomes clear enough. 
 It came of itself. It came when and where the 
 human soul was ready for it. It came, in the first 
 instance, through the effort of the human mind to 
 penetrate the mysteries which surrounded it, and 
 form some idea of what lies beyond. It came first 
 to those races whose longing for higher knowledge 
 was keenest, whose intellectual curiosity was great- 
 est, whose speculative instincts and mystic ten- 
 dencies were strongest, whose religious imagina- 
 tion was boldest and freest. It came in earlier 
 times, and in extraordinarily vivid form, to the 
 Egyptians. It came in later days to the Persians. 
 It came still later to the Greeks. It came, finally, 
 through the influence perhaps of each of these 
 latter nations, to the Jews, when their national 
 
204 DISCOURSES 
 
 calamities led them to deeper meditations upon 
 divine providence and their contact with foreign 
 faiths forced them out of their first indifference, 
 to take account of new and larger spiritual ideals. 
 It came therefore to the early Christians as an 
 inheritance from a religious ancestry far wider 
 than simple Judaism. It came to them, not be- 
 cause they were Jews, but because they were 
 human; and the human soul claims all realms of 
 enquiry, visible and invisible, as its own. 
 
 Turning back now once more to the early hours 
 of Christianity itself, we find, as we have seen, a 
 wide-spread belief in the resurrection. This word, 
 unknown to the Old Testament, is a familiar phrase 
 throughout the Gospels. "In the resurrection," 
 say the Sadducees, thinking to embarrass Jesus by 
 their inquiry, "whose wife shall this woman be of 
 the seven?" "I know," said Martha, "that my 
 brother shall rise again in the resurrection at the 
 last day." What does this word mean, we ask; for 
 this use of it seems to imply a somewhat different 
 sense from that in which we use it now. It 
 had indeed a different signification, I answer. In 
 those two centuries before the birth of Christianity, 
 in the place of the Old Testament idea of the grave 
 as the end of all had grown up a definite conception 
 of an underworld, peopled by the spirits of the 
 departed, who were awaiting there the last trump, 
 which was to announce to them the Messiah's com- 
 ing, and summon them all from their graves, to 
 stand before the great Judge, and enter, if worthy, 
 
IMMORTALITY 205 
 
 into the joys of the kingdom of God, which was to 
 be established upon earth. "Many of them that 
 sleep in the dust of the earth," says Daniel (whose 
 prophecy belongs to the same period with the 
 apocryphal books), "shall awake, some to everlast- 
 ing life and some to shame and everlasting con- 
 tempt." This Jewish doctrine of the future to 
 which I refer was somewhat vague, for it was still 
 in process of formation when Christianity ap- 
 peared. Some seem to have believed that the final 
 judgment was to come immediately upon the gen- 
 eral resurrection and the appearance of the Mes- 
 siah, others that the Messiah would first reign for 
 a thousand years, and then a second resurrection 
 would follow, when Gentiles as well as Jews 
 would be brought before the judgment-seat of 
 God. In any case, however, we are to bear in 
 mind that the Messiah's reign was to be an 
 earthly one, and resurrection meant not the en- 
 trance upon a spiritual immortality, but the rising 
 from the grave to enter upon a glorified earthly 
 existence. All the allusions in the New Testa- 
 ment to the resurrection (whether in the Book of 
 Acts or in the Epistles) show that this is the 
 only sense in which the word was then understood. 
 "Those of us who are alive, and remain unto the 
 coming of the Lord," says Paul, "shall not pre- 
 vent [have precedence over] them which are dead. 
 For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven 
 with a shout, and the voice of the archangel and 
 the trump of God, . . . and the dead in Christ shall 
 
206 DISCOURSES 
 
 rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall 
 be caught up together with them in the clouds, 
 to meet the Lord in the air." It was this idea of 
 a bodily resurrection and an earthly reign of the 
 Lord which gave importance to the question an- 
 swered by Paul in so much detail in the Epistle to 
 the Corinthians, an unmeaning question if the 
 future life is a spiritual one: "How are the dead 
 raised up, and in what body do they come ? " Was 
 it to be the same body in which they had formerly 
 lived upon earth or some new and etherealized form? 
 It is in this light, too, that the resurrection of 
 Jesus had its special significance. It was not 
 regarded then as in any sense a proof of immortal- 
 ity or of the resurrection; for the resurrection was 
 not denied, and no such proof was needed. Elijah 
 had restored the dead to life, according to their 
 Scriptures; so had Elisha. "Women received 
 their dead raised to life again," says the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews, as though this were no strange oc- 
 currence to the Jew, familiar with his nation's 
 history. Why, then, the great importance attached 
 to the resurrection of Christ? Paul gives us the 
 answer. "Now is Christ risen from the dead," 
 says Paul, "and become the first-fruits of them that 
 slept." In other words, the rising of Christ was 
 the first step toward the establishment of the heav- 
 enly kingdom, which was to be followed immedi- 
 ately by the rising of others who believed in him. 
 "Every man in his own order: Christ the first- 
 fruits; afterwards those that are Christ's at his 
 
IMMORTALITY 207 
 
 coming." After this Christ will reign "till he 
 hath put all enemies under his feet; then he 
 will deliver up the kingdom to God." 
 
 It is quite clear, then, that the term "resurrec- 
 tion," in its New Testament sense, cannot be under- 
 stood unless we take with it all the accompanying 
 ideas and beliefs of the time; the visible coming of 
 an earthly Messiah within the generation then liv- 
 ing, the literal rising from the graves of those who 
 had died, to enter, in their spiritual bodies, together 
 with those still living, into the purified and regen- 
 erated life upon earth. But it is equally clear that 
 this is by no means the sense in which we use the 
 word to-day. In this sense, it would have no mean- 
 ing for us at all. In this sense, indeed, it has but a 
 remote bearing upon the question of immortality. 
 Resurrection meant not the ascending of the free 
 spirit into heaven, to dwell in the presence of God, 
 but simply the rising of the body from the grave. 
 It meant, according to Paul, the entrance upon an 
 incorruptible and immortal existence; but it was 
 an existence within the limits of space. It is a 
 beautiful picture which Paul sketches for us here, 
 this exalted and purified humanity, dwelling upon 
 a sinless earth, or in the air just above the earth; 
 but it is not our conception of the life eternal. It 
 was a conception of the hour, possible only as part of 
 a very primitive ideal of the universe. Resurrec- 
 tion at its best is one thing, immortality is another. 
 The mere escape of the body from the grave or of 
 the soul from the embrace of death is one thing, 
 
208 DISCOURSES 
 
 immortality is another. Entrance upon a future 
 state of being, which may prove transient or may 
 prove permanent, is one thing, immortality is an- 
 other. The passing from a physical to a spiritual 
 existence is one thing, immortality is another. 
 The future, with all its mysteries revealed and its 
 highest hopes more than gratified, is one thing, 
 immortality is another; for the future may end as 
 well as the present, and to-morrow prove as fleet- 
 ing as to-day. 
 
 It being clear, then, that the terms "resurrection" 
 and "immortality" are by no means synonymous, 
 we ask next in what sense the New Testament does 
 teach the truth of immortality. So far as direct 
 texts are concerned, it is very hard, as you know, 
 to find them. It is not a theme which the Gospels 
 or Epistles are at any pains to put forward. It is 
 not discussed or emphasized. Probably the ab- 
 stract question, whether the soul exists independent 
 of the body or is in itself imperishable, had not 
 yet arisen among the Jews. We could read 
 through the entire Gospels without knowing that 
 there was such a question. The word "immortal- 
 ity" hardly occurs. If the evidence of Christianity 
 for immortality is to be sought in texts, in direct 
 assertions, in proofs or arguments, you will not 
 find it. You must seek it elsewhere than in texts. 
 The speculations and questionings and doubts 
 which are so familiar now, and enter so largely 
 into all the sacred literature of to-day, were then 
 unknown. The Jews and early Christians were 
 
IMMORTALITY 2C>9 
 
 concerned to know whether the end of the world 
 was approaching. They were concerned to know 
 whether they should behold the Messiah's coming, 
 whether they should themselves share in its glories, 
 whether their departed friends were to enter also 
 into it with them, and in what bodies they would 
 come. They were not concerned to know whether 
 the soul is in and of itself immortal. 
 
 What, then, is the testimony of the New Testa- 
 ment to immortality? If I were to answer this 
 question in my own language, I should say it testi- 
 fies not so much to immortality as to life. It 
 testifies not to the lesser thing, but to the greater. 
 Grant the reality of life, suppose a great intensity, 
 a fulness, a depth of spiritual life, and you have 
 something over which the grave can have no power. 
 Christianity does just this. It emphasizes the 
 spiritual quality, the moral essence, of this earthly 
 life. It declares that life consists in something 
 more than the abundance of the things which one 
 possesses. It shows the worth of virtue, the invin- 
 cible character of justice, the glory of self-sacrifice. 
 In saying, "He that taketh not his cross and fol- 
 loweth after me is not worthy of me," in saying, 
 "He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that 
 loseth his life for my sake shall find it," it says 
 far more than if it asserted never so positively a 
 second life beyond the grave. It declares that 
 without which a life beyond the grave would be no 
 life at all. It declares that which, if truly believed 
 in, would lift the soul far above the power of death 
 to touch. 
 
210 DISCOURSES 
 
 This, as it seems to me, is the real testimony of 
 the Scriptures to immortality. Christianity has 
 triumphed over death, not by its doctrine of the 
 resurrection, but by the vigor which it has lent to 
 man's moral and spiritual nature. It answers ev- 
 ery question which we put to it to-day, not by any 
 more direct reply than others have given, but by 
 saying, "He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he 
 that loseth it shall find it." The effect of Chris- 
 tianity upon the world's faith in immortality is a 
 purely moral effect. So far as speculation is con- 
 cerned, Christianity has raised more questions than 
 it has answered; so far as real and living faith is 
 concerned, it has strengthened man's hold upon 
 purity, goodness, truth, and so fortified his belief in 
 the eternal verities. If we were to judge simply by 
 the present state of the controversy over the future, 
 we might doubt how much Christianity has accom- 
 plished; for never was the discussion of this great 
 theme so general or were sides taken upon it so 
 violently as now. If we were, on the other hand, 
 to judge by the faith which man shows in right- 
 eousness and truth, we can see what Christianity, 
 joined of course with the other forces of modern 
 civilization, has done. Christianity has lifted no 
 veil, has betrayed no secret, has solved no mystery, 
 has silenced no queryings; but it has shown to the 
 world the beauty of a consecrated life. It has 
 shown once for all the dignity and sublimity of 
 self-sacrifice. 
 
 Is this little to say? Is it not rather the most 
 
IMMORTALITY 211 
 
 and best that can be said? It calls us back, as it 
 seems to me, from all our questionings and specu- 
 lations to the one point of practical importance to 
 us. It reminds us that immortality is a thing not 
 of place or time, but of spiritual quality. What is 
 there in your life or mine, it asks, which death 
 cannot touch? What is there here so pure that 
 death, though it approaches, must needs pass it by; 
 so ethereal or delicate that death will grasp at it 
 in vain? Nay, what is there here which, even 
 though the grave fails to ensnare it, will still have 
 power in itself to pass beyond? Death misses the 
 chrysalis, and the butterfly escapes; but the but- 
 terfly spreads its fragile wings in the unaccustomed 
 atmosphere only to flutter out its feeble moment 
 of existence, and then, with the first zephyr that 
 smites it, to die a second death. Are these spirits 
 of ours to survive the grave simply to flutter and 
 disappear? What is there in them capable of 
 meeting heaven's breath? What is there to en- 
 dure? What is there worthy to endure? What is 
 there strong enough to meet the new conditions of 
 another and higher existence? 
 
 These are the real questions which this hour 
 brings. If we ask them in all seriousness, we 
 shall not have meditated upon this subject in vain. 
 Remember that, however precious the boon of im- 
 mortality, the great Giver forces his gifts on none. 
 Are we alive to the value of this sublime preroga- 
 tive? Are we ready to assume it if offered us? 
 With the high calling goes the high responsibility. 
 
212 
 
 DISCOURSES 
 
 Are we willing to put forth the effort, the steadfast- 
 ness, the loyalty to all holiness and purity, which 
 befits those who, as they tread the dusty paths of 
 life, are carrying within them immortal souls? 
 
 Plainly, this offer of immortality is no honeyed 
 entreaty to us to come forward, even against our 
 will, to accept eternal joys, no soft assurance that 
 all our neglects and timidities and distrusts will 
 by and by be offset by the inpouring of heavenly 
 courage and might. It is a trumpet-call, ringing 
 through all the hiding-places of our effeminacy or 
 sloth, to tell us what God expects of those whom 
 he has called to be immortal spirits. 
 
 ; Foiled by our fellow-men, depressed, outworn, 
 We leave the brutal world to take its way, 
 And 'Patience — in another life,' we say, 
 1 The world shall be thrust down, and we upborne.' 
 And will not then the immortal armies scorn 
 The world's poor routed leavings ? or will they 
 Who failed under the heat of this life's day 
 Support the fervors of the heavenly morn ? 
 No, No : the energy of life may be 
 Kept on after the grave, but not begun: 
 And he who flagged not in the earthly strife, 
 From strength to strength advancing, only he, 
 His soul well knit, and all his battles won, 
 Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life." 
 
 1893. 
 
XVII. 
 
 THE PLACE OF JESUS IN THE 
 
 WORLD'S RELIGIOUS 
 
 HISTORY. 
 
 A COMMUNION SERMON. 
 
 "That the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." — Luke 
 »■ 35- 
 
 The table spread before you this morning recalls 
 a holy life to which, in common with the rest of 
 the Christian world, though after quite a different 
 fashion from most of them, we love to pay honor. 
 And what honor shall we pay? To every great 
 soul through whose aid the world has learned to 
 live a holier life we wish to offer the homage which 
 is its due; exactly what homage is due to Jesus, 
 and what place is his in the world's religious his- 
 tory? If at first it seems strange, after so many 
 centuries have passed, to be still asking this ques- 
 tion, at second thought I think it will appear that 
 we are better prepared to answer it to-day than at 
 any time before. Certainly, no generation since 
 Christian history began has devoted more time or 
 serious study to this theme than ours; nor do the 
 results of these scholarly researches seem to me 
 
214 DISCOURSES 
 
 altogether so vague or unsatisfactory as is com- 
 monly assumed. Let us at least try to make our 
 own thought upon it as clear and intelligible as 
 we can. 
 
 We turn naturally, first of all, to the Scripture 
 records themselves. Nothing has thrown more 
 light upon those records or given to their picture 
 of Jesus greater distinctness than the simple 
 arrangement of them in chronological order; the 
 discovery that the New Testament books belong 
 not to one period, but to several periods, and dis- 
 close therefore not the views of a single hour or 
 a single mind, but the ideas of successive epochs. 
 The effect of this discovery upon the Old Testa- 
 ment books, illumining as it has almost every 
 page of Jewish history, is well known; it will be 
 worth our while to-day to apply it to the New 
 Testament narratives, and see what results it pro- 
 duces there. 
 
 Modern investigation points more and more 
 clearly to one among the four Gospels as in all 
 probability (if not with certainty) the oldest; the 
 Gospel of Mark. Here, then, if anywhere, al- 
 though this, like all the Gospels, was put into its 
 present form at a much later day, we get the primi- 
 tive portraiture of the life of Jesus. And how 
 simple and clear that brief story! It begins at 
 once, as you remember, with the ministry of John 
 the Baptist, as though at that time the miraculous 
 birth and the various poetic traditions of the nativ- 
 ity had as yet no existence; it ends as abruptly 
 
JESUS IN THE WORLDS RELIGIOUS HISTORY 21 5 
 
 (the last twelve verses of the Gospel are a later ad- 
 dition) with the brief statement that the women, on 
 visiting the grave of their master, found it empty, 
 and were told that he had risen; as though all the 
 traditions which gathered around the resurrection 
 were also of a later growth. Between these two in- 
 cidents lie plainly marked the prominent features of 
 that one year's service in Galilee. Forgetting for 
 the moment all that was afterwards written, we see 
 in the Gospel of Mark an earnest follower of John 
 the Baptist, aroused by the appeals of that impas- 
 sioned anchorite and impelled upon the Baptist's 
 imprisonment to take up himself his unfinished 
 work, and proclaim to his countrymen the speedy 
 coming of the kingdom of God. What the one had 
 taught by the banks of the Jordan, the other, with 
 ever-growing sense of the significance and grandeur 
 of his mission, carries from village to village of 
 his native Galilee. Midway in this career comes 
 a grave and critical hour. Turning aside from his 
 accustomed round and entering the mountain re- 
 gions to the north of Galilee, he held an earnest 
 conversation with his followers, of which one start- 
 ling echo reaches us in the question put suddenly 
 to the disciples, "Whom do men say that I am?" 
 Various are the answers given. "John the Bap- 
 tist," (who had just died) said one. "Elias," said 
 another. "One of the prophets," said a third. 
 "But whom say ye that I am? And Peter an- 
 swered, Thou art the Christ" 
 
 Memorable words, with an unmistakable meaning. 
 
2l6 DISCOURSES 
 
 Till then, it would seem, he had not claimed to be 
 the Christ, nor had others ventured to think of him 
 as such ; else the conversation would have no mean- 
 ing at all. Till then he had simply preached the 
 thrilling tidings of mighty events close at hand, 
 wherein the expectation of ages were to be at last 
 fulfilled, and God's kingdom to be finally estab- 
 lished upon earth. 
 
 And here let us pause for a moment. Impos- 
 sible to our modern thought that Jewish concep- 
 tion of the kingdom of God as an earthly empire. 
 But equally impossible, we must remember, for any 
 soul reared in Jewish traditions not to share its 
 splendid and inspiring hopes. It is the form in 
 which all the more exalted spiritual ideals of the 
 hour must needs shape themselves. As well expect 
 one living in those days to put his thoughts into 
 English or German speech as to cast them in the 
 moulds of our modern beliefs. That would not be 
 what the earnest soul would strive to do. Not to 
 turn away from the ideals of his age would be his 
 impulse, but to be fired by them, to feel what was 
 best and sublimest in them, to be filled by their 
 grand and generous hopes. Till that moment Jesus 
 had simply preached of the coming kingdom to his 
 Galilean countrymen. But the time had come when 
 this was no longer enough. If such mighty events 
 were pending, was he to be a spectator only, a mere 
 foreteller of their coming? Some one must be a 
 leader in them; must urge his prophetic warnings 
 not upon humble Galilean peasants only, but upon 
 
JESUS IN THE WORLD S RELIGIOUS HISTORY 21J 
 
 priest and Pharisee and ruler as well; must brave 
 all the perils of the conflict, insure, if possible, its 
 victory, and meet, if necessary, the ignominies of 
 its defeat. Some one must stand at the front : then 
 why not he? Why might not those mystic, half- 
 understood prophecies of a Messiah who was to 
 usher in the heavenly kingdom find their fulfilment 
 in him? If that was indeed his call, he must heed 
 it. There was no choice. All the heroism of his 
 nature bade him listen to that voice. If his disci- 
 ples, too, believed that this call was his, what 
 room for hesitancy? There was none. He did 
 not hesitate. From that hour his course was clear. 
 He turned at once from Galilee to Jerusalem. No 
 more village parables by the pleasant wayside. 
 Jerusalem itself, its rulers, its high priests, its 
 councils, must hear his message. And they heard 
 it; but, alas! they did not listen. Rather they 
 turned in fury against him. The history of that 
 last tragic week at Jerusalem is the record of an 
 ever-growing sense in Jesus' heart of the hopeless- 
 ness of his effort. He looks for some divine attes- 
 tation of his faith, but looks in vain. Each day 
 deepens the gravity of the situation, multiplies his 
 perils, and brings the issue nearer, yet throws no 
 gleam of light upon his path. The prayer at Geth- 
 semane was the agonized wrestling of a soul bit- 
 terly aware that hope had almost vanished, yet 
 loftily submissive to an inscrutable will. Only at 
 the last moment did his hope finally give way; and 
 the disappointment of those awful hours found ut- 
 
2l8 DISCOURSES 
 
 terance in the heart-broken cry, "My God, my 
 God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " 
 
 It is sad indeed that in such hours the suffering 
 heart cannot look forward into the future, and see 
 the splendid triumph that is to spring out of appar- 
 ent defeat. It is easy for us, knowing all that was 
 to follow, to understand how much more glorious 
 was that death upon the cross than any immediate 
 success could have been, and how much grander 
 than the literal fulfilment of that hour's hopes is 
 the spiritual fulfilment which after ages have 
 beheld. But at the time the future was hidden, 
 and the moment's grief alone was felt. The dis- 
 ciples, as we know, were absolutely unnerved by 
 it, and fled in sheer despair. Had not his personal 
 influence over them been so much stronger than 
 they were aware, and their faith in the man proved 
 so much greater than their disappointment in his 
 mission, the name of Jesus might from that mo- 
 ment have been forgotten, and his ministry have 
 proved actually the failure which then it seemed. 
 Fortunately, such souls cannot perish from the 
 earth; and the impress which Jesus had made upon 
 his generation was too profound to be erased. 
 
 Such, in general outline, is the picture which 
 the world would have received of Jesus of Nazareth, 
 had nothing remained from those days but the 
 Gospel of Mark.* But other writings survive in 
 which, as we might expect, a different portraiture 
 
 * Matthew and Luke, while introducing great variations, do not essentially alter 
 this picture. 
 
JESUS IN THE WORLD S RELIGIOUS HISTORY 219 
 
 appears. In Paul's Epistles, though earlier in date 
 than the Gospels, we catch the impressions made 
 upon one who knew nothing of the earthly life of 
 Jesus, but accepted him as the Messiah, and applied 
 to him at once the prevailing notions for which the 
 Messiah stood. The reader of Paul's letters asks 
 himself continually how it happens that an immedi- 
 ate contemporary of Jesus, able to gather a hundred 
 anecdotes of his life and a hundred reminiscences 
 of his preaching, has preserved for us no single fact 
 connected with his ministry. The answer is that 
 to Paul those earthly incidents were of the slightest 
 possible account. He thought of Jesus only as ful- 
 filling a heavenly destiny, which was predetermined 
 in celestial counsels, and in which his human 
 career was hardly more than a passing incident. 
 To the Jews of Paul's school the conception of the 
 Messiah had taken a speculative and mystic form. 
 They thought of him as a pre-existent being, a 
 second Adam, present with God from all time, who 
 was to appear on earth and accomplish his mission, 
 and then return again to heaven. The important 
 events of Jesus' career to Paul's mind were his death 
 and resurrection. "Sown a natural body, he had 
 been raised a spiritual body." So the old Scripture 
 had been fulfilled. "The first Adam was made a 
 living soul; the last Adam was made a quicken- 
 ing spirit." In the light of this metaphysical con- 
 ception, it is easy to see that the human life and 
 purely human activities of Jesus, as set forth in the 
 earlier Gospels, would speedily disappear, and the 
 
220 DISCOURSES 
 
 actual Jesus be replaced by a visionary being whose 
 functions were heavenly rather than earthly, and in 
 whom very little flesh and blood would long remain. 
 The Galilean preacher, son of Joseph and Mary and 
 companion of Peter and James and John, became 
 the "man from heaven," the second Adam. The 
 first step had been taken in an idealizing process, 
 which was to be continued through many ages. 
 
 The next step in that process is to be found in 
 a still later New Testament book, the so-called 
 Gospel of John. Before this book appeared, the 
 greater part of a century had probably intervened; 
 and among the many who brought the philosophical 
 speculations of the hour to bear upon the traditions 
 of Jesus' life was the writer of this Gospel. The 
 mystic preface to the work is a chapter out of the 
 religious meditations of the second century, taking 
 the life of Jesus as its theme, and using those earthly 
 incidents only as the groundwork of its philosophy. 
 The "man from heaven" of Paul's Epistles has be- 
 come the eternal Word, the Logos, a celestial being 
 dwelling in the beginning with God, and acting as 
 the divine agent in creation. "All things were 
 made by him, and without him was nothing made 
 that was made." The Logos shares in the divine 
 nature. "And the Word was with God, and the 
 Word was a god"; i.e.> was a divine being, an 
 angelic creature. 
 
 Already, as you see, the idealizing process has 
 gone very far. Only one step further is needed, 
 and Jesus will become not merely a divine being, 
 
JESUS IN THE WORLD'S RELIGIOUS HISTORY 221 
 
 but God himself. And this further step, as we 
 know full well, the Christian church in the fourth 
 and fifth centuries was quite ready to take. To 
 have seen the transforming process which has gone 
 on within the New Testament pages is to under- 
 stand completely how Jesus of Nazareth became 
 in the end the Second Person of the Trinity. 
 
 Plainly, then, if Jesus is entitled still to the 
 world's homage, it must be the real Jesus, not the 
 Jesus of first or second or fourth century specula- 
 tion. It is the Jesus of the primitive Gospel, 
 fortunately preserved for us by Mark, whom we 
 must honor. It is the Galilean preacher, the 
 friend of publicans and sinners, the teacher of a 
 lofty and stern morality, whose heroic career seems 
 all the more grand and beautiful when contrasted 
 with the metaphysical creations which have usurped 
 its place. The test of one's admiration of Jesus of 
 Nazareth should be the capacity of appreciating the 
 simple story told in the Gospel of Mark. Does 
 that story appeal to you? Does it touch your 
 heart? Does it arouse your conscience? Does it 
 claim for itself, as you read, your instant love and 
 respect? Then you have paid him the honor which 
 is his due. The best homage you can offer to any 
 soul is to understand it; to take it at its actual 
 worth. The great soul asks to be esteemed not 
 for its titles or its offices, but only for itself. To 
 feel the severe and simple beauty of that gospel 
 story means tenfold more than to be dazzled by the 
 splendors with which a sacred theology or ritual or 
 
222 DISCOURSES 
 
 art has overlaid it. We are better followers of 
 Jesus, the nearer we get to the man himself. 
 
 Nor yet do I mean by the term followers of Jesus 
 that our duty is to accept him as a literal authority 
 to-day, or try to make him live again the life of 
 the present hour. The first century and the nine- 
 teenth are too far apart for that. In a certain 
 sense, the more distinctly we reproduce his actual 
 life, the more foreign from our own it seems. Of 
 what service is it, save as a piece of historic real- 
 ism, to bring back from its oblivion this old Jewish 
 conception of the Messiah's kingdom? It was the 
 dream of that far-off age, and did its service then. 
 The mission of Jesus was not to bring into the 
 world a religion ready made, which was to keep its 
 form despite the changes and progress of all time. 
 It was rather to give to the world a spiritual im- 
 pulse which it henceforth could not lose, but which 
 should shape itself anew with every age. The 
 value of his words lies not in themselves so much 
 as in the higher and larger thoughts to which they 
 are constantly leading. The moral convictions, 
 the spiritual ideals, which Jesus threw into the 
 world, entered at once upon a life and development 
 of their own. They were no longer his in the 
 sense of bearing always the exact shape and profile 
 of his thought. They were his only in their con- 
 stant power of provoking other souls to fresh con- 
 victions and opening out in other minds into new 
 and grander beliefs. The hidden tie which makes 
 the Christian ages one, the continuity of faith 
 
JESUS IN THE WORLDS RELIGIOUS HISTORY 223 
 
 which entitles any believers to-day, Catholic or 
 Protestant, traditionalists or free thinkers, to call 
 themselves Christian, lies in the right which any 
 great truth or body of truths has to claim as its 
 own all the new ideas and beliefs, however unlike 
 itself, into which in the course of ages it has grown. 
 Different enough always the first estate of such a 
 truth and its last. The pompous ceremonial of 
 the Greek or Roman Church bears no closer re- 
 semblance to the primitive worship in the upper 
 chamber in Jerusalem than do the Christian confes- 
 sions of to-day, orthodox or heretical, to the faith 
 of Peter or James or Paul. Ask one of those orig- 
 inal disciples to worship at a modern Christian 
 altar, and he would not know what to do or say. 
 Ask him to repeat the articles of any modern creed, 
 and he could not follow a single one of its phrases, 
 nor grasp a single one of its ideas. For each gen- 
 eration its own generation or century is enough; 
 it cannot look or think or dream beyond. Enough 
 that it think its own thoughts, do its own duty, 
 fight its own battles, win its own faith. If that 
 faith be torpid or shallow, it will die with those 
 who hold it; if it be living and deep, it will 
 touch other generations with the contagion of its 
 convictions, and move them to mighty beliefs and 
 convictions of their own. 
 
 Hopeless enough, then, the task of making Jesus 
 and his times live again in our lives, just as they 
 were when Christianity began. But possible enough 
 for any true heart to appreciate spiritual purity and 
 
224 DISCOURSES 
 
 moral heroism even amid the strangest surround- 
 ings, and to honor the great faith which, believing 
 that it could remove mountains, made the faith of 
 after generations strong. To read the gospel story 
 in its primitive simplicity is to comprehend how 
 human tenderness and unselfishness and love have 
 in them the power to transform the world. 
 
 Wherein, then, lies the secret of Jesus' power or 
 his title to our homage? For myself, I find it best 
 expressed in the words which I have taken as my 
 text, — words which always seem to me fuller than 
 almost any New Testament passage beside at once 
 of poetry and of prophecy. " That the thoughts of 
 many hearts may be revealed." The power of Jesus 
 has appeared not in forcing upon others his own 
 thoughts, but in awakening theirs. He has some- 
 how roused the world to noble dreams and filled 
 the soul with grand ideals. Those very idealizing 
 processes of which I have spoken, which wrapped 
 the Galilean ministry so soon in mists of unreality, 
 to what do they themselves point but to an earthly 
 career, which had in it great power to stir the imag- 
 ination, and, like the lofty mountain top, to create 
 the clouds which were to conceal it? From begin- 
 ning to end, Christianity has wrapped itself in 
 mists; has lost itself in splendid dreams; has 
 breathed out its heart in music and poetry; and 
 architecture and painting; has filled the soul with 
 rapturous and presumptuous hopes, and given it 
 an audacious faith in the future of humanity; has 
 filled the mind, too (Christianity, I mean, not the 
 
JESUS IN THE WORLD S RELIGIOUS HISTORY 225 
 
 Christian Church), with restless yearnings, and sent 
 it forth in endless pursuit of truth. It has been 
 the awakener of moral aims, of intellectual aspira- 
 tions, of spiritual ideas. 
 
 It is so still. In it "the thoughts of many- 
 hearts are still revealed." If Christianity survives 
 at all, and so long as it survives, it will be by 
 virtue of this power to stir the race to ever-new 
 aspirations, and help each soul to its best and no- 
 blest thought. 
 
 1893. 
 
XVIII. 
 FAREWELL DISCOURSE. 
 
 " We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of 
 God in company." — Psalm lv. 14. 
 
 Life has no choicer boon to offer than its com- 
 panionships; and, among them all, shall we not 
 say that none are holier or finer than its religious 
 companionships? This thinking together on high- 
 est themes, taking counsel together on gravest 
 duties, laboring together for the moral and social 
 advancement of the race, — what closer tie than this 
 can unite friend with friend? I should be sorry to 
 be understood, while severing such a tie, as under- 
 rating its value or significance. Though no longer 
 desiring for myself even the slight compulsions 
 which it involves, I cannot forget the strength 
 and joy it has brought to me in the past nor ques- 
 tion its abiding worth as a factor in our modern 
 life. Rather Jet me testify, while abandoning it, 
 to its great possibilities, when once the transitions 
 of the present religious situation have been passed, ; 
 and the preacher's office is recognized for what it 
 really is and prized for what is best and deepest 
 in it. 
 
 And, in bearing this testimony, let me touch at 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE 227 
 
 once upon what is to me the supreme token of its 
 value, — its confidential character. The pastor and 
 people "take sweet counsel together" on all high- 
 est concerns. Elsewhere in our earthly lives are 
 certain necessary or traditional reserves. Friend 
 is not obliged to speak with friend of his deeper 
 thoughts, and does not often care to unbosom him- 
 self of his religious troubles, or to disturb the 
 tenor of pleasant companionship by too serious a 
 vein. Parents not infrequently let their children 
 grow into maturity without once betraying the 
 secret of their spiritual life, timidly refraining 
 from themes which they do not wholly fathom, or 
 anxious lest they prejudice opinions which every 
 soul should be left to form unhampered. Here we 
 should meet for just those confidences which the 
 world avoids. If the people have any claim upon 
 their spiritual guide, it is to know his inmost soul 
 on sacred themes ; not what the past has delivered to 
 him, nor what the present expects him to say, but 
 what he thinks and feels. The perfunctory word 
 is a dead word, though all the ages have repeated 
 it; the personal word alone has life. The pulpit 
 should be the throne of sincerity and frankness. 
 If the man has nothing of his own to say, this is no 
 place for him; if he has, let it be spoken as the 
 sole message he is consecrated to deliver. If he 
 has one belief for his study, another for his pulpit, 
 he is betraying the most sacred trust that man ever 
 reposes in man. His thought may not be pro- 
 foundly wise, nor contain the whole of divine 
 
228 DISCOURSES 
 
 truth; but it is his, and is therefore as much of 
 divine truth as he can competently speak. Nor do 
 I mean that it must be his as an original birth in 
 his own soul, or that he is to set his crude notions 
 against the wisdom and learning of the ages. I 
 assume as the first condition of his taking so sacred 
 an office that he has acquainted himself thoroughly 
 with what the past has to teach; that he has 
 searched its scriptures and listened to its confes- 
 sions and traced out its problems and its beliefs; 
 and that both mind and soul have been enriched by 
 whatever spiritual wealth the world's holier souls 
 have bequeathed. No study is too profound, no 
 training too far-reaching or severe, to fit one to 
 address his fellows on religious themes. In these 
 days of earnest thought, the man who is willing to 
 enter the ministerial profession with half an educa- 
 tion, or to bring into the pulpit callow speculations 
 or hasty conclusions, only reveals his colossal mis- 
 conception of the work he has undertaken. Each 
 generation is heir to all the past, and must take up 
 its religious culture where the past has laid it 
 down. But this being understood, and the relig- 
 ious teacher having secured the best equipment 
 which the age can offer, then his message is of 
 worth only as it is a direct message from the heart. 
 Then he is to impart in confidence to those to 
 whom his confidence is due whatever comes home 
 to him as a spiritual reality. This is not only 
 his duty, it is his strength. It is not only his 
 people's right, it is their sole opportunity of 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE 229 
 
 vital nourishment. The priesthood having been 
 once for all stripped of its supernatural prestige, 
 and left to stand henceforth purely upon its own 
 merits, and to receive honor solely for what it 
 shows itself capable of doing for the world, what 
 can take the place of the old authority but this, — the 
 accent of sincerity, the tone of personality? Truth 
 is to win its victories henceforth through its own 
 intrinsic power, as delivered from the lips of those 
 who have inwardly felt its mighty persuasions. 
 The world is to learn to detect the truth through 
 the quiver of its voice, as it comes from hearts bap- 
 tized in the fire of glowing conviction. No man 
 can say effectively or persuasively what he does 
 not positively believe. If you wish to be moved 
 or uplifted when you gather here, or if you yearn 
 for genuine spiritual help, ask only to have the 
 preacher's self, — to be taken into his spiritual con- 
 fidence. Do not ask to have your own ideas re- 
 flected back to you, do not ask that the preacher 
 shall echo the regulation phrases, even upon the 
 highest of themes. Ask rather that he, in and of 
 himself, through whatever path, shall get at the 
 heart of things. Do not ask never to be antago- 
 nized by what is spoken here. Ask rather for those 
 first-hand deliverances of faith which, whether you 
 accept them or not, inevitably open fresh vistas, 
 and make clearer for you, and perhaps larger, your 
 own visions of the truth. Not because this is the 
 place for controversy, which it is not, nor because 
 truth is best stated aggressively, but because no 
 
23O DISCOURSES 
 
 real or living thought can get to you save through 
 the speaker's actual beliefs. There is no passion 
 of the soul but in the utterance of its own emo- 
 tions; no true eloquence but the eloquence of in- 
 tellectual and moral conviction. 
 
 It is an old thought, but let me urge it here once 
 more where it especially belongs, — that no truth 
 comes into the world at all save in the mould of 
 personal belief. The world's great religious 
 leaders have been such solely by virtue of their 
 capacity of seeing profoundly and feeling intensely 
 life's great verities. Their hold upon the world 
 has come through the contagion of their individual 
 faith. What was Christianity in its first inception 
 but the way in which Jesus and the two or three 
 who came nearest to him felt about eternal things ? 
 Had there not been just then and there a certain 
 soul or certain souls that believed surpassingly, 
 nothing would have happened to disturb the placid 
 tenor of the world's history. If there be not some- 
 thing of the same sort in the preacher to-day, in 
 however less degree, nothing will happen now. 
 Truth advances by having its every distinct and 
 successive phase in turn explicitly set forth. The 
 more explicit and definite, the surer the progress. 
 And in this progress no aspect of the truth, how- 
 ever humble, so it be real, is without its force. 
 The preacher is here to clothe for the hour these 
 eternal verities in the garb, or rather to impress 
 upon them the form, of his own individuality. To- 
 morrow to be forgotten, for the moment it must be 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE 23 I 
 
 reckoned with. In it perhaps the eternal word 
 will catch some passing accent which it has not 
 caught before. Through it, if you accept his confi- 
 dence, though no great wisdom comes to you, his 
 word may touch you by the tone and pathos of its 
 reality. 
 
 Especially is this true of a preacher of our own 
 faith, as indeed it is of him alone that I have any 
 right to speak. Let others construe religious duty 
 or fidelity as they may, for us, as it seems to me, 
 there is but one path, — the path of unfaltering 
 sincerity. There is a certain danger, it must be 
 remembered, in the very friendliness and unity 
 which are beginning to characterize the religious 
 world in our generation. Beautiful the brotherly 
 spirit which is abroad, in so far as it means simply 
 the breaking down of unchristian barriers and a 
 united search for the truth ; but not beautiful at all 
 if it leads to the destruction of religious individu- 
 ality, or to those soft concessions in which the clear 
 lines of thought or belief are lost. Truth lies, we 
 may be sure, in no middle ground between existing 
 creeds, but somewhere above and beyond them all. 
 The method of religious progress is for each party 
 in the Church to define its position unequivocally 
 and hold to it uncompromisingly. The spirit of 
 Christian charity demands neither of us nor of 
 others that we should surrender the slightest sylla- 
 ble of the faith that is dear to us, but only that we 
 should learn to credit each other's beliefs with the 
 truth that is in them, and each to take the other at 
 
232 DISCOURSES 
 
 his noblest and best. For this end we must be 
 able to see each other and bear with each other as 
 we truly are. We are truest to our Christian fel- 
 lowship when we announce our thought in its clear- 
 est tones. To temper or cover our beliefs or walk 
 with dainty and apologetic steps as we approach 
 our brethren of other creeds is to offer to Christian 
 charity no test at all by which it shall be known. 
 To unite opposing churches by abandoning all 
 prominent or characteristic tenets and meeting upon 
 certain undisputed axioms, which, for convenience' 
 sake, we entitle the "essentials of belief," is 
 simply to postpone indefinitely the true unity, 
 where diametrically conflicting faiths, if such there 
 are, shall recognize each other as brothers in the 
 truth. If we cannot bear the friction of antago- 
 nistic ideas, earnestly and reverently held, the hour 
 of Christian fellowship has still long to wait. 
 Brotherhood means friction, whether in the family 
 or in the Church, — the friction of friendly conflict, 
 the friction of bosom companions learning to honor 
 each other's individualities, to adjust themselves to 
 each other's peculiarities, and to recognize each 
 other's rights. The one question is whether the 
 Christian Church is large enough to hold us all, 
 and hold us all not as stunted or deformed, but in 
 our full stature. If it is not, the sooner we sep- 
 arate, the better; if it is, then the sooner we 
 assume our full stature and accustom each other to 
 our very form and face, the better. On every 
 ground it is time to give up this child's play of 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE 233 
 
 posturing and mincing in each other's presence 
 that we may seem to be what we are not, and to 
 begin in manly fashion to take and be taken at our 
 very worth. Never have I felt more strongly than 
 to-day that, if we are to be a strong body in the 
 future, or to maintain the best traditions of the 
 past, it cannot be by the path of pietism or of mys- 
 ticism; it cannot be by seeking to befog the deep 
 issues of the hour, or by reserving our highest 
 praises for those who substitute fine-sounding 
 phrases for honest convictions; it can only be by 
 following frankly and fearlessly our special lines 
 of thought. We must commend ourselves to the 
 world by the value of the word we preach and our 
 unflinching fidelity to the behests of modern in- 
 quiry. We must win the world's confidence by 
 the fulness of our resources, by our moral earnest- 
 ness, by our faith in eternal truth. 
 
 I should be sorry if, in advocating frankness and 
 fearlessness, as I have done here, I should seem to 
 be pleading for a defiant or aggressive attitude on 
 the preacher's part; I am thinking rather of the 
 silent claim which his own inmost beliefs have 
 upon him. He is not called upon to attack others, 
 but only to be true to himself. However it may 
 have been in the past, the mission of the liberal 
 preacher to-day is no longer to overthrow or assail. 
 Indeed, if he seeks the full confidence or sympathy 
 of his flock, he will regard their beliefs as tenderly 
 as his own. Nor is any one called upon in these 
 days to run a campaign for advanced thought or 
 
234 DISCOURSES 
 
 boast his courage in maintaining his opinions. He 
 is simply to follow quietly his own spiritual 
 promptings, regardless of the prejudices or censures 
 of the world, which once were so formidable, but 
 which have now lost all their terror. Even the 
 names by which the world likes always to stigma- 
 tize the methods which are foreign to it, he is not 
 obliged to heed. If others like to term him agnos- 
 tic, rationalistic, materialist, or apply any other 
 name to him, that is their concern, not his. To a 
 certain class of minds these names are everything. 
 They know nothing of the religious thought of 
 the hour till they have mapped out its territories 
 in definite lines and assigned a title to each. But 
 to the earnest student or the follower after relig- 
 ious truth these names are of slight account. The 
 moment a belief or system is labelled, its outcome 
 is in a certain sense predetermined. It is com- 
 mitted in advance to certain conclusions, and in 
 so far loses its elasticity or freedom. Convenient 
 for argumentative purposes or for historians of 
 thought, who must needs marshal their subjects in 
 recognized schools, for the individual thinker these 
 party labels are superfluous and harmful. What- 
 ever is true in any system, he will appropriate to 
 himself without apology or disclaimer, availing 
 himself of its help and then pushing on to his own 
 conclusions, without wasting time to define his 
 position or enroll himself in any existing ranks. 
 He will have his own preferences, of course, and 
 in a modest way his own definite philosophy; he 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE 235 
 
 will avow his sympathy, if occasion calls for it, 
 with one or the other of the great tendencies of 
 thought which have divided the world's thinkers 
 through all time; but he will accept no creeds and 
 commit himself to no conclusions. It is the truth 
 alone that he is after. Names have no terror for 
 him, nor yet any charm. Let him be true to this 
 single purpose, and neither he nor those who listen 
 to him will long be scared by any of the theological 
 spectres by which the world loves to terrify the 
 unthinking and the unwary. May the time soon 
 come when our congregations shall no longer 
 describe what they hear as safe or unsafe, orthodox 
 or heretical, moderate or radical; but only as ra- 
 tional or irrational, scholarly or unscholarly, clear 
 or crude, serious or trivial. Everything is safe 
 which has a larger truth in view and is thought- 
 fully and devoutly following it. I cannot believe 
 that the preacher who, without perhaps winning a 
 single follower to his own religious ideas, has 
 freed those who hear him from all needless alarms 
 and accustomed them to the clear air of honest 
 thinking, is wholly without his reward. 
 
 Here will, of course, arise the question whether 
 I am not making the preacher's function too purely 
 an intellectual one; whether his main office is not, 
 after all, rather to comfort and cheer than simply 
 to teach; and whether religion must not by its 
 very nature, to-day as well as in the past, appeal 
 supremely to sentiment and feeling rather than to 
 thought. Let me frankly recognize whatever truth 
 
236 DISCOURSES 
 
 there is in this statement. But to urge one idea is 
 not necessarily to disparage another. The preacher 
 to the sentiment has a great and boundless field, 
 and will always come nearest, no doubt, to his 
 hearers' hearts. Possibly his office is noblest and 
 highest of all. Yet to each one his own province. 
 I have been quite as aware as any of you, in the 
 years just past, that tender words of comfort and 
 consolation would often have brought far greater 
 satisfaction than the more strenuous gospel to 
 which you have been called upon to listen. But 
 each one must be true to himself, and give that 
 aspect of religion which to him is supreme. With- 
 out belittling the emotional side of piety. I would 
 only urge that the other, too, has its place and its 
 rights. If man's religious nature is not pure intel- 
 lect, no more is it pure sentiment. Mind and heart 
 are separated by no such rough and arbitrary boun- 
 daries as these. Xot only are there great problems 
 waiting to be intellectually solved, on which many 
 earnest souls stake their spiritual fate, but the pro- 
 founder thought carries not infrequently a deeper 
 sentiment with it, and touches deeper places in the 
 heart. I confess my faith in that order of spiritual 
 emotion which is coupled with high intelligence, 
 and cannot be dissevered from it. I confess my 
 faith in the spiritual yearnings which will be satis- 
 fied with naught but the unadorned and naked truth. 
 I still feel that of all the illusions of the hour that 
 which makes of religion a process of soothing and 
 fondling, and would lull the suffering heart or the 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE 237 
 
 young soul by soft and dreamy rites, is the falsest 
 and most perilous. I still feel that of all spiritual 
 atmospheres the most invigorating and health- 
 giving is the atmosphere of reality. There is not 
 yet room, I suppose, nor is the time fully ripe, for 
 the preacher who cares simply to tell the truth 
 about spiritual themes; who in times of sorrow will 
 not go a step beyond his knowledge of the future to 
 conjure up enchanting visions of what lies beyond 
 the veil; who in hours of mental struggle will not 
 claim a more intimate acquaintance with the divine 
 counsels or the divine nature than he really has; 
 who in moments of faltering faith will not stretch 
 a single point or borrow a single mystic phrase to 
 save a hundred believers for his sect. Yet, after 
 all, for frankly facing the truth and looking into 
 it with honest eyes the time has always come. 
 Not what we want to imagine God to be, but what 
 he verily is; not what we can possibly dream of 
 immortality, but what it actually promises; not 
 what we long to think of the present or the future, 
 of earth or of heaven, but what they really are, is 
 what the soul needs, — needs it in grief as in joy, 
 in convulsions of spiritual agony as in the calmness 
 of complacent trust. Grand verities are these, — 
 God, heaven, immortality. Man has not yet meas- 
 ured or fathomed their greatness, we may be sure. 
 We yearn to know their inmost secrets. But the 
 centuries are long, and the generations to come 
 will hasten more quickly to their goal if we bravely 
 and without reserve tell the truth that is in us; if 
 
238 DISCOURSES 
 
 we avow our blindness as well as our sight; if we 
 walk slowly and thoughtfully, that others who come 
 after us may make the better speed. If man cannot 
 bear the light of simple truth or breathe its unpol- 
 luted air, even in the soul's extremest hours, then 
 our fate is hard and our God is cruel indeed. For 
 myself, let me say that I know of no position in 
 which the preacher can stand, no hour of his career, 
 nor duty to which he can be called, where truth is 
 not his strongest ally and sincerity his surest 
 weapon. 
 
 I should neglect one of the most important of the 
 preacher's functions if I said nothing of his rela- 
 tions to society or to the social and political ques- 
 tions of the hour. If I am not wholly mistaken, 
 his duties here are in these days peculiarly binding 
 and imperative. He no longer stands as the offi- 
 cial monitor in all public concerns; no more does 
 he stand — as our fathers stood in the days of 
 slavery — in peril of his place if he speaks an 
 impolitic word. To-day the risk is small, but the 
 duty great. The peculiarity of which I speak is 
 this: Great moral questions are before us; but they 
 have no tribunal. We can no longer deceive our- 
 selves. Our popular institutions, whatever their 
 virtues, — which few of us question, — are breed- 
 ing a moral cowardice, a constant and inevita- 
 ble mingling of policy with personal conviction, 
 which robs some of the most important social or 
 political problems of an honest hearing. Those 
 who should naturally discuss and determine them 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE -239 
 
 can, for the most part, bring no calm or unterrified 
 judgment to bear upon them, if indeed they dare to 
 discuss them at all. The significant and appalling 
 feature of the situation is that there are certain 
 great questions of public interest upon which one 
 must not speak. This Western continent is sup- 
 posed to breathe the air of liberty, its press to be 
 free, its public servants to be laboring for the 
 rights of humanity ; yet at this very moment there 
 are two or three questions of the highest general 
 concern upon which every one in official position, 
 as he values his place, must be dumb. It is no 
 exaggeration to say that the fear of popular dis- 
 pleasure, or the necessity of winning and securing 
 the popular vote, browbeats Legislature, Congress, 
 and press, and lulls the entire community, even in 
 the face of grossest abuses, into timid silence. 
 
 For all these themes there is one tribunal at 
 least still open, before which each cause can be 
 pleaded without silence and without fear of conse- 
 quences, — a tribunal which has no care for votes, 
 which owes no allegiance to party, which is not 
 obliged to regard the opinions of laborer or soldier, 
 or to heed the decrees of politician or of priest. 
 If these topics were otherwise or at other times 
 unbefitting this place, they now become, by sheer 
 force of necessity, its proper themes. Whoever 
 finds himself standing where the voice of justice or 
 true humanity can be best or loudest heard is bound 
 by that very fact to speak. Circumstances give to 
 the preacher, for the moment, a vantage-ground 
 
24O DISCOURSES 
 
 which he may not neglect. The pulpit cannot 
 claim to be in reality a court of last appeal, nor 
 can the preacher claim for himself any peculiar 
 opportunities of information or securities against 
 error. Yet such thought as he has he must utter. 
 He may be wrong in his conclusions, but he 
 can at least break the deadening spell of silence; 
 he can force stifled questions into the arena of 
 open discussion; he can forbid the plotters of 
 evil to hide their schemings from the day; he 
 can deny to intriguing partisans the privilege of 
 frightening their followers into torpor; if politi- 
 cians are timorous, he can compel them at least 
 to confess their cowardice; if parties are governed 
 by policy alone, he can forbid them the luxury of 
 playing the role of patriotism. 
 
 Each generation protests against being faced by 
 its special sin, and will not hear it denounced 
 in any but the most general terms. We are always 
 sure that the iniquities of former ages were far 
 beyond any of our own more enlightened time. 
 When my ministry began, the foul system of slav- 
 ery was still polluting the moral atmosphere of the 
 land and degrading both public and private life to 
 an extent, as is popularly supposed, which has 
 never been known before or since. Let me declare 
 as distinctly as words will allow that I can recall 
 nothing in that black period of slavery more de- 
 moralizing, more profoundly humiliating, more 
 oppressive, more disheartening to the lover of his 
 country or the believer in popular institutions, 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE 24I 
 
 than the tyranny with which public opinion to-day 
 enslaves the masses of the community, or the ter- 
 rorism by which the coarsest and basest classes of 
 our populace hold our States and cities in their 
 clutch. No hour of the past has seen a more piti- 
 ful or ignominious spectacle than this. In such 
 hours he holds a place of power who can simply 
 summon these dark disgraces out of their hiding- 
 places into the light of day. 
 
 The ministry, especially the liberal ministry, is 
 the natural promoter of all humane activities and 
 the natural ally of the suffering and down-trodden 
 everywhere. May it ever remain so ! May it ever 
 show forth its faith by its works of beneficence and 
 love! Yet I confess that it is another aspect of 
 the question which interests me most to-day. I 
 hold the churches quite as much bound to guard 
 the community against weak and unwholesome sen- 
 timentalism as to foster a healthy sentiment of 
 brotherly love. If poverty and ignorance claim 
 our sympathy and have their rights, so do intelli- 
 gence and industry and enterprise ; and, if the lat- 
 ter are in the greater danger, our strength and 
 courage must be enlisted in their behalf. While 
 we stretch out our hands to the laborer in every 
 genuine effort which he makes to rise from his 
 degradation or poverty, let us be equally ready to 
 resist and condemn him the moment he seeks to 
 make all other interests in the land subordinate to 
 his own, or to use his political advantages to tyran- 
 nize over the institutions which have emancipated 
 him. 
 
242 DISCOURSES 
 
 In all these secular concerns, as in his theology, 
 the liberal preacher is privileged to take the atti- 
 tude of independence and individuality. He is 
 not bound, because he is liberal, to advocate every 
 movement which assumes that name; he is bound 
 only to be true to his own ideas. If good people, 
 misled by humane sympathies or deceived by 
 names, are wasting moral energy on false or delu- 
 sive issues, it is his duty to lift a warning voice, 
 though he seem to be siding with the most conser- 
 vative forces of society. There is no necessary 
 alliance between liberalism or radicalism and inno- 
 vation. Many old things are good, better far than 
 any new devices of modern times. Justice is good. 
 Orderliness is good. Intelligent obedience to law 
 and right is good. To hold by the best things in 
 the past is good. In many a latter-day cause 
 which enlists the men and women of his faith, he 
 may see the veriest caricature of progress, the most 
 flagrant denial of the foundation principles on 
 which society must rest, the most palpable efface- 
 ment of all the finer and more delicate distinctions 
 which beautify our social life. Here as before he 
 cares little for names. Radical or conservative, 
 progressive or reactionary, is all the same to him, 
 so long as he deems himself fighting for humanity 
 and right. 
 
 Such seems to me the liberal "preacher's place, 
 however poorly any individual preacher may suc- 
 ceed in filling it. For the future of the liberal 
 cause I can feel no anxiety, however little our own 
 
FAREWELL DISCOURSE 243 
 
 denomination may have to do in determining it. 
 The forces of modern progress all fight on our side. 
 In the growing love of humanity, which is bound 
 in the end to compel all churches to forget their 
 creeds in the practical service of man; above all, 
 in the spread of the scientific spirit with its single 
 eye for the truth, — a spirit to which I have always 
 given my absolute allegiance, — I see signs of 
 promise which nothing can conceal or annul. Side 
 by side with the ever-recurring triumphs of eccle- 
 siasticism, and mightier than the power of any 
 church or the allurements of any mediaeval rites, is 
 this resistless progress of critical inquiry, emanci- 
 pating the mind of Christendom in spite of itself, 
 and constraining the world to bring all its historic 
 faiths, with all its traditions and beliefs, to the 
 test of exact research. Here is a power which 
 nothing can stay. In better ways than we could 
 ourselves devise, and with a swifter progress than 
 any of which our fathers ever dreamed, it is work- 
 ing out the ends to which our church is pledged, 
 and the sole ends for which, as a denomination, we 
 can care. 
 
 And as I leave you with little anxiety for the 
 cause we have at heart, so I can leave you, I am 
 sure, with every hope for your own bright future as 
 a church. In a moment like this much that my 
 feelings urge me to say I may not even attempt to 
 speak, but must leave you to read for yourselves 
 within these guarded lines. These eleven years of 
 undisturbed and delightful intercourse cannot have 
 
244 DISCOURSES 
 
 been wholly vain either for your life or for mine; 
 and surely these closing hours have brought me 
 many sacred assurances which I may be pardoned 
 for holding henceforth among my choicest mem- 
 ories. I can only ask for my successor the same 
 confidence and sympathy which you have always so 
 freely granted to me. If I were to give you any 
 single message of farewell, it would be the wish 
 that this ancient church may be constantly ani- 
 mated by the spirit of which I have spoken here as 
 characterizing our modern age, — the fearless and 
 reverent love of truth, — and may find in it an ever- 
 increasing strength and joy. 
 
 1893. 
 
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